Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson

  1. That IBM typewriter isn’t the only thing that disappeared since this was written. The Sheraton-Schroeder itself no longer exists. Its disastrous reputation caused the new owners to get rid of the name along with most of the staff as soon as they took over. It would hardly be fair at this point to reveal the new name. Give the poor buggers a chance.

  2. aka Xerox Telecopier. We have had many inquiries about this. “Mojo Wire” was the name originally given the machine by its inventor, Raoul Duke. But he signed away the patent, in the throes of a drug frenzy, to Xerox board chairman Max Palevsky, who claimed the invention for himself and renamed it the “Xerox Telecopier.” Patent royalties now total $100 million annually, but Duke receives none of it. At Palevsky’s insistence he remains on the Rolling Stone payroll, earning $50 each week, but his “sports column” is rarely printed and he is formally barred by court order, along with a Writ of Permanent Constraint, from Palevsky’s house & grounds.

  3. Later in the campaign, when Rubin and I became reasonably good friends, he told me that the true story of the “U-13” was essentially the same as the version I’d pieced together in California. The only thing I didn’t know, he said, was that Humphrey eventually got the money anyway. For some reason, the story as I originally wrote it was almost universally dismissed as “just another one of Thompson’s Mankiewicz fables.”

  4. California was the first primary where the McGovern campaign was obviously well-financed. In Wisconsin, where McGovern’s money men had told him privately that they would withdraw their support if he didn’t finish first or a very close second, the press had to pay fifty cents a beer in the hospitality suite.

  5. The New Hampshire primary was Michelle’s first assignment in national politics. “I don’t have the vaguest idea what I’m doing,” she told me. “I think they’re just letting me get my feet wet.” Three months later, when McGovern miraculously emerged as the front-runner, Michelle was still covering him. By that time her star was rising almost as fast as McGovern’s. At the Democratic Convention in Miami, Walter Cronkite announced on the air that she had just been officially named “correspondent.” On December 8, 1972, Michelle Clark died in a plane crash at Midway Airport in Chicago—the same plane crash that killed the wife of Watergate defendant Howard Hunt.

  1. Later that summer Tom Morgan, Lindsay’s press secretary, came out to Colorado and we spent a few days fishing for garbage eels on the banks of the Roaring Fork River. “We all admired that stuff you wrote about the Lindsay blueprint,” he told me. “But there was one thing you didn’t know—there was no Lindsay blueprint. There wasn’t even any Lindsay strategy. We just winged it all the way from the start.”

  2. Several months later I was sitting on the pool terrace at the Washington Hilton Hotel, eating honeydew melons with Anthony Lucas. He had just come back from Ohio where he had spent a few days with Frank King in connection with an article he was writing for the New York Times magazine section. “You know I think you gave King too much credit,” he said. “I asked him about all that Byzantine maneuvering Rick Stearns told you was going on in Miami on the South Carolina challenge but he didn’t know what I was talking about. I doubt if King ever knew what was really going on that night.”

  3. Diane White disputes this—she says she knew from the start.

  4. Illinois had two delegations at the convention. One was Mayor Daley’s and the other was a “new politics” delegation led by Chicago alderman Billy Singer and Reverend Jesse Jackson. So before the convention could vote on a nominee, it had to decide which one of the 170 member Illinois delegations was “official.” Most people expected a 50-50 compromise—but the convention eventually voted to replace Daley’s “regulars” with the “rebel” Singer/Jackson delegation—thus alienating another Democratic Party kingpin (along with George Meany)… and saddling McGovern with the hellish task of trying to heal The Big Split in the party before he could focus on Nixon. It proved to be a fateful decision. Meany bolted the Democratic Party entirely, taking a big chunk of Organized Labor with him—and Daley stayed in a “neutral” funk until somewhere around mid-October, when he finally realized that a GOP victory in Chicago might take him down, along with McGovern/Shriver. But by then it was too late. Chicago “went Democratic,” as usual, but not by enough to carry Illinois—or even the state’s attorney race, where the Daley-backed incumbent Ed Hanrahan went down to ignominious defeat (despite McGovern’s reluctant endorsement, or perhaps because of it)… and in the end Mayor Daley came out one of the Big Losers in ’72. His clout is severely reduced now, both nationally and locally. So the McGovern campaign was not a total failure…

  5. This view was shared by most of the McGovern staff workers. For wholly pragmatic reasons: to carry Illinois in November they were pro-Daley in Miami. I was sitting in the McGovern press room on Monday night when Daley went down to defeat, and I was the only person in the room who cheered. My only regret was that the bastard hadn’t been thrown out physically, with mace and cattle prods. The McGovern troops disagreed. “We need him,” they said. I shrugged—and in retrospect I think that was the point where I realized that the McGovern campaign was exactly what it had looked like in New Hampshire.

  6. A strange sidelight on the McGovern victory celebration was the showing, in one of the main lounges of the Doral, of the infamous “Zapruder film” from November 22, 1963 in Dallas. I went out of curiosity and despite the angry snarls of many McGovern staffers, and the sight of Jack Kennedy’s head exploding in a cloud of bloody-pink bone splinters was such a vicious bummer for me that I went up to my room and spent the rest of the night watching TV in a mean-drunk stupor. Sometime near dawn I went down to the beach to swim, ignoring a monsoon-rainstorm that had whipped the surf into nasty six and eight foot swells under a foul black sky, and a wind that was tearing big limbs off the palm trees. Nobody else was on the beach—or even on the pool-patio. From two hundred yards out in the surf I could see people moving around in the dim yellow windows of the McGovern press room on the mezzanine… but they couldn’t see me, bobbing around in the rain-thrashed surf that I suddenly realized was carrying me out to sea…

  Indeed, a nasty rip-tide. I can’t say for sure how long it took me to get back to the beach, but it seemed like forty years… a bad way to die. I kept thinking: thrashing drunkenly in the surf off Miami Beach within sight of the McGovern press room where your friends sat pounding typewriters and glancing out at the sea now and then without seeing you… sipping coffee and bloody marys, composing the victory statements.

  I kept thinking about this as I clawed desperately in the troughs of the long white-capped waves… holding a well-aimed sidestroke to keep my head above the foam and saying constantly to myself: “Don’t worry, old sport—you’re making fine progress, a human torpedo…” until finally I got close enough to dig my heels in the sand and jump the last fifty yards, gasping for breath and cursing whatever strange instinct had brought me out here in the first place…

  When I got to the beach I was on my hands and knees, moving slowly and spasmodically in the style of a wounded crab. I leaned back on the trunk of a coconut palm for about twenty minutes, feeling the rain on my belly and the sand in my teeth, but still too tired to move…

  It was somewhere around 9:00 A.M., and upstairs in McGovern’s penthouse his brain-trust was meeting to select a vice-president. Business as usual… and my death by drowning on that ugly Thursday morning would not have changed their decision any more than the rude things I’d already said—to Mankiewicz, Hart, Caddell, on TV—so I limped upstairs to my room on the eighth floor, facing the sea that had almost done me in, and slept for two or three hours.

  1. January 7, 1973. King Features Syndicate. In the opinion of Republican insiders, Vice President Spiro Agnew is much closer than is generally believed to having the 1976 nomination locked up. As one of them put it to me recently, “If 100 equals the nomination, then Agnew is now at 75, or better.”—Jeffrey Hart

  2. He convinced some 15 million
of them by November 7th. It was all he needed.

  3. As it turned out, Mankiewicz was lying to me—as usual. He had no idea on Friday that Tom Eagleton would somehow get the VP nod six days later. Nor did anyone else, including George McGovern—who believed, to the bitter end, that Ted Kennedy would be his running mate.

  4. As it turns out, it was Teddy. He never actually vetoed Kevin White, but he was so vehemently opposed to him as the VP nominee that he first (in a phone talk with McGovern on that fateful Thursday morning) said he might take the Number Two spot himself rather than see it go to White… and then, after keeping McGovern dangling for thirty crucial minutes called back to say that a “George & Teddy” ticket was still out of the question—but if it turned out to be “George & Kevin,” then he (Kennedy) would just as soon not be included in any plans for the general election campaign. In other words, White was a good candidate but not a great one—and Kennedys only campaigned for Great Candidates.

  McGovern took the hint and scratched White’s name off the list without further ado—a fateful move, in retrospect, because after White was dropped the VP selection turned into a desperate grab-bag trip that eventually coughed up Eagleton.

  Looking back on it, McGovern would have been better off if he’d stuck with Kevin White. Ted Kennedy wound up “campaigning actively,” more or less, for the McGovern/Shriver ticket—which finished with 38.5 percent of the vote, against Nixon’s 61.5 percent.

  That’s a brutal 23-point spread, and it’s hard to see how George could have done any worse—with or without Kennedy’s help, or even with Charles Manson for a running mate.

  5. Pierre Salinger, former press secretary to JFK, strategist for Bobby in ’68, and a key advisor to McGovern in ’72, says Shriver was in fact “the first choice for VP in Miami—but he was in Moscow on business at the time and they couldn’t reach him.” And it may be true, but I doubt it. Most of the younger national staff people—and McGovern himself, for that matter—considered Sargent Shriver a useless dingbat, not only during the VP selection-nightmare in Miami, but even after he replaced Eagleton on the ticket. On the Shriver press plane he was openly referred to as “Yoyo.” (“What’s Yoyo’s schedule today, Sam?” or “Do we have any copies of Yoyo’s speech in Seattle?”)

  Neither the press nor McGovern’s hard-core staffers ever took Shriver seriously—except as a pragmatic necessity and a vaguely embarrassing burden. It was like Nixon’s abortive plan to send Jimmy Hoffa to Hanoi to negotiate the release of American prisoners—or sending a used-car salesman from Pasadena into public debate with the Prime Minister of Sweden on the question of Richard Nixon’s moral relationship with the ghost of Adolph Hitler.

  Shriver is a proven salesman, but in this case he never understood the product… which raises the obvious question: “Who did?” But I can’t answer that one for now, and I don’t know anybody who can.

  Not even Mankiewicz. And certainly not McGovern himself. So it is probably not fair to mock Shriver for marching to the beat of a different drummer, as it were… because that was a prevailing condition in the McGovern campaign. There were many different drummers—but no real bass-line, and the prospect of unseating any incumbent president with that kind of noise is what some people would call “a very hard dollar.”

  6. Earlier that week, Lucian Truscott from the Village Voice and I tried to arrange a brief chat between John “Duke” Wayne and about two dozen Vets from the vanguard of the Last Patrol. They had just arrived in Miami and when they heard Wayne was holding an “open” press conference at Nixon headquarters in the Doral they decided to stop by and pick up on it.

  But the GOP security guards wouldn’t let them in—so they moved about a half block down Collins Avenue to a public parking lot on the edge of the ocean—where they were quickly surrounded, at a discreet distance, by a cordon of Florida state troopers.

  “Say, man,” a vet in a wheelchair called out to me after I’d used my press credentials to penetrate the cop-cordon, “Can you get that asshole Wayne out here to talk to us?”

  “Why not?” I said. “He’s tough as nails, they say. He’d probably enjoy coming out here in the sun and abusing you dope-addled communist dupes for a while.”

  “The Duke fears nothing,” Lucian added. “We’ll bring him out right after his press conference.”

  But John Wayne was not eager that day for a chat with the Last Patrol. “What the hell do they want to talk about?” he asked.

  “Yeah, what?” said his drinking buddy, Glenn Ford. They were standing on the front steps of the Doral waiting for a cab.

  “They just want to shoot the bull,” said Lucian. “You know, maybe talk about the war…”

  “What war?” Ford snapped.

  “The one in Vietnam,” Lucian replied. “These guys all fought over there—a lot of them are crippled.”

  The Duke seemed agitated; he was scanning the street for a cab. Finally, without looking at us, he said: “Naw, not today, I can’t see the point in it.”

  “Why not?” Lucian asked. “They just want to talk. They’re not looking for trouble. Hell, the place is crawling with cops.”

  Wayne hesitated, then shook his head again as he suddenly spotted a cab. “So they just want to talk, eh?” he said with a thin smile.

  I nodded. “Why not. It won’t take long.”

  “Bullshit,” Wayne replied. “If they got somethin’ to say to me, tell ’em to put it in writing.”

  Then he waved us away and eased off across the driveway to the waiting cab. “Playboy Plaza,” he barked. “Jesus, I need a drink.”

  1. Germond actually works for the Gammet chain—this “Union-Leader” joke is one he didn’t appreciate.

  2. I was somewhat off on this prediction. The final margin was almost 23%. At this point in the campaign I was no longer functioning with my usual ruthless objectivity. Back in May and June, when my head was still clear, I won vast amounts of money with a consistency that baffled the experts. David Broder still owes me $500 as a result of his ill-advised bet on Hubert Humphrey in the California primary. But he still refuses to pay on the grounds that I lost the 500 back to him as a result of a forfeited foot-race between Jim Naughton and Jack Germond in Miami Beach.

  1. Prince, the original pilot of the Zoo Plane, quickly became such a fixture & a favorite with the campaign press corps that he ended up flying more than his normal schedule of flight hours. The mood on the Zoo Plane changed perceptibly for the worse whenever FAA regulations forced Paul to take time off. None of his temporary replacements had the proper style & élan. Rumblings of angst & general discontent ran up and down the aisle on days when “Perfect Paul, the Virgin Pilot” was not at the helm, as it were. Prince, in his own way, was as much a personal symbol of the McGovern campaign as Frank Mankiewicz.

  1. The following McGovern/HST interview is a verbatim transcript of their conversation that day—totally unedited and uncorrected by the author, editor, or anyone else.