The Boys on the Bus

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The Boys on the Bus Page 33

by Timothy Crouse


  There were a few reporters who were able to finesse the formula. The best example was Dan Rather, the White House correspondent for CBS. Rather often adhered to the “informed sources” or “the White House announced today” formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he by-passed these formulas and “winged it” on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn’t have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill. But these were all relatively trivial errors. The important thing was that Rather was making a balls-out effort to deal with a White House staff which refused to release any meaningful information.

  In a behemoth democracy, the mass circulation papers would always want to have straight reporters deliver up the political news, and these reporters would always be caught between the demands of objectivity, on the one hand, and the freakish stranger-than-fiction reality of the campaign plane on the other. Of course, there remained the radical solution of simply chucking all pretense of objectivity, and writing from a totally personal frame of reference. This luxury was given only to a few. There were the literary people sent by magazines to cover the Conventions—Germaine Greer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer. “For them,” Renata Adler wrote in The New Yorker, “the reporter’s basic question—what is the story and what the point—was resolved autobiographically: story and point were whatever happened to impinge on the author’s sensibility.” There was Bob Greene, the twenty-five-year-old whiz kid of the Chicago Sun-Times, who was dispatched, as a representative of the youth culture, to write his own daily impressions of the Conventions and the fall campaign. There was Ron Rosenbaum, a red-bearded young writer from New York, who did several excellent impressionistic campaign pieces for The Village Voice. But the nonobjective journalist who created the greatest sensation, and the only one who covered the campaign full-time from January through November, was Hunter S. Thompson of Rolling Stone.

  Rolling Stones? Is that the fan magazine of the rock group? Nobody on the campaign trial had ever heard of the magazine back in January of 1972, and it was not an easy publication to define in one or two sentences. The Time magazine of the Counter Culture? Well, not exactly. An underground rag? Well, it was too slick, expensive and apolitical really to claim underground status. It was really a music magazine, a hip Variety, that made extensive and literate sorties into all kinds of other phenomena—the drug scene, the movie scene, the literary scene, and now … national politics. Rolling Stone’s young founder and editor saw himself as the Charles Foster Kane of the seventies; it was his dream that Rolling Stone would muster the gigantic, newly enfranchised Youth Vote and throw it to the best man. Things did not exactly shape up that way, but fortunately the editor had the wit to hire Hunter Thompson as political correspondent.

  At the time Thompson had two main credentials. First, he had written a book about the Hell’s Angels, based on having lived and ridden with them for almost two years. Although the Angels had beaten Thompson up at the end of his stay, and his book was more critical than sympathetic, still it was clear in many passages that he identified with the Angels; he had the heroic aura of the veteran war correspondent about him, from having lived among the savages and survived. Secondly, he had received national publicity when he ran as the Freak Power Candidate for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on a platform that called for free mescaline for anybody who wanted it; ripping up the streets and resodding them with grass; and harassing all the corporate “greedheads” and real estate developers who were ruining the beauty of the valley.

  Thompson seemed just the man to establish a truly “adversary” relationship with the Presidential candidates. In December 1971, he was dispatched to Washington to open a Rolling Stone office and to turn his violent, satirical, epithet-studded style on the men in the Democratic primaries. I also worked for Rolling Stone, and they sent me out to write the serious backup pieces, keep Thompson out of trouble, and carry the bail bond money.

  It was interesting to watch Thompson and the other reporters get to know each other. Thompson was a tall, lean thirty-five-year-old who wore sneakers, Miami sport-shirts, a motley hunting jacket, and bat-wing blue-tinted sunglasses. He looked more like a Sierra Club back-packing nut than a hippie, but there was no confusing him with the rest of the reporters, all of whom wore suits and ties.

  And Hunter wanted no part of them, at least not at first. His memories of the press corps from the 1968 campaign, which he had covered for an aborted book, were all unpleasant. He told me that they had been a bunch of swine, a collection of suspicious reactionary old hacks who cared only about protecting their leads and were hopelessly out of touch with anything interesting that was happening in the country. He had met only one decent person the whole time—Bill Cardoso, who edited the Boston Globe Sunday magazine. Cardoso had spotted him as the author of Hell’s Angels on the Nixon press bus in New Hampshire and offered him a joint. “Don’t worry,” Cardoso had said, “these fuckers are all so square they won’t know what you’re doing.” He had been right.

  For his first outing in 1972—a ride around the New Hampshire hills in the airport limousine that then served as the McGovern press bus—Thompson had come equipped with two sixpacks of ale and a fifth of Wild Turkey. He had smiled with satisfaction when the other reporters turned down his offers to share the booze, and when James J. Kilpatrick, the conservative columnist, moved uneasily to the front of the limo. At every stop he would turn to me and suggest loudly, “Let’s go to the men’s room and eat some acid” or “Maybe there’ll be enough time here for us to shoot up.” He talked in gruff bursts, like a squawkbox in a squad car. Toward the end of the ride, he began grumbling that he needed “Sex, Dope, and Violence.”

  But nothing happened. Nobody threw him off the bus. The press corps was no longer so shockable. As the campaign went on, Thompson began to find kindred spirits without even looking for them. There were usually a few young reporters around with whom he could roll a joint or share a tab of MDA—not to mention the young staffers on the McGovern campaign. Even some of the representatives of the nation’s great newspapers had taken to smoking dope.

  But what baffled Thompson was that some of the straightest men on the bus soon began to accept him and to read his articles. The first sign that Hunter had caught on with the straight press was when they began searching newsstands all over the country or phoning their home offices to get them a copy of his lengthy chronicle of the Florida primary. Thompson had loaned his press card to a freak, who had run amuck aboard Muskie’s whistle-stop train, insulting reporters and heckling the candidate when he tried to speak at the final stop in Miami. Many of the reporters, seeing only the badge on the freak’s lapel, had taken him for Hunter S. Thompson of Rolling Stone. In the article, Thompson explained the mistake but revelled in its consequences. The piece was a big hit with the press corps, and they soon began to read him regularly. Thompson’s best lines were quoted in Newsweek. “Ed Muskie talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow on next year’s crop.” Hubert Humphrey was a “treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddam bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”

  Chris Lydon—a New York Times reporter who was only thirty-three but dressed like an Exeter headmaster and wore a James Reston Memorial Bow Tie—admired Thompson and went so far as to quote him in a Sunday Week in Review piece to the effect that Humphrey was campaigning “like a rat in heat.” However Lydon worried for weeks afterward about having used the quote; his wife told him
she thought it was “unfair.” Wherever the campaign went, local reporters would come up looking for Hunter, wanting to see what he looked like and to congratulate him. “After the revolution, we’ll all write like Hunter,” a local TV man in Los Angeles confided to me. “We’ll stop writing all this Mickey Mouse shit.”

  Not many people in the press corps went that far in their admiration. But reading Thompson obviously gave them a vicarious, Mittyesque thrill. Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces. Thompson was free to write the unmentionable—that the campaign was essentially meaningless, that some of the candidates were shams and liars, that the process was unjust and anachronistic. There were times when the other reporters ached to say the same things, but the rules would never allow it. I remember Lydon standing around the Silver Spring hospital in his tweed outfit after George Wallace had been shot, saying with his usual earnestness that “Hunter Thompson should be here to record this for history,” as if only Hunter possessed the license and proper style to capture the grotesqueness of the scene.

  Of course, there were no journalists aboard who actually agreed with Thompson’s basic premise that the “only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct.” Even the New York lefty journalists like Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Jack Newfield were fond of the party. In the late spring of ’72, Hamill had even engineered a meeting between his friend Meade Esposito, the Democratic Boss of Brooklyn, and George McGovern. Hamill, Esposito, and McGovern had breakfasted in the Senate dining room, and Esposito agreed to back McGovern. Later, during the New York primary, Hamill, Breslin, and Newfield had met with McGovern and chewed him out for the condescending way in which his people were treating the New York regular Democrats. Breslin, using language McGovern had never heard in South Dakota, advised the Senator to get out and meet the real Democrats by campaigning at firehouses, police headquarters, and party clubhouses.

  But Thompson detested the regulars. This hatred, he explained in print, stemmed from the fact that Larry O’Brien had promised him the governorship of American Samoa in 1968, and then reneged. Thompson claimed to be nursing a desire for revenge, waiting for O’Brien to send the Democrats into a hopeless battle that would “destroy the party by plunging it into a state of financial and ideological bankruptcy from which it would never recover. Wonderful, I thought. I won’t even have to do anything. Just watch, and write it all down.”

  But Thompson’s real reason for loathing the party was that he felt it excluded outsiders, like himself. There was a touch of Genêt in Thomspon. As a kid, he had grown up in the stifling small-town atmosphere of Louisville, Kentucky, where his father was an insurance man whose only diversion consisted of going out to the track at five every morning to clock the horses. Thompson rebelled and found other means of amusement—mainly knocking off liquor stores and gas stations. The authorities never nailed him for theft, but they managed to put him in jail for thirty days on a phony rape charge. Thompson was just short of eighteen and the whole experience scared the hell out of him. He decided to swear off stealing and channel his criminal energies into writing. He wrote to provoke, shock, protest, and annoy.

  His favorite pastime was hoaxing people, and he was forever springing outlandish rumors on the McGovern people, just to see if they would bite. His greatest triumph came one night late in the campaign at a New York restaurant called Elaine’s, a favorite of the literary set. Thompson walked in and spotted a group of McGovern heavies at one of the tables. He ran over to them, banged his fist on the table and started yelling that Tom Eagleton was in the back room, having a nervous breakdown. “He’s jumping up and down, screaming that McGovern is a sellout and a fraud.” The McGovern staffers were on their feet and heading for the back room before they realized that they had been pranked.

  This sort of joke was also a staple of Thompson’s writing. In a column on the Wisconsin primary, he claimed to have discovered that Muskie was taking an obscure Brazilian drug called Ibogaine, which accounted for the Senator’s zombie-like performances on the stump. Many readers, including several journalists, believed this. So in subsequent articles, Hunter telegraphed his punches by writing, “My God, why do I write crazy stuff like this?” at the end of each hoax.

  In any case, these hoaxes symptomized Thompson’s antisocial tendencies and his steady identification with outcasts like the Hell’s Angels, blacks, women, Chicanos, freaks, and people below the poverty line. He was looking for a candidate who would really represent these people and fight the greedheads. George McGovern might do it, he thought, but even before the New Hampshire election, his instincts warned him that there was a serious flaw in McGovern. “When the big whistle blows, he’s still a party man,” wrote Thomspon late in March. But McGovern’s first primary victories made a convert of Thompson. McGovern looked like a gutsy crusader for many of the causes that Thompson embraced. His enthusiasm for McGovern peaked around the time of the Wisconsin primary, in April, and he began to become more and more intrigued by the machinery of the campaign, getting to know the staff more closely than any other reporter on the road. He even built up a working relationship with McGovern, and McGovern paid Thompson the supreme compliment of reading his articles and telling him that they were “brilliant.”

  But by the time of the California primary, in June, Thompson began to smell the fat cats latching onto the campaign, and to sense that McGovern would sell much to get the nomination. By midsummer, Thompson had become wholly appalled at McGovern’s effort to woo the old party regulars like Richard Daley and Lyndon Johnson. “McGovern could have won this time if only he’d followed the strategy his own man, Fred Dutton, laid down in his book [Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970’s]—tapping the new forces in the land,” said Thompson. “Dutton understood that it’s only at times like these—when you come in with a wild card—that you can play on your own terms. They started that way. But McGovern—or somebody around him—lost his nerve. And I’m going to find out who.”

  Throughout the fall, Thompson searched for the “villain” of the campaign, the adviser who was counseling McGovern to sell out. He never found the villain, though he haunted the Washington McGovern Headquarters for several weeks, systematically stalking his prey. His last election piece conceded failure and ended with a painful outcry:

  This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

  The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his imprecise talk about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government,’ is really one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

  McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

  Jesus! Where will it all end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

  That was without a doubt the most passionate piece of writing that the campaign produced, and more than a few men on the plane probably agreed with it and would have liked to have written it themselves. But they were also keenly aware that you could not sway millions of Middle Americans by sneering at used c
ar dealers. Thompson had the luxury of a limited audience. He could say what he liked because he was talking to his own people. No matter how much the other reporters envied Thompson’s freedom, they also resented him for not having to play by the rules. For when Marty Nolan sat down to write a column, even one that was thoroughly leftish, he reminded himself to write for the “milkman in Dorchester.” When Dan Rather went before the camera, he remembered to address the construction worker in El Paso. And who was Thompson speaking to? A Chicano welfare lawyer, or perhaps a very hip college student. He did not have to learn the very dangerous skill of balancing honesty with tact. The others did.

  The straight reporters who worked for news organizations with vast audiences had been taught since their cub days that their first duty was to protect their own credibility and the credibility of their employers. It was for just this purpose that the rules of objectivity had been created. If a reporter wished to retain the trust of his readers, then he had to write about politics from a totally impartial point of view. Most of the reporters covering the campaign hewed closely to the rules of objectivity not only for the sake of advancing themselves in the profession, but also out of a genuine belief that the objective approach produced fair and honest coverage.

 

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