Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Ed: Usually.

  HST: In most states—between 10 and 15 percent higher.

  Ed: But not this year?

  HST: No, the presidential vote was lower in ’72. I have the figures… but here’s Pat Caddell on tape, from our phone talk yesterday….

  [Editor’s Note: What follows is a tape recording of Doctor Thompson and Pat Caddell discussing the statistics of the McGovern defeat.]

  HST: (to Caddell): 10 or 15 percent ahead of the state vote? When you say that, you mean Senator and Governor?

  Pat: Right.

  HST: And this year there were thirty-nine states that had both presidential and senator/governor races?

  Pat: A senator or governor race. Some had both. Most of them had one or the other. In a statewide race that’s the thing to look at.

  HST: In twenty of those, the state-office vote was higher than the presidential vote?

  Pat: Right.

  HST: And in eight states it was just 1 percent less… and in five others it was 2 percent less?

  Pat: Yeah—despite the increase in the number of people that voted this year, which is the highest number of all time…

  [end Caddell phone tape]

  Ed: I get a little confused with all these numbers. What’s the bottom line? If more people were voting for Governor and Senator than for President, you think this showed a lack of interest in the outcome of the presidential election or a definite decision on the part of some voters not to vote for either Nixon or McGovern?

  HST: According to Pat’s polls, based on repeat interviews with the same people all year long, it shows a conscious decision on the part of an incredibly large number of people not to vote for President, but to go in and vote for state-level offices. I’m not sure just what that means… if they felt that they had no choice, despite what somebody said that this was supposed to be the clearest choice of the century….

  Ed: What were Caddell’s statistical explanations for McGovern’s defeat? Why did he think McGovern lost?

  HST: He disagreed with both McGovern and Mankiewicz, and tended to agree more with Gary Hart. There is a definite split in the McGovern camp over the explanation for the loss.

  Ed: What is the Caddell/Hart position?

  HST: It has to do with two words: Eagleton and competence.

  Ed: “Eagleton and competence?”

  HST: Right. The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern’s image—not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war—but as a person who couldn’t get those things done even though he wanted to. He was perceived, then, as a dingbat—not as a flaming radical—a lot of people seem to think that was one of the images that hurt him. But according to Pat, that “radical image” didn’t really hurt him at all…. The same conclusion appeared in a Washington Post survey that David Broder and Haynes Johnson did…. They agreed that the Eagleton Affair was almost immeasurably damaging…. and according to Gary Hart, it was so damaging as to be fatal. Gary understood this as early as mid-September; so did Frank—they all knew it.

  Ed: McGovern too?

  HST Sure. They could all see it happening, but they couldn’t figure how to deal with it—because the damage was already done, and there was no way McGovern could prove that he was not as dangerously incompetent as the Eagleton Affair made him seem to be. They couldn’t figure out… there was nothing they could do… no issue they could manufacture, no act that they could commit… or anything they could say… that would change people’s minds on the question of McGovern’s competence to get anything done, regardless of what he wanted to get done. In other words, there were a lot of people who liked him, liked what he said—but who wouldn’t vote for him, because he seemed like a bumbler.

  Ed: You say Mankiewicz knew this, but he didn’t agree with Caddell and Hart?

  HST: Well, it’s never easy to be sure of what Frank really thinks…. But he was at least half convincing when he told me down in Owensboro that night…

  Ed: Down where?

  HST: In Owensboro, Kentucky—when I went down to listen to his speech at Kentucky Wesleyan. He seemed convinced that the Swing to the Right and the sort of silent, anti-nigger vote—the potential Wallace vote—was the issue that cost McGovern the election. And at one point—I’m not sure exactly when—the McGovern campaign was fairly well convinced—not the entire staff, but the theorists at the top—that if Wallace had stayed in the campaign, if he hadn’t been shot, if he had run as an Independent American… whatever the hell that party was in ’68, and if he’d run as the same healthy, feisty little judge from Alabama, that he would have split the vote that Nixon had ended up with… about 60 percent.

  Ed: How many percent?

  HST: 61 or 62 percent…. That Wallace would have split that vote with Nixon, leaving McGovern with a plurality—the largest popular vote among the three candidates—but not enough electoral votes to actually become President, at which point the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives.

  Ed: Mankiewicz & McGovern really believed that possibility?

  HST: George seemed to… I’m not sure how strong he thought the possibility really was. But I know that was sort of a private fear of theirs—a pretty dark view of the American electorate, I’d say: that half of the Nixon vote, given the chance, would have gone even further to the right. I suspect that’s really one of the roots of the thinking of at least half of the ranking staff people in McGovern’s campaign, even now…. The Hart/Caddell theory was a less ominous view of the potential of the electorate. Both Gary and Pat were convinced that McGovern could have won. That was the question I asked almost every one of the staff people I talked to at any length.

  Ed: What makes Caddell and Hart think he could have won?

  HST: Primarily the provable damage that the Eagleton Affair did to the actual numbers of the McGovern constituency—the potential constituency. In July, for instance, nationally, the polls…

  Ed: Caddell’s polls?

  HST: Caddell’s and I think there were two more, Gallup and Harris. It was a rough consensus among the polls in July that Nixon had 52 percent of the vote, McGovern had 37 percent, and 11 percent were undecided. In September the figures were Nixon 56 percent, McGovern 34 percent, and 10 percent undecided.

  Ed: That indicates no change.

  HST: On paper it indicates no change, but what it doesn’t show is… Nixon lost 9 percent of his vote in that period of time… 9 out of the original 52. He gained 15 percent from elsewhere but lost 9 percent of his first group. Meanwhile McGovern lost 13 points of his vote, his original 37 percent… But the McGovern loss was apparently, according to the figures, almost entirely due to the Eagleton Affair, whereas the Nixon loss would have happened anyway, because they were mainly people who in July had said that they were Democrats—Humphrey Democrats—who refused to vote for McGovern, but as the election drew closer they began to filter back. So Nixon’s 9 percent loss was inevitable, more or less. What Nixon did was pick up a tremendous amount of mainly young, not necessarily liberal Democrats—but young, sort of educated, relatively sophisticated voters who would have stayed with McGovern, according to the polls… according to the answers they gave the poll-takers, if it had not been for the Eagleton disaster. That’s when his image as a different kind of politician, an anti-politician, just cracked and shattered and there was no way to put it back together. According to the Hart/Caddell theory, if that hadn’t happened, the race would have been at least very close… And that’s where you get into another powerful factor: What the Eagleton disaster did, the worst thing it did, was to prevent the race from ever getting close, which allowed Nixon to hide…. There was no pressure on him, and that altered McGovern’s strategy to the point that he was always fighting with his back to the wall, more or less…. They were on the defensive the whole time, facing this ever increasing erosion of their vote, massive margins between him and Nixon…. McGovern’s main strength in the primaries—up until in California I think… he was always
the underdog, always trailing, but he always closed very fast, by picking up a big chunk of the undecided vote….

  In this case—there was almost nothing he could have done. To close that kind of gap was beyond the realm of possibility…. And therefore Nixon, who has never been good under pressure, was never put under any sort of pressure…. He could afford to just sit in the White House and watch McGovern sort of fumbling around the country. Had the race been close—anything under 10 points—the McGovern strategy, they say, would have been entirely different…. But they spent the whole time trying to overcome this massive fistula on their image, as it were…. which runs counter to the Mankiewicz/McGovern theory that it was basically a right-wing tide with heavy racist undertones, or undercurrents, rip tides…. The basic question in ’72 was: Could McGovern have won, under any circumstances?

  Ed: I don’t know how deeply you want to get into this, but these numbers are very interesting to me. In July Nixon had 52 percent of the vote and in September he had 56.

  HST: Those polls were taken before the Democratic Convention.

  Ed: And yet you say he was losing steadily…. So if he was losing some of his constituency, where was Nixon gaining his votes from?

  HST: According to Caddell, he was gaining them from the people who would have voted for McGovern, had he not…

  Ed: Were it not for the Eagleton Affair…. All right, meanwhile, you have McGovern losing 13 percent of his 37 percent in July, and still winding up with 34 percent in September. Where did he gain his strength from?

  HST: According to Caddell, he picked up almost all the Nixon defectors, because they were people who were angry in July over the spectacle of a gang of freaks taking over the party that even though they said they were Democrats, they wouldn’t vote for McGovern.

  Ed: In other words, were it not for the Eagleton Affair, Nixon was actually steadily losing, and McGovern was slowly but surely picking up the Humphrey voters… so the deciding factor, according to Caddell’s statistics, was the massive defection from McGovern to Nixon resulting from the Eagleton Affair. I just wanted to clarify this.

  HST: Yes, that’s it.

  Ed: Now the question is: Now that we’ve established these two schools of thought, to which do you subscribe or do you have your own theory?

  HST: Well… I’m not sure, but I doubt that McGovern himself could have won with any kind of campaign, even without the Eagleton incident.

  Ed: Why?

  HST: Well, that doesn’t mean another candidate with the same views as McGovern might not have been able to win… or even a candidate with views more radical than McGovern’s.

  Ed: So you think it was something personal about McGovern himself?

  HST: I think that element of indecisiveness, and the willingness—as he said in his interview—to do anything possible to forge a “winning coalition” didn’t do him any good at all…. I think it hurt him. It hurt him drastically with the so-called “youth vote,” for instance. And I think it hurt him with the Wallace-type Democrats that I talked to up in Serb Hall in Milwaukee that day; who disagreed with him, but perceived him—that word again—as a straight, honest, different type of politician, a person who would actually do what he said, make some real changes.

  Ed: Do you think Eagleton was the chief reason for them changing their minds? Those Wallace people?

  HST: No—not the Wallace people. But there was a whole series of things that hurt him all across the board: that trip to the LBJ Ranch, the sucking up to Mayor Daley, the endorsement of Ed Hanrahan, state’s attorney in Chicago—who was indicted for the murder of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader….

  Ed: McGovern endorsed Hanrahan?

  HST: Yeah. He also endorsed Louise Day Hicks in Boston.

  Ed: Oh, no!

  HST: The racist woman, who was running for Congress…

  Ed: Did she win?

  HST: No, I think she lost. And Hanrahan lost, despite the McGovern endorsement… all that hurt McGovern and also having his own so-called campaign director, Larry O’Brien, denounce him just before Labor Day. O’Brien denounced the whole McGovern campaign as a can of worms, a rolling ball of madness… incompetence, a bunch of ego freaks running around in circles with nobody in charge. That kind of thing couldn’t possibly have helped.

  Ed: O’Brien said all that?

  HST: Yeah. He went totally around the bend.

  Ed: Did you vote for McGovern?

  HST: Yeah, I did.

  Ed: Why?

  HST: It was essentially an anti-Nixon vote. McGovern, I don’t think, would have been a bad President. He’s a better Senator. But I don’t think that the kind of standard-brand Democrat that he came to be—or that he actually was all along, and finally came out and admitted he was toward the end, more by his actions than by what he said—I’m not sure that kind of person is ever going to win a presidential campaign again. What was once the natural kind of constituency for that kind person—the Stevenson constituency, the traditional liberal—has lost faith, I think, in everything that Liberalism was supposed to stand for. Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it. And the fact is people like Nixon—candidates like Nixon—have a running start which gives them a tremendous advantage. My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-“radical” campaign he ran in the primaries. Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was coming on with… a new… a different type of politician… a person who actually would grab the system by the ears and shake it. And meant what he said. Hell, he certainly couldn’t have done any worse. It’s almost impossible to lose by more than 23 percent…. And I think that conceivably this country is ready for a kind of presidential candidate who is genuinely radical, someone who might call for the confiscation of all inherited wealth, for instance, or a 100 percent excess-profits tax…. For example, Wallace, if he’d understood how much potential strength he had, and if he hadn’t been shot, could have gone to the Democratic Convention with a nasty block of votes—enough to probably dominate the convention, not to win the nomination, but enough to give him veto power on the candidate. Wallace did so much better in the primaries than even he expected, but by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late for him to file delegate slates in the states where he was running…. He came in second in Pennsylvania, beating both McGovern and Muskie, but he didn’t get a single delegate. He came in second in Wisconsin, but I don’t think he got any delegates up there either…. Whereas McGovern, in Pennsylvania, finishing in a virtual tie with Muskie for third—or fourth—got seventeen delegates, as I recall.

  Ed: Simply because Wallace failed to file?

  HST: He was very erratic about it. He wound up with more than 300 delegates in Miami, but with any planning he could have won twice that—more than Humphrey…. That was just an oversight, a lack of real confidence. But I think we Wallace people were stunned at the energy they set off and by the time they realized what was there, it was too late to put it together.

  Ed: And you think that this was the kind of energy which will bring forward a new candidate in ’76 who could win?

  HST: Not necessarily. There’s all kinds of weird energy out there. The Youth Vote, for instance—the first-time voters, the people between eighteen and twenty-four—could have altered the outcome drastically in states like California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Missouri…. McGovern could have won those states with a big turnout among first-time voters—not to mention the huge dropout vote, the people between twenty-five and forty who didn’t vote at all.

  Ed: Caddell’s figures showed this?

  HST: Right. There were states… where he compared Humphrey’s margin or his loss—whatever the figures were in ’68—to the number of new voters coming into the electorate this time around… and there were an incredible number of states where Pat’s figures showed that even if McGovern
could get at least half of them, he’d carry something like twelve states with this Youth Vote.

  Ed: You have said already that you doubt McGovern could have won. What do you think is going to happen in ’76?

  HST: McGovern could have won—but it was unlikely, given the nature of his organization. For one thing, it was technically oriented… or at least the best part of it was technically oriented. The best people in the campaign were technicians: at the staff command level there was almost constant confusion, and McGovern’s indecisiveness compounded that confusion and left the technicians often wandering around in circles wondering what the hell to do…. He had people who could do the work and could turn the vote out, but they weren’t always sure what he was doing. The campaign plane would fly into a state and the staffers would have conflicting things set up for him to do. The people on the plane—Mankiewicz, Dutton, Dick Dougherty, the press secretary—were running a different campaign than the one on the charts in the Washington headquarters, or in most of the state offices….

  Ed: You think he failed to provide his staff with the necessary direction or leadership?

  HST: Yeah, I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command. And he didn’t have either one, actually. But he did have the troops in the field….

  Ed: Is there a possibility for marshalling those troops again in ’76?

  HST: Yeah, definitely, but I doubt if a candidate like McGovern can marshal them again. The McGovern/McCarthy type candidacies have disappointed too many people, because of a disillusionment with the candidates themselves.

  Ed: Do you have any candidate in mind that you think could marshal those forces—as opposed to the old liberal candidates, such as Stevenson, McCarthy, McGovern?