Humphrey’s addiction to Wallot has not stirred any controversy, so far. He has always campaigned like a rat in heat, and the only difference now is that he is able to do it eighteen hours a day instead of ten. The main change in his public style, since ’68, is that he no longer seems aware that his gibberish is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class Blacks.
At least half the reporters assigned to the Humphrey campaign are convinced that he’s senile. When he ran for president four years ago he was a hack and a fool, but at least he was consistent.
Now he talks like an eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed. He will call a press conference to announce that if elected he will “have all our boys out of Vietnam within ninety days”—then rush across town, weeping and jabbering the whole way, to appear on a network TV show and make a fist-shaking emotional appeal for every good American to stand behind the president and “applaud” his recent decision to resume heavy bombing in North Vietnam.
Humphrey will go into a Black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring “the enduring tragedy” that life in Nixon’s America has visited on “these beautiful little children”—and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that “In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini.”
Humphrey seems genuinely puzzled by the fast-rising tide of evidence that many once-sympathetic voters no longer believe anything he says. He can’t understand why people snicker when he talks about “the politics of joy” and “punishing welfare chiselers” in almost the same breath . . . and God only knows what must have gone through his head when he picked up the current issue of Newsweek and found Stewart Alsop quoting Rolling Stone to the effect that “Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current.”
Alsop made it clear that he was not pleased with that kind of language. He called it “brutal”—then wound up his column by dismissing the Humphrey candidacy in terms far more polite than mine, but no less final. Both Stewart and his demented brother, Joseph, have apparently concluded—along with almost all the other “prominent & influential” Gentleman Journalists in Washington—that the Democratic primaries have disintegrated into a series of meaningless brawls not worth covering. On the “opinion-shaping” level of the journalism Establishment in both Washington and New York, there is virtually unanimous agreement that Nixon’s opponent in ’72 will be Ted Kennedy.
McGovern’s solid victory in Wisconsin was dismissed, by most of the press wizards, as further evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by “extremists”: George McGovern on the Left and George Wallace on the Right, with a sudden dangerous vacuum in what is referred to on editorial pages as “the vital Center.”
The root of the problem, of course, is that most of the big-time Opinion Makers decided a long time ago—along with all those Democratic senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, and other party pros—that the candidate of the “vital Center” in ’72 would be none other than that fireball statesman from Maine, Ed Muskie. By the summer of ’71 the party bosses had convinced themselves that Ed Muskie was the “only Democrat with a chance of beating Nixon.”
This was bullshit, of course. Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine. Big Ed was an adequate senator—or at least he’d seemed like one until he started trying to explain his “mistake” on the war in Vietnam—but it was stone madness from the start to ever think about exposing him to the kind of bloodthirsty thugs that Nixon and John Mitchell would sic on him. They would have him screeching on his knees by sundown on Labor Day. If I were running a campaign against Muskie, I would arrange for some anonymous creep to buy time on national TV and announce that twenty-two years ago he and Ed spent a summer working as male whores at a Peg House somewhere in the North Woods.
Nothing else would be necessary.
The idea that George McGovern has the Democratic nomination locked up by mid-April will not be an easy thing for most people to accept—especially since it comes from Frank Mankiewicz, the tall and natty “political director” for McGovern’s campaign.
Total candor with the press—or anyone else, for that matter—is not one of the traits most presidential candidates find entirely desirable in their key staff people. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business . . . and the main function of any candidate’s press secretary is to make sure the press gets nothing but Upbeat news. There is no point, after all, in calling a press conference to announce that nobody on the staff will be paid this month because three or four of your largest financial backers just called to say they are pulling out and abandoning all hope of victory.
When something like this happens, you quickly lock all the doors and send your press secretary out to start whispering, off the record, that your opponent’s California campaign coordinator just called to ask for a job.
This kind of devious bullshit is standard procedure in most campaigns. Everybody is presumed to understand it—even the reporters who can’t keep a straight face while they’re jotting it all down for page one of the early edition: “Sen. Mace Denies Pullout Rumors; Predicts Total Victory in All States.”
The best example of this kind of coverage in the current campaign has been the stuff coming out of the Muskie camp. In recent weeks the truth has been so painful that some journalists have gone out of their way to give the poor bastards a break and not flay them in print any more than absolutely necessary.
One of the only humorous moments in the Florida primary campaign, for instance, came when one of Muskie’s state campaign managers, Chris Hart, showed up at a meeting with representatives of the other candidates to explain why Big Ed was refusing to take part in a TV debate. “My instructions,” he said, “are that the senator should never again be put in a situation where he has to think quickly.”
By nightfall of that day every journalist in Miami was laughing at Hart’s blunder, but nobody published it; and none of the TV reporters ever mentioned it on the air. I didn’t even use it myself, for some reason, although I heard about it in Washington while I was packing to go back to Florida.
I remember thinking that I should call Hart and ask him if he actually said a thing like that, but when I got there I didn’t feel up to it. Muskie was obviously in deep trouble, and Hart had been pretty decent to me when I’d showed up at headquarters to sign up for that awful trip on the Sunshine Special . . . so I figured what the hell? Let it rest.
The other press people might have had different reasons for not using Hart’s quote, but I can’t say for sure because I never asked. Looking back on it, I think it must have been so obvious that the Muskie campaign was doomed that nobody felt mean enough to torment the survivors over something that no longer seemed important.
Muskie is finished. His only hope now is to do something like take a long vacation in New Zealand until July and get the ibogaine out of his system so he can show up in Miami and pray for a deadlocked convention. At that point, he can offer himself up for sacrifice as a “compromise candidate,” make a deal with George Wallace for the VP slot, then confront the convention with a Muskie-Wallace “unity ticket.”
Which might make the nut. If nothing else, it would command a lot of support from people like me who feel that the only way to save the Democratic Party is to destroy it. I have tried to explain this to George McGovern, but it’s not one of the subjects he really enjoys talking about. McGovern is very nervous about the possibility of boxing himself into the role of a McCarthy-type “spoiler” candidate, which he was beginning to look like until he somehow won a big chunk of the hard-hat vote in New Hampshire and sensed the first strange seed of a coalition that might make him a serious challenger instead of just another martyr.
There was only a hint of it in Ne
w Hampshire, but in Wisconsin it came together with a decisiveness that nobody could quite understand in the alcoholic chaos of election night . . .
The only glaring weakness in McGovern’s sweep was his failure to break Humphrey’s grip on the Black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was like Nixon flashing the peace sign, or Agnew chanting “Right on!” at a minstrel show.
The real shocker, however, came when McGovern carried the Polish south side of Milwaukee, which Muskie had planned on sweeping by at least ten to one. He was, after all, the first Pole to run for the presidency of the United States, and he had campaigned on the south side under his original Polish name . . . but when the deal went down he might as well have been an Arab, for all they cared in places like Serb Hall.
Which more or less makes the point, I think. And if it doesn’t, well . . . political analysis was never my game anyway. All I do is wander around and make bets with people, and so far I’ve done pretty well.
As for betting on the chance that Mankiewicz is right and that McGovern will actually win on the first ballot in Miami . . . I think I’d like some odds on that one, and right now they should be pretty easy to get. McGovern right now is the only one of the Democratic candidates with any chance at all of getting the nomination . . . and if anybody wants to put money on Muskie, Humphrey, or Wallace, get in touch with me immediately.
The Campaign Trail: Crank-Time on the Low Road
June 8, 1972
Apologia
One of my clearest memories of the Nebraska primary is getting off the elevator on the wrong floor in the Omaha Hilton and hearing a sudden burst of song from a room down one of the hallways . . . twenty to thirty young voices in ragged harmony, kicking out the jams as they swung into the final, hair-raising chorus of “The Hound and the Whore.”
I had heard it before, in other hallways of other hotels along the campaign trail—but never this late at night, and never at this level of howling intensity:
O the Hound chased the Whore across the mountains
Boom! Boom! Boom!
O the Hound chased the Whore into the sea . . .
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A very frightening song under any circumstances—but especially frightening if you happen to be a politician running for very high stakes and you know the people singing that song are not on your side. I have never been in that situation, myself, but I imagine it is something like camping out in the North Woods and suddenly coming awake in your tent around midnight to the horrible snarling and screaming sounds of a werewolf killing your guard dog somewhere out in the trees beyond the campfire.
I was thinking about this as I stood in the hallway outside the elevator and heard all those people singing “The Hound and the Whore” . . . in a room down the hall that led into a wing of the hotel that I knew had been blocked off for The Candidate’s national staff. But there is nothing in my notes to indicate which one of the candidates was quartered in that wing—or even which floor I was on when I first heard the song. All I remember for sure is that it was one floor either above or below mine, on the eleventh. But the difference is crucial—because McGovern’s people were mainly down on the tenth, and the smaller Humphrey contingent was above me on the twelfth.
It was a Monday night, as I recall, just a few hours before the polls opened on Tuesday morning—and at that point the race seemed so even that both camps were publicly predicting a victory and privately expecting defeat. So even in retrospect there is no way to be certain which staff was doing the singing.
And my own head was so scrambled at that hour that I can’t be sure of anything except that we had just come back from a pre-dawn breakfast at the Omaha Toddle House with Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty, and Gary Hart, McGovern’s national campaign manager who had just picked up a check for roughly $40,000 gross from another one of Beatty’s fund-raising spectacles.
This one had been over in Lincoln, the state capital town about sixty miles west of Omaha, where a friendly crowd of some 7,500 had packed the local civic center for a concert by Andy Williams and Henry Mancini . . . which apparently did the trick, because twenty-four hours later Lincoln delivered 2–1 for McGovern and put him over the hump in Nebraska.
I understand these things, and as a certified member of the national press corps I am keenly aware of my responsibility to keep calm and endure two hours of Andy Williams from time to time—especially since I went over to Lincoln on the press bus and couldn’t leave until the concert was over anyway—but I’m beginning to wonder just how much longer I can stand it: this endless nightmare of getting up at the crack of dawn to go out and watch the candidate shake hands with workers coming in for the day shift at the Bilbo Bear & Sprocket factory, then following him across town for another press-the-flesh gig at the local Slaughterhouse . . . then back on the bus and follow the candidate’s car through traffic for fortyfive minutes to watch him eat lunch and chat casually with the folks at a basement cafeteria table in some high-rise Home for the Aged.
Both Humphrey and McGovern have been doing this kind of thing about eighteen hours a day for the past six months—and one of them will keep doing it eighteen hours a day for five more months until November. According to the political pros, there is no other way to get elected: go out and meet the voters on their own turf, shake their hands, look them straight in the eye, and introduce yourself . . . there is no other way.
The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians book is George Wallace. He doesn’t do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones.
But to hell with these theories. This is about the thirteenth lead I’ve written for this goddamn mess, and they are getting progressively worse . . . which hardly matters now, because we are down to the deadline again and it will not be long before the Mojo Wire starts beeping and the phones start ringing and those thugs out in San Francisco will be screaming for Copy. Words! Wisdom! Gibberish!
Anything! The presses roll at noon—three hours from now, and the paper is ready to go except for five blank pages in the middle. The “center-spread,” a massive feature story. The cover is already printed, and according to the Story List that is lying out there on the floor about ten feet away from this typewriter, the center-spread feature for this issue will be A Definitive Profile of George McGovern and Everything He Stands For—written by me.
Looking at it fills me with guilt. This room reeks of failure, once again. Every two weeks they send me a story list that says I am lashing together some kind of definitive work on a major subject . . . which is true, but these projects are not developing quite as fast as we thought they would. There are still signs of life in a few of them, but not many. Out of twenty-six projects—a year’s work—I have abandoned all hope for twenty-four, and the other two are hanging by a thread.
There is no time to explain, now, why this is not a profile of George McGovern. That story blew up on us in Omaha, on the morning of the primary, when George and most of his troupe suddenly decided that Nixon’s decision to force a showdown with Hanoi made it imperative for the senator to fly back to Washington at once.
Nobody could say exactly why, but we all assumed he had something special in mind—some emergency move to get control of Nixon. No time for long mind-probing interviews. Humphrey was leaving too, and there were two or three cynics in the press corps who suggested that this left McGovern no choice. If Humphrey thought the War-Scare was important enough to make him rush back to the Capitol instead of hanging around Omaha on Election Day, then McGovern should be there too—or Hubert might say his Distinguished Opponent cared more about winning the Nebraska Primary than avoiding World War Three.
As it turned out, neither Humphrey nor McGovern did anything
dramatic when they got back to Washington—or at least nothing public—and a week or so later the New York Times announced that the mines in Haiphong harbor had been set to de-activate themselves on the day before Nixon’s trip to Moscow for the summit meeting.
Maybe I missed something. Perhaps the whole crisis was solved in one of those top-secret confrontations between the Senate and the White House that we will not be able to read about until the records are opened seventy-five years from now.
But there is no point in haggling any longer with this. The time has come to get full-bore into heavy Gonzo Journalism, and this time we have no choice but to push it all the way out to the limit. The phone is ringing again and I can hear Crouse downstairs trying to put them off:
“What the hell are you guys worried about? He’s up there cranking out a page every three minutes . . . What? . . . No, it won’t make much sense, but I guarantee you we’ll have plenty of words. If all else fails we’ll start sending press releases and shit like that . . . Sure, why worry? We’ll start sending almost immediately.”
Only a lunatic would do this kind of work: twenty-three primaries in five months; stone drunk from dawn till dusk and huge speed-blisters all over my head. Where is the meaning? That light at the end of the tunnel?
Crouse is yelling again. They want more copy. He has sent them all of his stuff on the Wallace shooting, and now they want mine. Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service; get one of those big AP tickers that spits out fifty words a minute, twenty-four hours a day . . . a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-way journey—all expenses paid—anywhere he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that’s where he went.