Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

  There is not much room for politics in the Amnesty argument. It boils down to an official admission that the American Military Establishment—acting in spiritual concert with the White House and the national Business Community—was Wrong.

  Almost everybody except Joe Alsop has already admitted this, in private… but it is going to be a very painful thing to say in public.

  It will be especially painful to the people who got their sons shipped back to them in rubber sacks, and to the thousands of young Vets who got their arms and their legs and balls blown off for what the White House and Ed Muskie now admit was “a mistake.”

  But 60,000 Americans have died for that “mistake,” along with several million Vietnamese… and it is only now becoming clear that the “war dead” will also include hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais. When this war goes into the history books, the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.

  Richard Nixon is flatly opposed to a general amnesty for the men who refused to fight this tragic war. Muskie agrees, but he says he might change his mind once the war ends… and Lindsay, as usual, is both for and against it.

  The only “candidates” in favor of Amnesty are McGovern and Ted Kennedy. I watched McGovern deal with the question when it popped out of that overflow student audience at Keene State. He was talking very sharp, very confident, and when the question of Amnesty came up, he got right on it, saying “Yes, I’m in favor…”

  This provoked a nice outburst of cheers and applause. It was a very strong statement, and the students clearly dug it.

  Then, moments later, somebody tossed out the fishhook—asking McGovern if he had any plans, pro or con, about supporting Muskie, if Big Ed got the nod in Miami.

  McGovern paused, shifted uneasily for a second or so at the podium, then said: “Yes, I’m inclined to that position.” I was standing behind him on the stage, looking out at the crowd through a slit in the big velvet curtain, and according to the red-inked speed-scrawl in my notebook, the audience responded with… “No cheering, confused silence, the audience seems to sag….”

  But these were only my notes. Perhaps I was wrong—but even making a certain allowance for my own bias, it still seems perfectly logical to assume that an audience of first-time voters might be at least momentarily confused by a Left/Champion Democratic candidate who says in one breath that his opponent is dead wrong on a very crucial issue… and then in the next breath says he plans to support that opponent if he wins the nomination.

  I doubt if I was the only person in the hall, at that moment, who thought: “Well, shit… if you plan to support him in July, why not support him now, and get it over with?”

  Moments later, the speech ended and I found myself out on the sidewalk shooting up with Ray Morgan, a veteran political analyst from the Kansas City Star. He was on his way to the airport, with McGovern, for a quick flight on the charter plane to Washington, and he urged me to join him.

  But I didn’t feel up to it. I felt like thinking for a while, running that narrow, icy, little highway back to Manchester just as fast as the Cougar would make it and still hold the road—which was not very fast, so I had plenty of time to brood, and to wonder why I felt so depressed.

  I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip—which was, after all, a longshot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than 30 to 1.

  What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn’t get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more—or maybe something different.

  Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?

  Well… that would take a lot of time and space I don’t have now, but for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been “against the War in Vietnam since 1963”—especially when your name is not one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and when you’re talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early ’65.

  A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned—but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.

  This is an ugly portent for the 25 million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five who may or may not vote in 1972. And many of them probably will vote. The ones who go to the polls in ’72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the “best minds of my generation,” as Allen Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in “Howl.” There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the “Youth Vote” will get a lot of people out to the polls in ’72. If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.

  But what about next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should “try again” for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations—between the ages of twenty-two and forty—who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson/Goldwater to Humphrey/Nixon to Nixon/Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.

  This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto “Live Free or Die” inscribed above the numbers.

  The highways are full of good mottos. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about… what was it? Have these Dangerous Drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this:

  “Between the Idea and the Reality… Falls the Shadow.”

  The Shadow? I could almost smell the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night, and tomorrow’s schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida—except for Sam Yorty, and I didn’t feel ready for that.

  The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhiker I saw was an eighteen-year-old kid with long black hair who was going to Reading—or “Redding,” as he said it—but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in the election he looked at me like I’d said something crazy.

  Mad Sam and wife touring New Hampshire on the Yortymobile. MICHAEL DOBO

  “What election?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I was only kidding.”

  One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than a year, now—a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked, but not well-Liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.

  A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase—to the “White side” of Rock Creek Park—to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small, loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slumped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to “the McGovern problem.”

  For more than a year now, he’s been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963; he’s for Amnesty Now; his alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5,000,000,000 Space Shuttle program, thereby croaking th
ousands of new jobs in the already depressed Cape Kennedy/Central Florida area.

  He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon/Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument by midsummer—one of those wild-eyed fire and brimstone issues that scares the piss out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it… but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it’s desirable, but because it’s “among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.”

  This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year—especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando… or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the federal government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of Niggers.

  McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.

  On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted—along with McGovern and most of his backers—that “American politics” is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and The Loyal Opposition.

  That’s the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry O’Brien has decided to go with this year—and he says he can’t for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren’t bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.

  MESSAGE TO O’BRIEN

  Well, Larry… I really hate to lay this on you… because we used to be buddies, right? That was back in the days when I bought all those white sharkskin suits because I thought I was going to be the next Governor of American Samoa.

  You strung me along, Larry; you conned me into buying all those goddamn white suits and kept me hanging around that Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, waiting for my confirmation to come through… but it never did, Larry; I was never appointed. You bushwhacked me.

  But what the hell? I’ve never been one to hold a grudge any longer than absolutely necessary… and I wouldn’t want you to think I’d hold that kind of cheap treachery against you, now that you’re running the party: The Loyal Opposition, as it were….

  You and Hubert, along with Muskie and Jackson. And Mad Sam Yorty, and Wilbur Mills—and, yes, even Lindsay and McGovern. Party loyalty is the name of the game, right? George Meany, Frank Rizzo, Mayor Daley….

  Well, shucks. What can I say, Larry? I’m still for that gig in Samoa; or anywhere else where the sun shines… because I still have those stinking white suits, and I’m beginning to think seriously in terms of foreign travel around the end of this year. Maybe November….

  Under different circumstances, Larry, I might try to press you on this: maybe lean on you just a trifle for an appointment to the Drugs and Politics desk at our outpost in the Canary Islands. My friend Cardozo, the retired Dean of Gonzo Journalism, just bought a jazz bar out there and he says it’s a very weird place.

  But shit, Larry; why kid ourselves? You’re not going to be in a position to appoint anybody to anything when November comes down on us. You won’t even have a job; or if you do it’ll be one of those gigs where you’ll have to get your half-salary in gold bullion… because the way it looks now, the Democratic Party won’t be issuing a hell of a lot of certified checks after November Seventh.

  Remember the Whigs, Larry? They went belly up, with no warning at all, when a handful of young politicians like Abe Lincoln decided to move out on their own, and fuck the Whigs… which worked out very nicely, and when it became almost instantly clear that the Whig hierarchy was just a gang of old impotent windbags with no real power at all, the Party just curled up and died… and any politician stupid enough to “stay loyal” went down with the ship.

  This is the soft underbelly of the “McGovern problem.” He is really just another good Democrat, and the only thing that sets him apart from the others is a hard, almost masochistic kind of honesty that drives him around the country, running up huge bills and turning people off.

  We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway… and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering—to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish—just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said.

  I spent about two weeks brooding on this, because I like McGovern—which still surprises me, because politicians, like journalists, are pretty hard people to like. The only other group I’ve ever dealt with who struck me as being essentially meaner than politicians are tight ends in pro football.

  There is not much difference in basic temperament between a good tight end and a successful politician. They will both go down in the pit and do whatever has to be done—then come up smiling, and occasionally licking blood off their teeth.

  Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb was not a tight end, but he had the same instincts. The Baltimore Colts paid Gene to mash quarterbacks—and, failing that, to crack collarbones and make people deaf.

  Shortly before he OD’d on smack, Big Daddy explained his technique to a lunchtime crowd of Rotarians. “I always go straight for the head,” he explained. “Whoever’s across from me, I bash him with the flat part of my hand—nail him square on the ear-hole of his helmet about five straight times. Pretty soon he gets so nervous he can’t concentrate. He can’t even hear the signals. Once I get him spooked, the rest is easy.”

  There is a powerful fascination that attaches to this kind of efficiency—and it is worth remembering that Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic nomination not by appealing to the higher and finer consciousness of the delegates, but by laying the stomp & the whipsong on Adlai Stevenson’s people when the deal went down in Los Angeles. The “Kennedy machine” was so good that even Mayor Daley came around. A good politician can smell the hammer coming down like an old sailor smells a squall behind the sun.

  But Daley is not acting, this year, like a man who smells the hammer. When George McGovern went to pay a “courtesy call” on Daley last month, the Mayor’s advice was, “Go out and win an election—then come back and see me.”

  McGovern and his earnest liberal advisors don’t like to talk about that visit; no more than Muskie and his people enjoy talking about Big Ed’s “courtesy call” on Supercop Frank Rizzo, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.

  But these are the men with the muscle; they can swing a lot of votes. Or at least that’s what the Conventional Wisdom says. Daley, Rizzo, George Meany; the good ole boys, the kingmakers.

  And there is the flaw in McGovern. When the big whistle blows, he’s still a Party Man. Ten years ago the electorate saw nothing wrong with the spectacle of two men fighting savagely for the Party nomination—calling each other “whores” and “traitors” and “thieves” all the way up to balloting time at the convention—and then miraculously Coming Together, letting bygones be bygones, to confront the common foe: The Other Party.

  But the electorate has different tastes now, and that kind of honkytonk bullshit doesn’t make it anymore. Back in 1960 most Americans still believed that whoever lived in the White House was naturally a righteous and upstanding man. Otherwise he wouldn’t be there….

  This was after twenty-eight years of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who were very close to God. Harry Truman, who had lived a little closer to the Devil, was viewed more as an accident than a Real Presiden
t.2

  The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas—when some twisted little geek blew the President’s head off… and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the “Peace Candidate.”

  Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of “government.”

  And then came ’68, the year that somehow managed to confirm almost everybody’s worst fears about the future of the Republic… and then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House. If Joe McGinnis had written The Selling of the President about good old Ike, he’d have been chased through the streets of New York by angry mobs. But when he wrote it about Nixon, people just shrugged and said, “Yeah it’s a goddamn shame, even if it’s true, but so what?”

  I went to Nixon’s Inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corps… and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting “Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!”

  George tried to ignore it. He knew the TV cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd—even as they continued to chant “Romney eats shit!”

  The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn’t walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President’s car passed by.