It wasn’t the big-time “Democratic bosses” who won the California primary for Bobby—but thousands of Niggers and Spics and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in California, and nobody would have had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.
But there was, of course, The Murder—and then the convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to “respectable” Democrats then and now—and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in ’72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower-Stevenson wipeout in 1956.
The people who turned out for Bobby are still around—along with several million others who’ll be voting for the first time—but they won’t turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser . . .
According to the Gallup polls, however, the underculture vote is holding up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Big Wigs and “pros” in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy’s name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations—calling him a “liar” and a “coward” and a “cheater.”
And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.
The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy’s recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won’t even admit that it’s happening—at least not for the record—and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming—too soon, perhaps, but there’s nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down, insisting he’s not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.
When I called Flug the other night, at the office, he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed, by the Senate, as Nixon’s new Secretary of Agriculture.
“To hell with Butz,” I said, “what about Rehnquist? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?”
“They have the votes,” he replied.
“Jesus,” I muttered, “is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I’ve read about him?”
“Worse,” Flug said. “But I think he’s in. We tried, but we can’t get the votes.”
Your New Supreme Court
Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long-standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for Esquire—an article that finally died in a blaze of niggling between me and the editors about how to cut my “final version” down from thirty thousand words to a size that would fit in the magazine.
Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.
We idled through the line with our trays, then took our plastic-wrapped tuna fish sandwiches over to a small Formica table, along with coffee in styrofoam cups. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill—trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line . . . until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.
Meanwhile, Flug was outlining every angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally into it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans—a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument the National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it ocurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom . . . and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my .44 Magnum fetish.
After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug’s trip—and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard that he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.