Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

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.2

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.3

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 AR3’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.’