"That son of a bitch," Merrion said once to Hilliard, 'you know there has to be something wrong with a guy who makes people uncomfortable on purpose."
Merrion had first met Pooler on the evening of the first Wednesday in April of 1968 at a small gathering of western Massachusetts Democratic politicians in the private dining room upstairs in a good restaurant in Springfield. The meeting had been called hurriedly by men and women with decades of gritty experience in Democratic state and national politics left puzzled and unsure of what to do in the wake of the shock they had sustained the previous Sunday evening. President Johnson's request for TV time had not been simply to announce, as feared, a further escalation of the war in Vietnam (although he had included that, to widespread disapproval). He had thunderstruck the country by mournfully and reproachfully announcing his irrevocable decision not to seek (or to accept, either, as though there'd been more than an outside chance that someone truly out of touch might call for a convention draft) their party's nomination to be re-elected 'as your prezdun."
Incorrectly, the party elders imputed their own sad uncertainty to younger regulars like Hilliard and Merrion. They too had been startled when Lyndon Johnson publicly renounced all ambition for a second full term of his own, but Merrion had been relieved and Hilliard had been elated. He had no doubt what to do. He was so sure that he abrogated his policy of saying nothing publicly until he had first tested it aloud on himself by discussing its probable effect with Merrion – Merrion that night had been unavailable, aloft on his way home from a long weekend in New Orleans with Sunny Keller, on leave from her assignment at Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Unrestrained by Merrion's caution, Hilliard jubilantly told the first reporter seeking his reaction that evening that he was backing Bobby Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, 'hammer and tongs."
Hilliard's commitment was not new. Only his disclosure of it was. Well before Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam war campaign bucking Johnson in the February New Hampshire primary had yielded a close-second-place finish, Hilliard had said he hoped that Kennedy would challenge the president, but he had not said so for attribution in the media. Rashly doing so that night, he said that LBJ's withdrawal was 'the best news the party's had in years. If he'd wanted the nomination, he would've had it for the asking. Sitting presidents are not to be denied, McCarthy or not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. But then he would've lost. Guarantee you, matched-up against Lyndon, Nixon wins."
"I think that maybe did not play too good," Merrion told him grimly in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Hilliard demurred, but after two days of fielding strong reactions, he reluctantly accepted Merrion's assessment: "You've made a lot of people goddamned mad at you, all at once, without doing yourself any damned good at all. No other mistake we've ever made, and we have made some beauts, did so much damage so fast. You've pissed-off people we don't even know. They didn't know each other, until you lit them off; you're the first thing they've ever had in common.
"First you pissed off the people who've always run the fucking party.
Postmasters, Customs collectors, marshals, all the way up to judges and ambassadors: "First our party, then our country, dead right or dead wrong." They think Eugene McCarthy is a rotten, treacherous, party-wreckin' son of a bitch, and anyone who's with him or anybody else, like Bobby, who's against the President, is either a traitor or a Republican. Which in their books is much the same thing.
"At the very same time you enraged the McCarthy people. They've been scheming and conniving for the past five years to mug the old farts and take the party away from them. Then lo and behold, along comes Gene McCarthy, the answer to their prayers, with the balls to stand up and say "Aw right, if nobody else'll do it, goddamn it, I'll do it myself."
Roll the fuckin' dice, and get the movement underway, even if it does mean the end of his career they go berserk the guy, the Way, the Truth and the Light. "Peacemakers" they claim to be; Colt Peacemakers, maybe. Look like dangerous animals to me; crazy eyes, foam in their scraggliass-beards. So what do you do? Make them as screaming mad at you's they were at LBJ. You ain't got no Secret Service to protect you, and you're local; they can get in your face.
