“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 Levi’s 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 backseat 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 football on the stump, but it had 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 no doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro 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 a 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 pinpoint style & precision.
He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh and laughed: “That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!”
That was four years ago. LBJ was Our President and there was no real hint, 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 today.
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-Romney 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 Wayfarer 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, but of course he had already dropped out.
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 those 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 6 and 8 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 & a Hitchhiker
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 or 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 illiterates 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 drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlborough and I saw she was crying, which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about “junkies” and “loonies” and “doom-freaks.”
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 for 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 in a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was okay.
I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really “okay.” 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 three thirty, 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 nymphet 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’d 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 home 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.
Harold Hughes Is Your Friend
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 handgrabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so 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-aged 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 diversion 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 and thirty-five.
After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Phillips 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 neo-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, goddamn it! 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 campaign manager in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa—Senator Harold Hughes—had just announced that 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’ve been crisscrossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him “untouchable.” 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 L.A. Times newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action, 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 got 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 gray marble tiles.
“Say . . . ah . . . I hate to mention this,” I said. “But what about this thing with Hughes?”
He flinched 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 undoing 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 o
ff to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pin-striped suit.
Enter, the Shadow
I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip—which was, after all, a long-shot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than thirty to one.
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 wish 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 usually much slower than the people they want to lead.
This is an ugly portent for the twenty-five million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five who may or may 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 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 twenty-five million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.