No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I’d always thought I was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful home and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be president, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
Harold Hughes Is Your Friend
Manchester, New Hampshire, is a broken-down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington, D.C.
I checked into the Wayfarer, just before dawn, and tried to get some music on my high-powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries, in Portsmouth.
It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his handgrabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain, above which hung a sign saying “Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work.”
The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything—and a lot of hissing & humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.
The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-aged liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern’s public appearances: the crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age diversion didn’t hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was . . . even at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three; that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five and thirty-five.
After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Phillips Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.
I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said—no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets—so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous neo-Nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender “Jim,” which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as “Mr. Reynolds.”
Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. “My name’s not Reynolds, goddamn it! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star.” Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.
The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his campaign manager in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa—Senator Harold Hughes—had just announced that he was endorsing Ed Muskie.
This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes-McGovern–Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who’ve been crisscrossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him “untouchable.” If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.
Hughes had grown a beard; he didn’t mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then—and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry O’Brien’s personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the national convention.