Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail

Copyright © 1973 by Hunter S. Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission by the Publisher, excepting brief quotations used in connection with reviews or essays written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following: Lines from "Taxi" by Harry F. Chapin, © 1972 Story Songs Ltd; used by permission, all rights reserved. "Eagleton Reveals Illness," "Vacation Ordeal" and "The McGovern Course," by William Greider, copyright © 1972 Washington Post Company, by permission of the Washington Post. "Be Angry at the Sun," copyright 1941, renewed 1969 by Donnan Jeffers and Garth Jeffers; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. "The McGovern Image," by James Naughton © 1972 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission.

First published in Great Britain 1974 by Allison and Busby Limited 6a Noel Street, London W.I.V 3rd

I.S.B.N 0 85031 125 X

First published in the United States of America by Straight Arrow Books Printed in Great Britain by The Anchor Press Ltd, Tiptree, Essex To Sandy who endured almost a year of grim exile in Washington D.C while the book was being written F.S.I Between the Idea and the Realty Falls the Shadow —T S Elot

's Note

nber 1971

Contents

Trip Necessary Strategic Retreat into National Politics minutes A One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Setting Up the National Affairs Desk Can George rive the Black Menace Fear and Leathing in Washington

ty

tion Pound Shathammer Prot Scorn the Youth Vote feat for the Boys in the Back Room The Death of Hope athering of Expectation Another McCarthy Crusade? day? The Rancid Resurrection of Hubert Humphrey 2 in the Press Box A Mano a Mano on T.W.A Who Is Big by Is Everybody Sucking Up to Him?

ary

Loathing in New Hampshire Back on the Campaign Trail bester, Keene & The Booth Fish Hatcheries Harold Hughes Friend Weird Memories of 68 A Private Conversation hard Nixon Will Dope Doom the Cowboys' A First & Reluctantly Final Judgment on the Reality of George ern Small Hope for the Hammer & No Hope At All for the lizards

7

w from key Biscavne Enter the Savage Boohoo Madness nce on the "Sunshine Special" Lindsay Runs Amok Runs Seared First Flexing of the Big Wallace Muscle First Doom for the Democrats Abandon All Hope Ye Who ere Except Maybe Ted Kennedy

119 Later in March

The Banshee Screams in Florida . . . The Emergence of Mankiewicz . . . Hard Times for the Man from Maine . . . Redneck Power & Hell on Wheels for George Wallace . . . Hube Slithers out of Obscurity . . . Fear and Loathing on the Democratic Left . . .

136 April

Stunning Upset in Wisconsin . . . McGovern Juggernaut Croaks Muskie . . . Humphrey Falters; Wallace Rolls On . . . Big Ed Exposed as Ibogaine Addict . . . McGovern Accosts the Sheriff . . . Bad News from Bleak House: Mojo Maddness in Milwaukee; or How Nazis Broke My Spirit on Election Night . . . Mankiewicz Predicts First Ballot Victory in Miami . . .

May

Crank Time on the Low Road . . . Fear and Loathing in Ohio & Nebraska . . . Humphrey Gets Ugly, McGovern Backs off . . . Delirium Tremens at the National Affairs Desk . . . Acid, Amnesty & Abortion . . . Massive Irregularities on Election Night in Cleveland; Death Watch in the Situation Room . . . Wallace Gunmed Down in Maryland . . . Showdown Looms in California . . .

219 June

California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance . . . Return of the Vincent Black Shadow . . . The Juggernaut Roars on; McGovern Troops Ease off as Polls Predict Sweeping Victory . . . Hubert's Last Stand: Vicious Attacks, Desperate Appeals, Strange Tales of Midnight Money from Vegas . . .

252 Later in June

Mass Burial for Political Bosses in New York . . . McGovern over the Hump . . . The Death by Beating of a Six-Foot Blue-Black Serpent . . . What Next for the Good Ole Boys? . . . Anatomy of a Fixer . . . Treachery Looms in Miami . . . Free Booze & Foul Rumors in the Press Room . . . Ominous Eleventh-Hour Slump Reveals Fistula in McGovern's Woodpile . . .

269 July

Fear and Loathing in Miami: Old Bulls Meet the Butcher . . . A Dreyay 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

Japanese text

Author's Note

Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now 609 A M I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn. Out here at the far end of Geary Street, this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of "Seal Rock" looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound. Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking—racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window howling & whining leaping up on the bed & scattering my book galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upset the gun bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami, but that one will never be used because the goddamn hound put five big claw holes in the middle of Frank's chest.

That dog will not enter this room again. He came in with the book-editor, who went away about six hours ago with thirteen finished chapters—the bloody product of fifty five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless high speed editing. But there was no other way to get the thing done. I am not an easy person to work with in terms of deadlines. When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn't show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing to move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.

One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about forty pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectic typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders—in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.

We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer's Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone—pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my head. When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel... and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.

There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of the book was written. From December '71 to January '73—in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country—there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day—while my own deadline fell every two weeks—but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland . . . On the other hand, it might easily be

something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear. Stupidity and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives. they are bored with their daily routines, eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now & then. No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while, there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road waiting for the next set of headlights to come along then streaking out of the bushes with split-second tuning and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

Wh not? Anything that gets the adrenaline moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the νess free of cholesterol but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain after a while you start burning out the circuits When a jackrabbit gets addicted to read running it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed—and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who his been There can possibly understand Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them Politics has its own language which is often so complex that it borders on being a code and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate—to make sense of the partisan bullshut that even your friends will lay on you—without carpling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to "crack down on Organized Crime". In both cases you find unexpected friends on both sides and in order to protect them—and to keep them as sources of private information—you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.

This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the '72 presidential campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as "off the record." The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists—in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in... especially not for "minor infractions" of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.

A classic example of this syndrome was the disastrous “Eagleton Affair.” Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps knew Eagleton was a serious boozer with a history of mental breakdowns—but none of them had ever written about it, and the few who were known to have mentioned it privately clammed up 1000 percent when McGovern's harried staffer began making inquiries on that fateful Thursday afternoon in Miami. Any Washington political reporter who blows a Senator's chance for the vice-presidency might as well start looking for another beat to cover—because his name will be instant Mud on Capitol Hill.

When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap. Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me—because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill. I went there for two reasons: (1) to learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign, and (2) to write about it the same way I'd write about anything else—as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.

It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well—but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach. The most obvious and least serious of these was the fact that even the few people I considered

my friends in Washington treated me like a walking bomb, some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and utter words that would almost certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. The other, more complex, problem had to do with my natural out-front brus in favor of the McGovern candidacy—which was not a problem at first, when George was such a hopeless underdog that his staffers saw no harm in talking frankly with any journalist who seemed friendly and interested—but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very uncomfortable position. Some of the friends I made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern winning the Democratic nomination seemed almost as weird as the appearance of a full time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I'd been hanging around with for entirely person it reasons but key people in a fast rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not only of winning the party nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.

McGovern's success in the primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who were running his campaign—especially those who had come to know me well enough to sense that my contempt for the time honored double standard in political journalism might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly pragmatic style of politics that George was getting into. And their apprehension increased measurably as it became obvious that dopefiends, anarchists and Big Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone. Not long after McGovern's breakthrough victory in the Wisconsin primary, arch establishment mouthpiece Stewart Alsop went out of his way to quote some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey in his Newsweek column thus raising me to the level of at least new-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.

Things were never the same after that A cloud of hellish intensity had come down on the McGovern campaign by the time it rolled into California Mandates came down from the top, warning staffers to beware of the press The only exceptions were reporters who were known to have a decent respect for things said

“in confidence,” and I didn't fit that description.

And so much for all that. The point I meant to make here—before we wandered off on that tangent about jackrabbits—is that everything in this book except the footnotes was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary—and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the fifty or sixty bets I made between February and November. My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern's staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35 percent of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37.5 percent. But from that point on, I won steadily—until November 7, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct.

The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? I blew that one, along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven't changed anything else in this mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can't find any excuse for changing my final prediction. Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which—in addition to the publisher's desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those twelve frantic months—was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening: from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.

So this is more a jangled campaign diary than a record or reasoned analysis of the '72 presidential campaign. Whatever I wrote in the midnight hours on rented typewriters in all those cluttered hotel rooms along the campaign trail—from the Wayfarer Inn outside Manchester to the Neil House in Columbus to the Wilshire Hyatt House in L.A. and the Fontainebleau in Miami

Introduction

—is no different now than it was back in March and May and July when I was cranking it out of the typewriter one page at a time and feeding it into the plastic maw of that goddamn Mojo Wire to some hash addled freak of an editor at the Rolling Stone news-desk in San Francisco What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel record of what the campaign was like at the time not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history. There will be no shortage of books covering that end. The last count I got was just before Christmas in 72 when ex McGovern speech writer Sandy Berger said at least nineteen people who'd been involved in the campaign were writing books about it—so we'll eventually get the whole story for good or ill Meanwhile my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rimbling introduction with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in twenty four hours but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed there might not be any Final Chapter About four fingers of king hell Crank would do the trick but I am not optimistic There is a definite scarcity of genuine high voltage Crank on the market these days—and recording to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington that's solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs Well thank Jesus for that I was beginning to think we were never going to put the arm on that crowd But the people in Washington say we're finally making progress And if anybody should know, it's them So maybe this country's about to get back on the Right Trick 115T Sunday January 28 1973 Sun Francisco Seal Rock Inn

December 1971

Is This Trip Necessary? Strategic Retreat into National Politics Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Setting Up the National Affairs Desk Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? Fear and Loathing in Washington Outside my new Front Door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk the grass is still green but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood pine elm and cherry I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days even more than the Also brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life—all night long every night huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp; and also a fifty watt boombot for the F.M car radio You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox they say because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping pong ball a very bad act in traffic especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation's Capital One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the Westward Movement in U.S history. After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road going west in the first place.

You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can't even park; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown... which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don't dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven't left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days.

Where indeed?

At 5:30 in the morning I can walk outside to piss casually off my stoop and watch the lawn dying slowly from a white glaze of frost. . . Nothing moving out here tonight; not since that evil nigger hurled a three-pound Washington Post through the shattered glass coachlight at the top of my stone front steps. He offered to pay for it, but my Dobermans were already on him.

Life runs fast & mean in this town. It's like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear. Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto in the Northwest quadrant of town—which seems to have made things a lot easier for the black marauders who have turned places like chic Georgetown and once-stylish Capitol Hill into hellishly paranoid Fear Zones.

Washington Post columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon/Mitchell administration—seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost. --seems totally unconcerned that Washington D.C. has become the Rape Capital of the World.

One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing brick colonial town houses with cut glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument. When I came here to look for a house or apartment about a month ago I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.

'Good God man' said my friend from the liberal New York Post "You can't live there' It's a goddamn jungle!

Crime figures for The District are so heinous that they em barrass even J. Edgar Hoover's Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970 and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has matched the morale of the local police to a new low Of the two hundred and fifty murders this year only thirty six have been solved and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up Meanwhile things like burglaries street muggings and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city's three dishes, is located in the Southeast District—a few blocks from the Capitol—in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as hall passes. So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis like people running the gauntlet—fearful with good reason of every sudden football between the street and the bright lit safety of the newsroom guard station.

This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the 0.44 magnum. But in Washington you get the impression—if you believe what you hear from even the most “liberal” insiders—that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a 0.38 Special, and maybe worse.

Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet . . . but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.

All this sounds incredible—and that was my reaction at first: “Come on! It can't be that bad!” “You wait and see,” they said. “And meanwhile, keep your doors locked.” I immediately called Colorado and had another Dobernan shipped in. If this is what's happening in this town, I felt, the thing to do was get right on top of it . . . but paranoia gets very heavy when there's no more humor in it; and it occurs to me now that maybe this is what has happened to whatever remains of the “liberal power structure” in Washington. Getting beaten in Congress is one thing—even if you get beaten a lot—but when you slink out of the Senate chamber with your tail between your legs and then have to worry about getting mugged, stomped, or raped in the Capitol parking lot by a trio of renegade Black Panthers . . . well, it tends to bring you down a bit, and warp your Liberal Instincts.

There is no way to avoid "racist undertones" here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks—not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, "Why the fuck did you do that?" And I tell myself, "Well, I'll pick up the next one I see." And sometimes I do, but not always.

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn as I recall when I struggled into Washington just ahead of the rush hour government worker car pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70s like a crippled steel piss-ant dragging a massive orange U haul trailer full of books and important papers™ feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.

It's a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough road mud & snow driving but not even this new six-cylinder super Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek Colorado to Washington D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Higerstown still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezwood in Pennsylvania I'd stopped there to ponder the drug quest on with two freks I met on the Turnpike They had blown a tire east of Everett but nobody would stop to lend them a pack. They had a spare tire—and a jack too for that matter—but no jack handle no way to crank the car up and put the spare on. They had gone out to Cleveland from Baltimore—to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit and they d picked up this 66 Ford Fairlane for $150.

I was impressed "Shit they said You can pick up a goddamn new Thunder bird out there for seven fifty All you need is cash man people are desperate There's no work out there min they're selling every thing It's down to a dime on the dollar Shut I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Biliu more" I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business if things were as good as they said. They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit Toledo Cleveland area and places like Baltimore Philly and Washington. All you need," they said, "is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars."

"Right," I said. "And some jack-handles." “What?”

"Jack-handles—for scenes like these."

They laughed. Yeah, a jack-handle or so might save a lot of trouble. They'd been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by . . . and in truth I only stopped because I couldn't quite believe what I thought I'd just seen. Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade—running easily, for a change—when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.

I hit the brakes and pulled over. What the fuck was that? I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days . . . and you don't really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.

A At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not? Check it out.

But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer . . . so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn't back up.

But I was still curious. So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a 0.357 magnum in the other. No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought—by wild beasts or anything else. My instincts were purely humanitarian—but what about that Thing I was going back to look for? You read about these people in the Reader's Digest: blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.

Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather. You never know . . . and that warning works both ways. Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle

. and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a 357 magnum in his hand A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help. For all they knew I was half mad on P.C.P and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.

But this time things worked out—as they usually do when you go with your instincts—and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half frozen heads with a blowout and the "white bear rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop. At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said. "I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane—even a Cop Car, this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me shut, they're supposed to help people, right?"

Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the ear until we started cranking it up. The Volvo jack wouldn't work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.

When Lester finally got out he didn't say much, but finally his head seemed to clear and he helped put the tire on. Then he looked up at me while Jerry tightened the bolts and said, "Say, man you have anything to smoke?"

"Smoke?" I said. "Do I look like the kind of person who'd be carrying marrywanna?"

Lester eyed me for a moment, then shook his head "Well, shut," he said. "Let's smoke some of ours" "Not here." I said "Those blue lights about a hundred yards from where my car's parked is a State Police barracks. Let's get some coffee down in Breezewood; there's bound to be a truck stop."

Jerry nodded. "It's cold as a bastard out here. If we want to get loaded, let's go someplace where it's warm."

They gave me a ride down to the Volvo, then followed me into Breezewood to a giant truckstop. “This is terrible shit.” Lester muttered, handing the joint to Jerry. “There's nothin' worth a damn for sale these days. It's got so the only thing you can get off on is smack.”

Jerry nodded. The waitress appeared with more coffee. "You boys are sure laughin' a lot," she said. "What's so funny at this hour of the morning?"

Lester fixed her with a front-toothless smile and two glittering eyes that might have seemed dangerous if he hadn't been in such a mellow mood. "You know," he said, "I used to be a male where, and I'm laughin' because I'm so happy that I finally found Jesus."

The waitress smiled nervously as she filled our cups and then hurried back to her perch behind the counter. We drank off the coffee and traded a few more stories about the horrors of the latter-day drug market. Then Jerry said they would have to get moving. "We're heading for Baltimore," he said. "What about you?"

"Washington." I said. “What for?” Lester asked. “Why the fuck would anybody want to go there?”

I shrugged. We were standing in the parking lot while my Doberman pissed on the wheel of a big Hard Brothers poultry truck. "Well , . . it's a weird sort of trip." I said finally. "What happened is that I finally got a job, after twelve years."

"Jesus!" said Lester. "That's heavy. Twelve years on the dele! Man, you must of been really strung out!"

I smiled. "Yeah... yeah. I guess you could say that."

"What kind of a job?" Jerry asked.

Now the Doberman had the driver of the Hard Brothers truck backed up against his cab, screeching hysterically at the dog and kicking out with his metal-toed Army boots. We watched with vague amusement as the Doberman—puzzled by this crazy outburst—backed off and growled a warning "O God Jesus," screamed the trucker "Somebody help me!" It was clear that he felt he was about to be chewed up and killed for no reason at all, by some vicious animal that had come out of the darkness to pin him against his own truck "ok, Benny!" I shouted "Don't fool with that man—he's nervous." The trucker shook his fist at me and yelled something about getting my license number. ' Get out of here you asshole' ' Lester screamed 'It's pigs like you that give Dobermans a bad name ' Jerry laughed as the trucker drove off 'You won't last long on the job with a dog like that,' he said. Seriously—what kind of work do you do?

'It's a political gig' I said I'm going to Washington to cover the '72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone 'Jesus Christ' Jerry muttered That's weird The Stone is into politics?

I stared down at the asphalt not sure of what to say Was ' The Stone ' into politics? Or was it just me? I had never really wondered about it but suddenly on the outskirts of Washington, in the cold grey dawn of this truckstop near Freezewood just north of the Maryland line it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't really say what I was doing there—except heading for D.C with an orange pig-shaped trailer and a Doberman Pinscher with bad bowels after too many days on the road "It sounds like a stunking goddamn way to get back into work," said Lester. "Why don't you hang up that bullshit and we'll put something together with that car shuttle Jerry told you about?"

I shook my head "No I want to at least try this trip" I said Lester stated at me for a moment then shrugged 'God damn'" he said "What a bummer Why would anybody want to get hung up in a pile of shot like Politics?"

"Well " I said, wondering if there was any sane answer to a question like that. "It's mainly a personal trip a very hard thing to explain."

Jerry smiled 'You talk like you've tried it,' he said "Like maybe you got off on it" “Not as far as I meant to,” I said, “but definitely high.”

Lester was watching me now with new interest. "I always thought that about politicians," he said. "Just a gang of goddamn power junkies, gone off on their own strange trips." “Come on now,” said Jerry. “Some of those guys are ok.” “Who?” Lester asked. “That's why I'm going to Washington,” I said. “To check out the people and find out if they're all swine.” “Don't worry,” said Lester. “They are. You might as well go looking for cherries in a Baltimore whorehouse.” “ok,” I said. “I'll see you when I make it over to Baltimore.” I stuck out my hand and Jerry took it in a quick conventional handshake—but Lester had his thumb up, so I had to adjust for the Revolutionary Drug Brothers grip, or whatever that goddamn thing is supposed to mean. When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston. “He's right,” said Jerry. “Those bastards wouldn't even be there if they weren't rotten.” He shook his head without looking at us, staring balefully across the parking lot. The grey light of dawn was getting brighter now; Thursday night was dying and the highway at the other end of the parking lot was humming with cars full of people going to work on Friday morning.

Welcome to Washington, D.C. That's what the sign says. It's about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall—a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.

It is not considered fashionable to live in "The District" itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged brick townhouse with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington's lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It's more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors, smoking tailor-made joints.

The same people in Georgetown are trendy young lawyers journalists and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pine pinched bars and "singles only discotheques where drinks cost $175 and there's No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants I live on the black side of Rock Creek park in what my journalistic friends call "a marginal neighborhood. Almost every body else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the "white side of the park, towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda in Maryland.

The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions and the only thing even approximating a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle downtown The only people I know who live down there are Nicholas Von Hoffman and Jim Flug Teddy Kennedy's hyper active Legislative Assistant But Von Hoffman seems to have had a belly full of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast to San Francisco and Flug like every body else even vaguely connected with Kennedy is gearing down for a very heavy year like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone and the other four on planes With December winding down there is a fast swelling under current of political angst in the air around Washington a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began three years ago Jim Flug says he'd rather not talk about Kennedy running for President—at least not until he has to and that time seems to be coming up first. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who matters' in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup Polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon—almost even with him now—and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.

There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck—and beaten once again—with some tried and half true hick like Humphrey Jackson or Muskie and George McGovern the only candidate in either party worth voting for is hung in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington Press Corps. He'd be a fine

President," they say, "but of course he can't possibly win."

Why not?

Well . . . the wizards haven't bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern President—that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists & dazed dropouts—won't even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on election day.

Maybe so... but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called “The McGovern Vote” to the polls if they actually represented it.

It sure as hell wasn't the A.F.L/C.I.O that ran L.B.J out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn't Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson... and it wasn't George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade "radical" organizer from the U.A.W.

It wasn't the big-time "Democratic bosses" who won the California primary for Bobby—but thousands of Niggers and Spices and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.

But there was, of course, The Murder—and then the Convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to “respectable” Democrats, then and now—and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in '72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower/Stevenson wipeout in 1956.

The people who turned out for Bobby are still around—along with several million others who'll be voting for the first time—but they won't turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser...

According to the Gallup Polls, however, the Underculture vote is building up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and

this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Bigwigs and "pros" in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy's name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations—calling him a "liar" and a "coward" and a "cheater".

And this is only December of 1971, the election is still ten months away The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy's recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won't even admit that it's happening—at least not for the record—and his top-level staffers like Jim Flug find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming—too soon, perhaps but there's nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down insisting he's not a candidate his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.

When I called Flue the other night at the office he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed by the Senate as Nixon's new Secretary of Agriculture "To hell with Butr ' I said ' what about Rehnqurt? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?' " They have the votes ' he replied ' Jesus ' I muttered is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I've read about him" "Worse," Flug said "But I think he's in. We tried, but we can't get the votes."

Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for Esquire—in article that finally died in a blaze of migging between me and the editors about how to cut my "final version down from 30,000 words to a size that would fit in the magazine.

Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Huuska, the statesman from Nebraska and various other heavies whose names I forget now We idled through the line with our trays and then took our plastic-wrapped tunafish sandwiches and coffee in styrofoam cups over to a small formica table. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill—trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half-expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line... until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.

Meanwhile, Flug was outlining evry angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally into it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans—a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument the National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it occurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom . . . and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my 0.44 magnum fetish.

After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug's trip—and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long-shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.

Coming on the heels of Judge Haynesworth's rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in . . . but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh's assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.

Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more Court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them. “Not even Rehnquist?” I asked. “Christ, that's like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court "I know," said Flug. 'Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who'll be up there."

"You mean down there," I said "Along with all the rest of us" I laughed "Well there's always smack" Flug didn't laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard for the past three years to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon/Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynesworth & Carswell then having to swallow a third rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years—despite the best efforts of the sharpest and merriest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on—is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss poor bowling team in Memphis—and this disastrous nazi bent shift of the federal government's Final Decision making powers won't even begin to like effect until the spring of 72.

The effects of this takeover are potentially so disastrous—in terms of personal freedom and police power—that there is no point even speculative on the fite of some poor misguided geek who might want to take his Illegal Search & Sessure case all the way up to the top A helpful hint however might be found in the case of the Tallahassee newspaper reporter who went to Canada in 1967 to avoid the draft—and returned to find that he was no longer a citizen of the United States and now he has ninety days to leave the country. He appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but they refused to even hear it.

So now he has to go but of course he has no passport—and international travel is not real easy without a passport. The federal immigration officials understand this but—backed up by the Supreme Court—they have given him an ultimatum to vacate, anyway. They don't cite where he goes, just get out—and meanwhile Chief Justice Burger has taken to answering his doorbell at night with a big six-shooter in his hand. You never know, he says who might come crashing in.

Indeed Maybe Rehnquist—far gone with an overdose of raw sowbelly and crazy for terminal vengeance on the first house he comes to.

This world is full of dangerous beasts—but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok—like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly decides to start sampling his contraband.

Yes . . . and . . . uh, where were we? I have a bad tendency to rush off on mad tangents and pursue them for fifty or sixty pages that get so out of control that I end up burning them, for my own good. One of the few exceptions to this rule occurred very recently, when I slipped up and let about two hundred pages go into print . . . which caused me a lot of trouble with the tax man, among others, and it taught me a lesson I hope I'll never forget.

Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth—including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.

And it's also a nasty fact that I have to catch a plane for Chicago in three hours—to attend some kind of national Emergency Conference for New Voters, which looks like the opening shot in this year's version of the McCarthy/Kennedy uprising in '68—and since the conference starts at six o'clock tonight, I must make that plane... ... Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on something. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars. u

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January

The Million Pound Shithammer. Pros Scorn the Youth Vote. Fresh Meat for the Boys in the Back Room "The Death of Hope" & A Withering of Expectation Another McCarthy Crusade? John Lindsay? The Rancid Resurrection of Hubert Humphrey Violence in the Press Box & Mano a Mano on T.W.A Who Is Big Ed & Why Is Everybody Sucking Up to Him?

There are issues enough. What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly hope is gone. The future of hope would be a terrible event, the blacks have never been cynical about America. But conversation you hear among the young now, on the South Side of Chicago up in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly suggests the birth of a new cynicism. In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect young blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different—a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations. D.J.R Bruckner, 1/6/72 in the L.A Times Bruckners Article was Focused on the mood of Young Blaeks, but unless you were reading very closely, the distinction was easy to miss. Because the mood among Young Whites is not much different — despite a lot of well financed publicity about the potentially massive "youth vote" These are the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25—going, maybe, to the polls for the first time—who supposedly hold the fate of the nation in the palms of their eager young hands. According to the people who claim to speak for it, this "youth vote" has the power to zap Nixon out of office with a flick of its wrist. Hubert Humphrey lost in '68 by 499,704 votes—a miniscule percentage of what the so-called "youth vote" could turn out in 1972.

But there are not many people in Washington who take this notion of the "youth vote" very seriously. Not even the candidates. The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in '72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) voters means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns... just another big wave of new immigrants who don't know the score yet. but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?

Why indeed? The scumbags behind this thinking are probably right, once again—but it might be worth pondering, this time, if perhaps they might be right for the wrong reasons. Almost all the politicians and press wizards who denigrate the “so-called youth vote” as a factor in the '72 elections have justified their thinking with a sort of melancholy judgment on “the kids” themselves. “How many will even register?” they ask. “And even then—even assuming a third of the possibles might register, how many of those will actually get out and vote?”

The implication, every time, is that the "youth vote" menace is just a noisy paper tiger. Sure, some of these kids will vote, they say, but the way things look now, it won't be more than ten percent. That's the colleges; the other ninety percent are either military types, on the dole, or working people—on salary, just married, hired into their first jobs. Man, these people are already locked down, the same as their parents.

That's the argument . . . and it's probably safe to say, right now, that there is not a single presidential candidate, media guru, or backstairs politics wizard in Washington who honestly believes the "youth vote" will have more than a marginal, splinter-vote effect on the final outcome of the 1972 presidential campaign.

These kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of 'em don't even want to hear about it. All they want to do these days

is he around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna yeah and just between you and me Fred, I think it's probably all for the best Among the half-dozen high-powered organizations in Washington who claim to speak for the "youth vote," the only one with any real muscle at this point is the National Association of Student Governments, which recently—after putting together an "Emergency Conference for New Voters" in Chicago last month—brought its leadership back to D.C and called a press conference in the Old Senate office building to announce the formation of a "National Youth Caucus."

The idea, said 26-year-old Duane Draper—the main organizer—was to get student type activists into power on the local level in every state where they might be able to influence the drift of the 72 election. The press conference was well attended. Edward P. Morgan of P.B.S was there dressed in a snappy London Tog raincoat and twirling a black umbrella, the New York Times sent a woman the Washington Post was represented by a human pencil, and the rest of the national press sent the same people they send to everything else that happens officially in this doomed sinkhole of a city.

As always the "print people' stood or sit in a timid half circle behind the network T.V cameras—while Draper and his mentor, Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, sat together at the front table and explained that the success of the Chicago rally had gotten the "youth vote" off to a running start. Harris didn't say much, he just sat there looking like Johnny Cash while Draper, a former student body president at the University of Oklahoma, explained to the jaded press that the "youth vote" would be an important and perhaps decisive factor in this year's election.

I came in about ten minutes late, and when question time came around I asked the same one I'd asked Allard Lowenstein at a similar press conference in Chicago Would the Youth Caucus support Hubert Humphrey if he won the Democratic nomination?

Lowenstein had refused to answer that question in Chicago, saying, "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it." But in Washington Draper said "Yes," the Youth Vote could get behind Hubert if he said the right things—"if he takes the right positions" "How about Jackson?" I asked.

This made for a pause . . . but finally Draper said the National Youth Caucus might support Jackson, too, "if he comes around." “Around to what?” I asked. And by this time I was feeling very naked and conspicuous. My garb and general demeanor is not considered normal by Washington standards. Levis don't make it in this town; if you show up wearing Levis they figure you're either a servant or a messenger. This is particularly true at high-level press conferences, where any deviation from standard journalistic dress is considered rude and perhaps even dangerous.

In Washington all journalists dress like bank tellers—and those who don't have problems. Mister Nixon's press handlers, for instance, have made it ominously clear that I shall not be given White House press credentials. The first time I called, they said they'd never heard of Rolling Stone. "Rolling what?" said the woman. “You'd better ask somebody a little younger,” I said. “Thank you,” she hissed. “I'll do that.” But the next obstacle up the line was the deputy White House press secretary, a faceless voice called Gerald Warren, who said Rolling Whatever didn't need White House press credentials—despite the fact they had been issued in the past, without any hassle, to all manner of strange and obscure publications, including student papers like the George Washington University Hatchet.

The only people who seem genuinely interested in the '72 elections are the actual participants—the various candidates, their paid staff people, the thousands of journalists, cameramen & other media-connected hustlers who will spend most of this year humping the campaign along... and of course all the sponsors, called "fat cats" in the language of Now-Politics, who stand to gain hugely for at least the next four years if they can muscle their man down the homestretch just a hair ahead of the others.

The fat-cat action is still one of the most dramatic aspects of a presidential campaign, but even in this colorful area the tension is leaking away—primarily because most of the really serious fat cats figured out, a few years back, that they could beat the whole

resp—along with the onus of going down the tube with some desperate loser—by “helping” two candidates, instead of just one A good example of this, in 1972, will probably be Mrs Reita Factor—ex-wife of "Jake the Barber" and the largest single contributor to Hubert Humphrey's campaign in '68. She didn't get a hell of a lot of return for her investment last time around. But this year, using the new method she can buy the total friendship of two, three, or perhaps even four presidential candidates, for the same price by splitting up the nut, as discreetly as possible, between Hubert, Nixon, and maybe—just for the natural sandy hell of it—a chunk to Gene McCarthy, who appears to be cranking up a genuinely weird campaign this time.

I have a peculiar affection for McCarthy, nothing serious or personal but I recall standing next to him in the snow outside the "ext" door of a shoe factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, in February of 1968 when the five o'clock whistle blew and he had to stand there in the midst of those workers rushing out to the parking lot. I will never forget the pain in McCarthy's face as he stood there with his hand out, saying over and over again "Shake hands with Senator McCarthy, shake hands with Senator McCarthy," a tense plastic smile on his face, stepping nervously toward anything friendly, "Shake hands with Senator McCarthy" but most of the crowd ignored him, refusing to even acknowledge his outstretched hand, staring straight ahead as they hurried out to their ears.

There was at least one network T.V camera on hand that afternoon, but the scene was never aired. It was painful enough, just being there, but to have put that scene on national T.V would have been an act of genuine cruelty. McCarthy was obviously suffering, not so much because nine out of ten people refused to shake his hand, but because he really hated being there in the first place. But his managers had told him it was necessary, and maybe it was.

Later, when his outlandish success in New Hampshire shocked Johnson into retirement, I half-expected McCarthy to quit the race himself, rather than suffer all the way to Chicago ( like Castro in Cuba—after Batista fluid ). And god only knows what kind of vengeful energy as driving him this time, but I lot of people who are so old to go to the world, but I have not mentioned that he might run again in 72 are becoming to like him seriously not as a Democratic contender but vs in increasingly possible Fourth Party candidate with the power to put a candidate like Musk through terrible changes between August and November. To Democratic chairman Larov O'Brien the spectator of a Mr. Maddux's name is must be something like among the Hound of the BatKevles's sniffing and the wrong around on your porch every night. A left bent Fourth Party candidate with a few serious grudges on his mind could easily take enough left/ridical votes away from either Musk or Humphrey to make the Dmo eratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them. " Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind this very, but the first time I was in the world, but I was kidding got swipped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Musk within hours after the Maine Senator made his candidacy official? The front page of the Washington Post carried photos of both men, along with a prominent headline and McCarthy's harsh words. He was the king of the world's first New England hawkish stance in the region in Vietnam prior to 1968. McCarthy also accused Muskie of being the most active representative of Johnson administration policy at the 1968 Convention. " Muskie seemed genuinely shaken by this attack. He immediately called a press conference to admit that he did been wrong about Vietnam in the past but this now. I have had reason to change the position of the post-war market and then I explain but after admitting his post mistakes," he said that he now Fivered " as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible.

McCarthy merely shrugged. He had done his gig for the day, and Muskie was jolted. The Senator focused all his efforts on the question of his altered Vietnam stance, but he was probably far more disturbed by McCarthy's ugly revenge-tainted reference to Muskie's role in the '68 Democratic-Convention. This was obviously the main bone in McCarthy's throat, but Muskie ignored it and nobody asked Gene what he really meant by the charge... probably because there is no way to understand what happened to McCarthy in Chicago unless you were there and saw it yourself.

I have never read anything that comes anywhere close to explaining the shock and intensity I felt at that convention . . . and although I was right in the middle of it the whole time, I have never been able to write about it myself. For two weeks afterwards, back in Colorado, I couldn't even talk about it without starting to cry—for reasons I think I finally understand now, but I still can't explain.

Because of this: because I went there as a journalist, with no real emotional attachment to any of the candidates and only the barest of illusions about the outcome... I was not personally involved in the thing, so there is no point in presuming to understand what kind of hellish effect Chicago must have had on Gene McCarthy.

I remember seeing him cross Michigan Avenue on Thursday night—several hours after Humphrey had made his acceptance speech out at the Stockyards—and then wandering into the crowd in Grant Park like a defeated general trying to mingle with his troops just after the Surrender. But McCarthy couldn't mingle. He could barely talk. He acted like a man in deep shock. There was not much to say. The campaign was over.

McCarthy's gig was finished. He had knocked off the President and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of

Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley's police, who burst into McCarthy's private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hystern that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pricing again.

Perhaps McCarthy has placed that whole scene in its proper historical and poetic perspective but if he has I didn't read it or maybe he's been hanging onto the manuscript until he can find a right ending McCarthy has a sharp sense of drama along with his kinky instinct for timing but nobody appears to have noticed, until now that he might also have a bull sized taste for revenge Maybe not. In terms of classic journalism this kind of wandering unfounded speculation will have a nasty effect on that asshole from Ireland who sent word across The Waters to nail me for bad language and lack of objectivity There have been numerous complaints, in fact about the publisher allowing me to get away with calling our new Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist a "swine" Well shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by these days. We all yern for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offhand is my good friend and colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only talk about objectivity, but Dr Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any argument among professionals, on the question of Dr Duke's Objectivity.

As for mine well, my doctor says it swole up and busted

about ten years ago. The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit T.V setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into the place... but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.

So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

And so much for all that, too. There was at least one more thing I wanted to get into here, before trying to wind this down and get into something human. Like sleep, or that 550'watt Humm Box they have up there in the Ree-Lax Parlor at Silver Spring. Some people say they should outlaw the Humm Box, but I disagree.

Meanwhile, all that venomous speculation about what McCarthy is up to these days leaves a crucial question hanging: The odd truth that almost everybody in Washington who is paid to analyze & predict the behavior of Vote Blocs seems to feel that the much-publicized "youth vote" will not be a Major Factor in the '72 presidential campaign would be a hell of a lot easier to accept if it weren't for the actual figures....

What the experts appear to be saying is that the sudden addition of 25 million new voters between the ages of 18 and 25 will not make much difference in the power-structure of American politics. No candidate will say this, of course. For the record, they are all very solicitous of the "youth vote." In a close election even ten percent of that bloc would mean 2.5 million votes—a very serious figure when you stack it up against Nixon's thin margin over Humphrey in 1968.

Think of it: Only ten percent! Two and a half million.

Enough—even according to Nixon's own wizards—to swing almost any election. There is a general assumption based on the outcome of recent presidential elections that it takes something genuinely vile and terrifying to cause either one of the major party candidates to come away with less than 40 percent of the vote. Goldwater managed to do this in 64 but not by much. Even after allowing Johnson's T.V sappers to cast him as a stupid bloodthirty goul who had every intention of blowing the whole world off as axis the moment he got his hands on the button. Goldwater still got 27,176,799 votes or 39 percent.

The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard brand two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn't pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.

We are talking about a purely physical image gig here but even if you let the candidates pubber like magpies about anything that comes to their minds not even a dangerous dinbat like Sam Yorty would be likely to alternate more than 45 percent or 50 percent of the electorate And even that far left radical busted George McGovern—babbling a middening litany of his most Fair Out Here—would be hard pressed to crank up any more than a 30 percent animosity quotient On balance they are a pretty bland lot I've'll Spiro Arenew—if you catch him between sereds—is not more than 20 percent different from Humphrey or Lindsey or Scoop Jackson. Four years ago in fact John I'm today due Agnew so much that he seconded his nomination for the vice presidency. There are a lot of people who say we should forget about that this year because John has already said he'd be a mistake about Agnew but there are a lot of others who take Lindsay's "Agnew Mistake" seriously—because they assume he would do the same thing again next week or next month, if he thought it would do him any good.

Nobody seems very worried about Lindsay right now; they are waiting to see what kind of action he can generate in Florida, a state full of tran-zee-unt and old transplanted New Yorkers. If he can't make it there, he's done for. Which is just as well. But if he scores big in Florida, we will probably have to start taking him seriously—particularly if Muskie looks convincing in New Hampshire.

A Muskie-Lindsay ticket could be one of those “naturals,” a marriage made in heaven and consummated by Larry O'Brien . . . Which gets us back to one of the main reasons why the political wizards aren't counting on much of a “youth vote” this year. It is hard to imagine even a zealot like Allard Lowenstein going out on the trail, once again, to whip up a campus-based firestorm for Muskie and Lindsay . . . particularly with Gene McCarthy lurking around, with that ugly mouth of his, and all those deep-bleeding grudges.

Another nightmare we might as well start coming to grips with is the probability that Hubert Humphrey will be a candidate for the Democratic nomination this year . . . And . . . there is probably some interesting talk going down around Humphrey headquarters these days:

"Say . . . ah, Hube, baby. I guess you heard what your old buddy Gene did to Muskie the other day, right? Yeah, and we always thought they were friends, didn't we?(Long pause, no reply from the candidate . . .)" “So … ah … Hube? You still with me? Jesus Christ! Where's that sunlamp? We gotta get more of a tan on you, baby. You look grey. (Long pause, no reply from the candidate …) Well, Hube, we might just as well face this thing. We're comin' up fast on what just might be a real nasty little problem for you … let's not try to kid ourselves, Hube, he's a really mean sonofabitch. (Long pause, etcetera …) You're gonna have to be ready, Hube. You announce next Thursday at noon, right? So we might as well figure that crazy fucker is gonna come down on you like a million pound shit-hammer that same afternoon. He'll probably stage a big scene at the Press Club—and we know who's gonna be there, don't we Hube? Yeah, every bastard in the business. Are you ready for that, Hube Baby? Can you handle it? (Long pause, no reply, etcetera—heavy breathing.) ok, Hube, tell me this: What does the bastard know? What's the worst he can spring on you?"

What indeed? Was McCarthy just honing up his act on Ed Muskie? Or does he really believe that Muskie—rather than Humphrey—was the main agent of Johnsonian policy at the '68 Convention?

Is that possible? Was Muskle the man behind all that treachery and bloodletting? Is McCarthy prepared to blow the whole lid off? Whose head does he really want? And how far will he go to get it? Does the man have a price?

This may be the only interesting question of the campaign until the big whistle blows in New Hampshire on March 7th. With McCarthy skulking around, Muskie can't afford anything but a thumping win over McGovern in that primary. But Mad Sam is up there too, and even Muskie's local handlers concede Yorty at least 15 percent of the Democratic vote, due to his freakish alliance with the neo-Nazi publisher of New Hampshire's only big newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader.

The Mayor of Los Angeles has never bothered to explain the twisted reasoning behind his candidacy in New Hampshire, but every vote he gets there will come off Muskie's pile, not McGovern's. Which means that McGovern, already sitting on 20 to 25 percent of the vote, could zap Muskie's whole trip by picking up another 10 to 15 percent in a last-minute rush.

Muskie took a headcount in September and found himself leading with about 40 percent—but he will need at least 50 percent to look good for the fence-sitters in Florida, who will go to the polls a week later... and in Florida, Muskie will have to beat back the show-biz charisma of John Lindsay on the Left, more or less, and also deal with Scoop Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace on the Right.

Jesus! This gibberish could run on forever and even now I can see myself falling into the old trap that plagues every writer who gets sucked into this rotten business. You find yourself getting fascinated by the drifts and strange quicks of the game. Even now, before I've even finished this article I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was all just another fat Sunday of pro football. Pick Pittsburgh by six points in the early game, get Dallas even with San Francisco Literon on. win one, lose one then flip the dial and try to get ahead by coming somebody into taking Green Bay even against the Redskins.

After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying luck who actually wins the only thing that matters is the point spread You find yourself scratching crazly at the screen pleading for somebody to rip the lungs out of that junkie bastard who just threw an interception and then didn't even pretend to tackle the pig who ran it back for six points to beat the spread There is something perverse and perverted about dealing with life on this level. But on the other hand, it gets harder to convince yourself, once you start thinking about it that it could possibly make any real difference to you if the 49ers win or lose although every once in a while you stumble into a situation where you find yourself really wanting some team to get stomped all over the field severely beaten and humiliated.

This happened to me on the last Sunday of the regular N.F.L season when two slobbing drunk sports visitors from the Alexanders Gazette got me thrown out of the press box at the Robert F. Kennedy stadium in Washington. I was there as a special guest of Dave Burgess sports editor of the Washington Star but when Burgess tried to force a bit of dignity on the scene, they ejected him too.

We were halfway down the ramp to the parking lot before I understood what had happened. "That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested."

"Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. Christ, I had no idea what was happening. You should have warned me." “I was afraid you'd run amok,” he said. “We'd have been in bad trouble. All those guys from things like the Norfolk Ledger and the Army-Navy Times. They would have stomped us like rats in a closet.”

I couldn't understand it. "Heli, I'd have taken the goddamn hat off, if I thought it was causing trouble. I barely even remember the national anthem. Usually, I don't even stand up." “I didn't think you were going to,” he said. “I didn't want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed.” “But I did stand,” I said. “I figured, hell, I'm Dave's guest—why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat.”

Actually, I was happy to get out of that place. The Redskins were losing, which pleased me, and we were thrown out just in time to get back to Burgin's house for the 49er game on T.V. If they won this one, they would go against the Redskins next Sunday in the playoffs—and by the end of the third quarter I had worked myself into a genuine hate frenzy; I was howling like a butcher when the 49ers pulled it out in the final moments with a series of desperate maneuvers, and the moment the gun sounded I was on the phone to T.W.A, securing a seat on the Christmas Nite Special to San Francisco. It was extremely important, I felt, to go out there and do everything possible to make sure the Redskins got the mortal piss beaten out of them.

Which worked out. Not only did the 49ers stomp the jingo bastards and knock them out of the playoffs, but my seat com-

panon for the flight from Washington to San Francisco was Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary trial lawyer, who is also president of the Washington Redskins "Heavy duty for you people tomorrow, I warned him 'Get braced for a serious beating. Nothing personal you understand. Those poor bristards couldn't have known what they were doing when they crooked a Doctor of Journalism out of the press box."

He nodded heavily and called for another scotch & soda. "It's a goddann shame," he muttered. "But what can you really expect? You've been with pigs and they'll call you a swine every time."

"What? Did you call me a swine?"

"Not me," he said. "But this world is full of slander" We spent the rest of the flight arguing politics. He is backing Muskie and as he talked I got the feeling that he thought he was already at a point where sooner or later we would all be. Ed's a good man," he said. He's honest. I respect the guy. Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. But the man reason I'm working for him he said is that he's the only guy we have who can beat Nixon. He stabbed the arm again. If Nixon wins again we're in real trouble." He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. "That's the real issue this time he said, "Beating Nixon. It's hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years."

I nodded The argument was familiar I had even made it myself here and there but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it How many more of these goddamn elec- tions are we going to have to write off as lame but "regrettably necessary" holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

I have been through three presidential elections, now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote for. In 1964, I refused to vote at all, and in '68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory.

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

Not even James Reston, the swinging Calvinist, claims to see any light at the end of the tunnel in '72. Reston's first big shot of the year dealt mainly with a grim "memo" by former J.F.K strategist, Fred Dutton, who is now a Washington lawyer.

There are hints of hope in the Reston/Dutton prognosis, but not for the next four years. Here is the rancid nut of it: "The 1972 election probably is fated to be a dated, weakening election, an historical curio, belonging more to the past than to the new national three or four-party trend of the future."

Reston either ignored or overlooked, for some reason, the probability that Gene McCarthy appears to be gearing up almost exactly the kind of “independent third force in American politics” that both Reston and Dutton see as a wave of the future.

An even grimmer note comes with Reston's offhand dismissal of Ed Muskie, the only man—according to E. B. Williams—who

can possibly save us from more years of Nixon And as if poor Muskie didn't already have enough evil shot on his neck, the emmently reasonable, fine old liberal journal, the Washington Post, called Muskie's official 'new beginning/I am now a candidate" speech on national T.V a meaningless rehash of old bullshot and stale clothes raked up from old speeches by yes Himself, Richard Mithous Nixon In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brain-rooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we're all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has no much respect for the man that they can't bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President John Lindsey is a dance, Gene McCarthy is crazy. Humphrey is doomed and useless Jackson should have staved in to do and well that just about wraps up the trip right.

Not entirely but I feel The Fear coming on and the only cure for that is to chew up a fit black wad of blood opium about the size of a young me thail and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of film houses on 14th Street peel brick the the brain let the opium take hold and get locked into serious pornography As for politics I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his "Fan letter to Nixon "I always wanted to get into politics but I was never light enough to make the team"

Fear & Loathing in New Hampshire . . . Back on the Campaign Trail in Manchester, Keene & The Booth Fish Hatcheries . . . Harold Hughes Is Your Friend . . . Weird Memories of '68: A Private Conversation with Richard Nixon . . . Will Dope Doom the Cowboys? . . . A First, Massive & Reluctantly Final Judgment on the Reality of George McGovern . . . Small Hope for the Hammer & No Hope At All for the Press Wizards . . .

it was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester—driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars that gets rubber for about twenty-nine seconds in Drive, and spits hot black divots all over the road in First or Second... a terrible screeching and fishtailing through the outskirts of Boston heading north to New Hampshire, back on the Campaign Trail... running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.

Not much of a moon tonight, but a sky full of very bright stars. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills . . . running about seventy-five or eighty through a landscape of stark naked trees and stone fences; the highway is empty and no lights in the roadside farmhouses. People go to bed carly in New England Four years ago I ran this road in a different Mercury, but I wasn't driving then. It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy clothes

cop at the wheel Sitting next to the cop up front, were two of Nixon's top speechwriters Ray Price and Pat Buchanan There were only two of us in back just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late—almost midnight then, too—and the cop was holding the big Mere at exactly sixty five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town somewhere near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech to the airport up in Manchester where a Lear Jet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.

It was a very weird trip, probably one of the weirdest things I've ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk and when we got to the airport I stood around the Leer Jet with Dick and the others chatting in a very relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands.

But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God I thought as I reeled backwards. Here We Go "Watch Out! somebody was shouting 'Get the cigarette!' A hand lushed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe. Nixon's chief advance man for New Hampshire saying 'God damnit Hunter you almost blew up the plane!'" I shrugged He was right I'd been leaning over the fuel trunk with a burning butt in my mouth Nixon smiled and retched out to shake hands again while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. "What worries me," he said, "is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the Boss."

'Very bad show," I said, "especially when you remember that I did about three king size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones you people are lucky. I'm a fine responsible journalist otherwise.

I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank." “Not you,” he said. “Egomaniacs don't do that kind of thing.” He smiled. “You wouldn't do anything you couldn't live to write about, would you?” “You're probably right,” I said. “Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach—because I am, after all, a professional.” “We know. That's why you're along.”

Actually, the reason was very different: I was the only one in the press corps that evening who claimed to be as seriously addicted to pro football as Nixon himself. I was also the only out-front, openly hostile Peace Freak; the only one wearing old Levis and a ski jacket, the only one (no, there was one other) who'd smoked grass on Nixon's big Greyhound press bus, and certainly the only one who habitually referred to the candidate as "the Dingbat."

So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me—out of the fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who'd been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview—as the one who should share the back seat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.

But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. "We want the Boss to relax," Ray Price told me, "but he can't relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football." He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting to board the press bus, then shook his head sadly. "I checked around," he said. "But the others are hopeless—so I guess you're it."

"Wonderful," I said. "Let's do it."

We had a fine time. I enjoyed it—which put me a bit off balance, because I'd figured Nixon didn't know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to things like "end runs" and "power sweeps" on the stump but it never occurred to me that he actually knew anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.

But I was wrong. Whatever else, might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of the football. At one point in our conversation when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass—in the waning moments of the 1967 Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland—to an obscure second string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pin point style & precision.

He hesitated for a moment lost in thought then he whicked me on the thigh & laughed "That's right by God! The Miami boy" I was stunned. He not only remembered the play but he knew where Miller had played in college.

That was four years ago. L.B.J was Our President and there was no real hunt in the winter of 68 that he was about to cash his check. Johnson seemed every bit as tough and invulnerable then as Nixon seems today and it is slightly unnerving to recall that Richard Nixon at that point in his campaign appeared to have about as much chance of getting himself elected to the White House as Hubert Humphrey appears to have now in February of 72.

When Nixon went into New Hampshire he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn right wing waterheads with nothing better to do. The polls showed him comfortably ahead of George Romney but according to most of the big time press wizards who were hanging around. Manchester at the time the Nixon, Ronney race was only a drill that would end just as soon as Nelson Rockefeller came in to mop up both of them. The bar at the Way farer Motor Inn was a sort of unofficial press headquarters where the press people hovered in nervous anticipation of the Rockefeller announcement that was said to be coming at any moment.

So I was not entirely overcome at the invitation to spend an hour alone with Richard Nixon. He was after all a Born Loser—even if he somehow managed to get the Republican nomination. I figured he didn't have a sick goat's chance of beating Lyndon Johnson.

I was as guilty as all the others, that year, of treating the McCarthy campaign as a foredoomed exercise in noble futility. We had talked about it a lot—not only in the Wayfarer bar, but also in the bar of the Holiday Inn where Nixon was staying—and the press consensus was that the only Republican with a chance to beat Johnson was Nelson Rockefeller... and the only other possible winner was Bobby Kennedy, who had already made it clear—both publicly and privately—that he would definitely not run for President in 1968.

I was remembering all this as I cranked the big green Cougar along U.S. 93 once again, four years later, to cover another one of these flakey New Hampshire primaries. The electorate in this state is notoriously perverse and unpredictable. In 1964, for instance, it was a thumping victory in the New Hampshire primary that got the Henry Cabot Lodge steamroller off to a roaring start ... and in '68, Gene McCarthy woke up on the morning of election day to read in the newspapers that the last minute polls were nearly unanimous in giving him between six and eight percent of the vote ... and even McCarthy was stunned, I think, to wake up twenty-four hours later and find himself with 42 percent.

Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East's psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico—big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old-timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists—people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service—who've been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhikers you find along these narrow twisting highways look exactly like the people you see on the roads around Boulder and Aspen or Taos.

The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville N H It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn't even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag but this doesn't worry her " I guess it sounds crazy," she explains ' We don't even sleep together He's just a friend But I'm happy when I'm with him because he makes me like myself ' Jesus I thought We've raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty two a journalism grad from Boston University, and now—six months out of college—she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn't even know she's coming.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era—but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover a whole subculture of frightened illustrates with no faith in anything The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.

She tried to be polite but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn't know what the fuck I was talking about and cared less. It was boring, just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don't keep moving.

Like her ex boyfriend At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over then not show up for three days—and then he'd be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.

It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drafting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlboro and I saw she was crying, which made me feel like a monster because I'd been saving some furly hard things about "junkies and "loonies and "doomfreaks" Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.

These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.

This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.

We couldn't find the commune. The directions were too vague: "Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree... proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines..."

After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck ... but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place on a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was ok.

I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really "ok." I was tempted to take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us... checking into the Wayfarer at 3:30, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast, and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.

Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nympet who thought politics was some kind of game

played by old people, like bridge No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I did always thought I was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.

Earlier that night in Cambridge—over dinner at a bogus Mexican restaurant run by Italian junkies—several people had asked me why I was wasting my time on "this kind of bullshit" McGovern Muskie Lindsay or even Gene McCarthy I had just come back from a long day at the Massachusetts "Rad/Lib Caucus" in Worchester billed as a statewide rally to decide which Democratic candidate to support in the Massachusetts primary on April 25th The idea said the organizers, was to unify and avoid a disastrous vote-splitting orgy that would splinter the Left between McGovern, Lindsay & McCarthy—thus guaranteeing an easy Muskie win. The Caucus organizers were said to be well known McCarthy supporters, who'd conceived the gathering as a sort of launching pad for Gene in '72 and McCarthy seemed to agree, he was the only candidate to attend the Caucus in person and his appearance drew a booming ovation that gave every indication of a pending victory.

The night before, at a crowded student rally in Hogan Student Center at Holy Cross, McCarthy had responded to a questioner who asked if he was "really a senious candidate" by saying "You'll see how senious I am after tomorrow's Caucus" The crowd at Holy Cross responded with a rolling cheer The median age, that night, was somewhere around nineteen and McCarthy was impressively sharp and confident as he drew roar after

roar of applause with his quietly vicious attack on Nixon, Humphrey, and Muskie. As I stood there in the doorway of the auditorium, looking across the shoulders of the overflow crowd, it looked like 1968 all over again. There was a definite sense of drama in seeing McCarthy back on the stump, cranking up another crusade.

But that high didn't last long. The site of Saturday's Caucus was the gym at Assumption College, across town, and the crowd over there was very different. The median age at the Caucus was more like thirty-three and the results of the first ballot were a staggering blow to McCarthy's newborn crusade.

McGovern cleaned up, beating McCarthy almost three to one. When the final tally came in, after more than eight hours of infighting, McGovern's quietly efficient grass-roots organizers had locked up 62 percent of the vote—leaving McCarthy to split the rest, more or less equally, with Shirley Chisholm. Both Muskie and Lindsay had tried to ignore the Caucus, claiming it was "stacked" against them, and as a result neither one got enough votes to even mention.

The outcome of the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus was a shock to almost everybody except the busloads of McGovern supporters who had come there to flex their muscle in public for the first time. McCarthy—who had left early to fly back to Washington for an appearance the next day on Meet the Press—was seriously jolted by the loss. He showed it the next morning on T.V when he looked like a ball of bad nerves caught in a crossfire of hostile questions from Roger Mudd and George Herman. He was clearly off-balance; a nervous shadow of the rising-tide, hammerhead spoiler he had been on Friday night for the rally at Holy Cross.

To make things worse, one of the main organizers of the Rad/Lib Caucus was Jerry Grossman, a wealthy envelope manufacturer from Newton, in the Boston suburbs, and a key McCarthy fundraiser in the '68 campaign... but after the Rad/Lib Caucus, Grossman went far out of his way, along with Mudd & Herman, to make sure McCarthy was done for.

He immediately endorsed McGovern saying it was clear that "Massachusetts liberals no longer believe in McCarthy's leadership quotient. What this meant according to the unanimous translation by political pros and press wizards was 'McCarthy won't get any more of Grossman's money."

Grossman ignored the obvious fact that he and other pro-Mc Carthy heaves had been beaten stupid on the grass roots organizing level by an unheralded McGovern machine put together in Massachusetts by John Reuther—a nephew of Walter Inte president of the U.A.W. I spent most of that afternoon wandering around the gym listening to people talk and watching the action and it was absolutely clear—once the voting started—that Reuther had everything wired.

Everywhere I went there was a local McGovern floor manager keeping people in line telling them exactly what was happening and what would probably happen next while the McCarthy forces—led by veteran Kennedy Cimelot field marshal Richard Goodwin—became more and more demoralized enough in a fast rising pincers movement between a surprisingly organized McGovern block on their Right and a wild eyed Chisholm uprising on the Left.

The Chisholm strength shocked everybody. She was one of twelve names on the ballot—which included almost every con receivable Democratic candidate from Hubert Humphrey to Patsy Mink Wilbur Mills and Sam Yorry—but after Muskie and Lindsay dropped out the Caucus was billed far and wide as a test between McGovern and McCarthy. There was no mention in the press or anywhere else that some unknown black woman from Brooklyn might seriously challenge these famous liberal heavies on their own turf but when the final vote came in Shirley Chisholm had actually beaten Gene McCarthy who finished a close third.

The Chisholm challenge was a last minute idea and only half organized on the morning of the Caucus by a handful of speedy young black politicos and Women's Lib types—but by 6:00 that evening it had developed from a noisy idea into a solid power

bloc What began as a symbolic kind of challenge became a serious position after the first ballot—among this overwhelmingly white, liberal, affluent, well-educated, and over thirty audience—when almost half of them refused to vote for George McGovern because he seemed “too conventional,” as one long hailed kid in a ski parka told me They had nothing against McGovern, they agreed with almost everything he said—but they wanted more, and it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the same people who showed up at McCarthy's Holy Cross rally on Friday night had come out to Assumption on Sunday There were not many Youth/Freak vote types at the Rad/Lib Caucus, perhaps one out of five and probably not even that. The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems according to a bushy young radical-talking non student from Boston was that you had to pay a “registration fee of two dollars before you got a vote.

Shit " he said 'I wouldn't pay it myself so I can't vote' He shrugged But this Caucus doesn't mean anything anyway This is just a bunch of old liberals getting their rocks off ' Manchester New Hampshire is a broken down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America's worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington D.C.

I checked into the Wayfarer just before dawn and tried to get some music on my high powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries in Portsmouth.

It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his hand grabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him to the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain above which hung a sign saying 'Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work'.

The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything—and a lot of hissing &

humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.

The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-class liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern's public appearances: The crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age gap didn't hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was . . . even at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three, that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five & thirty-five.

After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.

I can't recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn't let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said—no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets—so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender "Jim," which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as "Mr. Reynolds."

Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. "My name's not Reynolds, goddamnit! I'm James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star." Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.

The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his "political director" in Washington that McGovern's old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa—Senator Harold Hughes—had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung bomb Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough The Hughes/McGovern/Fred Harris (D-Okla) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years Even the Muskie endorsement hustlers who were cross-crossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn't bothered with Hughes because they considered him an touchable If anything he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself Hughes had grown a beard he didn't mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then—and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry O'Brien's personal choice for the chairmanship of the all important Credentials Committee at the national convention Dick Dougherty, a former Los Angeles Times newsman who is handling McGovern's national press action in New Hampshire, was so shaken by the news of Hughes' defection that he didn't even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just gotten the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan including the candidate's. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking "Nevermore By chance, I found George downstairs in the Men's Room. hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the grey marble tiles. “Say ... ah ... I hate to mention this,” I said. “But what about this thing with Hughes?”

He finched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his head and mumbling something about "a deal for the vice-presidency." I could see that he didn't want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together. “Why do you think he did it?” I said.

He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. "Well . . .," he said finally. "I guess I shouldn't say this, Hunter, but I honestly don't know. I'm surprised; we're all surprised."

He looked very tired, and I didn't see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room.

This proved to be my un-doing, because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I'd entered with The Senator... but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pin-stripe suit.

A lot has been written about McGovern's difficulties on the campaign trail, but most of it is far off the point. The career polls and press wizards say he simply lacks "charisma," but that's a cheap and simplistic idea that is more an insult to the electorate than to McGovern. The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator—or even a President—is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.

McGovern, they say, doesn't make it on this level. Which is probably true. But McCarthy was worse. His '68 campaign had none of the surface necessities. He had no money, no press, no endorsements, no camera-presence... his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.

There is nothing in McGovern's campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naive enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent—with a good voting record on "the issues"—is a natural man for the White House.

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big time politics today. One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon) and the other is to tap the massive frustrated energies of a mainly young disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a dust to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevro Ford and a Chevro McGovern's failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign. They all sense an untouched constituency. Chisholm's campaign manager a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson calls it the "Sleeping Giant vote".

"Nobody's reaching them" he said. "We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for.

Ron Dellums the black Congressman from Berkeley, called it "the Nieger vote". But he wasn't talking about skin pigment.

"It's time for somebody to lead all of America's Niggers," he said at the Capitol Hill press conference when Shirley Chisholm announced she was running for President "And by this I mean the Young, the Black, the Brown the Women the Poor—all the people who feel left out of the political process. If we can put the Nigger Vote together, we can bring about some real change in this country."

Dellums is probably the only elected official in America who

feels politically free enough to stare at the cameras and make a straight-faced pitch to the "Nigger Vote." But he is also enough of a politician to know it's out there . . . maybe not in the Exeter Inn, but the hills north and west of Manchester are teeming with Niggers. They didn't turn out for the speech-making, and they probably won't vote in the primary—but they are there, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

Looking back on that week in New Hampshire, it was mainly a matter of following George McGovern around and watching him do his thing—which was pleasant, or at least vaguely uplifting, but not what you'd call a real jerk-around.

McGovern is not one of your classic fireballs on the stump. His campaign workers in New Hampshire seem vaguely afflicted by a sense of uncertainty about what it all means. They are very decent people. They are working hard, they are very sincere, and most of them are young volunteers who get their pay in room & board ... but they lack something crucial, and that lack is painfully obvious to anybody who remembers the mood of the McCarthy volunteers in 1968.

Those people were angry. The other side of that "Clean for Gene" coin was a nervous sense of truce that hung over the New Hampshire campaign. In backroom late night talks at the Wayfarer there was no shortage of McCarthy staffers who said this would probably be their final trip "within the system." There were some who didn't mind admitting that, personally, they'd rather throw firebombs or get heavy into dope—but they were attracted by the drama, the sheer balls, of McCarthy's "hopeless challenge."

McCarthy's national press man at the time was Seymour Hersh, who quit the campaign in Wisconsin and called Gene a closet racist. Two years later, Sy Hersh was back in the public ear with a story about a place called My Lai, in South Vietnam. He was the one who dragged it out in the open.

McCarthy's state level press man that year was a hair freak named Bill Gallagher, who kept his room in the Wayfarer open from midnight to dawn as a sort of all night refuge for weed fanciers. A year later, when I returned to New Hampshire to write a piece on ski racer Jean Claude Killy I got off the cocktail circuit long enough to locate Gallagher in a small Vermont hamlet where he was living as the de facto head of a mini-commune. He had dropped out of politics with a vengeance, his beard was down to his belt and his head was far out of politics. "The McCarthy thing" had been "a bad trip," he explained. He no longer cared who was President You don't find people like Hersh and Gallagher around McGovern's headquarters in Manchester this year. They would frighten the staff McGovern's main man in New Hampshire is a fat young pol named Joe Granmaison whose personal style hovers somewhere between that of a state trooper and a used-car sales man.

Grammason was eager to rail Muskie. 'If we elect a President who three years ago said 'Gee I made a mistake' well, I think it's about time these people were held accountable for those mistakes' Indeed But Grammason backed away from me like he'd stepped on a rattlesnake when I asked him if it were true that he'd been a Johnson delegate to the Chicago convention in '68 We met at a McGovern cocktul party in a downstate hamlet called Keene 'Let's talk about this word 'accountable,' I said I get the feeling you stepped in shit on that one 'What do you mean?' he snapped "Just because I was a Johnson delegate doesn't mean anything I'm not running for office" "Good" I said. We were standing in a short hallway between the kitchen and the living room where McGovern was saying. "The thing the political bosses want most is for young people to drop out because they know the young people can change the system, and the bosses don't want any change."

True enough 1 thought But how do you "change the system" by hiring a young foggy like Grammaon to wire up your act in New Hampshire? With a veteran Judis Goat like that in charge of

the operation, it's no wonder that McGovern's Manchester headquarters is full of people who talk like nervous PoliSci students on job-leave.

Joe didn't feel like discussing his gig at the '68 Convention. Which is understandable. If I had done a thing like that, I wouldn't want to talk about it either. I tried to change the subject, but he crammed a handful of potato chips into his mouth and walked away.

Later that night, after the cocktail party, we drove out to the Student Union hall at Keene State College, where McGovern addressed a big and genuinely friendly crowd of almost 3000, jammed into a hall meant for 2000 tops. The advance man had done his work well.

The big question tonight was “Amnesty,” and when McGovern said he was for it, the crowd came alive. This was, after all, the first time any active candidate for the presidency had said “Yes” on the Amnesty question—which is beginning to look like a time-bomb with almost as much Spoiler Potential as the busing issue.

They both have long and tangled roots, but it is hard to imagine any question in American politics today that could have more long-range impact than the argument over “Amnesty,”—which is nothing more or less than a proposal to grant presidential pardon to all draft dodgers and U.S. military deserters, on the grounds that history has absolved them. Because if the Vietnam War was wrong from the start—as even Nixon has tacitly admitted—then it is hard to avoid the logic of the argument that says the Anti-War Exiles were right for refusing to fight it.

There is not much room for politics in the Amnesty argument. It boils down to an official admission that the American Military Establishment—acting in spiritual concert with the White House and the national Business Community—was Wrong.

Almost everybody except Joe Alsop has already admitted this, in private ... but it is going to be a very painful thing to say in public.

It will be especially painful to the people who got their sons

shipped back to them in rubber sacks, and to the thousands of young Vets who got their arms and their legs and balls blown off for what the White House and Ed Muskie now adant was "a mistake" But 60 000 Americans have died for that 'mistake," along with several million Vietnamese and it is only now becoming clear that the "war died" will also include hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians and Thais. When this war goes into the history books the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.

Richard Nixon is flatly opposed to a general amnesty for the men who refused to fight this tragic war. Muskie agrees but he says he might change his mind once the war ends and Lindsay, as usual is both for and against it.

The only "candidates" in favor of Amnesty are McGovern and Ted Kennedy. I watched McGovern deal with the question when it popped out of that overflow student audience at Keene State. He was talking very sharp very confident and when the question of Amnesty came up he got right on it saying "Yes, I'm in favor."

This provoked a nice outburst of cheers and applause It was a very strong statement and the students clearly dug it Then moments later somebody tossed out the fishhook—asking McGovern if he had any plans pro or con about supporting Muskie, if Big Ed got the nod in Miami McGovern paused shifted uneasily for a second or so at the podium, then said "Yes, I'm inclined to that position" I was standing behind him on the stage looking out at the crowd through a slit in the big velvet curtain, and according to the red inked speed scrawl on my notebook the audience responded with "No cheering, confused silence, the audience seems to say But these were only my notes. Perhaps I was wrong—but even making a certain allowance for my own bias it still seems perfectly logical to assume that an audience of first time voters might be at least momentarily confused by a Left/Champion Democratic candidate. date who says in one breath that his opponent is dead wrong on a very crucial issue . . . and then in the next breath says he plans to support that opponent if he wins the nomination.

I doubt if I was the only person in the hall, at that moment, who thought: "We'll, shit... if you plan to support him in July, why not support him now, and get it over with?"

Moments later, the speech ended and I found myself out on the sidewalk shooting up with Ray Morgan, a veteran political analyst from the Kansas City Star. He was on his way to the airport, with McGovern, for a quick flight on the charter plane to Washington, and he urged me to join him.

But I didn't feel up to it. I felt like thinking for a while, running that narrow, icy, little highway back to Manchester just as fast as the Cougar would make it and still hold the road—which was not very fast, so I had plenty of time to brood, and to wonder why I felt so depressed.

I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip—which was, after all, a longshot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than 30 to 1.

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn't get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more—or maybe something different.

Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?

Well . . . that would take a lot of time and space I don't have now, but for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been "against the War in Vietnam since 1963"—especially when your name is not one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and when you're talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early '65.

A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned—but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.

This is an ugly portent for the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 who may or many not vote in 1972. And many

of them probably will vote. The ones who go to the polls in '72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the "best minds of my generation," as Allen Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in "Howl." There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the "Youth Vote" will get a lot of people out to the polls in '72. If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.

But what about next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in '72 should "try again" for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations—between the ages of 22 and 40—who will not give a boot in hell about any election and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson/Goldwater to Humphrey/Nixon to Nixon/Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.

This is the ghibbish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto 'Live Free or Die' inscribed above the numbers.

The highways are full of good mottos But T S Eltot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about what was it? Have these Dangerous Drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so But I think it went something like this "Between the Idea and the Realty Falls the Shadow" The Shadow? I could almost smell the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night and tomorrow's schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida—except for Sam Yorty, and I didn't feel ready for that.

The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhuker I saw was an 18 year old kid with long black hair who

was going to Reading—or "Redding" as he said it —but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in the election he looked at me like I'd said something crazy “What election” he asked "Never mind," I said. "I was only kidding."

One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than 2 year, now—a sort of guilty half public breast-beating whenever George McGovern's name is mentioned. He has become the Wills Loman of the Left he is liked but not well-liked and his failure to make the big chivismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can't figure it out.

A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase—to the "White side" of Rock Creek Park—to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slamped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to "the McGovern problem."

For more than a year now, he's been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963, he's for Amnesty Now, has alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5,000,000,000 Space Shuttle program thereby croaking thousands of new jobs in the already depressed Cape Kennedy/Central Florida area.

He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon/Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument by midsummer—one of those wild eyed fire and bottom-tone issues that scares the pass out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it's desirable, but because it's “among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.”

This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year—especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando... or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the federal government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of Niggers.

McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.

On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics' conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted—along with McGovern and most of his backers—that “American politics” is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and The Loyal Opposition.

That's the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry O'Brien has decided to go with this year—and he says he can't for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren't bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.

Message to O'Brien

Well, Larry . . . I really hate to lay this on you . . . because we used to be buddies, right? That was back in the days when I bought all those white sharkskin suits because I thought I was going to be the next Governor of American Samoa.

You strung me along, Larry; you conned me into buying all those goddamn white suits and kept me hanging around that Holiday

February

I am in Pierre, South Dakota, waiting for my confirmation to come through but it never did, Larry, I was never appointed You bushwacked me But what the hell? I've never been one to hold a grudge any longer than absolutely necessary and I wouldn't want you to think I'd hold that kind of cheap treachery against you now that you're running the party. The Loyal Opposition, as it were You and Hubert along with Muskie and Jackson And Mad Sam Yorty, and Wilbur Mills—and yes even Lindsay and McGovern Party loyalty is the name of the game right? George Meany, Frank Rizzo Mayor Daley Well, shucks. What can I say. Larry? I'm still for that gig in Samoa, or anywhere else where the sun shines because I still have those stinking white suits and I'm beginning to think seriously in terms of foreign travel around the end of this year. Maybe November Under different circumstances Larry I might try to press you on this, mashe Jean on you just a trifle for an appointment to the Drugs and Politics desk at our outpost in the Canary Islands. My friend Cardoza, the retired Dean of Gonzo Journalism, just bought a jazz bar out there and he says it is a very weird place But shut Larry, why kid ourselves? You're not going to be in a position to appoint anybody to anything when November comes down on us. You won't even have a job or if you do it'll be one of those gigs where you'll have to get your half-salary in gold bullion because the way it looks now the Democratic Party won't be issuing a hell of a lot of certified checks after November Seventh Remember the Whigs Larry? They went bells up, with no warning at all, when a handful of young politicians like Abe Lincoln decided to move out on their own and luck the Whigs which worked out very nicely, and when it became almost instantly clear that the High hierarchies was just a gang of old impotent windbags with no real power at all, the Party just curled up and died and any politician stupid enough to stay loyal went down with the ship This is the soft underbelly of the “McGovern problem.” He is really just another good Democrat, and the only thing that sets him apart from the others is a hard, almost masochistic kind of honesty that drives him around the country, running up huge bills and turning people off.

We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway . . . and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering—to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish—just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said.

I spent about two weeks brooding on this, because I like McGovern—which still surprises me, because politicians, like journalists, are pretty hard people to like. The only other group I've ever dealt with who struck me as being essentially meaner than politicians are tight ends in pro football.

There is not much difference in basic temperament between a good tight end and a successful politician. They will both go down in the pit and do whatever has to be done—then come up smiling, and occasionally licking blood off their teeth.

Gene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb was not a tight end, but he had the same instincts. The Baltimore Colts paid Gene to mash quarterbacks—and, failing that, to crack collarbones and make people deaf.

Shortly before he O.D'd on smack, Big Daddy explained his technique to a lunchtime crowd of Rotarians. "I always go straight for the head," he explained. "Whoever's across from me, I bash him with the flat part of my hand—nail him square on the ear-hole of his helmet about five straight times. Pretty soon he gets so nervous he can't concentrate. He can't even hear the signals. Once I get him spooked, the rest is easy."

There is a powerful fascination that attaches to this kind of efficiency—and it is worth remembering that Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic nomination not by appealing to the higher and finer consciousness of the delegates, but by laying the stomp & the whipsong on Adlai Stevenson's people when the deal went down in Los Angeles. The "Kennedy machine" was so good that even Mayor Daley came around. A good politician can smell the hammer coming down like an old sailor smells a squall behind the sun.

But Daley is not acting, this year, like a man who smells the hammer When George McGovern went to pay a 'courtesy call" on Daley last month, the Mayor's advice was 'Go out and win an election—then come back and see me."

McGovern and his earnest liberal advisors don't like to talk about that visit, no more than Muskie and his people enjoy talking about Big Fds "courtesy" call" on Supereop Frank Razzo, the new Major of Philadelphia.

But these are the men with the muscle, they can swing a lot of votes Or at least that's what the Conventional Wisdom says Daley Ruzzo, George Meany, the good ole boys the kingmokers And there is the flaw in McGovern. When the big whistle blows, he's still a Party Man. Ten years ago the electorate saw nothing wrong with the spectacle of two men fighting savagely for the Party nomination—calling each other "whores" and traitors" and "thieves all the way up to balloting time at the convention—and then miraculously Coming Together letting bygones be bygones to confront the common for The Other Party.

But the electorate has different tastes now and that kind of honky tonk bullshit doesn't make it any more Back in 1960 most Americans still believed that whoever lived in the White House was naturally a righteous and upstanding man Otherwise he wouldn't be there This was after 28 years of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who were very close to God Harry Truman who had lived a little closer to the Devil, was viewed more as an accident than a Real President ^{2}

The shut train began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas—when some twisted little geek blew the President's head off and then a year later, L.I.B.J was re-elected as the 'Peace Candidate'

Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of "government."

And then came '68, the year that somehow managed to confirm almost everybody's worst fears about the future of the Republic . . . and then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House. If Joe McGinnis had written The Selling of the President about good old Ike, he'd have been chased through the streets of New York by angry mobs. But when he wrote it about Nixon, people just shrugged and said, "Yeah, it's a goddamn shame, even if it's true, but so what?"

I went to Nixon's Inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corps... and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

George tried to ignore it. He knew the T.V cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd—even as they continued to chant "Romney eats shit!"

The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn't walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President's car passed by.

But it was hard to be sure which one it was. The Secret Service ran a few decoys down the line, from time to time, apparently to confuse the snipers and maybe draw some fire ... but nothing serious happened: just the normal hail of rocks, beer cans, and wine bottles ... so they figured it was safe to run the President through.

Nixon came by—according to the T.V men—in what appeared to be a sort of huge, hollowed-out cannonball on wheels. It was a very nasty looking armored car, and God only knows who was actually inside it.

I was standing next to a C.B.S-T.V reporter named Joe Benu and I heard him say Here comes the President How do you know?" I asked him It was just barely possible to detect a hunt of human movement through the sits that passed for windows "The President is waving to the crowd said Bents into his mike Bullshot" said Lennox Raphael standing beside me That's Neal Cassady in there" Who? said Bent "Never mind" I said. He can't hear you anyway. That ear has a vacuum seal.

Bents stared at me then moved away. Shortly afterward he quit his job and took his family to Copenhagen.

When the Great Scorer comes to list the miner downers of our time the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One Altamont was a nightmare Chicago was worse Kent State was so bad that it's still hard to find the right words for it but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes a wild kind of momentary high before the shroud came down The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I've ever dealt with that was a king hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it. Standing there on Penn Sylvania Avenue watching our New President roll by in his black armored hearse surrounded by a trotting phalax of Secret Service men with their hands in the air batting away the garbage thrown out of the crowd. I found myself wondering how Lee felt at Appomattox or the main Jap admiral when they took him out to the battleship Mistouri to sign the final papers.

Well it's almost dawn now and the only thing keeping me sane is the knowledge that just as soon as I finish this gibberish I can zoom off to Florida I have a credit card that says I can run totally amok on the tab at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach Right Check into the penthouse and have the tailor send up a gallon of rum and ten yards of the best Irish silk I need a tailor made free falling suit just in case they invite me down to Caracas for the races. Charge it to Clifford Irving and while you're at it my man, send up a pair of white alligator-neck shoes, and an Arab to polish the windows.

I mean to cover this Florida primary in depth. New Hampshire was . . . well . . . what was it? On the plane back from Boston I scanned the New York Times and found that James Reston, as always, had his teeth right down on the bone. “After all,” he wrote, “there are hard and honest differences between the candidates and the parties over the best terms of peace and trade, and the allocation of limited resources to the competing claims of military security abroad and civil order and social security at home. This is really what the presidential campaign is all about.”

Reston is narrow, but he has a good eye when it's focused, and in this case he seems to be right. The '72 presidential campaign is looking more & more like a backroom squabble between Bankers, Generals, and Labor Bosses. There is no indication, at this time, that the outcome will make much difference to anyone else. If the Republicans win, we will immediately declare Limited Nuclear War on all of Indochina and the I.R.S will start collecting a 20 percent national sales tax on every dollar spent by anybody—for the National Defense Emergency.

But if the Democrats win, Congress will begin a fourteen-year debate on whether or not to declare Massive Conventional War on all of Indochina, and the I.R.S will begin collecting a 20 percent National Losers' Tax on all incomes under $25,000 per annum—for the National Defense Emergency.

The most recent Gallup Poll says Nixon & Muskie are running Head to Head, but on closer examination the figures had Muskie trailing by a bare one percent—so he quickly resigned his membership in the "Caucasians Only" Congressional Country Club in the horsey suburbs near Cabin John, Maryland. He made this painful move in late January, about the same time he began hammering Nixon's "end the war" proposal.

Watching Muskie on T.V that week, I remembered the words of ex-Senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) when he appeared at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in his role as the official spokesman for McGovern. Gruening was one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964—the

resolution that gave L.B.J carte blanche to do Everything Necessary to win the war in Vietnam (Wayne Morse of Oregon was the only other nay" vote and both Gruening & Morse were defeated when they ran for re-election in 1966)

In Worcester Ernest Gruening approached the stage like a slow moving golem. He is eighty five years old and his legs are not real springs—but when he got behind the podium he spoke like the Grim Reaper.

I've known Ed Muskie for many years he said I've considered him a friend but I can't help remembering that for all those years, while we were getting deeper and deeper into that war and while more and more boys were dying Ed Muskie stayed silent Gruening neglected to say where McGovern had been on the day of the Tonkin Gulf vote but I remember somebody saying up on the press platform near the roof of the Assumption College gym that I can forgive McGovern for blowing that Tonkin thing because the Pentagon led—but what's his excuse for not voting against that goddamn wire tapping bill? (The Omnibus Safe Streets & Crime Control Act of 1968 a genuinely oppressive piece of legislation even Lyndon Johnson was shocked by it but he couldn't quite bring himself to veto the bugger—for the same reasons cited by the many Senators who called the bill frightening while refusing to vote against it because they'd do it want to be on record as having voted against "safe streets and crime control." The bare handful of Senators who actually voted against the bill explained themselves in very eminous terms. For details, see Justice by Richard Harris.)

I had thought about this, but I had also thought about all the other aspects of this puzzling and depressing campaign—which seemed a few months ago to have enough weird and open-ended possibilities that I actually moved from Colorado to Washington for the purpose of covering the campaign. It struck me as a right thing to do at the time—especially in the wake of the success we did had with two back-to-back Freak Power runs at the heavily en tzenched Money/Politics/Yahoo establishment in Aspen.

But things are different in Wish ngton. It's not that everybody you talk to is aggressively hostile to any idea that might faze their well-ordered lifestyles; they'd just rather not think about it. And there is no sense of life in the Underculture. On the national reality spectrum, Washington's Doper/Left/Rock/Radical community is somewhere between Toledo and Biloxi. "Getting it on" in Washington means killing a pint of Four Roses and then arguing about Foreign Aid, over chicken wings, with somebody's drunken Congressman.

The latest craze on the local high-life front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia in Washington is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom—and the people who actually live and thrive here in the great web of Government are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the Party Affiliation of the next President won't make any difference at all, except on the surface.

The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same. So just lie back and live with it. To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about "getting things done in Washington" is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers "Stop Duane Thomas!"

That is one aspect of the '72 Super Bowl that nobody has properly dealt with: What was it like for those humorless, god-fearing Alger-bent Jesus Freaks to go out on that field in front of 100,000 people in New Orleans and get beaten like gongs by the only certified dope freak in the N.F.L? Thomas ran through the Dolphins like a mule through corn-stalks.

It was a fine thing to see; and it was no real surprise when the Texas cops busted him, two weeks later, for Possession of Marijuana... and the Dallas coach said Yes, he'd just as soon trade Duane Thomas for almost anybody.

They don't get along. Tom Landry, the Cowboys' coach, never misses a chance to get up on the platform with Billy Graham whenever The Crusade plays in Dallas. Duane Thomas calls Landry a "plastic man." He tells reporters that the team's general manager, Tex Schram, is "sick, demented and vicious." Thomas played his whole season, last year, without ever uttering a sentence to anyone.

on the team Not the coach, the quarterback, his blockers—nobody, dead silence All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number—which came to be more and more often and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over, the purse is safe in the vault, and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession.

Nobody really expects him to serve time, but nobody seems to think he'll be playing for Dallas next year, either and a few sporting people who claim to know how the N.F.L works say he won't be playing for anybody next year, that the Commissioner is outraged at this mockery of all those Government sponsored "Beware of Dope T.V shots that dressed up the screen last autumn We all enjoyed those spots but not everyone found them con vincing. Here was a White House directive saying several million dollars would be spent to drill dozens of Name Players to stare at the camera and try to stop grinding their teeth long enough to say they hate drugs of any kind and then the best running back in the world turns out to be a goddamn uncontrollable drug-sucker.

But not for long There is not much room for freaks in the National Football League Joe Namath was saved by the simple blind luck of getting drafted by a team in New York City, a place where social outlaws are not always viewed as criminals But Namath would have had a very different trip if he'd been drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals.¹ Which is neither here nor there for right now. We seem to have wandered out on another tangent. But why not? Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly Old Politics trip, or it will drive you to kicking the walls and hurling A.R.3's into the fireplace.

This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe the feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk: seven Washington Posts, seven Washington Stars, seven New York Times, six Wall Street Journals, and one Suck... to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated... and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street to freak the neighbors.

After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with the man who said, "No news is good news." In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest... but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont. on...") page...

The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa. The Star will say the same thing, and the Journal will say nothing at all. But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like: "When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental woman who seemed to be in control."

Now that's good journalism. Totally objective; very active and straight to the point. But we need to know more. Who was that woman? Why did they fight? Where was Muskie taken? What was he saying when the microphone broke?

Jesus, what's the other one? Every journalist in America knows the "Five W's." But I can only remember four. "Who, What, Why, Where,"... and, yes, of course... "When!"

But what the hell? An item like that tends to pinch the interest gland . . . so you figure it's time to move out: Pack up the $419 Abercrombie & Fitch elephant skin suitcase; send the phones

and the scanner and the tape viewers by Separate Float load every thing else into the weightless Magnesium kubag then call for a high speed cab to the airport load on and zip off to wherever The Word says it's happening The public expects no less They want a man who can zap around the nation like a goddamn methedrine bat Racing from airport to airport from one crisis to another—sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the Five Ws in a package that makes perfect sense.

Why not? With the truth so dull and depressing the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree. Or fly off and write nothing at all get a room on the edge of Chicago and shoot up for about sixteen straight days—then wander back to Washington with a notebook full of finely honed insights on The Mood of the Midwest.

Be warned The word among wizards is that Muskie will have the Democratic nomination locked up when the votes are counted in Wisconsin and never mind the fact that only 12 percent of the potential voters will go to the polls in that state (The Arizona polls—using bullhorns billboards and flects of roving Voter Buses—managed to drag out 13 or 14 percent)

This ugly truth is beginning to dawn on the big time Dimos They commandeered a whole network the other night for a T.V broadside called "The Loyal Opposition —featuring Larry O Brien and all the top managers discussing The Party's prospects for 1972 It was a terrible bummer. Even though I am paid to watch this kind of atavistic swill, I could barely keep a fix on it. It was like watching a gaggle of Woolworth stockholders, butching about all the trouble they were having getting the company to hire an executive level Jew.

Whatever O Brien and his people had in mind it didn't come across They looked and talked like a bunch of surly burned out Republ cars—still wondering why Hubert Humphrey d'n't make it in 68 with his Politics of Joy Jesus, what a shock it was! The Hube always seemed like Natural. But something went wrong... What was it?

The Democrats don't seem to know; or if they do they don't want to talk about it. They had a big fund-raising dinner for "the candidates" the other night at a ballroom in downtown Washington, but the people who went said it sucked. No candidates showed up—except Humphrey, and he couldn't stay for dinner. Gene McCarthy was introduced, but he didn't feel like talking. Ted Kennedy stayed for dinner, but nobody mentioned his name... and when the party broke up, before midnight, the chairman was still looking for somebody who could say something meaningful. But nobody seemed to be ready—or none of the regulars, at least, and when it comes to party affairs, the regulars are the ones who do the talking.

People who went to the party—at $500 a head—said the crowd got strangely restive toward the end of the evening, when it finally became apparent that nobody was going to say anything.

It was very unsettling they said—hke going to a pep rally with no cheerleaders One report said Ted Kennedy " just sat there looking very uncomfortable " And so it goes One of my last political acts in Colorado, was to check in at the Pitkin County courthouse and change my registration from Democrat to Independent Under Colorado law, I can vote in either primary, but I doubt if I'll find the time—and it's hard to say, right now, just what kind of mood I'll be in on November 7th Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Washington—waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a 'happy beat' At first I thought it was me that I was missing all the action because I wasn't plugged in. But then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in and it didn't take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because their contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.

At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said were right on top of things. But they all seemed very depressed not only about the 72 election but about the whole long range future of politics and democracy in America.

Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it's just barely tolerable and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.

March

The View from Key Biscayne . . . Enter the Savage Boohoo; Madness & Violence on the “Sunshine Special” . . . Lindsay Runs Amok, Muskie Runs Scared . . . First Flexing of the Big Wallace Muscle; First Signs of Doom for the Democrats . . . Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here . . . Except Maybe Ted Kennedy . . “I get the feeling that Muskie is starting to run scared—but not for the same reasons I keep reading about. Sure, he's worried about Humphrey in Florida; he's worried about McGovern with the liberals, and he's worried about Lindsay, but—well, there's the catch: The Muskie people aren't afraid of Lindsay actually winning the nomination.... What worries them is that Lindsay might start doing well enough to force Kennedy into this thing.” —A Former Campaign Manager. & Political Strategist the Ghost of Kennedys Past hangs so heavy on this dreary presidential campaign that even the most cynical journalistic veterans of the Jack & Bobby campaigns are beginning to resent it out loud. A few days ago in Jacksonville, ^{1} creeping through the early morning traffic between the Hilton Hotel and the railroad depot, I was slumped in my seat feeling half-alive and staring morosely at the front page of the Jacksonville Times-Union when I caught a few flashes of a conversation from behind my right ear:

". getting a little tired of this poddamn ersatz Kennedy cam pagn now they have Rosey Grier singing 'Let the Sun Shine In' for us It seems like they'd be embarrassed " We were going down to the depot to get aboard the “Sunshine Special”—Ed Muskie's chartered train that was about to chug off on a run from Jacksonville to Miami—the whole length of Florida—for a series of + whistlestop + speeches in towns like Deland, Winterhaven and Sebring One of Muskie's Senate aides had told me as we waited on a downtown streetcorner for the candidate's motorcade to catch up with the press bus that "nobody has done one of these whistlestop tours since Harry Truman in 1948.

Was he kidding? I looked to be sure but his face was dead serious "Well I said 'Funny you'd say that because I just heard some people on the bus talking about Bobby Kennedy a campaign trains in Indian and California in 1968 I smiled plea sandily "They even wrote a song about it Don't tell me you never heard The Ruthless Cannonball'" The Muskie man shook his head not looking at me—staring intently down the street as if he'd suddenly picked up the first distant vibrations from Big Ed's black Cadillac bearing down on us I looked but the only vehicle in sight was a rusty pickup truck from 'Larry's Plumbing & Welding. It was idling at the stoplight. The driver was wearing a yellow plastic hardhat and nipping at a can of Schlazz. He glanced curiously at the big red/white/blue

draped Muskie bus, then roared past us when the light changed to green. On the rear window of the cab was a small American flag decal, and a strip on the rear bumper said "President Wallace."

Ed Muskie is a trifle sensitive about putting the Kennedy ghost to his own use, this year. He has ex-L.A. Rams tackle and one-time R.F.K bodyguard Roosevelt Grier singing songs for him, and one of his main strategists is a former R.F.K ally named John English ... but Muskie is far more concerned with the ghost of Kennedy Present.

We were sitting in the lounge car on Muskie's train, rolling through the jackpines of north Florida, when this question came up. I was talking to a dapper gent from Atlanta who was aboard the train as a special guest of Ed Muskie and who said that his P.R firm would probably "handle Georgia" for the Democratic candidate, whoever it turned out to be. “Who would you prefer?” I asked. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. I could see that the question made him nervous. “Nothing personal,” I explained. “But on a purely professional, objective basis, which one of the Democratic candidates would be the easiest to sell in Georgia?”

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "No question about it," he said. "Ted Kennedy." “But he's not a candidate,” I said.

He smiled. “I know that. All I did was answer your hypothetical question.” “I understand perfectly,” I said. “But why Teddy? Isn't the stuff he's been saying recently a bit heavy for the folks in Georgia?”

"Not for Atlanta," he replied. "Teddy could probably carry The City. Of course he'd lose the rest of the state, but it would be close enough so that a big black vote could make the difference." He sipped his scotch and bent around on the seat to adjust for a new westward lean in the pitch and roll of the train. "That's the key," he said. "Only with a Kennedy can you get a monolithic black turnout." “What about Lindsay?” I asked. “Not yet,” he said. “But he's just getting started. If he starts building the same kind of power base that Bobby had in '68—that's

when you'll see Teddy in the race" This kind of talk is not uncommon in living rooms around Washington where the candidates, their managers, and various ranking journalists are wont to gather for the purpose of "talking serious politics"—as opposed to the careful gubberish they distill for the public prints. The New Kennedy Scenario is beginning to bubble up to the surface. John Lindsay has even said it for the record: Several weeks ago he agreed with a reporter who suggested—at one of those half-serious, after-hours campaign trail drinking sessions—that "the Lindsay campaign might just be successful enough to get Ted Kennedy elected."

This is not the kind of humor that a longshot presidential candidate likes to encourage in his camp when he's spending $10,000 a day on the Campaign Trail But Lindsay seems almost suicidally frank at times; he will spend two hours on a stage, dutifully haranguing a crowd about whatever topic his speechwriters have laid out for him that day ... and thirty minutes later he will sit down with a beer and say something that no politician in his right mind would normally dare to say in the presence of journalists.

One of the main marks of success in a career politician is a rooty distrust of The Press—and this cynicism is usually reciprocated, in spades, by most reporters who have covered enough campaigns to command a fat job like chronicling the Big Apple. Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken laid down the dictum that "The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down."

This notion is still a very strong factor in the relationship between politicians and the big-time press. On lower levels you find a tendency—among people like “national editors” on papers in Pittsburgh and Omaha—to treat successful politicians with a certain amount of awe and respect. But the prevailing attitude among journalists with enough status to work Presidential Campaigns is that all politicians are congenital thieves and liars.

This is usually true. Or at least as valid as the consensus opinion among politicians that The Press is a gang of swine. Both sides will agree that the other might occasionally produce an exception to prove the rule, but the overall bias is rigid . . . and, having been on both sides of that ugly fence in my time, I tend to agree. . . .

Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered off again, and this time I can't afford the luxury of raving at great length about anything that slides into my head. So, rather than miss another deadline, I want to zip up the nut with a fast and extremely pithy 500 words... because that's all the space available, and in two hours I have to lash my rum-soaked red convertible across the Rickenbacker Causeway to downtown Miami and then to the airport—in order to meet John Lindsay in either Tallahassee or Atlanta, depending on which connection I can make: It is nearly impossible to get either in or out of Miami this week. All flights are booked far in advance, and the hotel/motel space is so viciously oversold that crowds of angry tourists are “becoming unruly”—according to the Miami Herald—in the lobbies of places that refuse to let them in.

Fortunately, I have my own spacious suite attached to the new

National Affairs office in the Royal Biscayne Hotel When things got too heavy in Washington I had no choice but to move the National Affairs desk to a place with better working conditions. Everybody agreed that the move was long overdue. After three months in Washington I felt like I'd spent three years in a mueshraft und-meath Butte Montana. My relations with the White House were extremely negative from the start my application for press credentials was rejected out of hand. I wouldn't be needing them they said. Because Rolling Stone is a music maga zine and there is not much music in the White House these days.

And not much on Capitol Hill either apparently When I called the Congressional Press Gallery to ask about the application (for press credentials) that I did filed in early November '71 they said they hadn't got around to making any decision on it yet—but I probably wouldn't be needing that one either And where the hell did I get the gall to apply for press status at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer?

Where indeed? They had me dead to rights I tried to save my face by arguing that political science has never conclusively proven that music and politics can't mix—but when they asked for my evidence I said Shucks you're probably right Why shut in your own nest eh?

"What?

Nevermind I said I didn't really want the goddamn things anyway Which was true Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club There are definite advan tages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that The move to key Biscayne had a powerful effect on my humors. My suite in the Royal Biscayne Hotel is in a big palm grove on the beach and less than a mile from the Florida White House. Nixon is on the less desirable Biscayne Bay side of the key. I face the Atlantic sitting here at the typewriter on my spacious screen porch. I can hear the ocean bashing up against the seawall about two hundred feet away.

Nobody is out there tonight The spongy green lawn between here and the beach is empty, except for an occasional wild dog on the putting green. They like the dampness, the good footing, and the high sweet smell of slow-rotting coconuts. I sit here on my yellow lamp-lit porch, swilling rum, and work up a fine gut-level understanding of what it must feel like to be a wild dog.

Not much has been written on this subject, and when I have more time I'll get back to it—but not tonight; we still have to deal with the Lindsay-Kennedy problem.

There is a certain twisted logic in Lindsay's idea that he might succeed beyond his wildest dreams and still accomplish nothing more than carving out a place for himself in history as the Gene McCarthy of 1972. At this stage of the '68 campaign, McCarthy was lucky to crack 5 percent in the Gallup Poll—the same percentage Lindsay is pulling today.

It was not until after New Hampshire—after McCarthy proved that a hell of a lot of people were taking him seriously—that Robert Kennedy changed his mind and decided to run instead of playing things safe and waiting for '72. That was the plan, based on the widespread assumption that L.B.J would naturally run again and win a second term—thus clearing the decks for Bobby the next time around.

There is something eerie in the realization that Ted Kennedy is facing almost exactly the same situation today. He would rather not run: The odds are bad; his natural constituency has apparently abandoned politics; Nixon seems to have all the guns, and all he needs to make his life complete is the chance to stomp a Kennedy in his final campaign.

So it is hard to argue with the idea that Teddy would be a fool to run for President now. Nineteen seventy-six is only four years away. Kennedy is only forty-two years old, and when Nixon bows out, the G.O.P will have to crank up a brand new champion to stave off the Kennedy challenge.

This is the blueprint, and it looks pretty good as long as there are not much chance of any Democrat beating Nixon in 72—and as especially not somebody like Lindsay who would not only put Teddy on ice for the next eight years but also shatter the lingering menace of the "waiting for Kennedy" mistique. With John Lindsay in the White House, Ted Kennedy would no longer be troubled by questions concerning his own plans for the presidency. Even a Muskie victory would be hard for Kennedy to live with—particularly if Lindsay shows enough strength to make Muskie offer him the vice-presidency. This would make Lindsay the Democratic heir apparent. Unlike Agnew—who has never been taken seriously even by his enemies as anything but a top of the yahoo/racist vote—Lindsay as vice president would be so obviously. Next in Line that Kennedy would have to back off and admit, with a fine Irish smile that he blew it the opening was there, but he didn't see it in time, while Lindsay did. This is a very complicated projection and it needs a bit more thought than I have sure to give it right now because the computer says I have to leave for Atlanta at once—meet Lindsay in the Delta V.I.P hideout and maybe ponder the question at length on the long run to Los Angeles. Meanwhile if you listen to the hazards you will keep a careful eye on John Lindsay's action in the Florida primary because if he looks good down here and then even better in Wisconsin the hazards say he can start looking for some very heavy company and that would make things very interesting. With both Kennedy and Lindsay on the race a lot of people who weren't figuring on voting this year might change their minds in a hurry. And if nothing else it would turn the Democratic National Convention in Marnu this July into something like a week long orgy of sex violence and treachery in the Bronx Zoo. The Muskie would never weather a scene like that. God only knows who would finally win the nomination but the possibilities—along with the guaranteed momentum that a media spectacle of that magnitude would generate—are enough to make Nixon start thinking about stuffing himself into the White House vegetable shredder. The whistle stops were uneventful until his noon arrival in

Miami, where Yippie activisi Jerry Rubin and another man heckled and interrupted him repeatedly. The Senator at one point tried to answer Rubin's charges that he had once been a hawk on (Vietnam) war measures. He acknowledged that he had made a mistake, as did many other senators in those times, but Rubin did not let him finish.

"Muskie ultimately wound up scolding Rubin and fellow heckler Peter Sheridan, who had boarded the train in West Palm Beach with press credentials apparently obtained from Rolling Stone's Washington correspondent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson." — Miami Herald, 2/20/72 This incident has haunted me ever since it smacked me in the eyes one peaceful Sunday morning a few weeks ago as I sat on the balmy screened porch of the National Affairs Suite here in the Royal Biscayne Hotel. I was slicing up grapefruit and sipping a pot of coffee while perusing the political page of the Herald when I suddenly saw my name in the middle of a story on Ed Muskie's "Sunshine Special" campaign train from Jacksonville to Miami.

Several quick phone calls confirmed that something ugly had happened on that train, and that I was being blamed for it. A New York reporter assigned to the Muskie camp warned me to "stay clear of this place ... they're really hot about it. They've pulled your pass for good."

"Wonderful," I said. "That's one more bummer that I have an excuse to avoid. But what happened? Why do they blame me?" “Jesus Christ!” he said. “That crazy sonofabitch got on the train wearing your press badge and went completely crazy. He drank about ten martinis before the train even got moving, then he started abusing people. He cornered some poor bastard from one of the Washington papers and called him a Greasy Faggot and a Communist Buttfucker... then he started pushing him around and saying he was going to throw him off the train at the next bridge... we couldn't believe it was happening. He scared one of the network T.V guys so bad that he locked himself in a water-closet for the rest of the trip.”

"Jesus, I hate to hear this," I said "But nobody really thought it was me, did they?"

"Hell, yes, they did" he replied. "The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and ___ _ and ___ _" (He mentioned several reporters whose names need not be listed here). "But everybody else just looked at that I.D badge he was wearing and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie's car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosey Greer up to deal with you but Dick Stewart [Muskie's press secretary] said it wouldn't look good to have a three-hundred pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train.

"That's typical Muskie stuff-thinking" I said "They've done everything else wrong why bulk at stomping a reporter" He laughed ' Actually he said the rumor was that you'd eaten a lot of L.S.D and gone wild—that you couldn't control yourself" What do you mean? I said "I wasn't even on that goddamn train. The Muskie people deliberately didn't wake me up in West Palm Beach. They didn't like my attitude from the day before. My friend from the University of Florida newspaper said he heard them talking about it down in the lobby when they were checking off the press. Just and waking up all the others."

"Yeah I heard some of that talk ' he said Somebody said you seemed very negative " "I was," I said. "That was one of the most degrading political experiences I've ever been subjected to."

"That's what the Muskie people said about your friend," he replied. "Abusing reporters is one thing—hell we're all used to that—but about halfway to Miami I saw him reach over the bar and grab a whole bottle of gun off the rick. Then he began wandering from car to car drinking out of the bottle and getting after those poor goddamn girls. That's when it really got bad."

"What prls?" I said "The ones in those little red, white and blue hotpants outfits," he replied "All those so-called 'Muskie volunteers' from Jacksonville Junior College or whatever" “You mean the barmaids? The ones with the straw boaters?” “Yeah,” he said. “The cheerleaders. Well, they went all to goddamn pieces when your friend started manhandling them. Every time he'd come into a car the girls would run out the door at the other end. But every once in a while he'd catch one by an arm or a leg and start yelling stuff like 'Now I gotcha, you little beauty! Come on over here and sit on poppa's face!'” "Jesus!" I said. "Why didn't they just put him off the train?" “How? You don't stop a chartered Amtrak train on a main line just because of a drunken passenger. What if Muskie had ordered an emergency stop and we'd been rammed by a freight train? No presidential candidate would risk a thing like that.”

I could see the headlines in every paper from Key West to Seattle:

Muskie Campaign Train Collision Kills 34;

Demo Candidate Blames “Crazy Journalist” "Anyway," he said, "we were running late for that big rally at the station in Miami—so the Muskie guys figured it was better to just endure the crazy sonofabitch, rather than cause a violent scene on a train full of bored reporters. Christ, the train was loaded with network T.V crews, all of them bitching about how Muskie wasn't doing anything worth putting on the air. . ." He laughed. "Hell, yes, we all would have loved a big brawl on the train. Personally, I was bored stupid. I didn't get a quote worth filing out of the whole trip." He laughed again. "Actually, Muskie deserved that guy. He was a goddamn nightmare to be trapped on a train with, but at least he wasn't dull. Nobody was dozing off like they did on Friday. Hell, there was no way to get away from that brute! All you could do was keep moving and hope he wouldn't get hold of you."

Both the Washington Star and Women's Wear Daily reported essentially the same tale: A genuinely savage person had boarded the train in West Palm Beach, using a fraudulent press pass, then ran amok in the lounge car—getting in “several fistfights” and

finally "beckling the Senator unmercifully" when the train pulled into Miami and Muskie went out on the cabose platform to deliver what was supposed to have been the climactic speech of his triumphant whistlestop tour It was at this point—according to press reports both published & otherwise—that my alleged friend, calling himself "Peter Sherman," eranked up his act to a level that caused Senator Muskie to "cut short his remarks."

When the 'Sunshine Special' pulled into the station at Miami "Sheridan" reeled off the train and took a position on the trucks just below Muskie's caboose platform, where he spent the next half hour causing the Senator a hellish amount of grief—along with Jerry Rubin, who also showed up at the station to ask Muskie what had caused him to change his mind about supporting the War in Vietnam.

Rubin had been in Miami for several weeks making frequent appearances on local T.V to warn that Ten Thousand naked hippies" would be among those attending the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach in July. "We will march to the Convention Center," he announced, "but there will be no violence —at least not by us.

To questions regarding his presence in Florida Rubin said he "decided to move down here because of the climate," and that he was also registered to vote in Florida—as a Republican. Contrary to the ranchic suspicions of the Muskie staff people, Sheridan didn't even recognize Rubin and I hadn't seen him since the Counter Inaugural Ball which ran opposite Nixon's inauguration in 1969.

When Rubin showed up at the train station that Saturday afternoon to hassle Muskie, the Seoator from Maine was apparently the only person in the crowd (except Sheridan) who didn't know who he was. His first response to Rubin's heckling was 'Shut up, young man—I'm talking."

"You're not a damn bit different from Nixon," Rubin shouted back.

And it was at this point, according to compiled press reports and a first-hand account by Monte Chitty of the University of Florida Alligator, that Muskie seemed to lose his balance and fall back from the rail

What happened, according to Chitty, was that “the Boohoo reached up from the track and got hold of Muskie's pants-leg-waving an empty martini glass through the bars around the caboose platform with his other hand and screaming: 'Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!'” "It was really embarrassing," Chitty told me later on the phone. "The Boohoo kept reaching up and grabbing Muskie's legs, yelling for more gin... Muskie tried to ignore him, but the Boohoo kept after him and after a while it go so bad that even Rubin backed off." “The Boohoo,” of course, was the same vicious drunkard who had terrorized the Muskie train all the way from Palm Beach, and he was still wearing a press badge that said “Hunter S. Thompson—Rolling Stone.”

Chitty and I had met him the night before, about 2:30 A.M., in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where the press party was quartered. We were heading out to the street to look for a sandwich shop, feeling a trifle bent & very hungry... and as we passed the front desk, here was this huge wild-eyed monster, bellowing at the night-clerk about "All this chickenshit" and "All these pansies around here trying to suck up to Muskie" and "Where the fuck can a man go in this town to have a good time, anyway?"

A scene like that wouldn't normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one—something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap—a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.

This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear in the lobby of a Ramada Inn, and especially not in West Palm Beach—so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us.

"Don't mind if I do," he said. "At this hour of the night I'll flock around with just about anybody."

He had just got out of jail, he explained, as we walked five or six blocks through the warm midnight streets to a twenty four-hour hamburger place called The Copper Penny Fifteen days for vagrancy, and when he'd hit the bricks today around four he just happened to pick up a newspaper and see that Fd Muskie was in town and since he had this friend who "worked up top," he said, for Big Ed well, he figured he'd just drift over to the Ramada Inn and say hello But he couldn't find his friend "Just a bunch of prises from C.B.S and the New York Times, hanging around the bar," he said. "I took a few bites out of that crowd and they faded fast—just ran off like curs. But what the shut can you expect from people like that? Just a bunch of lowlife ass kissers who get paid for hanging around with politicians."

Well 1d like to run this story all the way out, here but it's deadline time again and the nuts & bolts people are starting to mean demanding a fast finish and heavy on the political stuff Right Let's not cheat the readers We promised them politics, by God and we'll damn well give them politics But just for the quick hell of it I'd like to explain or at least insist—despite massive evidence to the contrary—that this geek we met in the lobby of the Ramada Inn and who scared the shut out of everybody when he got on Muskie's train the next day for the run from Palm Beach to Miami, was in fact an excellent person with a rare sense of humor that unfortunately failed to mesh for various reasons, with the prevailing humors on Muskie's 'Sunshine Special" Just how he came to be wearing my press badge is a long and tangled story, but as I recall it had something to do with the fact that 'Sheridan' convinced me that he was one of the original ranking Boohoos of the Neo-American Church and also that he was able to rattle off all kinds of obscure and pathy tales about his experiences in places like Milbrook, the Hog Farm, La Honda,

and Mike's Pool Hall in San Francisco. ... Which would not have meant a hell of a lot if he hadn't also been an obvious aristocrat of the Freak Kingdom. There was no doubt about it. This bastard was a serious, king-hell Crazy. He had that rare weird electricity about him—that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."

Monte Chitty and I spent about five hours with "Sheridan" that night in West Palm Beach, and every place we went he caused serious trouble. In a rock club around the corner from The Copper Penny he terrified the manager by merely walking up to the bar and asking if he could check his hat—a mashed-up old Panama that looked like it had come out of the same Goodwill Store where he'd picked up his Levis and his crusty Cuban work shirt.

But when he tried to check his hat, the manager coiled up like a bull-snake—recognizing something in “Sheridan's” tone of voice or maybe just the vibrations that gave him a bad social fear, and I could see in his eyes that he was thinking: “O my God—here it comes. Should we mace him now or later?”

All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train—and which also explains why his "up-top friend" (later identified in Women's Wear Daily as Richie Evans, one of Muskie's chief advance men for Florida) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan—who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.

"To hell with that," I said. "Take the train with us. It's the presidential express—a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Richie's is a friend of Ed's, I guess—but since you can't find Evans at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, maybe you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard." “I think you're right,” he said.

"I am," I replied "And besides I paid $30 for the goddess thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life" He smiled, accepting the card "Maybe I can put it to better use," he said Which was true He did—and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps for allowing my “credentials” to fall into foreign hands There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster “Sheridan”—and also with Jerry Rubin—to sabotage" Muskies wind up gig in Miami and that “Sheridan s" beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully-laid plot by me Rubin and the International Yeppie Brain trust This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten—but they tried to give me a break and now look what I done to em planted a human bomb on the train A story like this one is very hard to spike because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devous behavior on all fronts—including the press—that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all would I give my credentials to some booze-maddened jailbird?

Well why indeed?

Several reasons come quickly to mind but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whittlestop speeches through central Florida We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads of black teenagers and some middle aged ladies from one of the local union halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, "It's time for the good people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust—namely me."

Standing next to me on the platform was a kid of about fifteen who looked not entirely fired up by what he was hearing. "Say," I said. "What brings you out here at this hour of the morning, for a thing like this?" “The bus,” he said.

After that, we went down to Deland—about a two-hour run—where Muskic addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who'd been let out of school to hear the candidate say, "It's about time the good people of America got together behind somebody they can trust—namely me."

And then we eased down the tracks to Sebring, where a feverish throng of about a hundred and fifty senior citizens was on hand to greet the Man from Maine and pick up his finely-honed message. As the train rolled into the station, Roosevelt Grier emerged from the caboose and attempted to lead the crowd through a few stanzas of "Let the Sun Shine In."

Then the candidate emerged, acknowledging Grier's applause and smiling for the T.V cameramen who had been let off a hundred yards up the track so they could get ahead of the train and set up ... in order to film Muskie socking it to the crowd about how "It's about time we good people, etcetera, etcetera.."

Meanwhile, the Muskie girls—looking very snappy in their tri-colored pre-war bunny suits—were mingling with the folks; saying cheerful things and handing out red, white, and blue buttons that said “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie.”

A band was playing somewhere, I think, and the Chief Political Correspondent from some paper in Australia was jabbering into the telephone in the dispatcher's office—feeding Muskie's wisdom straight down to the outback, as it were; direct from the Orange Juice State.

By mid-afternoon a serious morale problem had developed aboard the train. At least half of the national press corps had long since gone over the hump into serious boozing. A few had already

filed, but most had seemed the prepared text of Big Ed's "whistle-stop speech" and said to hell with it Now, as the train headed south again, the Muskie girls were passing out sandwiches and O B McChnton, the "Black Irishman of Country Music" was trying to lure people into the lounge car for a singalong thine It took a while, but they finally collected a crowd. Then one of Muskie's college-type staffers took charge. He told the Black Irishman what to play, eued the other staff people then launched into about nineteen straight choruses of Big Ed's newest campaign song "He's got the whole state of Florida. In his hands I left at that point. The scene was pure Nixon—so much like a pep rally at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I'd had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. "You know," he said. "It's taken me half the goodwiller day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people." He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. "I've covered a lot of Democratic campaigns," he continued, "but I've never felt out of place before—never personally uncomfortable with the people."

"I know what you mean 'I said “Sure,” he said. “It's obvious—and I've finally figured out when.” He chuckled and glanced at the Muskie people again. “You know what it is?” he said. “It's because these people act like god-damned Republicans! That's the problem. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out.” screaming for more gin.

I might even agree with this thinking, myself, if the question of "drastic retaliation against a candidate" ever actually confronted me... for the same reason that I couldn't crank up enough adrenalin to get myself involved in some low-level conspiracy to heckle a harmless dingbat like Ed Muskie in a Florida railroad station.² Which is not to say that I couldn't get interested in something with a bit of real style to it—like turning 50,000 bats loose in the Convention Center on the night of Hubert Humphrey's nomination. But I don't see much hope for anything that imaginative this time around, and most people capable of putting an Outrage like that together would probably agree with me that giving Hubert the Democratic nomination would be punishment enough in itself.

As for Muskie and his goddamn silly train, my only real feeling about that scene was a desire to get away from it as soon as possible. And I might have flown down to Miami on Friday night if we hadn't got ourselves mixed up with the Boohoo and stayed out until 6:00 A.M. Saturday morning. At that point, all I really cared about was getting myself hauled back to Miami on somebody else's wheels.

The Boohoo agreed, and since the train was leaving in two hours, that was obviously the easiest way to go. But Muskie's pressherders decided that my attitude was so negative that it was probably best to let me sleep—which they did, and there is a certain poetic justice in the results of that decision. By leaving me behind,

they unwittely cut the only person on the train who could have kept the Boohoo under control But of course they had no idea that he would be joining them. Nobody even knew the Boohoo existed until he turned up in the lounge car wearing my press bridge and calling people like New York Times correspondent Johnny Apple an 'ugly little wop' It was just about then according to another reporter's account that "people started trying to get out of his way" It was also about then Monte Chitty recalls that the Boohoo began ordering things like "triple Gin Bucks without the Buck" And from then on things went steadily downhill Now looking back on that tragedy with a certain amount of perspective and another glance at my notes the Boohoo's behavior on that train seems perfectly looseal—or at least as logical as my own less violent but noticeably negative reaction to the same scene a day earlier. It was a very oppressive atmosphere—very tense and guarded compared to the others I'd covered. I had just finished a swing around central Florida with Landsvy and before that I'd been up in New Hampshire with McGovern.

Both of those campaigns had been very loose and easy seen-s to travel with which might have been because they were both left bent underdogs but at that point I did n't really think much about it, the only other presidential candidates I had ever spent any time with were Gene McCarthy and Richard Nixon in 1968. And they were so vastly different—the Left and Right extremes of both parties—that I came into the 72 campaign thinking I would probably never see anything as extreme in either direction as the Nixon & McCarthy campaigns in 68.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find both the McGovern and Lindsay campaigns at least its related and informal as McCarthy's 68 trip they were nowhere near as intense or exciting but the difference was more a matter of degree of style and personal attitude.

In '68 you could drive across Manchester from McCarthy's woodsy headquarters at the Wayfarer to Nixon's grim concrete hole at the Holiday Inn and feel like you'd gone from Berkeley to Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

But then you sort of expected that kind of cheap formica trip from Richard Nixon: all those beefy Midwest detective types in blue sharkskin suits—ex-brokers from Detroit, ex-speculators from Miami, ex gear & sprocket salesmen from Chicago. They ran a very tight ship. Nixon rarely appeared, and when he did nobody in the press corps ever got within ten feet of him, except now and then by special appointment for cautious interviews. Getting assigned to cover Nixon in '68 was like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn.

It never occurred to me that anything could be worse than getting stuck on another Nixon campaign, so it came as a definite shock to find that hanging around Florida with Ed Muskie was even duller and more depressing than traveling with Evil Dick himself.

And it wasn't just me, although the Muskie Downer was admittedly more obvious to reporters who'd been traveling with other candidates than it was to the poor devils who'd been stuck with him from the start. I may have been the rudest "negative attitude" case on the "Sunshine Special," but I was definitely not the only one. About halfway through that endless Friday I was standing at the bar when Judy Michaelson, a New York Post reporter who had just switched over from the Lindsay campaign, came wandering down the aisle with a pained blank stare on her face, and stopped beside me just long enough to say, "Boy! This is not quite the same as the other one, is it?"

I shook my head, leaning into the turn as the train rounded a bend on the banks of either the Sewanee or the Chatahootchee River. "Cheer up," I said. "It's a privilege to ride the rails with a front-runner."

She smiled wearily and moved on, dragging her notebook behind her. Later that evening, in West Palm Beach, I listened to Dick Stout of Newsweek telling a Muskie press aide that his day on the "Sunshine Special" had been "so goddamn disgracefully bad that I don't have the words for it yet."

One of the worst things about the trip was the fact that the

a traveling zoo of local Party bigwigs The New Hampshire primary was still two weeks off and Muskie was still greedily pursuing his dead-end strategy of piling up endorsements from " powerful Democrats in every state he visited —presumably on the theory that once he got the Party Bosses signed up they would automatically deliver the votes (B) the time the deal went down in New Hampshire. Muskie had stened up just about every Democratic politician in the country whose name was well known by more than a hundred people and it did him about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin Dormann. A week later when the start to the north place finish in Florida, fishmongy in Cairo Illinois announced that he and U S Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa were forming a corporation to market Muskie datboards Hughes had planned to be present at the ceremony in Cairo the man said but the Senator was no longer able to travel from one place to another without the use of custom Weight Belts The New Hampshire results! hit the Muskie bandwagon like a front wheel blowout but Florida blew the transmission Big Ed will survive Illinois whatever the outcome but he still has to go to Wisconsin—where anything but victory will probably finish him off and his chances of beating Humphrey up there on The Hube home court are not good. The latest Gallup Poll, released on the eve of the Illinois primary, but based on a nationwide survey taken prior to the vote in New Hampshire showed Humphrey ahead of Muskie for the first time. In the February poll Muskie was leading by 33 percent to 32 percent — but a month later The Hube had surged up to 35 percent and Muskie had slipped seven points in thirty days down to 28 percent According to almost every media nztard in the country Wisconsin is the crunch — especially for Muskie and New York Mayor John Landay who was badly jolted in Florida when his gold plated Media Bliz apparently had no effect at all on the voters. Lindsay had spent almost a half million dollars in Florida yet limited home fifth with seven percent of the vote—just a point ahead of McGovern, who spent less than $100,000.

Two of the biggest losers in Florida, in fact, were not listed in the election results. They were David Garth, Lindsay's T.V-Media guru, and Robert Squier, whose T.V campaign for Muskie was such a debacle that some of the Man from Maine's top advisors in Florida began openly denouncing Squier to startled reporters, who barely had time to get their stories into print before Muskie's national headquarters announced that a brand new series of T.V spots would begin running yesterday.

But by then the damage was done. I never saw the new ones, but the Squier originals were definitely a bit queer. They depicted Muskie as an extremely slow-spoken man who had probably spent half his life overcoming some kind of dreadful speech impediment, only to find himself totally hooked on a bad Downer habit or maybe even smack. The first time I heard a Muskie radio spot I was zipping along on the Rickenbacker Causeway, coming in from Key Biscayne, and I thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. It was the voice of a man who had done about twelve Reds on the way to the studio—a very funny ad.

Whatever else the Florida primary might or might not have proved, it put a definite kink in the Media Theory of politics. It may be true, despite what happened to Lindsay and Muskie in Florida, that all you have to do to be President of the U.S.A. is look "attractive" on T.V and have enough money to hire a Media Wizard. Only a fool or a littlehead would argue with the logic at the root of the theory: If you want to sell yourself to a nation of T.V addicts, you obviously can't ignore the medium ... but the Florida vote at least served to remind a lot of people that the medium is only a tool, not a magic eye. In other words, if you want to be President of the U.S.A. and you're certified "attractive," the only other thing you have to worry about when you lay out all that money for a Media Wizard is whether or not your're hiring a good one instead of a bungler ... and definitely lay off the Reds when you go to the studio.

The Banshee Screams in Florida The Emergence of Mankiewicz Hard Times for the Man from Maine Redneck Power & Hell on Wheels for George Wallace Hube Shithers out of Obscurity Fear and Loathing on the Democratic Left on Monday Morning the day before the Florida primary, I flew down to Miami with Frank Mankiewicz who runs the McGovern campaign We hit the runway at just over two hundred miles an hour in a strong crosswind bouncing first on the left wheel and then—about a hundred yards down the runway—on the right wheel then another long bounce and finally straightening out just in front of the main terminal at Miami's International Airport.

Nothing serious But my Bloody Mary was spilled all over Monday's Washington Post on the armrest I tried to ignore it and looked over at Mankiewicz sitting next to me but he was still snoring peacefully I poked him "Here we are" I said "Down home in Fat City again What's the schedule?

Now he was wide awake, checking his watch "I think I have to make a speech somewhere" he said 'I also have to meet Shirley MacLaine somewhere Where is a telephone? I have to make some calls" Soon we were shuffling down the corridor toward the bag bag gage-claim merry go-round, Mankiewicz had nothing to claim. He has learned to travel light. His "baggage," as it were consisted of one small canvas bag that looked like an oversize shaving kit.

My own bundle—two massive leather bags and a Xerox telecopier strapped into a fiberglass Samsonite suitcase—would be coming down the baggage-claim chute any moment. I tend to travel heavy; not for any good reason, but mainly because I haven't learned the tricks of the trade. “I have a car waiting,” I said. “A fine bronze-gold convertible. Do you need a ride?” “Maybe,” he said. “But I have to make some calls first. You go ahead, get your car and all that goddamn baggage and I'll meet you down by the main door.”

I nodded and hurried off. The Avis counter was only about fifty yards away from the wall-phone where Mankiewicz was setting up shop with a handful of dimes and a small notebook. He made at least six calls and a page of notes before my bags arrived... and by the time I began arguing with the car-rental woman the expression on Mankiewicz's face indicated that he had everything under control.

I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist, and central intelligence behind the McGovern-for-President campaign—a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work "pre-Owned Car" salesman—putting McGovern's Florida primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.

Mankiewicz—a 47-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was Director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy's press secretary in 1968—has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got underway last year. For a while he was the "Press Secretary," then he was called the "Campaign Manager"—but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of "Political Director." Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern's alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon—the Man behind the Man.

Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent

of the vote This was long before Ed Muskie's infamous "break-down scene" on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union Leader When Frank laid this prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job—trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last minute surge for McGovern the only candidate in the 72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual lovalties of the so-called "Kennedy Machine".

Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern's campaign—and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by public cizing his nonsense. Journalists like The Rich are inclined to protect. Their Own even those who go off on hopeless targets.

So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant Guru level on the morning of March 8th when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and "front runner" Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.

New Hampshire in 72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in 68 jolted I B.J. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida still talking like the champ & reminding everybody within reach that he had after all. Hon in New Hampshire Just like L.B.I—who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin But Mushe had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida and he was already locked in he came down and hit the streets with what his founders called a 'last minute blitz" shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbuls saying 'Trust Muskie and Believe Muskie' and "Muskie Talks Straight" When Big Ed arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who'd been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Fortnary Leson at Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled in his head that I couldn't raise a bet on him—at any odds—among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the singside seats on fight night.

I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn't want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got underway 'Two' Mariano asked with a gun I shrugged, and drank one off very quickly as Floyd came out of his corner and turned to wax the first time Liston hit him. Then, with a minute still to go in the first round, Liston bashed him again and Patterson went down for the count. The fight was over before I touched my second beer.

Muskie went the same way to Florida—just as Muskiewicz had predicted forty eight hours earlier in the living room of his suburban Washington home. "Muskie is already finished," he said then. "He had no base. Nobody's really for Muskie. They're only for the Front Runner, the man who stay he's the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore, he couldn't even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire on his own turf.

The next morning on the plane from Washington to Miami, I tried for a firmer insight on Mankewicz's wisdom by offering to bet $100 that Muskie would finish worse than second. I saw him running third, not much ahead of Jackson—with The Hube not far behind Wallace and Lindsay beating McGovern with something like 11 percent to 9 percent. (This was before I watched both McGovern's and Lindsay's final fame shots on Monday night, McGovern at the University of Miami and Lindsay with Charles Evers at a black church in North Miami. By late Monday, seven hours before the polls opened, I thought both of them might finish behind Shirley Chisholm which almost happened. Lindsay finished with something around 7 percent, McGovern with roughly 6 percent, and Chisholm with 4 percent—while George Wallace rolled home with 42 percent, followed in the distance by Humphrey with 18.5 percent, Jackson with 12.5 percent and Muskie with 9 percent.

“Remember when you go out to vote tomorrow that the eyes of America are upon you, all the live-long day. The eyes of America are upon you, they will not go away.” —Senator George McGovern at a rally at the University of Miami the night before the Florida primary.

Cazart!... this fantastic rain outside: a sudden cloudburst, drenching everything. The sound of rain smacking down on my concrete patio about ten feet away from the typewriter, rain beating down on the surface of the big aqua-lighted pool out there across the lawn... rain blowing into the porch and whipping the palm fronds around in the warm night air.

Behind me, on the bed, my waterproof Sony says, "It's 5:28 right now in Miami..." Then Rod Stewart's hoarse screech: "Mother don't you recognize your son...?"

Beyond the rain I can hear the sea rolling in on the beach. This atmosphere is getting very high, full of strange memory flashes.

"Mother don't you recognize me now . . ."

Wind, rain, surf. Palm trees leaning in the wind, hard funk/blues on the radio, a flagon of Wild Turkey on the sideboard... are those footsteps outside? High heels running in the rain?

Keep on typing... but my mind is not really on it. I keep expecting to hear the screen door bang open and then turn around to see Sadie Thompson standing behind me, soaked to the skin... smiling, leaning over my shoulder to see what I'm cranking out tonight... then laughing softly, leaning closer; wet nipples against my neck, perfume around my head... and now on the radio: "Wild Horses... We'll ride them some day..."

Perfect. Get it on. Don't turn around. Keep this fantasy rolling and try not to notice that the sky is getting light outside. Dawn is coming up and I have to fly to Mazatlan in five hours to deal with a drug-fugitive. Life is getting very complicated. After Mazatlan I have to rush back to San Francisco and get this gibberish ready for the printer... and then on to Wisconsin to chronicle the next

act in this saga of Downers and Treachery called "The Campaign Trail" Wisconsin is the site of the next Democratic primary Six-year's candidates in this one-racing around the state in chartered gets spending Ten Grand a day for the privilege of laying a series of terrible bunners on the natives. Dull speeches for breakfast duller speeches for lunch then bullshit with gravy for dinner.

How long O Lord How long? Where will it end? The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct A lot of people are seriously worried about this but I am not one of them I have never been much of a Party Man myself and the more I learn about the realities of national politics the more I'm convinced that the Democratic Party is on a statistic in devour—more an Obstacle than a Vehicle—and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with It is a bonus alternative to the politics of Nixon. A gang of senile leeches like George Meany, Hubert Humphrey, and Mayor Daley, Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie and Frank Rizzo, the super cop Mayor of Philadelphia.

George McGovern is also a Democrat and I suppose I have to sympathize in some guilt stricken way with whatever demented obsession makes him think he can somehow cause this herd of venal pigs to see the light and make him their leader but after watching McGovern perform in two primaries I think he should stay in the Senate where his painfully earnest style is not only more appreciated but also far more effective than it is on the nationwide stump His surprising neo-victory in New Hampshire was less a triumph than a spin-off from Muskie's incredible bungling. But, up close he is a very likeable and convincing person—in total contrast to Big Ed, who seems okay on T.V or at the other end of a crowded auditorium, but who turns off almost everybody who has the mus-

fortune of having to deal with him personally.

Another key factor in New Hampshire was that McGovern only needed 33,007 votes to achieve the psychological "upset" that came with his 37 percent figure versus Muskie's 46 percent. This was possible because McGovern was able, in New Hampshire, to campaign in the low-key, town-meeting, person-to-person style in which he is most effective ... but which will be physically impossible in big, delegate-heavy states like California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, or even Wisconsin. (Chicago alone will send eighty delegates to the Democratic Convention, compared to only twenty for the whole state of New Hampshire ... and in Florida, McGovern managed to reach more than 75,000 voters, but wound up in sixth place with a depressing six percent of the state's total.)

The New Hampshire primary is perhaps the only important national election where a candidate like McGovern can be truly effective. Crowds seem to turn him off, instead of on. He lacks that sense of drama—that instinct for timing & orchestration that is the real secret of success in American politics.

Frank Munkiewicz seems to have it—& that helps but probably not enough. In a political situation where it is almost mathematically impossible to win anything unless you can make the sap rise in a crowd, a presidential candidate like McGovern—who simply lacks the chemistry—is at a fatal disadvantage in mass vote scenes where a bo-ho verbal counterpunch at the right moment, can be worth four dozen carefully reasoned position papers.

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apicee. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight—assuming it was straight in the first place.

Which harks back to McGovern's problem He is probably the most honest big time politician in America Robert Kennedy, several years before he was murdered called George McGovern "the most decent man in the Senate Which is not quite the same thing as being the best candidate for President of the United States For that McGovern would need at least one dark linky streak of Mick Jagger in his soul Not much & perhaps not even enough so people would notice at lunch in the Capitol Hill Hotel or walking down the hallway of the Senate Office Building—but just enough to drift out on the stage in front of a big crowd & let the spectacle turn him on That may be the handle. Maybe the whole secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd. The only candidate running for the presidency today who seems to understand this is George Wallace which might at least partially explain why Dobby Kennedy was the only candidate who could take votes away from Wallace in 69 Kennedy like Wallace, was able to connect with people on some kind of visceral, instinctive level that is probably both above X below "rational politics"

McGovern does not appear to have this instinct. He does not project real well, & his sense of humor is so dry that a lot of people insist on calling it "withered."

Maybe so—and that may be the root of the reason why I can't feel entirely comfortable around George... and he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.

But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing. One night about five years ago in Idaho, Mike Solheim & I were sitting in his house talking about Lenny Bruce in a fairly serious vein, when he suddenly got up and put on a record that I still remember as one of the most hysterical classics of satire I'd ever heard in my life. I laughed for twenty minutes. Every line was perfect. "What's the name of that album?" I said. "I thought I'd heard all of his stuff, but this one is incredible." “You're right,” he said. “But it's not Lenny Bruce.” “Bullshit,” I said. “Let's He smiled & tossed it across the room to me. It was General Douglas MacArthur's famous "farewell speech" to Congress in '52.

Remember that one? The “old soldiers never die” number? My friend Raoul Duke calls it “one of the ten best mescaline records ever cut.”

I am still a little sick about that episode. Solheim and I are still friends, but not in the same way. That record is not for everybody. I wouldn't recommend it to a general audience... But then I wouldn't recommend it to George McGovern either.

Jesus! The only small point I meant to make when I jackknifed into this trip was that McGovern is unusual, for a politician, in that he is less impressive on T.V than he is in person.

One of Muskie's main problems, thus far, has been that not even his own hired staff people really like him. The older ones try to explain this problem away by saying, "Ed's under a lot of pressure these days, but he's really a fine guy, underneath."

The younger staff members have apparently never had much contact with “the real Muskie.” With very few exceptions, they

Lattr in March

justify their strained allegiance to the man by saying, I wouldn't be working for him except that he's the only Democrat who can beat Nixon " Or at least that's what they said before the polls closed in Florida. After that—when it quickly became apparent that Muskie couldn't even beat Scoop Jackson much less Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace—he was faced with a virtual election night mutiny among the younger staff people, and even the veterans were so alarmed that they convened an emergency conference in Muskie headquarters at Miami's Dupont Plaza Hotel and decided that the candidate would have to drastically change his image.

For months they'd been trying to sell 'the Man from Maine' as a comfortable mushroom middle-of-the-road compromiser who wouldn't dream of offending anybody—the ideal centrist candidate who would be all things to all men But the voters were not quite that stupid. Muskie bombed in New Hampshire on what even the candidate admitted was his own tariff—and then he came down to Florida and got stomped so badly that his campaign staffers were weeping uncontrollably in front of T.V cameras in the ballroom that had been advertised all day—on the Dupont Plaza billboard—as the scene of "Muskie's Victory Party".

I got there just after he had come down from his upstairs hid away to console the crowd and denounce George Wallace on network T.V as “a demagogue of the worst sort” and 'a threat to the country's underlying values of humanism, of decency of progress.”

This outburst was immediately interpreted, by local politicians, as a slur on the people of Florida—calling 42 percent of the electorate Dupes and Racist Pigs because they voted for George Wallace.

U.S Senator Ed Gurney (R-Fla) demanded an apology, but Muskie ignored him and went back upstairs to the smoke filled room where his wizards had already decided that his only hope was a last turn to the Left. No more of that 'centre' bullshut. They looked both ways and—seeing the Right very crowded —convinced each other that Muskie's “new image” would be “The Liberal Alternative to Hubert Humphrey.”

And besides, neither McGovern nor Lindsay were showing much strength out there in Left Field, so Big Ed would probably fare a hell of a lot better by picking a fight with those two than he would by moving Right and tangling with Humphrey and Jackson.

Robert Squier, Muskie's national media advisor, emerged from the meeting and said, "We're going to erase that yellow stripe in the middle of the road." Another one of the brain-trusters tried to put a better face on it: "The irony of this defeat," he said, "is that it will make Muskie what we all wanted him to be all along... the only question is whether it's too late."

In the final analysis, as it were, this painful think session was “summed up” for the New York Times by a nameless “key aide/advisor” who explained: “The reason people didn't vote for Ed Muskie here is that they didn't have any reason to.”

Zang! The candidate's reaction to this ultimate nut of wisdom was not recorded, but we can only assume he was pleased to see signs that at least one of his ranking advisors was finally beginning to function well enough on the basic motor-skill/signal-recognition level that he might soon learn to tie his own shoes.

If I were running for the presidency of the United States and heard a thing like that from somebody I was paying a thousand dollars a week I would have the bastard dropped down an elevator shaft.

But Muskie has apparently grown accustomed to this kind of waterhead talk from his staff. They are not an impressive group, on the evidence. One of the first things you notice around any Muskie headquarters, local or national, is that many of the people in charge are extremely fat. Not just chubby or paunchy or flabby, but serious glandular cases. They require assistance getting in and out of cars, or even elevators.

Under normal circumstances I wouldn't mention this kind of thing—for all the obvious reasons: general humanity, good taste, relevance, etcetera—but in the context of what has happened to Ed

Muskie in the first two primaries, it's hard to avoid the idea that there may be some ominous connection between the total failure of his campaign and the people who are running it As late as February 15th, Ed Muskie was generally conceded —even by his political opponents—to be within an eyelash or two of having the Democratic nomination so skillfully locked up that the primaries wouldn't even be necessary. He had the public endorsements of almost every Big Name in the party including some who said they were only backing him because he was so far ahead that nobody else had a chance which was just as well, they said, because it is very important to get the Party machinery into high gear, early on behind a consensus candidate. And Ed Muskie, they all agreed, was the only Democrat who could beat Nixon in November.

The word went out early long before Christmas and by January it had already filtered down to low level fringe groups like the National Association of Student Governments and other youth vote organizers who were suddenly faced with the choice of either "getting your people behind Muskie or crippling the party with another one of those goddamn protest movements that'll end up like all the others and not accomplish anything except to guarantee Nixon's re-election A lot of people bought this—particularly the "youth leader" types who saw themselves playing key roles in a high-powered issue-oriented Muskie campaign that would not only dump Nixon but put a certified "good guy" in the White House.

In retrospect, the 'Sunshine Special' looks far more like an ill-conceived disaster than it did at the time when Rubin and the Boohoo made such a shambles of Muskies's arrival in Miami that the local news media devoted almost as much time and space to the Senator's clash with 'anti-war hecklers' at the train station as it did to the whole four hundred mile, thirty six hour Whistlestop Tour that covered the length of the state and produced what the candidates's headquarters said were "five major statements in five cities'

It probably cost the Muskie campaign almost $40,000—almost $7,500 of that for rental of the five car train from Amtrak. Staff salaries and special expenses for the trip (thirty advance men spending two weeks each in towns along the route to make sure Big Ed would draw crowds for the T.V cameras; payment to musicians, Rosey Grier, etcetera). . . a list of all expenses would probably drive the cost of the spectacle up closer to $50,000.

For all this money, time, and effort, Muskie's combined whistlestop crowds totaled less than three thousand, including the disastrous climax that not only botched news coverage in Miami, the state, and the whole country—but also came close to shattering the Senator's nerves. In addition to all that, his "major statements" along the way were contemptuously dismissed as "oatmeal" by most of the press and the network T.V news editors in New York & Washington.

In a word, the “Sunshine Special” bombed. The Miami Herald reported—in the same article dominated by the Rubin/Boohoo incident—that Muskie's trip into “the politics of the past” was considered a failure even by the Senator's own staff.

Meanwhile, in that same issue of the Herald, right next to the ugly saga of the "Sunshine Special," was a photograph of a grinning George Wallace chatting with national champion stock car racer Richard Petty at the Daytona 500, where 98,600 racing fans were treated to "a few informal remarks" by The Governor, who said he had only come to watch the races and check up on his old friend, Dick Petty—who enjoys the same kind of superhero status in the South that Jean-Claude Killy has in ski country.

That appearance at the Daytona 500 didn't cost Wallace a dime, and the A.P wire-photo of him and Petty that went to every daily and Sunday newspaper in Florida was worth more to Wallace than his own weight in pure gold ... and there was also the weight of the 98,600 racing fans, who figure that any friend of Richard Petty's must sit on both shoulders of God in his spare time.

The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile National Front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent ... and then he went on all the T.V networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened.

except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot Which is at least half true, but it doesn't have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that The Man From Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party's ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his die and elected Truman in 1948.

If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.

I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Big Ed's Milwaukee headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty and all the windows taped T.V crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables hoping to film the ex-Front runner from a safe distance when he comes crashing into the place to blame his sixth place finish on some land of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Criver. Nor is there any reason to believe he will refrain from physical violence at that time. With his dream and his nerves completely shot he might start laying hands on people.

Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of however, is the list of those who will not be there under any pretense at all. Senator Harold Hughes will not be there, for instance and neither will Senator John Tunney. Nor will any of the other Senators, Governors, Mayors, Congressmen, Labor Leaders, Liberal Pundits, Fascist Lawyers, Fixers from I.T.T, and extremely powerful Democratic National Committeewomen, who are already on the record as full-bore committed to stand behind Big Ed.

None of those people will be there when Muskie sees the first returns from Wisconsin and feels the first rush of pus into his brain. At that point he will have to depend on his friends, because that suitcase full of endorsements he's been dragging around won't be worth the price of checking it into a local bus station locker.

Except perhaps for Birch Bayh. There is something that doesn't quite meet the eye connected with this one. It makes no sense at all, on its face. Why would one of Ted Kennedy's closest friends and allies in the Senate suddenly decide to jump on the Muskie bandwagon when everybody else is struggling to get off gracefully?

Maybe Birch is just basically a nice guy—one of those down-home, warm-hearted Hoosiers you hear so much about. Maybe be and Big Ed are lifelong buddies. But if that were so, you'd think Bayh might have offered to fix Muskie up with some high-life political talent back then when it might have made a difference.

But times are tricky now, and you never know when even one of your best friends might slap a ruinous lawsuit on you for some twisted reason that nobody understands. Almost everybody you meet these days is nervous about the nasty drift of things.

It is becoming increasingly possible, for instance, that Hubert Humphrey will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year—which would cause another Nixon-Humphrey campaign. And a thing like that would probably have a serious effect on my nerves. I'd prefer no election at all to another Humphrey nightmare. Six months ago it seemed out of the question. But no longer.

Frank Mankiewicz was right. For months he's been telling anybody who asked him that the Democratic race would boil down, after the first few primaries, to a Humphrey/McGovern battle. But nobody took him seriously. We all assumed he was just talking up Humphrey's chances in order to slow Muskie down and thus keep McGovern viable.

But apparently he was serious all along. Humphrey is the bookies' choice in Wisconsin, which would finish Muskie and make Hubert the high rider all the way to the Oregon and California primaries in early June.

The “other” race in Wisconsin is between McGovern and Lind-say, which might strike a lot more sparks than it has so far if anybody really believed the boneheads who run the Democratic

Party would conceivably nominate either one of them. But there is a definite possibility that the Democratic Convention this year might erupt into something beyond the control of anybody, the new delegate selection rules make it virtually impossible for old style bosses like Mayor Daley to treat delegates like sheep hauled in to be dipped.

A candidate like Landsay or McGovern might be able to raise serious hell in a deadlocked convention but the odds are better than even that Hubert will peddle his ass to almost anybody who wants a chunk of it then arrive in Mimmi with the nomination sewed up and Nixon writing to pounce on him the instant he comes out of his scumbag Another Nixon's Humphrey horror would almost certainly cause a "Fourth Party" uprising and guarantee Nixon's re-election—which might bring the hounds of hell down on a lot of people for the next four very long years.

But personally I think I do be inclined to take that risk Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous guttless old ward beeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current. The idea of Humphrey running for President again makes a mockery out of things that it would take me too long to explain or even list here. And Hubert Humphrey wouldn't understand what I was talking about anyway. He was a swine in 68 and he's worse now. If the Democratic Party nominates Humphrey again in '72 the Party will get exactly what it deserves. 緊

Stunning Upset in Wisconsin... McGovern Juggernaut Croaks Muskie... Humphrey Falters; Wallace Rolls On... Big Ed Exposed as Ibogaine Addict... McGovern Accosts the Sheriff... Bad News from Bleak House: Mojo Madness in Milwaukee; or How Nazis Broke My Spirit on Election Night... Mankiewicz Predicts First Ballot Victory in Miami...

Easter Morning in Milwokee; ten minutes before five. Dawn is struggling up through the polluted mist on Lake Michigan to the east. I can sense the sunrise, but I can't feel it—because just outside my window on the twenty-first floor of the (I.T.T-owned) Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel a huge red neon citgo sign blocks my view of everything except the Pabst Brewing C-O. sign just off to the right, which is next to four massive pink letters saying Y.M.C.A.

The lake is out there somewhere: A giant body of water full of poison. You can still find a few places that serve “fresh seafood” in Milwaukee, but they have to fly it in from Maine and Bermuda, packed in dry ice.

People still fish in Lake Michigan, but you don't want to eat what you catch. Fish that feed on garbage, human shit, and raw industrial poisons tend to taste a little strange.

So beef and pork are very big here; prepared in the German Manner, with sauerkraut. Milwaukee is owned by old Germans who moved out to the suburbs about thirty years ago and hired Polaks to run the city for them. The German presence is very heavy here; the pace is very orderly. Even on totally empty downtown streets, nobody crosses against the Red Light.

April

Yesterday I was grabbed for "jay walking" outside the hotel I was standing in a crowd on the corner of Second and Wisconsin—impatient to get across the street to my illegally parked Mustang and zip out to the South Side for a Wallace rally—and after two full minutes of standing on the curb and looking at the empty street I thought "fuck this," and started to cross Suddenly a whistle blew and a cop was yelling 'What the hell do you think you're doing' I kept moving, but glanced around me out of a general curiosity to see who was about to get busted—and I realized at once it was me. I was the only violator so I shrugged and moved back to the curb, enduring the states of about two dozen Responsible Law-Abiding Citizens who clearly disapproved of my outburst. To first break the law then to be screamed at in public by a trooper this is not the sort of thing you want to call down on yourself in Milwaukee. There is no room in the good German mind for flashes of personal anarchy. (Suddenly the F.M radio switches off from the music and starts howling ' Rejoice and be Gind! He is Risen' Then a thunder of hymns and chanting)

Of course Easter morning Somewhere in Syria the junkies are rolling the rock away. All over the world they are celebrating once again, the symbolic release of The Church—two thousand years of vengeance.

Wonderful. Vengeance is a hard thing to knock on principle—but right now I am not especially interested in Principle. I want some decent music in order to keep working. Time is a factor, here. In forty-eight hours the voters of Wisconsin will go to the polls, and the morning after that the Rolling Stone presses will start cranking out No. 107 for newsstand sale in New York & San Francisco Tuesday—Thursday in Boston, Washington, L.A.

So things are getting tense up here in Milwaukee right now, and all this wild screaming about Jesus on the radio is not soothing my head. (Now we have a sermon on the box it sounds like something out of the Church of the Final Thunder in Snamptown, Mississippi.—'This woman Mary Magdalene walked to the tomb and found it empty'—then a groan of organs and cries of "Amen" in the background.)

What?...What? “I came to the Senate to fight for human rights! President Kennedy worked with me . . . we broke the filibuster . . .”

There is no avoiding Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin this week. The bastard is everywhere: on the tube, on the box, in the streets with his sound trucks . . . and now the bastard is even breaking into Easter morning sermons with his gibberish.

It didn't last long. The sermon is rolling again—un-fazed by that harsh thirty-second interruption—and I know in my heart that The Hube is not as sleepless as his media schedule would have us think. It is only the miracle of tape that brings us the cracked screeching of Hubert Humphrey's voice at this hour on Easter morning.

Because I know, for an absolute fact, that he is sleeping less than fifty yards away from this typewriter. He is upstairs in Room 2350, about thirty seconds from here, as the raven flies—but for me the journey would be a lot longer. I could make the first forty yards with no trouble, but when I emerged from the Exit next to the ice

machine on the twent-third floor I would instantly get put in a hammerlock by the S.S men The arrival of Secret Service personnel has changed the campaign drastically. Each candidate has ten or twelve S.S men surrounding him at all times. (Now with no warning another voice cuts into the sermon Four minutes after seven on Easter morning and this one is a McGovern spot talking about "courage but the voice has a definite fish quality to it Bobby Kennedy came back to hunt us in the midst of this low level campaign that would never have been necessary except for Sirhan Sirhan's twisted little hand so now we have the taped voice of Robert Kennedy long before he took a bullet in the brain endorsing George McGovern on the radio in Milwaukee on Easter morning, four years later There is not much talk about this around the McGovern carp paten. It was Frank Monkiewicz's idea to use the thing and Mankiewicz was very close to Bobby. He was the one who had to pull himself together on that grim morning in Los Angeles and go out to make The Announcement to a hospital lobby full of stunned reporters. "Senator Kennedy died tonight.

So the sound of his voice being used as a Paid Political Commercial is just a hair unsettling to some people—even to those who might agree with the McGovern/Mankewicz presumption that Robert would have wanted it this way Maybe so It's a hard thing to argue and the odds are far better than even that Robert Kennedy would find McGovern preferable to any other candidate for the Democratic nomination at this time. He never had much of a stomach for Hubert except as the lesser of evils and it probably never occurred to him that dim hacks like Muskie and Jackson would ever be taken seriously.

So it is probably fair to assume that if Bobby Kennedy were alive today—and somehow retired from politics—he would agree with almost everything McGovern says and stands for. It only because almost everything McGovern says and stands for is a cautious extension of what Bobby Kennedy was trying to put together in the aborted campaign of 1968.

But in another sense the 1972 Democratic Campaign mocks the memory of everything Bobby Kennedy represented in '68. It is hard to imagine that he would be pleased to see that—four years after his murder—the Democratic Party would be so crippled and bankrupt on all fronts that even the best of its candidates would be fighting for life by trying to put a good face on positions essentially dictated by Nixon & George Wallace.

In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary '72 campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them ^{1} ... but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice—that speedy, nasal Irish twang that nailed the ear like a shot of Let It Bleed suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic F.M station.

There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy's voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones. They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968, when L.B.J went on national T.V to announce that he wouldn't run for re-election—that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

It was like driving an evil King off the throne. Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be a product of the “New Consciousness.” By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, and The War would be over by Christmas.

April What happened after that, between April and November of 1968 plunged a whole generation of hyper-political young Americans into a terminal stupor. Nixon blamed it on communist drugs and said he had the Cure but what he never understood was that the simple stark fact of President Nixon was the problem or at least the main symbol. It is hard to even remember precisely—much less explain—just what a terrible bummer the last half of '68 turned into Actually, it took less than three months Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Bobby Kennedy in June then Nixon was nominated in July and in August the Democrats went to Chicago for the final act By Labor Day it was all over. The Movement was finished, except for the trials and somebody else was dealing. The choice between Nixon & Humphrey was no choice at all—not in the context of what had already gone down between Selma and Chicago. To be offered Hubert Humphrey as a sort of withered booby prize for all those bloody failures seemed more like a deliberate insult than a choice.

McGovern Wins, Strong Wallace Vote Edges Humphrey, Fourth Place Finish Staggers Ex-Frontrunner Musk's, Lindsay Quits Race —Muluaukee Journal April 4. 1972 Failure Comes fast at a time like this. After eight days in this fantastic dungeon of a hotel, the idea of failing totally and miserably in my work seems absolutely logical. It is a fitting end to this gig—not only for me, but for everyone else who got trapped here, especially journalists.

The Wisconsin primary is over now. It came to a shocking climax a few hours ago when George McGovern and George Wal- lace ran a blitz on everybody.

The results were such a jolt to the Conventional Wisdom that now—with a cold grey dawn bloating up out of Lake Michigan and Hubert Humphrey still howling in his sleep despite the sedatives in his room directly above us—there is nobody in Milwaukee this morning, including me, who can even pretend to explain what really went down last night. The McGovern brain-trust will deny this, but the truth of the matter is that less than twenty-four hours ago it was impossible to get an even-money bet in McGovern headquarters that their man would finish first. Not even Warren Beatty, who is blossoming fast in his new role as one of McGovern's most valuable and enthusiastic organizers, really believed George would finish better than a close second.

A week earlier it would have been considered a sign of madness, among those who knew the score, to bet McGovern any better than a respectable third—but toward the end of the final week the word went out that George had picked up a wave and was showing surprising strength in some of the blue-collar hardhat wards that had been more or less conceded to either Humphrey or Muskie. David Broder of the Washington Post is generally acknowledged to be the ranking wizard on the campaign trail this year, and five days before the election he caused serious shock waves by offering to bet—with me at least—that McGovern would get more than 30 percent, and Wallace less than 10.

He lost both ends of that bet, as it turned out—and I mean to hunt the bastard down and rip his teeth out if he tries to welsh—but the simple fact that Broder had that kind of confidence in McGovern's strength was seen as a main signal by the professional polls and newsmen who'd been saying all along that the Wisconsin primary was so hopelessly confused that nobody in his right mind would try to predict the outcome.

The consensus outlook, however, had Humphrey winning with almost 30 percent, McGovern just barely edging Muskie out of second with just under 25 percent, and fourth going to either Jackson or Wallace at roughly 10 percent.

My own bets had Humphrey hanging on to beat McGovern just barely, by something like 27 to 26 percent, Wallace a strong third with about 20 percent and poor Miskie crawling in a sick fourth with about 10 percent to Jackson's 9 percent. I was sorely tempted to pickup some easy money from Tom Morgan, Lindsay's press secretary, who emptied his pockets one afternoon in the Schroeder hotel bar and came up with $102 to back his conviction that Lindsay would get between 10 and 15 percent—but I had to back off because I had come to like Lindsay, he struck me as the most interesting of all the Democratic candidates in the sense that he seemed open to almost any kind of idea so I regretfully declined Morgan's bet on the grounds that I would feel uncomfortable by profiting from Lindsay's misfortune. (As it turned out he got only 7 percent and dropped out.)

But this was not the story I meant to write—or avoid writing—here, the idea was to say only that we suffered a terrible disaster on election night. All our finely laid plans were blasted into offal by the T.V network computers before the night even got into first gear When the polls closed at eight Tim Crouse and I were still sitting idly around the T shaped bar and desk in our National Affairs Suite at the Sheraton-Shroeder Hotel, laying detailed plans for what we assumed would be the next five or six hours of hellish suspense while the votes were being counted. It would be at least midnight, we felt, before the results would begin to take shape and if it looked at all close we were prepared to work straight through until dawn or even noon, if necessary.

The lead article in Sundays's Washington Post echoed the unanimous conviction of all the five or six hundred big-time press/politics wizards who were gathered here for what they all called "the crunch"—the showdown the first of the national primaries that would finally separate the sheep from the goats as it were After a month of intense research by some of the best political journalists in America, the Post had finally concluded that (1) "The Wisconsin primary election seems likely to make dramatic

changes in the battle for the 1972 presidential nomination" … and (2) that "an unusually high degree of uncertainty remains as the contest nears its climax."

In other words, nobody had the vaguest idea what would happen here, except that some people were going to get hurt—and the smart-money consensus had Muskie and Lindsay as the most likely losers. The fact that Lindsay was almost totally out of money made him a pretty safe bet to do badly in Wisconsin, but Muskie—coming off a convincing victory in Illinois² at least partially redeemed his disastrous failure in Florida—looked pretty good in Wisconsin, on paper... but there was still something weak and malignant in the spine of the Muskie campaign. There was a smell of death about it. He talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop.

Two weeks before the election the polls had Muskie running more or less even with Humphrey and well ahead of McGovern—but not even his staffers believed it; they kept smiling, but their morale had been cracked beyond repair in Florida, when Muskie called a meeting the day after the primary to announce that he was quitting the race. They had managed to talk him out of it, agreeing to work without pay until after Wisconsin, but when word of the candidate's aborted withdrawal leaked out to the press ... well, that was that. Nobody published it, nobody mentioned it on T.V or radio—but from that point on, the only thing that kept the Muskie campaign alive was a grim political version of the old vaudeville idea that “the show must go on.”

Midway in the final week of the campaign even Muskie himself began dropping hints that he knew he was doomed. At one point, during a whistlestop tour of small towns in the Fox River Valley near Green Bay, he fell into a public funk and began muttering about "needing a miracle" ... and then, when the sense of depres

sion began spreading like a piss-puddle on concrete, he invited the campaign-press regulars to help him celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday at a small hotel on a snowy night in Green Bay. But the party turned sour when his wife mashed a piece of the birthday cake in the face of Newsweek reporter Dick Stout, saying, "One good turn deserves another, eh Dick?"

The Morning News

Finally the True Wisdom arrives. I have been waiting for it all night. Nothing else has been available since Walter Cronkite signed off last night at ten, with McGovern already certified the clear winner and George Wallace a certain strong third.

Nelson Benton on C.B.S is interviewing Wallace, saying, "Is it true that you've decided to clean up your act?"

Wallace gives him a puzzled grin. He has never felt any need to cultivate the media.

Humphrey comes on, “I think we did well here and I'm looking forward to the next primaries—Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.”

Muskie is heading for Chicago & a painful meeting with his money men—to decide if he'll stay in the race. He has already spent a million & a half dollars on a total disaster.

But the news is no help. Frank McGee on N.B.C is acting like a wino: "We have the big winner in Wisconsin here with us this morning—Senator Proxmire, and also his lovely wife." (pause) "Did I say Proxmire? I meant McGovern . . . of course . . . We have Senator McGovern here with us this morning, and his wife is with him . ."

Sometime around seven on Friday night—three days before the

Wisconsin primary — I left my dreary suite in the Sheraton-Schroeder der Hotel and drove across town to McGovern headquarters at the Milwaukee Inn a comfortable obscure sort of motor hotel in a residential neighborhood near Lake Michigan. The streets were still key from a snowstorm earlier in the week and my rented patple Mustang had no snow tires. The cars were extremely unstable—one of those Detroit classes apparently assembled by punkers to teach the rest of us a lesson I had already been forced to remove the airflare in order to manjuate late the automatic choke by hand but there was no way to cure the unnerning accelerator delay. It was totally unpredictable. At some stoplights the car would move out normally but at others it would try to stall seeming to want more gas—and then suddenly leap ahead like a mule gone smok from a bee stung. Every red light was a potential disaster. Sometimes it would take slowly to the end of the traffic — but at about every third of the goodness of worthless machine would hang back for second or so as to give the others a head start and then come thundering off the line at top speed with no traction at all and the rear end fighting all over the street about halfway to the next corner. By the time I got to the Milwaukee Inn I had all three lants of State Street to myself. Anybody who couldn't get safely ahead of me was lagging safely behind. I wondered if anyone had taken my license number in order to turn me in on a dangerous drive. I would see addict. It was entirely possible that by the time I got back to the car every cop in Milwaukee would be altered to grab me on sight. It was brooding on this as I entered the dining room and spotted Frank. Mankewicz at a table near the rear. As I approached the table, he looked up with a nasty grin and said: Ah has it you I'm surprised you have the nerve to show up over here—after what you wrote about me." I started at him trying to get my brain back in focus Conversations comes to every table within ten feet of us but the only one that really concerned me was a lot of four Secret Service men who suddenly shifted into Daddy Pounce position at their table just behind Mankewicz and whoever else he was eating with

I had come down the aisle very fast, in my normal fashion, not thinking about much of anything except what I wanted to ask Mankiewicz—but his loud accusation about me having “the nerve to show up” gave me a definite jolt. Which might have passed in a flash if I hadn't realized, at almost the same instant, that four thugs with wires in their ears were so alarmed at my high-speed appearance that they were about to beat me into a coma on pure instinct, and ask questions later.

This was my first confrontation with the Secret Service. They had not been around in any of the other primaries, until Wisconsin, and I was not accustomed to working in a situation where any sudden move around a candidate could mean a broken arm. Their orders are to protect the candidate, period, and they are trained like high-strung guard dogs to react with Total Force at the first sign of danger. Never hesitate. First crack the wrist, then go for the floating rib... and if the "assassin" turns out to be just an oddly dressed journalist—well, that's what the S.S boys call "tough titty." Memories of Sirhan Sirhan are still too fresh, and there is no reliable profile on potential assassins... so everybody is suspect, including journalists.

All this flashed through my head in a split second. I saw it all happening, but my brain had gone limp from too much tension. First the car, now this ..., and perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was the fact that I'd never seen Mankiewicz even smile.

But now he was actually laughing, and the S.S guards relaxed. I tried to smile and say something, but my head was still locked in neutral. “You better stay away from my house from now on,” Mankiewicz was saying. “My wife hates your guts.”

Jesus, 'I thought. What's happening here? Somewhere behind me I could hear a voice saying, "Hey, Sheriff! Hello there! Sheriff!"

I glanced over my shoulder to see who was calling, but all I saw was a sea of unfamiliar faces, all staring at me . . . so I turned quickly back to Mankiewicz, who was still laughing.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said. "What did I do to your wife?"

He paused long enough to carve a bite out of what looked like a five or six pound Prime Rib on his plate, then he looked up again "You called me a rumped little man' he said "You came over to my house and drank my liquor and then you said I was a rumped little man who looked like a used car salesman" 'Sheriff' Sheriff' That goddamn voice again, it seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn't want to turn around and find all those people staring at me Then the fog began to lift I suddenly understood that Munkiewicz was joking—which struck me as perhaps the most shocking and peculiar development of the entire '72 campaign. The idea that anybody connected with the McGovern campaign might actually laugh in public was almost beyond my ken. In New Hampshire nobody had ever even smiled, and in Florida the mood was so down that I felt guilty even hanging around.

Even Mankiewicz in Florida was acting like a man about to take the bastimado so I was puzzled and even a little nervous to find him granning like this in Milwaukee Was he stoned? Had it come down to that?

"Sheraf Sheraf"

I spun around quickly, feeling a sudden flash of anger at some asshole mocking me in these rude and confusing circumstances. By this time I'd forgotten what I'd wanted to ask Mankiewicz in the first place. The night was turning into something out of Kafka.

"Sheriff"

I glared at the table behind me, but nobody blinked. Then I felt a hand on my belt, poking at me and my first quick instinct was to knock the hand away with a full stroke hammer-shot from about our level, really crack the bastard and then immediately apologize. "Oh! Pardon me, old sport! I guess my nerves are shot, eh?"

Which they almost were, about thirty seconds later, when I realized that the hand on my belt—and the voice that had been young 'Sheriff'—belonged to George McGovern. He was sitting right behind me, an arm's length away, having dinner with his wife and some of the campaign staffers.

Now I understood the Secret Service presence. I'd been standing so close to McGovern that every time I turned around to see who was yelling "Sheriff!" I saw almost every face in the room except the one right next to me.

He twisted around in his chair to shake hands, and the smile on his face was the smile of a man who has just cranked off a really wonderful joke. “God damn!” I blurted, “it's you!” I tried to smile back at him, but my face had turned to rubber and I heard myself babbling: “Well . . . ah . . . how does it look?” Then quickly: “Excellent, eh? Yeah. I guess so. It certainly does look . . . ah . . . but what the hell, I guess you know all this . . .”

He said a few things that I never really absorbed, but there was nothing he could have said at that moment as eloquent or as meaningful as that incredible smile on his face.

The most common known source of Ibogaine is from the roots of Tabernanthe Iboga, a shrub indigenous to West Africa. As early as 1869, roots of T.I. were reporied effective in combating sleep or fatigue and in maintaining alertness when ingested by African natives. Extracts of T.I. are used by natives while stalking game; it enables them to remain motionless for as long as two days while retaining mental alertness. It has been used for centuries by natives of Africa, Asia and South America in conjunction with fetishistic and mythical ceremonies. In 1905 the gross effects of chewing large quantities of T.I. roots were described . . . "Soon his nerves get tense in an extraordinary way; an epileptic-like madness comes over him, during which he becomes unconscious and pronounces words which are interpreted by the older members of the group as having a prophetic meaning and to prove that the fetish has entered him."

At the turn of the century, iboga extracts were used as stimulants, aphrodisiacs and inebriants. They have been available in European drugstores for over 30 years. Much of the research with Ibogaine has been done with animals. In the cat, for example,

2 to 10 milligrams/kg given intravenously caused marked excitation, dilated pupils, salivation and tremors leading to a picture of rage. There was an alerting reaction obvious apprehension and fear, and attempts to escape. In human studies at a dose of 300 milligrams given orally, the subject experiences visions changes in perception of the environment and delusions or alterations of thinking. Visual imagery became more vivid, with animals often appearing. Bogaine produces a state of drowsiness in which the subject does not wish to move, open his eyes, or be aware of his environment. Since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the presence of physical symptoms and the richness of the psychological experience, the choice of environment is an important consideration. Many are disturbed by lights or noises. Dr. Clausio Naranjo a psychotherapist is responsible for most current knowledge regarding Ibaogine effects in humans. He states I have been more impressed by the enduring effects resulting from Ibaogine than by those from sessions conducted with any other drug. —From a study by PharmChem Laboratories Palo Alto California Not much has been written about The Ibogante Effet as a serious factor in the Presidential Campaign but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race—about a week before the vote—word leaked out that some of Musk's top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with some kind of strange drug that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

It had been common knowledge for many weeks that Humphrey was using an exotic brand of speed known as Hallow and it had long been whispered that Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key I immediately recognized The Iboanae Effect—from Muskie's tearful breakdown on the flatbed truck in New Hampshire, the delusions and altered thinking that characterized his campaign in Florida and finally the condition of total age that gripped him in Wisconsin.

There was no doubt about it: The Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was “when did he start?” But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Muskie campaign after that incident on the “Sunshine Special” in Florida... and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time.

Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has frequently challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of T.V lights.

But there was none of that in Florida. When the Boohoo began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin, Big Ed went all to pieces ... which gave rise to speculation, among reporters familiar with his campaign style in '68 and '70, that the Music was not himself. It was noted, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during T.V interviews, that his thought patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisors could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages, or neo-comatose funks.

In restrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was—far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy—suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “the only Democrat who can beat Nixon.”

It is entirely conceivable—given the known effects of Ibogaine—that Muskie's brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.

We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the Senator's disastrous experiments with Ibogaine. I tried to find the Brazilian doctor on election night in Milwaukee, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone. One of the hired bimbos in Milwaukee's Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus.

to Chicago, but we were never able to confirm this.

The final straw, for Muskie, was the result of an unpublished but carefully leaked poll, taken by Oliver Quayle at the behest of Senator Jackson and the local A.F.L-C.I.O, that showed Muskie losing 70 percent of his support in Wisconsin in a period of two weeks. According to the Quayle poll, the onetime front-runner slipped from 39 percent to 13 percent, while McGovern was virtually doubling his figure from 12 percent to 23 percent in the same period—which put McGovern ahead of Humphrey, who had dropped about five points to 19 percent.

The same poll showed George Wallace with 12 percent, which convinced liberal Democratic Governor Pat Lucey and the moguls of Organized Labor that it would not be necessary to mount a serious effort to short-circuit the Wallace threat. Both the Governor and the state Labor Bosses had been worried about Wallace stomping into Wisconsin and embarrassing everybody by pulling off another one of those ugly, Florida-style upsets.

It is still hard to understand how the polls and the polls, and especially a wizard like Broder, could have so drastically underestimated the Wallace vote. Perhaps the threat of an anti-Wallace backlash by organized labor led the visiting press to think the other George was safely boxed in. Wisconsin's Big Labor braintrust had come up with a theory that Wallace got a huge boost in Florida when the liberal opposition got so hysterical about him that he got twice as many votes as he would have if the other candidates had simply ignored him and done their own things.

So they decided to turn the other cheek in Wisconsin. They ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few T.V spots—and every one of his rallies attracted more people than the halls could hold.

I went to one at a place called Scrb Hall on the South Side of Milwaukee—a neighborhood the polls said was locked up for Muskie. Serb Hall is a big yellow-brick place that looks like an abandoned gymnasium, across the street from Sentry Supermarket on Oklahoma Street about five miles from downtown Milwaukee. One half of the hall is a "Lounge & Bowling Alley," and the other half is a fair-sized auditorium with a capacity of about 300.

The Serb Hall rally was a last-minute addition to the Wallace schedule. His main rally that night was scheduled for 7:30 at a much bigger hall in Racine, about fifty miles south... but one of his handlers apparently decided to get him warmed up with a 5:00 gig at Serb Hall, despite the obvious risk involved in holding a political rally at that hour of the evening in a neighborhood full of Polish factory-workers just getting off work.

I got there at 4:30, thinking to get in ahead of the crowd and maybe chat a bit with some of the early arrivals at the bar ... but at 4:30 the hall was already packed and the bar was so crowded I could barely reach in to get a beer. When I reached in again, to pay for it, somebody pushed my hand back and a voice said, "It's already taken care of, fella—you're a guest here."

For the next two hours I was locked in a friendly, free-wheeling conversation with about six of my hosts who didn't mind telling me they were there because George Wallace was the most important man in America. "This guy is the real thing," one of them said. "I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain't the same as the others. He don't sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it."

It was the first time I'd ever seen Wallace in person. There were no seats in the hall; everybody was standing. The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert. Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back ... it was a flat-out fire & brimstone performance.

Humphrey's addiction to Wellor has not stared any controversy so far. He has always campaigned like a rat in heat, and the only difference now is that he is able to do at eighteen hours a day instead of ten. The main change in his public style, since '68, is that he no longer seems aware that his gibberish is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class blacks. Humphrey's style on the stamp was described with embarrassing accuracy by Donald Platter in the Milwaukee Journal. "When Humphrey addresses a crowd he does two things at once. First he makes promises, not a promise a day, as Senator Muskle has charmed but more like a promise every three minutes with one or two for every body willus reach of his voice. He claims that his promises are the expressions of a program for social change that he'll fight for." "Second and more important he tries to well a bond between himself and the audience. And he succeeds to sell that audience is usually the wrong word. His groups are more like meetings of people who want to get something done "If you're from Wisconsin's 1.5 a your neighbor from Minnesota and he tells you so 20 you're old he has an aging mother living in a nursing home in Huron S.D. If you're a farmer, he grew up among people like you. If you're a union man, he carries a union card and defended the unions when few others would. If you're black, he fought for civil rights. If you're young, he was a teacher, and he was young once himself. If you're from the city, he was a mayor. If you're poor, he was poor once himself and he had to quit school. "Then he goes through the crowd shaking hands, signing afographs and talking. Sometimes he even listens. He spends some time with each person looks him in the eye and asks for his help."

Planner was trying to be objective, so he stopped short of saying that at least half the reporters assigned to the Humphrey campaign are convinced that he's sentile. When he ran for President four years ago he was a hack and a fool but at least he was consistent.

Now he talks like an eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed. He will call a press conference to announce that if elected he will "have all our boys out of Vietnam within ninety days"—then rush across town, weeping and jabbering the whole way, to appear on a network T.V show and make a fist-shaking emotional appeal for every American to stand behind the President and "applaud" his recent decision to resume heavy bombing in North Vietnam.

Humphrey will go into a black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring "the enduring tragedy" that life in Nixon's America has visited on "these beautiful little children"—and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that "In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini."

Hubert seems genuinely puzzled by the fast-rising tide of evidence that many once-sympathetic voters no longer believe anything he says. He can't understand why people snicker when he talks about "the politics of joy" and "punishing welfare chisellers" in almost the same breath ... and God only knows what must have gone through his head when he picked up the current issue of Newsweek and found Stewart Alsop quoting Rolling Stone to the effect that "Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current."

Alsop made it clear that he was not pleased with that kind of language. He called it "brutal"—then wound up his column by dismissing the Humphrey candidacy in terms more polite than mine, but not less final. Both Stewart and his demented brother, Joseph, have apparently concluded—along with almost all the other "prominent & influential" Gentleman Journalists in Washington—that the Democratic primaries have disintegrated into a series of meaningless brawls not worth covering. On the "opinion-shaping" level of the journalism Establishment in both Washington and New York there is virtually unanimous agreement that Nixon's opponent in '72 will be Ted Kennedy.

McGovern's solid victory in Wisconsin was dismissed, by most of the press wizards, as further evidence that the Democratic Party

has been taken over by "extremists" George McGovern on the Left and George Wallace on the Right, with a sudden dangerous vacuum in what is referred to on editorial pages as "the vital Center" The root of the problem, of course, is that most of the big time Opinion Makers decided a long time ago—along with all those Democratic Senators, Congressmen Governors Mayors and other party pros—that the candidate of the 'Vital Center' in '72 would be none other than that fireball statesman from Mame Ed Muskie Humphrey was briefly considered then dumped as a sure loser in November. McGovern was not even considered and at that point George Wallace hadn't told anybody that he planned to run as a Democrat so it boiled down quick to Muskie who had in fact been Number One ever since his impressive election-eve T.V speech in 1970. It came at a time when the party pros were still reeling from the shock of Chappaquidick, which was seen as a fatal blow to any hope of a kennedv challenge this year and they were thrashing around desperately for a candidate when the Man from Maine suddenly emerged from the tube as the party's de facto spokesman.

In contrast to Nixon's vengeful screened on T.V from the California Cow Palace just a few hours earlier Ed Muskie came across as a paragon of decency and wisdom—just as he had looked very good in '68 compared to Hubert Humphrey. He was a Real Statesman, they said, a Reassuring Figure. By the summer of '71 the party bosses had convinced themselves that Ed Muskie was the "only Democrat with a chance of beating Nixon."

This was bullshit, of course. Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three toed stoth out to seize turf from a wolverine. Big Ed was on adequate Senator—or at least he'd seemed like one until he started trying to explain his "mistake" on the war in Vietnam—but it was stone madness from the start to ever think about exposing him to the kind of bloodthirsty thugs that Nixon and John Mitchell would see on him. They would have him screeching on his knees by sundown on Labor Day. It I were running a campaign against Muskie I would arrange for some anonymous creep to buy time on national T.V and announce that twenty-two years ago he and Ed spent a summer working as male whores at a Peg House somewhere in the North Woods.

Nothing else would be necessary. “It's all over, we have it locked up.” “What?” “Yeah, we have the delegates. All we have to do now is hang on and not make any mistakes.” “Well . . . ah . . . Jesus, Frank, this comes as a bit of a shock. Actually, I was calling to ask if McGovern has made any decision about whether or not he'd support Humphrey—if it comes to that.” “It won't. The question is moot. Put it out of your mind. We'll win on the first ballot.” “Hmmnnn . . . Well, I guess there's no point in asking you about this other thing, either . . ." “What's that?” “That thing about McGovern accepting the Vice-Presidency on a ticket with Ted Kennedy.” “What? I never said that!” “No? Well... I guess we were pretty stoned...” “We?” “Yeah, Wenner was there too. Remember? And he's pretty sure that's what you said.” (pause) “He is, eh?” “Yeah...but of course we could be mistaken.” (pause) “No . . . no . . wait a minute. I remember the question . . . but hell, I said it was just a guess.”

"What?" “That thing about Kennedy. What I said, I think, was that I couldn't speak for George—but my own personal feeling was that he wouldn't even think about accepting the number two spot . . ." “With anybody but Kennedy, right?” (pause)

"Well ... ah ... yeah, but I was just kind of thinking out loud. As far as the Senator's concerned, there's no point even talking"

about it" (pause) "Like I said we have the delegates now We'll win I'm sure of it" "Okay I hope you're right (pause) "But if something goes wrong If you can't carry it on the first ballot and the convention turns up deadlocked then if Kennedy jumps in McGovern might consider—" Yeah yeah I guess it's possible but I told you god damn't We have it locked up “I know I know but what the hell? I'm just reaching around for loose ends here and there just something to fill the space—you know how it is eh?

"Yeah I did it once myself" (pause) Say are you feeling any better?"

What do you mean?

"Well maybe I shouldn't say this but you looked pretty bad up there in Wisconsin" "I was sick Frank—extremely sick and besides that I was full of antibiotics I had doctors coming into the hotel every afternoon to give me shots" "What kind of shots" Christ everything they had Penicillin B 12 Corizzone Miss extract the hotel doctor would to for it so I called the medical society and told them to go down their let until they found somebody who wouldn't argue It took half a day but they finally sent a man around with everything I wanted He kept shaking his head while he filled the needles I don't know why you want me to shoot all this stuff into you fella he said It won't do a goddamn thing for your cold—but if you have any parasites in your body this is sure going to raise hell with them Then he gave me about nine shots Cash on the line No ehecks no receipt I never even found out his name *Well maybe you need some rest Hunter I get the feeling that you're not very careful about your health "You're right My health is failing rapidly—but I'll make it to Miami After that well let's see how it goes I may want to have myself committed" —From a telephone conversation with Frank Mankiewicz 4/15/72 The idea that George McGovern has the Democratic nomination locked up by mid-April will not be an easy thing for most people to accept—especially since it comes from Frank Mankiewicz, the tall and natty “political director” for McGovern's campaign.

Total candor with the press—or anyone else, for that matter—is not one of the traits most presidential candidates find entirely desirable in their key staff people. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business . . . and the main function of any candidate's press secretary is to make sure the press gets nothing but Upbeat news. There is no point, after all, in calling a press conference to announce that nobody on the staff will be paid this month because three or four of your largest financial bankers just called to say they are pulling out and abandoning all hope of victory.

When something like this happens to you quickly lock all the doors and send your press secretary out to start whispering, off the record, that your opponent's California campaign coordinator just called to ask for a job.

This kind of devious bullshit is standard procedure in most campaigns. Everybody is presumed to understand it—even the reporters who can't keep a straight face while they're jotting it all down for page one of the early edition: Sen. Mace Denies pull-out Rumors; Predicts Total Victory in all States... and then the lead:

The man who has been called The Lowest Underdog of Our Time today denied rumors that all but one of his financial backers have stopped payment on checks formerly earmarked for media time and staff salaries in what some observers have called "a hopeless campaign." Senator Otto "Slim" Mace, under indictment on twelve charges of Tax Fraud, told reporters at a special noon press conference in the lobby of the Ace Hotel that in fact he has "more money than I know what to do with" and that his headquarters phone has been tied up for days with calls from "extremely important people" now working for his opponent who say they plan to

quit and come to work for Senator Mace Needless to say, I am not free at this time to release any names,' the Senator explained. But I expect we will hire quite a few of them and then roll on to victory.

The best example of this kind of coverage in the current campaign has been the stuff coming out of the Muskic camp. In recent weeks the truth has been so painful that some journalists have gone out of their way to give the poor bastards a break and not flay them in print any more than absolutely necessary.

One of the only humorous moments in the Florida primary campaign, for instance, came when one of Muskie's state campaign managers Chris Hart showed up at a meeting with representatives of the other candidates to explain why Big Ed was refusing to take part in a T.V debate. "My instructions," he said, "are that the Senator should never again be put in a situation where he has to think quickly."

By nightfall of that day every journalist in Miami was laughing at Hart's blunder but nobody published it, and none of the T.V reporters ever mentioned it on the air. I didn't even use it myself, for some reason, although I heard about it in Washington while I was packing to go back to Florida.

I remember thinking that I should call Hart and ask him if he'd actually said a thing like that, but when I got there I didn't feel up to it. Muskie was obviously in deep trouble, and Hart had been pretty decent to me when I'd showed up at headquarters to sign up for that awful trip on the "Sunshine Special" so I figured what the hell? Let it rest.

The other press people might have had different reasons for not using Hart's quote, but I can't say for sure because I never asked Looking back on it, I think it must have been so obvious that the Muskie campaign was doomed that nobody felt mean enough to torment the survivors over something that no longer seemed important A week or so later there was another ugly story leaking out of the Muskie compound, and this one was never published either—or if it was, I didn't see it.

Shortly after the election-night returns showed Muskie hopelessly mired in fourth place behind Wallace, Humphrey, and Jackson, the Man from Maine called an emergency staff meeting and announced he was quitting the race. This stirred up a certain amount of panic and general anger among the staff people, who eventually persuaded Big Ed to at least get himself under control before talking to any reporters. He agreed to go out and play golf the next day, while the top-level staffers got together and tried to find some alternative.

This was the reality behind the story, widely published the next day, that Muskie had decided to “change his whole style” and start talking like the Fighting Liberal he really was at heart. He would move on to Illinois and Wisconsin with new zeal . . . and his staff people were so happy with this decision to finally “take off the gloves” that they had agreed to work without pay until the day after the big Victory Party in Wisconsin.

It took about a week for the story of Muskie's attempt to quit the race to leak out to the press, but it was not an easy thing to confirm. One of the most frustrating realities of this goddamn twisted business is the situation where somebody says, "I'll only answer your question if you promise not to print it."

Everybody I talked to about the Muskie story seemed to know all the details—but there was no point trying to check it out, they said, because it came from “somebody who was at the meeting” and he “obviously can't talk about it.”

Of course not. Only a lunatic would risk getting fired from his unsalaried job on the Muskie campaign several days before the crucial Wisconsin primary.

So I let that one slide, too. I saw no point in wasting any more time on the Man from Maine. He was a walking corpse in Wisconsin—where he finished a wretched fourth, once again—and recent reports from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are so grim that it is hard to avoid the impression that getting on Muskie's press bus these days is like loading yourself in a closet with a mad dog.

After another hellish argument with his staff, he decided to

abandon Massachusetts to McGovern and make his last stand in Pennsylvania against Humphrey, who has never won a primary But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then if he keeps on rooting around, and it's beginning to look like Hubert's time has come There is a huge black vote in Pennsylvania, and Humphrey will probably get most of it—for reasons I'd rather not even think about right now In any case both the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania primaries are on April 25, which means they if he over and done with by the time this thing gets on the newsstands. So that's another thing we can let slide.

Whatever that quack shot into me up in Milwaukee seems to have killed more than parasites The front half of my brain has been numb for ten days and my legs will no longer support me for more than two or three minutes at a time So this is probably as good a time as any to say that I'm inclined to think Mankiewicz was not lying when he told me the other day that McGovern will arrive in Miami with enough delegates to win the nomination on the first bullet.

This is an extremely crazy thing to say—and especially to print—at a time when McGovern has only 95 of the 1508 delegate votes he will need to win, and when the latest national Gallup poll shows him still creeping along at five percent behind Humphrey, Muskie and Wallace but I suspect these figures are meaningless Muskie is finished. His only hope now is to do something like take a long vacation in New Zealand until July and get the Ibogane

out of his system so he can show up in Miami and pray for a dead-locked convention. At that point, he can offer himself up for sacrifice as a “compromise candidate,” make a deal with George Wallace for the V.P slot, then confront the convention with a Muskie/Wallace “unity ticket.”

Which might make the nut. If nothing else, it would command a lot of support from people like me who feel that the only way to save the Democratic Party is to destroy it. I have tried to explain this to George McGovern, but it's not one of the subjects he really enjoys talking about. McGovern is very nervous about the possibility of boxing himself into the role of a McCarthy-type "spoiler" candidate, which he was beginning to look like until he somehow won a big chunk of the hardhat vote in New Hampshire and sensed the first strange seed of a coalition that might make him a serious challenger instead of just another martyr.

There was only a hint of it in New Hampshire, but in Wisconsin it came together with a decisiveness that nobody could quite understand in the alcoholic chaos of election night... but when the votes were all counted and the numbers broken down by wards, districts, and precincts, all you had to do was scan the tally sheets to see that McGovern had won all across the board. In Green Bay's Ward 12, which the tally sheet says is "mostly paper mill workers," he beat Wallace by 32 to 22 percent. In Sheboygan's Ward 4, another blue-collar, factory-worker neighborhood, he got 40 percent against Humphrey's 26 and Wallace's 9 percent. In Goetz Township, Chippewa County, he mopped up the Lutheran dairy farmer vote by 52 percent to 14 percent each for Humphrey and Wallace.

Two weeks before the election the wizards said McGovern would win only one of the state's nine congressional districts—D.2, which is dominated by the aggressively political University of Wisconsin complex in Madison. This was also a district that Lindsay

and McCarthy were counting on but the count from Madison's Ward 10, which is not much different from the others, showed McGovern with 73 percent, Lindsay with 7 percent, and McCarthy with less than 1 percent. Muskie picked up about 5 percent of the student vote, and Humphrey had 3 percent.

The only glaring weakness in McGovern's sweep was his failure to break Humphrey's grip on the black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was like Nixon flashing the peace sign or Agnew chanting "Right On!" at a min strel show 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 at this stage of the campaign 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.

It McGovern wins California and New York—and Mankiewicz says they have both of those already wired—he will go to Miami with enough delegates to come very close to winning on the first ballot. It not well God only knows what kind of treachery and madness will enjoy in Miami if they have to start bargaining. Whatever happens at that point will have to include George Wallace. —who has already said he'll take second place on a ticket with anybody who'll let him write the party platform.

A deadlocked convention would be faced with a choice between bargaining with George Wallace or trying to draft Ted Kennedy, in order to save the party. What Kennedy would do under those circumstances is impossible to say right now... but it's worth noting that the only one of the candidates who has presumably given any thought to running second on a Kennedy ticket is George McGovern, and McGovern is the only candidate whom Ted Kennedy would be likely to help over the hump prior to Miami Beach.

I am feeling a little desperate about getting out of this hotel. Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail. The place is run by old Germans. The whole staff is German. Most of them speak enough English to make themselves understood in a garbled, menacing sort of way... and they are especially full of hate this week because the hotel has just been sold and the whole staff seems to think they'll be fired just as soon as the election crowd leaves.

So they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won't drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer. The manager explained that they were "running out ze inventory"—selling off everything in stock, including all the booze and almost every item on the menu except things like cabbage and sauerbrauten. The first wave of complaints were turned aside with a hiss and a chop of the hand, but after two days and nights of this Prussian madness the manager was apparently caused to know pressure from forces beyond his control. By Friday the bar was stocked with beer again, and it was once more possible to get things like prime rib and sheep's head in the dining room.

But the root ambience of the place never changed. Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern,

has stayed here several times in the past and calls it "the worst hotel in the world" Ah yes I can hear the Mojo Wire humming frantically across the room Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it Greg Jackson, the A.B.C correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us long like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York and now we are left on our own The pressure is building up The copy no longer makes sense Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast And now the bastard is beeping beeping beeping which means it is hungry for this final page which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary But that can wait I think. We have a three-week rest now before the next one of these goddunn nightmares which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now The real surprise of this campaign according to Theodore White on C.B.S-T.V last night is that George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics" But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again. So this page will have to go for good or ill and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel like rats from a burning ship.

[Author's Note]

Actually there was nothing mysterious about McGovern's "stunning" victory in Wisconsin. The most surprising thing about it was that the national press wzards, including me, had somehow overlooked the existence of one of the most impressive grass roots political organizations in the history of American politics. Gene Polarny, McGovern's twenty-five-year-old national manager for Wisconsin had seen no special reason to inform the press about it. When the truth finally dawned on us several days before the election, I was too physically and mentally broken to cope with

anything that intricate As the deadline hour approached, I spent more and more time locked in the back bathroom of our National Affairs Suite in Bleak House, waving distractedly and yelling at Crouse to call the doctor for more drugs When it finally became apparent that I was hopelessly out of control, Crouse went out and lashed the story together on his own Milwokee, W.I.S.C — The George McGovern field organization has become a legend. Gene Pokorny has been hailed as the "best young political organizer in the history of this country," and people have begun talking about the volunteers in tones usually reserved for the guys who were in the hills with Castro.

A bunch of beautiful, euphoric, slightly drunk, very young McGovera volunteers were having a completely informal victory party in a block-long two-story brick warehouse, formerly used to store toys. They had been living there for two weeks, sleeping on the linoleum floor of the cavernous rooms.

They had all worked in the Fourth District, the Polish South Side of Milwaukee, a section that even the McGovern staff crossed off as the involable turf of Muskie Wallace, and Humphrey McGovern had not only won the district but beat Wallace by eight thousand votes. At the warehouse at 3:30 in the morning, nine or ten of the volunteers got up from a sleepy poker game and gathered around to talk.

"Tell everybody we really love George McGovern," said a blonde girl "I was in charge of the Wauwatosa-West Alls office in the Fourth," said a skinny young man wearing a T-shirt embroidered with a butterfly. "The Downtown office used to send volunteers out to us saying we couldn't win the Fourth, which was a pretty shutty thing to do. They wouldn't give us bumper stickers or buttons, we had to go down there and up them off. Downtown was fucked. They sat around there and watched T.V while we were putting out mailings until two in the morning."

"The district coordinator we had was really great," said a plump black girl. "He'd yell at us. Every time you came back he'd say, 'I know you'll go out one more time.' But he worked later than anybody. And he had a great way of getting little 13-year-old kids to work so they wouldn't just hang around the office."

“I had to pay to come out from Utah,” said a girl who was resting her head on a boy's chest. “I want to see Nixon get the hell beaten out of him.” “We came from Springfield, Illinois,” said another girl, who was dressed in overalls. “They sent a school bus from Nebraska to bring us up here. The guy in charge was a teacher from Nebraska who just happened to have a bus driver's license and was for McGovern. He kept singing and talking and he drove off the road twice in a snowstorm.” “When we canvassed we thought a lot of people were against us. We got really discouraged, it was freezing cold. You'd get a whole bunch of uncommitted and then you'd hit three favorables in a row and it was an amazing up. The people were good to us, they were impressed that we were out in the cold and they let us come in to get warm. They were impressed I had come from Michigan to do this.” “A Wallace lady followed me up one block. She picked up all the literature I had left and put hers there,” said a thin girl who was nursing a bottle of wine. “So I went back and picked hers up and put ours down.” “Some of these people were weird,” said another girl. “I asked one guy, 'What do you think of McGovern?' and he said, 'I'd vote for him if he'd turn Christian.' A couple of them said, 'McGovern? He's for dope.'” “I got a lady who liked George because she said he knew how to tie his tie right,” said the black girl. “Gloria Steinem showed him how to tie it. You should have seen how he tied it before that.” “I think you should know that in our office we had twenty states represented among the volunteers,” said the office manager. “All kinds of people haven't slept in a bed and have gone hungry. We had three hundred volunteers here in the warehouse some nights.” “They promised us room and board but they didn't feed us half the time,” said one of the girls. The rest of the group shouted her down. “One lady fed this whole warehouse for two and a half weeks,” said an older woman who seemed to be in charge. “She said she and her husband didn't pay their bills for the month so that they could feed us. She would come home from her job as a teacher

and start to cook and then bring the food over. That kind of thing makes you feel good. "When you write your article," said one of the boys, "tell them that we're all young kids and that they need a band at the next victory party. There was no band at the Pfister taught. And tell them that we want to see George more." "I have to crash," the prl from Utah said with a long yawn. "But I have to tell you something first. I've been here less than a week and yet I know so many people here well 'cause they're beautiful people. Even if we'd lost we'd have won so much."

A year and a half ago George McGovern set out to be President of the United States of America with little money no media chronic five percent showing in the polls and a face that was recognizable to nobody but a handful of liberals and South Dakota farmers His only prayer was to build a crack political organization Last week that organization made him the front runner in the Democratic primary race It was indisputably the best organization in the state of Wisconsin and it moved one McGovern volunteer a New York Teamsters boss to mvel I'm not kidding This is better than Tammany Hall ' This is the old politics " says Joel Swerdlow the 26-year old who ran McGovern's operation in the North half of Milwaukee " We have precinct captains ward leaders car captains the whole bit That's the only way you win But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we've got young people who work because they're interested in the issues " Political organization is basically a matter of list keeping. You canvass a state by foot and by phone to find out who is for you, who is against you and who is uncommitted. Once you have the list you cross off the ones against you barrage the uncommitted with pleas and information, and make sure your supporters get to the polls.

Not so long ago, the Party Organization that kept the best list and had the patronage clout to keep the listees in line could deliver an election. Today even Mayor Daley's fabled machine is showing signs of breakdown and if a candidate wants an organization he can count on, he has to build it himself.

Muskie has made countless bungles; one of the earliest was his decision to depend entirely on the Party Organization to come through with the vote in the key Democratic city of Manchester, N. H. The local organization turned out to be a group of hacks led by a mayor who had won by only four hundred votes. "I wouldn't run for ward committee with the organization they have up there," said Providence's Mayor Joseph A. Doorley, who was called in at the last moment to rescue votes for Muskie. Meanwhile, McGovern's organization ran a classic operation in Manchester, canvassing almost every precinct two times, and winning ethnic sections that no one believed they could capture. The McGovern organization was superior in both numbers and fervor. The McGovern people canvassed the city so thoroughly that by election night they were able to predict the vote in most Manchester wards with deadly accuracy.

After the excellent showing in low-income districts in Manchester, the McGovern organization generals made a crucial decision; they decided that the main strategic aim of the campaign would be to prove that the bulk of their candidate's support actually came from working men, not from students and suburbanites. “I've always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength,” said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's main strategist. “It always seemed to me that McGovern—not as the anti-war candidate but as the 'change' candidate—would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They're the ones with the most to gain from change and they're the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.”

Wisconsin was the perfect state for McGovern's first big bid for blue-collar votes. The major issue was property tax, and McGovern could hammer relentlessly away for tax reform, which is one of his favorite themes. All he needed was a spectacular organization that could tell the working class district who he was.

Last year, McGovern's campaign manager, a young Coloradoan named Gary Hart, who looks like a ski instructor and worked for

Bobby Kennedy was setting up local organizations in key primary states in November 1970, he recruited a former McCarthy worker named Gene Pokorny to oversee the Wisconsin operation. Pokorny, who grew up on a feed grains farm in Nebraska, started at once to line up workers using the old McCarthy lists. "It is tough starting a year and a half in advance," he said. "But just as long as you can find something useful for volunteers to do you're ok. So we did lists rummage sales parties petition drives fund raising. We had county leadership meetings and statewide workshops to show people how to canvass and how to set up storefronts." The lists were all important. The McGovern workers sent special interest mailings to every group they could pin down ecologists, feminists, university faculties high-school teachers, lawyers and businessmen. To get at the farm vote they sent McGovern literature to every rural box holder in the western districts of Wisconsin.

A shy man Pokorny has adopted a protective official posture sitting behind his immaculate nictal desk he comes on suspicious and thieftapped as a loan officer. The sight of the press begging for predictions drives him crazy. I'm a perennial pessimist gentlemen," he says. It's a congenital disease of the spirit. However he has the directness energy and conviction that myka is a good organizer. When the national McGovern staff—the advance men sched uters med a men pollsters and strategists—arrived in Milwaukee two weeks before the election. Pokorny pretented them with 10,000 volunteers 35 local offices and a clear appraisal of the situation. According to Pokorny McGovern would probably lose the Third and Seventh Districts—solid farmland on the Minnesota border. In those districts Hubert, with his perfect agricultural record of twenty years running and his absolute fluency in farm talk, rates as a Third Senator they would be his preserve. The Fourth District—the heavily Polish South Side of Milwaukee was the property of Muskie and Wallace McGovern could do well in the Farm Labor Ninth Sixth and Eighth Districts. The Second which contains the university town of Madison was his for the asking. The First and Fifth both heavy Labor districts were tossups. As it turned out Pokorny's estimates were characteristically pessimistic.

The consensus of the staff national and local was that McGovern should blitz the Fifth Milwaukee especially North Milwaukee looks like Archie Bunker's street drawn out to infinity; a large proportion of Wisconsin's population lives there. (It also encompasses the downtown area, with every big T.V station, radio station, and newspaper in the state.) A mixture of carefully segregated blacks and white labor, the district serves as a textbook example of the Roosevelt Democratic Coalition. By rights, it should go to that dogeared textbook Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. "If Humphrey doesn't win," said Pokorny, "that means the union can't deliver the rank and file to anybody anymore."

In the McGovern hierarchy, the task of bringing in the Fifth District belonged to Joel Swerdlow. On the Friday morning before the election, he was standing over two high-school girls in his tiny storefront headquarters, explaining how to send out a last-minute mailing. Having forfeited sleep for two nights, he had taken on a faint greenish tint and looked as if he might rise on Easter if not securely moored. “I'm a political hack,” he says. “I'm here because this is where I got the highest bid. Guys like me, we like to think we only go with candidates who can win.” Despite his bluff, he is deeply committed to McGovern.

Swerdlow's boxcar-sized storefront headquarters contained the usual depressing welter of folders, envelopes, and brochures—all the standard paraphernalia for pestering apathetic citizens until they crack and agree to vote for your man. Fourteen-year-olds were running around on errands, out-of-state college kids were stuffing envelopes, and a radio was blaring. Swerdlow started on a tour of inspection.

The walls of the office were papered with printout lists of all the voters in the district. "In most states, you'd find a little R or D by each name," said Swerdlow. "Not here—there's no prior registration in this state. So we have to phone or go see them all and about one-fifth are for Nixon, which means a tremendous waste of energy."

Volunteers had reached 60 percent of the voters by phone and filled out an index card for each one—the back wall was stacked to the ceiling with shoe boxes full of index cards telling how each voter felt about McGovern (on a scale of 1 to 5, hot or cold) and listing the issues that interested each voter. "The whole deal was done with

no money, no hired staff, and one phone in this whole place—it was all done by students out of their own homes, said Swerdlow. Other volunteers had convinced a quarter of the district door-to-door, bringing back more cards with the same kind of information ideally, a district should be phone-canassed once and foot can-vensed twice, but in 1972 student volunteers are scarce. Swerdlow decided to settle for dropping a piece of literature at the households that hadn't been canassed. “Besides the mailings,” he said, “we have a hunteen man phone bank downtown that is calling all the people we identified as uncommitted—and that's about 60 percent of them.” Swerdlow's other operations included: • Plantense leaflets handled out at factories by two groups leaving the office at 50 every morning • Postcards with a picture of McGovern and wife fonding a grandchild. Each local volunteer addresses postcards to thirty friends. Prominent members of parties' Jewish congregations and bowling leagues send postcards to these groups. Thirty thousand had been mailed by the Friday before the election. • Palm cards—small sheets of paper which show exactly where McGovern's name appears on the ballot. Two McGovern workers would hand out cards at polling places in each of the city's three hundred precomes. According to Swerdlow a good palm-card operation can make a ten percent difference in the vote. • Signs which have the same effect as palm cards. A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that McGovern volunteers began putting up signs outside polling places at two in the morning of election day, in this poll had little time to pull them down. Swerdlow's two week operation was sketchy and primitive, but McGovern's three biggest rivals in the district—Humphrey, Jackson, and Wallace—could not even approach it. 810 F.V election rights: Ten minutes after the polls closed down Pat Caddell resident McGovern pollster got the early results of a blue-collar factory precent in Sheboygan and predicted that McGovern would end up by asking the nearest opposition by at least seven points. 940 F.M, election night Frank Mankiewicz announced to a cheering crowd at the Pfister ballroom that McGovern had taken seven out of Wisconsin's nine congressional districts—lacking only the Fifth and the Seventh (farm country on the Minnesota border) for a clean sweep. He called McGovern a "candidate for all the people."

Joel Swerdlow said that this campaign marked the first time McGovern had run strong in a real urban center. He thought McGovern would take the Fifth. He had lost one of his weak precincts to Humphrey by one vote. 2:00 A.M., the morning after election night: Out of the thirty-odd reporters who began the evening manning the banks of typewriters there, only one straggler was left, and he, like almost all the rest, was using the phrase "stunning victory" to describe McGovern's performance. Swerdlow and another McGovern worker were on their hands and knees sorting out adding machine slips on the floral carpet. McGovern was trailing behind Humphrey in the Fifth District, and Swerdlow was adding up the votes to see whether the race was close enough to demand a recount. He showed me a pencilwritten analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for McGovern.

Later Swerdlow sat on a sofa in the lobby and went over the figures for each precinct with Paul Cobb, who looks like a small edition of Isaac Hayes. Cobb is co-directing McGovern's operation in Northern California but he also serves as the resident expert of the black community. "I'm upset about the black vote," said Swerdlow. "I'm upset and hypertense," said Cobb. “I'm convinced that if we had had two or three black pros in Milwaukee for a month we could have ripped off 40 percent of the black vote,” he said. “You could have organized under the soft underbelly of the Baptist Church hierarchy and literally picked out votes one by one and identified them.” 10:00 A.M., the morning after the election: The press was assembled in the conference room of the Milwaukee Inn. Pat Caddell and Frank Mankiewicz had summoned the press for their analysis of the vote. This was a precautionary measure they had planned weeks ago—to make sure that the press did not go on writing, out of sheer force of habit, that McGovern's support comes only from students and suburbanites.

Using analyses of selected precincts, Mankiewicz proved with statistics what he had been saying for weeks—that McGovern has the support of blue-collar workers, farmers, old people, young people, students, housewives—in short he is a presidential candidate so statistically proven that no convention could refuse him. “Do your notes show any weaknesses?” a reporter asked. “Yes—Mankiewicz!” another reporter shouted.

Mankiewicz admitted that McGovern has not yet cultivated the black vote. Caddell then got up to analyze the blue-collar support. Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters. a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

Mankiewicz added that the “leading edge of labor support is now beginning to come to Senator McGovern. Some of the top labor officers who endorsed Muskie—like Leonard Woodcock—always said that they had great admiration for McGovern, that he was probably the most qualified candidate. But Muskie was the one who could beat Nixon or unite the party or was the clear leader—or any of those other phrases of antiquity.”

Gary Hart now took over to explain why Wisconsin had been McGovern's watershed. Their one resource up to now—"aside from a superior candidate"—had been their organization. "We had to lay our plans very carefully," he said, "and we put the best people we could find in this country into these early key states. The tenor of the campaign is changing now. There is not enough time to develop state by state what we had in New Hampshire and in Wisconsin." From now on George McGovern will be using polls, media endorsements, and all the other resources available to a front-runner. His organization may never reach full flower again. 3:00 P.M., the day after: Back at the Pfister lobby, I ran into Dave Aylward, a veteran of both the New Hampshire and Wisconsin campaigns although less than a year out of Dartmouth. The Sixth District, which had been under his direction, had voted strongly for McGovern. Dave was still high on victory. "Jesus," he said, "we won the fucking city of Fond du Lac with thirty high-school kids, April three-fourths of whom are drug freaks We only lost three wards and in one of those we lost to Wallace by two votes! And before last summer I had never done anything like this before " I asked Dave if he had decided to go into politics full time "Not forever," he said "Can't take it physically My hands were shaking yesterday morning I was straight out for two nights making lists of positives and writing letters to uncommitted But we goddamn well touched people with those letters and leaflets' "There's only one thing that worries me about being out front," he said. "The hacks When McCarthy took Wisconsin in '68, the hacks were getting on board before anyone knew what had happened and they were saying 'ok, kids the fun's over we'll run it from here, get lost.' And the kids had just racked up 56 percent for McCarthy in this state. If it happens again this time they can have the campaign. I'll just pack my bags and split."

Crank Time on the Low Road . . . Fear and Loathing in Ohio & Nebraska . . . Humphrey Gets Ugly, McGovern Backs off . . . Delirium Tremens at the National Affairs Desk . . . Acid, Amnesty & Abortion . . . Massive Irregularities on Election Night in Cleveland; Death Watch in the Situation Room . . . Wallace Gunned Down in Maryland . . . Showdown Looms in California . . .

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 that 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, 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. Even in retrospect there is no way to be certain which staff was doing the singing.

And my own head was so scrambled at the hour that I can't be sure of anything except that I had just come back from a predawn 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 540,000 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 7500 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 two to one for McGovern and put him over the hump in Nebraska I understand the necessity for 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 Gear & 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 forty-five 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 Handbook 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 Hanot 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 had already announced that he was flying back to Washington at dawn, 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 official 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?

Crousc 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 A.P 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 A.P wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation—all expenses paid—wherever 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 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". So we 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 We still had five blank pages So I came back to Washington and grappled with it for a few days, Crouse came down from Boston to help beat the thing into shape but nothing worked no spine no hope to hell with it We decided to burv 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 struggled back from New York but by the time we got there it was all over.

What follows then is one of the most desperate last-minute hamburger jobs in the history of journalism—including the first known experiment with large scale Gonzo Journalism—which we accomplished, in this case, by tearing my Ohio primary notebook apart and sending about fifty pages of scribbled shorthand notes straight to the typesetter But we had no choice The fat was in the fire When the going gets tough, the tough get going Ed Muskie said that My next job—after getting my brother elected President of the United States—will be the political destruction of Hubert Humphrey. —Robert Kennedy; after the West Virginia primary in 1960 Strange, how a thing like that can stick in the memory. I may have a word or two wrong, but the balls of that quote are intact... and now, twelve years later on a rainy grey dawn in Omaha, Nebraska, it comes back to me with a vengeful clarity that makes me wonder once again if my head is entirely healthy.

That was back in Bobby's "ruthless" period . . . which is a pretty good word for the way I'm feeling right now after watching the C.B.S Morning News and seeing that Hubert just won the West Virginia primary. He beat George Wallace, two to one . . . and now he's moving on to California, for the nut-cutting ceremony on June 6th.

Which is very convenient for me, because I plan to be in California myself around that time: going out to do a road test on the new Vincent Black Shadow . . . and maybe follow Hubert for a while, track him around the state like a golem and record his last act for posterity.

Remember me, Hubert? I'm the one who got smacked in the stomach by a billy club at the corner of Michigan and Balboa on that evil Wednesday night four years ago in Chicago... while you looked down from your suite on the twenty-fifth floor of the Hilton, and wept with a snout full of tear gas drifting up from Grant Park.

I have never been one to hold a grudge any longer than absolutely necessary, Hubert, and I get the feeling that we're about to write this one off. Big Ed was first ... then you ... and after that—the Other One.

Nothing personal. But it's time to balance the books. The Raven is calling your name, Hubert; he says you still owe some dues—payable, in full, on June 6th. In the coin of the realm; no credit this time, no extensions.

My head is not quite straight this morning. These brutal Tuesday nights are running my health. Last week at this time I was passing around my room on the seventh floor of the Neil House Motor Hotel in Columbus. Ohio pausing now and then to stare out the window at the early morning buses just starting to move down on High Street. Listening to the Grateful Dead sipping Wild Turkey, and trying not to identify with a wino stumped in the doways of Mister Angelos is Wig Salon down there behind the stoplight and beyond the cool green lawn of the state Capitol Building. Moments earlier had left Par Goddess McGovern's votes and the other morning to himself in the hallway outside the Situation Room—where he and Frank Mankweiz and about six others had been grappling all night with botched returns from places like Toledo and Youngstown and Catanniate. “Goddamart!” he was saying. I still�n't believe it happened! They stole it from us! He shook his head and lacked a tin spiction next to the elevator. We won this goddann effection! We had a lock on the nomination tonight we had it nailed down—but the bastards stole it from us! Which was more or less true. If McGovern had been able to win Ohio with his last minute half-organized blizz it would have stapped the psyche spine of the Humphrey campaign because Herbert had been formally strong in Ohio squattime till in the pocket behind his now family's screen of Organized Labor and Old Blitz. By dawn on Wednesday it was still too close to c'ill officially — but sometime around five Harold Himmelman McGovern's national overseer for Ohio had picked up one of the phones in the Neil House Situation Room and been jolted half out of his chair by the long-awated tallies from midtown Cleveland McGovern had already won three of the four Congressional D stricts in Cuyahoga County (metropolitan Cleveland) and all he needed to carry the state now—along with the thirty-eight additional convention delegates reserved for the statewide winner—was a half-respectable showing in the twenty first the heritland of the black vote a crowded urban fieldroom based by Congressman Louis Stokes Ten seconds after he picked up the phone Himmelman was screaming: "What? Jesus Christ! No! That can't be right!" (pause ...) Then: "Awww, shit! That's impossible!"

He turned to Mankiewicz: "It's all over. Listen to this..." He turned back to the phone: "Give that to me again... okay, yeah, I'm ready." He waited until Mankiewicz got a pencil, then began feeding the figures: "A hundred and nine to one! A hundred and twenty-seven to three!... Jesus..."

Mankiewicz finched, then wrote down the numbers. Caddell slumped back in his chair and shook both fists at the ceiling. Him-melman kept croaking out the figures; a fantastic beating, unbelievable—the twenty-first district was a total wipeout. "Well , . . .," he said finally. "Thanks for calling. anyway. What? No . . . but we'll damn well do something. Yeah, I realize that . . ." (pause) "Goddamnit I know it's not your fault! Sure! We're gonna put some people in jail . . . yeah, this is too obvious . . ." (starts to hang up, then pauses again) "Say, how many more votes do they have to count up there?"

"As many as they need," Mankiewicz muttered.

Himmelman glanced at him, grimaced, then hune up. “What does that project to,” Frank asked Caddell. “About thirty thousand to six?”

The wizard shugged. "Who cares? We got raped. We'll never make that up—not even with Akron."

At that point the ancient black bell captain entered, bringing a pot of coffee and a small tin box that he said contained the two Alka-Seltzers I'd asked for—but when I opened the box it was full of dirty vaseline. “What the fuck is this?” I said, showing it to him.

He took the box back and examined it carefully for a long time. "Well . . . damn-nation," he said finally. "Where did this stuff come from?"

"Probably Nashville," I said. "That's White Rose Petroleum Jelly, sure as hell

He nodded slowly Yes mebee so “No maybe about it” I said “I know that stuff W.L.A.C around 1958 Jesus Christ man! That grease is fourteen years old! What are you keeping it for?

He shrugged and dropped the tin box in the pocket of his white water's smock. Damn it I know he said I thought it was Alka-Selzer.

I signed the tab for the coffee then helped him load about a dozen stale glasses on his tray but he seemed very agitated and I thought it was because of his blunder Of course the poor old bugger was feeling guilty about the dollar I'd given him for the seltzer "Don't worry I said You'll find some Bring it up with the next pot of coffee" He shook his head and gestured at the big round wooden table where Mankiewicz Himmelman and Caddell were brooding over the tally sheets "What's wrong" I asked He was jabbing his finger at the half gallon of Early Times but I was slow to understand so he picked up one of the coffee cups he'd just brought us and gestured again at the bottle Ah ha' I said. "Of course. He held the cup with both hands while I filled it to the brim with fresh whiskey feeling grossly out of sync with my surroundings. Here I was in the nerve center of a presidential campaign that even such far out latent papists as Evans & Novak considered alarmingly radical and at the peak of the crisis I was taking time out to piece off some befuddled old Darkie with a cup full of bourbon then I opened the door for him as he shuffled out into the hallway with his stash still holding it with both hands and mumbling his thanks.

A very weird scene I thought as I closed the door A flashback to Gone With the Wind and as I went back to your myself a cup of coffee I had another flash And so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past I was tempted to buy it on Frank just to see how he'd handle it. The McGovern campaign has been hagnidden from the start with unsettling literary references: Mankiewicz apparently sees the whole thing through the eyes of a latter-day Gertrude Stein; Gary Hart, the national manager, is hung up on Tolstoy... and Chris Lydon, the resident New York Times correspondent, has an ugly habit of relating mundane things like a bomb scare on the press bus or a low turnout in the Polak wards to pithy lines from Virgil. On the morning of election day in Nebraska I was talking to Lydon in the lobby of the Omaha Hilton when he suddenly wrapped off the conversation with: "You know, Virgil wanted to burn The Aeneid."

I stared at him, trying to remember if Virgil was maybe one of McGovern's advance men for Scott's Bluff that I hadn't met yet, or ... "You point-head bastard," I said. "Wait till Wallace gets in. He'll kick your ass all over the street with Virgil."

Meanwhile . . . back in Columbus, Ohio, it was 5:05 A.M. on a cool Wednesday morning and Frank Mankiewicz is calling the Secretary of State, getting him out of bed to protest what he gently but repeatedly refers to as "these fantastic irregularities" in the vote-counting procedure. McGovern's slim lead has suddenly fallen apart; the phones are ringing constantly, and every call brings a new horror story.

In Cincinnati the vote-counters have decided to knock off and rest for twelve hours, a flagrant violation of Sec. 350529 of the State Election Code, which says the counting must go on, without interruption, until all the votes are tallied. In Toledo, McGovern is clinging to a precarious eleven-vote lead—but in Toledo and everywhere else the polling places are manned by local (Democratic) party hacks not friendly to McGovern, and any delay in the counting will give them time to ... ah...

Mankiewicz studiously avoids using words like "fraud" or "cheat" or "steal." Earlier that day Pierre Salinger had gone on the air to accuse the Humphrey forces of "vote fraud," but the charge was impossible to substantiate at the time and Humphrey was able to broadcast an embarrassing counterattack while the polls were still open.

In Cleveland, in fact, 127 polling places had remained open until midnight—on the basis of an emergency directive from the state Supreme Court.

At this point we were forced to switch the narrative into the straight Gon o mode The rest of the Ohio section comes straight out of the notebook for good or ill 12 00—Cronkite comes on—barely able to talk—and says Humphrey has won Indiana 46 to 41 percent over Wallace (Cad dell had Wallace at 29 percent) but only 17 percent of the Ohio vote is counted as of now so far showing Hump with the same 41 to 36 percent lead he had at 9 45 wandering around the hotel with Dick Tuck—into Humphrey Hq “Mr Banyo Returns H—58 000 to M—53 000 Midnight—N.B.C Columbus (polls just closed in Cleveland) A.B.C has delegates 55 22 in H.H Hq just before McGovern speaks. N.B.C has 41 39 91 244 to 86 825. Five thousand difference & the polls just closed in Cleveland. Muskie 24 000 Mankiewicz's speech in the ballroom was a careful downer speaking out of one side of his mouth for the mob of young McGovern volunteers & out of the other side for the national press—claiming a victory in Ohio but also saying that even a narrow defeat would be victory enough. I was standing with Warren Bently while Frank spoke. What does this mean: Hunter? he asked with his weird hustler's smile. “It means McGovern will come into Miami with less than enough to win and it means pute hell on the convention floor” Meanwhile C.B.S has some kind of wild west cowboy drama Jimmv Stewart Brg Gen U.S.A.F rolling in the dust under cow hoofs Old woman shooting at the feet of a cowhand tempted to jump in with a six shooter on the Late Show She fires the 30 30 and warns to “let em fight” 'Where you come from stranger? “I come from Laramie and you better get used to me being here” "I own this town stranger" (Like Daley Meany to McGovern—"I own this town stranger " But maybe not

Midnight and the polls just closed in Cleveland—41 to 39 percent.

12 25—Call Mank on the phone in Situation Room No. 258: "Yeah, we'll be up for four to five more hours." (pause) "Yeah, come on down if you want. But you'll have to bring twenty hamburgers. Otherwise, the press is barred, as always..." “Twenty? Who'll pay?”

"Ask Pierre—he has the cash." 12:33—C.B.S: 91,000 to 86,000—same 5,000 split. 12 35—Hump. says he has a "great victory in Indiana—Mr. Wallace has made this a sort of second Alabama." And adds, "I doubt that anyone is going to come to that convention with enough votes to win on the first ballot."

So the bloodbath looms. Heavy duty in Miami. 12 36—McGov. tense on C.B.S interview:

Schoumacher: "Do you regret this decision to come into Ohio?" McG: "Not at all." 2 30—Arrive in Situation Room with twenty hamburgers and receive $20 from Pierre Salinger... 2 36—Mank on phone to Washington says "Hell, let's scrub it." (N.B.C invitation for McGov. appear on Today Show at dawn.)

Yancy Martin: "Sheeitt! McGovern says scrub it to The Today Show. Man, we're gettin' big."

Mank: "Hell, we used to have to fight to get on Uncle Bob—or The Flintstones." 2 38—Mank: "It looks like we're winning in Districts 23, 20 & 22—Scammon says he thinks we'll come out of Cuyahoga County with a plurality of 60,000."

Mank: "He [Scoop Jackson] went out like he came in—with a lot of class, huh?" 2:52—bad news from 21.

Himm. (on phone): “Come on, don't play games—how much

are we gonna lose by? (pause, jois down figures) "Shut We're dead if that happens!

Butterness about Stokes brothers in Ohio—"When we win this thing they re gonna have to crawl, goddamnit" 3 03—the down feeling again Caddell shrugs "I don't know, I just feel pessimistic" What you tend to forget is that two weeks ago McGov couldn't have pulled twenty percent in Ohio Recall quote from Sunday night "If we'd only had one more week."

H Humphrey in '68—"one more month—even two weeks" But you don't get any overumes in this game—"there isn't no instant replay in the football game of life" (Mitch Greenhill)

Caddell 'Watching the map is sort of like watching the clock." (snarling) 3 05—definite funk setting in now/not going to win But hope forever springs etcetera Phones slamming—' The goddamn 21st district is what's killing us We'll probably carry the other three Human “Wagner says it's an 8 to 1 loss in the 21st Jesus Christ!

Yancy Martin answers all phones with e-mail "Good Morning" 3 34--door opens and John Chancellor wanders in Mank 'Hi Jack—what do you hear?'

Chancellor "Well we ended up saying you won so I hope you do" Mank "You want a drink, Jack?" “Yeah But the point is not whether you won, but how close you came” 3 51—it comes down to the 21st Caddell (starring gloomily at Chancellor, confirming Mank's wisdom) "Yes, if I had to generalize, I'd say it comes down to the 21st" 3 53—phone rings—"But still no news from the 21st" Weird, even this presidential election comes down to some student and/or housewife poll watcher....

Himm (yelling at girl): “Goddamnit, I want you to call me on every precinct!” 3 59—Delegate count is 55 to 37, McGovern.

Mank (on phone to lawyers): "What I think is that Stokes is sitting there and waiting to be told how many they need." 4 11—the whole state now hinges on the outcome in the 21st Congressional District, midtown Cleveland.

Returns from only three precincts out of more than 400 in the 21st District. 4 15—Mank: "Well, I'm at the point where I'm ready to start getting judges out of bed." 4 36—Phone rings. Himmelman answers. 21st starts in: "What! What was that?" (shouting) Then aside to Mank and Caddell, "Black middle class—109 to 1! Jesus Christ!" 4 48—the hammer falls. Incredible ratios from black precincts in Cleveland. 4 55—Mank holding phone. Turns to Caddell—"Who is this?"

Caddell: “Jim.” (shrugs) “I think he's our man in Cincinnati.”

Mank: "Jim—what do they want?" (answer from phone, "They want you to consult with your lawyer and get his agreement to stop counting until 6 P.M.") (Pause)

Mank: "Well, tell 'em you just talked to your lawyer and he says there's no way he can acquiesce in a violation of the law. And your lawyer's name is Frank Mankiewicz—member of the bar in California and the Supreme Court of the United States!... No, I simply can't go along with the breaking of the law." 5 16—Mank on phone to Secretary of State Brown: "Mr. Brown, we're profoundly disturbed about this situation in the 21st. We can't get a single result out of there. The polls have been closed for 12 hours. I can't help but think they're lying in the weeds up there."

Weird conversation with Brown, a tired & confused old man who's been perked out of bed at 5 15 Mank talking very fast, cool and vaguely menacing. Brown obviously baffled—end of a bad day. It began when Governor John Gilingan said he (Brown) should resign for reasons of gross incompetence. 5 26—Mark on phone 20 minutes to "Socko' Wiethe, Democratic Party boss in Cincinnati—Mark screaming Wiethe's voice screeching out of the small black phone receiver shatters quiet tension of the room Mank "Ok. Mr Wiethe, all I want from you is a clear affirmation that you're going to ignore the law" (Mank pauses) "Wait a minute, I don't want any more abuse, I just want to know if you're going to obey that law!" 5 31—Mank on phone to lawyer "Jesus I think we gotta go in there and get those ballots" Impound 'em! Every damn one! 5 35—all phones ringing now the swing shift has shot the gap—now the others are waking up Mank They're gonna stop the count in Cincinnati in a half hour—and wait 12 hours before starting again Yeah we're ahead down there, but not by much we can't afford to give 'em time to get their counts documented 5 43—Mank on phone to “Mary” in Washington, “It now appears quite clear that we'll lead the state—without the 21st.”

Mankiewicz has been on the phone now since 11 P.M with only a few breaks Socko Wiethe to Mank. "This is your boss's fault—he should have known—you start electing delegates and you get this kind of thing" Bad note on “party reform” Night ends, 6:49 Meet in the coffee shop at 7:30, press conference at 10:00

6 05—Waiting for elevator in Columbus, Ohio, pacing back and forth on the damp red carpet in the second floor hall. Pat Caddell is jerking a bundle of legal-sized paper around in his hands and mumbling: "I knew this campaign was too goddamn honest! It was bound to get us in trouble. Now I understand why the North Vietnamese wouldn't agree to elections in The South."

Caddell is twenty-one years old. He has never had his face mashed in the dirty realities of American politics. For almost a year now, he has been George McGovern's official numbers wizard. Caddell and his Cambridge Research Associates have been working the streets and suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts for McGovern, then coming back to headquarters on election nite and calling the results almost down to the percentage point...

But tonight was different. The polls closed—officially—at 6:30, but the situation in Cleveland was out of control since early morning . . . And by midnight the outlook was ominous. McGovern's eleventh-hour challenge in Ohio was almost over the hump; he was on the brink of knocking Hubert out of the race, maintaining a razor-thin lead all night long . . . but for some reason there were no results from the black districts in midtown Cleveland. 7 Today Show: McGee says J. Edgar Hoover died last night and Humphrey won a narrow victory over Wallace in Indiana—but his slim lead over George McGovern in Ohio is by no means certain.

N.B.C newsman Bill Monroe: "McGov. will wind up with the biggest psychological boost in the Ohio primary—but his pulling power among blue-collar workers still remains uncertain."

Bullshit?

Wallace from Houston: We will definitely be the balance of power in Miami—we've already turned the party in a different direction." 7:30—C.B.S Morning News:

Scoop Jackson comes on saying he's dropped out—hoping for a polarization between Wallace and McGovern (Recall Mank quote—"class, huh?") "I'm not gonna take sides in this campaign"—Then attacks McGovern again on amnesty, acid, abortion, etcetera

C.B.S John Hart election roundup No hunt of the all night phone madness and treachery reports in Situation Room Even reading and watching all the news there is no way to know the truth—except to be there Humphrey on C.B.S says, "If you put Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie and Scoop Jackson together—we're pretty much on the same wave length—and we've got the numbers" McGovern on C.B.S takes a very gentle line on the "very peculiar things that happened out there in Cleveland". No hint of Mank screaming on the phone at Socko McGee on Today Show (second hour) ' There is still no result in that big Ohio primary—Senator Humphrey is still maintaining his slim lead over Senator George McGovern ' Suddenly, Kleindienst and Eastland and Thomas Corchoran are on the screen praising J Edgar Hoover—Jesus, these are the pigs who run the country Nixon/southerners/Big Business 10 10—Wednesday morning press conf—gram faces at head table Frank Mankiewicz Yancy Martin Gary Hart Pat Caddell Harold Himmelman Bob McCallister Hart “We're making no allegations of illegality or fraud—at this point” Acid

Amnesty Appeasement Vote

An extremely haggard crew, red eyes, hovering on stupor “By mid afternoon massive numbers of people in Youngstown —including the judge up there—were not able to obtain ballots” Mankiewicz compares yesterday's election in Ohio to the 1969 election of Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador—next to Saigon, perhaps the second most flagrantly crooked election in the history of the democratic process—he needed a team of O.A.S observers in Guayaquil etcetera "In some precincts here, voters were not given the paper ballots unless they asked for them" Mank "We have achieved what we set out to do in Ohio—we stood Senator Humphrey at least dead even and probably beat him, as far as the working man's vote is concerned "This is Humphrey's peak—from now on there isn't much he can win" Another Wednesday morning another hotel room another grim bout with the T.V Morning News and another post mortem press conference scheduled for 10:00 A.M. Three hours from now Call room service and demand two whole grapefruits, along with a pot of coffee and four glasses of V-8 juice These goddamn Wednesday mornings are running my health Last night I came out of a mild fogtime come's just about the time the polls closed at eight No booze on election day—at least not until the polls close, but they always seem to leave at least one loophole for serious juicers In Columbus it was the bar at the airport, and in Omaha we had to rent a car and drive across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs which is also across the state line into Iowa Every year, on election day the West End bars in Council Bluffs are jammed with boozers from Omaha Which is fine, for normal people. but when you drink all day with a head full of Ibogane and then have to spend the next ten hours analyzing election returns there will usually be problems Last week—at the Neil House Motor Hotel in Columbus Ohio—some lunatic tried to break into my room at six in the morning. But fortunately I had a strong chain on the door. In every reputable hotel there is a sign above the knob that warns: 'For Our Guests' Protection—Please Use Door Chain at all Times, Before Retiring.

I always use it. During four long months on the campaign trail I have had quite a few bad experiences with people trying to get into my room at strange hours—and in almost every case they object to the music. One out of three will also object to the typewriter, but that hasn't been the case here in Omaha....

(Proposed Photo Caption)

Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his "old friend" Hunter S. Thompson, the National Correspondent for Rolling Stone and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs.

A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that “Hi, sheriff” bullshit; I am now the resident Puff Adder . . . and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim 19,000 vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps 10,000 of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by that worthless asshole Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and turned into a major issue.

So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey's people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the Sheriff and all his Deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.

No, this would never do. Not for George McGovern—at least not in May of '72, and probably never. He has spent the past week traveling around Nebraska and pausing at every opportunity to explain that he is flatly opposed to the legalization of marijuana. He is also opposed to putting people in prison for mere possession, which he thinks should be re-classified as a misdemeanor instead of a felony And even this went down hard in Nebraska. He came into this state with a comfortable lead, and just barely escaped with a six percentage point (41 percent to 35) win over Hubert Humphrey—who did everything possible, short of making the accusations on his own, to identify McGovern as a Trojan Horse full of dope dealers and abortionsists.

Jackson had raised the same issues in Ohio but George ignored them—which cost him the state and at least thirty-eight delegates according to his staff thinkers—so when Hubert laid it on him again, in Nebraska, McGovern decided to meet them head on. For almost a week every speech he made led off with an angry denial that he favored either legalized grass or Abortion. On Demand and in the dawn hours of Saturday morning three days before the election he called his media wizard Charley Guggenheim back from a vacation in the Caribbean to make a Special Film in Nebraska designed—for statewide exposure on Sunday night—to make goddamn sure that The Folks in Nebraska understood that George McGovern was just a regular guy like them, who would no more tolerate marijuana than send his wife to an abortionist.

And it worked I watched it in McGovern's Omaha Hilton "press suite" with a handful of reporters and Dick Dougherty a former L.A Times reporter who writes many of George's major speech/statements, but who is usually kept out of the public eye because of his extremely seedy and unsettling appearance. On Sunday night, however, Dougherty came out of wherever he usually stays to watch The Man on the T.V set in the press room. We found him hunkered there with a plastic plasy of Old Overholt and a pack of Home Run cigarettes, staring at the tube and saying over and over again. "Jesus that's fantastic! Christ, look at that camera angel God damn, this is really a hell of a film ch."

I agreed It was a first-class campaign film The lighting was fantastic, the sound was as sharp and clear as diamonds bouncing

on a magnesium tabletop; the characters and the dialogue made Turgenev seem like a punk. ... McGovern sat in the round and masterfully de-fused every ugly charge that had ever been leveled at him. He spoke like a combination of Socrates, Clarence Darrow, and God. It was a flat-out masterpiece, both as a film and a performance—and when it ended I joined in the general chorus of praise. “Beautiful,” somebody muttered. “Damn fine stuff,” said somebody else.

Dougherty was grinning heavily. "How about that?" he said. "Wonderful," I replied. "No doubt about it. My only objection is that I disagree with almost everything he said." “What?” “Yeah—I'm for all those things: Amnesty, Acid, Abortion….” “So what? You're not a candidate for President in the Nebraska primary, are you?” “No—but if I was—” Dougherty stood up quickly and backed off a few steps. "Jesus Christ," he snapped. "You're really a goddamn nit-picker, aren't you?"

McGovern told a Flint (Michigan.) press conference that while "Wallace is entitled to be treated with respect at the convention (in Miami), I don't propose to make any deals with him..."

Humphrey (in Michigan) attacked Wallace more personally than McGovern, but when a question about wooing Wallace delegates was thrown at him, Humphrey said, "I will seek support wherever I can get it, if I can convince them to be for me." —Washington Post, May 14, '72 Quotes like this are hard to come by—especially in presidential elections, where-most candidates are smart enough to know better than to call a press conference and then announce—on the record—an overweening eagerness to peddle their asses to the highest bidder.

Only Hubert Humphrey would do a thing like that . . . and we can only assume that now, in his lust for the White House—

after suffering for twenty-four years with a case of Political Blueballs only slightly less severe than Richard Nixon's—that The Hube has finally cracked, and he did it in public With the possible exception of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey is the purest and most disgusting example of a Political Animal in American politics today. He has been going at it hammer and tong twenty five hours a day since the end of World War 2—just like Richard Nixon, who launched his own career as a Red batting California congressman about the same time. Hubert began making headlines as the Red batting Mayor of Minneapolis. They are both career anti-Communists. Nixon's gig was financed from the start by Big Business, and Humphrey's by Big Labor and what both of them stand for today is the de facto triumph of a One Party System in American politics.

George Meany, the aging ruler of the A.F.L-C.I.O was one of the first to announce his whole hearted support of Nixon's decision to lay mines around Haiphong Harbor and celebrate the memory of Guernica with a fresh round of saturation bombing in North Vietnam Humphrey disagreed of course—long with Major Daley—but in fact neither one of them had any choice. The war in Vietnam will be a key issue in November and Senator Henry Jackson of Washington has already demonstrated—with a series of humiliating defeats in the primaries—what fate awaits any Democrat who tries to agree with Nixon on The War.

But Humphrey seems not quite convinced. On the morning before the Wisconsin primary he appeared on The Today Show, along with all the other candidates and when faced with a question involving renewed escalation of the bombing in Vietnam he lined up with Jackson and Wallace—an clear opposition to McGovern and Lindsay, who both said we should get the hell out of Vietnam at once. Big Ed, as usual, couldn't make up his mind.

Since then—after watching Jackson suck wind all over the Midwest—Hubert has apparently decided to stick with Dick Doley on Vietnam. But he has not explained, yet, how he plans to square his late blooming dovishness with Boss Meany—who could crook Humphrey's last chance for the nomination with a single phone call.

Meany's hired hacks and goon squads are just about all Hubert

even count on these days, and even his Labor friends are having their problems. Tony Boyle for instance, is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have space to list here Boyle, former president of the United Mineworkers Union, was recently cracked out of office by the Justice Department for gross and flagrant "muse" of the union treasury—which involved among other things, illegal contributions to Humphrey's presidential campaign in 1968. In addition to all this, Boyle now faces a Conspiracy/Murder rap in connection with the contract killing of Joseph Yahlonski, who made the mistake of challenging him for the union presidency in December, 1969, and paid for it a few months later when hired things appeared one night in his bedroom and ganned him down, along with his wife and daughter. Hubert Humphrey's opinion of Tony Boyle was best expressed when they appeared within the United Mineworkers Convention. In 1968, the Hubrbrey referred to Boyle as "My friend, this great American" For whatever it's worth the U.M.W is one of the most powerful political realities in West Virginia where Humphrey recently won his fourth primary in a row. This may or may not properly explain Humphrey's startling admission at that press conference in Michigan which was nothing less than a half-shrouded bargaining overture to George Wallace, who has already gone out of his way to tell the national press corps that "My daughter has a big picture of Hubert Humphrey tacked up on the wall above her bed". This was very much like Teddy Kennedy telling the press that his wife, his children, and indeed the whole Kennedy blood-clan, have decided to vote for McGovern. There is not much doubt now, that Kennedy is preparing to get seriously and publicly behind McGovern. I haven't talked to him about it. I can't even get through to his goddamn press secretary. The only way to talk to Kennedy these days is to spend a lot of time on the Washington cocktail circuit, which is not my best—but the society columns and Gentlemen Journalists who do most of their work in their area. Boyle is no longer the President of the United Mine Workers. He was deemed to be a little disliked to take theArabic text in November of 1972 by a are now convinced that Kennedy is ready to crank his weight behind McGovern any time the Senator asks for it.

The only reporter in Washington who appears to believe that Teddy is marshalling his forces for a last-minute blitz for his own candidacy in '72 is Kandy Stroud of Women's Wear Daily. She says he is sneaking around the country on weekends, lashing together a very ominous coalition. She broke the story in W.W.D on April 25th, the same day George McGovern swept all 102 delegates in the Massachusetts primary. “Quietly,” she wrote, “as if it were being pulled by cats, the Kennedy bandwagon has begun rolling. “For a couple of days last week, while everyone else was pre-occupied with moon shots, primaries and pandas, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) slipped out of town and went to Little Rock, Ark., Columbia, S.C., and Indianapolis, Ind. “He spoke to the people and his appearances generated the old Kennedy magic. The hands reached out for him, stretching and grasping, seeking just to touch him, and some of them started calling him 'President Kennedy.'” “And while the excitement began to swell, Kennedy quietly solidified relationships with some of the country's most powerful politicians—Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), Senator Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings (D-S.C.) and Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.). Even though he continues to insist he is not a candidate, it is clear to many observers that a campaign of sorts is under way.”

Of sorts.

And it may be true. It is hard to imagine anybody flying around the country to visit socially with people like that unless he had some kind of very powerful ulterior motive in mind. The W.W.D article went on to describe Mills as "A conservative who has voted against every major civil rights bill and has never voiced opposition to the war in Southeast Asia..." And also: "According to one high-ranking Democratic finance committeeman, it was Rose Kennedy [Teddy's mother] who donated 'most, if not all' of the funds for Mills' New Hampshire primary campaign."

Mills got badly stomped in New Hampshire, running neck in neck for the booby prize with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and Edward T. Coll, the anti-rat candidate... but he refused to com-

meat on the rumor that Rose Kennedy had financed his New Hampshire campaign, and it remained for Mills' brother, Roger, to salvage the story by explaining that 'He [Kennedy] is the only Democrat Wallace could support.'

This is probably a remark worth remembering. The Democratic Convention in Miami begins on July 10th, and the only major political event between now and then is the California primary on June 6th. It Humphrey loses in California—and he will, I think—his only hope for the nomination will be to make a deal with Wallace, who will come to Miami with something like 350 delegates, and he'll be looking around for somebody to bargain with The logical bargain as it were, is Hubert Humphrey, who has been running a sort of left handed, stupid-coy flirtation with Wallace ever since the Florida primary, where he did everything possible to co-opt Wallace's position on busing without actually agreeing with it. Humphrey even went so far as to agree momentarily, with Nixon on busing—hurling out "Oh thank goodness!" when he heard of Nixon's proposal for a moratorium which amounted to a presidential edict to suspend all busing until the White House could figure out some way to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court.

When somebody called Hubert's attention to this aspect of the problem and reminded him that he had always been known as a staunch foe of racial segregation, he quickly changed his mind and rushed up to Wisconsin to nail down the Black Vote by denouncing Wallace as a racist demagogue and Nixon as a cynical opportunist for saying almost exactly the same things about busing that Humphrey himself had been saying in Florida.

There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you've followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the "straight/objective" reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.

Hubert Humphrey, for one, would go crazy with rage and attempt to strangle his press secretary if he ever saw in print what most reporters say about him during midnight conversations around barroom tables in all those Hilton's and Sheratons where the cand- dates make their headquarters when they swoop into places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis.

And some of these reporters are stepping out of the closet and beginning to describe Humphrey in print as the bag of P.R gimmicks that he is. The other day one of the Washington Post regulars nailed him: “Humphrey has used the campaign slogans of John Kennedy ('let's get this country moving again') and of Wallace ('stand up for America') and some of his literature proclaims that 1972 is 'the year of the people,' a title used by Eugene McCarthy for a book about his 1968 campaign.”

Enroute from Columbia to La Guardia airport I stopped off in the midtown Rolling Stone office to borrow some money for cab-fare and heard that Wallace had just been shot. But the first report was a ten-second radio bulletin, and when I tried to call Washington every news-media phone in the city was busy... and by the time the details began coming through on the radio it was 4:30 in Manhattan, the start of the evening Rush Hour. No way to make the airport until 6:00 or maybe 6:30.

Tim Crouse called from Boston, 250 miles north, saying he had a straight shot to Logan airport up there and would probably make it to Washington before I got out of Manhattan.

Which he did, spending most of Monday night and half of Tuesday in the eye of the media-chaos around Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland—where Wallace had been taken by ambulance for five hours of surgery. While Wallace was under the knife and in the recovery room, Crouse waited with about two hundred reporters to glean tid-bits from announcements by surgeons, police chiefs, and Wallace staffers. The next night, when Wallace had been pronounced out of danger, Crouse changed into a suit and tie and went to the election-night gathering of Maryland Wallace workers at the North Holiday Inn in Baltimore. Wallace was winning big that night in the Maryland primary. Crouse's reports from both places follow:

M.A.1

Silver Spring, M.D — In the late night hours after the Wallace shooting the Press had only one man to interview Dr Joseph Schanno the pale vascular surgeon with bombed-out eyes who had been picking bullets out of George Wallace The Press sweltering in the underblock gym of the Silver Spring Boys Club waiting for the doctor was crazy with hunger for copy Is he a viable candidate?" a reporter kept shouting at Schanno from the middle of the sweating shoving miss that surrounded the table where he sat He is a very viable person said Schanno Schanno was the first one to speak the unspeakable but a lot of us had already entertained the horrifying possibility that the country might be in for another wheelchair Democrat. The doctor was blately predicting that Wallace might be going home inside of a week which meant that he might be on the loose again within the month. When he resumes campaigning he's going to have a lot going for him increased coverage or as one reporter was saying last night "Jesus this is the biggest break George ever got.

If Wallace loses the use of the lower half of his body it will make him in one fell swoop (a) less of a monster and (b) more of a superman the only assassin's target of the last ten years who his been blessed enough and strong enough to survive Wallace's handlers were holed up downstairs in the "pastoral services" sector of the hospital a corridor decorated with plaster madonna and crucifixes George Mangum the tall bosterous Baptist preacher who warns up the crowds at Wallace rallies ("And now, cause we're in Milwaukee the boys are gonna do their best to play a polka for ya"), was teaming around looking pale and murderous A skinny woman straight from a Walker Evans picture was quietly weeping. A young lean and blond man was un controllably sobbing. He was some sort of assistant press officer, wearing a fire-engine red campaign bitzer with the Wallace. "72 crest on his breast pocket He was being hugged and consoled by I had to look twice but it was a Negro a huge Pullman porter type balding with a little grey goatee and dressed in an elephant blue pinstripe with Wallace for President buttons pinned to each lapel He was consoling the boy in a beautiful, deep, rolling Paul Robeson bass voice.

I waited a decent interval and then approached him to find out what the hell he was doing on the Wallace campaign. He turned out to be none other than Norman E. Jones, the Chairman of the National Black Citizens for Wallace, Inc., and by conventional Press estimate, the biggest jiveass in all of Campaign '72, a man who can run bullshit circles around even Hubert Humphrey. “Mr. Wallace is the only hope of the little man,” Norman said in a voice so resonant that it set the crucifix trembling. I asked him how many blacks he had signed up for Wallace. “You want numbers,” he replied accusingly. “I have no numbers. As fast as I'm traveling now, I just can't keep up with the thousands of letters coming in every day. The greater majority wish to remain anonymous, for fear of economic and social reprisal.”

This is the man who was challenged by the Wall Street Journal

to come up with the name and address of a single Black Citizen for Wallace and who couldn't do it. He bills himself as a former journalist and public relations man. Now he unwrapped a fat cigar hit it and glowered through the smoke. How's McGovern's Indians getting along? he challenged me. How's Humphrey's Indians?

What Indians? I said Why all them Indians that live up in the Dakot's and are starving. There am t no black that would live up there in Dakota. With that he walked away in a huff. Which was too bad because I wanted to ask him about the reaction of the Wallace crowd at the Laurel Shopping Center. When the five shots got out a large part of the crowd had immediately turned its attention to four young blacks who had been heckling Wallace from the rear. One of them spotted an Afro and a dashki. The crowd rounded on them ready to beat them to shot. They started shouting. No no no no it wasn't us we didn't shoot him! But the Prince George's County police stepped in between them and the crowd split unseated. The Wallace crowd was ready for a reflective lynching.

There were some Wallace supporters though who talked like men of peace and it was easy to feel sympathetic with them. A short grey haired county chairman for Wallace in Florida softly asked me why the media had it in for Wallace. I answered that first of all it was because Wallace was for segregation.

"You're thinking of the old George Wallace the man in the schoolhouse door he said. He's for integration now cause it's the law of the land isn't it? He just wants those Northern cities to integrate too. There is no one harder to argue with than a Wallace who happens to be a Southern gentleman. They'll make you feel hypothetical every time without one nasty word."

The next afternoon I called up Frank Mankiewicz to find out how the shooting would affect the McGovern campaign. The smart money had McGovern getting beaten in both Maryland and Michigan, but there had been other bets. Ham Davis, the bureau chief of the Providence Journal, who has one of the most sensitive political guts in the National Press Building, had felt for no particular reason that McGovern had been building a victory in Maryland before the assassination attempt. But that depended largely on one of

McGovern's last minute get-out-the-vote blitzes, which was called off in the wake of the shooting. “I thought we might have won Michigan,” said Mankiewicz. “Our polls there showed us within the range of statistical error. It was within two or three points, so it could have gone either way. But the shooting screws this afternoon's results. I don't think that it hurts McGovern more than anyone else, except that McGovern has traditionally been the second choice of a lot of Wallace voters, and we probably won't get the benefit of that now.”

As for Wallace's future effect on the primaries, Mankiewicz said, "Wallace is at his high-water mark right now. He had nowhere to go but home after today anyway. Even if the shooting had never taken place his campaign is over, he has no more delegates to get anywhere. He isn't going to win any in Oregon or California or New York. “He's got his 300 or 350 delegates and they're indigestible. He just has to go on with the convention around him. Most of his delegates aren't going to break for anybody—that's why I say they're indigestible.”

I asked him if he feared for McGovern in California. "I shouldn't allow my peculiarities to prevail," he said, "but I'm very nervous on the West Coast. It's the random violence capital of the world. But there's no way of knowing. They hit Bobby the first time he didn't go through a crowd. I always felt very safe in the crowds."

Last night, Senator Ribicoff told a McGovern fund-raising dinner in California that the Wallace incident would help McGovern because it increased people's feeling that they "needed a quiet man."

In Maryland, Wallace's election-night party took place in an oven of a meeting room in the basement of a Baltimore Holiday Inn—long and low-ceilinged, more like a bunker than a ballroom. Wallace parties inevitably take place in Holiday Inns, usually without such standard election-night paraphernalia as blackboards and T.V sets, but almost always with a hillbilly band.

with T.V crews, color T.V cameras a blackboard and T.V sets, over which was coming news of the Wallace landslide At every fresh set of returns war whoops "Ya wanna hear an Alabama hog call?" asked Zeke Calhoun who looked like a Kentucky colonel and was a friend of the Wallace family. An Alabama hog call pierced through the acoustic tiles.

Zeke Calhoun, like most of the men in the room had on a cheap red silk tie with Wallace painted on it vertically in white letters. Zeke said he owned a country store that doubled as a Wallace headquarters at Mitchell Springs Alabama—'just across from Fort Benning' "Everytime a soldier is shippin out for Vietnam or goin' home. Zeke said in his smoked Virginia accent, "I load out down with Wallace stickers and they'll glad to take em I was heartseck yesterday after hearing the news. My wife was afraid I'd have another heart attack. Today I couldn't be still in I made a plane up here. The Chef was in trouble and I had to be near him."

Off in a corner three old Wallace workers were having a reunion — a middle-aged rake with a pencil moustiche who was 'in construction', a man in glasses and a styroform Wallace 'straw' hat who was an automobile dealer, and a burly gas-station attendant 'Boys, we been together since May 1, 1964—that's when George Wallace came to the Lord Baltimore Hotel said the man in construction "Madeleine Murray's son climbed up a fence and tried to take our flag away from us remember?

"And remember, that Comme from New York wrapped himself in a flag and gave you a hard time?" the auto dealer reminded 'We might get our country back,' said the construction man, stirred 'I feel like I lost it I feel like I been lost in it all this time' "I've been lost too," said the gas station operator. "I've been trying to find somebody I can understand to vote for. This is one of the happiest days of my life." ' One thing puzzling the press is why there weren't more Wallace stuckers on cars," the auto dealer told me. ' It's fear Fear of retaliation from blacks Of getting bricks thrown at your car " "You didn't have any problems down in that black section did you?" asked the construction man. “A few. Just a few,” said the auto dealer. “I think it's just a small group of black revolutionaries cause the trouble,” the construction man said.

Everyone in the room was drunk on victory and quite sure George Wallace was going to win the nomination. Every so often they would cheerfully scoff at a T.V commentator who attributed the Wallace victory to a "sympathy vote." “A sympathy vote? Definitely not. We never had any doubts he was gonna run away with it in Maryland.” “I don't want a sympathy vote for George. I want people to vote for him out of outrage.”

Charles Snyder, the National Campaign Manager, was making a statement to the cameras. Snyder, short, neatly groomed, the kind of man who reads Playboy. In real life, a general contractor. Which provokes smirks from every political reporter who has ever witnessed that special and beautiful relationship a contractor and a politician can have when highways and public works are involved. "Probably the biggest bagman in the state of Alabama," pronounced a reporter, with absolutely no evidence.

The Governor, said Snyder, had been informed of his two victories. "They got a big smile out of him and a nod of his head." —Tim Crouse “I predict regretfully that you in California will see one of the dirtiest campaigns in the history of this state—and you have had some of the dirtiest.” —Senator Abraham Ribicoff, speaking in San Francisco No hope for this section. Crouse is caving in downstairs; they have him on two phones at once and even from up here I can hear the conversation turning ugly... so there is not much time for anything except maybe a flash roundup on the outlook for California and beyond.

George Wallace himself will not be a factor in the California primary. His handlers are talking about a last-minute write-in campaign, but he has no delegates—and the California ballot doesn't list candidates; only delegates pledged to candidates.

Wallace is not even likely now to have much bargaining power at the Convention. Even before he was shot—and before he won Michigan and Maryland—his only hope for real leverage in Miami depended on Humphrey coming into the convention with enough delegates of his own (something like seven to eight hundred) to bargain with Wallace from strength. But as things stand now, Humphrey and Wallace between them will not have 1000 delegates on the first ballot—and McGovern is a pretty good bet today to go down to Miami with almost 1300.

California to get the nomination.

This is an interesting notion—particularly after Humphrey himself had de-emphasized the importance of winning the New York primary a few days earlier. He understood, even then, that there was no point even thinking about New York unless he could win in California.

And that's not going to happen unless something very drastic happens between now and June 6th. Hubert's only hope in California is a savage, all-out attack on McGovern—a desperate smear campaign focused on Grass, Amnesty, Abortion, and even Busing. And to do that he would have to consciously distort McGovern's positions on those issues... which is something he would find very hard to do, because Humphrey and McGovern have been close personal friends for many years.

I have said a lot of foul things about Hubert, all deserved, but I think I'd be genuinely surprised to see him crank up a vicious and groundless attack on an old friend. His California managers have already said they will try to do it, with or without his approval—but Hubert knows he could never carry that off. In Ohio he got away with letting Jackson do his dirty work, and in Nebraska he let his supporters smear McGovern in a Catholic newspaper, The True Voice... but Hubert himself never got down in the ditch; he stayed on what he likes to call "the high road."

But he won't have that option in California. His only hope for winning out there is go flat out on the Low Road.

Maybe he will, but I doubt it. The odds are too long. McGovern would probably win anyway—leaving Humphrey to rot in the history books for generations to come.

A

June

California Traditional Politics with a Vengeance Return of the Vincent Black Shadow The Juggernaut Roars on, McGovern Troops Ease off as Polls Predict Sweeping Victory Hubert's Last Stand Vicious Attacks, Desperate Appeals, Strange Tales of Midnight Money from Vegas Free Booze & Foul Rumors in the Press Room Ominous Eleventh-Hour Slump Reveals Fistula in McGovern's Woodpile In my own country I am in a far-off land I am strong but have no force or power I win all yet remain a loser At break of day I sav goodnight When I lie down I have a great fear of falling —Francois Villon there is probably some long standing rule among writers journalists and other word mongers that says 'When you start stealing from your own work you're in bad trouble' And it may be true I am growing extremely weary of writing constantly about politics. My brain has become a steam vat my body is turning to wax and bad flab impotence looms my fingernails are growing at a fantastic rate of speed—they are turning into claws my stand and-size clippers will no longer cut the growth so now I carry a set of huge toe nail clippers and sneak off every night around dusk regardless of where I am—in any city hamlet or plastic hotel room along the campaign trail—to chop another quarter of an inch or

It is very hard to walk straight with the Big Toes gone; the effect is sort of like taking the keel off a sailboat—it becomes impossible top-heavy, wallowing crazily in the swells, needing out-riggers to hold it upright... and the only way a man can walk straight with no Big Toes is to use a very complex tripod mechanism, five or six retractable aluminum rods strapped to each arm, moving around like a spider instead of a person.

Ah ... this seems to be getting heavy. Very harsh and demented language. I have tried to suppress these feelings for more than a week, but every time I sit down at a typewriter they foam to the surface. So it is probably better—if for no other reason than to get past this ugly hang-up and into the rest of the article—to just blow it all out and take the weight off my spleen, as it were, with a brief explanation.

Morning again in downtown Los Angeles; dawn comes up on this city like a shitmist. Will it burn off before noon? Will the sun eventually poke through? That is the question they'll be asking each other down there on the Pool Terrace below my window a few hours from now. I'm into my eighteenth day as a resident of the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel, and I am getting to know the dreary routine of this place pretty well.

Outside of that pigsty in Milwaukee, this may be the worst hotel in America. The Sheraton-Schroeder remains in a class of its own: Passive incompetence is one thing, but aggressive nazi hostility on the corporate level is something else again. The only thing these two hotels have in common is that the Sheraton (I.T.T) chain got rid of them: The Schroeder was sold to a local business magnate, and this grim hulk ended up as a part of the Hyatt House chain.

As far as I know there was no pool in the Schroeder. Maybe a big grease pit or a scum vat of some kind on the roof, but I never saw a pool. There were rumors of a military-style S&M gallery in the basement with maybe an icewater plunge for the survivors, but I never saw that one either. There was no way to deal with management personnel in the Schroeder unless your breath smelled heavily of Sauerbraten... and in fact one of the happiest things about my life, these days, is that my memories of life in the Sheraton-Schroeder are becoming mercifully dim. The only open sore

that remains from that relationship is the trouble I'm still having with the I.B.M typewriter rental service in Milwaukee—with regard to the $600 Selectine Typewriter I left behind the desk when I checked out It was gone when the I.B.M man came around to pick it up the next morning and now they want me to pay for it Right Another contribution to the Thousand Year Reich "We will march on a road of bones" Tom Paxton wrote a song about it And now I get these harsh letters from Milwaukee "Herr Docktor Thompson" Der Typewriting machine you rented hass disappeared! And you will of course pay!

No Never in hell Because I have a receipt for that typewriter But first things first. We were talking about motorcycles. Jackson and I were out there in Ventura fucking around with a 750 Honda and an experimental prototype of the new Vincent—a 1000-e brute that proved out to be so awesomely fast that I didn't even have time to get scared of it before I found myself coming up on a highway stoplight at ninety miles an hour and then skidding halfway through the intersection with both wheel brakes locked A genuinely hellish bike Second gear peaks around 65—cruising speed on the freeways—and third winds out somewhere between 95 and 100 I never got to fourth, which takes you up to 120 or so—and after that you shift into fifth Top speed is 140 more or less, depending on how the thing is tuned—but there is nowhere in Los Angeles County to run a bike like that. I managed to get it back from Ventura to McGovern's downtown headquarters hotel, staying mainly in second gear, but the vibration almost fused my wrist bones and boiling oil from the breather pipes turned my right foot completely black. Later, when I tried to start it up for another test run, the backlash from the kick starter almost broke my leg. For two days afterward I limped around with a golfball size blood bruise in my right arch.

Later in the week I tried the bastard again, but it stalled on a ramp leading up to the Hollywood Freeway and I almost broke my hand when I exploded in a stupid, screaming rage and punched the gas tank. After that, I locked it up and left it in the hotel parking lot—where it sat for many days with a McGovern for President tag on the handlebars.

George never mentioned it, and when I suggested to Gary Hart that the Senator might like to take the machine out for a quick test-ride and some photos for the national press, I got almost exactly the same reaction that Mankiewicz laid on me in Florida when I suggested that McGovern could pick up a million or so votes by inviting the wire-service photographers to come out and snap him lounging around on the beach with a can of beer in his hand and wearing my Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Looking back on it, I think that was the moment when my relationship with Mankiewicz turned sour. Twenty-four hours earlier I had showed up at his house in Washington with what John Prime calls "an illegal smile" on my face—and the morning after that visit he found himself sitting next to me on the plane to Florida and listening to some lunatic spiel about how his man should commit political suicide by irreparably identifying himself as the candidate of the Beachburns Weirdos and Boozers The Villon quote leading into this chapter was lifted from a book I wrote a few years ago on outlaw motorcycle gangs and at the time it seemed like a very apt little stroke—reaching brick into tute and French poetry for a remind—r that a sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new But why use the same quote to lead off another one of these rambling sereds on American politics in 1972? On the California Democratic primary? The McGovern campaign?

There has to be a reason And there is, in fact—but I doubt if I may to explaining it right now. All I can say for sure is that I walked into the room and stared at the typewriter for a long time. knowing I'd just spent seventeen days and $2000 in Canada, lashing together this thirty three pound satchel of notes tapes clippings propaganda etcetera and also knowing that somewhere in one of these goddamn drawers is a valid contract that says I have to write a long article immediately about whatever happened out there.

How long, O Lord how long? Where will it end?

All I ever wanted out of this grueling campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squall in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and no neighbors Some book reviewer whose name I forbet recently called me a "vicious musanthrope" or maybe it was a cyclical misanthrope but either way he (or she) was right and what pot me this way was politics Everything that is wrong-headed cynical & vicious in me today traces straight back to that evil hour in September of '69 when I decided to get heavily insolved in the political process But that is another story. What worries me now—in addition to this still unwritten saga of the California primary—is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as Governor of American Samoa.

I coveted that post for many years. For a while it was my only ambition. I pursued it relentlessly, and at one point in either 1964 or '65 it seemed within my grasp. Larry O'Brien, now the chairman of the Democratic Party, was the man in charge of pork-barrel/patronage appointments at the time, and he gave me excellent reason to believe my application was on the verge of bearing fruit. I was living at the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota when the good news arrived. It came on a Wednesday, as a recall, by telegram. The manager of the Inn was ecstatic; he called a cab immediately and sent me downtown to a drygoods store where I bought six white sharkskin suits—using a Sinclair Oil card, which was subsequently revoked and caused me a lot of trouble.

I never learned all the details, but what was finally made clear—in the end, after a bad communications breakdown—was that O'Brien had pulled a fast one on me. As it turned out, he never had any intention of making me Governor of American Samoa, and when I finally realized this it made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.

Like George Metesky—the “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York for fifteen years to get even with Con Edison for over-charging him on his light bill and finally cutting off his electricity—I changed my whole lifestyle and channeled my energies into long-range plotting for vengeance on O'Brien and the Democratic Party. Instead of going into government service in the South Pacific, I fled Pierre, S.D. in a junk Rambler and drove to San Francisco—where I fell in with the Hells Angels and decided to become a writer instead of a diplomat.

Several years later I moved to Colorado and tried to live quietly. But I never forgot O'Brien. In the solitude of the Rockies I nursed a lust for vengeance... saying nothing to anyone, until suddenly in the summer of '69 I saw an opportunity to cripple the Democratic Party in Aspen.

This took about fifteen months and by the time it was done I was hopelessly hooked again on the politics of vengeance. The next step would have to be national. O'Brien was riding high in Washington commanding a suite of offices in the Watergate and reluctantly gearing up to send a party with no real candidate and a $9 million debt from 68 into a hopeless battle with Nixon—a battle that would not only humiliate the candidate (the Man from Maine they said), but also destroy the party by plunging it into a state of financial and ideological bankruptcy from which it would never recover.

Wonderful I thought I won't even have to do anything. Just watch and write it all down.

That was six months ago. But things are different now—and in the strange calm of those first few days after the votes were counted in California I began to see that George McGovern has scrambled my own carefully laid plans along with all the others except his own—and that I am suddenly facing the very distinct possibility that I might have to drag myself into a voting booth this November and actually pull the fever for the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. O'Brien's party. That same gang of corrupt and genocidal bastards who not only burned me for six white sharkskin suits eight years ago in South Dakota and chased me through the streets of Chicago with clubs & tear gas in August of '68 but also forced me to choose for five years between going to prison or chipping in 20 percent of my income to pay for napalm bombs to be dropped on people who never threatened me with anything and who put my friends in jail for refusing to fight an undeclared war in Asia that even Mayor Daley is now opposed to Ah careful careful That trip has been done No point getting off on another violent tangent And besides now that the Republicans are running The War, the Democrats are against it

... or at least some of them are against it, including such recent converts as Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. But it is also worth noting that the only Democrat to survive this hellish six-month gauntlet of presidential primaries is the only one of the lot who began as a genuine anti-war candidate.

Six months ago George McGovern was dismissed by the press and the polls as a “one-issue candidate.” And to a certain extent they were right. He has branched out a bit since then, but The War in Vietnam is still the only issue in McGovern's jumbled arsenal that he never has to explain, defend, or modify. All he has to do is start talking about Vietnam, and the crowd begins cheering and clapping.

For a “one-issue candidate,” McGovern has done pretty well. Four years ago Gene McCarthy was another “one-issue candidate”—the same issue poor McGovern is stuck with today—and if McCarthy had somehow managed to put together the kind of political organization that McGovern is riding now, he would be the incumbent President and the '72 campaign would be a very different scene.

Gene Pokorny, one of McGovern's key managers, who also worked for McCarthy in '68, describes the difference between the two campaigns as "the difference between an organization and a happening"... Which is probably true, but that "happening" dumped a Democratic President and made McCarthy the frontrunner all the way to California, where he lost to Robert Kennedy by only three percentage points. They were still counting the votes when Sirhan Sirhan fired a bullet into Kennedy's head.

What if McCarthy had won California? Would Sirhan have gone after him, instead of Kennedy? . . . Like Artie Bremer, who stalked Nixon for a while, then switched to Wallace? Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.

Strange speculation . . . and worth pursuing, no doubt, on a day when I have more time. Is the Governor's mansion in American Samoa on a cliff above the beach? Does it have a big screen porch? Sometime soon I will have to speak with Mankiewicz about this. I don't look forward to it, but perhaps we can work something out if we handle the whole thing by telephone.

Some people are easier to deal with at a distance, and Frank is

June

one of them. His whole manner changes when you confront him in person. It is very much like dealing with a gla monster who was only pretending to be asleep when you approached him—but the instant you enter his psychic territory, a radius of about six feet, he will dart off in some unexpected direction and take up a new stance, fixing you with a lazy unblinking stare and apparently trying to make up his mind whether to dart back and sink a fang in your flesh or just sit there and wait till you move on.

This is the way Mankwicz behaved when I ran across him around midnight, a week or so before election day, in the hallway outside the McGovern press room in the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel and asked him if he could help me out with some details on a story I'd just picked up in a strip point called The Losers Club on La Cenega Boulevard—a very strange tale about Hubert Humphrey keeping a private plane on standby at a nearby landing strip, ready to take off at any moment for Vegas and return the same night with a big bag of cash which would then be rushed to Humphrey headquarters at the Beverly Hilton and used to finance a bare-knuckle media blitz against McGovern during the last days of the campaign.

The story was at least second-hand by the time I heard it, but the source seemed reliable and I was eager to learn more but there was no point in calling Humphrey on a thing like this, so I brooded on it for a while and finally decided—for reasons better left unexplained, at this point—that the only two people even half-likely to know anything about such a bizarre story were Mankiewicz and Dick Tuck.

But a dozen or so phone calls failed to locate either one of them, so I wandered up to the press room to get a free drink and check the bulletin board for a message of some kind from Tim Crouse, who had gone off about six hours earlier to find a bottle of Schnapps and continue his research on How the Press Covers The Campaign The project had already starred up a surprising amount of outspoken resentment among the objects of his study, and now he had gone out to get crazy on German whiskey with a bunch of people.

who thought he was planning to skewer them in the public prints.

The press room was crowded—two dozen or so ranking media wizards, all wearing little egg-shaped I.D tags from the Secret Service: Leo Sauvage/La Figaro, Jack Perkins/N.B.C, R. W. Apple/N.Y. Times ... the McGovern campaign went big-time, for real, in California. No more of that part-time, secondary coverage. McGovern was suddenly the front-runner, perhaps the next President, and virtually every room in the hotel was filled with either staff or media people ... twelve new typewriters in the press suite, ten phones, four color T.V sets, a well-stocked free bar, even a goddamn Mojo Wire.

The gossip in the press room was heavier than usual that night: Gary Hart was about to be fired as McGovern's campaign manager; Fred Dutton would replace him . . . Humphrey's sister had just been arrested in San Diego on a warrant connected with Hubert's campaign debts . . . Muskie was offering to support McGovern if George would agree to take over $800,000 of his (Muskie's) campaign debt . . . But Crouse was nowhere in sight. I stood around for a while, trying to piece together a few grisly unsubstantiated rumors about "heavy polls preparing to take over the whole McGovern campaign". . . Several people had chunks of the story, but nobody had a real key; so I left to go back down to my room to work for a while.

That was when I ran into Mankiewicz, picking a handful of thumb-tacked messages off the bulletin board outside the door.

I have a very weird story for you " I said He eyed me cautiously ' What is it?

"Come over here," I said motioning him to follow me down the corridor to a quiet place. Then I told him what I had heard about Humphrey's midnight air-counter to Vegas. He stared down at the carpet, not seeming particularly interested—but when I finished he looked up and said, "Where'd you hear that?"

I shrugged, sensing definite interest now Well, I was talking to some people over at a place called The Losers, ard— "With Kirby? he snapped "No," I said. "I went over there looking for him but he wasn't around." Which was true. Earlier that day Kirby Jones McGovern's press secretary had told me he planned to stop by The Losers Club later on because Warren Beatty had recommended it highly but when I stopped by around midnight there was no sign of him.

Mankiewicz was not satisfied "Some of our people" Who was there? he asked "Nobody you'd know, I said But what about this Humphrey story? What can you tell me about it?

"Nothing he and glancing over his shoulder at a burst of yelling from the press room. Then. "When s your next issue coming out?'

Thursday 'Before the election? “Yeah, and so far I don't have anything worth a shut to write about—but this thing sounds interesting.”

He nodded staring down at the floor again then shook his head 'Listen," he said 'You could cause a lot of trouble for us by printing a thing like that They'd know where it came from and they'd jerk our man right out " "What man?"

He stared at me, smiling faintly At this point the story becomes very slippery, with many loose ends and dark shadows—but the nut was very simple. I had blun- dered almost completely by accident on a flat-out byzantine spook story. There was nothing timely or particularly newsworthy about it, but when your deadline is every two weeks you don't tend to worry about things like scoops and newsbreaks. If Mankiewicz had broken down and admitted to me that night that he was actually a Red Chinese agent and that McGovern had no pulse, I wouldn't have known how to handle it—and the tension of trying to keep that kind of heinous news to myself for the next four days until Rolling Stone went to press would almost certainly have caused me to lock myself in my hotel room with eight quarts of Wild Turkey and all the Ibogaine I could get my hands on.

So this strange tale about Humphery & Vegas was not especially newsworthy, by my standards. Its only real value, in fact, was the rare flash of contrast it provided to the insane tedium of the surface campaign. Important or not, this was something very different: midnight flights to Vegas, mob money funneled in from casinos to pay for Hubert's T.V spots; spies, runners, counterspies; cryptic phone calls from airport phone booths... Indeed; the

dark underbelly of big time politics A useless story, no doubt, but it sure beat the hell out of getting back on that goddamn press bus and being hauled out to some shopping center in Gardena and watching McGovern shake hands for two hours with lumpy housewives Unfortunately, all I really knew about what I called the U-13 story was the general outline and just enough key points to convince Mankiewicz that I might be irresponsible enough to go ahead and try to write the thing anyway. All I knew—or thought I knew—at that point was that somebody very close to the top of the Humphrey campaign had made secret arrangements for a night flight to Vegas in order to pick up a large bundle of money from unidentified persons presumed to be sunder and that this money would be used by Humphrey's managers to finance another one of Hubert's eleventh hour fast-finish blitzknegs.

Even then a week before the vote he was thought to be running ten points and maybe more behind McGovern—and since the average daily media expenditure for each candidate in the California primary was roughly $30 000 a day Humphrey would need at least twice that amount to pay for the orgy of exposure he would need to overcome a ten point lead No less than a quick $500 000 The people in Vegas were apparently willing to spring for it, because the plane was already chartered and ready to go when McGovern's headquarters got word of the flight from their executive-level spy in the Humphrey campaign. His identity remains a mystery—in the public prints, at least—but the handful of people aware of him say he performed invaluable services for many months.

His function in the U-13 gig was merely to call McGovern headquarters and tell them about the Vegas plane. At this point, my second-or third hand source was not sure what happened next. According to the story, two McGovern operatives were instantly dispatched to keep around the clock watch on the plane for the next seventy two hours and somebody from McGovern headquarters called Humphrey and warned him that they knew what he was up to.

In any case the plane never took off and there was no evidence in the last week of the campaign to suggest that Hubert got a last-minute influx of money, from Vegas or anywhere else.

That is as much of the U-13 story as I could piece together without help from somebody who knew the details—and Mankiewicz finally agreed, insisting the whole time that he knew nothing about the story except that he didn't want to see it in print before election day, that if I wanted to hold off until the next issue he would put me in touch with somebody who would tell me the whole story, for good or ill. “Call Miles Rubin,” he said, “and tell him I told you to ask him about this. He'll fill you in.”

That was fine, I said. I was in no special hurry for the story, anyway. So I let it ride for a few days, missing my deadline for that issue ... and on Wednesday I began trying to get hold of Miles Rubin, one of McGovern's top managers for California. All I knew about Rubin before I called was that several days earlier he had thrown Washington Post correspondent David Broder out of his office for asking too many questions—less than twenty-four hours before Broder appeared on Rubin's T.V screen as one of the three interrogators on the first Humphrey/McGovern debate.

My own experience with Rubin turned out to be just about par for the course. I finally got through to him by telephone on Friday, and explained that Mankiewicz had told me to call him and find out the details of the U-13 story. I started to say we could meet for a beer or two sometime later that afternoon and he could— “Are you kidding?” he cut in. “That's one story you're never going to hear.” “What?” “There's no point even talking about it,” he said flatly. Then he launched into a three-minute spiel about the fantastic honesty and integrity that characterized the McGovern campaign from top to bottom, and why was it that people like me didn't spend more time writing about The Truth and The Decency and The Integrity, instead of picking around the edge for minor things that weren't important anyway? “Jesus Christ!” I muttered. Why argue? Getting anything but pompous bullshit and gibberish out of Rubin would be like trying to steal meat from a hammerhead shark.

"Thanks," I said, and hung up That night I found Mankiewicz in the press room and told him what had happened He couldn't understand it, he said. But he would talk to Miles tomorrow and straighten it out.

I was not optimistic, and by that time I was beginning to agree that the U-13 story was not worth the effort. The Big Story in California, after all, was that McGovern was on the brink of locking up a first ballot nomination in Miami—and that Hubert Humphrey was about to get stomped so badly at the polls that he might have to be carried out of the state in a rubber sack.

The next time I saw Mankiewicz was on the night before the election and he seemed very tense very strong into the gla monster trip and when I started to ask him about Rubin he began reducing the story in a very loud voice so I figured it was time to forget it Several days later I learned the reason for Frank's bad nerves that night McGovern's fat lead over Humphrey which had hovered between 14 and 20 percentage points for more than a week, had gone into a sudden and apparently uncontrollable dive in the final days of the campaign By election ever it had shrunk to five points, and perhaps even less The shrinkage crisis was a closely guarded secret among McGovern's top command. Any leak to the press could have led to disastrous headlines on Tuesday morning. Election Day McGovern falters, Humphrey closing gap, a headline like that in either the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle might have thrown the election to Humphrey by generating a last minute Sympathy/Underdog turnout and whipping Hubert's field workers into a frenzied "get out the vote" effort.

But the grim word never leaked and by noon on Tuesday an almost visible wave of relief rolled through the McGovern camp

The dike would hold, they felt, at roughly five percent.

The coolest man in the whole McGovern entourage on Tuesday was George McGovern himself—who had spent all day Monday on airplanes, racing from one critical situation to another. On Monday morning he flew down to San Diego for a major rally; then to New Mexico for another final-hour rally on the eve of the New Mexico primary (which he won the next day—along with New Jersey and South Dakota) ... and finally on Monday night to Houston for a brief, unscheduled appearance at the National Governors' Conference, which was rumored to be brewing up a "stop McGovern" movement.

After defusing the crisis in Houston he got a few hours' sleep before racing back to Los Angeles to deal with another emergency: His 22-year-old daughter was having a premature baby and first reports from the hospital hinted at serious complications.

But by noon the crisis had passed, and somewhere sometime around one he arrived with his practorian guard of eight Secret Service agents at Max Palevsky's house in Bel Air, where he immediately changed into swimming trunks and dove into the pool. The day was grey and cool, no hint of sun, and none of the other guests seemed to feel like swimming.

For a variety of tangled reasons—primarily because my wife was one of the guests in the house that weekend—I was there when McGovern arrived. So we talked for a while, mainly about the possibility of either Muskie or Humphrey dropping out of the race and joining forces with George if the price was right... and it occurred to me afterward that it was the first time he'd ever seen me without a beer can in my hand or babbling like a loon about Freak Power, election bets, or some other twisted subject... but he was kind enough not to mention this.

It was a very relaxed afternoon. The only tense moment occurred when I noticed a sort of narrow-looking man with a distinctly predatory appearance standing off by himself and glowering down at the white telephone as if he planned to jerk it out by the root if it didn't ring within ten seconds and tell him everything he wanted to know.

June

"Who she hell is that?" I asked, pointing across the pool at him "That's Miles Rubin," somebody replied "Jesus," I said "I should have guessed" Moments later my curiosity got the better of me and I walked over to Rubin and introduced myself "I understand they're going to put you in charge of press relations after Miami," I said as we shook hands He said something I didn't understand, then hurried away. For a moment I was tempted to call him back and ask if I could feel his pulse. But the moment passed and I jumped into the pool, instead.

The rest of the day disintegrated into chaos drunkenness, and the kind of hysterical fatigue that comes from spending too much time racing from one place to another and being shoved around in crowds. McGovern won the Democratic primary by exactly five percent—45 to 40—and Nixon came from behind in the G.O.P race to top Ashbrook by 87 to 13 She was gonna be an actress and I was gonna learn to fly She took off to find the footlights and I took off to find the sky —Tax by Harry Chapin George McGovern's queer idea that he could get himself elected President on the Democratic ticket by dancing a muted whipsong on the corpse of the Democratic Party is suddenly beginning to look very sane, and very possible. For the last five or six days in California, McGovern's campaign was covered from dawn to midnight by fifteen or twenty camera crews, seventy-five to a hundred still photographers, and anywhere from fifty to two hundred linear/writing press types.

The media crowd descended on McGovern like a swarm of wild bees, and there was not one of them who doubted that he/she was covering The Winner. The sense of impending victory around the pool at the Wilshire Hyatt House was as sharp and all-pervasive. as the gloom and desperation in Hubert Humphrey's national staff headquarters about ten miles west at the far more chic and fashionable Beverly Hilton.

In the McGovern press suite the big-time reporters were playing stud poker—six or eight of them, hunkered down in their shirt-sleeves and loose ties around a long white-cloth-covered table with a pile of dollar bills in the middle and the bar about three feet behind Tom Wicker's chair at the far end. At the other end of the room, to Wicker's left, there were three more long white tables, with four identical big typewriters on each one and a pile of white legal-size paper stacked neatly beside each typewriter. At the other end of the room, to Wicker's right, was a comfortable couch and a giant floor-model 24-inch Motorola color T.V set . . . the screen was so large that Dick Cavett's head looked almost as big as Wicker's, but the sound was turned off and nobody at the poker table was watching the T.V set anyway. Mort Sahl was dominating the screen with a seemingly endless, borderline-hysteria monologue about a bunch of politicians he didn't have much use for—(Muskie, Humphrey, McGovern)—and two others (Shirley Chisholm and former New Orleans da Jim Garrison) that he liked.

I knew this, because I had just come up the outside stairway from my room one floor below to get some typing paper, and I'd been watching the Cavett show on my own 21-inch Motorola color T.V.

I paused at the door for a moment, then edged around to the poker table towards the nearest stack of paper. "Ah, decadence, decadence . . . ," I muttered. "Sooner or later it was bound to come to this."

Kirby Jones looked up and grinned. “What are you bitching about this time, Hunter? Why are you always bitching?” “Never mind that,” I said. “You owe me $20 & I want it now.” “What?” he looked shocked. “Twenty dollars for what?”

I nodded solemnly. "I knew you'd try to welsh. Don't tell me you don't remember that bet."

"What bet?" “The one we made on the train in Nebraska,” I said. “You said Wallace wouldn't get more than 300 delegates . . . But he already has 317, and I want that $20.”

He shook his head. “Who says he has that many? You've been reading the New York Times again.” He chuckled and glanced at Wicker, who was dealing. “Let's wait until the convention, Hunter, things might be different then.”

"You pig," I muttered, easing toward the door with my paper. "I've been hearing a lot about how the McGovern campaign is finally turning dishonest, but I didn't believe it until now."

He laughed and turned his attention back to the game. “All bets are payable in Miami, Hunter. That's when we'll count the marbles.”

I shook my head sadly and left the room. Jesus, I thought, these bastards are getting out of hand. Here we were still a week away from D-day in California, and the McGovern press suite was already beginning to look like some kind of Jefferson-Jackson Day stag dinner. I glanced back at the crowd around the table and realized that not one of them had been in New Hampshire. This was a totally different crowd, for good or ill. Looking back on the first few weeks of the New Hampshire campaign, it seemed so different from what was happening in California that it was hard to adjust to the idea that it was still the same campaign. The difference between a sleek front-runner's act in Los Angeles and the spartan, almost skeletal machinery of an underdog operation in Manchester was almost more than the mind could deal with all at once.

Four months ago on a frozen grey afternoon in New Hampshire the McGovern "press bus" rolled into the empty parking lot of a motel on the outskirts of Portsmouth. It was 3:30 or so, and we had an hour or so to kill before the Senator would arrive by air from Washington and lead us downtown for a hand-shaking gig at the Booth fishworks.

The bar was closed, but one of McGovern's advance men had

1.N.P

arranged a sort of beer/booze and sandwich meat smorgasbord for the press in a lounge just off the lobby so all six of us climbed out of the bus which was actually an old three seater airport limou-sine and I went inside to kill time Of the six passengers in the "press bus, three were local McGovern volunteers. The other three were Ham Davis from the Providence Journal, Tim Crouse from the Rolling Stone Boston Bureau, and me. Two more media/press people were already inside Don Bruckner from the Los Angeles Times and Michelle Clark from C.B.S' There was also Dick Doucherty who had just quit his job as chief of the L.A Times New York bureau to become George McGovern's press secretary speechwriter main five, advance man, and all purpose traveling wazzard. Dougherty and Breuckner were sitting off by themselves at a corner table when the rest of us struggled into the lounge and filled out plates at the smorgubord table olives carrots celery stalks salami deviled eggs but when I asked for beer the middle aged waitress who was also the desk clerk said beer "wasn't included" in "the arrangements," and that if I wanted any I would have to pay cash for it.

"That's fine" I said "Bring me three Budweisers" She nodded "With three glasses?

"No One class" She hesitated, then wrote the order down and lumbered off toward wherever she kept the beer. I carried my plate over to an empty table and sat down to eat and read the local paper but there was no salt and pepper on the table so I went back up to the smorgasbord to look for it & bumped into somebody in a tan garbardine suit who was quietly loading his plate with carrots & salami.

"Sorry," I said

“Pardon me,” he replied.

I shrugged and went back to my table with the salt and pepper. The only noise in the room was coming from the L.A. Times corner. Everybody else was either reading or eating, or both. The only person in the room not sitting down was the man in the tan suit at the smorgasbord table. He was still fumbling with the food, keeping his back to the room.

There was something familiar about him. Nothing special—but enough to make me glance up again from my newspaper; a subliminal recognition-flash of some kind, or maybe just the idle journalistic curiosity that gets to be a habit after a while when you find yourself drifting around in the nervous murk of some story with no apparent meaning or spine to it. I had come up to New Hampshire to write a long thing on the McGovern campaign—but after twelve hours in Manchester I hadn't seen much to indicate that it actually existed, and I was beginning to wonder what the fuck I was going to write about for that issue.

There was no sign of communication in the room. The press people, as usual, were going out of their way to ignore each other's existence. Ham Davis was brooding over the New York Times, Crouse was re-arranging the contents of his knapsack, Michelle Clark was staring at her fingernails, Bruckner and Dougherty were trading Sam Yorty jokes... and the man in the tan suit was still shuffling back and forth at the smorgasbord table—totally absorbed in it, studying the carrots...

Jesus Christ! I thought. The Candidate! That crouching figure up there at the food table is George McGovern.

But where was his entourage? And why hadn't anybody else noticed him? Was he actually alone?

No, that was impossible. I had never seen a presidential candidate moving around in public without at least ten speedy “aides” surrounding him at all times. So I watched him for a while, expecting to see his aides flocking in from the lobby at any moment... but it slowly dawned on me that The Candidate was by himself: there were no aides, no entourage, and nobody else in the room had even noticed his arrival

This made me very nervous McGovern was obviously waiting for somebody to greet him keeping his back to the room not even looking around—so there was no way for him to know that nobody in the room even knew he was there.

Finally I got up and walked across to the food table watching McGovern out of the corner of one eye while I picked up some olives fetched another beer out of the ice bucket and finally reached over to tap The Candidate on the arm and introduce myself Hello Senator We met a few weeks ago at Tom Braden's house in Washington He smiled and reached out to shake hands "Of course of course he said What are you doing up here?

"Not much so far I said We've been waiting for you He nodded still poking around with the cold cuts I felt very uneasy. Our last encounter had been somewhat jangled. He had just come back from New Hampshire very tired and depressed and when he arrived at Briden's house we had already finished dinner and I was getting heavily into drink. My memory of that evening is somewhat dim, but even in dimness I recall beating my guns at top speed for about two hours about how he was doing everything wrong and how helpless it was for him to think he could ever accomplish anything with that goddamn albatross of a Democratic Party on his neck, and that if he had any real sense he would make drastic alterations in the whole style & tone of his campaign and re model it along the lines of the Aspen Freak Power Uprising specifically along the lines of my own extremely weird and nerve rattling campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County Colorado McGovern had listened politely but two weeks later in New Hampshire there was no evidence to suggest that he had taken my advice very seriously. He was still plodding along in the passive/underdog role still driving back & forth across the state in his lonely one-car motorcade to talk with small groups of people in rural living rooms. Nothing heavy nothing wild or electric. All he has offering he said was a care and admittedly longshot opportunity to vote for an honest and intelligent presidential can didate.

A very strange option, in any year—but in mid-February of 1972 there were no visible signs, in New Hampshire, that the citizenry was about to rise up and drive the swine out of the temple. Beyond that, it was absolutely clear—according to the Wizards, Gurus, and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington—that Big Ed Muskie, the Man from Maine, had the Democratic nomination so deep in the bag that it was hardly worth arguing about.

Nobody argued with the things McGovern said. He was right, of course—but nobody took him very seriously, either... 7:45 A.M. . . . The sun is fighting through the smog now, a hot grey glow on the street below my window. Friday morning business-worker traffic is beginning to clog Wilshire Boulevard and the Glendale Federal Savings parking lot across the street is filling up with cars. Slump-shouldered girls are scurrying into the big Title Insurance & Trust Company and Crocker National Bank buildings, rushing to punch in on the time clock before 8:00.

I can look down from my window and see the two McGovern press buses loading. Kirby Jones, the press secretary, is standing by the door of the No. 1 bus and herding two groggy C.B.S cameramen aboard like some kind of latter-day Noah getting goats aboard the ark. Kirby is responsible for keeping the McGovern press/media crowd happy—or at least happy enough to make sure they have the time and facilities to report whatever McGovern, Mankiewicz, and the other Main Boys want to see and read on tonight's T.V news and in tomorrow's newspapers. Like any other good press secretary, Kirby doesn't mind admitting—off the record—that his love of Pure Truth is often tempered by circumstance. His job is to convince the press that everything The Candidate says is even now being carved on stone tablets.

The Truth is whatever George says; this is all ye know and all ye need to know. If McGovern says today that the most important issue in the California primary is abolition of the sodomy statutes, Kirby will do everything in his power to convince everybody on the press bus that the sodomy statutes must be

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abolished and if George decides tomorrow that his prosodomy gg isn't making it with the voters, Kirby will get behind a quick press release to the effect that "new evidence from previously obscure sources" has convinced the Senator that what he really meant to say was that sodomy itself should be abolished.

This kind of fancy footwork was executed a lot easier back there in the early primaries than it is now. Since Wisconsin, McGovers's words have been watched very carefully. Both his mushrooming media entourage and his dwindling number of opponents have pounced on anything even vaguely controversial or potentially damaging in his speeches. Press conferences, position papers, or even idle comments.

McGovern is very sensitive about this sort of thing, and for excellent reason In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska & California) he has spent an alarmingly big chunk of his campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is really a sort of Trojan Horse candidate—coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a Red bent helibroth of Radicals, Dopers, Trators, Sex Fiends, Anarchists Winos, and "extremists" of every description The assault began in Ohio when the Senator from Boeing (Henry Jackson, D Wash) began telling everybody his advance man could round up to listen to him that McGovern was not only a Marjuana Sympathizer, but also a Fellow Traveler. Not exactly a dope-sucker and a card-carrying Red but almost In Nebraska it was Humphrey, and although he dropped the Fellow Traveler slur, he added Amnesty and Abortion to the Marijuana charge and caused McGovern considerable grief By election day the situation was so grim in traditionally conservative, Catholic Omaha that it looked like McGovern might actually lose the Nebraska primary one of the kingpans in his overall strategy Several hours after the polls closed the mood in the Omaha Hilton

Situation Room was extremely glum. The first returns showed Humphrey well ahead, and just before I was thrown out I heard Bill Dougherty—Lieutenant Gov. of South Dakota and one of McGovern's close friends and personal advisors—saying: "We're gonna get zinged tonight, folks."

It was almost midnight before the out-state returns began offsetting Hubert's big lead in Omaha, and by 2:00 A.M. on Wednesday it was clear that McGovern would win—although the final 6 percent margin was about half of what had been expected ten days earlier, before Humphrey's local allies had fouled the air with alarms about Amnesty, Abortion, and Marijuana.

Sometime around 11:30 I was readmitted to the Situation Room—because they wanted to use my portable radio to get the final results—and I remember seeing Gene Pokorny slumped in a chair with his shoes off and a look of great relief on his face. Pokorny, the architect of McGovern's breakthrough victory in Wisconsin, was also the campaign manager of Nebraska, his home state, and a loss there would have badly affected his future. Earlier that day in the hotel coffee shop I'd heard him asking Gary Hart which state he would be assigned to after Nebraska. “Well, Gene,” Hart replied with a thin smile. “That depends on what happens tonight, doesn't it?” Pokorny stared at him, but said nothing. Like almost all the other key people on the staff, he was eager to move on to California. “Yeah,” Hart continued. “We were planning on sending you out to California from here, but recently I've been thinking more and more about that slot we have open in the Butte, Montana office.”

Again, Pokorny said nothing ... but two weeks later, with Nebraska safely in the bag, he turned up in Fresno and hammered out another McGovern victory in the critically important Central Valley. And that slot in Butte is still open ...

Which is getting a bit off the point here. Indeed. We are drift ing badly—from motorcycles to Mankiwicz to Omaha, Butte, Fresno, where will it end?

The point, I think, was that in both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries, back to back, McGovern was confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit punch and the groin shot, and in both states he found himself dangerously vulnerable to this kind of thing. Dirty politics confused him. He was not ready for it—and especially not from his fine old friend and neighbor, Hubert Humphrey. Toward the end of the Nebraska campaign he was spending most of his public time explaining that he was not for abortion on demand. Not for legalized Marijuana. Not for uncon dissonal amnesty and his staff was becoming more and more concerned that there man had been put completely on the defensive.

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hick in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson's early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent's life long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnward sons.

"Christ we can't get away with calling him a pig fucker," the campaign manager protested "Nobody's going to believe a thing like that."

"I know," Johnson replied. But let's make the sonofabitch deny it."

McGovern has not learned to cope with this tactic yet. Humphrey used it again in California with different issues, and once again George found himself working overtime to deny wild, baseless charges that he was (1) Planning to scuttle both the Navy and the Air Force, along with the whole Aerospace industry, and (2) He was a sworn foe of all Jews and if he ever got to the White House he would immediately cut off all military aid to Israel and sit on his hands while Russian-equipped Arab lions drove the Jews into the sea.

McGovern scolded at these charges dismissing them as "ridiculous lies" and repeatedly explained his positions on both issues—but when they counted the votes on election night it was obvious that both the Jews and the Aerospace workers in Southern California had taken Humphrey's bait. All that saved McGovern in California was a long-overdue success among black voters, strong support from chicanos, and a massive pro-McGovern Youth Vote.

This is a very healthy power base, if he can keep it together—but it is not enough to beat Nixon in November unless McGovern can figure out some way to articulate his tax and welfare positions a hell of a lot more effectively than he did in California. Even Hubert Humphrey managed to get McGovern tangled up in his own economic proposals from time to time during their T.V debates in California—despite the fact that toward the end of that campaign Humphrey's senile condition was so obvious that even I began feeling sorry for him.

Indeed. Sorry. Senile. Sick. Tangled... That's exactly how I'm beginning to feel. All those words and many others, but my brain is too numb to spit them out of the memory bank at this time. No person in my condition has any business talking about Hubert Humphrey's behavior. My brain has slowed down to the point of almost helpless stupor. I no longer even have the energy to grind my own teeth.

So this article is not going to end the way I thought it would . . . and looking back at the lead I see that it didn't even start that way either. As for the middle, I can barely remember it. There was something about making a deal with Mankiewicz and then Seizing Power in American Samoa, but I don't feel ready right now. Maybe later . . .

Way out on the far left corner of this desk I see a note that says "Call Mankiewicz—Miami Hotel rooms."

That's right. He was holding three rooms for us at the convention. Probably I should call him right away and firm that up... or maybe not.

But what the hell? These things can wait. Before my arms go numb there were one or two points I wanted to make. This is certainly no time for any heavy speculation or long-range analysis—on any subject at all, but especially not on anything as volatile and complex as the immediate future of George McGovern vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

Yet it is hard to avoid the idea that McGovern has put the June Hart and Mankewicz search for clues as Pat Caddell briefs the press on the strange case of the�d appearing margin at a press confer ence the morning after the California primary Party through some very drastic changes in the last few months. The Good Ole Boys are not pleased with him. But they can't get a grip on him either—and now, less than three weeks before the convention, he is so close to a first-ballot victory that the old hacks and ward-heelers who thought they had total control of the Party less than six months ago find themselves skulking around like old winos in the side alleys of presidential politics—first stripped of their power to select and control delegations, then rejected as delegates themselves when Big Ed took his overcrowded bandwagon over the high side on the first lap . . . and now, incredible as it still seems to most of them, they will not even be allowed into the Party convention next month.

One of the first people I plan to speak with when I get to Miami is Larry O'Brien: shake both of his hands and extend powerful congratulations to him for the job he has done on the Party. In January of 1968 the Democratic Party was so fat and confident that it looked like they might keep control of the White House, the Congress, and in fact the whole U.S. Government almost indefinitely. Now, four and a half years later, it is a useless bankrupt hulk. Even if McGovern wins the Democratic nomination, the Party machinery won't be of much use to him, except as a vehicle. “Traditional Politics with a Vengeance” is Gary Hart's phrase — a nutshell concept that pretty well describes the theory behind McGovern's amazingly effective organization. “The Politics of Vengeance” is a very different thing—an essentially psychotic concept that Hart would probably not go out of his way to endorse.

Vehicle . . . vehicle . . . vehicle—a very strange looking word, if you stare at it for eight or nine minutes . . . “Skulking” is another interesting-looking word.

And so much for that.

The morning news says Wilbur Mills is running for President again. He has scorned all invitations to accept the Number Two spot with anyone else—especially George McGovern. A very depressing bulletin. But Mills must know what he's doing. His name

is said to be magic in certain areas. If the Party rejects McGovern, I hope they give it to Mills. That would just about make the nut Another depressing news item—out of Miami Beach this time—says an unnatural number of ravens have been seen in the city recently. Tourists have complained of being kept awake all night by “horrible croaking sounds” outside their hotel windows. “At first there were only a few,” one local businessman explained. “But more and more keep coming. They're building big nests in the trees along Collins Avenue. They're killing the trees and their droppings smell like dead flesh.”

Many residents say they can no longer leave their windows open at night, because of the crooking "I've always loved birds," said another resident "But these goddamn ravens are something else!"