Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (38 page)

“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.”

It Takes a Junkie to Know One

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 political 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 fiendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign as a journalist, 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.

August 17, 1972

Back in February it was still considered very shrewd and avant-garde to assume that the most important factor in a presidential campaign was a good “media candidate.” If he had Star Quality, the rest would take care of itself. The Florida primary turned out to be a funeral procession for would-be “media candidates.” Both Lindsay and Muskie went down in Florida—although not necessarily because they geared their pitch to TV; the real reason, I think, is that neither one of them understood how to
use
TV . . . or maybe they knew, but just couldn’t pull it off. It is hard to be super-convincing on the tube, if everything you say reminds the TV audience of a Dick Cavett commercial for Alpo dog food. George McGovern has been widely ridiculed in the press as “the ideal anti-media candidate.” He looks wrong, talks wrong, and even acts wrong—by conventional TV standards. But McGovern has his own ideas about how to use the tube. In the early primaries he kept his TV exposure to a minimum—for a variety of reasons that included a lack of both money and confidence—but by the time he got to California for the showdown with Hubert Humphrey, McGovern’s TV campaign was operating on the level of a very specialized art form. His thirty-minute biography—produced by Charlie Guggenheim—was so good that even the most cynical veteran journalists said it was the best political film ever made for television . . . and Guggenheim’s sixty-second spots were better than the bio film. Unlike the early front-runners, McGovern had taken his time and learned how to use the medium—instead of letting the medium use him.

Sincerity
is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate
should at least
seem
to believe what he’s saying—even if it’s all stone crazy. McGovern learned this from George Wallace in Florida, and it proved to be a very valuable lesson. One of the crucial moments of the ’72 primary campaign came on election night in Florida, March 14, when McGovern—who had finished a dismal sixth, behind even Lindsay and Muskie—refused to follow their sour example and blame his poor showing on that Evil Racist Monster, George Wallace, who had just swept every county in the state. Moments after both Lindsay and Muskie had appeared on all three networks to denounce the Florida results as tragic proof that at least half the voters were ignorant dupes and Nazis, McGovern came on and said that although he couldn’t agree with some of the things Wallace said and stood for, he sympathized with the people who’d voted for “The Governor” because they were “angry and fed up” with some of the things that are happening in this country.

“I feel the same way,” he added. “But unlike Governor Wallace, I’ve proposed
constructive solutions
to these problems.”

Nobody applauded when he said that. The two hundred or so McGovern campaign workers who were gathered that night in the ballroom of the old Waverly Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard were not in a proper mood to cheer any praise for George Wallace. Their candidate had just been trounced by what they considered a dangerous bigot—and now, at the tail end of the loser’s traditional concession statement, McGovern was saying that he and Wallace weren’t really that far apart.

It was not what the ballroom crowd wanted to hear at that moment. Not after listening to both Lindsay and Muskie denounce Wallace as a cancer in the soul of America . . . but McGovern wasn’t talking to the people in that ballroom; he was making a very artful pitch to potential Wallace voters in the other primary states. Wisconsin was three weeks away, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan—and Wallace would be raising angry hell in every one of them. McGovern’s brain trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was “soft”—that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” who’d been fucking them over for so long.

The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for
knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy—and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant, overnight cure for all their worst afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? Army worms killing the turnip crop? Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn’t
want
the problems solved, so they wouldn’t be put out of work.

George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. What McGovern sensed in Florida, however—while Wallace was stomping him, along with all the others—was the possibility that Wallace appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel. The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it—but what then? If Wallace had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate—as a Democrat or anything else—he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler.

McGovern, on the other hand, had put together a fantastic organization—but until he went into Wisconsin, he had never tried to tap the kind of energy that seemed to be flowing, perhaps by default, to Wallace. He had given it some thought while campaigning in New Hampshire, but it was only after he beat Muskie in two blue-collar hardhat wards in the middle of Manchester that he saw the possibility of a really mind-bending coalition: a weird mix of peace freaks and hard hats, farmers and film stars, along with urban blacks, rural Chicanos, the “youth vote” . . . a coalition that could elect almost anybody.

Muskie had croaked in Florida, allowing himself to get crowded over on the Right with Wallace, Jackson, and Humphrey—then finishing a slow fourth behind all three of them. At that point in the race, Lindsay’s presumptuous blueprint was beginning to look like prophecy. The New Hampshire embarrassment had forced Muskie off-center in a mild panic, and now the party was popularized. The road to Wisconsin was suddenly clear in both lanes, fast traffic to the Left and the Right.
The only mobile hazard was a slow-moving hulk called “The Muskie Bandwagon,” creeping erratically down what his doom-stricken Media Manager called “that yellow stripe in the middle of the road.”

The only other bad casualty, at that point, was Lindsay. His Wisconsin managers had discovered a fatal flaw in the blueprint: nobody had bothered to specify the name of the candidate who would seize all that high ground on the Left, once Muskie got knocked off center. Whoever drew it up had apparently been told that McGovern would not be a factor in the later stages of the race. After absorbing two back-to-back beatings in New Hampshire and Florida, he would run out of money and be dragged off to the nearest glue factory . . . or, failing that, to some cut-rate retirement farm for old liberals with no charisma.

But something went wrong, and when Lindsay arrived in Wisconsin to seize that fine high ground on the Left that he knew, from his blueprint, was waiting for him—he found it already occupied, sealed off and well-guarded on every perimeter, by a legion of hard-eyed fanatics in the pay of George McGovern.

Gene Pokorny, McGovern’s twenty-five-year-old field organizer for Wisconsin, had the whole state completely wired. He had been on the job, full time, since the spring of ’71—working off a blueprint remarkably similar to Lindsay’s. But they were not quite the same. The main difference was painfully obvious, yet it was clear at a glance that both drawings had been done from the same theory. Muskie would fold early on, because The Center was not only indefensible but probably nonexistent . . . and after that the Democratic race would boil down to a quick civil war, a running death-battle between the Old Guard on the Right and a gang of Young Strangers on the Left.

The name slots on Lindsay’s blueprint were still empty, but the working assumption was that the crunch in California would come down to Muskie on the Right and Lindsay on the Left.

Pokorny’s drawing was a year or so older than Lindsay’s, and all the names were filled in—all the way to California, where the last two slots said “McGovern” and “Humphrey.” The only other difference between the two was that Lindsay’s was unsigned, while Pokorny’s had a signature in the bottom right-hand corner: “Hart, Mankiewicz & McGovern—architects.”

Even Lindsay’s financial backers saw the handwriting on the wall in Wisconsin. By the time he arrived, there was not even any low ground on the Left to be seized. The Lindsay campaign had been keyed from the start on the assumption that Muskie would at least have the strength to retire McGovern before he abandoned the Center. It made perfect sense, on paper—but 1972 had not been a vintage year for paper wisdom, and McGovern’s breakthrough victory in Wisconsin was written off as “shocking” and “freakish” by a lot of people who should have known better.