Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [124]
“Howard, I dont think this will happen but it is a possibility which I think we must bear in mind,” Maheu cautioned Hughes. “When the President shows up at the Convention, it is conceiveable that the place may break up in pandemonium and that the delegates could insist on a draft. Obviously, if this takes place, the Vice President is in no position to fight it.
“I believe, therefore, that if it is your intention to pledge some support in helping the President with his new concept of a College of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, we should do so prior to the Convention being in full force.”
Hughes, however, remained stubbornly unwilling to make the donation Johnson had requested in his secret meeting with Maheu at the LBJ Ranch two weeks earlier, and was instead preoccupied with the threat of a sudden boom for Teddy Kennedy.
“Needless to say, there is one hell of a drive on to draft Kennedy,” Maheu told Hughes. “Our informants tell us, however, that, as of this morning, Mr. H. is in.”
Hughes was not satisfied. “I dont want to see Ted Kennedy get the V.P. nomination,” he scrawled, determined to keep Teddy off the ticket entirely. “Is there anything we can do about this?”
Maheu checked out the scene in Chicago and reported back to the penthouse. “Bob believes the Kennedy situation is under control,” a Mormon aide told Hughes. “Bob’s choice would be the Senator from Maine.”
That senator, of course, was none other than Maheu’s old pal Ed Muskie. In his hotel suite, Humphrey was about to make the same choice. After agonizing for hours, Humphrey finally turned to his campaign manager, Larry O’Brien, and asked, “Larry, if you had fifteen seconds to decide, who would it be?” O’Brien picked Muskie, and Hubert called in the big man from Maine.
“Howard, as I indicated to you yesterday, Muskie was definitely my No. 1 choice,” wrote a triumphant Maheu. “He and his wife, my wife and I have been lifelong friends—all coming from the same small city in Maine. We have been supporting him since his first trip in the political arena, and he is truly one hell of a man. He was my personal attorney until he became a senator. As a matter of fact, he stopped here at the D.I. a few months ago to see me. The Vice President and Larry are fully aware of my closeness to Muskie.”
All the while Hughes and Maheu and Humphrey and O’Brien were cutting backroom deals, the battle raged in the streets of Chicago. Finally, on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, just as the delegates prepared to cast their ballots in a convention hall surrounded by barbed wire and armored personnel vehicles, the violence outside peaked.
Out in front of the Conrad Hilton, right below Humphrey’s window, in full view of the television cameras, the Chicago police suddenly attacked thousands of demonstrators marching on the amphitheatre. It was a bloodbath. Shooting tear gas, spraying Mace, waving their billy clubs, the helmeted cops converged from all sides, cutting through the crowd, chasing men and women, teenaged boys and girls, running them down, beating them with unrestrained fury, finally losing all control and attacking even middle-aged bystanders, pushing scores of them backward through the hotel’s plate-glass window and charging in after them, swinging wildly, clubbing patrons sitting at the bar, eating in the restaurant, standing in the lobby.
“The whole world is watching!” chanted the demonstrators outside, but Mayor Daley and his police didn’t seem to care.
Even inside the convention hall, Daley’s security force attacked and dragged off dissident delegates, even went after Dan Rather, punching him in the belly and beating him to the floor live on national television, while a shocked Walter Cronkite called to him from the anchor booth in horror.
From the podium, Senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” and Mayor Daley just below stood up enraged, shaking his fist at the senator, calling him a “fucking Jew bastard.”
In that scene of violence and mass hysteria, Hubert Humphrey