Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

  “Would you admit a thing like that?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “But I wouldn’t do it either,” she said. “You could kill somebody by making them drink acid—why would he want to kill you?”

  I shrugged, “Who knows? He eats a lot of it himself.” I paused, sensing confusion…. “Actually I doubt if he really wanted to kill me. It was a hell of a dose, but not that strong.” I smiled. “All I remember is the first rush: It came up my spine like nine tarantulas… drilled me right to the bar stool for two hours; I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink my eyes.”

  “Boy, what kind of acid does that?” somebody asked.

  “Sunshine,” I said. “Every time.”

  By now several others had picked up on the conversation. A bright-looking kid in a blue gabardine suit interrupted: “Sunshine acid? Are you talking about LSD?”

  “Right,” I said.

  Now the others understood. A few laughed, but others muttered darkly, “You mean John Chancellor goes around putting LSD in people’s drinks? He takes it himself?… He’s a dope addict…?”

  “Golly,” said the girl. “That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

  By this time I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. These poor, ignorant young water heads. Would they pass this weird revelation on to their parents when they got back home to Middletown, Shaker Heights, and Orange County? Probably so, I thought. And then their parents would write letters to NBC, saying they’d learned from reliable sources that Chancellor was addicted to LSD-25—supplied to him in great quantities, no doubt, by Communist agents—and demanding that he be jerked off the air immediately and locked up.

  I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade—sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard….

  But before I could get into this one, the men in the red hats began shouting that the magic moment was on us. The Ready Room crackled with tension; we were into the countdown. They divided us into four groups of about five hundred each and gave the final instructions. We were to rush onto the floor and begin chanting, cheering, waving our signs at the TV cameras, and generally whooping it up. Every other person was given a big garbage bag full of twenty-five or thirty helium balloons, which they were instructed to release just as soon as we reached the floor. Our entrance was timed precisely to coincide with the release of the thousands of non-helium balloons from the huge cages attached to the ceiling of the hall… so that our balloons would be rising while the others were falling, creating a sense of mass euphoria and perhaps even weightlessness for the prime-time TV audience.

  I was ready for some good clean fun at that point, and by the time we got the signal to start moving I was seized by a giddy conviction that we were all about to participate in a spectacle that would go down, as it were, in history.

  They herded us out of the Ready Room and called a ragged kind of cadence while we double-timed it across the wet grass under the guava trees in back of the hall, and finally burst through a well-guarded access door held open for us by Secret Service men just as the balloons were released from the ceiling… it was wonderful; I waved happily to the SS man as I raced past him with the herd and then onto the floor. The hall was so full of balloons that I couldn’t see anything at first, but then I spotted Chancellor up there in the booth and I let the bastard have it. First I held up my “GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME” sign at him. Then, when I was sure he’d noticed the sign, I tucked it under my arm and ripped off my hat, clutching it in the same fist I was shaking angrily at the NBC booth and screaming at the top of my lungs: “You evil scumsucker! You’re through! You limp-wristed Nazi moron!”

  I went deep into the foulest back-waters of my vocabulary for that trip, working myself into a flat-out screeching hate-frenzy for five or six minutes and drawing smiles of approval from some of my fellow demonstrators. They were dutifully chanting the slogans that had been assigned to them in the Ready Room—but I was really into it, and I could see that my zeal impressed them.

  * * *

  But a little bit of that bullshit goes a long way, and I quickly tired of it. When I realized that my erstwhile buddies were settling into the FOUR MORE YEARS chant, I figured it was time to move on.

  Which was not easy. By this time, the whole crowd was facing the TV booths and screaming in unison. People were trampling each other to get up front and make themselves heard—or at least to get on camera for the homefolks—and the mood of that crowd was not receptive to the sight of a MCGOVERN button in their midst, so I moved against the tide as gently as possible, keeping my elbows close down on my ribs and shouting “Chancellor to the Wall!” every thirty seconds or so, to keep myself inconspicuous.

  By the time I got to the “periodical press” exit I was almost overcome with a sense of déjà vu. I had seen all this before. I had been right in the middle of it before—but when?

  Then it came to me. Yes. In 1964, at the Goldwater convention in San Francisco, when poor Barry unloaded that fateful line about “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, etc….” I was on the floor of the Cow Palace when he laid that one on the crowd, and I remember feeling genuinely frightened at the violent reaction it provoked. The Goldwater delegates went completely amok for fifteen or twenty minutes. He hadn’t even finished the sentence before they were on their feet, cheering wildly. Then, as the human thunder kept building, they mounted their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth—and finally they began picking up those chairs with both hands and bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on.

  It was a memorable performance, etched every bit as clearly in the grey folds of my brain as the police beatings I saw at the corner of Michigan and Balboa four years later… but the Nixon convention in Miami was not even in the same league with Chicago in ’68. The blinding stench of tear gas brought back memories, but only on the surface. Around midnight on Wednesday I found myself reeling around completely blind on Washington Avenue in front of the convention hall, bumping against cops wearing black rubber gas masks and running demonstrators clutching wet towels over their faces. Many of the cops were wearing khaki flak jackets and waving three-foot hickory pick-handles… but nobody hit me, and despite the gas and the chaos, I never felt in danger. Finally, when the gas got so bad that I no longer knew what direction I was moving in, I staggered across somebody’s lawn and began feeling my way along the outside of the house until I came to a water faucet. I sat down on the grass and soaked my handkerchief under the tap, then pressed it on my face, without rubbing, until I was able to see again. When I finally got up, I realized that at least a dozen cops had been standing within twenty feet of me the whole time, watching passively and not offering any help—but not beating me into a bloody, screaming coma, either.

  That was the difference between Chicago and Miami. Or at least one of the most significant differences. If the cops in Chicago had found me crawling around in somebody’s front yard, wearing a “press” tag and blind from too much gas, they’d have broken half my ribs and then hauled me away in handcuffs for “resisting arrest.” I saw it happen so often that I still feel the bile rising when I think about it.

  Time Warp: New Hampshire, Aug. 24

  We arrived at the Wayfarer sometime around four-thirty or five on Thursday morning, badly twisted—and for a while neither one of us said anything. We just sat there in the driveway and stared straight ahead, with no focus. Somewhere in front of the windshield I thought I could see a long row of sand dunes in the fog and there seemed to be small moving shapes.

  “Jesus,” I said finally. “Look at all those goddamn sea otters. I thought they were extinct.”

  “Sea otters?” Crouse muttered, hunching down on the wheel and staring intently into the darkness.

  “Straight ahe
ad,” I said. “They’re hunkered down in the dune grass. Hundreds of the bastards… Yeah… we’re almost to San Luis Obispo.”

  “What?” he said, still squinting into the darkness.

  I noticed he was running through the gears fairly rapidly: First-Second-Third-Fourth… Fourth-Third-Second-First. Down and up, up and down; not paying much attention to what he was doing.

  “You better slow down,” I said. “We’ll roll this bastard if we go into the turn with no warning… with these goddamn U-joints blown out.” I looked over at him. “What the fuck you doing with the gears?”

  He continued to shift aimlessly, not meeting my gaze. The radio was getting louder: some kind of big-beat hillbilly song about truck drivers popping little white pills and driving for six days with no sleep. I could just barely hear him when he started talking.

  “I think we came to the motel,” he said. “There’s a man standing there behind the desk, trying to watch us.”

  “Fuck him,” I said. “We’re okay.”

  He shook his head. “Not you.”

  “What?”

  “The next thing is to register,” he said. “We’re here. McGovern headquarters. Manchester, New Hampshire… and that man in there might call the police if we sit out here any longer without doing something.”

  I could see the man staring out at us through the glass doors. “Do we have reservations?” I said finally.

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” said. “Let’s take in the luggage.”

  He twisted around in his seat and began counting out loud, very slowly: “One… Two… Three… Four… Five… Six… and two silver ice-buckets.” Then he shook his head slowly. “No… we can’t take it all at once.”

  “The hell we can’t,” I snapped. “What the fuck do you want to do—leave it in the car?”

  He shrugged.

  “Not mine,” I said. “Not with these U-joints like they are.”

  “Bullshit,” he muttered. “U-joints, sea otters, sand dunes… I think we’re about to get busted; let’s walk in there and tell him we want to register.” He tossed off his seat belt and opened the door. “Let’s each take a suitcase and tell him who we are.”

  “Right,” I said, opening my own door and stepping out. “We got here from Boston with no trouble. Why should we have any now?”

  He was opening up the back, to get the luggage. It was one of those new Volvo station wagons with a hinge on the whole rear end, like a small garage door. I didn’t want to alarm the man inside the motel by moving slowly or erratically, so I planted my left foot firmly on the gravel driveway and moved fast toward the rear of the car.

  WHACK!!! A dull sound in my ear, and pain all over my head. I heard myself screech… then reeling across the gravel and falling into shrubbery, grasping wildly for a handhold, then hitting a wooden wall with a heavy thump… then silence, while I leaned there, holding on to the wall with one hand and my head with the other. I could see Crouse watching me, saying something I couldn’t hear. The right half of my skull felt like it had just been blown off by a bazooka. But I felt no blood or bone splinters, and after forty seconds or so I managed to straighten up.

  “Jesus god!” I said. “What was that?”

  He shook his head. “You just suddenly fell away and started yelling,” he said. “Christ, you took a real crack on the head—but you were coming so fast I couldn’t say anything until…”

  “Was it Mankiewicz?” I asked.

  He hesitated, seeming to think for a moment, then nodded. “I think so,” he said quietly. “But he came out of the darkness so fast, I couldn’t be sure. Jesus, he never even broke stride. He got a full-stoke running shot on you with that big leather sap he carries… then he kept right on going; across the driveway and into those bushes at the end of the building, where the path leads down to the river… over there by the gazebo.”

  I could see the white-domed wooden gazebo out there in the moonlight, squatting peacefully about ten yards offshore in the slow-moving current of the Piscataquog River… but now it seemed very ominous-looking, and big enough inside to conceal a dozen men with saps.

  Was Mankiewicz out there? How long had he been waiting? And how had he known I was coming? It had been a last-minute decision, precipitated by a snarling argument with the night manager of the Ritz-Carleton in Boston. He’d refused to cash a check for me at 2:00 A.M…. but he finally agreed to spring for $10 if I gave the bellboy 10 percent of it for bringing the cash up to the room.

  By that time, the bellboy was so rattled that he forgot to take the check. I had to coax him back down the hall and push it into his hands… and there was no argument when we checked out moments later, after stripping the room of everything we could haul through the lobby in big laundry bags.

  Now, ninety miles away on the outskirts of Manchester, I had to shut one eye in order to focus on Crouse. “Are you sure that was Mankiewicz who hit me?” I asked, trying to look him in the eye.

  He nodded.

  “How did he know I’d be here tonight?” I snapped. “You fingered me, didn’t you?”

  “Hell no!” he replied, “I didn’t even know myself until we had that scene at the Ritz.”

  I thought for a moment, trying to reconstruct the events that had brought us to this place. “Back there in Boston, you were gone for ten minutes!” I said, “When you went out to get your car… yes… you carried those ice buckets out, then you disappeared.” I slammed my fist on the raised rear door of the Volvo. “You had time to call, didn’t you?”

  He was pulling our bags out, trying to ignore me.

  “Who else could have tipped him off?” I shouted.

  He glanced nervously at the man behind the desk inside the office. “Okay,” he said finally. “I might as well admit it… Yeah, I knew Frank was laying for you, so I called him and set it all up.”

  My head was beginning to swell. “Why?” I groaned. “What was in it for you?”

  He shrugged, then reached for another suitcase. “Money,” he said. “Power. He promised me a job in the White House.”

  I nodded, “So you set me up, you bastard.”

  “Why not,” he replied. “I’ve worked with Frank before. We understand each other.” He smiled. “How do you think I got this new Volvo wagon?”

  “From Rolling Stone,” I said. “Hell, they paid for mine.”

  “What?”

  “Sure, we all got them.”

  He stared at me, looking very groggy. “Bullshit,” he muttered. “Let’s get inside before Mankiewicz decides to come back and finish you off.” He nodded toward the gazebo. “I can hear him pacing around out there… and if I know Frank, he’ll want to finish the job.”

  I focused my good eye on the gazebo, a moonlit wooden pillbox out in the river… Then I picked up my bag. “You’re right,” I said. “He’ll make another try. Let’s get inside. I have a can of Mace in that satchel. You think he can handle it?”

  “Handle what?”

  “Mace. Soak the fucker down with it. Put him right to his knees, stone blind, unable to breathe for forty-five minutes.”

  Crouse nodded. “Right, it’ll be a good lesson for him. That arrogant bastard. This’ll teach him to go around cracking responsible journalists in the head.”

  Checking into the Wayfarer was difficult, but not in the way we expected. The man at the desk ignored our twisted condition and sent us off to a wing so far from the main nexus of the hotel that it took us about forty-five minutes to find our rooms… and by then it was almost dawn, so we cranked up the tape machine and got into the Singapore Grey for a while… admiring the appointments and congratulating ourselves on having the wisdom to flee the Ritz-Carleton and move to a decent place like the Wayfarer.

  In the course of this apparently endless campaign I have set up the National Affairs Desk in some of the worst hotels, motels, and other foul commercial lodging establishments in the western world. Politicians, journalists, and traveling salesmen seem to gravitate to these
places—for reasons I’d rather not think about, right now—but the Wayfarer is a rare and constant exception. The one that proves the rule, perhaps… but, for whatever reason, it is one of my favorite places: a rambling, woodsy barracks with big rooms, good food, full ice machines, and… yes… a brief history of pleasant memories.

  The Wayfarer was Gene McCarthy’s headquarters for the New Hampshire primary in 1968; and it was also McGovern’s—unofficially, at least—in the winter of ’72. The recent history of the place suggests that it may be something like the Valley Forge of presidential politics. Or maybe the Wayfarer’s peculiar mystique has to do with the nature of the New Hampshire primary. There is nothing else quite like it: an intensely personal kind of politics that quickly goes out of style when the field starts narrowing down and the survivors move on to other, larger, and far more complex states.

  Which is precisely why both McCarthy and McGovern did so well here. The New Hampshire primary is one of the few situations in presidential politics where the candidates are forced to campaign like human beings, on the same level with the voters. There is no Secret Service presence in New Hampshire, no vast and everpresent staff of hired minions and police escorts… the candidates drive around the state in rented Fords, accompanied by a handful of local workers and press people, and they actually walk into people’s living rooms and try to explain themselves—taking any and all questions face to face, with no screening, and no place to hide when things get nasty.

  It was up in New Hampshire, several weeks before the vote, that I blundered into that now infamous “Mens’ Room Interview” with McGovern. People have been asking me about it ever since—as if it were some kind of weird journalistic coup, a rare and unnatural accomplishment pulled off by what had to have been a super-inventive or at least super-aggressive pervert.

  But in truth in was nothing more than a casual conversation between two people standing at adjoining urinals. I went in there to piss—not to talk to George McGovern—but when I noticed him standing next to me I figured it was only natural to ask him what was happening. If it had been the men’s room at the Los Angeles Coliseum during half time at a Rams-49ers game I would probably have cursed John Brodie for throwing “that last interception”… but since we were standing in Exeter, New Hampshire, about midway through a presidential primary, I cursed Senator Harold Hughes for siding with Muskie instead of the man I was talking to… and if we had just driven through a terrible hailstorm I would probably have cursed the hailstones instead of Hughes.