Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  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 ISLANDER NEWS

  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 jackknifed 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 hideaway 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 assist
ance 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 others and not accomplish anything except to guarantee Nixon’s re-election.”

  A lot of people bought this—particularly the “youth leader” types who saw themselves playing key roles in a high-powered, issue-oriented Muskie campaign that would not only dump Nixon but put a certified “good guy” in the White House.

  In retrospect, the “Sunshine Special” looks far more like an ill-conceived disaster than it did at the time, when Rubin and the Boohoo made such a shambles of Muskie’s arrival in Miami that the local news media devoted almost as much time and space to the Senator’s clash with “anti-war hecklers” at the train station as it did to the whole four hundred-mile, thirty-six-hour Whistlestop Tour that covered the length of the state and produced what the candidate’s headquarters said were “five major statements in five cities.”

  It probably cost the Muskie campaign almost $40,000—almost $7,500 of that for rental of the five car train from Amtrak. Staff salaries and special expenses for the trip (thirty advance men spending two weeks each in towns along the route to make sure Big Ed would draw crowds for the TV cameras; payment to musicians, Rosey Grier, etc.)… a list of all expenses would probably drive the cost of the spectacle up closer to $50,000.

  For all this money, time, and effort, Muskie’s combined whistle-stop crowds totaled less than three thousand, including the disastrous climax that not only botched news coverage in Miami, the state, and the whole country—but also came close to shattering the Senator’s nerves. In addition to all that, his “major statements” along the way were contemptuously dismissed as “oatmeal” by most of the press and the network TV news editors in New York & Washington.

  In a word, the “Sunshine Special” bombed. The Miami Herald reported—in the same article dominated by the Rubin/Boohoo incident—that Muskie’s trip into “the politics of the past” was considered a failure even by the Senator’s own staff.

  Meanwhile, in that same issue of the Herald, right next to the ugly saga of the “Sunshine Special,” was a photograph of a grinning George Wallace chatting with national champion stock car racer Richard Petty at the Daytona 500, where 98,600 racing fans were treated to “a few informal remarks” by The Governor, who said he had only come to watch the races and check up on his old friend, Dick Petty—who enjoys the same kind of superhero status in the South that Jean-Claude Killy has in ski country.

  That appearance at the Daytona 500 didn’t cost Wallace a dime, and the AP wire-photo of him and Petty that went to every daily and Sunday newspaper in Florida was worth more to Wallace than his own weight in pure gold… and there was also the weight of the 98,600 racing fans, who figure that any friend of Richard Petty’s must sit on both shoulders of God in his spare time….

  The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile National Front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent… and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.

  Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that The Man From Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.

  If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone-blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.

  I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Big Ed’s Milwaukee headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty, and all the windows taped… TV crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables, hoping to film the ex-Front-runner from a safe distance when he comes crashing into the place to blame his sixth-place finish on some kind of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Crater. Nor is there any reason to believe he will refrain from physical violence at that time. With his dream and his nerves completely shot, he might start laying hands on people.

  Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of, however, is the list of those who will not be there, under any pretense at all… Senator Harold Hughes will not be there, for instance, and neither will Senator John Tunney… Nor will any of the other Senators, Governors, Mayors, Congressmen, Labor Leaders, Liberal Pundits, Fascist Lawyers, Fixers from ITT, and extremely powerful Democratic National Committeewomen, who are already on the record as full-bore committed to stand behind Big Ed.

  None of those people will be there when Muskie sees the first returns from Wisconsin and feels the first rush of pus into his brain. At that point he will have to depend on his friends, because that suitcase full of endorsements he’s been dragging around won’t be worth the price of checking it into a local bus station locker.

  Except perhaps for Birch Bayh. There is something that doesn’t quite meet the eye connected with this one. It makes no sense at all, on its face. Why would one of Ted Kennedy’s closest friends and allies in the Senate suddenly decide to jump on the Muskie bandwagon when everybody else is struggling to get off gracefully?

  Maybe Birch is just basically a nice guy—one of those down-home, warm-hearted Hoosiers you hear so much about. Maybe he and Big Ed are lifelong buddies. But if that were so, you’d think Bayh might have offered to fix Muskie up with some high-life political talent back then when it might have made a difference.

  But times are tricky now, and you never know when even one of your best friends might slap a ruinous lawsuit on you for some twisted reason that nobody understands. Almost everybody you meet these days is nervous about the nasty drift of things.

  It is becoming increasingly possible, for instance, that Hubert Humphrey will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year—which would cause another Nixon-Humphrey campaign. And a thing like that would probably have a serious effect on my nerves. I’d prefer no election at all to another Humphrey nightmare. Six months ago it seemed out of the question. But no longer.

  Frank Mankiewicz was right. For months he’s been telling anybody who asked him that the Democratic race would boil down, after the first few primaries, to a Humphrey/McGovern battle. But nobody took him seriously. We all assumed he was just talking up Humphrey’s chances in order to s
low Muskie down and thus keep McGovern viable.

  But apparently he was serious all along. Humphrey is the bookies’ choice in Wisconsin, which would finish Muskie and make Hubert the high rider all the way to the Oregon and California primaries in early June.

  The “other” race in Wisconsin is between McGovern and Lindsay, which might strike a lot more sparks than it has so far if anybody really believed the boneheads who run the Democratic Party would conceivably nominate either one of them. But there is a definite possibility that the Democratic Convention this year might erupt into something beyond the control of anybody; the new delegate-selection rules make it virtually impossible for old-style bosses like Mayor Daley to treat delegates like sheep hauled in to be dipped.

  A candidate like Lindsay or McGovern might be able to raise serious hell in a deadlocked convention, but the odds are better than even that Hubert will peddle his ass to almost anybody who wants a chunk of it, then arrive in Miami with the nomination sewed up and Nixon waiting to pounce on him the instant he comes out of his scumbag.

  Another Nixon/Humphrey horror would almost certainly cause a “Fourth Party” uprising and guarantee Nixon’s re-election—which might bring the hounds of hell down on a lot of people for the next four very long years.

  But personally I think I’d be inclined to take that risk. Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current. The idea of Humphrey running for President again makes a mockery out of things that it would take me too long to explain or even list here. And Hubert Humphrey wouldn’t understand what I was talking about anyway. He was a swine in ’68 and he’s worse now. If the Democratic Party nominates Humphrey again in ’72, the Party will get exactly what it deserves.