Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

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.1 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 …