—Commonwealth of Virginia Anti-Sodomy Statute, 1792
One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from “long shot” to “serious contender.” The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn’t already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign “press corps.”
There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let’s say there are three: Stage one is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get—especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup poll; stage two is the “winnowing out,” the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like longdistance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and stage three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls, and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.
This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn’t get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he’s still in stage one might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to stage two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.
At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, eighteen-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades, and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars . . . Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of fifteen amateur political activists gathered in some English professor’s living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech—often three or four times in a single day—to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters . . . And all the fat cats, labor leaders, and big-time pols who couldn’t find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami, or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don’t plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.
It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be “the most powerful man in the world,” but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.
Tonight, I am going to call my old friend, Pat Caddell, who is Jimmy Carter’s pollster and one of the two or three main wizards in Carter’s brain trust, and we will have another one of our daily philosophical chats. Jimmy Carter is always the main topic when I talk to Caddell, and we’ve been talking, arguing, plotting, haggling, and generally whipping on each other almost constantly, ever since this third-rate, low-rent campaign circus hit the public roads about four months ago.
That was before Pat went to work for Jimmy, but long after I’d been cited in about thirty-three dozen journals all over the country as one of Carter’s earliest and most fervent supporters. Everywhere I went for at least the past year, from Los Angeles to Austin, Nashville, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Key West, I’ve been publicly hammered by friends and strangers alike for saying that I “like Jimmy Carter.” I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits and other Gucci people; I have been called a braindamaged geek by some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on the night of the Wisconsin primary when the midnight radio stunned us both with a news bulletin from a CBS station in Los Angeles, saying that earlier announcements by NBC and ABC regarding Mo Udall’s narrow victory over Carter in Wisconsin were not true, and that late returns from the rural districts were running so heavily in Carter’s favor that CBS was now calling him the winner.
Sandy likes Mo Udall; and so do I, for that matter . . . I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don’t necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. Or her back. Or its back . . . At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it—like Nixon did—to pack-crowd the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia’s antisodomy statutes . . . And anybody who thinks that a 6–3 vote against “sodomy” is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn’t really affect them had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an “unnatural sex act.” Because “unnatural” is defined by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes go to prison.
Which won’t make much difference to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can’t remember when I first became a felon—but I have been one ever since, and it’s way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again . . . God knows, I hate it, but I can’t help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says, “The devil made me do it the first time. The second time, I done it on my own.”
Right. And the third time, I did it because of brain damage . . . And after that: well, I figured that anybody who was already doomed to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.
Anything worth all that risk and energy almost has to be beyond the reach of any kind of redemption except the power of Pure Love . . . and this flash of twisted wisdom brings us back, strangely enough, to politics, Pat Caddell, and the 1976 presidential campaign . . . And, not incidentally, to the fact that any Journal on any side of Wall Street that ever quoted me as saying “I like Jimmy Carter” was absolutely accurate. I have said it many times, to many people, and I will keep on saying it until Jimmy Carter gives me some good reason to change my mind—which might happen about two minutes after he finishes reading this article: but I doubt it.
I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probab
ly spent more private, human time with him than any other journalist on the ’76 campaign trail. The first time I met him—at about eight o’clock on a Saturday morning in 1974 at the back door of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta—I was about two degrees on the safe side of berserk, raving and babbling at Carter and his whole bemused family about some hostile bastard wearing a Georgia State Police uniform who had tried to prevent me from coming through the gate at the foot of the long, tree-shaded driveway leading up to the mansion.
I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates, and when I rolled up to the gatehouse in the backseat of a taxi I’d hailed in downtown Atlanta, the trooper was not amused by the sight and sound of my presence. I was trying to act calm, but after about thirty seconds I realized it wasn’t working; the look on his face told me I was not getting through to the man. He stared at me, saying nothing, while I explained from my crouch in the backseat of the cab that I was late for breakfast with “the governor and Ted Kennedy” . . . Then he suddenly stiffened and began shouting at the cabdriver: “What kind of dumb shit are you trying to pull, buddy? Don’t you know where you are?”
Before the cabbie could answer, the trooper smacked the flat of his hand down on the hood so hard that the whole cab rattled. “You! Shut this engine!” Then he pointed at me: “You! Out of the cab. Let’s see some identification.” He reached out for my wallet and motioned for me to follow him into the gatehouse. The cabbie started to follow, but the trooper waved him back. “Stay right where you are, good buddy. I’ll get to you.” The look on my driver’s face said we were both going to jail and it was my fault. “It wasn’t my idea to come out here,” he whined. “This guy told me he was invited for breakfast with the governor.”
The trooper was looking at the press cards in my wallet. I was already pouring sweat, and just as he looked over at me, I realized I was holding a can of beer in my hand. “You always bring your own beer when you have breakfast with the governor?” he asked.
I shrugged and dropped it in a nearby wastebasket.
“You!” he shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The scene went on for another twenty minutes. There were many phone calls, a lot of yelling, and finally the trooper reached somebody in the mansion who agreed to locate Senator Kennedy and ask if he knew “some guy name of Thompson, I got him down here, he’s all beered up and wants to come up there for breakfast . . .”
Jesus, I thought, that’s all Kennedy needs to hear. Right in the middle of breakfast with the governor of Georgia, some nervous old darky shuffles in from the kitchen to announce that the trooper down at the gatehouse is holding some drunkard who says he’s a friend of Senator Kennedy’s and he wants to come in and have breakfast . . .
Which was, in fact, a lie. I had not been invited for breakfast with the governor, and up to that point I had done everything in my power to avoid it. Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with lunch and dinner.
I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert . . . Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music . . . All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.
It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful Mojo Wire and across two thousand miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast . . . But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.
After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all—not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark, and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond—to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like twelve bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in the Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church) . . . Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 Magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and all of his press conferences.
There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.
But I had not made the final decision on that morning when I rolled up to the gatehouse of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta to have breakfast with Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. My reason for being there at that hour was simply to get my professional schedule back in phase with Kennedy’s political obligations for that day. He was scheduled to address a crowd of establishment heavies who would convene at the University of Georgia Law School at ten thirty in the morning to officially witness the unveiling of a huge and prestigious oil portrait of former secretary of state Dean Rusk, and his tentative schedule for Saturday called for him to leave the governor’s mansion after breakfast and make the sixty-mile trip to Athens by means of the governor’s official airplane . . . So in order to hook up with Kennedy and make the trip with him, I had no choice but to meet him for breakfast at the mansion, where he had spent the previous night at Carter’s invitation.
Oddly enough, I had also been invited to spend Friday night in a bedroom at the governor’s mansion. I had come down from Washington with Kennedy on Friday afternoon, and since I was the only journalist traveling with him that weekend, Governor Carter had seen fit to include me when he invited “the Kennedy party” to overnight at the mansion instead of a downtown hotel.
But I am rarely in the right frame of mind to spend the night in the house of a politician—at least not if I can spend it anywhere else, and on the previous night I figured I would be a lot happier in a room at the Regency Hyatt House than I would in the Georgia governor’s mansion. Which may or may not have been true, but regardless of all that, I still had to be at the mansion for breakfast if I wanted to get any work done that weekend, and my work was to stay with Ted Kennedy.
The scene at the gate had unhinged me so thoroughly that I couldn’t find the door I’d been told to knock on when I finally got out of my cab at the mansion . . . and by the time I finally got inside I was in n
o shape at all to deal with Jimmy Carter and his whole family. I didn’t even recognize Carter when he met me at the door. All I knew was that a middle-aged man wearing Levi’s was taking me into the dining room, where I insisted on sitting down for a while, until the tremors passed.
One of the first things I noticed about Carter, after I’d calmed down a bit, was the relaxed and confident way he handled himself with Ted Kennedy. The contrast between the two was so stark that I am still surprised whenever I hear somebody talking about the “eerie resemblance” between Carter and John F. Kennedy. I have never noticed it, except every once in a while in some carefully staged photograph—and if there was ever a time when it seems like any such resemblance should have been impossible to miss, it was that morning in Atlanta when I walked into the dining room and saw Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy sitting about six feet apart at the same table.
Kennedy, whose presence usually dominates any room he walks into, was sitting there looking stiff and vaguely uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and black shoes. He glanced up as I entered and smiled faintly, then went back to staring at a portrait on the wall on the other side of the room. Paul Kirk, his executive wizard, was sitting next to him, wearing the same blue suit and black shoes—and Jimmy King, his executive advance man, was off in a distant corner yelling into a telephone. There were about fifteen other people in the room, most of them laughing and talking, and it took me a while to notice that nobody was talking to Kennedy—which is a very rare thing to see, particularly in any situation involving other politicians or even politically conscious people.
Kennedy was obviously not in a very gregarious mood that morning, and I didn’t learn why until an hour or so later when I found myself in one of the Secret Service cars with King, Kirk, and Kennedy, running at top speed on the highway to Athens. The mood in the car was ugly. Kennedy was yelling at the SS driver for missing a turnoff that meant we’d be late for the unveiling. When we finally got there and I had a chance to talk privately with Jimmy King, he said Carter had waited until the last minute—just before I got to the mansion—to advise Kennedy that a sudden change in his own plans made it impossible for him to lend Teddy his plane for the trip to Athens. That was the reason for the tension I half noticed when I got to the mansion. King had been forced to get on the phone immediately and locate the Secret Service detail and get two cars out to the mansion immediately. By the time they arrived it was obvious that we would not get to Athens in time for the unveiling of Rusk’s portrait—which was fine with me, but Kennedy was scheduled to speak, and he was very unhappy.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson Page 41