Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  California was “The Super Bowl.” Hubert himself had said it; whoever won “on the coast” would get the nod in Miami… it was a foregone conclusion, and I doubt if I’ll ever forget the sight of Mankiewicz, Hart, and all the other “vets” swaggering through the lobby of the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel in Los Angeles. It was almost impossible to talk to them. They were “high as a pigeon,” in Lord Buckley’s words, and the adrenaline level in McGovern headquarters just a few blocks down Wilshire Boulevard was so tall that you could feel it out on the sidewalk. During the day you could almost hear the energy humming, and at night the place seemed to glow. One of the lowest underdog trips in American politics was about to explode in a monumental victory celebration at the Hollywood Palladium on Tuesday night, and the people who’d put it together were feeling like champions….

  Until somewhere around midnight on election day, when the votes came rolling in and cut McGovern’s victory margin down to a nervous five percentage points, instead of fifteen to twenty. On Monday afternoon, Gary Hart had tried to ease the pain of the shock he suddenly realized was coming by announcing that the final margin would be “between eight and ten percent.” And just before the polls closed on Tuesday, Mankiewicz cut it again, telling a network TV reporter that he thought McGovern would win California by five points… which turned out to be right on the mark, although neither Hart nor Mankiewicz nor any of the embarrassed pollsters could offer any coherent explanation for what looked like a massive swing to Humphrey in the final days of the campaign.

  Sometime around 2:00 on Wednesday morning I was standing with Hart in the hall outside the hotel press room when a glum-looking student canvasser grabbed his arm and asked, “What happened?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What happened?’” Gary snapped. “We won, godamnit! What did you expect?”

  The young volunteer stared at him, but before he could say anything Hart cut him off: “What are you standing around here for? Let’s go to New York. We have work to do.”

  The boy hesitated, then flashed a thin smile and darted into the press room, where the beer was flowing free and nobody was hung up on embarrassing questions like “What happened?”

  * * *

  But the question remains, and the answer is too pregnant to be shrugged off with a simple drill-sergeant’s comment like “We won.” Which was true, and a lot of people called it a Great Victory—which was also true, in a sense—but in the tight little circle of brain-trusters who run the McGovern campaign, the reaction was not euphoric. There was nothing wrong with the victory margin itself. It was “very convincing,” they said. “Absolutely decisive.”

  And besides, it cinched the nomination. California’s 271 delegates would send McGovern down to Miami with enough votes to win on the first ballot.

  Which he did—although not without some unexpected problems and a few hellish aftereffects—but when the sun loomed out of the ocean to light Miami Beach on the morning of Thursday, July 14, George McGovern was the man in the catbird seat. Despite the savage opposition of Big Labor and “The Bosses,” McGovern would carry the party colors against Nixon in November. For better or for worse… and to ease the sting of those who figured it was definitely worse, McGovern made room in his chariot for a sharp and ambitious young pol from Missouri named Thomas Eagleton; a first-term Senator and a Catholic by birth, known as a friend of Big Labor and also known—even to McGovern—as a man who didn’t mind taking thirteen or fourteen tall drinks now and then, and whose only other distinguishing factor at the time was a naked and overweening lust for the Main Chance. Senator Eagleton was one of the two “possibles” on McGovern’s list of VP candidates who didn’t mind telling anyone who asked that he was ready and willing to spring for it. The other was Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, a good friend of Mayor Daley’s.

  McGovern never even considered Shriver in Miami5 and his personal affinity for Eagleton was close to nil. Which hardly mattered—until about six hours before the deadline on Thursday—because up until then George was still convinced that Ted Kennedy would “come around.” He had never given much serious thought to alternative candidates, because McGovern and most of his ranking staff people had been interpreting Kennedy’s hazy/negative reaction to the VP offer as a sort of shrewd flirtation that would eventually come up “yes.” A McGovern/Kennedy ticket would, after all, put Nixon in deep trouble from the start—and it would also give Teddy a guaranteed launching pad for 1980, when he would still be two years younger than McGovern is today.

  Indeed. It made fine sense, on paper, and I recall making that same argument, myself, a few months back—but I’d no sooner sent it on the Mojo Wire than I realized it made no sense at all. There was something finally and chemically wrong with the idea of Ted Kennedy running for vice-president; it would be like the Jets trading Joe Namath to the Dallas Cowboys as a sub for Roger Staubach.

  Which might make excellent sense, from some angles, but Namath would never consent to it—for the same reasons Kennedy wouldn’t put his own presidential ambitions in limbo for eight years, behind McGovern or anyone else. Superstar politicians and superstar quarterbacks have the same kind of delicate egos, and people who live on that level grow accustomed to very thin, rarified air. They have trouble breathing in the lower altitudes; and if they can’t breathe right, they can’t function.

  The ego is the crucial factor here, but ego is a hard thing to put on paper—especially on that 3x5 size McGovern recommends. File cards are handy for precinct canvassing, and for people who want to get heavy into the Dewey Decimal System, but they are not much good for cataloguing things like Lust, Ambition, or Madness.

  This may explain why McGovern blew his gig with Kennedy. It was a perfectly rational notion—and that was the flaw, because a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him… but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

  The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

  A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can’t handle personally he will hire out—or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician.

  The presidency is as far as he can go. There is no more. The currency of politics is power, and once you’ve been the Most Powerful Man in the World for four years, everything else is downhill—except four more years on the same trip.

  Dozen Protestors Do About-Face

  Sgt. Roy Gates, an Army recruiter in Miami Beach, looked out his carpeted and paneled office at a sign in the window saying, “Non-delegates—Help Wanted.”

  In what must rank as one of the Army’s finest recruiting efforts, Gates thought he had convinced 13 non-delegates during the conventions to enlist in the military.

  Nine of the protesters, however, failed to pass the Army’s intelligence tests.

  “Their low
education surprised me—around the eighth grade and wanting to change the world,” he said. “They said they didn’t want to go along with the hard core radicals. It’s amazing the different types you find.”

  —Miami News, Friday, August 25

  On Tuesday afternoon my car disappeared. I left it on the street in front of the hotel while I went in to pick up my swimming trunks, and when I came back out, it was gone.

  To hell with it, I thought, it was time to get out of Miami.

  I went up to my room and thought for a while, sitting with my back to the typewriter and staring out the window at the big ocean-going yachts and luxury houseboats tied up across the street, at the piers along Indian Creek. Last week they’d been crawling with people, and cocktail parties. Every time the Fontainebleau lobby started buzzing with rumors about another crowd of demonstrators bearing down on the hotel from the direction of Flamingo Park, the boats across Collins Avenue would fill up with laughing Republican delegates wearing striped blazers and cocktail dresses. There was no better place, they said, for watching the street action. As the demonstrators approached the front entrance to the hotel, they found themselves walking a gauntlet of riot-equipped police on one side, and martini-sipping GOP delegates on the other.

  One yacht—the Wild Rose, out of Houston—rumbled back and forth, just offshore, at every demonstration. From the middle of Collins Avenue, you could see the guests lounging in deck chairs, observing the action through high-powered field glasses, and reaching around from time to time to accept a fresh drink from crewmen wearing white serving jackets with gold epaulets.

  The scene on the foredeck of the Wild Rose was so gross, so flagrantly decadent, that it was hard to avoid comparing it with the kind of bloodthirsty arrogance normally associated with the last days of the Roman Empire: Here was a crowd of rich Texans, floating around on a $100,000 yacht in front of a palatial Miami Beach hotel, giggling with excitement at the prospect of watching their hired gladiators brutalize a mob of howling, half-naked Christians. I half-expected them to start whooping for blood and giving the Thumbs Down signal.

  Nobody who was out there on the street with the demonstrators would be naive enough to compare them to “helpless Christians.” With the lone exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant, chicken-shit egojunkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest. They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted on grass, wine, and downers that they couldn’t say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego.

  Five weeks earlier, these same people had been sitting in the lobby of the Doral, calling George McGovern a “lying pig” and a “warmonger.” Their target-hotel this time was the Fontainebleau, headquarters for the national press and many TV cameras. If the Rolling Stones came to Miami for a free concert, these assholes would build their own fence around the bandstand—just so they could have something to tear down and then “crash the gates.”

  The drug action in Flamingo Park, the official campground for “non-delegates” and other would-be “protesters,” was so bottom-heavy with downers that it was known as “Quaalude Alley.”

  Quaalude is a mild sleeping pill, but—consumed in large quantities, along with wine, grass, and adrenaline—it produces the same kind of stupid, mean-drunk effects as Seconal (“Reds”). The Quaalude effect was so obvious in Flamingo Park that the “Last Patrol” caravan of Vietnam Vets—who came here in motorcades from all parts of the country—refused to even set up camp with the other demonstrators. They had serious business in Miami, they explained, and the last thing they needed was a public alliance with a mob of stoned street crazies and screaming teenyboppers.

  The Vets made their camp in a far corner of the Park, then sealed it off with a network of perimeter guards and checkpoints that made it virtually impossible to enter that area unless you knew somebody inside. There was an ominous sense of dignity about everything the VVAW did in Miami. They rarely even hinted at violence, but their very presence was menacing—on a level that the Yippies, Zippies, and SDS street crazies never even approached, despite all their yelling and trashing.6

  The most impressive single performance in Miami during the three days of the GOP convention was the VVAW march on the Fontainebleau on Tuesday afternoon. Most of the press and TV people were either down at the Convention Hall, covering the “liberals vs. conservatives” floor-fight over rules for seating delegates in 1976—or standing around in the boiling mid-afternoon sun at Miami International Airport, waiting for Nixon to come swooping out of the sky in Air Force One.

  My own plan for that afternoon was to drive far out to the end of Key Biscayne and find an empty part of the beach where I could swim by myself in the ocean, and not have to talk to anybody for a while. I didn’t give a fuck about watching the rules fight, a doomed charade that the Nixon brain-trust had already settled in favor of the conservatives… and I saw no point in going out to the airport to watch three thousand well-rehearsed “Nixon Youth” robots “welcome the President.”

  Given these two depressing options, I figured Tuesday was as good a day as any to get away from politics and act like a human being for a change—or better still, like an animal. Just get off by myself and drift around naked in the sea for a few hours….

  But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets…. They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots… a few carried full-size plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow-moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches…. But nobody spoke; all the “stop, start,” “fast, slow,” “left, right” commands came from “platoon leaders” walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals.

  One look at that eerie procession killed my plan to go swimming that afternoon. I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march…. No, “joined” is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue… all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach.

  The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

  The Fontainebleau was already walled off from the street by five hundred heavily armed cops when the front ranks of the Last Patrol arrived, still marching in total silence. Several hours earlier, a noisy mob of Yippie/Zippie/SDS “non-delegates” had shown up in front of the Fontainebleau and been met with jeers and curses from GOP delegates and other partisan spectators, massed behind the police lines…. But now there was no jeering. Even the cops seemed deflated. They watched nervously from behind their face-shields as the VVAW platoon leaders, still using hand signals, funneled the column into a tight semicircle that blocked all three northbound lanes of Collins Avenue. During earlier demonstrations—at least six in the past three days—the police had poked people with riot sticks to make sure at least one lane of the street stayed open for local traffic, and on the one occasion when mere prodding didn’t work, they had charged the demonstrators and cleared the street completely.

  But not now. For the first and only time during the whole convention, the cops were clearly off balance. The Vets could have closed all six lanes of Collins Avenue if they’d wanted to, and nobody would have argued. I have been covering anti-war demonstrations with depressing regularity since the winter of 1964, in cities all over the country, and I have never seen co
ps so intimidated by demonstrators as they were in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel on that hot Tuesday afternoon in Miami Beach.

  There was an awful tension in that silence. Not even that pack of rich sybarites out there on the foredeck of the Wild Rose of Houston could stay in their seats for this show. They were standing up at the rail, looking worried, getting very bad vibrations from whatever was happening over there in the street. Was something wrong with their gladiators? Were they spooked? And why was there no noise?

  After five more minutes of harsh silence, one of the VVAW platoon leaders suddenly picked up a bullhorn and said: “We want to come inside.”

  Nobody answered, but an almost visible shudder ran through the crowd. “O my God!” a man standing next to me muttered. I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively—for the first time in a long, long while—by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you’ve lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when it’s time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.

  I can’t say for sure what I would have done if the Last Patrol had tried to crack the police line and seize control of the Fontainebleau—but I have a fair idea, based on instinct and rude experience, so the unexpected appearance of Congressman Pete McCloskey on that scene calmed my nerves considerably. He shoved his way through the police line and talked with a handful of the VVAW spokesmen long enough to convince them, apparently, that a frontal assault on the hotel would be suicidal.

  MARK DIAMOND