Fear and Loathing in America
Page 68
August 11, 1972
New York, NY
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 they 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 Kiker22 got Pat Lucey23 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 [Baltimore] 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
TO JOHN CHANCELLOR, NBC NEWS:
Thompson replied to Chancellor regarding the unorthodox behavior of certain members of the ’72 campaign press corps.
September 11, 1972
Woody Creek, CO
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 … 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…. Then, about an hour later, Bill Daughtery (sp?)24 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.
But I guess you wouldn’t remember that episode, eh? Fuck no, you wouldn’t! … I’m heading east in a few days, and I think it’s about time we got this evil shit cleared away. Your deal is about to go down, John. You can run, but you can’t hide. See you soon….
Hunter S. Thompson
TO JANN WENNER, ROLLING STONE:
After two weeks at home recuperating from the Republican National Convention in Miami in late August, Thompson began bracing himself to “go out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, to watch him waltz in—if only to get the drift of his thinking, to watch the moves, his eyes.”
September 11, 1972
Woody Creek, CO
Jann …
I was ready for all the standard-brand Secret Service bullshit. The only thing that worried me was that maybe some of the SS boys might have seen the current Rolling Stone—which was available that week at newsstands all over Washington. It contained, along with my calm and well-reasoned analysis of the recent GOP convention in Miami, some of the most brutal and hateful caricatures of Richard Nixon ever committed to print, in this country or any other.
That crazy bastard Steadman! Why is it that it’s always your friends who cause you to be screwed to the wall? What do you say when you go across town to the White House to apply for press credentials to cover the Nixon campaign as the National Affairs Editor of Rolling Stone and the first thing you see when you walk through the door of the press office is one of Stead-man’s unconscionably obscene Nixon/Agnew drawings tacked up on the bulletin board with a big red circle around Ralph’s name?
“Well …ah… yes. Ho ho, eh? My name is …ah…… Thompson, from Rolling Stone, and I’m here to pick up my credentials to fly around the country with President Nixon on Air Force One for the next month or so.”
Cold stare from the man at the desk. No handshake offered. “Well … Ho ho, eh? I can’t help but notice you’ve been admiring the work of my friend Ralph Steadman. Ho ho, he sure has an eye for it, eh? Sure does. Good ole Ralph.” Sad smile and shrug of the shoulders. “Crazy as a loon, of course. Terminal brain syphilis.” Keep smiling, another shrug. “Jesus, what can you do, eh? These goddamn vicious limeys will do anything for money. He was paid well for these rotten drawings. My protests were totally ignored. It’s a fucking shame, I say. What the hell is the world coming to when the goddamn British can get away with stuff like this?”
Ciao,
Hunter
TO RALPH STEADMAN:
British artist Ralph Steadman had turned in a series of particularly apt and hideous drawings of the President to illustrate Thompson’s September 28, 1972, Rolling Stone coverage of the Republican National Convention, “Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb.”
September 11, 1972
Woody Creek, CO
Ralph …
You illiterate bastard. I had to send your letter to an interpreter to figure out what kind of “ecology book” you were talking about. Needless to say, I’d like to work with you on it—but anything involving a lengthy text is out of the question for at least six months. I have a ’72 Campaign book due on Jan 1, and after that another book for Random House. But if you can get by with a series of captions, instead of a full-length text, I can probably manage to do it—providing you can arrange to have me flown over to London for at least two weeks, so we can lash our ideas together.
To that end, I spoke with Jim Silberman—editor in chief at Random House—about your ideas, and he said he would contact Jonathan Cape25 & see what they had in mind. I’ve also mentioned it to my agent, Lynn Nesbit … and between them they should be able to make sense of the thing.
As for Straight Arrow (Rolling Stone’s book publishing arm), I would not at this time be inclined to deal with them under any circumstances—with the possible exception of a huge advance in the form of gold bullion. I suspect Alan Rinzler and Sidney Zion were weaned on the same ugly tit, and Wenner acts more & more like Hinckle with every passing day.
Under the circumstances, I don’t want to go into detail on this—but until we can talk personally I advise you to be very wary of making any long-term contract agreements with either one of them.
OK for now. I assume you’ll hear something shortly from Cape, inre: Sil-berman & Random House. Meanwhile, that Nixon stuff was a first-class horror from start to finish … and the center-spread was so bad that I’ll no doubt be barred from coming anywhere near Nixon for the duration of the campaign.
But what the hell? I only have to do 4 more columns, and then 6 weeks on the book … and then a nice rest. But I like the idea of your twisted ecology book, so why not send me some details? Or at least one. OK for now …
Hunter
TO PAUL SCANLON, ROLLING STONE:
Low-key former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Scanlon was managing editor of Rolling Stone.
September 11, 1972
Woody Creek, CO
Paul …
I just talked to Gary Hart again, & now he wants to rent my car until election day, instead of buying it. Last week he was ready to spring for $2250, quick cash. Should America’s top political reporter read anything into that switch? Would you?
Anyway, Hart’s disturbing turnaround removes my most pressing reason for flying to Washington today. (Crouse will be there tomorrow, to pick up the car & put it into a garage until I can get there in a few days.) My other pressing reason—the idea that I might beat the Steadman centerfold to the White House—has also gone by the boards. The deskman at the NY Times D.C. bureau had already either seen or heard about it on Saturday, which means G. Warren26 can’t be far behind. So I assume there’s no hurry now; the bastards will be ready for me when I show up—waving the goddamn thing in my eyes.
I have a new plan, but it’s too complicated to explain now, so I’ll call ASA
P. Meanwhile, I think what I’ll do is write a short sort of Pause & Reflection piece for this issue—2500 to 3500 words—and then go to Wash. this weekend for a 5 or 6 day visit with the Nixon crowd & a long piece for the issue after this one. The Crouse/Press job should be just about enough politics this time, anyway—and if that won’t make the nut, you can always ask Alan to tap The Creator of Gonzo Journalism for a few thousand sparkling words. (My only real regret, at this point, is that I never got around to conning Alan into publishing a book on Volvos by Tyler Knapp.27 Considering his now-legendary tapeworm-appetite for swill, Knapp’s tome would have been a natural for him—resulting in massive lawsuits that would have caused Straight Arrow to explode like a lump of magnesium in firewater…. Ah, these missed opportunities; but perhaps I can make it up to him in a few months.)
Anyway, considering the circumstances I think I’ll take it easy this week. Figure on a (printed) page or so by the weekend, but nothing serious. As for art, I think we can get off with one photo: it appeared in that post-convention issue of Newsweek—a shot of Nixon doing the Humphrey handshake with one of his youth freaks. Call me if you have trouble locating it.
OK for now. Tell Findlay I thought his Miami piece was excellent; it’s about time RS had some first-class real journalism, instead of all this crazy bullshit….
And the next time you worthless sybarites feel the need for a whipping boy, I suggest you look around for somebody besides [David] Felton. He’s not only the best writer on the SF staff, but also the best editor. He did a hell of a job putting that monster of mine together. One of these days somebody out there is going to have to confront the question of why all the best talents who’ve ever worked for RS have either quit in a rage or been fired.
Nothing personal here. I’m just talking off the top of my head at 7:26 A.M. Let me know when you’ll be in Aspen. I’d like to talk about some of these things. OK …
Hunter
MEMO FROM THE SPORTS DESK:
Toward the end of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Thompson would concede of McGovern’s effort that “If George gets stomped in November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him,” but because the candidate went along with the conventional wisdom that he had to abandon the mostly young, antiwar grassroots coalition that gave him the nomination and “swiftly move to consolidate the one he’d just shattered: the … senile remnants of the Democratic Party’s once-powerful ‘Roosevelt coalition.’”
September, 1972
Washington, D.C.
From: Raoul Duke
To: Hunter S. Thompson
Subject: CAMPAIGN ’72
Dear HST:
I’ve been meaning to write this note for a long time, but numerous financial problems have made my life difficult & until yesterday I didn’t have time for fucking around with dilettante sports like Politics. But yesterday I came across a three-day-old copy of The Washington Post (9/7/72) and I was jolted to the point of bad craziness by a headline on page A6 that said:
“McGovern Plans Touring in Tandem With Party Stars”
The nut of the story had to do with McGovern’s new campaign plan—apparently lashed together by Fred Dutton28 and Frank Mankiewicz—to spruce up his crippled campaign by making a series of joint appearances with what Post reporter Bill Greider called “other big stars of the Democratic party.”
The only one currently under contract, as it were, was said to be Ted Kennedy, who agreed to campaign with McGovern in “nine industrial cities of the Midwest and East.” I caught his act on the CBS Evening News last week: He was in Albany, NY, making fun of Nelson Rockefeller.29 But he looked and sounded so much like Sargent Shriver that I didn’t even realize it was Kennedy until the news spot was over and [CBS anchorman Walter] Cronkite did the ID. Granted, I have a cheap set & the picture’s a little ragged—but I still could have sworn it was Shriver. I don’t recall much of what he said, but I think most of it had to do with getting rid of Nelson—or maybe it was Nixon.
But what the hell? That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you about, anyway.
The thing that really horrified me was a paragraph in Greider’s story that said: “After (Kennedy), McGovern’s campaign organizers hope to arrange similar dual schedules with some other big names—Sen. Hubert Humphrey, Sen. Edmund Muskie and perhaps Sen. Thomas Eagleton, the man who was dropped as McGovern’s running mate.”
Jesus!
What the hell is McGovern thinking about?
According to the Post, he plans “to appear with Humphrey in California, where the two men were at each other’s throats last June when they were campaigning in the California primary.” Mankiewicz seemed to like the idea, calling it “a great crowd gatherer” … and Dutton defended it on the grounds that “the pluses are overwhelmingly stronger than the minuses.”
Well … Mankiewicz has nursed his strange act through many hazards this year, but now he is pushing his luck right out to the edge. Only a fucking lunatic, or worse, would talk publicly about going into California with a McGovern-Humphrey routine. It sounds like a scene out of The Magic Christian.30 A word like “demented” is not strong enough for it. The idea of George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey necking in front of big crowds up and down the West Coast goes beyond dementia to the brink of obscenity and stone sickness.
Here is one of the three states McGovern must win—along with New York and Illinois—and also one of his potentially strongest states, because of the massive College/Youth vote … so his California strategy is to seize those electoral votes by blitzing the state “in tandem” with Hubert Humphrey, the one politician in America more despised than Richard Nixon among anti-war College/Youth voters.
Hubert is big in Omaha, Philly and St. Petersburg—but in California he sucks wind. His role, in that primary, was to function as a sort of transvestite stand-in for George Meany and Richard Nixon. If George Wallace had been on the ballot in California—and if he’d been able to campaign there like he did in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania—Humphrey would have finished a bent third, instead of second.
Even in California his strength was deceptive. He pulled just over 40%—but it was essentially an anti-McGovern vote, not pro-Humphrey. With the help of his friend Lorne Greene,31 he managed to convince thousands of elderly Jews around Los Angeles that McGovern planned to send them to The Showers the moment he got elected … and with the help of the old union bosses, he convinced more thousands of insecure aerospace workers that a McGovern victory would put them on permanent welfare.
This was the Democratic “fear vote”—a disorganized negative mass, hunkered down in the suburbs and screeching fearfully at each other: “No! No! If it’s anything new, we don’t want it!” These useless slugs would have voted just as readily for Judge Crater as they did for Hubert Humphrey … but the Judge was not on the ballot, and Hubert was; so the California vote came down, in the end, to a sort of unspoken trial run for the same ABM (“Anybody But McGovern”) movement that Humphrey himself led at the convention in Miami, a month later.
***
So what will be the effect of a brief and awkward McGovern-Humphrey alliance, against Nixon, in California less than six months after that savage primary? Will Hubert’s appearance somehow deliver the Jews and the riveters back to McGovern? Or will the shameless hypocrisy of the George & Hubert Show cause McGovern’s original hard-core supporters to wonder what in hell the primary was all about in the first place?
Perhaps Dutton and Mankiewicz are right about Humphrey’s latent pulling power in California, but I doubt it. Their theory derives from LBJ’s 1964 idea that any contest between the Right and the Center automatically co-opts the Left voters for the “centrist.”
But that is no longer necessarily true. It worked nicely for Johnson in ’64, but in ’68 it failed. Not entirely—but enough to cost Humphrey the election. Most political wizards agree that George Wallace was the man who made the ’68 election such a cliff-hanger. His 15% (check this figure)32 came
mainly from Nixon’s nut, they say. And no doubt they’re right. But the Cleaver/Gregory vote—roughly 2% (?)33—took just enough votes from Humphrey to put Nixon into the White House, whether that was wise, etc. …?
***
(Jump to McGov staff reaction against press … then to real reasons …NJ girl Joe Kraft34 Hump quote … the problem with McGov is that he might sink the idea of the New Politics without ever really representing it … like Lindsay (recall Morgan comment about my advice)35
TO JANN WENNER, ROLLING STONE:
Top McGovern campaign strategist and pollster Patrick Caddell had come up with new data he claimed showed the Democratic cause might not be as hopeless as it looked. He wrote up his analysis and gave it to Thompson to consider for publication in Rolling Stone.
September 17, 1972
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Jann:
I have just finished Caddell’s article & agree with Paul [Scanlon] that it’s essentially a piece of unconvincing propaganda—but I think we should print the fucker anyway. Pat is a key figure in the McGovern machinery, so his thinking—right or wrong—is definitely worth having.
Whether we agree with it or not is beside the point. The Stearns-Dougherty tape had a lot of stuff in it that I didn’t agree with, but I think it was an important document & definitely worth printing.
Further, I think we should offer McGovern a full page, free, in every issue between now and the election. As far as I’m concerned he has a pretty weak goddamn case, but I think we should give him a chance to make it—especially in RS, because everything he’s done since Miami has been subject to criticism by various RS writers, including me, and I suppose it’s possible we’ve all been wrong.
So why don’t we just give him a “house ad” in every issue from now until Nov 7? Let him do whatever he wants with it: solicit funds, denounce drugs, praise Muskie, etc…. whatever he wants.