Playboy Magazine, December 1974
Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith
Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 76
Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous
The View from Key West: Ninety Miles North of Havana and Nine Hundred Years on the Campaign Trail. . . Farewell to the Boys on the Bus: Or, Johnny, I Never Knew Ye. . . Another Rude and Wistful Tale from the Bowels of the American Dream, With Notes, Nightmares and Other Strange Memories from Manchester, Boston, Miami and Plains, Georgia. . . And 440 Volts from Castrato, the Demon Lover of Coconut Grove
A lot of people will tell you that horses get spooked because they're just naturally nervous and jittery, but that ain't right. What you have to remember is that a horse sees things maybe six or seven times bigger than we do.
-- Billy Herman, a harness-racing trainer at Pompano Park in Miami
This news just came over the radio, followed by a song about "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey and more money. . ." and then came a news item about a Polish gentleman who was arrested earlier today for throwing "more than two dozen bowling balls into the sea off a pier in Fort Lauderdale" because, he told arresting officers, "he thought they were nigger eggs."
. . . We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out. Which could happen a lot sooner than even Henry Kissinger thinks. . . Because this is, after all, another election year, and almost everybody I talk to seems to feel we are headed for strangeness. . . of one sort or another. And some people say we are already deep in the midst of it. Which may be true. The evidence points both ways. . . But from my perch in this plastic catbird seat out here on the southernmost rim of Key West, the barometer looks to be falling so fast on all fronts that it no longer matters. And now comes this filthy news in the latest Gallup Poll that Hubert Humphrey will be our next president. . . Or, failing that, he will foul the national air for the next six months and drive us all to smack with his poison gibberish.
Jesus, no wonder that poor bastard up in Fort Lauderdale ran amok and decided that all bowling balls were actually nigger eggs that would have to be hurled, at once, into shark-infested waters. He was probably a desperate political activist of some kind trying to send a message to Washington.
Last night, on this same radio station, I heard a warning about "a new outbreak of dog mutilations in Coconut Grove." The disc jockey reading the news sounded angry and agitated. "Three more mongrel dogs were found castrated and barely alive tonight," he said, "and investigating officers said there was no doubt that all three animals were victims of the same bloodthirsty psychotic -- a stocky middle-aged Cuban known as 'Castrato' -- who has terrorized dog owners in Coconut Grove for the past three months.
"Today's mutilations, police said, were executed with the same sadistic precision as all the others. According to the owner of one victim, a half-breed chow watchdog named Willie, the dog was 'minding his own business, just lying out there in the driveway, when all of a sudden I heard him start yelping and I looked out the front door just in time to see this dirty little spic shoot him again with one of those electric flashlight guns. Then the sonofabitch grabbed Willie by the hind legs and threw him into the back of an old red pickup. I yelled at him, but by the time I got hold of my shotgun and ran out on the porch, he was gone. It all happened so fast that I didn't even get the license number off the truck.' "
The voice on the radio paused for a long moment, then dipped a few octaves and went on with the story: 'Several hours later, police said, Willie and two other dogs -- both mongrels -- were found in a vacant lot near the Dinner Key yacht marina. All three had been expertly castrated. . ."
Another long pause, followed by a moaning sound as the radio voice seemed to crack and stutter momentarily. . . And then it continued, very slowly: "The nature of the wounds, police said, left no room for doubt that today's mutilations were the work of the same fiendish hand responsible for all but two of the 49 previous dog castrations in Coconut Grove this year.
" 'This is definitely the work of Castrato,' said Senior Dog Warden Lionel Olay at a hastily called press conference late this afternoon. 'Look at the razor work on this mongrel chow,' Olay told reporters. 'These cuts are surgically perfect, and so is this cauterization. This man you call "Castrato" is no amateur, gentlemen. This is very artistic surgery -- maybe 50 or 55 seconds from start to finish, assuming he works with a whip-steel straight razor and a 220-volt soldering iron.'
"Olay ended the press conference on a humorous note, urging reporters to 'work like dogs until this case is cracked. And if any of you people own mongrels,' he added, 'either keep them out of Coconut Grove or have them put to sleep.'
"Meanwhile," said the newscaster, "South Miami police have warned all dog owners in the area to be on the lookout for a red pickup truck cruising slowly in residential neighborhoods. The driver, a small but muscular Cuban between 40 and 50 years old, is known to be armed with an extremely dangerous, high-voltage electric weapon called a 'Taser' and is also criminally insane."
Jesus Christ! I'm not sure I can handle this kind of news and frantic stimulus at four o'clock in the morning -- especially with a head full of speed, booze and Percodan. It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these circumstances. The idea of covering even the early stages of this cynical and increasingly retrograde campaign has already plunged me into a condition bordering on terminal despair, and if I thought I might have to stay with these people all the way to November I would change my name and seek work as a professional alligator poacher in the swamps around Lake Okeechobee. My frame of mind is not right for another long and maddening year of total involvement in a presidential campaign. . . and somewhere in the back of my brain lurks a growing suspicion that this campaign is not right either; but that is not the kind of judgment any journalist should make at this point. At least not in print.
So for the moment I will try to suspend both the despair and the final judgment. Both will be massively justified in the next few months, I think -- and until then I can fall back on the firmly held but rarely quoted conviction of most big-time Washington pols that nobody can function at top form on a full-time basis in more than one presidential campaign. This rule of thumb has never been applied to journalists, to my knowledge, but there is ample evidence to suggest it should be. There is no reason to think that even the best and brightest of journalists, as it were, can repeatedly or even more than once crank themselves up to the level of genuinely fanatical energy, commitment and total concentration it takes to live in the speeding vortex of a presidential campaign from start to finish. There is not enough room on that hell-bound train for anybody who wants to relax and act human now and then. It is a gig for ambitious zealots and terminal action-junkies. . . and this is especially true of a campaign like this one, which so far lacks any central, overriding issue like the war in Vietnam that brought so many talented and totally dedicated nonpoliticians into the '68 and '72 campaigns.
The issues this time are too varied and far too complex for the instant polarization of a Which Side Are You On? crusade. There will not be many ideologues seriously involved in the '76 campaign; this one is a technicians' trip, run by and for politicians. . . Which is not really a hell of a lot different from any other campaign, except that this time it is going to be painfully obvious. This time, on the 200th anniversary of what used to be called "The American Dream," we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after day -- on the tube and in the headlines -- in this mess we have made for ourselves.
Today, wherever in this world I meet a man or woman who fought for Spanish liberty, I meet a kindred soul. In those years we lived our best, and what has come after and what there is to come can never carry us to those heights again.
-- from The Education of a Correspondent by Herbert Matthews
My problem with this campaign began not quite two years ago, in May of 1974, when I flew down to Georgia
with Teddy Kennedy and ran into Jimmy Carter. The meeting was not so much accidental as inevitable: I knew almost nothing about Carter at the time, and that was all I wanted to know. He was the lame duck governor of Georgia who had nominated "Scoop" Jackson at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, and in the course of that year I had written some ugly things about him.
. . .Or at least that's what he told me when I showed up at the governor's mansion for breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning. I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates. . . ah, but let's not get into that, at least not quite yet. I just reread that Castrato business, and it strikes me that I am probably just one or two twisted tangents away from terminal fusing of the brain circuits.
Yes, the point: my feeling for Southern politicians is not especially warm, even now. Ever since the first cannonballs fell on Fort Sumter in 1861, Southern politics has been dominated by thieves, bigots, warmongers and buffoons. There were governors like Earl Long in Louisiana, "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in Alabama and Orval Faubus in Arkansas. . . and senators like Bilbo and Eastland from Mississippi, Smathers and Gurney from Florida. . . and Lyndon Johnson from Texas.
Toward the end of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the governor of Georgia was a white trash dingbat named Lester Maddox -- who is still with us, in one crude form or another -- and when the curtain finally falls on George Wallace, he will probably go down in history as the Greatest Thief of them all. Wallace was the first Southern politician to understand that there are just as many mean, stupid bigots above the Mason-Dixon Line as there are below it, and when he made the shrewd decision to "go national" in 1968, he created an Alabama-based industry that has since made very rich men of himself and a handful of cronies. For more than a decade, George Wallace has bamboozled the national press and terrified the ranking fixers in both major parties. In 1968, he took enough Democratic votes from Hubert Humphrey to elect Richard Nixon, and if he had bothered to understand the delegate selection process in 1972, he could have prevented McGovern's nomination and muscled himself into the number two spot on a Humphrey-Wallace ticket.
McGovern could not have survived a second-ballot short-fall in Miami that year, and anybody who thinks the Happy Warrior would not have made that trade with Wallace is a fool. Hubert Humphrey would have traded anything, with anybody, to get the Democratic nomination for himself in 1972. . . and he'll be ready to trade again, this year, if he sees the slightest chance.
And he does. He saw it on the morning after the New Hampshire primary, when five percent of the vote came in as "uncommitted." That rotten, truthless old freak was on national TV at the crack of dawn, cackling like a hen full of amyls at the "wonderful news" from New Hampshire. After almost four years of relatively statesmanlike restraint and infrequent TV appearances that showed his gray hair and haggard jowls -- four long and frantic years that saw the fall of Richard Nixon, the end of the war in Vietnam and a neo-collapse of the U.S. economy -- after all that time and all those sober denials that he would never run for president, all it took to jerk Hubert out of his closet was the news from New Hampshire that five percent of the Democratic voters, less than 4000 people, in that strange little state had cast their ballots for "uncommitted" delegates.
To Humphrey, who was not even entered in the New Hampshire primary, this meant five percent for him. Never mind that a completely unknown ex-governor of Georgia had won the New Hampshire with more than 30% of the vote; or that liberal Congressman Morris Udall had finished a solid but disappointing second with 24%; or that liberal Senator Birch Bayh ran third with 16%. . . None of that mattered to Hubert, because he was privy to various rumors and force-fed press reports that many of the "uncommitted" delegates in New Hampshire were secret Humphrey supporters. There was no way to be sure, of course -- but no reason to doubt it, either; at least not in the mushy mind of the Happy Warrior.
His first TV appearance of the '76 campaign was a nasty shock to me. I had been up all night, tapping the glass and nursing my bets along (I had bet the quinella, taking Carter and Reagan against Udall and Ford) and when the sun came up on Wednesday I was slumped in front of a TV set in an ancient New England farmhouse on a hilltop near a hamlet called Contoocook. I had won early on Carter, but I had to wait for Hughes Rudd and the Morning News to learn that Ford had finally overtaken Reagan. The margin at dawn was less than one percent, but it was enough to blow my quinella and put Reagan back on Cheap Street, where he's been ever since. . . and I was brooding on this unexpected loss, sipping my coffee and tapping the glass once again, when all of a sudden I was smacked right straight in the eyes with the wild-eyed babbling spectacle of Hubert Horatio Humphrey. His hair was bright orange, his cheeks were rouged, his forehead was caked with Mantan, and his mouth was moving so fast that the words poured out in a high-pitched chattering whine. . . "O my goodness, my gracious. . . isn't it wonderful? Yes, yes indeed. . . O yes, it just goes to show. . . I just can't say enough. . ."
No! I thought. This can't be true. Not now! Not so soon! Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse -- giggling and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he'd just been elected president. He looked like three iguanas in a feeding frenzy. I stood up and backed off from the TV set, but the view was no different from the other side of the room. I was seeing The Real Thing, and it stunned me. . . Because I knew, in my heart, that he was real: that even with a five percent shadow vote in the year's first primary, where his name was not on the ballot, and despite Jimmy Carter's surprising victory and four other nationally known candidates finishing higher than "uncommitted," that Hubert Humphrey had somehow emerged from the chaos of New Hampshire with yet another new life, and another serious shot at the presidency of the United States.
This was more than a visceral feeling, or some painful flash of dread instinct. It was, in fact, a thing I'd predicted myself at least six months earlier. . . It was a summer night in Washington and I was having dinner at an outdoor restaurant near the Capitol with what the Wall Street Journal later described as "a half-dozen top operatives from the 1972 McGovern campaign." And at that point there were already three certain candidates for '76 -- Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall and Fred Harris. We had just come from a brief and feisty little session with Carter, and on the way to the restaurant we had run into Udall on the street, so the talk at the table was understandably "deep politics." Only one person in the group had even a tentative commitment to a candidate in '76, and after an hour or two of cruel judgments and bitter comment, Alan Baron -- McGovern's press secretary and a prime mover in the "new politics" wing of the Democratic party -- proposed a secret ballot to find out which candidate those of us at the table actually believed would be the party nominee in 1976. "Not who we want, or who we like," Baron stressed, "but who we really think is gonna get it."
I tore a page out of my notebook and sliced it up to make ballots. We each took one, wrote a name on it, then folded it up and passed the ballots to Baron, a Farouk-like personage with a carnivorous sense of humor and the build of a sumo wrestler.
(Alan and I have not always been friends. He was Muskie's campaign manager for Florida in '72, and he had never entirely recovered from his encounter with the Gin-Crazed Boohoo on Big Ed's "Sunshine Special". . . and even now, after all this time, I will occasionally catch him staring at me with a feral glint in his eyes.)
Indeed, and so much for that -- just another bucket of bad blood gone under the bridge, so to speak, and in presidential politics you learn to love the bridges and never look down.
Which gets us back to the vote count, and the leer on Baron's face when he unfolded the first ballot. "I knew it," he said. "That's two already, counting mine. . . yeah, here's another one." He looked up and laughed. "It's a landslide for Hubert."
And it was. The final count was Humphrey 4, Muskie 2 and one vote for Udall from Rick Stearns, who was already involved in the planning and organizing stages of Udall's campaign. Nobody else at the table was committed to anything except
gloom, pessimism and a sort of aggressive neutrality.
So much for the idea of a sequel to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Barring some totally unexpected development, I will leave the dreary task of chronicling this low-rent trip to Teddy White, who is already trapped in a place I don't want to be.
But there is no way to escape without wallowing deep in the first few primaries and getting a feel, more or less, for the evidence. . . And in order to properly depress and degrade myself for the ordeal to come, I decided in early January to resurrect the National Affairs Desk and set up, once again, in the place where I spent so much time in 1972 and then again in 1974. These were the boom-and-bust years of Richard Milhous Nixon, who was criminally insane and also president of the United States for five years.
Marching through Georgia with Ted Kennedy. . . Deep, Down and Dirty; on the Darkest Side of Shame. . . The Politics of Mystery and Blood on the Hands of Dean Rusk. . . Jimmy Carter's Law Day Speech, and Why It Was Shrouded in Secrecy by Persons Unknown. . . Derby Day in the Governor's Mansion and the Strangling of the Sloat Diamond
If any person shall carnally know in any manner any brute animal, or carnally know any male or female person by the anus or by and with the mouth, or voluntarily submit to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a felony and shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than one year nor more than three years.
-- Commonwealth of Virginia Anti-Sodomy Statute, 1792
One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from "long shot" to "serious contender." The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn't already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign "press corps."
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 64