But I have more important things to do.
Politics.
Human Problems are secondary.
—30—
Letter from HST to JSW
Sept 17 ’72
Dear Jann:
I think we should offer McGovern a full page, free, in every issue between now and the election. As far as I’m concerned he has a pretty weak goddamn case, but I think we should give him a chance to make it—especially in RS, because everything he’s done since Miami has been subject to criticism by various RS writers, including me, and I suppose it’s possible we’ve all been wrong.
So why don’t we just give him a “house ad” in every issue from now until Nov 7? Let him do whatever he wants with it: solicit funds, denounce drugs, praise Muskie, etc. . . . whatever he wants.
Needless to say, we’ll reserve all rights to comment, whenever necessary, on the content of the ads . . . Or at least I will.
OK for now. I have no plans to come to California anytime soon—unless McGov follows thru on his rumored plan to campaign out there with Humphrey. If that happens, I’ll definitely make the trip. A horror like that would just about wrap the thing up for me, I think.
Hunter
Letter from HST to JSW
12/3
Jann/
—I will definitely need speed to get the campaign book done properly & on time—nevermind the fucking wisdom of it; just gather all you can & send it ASAP—with a bill, of course.
H
The Campaign Trail:
Is This Trip Necessary?
January 6, 1972
Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days—even more than the Alsop brothers.
When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life—all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp—and also a fifty-watt “boombox” for the FM car radio.
You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn pingpong ball . . . a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.
One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the “Westward Movement” in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.
Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown . . . which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.
There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.
Where indeed?
“It’s a Goddamn Jungle!”
Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon-Mitchell administration—seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost—seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C., has become the “Rape Capital of the World.”
One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial townhouses with cut glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument . . . When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.
“Good God, man!” said my friend from the liberal New York Post. “You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!”
Crime figures for “The District” are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover. Rape is up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the 250 murders this year, only 36 have been solved . . . and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.
Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings, and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District—a few blocks from the Capitol—in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as “hall passes.” So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped, and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet—fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.
This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 Magnum. But in Washington you get the impression—if you believe what you hear from even the most “liberal” insiders—that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.
Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet . . . but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.
There is no way to avoid “racist undertones” here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks—not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear/Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, Why the fuck did you do that? And I tell myself, Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see. And sometimes I do, but not always . . .
My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker carpool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs . . . humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel pissant; dragging a massive orange U-Haul trailer full of books and “important” papers . . . feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.
It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving . . . but not even this new, six-cylinder “super-Volvo” is up to hauling two thousa
nd pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado, to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown.
“Welcome to Washington D.C.” That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall—a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.
It is not considered fashionable to live in “The District” itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged-brick townhouse with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists, and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pinepaneled bars and “singles only” discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.
I live on the “black side” of Rock Creek Park, in what my journalistic friends call “a marginal neighborhood.” Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the “white side” of the park, toward Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.
The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximately a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only two people I know who live down there are Nicholas von Hoffman, a columnist for the Washington Post, and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyperactive Legislative Assistant. But von Hoffman seems to have had a bellyful of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco . . . and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.
McGovern & the Press Wizards
With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began about two years ago.
Jim Flug says he’d rather not talk about Kennedy running for president—at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who “matters” in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon—almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.
There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck—and beaten once again—with some tried-and-half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie . . . and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustration limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington press corps. “He’d be a fine president,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.”
Why not?
Well . . . the wizards haven’t bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern president—that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists, & dazed dropouts—won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on Election Day.
Maybe so . . . but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called “The McGovern Vote” to the polls if they actually represented it.
It sure as hell wasn’t the AFL-CIO that ran LBJ out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn’t Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson . . . and it wasn’t George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade “radical” organizer from the UAW.
It wasn’t the big-time “Democratic bosses” who won the California primary for Bobby—but thousands of Niggers and Spics and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in California, and nobody would have had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.
But there was, of course, The Murder—and then the convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to “respectable” Democrats then and now—and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in ’72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower-Stevenson wipeout in 1956.
The people who turned out for Bobby are still around—along with several million others who’ll be voting for the first time—but they won’t turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser . . .
According to the Gallup polls, however, the underculture vote is holding up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Big Wigs and “pros” in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy’s name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations—calling him a “liar” and a “coward” and a “cheater.”
And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.
The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy’s recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won’t even admit that it’s happening—at least not for the record—and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming—too soon, perhaps, but there’s nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down, insisting he’s not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.
When I called Flug the other night, at the office, he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed, by the Senate, as Nixon’s new Secretary of Agriculture.
“To hell with Butz,” I said, “what about Rehnquist? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?”
“They have the votes,” he replied.
“Jesus,” I muttered, “is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I’ve read about him?”
“Worse,” Flug said. “But I think he’s in. We tried, but we can’t get the votes.”
Your New Supreme Court
Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long-standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for Esquire—an article that finally died in a blaze of niggling between me and the editors about how to cut my “final version” down from thirty thousand words to a size that would fit in the magazine.
Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.
We idled through the line with our trays, then took our plastic-wrapped tuna fish sandwiches over to a small Formica table, along with coffee in styrofoam cups. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill—trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line . . . until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.
Meanwhile, Flug was outlining every angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally into it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans—a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument t
he National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it ocurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom . . . and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my .44 Magnum fetish.
After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug’s trip—and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard that he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.
Coming on the heels of Judge Haynsworth’s rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in . . . but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh’s assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.
Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.
“Not even Rehnquist?” I asked. “Christ, that’s like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court.”
“I know,” said Flug. “Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who’ll be up there.”
“You mean down there,” I said. “Along with all the rest of us.” I laughed. “Well, there’s always smack . . .”
Flug didn’t laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard, for the past three years, to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon-Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynsworth & Carswell, then having to swallow a third-rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years—despite the best efforts of the sharpest and meanest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on—is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss-poor bowling team in Memphis—and this disastrous, Nazi-bent shift of the federal government’s Final Decision–making powers won’t even begin to take effect until the spring of ’72.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson Page 13