Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  I laughed nervously. Was Frank listening? Was he conscious? Could he hear us—above the roar of the engines and the whine of his own nerve ends?

  A sudden burst of noise from the radio ended our conversation. It was the voice of an air-traffic controller from the LaGuardia tower, telling us to get back in the landing pattern immediately. We hooked a hard right over Brooklyn, then left & down to the private/charter runway in front of the small yellow Butler Aviation terminal, a painfully familiar docking place to anyone who spent any time on the McGovern campaign plane last fall.

  We had about four minutes to make the Eastern flight to Evansville, which was leaving from a gate about a mile across the LaGuardia parking lot in the main terminal… but our pilot had radioed ahead for a cab, and it was waiting for us on the runway.

  This is the kind of split-second service that you come to take for granted after a year of so on the [presidential] campaign trail. But the cost—for chartered planes, private cars, police escorts, and a small army of advance men and Secret Service guards clearing a path for you—is about $5000 a day, which is nice while it lasts, but the day after the polls close you suddenly understand why Cinderella never stayed out after midnight.

  McGoverns Now Ordinary Tourists

  St. Thomas, V.I. (UPI)—Sen. George McGovern, his Secret Service protection gone, stood in line with ordinary tourists Thursday to fly to the Virgin Islands for a week of rest after his crushing election defeat…. McGovern gave up his 727 jet—which he had dubbed Dakota Queen II, after his World War Two bomber—when he returned to Washington Wednesday from South Dakota. As he left Dulles Airport outside Washington Thursday morning, he stood in line at the ticket counter and rode a bus with the other passengers from the terminal to the plane…. A few Secret Service agents accompanied him to the airport, and one who was in the Virgin Islands on other business paid a courtesy call with the local police chief when McGovern arrived. But the agents who hounded his steps for the past nine months were with him no more.

  —Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 10, 1972

  McGovern himself was not as overtly unhinged by this sudden fall from grace as were some of his staff people and journalists who’d been following him back and forth across the country for the past year. In Mankiewicz’s case, it had been almost two years, and now—a month after the election—he was having a hard time coping with the rigors of public transportation. We were on our way from New Haven to Owensboro, Kentucky, where he was scheduled to explain the meaning of the election and McGovern’s disastrous defeat to a crowd of dispirited local liberals at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Earlier that afternoon Frank and I had been part of a panel discussion on “The Role of the Media in the Campaign.” The moment the Yale gig ended, we sprinted out of the auditorium to a waiting car. Rather than cope with the complexities of commercial transportation, Mankiewicz insisted on chartering the Beechcraft. There was no particular reason for me to fly down to Owensboro with him—but it seemed like a good time to spend a few hours talking seriously, for the first time since Election Day, about the reasons and realities that caused McGovern to get stomped so much worse than either he or anybody on his staff had expected.

  “This country is going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it.” UPI PHOTO

  After his speech in Kentucky that night, Frank and I spent about three hours in a roadside hamburger stand, talking about the campaign. Three weeks earlier, just after the election, he had said that three people were responsible for McGovern’s defeat: Tom Eagleton, Hubert Humphrey, and Arthur Bremer—but now he seemed more inclined to go along with the New York Times/ Yankelovitch poll, which attributed Nixon’s lopsided victory to a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate. The other McGovern staffers I’d talked to had already cited that “latent racism” theory, but there was no consensus on it. Gary Hart and Pat Caddell, for example, felt the Eagleton Affair had been such a devastating below to the whole campaign machinery that nothing else really mattered. Frank disagreed, but there was no time to pursue it that night in Owensboro; at the crack of dawn the next morning we had to catch a plane back to Washington, where the Democratic National Committee was scheduled to meet the next day—Saturday, December 9—for the long-awaited purge of the McGovernites. There was not much doubt about the outcome. In the wake of McGovern’s defeat, the party was careening to the right. John Connally’s Texas protegé, Robert Strauss, already had more than enough votes to defeat McGovern’s appointee, Jean Westwood, and replace her as Democratic National Chairman. Which is exactly what happened the next day. George’s short-lived fantasy of taking over the party and remolding it in his own image had withered and died in the five short months since Miami. Now the old boys were back in charge.

  “Just why the American electorate gave the present administration such an overwhelming mandate in November remains something of a mystery to me. I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat could defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.”

  —Sen. George McGovern, speaking at

  Oxford University two months after the election.

  After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom—that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place…. To wit:

  (1) Any incumbent President is unbeatable, except in a time of mushrooming national crisis or a scandal so heinous—and with such obvious roots in the White House—as to pose a clear and present danger to the financial security and/or physical safety of millions of voters in every corner of the country.

  (2) The “mood of the nation,” in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded “typical voters” of the fear & anxiety they’d felt during the constant “social upheavals” of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year—not even Ted Kennedy—because the pendulum “effect” that began with Nixon’s slim victory in ’68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavioral sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives—even if it meant turning the whole state of Nevada into a concentration camp for hippies, niggers, dope fiends, do-gooders, and anyone else who might threaten the status quo. The Pendulum Theory is very vogueish these days, especially among Washington columnists and in the more prestigious academic circles, where the conversion-rate has been running at almost epidemic proportions since the night of November 7. Until then, it had not been considered entirely fashionable to go around calling ex-Attorney General John Mitchell a “prophet” because of his smiling prediction, in the summer of 1970, that “This country is going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it.”

  This is the nut of the Pendulum Theory. It is also a recurring theme in McGovern’s personal analysis of why the voters rejected him so massively last November. The loss itself didn’t really surprise him, but he was deeply and genuinely shocked by the size of it. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken, and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota.

  I hung around Wash
ington for a few days after the DNC purge, buying up all the cheap smack I could find… and on Wednesday afternoon I stopped at McGovern’s office in the Old Senate Office Building for an hour or so of talk with him. He was gracious, as always, despite the fact that I was an hour late. I tried to explain it away by telling him that I’d had a bit of trouble that morning: a girl had been arrested in my suite at the Washington Hilton. He nodded sympathetically, without smiling and said that yes, John Holum had already told him about it.

  I shook my head sadly. “You never know these days,” I said. “Where will it end?”

  He walked around the desk and sat down in his chair, propping his feet up on the middle drawer. I half-expected him to ask me why a girl had been arrested in my hotel room, but it was clear from the look on his face that his mind had already moved on to whatever might come next. McGovern is a very private person—which might be part of the reason why not even his friends call him “George”—and you get the feeling, after being around him for a while, that he becomes uncomfortable when people start getting personal.

  I was tempted for a moment to push on with it, to keep a straight face and start mumbling distractedly about strange and unsettling events connected with the arrest—pornographic films that had allegedly been made on the Zoo Plane, Ted Van Dyk busted for pimping at the “Issues” desk—but he seemed so down that I didn’t have the heart to hassle him, even as a friendly joke…. Besides I had my professional reputation to uphold. I was, after all, the National Affairs Editor of Rolling Stone.

  He was obviously anxious to get on with it, so I set up the tape recorder and asked him about a comment he’d made shortly after the election about the split in the Democratic Party. He had told a group of reporters who flew down to talk with him at Henry Kimmelman’s house in the Virgin Islands that he wasn’t sure if the two wings of the party could be put back together…. But the part of the quote that interested me more was where he said he wasn’t sure if they should be put back together. “What did you mean by that?” I asked. “Are you thinking about something along the lines of a fourth party?”1

  McGovern: No, I was not suggesting a major break-up of the Democratic Party. We had been talking earlier about Connally’s role, you know, and also about so-called Democrats for Nixon that had formed in the campaign, and they had asked me what I thought could be done to bring those people back in. Well, I don’t think they ever really belonged in the Democratic Party. I thought that it wasn’t just a matter of personality differences with me or ideological differences with me. I thought that basically they were more at home in the Republican Party and I wasn’t sure that we ought to make the kind of gestures that would bring them back.

  HST: Were you talking specifically about…?

  McGovern: Well, I was really talking about this organized group rather than the defection of large numbers of blue-collar workers, which I regard as a serious problem. I think those people do have to be brought back into the Democratic Party if it’s going to survive as a party that can win national elections. But in terms of those that just took a walk, you know, and really came out for Nixon, I’m really not interested in seeing those people brought back into the Democratic Party. I don’t think Connally adds anything to the party. I think, as a matter of fact, he’s the kind of guy that’s always forcing the party to the right and into positions that really turn off more people than he brings with him. What I regard as a much more serious defection is the massive movement of people to Wallace that we saw taking place in the primaries.

  HST: Yeah, that’s another thing I was going to ask you.

  McGovern: I don’t think anybody really knows what was at the base of that movement. I suspect that race was a lot more of a factor than we were aware of during the campaign. There wasn’t a lot of talk about racial prejudice and the old-fashioned racial epithet, things like that, but I think it was there. There were all kinds of ways that—of tapping that prejudice. The busing issue was the most pronounced one, but also the attacking on the welfare program and the way the President handled that issue. I think he was orchestrating a lot of things that were designed to tap the Wallace voters, and he got most of them. Now what the Democratic Party can do to bring those people back, I’m not sure. I suspect that there should have been more discussion in the campaign of the everyday frustrations and problems of working people, conditions under which they work, maybe more of an effort made to identify with them.

  HST: I spent a whole day during the Wisconsin primary on the south side of Milwaukee at a place called Serb Hall…

  McGovern: Yeah.

  HST: I went up there in the afternoon and Wallace was scheduled to be there at five, I think it was—then you and Muskie were coming in later… I went out there to talk to those people and I was really amazed to find that you and Wallace were the two people they were… kind of muttering and mumbling about who to vote for. Humphrey and Muskie were pretty well excluded. You seemed to have a pretty good grip on it.

  McGovern: Yeah.

  HST: But at some point you seemed to lose it. I’m not sure why…

  McGovern: Well, I think there were a number of factors. One, once I became the nominee of the party, they saw me more as a typical Democrat. I mean, I was no longer the challenger taking on the party establishment. I was the nominee at that point. Secondly, instead of competing with Muskie and Humphrey, I was then competing with Nixon, the author of the Southern strategy and the guy who hammered hard against those who were dissenters on the war and hammered on amnesty and busing and those things, so that it was a different type of competition than I had with Muskie and Humphrey in Wisconsin.

  HST: But I got the impression that they were actually considering voting for you or Wallace.

  McGovern: I know that. I know.

  HST: Even though they disagreed with you on a lot of things.

  McGovern: If I could just say this to you: I think that probably you may have gotten an exaggerated impression of the numbers of them. I think that it always startled people to find any—and it was easy to assume that when you ran into a guy who said well it’s either Wallace or McGovern, that he was typical of large numbers of people. As I think back on it, it always struck me as such a paradox that it made more of an impression on me than was justified by the numbers of people that actually said it. Furthermore, I think we were hurt by the—I think those people were turned off, some of them, by the Eagleton controversy. I think that others were turned off by the attacks on me as a radical. I think they came to perceive me as more radical than they wanted me to be. Also, some of them were offended by the convention. I thought the convention was great, but what came across on television, apparently, to many of these guys was they saw a lot of aggressive women, they saw a lot of militant blacks, they saw long-haired kids, and I think that combination, which helped win the nomination for me, I think it offended a lot of them.

  HST: John Holum and I were talking about that the other night. There should have been somebody assigned to sit in a room in Ft. Lauderdale and just watch the whole show on television, to see how it came across…

  McGovern: Yeah, I thought one of the highlights of that convention was that ringing peroration of Willie Brown’s when he said give me back my delegation—screamed that into the television networks of the country, and it scared the hell out of a lot of people who saw that as a wild militant cry of the blacks, you see, they’re going to take over the country. And so that what seemed to be powerful and moving and eloquent to us was terrifying to many people.

  HST: Did you get any kind of feedback on that?

  McGovern: I did, yeah.

  HST: During the convention?

  McGovern: Not during the convention, but afterward I ran into people who weren’t nearly as impressed with it as I was, and who, in fact, were turned off by it. And that was one of the most celebrated incidents of the convention… You need a bottle opener?

  HST: Yeah, but I only have one beer. Would you like some? Do you have a glass?… I haven’t
even eaten breakfast yet. I had a disturbing sort of day. I was up until eight o’clock.

  McGovern: Was that when they arrested the gal in your room?

  HST: Yeah, I don’t want to go into it… But actually I got so wound up I went to the doctor in Aspen on Tuesday to find out what the hell was wrong with me… why I was so knotted up. I had a cold and I had all kinds of things wrong. We went through about six hours of tests at the hospital, the whole works, then I went back to his office and he said I had this and that, a virus, nothing serious but he said in all of his years in medicine, about fifteen or twenty years, he’s one of those people, one of those high-powered Houston Medical Center doctors who dropped out and came to Aspen, he said he’d never seen anybody with as bad a case of anxiety as I had. He said I was right on the verge of a complete mental, physical, and emotional collapse. At that point I began to wonder how the hell you or anyone else survived because… I really am amazed, I think I said that to you on Monday on the plane.

  McGovern: Well, it is a fantastic physical and emotional beating.

  HST: Yeah, but it never seemed to show on you—it showed on some people, God knows it showed on me.

  McGovern: Well, I wouldn’t want to go through it again, I don’t think.

  HST: No, once every four years just to recover. Here’s the main question I want to get to and I think it’s something that I have a very personal interest in. I don’t see any need for me to stay in politics at all or getting my head involved or running for anything, which I’m kind of thinking of doing. I was thinking of running for the Senate in Colorado, running against Gary in the primary. I’m not sure how serious I am about that, but here’s a question that sort of haunts me now, talking to John and everyone else in the campaign about it just in the last two-three days, is whether this kind of campaign could have worked? Were the mistakes mechanical and technical? Or was it either flawed or doomed from the start by some kind of misconception or misdirection?