Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (60 page)

__ __ __ __

Two years before his presidential run, Jimmy Carter gave a little-noticed speech at the University of Georgia. Hunter, having flown to town with Ted Kennedy, happened to be in the audience, and what he heard—in between regular trips outside to retrieve a bottle of Wild Turkey from the trunk of a Secret Service car—stunned him. For years, Hunter forced friends to listen to his audio recording of what became known as the Law Day speech, which Hunter compares to General Douglas MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die” address to Congress in 1951 for sheer oratorical power. (Hunter also conducted lengthy interviews with the candidate, which President Carter recalls as being lengthy and very revealing—so much so, in fact, that the president was relieved to hear from Hunter later that he’d lost all the audiotapes.)

Letter from HST TO JSW

Oct 27 ’77

Jann/

—now is the time to start pondering “The Case of James Earl Carter.” A proper Job would need about 6 months, all expenses, a window looking down on the fountain and $44k.

—I’ve got better things to do; but, then, so did Moses.

—Somebody is going to do it, + the price will be high. All around, my own recommendations follow in order of mutual preference:

1—ignore the whole idea + keep riding the hyena

2—hire professionals to do the job

3—if all else fails, + you still want to know what a real firestorm feels like, give me a ring.

A 3-part “Assessment,” beginning in Sept ’78—followed by a 200-pg. book in the summer of ’79—will just about make the nut—(add another $250k advance for the book, for old times sake . . .)

Okay. That’s it for now.

/H

June 3, 1976

It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of campaign ’76. The idea of covering even the early stages of this cynical and increasingly retrograde campaign has already plunged me into a condition bordering on terminal despair, and if I thought I might have to stay with these people all the way to November, I would change my name and seek work as a professional alligator poacher in the swamps around Lake Okeechobee. My frame of mind is not right for another long and maddening year of total involvement in a presidential campaign . . . and somewhere in the back of my brain lurks a growing suspicion that this campaign is not right either; but that is not the kind of judgment any journalist should make at this point. At least not in print.

So for the moment I will try to suspend both the despair and the final judgment. Both will be massively justified in the next few months, I think—and until then I can fall back on the firmly held but rarely quoted conviction of most big-time Washington pols that
nobody
can function at top form on a full-time basis in more than one presidential campaign. This rule of thumb has never been applied to journalists, to my knowledge, but there is ample evidence to suggest it should be. There is no reason to think that even the best and brightest of journalists, as it were, can repeatedly or even more than once crank themselves up to the level of genuinely fanatical energy, commitment, and total concentration it takes to live in the speeding vortex of a presidential campaign from start to finish. There is not enough room on that hell-bound train for anybody who wants to relax and act human now and then. It is a gig for
ambitious zealots and terminal action junkies . . . and this is especially true of a campaign like this one, which so far lacks any central, overriding issue like the war in Vietnam that brought so many talented and totally dedicated nonpoliticians into the ’68 and ’72 campaigns.

The issues this time are too varied and far too complex for the instant polarization of a Which Side Are You On? crusade. There will not be many ideologues seriously involved in the ’76 campaign; this one is a technicians’ trip, run by and for politicians . . . Which is not really a hell of a lot different from any other campaign, except that this time it is going to be painfully obvious. This time, on the two hundredth anniversary of what used to be called “the American Dream,” we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after day—on the tube and in the head-lines—in this mess we have made for ourselves.

Today, wherever in this world I meet a man or woman who fought for Spanish liberty, I meet a kindred soul. In those years we lived our best, and what has come after and what there is to come can never carry us to those heights again.

—from
The Education of a Correspondent
by Herbert Matthews

So much for the idea of a sequel to
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
. Barring some totally unexpected development, I will leave the dreary task of chronicling this low-rent trip to Teddy White, who is already trapped in a place I don’t want to be.

But there is no way to escape without wallowing deep in the first few primaries and getting a feel, more or less, for the evidence . . . And in order to properly depress and degrade myself for the ordeal to come, I decided in early January to resurrect the National Affairs desk and set up, once again, in the place where I spent so much time in 1972 and then again in 1974. These were the boom-and-bust years of Richard Milhous Nixon, who was criminally insane and also president of the United States for five years.

If any person shall carnally know in any manner any brute animal, or carnally know any male or female person by the anus or by and with
the mouth, or voluntarily submit to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a felony and shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than one year nor more than three years.

—Commonwealth of Virginia Anti-Sodomy Statute, 1792

One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from “long shot” to “serious contender.” The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn’t already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign “press corps.”

There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let’s say there are three: Stage one is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get—especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup poll; stage two is the “winnowing out,” the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like longdistance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and stage three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls, and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a
probable
nominee, and a
possible
next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn’t get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he’s still in stage one
might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to stage two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, eighteen-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades, and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars . . . Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of fifteen amateur political activists gathered in some English professor’s living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech—often three or four times in a single day—to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters . . . And all the fat cats, labor leaders, and big-time pols who couldn’t find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami, or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don’t plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know
him
a little better.

It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be “the most powerful man in the world,” but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

Tonight, I am going to call my old friend, Pat Caddell, who is Jimmy Carter’s pollster and one of the two or three main wizards in Carter’s brain trust, and we will have another one of our daily philosophical chats. Jimmy Carter is always the main topic when I talk to Caddell, and
we’ve been talking, arguing, plotting, haggling, and generally whipping on each other almost constantly, ever since this third-rate, low-rent campaign circus hit the public roads about four months ago.

That was
before
Pat went to work for Jimmy, but long after I’d been cited in about thirty-three dozen journals all over the country as one of Carter’s earliest and most fervent supporters. Everywhere I went for at least the past year, from Los Angeles to Austin, Nashville, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Key West, I’ve been publicly hammered by friends and strangers alike for saying that I “like Jimmy Carter.” I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits and other Gucci people; I have been called a braindamaged geek by some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on the night of the Wisconsin primary when the midnight radio stunned us both with a news bulletin from a CBS station in Los Angeles, saying that earlier announcements by NBC and ABC regarding Mo Udall’s narrow victory over Carter in Wisconsin were not true, and that late returns from the rural districts were running so heavily in Carter’s favor that CBS was now calling him the winner.

Sandy likes Mo Udall; and so do I, for that matter . . . I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don’t necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. Or
her
back. Or
its
back . . . At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it—like Nixon did—to pack-crowd the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia’s antisodomy statutes . . . And anybody who thinks that a 6–3 vote against “sodomy” is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn’t really affect
them
had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an “unnatural sex act.” Because “unnatural” is defined by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a
felony crime
, and people who commit felony crimes
go to prison
.

Which won’t make much difference to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can’t remember when I first became a felon—but I have been one ever since, and it’s way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again . . . God knows, I hate it, but I can’t help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says, “The devil made me do it the first time. The second time, I done it on my own.”

Right. And the third time, I did it because of brain damage . . . And after that: well, I figured that anybody who was already doomed to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.

Anything worth all that risk and energy almost has to be beyond the reach of any kind of redemption except the power of Pure Love . . . and this flash of twisted wisdom brings us back, strangely enough, to
politics
, Pat Caddell, and the 1976 presidential campaign . . . And, not incidentally, to the fact that any Journal on any side of Wall Street that ever quoted me as saying “I like Jimmy Carter” was absolutely accurate. I have said it many times, to many people, and I will keep on saying it until Jimmy Carter gives me some good reason to change my mind—which might happen about two minutes after he finishes reading this article: but I doubt it.