Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

‘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. 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

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 …