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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
Hunter S. Thompson
The best, the fastest, the hippest and the most unorthodox account ever published of the US presidential electoral process in all its madness and corruption.In 1972 Hunter S. Thompson, the creator and king of Gonzo journalism, covered the US presidential campaign for Rolling Stone magazine alongside the establishment newsmen of Washington. The result is a classic piece of subversive reportage and a fantastic ride on the rollercoaster of Hunter’s uniquely savage imagination. In his own words, written years before Watergate: ‘It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.’



HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Illustrated by Ralph Steadman




Copyright (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2005
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo as a Modern Classic in 1994
Copyright © Hunter S. Thompson 1973
PS section copyright © Travis Elborough 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Hunter S. Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007204489
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440009 Version: 2017-10-17
To Sandy, who endured almost a year of grim exile in Washington, D.C. while this book was being written.
– HST
Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.
T.S. Eliot

Contents
Cover (#u8dc39fa6-f91e-5411-952a-cc6088908578)
Title Page (#ue5504c34-e876-58ed-9683-30414063f595)
Copyright
December 1971
January
February
March
Later in March
April
May
June
Later in June
July
Dark Interlude
August
September
October
November
Be Angry At The Sun
December
Epitaph
Author’s Note
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Biography (#litres_trial_promo)
Did You Know? (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
A Fantastic Mushroom: the Start of Thompson’s Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)
What is Gonzo? (#litres_trial_promo)
Hunter on Screen (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on (#litres_trial_promo)
Must Reads (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, Why Not Try These … (#litres_trial_promo)
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author
About the Publisher

December 1971 (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
Is This Trip Necessary? … Strategic Retreat into National Politics … Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike … Setting Up the National Affairs Desk … Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? … Fear and Loathing in Washington …
Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days … even more than the Alsop brothers.
When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life – all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp – and also a fifty watt ‘boombox’ for the FM car radio.
You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball … a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.
One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the ‘Westward Movement’ in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk … and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.
Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown … which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.
There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed … for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.
Where indeed?
At 5:30 in the morning I can walk outside to piss casually off my stoop and watch the lawn dying slowly from a white glaze of frost … Nothing moving out here tonight; not since that evil nigger hurled a three-pound Washington Post through the shattered glass coachlight at the top of my stone front steps. He offered to pay for it, but my Dobermans were already on him.
Life runs fast & mean in this town. It’s like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear. Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto in the Northwest quadrant of town – which seems to have made things a lot easier for the black marauders who have turned places like chic Georgetown and once-stylish Capitol Hill into hellishly paranoid Fear Zones.
Washington Post columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon/Mitchell administration – seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost – seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C. has become the ‘Rape Capital of the World.’
One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial town-houses with cut-glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument … When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.
‘Good God, man!’ said my friend from the liberal New York Post. ‘You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!’
Crime figures for ‘The District’ are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover.
(#ulink_1bc078c2-88be-5853-a7e0-c4d1a2b5855f) Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the two hundred and fifty murders this year, only thirty-six have been solved … and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.
Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District – a few blocks from the Capitol -in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as ‘hall passes.’ So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet -fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.
This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 magnum. But in Washington you get the impression – if you believe what you hear from even the most ‘liberal’ insiders – that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.
Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet … but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.
All this sounds incredible – and that was my reaction at first: ‘Come on! It can’t be that bad!’
‘You wait and see,’ they said. ‘And meanwhile, keep your doors locked.’ I immediately called Colorado and had another Doberman shipped in. If this is what’s happening in this town, I felt, the thing to do was get right on top of it … but paranoia gets very heavy when there’s no more humor in it; and it occurs to me now that maybe this is what has happened to whatever remains of the ‘liberal power structure’ in Washington. Getting beaten in Congress is one thing – even if you get beaten a lot - but when you slink out of the Senate chamber with your tail between your legs and then have to worry about getting mugged, stomped, or raped in the Capitol parking lot by a trio of renegade Black Panthers … well, it tends to bring you down a bit, and warp your Liberal Instincts.
There is no way to avoid ‘racist undertones’ here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks – not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ And I tell myself, ‘Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see.’ And sometimes I do, but not always …
My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs … humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel piss-ant; dragging a massive orange U-haul trailer full of books and ‘important papers’ … feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.
It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving … but not even this new, six-cylinder super-Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown … still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezewood in Pennsylvania; I’d stopped there to ponder the drug question with two freaks I met on the Turnpike.
They had blown a tire east of Everett, but nobody would stop to lend them a jack. They had a spare tire – and a jack, too, for that matter – but no jack-handle; no way to crank the car up and put the spare on. They had gone out to Cleveland, from Baltimore to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit … and they’d picked up this ’66 Ford Fairlane for $150.
I was impressed.
‘Shit,’ they said. ‘You can pick up a goddamn new Thunderbird out there for seven-fifty. All you need is cash, man; people are desperate! There’s no work out there, man; they’re selling everything! It’s down to a dime on the dollar. Shit, I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Baltimore.’
I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business, if things were as good as they said. They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland area and places like Baltimore, Philly and Washington. ‘All you need,’ they said, ‘is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And some jack-handles.’
‘What?’
‘Jack-handles – for scenes like these.’
They laughed. Yeah, a jack-handle or so might save a lot of trouble. They’d been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by … and in truth I only stopped because I couldn’t quite believe what I thought I’d just seen. Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade -running easily, for a change – when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.
I hit the brakes and pulled over. What the fuck was that? I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days … and you don’t really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.
A white bear? Agnew’s other son?
At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not? Check it out.
But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer … so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn’t back up.
But I was still curious. So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a .357 magnum in the other. No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought – by wild beasts or anything else. My instincts were purely humanitarian – but what about that Thing I was going back to look for? You read about these people in the Reader’s Digest: blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.
Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather. You never know … and that warning works both ways. Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle … and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a .357 magnum in his hand.
A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help. For all they knew I was half-mad on PCP and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials … nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.
But this time things worked out – as they usually do when you go with your instincts – and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half-frozen heads with a blowout … and the ‘white bear’ rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop. At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said: ‘I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane – even a Cop Car; this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me … shit, they’re supposed to help people, right …?’
Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the car until we started cranking it up. The Volvo jack wouldn’t work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.
When Lester finally got out he didn’t say much; but finally his head seemed to clear and he helped put the tire on. Then he looked up at me while Jerry tightened the bolts and said: ‘Say, man, you have anything to smoke?’
‘Smoke?’ I said. ‘Do I look like the kind of person who’d be carrying marrywanna?’
Lester eyed me for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Well, shit,’ he said. ‘Let’s smoke some of ours.’
‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Those blue lights about a hundred yards from where my car’s parked is a State Police barracks. Let’s get some coffee down in Breezewood; there’s bound to be a truckstop.’
Jerry nodded. ‘It’s cold as a bastard out here. If we want to get loaded, let’s go someplace where it’s warm.’
They gave me a ride down to the Volvo, then followed me into Breezewood to a giant truckstop.
‘This is terrible shit,’ Lester muttered, handing the joint to Jerry. ‘There’s nothin‘ worth a damn for sale these days. It’s got so the only thing you can get off on is smack.’
Jerry nodded. The waitress appeared with more coffee. ‘You boys are sure laughin’ a lot,’ she said. ‘What’s so funny at this hour of the morning?’
Lester fixed her with a front-toothless smile and two glittering eyes that might have seemed dangerous if he hadn’t been in such a mellow mood. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I used to be a male whore, and I’m laughin’ because I’m so happy that I finally found Jesus.’
The waitress smiled nervously as she filled our cups and then hurried back to her perch behind the counter. We drank off the coffee and traded a few more stories about the horrors of the latterday drug market. Then Jerry said they would have to get moving. ‘We’re heading for Baltimore,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
‘Washington,’ I said.
‘What for?’ Lester asked. ‘Why the fuck would anybody want to go there?’
I shrugged. We were standing in the parking lot while my Doberman pissed on the wheel of a big Hard Brothers poultry truck. ‘Well … it’s a weird sort of trip,’ I said finally. ‘What happened is that I finally got a job, after twelve years.’
‘Jesus!’ said Lester. ‘That’s heavy. Twelve years on the dole! Man, you must of been really strung out!’
I smiled. ‘Yeah … yeah, I guess you could say that.’
‘What kind of a job?’ Jerry asked.
Now the Doberman had the driver of the Hard Brothers truck backed up against his cab, screeching hysterically at the dog and kicking out with his metal-toed Army boots. We watched with vague amusement as the Doberman – puzzled by this crazy outburst – backed off and growled a warning.
‘O God Jesus,’ screamed the trucker. ‘Somebody help me!’ It was clear that he felt he was about to be chewed up and killed, for no reason at all, by some vicious animal that had come out of the darkness to pin him against his own truck.
‘OK, Benjy!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t fool with that man – he’s nervous.’ The trucker shook his fist at me and yelled something about getting my license number.
‘Get out of here, you asshole!’ Lester screamed. ‘It’s pigs like you that give Dobermans a bad name.’
Jerry laughed as the trucker drove off. ‘You won’t last long on the job with a dog like that,’ he said. ‘Seriously – what kind of work do you do?’
‘It’s a political gig,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Washington to cover the ’72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Jerry muttered. ‘That’s weird! The Stone is into politics?’
I stared down at the asphalt, not sure of what to say. Was ‘The Stone’ into politics? Or was it just me? I had never really wondered about it … but suddenly on the outskirts of Washington, in the cold grey dawn of this truckstop near Breezewood just north of the Maryland line, it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t really say what I was doing there – except heading for D.C. with an orange pig-shaped trailer and a Doberman Pinscher with bad bowels after too many days on the road.
‘It sounds like a stinking goddamn way to get back into work,’ said Lester. ‘Why don’t you hang up that bullshit and we’ll put something together with that car shuttle Jerry told you about?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I want to at least try this trip,’ I said.
Lester stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. ‘God damn!’ he said. ‘What a bummer. Why would anybody want to get hung up in a pile of shit like Politics?’
‘Well …’ I said, wondering if there was any sane answer to a question like that: ‘It’s mainly a personal trip, a very hard thing to explain.’
Jerry smiled. ‘You talk like you’ve tried it,’ he said. ‘Like maybe you got off on it.’
‘Not as far as I meant to,’ I said, ‘but definitely high.’
Lester was watching me now with new interest. ‘I always thought that about politicians,’ he said. ‘Just a gang of goddamn power junkies, gone off on their own strange trips.’
‘Come on now,’ said Jerry. ‘Some of those guys are OK.’
‘Who?’ Lester asked.
‘That’s why I’m going to Washington,’ I said. ‘To check out the people and find out if they’re all swine.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lester. ‘They are. You might as well go looking for cherries in a Baltimore whorehouse.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you when I make it over to Baltimore.’ I stuck out my hand and Jerry took it in a quick conventional handshake – but Lester had his thumb up, so I had to adjust for the Revolutionary Drug Brothers grip, or whatever that goddamn thing is supposed to mean. When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston.
‘He’s right,’ said Jerry. ‘Those bastards wouldn’t even be there if they weren’t rotten.’ He shook his head without looking at us, staring balefully across the parking lot. The grey light of dawn was getting brighter now; Thursday night was dying and the highway at the other end of the parking lot was humming with cars full of people going to work on Friday morning.
Welcome to Washington, D.C. That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall – a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.
It is not considered fashionable to live in ‘The District’ itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged brick town-house with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors, smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pine-paneled bars and ‘singles only’ discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.
I live on the ‘black side’ of Rock Creek park, in what my journalistic friends call ‘a marginal neighborhood.’ Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the ‘white side’ of the park, towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.
The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximating a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only people I know who live down there are Nicholas Von Hoffman and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyper-active Legislative Assistant. But Von Hoffman seems to have had a belly-full of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco … and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.
With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began three years ago.
Jim Flug says he’d rather not talk about Kennedy running for President – at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who ‘matters’ in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup Polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon – almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.
There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck – and beaten once again – with some tried and half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie … and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington Press Corps. ‘He’d be a fine President,’ they say, ‘but of course he can’t possibly win.’
Why not?
Well … the wizards haven’t bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern President – that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists & dazed dropouts -won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on election day.
Maybe so … but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called ‘The McGovern Vote’ to the polls if they actually represented it.
It sure as hell wasn’t the AFL/CIO that ran LBJ out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn’t Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson … and it wasn’t George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade ‘radical’ organizer from the UAW.
It wasn’t the big-time ‘Democratic bosses’ who won the California primary for Bobby – but thousands of Niggers and Spics and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.
But there was, of course, The Murder – and then the Convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to ‘respectable’ Democrats, then and now – and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in ’72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower/Stevenson wipeout in 1956.
The people who turned out for Bobby are still around – along with several million others who’ll be voting for the first time – but they won’t turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser …
According to the Gallup Polls, however, the Underculture vote is building up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Bigwigs and ‘pros’ in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy’s name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations – calling him a ‘liar’ and a ‘coward’ and a ‘cheater.’
And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.
The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy’s recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won’t even admit that it’s happening – at least not for the record – and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming – too soon, perhaps, but there’s nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down, insisting he’s not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.
When I called Flug the other night at the office he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed by the Senate as Nixon’s new Secretary of Agriculture.
‘To hell with Butz,’ I said, ‘what about Rehnquist? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?’
‘They have the votes,’ he replied.
‘Jesus,’ I muttered, ‘is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I’ve read about him?’
‘Worse,’ Flug said. ‘But I think he’s in. We tried, but we can’t get the votes.’
Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long-standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for Esquire – an article that finally died in a blaze of niggling between me and the editors about how to cut my ‘final version’ down from 30,000 words to a size that would fit in the magazine.
Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.
We idled through the line with our trays and then took our plastic-wrapped tunafish sandwiches and coffee in styrofoam cups over to a small formica table. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill – trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half-expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line … until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.
Meanwhile, Flug was outlining every angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally into it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans – a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument the National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it occurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom … and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my .44 magnum fetish.
After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug’s trip – and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long-shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.
Coming on the heels of Judge Haynesworth’s rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in … but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh’s assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.
Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more Court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.
‘Not even Rehnquist?’ I asked. ‘Christ, that’s like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court.’
‘I know,’ said Flug. ‘Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who’ll be up there.’
‘You mean down there,’ I said. ‘Along with all the rest of us,’ I laughed. ‘Well, there’s always smack …’
Flug didn’t laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard for the past three years to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon/Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynesworth & Carswell, then having to swallow a third-rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years – despite the best efforts of the sharpest and meanest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on – is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss-poor bowling team in Memphis – and this disastrous, nazi-bent shift of the federal government’s Final Decision-making powers won’t even begin to take effect until the spring of ’72.
The effects of this takeover are potentially so disastrous – in terms of personal freedom and police power – that there is no point even speculating on the fate of some poor, misguided geek who might want to take his ‘Illegal Search & Seizure’ case all the way up to the top.
A helpful hint, however, might be found in the case of the Tallahassee newspaper reporter who went to Canada in 1967 to avoid the draft – and returned to find that he was no longer a citizen of the United States, and now he has ninety days to leave the country. He appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but they refused to even hear it.
So now he has to go, but of course he has no passport – and international travel is not real easy without a passport. The federal immigration officials understand this, but – backed up by the Supreme Court – they have given him an ultimatum to vacate, anyway. They don’t care where he goes; just get out – and meanwhile Chief Justice Burger has taken to answering his doorbell at night with a big six-shooter in his hand. You never know, he says, who might come crashing in.
Indeed. Maybe Rehnquist – far gone with an overdose of raw sowbelly and crazy for terminal vengeance on the first house he comes to.
This world is full of dangerous beasts – but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok – like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly decides to start sampling his contraband.
Yes … and … uh, where were we? I have a bad tendency to rush off on mad tangents and pursue them for fifty or sixty pages that get so out of control that I end up burning them, for my own good. One of the few exceptions to this rule occurred very recently, when I slipped up and let about two hundred pages go into print … which caused me a lot of trouble with the tax man, among others, and it taught me a lesson I hope I’ll never forget.
Live steady. Don’t fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth – including people. It’s not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.
And it’s also a nasty fact that I have to catch a plane for Chicago in three hours – to attend some kind of national Emergency Conference for New Voters, which looks like the opening shot in this year’s version of the McCarthy/Kennedy uprising in ‘68 ---and since the conference starts at six o’clock tonight, I must make that plane …
… Back to Chicago; it’s never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on something. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.
1. (#ulink_24112dfc-b90e-5e69-8e2d-80665f5d5ad3) Hoover died in the spring of 1972. Figures released later in the year showed that the national crime rate declined for the first time in the last decade.

January (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
The Million Pound Shithammer … Pros Scorn the Youth Vote … Fresh Meat for the Boys in the Back Room … ‘The Death of Hope’ & A Withering of Expectation … Another McCarthy Crusade? … John Lindsay? … The Rancid Resurrection of Hubert Humphrey … Violence in the Press Box & Mano a Mano on TWA … Who Is Big Ed & Why Is Everybody Sucking Up to Him? …
‘There are issues enough. What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone. The failure of hope would be a terrible event; the blacks have never been cynical about America. But conversation you hear among the young now, on the South Side of Chicago, up in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly suggests the birth of a new cynicism. In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect young blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different – a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations.’
– D.J.R. Bruckner, 1/6/72 in the L.A. Times
Bruckner’s article was focused on the mood of Young Blacks, but unless you were reading very closely, the distinction was easy to miss. Because the mood among Young Whites is not much different – despite a lot of well-financed publicity about the potentially massive ‘youth vote.’
These are the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 – going, maybe, to the polls for the first time – who supposedly hold the fate of the nation in the palms of their eager young hands. According to the people who claim to speak for it, this ‘youth vote’ has the power to zap Nixon out of office with a flick of its wrist. Hubert Humphrey lost in ‘68 by 499,704 votes – a minuscule percentage of what the so-called ‘youth vote’ could turn out in 1972.
But there are not many people in Washington who take this notion of the ‘youth vote’ very seriously. Not even the candidates. The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in ’72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) voters means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns … just another big wave of new immigrants who don’t know the score yet, but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?
Why indeed? The scumbags behind this thinking are probably right, once again – but it might be worth pondering, this time, if perhaps they might be right for the wrong reasons. Almost all the politicians and press wizards who denigrate the ‘so-called youth vote’ as a factor in the ’72 elections have justified their thinking with a sort of melancholy judgment on ‘the kids’ themselves.
‘How many will even register?’ they ask. ‘And even then – even assuming a third of the possibles might register, how many of those will actually get out and vote?’
The implication, every time, is that the ‘youth vote’ menace is just a noisy paper tiger. Sure, some of these kids will vote, they say, but the way things look now, it won’t be more than ten percent. That’s the colleges; the other ninety percent are either military types, on the dole, or working people – on salary, just married, hired into their first jobs. Man, these people are already locked down, the same as their parents.
That’s the argument … and it’s probably safe to say, right now, that there is not a single presidential candidate, media guru, or backstairs politics wizard in Washington who honestly believes the ‘youth vote’ will have more than a marginal, splinter-vote effect on the final outcome of the 1972 presidential campaign.
These kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of ‘em don’t even want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna … yeah, and just between you and me, Fred, I think it’s probably all for the best.
Among the half-dozen high-powered organizations in Washington who claim to speak for the ‘youth vote,’ the only one with any real muscle at this point is the National Association of Student Governments, which recently – after putting together an ‘Emergency Conference for New Voters’ in Chicago last month -brought its leadership back to D.C. and called a press conference in the Old Senate office building to announce the formation of a ‘National Youth Caucus.’
The idea, said 26-year-old Duane Draper – the main organizer -was to get student-type activists into power on the local level in every state where they might be able to influence the drift of the ’72 election. The press conference was well attended. Edward P. Morgan of PBS was there, dressed in a snappy London Fog raincoat and twirling a black umbrella; the New York Times sent a woman, the Washington Post was represented by a human pencil, and the rest of the national press sent the same people they send to everything else that happens, officially, in this doomed sinkhole of a city.
As always, the ‘print people’ stood or sat in a timid half circle behind the network TV cameras – while Draper and his mentor, Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, sat together at the front table and explained that the success of the Chicago rally had gotten the ‘youth vote’ off to a running start. Harris didn’t say much; he just sat there looking like Johnny Cash while Draper, a former student body president at the University of Oklahoma, explained to the jaded press that the ‘youth vote’ would be an important and perhaps decisive factor in this year’s election.
I came in about ten minutes late, and when question time came around I asked the same one I’d asked Allard Lowenstein at a similar press conference in Chicago: Would the Youth Caucus support Hubert Humphrey if he won the Democratic nomination?
Lowenstein had refused to answer that question in Chicago, saying, ‘We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.’ But in Washington Draper said ‘Yes,’ the Youth Vote could get behind Hubert if he said the right things – ‘if he takes the right positions.’
‘How about Jackson?’ I asked.
This made for a pause … but finally Draper said the National Youth Caucus might support Jackson, too, ‘if he comes around.’
‘Around to what?’ I asked. And by this time I was feeling very naked and conspicuous. My garb and general demeanor is not considered normal by Washington standards. Levis don’t make it in this town; if you show up wearing Levis they figure you’re either a servant or a messenger. This is particularly true at high-level press conferences, where any deviation from standard journalistic dress is considered rude and perhaps even dangerous.
In Washington all journalists dress like bank tellers – and those who don’t have problems. Mister Nixon’s press handlers, for instance, have made it ominously clear that I shall not be given White House press credentials. The first time I called, they said they’d never heard of Rolling Stone. ‘Rolling what?’ said the woman.
‘You’d better ask somebody a little younger,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll do that.’ But the next obstacle up the line was the deputy White House press secretary, a faceless voice called Gerald Warren, who said Rolling Whatever didn’t need White House press credentials – despite the fact they had been issued in the past, without any hassle, to all manner of strange and obscure publications, including student papers like the George Washington University Hatchet.
The only people who seem genuinely interested in the ’72 elections are the actual participants – the various candidates, their paid staff people, the thousands of journalists, cameramen & other media-connected hustlers who will spend most of this year humping the campaign along … and of course all the sponsors, called ‘fat cats’ in the language of Now-Politics, who stand to gain hugely for at least the next four years if they can muscle their man down the homestretch just a hair ahead of the others.
The fat-cat action is still one of the most dramatic aspects of a presidential campaign, but even in this colorful area the tension is leaking away – primarily because most of the really serious fat cats figured out, a few years back, that they could beat the whole rap -along with the onus of going down the tube with some desperate loser – by ‘helping’ two candidates, instead of just one.
A good example of this, in 1972, will probably be Mrs. Rella Factor – ex-wife of ‘Jake the Barber’ and the largest single contributor to Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in ‘68. She didn’t get a hell of a lot of return for her investment last time around. But this year, using the new method, she can buy the total friendship of two, three, or perhaps even four presidential candidates, for the same price … by splitting up the nut, as discreetly as possible, between Hubert, Nixon, and maybe – just for the natural randy hell of it – a chunk to Gene McCarthy, who appears to be cranking up a genuinely weird campaign this time.
I have a peculiar affection for McCarthy; nothing serious or personal, but I recall standing next to him in the snow outside the ‘exit’ door of a shoe factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, in February of 1968 when the five o’clock whistle blew and he had to stand there in the midst of those workers rushing out to the parking lot. I will never forget the pain in McCarthy’s face as he stood there with his hand out, saying over and over again: ‘Shake hands with Senator McCarthy … shake hands with Senator McCarthy … shake hands with Senator McCarthy …’ a tense plastic smile on his face, stepping nervously toward anything friendly, ‘Shake hands with Senator McCarthy’ … but most of the crowd ignored him, refusing to even acknowledge his outstretched hand, staring straight ahead as they hurried out to their cars.
There was at least one network TV camera on hand that afternoon, but the scene was never aired. It was painful enough, just being there, but to have put that scene on national TV would have been an act of genuine cruelty. McCarthy was obviously suffering; not so much because nine out of ten people refused to shake his hand, but because he really hated being there in the first place. But his managers had told him it was necessary, and maybe it was …
Later, when his outlandish success in New Hampshire shocked Johnson into retirement, I half-expected McCarthy to quit the race himself, rather than suffer all the way to Chicago (like Castro in Cuba – after Batista fled) … and God only knows what kind of vengeful energy is driving him this time, but a lot of people who said he was suffering from brain bubbles when he first mentioned that he might run again in ’72 are beginning to take him seriously: not as a Democratic contender, but as an increasingly possible Fourth Party candidate with the power to put a candidate like Muskie through terrible changes between August and November.
To Democratic chairman Larry o’Brien, the specter of a McCarthy candidacy in ’72 must be something like hearing the Hound of the Baskervilles sniffing and pissing around on your porch every night. A left-bent Fourth Party candidate with a few serious grudges on his mind could easily take enough left/radical votes away from either Muskie or Humphrey to make the Democratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them.
Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind this year, but the possibilities are ominous, and anybody who thought he was kidding got snapped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Muskie within hours after the Maine Senator made his candidacy official.
The front page of the Washington Post carried photos of both men, along with a prominent headline and McCarthy’s harsh warning that he was going to hold Muskie ‘accountable’ for his hawkish stance on the war in Vietnam prior to 1968. McCarthy also accused Muskie of being ‘the most active representative of Johnson administration policy at the 1968 Convention.’
Muskie seemed genuinely shaken by this attack. He immediately called a press conference to admit that he’d been wrong about Vietnam in the past, but now ‘I’ve had reason to change my mind.’ His new position was an awkward thing to explain, but after admitting his ‘past mistakes’ he said that he now favored ‘as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible.’
McCarthy merely shrugged. He had done his gig for the day and Muskie was jolted. The Senator focused all his efforts on the question of his altered Vietnam stance, but he was probably far more disturbed by McCarthy’s ugly revenge-tainted reference to Muskie’s role in the ’68 Democratic Convention. This was obviously the main bone in McCarthy’s throat, but Muskie ignored it and nobody asked Gene what he really meant by the charge … probably because there is no way to understand what happened to McCarthy in Chicago unless you were there and saw it yourself.
I have never read anything that comes anywhere close to explaining the shock and intensity I felt at that convention … and although I was right in the middle of it the whole time, I have never been able to write about it myself. For two weeks afterwards, back in Colorado, I couldn’t even talk about it without starting to cry – for reasons I think I finally understand now, but I still can’t explain.
Because of this: because I went there as a journalist, with no real emotional attachment to any of the candidates and only the barest of illusions about the outcome … I was not personally involved in the thing, so there is no point in presuming to understand what kind of hellish effect Chicago must have had on Gene McCarthy.
I remember seeing him cross Michigan Avenue on Thursday night – several hours after Humphrey had made his acceptance speech out at the Stockyards – and then wandering into the crowd in Grant Park like a defeated general trying to mingle with his troops just after the Surrender. But McCarthy couldn’t mingle. He could barely talk. He acted like a man in deep shock. There was not much to say. The campaign was over.
McCarthy’s gig was finished. He had knocked off the President and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley’s police, who burst into McCarthy’s private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.
Perhaps McCarthy has placed that whole scene in its proper historical and poetic perspective, but if he has I didn’t read it … or maybe he’s been hanging onto the manuscript until he can find a right ending. McCarthy has a sharp sense of drama, along with his kinky instinct for timing … but nobody appears to have noticed, until now, that he might also have a bull-sized taste for revenge.
Maybe not. In terms of classic journalism, this kind of wandering, unfounded speculation will have a nasty effect on that asshole from Ireland who sent word across The Waters to nail me for bad language and lack of objectivity. There have been numerous complaints, in fact, about the publisher allowing me to get away with calling our new Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist a ‘swine.’
Well … shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offhand, is my good friend and colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only talk about objectivity, but Dr. Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any argument, among professionals, on the question of Dr. Duke’s Objectivity.
As for mine … well, my doctor says it swole up and busted about ten years ago. The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into the place … but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.
So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here – not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
And so much for all that, too. There was at least one more thing I wanted to get into here, before trying to wind this down and get into something human. Like sleep, or that 550 watt Humm Box they have up there in the Ree-Lax Parlor at Silver Spring. Some people say they should outlaw the Humm Box, but I disagree.
Meanwhile, all that venomous speculation about what McCarthy is up to these days leaves a crucial question hanging: The odd truth that almost everybody in Washington who is paid to analyze & predict the behavior of Vote Blocs seems to feel that the much-publicized ‘youth vote’ will not be a Major Factor in the ’72 presidential campaign would be a hell of a lot easier to accept if it weren’t for the actual figures …
What the experts appear to be saying is that the sudden addition of 25 million new voters between the ages of 18 and 25 will not make much difference in the power-structure of American politics. No candidate will say this, of course. For the record, they are all very solicitous of the ‘youth vote.’ In a close election even ten percent of that bloc would mean 2.5 million votes – a very serious figure when you stack it up against Nixon’s thin margin over Humphrey in 1968.
Think of it: Only ten percent! Two and a half million. Enough -even according to Nixon’s own wizards – to swing almost any election. There is a general assumption, based on the outcome of recent presidential elections, that it takes something genuinely vile and terrifying to cause either one of the major party candidates to come away with less than 40 percent of the vote. Goldwater managed to do this in ’64, but not by much. Even after allowing Johnson’s TV sappers to cast him as a stupid, bloodthirsty ghoul who had every intention of blowing the whole world off its axis the moment he got his hands on ‘the button,’ Goldwater still got 27,176,799 votes, or 38 percent.
The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.
We are talking about a purely physical-image gig here, but even if you let the candidates jabber like magpies about anything that comes to their minds, not even a dangerous dingbat like Sam Yorty would be likely to alienate more than 45 percent or 50 percent of the electorate.
And even that far-left radical bastard, George McGovern – babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas – would be hard pressed to crank up any more than a 30 percent animosity quotient.
On balance, they are a pretty bland lot. Even Spiro Agnew – if you catch him between screeds – is not more than 20 percent different from Humphrey or Lindsay or Scoop Jackson. Four years ago, in fact, John Lindsay dug Agnew so much that he seconded his nomination for the vice-presidency. There are a lot of people who say we should forget about that this year ‘because John has already said he made a mistake about Agnew,’ but there are a lot of others who take Lindsay’s ‘Agnew Mistake’ seriously – because they assume he would do the same thing again next week or next month, if he thought it would do him any good.
Nobody seems very worried about Lindsay right now; they are waiting to see what kind of action he can generate in Florida, a state full of transient and old transplanted New Yorkers. If he can’t make it there, he’s done for. Which is just as well. But if he scores big in Florida, we will probably have to start taking him seriously -particularly if Muskie looks convincing in New Hampshire.
A Muskie-Lindsay ticket could be one of those ‘naturals,’ a marriage made in heaven and consummated by Larry o’Brien … Which gets us back to one of the main reasons why the political wizards aren’t counting on much of a ‘youth vote’ this year. It is hard to imagine even a zealot like Allard Lowenstein going out on the trail, once again, to whip up a campus-based firestorm for Muskie and Lindsay … particularly with Gene McCarthy lurking around, with that ugly mouth of his, and all those deep-bleeding grudges.
Another nightmare we might as well start coming to grips with is the probability that Hubert Humphrey will be a candidate for the Democratic nomination this year … And … there is probably some interesting talk going down around Humphrey headquarters these days:
‘Say … ah, Hube, baby. I guess you heard what your old buddy Gene did to Muskie the other day, right? Yeah, and we always thought they were friends, didn’t we? (Long pause, no reply from the candidate …)
‘So … ah … Hube? You still with me? Jesus Christ! Where’s that sunlamp? We gotta get more of a tan on you, baby. You look grey. (Long pause, no reply from the candidate …) Well, Hube, we might just as well face this thing. We’re comin’ up fast on what just might be a real nasty little problem for you … let’s not try to kid ourselves, Hube, he’s a really mean sonofabitch. (Long pause, etc …) You’re gonna have to be ready, Hube. You announce next Thursday at noon, right? So we might as well figure that crazy fucker is gonna come down on you like a million pound shithammer that same afternoon. He’ll probably stage a big scene at the Press Club – and we know who’s gonna be there, don’t we Hube? Yeah, every bastard in the business. Are you ready for that, Hube Baby? Can you handle it? (Long pause, no reply, etc. – heavy breathing.) OK, Hube, tell me this: What does the bastard know? What’s the worst he can spring on you?’
What indeed? Was McCarthy just honing up his act on Ed Muskie? Or does he really believe that Muskie – rather than Humphrey -was the main agent of Johnsonian policy at the ’68 Convention?
Is that possible? Was Muskie the man behind all that treachery and bloodletting? Is McCarthy prepared to blow the whole lid off? Whose head does he really want? And how far will he go to get it? Does the man have a price?
This may be the only interesting question of the campaign until the big whistle blows in New Hampshire on March 7th. With McCarthy skulking around, Muskie can’t afford anything but a thumping win over McGovern in that primary. But Mad Sam is up there too, and even Muskie’s local handlers concede Yorty at least 15 percent of the Democratic vote, due to his freakish alliance with the neo-Nazi publisher of New Hampshire’s only big newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader.
The Mayor of Los Angeles has never bothered to explain the twisted reasoning behind his candidacy in New Hampshire, but every vote he gets there will come off Muskie’s pile, not McGovern’s. Which means that McGovern, already sitting on 20 to 25 percent of the vote, could zap Muskie’s whole trip by picking up another 10 to 15 percent in a last-minute rush.
Muskie took a headcount in September and found himself leading with about 40 percent – but he will need at least 50 percent to look good for the fence-sitters in Florida, who will go to the polls a week later … and in Florida, Muskie will have to beat back the show-biz charisma of John Lindsay on the Left, more or less, and also deal with Scoop Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace on the Right.
Jesus! This gibberish could run on forever and even now I can see myself falling into the old trap that plagues every writer who gets sucked into this rotten business. You find yourself getting fascinated by the drifts and strange quirks of the game. Even now, before I’ve even finished this article, I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was all just another fat Sunday of pro football: Pick Pittsburgh by six points in the early game, get Dallas even with San Francisco later on … win one, lose one … then flip the dial and try to get ahead by conning somebody into taking Green Bay even against the Redskins.
After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying fuck who actually wins; the only thing that matters is the point-spread. You find yourself scratching crazily at the screen, pleading for somebody to rip the lungs out of that junkie bastard who just threw an interception and then didn’t even pretend to tackle the pig who ran it back for six points to beat the spread.
There is something perverse and perverted about dealing with life on this level. But on the other hand, it gets harder to convince yourself, once you start thinking about it, that it could possibly make any real difference to you if the 49ers win or lose … although every once in a while you stumble into a situation where you find yourself really wanting some team to get stomped all over the field, severely beaten and humiliated …
This happened to me on the last Sunday of the regular NFL season when two slobbering drunk sportswriters from the Alexandria Gazette got me thrown out of the press box at the Robert F. Kennedy stadium in Washington. I was there as a special guest of Dave Burgin, sports editor of the Washington Star … but when Burgin tried to force a bit of dignity on the scene, they ejected him too.
We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. ‘That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn’t doff your hat for the national anthem,’ Burgin explained. ‘He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested.’
‘Jesus creeping shit,’ I muttered. ‘Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me.’
‘I was afraid you’d run amok,’ he said. ‘We’d have been in bad trouble. All those guys from things like the Norfolk Ledger and the Army-Navy Times. They would have stomped us like rats in a closet.’
I couldn’t understand it. ‘Hell, I’d have taken the goddamn hat off, if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually, I don’t even stand up.’
‘I didn’t think you were going to,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed.’
‘But I did stand,’ I said. ‘I figured, hell, I’m Dave’s guest – why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat.’
Actually, I was happy to get out of that place. The Redskins were losing, which pleased me, and we were thrown out just in time to get back to Burgin’s house for the 49er game on TV. If they won this one, they would go against the Redskins next Sunday in the playoffs and by the end of the third quarter I had worked myself into a genuine hate frenzy; I was howling like a butcher when the 49ers pulled it out in the final moments with a series of desperate maneuvres, and the moment the gun sounded I was on the phone to TWA, securing a seat on the Christmas Nite Special to San Francisco. It was extremely important, I felt, to go out there and do everything possible to make sure the Redskins got the mortal piss beaten out of them.
Which worked out. Not only did the 49ers stomp the jingo bastards and knock them out of the playoffs, but my seat companion for the flight from Washington to San Francisco was Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary trial lawyer, who is also president of the Washington Redskins.
‘Heavy duty for you people tomorrow,’ I warned him. ‘Get braced for a serious beating. Nothing personal, you understand. Those poor bastards couldn’t have known what they were doing when they croaked a Doctor of Journalism out of the press box.’
He nodded heavily and called for another scotch & soda. ‘It’s a goddamn shame,’ he muttered. ‘But what can you really expect? You lie down with pigs and they’ll call you a swine every time.’
‘What? Did you call me a swine?’
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘But this world is full of slander.’
We spent the rest of the flight arguing politics. He is backing Muskie, and as he talked I got the feeling that he thought he was already at a point where, sooner or later, we would all be. ‘Ed’s a good man,’ he said. ‘He’s honest. I respect the guy.’ Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. ‘But the main reason I’m working for him,’ he said, ‘is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.’ He stabbed the arm again. ‘If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.’ He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. ‘That’s the real issue this time,’ he said. ‘Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.
(#ulink_32fa191c-e353-505e-a61e-0e40f01794e7)
I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
I have been through three presidential elections, now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote for. In 1964, I refused to vote at all, and in ’68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory.
Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.
Not even James Reston, the swinging Calvinist, claims to see any light at the end of the tunnel in ’72. Reston’s first big shot of the year dealt mainly with a grim ‘memo’ by former JFK strategist, Fred Dutton, who is now a Washington lawyer.
There are hints of hope in the Reston/Dutton prognosis, but not for the next four years. Here is the rancid nut of it: ‘The 1972 election probably is fated to be a dated, weakening election, an historical curio, belonging more to the past than to the new national three or four-party trend of the future.’
Reston either ignored or overlooked, for some reason, the probability that Gene McCarthy appears to be gearing up almost exactly the kind of ‘independent third force in American politics’ that both Reston and Dutton see as a wave of the future.
An even grimmer note comes with Reston’s offhand dismissal of Ed Muskie, the only man – according to E. B. Williams – who can possibly save us from more years of Nixon. And as if poor Muskie didn’t already have enough evil shit on his neck, the eminently reasonable, fine old liberal journal, the Washington Post, called Muskie’s official ‘new beginning/I am now a candidate’ speech on national TV a meaningless rehash of old bullshit and stale cliches raked up from old speeches by … yes … Himself, Richard Milhous Nixon.
In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brain-rooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we’re all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can’t bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President … John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed … and, well, that just about wraps up the trip, right?
Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street … peel back the the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his Tan letter to Nixon.’
‘I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.’
1. (#ulink_a9dd51be-d51c-5fc0-977d-3cb36459d3f2) As it turned out, another rabid Redskins fan that year was Richard Nixon, despite his political differences with the management. His unsolicited advice to Coach George Allen resulted in a disastrous interception ending the Redskins’ last hopes for a come-from-behind victory in the 1971 playoffs. They lost – the final score was 24 to 20. Two weeks later Nixon announced he was backing Miami against Dallas in the Super Bowl. This time he went so far as to send in a play which once again backfired disastrously. Miami lost 24 to 3. The Nixon jinx continued to plague the Redskins again in the 1973 Super Bowl, despite quarterback Bill Kilmer’s widely-quoted statement that this time he would just as soon do without the President’s tactical advice. The Redskins were three-point favorites against the Dolphins this time around, hut with Nixon on their side they got blown out of the stadium and wound up on the sick end of a deceptively one-sided 14 to 7 defeat.

February (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
Fear & Loathing in New Hampshire … Back on the Campaign Trail in Manchester, Keene & The Booth Fish Hatcheries … Harold Hughes Is Your Friend … Weird Memories of ’68: A Private Conversation with Richard Nixon … Will Dope Doom the Cowboys? … A First, Massive & Reluctantly Final Judgment on the Reality of George McGovern … Small Hope for the Hammer & No Hope At All for the Press Wizards …
It was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester – driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars that gets rubber for about twenty-nine seconds in Drive, and spits hot black divots all over the road in First or Second … a terrible screeching and fishtailing through the outskirts of Boston heading north to New Hampshire, back on the Campaign Trail … running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.
Not much of a moon tonight, but a sky full of very bright stars. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills … running about seventy-five or eighty through a landscape of stark naked trees and stone fences; the highway is empty and no lights in the roadside farmhouses. People go to bed early in New England.
Four years ago I ran this road in a different Mercury, but I wasn’t driving then. It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s top speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchannan.
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late -almost midnight then, too – and the cop was holding the big Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town somewhere near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech, to the airport up in Manchester where a Lear Jet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain-trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Lear Jet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very-relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been … and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands …
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backwards, Here We Go … ‘Watch Out!’ somebody was shouting. ‘Get the cigarette!’ A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, ‘God damnit, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!’
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. ‘What worries me,’ he said, ‘is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the Boss …’
‘Very bad show,’ I said, ‘especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones … you people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.’
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.’ He smiled. ‘You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach – because I am, after all, a professional.’
‘We know. That’s why you’re along.’
Actually, the reason was very different: I was the only one in the press corps that evening who claimed to be as seriously addicted to pro football as Nixon himself. I was also the only out-front, openly hostile Peace Freak; the only one wearing old Levis and a ski jacket, the only one (no, there was one other) who’d smoked grass on Nixon’s big Greyhound press bus, and certainly the only one who habitually referred to the candidate as ‘the Dingbat.’
So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me - out of the fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who’d been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview – as the one who should share the back seat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.
But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. ‘We want the Boss to relax,’ Ray Price told me, ‘but he can’t relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football.’ He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting to board the press bus, then shook his head sadly. ‘I checked around,’ he said. ‘But the others are hopeless – so I guess you’re it.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
We had a fine time. I enjoyed it – which put me a bit off balance, because I’d figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to things like ‘end runs’ and ‘power sweeps’ on the stump but it never occurred to me that he actually knew anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.
But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon -and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human – he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass – in the waning moments of the 1967 Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland – to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style & precision.
He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh & laughed: ‘That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!’
I was stunned. He not only remembered the play, but he knew where Miller had played in college.
That was four years ago. LBJ was Our President and there was no real hint, in the winter of ’68, that he was about to cash his check. Johnson seemed every bit as tough and invulnerable then as Nixon seems today … and it is slightly unnerving to recall that Richard Nixon, at that point in his campaign, appeared to have about as much chance of getting himself elected to the White House as Hubert Humphrey appears to have now, in February of ’72.
When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do. The polls showed him comfortably ahead of George Romney, but according to most of the big-time press wizards who were hanging around Manchester at the time, the Nixon-Romney race was only a drill that would end just as soon as Nelson Rockefeller came in to mop up both of them. The bar at the Wayfarer Motor Inn was a sort of unofficial press headquarters, where the press people hovered in nervous anticipation of the Rockefeller announcement that was said to be coming ‘at any moment.’
So I was not entirely overcome at the invitation to spend an hour alone with Richard Nixon. He was, after all, a Born Loser – even if he somehow managed to get the Republican nomination I figured he didn’t have a sick goat’s chance of beating Lyndon Johnson.
I was as guilty as all the others, that year, of treating the McCarthy campaign as a foredoomed exercise in noble futility. We had talked about it a lot – not only in the Wayfarer bar, but also in the bar of the Holiday Inn where Nixon was staying – and the press consensus was that the only Republican with a chance to beat Johnson was Nelson Rockefeller … and the only other possible winner was Bobby Kennedy, who had already made it clear – both publicly and privately – that he would definitely not run for President in 1968.
I was remembering all this as I cranked the big green Cougar along U.S. 93 once again, four years later, to cover another one of these flakey New Hampshire primaries. The electorate in this state is notoriously perverse and unpredictable. In 1964, for instance, it was a thumping victory in the New Hampshire primary that got the Henry Cabot Lodge steamroller off to a roaring start … and in ’68, Gene McCarthy woke up on the morning of election day to read in the newspapers that the last minute polls were nearly unanimous in giving him between six and eight percent of the vote … and even McCarthy was stunned, I think, to wake up twenty-four hours later and find himself with 42 percent.
Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East’s psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico – big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old-timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists – people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service – who’ve been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhikers you find along these narrow twisting highways look like the people you see on the roads around Boulder and Aspen or Taos.
The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her. ‘I guess it sounds crazy,’ she explains. ‘We don’t even sleep together. He’s just a friend. But I’m happy when I’m with him because he makes me like myself.’
Jesus, I thought. We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now – six months out of college – she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn’t even know she’s coming.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.
She tried to be polite but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don’t keep moving.
Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days – and then he’d be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.
It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlboro and I saw she was crying which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about ‘junkies’ and ‘loonies’ and ‘doomfreaks.’
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.
These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.
This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.
We couldn’t find the commune. The directions were too vague: ‘Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree … proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines …’
After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck … but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place on a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was OK.
I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really ‘OK.’ I was tempted to take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us … checking into the Wayfarer at 3:30, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast, and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.
Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nymphet who thought politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.
No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I’d always thought 1 was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
Earlier that night, in Cambridge – over dinner at a bogus Mexican restaurant run by Italian junkies – several people had asked me why I was wasting my time on ‘this kind of bullshit.’ McGovern, Muskie, Lindsay, or even Gene McCarthy. I had just come back from a long day at the Massachusetts ‘Rad/Lib Caucus’ in Worcester, billed as a statewide rally to decide which Democratic candidate to support in the Massachusetts primary on April 25th.
The idea, said the organizers, was to unify and avoid a disastrous vote-splitting orgy that would splinter the Left between McGovern, Lindsay & McCarthy – thus guaranteeing an easy Muskie win. The Caucus organizers were said to be well-known McCarthy supporters, who’d conceived the gathering as a sort of launching pad for Gene in ’72 … and McCarthy seemed to agree; he was the only candidate to attend the Caucus in person, and his appearance drew a booming ovation that gave every indication of a pending victory.
The night before, at a crowded student rally in Hogan Student Center at Holy Cross, McCarthy had responded to a questioner who asked if he was ‘really a serious candidate’ by saying: ‘You’ll see how serious I am after tomorrow’s Caucus.’
The crowd at Holy Cross responded with a rolling cheer. The median age, that night, was somewhere around nineteen and McCarthy was impressively sharp and confident as he drew roar after roar of applause with his quietly vicious attack on Nixon, Humphrey, and Muskie. As I stood there in the doorway of the auditorium, looking across the shoulders of the overflow crowd, it looked like 1968 all over again. There was a definite sense of drama in seeing McCarthy back on the stump, cranking up another crusade.
But that high didn’t last long. The site of Saturday’s Caucus was the gym at Assumption College, across town, and the crowd over there was very different. The median age at the Caucus was more like thirty-three and the results of the first ballot were a staggering blow to McCarthy’s newborn crusade.
McGovern cleaned up, beating McCarthy almost three to one. When the final tally came in, after more than eight hours of infighting, McGovern’s quietly efficient grass-roots organizers had locked up 62 percent of the vote – leaving McCarthy to split the rest, more or less equally, with Shirley Chisholm. Both Muskie and Lindsay had tried to ignore the Caucus, claiming it was ‘stacked’ against them, and as a result neither one got enough votes to even mention.
The outcome of the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus was a shock to almost everybody except the busloads of McGovern supporters who had come there to flex their muscle in public for the first time. McCarthy – who had left early to fly back to Washington for an appearance the next day on Meet the Press – was seriously jolted by the loss. He showed it the next morning on TV when he looked like a ball of bad nerves caught in a crossfire of hostile questions from Roger Mudd and George Herman. He was clearly off-balance; a nervous shadow of the rising-tide, hammerhead spoiler he had been on Friday night for the rally at Holy Cross.
To make things worse, one of the main organizers of the Rad/ Lib Caucus was Jerry Grossman, a wealthy envelope manufacturer from Newton, in the Boston suburbs, and a key McCarthy fundraiser in the ’68 campaign … but after the Rad/Lib Caucus, Grossman went far out of his way, along with Mudd & Herman, to make sure McCarthy was done for.
He immediately endorsed McGovern, saying it was clear that ‘Massachusetts liberals no longer believe in McCarthy’s leadership quotient.’ What this meant, according to the unanimous translation by political pros and press wizards, was, ‘McCarthy won’t get any more of Grossman’s money.’
Grossman ignored the obvious fact that he and other pro-McCarthy heavies had been beaten stupid, on the grass-roots organizing level, by an unheralded ‘McGovern machine’ put together in Massachusetts by John Reuther – a nephew of Walter, late president of the UAW. I spent most of that afternoon wandering around the gym, listening to people talk and watching the action, and it was absolutely clear – once the voting started -that Reuther had everything wired.
Everywhere I went there was a local McGovern floor manager keeping people in line, telling them exactly what was happening and what would probably happen next … while the McCarthy forces – led by veteran Kennedy/Camelot field marshal Richard Goodwin – became more and more demoralized, caught in a fast---rising pincers movement between a surprisingly organized McGovern block on their Right, and a wild-eyed Chisholm uprising on the Left.
The Chisholm strength shocked everybody. She was one of twelve names on the ballot – which included almost every conceivable Democratic candidate from Hubert Humphrey to Patsy Mink, Wilbur Mills, and Sam Yorty – but after Muskie and Lindsay dropped out, the Caucus was billed far and wide as a test between McGovern and McCarthy. There was no mention in the press or anywhere else that some unknown black woman from Brooklyn might seriously challenge these famous liberal heavies on their own turf … but when the final vote came in, Shirley Chisholm had actually beaten Gene McCarthy, who finished a close third.
The Chisholm challenge was a last-minute idea and only half-organized, on the morning of the Caucus, by a handful of speedy young black politicos and Women’s Lib types – but by 6:00 that evening it had developed from a noisy idea into a solid power bloc. What began as a symbolic kind of challenge became a serious position after the first ballot – among this overwhelmingly white, liberal, affluent, well-educated, and over-thirty audience – when almost half of them refused to vote for George McGovern because he seemed ‘too conventional,’ as one long-haired kid in a ski parka told me.
They had nothing against McGovern; they agreed with almost everything he said – but they wanted more; and it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the same people who showed up at McCarthy’s Holy Cross rally on Friday night had come out to Assumption on Sunday.
There were not many Youth/Freak vote types at the Rad/Lib Caucus; perhaps one out of five, and probably not even that. The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a ‘registration fee’ of two dollars before you got a vote.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t pay it myself, so I can’t vote.’ He shrugged. ‘But this Caucus doesn’t mean anything, anyway. This is just a bunch of old liberals getting their rocks off Manchester, New Hampshire, is a broken down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington, D.C.
I checked into the Wayfarer just before dawn and tried to get some music on my high-powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries, in Portsmouth.
It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his hand-grabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain, above which hung a sign saying ‘Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work.’
The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything – and a lot of hissing & humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.
The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-class liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern’s public appearances: The crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age gap didn’t hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was … even at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three, that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five & thirty-five.
After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.
I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said – no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets – so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender ‘Jim,’ which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as ‘Mr. Reynolds.’
Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. ‘My name’s not Reynolds, goddamnit! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star.’ Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.
The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his ‘political director’ in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa – Senator Harold Hughes – had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie.
This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes/McGovern/Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who were criss-crossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him ‘un-touchable.’ If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.
Hughes had grown a beard; he didn’t mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then – and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry o’Brien’s personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the national convention.
Dick Dougherty, a former Los Angeles Times newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action in New Hampshire, was so shaken by the news of Hughes’ defection that he didn’t even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just gotten the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate’s. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking ‘Nevermore …’
By chance, I found George downstairs in the Men’s Room, hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the grey marble tiles.
‘Say … ah … I hate to mention this,’ I said. ‘But what about this thing with Hughes?’
He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his head and mumbling something about ‘a deal for the vice-presidency.’ I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ I said.
He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. ‘Well …’ he said finally. ‘I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re all surprised.’
He looked very tired, and I didn’t see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room.
This proved to be my un-doing, because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I’d entered with The Senator … but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pinstripe suit.
A lot has been written about McGovern’s difficulties on the campaign trail, but most of it is far off the point. The career pols and press wizards say he simply lacks ‘charisma,’ but that’s a cheap and simplistic idea that is more an insult to the electorate than to McGovern. The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator – or even a President – is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.
McGovern, they say, doesn’t make it on this level. Which is probably true. But McCarthy was worse. His ’68 campaign had none of the surface necessities. He had no money, no press, no endorsements, no camera-presence … his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.
There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naive enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent – with a good voting record on ‘the issues’ – is a natural man for the White House.
But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon) … and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.
McGovern’s failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign. They all sense an untouched constituency. Chisholm’s campaign manager, a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson, calls it the ‘Sleeping Giant vote.’
‘Nobody’s reaching them,’ he said. ‘We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for.’
Ron Dellums, the black Congressman from Berkeley, called it ‘the Nigger vote.’ But he wasn’t talking about skin pigment.
‘It’s time for somebody to lead all of America’s Niggers,’ he said at the Capitol Hill press conference when Shirley Chisholm announced she was running for President. ‘And by this I mean the Young, the Black, the Brown, the women, the Poor – all the people who feel left out of the political process. If we can put the Nigger Vote together, we can bring about some real change in this country.’
Dellums is probably the only elected official in America who feels politically free enough to stare at the cameras and make a straight-faced pitch to the ‘Nigger Vote.’ But he is also enough of a politician to know it’s out there … maybe not in the Exeter Inn, but the hills north and west of Manchester are teeming with Niggers. They didn’t turn out for the speech-making, and they probably won’t vote in the primary – but they are there, and there are a hell of a lot of them.
Looking back on that week in New Hampshire, it was mainly a matter of following George McGovern around and watching him do his thing – which was pleasant, or at least vaguely uplifting, but not what you’d call a real jerk-around.
McGovern is not one of your classic fireballs on the stump. His campaign workers in New Hampshire seem vaguely afflicted by a sense of uncertainty about what it all means. They are very decent people. They are working hard, they are very sincere, and most of them are young volunteers who get their pay in room & board … but they lack something crucial, and that lack is painfully obvious to anybody who remembers the mood of the McCarthy volunteers in 1968.
Those people were angry. The other side of that ‘Clean for Gene’ coin was a nervous sense of truce that hung over the New Hampshire campaign. In backroom late night talks at the Wayfarer there was no shortage of McCarthy staffers who said this would probably be their final trip ‘within the system.’ There were some who didn’t mind admitting that, personally, they’d rather throw firebombs or get heavy into dope – but they were attracted by the drama, the sheer balls, of McCarthy’s ‘hopeless challenge.’
McCarthy’s national press man at the time was Seymour Hersh, who quit the campaign in Wisconsin and called Gene a closet racist.
(#ulink_8dcd5869-580b-52f7-a45b-f2594b0c6b67) Two years later, Sy Hersh was back in the public ear with a story about a place called My Lai, in South Vietnam. He was the one who dragged it out in the open.
McCarthy’s state-level press man that year was a hair-freak named Bill Gallagher, who kept his room in the Wayfarer open from midnight to dawn as a sort of all-night refuge for weed fanciers. A year later, when I returned to New Hampshire to write a piece on ski racer Jean-Claude Killy, I got off the cocktail circuit long enough to locate Gallagher in a small Vermont hamlet where he was living as the de facto head of a mini-commune. He had dropped out of politics with a vengeance; his beard was down to his belt and his head was far out of politics. ‘The McCarthy thing’ had been ‘a bad trip,’ he explained. He no longer cared who was President.
You don’t find people like Hersh and Gallagher around McGovern’s headquarters in Manchester this year. They would frighten the staff. McGovern’s main man in New Hampshire is a fat young pol named Joe Granmaison, whose personal style hovers somewhere between that of a state trooper and a used-car salesman.
Granmaison was eager to nail Muskie: ‘If we elect a President who three years ago said, “Gee, I made a mistake” … well, I think it’s about time these people were held accountable for those mistakes.’
Indeed. But Granmaison backed away from me like he’d stepped on a rattlesnake when I asked him if it were true that he’d been a Johnson delegate to the Chicago convention in ’68.
We met at a McGovern cocktail party in a downstate hamlet called Keene. ‘Let’s talk about this word “accountable,” I said. ‘I get the feeling you stepped in shit on that one …’
‘What do you mean?’ he snapped. ‘Just because I was a Johnson delegate doesn’t mean anything. I’m not running for office.’
‘Good,’ I said. We were standing in a short hallway between the kitchen and the living room, where McGovern was saying, ‘The thing the political bosses want most is for young people to drop out … because they know the young people can change the system, and the bosses don’t want any change.’
True enough, I thought. But how do you ‘change the system’ by hiring a young fogey like Granmaison to wire up your act in New Hampshire? With a veteran Judas Goat like that in charge of the operation, it’s no wonder that McGovern’s Manchester headquarters is full of people who talk like nervous PoliSci students on job-leave.
Joe didn’t feel like discussing his gig at the ’68 Convention. Which is understandable. If I had done a thing like that, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. I tried to change the subject, but he crammed a handful of potato chips into his mouth and walked away.
Later that night, after the cocktail party, we drove out to the Student Union hall at Keene State College, where McGovern addressed a big and genuinely friendly crowd of almost 3000, jammed into a hall meant for 2000 tops. The advance man had done his work well.
The big question tonight was ‘Amnesty,’ and when McGovern said he was for it, the crowd came alive. This was, after all, the first time any active candidate for the presidency had said ‘Yes’ on the Amnesty question – which is beginning to look like a time-bomb with almost as much Spoiler Potential as the busing issue.
They both have long and tangled roots, but it is hard to imagine any question in American politics today that could have more long-range impact than the argument over ‘Amnesty,’ – which is nothing more or less than a proposal to grant presidential pardon to all draft dodgers and U.S. military deserters, on the grounds that history has absolved them. Because if the Vietnam War was wrong from the start – as even Nixon has tacitly admitted – then it is hard to avoid the logic of the argument that says the Anti-War Exiles were right for refusing to fight it.
There is not much room for politics in the Amnesty argument. It boils down to an official admission that the American Military Establishment – acting in spiritual concert with the White House and the national Business Community – was Wrong.
Almost everybody except Joe Alsop has already admitted this, in private … but it is going to be a very painful thing to say in public.
It will be especially painful to the people who got their sons shipped back to them in rubber sacks, and to the thousands of young Vets who got their arms and their legs and balls blown off for what the White House and Ed Muskie now admit was ‘a mistake.’
But 60,000 Americans have died for that ‘mistake,’ along with several million Vietnamese … and it is only now becoming clear that the ‘war dead’ will also include hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais. When this war goes into the history books, the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.
Richard Nixon is flatly opposed to a general amnesty for the men who refused to fight this tragic war. Muskie agrees, but he says he might change his mind once the war ends … and Lindsay, as usual, is both for and against it.
The only ‘candidates’ in favor of Amnesty are McGovern and Ted Kennedy. I watched McGovern deal with the question when it popped out of that overflow student audience at Keene State. He was talking very sharp, very confident, and when the question of Amnesty came up, he got right on it, saying ‘Yes, I’m in favor …’
This provoked a nice outburst of cheers and applause. It was a very strong statement, and the students clearly dug it.
Then, moments later, somebody tossed out the fishhook -asking McGovern if he had any plans, pro or con, about supporting Muskie, if Big Ed got the nod in Miami.
McGovern paused, shifted uneasily for a second or so at the podium, then said: ‘Yes, I’m inclined to that position.’ I was standing behind him on the stage, looking out at the crowd through a slit in the big velvet curtain, and according to the red-inked speed-scrawl in my notebook, the audience responded with … ‘No cheering, confused silence, the audience seems to sag …’
But these were only my notes. Perhaps I was wrong – but even making a certain allowance for my own bias, it still seems perfectly logical to assume that an audience of first-time voters might be at least momentarily confused by a Left/Champion Democratic candidate who says in one breath that his opponent is dead wrong on a very crucial issue … and then in the next breath says he plans to support that opponent if he wins the nomination.
I doubt if I was the only person in the hall, at that moment, who thought: ‘Well, shit… if you plan to support him in July, why not support him now, and get it over with?’
Moments later, the speech ended and I found myself out on the sidewalk shooting up with Ray Morgan, a veteran political analyst from the Kansas City Star. He was on his way to the airport, with McGovern, for a quick flight on the charter plane to Washington, and he urged me to join him.
But I didn’t feel up to it. 1 felt like thinking for a while, running that narrow, icy, little highway back to Manchester just as fast as the Cougar would make it and still hold the road – which was not very fast, so I had plenty of time to brood, and to wonder why I felt so depressed.
I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip – which was, after all, a longshot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than 30 to 1.
What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn’t get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more – or maybe something different.
Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?
Well … that would take a lot of time and space I don’t have now, but for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been ‘against the War in Vietnam since 1963’ – especially when your name is not one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and when you’re talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early ’65.
A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned – but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.
This is an ugly portent for the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 who may or may not vote in 1972. And many of them probably will vote. The ones who go to the polls in ’72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the ‘best minds of my generation,’ as Allen Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in ‘Howl.’ There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the ‘Youth Vote’ will get a lot of people out to the polls in ’72. If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.
But what about next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should ‘try again’ for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations – between the ages of 22 and 40 – who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson/Goldwater to Humphrey/Nixon to Nixon/Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.
This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto ‘Live Free or Die’ inscribed above the numbers.
The highways are full of good mottos. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about … what was it? Have these Dangerous Drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this:
‘Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.’
The Shadow? I could almost smell the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night, and tomorrow’s schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida – except for Sam Yorty, and I didn’t feel ready for that.
The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhiker I saw was an 18-year-old kid with long black hair who was going to Reading – or ‘Redding,’ as he said it – but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in the election he looked at me like I’d said something crazy.
‘What election?’ he asked.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I was only kidding.’
One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been – for more than a year, now – a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked, but not well-Liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.
A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase – to the ‘White side’ of Rock Creek Park – to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small, loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slumped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to ‘the McGovern problem.’
For more than a year now, he’s been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963; he’s for Amnesty Now; his alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5,000,000,000 Space Shuttle program, thereby croaking thousands of new jobs in the already depressed Cape Kennedy/Central Florida area.
He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon/Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument by midsummer – one of those wild-eyed fire and brimstone issues that scares the piss out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it … but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it’s desirable, but because it’s ‘among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.’
This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year – especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando … or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the federal government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of Niggers.
McGovern is the only major candidate – including Lindsay and Muskie – who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.
On the face of it, the ‘McGovern problem’ looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted – along with McGovern and most of his backers – that ‘American politics’ is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and The Loyal Opposition.
That’s the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry o’Brien has decided to go with this year – and he says he can’t for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren’t bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.

MESSAGE TO o’BRIEN
Well, Larry … I really hate to lay this on you … because we used to be buddies, right? That was back in the days when I bought all those white sharkskin suits because I thought I was going to be the next Governor of American Samoa.
You strung me along, Larry; you conned me into buying all those goddamn white suits and kept me hanging around that Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, waiting for my confirmation to come through … but it never did, Larry; I was never appointed. You bushwhacked me.
But what the hell? I’ve never been one to hold a grudge any longer than absolutely necessary … and I wouldn’t want you to think I’d hold that kind of cheap treachery against you, now that you’re running the party: The Loyal Opposition, as it were …
You and Hubert, along with Muskie and Jackson. And Mad Sam Yorty, and Wilbur Mills – and, yes, even Lindsay and McGovern. Party loyalty is the name of the game, right? George Meany, Frank Rizzo, Mayor Daley …
Well, shucks. What can I say, Larry? I’m still for that gig in Samoa; or anywhere else where the sun shines … because I still have those stinking white suits, and I’m beginning to think seriously in terms of foreign travel around the end of this year. Maybe November …
Under different circumstances, Larry, I might try to press you on this: maybe lean on you just a trifle for an appointment to the Drugs and Politics desk at our outpost in the Canary Islands. My friend Cardozo, the retired Dean of Gonzo Journalism, just bought a jazz bar out there and he says it’s a very weird place.
But shit, Larry; why kid ourselves? You’re not going to be in a position to appoint anybody to anything when November comes down on us. You won’t even have a job; or if you do it’ll be one of those gigs where you’ll have to get your half-salary in gold bullion … because the way it looks now, the Democratic Party won’t be issuing a hell of a lot of certified checks after November Seventh.
Remember the Whigs, Larry? They went belly up, with no warning at all, when a handful of young politicians like Abe Lincoln decided to move out on their own, and fuck the Whigs … which worked out very nicely, and when it became almost instantly clear that the Whig hierarchy was just a gang of old impotent wind-bags with no real power at all, the Party just curled up and died … and any politician stupid enough to ‘stay loyal’ went down with the ship.
This is the soft underbelly of the ‘McGovern problem.’ He is really just another good Democrat, and the only thing that sets him apart from the others is a hard, almost masochistic kind of honesty that drives him around the country, running up huge bills and turning people off.
We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway … and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering – to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish – just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said.
I spent about two weeks brooding on this, because I like McGovern – which still surprises me, because politicians, like journalists, are pretty hard people to like. The only other group I’ve ever dealt with who struck me as being essentially meaner than politicians are tight ends in pro football.
There is not much difference in basic temperament between a good tight end and a successful politician. They will both go down in the pit and do whatever has to be done – then come up smiling, and occasionally licking blood off their teeth.
Gene ‘Big Daddy’ Lipscomb was not a tight end, but he had the same instincts. The Baltimore Colts paid Gene to mash quarterbacks – and, failing that, to crack collarbones and make people deaf.
Shortly before he OD’d on smack, Big Daddy explained his technique to a lunchtime crowd of Rotarians. ‘I always go straight for the head,’ he explained. ‘Whoever’s across from me, I bash him with the flat part of my hand – nail him square on the ear-hole of his helmet about five straight times. Pretty soon he gets so nervous he can’t concentrate. He can’t even hear the signals. Once I get him spooked, the rest is easy.’
There is a powerful fascination that attaches to this kind of efficiency – and it is worth remembering that Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic nomination not by appealing to the higher and finer consciousness of the delegates, but by laying the stomp & the whipsong on Adlai Stevenson’s people when the deal went down in Los Angeles. The ‘Kennedy machine’ was so good that even Mayor Daley came around. A good politician can smell the hammer coming down like an old sailor smells a squall behind the sun.
But Daley is not acting, this year, like a man who smells the hammer. When George McGovern went to pay a ‘courtesy call’ on Daley last month, the Mayor’s advice was, ‘Go out and win an election – then come back and see me.’
McGovern and his earnest liberal advisors don’t like to talk about that visit; no more than Muskie and his people enjoy talking about Big Ed’s ‘courtesy call’ on Supercop Frank Rizzo, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.
But these are the men with the muscle; they can swing a lot of votes. Or at least that’s what the Conventional Wisdom says. Daley, Rizzo, George Meany; the good ole boys, the kingmakers.
And there is the flaw in McGovern. When the big whistle blows, he’s still a Party Man. Ten years ago the electorate saw nothing wrong with the spectacle of two men fighting savagely for the Party nomination – calling each other ‘whores’ and ‘traitors’ and ‘thieves’ all the way up to balloting time at the convention – and then miraculously Coming Together, letting bygones be bygones, to confront the common foe: The Other Party.
But the electorate has different tastes now, and that kind of honky-tonk bullshit doesn’t make it any more. Back in 1960 most Americans still believed that whoever lived in the White House was naturally a righteous and upstanding man. Otherwise he wouldn’t be there …
This was after 28 years of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who were very close to God. Harry Truman, who had lived a little closer to the Devil, was viewed more as an accident than a Real President.
(#ulink_c2edfbed-4ccc-5bb4-a2ca-a728bed0e60b)
The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas – when some twisted little geek blew the President’s head off … and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the ‘Peace Candidate.’
Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army and in fact the whole structure of ‘government.’
And then came ’68, the year that somehow managed to confirm almost everybody’s worst fears about the future of the Republic … and then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House. If Joe McGinnis had written The Selling of the President about good old Ike, he’d have been chased through the streets of New York by angry mobs. But when he wrote it about Nixon, people just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, it’s a goddamn shame, even if it’s true, but so what?’
I went to Nixon’s Inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corps … and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting ‘Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!’
George tried to ignore it. He knew the TV cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd – even as they continued to chant ‘Romney eats shit!’
The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn’t walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President’s car passed by.
But it was hard to be sure which one it was. The Secret Service ran a few decoys down the line, from time to time, apparently to confuse the snipers and maybe draw some fire … but nothing serious happened: just the normal hail of rocks, beer cans, and wine bottles … so they figured it was safe to run the President through.
Nixon came by – according to the TV men – in what appeared to be a sort of huge, hollowed-out cannonball on wheels. It was a very nasty looking armored car, and God only knows who was actually inside it.
I was standing next to a CBS-TV reporter named Joe Benti and I heard him say, ‘Here comes the President …’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked him. It was just barely possible to detect a hint of human movement through the slits that passed for windows.
‘The President is waving to the crowd,’ said Benti into his mike.
‘Bullshit!’ said Lennox Raphael standing beside me. ‘That’s Neal Cassady in there.’
‘Who?’ said Benti.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘He can’t hear you anyway. That car has a vacuum seal.’
Benti stared at me, then moved away. Shortly afterward, he quit his job and took his family to Copenhagen.
When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One. Altamont was a nightmare, Chicago was worse, Kent State was so bad that it’s still hard to find the right words for it … but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes, a wild kind of momentary high, before the shroud came down.
The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I’ve ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it. Standing there on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching our New President roll by in his black/armored hearse, surrounded by a trotting phalanx of Secret Service men with their hands in the air, batting away the garbage thrown out of the crowd, I found myself wondering how Lee felt at Appomattox … or the main Jap admiral when they took him out to the battleship Missouri to sign the final papers.
Well … it’s almost dawn now, and the only thing keeping me sane is the knowledge that just as soon as I finish this gibberish I can zoom off to Florida. I have a credit card that says I can run totally amok, on the tab, at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach.
Right. Check into the penthouse and have the tailor send up a gallon of rum and ten yards of the best Irish silk. I need a tailor-made free-falling suit, just in case they invite me down to Caracas for the races. Charge it to Clifford Irving … and while you’re at it, my man, send up a pair of white alligator-neck shoes, and an Arab to polish the windows.
I mean to cover this Florida primary in depth. New Hampshire was … well … what was it? On the plane back from Boston I scanned the New York Times and found that James Reston, as always, had his teeth right down on the bone.
‘After all’ he wrote, ‘there are hard and honest differences between the candidates and the parties over the best terms of peace and trade, and the allocation of limited resources to the competing claims of military security abroad and civil order and social security at home. This is really what the presidential campaign is all about.’
Reston is narrow, but he has a good eye when it’s focused, and in this case he seems to be right. The ’72 presidential campaign is looking more & more like a backroom squabble between Bankers, Generals, and Labor Bosses. There is no indication, at this time, that the outcome will make much difference to anyone else. If the Republicans win, we will immediately declare Limited Nuclear War on all of Indochina and the IRS will start collecting a 20 percent national sales tax on every dollar spent by anybody -for the National Defense Emergency.
But if the Democrats win, Congress will begin a fourteen-year debate on whether or not to declare Massive Conventional War on all of Indochina, and the IRS will begin collecting a 20 percent National Losers’ Tax on all incomes under $25,000 per annum -for the National Defense Emergency.
The most recent Gallup Poll says Nixon & Muskie are running Head to Head but on closer examination the figures had Muskie trailing by a bare one percent – so he quickly resigned his membership in the ‘Caucasians Only’ Congressional Country Club in the horsey suburbs near Cabin John, Maryland. He made this painful move in late January, about the same time he began hammering Nixon’s ‘end the war’ proposal.
Watching Muskie on TV that week, I remembered the words of ex-Senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) when he appeared at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in his role as the official spokesman for McGovern. Gruening was one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 – the resolution that gave LBJ carte blanche to do Everything Necessary to win the war in Vietnam. (Wayne Morse of Oregon was the only other ‘nay’ vote … and both Gruening & Morse were defeated when they ran for re-election in 1966.)
In Worcester, Ernest Gruening approached the stage like a slow-moving golem. He is eighty-five years old, and his legs are not real springy – but when he got behind the podium he spoke like the Grim Reaper.
‘I’ve known Ed Muskie for many years,’ he said. ‘I’ve considered him a friend … but I can’t help remembering that, for all those years, while we were getting deeper and deeper into that war, and while more boys were dying … Ed Muskie stayed silent.’
Gruening neglected to say where McGovern had been on the day of the Tonkin Gulf vote … but I remember somebody saying up on the press platform near the roof of the Assumption College gym, that ‘I can forgive McGovern for blowing that Tonkin thing, because the Pentagon lied – but what’s his excuse for not voting against that goddamn wire-tapping bill?’ (The Omnibus Safe Streets & Crime Control Act of 1968, a genuinely oppressive piece of legislation … even Lyndon Johnson was shocked by it, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to veto the bugger – for the same reasons cited by the many Senators who called the bill ‘frightening’ while refusing to vote against it because they didn’t want to be on record as having voted against ‘safe streets and crime control.’ The bare handful of Senators who actually voted against the bill explained themselves in very ominous terms. For details, see Justice by Richard Harris.)
I had thought about this, but I had also thought about all the other aspects of this puzzling and depressing campaign – which seemed, a few months ago, to have enough weird and open-ended possibilities that I actually moved from Colorado to Washington for the purpose of ‘covering the campaign.’ It struck me as a right thing to do at the time – especially in the wake of the success we’d had with two back-to-back Freak Power runs at the heavily entrenched Money/Politics/Yahoo establishment in Aspen.
But things are different in Washington. It’s not that everybody you talk to is aggressively hostile to any idea that might faze their well-ordered lifestyles; they’d just rather not think about it. And there is no sense of life in the Underculture. On the national reality spectrum, Washington’s Doper/Left/Rock/Radical community is somewhere between Toledo and Biloxi. ‘Getting it on’ in Washington means killing a pint of Four Roses and then arguing about Foreign Aid, over chicken wings, with somebody’s drunken Congressman.
The latest craze on the local high-life front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia in Washington is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom – and the people who actually live and thrive here in the great web of Government are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the Party Affiliation of the next President won’t make any difference at all, except on the surface.
The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same. So just lie back and live with it. To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about ‘getting things done in Washington’ is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami line-backers ‘Stop Duane Thomas!’
That is one aspect of the ’72 Super Bowl that nobody has properly dealt with: What was it like for those humorless, godfearing Alger-bent Jesus Freaks to go out on that field in front of 100,000 people in New Orleans and get beaten like gongs by the only certified dope freak in the NFL? Thomas ran through the Dolphins like a mule through corn-stalks.
It was a fine thing to see; and it was no real surprise when the Texas cops busted him, two weeks later, for Possession of Marijuana … and the Dallas coach said Yes, he’d just as soon trade Duane Thomas for almost anybody.
They don’t get along. Tom Landry, the Cowboys’ coach, never misses a chance to get up on the platform with Billy Graham whenever The Crusade plays in Dallas. Duane Thomas calls Landry a ‘plastic man.’ He tells reporters that the team’s general manager, Tex Schram, is ‘sick, demented and vicious.’ Thomas played his whole season, last year, without ever uttering a sentence to anyone on the team: Not the coach, the quarterback, his blockers – nobody; dead silence.
All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number – which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over; the purse is safe in the vault; and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession.
Nobody really expects him to serve time, but nobody seems to think he’ll be playing for Dallas next year, either … and a few sporting people who claim to know how the NFL works say he won’t be playing for anybody next year; that the Commissioner is outraged at this mockery of all those Government-sponsored ‘Beware of Dope’ TV shots that dressed up the screen last autumn.
We all enjoyed those spots, but not everyone found them convincing. Here was a White House directive saying several million dollars would be spent to drill dozens of Name Players to stare at the camera and try to stop grinding their teeth long enough to say they hate drugs of any kind … and then the best running back in the world turns out to be a goddamn uncontrollable drugsucker.
But not for long. There is not much room for freaks in the National Football League. Joe Namath was saved by the simple blind luck of getting drafted by a team in New York City, a place where social outlaws are not always viewed as criminals. But Namath would have had a very different trip if he’d been drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals.
(#ulink_4e4564a6-d30c-5973-adf5-363d632ee1b3)
Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered out on another tangent. But why not? Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly Old Politics trip, or it will drive you to kicking the walls and hurling AR
’s into the fireplace.
This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe the feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk: seven Washington Posts, seven Washington Stars, seven New York Times, six Wall Street Journals, and one Suck … to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated … and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street to freak the neighbors.
After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with the man who said, ‘No news is good news.’ In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest … but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the jump (or ‘Cont. on …’) page …
The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa. The Star will say the same thing, and the Journal will say nothing at all. But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like: ‘When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental woman who seemed to be in control.’
Now that’s good journalism. Totally objective; very active and straight to the point. But we need to know more. Who was that woman? Why did they fight? Where was Muskie taken? What was he saying when the microphone broke?
Jesus, what’s the other one? Every journalist in America knows the ‘Five W’s.’ But I can only remember four. ‘Who, What. Why, Where,’ … and, yes, of course … ‘When!’
But what the hell? An item like that tends to pinch the interest gland … so you figure it’s time to move out: Pack up the $419 Abercrombie & Fitch elephant skin suitcase; send the phones and the scanner and the tape viewers by Separate Float, load everything else into the weightless Magnesium Kitbag … then call for a highspeed cab to the airport; load on and zip off to wherever The Word says it’s happening.
The public expects no less. They want a man who can zap around the nation like a goddamn methedrine bat: Racing from airport to airport, from one crisis to another – sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the ‘Five W’s’ in a package that makes perfect sense.
Why not? With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree. Or fly off and write nothing at all; get a room on the edge of Chicago and shoot up for about sixteen straight days – then wander back to Washington with a notebook full of finely-honed insights on ‘The Mood of the Midwest.’
Be warned. The word among wizards is that Muskie will have the Democratic nomination locked up when the votes are counted in Wisconsin … and never mind the fact that only 12 percent of the potential voters will go to the polls in that state. (The Arizona pols – using bullhorns, billboards, and fleets of roving Voter Buses -managed to drag out 13 or 14 percent.)
This ugly truth is beginnning to dawn on the big-time Demos. They commandeered a whole network the other night for a TV broadside called ‘The Loyal Opposition’ – featuring Larry o’Brien and all the top managers discussing The Party’s prospects for 1972.
It was a terrible bummer. Even though I am paid to watch this kind of atavistic swill, I could barely keep a fix on it. It was like watching a gaggle of Woolworth stockholders, bitching about all the trouble they were having getting the company to hire an executive-level Jew.
Whatever o’Brien and his people had in mind, it didn’t come across. They looked and talked like a bunch of surly, burned-out Republicans – still wondering why Hubert Humphrey didn’t make it in ’68 with his Politics of Joy.
Jesus, what a shock it was! The Hube always seemed like Natural. But something went wrong … What was it?
The Democrats don’t seem to know; or if they do they don’t want to talk about it. They had a big fund-raising dinner for ‘the candidates’ the other night at a ballroom in downtown Washington, but the people who went said it sucked. No candidates showed up – except Humphrey, and he couldn’t stay for dinner. Gene McCarthy was introduced, but he didn’t feel like talking. Ted Kennedy stayed for dinner, but nobody mentioned his name … and when the party broke up, before midnight, the chairman was still looking for somebody who could say something meaningful. But nobody seemed to be ready – or none of the regulars, at least, and when it comes to party affairs, the regulars are the ones who do the talking.
People who went to the party – at $500 a head – said the crowd got strangely restive toward the end of the evening, when it finally became apparent that nobody was going to say anything.
It was very unsettling, they said – like going to a pep rally with no cheerleaders.
One report said Ted Kennedy ‘just sat there, looking very uncomfortable.’
And so it goes. One of my last political acts, in Colorado, was to check in at the Pitkin County courthouse and change my registration from Democrat to Independent. Under Colorado law, I can vote in either primary, but I doubt if I’ll find the time – and it’s hard to say, right now, just what kind of mood I’ll be in on November 7th.
Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Washington – waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a ‘happy beat.’
At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn’t plugged in. But then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn’t take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because their contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.
At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said ‘were right on top of things.’ But they all seemed very depressed; not only about the ’72 election, but about the whole, long-range future of politics and democracy in America.
Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it’s just barely tolerable … and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.
1. (#ulink_fd4a2550-7125-5abf-8379-ae9cb880502a) Hersh now denies that this is exactly what he said. ‘I was mad as hell when I quit the McCarthy campaign,’ he explains. ‘I might have said almost anything.’
2. (#ulink_4396f265-2c11-5b5d-9a5f-5e660ee8b1b5) This shoddy estimate was subjected to sudden and almost universal revision immediately after Truman’s death shortly after the 1972 election. Whether or not this had any direct connection with the recent Nixon landslide is a matter of speculation but facing the prospect of Four More Years in the Nixon/Agnew doldrums, a lot of people suddenly decided that Truman looked pretty good, if only in retrospect.
3. (#ulink_11234be5-55b3-5189-8ef4-2ddbc3092504) In the summer of 1972 Dallas traded Duane Thomas to the Boston Patriots where he lasted less than a week. The Boston management sent him back to Dallas, citing mysterious ‘physical problems.’ Dallas then traded Thomas to the San Diego Chargers, but didn’t work either. After a long salary dispute and widespread speculation on the meaning of his increasingly bizarre public behavior, Thomas dropped out of sight and watched the entire 1972 pro football season on TV at his home in Texas.

March (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
The View from Key Biscayne … Enter the Savage Boohoo; Madness & Violence on the ‘Sunshine Special’ … Lindsay Runs Amok, Muskie Runs Scared … First Flexing of the Big Wallace Muscle; First Signs of Doom for the Democrats … Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here … Except Maybe Ted Kennedy …
‘I get the feeling that Muskie is starting to run scared – but not for the same reasons I keep reading about. Sure, he’s worried about Humphrey in Florida; he’s worried about McGovern with the liberals, and he’s worried about Lindsay, but – well, there’s the catch: The Muskie people aren’t afraid of Lindsay actually winning the nomination … What worries them is that Lindsay might start doing well enough to force Kennedy into this thing.’
– A Former Campaign Mgr. & Political Strategist
The ghost of Kennedys past hangs so heavy on this dreary presidential campaign that even the most cynical journalistic veterans of the Jack & Bobby campaigns are beginning to resent it out loud. A few days ago in Jacksonville
(#ulink_86276b5c-5bbe-5fe1-a62e-b5b3ce263db4), creeping through the early morning traffic between the Hilton Hotel and the railroad depot, I was slumped in my seat feeling half-alive and staring morosely at the front page of the Jacksonville Times-Union when I caught a few flashes of a conversation from behind my right ear: ‘… getting a little tired of this goddamn ersatz Kennedy campaign … now they have Rosey Grier singing ‘Let the Sun Shine In’ for us … It seems like they’d be embarrassed …’
We were going down to the depot to get aboard the ‘Sunshine Special’ – Ed Muskie’s chartered train that was about to chug off on a run from Jacksonville to Miami – the whole length of Florida -for a series of ‘whistlestop’ speeches in towns like Deland, Winterhaven, and Sebring.
One of Muskie’s Senate aides had told me, as we waited on a downtown streetcorner for the candidate’s motorcade to catch up with the press bus, that ‘nobody has done one of these whistlestop tours since Harry Truman in 1948.’
Was he kidding? I looked to be sure, but his face was dead serious. ‘Well …’ I said. ‘Funny you’d say that … because I just heard some people on the bus talking about Bobby Kennedy’s campaign trains in Indiana and California in 1968.’ I smiled pleasantly. ‘They even wrote a song about it: Don’t tell me you never heard “The Ruthless Cannonball”?’
The Muskie man shook his head, not looking at me – staring intently down the street as if he’d suddenly picked up the first distant vibrations from Big Ed’s black Cadillac bearing down on us. I looked, but the only vehicle in sight was a rusty pickup truck from ‘Larry’s Plumbing & Welding.’ It was idling at the stoplight: The driver was wearing a yellow plastic hardhat and nipping at a can of Schlitz. He glanced curiously at the big red/white/blue draped Muskie bus, then roared past us when the light changed to green. On the rear window of the cab was a small American flag decal, and a strip on the rear bumper said ‘President Wallace.’
Ed Muskie is a trifle sensitive about putting the Kennedy ghost to his own use, this year. He has ex-L.A. Rams tackle and one-time RFK bodyguard Roosevelt Grier singing songs for him, and one of his main strategists is a former RFK ally named John English …but Muskie is far more concerned with the ghost of Kennedy Present.
We were sitting in the lounge car on Muskie’s train, rolling through the jackpines of north Florida, when this question came up. I was talking to a dapper gent from Atlanta who was aboard the train as a special guest of Ed Muskie and who said that his PR firm would probably ‘handle Georgia’ for the Democratic candidate, whoever it turned out to be.
‘Who would you prefer?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked. I could see that the question made him nervous.
‘Nothing personal,’ I explained. ‘But on a purely professional, objective basis, which one of the Democratic candidates would be the easiest to sell in Georgia?’
He thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘No question about it,’ he said. ‘Ted Kennedy.’
‘But he’s not a candidate,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I know that. All I did was answer your hypothetical question.’
‘I understand perfectly,’ I said. ‘But why Teddy? Isn’t the stuff he’s been saying recently a bit heavy for the folks in Georgia?’
‘Not for Atlanta,’ he replied. ‘Teddy could probably carry The City. Of course he’d lose the rest of the state, but it would be close enough so that a big black vote could make the difference.’ He sipped his scotch and bent around on the seat to adjust for a new westward lean in the pitch and roll of the train. ‘That’s the key,’ he said. ‘Only with a Kennedy can you get a monolithic black turnout.’
‘What about Lindsay?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But he’s just getting started. If he starts building the same kind of power base that Bobby had in ’68 – that’s when you’ll see Teddy in the race.’
This kind of talk is not uncommon in living rooms around Washington where the candidates, their managers, and various ranking journalists are wont to gather for the purpose of ‘talking serious politics’ – as opposed to the careful gibberish they distill for the public prints. The New Kennedy Scenario is beginning to bubble up to the surface. John Lindsay has even said it for the record: Several weeks ago he agreed with a reporter who suggested – at one of those half-serious, after-hours campaign trail drinking sessions – that ‘the Lindsay campaign might just be successful enough to get Ted Kennedy elected.’
This is not the kind of humor that a longshot presidential candidate likes to encourage in his camp when he’s spending $10,000 a day on the Campaign Trail. But Lindsay seems almost suicidally frank at times; he will spend two hours on a stage, dutifully haranguing a crowd about whatever topic his speech-writers have laid out for him that day … and thirty minutes later he will sit down with a beer and say something that no politician in his right mind would normally dare to say in the presence of journalists.
One of the main marks of success in a career politician is a rooty distrust of The Press – and this cynicism is usually reciprocated, in spades, by most reporters who have covered enough campaigns to command a fat job like chronicling the Big Apple. Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken laid down the dictum that ‘The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.’
This notion is still a very strong factor in the relationship between politicians and the big-time press. On lower levels you find a tendency – among people like ‘national editors’ on papers in Pittsburgh and Omaha – to treat successful politicians with a certain amount of awe and respect. But the prevailing attitude among journalists with enough status to work Presidential Campaigns is that all politicians are congenital thieves and liars.
This is usually true. Or at least as valid as the consensus opinion among politicians that The Press is a gang of swine. Both sides will agree that the other might occasionally produce an exception to prove the rule, but the overall bias is rigid … and, having been on both sides of that ugly fence in my time, I tend to agree …
Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered off again, and this time I can’t afford the luxury of raving at great length about anything that slides into my head. So, rather than miss another deadline, I want to zip up the nut with a fast and extremely pithy 500 words … because that’s all the space available, and in two hours I have to lash my rum-soaked red convertible across the Rickenbacker Causeway to downtown Miami and then to the airport – in order to meet John Lindsay in either Tallahassee or Atlanta, depending on which connection I can make: It is nearly impossible to get either in or out of Miami this week. All flights are booked far in advance, and the hotel/motel space is so viciously oversold that crowds of angry tourists are ‘becoming unruly’ – according to the Miami Herald - in the lobbies of places that refuse to let them in.
Fortunately, I have my own spacious suite attached to the new National Affairs office in the Royal Biscayne Hotel.
When things got too heavy in Washington I had no choice but to move the National Affairs desk to a place with better working conditions. Everybody agreed that the move was long overdue. After three months in Washington I felt like I’d spent three years in a mineshaft underneath Butte, Montana. My relations with the White House were extremely negative from the start; my application for press credentials was rejected out of hand. I wouldn’t be needing them, they said. Because Rolling Stone is a ‘music magazine,’ and there is not much music in the White House these days.
And not much on Capitol Hill either, apparently. When I called the Congressional Press Gallery to ask about the application (for press credentials) that I’d filed in early November ’71, they said they hadn’t got around to making any decision on it yet – but I probably wouldn’t be needing that one either. And where the hell did I get the gall to apply for ‘press’ status at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer?
Where indeed? They had me dead to rights. I tried to save my face by arguing that political science has never conclusively proven that music and politics can’t mix – but when they asked for my evidence I said, ‘Shucks, you’re probably right. Why shit in your own nest, eh?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really want the goddamn things anyway.’
Which was true. Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club. There are definite advantages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that.
The move to Key Biscayne had a powerful effect on my humors. My suite in the Royal Biscayne Hotel is in a big palm grove on the beach and less than a mile from the Florida White House. Nixon is on the less desirable Biscayne Bay side of the Key: I face the Atlantic; sitting here at the typewriter on my spacious screen porch I can hear the ocean bashing up against the seawall about two hundred feet away.
Nobody is out there tonight. The spongy green lawn between here and the beach is empty, except for an occasional wild dog on the putting green. They like the dampness, the good footing, and the high sweet smell of slow-rotting coconuts. I sit here on my yellow lamp-lit porch, swilling rum, and work up a fine gut-level understanding of what it must feel like to be a wild dog.
Not much has been written on this subject, and when I have more time I’ll get back to it – but not tonight; we still have to deal with the Lindsay-Kennedy problem.
There is a certain twisted logic in Lindsay’s idea that he might succeed beyond his wildest dreams and still accomplish nothing more than carving out a place for himself in history as the Gene McCarthy of 1972. At this stage of the ’68 campaign, McCarthy was lucky to crack 5 percent in the Gallup Poll – the same percentage Lindsay is pulling today.
It was not until after New Hampshire – after McCarthy proved that a hell of a lot of people were taking him seriously – that Robert Kennedy changed his mind and decided to run instead of playing things safe and waiting for ’72. That was the plan, based on the widespread assumption that LBJ would naturally run again and win a second term – thus clearing the decks for Bobby the next time around.
There is something eerie in the realization that Ted Kennedy is facing almost exactly the same situation today. He would rather not run: The odds are bad; his natural constituency has apparently abandoned politics; Nixon seems to have all the guns, and all he needs to make his life complete is the chance to stomp a Kennedy in his final campaign.
So it is hard to argue with the idea that Teddy would be a fool to run for President now. Nineteen seventy-six is only four years away. Kennedy is only forty-two years old, and when Nixon bows out, the GOP will have to crank up a brand new champion to stave off the Kennedy challenge.
This is the blueprint, and it looks pretty good as long as there’s not much chance of any Democrat beating Nixon in ’72 – and especially not somebody like Lindsay, who would not only put Teddy on ice for the next eight years but also shatter the lingering menace of the ‘waiting for Kennedy’ mystique. With John Lindsay in the White House, Ted Kennedy would no longer be troubled by questions concerning his own plans for the presidency.
Even a Muskie victory would be hard for Kennedy to live with -particularly if Lindsay shows enough strength to make Muskie offer him the vice-presidency. This would make Lindsay the Democratic heir apparent. Unlike Agnew – who has never been taken seriously, even by his enemies, as anything but a sop to the yahoo/racist vote – Lindsay as vice-president would be so obviously Next in Line that Kennedy would have to back off and admit, with a fine Irish smile, that he blew it … the opening was there, but he didn’t see it in time: while Lindsay did.
This is a very complicated projection and it needs a bit more thought than I have time to give it right now, because the computer says I have to leave for Atlanta at once – meet Lindsay in the Delta VIP hideout and maybe ponder this question at length on the long run to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, if you listen to the wizards you will keep a careful eye on John Lindsay’s action in the Florida primary … because if he looks good down here, and then even better in Wisconsin, the wizards say he can start looking for some very heavy company … and that would make things very interesting.
With both Kennedy and Lindsay in the race, a lot of people who weren’t figuring on voting this year might change their minds in a hurry. And if nothing else it would turn the Democratic National Convention in Miami this July into something like a week-long orgy of sex, violence, and treachery in the Bronx Zoo.
Muskie could never weather a scene like that. God only knows who would finally win the nomination, but the possibilities – along with the guaranteed momentum that a media-spectacle of that magnitude would generate – are enough to make Nixon start thinking about stuffing himself into the White House vegetable shredder.
‘The whistle-stops were uneventful until his noon arrival in Miami, where Yippie activist Jerry Rubin and another man heckled and interrupted him repeatedly. The Senator at one point tried to answer Rubin’s charges that he had once been a hawk on (Vietnam) war measures. He acknowledged that he had made a mistake, as did many other senators in those times, but Rubin did not let him finish.
‘Muskie ultimately wound up scolding Rubin and fellow heckler Peter Sheridan, who had boarded the train in West Palm Beach with press credentials apparently obtained from Rolling Stone’sWashington correspondent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.’
– Miami Herald, 2/20/72
This incident has haunted me ever since it smacked me in the eyes one peaceful Sunday morning a few weeks ago as I sat on the balmy screened porch of the National Affairs Suite here in the Royal Biscayne Hotel. I was slicing up grapefruit and sipping a pot of coffee while perusing the political page of the Herald when I suddenly saw my name in the middle of a story on Ed Muskie’s ‘Sunshine Special’ campaign train from Jacksonville to Miami.
Several quick phone calls confirmed that something ugly had happened on that train, and that I was being blamed for it. A New York reporter assigned to the Muskie camp warned me to ‘stay clear of this place … they’re really hot about it. They’ve pulled your pass for good.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘That’s one more bummer that I have an excuse to avoid. But what happened? Why do they blame me?’
‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘That crazy sonofabitch got on the train wearing your press badge and went completely crazy. He drank about ten martinis before the train even got moving, then he started abusing people. He cornered some poor bastard from one of the Washington papers and called him a Greasy Faggot and a Communist Buttfucker … then he started pushing him around and saying he was going to throw him off the train at the next bridge … we couldn’t believe it was happening. He scared one of the network TV guys so bad that he locked himself in a water-closet for the rest of the trip.’
‘Jesus, I hate to hear this,’ I said. ‘But nobody really thought it was me, did they?’
‘Hell, yes, they did,’ he replied. ‘The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and – and – .’ (He mentioned several reporters whose names need not be listed here.) ‘But everybody else just looked at that ID badge he was wearing and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie’s car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosey Grier up to deal with you, but Dick Stewart [Muskie’s press secretary] said it wouldn’t look good to have a three-hundred-pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train.’
‘That’s typical Muskie staff-thinking,’ I said. ‘They’ve done everything else wrong; why balk at stomping a reporter?’
He laughed. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the rumor was that you’d eaten a lot of LSD and gone wild – that you couldn’t control yourself.’
‘What do you mean me?’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even on that goddamn train. The Muskie people deliberately didn’t wake me up in West Palm Beach. They didn’t like my attitude from the day before. My friend from the University of Florida newspaper said he heard them talking about it down in the lobby when they were checking off the press list and waking up all the others.’
‘Yeah, I heard some of that talk,’ he said. ‘Somebody said you seemed very negative.’
‘I was,’ I said. ‘That was one of the most degrading political experiences I’ve ever been subjected to.’
‘That’s what the Muskie people said about your friend,’ he replied. ‘Abusing reporters is one thing – hell, we’re all used to that – but about halfway to Miami I saw him reach over the bar and grab a whole bottle of gin off the rack. Then he began wandering from car to car, drinking out of the bottle and getting after those poor goddamn girls. That’s when it really got bad.’
‘What girls?’ I said.
‘The ones in those little red, white, and blue hotpants outfits,’ he replied. ‘All those so-called “Muskie volunteers” from Jacksonville Junior College, or whatever …’
‘You mean the barmaids? The ones with the straw boaters?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The cheerleaders. Well, they went all to goddamn pieces when your friend started manhandling them. Every time he’d come into a car the girls would run out the door at the other end. But every once in a while he’d catch one by an arm or a leg and start yelling stuff like “Now I gotcha, you little beauty! Come on over here and sit on poppa’s face!’”
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they just put him off the train?’
‘How? You don’t stop a chartered Amtrak train on a main line just because of a drunken passenger. What if Muskie had ordered an emergency stop and we’d been rammed by a freight train? No presidential candidate would risk a thing like that.’
I could see the headlines in every paper from Key West to Seattle:
Muskie Campaign Train Collision Kills 34;
Demo Candidate Blames ‘Crazy Journalist’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we were running late for that big rally at the station in Miami – so the Muskie guys figured it was better to just endure the crazy sonofabitch, rather than cause a violent scene on a train full of bored reporters. Christ, the train was loaded with network TV crews, all of them bitching about how Muskie wasn’t doing anything worth putting on the air. …’ He laughed. ‘Hell, yes, we all would have loved a big brawl on the train. Personally, I was bored stupid. I didn’t get a quote worth filing out of the whole trip.’ He laughed again. ‘Actually, Muskie deserved that guy. He was a goddamn nightmare to be trapped on a train with, but at least he wasn’t dull. Nobody was dozing off like they did on Friday. Hell, there was no way to get away from that brute! All you could do was keep moving and hope he wouldn’t get hold of you.’
Both the Washington Star and Women’s Wear Daily reported essentially the same tale: A genuinely savage person had boarded the train in West Palm Beach, using a fraudulent press pass, then ran amok in the lounge car – getting in ‘several flstfights’ and finally ‘heckling the Senator unmercifully’ when the train pulled into Miami and Muskie went out on the caboose platform to deliver what was supposed to have been the climactic speech of his triumphant whistlestop tour.
It was at this point – according to press reports both published & otherwise – that my alleged friend, calling himself ‘Peter Sheridan,’ cranked up his act to a level that caused Senator Muskie to ‘cut short his remarks.’
When the ‘Sunshine Special’ pulled into the station at Miami, ‘Sheridan’ reeled off the train and took a position on the tracks just below Muskie’s caboose platform, where he spent the next half hour causing the Senator a hellish amount of grief – along with Jerry Rubin, who also showed up at the station to ask Muskie what had caused him to change his mind about supporting the War in Vietnam.
Rubin had been in Miami for several weeks, making frequent appearances on local TV to warn that ‘Ten Thousand naked hippies’ would be among those attending the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach in July. ‘We will march to the Convention Center,’ he announced, ‘but there will be no violence – at least not by us.’
To questions regarding his presence in Florida, Rubin said he ‘decided to move down here, because of the climate,’ and that he was also registered to vote in Florida – as a Republican. Contrary to the rancid suspicions of the Muskie staff people, Sheridan didn’t even recognize Rubin and I hadn’t seen him since the Counter Inaugural Ball which ran opposite Nixon’s inauguration in 1969.
When Rubin showed up at the train station that Saturday afternoon to hassle Muskie, the Senator from Maine was apparently the only person in the crowd (except Sheridan) who didn’t know who he was. His first response to Rubin’s heckling was, ‘Shut up, young man – I’m talking.’
‘You’re not a damn bit different from Nixon,’ Rubin shouted back …
… And it was at this point, according to compiled press reports and a first-hand account by Monte Chitty of the University of Florida Alligator, that Muskie seemed to lose his balance and fall back from the rail.
What happened, according to Chitty, was that ‘the Boohoo reached up from the track and got hold of Muskie’s pants-leg – waving an empty martini glass through the bars around the caboose platform with his other hand and screaming: “Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!”’
‘It was really embarrassing,’ Chitty told me later on the phone. ‘The Boohoo kept reaching up and grabbing Muskie’s legs, yelling for more gin … Muskie tried to ignore him, but the Boohoo kept after him and after a while it got so bad that even Rubin backed off.’
‘The Boohoo,’ of course, was the same vicious drunkard who had terrorized the Muskie train all the way from Palm Beach, and he was still wearing a press badge that said ‘Hunter S. Thompson -Rolling Stone.’
Chitty and I had met him the night before, about 2:30 A.M., in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where the press party was quartered. We were heading out to the street to look for a sandwich shop, feeling a trifle bent & very hungry … and as we passed the front desk, here was this huge wild-eyed monster, bellowing at the nightclerk about ‘All this chickenshit’ and ‘All these pansies around here trying to suck up to Muskie’ and ‘Where the fuck can a man go in this town to have a good time, anyway?’
A scene like that wouldn’t normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one – something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap – a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.
This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear in the lobby of a Ramada Inn, and especially not in West Palm Beach – so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said. ‘At this hour of the night I’ll fuck around with just about anybody.’
He had just got out of jail, he explained, as we walked five or six blocks through the warm midnight streets to a twenty-four-hour hamburger place called The Copper Penny. Fifteen days for vagrancy, and when he’d hit the bricks today around four he just happened to pick up a newspaper and see that Ed Muskie was in town … and since he had this friend who ‘worked up-top,’ he said, for Big Ed … well, he figured he’d just drift over to the Ramada Inn and say hello.
But he couldn’t find his friend. ‘Just a bunch of pansies from CBS and the New York Times, hanging around the bar,’ he said. ‘I took a few bites out of that crowd and they faded fast – just ran off like curs. But what the shit can you expect from people like that? Just a bunch of lowlife ass-kissers who get paid for hanging around with politicians.’
Well … I’d like to run this story all the way out, here, but it’s deadline time again and the nuts & bolts people are starting to moan … demanding a fast finish and heavy on the political stuff. Right. Let’s not cheat the readers. We promised them politics, by God, and we’ll damn well give them politics.
But just for the quick hell of it, I’d like to explain or at least insist – despite massive evidence to the contrary – that this geek we met in the lobby of the Ramada Inn and who scared the shit out of everybody when he got on Muskie’s train the next day for the run from Palm Beach to Miami, was in fact an excellent person, with a rare sense of humor that unfortunately failed to mesh, for various reasons, with the prevailing humors on Muskie’s ‘Sunshine Special.’
Just how he came to be wearing my press badge is a long and tangled story, but as I recall it had something to do with the fact that ‘Sheridan’ convinced me that he was one of the original ranking Boohoos of the Neo-American Church and also that he was able to rattle off all kinds of obscure and pithy tales about his experiences in places like Millbrook, the Hog Farm, La Honda, and Mike’s Pool Hall in San Francisco …
… Which would not have meant a hell of a lot if he hadn’t also been an obvious aristocrat of the Freak Kingdom. There was no doubt about it. This bastard was a serious, king-hell Crazy. He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving ‘normally.’
Monte Chitty and I spent about five hours with ‘Sheridan’ that night in West Palm Beach, and every place we went he caused serious trouble. In a rock club around the corner from The Copper Penny he terrified the manager by merely walking up to the bar and asking if he could check his hat – a mashed-up old Panama that looked like it had come out of the same Goodwill Store where he’d picked up his Levis and his crusty Cuban work shirt.
But when he tried to check his hat, the manager coiled up like a bull-snake – recognizing something in ‘Sheridan’s’ tone of voice or maybe just the vibrations that gave him a bad social fear, and I could see in his eyes that he was thinking: ‘O my God – here it comes. Should we mace him now or later?’
All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train – and which also explains why his ‘up-top friend’ (later identified in Women’s Wear Daily as Richie Evans, one of Muskie’s chief advance men for Florida) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan – who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.
‘To hell with that,’ I said. ‘Take the train with us. It’s the presidential express – a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Richie’s is a friend of Ed’s, I guess – but since you can’t find Evans at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, maybe you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard.’
‘I think you’re right,’ he said.
‘I am,’ I replied. ‘And besides, I paid $30 for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life.’
He smiled, accepting the card. ‘Maybe I can put it to better use,’ he said.
Which was true. He did – and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my ‘credentials’ to fall into foreign hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster ‘Sheridan’ – and also with Jerry Rubin – to ‘sabotage’ Muskie’s wind-up gig in Miami, and that ‘Sheridan’s’ beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully-laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippie Brain-trust.
This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers, who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten – but they tried to give me a break, and now look what I done to ‘em: planted a human bomb on the train.
A story like this one is very hard to spike, because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devious behavior on all fronts – including the press – that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would I give my credentials to some booze-maddened jailbird?
Well … why indeed?
Several reasons come quickly to mind, but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whistlestop speeches through central Florida.
We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads of black teenagers and some middle-aged ladies from one of the local union halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, ‘It’s time for the good people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust – namely me.’
Standing next to me on the platform was a kid of about fifteen who looked not entirely fired up by what he was hearing. ‘Say,’ I said. ‘What brings you out here at this hour of the morning, for a thing like this?’
‘The bus,’ he said.
After that, we went down to Deland – about a two-hour run -where Muskie addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who’d been let out of school to hear the candidate say, ‘It’s about time the good people of America got together behind somebody they can trust – namely me.’
And then we eased down the tracks to Sebring, where a feverish throng of about a hundred and fifty senior citizens was on hand to greet the Man from Maine and pick up his finely-honed message. As the train rolled into the station, Roosevelt Grier emerged from the caboose and attempted to lead the crowd through a few stanzas of ‘Let the Sun Shine In.’
Then the candidate emerged, acknowledging Grier’s applause and smiling for the TV cameramen who had been let off a hundred yards up the track so they could get ahead of the train and set up … in order to film Muskie socking it to the crowd about how ‘It’s about time we good people, etc., etc …’
Meanwhile, the Muskie girls – looking very snappy in their tri-colored pre-war bunny suits – were mingling with the folks; saying cheerful things and handing out red, white, and blue buttons that said ‘Trust Muskie’ and ‘Believe Muskie.’
A band was playing somewhere, I think, and the Chief Political Correspondent from some paper in Australia was jabbering into the telephone in the dispatcher’s office – feeding Muskie’s wisdom straight down to the outback, as it were; direct from the Orange Juice State.
By mid-afternoon a serious morale problem had developed aboard the train. At least half of the national press corps had long since gone over the hump into serious boozing. A few had already filed, but most had scanned the prepared text of Big Ed’s ‘whistlestop speech’ and said to hell with it. Now, as the train headed south again, the Muskie girls were passing out sandwiches and O. B. McClinton, the ‘Black Irishman of Country Music,’ was trying to lure people into the lounge car for a ‘singalong thing.’
It took a while, but they finally collected a crowd. Then one of Muskie’s college-type staffers took charge: He told the Black Irishman what to play, cued the other staff people, then launched into about nineteen straight choruses of Big Ed’s newest campaign song: ‘He’s got the whole state of Florida … In his hands …’
I left at that point. The scene was pure Nixon – so much like a pep rally at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.’ He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. ‘I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,’ he continued, ‘but I’ve never felt out of place before – never personally uncomfortable with the people.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious – and I’ve finally figured out why.’ He chuckled and glanced at the Muskie people again. ‘You know what it is?’ he said. ‘It’s because these people act like goddamned Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out.’
There are very few members of the establishment press who will defend the idea that things like aggressive flatulence, forced feedings of swill, or even a barely-muted hostility on the part of the candidate would justify any kind of drastic retaliation by a professional journalist – and certainly nothing so drastic as to cause the Democratic front-runner to cut short a major speech because some dangerous freak wearing a press badge was clawing at his legs and screaming for more gin.
I might even agree with this thinking, myself, if the question of ‘drastic retaliation against a candidate’ ever actually confronted me … for the same reason that I couldn’t crank up enough adrenalin to get myself involved in some low-level conspiracy to heckle a harmless dingbat like Ed Muskie in a Florida railroad station.
(#ulink_4b3a2761-5400-5825-a5f0-6d48fdde85d4)
Which is not to say that I couldn’t get interested in something with a bit of real style to it – like turning 50,000 bats loose in the Convention Center on the night of Hubert Humphrey’s nomination. But I don’t see much hope for anything that imaginative this time around, and most people capable of putting an Outrage like that together would probably agree with me that giving Hubert the Democratic nomination would be punishment enough in itself.
As for Muskie and his goddamn silly train, my only real feeling about that scene was a desire to get away from it as soon as possible. And I might have flown down to Miami on Friday night if we hadn’t got ourselves mixed up with the Boohoo and stayed out until 6:00 A.M. Saturday morning. At that point, all I really cared about was getting myself hauled back to Miami on somebody else’s wheels.
The Boohoo agreed, and since the train was leaving in two hours, that was obviously the easiest way to go. But Muskie’s pressherders decided that my attitude was so negative that it was probably best to let me sleep – which they did, and there is a certain poetic justice in the results of that decision. By leaving me behind, they unwittingly cut the only person on the train who could have kept the Boohoo under control.
But of course they had no idea that he would be joining them. Nobody even knew the Boohoo existed until he turned up in the lounge car wearing my press badge and calling people like New York Times correspondent Johnny Apple an ‘ugly little wop.’
It was just about then, according to another reporter’s account, that ‘people started trying to get out of his way.’ It was also about then, Monte Chitty recalls, that the Boohoo began ordering things like ‘triple Gin Bucks, without the Buck.’ And from then on, things went steadily downhill.
Now, looking back on that tragedy with a certain amount of perspective and another glance at my notes, the Boohoo’s behavior on that train seems perfectly logical – or at least as logical as my own less violent but noticeably negative reaction to the same scene a day earlier. It was a very oppressive atmosphere – very tense and guarded, compared to the others I’d covered. I had just finished a swing around central Florida with Lindsay, and before that I’d been up in New Hampshire with McGovern.
Both of those campaigns had been very loose and easy scenes to travel with, which might have been because they were both left-bent underdogs … but at that point I didn’t really think much about it; the only other presidential candidates I had ever spent any time with were Gene McCarthy and Richard Nixon in 1968. And they were so vastly different – the Left and Right extremes of both parties – that I came into the ’72 campaign thinking I would probably never see anything as extreme in either direction as the Nixon & McCarthy campaigns in ’68.
So it was a pleasant surprise to find both the McGovern and Lindsay campaigns at least as relaxed and informal as McCarthy’s ’68 trip; they were nowhere near as intense or exciting, but the difference was more a matter of degree, of style and personal attitudes …
In ’68 you could drive across Manchester from McCarthy’s woodsy headquarters at the Wayfarer to Nixon’s grim concrete hole at the Holiday Inn and feel like you’d gone from Berkeley to Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
But then you sort of expected that kind of cheap formica trip from Richard Nixon: all those beefy Midwest detective types in blue sharkskin suits – ex-brokers from Detroit, ex-speculators from Miami, ex gear & sprocket salesmen from Chicago. They ran a very tight ship. Nixon rarely appeared, and when he did nobody in the press corps ever got within ten feet of him, except now and then by special appointment for cautious interviews. Getting assigned to cover Nixon in ’68 was like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn.
It never occurred to me that anything could be worse than getting stuck on another Nixon campaign, so it came as a definite shock to find that hanging around Florida with Ed Muskie was even duller and more depressing than travelling with Evil Dick himself.
And it wasn’t just me, although the Muskie Downer was admittedly more obvious to reporters who’d been traveling with other candidates than it was to the poor devils who’d been stuck with him from the start. I may have been the rudest ‘negative attitude’ case on the ‘Sunshine Special,’ but I was definitely not the only one. About halfway through that endless Friday I was standing at the bar when Judy Michaelson, a New York Post reporter who had just switched over from the Lindsay campaign, came wandering down the aisle with a pained blank stare on her face, and stopped beside me just long enough to say, ‘Boy! This is not quite the same as the other one, is it?’
I shook my head, leaning into the turn as the train rounded a bend on the banks of either the Sewanee or the Chatahootchee River. ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘It’s a privilege to ride the rails with a front-runner.’
She smiled wearily and moved on, dragging her notebook behind her. Later that evening, in West Palm Beach, I listened to Dick Stout of Newsweek telling a Muskie press aide that his day on the ‘Sunshine Special’ had been ‘so goddamn disgracefully bad that I don’t have the words for it yet.’
One of the worst things about the trip was the fact that the candidate spent the whole time sealed off in his private car with a traveling zoo of local Party bigwigs. The New Hampshire primary was still two weeks off, and Muskie was still greedily pursuing his dead-end strategy of piling up endorsements from ‘powerful Democrats’ in every state he visited – presumably on the theory that once he got the Party Bosses signed up, they would automatically deliver the votes. (By the time the deal went down in New Hampshire, Muskie had signed up just about every Democratic politician in the country whose name was well known by more than a hundred people, and it did him about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin Bormann.) A week later, when he staggered to a fourth place finish in Florida, a fishmonger in Cairo, Illinois, announced that he and U.S. Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa were forming a corporation to market ‘Muskie dartboards.’ Hughes had planned to be present at the ceremony in Cairo, the man said, but the Senator was no longer able to travel from one place to another without the use of custom Weight-Belts.
The New Hampshire results
(#ulink_e3308b3a-f111-5024-a38f-fcee1baff1f4) hit the Muskie bandwagon like a front-wheel blowout, but Florida blew the transmission. Big Ed will survive Illinois, whatever the outcome, but he still has to go to Wisconsin – where anything but victory will probably finish him off, and his chances of beating Humphrey up there on The Hube’s home court are not good. The latest Gallup Poll, released on the eve of the Illinois primary but based on a nationwide survey taken prior to the vote in New Hampshire, showed Humphrey ahead of Muskie for the first time. In the February poll, Muskie was leading by 35 percent to 32 percent … but a month later The Hube had surged up to 35 percent and Muskie had slipped seven points in thirty days down to 28 percent.
According to almost every media wizard in the country, Wisconsin is ‘the crunch’ – especially for Muskie and New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was badly jolted in Florida when his gold-plated Media Blitz apparently had no effect at all on the voters. Lindsay had spent almost a half million dollars in Florida, yet limped home fifth with seven percent of the vote – just a point ahead of McGovern, who spent less than $100,000.
Two of the biggest losers in Florida, in fact, were not listed in the election results. They were David Garth, Lindsay’s TV-Media guru, and Robert Squier, whose TV campaign for Muskie was such a debacle that some of the Man from Maine’s top advisors in Florida began openly denouncing Squier to startled reporters, who barely had time to get their stories into print before Muskie’s national headquarters announced that a brand new series of TV spots would begin running yesterday.
But by then the damage was done. I never saw the new ones, but the Squier originals were definitely a bit queer. They depicted Muskie as an extremely slow-spoken man who had probably spent half his life overcoming some kind of dreadful speech impediment, only to find himself totally hooked on a bad Downer habit or maybe even smack. The first time I heard a Muskie radio spot I was zipping along on the Rickenbacker Causeway, coming in from Key Biscayne, and I thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. It was the voice of a man who had done about twelve Reds on the way to the studio – a very funny ad.
Whatever else the Florida primary might or might not have proved, it put a definite kink in the Media Theory of politics. It may be true, despite what happened to Lindsay and Muskie in Florida, that all you have to do to be President of the U.S.A. is look ‘attractive’ on TV and have enough money to hire a Media Wizard. Only a fool or a linthead would argue with the logic at the root of the theory: If you want to sell yourself to a nation of TV addicts, you obviously can’t ignore the medium … but the Florida vote at least served to remind a lot of people that the medium is only a tool, not a magic eye. In other words, if you want to be President of the U.S.A. and you’re certified ‘attractive,’ the only other thing you have to worry about when you lay out all that money for a Media Wizard is whether or not you’re hiring a good one instead of a bungler … and definitely lay off the Reds when you go to the studio.
1. (#ulink_67ddfc91-3efb-54cc-be2c-78f98e9cb59c) Both the New Hampshire and Florida primaries were scheduled for early March so sometime in late February I left McGovern up in New Hampshire and went down to Florida to check on Muskie and Lindsay. Lindsay had just made a strong showing in the Arizona delegate-selection caucuses, running even with Muskie and beating McGovern almost 2 to 1. All he needed in Florida was 20 percent of the Democratic vote – which seemed entirely possible at the time. A Lindsay ‘win’ on Florida would have changed the race entirely. There were twelve candidates in the primary and in February the wizards were saying that no one of them could hope to poll more than 25 or 30 percent of the vote. Muskie was still a front-runner and George Wallace had only recently decided to enter the race as a Democrat, rather than as an American Independent. McGovern was running out of money and had already decided to cut his losses in Florida and go for broke in Wisconsin several weeks later. So if Lindsay had made a strong showing in Florida – even running second or close third to Muskie – he would probably have crippled McGovern’s image as a candidate of the Democratic Left. When I arrived in Miami, the consensus of the local pols was that the Democratic primary would probably come down to a relatively close race between Muskie and Lindsay, with Humphrey and Wallace splitting the right-wing vote and McGovern grappling for the booby prize with Shirley Chisholm.
2. (#ulink_54c6b3ae-a0f5-5a63-aefb-73250eb941fa) The Boohoo incident haunted me throughout the campaign. First it got me barred from the Muskie camp, then – when investigations of the Watergate Scandal revealed that Nixon staffers had hired people to systematically sabotage the primary campaigns of almost all the serious Democratic contenders – the ex-Muskie lieutenants cited the Boohoo incident as a prime example of CREEP’S dirty work. Ranking Muskie lieutenants told congressional investigators that Sheridan and I had conspired with Donald Segretti and other unnamed saboteurs to humiliate Muskie in the Florida primary. The accusation came as a welcome flash of humor at a time when I was severely depressed at the prospect of another four years with Nixon. This also reinforced my contempt for the waterheads who ran Big Ed’s campaign like a gang of junkies trying to send a rocket to the moon to check out rumors that the craters were full of smack.
3. (#ulink_bc5162ea-e6a9-55a3-9957-31e2a0aded11) Contrary to all predictions and polls except McGovern’s, Muskie finished with less than 50 percent of the vote, pulling roughly 46 percent, while McGovern came in with exactly 37.5 percent, a difference of less than ten points. Muskie never recovered from the pyrrhic victory.

Later in March (#u875c3669-8c7a-5a00-949a-1258e962c936)
The Banshee Screams in Florida … The Emergence of Mankiewicz … Hard Times for the Man from Maine … Redneck Power & Hell on Wheels for George Wallace … Hube Slithers out of Obscurity … Fear and Loathing on the Democratic Left …
On Monday morning, the day before the Florida primary, I flew down to Miami with Frank Mankiewicz, who runs the McGovern campaign.
We hit the runway at just over two hundred miles an hour in a strong crosswind, bouncing first on the left wheel and then – about a hundred yards down the runway – on the right wheel … then another long bounce, and finally straightening out just in front of the main terminal at Miami’s International Airport.
Nothing serious. But my Bloody Mary was spilled all over Monday’s Washington Post on the armrest. I tried to ignore it and looked over at Mankiewicz sitting next to me … but he was still snoring peacefully. I poked him. ‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘Down home in Fat City again. What’s the scheduler’
Now he was wide awake, checking his watch. ‘I think I have to make a speech somewhere,’ he said. ‘I also have to meet Shirley MacLaine somewhere. Where’s a telephone? I have to make some calls.’
Soon we were shuffling down the corridor toward the big baggage-claim merry-go-round; Mankiewicz had nothing to claim. He has learned to travel light. His ‘baggage,’ as it were, consisted of one small canvas bag that looked like an oversize shaving kit.
My own bundle – two massive leather bags and a Xerox telecopier strapped into a fiberglass Samsonite suitcase – would be coming down the baggage-claim chute any moment. I tend to travel heavy; not for any good reason, but mainly because I haven’t learned the tricks of the trade.
‘I have a car waiting,’ I said. ‘A fine bronze-gold convertible. Do you need a ride?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I have to make some calls first. You go ahead, get your car and all that goddamn baggage and I’ll meet you down by the main door.’
I nodded and hurried off. The Avis counter was only about fifty yards away from the wall-phone where Mankiewicz was setting up shop with a handful of dimes and a small notebook. He made at least six calls and a page of notes before my bags arrived … and by the time I began arguing with the car-rental woman the expression on Mankiewicz’s face indicated that he had everything under control.
I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist, and central intelligence behind the McGovern-for-President campaign – a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work ‘pre-Owned Car’ salesman – putting McGovern’s Florida primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.
Mankiewicz – a 47-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was Director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968 – has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got underway last year. For a while he was the ‘Press Secretary,’ then he was called the ‘Campaign Manager’ – but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of ‘Political Director.’ Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern’s alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon – the Man behind the Man.
Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote. This was long before Ed Muskie’s infamous ‘breakdown scene’ on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union-Leader.
When Frank laid this prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job – trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last minute surge for McGovern, the only candidate in the ’72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called ‘Kennedy Machine.’
Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern’s campaign -and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing his nonsense. Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own … even those who go off on hopeless tangents.
So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8th, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and ‘front-runner’ Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.
New Hampshire in ’72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in ’68 jolted LBJ. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like ‘the champ,’ & reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all, Won in New Hampshire.
Just like LBJ – who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.
But Muskie had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already locked in … he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a ‘last minute blitz’ … shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying ‘Trust Muskie’ and ‘Believe Muskie’ and ‘Muskie Talks Straight’ …
When Big Ed arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who’d been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship rematch with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled, in his head, that I couldn’t raise a bet on him – at any odds – among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the ringside seats on fight night.
I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn’t want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got underway.
‘Two?’ Marciano asked with a grin.
I shrugged, and drank one off very quickly as Floyd came out of his corner and turned to wax the first time Liston hit him. Then, with a minute still to go in the first round, Liston bashed him again and Patterson went down for the count. The fight was over before I touched my second beer.
Muskie went the same way to Florida – just as Mankiewicz had predicted forty-eight hours earlier in the living room of his suburban Washington home. ‘Muskie is already finished,’ he said then. ‘He had no base. Nobody’s really for Muskie. They’re only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he’s the only one who can beat Nixon – but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn’t even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.’
The next morning, on the plane from Washington to Miami, I tried for a firmer insight on Mankiewicz’s wisdom by offering to bet $100 that Muskie would finish worse than second. I saw him running third, not much ahead of Jackson – with The Hube not far behind Wallace and Lindsay beating McGovern with something like 11 percent to 9 percent. (This was before I watched both McGovern’s and Lindsay’s final lame shots on Monday night; McGovern at the University of Miami and Lindsay with Charles Evers at a black church in North Miami.) By late Monday, seven hours before the polls opened, I thought both of them might finish behind Shirley Chisholm … which almost happened: Lindsay finished with something around 7 percent, McGovern with roughly 6 percent, and Chisholm with 4 percent – while George Wallace rolled home with 42 percent, followed in the distance by Humphrey with 18.5 percent, Jackson with 12.5 percent … and Muskie with 9 percent.
‘Remember when you go out to vote tomorrow that the eyes of America are upon you, all the live-long day. The eyes of America are upon you, they will not go away.’
– Senator George McGovern at a rally at the University of Miami the night before the Florida primary.
Cazart! … this fantastic rain outside: a sudden cloudburst, drenching everything. The sound of rain smacking down on my concrete patio about ten feet away from the typewriter, rain beating down on the surface of the big aqua-lighted pool out there across the lawn … rain blowing into the porch and whipping the palm fronds around in the warm night air.
Behind me, on the bed, my waterproof Sony says, ‘It’s 5:28 right now in Miami …’ Then Rod Stewart’s hoarse screech: ‘Mother don’t you recognize your son …?’
Beyond the rain I can hear the sea rolling in on the beach. This atmosphere is getting very high, full of strange memory flashes …
‘Mother don’t you recognize me now …?’
Wind, rain, surf. Palm trees leaning in the wind, hard funk/blues on the radio, a flagon of Wild Turkey on the sideboard … are those footsteps outside? High heels running in the rain?
Keep on typing … but my mind is not really on it. I keep expecting to hear the screen door bang open and then turn around to see Sadie Thompson standing behind me, soaked to the skin … smiling, leaning over my shoulder to see what I’m cranking out tonight … then laughing softly, leaning closer; wet nipples against my neck, perfume around my head … and now on the radio: ‘Wild Horses … We’ll ride them some day …’’
Perfect. Get it on. Don’t turn around. Keep this fantasy rolling and try not to notice that the sky is getting light outside. Dawn is coming up and I have to fly to Mazatlan in five hours to deal with a drug-fugitive. Life is getting very complicated. After Mazatlan I have to rush back to San Francisco and get this gibberish ready for the printer … and then on to Wisconsin to chronicle the next act in this saga of Downers and Treachery called ‘The Campaign Trail.’
Wisconsin is the site of the next Democratic primary. Six serious candidates in this one – racing around the state in chartered jets, spending Ten Grand a day for the privilege of laying a series of terrible bummers on the natives. Dull speeches for breakfast, duller speeches for lunch, then bullshit with gravy for dinner.
How long, O Lord … How long? Where will it end? The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct.
A lot of people are seriously worried about this, but I am not one of them. I have never been much of a Party Man myself … and the more I learn about the realities of national politics, the more I’m convinced that the Democratic Party is an atavistic endeavor---more an Obstacle than a Vehicle – and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with.
It is a bogus alternative to the politics of Nixon: A gang of senile leeches like George Meany, Hubert Humphrey, and Mayor Daley … Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie, and Frank Rizzo, the supercop Mayor of Philadelphia.
George McGovern is also a Democrat, and I suppose I have to sympathize in some guilt-stricken way with whatever demented obsession makes him think he can somehow cause this herd of venal pigs to see the light and make him their leader … but after watching McGovern perform in two primaries I think he should stay in the Senate, where his painfully earnest style is not only more appreciated but also far more effective than it is on the nationwide stump.
His surprising neo-victory in New Hampshire was less a triumph than a spin-off from Muskie’s incredible bungling. But, up close, he is a very likeable and convincing person – in total contrast to Big Ed, who seems okay on TV or at the other end of a crowded auditorium, but who turns off almost everybody who has the misfortune of having to deal with him personally.
Another key factor in New Hampshire was that McGovern only needed 33,007 votes to achieve the psychological ‘upset’ that came with his 37 percent figure versus Muskie’s 46 percent. This was possible because McGovern was able, in New Hampshire, to campaign in the low-key, town-meeting, person-to-person style in which he is most effective … but which will be physically impossible in big, delegate-heavy states like California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, or even Wisconsin. (Chicago alone will send eighty delegates to the Democratic Convention, compared to only twenty for the whole state of New Hampshire … and in Florida, McGovern managed to reach more than 75,000 voters, but wound up in sixth place with a depressing six percent of the state’s total.)
The New Hampshire primary is perhaps the only important national election where a candidate like McGovern can be truly effective. Crowds seem to turn him off, instead of on. He lacks that sense of drama – that instinct for timing & orchestration that is the real secret of success in American politics.
Frank Mankiewicz seems to have it – & that helps, but probably not enough. In a political situation where it is almost mathematically impossible to win anything unless you can make the sap rise in a crowd, a presidential candidate like McGovern – who simply lacks the chemistry – is at a fatal disadvantage in mass-vote scenes where a ho-ho verbal counterpunch, at the right moment, can be worth four dozen carefully reasoned position papers.
The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy – then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight -assuming it was straight in the first place.
Which harks back to McGovern’s problem. He is probably the most honest big-time politician in America; Robert Kennedy, several years before he was murdered, called George McGovern ‘the most decent man in the Senate.’ Which is not quite the same thing as being the best candidate for President of the United States. For that, McGovern would need at least one dark kinky streak of Mick Jagger in his soul …
Not much, & perhaps not even enough so people would notice at lunch in the Capitol Hill Hotel or walking down the hallway of the Senate Office Building – but just enough to drift out on the stage in front of a big crowd & let the spectacle turn him on.
That may be the handle. Maybe the whole secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd. The only candidate running for the presidency today who seems to understand this is George Wallace … which might at least partially explain why Bobby Kennedy was the only candidate who could take votes away from Wallace in ’68. Kennedy, like Wallace, was able to connect with people on some kind of visceral, instinctive level that is probably both above & below ‘rational politics.’
McGovern does not appear to have this instinct. He does not project real well, & his sense of humor is so dry that a lot of people insist on calling it ‘withered.’
Maybe so – and that may be the root of the reason why I can’t feel entirely comfortable around George … and he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.
But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing. One night about five years ago in Idaho, Mike Solheim & I were sitting in his house talking about Lenny Bruce in a fairly serious vein, when he suddenly got up and put on a record that I still remember as one of the most hysterical classics of satire I’d ever heard in my life. I laughed for twenty minutes. Every line was perfect. ‘What’s the name of that album?’ I said. ‘I thought I’d heard all of his stuff, but this one is incredible.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But it’s not Lenny Bruce.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘Let’s see the jacket.’
He smiled & tossed it across the room to me. It was General Douglas MacArthur’s famous ‘farewell speech’ to Congress in ’52.
Remember that one? The ‘old soldiers never die’ number? My friend Raoul Duke calls it ‘one of the ten best mescaline records ever cut.’
I am still a little sick about that episode. Solheim and I are still friends, but not in the same way. That record is not for everybody. I wouldn’t recommend it to a general audience … But then I wouldn’t recommend it to George McGovern either.
Jesus! The only small point I meant to make when I jack-knifed into this trip was that McGovern is unusual, for a politician, in that he is less impressive on TV than he is in person.
One of Muskie’s main problems, thus far, has been that not even his own hired staff people really like him. The older ones try to explain this problem away by saying, ‘Ed’s under a lot of pressure these days, but he’s really a fine guy, underneath.’
The younger staff members have apparently never had much contact with ‘the real Muskie.’ With very few exceptions, they justify their strained allegiance to the man by saying, ‘I wouldn’t be working for him except that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Nixon.’
Or at least that’s what they said before the polls closed in Florida. After that – when it quickly became apparent that Muskie couldn’t even beat Scoop Jackson, much less Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace – he was faced with a virtual election-night mutiny among the younger staff people, and even the veterans were so alarmed that they convened an emergency conference in Muskie headquarters at Miami’s Dupont Plaza Hotel and decided that the candidate would have to drastically change his image.
For months they’d been trying to sell ‘the Man from Maine’ as a comfortable, mushmouth, middle-of-the-road compromiser who wouldn’t dream of offending anybody – the ideal ‘centrist’ candidate, who would be all things to all men.
But the voters were not quite that stupid. Muskie bombed in New Hampshire, on what even the candidate admitted was his own turf – and then he came down to Florida and got stomped so badly that his campaign staffers were weeping uncontrollably in front of TV cameras in the ballroom that had been advertised all day – on the Dupont Plaza billboard – as the scene of ‘Muskie’s Victory Party.’
I got there just after he had come down from his upstairs hide-away to console the crowd and denounce George Wallace on network TV as ‘a demagogue of the worst sort’ and ‘a threat to the country’s underlying values of humanism, of decency, of progress.’
This outburst was immediately interpreted, by local politicians, as a slur on the people of Florida – calling 42 percent of the electorate Dupes and Racist Pigs because they voted for George Wallace.
U.S. Senator Ed Gurney (R-Fla.) demanded an apology, but Muskie ignored him and went back upstairs to the smoke-filled room where his wizards had already decided that his only hope was a fast turn to the Left. No more of that ‘centrist’ bullshit. They looked both ways and – seeing the Right very crowded – convinced each other that Muskie’s ‘new image’ would be ‘The Liberal Alternative to Hubert Humphrey.’
And besides, neither McGovern nor Lindsay were showing much strength out there in Left Field, so Big Ed would probably fare a hell of a lot better by picking a fight with those two than he would by moving Right and tangling with Humphrey and Jackson.
Robert Squier, Muskie’s national media advisor, emerged from the meeting and said, ‘We’re going to erase that yellow stripe in the middle of the road.’ Another one of the brain-trusters tried to put a better face on it: ‘The irony of this defeat,’ he said, ‘is that it will make Muskie what we all wanted him to be all along … the only question is whether it’s too late.’
In the final analysis, as it were, this painful think session was ‘summed up’ for the New York Times by a nameless ‘key aide/ advisor’ who explained: ‘The reason people didn’t vote for Ed Muskie here is that they didn’t have any reason to.’
Zang! The candidate’s reaction to this ultimate nut of wisdom was not recorded, but we can only assume he was pleased to see signs that at least one of his ranking advisors was finally beginning to function well enough on the basic motor-skill/signal-recognition level that he might soon learn to tie his own shoes.
If I were running for the presidency of the United States and heard a thing like that from somebody I was paying a thousand dollars a week I would have the bastard dropped down an elevator shaft.
But Muskie has apparently grown accustomed to this kind of waterhead talk from his staff. They are not an impressive group, on the evidence. One of the first things you notice around any Muskie headquarters, local or national, is that many of the people in charge are extremely fat. Not just chubby or paunchy or flabby, but serious glandular cases. They require assistance getting in and out of cars, or even elevators.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mention this kind of thing – for all the obvious reasons: general humanity, good taste, relevance, etc. – but in the context of what has happened to Ed Muskie in the first two primaries, it’s hard to avoid the idea that there may be some ominous connection between the total failure of his campaign and the people who are running it.
As late as February 15th, Ed Muskie was generally conceded -even by his political opponents – to be within an eyelash or two of having the Democratic nomination so skillfully locked up that the primaries wouldn’t even be necessary. He had the public endorsements of almost every Big Name in the party, including some who said they were only backing him because he was so far ahead that nobody else had a chance … which was just as well, they said, because it is very important to get the Party machinery into high gear, early on, behind a consensus candidate. And Ed Muskie, they all agreed, was the only Democrat who could beat Nixon in November.
The word went out early, long before Christmas, and by January it had already filtered down to low-level fringe groups like the National Association of Student Governments and other ‘youth vote’ organizers, who were suddenly faced with the choice of either ‘getting your people behind Muskie’ or ‘crippling the party with another one of those goddamn protest movements that’ll end up like all the others and not accomplish anything except to guarantee Nixon’s re-election.’
A lot of people bought this – particularly the ‘youth leader’ types who saw themselves playing key roles in a high-powered, issue-oriented Muskie campaign that would not only dump Nixon but put a certified ‘good guy’ in the White House.
In retrospect, the ‘Sunshine Special’ looks far more like an ill-conceived disaster than it did at the time, when Rubin and the Boohoo made such a shambles of Muskie’s arrival in Miami that the local news media devoted almost as much time and space to the Senator’s clash with ‘anti-war hecklers’ at the train station as it did to the whole four-hundred-mile, thirty-six-hour Whistlestop Tour that covered the length of the state and produced what the candidate’s headquarters said were ‘five major statements in five cities.’
It probably cost the Muskie campaign almost $40,000 – almost $7,500 of that for rental of the five car train from Amtrak. Staff salaries and special expenses for the trip (thirty advance men spending two weeks each in towns along the route to make sure Big Ed would draw crowds for the TV cameras; payment to musicians, Rosey Grier, etc.) … a list of all expenses would probably drive the cost of the spectacle up closer to $50,000.
For all this money, time, and effort, Muskie’s combined whistle-stop crowds totaled less than three thousand, including the disastrous climax that not only botched news coverage in Miami, the state, and the whole country – but also came close to shattering the Senator’s nerves. In addition to all that, his ‘major statements’ along the way were contemptuously dismissed as ‘oatmeal’ by most of the press and the network TV news editors in New York & Washington.
In a word, the ‘Sunshine Special’ bombed. The Miami Herald reported – in the same article dominated by the Rubin/Boohoo incident – that Muskie’s trip into ‘the politics of the past’ was considered a failure even by the Senator’s own staff.
Meanwhile, in that same issue of the Herald, right next to the ugly saga of the ‘Sunshine Special,’ was a photograph of a grinning George Wallace chatting with national champion stock car racer Richard Petty at the Daytona 500, where 98,600 racing fans were treated to ‘a few informal remarks’ by The Governor, who said he had only come to watch the races and check up on his old friend, Dick Petty – who enjoys the same kind of superhero status in the South that Jean-Claude Killy has in ski country.
That appearance at the Daytona 500 didn’t cost Wallace a dime, and the AP wire-photo of him and Petty that went to every daily and Sunday newspaper in Florida was worth more to Wallace than his own weight in pure gold … and there was also the weight of the 98,600 racing fans, who figure that any friend of Richard Petty’s must sit on both shoulders of God in his spare time …
The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile National Front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent … and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.
Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that The Man From Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.
If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone-blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.
I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Big Ed’s Milwaukee headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty, and all the windows taped … TV crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables, hoping to film the ex-Front-runner from a safe distance when he comes crashing into the place to blame his sixth-place finish on some kind of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Crater. Nor is there any reason to believe he will refrain from physical violence at that time. With his dream and his nerves completely shot, he might start laying hands on people.
Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of, however, is the list of those who will not

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