Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  5:26—Mank on phone 20 minutes to “Socko” Wiethe, Democratic Party boss in Cincinnati—Mank screaming. Wiethe’s voice screeching out of the small black phone receiver shatters quiet tension of the room.

  Mank: “OK Mr. Wiethe, all I want from you is a clear affirmation that you’re going to ignore the law.” (Mank pauses.) “Wait a minute, I don’t want any more abuse, I just want to know if you’re going to obey that law!”

  5:31—Mank on phone to lawyer: “Jesus, I think we gotta go in there and get those ballots! Impound ’em! Every damn one!”

  5:35—All phones ringing now, the swing shift has shot the gap—now the others are waking up.

  Mank: “They’re gonna stop the count in Cincinnati in a half hour—and wait 12 hours before starting again. Yeah we’re ahead down there, but not by much… we can’t afford to give ’em time to get their counts documented.”

  5:43—Mank on phone to “Mary” in Washington; “It now appears quite clear that we’ll lead the state—without the 21st.”

  Mankiewicz has been on the phone now since 11 P.M. with only a few breaks.

  Socko Wiethe to Mank: “This is your boss’s fault—he should have known—you start electing delegates and you get this kind of thing.”

  Bad note on “party reform.”

  Night ends, 6:49. Meet in the coffee shop at 7:30; press conference at 10:00.

  6:05—Waiting for elevator in Columbus, Ohio, pacing back and forth on the damp red carpet in the second floor hall… Pat Caddell is jerking a bundle of legal-sized paper around in his hands and mumbling: “I knew this campaign was too goddamn honest! It was bound to get us in trouble… Now I understand why the North Vietnamese wouldn’t agree to elections in The South.”

  Caddell is twenty-one years old. He has never had his face mashed in the dirty realities of American politics. For almost a year now, he has been George McGovern’s official numbers wizard. Caddell and his Cambridge Research Associates have been working the streets and suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts for McGovern, then coming back to headquarters on election nite and calling the results almost down to the percentage point…

  But tonight was different. The polls closed—officially—at 6:30, but the situation in Cleveland was out of control since early morning… And by midnight the outlook was ominous. McGovern’s eleventh-hour challenge in Ohio was almost over the hump; he was on the brink of knocking Hubert out of the race, maintaining a razor-thin lead all night long… but for some reason there were no results from the black districts in midtown Cleveland.

  7:00—Today Show: McGee says J. Edgar Hoover died last night and Humphrey won a narrow victory over Wallace in Indiana—but his slim lead over George McGovern in Ohio is by no means certain.

  NBC newsman Bill Monroe: “McGov. will wind up with the biggest psychological boost in the Ohio primary—but his pulling power among blue-collar workers still remains uncertain.”

  Bullshit?

  Wallace from Houston: “We will definitely be the balance of power in Miami—we’ve already turned the party in a different direction.”

  7:30—CBS Morning News:

  Scoop Jackson comes on, saying he’s dropped out—hoping for a polarization between Wallace and McGovern. (Recall Mank. quote—“class, huh?”) “I’m not gonna take sides in this campaign.”—Then attacks McGovern again on amnesty, acid, abortion etc….

  CBS John Hart election roundup. No hint of the all-night phone madness and treachery reports in Situation Room. Even reading and watching all the news, there is no way to know the truth—except to be there.

  Humphrey on CBS says, “If you put Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie and Scoop Jackson together—we’re pretty much on the same wave length—and we’ve got the numbers.”

  McGovern on CBS takes a very gentle line on the “very peculiar things that happened out there in Cleveland.” No hint of Mank screaming on the phone at Socko.

  McGee on Today Show (second hour): “There is still no result in that big Ohio primary—Senator Humphrey is still maintaining his slim lead over Sen. George McGovern.”

  Suddenly, Kleindienst and Eastland and Thomas Corchoran are on the screen, praising J. Edgar Hoover—Jesus, these are the pigs who run the country. Nixon/southerners/Big Business.

  10:10—Wednesday morning press conf.—grim faces at head table:

  Frank Mankiewicz

  Yancy Martin

  Gary Hart

  Pat Caddell

  Harold Himmelman

  Bob McCallister

  STUART BRATESMAN / ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  Hart: “We’re making no allegations of illegality or fraud—at this point.”

  An extremely haggard crew; red eyes, hovering on stupor.

  “By mid-afternoon massive numbers of people in Youngstown—including the judge up there—were not able to obtain ballots.”

  Mankiewicz compares yesterday’s election in Ohio to the 1969 election of Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador—next to Saigon, perhaps the second most flagrantly crooked election in the history of the democratic process—he needed a team of OAS observers in Guayaquil etc. “In some precincts here, voters were not given the paper ballots unless they asked for them…”

  Mank: “We have achieved what we set out to do in Ohio—we stood Senator Humphrey at least dead even and probably beat him, as far as the working man’s vote is concerned….

  “This is Humphrey’s peak—from now on there isn’t much he can win.”

  Another Wednesday morning, another hotel room, another grim bout with the TV Morning News… and another post-mortem press conference scheduled for 10:00 A.M. Three hours from now. Call room service and demand two whole grapefruits, along with a pot of coffee and four glasses of V-8 juice.

  These goddamn Wednesday mornings are ruining my health. Last night I came out of a mild Ibogaine coma just about the time the polls closed at eight. No booze on election day—at least not until the polls close; but they always seem to leave at least one loophole for serious juicers. In Columbus it was the bar at the airport, and in Omaha we had to rent a car and drive across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, which is also across the state line into Iowa. Every year, on election day, the West End bars in Council Bluffs are jammed with boozers from Omaha.

  Which is fine, for normal people, but when you drink all day with a head full of Ibogaine and then have to spend the next ten hours analyzing election returns… there will usually be problems.

  Last week—at the Neil House Motor Hotel in Columbus, Ohio—some lunatic tried to break into my room at six in the morning. But fortunately I had a strong chain on the door. In every reputable hotel there is a sign above the knob that warns: “For Our Guests’ Protection—Please Use Door Chain at all Times, Before Retiring.”

  I always use it. During four long months on the campaign trail I have had quite a few bad experiences with people trying to get into my room at strange hours—and in almost every case they object to the music. One out of three will also object to the typewriter, but that hasn’t been the case here in Omaha….

  (PROPOSED PHOTO CAPTION)

  Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his “old friend” Hunter S. Thompson, the National Correspondent for Rolling Stone and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs.

  A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that “Hi, sheriff” bullshit; I am now the resident Puff Adder… and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim 19,000 vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps 10,000 of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by tha
t worthless asshole Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and turned into a major issue.

  So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey’s people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the Sheriff and all his Deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.

  No, this would never do. Not for George McGovern—at least not in May of ’72, and probably never. He has spent the past week traveling around Nebraska and pausing at every opportunity to explain that he is flatly opposed to the legalization of marijuana. He is also opposed to putting people in prison for mere possession, which he thinks should be reclassified as a misdemeanor instead of a felony.

  And even this went down hard in Nebraska. He came into this state with a comfortable lead, and just barely escaped with a six percentage-point (41 percent to 35) win over Hubert Humphrey—who did everything possible, short of making the accusations on his own, to identify McGovern as a Trojan Horse full of dope dealers and abortionists.

  Jackson had raised the same issues in Ohio, but George ignored them—which cost him the state and at least thirty-eight delegates, according to his staff thinkers—so when Hubert laid it on him again, in Nebraska, McGovern decided to “meet them head on.” For almost a week, every speech he made led off with an angry denial that he favored either legalized grass or Abortion On Demand… and in the dawn hours of Saturday morning, three days before the election, he called his media wizard Charley Guggenheim back from a vacation in the Caribbean to make a Special Film in Nebraska designed—for statewide exposure on Sunday night—to make goddamn sure that The Folks in Nebraska understood that George McGovern was just a regular guy, like them, who would no more tolerate marijuana than send his wife to an abortionist.

  And it worked. I watched it in McGovern’s Omaha Hilton “press suite” with a handful of reporters and Dick Dougherty, a former L.A. Times reporter who writes many of George’s major speech/statements, but who is usually kept out of the public eye because of his extremely seedy and unsettling appearance. On Sunday night, however, Dougherty came out of wherever he usually stays to watch The Man on the TV set in the press room. We found him hunkered there with a plastic glass of Old Overholt and a pack of Home Run cigarettes, staring at the tube and saying over and over again: “Jesus, that’s fantastic! Christ, look at that camera angle! God damn, this is really a hell of a film, eh?”

  I agreed. It was a first-class campaign film: The lighting was fantastic; the sound was as sharp and clear as diamonds bouncing on a magnesium tabletop; the characters and the dialogue made Turgenev seem like a punk…. McGovern sat in the round and masterfully de-fused every ugly charge that had ever been leveled at him. He spoke like a combination of Socrates, Clarence Darrow, and God. It was a flat-out masterpiece, both as a film and a performance—and when it ended I joined in the general chorus of praise.

  “Beautiful,” somebody muttered.

  “Damn fine stuff,” said somebody else.

  Dougherty was grinning heavily. “How about that?” he said.

  “Wonderful,” I replied. “No doubt about it. My only objection is that I disagree with almost everything he said.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah—I’m for all those things: Amnesty, Acid, Abortion…”

  “So what? You’re not a candidate for President in the Nebraska primary, are you?”

  “No—but if I was—”

  Dougherty stood up quickly and backed off a few steps. “Jesus Christ,” he snapped. “You’re really a goddamn nit-picker, aren’t you?”

  McGovern told a Flint (Mich.) press conference that while “Wallace is entitled to be treated with respect at the convention (in Miami), I don’t propose to make any deals with him…”

  Humphrey (in Michigan) attacked Wallace more personally than McGovern, but when a question about wooing Wallace delegates was thrown at him, Humphrey said, “I will seek support wherever I can get it, if I can convince them to be for me.”

  —Washington Post, May 14, ’72

  Quotes like this are hard to come by—especially in presidential elections, where most candidates are smart enough to know better than to call a press conference and then announce—on the record—an overweening eagerness to peddle their asses to the highest bidder.

  Only Hubert Humphrey would do a thing like that… and we can only assume that now, in his lust for the White House—after suffering for twenty-four years with a case of Political Blueballs only slightly less severe than Richard Nixon’s—that The Hube has finally cracked; and he did it in public.

  With the possible exception of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey is the purest and most disgusting example of a Political Animal in American politics today. He has been going at it hammer and tong twenty-five hours a day since the end of World War II—just like Richard Nixon, who launched his own career as a Red-baiting California congressman about the same time Hubert began making headlines as the Red-baiting Mayor of Minneapolis. They are both career anti-Communists: Nixon’s gig was financed from the start by Big Business, and Humphrey’s by Big Labor… and what both of them stand for today is the de facto triumph of a One Party System in American politics.

  George Meany, the aging ruler of the AFL-CIO, was one of the first to announce his whole-hearted support of Nixon’s decision to lay mines around Haiphong Harbor and celebrate the memory of Guernica with a fresh round of saturation bombing in North Vietnam.

  Humphrey disagreed, of course—along with Mayor Daley—but in fact neither one of them had any choice. The war in Vietnam will be a key issue in November, and Senator Henry Jackson of Washington has already demonstrated—with a series of humiliating defeats in the primaries—what fate awaits any Democrat who tries to agree with Nixon on The War.

  But Humphrey seems not quite convinced. On the morning before the Wisconsin primary he appeared on The Today Show, along with all the other candidates, and when faced with a question involving renewed escalation of the bombing in Vietnam he lined up with Jackson and Wallace—in clear opposition to McGovern and Lindsay, who both said we should get the hell out of Vietnam at once. Big Ed, as usual, couldn’t make up his mind.

  Since then—after watching Jackson suck wind all over the Midwest—Hubert has apparently decided to stick with Dick Daley on Vietnam. But he has not explained, yet, how he plans to square his late-blooming dovishness with Boss Meany—who could croak Humphrey’s last chance for the nomination with a single phone call.

  “There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the Campaign Trail.” ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  Meany’s hired hacks and goon squads are just about all Hubert can count on these days, and even his Labor friends are having their problems. Tony Boyle, for instance, is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have space to list here. Boyle, former president of the United Mineworkers Union, was recently cracked out of office by the Justice Department for gross and flagrant “misuse” of the union treasury—which involved, among other things, illegal contributions to Humphrey’s presidential campaign in 1968. In addition to all this, Boyle now faces a Conspiracy/Murder rap in connection with the contract-killing of Joseph Yablonski, who made the mistake of challenging him for the union presidency in December, 1969, and paid for it a few months later when hired thugs appeared one night in his bedroom and gunned him down, along with his wife and daughter.

  Hubert Humphrey’s opinion of Tony Boyle was best expressed when they appeared together at the United Mine Workers Convention in Denver in 1968, and Humphrey referred to Boyle as “My friend, this great American.”3

  For whatever it’s worth, the UMW is one of the most powerful political realities in West Virginia, where Humphrey recently won his fourth primary in a row.

  This may or may not properly explain Humphrey’s startling admission at that press con
ference in Michigan, which was nothing less than a half-shrouded bargaining overture to George Wallace, who has already gone out of his way to tell the national press corps that “My daughter has a big picture of Hubert Humphrey tacked up on the wall above her bed.”

  This was very much like Teddy Kennedy telling the press that his wife, his children, and indeed the whole Kennedy blood-clan have decided to vote for McGovern. There is not much doubt, now, that Kennedy is preparing to get seriously and publicly behind McGovern. I haven’t talked to him about it. I can’t even get through to his goddamn press secretary. The only way to talk to Kennedy these days is to spend a lot of time on the Washington cocktail circuit, which is not my beat—but the society columnists and Gentlemen Journalists who do most of their work in that area are now convinced that Kennedy is ready to crank his weight behind McGovern any time the Senator asks for it.

  The only reporter in Washington who appears to believe that Teddy is marshalling his forces for a last-minute blitz for his own candidacy in ’72 is Kandy Stroud of Women’s Wear Daily. She says he is sneaking around the country on weekends, lashing together a very ominous coalition. She broke the story in WWD on April 25th, the same day George McGovern swept all 102 delegates in the Massachusetts primary.

  Quietly, as if it were being pulled by cats, the Kennedy bandwagon has begun rolling.

  For a couple of days last week, while everyone else was preoccupied with moon shots, primaries and pandas, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) slipped out of town and went to Little Rock, Ark., Columbia, S.C., and Indianapolis, Ind.