The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let's say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get -- especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup Poll; Stage Two is the "winnowing out," the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

  This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn't get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he's still in Stage One might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to Stage Two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

  At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars. . . Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of 15 amateur political activists gathered in some English professor's living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech -- often three or four times in a single day -- to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters. . . And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time pols who couldn't find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don't plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

  It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be "the most powerful man in the world," but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

  The power of the presidency is so vast that it is probably a good thing, in retrospect, that only a very few people in this country understood the gravity of Richard Nixon's mental condition during his last year in the White House. There were moments in that year when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the president of the United States was so crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair that he was only two martinis away from losing his grip entirely and suddenly locking himself in his office long enough to make that single telephone call that would have launched enough missiles and bombers to blow the whole world off its axis or at least kill 100 million people.

  The sudden, hellish reality of a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both was probably the only thing that could have salvaged Nixon's presidency after the Supreme Court ruled that he had to yield up the incriminating tapes that he knew would finish him off. Would the action-starved generals at the Strategic Air Command Headquarters have ignored an emergency order from their Commander-in-chief? And how long would it have taken Pat Buchanan or General Haig to realize that 'The Boss" had finally flipped? Nixon spent so much time alone that nobody else in the White House would have given his absence a second thought until he failed to show up for dinner, and by that time he could have made enough phone calls to start wars all over the world.

  A four-star general commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps with three wars and 35 years of fanatical devotion to duty, honor and country in his system would hack off his own feet and eat them rather than refuse to obey a direct order from the president of the United States -- even if he thought the president was crazy.

  The key to all military thinking is a concept that nobody who ever wore a uniform with even one stripe on it will ever forget: "You don't salute the man, you salute the uniform." Once you've learned that, you're a soldier -- and soldiers don't disobey orders from people they have to salute. If Nixon's tortured mind had bent far enough to let him think he could save himself by ordering a full-bore Marine/Airborne invasion in Cuba, he would not have given the Boom-Boom order to some closet-pacifist general who might be inclined to delay the invasion long enough to call Henry Kissinger for official reassurance that the president was not insane.

  No West Pointer with four stars on his hat would take that kind of risk anyway. By the time word got back to the White House, or to Kissinger, that Nixon had given the order to invade Cuba, the whole Caribbean would be a sea of fire; Fidel Castro would be in a submarine on his way to Russia, and the sky above the Atlantic would be streaked from one horizon to the other with the vapor trails of a hundred panic-launched missiles.

  Right. But it was mainly a matter of luck that Nixon's mental disintegration was so obvious and so crippling that by the time he came face to face with his final option, he was no longer able to even recognize it. When the going got tough, the politician who worshiped toughness above all else turned into a whimpering, gin-soaked vegetable. . . But it is still worth wondering how long it would have taken Haig and Kissinger to convince all those SAC generals out in Omaha to disregard a Doomsday phone call from the president of the United States because a handful of civilians in the White House said he was crazy.

  Ah. . . but we are wandering off into wild speculation again, so let's chop it off right here. We were talking about the vast powers of the presidency and all the treacherous currents surrounding it. . . Not to mention all the riptides, ambushes, Judas goats, fools and ruthless, dehumanized thugs that will sooner or later have to be dealt with by any presidential candidate who still feels strong on his feet when he comes to that magic moment for the leap from Stage Two to Stage Three.

  But there will be plenty of time for that later on. And plenty of other journalists to write out it. . . But not me. The most active and interesting phase of a presidential campaign is Stage One, which is as totally different from the Sturm und Drang of Stage Three as a guerrilla-style war among six or eight Gypsy nations is totally different from the bloody, hunkered down trench warfare that paralyzed and destroyed half of Europe during World War I.

  ATHENS, Ala. (AP)-- Iladean Tribble, who had said she would marry entertainer Elvis Presley on Saturday, confirmed Sunday that the ceremony did not take place. Mrs. Tribble, a 42-year-old widow with four children, was asked in a telephone interview why the wedding did not take place. She replied: "This is the Sabbath day and I don't talk about things like this on the Lord's day."

  Well. . . that's fair enough, I guess. Jimmy Carter had said that he won't talk about his foreign policy until the day he delivers his inaugural address. Everybody has a right to their own quirks and personal convictions -- as long as they don't try to lay them on me -- but just for the pure, meanspirited hell of it, I am going to call Iladean Tribble when the sun comes up in about three hours and ask her the same question the AP reporter insulted her faith by asking on the Sabbath.<
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  By Mrs. Tribble's own logic, I should get a perfectly straight answer from her on Tuesday, which according to my calendar is not a religious holiday of any kind. . . So in just a few hours I should have the answer, from Iladean herself, to the question regarding her mysterious nonmarriage to Elvis Presley.

  And after I talk to Iladean, I am going to call my old friend Pat Caddell, who is Jimmy Carter's pollster and one of the two or three main wizards in Carter's brain trust, and we will have another one of our daily philosophical chats. . .

  When I read Mrs. Tribble's quote to Pat earlier tonight, in the course of a more or less bare-knuckled telephone talk, he said he didn't know any woman named Iladean in Athens, Alabama -- and besides that he didn't see any connection between her and the main topic of our conversation tonight, which was Jimmy Carter -- who is always the main topic when I talk to Caddell, and we've been talking, arguing, plotting, haggling and generally whipping on each other almost constantly, ever since this third-rate, low-rent campaign circus hit the public roads about four months ago.

  That was before Pat went to work for Jimmy, but long after I'd been cited in about 33 dozen journals all over the country as one of Carter's earliest and most fervent supporters. Everywhere I went for at least the past year, from Los Angeles to Austin, Nashville, Washington, Boston, Chicago and Key West, I've been publicly hammered by friends and strangers alike for saying that "I like Jimmy Carter." I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits and other Gucci people; I have been called a brain-damaged geek by some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on the night of the Wisconsin primary when the midnight radio stunned us both with a news bulletin from a CBS station in Los Angeles, saying that earlier announcements by NBC and ABC regarding Mo Udall's narrow victory over Carter in Wisconsin were not true, and that late returns from the rural districts were running so heavily in Carter's favor that CBS was now calling him the winner.

  Sandy likes Mo Udall; and so do I, for that matter. . . I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don't necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. Or her back. Or its back. . . At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to nil vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it -- like Nixon did -- to pack-crowd the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia's ahtisodomy statutes. . . And anybody who thinks that 6-3 vote against "sodomy" is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn't really affect them had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an "unnatural sex act." Because "unnatural" is denned by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes go to prison.

  Which won't make much difference to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become a felon -- but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again. . . God knows, I hate it, but I can't help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says, "The devil made me do it the first time. The second time, I done it on my own."

  Right And the third time, I did it because of brain damage. . . And after that: well, I figured that anybody who was already doomed to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.

  Anything worth all that risk and energy almost has to be beyond the reach of any kind of redemption except the power of Pure Love. . . and this flash of twisted wisdom brings us back, strangely enough, to politics, Pat Caddell, and the 1976 presidential campaign. . . And, not incidentally, to the fact that any Journal on any side of Wall Street that ever quoted me as saying "I like Jimmy Carter" was absolutely accurate. I have said it many times, to many people, and I will keep on saying it until Jimmy Carter gives me some good reason to change my mind -- which might happen about two minutes after he finishes reading this article: But I doubt it.

  I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probably spent more private, human time with him than any other journalist on the '76 campaign trail. The first time I met him -- at about eight o'clock on a Saturday morning in 1974 at the back door of the governor's mansion in Atlanta -- I was about two degrees on the safe side of berserk, raving and babbling at Carter and his whole bemused family about some hostile bastard wearing a Georgia State Police uniform who had tried to prevent me from coming through the gate at the foot of the long, tree-shaded driveway leading up to the mansion.

  I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates, and when I rolled up to the gatehouse in the back seat of a taxi I'd hailed in downtown Atlanta, the trooper was not amused by the sight and sound of my presence. I was trying to act calm but after about 30 seconds I realized it wasn't working; the look on his face told me I was not getting through to the man. He stared at me, saying nothing, while I explained from my crouch in the back seat of the cab that I was late for breakfast with "the governor and Ted Kennedy". . . Then he suddenly stiffened and began shouting at the cabdriver: "What kind of dumb shit are you trying to pull, buddy? Don't you know where you are?"

  Before the cabbie could answer, the trooper smacked the flat of his hand down on the hood so hard that the whole cab rattled. "You! Shut this engine!" Then he pointed at me: "You! Out of the cab. Let's see some identification." He reached out for my wallet and motioned for me to follow him into the gatehouse. The cabbie started to follow, but the trooper waved him back. "Stay right where you are, good buddy. I'll get to you." The look on my driver's face said we were both going to jail and it was my fault. "It wasn't my idea to come out here," he whined. "This guy told me he was invited for breakfast with the governor."

  The trooper was looking at the press cards in my wallet. I was already pouring sweat, and just as he looked over at me I realized I was holding a can of beer in my hand. "You always bring your own beer when you have breakfast with the governor?" he asked.

  I shrugged and dropped it in a nearby wastebasket.

  "You!" he shouted. "What do you think you're doing?"

  The scene went on for another 20 minutes. There were many phone calls, a lot of yelling, and finally the trooper reached somebody in the mansion who agreed to locate Senator Kennedy and ask if he knew "some guy name of Thompson, I got him down here, he's all beered up and wants to come up there for breakfast. . ."

  Jesus, I though, that's all Kennedy needs to hear. Right in the middle of breakfast with the governor of Georgia, some nervous old darky shuffles in from the kitchen to announce that the trooper down at the gatehouse is holding some drunkard who says he's a friend of Senator Kennedy's and he wants to come in and have breakfast. . .

  Which was, in fact, a lie. I had not been invited for breakfast with the governor, and up to that point I had done everything in my power to avoid it. Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.

  I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home -- and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed -- breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crep
es, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon or corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert. . . Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next 24 hours, and at least one source of good music. . . All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

  It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of "The Meaning of Jimmy Carter" to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast. . . But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.

  After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all -- not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond -- to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church). . . Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.