The younger man, three to five inches taller than Pooler at five-eight or so like nearly every normal adult male, Merrion thought, with what he recognized as mean pleasure was stooping slightly, inclining his shiny head so as to hear clearly what Pooler was saying. That made it look as though he was deferring to Pooler.
That was the way Pooler wished it. He deliberately inflicted that discomfort upon everyone he talked to, speaking so softly that anyone taller would have to bow slightly to hear him. He did not look up while talking with anyone, even when he was seated and his listener was standing. He believed that the person inducing another to adopt a posture of deference dominated every situation. He sought dominance at all times, regardless of the apparent absence of any subject in contention or under negotiation.
'That son of a bitch,' Merrion said once to Hilliard, 'you know there has to be something wrong with a guy who makes people uncomfortable on purpose.'
Merrion had first met Pooler on the evening of the first Wednesday in April of 1968 at a small gathering of western Massachusetts Democratic politicians in the private dining room upstairs in a good restaurant in Springfield. The meeting had been called hurriedly by men and women with decades of gritty experience in Democratic state and national politics left puzzled and unsure of what to do in the wake of the shock they had sustained the previous Sunday evening. President Johnson's request for TV time had not been simply to announce, as feared, a further escalation of the war in Vietnam (although he had included that, to widespread disapproval). He had thunderstruck the country by mournfully and reproachfully announcing his irrevocable decision not to seek (or to accept, either, as though there'd been more than an outside chance that someone truly out of touch might call for a convention draft) their party's nomination to be re-elected 'as your prezdun.'
Incorrectly, the party elders imputed their own sad uncertainty to younger regulars like Hilliard and Merrion. They too had been startled when Lyndon Johnson publicly renounced all ambition for a second full term of his own, but Merrion had been relieved and Hilliard had been elated. He had no doubt what to do. He was so sure that he abrogated his policy of saying nothing publicly until he had first tested it aloud on himself by discussing its probable effect with Merrion — Merrion that night had been unavailable, aloft on his way home from a long weekend in New Orleans with Sunny Keller, on leave from her assignment at Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Unrestrained by Merrion's caution, Hilliard jubilantly told the first reporter seeking his reaction that evening that he was backing Bobby Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, 'hammer and tongs.'
Hilliard's commitment was not new. Only his disclosure of it was. Well before Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti- Vietnam war campaign bucking Johnson in the February New Hampshire primary had yielded a close-second-place finish, Hilliard had said he hoped that Kennedy would challenge the president, but he had not said so for attribution in the media. Rashly doing so that night, he said that LBJ's withdrawal was 'the best news the party's had in years. If he'd wanted the nomination, he would've had it for the asking. Sitting presidents are not to be denied, McCarthy or not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. But then he would've lost. Guarantee you, matched-up against Lyndon, Nixon wins.'
'I think that maybe did not play too good,' Merrion told him grimly in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Hilliard demurred, but after two days of fielding strong reactions, he reluctantly accepted Merrion's assessment: 'You've made a lot of people goddamned mad at you, all at once, without doing yourself any damned good at all. No other mistake we've ever made, and we have made some beauts, did so much damage so fast. You've pissed-off people we don't even know. They didn't know each other, until you lit them off; you're the first thing they've ever had in common.
'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
