The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  If your price is a lifetime appointment as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court, your only hope is to deal with a candidate who is so close to that magic 1509 figure that he can no longer function in public because of uncontrollable drooling. If he is stuck around 1400 you will probably not have much luck getting that bench appointment. . . but if he's already up to 1499 he won't hesitate to offer you the first opening on the U.S. Supreme Court. . . and if you catch him peaked at 1505 or so, you can squeeze him for almost anything you want.

  The game will get heavy sometimes. You don't want to go around putting the squeeze on people unless you're absolutely clean. No skeletons in the closet: no secret vices. . . because if your vote is important and your price is high, the Fixer-Man will have already checked you out by the time he offers to buy you a drink. If you bribed a traffic-court clerk two years ago to bury a drunk driving charge, the Fixer might suddenly confront you with a photostat of the citation you thought had been burned.

  When that happens, you're fucked. Your price just went down to zero, and you are no longer an Uncommitted delegate.

  There are several other versions of the Reverse-Squeeze: the fake hit-and-run; glassine bags found in your hotel room by a maid; grabbed off the street by phony cops for statutory rape of a teenage girl you never saw before. . .

  Every once in a while you might hit on something with real style, like this one: On Monday afternoon, the first day of the convention, you -- the ambitious young lawyer from St. Louis with no skeletons in the closet and no secret vices worth worrying about -- are spending the afternoon by the pool at the Playboy Plaza, soaking up sun and gin/tonics when you hear somebody calling your name. You look up and see a smiling, rotund chap about thirty-five years old coming at you, ready to shake hands.

  "Hi there, Virgil," he says. "My name's J. D. Squane. I work for Senator Bilbo and we'd sure like to count on your vote. How about it?"

  You smile, but say nothing -- waiting for Squane to continue. He will want to know your price.

  But Squane is staring out to sea, squinting at something on the horizon. . . then he suddenly turns back to you and starts talking very fast about how he always wanted to be a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, but politics got in the way. . . "And now, goddamnit, we must get these last few votes. . ."

  You smile again, itching to get serious. But Squane suddenly yells at somebody across the pool, then turns back to you and says: "Jesus, Virgil, I'm really sorry about that, but I have to run. That guy over there is delivering my new Jensen Interceptor." He grins and extends his hand again. Then: "Say, maybe we can talk later on, eh? What room are you in?"

  "1909."

  He nods. "How about seven, for dinner? Are you free?"

  "Sure."

  "Wonderful," he replies. "We can take my new Jensen for a run up to Palm Beach. . . It's one of my favorite towns."

  "Mine too," you say. "I've heard a lot about it."

  He nods. "I spent some time there last February. . . but we had a bad act, dropped about twenty-five grand."

  Jesus! Jensen Interceptor; twenty-five grand. . . Squane is definitely big-time.

  "See you at seven," he says, moving away. ""

  The knock comes at 7:02 -- but instead of Squane it's a beautiful silver-haired young girl who says J. D. sent her to pick you up. "He's having a business dinner with the Senator and he'll join us later at the Crab House."

  "Wonderful, wonderful -- shall we have a drink?"

  She nods. "Sure, but not here. We'll drive over to North Miami and pick up my girlfriend. . . but let's smoke this before we go."

  "Jesus! That looks like a cigar!"

  "It is!" she laughs. "And it'll make us both crazy."

  Many hours later, 4:30 a.m. Soaking wet, falling into the lobby, begging for help: No wallet, no money, no ID. Blood on both hands and one shoe missing, dragged up to the room by two bellboys. . .

  Breakfast at noon the next day, half sick in the coffee shop -- waiting for a Western Union money order from the wife in St. Louis. Very spotty memories from last night.

  "Hi there, Virgil."

  J. D. Squane, still grinning. "Where were you last night, Virgil?" I came by right on the dot, but you weren't in."

  "I got mugged -- by your girlfriend."

  "Oh? Too bad. I wanted to nail down that ugly little vote of yours."

  "Ugly? Wait a minute. . . That girl you sent; we went someplace to meet you."

  "Bullshit! You double-crossed me, Virgil! If we weren't on the same team I might be tempted to lean on you."

  Rising anger now, painful throbbing in the head. "Fuck you, Squane! I'm on nobody's team! If you want my vote you know damn well how to get it -- and that goddamn dope-addict girlfriend of yours didn't help any."

  Squane smiles heavily. "Tell me, Virgil -- what was it you wanted for the vote of yours? A seat on the federal bench?"

  "You're goddamn fuckin'-A right! You got me in bad trouble last night, J. D. When I got back there my wallet was gone and there was blood on my hands.

  "I know. You beat the shit out of her."

  "What?"

  "Look at these photographs, Virgil. It's some of the most disgusting stuff I've ever seen."

  "Photographs?"

  Squane hands them across the table.

  "Oh my god!"

  "Yeah, that's what I said, Virgil."

  "No! This can't be me! I never saw that girl! Christ, she's only a child!"

  "That's why the pictures are so disgusting, Virgil. You're lucky we didn't take them straight to the cops and have you locked up." Pounding the table with his fist. "That's rape, Virgil! That's sodomy! With a child!"

  "No!"

  "Yes, Virgil -- and now you're going to pay for it."

  "How? What are you talking about?"

  Squane smiling again. "Votes, my friend. Yours and five others. Six votes for six negatives. Are you ready?"

  Tears of rage in the eyes now. "You evil sonofabitch! You're blackmailing me!"

  "Ridiculous, Virgil. Ridiculous. I'm talking about coalition politics."

  "I don't even know six delegates. Not personally, anyway. And besides, they all want something."

  Squane shakes his head. "Don't tell me about it, Virgil. I'd rather not hear. Just bring me six names off this list by noon tomorrow. If they all vote right, you'll never hear another word about what happened last night."

  "What if I can't?"

  Squane smiles, then shakes his head sadly. "Your life will take a turn for the worse, Virgil."

  Ah, bad craziness. . . a scene like that could run on forever. Sick dialogue comes easy after five months on the campaign trail. A sense of humor is not considered mandatory for those who want to get heavy into presidential politics. Junkies don't laugh much; their gig is too serious -- and the politics junkie is not much different on that score than a smack junkie.

  The High is very real in both worlds, for those who are into it -- but anybody who has ever tried to live with a smack junkie will tell you it can't be done without coming to grips with the spike and shooting up, yourself.

  Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign -- especially when you're running against big odds and starting to feel like a winner.

  As far as I know, I am the only journalist covering the '72 presidential campaign who has done any time on the other side of that gap -- both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level -- and despite all the obvious differences between running on the Freak Power ticket for Sheriff of Aspen and running as a well-behaved Democrat for President of the United States, the roots are surprisingly similar. . . and whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about, compared to the massive, unbridgeable gap between the cranked-up reality of living day after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign -- and the friendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign as a journalis
t, from the outside looking in.

  For the same reason that nobody who has never come to grips with the spike can ever understand how far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives. . . there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself.

  Very few of the press people assigned to the McGovern campaign, for instance, have anything more than a surface understanding of what is really going on in the vortex. . . or if they do, they don't mention it, in print or on the air: And after spending half a year following this goddamn zoo around the country and watching the machinery at work I'd be willing to bet pretty heavily that not even the most privileged ranking insiders among the campaign press corps are telling much less than they know.

  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail,

  San Francisco, Straight Arrow Books, 1973

  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 cannister 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 on 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.

  The mood at McGovern's grim headquarters building at 1910 K Street, NW, in Washington is oddly schizoid these days: a jangled mix of defiance and despair -- tempered, now and then, by quick flashes of a lingering conviction that George can still win.

  McGovern's young staffers, after all, have never lost an election they expected to win, at the outset -- and they definitely expected to win this one. They are accustomed to being far behind in the public opinion polls. McGovern has almost always been the underdog, and -- except for California -- he has usually been able to close the gap with a last-minute stretch run.

  Even in the primaries he lost -- New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania -- he did well enough to embarrass the pollsters, humiliate the pols, and crank up his staff morale another few notches.

  But that boundless blind faith is beginning to fade now. The Curse of Eagleton is beginning to make itself felt in the ranks. And not even Frank Mankiewicz, the Wizard of Chevy Chase, can properly explain why McGovern is now being sneered at from coast to coast as "just another politician." Mankiewicz is still the main drivewheel in this hamstrung campaign; he has been the central intelligence from the very beginning -- which was fine all around, while it worked, but there is not a hell of a lot of evidence to suggest that it's working real well these days, and it is hard to avoid the idea that Frank is just as
responsible for whatever is happening now as he was six months ago, when McGovern came wheeling out of New Hampshire like the Abominable Snowman on a speed trip.

  If George gets stomped in November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him. The blame will trace straight back to his brain-trust, to whoever had his ear tight enough to convince him that all that bullshit about "new politics" was fine for the primaries, but it would never work again against Nixon -- so he would have to abandon his original power base, after Miami, and swiftly move to consolidate the one he'd just shattered: the Meany/Daley/Humphrey/Muskie axis, the senile remnants of the Democratic Party's once-powerful "Roosevelt coalition."

  McGovern agreed. He went to Texas and praised LBJ; he revised his economic program to make it more palatable on Wall Street; he went to Chicago and endorsed the whole Daley/Democratic ticket, including State's Attorney Ed Hanrahan, who is still under indictment on felony/conspiracy (Obstruction of Justice) charges for his role in a police raid on local Black Panther headquarters three years ago that resulted in the murder of Fred Hampton.

  In the speedy weeks between March and July, the atmosphere in McGovern's cramped headquarters building on Capitol Hill was so high that you could get bent by just hanging around and watching the human machinery at work.

  The headquarters building itself was not much bigger than McGovern's personal command post in the Senate Office Building, five blocks away. It was one big room about the size of an Olympic swimming pool -- with a grocery store on one side, a liquor store on the other, and a tree-shaded sidewalk out front. The last time I was there, about two weeks before the California primary, I drove my blue Volvo up on the sidewalk and parked right in front of the door. Crouse went inside to find Mankiewicz while I picked up some Ballantine ale.