LOS ANGELES – At the long tables rented inside the gate of the Kennedy-for-President headquarters, 3 middle-aged women dressed in Kennedy hats promoted decals and posters. It was the afternoon after Nebraska and you came expecting the excitement, maybe even the euphoria; Instead, the 3 middle-aged girls sat there searching in the dark, searching the clear, empty sidewalks of Wilshire Boulevard and the circular silhouettes and costumes of other girls buying groceries on Broadway across the street.
“What’s the problem?” I asked one of them, a blue-haired girl who nervously waved the stickers. “I think you were going to have a party here.”
“Oh, no, “she said, smiling metallically. “We’re just beginning. The real one is just beginning.”
She was right, of course, Indiana, the District of Columbia, and Nebraska were important enough; Kennedy could not have afforded to lose any of them. But the real fight is in California. This is the heart of the new United States, and if he cannot win convincingly, Hubert Humphrey will be the next President of the United States.
“The others were just preliminary games,” said a young USC graduate. “It’s a bit like getting rid of the heavyweights. You can’t lose any of them, but the last one is the biggest.”
Away down Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, McCarthy for President headquarters had seemied like a West Coast version of Walter B. Cooke’s. One lovely little girl sat behind a table covered with literature and her face was so wasted and forlorn that you felt like taking her to a Laurel and Hardy movie just to give her some perspective.
“It’s so … unfair!” she said.
Kennedy’s headquarters anything else: there is a kind of movement and fury, which opposes a trembling background. The walls were painted red, white and blue; adorned with posters of the candidate. People were running everywhere: the 3 middle-aged girls were the dark facade of a bunch of hammering typewriters, damn mimeographer machines, phones ringing, explosive TVs, radios aimed at the news channel. Young women with incredibly white teeth and Kennedy hats amassed clusters of posters and symptoms to take them to the airport to receive the candidate. They crossed a floor full of cigarette compost, crushed coffee cups, discarded press releases, charcoal ball paper and Danish pastry crusts. They were quite, but they were like any other woman you’ve ever seen at the headquarters of a country: clean, heterosexual, intelligent and strangely asexual; in the bag, they probably screamed for the candidate.
The men at Kennedy’s headquarters were anything else. All young people have been pressured from the same mold to the works of Rent-a-Volunteer-with-Pragmatic-Compassion Works. They wore gray suits on the street and, in the office, the sleeves of the blouse were rolled up to the middle of the forearms, in case a Look photographer passed by. They all had horn-mounted glasses. Everyone had their mouths pressed in law school. They all smoked fine panatella cigars. And they were all. In other words, they were almost identical, brimming with presumption, quick to hang up phones, unable to return calls and, in the maximum case, disconnected from anything other than the technical processes of politics.
With a few exceptions, Kennedy had nothing to do with enlisting these people. Most of them, I’m told, have come out of the Jesse Unruh operation in California. Unruh does not run a machine, in the old sense of that word; but in Democratic politics in this state he has the best organization. The trouble is that the guys who work for him now feel they are working for a winner at last, after the Pat Brown and Pierre Salinger disasters. And they feel that they can win without any outside help. The major organizational problem Kennedy has in California has been caused by the Unruh men who answer the telephones; hundreds of people who wanted to work for Kennedy were told by Unruh’s people to forget it, they had enough help. These potential volunteers have gone to work for McCarthy, or the Peace and Freedom Party, or stayed home. (I haven’t heard of anyone joining up with Hubert, the Soul Brother.)
My brother Brian and I were there when one of the volunteers came. He was one of the few greats in the position and stuttered a little.
“Are you going to the airport?” He said.
“If … “
“Can you carry two riders?”
“Sure.”
Why not? I told Brian. We’re going out there anyway. A few minutes later the fat guy came back with a girl and a pile of posters.
“You can squeeze in some more people, can’t you?”
“No.”
The guy looked miffed. We went and got the car, and the fat guy and his girl and his hats and his posters all piled into the back. We started for the San Diego freeway and the airport. After two blocks the fat guy said: “Roll the window down, will you?”
“Can I smoke?” I asked.
“Let him walk, ” Brian.
“I just don’t need to catch a cold,” the fat guy said.
I rolled the window. The woman calmed down and the fat guy started saying how terrible it was that Kennedy had been late after all the plans they had made. I went downstairs.
Kennedy waited at Gate 44 of American Airlines, and until the airport, a disc jockey who looked like Bruce Morrow in 1958 announced his arrival time every 10 minutes. I expect 10, 000 people. There were a hundred of them when we arrived. They were clustered around the door, with the press in the waiting room aside. About 60 Kennedy women dressed in tight white blouses and plastic navigators rehearsed a song as a woman’s voice pulled them out of the same mysterious speaker. The song repeated a line that spoke of “… consciousness with a capital K…” It looked like a song built through Jimmy Van Heusen for the Ku Klux Klan.
All the little women were white, for a pretty black girl with blue eyes (sorry, Rap) who was introduced to the photographers. A black man, his wife and six-year-old daughter leaned over the fence to see Kennedy. The boy was dressed in a Kodak. I asked him why he was here.
“Bobby’s my man.” He said. “I, my daughter, to see him too.”
“We’ve never seen President Kennedy in person,” his wife said. “And then we need the little woman to see Bobby.”
The little woman looked at the cameramen, who stumbled and stumbled upon cameras and wires. As usual, I was reminded of the CBS reporter who once said, “If I ever have a retarded son, God forbid, I may not worry. I’ll put it in the cameraman’s joint. Then came a middle-aged woman. The front, elegant, clean, bright-eyed, dressed in white a few inches above the knee, as if he drank Tanqueray in summer and Chivas Regal in winter and obediently subscribes to the New York Review. He started dancing. , coldly sober, and I knew she was the cheerleader. She started making a song on her back with a big K, and all of Kennedy’s women did their best, while hounds and photographers looked at them deaf and wondered if there were women in California. with flat breasts and cavities. They weren’t at the airport.
A squad of stingers with paper clips and folders arrived, smoking the fucking purites, dressed in tight mouths and horn-mounted glasses. They began to push the crowd and make brief announcements about how Kennedy would get to the press first, then cross a type of Kennedy girl glove “so everyone can see it.” They then began organizing the hounds, with the boys on television at the front, followed through some lonely press hounds and local newspapers somewhere around the sweet post in the next terminal. The crowd was now growing, with other people’s status on the stairs on the left and some cops adrift.
By 7:30 a.m., the plane arrived and the crowd had grown to about 1,000 people. Journalists who had not had a week off through their bosses stopped first, comfortable and pale, stroking the typewriters. The hereramen crashed forward, a wall of them, and the chorus of the girls came to consciousness with a big K, and you may only hear screams and screams, and there was Kennedy, with tired lines around his eyes, a blue gray suit, his lips moving in the microphone organization, and I to get out of there.
I made it just in time: the line of girls were pushed forward, some women screamed, the black guy was wobbling with his daughter on his shoulder, and the cameramen were committing various acts of mayhem as they shot film they must have known would never be used. Another mob was in the rotunda near the escalator. One of the pricks pushed a tv reporter and the tv reporter gave him a good shove back. More screaming. A little girl fell.
“I touched his hand, I touched his hand,” said one of the long-haired California girls.
“I’d hate to tell you where I touched him,” her girl friend said, all teeth and innocence.
And then we were down the stairs and moving fast along the shiny corridor between the horizontal escalators that they use to move people in L.A. Kennedy did his best to smile while people leaped around him and then he was outside, climbing into the convertible, while the press buses loaded, and we went off behind him to Valley College in Van Nuys.
The trip took us north on the freeways, heading for the blue ridge of mountains that separates L.A. from the San Fernando Valley. Mayor Yorty had provided two motorcycle cops and a stationwagon with two more to follow the press buses. We didn’t know until later that the Van Nuys cops had received a call from some terrified citizen saying that his brother was going to shoot Kennedy.
We were pulled off the road on Burbank Boulevard and entered a community of townhomes, clothes racks, gas stations, young people by bike. An audible truck had plowed the road before, warns the citizens that Kennedy is coming. Welcome from the knots of other warm scattered people. The young men on motorcycles followed the procession to college. I saw a sign from Nixon, a sign that said “Ecch!” and about 50 signs of Kennedy. At one point, a lonely man in the bodys of a sleeveless bodyman broke down in the street under the trees and shouted “Booo.” That’s all he said and you wondered what the hell his little kids thought of him.
There were cops blocking traffic at the college, and they stopped a black reporter in a Volkswagen in front of us and made him park three blocks away. They couldn’t let us do anything else. We parked and started running through the cool evening after the twin red eyes of the press bus. It was beautiful: kids on an overpass, someone yelling into a bullhorn, and Brian and me running through the tennis courts on the trail of the candidate. And all around us young college kids were running too, in the direction of the great ugly brown building where Kennedy was scheduled to speak.
The motorcade stopped at the front door and the McCarthy signs started waving high. Kennedy tried to get out, and the cops started rapping people with bats held at each end. I was on the side beside a hedge of pine trees as we all tried to get into the gym behind Kennedy.
This was impossible. When Kennedy was through the door, they slammed it behind him and locked it.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, there’s a loudspeaker.”
“What about the press?”
I said, “Go back to your back.”
A boy fell to the ground next to me, and a woman stepped on him, and we cleared the room. “I lost my shoe!” He said. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go, so Brian and I crawling under the pines. A giant dark grey dog looked us straight in the eye.
“God with that, ” I say. We ran backwards and the door was also locked. Three football players arrived and began banging their fists in front of the door. It seemed certain that we would be arrested if we stayed with them. This, or a limb torn through the other people guilty of feeding them. We went back to the front and, despite everything, convinced a policeman that we were meant to be inside. We pass, all of a sudden we continue through the football players. Another lovely night in the only life I’ll ever have.
Kennedy was already talking when we walked into the gym. There were about 8,000 other young people there. The mcCarthy youths were in the stands that flanked the speaker’s platform and downstairs, sitting on the floor, were some of the young men of the Peace and Freedom Party, who looked like the mcCarthy youth before cutting their hair.
Kennedy spoke about well-being and a desire to give people jobs. It was a family issue, and Kennedy himself seemed a little annoyed. Formal discourse was repetitive and abnormal, and it wasn’t really what these young middle-class sons and daughters had come to hear. They wanted to hear about Vietnam and the genuine replacement in the American system. Kennedy didn’t give them this, he was applauded loudly and often. She explained how many Americans were starving and humiliated, “how some of them might have sought husbands, some might have looked for parents, and we only gave them checks.” He talked about the welfare disaster, how humiliating and ugly it was. Then he began to build, throwing the speech ready. He spoke about the law passed in Congress last year that will save a large number of young people from the humiliating livelihoods of welfare. “These young children can choose between starving or moving,” Kennedy said. “I saw them in the state of Mississippi with their swollen bellies and their faces covered in sores…” He pointed to and exploited some myths about the deficient. “It’s not true that the deficient don’t want to work,” he said. “They are much more likely to be young people from privileged families rather than poor…”
Then there was a question period and Kennedy was better than he ever is with prepared speeches. Some of the kids were nasty and bitter, and after one particularly snotty question, Kennedy said, with a tired voice, “What we need in the country is to cut down the belligerence. If we let this hatred and emotion control our lives, we’re lost.”
“It’s our lives!” one of the Peace and Freedom kids yelled.
Kennedy talked about the draft, as he always does with college audiences, and tried again to say to them that if they really oppose the war, if they were against the draft, they should follow their consciences on the matter. “But you also have to face the consequences of your actions,” he said. This never goes over well, because most of these kids have grown up believing that there are no consequences to their actions. (Joel Oppenheimer once explained why he can’t take potheads seriously: “The drinker pays with a hangover. The junkie pays with a big habit. The pothead never pays.”)
Kennedy’s line of argument infuriated the Peace and Freedom kids. They shouted and booed and interrupted both questions and answers. “You fascist pig!” one kid said (seriously). Others threw tantrums, like nine-year-olds being asked to clean up after a birthday party. They looked as if they wanted to kill somebody, and they were in the same ugly mood when the evening ended and Kennedy made his way outside to the convertible.
A group of them stationed themselves on the school overpass, and as Kennedy’s car started moving they unleashed a barrage of small stones, pebbles, apple cores, and other debris. This was in the name of social and racial justice, of course. Kennedy was not hit, but he slid down into the seat. Fred Dutton, of Kennedy’s staff, was hit on the head. The kids were ranting on the overpass, and I tried to get up there. The cops sealed it off. Kennedy’s car disappeared into the quiet side streets, heading for the Ambassador Hotel and some sleep.
I don’t think these other young people were simply a difficult case to understand, hardened by the barbarities of the Marxist prosa. No, it was the top original young men from the Johnson era, because if the last few filthy years taught us anything, they taught us to hate. The hatred of the left is even more vile and unpleasant than the hatred on the right, because it is based on the rhetoric of decency. All the other people seated on the West Side who get rid of their I-hate-Bobthrough rocks are not very different from George Wallace’s animals; they just think their hatred is purer. They turned Kennedy into Savanarola and McCarthy in Francis of Assisi, and when the primary ends, hatred will spread further, also beating Humphrey, Rockefeller and Nixon.
I think Kennedy’s a decent guy; he is the only politician who now operates at the national point who at least presents the option of taking us back to the breaking point of the race war; personally, he’s the only politician I know who’s ever lied to me. You’ll get my vote, no matter how suspicious the potential of Walt Rostows is now attached to his crusade. But it would be a deception of the worst kind to that man who will save America. Kennedy alone won’t; McCarthy can’t and Nixon would just push us into a bubbling cauldron, like Mexico, around 1917. It’s too late for fairy tales, especially when we tell ourselves. I enjoy some laugh hats, balloons, crusader songs and things like that. But 562 Americans were massacred in Vietnam last week. That’s what politics is all about this year. The smug, pampered and well-founded child who takes stones in the dark of an overpass and strips a candidate with them is just a short distance away from picking up a Carcano Mannlicher with a telescopic bezel. That’s also politics in 1968. The bloodless stupidity of pragmatism killed these young men in Vietnam. The Cocktail Party Left, with its small mischievous sophistications and slavery in the face of the prospect of violence, has put the stones in the hands of these young men. I would like America to be saved, but that will not happen until everyone, left even more than the right, let’s start disabling our capacity for informal hatred. Politics was our national clown show; However, it has become a terrible confrontation between armies of opposing enemies, and if this continues like this, we are doomed. ♦