So much for objective journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction in terms.
And so much for all that, too. There was at least one more thing I wanted to get into here, before trying to wind this down and get into something human. Like sleep, or that 550-watt Humm Box they have up there in the Ree-Lax Parlor at Silver Spring. Some people say they should outlaw the Humm Box, but I disagree.
Meanwhile, all that venomous speculation about what McCarthy is up to these days left a crucial question hanging: the odd truth that almost everybody in Washington who is paid to analyze & predict the behavior of Vote Blocs seems to feel that the much-publicized “Youth Vote” will not be a Major Factor in the ’72 presidential campaign would be a hell of a lot easier to accept if it weren’t for the actual figures.
What the experts appear to be saying is that the sudden addition of twenty-five million new voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will not make much difference in the power-structure of American politics. No candidate will say this, of course. For the record, they are all very solicitous of the “youth vote.” In a close election, even 10 percent of that bloc would mean two and a half million votes—a very serious figure when you stack it up against Nixon’s thin margin over Humphrey in 1968.
Think of it: only 10 percent! Two and a half million. Enough—even according to Nixon’s own wizards—to swing almost any election. It is a general assumption, in the terms of contemporary presidential elections, that it would take something genuinely vile and terrifying to cause either one of the major party candidates to come away with less than 40 percent of the vote. Goldwater managed to do this in ’64, but not by much. Even after allowing Johnson’s TV sappers to cast him as a stupid, bloodthirsty ghoul who had every intention of blowing the whole world off its axis the moment he got his hands on “the button,” Goldwater still got 27,178,188 votes, or 38.5 percent.
The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The basic assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.
We are talking about a purely physical/image gig here, but even if you let the buggers jabber like magpies about anything that comes to their minds, not even a dangerous dingbat like Sam Yorty would be likely to alienate more than 45 or 50 percent of the electorate.
And even that far-left radical bastard, George McGovern—babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas—would be hard pressed to crank up any more than a 30 percent animosity quotient.
On balance, they are a pretty bland lot. Even Spiro Agnew—if you catch him between screeds—is not more than 20 percent different from Humphrey or Lindsay or Scoop Jackson. Four years ago, in fact, John Lindsay dug Agnew so much that he seconded his nomination for the vice-presidency. There are a lot of people who say we should forget about that this year “because John has already said he made a mistake about Agnew,” but there are a lot of others who take Lindsay’s “Agnew Mistake” very seriously—because they assume he would do the same thing again next week or next month, if he thought it would do him any good.
Nobody seems very worried about Lindsay right now; they are waiting to see what kind of action he can generate in Florida, a state full of transient and old/transplanted New Yorkers. If he can’t make it there, he’s done for. Which is just as well. But if he scores big in Florida, we will probably have to start taking him seriously—particularly if Muskie looks convincing in New Hampshire.
A Muskie-Lindsay ticket could be one of those “naturals,” a marriage made in heaven and consummated by Larry O’Brien ... Which gets us back to one of the main reasons why the political wizards aren’t counting on much of a “youth vote” this year. It is hard to imagine even a zealot like Allard Lowenstein going out on the trail once again to whip up a campus-based firestorm for Muskie and Lindsay ... particularly with Gene McCarthy lurking around with that ugly mouth of his, and those deep-bleeding grudges.
There is probably a lot of interesting talk going down around Humphrey headquarters these days: “Say ... ah, Hube, baby. I guess you heard what your old buddy Gene did to Muskie the other day, right? Yeah, and we always thought they were friends, didn’t we? [Long pause, no reply from the candidate . . .]
“So ...ah ... Hube? You still with me? Jesus Christ! Where’s that goddamn sunlamp? We gotta get more of a tan on you, baby. You look gray. [ Long pause, no reply from the candidate . . .] “Well, Hube, we might just as well face this thing. We’re comin’ up fast on what just might be a real nasty little problem for you ... let’s not try to kid ourselves, Hube, he’s a really mean sonofabitch. [Long pause, etc . . .] You gonna have to be ready , Hube. You announce next Thursday at noon, right? So we might as well figure that crazy fucker is gonna come down on you like a million-pound shithammer that same afternoon. He’ll probably stage a big scene at the Press Club—and we know who’s gonna be there, don’t we Hube? Yeah, every bastard in the business. Are you ready for that, Hube Baby? Can you handle it? [Long pause, no reply, etc.—heavy breathing.] Okay, Hube, tell me this: What does the bastard know? What’s the worst he can spring on you?”
Jesus! This gibberish could run on forever, and even now I can see myself falling into the old trap that plagues every writer who gets sucked into this rotten business: you find yourself getting fascinated by the rules and strange quirks of the game. Even now, before I’ve even finished this one article, I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was all just another fat Sunday of pro football: pick Pittsburgh by 6 points in the early game, get Kansas City even with Oakland later on ... win one, lose one ... then flip the dial and try to get ahead by conning somebody into taking the Rams even against San Francisco.
After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying fuck who actually wins; the only thing that matters is the point spread. You find yourself screeching crazily at the screen, pleading for somebody to rip the lungs out of that junkie bastard who just threw an interception and then didn’t even pretend to tackle the pig who ran it back for 6 points to beat the spread.
There is something perverse and perverted about dealing with life on this level. But on the other hand, it gets harder to convince yourself, once you start thinking about it, that it could possibly make any real difference to you if the 49ers win or lose . . . although every once in a while you stumble into a situation where you find yourself really wanting some team to get stomped all over the field, severely beaten and humiliated . . .
This happened to me on the last Sunday of the regular NFL season when two slobbering drunk sportswriters from the Alexandria Gazette got me thrown out of the press box at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. I was there as a special guest of Dave Burgin, sports editor of the Washington Star ... but when Burgin tried to force a bit of dignity on the scene, they ejected him too.
We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. “That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn’t doff your hat for the national anthem,” Burgin explained. “He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested.”
“Jesus creeping shit,” I muttered. “Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me.”
“I was afraid you’d run amok,” he said. “We’d have been in b
ad trouble. All those guys are from things like the Norfolk Ledger and the Army-Navy Times. They would have stomped us like rats in a closet.”
I couldn’t understand it. “Hell, I’d have taken the goddamn hat off if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually I don’t even stand up.”
“I didn’t think you were going to,” he said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed.”
“But I did stand,” I said. “I figured, hell, I’m Dave’s guest—why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat.”
Actually, I was happy to get out of that place. The Redskins were losing, which pleased me, and we were thrown out just in time to get back to Burgin’s house for the 49er game on TV. If they won this one, they would go against the Redskins next Sunday in the playoffs—and by the end of the third quarter I had worked myself into a genuine hate frenzy; I was howling like a butcher when the 49ers pulled it out in the final moments with a series of desperate maneuvers, and the moment the gun sounded I was on the phone to TWA, securing a seat on the Christmas Nite Special to San Francisco. It was extremely important, I felt, to go out there and do everything possible to make sure the Redskins got the mortal piss beaten out of them.
Which worked out. Not only did the 49ers stomp the jingo bastards and knock them out of the playoffs, but my seat companion for the flight from Dallas to San Francisco was Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary trial lawyer, who is also president of the Washington Redskins.
“Heavy duty for you people tomorrow,” I warned him. “Get braced for a serious beating. Nothing personal, you understand. Those poor bastards couldn’t have known what they were doing when they croaked a Doctor of Journalism out of the press box.”
He nodded heavily and called for another drink. “It’s a goddamn shame,” he muttered. “But what can you really expect? You lie down with pigs and they’ll call you a swine every time.”
“What? Did you call me a swine?”
“Not me,” he said. “But this world is full of slander.”
We spent the rest of the evening on politics. He is backing Muskie, and as he talked I got the feeling that he felt he was already at a point where, sooner or later, we would all be. “Ed’s a good man,” he said. “He’s honest. I respect the guy.” Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. “But the main reason I’m working for him,” he said, “is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.” He stabbed the arm again. “If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” hold actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the forty million I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
I have been through three presidential elections now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote for. In 1964 I refused to vote at all, and in ’68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory.
Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.
Not even James Reston, the swinging Calvinist, claims to see any light at the end of the tunnel in ’72. Reston’s first big shot of the year dealt mainly with a grim “memo” by former JFK strategist Fred Dutton, who is now a Washington lawyer.
There are hints of hope in the Reston-Dutton prognosis, but not for the next four years. Here is the rancid nut of it: “The 1972 election probably is fated to be a dated, weakening election, an historical curio, belonging more to the past than to the new national three- or four-party trend of the future.”
Reston either ignored or overlooked, for some reason, the probability that Gene McCarthy appears to be gearing up almost exactly the kind of “independent third force in American politics” that both Reston and Dutton see as a wave of the future.
An even grimmer note comes with Reston’s offhand dismissal of Ed Muskie, the only man—according to E. B. Williams—who can possibly save us from more years of Nixon. And as if poor Muskie didn’t already have enough evil shit on his neck, the eminently reasonable, fine old liberal journal, the Washington Post, called Muskie’s official “new beginning/I am now a candidate” speech on national TV a meaningless rehash of old bullshit and stale clichés raked up from old speeches by ... yes ... Himself, Richard Milhous Nixon.
In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brainrooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we’re all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can’t bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for president ... John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed ... and, well, that just about wraps up the trip, right?
Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street ... peel back the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his “Fan letter to Nixon.”
“I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.”
The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire
March 2, 1972
It was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester—driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars that gets rubber for about twenty-nine seconds in Drive, and spits hot black divots all over the road in First or Second . . . a terrible screeching and fishtailing through the outskirts of Boston heading north to New Hampshire, back on the Campaign Trail . . . running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.
Not much of a moon tonight, but a sky full of very bright stars. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills . . . running about seventy-five or eighty through a landscape of stark naked trees and stone fences; not many cars out tonight, and no lights in the roadside farmhouses. People go to bed early in New England.
Four years ago I ran this road in a different Mercury, but I wasn’t driving then. It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s best speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchanan.
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late—almost midnight then, too—and the cop was holding the big Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech and the airport up in Manchester where a Learjet was waiting to w
hisk the candidate and his brain trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Learjet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been . . . and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands . . .
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backward, here we go . . . “Watch out!” somebody was shouting. “Get the cigarette!” A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, “Goddamn it, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!”
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. “What worries me,” he said, “is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the Boss . . .”
“Very bad show,” I said, “especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones . . . you people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.”