The Campaign Trail: In the Eye of the Hurricane
July 20, 1972
The St. Louis Lawyer & the Fixer-Man
On the face of it, McGovern seems to have everything under control now. Less than twenty-four hours after the New York results were final, chief delegate-meister Rick Stearns announced that George was over the hump. The New York blitz was the cincher, pushing him over the 1,350 mark and mashing all but the flimsiest chance that anybody would continue to talk seriously about a “Stop McGovern” movement in Miami. The Humphrey-Muskie axis had been desperately trying to put something together with aging diehards like Wilbur Mills, George Meany, and Mayor Daley—hoping to stop McGovern just short of 1,400—but on the weekend after the NY sweep George picked up another 50 or so from the last of the non-primary state caucuses and by Sunday, June 25, he was only 100 votes away from the 1,509 that would zip it all up on the first ballot.
At that point the number of officially “uncommitted” delegates was still hovering around 450, but there had already been some small-scale defections to McGovern, and the others were getting nervous. The whole purpose of getting yourself elected as an Uncommitted delegate is to be able to arrive at the Convention with bargaining power. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
If you’re a lawyer from St. Louis, for instance, and you manage to get yourself elected as an Uncommitted delegate from Missouri, you will hustle down to Miami and start scouting around for somebody to make a deal with . . . which won’t take long, because every candidate still in the running for anything at all will have dozens of his own personal fixers roaming around the hotel bars and buttonholing Uncommitted delegates to find out what they want.
If your price is a lifetime appointment as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court, your only hope is to deal with a candidate who is so close to that magic 1,509 figure that he can no longer function in public because of uncontrollable drooling. If he is stuck around 1,400, you will probably not have much luck getting that bench appointment . . . but if he’s already up to 1,499 he won’t hesitate to offer you the first opening on the U.S. Supreme Court . . . and if you catch him peaked at 1,505 or so, you can squeeze him for almost anything you want.
The game will get heavy sometimes. You don’t want to go around putting the squeeze on people unless you’re absolutely clean. No skeletons in the closet; no secret vices . . . because if your vote is important and your price is high, the Fixer-Man will have already checked you out by the time he offers to buy you a drink. If you bribed a traffic court clerk two years ago to bury a drunk driving charge, the Fixer might suddenly confront you with a photostat of the citation you thought had been burned.
When that happens, you’re fucked. Your price just went down to zero, and you are no longer an Uncommitted delegate.
There are several other versions of the Reverse-Squeeze: the fake hit-and-run; glassine bags found in your hotel room by a maid; grabbed off the street by phoney cops for statutory rape of a teenage girl you never saw before . . .
Every once in a while you might hit on something with real style, like this one: on Monday afternoon, the first day of the convention, you—the ambitious young lawyer from St. Louis with no skeletons in the closet and no secret vices worth worrying about—are spending the afternoon by the pool at the Playboy Plaza, soaking up sun and gin/tonics, when you hear somebody calling your name. You look up and see a smiling, rotund chap about thirty-five years old coming at you, ready to shake hands.
“Hi there, Virgil,” he says. “My name’s J. D. Squane. I work for Senator Bilbo and we’d sure like to count on your vote. How about it?”
You smile, but say nothing—waiting for Squane to continue. He will want to know your price.
But Squane is staring out to sea, squinting at something on the horizon . . . then he suddenly turns back to you and starts talking very fast about how he always wanted to be a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, but politics got in the way . . . “And now, goddamn it, we must get these last few votes . . .”
You smile again, itching to get serious. But Squane suddenly yells at somebody across the pool, then turns back to you and says: “Jesus, Virgil, I’m really sorry about this, but I have to run. That guy over there is delivering my new Jensen Interceptor.” He grins and extends his hand again. Then: “Say, maybe we can talk later on, eh? What room are you in?”
“1909.”
He nods. “How about seven, for dinner? Are you free?”
“Sure.”
“Wonderful,” he replies. “We can take my new Jensen for a run up to Palm Beach . . . It’s one of my favorite towns.”
“Mine too,” you say. “I’ve heard a lot about it.”
He nods. “I spent some time there last February . . . but we had a bad act, dropped about twenty-five grand.”
Jesus! Jensen Interceptor; twenty-five grand . . . Squane is definitely big-time.
“See you at seven,” he says, moving away.
The knock comes at 7:02—but instead of Squane it’s a beautiful silver-haired young girl who says J. D. sent her to pick you up. “He’s having a business dinner with the senator and he’ll join us later at the Crab House.”
“Wonderful, wonderful—shall we have a drink?”
She nods. “Sure, but not here. We’ll drive over to North Miami and pick up my girlfriend . . . but let’s smoke this before we go.”
“Jesus! That looks like a cigar!”
“It is!” she laughs. “And it’ll make us both crazy.”
Many hours later. 4:30 AM. Soaking wet, falling into the lobby, begging for help: no wallet, no money, no ID. Blood on both hands and one shoe missing, dragged up to the room by two bellboys . . .
Breakfast at noon the next day, half sick in the coffee shop—waiting for a Western Union money order from the wife in St. Louis. Very spotty memories from last night.
“Hi there, Virgil.”
J. D. Squane, still grinning. “Where were you last night, Virgil? I came by right on the dot, but you weren’t in.”
“I got mugged—by your girlfriend.”
“Oh? Too bad. I wanted to nail down that ugly little vote of yours.”
“Ugly? Wait a minute . . . That girl you sent; we went someplace to meet you.”
“Bullshit! You double-crossed me, Virgil! If we weren’t on the same team I might be tempted to lean on you.”
Rising anger now, painful throbbing in the head. “Fuck you, Squane! I’m on nobody’s team! If you want my vote you know damn well how to get it—and that goddamn dope-addict girlfriend of yours didn’t help any.”
Squane smiles heavily. “Tell me, Virgil—what was it you wanted for that vote of yours? A seat on the federal bench?”
“You’re goddamn fuckin’-A right! You got me in bad trouble last night, J. D. When I got back here, my wallet was gone and there was blood on my hands.”
“I know. You beat the shit out of her.”
“What?”
“Look at these photographs, Virgil. It’s some of the most disgusting stuff I’ve ever seen.”
“Photographs?”
Squane hands them across the table.
“Oh my God!”
“Yeah, that’s what I said, Virgil.”
“No! This can’t be me! I never saw that girl! Christ, she’s only a child!”
“That’s why the pictures are so disgusting, Virgil. You’re lucky we didn’t take them straight to the cops and have you locked up.” Pounding the table with his fist. “That’s rape, Virgil! That’s sodomy! With a child!”
“No!”
“Yes, Virgil—and now you’re going to pay for it.”
“How? What are you talking about?”
Squane smiling again. “Votes, my friend. Yours and five others. Six votes for six negatives. Are you ready?”
Tears of rage in the eyes now. “You evil sonofabitch! You’re blackmailing me!”
“Ridiculous, Virgil. Ridiculous. I’m talking about coalition politics.”
“
I don’t even know six delegates. Not personally, anyway. And besides, they all want something.”
Squane shakes his head. “Don’t tell me about it, Virgil. I’d rather not hear. Just bring me six names off this list by noon tomorrow. If they all vote right, you’ll never hear another word about what happened last night.”
“What if I can’t?”
Squane smiles, then shakes his head sadly. “Your life will take a turn for the worse, Virgil.”
It Takes a Junkie to Know One
Ah, bad craziness . . . a scene like that could run on forever. Sick dialogue comes easy after five months on the campaign trail. A sense of humor is not considered mandatory for those who want to get heavy into presidential politics. Junkies don’t laugh much; their gig is too serious—and the political junkie is not much different on that score than a smack junkie.
The high is very real in both worlds, for those who are into it—but anybody who has ever tried to live with a smack junkie will tell you it can’t be done without coming to grips with the spike and shooting up yourself.
Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign—especially when you’re running against big odds and starting to feel like a winner.
As far as I know, I am the only journalist covering the ’72 presidential campaign who has done any time on the other side of that gap—both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level—and despite all the obvious differences between running on the Freak Power ticket for sheriff of Aspen and running as a well-behaved Democrat for president of the United States, the roots are surprisingly similar . . . and whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about, compared to the massive, unbridgeable gap between the cranked-up reality of living day after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign—and the fiendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign as a journalist, from the outside looking in.
For the same reason that nobody who has never come to grips with the spike can ever understand how far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives . . . there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself.
Very few of the press people assigned to the McGovern campaign, for instance, have anything more than a surface understanding of what is really going on in the vortex . . . or if they do, they don’t mention it, in print or on the air: and after spending half a year following this goddamn zoo around the country and watching the machinery at work, I’d be willing to bet pretty heavily that not even the most privileged ranking insiders among the campaign press corps are telling much less than they know.
The Campaign Trail: Fear & Loathing in Miami: Old Bulls Meet the Butcher
August 17, 1972
Back in February it was still considered very shrewd and avant-garde to assume that the most important factor in a presidential campaign was a good “media candidate.” If he had Star Quality, the rest would take care of itself. The Florida primary turned out to be a funeral procession for would-be “media candidates.” Both Lindsay and Muskie went down in Florida—although not necessarily because they geared their pitch to TV; the real reason, I think, is that neither one of them understood how to use TV . . . or maybe they knew, but just couldn’t pull it off. It is hard to be super-convincing on the tube, if everything you say reminds the TV audience of a Dick Cavett commercial for Alpo dog food. George McGovern has been widely ridiculed in the press as “the ideal anti-media candidate.” He looks wrong, talks wrong, and even acts wrong—by conventional TV standards. But McGovern has his own ideas about how to use the tube. In the early primaries he kept his TV exposure to a minimum—for a variety of reasons that included a lack of both money and confidence—but by the time he got to California for the showdown with Hubert Humphrey, McGovern’s TV campaign was operating on the level of a very specialized art form. His thirty-minute biography—produced by Charlie Guggenheim—was so good that even the most cynical veteran journalists said it was the best political film ever made for television . . . and Guggenheim’s sixty-second spots were better than the bio film. Unlike the early front-runners, McGovern had taken his time and learned how to use the medium—instead of letting the medium use him.
Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying—even if it’s all stone crazy. McGovern learned this from George Wallace in Florida, and it proved to be a very valuable lesson. One of the crucial moments of the ’72 primary campaign came on election night in Florida, March 14, when McGovern—who had finished a dismal sixth, behind even Lindsay and Muskie—refused to follow their sour example and blame his poor showing on that Evil Racist Monster, George Wallace, who had just swept every county in the state. Moments after both Lindsay and Muskie had appeared on all three networks to denounce the Florida results as tragic proof that at least half the voters were ignorant dupes and Nazis, McGovern came on and said that although he couldn’t agree with some of the things Wallace said and stood for, he sympathized with the people who’d voted for “The Governor” because they were “angry and fed up” with some of the things that are happening in this country.
“I feel the same way,” he added. “But unlike Governor Wallace, I’ve proposed constructive solutions to these problems.”
Nobody applauded when he said that. The two hundred or so McGovern campaign workers who were gathered that night in the ballroom of the old Waverly Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard were not in a proper mood to cheer any praise for George Wallace. Their candidate had just been trounced by what they considered a dangerous bigot—and now, at the tail end of the loser’s traditional concession statement, McGovern was saying that he and Wallace weren’t really that far apart.
It was not what the ballroom crowd wanted to hear at that moment. Not after listening to both Lindsay and Muskie denounce Wallace as a cancer in the soul of America . . . but McGovern wasn’t talking to the people in that ballroom; he was making a very artful pitch to potential Wallace voters in the other primary states. Wisconsin was three weeks away, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan—and Wallace would be raising angry hell in every one of them. McGovern’s brain trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was “soft”—that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” who’d been fucking them over for so long.
The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy—and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant, overnight cure for all their worst afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? Army worms killing the turnip crop? Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn’t want the problems solved, so they wouldn’t be put out of work.
George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. What McGovern sensed in Florida, however—while Wallace was stomping him, along with all the others—was the possibility that Wallace appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel. The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it—but what then? If Wallace had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate—as a Democrat or anything else—he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler.
McGovern, on the other hand, had put together a fantastic organization—but until he went into Wisconsin, he had never tried to tap the k
ind of energy that seemed to be flowing, perhaps by default, to Wallace. He had given it some thought while campaigning in New Hampshire, but it was only after he beat Muskie in two blue-collar hardhat wards in the middle of Manchester that he saw the possibility of a really mind-bending coalition: a weird mix of peace freaks and hard hats, farmers and film stars, along with urban blacks, rural Chicanos, the “youth vote” . . . a coalition that could elect almost anybody.
Muskie had croaked in Florida, allowing himself to get crowded over on the Right with Wallace, Jackson, and Humphrey—then finishing a slow fourth behind all three of them. At that point in the race, Lindsay’s presumptuous blueprint was beginning to look like prophecy. The New Hampshire embarrassment had forced Muskie off-center in a mild panic, and now the party was popularized. The road to Wisconsin was suddenly clear in both lanes, fast traffic to the Left and the Right. The only mobile hazard was a slow-moving hulk called “The Muskie Bandwagon,” creeping erratically down what his doom-stricken Media Manager called “that yellow stripe in the middle of the road.”
The only other bad casualty, at that point, was Lindsay. His Wisconsin managers had discovered a fatal flaw in the blueprint: nobody had bothered to specify the name of the candidate who would seize all that high ground on the Left, once Muskie got knocked off center. Whoever drew it up had apparently been told that McGovern would not be a factor in the later stages of the race. After absorbing two back-to-back beatings in New Hampshire and Florida, he would run out of money and be dragged off to the nearest glue factory . . . or, failing that, to some cut-rate retirement farm for old liberals with no charisma.
But something went wrong, and when Lindsay arrived in Wisconsin to seize that fine high ground on the Left that he knew, from his blueprint, was waiting for him—he found it already occupied, sealed off and well-guarded on every perimeter, by a legion of hard-eyed fanatics in the pay of George McGovern.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson Page 25