The Good Fight, page 1
Dedication
TO CONRAD CHISHOLM, MY DEVOTED HUSBAND
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
I. The Nomination
II. After 1968
III. The Kids
IV. Black Politics
V. Making Up My Mind
VI. Florida
VII. She’s Just a Stalking-Horse
VIII. Wallace’s Shooting
IX. The Last Primary
X. The Convention
XI. McGovern and the Campaign
XII. Black Alternatives
XIII. Coalition Politics
XIV. Looking Both Ways
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Position Papers
Equality of Commitment—Africa
Foreign Aid
Justice in America
The Economy
Appendix B: Campaign Speeches
Economic Justice for Women
The Cost of Care
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
ONE OF THE most dismaying aspects of politics and public life in America today is the increasingly closed nature of the entire political process, particularly at the highest level. We hear much these days about the growing power of the Presidency at the expense of Congress, the lack of White House communication with the public, the virtual end of Presidential press conferences, and the secret bargaining and trading of favors in the back rooms of the powerful—all of which have repelled many people in the country. The low voter turnout in the November 1972 elections was a disturbing barometer of the air of apathy and resignation which permeates the nation’s political atmosphere in this new year, a terribly unhealthy sign in a democracy.
Sorrow over the deaths of two former Presidents and somber relief over the apparent halt in our massive military intervention in Southeast Asia do not seem enough to enable us to stop and blink and perhaps turn our eyes from the past—so much of which has shocked and confused Americans—in hopes of starting anew and refocusing our hopes and energies toward the urgent needs of our nation.
Yet there are nonetheless positive undercurrents coursing through the lifeblood of America. A strong economic performance seems imminent, hopefully promising more jobs. The recent Supreme Court decision on abortions gives me confidence that there are indeed men of reason and basic goodwill who are prepared to make terribly difficult and profound social and moral decisions despite sharp and highly emotional opposition. Furthermore, the election of a Democratic Congress in 1972 indicates to me that most Americans want a counter to the administration and have not forgotten those humane, progressive values which some feared were lost forever as our technological society rolled on.
In response to public demand, more light is being shed on our political process—on campaign financing, on convention delegate selection, and on Congressional committee operations. The recent decision by a Democratic caucus of the House to reform the seniority system may well have a significant impact on the ability of the House to respond more quickly and effectively to local and national problems.
I ran for the Presidency in order to crack a little more of the ice which in recent years has congealed to nearly immobilize our political system and demoralize people. I ran for the Presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.
It seems to me that a Presidential candidate can open the door a bit farther by discussing openly and frankly what transpired during his or her campaign—the pressures, the conflicts, the fears, the double crosses, the financial costs—while the campaign is fresh in the public mind and before the candidate reaches that autumnal time of life when the traditional memoir may be deemed suitable.
I therefore freely give my impressions of events and personalities as I perceived them during the 1972 Presidential primary campaigns. In so doing, I hope the public may better understand this grueling, often bewildering phase of our election system. Some readers may find their worst fears confirmed; others may feel compelled to participate themselves in some future campaign. Either way I feel that such a book may play a useful role in my continuing efforts to shake up our system.
February 1973, S.C.
I.
The Nomination
IT WAS STRANGE that some of the people screaming the loudest were Wallace delegates with long red, white and blue neckties. One little white man kept jumping up and down; he didn’t stop during the ten minutes it took for my acceptance speech. Little of the enthusiasm spread to the rostrum, though. Party chairman Larry O’Brien and the other officers at the Democratic National Convention in July, 1972, were impassive. It was an odd contrast; I noticed it fleetingly as I walked to the microphone.
There was no speech prepared. I didn’t need one, because there was only one thing for me to say: “Brothers and sisters! At last I’ve reached this spot!” I don’t remember my exact words. There are tape recordings somewhere, probably, for anyone who thinks the exact words matter. The placards waved, a band played, the hall was a stormy beach with waves made of people dressed in all colors, and their shouts were like the noise of an ocean. I had never seen a national convention session before except on television. State ones, yes. But the only convention I had gone to was the 1968 one in Chicago, and that was neither as a candidate nor as a delegate; when the session was nearly over I went to attend a meeting of the Democratic National Committee.
As I left my trailer behind the hall in Miami, surrounded by a ring of Secret Service men, I felt no excitement. Backstage, watching the scene on a television set until it was time to go on, I was still calm. But now this huge room was pulsing and jumping at me, so much more than I had expected. How long it went on, I could never tell. Even when I began to speak, they never really quieted down. If you had just landed from the moon, you might have thought that I was the convention’s choice, not just a preliminary to the main event. I tried to focus on something and get myself together. People were leaving their seats, pushing through the chairs to the aisle below the speakers’ platform, where I stood behind a huge-seeming lectern. Almost everybody was applauding and cheering—everybody except some of the McGovern delegates, who had contented themselves with a few claps. What I noticed most were the older black men and women. Some were crying, and their faces were so full of joy that they looked in pain. I thought I could read their lives’ experiences in their faces at that instant, and I know what it was they felt. For a moment they really believed it: “We have overcome!”
What I said that night was that most people had thought I would never stand there, in that place, but there I was. All the odds had been against it, right up to the end. I never blamed anyone for doubting. The Presidency is for white males. No one was ready to take a black woman seriously as a candidate. It was not time yet for a black to run, let alone a woman, and certainly not for someone who was both. Someday . . . but not yet. Someday the country would be ready. Those were the things I had been told, everywhere I went for ten months, even before I announced officially that I was a candidate, and everywhere I was asked the same question: “But, Mrs. Chisholm—are you a serious candidate?” Each time, trying not to lose patience, I explained, and tonight I was explaining again.
Of course my candidacy had no chance. I had little money and no way of raising the funds it takes to run for high office. I had no big party figures supporting me. To the extent that they noticed me at all, the movers and shakers wished only that I would go away. A wild card, a random factor that might upset some detail of their plans, an intruder into the real contest among the white male candidates. Their response was ridicule—in private, not in public, because a gentleman doesn’t make fun of a lady and a politician doesn’t want to risk losing the black vote. But their attitude came through clearly: treat her with respect, but of course you don’t have to take her seriously. If they ever wondered why I was running, their explanation was usually “Chisholm is on an ego trip.”
So I did not devote my acceptance speech to a discussion of “the issues.” I had discussed the issues before. People hear about the issues from every politician who gets up on a stump. They’ve quit listening to the traditional speeches with the traditional promises. “Fellow Americans, these are the great issues we must face. Fellow Americans, this is what I will do for you if you elect me.” So what’s new?
Who are you, and where are you coming from? Those are the questions people want to hear answered now. The old routine worked for a long, long time, but its time is done. I had no promises to make anyway, because I was not about to be the nominee. I had something more important to explain: why I was there. I’m still explaining it.
I ran because someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for President, but that’s never been really true. I ran because most people think the country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate. Someday . . .
It was time in 1972 to make that someday come and, partly through a series of accidents that might never recur, it seemed to me that I was the best fitted to try. Once I was in the campaign, I had to stay all the way to the end, all the way to that night at the convention. Nothing less would have shown that I was “a serious candidate.” If there had been only ten delegates ready to vote for me on the first ballot, instead of more than 150, I would sti
II.
After 1968
SENATOR HUBERT H. Humphrey might easily have been elected President in 1968. If about 1.5 percent of the votes in California and Illinois and only about 1 percent in New Jersey had shifted to him, those states with their 83 electoral votes would not have fallen to Richard M. Nixon. Humphrey would have won by 274 electoral votes to 228. Even without New Jersey he would have won by 22 electoral votes. Had he carried California and New Jersey but not Illinois, he would still have won by 4. The election was lost because too many voters stayed home, unwilling to cast a ballot for either candidate. Humphrey lost because he had supported President Lyndon B. Johnson on the Vietnam war and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago on the police riot during the 1968 Democratic convention. The figures leave no doubt of it, in my mind. Of course, election returns are like the daily advice in a newspaper astrology column: everyone can find there whatever it is he wants to see. It is also possible to prove from the 1968 returns that Humphrey would have won if George Wallace had not been in the race, or that Nixon would have won even more decisively if Wallace had not been in it. It is possible to conclude almost anything, because we do not know very much about what goes on in a voter’s head behind the curtains of a polling booth. Interpretation of the returns tells one more about the interpreter, I suppose, than it does about the returns. But the figures are there: Humphrey lost California’s 40 votes by 3.1 percent, Illinois’ 26 by 2.9 percent and New Jersey’s 17 by 2.1 percent; and Nixon won 301 to 191. I choose to feel that Humphrey lost because he represented a Democratic Party that stood in the minds of youth for a hateful war, and because he did not win the allegiance of blacks and other minority voters to the extent that he, perhaps, deserved.
Leave the young voters aside for a moment; blacks make up between 15 and 20 percent of the United States population, and other racial minorities bring the total to nearly 30 percent. Minorities are numerous in cities of the three crucial states I named—California, Illinois and New Jersey. Their votes could have made the difference. Humphrey, I know, did well in black voting districts—among registered voters. But blacks in particular, and racial minorities in general, are the most under-registered part of the population. They do not vote because they see no salvation for them in either political party or candidate. They know that the parties represent the white majority, and that they are not true participants in the political process; all that the candidates want from them is a vote. So, quite pardonably, they tend to refuse to play such a demeaning role.
If ever a Presidential candidate’s record qualified him for the support of blacks and other minorities, Humphrey’s did. He was a civil rights advocate in the 1940s, long before it was a popular position, and he did more than talk; he went to the mat for equal rights at party conventions and in the Senate. Few if any white politicians are in his league as an ardent and sincere advocate of civil rights. There is no doubt that he deserved better from the people he had fought for than he got in the 1968 election. For that matter, he probably deserved more support than he received from the anti-war voters, young and old; a decent and peace-loving man, he would in all likelihood have put a much speedier end to the Southeast Asian war than did the victor in the contest. But this is exactly the point: one has to deal in politics not with reality per se, but with reality as it is perceived by voters, through clouds of distortion, simplification, prejudices and misinformation. Humphrey was looked on by anti-war voters as a crony of LBJ and Dick Daley; and to minority-group voters, particularly younger ones, he appeared to be just another white politician—nowhere near the sympathetic, compelling figure that Robert F. Kennedy had been, although (in all honesty) Kennedy had far less to show in the way of genuine, sustained effort in the minorities’ cause. The point is that these groups stayed home because they saw no gain in participating in the electoral process; there was nothing in it for them. It was a crooked game, where heads you win and tails I lose.
My point is that Humphrey could have won if he and the Democratic Party had appeared only slightly, ever so slightly (a matter of a few percentage points) more credible to some of the groups of voters who had become disillusioned with the processes of representative government, or who (in the case of many blacks) had little or no faith in those processes to start with. That he did not manage to do so was a deplorable event, and it has, I believe, changed the history of this nation for the worse.
So these groups stayed away from the polls on Election Day, 1968, and their absence was decisive, because the old alignments were changing. The South was no longer solid, and the coalition that had made the Democrats a majority party for more than half a century was crumbling. A few people understood what was going on before the 1968 election; in the wake of it, there could be no doubt. Victory for the Democrats in 1972 was going to depend on a rather radical realignment of voting groups; to hope to restore the coalition that had elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy was not realistic. But the new shape of things remained unclear. The more some of the professionals and intellectuals thought about it, the more they began to wonder whether the end of the two-party system as they had known it was not in sight.
The full picture with all its details need not concern us; the point I want to develop is that one of the elements of the Democratic coalition that was falling away was the racial minority groups, the blacks, Indians, Puerto Ricans and other citizens discriminated against because of the color of their skins or their language differences. The position of white ethnic minorities is an entirely different question, although there may be a few similarities. But blacks and the other racial minorities were beginning more and more to rebel at their role as captives of the Democrats, or as it has been beautifully put, “tenants” in the party. “Where else can they go?” the white politicians asked smugly. And it certainly seemed true that they had nowhere else to go, as the first term of the Nixon administration unrolled: backtracking and waffling on school desegregation; cutbacks in job programs; cutbacks in education; hostility to school lunch and food stamp programs. “You don’t solve problems by throwing money at them,” counseled Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the same Nixon adviser who achieved a kind of immortality by coining the phrase “benign neglect.” Indeed, it was clear that no problems were going to be solved with money by this administration; unemployment mounted until it reached 15 percent or more in entire cities and counties, and triple that in the black and Chicano districts. Urban housing problems were “attacked” with programs that bankrupted the poor and enriched speculators. The record of the Nixon administration on minorities and poor people generally was one of cruel inaction, punctuated with instances of outright oppression.
Certainly, the Democrats had no reason to fear that the black vote and that of the other minorities would desert to the Republican Party. The party’s white leaders could certainly sit back and count on the minorities for 1972; no great consideration needed to be given them, because they could easily be made to understand that, once again, the Democratic candidate would be for them the lesser evil.
Exactly who the party’s leader would be was at that time far from settled—whether a traditional Democratic liberal like Humphrey or Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, or a more mod candidate like Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, former Senator Eugene McCarthy or that recent convert Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York. There were even darker horses in the field. It was clear, as the 1972 primaries drew nearer, that they would be crowded ones. Not only was the glut of candidates bewildering but the party machinery also was undergoing some novel changes. One lesson had been learned from the 1968 defeat: there would have to be some way to attract the allegiance of the newly important youth bloc (there would be several million voters under eighteen in 1972, thanks to a new Constitutional amendment), and the increasingly independent and militant women’s vote had to be considered; either one might be decisive. The minorities, too, were not going to be content with token representation any longer. A reform commission pondered these and other problems and came up with a radical reorganization of the rules by which the national party constituted itself and managed its business, particularly that of nominating a President. The new rules made it likely that there would be more black delegates than ever before at the 1972 nominating convention, by a wide margin, and more women delegates, and probably more young ones of whatever color or sex. It was little short of a revolutionary change—on paper. The 1968 defeat, and the specter of another in 1972, had jolted the Democrats into a healthy reaction; they were making a sincere effort to open up the party to all kinds of people, old and young, white and black, men and women. It seemed possible that this would be a new kind of campaign and a different kind of convention, with no more smoke-filled rooms where deals by a few insiders decided the important questions. The phrase was “the new politics.”
