Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Pfarrer was trying to be objective, so he stopped short of saying that at least half the reporters assigned to the Humphrey campaign are convinced that he’s senile. When he ran for President four years ago he was a hack and a fool, but at least he was consistent.

  Now he talks like an eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed. He will call a press conference to announce that if elected he will “have all our boys out of Vietnam within ninety days”—then rush across town, weeping and jabbering the whole way, to appear on a network TV show and make a fist-shaking emotional appeal for every American to stand behind the President and “applaud” his recent decision to resume heavy bombing in North Vietnam.

  Humphrey will go into a black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring “the enduring tragedy” that life in Nixon’s America has visited on “these beautiful little children”—and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that “In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini.”

  Hubert seems genuinely puzzled by the fast-rising tide of evidence that many once-sympathetic voters no longer believe anything he says. He can’t understand why people snicker when he talks about “the politics of joy” and “punishing welfare chiselers” in almost the same breath… and God only knows what must have gone through his head when he picked up the current issue of Newsweek and found Stewart Alsop quoting Rolling Stone to the effect that “Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”

  Alsop made it clear that he was not pleased with that kind of language. He called it “brutal”—then wound up his column by dismissing the Humphrey candidacy in terms more polite than mine, but not less final. Both Stewart and his demented brother, Joseph, have apparently concluded—along with almost all the other “prominent & influential” Gentleman Journalists in Washington—that the Democratic primaries have disintegrated into a series of meaningless brawls not worth covering. On the “opinion-shaping” level of the journalism Establishment in both Washington and New York there is virtually unanimous agreement that Nixon’s opponent in ’72 will be Ted Kennedy.

  McGovern’s solid victory in Wisconsin was dismissed, by most of the press wizards, as further evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by “extremists”: George McGovern on the Left and George Wallace on the Right, with a sudden dangerous vacuum in what is referred to on editorial pages as “the vital Center.”

  The root of the problem, of course, is that most of the big-time Opinion Makers decided a long time ago—along with all those Democratic Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, and other party pros—that the candidate of the “vital Center” in ’72 would be none other than that fireball statesman from Maine, Ed Muskie.

  Humphrey was briefly considered, then dumped as a sure loser in November. McGovern was not even considered, and at that point George Wallace hadn’t told anybody that he planned to run as a Democrat… so it boiled down quick to Muskie, who had in fact been Number One ever since his impressive election-eve TV speech in 1970. It came at a time when the party pros were still reeling from the shock of Chappaquidick, which was seen as a fatal blow to any hope of a Kennedy challenge this year, and they were thrashing around desperately for a candidate when the Man from Maine suddenly emerged from the tube as the party’s de facto spokesman.

  In contrast to Nixon’s vengeful screed on TV from the California Cow Palace just a few hours earlier, Ed Muskie came across as a paragon of decency and wisdom—just as he had looked very good in ’68, compared to Hubert Humphrey. He was a Real Statesman, they said; a Reassuring Figure. By the summer of ’71 the party bosses had convinced themselves that Ed Muskie was the “only Democrat with a chance of beating Nixon.”

  This was bullshit, of course. Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine. Big Ed was an adequate Senator—or at least he’d seemed like one until he started trying to explain his “mistake” on the war in Vietnam—but it was stone madness from the start to ever think about exposing him to the kind of bloodthirsty thugs that Nixon and John Mitchell would sic on him. They would have him screeching on his knees by sundown on Labor Day. If I were running a campaign against Muskie I would arrange for some anonymous creep to buy time on national TV and announce that twenty-two years ago he and Ed spent a summer working as male whores at a Peg House somewhere in the North Woods.

  Nothing else would be necessary.

  “It’s all over, we have it locked up.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, we have the delegates. All we have to do now is hang on and not make any mistakes.”

  “Well… ah… Jesus, Frank, this comes as a bit of a shock. Actually, I was calling to ask if McGovern has made any decision about whether or not he’d support Humphrey—if it comes to that.”

  “It won’t. The question is moot. Put it out of your mind. We’ll win on the first ballot.”

  “Hmmnnn… Well, I guess there’s no point in asking you about this other thing, either…”

  “What’s that?”

  “That thing about McGovern accepting the Vice-Presidency on a ticket with Ted Kennedy.”

  “What? I never said that!”

  “No? Well… I guess we were pretty stoned…”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, Wenner was there too. Remember? And he’s pretty sure that’s what you said.” (pause)

  “He is, eh?”

  “Yeah… but of course we could be mistaken.” (pause)

  “No… no… wait a minute. I remember the question… but hell, I said it was just a guess.”

  “What?”

  “That thing about Kennedy. What I said, I think, was that I couldn’t speak for George—but my own personal feeling was that he wouldn’t even think about accepting the number two spot…”

  “With anybody but Kennedy, right?” (pause)

  “Well… ah… yeah, but I was just kind of thinking out loud. As far as the Senator’s concerned, there’s no point even talking about it.” (pause) “Like I said, we have the delegates now. We’ll win. I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay, I hope you’re right.” (pause) “But if something goes wrong… If you can’t carry it on the first ballot and the convention turns up deadlocked… then, if Kennedy jumps in, McGovern might consider—”

  “Yeah, yeah: I guess it’s possible… but I told you, goddamnit! We have it locked up.”

  “I know, I know… but what the hell? I’m just reaching around for loose ends here and there: just something to fill the space—you know how it is, eh?”

  “Yeah. I did it once myself.” (pause) “Say, are you feeling any better?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well… maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you looked pretty bad up there in Wisconsin.”

  “I was sick, Frank—extremely sick; and besides that I was full of antibiotics. I had doctors coming into the hotel every afternoon to give me shots.”

  “What kind of shots?”

  “Christ, everything they had: Penicillin, B-12, Cortizone, Moss extract… the hotel doctor wouldn’t go for it, so I called the medical society and told them to go down their list until they found somebody who wouldn’t argue. It took half a day, but they finally sent a man around with everything I wanted… He kept shaking his head while he filled the needles. ‘I don’t know why you want me to shoot all this stuff into you fella,’ he said. ‘It won’t do a goddamn thing for your cold—but if you have any parasites in your body, this is sure going to raise hell with them.’ Then he gave me about nine shots. Cash on the line. No checks, no receipt. I never even found out his name.”

  “Well… maybe you need some rest, Hunter. I get the feeling that you’re not very careful about your health.”

  “You’re right. My health is failing rapidly—but I’ll m
ake it to Miami. After that… well, let’s see how it goes. I may want to have myself committed.”

  —From a telephone conversation with Frank Mankiewicz, 4/15/72

  The idea that George McGovern has the Democratic nomination locked up by mid-April will not be an easy thing for most people to accept—especially since it comes from Frank Mankiewicz, the tall and natty “political director” for McGovern’s campaign.

  Total candor with the press—or anyone else, for that matter—is not one of the traits most presidential candidates find entirely desirable in their key staff people. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business… and the main function of any candidate’s press secretary is to make sure the press gets nothing but Upbeat news. There is no point, after all, in calling a press conference to announce that nobody on the staff will be paid this month because three or four of your largest financial bankers just called to say they are pulling out and abandoning all hope of victory.

  When something like this happens to you quickly lock all the doors and send your press secretary out to start whispering, off the record, that your opponent’s California campaign coordinator just called to ask for a job.

  This kind of devious bullshit is standard procedure in most campaigns. Everybody is presumed to understand it—even the reporters who can’t keep a straight face while they’re jotting it all down for page one of the early edition: SEN. MACE DENIES PULLOUT RUMORS; PREDICTS TOTAL VICTORY IN ALL STATES… and then the lead:

  The man who has been called The Lowest Underdog of Our Time today denied rumors that all but one of his financial backers have stopped payment on checks formerly earmarked for media time and staff salaries in what some observers have called “a hopeless campaign.” Sen. Otto “Slim” Mace, under indictment on twelve charges of Tax Fraud, told reporters at a special noon press conference in the lobby of the Ace Hotel that in fact he has “more money than I know what to do with” and that his headquarters phone has been tied up for days with calls from “extremely important people” now working for his opponent who say they plan to quit and come to work for Sen. Mace.

  “Needless to say, I am not free at this time to release any names,” the Senator explained. “But I expect we will hire quite a few of them and then roll on to victory.”

  The best example of this kind of coverage in the current campaign has been the stuff coming out of the Muskie camp. In recent weeks the truth has been so painful that some journalists have gone out of their way to give the poor bastards a break and not flay them in print any more than absolutely necessary.

  One of the only humorous moments in the Florida primary campaign, for instance, came when one of Muskie’s state campaign managers, Chris Hart, showed up at a meeting with representatives of the other candidates to explain why Big Ed was refusing to take part in a TV debate. “My instructions,” he said, “are that the Senator should never again be put in a situation where he has to think quickly.”

  By nightfall of that day every journalist in Miami was laughing at Hart’s blunder but nobody published it; and none of the TV reporters ever mentioned it on the air. I didn’t even use it myself, for some reason, although I heard about it in Washington while I was packing to go back to Florida.

  I remember thinking that I should call Hart and ask him if he’d actually said a thing like that, but when I got there I didn’t feel up to it. Muskie was obviously in deep trouble, and Hart had been pretty decent to me when I’d showed up at headquarters to sign up for that awful trip on the “Sunshine Special”… so I figured what the hell? Let it rest.

  The other press people might have had different reasons for not using Hart’s quote, but I can’t say for sure because I never asked. Looking back on it, I think it must have been so obvious that the Muskie campaign was doomed that nobody felt mean enough to torment the survivors over something that no longer seemed important.

  A week or so later there was another ugly story leaking out of the Muskie compound, and this one was never published either—or if it was, I didn’t see it.

  Shortly after the election-night returns showed Muskie hopelessly mired in fourth place behind Wallace, Humphrey, and Jackson, the Man from Maine called an emergency staff meeting and announced he was quitting the race. This stirred up a certain amount of panic and general anger among the staff people, who eventually persuaded Big Ed to at least get himself under control before talking to any reporters. He agreed to go out and play golf the next day, while the top-level staffers got together and tried to find some alternative.

  This was the reality behind the story, widely published the next day, that Muskie had decided to “change his whole style” and start talking like the Fighting Liberal he really was at heart. He would move on to Illinois and Wisconsin with new zeal… and his staff people were so happy with this decision to finally “take off the gloves” that they had agreed to work without pay until the day after the big Victory Party in Wisconsin.

  It took about a week for the story of Muskie’s attempt to quit the race to leak out to the press, but it was not an easy thing to confirm. One of the most frustrating realities of this goddamn twisted business is the situation where somebody says, “I’ll only answer your question if you promise not to print it.”

  Everybody I talked to about the Muskie story seemed to know all the details—but there was no point trying to check it out, they said, because it came from “somebody who was at the meeting” and he “obviously can’t talk about it.”

  Of course not. Only a lunatic would risk getting fired from his unsalaried job on the Muskie campaign several days before the crucial Wisconsin primary.

  So I let that one slide, too. I saw no point in wasting any more time on the Man from Maine. He was a walking corpse in Wisconsin—where he finished a wretched fourth, once again—and recent reports from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are so grim that it is hard to avoid the impression that getting on Muskie’s press bus these days is like loading yourself in a closet with a mad dog.

  After another hellish argument with his staff, he decided to abandon Massachusetts to McGovern and make his last stand in Pennsylvania against Humphrey, who has never won a primary.

  But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then if he keeps on rooting around, and it’s beginning to look like Hubert’s time has come. There is a huge black vote in Pennsylvania, and Humphrey will probably get most of it—for reasons I’d rather not even think about right now.

  In any case, both the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania primaries are on April 25, which means they’ll be over and done with by the time this thing gets on the newsstands. So that’s another thing we can let slide.4

  Whatever that quack shot into me up in Milwaukee seems to have killed more than parasites. The front half of my brain has been numb for ten days and my legs will no longer support me for more than two or three minutes at a time.

  So this is probably as good a time as any to say that I’m inclined to think Mankiewicz was not lying when he told me the other day that McGovern will arrive in Miami with enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot.

  This is an extremely crazy thing to say—and especially to print—at a time when McGovern has only 95 of the 1508 delegate votes he will need to win, and when the latest national Gallup poll shows him still creeping along at five percent behind Humphrey, Muskie, and Wallace… but I suspect these figures are meaningless.

  Muskie is finished. His only hope now is to do something like take a long vacation in New Zealand until July and get the Ibogaine out of his system so he can show up in Miami and pray for a dead-locked convention. At that point, he can offer himself up for sacrifice as a “compromise candidate,” make a deal with George Wallace for the VP slot, then confront the convention with the Muskie/Wallace “unity ticket.”

  Which might make the nut. If nothing else, it would command a lot of support from people like me who feel that the only way to save the Democratic Party is to destroy it. I
have tried to explain this to George McGovern, but it’s not one of the subjects he really enjoys talking about. McGovern is very nervous about the possibility of boxing himself into the role of McCarthy-type “spoiler” candidate, which he was beginning to look like until he somehow won a big chunk of the hardhat vote in New Hampshire and sensed the first strange seed of a coalition that might make him a serious challenger instead of just another martyr.

  There was only a hint of it in New Hampshire, but in Wisconsin it came together with a decisiveness that nobody could quite understand in the alcoholic chaos of election night… but when the votes were all counted and the numbers broken down by wards, districts, and precincts, all you had to do was scan the tally sheets to see that McGovern had won all across the board. In Green Bay’s Ward 12, which the tally sheet says is “mostly paper mill workers,” he beat Wallace by 32 to 22 percent. In Sheboygan’s Ward 4, another blue-collar, factory-worker neighborhood, he got 40 percent against Humphrey’s 26 and Wallace’s 9 percent. In Goetz Township, Chippewa County, he mopped up the Lutheran dairy farmer vote by 52 percent to 14 percent each for Humphrey and Wallace.

  Two weeks before the election the wizards said McGovern would win only one of the state’s nine congressional districts—D2, which is dominated by the aggressively political University of Wisconsin complex in Madison. This was also a district that Lindsay and McCarthy were counting on… but the count from Madison’s Ward 10, which is not much different from the others, showed McGovern with 73 percent, Lindsay with 7 percent, and McCarthy with less than 1 percent. Muskie picked up about 5 percent of the student vote, and Humphrey had 3 percent.

  The only glaring weakness in McGovern’s sweep was his failure to break Humphrey’s grip on the black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was like Nixon flashing the peace sign, or Agnew chanting “Right On!” at a minstrel show.

  The real shocker, however, came when McGovern carried the Polish south side of Milwaukee, which Muskie had planned on sweeping by at least ten to one. He was, after all, the first Pole to run for the Presidency of the United States, and he had campaigned on the south side under his original Polish name… but when the deal went down he might as well have been an Arab, for all they cared in places like Serb Hall.