Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Every red light was a potential disaster. Sometimes I would take off slowly, with the rest of the traffic… but at about every third light the goddamn worthless machine would hang back for a second or so, as if to give the others a head start, and then come thundering off the line at top speed with no traction at all and the rear end fishtailing all over the street about halfway to the next corner.

  By the time I got to the Milwaukee Inn I had all three lanes of State Street to myself. Anybody who couldn’t get safely ahead of me was lagging safely behind. I wondered if anyone had taken my license number in order to turn me in as a dangerous drunk or a dope addict. It was entirely possible that by the time I got back to the car every cop in Milwaukee would be alerted to grab me on sight.

  I was brooding on this as I entered the dining room and spotted Frank Mankiewicz at a table near the rear. As I approached the table he looked up with a nasty grin and said, “Ah ha, it’s you; I’m surprised you have the nerve to show up over here—after what you wrote about me.”

  I stared at him, trying to get my brain back in focus. Conversation ceased at every table within ten feet of us, but the only one that really concerned me was a knot of four Secret Service men who suddenly shifted into Deadly Pounce position at their table just behind Mankiewicz and whoever else he was eating with.

  I had come down the aisle very fast, in my normal fashion, not thinking about much of anything except what I wanted to ask Mankiewicz—but his loud accusation about me having “the nerve to show up” gave me a definite jolt. Which might have passed in a flash if I hadn’t realized, at almost the same instant, that four thugs with wires in their ears were so alarmed at my high-speed appearance that they were about to beat me into a coma on pure instinct, and ask questions later.

  This was my first confrontation with the Secret Service. They had not been around in any of the other primaries, until Wisconsin, and I was not accustomed to working in a situation where any sudden move around a candidate could mean a broken arm. Their orders are to protect the candidate, period, and they are trained like high-strung guard dogs to react with Total Force at the first sign of danger. Never hesitate. First crack the wrist, then go for the floating rib… and if the “assassin” turns out to be just an oddly dressed journalist—well, that’s what the SS boys call “tough titty.” Memories of Sirhan Sirhan are still too fresh, and there is no reliable profile on potential assassins… so everybody is suspect, including journalists.

  All this flashed through my head in a split second. I saw it all happening, but my brain had gone limp from too much tension. First the car, now this… and perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was the fact that I’d never seen Mankiewicz even smile.

  But now he was actually laughing, and the SS guards relaxed. I tried to smile and say something, but my head was still locked in neutral.

  “You better stay away from my house from now on,” Mankiewicz was saying. “My wife hates your guts.”

  Jesus, I thought. What’s happening here? Somewhere behind me I could hear a voice saying, “Hey, Sheriff! Hello there! Sheriff!”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see who was calling, but all I saw was a sea of unfamiliar faces, all staring at me… so I turned quickly back to Mankiewicz, who was still laughing.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “What did I do to your wife?”

  He paused long enough to carve a bite out of what looked like a five or six pound Prime Rib on his plate, then he looked up again. “You called me a rumpled little man,” he said. “You came over to my house and drank my liquor and then you said I was a rumpled little man who looked like a used car salesman.”

  “Sheriff! Sheriff!” That goddamn voice again; it seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t want to turn around and find all those people staring at me.

  Then the fog began to lift. I suddenly understood that Mankiewicz was joking—which struck me as perhaps the most shocking and peculiar development of the entire ’72 campaign. The idea that anybody connected with the McGovern campaign might actually laugh in public was almost beyond my ken. In New Hampshire nobody had ever even smiled, and in Florida the mood was so down that I felt guilty even hanging around.

  Even Mankiewicz, in Florida, was acting like a man about to take the bastinado… so I was puzzled and even a little nervous to find him grinning like this in Milwaukee.

  Was he stoned? Had it come down to that?

  “Sheriff! Sheriff!”

  I spun around quickly, feeling a sudden flash of anger at some asshole mocking me in these rude and confusing circumstances. By this time I’d forgotten what I’d wanted to ask Mankiewicz in the first place. The night was turning into something out of Kafka.

  “Sheriff!”

  I glared at the table behind me, but nobody blinked. Then I felt a hand on my belt, poking at me… and my first quick instinct was to knock the hand away with a full-stroke hammer-shot from about ear level; really crack the bastard… and then immediately apologize: “Oh! Pardon me, old sport! I guess my nerves are shot, eh?”

  Which they almost were, about thirty seconds later, when I realized that the hand on my belt—and the voice that had been yelling “Sheriff”—belonged to George McGovern. He was sitting right behind me, an arm’s length away, having dinner with his wife and some of the campaign staffers.

  Now I understood the Secret Service presence. I’d been standing so close to McGovern that every time I turned around to see who was yelling “Sheriff!” I saw almost every face in the room except the one right next to me.

  He twisted around in his chair to shake hands, and the smile on his face was the smile of a man who has just cranked off a really wonderful joke.

  “God damn!” I blurted, “it’s you!” I tried to smile back at him, but my face had turned to rubber and I heard myself babbling: “Well… ah… how does it look?” Then quickly: “Excellent, eh? Yeah, I guess so. It certainly does look… ah… but what the hell, I guess you know all this…”

  He said a few things that I never really absorbed, but there was nothing he could have said at that moment as eloquent or as meaningful as that incredible smile on his face.

  The most common known source of Ibogaine is from the roots of Tabernanthe Iboga, a shrub indigenous to West Africa. As early as 1869, roots of T.I. were reported effective in combating sleep or fatigue and in maintaining alertness when ingested by African natives. Extracts of T.I. are used by natives while stalking game; it enables them to remain motionless for as long as two days while retaining mental alertness. It has been used for centuries by natives of Africa, Asia and South America in conjunction with fetishistic and mythical ceremonies. In 1905 the gross effects of chewing large quantities of T.I. roots were described… “Soon his nerves get tense in an extraordinary way; an epileptic-like madness comes over him, during which he becomes unconscious and pronounces words which are interpreted by the older members of the group as having a prophetic meaning and to prove that the fetish has entered him.”

  At the turn of the century, iboga extracts were used as stimulants, aphrodisiacs and inebriants. They have been available in European drugstores for over 30 years. Much of the research with Ibogaine has been done with animals. In the cat, for example, 2-10 mg./kg. given intravenously caused marked excitation, dilated pupils, salivation, and tremors leading to a picture of rage. There was an alerting reaction; obvious apprehension and fear, and attempts to escape… In human studies, at a dose of 300 mg. given orally, the subject experiences visions, changes in perception of the environment and delusions or alterations of thinking. Visual imagery became more vivid, with animals often appearing. Ibogaine produces a state of drowsiness in which the subject does not wish to move, open his eyes, or be aware of his environment. Since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the presence of physical symptoms and the richness of the psychological experience, the choice of environment is an important consideration. Many are disturbed by lights or noises… Dr. Claudio Naranjo, a psychothera
pist, is responsible for most current knowledge regarding Ibogaine effects in humans. He states: “I have been more impressed by the enduring effects resulting from Ibogaine than by those from sessions conducted with any other drug.”

  —From a study by PharmChem Laboratories, Palo Alto, California

  Not much has been written about The Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the Presidential Campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race—about a week before the vote—word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug” that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

  It had been common knowledge for many weeks that Humphrey was using an exotic brand of speed known as Wallot… and it had long been whispered that Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key.

  I immediately recognized The Ibogaine Effect—from Muskie’s tearful breakdown on the flatbed truck in New Hampshire, the delusions and altered thinking that characterized his campaign in Florida, and finally the condition of “total rage” that gripped him in Wisconsin.

  There was no doubt about it: The Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was “when did he start?” But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Muskie campaign after that incident on the “Sunshine Special” in Florida… and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time.

  Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has frequently challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of TV lights.

  But there was none of that in Florida. When the Boohoo began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin, Big Ed went all to pieces… which gave rise to speculation, among reporters familiar with his campaign style in ’68 and ’70, that Muskie was not himself. It was noted, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during TV interviews, that his thought patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisors could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages, or neo-comatose funks.

  In restrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was—far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy—suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “the only Democrat who can beat Nixion.”

  It is entirely conceivable—given the known effects of Ibogaine—that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.

  We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the Senator’s disastrous experiments with Ibogaine. I tried to find the Brazilian doctor on election night in Milwaukee, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone. One of the hired bimbos in Milwaukee’s Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus to Chicago, but we were never able to confirm this.

  The final straw, for Muskie, was the result of an unpublished but carefully leaked poll, taken by Oliver Quayle at the behest of Senator Jackson and the local AFL-CIO, that showed Muskie losing 70 percent of his support in Wisconsin in a period of two weeks. According to the Quayle poll, the onetime front-runner slipped from 39 percent to 13 percent, while McGovern was virtually doubling his figure from 12 percent to 23 percent in the same period—which put McGovern ahead of Humphrey, who had dropped about five points to 19 percent.

  The same poll showed George Wallace with 12 percent, which convinced liberal Democratic Governor Pat Lucey and the moguls of Organized Labor that it would not be necessary to mount a serious effort to short-circuit the Wallace threat. Both the Governor and the state Labor Bosses had been worried about Wallace stomping into Wisconsin and embarrassing everybody by pulling off another one of those ugly, Florida-style upsets.

  Big Ed discussed the marijuana question for the dope-smoking students in Madison, Wisconsin, moments before refusing to take a toke himself. Later in the campaign, however, it was reported that Senator Muskie was a known user of a powerful drug called Ibogaine. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ / ELIHU BLOTINCK / ARTHUR POLLOCK

  It is still hard to understand how the polls and the pols, and especially a wizard like Broder, could have so drastically underestimated the Wallace vote. Perhaps the threat of an anti-Wallace backlash by organized labor led the visiting press to think the other George was safely boxed in. Wisconsin’s Big Labor brain-trust had come up with a theory that Wallace got a huge boost in Florida when the liberal opposition got so hysterical about him that he got twice as many votes as he would have if the other candidates had simply ignored him and done their own things.

  So they decided to turn the other cheek in Wisconsin. They ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few TV spots—and every one of his rallies attracted more people than the halls could hold.

  I went to one at a place called Serb Hall on the South Side of Milwaukee—a neighborhood the pols said was locked up for Muskie. Serb Hall is a big yellow-brick place that looks like an abandoned gymnasium, across the street from Sentry Supermarket on Oklahoma Street about five miles from downtown Milwaukee. One half of the hall is a “Lounge & Bowling Alley,” and the other half is a fair-sized auditorium with a capacity of about 300.

  The Serb Hall rally was a last-minute addition to the Wallace schedule. His main rally that night was scheduled for 7:30 at a much bigger hall in Racine, about fifty miles south… but one of his handlers apparently decided to get him warmed up with a 5:00 gig at Serb Hall, despite the obvious risk involved in holding a political rally at that hour of the evening in a neighborhood full of Polish factory-workers just getting off work.

  I got there at 4:30, thinking to get in ahead of the crowd and maybe chat a bit with some of the early arrivals at the bar… but at 4:30 the hall was already packed and the bar was so crowded I could barely reach in to get a beer. When I reached in again, to pay for it, somebody pushed my hand back and a voice said, “It’s already taken care of, fella—you’re a guest here.”

  Wallace fans listening to the candidate at a rally in Racine. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  For the next two hours I was locked in a friendly, free-wheeling conversation with about six of my hosts who didn’t mind telling me they were there because George Wallace was the most important man in America. “This guy is the real thing,” one of them said. “I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain’t the same as the others. He don’t sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it.”

  It was the first time I’d ever seen Wallace in person. There were no seats in the hall; everybody was standing. The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert. Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back… it was a flat-out fire & brimstone performance.

  Humphrey’s addiction to Wallot has not stirred any controversy so far. He has always campaigned like a rat in heat, and the only difference now is that he is able to do it eighteen hours a day instead of ten. The main change in his public style, since ’68, is that he no longer seems aware that his gibberis
h is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class blacks.

  Humphrey’s style on the stump was described with embarrassing accuracy by Donald Pfarrer in the Milwaukee Journal:

  “When Humphrey addresses a crowd he does two things at once. First he makes promises; not ‘a promise a day,’ as Senator Muskie has charged, but more like a promise every three minutes, with one or two for everybody within reach of his voice. He claims that his promises are the expressions of a program for social change that he’ll fight for.

  “Second and more important, he tries to weld a bond between himself and the audience. And he succeeds so well that ‘audience’ is usually the wrong word. His groups are more like meetings of people who want to get something done.

  “If you’re from Wisconsin, he’s your neighbor from Minnesota and he tells you so. If you’re old, he has an aging mother living in a nursing home in Huron, S.D. If you’re a farmer, he grew up among people like you. If you’re a union man, he carries a union card and defended the unions when few others would. If you’re black, he fought for civil rights. If you’re young, he was a teacher, and he was young once himself. If you’re from the city, he was a mayor. If you’re poor, he was poor once himself and he had to quit school.

  “Then he goes through the crowd, shaking hands, signing autographs and talking. Sometimes he even listens. He spends some time with each person, looks him in the eye and asks for his help.”