Miami Beach

Even his campaign signs reflected it. They didn't merely suggest MCGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT; they insisted on it, "PRESIDENT MCGOVERN, '72," as if the primaries, the convention, and finally the election itself were only technical problems on the way to an inevitable Inauguration Day.

Miami Beach, though, was different and, in its way, intensely revealing of a man almost as little known or understood as, yes, Richard Nixon. On Tuesday of convention week, late in the afternoon, the candidate and certain nominee had just been roused from a sound nap. He was tired and a little cranky. Monday, the crucial California credentials challenge had been settled in his favor. The day had been a long one, exhausting, and he had just, as he put it, "zonked," when Hubert Humphrey was on the phone, waking him at three in the morning to offer his congratulations.

So, even now, he was tired. In fact, he looked awful. To a friend, he seemed to have lost twenty pounds in the last year. The lines in his face had deepened into dark rivulets, and for the moment at least, sleepy and vulnerable, he looked very, very old.

McGovern was ready to talk in a moment, though, droning back the answers as fast as the questions clicked out. Gradually he settled into the sofa and propped his feet up on the coffee table in front of him. Then, the obvious question: "How does it feel to be Democratic nominee?" For the first time since the interview began, McGovern was more than routinely interested. It almost seemed that after a year and a half of answering thousands of questions, from defense spending to how he parts his hair, and having come back hard and finely chiseled, here was one query he had never considered.

"You know," he said finally, "I haven't really stopped to think about it. I have delayed reactions to these kinds of things. I guess a couple of weeks from now, when I am out in the Black Hills, it will suddenly strike me, what has happened and who I am."

WHO IS HE?

A nomination for President, and all that it portends, is enough to give any man pause. And so it is even for George McGovern, a most unexistential person. By now, if his prediction is right--and all of them have been, as his slogan puts it, "right from the start"--it will be clear to him who he is and what his identity means.

But will it change him? And from what to what? Miami, among all the other things it did, underscored once again that neither his friends nor his enemies have a clear understanding of who George McGovern is, how he has come to be that way, and where his nomination is likely to take not only him but all of us.

Some things, of course, should have been obvious from the beginning, and by convention time in Miami Beach, they were. For instance, by convention time it had become an article of journalistic faith that George McGovern had assembled an awesomely efficient campaign organization. (Interestingly, the only serious quarrel with this contention came from the "brilliant"--as they were invariably described--members of the organization itself. McGovern's campaign manager Gary Hart remarked at one point, with more perception than wit, "There is less to this campaign than meets the eye.") Theodore White, the chronicler of presidential campaigns, to cite only one example had, by July, already made up his mind that the success of George McGovern could be attributed almost exclusively to the competence of his campaign team. By Miami Beach there was also general, if more grudging recognition that there seemed to be something "out there" among the people that had earlier not been recognized or appreciated; it was most often called an "anti" feeling. The very qualities that made McGovern seem such an improbable candidate to the professionals--the supposed radicalism, the acknowledged lack of charisma, even that voice--were what made him so appealing to this year's crop of more than uncommonly alienated Voters.

Those were the givens, and Miami Beach did little to disturb them. The McGovern "machine" provided a dazzling display of its prowess. Indeed. almost everything about the convention was predictable save one: the candidate himself. At Miami Beach, George McGovern, for the first time in the long campaign, puzzled, bewildered, even disheartened many of the people who worked so hard and so long to get him the nomination. In the process, he even managed to offend a lot who hadn't.

There was, first of all, the matter of Mayor Daley and his fifty-eight delegates. Despite his aides', as well as his own, protestations that they did everything humanly possible to "force" Daley to accept a compromise that would have seated him and his delegates as one-half-vote coequals with the Jesse Jackson-William Singer insurgents, there remains doubt about just how much "everything" really represented. The senator himself held out no personal animus for the mayor, even after Daley bluntly informed him by phone, just days before the mayor's credentials were stripped, that McGovern was "beaten," and that he, Daley, would offer no aid on the California chalIenge. McGovern was still inclined to work for a compromise, even one that would put the Jackson-Singer forces at a severe disadvantage. But after the credentials committee denied him the full fruits of his California victory, events were in the saddle--with McGovern unwilling, and quite possibly unable, to unhorse them.

Daley's intransigence was symbolized by his own compromise proposal, which would have seated the Jackson-Singer delegates, attaching some of them to every delegation except Illinois'. That, coupled with the desire of McGovern partisans to "stick it" to Daley for 1968 ("He needs us in Illinois just as much as we need him, said Frank Mankiewicz), could produce only one result.

What is fascinating about the Illinois debacle, and instructive in the ways of George McGovern, is not the manner of Daley's unseating, or even what could have been done to prevent it, but McGovern's feelings for the parties involved. The convenient assumption is that George McGovern, that firebrand of reform, was instinctively the champion of Messrs. Jackson and Singer. In fact, the precise opposite was true. Politics aside, McGovern's real sympathy lay with the mayor. McGovern has never been personally close to Jackson, who offended him during the 1968 convention by keeping him waiting for an hour and a half in ninety-degree-plus heat to speak to a massive congregation of black Chicagoans. If anything, he is less sympathetic to Alderman Singer, who is at least as personally ambitious as he is a committed reformer. McGovern, who came to political maturity as chief organizer for the South Dakota Democratic Party, for all his newfound friends and liberal causes, remains at gut level a traditional organization man. He knows the problems of organization men, and suffers with them. McGovern, above all, knows that while kids and reformers come and go, it is the organization men--the so-called hacks of the Daley machine--who stay on to do the dull dirty work that has made the Democratic Party the most consistently vital political force in the country. McGovern should know. He began, in conventional terms, as a "hack" himself.

McGovern also respects Daley not only for the usual reasons but because Daley was the first major political power to take him seriously. Even before McGovern left Chicago in 1968, when his thirteen-day quixotic campaign for the presidency had brought him all of 146 and a half votes for the nomination, Daley took him aside and in almost fatherly tones advised, "My dear mother, God rest her soul, always told me, 'Richard, as one door closes, another door opens.'" To a recent interviewer, McGovern put it much less cryptically. "He [Daley] said to me, Well, you know the candidate in seventy-two is probably going to be young Kennedy or you." That made a big impression on me."

The realization that the prairie populist is a political soul mate of the big-city boss may have been disillusioning to purists in the McGovern camp, but it was not nearly as crushing as the recognition in Miami Beach that--wonder of wonders--there is some old-fashioned expediency in their man. One example was McGovern's deliberation on the matter of his running mate. Naturally, Edward Kennedy was McGovern's first choice. But in fact, McGovern may privately have been relieved when the call came in from Hyannisport, confirming that "for very real personal reasons" the surviving Kennedy brother would not be available. In the first place, McGovern's concern for the Kennedy family is very deep. After Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, McGovern for a time blamed himself for the tragedy. "If I had run, maybe none of this would have happened," he told Allard Lowenstein on his way home from the funeral. The thought of exposing the final Kennedy brother to an assassin's bullet must have preyed on McGovern's mind. Secondly, he and Ted Kennedy have never enjoyed the relationship McGovern shared with Robert. An admirer of Kennedy's political abilities, McGovern has nonetheless regarded Kennedy as something less than a complete person. Nor, finally, is it for nothing that McGovern never formally asked Kennedy for his endorsement. McGovern was determined, says one of his closest advisers, "to do this thing on his own. He didn't need Teddy's help." Having done it all on his own, it is difficult to see why McGovern would welcome a running mate who would very likely overshadow him in the general election.

With Kennedy out of the running, the field was wide open. If he had had his druthers, McGovern would have tapped Wisconsin's Gaylord Nelson, his closest friend in the Senate and a man whom he respects enormously and relies on for counsel. But eventually, the choice devolved on Thomas Eagleton. Eagleton's ties with labor, his reputation for moderation, his demonstrated ability to get on with the regulars, and above all his Roman Catholicism were significant factors in the final selection. Eagleton's history of hospitalizations was not, by the candidates' accounts, brought into their deliberations with each other, inexplicably. After the story surfaced, McGovern's choice seemed hasty, for all the expediency of his instinct.

More curious, however, than the selection of Eagleton or the cozying to Daley, and less explicable than either, was McGovern's statement on Tuesday of convention week to Families for Immediate Release, an antiwar organization of relatives of POW's and servicemen missing in action. A delegation of the organization came to Miami Beach to endorse McGovern's candidacy. One of the members, Mrs. Valerie Kushner, whose husband has been a prisoner of the National Liberation Front for five years, also seconded McGovern's nomination.

In a statement read to the press by Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern promised the wives that, while he would order an immediate cease-fire on Inauguration Day, terminate military aid to the Thieu regime, and withdraw all U.S. military personnel from Indochina (meaning Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) within ninety days after taking office, he would maintain forces at bases in Thailand and on the Tonkin Gulf until the prisoners were returned and an accounting made of all the missing.

UNCLEAN

McGovern's promise provoked an immediate uproar, among both his supporters, and the protesters until then docilely encamped in Flamingo Park. The kids, about two hundred of them, reacted by staging a noisy sit-in in the lobby of the Doral Beach, McGovern's headquarters hotel. Speaker after speaker denounced him as a "sellout" and a "puppet of the bosses," until McGovern himself felt compelled to come down from his penthouse and personally cool their tempers. The rhetoric of McGovern's delegates and supporters was more temperate, but the moment of disenchantment was the same.

The McGovern high command reacted twenty-four hours later by issuing a "clarification" underscoring McGovern's intention to end the fighting and withdraw all U.S. forces from the area, including Thailand and Tonkin, once the prisoners were returned. The original statement, the clarification insisted, represented no change from previous policy. What led to the confusion, went the explanation, was a misunderstanding by the press.

In fact, as McGovern well knew, there had been no misunderstanding by the press or anyone else The Thailand-Tonkin proviso did present a sharp departure from his previous policy, which in the past had clearly spelled out that withdrawal from Indochina specifically encompassed Thailand and Tonkin as well, with no preconditions.

The only reasonable impression an observer could get was that, as on welfare reform, McGovern was waffling, and this time lying in the bargain. No matter that not even the North Vietnamese had ever insisted on a complete withdrawal from ThaiIand and Tonkin as a precondition to releasing the prisoners. Vietnam was supposed to be McGovern's cleanest issue, and now he was sullying it, apparently for the sake of a few votes to the right of him.

The actual explanation for McGovern's behavior, when it emerged a few days later in conversation with the staffman who wrote the statement, was at once less disturbing and more perplexing. According to the staffman, the McGovern camp had known for some time that it would have to formulate some sort of acceptable answer to the constantly posed query, "But what if they don't let the prisoners go when the war is over?" McGovern himself, based on conversations with the Vietnamese in Paris, was personally convinced that the problem of the prisoners not being released after the withdrawal of American forces was purely hypothetical. For one thing, why would the North Vietnamese want to keep them? Rational as this explanation was, McGovern also knew it was not enough to allay the emotional fears of the POW-MIA wives, a potent political force and women for whom McGovern felt considerable personal sympathy. The logical moment to answer that "what-if" question, McGovern and his advisers concluded, was before a forum of wives themselves. Unfortunately, they timed the forum at the worst possible moment: smack in the middle of the Democratic convention.

The staffman drafted the original statement and took it to McGovern's penthouse on the seventeenth floor of the Doral for the candidate's personal approval. It was past midnight when he arrived, and Willie Brown, a black assemblyman from California, had just concluded his denunciation of the anti-McGovern credentials report. As might be expected, McGovern's attention was on the television set in front of him, where, at that moment, the chances of his nomination were being decided. Whether McGovern actually realized what he was reading is not clear. In any case, he approved the statement without any additions or subtractions, and the staffer whipped it into final form. Then the storm broke.

Fortunately for McGovern, his newly revised Vietnam policy stopped far short of being a calamity. A question, even one that raised doubts, yes. Evidently, people accept McGovern's explanations and trust that he will carry through with them: After all, if George McGovern cannot be believed on Vietnam, what can he be believed on?

McGovern has a knack for committing potentially disastrous mistakes and then, if not turning them to advantage, at least neutralizing them. "He is the most cliffhanging guy I have ever met in politics." says a longtime political pro and McGovern operative. And yet McGovern always seems to pull himself back--not all the way up, but just out of immediate danger. The drama, one might say, is in the dangling.

Of course, come the fall, it will be his Republican opponents who are at the top of the cliff, doing their damnedest to stomp on McGovern's fingertips. The question, then, is whether a bare handhold is enough, whether McGovern will be able to trust, as he always has in the past, that goodness (buttressed by indefatigable hard work) will win out.

Few people question McGovern's goodness, or doubt that his nomination was an extraordinary achievement. It is what McGovern will become that is at issue. After the experience of Miami Beach, can he be trusted with quite the abandon that he has been in the past? What will be the cost of the "moderation" that labor and the political pros are demanding, and how deep will it run? The opportunity to be a part of history has always been a powerful lure for George McGovern, himself a teacher and writer of history. When all the explanations are in, and the average politician's ego drive accounted for, it is that sense of being at the head of powerful historic forces that seems to drive him, even in the face of overwhelming odds. McGovern has said more than once that he will be President, that the history of the moment makes it not only possible but nearly inevitable. How much is McGovern willing to give, of himself and what he believes, to make that inevitability a certainty?

Anyone who claims to know the answers knows George McGovern better than the nominee knows himself. McGovern has come as far as he has because, more than most men, he has followed his instincts, even toward what others said was folly. Up to now, those instincts have demanded the boldest course.

Now, though, McGovern is in transition. Politically and personally, he is in a state of flux. Those who are close to him, who have access to his mind as well as his ear predict that far from moderating, McGovern will stiffen, toughening both himself and his ideas. In the details, there will be concessions--to Daley, to labor, to a center. For the true believers, the summer and fall may be painful. But they will miss the real man McGovern's advisers say; there at core, where it matters, will be hardness. But that is a biased view, however well informed. Only one man can truly know, and even for him, there is wonder.