Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Ed: Why was that?

  HST: Gordon Allot got beaten… A Republican senator… an arch Nixon supporter… He was defeated by Floyd Haskell, a sort of unknown Democrat, by a very small margin… and also the Olympics were defeated which was a definite victory…

  Ed: There had been a referendum?

  HST: Oh yeah… They actually threw the Winter Olympics out of Colorado… Which was a great shock to the Chamber of Commerce people, the greedheads… And then I called Aspen and… we carried… you know Aspen was the only county in Colorado that went for McGovern… And there was one other thing… I forget what… oh, Pat Schroeder… a sort of a liberal woman lawyer who beat the former DA who was the incumbent congressman.

  Ed: Where was that?

  HST: In Denver.

  Ed: Also in Colorado.

  HST: Yeah, but the rest of the country—except for Massachusetts—was a sort of a never-ending nightmare. For a while, in the press room, there were people trying to write or… half-heartedly poking on typewriters around the edge of the room…. But nobody was writing by five, we were just sort of watching television and drinking, and I saw this abandoned story sort of… lying around. One page was still in the typewriter, the others were on the table beside it, and I think it pretty well expresses the feeling of most of the press about the McGovern campaign… I have no idea who wrote it… There was no byline… it was a first draft… just left there unfinished on the table… and at first I found one page and I thought,… hmnnn… where’s the rest of this? So I shuffled around through the paper on the table and put it together…

  Ed: Well, let’s include this, with the following message to whoever originally wrote it: We hope you’ll get in touch with Barbara Burgower at Straight Arrow Books in order that we may properly credit this piece of writing and carry the customary copyright of permissions and acknowledgments in future editions of this book. What follows is the actual manuscript which Dr. Thompson found that morning.

  the cruel moment of defeat hurt senator mcgovern more deeply than it might most other men. his quest for the presidency was inspired not so much by simple desire for power but by xxxxxxxxxxx a conviction that the country xxxxxx wanted new spiritual direction, fresh vision about its ideal and perhaps, above all, a national integrity that he felt was its greatest need. he talked frequently about a @crisis of spirit@ in the united states but xxx americans overwhelmingly demonstrated that they did not agree with him. not even the country*s young people.

  senator mcgovern had hinged his lxxxxcxx whole campaign on oppostion to the vietnam war, xxxxxxxxxxxx hoping to pursuade americans of its immorality and awakenong in them a sense of outrage and shame, he tried to demonstrate that the continuing american presnece in vietnam, the bombing and the xxxxxx suport of what he denounced as a corrupt dictatorship was an indication of xxx a xxxxx moral collapse in the x united states. He did not balme the people but the nixon administration / but the people did not xxxxx respond to his appeals, ironically yesterday morning he voted here in support of a local xxxxx proposition to outlwa the killing of a small bird known as the @mourning dove@ last night, as the nixon landslide gathered momentum that is precisely what heorge mcgovern became—a mourning dove.

  late yesterday afternoon in an informal talk with me, sen. mcgovern said he truly believed xx what he had earlier suggested in x his final campaigning that the re-election of president nixon could actually mean four more years of war in south-east asia. it was a poignant moment because xxxxxxx he seemed to snese that the american people were about to re-elect pres dent nicon just thesame.

  i xxxxx asked him if the worst happened whether he would run again and he said: @emphantically: no i will not. i shall stay in the senate but xxx someone else will have to carry on what I began.@

  frewuently in the last two weeks, senator mcgovern had spoken of a young p black man who xxxxxx predicted that the election was going to break his heart because he was going to g find out that the american people were not as high minded as he thought they were/typically, mr. mcgovern challenged this view, x saying that he believed in the goodness and decency of the people and that they would respond to their own consciences.

  but the election did break his heart after all. he thought he saw xxx faces glowing with hope xx that the country would aim for higher standards, yearing for peace and an edn to the domestic anguish. but the voters turned their backs on him.

  senator mcgovern had x hoped too that americans x would share his concernx that the nixon adminstratiob was ignoring the interests of the people and consorting only with xxxxxxxx industrial giants / attending to the @special interests@ of the super rich and generally sacrificing the welfare of the country at large.

  nothing x that mr. mcgovern had to say on these questions got through to the people sufficiently to pursuade them to vote for him. they did not even react to his dark xxxxxxxx insinuations that the alleged wirtapping, espionage and sabotage tactics of the nixon administrationxxxxxxxxxxxx was leading them towards a @big brother@ state where nowone would be safe from instrusion on xxxxxxx on personal privacy. ib his xxxxxx long pilgrimage—

  Ed: I have one last question. What does this mean here, “Time of departure of planes back to Washington will be posted in press room immediately following election night statement”?

  HST: That was the last flight of the Dakota Queen and also the last flight of the Zoo Plane. It was the trip back to Washington from Sioux Falls, which borders on one of the worst trips I’ve ever taken in my life. I was on the Zoo Plane. Apparently the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen was something very close to a public hanging of a good friend. When we got to the Washington National Airport, we landed at a… I think it was a Coast Guard terminal somewhere away from the commercial terminal and all of the McGovern national staff people from Washington were there… Jesus Christ… I can’t even describe what’s coming off… it was easily the worst scene of the campaign… I’d thought that election night was the worst thing I’d been through. But this was the most depressing experience I’ve had in a long, long time… Far more depressing than, for instance than getting beaten myself, in any kind of political race in Colorado. There was something… total… something very understanding about the McGovern defeat… a shock. There was a very unexplained kind of… ominous quality to it… So when we got to Washington… the national staff people were there and the wives of the people who had been on the plane… and it was a scene of just complete… weeping chaos. People you’d never expect to break down… stumbled off the plane in tears, and… it was… I don’t know like a… funeral after a mass murder or something… there was no way to describe it, a kind of… falling apart. Mass disintegration…

  It was such a shock to me that although I’d gone back to Washington to analyze… the reasons for McGovern’s defeat and the dimensions of it, when I saw that scene at the airport… and I saw how ripped up people were, you know, unable to even focus, much less think or talk… I decided to hell with this… I can’t stay around here… so I just went right around to the main terminal and got on another plane and went back to Colorado.

  Ed: You never left the airport?

  HST: Well… I was looking for a cab to get across the main terminal… it was about a mile away… and Sandy Berger… appeared in his car… he was one of the people who had broken down earlier…

  Ed: Who is Sandy Berger?

  HST: He was one of the speech writers,… first-class speech writer, one of the two or three who were with McGovern all the way through from Miami on, and… he was in such a state when he picked us up. It was rush hour in Washington and we had to go down one side of a freeway. There was a big grass island about eighteen inches high and twelve feet wide separating the two… freeways… six lanes, three in each direction… Sandy thought he was giving Tim Crouse and me a ride into town but we said we were going over to the main terminal to catch another plane, and he said, “Oh, back there, eh?”… And right smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic in Washington, right straight across
the island… up over this huge bump, in a driving rain, he just made a high-speed U-turn right over the island and back into the other lane, and cars were skidding at us, coming sideways and fishtailing, trying to avoid us… That was the kind of mood the McGovern people were in. I don’t think he cared whether anybody hit us or not. It scared the hell out of me… But we made it to the terminal and I bought a ticket for Denver, and… just got the hell out of Washington.

  Ed: Just got the hell out of Washington? I think that should be the end, that’s a good point to end this chapter.

  HST: Yeah, I decided to get the hell out… give them time to cool off and get themselves together… then come back later and get into some serious talk about why… why it happened.

  Ed: A serious talk?

  HST: Yeah—poke into the reasons for it…

  Ed: Okay, that’ll be the end of the chapter we’ll call “November.”

  HST: Why not?

  Be Angry at the Sun

  That public men publish falsehoods

  Is nothing new. That America must accept

  Like the historical republics corruption and empire

  Has been known for years.

  Be angry at the sun for setting

  If these things anger you. Watch the wheel

  slope and turn,

  They are all bound on the wheel, these people,

  those warriors.

  This republic, Europe, Asia.

  Observe them gesticulating,

  Observe them going down. The gang serves lies,

  the passionate

  Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth

  Hunts in no pack.

  You are not Catullus, you know,

  To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You

  are far

  From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty

  Political hatreds.

  Let boys want pleasure, and men

  Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,

  And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes

  to be duped.

  Yours is not theirs.

  —Robinson Jeffers

  December

  Purging the McGovernites… Shoot-Out in the Dung-Heap Corral… Where Do We Go From Here: What Next for the “New Politics”?… A Crude Autopsy & Quarrelsome Analysis on Why McGovern Got Stomped…

  “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

  —Jeremiah 8:20

  On a Friday afternoon in early December I spent about thirty-three minutes observing the traffic pattern around Times Square from the co-pilot’s seat of a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza. We were trying to land at LaGuardia airport on Long Island in time to catch a 6:30 flight to Evansville, Indiana… but the runways were crowded at that hour, and when the Tower put us into the holding pattern we were faced with a choice between drifting idly around in circles above the New Jersey shoreline, or doing something different.

  I offered the pilot a Harp Ale out of my kitbag and said I’d just as soon do anything that wouldn’t cost him his license—like maybe swooping down on Manhattan Island to check the size of the crowd outside of whatever theater was showing “Deep Throat.”

  He glanced across at me, refusing the ale, but I could see a new light in his eyes. “Lissen,” he said. “Are your serious? Because we can really do that, if you want to.” He smiled wickedly. “We can go right down to five hundred feet and still be legal.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Five hundred feet still gives us plenty of room to maneuver.”

  He chuckled and pushed the stick hard left, throwing the plane into a tight downward spiral. “You’ll get a big kick out of this,” he said. “Five hundred feet ain’t much….” He glanced over at me, keeping the plane aimed straight down at Times Square. “You a pro football fan?”

  “Absolutely,” I replied.

  He nodded. “Well, five hundred feet is about a hundred and seventy yards—and every quarterback in the league can throw a football about half that far.”

  I tried to raise my ale-bottle for a long drink, but our plunge-angle made it impossible to lift it high enough to overcome the reverse-gravity flow. We were headed straight down at a little over 300 miles an hour… and from somewhere behind me in the small cabin I heard a voice; a low keening sound, very much like a moan….

  “What’s that noise?” the pilot asked.

  “That’s Frank,” I said. “I think he just bit a chunk out of his own liver.” I looked back to be sure Mankiewicz was still strapped into his seat—which he was, but his face was grey and his eyes seemed unable to focus. He was sitting with his back to the window, so he couldn’t enjoy the view. And our engine noise was so loud that he couldn’t hear what we were saying up in the cockpit, so he had no way of knowing that our sudden, high-speed power-dive straight down at the vortex of Manhattan Island was anything more or less than what anybody who has spent a lot of time on commercial jetliners would assume it to be—the last few seconds of an irreversible death-plunge that would end all our lives, momentarily, in a terrible explosion and a towering ball of fire in the middle of Broadway.

  “Don’t worry,” I yelled back at him. “We’re stuck in a holding pattern.”

  He stared down at me, clinging to a hand-strap on the roof of the plane: “What? What? I can’t hear you!”

  Just then we began leveling out, and the ale spilled all over my lap. “Nevermind!” I shouted. “We’re right over Times Square.”

  He tried to lean back in his seat, fighting the G’s, but I could see that his heart was not in it. Spontaneous night power-dives over metropolitan areas are not lightly dismissed by those who were weaned on “the Friendly Skies of United.” Few commercial passengers have ever experienced a rise or drop angle worse than thirty or forty degrees—so a sudden ninety-degree spiraling swoop over midtown Manhattan does serious things to the nerves.

  Soon we were standing on our right wing, and the only thing between me and the sidewalk in Times Square was a thick pane of plexiglass. We were flying in very tight circles, so low that if the window had a hole in it I felt like I could reach down and touch the people on the street.

  “You see what I mean?” said the pilot. “Five hundred feet ain’t much, is it?”

  “Jesus!” I muttered

  He laughed. “You wanna go around again?”

  I glanced back at Frank, but even at a glance I could see that the damage was already done. His face was frozen; his mouth had gone slack and his eyed were locked in a kind of glazed-blank fascination on the toes of his own shoes, which—because of our flight angle—seemed to be floating in a state of weightlessness about fifteen inches off the floor of the plane.

  “He looks okay,” I said to the pilot. “Let’s take another run.”

  He grinned. “We’ll turn a little wider this time, and come in real low—right across Central Park.” He eased back on the stick and aimed us out above the docks on the Hudson River. “I don’t do this much with passengers,” he said. “Most people get scared when I take it down this low.” He nodded. “I usually don’t even mention it, but you guys looked like the type who’d probably get a boot out of stuff like this.”

  “You were right,” I said. “Frank’s acting a little funny right now, but it’s only because he’s tired…. It’s been about fifteen months since he had any real sleep.”

  Now we were bearing down on Times Square again, coming in so low over Central Park and the Plaza Fountain that I was sure if I could lean out the window and yell something vicious, everybody on Fifth Avenue would hear me and look up.

  The pilot spoke without taking his eyes off our tree-skimming course: “Fifteen months with no sleep? God damn! You guys must have really been whooping it up!”

  I shrugged, trying to light a cigarette as we zoomed across 59th Street. “Well… I guess maybe you could say that.”

  “What line of work are you in?” he asked.

  “Work?” It had been a long tim
e since anybody asked me a thing like that. “Well… ah… Frank’s writing a book about politics, I think… and I’m organizing a campaign for the U.S. Senate.”

  “Whose campaign?” he asked.

  “Mine,” I said.

  He glanced over at me and smiled. “Well I’ll be damned! So you’re gonna be a Senator, eh?” He chuckled. “You think you might want to hire a private pilot?”

  I shrugged. “Why not? But you’ll have to clear it with Frank. He’ll be handling that end of the action—after he gets some sleep.”

  Now we were circling Times Square, standing on the wing and looking straight down at the New York Times building. The pilot appeared to be thinking. “Frank?” he said. “Frank Mankiewicz?… I saw that name on the manifest. Didn’t he have something to do with that goddamn McGovern business?”

  I hesitated, reaching around behind me to fetch another bottle of ale out of the kitbag as we leaned left around the Empire State Building.

  “Yeah,” I said finally. “Frank was McGovern’s political director.”

  He said nothing for a moment, then he slowly turned to look at me again. “So now you want Mankiewicz to run your campaign?”