Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  April

  Stunning Upset in Wisconsin… McGovern Juggernaut Croaks Muskie… Humphrey Falters; Wallace Rolls On… Big Ed Exposed as Ibogaine Addict… McGovern Accosts the Sheriff… Bad News from Bleak House: Mojo Madness in Milwaukee; or How Nazis Broke My Spirit on Election Night… Mankiewicz Predicts First Ballot Victory in Miami…

  Easter morning in Milwaukee; ten minutes before five. Dawn is struggling up through the polluted mist on Lake Michigan to the east. I can sense the sunrise, but I can’t feel it—because just outside my window on the twenty-first floor of the (ITT-owned) Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel a huge red neon CITGO sign blocks my view of everything except the PABST BREWING CO. sign just off to the right, which is next to four massive pink letters saying YMCA.

  The lake is out there somewhere: A giant body of water full of poison. You can still find a few places that serve “fresh seafood” in Milwaukee, but they have to fly it in from Maine and Bermuda, packed in dry ice.

  People still fish in Lake Michigan, but you don’t want to eat what you catch. Fish that feed on garbage, human shit, and raw industrial poisons tend to taste a little strange.

  So beef and pork are very big here; prepared in the German Manner, with sauerkraut. Milwaukee is owned by old Germans who moved out to the suburbs about thirty years ago and hired Polaks to run the city for them. The German presence is very heavy here; the pace is very orderly. Even on totally empty downtown streets, nobody crosses against the Red Light.

  Yesterday I was grabbed for “jay-walking” outside the hotel. I was standing in a crowd on the corner of Second and Wisconsin—impatient to get across the street to my illegally parked Mustang and zip out to the South Side for a Wallace rally—and after two full minutes of standing on the curb and looking at the empty street I thought “fuck this,” and started to cross.

  Suddenly a whistle blew and a cop was yelling. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I kept moving, but glanced around me out of a general curiosity to see who was about to get busted—and I realized at once it was me. I was the only violator… so I shrugged and moved back to the curb, enduring the stares of about two dozen Responsible, Law-Abiding Citizens who clearly disapproved of my outburst… To first break the law, then to be screamed at in public by a trooper; this is not the sort of thing you want to call down on yourself in Milwaukee. There is no room in the good German mind for flashes of personal anarchy…

  (Suddenly the FM radio switches off from the music and starts howling: “Rejoice and be Glad! He is Risen!” Then a thunder of hymns and chanting.)

  Of course. Easter morning. Somewhere in Syria the junkies are rolling the rock away. All over the world they are celebrating, once again, the symbolic release of The Church—two thousand years of vengeance.

  Wonderful. Vengeance is a hard thing to knock, no principle—but right now I am not especially interested in Principle. I want some decent music, in order to keep working. Time is a factor, here. In forty-eight hours the voters of Wisconsin will go to the polls, and the morning after that the Rolling Stone presses will start cranking out No. 107 for newsstand sale in New York & San Francisco Tuesday—Thursday in Boston, Washington, L.A….

  So things are getting tense up here in Milwaukee right now, and all this wild screaming about Jesus on the radio is not soothing my head. (Now we have a sermon on the box; it sounds like something out of the Church of the Final Thunder in Swamptown, Mississippi—“This woman Mary Magdalene walked to the tomb, and found it empty!”—then a groan of organs and cries of “Amen” in the background…)

  What?… What?

  “I came to the Senate to fight for human rights! President Kennedy worked with me… we broke the filibuster…”

  There is no avoiding Hubert Humphery in Wisconsin this week. The bastard is everywhere: on the tube, on the box, in the streets with his sound trucks… and now the bastard is even breaking into Easter morning sermons with his gibberish.

  It didn’t last long. The sermon is rolling again—unfazed by that harsh thirty-second interruption—and I know in my heart that The Hube is not as sleepless as his media schedule would have us think. It is only the miracle of tape that brings us the cracked screeching of Hubert Humphrey’s voice at this hour on Easter morning.

  Because I know, for an absolute fact, that he is sleeping less than fifty yards away from this typewriter. He is upstairs in Room 2350, about thirty seconds from here, as the raven flies—but for me the journey would be a lot longer. I could make the first forty yards with no trouble, but when I emerged from the Exit next to the ice machine on the twenty-third floor I would instantly get put in a hammerlock by the SS men.

  The Secret Service arrives in Wisconsin. OWEN FRANKEN

  The arrival of Secret Service personnel has changed the campaign drastically. Each candidate has ten or twelve SS men surrounding him at all times—

  (Now, with no warning, another voice cuts into the sermon. Four minutes after seven on Easter morning… and this one is a McGovern spot, talking about “courage”… but the voice has a definite flash quality to it:

  Bobby Kennedy, come back to haunt us in the midst of this low-level campaign that would never have been necessary except for Sirhan Sirhan’s twisted little hand… so now we have the taped voice of Robert Kennedy, long before he took a bullet in the brain, endorsing George McGovern on the radio in Milwaukee on Easter morning, four years later…)

  There is not much talk about this around the McGovern campaign. It was Frank Mankiewicz’s idea to use the thing, and Mankiewicz was very close to Bobby. He was the one who had to pull himself together on that grim morning in Los Angeles and go out to make The Announcement to a hospital lobby full of stunned reporters: “Senator Kennedy died tonight…”

  So the sound of his voice being used as a Paid Political Commercial is just a hair unsettling to some people—even to those who might agree with the McGovern/Mankiewicz presumption that Robert would have wanted it this way.

  Maybe so. It’s a hard thing to argue, and the odds are far better than even that Robert Kennedy would find McGovern preferable to any other candidate for the Democratic nomination at this time. He never had much of a stomach for Hubert, except as the lesser of evils, and it probably never occurred to him that dim hacks like Muskie and Jackson would ever be taken seriously.

  So it is probably fair to assume that if Bobby Kennedy were alive today—and somehow retired from politics—he would agree with almost everything McGovern says and stands for. If only because almost everything McGovern says and stands for is a cautious extension of what Bobby Kennedy was trying to put together in the aborted campaign of 1968.

  But in another sense the 1972 Democratic Campaign mocks the memory of everything Bobby Kennedy represented in ’68. It is hard to imagine that he would be pleased to see that—four years after his murder—the Democratic Party would be so crippled and bankrupt on all fronts that even the best of its candidates would be fighting for life by trying to put a good face on positions essentially dictated by Nixon & George Wallace.

  In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary ’72 campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them1… but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice—that speedy, nasal Irish twang that nailed the ear like a shot of Let It Bleed suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic FM station.

  There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy’s voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones. They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

  The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968, when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election—that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

  It was lik
e driving an evil King off the throne. Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be a product of the “New Consciousness.” By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, and The War would be over by Christmas….

  What happened after that, between April and November of 1968, plunged a whole generation of hyper-political young Americans into a terminal stupor. Nixon blamed it on communist drugs and said he had The Cure, but what he never understood was that the simple stark fact of President Nixon was the problem, or at least the main symbol. It is hard to even remember precisely—much less explain—just what a terrible bummer the last half of ’68 turned into.

  Actually, it took less than three months. Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Bobby Kennedy in June… then Nixon was nominated in July, and in August the Democrats went to Chicago for the final act.

  By Labor Day it was all over. “The Movement” was finished, except for the trials, and somebody else was dealing. The choice between Nixon & Humphrey was no choice at all—not in the context of what had already gone down, between Selma and Chicago. To be offered Hubert Humphrey as a sort of withered booby prize for all those bloody failures seemed more like a deliberate insult than a choice.

  McGovern Wins; Strong Wallace Vote Edges Humphrey; Fourth Place Finish Staggers Ex-Frontrunner Muskie; Lindsay Quits Race

  —Milwaukee Journal, April 4, 1972

  Failure comes easy at a time like this. After eight days in this fantastic dungeon of a hotel, the idea of failing totally and miserably in my work seems absolutely logical. It is a fitting end to this gig—not only for me, but for everyone else who got trapped here, especially journalists.

  The Wisconsin primary is over now. It came to a shocking climax a few hours ago when George McGovern and George Wallace ran a blitz on everybody.

  The results were such a jolt to the Conventional Wisdom that now—with a cold grey dawn bloating up out of Lake Michigan and Hubert Humphrey still howling in his sleep despite the sedatives in his room directly above us—there is nobody in Milwaukee this morning, including me, who can even pretend to explain what really went down last night. The McGovern brain-trust will deny this, but the truth of the matter is that less than twenty-four hours ago it was impossible to get an even-money bet in McGovern’s headquarters that their man would finish first. Not even Warren Beatty, who is blossoming fast in his new role as one of McGovern’s most valuable and enthusiastic organizers, really believed George would finish better than a close second.

  A week earlier it would have been considered a sign of madness, among those who knew the score, to bet McGovern any better than a respectable third—but toward the end of the final week the word went out that George had picked up a wave and was showing surprising strength in some of the blue-collar hardhat wards that had been more or less conceded to either Humphrey or Muskie. David Broder of the Washington Post is generally acknowledged to be the ranking wizard on the campaign trail this year, and five days before the election he caused serious shock waves by offering to bet—with me at least—that McGovern would get more than 30 percent, and Wallace less than 10.

  He lost both ends of that bet, as it turned out—and I mean to hunt the bastard down and rip his teeth out if he tries to welsh—but the simple fact that Broder had that kind of confidence in McGovern’s strength was seen as a main signal by the professional pols and newsmen who’d been saying all along that the Wisconsin primary was so hopelessly confused that nobody in his right mind would try to predict the outcome.

  The consensus outlook, however, had Humphrey winning with almost 30 percent, McGovern just barely edging Muskie out of second with just under 25 percent, and fourth going to either Jackson or Wallace at roughly 10 percent.

  My own bets had Humphrey hanging on to beat McGovern just barely, by something like 27 to 26 percent, Wallace a strong third with about 20 percent, and poor Muskie crawling in a sick fourth with about 10 percent, to Jackson’s 9 percent. I was sorely tempted to pick up some easy money from Tom Morgan, Lindsay’s press secretary, who emptied his pockets one afternoon in the Schroeder hotel bar and came up with $102 to back his conviction that Lindsay would get between 10 and 15 percent—but I had to back off because I had come to like Lindsay; he struck me as the most interesting of all the Democratic candidates in the sense that he seemed open to almost any kind of idea… so I regretfully declined Morgan’s bet on the grounds that I would feel uncomfortable by profiting from Lindsay’s misfortune. (As it turned out, he got only 7 percent and dropped out…)

  But this was not the story I meant to write—or avoid writing—here; the idea was to say only that we suffered a terrible disaster on election night. All our finely laid plans were blasted into offal by the TV network computers before the night even got into first gear.

  When the polls closed at eight, Tim Crouse and I were still sitting idly around the T-shaped bar and desk in our National Affairs Suite at the Sheraton-Shroeder Hotel, laying detailed plans for what we assumed would be the next five or six hours of hellish suspense while the votes were being counted. It would be at least midnight, we felt, before the results would begin to take shape… and if it looked at all close we were prepared to work straight through until dawn or even noon, if necessary.

  The lead article in Sunday’s Washington Post echoed the unanimous conviction of all the five or six hundred big-time press/politics wizards who were gathered here for what they all called “the crunch”—the showdown, the first of the national primaries that would finally separate the sheep from the goats, as it were.

  After a month of intense research by some of the best political journalists in America, the Post had finally concluded that (1) “The Wisconsin primary election seems likely to make dramatic changes in the battle for the 1972 presidential nomination”… and (2) that “an unusually high degree of uncertainty remains as the contest nears its climax.”

  In other words, nobody had the vaguest idea what would happen here, except that some people were going to get hurt—and the smart-money consensus had Muskie and Lindsay as the most likely losers. The fact that Lindsay was almost totally out of money made him a pretty safe bet to do badly in Wisconsin, but Muskie—coming off a convincing victory in Illinois2 at least partially redeemed his disastrous failure in Florida—looked pretty good in Wisconsin, on paper… but there was still something weak and malignant in the spine of the Muskie campaign. There was a smell of death about it. He talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.

  Two weeks before the election the polls had Muskie running more or less even with Humphrey and well ahead of McGovern—but not even his staffers believed it; they kept smiling, but their morale had been cracked beyond repair in Florida, when Muskie called a meeting the day after the primary to announce that he was quitting the race. They had managed to talk him out of it, agreeing to work without pay until after Wisconsin, but when word of the candidate’s aborted withdrawal leaked out to the press… well, that was that. Nobody published it, nobody mentioned it on TV or radio—but from that point on, the only thing that kept the Muskie campaign alive was a grim political version of the old vaudeville idea that “the show must go on.”

  Midway in the final week of the campaign even Muskie himself began dropping hints that he knew he was doomed. At one point, during a whistlestop tour of small towns in the Fox River Valley near Green Bay, he fell into a public funk and began muttering about “needing a miracle”… and then, when the sense of depression began spreading like a piss-puddle on concrete, he invited the campaign-press regulars to help him celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday at a small hotel on a snowy night in Green Bay. But the party turned sour when his wife mashed a piece of the birthday cake in the face of Newsweek reporter Dick Stout, saying, “One good turn deserves another, eh Dick?”3

  David Broder of the Washington Post, one of the few press wizards to predict a McGovern victory in Wiscons
in. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  Jane Muskie. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  The Morning News

  Finally the True Wisdom arrives. I have been waiting for it all night. Nothing else has been available since Walter Cronkite signed off last night at ten, with McGovern already certified the clear winner and George Wallace a certain strong third.

  Nelson Benton on CBS is interviewing Wallace, saying, “Is it true that you’ve decided to clean up your act?”

  Wallace gives him a puzzled grin. He has never felt any need to cultivate the media.

  Humphrey comes on, “I think we did well here and I’m looking forward to the next primaries—Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.”

  Muskie is heading for Chicago & a painful meeting with his money men—to decide if he’ll stay in the race. He has already spent a million & a half dollars on a total disaster.

  But the news is no help. Frank McGee on NBC is acting like a wino: “We have the big winner in Wisconsin here with us this morning—Senator Proxmire, and also his lovely wife.” (pause) “Did I say Proxmire? I meant McGovern… of course… We have Senator McGovern here with us this morning, and his wife is with him…”

  Sometime around seven on Friday night—three days before the Wisconsin primary—I left my dreary suite in the Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel and drove across town to McGovern headquarters at the Milwaukee Inn, a comfortably obscure sort of motor hotel in a residential neighborhood near Lake Michigan. The streets were still icy from a snowstorm earlier in the week, and my rented purple Mustang had no snow tires.

  The car was extremely unstable—one of those Detroit classics, apparently assembled by junkies to teach the rest of us a lesson. I had already been forced to remove the air filter, in order to manipulate the automatic choke by hand, but there was no way to cure the unnerving accelerator delay. It was totally unpredictable. At some stoplights the car would move out normally, but at others it would try to stall, seeming to want more gas—and then suddenly leap ahead like a mule gone amok from a bee sting.