Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Volunteers had reached 60 percent of the voters by phone and filled out an index card for each one—the back wall was stacked to the ceiling with shoe boxes full of index cards telling how each voter felt about McGovern (on a scale of 1 to 5, hot or cold) and listing the issues that interested each voter. “The whole deal was done with no money, no hired staff, and one phone in this whole place—it was all done by citizens out of their own homes,” said Swerdlow. Other volunteers had canvassed a quarter of the district door-to-door, bringing back more cards with the same kind of information. Ideally, a district should be phone-canvassed once and foot-canvassed twice, but in 1972 student volunteers are scarce. Swerdlow decided to settle for dropping a piece of literature at the households that hadn’t been canvassed.

  “Besides the mailings,” he said, “we have a nineteen-man phone bank downtown that’s calling all the people we identified as uncommitted—and that’s about 60 percent of them.”

  Swerdlow’s other operations included:

  • Plantgate leaflets, handed out at factories by two groups leaving the office at 5:30 every morning.

  • Postcards, with a picture of McGovern and wife fondling a grandchild. Each local volunteer addresses postcards to thirty friends. Prominent members of parishes, Jewish congregations, and bowling leagues send postcards to these groups. Thirty thousand had been mailed by the Friday before the election.

  • Palm cards—small sheets of paper which show exactly where McGovern’s name appears on the ballot. Two McGovern workers would hand out cards at polling places in each of the city’s three hundred precincts. According to Swerdlow, a good palm-card operation can make a ten percent difference in the vote.

  • Signs, which have the same effect as palm cards. A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that. McGovern volunteers began putting up signs outside polling places at two in the morning of election day; rival pols had little time to pull them down.

  Swerdlow’s two week operation was sketchy and primitive, but McGovern’s three biggest rivals in the district—Humphrey, Jackson, and Wallace—could not even approach it.

  8:10 P.M., election night: Ten minutes after the polls closed down, Pat Caddell, resident McGovern pollster, got the early results of a blue-collar, factory precinct in Sheboygan and predicted that McGovern would end up by taking the nearest opposition by at least seven points.

  9:40 P.M., election night: Frank Mankiewicz announced to a cheering crowd at the Pfister ballroom that McGovern had taken seven out of Wisconsin’s nine congressional districts—lacking only the Fifth and the Seventh (farm country on the Minnesota border) for a clean sweep. He called McGovern a “candidate for all the people.”

  Joel Swerdlow said that this campaign marked the first time McGovern had run strong in a real urban center. He thought McGovern would take the Fifth. He had lost one of his weak precincts to Humphrey by one vote.

  2:00 A.M., the morning after election night: Out of the thirty-odd reporters who began the evening manning the banks of typewriters there, only one straggler was left, and he, like almost all the rest, was using the phrase “stunning victory” to describe McGovern’s performance. Swerdlow and another McGovern worker were on their hands and knees sorting out adding-machine slips on the floral carpet. McGovern was trailing behind Humphrey in the Fifth District, and Swerdlow was adding up the votes to see whether the race was close enough to demand a recount. He showed me a pencil-written analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for McGovern.

  Later Swerdlow sat on a sofa in the lobby and went over the figures for each precinct with Paul Cobb, who looks like a small edition of Isaac Hayes. Cobb is co-directing McGovern’s operation in Northern California but he also serves as the resident expert of the black community. “I’m upset about the black vote,” said Swerdlow. “I’m upset and hypertense,” said Cobb.

  “I’m convinced that if we had had two or three black pros in Milwaukee for a month we could have ripped off 40 percent of the black vote,” he said. “You could have organized under the soft underbelly of the Baptist Church hierarchy and literally picked out votes one by one and identified them.”

  Gary Hart and Warren Beatty. STUART BRATESMAN

  10:00 A.M., the morning after the election: The press was assembled in the conference room of the Milwaukee Inn. Pat Caddell and Frank Mankiewicz had summoned the press for their analysis of the vote. This was a precautionary measure they had planned weeks ago—to make sure that the press did not go on writing, out of sheer force of habit, that McGovern’s support comes only from students and suburbanites.

  Using analyses of selected precincts, Mankiewicz proved with statistics what he had been saying for weeks—that McGovern has the support of blue-collar workers, farmers, old people, young people, students, housewives—in short he is a presidential candidate so statistically proven that no convention could refuse him.

  “Do your notes show any weaknesses?” a reporter asked.

  “Yes—Mankiewicz!” another reporter shouted.

  Mankiewicz admitted that McGovern has not yet cultivated the black vote. Caddell then got up to analyze the blue-collar support. Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

  Mankiewicz added that the “leading edge of labor support is now beginning to come to Senator McGovern. Some of the top labor officers who endorsed Muskie—like Leonard Woodcock—always said that they had great admiration for McGovern, that he was probably the most qualified candidate. But Muskie was the one who could beat Nixon or unite the party or was the clear leader—or any of those other phrases of antiquity.”

  Gary Hart now took over to explain why Wisconsin had been McGovern’s watershed. Their one resource up to now—“aside from a superior candidate”—had been their organization. “We had to lay our plans very carefully,” he said, “and we put the best people we could find in this country into these early key states. The tenor of the campaign is changing now. There is not enough time to develop state by state what we had in New Hampshire and in Wisconsin.” From now on George McGovern will be using polls, media endorsements, and all the other resources available to a front-runner. His organization may never reach full flower again.

  3:00 P.M., the day after: Back at the Pfister lobby, I ran into Dave Aylward, a veteran of both the New Hampshire and Wisconsin campaigns although less than a year out of Dartmouth. The Sixth District, which had been under his direction, had voted strongly for McGovern. Dave was still high on victory. “Jesus,” he said, “we won the fucking city of Fond du Lac with thirty high-school kids, three-fourths of whom are drug freaks. We only lost three wards and in one of those we lost to Wallace by two votes! And before last summer I had never done anything like this before.”

  Election Night in Wisconsin. MARK PERLSTEIN

  I asked Dave if he had decided to go into politics full time. “Not forever,” he said. “Can’t take it physically. My hands were shaking yesterday morning. I was straight out for two nights making lists of positives and writing letters to uncommitteds. But we goddamn well touched people with those letters and leaflets.

  “There’s only one thing that worries me about being out front,” he said. “The hacks. When McCarthy took Wisconsin in ’68, the hacks were getting on board before anyone knew what had happened and they were saying, ‘OK, kids, the fun’s over, we’ll run it from here, get lost.’ And the kids had just racked up 56 percent for McCarthy in this state. If it happens again this time, they can have the campaign. I’ll just pack my bags and split.”

  May

  Crank Time on the Low Road… Fear and Loathing in Ohio & Nebraska… Humphrey Gets Ugly, McGovern Backs off… Delirium Tremens at
the National Affairs Desk… Acid, Amnesty & Abortion… Massive Irregularities on Election Night in Cleveland; Death Watch in the Situation Room… Wallace Gunned Down in Maryland… Showdown in California…

  One of my clearest memories of the Nebraska primary is getting off the elevator on the wrong floor in the Omaha Hilton and hearing a sudden burst of song from a room down one of the hallways… twenty to thirty young voices in ragged harmony, kicking out the jams as they swung into the final hair-raising chorus of “The Hound and the Whore.”

  I had heard it before, in other hallways of other hotels along the campaign trail—but never this late at night, and never at this level of howling intensity:

  O the Hound chased the Whore across the mountains

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  O the Hound chased the Whore into the sea….

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  A very frightening song under any circumstances—but especially frightening if you happen to be a politician running for very high stakes and you know the people singing that song are not on your side. I have never been in that situation, myself, but I imagine it is something like camping out in the North Woods and suddenly coming awake in your tent around midnight to the horrible snarling and screaming sounds of a Werewolf killing your guard dog somewhere out in the trees beyond the campfire.

  I was thinking about this as I stood in the hallway outside the elevator and heard all those people singing “The Hound and the Whore”… in a room down the hall that led into a wing of the hotel that I knew had been blocked off for The Candidate’s national staff. But there is nothing in my notes to indicate which one of the candidates was quartered in that wing—or even which floor I was on when I first heard the song. All that I remember for sure is that it was one floor either above or below mine, on the eleventh. But the difference is crucial—because McGovern’s people went mainly down on the tenth, and the smaller Humphrey contingent was above me on the twelfth.

  It was a Monday night, just a few hours before the polls opened on Tuesday morning—and at that point the race seemed so even that both camps were publicly predicting a victory and privately expecting defeat. Even in retrospect there is no way to be certain which staff was doing the singing.1

  And my own head was so scrambled at the hour that I can’t be sure of anything except that I had just come back from a predawn breakfast at the Omaha Toddle House with Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty, and Gary Hart, McGovern’s national campaign manager who had just picked up a check for roughly $40,000 gross from another one of Beatty’s fund-raising spectacles.

  This one had been over in Lincoln, the state capital town about sixty miles west of Omaha, where a friendly crowd of some 7500 had packed the local civic center for a concert by Andy Williams and Henry Mancini… which apparently did the trick, because twenty-four hours later Lincoln delivered two to one for McGovern and put him over the hump in Nebraska.

  * * *

  I understand the necessity for these things, and as a certified member of the national press corps I am keenly aware of my responsibility to keep calm and endure two hours of Andy Williams from time to time—especially since I went over to Lincoln on the press bus and couldn’t leave until the concert was over anyway. But I’m beginning to wonder just how much longer I can stand it: this endless nightmare of getting up at the crack of dawn to go out and watch the candidate shake hands with workers coming in for the day shift at the Bilbo Gear & Sprocket factory, then following him across town for another press-the-flesh gig at the local Slaughterhouse… then back on the bus and follow the candidate’s car through traffic for forty-five minutes to watch him eat lunch and chat casually with the folks at a basement cafeteria table in some high-rise Home for the Aged.

  Both Humphrey and McGovern have been doing this kind of thing about eighteen hours a day for the past six months—and one of them will keep doing it eighteen hours a day for five more months until November. According to the political pros, there is no other way to get elected: Go out and meet the voters on their own turf, shake their hands, look them straight in the eye, and introduce yourself… there is no other way.

  The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians Handbook is George Wallace. He doesn’t do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones.

  But to hell with these theories. This is about the thirteenth lead I’ve written for this goddamn mess, and they are getting progressively worse… which hardly matters now, because we are down to the deadline again and it will not be long before the Mojo Wire starts beeping and the phones start ringing and those thugs out in San Francisco will be screaming for Copy. Words! Wisdom! Gibberish!

  Anything! The presses roll at noon—three hours from now, and the paper is ready to go except for five blank pages in the middle. The “center-spread,” a massive feature story. The cover is already printed, and according to the Story List that is lying out there on the floor about ten feet away from this typewriter, the center-spread feature for this issue will be A Definitive Profile of George McGovern and Everything He Stands For—written by me.

  Looking at it fills me with guilt. This room reeks of failure once again. Every two weeks they send me a story list that says I am lashing together some kind of definitive work on a major subject… which is true, but these projects are not developing quite as fast as we thought they would. There are still signs of life in a few of them, but not many. Out of twenty-six projects—a year’s work—I have abandoned all hope for twenty-four, and the other two are hanging by a thread.2

  There is no time to explain, now, why this is not a profile of George McGovern. That story blew up on us in Omaha, on the morning of the primary, when George and most of his troupe suddenly decided that Nixon’s decision to force a showdown with Hanoi made it imperative for the Senator to fly back to Washington at once.

  Nobody could say exactly why, but we all assumed he had something special in mind—some emergency move to get control of Nixon. No time for long mind-probing interviews. Humphrey had already announced that he was flying back to Washington at dawn, and there were two or three cynics in the press corps who suggested that this left McGovern no choice. If Humphrey thought the War Scare was important enough to make him rush back to the Capitol instead of hanging around Omaha on election day, then McGovern should be there too—or Hubert might say his Distinguished Opponent cared more about winning the Nebraska primary than avoiding World War Three.

  As it turned out, neither Humphrey nor McGovern did anything dramatic when they got back to Washington—or at least nothing public—and a week or so later the New York Times announced that the mines in Haiphong harbor had been set to de-activate themselves on the day before Nixon’s trip to Moscow for the summit meeting.

  Maybe I missed something. Perhaps the whole crisis was solved in one of those top-secret confrontations between the Senate and the White House that we will not be able to read about until the official records are opened seventy-five years from now.

  But there is no point in haggling any longer with this. The time has come to get full bore into heavy Gonzo Journalism, and this time we have no choice but to push it all the way out to the limit. The phone is ringing again and I can hear Crouse downstairs trying to put them off.

  “What the hell are you guys worried about? He’s up there cranking out a page every three minutes… What?… No, it won’t make much sense, but I guarantee you we’ll have plenty of words. If all else fails we’ll start sending press releases and shit like that… Sure, why worry? We’ll start sending almost immediately.”

  Only a lunatic would do this kind of work: twenty-three primaries in five months; stone drunk from dawn till dusk and huge speed-blisters all over my head. Where is the meaning? That light at the end of the tunnel?

  Crouse is yelling again. They
want more copy. He has sent them all of his stuff on the Wallace shooting, and now they want mine. Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service; get one of those big AP tickers that spits out fifty words a minute, twenty-four hours a day… a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation—all expenses paid—wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera… but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that’s where he went.

  Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

  So much for all that. The noise-level downstairs tells me Crouse will not be able to put them off much longer. So now we will start getting serious: First Columbus, Ohio, and then Omaha. But mainly Columbus, only because this thing began—in my head, at least—as a fairly straight and serious account of the Ohio primary.

  Then we decided to combine it with the ill-fated “McGovern Profile.” So we arranged to meet George in Nebraska. I flew out from Washington and Wenner flew in from the Coast—just in time to shake hands with the candidate on his way to the airport.

  No—I want to be fair about it: There was a certain amount of talk, and on the evidence it seems to have worked out.

  But not in terms of “The Profile.” We still had five blank pages. So I came back to Washington and grappled with it for a few days, Crouse came down from Boston to help beat the thing into shape… but nothing worked; no spine, no hope, to hell with it. We decided to bury the bugger and pretend none of that stuff ever happened. Tim flew back to Boston and I went off to New York in a half-crazed condition to explain myself and my wisdom at the Columbia School of Journalism.