Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (62 page)

It is not my wont to take undue advantage of the Secret Service. We have gone through some heavy times together, as it were, and ever since I wandered into a room in the Biltmore Hotel in New York one night during the 1972 campaign and found three SS agents smoking a joint, I have felt pretty much at ease around them . . . So it seemed only natural, down in Georgia, to ask one of the four agents in our detail for the keys to the trunk of his car so I could lock my leather satchel in a safe place, instead of carrying it around with me.

Actually, the agent had put the bag in the trunk on his own, rather than give me the key . . . But when I sat down at our table in the cafeteria and saw that the only available beverage was iced tea, I remembered that one of the things in my satchel was a quart of Wild Turkey, and I wanted it. On the table in front of me—and everyone else—was a tall glass of iced tea that looked to be the same color as bourbon. Each glass had a split slice of lemon on its rim: so I removed the lemon, poured the tea into Paul Kirk’s water glass, and asked one of the agents at the next table for the key to the trunk. He hesitated for a moment, but one of the law school deans or maybe Judge Crater was already talking into the mike up there at the speakers’ table, so the path of least disturbance was to give me the key, which he did . . .

And I thought nothing of it until I got outside and opened the trunk . . .

Cazart!

If your life ever gets dull, check out the trunk of the next SS car you
happen to see. You won’t need a key; they open just as easily as any other trunk when a six-foot whip-steel is properly applied . . . But open the bugger
carefully
, because those gentlemen keep about sixty-nine varieties of instant death inside. Jesus, I was literally staggered by the mass of weaponry in the back of that car: there were machine guns, gas masks, hand grenades, cartridge belts, tear gas canisters, ammo boxes, bulletproof vests, chains, saws, and probably a lot of other things . . . But all of a sudden I realized that two passing students had stopped right next to me on the sidewalk, and I heard one of them say, “God almighty! Look at
that
stuff!”

So I quickly filled my glass with Wild Turkey, put the bottle back in the trunk, and slammed it shut just like you’d slam any other trunk . . . and that was when I turned around to see Jimmy Carter coming at me with his head down, his teeth bared, and his eyes so wildly dilated that he looked like a springtime bat . . .

What? No. That was later in the day, on my third or fourth trip to the trunk with the iced-tea glass. I have been sitting here in a frozen, bewildered stupor for fifty or fifty-five minutes trying to figure out where that last image came from. My memories of that day are extremely vivid, for the most part, and the more I think back on it now, the more certain I am that whatever I might have seen coming at me in that kind of bent-over, fast-swooping style of the springtime bat was
not
Governor Carter. Probably it was a hunchbacked student on his way to final exams in the school of landscaping, or maybe just trying to walk fast and tie his shoes at the same time . . . Or it could have been nothing at all; there is no mention in my notebook about anything trying to sneak up on me in a high-speed crouch while I was standing out there in the street.

According to my notes, in fact, Jimmy Carter had arrived at the cafeteria not long after Kennedy—and if he attracted any attention from the crowd that had come to see Teddy, I would probably have noticed it and made at least a small note to emphasize the contrast in style—something like: “12:09, Carter suddenly appears in slow-moving crowd behind TK. No autographs, no bodyguards, and now a blue plastic suit instead of Levi’s///No recognition, no greetings, just a small sandy-haired man looking for somebody to shake hands with . . .”

That is the kind of note I would have made if I’d noticed his arrival
at all, which I didn’t. Because it was not until around ten o’clock on the night of the New Hampshire primary, almost two years later, that there was any real reason for a journalist to make a note on the time and style of Jimmy Carter’s arrival for any occasion at all, and especially not in a crowd that had come to rub shoulders with big-time heavies like Ted Kennedy and Dean Rusk. He is not an imposing figure in any way: and even now, with his face on every TV screen in the country at least five nights a week, I’d be tempted to bet $100 to anybody else’s $500 that Jimmy Carter could walk—by himself and in a normal noonday crowd—from one end of Chicago’s huge O’Hare Airport to the other without being recognized by anybody . . .

Ah . . . but that is not what we need to be talking about right now, is it?

The only thing I remember about the first hour or so of that luncheon was a powerful sense of depression with the life I was drifting into. According to the program, we were in for a long run of speeches, remarks, comments, etc., on matters connected with the law school. Carter and Kennedy were the last two names on the list of speakers, which meant there was no hope of leaving early. I thought about going back to the beer parlor and watching a baseball game on TV, but King warned me against it. “We don’t know how long this goddamn thing is gonna last,” he said, “and that’s a hell of a long walk from here, isn’t it?”

I knew what he was getting at. Just as soon as the program was over, the SS caravan would rush us out to the Athens airport, where Carter’s plane was waiting to fly us back to Atlanta. Another big dinner banquet was scheduled for six thirty that night, and immediately after that, a long flight back to Washington. Nobody would miss me if I wanted to go to the beer parlor, King said; but nobody would miss me when the time came to leave for the airport, either.

There was no need for King and Kirk to warn me that the SS detail would have a collective nervous breakdown at the prospect of taking Senator Kennedy and the governor of Georgia through the streets of downtown Athens—or any other city, for that matter—to search for some notoriously criminal journalist who might be in any one of the half-dozen bars and beer parlors on the edge of the campus.

So there was nothing to do except sit there in the university cafeteria,
slumped in my chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk’s, and drink one tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day luncheon ceremonies were finished. After my third trip out to the trunk, the SS driver apparently decided that it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a disturbance every fifteen or twenty minutes by passing them back and forth . . . Which made a certain kind of fatalistic sense, because I’d already had plenty of time to do just about anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all, been together for the better part of two days, and the agents were beginning to understand that there was no need to reach for their weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk’s hands, or how easily I could reach over and cut off his ears with my steak knife. Most Secret Service agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has managed to stash an apparently endless supply of powerful whiskey right in the middle of their trunk arsenal. That is not one of your normal, everyday situations in the SS life; and especially not when this drunkard who keeps talking about taking a steak knife to the head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the Washington SS headquarters in addition to having the keys to the SS car in his pocket.

Carter was already speaking when I came back from my fourth or fifth trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the other iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was beginning to get nervous about the smell. “Goddamn it, Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery,” he said.

“Balls,” I said. “That’s blood you’re smelling.”

King winced, and I thought I saw Rusk’s head start to swing around on me, but apparently he thought better of it. For at least two hours he’d been hearing all this ugly talk about blood coming over his shoulder from what he knew was “the Kennedy table” right behind him. But why would a group of Secret Service agents and Senator Kennedy’s personal staff be talking about him like that? And why was this powerful stench of whiskey hanging around his head? Were they all drunk?

Not all—but I was rapidly closing the gap, and the others had been
subjected to the fumes for so long that I could tell by the sound of their laughter that even the SS agents were acting a little weird. Maybe it was a contact drunk of some kind, acting in combination with the fumes and fiendish drone of the speeches. We were trapped in that place, and nobody else at the table liked it any better than I did.

I am still not sure when I began listening to what Carter was saying, but at some point about ten minutes into his remarks I noticed a marked difference in the style and tone of the noise coming from the speakers’ table, and I found myself listening, for the first time all day. Carter had started off with a few quiet jokes about people feeling honored to pay $10 or $12 a head to hear Kennedy speak, but the only way he could get people to listen to him was to toss in a free lunch along with his remarks. The audience laughed politely a few times, but after he’d been talking for about fifteen minutes I noticed a general uneasiness in the atmosphere of the room, and nobody was laughing anymore. At that point we were all still under the impression that Carter’s “remarks” would consist of a few minutes of friendly talk about the law school, a bit of praise for Rusk, an introduction for Kennedy, and that would be it . . .

But we were wrong, and the tension in the room kept increasing as more and more people realized it. Very few if any of them had supported Carter when he won the governorship, and now that he was just about finished with his four-year term and barred by law from running again, they expected him to bow out gracefully and go back to raising peanuts. If he had chosen that occasion to announce that he’d decided to run for president in 1976, the reaction would almost certainly have been a ripple of polite laughter, because they would know he was kidding. Carter had not been a bad governor, but so what? We were, after all, in Georgia; and, besides that, the South already had one governor running for president . . . Back in the spring of 1974, George Wallace was a national power; he had rattled the hell out of that big cage called the Democratic National Committee in ’72, and when he said he planned to do it again in ’76, he was taken very seriously.

So I would probably have chuckled along with the others if Carter had said something about running for president at the
beginning
of his “remarks” that day, but I would not have chuckled if he’d said it at the end . . . Because it was a king hell bastard of a speech, and by the time it
was over he had rung every bell in the room. Nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of it, but they knew it was sure as hell not what they’d come there to hear.

I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians—usually against my will and for generally the same reasons I got trapped into hearing this one—but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974. It ran about forty-five minutes, climbing through five very distinct gear changes while the audience muttered uneasily and raised their eyebrows at each other, and one of the most remarkable things about the speech is that it is such a rare piece of oratorical artwork that it remains vastly impressive, even if you don’t necessarily believe Carter was sincere and truthful in all the things he said. Viewed purely in the context of rhetorical drama and political theater, it ranks with General Douglas MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die” address to the Congress in 1951—which still stands as a masterpiece of insane bullshit if nothing else.

There were, however, a lot of people who believed every word and sigh of MacArthur’s speech, and they wanted to make him president—just as a lot of people who are still uncertain about Jimmy Carter would want to make him president if he could figure out some way to deliver a contemporary version of his 1974 Law Day speech on network TV . . . Or, hell, even the same identical speech; a national audience might be slightly puzzled by some of the references to obscure judges, grade-school teachers, and backwoods Georgia courthouses, but I think the totality of the speech would have the same impact today as it did two years ago.

But there is not much chance of it happening . . . And that brings up another remarkable aspect of the Law Day speech: it had virtually no impact at all when he delivered it, except on the people who heard it, and most of them were more stunned and puzzled by it than impressed. They had not come there to hear lawyers denounced as running dogs of the status quo, and there is still some question in my own mind—and in Carter’s too, I suspect—about what he came there to say. There was no written text of the speech, no press to report it, no audience hungry to hear it, and no real reason for giving it—except that Jimmy Carter had a
few serious things on his mind that day, and he figured it was about time to unload them, whether the audience liked it or not . . .

Which gets to another interesting point of the speech: although Carter himself now says, “That was probably the best speech I ever made,” he has yet to make another one like it—not even to the extent of lifting some of the best images and ideas for incorporation into his current speeches—and his campaign staff attached so little importance to it that Carter’s only tape recording of his Law Day remarks got lost somewhere in the files and, until about two months ago, the only existing tape of the speech was the one I’d had copied off the original, before it was lost. I’ve been carrying the bastard around with me for two years, playing it in some extremely unlikely situations for people who would look at me like I was finally over the hump into terminal brain damage when I’d say they were going to have to spend the next forty-five minutes listening to a political speech by some ex-governor of Georgia.