Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  It was a nasty swansong for Hubert. He’d been signing those IOUs to Big Labor for more than twenty years, and it must have been a terrible shock to him when Meany called them all due at the same time.

  But how? George Meany, the seventy-seven-year-old quarterback of the “Stop McGovern Movement,” is said to be suffering from brain bubbles at this stage of the game. Totally paralyzed. His henchmen have kept him in seclusion ever since he arrived in Florida five days ago with a bad case of The Fear. He came down from AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington by train, but had to be taken off somewhere near Fort Lauderdale and rushed to a plush motel where his condition deteriorated rapidly over the weekend, and finally climaxed on Monday night when he suffered a terrible stroke while watching the Democratic Convention on TV.

  The story is still shrouded in mystery, despite the best efforts of the five thousand ranking journalists who came here to catch Meany’s last act, but according to a wealthy labor boss who said he was there when it happened, the old man went all to pieces when his creature, Hubert Humphrey, lost the crucial “California challenge.”

  He raged incoherently at the Tube for eight minutes without drawing a breath, then suddenly his face turned beet red and his head swelled up to twice its normal size. Seconds later—while his henchmen looked on in mute horror—Meany swallowed his tongue, rolled out of his chair like a log, and crawled through a plate glass window.

  The confrontations with the Old Guard seldom come in public. There are conversations on the telephone, plans are laid, people are put to work, and it’s done quietly. California is a classic. There will never be a case in American politics of such a naked power grab—straight power, no principle, straight opportunism. I wasn’t aware of it. I thought it was a purely defensive move to protect themselves against attack. We were naive. It never occurred to me that anybody would challenge California—until the last 36 hours before the credentials committee meeting. Then we really got scared when we saw the ferocity of their attack.

  —George McGovern, talking to LIFE

  reporter Richard Meryman in Miami

  What happened in Miami was far too serious for the kind of random indulgence that Gonzo Journalism needs. The Real Business happened, as usual, on secret-numbered telephones or behind closed doors at the other end of long hotel corridors blocked off by sullen guards. There were only two crucial moments in Miami—two potential emergencies that might have changed the outcome—and both of them were dealt with in strict privacy.

  The only real question in Miami was whether or not McGovern might be stripped of more than half of the 271 delegates he won in the California primary—and that question was scheduled to come up for a vote by the whole convention on Monday night. If the “ABM Movement” could strip 151 of those delegates away, McGovern might be stopped—because without them he had anywhere from 10 to 50 votes less than the 1509 that would give him the nomination on the first ballot. But if McGovern could hold his 271 California delegates, it was all over.

  The “ABM Movement” (Anybody but McGovern) was a coalition of desperate losers, thrown together at the last moment by Big Labor chief George Meany and his axe-man, Al Barkan. Hubert Humphrey was pressed into service as the front man for ABM, and he quickly signed up the others: Big Ed, Scoop Jackson, Terry Sanford, Shirley Chisholm—all the heavies.

  The ABM movement came together officially sometime in the middle of the week just before the convention, when it finally became apparent that massive fraud, treachery, or violence was the only way to prevent McGovern from getting the nomination… and what followed, once this fact was accepted by all parties involved, will hopefully go down in history as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Democratic process.

  It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public. By noon on Sunday both Humphrey and Muskie were so desperate that they came out of their holes and appeared—trailing a mob of photographers and TV crews—in the lobby of the Fontainebleau, the nexus hotel about five hundred yards down the beach from the Doral, racing back and forth from one caucus or press conference to another, trying to make any deal available—on any terms—that might possibly buy enough votes to deny McGovern a first-ballot victory.

  The ABM strategy—a very shrewd plan, on paper—was to hold McGovern under the 1500 mark for two ballots, forcing him to peak without winning, then confront the convention with an alternative (ABM) candidate on the third ballot—and if that failed, try another ABM candidate on the fourth ballot, then yet another on the fifth, etc…. on into infinity, for as many ballots as it would take to nominate somebody acceptable to the Meany/Daley axis.

  The name didn’t matter. It didn’t even make much difference if He, She, or It couldn’t possibly beat Nixon in November… the only thing that mattered to the Meany/Daley crowd was keeping control of The Party; and this meant the nominee would have to be some loyal whore with more debts to Big Labor than he could ever hope to pay… somebody like Hubert Humphrey, or a hungry opportunist like Terry Sanford.

  Anybody but George McGovern—the only candidate in Miami that week who would be under no obligation to give either Meany or Daley his private number if he ever moved into the White House.

  But all that noxious bullshit went by the boards, in the end. The ABM got chewed up like green hamburger on opening night. They were beaten stupid at their own game by a handful of weird-looking kids who never even worked up a sweat. By midnight on Monday it was all over. Once McGovern got a lock on those 271 delegates, there was never any doubt about who would get the nomination on Wednesday.

  The blow-by-blow story of how McGovern beat the ABM will become an instant fixture in political science textbooks, regardless of who wins in November—but it’s not an easy thing to explain. If a transcript existed, it would read more like an extremely complicated murder trial than the simple, out-front political convention that most people think they watched on TV. Trying to understand the Byzantine reality of that convention on TV—or even on the floor, for that matter—was like somebody who’s never played chess trying to understand a live telecast of the Fisher/Spassky world championship duel up in Iceland.

  The bedrock truths of the McGovern convention were not aired on TV—except once, very briefly on Monday night; but it hardly mattered, because all three networks missed it completely. When the deal went down, Walter Cronkite saw green and called it red, John Chancellor opted for yellow, and ABC was already off the air.

  What happened, in a nut, was a surprise parliamentary maneuver—cooked up by over-ambitious strategists in the Women’s Caucus—forcing a premature showdown that effectively decided whether or not McGovern would get the nomination. The crisis came early, at a time when most of the TV/Press people were still getting their heads ready to deal with all the intricate possibilities of the vote on the ABM challenge to McGovern’s California delegates… and when Larry O’Brien announced a pending roll-call vote on whether or not the South Carolina delegation included enough women, very few people on the Floor or anywhere else understood that the result of that roll-call would also be an accurate forecast of how many delegates would later vote for McGovern on the California challenge, and then on the first ballot.

  On the evidence, less than a dozen of the five thousand “media” sleuths accredited to the convention knew exactly what was happening, at the time. When McGovern’s young strategists deliberately lost that vote, almost everybody who’d watched it—including Walter Cronkite—concluded that McGovern didn’t have a hope in hell of winning any roll-call vote from that point on: which meant the ABM could beat him on the California challenge, reducing his strength even further, and then stop him cold on the first ballot.

  Humphrey’s campaign manager, Jack Chestnut, drew the same conclusion—a glaring mistake that almost immediately became the subject of many crude jokes in McGovern’s press room at the Doral, where a handful of resident correspondents who’d been attache
d to the campaign on a live-in basis for many months were watching the action on TV with press secretary Dick Dougherty and a room full of tense staffers—who roared with laughter when Cronkite, far up in his soundproof booth two miles away in the Convention Hall, announced that CBS was about to switch to McGovern headquarters in the Doral, where David Schoumacher was standing by with a firsthand report and at least one painfully candid shot of McGovern workers reacting to the news of this stunning setback.

  The next scene showed a room full of laughing, whooping people. Schoumacher was grinning into his microphone, saying: “I don’t want to argue with you, Walter—but why are these people cheering?”

  Schoumacher then explained that McGovern had actually won the nomination by losing the South Carolina vote. It had been a test of strength, no doubt—but what had never been explained to the press or even to most of McGovern’s own delegates on the floor, was that he had the option of “winning” that roll-call by going either up or down… and the only way the ABM crowd could have won was by juggling their votes to make sure the South Carolina challenge almost won, but not quite. This would have opened the way for a series of potentially disastrous parliamentary moves by the Humphrey-led ABM forces.

  “We had to either win decisively or lose decisively,” Rick Stearns explained later. “We couldn’t afford a close vote.”

  Stearns, a twenty-eight-year-old Rhodes Scholar from Stanford, was McGovern’s point man when the crisis came. His job in Miami—working out of a small white trailer full of telephones behind the Convention Hall—was to tell Gary Hart, on the floor, exactly how many votes McGovern could muster at any given moment, on any question—and it was Stearns who decided, after only ten out of fifty states had voted on the South Carolina challenge, that the final tally might be too close to risk. So he sent word to Hart on the floor, and Gary replied: “Okay, if we can’t win big—let’s lose it.”

  McGovern strategist Rick Stearns plotting floor strategy with Wisconsin Governor Pat Lucey. STUART BRATESMAN

  The old bulls never quit until the young bulls run them out. The old bulls are dead, but don’t forget that the young bulls eventually become old bulls too.

  —James H. Rowe, “an old professional

  from FDR’s days,” in Time Magazine

  The next time I saw Rick Stearns, after he croaked the Humphrey/Meany squeeze play on Monday night, was out on the beach in front of the Doral on Saturday afternoon. He was smoking a cigar and carrying a tall plastic glass of beer—wearing his black and red Stanford tank shirt. I sat with him for a while and we talked as the Coast Guard cutters cruised offshore about a hundred yards from the beach and National Guard helicopters and jets thundered overhead. It was the first time in ten days I’d had a chance to feel any sun and by midnight I was burned, drunk, and unable to get any sleep—waking up every fifteen minutes to rub more grease on my head and shoulders.

  What follows is a 98 percent verbatim transcript of my tape recording of that conversation. The other 2 percent was deleted in the editing process for reasons having to do with a journalist’s obligation to “protect” his sources—even if it sometimes means protecting them from themselves and their own potentially disastrous indiscretions.

  HST: I was reading Haynes Johnson’s thing in the Washington Post about how you won South Carolina. He mainly had it from Humphrey’s side; he cited the fact that it fooled almost everybody. He said only a few McGovern staffers knew.

  Stearns: No, that’s not true. The guys in the trailer operation knew. The floor leaders, the ones who paid attention, knew; but some of them were just following instructions.

  HST: That was it, more or less?

  Stearns: That was it, although if you have that many people who know, chances are…

  HST: Well, I was standing with Tom Morgan, Lindsay’s press secretary; I don’t know if anybody told him, but he figured it out. Then I went out in the hall and saw Tom Braden the columnist. He said, “Oh, Jesus! Terrible! A bad defeat.” Then I was really confused.

  Stearns: Johnny Apple of the New York Times rushed out and filed the story which went to [Times Managing Editor] Abe Rosenthal. Rosenthal was sitting watching Walter Cronkite sputter on about the great setback the McGovern forces had, you know, the terrible defeat. So he killed Apple’s story.

  HST: Jesus!

  Stearns: Apple got on the phone to Rosenthal and they had a shouting match for thirty minutes that ended with Apple resigning from the N.Y. Times.

  HST: Cazart!

  Stearns: But he was hired back at the end of the next day. They never ran his story, but he was hired back at what I assume was a substantial increase in his salary.

  HST: There was a reference in Johnson’s story to a private discussion on Sunday. He said you’d explained the strategy twenty-four hours earlier.

  Stearns: Let’s see. What could that have been? The floor leaders meeting?

  HST: He didn’t say. You saw it coming that early? Sunday? Or even before that? When did you see the thing coming?

  Stearns: It became clear during the maneuvering that went on the week before the Convention when we were trying to define several key parliamentary points.

  HST: You’d seen this coming up all the week before during this maneuvering with Larry O’Brien and James G. O’Hara, the convention parliamentarian?

  Stearns: Well, I’d seen it as of Thursday when we began to get some idea of how O’Brien and O’Hara intended to rule on the two issues, but as early as then we were going over a whole war game of possible parliamentary contingencies. The Humphrey camp would have never turned to procedural chicanery if they’d really had a working majority on the floor. The essential point is that procedure is the last defense of a vanishing majority.

  Stearns: First, who could vote, under the rules, on their own challenge? Did the rule which says a delegate can vote on anything but his own challenge mean that the 120 McGovern delegates from California not being challenged would be able to vote? We contended that they could. Eventually the chairman agreed.

  The second and most important question was the question of what constituted a majority—whether it was a constitutional majority, or, as we originally contended, a majority of those present-and-voting. The chair’s decision on that was a compromise between the two rules—that the majority would be determined by those eligible to vote. And he ruled then that since everyone but 153 bogus delegates from California were eligible, the majority on the California question would be 1433. So, in other words, we won the first point on who could vote. On the second point we came up with a compromise which was really to our advantage…

  HST: What did you lose on that?

  Stearns: Well, the only thing lost was that, if it had been present-and-voting, it would have meant that we could have picked up extra votes by urging people just not to vote: if they were caught between pressures from labor on one hand and us on the other and couldn’t find any way out of the dilemma, they could leave, and their absence then would lower the majority.

  On the third issue we…

  [Helicopter]

  HST: Damn! Fuck! I can’t believe those fuckin’ helicopters! I’ll leave it on the tape just to remind me how bad it was.

  Stearns: The LEAA [the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Act]…

  HST: Oh, it’s one of those pork barrel…

  Stearns:… One thing Jerry and Abbie did for the city of Miami was to beef up the technology of the police department with that grant Miami got to buy all this stuff…

  Well, the third point—which we lost and which we were arguing obviously because it was in our interest—was that the challenges ought to be considered in the order of the roll-call. This would have put California first and would have avoided the problem entirely, of course. On that, the chair ruled against us, and I think fairly. He followed the precedent of the last Conventions, which was that challenges were to be considered in the order in which the Credentials Committee had discussed them. That meant that we had South Carolina, Al
abama, Georgia, and Kentucky—four possible test cases—coming before we got to the California vote.

  Stearns: Kentucky we got withdrawn, eliminating one of them. [Dr. James] Cashin’s Alabama challenge was the same challenge he brought in ’68. It’s not a very attractive challenge. A lot of people felt that they had been misled by Cashin in ’68, including blacks, and were not disposed to work for him again. He was trying to get Wallace thrown out of the Convention. Wallace’s slate had been openly elected. Alabama was one of the first states in the country to comply with the reform rules. Votes happened to choose Wallace delegates. [Airplane] So we knew the Alabama challenge would be defeated on a voice vote. On Georgia, Julian [Bond] and Governor Jimmy Carter worked out a compromise. South Carolina was the only possible test vote to come up before the California challenge.

  There were two procedural issues that the Humphrey coalition wanted to settle on the South Carolina challenge. The first was that question of who could vote. The chair ruled that there were nine South Carolinian women who had not been challenged, who would be entitled to vote on the challenge. It is a thirty-two-member delegation, which meant that there were then twenty-three South Carolinians who were disqualified.

  The second area of challenge—and the most troublesome—is what constituted a majority. That was what the Humphrey people went after first. The maneuvering that was going on! There was only one way that the question of what constituted a majority could arise, and that was if either side prevailed in the range of 1497 to 1508 votes. If either side prevailed by more than a constitutional majority, 1509, the question is moot.

  It sounds impossible to maneuver a vote into that area, but in fact it’s very easy if you have a Humphrey delegation controlled as well as Ohio. Ohio passed and passed and passed. All Frank King, their chairman, had to do was sit there, add correctly, cast the vote accordingly and we would have been in that area.2 Not only that, we would have been sucked into that area with an artificial vote from the Ohio delegation, which means that on the procedural test…