Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Six months ago George McGovern was dismissed by the press and the pols as a “one-issue candidate.” And to a certain extent they were right. He has branched out a bit since then, but The War in Vietnam is still the only issue in McGovern’s jumbled arsenal that he never has to explain, defend, or modify. All he has to do is start talking about Vietnam, and the crowd begins cheering and clapping.

  For a “one-issue candidate,” McGovern has done pretty well. Four years ago Gene McCarthy was another “one-issue candidate”—the same issue poor McGovern is stuck with today—and if McCarthy had somehow managed to put together the king of political organization that McGovern is riding now, he would be the incumbent President and the ’72 campaign would be a very different scene.

  Gene Pokorny, one of McGovern’s key managers, who also worked for McCarthy in ’68, describes the difference between the two campaigns as “the difference between an organization and a happening”… Which is probably true, but that “happening” dumped a Democratic President and made McCarthy the front-runner all the way to California, where he lost to Robert Kennedy by only three percentage points. They were still counting the votes when Sirhan Sirhan fired a bullet into Kennedy’s head.

  What if McCarthy had won California? Would Sirhan have gone after him, instead of Kennedy?… Like Artie Bremer, who stalked Nixon for a while, then switched to Wallace? Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.

  Strange speculation… and worth pursuing, no doubt, on a day when I have more time. Is the Governor’s mansion in American Samoa on a cliff above the beach? Does it have a big screen porch? Sometime soon I will have to speak with Mankewicz about this. I don’t look forward to it, but perhaps we can work something out if we handle the whole thing by telephone.

  Some people are easier to deal with at a distance, and Frank is one of them. His whole manner changes when you confront him in person. It is very much like dealing with a gila monster who was only pretending to be asleep when you approached him—but the instant you enter his psychic territory, a radius of about six feet, he will dart off in some unexpected direction and take up a new stance, fixing you with a lazy unblinking stare and apparently trying to make up his mind whether to dart back and sink a fang in your flesh or just sit there and wait till you move on.

  This is the way Manikewicz behaved when I ran across him around midnight, a week or so before election day, in the hallway outside the McGovern press room in the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel and asked him if he could help me out with some details on a story I’d just picked up in a strip joint called The Losers Club on La Cienega Boulevard—a very strange tale about Hubert Humphrey keeping a private plane on standby at a nearby landing strip, ready to take off at any moment for Vegas and return the same night with a big bag of cash, which would then be rushed to Humphrey headquarters at the Beverly Hilton and used to finance a bare-knuckle media blitz against McGovern during the last days of the campaign.

  The story was at least second-hand by the time I heard it, but the source seemed reliable and I was eager to learn more… but there was no point in calling Humphrey on a thing like this, so I brooded on it for a while and finally decided—for reasons better left unexplained, at this point—that the only two people even half-likely to know anything about such a bizarre story were Mankiewicz and Dick Tuck.

  But a dozen or so phone calls failed to locate either one of them, so I wandered up to the press room to get a free drink and check the bulletin board for a message of some kind from Tim Crouse, who had gone off about six hours earlier to find a bottle of Schnapps and continue his research on How the Press Covers The Campaign. The project had already stirred up a surprising amount of outspoken resentment among the objects of his study, and now he had gone out to get crazy on German whiskey with a bunch of people who thought he was planning to skewer them in the public prints.

  The press room was crowded—two dozen or so ranking media wizards, all wearing little egg-shaped ID tags from the Secret Service: Leo Sauvage/La Figaro, Jack Perkins/NBC, R.W. Apple/N.Y. Times… the McGovern campaign went big-time, for real, in California. No more of that part-time, secondary coverage. McGovern was suddenly the front-runner, perhaps the next President, and virtually every room in the hotel was filled with either staff or media people… twelve new typewriters in the press suite, ten phones, four color TV sets, a well-stocked free bar, even a goddamn Mojo Wire.2

  The gossip in the press room was heavier than usual that night: Gary Hart was about to be fired as McGovern’s campaign manager; Fred Dutton would replace him… Humphrey’s sister had just been arrested in San Diego on a warrant connected with Hubert’s campaign debts… Muskie was offering to support McGovern if George would agree to take over $800,000 of his (Muskie’s) campaign debt… But Crouse was nowhere in sight. I stood around for a while, trying to piece together a few grisly unsubstantiated rumors about “heavy pols preparing to take over the whole McGovern campaign”… Several people had chunks of the story, but nobody had a real key; so I left to go back down to my room to work for a while.

  That was when I ran into Mankiewicz, picking a handful of thumb-tacked messages off the bulletin board outside the door.

  “I have a very weird story for you,” I said.

  He eyed me cautiously. “What is it?”

  “Come over here,” I said motioning him to follow me down the corridor to a quiet place… Then I told him what I had heard about Humphrey’s midnight air-courier to Vegas. He stared down at the carpet, not seeming particularly interested—but when I finished he looked up and said, “Where’d you hear that?”

  I shrugged, sensing definite interest now. “Well, I was talking to some people over at a place called The Losers, and—”

  “With Kirby?” he snapped.

  “No,” I said. “I went over there looking for him, but he wasn’t around.” Which was true. Earlier that day Kirby Jones, McGovern’s press secretary, had told me he planned to stop by The Losers Club later on, because Warren Beatty had recommended it highly… but when I stopped by around midnight there was no sign of him.

  Mankiewicz was not satisfied. “Who was there?” he asked. “Some of our people? Who was it?”

  “Nobody you’d know,” I said. “But what about this Humphrey story? What can you tell me about it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at a burst of yelling from the press room. Then: “When’s your next issue coming out?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Before the election?”

  “Yeah, and so far I don’t have anything worth a shit to write about—but this thing sounds interesting.”

  He nodded, staring down at the floor again, then shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “You could cause a lot of trouble for us by printing a thing like that. They’d know where it came from, and they’d jerk our man right out.”

  “What man?”

  He stared at me, smiling faintly.

  At this point the story becomes very slippery, with many loose ends and dark shadows—but the nut was very simple: I had blundered almost completely by accident on a flat-out byzantine spook story. There was nothing timely or particularly newsworthy about it, but when your deadline is every two weeks you don’t tend to worry about things like scoops and newsbreaks. If Mankiewicz had broken down and admitted to me that night that he was actually a Red Chinese agent and that McGovern had no pulse, I wouldn’t have known how to handle it—and the tension of trying to keep that kind of heinous news to myself for the next four days until Rolling Stone went to press would almost certainly have caused me to lock myself in my hotel room with eight quarts of Wild Turkey and all the Ibogaine I could get my hands on.

  “I was a Jew once myself.” ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  So this strange tale about Humphery & Vegas was not especially newsworthy, by my standards. Its only real value, in fact, was the rare flash of contrast it provided to the insane tedium of the surface campaign. Important or not, this was something ver
y different: midnight flights to Vegas, mob money funneled in from casinos to pay for Hubert’s TV spots; spies, runners, counterspies; cryptic phone calls from airport phone booths… Indeed; the dark underbelly of big-time politics. A useless story, no doubt, but it sure beat the hell out of getting back on that goddamn press bus and being hauled out to some shopping center in Gardena and watching McGovern shake hands for two hours with lumpy housewives.

  Unfortunately, all I really knew about what I called the U-13 story was the general outline and just enough key points to convince Mankiewicz that I might be irresponsible enough to go ahead and try to write the thing anyway. All I knew—or thought I knew—at that point was that somebody very close to the top of the Humphrey campaign had made secret arrangements for a night flight to Vegas in order to pick up a large bundle of money from unidentified persons presumed to be sinister, and that this money would be used by Humphrey’s managers to finance another one of Hubert’s eleventh-hour fast-finish blitzkriegs.

  Even then, a week before the vote, he was thought to be running ten points and maybe more behind McGovern—and since the average daily media expenditure for each candidate in the California primary was roughly $30,000 a day, Humphrey would need at least twice that amount to pay for the orgy of exposure he would need to overcome a ten-point lead. No less than a quick $500,000.

  The people in Vegas were apparently willing to spring for it, because the plane was already chartered and ready to go when McGovern’s headquarters got word of the flight from their executive-level spy in the Humphrey campaign. His identity remains a mystery—in the public prints, at least—but the handful of people aware of him say he performed invaluable services for many months.

  His function in the U-13 gig was merely to call McGovern headquarters and tell them about the Vegas plane. At this point, my second- or third-hand source was not sure what happened next. According to the story, two McGovern operatives were instantly dispatched to keep around-the-clock watch on the plane for the next seventy-two hours, and somebody from McGovern headquarters called Humphrey and warned him that they knew what he was up to.

  In any case, the plane never took off and there was no evidence in the last week of the campaign to suggest that Hubert got a last-minute influx of money, from Vegas or anywhere else.

  That is as much of the U-13 story as I could piece together without help from somebody who knew the details—and Mankiewicz finally agreed, insisting the whole time that he knew nothing about the story except that he didn’t want to see it in print before election day, that if I wanted to hold off until the next issue he would put me in touch with somebody who would tell me the whole story, for good or ill.

  “Call Miles Rubin,” he said, “and tell him I told you to ask him about this. He’ll fill you in.”

  That was fine, I said. I was in no special hurry for the story, anyway. So I let it ride for a few days, missing my deadline for that issue… and on Wednesday I began trying to get hold of Miles Rubin, one of McGovern’s top managers for California. All I knew about Rubin before I called was that several days earlier he had thrown Washington Post correspondent David Broder out of his office for asking too many questions—less than twenty-four hours before Broder appeared on Rubin’s TV screen as one of the three interrogators on the first Humphrey/McGovern debate.

  My own experience with Rubin turned out to be just about par for the course. I finally got through to him by telephone on Friday, and explained that Mankiewicz had told me to call him and find out the details of the U-13 story. I started to say we could meet for a beer or two sometime later that afternoon and he could—

  “Are you kidding?” he cut in. “That’s one story you’re never going to hear.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no point even talking about it,” he said flatly. Then he launched into a three-minute spiel about the fantastic honesty and integrity that characterized the McGovern campaign from top to bottom, and why was it that people like me didn’t spend more time writing about The Truth and The Decency and The Integrity, instead of picking around the edge for minor things that weren’t important anyway?

  “Jesus Christ!” I muttered. Why argue? Getting anything but pompous bullshit and gibberish out of Rubin would be like trying to steal meat from a hammerhead shark.

  “Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  That night I found Mankiewicz in the press room and told him what had happened.

  He couldn’t understand it, he said. But he would talk to Miles tomorrow and straighten it out.

  I was not optimistic; and by that time I was beginning to agree that the U-13 story was not worth the effort. The Big Story in California, after all, was that McGovern was on the brink of locking up a first-ballot nomination in Miami—and that Hubert Humphrey was about to get stomped so badly at the polls that he might have to be carried out of the state in a rubber sack.

  The next time I saw Mankiewicz was on the night before the election and he seemed very tense, very strong into the gila monster trip… and when I started to ask him about Rubin he began ridiculing the story in a VERY LOUD VOICE, so I figured it was time to forget it.

  Several days later I learned the reason for Frank’s bad nerves that night. McGovern’s fat lead over Humphrey, which had hovered between 14 and 20 percentage points for more than a week, had gone into a sudden and apparently uncontrollable dive in the final days of the campaign. By election eve it had shrunk to five points, and perhaps even less.

  The shrinkage crisis was a closely guarded secret among McGovern’s top command. Any leak to the press could have led to disastrous headlines on Tuesday morning: Election Day… MCGOVERN FALTERS; HUMPHREY CLOSING GAP… a headline like that in either the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle might have thrown the election to Humphrey by generating a last minute Sympathy/Underdog turnout and whipping Hubert’s field workers into a frenzied “get out the vote” effort.

  But the grim word never leaked, and by noon on Tuesday an almost visible wave of relief rolled through the McGovern camp. The dike would hold, they felt, at roughly five percent.

  The coolest man in the whole McGovern entourage on Tuesday was George McGovern himself—who had spent all day Monday on airplanes, racing from one critical situation to another. On Monday morning he flew down to San Diego for a major rally; then to New Mexico for another final-hour rally on the eve of the New Mexico primary (which he won the next day—along with New Jersey and South Dakota)… and finally on Monday night to Houston for a brief, unscheduled appearance at the National Governors’ Conference, which was rumored to be brewing up a “stop McGovern” movement.

  After defusing the crisis in Houston he got a few hours’ sleep before racing back to Los Angeles to deal with another emergency: His twenty-two-year-old daughter was having a premature baby and first reports from the hospital hinted at serious complications.

  But by noon the crisis had passed, and somewhere sometime around one he arrived with his praetorian guard of eight Secret Service agents at Max Palevsky’s house in Bel Air, where he immediately changed into swimming trunks and dove into the pool. The day was grey and cool, no hint of sun, and none of the other guests seemed to feel like swimming.

  For a variety of tangled reasons—primarily because my wife was one of the guests in the house that weekend—I was there when McGovern arrived. So we talked for a while, mainly about the possibility of either Muskie or Humphrey dropping out of the race and joining forces with George if the price was right… and it occurred to me afterward that it was the first time he’d ever seen me without a beer can in my hand or babbling like a loon about Freak Power, election bets, or some other twisted subject… but he was kind enough not to mention this.

  It was a very relaxed afternoon. The only tense moment occurred when I noticed a sort of narrow-looking man with a distinctly predatory appearance standing off by himself and glowering down at the white telephone as if he planned to jerk it out by the root if it didn’t ring within ten seconds and
tell him everything he wanted to know.

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked, pointing across the pool at him.

  “That’s Miles Rubin,” somebody replied.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I should have guessed.”

  Moments later my curiosity got the better of me and I walked over to Rubin and introduced myself. “I understand they’re going to put you in charge of press relations after Miami,” I said as we shook hands.

  He said something I didn’t understand, then hurried away. For a moment I was tempted to call him back and ask if I could feel his pulse. But the moment passed and I jumped into the pool, instead.3

  The rest of the day disintegrated into chaos, drunkenness, and the kind of hysterical fatigue that comes from spending too much time racing from one place to another and being shoved around in crowds. McGovern won the Democratic primary by exactly five percent—45 to 40—and Nixon came from behind in the GOP race to nip Ashbrook by 87 to 13.

  She was gonna be an actress and I was gonna learn to fly

  She took off to find the footlights and I took off to find the sky.

  —Taxi by Harry Chapin

  George McGovern’s queer idea that he could get himself elected President on the Democratic ticket by dancing a muted whipsong on the corpse of the Democratic Party is suddenly beginning to look very sane, and very possible. For the last five or six days in California, McGovern’s campaign was covered from dawn to midnight by fifteen or twenty camera crews, seventy-five to a hundred still photographers, and anywhere from fifty to two hundred linear/writing press types.

  The media crowd descended on McGovern like a swarm of wild bees, and there was not one of them who doubted that he/she was covering The Winner. The sense of impending victory around the pool at the Wilshire Hyatt House was as sharp and all-pervasive as the gloom and desperation in Hubert Humphrey’s national staff headquarters about ten miles west at the far more chic and fashionable Beverly Hilton.