Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

  One of the platoon leaders smiled faintly and assured McCloskey that they’d never had any intention of attacking the Fontainebleau. They didn’t even want to go in. The only reason they asked was to see if the Republicans would turn them away in front of network TV cameras—which they did, but very few cameras were on hand that afternoon to record it. All the network floor crews were down at the Convention Hall, and the ones who would normally have been on standby alert at the Fontainebleau were out at the airport filming Nixon’s arrival.

  No doubt there were backup crews around somewhere—but I suspect they were up on the roof, using very long lenses; because in those first few moments when the Vets began massing in front of the police line there was no mistaking the potential for real violence… and it was easy enough to see, by scanning the faces behind those clear plastic riot masks, that the cream of the Florida State Highway Patrol had no appetite at all for a public crunch with twelve hundred angry Vietnam Veterans.

  Whatever the outcome, it was a guaranteed nightmare situation for the police. Defeat would be bad enough, but victory would be intolerable. Every TV screen in the nation would show a small army of heavily armed Florida cops clubbing unarmed veterans—some on crutches and others in wheelchairs—whose only crime was trying to enter Republican convention headquarters in Miami Beach. How could Nixon explain a thing like that? Could he slither out from under it?

  Never in hell, I thought—and all it would take to make a thing like that happen, right now, would be for one or two Vets to lose control of themselves and try to crash through the police line; just enough violence to make one cop use his riot stick. The rest would take care of itself.

  Ah, nightmares, nightmares…. Not even Sammy Davis Jr. could stomach that kind of outrage. He would flee the Nixon family compound on Key Biscayne within moments after the first news bulletin, rejecting his newfound soul brother like a suckfish cutting loose from a mortally wounded shark… and the next day’s Washington Post would report that Sammy Davis Jr. had spent most of the previous night trying to ooze through the keyhole of George McGovern’s front door in Washington, D.C.

  Right… but none of this happened. McCloskey’s appearance seemed to soothe both the crowd and the cops. The only violent act of the afternoon occurred moments later when a foul-mouthed twenty-year-old blonde girl named Debby Marshal tried to ram her way through the crowd on a 125 Honda. “Get out of my way!” she kept shouting. “This is ridiculous! These people should go back where they belong!”

  The Vets ignored her, but about halfway through the crowd she ran into a nest of press photographers, and that was as far as she went. An hour later she was still sitting there, biting her lips and whining about how “ridiculous” it all was. I was tempted to lean over and set her hair on fire with my Zippo, but by that time the confrontation had settled down to a series of bullhorn speeches by various Vets. Not much of what was said could be heard more than fifteen feet from the bullhorn, however, because of two Army helicopters that suddenly appeared overhead and filled the whole street with their noise. The only Vet speaker who managed to make himself plainly understood above the chopper noise was an ex-Marine Sergeant from San Diego named Ron Kovic, who spoke from a wheelchair because his legs are permanently paralyzed.

  I would like to have a transcript or at least a tape of what Kovic said that day, because his words lashed the crowd like a wire whip. If Kovic had been allowed to speak from the convention hall podium, in front of network TV cameras, Nixon wouldn’t have had the balls to show up and accept the nomination.

  No… I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Nothing in the realm of human possibility could have prevented Richard Nixon from accepting that nomination. If God himself had showed up in Miami and denounced Nixon from the podium, hired gunsels from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President would have quickly had him arrested for disturbing the peace.

  Fifty years ago

  August 23, 1972. Little is known of this picture except that Mr. Nixon (center) suffered from a power complex, a hatred of humanity, near impotence and finally premature senility which resembled Parkinson’s disease—or an advanced stage of neuro-syphilis caught during his student days—which has hallucinatory effects on the victim giving him a sense of grandeur. The second possibility has been ruled out on the grounds that at the time Mr. Nixon was a student it would have been socially impossible for him to contract the disease except from a lavatory seat. He died senile in an anti-environment bunker near Camp David, seated before a sun-ray lamp in a deckchair wearing only a pair of old style “jackboots.” Miami was subsequently reclaimed in 1982, and became an alligator swamp and tourist attraction during the mid-eighties.

  Vietnam veterans like Ron Kovic are not welcome in Nixon’s White House. They tried to get in last year, but they could only get close enough to throw their war medals over the fence. That was perhaps the most eloquent anti-war statement ever made in this country, and that Silent March on the Fontainebleau on August 22 had the same ugly sting to it.

  There is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group in America today with the psychic leverage of the VVAW. Not even those decadent swine on the foredeck of the Wild Rose can ignore the dues Ron Kovic and his buddies have paid. They are golems, come back to haunt us all—even Richard Nixon, who campaigned for the presidency in 1968 with a promise that he had “a secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.

  Which was true, as it turns out. The plan was to end the war just in time to get himself re-elected in 1972. Four more years.

  September

  Fat City Blues… Fear and Loathing on the White House Press Plane… Bad Angst at McGovern Headquarters… Nixon Tightens the Screws… “Many Appeared to Be in the Terminal Stages of Campaign Bloat”…

  Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

  —Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877

  If George McGovern had a speech writer half as eloquent as Sitting Bull, he would be home free today—instead of twenty-two points behind and racing around the country with both feet in his mouth. The Powder River Conference ended ninety-five years ago, but the old Chief’s baleful analysis of the White Man’s rape of the American continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came back from the dead and said it for the microphones on prime-time TV. The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time—and the only real difference now, with Election Day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.

  Sitting Bull made no distinction between Democrats and Republicans—which was probably just as well, in 1877 or any other year—but it’s also true that Sitting Bull never knew the degradation of traveling on Richard Nixon’s press plane; he never had the bilious pleasure of dealing with Ron Ziegler, and he never met John Mitchell, Nixon’s king fixer.

  If the old Sioux Chief had ever done these things, I think—despite his angry contempt for the White Man and everything he stands for—he’d be working overtime for George McGovern today.

  These past two weeks have been relatively calm ones for me. Immediately after the Republican Convention in Miami, I dragged myself back to the Rockies and tried to forget about politics for a while—just lie naked on the porch in the cool afternoon sun and watch the aspen trees turning gold on the hills around my house; mix up a huge canister of gin and grapefruit juice, watch the horses nuzzling each other in the pasture across the road, big logs in the fireplace at night; Herbie Mann, John Prine, and Jesse Colin Young booming out of the speakers… zip off every once in a while for a fast run into town
along a back road above the river; to the health-center gym for some volleyball, then over to Benton’s gallery to get caught up on whatever treacheries the local greedheads rammed through while I was gone, watch the late TV news and curse McGovern for poking another hole in his own boat, then stop by the Jerome on the way out of town for a midnight beer with Solheim.

  After two weeks on that peaceful human schedule, the last thing I wanted to think about was the grim, inescapable spectre of two more frenzied months on the campaign trail. Especially when it meant coming back here to Washington, to start laying the groundwork for a long and painful autopsy job on the McGovern campaign. What went wrong? Why had it failed? Who was to blame? And, finally, what next?

  That was one project. The other was to somehow pass through the fine eye of the White House security camel and go out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, to watch him waltz in—if only to get the drift of his thinking, to watch the moves, his eyes. It is a nervous thing to consider: Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon’s last four years in politics—completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around.

  If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants… or maybe “wants” is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered “political prisoners” and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four A.M.

  There is no point in kidding ourselves about what Richard Nixon really wants for America. When he stands at his White House window and looks out on an anti-war demonstration, he doesn’t see “dissenters,” he sees criminals. Dangerous parasites, preparing to strike at the heart of the Great American System that put him where he is today.

  There may not be much difference between Democrats and Republicans; I have made that argument myself—with considerable venom, as I recall—over the past ten months…. But only a blind geek or a waterhead could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon. Granted, they are both white men; and both are politicians—but the similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so vast that anybody who can’t see it deserves whatever happens to them if Nixon gets re-elected due to apathy, stupidity, and laziness on the part of potential McGovern voters.

  The tragedy of this campaign is that McGovern and his staff wizards have not been able to dramatize what is really at stake on November 7th. We are not looking at just another dim rerun of the ’68 Nixon/Humphrey trip, or the LBJ/Goldwater fiasco in ’64. Those were both useless drills. I voted for Dick Gregory in ’68, and for “No” in ’64… but this one is different, and since McGovern is so goddamn maddeningly inept with the kind of words he needs to make people understand what he’s up to, it will save a lot of time here—and strain on my own weary head—to remember Bobby Kennedy’s ultimate characterization of Richard Nixon, in a speech at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 1968, not long before he was murdered.

  “Richard Nixon,” he said, “represents the dark side of the American spirit.”

  I don’t remember what else he said that day. I guess I could look it up in the New York Times speech morgue, but why bother? That one line says it all.

  Anybody who doubts it should go out and catch The President’s act the next time he swoops into the local airport. Watch the big silver-and-blue custom-built 707 come booming down the runway and roll up in front of the small but well-disciplined crowd of Nixon Youth cheerleaders singing the “Nixon Now” song, waving their freshly printed red-white-and-blue RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT signs and then pausing, in perfect spontaneous unison, before intimidating every TV crew on the runway with the stylish “Four More Years!” chant.

  Watch The President emerge from the belly of the plane, holding hands with the aging Barbie doll he calls his wife, and ooze down the rolling VIP stairway while the 105th Division Rolling Thunder Women & Children Classic Napalm U.S. Army Parade Band whips the crowd higher and higher with a big-beat rendition of “God Save the Freaks.”

  See the Generals strut down from the plane behind The President. Take a long look at the grinning “local dignitaries” who are ushered out, by armed guards, to greet him. See the White House press corps over there about two hundred yards away, herded into that small corral behind heavy ropes stretched around red-white-and-blue painted oil drums. Why are they smiling?

  I went out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon last week… Right: After seven straight days of savage in-fighting with the White House press office, the bastards finally caved in and let me join up, if only for a few days, with the Presidential Press Corps.

  Cazart! Vindication! When the magic words of approval finally zipped across the phone line from the White House to my room on the top floor of the Washington Hilton, my brain went limp with pride. “We’ll leave from Andrews Air Force Base,” said the hard baritone voice of deputy press secretary Gerald Warren. “I don’t have the final schedule yet, but if you call me before noon tomorrow I’ll tell you exactly when to be there with your bags.”

  Indeed. My bags. No doubt they would be searched thoroughly, prior to boarding, by extremely sophisticated electronic machinery and a brace of super-sharp Secret Service agents. When you travel on the Presidential Press Plane, boy, you do it OUR way.

  HANK LEBO

  Of course. I was ready for it: A total skin-search, if necessary, and perhaps even a lie-detector: Do you have any violent thoughts regarding the President?

  Violent? Certainly not. We’re old football buddies.

  Football buddies?

  Right. Richard and I go way back. I was with him long ago, in the snows of New Hampshire. Things were different then, fella. Where were you in the winter of ’68?

  I was ready for all the standard-brand Secret Service bullshit. The only thing that worried me was that maybe some of the SS boys might have seen the current Rolling Stone—which was available that week at newsstands all over Washington. It contained, along with my calm and well-reasoned analysis of the recent GOP convention in Miami, some of the most brutal and hateful caricatures of Richard Nixon ever committed to print, in this country or any other.

  That crazy bastard Steadman! Why is it that it’s always your friends who cause you to be screwed to the wall? What do you say when you go across town to the White House to apply for press credentials to cover the Nixon campaign as the National Affairs Editor of Rolling Stone and the first thing you see when you walk through the door of the press office is one of Steadman’s unconscionably obscene Nixon/Agnew drawings tacked up on the bulletin board with a big red circle around Ralph’s name?

  Well… ah… yes. Ho ho, eh? My name is… ah… Thompson, from Rolling Stone, and I’m here to pick up my credentials to fly around the country with President Nixon on Air Force One for the next month or so.

  Cold stare from the man at the desk. No handshake offered.

  “Well… Ho ho, eh? I can’t help but notice you’ve been admiring the work of my friend Ralph Steadman. Ho ho, he sure has an eye for it, eh? Sure does. Good ole Ralph.” Sad smile and shrug of the shoulders. “Crazy as a loon, of course. Terminal brain syphilis.” Keep smiling, another shrug. “Jesus, what can you do, eh? These goddamn vicious limeys will do anything for money. He was paid well for these rotten drawings. My protests were totally ignored. It’s a fucking shame, I say. What the hell is the world coming to when the goddamn British can get away with stuff like this?”

  * * *

  Nixon has never made any secret of his feelings about the press. They are still the same gang of “biased bastards” and “cynical sons of bitches” that he called them, backstage, on election day in California ten years ago when he made his now-legendary concession statement after losing the 1962 governor’s race to Pat Brown. His aides tried to restrain him, but Nixon would have none of it. Trembling with rage, he confronted a hotel ballroom full of political reporters and snarled: “This is my
last press conference! You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore!”

  He failed to honor that pledge, but the anger that caused him to utter it still burns in his breast. He rarely holds press conferences, and his personal relationship with the working press is almost nonexistent. In the White House and on the road, he “communicates” with the press corps through his mouthpiece, press secretary Ron Ziegler—an arrogant thirty-three-year-old punk who trained for his current job by working as a PR man for Disneyland, and who treats the White House press corps like a gang of troublesome winos who will only be tolerated as long as they keep out of the boss’s hair.

  The few reporters who switched off the McGovern campaign to travel with Nixon on this last trip to California were shocked by what they found. The difference between traveling with McGovern and traveling with Nixon is just about like the difference between going on tour with the Grateful Dead & going on tour with the Pope.

  My first experience with it came shortly after Nixon’s arrival in Oakland. After nervously pressing the flesh with some of the several hundred well-drilled young “supporters” who’d been rounded up to greet him for the TV cameras, Nixon was hustled off in a huge black bulletproof Cadillac for a brief appearance at one of the Bay Area’s new rapid-transit stations. The three big press buses followed, taking a different route, and when we arrived at the BART station we were hauled down by freight elevator to a narrow hallway outside a glass-walled control room.

  Moments later Nixon emerged from a nearby subway tunnel, waved briefly at the crowd, and was ushered into the control room with a dozen or so local Republican dignitaries. Two certified harmless photographers were allowed inside to take pictures of The President shaking hands and making small talk with the engineers. His pithy remarks were broadcast out to the press mob in the hallway by means of loudspeakers.