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While all this was going on, the candidates were savoring the lull before the final battle. Humphrey retreated to his house in Waverly, Minn., where he puttered with his Model T Ford and insisted: "I'm the best man to beat Nixon." Muskie vacationed with his family at Kennebunk Beach in Maine, keeping in touch with his staff by telephone. Edward Kennedy watched events from Cape Cod, though there were hints he might come to Miami Beach to help the cause of party unity.
George Wallace, gaunt and subdued after almost eight weeks in the hospital with gunshot wounds, still paralyzed below the waist, made good his determination to get to Miami Beach and see what ideological leverage he could apply with his 373 delegates. It has been for him a grim and courageous convalescence. After appearing at a Mass in Maryland and reading the 23rd Psalm, Wallace flew in an Air Force jet supplied by Richard Nixon to Montgomery, Ala., where, seated in his wheelchair behind a low, bulletproof lectern, he delivered an airport speech, a wan version of his old campaign rousers. Then he flew on to Miami. All the while, a stop-McGovern coalition led by Arkansas' Wilbur Mills continued its last-minute efforts. A small Washington group of strategists bent on heading off the South Dakotan included Humphrey Aide Stan Bregman, Muskie's Berl Bernhard, Wallace's Billy Joe Camp and the AFL-Clo's Al Barkan.
Acrimony. At his summer house in Maryland, McGovern tended his swimming pool and delegate arithmetic. At one point he paid a second courtesy call on George Wallace, presumably to feel out the Alabaman's intentions. Occasionally McGovern spoke apocalyptically of the consequences if his nomination were "literally stolen in a naked power play." He did not discount running as a third-party candidate. Said McGovern: "I don't think people have fully assessed how the party could destroy itself if the reform process is denied after all that has happened in American politics these past few years."
Many regulars, humbled by the McGovern young and suddenly astonished by their own impotence, already see ruination for the party. St. Louis Dentist Martin Greenberg, for four years the Democratic chairman of St. Louis County, found himself outnumbered by McGovernites in the spring caucuses and defeated for delegate. Last week he contemplated the prospect of a McGovern nomination and said dolefully: "Unless the party comes to its senses, it will destroy all of us. The acrimony and dissension will be suicidal. The disaster this fall will not only be felt on the national ticket but on statewide Democratic tickets as well."