Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Nobody argued that. The big problem in February was knowing which two of the twelve candidates would survive until then. If California was going to be the showdown, it was also three months and twenty-three primaries away—a long and grueling struggle before the field would narrow down to only two.

  Ed Muskie, of course, would be one of them. In late February—and even in early March—he was such an overwhelming favorite that every press wizard in Washington had already conceded him the nomination. At that point in the campaign, the smart-money scenario had Big Ed winning comfortably in New Hampshire, finishing a strong second to Wallace a week later in Florida, nailing it in Wisconsin on April 4th.

  New Hampshire would finish McGovern, they said, and Hubert’s ill-advised Comeback would die on the vine in Florida. Jackson and Chisholm were fools, McCarthy and Wilbur Mills doomed tokens… and that left only Lindsay, a maverick Republican who had only recently switched parties. But he had already caused a mild shock wave on the Democratic side by beating McGovern badly—and holding Muskie to a stand-off—with an eleventh-hour, “Kennedy-style” campaign in non-primary Arizona, the first state to elect delegates.

  Lindsay’s lieutenants saw that success in Arizona as the first spark for what would soon be a firestorm. Their blueprint had Lindsay compounding his momentum by finishing a strong third or even second in Florida, then polarizing the party by almost beating Muskie in Wisconsin—which would set the stage for an early Right/Left showdown in Massachusetts, a crucial primary state with 102 delegates and a traditionally liberal electorate.

  The key to that strategy was the idea that Muskie could not hold the Center, because he was basically a candidate of the Democratic Right, like Scoop Jackson, and that he would move instinctively in that direction at the first sign of challenge from his Left—which would force him into a position so close to Nixon’s that eventually not even the Democratic “centrists” would tolerate him.

  There was high ground to be seized on The Left, Lindsay felt, and whoever seized it would fall heir to that far-flung, leaderless army of Kennedy/McCarthy zealots from 1968… along with 25 million new voters who would naturally go 3-1 against Nixon—unless the Democratic candidate turned out to be Hubert Humphrey or a Moray Eel. This meant that almost anybody who could strike sparks with the “new voters” would be working off a huge and potentially explosive new power base that was worth—on paper, at least—anywhere between 5 percent and 15 percent of the total vote. It was a built-in secret weapon for any charismatic Left-bent underdog who could make the November election even reasonably close.

  * * *

  Now, walking down a long empty white corridor in the Atlanta airport on a Sunday night in July, I had a very clear memory of my last visit to this place—but it seemed like something that had happened five years ago, instead of only five months. The Lindsay campaign was a loose, upbeat trip while it lasted, but there is a merciless kind of “out of sight, out of mind” quality about a losing presidential campaign… and when I saw Lindsay on the convention floor in Miami, sitting almost unnoticed in the front row of the New York delegation, it was vaguely unsettling to recall that less than six months ago he was attracting big crowds out on Collins Avenue—just one block east of his chair, that night, in the Miami Beach convention hall—and that every word he said, back then, was being sucked up by three or four network TV crews and echoed on the front pages of every major newspaper from coast to coast.

  As it turned out, the Lindsay campaign was fatally flawed from the start. It was all tip and no iceberg—the exact opposite of the slow-building McGovern juggernaut—but back in February it was still considered very shrewd and avant-garde to assume that the most important factor in a presidential campaign was a good “media candidate.” If he had Star Quality, the rest would take care of itself.

  The Florida primary turned out to be a funeral procession for would-be “media candidates.” Both Lindsay and Muskie went down in Florida—although not necessarily because they geared their pitch to TV; the real reason, I think, is that neither one of them understood how to use TV… or maybe they knew, but just couldn’t pull it off. It is hard to be super-convincing on the tube if everything you say reminds the TV audience of a Dick Cavett commercial for Alpo dogfood. George McGovern has been widely ridiculed in the press as “the ideal anti-media candidate.” He looks wrong, talks wrong, and even acts wrong—by conventional TV standards. But McGovern has his own ideas about how to use the tube. In the early primaries that kept his TV exposure to a minimum—for a variety of reasons that included a lack of both money and confidence—but by the time he got to California for the showdown with Hubert Humphrey, McGovern’s TV campaign was operating on the level of a very specialized art form. His thirty-minute biography—produced by Charley Guggenheim—was so good that even the most cynical veteran journalists said it was the best political film ever made for television… and Guggenhein’s sixty-second spots were better than the bio film. Unlike the early front-runners, McGovern had taken his time and learned how use the medium—instead of letting the medium use him.

  Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying—even if it’s all stone crazy. McGovern learned this from George Wallace in Florida, and it proved to be a very valuable lesson. One of the crucial moments of the ’72 primary campaign came on election night in Florida, March 14th, when McGovern—who had finished a dismal sixth, behind even Lindsay and Muskie—refused to follow Big Ed’s sour example and blame his poor showing on that Evil Racist Monster, George Wallace, who had just swept every county in the state. Moments after Muskie had appeared on all three networks to denounce the Florida results as tragic proof that at least half the voters were ignorant dupes and nazis, McGovern came on and said that although he couldn’t agree with some of the things Wallace said and stood for, he sympathized with the people who’d voted for “The Governor” because they were “angry and fed up” with some of the things that are happening in this country.

  “I feel the same way,” he added. “But unlike Governor Wallace, I’ve proposed constructive solutions to these problems.”

  Nobody applauded when he said that. The two hundred or so McGovern campaign workers who were gathered that night in the ballroom of the old Waverly Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard were not in a proper mood to cheer any praise for George Wallace. Their candidate had just been trounced by what they considered a dangerous bigot—and now, at the tail end of the loser’s traditional concession statement, McGovern was saying that he and Wallace weren’t really that far apart.

  It was not what the ballroom crowd wanted to hear at that moment. Not after listening to Muskie denounce Wallace as a cancer in the soul of America… but McGovern wasn’t talking to the people in that ballroom; he was making a very artful pitch to potential Wallace voters in the other primary states. Wisconsin was three weeks away, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan—and Wallace would be raising angry hell in every one of them. McGovern’s brain-trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was “soft”—that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” who’d been fucking them over for so long.

  The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy—and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant, overnight cure for all their worst afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? Army worms killing the turnip crop? Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn’t want the problems solved, so they wouldn’t be put out of work.

  The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems—
much less come up with any honest solutions—but “the Fighting Little Judge” has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. Southern politicians are not made that way. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand.

  Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease… all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King…

  So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it.

  The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types… and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help?

  There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves… and all that rich land lying fallow.

  The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in… hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals….

  Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity… then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale.

  That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out.

  Indeed. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London’s infamous Hardcase jail, urging them on to revolt:

  “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots!

  “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans!

  “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes—pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it! We can send the king a message and tell him how we feel! I’ll write it up myself, and all you boys can sign it… or better still, I’ll go talk to the king personally! All you boys have to do is dig me a little tunnel under the wall over there behind the gallows, and I’ll…”

  Right. That bottom line never changes: “You folks be sure and come to see me in the White House, you hear? There’ll be plenty of room for my friends, after I clean house… but first I need your vote, folks, and after that I’ll…”

  George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. What McGovern sensed in Florida, however—while Wallace was stomping him, along with all the others—was the possibility that Wallace appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel. The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it—but what then? If Wallace had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate—as a Democrat or anything else—he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler.

  McGovern, on the other hand, had put together a fantastic organization—but until he went into Wisconsin he had never tried to tap the kind of energy that seemed to be flowing, perhaps by default, to Wallace. He had given it some thought while campaigning in New Hampshire, but it was only after he beat Muskie in two blue-collar, hardhat wards in the middle of Manchester that he saw the possibility of a really mind-bending coalition: a weird mix of peace freaks and hardhats, farmers and film stars, along with urban blacks, rural Chicanos, the “youth vote”… a coalition that could elect almost anybody.

  Muskie had croaked in Florida, allowing himself to get crowded over on the Right with Wallace, Jackson, and Humphrey—then finishing a slow fourth behind all three of them. At that point in the race, Lindsay’s presumptuous blueprint was beginning to look like prophecy. The New Hampshire embarrassment had forced Muskie off center in a mild panic, and now the party was polarized. The road to Wisconsin was suddenly clear in both lanes, fast traffic to the Left and the Right. The only mobile hazard was a slow-moving hulk called “The Muskie Bandwagon,” creeping erratically down what his doom-stricken Media Manager called “that yellow stripe in the middle of the road.”

  The only other bad casualty, at that point, was Lindsay. His Wisconsin managers had discovered a fatal flaw in the blueprint: Nobody had bothered to specify the name of the candidate who would seize all that high ground on the Left, once Muskie got knocked off center. Whoever drew it up had apparently been told that McGovern would not be a factor in the later stages of the race. After absorbing two back-to-back beatings in New Hampshire and Florida, he would run out of money and be dragged off to the nearest glue factory… or, failing that, to some cut-rate retirement farm for old liberals with no charisma.

  But something went wrong, and when Lindsay arrived in Wisconsin to seize that fine high ground on the Left that he knew, from his blueprint, was waiting for him—he found it already occupied, sealed off, and well-guarded on every perimeter, by a legion of hard-eyed fanatics in the pay of George McGovern.1

  Gene Pokorny, McGovern’s twenty-five-year-old field organizer for Wisconsin, had the whole state completely wired. He had been on the job, full time, since the spring of ’71—working off a blueprint remarkably similar to Lindsay’s. But they were not quite the same. The main difference was painfully obvious, yet it was clear at a glance that both drawings had been done from the same theory: Muskie would fold early on, because The Center was not only indefensible but probably nonexistent… and after that the Democratic race would boil down to a quick civil war, a running death-battle between the Old Guard on the Right and a gang of Young Strangers on the Left.

  The name-slots on Lindsay’s blueprint were still empty, but the working assumption was that the crunch in California would come down to Muskie on the Right and Lindsay on the Left.

  Pokorny’s drawing was a year or so older than Lindsay’s, and all the names were filled in
—all the way to California, where the last two slots said, “McGovern” and “Humphrey.” The only other difference between the two was that Lindsay’s was unsigned, while Pokorny’s had a signature in the bottom right-hand corner: “Hart, Mankiewicz & McGovern—architects.”

  Even Lindsay’s financial backers saw the handwriting on the wall in Wisconsin. By the time he arrived, there was not even any low ground on the Left to be seized. The Lindsay campaign had been keyed from the start on the assumption that Muskie would at least have the strength to retire McGovern before he abandoned the center. It made perfect sense, on paper—but 1972 had not been a vintage year for paper wisdom, and McGovern’s breakthrough victory in Wisconsin was written off as “shocking” and “freakish” by a lot of people who should have known better.

  Wisconsin was the place where he found a working model for the nervous coalition that made the rest of the primary campaign a downhill run. Wisconsin effectively eliminated every obstacle but the corpse of Hubert Humphrey—who fought like a rabid skunk all the way to the end; cranked up on the best speed George Meany’s doctors could provide for him, taking his cash and his orders every midnight from Meany’s axe-man Al Barkan; and attacking McGovern savagely, day after day, from every treacherous angle Big Labor’s sharpest researchers could even crudely define for him…