Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  But then you sort of expected that kind of cheap formica trip from Richard Nixon: all those beefy Midwest detective types in blue sharkskin suits—ex-brokers from Detroit, ex-speculators from Miami, ex gear & sprocket salesmen from Chicago. They ran a very tight ship. Nixon rarely appeared, and when he did nobody in the press corps ever got within ten feet of him, except now and then by special appointment for cautious interviews. Getting assigned to cover Nixon in ’68 was like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn.

  It never occurred to me that anything could be worse than getting stuck on another Nixon campaign, so it came as a definite shock to find that hanging around Florida with Ed Muskie was even duller and more depressing than traveling with Evil Dick himself.

  And it wasn’t just me, although the Muskie Downer was admittedly more obvious to reporters who’d been traveling with other candidates than it was to the poor devils who’d been stuck with him from the start. I may have been the rudest “negative attitude” case on the “Sunshine Special,” but I was definitely not the only one. About halfway through that endless Friday I was standing at the bar when Judy Michaelson, a New York Post reporter who had just switched over from the Lindsay campaign, came wandering down the aisle with a pained blank stare on her face, and stopped beside me just long enough to say, “Boy! This is not quite the same as the other one, is it?”

  I shook my head, leaning into the turn as the train rounded a bend on the banks of either the Sewanee or the Chatahootchee River. “Cheer up,” I said. “It’s a privilege to ride the rails with a front-runner.”

  She smiled wearily and moved on, dragging her notebook behind her. Later that evening, in West Palm Beach, I listened to Dick Stout of Newsweek telling a Muskie press aide that his day on the “Sunshine Special” had been “so goddamn disgracefully bad that I don’t have the words for it yet.”

  One of the worst things about the trip was the fact that the candidate spent the whole time sealed off in his private car with a traveling zoo of local Party bigwigs. The New Hampshire primary was still two weeks off, and Muskie was still greedily pursuing his dead-end strategy of piling up endorsements from “powerful Democrats” in every state he visited—presumably on the theory that once he got the Party Bosses signed up, they would automatically deliver the votes. (By the time the deal went down in New Hampshire, Muskie had signed up just about every Democratic politician in the country whose name was well known by more than a hundred people, and it did him about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin Bormann.) A week later, when he staggered to a fourth place finish in Florida, a fishmonger in Cairo, Illinois, announced that he and U.S. Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa were forming a corporation to market “Muskie dartboards.” Hughes had planned to be present at the ceremony in Cairo, the man said, but the Senator was no longer able to travel from one place to another without the use of custom Weight-Belts.

  The New Hampshire results3 hit the Muskie bandwagon like a front-wheel blowout, but Florida blew the transmission. Big Ed will survive Illinois, whatever the outcome, but he still has to go to Wisconsin—where anything but victory will probably finish him off, and his chances of beating Humphrey up there on The Hube’s home court are not good. The latest Gallup Poll, released on the eve of the Illinois primary but based on a nationwide survey taken prior to the vote in New Hampshire, showed Humphrey ahead of Muskie for the first time. In the February poll, Muskie was leading by 35 percent to 32 percent… but a month later The Hube had surged up to 35 percent and Muskie had slipped seven points in thirty days down to 28 percent.

  According to almost every media wizard in the country, Wisconsin is “the crunch”—especially for Muskie and New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was badly jolted in Florida when his gold-plated Media Blitz apparently had no effect at all on the voters. Lindsay had spent almost a half million dollars in Florida, yet limped home fifth with seven percent of the vote—just a point ahead of McGovern, who spent less than $100,000.

  Two of the biggest losers in Florida, in fact, were not listed in the election results. They were David Garth, Lindsay’s TV-Media guru, and Robert Squier, whose TV campaign for Muskie was such a debacle that some of the Man from Maine’s top advisors in Florida began openly denouncing Squier to startled reporters, who barely had time to get their stories into print before Muskie’s national headquarters announced that a brand new series of TV spots would begin running yesterday.

  But by then the damage was done. I never saw the new ones, but the Squier originals were definitely a bit queer. They depicted Muskie as an extremely slow-spoken man who had probably spent half his life overcoming some kind of dreadful speech impediment, only to find himself totally hooked on a bad Downer habit or maybe even smack. The first time I heard a Muskie radio spot I was zipping along on the Rickenbacker Causeway, coming in from Key Biscayne, and I thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. It was the voice of a man who had done about twelve Reds on the way to the studio—a very funny ad.

  Whatever else the Florida primary might or might not have proved, it put a definite kink in the Media Theory of politics. It may be true, despite what happened to Lindsay and Muskie in Florida, that all you have to do to be President of the U.S.A. is look “attractive” on TV and have enough money to hire a Media Wizard. Only a fool or a linthead would argue with the logic at the root of the theory: If you want to sell yourself to a nation of TV addicts, you obviously can’t ignore the medium… but the Florida vote at least served to remind a lot of people that the medium is only a tool, not a magic eye. In other words, if you want to be President of the U.S.A. and you’re certified “attractive,” the only other thing you have to worry about when you lay out all that money for a Media Wizard is whether or not you’re hiring a good one instead of a bungler… and definitely lay off the Reds when you go to the studio.

  Later in March

  The Banshee Screams in Florida… The Emergence of Mankiewicz… Hard Times for the Man from Maine… Redneck Power & Hell on Wheels for George Wallace… Hube Slithers out of Obscurity… Fear and Loathing on the Democratic Left…

  On Monday morning, the day before the Florida primary, I flew down to Miami with Frank Mankiewicz, who runs the McGovern campaign.

  We hit the runway at just over two hundred miles an hour in a strong crosswind, bouncing first on the left wheel and then—about a hundred yards down the runway—on the right wheel… then another long bounce, and finally straightening out just in front of the main terminal at Miami’s International Airport.

  Nothing serious. But my Bloody Mary was spilled all over Monday’s Washington Post on the armrest. I tried to ignore it and looked over at Mankiewicz sitting next to me… but he was still snoring peacefully. I poked him. “Here we are,” I said. “Down home in Fat City again. What’s the schedule?”

  Now he was wide awake, checking his watch. “I think I have to make a speech somewhere,” he said. “I also have to meet Shirley MacLaine somewhere. Where’s a telephone? I have to make some calls.”

  Soon we were shuffling down the corridor toward the big baggage-claim merry-go-round; Mankiewicz had nothing to claim. He has learned to travel light. His “baggage,” as it were, consisted of one small canvas bag that looked like an oversize shaving kit.

  My own bundle—two massive leather bags and a Xerox telecopier strapped into a fiberglass Samsonite suitcase—would be coming down the baggage-claim chute any moment. I tend to travel heavy; not for any good reason, but mainly because I haven’t learned the tricks of the trade.

  “I have a car waiting,” I said. “A fine bronze-gold convertible. Do you need a ride?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I have to make some calls first. You go ahead, get your car and all that goddamn baggage and I’ll meet you down by the main door.”

  I nodded and hurried off. The Avis counter was only about fifty yards away from the wall-phone where Mankiewicz was setting up shop with a handful of dimes and a small notebook. He made at least six calls and a page of notes befo
re my bags arrived… and by the time I began arguing with the car-rental woman the expression on Mankiewicz’s face indicated that he had everything under control.

  I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist, and central intelligence behind the McGovern-for-President campaign—a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work “pre-Owned Car” salesman—putting McGovern’s Florida primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.

  Mankiewicz—a forty-seven-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was Director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968—has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got under way last year. For a while he was the “Press Secretary,” then he was called the “Campaign Manager”—but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of “Political Director.” Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern’s alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon—the Man behind the Man.

  Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote. This was long before Ed Muskie’s infamous “break-down scene” on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union-Leader.

  When Frank laid this prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job—trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last minute surge for McGovern, the only candidate in the ’72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called “Kennedy Machine.”

  Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern’s campaign—and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing his nonsense. Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own… even those who go off on hopeless tangents.

  So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8th, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and “front-runner” Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.

  New Hampshire in ’72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in ’68 jolted LBJ. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like “the champ,” & reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all, Won in New Hampshire.

  Just like LBJ—who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.

  But Muskie had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already locked in… he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a “last minute blitz”… shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie” and “Muskie Talks Straight”…

  When Big Ed arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who’d been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled, in his head, that I couldn’t raise a bet on him—at any odds—among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the ringside seats on fight night.

  I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn’t want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got under way.

  Frank Mankiewicz. TERRY ARTHUR

  Wallace on the stump. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  “Two?” Marciano asked with a grin.

  I shrugged, and drank one off very quickly as Floyd came out of his corner and turned to wax the first time Liston hit him. Then, with a minute still to go in the first round, Liston bashed him again and Patterson went down for the count. The fight was over before I touched my second beer.

  Muskie went the same way to Florida—just as Mankiewicz had predicted forty-eight hours earlier in the living room of his suburban Washington home. “Muskie is already finished,” he said then. “He had no base. Nobody’s really for Muskie. They’re only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he’s the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn’t even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.”

  The next morning, on the plane from Washington to Miami, I tried for a firmer insight on Mankiewicz’s wisdom by offering to bet $100 that Muskie would finish worse than second. I saw him running third, not much ahead of Jackson—with The Hube not far behind Wallace and Lindsay beating McGovern with something like 11 percent to 9 percent. (This was before I watched both McGovern’s and Lindsay’s final lame shots on Monday night; McGovern at the University of Miami and Lindsay with Charles Evers at a black church in north Miami. By late Monday, seven hours before the polls opened, I thought both of them might finish behind Shirley Chisholm… which almost happened: Lindsay finished with something around 7 percent, McGovern with roughly 6 percent, and Chisholm with 4 percent—while George Wallace rolled home with 42 percent, followed in the distance by Humphrey with 18.5 percent, Jackson with 12.5 percent… and Muskie with 9 percent.)

  “Remember when you go out to vote tomorrow that the eyes of America are upon you, all the live-long day. The eyes of America are upon you, they will not go away.”

  —Senator George McGovern at a rally at the University

  of Miami the night before the Florida primary.

  Cazart!… this fantastic rain outside: a sudden cloudburst, drenching everything. The sound of rain smacking down on my concrete patio about ten feet away from the typewriter, rain beating down on the surface of the big aqua-lighted pool out there across the lawn… rain blowing into the porch and whipping the palm fronds around in the warm night air.

  Behind me, on the bed, my waterproof Sony says, “It’s 5:28 right now in Miami…” Then Rod Stewart’s hoarse screech: “Mother don’t you recognize your son…?”

  Beyond the rain I can hear the sea rolling in on the beach. This atmosphere is getting very high, full of strange memory flashes….

  “Mother don’t you recognize me now…?”

  Wind, rain, surf. Palm trees leaning in the wind, hard funk/blues on the radio, a flagon of Wild Turkey on the sideboard… are those footsteps outside? High heels running in the rain?

  Keep on typing… but my mind is not really on it. I keep expecting to hear the screen door bang open and then turn around to see Sadie Thompson standing behind me, soaked to the skin… smiling, leaning over my shoulder to see what I’m cranking out tonight… then laughing softly, leaning closer; wet nipples against my neck, perfume around my head… and now on the radio: “Wild Horses… We’ll ride them some day…”

  Perfect. Get it on. Don’t turn around. Keep this fantasy rolling and try not to notice that the sky is getting light outside. Dawn is coming up and I have to fly to Mazatlan in five hours to deal with a drug-fugitive. Life is getting very complicated. After Mazatlan I have to rush back to San Francisco and get this gibberish ready for the printer… and then on to Wisconsin to chronicle the next act in this saga of Downers and Treachery called “The Campaign Trial.”

  Wisconsin is the site of the next Democratic primary. Six serious candidates in this one—racing around the state in chartered jets. Spending Ten Grand a day for the privilege of laying a series of terrible bummers on the natives. Dull speeches for breakfast, duller speeches for lunch, then bullshit with gravy for dinner.

  How long, O Lord… How long? Where will it end? The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct.

  A lot of people are seriously worried about this, but I am not one of them. I have never been much of a Party Man myself… and the more I learn about the realities of national politics,
the more I’m convinced that the Democratic Party is an atavistic endeavor—more an Obstacle than a Vehicle—and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with.

  It is a bogus alternative to the politics of Nixon: A gang of senile leeches like George Meany, Hubert Humphrey, and Mayor Daley… Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie, and Frank Rizzo, the super-cop Mayor of Philadelphia.

  George McGovern is also a Democrat, and I suppose I have to sympathize in some guilt-stricken way with whatever demented obsession makes him think he can somehow cause this herd of venal pigs to see the light and make him their leader… but after watching McGovern perform in two primaries I think he should stay in the Senate, where his painfully earnest style is not only more appreciated but also far more effective than it is on the nationwide stump.

  His surprising neo-victory in New Hampshire was less a triumph than a spin-off from Muskie’s incredible bungling. But, up close, he is a very likeable and convincing person—in total contrast to Big Ed, who seems okay on TV or at the other end of a crowded auditorium, but who turns off almost everybody who has the misfortune of having to deal with him personally.

  Another key factor in New Hampshire was that McGovern only needed 33,007 votes to achieve the psychological “upset” that came with his 37 percent figure versus Muskie’s 46 percent. This was possible because McGovern was able, in New Hampshire, to campaign in the low-key, town-meeting, person-to-person style in which he is most effective… but which will be physically impossible in big, delegate-heavy states like California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, or even Wisconsin. (Chicago alone will send eighty delegates to the Democratic Convention, compared to only twenty for the whole state of New Hampshire… and in Florida, McGovern managed to reach more than 75,000 voters, but wound up in sixth place with a depressing six percent of the state’s total.)