It was going to be a hell of a story—and especially for Life because they had an angle that nobody else could touch. They’d only been in town about 24 hours, but when they arrived at our headquarters on Monday morning they were confronted with a really mind-bending scene. Here was the candidate, the next sheriff of Aspen and indeed all of Pitkin County, Colorado, raving crazily about Armageddon and pounding on a desk with a big leather sap. We had been up all night dealing with a violent personal crisis that would have blown the whole campaign out of the water if we hadn’t contained it, and by ten o’clock on Monday we were half hysterical with fatigue, drink, and a general sense of relief that there was nothing else to be done. At least by me: Pierre Landry had the poll-watching teams organized, Bill Noonan was still getting our sample ballots printed, Solheim had a full schedule of radio ads laid out for Monday and Tuesday, and Ed Bastian was putting together a vast telephone network to get the vote out.
That Monday was the first day in a month that I felt able to relax and let my head run—which is precisely what I was doing when the Life team walked in and found me laughing about Freak Power and what a fantastic shuck we had run on the liberals. “We’ll put those fuckers on trial, starting Wednesday!” I shouted. “Paul, do you have the list? Maybe we should start reading it on the radio today.” Paul Davidson grinned. “Yeah, we’ll start rounding the bastards up tomorrow night. But we need money for Mace; do you have any?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We have plenty of money—and plenty of mescaline to sell if we need more. Get the Mace—get several gallons, and some double-ought buckshot.”
. . .
Within two hours after the polls closed, the Battle of Aspen was over . . . at least that’s how it looked at the time, from the eye of the shit rain. Freak Power bombed early that night, and we didn’t need an RCA 1060 to project the final result—even after the early returns showed us winning. But not by enough. The early returns came from our hard-core freak strongholds in the middle and east end of town. We won handily in precincts One, Two, and Three, but our voter turnout was too light and the margin it gave us was not nearly enough to overcome the landslide that we knew was about to come down on us from suburban Agnewville and the down-county trailer courts. The backlash vote was kicking in, and the doom message was obvious in the eyes of our poll watchers about halfway through the day. They refused to confirm it, but I think we all knew. . . .
So somewhere around dusk we began loading up on mescaline, tequila, hash, beer, and whatever else we could get our hands on . . . and after that, it was only a matter of fucking with the national press and waiting for the axe to fall. Our elegant Hotel Jerome headquarters was a total madhouse. Everybody in the place seemed to have a long black microphone the size of a baseball bat, and all those without microphones had cameras—Nikons, Nagras, Eclairs, Kodaks, Polaroids, there was even a finely equipped videotape team from the California Institute of Arts.
The floor was a maze of cables, there were strobe lights taped to the ceiling. . . . The photographer from Life was muscled out of the way by two CBS thugs from Los Angeles; the chief cameraman on Woodstock got ugly with the director of the British TV crew . . . there was constant, savage jostling for camera positions around the phone desk and the fatal blackboard where Alison and Vicky Colvard were putting the numbers together. Bill Kennedy, a writer from Harper’s, was maintaining his position in front of the telephone desk with a nasty display of elbow tactics summoned up, on instinct, from memories of covering the riot squad in Albany and San Juan.
Writers from Life, LOOK, Scanlan’s, Ski, The Village Voice, Fusion, Rat—even a Dutch correspondent from Suck—moved constantly through the crowd, hassling everybody. The phones jangled with longdistance calls from AP, UPI, the TV networks, and dozens of curious strangers calling from Virginia, Michigan, and Oregon demanding to know the results. One of the best quick descriptions of the chaos came later from Steve Levine, a young columnist for The Denver Post who had spent half the day as one of our poll watchers:
“It was madness and sadness and drinking and dope and tears and anger and harsh plaster smiles,” he wrote. “Parlor B in the old Jerome was jammed from wall to fading, flowered wall with partisan struggles, both full freak and moderate freak, and the press from London and L.A., and well-wishers, and many people were rip-smashed and optimistic, but some knew better. . . .”
Indeed . . . and the solemn, smoke-filled hideaway for those who really knew better was room Number One, about two hundred feet down the crowded hallway from the vortex-madness in Parlor B. It was Oscar Acosta’s room. He had been there for two weeks, dealing with one crisis after another and rarely sleeping in his complex, triple-pronged role of old friend, bodyguard, and emergency legal advisor to what The New York Times called “The most bizarre (political) campaign on the American scene today.” But the Timesman didn’t know the half of it; he had come to town early in October, long before the campaign turned so crazy and vicious that The New York Times couldn’t possibly have told the real story.
By the time Acosta arrived the Aspen political scene looked like some drug-addled Mafia-parody of a gang war scene from The Godfather. And a week before the election we actually went to the mattresses. Oscar, a prominent Chicano civil rights lawyer from Los Angeles, stopped in Aspen after a Denver visit with his client Corky Gonzales—the Chicanos’ answer to Huey Newton or maybe H. Rap Brown in the old days. In mid-November Corky was scheduled to go on trial in L.A. on dubious charges of “carrying a deadly weapon” during the East Los Angeles riot the previous August, which resulted in the murder of Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy. Oscar would be the defense attorney in that trial, but in mid-October he found himself in Colorado with not much else to do, so he decided to stop by his old home in Aspen to see what the Honky/Gabachos were up to . . . and the nightmare scene that he found here seemed to convince him that white middle-class Amerika was truly beyond redemption.
HST and Oscar Acosta on election night in Aspen, November 1970 (Bob Krueger)
. . .
On election night Oscar’s small room in the Jerome filled quickly with people—both locals and “outsiders”—who shared his dreary conviction that this Aspen election had serious implications in the context of national politics. From the very beginning it had been a strange and unlikely test case, but toward the end—when it looked like a Radical/Drug candidate might actually win a head-on clash with the Agnew people—the Aspen campaign suddenly assumed national importance as a sort of accidental trial balloon that might, if it worked, be tremendously significant—especially to the angry legions of New Left/Radical types who insisted, on good evidence, that there was no longer any point in trying to achieve anything “within the system.”
But obviously, if an essentially Republican town like Aspen could elect a sheriff running on a radical Freak Power platform, then the Vote might still be a viable tool . . . and it might still be possible to alter the mean, fascist drift of this nation without burning it down in the process. This was the strange possibility that had brought Dave Meggyesy out of San Francisco. Meggyesy, a former linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals, had recently abandoned pro football and plunged into radical politics. . . . The first serialization of his book, Out of Their League, was on the newsstands in LOOK that week, and he had just come back from a New York gig on The Dick Cavett Show. But LOOK was a bit too cerebral for the kind of people who voted against us in Aspen; to them, Dave Meggyesy was just another one of those “dirty Communist outsiders that Thompson was importing to take over the town.”
It’s hard to communicate when they don’t speak your language, so Meggyesy reverted to type and signed on as a bodyguard, along with Teddy Yewer, the wild young biker from Madison; Paul Davidson, the Black Belt White Panther from Denver; and Gene Johnson, a super-wiggy ex-painting contractor from Newport Beach . . . all Communists, of course, every one of them on salary from Peking.
These treacherous perverts—and others—were among
those who gathered in Oscar’s room that night to ponder the wreckage of Amerika’s first Freak Power campaign.
. . .
There was certainly no shortage of reasons to explain our defeat. A few were so brutally obvious that there is not much point in listing them except for the record—which is crucial, because the record will also show that, despite these apparently suicidal handicaps, we actually carried the city of Aspen and pulled roughly 44 percent of the vote in the entire county. This was the real shocker. Not that we lost, but that we came so close to winning.
The record will also show that we learned our political lessons pretty well, after coming to grips with the reasons for Joe Edwards’s six-vote loss in 1969. Our mistake, of course—which was actually my mistake—was in publishing what we learned in a national magazine that hit the newsstands just in time to become a millstone around our necks in 1970. The local appearance of the October 1, 1970, issue of Rolling Stone was a disaster of the first magnitude, for several reasons: 1) because it scared the mortal shit out of our opposition; 2) because it got here just a week or so too late to be effective in our crucial “freak-registration” campaign; and 3) because it outlined our campaign strategy in such fine detail that the enemy was able to use it against us, with hellish effectiveness, all the way to the end.
Among other damaging revelations, the article went into great detail to show that we couldn’t possibly win in 1970 unless the Democrats and the Republicans effectively split the “establishment vote,” as they had a year earlier. Here is a word-for-word excerpt from “The Battle of Aspen” (Rolling Stone #67, October 1, 1970):
The root point is that Aspen’s political situation is so volatile—as a result of the Joe Edwards campaign—that any Freak Power candidate is now a possible winner.
In my case, for instance, I will have to work very hard—and spew out some really heinous ideas during my campaign—to get less than 30 percent of the vote in a three-way. And an underground candidate who really wanted to win could assume, from the start, a working nut of about 40 percent of the electorate—with his chances of victory riding almost entirely on the Backlash Potential: or how much active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the burghers who have controlled local candidates for so long.
With Sandy, in Aspen (Bob Krueger)
. . .
So it was no surprise, when it finally became apparent that the Freak Power slate was going to get no less than 40 percent of the vote, to find our local GOP brain trust scrambling to arrange a last-minute emergency compromise with their “archenemies” in the other party. The difference, in Aspen, was like the difference between Nixon and LBJ on the national level: Beyond the personalities and patronage squabbles, there was no real difference at all. Not on the issues.
What happened, however, is that about halfway through the campaign both establishment parties found themselves hawking a local version of the Black Panthers’ “theory of the greater fear.” As much as they might detest each other personally, they hated “freak power” more—and they agreed that it had to be stopped, by any means necessary.
The unholy agreement they forged, less than 48 hours before the election, was that each party would sacrifice one of its two major candidates (in the sheriff and county commissioner races) so as not to split the vote. This assured massive bipartisan support for both incumbents: Sheriff Carrol Whitmire, a Democrat, and Commissioner J. Sterling Baxter.
The trade-off was effected by a sort of chain-letter telephone campaign on election eve, an effort so frantic that one man, a Republican, got eighteen calls that night telling him that the final word from headquarters was to “split your ticket; we’re dumping [GOP sheriff candidate] Ricks and the Democrats are dumping Caudhill.”
. . .
What we learned in Aspen was that if you “work within the system,” you’d damn well better win—because “the system” has a built-in wipe-out mechanism for dealing with failed challengers.
If the Freak Power brain trust learned anything serious in that election, it was that “working within the system” is merely a lame euphemism for “playing by their rules.” Once you do this, and lose—especially in a small town with a voting population of just under 2,500—you’re expected to hunker down like a natural gentleman/politician and take your beating, the inevitable consequences of running a failed challenge on a deeply entrenched Power Structure.
Like the laws of Physics, the laws of Politics in America seem based on the notion that every force creates a counterforce of exactly equal strength. Our bizarre voter-registration campaign mobilized a vast number of local “freaks” who had never registered, before, to vote for anything—and many of them said afterward that they would never register again. They insisted all the way to the voting booths that they “hated politics” and especially “politicians.”
But the Freak Power platform—and indeed the whole campaign—was so far above and beyond anybody’s idea of “politics” that in the end we found most of our strength among people who were proud to call themselves Non-Voters. In a town where no candidate for any public office had ever considered it necessary to pull more than 250 votes, a stone-bald and grossly radical Freak Power candidate for sheriff pulled 1,065 votes in 1970, yet lost by nearly 400 votes.
The Freak Power election so polarized Aspen that we managed, in the end, to frighten up enough Negative/Scare votes to offset our shocking and unprecedented success in mobilizing the “freak” vote. We frightened the bastards so badly that on Election Day they rolled people in wheelchairs—and even on stretchers—into the polling places to vote against us. They brought out people, young and old, who thought “Ike” Eisenhower was still president of the U.S.A. “It was the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” said one of our poll watchers. “I was out there in Precinct One, where we thought things were cool, and all of a sudden they just rolled over us like a sheep drive. I’ve never seen so many pickup trucks in my life.”
We are still seeing those pickups. And anybody who challenges them had better be ready to die. That’s what they told me, over and over again, when I ran for sheriff: That even if I won, I would never live to take office. And when I lost, they instantly got down to making sure that nobody like me could ever run for office again.
With George McGovern in Washington, 1972 (Stuart Bratesman)
Sunday Night at the Fontainebleau
Sunday night at the Fontainebleau: Hot wind on Collins Avenue. Out in front of the hotel, facing the ocean, teams of armed guards and “police dogs” were patrolling the beach & pool area to make sure nobody sneaked in to feel the water. Not even the guests. It was illegal to use the ocean in Miami Beach at night. The beach itself was technically public property, but the architects of this swinish “hotel row” along what the local Chamber of Commerce called the “Gold Coast” had managed to seal off both the beach and the ocean completely by building the hotels so they formed a sort of Berlin Wall between Collins Avenue and the sea.
There were ways to get through, if you didn’t mind climbing a few wire fences and seawalls, or if you knew where to find one of the handful of tiny beach areas the city fathers had quietly designated as “public,” but even if you made it down to the beach, you couldn’t walk more than 50 or 60 yards in either direction, because the hotels had sealed off their own areas . . . and the “public” areas were little more than rocky strips of sand behind hotel parking lots, maintained as a grudging, token compliance with the law that said hotels had no legal right to fence the public away from the ocean. This was a touchy subject in Miami then, because many of the hotels had already built so close to the high-tide line that their pools and cabanas were on public land, and the last thing they wanted was a lawsuit involving their property lines.
The Doral, for instance—headquarters for both George McGovern and Richard Nixon in that mean “Convention summer” of 1972—had been built so close to the sea that at least half of its beachfront cabanas and probably half of its so-called Olympic-size p
ool were built on public property. A test case on this question could have precipitated a financial disaster of hellish proportions for the Doral, but the owners were not losing much sleep over it. They had me arrested on four consecutive nights during the Democratic Convention that August for swimming in the pool “after hours.” Usually around three or four in the morning.
After the first two days it got to be a ritual. I would appear on the moonlit patio and say hello to the black private cop while I took off my clothes and piled them on a plastic chair near the diving board. Our conversation on the first night was a model for all the others:
“You’re not supposed to be out here,” the private cop said. “This area is closed at night.”
“Why?” I said, sitting down to take off my shoes.
“It’s against the law.”
“What law?”
“The one they pay me to enforce, goddamnit. The one that says you can’t go swimmin’ out here at night.”
“Well. . .” I said, taking off my watch and stuffing it into one of my crusty white basketball shoes. . . . “What happens if I just jump into the pool and swim, anyway?”
“You gonna do that?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m sorry to hassle you, but it’s necessary. My nerves are all twisted up, and the only way I can relax is by coming out here by myself and swimming laps.”
He shook his head sadly. “Okay, but you’re gonna be breakin’ the law.”
“I doubt it.”
“What?”
“The way I see it,” I said, “about twenty feet of this pool over there on the side near the ocean is on public property.”
He shrugged. “I’m not gonna argue with you about that. All I know is the law says you can’t swim out here at night.”
Kingdom of Fear Page 10
