Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

by Hunter S. Thompson

Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

  So much for all that. The noise level downstairs tells me Crouse will not be able to put them off much longer. So now we will start getting serious: first Columbus, Ohio, and then Omaha. But mainly in Columbus, only because this thing began—in my head, at least—as a fairly straight and serious account of the Ohio primary.

  Then we decided to combine it with the ill-fated “McGovern Profile” and arranged to meet George in Nebraska. I flew out from Washington and Wenner flew in from the Coast—just in time to shake hands with the candidate on his way to the airport.

  No—I want to be fair about it: there was a certain amount of talk, and on the evidence, it seems to have worked out.

  But not in terms of “The Profile,” which still had five blank pages. So I came back to Washington and grappled with it for a few days, and Crouse came from Boston to help beat the thing into shape . . . but nothing worked; no spine, no hope, to hell with it. We decided to bury the bugger and pretend none of that stuff ever happened. Tim flew back to Boston, and I went off to New York in a half-crazed condition to explain myself and my wisdom at the Columbia School of Journalism.

  Later that day George Wallace was shot at a rally in Maryland about twelve minutes away from my house. It was the biggest political story of the year, and those five goddamn pages were still blank. Crouse flew back immediately from Boston, and I straggled back to New York, but by the time we got there it was all over.

  After the Ohio polls closed, I had left Pat Caddell, McGovern’s voter-analysis wizard, muttering to himself in the hallway outside the Situation Room—where he and Frank Mankiewicz and about six others had been grappling all night with botched returns from places like Toledo and Youngstown and Cincinnati.

  “Goddamn it,” he was saying. “I still can’t believe it happened! They stole it from us!” He shook his head and kicked a tin spittoon next to the elevator. “We won this goddamn election! We had a lock on the nomination tonight, we had it nailed down—but the bastards stole it from us!”

  Which was more or less true. If McGovern had been able to win Ohio with his last-minute, half-organized blitz it would have snapped the psychic spine of the Humphrey campaign . . . because Hubert had been formidably strong in Ohio, squatting tall in the pocket behind his now-familiar screen of Organized Labor and Old Blacks.

  By dawn on Wednesday it was still “too close to call,” officially—but sometime around five Harold Himmelman, the national overseer for Ohio, had picked up one of the phones in the situation room and been jolted half out of his chair by the long-awaited tallies from midtown Cleveland. McGovern had already won three of the four congressional districts in Cuyahoga County (metropolitan Cleveland), and all he needed to carry the state, now—along with the thirty-eight additional convention delegates reserved for the statewide winner—was a half-respectable showing in the twenty-first, the heartland of the black vote, a crowded urban fiefdom bossed by Congressman Louis Stokes.

  Ten seconds after he picked up the phone Himmelman was screaming: “What? Jesus Christ! No! That can’t be right!” (pause . . .) Then: “Awww, shit! That’s impossible!”

  He turned to Mankiewicz: “It’s all over. Listen to this . . .” He turned back to the phone: “Give that to me again . . . okay, yeah, I’m ready.” He waited until Mankiewicz got a pencil, then began feeding the figures: “A hundred and nine to one! A hundred and twenty-seven to three! . . . Jesus . . .” Mankiewicz flinched, then wrote down the numbers.

  It is 5:05 AM the following morning, and Frank Mankiewicz is calling the Secretary of State, getting him out of bed to protest what he gently but repeatedly refers to as “these fantastic irregularities” in the vote-counting procedure. McGovern’s slim lead has suddenly fallen apart: the phones are ringing constantly, and every call brings a new horror story.

  In Cincinnati the vote-counters have decided to knock off and rest for twelve hours, a flagrant violation of Sec. 350529 of the State Election Code, which says the counting must go on, without interruption, until all the votes are tallied. In Toledo McGovern is clinging to a precarious 11-vote lead—but in Toledo and everywhere else the polling places are manned by local (Democratic) party hacks not friendly to McGovern, and any delay in the counting will give them time to . . . ah . . .

  Mankiewicz studiously avoids using words like “fraud” or “cheat” or “steal.” Earlier that day Pierre Salinger had gone on the air to accuse the Humphrey forces of “vote fraud,” but the charge was impossible to substantiate at the time, and Humphrey was able to broadcast an embarrassing counterattack while the polls were still open.

  In Cleveland, in fact, 127 polling places had remained open until midnight—on the basis of an emergency directive from state Supreme Court.

  A Puff Adder in Omaha

  Another Wednesday morning, another hotel room, another grim bout with the CBS Morning News . . . and another postmortem press conference scheduled for ten o’clock. Three hours from now. Call room service and demand two whole grapefruits, along with a pot of coffee and four glasses of V-8 juice.

  These goddamn Wednesday mornings are ruining my health. Last night I came out of a mild ibogaine coma just about the time the polls closed at eight. No booze on Election Day—at least not until the polls close; but they always seem to leave at least one loophole for serious juicers. In Columbus it was the bar at the airport, and in Omaha we had to rent a car and drive across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, which is also across the state line into Iowa. Every year, on Election Day, the West End bars in Council Bluffs are jammed with boozers from Omaha.

  Which is fine, for normal people, but when you drink all day with a head full of ibogaine and then have to spend the next ten hours analyzing election returns . . . there will usually be problems.

  Last week—at the Neil House Motor Hotel in Columbus, Ohio—some lunatic tried to break into my room at six in the morning. But fortunately I had a strong chain on the door. In every reputable hotel there is a sign above the knob that warns: “For Our Guests’ Protection—Please Use Door Chain at All Times, Before Retiring.”

  I always use it. During four long months on the campaign trail I have had quite a few bad experiences with people trying to get into my room at strange hours—and in almost every case they object to the music. One out of three will also object to the typewriter, but that hasn’t been the case here in Omaha . . .

  MCGOVERN AND FRIEND

  Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his “old friend” Hunter S. Thompson, the notorious National Correspondent for Rolling Stone who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs.

  A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that “Hi, sheriff” bullshit; I am now the resident puff adder . . . and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim nineteen-thousand-vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps ten thousand of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by the worthless asshole Sen. Henry Jackson (D. Wash.) and turned into a major issue.

  So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey’s people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the sheriff and all his deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.

  No, this would never do. Not for George McGovern—at least not in May of ’72, and probably never. He has spent the past week traveling around Nebraska and pausing at every opportunity to explain that he is flatly opposed to the legalization of ma
rijuana. He is also opposed to putting people in prison for mere possession, which he thinks should be reclassified as a misdemeanor instead of a felony.

  And even this went down hard in Nebraska. He came into this state with a comfortable lead, and just barely escaped with a 6 percentage-point (41 percent to 35 percent) win over Hubert Humphrey—who did everything possible, short of making the accusations on his own, to identify McGovern as a Trojan Horse full of dope dealers and abortionists.

  Jackson had raised the same issues in Ohio, but George ignored them—which cost him the state and thirty-eight delegates, according to his staff thinkers—so when Hubert laid it on him again, in Nebraska, McGovern decided to “meet them head on.” For almost a week, every speech he made led off with an angry denial that he favored either legalized grass or Abortion On Demand . . . and in the dawn hours of Saturday morning, three days before the election, he called his media wizard Charlie Guggenheim back from a vacation in the Caribbean to make a Special Film designed—for statewide exposure on Sunday night—to make goddamn sure that The Folks understood that George McGovern was just a regular guy, like them, who would no more tolerate marijuana than would send his wife to an abortionist.

  And it worked. I watched it in McGovern’s Omaha Hilton “press suite” with a handful of reporters and Dick Dougherty, a former L.A. Times reporter who writes many of George’s major speech/statements, but who is usually kept out of the public eye because of his extremely seedy and unsettling appearance. On Sunday night, however, Dougherty came out of wherever he usually stays to watch The Man on the TV set in the pressroom. We found him hunkered there with a plastic glass of Old Overholt and a pack of Home Run cigarettes, staring at the tube and saying over and over again: “Jesus, that’s fantastic! Christ, look at that camera angle! God damn, this is really a hell of a film, eh?”

  I agreed. It was a first-class campaign film: the lighting was fantastic, the sound was as sharp and clear as diamonds bouncing on a magnesium tabletop, the characters and the dialogue made Turgenev seem like a punk. McGovern sat in the round and masterfully defused every ugly charge that had ever been leveled at him. He spoke like a combination of Socrates, Clarence Darrow, and God. It was a flat-out masterpiece, both as a film and a performance—and when it ended I joined in the general chorus of praise.

  “Beautiful,” somebody muttered.

  “Damn fine stuff,” said somebody else.

  Dougherty was grinning heavily. “How about that?” he said.

  “Wonderful,” I replied. “No doubt about it. My only objection is that I disagree with almost everything he said.”

  He stood up quickly and backed off a few steps. “Jesus Christ,” he snapped. “You’re really a goddamn nit-picker, aren’t you?”

  NIGHTMARE IN FAT CITY?

  McGovern told a Flint (Mich.) press conference that while “Wallace is entitled to be treated with respect at the convention (in Miami), I don’t propose to make any deals with him . . .” Humphrey (in Michigan) attacked Wallace more personally than McGovern, but when a question about wooing Wallace delegates was thrown at him, Humphrey said, “I will seek support wherever I can get it, if I can convince them to be for me.”

  —Washington Post, May 14, ’72

  Quotes like this are hard to come by—especially in presidential elections, where most candidates are smart enough to know better than to call a press conference and then announce—on the record—an overweening eagerness to peddle his ass to the highest bidder.

  Only Hubert Humphrey would do a thing like that . . . and we can only assume that now, in his lust for the White House—after suffering for twenty-four years with a case of Political Blueballs only slightly less severe than Richard Nixon’s—that the Hube has finally cracked; and he did it in public.

  With the possible exception of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey is the purest and most disgusting example of a Political Animal in American politics today. He has been going at it hammer and tongs about twenty-five hours a day since the end of World War II—just like Richard Nixon, who launched his own career as a Red-baiting California congressman about the same time Hubert began making headlines as the Red-baiting mayor of Minneapolis. They are both career anti-Communists: Nixon’s gig was financed from the start by Big Business, and Humphrey’s by Big Labor . . . and what both of them stand for today is the de facto triumph of a One Party System in American politics.

  George Meany, the aging ruler of the AFL-CIO, was one of the first to announce his whole-hearted support of Nixon’s decision to lay mines around Haiphong harbor and celebrate the memory of Guernica with a fresh round of saturation bombing in North Vietnam.

  Humphrey disagreed, of course—along with Mayor Daley—but in fact neither one of them had any choice. The war in Vietnam will be a key issue in November, and Senator Henry Jackson of Washington has already demonstrated—with a series of humiliating defeats in the primaries—what fate awaits any Democrat who tries to agree with Nixon on The War.

  But Humphrey seems not quite convinced. On the morning before the Wisconsin primary he appeared on the Today show, along with all the other candidates, and when faced with a question involving renewed escalation of the bombing in Vietnam, he lined up with Jackson and Wallace—in clear opposition to McGovern and Lindsay, who both said we should get the hell out of Vietnam at once. Big Ed, as usual, couldn’t make up his mind.

  Since then—after watching Jackson suck wind all over the Midwest—Hubert has apparently decided to stick with Dick Daley on Vietnam. But he has not explained, yet, how he plans to square his late-blooming dovishness with Boss Meany—who could croak Humphrey’s last chance for the nomination with a single phone call.

  Meany’s hired hacks and goon squads are just about all Hubert can count on these days, and even his Labor friends are having their problems. Tony Boyle, for instance, is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have space to list here. Boyle, former president of the United Mine Workers Union, was recently cracked out of office by the Justice Dept. for gross and flagrant “misuse” of the union treasury—which involved, among other things, illegal contributions to Humphrey’s presidential campaign in 1968. In addition to all this, Boyle now faces a ConspiracyMurder rap in connection with the contract-killing of Joseph Yablonski, who made the mistake of challenging him for the union presidency in December 1969, and paid for it a few months later when hired thugs appeared one night in his bedroom and gunned him down, along with his wife and daughter.

  Hubert Humphrey’s opinion of Tony Boyle was best expressed when they appeared together at the United Mine Workers Convention in Denver in 1968, and Humphrey referred to Boyle as “My friend, this great American.”

  For whatever it’s worth, the UMW is one of the most powerful political realities in West Virginia, where Humphrey recently won his fourth primary in a row.

  The Democratic Convention in Miami begins on July 10, and the only major political event between now and then is the California primary on June 6. If Humphrey loses in California—and he will, I think—his only hope for the nomination will be to make a deal with Wallace, who will come to Miami with something like 350 delegates, and he’ll be looking around for somebody to bargain with.

  The logical bargainee, as it were, is Hubert Humphrey, who has been running a sort of left-handed, stupid-coy flirtation with Wallace ever since the Florida primary, where he did everything possible to co-opt Wallace’s position on busing without actually agreeing with it. Humphrey even went so far as to agree, momentarily, with Nixon on busing—blurting out “Oh, thank goodness!” when he heard of Nixon’s proposal for a “moratorium,” which amounted to a presidential edict to suspend all busing until the White House could figure out some way to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court.

  When somebody called Hubert’s attention to this aspect of the problem and reminded him that he had always been known as a staunch foe of racial segregation, he quickly changed his mind and rushed up to Wisconsin to nail down the black vote by denouncing Wallace as a
racist demagogue, and Nixon as a cynical opportunist for saying almost exactly the same things about busing that Humphrey himself had been saying in Florida.

  There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the “straight/objective” reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.

  Hubert Humphrey, for one, would go crazy with rage and attempt to strangle his press secretary if he ever saw in print what most reporters say about him during midnight conversations around bar-room tables in all those Hiltons and Sheratons where the candidates make their headquarters when they swoop into places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis.

  And some of these reporters are stepping out of the closet and beginning to describe Humphrey in print as the bag of PR gimmicks that he is. The other day one of the Washington Post regulars nailed him:

  “Humphrey has used the campaign slogans of John Kennedy (‘let’s get this country moving again’) and of Wallace (‘stand up for America’) and some of his literature proclaims that 1972 is ‘the year of the people,’ a title used by Eugene McCarthy for a book about his 1968 campaign.”

  THE WISDOM

  I predict regretfully that you in California will see one of the dirtiest campaigns in the history of this state—and you have had some of the dirtiest.

  —Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, speaking in San Francisco

  No hope for this section. Crouse is caving in downstairs; they have him on two phones at once and even from up here I can hear the conversation turning ugly . . . so there is not much time for anything except maybe a flash round-up on the outlook for California and beyond.

  George Wallace himself will not be a factor in the California primary. His handlers are talking about a last-minute write-in campaign, but he has no delegates—and the California ballot doesn’t list candidates; only delegates pledged to candidates. So a write-in vote for Wallace won’t even be counted.