Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  After watching for a moment, I turned to Bob Greene, a young Chicago Sun-Times reporter who had just dropped off the McGovern campaign. “Jesus,” I said. “Is it always like this?”

  He laughed. “Hell, this is accessible! We can actually see him. I spent about twelve hours covering him in New York yesterday, and I never saw him once—except on closed-circuit TV when he made his speech last night. They had us in a separate room, with speakers and TV monitors.”

  Our next stop was across the Bay in San Francisco, where Nixon was scheduled to address several hundred “Young Republicans” at a $500-a-plate lunch in the ballroom of the (ITT-owned) Sheraton-Palace Hotel. Thousands of anti-war demonstrators milled around in the streets outside, kept off at a safe distance by hundreds of cops carrying twelve-gauge shotguns.

  Nixon’s “remarks” were piped into the press room, where the cream of American journalism sat down with each other at several long white-cloth-covered banquet tables, to eat a roast beef buffet and take notes while staring intently at two big brown speakers hung on the wall.

  I went across the street to the Shields House tavern, where I met a thirty-year-old merchant seaman wearing a tweed sports coat and a tie, who said he and three friends had just “split from that goddamn phony sideshow across the street.”

  “The Nixon rally?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Shit, they tried to make us rehearse cheers! They put us all in a big room and told us to synchronize our watches so we would all start singing that goddamn ‘Nixon Now’ song at exactly 1:17 P.M., when his car pulled up to the door.”

  I smiled and ordered a Tuborg. “Why not? You can’t sing? You mean you just blew $500 on that lunch, and you didn’t even stay to eat it?”

  He waved me off. “Shit, are you kidding? Do I look like one of those Young Republican assholes? You think I’d pay $500 to have lunch with Nixon?”

  I shrugged.

  “Hell no!” he said. “Some guy down at the Maritime Hall just came up and asked us if we wanted to go to a $500-a-plate lunch, for free. We said sure, so he gave us the tickets—but he didn’t say anything about cheering and singing songs.” He shook his head. “Hell no, not me. When they started that bullshit I just walked out.”

  “Your friends stayed?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess so. They were pretty loaded.”

  “Loaded?” I said. “Nixon supporters?”

  He looked at me. “Nixon? Are you nuts?”

  I started to ask him about McGovern, but just then my attorney arrived and we got heavily into business matters until I looked out the window and noticed the press buses beginning to fill up. Moments later we pulled out, with a massive police escort, and joined the Nixon motorcade going back to the Oakland airport, where the press plane was waiting to haul us down to L.A.

  Nixon, as always, made the trip in his private compartment aboard Air Force One. Five or six “pool” reporters went with him. Or at least they went on the same plane. The tiny press compartment is far back in the rear, and nobody leaves it in flight except by special permission from Ron Ziegler—who routinely accepts individual requests for brief interviews with Nixon, and just as routinely ignores them.

  When we got to L.A. I asked the UPI “pool” man if there was any professional advantage in traveling on Air Force One instead of the press plane.

  “Absolutely none,” he replied. “We never leave the compartment; just sit in there and play cards. They could all be running around naked up in front, for all we know. We don’t even get on and off the plane through the same door Nixon uses. Ours is way back in the tail.”

  “You never get a chance to talk with him?” I asked. “Never even see him?”

  He shook his head. “Not usually.” He paused. “Oh, every once in a while he’ll ask somebody up front for a few minutes, but it’s almost always for his reasons, not ours. You know—like if he happens to be writing a speech about hog futures, or something, he might ask Ron if any of the pool guys that day used to be pig farmers…”

  I shook my head sadly. “Sounds pretty frustrating.”

  He shrugged. “No, not really. No worse than riding on the press plane.”

  Which is probably true. The entire White House press corps apparently lives in fear of somehow getting on the wrong side of Ziegler. He is their only human connection with the man they’re supposed to be covering—and since they can’t possibly get to Nixon on their own, they have to deal with Ron. Every once in a while someone will freak out and start yelling at him, but that involves serious risks. It is just about impossible to stay on the White House beat if Ziegler won’t talk to you, and if you push him far enough that’s exactly what will happen.

  Even king-bee types like the Associated Press correspondent Walter Mears and the New York Times’s Bob Semple are nervous in Ziegler’s presence. The White House beat is one of the most prestigious in American journalism, but Ziegler manages to make it so uncomfortable and potentially humiliating that only the most ambitious reporters still push for it.

  The handful of McGovern exiles who traveled with Nixon to California found themselves standing off in little knots by themselves in the press room of Los Angeles’ Century Plaza Hotel, and saying things like: “Jesus, this is really incredible! These White House guys are totally broken, they act like sick sheep… Christ, McGovern would laugh all night if he could see guys like Mears and Semple whimpering around and kissing Ron Ziegler’s ass.”

  Just for the record, here is the “pool report” from Nixon’s New York to California trip. Contrary to popular impression, the press does not ride free. The rate on the chartered planes is First Class plus one third, so to send the two hundred newsmen who went along on this expedition cost, including copy-transmission expenses, approximately a grand apiece.

  Pool Report—Waldorf to Oakland Airport—Sept. 27

  The motorcade departed the Waldorf at 9:28. Fair crowds were out at 50th and Lexington to wave at the President, and knots of people dotted the path. On FDR Drive, small groups of hardhats appeared here and there, waving at the President as he sped by.

  Choppers from the Wall Street helipad took a last swing past the Statue of Liberty before reaching Newark. Wheels up was at 9:50.

  All was quiet aboard Air Force One until press secretary Ziegler materialized with statements that had already been released aboard the press plane. John Ehrlichman appeared briefly with some added information on BART financing. A total of $219 million in financing has come from the government, out of the total cost of $1.4 billion. Of this new grant of $38 million, $26.6 million goes to work along Market Street. The rest goes to various items such as development of an undercar fire protection system, a fare collection data collecting system, storage buildings, and car washing equipment.

  Mr. Ehrlichman also advised that Clark MacGregor has called upon the opposition to “repudiate” demonstrations said to be aborning in San Francisco. Information that demonstrations are being generated “squares with some intelligence that law enforcement agencies had,” he said, which shows that “these demonstrations are political rather than of an anti-war nature.” Asked if it was possible to make that distinction, Ehrlichman implied that the agencies know what is going on. He did not clarify. He added that the “motorcade seems to be the prime target.”

  Henry Hubbard, Newsweek

  Jack Germond, Manchester Union-Leader1

  The worst thing to look like right now is a politician; this is a bad year for them.

  —Frank Mankiewicz, April 1972

  McGovern was doing better when he was an anti-politician.

  —George Gallup, September 1972

  You know, I finally figured out why McGovern’s gonna get his ass beat this year: He doesn’t have half the class of the people who work for him. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to think George McGovern doesn’t have much class at all.

  —Jack Germond, correspondent, October 1972

  Seldom has the public perception of a major political figure c
hanged so rapidly. George McGovern’s political problem stems not from the belief that he is a dangerous radical and unpatriotic American. His trouble lies in the way people feel about him personally. Many who were attracted to him earlier this year because of his freshness and promise now express strong disillusionment.

  —Haynes Johnson in the Washington Post, October 1972

  The mood at McGovern’s grim headquarters building at 1910 K Street, NW, in Washington is oddly schizoid these days: a jangled mix of defiance and despair—tempered, now and then, by quick flashes of a lingering conviction that George can still win.

  McGovern’s young staffers, after all, have never lost an election they expected to win, at the outset—and they definitely expected to win this one. They are accustomed to being far behind in the public opinion polls. McGovern has almost always been the underdog, and—except for California—he has usually been able to close the gap with a last-minute stretch run.

  Even in the primaries he lost—New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania—he did well enough to embarrass the pollsters, humiliate the pols, and crank up his staff morale another few notches.

  But that boundless blind faith is beginning to fade now. The Curse of Eagleton is beginning to make itself felt in the ranks. And not even Frank Mankiewicz, the Wizard of Chevy Chase, can properly explain why McGovern is now being sneered at from coast to coast as “just another politician.” Mankiewicz is still the main drivewheel in this hamstrung campaign; he has been the central intelligence from the very beginning—which was fine all around, while it worked, but there is not a hell of a lot of evidence to suggest that it’s working real well these days, and it is hard to avoid the idea that Frank is just as responsible for whatever is happening now as he was six months ago, when McGovern came wheeling out of New Hampshire like the Abominable Snowman on a speed trip.

  If George gets stomped in November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him. The blame will trace straight back to his brain-trust, to whoever had his ear tight enough to convince him that all that bullshit about “new politics” was fine for the primaries, but it would never work against Nixon—so he would have to abandon his original power base, after Miami, and swiftly move to consolidate the one he’d just shattered: the Meany/Daley/Humphrey/Muskie axis, the senile remnants of the Democratic Party’s once-powerful “Roosevelt coalition.”

  McGovern agreed. He went to Texas and praised LBJ; he revised his economic program to make it more palatable on Wall Street; he went to Chicago and endorsed the whole Daley/Democratic ticket, including State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, who is still under indictment on felony/conspiracy (Obstruction of Justice) charges for his role in a police raid on local Black Panther headquarters three years ago that resulted in the murder of Fred Hampton.

  In the speedy weeks between March and July, the atmosphere in McGovern’s cramped headquarters building on Capitol Hill was so high that you could get bent by just hanging around and watching the human machinery at work.

  The headquarters building itself was not much bigger than McGovern’s personal command post in the Senate Office Building, five blocks away. It was one big room about the size of an Olympic swimming pool—with a grocery store on one side, a liquor store on the other, and a tree-shaded sidewalk out front. The last time I was there, about two weeks before the California primary, I drove my blue Volvo up on the sidewalk and parked right in front of the door. Crouse went inside to find Mankiewicz while I picked up some Ballantine ale.

  False dawn in Chicago: Daley, Kennedy & McGovern whooping it up. STUART BRATESMAN

  “Is this a charge?” the booze-clerk asked.

  “Right,” I said, “Charge it to George McGovern.”

  He nodded, and began to write it down.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” I said. “I was just kidding. Here—here’s the cash.”

  He shrugged and accepted the three bills… and when I got to Frank’s office and told him what had happened, he didn’t seem surprised. “Yeah, our credit’s pretty good,” he said, “in a lot of places where we never even asked for it.”

  That was back in May, when the tide was still rising. But things are different now, and the credit is not so easy. The new K Street headquarters is an eight-story tomb once occupied by the “Muskie for President” juggernaut. Big Ed abandoned it when he dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination, and it stood empty for a month or so after that—but when McGovern croaked Humphrey in California and became the nominee-apparent, his wizards decided to get a new and larger headquarters.

  The Muskie building was an obvious choice—if only because it was available very cheap, and already wired for the fantastic maze of phone lines necessary for a presidential campaign headquarters. The Man from Maine and his army of big-time backers had already taken care of that aspect; they had plenty of phone lines, along with all those endorsements.

  Not everybody on the McGovern staff was happy with the idea of moving out of the original headquarters. The decision was made in California, several days before the primary, and I remember arguing with Gary Hart about it. He insisted the move was necessary, for space reasons… and even in retrospect my argument for keeping the original headquarters seems irrational. It was a matter of karma, I said, psychic continuity. And besides, I had spent some time in the Muskie building on the night of the New Hampshire primary, when the atmosphere of the place was strongly reminiscent of Death Row at Sing Sing. So many memories of that building were not pleasant—but my reasons, as usual, had a noticeably mystic flavor to them. And Gary, as usual, was thinking in terms of hard lawyer’s logic and political pragmatism.

  So the McGovern headquarters was moved, after Miami, from the original base between the liquor store and the grocery store on Capitol Hill to the Muskie tomb on K Street, in the fashionable downtown area. It was a central location, they said, with a big parking lot next door. It also had two elevators and sixteen bathrooms.

  The original headquarters had only one bathroom, with a cardboard arrow on the door that could be moved, like a one-armed clock, to three different positions: MEN, WOMEN or EMPTY.

  There was also a refrigerator. It was small, but somehow there were always a few cans of beer in it, even for visiting journalists. Nobody was in charge of stocking it, but nobody drank the last beer without replacing it, either… (or maybe it was all a shuck from the start; maybe they had a huge stash outside the back door, but they only kept two or three cans in the refrigerator, so that anybody who drank one would feel so guilty that he/she would bring six to replace it, the next time they came around… but I doubt it; not even that devious Arab bastard Rick Stearns would plot things that carefully).

  But what the hell? All that is history now, and after roaming around the new McGovern headquarters building for a week or so, the only refrigerator I found was up in finance director Henry Kimmelman’s office on the sixth floor. I went up there with Pat Caddell one afternoon last week to watch the Cronkite/Chancellor TV news (every afternoon at 6:30, all activity in the building is suspended for an hour while the staff people gather around TV sets to watch “the daily bummer,” as some of them call it) and Kimmelman has the only accessible color set in the building, so his office is usually crowded for the news hour.

  But his set is fucked, unfortunately. One of the color tubes is blown, so everything that appears on the screen has a wet purple tint to it. When McGovern comes on, rapping out lines from a speech that somebody watching one of the headquarters’ TV sets just wrote for him a few hours earlier, his face appears on the set in Kimmelman’s office as if he were speaking up from the bottom of a swimming pool full of cheap purple dye.

  It is not a reassuring thing to see, and most of the staffers prefer to watch the news on the black & white sets downstairs in the political section….

  What? We seem to be off the track here. I was talking about my first encounter with the refrigerator in Henry Kimmelman’s office—when I was looking for beer, and found none. The only thing in th
e icebox was a canned martini that tasted like brake fluid.

  One canned martini. No beer. A purple TV screen. Both elevators jammed in the basement; fifteen empty bathrooms. Seventy-five cents an hour to park in the lot next door. Chaos and madness in the telephone switchboard. Fear in the back rooms, confusion up front, and a spooky vacuum on top—the eighth floor—where Larry O’Brien is supposed to be holding the gig together… what is he doing up there? Nobody knows. They never see him.

  “Larry travels a lot,” one of the speech writers told me. “He’s Number One, you know—and when you’re Number One you don’t have to try so hard, right?”

  The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked at this time. A spectacular Come From Behind win is still possible—on paper and given the right circumstances—but the underlying realities of the campaign itself would seem to preclude this. A cohesive, determined campaign with the same kind of multi-level morale that characterized the McGovern effort in the months preceding the Wisconsin primary might be a good bet to close a twenty-point gap on Nixon in the last month of this grim presidential campaign.

  As usual, Nixon has peaked too early—and now he is locked into what is essentially a Holding Action. Which would be disastrous in a close race, but—even by Pat Caddell’s partisan estimate—Nixon could blow twenty points off his lead in the next six weeks and still win. (Caddell’s figures seem in general agreement with those of the most recent Gallup Poll, ten days ago, which showed that Nixon could blow thirty points off his lead and still win.)

  My own rude estimate is that McGovern will steadily close the gap between now and November 7th, but not enough. If I had to make book right now, I would try to get McGovern with seven or eight points, but I’d probably go with five or six, if necessary. In other words, my guess at the moment is that McGovern will lose by a popular vote margin of 5.5 percent—and probably far worse in the electoral college.2