Hustling the Youth Vote

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Hubert Humphrey was running for President, of course, and he was flying from Washington, D. C., to Youngstown, Ohio, to speak to the national convention of the College Young Democrats. There were going to be a lot of empty seats on the chartered 737...and there were going to be 25,000,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 eligible to cast their first Presidential votes in 1972...and more than 6,000,000 of those young voters were college students....Well. One of Humphrey's "youth advisors," 24-year-old Mike Grimes, got the idea: Invite some college-newspaper reporters to fly along, chat with the candidate, have a few laughs, just like the big guys from The New York Times and The Washington Post, then....

Then the nine college reporters wrote their stories. Here are a couple of excerpts. Mark Nadler, in George Washington University's The Hatchet:

The trip to Ohio, as I recall, was a continuous succession of offers of booze....After the speech, Humphrey met in private rooms with local politicos. I was surprised to find the private conferences exactly what I had expected: cigar-smoking local big shots thumping Humphrey on the chest and back, telling him he was "a good old boy," "a damn good Vice-President," "one hell of a fighter." ... As we tried to follow Humphrey to these meetings, we were assured by press aides that it was hot and crowded out in the corridor, and why didn't we just wait for the Senator in his private suite. We were ushered into a plushly carpeted room where the stewardesses were serving more drinks. One young campaign aide, dressed in a loud checkered sports jacket and puffing on an obscene cigar, told us the stewardesses were "good kids," adding with a smirk and the jab of an elbow that "at night they become part of the family." ... Back on the plane, Humphrey spent the 45-minute flight answering our questions....When I asked him about the moral obligation of a Vice-President to voice his opposition to potentially disastrous policies, Humphrey, to put it bluntly, got pissed.

Jeff Rodack wrote in The Eagle of American University:

I asked him whether or not he felt killing was morally wrong, and somehow I knew he would never smile again that night. Obviously surprised more than angered, Humphrey told this reporter that it was easy enough for me to say, but how would I have talked back in 1964? No one had the heart to tell him he was Vice-President until 1968.... Humphrey was still talking when the plane started to descend, but no one was listening anymore.

"They act like a goddamned bunch of kids!" an older Humphrey advisor said later. So they do, but each of their votes will count as much as Muriel Humphrey's on November seventh and they, millions of them, confused the hell out of most American politicians. The old pros sounded like so many housewives wondering what to do with the kids. And the big guys of the press seemed just as confused, judging by three headlines from The New York Times during one five-month period: "Experts Foresee Little Impact From 18-Year-Old Voting"; "Impact of Youth Vote in 1972 is Unclear"; "Young Voters May Change Make-Up Of Congress In '72."

But lack of knowledge has never deterred the American politician. The pros started hustling the kids before the ink was dry on the 26th Amendment. In California, they formed "Newlyweds for Nixon" and in New York, there were "Stewardesses for Lindsay." In a city-council election in Boulder, Colorado, a slate of candidates tried to smoke out young voters with slogans like "Register to Vote / Someday Soon the Jurors May Begin to Look More Like You"--and then printed the slate's advertising on cigarette papers. Frontlash, a nonpartisan youth-registration project sponsored mainly by labor unions, went after high school voters with an eight-minute film titled Tellin' the World showing a lot of Frisbee throwing while musicians pounded out a hip civics lesson:

You wish that they would leave you be,/ To ramble and to roam, / To do with your life what you'd like to do....

But sooner or later the world moves in, / And gives you a shove or a kick in the shin, / And asks you, "Brother, who the hell are you?" ...

They can send you to war with deep regret / And give you a number you'll never forget....

There is a way to say Yes or No. / There is a way to let everyone know./ ...I'll vote you in, I'll vote you out. / ...And every time I make those levers slam--wham! / I'm telling the world--I'm the Great I AM!

Most of the Presidential candidates (remember, we started with more than a dozen) hired youth advisors or coordinators. Even Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, a devotee of Scammon and Wattenberg's "unyoung, unpoor, unblack electorate" theories, had his version of a youth coordinator. This turned out to be a 37-year-old "kid" named Jerry ("Big Daddy") Gereau, who was national coordinator of interest groups. It may have been on Big Daddy's advice that Jackson said at Florida State University: "I'm not going to tell you I think you are the best student generation we have ever produced, because I don't think you are."

Jackson thought he could win by running against youth, or at least against shaggy, noisy students. That theory may have some validity. But the number of young people is just too great for any serious American politician to side with Scammon and Wattenberg. Characteristically, Nixon has covered his bets by investing more than a million good Republican dollars in massive polling and organization among young people.

There are over 6,000,000 in college and over 18,000,000 "invisible youth" who are, in fact, quite visible if you ever get into a gas station, an Army base or a bowling alley. It has turned out that the apathy of young America was exaggerated. They have (continued on page 122)Youth Vote(continued from page 119) registered to vote in steadily increasing numbers--significantly higher than the 40 percent that was predicted when the 26th Amendment was passed in 1971. Only an estimated 26 percent of American women voted in 1920 after they were enfranchised, and one can only imagine what the over-24 registration would be if every single "old" voter had to start from scratch and go through the red tape of reregistering at the courthouse. (In Champaign-Urbana, registrars trying to discourage potential young voters from the University of Illinois asked them whether they intended to be buried within the city limits.)

The fact that, according to a pokes man for The Student Vote, 65 percent of the 25,000,000 new voters will have registered by now is in part due to McGovern's enlightened self-interest. The Democratic candidate recognized early that his chances in both the primaries and the November election might be directly proportional to the number of kids who got to county courthouses and polling places, particularly courthouses and polling places near universities. There might be no McGovern campaign if it weren't for two sets of working papers prepared by his youth advisors from two generations--Edward O'Donnell, Jr., a 23-year-old former student at Harvard Divinity School who in December 1970 became the fifth full-time member of the McGovern campaign staff, working under the title national youth coordinator; and Frederick Dutton, a 49-year-old Democratic lawyer and author and regent of the University of California who became the candidate's traveling companion in April.

O'Donnell, an intense product of Wilmington, Delaware, and Colgate University, who is already on a bland diet, prepared the first McGovern youth-organizer manuals in a cluttered little cubicle on the Harvard campus. His advice, crammed into 60 pages distributed on more than 1000 campuses, was both specific and pointed. A couple of samples: "Go around to classrooms the night before your drive begins and write 'Register Now--for George McGovern Next Year' or similar slogans on all the blackboards....Emphasize in all dealings with the election board that you plan across-the-board youth-voter registration, that you will not turn down non-McGovern supporters who wish to register. (This does not prevent you from concentrating on supporters in your follow-up efforts.)"

Dutton's contribution was a four-page, single-spaced memo titled "The Determining Margin of Difference," which McGovern approved last June.

"An immediate blueprint should be drawn up," the memo began, "for the biggest registration drive in the history of American politics.... The goal should be to register and later get to the polls at least 75 percent (80 percent is not beyond reach) of the over 25,000,000 young people who could vote in their first Presidential election this year.... That would completely change the ball game and even the ball park of this year's general election campaign.

"McGovern should receive close to three fourths of all the first-time votes, according to samplings thus far. But even if he gets only 70 percent, to be conservative here, that would gain him 13,000,000 votes, compared with 5,000,000 for Nixon....Target: over 50,000 young workers for this project."

Dutton, however, may have taken too much for granted. The McGovern people have consistently confused their elitist youth constituency--college students--with youth itself. There were damn few gas-station attendants on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. In fact, when you saw young McGovern delegates there, you usually began the conversation by asking, "How's your father?" Men like John Kenneth Galbraith and Robert Bernstein, the president of Random House, had sons there as youth delegates. The McGovern young smelled suspiciously like the new establishment--they were part of a convention at which a stunning 45 percent of the McGovern delegates had had some postgraduate education.

"The McGovern people had quite a surprise when they started registering young people after the convention," said Charlotte Roe, one of the founders of Frontlash. "Their people were already registered--maybe 80 percent of the college kids registered in the primary states, but only something like 40 percent of the noncollege youth did--and McGovern found out that many of these other young people resented the college activists and were leaning toward Richard Nixon."

The disillusioned McGovern troops tried to compensate by quietly concentrating on nice suburbs in places like New Jersey; but organizations like Frontlash insisted on going their merry way into Italian, Irish and black neighborhoods. The independence of labor financed registration drives, of course, has not been completely separate from many union leaders' distaste for McGovern.

The Republicans were quick to spot the weakness in the Democrats' claims to be the party of youth--and the G. O. P. writes memos, too. One of the first was sent to the White House on December 14, 1970, by David Keene, a 26-year-old deputy assistant to Vice-President Agnew. Keene mixed guarded optimism with warnings about going after young people:

Young people will split in roughly the same ways as their elders ... [but] they are more likely than their elders to look for change for change's sake, a fact that favors challengers over incumbents....

Students, regardless of their persuasion, do feel we have written them off. We can be just as hard on the radicals and the violent few as we have been, so long as we demonstrate an interest in the opinions of the legitimately concerned.... The Kennedy and Johnson administrations went out of their way to speak to students. Today, by contrast, few Administration spokesmen appear on campuses. This is an area that needs development.... The Republican philosophy is more salable than many of us imagine.

That two thirds of the 18--21-year-old bloc that is not in school will be hard, but not impossible to reach.... Indeed, they resent student radicalism more deeply than any other segment of our society. Outright appeals to dissidents on the campus could lose support from this group.... The point here is that a special appeal to younger workers unaccustomed to voting a straight Democratic ticket could pay real dividends in 1972. I would think that special organizational work might be done among these people at the local level.

There is more similarity than meets the eye in the McGovern and Nixon youth campaigns. Both are built around the idea of getting friendly young people involved in the campaign itself. Kenneth Rietz, the 30-year-old director of Nixon's youth division, may be a former public-relations man who specialized in making Wisconsin paper manufacturers look good, but his basic quotation is indistinguishable from that of O'Donnell: "What we're really trying to do is contact 25,000,000 individuals and try to persuade them to work for or at least vote for President Nixon. You'd be surprised how effective it is to ask people to take an active role in the campaign. The key is to start with three or four people and ask each of them to get three or four more."

It's a pyramid club--and the McGovern operation is basically the same thing. Of course, the two clubs tend to look for members in different places. Rietz pointed to San Diego and Orlando, Florida, as typical of his target areas, while the banner McGovern target was Madison, Wisconsin, home of the left-looking University of Wisconsin. The paths of the parties occasionally cross, at, places like the University of Arizona at Tucson, where Julie Ferdon, a Democratic registration coordinator, said: (continued on page 204)Youth Vote(continued from page 122) "Several of the Democratically inclined registrars avoided registering in fraternities and sororities, whereas the Republican-oriented registrars concentrated on them."

The McGovern operation in Madison was run by Michael Bleicher, a 36-year-old professor of mathematics at the university, who began organizing early in 1971 for the state's April primary. The best testimony to Bleicher's efforts in the primary came from the opposition's Lanny Davis, the national youth coordinator of Edmund Muskie's campaign. On the day of the primary, Davis, a 26-year-old former editor of The Yale Daily News, was in Madison running a ten-telephone office to remind pro-Muskie voters to come out and do their thing. I asked him whether the McGovern operation was similar and he laughed and said: "They don't need telephones; Bleicher's got a kid on every corner to knock on doors every half hour."

"We're not quite that good," said Bleicher, who was laughing more heartily in his office--a grimy room in the Washington Hotel that had seen its best days about 50 years ago; it was the kind of place with a pull-chain toilet and a sign pointing to the Shower Down Hall. What Bleicher had that day were 400 canvassers checking on 7000 "number one" cards filled out by other canvassers who had talked with the 7000 voters who had indicated they were definitely for McGovern. Besides that, the McGovern team, with the cooperation of the student government, used shuttle buses to take 10,000 students to cast absentee ballots before the primary, because April fourth fell during a university vacation.

For a Madison primary, the number of people voting was a record and McGovern rolled up 44 percent of the vote, which included an estimated 70 percent of the students and other young people there. Bleicher sat back and said, "What we've been doing is working with the 'organizable' youth vote, the ones in colleges and high schools. They tend to be much more liberal than the society as a whole.... Property-tax issues, for example, are meaningless to them. This could be the unique election when students will have maximum impact. By 1976," he predicted, "the unorganizable youth will be plugged into the process and then young voters really will be pretty representative of the whole society."

Whether or not a representative cross section of young America is plugged into politics this year, youth chasers such as Bleicher and Davis tend to agree that the future impact of young people in politics will depend not so much on the way they cast their votes as on the way they are willing to work. "They'll continue to be a major force of political organization," Davis said. "They're going to do the jobs that used to be done by the old machines; they're the new Richard Daleys--they're better than the old pols; there are more of them; they have more time and more commitment. I saw the McGovern people do it with a candidate who had very little appeal to most people. Without the kids organizing, he would have gotten 15 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and come in third in Wisconsin."

And the new child labor comes cheap. Three hundred kids went into Brooklyn last June to work for Alland Lowenstein against Representative John Rooney in a Democratic Congressional primary. In a vignette symbolizing the changing of the guard, Rooney and one of the young volunteers, Bart Brown, stumbled into each other one night just before midnight. Brown was putting a Lowenstein poster on a telephone pole and Rooney, an old Irish pol on every count, stepped out of a bar and asked, "How much are you getting paid for this?"

"Paid? I get food money and sometimes not that," Brown said.

Rooney shrugged. "You're never going to be a successful politician."

Maybe not. But maybe so. There is a deep strain of ambition in national youth coordinators, though they're not going to strike it rich this year. McGovern's O'Donnell gets $150 a week; Humphrey's Grimes was on a $9000-a-year salary and Muskie's Davis was hired at $10,000 a year; politics can be a tough business when your candidate doesn't last a year.

There is probably money in the youth-vote business, but private enterprise hasn't quite caught up with it. Consulting firms may not be far behind--and Ken Rietz and Lanny Davis may well found them. But in 1972, there were only a few examples of the possibilities. The American Program Bureau, a Boston lecture-management agency, put together a series of 18 video-taped interviews with candidates and other political figures and has been marketing a ten-program package to colleges for $1000.

Money is one of many subjects that Rietz doesn't want to talk about--he won't discuss his salary, which payroll records showed to be $23,000, and said only that the funding of his operation is "adequate." It's at least that. One of the Committee for the Re-election of the President's first contracts was with a college marketing group for a sophisticated opinion survey on 150 campuses. What did the President want to know about the campuses? The questionnaires were quite sophisticated and after the usual questions about issues and attitudes, the survey compiled lists of the "most respected" campus leaders and professors--a handy tool if you're interested in organizing a university.

The McGovern people aren't as well financed and they've tried to do the same kind of thing by having volunteers leaf through high school and college yearbooks.

"There is some exaggeration in all the talk you hear about Nixon computers," said Rietz, who works in a suite of offices in the First National Bank of Washington Building near the White House. Like most Nixon offices, his has the color-coordinated look and IBM typewriters of a successful old insurance company, with pictures of R. M. N.--"Our Founder"--smiling down from blank walls. In fact, Rietz is color coordinated, too--rust colored corduroy suit, rust loafers, gray-and-white-striped shirt with a paisley tie (just a touch of rust there).

Rietz won his reputation as Senator William Brock's 1970 campaign manager in Tennessee. According to Sidney Hyman's Youth in Politics, Rietz claims to have organized 3500-4000 young people who worked for Brock against Democrat Albert Gore, while Brock's figure was 30,000. More recently, Rietz has used 9000 as his estimate. In fact, everyone's figures are different--but then, that's what public relations is all about.

Despite his own elastic rhetoric, Rietz started his hustling for Nixon by trying to get other Administration spokesmen to shut their mouths. In the beginning of the youth-vote game--Rietz went on the G. O. P. payroll in July 1971--anonymous Republican strategists were making statements such as this one to Time: "Let's face it. Nixon isn't going to carry the college vote. But the margin by which he loses it is important." Now the official line of Young Voters for the Re-election of the President is victory. Maybe, but you could never tell it from the first list of "young celebrities" for Nixon, including Clint Eastwood, Brenda Box, Sandy Livingston, Robert Lunn, Harlan Marbley and Barbie Wells. (In case you missed one, Brenda is a former Miss Texas Universe, Sandy is an actress married to actor Stanley Livingston, Robert is a "professional golf star," Harlan won a bronze medal in the 1968 Olympics and Barbie is a national director of Teenage Republicans. And Clint Eastwood is 42.)

Rietz did his work this fall through a network of 50 state chairmen of Young Voters, usually politically ambitious young lawyers who got their orders and budgets from the campaign chairman in each state. The New York Young Voters chairman, for instance, is Jerold Ruderman, a 29-year-old Manhattan attorney, president of the New York Young Republican Club and a onetime candidate for the state senate.

"I'm a full-time volunteer," said Ruderman, who had just finished making arrangements with Rietz to have Edward Cox, the President's 26-year-old son-in-law, speak at a meeting of Teenage Republicans in Albany.

The Nixon youth office in the Hotel Roosevelt was a looser place than Rietz's IBM-contemporary cubicles in Washington, but there was still something self-conscious about the slogans on the walls around Ruderman and his dozen or so paid assistants: A-H-H-H-H Youth--They Giveth The Campaign Zap. Youth will Vote Nixon.... Young Action: "Good Karma" For Big Nixon Youth Swing.

But attention to detail seemed to be as evident in the New York operation as it was in most dull, typewriter-clicking Nixon offices around the country. Ruderman and his young corps were fed research data on campuses and cities where they recruited canvassers and free office workers and, besides that, they went to large corporations and department stores throughout the state to find young workers in groups they could organize. Young speakers were provided with two-inch-thick manuals to tell their audiences everything they always wanted to know about Nixon. If their audiences weren't afraid to ask about amnesty, the speakers just had to turn to Section II-L to find that the President had said: "I would be very liberal with regard to amnesty but not while there are still Americans fighting in Vietnam...." And in several sections, they would be reminded that it was Richard M. Nixon who signed the 26th Amendment into the law of the land. And every single piece of Nixon youth literature--and there were dozens, some modeled after rock posters--had a line Rietz loved: "Get involved--join."

One thing, aside from his coat and tie, that differentiates Rietz from the McGovern crew and the retired Democratic youth coordinators is his attitude toward the two dozen or so nonpartisan youth-voter-registration projects. Frankly, he thinks some of them are anti-Nixon and, frankly, he's right.

Obviously, the Republicans wouldn't play ball with the National Youth Caucus, a group whose founding statement contained the line "President Nixon must be repudiated." (N. Y. C. was the brain child of Allard Lowenstein, the "Dump Johnson" organizer of 1968 and the mentor or idol of dozens of the young men you come across in the youth-vote business.) But the Republicans do have some young friends out there and some of them, such as Hendrix Niemann, who left Princeton for a year to work with The Student Vote, are upset with what they've seen. "It's bothered me to see that so many conservatives are afraid of the youth vote," he said, complaining that Republicans did attempt to block registration of young voters in Ohio. "You know, I'm a Republican."

The director of another, and strictly nonpartisan, organization questioned the wisdom of Republican attitudes: "Nixon will get a lot of the youth vote. Not because they like him, but they'll say, 'At least the son of a bitch has done something.' "

The youth groups and youth advisors are, in a great American tradition, not above hustling the parties and candidates. The National Youth Caucus newsletter advised its operators: "Remember, every liberal candidate wants to be identified with party reform and will go a long way if threatened with embarrassment." Charles Wolff, the 24-year-old chairman of Illinois Youth for Muskie and a product of Lowenstein's 1968 training, said he wavered between McGovern and Muskie and then didn't go to work until he had a guarantee from Muskie that he wouldn't be in charge "of some kind of kiddie corps doing shit work." He wasn't. One of the results of the 26th Amendment was to accelerate the upward mobility of young men and women inside political organizations.

Robert Livernash, a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, traveled from New York to Manchester, New Hampshire, to join the chilled legions working up there for McGovern. The bus trip started with a lecture on the evils of marijuana--the evils that would befall McGovern if local police caught one of the kids with it and the thing got into the newspapers. Envelopes were passed out so the troops could mail their grass back home before taking to the streets. When they did go into the snow, they were given briefing literature on how to deal with the good burghers: "Be low-key, not argumentative....Be judicious in your choice of issues.... Don't mention other candidates by name; it will be too confusing....Do not press for direct answers."

This was Livernash's report on his colleagues and their motivations:

If none of the volunteers were here because they thought McGovern was going to win, why were they here? I tentatively broke them down into the following groups:

Angels: These were the freshmen and sophomores in college who saw McCarthy in '68 on television but whose political sensibilities did not go back much further than that and who had an almost virginal faith in the system. The girl who sat next to me when we were writing letters to the "positives" and "neutrals" was from Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, and she was rushing back that night so she could canvass on Sunday for the Heart Fund.

Fun Seekers: Many were there to meet members of the opposite sex; others were there because it would sure be more fun than another weekend in Our Lady of X dorms. A bleached blonde, who taught kindergarten in Bedford-Stuyvesant and snacked on carrots to clear up her complexion, said she was searching "for the right kind of man." An Australian classmate of mine ... was curious to see New Hampshire. "It was the closest I could come to a ski weekend," he said.

The Spectacularly Undaunted: There were graduate students and employed people who doggedly refused to give up on the system. Mark Bernstein, a second-year law student from Penn, came not because he thought McGovern was going to win but for the experience. A student from Long Island University tried to convince the student behind him that the Soviet Union did not have a democratic form of government.

I met an angel one morning at eight o'clock at the Allen Shoe Company in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a grimy pile of brick that John Austin, a Time correspondent, instantly described as early Clifford Odets. Her name was Mary Fifield and she was from Hooksett, New Hampshire. She had dropped out of Mount St. Mary College two months before graduation--with a 4.0 average for the fall semester--to work for McGovern at $30 a week, telling her parents she thought "it was more important than the English novel." "They were disappointed," she said, "but I think they understood what I was doing. They're not for McGovern, because of amnesty. My brother Tommy just got home from Vietnam."

Mary was handing out buttons and literature to workers that morning in Haverhill. That night, more than 12 hours later, I had to telephone McGovern headquarters in Boston and I heard this cheerful little voice: "Hi, Dick, it's Mary Fifield."

She turned out to be an example of what the 26th Amendment was all about. Getting kids involved; getting Mary Fifield involved was the secret. The youth advisors who saw that are still working--Rietz and O'Donnell. The ones who didn't are ex-youth advisors. Mike Grimes found out that it was no good to have stewardesses pump 100 proof into college reporters. Muskie's young men didn't get very far with orange-and-blue posters reading The Muskie Camp Comes to Campus Featuring the Hilarious Nixon "Checkers" Speech. And John Lindsay got nowhere with free rock concerts: A lot of kids cheered Richie Havens and Lindsay, in that order, and then voted for McGovern, who had been organizing their campuses for more than a year.

In the end, the kids reacted to politics in pretty much the same way as older Americans--it's the same love-hate fascination that De Tocqueville spotted 140 years ago--only kids tended to be more uninhibited about showing their feelings. When they were turned on, they had the time, energy and commitment to make themselves a force in 1972.

When they were turned off ... well, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana was a candidate for a while and his youth coordinator told him it would be a good idea to visit a high school in Milford, New Hampshire, and answer questions from assembled students. The first question was: "Senator, do you think students should be forced to come to these political rallies?" Hartke said no--and the kid walked out.