Mankiewicz was not satisfied. "Who was there?" he asked. "Some of our people? Who was it?"
"Nobody you'd know," I said. "But what about this Humphrey story? What can you tell me about it?"
"Nothing," he said, glancing over his shoulder at a burst of yelling from the press room. Then: "When's your next issue coming out?"
"Thursday."
"Before the election?"
"Yeah, and so far I don't have anything worth a shit to write about -- but this thing sounds interesting."
He nodded, staring down at the floor again, then shook his head. "Listen," he said. "You could cause a lot of trouble for us by printing a thing like that. They'd know where it came from, and they'd jerk our man right out."
"What man?"
He stared at me, smiling faintly.
At this point the story becomes very slippery, with many loose ends and dark shadows -- but the nut was very simple: I had blundered almost completely by accident on a flat-out byzantine spook story. There was nothing timely or particularly newsworthy about it, but when your deadline is every two weeks you don't tend to worry about things like scoops and newsbreaks. If Mankiewicz had broken down and admitted to me that night that he was actually a Red Chinese agent and that McGovern had no pulse, I wouldn't have known how to handle it -- and the tension of trying to keep that kind of heinous news to myself for the next four days until Rolling Stone went to press would almost certainly have caused me to lock myself in my hotel room with eight quarts of Wild Turkey and all the Ibogaine I could get my hands on.
So this strange tale about Humphrey & Vegas was not especially newsworthy, by my standards. Its only real value, in fact, was the rare flash of contrast it provided to the insane tedium of the surface campaign. Important or not, this was something very different: midnight flights to Vegas, mob money funneled in from casinos to pay for Hubert's TV spots; spies, runners, counterspies; cryptic phone calls from airport phone booths. . . Indeed; the dark underbelly of big-time politics. A useless story, no doubt, but it sure beat the hell out of getting back on that goddamn press bus and being hauled out to some shopping center in Gardena and watching McGovern shake hands for two hours with lumpy housewives.
Unfortunately, all I really knew about what I called U-13 story was the general outline and just enough key points to convince Mankiewicz that I might be irresponsible enough to go ahead and try to write the thing anyway. All I knew -- or thought I knew -- at that point was that somebody very close to the top of the Humphrey campaign had made secret arrangements for a night flight to Vegas in order to pick up a large bundle of money from unidentified persons presumed to be sinister, and that this money would be used by Humphrey's managers to finance another one of Hubert's eleventh-hour fast-finish blitzkriegs.
Even then, a week before the vote, he was thought to be running ten points and maybe more behind McGovern -- and since the average daily media expenditure for each candidate in the California primary was roughly $30,000 a day, Humphrey would need at least twice that amount to pay for the orgy of exposure he would need to overcome a ten-point lead. No less than a quick $500,000.
The people in Vegas were apparently willing to spring for it, because the plane was already chartered and ready to go when McGovern's headquarters got word of the flight from their executive-level spy in the Humphrey campaign. His identity remains a mystery -- in the public prints, at least -- but the handful of people aware of him say he performed invaluable services for many months.
His function in the U-13 gig was merely to call McGovern headquarters and tell them about the Vegas plane. At this point, my second- or third-hand source was not sure what happened next. According to the story, two McGovern operatives were instantly dispatched to keep around-the-clock watch on the plane for the next seventy-two hours, and somebody from McGovern headquarters called Humphrey and warned him that they knew what he was up to.
In any case, the plane never took off and there was no evidence in the last week of the campaign to suggest that Hubert got a last-minute influx of money, from Vegas or anywhere else.
This is as much of the U-13 story as I could piece together without help from somebody who knew the details -- and Mankiewicz finally agreed, insisting the whole time that he knew nothing about the story except that he didn't want to see it in print before election day, that if I wanted to hold off until the next issue he would put me in touch with somebody who would tell me the whole story for good or ill.
"Call Miles Rubin," he said, "and tell him I told you to ask him about this. He'll fill you in."
That was fine, I said. I was in no special hurry for the story, anyway. So I let it ride for a few days, missing my deadline for that issue. . . and on Wednesday I began trying to get hold of Miles Rubin, one of McGovern's top managers for California. All I knew about Rubin before I called was that several days earlier he had thrown Washington Post correspondent David Broder out of his office for asking too many questions - less than twenty-four hours before Broder appeared on Rubin's TV screen as one of the three interrogators on the first Humphrey/McGovern debate.
My own experience with Rubin turned out to be just about par for the course. I finally got through to him by telephone on Friday, and explained that Mankiewicz had told me to call him and find out the details of the U-13 story. I started to say we could meet for a beer or two sometime later that afternoon and he could --
"Are you kidding?" he cut in. "That's one story you're never going to hear."
"What?"
"There's no point even talking about it," he said flatly. Then he launched into a three-minute spiel about the fantastic honesty and integrity that characterized the McGovern campaign from top to bottom, and why was it that people like me didn't spend more time writing about The Truth and The Decency and The Integrity, instead of picking around the edge for minor things that weren't important anyway?
"Jesus Christ!" I muttered. Why argue? Getting anything but pompous bullshit and gibberish out of Rubin would be like trying to steal meat from a hammerhead shark.
"Thanks," I said, and hung up.
That night I found Mankiewicz in the press room and told him what had happened.
He couldn't understand it, he said. But he would talk to Miles tomorrow and straighten it out.
I was not optimistic; and by that time I was beginning to agree that the U-13 story was not worth the effort. The Big Story in California, after all, was that McGovern was on the brink of locking up a first-ballot nomination in Miami -- and that Hubert Humphrey was about to get stomped so badly at the polls that he might have to be carried out of the state in a rubber sack.
The next time I saw Mankiewicz was on the night before the election and he seemed very tense, very strong into the gjla monster trip. . . and when I started to ask him about Rubin he began ridiculing the story in a VERY LOUD VOICE, so I figured it was time to forget it.
Several days later I learned the reason for Frank's bad nerves that night. McGovern's fat lead over Humphrey, which had hovered between 14 and 20 percentage points for more than a week, had gone into a sudden and apparently uncontrollable dive in the final days of the campaign. By election eve it had shrunk to five points, and perhaps even less.
The shrinkage crisis was a closely guarded secret among McGovern's top command. Any leak to the press could have led to disastrous headlines on Tuesday morning: Election Day. . . MCGOVERN FALTERS; HUMPHREY CLOSING GAP. . . a headline like that in either the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle might have thrown the election to Humphrey by generating a last minute Sympathy/Underdog turnout and whipping Hubert's field workers into a frenzied "get out the vote" effort.
But the grim word never leaked, and by noon on Tuesday an almost visible wave of relief rolled through the McGovern camp. The dike would hold, they felt, at roughly five percent.
The coolest man in the whole McGovern entourage on Tuesday was George McGovern himself -- who had spent all day Monday on airplanes, raci
ng from one critical situation to another. On Monday morning he flew down to San Diego for a major rally; then to New Mexico for another final-hour rally on the eve of the New Mexico primary (which he won the next day -- along with New Jersey and South Dakota). . . and finally on Monday night to Houston for a brief, unscheduled appearance at the National Governors' Conference, which was rumored to be brewing up a "stop McGovern" movement.
After defusing the crisis in Houston he got a few hours' sleep before racing back to Los Angeles to deal with another emergency: His 22-year-old daughter was having a premature baby and first reports from the hospital hinted at serious complications.
But by noon the crisis had passed, and somewhere sometime around one he arrived with his praetorian guard of eight Secret Service agents at Max Palevksy's house in Bel Air, where he immediately changed into swimming trunks and dove into the pool. The day was grey and cool, no hint of sun, and none of the other guests seemed to feel like swimming.
For a variety of tangled reasons -- primarily because my wife was one of the guests in the house that weekend -- I was there when McGovern arrived. So we talked for a while, mainly about the possibility of either Muskie or Humphrey dropping out of the race and joining forces with George if the price was right. . . and it occurred to me afterward that it was the first time he'd ever seen me without a beer can in my hand or babbling like a loon about Freak Power, election bets, or some other twisted subject. . . but he was kind enough not to mention this.
It was a very relaxed afternoon. The only tense moment occurred when I noticed a sort of narrow-looking man with a distinctly predatory appearance standing off by himself and glowering down at the white telephone as if he planned to jerk it out by the root if it didn't ring within ten seconds and tell him everything he wanted to know.
"Who the hell is that?" I asked, pointing across the pool at him.
"That's Miles Rubin," somebody replied.
"Jesus," I said. "I should have guessed."
Moments later my curiosity got the better of me and I walked over to Rubin and introduced myself. "I understand they're going to put you in charge of press relations after Miami," I said as we shook hands.
He said something I didn't understand, then hurried away. For a moment I was tempted to call him back and ask if I could feel his pulse. But the moment passed and I jumped into the pool, instead.*
* Later in the campaign, when Rubin and I became reasonably good friends, he told me that the true story of the "U-13" was essentially the same as the version I'd pieced together in California. The only thing I didn't know, he said, was that Humphrey eventually got the money anyway. For some reason, the story as I originally wrote it was almost universally dismissed as "just another one of Thompson's Mankiewicz fables."
The rest of the day disintegrated into chaos, drunkenness, and the kind of hysterical fatigue that comes from spending too much time racing from one place to another and being shoved around in crowds. McGovern won the Democratic primary by exactly five percent -- 45 to 40 -- and Nixon came from behind in the GOP race to nip Ashbrook by 87 to 13.
She was gonna be an actress and I was gonna learn to fly
She took off to find the footlights and I took off to find the sky
-- Taxi by Harry Chapin
George McGovern's queer idea that he could get himself elected President on the Democratic ticket by dancing a muted whipsong on the corpse of the Democratic Party is suddenly beginning to look very sane, and very possible. For the last five or six days in California, McGovern's campaign was covered from dawn to midnight by fifteen or twenty camera crews, seventy-five to a hundred still photographers, and anywhere from fifty to two hundred linear/writing press types.
The media crowd descended on McGovern like a swarm of wild bees, and there was not one of them who doubted that he/she was covering The Winner. The sense of impending victory around the pool at the Wilshire Hyatt House was as sharp and all-pervasive as the gloom and desperation in Hubert Humphrey's national staff headquarters about ten miles west at the far more chick and fashionable Beverly Hilton.
In the McGovern press suite the big-time reporters were playing stud poker -- six or eight of them, hunkered down in their shirt-sleeves and loose ties around a long white-cloth-covered table with a pile of dollar bills in the middle and the bar about three feet behind Tom Wicker's chair at the far end. At the other end of the room, to Wicker's left, there were three more long white tables, with four identical big typewriters on each one and a pile of white legal-size paper stacked neatly beside each typewriter. At the other end of the room, to Wicker's right, was a comfortable couch and a giant floor-model 24-inch Motorola color TV set. . . the screen was so large that Dick Cavett's head looked almost as big as Wicker's, but the sound was turned off and nobody at the poker table was watching the TV set anyway. Mort Sahl was dominating the screen with a seemingly endless, borderline-hysteria monologue about a bunch of politicians he didn't have much use for -- (Muskie, Humphrey, McGovern) -- and two others (Shirley Chisholm and former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison) that he liked.
I knew this, because I had just come up the outside stairway from my room one floor below to get some typing paper, and I'd been watching the Cavett show on my own 21-inch Motorola color TV.
I paused at the door for a moment, then edged around to the poker table towards the nearest stack of paper. "Ah, decadence, decadence. . ." I muttered. "Sooner or later it was bound to come to this."
Kirby Jones looked up and grinned. "What are you bitching about this time, Hunter? Why are you always bitching?"
"Never mind that," I said. "You owe me $20 & I want it now."
"What?" he looked shocked. "Twenty dollars for what?"
I nodded solemnly. "I knew you'd try to welsh. Don't tell me you don't remember that bet."
"What bet?"
"The one we made on the train in Nebraska," I said. "You said Wallace wouldn't get more than 300 delegates. . . But he already has 317, and I want that $20."
He shook his head. "Who says he has that many? You've been reading the New York Times again." He chuckled and glanced at Wicker, who was dealing. "Let's wait until the convention, Hunter, things might be different then."
"You pig," I muttered, easing toward the door with my paper. "I've been hearing a lot about how the McGovern campaign is finally turning dishonest, but I didn't believe it until now."
He laughed and turned his attention back to the game. "All bets are payable in Miami, Hunter. That's when we'll count the marbles."
I shook my head sadly and left the room. Jesus, I thought, these bastards are getting out of hand. Here we were still a week away from D-day in California, and the McGovern press suite was already beginning to look like some kind of Jefferson-Jackson Day stag dinner. I glanced back at the crowd around the table and realized that not one of them had been in New Hampshire. This was a totally different crowd, for good or ill. Looking back on the first few weeks of the New Hampshire campaign, it seemed so different from what was happening in California that it was hard to adjust to the idea that it was still the same campaign. The difference between a sleek front-runner's act in Los Angeles and the spartan, almost skeletal machinery of an underdog operation in Manchester was almost more than the mind could deal with all at once.*
* California was the first primary where the McGovern campaign was obviously well-financed. In Wisconsin, where McGovern's money men had told him privately that they would withdraw their support if he didn't finish first or a very close second, the press had to pay fifty cents a beer in the hospitality suite.
Four months ago on a frozen grey afternoon in New Hampshire the McGovern "press bus" rolled into the empty parking lot of a motel on the outskirts of Portsmouth. It was 3:30 or so, and we had an hour or so to kill before the Senator would arrive by air from Washington and lead us downtown for a hand-shaking gig at the Booth fishworks.
The bar was closed, but one of McGovern's advance men had arranged a sort of bee
r/booze and sandwich meat smorgasbord for the press in a lounge just off the lobby. . . so all six of us climbed out of the bus, which was actually an old three-seater airport limousine, and I went inside to kill time.
Of the six passengers in the "press bus," three were local McGovern volunteers. The other three were Ham Davis from the Providence Journal, Tim Crouse from the Rolling Stone Boston Bureau, and me. Two more media/press people were already inside: Don Bruckner from the Los Angeles Times, and Michelle Clark from CBS.*
* The New Hampshire primary was Michelle's first assignment in national politics. "I don't have the vaguest idea what I'm doing," she told me. "I think they're just letting me get my feet wet." Three months later, when McGovern miraculously emerged as the front-runner, Michelle was still covering him. By that time her star was rising almost as fast as McGovern's. At the Democratic Convention in Miami, Walter Cronkite announced on the air that she had just been officially named "correspondent." On December 8, 1972, Michelle Clark died in a plane crash at Midway Airport in Chicago -- the same plane crash that killed the wife of Watergate defendant Howard Hunt.
There was also Dick Dougherty, who has just quit his job as chief of the L.A. Times New York bureau to become George McGovern's press secretary, speechwriter, main fixer, advance man, and all-purpose traveling wizard. Dougherty and Bruckner were sitting off by themselves at a corner table when the rest of us straggled into the lounge and filled our plates at the smorgasbord table: olives, carrots, celery stalks, salami, deviled eggs. . . but when I asked for beer, the middle-aged waitress who was also the desk clerk said beer "wasn't included" in "the arrangements," and that if I wanted any I would have to pay cash for it.