Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Which hardly matters. The point is that anybody could have walked up to that urinal next to McGovern at that moment, and asked him anything they wanted—and he would have answered, the same way he answered me.

  That is the odd magic of the New Hampshire primary, and I didn’t really appreciate it until about two months later when I realized that every time McGovern wanted to piss, at least nine Secret Service agents would swoop into the nearest men’s room and clear it completely, then cordon off the whole area while the poor bastard went in alone to empty his bladder.

  This was only one of the changes in the style of the McGovern campaign that Crouse and I tried to discuss rationally in the dawn hours of that Friday morning in Manchester. George was scheduled to arrive at the local airport at 10:15, then lead a huge caravan of press, staff, and SS men to the J. F. McElwain Shoe Factory on Silver Street—a symbolic return to The Roots; his first full-dress campaign appearance since the disastrous “Eagleton affair.”

  It was the first time since the day after the California primary that we’d had a chance to talk seriously about McGovern. We had covered most of the primaries together, and we had both been in Miami for the convention, but I don’t recall uttering a single coherent sentence the whole time I was down there—except perhaps on Thursday afternoon in the basement coffee shop of the Doral Beach Hotel, when I spent an hour or so denouncing McGovern for selecting a “bum” and a “hack” like Eagleton to share the ticket with him. Mankiewicz had not brought the official word down from the penthouse yet, but the name had already leaked and nobody seemed very happy about it.

  The lobby of the Doral was jammed with media people, waiting for the announcement, but after milling around up there for a while I went down to the coffee shop with Dave Sugarman, a twenty-two-year-old Dartmouth student from Manchester who had signed on as a volunteer “press aide” in New Hampshire and gone on to handle McGovern press operations in several other key primary states. He was obviously less than pleased with the Eagleton choice. But he was, after all, on The Staff—so he did his duty and tried to calm me down.

  He failed. I had been without sleep for two or three days at the time, and my temper was close to the surface. Beyond that, I had spent the past five or six days brooding angrily over the list of vice-presidential possibilities that McGovern had floated in the New York Times several days before the convention even started. I recall telling Mankiewicz in the coffee shop on Friday night that I had never seen so many bums and hacks listed in a single paragraph in any publication for any reason.

  Two names that come to mind are Governor Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. The others—including Eagleton and Shriver—were almost as bad, I thought. But Frank assured me that my wrath was premature. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

  The clear implication, which made fine sense at the time, was that McGovern was merely tossing a few bones to the demoralized “party bosses” who knew they were about to get steam-rollered. Eagleton was a Muskie man, Shriver was a Kennedy by marriage and a good friend of both Daley and Humphrey, Carter and Bumpers were Good Ole Boys… but I had spent enough time around Mankiewicz in the past six months to understand that he was saying all these names were just decoys: that when the deal went down, McGovern would choose his vice-president with the same merciless eye to the New Politics that had characterized his sweep through the primaries.3

  So there was nothing personal in my loud objections to Eagleton a week later. It struck me as a cheap and unnecessary concession to the pieced-off ward-heeler syndrome that McGovern had been fighting all along. Tom Eagleton was exactly the kind of VP candidate that Muskie or Humphrey would have chosen: a harmless, Catholic, neo-liberal Rotarian nebbish from one of the border states, who presumably wouldn’t make waves. A “progressive young centrist” with more ambition than brains: Eagleton would have run with anybody. Four years earlier he had seen Hubert lift Muskie out of obscurity and turn him into a national figure, even in defeat. Big Ed had blown it, of course, but his role in the ’68 campaign had given him priceless Exposure—the same kind of Exposure that Eagleton knew he would need as a springboard to the White House in ’76 or ’80, depending on whether McGovern won or lost in ’72.

  Ex-Vice-Presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton with James Knowlton of the New York Times at right. Below: Sargent Shriver, Eagleton’s replacement. STUART BRATESMAN

  STUART BRATESMAN

  But winning or losing didn’t really matter to Eagleton. The important thing was getting on the ticket. Exposure. Recognition. No more of this “Tom Who?” bullshit. He was a career politician, and he had driven himself harder than all but a few people knew, to get where he was on that Thursday afternoon in Miami when he heard McGovern’s voice on the telephone.

  Did he have any “skeletons in his closet?”

  Fuck no, he didn’t. At least none that either Mankiewicz or Hart were going to locate that afternoon without a king-hell set of bolt-cutters. Eagleton understood—like all the rest of us in Miami that day—that McGovern had to name his choice by 4:00 P.M. or take his chances with whoever the convention might eventually nominate in what would surely have been a brain-rattling holocaust on Thursday night. It was difficult enough with Eagleton already chosen; God only knows who might have emerged if the delegates had actually been forced to name the vice-presidential nominee in an all-night floor fight. Given the nature and mood of the people on that floor, McGovern might have found himself running with Evel Knievel.

  So all this gibberish about how many questions Mankiewicz asked Eagleton and how much truth Eagleton avoided telling is beside the point. The deed was done when McGovern made the call. Only a lunatic would have expected Eagleton to start babbling about his “shock treatments” at that point. Shit, all he had to do was stall for fifteen minutes; just keep talking… it was almost four o’clock, and McGovern was out of options.

  Just exactly why things came to this desperate pass is still not clear. It is almost impossible now to find anybody remotely associated with McGovern who will admit to having been for Eagleton. He “sort of happened,” they say, “because none of the others were quite right.” Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers, was a Catholic, but a fallen one. (“He hasn’t been to church in twenty years,” said one McGovern aide.) Wisconsin Governor Pat Lucey was Catholic, but his wife was given to tantrums in the Martha Mitchell style… and Mayor Kevin White of Boston was not acceptable to Ted Kennedy. At least that’s how I heard it from one of McGovern’s speech writers. The official public version, however, says White was vetoed by the two kingpins of McGovern’s Massachusetts delegation: Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Congressman Robert F. Drinian.

  One member of the Massachusetts delegation told me Galbraith and Drinian had nothing to do with White’s rejection—but when I asked Galbraith about it in Miami, on the first night of the GOP convention, he first refused to say anything at all—but when I persisted he finally said, “Well, I’ll tell you this much—it wasn’t Teddy.” Selah.4

  The other vice-presidential finalists were rejected for a variety of reasons that don’t really matter much now, because the point of the whole grim story is that McGovern and his brain-trust were determined from the start to use the VP as a peace offering to the Old Politics gang they’d just beaten. It was crucial, they felt, to select somebody acceptable to the Old Guard: The Meany/Daley/Muskie/Humphrey/Truman/LBJ axis—because McGovern needed those bastards to beat Nixon.

  Which may be true—or at least as true as the hoary wisdom that said a maverick like McGovern couldn’t possibly win the Democratic nomination because Ed Muskie began the campaign with a lock on the Party Machinery and all the pols who mattered.

  You can’t beat City Hall, right?

  One of McGovern’s closest advisors now is a widely-respected political wizard named Fred Dutton, a forty-nine-year-old Washington lawyer and longtime Kennedy advisor who recently wrote a book c
alled Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970’s. Dutton’s main theory revolves around the idea that the politics of the Seventies will be drastically different from the politics of the last thirty or even forty years; that the 1970s will produce a “cornerstone generation” that will bring about a major historical watershed in American politics.

  “The politics of the Seventies offer one of those rare chances to rally a new following,” he says, “or at least to provoke a different configuration, out of this immense section of younger voters who are still at an impressionable and responsive stage. If an exciting individual or cause really stirs this generation, it could be activated in numbers that make irrelevant any past indicator of political participation among the young, and it would then become one of the few human waves of historic consequence. If this still unmarshalled mass is allowed to scatter, or a substantial part of it is politically turned off, it will pass by as one of the great lost opportunities in American politics and history.”

  The book makes more sense—to me, at least—than anything I’ve read about politics in ten years. It is a cool, scholarly affirmation of the same instinct that plunged me and almost (but not quite) half the population of this Rocky Mountain valley where I live into what came to be known as “The Aspen Freak Power Uprising” of 1969 and ’70.

  Ah yes… but that is a different story. No time for it now.

  * * *

  We were talking about Fred Dutton’s book, which reads like a perfect blueprint for everything the McGovern campaign seemed to stand for—until sometime around the middle of the California primary, when Dutton finally agreed to take an active, out-front role, as one of George’s main advisors. This was also the fateful point in time when it suddenly became clear to almost every political pro in the country except Hubert Humphrey and his campaign manager that McGovern was going to be the Democratic Party’s candidate against Nixon in 1972… and Dutton was not along when the time came for those who saw the handwriting on the wall, as it were, to come out of their holes and sign on. Senators Frank Church of Idaho, Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, John Tunney of California: These three and many more scratched all their previous commitments and got going strong behind McGovern. By June 1—six days before the vote in California—George had more rich and powerful friends than he knew what to do with.

  Not everyone agrees that June 1 was also the day—give or take a few—when the McGovern campaign seemed to peak and start losing its energy. There was still enough momentum to edge Hubert in California and to win New York by a landslide against no opposition… and enough tactical expertise to croak the ABM (Anybody But McGovern) Movement in Miami…

  But once that was done—the moment his troops understood that George had actually won the nomination—his act started falling apart.

  Another problem in Wisconsin, as elsewhere, is patching things up with old-time Democrats and labor leaders who were strong backers of Senator Humphrey or Senator Muskie. The organization is working on it. Everywhere that an office is opened, the Democratic Party and local candidates are invited to share it. Bumper stickers and signs are being made available to permit candidates to have their names on them with Mr. McGovern. And other efforts are being made…

  … a move was made a few days ago to try to win favor from Rep. Clement J. Zablocki, a Democrat who has been a strong supporter of the Vietnam war policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Mr. Zablocki, whose Fourth (congressional) District includes Milwaukee’s working class South Side, is faced with primary opposition Sept. 12, from Grant Waldo, an anti-war candidate.

  When the McGovern state organizers found that their Fourth District chairman was running Mr. Waldo’s campaign, they squeezed him out abruptly. “We can’t possibly win the Fourth without the Zablocki voters,” Mr. Dixon explained.

  —excerpt from a New York Times article headlined

  “Wisconsin McGovern Team Revives Preprimary Faith,”

  by Douglas Kneeland, 8/25/72

  There will not be universal agreement at this time on the idea that Nixon is seriously worried about losing to McGovern in November. The September 1 Gallup Poll showed Nixon leading by 61 percent to 30 percent and still climbing… while McGovern, on the same day, was appearing on the CBS evening news to deny that his recently hired campaign chairman, former Democratic Party chief Larry O’Brien, was threatening to quit because the campaign is “disorganized” and “uncoordinated.” Moments later, O’Brien appeared on the screen to say things weren’t really that bad, and that there was no truth to any rumors concerning his inability to stay in the same room for more than forty seconds with Gary Hart, McGovern’s campaign manager…. Then Hart came on to deny any and all rumors to the effect that he would just as soon feed O’Brien, head-first, into the nearest meat grinder.

  This kind of thing is extremely heavy-duty for a presidential candidate. Private power struggles inside a campaign are common enough, but when one of your top three men flips out and starts blowing his bile all over the national press and the TV networks, it means you’re in a lot more trouble than you realized… and when the howler is a veteran professional pol like O’Brien, you have to start flirting with words like Madness, Treachery, and Doom.

  It would have seemed far more logical if Gary Hart had been the one to flip out. After all, he’s only thirty-four years old, managing his first presidential campaign, not used to this kind of pressure, etc…. but when I called Gary today, almost immediately after catching his strange act on the Cronkite show, he sounded more cheerful and relaxed than I’d ever heard him. It was like calling McGovern headquarters and talking with Alfred E. Newman… “What! Me worry?”

  But Hart has been talking like that since last Christmas: relentless optimism. There was never any doubt in his mind—at least not in any conversation with me—that McGovern was going to win the Democratic nomination, and then the presidency. One of his central beliefs for the past two years has been that winning the Democratic nomination would be much harder than beating Nixon.

  He explained it to me one night in Nebraska, sitting in the bar of the Omaha Hilton on the day before the primary: Nixon was a very vulnerable incumbent, he’d failed to end the war, he’d botched the economy, he was a terrible campaigner, he would crack under pressure, nobody trusted him, etc….

  So any Democratic candidate could beat Nixon, and all the candidates knew it. That’s why they’d been fighting like wolverines for the nomination—especially Humphrey, who was a far more effective campaigner than Nixon, and who had just inherited enough of the “regular” old-line party machinery, money, and connections from the Muskie campaign to make McGovern go into California and take on what amounted to the entire Old Guard of the Democratic Party… California was the key to both the nomination and the White House; a victory on the coast would make all the rest seem easy.

  Hart and I agreed on all this, at the time. Nixon was obviously vulnerable, and he was such a rotten campaigner that, four years ago, Humphrey—even without the Youth Vote or the activist Left—had gained something like fifteen points on Nixon in seven weeks, and only lost by an eyelash. So this time around, with even a third of the 25 million potential new voters added to Hubert’s ’68 power base, anybody who could win the Democratic nomination was almost a cinch to win the presidency.

  Now, looking back on that conversation, I can see a few flaws in our thinking. We should have known, for instance, that Nixon had been hoarding his best shots for the ’72 stretch drive: The China/Russian trips, pulling the troops out of Vietnam, ram-rodding the economy… but none of these things, no matter how successful, would change enough votes to offset the Youth Vote. The day after he won the nomination, McGovern would bank at least five million eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds’ votes… and another five million by mid-October, after massive campus registration drives.

  So the minor flaws didn’t matter a hell of a lot. It was the Big One—the Humphrey Sidewinder—that blew half the spine out of McGovern’s campaig
n strategy. The one thing that apparently never occurred to either Hart or Frank Mankiewicz—or to me either, for that matter, despite my rancid contempt for the Humphrey/Meany axis and everything it stood for—was the ominous possibility that those evil bastards would refuse to close ranks behind McGovern once he had the nomination. It was almost inconceivable that they would be so bitter in defeat that they would tacitly deliver their own supporters to a conservative Republican incumbent, instead of at least trying to rally them behind the candidate of their own party… but this is what they have done, and in doing it they have managed to crack the very foundations of what McGovern had naturally assumed would be the traditional hard core of his Democratic Party power base.

  The trademark of the McGovern campaign since it started has been ineptitude which somehow turns into victory.

  —unnamed “McGovern topsider,” quote in Newsweek, 8/14/72

  God only knows who actually said that. It sounds like vintage Mankiewicz—from that speedy, free-falling era that ended in California… not on the night of June 6, when the votes were counted, but somewhere prior to June 1, when Frank and all the others were still wallowing crazily in the news from all those polls that said McGovern was going to stomp Humphrey in California by anywhere from fifteen to twenty percentage points.