Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (32 page)

The real shocker, however, came when McGovern carried the Polish south side of Milwaukee, which Muskie had planned on sweeping by at least ten to one. He was, after all, the first Pole to run for the presidency of the United States, and he had campaigned on the south side under his original Polish name . . . but when the deal went down he might as well have been an Arab, for all they cared in places like Serb Hall.

Which more or less makes the point, I think. And if it doesn’t, well . . . political analysis was never my game anyway. All I do is wander around and make bets with people, and so far I’ve done pretty well.

As for betting on the chance that Mankiewicz is right and that McGovern will actually win on the first ballot in Miami . . . I think I’d like some odds on that one, and right now they should be pretty easy to get. McGovern right now is the only one of the Democratic candidates with any chance at all of getting the nomination . . . and if anybody wants to put money on Muskie, Humphrey, or Wallace, get in touch with me immediately.

June 8, 1972

Apologia

One of my clearest memories of the Nebraska primary is getting off the elevator on the wrong floor in the Omaha Hilton and hearing a sudden burst of song from a room down one of the hallways . . . twenty to thirty young voices in ragged harmony, kicking out the jams as they swung into the final, hair-raising chorus of “The Hound and the Whore.”

I had heard it before, in other hallways of other hotels along the campaign trail—but never this late at night, and never at this level of howling intensity:

O the Hound chased the Whore across the mountains
Boom! Boom! Boom!
O the Hound chased the Whore into the sea . . .
Boom! Boom! Boom!

A very frightening song under any circumstances—but especially frightening if you happen to be a politician running for very high stakes and you know the people singing that song are
not on your side
. I have never been in that situation, myself, but I imagine it is something like camping out in the North Woods and suddenly coming awake in your tent around midnight to the horrible snarling and screaming sounds of a werewolf killing your guard dog somewhere out in the trees beyond the campfire.

I was thinking about this as I stood in the hallway outside the elevator
and heard all those people singing “The Hound and the Whore” . . . in a room down the hall that led into a wing of the hotel that I knew had been blocked off for The Candidate’s national staff. But there is nothing in my notes to indicate which one of the candidates was quartered in that wing—or even which floor I was on when I first heard the song. All I remember for sure is that it was one floor either above or below mine, on the eleventh. But the difference is crucial—because McGovern’s people were mainly down on the tenth, and the smaller Humphrey contingent was above me on the twelfth.

It was a Monday night, as I recall, just a few hours before the polls opened on Tuesday morning—and at that point the race seemed so even that both camps were publicly predicting a victory and privately expecting defeat. So even in retrospect there is no way to be certain which staff was doing the singing.

And my own head was so scrambled at that hour that I can’t be sure of anything except that we had just come back from a pre-dawn breakfast at the Omaha Toddle House with Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty, and Gary Hart, McGovern’s national campaign manager who had just picked up a check for roughly $40,000 gross from another one of Beatty’s fund-raising spectacles.

This one had been over in Lincoln, the state capital town about sixty miles west of Omaha, where a friendly crowd of some 7,500 had packed the local civic center for a concert by Andy Williams and Henry Mancini . . . which apparently did the trick, because twenty-four hours later Lincoln delivered 2–1 for McGovern and put him over the hump in Nebraska.

I understand these things, and as a certified member of the national press corps I am keenly aware of my responsibility to keep calm and
endure
two hours of Andy Williams from time to time—especially since I went over to Lincoln on the press bus and couldn’t leave until the concert was over anyway—but I’m beginning to wonder just how much longer I can stand it: this endless nightmare of getting up at the crack of dawn to go out and watch the candidate shake hands with workers coming in for the day shift at the Bilbo Bear & Sprocket factory, then following him across town for another press-the-flesh gig at the local Slaughterhouse . . . then back on the bus and follow the candidate’s car through traffic for fortyfive
minutes to watch him eat lunch and chat casually with the folks at a basement cafeteria table in some high-rise Home for the Aged.

Both Humphrey and McGovern have been doing this kind of thing about eighteen hours a day for the past six months—and one of them will keep doing it eighteen hours a day for five more months until November. According to the political pros, there is no other way to get elected: go out and meet the voters on their own turf, shake their hands, look them straight in the eye, and introduce yourself . . . there is no other way.

The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians book is George Wallace. He doesn’t do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really
big
crowd is better than forty small ones.

But to hell with these theories. This is about the thirteenth lead I’ve written for this goddamn mess, and they are getting progressively worse . . . which hardly matters now, because we are down to the deadline again and it will not be long before the Mojo Wire starts beeping and the phones start ringing and those thugs out in San Francisco will be screaming for Copy. Words! Wisdom! Gibberish!

Anything! The presses roll at noon—three hours from now, and the paper is ready to go except for five blank pages in the middle. The “center-spread,” a massive feature story. The cover is already printed, and according to the Story List that is lying out there on the floor about ten feet away from this typewriter, the center-spread feature for this issue will be A Definitive Profile of George McGovern and Everything He Stands For—written by me.

Looking at it fills me with guilt. This room reeks of failure, once again. Every two weeks they send me a story list that says I am lashing together some kind of definitive work on a major subject . . . which is true, but these projects are not developing quite as fast as we thought they would. There are still signs of life in a few of them, but not many. Out of twenty-six projects—a year’s work—I have abandoned all hope for twenty-four, and the other two are hanging by a thread.

There is no time to explain, now, why this is not a profile of George McGovern. That story blew up on us in Omaha, on the morning of the
primary, when George and most of his troupe suddenly decided that Nixon’s decision to force a showdown with Hanoi made it imperative for the senator to fly back to Washington at once.

Nobody could say exactly why, but we all assumed he had something special in mind—some emergency move to get control of Nixon. No time for long mind-probing interviews. Humphrey was leaving too, and there were two or three cynics in the press corps who suggested that this left McGovern no choice. If Humphrey thought the War-Scare was important enough to make him rush back to the Capitol instead of hanging around Omaha on Election Day, then McGovern should be there too—or Hubert might say his Distinguished Opponent cared more about winning the Nebraska Primary than avoiding World War Three.

As it turned out, neither Humphrey nor McGovern did anything dramatic when they got back to Washington—or at least nothing public—and a week or so later the
New York Times
announced that the mines in Haiphong harbor had been set to de-activate themselves on the day before Nixon’s trip to Moscow for the summit meeting.

Maybe I missed something. Perhaps the whole crisis was solved in one of those top-secret confrontations between the Senate and the White House that we will not be able to read about until the records are opened seventy-five years from now.

But there is no point in haggling any longer with this. The time has come to get full-bore into heavy Gonzo Journalism, and this time we have no choice but to push it all the way out to the limit. The phone is ringing again and I can hear Crouse downstairs trying to put them off:

“What the hell are you guys worried about? He’s up there cranking out a page every three minutes . . . What? . . . No, it won’t make much sense, but I guarantee you we’ll have plenty of words. If all else fails we’ll start sending press releases and shit like that . . . Sure, why worry? We’ll start sending almost immediately.”

Only a lunatic would do this kind of work: twenty-three primaries in five months; stone drunk from dawn till dusk and huge speed-blisters all over my head. Where is the meaning? That light at the end of the tunnel?

Crouse is yelling again. They want more copy. He has sent them all of his stuff on the Wallace shooting, and now they want mine. Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service; get one of
those big AP tickers that spits out fifty words a minute, twenty-four hours a day . . . a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-way journey—all expenses paid—anywhere he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that’s where he went.

Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

So much for all that. The noise level downstairs tells me Crouse will not be able to put them off much longer. So now we will start getting serious: first Columbus, Ohio, and then Omaha. But mainly in Columbus, only because this thing began—in my head, at least—as a fairly straight and serious account of the Ohio primary.

Then we decided to combine it with the ill-fated “McGovern Profile” and arranged to meet George in Nebraska. I flew out from Washington and Wenner flew in from the Coast—just in time to shake hands with the candidate on his way to the airport.

No—I want to be fair about it: there was a certain amount of talk, and on the evidence, it seems to have worked out.

But not in terms of “The Profile,” which still had five blank pages. So I came back to Washington and grappled with it for a few days, and Crouse came from Boston to help beat the thing into shape . . . but nothing worked; no spine, no hope, to hell with it. We decided to bury the bugger and pretend none of that stuff ever happened. Tim flew back to Boston, and I went off to New York in a half-crazed condition to explain myself and my wisdom at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Later that day George Wallace was shot at a rally in Maryland about twelve minutes away from my house. It was the biggest political story of the year, and those five goddamn pages were still blank. Crouse flew back immediately from Boston, and I straggled back to New York, but by the time we got there it was all over.