1968 - Mark Kurlansky [154]
First was the political question, could he win? It was often said that he would be shot if it looked as if he would win. On June 4 he won the California primary, defeating McCarthy 45 to 42 percent, with Humphrey drawing only 12 percent of the vote. At that moment he had finally overcome McCarthy’s considerable lead. He had only to outmaneuver Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention. “And now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there,” he said. Minutes later he was shot in the head, strangely while taking an unplanned shortcut through the kitchen because admirers had blocked the planned exit path. And there in the kitchen, on the unplanned route, was a man waiting with a handgun.
He had been shot by someone named Sirhan Sirhan, an odd appellation that made no sense to American ears. Who was Sirhan Sirhan? Unsatisfactory answers started coming. A Jordanian, an Arab from occupied Jordan, a Palestinian, but not in the old sense of a militant. Not an Arab with an agenda—no agenda. A displaced person who seemed mentally unstable. We learned who killed him, but we have never found out why.
Now that Kennedy was gone, who would be the next front-runner, and would he too be killed? “There is no God but death,” Ferlinghetti wrote in a poem to Kennedy that he read the day he was buried. All the candidates, Democrats and Republicans, none so much as McCarthy, who seemed to have withdrawn from the race, knew that they could be next. Norman Mailer, who covered both party conventions, observed that all of the candidates had become uneasy-looking when in crowds. The most likely victim already dead, the federal government decided it had to do more to protect the other seven. Robert Kennedy’s assassination would have failed if the Secret Service had been guarding him, because they would have cleared the kitchen before he entered. One hundred and fifty Secret Service agents were attached to the remaining candidates, which had little impact on Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace because they were already heavily guarded. But it was a huge change for Eugene McCarthy, who had never even had a bodyguard.
With politics dead and seven candidates still alive, the political conventions were empty, like a sporting event in which the star athlete had been scratched from the competition. Republicans and Democrats are different, and so the Republican convention was controlled emptiness, whereas the Democratic one was empty chaos.
National political conventions were invented for political bosses from around the country to meet and pick their candidate for president. The first president to be nominated by a convention had been Andrew Jackson in his second term. Originally, candidates were chosen by a few top party cronies in private. Not only did this seem undemocratic, but as the country got larger it became unwieldy, because all American political parties have always been a confederation of local bosses—state bosses, city bosses, people like Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. As the country got bigger, the parties had more bosses.
The conventions were always bad theater, full of grandiose and foolish stunts. In 1948, the first year they were televised, they became bad television. That was the year the Democrats unleashed a flock of recalcitrant pigeons who attempted to perch everywhere, including on chairman Sam Rayburn’s head while he was trying to call the meeting back to order with a gavel. He swatted it away, but the persistent bird landed in front of him on the podium. In front of a platoon of photographers with flashbulbs and television cameras, he grabbed the bird and flung it out of the way.
In 1952 the summer