Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (22 page)

McCarthy’s gig was finished. He had knocked off the president and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley’s police, who burst into McCarthy’s private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.

Perhaps McCarthy has placed that whole scene in its proper historical and poetic perspective, but if he has I didn’t read it ... or maybe he’s been hanging onto the manuscript until he can find a right ending. McCarthy has a sharp sense of drama, along with his now kinky instinct for timing. But nobody appears to have noticed, until now, that he might also have a bull-sized taste for revenge.

Maybe not. In terms of classic journalism, this kind of wandering, unfounded speculation will have a nasty effect on that asshole from Ireland who sent word across The Waters to nail me for bad language and lack of objectivity. There have been numerous complaints, in fact, about the publisher allowing me to get away with calling our new Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist a “swine.”

Well ... shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by, these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offhand, is my good friend and
colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only
talk
about objectivity, but Dr. Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any argument, among professionals, on the question of Dr. Duke’s Objectivity.

As for mine ... well, my doctor says it swole up and busted about ten years ago. The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was the closed-circuit TV that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into the place ... but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.

So much for objective journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction in terms.

And so much for all that, too. There was at least one more thing I wanted to get into here, before trying to wind this down and get into something human. Like sleep, or that 550-watt Humm Box they have up there in the Ree-Lax Parlor at Silver Spring. Some people say they should outlaw the Humm Box, but I disagree.

Meanwhile, all that venomous speculation about what McCarthy is up to these days left a crucial question hanging: the odd truth that almost everybody in Washington who is paid to analyze & predict the behavior of Vote Blocs seems to feel that the much-publicized “Youth Vote” will not be a Major Factor in the ’72 presidential campaign would be a hell of a lot easier to accept if it weren’t for the actual figures.

What the experts appear to be saying is that the sudden addition of twenty-five million new voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will not make much difference in the power-structure of American politics. No
candidate
will say this, of course. For the record, they are all very solicitous of the “youth vote.” In a close election, even 10 percent of that bloc would mean two and a half million votes—a very serious
figure when you stack it up against Nixon’s thin margin over Humphrey in 1968.

Think of it: only
10 percent
! Two and a half million. Enough—even according to Nixon’s own wizards—to swing almost
any
election. It is a general assumption, in the terms of contemporary presidential elections, that it would take something genuinely vile and terrifying to cause either one of the major party candidates to come away with less than 40 percent of the vote. Goldwater managed to do this in ’64, but not by much. Even after allowing Johnson’s TV sappers to cast him as a stupid, bloodthirsty ghoul who had every intention of blowing the whole world off its axis the moment he got his hands on “the button,” Goldwater still got 27,178,188 votes, or 38.5 percent.

The prevailing wisdom today is that
any
candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The basic assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.

We are talking about a purely physical/image gig here, but even if you let the buggers jabber like magpies about anything that comes to their minds, not even a dangerous dingbat like Sam Yorty would be likely to alienate more than 45 or 50 percent of the electorate.

And even that far-left radical bastard, George McGovern—babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas—would be hard pressed to crank up any more than a 30 percent animosity quotient.

On balance, they are a pretty bland lot. Even Spiro Agnew—if you catch him between screeds—is not more than 20 percent different from Humphrey or Lindsay or Scoop Jackson. Four years ago, in fact, John Lindsay dug Agnew so much that he seconded his nomination for the vice-presidency. There are a lot of people who say we should forget about that this year “because John has already said he made a mistake about Agnew,” but there are a lot of others who take Lindsay’s “Agnew Mistake” very seriously—because they assume he would do the same thing again next week or next month, if he thought it would do him any good.

Nobody seems very worried about Lindsay right now; they are waiting to see what kind of action he can generate in Florida, a state full of transient and old/transplanted New Yorkers. If he can’t make it there, he’s done for. Which is just as well. But if he scores big in Florida, we will probably have to start taking him seriously—particularly if Muskie looks convincing in New Hampshire.

A Muskie-Lindsay ticket could be one of those “naturals,” a marriage made in heaven and consummated by Larry O’Brien ... Which gets us back to one of the main reasons why the political wizards aren’t counting on much of a “youth vote” this year. It is hard to imagine even a zealot like Allard Lowenstein going out on the trail once again to whip up a campus-based firestorm for Muskie and Lindsay ... particularly with Gene McCarthy lurking around with that ugly mouth of his, and those deep-bleeding grudges.

There is probably a lot of interesting talk going down around Humphrey headquarters these days: “Say ... ah, Hube, baby. I guess you heard what your old buddy Gene did to Muskie the other day, right? Yeah, and we always thought they were
friends
, didn’t we? [
Long pause, no reply from the candidate . . .
]

“So ...ah ... Hube? You still with me? Jesus Christ! Where’s that goddamn sunlamp? We gotta get more of a tan on you, baby. You look
gray
. [
Long pause, no reply from the candidate . . .
] “Well, Hube, we might just as well face this thing. We’re comin’ up fast on what just might be a real nasty little problem for you ... let’s not try to kid ourselves, Hube, he’s a really
mean
sonofabitch. [
Long pause, etc . . .
] You gonna have to be
ready
, Hube. You announce next Thursday at noon, right? So we might as well figure that crazy fucker is gonna come down on you like a million-pound shithammer that same afternoon. He’ll probably stage a big scene at the Press Club—and we know who’s gonna be there, don’t we Hube? Yeah, every bastard in the business. Are you ready for that, Hube Baby? Can you handle it? [
Long pause, no reply, etc.—heavy breathing.
] Okay, Hube, tell me this: What does the bastard know? What’s the worst he can spring on you?”

Jesus! This gibberish could run on forever, and even now I can see myself falling into the old trap that plagues every writer who gets sucked into
this rotten business: you find yourself getting fascinated by the rules and strange quirks of the game. Even now, before I’ve even finished this one article, I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was all just another fat Sunday of pro football: pick Pittsburgh by 6 points in the early game, get Kansas City even with Oakland later on ... win one, lose one ... then flip the dial and try to get ahead by conning somebody into taking the Rams even against San Francisco.

After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying fuck who actually wins; the only thing that matters is the point spread. You find yourself screeching crazily at the screen, pleading for somebody to rip the lungs out of that junkie bastard who just threw an interception and then didn’t even
pretend
to tackle the pig who ran it back for 6 points to beat the spread.

There is something perverse and perverted about dealing with life on this level. But on the other hand, it gets harder to convince yourself, once you start thinking about it, that it could possibly make any real difference to you if the 49ers win or lose . . . although every once in a while you stumble into a situation where you find yourself really
wanting
some team to get stomped all over the field, severely beaten and humiliated . . .

This happened to me on the last Sunday of the regular NFL season when two slobbering drunk sportswriters from the
Alexandria Gazette
got me thrown out of the press box at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. I was there as a special guest of Dave Burgin, sports editor of the
Washington Star
... but when Burgin tried to force a bit of dignity on the scene, they ejected him too.

We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. “That gin-soaked little Nazi from the
Gazette
got pissed off when you didn’t doff your hat for the national anthem,” Burgin explained. “He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested.”

“Jesus creeping shit,” I muttered. “Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me.”

“I was afraid you’d run amok,” he said. “We’d have been in bad trouble.
All those guys are from things like the
Norfolk Ledger
and the
Army-Navy Times.
They would have stomped us like rats in a closet.”

I couldn’t understand it. “Hell, I’d have taken the goddamn hat off if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually I don’t even stand up.”