Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Hunter S. Thompson

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007204489
• eBook ISBN: 9780007440009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The best, the fastest, the hippest and the most unorthodox account ever published of the US presidential electoral process in all its madness and corruption.

July

Fear and Loathing in Miami: Old Bulls Meet the Butcher … A Dreary Saga Direct from the Sunshine State … How George McGovern Ran Wild on the Beach & Stomped Almost Everybody … Flashback to the Famous Lindsay Blueprint & A Strange Epitaph for the Battle of Chicago … More Notes on the Politics of Vengeance, Including Massive Technical Advice from Rick Stearns & the Savage Eye of Ralph Steadman …

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light.

– Dylan Thomas

Sunday is not a good day for traveling in the South. Most public places are closed – especially the bars and taverns – in order that the denizens of this steamy, atavistic region will not be distracted from church. Sunday is the Lord’s day, and in the South he still has clout – or enough, at least, so that most folks won’t cross him in public. And those few who can’t make it to church will likely stay home by the fan, with iced tea, and worship him in their own way.

This explains why the cocktail lounge in the Atlanta airport is not open on Sunday night. The Lord wouldn’t dig it.

Not even in Atlanta, which the local chamber of commerce describes as the Enlightened Commercial Capital of the ‘New South.’ Atlanta is an alarmingly liberal city, by Southern standards – known for its ‘progressive’ politicians, nonviolent race relations, and a tax structure aggressively favorable to New Business. It is also known for moonshine whiskey, a bad biker/doper community, and a booming new porno-film industry.

Fallen pompon girls and ex-cheerleaders from Auburn, ‘Bama, and even Ole Miss come to Atlanta to ‘get into show business,’ and those who take the wrong fork wind up being fucked, chewed, and beaten for $100 a day in front of hand-held movie cameras. Donkeys and wolves are $30 extra, and the going rate for gang-bangs is $10 a head, plus ‘the rate.’ Connoisseurs of porno-films say you can tell at a glance which ones were made in Atlanta, because of the beautiful girls. There is nowhere else in America, they say, where a fuck-flick producer can hire last year’s Sweetheart of Sigma Chi to take on twelve Georgia-style Hell’s Angels for $220 & lunch.

So I was not especially surprised when I got off the plane from Miami around midnight and wandered into the airport to find the booze locked up. What the hell? I thought: This is only the public bur. At this time of night in the heart of the bible belt and especially on Sunday – you want to look around for something private.

Every airport has a ‘VIP Lounge.’ The one in Atlanta is an elegant neo-private spa behind a huge wooden door near Gate 11. Eastern Airlines maintains it for the use of traveling celebrities, politicians, and other conspicuous persons who would rather not be seen drinking in public with the Rabble.

I had been there before, back in February, sipping a midday beer with John Lindsay while we waited for the flight to L.A. He had addressed the Florida state legislature in Tallahassee that morning; the Florida primary was still two weeks away, Muskie was still the front-runner, McGovern was campaigning desperately up in New Hampshire, and Lindsay’s managers felt he was doing well enough in Florida that he could afford to take a few days off and zip out to California. They had already circled June 6th on the Mayor’s campaign calendar. It was obvious, even then, that the California primary was going to be The Big One: winner-take-all for 271 delegate votes, more than any other state, and the winner in California would almost certainly be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 1972.

Nobody argued that. The big problem in February was knowing which two of the twelve candidates would survive until then. If California was going to be the showdown, it was also three months and twenty-three primaries away – a long and grueling struggle before the field would narrow down to only two.

Ed Muskie, of course, would be one of them. In late February – and even in early March – he was such an overwhelming favorite that every press wizard in Washington had already conceded him the nomination. At that point in the campaign, the smart-money scenario had Big Ed winning comfortably in New Hampshire, finishing a strong second to Wallace a week later in Florida, then nailing it in Wisconsin on April 4th.

New Hampshire would finish McGovern, they said, and Hubert’s ill-advised Comeback would die on the vine in Florida. Jackson and Chisholm were fools, McCarthy and Wilbur Mills were doomed tokens … and that left only Lindsay, a maverick Republican who had only recently switched parties. But he had already caused a mild shock wave on the Democratic side by beating McGovern badly – and holding Muskie to a stand-off – with an eleventh-hour, ‘Kennedy-style’ campaign in non-primary Arizona, the first state to elect delegates.

Lindsay’s lieutenants saw that success in Arizona as the first spark for what would soon be a firestorm. Their blueprint had Lindsay compounding his momentum by finishing a strong third or even second in Florida, then polarizing the party by almost beating Muskie in Wisconsin – which would set the stage for an early Right/Left showdown in Massachusetts, a crucial primary state with 102 delegates and a traditionally liberal electorate.

The key to that strategy was the idea that Muskie could not hold the Center, because he was basically a candidate of the Democratic Right, like Scoop Jackson, and that he would move instinctively in that direction at the first sign of challenge from his Left – which would force him into a position so close to Nixon’s that eventually not even the Democratic ‘centrists’ would tolerate him.

There was high ground to be seized on The Left, Lindsay felt, and whoever seized it would fall heir to that far-flung, leaderless army of Kennedy/McCarthy zealots from 1968 … along with 25 million new voters who would naturally go 3-1 against Nixon – unless the Democratic candidate turned out to be Hubert Humphrey or a Moray Eel. This meant that almost anybody who could strike sparks with the ‘new voters’ would be working off a huge and potentially explosive new power base that was worth – on paper, at least – anywhere between 5 percent and 15 percent of the total vote. It was a built-in secret weapon for any charismatic Left-bent underdog who could make the November election even reasonably close.

Now, walking down a long empty white corridor in the Atlanta airport on a Sunday night in July, I had a very clear memory of my last visit to this place – but it seemed like something that had happened five years ago, instead of only five months. The Lindsay campaign was a loose, upbeat trip while it lasted, but there is a merciless kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ quality about a losing presidential campaign … and when I saw Lindsay on the convention floor in Miami, sitting almost unnoticed in the front row of the New York delegation, it was vaguely unsettling to recall that less than six months ago he was attracting big crowds out on Collins Avenue – just one block east of his chair, that night, in the Miami Beach convention hall – and that every word he said, back then, was being sucked up by three or four network TV crews and echoed on the front pages of every major newspaper from coast to coast.

As it turned out, the Lindsay campaign was fatally flawed from the start. It was all tip and no iceberg – the exact opposite of the slow-building McGovern juggernaut – but 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 dogfood. 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 Charley 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 14th, when McGovern – who had finished a dismal sixth, behind even Lindsay and Muskie – refused to follow Big Ed’s 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 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 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.

The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems – much less come up with any honest solutions – but ‘the Fighting Little Judge’ has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. Southern politicians are not made that way. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler populatio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• December 1971
• January
• February
• March
• Later in March
• April
• May
• June
• Later in June
• July
• Dark Interlude
• August
• September
• October
• November
• Be Angry At The Sun
• December
• Epitaph
• Author’s Note
• Keep Reading
• P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• About the Publisher