Word: precincts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...system, and (BAM! POW! SPLAT!) they did. Armed with the reform rules that McGovern helped to formulate, the young legions this year shattered political assumptions and shut down party machines that had been grinding on for decades. Through New Hampshire's bitter months, through the endlessly tedious precinct caucuses and state conventions, they mimeographed and telephoned and pounded door to door, living on peanut butter and jelly and spending their nights in sleeping bags on someone else's living-room floor. Their numbers grew with success; duty became dream became destiny; the impossible turned possible turned probable. Often...
...McGovern headquarters swarmed with them, boys and girls in jeans and sneakers, cranking the mimeographs, telephoning voters. In the nonprimary states, the McGovern zealots had the advantage of understanding the new reform rules and how to use them. They organized early, often stunned the regulars by their success at precinct caucuses and state conventions. In Iowa, for example, McGovern's brilliant young aides Rick Stearns and Gene Pokorny crisscrossed the state in 1970 to establish an organization, starting with only a list of 15 people who had contributed to the McGovern campaign. By last January, 2,000 volunteers were...
...elderly. They respond to Hubert with warmth and affection, but there is a woeful absence of the fiery spontaneity that greets a Wallace or a Kennedy or even, sometimes, a McGovern. An integral fixture of the national Humphrey campaign has been the potbellied union leaders who could double as precinct bosses. Their rye-and-gravel voices and center-city accents prompted some newsmen following Humphrey to invent a mythical character named Augie. Introducing Humphrey to union crowds, California Labor Chieftain Joe Mazzola likes to tell his audiences: "This man speaks nuttin' but the trut'." He then sternly admonishes...
...side of his personality-one that people had not seen before. He developed a sense of humor. Marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade, he doffed his hat and released a white dove as he passed Mayor Daley. He engineered a surprise dessert for Daley's precinct captains when they gathered in support of Berg at a dinner. When they cracked open their fortune cookies, they found the message "Hanrahan...
...that the cops are always busting them, never the pushers." That frustration, he claims, caused the rape and murder of an alleged woman pusher three months ago. "The week before," says Gracia, "some of her junkies had stabbed some of the Immortals. The kids went to the 41st Precinct and told the cops: 'You've got 72 hours to get them junkies out of there or we will.' When no arrests were made, they did it themselves...