Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

2. 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. 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

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.’