Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  HST: I don’t follow that.

  Stearns: Temporary rule votes until you get all through the credential challenges. That is, those 151 unseated delegates from California went on voting right to the end of the evening until the majority report was passed. The same was true of Illinois; the Singer/Jackson delegation would have voted right to the end, regardless of whether Daley had been seated or not. The last hope the Humphrey people had was that we would desert Jackson, that is betray our word on that agreement, and then be able to use that Illinois delegation plus the 151 votes from California to defeat the passage of the majority report on credentials, which would have put us right back at the beginning again. But we kept our word.

  HST: I didn’t know that. Even the people who had been unseated could vote on the final passage.

  Stearns: They would vote on the passage of the final report. And if we did not keep our word—if Jackson had been unseated—he might be angry enough to go out and by that point we would have also offended the women, and would have offended the blacks, and then they could have put together enough of a vote to defeat the passage of the majority report [which would have cost McGovern 151 delegates for “the California challenge”—and probably doomed his chance for the nomination]. But by the time we finished that night, they were so demoralized that they just let it go through on a voice vote. They lost their appetite to fight. On the next morning, Muskie and Humphrey were through.

  HST: According to the Haynes Johnson story, they pretty well gave up at the end of the South Carolina roll-call. They knew it.

  Stearns: It was obvious. But even as late as the nomination roll-call, I had an AFL-CIO guy come up to me and tell me that we only had 1451 votes for the nomination. What he was telling me was my own figure, from our absolutely hard count on the California thing, not realizing we just seated 151 delegates from California to take the total up to 1600.

  HST: How important was O’Hara’s ruling then? What accounts for the worry over O’Hara’s ruling? And the tremendous spread that you got in the end? O’Hara’s ruling wouldn’t matter, it would appear.

  Dougherty: Yeah, it would have. If he’d ruled different, we wouldn’t… it kinda broke things, and we needed a break at that point.

  Stearns: You not only deal with numbers at a Convention, you deal with psychology.

  Dougherty: When a train starts leaving the station…

  Stearns: If people think you’re gonna lose, votes can just melt away.

  Dougherty: See, just like on the Eagleton vote, there were all kinds of rumors around the floor that we didn’t have the votes.

  HST: Yeah, I was on the floor. People were trying to leave.

  Stearns: We didn’t turn it on at that point because we knew we had the votes, and if we turned it on, we would have destroyed the atmosphere for McGovern’s presentation.

  HST: For good or ill.

  Dougherty: It’s the first time in the history of this country that the presidential nominating speech was given at three o’clock in the morning.

  Stearns: It was one of the best hours in the history of the Democratic Party, that hour. I almost cried.

  HST: That was the best speech I’ve ever heard him give. I’ve been following the campaign ever since way back in New Hampshire, and that’s the best I’ve ever heard him speak.

  Dougherty: He had 126 guys writing his speech for him, but I think he wrote the final draft himself.

  HST: Whose idea was it to put in the line about you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore? I thought that was the best part of the…

  Stearns: That was his. “I want those doors open and that war closed” was also his idea.

  HST: That was a good shot at Nixon. I saw it was almost over, so I decided to flee. I was in the cab listening to it on the way back, and the cab driver—a total stranger—just turned around and laughed, as if I understood somehow, too.

  HST: Where are you going now?

  Stearns: I’m getting my assignments these days from the New York Times. There are things that I read about in the Times before anybody talked to me. As I understand it from Jim Naughton’s latest story, I’m supposed to take the states west of the Mississippi.

  HST: Is that in today?

  Stearns: It was in the Times yesterday. First I ever heard of it. It really pissed me off. I mean, somebody ought to tell me before…

  Dougherty: That’s George McGovern for ya.

  Stearns: Yeah, but if you got time to talk to Jim Naughton, you got time…

  Dougherty: What about Dick Stout’s Newsweek story?

  Stearns: I didn’t see that.

  Dougherty: Did you see that one Monday? About Dick Dougherty being press secretary and Mankiewicz traveling. Hart being in charge of the campaign.

  Stearns: Oh yeah, they had you in there as a seasoned political pro.

  Dougherty: Yeah. He got that in Maryland the day I was out there with McGovern. I found out it was gonna be in there. So I went to Dick Stout and I said, “Where in the hell did you get that?” Dick Stout said he ran into Fred Dutton comin’ outta the bank in Washington and Fred told him the whole deal. Then Dutton came to me and he said, “I wonder if Cunningham [McGovern’s administrative assistant] and those guys know about it.” So I said, “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  When I got in town I got ahold of Dick Dougherty [McGovern’s press secretary] and told him the whole deal and he said, “For chrissakes.” So he got ahold of Dick Stout and found out exactly how much was gonna be in that story and then I went to Gary and I said, “Here’s what’s gonna be in Newsweek on Monday. I think some of these guys should be aware.” Cunningham wasn’t even aware, or any of them. But that’s typical George McGovern, you know.

  [Garbled conversation. Whistling. Clicks. Airplane.]

  HST: You taking off today?

  Stearns: No, I think not. If my luck holds, I’ll catch a late flight back to Washington tomorrow. Today I feel like sitting out here on this beach and drinking for a while.

  It was somewhere around eight-thirty or nine on Sunday evening when I dragged myself onto a plane out of Miami—headed for Atlanta and L.A. The ’72 Democratic Convention was over. McGovern had wrapped it up just before dawn on Friday, accepting the bloody nomination with an elegant, finely crafted speech that might have had quite an impact on the national TV audience… (Time correspondent Hugh Sidey called it “perhaps as pure an expression as George McGovern has ever given of his particular moralistic sense of the nation”)… but the main, middle-American bulk of the national TV audience tends to wither away around midnight, and anybody still glued to the tube at 3:30 A.M. Miami time is probably too stoned or twisted to recognize McGovern anyway.

  A few hundred ex-Muskie/Humphrey/Jackson delegates had lingered long enough to cheer Ted Kennedy’s bland speech, but they started drifting away when George came on—hurrying out the exits of the air-conditioned hall, into the muggy darkness of the parking lot to fetch up a waiting cab and go back to whichever one of the sixty-five official convention hotels they were staying in… hoping to find the tail end of a party or at least one free drink before catching a few hours’ sleep and then heading back home on one of the afternoon planes: back to St. Louis, Altoona, Butte…

  By sundown on Friday the “political hotels” were almost empty. In the Doral Beach—McGovern’s ocean-front headquarters hotel—Southern Bell Telephone workers were dragging what looked like about five thousand miles of multicolored wires, junction boxes, and cables out of the empty Press/Operations complex on the mezzanine. Down in the lobby, a Cuban wedding (Martinez-Hernandez: 8:30-10:30) had taken over the vast, ornately sculptured Banquet Room that ten hours earlier had been jammed with hundreds of young, scruffy-looking McGovern volunteers celebrating the end of one of the longest and most unlikely trips in the history of American politics… it was a quiet party, by most Convention standards: free beer for the troops, bring your own grass, guitar-minstrels working out here and there; but not much noise, no whooping & sh
outing, no madness….6

  The atmosphere at the victory party was not much different from the atmosphere of the Convention itself: very cool and efficient, very much under control at all times… get the job done, don’t fuck around, avoid violence, shoot ten seconds after you see the whites of their eyes.

  It was a McGovern party from start to finish. Everything went according to plan—or almost everything; as always, there were a few stark exceptions. Minor snarls here and there, but not many big ones. McGovern brought his act into Miami with the same kind of fine-focus precision that carried him all the way from New Hampshire to California… and, as usual, it made all the other acts look surprisingly sloppy.

  I was trapped in the Doral for ten days, shuttling back & forth between the hotel and the Convention Hall by any means available: taxi, my rented green convertible, and occasionally down the canal in the fast white “staff taxi” speedboat that McGovern’s people used to get from the Doral to the Hall by water, whenever Collins Avenue was jammed up with sight-seer traffic… and in retrospect, I think that boat trip was the only thing I did all week that I actually enjoyed.

  There was a lot of talk in the press about “the spontaneous outburst of fun and games” on Thursday night—when the delegates, who had been so deadly serious for the first three sessions, suddenly ran wild on the floor and delayed McGovern’s long-awaited acceptance speech until 3:30 A.M. by tying the convention in knots with a long outburst of frivolous squabbling over the vice-presidential nomination. Newsweek described it as “a comic interlude, a burst of silliness on the part of the delegates whose taut bonds of decorum and discipline seemed suddenly to snap, now that it didn’t make any difference.”

  There was not much laughter in Miami, on the floor or anywhere else, and from where I stood that famous “comic interlude” on Thursday night looked more like the first scattered signs of mass Fatigue Hysteria, if the goddamn thing didn’t end soon. What the press mistook for relaxed levity was actually a mood of ugly restlessness that by 3:00 A.M. on Friday was bordering on rebellion. All over the floor I saw people caving in to the lure of booze, and in the crowded aisle between the California and Wisconsin delegations a smiling freak with a bottle of liquid THC was giving free hits to anybody who still had the strength to stick their tongue out.

  After four hours of listening to a seemingly endless parade of shameless dingbats who saw no harm in cadging some free exposure on national TV by nominating each other for vice-president, about half the delegates in the hall were beginning to lose control. On the floor just in front of the New York delegation, leaning against the now-empty VIP box once occupied by Muriel Humphrey, a small blonde girl who once worked for the Lindsay campaign was sharing a nasal inhaler full of crushed amyls with a handful of new-found friends.

  Each candidate was entitled to a fifteen-minute nominating speech and two five-minute seconding speeches. The nightmare dragged on for four hours, and after the first forty minutes there was not one delegate in fifty on the floor, who either knew or cared who was speaking. No doubt there were flashes of eloquence, now and then: Probably Mike Gravel and Cissy Farentholt said a few things that might have been worth hearing, under different circumstances… but on that long Thursday night in Miami, with Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri waiting nervously in the wings to come out and accept the vice-presidential nomination that McGovern had sealed for him twelve hours earlier, every delegate in the hall understood that whatever these other seven candidates were saying up there on the rostrum, they were saying for reasons that had nothing to do with who was going to be the Democratic candidate for vice-president in November… and it was not going to be ex-Massachusetts governor “Chub” Peabody, or a grinning dimwit named Stanley Arnold from New York City who said he was The Businessman’s Candidate, or some black Step’n’Fetchit-style Wallace delegate from Texas called Clay Smothers.

  But these brainless bastards persisted, nonetheless, using up half the night and all the prime time on TV, debasing the whole convention with a blizzard of self-serving gibberish that drove whatever was left of the national TV audience to bed or the Late Late Show.

  Thursday was not a good day for McGovern. By noon there was not much left of Wednesday night’s Triumphant Warrior smile. He spent most of Thursday afternoon grappling with a long list of vice-presidential possibilities and by two, the Doral lobby was foaming with reporters and TV cameras. The name had to be formally submitted by 3:59 P.M., but it was 4:05 when Mankiewicz finally appeared to say McGovern had decided on Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri.

  There is a very tangled story behind that choice, but I don’t feel like writing it now. My immediate reaction was not enthusiastic, and the staff people I talked to seemed vaguely depressed—if only because it was a concession to “Old Politics,” a nice-looking Catholic boy from Missouri with friends in the Labor Movement. His acceptance speech that night was not memorable—perhaps because it was followed by the long-awaited appearance of Ted Kennedy, who had turned the job down.

  Kennedy’s speech was not memorable either: “Let us bury the hatchet, etc…. and Get Behind the Ticket.” There was something hollow about it, when McGovern came on he made Kennedy sound like an old-timer.

  Later that night, at a party on the roof of the Doral, a McGovern staffer asked me who I would have chosen for VP… and finally, after long brooding, I said I would have chosen Ron Dellums, the black congressman from Berkeley.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said. “That would be suicide!”

  I shrugged.

  “Why Dellums?” he asked.

  “Why not?” I said. “He offered it to Mayor Daley before he called Eagleton.”

  “No!” he shouted. “Not Daley! That’s a lie!”

  “I was in the room when he made the call,” I said. “Ask anybody who was there—Gary, Frank Dutton—they weren’t happy about it, but they said he’d be good for the ticket.”

  He stared at me. “What did Daley say?” he asked finally.

  I laughed. “Christ, you believed that, didn’t you?”

  He had, for just an instant. After all, there was a lot of talk about “pragmatism” in Miami, and Illinois was a key state… I decided to try the Daley rumor on other staff people, to see their reactions.

  But I never got around to it. I forgot all about it, in fact, until I flipped through my notebook on the midnight jet from Atlanta. I came across a statement by Ron Dellums. It depressed me, for some reason, but it seems like a good way to end this goddamn thing. Dellums writes pretty good, for a politician. It’s part of the statement he distributed when he switched his support from Shirley Chisholm to McGovern:

  The great bulk of that coalition committed to change, human freedom and justice in the country has moved actively and powerfully behind the candidacy of Senator McGovern. That coalition of hope, conscience, morality and humanity—of the powerless and the voiceless—that did not exist in 1964, that expressed itself in outrage and frustration in 1968, and in 1972 began to form and welded itself imperfectly but courageously and lifted a man to the brink of the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States, and within a short but laborious step from the Presidency of the United States. The coalition that has formed behind Senator McGovern has battled the odds, baffled the pollsters, and beat the bosses. It is my conviction that when that total coalition of the victims in this country is ever formed, this potential for change would be unheralded, for it could pose a real alternative to expediency and status quo politics in America.

  —Ron Dellums, July 9, 1972

  [Postscript]

  Friday, Aug. 11

  National Broadcasting Company, Inc.

  Thirty Rockefeller Plaza

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  CIRCLE 7-8300

  Dear Hunter,

  Because we share a fear and loathing for things which aren’t true, I point out that it ain’t true that I was taken in by the McGoverns on the South Carolina challenge in Miami Beach.

  While the
y were still switching votes, I said on the air that they might be trying to lose it deliberately. We had the floor people try to check this out and they ran into a couple of poolroom liars employed by McGovern who said yas, yas, it was a defeat, etc., but a little while later Doug Kiker got Pat Lucey to tell it all. (Lucey called headquarters for permission, first, as Kiker waited.)

  We were pleased that we got it right. Adam Clymer of the Sun called the next day with congratulations. I think the reason most people thought we blew the story is that CBS blew it badly. I guess I should have gone through the night pointing out what happened, but we got involved in the California roll-call and a lot of other stuff, and suddenly it was dawn.

  Other than that I enjoyed your convention piece and let’s have a double Margarita when we next meet.

  J. Chancellor

  Sept 11 ’72

  Owl Farm

  Woody Creek

  Colorado

  Dear John….

  You filthy skunk-sucking bastard! What kind of gall would prompt you to write me a letter like that sac of pus dated Aug. 11? I checked your story—about how NBC had the South Carolina trip all figured out—with Mrs. Lucey (Pat wouldn’t talk to me, for some reason), and she said both you & Kiker were so fucked up on drugs that you both kept calling it “the South Dakota challenge,” despite her attempts to correct you. She was baffled by your behavior, she said, until Mankiewicz told her about you and LSD-25. Then, about an hour later, Bill Daughtery (sp?) found Kiker on his knees in the darkness outside McGovern’s command trailer, apparently trying to choke himself with his own hands… but, when Bill grabbed him, Kiker said he was trying to un-screw his head from what he called his “neck-pipe,” so he could “check the wiring” in his own brain.