Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Page 44
Ed: It’s the third dimension. Motorcycles are only two dimensional.
HST: Yeah, right. I think I’d like to get up there at night, all alone—with a head full of mescaline, just roll around in the sky like a big Condor….
Ed: What about drugs on the Zoo Plane?
HST: Christ, you have a one-track mind! I think probably… I wish we had a picture of this somewhere… I don’t think anybody ever got one. If they did, we’ll all be arrested for it. But early on in the campaign, I’m not sure at what point, both galleys, which is where on commercial jets the stewardesses kind of station themselves to serve food… On the Zoo Plane both of them were immediately converted into bars, one in the front and one in the back. The stewardesses were totally helpless—at the mercy of these lunatics who had taken over the plane. That trip from Long Beach to Sioux Falls was probably the worst… after we had left the cockpit, about five of us gathered in the rear galley, there was one overhead light and the rest of the plane was dark. They had turned the lights out—it was practically midnight and…
Ed: Midnight?
HST: Yeah, we didn’t arrive in Sioux Falls until one-thirty in the morning on November 7, election day. And the rest of the plane was dark and here was this one overhead light in this galley, and I had taken my tape recorder back, playing Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground album, at top volume in this tiny little room with tin walls and the music was echoing all up and down the plane. Somebody up in front was playing a Rolling Stones album on another tape recorder and we were… smoking this very peculiar looking hash pipe… passing it around…
Ed: Was that your billy club hash pipe?
HST: I’d rather not talk about that…. No, this was some kind of strange Lebanese flower pipe which was clearly a drug implement. There was no mistaking it. And right next to us were about four of these rather old-time, straight-looking cameramen from ABC-TV, just looking up in stone horror that here on a presidential campaign these… addicts and… loonies… all of them being paid, presumably well, by respectable or whatever newspapers or media that covered this presidential campaign.
Ed: Union members.
HST: These people were, yes, that sort. And it was funny and very bizarre for a presidential campaign. Behavior like that was consistent for maybe a month on the Zoo Plane… the last month. As the McGovern situation got worse, the Zoo Plane became crazier and crazier.
Ed: What happened when you arrived in Sioux Falls?
HST: Well, there was a very sad kind of… welcome-home rally for George McGovern and… One final note on the Zoo Plane. I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns… At every hotel wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press. And everyone upon checking out would keep their keys, and we brought the keys on the plane and taped them along the aisle. The keys jingled like a giant tambourine on every takeoff… They were taped next to each other in a solid row along both top racks above the seats. There were maybe five thousand hotel keys…
Ed: From the entire campaign?
HST: Every hotel in the country, it looked like. And I think on the last day of the campaign, one of the CBS cameramen put them all in a huge bag. He was going to take them to one mailbox in Washington and dump them all in there…. Then they were going to film the behavior of the postman when he opened the box and found five thousand hotel keys… it must have weighed two hundred pounds… that was the kind of twisted humor that prevailed on the Zoo Plane.
Ed: What happened when you arrived in Sioux Falls?
HST: Well, it was, as I say, it was really a sad kind of rally. It was cold and late. My notes here say: 12:55 and the sign says “Welcome Home, George”… erected by the local Jaycees. It was sort of the return of the local boy who made good, but I suspect that even in that crowd there was an ominous sense that some kind of awful beating was about to occur. And as it happened, McGovern didn’t even carry South Dakota. He lost it by eight or nine points.
Ed: What did McGovern say when he got off the plane? Did he make a speech?
HST: The only quote I have here in the notebook—yeah, here it is: “When I see these thousands of people standing here I think of words like love and devotion.” My own feeling at the time was… sort of like “the party’s over” and… once you got off the Zoo Plane it was almost like being… plunged back into reality. Most of us just crashed that night either at the Holiday Inn or the Ramada Inn. And the next morning by about ten o’clock McGovern had a schedule… this was his last official campaign schedule and about half of the press corps followed him. I didn’t, I slept. Then I had lunch with some of the heavier, straighter reporters… Doug Kneeland from the New York Times, Bill Greider from the Post, and four or five others. We were discussing what bets were safe and I think Kneeland had McGovern and six points, meaning that if McGovern lost by five he would win the bet. He was a little dubious about that one, but we decided that anybody who had McGovern and ten points was pretty safe. There was no question in their minds, even the most enlightened and supposedly… inside, hard-core press people—that McGovern would lose by more than ten points. And this was at noon on election day….
Ed: I notice here we have the schedule for Senator George McGovern on Tuesday, November 7, election day. It only runs up to 3:30, where it says private time at Holiday Inn. What happened after that?
HST: There wasn’t a hell of a lot to do in Sioux Falls…
Ed: We’re now on election day and according to what you’ve told me so far, you and the members of the press were sitting around betting on exactly how much McGovern would lose by. What was McGovern doing during that day? This “Schedule for Senator George McGovern”… begins at 8:30 A.M….
HST: Let’s just put the goddamn thing in the record…
Schedule for Senator George McGovern
Tuesday, November 7, 1972
8:30 A.M.
Depart Holiday Inn Downtown. Shuttle buses will pick up people from the other hotels shortly beforehand—bus schedules forthcoming upon arrival Mon. evening at the Holiday Inn.
9:45 A.M.
Arrive to vote at Educational Building of Congregational Church, 301 E. 4th Street, Mitchell, S. Dakota. There will only be room inside for press pool.
10:15 A.M.
Depart for Dakota Wesleyan.
10:25 A.M.
Informal coffee with President Don Messer, University Building, Allen Hall, Dakota Wesleyan University.
11:10 A.M.
Depart (walking) for Campus Center.
11:15 A.M.
High School Students Seminar—speech, Campus Center Building, 2nd floor cafeteria.
12:00 P.M.
Interview with Mitchell Daily Republic. PRESS FILING in Campus Center Building.
12:20 P.M.
Drop in at Burg Shoe Store, 216 N. Main Street, followed by visit to Mitchell McGovern Headquarters.
1:00 P.M.
Depart for Sioux Falls (box lunch in cars and buses).
2:15 P.M.
Presentation and press reception, Minnehaha Country Club, W. 22nd Street, Sioux Falls.
3:15 P.M.
Depart for Holiday Inn.
3:30 P.M.
Private time at Holiday Inn.
To be
Election Night Statement, Coliseum, 501 N. Main,
announced:
Sioux Falls.
Time of Departure of planes back to Washington will be posted in Press Room immediately following Election Night statement.
Ed: What did McGovern do after 3:30? How did he spend his private time? What did he do that day?
HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at that Country Club reception… it was the first time I’d ever seen him drinking… sort of casually and openly in public…
Ed: Was he drinking more heavily than usual?
HST: Not heavily, but he wasn’t worried about walking up to the bar and saying… uh… let me have… a… vodka and orange juice. Normally a p
residential candidate wouldn’t do that. He’d have somebody else go get it for him… and if anybody asked what he was drinking, he’d say “orange juice.” But by that time McGovern no longer cared what people thought about his minor vices. Particularly the press corps… A weird relationship develops when you follow a candidate for a long time. You become sort of a… friendly antagonist… to the extent sometime where it can get dangerous… It certainly did in this campaign during the last month or so… In my case I became more of a flack for McGovern than… than a journalist. Which is probably why I made that disastrous bet, although there wasn’t a reporter in the press corps who thought that George would lose by more than 10 points… except Joe Alsop; he said McGovern wouldn’t get more than 40 percent of the vote.
Ed: The others were more optimistic?
HST: Well… there was a sense of suspended… ah… not animation… that’s the wrong word: it was sort of a sense of limbo, an ominous sense that the night was not gonna be very pleasant. We all knew it but nobody was talking about it. McGovern Headquarters was in the downtown Holiday Inn and there was a sort of false gaiety that prevailed there. There was a bar on the top floor… kind of a big, glass-walled dome. People were having a few drinks and pretending that none of them knew what was about to happen. I recall spending a few hours up there with Ron Rosenbaum from the Village Voice and Bob Greene from the Chicago Sun Times and I don’t think we talked about the election at all… We just talked about how strange it was to be sitting in Sioux Falls up at the top of the Holiday Inn… wondering what songs were on the jukebox… It was like going to visit a couple on the verge of a really nasty divorce scene… where you know it, and you’re invited over for dinner, but nobody mentions it… You sit there listening to music… and you talk about… I don’t know… the Super Bowl… or the pig races… or…
Ed: Pig races?
HST: Right. Pig races are incredible. Drama. Tension. Speed. I think what we… what we all thought would happen would be that… They had a giant press room set up with a free bar, about fifty typewriters, and six TV consoles at one end of the room and I think the general impression was that we’d sort of filter in there about 6 o’clock… which would be seven, Eastern Time… when the polls closed in New York and Massachusetts… and we would sort of watch the deal go down slowly. I think we all assumed that by midnight it would be over. The only question was how bad it would be… But what happened as it turned out was that… well, I decided rather than go to the press room, I’d go up and watch the first TV returns with some of McGovern’s closest staff people. It seemed more fitting somehow to go up to the ninth floor where most of the staffers were staying and watch the first returns with some of McGovern’s key people, the ones who were closest to him. I knew that John Holum and Sandy Berger, two speech writers, were staying in a room up there, so I picked up the house phone in the lobby about 6:15… I’d heard that some of the results had come in but I didn’t know what they were at that point… and it didn’t seem to make much difference… Too early, I thought… when Holum answered I asked if he was busy and if he wasn’t I’d like to come up and have a drink and sit around and wait for the results… He said, “Don’t bother… It’s all over… We’ve been wiped… Shit, we’re losing everything!”
Ed: What time was this?
HST: Shortly after 6… Central Time. So that was what… 5 o’clock Eastern Time… No, 7 Eastern Time, excuse me… and 4 California time… It was really all over by then. By 6:30 there wasn’t a person at the Holiday Inn who didn’t know what had happened. There was never any question of winning, but the Shock set in when people began to sense the dimensions of it, how bad it was…. And the tip-off there was… I’m not sure… but… first it was when Ohio went down… no, Illinois… that’s right, it was Illinois… When Illinois went by 11 points you could almost feel the shudder that went through the place because Illinois was where they had Gene Pokorny, their best organizer. He was a real wizard. He’s the one who did the Wisconsin primary. And Illinois was the key state so they put their best person in. They had to have Illinois. If the election had been close Illinois would have been critical, and with Daley coming around there was at least a possibility that Illinois would go for McGovern. But if Pokorny couldn’t carry Illinois—when it went down by 11 points, a feeling of shock and doom came over the whole place. Nobody talked. You could see TV people like Frank Reynolds and Bruce Morton doing their interviews…
Ed: Frank Reynolds, Bruce Morton?
HST: ABC-TV, and Bruce Morton from CBS… Setting up their cameras and their lights out in the lobby, doing on-the-scene reports with a quiet crowd gathered around watching them, and theirs were the only voices you could hear and they were broadcasting…
Ed: Who were they interviewing?
HST: They weren’t interviewing anybody. It was eerie, you’d walk out of the press room, through the lobby out of the elevators, into the bar… There’d be a huge crowd in the lobby and only one person talking and you’d hear this voice saying, “The mood at the McGovern headquarters… is extremely solemn and shocked… one of shock and depression… right now… Illinois has just fallen… California is gone, New York is gone…” They’d read this list of disasters and you knew their faces and what they were saying was on TV screens all over the country… It was like a televised funeral.
I think about 8:00 I was sitting in the coffee shop eating a hamburger… no, pea soup it was… I didn’t feel like eating, but somebody insisted I have something… I was feeling depressed… And John Holum came in. I could see that he’d been crying… and… he’s not the kind of person you’d expect to see walking around in public with tears all over his face. I said why don’t you sit down and have a beer, or some pea soup or whatever… And he said, “No, I think it’s about time to go upstairs and write the statement.” He was going up to write McGovern’s concession statement and… you could see he was about to crack again… and that’s what he did, he turned and walked out of the coffee shop and into the elevator.
I think McGovern slept through the first returns. Holum woke him up and asked him what he wanted to say… and… McGovern was very cool for a while till he read the statement that Holum had written… he typed a first draft, then woke George up and said, “Here it is… we have to go over about 10 o’clock to the coliseum and… do it.” It was sort of a giant auditorium… where a big crowd of mainly young people were waiting for McGovern… and all the national press and the network cameras.
Ed: But first he read the statement that Holum had written for him.
HST: Yeah… That was the only time that McGovern cracked. For about a minute he broke down and… and… and couldn’t talk for a few minutes. Then he got himself together… He was actually the coolest person in the place from then on. Other people were cracking all around. It was… spooky to be there later at night.
Ed: What was Mankiewicz’s reaction?
HST: Well, Frank had flown out early from Washington. There were plans for two planes to fly out… Mankiewicz had come out in a small Lear jet… with… I’ve forgotten who else came out with him. Most of the top people were supposed to come out on the second plane, once the polls closed in the east… But when the shittrain started they cancelled that flight… Gary Hart never showed up in Sioux Falls, for instance… his wife was waiting for him out there, at the Holiday Inn… Rick Stearns… Eli Segal… Hal Himmelman; none of them ever left Washington.
Ed: Why not?
HST: Well… the shock was so sudden, so massive… that they didn’t want to come out.
Ed: But Mankiewicz came?
HST: He came out on the first plane… the four-person jet… and I recall seeing him once or twice, but I didn’t talk to him that night… It was not the kinda night when you… it wasn’t the scene where you felt like talking to people.
Ed: How did Mankiewicz look? How did he take it?
HST: Like everybody else… stunned, wall-eyed… there was nothing to say… just a helluva shock… you know… a
fantastic beating… and I think about… oh… ten or fifteen of us stayed in the press room watching the final returns from other races around the country until about 4 or 5 in the morning. I remember, when Agnew came on, throwing something at the television set. It was a beer can…
Ed: You threw a beer can at the television set when Agnew came on?
HST: Yeah… That was the mood there. I was more extreme, but that was the general mood, even among the press. I think one of the best expressions of that—the feeling of the press, which McGovern has cursed all the way through the campaign and ever since the campaign…
Ed: Excuse me, McGovern cursed what?
HST: McGovern places a large part of the blame for his defeat on the press. He did before the election, and even now he’s still doing it. The Eagleton affair turned him brutally against the press. He thought they were crucifying him and leaving Nixon alone… and he was right, on one level. But what he ignored was the fact that, first, he was out in the open and committing these blunders that the press couldn’t ignore… while Nixon was not out in the open and committing no blunders… or at least none that the press could pin on him. The Watergate thing came about as close as anything and the Washington Post worked that one about as heavily as any newspaper could. But McGovern throughout the campaign blamed the press for taking advantage of his… of what he called his “open campaign”… as if… he opened up his house to guests and they came in and pissed all over the floor and ripped off his silver and… you know… raped the children… that sort of thing… But I think one of the best examples of the way the press people felt that night showed up in these few pieces of paper I found in the typewriter about 5 in the morning in the press room. I was just sort of wandering around… There was an odd sense of not wanting to go to sleep… because that would have been giving up… In a scene like that you get a weird feeling that maybe if you stay up a little longer, maybe something good might happen… but Colorado was the only bright spot in the country that night…