George Higgins - A change of gravity

"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.

"You think you can reason with them? Calmly tell them they just have to understand that this's how it's going to be, might as well get used to it? Bobby Kennedy's bringing all his muscle in and he's going to take it away: you got any idea how they're gonna react? They probably wont tear you limb from limb. They'll want to do that, but they wont know how. They're from good homes, went to private schools; no seminars in dismemberment. They'll practice self-restraint. Engage you in dialogue. All that passive shit, you know? Non-violent resistance. Pacificism. They'll address you in dulcet tones, probing your raison d'etre. They'll say: '"Hey you fucker, what the fuck, the nomination's his7. Like it was a fucking tricycle he now decides he wants to play with, and all he's gotta do is just come along and take it? This's something that he owns, 'cause he's a fucking Kennedy7. His brother left it to him?

Whose fuckin' country is this ours or the Kennedys?"

Pooler that evening in the spring of '68 was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. He was four confident years out of Yale and the Georgetown Law School. Immediately after they'd been introduced by Frank Snodgrass, a State committeeman who owned a lumber yard in Ware, Pooler said: "Being Hilliard's co-pilot, you're also therefore RFK."

Merrion, nearing thirty and feeling seasoned, mature and sagacious, failed nonetheless to connect an arrogant young man named Pooler to a powerful political family named Corey at the helm of a powerhouse law firm. He was distracted; Sunny Keller by then was many thousands of miles away from home in Vietnam, and that night like most April nights in the Pioneer Valley was a little chilly. Merrion's mind at that point had been focused on his chances of getting into bed with Mary Pat Sweeney after the meeting they turned out to be good. Rather absently he said to Pooler: "I haven't really decided. But Danny's always been a strong Kennedy backer. So I suppose I will be, too." Levelly, he thought.

Pooler said: "I suppose that means you wont give the vice president anything more'n lip-service if he gets the nomination."

"At this point I don't think I'd been in that room more than five minutes," Merrion said many times after that evening, explaining time and time again, at Hilliard's insistence, to person after person, that he'd never had a beef with Pooler and that as far as he knew Pooler'd never had a reason, that night or any other, to have a beef with him.

Each time word of another such recital reached his ears, Dan Hilliard privately thanked Merrion. "Since we of course both realize that that soothing declaration isn't one hundred percent true, and I know how painful you find it to dissemble, I really appreciate your willingness to repeat it so many, many times."

The necessity for many repetitions made it clear to them that Pooler had marketed his version at every political gathering he attended, well into the mid-Seventies, long after RFK had been assassinated and Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey. He used it to imply that Hilliard and Merrion put personal loyalties before party loyalty, and therefore should not be entrusted with power. Merrion and Hilliard used their sanitized summary of the encounter in Springfield as evidence that Pooler was a saboteur, undermining them to promote his own veiled interests.

Hilliard was the only person who ever heard Merrion's complete and accurate report of his exchange with Pooler. "I told him I hadn't said that, either that I was gonna be with Kennedy or I'd be sitting out. I said neither one of us ever refused to close ranks and I didn't like him suggesting that we would. I said you hadn't made any threats; you just said you were backing RFK. No dramatics at all.

"Pooler told me he didn't believe me and anyway, I didn't have to say a word it was written all over my face. That sounded to me like he was calling me a liar. I asked him if he'd mind telling me what else he could read on my face, so I'd have some idea of all the stuff I didn't know I knew yet. He called me a typical country wise-ass. I guess that could've been his sophisticated Yale idea of humor.

"If it is, his idea's wrong. He may have a very good barber razor-cut that wavy hair, not to mention an excellent tailor — he probably paid more for his suit than my whole wardrobe cost but he doesn't have a nice way of telling anybody anything. He never will. He's a natural-born prick.

"He gets up too close when he talks to you, and he spits when he says words that have S in them. It's all he can do to keep from poking you in the chest. He's got a couple bad teeth, almost black; you can see them on the upper left side of his mouth when he curls that lip of his.

His breath's too sweet; must be really bad before he uses too much mouthwash. He's ugly, too; he's already got jowls, at what, twenty-eight or twenty-nine? That's fuckin' indecent, too young to have jowls. But it figures; he's starting to get heavy all over. His waist's already begun to disappear. Some day pretty soon he wont have one anymore. Wake up some fine morning and find he's dispensed with it. He'll say he got rid of it because he couldn't find any purpose for it. He'll taper: Narrow at the ends, his head and his feet, and thick in the middle, his ass and his belly for ballast, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Thirty years or so from now, he's pushing sixty, he'll have wattles, like a turkey. And those beady little eyes like a snake, a short, fat snake that spits. A garden adder, green and black. Except I don't think those're poisonous, and he is."

"Are adders smart?" Hilliard said. "I don't know that much about reptile IQs."

"I dunno, why?" Merrion said.

"Because if they're not," Hilliard said, "Pooler's no adder. I don't argue with you that the guy's a snake. You know him lots better'n I do, since I don't know him at all, but if he's a snake and adders aren't smart, Pooler's a different breed."

"Yeah, well," Merrion said, "I called him an asshole, which he is, smart or not. I said it politely, of course. Just making an observation: "You're the biggest asshole I've met in a long time."

"He seemed to take it personally, looked shocked and backed away, so that's where I guess we agreed to leave it. Little prick."

Hilliard said it would be best if no one heard that part. "Bob Pooler isn't just trying to look dangerous he is dangerous. His mother's maiden name was Corey, and his daddy is a partner, along with his granddaddy, Warren, in Butler, Corey. Which means his family's got a major piece of that mammoth law firm, which makes nothing but money.