Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Rubin had been in Miami for several weeks, making frequent appearances on local TV to warn that ‘Ten Thousand naked hippies’ would be among those attending the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach in July. ‘We will march to the Convention Center,’ he announced, ‘but there will be no violence – at least not by us.’

To questions regarding his presence in Florida, Rubin said he ‘decided to move down here, because of the climate,’ and that he was also registered to vote in Florida – as a Republican. Contrary to the rancid suspicions of the Muskie staff people, Sheridan didn’t even recognize Rubin and I hadn’t seen him since the Counter Inaugural Ball which ran opposite Nixon’s inauguration in 1969.

When Rubin showed up at the train station that Saturday afternoon to hassle Muskie, the Senator from Maine was apparently the only person in the crowd (except Sheridan) who didn’t know who he was. His first response to Rubin’s heckling was, ‘Shut up, young man – I’m talking.’

‘You’re not a damn bit different from Nixon,’ Rubin shouted back …

… And it was at this point, according to compiled press reports and a first-hand account by Monte Chitty of the University of Florida Alligator, that Muskie seemed to lose his balance and fall back from the rail.

What happened, according to Chitty, was that ‘the Boohoo reached up from the track and got hold of Muskie’s pants-leg – waving an empty martini glass through the bars around the caboose platform with his other hand and screaming: “Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!”’

‘It was really embarrassing,’ Chitty told me later on the phone. ‘The Boohoo kept reaching up and grabbing Muskie’s legs, yelling for more gin … Muskie tried to ignore him, but the Boohoo kept after him and after a while it got so bad that even Rubin backed off.’

‘The Boohoo,’ of course, was the same vicious drunkard who had terrorized the Muskie train all the way from Palm Beach, and he was still wearing a press badge that said ‘Hunter S. Thompson -Rolling Stone.’

Chitty and I had met him the night before, about 2:30 A.M., in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where the press party was quartered. We were heading out to the street to look for a sandwich shop, feeling a trifle bent & very hungry … and as we passed the front desk, here was this huge wild-eyed monster, bellowing at the nightclerk about ‘All this chickenshit’ and ‘All these pansies around here trying to suck up to Muskie’ and ‘Where the fuck can a man go in this town to have a good time, anyway?’

A scene like that wouldn’t normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one – something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap – a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.

This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear in the lobby of a Ramada Inn, and especially not in West Palm Beach – so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said. ‘At this hour of the night I’ll fuck around with just about anybody.’

He had just got out of jail, he explained, as we walked five or six blocks through the warm midnight streets to a twenty-four-hour hamburger place called The Copper Penny. Fifteen days for vagrancy, and when he’d hit the bricks today around four he just happened to pick up a newspaper and see that Ed Muskie was in town … and since he had this friend who ‘worked up-top,’ he said, for Big Ed … well, he figured he’d just drift over to the Ramada Inn and say hello.

But he couldn’t find his friend. ‘Just a bunch of pansies from CBS and the New York Times, hanging around the bar,’ he said. ‘I took a few bites out of that crowd and they faded fast – just ran off like curs. But what the shit can you expect from people like that? Just a bunch of lowlife ass-kissers who get paid for hanging around with politicians.’

Well … I’d like to run this story all the way out, here, but it’s deadline time again and the nuts & bolts people are starting to moan … demanding a fast finish and heavy on the political stuff. Right. Let’s not cheat the readers. We promised them politics, by God, and we’ll damn well give them politics.

But just for the quick hell of it, I’d like to explain or at least insist – despite massive evidence to the contrary – that this geek we met in the lobby of the Ramada Inn and who scared the shit out of everybody when he got on Muskie’s train the next day for the run from Palm Beach to Miami, was in fact an excellent person, with a rare sense of humor that unfortunately failed to mesh, for various reasons, with the prevailing humors on Muskie’s ‘Sunshine Special.’

Just how he came to be wearing my press badge is a long and tangled story, but as I recall it had something to do with the fact that ‘Sheridan’ convinced me that he was one of the original ranking Boohoos of the Neo-American Church and also that he was able to rattle off all kinds of obscure and pithy tales about his experiences in places like Millbrook, the Hog Farm, La Honda, and Mike’s Pool Hall in San Francisco …

… Which would not have meant a hell of a lot if he hadn’t also been an obvious aristocrat of the Freak Kingdom. There was no doubt about it. This bastard was a serious, king-hell Crazy. He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving ‘normally.’

Monte Chitty and I spent about five hours with ‘Sheridan’ that night in West Palm Beach, and every place we went he caused serious trouble. In a rock club around the corner from The Copper Penny he terrified the manager by merely walking up to the bar and asking if he could check his hat – a mashed-up old Panama that looked like it had come out of the same Goodwill Store where he’d picked up his Levis and his crusty Cuban work shirt.

But when he tried to check his hat, the manager coiled up like a bull-snake – recognizing something in ‘Sheridan’s’ tone of voice or maybe just the vibrations that gave him a bad social fear, and I could see in his eyes that he was thinking: ‘O my God – here it comes. Should we mace him now or later?’

All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train – and which also explains why his ‘up-top friend’ (later identified in Women’s Wear Daily as Richie Evans, one of Muskie’s chief advance men for Florida) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan – who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.

‘To hell with that,’ I said. ‘Take the train with us. It’s the presidential express – a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Richie’s is a friend of Ed’s, I guess – but since you can’t find Evans at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, maybe you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard.’

‘I think you’re right,’ he said.

‘I am,’ I replied. ‘And besides, I paid $30 for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life.’

He smiled, accepting the card. ‘Maybe I can put it to better use,’ he said.

Which was true. He did – and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my ‘credentials’ to fall into foreign hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster ‘Sheridan’ – and also with Jerry Rubin – to ‘sabotage’ Muskie’s wind-up gig in Miami, and that ‘Sheridan’s’ beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully-laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippie Brain-trust.

This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers, who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten – but they tried to give me a break, and now look what I done to ‘em: planted a human bomb on the train.

A story like this one is very hard to spike, because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devious behavior on all fronts – including the press – that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would I give my credentials to some booze-maddened jailbird?

Well … why indeed?

Several reasons come quickly to mind, but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whistlestop speeches through central Florida.

We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads of black teenagers and some middle-aged ladies from one of the local union halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, ‘It’s time for the good people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust – namely me.’

Standing next to me on the platform was a kid of about fifteen who looked not entirely fired up by what he was hearing. ‘Say,’ I said. ‘What brings you out here at this hour of the morning, for a thing like this?’

‘The bus,’ he said.

After that, we went down to Deland – about a two-hour run -where Muskie addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who’d been let out of school to hear the candidate say, ‘It’s about time the good people of America got together behind somebody they can trust – namely me.’

And then we eased down the tracks to Sebring, where a feverish throng of about a hundred and fifty senior citizens was on hand to greet the Man from Maine and pick up his finely-honed message. As the train rolled into the station, Roosevelt Grier emerged from the caboose and attempted to lead the crowd through a few stanzas of ‘Let the Sun Shine In.’

Then the candidate emerged, acknowledging Grier’s applause and smiling for the TV cameramen who had been let off a hundred yards up the track so they could get ahead of the train and set up … in order to film Muskie socking it to the crowd about how ‘It’s about time we good people, etc., etc …’

Meanwhile, the Muskie girls – looking very snappy in their tri-colored pre-war bunny suits – were mingling with the folks; saying cheerful things and handing out red, white, and blue buttons that said ‘Trust Muskie’ and ‘Believe Muskie.’

A band was playing somewhere, I think, and the Chief Political Correspondent from some paper in Australia was jabbering into the telephone in the dispatcher’s office – feeding Muskie’s wisdom straight down to the outback, as it were; direct from the Orange Juice State.

By mid-afternoon a serious morale problem had developed aboard the train. At least half of the national press corps had long since gone over the hump into serious boozing. A few had already filed, but most had scanned the prepared text of Big Ed’s ‘whistlestop speech’ and said to hell with it. Now, as the train headed south again, the Muskie girls were passing out sandwiches and O. B. McClinton, the ‘Black Irishman of Country Music,’ was trying to lure people into the lounge car for a ‘singalong thing.’

It took a while, but they finally collected a crowd. Then one of Muskie’s college-type staffers took charge: He told the Black Irishman what to play, cued the other staff people, then launched into about nineteen straight choruses of Big Ed’s newest campaign song: ‘He’s got the whole state of Florida … In his hands …’

I left at that point. The scene was pure Nixon – so much like a pep rally at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.’ He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. ‘I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,’ he continued, ‘but I’ve never felt out of place before – never personally uncomfortable with the people.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious – and I’ve finally figured out why.’ He chuckled and glanced at the Muskie people again. ‘You know what it is?’ he said. ‘It’s because these people act like goddamned Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out.’

There are very few members of the establishment press who will defend the idea that things like aggressive flatulence, forced feedings of swill, or even a barely-muted hostility on the part of the candidate would justify any kind of drastic retaliation by a professional journalist – and certainly nothing so drastic as to cause the Democratic front-runner to cut short a major speech because some dangerous freak wearing a press badge was clawing at his legs and screaming for more gin.

I might even agree with this thinking, myself, if the question of ‘drastic retaliation against a candidate’ ever actually confronted me … for the same reason that I couldn’t crank up enough adrenalin to get myself involved in some low-level conspiracy to heckle a harmless dingbat like Ed Muskie in a Florida railroad station.2

Which is not to say that I couldn’t get interested in something with a bit of real style to it – like turning 50,000 bats loose in the Convention Center on the night of Hubert Humphrey’s nomination. But I don’t see much hope for anything that imaginative this time around, and most people capable of putting an Outrage like that together would probably agree with me that giving Hubert the Democratic nomination would be punishment enough in itself.

As for Muskie and his goddamn silly train, my only real feeling about that scene was a desire to get away from it as soon as possible. And I might have flown down to Miami on Friday night if we hadn’t got ourselves mixed up with the Boohoo and stayed out until 6:00 A.M. Saturday morning. At that point, all I really cared about was getting myself hauled back to Miami on somebody else’s wheels.

The Boohoo agreed, and since the train was leaving in two hours, that was obviously the easiest way to go. But Muskie’s pressherders decided that my attitude was so negative that it was probably best to let me sleep – which they did, and there is a certain poetic justice in the results of that decision. By leaving me behind, they unwittingly cut the only person on the train who could have kept the Boohoo under control.

But of course they had no idea that he would be joining them. Nobody even knew the Boohoo existed until he turned up in the lounge car wearing my press badge and calling people like New York Times correspondent Johnny Apple an ‘ugly little wop.’

It was just about then, according to another reporter’s account, that ‘people started trying to get out of his way.’ It was also about then, Monte Chitty recalls, that the Boohoo began ordering things like ‘triple Gin Bucks, without the Buck.’ And from then on, things went steadily downhill.

Now, looking back on that tragedy with a certain amount of perspective and another glance at my notes, the Boohoo’s behavior on that train seems perfectly logical – or at least as logical as my own less violent but noticeably negative reaction to the same scene a day earlier. It was a very oppressive atmosphere – very tense and guarded, compared to the others I’d covered. I had just finished a swing around central Florida with Lindsay, and before that I’d been up in New Hampshire with McGovern.

Both of those campaigns had been very loose and easy scenes to travel with, which might have been because they were both left-bent underdogs … but at that point I didn’t really think much about it; the only other presidential candidates I had ever spent any time with were Gene McCarthy and Richard Nixon in 1968. And they were so vastly different – the Left and Right extremes of both parties – that I came into the ’72 campaign thinking I would probably never see anything as extreme in either direction as the Nixon & McCarthy campaigns in ’68.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find both the McGovern and Lindsay campaigns at least as relaxed and informal as McCarthy’s ’68 trip; they were nowhere near as intense or exciting, but the difference was more a matter of degree, of style and personal attitudes …

In ’68 you could drive across Manchester from McCarthy’s woodsy headquarters at the Wayfarer to Nixon’s grim concrete hole at the Holiday Inn and feel like you’d gone from Berkeley to Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

But then you sort of expected that kind of cheap formica trip from Richard Nixon: all those beefy Midwest detective types in blue sharkskin suits – ex-brokers from Detroit, ex-speculators from Miami, ex gear & sprocket salesmen from Chicago. They ran a very tight ship. Nixon rarely appeared, and when he did nobody in the press corps ever got within ten feet of him, except now and then by special appointment for cautious interviews. Getting assigned to cover Nixon in ’68 was like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn.

It never occurred to me that anything could be worse than getting stuck on another Nixon campaign, so it came as a definite shock to find that hanging around Florida with Ed Muskie was even duller and more depressing than travelling with Evil Dick himself.

And it wasn’t just me, although the Muskie Downer was admittedly more obvious to reporters who’d been traveling with other candidates than it was to the poor devils who’d been stuck with him from the start. I may have been the rudest ‘negative attitude’ case on the ‘Sunshine Special,’ but I was definitely not the only one. About halfway through that endless Friday I was standing at the bar when Judy Michaelson, a New York Post reporter who had just switched over from the Lindsay campaign, came wandering down the aisle with a pained blank stare on her face, and stopped beside me just long enough to say, ‘Boy! This is not quite the same as the other one, is it?’

I shook my head, leaning into the turn as the train rounded a bend on the banks of either the Sewanee or the Chatahootchee River. ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘It’s a privilege to ride the rails with a front-runner.’

She smiled wearily and moved on, dragging her notebook behind her. Later that evening, in West Palm Beach, I listened to Dick Stout of Newsweek telling a Muskie press aide that his day on the ‘Sunshine Special’ had been ‘so goddamn disgracefully bad that I don’t have the words for it yet.’

One of the worst things about the trip was the fact that the candidate spent the whole time sealed off in his private car with a traveling zoo of local Party bigwigs. The New Hampshire primary was still two weeks off, and Muskie was still greedily pursuing his dead-end strategy of piling up endorsements from ‘powerful Democrats’ in every state he visited – presumably on the theory that once he got the Party Bosses signed up, they would automatically deliver the votes. (By the time the deal went down in New Hampshire, Muskie had signed up just about every Democratic politician in the country whose name was well known by more than a hundred people, and it did him about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin Bormann.) A week later, when he staggered to a fourth place finish in Florida, a fishmonger in Cairo, Illinois, announced that he and U.S. Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa were forming a corporation to market ‘Muskie dartboards.’ Hughes had planned to be present at the ceremony in Cairo, the man said, but the Senator was no longer able to travel from one place to another without the use of custom Weight-Belts.

The New Hampshire results3 hit the Muskie bandwagon like a front-wheel blowout, but Florida blew the transmission. Big Ed will survive Illinois, whatever the outcome, but he still has to go to Wisconsin – where anything but victory will probably finish him off, and his chances of beating Humphrey up there on The Hube’s home court are not good. The latest Gallup Poll, released on the eve of the Illinois primary but based on a nationwide survey taken prior to the vote in New Hampshire, showed Humphrey ahead of Muskie for the first time. In the February poll, Muskie was leading by 35 percent to 32 percent … but a month later The Hube had surged up to 35 percent and Muskie had slipped seven points in thirty days down to 28 percent.

According to almost every media wizard in the country, Wisconsin is ‘the crunch’ – especially for Muskie and New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was badly jolted in Florida when his gold-plated Media Blitz apparently had no effect at all on the voters. Lindsay had spent almost a half million dollars in Florida, yet limped home fifth with seven percent of the vote – just a point ahead of McGovern, who spent less than $100,000.

Two of the biggest losers in Florida, in fact, were not listed in the election results. They were David Garth, Lindsay’s TV-Media guru, and Robert Squier, whose TV campaign for Muskie was such a debacle that some of the Man from Maine’s top advisors in Florida began openly denouncing Squier to startled reporters, who barely had time to get their stories into print before Muskie’s national headquarters announced that a brand new series of TV spots would begin running yesterday.

But by then the damage was done. I never saw the new ones, but the Squier originals were definitely a bit queer. They depicted Muskie as an extremely slow-spoken man who had probably spent half his life overcoming some kind of dreadful speech impediment, only to find himself totally hooked on a bad Downer habit or maybe even smack. The first time I heard a Muskie radio spot I was zipping along on the Rickenbacker Causeway, coming in from Key Biscayne, and I thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. It was the voice of a man who had done about twelve Reds on the way to the studio – a very funny ad.

Whatever else the Florida primary might or might not have proved, it put a definite kink in the Media Theory of politics. It may be true, despite what happened to Lindsay and Muskie in Florida, that all you have to do to be President of the U.S.A. is look ‘attractive’ on TV and have enough money to hire a Media Wizard. Only a fool or a linthead would argue with the logic at the root of the theory: If you want to sell yourself to a nation of TV addicts, you obviously can’t ignore the medium … but the Florida vote at least served to remind a lot of people that the medium is only a tool, not a magic eye. In other words, if you want to be President of the U.S.A. and you’re certified ‘attractive,’ the only other thing you have to worry about when you lay out all that money for a Media Wizard is whether or not you’re hiring a good one instead of a bungler … and definitely lay off the Reds when you go to the studio.

1. Both the New Hampshire and Florida primaries were scheduled for early March so sometime in late February I left McGovern up in New Hampshire and went down to Florida to check on Muskie and Lindsay. Lindsay had just made a strong showing in the Arizona delegate-selection caucuses, running even with Muskie and beating McGovern almost 2 to 1. All he needed in Florida was 20 percent of the Democratic vote – which seemed entirely possible at the time. A Lindsay ‘win’ on Florida would have changed the race entirely. There were twelve candidates in the primary and in February the wizards were saying that no one of them could hope to poll more than 25 or 30 percent of the vote. Muskie was still a front-runner and George Wallace had only recently decided to enter the race as a Democrat, rather than as an American Independent. McGovern was running out of money and had already decided to cut his losses in Florida and go for broke in Wisconsin several weeks later. So if Lindsay had made a strong showing in Florida – even running second or close third to Muskie – he would probably have crippled McGovern’s image as a candidate of the Democratic Left. When I arrived in Miami, the consensus of the local pols was that the Democratic primary would probably come down to a relatively close race between Muskie and Lindsay, with Humphrey and Wallace splitting the right-wing vote and McGovern grappling for the booby prize with Shirley Chisholm.