McGoverning

[Yes]

This starts with everybody else. It's my TL like any other writer around here, but none of us would be here without the strength of community this place offers: the friends, the inspirations, the resources, the folks who read us and the folks we read, the artisans, the fixers, the buckers-up of insecure hopes, the folks who happen on your creative dream and think it's cool.

For the Test Threaders first of all, we happy not-so-few, and the bright, fierce little community that's grown up there in which the backstories and early visions of this project first found both an audience and friends. In among them is the trailblazer, the gifted and deservedly well-liked @Gorrister, whose clarity of vision about a POD caused this whole vast, glittering, ungainly creation, project of several years of abortive efforts, to launch without a quick drop like a stone. That bit where Bob Cratchit says "to the founder of the feast"? Yeah. Only without all the Scrooge baggage. Anyone who likes where this goes should thank him deeply, as I do, for the place it starts. And for all the other dear friends and faithful readers of abstruse footnotes and compendious lists that gave me the guts to try. Special thanks also for the graphics skills of @wolfram and @Gentleman Biaggi, proof again if any was needed that each new generation gets even better than the one before at working the cool new toys.

For the learned minds too, each person of whom I've asked subject-matter questions or bounced off ideas more or (hopefully) less laughable, and your generosity in the answers you've given. Thanks too, to the folks of whom I've only just started asking questions. There will be more to follow, believe me.

Last but most the special souls in meatspace; you know who you are.

 

[Yes]

INTRODUCTION​

Bernstein and Woodward had, after all, traced a plot to sabotage the Democratic party
right into the inner sanctums of the White House. Yet somehow the Watergate affair failed to “sink in”;
its sinister implications never registered on the public’s imagination. A Gallup poll taken around the time
of the election found that 48 percent of the American public had never heard of the Watergate affair,
and most of the rest didn’t care about it.
- Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus

The tragedy of this is that McGovern appeared to have a sure lock on the White House when the sun came up on Miami Beach on the morning of Thursday, July 13th. Since then he has crippled himself with a series of almost unbelievable blunders — Eagleton, Salinger, O’Brien, etc. — that have understandably convinced huge chunks of the electorate, including at least half of his own hard-core supporters, that The Candidate is a gibbering dingbat. His behavior since Miami has made a mockery of everything he seemed to stand for in the primaries.

…George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government” is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country could have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
- George McGovern

I come from deeply Republican stock in conservative South Dakota. Only years of study as a student of history finally convinced me that the Democratic Party was by and large a little more dedicated to the average citizen’s interest than the Republican Party. My half-dozen political heroes continue to this day to include such Republicans as Abraham Lincoln, George Norris and Robert La Follette. Among the Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson stand the tallest. I do not consider any of these men “leftists.”

I ran for the presidency in 1972 not to capture the Democratic Party for "the left" or for any other faction. I ran to rally as many people as possible to demand that a senseless war be ended in Vietnam before it ruined our country as well as Southeast Asia. I ran in support of a fairer tax code. I ran on behalf of curbing an arms race that threatens to destroy both our fiscal integrity and our national security. I ran to replace an irrational welfare system with one that could be efficiently and fairly administered through the tax code.

These are not left-wing ideas. They are down-to-earth, common-sense propositions that could lead to a happier, more secure and more prosperous nation. Some members of the press as well as some political opponents worked overtime to paint my campaign in ridiculous terms. Thus it came as a surprise to many people when, campaigning on essentially the same concepts in 1984, I appeared to be talking sense and demonstrating that after all I was a pretty level-headed fellow.
-George McGovern, “’The Left’? What Left?” Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1985​

Welcome to McGoverning. Let me tell you a little about how we got here.

Sometimes, by accident or fancy, we see a little way into another world, real as ours but… elsewhere. For a denizen of alternate history, who likes to dust off the lost possibilities of human experience, it’s a rare delight to stare right at an object that’s walked right out of such a world. Except for the title of this work, that opening image was not the product of someone’s deft hand with a pixel or two and some graphics software. It was made of ink and paper back when it paid to be careful even in the most unlikely cases. As the principled, troubled McGovern campaign stared calmly at its doom, and every reputable pollster in the United States told whoever wanted to know that the election of 1972 was settled in advance, no one wanted to get caught out by chance. Senior editors of that era’s print media, slaves to the schedule of pressing out news you could hold in your hand in time for their markets, had been young men when the everlasting gaffe “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” was burned into their brains. They swore there would never be another screwup like that; this cover was a product of that vow, a little something tucked in the back pocket just in case.

The lithographers only ever made three copies of this exercise in alternate history. One moldered somewhere in Newsweek’s own archive, ready to use but never needed, a reed held up into the tidal wave of prohibitive odds that was November 1972. One was given to correspondent Peter Greenberg, who had covered McGovern’s campaign for Newsweek before he went on to greater things. Greenberg kept his copy and even displayed it at times with a wistful fondness, as remembrance of what was not to be. The third copy went to Senator McGovern himself. The senator framed his, and it passed on at his death either to his archival papers or his surviving heirs. Neither Greenberg’s copy nor McGovern’s was donated formally. Instead Newsweek employees gifted those themselves, in the same spirit as a case of beer given in 1980 by British military advisers in Oman to weary survivors of the doomed American rescue mission in Iran with the note “To You All from Us All, For Having the Guts to Try.”

For alternate-historians, as among the regular kind, the 1972 election we know so well — the currents and events of what the allohistorical often call “OTL,” Our Time Line — exists as a quixotic curiosity. It sits in its pocket of the past a little forlorn, a point of fact that helps define and ratify other years’ potential side roads and exceptions. There was a wildness abroad in American politics through the Sixties and Seventies, perhaps the Eighties as well, that yields many other points to depart for altered timestreams, yet 1972 seems to resist most nudges. Big tampering can work: you can use different candidates, different plans hatched by that warped and bitter and armed young man Arthur Bremer, different nominees (in the alternate-reality allegory Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo a certain former governor of Louisiana cut quite a wake through the eddies of the possible.) But majority logic holds that you need to swing a big damn hammer to get ‘72 out of joint. Dabble in the familiar and, with port-and-cigars assurance — with what one stage-left player in the sad little drama, John Kenneth Galbraith, would call conventional wisdom — you hear that even on the raggedy edge of chaos theory sometimes things happen as they do for a reason. So it is the Year of Fear and Loathing stands pat against rash fancies that it might ever be a place where you could move a world.

But what if it was? What we presume to know about it is exactly what the whole Nixon machine, from the palatine heights of the White House to crenelated Madison Avenue ad firms and the marbled halls of the Federal Reserve, fought with bloodsoaked tooth and claw to ensure. We see the conflict in Southeast Asia recede. We read the staggering GDP numbers after the recession of ‘71. We watch the stunning summer collapse of the breakneck McGovern campaign into ever decreasing circles of self-defeat, the relentless and strangely soothing logic of Nixon's reelection campaign that helped define the warped, self-justifying phrase “on message.” And we think how obvious it is. How clear the elements. How sure the end.

Moments — in the fires of their brevity, in the now — rebel against the tidiness of memory. We know all those things as they played out. But we also know when we look with care beneath that cold hard surface of certainty that the year was a packed grenade of wild chance. It threatened more than once to burst, to tear through American life with its shards. Primary voters, fed up with the political establishment, bounced wildly back and forth between George McGovern and George Wallace as instruments to “shake things up.” Economic populism strained on its halter for a while both those men raised the West Wing’s blood pressure with promises that they actually would redistribute the nation’s wealth. Despite all the delegates and momentum the ragtag rebels of McGovernism brought with them to the Democratic National Convention, the campaign’s control of actual votes on the floor was so frail that its staffers thrashed blindly into the catastrophe of the Eagleton nomination for the vice presidency in a rash effort to stem Miami’s chaos before it swamped them. When the Republicans came to town a month later an army of cops and soldiery made camp around them. The GOP's Miami organizers feared a mass of countercultural riot and rebellion, while the longhairs feared the truncheon-swingers would seize on that paranoia and declare for a police state.

There were fragile certainties beyond the campaign trail, too. Behind the lullabies sung to suburbanites at Henry Kissinger’s press conferences, the “Paris process” to settle the fate of Vietnam threatened to spiral out of control. Even in the story we know it almost defied Nixon’s efforts to mask the fact the Accords offered neither peace nor honor in the eyes of his own core voters if you took them into the light to see. There was no guarantee the deliberate overheating of the economy staged by Nixon’s pliant Fed chairman Arthur Burns would wait until December or January before it went south. Both of the fall campaigns sat on secrets of devastating political effect: a scandal of cultural norms and public morals in the do-gooder McGovern’s past, and a Nixonian breach of American law to the edge of treason that dragged out the war he had won the presidency with promises to end. If the unstable, vicious young narcissist named Arthur Bremer had shown more brains and nerve on his Nixon-hunting trip to Ottawa in the spring, the whole country might have faced the nightmare of an Agnew-versus-Wallace contest in November. Nixon may have built his landslide on a foundation of steel, but it had a razor’s edge.

And always, always, there was the Nixon machine itself. The devil’s own engine of American politics, a self-justifying, self-destroying deus ex machina built in the terrible fires of Richard Nixon’s soul, made not just whole but byzantine as it drew to it like something out of Tolkien kindred spirits who together spun plots and tricks and lies to the nation and each other, who fucked rats and patsies and opponents, hatched plots and rumors of plots and boasts of plots and crimes layered over one another with no system or regard, only the appetites of each player in the mob to reckon by. It was a device of self-corruption and self-destruction the likes of which American politics has rarely seen. It grew so vast and wild in its raging that it even showed its face in this predictable, inevitable year. At first that face was so alien, so hard to fathom in its ugliness, that the smooth, reassuring narrative spooled out by Nixon’s ad men to the pool reporters glazed eyes around the country while the mantra that everyone does it swung attention back to the sheer learned haplessness of the McGovern campaign. So the hell-fueled engine thundered on a little longer before the country choked on its pall. But there was no reason, no governing law over slew of the battle to reelect Dick Nixon that made sure it would turn out that way.

This is a story that bends that moment of 1972, that spreads out and grows in its difference enough to build a world of interrelated changes from the one we know. Can we get away with that? Yes, just not easily. Alternate history loves the “Butterfly Effect” but if there are Butterflies there are also Trends. Some of those hefty bastards bind our own 1972 and this place to depart — the American presidential election — in mighty cables. So, difficult, yes — possible just the same. There’s a way. The path is narrow, and twisty, easily thrown askew and about as well paved as the skin of your teeth. But this can be done. The tale from here takes that path. It sets up a wild but central conceit that ripples over time, space, and culture to some corners pretty far from home: a McGovern presidency.

What does that net us? That’s where it gets interesting. Working out what you get for your trouble is alternate history’s whole reward system, after all. Many people at the time had very firm ideas of what kind of world that might be: definite, polar, and opposed in the most fundamental ways. So much so they have colored generations of reflection as even people who were there warped their own plumb-line on reality with confirmation bias and self-distorted supposition. On one hand, you had people who believed as sure as the life in their next breath that George McGovern Would Save America, that the nation would stop struck by awe on its road to Damascus, turn from wrongs and prejudice and war-mongering greed to a very specific and particular set of ideals on which everyone would suddenly agree, that the Youth of Today would build justice and equity leaving the citizens of the American Dream to stand hand in hand as brothers while Fifth Dimension cover bands paraded the nation’s avenues singing Let The Sun Shine In. On the other hand you had millions more who believed that McGovern was at best too nice (and by definition, weak) to be President, all the way to those who thought the limp-wristed hippie lover would torch the American economy, humiliate us in Vietnam, spit on American ideals of courage and self-reliance, and rearm the police with wet pasta noodles as ravenous thugs roamed the burning streets while he handed the launch codes to Moscow. Both sides missed all the fun.

This story may be a curious animal. It is an effort to use what never was to rescue the real. It does not seek the climes of satire, or allegory, or even just a ripping yarn although some exciting things will happen because they do even in the world we call the real one. Wherever it can, this means to be — as much as an author ever really controls the story they tell — an exercise in “hard alternate history.” That describes a style in the vein of “hard sci-fi” and “hard fantasy” that seek most of all to be plausible, to shape a fantastic landscape out of the good, common clay of what we can reckon. There might be magic at work, but it has consistent rules we can understand. Grand things, horrific things, dramatic things, and unlikely things will happen, because that’s what they do in our own world, but no more often than we see around us and the world will soon enough pull them back into a weft of plausibility. Even what many people would call the most outrageous chance in the whole deal here, a McGovern presidency itself, gets to its destination on tracks as stolidly likely (and sometimes downright rickety with chance) as I can lay them.

It also takes off and goes from there. Many timelines in the craft of alternate history, good ones — brilliant ones — focus on a single subject or discrete set of moments. If the author gets far enough off his duff to get all the work done over the next few years, this will span forty years. It goes from the subtle points where it starts all the way to the conveniently-timed passing of the man whose unlikely arrival in the White House ties the whole thing together, not far from where he parted company with us in the real world. Forty years is a good long time if you want to get into the weeds, so this will cover a few "volumes," or at least a big chunk of central conceit and some tasty after-parties in print. It spreads out over topics and continents, too, because the author has a generalist’s heart. Even this first one has restless feet and wants constantly to exceed narrow American politics for a tour of the Seventies' horizon, a tour that reads like it happened but ... changed.

I start here for a reason. Some of that is personal connection. Our story kicks off as I wait physically to be born. Even if that birthday gets a little wibbly-wobbly in the stress of change I’ll guarantee that inside the first two thousand words or so of the first chapter there I am, in Alta Bates Hospital in the East Bay, California, wiggling and squalling. But it’s also more than that. These are the years, by my own view of things, when much of the world we live in was born as well. So it's these conditions, this confluence, from which we depart. From there, well, the results go all over the place. We are not at home to Mister Narrow. The results may surprise: from the microcomputer revolution to Catholic Church politics, from the Assad regime in Syria to the fortunes of the Walt Disney empire, from party-building in the American South to economic revolutions in the Indian Subcontinent, from punk rock to nuclear proliferation, it is a strange and surprising thing to watch the ripples flow from that first blow. This unfamiliar Seventies is a chance to know more about the one we actually had.

With that buried lede I want to raise again the matter of realism. The best fantasies are some of our most realistic fiction. “Literary realism” takes the world we know and peoples it with contrived humans,. The best fantasists, on the other hand, weave altered worlds then drop real souls in them, where they behave in the fresh landscape as real souls would. That’s the goal here. Things change, but Things change. People don’t stop being themselves (at least the ones already born when we start.) Perhaps we can understand more about who they are or were, how we got to the milestones of our own world, by living a while in a different place where we can reconnect with those we know through their alternate lives. History at its most raw is the chance to pierce the veils of death and entropy and touch the thousands of generations of other humans who have been enough like us for us to understand. Or at least, like the one baby turtle among many the philosopher picks up and saves on the beach, a few at a time. Really alternate history is the cat’s pajamas, so let’s get on with it. Welcome to town.

​

 

[Yes]

PROLOGUE ​

Let it burn, said the voice in the head of the man in glasses.

The man in glasses sat, his mind afire, in the deadened calm of a Washington side street, behind the wheel of a used 1968 Ford Falcon paid for cash-on-the-nail with a bum’s name. He sat, marked time, and waited to burn down America in order to save it.

In his bespectacled mind this would be a purifying flame. It had grown more pure, steadily, over the months since he was shuffled outside the door, moved out of the rhythm of the inner circle, the presence of the man himself. Of course he had to do something. You didn’t stand still with a war on, though the war that consumed his days and his efforts was not the one against the Communists. There were plenty of good men committed to that already. It was the other war that fired him, the one against the rude seething tide of pinkos, of longhairs and blacks and spics and Jews, street scum and pampered cowards, and the coy establishment types who smoothed the horde's way even on the evening news. All aimed at the best President the nation had ever had, for whom the man in glasses committed what was his own last measure of devotion.

In the face of this conflict one could not rest and he certainly didn’t. He’d gone to the doctor to see to that the better part of a year ago and since then,the fire had… grown more focused. He felt he understood it better now, even in the jittering moments before the pills kicked in — the right ones, all that street stuff was for the other side, that foul tide across the blood-dimmed line. Uppers on the other hand were tools of the trade, had been since the war, and the guys who got the job done understood how to ride them, let them bring things to clarity at the critical moment.

Or so it seemed. So it seemed to the man in glasses in the unmarked Falcon, who waited for a package he had crammed into the dustbin down the long hall that spanned the ground floor to do its thing. To him this was the true war, the thing that socialist Orwell had gotten right about rough men who did what had to be done so ordinary people could sleep safe. He had always believed that but it became clearer once he got out of the whirl of the inner circle, once there was time enough to hate the other side properly. And, in the circuity of an election year as he piled on the effort and piled the pills on to the effort because this was all worth so much more than one man’s sleep, it grew more certain that he’d been right all along. Not because he was a bright guy, though he had the self-assurance to think so. But because the President had thought it all up himself. Thought it up, and then when the man in the Falcon had the wit and the stomach to act that scared little rabbit John Dean ran all the way across the country to San Clemente to get it called off.

The flaw, the man in glasses had realized later in a coruscating rush of black coffee and amphetamines, was not the plan. It was the scope. He had thought too small, too small for the President’s interests, too small for the fight they waged. Now he had brought it all into focus, one plan, indivisible, that would burn down the pious falsehoods on the other side and prove their treachery in the light of day, where real Americans could see. One grand strike here, where he would do a commander’s job in a war and take the burden of the main effort for the sake of his men, plus the silent strike by Liddy and McCord and their Cubans down at the river. One bomb, two offices, and all the dirty laundry the other side had massed in secret to bring the President down scooped up that very night. In one stroke — the line from Goldfinger had occurred to him at some point, “Operation Grand Slam.” That’s what it was, one very grand slam. He doubled up the dose with a chaser from a six-pack of Coca-Cola, mostly drunk already in the waiting, then checked his watch—

Too soon; no matter. Later, in a different place, he would piece the elements together and consider that it probably was what those Jewish shrinks called a Freudian slip, his desire to be ready before the moment had translated to his hands when he set the timer in a whirl of preparation and paranoia and fierce, clawing energy. Now it meant that the overpacked firebomb he had built over weeks, with the patience of an artisan, blew the doors, and the windows, and the whole damn front entrance fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. From the car the blast was… freeing. As though the world were a balloon made of white heat and it popped, with force that sucked in his cheeks, beat his ears funny while the raw fire surged down his throat from his nose, all the way from across the wide neoclassical avenue. As he exited the car he stepped involuntarily back from the heat for a moment, lost in sheer sensation, before the adrenaline rush that the bennies were there to focus kicked in. Now it was time to work the plan.

He ran in and to the right, where punched-open windows waited. Glasses aside he was not the most gainly man for the job, lanky limbs battened on to a short torso paunched a little in the middle that always made him look a little like a funhouse mirror’s version of himself. But he forced himself up on the frame of the first floor, shoe leather jigsawed by glass, then used those gangling arms to grab the frame on the second floor and pulled, hard. For a moment the wild dangle seemed to crush his chest but he pulled up, the blood roaring in the waves of heat and acrid haze. There was a purity, it seemed, to everything now that he could actually do what he had planned, dreamed of, pushed for, believed in, ever since the man in the big chair first said those three words, “blow the safe.” Simpler than that, really, you just had to figure out what office and what time. Then it was training, and waiting. Just like a soldier.

That will to hash out the details over and over as he cycled up on each dose seemed to pay off in the moment. Through the flourishing cloud of fume he knew what halls to run down, what door to find. When he did he pounded the door open with one kick after another from a long foot until it gave way. In the background, the nearest ladder company of the District of Columbia Fire Department screamed along the bedded-down drizzle of Massachusetts Avenue. But their Doppler wail was not more than a hint in the mind of the man with glasses askew, drenched in sweat, dressed like an accountant and running with great bundled manila folders he believed would hold the answers to all the leader of the Free World’s problems. Nothing mattered now except to get away. Run. Not where to run. Not how long it might take to reckon where the best exit lay. Not whether there was clear air enough to fuel this awkward hurtle out the business end of a building on fire. Not whether the professionals who beat flame back from a vulnerable city might have the wit to cordon the site with their big engines of red metal. No need for such fancy thoughts now. There was just the giddy hormonal stream of victory and running, as the man in glasses lit with firelight hurtled forward on the jagged edge of self-belief. They’d never see.

It took barely a minute and forty seconds for him to learn different, not too long after his loping, vaporous stride brought him clear of the blast zone. He saw just enough from the corner of his vision to wonder why someone else ran just as hard as he did, why their paths might cross, what reason one of those goddamn blacks might have to be dressed up in a fireman’s red helmet and one of those big black cloaks that weighed a ton, all of which bore down on him like the cruel victory over will and grandiosity enjoyed by reason and time.

Then the world exploded. More even than the first blast of flame. There was now no up anywhere, just the fierce dumb power of the ground. Papers flew across both the sidewalk and the parking spots along the cross street, while the man with glasses who ran saw with the frozen clarity of the fight-or-flight instinct that those glasses skittered along the asphalt like a dropped tool down a skyscraper. As the dimensions of the world returned he tried to look through a burning eye around the numbness of his own face, just enough to sense the dampness was probably blood not the casual shower of an hour ago, and that his cheekbone was probably cracked all the way down GET THIS GODDAMN BASTARD OFF ME!

“ ‘the hell’s this firebug?” asked a second fireman, a white guy with a mustache and nine years on the job, who ran up to join his comrade.

“Dunno,” said the first fireman. “Go get that beat cop that came up from Eighteenth and Mass.” His voice hardened. “Let’s find out.”

As the tumult of reality crashed in on the once-running, once-bespectacled man’s clarity of purpose, and as a fireman wrenched the wallet out of his pants pocket, he shrieked with piss and rage. “GET YOUR GODDAMN HANDS OFF ME!” smacked off the brick and concrete of the buildings to echo back above the engines’ wail. Then the little packet of leather and truth was passed to a man in blue, a man with a nightstick and a badge who the man spiraling down from the dreams of victory closed up tight in a used Ford Falcon knew in his heart should be on his side, goddammit, his side….

The policeman spoke.

“Charles Colson. So who’re you, Charles Colson, to be running from that?” he asked, as a cobalt-blue sleeved arm and mahogany hand gestured vaguely at the wall of smoke that had been the Brookings Institution behind them.

Let it burn? It had already started.

 

[Yes]

A Third-Rate Break In? ​

Reflecting on the meaning of the last presidential election, I have decided… Mr. Nixon’s
landslide victory and my overwhelming defeat will probably prove of greater value to the
nation than the victory my supporters and I worked so hard to achieve…. The shattering
Nixon landslide, and the even more shattering exposure of the corruption that surrounded
him, have done more than I could have done in victory to awaken the nation…. This is not
a comfortable conclusion for a self-confident — some would say self righteous — politician
to reach….

- George McGovern, Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1973​

Nothing became Chuck Colson’s criminal career like its collapse. The sole personal deed in that grandiose failure was an actual, physical blaze though not very glorious. The coordinated effort to defeat Richard Nixon’s enemies with a single criminal stroke reflected not the mind of a man corrupted by the secret culture of paranoia and dirty tricks around the incumbent President, but rather one who dove in eager and devoted. Now he was caught, once the giddy, broken rush of his effort to both ransack and burn down the Brookings Institute subsided, Colson in his loyalist’s heart was very much ready to face his accusers. Indeed he needed to talk about it all. About his own part in the plan. About how he’d jumped the gun with a Freudian slip on the bomb’s timer. About how that caused the tandem break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Complex down by the Potomac to fall prey to a guard who’d listened in on reports of the Brookings fire on the radio before he double-checked the building. About why this had happened. About what “Tex” Colson and his ragtag band of Nixonian heroes hoped to achieve. He told anyone who asked at DC central booking, in the interview room and out, with the fierce detail of conviction. Egomania and Benzedrine could do that to a fellow.

Almost before the smoke had cleared, with the relentless boxer’s energy out of their corner the Nixon White House always showed, the administration sought to distance and label. With his usual talent for telling the truth by inversion, Nixon’s pasty robot of a press secretary Ron Ziegler called the whole tawdry, scary business a “third-rate burglary.” The banquet where Ziegler could eat those words stretched out across the decades. In the moment, however, in rare synchronicity, the captive White House press corps and their demon lover in the West Wing shared a common question: how the hell had someone as connected as Chuck Colson gone so far off the deep end?

Colson was long past halfway to criminal conspiracy when the drugs took hold. Indeed he’d worked towards the same plan, minus the DNC angle, the year before. Then that other conspirator deep in the West Wing John Dean had feared Colson’s rashness would give the game away and flew, in body and spirit, to San Clemente to tell Nixon what the hatchet man was up to. The effect of that act, besides the schism it formed between Dean and Colson, already suspicious of the purity of John Dean’s intentions, took a few months to unwind. But unwind it did. As winter approached and the machinery geared up for the re-election of Richard Nixon, Dean’s star began to rise. Meanwhile, as White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, the strong right hand of Dick, looked to the disposition of the West Wing so as to minimize risk, it began to seem like a good thing if they lowered Chuck Colson’s profile.

So, from the Office of Public Liaison, where Colson sat in with the President regularly, helped gin up the Hard Hat Riot in New York, and abetted a war on drug dealing that conveniently set minorities and leftists in the firing line, all of a sudden Colson found himself sent to Coventry, or at least to be counsel in John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Affairs office. Public Liaison went to a more polished figure — more of a boy scout, Haldeman said with an untypical smile — a young West Wing lawyer named Egil Krogh. Colson soldiered on in a grim, quiet slide towards obscurity.

That, though, was not a state Colson meant to stay in for long. There was work to do, and loyalty to prove, and it would take every minute Colson had. So it was he first made his way to his physician who wrote the prescription for a driven man's drug of choice, vetted by the Second World War and talked over in easy conversation by the kind of hard-edged operatives with whom Colson wanted fraternity. And as Colson poured in hour after hour, usually a good eighteen in a working day, all of which continued to impress the dour Ehrlichman, it was only a matter of time until a chance appeared. That came as the election plan institutionalized itself through the Committee to Re-elect the President. The CRP, called “CREEP” both by its political enemies and its bureaucratic rivals elsewhere in the Nixon machine, was a swelling affair, lubricated with millions in sketchy campaign contributions and manned by some of the most driven and… flexible figures to work for the President. Like the Prodigal’s father, only “Tex” Colson could love them all.

And he did, and the chance to fight the real fight again, which he felt almost compelled to do as little by little it took more Benzedrine to keep the edge for as long as he sought. The shadow side of the CRP brought in some real “characters” and Colson grew ever closer to the most committed and expansive men who swam in the deep waters of the CRP slush fund — dairy money, mostly, of all things — who had names to conjure with like Liddy, and Segretti, and Hunt. Colson as ever was an ideas man, and something of an impresario in the Silent Majority’s secret service, and quickly — or not, since he worked eighteen-hour days for the most part — drew together an organization designed to undertake every dirty job the campaign needed done. From pranks and frauds to intelligence ops, bugging offices, and other black-bag jobs, Colson built an edifice of malfeasance worthy of the paranoid, driven man behind the Resolute Desk.

Ehrlichman himself saw how Colson rose up phoenix-like in the works of the campaign, and decided that besides his general role as a director of operations, Colson should have personal command of a “Special Investigations Unit” designed to plug leaks in the campaign, and start them in others’. With a role like that, the nickname “the Plumbers” did not follow far behind. So it was that, as the primaries picked up steam and chaos reigned where Colson’s men sowed it, while two very different Georges — McGovern and Wallace — made waves and Richard Nixon obsessed over the thought that his past sins sabotaging the Paris Talks in the autumn of 1968 would come back to haunt him, as the pills multiplied, as Colson’s vision tunneled into a vivid sense that any able Democrat would torch the country and their treasonous leaks of facts about Vietnam must be stopped, paranoia became plans and plans became policy. Then, by the end of May, what had nearly happened a year before came to fruition. And when drug-addled exultation gave way to the light of day and the smoking hulk of the Brookings Institution, Colson wanted to talk about it.

The other Plumbers, however, didn’t. They kept their mouths shut, took pride that they were trained to do just that, and watched the eddies of secret Washington swirl around them. Those eddies stank from the headwater: first Nixon asked John Ehrlichman what the goddamn hell Chuck Colson thought he was playing at and who’d been stupid enough to tell him he should go ahead. Ehrlichman shrugged and said no one, we can be very clear this didn’t come out of the building, as they called the West Wing of the White House. This was CRP’s deal and Colson was good at it, but he’d cracked up somehow. (No one mentioned the pills; one man’s addiction was another’s prescribed consolation.) That was bad, but not necessarily fatal. Colson's spiral had been not only downward but inward, so with some footwork and readiness to sacrifice lower-level employees (never in short supply around the Nixon White House) Colson’s own loose tongue might screen “the building” with tales of CREEP derring-do.

If that failed, or threatened to, then the relentless, steel-lined minds of Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman, nudged forward in a couple of meetings by the feral skittering of John Dean, proposed a two-front strategy. Several of the crew picked up down at the Watergate Complex were Cuban, with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and its shadow army of reactionary Cuban exiles strewn from South America to Africa. The first step, then, was to lean on the Agency, whose relations with the Nixon White House had always been somewhat fraught. Langley would get the message that Dick Nixon knew where the bodies were buried, too, and if the CIA wanted them not to be dug up it would be good to put a flurry of paperwork in front of any domestic investigation of these two incidents.

This had mixed results. One one hand Langley had its own parochial reasons to make the FBI and related agencies play by the CIA’s rules as they processed the Cuban “Plumbers.” On the other the institutional CIA, led in large part by its deputy director Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters, one of the grand old men of American espionage and covert diplomacy, was unmoved by West Wing attempts at damage control. Walters in particular played a strong hunch from the very start that all this went much farther up the Nixonian chain of command, and much further into the inner workings of its paranoid gestalt, than anyone the likes of John Dean or Bob Haldeman wanted to say. Walters would look out for Agency interests and slow down questioning of the Cubans for a few weeks — Liddy and McCord resolutely refused to talk to anyone as petty as a Special Agent in Charge — but he was not in the business of cleaning up the President’s personal messes. He made this very clear. He’d had a good run. Retirement did not look bad to a man with thirty years at the top levels of the game.

The other front for the White House was more direct. L. Patrick Gray, acting head of the FBI and the second such since the death of America’s secret policeman J. Edgar Hoover, was a man in a difficult position even before “Tex” Colson burned out the hallways of the top foreign policy think tank in town, or a bunch of would-be James Bonds bungled a black-bag job at Democratic Party headquarters. Now Gray found himself pinned between mighty forces. There was the institutional memory of the Bureau which had gotten up to all kinds of suspect acts in Hoover’s time and tended to see these characters as loose cannons but on the right side. There were the expectations of a White House obsessed even more than most with national security and a sense of struggle against enemies within. And there was Gray's obligation to keep the Bureau’s profile clean in the public eye, to see to it this mess was tidied up in the light of day. These were too many priorities at once for a man who, despite his wartime heroics as a submariner, had a deeply nervous disposition in the presence of his political betters.

He would have problems closer to home as well, with his deputy director Mark Felt. Felt believed he’d been passed over in favor of a Nixon flunky through Gray’s appointment as boss. Felt was old-school FBI. He had worked within the Hoover system and done his share of illegal wiretaps and questionable evidence gathering. But he also had a sense of the larger rules on which the system depended if it was to function. As Felt took the measure of Gray, it looked to him like the acting director was a weak reed under the Nixon administration’s boot. Collusion now without the nation’s puppetmaster, J. Edgar, there to protect the Agency might doom the whole institution.

But all that was in the future. For now, as Colson spun his tales to Metro detectives and FBI special agents, Gray latched gratefully on to the part of the story that had nothing to do with plumbing or West Wing employees. There were plenty of secret operations underway in the CRP’s backrooms and basements, and one in particular had caught first Colson’s eye in retrospection, then Gray’s. It involved a crew of young California lawyers, the most ambitious of whom was the weedy kid named Donald Segretti. Segretti had a talent for what he called “ratfucking,” political dirty tricks carried out with the many thousands of dollars in slush-fund money put their way by the CRP’s bagmen. They had written bogus letters to editors, phony campaign literature, screwed up scheduling and logistics for Democratic candidates’ rallies, canceled flights for Democratic operatives, started rumors among the press and opposition researchers, aided and abetted George Wallace’s bomb-throwing run at the Democratic nomination before an attempted assassination paralyzed him, and generally done everything they could to make every Democratic candidate’s campaign they could reach a stumbling, in-fighting mess.

They had done it all with dodgy campaign money; there was the in for Gray. He could check into Segretti’s gang, score some points as he cleaned up CRP’s funding, isolate and label Colson’s merry band as extremists, and pronounce that there was nothing else to see. Haldeman and Dean suggested as much to Gray in a private meeting where the West Wing men could practically smell Gray’s flop-sweat. It would even make the Bureau look good to liberals, surely a minor miracle in itself. And when it came down to it, Dean said, Segretti and those other kids might not even have done anything illegal. Unethical, sure, but what was a misdemeanor or two among friends?

Others in federal law enforcement, once the names of Segretti and his pranksters were known, did not share that optimism. Chief among them was Martin McGee. McGee was a tough, businesslike Chicago Irishman, and the Chief Postal Inspector of the United States. The Bureau’s men might have laughed over a quiet drink about postal inspectors, but you failed to take them seriously at your peril and Martin McGee was the reason why. Over the previous twenty years McGee had taken one of the most loosely written criminal causes of action in the United States Code — mail and wire fraud — and made it the truncheon with which he beat down land swindles, shady advertising, fraudulent charities, phony sweepstakes, and every other con that passed through the U.S. Mail.

Now, with the Bureau at sea after its longtime master’s death, and the nation in a state of quiet but deep unease about what exactly had taken place in “the Washington incidents” — wire-service reporters quickly dumped that description for the term “Brookingsgate,” a portmanteau of the Brookings Institution and the Watergate Complex, the sites of the crimes — McGee saw his main chance. At least some of what the ratfuckers had gotten up to involved the abuse of mailings, from campaign paraphenalia to forged letters designed to confound and spread slanders and misinformation. These too-clever-by-half young lawyers were low hanging fruit so far as “Brookingsgate” was concerned. And they had engaged in tortious conduct at the very least, federal crimes maybe, on McGee's turf. The ratfuckers had fucked with the wrong Mick, as Martin McGee quickly resolved to show them. By the middle of June, the most intensive Postal Inspectorate investigation in years, determined to show its quality, came down on the Segretti wing of CREEP’s dirty-tricks division. And if one looked very carefully, you could see the first cracks in the basement ceiling of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

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George Mitchell took the train to Manchester, New Hampshire late in June. Martin McGee’s investigation hung in the air and clung to the bottom half of front pages across the country. Mitchell had time to read in detail on the train as he balanced a slew of yellow legal pads in his lap, his briefcase tilted against him with the weight of the leather-bound Title 18 of the United States Code he’d stuffed in it back in Washington the day before. Mitchell was medium-tall and entirely lawyerly in his large glasses, a Mainer and a Lebanese-American both, the latter by adoption on his father’s side and birth on his mother’s. The Maronite Catholic priests who peopled the Sundays of his growing-up had a fondness for the story of Daniel, no surprise given their demography back home in the Levant. Mitchell remembered it now as he shuffled everything together, stood up after the train chuntered to a halt, and set out to look for a cab straight to the offices of the Manchester Union-Leader. Once he’d flagged a ride out front of the station, he imagined himself inside William Loeb’s office to prepare for the event in advance. Lion’s den, indeed.

Loeb had been the Union-Leader’s publisher since the Forties, with politics a little to Genghis Khan’s right and a thumb on the scales of the New Hampshire primary that for the last two presidential cycles had been the wreck of Democratic front-runners. Mitchell knew that all too well. As deputy chairman of Ed Muskie’s presidential campaign and the Lincolnesque senator’s former legislative aide, Mitchell had lived every minute in slow motion as the wheels came off Muskie’s campaign in this town, amid the snows of late February. First the scurrilous "Canuck Letter," then Muskie’s clenched, furious presser on which the pool reporters descended like jackals, then the desertions, the confusion, and in time the avalanche came down. Loeb had taken pride in it, all things considered. The publication of the letter, the purported scoop that destroyed “Moscow Muskie”’s ambitions and confirmed Loeb’s personal power over “the nation’s first primary” in the new world where what had been beauty contests now stole the party conventions’ thunder. Now in this fraught summer Mitchell had an idea, the kind only a lawyer of his caliber would dare to have. And really, if Dick Nixon could go to China, surely he could at least go to Manchester….

The road to Loeb’s office was short — Manchester wasn’t the District — and Mitchell later confessed surprise he was shown in so quickly. He expected, really, that Loeb would want to play with his food a bit more. Instead the bald, hawklike, and perpetually bow-tied Loeb gestured for Mitchell to sit down and confessed his frank amusement that “Muskie’s body man” wanted an audience. Mitchell smiled politely and minced no words. This is not what you think, he said. There are no grudges here, he said. That’s not the point. This was a proposal, and it would only work in company. We have to work together, he said. Loeb smiled a vulpine smile and let the Down East lawyer carry on.

Loeb would later insist it was Mitchell’s guts that impressed him, not the brilliance of it. The idea that in a thousand years Loeb would ever say yes — which he did, after a nerve-shattering silence of consideration. Mitchell was inclined to think it was the audacity, that and the fact Mitchell had found the one chink in Loeb’s conservative armor, that he was a newspaper man through and through. Whatever the cause Mitchell laid out the plan with precision. It was plain enough. He wanted Loeb, probably by and through the Union-Leader, to sue Donald Segretti and his co-conspirators.

Why? Fraud, Mitchell said. Yes, Loeb still insisted the “Canuck Letter” was a genuine article despite Martin McGee’s spadework. It wouldn’t last. The investigation would move forward, and it would do nothing but damage the Union-Leader’s reputation, and through that its circulation. Advertisers would drop out. The tremendous informal power Loeb enjoyed — kingmaker for the New Hampshire GOP, scourge of the Democrats — would fade. There were material costs involved, other lawyers could calculate presumptive damages. The letter made statements on which the Union-Leader relied for its scoop, the scoop that destroyed Ed Muskie’s candidacy more than any other single factor.

But it was not about the cause of action, really. It was about the discovery: tactically reasonable blanket demands for the records of Segretti’s crew could blow their operation wide open. If that happened quickly, and thoroughly, there was still a chance the Union-Leader could beat the big boys to the goods again, this time on the up and up. At a stroke Loeb and his paper could prove their integrity, their shrewdness, and their ability to shape national political outcomes. The whole story of this rogue operation in CREEP’s basement would sell copy, both local papers and reprints in the big markets, like no tomorrow.

The genius, though, lay in the cross-petition. The Union-Leader’s claim for damages was a thin reed, and while even a claim for business losses in the New Hampshire market could clean out Segretti and his co-conspirators, it wouldn’t shake the bigger fish who had supplied slush funds from… somewhere. No one knew yet really. But the cross-petition… Mitchell had lined up five major contributors to the Muskie campaign, three of them unions with pockets quite deep enough to fund the attorneys’ fees this job would take, who claimed that the fraudulent letter had specifically and irreparably damaged the political campaign in which they’d invested, that but for the letter there would never have been the press conference, never the wolf-pack of reporters undercutting Muskie’s reputation, never the rush of other ratfucking that followed up the letter’s success blow upon blow because the CRP outlaws saw blood in the political water. False witness to the Union-Leader foreclosed the Muskie campaign’s chances. There were damages to seek, wrongs to make whole.

It didn’t matter how much substance there was, any more than it mattered how authentic the letter was. Clarity and confidence carried the tort of fraud, and money, or its loss, was the weapon of choice in the effort. The cross-petition could bleed some very big players, and on top of McGee’s Chicago-Irish unconcern for Segretti’s big friends it would scare the young ratfucker and the other field hands shitless. Loeb could scoop the nationals, save Dick Nixon from his subordinates, and get to the bottom of the biggest political story in the country.

As for Mitchell? What he got besides the reputation for cooking this up — it wouldn’t hurt for a man with his eye on the Maine governor’s mansion in Augusta in two years — was Ed Muskie’s good name back. That and a bare hunch, only just, that this ran a lot deeper than any Republican newspaper editors wanted it to. Once Loeb and Mitchell had settled that Loeb would file suit personally in the federal New Hampshire District, so as to disentangle his field reporters from a conflict of interest in the matter, the two shook on it. And down in the CREEP basement another part of the roof caved in.

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Ed Muskie said no first. Or at least, he was the first to be asked formally and said no when he was. After California, after the breathless success of the primaries, George McGovern came back to Boston for a campaign stop in one of the nation’s most Democratic cities. There he took lunch with Teddy Kennedy. As an astute reader of people Kennedy felt his old friend George edge towards the question, so Kennedy steered the shop talk away with the words, “you know, I watched my brothers do it and I’ve watched you do it — I don’t think I could stomach a nationwide campaign when it comes down to it.”

As McGovern deflated Kennedy grinned to buck him up and launched into energetic talk of how McGovern should poach a Southerner for the ticket. McGovern, said Teddy, needed to come back around to the economic populism that had worked so well in the Wisconsin primary and get someone like Wilbur Mills, the longtime boss of House Ways and Means. That role made Mills in practical terms one of the three or four most powerful people in Congress, and a favorite-son presidential candidate out of Arkansas this very cycle. A drinker, sure, but a ruthlessly knowledgeable and trusted man on economics and a possible key to the Mississippi valley states. If not old Wilbur, then maybe someone like Louisiana’s former governor John McKeithen, a war hero like McGovern and an economic populist with a cagily moderate record on racial issues, or the bright young host of the upcoming Democratic National Convention, Florida governor Reubin Askew, a winter soldier on civil rights and crusader for ethics reform. Southerners, the grandson of Boston’s legendary mayor “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald said. That was where to look to seal McGovern’s leadership in the race.

It was not, though, what McGovern’s campaign team said. Pat Caddell the wunderkind pollster, and McGovern’s manager, factotum, and fixer Gary Hart, and Jean Westwood on her way to becoming the first woman to head the Democratic National Committee, and several others swung very much another way. Write off the South, they said. Democrats in the state-level races will or won’t win on their own merits; many of them wanted no part of McGovern’s nomination, and others feared they couldn’t win if they talked up the South Dakotan crusader too much. What the campaign needed in a running mate, went this other argument, was a prominent Catholic, a favorite of the unions, and if possible someone with ties to one or more of the big-city political machines to boot.

At a personal level McGovern liked Boston’s mayor Kevin White for the role. With one stern look down that glacially long face of his McGovern’s dear friend, economics tutor, fellow campaigner of the first hour when no one took McGovern seriously, and Harvard legend John Kenneth Galbraith shot down the White idea. White was a leading Muskie backer, and the Massachusetts delegation wouldn’t wear it. Catholic was fine, Galbraith said, even to be encouraged, but the nice thing was that they bred so freely there were plenty to choose from. McGovern shot back with a smile that Protestantism hadn’t kept Galbraith from a bevy of children of his own. But the candidate took the advice.

On those grounds, then, the next day McGovern walked to the back of the “Dakota Queen II”, the campaign’s charter jet, where he found Hart and the young guru of the state caucuses Rick Stearns together with the campaign’s sage and media maven Frank Mankiewicz. Their boss told them if they wanted a Catholic union man they might as well start at the front of the phone book. One pay phone at the next airport later, Mankiewicz himself called the doughty little Irish operator Mark Shields, who’d been a heavy hitter in Muskie’s communications staff before the campaign imploded, and said McGovern wanted a word. As Shields passed that on, Muskie guessed the reason and declined.

He was the first of several in the middle of that June. Hubert Humphrey’s protege Fritz Mondale was next — the wounds of California were still fresh. Then, after a full day of circuitous talk about where to look now, jotted down in fierce detail by the campaign’s freak-powered journalistic body man Hunter S. Thompson (while buzzed on a light dose of mescaline plus sipping tequila to even it out), an ask went to McKeithen. The Louisianan had the good grace to spend a day of his own in thought before he dumped them too. McGovern’s old friend Abe Ribicoff, asked in person when McGovern pulled him aside at a New York fundraiser, pleaded a new marriage on the way. It was a reasonable out but still just that. The pickings looked thin.

It was a bad look for what at that point seemed to be a powerful campaign. It had listed a bit, almost to keeling, before the firebomb blew in Washington. McGovern’s principal rivals in the crucial California primary, still grandfathered as winner-take-all despite the rules of the very reform commission McGovern co-chaired a few years before, asked for a series of three debates in the fortnight before the vote. The first had been harmless enough. But in the second Hubert Humphrey, steeled with desperate concern that the family history of cancer made this his last chance at the White House, lit into his old friend and fellow South Dakota native McGovern as though he were reading Richard Nixon’s talking points. In sheer befuddled shock at the attacks, swamped with anger and sadness and a sense of betrayal, McGovern clammed up like a good Midwesterner and only looked wooden for his trouble, a punching bag for the voluble Humphrey.

Now, though, not quite three days on from the shocking news out of Washington, Hunter S. Thompson seemed to capture it best in a passage from his dispatches that later became the famous Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72: How The Good Guys Finally Won: “… old George had the gimlet eye of righteousness again, the prairie fire that showed up once in a while in the primaries, probably to the best effect in Wisconsin where he and the Christ of the Crackers, George Corley Wallace, had carried all before them…. For once he brushed aside Frank Mankiewicz’s pre-bout strategizing — Frank always did look like a welterweight’s trainer in a bad suit during those bull sessions — the candidate had things to say and damned if he wouldn’t say them. He walked out of there not tucked into himself the way he’d been ever since Humphrey played rope-a-dope in the last round, but striding like the man who’d bombed hell out of the Nazis, headed for the hearthrugged battlefield with a cunning plan to bring back the pelt of at least one Minnesota pharmacist, maybe more if they held a convention in Studio City….”

Later observers, scholars of communications and psychologists both, would say on reflection that McGovern’s body language made a great deal of the difference. He put himself physically forward in the small scrum of the studio, with Shirley Chisholm brought in by satellite from the East Coast. McGovern hammered the recent lawbreaking. He tied it into the war — “if this is a rogue element, well then we’ve got a whole Executive Branch up to the eye teeth in rogue elements … this is what happens when you run a bad war out of basements and back rooms for four administrations.” He promised vigorous action and a clear alternative. And now it was Humphrey’s turn to be outflanked, as the remedies he offered did not differ too much from McGovern’s but lacked the fire and clarity. Humphrey, who knew of what the Johnson administration had gone through debating whether it should out the "Chennault Affair" in 1968, fudged and fidgeted and watched what he said. McGovern moved on.

When Humphrey seemed to recover himself on aid to Israel, McGovern tacked: “Peace in that troubled part of the world is the very best thing for all concerned. If the Soviets were ever fool enough to take military action in the region, of course, we’d have to respond. I think it’s very important, right here, to get something clear. And that is, to oppose a secretive and self-destructive and immoral war doesn’t mean some kind of blanket pacifism. We are not going to let people who have been victims of humanity’s worst crimes lose their refuge and their chosen home. Israel would be safe on my watch. To not bomb first and question later, or not cheerlead foolish, bloody conflicts born out of fear and political gain, doesn’t mean you don’t stand and fight when you have to.”

He turned again on economics, and with a cooler head berated both Frank Reynolds' hosting and Humphrey for the Minnesotan’s comments on the Demogrant proposal at the last debate: “… all this business about higher taxes for ordinary people, the numbers simply don’t bear that out. Quite a few different people, have done those numbers. They simply don’t say that. But it’s a sad thing when a true Democrat — I’d say here again that only Senator Humphrey and have said we'll support our party’s nominee no matter what — a true Democrat takes a leaf out of Richard Nixon’s hymnal like that. And then the press run with it. We get three-inch headlines about how a plan to administer public aid fairly and efficiently through the tax code will make life hard on working people, then a week or two later there’s an apology that they got it wrong on the back page, but who reads the apology?” McGovern’s last blow fell against a man on his way out of both the campaign and, in the end, the party, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty. As Yorty apologized for mistakenly identifying the wrong government official in response to a question, McGovern jabbed back, “I can see how someone who thought a twenty-year cop was a dangerous radical might make that mistake.” It was a sharp barb aimed at Yorty’s scorched-earth advertising against African American mayoral candidate Tom Bradley, an LAPD veteran and distinguished lawyer, in the last election.

McGovern left the room to find his fortunes lifted in a very large part. The state’s more conservative papers called him “too strident,” but the vigorous defense of his positions, the pugnacity, and the blows against the criminal conduct of people tied to the Nixon White House won him praise. With the fierce urgency of the moment, Frank Mankiewicz and Mankiewicz’s old friend and ally Jesse Unruh, former Speaker of the California House, rushed McGovern in two directions before a wrap-up in the Bay Area. The first was into the minority communities of Los Angeles, where pragmatism about Shirley Chisholm’s actual chances and appreciation for McGovern’s stinging defense of Tom Bradley had made waves. The other was the Central Valley, not natural territory for McGovern except for the fact that, even more than Humphrey, McGovern had the most thoroughly developed farm policy of any Democrat in the field. McGovern spent a day and a half getting that across, along with bromides about Washington corruption that, to quote Thompson again, “would have made William Jennings Bryan order a round for the house, even that nice homo erectus down at the end of the bar.” Humphrey’s campaign moved more slowly but the circumstances were not lost on the veteran campaigner. He mobilized the California offices of the AFL-CIO in full, particularly those that worked with the engineering and technical unions among southern California’s defense contractors where McGovern’s planned cuts would bite hard.

Turnout was high on the day of the primary but the end results ratified the shocking McGovern comeback in the largest state, played out over the previous month and so nearly derailed. McGovern won by an eyelash over nine points, especially among partisan Democrats who had hated Dick Nixon personally for decades, and sure enough better than expected results among racial and ethnic minorities and the southern counties of the Central Valley. Humphrey had still produced a solid result, and still meant to challenge the all-or-nothing allocation of California delegates at the convention. But this ended the primaries on a high note for the presumptive nominee.

It was a lonely victory. A few days of euphoria passed afterward, with light campaigning, and then Ed Muskie said no, and Mondale and McKeithen after him, and on it went from there. No one in the party was ready just yet to make peace with McGovern’s success, or reconcile with the fact that his policy proposals spooked a significant portion of what people like Jules Witcover of the Los Angeles Times and the up and coming David Broder liked to call middle opinion. The campaign itself fell into a kind of lethargy as McGovern personally intended to do some of his work as a senator before the Fourth of July break. Meanwhile a running argument broke out between Hart, as always on a side of his own, with Mankiewicz and Westwood on the other side, about what to do if Humphrey succeeded in breaking up the California bloc at the convention.

Pollster Pat Caddell, the maverick South Carolinian number cruncher who believed the campaign’s prophetic, outsider aura was its greatest weapon, still pressed the issue of a running mate. One way or the other, he said, but no middles. They could get a boost either with a man the bosses trusted, or with someone who would double down on the campaign’s message. But a weak candidate, a poor mix or imitation of either category, that would be disaster. It would cast doubt on McGovern’s judgment, it would paint the campaign as second-rate after all, and it wouldn’t offset the people they might lose to a definite choice — go inside or go outside — with converts. In practical terms, despite his petty point-scoring on other issues, it was Gary Hart who took this most seriously and who tried now to come up with useful options for the campaign. In the third week of June Hart set up a working group that included the young, pug-faced speechwriter Bob Shrum, Doug Coulter — the Rockies organizer and Harvard MBA who had volunteered for Vietnam with a secret Special Forces reconnaissance project and found in McGovern the principled voice against the war Coulter had sought on his return — and the young, Southern lawyer from Yale turned Gulf Coast organizer, Bill Clinton.

Within days they settled on three candidates. The first was one of McGovern’s closest friends, the former governor turned senator from Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson. Firmly anti-war and perhaps the leading environmentalist in a Senate that had several of those, Nelson would satisfy Caddell’s advice to double down. The working group hoped that some proper preparation and advance talks could calm Nelson’s skittishness about national politics. The second was Georgia’s ambitious governor Jimmy Carter, who seemed more than Reubin Askew and the retired McKeithen to have a nose for where power was and the ambition to take a risk on the ticket. The third was Michigan senator Phil Hart, a war hero like McGovern who had been wounded on the D-Day beaches, a Catholic with strong ties to the United Auto Workers, the well chosen floor boss of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, sometimes called “the conscience of the Senate” when that monicker was not, more derisively, laid on McGovern. There was the list.

Gary Hart paired like with like and delegated Clinton to sound out Carter’s people. With a flair for the dramatic Clinton passed messages through a trusted contact at the University of Arkansas to Carter’s staff offices. Just past the middle of the month Clinton made two trips by car to Georgia where he met with a bright, thoughtful Carter aide named Powell, and the two men hashed through possible terms and offers for Carter to join the ticket. After the second meeting, word came to Clinton through the academic contact that Carter had detailed proposals for a poll to be put in the field that would test the reception of such a ticket by voters. Prone to plunge into the fine details of such a project once he had a grip on it, Clinton passed this up the chain with a series of proposals, and then churned out an eight-page policy memo on a possible platform compromise on busing that would give Carter political cover.

But while Clinton invested himself in the mission the winds shifted. A wave of paranoia hit the senior campaign staff, moved by Frank Mankiewicz’s gut feeling that Carter would sell them out to Humphrey given a chance and by Gary Hart’s dislike of Clinton’s ingratiatingly hard work on the project. The Carter ask settled into neutral then foundered. Mankiewicz’s gut was misplaced, but not entirely. Carter and some of his senior advisers had the prescience to see that the California delegates were likely to be seated, which would take the wind out of Humphrey, and that Scoop Jackson would then likely emerge as the main challenger to McGovern. Carter therefore sought to maximize his chances with both the McGovern and Jackson campaigns, without giving enough to either to prejudice his position.

Gaylord Nelson had a poll already; Caddell created a generic version of Nelson in a question set for assessments and ran it the third week of June while other efforts faded. It didn’t hurt, at least, though the uptick was on paper only marginal. At the same time, while other candidates begged off or shied away, Gary Hart fixed his attention on Gaylord Nelson. With Nelson in Washington doing the business of the Senate, Hart asked John Holum, McGovern’s bespectacled, polymath legislative aide who’d written McGovern’s huge and detailed position paper on defense policy among other things, to meet with Nelson a few times. They would discuss campaign business and the senator’s input. Holum was a policy man to his fingertips, so it seemed a safe way to ease Nelson into the waters of an active role in the campaign. Nelson was also no fool, and he played coy with the possibility. Hart himself flew to Washington after more than a week of this, taking a day away from the campaign which always seemed like a risk to Hart given his rivalry with Mankiewicz, to talk platform issues with Nelson personally. This put Nelson’s back up though he did not show it and the brisk, focused Hart did not seem to see. Whenever questions came around that might lead to talk of Nelson joining the ticket, the senator stayed firmly back from them and steered the talk back to policy. Hart believed he might have another trick, perhaps two, up his sleeve to induce Nelson yet now it looked like the campaign was running quietly but desperately out of options.

The next day, in town to shepherd a rider on defense appropriations, George McGovern made a choice. After time on the Senate floor he walked out from the chamber and all the way to Ed Muskie’s offices. The young Madeleine Albright happened to be the senior staffer around at that moment, and let the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in to sit on the couch, which McGovern accepted with a smile and Midwestern self-containment. Muskie happened in a few minutes later. What followed was never put down on paper, and remains the province of the memories of the two men, who later recounted it more than once. With his dry New England sense of humor, Muskie summed it up in an interview with the phrase, “George wanted to remind me, as a good Methodist, that the faith of my fathers has no monopoly on professions of guilt.”

With the earnest focus for which he was known, McGovern talked about the CREEP investigation, and the Canuck Letter, and the slander of Muskie’s wife of thirty years, Jane. McGovern was struck deeply by the pain it all had caused, and blamed himself for being too focused on the campaign to appreciate both the personal toll it cost the Muskies and the way it tarnished McGovern’s own victory. McGovern came with an offer too — a little thing, he said, but something. The McGovern campaign would drop the alternate slate of delegates they had named through a procedural challenge in Illinois, Muskie’s single largest primary victory. The primary there elected delegates, rather than candidates, and a more radical slate headed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson among others had displaced Muskie’s electors with challenges to the delegates’ propriety and diversity. I’ll make it right with Jackson, McGovern said. He’s going to have this over me and he knows the value of that. You, said the presumptive nominee to Muskie, have a voice in this convention and it shouldn’t be taken from you.

Muskie, by mutual account, looked McGovern over, first thanked him, and then added that Muskie knew where McGovern wanted to go with this discussion and that he shouldn’t ask. McGovern, a little crestfallen, simply nodded. Muskie recalled, “I told him I had the advantage here by studying law rather than history.” With the fraud suit underway, in which Muskie was a material witness and an interested party who might be named in some kind of creative cross-claim, it was better to steer clear of association with somebody else’s ticket. It was also a matter of investment. Muskie was a private and, behind the craggy facade, a deeply emotional man who wanted time for himself and his family to recover from the death of their dreams in the March cold.

McGovern brightened a bit at a thought of his own devising, and by both men’s recall said, “Ed, I’m going to win this thing. The nomination, maybe even the election. But if I’m wrong, and I sure can be good at that, I mean to put you forward. We can’t have Chicago ever again, not now of all times. If they get me I want you to know, right here, that I believe you should lead the ticket.” Muskie smiled, and thanked McGovern again, then wondered out loud if might be of some help in a more practical way. McGovern had to think about that ticket, Muskie said, about the best way to organize it.

Of course, said McGovern. To rush in would mean disaster, Muskie went on in “a way more professorial than I ever was at Dakota Wesleyan,” in McGovern’s words. McGovern had to square his passionate supporters with a choice that would only alienate part of the party, not all of it. All right, replied McGovern, one learned friend to another — using the usual Senate term of endearment for a colleague — what did Muskie think? First, said Muskie, that there were no good Southerners from whom to choose. McKeithen had said no, Sanford despite his primary run was too far into retirement, and other possibilities like Askew, or Carter, or Texas’ freshman senator Lloyd Bentsen didn’t have enough experience. Both men agreed Al Gore, Sr. would have fit just right. What then, asked McGovern. At this, as Muskie retold the story more than once, “I told him that as a lawyer I had a proposal for a comprehensive settlement.”

It took a parliament of women to do it; that was, likely, what irked Gary Hart the most. As June started to fade away, as the requests for production of documents in Loeb v. Segretti went ahead, and as Gaylord Nelson continued to perseverate in his indecision, Hart began to cast around for ways out of the problem. The ticket needed to look strong in Miami, to get past the parliamentary ambushes on delegate credentials and impose its vision on the convention. With the uncertain climate in the country that meant a bold move to prove to thoughtful voters who needed cause to vote for the Democrats that this was the way out of the Nixon nightmare. Already one Hart had dished the idea of the other Hart: Gary, in a campaign policy meeting, vetoed an approach from the national staff to Sen. Phil Hart of Michigan.

It wasn’t the man, Hart Gary insisted about Hart Phil with not a single sense of how this sounded in “America’s inclusive campaign.” It was his wife. Jean Briggs Hart was a formidable, striking, and consummately self-assured woman, the daughter of an auto-parts manufacturing magnate who was a longtime owner of the Detroit Tigers. She had learned to fly planes in uniform during the war and now flew her husband to various campaign and constituency stops by helicopter. In the early Sixties she had taken part in a private foundation’s efforts to subject a pool of women to the physical, intellectual, and psychological tests of the Mercury Program astronauts: Jean Briggs Hart passed with flying colors. She was also a devout Catholic and mother of nine (one of whom had died tragically as a toddler), who had been arrested for trying to hold an impromptu mass and peace protest inside the Pentagon, and who assailed her mother Church as racist and possessed of an “outrageous” position on birth control. In May she had refused to pay taxes because of the Operation LINEBACKER bombings of North Vietnam and mining of its harbors. Too much baggage, said Hart Gary. We need a running mate who will either make a big impression on their own or not have baggage. For the former, he suggested a Nixon-to-China pitch to second-tier primaries candidate “Scoop” Jackson, the hawkish New Dealer from Washington state, and for the latter the Catholic product of the St. Louis political machine Sen. Thomas Eagleton.

As it was, the campaign did not so much go over Hart’s head as it went around him in a pincer movement. The conversation in Ed Muskie’s office had sealed George McGovern’s own judgment on the matter. He, in turn, went to two women, his own remarkable wife Eleanor, and Jean Westwood, the tireless organizer and administrator inside the national campaign staff, a flinty Utah native who was very good at strategically ignoring the younger, less experienced Hart’s commandments. Go to her, said McGovern, so they did. He, said McGovern, would think himself to death if that was possible, he’ll go over every angle so carefully they’ll finish counting votes in Ohio before he’s done. Go to her, though, and we’ll settle this.

So, thanks to the candidate’s Washington schedule, Eleanor McGovern and Jean Westwood converged on the right Federal-era townhouse and met the smiling, unflappable heiress at the door. After just over an hour’s conversation they waited for her husband to return home. When he did they told him what had been decided. In keeping with his sensible and generous nature, he accepted. Then there was a phone call under an assumed name to McGovern’s Senate office. An aide with an innocuous but coded message was sent to find McGovern, who seemed to smile more than usual in the canteen. So it was Philip Aloysius Hart joined the presumptive Democratic ticket.

As the temporarily secret duo squared up to face the Democratic National Convention ahead in Miami the campaign’s newest volunteer, Jean Briggs Hart, half declared and half hoped that the addition of her husband to the ticket meant that, “now Dick Nixon was going to have one hell of a fight on his hands.” With the White House’s mastery at manipulation of the press corps — so far they’d walked clean through this Brookingsgate business without any shit on their suits, Gary Hart observed mordantly — others were more skeptical. When Frank Mankiewicz quipped, “we have maybe the two most honest, decent men in the Senate on this ticket. How could we possibly win?” the veteran of Bobby Kennedy’s tragic campaign was only half kidding. At the very least McGovern had made it out of Gethsemane, as the candidate himself, a Methodist pastor’s son, put it, where “it seemed like every leading Democrat in Congress was determined to deny me three times.” And he’d done it without a foot wrong. Whether that would persuade the country would have to wait a bit; first they had to convince the convention.

 

[Yes]

Chuck Colson, fitted with the glasses broken when he was tackled by a Washington, D.C. firefighter at the site of the Brookings Institution firebombing and burglary, seen in his mug shot

Thrown to the wolves: Donald Segretti interviewed by the press in connection with Postal Inspector Martin McGee's mail fraud investigation in June 1972

Outside the Cow Palace in San Francisco, George McGovern celebrates early word of his victory in the California primary, which clinched the nomination for the outsider candidate

Sen. Phil Hart (D-MI) at a Senate hearing in late June 1972; only a few days after this picture was taken, Hart was approached in secret by the McGovern campaign and agreed to serve as George McGovern's running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket

 

[Yes]

Turning Up the Heat ​

“But we never expected to have much impact anyway,” [Bernstein] said matter-of-factly.
“Why? Well, we watched the McGovern campaign fall apart, we knew how the press had
been undercut, and we realized one crucial fact about the White House: they know our
business and we don’t know their business.”

- Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus​

Miami was as hot, and as bothered, as everyone imagined in advance. The activist contingent of McGovern delegates, including many first-time convention attendees, ranged itself against the old guard of union officers, urban ward bosses, and elected officials from state and local levels. McGovern’s campaign team were at their best at the start, when they relied on the same ground-level coordination that had won caucus after caucus to stem procedural challenges against various delegations. In this they were aided by McGovern’s civil compromise with Ed Muskie over the Illinois delegates. The effect was to winnow down challenges from second-tier candidates or their proxies onto the central issue of California. Patricia Roberts Harris, the distinguished (and African American) rules chairwoman of the convention, heard the Humphrey campaign’s formal challenge, and batted it down. No rules would change after the vote even if California had grandfathered its primary mechanisms improperly.

McGovernites soared on the adrenaline rush of their last great parliamentary victory, backed by quiet promises to Frank Mankiewicz from the Muskie and Chisholm delegations that they would side with McGovern against any credentials challenges from George Wallace’s operatives. At the same time the Humphrey campaign, in many ways the unheralded success story of the primaries, sank at the single killing blow. Stewards of Humphrey delegations drifted, or swore revenge in platform committees. Humphrey himself, idol of party liberals for two decades and the previous nominee, faded into the background of the whole affair in the melancholy quiet of a man who had raced his family curse — bladder cancer — for the sake of his dream a last time at great cost to himself and, perhaps, to his party.

The Democratic right, however, had no intention to fade. The platform fights were long, and wary, and on occasion ugly. It began with the first reply to the California delegate challenge, a hasty alliance of convenience between the campaigns of Scoop Jackson and George Wallace worked out on a provisional basis. That netted Jackson a vote from Humphrey castoffs, disaffected Muskie supporters, the Wallace bloc, and Jackson’s own delegates totaling nine hundred thirty-three delegats for the nomination, a clear second to McGovern’s first-ballot majority. This thrust the hawkish Northwesterner into the national spotlight. In the exuberance of the moment one of Jackson’s staffers, a prescient Ivy Leaguer named Wolfowitz, drafted a memo for the senator. The note laid out a more deliberate coalition: Jackson’s support from Vietnam hawks, AFL-CIO officials up to and including the bald, scowling eminence of George Meany, and vigorous backers of a well defended Israel all on one hand, with Wallace’s Southern conservatives on the other.

The memo was provisional but thorough, intended mostly to provoke thought. But one of the iron laws of conventions is that they leak like sieves; the several versions of what young Wolfowitz had gotten up to touched off a panic in McGovern’s headquarters. At least three separate and entirely hasty reactions tripped over each other in response. These included a revival of Gary Hart’s proposed offer of a spot on the ticket to Jackson. Another proposal involved what amounted to a loyalty-oath quiz for non-McGovern delegates, scotched by Westwood and Gene Pokorny but not before word got out. It was not a proud moment. The committee sessions, which lasted long into the early hours of the morning in many cases, were hard enough as it was. Now in some cases sessions shut down as “Anybody But McGovern” delegates filibustered, or otherwise stalled parliamentary procedures to prevent final votes on the planks and embarrass the nominee.

Two forces took the situation in hand. One was Jean Westwood. Given the opportunity to audition for her planned role as the first woman chair of the Democratic National Committee, Westwood sat down with then-chair Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien, Kennedy factotum and well connected lobbyist, to set up a force of floor bosses qualified to work with state delegation heads. They would move business through general votes and scotch attempts to unhinge or sabotage parliamentary work. It took time to find the people, and the runners who would connect them with senior convention bosses like O’Brien. But by late on the second night the process was in place.

The other force was the arrival of Ed Muskie, along with a trio of senior aides, in the McGovern camp on the second day. Hunter Thompson worried about “chasing the speedball of panic in the McGovern suite with the distilled flop-sweat of second raters,” but in practical terms that was the opposite of what happened. Meanwhile in the committee rooms McGovern backers from the women’s rights movement had already tamped down the debate on an abortion plank. Besides McGovern’s personal religious reservations, even famous “women’s libbers” who backed McGovern like Gloria Steinhem and Shirley MacLaine had no wish to scare off the vital Catholic vote.

By the same token, discussions between Mankiewicz, Westwood, Muskie, and his aides led to a compromise plank on what McGovern liked to refer to as “root and branch defense reform.” Instead of the earlier McGovern plan for roughly a one-third cut in defense spending and a post-Vietnam drawdown, the convention substituted a promise to deliver on the book-length proposals drawn up the year before by the Members of Congress For Peace Through Law committee, a bipartisan cluster of liberals in both houses of Congress. This meant a percentage drop to roughly half of what McGovern, John Holum, and many young idealists who backed the candidate wanted. It was at least tied to a dependent clause that promised, “to seek further efficiencies and rationalizations wherever possible.”

The talking shop in the nominee’s suite also spent three blistering hours in which they hashed out compromise language on busing and integration. It was heated — afterwards Mankiewicz smiled at questions about it, saying only that “we got the chance to find out who in the room had a temper, to which the answer was practically everybody” — but in the end it was Muskie himself who offered the lawyerly and elliptical language that the Democratic Party would “respect and obey the laws made by courts and legislatures regarding integration.” Delegates could read into that what they would.

Despite such fudges or circles walked around subjects, the McGovern majority worked a great deal of influence over the final platform. The redistributive economic language, the suggestion of the government as an employer of last resort, the strong words on tax reform, retrenchment on defense that didn’t reach what John Holum had cooked up and McGovern had endorsed but still promised a real change, pledges on health care reform, the now-famous “right to be different” that seemed for a moment to enshrine the McGovern movement as a quite different demographic animal from the New Deal coalition that had powered the Democratic vote since the Depression — all that went into ink.

McGovern’s opponents ranged against it, while Scoop Jackson spoke monotonously on stage, George Wallace dropped tantalizing press leaks like candy, and George Meany, master of the AFL-CIO and disappointed sponsor of Hubert Humphrey’s stop-McGovern campaign, scowled far up in the rafters. What seemed like their last moment for action lay directly ahead. That was the nomination of McGovern’s running mate. After two weeks of leaks and intimations, McGovern announced it that morning, in Phil Hart’s beaming company, at one of the cozy pressers in which Frank Mankiewicz specialized. The nominating process lay open that evening with all kinds of potential mischief. McGovern’s people could see that ahead and, while Gary Hart hoped to ride it out with a simple majority, the team of people around the candidates thought otherwise.

Both candidates’ wives —powerful women with an eye for what went on — Jean Westwood on the precipice of chairing the DNC, Gene Pokorny ever ready, and even late convert Larry O’Brien who now wanted to avoid bedlam on his watch, all stepped in. Runners went out into the delegations, and sometimes more than runners. Jean Briggs Hart met in person with Shirley Chisholm, Rick Stearns with Terry Sanford, Bill Clinton met again with Jimmy Carter bearing the promise of consideration for a cabinet post if McGovern somehow won, while Ed Muskie steered his own remaining delegates and sat down in a quiet corner with Scoop Jackson to suggest, with stern politesse, that Jackson should value and bank his noble defeat for another go in four years if McGovern lost.

It was McGovern himself who arranged a late lunch with Hubert Humphrey. McGovern still bore a grudge over California, and Humphrey did too for his own reasons; the meet was not altogether smooth despite Midwestern politeness. McGovern tacked into detail about the corruption revelations that poured out daily about CREEP. “Hubert,” said McGovern in front of aides in attendance, “look, I know Meany won’t endorse this ticket. He’s made that much clear. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up on labor. Phil [Hart] has the credibility with the UAW, with the electrical and transport workers and others, and with black voters, that we need. He makes sense for the party, not just for my campaign. All we can do to get him through on a straight vote only does the party good.” In the end, begrudgingly, Humphrey bought it.

So it was, despite some early mischief and a concerted effort by Wallace supporters to put forward Sen. James Allen of Alabama, pressure from the major masters of delegations closed the vote to new nominees in just over an hour and the convention selected Phil Hart with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Soon after that the senator took the stage. Never a charismatic speaker, Phil Hart nevertheless brought focus and humility to the role. Mankiewicz would say later that they had in Phil Hart “a perfect translator,” a man who could get the McGovern campaign’s ideals across to cautious, Catholic Democrats across the Midwest and Northeast.

After Hart, and just after 10:00 Eastern time, George McGovern took the stage. With his almost reedy Midwestern tenor and earnest pauses, he nevertheless delivered what he and other observers later called a career-changing speech. In particular McGovern tied together the fundamental themes of his campaign in clear, graceful language with the repeated metaphor of closed rooms and shady deals undertaken by the Nixon administration and his call, as though raised from the dust of McGovern’s own Progressive past, to “come home, America!” Political analysts and rhetoricians simply called it the Come Home America Speech thereafter. Regardless of the drag on the campaign over questions of ideas and ideals, for several crucial hours that night the “McGovern moment” put its best foot forward.

That was for the best, because what followed was less pleasant. First, as expected, George Meany issued a stony non-endorsement of the Democratic ticket and indeed set plans to meet with Dick Nixon on Vietnam and price controls just after the convention. Fair enough, said both Phil and Jean Hart to the McGovern staff. We’ll concentrate on those actors in union politics who want more, not less to do with a potential Democratic administration. Even the silence of figures like Jackson and Humphrey simply meant tempers were still frayed after California and Miami. The real surprise came from a man who seemed to have been banished by fate from the trail, yet who rose up in flight and flame from the ashes of his primary campaign: George Wallace.

Through the convention Wallace had gone around his campaign chair, former NASCAR president and yellow-dog Southern Democrat Bill France, Sr., to send two trusted aides back and forth with Scoop Jackson’s legislative deputy Richard Perle about a united front on the platform and a potential third-party run. That door seemed closed just days before. It had been, really, since a secret meeting with the President the previous November, in which Nixon leaned on Wallace to run as a Democrat, in a campaign to sabotage and divide the party, then drop out or face the chance that the IRS would come after Wallace’s brother Gerald and perhaps the governor himself for tax evasion. Now, with the CRP in disarray and McGovern mustering only in the mid-forties even with a convention “bounce,” Wallace saw the chance to break free of Nixon’s iron bonds and chase his true strategic goal: to throw the election into the House of Representatives where “his” states could be vital to a majority. Revenge was the best kind of living well.

Wallace let the McGovernites have their night with the candidates’ speeches, then fed the pool reporters a steady diet of enticing fragments from the wee hours to the following morning. At that time Wallace, in a shining silver wheelchair and a bright blue three-piece suit, explained in the ebb and flow of rhetorical detail he liked exactly where things stood. He had come to this convention in good faith and seen in action exactly the things that convinced him any attempt to bring the Democratic Party around to his way of thinking was misguided. Hell, he said, they’d nominated for Vice President a man who had asked Wallace point-blank if Wallace thought Heaven itself was segregated. The only real option, then, was to take a stand, apart.

As he announced what he meant to do and his aides began the business of bum-rushing the planned American Independent Party convention in August with pro-Wallace delegates, Wallace paused in response to a question about the Democratic convention’s diversity. As he rolled the answer around in his mind he found just the sound bite he sought. “George McGovern says he’s opened the doors of the Democratic Party, that now all manner of folks can come into it. He’s real proud of that,” said Wallace, as he strained in his wheeled cage to reach the force and power he used to show on the stump. “I am here, today, to say that Senator McGovern has indeed opened the doors of the Democratic Party. And thirty million Democrats are going to walk right out!” He never needed to add the phrase, To follow me. The gauntlet was already thrown.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What made fraud suits such a bitch, or so John Dean observed to the President of the United States as the tape recorders squirreled into the cabinetry of the Oval Office whirred away, was the vagueness. “Intention to deceive” was broad enough to take in everything Segretti, Dwight Chapin, and the rest of the dirty-tricks gang had got up to. Sure there was the question of actual damages, and Dean had certainly advised the lawyers on the job to go at George Mitchell hard on that point, but it really was like shutting the barn door after the stampede. That question would come at trial — or, worse, in a settlement hearing — and in the meanwhile discovery was just killing the CRP. It wasn’t that they played by the rules, either. Certainly there were files either that had gone missing or had never been properly kept, much less the stuff Herb Kalmbach, President Nixon’s personal lawyer, destroyed back in the spring in violation of the old Federal Corrupt Practices Act. But there was enough. Enough to feed the process, enough to establish rough outlines of accounting trails and, as July wore on into August, a picture of who in this rough-edged community of saboteurs and black-bag men had trucked with what funding lines. In time that rendered a picture of the half-million dollars stashed in a separate fund line under the CRP corporate aegis.

It was Herb Kalmbach’s work, when you traced it to its roots. He was Nixon’s personal counsel, and a dozen corporations’ too on grounds that he was Nixon’s personal counsel. This made the logic quite straightforward that he was the perfect bagman. Egil Krogh had helped out a bit, at the start, when they just wanted to salt money away for a series of advance polls in ‘71. But after that the hundreds of thousands that had come in — again mostly milk money, those dairy combines had a reputation around town — were shifted to the left in the CRP’s books, out of sight and into a complex network of accounts designed to provide whatever the shadow side of the incorporated committee needed. Herb Kalmbach, more and more, looked like the key. Certainly the personal lawyers of Segretti, Chapin, and the other named co-defendants in Loeb v. Segretti, thought so and were only too happy to pile on. And when you considered again, in that light, that Kalmbach was the President’s personal lawyer, life got more interesting.

By August, as Washington lulled in the end of summer recess, that had got very interesting indeed. The players on the stage of Congress read the papers too, and had contacts with the litigators in Loeb v. Segretti, no surprise in a town where the person who answered your phone often sported a high-end law degree. With Kalmbach drawn into the picture, it raised questions about the very integrity of the CRP, questions the Nixon White House had no desire to answer and indeed had done everything they could to set up John Dean and Bob Haldeman to stonewall all discussions that wandered in the direction of West Wing connections to the campaign. But that was not enough. The Kalmbach link rang bells, and played into a complex web of political agendas whose twists and turns rivaled the facts turned up by George Mitchell’s team of associate counsels and investigators.

It’s the same puzzle, said Phil Hart to Mike Mansfield, the flinty Montanan Senate Majority Leader. Dozens of pieces of evidence, separate investigations that seem when you follow them along for a while to corroborate and… to fit with one another. They’re all pieces of the same puzzle. There’s no way for us to avoid the fact that this is political, he went on. To that Mansfield said, Exactly. The problem was exactly that. For now, in those swampy weeks of early August, Mansfield listened to the concerns senators raised to him, Phil Hart more than most. Hart had been on the special committee that looked into the “ITT Affair” back in the spring. Then it looked like the same cast of shady characters thrown into the spotlight by Brookingsgate and Loeb v. Segretti had been involved in a possible effort by telecommunications giant ITT to buy the executive branch’s compliance for a corporate merger that made antitrust lawyers wince with four hundred grand nudged quietly towards the CRP. Now someone had blown a hole in the Brookings Institution, as Ted Kennedy did not hesitate to say in the heat of his Irishness during a separate audience with Mansfield, and all the players and their funny money kept fitting into the same frame.

Mansfield stayed adamant. The civil action had plenty of press, because it turned out that lawyer who’d worked for Ed Muskie knew what he was about. Let that go on, said Mansfield. If we do something on our own Nixon will just hound us across the television dial about liberal witch hunts and go up five points in the polls. We’ll keep our powder dry, Mansfield said. Keep it dry and wait for something to shift.

The shift, had he seen it coming before the day Senator James Eastland marched into his office like an oncoming storm, would have surprised him. It started quite on its own in July, as George Wallace staged his now famous press conference at the close of the Democrats’ convention, shed a few advisers who were far more committed than the governor to sticking with the party, and rolled in to the convention of the Wallace outfit had founded, with a wave of popular support both hasty and brilliant in its execution. Wallace knew how to boss a floor and, even though his presidential runs had at times snared themselves in his own ego, he could muster a crowd with the simple mention of his name like no one else in American politics. Not only did Wallace give the reporters who wanted to see just what would happen if Wallace stayed on the trail a show, by his presence he raised the AIP’s profile and when he sat down with the presumptive AIP nominee who the governor had just cut off at the knees, Wallace smiled and offered the man a deal.

John G. Schmitz, the combative, reactionary Republican congressman from the depths of Orange County in California who had been quietly blackballed in the John Birch Society for his volatility was, on Wallace’s reflection, just what the ticket needed in a side man. The AIP couldn’t afford to lose the foot soldiers of the hard right, Wallace understood that. They were dedicated fundraisers and organizers, and they would eat into the fringe of Richard Nixon’s base. They also shared at least one set of motivations with the disaffected white populists Wallace sought after as the main body of his voters: a deep, gut feeling that the American system was broken, that the two big parties were corrupt and controlled, in the kind of logical contradiction that emotion-driven humanity enjoys, by exclusive moneyed interests and by young ideologues who didn’t grasp ordinary people’s struggles. Wallace had called a truce on “segregation forever”; besides, there were plenty of other ways to draw a color line aside from the law. One was to talk about who the real Americans were, how they had been betrayed, how the country needed to fix itself from the bottom up, how the laborers and the shopkeepers and the diligent first-generation suburbanites needed someone who understood what it was to struggle, who knew how to fight and how to keep fighting until the other man went down. Wallace had taught Dick Nixon that language, the governor reminded any campaign staffer who’d listen, with a carnivorous smile as he reflected on the irony. Now he was just taking it back.

It certainly had some juice to it. Wallace came out swinging and simply did not stop. Against Nixon’s masterful manipulation of the news cycle Wallace just kept on talking, and as ever put on a show wherever he went. The physical toll was high and Wallace simply did not care. Or rather he did, but cared that people should watch him struggle, that they should see that he was as in his boxing days, the relentless little man who could get beat up but never go down, not until he landed the last blow. Hunter Thompson’s observation while Wallace had lain in a hospital bed, paralyzed below the waist and wasting into his spark-gapped bones, seemed to hold true. Among true fans of the governor there was almost a holiness to Wallace now, for of all the famous men felled by gunfire in the last ten years Wallace had taken his bullet and lived. Now, as Thompson himself put it on a side trip to watch the show in Bakersfield County, California as McGovern campaigned in Los Angeles, Wallace “had done it again…. That face, transcendent, seemed to levitate above his broken body, the white fire of that dark soul lit up the whole hall as he called down brimstone on Wall Street and CREEP, wreathed in the steel of his chair, one part cage for one of nature’s pure predators, one part throne.”

So it was Wallace carried on, more than any politician in the country weighing in against the President on the very issues where Nixon’s advance men shut down questions with threats to cut off sources, or started fights among rival news organizations. There was good cause: out there in the darkness Nixon waited, because it was a question of timing, not anything else, when the IRS investigation of Gerald Wallace’s finances would begin. Early in August George Wallace hit on the right words which, once he’d said them, took on a life of their own on the evening news. In front of a crowd in Decatur, Georgia Wallace did as he often would and tossed aside the script for his stump speech when inspiration struck.

“Now friends… friends, I’ve been a lawyer. I have prosecuted the guilty. I know what questions you ask a man when you get him up there on the witness stand and you’re trying to get at the truth. And there are just two questions here. And the whole country wants the answers! WHAT did Richard Nixon know… and WHEN did he KNOW IT!?!”

James Eastland asked himself the same. He thought more besides; the tall, bespectacled, unrepentant segregationist from Mississippi was likely the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, also the chair of its mighty Judiciary Committee and a master of Senate rules, written and unwritten. There was never just one piece in motion when Eastland played the game. In this case there were several. Eastland had, whatever his other motives, a genuine concern that abuses of power on the part of the presidency had spiraled over the last decade and now threatened both the dignity and the substantive power of Congress, the body that made Eastland one of the most important men in the federal government. He knew, too, that as George Wallace spat populist fire at the White House Nixon would counter with evidence of corruption elsewhere, to which Eastland, a favorite legislator of every oil conglomerate with a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, was not himself immune. And Eastland had a dog in the fight. Wallace’s third-party run was the governor’s business. But if Wallace could actually force a contingent election in the Congress it would restore the power that reactionary Southern Democrats like Eastland himself had lost steadily in the national party since Harry Truman integrated the Armed Forces. There was no reason not to get to the bottom of this mess, and Eastland had resolved to tell Mansfield how.

Collateral questions, Eastland said. The whole thing raised some very large collateral questions. An Attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell, who now ran the CRP, sat at the top of three developments that had triggered Congressional, civil, and criminal investigations. One was that whole ITT mess. Another was the campaign slush funds, where Mitchell had at least in name hired and delegated authority to key people involved in wrongdoing. The third was the matter of where Chuck Colson had gotten the damn fool idea to bomb Brookings, and what kind of climate of decision making made that possible. Then there was a second Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, the man who had the job now. As Mitchell’s deputy he had been involved in processing high-level legal issues like the ITT merger. And since the Brookingsgate fiasco, Eastland said, stabbing a finger towards the cool Mansfield whose eyes narrowed, no one in the executive branch had exactly tripped over themselves to corroborate whether these were loose cannons, only insisted that was so. If Colson had pissed on my hearthrug, Eastland said saltily, I’d want that cleaned up the same day so people knew it wasn’t me. After a while delay started to look like deception.

They came to an agreement, the worldly and quietly liberal boyhood runaway and former China Marine, and the devoutly fundamentalist plantation owner. There would be a select committee to look at breaches of campaign finance and conduct laws across the board, and at who may have gotten their fingers dirty. Seven men: could agree on the chair, for starters. North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, a distinguished lawyer and constitutional scholar and decorated First World War veteran, had credibility with Eastland’s faction as “segregation’s defense attorney” in the 1950s, and more recently with Democratic liberals as Ervin aggressively investigated illegal surveillance of US citizens by the CIA and the military. Ervin wanted to go home and retire at the end of his term, which made him immune to charges of political point-scoring and his feelings towards the McGovern/Hart ticket were ambiguous at best. He’d do.

From there it was a matter of filling the ranks in such a way as to avoid impression of a liberal stampede, which suited Eastland fine given his desire to give conservative Democrats the greatest leverage they could grab on to. For obvious reasons Phil Hart was off the list as he campaigned through New England and the Midwest, but as Mansfield pointed out the hearings would be public, and nobody said Hart staffers couldn’t sit in the gallery and take notes. The Nixon people had spent the summer with their heads down, watching the civil suit against Segretti’s crew take form and trying to wait out criminal proceedings on the “Brookingsgate Boys.” Now they would face a wall of senators and the lawyers who worked for them, all eager, or so Eastland told the lobby press with untypical levity, to help the President get this whole business out in the open and put it behind him.

In the meanwhile the world turned and, in particular, the Nixon campaign soldiered on, even thrived at times. The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty temporarily unconstitutional until new laws — less punitive and racist — were drafted at federal and especially state levels. The British Army launched a sweeping campaign to cordon and retake “no-go” territory in Northern Ireland, to staunch the drift of rampant terrorism towards outright civil war. A beautiful meteor shot across North America’s daylight sky. The King of Morocco miraculously survived his private jet being shot out of the air by coup plotters and returned like an Islamic saint from the wreckage to his people, to roll heads and reassert control. In a burst of bright pastels and good feeling the Munich Olympics sought to offset and replace memories of the Nazi-run Berlin games thirty-six years before. The Games did this very well until a squad of Palestinian fedayeen slipped through nonexistent security into the dormitory where Israeli athletes lived, who were first seized and then massacred in tragedy of blood and shrapnel and gunfire that shook the world. In the meanwhile, Richard Nixon rallied his ad men, poured funds into his pollsters’ pockets, and considered how he could do two nearly contradictory things: cut the Democratic ticket off among middle opinion, and bring down George Wallace.

Nixon began at the top. In the first week of August, with a meeting that the press were told had to do with event planning for the upcoming Republican National Convention, the future of Ted Agnew was weighed and measured. Nixon had gone from impulsive embrace through disappointment to outright disgust with his Vice President, and Nixon called a clutch of his closest associates together to consider what they could do to replace the hard right’s favorite bulldog in the White House. The other attendees knew Nixon’s own agenda; he wanted a grand bargain, a move to outflank McGovern and Wallace both all at once and also indulge his own infatuation, by appointing outgoing Treasury Secretary John Connally as the replacement. On his registration papers Connally was still a Democrat, and Haldeman in particular worked slowly and deliberately to wean Nixon, known to his inner circle for these fits of determination, off the idea. Certainly it made sense at a strategic level but, as Haldeman said to both John Dean and former Attorney General John Mitchell afterwards, “going to China once was enough.”

As Haldeman, helped by Mitchell, wore Nixon down into profanity and muttering, they turned to other options. On paper Ed Gurney of Florida and Bob Dole of Kansas were both excellent choices to shore up the party’s right while Nixon moved to the middle. But the administration needed both men in the Senate, and both had Democratic governors back home who would choose their first replacements. Dean suggested Bill Brock of Tennessee, but Nixon dismissed the freshman senator as “a goddamn cigar-store Indian.” They talked it to death, Dean reflected later, but other than a reach to Ron Reagan, whom Nixon alternately admired and loathed (and who presented Electoral College issues since Nixon had moved his home away from Pennsylvania Avenue back to California from New York), it seemed there was nowhere to go but to Agnew, to stand pat.

So it was that Miami, again home to a political convention weeks after the Democrats blew through, became a monument to standing pat. In a feat that press-plane wags called worthy of Nixon’s Soviet opposite number, Leonid Brezhnev, the Republican National Convention became a monument to Richard Nixon’s achievements that seemed to build a whole other world out of brick and mortar with Madison Avenue’s work-gnarled hands. Only the soaring economic growth charts, a year’s worth of relative quiet after the waves of protest and bloodshed that followed the Cambodia invasion faded, Nixon’s truly historic opening to China, and the stolid dignity of his quest for world peace — told with a ruthlessly precise mawkishness in relation to the life of a young girl who was the daughter of a Nixon campaign contributor — mattered. No blazing buildings and drug-addled henchmen, no bugged offices, no rolled wads of thousands in milk money that bought slander and cheap tricks, no government officials looking the other way or worse. Strength at home, wisdom abroad, and a program of common sense every right-thinking American could agree on: those were the plain, clear words the convention used.

Ted Agnew did his job and riled up the problem cases to roars of applause about beating back crime and moral turpitude, about the weak knees of the Democrats and that unhinged hillbilly Wallace. Nixon was all Solomon, sobriety and wisdom, willing to take bold steps for peace especially, but never a step too far, never to create weakness or disturb order. The President always could read a crowd, and now he read the country as one and guessed, not without reason, that the fact of disorder and corruption scared a lot of people much more than the details that his own administration had caused it. So he would set the tone now that to stay the course, ride this out rather than do anything hasty, would serve the country best. Hang on. If there was one thing Dick Nixon knew how to do, it was that.

Then came the advertising. In a stroke of authentic wisdom Nixon talked about the McGovern ticket by not talking about them. Nixon would dismiss the Democrats with silence. He could read polls; unless something happened, McGovern just didn’t have the numbers and would not come to have them. The problem was how Wallace ate into the Nixon vote, both from the pure right-hand side and through his disruption of the “Southern Strategy” to draw in conservative Democrats and independents worried about issues of race and crime and disorder. So Wallace got the treatment first. It varied by region and demographics. In the Midwest, Nixon played out of the AFL-CIO’s songbook from 1968 with repeated charges and mailings that Wallace was one of the most anti-union governors in America. In the South, Nixon flyers were strewn across the manicured new suburbs of cities like Atlanta and Memphis that drove home Wallace’s support for the welfare state and its profligacy. Maybe, that implied, he’d conveniently changed his mind about other things as well, like how to maintain the informal barriers those white suburbanites had redrawn in their flight to the St. Augustine grass beyond the fearful blackness of the cities.

And when it came down to it, Nixon and his front men said that it just wasn’t a good time to talk about Wallace — there were things worth bringing up, but the governor had been through so much it would be uncouth to mention what it was they weren’t mentioning. This drew out the reporters: what was that, was the obvious question for this bait. The press would have to direct such questions elsewhere, came the answer. This was a matter for the right agencies — the right authorities — and it was improper to make everything the Nixon camp had just implied into a petty political question. And all the while the mighty beasts of the newsroom plains, the Johnny Apples and Jack Andersons, slugged back their drinks and talked about how much they couldn’t talk about that in their columns, and about who they thought was driving this model of campaigning, while Hunter Thompson’s young Rolling Stone minder Timothy Crouch shook his head and took notes like Micah and Hosea and Amos of old.

George Wallace was not, however, the only one with problems that could turn petty and political in a heartbeat. Political arithmetic and personal grievance meant that, while the Senate convened its committee and plodded through the same fact pattern that drove George Mitchell’s litigated muckracking, the Washington Post had a source of their own. This did not mean quite what it seemed to on its face. The Post’s best younger crime-beat man, Carl Bernstein, had bird-dogged his way through DC Metro and FBI resources on the actual events of “Brookingsgate” and where the investigations led, or didn’t. It convinced him that there were gaps, absences, walls thrown up to stop short lines of inquiry that got past a barrel of bad apples with CREEP and asked questions about the people who had stood up that organization, the administration itself. But in the lull of late summer, it turned out Berstein knew a guy. Or rather, the guy knew Bernstein’s guy.

It was thus. Bernstein had a colleague at the Post, a reserved, mildly Republican, ex-Navy officer named Woodward. Among his other contacts around town Woodward had cause to know Mark Felt, the face of the permanent FBI beneath Nixon’s crony Pat Gray, and so one of the most powerful g-men anywhere near the criminal investigation. Felt wanted a conduit, a way to funnel details and suspicions that concerned him out into the press. So young Woodward became the asset, used with an amusing amount of tradecraft in Felt’s view — if Woodward knew how closely the part of town around his apartment was watched it would spook him, Felt figured — so that the reporter could act as interlocutor between Felt and Berstein. So it was that the Post could read the FBI’s mail, or rather the weekly progress reports on Brookingsgate evidence-gathering and connections between the felons and key leadership with the CRP.

Bernstein in particular came away from this with exactly the conclusions Felt hoped the reporter would reach. First, that the odds a plan for concerted criminal acts to sabotage Democratic candidates and ensure Nixon’s reelection involved the most powerful people around the Presidency. Maybe the man himself. Second, that this had so far barely scratched Nixon’s chances of reelection. The White House knew exactly how reporters worked, their craving for access, their herd instinct around leads or sources, their need for counter-examples to provide “balance,” their habit of reporting method rather than intent. But, Bernstein said to himself and to Woodward over lashings of coffee, we don’t know how it works in there. On their side. We’ve got nobody in the room, no way to know them like they know us. Until that happens, Bernstein held, none of this changes. Woodward then, with typical earnestness, simply asked Felt at a car-park message drop early in September. How does this change? Woodward said. Felt smiled like the blade of a dagger. “Wait and see.”

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It began, like all the breakthroughs in this sordid business seemed to begin, with a meeting. The timing at least was chance. But the men moved in the same circles so when George Mitchell and Rufus Edmisten, the farmer-faced legal counsel to Sam Ervin, found themselves drinks in hand at the same toney D.C. watering hole, they had at the very least to make pleasant conversation. Both men knew the rules of their profession; Mitchell in particular was kind but cagey. But Edmisten, who could small-talk for his country if called on, did not intend to waste this chance. Like a good Southerner he took the moment where the two men might make their goodbyes and pushed on through with a smile. Put yourself in my shoes a minute, Edmisten went on. Say you come work for the committee, carry whoever's water you want to carry, what is it that you do then? Nothing to do with Loeb v. Segretti, just how do you size this thing up?

Mitchell paused what seemed an age. Edmisten said later it was like watching a Swiss watch with glasses, acres of tiny, finely tuned gears all worked together. He sipped briefly on his drink, then spoke. Alexander Butterfield and Rose Mary Woods, Mitchell said. Edmisten inclined his eyebrows. Mitchell went on. Everyone wants to go at Haldeman, Mitchell elaborated. Haldeman knows everything there is to know, whatever that is, so the White House will fight tooth and nail to withhold his testimony and I don't doubt Hadleman's willingness to fall on his sword. If you want to really know what's gone on, you look at Butterfield and Woods. There you've got Haldeman's trusted deputy who keeps it all in order, and you have Nixon's personal secretary who sees and hears damn near everything. That, said Mitchell, is what I would do. Edmisten nodded, the two men made their goodbyes, and the garrulous Tar Heel turned to leave.

As Edmisten walked to the door, Mitchell spoke up one last time. Butterfield first, Mitchell said. Make sure you don't just ask him what he knows. You ask him how he knows it. This is discovery; you find out where they keep the secrets. Edmisten smiled like he had a deer in his sights and nodded slightly. Butterfield it was, then.

Alexander Butterfield was a straight guy in a crooked kingdom. In his youth, at UCLA, he made fast friendships with "the Berlin Wall" -- Haldeman and Erlichman. This proved a mixed blessing. For years Butterfield lived and served apart from that funhouse-mirror world of politics. He was an Air Force officer, a good one, who flew combat missions in Korea and Vietnam and rose steadily through efficiency, probity, and dedicated service. The problem was, he had topped out it seemed around '68 or so. A two-year assignment as project manager for the integration of F-111s into the Royal Australian Air Force might have sounded to someone else like a cushy yet fascinating job in a scenic location. To Butterfield it sounded like the kind of thing that would keep him from making general. And when he couldn't get himself back to the sound of the guns again he started to look outside the service. Fate spied the moment and found a way to reconnect him with Bob Haldeman, through whom one thing led to another and by early 1969 Butterfield found himself in a checked sportcoat instead of dress blues, at work in the Nixon White House as Haldeman's deputy chief of staff.

It took all of Butterfield's discipline and dedication to hold that unruly mess around the Oval Office together, and all his personal forbearance to deal with the fierce, neurotic President who Butterfield found at its heart. Butterfield spent almost four years torn between loyalty and duty on one hand, and disdain that could tip into disgust with the administration's personal and political failings. He hated Kissinger's ego trips, the organized-crime feel of political scheming in the Oval Office, all the shady money, the clearly dirty tricks, even Nixon's fugue states and the President's coldness to the First Lady -- sometimes the happily-married Butterfield just wanted to grab Nixon and shake him.

Yet that was not the done thing. What you did was your job, and in early 1971 part of that job had been the installation and concealment of a tape recording system in the Oval Office. The President wanted every conversation he had in that room recorded -- for posterity, insurance, or both wasn't clear. Nixon wanted it, he got it. Just like he got too many other things; in this very moment, as the Senate select committee spooled up, Butterfield sat disgusted through meetings with Nixon and Dean and Erlichman and other cronies as they plotted to put a Secret Service mole on the security detail intended for Ted Kennedy, someone who could gather blackmail material to tar the Democratic presidential ticket by association. Abusive, that was the word Butterfield found in his head later when he went looking. An abusive system. An abusive administration. Abusive and it kept too many secrets, like that tape system. Butterfield wondered when that would come up.

He had not long to wait. It took time to process paperwork, rally the committee on the points involved, issue the summons, calendar... it all percolated behind the slow wave of cross-examination that brought the committee up to speed with what Mitchell's team largely knew already from civil discovery. But in the grand scheme half of September was no time at all. Just time enough for Ervin, ever the lawyer, to establish ground rules for how this would be done. Two staff lawyers, Ervin said. Edmisten, as counsel for the committee chair and on behalf of the majority, and the counsel for the most liberal Republican on the committee, Connecticut's Lowell Weicker, Bill Shure -- H. William on his business cards -- who was there to secure the GOP an equal voice and a direct source of information when the two deposed Butterfield. Ervin wanted no problems Nixon's champion Ed Gurney or any other likely parties could use to claim the proceeding had been hijacked on party lines. If Rufus was right -- Rufus was ready to bet on Mitchell's hunch -- they would need all the political cover they could get if something popped out.

Mostly it took nerve. Nerve to press ahead, composed, down each methodical line of questions, nerve to sit wedged into wood-backed chairs in a dim room in the long, gut-hollowed moment before something — whatever it was they would find — happened. It wore harder on Edmisten; he was a politician by nature as much as a lawyer, drawn to the electricity of moments. Bill Shure, on the other hand, though he was Lowell Weicker’s faithful lieutentant and bagman for statewide campaigns back in Connecticut, was an attorney to his fingertips. He could go all day.

A couple of hours in it seemed as though they would, like the committee counsels and Butterfield, three years out of date in his narrow lapels and close-cropped hair, straight up and down in his seat, composed, went through the routine. Butterfield had already decided on his course of action. The building — everyone who mattered in the West Wing — knew he was first out of the gate, the first person beyond the CRP menagerie to be called. So he had arranged in his mind the kind of line he’d walked every day for most of four years now. He would not answer anything he didn’t have to based on the question, and he was a smart enough guy not to give a lawyer more than they asked for. But if they asked him straight, he would be straight with them. At the end of the day the person you had to live with was yourself.

Notes? Who knows, Butterfield answered. I can’t speak to that in detail, he added. A system of creating or logging documents? Did Mrs. Woods transcribe meetings? If so which ones? Did Bob Haldeman keep a journal? Probably. What about Ehrlichman? John Dean? It went on.

So much so, that when the moment came it was anticlimactic until the answer, like filling out a customs form to announce you’d invaded a country. Shure looked up from his notes, inclined his neck just a little forward because he liked the question, and asked, “Were any conversations recorded? Any conversations in the Oval Office?”

Butterfield smiled, sheer reflex from our ancient past when that meant the tiger got the guy next to you, not you. “I was wondering if you’d ask that,” he said, composed. “Yes. There is tape.” Tape of what, Shure asked, as he scratched the side of his nose while a great ball of stress acid passed through his throat in silence. “Since I supervised installation of a taping system in the Oval Office, I’ve never received instructions that anything should not be taped.”

Shure sat back a moment. “Jesus,” breathed Edmisten quietly, not an exclamation so much as an expression of awe at what had just happened. Shure scribbled a couple of notes very quickly on his pad and conferred with Edmisten. Then Edmisten stepped in to ask about the vital statistics: when was the tape machine installed, how did it work, did Butterfield know where and how tapes were stored after they were used up, had he received instructions to destroy anything. Once it was done, as Edmisten’s pen slipped and danced in the sweat of his own hands while he made notes, Shure thanked Butterfield politely. The Air Force man nodded a kind of salute and got up and walked out.

The lawyers and two aides stepped into the hallway, where Edmisten grabbed furiously at a cigarette and nearly sucked it straight into his right lung. Shure was the model of Connecticut Yankee sangfroid. No one talks, he said. Edmisten nodded vigorously. We will take this together to the chairman and he will bring in the three minority members, Shure went on. And, Edmisten added, we make damn sure they know you asked. It has got to be clear a Republican lawyer asked this question and that your people — Edmisten was a Southerner, where party was still tribal — understand this was pursuant to reasonable investigation. Shure nodded calmly. What the hell had just happened they couldn’t be sure yet. But life was certain to get more interesting.

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So there were revelations, and parades of witnesses before the Senate select committee, and the finely tuned slanging matches between the Nixon and Wallace campaigns, and grand constitutional questions started to entwine with who said what to whom. As autumn slipped in past Labor Day, what carried on regardless was the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign. What had been over the summer exotic and good for sales in the news business seemed to dull with time and exposure. Larry O’Brien, despite his occasional moments in front of reporters to comment on the chance he might be deposed either in Loeb v. Segretti or the Senate investigation, plastered a bland normality, a meticulous plodder’s patience, on the front of the campaign. People who mattered, people who knew people who mattered even more and could be quoted off the record, people who wrote what all the people who wanted to matter hoped to write someday, like Johnny Apple and Jules Witcover, became less and less impressed by novelty with the McGovern ticket, and got themselves too busy with what dirt the reliably bitter Wallace campaign had thrown lately and why ten percent of American voters seemed to like it.

This was exactly what the people in the back office with the Democratic ticket, the folks who truly ran things, wanted. It had been a crucial element of the original plan when Wallace was hale and seemed dangerous, though then his wings were still clipped by Nixon. Now Wallace was broken and twisted up in vengeful purpose and actually dangerous. So long as things held steady that seemed an answer to a prayer. Wait because there would be something. Something to change the story, to turn not the tide but something in the current, so just a little extra flowed their way that would be enough in the correct states. Pat Caddell kept his eye on the state internals, and together with Rick Stearns the guru of caucuses, on some of the first precinct level data available to the infant world of microcomputing. That itself was a sort of magic, a picture of where the campaign stood in the states that mattered, the bare path to 270 electoral votes, and what it would take for them to get there.

With something. I don’t know what, Caddell answered, his surprising size (he tended to slump) reared up in defense of his beloved numbers whenever anyone, most often Gary Hart, made acid comments about where Caddell thought the “something” would come from. Something unexpected, something that would tap into the alienation with politics as usual that Caddell believed was the tectonic force beneath American politics, something that would shift that force and put the noble outsider, George McGovern, in the right place for voters who needed a sweeping change they could trust. The ignoble outsider, George Wallace, would get the right-hand side of those votes and between them Nixon would go down. But there would be a thing. Part of its value, “the shibboleth of the back office,” as Hunter Thompson put it, was that no one knew just what it would be. That meant, for once, Dick Nixon would not have half of Madison Avenue out in front of it, while a distracting medley number from Up With People thundered on as the ad men went to work.

As the external tumults of the autumn carried on the campaign moved with consistency. Led officially by O’Brien the candidates worked the UAW angle as deeply as they could. Gene Pokorny, McGovern’s windswept kid from Nebraska and the organizing genius behind the primary win in Wisconsin, camped at every damn UAW jobsite from Kansas City to Akron, mobilizing shop stewards and the sons and daughters of workers to campaign. McGovern bought himself some ink in the papers by meeting with Miners For Democracy which, as Mankiewicz and Shields both predicted, lit George Meany’s remaining hair on fire. McGovern and Phil Hart shook hands until their palms nearly bled in Oregon timber towns, in Minneapolis, in Des Moines, in the Ohio steel-and-auto belt, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in Brooklyn. The message of integrity and reform remained the same. That worked well enough. As Wallace’s and even Nixon’s numbers cycled, a repeated majority of Americans said they didn’t like George McGovern’s ideas on national security and worried about higher taxes, but they trusted him personally. Stearns and Mankiewicz wanted to know who would bus black churches and union shops to the polls; Caddell said it was all about trust.

For Democratic partisans in an autumn of scandal and mud slung, the speeches worked as well. One of Ed Muskie’s last acts in support of the nominee at the convention was to call Mark Shields into the Muskie’s hotel room and tell, not ask, the brisk campaigner that now he would be writing for Phil Hart through the fall. Shields had worked for William Proxmire as well as Muskie, enough to know that Midwesterners were a very different bunch of people than the urban New England Democrats who Shields knew best and from whom he came. Muskie replied with a touch of humor about the common factor between Muskie, Shields, and Hart: their Catholicism. “His middle name’s Aloysius,” said Muskie of Phil Hart. “You’ll get the hang of it, Mark.” Shields did. It got to a point where “the Fighting Irish,” as campaign staff called Bob Shrum and Shields for short, worked out of the same hymnal as they split up and churned out stump speeches.

Things held steady: forty-one percent, forty-two in a carrying wind, constant enough that pollsters could believe the numbers and not wonder about margins of error. The Democrats’ ticket was the known quantity of the race, for good or ill. Independent pollsters looked at Michigan and Rhode Island and parts of Pennsylvania and said with wry grins that if McGovern somehow pulled this out it would be on Phil Hart’s coattails. No matter.

Along the way they did what needed done to keep everyone on board. Fundraisers with Paul Newman, meetings with Mothers Against the War, chicken dinner with the Transport Workers’ Union who hated George Meany as only people who knew him well could, an afternoon beer with teamsters. At the end of the month, that schedule included a stop calculated as a move for party unity, for a mending of fences, and for the slower learners on the press plane a nice bauble of Senator McGovern as respectable party man. The planes touched down in San Antonio, McGovern did a rally with local Latino representatives and a steak dinner with the oil roughnecks’ union at the Menger Hotel, then drove out on the next dry, dust-choked morning all the way to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch.

There they met, the man who had bestrode the Sixties as a colossus and his Diogenes, the warrior against poverty and master of war alongside the idealist who’d talked about a Senate that reeked of blood. But they were both old hands at this. They smiled, talked quietly with open expressions, Lyndon ran George through the basics of a cattle drive with those vast hands that gestured fit to fashion a landscape themselves while George parked his own hands and any tells they might give neatly in his lap and reminisced about wheat and corn back home, beneath a rehearsed smile his prominent chin like a shield against Johnson’s sheer presence. The flashbulbs clattered, a second, unsteady sun on a bright day. They had reversed roles as well, with McGovern buttoned up in a suit and a thick red tie, Johnson open-necked with his white hair fluttering back of his head as long as an Ivy League kid’s. Scribbling hacks imparted, or imputed, meaning to it all.

When the photographers wrapped up, Johnson waved off the stringers like a sheikh, asked his butler for scotch for the both politicians, and got down to business. “Now George, you and I, we know each other. We know what’s between us,” said Johnson, as he squared himself up in his lawn chair, a retiree’s version of “the treatment” as everyone used to call the way he backed smaller and often lesser men into a corner and forced his views on them. McGovern sat pat, a prairie stone unmoved before a vast, Texan plow. “And I don’t suppose we are ever going to see eye to eye on this goddamn war. I can see that a little clearer now. The view’s better out here.

“But all that’s coming out in Washington now — we can’t have that sonofabitch in the White House one second longer than we have to, and I expect that means you and I are stuck with each other. Now you just take a minute, and listen, and I’m going to tell you how this is going to be. I won’t tell you what to believe or anything like that. You can keep your principles. You can get those kids — hell, even I have the long hair these days — all to vote for you. You can get right with some labor folks even if that gets George Meany’s dick in a twist. Hell, especially if it does that.

“So here it is. You are going to get our prisoners back, and you’re not gonna bend any goddamn knee to do it, not one, senator. And I…”

Johnson paused a breath, a distance in time within which he hung a whole vision of the future. With a stare that never left McGovern, Johnson brushed aside a tea towel on one of the tables around them and picked up without a glance the object under it. That was a big manila envelope, one Walt Rostow, former National Security Adviser and Johnson confidante, had driven most of the day before from Austin and back to deliver. In it was the dagger that had hung by a thread over Richard Nixon’s head the whole length of Nixon's presidency. With this choice, Lyndon Johnson cut the string.

“… I am going to hand you this goddamn election.”

Maybe Pat Caddell’s thing had happened, after all.

 

[Yes]

Timely alliance: Presidential nominee George McGovern and Sen. Ed Muskie (D-ME) make an appearance amid the New York delegation at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami, FL

Breaking away: Gov. George Wallace of Alabama at a press conference held prior to the American Independent Party convention of 1972; the governor capped another dramatic break with the Democrats with the capture of a second presidential nomination with the AIP and his decision to run as a spoiler in the fall campaign of that year

Slow and steady: McGovern campaign director Frank Mankiewicz considers his answer to a reporter's question at a press conference in Chicago, IL, in early September of 1972; through the early weeks of the fall campaign the McGovern/Hart ticket concentrated on securing its base of Democratic voters and trying to make as few unforced errors as possible

Fateful moment?: George McGovern and Lyndon Johnson meet at Johnson's ranch in Texas near the end of September 1972; minutes after this photo was taken, in a private conference, Johnson delivered to McGovern the "X File" containing documentary evidence of the Chennault Affair

(NB: That's my absolute favorite picture of Frank, period.)

 

[Yes]

This frankly magnificent piece of work (the typeface and the block coloring are period-perfect) was the product of our gifted Test Threader @wolfram, who you can read in the TL Who's Your Huckleberry, a great deep dive into 21st century Texas politics, among other things. Also a fine crafter of election games and a shockingly talented linguistics buff for a guy his age. And his work is only one of several tips of the mighty iceberg that is the Test Threads community. Some very, very cool AH.commers ginning up a whole raft of wonderful ideas over there, the best of which come to these forums for general enjoyment. Round of applause for our artisanal graphics maven @wolfram, please. Awesome stuff.

 

[Yes]

October Surprise? You Should See November… ​

Nixon himself stated this law of journalism back in the Fifties, when he saw himself as a victim of attacks from the left.
“A charge is usually put on the front page; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads,” he said. ..

- Timothy Crouse, The Boys On The Bus

Later he said he’d known for at least a week, and Gary Hart later said he’d known for a month …. According
to Pat Caddell’s polls they had known — when I say “they,” I mean the McGovern top command — had
known what kind of damage the Eagleton thing had done and how terminal it had been since September….

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72​

George McGovern brought the file into the staff meeting he had called with a kind of bitter reverence, like the body of a child. Lyndon Johnson — a president, a force of nature, one of the bloody hands of Vietnam — had given the file to McGovern the day before in a plain manila envelope like the evidence of a crime that it seemed truly to be. Now McGovern and the people who had gathered around him on the principle that an election campaign could be an act of civic faith, something done despite contrary evidence to better the world you lived in, they together had to take the wild, corrupted, ungoverned power inside that file and figure out what the hell to do with it.

Opinions varied wildly. Most of the senior staff had never seen Gary Hart so angry. “He fucked us!” Hart spat with the ferocity Jean Westwood and Frank Mankiewicz always suspected was there. “Goddammit Johnson has fucked us! We’re his tools now! Who will ever believe what we say again if we’re Lyndon fucking Johnson’s pawns!”

While she did not share Hart’s feral sense of power lost, Westwood said more calmly that the campaign should put some distance between this revelation and the candidate. Rick Stearns, gunning for law school outside the strange kingdom of the McGovern campaign, took the attorney’s view. This was all evidence and some of it pretty damning but it wasn’t clear that it was proof. Not beyond doubt. Especially not if Madame Chennault had the salt to lie to people’s faces about it and Stearns guessed she did.

Also there was the whole question of how Johnson had come by this information in the first place. Mankiewicz shrugged with his effortlessly malleable face, and said that he sure as hell didn’t have a brief for Lyndon Johnson but the fact Johnson was willing to put his own credibility on the line meant that this was a lot bigger than point-scoring. Pat Caddell as usual talked in intangibles. If this got out, it would shatter well over half of Americans’ trust in the current President. If you go and do that, Caddell went on, you’ve got to make damn sure that people trust you instead, or they’ll just hate you for breaking their hearts. Mankiewicz acknowledged the point. George McGovern, caught in the hurricane’s eye, said nothing.

Then Phil Hart spoke. He had been… elsewhere. As this scruffy, witty, overworked, human staff of misfits and insurgents who had launched an obscure senator to a presidential nomination tried to grab hold of the biggest bombshell of their day, Phil Hart had gone in mind and spirit to a place far more important. He was with the dead again, with the good young men torn and wrenched away from their lives by white-hot metal, metal everywhere, earth churned up like the fist of God, metal going at over a thousand miles an hour, strewn among the dead on the red sand of Utah Beach where Hart himself had nearly lost the use of an arm to a German bullet. Through the least flicker on his face Hart came back into himself and with immeasurable knowledge in his eyes looked through those big square glasses right at McGovern.

“People died, George,” Hart said.

What shocked so many of the younger listeners in that room was the use of the familiar; McGovern was always “the Senator.” Even Eleanor only called him George sometimes. Hart repeated in quiet the only two words that mattered. “People died.”

McGovern pursed his lips. The fire took him, that spark of divine fury when he knew what he felt was right, when he could do what he believed to the very bottom was the only worthwhile thing in politics, the right thing. “People died.” He said it to hear it again, to absorb it. “They did. They did. This… this thing. If it’s true there’s not a hell deep enough. The fact anyone thought it is a crime. If it is true…” he shook his head. “We have to bring this out. We have to find a way, find the right way, and put this before the American people. We can’t ever be whole if this does not come to light.” No one in the room had ever heard such depth of emotion in McGovern’s voice when he said his next four words. “We have to end this.”

The candidate laid what Walt Rostow had labeled “the X File” on a linoleum counter beside him and walked off. He had to be with Eleanor for a little while. There were too many ghosts.

The next morning in the early cold Dick Dougherty called them all together, wrangled the pool reporters both grand and petit, got them out into the shivering open before he organized the buses for the morning event and the next inevitable trip to the airport. When the press with their usual entitlement pushed him on this unplanned gathering, Dougherty shrugged, dragged on his perpetual cigarette like a Frenchman, and said, “Frank wants to say something to all of you, and he wants to be the one to say it. So we’re here; now you know the same things I do.”

In a few minutes the round, sturdy Mankiewicz shuffled out in front of the crowd, many of whom felt a chill not of the air come over as he did so. Those were the ones who remembered Los Angeles, remembered Frank in a much sharper suit in the glare of flashbulbs as he told the world Bobby was dead. Now he had a different weight to lay on the nation and some of the hacks could feel it in their water.

Mankiewicz spoke up. “Ladies and gentlemen, I need,” they hung on each word, the smart reporters, they heard need and even Tim Crouch in the back watching the watchers froze still. “I need to make an announcement on behalf of the campaign. Yesterday, in Texas, the McGovern campaign came into possession of highly sensitive materials. These were papers archived by the former President, Mr. Lyndon Johnson, and in his keeping as a former chief executive. They concern matters of grave importance to national security, and allegations on which we in the campaign have neither the wish nor the right to comment.”

The pack’s blood was up now. Every reporter there knew someone was fucked, that a great sky of American politics would now fall. Whose?

“A political campaign is not — and let me go back over that part because it’s important, ladies and gentlemen — a political campaign is not the place or the platform for matters this sensitive…”

The aircraft took off about the right time, as Jean Westwood’s cold-blooded rush had seen to it. The phone calls to O’Brien and Teddy Kennedy, the rolls of campaign petty cash raked out, the terrified young aide who made the run before the counters closed that night. Far from the crowd, and among the many moving pieces of the campaign, the two messengers sat together for their flight to Washington. Once there they would go separate ways. Doug Coulter, ever the cool-headed scout far behind enemy lines, would take a series of bus routes to the Senate offices of John Sherman Cooper, the resolute Lincoln Republican from Kentucky, crusader against the Vietnam War, former diplomat, and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gordon Weil, always twenty-five going on sixty, dour as a banker faced with overdrafts, marched curtly to the offices of John C. Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat, defense hawk, and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Coulter and Weil each had copies of the same papers. The papers Lyndon Johnson had let slip like furies on Dick Nixon’s trail.

“… and so we will not keep, nor handle further, nor comment on those materials. They have been sent directly and with as much speed as we can manage, to appropriate authorities…”

The brown parcel overnighted by Gary Hart’s own hand took a day and a half in the mail because sometimes that was how these things went. It took half that time for the gang in the West Wing to sort out just how McGovern’s people would do it. For the other half Martin McGee, who knew unindicted conspirators twisting in the wind when he saw them, told John Ehrlichman’s aide to pound sand. Pat Gray felt the ulcer spread in his gut as the special agent brought the parcel to him. He slammed down the full-fat milk cream like bourbon and passed it on to Mark Felt’s desk. Felt did not bother with an ad in the paper this time; a call from a pay phone in Adams-Morgan with a muffled voice would do and Bob Woodward took the one word of instruction at his Post desk. “Tonight.”

“… so they can ensure rules of procedure are followed, that the materials are weighed fairly, and proper, reasoned judgments can be made about them…”

Cooper sent a fresh-faced page with a written note to the Senate floor just after lunchtime. The baritone-voiced Oregonian, Cooper’s fellow Vietnam peace activist and the model of a handsomely senatorial liberal Republican sent by central casting, folded that note shut with one hand and made his exit. Cooper sat, and told Mark Hatfield what he now knew, and what was not yet known, and together the two men rehearsed the possibilities and the consequences. In the end as he usually did, Hatfield brought religion into it. This can’t be a silent witness, he said to Cooper. Nothing is for certain here but if we fail to shine a light here, if there’s no debate, it will ruin us. The Senate as an institution, probably the country. I’ll talk to John too, said Hatfield — against all expectation the ex-governor who had integrated Oregon and the old Mississippi segregationist John Stennis, both evangelicals if rather different flavors thereof, were in the same senatorial prayer group. So it was John Sherman Cooper, with nothing now to think of as he faced retirement and, according to his doctors, a gradual but inexorable blindness, except the right thing, decided to read the full contents of the “X File” into the Senatorial Record.

“… in keeping with the law, the right to a fair hearing, and the proper separation of legal matters from the motives and the work of a campaign. We can direct you to the people to whom you should talk next; I just ask that you not rush any of us here in the campaign to judgment. We’ve acted as quickly as possible to make right the problem that we were given these materials, and I speak for the very few of us who dealt with that when I say we want no part of what should be a sober process and won’t have any further comment to give from the campaign. Now if you can hold back questions I can give you those contact details.”

They had gotten him up for it, which was half the problem Bob Haldeman reckoned. Up, after another night of little to no sleep, of the dark recesses of Dilantin and blended whisky, up in a campaign season tighter than it should be, up when he knew the boss was smart enough to put together the timing and the location and end up left in the darkness with his fear. The fear had washed away as Frank Mankiewicz walked out, as though made in black-and-white although it was a color set. Now there was just rage. Nixon said nothing, breathed nothing, glared with that level intensity he had when he devoted himself to the moment. Then as it ended, he stood up in a low rumble that never reached the stage that would form words, walked briskly towards the set and, with a batterer’s vicious swiftness, kicked in the screen.

Haldeman, one of the least profane members of the inner circle, swore a blue streak at the dazzle of sparks and glass. A Secret Service agent rushed forward to see to the President’s safety and Nixon swatted him away, like the blows of a caged beast. John Dean, among the others in the room, sat in one part frozen by fear, in another memorizing the moment so he could replay these events when the time came to describe it in order to save his own skin. Nixon stormed out. Off to the Residence. Another wing of the prison he had made.

Haldeman felt a strange lightness when the breach of the peace was done. It was all out now, at least everything that mattered. No uncertainty anymore. Now they’d see which way the country fell.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It was Warren Beatty who first saw the coffins, in his mind’s eye. He was on the road with the McGovern people, playing airbrushed impressario for one celebrity fundraiser after another. In the meanwhile, in the campaign’s nooks and crannies, he indulged his own deep interest in the nuts and bolts of politics. What several senior staffers and a number of elected friends of the campaign had learned was that Beatty, the world-famous movie star, Hollywood lothario, networker among the beautiful people and by his own admission caretaker of his own Adonis-like vanity, also had a keen eye and nimble mind for the election game. He made the backrooms of the McGovern campaign his home from home not by imposing his celebrity on them, but because bit by bit the key players learned that Warren was a guy you could talk shop with, that he was a quick study and a decent judge of what worked and what didn’t out on the trail. So as the ad came on TV again and a couple of organizers started to boo it, when Beatty shushed them they had the courtesy to listen. He wanted to pay attention this time. He needed to see.

The Nixon campaign called this one “The McGovern Defense.” It was their right cross thrown at McGovern’s proposals for defense reform, which of course the CREEP gang framed as stripping America’s military bare. What even Beatty’s bright, fierce, idealistic big sister, Shirley MacLaine, didn’t get, like so many other McGovern faithful, was just how fucking clever these Mad Ave guys on Nixon’s payroll were. The actor who really wanted to direct leaned in and watched frame by frame. In his heart of hearts, though he loathed every principle they stood for, he did love to watch these guys work. The stage was set as a game, and of course that was the point, to “show not tell” that George McGovern treated national defense in the Cold War as some kind of children’s game. Not like Republicans, the party of grown-ups, the party of responsibility even though they blew holes in buildings and taped conversations like the goddamn KGB.

Beatty shook his head and smiled, as though he had just watched the sheer athleticism of the other team’s star player. The calm, smooth-voiced baritone of the announcer explained everything CREEP said McGovern would cut, and as it did, different figures — soldiers in helmets, ships, planes — were removed from the serried ranks of toys. The two cameras they’d shot the thing with cut down and in, to highlight the gaps, emphasize the emptiness when McGovern chose like a child with a whim to pick up these emblems of American security and toss them aside. Soon hardly anything was left. The announcer delivered his sting: could you trust a candidate who would treat the nation’s safety this way? Beatty shook his head again. It wasn’t art, but damn if they weren’t good at it. But what did it say? He pushed his own mind forward. How did you get inside that little drama and beat it?

For starters, what was the story? That McGovern would treat national security like a child at play, like a game, and leave Americans unsafe. Fine. A game. How did you play a game? What were games that you played? Beatty thought his way through children’s games, through cards, sports, gambling. Well, there was chess, too. He liked chess, especially because he was better at it than most of his opponents expected. He thought about the board, about strategy. He thought about the flow of the game, how you played, how you shaped a strategy and ensnared the other side, how you could lay a trap or wear them down with attrition. Some people took the pieces off the board, others tipped them over. Tipped over white pieces, tipped over black. Kings and pawns, pawns everywhere….

In his mind’s eye, Beatty tipped over a black pawn. And in that moment his vision was transformed. When he charged at a trot into Frank Mankiewicz’s makeshift office a minute and a half later, Gary Hart worried for a moment that his best celebrity friend was on something. Mankiewicz just smiled. Frank had grown up around Hollywood “creatives”; as the son of one of the movies’ most renowned screenwriters, the guy who had written Citizen Kane among other things, there were writers and artists and directors in and out of Frank’s childhood home and around the dinner table most nights a week. Mankiewicz had seen this look a thousand times before. He smiled and said to his young pal Warren, “tell me.” Warren did.

It took six days to script, then shoot, then pull every goddamn red cent they could get out of union shops and anti-war groups and women’s rights associations and celebrity donors and black churches and everywhere the hell else they could dig one last time, to make enough ad buys. To match these thirty-odd seconds up against the electoral map that Pat Caddell, Rick Stearns, and Doug Coulter had built. When it first aired in Philadelphia, where McGovern had made a campaign stop, Beatty sat at the candidate’s left hand (Eleanor was on McGovern’s right.) Then they watched.

What they saw was a chess board. Half of a chess board, the other half was implied, out there, the foreign, the whims of a complex world. What you saw was all the black chess pieces lined up at the start of a game. The pawns didn’t have the usual knob on top, they were conical all the way up from their broad bases. And on the side of each was an American flag. The narrator — another baritone thrum of authority, it was amazing how much you had to pay for one of these guys — started in. In 1968, the United States had been mired deep in its war in Vietnam. At the same time, the US government secretly tried to make peace, and made unexpected strides.

Then, in came Richard Nixon. Nixon wanted to be president — the camera zoomed through the rank of pawns to the king. Nixon had promised to end the war, and he was willing to do whatever it took to have a war to end. Once he’d won, he feared that if South Vietnam fell then Richard Nixon wouldn’t get a second term. In 1968, Nixon prolonged a war that might have ended. In 1972, America was still in the same war, drawn out to make sure “our guys” didn’t lose before Nixon could be elected again. In chess, you sacrifice pawns to protect your king. Now they fell. Now those pawns went down one by one like dominoes — even McGovern smiled just a little at the reference Beatty had written in there — and the camera panned along them as they dropped, black cylinders now on their side, draped in an American flag. Coffins before the king, sacrifices for his sake. Because over twenty thousand of America’s best young men had died so Richard Nixon could be president, and then be president again.

The screen washed out. In place of the chessboard stood George McGovern, resolute and calm, in a sober suit with a dark tie, dressed for something important, perhaps even a funeral. McGovern spoke. “In America, we have no kings. And the brave men who serve our country are not pawns. They deserve a government that will never throw away their lives for cheap political gain. Together this November we can create a government as good as its people. For our future. For their sake.”

The ad ended. There were hands shaken, a buzz of commentary, and Gary Hart leaned in towards the central clutch of figures around McGovern. “Ziegler’s already done a presser attacking the ad. He said it cheapens the memory of our fighting men and shows we just want to play politics with national defense.”

“Then we got the bastards,” said Warren Beatty. And he smiled that smile.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

In the meanwhile the campaigns hurtled forward, like the chariots of the damned. Just two days before Frank Mankiewicz stood in front of a frigid press of reporters to light the fuse of what was immediately called “the Chennault Affair,” Richard Nixon had grabbed hold of the new broom that, he promised, would sweep clean. Amid a stop off in the friendly confines of southern California, Nixon held a brief presser, staged on his terms as always, with Governor Ronald Reagan and the man who would now become Nixon’s Attorney General, the trim, upstanding New England establishment man Elliot Richardson. Already the Senate committee had started asking inconvenient questions about Kliendienst as they tried to draw together the data about the whole ITT business and the CRP slush funds. The polls said Nixon’s trustworthiness among voters had been ground down slow but steady like a levee in a flood. This was step one to get control of that situation, cut off the damaged parts of the administration — the “Brookingsgate Boys” had already been in court and for the most part awaited sentencing — then sacrifice a big name or two and roll out the talking points about how Nixon had stepped in to take charge and end all this irresponsibility once and for all like the strong leader he was.

Then the secrets came to light and the whole thing blew up again. First the word that there were taped conversations in the White House, which put new wind in the sails of the Senate investigators whose political maneuver had suffered from its own dryness — hours of questioning about numbered accounts and business associates failed to charm low-information voters — and gave them a compelling reason to press ahead at the White House and get this sorted out once and for all. This was buttressed by a steady stream of small details leaked by way of Mark Felt to Woodward and Bernstein, though still not yet picked up by too many other correspondents. It was reaffirmed when a visibly shaken Pat Gray had lunch with a young New York Times reporter he trusted and affirmed by his silence that there were issues and players in the CREEP mess who went all the way to the top of the administration, and all but told the shaken if eager young man to go to Felt for confirmation. Felt knew better than to play to more than one resource but the story moved ahead anyway as the Grey Lady played catchup with the Post. Momentum built in the Senate committee for action, so its chair Sam Ervin issued a subpoena for the tapes. That, Ervin expected, would create enough unforced errors to make life interesting. Certainly George Wallace eagerly implied as much out on the trail.

And then for more than a week it was Chennault, Chennault, Chennault. A second set of Senate hearings opened up, this one in the Foreign Relations Committee where William Fulbright had the bit between his teeth. After a critical three days at the start where Nixon campaigned dully and seemed to linger in a funk to the horror of his senior aides, he sprang to life again in that way he did sometimes and turned, feral, on the attack. Accusations flew, of illegal wiretapping, of character assassination, of a personal vendetta on the part of Johnson, of Johnson’s desire to usurp the election which had the backhanded advantage of casting McGovern as LBJ’s catspaw after all, despite the deft early handling of the matter. And indeed, McGovern was so dedicated to following the campaign model laid out back in July, to be upright and issue-oriented, and seemingly paralyzed for making choices about what he might do differently, that the narrative stuck with reporters bored by McGovern’s rectitude and given to calling him “Mr. Magoo” behind his back. Though McGovern’s position was saved by Warren Beatty’s flash of inspiration, the pushback against Johnson continued.

Lyndon Johnson, as he could do, took this in his stride. He reveled in the chance to give a full account of the case, of the data gained, of what they did not know but suspected, of the decision not to use the information four years earlier for fear of this kind of blowback (which sent more reporters in a chase after Hubert Humphrey who, aghast at the publicity, declined to comment.) Now, though, with the stream of accusations and known criminal acts — Johnson took positive glee at the chance to say, “now, this Mr. Colson, he blew up a damn building, Frank,” to ABC’s Frank Reynolds on live television — it seemed to him that the time to air this information was now. So it was that the man in American politics able to square up in the ring against Richard Nixon’s capacity to counterpunch started to wear away at the White House.

Other things gained momentum as well. More and more Democrats, not just Ed Muskie and a few other good-hearted sympathizers, but people like Mayor Daley and onetime rival John Lindsay in New York City and Marvin Mandel in Maryland, began to rally round the Democratic ticket. This was in part the work of Phil Hart, and Larry O’Brien, and Frank Mankiewicz, in their dull but steady drumbeat of argument in favor of McGovern. But it owed even more to the sense that an unchained Nixon was a dangerous force, that McGovern needed at least to be strong enough to hobble him, and that perhaps the man of principle was pliable enough after all, given a chance to actually win, to acknowledge political debts to those who stepped in and helped out.

Meanwhile, George Wallace damn near rejoiced in everything that seemed to happen, in the chance to thrill friendly crowds with tirades against Nixonian corruption, about how he was the only man in the country not afraid to call Nixon crooked in public. Even when the IRS began the inevitable public investigation of Gerald Wallace’s business tax shelters, the one that had been coming since Wallace walked out of the Democratic convention into the arms of the AIP, he gave Nixon a taste of the same medicine saying that if the men behind Brookingsgate had it in for George Wallace’s very own brother, an upstanding Alabama success story, then clearly George Wallace was on to something.

Through the melee, between bouts of anxiety and doom-saying that tore at his soul, between sleepless nights and slugs of alcohol and barbiturates, Nixon had the cold, steady eye to see two pieces on the board that could see him through. He had crafted those pieces and put them in place himself. Now, perhaps, they were set to deliver him out of the flames and into a second term, the biggest triumph of them all against these odds. The pieces were Warren Burger and Henry Kissinger. When the White House flatly refused to hand over any tapes on grounds of national security, Ervin the constitutional lawyer — he carried pocket copies of the Constitution in the many folds of his overcoat, like a fence carried watches — filed suit in the Federal District Court of D.C. first thing the next morning, after Rufus Edmisten spent the whole night typing up the complaint personally. Given the gravity and apparent urgency of the matter, the court agreed to two things: to hear arguments within a week, and to sit en banc, all justices present, in order to ensure a thorough decision.

Fourteen judges appeared; a daunting sight. To the shock and concern of his colleagues, and the interest of the press, Ervin appeared pro se in Ervin v. Nixon. They need not have worried. This was the last bow of a great Senate legalist and he came ready for war, ready too to allow Nixon’s personal attorney for the matter to hang himself up by his own arguments. The judgment came back the next day, which Bob Haldeman at first tried to hope was a sign in the President’s favor: 10-4 for the plaintiff. The opinion was given to the unremarkable John Sirica, an Eisenhower appointment, to write, who managed, against similar expectations to those for Ervin, to write a short, lyrical holding on the limits of power. The case was appealed and now it was in Warren Burger’s hands, the solid conservative who Nixon had made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Nixon hoped Burger would find six justices ready to buy an argument that this was a “political question” — a legitimate contest between the other two branches of government that judges should not properly decide.

Kissinger was busy on his own front, doing what he loved best: advancing his own career in the name of American statecraft. His visits to Paris this October had been furious in their pace, almost constant, and after a meeting with his opposite number Le Duc Tho on the 19th, it seemed everything was in readiness. No one was to mention that, if you had asked Nixon’s national security staff and the president himself three years, or even one, earlier that the terms on the table now amounted to surrender of the American bargaining position. Nor really should anyone mention that they abandoned the very thing that now hounded Nixon by insinuation, his determination to stick up for the prim, grandiose, volatile South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu.

Kissinger always found it paid to be flexible about one’s desired outcomes; it helped guarantee success every time. Thieu could stay on, however, while the parties — the North, the South, and the “Provisional Revolutionary Government” that was the rebirth of the Viet Cong out in the Mekong provinces — would simply stay where they were, resupplied by their sponsors at parity, with a guarantee of a cease-fire long enough for the United States to get the hell out of town. It suited every political end Kissinger sought after for his boss and for himself. He came back to Washington practically a cherub, dancing off his feet that peace was at hand. They would pull the rug out from under McGovern’s peace candidacy, blitz him with ads about his irresponsible policy proposals, and squeeze the vice on Wallace until his more respectable supporters shuffled off to support someone stronger. Whatever this whole business about ‘68 holds Mr. President, said Kissinger, you can face it as a man reelected by a grateful country.

It was then the harvest of folly was brought home. As the stories emerged McGovern’s Dick Dougherty, a good unreliable Irish Catholic, wondered out loud whether irony was God’s favorite carving knife. The terms of the Washington-Hanoi proposal in Paris reached Saigon as they were bound to do. Nguyen Van Thieu reacted with a rage he did not bother to suppress. First, no matter how balanced nervous Washington correspondents tried to make their coverage, Nixon’s grand promises from 1968 were dashed on the rocks. Johnson had known exactly what was going on and now, almost casually, Johnson — and there were few men alive Thieu hated more — had ruined the reputation, the political leverage, of the patron who had assured Thieu that everything would be alright, that South Vietnam would last like Gibraltar and Thieu could grow a personal dynasty in that fertile soil. Second, that goddamn trickster Kissinger had sold Thieu down the river. Hanoi and the PRG would hold their breath long enough for the Americans to get out, and then they would come for him. And he could no longer believe Nixonian guarantees of support. Thieu physically tore the telexed copy of the draft agreement, brought still warm from the American embassy, into pieces. In its place, with the petulant fury of a strongman on borrowed time, he wrote up nearly one hundred fifty amendments that between them guaranteed South Vietnam a sovereignty never promised in Geneva in ‘54. He might have no other power in practical terms, but Thieu would make the peace, or give none to Nixon.

A few days later, as a federal grand jury convened in the Gerald Wallace investigation, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called its first witnesses in the Chennault Affair, as Pat Gray left his office at the FBI on extended sick leave with a bleeding ulcer and dangerous hypertension, as Kissinger’s promise of peace was pipped by the man at the center of the new Nixonian scandal, the Supreme Court signed off on a piece of paper. Ervin v. Nixon had come to them, like a family scandal aired in front of all the neighbors, and they took it for consideration. There was plenty of other movement, with sentencing scheduled for six of the “Brookingsgate Boys,” Senate subpoenas for every piece of paper John Mitchell had that was tied to the CREP operation, and a pre-trial status check for Loeb v. Segretti. But it was the big Court that mattered. It was there that Richard Nixon looked for relief, for a dismissal that would validate his power, lock down the tapes, and let the President argue on his own terms to voters that he was the victim of liberal perfidy. And it was just then that, in Johnny Apple’s memorable phrase in one of the bars that were always there along the trail, that the Supreme Court walked up, clasped the defendant in a manly embrace, and fucked Richard Nixon hollow.

The court granted a writ of certiorari on October 26th. A Thursday, and barely a week and a half from the election. Not only that, not only had they left Nixon’s political-question argument in the dust with the rest of his designs, but they would not hear the arguments until after the election. It was the Caesar’s-wife approach, not one sign to be made that the Court would influence a political outcome. Except, of course, that this is exactly what they did; a will to hear the matter implied guilt as much as it did innocence, when tied to the decision to wait. There were other logics, other principles, other political ends to be met, even on the right, than the vast animal reach of Richard Nixon’s will to political survival. The Court chose to exercise theirs. The pieces had fallen. The board was shrouded in fog. Dick Nixon would have to fight his way blind, simply forward against whatever he met. No more rules — at least that was clear now.

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They called it “the Fort Wayne story.” “They,” of course, were the people who knew, the people who always knew in the current of whispers that ran beneath the surface of reported news, the truths not meant to be heard, the polite silences, the bombs that waited to go off in many a political life: who was a drunk, who was a crack-up, who was homosexual, who beat their wife, who’d gambled it all away, who was in bed with the mob, who tomcatted around town, who had a secret family, who had diverse other hidden crimes. It had started to look like 1972 was a banner year for Them; what was certainly true was that They were far from done.

The story was this. In the wild, lovely, terrified days between his draft notice and the war he’d waged, George McGovern met a girl. They knew each other in those familiar summer campgrounds of the Upper Midwest, and in the rush of infatuation and real fear of death that moved both of them, McGovern had sex for the first time. Within days the girl, a formidable young woman McGovern’s own age, told her impulsive beau she was pregnant. When McGovern clumsily tried to figure out how he could make things right, she told him calmly that she wanted neither a back-alley abortion that might kill her or a marriage to someone she barely knew who might very well come home in a pine box. She would take her chances, throw herself on the mercy of war’s expediencies, and leave for relatives in Indiana — this was where the reference to Fort Wayne came into the tale. There she was delivered of a girl and, as he wanted her to, she assigned to the hospital record as the father’s name “George McGovern.” From there, like so many unwed mothers of the time, she disappeared into sealed legal records and the eddies of the now. George McGovern, bewildered but with a typical optimism weighed against his practical Plainsman’s view of the world, went on to fall in love with his wife, fight his war, and come home alive to start a family. It seemed to have turned out for the best, all things considered.

That was not the end of the story, however. By the end of the Fifties, as the forces of postwar American liberalism and the national-security state ranged the field against each other and took one another’s measure, George S. McGovern came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. And whether any of the decades-long whispers about America’s secret policeman were true or not, he certainly had the obsession with controlling other people’s dirty secrets shared by a number of closeted men who also happened to hold great power locally or nationally. Hoover even had a special cadre of special agents whose job was to keep their muckrakes sharp and oiled, and as they trawled through the past of George McGovern they practically tripped over the “Fort Wayne story.” Like so many of Hoover’s actual files it was a bureaucratic tangle of insinuation and supposition, but it was enough to rouse attention when seen. And anyway, They tended to talk about such things when the drinks flowed. Backchannel chats were the finest of Washington’s aphrodisiacs; far better than actual sex was the raw animal thrill of power over others’ dirt. For the road crews of American journalism, the cheap hacks as well as the Apples and Andersons, an affected world-weariness was the proper response to such things. We know all of what They say, the reporters yawned, but that’s not where the game is played, just where the real men go to relax, and anyway there are libel laws as our lawyers love to remind the editorial staff. You’d have to open up J. Edgar’s vaults before you….

It was late September when the field hands for the Indiana Republican Party went digging in Fort Wayne. A little insurance, they thought to themselves, for they had heard Their stories as the carnival passed through town back in primaries season. They charged through the city loud and clumsy enough to wake the papers, and those who knew what They said kept a side eye on what came of it. All leashes were off now; the Chennault Affair had put everything on the table. After all, a McGovern scandal would provide balance, a little something to stay on the nice side of editors harried by their advertisers about liberal hit jobs on President Nixon. County clerks protested, upright citizens well backed by rolls of unmarked hundreds from the state GOP pressed ahead, the municipal court hemmed and hawed.

All the while George McGovern watched, in solemn quiet, along with Frank Mankiewicz and a couple of other people who knew: Eleanor, among them, who had not known until the last year when her husband decided there was no way they could take on this enterprise with any secrets between them even from so long ago. So now it journeyed with them, like a family shame just off the glare of the spotlights, with at least each other for company. Sometimes they could even let it rest, nearly forget, hope that the walls between different people’s hoards of secrets would stay firm, that Nixon might think it would only reflect badly on him, that they were far enough behind so the hard-faced men in the White House would not feel threatened, or that they simply would get lucky, stay as lucky as they had been before they rose this far. Then Lyndon Johnson chose this moment to tell the truth — it was always Lyndon, it seemed — and all the rules changed.

One morning late in October a message found its way to Frank Mankiewicz. The McGoverns were back in Washington, as the Senator had to go be a senator for a couple of days, and while the campaign hurtled on around the country its two principals were temporarily bound to the capitol. Mankiewicz read the message, and felt the great, cold stone in his gut that he remembered, the one that came that June of '68 when there was nowhere to run to, when you were condemned to the moment. He found Gordon Weil, the senior-most aide in the offices that early morning, grabbed him by the arm even, and spoke in low, slate words across which winds blew. Go to the Senator, he told Weil. Tell him they’re digging in the county clerk’s office in Terre Haute. Don’t ask. Just say the words.

Weil did as he was told and turned up, with his undertaker’s charm, at the McGoverns’ Washington home. McGovern himself, in an open-necked shirt and slacks but with a robe on, stood at the door. Resolute. It had come, there was no turning away from that. Now he would have to figure out what to say, and when to say it. But he meant to breach the wall himself. No cheap thug on a witch hunt was going to twist words or facts. If it’d come time for the truth then he was the one to tell it. Face unmoved, he listened to the sentence Weil had memorized at the campaign office. He neither blinked nor spoke. The least moment passed, but long enough, and he nodded, then in a low voice that still held a whisper of kindness said, “thank you, Gordon. Tell Frank thank you, too. Make sure you do that.”

With that he walked inside, where Eleanor only had to look at him to know it was time. She rubbed his arm as though he were terribly cold, and said, “right, then. Do you want to call the Harts or should I do that?”” McGovern simply nodded, and she found the living room phone. In less than an hour, as the newsmen were just waking up to the day’s possibilities, Phil and Jean Hart drove themselves to the McGovern home where they were let in by the Secret Service detail. Once there, and around the kitchen table like any Midwestern family’s secret laid bare, McGovern told them. The truth they knew — McGovern felt he couldn’t in good conscience ask them to be a part of this venture without that. What they needed to know now was what was likely to happen, and McGovern made plain his intent. There was silence for a little while. Then Jean Briggs Hart spoke.

“No you will not, George McGovern. No you will not. Let me tell you why.” She had but to tilt her head a little for her husband to stop himself before he said a word. “There is not a damned thing to find in Fort Wayne, you know that and I know that. How Hoover’s men managed to play that particular game of telephone I don’t know but it just goes to show they’re not supermen. And these cheap precinct hacks from the Indiana GOP are no better. They should never have been let in there to begin with but do you know what? It’s a good thing they were. It’s good that they bulled around that china shop and have nothing to show. Now I’ve heard this same thing that Frank heard — wives aren’t deaf, you should know that perfectly well. The Terre Haute district court judge isn’t going to let them in. Records like that are sealed for a reason. I have spent enough time in the care and concern for young women in that situation who only want to be allowed to get on with their lives without all this nonsense and shame and all for our neanderthal attitudes about birth control…. You will not say one thing. I take that back. You’ll say one thing, and it is this: there is no hidden child in Fort Wayne. It has the virtue of being entirely true. If some pool reporter is fool enough to ask, in this climate, you say that. And that is all you will say before this is done in November or you’re a bigger fool than ever was Dick Nixon.

“More than that. More than that. You get that hatchet man of yours, Gary Hart, and you have him send a message to Mr. Butterfield at the White House. The one with the tapes. He seems to be a decent soul all things considered and he’ll tell the others. The message is: we’ll talk. The wives will talk. The aides will talk. The butlers, the cabbies, the whole damned town will talk. Because we know. No one says it in the open but those days may be gone now. We will talk, and every hidden sin of every elected Republican above dogcatcher will sweep the news like the wrath of Almighty God. And every hand, every hand that man ever raised at that poor woman,” here she meant Pat Nixon, for They would know that instantly, “will be splashed over the front page of the Post like blood. He can measure out his own rope if he wants to. I doubt he does.”

She was right enough. And she found an unexpected ally in Gary Hart; through him an approach was made and not much more than a day later Hart and John Dean met in a parking garage — they had become the agora of this year of spilled secrets — where the lawyer in Hart laid things out neatly for the lawyer in Dean. The Gerald Wallace investigation was a matter for the proper authorities at this point, said Hart. But if CREEP tried to attack the character of George McGovern or George Wallace for that matter, there was a dam ready to burst and in such a short window before the election it would go very badly for the GOP. The President knew how hard it was to get people to listen to a denial, said Hart with a twist of the knife. We’ll even pull the ad with the coffins, he added, enjoying the moment with a desire to sound magnanimous. With his usual eye for the last branch to grab on the way down, Dean did so and asked, Why do that if you have nothing to hide? Hart’s face betrayed him but his mind danced. Because the President needs to feel like he’s won something in this deal, Hart went on. That’s how he operates, isn’t it? Dean nodded, took the terms, and left with mind afire about how to undermine McGovern from the flank.

Another day passed, and the campaign returned to the rhythm of public appearances and travel. That was when it happened. Mankiewicz was right — it was a pool kid, one of the wire-service stringers who knew that the big men of the press plane thought McGovern was getting in deeper and deeper, who wanted a reaction, who asked. There have been reports about Republican staffers going through vital records in Indiana, on a tip-off from some source inside the government. Could the Senator comment?

McGovern stopped his forward motion and stiffened awkwardly the way he did when one of the press guys got under his skin; this was why the grandees of correspondence didn’t take to him, he had no sense of how to play the game with good grace, only honesty. Mouth twisted between a flat line and a frown, prickled across his face and neck with heat and guilt and frustration, McGovern sucked in a breath through his nose and replied. Frank Mankiewicz and Gordon Weil, who by chance were walking together nearby in the scrum of staff and scribblers, saw the pause, thought they caught at least a part of the question, and seemed to pause mid-step suspended.

“Now I know what you’re going to ask, young man,” said McGovern, suddenly the stern schoolmaster. “And I’m going to address it right here. There’s no hidden child in Fort Wayne, Indiana. None. Just as Gerald Wallace is innocent until proven guilty and George Wallace likewise and, for that matter, so is President Nixon. Some terrible things have been done in this country in the name of power. But that doesn’t mean we need to swim in a sea of mud when there are real issues we have to deal with. That’s not what the public wants. Frankly all of this hurling rumors and false stories around is a bunch of guff.”

A head of almost literal steam built up in McGovern’s wiry frame, furor at the press, at the Nixon machine, at himself. He snapped, “what this is, is the Committee to Re-Elect the President trying to drag this campaign down to their level!” Other reporters crowded in as McGovern moved ahead again and asked if he could please get some questions about issues to talk about. Mankewicz carried on wary. Weil lowered his chin and walked beside. Somewhere a little back, still notable for his height despite his shrug of a posture, Pat Caddell nodded steadily. The Senator had lost his temper but he’d managed to say the right thing by chance. Everyone knew CREEP was crooked, that they were a symbol of everything broken about American politics. If you could be the good man smeared by crooks, the mud only made you look better to disaffected voters. Wallace knew that, he practically rolled in the damn stuff. As long as you were the good man it would work out. That was the model, anyway.

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By the rules. George Beall believed in the rules, which was on reflection hardly surprising. A belief in the scrupulous, fair, faultless application of rules had driven his career and indeed shaped the world in which he tried to live. Beall was a distinguished graduate of Princeton, a high-flyer in the Justice Department, one of the younger United States Attorneys — in charge of an entire federal District, in this case the state of Maryland — in the business. He lived with pressure to achieve even more. His father had been a rock-ribbed Republican United States Senator from Maryland, a position now held by George’s older brother John Glenn Beall, Jr. There was a lot to live up to there, and at the core lay the conviction that it was both a practical need and a moral duty to do it right, whatever “it” was.

Now, in the autumn of 1972, “it” was a major investigation into networks of bribery and backhanders at the county and state level in Maryland. The trawl through public contracts concentrated on Baltimore, in part because as the big city of the state it was an obvious target, in part because it would not hurt that a county and city dominated by Democrats was likely to yield a fair number of actionable cases. But for George Beall that was simply a happy accident that might reflect well on him with the embattled Nixon administration. His real concern was to clean up public business in his home state; doing well out of doing good was just a happy dovetail of circumstance. He had, though, sped up his plan to get to work on this, committed more resources sooner, with the atmosphere of scandal and investigation in the national news. There were scandals in the states too — the whole Sharpstown business out in Texas came to mind — and he meant to show the reporters that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland knew how to handle these things properly. Indeed it had only been a few weeks and already they had some plausible sources.

One in particular gave him some pause. The man’s name was Matz, Lester Matz, and he was a contractor who had worked at high levels in Maryland road-building and construction projects for years. He had a tale to tell. Among the many other things he said about the underground economy of kickbacks that launched other parallel investigations by Beall’s assistants, was that he had made regular payments to secure work on major projects to Ted Agnew. This had gone on for years, said Matz, since Agnew’s service in Baltimore city government up through his Vice Presidency. There was a system, said Matz, and the two men among several others had kept their ends of it up a decade or more. Beall’s investigators took down all the details. Beall interviewed Matz personally. Beall had his own level of skepticism about it — Baltimore Sun reporters and Democratic opposition researchers had been after Agnew on bribery causes for years to no effect. But it seemed Beall was the only one so scrupulous. Word got out just enough from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland that George White, Agnew’s personal lawyer — not White House staff, Agnew’s personal lawyer — had an afternoon coffee with Beall about it. Beall made clear he didn’t think much of Matz’s story on its face. It was the kind of thing anyone could say, there weren’t enough proofs of the elements of the crime in play, and the best thing for the Vice President was to let Beall trawl this through properly and clear his name. In the meanwhile, on the presumption of innocence, Beall told White it could be kept quiet.

Word, once out, never goes in one direction only. In a matter of days a mimeographed copy of Matz’s longest interview, a couple of hours with Beall’s investigators transcribed, made its way in another one of the manila envelopes that were the currency of the 1972 presidential cycle to a friendly source in D.C. and from there to Montgomery. George Wallace read them twice front to back, before he spent a full night possessed of coffee and a demon’s own energy deciding what to do next. Two days on, a pair of men set their shoe leather to the streets of Maryland and started looking. One was slighter of build, in glasses, trained by one of Hoover’s g-men in the forensic arts of digging up dirt and in forensic accounting. The other was lean but powerful, a former state trooper, Alabama’s praetorian guard of segregation, who knew just how a carefully applied mix of a voice with menace and a Southern accent gave nervous Yankees the shits. They had a ream of potential suspects, and a number of useful leads supplied over quiet cups of coffee by politically connected Wallace supporters in-state. There was not much time to work but they took the almost reckless urgency of the effort as fuel, not unlike the reporters on the many beats that these days promised scandal and an upheaval of the politics most regular citizens took for granted. They worked Matz by working around him; he was the spoke, not the wheel. Sure enough it paid off.

His name was Jerome, and wasn’t that fitting thought the two of them. Jerome B. Wolff, and he was a nervous bastard and a bit of a hoarder, both of which were gifts if you wanted to know these things. Jerome Wolff was also the chief of the State Roads Commission and he had the paperwork to prove it. Much of that paperwork, when you spent enough hours in his musty attic as the light faded, had to do with how the kickback system worked. Some of it, reams worth of paperwork, dealt with when, and how, and for how much, Ted Agnew had been bribed for contracts. The forensic accountant didn’t even have to work at it. Even the old trooper could see some of what was laid out in the bills itemized here. If you kept two sets of books to throw off the scent, this was definitely the other set. Wolff, who paced the downstairs like a setter anxious for its master, kept the black book with obsessive clarity. They took their pictures, made their notes, advised Jerome of his civic duty to make the U.S. Attorney’s office aware of these materials — they had, in the moment of final triumph somewhere around eight that night, found payment records dated after Agnew’s vice-presidential inauguration — then made their way out, trilbies on, like the secret policemen they nearly were.

This was the last Monday of October, the night before Halloween. The two men in hats flew out of Baltimore the next afternoon bound for Birmingham. The day after that Jerome B. Wolff walked, a little befuddled, into the U.S. Attorney’s office and complicated George Beall’s life to no end. The Assistant Attorneys were nearly frantic; they got the political implications. Beall, between deep breaths, kept calm. He had obligations. Obligations to do this right. A very East Coast Establishment variety of rectitude was for all intents and purposes the Beall family business. He had no intention to betray it now. This would be quiet, he told his staff, or at least as quiet as we can make it. But we will search through it all. If it implicates the Vice President in any way that does not change our job. We have a duty. Let’s just hope we don’t have to do that duty.

George Wallace sat for three whole days. Sat with the information, sat and waited to watch Beall’s office, then the Office of the Vice President, come into the same information his boys had turfed up. Waited to watch them sweat. He spent part of a fourth day in silence just to watch the bastards fidget, wonder in their every wakeful moment who else knew, and what they knew. Then he struck.

On Friday morning, November 3rd of that year, four days prior to a nationwide general election, Wallace summoned the reporters who would always descend on his press conferences if you just said his name and turned around three times. He told them about the concerns that had arisen in Maryland, and about the good offices of the federal attorneys there who were just trying to do their duty. Then he told them what he had. After that, he let them examine the photographic copies of the materials that Wolff had shown freely to private investigators. And at last, Wallace settled back into the twisted metal of his wheeled throne and watched with satisfaction as, across the wire services of an unsettled nation, the flames whipped up around them.

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They had spent as much of the day up in the sky as they could let themselves do; as the night drew in it was time to come back down. George McGovern had started the day with a speech and last-minute fundraising breakfast in St. Louis, flanked by Missouri’s governor Warren Hearnes and Senator Tom Eagleton. McGovern remained cagey about one of the Missourians’ big concerns, McGovern’s defense proposals that could cancel McDonnell Douglas’ F-15 fighter, a jobs issue of the first order here. Instead he talked about new labor laws, a “revolution” in support of Missouri’s farmers, and federal investment in McDonnell Douglas’ civil-aviation projects. After a meeting with dockyard workers from the Mississippi waterfront, it was back to the “Dakota Queen II” and the flight, above November grey, to Sioux Falls.

There it was bunting and bands and a grandstand shared with the other two most powerful Democrats in South Dakota, the governor Dick Kniep and Senate candidate James Abourezk, both friends of McGovern’s even before this run. The candidate gave a stemwinder to the large crowd, urban by South Dakota standard, and a pep talk to get out the vote in the state’s largest city, crucial in order to carry his home state. After that it was Mitchell. Home. To vote, and to wait.

The other candidates did much the same. Courtesy of wife Jean’s redoubtable helicopter, Phil Hart leapfrogged from a breakfast with the Knights of Columbus in Erie, PA, to a UAW event in Cleveland that dovetailed with a photo op with Urban League leaders there, then back home to Michigan to vote. The Harts would take an early dinner then board a plane for Sioux Falls. If traffic wasn’t awful with the media hogging the two-lane highway they would be in Mitchell as the East Coast picture became clear. Spiro Agnew, for his sins, spent the day shaking hands in his home state Maryland, hounded by reporters, as polls showed Nixon’s lead hemmed in tight by a late Wallace surge and McGovern as well, helped at the state level by McGovern’s fast and enthusiastic friend Sargent Shriver.

Against the advice of his doctors George Wallace barnstormed through Tennessee, one of the states he had to have in order to prevent an Electoral College majority, and yes he was ready to answer questions about what his campaign had dug up about Ted Agnew, why thank you for asking. Out west in the depths of Orange County both the President of the United States and the inimitably awful John Schmitz held dueling fundraisers that morning before Schmitz lit out by plane for Alabama and Richard Nixon decamped like the rough beast before Jerusalem to his fortified ranch-style villa. The others threw themselves at the crowd one last time; Nixon dug in.

It was probably the biggest outdoor stage anyone ever had built in Mitchell, South Dakota, so thank God the weather held off, as Mitchell’s native son George McGovern himself pointed out to Gene Pokorny who’d been tapped as ringmaster for the whole business. Some of the younger staff — well, most of the staff were young in political terms, these were those youthful in spirit — had wanted something bright, something alive, spring colors and a rainbow and the bright sun of possibility. Jean Westwood thought that kind of optimism tempted fate, Frank Mankiewicz gently steered the designers away out of concern the hippie-lover bylines would write themselves, Gary Hart just wanted it fucking done because there were other things to get on with. The result was a vast, long, quiet blackness, with heavy curtains that shielded the shanty town of McGovern’s last campaign headquarters, the final stand of the adventure. The outside looked sober, and stilted, foursquare, downright Lutheran in its circumspection. Dick Dougherty, through his fog of chainsmoke, dubbed it “the grandest high-school auditorium of them all, from the town that gave the world the Corn Palace.” Someone had the sense to drape a large “McGovern ‘72” banner down over the center behind the plinth, though that nearly did not happen. The campaign’s minds were elsewhere, at feverish work to set up all the phone and teletype lines, swaying in the adrenal haze before the first polls closed alongside the Atlantic. In California, the familiar scowls of the Nixon crew passed through the President's front door one after the other, snatched briefly by telephoto lenses of the encamped press out beyond the gate while the council of war assembled.

Then the polls did close and there were no words for it, as every guess, every hope, every terror collapsed into inescapable facts that burst one by one like children into a suspended moment, separate from the ordinal flow, apart from time. First, it was clear that this was a three-way battle after all, which washed over the McGovern staffers like a kind of salvation. Pat Caddell and a trio of secretaries not too put out at the young egotist’s manner huddled over the Eastern and Central time states’ exit polls. If those were right, Caddell said, there was at least a shot at a hung Electoral College and a contingent election. But they needed to be watched; there had been what Caddell described as “static” ever since the conventions. What did that mean? asked Pokorny and Weil. What it meant, Caddell said, was that probably there were voters out there who lied. Mostly Nixon voters, Caddell hoped, but there was friction there that meant probably there were Nixon voters who when it came to it would vote for Wallace instead. Maybe even a few for McGovern.

Rick Stearns picked his chin up from a rhythm of nods and said, watch the differentials. If we get real precincts from a state that come away from the exits, that’ll tell what the differences are. At that point, so far, there seemed to be few. But Connecticut, maybe, was promising. There, besides a small hunk of Wallace voters that scuppered any hope of a Nixon majority, the polls found what looked like strong turnout among the working poor, minorities, and just maybe suburban liberal Republicans who’d walked in to that booth and decided that George McGovern was the only decent man in the race. All together that had put the Democrats in the lead. That and the merry chase both McGovern and Wallace were leading the Republicans in Maryland, met by cheers and hoots from junior staffers who’d started already on the liquid courage, gave some encouragement for the evening. What the hell about Pennsylvania? asked Rick Stearns. We don’t know yet, Gary Hart replied, his face like iron, even as Mankiewicz had a call in to governor Milt Shapp’s direct line for an update.

Then it started to happen. Dick Dougherty blew in like a magician in the usual miasma of cheap cigarettes. “Christ on a tuna melt,” said the gnarl-faced Irishman. “Get the hell in here and look at ABC. Look at ‘em. What they’re saying about Maine.” A couple of key heads turned. What about Maine, said Gary Hart like a hound on a scent. Get in and see, said Doughterty. From nowhere and yet from always, as he now had become as though part of the campaign’s furniture, Hunter Thompson appeared deep into an eye-reddening dose of mescaline beneath the tinted glasses and higher than a kite already on the adrenaline of political crisis. Howdy Dick, Thompson said to Dougherty, with the typical hint of sarcasm. “Get in here,” responded Dougherty with a grin. The ABC faces droned on.

What was happening, it seemed, was that Maine was anybody’s game. Maine was never supposed to be anybody’s game. Other than two or three percent at the very most, George Wallace had no presence up there despite all the state’s backwoodsmen. And without somebody named Muskie on the ticket it was hard to fight generations of partisan training. But here it was: William Hathaway was getting straight away with it in the Senate race, he looked set to win in a walk, and George McGovern and Richard Nixon were within one and a half percent of each other while nobody had finished counting either Portland or the Frenchies up north yet. Ed Muskie was as good as his word. He had sweated blood into the presidential back in his home state, probably visited every single home he’d door-knocked when he first ran for governor, day after day since the Chennault Affair blew up. Here it was actually paying off. There was a decent chance McGovern would poach a state where he was never meant to be in the game. Thompson stood there silent for upwards of five minutes as he absorbed the implication. “Holy Mary we could win this fucking thing,” said Dougherty, which gave voice to the moment. “We could win tonight.”

The ride grew wilder. Next thing anybody knew Pennsylvania was in play. A momentary frisson ran through the NBC field reporters, which also blew up the teletype in Gary Hart’s office, where it looked like Wallace was gaining on Nixon in Florida. This faded back again, but not before it became clear that Wallace was set to take most of the Deep South right up to the line Strom Thurmond had drawn for the GOP at the South Carolina border, and that Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina were all in play for the AIP’s candidate. The networks shifted their coverage towards the grand ballroom in Birmingham George Wallace had rented out to celebrate his ultimate revenge and the atmosphere was festive. Good, said Frank Mankiewicz calmly. Our West Coast people could use a kick in the pants, he added, as Westwood and Stearns never left the phones to California. The reporters smelled it too, now, and stalwarts of the McGovern beat like Peter Greenberg pressed ever harder to get in with Gary or Jean or even Gene Pokorny to see if they knew what the hell was really going on. No one seemed to, for sure.

By ten-thirty in Mitchell, half an hour after most polls closed on the West Coast (the Caddell team believed they could reasonably suppose Alaska and Hawaii were set to go for Nixon), a picture become more clear. George McGovern had, as the press pack said in that sporting language they favored, “overperformed” in the Northeast and New England. Not only had he taken more obvious states like Massachusetts and New York, but also Connecticut and crucially Pennsylvania, where a combination of factors that included the outreach to the Miners for Democracy movement, higher than normal minority turnout in the cities, and the revulsion of liberal Republicans with Nixon — plus a strong Wallace vote in the “Pennsyltucky” steel-and-coal belt — looked set to deliver the state. Even small favors like Delaware, again with one of the strongest Wallace votes outside the South and what looked like “reverse coattails” from the young lawyer running for the Senate, Joe Biden, brought McGovern along. Cronkite had called Michigan just recently for McGovern, to the delight of all that Phil Hart had helped deliver his state.

The rest of the upper Midwest, inclusive of South Dakota, was McGovern’s firmest ground of the night, with outright majorities there, in Minnesota, and very narrowly in Wisconsin. Thanks to a late surge of support from both the Democratic left and right in Illinois, things looked secure there as well. At the same time Wallace had locked down nearly all the Deep South and looked set to win in at least Arkansas and Tennessee too. Howard K. Smith went on about how the AIP could improve on their totals from ‘68 and how significant this was. No one knew who the hell was going to come out of Ohio, or Iowa, or Missouri with a win. Nixon held the remainder and, as downstate totals started to pile up, looked set to pull out Maryland while a Republican sea opened up across the Great Plains and the Rockies. But as it wore on towards midnight in Mitchell it looked very much like McGovern was going to reach at least two hundred electoral votes and George Wallace might make it to sixty. A hung election permeated the air.

The result, to the embarrassment and circumspection of the McGovern campaign’s staffers, was panic. The same kind of panic and indecision and dissociated foundering that had struck at other difficult points, like the collapse in the Ohio primary or the second debate out in California. For over an hour and a half the decision makers of the campaign were seized by rumors and caught up in a roil that approached civil war about the Wallace campaign if there really was no winner that night. One of the coolest heads, Doug Coulter, later said, “our greatest flaw was the lack of faith in ourselves, that same combination of fatalism and lurching around for solutions to prove we could handle a crisis, which of course proved we couldn’t.”

One rumor, that Wallace had won North Carolina after all and that Nixon looked set to take Missouri, sent a buzz through headquarters. Another, that Nixon was on course to take both California and Ohio and maybe pull this thing out after all, plunged junior staffers into despair. All the while behind the scenes a visceral debate went on among senior staff about whether to move towards a compromise to keep Dick Nixon out, or to keep away from Wallace like the plague because it violated the campaign’s principles. Pat Caddell, at full height with his voice raised, insisted on the former, that together McGovern and Wallace voters represented a spectrum of ordinary America alienated from its failing institutions, that had to come together somehow to create a solution. Jean Westwood, almost to her own surprise, was the loudest voice for telling Wallace where to go, joined in a purely tactical alliance by Gary Hart who again feared that reaching out meant handing the family jewels over to Larry O’Brien and Bob Strauss and the party establishment.

Conflicting messages went out, a phone call rang for a Wallace intermediary in Louisiana, and a line was opened for a long-distance call to Birmingham for McGovern himself before Hart, who physically ran through the warren of makeshift offices backstage in Mitchell, reached his least likely ally Jean Briggs Hart and together they went to McGovern to say he should stay cool and hold off on Wallace as long as possible. The issue continued to paralyze the campaign, as Frank Mankiewicz called O’Brien, and Jesse Unruh in California, and Stuart Symington in Missouri, everything he could think of but not an answer to the question: what do we do now? Even Dick Dougherty, buttonholed by the press pool for comment, simply said, “guys, I’d tell you something if I knew what to say.” In distant Washington, D.C. David Brinkley was unimpressed.

Then California happened. And everything changed. Steadily, up to about two in the morning South Dakota time, something changed in California. First, turnout was lower in the Southland strongholds of the GOP, particularly the San Diego area and Bakersfield County, than normal. Second, on the backs of what native Californian observers would call “Yorty voters” and a guerrilla campaign in Orange County, George Wallace took over six percent of the statewide vote. Third, a much higher turnout among voters under 25, black and Chicano voters, and union voters than observers anticipated aligned with the same kind of shift seen in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where the most liberal of typically Republican voters looked at their options and, with reluctance balanced by disgust with the other candidates, pulled the lever for George McGovern. The end result was that, as the count moved into historically Democratic counties in the northern and north-coastal parts of the state, McGovern looked to be in the clear. Not by much, about one percent all told, but in the clear.

In California. “Sweet electric honky-tonk Jesus,” Hunter Thompson scribbled down in the heat of the moment, “what tectonic power was unleashed out there on the West Coast? All of a sudden the craziest chance of a crazy year opened like the pearly gates and out stepped George goddamn Washington, dressed strikingly like Elvis — or maybe it was just Harry Reasoner, it was hard to tell through the Camels and Wild Turkey — to say that George Stanley McGovern, a Methodist history professor of Mitchell, South Dakota and erstwhile Senator, might actually be in the lead.” This was so. By two-thirty it appeared McGovern held the states he’d seemed to earlier, plus California with Oregon thrown in for good measure. More and more states went Nixon, including a comeback with urban votes in Arkansas that bid fair to clip George Wallace’s wings as a spoiler. But it was not clear any of them truly mattered. None, at least, except Missouri and Ohio. Missouri, and Ohio, and Maine because who’d have thunk?

After the first giddy rush of the news McGovern’s headquarters quietly transformed. Phil Hart, well into a fresh pot of coffee, and Frank Mankiewicz took shifts phoning Larry O’Brien in D.C. who now kept the reporters fed, and Ohio’s governor Jack Gilligan for the latest on where the votes were and what they looked like. Ohio, it seemed, was the least of their worries; this was another state where George Wallace’s capture of disgruntled conservatives and the ability of the United Auto Workers’ leadership to keep rank and file on board made the difference as in Michigan to the north. There were rural counties voting, but even a few of those had colleges in them whose students were among the most motivated voters under 25, and there were many precincts still out in Cleveland. Ohio could hold, and if it did McGovern had undisputed first place in the Electoral College. Dick Dougherty rounded up staffers and told them what not to say to reporters. Gary Hart and Rick Stearns held continuous conversation over how to approach the Democratic leadership about a contingent election. Doug Coulter, cool-headed as ever and good natured, sat with Eleanor and made conversation. With his minder young Tim Crouch absorbed in study of the press pool, Hunter Thompson liberated several bottles of champagne “for practice” and popped the corks like small arms fire to the Secret Service’s dismay.

The call to George Wallace went out at last at quarter past three in Mitchell. McGovern, as ever “Midwest nice” with the governor, and Wallace, who clung now to threads of a recount chance in Arkansas with North Carolina gone to Nixon, circled each other warily. Each sentence of diplomatic small talk waited on the other side to make a break, to put themselves forward. But nothing budged. Wallace had angrily vetoed staffers’ calls to reach out to Richard Nixon, and now he was perfectly willing to make McGovern ask for it, and hold it over the Democrat if he didn’t when it all went to Congress. In this hour of the wolf Wallace held that chance close to him, his own health teetering on its edge, the chance that Nixon would make good on Missouri and Maine and, thereby, make George Wallace the most powerful man in the country. After four minutes of irritation McGovern decided to bring it all to a close, then seemed to look into the distance for a moment and exclaimed, “that man!” Now he asked for fresh numbers from California. Gene Pokorny, who seemed to be everywhere now and had the legendarily prickly Stuart Symington holding on another line, said not to worry, California’s good. We have California and we’re damn sure going to have Ohio. Get me Maine, said McGovern stiffly but with urgency.

What happened then was fable, the stuff of a strange and wild and dangerous magic, the kind that gives you the world and then as the cheering fades names the price. There was quiet for a time, as Gary Hart talked to Ted Kennedy and Sargent Shriver on the phone, Shriver an especially hale fellow still frustrated at the near miss against Ted Agnew in Maryland, but good for getting McGovern at last to laugh a little when the candidate joined the conversation. Pat Caddell, Rick Stearns, and Gordon Weil sat with the numbers and began to bring them together. Jean Westwood stepped briskly out on stage and started to sort out the various elements of McGovern’s eventual appearance; there were only two states that mattered still in play, the candidate would need to say something soon.

Then there was a call. Who, was Mankiewicz’s simple question. Tom Eagleton, said Shirley MacLaine, who had wandered in from the celebrity gathering run by her baby brother and, stood next to the phone as she was, decided to make herself useful. Eagleton had been one of the most hesitant of the mainline Democrats, schmoozed gently but persistently by Phil Hart, but now here he was. What does he say? Asked Mankiewicz. Almost in a whisper MacLaine said, He says we did it.

Every head in the room turned. MacLaine went on. We did it, she said. The state’s gone for McGovern. All that’s out are a few Ozark counties running heavy to Wallace, and St. Joe, and the Independence area. These are our people and we’re nine thousand up. There was no time for the excitement before Jean Westwood grabbed Mankiewicz by the arm. Her face was stone. Get the Senator, she said. Mankiewicz was taken aback, but there were few people on the campaign he trusted so thoroughly. A runner found Eleanor, and Eleanor pulled her husband, in a quiet chat with Gary Hart, to the phone. NBC still hadn’t called Missouri.

George McGovern picked up the receiver. On the other end was a familiar New England rumble. It was the man who had, quietly, transformed both McGovern’s campaign and McGovern’s understanding of what he sought after, what he was there to do for others. Ed Muskie.

“Good morning, Mister President,” said the man who had started 1972 in expectation of those words. George McGovern heard them, and breathed out very slowly, and then he smiled.

The party became a local legend. They shot off fireworks in front of the Corn Palace. Paul Newman found himself, grinning like the kid who’d just broken his rotten neighbor’s window, walking backwards in front of a high school band that left the stage site and marched down the main drag. McGovern’s speech, a deliberate echo of his announcement the previous year, did not go down in the books but the sheer dumbfounded shock of the outcome did. At the time it hardly seemed to matter that Richard Nixon did not call until the next day — in the exuberance of the moment, Frank Mankiewicz beamed as he shrugged and said, “ah, fuck ‘im” to Tim Crouse’s delight. The President of the United States, though no one would say until the tell-alls crept on to bookstore shelves some years later, was as far into a fugue state as he was into a bottle of Canadian whisky when it became clear Maine and Missouri had gone to the Democrat. Warren Beatty, tireless and frankly on top of the world, roused young aides who had worked sixteen- to eighteen-hour days for the last ten months to raid the campaign liquor cabinet and have a proper shindig. Hunter Thompson staggered, oddly observant, through one of the strangest trips of his bohemian life.

As the cheering died down in the deep darkness just before the November sunrise, as you could almost hear the prairie silence again from which this unlikely president had come, Eleanor McGovern gave her husband a firm peck on the cheek before she went off to celebrate with their children. As she did, her husband leaned himself against a wall, turned towards Frank Mankiewicz, and shared a look. It was Mankiewicz who had come to McGovern, Mankiewicz who had walked out into the wall of cameras in Los Angeles a little over four years before to tell the world the two men’s beloved friend Robert Kennedy was dead. Now here they were.

McGovern waxed historical. “You know Frank, when the British marched out of Yorktown after their surrender, their band played a tavern song. It was called ‘The World Turned Upside Down.’” Mankiewicz smiled and nodded, to encourage more. McGovern went on.

“There’s a world upside down now, Frank. I just hope it’s not ours.”

 

[Yes]

The first of two appendices to the chapter above: this one covers the gritty allohistorical details of the presidential election. You'll get a scorecard on other major races in the next appendix.



So how did they do it? How did this TL come to its particular end of the wild ride through a very different 1972 presidential election? What are the demographic breakdowns? When do we get some sweet, sweet Electoral College porn? The answer to that last question is, right now you lucky people:

This totals out as:

Sen. George S. McGovern (D-SD)/Sen. Philip A. Hart (D-MI), 271 EVs, 43.36%
Pres. Richard M. Nixon (R-CA)/Vice Pres. Spiro T. Agnew (R-MD), 219 EVs, 42.71%
Gov. George C. Wallace (AIP-AL)/Rep. John G. Schmitz (AIP-CA), 48 EVs, 13.88%

For starters, in the end the AIP ticket outperformed the party's 1968 results, notably in their popular-vote total. Numbers were up at least slightly for the AIP nationwide and the number of states in which they made the critical difference was frankly huge, given later second-preference polling of declared Wallace voters in different parts of the country. Local quirks late in the race denied Wallace Arkansas' electoral votes, chiefly former governor Winthrop Rockefeller deciding to go in for the Nixon ticket in an anti-Wallace effort and the one state in the country where an uptick in McGovern voting actually pulled down Wallace, rather than Wallace enabling McGovern pluralities. Wallace did in the end mobilize a conservative anti-Nixon vote, to the ends that he sought, it just wasn't quite enough in the end when matched up with the very late McGovern surge. Otherwise, the AIP got as close as they could while falling short of their goal in the end.

What about those McGovern numbers? Well, the national numbers reflect my methodology in general. First there's a portion of the shift (between OTL's final McGovern numbers and these numbers) of a little less than 0.5% that's a combination of improved turnout by McGovern partisans who don't feel discouraged here plus some low-information voters who decide that at least they haven't heard anything morally bad about McGovern. That gets the distance between OTL and this down to about 5%. Of that 5%, slightly less than half is voters McGovern keeps because there's no Eagleton disaster and he runs a more disciplined campaign in the fall that makes those voters feel it's worth sticking with him. Those are the numbers -- about 2-3% of the final vote total -- that electoral demographers and most reputable pollsters figure McGovern lost IOTL to the knock-on consequences of the Eagleton affair. So now we're inside of 3% in the gap. That gets closed by a combination of increased turnout among what we could call motivated voters (not "I'll vote for McGovern if I don't think it'll suck" but "I want to get rid of Nixon but need to believe my vote counts"), particularly under-25s and minority voters. And the under-25s who do bother to vote end up tending towards the ones who back McGovern (from the very start there was always a strong conservative element in the Baby Boom generation, they were just often politically lazy until Saint Ronnie turned up and made hippie-punching fun.) That accounts for some of the difference and it makes a critical difference in some states, for example in California and also, to some surprise, in Missouri. There are also more farmers and union workers who stick with the ticket in the end, but many of those can be reckoned in the lost-to-Eagleton column. The last vital difference, probably the entirety of the small margin between McGovern and Nixon above of just under 500,000 voters are a combination of self-declared independents and very, very liberal Republicans (still registered Republican but by '72 they vote Democratic about as often as they do for the GOP), more women among them than men, who decide that while they have reservations about McGovern they also have a civic duty to vote and he's better than these other two morally tainted candidates, Nixon and Wallace. This is the kind of voting that nets McGovern some very important states: to move with the time zones, Connecticut first, then Pennsylvania, then Iowa, then California and to a lesser degree (because McGovern is already strong there) Oregon.

At state-by-state level, then, with a few local variations based on what I set out as the local conditions in the race (like Arkansas), that governs the results. Take a slightly improved 1968 AIP percentage, take this McGovern total typically modified by a hair over 5%, and see what happens. Now, there are four key exceptions to that. In two cases it's only a slight difference, and that's in Connecticut and Missouri. In CT it's a combination of more union loyalty to the Democrats and Liberals-For-McGovern GOP turncoats. In Missouri it's more farmers who decide to go with the most objectively pro-small farmer candidate of either major party since 1945, plus increased youth and minority turnout in the urban areas, and holding the line on Catholics thanks to Phil Hart's campaigning and getting buy-in from the state's still-Democratic establishment in the end (the "we need to get Nixon out and McGovern will owe us one" argument.) Pennsylvania reflects this on a larger scale, in part because there are more Liberals-For-McGovern Republican types, in part because McGovern actually gets advised to wade in and align with the Miners For Democracy movement, most popular in PA because that's where the late Jake Yablonsky was from, and this gets more blue-collar types on his side who are far enough out of the South to calculate that a Wallace vote is ultimately wasted in their state. The big difference of anywhere in the country, the place where I've gotten closest to true handwavium rather than a different set of practical dynamics, is Maine. McGovern could certainly overperform in Maine in a TL like this, above his average national improvement. But that would still likely leave him short. In this case, Muskie and the state party pull out all the stops to encourage (untypical in Maine) straight-ticket votes for McGovern and Hathaway at the top of the ballot and then on down. Even then it's hairy. McGovern takes ME-1 with a small but clear majority. In the back country of ME-2 he just loses, and with it an electoral vote, but this is also the area where Wallace is strongest in the state. So when you tally up the Maine totals McGovern ends up winning by a plurality, which gives him three out of the four electoral votes and enough for the victory.

So despite the popular-vote margin it's really desperately close, because that margin's in places like New York and California and Illinois, where even one percent of the vote is a lot of people and places where his margin's any bigger helps, because a lot of the states where Nixon would otherwise crush McGovern have substantial Wallace votes that bite into Nixon's numbers. Really it's just over 9,000 votes in Missouri and a little over 3,000 in Maine that make the difference for an Electoral College victory. So in the end really you could shift just a hair over 20,000 votes in three states and come up with a hung Electoral College that looked like this:

McGovern/Hart 256 EVs
Nixon/Agnew 228 EVs
Wallace/Schmitz 54 EVs

Or, indeed, McGovern could win MO and take ME-1 by only a plurality and end up on 269 EVs, where all it takes is a faithless Elector to put him over -- or a deal with Wallace for one of the two or three Wallace states where Electors were not legally bound by their votes in 1972 (Louisiana comes to mind, Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo indeed....) The latter could potentially have Eagleton-ed McGovern, damaged the view that he was a different, more principled kind of politician. But in the longer term some of it would depend on the substance of the deal. So the degree to which this avoids a damned mess is wafer-thin.

How much difference, for that matter, does Wallace make in the end? A huge one. Based on second-preference numbers for Wallace voters and more sense among undecideds that there's only McGovern to go to if you want to vote against Nixon, you get something like this:

Nixon/Agnew 423
McGovern/Hart 115

A herculean effort delivers Phil Hart's home state by a plurality, and elsewhere Iowa and Illinois are really quite close but not close enough. With even more doom and gloom about Nixon you could probably snag both of them, which takes the McGovern total for the Electoral College to 149, a respectable effort with a national vote total maybe around 44% but even then the whole conservative-coalition phenomenon makes the difference. All for a GOP ticket whose Vice President will be lucky to make it to the inauguration without resigning and a President with ... some serious explaining to do. Really because of OH NOES TEH HIPPEHS and McGovern's positions on national security issues. What would that mean, ITTL, for the political future of the Dems? McGovern himself would probably give some serious consideration to a "buyer's remorse" run in 1976 and, if not, he would likely back the same kind of effort by Ed Muskie who in this 'verse has Loeb v. Segretti as well as Nixon's own mess to encourage people that Muskie Wuz Robbed. At the level of the Democratic establishment, there would be a lot of pressure for something like a Scoop Jackson/Reubin Askew ticket: the New Dealer hawk who was against busing at the top and an integrationist liberal Southerner who's into government reform but also anti-abortion on religious grounds (so in the comfort zone of "Catholic ethnics") to try and take the old Democratic coalition for one last ride because people flee to the familiar under stress. On the Republican side when Agnew goes there's still a very good chance that Ford ends up as the 25th-ed VP, and if not him Nixon either gambles on Reagan as an insurance policy against impeachment (and a chance to make this look even more like a partisan witch hunt if Democrats vote against him) or picks someone like Chuck Percy on the same general grounds as Ford, though Ford has more credibility with old-line (in other words pre-New Right) Republican conservatives. Really in most 'verses an Agnew-less Nixon finds Gerry Ford in the frame more often than not. I suspect, in-universe here where people remember the shock of McGovern's mythic, insurgent run for the presidency and the crazy election night that actually brought him into office, these are the AH discussions people would have later. And their content -- the propositions they make -- will have repercussions here as people mull over what alternatives to the fact of a McGovern Administration might look like.

 

[Yes]

Here are the additional races, because of course there's this level of granular detail, would you ever think otherwise? You're lucky I don't inflict the full run of changes in the House of Representatives on both of us....

United States Senatorial Elections, 1972

Alabama: John Sparkman (D) def. Winton M. Blount (R)
Alaska: Ted Stevens (R) def. Gene Guess (D)
Arkansas: John McClellan (D) def. Wayne H. Babbitt (R)
Colorado: Floyd Haskell (D) def. Gordon L. Allott (R)
Delaware: Joe Biden (D) def. Caleb L. Boggs (R)
Georgia: Fletcher Thompson (R) def. Sam Nunn (D) (in the end Nixon breaks his Southern Strategy rule for fear of Wallace and Thompson just edges it out)
Idaho: James McClure (R) def. William E. Davis (D)
Illinois: Charles Percy (R) def. Roman Pucinski (D)
Iowa: Dick Clark (D) def. Jack Miller (R)
Kansas: James B. Pearson (R) def. Arch Tetzlaff (D)
Kentucky: Walter Dee Huddleston (D) def. Louie B. Nunn (R)
Louisiana: J. Bennett Johnston (D) def. John McKeithen (I) and Ben Toledano (R) (pre-jungle primary days)
Maine: William Hathaway (D) def. Margaret Chase Smith (R)
Massachusetts: Edward Brooke (R) def. John J. Droney (D)
Michigan: Frank Kelley (D) def. Robert P. Griffin (R) (much easier for you to win when McGovern takes your state...)
Minnesota: Walter Mondale (D) def. Phil Hansen (R)
Mississippi: James Eastland (D) def. Gil Carmichael (R)
Montana: Lee Metcalf (D) def. Henry S. Hibbard (R)
Nebraska: Terry Carpenter (D) def. Carl Curtis (R) (possibly the marquee upset of the night)
New Hampshire: Thomas J. McIntyre (D) def. Wesley Powell (R)
New Jersey: Clifford P. Case (R) def. Paul J. Krebs (D)
New Mexico: Pete Domenici (R) def. Jack Daniels (D)
North Carolina: Jesse Helms (R) def. Nick Galifianakis (D) (Jesse wins yet so does Skipper Bowles -- conservative NC Dems are still feeling their way in this new world)
Oklahoma: Ed Edmonson (D) def. Dewey F. Bartlett (R) (boosted by the Wallace factor despite his personal moderation)
Oregon: Mark Hatfield (R) def. Wayne Morse (D) (Hatfield actually, quietly, plays on his past ties to McGovern to outdistance the prickly Morse)
Rhode Island: Claiborne Pell (D) def. John Chafee (R)
South Carolina: Strom Thurmond (R) def. Eugene N. Ziegler (D)
South Dakota: James Abourezk (D) def. Robert W. Hirsh (R)
Tennessee: Howard Baker (R) def. Ray Blanton (D)
Texas: John Tower (R) def. Barefoot Sanders (D)
Virginia: William B. Spong, Jr. (D) def. William L. Scott (R) (another unintended beneficiary of the Wallace run, or at least a dissatisfaction with the GOP among late deciders)
West Virginia: Jennings Randolph (D) def. Louise Blount (R)
Wyoming: Clifford Hansen (R) def. Mike Vinich (D)

In special cases:
Frank E. Denholm (D) is appointed to replace President-elect McGovern from South Dakota
Robert P. Griffin (R) is returned to the Senate by Michigan's Republican governor Bill Milliken to replace Vice President-elect Hart

U.S. Senate now Democrats 57, Republicans 43

United States House of Representatives Elections, 1972

Democrats: 250, - 5 seats
Republicans: 185, + 5 seats
(Yes I have actually gone through it seat by seat. The most notable event -- "highlight" is a relative term -- is that in the TBTverse Dennis Kucinich gets into the House sooner. I don't think any of us want me to do a blow-by-blow on this. Just trust I've run the numbers and the local factors.)

United States Gubernatorial Elections, 1972

Arkansas: Dale Bumpers (D) def. Len E. Blaylock (R)
Delaware: Sherman Willard Tribbit (D) def. Russell W. Peterson (R)
Illinois: Richard B. Ogilvie (R) def. Dan Walker (D) (Ogilvie does a little better pulling AIP voters to his side)
Indiana: Otis Bowen (R) def. Matthew Empson Welsh (D)
Iowa: Robert D. Ray (R) def. Paul Franzenberg (D)
Kansas: Robert Docking (D) def. Morris Kay (R)
Missouri: Christopher "Kit" Bond (R) def. Edward L. Doud (D) (Bond does a little better with Wallace voters than the average Republican)
Montana: Thomas Lee Judge (D) def. Ed Smith (R)
New Hampshire: Roger J. Crowley (D) def. Meldrim Thompson, Jr. (R) and Malcolm McLane (I) (say buh-bye, Mel...)
North Carolina: Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles (D) def. James Holshouser (R) (more tribal Southern Dems vote for not-the-Republicans again)
North Dakota: Arthur A. Link (D) def. Richard F. Larsen (R)
Rhode Island: Philip W. Noel (D) def. Herbert F. DeSimone (R)
South Dakota: Richard F. Kneip (D) def. Carveth Thompson (R)
Texas: Dolph Briscoe (D) def. Henry Grover (R) and Ramsey Muniz (LRU)
Utah: Calvin L. Rampton (D) def. Nicholas L. Strike (R) (a last hurrah for the Utah Dems)
Vermont: Thomas P. Salmon (D) def. Luther Fred Hackett (R)
Washington: Daniel J. Evans (R) def. Albert Rosselini (D) and Vick Gould (T) (Evans has the closest escape of his career)
West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (D) def. Arch A. Moore, Jr. (a Rockefeller surfs the wave of popular discontent. Go figure.)​

 

[Yes]

At the end of September, 1972, President Nixon appears with Governor Ronald Reagan (L) in Los Angeles, CA to announce the "Clean Sweep With Nixon" campaign slogan and Nixon's Attorney General-designate, Elliot Richardson (R)

Dirty laundry: Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the "Chennault Affair"; Cooper was one of the original recipients of copies of Lyndon Johnson's "X File" on the matter, and earlier had read the contents of that file into the Senatorial Record in an extended parliamentary maneuver

The unexpected President: Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) flashes the victory sign to crowds of supporters in Mitchell, SD shortly before dawn on Nov. 8, 1972, after confirmation of his Electoral College victory (and popular plurality) in the 1972 Presidential Election

A long, strange trip: in December 1972, Hunter S. Thompson (flanked by McGovern campaign boss and confidante Frank Mankiewicz) reflects on media coverage of the 1972 campaign at a public panel on that subject in New York

Hunter thought those were pinstripes....

ETA: Bah, humbug. It's not cooperating on that HST one. You'll just have to trust me that its a very Seventies shirt.

 

[Yes]

Just a little something to tide folks over as I bounce back and forth on three consecutive chapters (the next three) just to bump the thread for readin' purposes and also to generate a little content for the faithful. So just for fun, here is a little taster of Time magazine's year-end edition for 1972 in the universe of McGoverning.

TIME MAGAZINE MAN OF THE YEAR
Charles Colson
"In the fall of dominoes that toppled a President, produced perhaps the greatest run of political scandal in United States history, and propelled another hair-raising, three way presidential election whose outcome defied the odds, Charles Colson was the conflagration's Gavrilo Princip."
​

Top Ten News Stories of 1972

1) Brookingsgate
The Rosetta Stone of scandal in a year topped again and again by devastating political revelations, the firebombing of the Brookings Institution and concurrent attempted burglary at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Complex by the Potomac River drew together threads of corruption and criminality that placed the entire Nixon administration under its cloud. Offenders were uncovered, lawsuits commenced, criminal investigations stretched across the breadth of the Committee to Re-elect the President and into the White House itself. Revelations that evidence might be found in the secret tape recordings made in the Oval Office itself led the chair of a Senate investigative committee to sue President Nixon himself for access to those tapes. The aura of power, security, and inevitability that surrounded the Nixon administration faded in the face of chaos and corruption.

2) The United States Presidential election
A drama of twists and turns in which the least likely outcome consistently turned up as the answer, the 1972 presidential election defied all its early expectations. The learned minds of Washington and the news business believed it would be a story of two coronations: first, of Ed Muskie as the nominee of the Democratic Party, second of Richard M. Nixon as the entrenched incumbent who looked set to create peace abroad and prosperity at home. Instead Muskie's campaign ended in spectacular fashion, and a breakneck race emerged in which the left-leaning outsider Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) rode a well tooled primaries campaign to the Democratic nomination. One major Democratic candidate, George Wallace, was nearly killed at the height of his political appeal in May; another, the familiar eminence of Hubert Humphrey, barely seemed to tolerate the Democratic National Convention's results. Nixon, on the other hand, still determined to make himself inevitable, saw that momentum fall apart over the summer after the "Brookingsgate" scandal erupted. From a wheelchair, George Wallace reentered the race, and a manic three-way contest of accusation and counter-accusation barreled through the autumn to its unlikely conclusion: the election, by a razor-thin Electoral College majority and a bare plurality, of George McGovern as America's next president.

3) The Chennault Affair
Another political bombshell in a year full of them, this one was nonetheless so powerful that it produced a second wave of Congressional investigations, and perhaps brought a Nixonian bid for peace in Southeast Asia crashing down. It also marked the reemergence from the political exile of retirement of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who for a few weeks seemed both to overshadow his own party's nominee and to enjoy that thoroughly. The depth of the accusations -- that in 1968 the Nixon campaign colluded with the Saigon government to torpedo the early peace talks in Paris, against federal law -- took the air of scandal that already surrounded the White House and charged it with loose talk about espionage and treason. Johnson's own methods of investigation came under scrutiny as well, as no past administration's hands appeared clean. The compelling need to examine evidence in the case, however, aided Congressional investigators' cause as they pressed the courts for access to Nixon administration officials and their private papers.

4) The Resignation of Spiro Agnew
Perhaps the straw that broke the Nixon campaign's back, the revelation by the Wallace campaign of Vice President Agnew's alleged acts of bribery and corruption in connection with Maryland state construction projects was the last great political explosion of the presidential race. That the story broke less than a week before the vote was no accident of timing, but rather an act of political genius -- or cruelty, opinions varied -- by the Wallace campaign. The result, which seemed to be among the clearest, most damning evidence of misconduct in any of the year's scandals, drove voters away from the President at the last possible minute. It also snared the man who seemed to be conservative Republicans' first choice to succeed Richard Nixon in 1976 from a place at Nixon's right hand into resignation from office in a matter of weeks.

5) The Nixon Trip to China
This was the sort of event that Richard Nixon hoped would dominate the politics of 1972, both for his own benefit and because it had the potential to transform the Cold War and its relationships. The shocking diplomatic coup by which the President, his closest foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, and other key aides arrived in Peking to stage what amounted to a summit with Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai, grabbed the headlines like nothing else in the early months of the year. By this stroke, Richard Nixon seemed -- with the encouragement of the Chinese leadership -- to drive an even deeper wedge between Peking and Moscow, and perhaps between Peking and Hanoi as well. It seemed to offer new leverage for the administration in arms control talks, and to represent the rise of more worldly, pragmatic leadership in China, patronized by Chou En-Lai especially, after the bloody and radical excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

6) The Journey of George Wallace
The most radical -- some said the most dangerous -- major presidential candidate of 1968, George Wallace reemerged in the 1972 election not once or even twice, but at least three times. First, he appeared as the loud, strong voice of blue-collar populists in the Democratic Party, having laid aside his most extreme views on segregation in favor of economic populism plus a healthy dose of law and order. This made him a powerful candidate in the primaries, until his near death in the assassination attempt of Arthur Bremer, a disturbed young man from Wisconsin, in Laurel, Maryland in May. After languishing for weeks in the hospital, near death and now paralyzed from the waist down, Wallace reappeared for the Democratic National Convention. There, he dallied with anti-McGovern stalwarts like AFL-CIO president George Meany and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), and stole the thunder of the convention's end as he announced yet another walkout from the party. In the autumn, he rose again under the American Independent Party banner to outdo his 1968 results, draw away many Southern and Midwestern conservatives from the Nixon ticket, and deal the fatal blow to Spiro Agnew's career. Wallace was denied, barely, his goal of throwing the election to the House of Representatives. But his success in the face of continuous adversity seemed to show he had a true following in the voting public, whose effects on the two-party system are as yet unclear.

7) Signing of the SALT Treaty
The other diplomatic triumph of the Nixon administration in a year that began so well for them, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty seemed to offer the first fruits of the policy of détente. The brainchild of Nixon himself, the treaty represents the first comprehensive attempt to curtail the arms race, to set a base from which further talks, already underway, could begin actual reductions in the superpowers' vast nuclear arsenals. Both its boldness in concept and the relatively conservative choices inked in the final treaty represent a testament to Nixon's wary pragmatism in relations with Moscow. They may also represent signs that, as Leonid Brezhnev emerges at the fore of the "collective leadership" that followed Kruschev, he seeks calm, though not actual peace, with the West while he consolidates power at home. In a chaotic year full of scandal and unpredictability, SALT seemed to say that there were at least some reasons for optimism in the world's political climate.

8) War in Southeast Asia
As "Vietnamization" moved ahead and the US presence in South Vietnam grew ever smaller -- the last combat troops on the ground left in June -- it was nonetheless another roller coaster year in the long and bitter conflict there, with few signs of true resolution. In the spring, a direct invasion of South Vietnam by the North roiled the political climate, and seemed to threaten another Tet-like disaster for Western forces. Yet in the end ARVN lines held in most places, and a massive and controversial application of American aerial warfare, including strategic bombing above the Seventeenth Parallel and the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, ground the offensive down to an end. After that came a period of wariness and negotiation; in Paris, by October, Henry Kissinger seemed ready to announce that "peace was at hand." But the scandals of American politics, especially the revelation of possible foul play in the 1968 peace talks, helped throw President Thieu in against the compromise proposals Kissinger had crafted. Then [NOPE SORRY THAT'S GOING TO HAVE TO STAY REDACTED FOR RIGHT NOW] Where that then will lead may not become clear even in the new year.

9) The Munich Olympics Massacre
It was a summer Games, a bright, pastel, buoyant Games. The Summer Olympics staged in Munich, West Germany, were built from the ground up to be the complete opposite of the grey, iron, Nazi Olympics staged in Berlin thirty-six years ago. At the start they seemed to be, with dachshunds as police dogs, tourists with balloons, and flower-power decorations for the world's athletes. There was drama in the sporting arena as well: the incredible medal haul of swimmer Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut's perfect score on the uneven bars in gymnastics, and the Cold War-style brawl between American and Soviet basketball players after the United States' last-minute victory. Then everything changed. Eight radical Palestinian Fedayeen, well armed with Kalashnikovs and grenades, slipped through the absence of security and attacked the residence hall where Israeli athletes lived, shooting one wrestling official dead and seizing fourteen more Israelis hostage. After a long, hot day of negotiations in front of the dormitory with West German officials and Arab diplomats, the Palestinians and their captives (at one point paraded along balconies at gunpoint) made ready to leave by bus to reach Munich's airport. Then, there in the parking garage below the Olympic Village, Munich police bungled an armed ambush of the kidnap party. It ended in blood and fire, the small bus burnt out by grenades dropped by its fuel tank, with seven Fedayeen, two Germans (a policeman and the volunteer driver) and all the Israelis dead. The decision to carry on with the Games brought the downfall of legendary International Olympic Committee chair Avery Brundage. Bonn's decision to hand over the Palestinian survivor to Israeli authorities prompted bombs at West German embassies in Egypt and Kuwait, which left another nine dead.

10) The Apollo Program Ends
It was at times difficult to remember, during a year of scandals, wars, murder, corruption, and other careworn signs of the times, that humanity, at least its American branch, was busier than ever in space. More missions reached the moon, with more complex and detailed scientific projects carried out. NASA had every reason to be proud that, at least since the high drama over the Apollo 13 mission, now manned flight to the nearest object in space had become all but routine. Apollo 17 took advantage of that fact to stretch the bounds of their work with the longest-ever lunar orbit, longest mission on the surface, and longest moonwalks to date. The crew as well, ever professional, seemed to make complex experiments with lunar volcanology and cosmic-ray physics look easy. The only marker of the extraordinary year back down on earth was one mention, almost wistful, of Vice President Agnew's absence (the resigned vice president had always been a NASA supporter.) This year the Nixon administration guaranteed a new program for a space "shuttle" to handle orbital missions in support of manned satellites. But the allure of the moon now seemed to belong almost to a bygone era. The President-elect's convention message, to "come home, America," took a literal form as the last men to walk on the moon, for now, boarded their mission module and returned to the ground. With them they brought a photograph that took mere days to belong legend; what is known now and likely will be known, as the "Blue Marble" image. A whole earth, alive and small and fragile, glimpsed from another place. It was a valuable reminder in a difficult year.

(So you'll note the different writing style there on behalf of the Time staff; titillation, stentorian judgments, and Both Sides Do It are hardly new in the world of journalism....)

 

[Yes]

The Flight Forward I: High Crimes and Misdemeanors ​

It is not by great acts, but by small failures, that freedom dies.

- Charles Morgan, Jr.


A man with poor judgment, an impetuous man, a sick man, a power-mad man,
each would be dangerous in the [Presidency]. Even an able, sensitive man needs
stronger safeguards around him than exist today.

- Max Lerner, 1973​

The shock came first. As he tried in his diary to reconstruct how it had happened, how it felt as all President Nixon’s work was dashed away, and given as he was to draw his own logic off from damaging conclusions or cloud motives with detail, Bob Haldeman put down in his diary that first and most it was shock. A numbness when the California result came in — California of all places! — so that it would now be impossible to build a Nixon majority, either popular or in the Electoral College. By the deep, dead hours when they heard about Missouri and the popular vote in Maine, you could see the blood but not feel the wounds anymore.

And, Haldeman went on in ink and meditation, he could “only imagine how the President felt about it, who had been through 1960 already and those few thousand votes, that hell, then triumphed in ‘68 but by the skin of his teeth.” What could that say, he carried on, to a man who had done so much in such a short time, who just months earlier looked to be on the rim of destiny, set to shape a new governing coalition in American politics and new horizons in foreign affairs? The answer, at least for a few observers like Timothy Crouse, Carl Bernstein, and with the most electric prose Hunter S. Thompson, was simple and blunt: it said the President of the United States was a crook.

As November tipped further into the second week, while the solons of the media tried to measure up the meaning of the “Wallace phenomenon” and struggled to deal with the fact that the man they had damned with faint praise since the ‘68 convention had just won a presidential election, the rain of blows on the public edifice of the Nixon White House had just started. Trial dates were set now for Loeb v. Segretti and for the mail-fraud trial against Segretti’s crew, where every wire-service tipster expected the ratfuckers to trade light sentences for enough dirt to drag Kalmbach and probably John Mitchell, a former Attorney General, under. The Supreme Court intended to hear arguments in Ervin v. Nixon a week after the election. Elliot Richardson, pressed hard at his confirmation for promises to clear the decks, moved to appoint a special prosecutor who would bring all the earnest senators’ committees together — the ones that kept headlines well fed around the country — into a pair of cross hairs set on the West Wing.

When on the Friday of election week — Friday was always the day for bad news because you got asked fewer questions right in front of the weekend — Richardson announced the prosecutor would be Nicholas Katzenbach, himself a former Attorney General who had squared off with George Wallace at that schoolhouse door almost a decade before, moods did not improve at the White House. On the one hand, for several days Haldeman struggled just to get the President to function, to pull himself out the deep, terrible blackness that was in him. On the other hand, so much so that for once Haldeman wrote about it, the President’s Chief of Staff feared what would happen when Nixon did rise. Given one chance to leave his mark, Nixon had little left to lose.

If it threatened to end it tragedy, it certainly kicked off in face. No sooner had the glare of election headlines faded when the hunting pack of the press pool turned its eyes to Ted Agnew. He had been mid-scandal when the vote distracted them, and to the reporters that felt like dereliction of duty. Also the frightening grandness of Nixon’s dilemma challenged something that seemed just as important as how the country was run — what did you do if the President was a crook, asked Ben Bradlee, editor in chief of the Post — it challenged the terms on which Tim Crouse’s “boys on the bus” did their business. Agnew’s scandal, on the other hand, was as simple as it was sordid, a wonderful combination. Some observers — “some observers” were favorite weasel words when correspondents rooted around for a lede — thought Agnew’s troubles more than Nixon’s had turned the election. The idea that corruption went that high and Nixon failed to know had tainted him, driven liberal late deciders to McGovern and conservative ones to Wallace, and worn Nixon’s edge in the polls clean away. That played by the journalists’ rules, and practically wrote itself. The urge to follow it along ran deep.

Agnew’s mess was also easy to understand. As Nixon’s “Mr. Clean” Elliot Richardson put it, it was “in all my years as a prosecutor … the most open and shut case I’ve ever seen.” Maryland state prosecutors thought so too and despite Nixon’s win there so did Maryland voters, who the press practically trampled each other trying to interview. On the other hand, this din of judgment around Agnew simply got his back up. He shouted his innocence in press statements. He held a single, pugnacious press conference in which he was sure, in that way Ted Agnew was sure about everything when he got in front of a microphone, that the U.S Attorney’s office in Maryland and the state investigators would clear him of all charges. Agnew got no comfort from Richardson. The precise New Englander was not there to make Agnew’s troubles go away — he was there to make troubles like Agnew go away. This left the sitting Vice President in a lurch unseen in modern times. He went then to the last hiding place, the Oval Office itself.

There the mood had turned. Where Nixon defended Agnew out of necessity before the vote, there were bigger problems now. The great contest before the Supreme Court went ahead: on Nixon’s side, drawn up behind all his powers as President, came the Solicitor General, the bearded and bespectacled curiosity Robert Bork, with his originalist logic and absolutist undertones. Against him came a man who’d held Bork’s job under Jack Kennedy, Archibald Cox, who looked every bit the crew-cut Ivy League football coach, delightfully out of place in his trim suit and small square reading glasses amid sideburns and wide paisleys in the gallery. The Court heard them for a day, then retired to think. It came back Thursday afternoon, with an opinion written by Nixon’s own Warren Burger, and a decision reached eight to nothing (William Rehnquist had recused himself): hand over the tapes.

Agnew had the bad grace to go to Nixon the day after, with wounds still fresh. The more Agnew pressed his case the more combative Nixon got. Haldeman later recalled the end of the conversation, which rose in volume loud enough to hear from outside the Oval Office. As Haldeman noted it down Nixon closed by saying: “Ted, now don’t, do not bullshit me Ted. Don’t give me any, any nonsense about this. You know where things stand. Do not bullshit me. We can both see where this is, you can either say that you’re going to fight the charges and you will not get any support out of me if you’re fighting impeachment — you can do that or you can go. And goddammit you’re going to go. And go quietly, or else.”

The Maryland district court in Annapolis handed down indictments on Monday of Thanksgiving week. Up to that point there had been no formal Congressional opinion voiced on the matter. But that afternoon Rep. Emmanuel Celler, the lame-duck chair of the House Judiciary Committee (the aging Celler had lost his seat in a primary fight to a young Elizabeth Holtzman) known for his good relations with Nixon, said on the record that criminal charges were grounds for the Committee to consider impeachment charges for the Vice President. The next day Spiro Agnew resigned the Vice Presidency.

Now two roads lay ahead, so far as most observers could see. Nixon could lay back and let Katzenbach get on with his work, which might very well paralyze the workings of the White House until it was almost time to turn out the lights for the Nixon crew. Or, Nixon could fight it, even consider firing Katzenbach, or ask Richardson to do it. Nixon’s men saw that as a simple matter of getting a Cabinet secretary to help make a problem go away. Others, who included that Cabinet member, might call it obstruction of justice. The question that posed — whether it was simply okay for a President to do such things — hung over the Constitutional order like the eye of a hurricane.

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The Lord moved in mysterious ways, to make Chuck Colson perform.

Nicholas Katzenbach set about his work as special prosecutor in the middle of a flurry of legal action and investigative confusion. Preexisting legal issues tied down key witnesses to the crimes of CREEP in particular, as criminal trials against key personnel moved ahead and Loeb v. Segretti siphoned off important files for discovery. It would take at least a week to figure out where exactly to start with the whole Chennault business, not to mention the political massage necessary to get the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to give up the biscuit and let a criminal investigation move ahead. The “Brookingsgate Boys,” it seemed, had done whatever deals they would and taken their sentences, and it would be hard to squeeze more detail out of them especially about Ehrlichman and Mitchell who were still in the frame for CREEP’s sins. And there were the tapes — the fucking tapes, as Katzenbach’s team quickly took to calling them, since they turned on whenever anyone spoke in the Oval Office. As a result the Nixon administration met the Court’s decision and the subpoenas that followed either by tying them up in national security objections or by burying Katzenbach’s team in months of material at once, reels and reels of the stuff.

Katzenbach rallied his troops near the end of the week before Thanksgiving and gave them three targets to concentrate their efforts. The first was Ehrlichman and Mitchell, who looked dirty as hell on inspection when it came to CREEP’s funny money. The second was to map out the Chennault business, get a timeline, figure out where pieces were missing before they tried to find what those were. The third was the fucking tapes, but there it would take so much time to work their way through the month or more where they suspected something might be hiding that who knew when they could look — listen — anywhere else?

It was there Colson came back into the story. To come off bennies more or less cold turkey, while you sat in jail, was a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing. In that pain and paranoia and isolation, shorn from the life he’d lived and the cause he’d fought for, Colson’s believer’s heart flailed for a purpose. Here an outside factor entered the picture; despite the expectation of observers like Hunter Thompson, Colson had friends. And in the later days of September, not so long before Lyndon Johnson had sat George McGovern down and dynamited the presidential election while rubble still fell from Colson’s own contribution, one of Colson’s friends visited him bearing a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. It was something to read, and the friend certainly trusted in the power of the Gospel to reshape lives. What Colson did best, on the other hand, was believe — believe what, was always the question — and now he had jail, and withdrawal, and a book. Within a fortnight “Tex” Colson had found the Lord. By itself this was an old prison story. What Tex and the Lord got up to from there, though, was rather more interesting.

It took some time at the start. In the early days mostly what Colson wanted to talk about was the Lord, or C.S. Lewis the author and thinker, or the broad new theological landscapes this opened up. When Colson’s intimates mentioned that his new outlook might be relevant to his situation — saved by grace alone or not he was still in stir — that brought him back to the moment. He was indeed in jail, for wrongs he had done, that was clear now. Not that doing what one could to help Richard Nixon be president was wrong but he’d been… immoderate, been excessive, been egotistical and impulsive. There were other things, too. Things that, now that “Tex” Colson wanted to square his two great objects of affection, Richard Milhous Nixon and God Almighty, with one another he might need to reflect on and explain.

But he had to consider whether they would do more harm than good. For the moment he would keep his mouth shut. There was all this stuff in the news, so his friends and the guards told him, about Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam and the ‘68 election, another goddamned witch hunt aimed at the President. Charge and countercharge flew, and Colson wanted no part of that. The truth would set you free but he blanched at making life more difficult for Nixon before the election. People should have the right to make up their own minds about that, even after these accusations about the Vice President got sprung at the last minute (Colson was an old hand himself, after all, he understood Wallace’s logic to a fault and his new self disdained it.) He wasn’t going to take any chances that what he might say could affect the outcome. That should stay in the hands of God and ordinary Americans.

When both those cosmic forces gave Richard Nixon the bum’s rush, Colson’s perceptions began to change. Nixon was great, a great man, still the best president of the modern era, but he was frail too, a sinner like the rest of us. Agnew, Agnew was a mess, a fool, a disappointment, a man who did not know how to see the light, a liability for the White House and an embarrassment to the county. But Nixon… there were things Nixon needed to get off his chest. Truth was important. Confession cleansed. And when people understood how you had been backed into a corner, how you had to handle matters so important, for the good of the country, that they possessed you and you couldn’t think straight anymore, people ought to know the cost of standing on the wall, why making sure regular folks could sleep at night meant you couldn’t. If they heard that, if they knew about the pain and the effort, they could understand. Bernie said so, too.

Bernie was new, relatively speaking. He had shown up less than a fortnight after the vote, dressed more tidily than a typical jailhouse lawyer, a polite visitor, thoughtful, patient and, it seemed to Colson, a listener. This was good since Colson wanted to talk; whatever in the bennies woke that need in Colson had not faded with the high. Medium-sized, trim, sharp faced and entirely bald on top though he was still in his thirties, with the fashionable sideburns he wore Bernie looked like he’d just stepped out of a Civil War uniform, not a New York law office. He was good company anyway, “my attorney Bernie,” like that song Blossom Dearie sang fifteen years ago. And with his mind for connections, for the lateral ties that could be used to tug society, or the law, in unexpected connections, Colson felt like he should know Bernie from somewhere.

But mostly they talked. Talked about the Brookings job, talked about Kalmbach and the money, talked about how people on the grapevines of Washington said Colson had more to share. Talked about Abraham, about the great monotheistic religions — an impresario by nature, Colson the convert was already ecumenical — and shared traditions. They brought up Bernie’s Jewishness — besides the tell in the first name, his last name was Nussbaum — and the great tradition of Yom Kippur, where you spent a day in the company of the last year’s sins, in openness to God and to personal atonement. Bernie got that Colson was now a “magic Christian”but it was a nice tradition regardless, and Colson appreciated that. Something to think over.

Bernard Nussbaum had volunteered. For Nick Katzenbach’s flying squad of lawyers in the special prosecutor’s office, then again for the Brookingsgate beat among the several parallel investigations, thrice for the shot at Colson. He did not have to: first a Harvard Law Review editor and an Assistant United States Attorney, he’d then joined Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the most outrageously successful combine of corporate lawyers of his generation, all in their thirties and already with the titans of Manhattan beating down their door. Nussbaum had helped Robert Morgenthau run for governor two years before, and kept up those political connections while the day job furthered the interests of companies listed on the Dow Jones average as their personal attorney.

Now there was blood in the water from the biggest whale in politics, Dick Nixon’s whole vast corrupt enterprise had come unstuck — you heard whispers and boasts and fishing stories in the bars of Midtown, mostly from advertising guys — and it was time to hold people to account. Together, over a painstaking week, Nussbaum sat down with some bright young law clerks and an endless stream of cigarettes to map out the players, a geography of who could know something that was not yet public record. Nussbaum came back often to Colson. And now people had come to the special prosecutor’s office, with word Colson did know things. That he might be convinced to spill them. At least if you listened close and gave Colson a reason. Bernie could do that.

Nussbaum was not so much patient as determined. He could take the time, calmly, to let Colson get comfortable, to spread out an open space of safety and conversation in which Colson could let his own conflicting perceptions duke it out. Nixon the man of destiny, the great leader and thinker, had room now to battle reckless and self-destructive Nixon, Nixon who vacillated, Nixon who failed to appreciate what the people who believed in Nixon were willing to do. This took time. While Katzenbach leaned that long high-German face in Nussbaum’s direction, chin tucked for emphasis, and dragged on what always seemed like the same cigarette, Nussbaum quipped that they should take the Colson matter on a contingency fee — the hourly rate would cripple the federal budget. He has to tell it to himself first, Nussbaum said. We have to let Colson get comfortable hearing it out loud, have to let him make himself sure it needs to be said. Then we nail the bastards. His own compass set by a lifetime of prosecutions, Katzenbach nodded. Sounded right to him. So Bernie just kept showing up, and settled those fixed eyes on Colson’s doughy, earnest yet instinctively obscure face, and waited.

The days dragged on after Thanksgiving. The White House kept spitting seemingly random transcripts like the chunks of food in a drunk man’s sick but Katzenbach had some of the younger guns on it, who drew up a nice tight order that said the Court meant everything, which it really did, burdensome or not, and sent it to district level. Nixon’s guy, Saint-Something, of course objected and now they had to get it calendared with DC Circuit. Everyone needed a pick-me-up. So Nussbaum sat with Tex and waited. Then, as though Colson had eaten the roll of his prophecy as it says in the Good Book, it came.

It happened as Colson carried on one of his twisty internal Nixon monologues out loud, in which the President was both the genius who would settle the damnfool Democrats’ war (Nussbaum knew better than to bring up Eisenhower) with honor, and also a frightened obsessive. The Pentagon Papers, the fact of them in that rat fink Ellsberg’s possession, that meant there had to be more out there. Had to. That’s what it was all about. The Democrats were breaking every national security law on the books all to try and dump their guilt on Nixon. And it drove Nixon crazy, drove him literally to excess — so Colson said. “I mean, it was him who said it, you know?” Colson observed.

“Said what?” asked Nussbaum.

“Said to do it. Blow the safe. I think those were even his words. We’d talked before about what a problem Brookings was, how many people there were probably culpable. He said it. That we had to get somebody in there — to my cost I chose to be ‘somebody.’ I don’t regret the impulse to help the President clear his name, but I should not have encouraged him to turn to criminality in his fear. I should have helped him turn from sin…”

Before Colson got revved up, Nussbaum slipped in calmly. “I want to make sure I understand you. This is the President who said something? President Nixon?”

“Yes he did. He’s the one who said to do it. Get somebody inside Brookings and blow the safe. Those were definitely his words: ‘blow the safe.’ Now he may not even have meant anything as violent as what I did. I do think he wanted to know what they had. He deserved to, this was a… a harrowing time. You had these people committing all kinds of illegal acts to entrap him.”

“The President said to break into Brookings?” Nussbaum asked again. “This was because they had more classified information about the war?”

“He said to break in.”

“When was that? Just if you think you can remember — where was it,” Nussbaum interrupted himself, “when and where did he say this?”

“Last summer. June. I’m going to say June, it definitely was not long after the Times broke the Pentagon Papers business. The President thought there was more material there of the same kind.”

Nussbaum was half the distance into the burning chill of an adrenaline high now. He had turned on. “Lay this out for me again. You say this was something the President said to do not this last June but the year before, that June of 1971, and that it was tied to the Pentagon Papers?”

“That’s what he felt at the time. Oh… the Oval Office. The conversation, I think he probably said this to more than one set of people, but he talked about it while he was in the Oval Office.” Nussbaum’s nostrils were wide as he held himself entirely still. That was nothing; Colson went on.

“Of course that wasn’t the end of it. I mean I tried to, I tried to operationalize a plan about that then. That… didn’t pan out,” Colson said darkly, a flicker of the old malice as the thought of John Dean crossed his mind. “Over time, though, I came to understand there was probably more to it. Certainly there were these papers, really they were part of the larger archive the press calls the Pentagon Papers. But I don’t think that was all of it.” He seemed to steady himself a little.

“I think the President thought they were there. The files — these damned files, excuse my language, that Lyndon Johnson had a copy of. The spying on Nixon, trying to make out that he had done something illegal back in ‘68 during the election. I think the President was so… moved about Brookings and about these other locations where we needed to see what assets the Democrats had, because he felt certain that the files of that investigation were there.”

Nussbaum’s stomach turned over, as if he had just jumped out of a plane. He bore down hard with his teeth, clamped bottom and top against each other, and found calm. “This was your guess — your understanding, what you put together from conversations you heard of or were a part of?”

“Yes.”

“That that’s where this… all this, where it was going?”

Colson spoke with a believer’s certainty. “Yes.”

Nussbaum nodded, like he had just watched the Constitution rewritten. “I want to thank you for that.”

Colson smiled. “You’re quite welcome.” And then he launched into some questions he’d come up with about seder because he’d been reading Exodus. It wasn’t like the movie, on rereading, he said.

Words drifted by Nussbaum like flotsam. Well, this was it, he said to himself. Time. Time to talk Colson down to a point and get the hell out — no phones, God knows which ones were bugged — and get this to Katzenbach. Which Nussbaum did. Colson says it’s there in the tapes, he said in person, and Katzenbach’s gimlet eyes widened. Get the goddamn order to DC Circuit and get it signed, said the former Attorney General. We need all of it because it’s there. The words, the probable cause on Chennault for new subpoenas. Christ, said the Jewish guy from New York. Maybe we need to see if we can indict a sitting President after all.

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Manny said no and thought that would be the end of it; no because to rush anything like this was improper on its face and no because Gurney and Wiggins were too damn much trouble for a man on the way out the door. Bob Drinan would have none of that, but then for a priest Bob could be a real son of a bitch when it came to practicality, that had to be the Jesuit in him. That was how Thomas Patrick O’Neill, Junior, “Tip” to everybody including strangers, saw it laid out in front of him, and that was the point from which the vast, knobble-nosed Boston Irishman started his preamble. Manny was there — Emmanuel Celler, a wisp of an aged Boroughs New Yorker, primaried out of his charimanship of the House Committee on the Judiciary by young Liz Holtzmann, who got the political moment that Manny didn’t. So was the Speaker, the sharp-eyed little Oklahoma fireplug Carl Albert, and the bejowled Louisianan Majority Leader Hale Boggs whose name somehow sounded exactly like he looked.

This was the conclave, these four plus dour, silver-haired Pete Rodino, an honorable time-server from Jersey who’d found himself thrust into Celler’s old job with the new Congress in January, just weeks away. They would sort it out here in Albert’s chambers, where the alcoholic Speaker could drink slowly but openly because, hell, anybody’d need a drink to deal with this mess. No soapboxers like Bob Drinan, no glory hounds, no moles for the White House, no partisan slanging with the other team even though Gerry Ford would’ve been a decent enough guy to have in the room on this. Just the bosses — two of whom incidentally, O’Neill and Boggs alike, both coveted Carl Albert’s job — and a clean decision.

Not only no but hell no, Boggs said. How the hell do you expect me to keep my boys together, said Boggs — his boys were the still-great mass of stolid, Southern career congressmen who formed a powerful plurality in the Democratic caucus — if you hand out a splitter like this issue? For Boggs the question was rhetorical. Tip still went right at it. Because he’s dirty, Tip said. Of course he’s dirty, Boggs answered, dirty’s everywhere, always has been. Dirty doesn’t signify. To this Tip answered that Dick Nixon was so damn dirty that the committees and Nick Katzenbach were at him eight ways from Sunday, and the thing was it all fit together. Not like a city machine where you earmarked and you hired cousins because it greased the wheels, but a damn conspiracy. A conspiracy for Dick Nixon to do whatever the hell he wanted in order to stay in power.

This had been coming since the summer, Tip went on, and Tip had said it then, that if Nixon got out of this alive in November they were going to have to lay out procedures for impeachment. Manny Celler tried to raise a qualifier and Tip stepped right over him with that deep Irish bark. Now that Nixon was done it was even more important, or he’d squirrel right out of it like he did with that goddamn Checkers speech when he was running with Ike. Our voters would never forgive us. Tip looked the meagerness of Carl Albert right in the eye and said it again: our voters would never forgive us.

That was how you did it, Tip thought to himself. It’s what he told those goddamn law-school legislative aides, the well-read ones who called Speaker Albert “the Little Corporal” behind Albert’s back and not because of a resemblance to Napoleon. You couldn’t treat people like that and get things done. When you had a tough guy, a proud guy like Boggs, you squared right up because you showed him you respected him by fighting like men, that way after you beat hell out of each other there could be some kind of settlement at quits. With a weak man, you appealed to his dignity, to his generosity, you built him up so he’d do what you needed him to.

Now Boggs went at Albert the other way, with what the weak man feared: threats to his fragile power, to the order he was supposed to keep. Bullshit, Boggs said. This worm had about turned already. People went and voted that they were mad at Dick Nixon, and now they’re scared that they elected George McGovern. McGovern’s gonna be president soon enough, Tip said, to which Boggs answered, Exactly, in a voice like his listener’s dog had dropped dead on the rug as they spoke. My boys don’t want any part of that, Boggs went on, ‘less McGovern can get something for their districts. Strictly business. Otherwise they want a strong hand and they’re about to lose one even if he is dirty. Katzenbach’s digging and he’s done real well it seems like everywhere but with Dick Nixon. Ed Gurney goes and hikes himself up there on that Senate committee and lays into Sam Ervin about how there’s no direct evidence and no corroborative evidence and after a while that sticks. Charlie Wiggins does the same thing in Judiciary — Celler moved to agree but Boggs cut him off. And then they all gang up and say there’s a whole lot of rotten apples but nobody can say Nixon said “do this” or “do that.” The goddamn tapes are a mess and this whole Chennault thing, hell, half the country thinks Lyndon set the whole damn thing up and some of them are McGovern’s people! How do we keep this together if there’s nothing. And that fool Katzenbach’s talking about trying to indict a sitting president…

… Tip chipped in that there was nothing in substantive law that said he couldn’t…

… Celler cavilled again but Boggs went right over him: hell yes there is, said Boggs. Hell yes. There is not one damn Southern congressman who is going to break the damn system in a moment of crisis like this just because they don’t like Nixon. We’ve got a murderer’s row of criminals in the Nixon campaign, and probably some more in the West Wing. We need to keep an eye on the ball and get that dealt with, Boggs said. Look after some proper law and order because then we look like we’re looking after it. Ervin and Fulbright and them have shot their Senatorial bolt, Boggs went on. They are bogged down in details and they need to get on with showing how dirty CREEP was and leave Nixon the hell alone. It’s bad politics right now. He’s started to look like the victim in all this and we don’t need to kick him while he’s down. Plus we’ve got cranks like Bob Drinan who want to get on him just about bombing Cambodia when most Americans want this war settled for good. They still think maybe Nixon can do that, or at least they think he’s got a better shot than George McGovern. Rodino calmly but firmly said he didn’t think bombing Cambodia was any kind of “just.” Boggs stared Rodino down.

Tip stepped back in; Albert drank methodically and took it all in, keen for every detail as a frightened man would be. I know Bob’s a pain. He’s a good man, he’s a father of my Church but he’s a pain in the ass when he gets stuck on principle. We need to sit down and see what the legal grounds are. And we probably need to take this process back. Otherwise Katzenbach may go off the rails and that will just look bad for us and for McGovern who, like it or not, is gonna be our guy. We need to show people that the Congress of this country is worth a damn. Not just to do plain detective work. That Muskie guy George Mitchell’s lawsuit is doing just fine, I don’t like his chances on appeal but he’s got the dirty money out in the public record. Nick Katzenbach’s pulled in all the guys he can flip on the big fish like John Mitchell and Kalmbach and maybe Haldeman or Ehrlichman. The question is how can we properly see just what the issue is with Nixon.

“Now Hale I agree with you on one thing” — Tip said this and smiled the smile he used when he would spring his point — “this whole process is a mess. Too many directions and that just gives Gurney and Wiggins and Delbert Latta and the rest ammunition. Dick Nixon sure as hell knows how to look persecuted, too. So we need to do this by the book. We need to hand this over to Pete here” — he gestured to Rodino, who looked like the GI private who’d just gotten stripes he didn’t want to deal with — “and get this laid out proper. Manny can figure out how it’s done, because when was the last time we even impeached a judge around here? The Thirties? That’ll take long enough by itself. He goes out looking sober, responsible. Hasn’t done a damn thing, he’s just taught us how to do it. Then we see where we are. See what comes of the damn tapes, and the Paris talks, just see where we are.”

Boggs was doubtful. Gurney’s handed it to us, Boggs replied, handed it over yesterday in that speech down on the Senate floor. If we even think that Nixon fostered a climate of “ill will and misbehavior,” that’s what he said, and sure we all think it, if we think that then we should just censure the man and move on. That’s simple enough. We wrap the damn committees up and get some people charged who Katzenbach hasn’t charged yet, and we get the hell on. The leftists like Drinan can go on with their impeachment ideas and that’ll work real fine for their supporters. But it gets us away from it, we get to say Nixon did wrong and the rest is up to him.

Tip darkened. What if they do have him? he said. What if they turn up a magic piece somewhere? Do you want us to be wrong on that? Tip shaped the word as it came out of its mouth, nearly breathed it over to where Carl Albert sat, the pieces laid out on the board in his mind, the blended whisky poured neatly over the sharper edges of his fear. What if that means we blew our chance or the whole thing gets handed over to Katzenbach who wants to be the next Governor of New York based on whether he can make the President of the United States take a perp walk? I know your boys don’t like it. Tip shrugged now. They don’t have to, he added. They just have to hate the other options worse.

Now Hale Boggs was silent. At long last Manny Celler chimed in that Tip’s was a reasonable point. Celler himself felt that Nixon was hard done by, a reasonable man whose subordinates got ahead of themselves. But examining options was responsible. It also, as Tip himself had said, killed time. Unless things sped up unexpectedly, they could make the right noises until Richard Nixon was a private citizen and let the ordinary justice system carry on as needed. Carl Albert liked the sound of that. He knew how to play for time. Time cooled hot heads; time would get this all done soon enough. Time it was, then.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Then came the flood. Two days on, as Celler quietly assembled constitutional lawyers and law-clerk congressional aides, even called in the Library of Congress, the Federal District for the District of Columbia sat down en banc again — there were grumbles — and told the sitting President to quit fucking around and hand it all over. So it began.

The reels poured out like a plasticine everlasting stream. First it was a phenomenon, then an industry: it took more hands to the job and Katzenbach lurched frantically into the offices of Mike Mansfield and Speaker Albert to get emergency appropriations out of Congress for more staff before Nixon’s GOP praetorians could talk the bills to death. The press joined in, and not just the papers. HaperCollins took a flyer and got into the rooms as they were transcribed, picking up enough material to rush out a trade-paper “first volume” that went into the nation’s Christmas stockings. It was a phenomenon from birth; water-cooler conversation, fodder for Johnny Carson, the stuff of pop culture where, since Nixon’s crew swore like longshoremen when they were about their work, the phrase “Expletive Deleted” entered American English argot. That was all much of a muchness on its own, enough to rile the half of the country that wanted Dick Nixon run out of town to new levels of indignation, while the half that partly dug in its heels against admitting a mistake and partly believed the goddamn pinkos deserved what they got stood their ground, too. And that was just the noise from the stands.

Down on the playing field there was blood and fury. The Senate’s committees bulled ahead for more witnesses. John Dean, in a dizzy hormonal tangle between self-sacrifice and self-preservation, volunteered to go in front of Ervin’s firing squad in a self-proposed effort to have Nixon’s senior lieutenants fall on their swords and shut the books on the whole thing. Dean tried, and indeed for a couple of days nearly mesmerized the Senate gallery and the television viewers with detailed recollections of privileged Oval Office meetings and backchannel schemes. But the tapes caught up with him. Where there were inconsistencies the nice Harper Collins folks let Rufus Edmisten and the lawyers walk in and take a look and Ervin was back on the hunt. He hemmed Dean in with questions like treeing a fox while in the background Ed Gurney’s deep New England tones bayed in protest (for a Florida senator, you could hear Gurney’s Maine boyhood in every syllable.) Foreign Relations wanted Bob Haldeman on their carpet and he danced in circles of legal protest up to the edge of contempt of Congress: to stay on the job, to keep Nixon reined in on Vietnam. In the meanwhile, more and more of the tapes came out. More suspicious discussion of the investigations, more general malfeasance. Just past the ides of December Katzenbach’s coffee-jagged youngsters found the magic words. There on the reels from June 17, 1971 they met them face to face: blow the safe.

The furor was vast. Nixon’s chorus was swift to respond that a President who liked to talk tough and had a … complicated sense of humor should not be taken literally. For the middle hinge of American opinion this argument did not survive Johnny Carson’s acid disdain that night, but for the hardening shield around the sitting President it was an article of faith. How many terrible or shocking things had LBJ said in his time? Or Roosevelt? The air of debate was a poisonous fume and there was no peace in midwinter. Then Katzenbach sprang his play.

He had feinted already, indicted John Mitchell and also Ehrlichman, and spread fear among the men who sat on couches in the Oval Office that either one would flip something big (John Dean, now barely allowed in the West Wing after his Senate performance, was white with expectation.) Katzenbach had talked it through on long evenings with Bob Sack and Bernie Nussbaum and a tousled young redhead named Weld who had worked twenty-hour days to reach the inner sanctum, in rooms where nicotine settled like an opiate haze and they mapped out the plays and the points and authorities on forests of lined yellow paper. They prepared in detail and then launched their arrows in Times New Roman. The papers had it from planted leaks before it happened; Nick Katzenbach was asking for discovery from President Nixon. Katzenbach said nothing to reporters, or nothing that leaked, but they could surmise that Nixon might then be named as a third-party defendant in the cases of John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman.

So it was that, like a wounded bear, up out of the Southeast Asian mire lurched Richard M. Nixon. This was just about goddamn enough, he said on the phone to the straitened Elliot Richardson. You couldn’t indict a sitting president (Richardson delicately pointed out that there was no formal language to that effect and that the Constitution specified certain immunities for members of Congress so they’d have inked it if they wanted to.) Besides that, Bork had told Nixon — that would be Solicitor General Robert Bork, of the goatee and the originalism — that as the officer charged with the proper exercise of the laws of the United States Dick Nixon didn’t have to put up with this horseshit if he didn’t want to. Again, Richardson pointed to privileges and immunities in Katzenbach’s charter. Nixon would have none of it. Fire him, Nixon said. Goddamn fire him. Nixon kept his sentences short when he meant it; the matter was closed.

Elliot Richardson said no. Nixon pointed out in a predatory growl that he was duly managing the execution of the laws of the country. Richardson said no again, and in clipped Brahmin tones added that he had a letter of resignation drafted against this day already. Bob Haldeman had phoned Richardson’s deputy on a second Oval Office line before the call was over. No luck again — Justice’s number two preferred to jump rather than be pushed, too. That moved the order of succession to Solicitor General — Attorney General now, for a little while at least — Bork. Here Nixon found both a legal mind and a political instinct entirely obliging. Bork let himself be talked out of resignation for the sake of operational continuity in order to bear the burden of being the newest hero of the American right. A life in the law had its demands sometimes.

The papers went crazy. There was no peace at Christmas as bombs fell abroad and the President made the law do what he wanted it to at home. But of course that was what Nick Katzenbach had wanted.

Above his other talents and ambitions, Katzenbach was a prosecutor. He did not win cases by virtuous use of statutes or by mastery of legal loopholes. He won, like any good prosecutor, by getting inside the other guy’s head and making him do what Katzenbach wanted the other guy to do. What Nick Katzenbach wanted Dick Nixon to do was obstruct justice. All Katzenbach had asked for was discovery of documents and related information. In turn Nixon, quoting Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to every press gaggle that bushwhacked him, had fired a special prosecutor he wasn’t supposed to be able to fire. Katzenbach had mixed feelings about the special-prosecutor approach in any case; what he did know was that if he made the right threat at the right time, Richard Nixon would stomp a mudhole in the prosecutor’s office. And, because of the way the Congress of the United States had described Katzenbach’s job, that was probably an impeachable offense.

Carl Albert smiled a harried, jagged smile as Katzenbach explained all this in smooth Episcopalian tones in the Speaker’s chambers. And that very day, with the aid of a crew of burly delivery-van men, Bob Sack and young Bill Weld delivered tens of thousands of pages of material to the Office of Counsel for the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. In the background, committee staffers and the Library of Congress raced the calendar to prepare a comprehensive con-law report on the impeachment process for the new Chairman, Pete Rodino, by the time the Ninety-Third Congress was sworn in just after New Year’s. In the foreground, into Rodino’s office marched the hired gun: the broad and bespectacled Charles Moore, Jr., the white civil rights attorney from Birmingham, Alabama who had wound stems against the Birmingham church bombers on national television and shrugged off crosses burnt in his yard, who’d destroyed the racial gerrymander in front of the Supreme Court, who’d sued the state of Georgia for what Moore called an illegal vote in the largely racially restricted 1966 gubernatorial election, who’d diced with his career as a senior officer of the American Civil Liberties Union by calling for Nixon’s impeachment. Glasses askew as the photographers flashed their record of the moment, three briefcases gripped in two hands, Moore was about his business and did not look amused. With the new Congress Rodino would let slip Moore’s lead.

Then the race would be on.

 

[Yes]

The Flight Forward II: Think Big
​

[Nothing less than] the destruction of a government that a few weeks earlier
had seemed invulnerable. The president lived in the stunned lethargy of a man
whose nightmares had come true … Like a figure in Greek tragedy, he was
fulfilling his own nature and destroying himself.

- Henry Kissinger, 1973​

If the President had his way, there would be a nuclear war every week!

- Henry Kissinger, various occasions


[T]hat thing which was the main fear and therefore the prime issue. Which wasn’t whether
Nixon was a crook. Millions had been talking on both sides of that issue for more than a
quarter-century now. Everyone knew what the prime issue was. A certain thumb moving
towards a certain red button, a certain question of sanity…. Query: if the man who holds
the thumb over the button is mad….

- Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), 1973​

Through it all the war went on. The war that had started all the others, the one that had stood like a bloody wraith at Richard Nixon’s side through every decision of his presidency even before the political dagger Lyndon Johnson had so recently thrust in Nixon’s side showed that fact to all present, except those blinded by faith. It went on and Nixon faced it now, hungry, out of time, and driven by his inner fires to end it one way or another. That his mood and his resolve now frightened calculating men, who knew Dick Nixon in full for who he was, sent a chill throughout “the building,” even among those ordinary souls who had no sure way to know that this was what moved them. The President would have peace in Vietnam, or even victory, or he would not face political oblivion alone. Those calculating others, from fear as much or more than justice, resolved not to join him.

Henry had a plan; Henry always had a plan. And for a political scientist, the National Security Adviser possessed a very lawyerly mind. He took the facts on the ground, while the cold hard sense of Nixon’s desperation stabbed at the base of his mind, and arranged those facts to suit a new theory. Before what mattered most was peace: peace with Hanoi, peace at home to speed the President’s reelection. Now what mattered most was containment. Kissinger had to contain Hanoi’s power, Thieu’s ambition, and Richard Nixon’s rage.

The first step was to gain control of time, to set out precepts for the parties and talk them all to death while other matters were arranged. Then, they would knock North Vietnam back on its heels and make clear that the best Hanoi and their Soviet patrons could hope for was some — probably not all — of the American concessions in the October offer. All the while they would buttress Saigon and Lon Nol’s regime in Cambodia, and bomb hell out of the guerrillas there. At some point there would be an ultimatum about American POWs. Lastly they would sell the story: that Richard Nixon had always sought peace with honor, real honor, that he would not desert America’s friends or give up on America’s captives, that he would press their cause to the last moment of his presidency like an honorable man, that he had been robbed of the chance to do things right by internal enemies and external misfortune. That would probably do.

Kissinger worked the plan for as much of November as he could. He reopened lines of communication in Paris. He stretched out days into a week or more as he indulged Nixon’s and Thieu’s fantasies of strength with aggressive new demands that would secure a South Vietnamese state in treaty law. He even arranged for his old rival, Secretary of State William Rogers who was long since sent to Coventry, to take a multi-day trip to Saigon where he would go over the proposals with Thieu in painful detail. After a while some folk like Rogers himself and Bob Haldeman cottoned on to the outline of Kissinger’s plan and marveled that it might save the day. That surely wasn’t Henry’s intent, they told themselves, but at least you could always count on Henry’s self-interest.

The trouble, as it always was with Nixon, was politics. Nixon spent nearly two weeks after the election in a depressed state: he drank heavily, slept little, raged sometimes, sulked mostly. This gave Kissinger time to work out the hard-line proposal for Paris and take it there. But as he left for more talks the Supreme Court returned the verdict in Ervin v. Nixon. This brought Nixon roaring back to life within days. His attitude put several senior national security staffers in a state of near panic; Nixon was calm. He intended no sudden moves, not while Henry worked away in Paris and tried to walk Le Duc Tho and his crew back to the proposals of October. The staff felt their stomachs drop away. This meant Nixon wanted to act deliberately, and that terrified them.

As Nixon wrestled with Katzenbach’s investigation over the Thanksgiving weekend, he also wrestled with Vietnam. If Henry couldn’t talk the North Vietnamese into something they would simply hunker down and wait for favorable terms when McGovern took … he could barely say it in his own head. Thieu, that bastard, would demand concrete assurances or he’d try to blackmail the new administration by refusing any agreements that might free American prisoners unless Thieu liked the terms. There would have to be a decisive blow; something to hurt the North, something to break them. Then he could squeeze Thieu’s nuts and get a proper agreement signed. This was for the good of the country, really, even for the good of that lefty lunatic McGovern. The question was not whether to break Hanoi, but instead how.

Kissinger kept talking in Paris, even after Thanksgiving, but the substance in his cables grew thin and Nixon laid down an ultimatum: results by the first of December or come home. Le Duc Tho, interested to see what he could get from Kissinger if he pushed hard, abandoned the talks on purpose. Nixon meanwhile had already begun to plan. Now, with Kissinger home, he pressed ahead with his ideas. He wanted national security staff, civilian and uniformed, to return to the DUCK HOOK proposals from 1969 and reevaluate options in light of current plans and circumstances. Now Nixon had an almost manic energy, with twice-daily meetings with principals to look into what their deputies were doing, updates on draft proposals, and streams of suggestions.

By the first weekend in December there were four clear options proposed. The first was simply — “simply” — a massive bombing campaign against Hanoi and Haiphong that would hit strategic targets round the clock for up to a week. The second was a plan, mooted back in the spring, that would marshal and launch a massive raid on Hanoi with nearly three divisions’ worth of ground troops to free American prisoners in the city and seize key North Vietnamese leaders as bargaining chips. The third option was a lightning bombing campaign to destroy North Vietnam’s vast network of irrigation dikes. In the monsoon rains this would trigger floods, crop loss, disease, and possible famine. The fourth option was the use of nuclear weapons.

Nixon himself was drawn to the bombing campaigns. On one hand he nursed a deep skepticism of past strategic air "projects," as he told senior advisers more than once while they haggled over how to break a country like turning a few votes on a bill in the House. In Nixon's view all those big impressive Air Force jobs had done “zilch” to alter the course of the war. This, though, he could get behind. It had the ring of punishment to it; that was what Nixon wanted most, he wanted Hanoi punished, he wanted North Vietnam broken on the wheel and pliant while he went at Thieu. First the dikes, then the cities, then if need be expand again to hit the forces that were mustered to attack the South given an opportunity. Hit the North, hit them and hit them and hit them, until they broke because at the end of the day they had to be weaker men than Richard Nixon. Had to. He asked detailed questions about the dikes, like how many aircraft, how many days, day or night bombing, how far would floods extend, how many dead up front, how many would die for months as food grew scarce.

All this sent chills through several principals. Kissinger, who danced on the head of his main chance as always, complemented Nixon’s strategic vision in the same breath that he drew the talk around again to the estimates from staff studies that bomb, flood, and famine together would kill perhaps two hundred thousand souls. Admiral Thomas Moorer, the round-faced carrier pilot from Alabama turned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, did what he always did with a President as erratic and given to dissemble as Nixon — he took precise notes in his impressively detailed diary. Conservative by temperament, not inclined to be the first boss of the uniformed military to lose a war, Moorer wanted action but preferred decapitation strikes on Hanoi mixed with the massive ground raid, a modern chevauchee to shatter Hanoi’s sense of security. He also suspected the dikes plan would endanger the POWs; Moorer knew dozens of those men personally, they were friends, even sons of friends, and a priority to him.

William Rogers, the tall, dour, Eastern Establishment champion and Nixon’s marginalized Secretary of State, was appalled and said so. With an end in sight to his confinement at Foggy Bottom and with Nixon’s authority under siege, Rogers threatened to resign if the dikes plan went ahead. Nixon, full of piss and vinegar, ran through three consecutive angry phone calls to Kissinger in which he threatened to fire Rogers just as easily as he would Katzenbach if the legal noose got too tight. With a formidable display of his real gift — blame displacement — Kissinger cajoled Rogers into staying, so he could aid in any talks that did restart. Kissinger found fault with unnamed military officers who doubted the usefulness of strikes on the dikes and fretted about the Geneva Convention. In his cups, Nixon would have none of it. With a new target he laid off Rogers, but said again to Henry in slurs and growls that he would burn the whole damn country down over there if that was what it took. Meantime Kissinger’s staff and Strategic Air Command were to run a planning study for the dikes, and US forces in-country were to be reduced at a faster rate than planned as political cover

While the study charged ahead in the first week of December, the reality of the situation settled on another central figure in Nixon’s apparatus, his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. A balding, cherub-faced Wisconsinite, Mel Laird was a veteran Congressman and a skilled boss of the unruly, imperial Pentagon. He was also one of the most underrated schemers and operators in the Nixon machine, not so much through any real criminality but in his mastery at getting what he wanted out of the Department of Defense and Congress alike. He also acted, like any truly competent operator, to try and rein in Richard Nixon’s volcanic, often self-destructive approach to national security. More than once he’d arranged convenient misdirection, complication, or outright failure when Nixon wanted to burn it all down and bomb them all, whoever they were that day, so as to serve what Laird saw as the real goals of the administration.

It was Laird who reached out to Moorer on the 7th — Pearl Harbor Day, Laird had nearly forgotten before his executive secretary brought him the remarks he was to make down at the Navy Yard — to discuss how they would couch the dikes plan in advice. Moorer also discussed the major exercises planned for the 3rd Marine Division around Okinawa that month, and that a more austere version of the big raid on Hanoi — “just” two and a third divisions, not three and a half — could potentially be executed by New Year’s, if permission to move assets was gained in the next three to four days. Laird pulled every military weather service report on forecasts for Southeast Asia between that day and Christmas, asked for data on the logistics of supplying heavy bombers, and an assessment about accuracy differences between the B-52s and smaller aircraft with precision-guided weapons. Years in the House of Representatives still had their uses: when in doubt, talk it to death.

Laird bought more time when he sent SAC and the Joint Staff back to the drawing board for two separate plans, labeled HAMMER for the B-52s, and ARROW for a plan based on Air Force Phantoms and F-111s with F-105G “Wild Weasels” flying radar suppression, and Navy A-6s, all laden with directed air-to-ground missiles or the new laser-guided bombs. Nixon had reached a state of equipoise, concentrated on his legal issues, so any diligent talk of “doing it right” sold well. Even Henry indicated a measure of respect for Laird’s stagecraft. It took another couple of days on top to look thoroughly at weather and casualty issues to do with ARROW and to involve all the relevant commanders in discussion. It always helped to look busy. As that wound up, Kissinger went to Paris for a day to confer with the South Vietnamese who had turned up because Thieu had his own reasons to look diligent, and then at last, as the principals had wrung every day they could grasp from the process, they briefed the sullen Nixon.

There were three plans. One carried the unimaginative name LINEBACKER II for a reason, because it focused on a deliberate series of attacks by heavy bombers on strategic North Vietnamese targets, to be carried out without letup for a week or more. This was the least imaginative option and Nixon smelled that a mile off. He still held forth about it, noted the other players in the room, but the blather was a distraction from the fact he had no interest, an effort to get the other confreres loose and lax. Then Laird, Moorer, and that patrician undertaker of a Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, briefed the other two options.

Both, with their derivations from the DUCK HOOK studies, bore golf-slang nicknames that referenced those roots. The first was EAGLE, which would lead with convergent B-52 strikes to paralyze North Vietnamese command and control, followed by the “great raid” on Hanoi and efforts to draw out and destroy North Vietnamese units with air power as the American force withdrew. It was much the larger concentration of new force and would take until roughly the new year to marshal. The second was RIGHT SLICE, an evolution of ARROW into a comprehensive plan to attack the dikes above and around Hanoi and the urban centers of northeast North Vietnam with hundreds of tactical aircraft laden with precision-guided bombs and missiles. Some, though not many, extra aircraft were needed and would be sent forthwith, because they had potential value for the other plans as well. There would be inter-service coordination on RIGHT SLICE too; the Air Force would hit the dikes themselves, while Navy fighters would concentrate on the artillery and anti-aircraft batteries bunched in around the dikes for both defense and protection (out of belief that the Americans would not launch a coordinated attack on the dikes.)

Nixon mulled. He asked questions about EAGLE, then dismissed it. Too many American boots on the ground meant they might blow the opening to China, get the hard-liners riled up and ready to help Hanoi after all. (Several others present also reckoned that Nixon felt he still needed the POWs, for political reasons, that they had to come out last as cleanly as possible to drive home Nixon’s bid for survival with a flourish.) Nixon was clear. He wanted fear and death and a batterer’s leverage, and for that really only the dikes would do. Keep the plans for LINEBACKER II of course, if the Pentagon screwed up another thing there had to be a fallback plan because you couldn’t just leave Hanoi to their own devices. But first, hit the dikes.

Nixon asked blunt questions. It was Kissinger who fielded them, because Kissinger always wanted to be the factotum, also because Kissinger believed he was the only one who could steer Nixon in a particular direction. Can we break their will and get them to go back to the October terms? Will this show Thieu we’re steady, that we do what we say we’ll do? All very familiar. There were nods with both motion and words. Admiral Moorer answered technical questions from the hump-shouldered chief executive who was all but drawing up football plays in the sand, as Moorer described air corridors, sortie rates, suppression of enemy air defenses. What about weather? came the fateful question. Laird was Wisconsin nice; weather’s always a question but we believe we’ve got a shot in the next few days, he said with a smile, his body three quarters onto the short road out of the Oval Office.

Aircraft criss-crossed the Pacific. Kissinger fielded phone calls like desultory gunfire from Nixon over the days that followed, rehashing plots while constitutional government shook around them. Then the calls swung away towards Laird. Now we look at the weather, the Secretary of Defense said. We look at the weather. As though for the sake of a common purpose of humanity, the weather was awful. Goddamn awful, bitched Nixon. How had they gotten this one wrong? Monsoon season was tricky, Laird philosophized, backed up by as much bullshit as Henry could shovel. There were great rewards if you could get it clear because the dikes were laden with water and you’d get the floods Nixon intended, but it was hard to time it just so. Keep at it, was the order. The Pentagon did.

It still rained. Nixon asked the questions. Kissinger answered them at length, heaping blame on Laird, Moorer, whoever else he could think of who was willing to take it. Days passed; the study about unfavorable loss-to-target destruction ratios out of ARROW reached Kissinger’s desk as if asked for. He waited for Nixon to reach a ruminative mood and talked it over with him. It got Nixon fidgety, which was the goal. The goddamn Pentagon had screwed the fencepost again. There was nothing you could rely on with all this precision bombing except to go back at it another way, to try it differently. Because you needed to hurt them; it was the only way. So they’d have another day — Moorer recorded that Laird spent it quietly, white as a sheet whenever someone brought up the six-hour weather reports — and then the President himself would scratch this whole damned mess. Play the next hand of cards. LINEBACKER II it was then.

It was less than a week to Christmas when Richard Nixon finally got his chance to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam. And to his great relief it really was, in his considered opinion, quite a show. Two hundred and four B-52s darkened the monsoon skies in waves, with fuel tankers, electronic-warfare aircraft, ground suppression from the F-105Gs, and littler bombs tossed by Phantoms and F-111s and carrier jets. It really was a show. From their northern heartland the Viet hurled surface-to-air missiles with abandon and seeded the clouds with shrapnel from flak. There were higher B-52 losses the first night than expected; this turned out to be a temporary hiccup, a case of pride going before destruction as the Big Ugly Fat Fuckers marched in line like redcoats and were asking for it, practically. SAC sorted that all out over the forty-eight hours that followed, with a lower sortie rate that had Nixon prowling the halls to know when the new tactics would be employed and the rate of dumping seventy thousand pounds of explosives each out of the B-52Ds would go back up. The smaller aircraft flew as well, prowled and waited for clear places among the clouds where they could drop their TV- or laser-guided bombs on target.

Nixon stayed up all hours as the combined air task forces pummeled the North again and again. Here and there something went awry, a bombload dumped in a shipping channel, a grid marker settled off plumb that meant a hospital was destroyed, its frightened patients suffocated in the rubble of a house of care that became their tomb, hits purposeful or not on localized stretches of the dikes that suppurated water and washed away lives and food. On it went. Christmas came; Nixon would have none of Christmas. The jets flew, the bombs dropped. Paper armies of placards and bills and editorials rose up against him, not just at home but across the world. Nixon had never been a quitter. He pressed on.

Finally, on New Year’s eve, Hanoi moved. Notes were passed in Paris. Kissinger responded, and late that evening Washington time talked to the jowled, voluble Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The North and the PRG wanted to come back to the talks. They had proposals, based on counters to Washington’s October plan. The terms of parley were set out again. Nixon was almost loath to let his offensive go, he wanted assurances from Le Duc Tho directly about the course of talks. Kissinger, scrambling again to justify his patter as he often had to, got Le’s word. On New Year’s the last bombs dropped, for the moment. Thirteen solid days of uninterrupted hell loosed from the skies had done enough for now. Great men would sit and talk and Nixon found that fitting. But he could read a calendar as well as anyone. So could Kissinger. The window was terribly narrow. On the face of it that gave Hanoi tremendous leverage. In order to flip that leverage back to the American side you needed a madman in your back pocket. Kissinger had but to look homeward, to those iron eyes sunk as deep as the abyss, to know he had one handy.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

They stored the bombs aboard the ships; for the war’s whole length that had been the irony. While fresh-faced boys faced fire and metal and the maiming of body and soul and death in the elephant grass, the bombs had lurked in nuclear-proofed bunkers on Guam, or on the long grey warships out on “Dixie” and “Yankee” stations, south and north of the Demilitarized Zone respectively, in secret off in Thailand, or one red phone’s call away in the arsenals of apocalypse spread across Congressional districts in nearly all fifty states. At the quagmire’s edge always there was the whiff of cobalt and tritium and megadeath, and sometimes when you found the right general you could read it in their eyes. The bloody arithmetic. The urge.

The ships were the most convenient source, because per every formal, three-ring bindered operational plan and every contingency scenario on the books, all United States Navy capital ships kept a special magazine of nuclear weapons. On aircraft carriers — especially the largest like the USS Enterprise, “Big E,” the nuclear-powered ship for a nuclear age, lately a part of LINEBACKER II and still tracing lazy eights in the South China Sea — those weapons took the form of “gravity” bombs — no special guidance system, you dropped them and they fell — there for “tactical and operational use.” Those were just the adjectives Richard Nixon wanted to hear. An operation, a procedure. Driven by superior tactics. Surgical. All the magic words, all the lies of mind that lay behind the specially designed locks on those magazine doors. Doors for which the orders to open up were held so close that for most of the distance from Richard Nixon’s yuletide fugue to the middle of January even the Secretary of Defense did not know of them. Orders hidden behind a short drab word: more golf slang for a player’s hole-in-one, poker slang for a poker President that named what he kept up his sleeve always, ready for the moment when he had the will to play it. Three pages of onion paper and a National Security staffer’s haunted soul. Operation ACE.

Now, on the fourteenth day of January, Dick Nixon took that folder off his desk. He talked with Henry again first; Kissinger was dour, resolved. They accept the terms, Kissinger said. Not just in principle, they accept the terms as what we can do, what they wish both sides to put in writing. But Hanoi won’t move, not now, not when they think you might listen to Thieu and walk back the American concessions, not when they can embarrass you — the word that raced down Dick Nixon’s brain stem like wildfire — if they just wait for McGovern. We can get this done but really we have to hold their feet to the fire. I want to talk about how we do that, said Henry. Nixon was in no mood to talk. He knew already, anyway. Word went to Rose Mary Woods, his now famous secretary, and from her to a trusted commodore who had worked on the big nuclear targeting exercises back in ‘69. Nixon would tell Mel Laird when he goddamn got around to it. Meanwhile in the next eighteen hours the commodore would fly to Pearl Harbor, then out to the Philippines and onto the deck of the Enterprise. That was the start of the show.

From there, Nixon’s emissary would call a closed-door meeting with the rear admiral in command of “Big E” and with the Commander, Air Group who was also the unit boss of the Enterprise’s squadron of A-6E Intruders. Those “Short Little Ugly Fuckers,” with their long range and solid bomb load, were the Navy’s premier medium bombers. Two aircraft they’d need, with the two best Intruder pilots on board one of whom, the CAG, was already in the room. Each aircraft would load out one B61 nuclear gravity bomb: these were what they called “dial a yield” weapons, where tripping different permissive locks would trigger explosions of a different scale from the bomb up to one-hundred-eighty kilotons that could lay waste a smaller city. The lead jet’s bomb would be set to ten kilotons, “only” another Hiroshima let out into the world. The CAG would fly that one up to the Lang Chi hydroelectric dam above Hanoi. There he would execute a “lay down” drop, and inside the bullet-shaped metal canister a warhead would tear its own atomic structure apart, shatter the integrity of the dam, and loose the irradiated flood on those downstream at the same time it turned out the lights in much of North Vietnam. The second A-6, its bomb “dialed” to forty-five kilotons, would let the device airburst above Haiphong Harbor, the North’s second city and chief port. That was the plan, the damage, the will to act, and the gamble.

Expect coded confirmation in seventy-two hours said the commodore, as though he had just said the trains were running on time. The Rear Admiral and the pilot nodded and walked out. They were nuclear men in a nuclear world. This was real, this time, but they had heard such words often enough to take the edge off their nerves. Anyway, the President had guts. Whatever else he’d done, he wouldn’t knuckle under to the goddamn gooks. In this, the younger of the two Intruder pilots and Dick Nixon were of one mind. This could be the greatest strategic stroke delivered by the United States since… well, since Nagasaki.

Nixon thought so too. This was what it was to think, to act, to live in the place of the rare men who could make the big decisions. That’s what this was, it was big, truly big. If you wanted to succeed you had to go all the way. Had to make the other side deal with the moment on your terms. You carved out history, or it carved into you. They could argue all they liked, the cheap ,shifty bastards. Hanoi could argue balls and strikes and clauses in Paris til hell froze over. Those goddamn limp wrists and pinkos on the House Judiciary Committee could go through all the motions they wanted, even the good ones, the guys like Wiggins and Latta who stood up and told it like it was. They couldn’t reach him, could they? There was no way to know who meant what — even he wondered sometimes, sometimes you had to wonder when there were so many choices, so many calls in your own head to go one way or another much less what anyone else thought they goddamn knew — no way to say the big mess was any damn thing to do with him. No way to say that there was anything really wrong, because the President did what was right.

More than that he did what he had to do. That was what they never understood. None of them ever understood it. Bebe, he understood what it did, what it cost; sometimes Bob understood where it took him, or at least the goddamn cross he had to bear, the nights, the pain, the rage, the doubt. They were good men, they tried. There was nobody he could rely on like Bebe, Bob could get fucking temperamental about all this, all the bullshit that had been churned up — Christ, McGovern of all people! And that human scum Wallace, there would be a reckoning, that would get done because you could never let any of them think you’d forgiven them not for a moment — but his guys were good men. Good men. They would grasp what he had to do. Not just joke about it any more. It was time to break or be broken. Nixon knew which he’d do.

So it was the days passed; the nights were harder. They hurt. They screamed, they feared, they accused, they stalked him like hounds astride his soul. But he could choose not to remember them, to do what a man did which was square up and lock the door on them when the sun came up. There wasn’t enough drink. And who understood? No one. That little rat fink Dean probably had most of them half out the goddamn door by now and even Laird was unreliable and he was supposed to be in goddamn charge of this thing! Laird with China this and Brezhnev that and that winkle of fear in his eyes. No goddamn guts. What China this and Brezhnev that would know was that when they dealt with Richard Nixon, this was a man, this was a man who meant what he said. And now what? McGovern? Who couldn’t fucking figure out what he meant, much less say it? Christ. And still with the television. Still in the House arguing petty points of law with no sense of political consequences, of how they should treat someone who bore the weight of what he bore, that he could still function, bear up and be a man even through the nights and the tears, face Hanoi with an inescapable consequence and get them to move at last. Who could watch that? Who could care about him and watch that? Pat? CHRIST!!

Then they acted like it was his fault, the goddamn Secret Service suits as they walked her off to somebody, probably some goddamn nurse who could keep her mouth shut but they would judge anyway, never understand that she was the only one for him, that that bright red brand across her jawline was a punishment wrought by the world, that a man could only carry the world for so long when the people he loved didn’t know how to care for him, or at least the people who said they loved him. He had made strategic decisions Dwight goddamn Eisenhower didn’t have the nuts to follow through on, held the fortunes of the nation in his hand and she had to watch that bullshit? The way the agents’ eyes avoided him, guilty little men. Didn’t know. Not them or Butterfield or Rose Mary or any of them.

He had to look over his goddamn shoulder at Moorer and someone with the fucking CIA was leaking like a sieve to the next administration. Had to keep Laird in line now that he knew, at least he’d only given Laird a couple of days to adjust to the operational realities. At least Moorer had set up a direct line to the Enterprise, that was how you kept an eye on the bullshit. Speaking of which, Christ, Henry, Henry was full of it and trying to keep every damn body happy. So what if the President of the United States made a personal call to Thieu and told him if he didn’t want to end up in the same goddamn trunk as Diem he’d sign? There was a point where you played it straight. It benefited nobody, just nobody, if you tried to bluff it out with no time to bluff. Anyway Henry cleaned up stuff like that all the time. At least now the press were on about how that fucking cracker lawyer Moore had screwed it up, pushed too hard too fast. They were trying to let the wop off, Rodino — why did Manny Celler have to go at exactly the wrong time? Never could trust Democrats — that he was running a tight ship and showed patience and statesmanship, just the Counsel’s office had tried to do too much at once. Wiggins was all over that, good for him. A couple of hours of it wasn’t so bad because you could see what the other bastards were up to. Debating like they could do a damn thing to a sitting President. At least that one, the new one, black lady from Texas — wasn’t that a thing — could speak well. She had more balls than the rest of those useless bastards. Well spoken, polite, convinced of the worth of the Constitution like a good American should be. That’s what he was going to defend. The goddamn gooks had a day. They could sign the treaty — for what that was worth, fucking pieces of paper — and give him the peace America deserved or they could fucking burn. He could not care less. He could see the big picture.

He wasn’t expecting Julie, as he waited. They kept up his calendar even when he didn’t want it, to look presidential, to keep the business of government going. Now, even when they had half the goddamn rats off the ship and Ehrlichman under indictment — John, what did they think he did that hadn’t needed to be done, that wasn’t part of the business? When a President or his men needed to do what needed done, that was okay — you had to keep up and see these useless bastards from State and Treasury and the goddamn AFL-CIO. He wouldn’t even let them bring the McGovern people into the building. Not into the West Wing. They could hold those meetings somewhere else if they had to, anywhere in Washington, he hated the town anyway and it wouldn’t bother him there. But he’d seen Julie nowhere on the upcoming logs until someone put her there. Butterfield, maybe. It was so good to see her. Such energy, such life. Integrity. Here she was a young wife and trying to manage a career, too, more on her plate than Julie had, and there was nothing she wanted so much as to help her old dad, to defend that … that purpose, the dignity, the vision, to people. So many sunshine patriots, not enough real friends. Bebe, yes, probably Connally but he had a career to think about so it paid to lay low. So good to see her.

Julie had it. Trish, she was a sweet young woman and the apple of his eye but that’s all she was going to be, and that was all right. Julie had it. She understood the virtues others had a hard time seeing, she saw straight through to what he really meant, what he tried to do. And she understood how to make that clear, really she had a man’s head for public relations, maybe even for politics. She was so clear. Forthright. When she talked to him about legacy, she had a point. That’s what this was about, wasn’t it? Legacy? To make peace for America, to end the damn Democrats’ war, to think big enough to formulate a real solution. To be a man, who stood with the giants who’d held this office, those who knew how to do what was necessary. Julie had a point, though. It was important that people understand. Hard to have leverage if people had closed minds. Flexibility mattered. How you got things done was that you adapted. You never budged beyond a certain line and then inside it you adapted to deal with the circumstances. He had that spirit about him, she could see that. The people who cared, could. You had to be strong, it was just a question of what was the right sort of strength.

Then there was Henry on the phone. Henry who for all his faults was always there, who stayed in the game even when it was tough, although you still had to tell him what to do or he’d go up his own ass trying to cover himself. We can get this done, Henry said. They’re ready. Really? Because there’s no time. No. Time. Those idiots on Judiciary were trying to force a vote, trying to game the goddamn system just to make it difficult for him, when they thought he was vulnerable, thought he’d be weak. We will get it done, soothed Henry. We’ve been this before, all the way along this journey. Thieu is already there because he knows what’s coming with McGovern. They’ll sign? Yes. This is crucial for several reasons. Several reasons. It was hard to think of them in the nagging ache of those idiots in Congress, of Laird and Rogers and so many people who did not understand. Of course, said Henry. We need to show the Soviets, show the Chinese, what they’ll be missing if they have to deal with that fantasist McGovern. Henry went on: we will get the agreement the way we want it and they will give it to you. Before Saturday? By Saturday. By Saturday we’ll get Rogers over here and have this signed.

What about the prisoners clause? It was nut-cutting time. If you had to bow out of a game you needed to make damn sure the guy you wanted to lose didn’t inherit the spot with the best hand. We have the language down, said Henry. Agreement on exchange to be negotiated in its particulars and completed by time of withdrawal, Henry went on. This will make sense because this is a big-picture document. Of course it is, that’s the way we always wanted it. No point in getting bogged down in the details, haggling over anything made you look weak. Think big, do the important things, leave the rest to someone else. This is a strategic document, said Henry in his most wearing professorial style, not a tactical one. It guarantees the cease-fire, it guarantees the withdrawal. It guarantees the scope of how both sides will define replenishment and how they’ll sort out the prisoners. Because we can’t leave them behind, that would be lying after all those guarantees. Can we do that? Do we need to push them?

There was a little hesitation there on the line. You could feel the twitch of Henry’s fear, the damn Jewish knack for self-preservation. This was legacy stuff, just like Julie said. We have set out the terms for arranging release, Henry said. If McGovern can’t get enough people out or has troubles with that, that’s his lookout. We are being open and forthright about everything we and the South plan to do under this treaty. It sets out a path to define the self-determination referendum too. Do we need to get into that kind of thing? Yes, Henry replied. It’s what you say, Mr. President, we need to lay out the big picture. That does not mean we have to carry through all of the big picture now. This is a peace treaty, not a treaty about the details of disengagement or self-determination. This is a treaty that makes peace, and that can get us to those places. Because that’s what we can do. Yes, said Henry. They can have a day. Henry cavilled and clarified. A day. One damn day. You had to have a feel for things to leave a legacy that counted. Twenty-four extra hours on the clock. Yes, Mr. President, replied Henry who understood what he was to say by not saying. Make that clear. Crystal.

The time passed; tired time, slow, foggy time, a waiting room of a world. But there was supposed to be relief at the end. This would prove he’d done what he said he would do. Prove it even to the people who didn’t get it. Maybe nobody got it. Bob couldn’t look at him straight, the bastard, after all they’d done together. Sometimes people couldn’t see what was in front of them. And now Rogers wanted a Cabinet meeting. Rogers! How did he think he had any goddamn leverage? Tear it up — don’t bother reading it all the way through. Just tear it up, it doesn’t matter. That gutless coward Laird leaked to Rogers. Hardly surprising. Not any less surprising that it would’ve been too damn late, that it was a choice to give Hanoi just enough room to see what was in front of them before they hit the wall. That there were still surprises in store. If the parties did not sit down to sign he would burn it down. Not just the warning shots either. Six hours. They could face the first blows and then Hanoi had six hours to do everything, sign, everything including the prisoners. Or there would be another jet plane, with two bombs itself, and right over the city. Burn it all, Hanoi, the leadership, even our own men if it brings peace. He knew what Trish had said about legacies. But in his heart, in a strange way, he wanted it. Wanted it because then people would know, they would see and know and hate themselves for thinking that this bullshit, this hell he lived in, was worth inflicting. He felt it most when his legs hurt; maybe nothing, maybe the phlebitis again. If they killed him, then goddammit he was going to die on his feet. He would do what no other men had the guts to do, always.

Time was a pain-pricked furze of waiting, of drink and drink and drink and not knowing. When they tried to talk to him, Bob or Butterfield or Rose Mary, he just waved them off. This was the big time. This was where it was real. All the useless bullshit — this was real. Where he would be measured. Playwrights, they’d try to capture this and fail. The goddamn useless country had robbed him of his presidency but he would have his legacy nonetheless. And that legacy would be peace, peace in a wasteland if he had to have it. The wasteland was what there was.

Henry called. They had the final copy. They had the copy and it had circulated and now Rodgers needed to get on a plane. Because they’ll sign in time? Yes. They will sign in time. They will sign at ten o’clock Saturday morning, Paris time, if we can guarantee Rodgers and we can keep the South in line, said Henry. Saturday? Definitely Saturday. The protocols were set, the final draft had passed through the Politburo in Hanoi for approval. Saturday? Saturday. Because if not, by Christ… Saturday, Henry came back again, like mindfulness, like a prayer. Signed in entirety? Yes. So that’s it. Mr. President, Henry went on as he was wont to when things looked good for him, we are going to have the peace treaty and have it on your watch. Peace, then. The word was like rum, all the rum on a good day down in the Keys, with Bebe and fishing and a roomful of men without a damned care about the business of the world. Peace, Mr. President, was the answer. The facts gnawed. The prisoners, the violations, the geopolitics when it came unstuck and didn’t matter about the South and the future. Didn’t matter. Fuck them. Bastards. There would be peace. His peace.

He watched them do it, watched the goddamn networks split the screen as they’d figured out how to do because they could let him have nothing, nothing ever. But he didn’t care. Didn’t care about this town or the press or any goddamn bit of it. What mattered was the left of the screen. On the left while the bourbon and Dilantin wore off, while his legs throbbed, men in dark suits set in a ballroom in Paris, around a grand table, and signed another goddamn piece of paper. But this one mattered. This was his peace. He was a man; he kept his promises. There would be peace for the American people, for all they could do to keep it. If that feckless idiot McGovern couldn’t keep it then fuck him. Fuck him. Richard Nixon had made peace. Richard Nixon would be vindicated. He watched the right of the screen too, where they’d scrambled towards it, practically fucking tripped over themselves, ignored all the sensible people who told them this was all just for show now, that they had no power, no right, just their own vanity. That’s all this was anyway, vanity.

Five counts: they voted against three of them. Even Democrats. All this foolishness and they couldn’t make their lies stick. He didn’t know how they’d made the conspiracy count stick, and by one vote — even he didn’t know what anybody meant by all that back then anyway. How could they pretend to? When they had to rely on other people — practically hearsay. That goddamn bastard Colson. Trusted. Bastard. And abuse of power. They didn’t know what power was. Power was when you could end a goddamn nation in fire. Power was when you didn’t because you knew that made you even more powerful, because you let them live with their fear. He watched the vote. What was it Jack Kennedy used to say? “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” Right. Never been more right. Never forget, never forgive. He didn’t care about it, anyway.

 

[Yes]

Choice and Circumstance ​

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

- Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway​

It was the toilet paper that sent Gary Hart round the bend, perhaps most of all because the President-elect later had a good laugh about it. Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1963 the Executive Branch, through the civil-service General Services Administration, made available departmental reports, operating funds, secretarial resources, and office space for staff attached to the campaign of the President-elect. The view was that this let the new crowd ride along a little with the outbound administration, get briefed on both the policy points and the day to day running of large departments, and do the work of figuring out how they would do the work for the next four years from close to the seat of the action. When Hart and a few key staffers arrived at offices in the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the besieged Nixon White House, they found file cabinets, typewriters, organizational handbooks, reams of paper, drawing boards … and toilet paper. Several of the smaller offices, indeed, seemed mostly to be full of toilet paper, neatly wrapped in paper packaging with United States Government seals on it.

Some of the staffers were bemused, some offended, some just shrugged and got on with it. Others queried. More precisely, “the fuck?” said the necktied yet woolly-haired Bill Clinton to Gary Hart. Hart said nothing, just nothing, simply narrowed his eyes.

Doug Coulter, who had a knack with such things and a survivor of combat’s understanding of gallows humor, educated the Arkansan. “It’s because they think we’re full of shit, Bill,” he said calmly. “That’s why.” A cheap ink pen snapped in Gary Hart’s hand not more than a minute later.

Certainly that was the spirit of it more often than not, as political appointees and devoted staffers of the Nixon administration dealt with the younger, scruffier, or occasionally older, more arch, and more liberal McGovern newcomers. Typewriters were supplied without ribbons. Keys were “lost” to file cabinets. Inkpens were drained. Erasers had been stuck in toaster ovens and hardened until useless. Coffee pots were tampered with, short-circuited by way of interference. People removed the “A” and “a” keys from keyboards, or scrawled “AAA” — Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion — on chalkboards. Locks to bathrooms were jammed. It was a long, slow, ratfucking thrum of malfeasance that mostly served only to harden hearts in the new administration. Some brave woman — there were few to choose from — in the McGovern crew walked down to the bathroom favored by the secretarial pool of the Executive Office of the President and scrawled “HE IS A CROOK” in vast lipstick letters across the long mirror. No love was there to lose.

By and large the same spirit pervaded communications between the two camps, such as those communications were. When John Kenneth Galbraith and Edwin Kuh turned up in Washington to talk to the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget, with the OMB they dealt with a communications system that seemed willfully determined to lose their messages, and with the Treasury there was silence from their Monday request a week after the election until that Thursday, when a staffer from the Deputy Secretary’s office turned up. He bore what amounted to a newsletter commonly passed around Congress. Galbraith replied icily, “you tell George,” in reference to the burly corporate economist from Illinois, George Schultz, the incumbent Secretary, “that any time he wants to talk about policy he can just drop by. In the meanwhile I will simply assume that tiger bit into his higher functions.” The tiger was a reference to the well-known story that Schultz, a proud Princeton athlete in his youth, had a tattoo of the school’s mascot on his backside. When Schultz asked exactly how Galbraith had replied — Kuh, a methodical econometrician, shut his trap and let Galbraith get on with it — the Treasury Secretary had a rejoinder. “Tell Galbraith those headaches from the weather up there must be getting to him. If he can pay out of the campaign fund I’ll be happy to sign off on some aspirin to go with his briefing.” And so it went.

There were honorable exceptions; two of the most notable surprised no one, being William Rogers and Elliot Richardson. Rogers was happy simply to have someone take his standing as Secretary of State seriously. He sat down no less than four times in person with a small delegation of Phil Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Sargent Shriver, and Robert Sherman, McGovern’s able, thirtyish national security staffer from the campaign. There they discussed the SALT Treaty, the status of American embassies overseas and potential turnover in ambassadors, the state of Rogers’ shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, and issues in the administration of the department. Phil Hart asked detailed questions, as did Shriver who also palled around with his fellow East Coast Establishmentarian Rogers. Sherman scribbled away at his notebook, while Mankiewicz was mildly charmed by a man clearly too upright to stay in Nixon's good graces.

Elliot Richardson, meanwhile, gave a steady rhythm of sparely written but detailed briefs on the state of the criminal investigations that had ensnared the outgoing White House staff. At the height of irony, Richardson also assigned a senior Justice Department official to brief McGovern’s legal staff, led at the time by Gary Hart, on the administrative state of the department and on the work of the special prosecutor: the acting director of the FBI, Mark Felt. His other briefings, the ones in darkened, dampened parking garages for the Post, carried on undaunted. Felt juggled the roles with ruthless smoothness.

The key question, though, revolved around national security. After Miami, in the spirit of a precedent set by Nixon’s old boss Dwight Eisenhower, George McGovern received occasional intelligence briefings from a senior CIA officer. Dick Helms kept these magnificently vague, to the point that McGovern himself commented on the fact. With the election won, Helms shifted approach and provided a secured copy of the President’s Daily Briefing, the same summary of intelligence estimates and predictions that landed on Nixon’s desk every morning. This was valuable stuff, and advertised as a show of the intelligence community’s capabilities. But it lacked context — especially, it lacked any word of what Nixon would do about it. And as the Paris Talks trailed away by the end of November, that was a question on every mind.

McGovern chafed against what he got. He went to fellow senators, he petitioned through letters and memos to Helms, to the White House, to Mel Laird at the Pentagon. That led to stone-faced meetings between Admiral Moorer on one hand, Paul Warnke and John Holum on the other, about the state of US forces in Southeast Asia and American nuclear policy. McGovern, the historian in search of an archive, pressed the point on intelligence. In time that got him a sit-down with Lt. Gen. Lew Allen, freshly christened director of the National Security Agency, and a long, twisty discussion of precisely what the nation’s codemakers and codebreakers could do. But that by its nature dodged the real question — what the hell was Dick Nixon up to in Vietnam, or elsewhere, and what did he mean to leave in McGovern’s lap on January 20th?

There the context changed. After Thanksgiving, as December rushed in, something… altered. The signal moment was when Vernon Walters, still Deputy Director of the CIA, came in person to meet with McGovern and a select team of aides. The words said in the meeting were on their face unremarkable, but also laden with possible meanings. But it was what Walters did that caught Doug Coulter’s eye. Chosen purely because of his military background to sit in, Coulter picked up the tells. They were little things, but they were coreographed. The time Coulter spent wondering if Walters meant it was short. Coulter settled quickly on the answer: this was tradecraft. Walters wanted to see if anyone on the McGovern team could pick up unspoken signs. As the meeting closed Coulter responded in kind. As hands were shaken at the end, Walters simply nodded as he looked to Coulter. Sometimes it was good to hide a sign in plain sight. With that, and respectful of Coulter’s say so, George McGovern sat down with Frank Mankiewicz, and Phil Hart, and Coulter, Robert Sherman, and Sarge Shriver, to decipher what Walters might have meant in the meeting.

A week later they met again. McGovern asked several pointed questions, which Walters answered with mild evasion before he passed papers to the President-elect. On a hunch they were tested for invisible ink which sure enough was there. Sometimes the best tricks were the simplest. The message set out reference points for a meeting at a park near the Potomac Canal. Based on what they had already gleaned, McGovern did not hesitate to tap the lean, crook-nosed, contemplative Coulter as the campaign’s emissary. “It’s a good thing no one in town really knows who the hell my people are even now,” said McGovern. Coulter nodded and said that was true enough. So off into the wet, hard cold of the Washington winter he went.

Once there, Coulter waited for something unremarkable to happen. That was how it worked, he had the presence of mind to know. Ordinary person, ordinary interaction, nothing to see, extraordinary results. Still, the sheer scale of ordinariness took Coulter aback. On a park bench, marked on the metal behind its crossbeams with an intelligence agent’s hobo code for a meet, Coulter sat down. He was faced soon enough by one of the most remarkable unremarkable men in the American government: the slight, bespectacled Bill Colby, possibly the most successful field man in the whole goddamn CIA and now boss of its Clandestine Service, the guys newspaper readers would call honest to God spies. They executed the drop with the least flickers of recognition on their faces, Coulter who looked like a harried young associate at a D.C. law firm, Colby one of nature’s actuaries. So it was that the presidential transition team got their hands on their first copy of a fourteen-page CIA briefing on potential military options for the Nixon administration as political leverage to drive Hanoi back to the talks in Paris. More would follow on the underground stream.

In his memoir, Coming Home: A Life in American Politics, McGovern mused briefly and a little cryptically about Walters’ role as impresario in that process. “In the matter of getting a handle on what actually was going on, with the [Nixon] administration’s policy on Vietnam in particular, we had an unexpected avenue to the facts opened for us by Vernon Walters…. Whether his motives were those of a whistleblower or what we might call a true conservative, interested in preserving institutions and the status quo against what he saw as Nixon policies that rocked the boat very sharply, was never clear. That was in keeping with the man. Walters always played his cards very close, and if presented with a sufficiently pragmatic course of action followed the orders even of a liberal like me with drive and his exceptional wits about him.”

Doug Coulter in his own autobiography Under the Wire, published just after the turn of the century, worked over the question more openly. “It was a time full of unnamed sources in the right places — those were the conductors of information who really brought the whole Nixon edifice crashing down — and Walters was certainly one of them.

“When I looked back on it later the word I came up with was ‘tutelary.’ He’d guided that first briefing to discover whether any of us picked up on his tradecraft. When he figured out I had, the next step was to use me as messenger, to figure out whether the President-elect could sort through the multiple meanings of what he said and find the right ones, like tumblers in a lock. Then there was the whole business with Bill Colby, which I look back on now with something close to awe, that Walters so clearly and cleanly played one of the best true spies, in a novel-reader’s sense of the word, who ever worked for the United States.

“Walters knew that in his heart of hearts Colby was a desperate, a conflicted, man. An idealistic liberal in his youth, Colby had been on the hard front lines of the Cold War for years, suborned bad outcomes for what he thought was the greater good, waded in blood up to his elbows with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Walters read, correctly, the silent tells of how badly Colby still wanted to serve a higher purpose, or at least ransom the sins of a long career with the Agency. But whether that was Vernon Walters dropping the dime on Nixonian excess, or whether it was ‘boiling the frog’ — getting us used to the dirty game of national security policy so we wouldn’t let the team down — that was harder to say. I cannot now answer for certain. And Walters to this day smiles that smile crossed between a grandfatherly priest and a high school coach, and won’t say.”

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Amid all this, overshadowed daily in the news (”It’s like we didn’t even win,” groused Gary Hart at one point), the McGovern team got on with the business of turning their gifted, lucky, but also ramshackle campaign into a government. It became clear quickly that while the President-elect himself expressed a few clear ideas about who he wanted to handle the levers of the Executive Branch, by and large he had what Frank Mankiewicz called, with a gentle kind of scolding, a “ruminative view.” McGovern would rather talk policy or principles than map out who took what office. It didn’t help, of course, that it seemed like the only news there was about the campaign (other than one or two brief, dangerous rumbles about “Fort Wayne” in regional newspapers) were speculative leaks staged either by the Nixon administration on their way out, or by unnamed Democratic sources likely to be the same legislators who now expected “a plurality President” to dance to their tune in the name of smooth government. That by itself got McGovern’s back up and, to the minds of several close advisers, tended to distract him when work needed to get done.

One question, which sprang from the need to get on with it, was who would do the work. Near the end of November four people stepped forward to do something about the slow, oddly self-assured, but thus far unprepared transition process. One, with untypical forthrightness, was Phil Hart. A quiet but diligent and detailed worker, he had seen the loosely-fastened campaign come unstuck at the wheels several times in the fall, and wanted at all costs to avoid more of that now. A second was Frank Mankiewicz, always with his eye on the strategic picture. The third was Eleanor McGovern herself, driven again by her own sound instincts about political judgment and with a more detached eye than her husband’s. The fourth would have seemed unexpected two or three months before, but he had become an important foreign policy surrogate and occasional adviser down the breathless stretch in October — another one of Ed Muskie’s bequests to the campaign — Clark Clifford.

Together, in a combination of brief meetings and many phone calls or individual conversations, they decided McGovern needed not one support network but two. One would get into the weeds of policy and look at how to develop McGovern’s platform as directions for Cabinet-level departments or as proposed legislation. By temperament McGovern himself would probably stick closer to that small band, make more of his time poring over their legal-length notes and typed papers. The other working body would be a kitchen cabinet of senior people who would look over the key offices that needed people in them, from the Cabinet on down, and come up with acceptable names to put before their guy. It was tidy that way, said Eleanor. From a Scandinavian daughter of prairie culture this was high praise. She then “told George by asking,” in a typical turn of phrase, how it would be and to the pleasure of her co-conspirators it was. By the Monday after Thanksgiving they finally had a handle on things.

The policy wranglers even got a fancy name for themselves courtesy of Clark Clifford’s dry wit: the Policy Priorities Board. It had four members: Gary Hart as the official boss, McGovern’s tireless right-hand analyst John Holum, Jean Westwood who brought both a background in domestic issues and the power of her role until the new year as Democratic National Committee chair to keep Hart in line, and the number-crunching econometrician Edwin Kuh, one of the brains trust of progressive economists who had rallied very early to the McGovern cause. There was plenty for them to get on with. The withdrawal from Southeast Asia, reform of the tax and welfare systems, a push for national health care, comprehensive food and farm policy reform, a new breadth to legal enforcement of civil rights, and a more integrated and less militarized approach to national security — all that was there, laid out in reams of outline numbers, bullets, scraps of research, position papers scrawled out in a lawyer’s ragged hand by Hart with his bare feet up on a coffee table or bashed out on a noisy little portable by John Holum, and Ed Kuh with his charts on pockmarked computer printouts.

It didn’t take long for them to recruit other bodies — Rick Stearns and a rather petulant Pat Caddell stretched the formal numbers to six, and a series of young aides came in and out in support as they all made camp in Hart’s newly rented Adams-Morgan row house. Mankiewicz laid down one rule early on, and was as pleased as he was surprised that Gary Hart supported him. That was, there would be no trial balloons, no planned leaks of proposals or language or specifics. That would all wait until the President-elect could speak his mind to the nation, and not come out when a chance to attack those ideas might give the Nixon people relief from their self-inflicted apocalypse.

While the “board” got on with their work in the full furious spirit of the idea-rich primaries campaign last spring, the kitchen cabinet got down to work. Mankiewicz pulled together what he called his “gang of four” for the job. They were himself, Phil Hart every bit the activist running mate, Larry O’Brien the consummate party insider and weather vane for how these picks would be treated, and that semi-permanent fixture of Democratic administrations Clark Clifford. Not a wild-eyed experimentalist in the room, Mankiewicz was pleased to say, even if some of the campaign’s close friends not to mention Pat Caddell sounded worried. Mankiewicz liked to say that the policy gang were the idealists, all things considered, and you needed those to push you forward, while the personnel team were the realists. Caddell again begged to differ saying in a twelve-page memo with internals from two different post-election surveys, that the belief that George McGovern would shake things up was key to favorable opinions of him. Mankiewicz answered that he appreciated that, but there were also 535 people in Congress and nine on the Supreme Court whose opinions were going to matter a hell of a lot as well and you had to try and strike a balance, or at least a bargain. Caddell fugued quietly as he often did.

The “gang of four” turned first to the subject most likely to be a sore point with Congress: foreign and national security policy. By virtue of rank Secretary of State was the senior Cabinet job anyway, and it also forced the committee to face a thorny issue up front. Clark Clifford himself, who had been one of Ed Muskie’s senior-most advisers on any issue, deeply wanted the job, and would have been assured of it had the Muskie campaign not come undone in the New Hampshire snow. Now, though, both Phil Hart and Mankiewicz sought a defined role for Clifford in the foreign policy realm much like Dean Acheson had performed for Jack Kennedy, an unofficial-official wise man, part adviser and part tutor, though McGovern’s own interest in foreign affairs was actually sharp and well defined.

The four men had few doubts about McGovern’s own feelings, however. McGovern had been on good terms for years with Sargent Shriver, the charming, upper-class Kennedy in-law who had launched the Peace Corps (Frank Mankiewicz had worked as the Corps’ first Latin American regional director) and served as Ambassador to France. But the fall campaign cemented the relationship. Shriver had experience, ineffable charm, like McGovern a solid war record, credibility with the party, and a powerful ally in his bother-in-law Ted Kennedy (unlike Bobby, who had always looked down on Shriver, Ted considered “Sarge” a dear friend and true member of the clan.) Shriver also had a talent for getting McGovern’s ear in group discussions, a good knack for a senior counselor; Secretary of State it was.

On the harder edges of national security, Clifford and Mankiewicz together mapped out something like a balance-of-power system to manage the defense and intelligence apparatus. Indeed it was one of the episodes in the selection process that made “Clark” and “Frank”’s firm friendship; Clifford’s fondness for a quick wit and his rock-ribbed philosemitism made the short, stocky, funny, savvy Jewish guy from Los Angeles with the crooked smile a natural ally to the patrician Midwesterner and Democratic elder. Together they decided Cyrus Vance should return to the Pentagon, this time as Secretary rather than Deputy, that his combination of establishment credibility — as a star of “Averell Harriman’s stable” — and circumspection about both defense contracting and the use of force struck a good balance. Directly below Vance the committee would put Townsend Hoopes, the Yale brahmin and former Air Force Secretary who had penned a telling book The Limits of Intervention about Vietnam and who Lyndon Johnson privately blamed for the airing of the Pentagon Papers. Along with Hoopes came a series of new Under Secretaries with broad organizational headings that would include McGovern’s man John Holum, who had written an exhaustive fifty-odd page defense plan that would slash the Pentagon’s budget by a third (none of the “gang of four” expected that to survive Congress) and who would keep the four-stars honest.

As service secretaries, they came up with a pair of able Congressmen who specialized in the subject matter (for the Army Florida’s war hero and ethics boy scout Charlie Bennett, both a defense hawk and an ardent environmentalist; for the Navy the wily and dogged Otis Pike, Bennett’s House Armed Services colleague and a wartime dive-bomber pilot for the Marines.) For the Air Force they inveigled the starkly non-countercultural Southerner David S. Lewis, who had led the design team for the F-4 Phantom and later helmed both McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics. It was a chance that the “gang of four” took here, but also a hunch backed by Phil Hart that such a team of mixed views would be easier to confirm as a whole.

For the Central Intelligence Agency, the committee decided on a gesture of bipartisan reach to the liberal Republican from California Pete McCloskey, a highly-decorated Korean War hero and former Marine Reserve intelligence officer who had run a quixotic anti-Vietnam primary campaign against Nixon. As for another very senior security analyst close to the President-elect, Paul Warnke, Clifford — who had worked with Warnke at the Pentagon — worried the brilliant but testy defense reformer had powerful enemies in the Senate with regard to arms control. Why not, then, make Warnke National Security Adviser instead, with no need for a confirmation battle? Phil Hart simply smiled and nodded and it was done.

As the committee moved towards domestic policy near the end of the first week of December, two names bubbled quickly to the top of discussion. The first was one of George McGovern’s oldest political allies, a partisan for the presidential bid long before there was one, a dear personal friend and part of McGovern’s dinner group — it was better, really, to say McGovern was part of his dinner group — the legendary Harvard professor, former Ambassador to India, and general of the small army of economists who had flocked to the McGovern banner, John Kenneth Galbraith. McGovern needed someone with a notable, familiar, partisan — McGovern felt strongly about his economic proposals and needed a champion — but also politically adept persona to herd those less-charismatic quantitative thinkers and haggle with Congress. Galbraith was top of the list. Likewise John Kennedy’s Solicitor General, Archibald Cox, was just the sort of reliable but also genuinely principled Establishment liberal they needed to put a steady, trustworthy face on the Justice Department that McGovern wanted more active in several controversial fields. To those ends, however, the group did not hesitate to put forward John Doar, the lion of civil-rights enforcement during the Sixties, as prospective Solicitor General. There were … delicate legal issues ahead with regard to the outgoing administration, it seemed sure. The new administration was going to need someone who could play them absolutely straight and fight them all the way to the end.

Some other appointments were a matter of loyalty: Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh of California, who had done so much to bring the state in for McGovern, at Interior; Frank Morrison, the well-liked former Nebraska governor and one of McGovern’s only loyal friends from the High Plains during the primaries, at Agriculture; Leonard Woodcock, the bookish but relentlessly adept boss of the United Auto Workers, to whom McGovern himself said the campaign owed the election, at Labor. Sometimes it was a matter of pragmatism instead. Into an unsettled discussion McGovern himself introduced the name of Dwayne Andreas for Commerce. The chair of Archer Daniels Midland, known for his spendthrift and sometimes ethically doubtful donations to candidates of both parties, Andreas ran the largest corporate agribusiness in the country. Mankiewicz and Phil Hart both raised questions about whether that fit with a President who planned to do more for the small farmer than anyone had talked about since William Jennings Bryan. McGovern, with the saltiness that was not foreign to his good moods, said he’d rather have Andreas inside the tent pissing out than the other way ‘round.

There were also administrative changes to be made. McGovern and his policy stable wanted Health, Education, and Welfare split in two, feeling it tried to cover too much ground to work. For a new Department of Education, the “gang” decided it was time to fit a Southerner into the Cabinet and put forward Duke University president and 1972 primaries candidate Terry Sanford of North Carolina. For the planned Department of Health and Human Services, they moved to satisfy McGovern’s core constituents again and proposed the driven, intellectual, but prickly young black congressman and civil rights leader Andrew Young. In another bout of pragmatism, McGovern himself wrote a three-page letter by hand that asked outgoing Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney to stay on. Like the “gang,” McGovern himself reckoned it would be impossible for his administration to govern without help from liberal Republicans, and Romney was at his most liberal on housing integration. A man who actually wanted to integrate the country at the neighborhood level, street by street, was first of all at home with the President-elect’s ideals and second could take on a crushing task without making a Democrat pay the political price for it.

McGovern also wanted two entirely novel establishments in the Cabinet. One was a Cabinet-level Department of Veterans’ Affairs, to keep the Democratic Party platform promise to look after the damaged and disheartened veterans of Southeast Asia. Here the conclave picked David M. Shoup: a former Marine Corps Commandant, a Medal of Honor winner during the island-hopping campaigns of World War II, and perhaps the most senior dissenter of the first hour on Vietnam inside the military. That opinion had broken many relationships Shoup held dear; this job might offer a chance to repair some of them, and let him serve again in a different way.

The other new toy in the bureaucracy had been tossed around since the birth of the country: a Department of Peace. It would take charge of the Peace Corps, VISTA and other new initiatives for “a Peace Corps at home” in areas of high urban or rural poverty and decay, as a coordinator of initiatives for things like drug treatment policy and cultural diplomacy, and so on. Critics, including Larry O’Brien and Phil Hart who liked the sentiment but not the execution, called it “a department in search of a job.” But it was a symbol, Frank Mankiewicz pointed out, and they needed at least a few of those to keep friends of the new President happy. The “gang” united in proposing McGovern’s partner on the famous primaries-reform committee that bore their names, Don Fraser of Minnesota, as the first Secretary.

There were other jobs to fill as well below cabinet level and in departments that did not rate membership but held similar rank — the prickly but omnicompetent George Ball as Sarge Shriver’s deputy at State, the brilliant and mercurial economist Lester Thurow to run the Office of Management and Budget, and so on. One of the most forward-looking choices in this array of mostly white men was McGovern’s own inspiration. The tenacious and brilliant Shirley Chisholm, fresh off her historic primary run for the presidency, would in this scheme be the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations. Clark Clifford was actually the first to speak up, vigorously, in favor. From his notes of the meeting Clifford recalled McGovern saying, “We say we’re for a new America. Well, that new America probably ought to have a new face, one that shows where we’re going.” So it was a teacher from Brooklyn, unbought and unbossed, became America’s personal representative to the globe.

This left the question of, as Frank Mankiewicz put it, “who was in the building.” The Executive Office of the President itself needed to be filled. Since this meant the people who would work closest to McGovern both physically and politically, it was a matter of careful choice.

One matter on which they could all agree, however, amounted to a kind of revolution in the way the office did business. Vice President Hart, as he now was (Jean did not hesitate to remind him), would have a formal office in the West Wing, with a small but specifically dedicated policy staff of his own people to work directly with President McGovern. The men had bonded over the course of the campaign; McGovern valued Hart’s decency, his attention to detail, his patience, his personal moderation and his philosophical liberalism both. McGovern made that clear as well: “Phil, I’m not going to do to you what Lyndon did to Hubert, or Eisenhower did to Nixon. I’m just not.” Hart would chair planned policy committees on civil rights, consumer protection, and urban issues, all dear to him. William Welsh, Hart’s longtime aide and legal counsel, would be Chief of Staff to the Vice President, deputized by the able young Harrison Wellford, while Muriel Ferris — another daring pilot like Mrs. Hart — would be Hart’s senior policy adviser. Anthony Lake, the State Department wunderkind who had resigned over the Cambodia invasion in 1970 and aided Ed Muskie’s spring campaign, would be Phil Hart’s own national security adviser. This gave the Vice President a proper staff of his own and jobs of substance that would help make this presidency work. It was the least they all could do.

Then there was McGovern’s direct staff to sort out. The conclave agreed, on behalf of one of their own, that Frank Mankiewicz would hold down not one job but two. The Office of Counsel to the President, mighty by its very vagueness, would belong to Frank, with the indispensable Gene Pokorny as his deputy there. This was on the organization charts themselves the guy who sat at McGovern’s left hand; it was a matter of both comfort and necessity for Mankiewicz to keep that up in the storms ahead. He would also become White House Communications Director, because in his own words he’d never met a microphone he didn’t like and because he believed in his marrow that the press would save or kill this presidency. Dick Dougherty would keep his job as press secretary. Even mild Phil Hart smiled at the contrast between the knobbled, chainsmoking part-time poet and Nixon’s sallow young creature Ron Ziegler. As White House Counsel, lawyer to the Executive Office itself, the “gang” weighed their options and McGovern himself intervened for Ramsey Clark. Lyndon Johnson’s former attorney general, Clark’s politics seemed to move further left with each passing month, and on that score McGovern argued that this would show the dispossessed and disillusioned out there in the country that this White House took their interests seriously (if they could pick the White House Counsel out of a lineup, Mankiewicz said under his breath as Clark Clifford smiled.)

There were policy jobs up too, and here at last there was a substantive opening beyond the men’s club. Jean Westwood would take over the Office of Domestic Policy, staffed more deeply and with more topical subdivisions than in John Ehrlichman’s day, where she would rank on legislation development up there with Mankiewicz as Counsel to the President and the White House Chief of Staff. For the Office of Public Liaison, the administration’s diplomat to vested domestic interests, Larry O’Brien proposed — and it was accepted — one of the maestros of the fall campaign and another Muskie veteran, the brilliant and formidable Anne Wexler. This was an administration that planned to trek with policy deep into the weeds, which meant Westwood and Wexler had their jobs cut out for them and that they would need leeway to make judgments and get McGovern’s ear when it was important.

For that, the conclave wanted a capable and above all thoughtful gatekeeper, who could keep the trains on time and also balance the egos and agendas of the West Wing players. For that they looked to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff role — it was Clifford who suggested the Deputy should take on the everyday running of the West Wing so the Chief of Staff could manage Cabinet- and Congressional-level access to McGovern — and there they combed resumes before putting forward Doug Coulter. As Larry O’Brien observed with unexpected wit, “he was the only Harvard MBA who’d led Montagnards in combat we could find at the time.”

There was a run of other positions to sort through as well, long days over cigarettes and coffee and rolodexes and scrawled notes on letterhead. But there remained one crucial job to fill: White House Chief of Staff. This was McGovern’s right arm, manager of the President’s day, conductor and stage manager of his relations with Secretaries and Senators and ambassadors and such, and in theory the last word before George McGovern’s own on the yeas or nays of policy formation. For that job there were two substantial choices left who McGovern seemed likely to consider, the “gang”’s own Larry O’Brien and Gary Hart. At the same time, the job of United States Trade Representative was still open, kept in reserve on Clifford’s suggestion, with Phil Hart’s approval, as a consolation prize for the loser of this particular contest. It carried Cabinet rank even if it was not part of that body, and an ambitious sort of guy could parlay it into a secretaryship later, or a lifetime of corporate board memberships and personal wealth. In most ways, said Clark Clifford drily, it was the better end of the deal.

Clifford and Mankiewicz made up their minds almost immediately, while O’Brien recused himself. Phil Hart thought it over, as he was wont to do, but in the end he granted the other two probably had it right. They would put their case together and go as a trio to McGovern, rather than have him come to them as he did every few days for a briefing and list of candidates. There they’d put Larry O’Brien forward. He would keep the party happy, the big names in Congress felt they knew O’Brien, and he would run the trains soberly and on time until he backed out for corporate life.

It was McGovern himself who turned things upside down. While the personnel team wound their way around towards a big finish for O’Brien, McGovern made his feeling clear. He wanted Gary Hart for the job. Clifford, ever the lawyer, delicately worked his way over some points to consider; Frank Mankiewicz shook not even his head but just his burly chin, and Clifford took the signal. The discussion was done. McGovern wanted what he wanted.

There were two schools of thought about that. In his later memoirs So As I Was Saying, Mankiewicz stepped inside his old friend McGovern’s head and walked through the process. “I think George McGovern — the President-elect now, I was still reminding myself — looked at himself and he looked at Gary, and he saw their common roots. The boyhoods on the high prairie, the religious upbringing that drove their work ethics each in their own way, the self-made self reliance. George had won himself the biggest job in the world by pretty much the devil’s own luck, and things were in a hell of a mess on top of that. To pick Gary out as the man who’d run his staff every day, then, was a flight to the familiar.”

In his own cavernous autobiography, Good Counsel, Clark Clifford turned to British wit to voice dissent. “Larry O’Brien was the sensible choice,” Clifford said with authority. “He was the way to put President McGovern’s best foot forward with his own party, among whom skepticism reared its ugly head now that they looked at the prospect of his presence in the Oval Office. Gary Hart on the other hand had an undeniable appeal to the President, but heart had beaten head more than once during the presidential campaign, often at real political cost. It reminded me of a remark once made about the great Welsh firebrand of Britain’s Labour Party, Nye Bevan, another idealist in his own way, and Bevan’s choice of a wife just as outspoken and confrontational as he was. ‘Nye needed a sedative,’ said a fellow politician of that marriage, ‘he got an irritant.’ I came away from the decision to make Gary Hart Chief of Staff with those words firm in my mind.”

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By then it had come up on Christmas. The next President had to hold his bitter tongue while he watched more bombs fall on Hanoi, and Dick Dougherty looked worn thin from putting reporters off the scent of unnamed sources on how McGovern’s people really felt about potential charges against Richard Nixon. The meetings after New Year’s about how to put together vanilla statements about due process and the rule of law as the House Judiciary ramped up both bored and irritated McGovern. He wanted to write draft bills, not figure out how to stay on the good side of the press about the hunt for the great white whale Richard Nixon. But at least, with the Ninety-Third Congress sworn in, they could get on with getting his people in front of the Senate for confirmation.

This became Larry O’Brien’s special job; he wasn’t the most sparkling or decisive guy, Mankiewicz observed in private, but he knew how to turn the bureaucratic wheels. O’Brien brought together several key people from the transitional staff who had proved themselves able, including Gene Pokorny and the policy board’s Rick Stearns, and spent two days solid over which they put together what amounted to a batting order, a carefully blended mix of primary and secondary appointments with attention to which senators were on more than one committee and the makeup of each. Stearns the caucus guru was especially good at this. Armed with that dossier, O’Brien lived on the telephone for a third day as he lined up the entrants. There was plenty afoot already in the new Congress thanks to the Nixon crew; this needed to make itself a high contrast, an exercise that showed at least some people connected to the new administration could run things smoothly.

The best theater of it all, as everyone should have expected, was Galbraith’s hearing, where he nearly got ahead of himself sparring with Republican senators but had the good sense to rein in his wit in the end. What he did do, in the meanwhile, was make the clearest, most methodical case for McGovern’s planned tax regime anyone had heard yet. He also parried a variety of questions from the stodgy voices of senatorial economics. When Bill Roth of Delaware floated a question about monetarism, Galbraith answered in … Galbraithian style. “I have known Milton Friedman a long time,” said Galbraith, as he cut to the political chase. “Milton has a walking brief for the defense of avarice; I’ve never known anyone else with the gumption to describe a massive upwards transfer of wealth as ‘consumer choice.’” To Russell Long’s line of inquiry about the Mills-Mansfield revenue review of the previous year, Galbraith held forth again. “Several of us told President Johnson very clearly, we said to him that you have to tax, and tax now, or all the good we’ve done is going to get away from us. You cannot spend money like water, as Harold Macmillan aptly described it, unless you also maintain the tax base. Now on balance, we have had a very, very good last twenty years, perhaps even twenty-five if you look at it from certain angles. If we are to have any hope to continue that, we cannot turn our backs on that simple reality to hurl money at the military, or even at domestic programs, or especially just to let financial speculation be unconfined.”

As much as he could, and almost more than some of his more orthodox Keynesian colleagues tied to the administration wanted, he also sounded the gong on inflation. “Before we hurl ad hominems like potatoes at the President-elect and all read out of Republican opposition research like the Book of Common Prayer, saying that the mere fact of him has caused nervous exhaustion in the markets, let us look very carefully at what’s happened to the liquidity of the economy in the last year. And … and at its unsustainable, indeed unhinged growth rate in the middle two quarters. Never was an election more artfully bribed even if it didn’t take. I look forward to a very uncomfortable lunch with Arthur Burns about that in the near future.” Though genuine doubts were raised in some quarters, Russell Long herded the vote with an injunction to his colleagues that, “Galbraith’s going to keep our minds on the job when we tell him what he can’t do.” The Treasury Secretary-designate passed muster.

Other hearings passed more smoothly: Cy Vance was crisp and diligent, Sarge Shriver’s trip before Senate Foreign Relations was like a cocktail party. Lester Thurow’s confirmation at OMB bogged down for a time in technical detail as he frankly befuddled some committee members with his labyrinthine mind and friendly delivery, but came around in the end. Jesse Unruh and Paul Fannin — the Arizonan senator who oftentimes managed to be to his partner Barry Goldwater’s right on the issues — bristled at one another over conservation and Environmental Protection Agency regulations. But to the surprise of many Scoop Jackson, who chaired Interior and Insular Affairs, decided this was not the moment to throw stones at his fellow Democrats and shut down Fannin’s momentum. Archibald Cox was entirely unflappable in front of the Judiciary Committee. John Doar and chairman James Eastland faced off on inevitable conflicts over civil rights enforcement, but Doar’s name moved out to a general vote even as Eastland himself turned against the nomination.

The Senate was perhaps hardest on Townsend Hoopes, on whom both John Stennis and Scoop Jackson came down with the latter actually voting against him. Indeed Jackson went far enough to raise the issues Lyndon Johnson had expressed about the Pentagon Papers, which the genteel Hoopes — who nevertheless had once been a Marine lieutenant on Iwo Jima — icily denied. Stennis instead preferred to steer the committee to confirmation with enough read into the record to say I told you so if there was trouble later. In that he was ultimately joined by a bipartisan committee vote though Hoopes’ floor vote was, together with John Doar’s and Andrew Young’s, the closest of any. To general surprise, Stennis actually toned down the hearing on John Holum, on the argument that there were enough people over his head to rein him in, and a good debate would keep the uniforms on their toes. Otherwise as the tempo of confirmation hearings picked up their political noise stayed quiet, a low thrum under the clash and tearing of gears in the investigative committees.

The first bits of legislation started, quietly, to make their way too. Phil Hart, constantly back and forth between his townhouse and the Senate offices, scored the nearly shocking coup of Barry Goldwater’s co-sponsorship, with Walter Mondale, of a Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Hart, a quiet sort of operator, let Goldwater draw out a contrast with his hated foe Richard Nixon. The senator from Arizona said to the press mob, “we may have a flock of doves and a bunch of naivety headed for the White House, but if they’re going to be more forthright about supporting our veterans than the Nixon administration ever was, we owe it to those fine men to nudge these folks in the right direction.”

The proposed Department of Peace was shepherded in the Senate by two of its staunchest advocates, Jennings Randolph of West Virginia who had sponsored bills to create it since the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and the deeply religious liberal Republican Mark Hatfield. In the House young Ron Dellums wrote the corresponding bill for the DoP but Majority Whip Tip O’Neill gave respectability and cover. It cleared the House smoothly but faced trouble in the Senate as Ed Gurney and James Eastland ganged up on it over cloture, the “vote to vote.” But an ideologically mixed conclave of Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Goldwater, and ultraliberal Jack Javits came to Gurney to ask nicely if he would give this one a pass, that the GOP needed to look polite and respectable with a new President right now and should leave the other side enough rope to hang themselves. So it was that Benjamin Rush’s dream came true two centuries on.

Now, together, McGovern’s people looked to that mythic and entirely dreamed-up marker of the first hundred days in office, made famous by two other Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Getting the hell out of Southeast Asia with American prisoners came top of the list. Along with it went the remaking of tax and welfare policy around the Demogrant — saved from the altar of the last autumn’s pragmatism — and national policy on food and farming. Then came relations with the Soviet Union, national health care, feeling a way ahead with China, labor legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, the war-powers question, a major new opening to India, on and on. In the side rooms of Washington and the middle pages of the news, a real, honest-to-God as many young staffers told themselves, McGovern Administration felt its way upright and paused on the cliff edge of the job ahead.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The 20th came after all. It had seemed at times impossible, and it was dogged to the last by an underground stream of speculation, about McGovern’s personal fitness, about the people he would choose to serve, about policy above all, about whether McGovern himself was to blame for the steady slide of the Dow Jones since late December or the uptick in inflation. There were scare pieces on opinion pages — notably, in the Wall Street Journal McGovern’s most implacable Democratic opponent on security issues from the Johnson years, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, took McGovern to task on proposed defense cutbacks and blamed him outright for the intractability of talks on American prisoners of war in Paris. Despite spooling up his staff for the Treasury, John Kenneth Galbraith had found time to maintain, for now, his weekly opinion column and took the economic issues in had. Paul Warnke published a long-form rejoinder to Rusk in the New York Review of Books, but the choice of that liberal bastion seemed to hem in Warnke’s audience in advance . The Policy Planning Board nixed any formal statements on defense policy on the no-leaks principle, and because they had their hands full as they weighed how to get proposals through Congress. But this left the floor to Rusk, and Gerry Ford, and others who tacitly blamed McGovern for the tortured path in Paris over the months since the election.

On the floor of the Senate Roman Hruska and Ed Gurney waved newspapers that cited unnamed sources critical of the Nixon administration with supposed links to McGovern and chastised him for failing somehow to meet a standard of civility with an administration that had lied to their successors’ faces about policy more than once. Clifford and Mankiewicz advised McGovern to bite his lip and, against his instincts, he did. It was surprising how little it took to make an orderly succession look less so. But the 20th came just the same.

It was cold, first of all. Even for January the settled, hard cold put off smart Inaugural dresses for the ladies in favor of brightly colored overcoats and hats. Pat Nixon, lean, self-contained, and faintly hollow, wore her hair big and up, and a grand fur-lined coat with teal fabric. Eleanor instead favored a pillbox hat and double-breasted greatcoat both in bright green. The grown McGovern children sat with their parents, Teresa in a coral echo of her mother’s clothes, hair long and plain. Nixon himself, the great beast lowered, came in a camel-hair greatcoat and beneath it a plain black suit and tie as though for a funeral. It seemed almost a gesture of respect — these two, the President going out and the one coming in, were self-made men, that much could be agreed, no top hats or morning suits for them. McGovern’s own suit — son of the great, windswept flatness, he wore no coat — was black as well though his tie was a deep red, in all of which he looked trim, presented. He had trimmed the sideburns just a bit, taken off the feathery furl at the base of his neck from the campaign season. The Harts were much the same, Phil adding a grey waistcoat against the cold to keep his thinness warmer; Jean walked implacably past the Nixon clan as though she owned the place which caused McGovern, with the view from his peripheral vision, to smile to himself. The other elders of both parties, both camps, found their places. Ranged as if for battle.

Nixon walked down to “Hail to the Chief” and the McGovern party was made as to follow that closely, an emblem of transition; Dick Nixon always did have an eye for ceremony, for a self-made man. The resonant bulk of Ralph Abernathy stood — McGovern had first wanted William Sloane Coffin, but the kitchen cabinet thought that was a little too on the nose, a point made just as well with a reach to the minority voters who’d turned out in record numbers — and prayed not just for reconciliation but quite pointedly for justice for all. It was hard not to spot that the reference was not just about a common dignity, but about justice dealt too. Nixon drew into himself. There was a pause while the Marines, stuck in those awful Ruritanian uniforms Nixon had ginned up, played a fanfare.

Then it was time. Phil Hart stood up, made hale by comparison to the wisp of William O. Douglas that was left, who walked forward painstakingly to deliver the oath of office to the Vice President. Then stood Warren Burger, a shock of white hair and black robe, and after him George Stanley McGovern. Now a cheer went up like the noise of the sea — it was a big crowd, for the weather, full of union dues-payers who wanted to soak the rich and guarantee a fair shake and a job, and young people who craned forward for news that the war was over and that a vision of peace and justice would somehow descend on the land. McGovern looked a little drawn, but he smiled. The words were said.

In the ruffle of deep cold McGovern stepped to the microphone. When he said “my fellow Americans” he seemed to mean it, a South Dakota homeowner calling out to his neighbors over the noise of a prairie wind. Those same Americans had laid on him a great duty, he said. Then he ran down the list. The war. The injustices. The civil violence. The economic stagnation despite Arthur Burns’ river of cash. The alienation. The “season of distrust towards those with power,” which was as close as Mankiewicz and O’Brien would let George McGovern and his writers get to saying it out loud; Lord knows they had worked for enough nights to find a way. The dreariness. The loss of hope. He picked up again.

“We come to this city, a great capital built solely for democracy’s sake, with work to do. There is war; we will end it. There is division; we will act with justice and dignity for all, for a nation that can find again a shared purpose. There is fear; we will raise up our common, American family and heal our American home. There is mistrust; we will throw open the doors of government, empty the back rooms, set before its people the business of the nation. There is want and stagnation and loss of opportunity; we will act justly in the taxing and spending of the nation, create ways and means for peaceful and creative industry to flourish, and fight to secure for all our citizens the dignity of work. There is crime and oppression both; we will toil together to make our streets safe, to extend justice to the fearful and the least of us, too often lost in the shadows. There is a terrible sense that it all might end in consuming, nuclear fire; we will protect our shores, and our trusted friends, and work with common sense and common humanity to humble the arms race and turn from the heedless rush to Armageddon. These needs span the world as well; we, who are the people of promises, will make out of swords plowshares instead, and with them feed the world, bearing with that bounty a common kindness and uncommon freedom.

“We look on years of blood and strife, of dead heroes and broken trust, of suspicion and division and despair. Yet there is always hope. From oppression and foreign armies ranged across the land, we built freedom and the rights of man. From a vast, wild continent we built a nation of laws, principle, and opportunity. From slavery’s lash and the theft of humanity, we built justice and a nation indivisible. From dust and disaster and Depression we built opportunity, dignity, and security for all. From the fires of Pearl Harbor we built the victory over evil of the free peoples of the world. That is our common story. Now comes our chapter. Now comes a new day.

“In our divided, careworn age people came from across the country to reach that moment, to toll that time in America’s life. Now we are here, and here there’s work to do. For that work I promise you, my friends, my neighbors, the united citizens of history’s greatest experiment, my last measure of effort and devotion. But no single person can change our country — no single person is meant to. There is work for all, work that is old, work that is ever present, work that is true. In the poetry of our Founding Fathers we owe to ourselves and most of all to one another, to our posterity, the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness won for us two centuries ago. We owe too what was said best of all by the one we call the Christ: to heal the sick, to raise up the humble, to proclaim freedom for the oppressed, to clothe the naked, to shelter the lost, to make peace and goodwill among all men, to love all our neighbors as ourselves.

“Ours is the only nation made by the whole world, a nation forged from a common ideal. Now we come to make it anew, to honor our best hopes with our best selves, to strive together, not for power or wealth or dominion abroad, but for the brightest future of our American home. Lay down your burdens, your pain, your enmity. Take up the tools, and together we will build the nation we deserve, the next triumph on the American journey. I thank you. I believe in you, and I believe in this land we share. Take care of it, and of one another, and let us go forward together. God bless America.”

It really wasn’t bad, said the press pack among each other, breath foggy in the glassy late-morning light. But then, Miami and this, together they seemed to say speeches were probably McGovern’s specific talent. Declaiming principles, getting people worked up to go at it together. They could at least respect that, it was a known skill in the great game on which they commented for the average American and, even more than that, had the privilege of talking about with each other and other such people who mattered. No wild hippie declensions, no off the wall policy announced on the spot. A whole lot of high talk and self-confidence and, well, why not? He’d pulled it off after all even if George Wallace had largely given it to him, and things would get tough — get back to normal — soon enough. Give the guy his due on his day; it never hurts to use manners on a big occasion. As he had for a year now, young Tim Crouse listened, and considered, and made notes. Elsewhere, Hunter Thompson surprised himself by crying a little, quietly, and reached solidly for the second bottle of Wild Turkey to stem the tide.

There was more music, hands were shaken, McGovern noted especially the way Nixon looked right past him, almost through him, eyes like glass. And how… elsewhere Pat Nixon seemed to be, despite the friendliness of the daughters and the boyish grin of the in-law, Eisenhower’s grandson David. Jean Briggs Hart walked up to him and kissed him firmly on the cheek, and not far behind from a trip down the grandstands was McGovern’s Republican friend and co-sponsor of their bill to end the war Mark Hatfield, his rolling baritone full of congratulations. Phil Hart looked unexpectedly emotional, and simply smiled. Ralph Abernathy beamed and only said “Mister President” in that Baptist preacher’s voice of his which seemed more than anything else to make it official. Then there was Teddy. Teddy with that barrel chest and his maternal grandfather’s smile. That smile drew closed for a moment, not stern but simply still, as the last Kennedy brother simply said, “remember. Remember.” He did not mean the day.

After that they were off, but first with a shock. On the way down from the great portico of the Capitol, with a lurch off the path towards the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade, his hand firmly on Eleanor’s elbow to steer her with him, George McGovern whirled away from the game plan and made into the nearest part of the crowd. Black-coated Secret Servicemen hustled to keep with him, one or two with hands plainly against their opposing armpits, where the guns were. Now there was that vast, almost quarried, smile, the bright teeth and square chin, Eleanor’s keen eyes and pixie grin right behind him, as he reached out both hands to shake with whoever surged close.

Hearts stopped across the nation; there were too many dead hopes already. But George Stanley McGovern was having none of it — he was a tribune of the people after all, wasn’t he? — and this was his day if any was. The Harts carried on the planned route, but both smiled widely nonetheless. Just a few minutes of that and then it was all waves, still with both hands, and McGovern trudged purposefully back up to the pathway, like a homesteader beating his bounds, off to sit in the grandstand while the parade went by. Somewhere ahead Nixon appeared, as he talked to a few people around him, but soon enough he had vanished. Even the leave he took seemed a mystery. But now was George McGovern’s time. Even though duly sworn as the President of the United States, he wondered if he’d get another.

 

[Yes]

It has been a fulsome day around here, folks, a regular TLvus miracle. But we're not done yet! That's right, there's more. FEAST UPON THE FINE FINE GRAINS OF DETAIL MY HOMIES AND PROCEED FROM THERE TO THE FEATS OF STRENGTH. It's Cabinetry time!! No, we're not talking home furnishings here...

McGovern Administration

McGovern Cabinet
President: George S. McGovern
Vice President: Philip A. Hart
Secretary of State: R. Sargent Shriver Jr.
Secretary of the Treasury: John Kenneth Galbraith
Secretary of Defense: Cyrus Vance
Attorney General: Archibald Cox
Secretary of the Interior: Jesse Unruh
Secretary of Agriculture: Frank B. Morrison
Secretary of Commerce: Dwayne Andreas
Secretary of Labor: Leonard Woodcock
Secretary of Health and Human Services: Andrew Young
Secretary of Education: J. Terry Sanford
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: George Romney
Secretary of Transportation: W. Graham Claytor
Secretary of Peace: Donald M. Fraser
Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs: Gen. David M. Shoup, USMC (ret.)

“Cabinet-rank” positions
Director of Central Intelligence: Paul “Pete” McCloskey
Ambassador to the United Nations: Shirley Chisholm
United States Trade Representative: Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien
Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: John Sherman Cooper

Executive Office of the President
White House Chief of Staff: Gary W. Hart
Deputy White House Chief of Staff: Douglas A. Coulter
Office of Counselor to the President: Frank Mankiewicz
Deputy to the Office of Counselor to the President: Gene Pokorny
White House Counsel: Ramsey L. Clark
National Security Adviser: Paul Warnke
Deputy National Security Adviser: Robert Sherman
Director, Office of Management and Budget: Lester Thurow
Chair, Council of Economic Advisers: Edwin Kuh
Director, Office of Policy Development: Jean Westwood
Director, Office of Public Liaison: Anne Wexler
White House Communications Director: Frank Mankiewicz
White House Press Secretary: Richard “Dick” Dougherty

United States Department of State
Secretary of State: R. Sargent Shriver Jr.
Deputy Secretary of State: George Ball
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs: Alexis Johnson (replaced in 1973 by Philip Habib)
Undersecretary of State for International Security Affairs: David L. Aaron
Assistant Secretary for African Affairs: Patricia Roberts Harris
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs: Richard “Dick” Holbrooke
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs: George S. Vest
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs: William G. Bowdler
Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs: Charles W. Mayne
Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs: Alfred R. “Roy” Atherton
United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union: Robert S. “Bob” Strauss
United States Representative to the People’s Republic of China: Arthur W. Hummel, Jr.
United States Ambassador to India: Chester B. Bowles (returns for a hat trick)
United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom: Kingman Brewster, Jr.
United States Ambassador to France: Pierre Salinger
United States Ambassador to West Germany: Walter J. Stoessel, Jr.
United States Ambassador to Mexico: Edward R. Roybal
United States Ambassador to Brazil: Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters (ret.)
United States Ambassador to Israel: Kenneth B. Keating
United States Ambassador to Iran: Talcott W. Seelye
United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia: James E. Akins
United States Ambassador to South Vietnam: John Gunther Dean
United States Ambassador to Cambodia: Daniel Patrick Moynihan
United States Ambassador to Bangladesh: Archer Blood

United States Department of the Treasury
Secretary: John Kenneth Galbraith
Deputy Secretary: Paul A. Volcker, Jr.

United States Department of Defense
Secretary: Cyrus Vance
Deputy Secretary: Townsend Hoopes II
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy: John D. Holum
Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering: Harold Brown
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence: Robert C. “Bob” Komer
Secretary of the Navy: Otis G. Pike
Secretary of the Army: Charles E. “Charlie” Bennett
Secretary of the Air Force: David S. Lewis, Jr.

United States Department of Justice
Attorney General: Archibald Cox
Deputy Attorney General: Clifford L. Alexander, Jr.
Solicitor General: John Doar

YMMV over the course of the McGovern administration of course, but this is a significant chunk of the starting lineup. I am particularly fond of State because it has so many undersecretaryships and better-than-average biographical information very deep into the past. I would like to say CALIFORNIA REPRESENT to Ed Roybal and note that it is politically significant for a reason that Archer Blood is McGovern's first ambassador to Bangladesh. You really wanna see Nixon at his worst? Go read The Blood Telegram. No, really, go do that, it's a great book.

As for the rest, enjoy.

 

[Yes]

An official White House photographer's image of President Richard Nixon taken on Jan. 12th, 1973; unbeknownst to the photographer, Nixon had given final approval for Operation ACE earlier in the day

Counsel for the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Charles Morgan, Jr., speaks during impeachment hearings for President Nixon, January 1973

Secretary of State-designate Sargent Shriver speaks with senior McGovern adviser Gary Hart before a meeting of McGovern's presidential transition staff in Georgetown, January 1973

 

[Yes]

A little taster for the future, in a room where the postwar boom never really died:

"Sargent Shriver was always good for a smile, especially at moments like this. He and Armand Hammer sat opposite one another in sculpted tulip chairs, in a hotel suite -- suite? Floor -- Hammer owned while the hi-fi across the greatroom played Frank Chacksfield & His Orchestra's svelte tones without a trace of irony and the two men nursed snifters of brandy fortified back in the Belle Epoque."

I like to feel that, whenever I write Sargent Shriver, a good time was had by all. Sarge was that kind of guy.

 

[Yes]

Hundred Days I: Air of Command?
​

Senator William Fulbright … said he wanted a
McGovern presidency “because George is such an ordinary fellow — I
don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was
designed for ordinary men — not for a succession of so many larger-than-life
men on horseback. If George McGovern were President he wouldn’t
stand for a CIA or FBI pushing people around the way they do now, or
the Pentagon building and buying what it pleased. He wouldn’t stand
for price fixing or these outrages against people who work for wages
and pay their taxes. And you can be damned sure he wouldn’t try to
prove his manhood by prolonging a war that shouldn’t have been
started in the first place. It’s a damned shame all this has happened to
George, because I don’t know how long it will be until we have a President
who feels like that.”

- Washington Monthly, May 1973
​

The war never needed a bullet to kill him. Where it touched Lyndon, the dead had their own fateful pull. They stood by his bedside as he woke and walked through his dreams. They attended him whenever he draped the Medal of Honor on the shoulders of hardened, haunted men in the White House press room. The dead sat in the empty chairs of the briefing room where Lyndon listened to audio tapes from his daughter Lynda’s young man, the Marine, as the boyish officer talked about who they’d lost on the latest patrol. When the President of the United States heard the words the dead tilted their phantom heads to consider the moment as Lyndon put his own head in his hands, this close to broken. They raised thunderous silence in song with the vibrant fury of young people beyond the White House gates who demanded to know how many kids LBJ had killed that day. As he took off his reading glasses, looked out at the television audience, then announced he would not run again, the dead stared right through him. In retirement his jowls sagged and his hair grew long and white and twisty in the back; he ate and drank and smoked a little, then ate and drank some more. It was his time now, that’s what he’d told his girls. Yet none of it filled the space where the dead waited. They could afford to be patient.

Now here he was, cased in black lacquer and metal, laid beneath the flag in the United States Capitol Rotunda and soon enough beneath the ground. The end was full of fear and pain. His weak heart had failed at last. He would die alone. Opinions varied on the justice of it. Fair or foul, though, it was a watershed. So they all came, all the Washington faces, all the people who had loved and hated him often by turns, all the witnesses to Lyndon’s burning path through American life from the stars down into the dirt.

The others came too, survivors three. Dick Nixon, his very form a cowl that shrouded his wounded, furious soul, pale and almost scruffy despite the hair and makeup work for the memorial service, eyes that stabbed back at the silent judgment of others, seduced and claimed by the same war that brought Lyndon down. The merest wisp of Harry Truman, the Missouri fireplug now thin as onion paper between this life and the other side, the man who’d opened the door to Indochina and all the rest and now, when he took off the trademark hat, was a wisp of almost translucent hair and skin, a gossamer remainder from a different age.

And there was the new man, thirty-eighth in the line: President George McGovern in his black camel-hair coat and grey suit, on whom all the cameras turned, who looked calm and a little hard, a little awkward in the cameras’ glare, strong chin fixed in consideration. This war, went the thoughts in his head. This God-damned war, the wreck of presidents for a generation, and here I am the one who had to end it. It was a necessary act, perhaps even holy as McGovern thought about it in this moment. But he felt terribly small thirty feet from the war’s most famous victim, lost in the trackless space made by all the dead.

McGovern had set to work as soon as he left the Capitol balcony where the oath was said. During the inaugural parade aides brought him two thin binders with sheafs of paper inside to sign. These were the executive orders that terminated Operation FREEDOM DEAL, the covert and quite possibly illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos. The ink was hardly dry on the Paris Accords but on the new president’s orders Dick Dougherty told reporters the President considered the cease-fire in force as of that day. At the Quai d’Orsay, site of France’s foreign ministry, McGovern’s newly confirmed ambassador Pierre Salinger, who had hopped a flight with his own money in pursuit of the Rogers-Kissinger delegation as soon as he was voted in, met first to debrief the Americans after the signing and then with Le Duc Tho about the POWs.

The effort leapfrogged Paris and spanned the globe. In Moscow for a meeting about grain sales Australia’s new, left-leaning premier Gough Whitlam, a waspish Victoria lawyer with an Outback drover’s physique, handed to a deputy of Foreign Secretary Gromyko a three-page typed letter from President McGovern supplied by the US embassy in Canberra. The letter laid out proposals for improvements in US-Soviet relations based in part on smooth transfer of the American prisoners in Indochina and a wind-down of resupply to both North and South Vietnam, to help demilitarize the conflict.

In Saigon Ellsworth Bunker, America’s viceroy in Southeast Asia under two presidents, packed his things before he headed to the airport. Across that tarmac walked John Gunther Dean, a Jewish German refugee in his boyhood, a civilian veteran of this conflict himself and of many other hardship posts, with his lean shoulders and flinty Mitteleuropa face that spoke only of limits and the end of possibility when he presented President Thieu with credentials. There was a new policy in town.

As they swept up the confetti on Pennsylvania Avenue and “permanent Washington” checked its reservations for the inaugural parties, George McGovern sat down for the first meeting of what he simply called “the Group.” This was the conclave that would run the process of getting out of Vietnam. There was of course Phil Hart, not only Vice President but by now a trusted friend and counsel. There was Paul Warnke, National Security Adviser and moderator, and both Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart standing on McGovern’s shoulders though which was angel or devil you sometimes weren’t sure. Beyond them Sargent Shriver, Cy Vance, and Ken Galbraith, only the last of whom had actually written a book about the strategy and tactics of a withdrawal, helpfully titled How To Get Out of Vietnam because Galbraith valued clarity. There was Clark Clifford, the grey eminence on call. There were Vance and Shriver’s deputies the aristocratic Townsend Hoopes and the pugnacious George Ball, a resister of the first hour to the whole quagmire. There was Pete McCloskey of course as Director of Central Intelligence, Tom Moorer likewise as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the bespectacled rectitude of John Holum now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and the ruddy, boyish Dick Holbrooke freshly minted as Undersecretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. They were joined on occasion by three congressmen read in to honor McGovern’s desire for more open, accountable policy: Carl Albert as Speaker of the House, William Fulbright who was both the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a personal friend of McGovern’s, and John Stennis, chair of Senate Armed Services.

They did have a plan: like Caesar’s Gaul it was divided into three parts though circumstances forced on them a fourth. The first was to stage-manage the cease fire that had ceased very little firing so American units could leave with deliberate speed. The second was to create incentives for Hanoi to act as a working partner and leave room for both Saigon and the PRG to play roles in Vietnam’s self-determination rather than force an outcome for Hanoi’s benefit. The third was to reshape Saigon’s internal politics and its strategy in the conflict that carried on. The fourth part, as Hanoi dragged its feet much harder than the Group’s politicos had expected on the campaign trail, was figuring out what the hell to do about the POWs.

Even though you could lay the pieces out neatly at a principals’ meeting in the Oval Office, with tabbed reports and maps and all, they were entirely entwined. It was immediately clear that for all the high language about supervisory commissions and peace there was a major battle underway at Tay Ninh, a provincial capital in the South’s Mekong Delta. The PRG wanted to run up their flag in Tay Ninh, call it a capital for an alternative government in the South, and Thieu poured aircraft sorties and ARVN grunts into the meat grinder in response. It was clear that despite the International Commission for Control and Supervision’s input the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its tributaries were open for business to shore up PAVN positions aimed at the northerly third of South Vietnam. As the ICCS readied a report on the cease fire’s failings and the press suggested the whole language of truce was just a fig leaf to let the US scuttle, several of McGovern’s advisers, notably Gary Hart, Pete McCloskey, and George Ball, pointedly wanted to blame the Nixon crew in public. McGovern himself, backed by Phil Hart and Sarge Shriver, saw this as fruitless, something that would just piss off a different set of interests and make the administration look like it didn’t know how to call the shots. The important thing, Ken Galbraith said with brevity, was to work the plan and change the discussion.

The Group sidestepped Tay Ninh entirely: better to let the two sides wear themselves out, congratulate whoever won, and be available to the loser to help ensure they kept some leverage. The Group ramped up demining operations in North Vietnamese waters, and laid out transit terms and corridors for the ICCS, officials from Saigon and Hanoi, and members of the coming Four-Power military commission to travel where they needed, subject to nagging inertia and point-scoring from local bureaucrats. Salinger’s meetings in Paris cleared the way for two developments. The first was a senatorial fact-finding mission to Hanoi to interview and inspect conditions for the American POWs herded into Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton” of POW/MIA lore: Fulbright, Ed Muskie, the stoic conservative George Aiken, and liberal-Republican fireplug Jack Javits of New York. Within four days of the inauguration they took off from Maryland. After most of a day in the air touched down in Hanoi itself, to ride through its rain-chilled streets and reach the dank crenellations of Hoa Lo and the lean, worn men in orange made to live there. At the same time, George Ball flew out to Paris to join Salinger and haggle over mechanisms to formalize the transfer of prisoners.

That was where they hit the skids. As research over the decades that followed would show, the roadblock was about Moscow, or rather Hanoi’s reaction when the McGovern team talked to Moscow. The Kremlin was encouraged by the arrival of the McGovern administration even though General Secretary Brezhnev had got on famously with Nixon and the analysts were antsy about a West Wing new on the job and unsure of its goals. They liked what Washington had to say about making Saigon tow the line on elections and representation. They tolerated McGovern’s interest in non-Communist membership within the PRG. They figured that, on the whole, it was worth a quiet word with their clients to ease the US path out of Indochina, that it served the long game.

Hanoi on the other hand, in particular the circle around Le Duan, hard-edged chair of the Party since the death of old Ho, didn’t like it so well. They had natural strategic advantages over an American government now tripping over itself to divest from the region. They had demands they reckoned legitimate, in particular the $3.5 billion dollar “reconstruction payments” in reparations that they asked of Ball and Salinger in Paris plus the release of political prisoners in the South. They had learned to watch the American news too, watched as that freshman bomb-thrower in the Senate Jesse Helms staged daily briefings on how much money it cost to make it easier for Moscow and Peking to funnel heavy weapons into the North, how many brave anti-communist Asian boys had died that day fighting village to village over political leverage in the South, how many captive Americans might be salted in dark holes all over Southeast Asia (always numbered by the most generous conjectures) and how many days the longest-held of them had been there. California’s governor Ron Reagan, who could smell the next presidential cycle from four years off, started to say the same things with that winning smile of his. The press, already laden with the continuing criminal hunt after the last president, saw a chance for balance by proving McGovern had been dead wrong about how everything could be solved by withdrawal with nightly broadcasts from hamlet firefights across the Mekong Delta. Hanoi’s presidium looked at its cards and knocked on the table; they wanted to see what McGovern would do.

In the midst of a blizzard of domestic policy to manage and meetings on China — urged by Sarge Shriver — and collective monetary policy with Western Europe — urged by Ken Galbraith — McGovern pulled in the Group and haggled late into the nights. What it boiled down to with some speed was pincers. They would twist Saigon’s arm on political prisoners, and get reparations through Congress. With some quid for Hanoi to take home, maybe, out would come the quo from prison bars.

McGovern chose Cy Vance to deliver the news, his patrician reserve the right note to strike when the White House held Nguyen Van Thieu’s future to ransom. Vance delivered the news like a lawyer whose client had lost his shirt, which was close to truth. The administration had at least fifty votes in the Senate, and two or three key committee chairs in the House ready to play along, who between them would stop the billions in American aid to South Vietnam in its tracks. That was over and above the veto President McGovern dangled before the assembled media in his second press conference. Money, parts, ammunition, purchases of rice and raw materials over the odds, all of it halted. Meanwhile Sarge Shriver smiled and charmed with Thieu’s loyal, befuddled prime minister Tran Thien Kiem, rarely offered such attention. Shriver through himself into the role, whose purpose Kiem missed to his cost: it was, exactly, to make Thieu doubt who he could trust, think that the new boys in D.C. might cut deals all around him just as they’d done around Ngo Dinh Diem before the most powerful man in South Vietnam ended up full of holes in the trunk of a car.

The most creative part of the process, perhaps, kicked off when Solicitor General John Doar and McGovern’s finance chair from the presidential campaign, Morris Dees who sued Klansmen into the ground with his Southern Poverty Law Center, touched down in Saigon unbidden on a routine mail flight. With them came a small clutch of American, Canadian, and French lawyers. Around two hours after they passed through customs they met with local civil rights attorneys. By that night, in a large, dank office space lit by swinging fluorescents, they set up a war room. Doar shook hands with Dees and the others and decamped to the embassy, eloquent by his presence rather than by any public appearances. Strewn around the war room were manila folders. In them were the files and identities of several thousand South Vietnamese, some “guests” of the tiger cages on the forlorn green island of Con Son off Saigon’s patch of coastline, where Thieu’s regime had turned a dark French colonial hole to its own purposes. Until a few months ago these all had been political prisoners, subject then to the theories that drove Washington’s aid cutoff. In the meanwhile, several of Thieu’s cleverer cronies had seen to it the holders of these lost names were charged on petty criminal grounds, kept in prison at the state’s pleasure. Now, several dozen lawyers from four nations intended to tie those charges up in paperwork so dense and hard to hack through that the Saigon government would throw millions down the hole in the effort. Choke one channel, drain the other. Together it looked like a plan.

Then there were the reparations. The common ground of the administration, indeed an area where some key men in uniform like Tom Moorer who valued the prisoners as highly as they did the geopolitics of the thing could meet the civilians where they were, was that reparations were a necessary measure to free the process up, satisfy Hanoi’s senses of both power and honor, even as some policy hands suggested to give moderates in Hanoi a hand up, show that where there were common interests Washington and the North could do business like civilized nations. No one in Hanoi, or Moscow and Peking for that matter, failed to see that the McGovern team would put the screws to Saigon as needed. That was leverage of a kind; Hanoi especially would want that to continue, to cultivate that attitude in the White House. The last great trouble of it then was just fronting the money.

There McGovern’s team ran into Congress. Or rather, they ran smack into one of the mighty gnomes of Arkansas, Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and it seemed both a sworn foe of just throwing money around and of buying the North’s favors. The White House could marshal fifty votes in the Senate and maybe enough in the House to choke Saigon white on military aid, but McClellan was not among them and here there was both leverage on those issues and a chance to cut a national figure rather than stand in Bill Fulbright’s shadow all day. The White House did itself few favors spending three long days arguing over how to trim numbers and language off the sides of Hanoi’s $3.5 billion in order to fit it through an Appropriations majority. By the nightly news of the second day the quiet on POWs in D.C. started to deafen.

Then, together, Sarge Shriver and Clark Clifford went to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee and submitted the new bill that offered just $1.5 billion but also purchases of key materials — railroad ties, concrete, steel re-bar, and so on — below cost from federal contractors for the North to put its infrastructure back together. McClellan was a mere member on the subcommittee, and sat back as its overwhelming liberal majority (from both parties) kicked the bill straight to where McClellan held the gavel. With unaccustomed nous Carl Albert had the companion bill on the floor already over in the House. From the Oval Office McGovern wanted his old friend and mentor Fulbright, privy to the Group and chair of Senate Foreign Relations, to take charge of the matter, but its scale made the proposal something McClellan guarded jealously. He maneuvered to have hearings and in quiet urged Strom Thurmond, master of the art, to filibuster if needed.

Those nights were terribly long. The Group considered what they could, or might have to, do if McClellan barred the gates. The Joint Chiefs already had reprisals planned if Hanoi were to disperse or harm the POWs, in particular a massed raid by nearly a hundred B-52Ds from Guam and Thailand on two PAVN divisions perched along the highlands facing just south of the DMZ. Both Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart shuffled over to the same shoulder and suggested President McGovern needed at least to consider the idea, first because it would come as a surprise to the North and second to stop the loss of momentum to McClellan’s hijacking. The Chiefs consistently favored all the leverage the US could find. McGovern said no; the administration was still in the flush of youth, and that way lay the same traps that snared America in Southeast Asia in the first place. You could blow up tanks and bridges and Le Duan’s clique still held the cards.

McGovern did entertain one option. With a million or more tons of the Seventh Fleet still perched in the South China Sea, said the new president, if the North are foolish enough to harm any prisoners or we simply run out of options, we owe them some thought about what it would take to go in and get them out. The swift consensus was that meant mounting up marines, either the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit afloat on “Yankee Station” or the air-contingency battalion on Okinawa, for a heliborne attack on the “Hanoi Hilton” where multiple credible intelligence sources placed all the known prisoners in the North. We still want answers about Laos and Cambodia, said both Dick Holbrooke and Tom Moorer. But that could wait if necessary. McGovern was drawn but clear. He would accept the risk should it prove necessary if the Pentagon stopped trying to bomb for peace and offered a plan, however dangerous, to deal with the problem directly. When General Robert Cushman, Commandant of the Marine Corps and an old friend of Dick Nixon’s, appeared to drag his feet over the next couple of days, Tom Moorer met him quietly in the “E-Ring” nerve center of the Defense Department. There Moorer said in brief, direct language that if Cushman wanted to stall because it would hobble a left-leaning president, or because he didn’t like the risk to his Marines, that needed to stop before creative things happened to the Commandant’s genitalia. Moorer wanted his flyboys home.

In the end Moore offered up even more aid to a president whose strategic instincts he did not trust, but whose sincerity he had begun to. After discussion with President McGovern, Frank Mankiewicz, and Cy Vance, Moorer agreed to become Senate Appropriation’s first — in the end, only — witness on the reparations bill. Moorer stressed that the Paris Accords had left a door wide open on whether or how prisoners would be exchanged, that such an exchange needed to take first priority for American policy in the region, that America had rebuilt West Germany and Japan despite their crimes against humanity against which some North Vietnamese trains running on time failed to signify. That sold a strong committee majority.

What made the difference was something a little newer. On one hand Strom Thurmond counted that majority and saw few options outside McLellan’s own hand to block passage. On the other, Thurmond could vote against bribing the Communists with a clear conscience. McLellan, on the other hand, faced both a party whose majority would not forgive him for undercutting a fragile presidency, and conservative voters back home who would not forgive him for bribing the Communists. Either way, as the landmark Dixiecrat borrowed language from the Marxist hymnal, cutting McLellan’s legs from under him would heighten the contrast between the parties and draw more Southerners to the GOP. Where the chairman had looked to the old conservative alliance for aid, a young, healthy, and very different partisan logic stared back.

Tucked around the edges at $1.4 billion in direct aid plus the breaks on supplies, the bill moved out of committee on a 19-7 vote. From there, with Doug Coulter jogging back and forth from the West Wing to the Hill as messenger, it moved on to the floor and Pierre Salinger reported to his opposite numbers in Paris that the money would be available in days. Flight clearances were arranged. Medical exams were given. Then, with a painstaking slowness, lean men in prison pajamas made their way out into buses on the Hanoi streets to the great steel birds with American roundels that took off with a warm meal and howling cheers for places long absent.

They were still coming home when Lyndon passed, still landing on tarmacs off in California and Hawaii, just east of the sunset. Still rushing into the arms of loving family or walking silently off into worlds broken in their absence. Still thanking President McGovern quietly but firmly for ending that captivity or, like Commander Jeremiah Denton who had blinked the word “torture” in Morse code before another set of cameras in 1967, talked about the country they hoped to find rather than the one they did and, by implication, how the Commander in Chief on duty when they returned didn’t fit that bill. More came still at the end of February, the final batch just four days before the scheduled withdrawal of the last organized American military units in South Vietnam on the first of March. Six hundred twenty seven in total: five-ninety-five out of the North and thirty-two, better than they had hoped, out of Laos. Tom Moorer was suspicious still but even he agreed it was a hell of a thing.

McGovern then did as he had said he would do, more than once. On the second of the month he issued an executive order that declared amnesty for all draft evaders. In the moment there was no speech or ceremony, just a quiet signing in the Oval Office for the official photographers. That night, though, armed with a speech written in parts by Dick Dougherty the part-time poet, by Bob Shrum, and by McGovern himself, the President sat down at the Resolute desk in the blue suit with the red tie and talked to the country.

It was a speech, but not in the usual way; McGovern had decided to tell a story. The minister’s son reached for a parable, for the Prodigal Son in fact, though he skipped right past the prodigality to what he saw as the point. That was the reaction of the father, the joy and the wonder: “My son was dead, and now he lives.” So it was for America, McGovern said. Vietnam had torn a terrible gulf through the country, a divide not just of politics but of spirit. It had broken in two Americans’ sense of where they did and didn’t belong. But each side of that divide had lost people. Each side had found them again as well, sons lost who now lived again: the POWs on one side, the draft resisters on the other. At the same time, each side felt like the other son in the story, the dutiful one who saw the father’s joy when the son who’d broken all the rules returned, who wondered why honor and loyalty was not met with the same outpouring.

The father explained that those feelings were always there for the dutiful son, if that son could only see them. The wonder was because it had seemed the prodigal was lost forever, but instead returned to those who loved him. America, President McGovern said as he wrapped up, needed to heal the wound in its soul. It needed to find and show the love of the father, who rejoices to God that the family is whole again, that lost children are home, that now they can all go forward together. With that ask and a wisp of prayer at the end, McGovern wrapped up. The networks switched back to their usual shows.

It was a good speech, all things considered, and what the press gods called “middle opinion” actually liked it pretty well. They saw what McGovern tried to do, so far he didn’t seem to have screwed it up too badly, and God knows they all wanted to put this dreadfulness behind them, to get back to suburban routine. What was sometimes derisively called the “soft” left had empathy too, partly because empathy was officially their thing, partly because McGovern had put the amnesty they’d hoped for in a context that perhaps the country could accept. Even a few old-line Republicans, who had not liked the outcome, said that at least McGovern put his case with thought and compassion.

But none of them made the big waves in politics, or were angry enough to be interesting for reporters who wrote about the mechanics of conflict. That role went to the shouters. On one side were extremists among the League of Families coalition, plus the bracelet-makers and the iconoclasts who shouted about repressed information and intelligence leaks. On the other side stood the most militant anti-war groups and the SDS-adjacent. Both of those factions along the great American divide howled with anger at McGovern’s homily. They each said new president had coddled, had sold out to, the other side. Now was the moment to give the enemy a good kick while they’re down, said the purists. This nonsense about forgiveness and unity meant the true America would be compromised, corrupted, by the presence of unacceptable Others. Every once in a while declare war; it was the best way to wipe your enemies’ slate clean.

So it went. The administration changed the game with Saigon, trimmed Thieu’s sails, and opened up room to press for open elections in the fall; the White House found itself blamed on one side for undermining an ally, on the other for not recognizing the PRG as a distinct government at Saigon’s expense. A passel of right-wing sources not just in Congress but also from the fringe groups who churned out alternate realities on in-house presses said the POWs’ return was a carefully contrived excuse for McGovern to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Ed Gurney and Jesse Helms and Paul Fannin and James Eastland howled that the administration had built “a purpose-built road to defeat” for Indochina’s anti-communists. Old allies of McGovern’s people on the anti-war left said they were not angry, just sad and disappointed, that the administration would resume military aid if conditions were met. You might please some of the people some of the time, but they sure weren’t the ones who got quoted in the papers.

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What I want to know, Mr. President, said Ed Muskie not in the best of moods, is what the hell your man Hart — no of course not Phil. He’d never have hitched a wagon to this damnfool proposition. Your campaign manager who you raised to the dizzy level of chief of staff — what the hell he expects us to do now with the fix he’s got us in. This was going to be trouble enough even with the unions behind it, Muskie went on, it is a delicate and a complex matter even in the best case. Now this … mess has gone out there and it has your name on it. I would have thought that since he brings you the papers every day Hart thought you had enough bad press being blamed for the stock market each morning. We all understand your agenda and you certainly don’t need any glorious failures.

What in fact Gary Hart had been up to with the minimum wage proposal was yet to be divined. People knew what he’d said when he helmed the policy review meetings and rolled over Jean Westwood’s more piecemeal suggestions. That was, that the administration needed to find a few key issues where it could show it would live up to its promises, and also show voters who the opposition was on bread-and-butter issues. Some folks suspected this was to grab the rudder back for a moment from Westwood and the Office of Policy Development. Others even thought that it was a chance to shift some blame towards the Senate in particular, show that too many people in Congress weren’t up to the job of fundamental reforms. Still others thought it was a poison pill all the way, to overbid and at once put the unions in their place and back Ken Galbraith’s inflation-hawk position that wages needed not to rise much. Whether there was a chess game or a publicity stunt afoot the details were the same. Hart, with some dexterity, maneuvered the policy review to draft proposed legislation for a minimum wage hike all the way to $2.50 an hour, just like the convention platform said.

The problem then, to be fair, was not entirely of Gary Hart’s making. There was already a big piece of legislation on Capitol Hill under fire: the painstakingly drafted bill for the Demogrant, put forward in the House by Bob Drinan and, to some surprise, by Mark Hatfield in the Senate who talked up the mixture of equity and bureaucratic roll-back. The administration was determined to hold its line on the Demogrant, to meet with legislators one by one into the dozens if need be, mobilize experts, dangle tidbits before the press pool to keep the administration’s arguments in the papers. All that even against the withering skepticism of, mostly Southern, congressmen who manned the levers of the tax and budget processes. Conservatives, fiscal and otherwise, were after the minimum wage hike from the start. There were even skeptics among the unions who thought the universality provisions would undermine their ability to bring more workers into their trades and satisfy those workers through the bargains struck with management.

But the real killer was Ken Galbraith. Already roused over the roiling inflation Arthur Burns had injected into the US economy during the presidential election, Galbraith sat down with McGovern and said in no uncertain terms that a sharp, across the board wage hike was something the system very much did not need. It could push inflation figures out beyond Treasury’s ability to control with anything short of the harshest measures and start a bidding war in big industries. Galbraith knew how to persuade. There would need to be a change of course.

McGovern had let the first bill out the gate because he believed half-measures might leave you with nothing after you gave pieces away in committee, and because he trusted staff to get on with the details. Now from the top came an order to change course. The first bill had already put Congressional liberals in the same place as the Demogrant: hew to the principles, so that when the grandees ground them down, there was still something there to mark up and reconcile that could be called progress, even of a kind. McGovern’s change of tone was a bad sign by its publicity but the smart thing to do, in the eyes of Ed Muskie and other liberal powers on the Hill, was to cool down the publicity and grind this one out too, down to some kind of progress. Instead, Gary Hart meant to fix it. He sat down through day-long meetings with Ed Kuh, economists from the Fed, assistant secretaries from Labor, and Jean Westwood’s staffers to hammer out a revised bill that represented a best-possible outcome based on incoming fire in the labor and appropriations committees of Congress. Then Hart swapped bills.

No one was happy. Jean Westwood and the liberals, in the Senate especially, felt undercut. Ken Galbraith glowered that now more fuss had been made over something that needed to die down quietly — equal pay was to his mind more important than increased pay. McGovern was frustrated that such thorough work by the staff just ended up raising hackles and snippy columns in the Sunday papers, while Frank Mankiewicz considered what he needed to do to ensure Hart didn’t step on Jean Westwood’s toes again: the last thing they needed was a high profile resignation early in the term. The new bill arrived, and soldiered on in more quiet. In the end, by September, they got $2.00 an hour which was something, and service and non-profit workers folded in, though there were threats of filibuster over farm labor increases and specific language only about equal pay by age rather than sex. But the good stuff often ended up on the back page anyway.

Elsewhere on the Hill, though, whether the administration led or simply tagged along, there were strides. Within the first three months Congress produced an Endangered Species Act, beloved of environmentalists in both parties, with streamlined language on how to qualify and list species as threatened that was pushed past conservatives who spotted that killing those clauses could hobble the bill. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 appeared and brought with it a revolution in the treatment of disabled Americans. Its Sections 501 through 505 defined clearly who counted as “handicapped,” banned discrimination in federal employment, required affirmative action by federal contractors, created levers to pressure states for similar statutes, extended civil rights to those titled as handicapped, and required access to public services including public education. It was on reflection one of the first great blows for civil reform under the new administration and President McGovern took quite some pleasure signing it on the White House lawn so that a crowd of protesters in favor of public accommodation could be brought in to enjoy the moment.

There were other hallmarks too. A Domestic Volunteer Service Act, that revived the Civilian Conservation Corps, brought that body and the VISTA program together under the aegis of the new Department of Peace, created enabling language and funds to develop a “Peace Corps for America”, and budget lines to stand up major regional operating bases for these services passed through despite grumbling from the budget hawks. The doggedly unlikely pairing of Ron Dellums in the House (a socialist but also a former Marine) and Bob Dole in the Senate yielded the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Act, known more often as VEVRA: it produced dedicated eligibility and funds for psychiatric treatment of veterans of the conflict, an expanded GI Bill of Rights that included vocational and some graduate education, and preferential hiring into federal work, among other things.

To some fanfare President McGovern publicly launched an executive investigative commission on corporate monopolies and the tangled workings of multinational corporations. Officially and rather clumsily the Commission to Investigate Practices by Multinational Corporations and Conglomerate Ownership, in practice people called it the Gavin Commission. That was for its chairman, retired general, war hero, and polymath James Gavin, a liberal Republican who’d worked for several Democratic presidents before and had a special interest in the potential of multinationals to reshape international relations, not always for the better. Mighty interests watched closely and made notes.

On another issue, one Congress had pushed for a couple of years now, the fact of not just a new president but a President George McGovern meant that the new man grabbed the subject and took the lead. There were several trial bills loose on the Hill to do with presidential and congressional war powers. One particular resolution, pushed by Clem Zablocki on House Foreign Affairs, who was otherwise a Vietnam hawk, had language that appealed to a real cross-section of political animals, from outright doves to legislators who simply thought the White House had gone too far with its singular, even imperial, approach to Southeast Asia. McGovern met in person with Zablocki several times in early February; he was not just a fan, he wanted more. So it was that Phil Hart — neither the first nor the last time the administration would trade on Hart’s integrity — the Deputy Attorney General, White House Counsel, Townsend Hoopes from Defense, and a series of other powerful policy-makers sat down with a mixed group of Representatives and Senators on war powers. The job was as simple as it was profound: hash out the precepts, trim the language, and build a War Powers Amendment. Laws were all very well, but George McGovern himself pointed out how presidents of both parties had fudged and caviled and sidestepped in the past. Nail this down, he said to a mixed meeting of Zablocki, the archly principled William Proxmire, and Ramsey Clark. Get us language that brings Congress together and I’ll get out of the way.

Both happened. There were hearings before the judiciary and armed services committees, as the administration put its best foot forward via Cy Vance and Clark Clifford, the latter always standing by the curtain in case of need. The meetings were grueling but Phil Hart, out of his usual turf but committed to the outcome, and Cliff Alexander from Justice steered them admirably. By the middle of March they had the language, which shot through Congress comfortably past the two-thirds majorities and out into the states. Resistance emerged in places: with fears of liberal power over Congress, conservatives of both parties backed by private (often John Birch Society) money launched campaigns in several legislatures to strike down language that “tied a president’s hands against Moscow.” It gained traction but not enough. Though ratification played out down into the ending of the year, seven weeks of hard work in February and March yielded in the end a Twenty-Seventh Amendment, more often the War Powers Amendment to wire-service stringers and law students nationwide. Sometimes the best way to lead was to get out of the way.

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Colonel Volney Warner didn’t see himself as a writer, but when this whole sorry business was done he sure planned to get a book out of it. A bitter satire if he was lucky; if not, well…. A handsome, square-jawed son of the South Dakota plains, not unlike the new Commander in Chief, Warner had survived some of the worst infantry combat in Korea, snuck up the ranks as a closet intellectual, and then as a provincial liaison officer in South Vietnam and later aide in the Army Chief of Staff’s office joined a ragtag bunch of uniformed dissenters against massive escalation in Vietnam. Now Warner was chief of staff of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, the Army’s rapid deployment force abroad and, as riots across several American cities in the Sixties proved, at home as well.

It was the second phone call that made the real impression. The first said something Warner knew a little from the papers, when he had a chance to see them between staff work and parachute jumps. There was trouble out on the Pine Ridge Res back home, Oglala Sioux land down by the Black Hills. By itself that was already a damn shame; at the best of times Pine Ridge had troubles enough.

Protests and political campaigns on behalf of American Indians had taken wing in the late Sixties. AIM, the pan-tribal American Indian Movement that “put the red in the rainbow” of racial-equality movements, led the way but was hardly alone in the effort. There had been sit-ins at Alcatraz and in Washington, D.C., the “Trail of Broken Treaties” awareness campaign, and more localized sallies. This brought some results, like the Nixon administration’s end to “termination,” the laws and policies that, with the sweep of a pen, blotted out the legality of Indians’ identities. In places like Pine Ridge it was as though the new winds never blew. Just the same old cold ones that whispered of poverty, booze, crime, despair, cut through the fragile walls of camper homes as though they weren’t there, blew down the dirt suggestions of streets where there was no work, carried rootless sons and husbands off to drink in white men’s counties were you were as likely to get a knife in the gut as a handshake, harried the graying hair of generations of women who tried to hold specks of a stable life together.

In the mess of hopelessness and generational conflict, the res had gone and elected itself a smooth-talking autocrat, a corrupt modernizer with a white man’s name called Richard Wilson. Wilson sold grazing rights cheap to white ranchers in return for backhanders, misappropriated funds, and cracked heads to get his way backed by the poorly named Guardians of the Oglala Nation who would forever be GOONs to those who faced off against them. Traditionalist elders and young activists banded together to make the law work for them and turf Wilson out by impeachment. But the meeting came unstuck, Wilson pulled a parliamentary maneuver in absentia, and the GOONs bum-rushed would-be tribal voters with bruised ribs and bleeding heads.

A group of influential traditionalist women tried to organize a protest in the nearest county seat but white riot cops just repeated the GOON performance. Russell Means, one of the senior leaders of AIM, showed up on the reservation to hear grievances and deliver a letter of condemnation to Wilson’s office. A squad of GOONs ambushed Means and some traditionalist activists in a parking lot on the res. In the brawl that followed Means got most of his ribs cracked and his right knee ruined while Pedro Bissonette, son of traditionalist activist Gladys Bissonette, was shot dead. No one claimed to know who pulled that trigger. This was when the women resolved to walk to Wounded Knee.

It was the women who started it, as so often in res-level activism. Women who knew their plight was a cultural emblem for the cruelty of their opponents, who knew their resolve would shame their menfolk into action, who knew just how many of their foremothers had been shelled and bayoneted to death at the Wounded Knee campsite eighty years prior. Now a gimcrack little village, the women marched there, children in hand, laid in their supplies, and occupied the site. Within a couple of days it was like a battlement in the coal wars of eastern Kentucky. Ringed by GOONs and federal agents, shotgun-toting activists set up defenses, Oglala grandmaws with pickets on their shoulders and revolvers in their laps minded the children. Idealists of multiple generations staged a Ghost Dance, the hallowed ceremony intended to cleanse the earth of white men’s sins and bind all peoples in harmony. Above, United States Marshal’s Service sharpshooters in helicopters hovered and ranged them in.

This was where the second phone call to Colonel Warner came in. Warner stiffened by instinct as he heard the distinctive rumble of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Creighton “Abe” Abrams, on the other end. Abrams had drawn Warner’s file personally, and knew a little already from other senior generals, not just because the colonel was the correct man in the 82nd for the job but because he had the right mentality for it. Federal law enforcement have a burr up their ass about this, said Abrams. They want two thousand men out of your division to walk in there with M-16s and shiny boots and martial-law it all away. Clearly they’ve never seen trained infantry react to incoming fire, nor thought about the political consequences. Neither side seems to know what they’re really there for, the whole damned thing is a powder keg.

We need to keep the military clean out of this, Abrams went on. Firstly because that would only make this worse, second because we can’t bear the bad press right now. Your job, he told Warner, is to go out there, get their civilian asses in a row, tell them what cannot be done, and see if you can’t help wind this down. And for God’s sake don’t shoot any damn Indians, Abrams went on. The Army’s done too much of that already. Warner was from there; he knew very well. After a verbal salute, Warner filed notice of temporary duty to his CO, put on civilian clothes, and hopped a flight to the Dakotas.

Abrams had called it. The occupation site was one part shanty town, one part barricade. On Warner’s side perhaps a thousand GOONs and federal agents, the latter mostly FBI and Marshal’s Service, swarmed like ants over the ridgeline roads toting automatic rifles bummed off the National Guard, binoculars posed like they knew what they were doing but not pointed the right way. All the while wind-chilled, food-starved activists postured with their own guns and drawn-faced women darted between campers while harrying fire from the federal choppers chucked and stung in the grey dust of the compound. On his second day, after Warner sat down in stony Midwestern calm and read the FBI the riot act — or rather, Posse Comitatus — about what he could not do, another call came in. This one was from Gen. Fred Weyand, fresh back from Saigon with the American withdrawal. We have political folks, said Weyand who by that meant administration officials, who’d like to hear your assessment.

Well, Abe Abrams was right, Warner replied. It’s nothing if not a damn shambles. Law enforcement, especially the FBI field office, are itching to go in and shoot the place up and make some high-profile arrests. That’s why they’re playing rope-a-dope with harassing fire. Inside the compound it’s not clear that there is any proper chain of authority or command, thank God at least the AIM folk keep reminding the Oglala boys in there to keep their safeties on or they’d shoot their own legs off. There is no personal or food security so everyone in there is pretty desperate. Both sides are manic about potential double agents and informants, which keeps their trigger fingers itchy and further complicates matters.

What we need to do, said Warner, is rein in the feds and figure out some kind of deputation with a specific level of authority find out who we can talk to. See if we can establish some connections to get food in there and assure the safety of the children in the compound. These really are terrible conditions; I’ve talked this through at the federal level and even some of the Marshals think there was legal cause to hold impeachment proceedings on Wilson before all this got out of hand. We need to get these people looked after, get the guns out of their hands before someone else gets killed, then walk this thing back to square one.

Weyand thanked Warner for his input while Gary Hart quietly put down the third receiver on the line. After a look at Hart Weyand added, I think we can get to work on getting you a deputation. Hold your ground with the lawmen, let us see what we can get the political folks to do. Warner thanked the general and went about his work.

Two mornings further on a call came for Warner. An official federal delegation had just landed at Ellsworth Air Force Base outside Grand Rapids. Warner was told: it’ll take them a couple of hours to get down there, but you should receive them and help coordinate their effort to negotiate. Warner gave a verbal nod and went off to tell the feds they would have to wait on any plans to snatch targeted AIM activists. More like three hours later, just past lunch, a moving cloud of dust, like a storm coming in but too low to be weather, moved steadily up the main route through the res to the occupation site.

It was a solid clutch of big black Continentals, the usual government jobs strangely out of their element as they skittered and ground on the gravel road so far from the broad avenues of D.C. Warner walked out to the main roadblock point together with the Deputy Special Agent in Charge for the FBI field office and a couple of flunkies. They budged the wooden barrier to one side a bit to let the cars further down the road. Then the convoy stopped and doors opened. It took a minute in the brown-gray haze to see what they were dealing with here. It took another minute to believe it.

“Colonel Warner,” said the President of the United States as he extended a hand to shake, that square chin cocked into the breeze, eyes bright. “Pleased to meet you. I hear you’re a Woonsocket kid, like Eleanor.” This was a reference to the hamlet out in the state’s eastern plains where both Colonel Warner and the First Lady had been born. “It’s good to have a South Dakotan here. Let’s see if we can sort out these carpetbaggers,” McGovern’s head tilted in the direction of the federal lines, “and get those folks in there to sit down and talk.”

That summed up President McGovern’s view of the situation in a nutshell. He had brought quite a group: freshman South Dakota senator James Abourezk, the avuncular Arab-American South Dakota native and advocate for Indian rights; the state’s Lieutenant Governor, handsome Bill Dougherty; the barrel-chested Secretary of the Interior Jesse Unruh, who looked as always like a cleaned-up bar bouncer from the wrong side of the tracks; Solicitor General John Doar, longtime veteran of the armed camps that seemed to crop up wherever civil rights was an issue, cool and quiet; Dennis Banks, one of the founding fathers of AIM, compact, reserved, who read the assembled white faces keenly; and the sharp eyes and distinctive Afro of Reverend Jesse Jackson, director of PUSH — People United to Save Humanity — the umbrella rights organization Jackson founded to carry on the work of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. on multiple fronts. The chief executive wanted no doubts that the delegation had the power to make decisions. It got that message across. Word passed quickly, however it did, into the Wounded Knee compound. Oglala eyes strained for a vie.

After some discussion it was Abourezk and Doar who walked up first, a Secret Service man at their side with his hands always in the open. Folk on the res knew about the new senator’s record on Indian issues, of his empathy as another minority in a lily-white state. A few of them, especially the AIM advisors, knew Doar too, the man who had stood fast on the bridge at Selma, segregationist thugs poised to stove his head in, and said for all to hear that what he stood for was right. Both men knew the first couple of earnest youngsters they talked to had no real power, but they made a good impression and after a few minutes out came Gladys Bissonette herself, to have a word. All eyes were drawn to the two rumpled federalists and the terse woman wrapped in a shawl; each of the threesome knew this was where they had to find the path that did not end in bullets and fire. Bissonette looked incredulous at one suggestion but the men’s body language spoke to their honesty. If that’s what he wants, she answered, we can bring the elders together. It is, said Doar, who was then silent. Abourezk thanked her again and the messengers trudged back uphill.

The Secret Service objected. To say “flat out refused” was a matter of some delicacy, the balance between the Service’s authority to protect a president at nearly all costs set against the Chief Executive’s constitutional power to enforce laws. Colonel Warner shifted the potential pissing contest into a language of threat and tactics. To walk across that open terrain and go into the encampment exposed any valuable target — he let the reference to McGovern hang in the air — to just about all fields of fire. It didn’t matter who the crackpot or the radical or the guy with a grudge was, Warner went on, this was a pass to be the next Oswald. I hear that, said McGovern, but there are some larger issues at stake here. That we don’t want this to turn into another Attica, not with all those children in there, is just one of them. They’ve had it worse, for longer, than nearly any racial or ethnic group in the country. They need us to show this is different. Warner then said that if McGovern was determined, Warner would go with them. The Oglala saw him as a cool head. The senior United States Marshal on site said that, even if they let the presidential party in with a Secret Service detail, he sure didn’t want to be part of delivering a United States President into the hands of armed radicals.

McGovern shrugged this off. “I wouldn’t be the first South Dakotan to get shot at by an Indian. And I sure wouldn’t be the first to deserve it.” Warner smiled, much more than was strictly wise, and set off after the Commander in Chief like a man who enjoyed life more when he liked his marching orders. Warner had his doubts about the President’s ideology, but man to man they got on just fine after that.

So on that bitterly clear afternoon they walked across the broad divide between federal and Indian lines: President McGovern in his old leather bomber jacket (the bulletproof vest on which the Secret Service insisted was less obvious beneath it), Secretary Unruh, Lieutenant Governor Dougherty for the state authorities, and the Reverend Jackson, each with a Secret Service body man, and Colonel Warner in a windbreaker and khakis, his service .45 strapped to his thigh, flintlock eyes on the defilade lines. A huddle of elders and a couple of younger men in AIM armbands met them. McGovern looked found Gladys Bissonette’s face. He fixed her with the look of earnest sincerity he wore almost as a badge. “It was wrong,” he said. “I’m so terribly sorry.” Bissonette took it on her own terms — she had buried her own child, what was there to say after that — but nodded acknowledgment of what McGovern had just done. They all moved inside.

When people later held their interviews or made their documentaries, what came of asking the Oglala who sat in that room was that President McGovern and Reverend Jackson were really the ones who stole the show. And, later when he joined the group, Jim Abourezk who grasped how to turn into bills, into changes in law, what the Indian delegation talked about once Reverend Jackson got them comfortable and found a common language of pain and redemptive struggle to contain their thoughts. What President McGovern did over that afternoon and the next morning, the attendees agreed, was twofold. The first part was more surprising, given McGovern’s taste for talking out action, and that was steer: when he’d made clear this administration took a serious view of the wrongs tribal Indians suffered, he backed off to let the others find the language.

The second thing was that he took seriously the plans hashed out in that cramped, drafty trailer with vinyl floors and two battered old beige couches, not as pieces on the board of a larger game but as acts to solve problems. Jackson and Abourezk seemed to know how to bridge the gap between what Congress or the Executive Branch did and what Indians called out for on many a res. McGovern made it all honest labor largely free of baggage. For once, said Grandfather Frank Fools Crow, the best-known traditionalist in the camp, we had one of those practical, hard-faced white sod busters on our side.

Things started to happen. After two more days in which factions inside Wounded Knee argued over whether they could push the feds to remove Richard Wilson, joined by Dennis Banks who could report on the McGovern delegation’s moods and views, the occupants of Wounded Knee packed up camp and left the day after. Despite Colonel Warner’s misgivings — he remembered Abe Abrams’ directions clearly — Secretary Unruh, John Doar and Bill Dougherty had ginned up a plan that called up an engineering battalion of the South Dakota National Guard for an infrastructure repair project on the Pine Ridge res. Part bridge-building, literal and metaphoric, in practice Doar and Dougherty wanted the engineers there as uniformed witnesses in case of retaliation against the traditionalists by GOON forces. As the Solicitor General slipped quietly away, in came lawyers from the Justice Department, and assessors and social workers tied to Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in what amounted to a mass act of legal discovery about Wilson’s corrupt practices and intimidation. The DOJ also issued policy notices to its staff to extend courtesies when private lawyers funded by AIM (with grants in aid from PUSH) showed up to pursue the question of whether and how Wilson’s armed regime had violated tribal citizens’ civil rights.

Back in Washington James Abourezk cut the dash of his freshman term: rather than use its unwieldy formal designation, reporters and the Annotated United States Code just called it the Abourezk Act thereafter. It routed federal appropriations directly to the tribes, around the gatekeepers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In painstaking subsections it reformed the Bureau away from regulation and supervision towards facilitation. It required state, local, and federal authorities who put Indian children into foster care to try first placing them within their own culture. It created a deft gap in its own language that smart lawyers might use to help urban Indians tribalize or acquire a quasi-tribal status. It legalized peyote and other substances or practices when used in the context of religious ceremonies. It shored up language on intra-tribal civil rights and gave tribal citizens a direct appeal to the Justice Department on civil rights enforcement via “Section 1983” claims. Abourezk and his co-sponsors, Quentin Burdick and Mark Hatfield, had to drop language to enforce a “treaty veto” on mineral rights questions and a new Indian-rights division in the Justice department, but gains outweighed losses.

The process trudged on in increments. It dropped off the evening news except when Abourezk’s act passed, and deep into the folds of the papers, because when you got past a sitting president meeting with gun-toting longhairs, what was the readership on American Indian issues anyway? (Abourezk, at least, got a Select Committee out of the issues in the Senate.) But changes did come. Asked about it some years later Dennis Banks, who had been in the room with President McGovern for a couple of sessions, reflected on the event.

“It wasn’t that he offered the world or something,” Banks said. “What he said, what he promised to do, it was all pretty much common sense. But there was not a whole lot of common sense around at that time, and he could see that … more important he could acknowledge it. I had a strange feeling in that room. Not a bad one, just strange. Here I was like I’d been all my life, a foreigner in my own country, cutting little pieces out of white men’s rules to make some space. But as I watched George McGovern, watched how he held himself, watched him listen, watched him try to figure out what to say back to us, that feeling stuck. It was: well, if I’m stuck in a white man’s country for now, at least I might just have a president here. Funny feeling. There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”