Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (20 page)

It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving . . . but not even this new, six-cylinder “super-Volvo” is up to hauling two thousand pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado, to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown.

“Welcome to Washington D.C.” That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall—a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.

It is not considered fashionable to live in “The District” itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged-brick townhouse with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright
Playboy
editors smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists, and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pinepaneled bars and “singles only” discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.

I live on the “black side” of Rock Creek Park, in what my journalistic friends call “a marginal neighborhood.” Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia
suburbs or over on the “white side” of the park, toward Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.

The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximately a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only two people I know who live down there are Nicholas von Hoffman, a columnist for the
Washington Post
, and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyperactive Legislative Assistant. But von Hoffman seems to have had a bellyful of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco . . . and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.

McGovern & the Press Wizards

With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began about two years ago.

Jim Flug says he’d rather not talk about Kennedy running for president—at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who “matters” in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon—almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.

There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck—and beaten once again—with some tried-and-half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie . . . and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustration limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington press corps. “He’d be a fine president,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.”

Why not?

Well . . . the wizards haven’t bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern president—that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists, & dazed dropouts—won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on Election Day.

Maybe so . . . but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called “The McGovern Vote” to the polls if they
actually represented it
.

It sure as hell wasn’t the AFL-CIO that ran LBJ out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn’t Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who
voted
for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson . . . and it wasn’t George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade “radical” organizer from the UAW.

It wasn’t the big-time “Democratic bosses” who won the California primary for Bobby—but thousands of Niggers and Spics and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in California, and nobody would have had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.

But there was, of course, The Murder—and then the convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to “respectable” Democrats then and now—and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in ’72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower-Stevenson wipeout in 1956.

The people who turned out for Bobby are still around—along with several million others who’ll be voting for the first time—but they won’t turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser . . .

According to the Gallup polls, however, the underculture vote is holding up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Big Wigs and “pros” in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy’s name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations—calling him a “liar” and a “coward” and a “cheater.”

And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.

The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy’s recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won’t even admit that it’s happening—at least not for the record—and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming—too soon, perhaps, but there’s nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down, insisting he’s not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.

When I called Flug the other night, at the office, he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed, by the Senate, as Nixon’s new Secretary of Agriculture.

“To hell with Butz,” I said, “what about Rehnquist? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?”

“They have the votes,” he replied.

“Jesus,” I muttered, “is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I’ve read about him?”

“Worse,” Flug said. “But I think he’s in. We tried, but we can’t get the votes.”

Your New Supreme Court

Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long-standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for
Esquire
—an article that finally died in a blaze of niggling between me and the editors about how to cut my “final version” down from thirty thousand words to a size that would fit in the magazine.

Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.

We idled through the line with our trays, then took our plastic-wrapped tuna fish sandwiches over to a small Formica table, along with
coffee in styrofoam cups. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill—trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line . . . until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.

Meanwhile, Flug was outlining every angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally
into
it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans—a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument the National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it ocurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom . . . and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my .44 Magnum fetish.

After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug’s trip—and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard that he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.

Coming on the heels of Judge Haynsworth’s rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in . . . but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh’s assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.

Now, with Nixon trying to fill two
more
court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.

“Not even Rehnquist?” I asked. “Christ, that’s like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court.”

“I know,” said Flug. “Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who’ll be up there.”

“You mean
down
there,” I said. “Along with all the rest of us.” I laughed. “Well, there’s always smack . . .”

Flug didn’t laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard, for
the past three years, to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon-Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynsworth & Carswell, then having to swallow a third-rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years—despite the best efforts of the sharpest and meanest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on—is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss-poor bowling team in Memphis—and this disastrous, Nazi-bent shift of the federal government’s Final Decision–making powers won’t even
begin
to take effect until the spring of ’72.

The effects of this takeover are potentially so disastrous—in terms of personal freedom and police power—that there is no point even speculating on the fate of some poor, misguided geek who might want to take his “Illegal Search & Seizure” case all the way up to the top. A helpful hint, however, might be found in the case of the Tallahassee newspaper reporter who went to Canada in 1967 to avoid the draft—and returned to find that he was no longer a citizen of the United States and he now has ninety days to leave the country. He appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but they refused to even hear it.

So now he has to go, but of course he has no passport—and international travel is not real easy without a passport. The federal immigration officials understand this, but—backed up by the Supreme Court—they have given him an ultimatum to vacate, anyway. They don’t care where he goes; just get out—and meanwhile Chief Justice Burger has taken to answering his doorbell at night with a big six-shooter in his hand. You never know, he says, who might come crashing in.

Indeed. Maybe Rehnquist—far gone with an overdose of raw sowbelly and crazy for terminal vengeance on the first house he comes to.

More Bad Tendencies

This world is full of dangerous beasts—but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok—like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly desides to start sampling his contraband.

Yes . . . and . . . ah, where were we? I have a bad tendency to rush off on mad tangents and pursue them for fifty or sixty pages that get so out of control that I end up burning them, for my own good. One of the few exceptions to this rule occurred very recently, when I slipped up and let about two hundred pages go into print . . . which caused me a lot of trouble with the tax man, among others, and it taught me a lesson I hope I’ll never forget.

Live steady. Don’t fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth—including people. It’s not worth it. I learned this the hard way through brutal indulgence.

And it’s also a nasty fact that I have to catch a plane for Chicago in three hours—to attend some kind of national Emergency Conference on New Voters, which looks like the opening shot in this year’s version of the McCarthy-Kennedy uprising in ’68—and since the conference starts at six o’clock tonight, I must make that plane . . .

. . . Back to Chicago; it’s never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on
something
. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.