Dave had taken LSD himself, and he knew there was little prospect of getting any sense out of Walli in this state. He turned to Beep, who seemed to be coming down from the high. ‘Are you sorry?’
‘I don’t believe that what we did was wrong. I’ve grown past that mentality.’
‘So you’d do it again?’
‘Dave, don’t break up with me.’
‘What’s to break up?’ Dave said wildly. ‘We don’t have a relationship. You screw anyone you fancy. Live that way if you want, but it’s not marriage.’
‘You have to leave those old ideas behind.’
‘I have to get out of this house.’ Dave’s rage was turning to grief. He realized he had lost Beep: lost her to drugs and free love, lost her to the hippie culture his music had helped to create. ‘I have to get away from you.’ He turned away.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Please.’
Dave went out.
He ran down the stairs and out of the house. He jumped into his car and roared away. He almost ran over a long-haired boy staggering across Ashbury Street, smiling vacantly, stoned out of his mind in the afternoon. To hell with all hippies, Dave thought; especially Walli and Beep. He did not want to see either of them again.
Plum Nellie was finished, he realized. He and Walli were the essence of the group, and now that they had quarrelled there was no group. Well, so be it, Dave thought. He would start his solo career today.
He saw a phone booth and pulled up. He opened the glove box and took out the roll of quarters he kept there. He dialled Morty’s office.
Morty said: ‘Hey, Dave, I talked to the realtor already. I offered fifty grand and we settled on fifty-five, how’s that?’
‘Great news, Morty,’ said Dave. He would need the recording studio for his solo work. ‘Listen, what was the name of that TV producer?’
‘Charlie Lacklow. But I thought you were worried about breaking up the group.’
‘Suddenly I’m not so worried about it,’ Dave said. ‘Set up a meeting.’
*
By March, the future was looking bleak for George and for America.
George was in New York with Bobby Kennedy on Tuesday, 12 March, the day of the New Hampshire primary, the first major clash between rival Democratic hopefuls. Bobby had a late supper with old friends at the fashionable 21 restaurant on 52nd Street. While Bobby was upstairs, George and the other aides ate downstairs.
George had not resigned. Bobby seemed liberated by announcing that he would not run for President. After the Tet Offensive, George wrote a speech that openly attacked President Johnson, and for the first time Bobby did not censor himself, but used every coruscating phrase. ‘Half a million American soldiers with seven hundred thousand Vietnamese allies, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons, are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose strength is about two hundred and fifty thousand!’
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 the 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 advance – 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 advisors – including George – and newspaper reporters. Rumours 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 re-election. 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.
Towards 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 per cent 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 judgements 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 were 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 colourful 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 rumour 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. As 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 as 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’.
Bobby began to speak, referring to a small pack of file cards he took from his inside pocket. ‘Let me begin with an apology,’ he said. ‘I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which set us on our present path.’
Beep yelled out: ‘Too damn right!’ and the people around her laughed.
Bobby went on in his flat Boston accent. ‘I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom. “All men make mistakes,” said the ancient Greek Sophocles. “But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.”’
The audience liked that, and applauded. As they did so, Bobby looked down at his notes, and Walli saw that he was making a theatrical mistake. This should be a two-way exchange. The crowd wanted their star to look at them and acknowledge their praise. Bobby seemed embarrassed by them. This kind of political rally did not come easily to him, Walli realized.
Bobby continued on the subject of Vietnam but, despite the initial success of his opening confession, he did not do well. He was tentative, he stammered, and he repeated himself. He stood still, looking wooden, seeming reluctant to move his body or gesture with his hands.
A few opponents in the hall heckled him, but Walli and Beep did not join in. There was no need. Bobby was killing himself without assistance.
During a quiet moment, a baby cried. Out of the corner of his eye, Walli saw a woman get up and move towards the exit. Bobby stopped in mid-sentence and said: ‘Please don’t leave, mam!’
The audience tittered. The woman turned in the aisle and looked at Bobby up on the stage.
He said: ‘I’m used to the sound of babies crying.’
They laughed at that: everyone knew he had ten children.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘if you go, the newspapers will say that I ruthlessly threw a mother and baby out of the hall.’
They cheered at that: many young people hated the press for its biased coverage of demonstrations.
The woman smiled and returned to her seat.
Bobby looked down at his notes. For a moment he had come across as a warm human being. At that point he might have turned the crowd. But he would lose them again by returning to his prepared speech. Walli thought he had missed his opportunity.
Then Bobby seemed to realize the same thing. He looked up again and said: ‘I’m cold in here. Are you cold?’
They roared their agreement.
‘Clap,’ he said. ‘Come on, that’ll warm us up.’ He began to clap his hands, and the audience did the same, laughing.
After a minute he stopped and said: ‘I feel better now. Do you?’ And they shouted their assent again.
‘I want to talk about decency,’ he said. He was back to his speech, but now he was not referring to his notes. ‘Some people think that long hair is indecent, and bare feet, and smooching in the park. I’ll tell you what I think.’ He raised his voice. ‘Poverty is indecent!’ The crowd shouted approval. ‘Illiteracy is indecent!’ They applauded again. ‘And I say, right here in California, that it is indecent for a man to work in the fields with his back and his hands without ever having hope of sending his son to college.’
No one in the room could doubt that Bobby believed what he was saying. He had put away his file cards. He became passionate, waving his arms, pointing, banging the lectern with a fist; and the listeners responded to the strength of his emotion, acclaiming every fervent phrase. Walli looked at their faces and recognized the expressions he saw when he himself was up on stage: young men and women staring in rapture, eyes wide, mouths open, faces shining with adoration.
No one ever looked at Gene McCarthy that way.
At some point, Walli realized, he and Beep had quietly dropped their ‘TRAITOR’ banner to the floor.
Bobby was speaking about poverty. ‘In the Mississippi Delta I have seen children with distended stomachs and facial sores from starvation.’ He raised his voice. ‘I don’t think that’s acceptable!
‘Indians living on their bare and meagre reservations have so little hope for the future that the greatest cause of death among teenagers is suicide. I believe we can do better!