“I had an excellent meeting,” he wrote, reporting his conquest later that night, “and this man wants me to assure you that he will break his back in an effort to accomplish our needs.”
Hubert Humphrey had lost his virginity in the classic American way—with a furtive quickie in the backseat of a car. It was a fittingly sad consummation of the Hughes-Humphrey relationship, the corruption of a candidate more to be pitied than scorned. He had simply surrendered to the sordid realities of politics in America.
Humphrey, who had opened his campaign proclaiming the “politics of joy,” arrived in Chicago August 25 morose, with no one to greet him except a handful of paid party workers. There were no crowds lining the route from the airport to the hotel, no cheering supporters to welcome the candidate to his convention headquarters. Humphrey was relieved simply to get into his suite unmolested.
Chicago was in turmoil. Earlier that Sunday police had swept through Lincoln Park, clubbing antiwar demonstrators, beating youths blinded by tear gas. The mayhem mounted every day. Humphrey was nervous.
So was Maheu. The backseat payoff was his biggest bag job. Although he had handled Hughes’s political money for years, he had never before passed $50,000 in secret cash to a vice-president of the United States.
“I know you think I may be overly cautious about having messages transmitted over the telephone which pertain to Humphrey and the convention,” he wrote Hughes as the Democrats prepared to choose a presidential candidate.
“Personally, I would put nothing past the AEC and their attempt to curtail our efforts. If—they ever were in a position to show the extent to which we are helping this man—they would clobber us.
“I don’t mind taking a calculated risk on Air West, L. A. Airways and many other projects in which we are involved—but—the Humphrey situation is one we should play real close to the vest.”
And that’s how they played it, all through the convention.
Closeted in their hotel command posts in Las Vegas and Chicago, both Hughes and Humphrey were feeling besieged. Neither really focused on the open warfare in the streets of Chicago but instead on hidden threats from rival powers.
First there was the president, Lyndon Johnson. For weeks he had been publicly ridiculing and privately tormenting his presumed heir, and now Humphrey feared something far worse. A coup. There were rumors that LBJ was about to board Air Force One, fly into Chicago, appear at the convention on his sixtieth birthday, and dramatically seize the nomination back from Humphrey.
“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 was nominated the Democrats’ candidate for president of the United States.
So, at the end, it came down to that. After all the passion and hope and tragedy and turmoil of 1968, after McCarthy and his children’s crusade, after New Hampshire and Johnson’s abdication, after Bobby Kennedy and his assassination, after the riots and marches and demonstrations, after the siege of Chicago, it came down to that—a choice between the old Humphrey and the new Nixon.
Up in his penthouse, watching TV, Howard Hughes could not have been more pleased.
It was now a contest he could not lose.
“Rather than take the calculated risk of ‘picking the winner’ I think we should hedge our bets,” wrote Maheu, plotting the final drive. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the election were tonight the Republicans would enjoy a glorious victory. There is equally no doubt in my mind that in the sanctimonious confines of the voting booth there will be many Democrats who will have a tremendous struggle with their conscience and make an instantaneous change in their thinking.