Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

  Indeed. Sorry. Senile. Sick. Tangled… That’s exactly how I’m beginning to feel. All those words and many others, but my brain is too numb to spit them out of the memory bank at this time. No person in my condition had any business talking about Hubert Humphrey’s behavior. My brain had slowed down to the point of almost helpless stupor. I no longer even have the energy to grind my own teeth.

  So this article is not going to end the way I thought it would… and looking back at the lead I see that it didn’t even start that way either. As for the middle, I can barely remember it. There was something about making a deal with Mankiewicz and then Seizing Power in American Samoa, but I don’t feel ready right now. Maybe later…

  Way out on the far left corner of this desk I see a note that says “Call Mankiewicz—Miami Hotel rooms.”

  That’s right. He was holding three rooms for us at the convention. Probably I should call him right away and firm that up… or maybe not.

  But what the hell? These things can wait. Before my arms go numb there were one or two points I wanted to make. This is certainly no time for any heavy speculation or long-range analysis—on any subject at all, but especially not on anything as volatile and complex as the immediate future of George McGovern vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

  Yet it is hard to avoid the idea that McGovern has put the Party through some very drastic changes in the last few months. The Good Ole Boys are not pleased with him. But they can’t get a grip on him either—and now, less than three weeks before the convention, he is so close to a first-ballot victory that the old hacks and ward-heelers who thought they had total control of the Party less than six months ago find themselves skulking around like old winos in the side alleys of presidential politics—first stripped of their power to select and control delegations, then rejected as delegates themselves when Big Ed took his overcrowded bandwagon over the high side on the first lap… and now, incredible as it still seems to most of them, they will not even be allowed into the Party convention next month.

  One of the first people I plan to speak with when I get to Miami is Larry O’Brien: shake both of his hands and extend powerful congratulations to him for the job he has done on the Party. In January of 1968 the Democratic Party was so fat and confident that it looked like they might keep control of the White House, the Congress, and in fact the whole U.S. Government almost indefinitely. Now, four and a half years later, it is a useless bankrupt hulk. Even if McGovern wins the Democratic nomination, the Party machinery won’t be of much use to him, except as a vehicle.

  “Traditional Politics with a Vengeance” is Gary Hart’s phrase—a nutshell concept that pretty well describes the theory behind McGovern’s amazingly effective organization.

  “The Politics of Vengeance” is a very different thing—an essentially psychotic concept that Hart would probably not go out of his way to endorse.

  Vehicle… vehicle… vehicle—a very strange looking word, if you stare at it for eight or nine minutes… “Skulking” is another interesting-looking word.

  And so much for that.

  The morning news says Wilbur Mills is running for President again. He has scorned all invitations to accept the Number Two spot with anyone else—especially George McGovern. A very depressing bulletin. But Mills must know what he’s doing. His name is said to be magic in certain areas. If the party rejects McGovern, I hope they give it to Mills. That would just about make the nut.

  Hart and Mankiewicz search for clues as Pat Caddell briefs the press on the strange case of the disappearing margin at a press conference the morning after the California primary. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  Another depressing news item—out of Miami Beach this time—says an unnatural number of ravens have been seen in the city recently. Tourists have complained of being kept awake all night by “horrible croaking sounds” outside their hotel windows. “At first there were only a few,” one local businessman explained. “But more and more keep coming. They’re building big nests in the trees along Collins Avenue. They’re killing the trees and their droppings smell like dead flesh.”

  Many residents say they can no longer leave their windows open at night, because of the croaking. “I’ve always loved birds,” said another resident. “But these goddamn ravens are something else!”

  Later in June

  Mass Burial for Political Bosses in New York… McGovern over the Hump… The Death by Beating of a Six-Foot Blue-Black Serpent… What Next for the Good Ole Boys?… Anatomy of a Fixer… Treachery Looms in Miami…

  It is now clear that this once small devoted band has become a great surging multitude all across this country—and it will not be denied.

  —George McGovern, on the night of the New York primary

  The day after the New York primary I woke up in a suite on the twenty-fourth floor of Delmonico’s Hotel on Park Avenue with a hellish wind tearing both rooms apart and rain coming in through all the open windows… and I thought: Yes, wonderful, only a lunatic would get out of bed on a day like this; call room service for grapefruit and coffee, along with a New York Times for brain food, and one of those portable brick-dome fireplaces full of oil-soaked sawdust logs that they can roll right into the suite and fire up at the foot of the bed.

  Indeed. Get some heat in the room, but keep the windows open—for the sounds of the wind and the rain and the far-off honking of all those taxi horns down on Park Avenue.

  Then fill a hot bath and get something like Memphis Underground on the tape machine. Relax, relax. Enjoy this fine rainy day, and send the bill to Random House. The budget boys won’t like it, but to hell with them. Random House still owes me a lot of money from that time when the night watchman beat my snake to death on the white marble steps leading up to the main reception desk.

  I had left it overnight in the editor’s office, sealed up in a cardboard box with a sacrificial mouse… but the mouse understood what was happening, and terror gave him strength to gnaw a hole straight through the side of the box and escape into the bowels of the building.

  The snake followed, of course—through the same hole—and somewhere around dawn, when the night watchman went out to check the main door, he was confronted with a six-foot blue-black serpent slithering rapidly up the stairs, flicking its tongue at him and hissing a warning that he was sure—according to his own account of the incident—was the last sound he would ever hear.

  The snake was a harmless Blue Indigo that I’d just brought back from a reptile farm in Florida… but the watchman had no way of knowing; he had never seen a snake. Most natives of Manhattan Island are terrified of all animals except cockroaches and poodles… so when this poor ignorant bastard of a watchman suddenly found himself menaced by a hissing, six-foot serpent coming fast up the stairs at him from the general direction of Cardinal Spellman’s quarters just across the courtyard… he said the sight of it made him almost crazy with fear, and at first he was totally paralyzed.

  Then, as the snake kept on coming, some primal instinct shocked the man out of his trance and gave him the strength to attack the thing with the first weapon he could get his hands on—which he first described as a “steel broom handle,” but which further investigation revealed to have been a metal tube jerked out of a nearby vacuum cleaner.

  The battle apparently lasted some twenty minutes: a terrible clanging and screaming in the empty marble entranceway, and finally the watchman prevailed. Both the serpent and the vacuum tube were beaten beyond recognition, and later that morning a copy editor found the watchman slumped on a stool in the basement next to the Xerox machine, still gripping the mangled tube and unable to say what was wrong with him except that something horrible had tried to get him, but he finally managed to kill it.

  The man has since retired, they say. Cardinal Spellman died and Random House moved to a new building. But the psychic scars remain, a dim memory of corporate guilt that is rarely mentioned except in times of stress or in arguments over money. Every time I start feeling a bit uneasy about running up hug
e bills on the Random House tab, I think about that snake—and then I call room service again.

  State Vote Aids M’Govern:

  Senator’s Slates Win By Large Margin

  In The Suburbs

  That was the Times’s big headline on Wednesday morning. The “3 A’s candidate” (Acid, Abortion, Amnesty) had definitely improved his position by carrying the suburbs. The bulk of the political coverage on page one had to do with local races—“Ryan, Badillo, Rangel Win: Coller is in Close Battle”… “Delegates Named”… “Bingham Defeats Scheuer; Rooney Apparent Winner.”

  Down at the bottom of the page was a block of wire-photos from the National Mayors’ Conference in New Orleans—also on Tuesday—and the choice shot from down there showed a smiling Hubert Humphrey sitting next to Mayor Daley of Chicago with the Mayor of Miami Beach leaning into the scene with one of his arms around Daley and the other around Hubert.

  The caption said, “Ex-Mayor Is Hit with Mayors.” The “details, Page 28” said Humphrey had definitely emerged as the star of the Mayors’ conference. The two losers were shown in smaller photos underneath the Daley/Humphrey thing. Muskie “received polite applause,” the caption said, and the camera had apparently caught him somewhere near the beginning of a delayed Ibogaine rush: his eyes are clouding over, his jaw has gone slack, his hair appears to be combed back in a DA.

  The caption under the McGovern photo says, “He, too, received moderate response.” But McGovern at least looked human, while the other four looked like they had just been trucked over on short notice from some third-rate wax museum in the French Quarter. The only genuinely ugly face of the five is that of Mayor Daley: He looks like a potato with mange—it is the face of a man who would see nothing wrong with telling his son to go out and round up a gang of thugs with bullhorns and kick the shit out of anybody stupid enough to challenge the Mayor of Chicago’s right to name the next Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

  I started at the front page for a long time; there was something wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite fix on the problem until… yes… I realized that the whole front page of the June 21st New York Times could just as easily have been dated March 8th, the day after the New Hampshire primary.

  “Pacification” was failing again in Vietnam; Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was demanding more bombers; ITT was beating another illegal stock-sales rap… but the most striking similarity was in the overall impression of what was happening in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

  Apparently nothing had changed. Muskie looked just as sick and confused as he had on that cold Wednesday morning in Manchester four months ago. McGovern looked like the same tough but hopeless underdog—and there was nothing in the face of either Daley or Humphrey to indicate that either one of those correct and vicious old screws had any doubt at all about what was going to happen in Miami in July. They appeared to be very pleased with whatever the Mayor of Miami Beach was saying to them….

  An extremely depressing front page, at first glance—almost rancid with a sense of dejá vú. There was even a Kennedy story: Will he or Won’t he?

  This was the most interesting story on the page, if only because of the timing. Teddy had been out of the campaign news for a few months, but now—according to the Times’s R. W. Apple Jr.—he was about to make his move:

  “City Councilman Matthew J. Troy Jr. will announce today that he is supporting Senator Edward M. Kennedy for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, informed sources said last night. Mr. Troy, a long-time political ally of the Kennedy family, was one of the earliest supporters of Senator George McGovern for the presidency. As such, he would be unlikely to propose a running mate for the South Dakotan unless both men had indicated their approval.”

  Unlikely.

  Right. The logic was hard to deny. A McGovern/Kennedy ticket was probably the only sure winner available to the Democrats this year, but beyond that it might solve all of Kennedy’s problems with one stroke. It would give him at least four and probably eight years in the spotlight; an unnaturally powerful and popular vice-president with all the advantages of the office and very few of the risks. If McGovern ran wild and called for the abolition of Free Enterprise, for instance, Kennedy could back off and shake his head sadly… but if McGovern did everything right and won a second term as the most revered and successful President in the nation’s history, Teddy would be right there beside him—the other half of the team; so clearly the heir apparent that he would hardly have to bother about campaigning in public in 1980.

  Don’t worry, boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever.

  —Saul Alinsky to his staff shortly before his death, June 1972

  The primaries are finally over now: twenty-three of the goddamn things—and the deal is about to go down. New York was the last big spectacle before Miami Beach, and this time McGovern’s people really kicked out the jams. They stomped every hack, ward-heeler, and “old-line party boss” from Buffalo to Brooklyn. The Democratic Party in New York State was left in a frightened shambles.

  Not even the state party leader, Joe Crangle, survived the McGovern blitz. He tried to pass for “uncommitted”—hoping to go down to Miami with at least a small remnant of the big-time bargaining power he’d planned on when he originally backed Muskie—but McGovern’s merciless young Streetfighters chopped Crangle down with the others. He will watch the convention on TV, along with Brooklyn Party boss Meade Esposito and once-powerful Bronx leader Patrick Cunningham.

  Former New York Governor Averell Harriman also wound up on the list of ex-heavies who will not attend the convention. He too was an early Muskie supporter. The last time I saw Averell he was addressing a small crowd in the West Palm Beach railroad station—framed in a halo of spotlights on the caboose platform of Big Ed’s “Sunshine Special”… and the Man from Maine was standing tall beside him, smiling broadly, looking every inch the winner that all those half-bright party bosses had assured him he was definitely going to be.

  The candidate with Senator Abraham Ribicoff pitching for the Jewish vote among the Hasidim. STUART BRATESMAN

  It was just about dusk when Harriman began speaking, as I recall, and Muskie might have looked a little less pleased if he’d had any way of knowing that—ten blocks away, while Ave was still talking—a human threshing machine named Peter Sheridan was eagerly hitting the bricks after two weeks in the Palm Beach jail on a vagrancy rap.

  Unknown to either Big Ed or Peter, their paths were soon destined to cross. Twelve hours later, Sheridan—the infamous wandering Boohoo for the Neo-American church—would board the “Sunshine Special” for the last leg of the trip into Miami.

  That encounter is already legend. I am not especially proud of my role in it—mainly because the nightmare developed entirely by accident—but if I could go back and try it all over again I wouldn’t change a note.

  At the time I felt a bit guilty about it: having been, however innocently, responsible for putting the Demo front-runner on a collision course with a gin-crazed acid freak—but that was before I realized what kind of beast I was dealing with.

  It was not until his campaign collapsed and his ex-staffers felt free to talk that I learned that working for Big Ed was something like being locked in a rolling boxcar with a vicious 200-pound water rat. Some of his top staff people considered him dangerously unstable. He had several identities, they said, and there was no way to be sure on any given day if they would have to deal with Abe Lincoln, Hamlet, Captain Queeg, or Bobo the Simpleminded…

  Many strange Muskie stories, but this is not the time for them. Perhaps after the convention, when the pressure lets off a bit—although not even that is certain, now: Things are getting weird.

  The only “Muskie story” that interests me right now is the one about how he managed to con those poor bastards into making him the de facto party leader and also the bosses’ choice to carry the party colors against Nixon in November. I want to kn
ow that story, and if anybody who reads this can fill me in on the details, by all means call at once c/o Rolling Stone, San Francisco.

  The Muskie nightmare is beginning to look more and more like a major political watershed for the Democratic Party. When Big Ed went down he took about half of the national power structure with him. In one state after another—each time he lost a primary—Muskie crippled and humiliated the local Democratic power-mongers: Governors, Mayors, Senators, Congressmen… Big Ed was supposed to be their ticket to Miami, where they planned to do business as usual once again, and keep the party at least livable, if not entirely healthy. All Muskie had to do, they said, was keep his mouth shut and act like Abe Lincoln.

  The bosses would do the rest. As for that hare-brained bastard McGovern, he could take those reformist ideas he’d been working on, and jam them straight up his ass. A convention packed wall to wall with Muskie delegates—the rancid cream of the party, as it were—would make short work of McGovern’s Boy Scout bullshit.

  That was four months ago, before Muskie began crashing around the country in a stupid rage and destroying everything he touched. First it was booze, then Reds, and finally over the brink into Ibogaine… and it was right about that time that most of the Good Ole Boys decided to take another long look at Hubert Humphrey. He wasn’t much; they all agreed on that—but by May he was all they had left.

  Not much, for sure. Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ’em like Hubert anymore—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.