Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  [Helicopter]

  HST: You son of a bitch!

  Stearns: If we’d let ourselves be sucked into that trap, I think we would have lost the procedural tests.

  HST: I see. They could lend you votes on one roll-call, then take them back on the next one.

  Stearns: A bogus count. If you look at the tally on the South Carolina challenge, the Minnesota delegation on which Humphrey had thirty-five hard-core votes went 56-to-8 for the South Carolina challenge, so there were at least thirty-five votes that the Humphrey coalition could have manipulated. In Ohio, Humphrey had as many as eighty votes that could have been cast any way that Humphrey forces chose to cast them…

  So our problem was to maneuver ourselves around the Ohio delegation in a way that the Ohio votes could not be cast to force us into a test vote on California before we got to the real issue. And remember, to win a procedural test on California, it would only require turning out 1433 votes, but South Carolina would have had to have 1497 votes to win the same procedural question as to who could vote and what constituted a majority.

  HST: That’s why you wanted to put the showdown off till California?

  Stearns: The numbers were much better for us on California than they were on South Carolina.

  HST: I was asking [McGovern pollster] Pat Caddell why you didn’t just want to get it over with, and he was running back and forth on the floor and just said, “Well, we want to wait for California.” But he never explained why.

  Stearns: It was the difference in what was the working majority on the floor. Plus, it’s much harder to hold delegates on procedural questions since they don’t understand the significance of a parliamentary point. Everyone had gotten clear enough instructions on how to handle California that I think they were aware of the procedural problem if it had arisen with the California vote, which it did.

  My instructions to our floor leaders and to our delegation chairmen was that on the first twelve tallies we would go all out to win the South Carolina minority report challenges. Perhaps not all out. We would go out to win, but not to the extent of jeopardizing votes we had on the California challenge. If there was somebody whose support we knew we had on California, but weren’t sure if he would be able to withstand pressure from labor, Humphrey, or whoever else, they were not to bother the guy. We didn’t want to sacrifice votes on California. But that aside, we went after that challenge. That didn’t quite work, because I had a number of passes in the first twelve states that reported, which meant that I put off the decision another eight or nine tallies.

  HST: The passes weren’t for political reasons, but because they couldn’t make up their minds?

  Stearns: Well, one for political reasons—that was the Ohio delegation, which was passing so it could put itself in the position of voting last, so it could maneuver the vote and throw us into the procedural test. The others, just because it took a long time to get the counting done in the delegation.

  HST: What was the women’s angle? It was talked about like it was some kind of shameful trip or something.

  Stearns: The Women’s Caucus was disputing the fact that only nine members of the thirty-two-member delegation were women. The women made the South Carolina Minority Report their test vote to the Convention. I personally don’t think they had a terribly good case.

  Their case was based on a misunderstanding of the McGovern guidelines. The misunderstanding was thinking that quotas had somehow been established. What the McGovern commission argued was that quotas would be imposed if the state did not take effective steps to see that women were represented in reasonable proportions. That is, they had to take down all the barriers to women being elected, but there was no guarantee in the guidelines that because a woman was a woman, she was necessarily going to be elected. The guidelines attempted to give women the same chance of election that men had, removing some of the obstacles that kept them off slates in the past.

  It was not a terribly good challenge in the first place, but no credentials challenge has ever really been decided strictly on the justice and merits of the challenge. They all come down to essentially political questions and in that case the Women’s Caucus made what was in effect a weak challenge into a political issue. So it had to be treated seriously. This is why we set out at the beginning to try to win it, to try to see if we had the votes to win it the first time around.

  HST: You’re saying it was sort of forced on you?

  Stearns: Well, it was, but I don’t think the Women’s Caucus really understood the significance of an early test vote. I would have much preferred that they would have picked—well, they had a much better case in Hawaii, for example, because the challenge came up after both the California and Illinois decisions. If we had to have a test vote on a women’s issue, I’d rather they had picked a stronger case, Hawaii, which also would have moved the test vote after California.

  HST: Why did they insist on being first?

  Stearns: I’m not sure of the process they went through to pick South Carolina, but they had chosen it, and that made the issue of South Carolina one that we had to respond to as a political question.

  HST: But they weren’t somehow hooked into the Chisholm/Humphrey/Stop McGovern thing in order to get some bargaining power?

  Stearns: I think there may have been some thought of that—the fact that it was to come first would give them some leverage with us that they might otherwise not have had… But my intentions were to win that California challenge.

  [Also on the beach is Bill Dougherty, Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota, longtime McGovern crony and a key floor leader who worked under Stearns. Forty-two years old, he is wearing trunks and a short-sleeve shirt and staring at the surf.]

  Dougherty: You know, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the ocean. Oh, I saw it out in California, but not like this. Not close up.

  HST: Were you over there for the Democratic National Committee meeting yesterday morning [Friday]?

  Dougherty: Shit, I never got out of bed all day yesterday. I’m on the national committee. I’ve got McGovern really pissed at me. I never showed up. I couldn’t move. I absolutely couldn’t move yesterday. I was sick. I was just sick, physically.

  HST: Well, there’s a lot of people that are sick…

  Stearns: I’ve never been as exhausted as I was on Wednesday night [after McGovern’s nomination, but six or so hours before the series of staff conferences that led to Eagleton’s selection as the VP nominee].

  Dougherty: I was going home yesterday, but I couldn’t get to the airport. No shit. I didn’t sleep at all between Saturday and Wednesday, I think it was… and I don’t think I ever sat down until yesterday, ’cause I was working hotels.

  Stearns: I got two hours of sleep in three days.

  HST: This had been the least fun to me of all things since I’ve been on this trip. It seems like it would have been at least… this is the first time I’ve been on the beach, except at night or around dawn—when I came down to swim a few times.

  McGovern chats with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem at the Women’s Caucus twenty-four hours before pulling the plug. STUART BRATESMAN

  McGovern with press secretary Dick Dougherty monitoring Larry O’Brien’s handling of the Convention from their penthouse command post at the Doral Beach Hotel. STUART BRATESMAN

  [Tape halts momentarily here, then jumps to preparations for the Convention…]

  Stearns: Gary Hart and I came down in May to talk to Southern Bell and outline the communications equipment we wanted for the Convention. See, we ran a two-tier operation. We had 250 whips on the floor, people we’d selected from each delegation to make sure that somebody was talking to the individual delegates. We had one person in every row of the Convention giving instructions somewhere. Then we had our floor leaders, Bill, Pierre Salinger, and so on and then our delegation chairmen. We had two ways to get to them. We had a boiler room here at the hotel, which was plugged into the SCOPE system. You’d call in at whip level.

  H
ST: Which color phone did that come into?

  Dougherty: White.

  HST: And you had a different color. A red phone?

  Dougherty: Blue phone.

  Stearns: We had a blue phone for the floor leaders and delegation chairmen.

  HST: Who was there in the boiler room at the [Doral Beach/McGov. Headquarters] hotel?

  Stearns: There were ten people. The western director was Barbara McKenzie. Doug Coulter did the Mountain States. Judy Harrington did the Plains States. Scott Lilly did the Central States, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky. Gail Channing did Ohio and Michigan. Laura Mizelle did the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware area. Tony Babb did the New York delegation, Puerto Rico; and Alan Kriegle did the New England States. They were in charge of the whips who were on the floor. They had worked for over a year in Washington as the liaison with regional areas of the campaign, handling the detail work, running to the delegates… the group we had in the trailer were the best of our field organizers.

  HST: Were the hotel boiler room phones wired right to the floor, or into the trailer?

  Stearns: Right to the floor… I had a point-to-point line between them and me. Then that red phone in the office, I’d pick that up and it rang automatically at the hotel.

  Dougherty: We on the floor could get either place.

  HST: Was it completely triangular?

  Stearns: Oh no. We oversaw a full communications system. You could go anywhere with the communications we had.

  HST: There wasn’t one main nexus where everything had to go through?

  Stearns: There was a switchboard here at the Doral. The way instructions went out is that I would stand up in the back of the trailer and shout “NO” and then pick up that red phone which would ring automatically [on the floor & in the Doral “situation room”] and someone would pick it up and I’d say “NO” and then everyone knew that they were to instruct everyone to vote no on that. That way you had two tries at making sure the instructions got through.

  Dougherty: David Schoumacher of CBS has a film of you in the trailer with a cigar in your mouth shouting “NO.” They’re gonna run it Sunday night.

  Stearns: When will it be on?

  Dougherty: I think Sixty Minutes. He said you got a cigar in your mouth. He said, “Boy, Dougherty, does this spoil the grass-roots flavor of your campaign.” Of course, Schoumacher just loves it.

  HST: Let’s get back: You came down in May to set up your communications.

  Stearns: We had to protect the communications system in the trailer and the communications system in the hotel, so we traced the telephone lines and there were two points where it was vulnerable. In the Convention center it was behind five link fences and pretty well guarded; but you had open manhole covers. The telephone lines here are laid very close to the surface—it’s an artificial peninsula and you hit water if you dig any deeper than twelve feet—so anyone who could open a manhole cover could get into any of the telephone lines…

  HST: If they knew where they were.

  Stearns: If you knew where they were. But chances are any manhole cover you pick up in this city you’re gonna find telephone lines laid under it. We pointed that out to Southern Bell, and they suggested that we weld the manhole covers down, which we agreed to. The only other vulnerable point was in the hotel itself. There is a switching room at the backside of the hotel behind the room where all the press equipment was set up. That was the other vulnerable spot. So we had an armed guard placed on that. A guy with an axe could have demolished that communications system in thirty seconds.

  Dougherty: You can do some of those things at a Convention, ’cause everybody forgets about it five days after it happens. Once the vote goes in, they don’t recall any situation even where the crookedest of things may have changed it. There’s no protest. There have been terrible things that happen at Conventions.

  HST: Yeah, I’m surprised this thing went off as well as it did. You were dealing with a gang of real scum, the kind of people Barkan and Meany & those AFL-CIO people could have brought in…

  Stearns: Well, they did. They brought them in, but we beat them…

  HST: I mean people with axes—that kind of thing.

  Stearns: Oh, yeah, they wouldn’t have hesitated if they’d had the chance.

  Dougherty: I’ll tell you, one of the things we had going for us: You know how tough it is to keep communications going in one camp? The Stop McGovern movement had to keep communications going in four camps—try to coordinate all the communications of four camps at a national convention…

  We could have won the South Carolina challenge if we were absolutely sure of every vote. We were getting votes out of places like Minnesota that we never expected. But we had Ohio waiting with a delegation that Humphrey… I mean they had eighty or ninety votes with which they could have done the same thing we did.

  HST: Was that Humphrey’s accordian delegation—Ohio?

  Stearns: Yes. With the eighty or ninety Humphrey delegates, Frank King could have sat up and read any set of figures he wanted. We had a few delegations like that, too, as you saw in the last moments of that challenge.

  HST: Oh yeah, but I forget which ones…

  Stearns: Colorado, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Rhode Island. In the last seven or eight minutes of that challenge we didn’t even bother to poll the delegations; I was just reading the numbers that we expected them to cast. That was the best moment of the Convention: when [ex-Governor of Nebraska] Frank Morrison’s first instructions were to cut that vote down to 14 and then Bill came rushing up the aisle to take four more.

  Dougherty: No, it was 17, and then I changed it to 14. I was whispering right in his ear. They got a shot of that on TV, I guess.

  Stearns: I heard.

  HST: Was the Humphrey guy standing next to you? When you came up to Morrison, was there somebody there who knew what you were saying to him?

  Dougherty: Johnny Apple [New York Times reporter] caught me.

  HST: Kirby [Jones, McGovern press assistant] said that King was aware that one of your people was on him.

  Dougherty: Oh, they were aware of it on the floor.

  Stearns: That was Dick Sklar standing next to King. He was our liaison for the Ohio delegation. He and Frank King did not get along.

  Dougherty: That South Carolina deal with me, who loves politics, and this is my third Convention, it was so great… it was like getting your first piece of ass.

  Stearns: [flinching] Bill can describe it better than I can—I mean, I can tell you what it was like sitting in the trailer—but Bill can describe it from working on the floor.

  Dougherty: Oh, it was perfect. When I got the word to shave, I had about ten minutes. I couldn’t go to the other side after the first night, ’cause I damn near got in a fist fight with the Governor. See, he moved in—you know he moved in a couple of alternates on us, and I wouldn’t let him do it. And, God, he got madder ’n hell and he never spoke to me the rest of the Convention. So I had to go way over to the other side because I couldn’t use that girl, ’cause she was sittin’ right next to the Governor, and I had to lean over him to talk to her. And he was ready to punch me every time I leaned over.

  So I ran clear out the other side and got ahold of our whip, then I came back around and got ahold of Mondragon and Ortez, or whatever his name is… I told him I wanted to get as many votes as I could get and it wasn’t very many.

  HST: When did you suddenly decide to start shaving?

  Dougherty: Oh, Kansas was the key.

  Stearns: Yeah, we counted it down to Kansas and then made the decision at that point that we were not going to win with a working majority of our own.

  HST: How far along was that?

  Stearns: That was the eleventh or twelfth vote.

  Dougherty: But see, you didn’t know the real count, because Ohio would pass…

  Stearns: Right. Ohio would pass, is what screwed us up. So I had to wait for another four or five votes. We had our New York delegation pass.

&nbs
p; HST: What number was Ohio?

  Stearns: Ohio was, I think, eleven.

  Dougherty: Kansas was eleven, wasn’t it?

  Stearns: That’s right, Kansas.

  Dougherty: Frank King, with his Ohio delegation, has passed on every roll-call since…

  HST: It’s sort of a political habit. You always want to have that leverage at the end, I suppose.

  Dougherty: In the legislature you get the same thing, you get guys who pass all the time and wait to see how the vote is.

  Stearns: But the question was whether we would throw New York’s votes behind the challenge or hold New York out—but when they held out Ohio, I gave instructions to our New York delegates to pass the first time.

  HST: That gave you a helluva cushion, right?

  Stearns: Yeah, there was a lot to work with there.

  Dougherty: Then we started shaving.

  Stearns: Then we heard a few more votes just to get a better sense of where things were going, and then the instructions went out to start cutting.

  Dougherty: See, we were afraid the Humphrey forces were gonna start going the other way, which, if they were really coordinated, they could have done.

  HST: Well, wait a minute. What would have happened then?

  Stearns: The game that was going on was to see who could push who over the 1509 mark first. If they’d pushed us up above 1509 with a lot of bogus votes, it would have been very hard to persuade our people to cut back then, ’cause if you think you’ve won, then the instinct is to go out and fight for every vote you can get your hands on. We tried to hold the obvious switches to the end. We started cutting votes at that point—hold the obvious ones to the end and suddenly throw a lot of votes on them, push them up over 1509, and then at that point the only way they can get out from under that is by abandoning one of their own. Governor West of South Carolina. They would have had to throw him to the wolves at that point.