Page 328 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

Just as Bobby seemed to be getting his fire back, George's disillusionment with President Johnson had been completed by the president's reaction to the Kerner Commission, appointed to examine the causes of racial unrest during the long, hot summer of 1967. Their report pulled no punches: the cause of the rioting was white racism, it said. It was sharply critical of government, the media, and the police, and it called for radical action on housing, jobs, and segregation. It was published as a paperback and sold two million copies. But Johnson simply rejected the report. The man who had heroically championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965--the keystones of Negro advancement--had given up the fight.

Bobby, having made the decision not to run, continued to torment himself with worry about whether he had done the right thing--as was his characteristic way. He talked about it to his oldest friends and his most casual acquaintances, his closest advisers--including George--and newspaper reporters. Rumors began to circulate that he had changed his mind. George would not believe it unless he heard it from Bobby's own lips.

Primaries were local races between people from the same party who wanted to be that party's presidential candidate. The first Democratic primary was held in New Hampshire. Gene McCarthy was the hope of the young, but he was doing badly in opinion polls, trailing a long way behind President Johnson, who wanted to run for reelection. McCarthy had little money. Ten thousand enthusiastic young volunteers had arrived in New Hampshire to campaign for him, but George and the other aides around the table at "21" confidently expected tonight's result to be a victory for Johnson by a huge margin.

George looked forward to the presidential election in November with trepidation. On the Republican side the leading moderate, George Romney, had dropped out of the race, leaving the field clear for the flaky conservative Richard Nixon. So the presidential election would almost certainly be fought between Johnson and Nixon, both pro-war.

Toward the end of the gloomy meal George was summoned to the phone by a staffer who had the New Hampshire result.

Everyone had been wrong. The result was completely unexpected. McCarthy had gained 42 percent of the vote, astonishingly close to Johnson's 49.

George realized that Johnson could be beaten after all.

He rushed upstairs and gave Bobby the news.

Bobby's reaction was downbeat. "It's too much!" he said. "Now how am I going to get McCarthy to drop out?"

That was when George understood that, after all, Bobby was going to run.

*

Walli and Beep went to Bobby Kennedy's rally to disrupt it.

Both were angry at Bobby. For months he had refused to declare himself a presidential candidate. He did not think he could win, and--they believed--he had not had the guts to try. So Gene McCarthy had stuck his neck out, and had done so well that he now had a real chance of beating President Johnson.

Until now. For Bobby Kennedy had declared his candidacy and stepped in to exploit all the work McCarthy's supporters had done and snatch the victory for himself. They thought he was a cynical opportunist.

Walli was contemptuous, Beep was incandescent. Walli's response was more moderate because he saw the political reality behind the personal morality. McCarthy's base consisted mostly of students and intellectuals. His masterstroke had been to conscript his young followers into a volunteer army of election campaigners, and that had given him a burst of success no one had expected. But would those volunteers be enough to take him all the way to the White House? All through his youth Walli had heard his parents making judgments like this, talking about elections--not those in East Germany, which were a sham, but in West Germany and France and the United States.

Bobby's support was broader. He pulled in the Negroes, who believed he was on their side, and the vast Catholic working class--Irish, Polish, Italian, and Hispanic. Walli hated Bobby's moral shallowness, but he had to admit--though it made Beep angry--that Bobby had a better chance than Gene of beating President Johnson.

All the same, they agreed that the right thing to do was to boo Bobby Kennedy tonight.

The audience included a lot of people like themselves: young men with long hair and beards, hippie girls with bare feet. Walli wondered how many of them had come to jeer. There were also blacks of all ages, the young ones with their hair in the style now called an Afro, their parents in the colorful dresses and smart suits they wore to church. The breadth of Bobby's appeal was shown by a substantial minority of middle-class, middle-aged white people, dressed in chinos and sweaters in the chill of a San Francisco spring.

Walli himself had his hair tucked up inside a denim cap, and wore sunglasses to hide his identity.

The stage was surprisingly bare. Walli had been expecting flags, streamers, posters, and giant photographs of the candidate, such as he had seen on television for other campaign rallies. Bobby just had a bare stage with a lectern and a microphone. In another candidate that would have been a sign that he had run out of money, but everyone knew Bobby had unlimited access to the Kennedy fortune. So what did it mean? To Walli it said: "No bullshit, this is the real me." Interesting, he thought.

Right now the lectern was occupied by a local Democrat who was warming up the crowd for the big star. It was a lot like show business, Walli reflected. The audience was getting used to laughing and clapping, and at the same time becoming more eager for the appearance of the act they had come to see. For the same reason, Plum Nellie concerts featured a lesser group as support.

But Plum Nellie no longer existed. The group should by now have been working on a new album for Christmas, and Walli had a few songs that had reached the stage where he wanted to play them for Dave, so that Dave could write a bridge or change a chord or say: "Great, let's call it 'Soul Kiss.'" But Dave had dropped out of sight.

He had sent a coldly polite note to Beep's mother, thanking her for letting him stay at the house and asking her to pack his clothes ready to be picked up by an assistant. Walli knew, from a phone call to Daisy in London, that Dave was renovating a farmhouse in Napa Valley and planning a recording studio there. And Jasper Murray had phoned Walli, trying to check a rumor that Dave was making a television special without the group.

Dave was suffering from old-fashioned jealousy, quite out of date now according to hippie thinking. He needed to realize that people could not be tied down, they should make love to anyone they wanted. Strongly as Walli believed this he could not help feeling guilty. He and Dave had been close, they liked and trusted one another, they had stuck together all the way from the Reeperbahn. Walli was unhappy about having wounded his friend.

It was not a

s if Beep was the love of Walli's life. He liked her a lot--she was beautiful and fun and great in the sack, and they were a much-admired couple--but she was not the only girl in the world. Walli probably would not have screwed her if he had known it would destroy the group. But he had not been thinking about consequences; he had instead been living for the moment, the way people should. It was especially easy to give in to such careless impulses when you were stoned.

She was still shaken from having been dumped by Dave. Perhaps that was why she and Walli were comfortable together: she had lost Dave and he had lost Karolin.

Walli's mind was wandering, but he was jerked back to the present moment when Bobby Kennedy was announced.

Bobby was smaller than Walli had imagined, and less confident. He walked up to the lectern with a half smile and a wave that was almost shy. He put his hand in the pocket of his suit jacket, and Walli recalled President Kennedy doing exactly the same.

Several people in the audience immediately held up signs. Walli saw KISS ME, BOBBY! and BOBBY IS GROOVY. Beep now drew a rolled-up sheet of paper from her pants leg, and she and Walli held it up. It read simply: TRAITOR.

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