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 position 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.
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 say goodnight
When I lie down I have a great fear of falling.”
—François 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 standard-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 so off of all ten fingers.
People are beginning to notice, I think, but fuck them. I am beginning to notice some of their problems, too. Drug dependence is out in the open, now: Some people are getting heavy into downers—Reds, Quaaludes, Valiums—and others are gobbling speed, booze, Maalox, and other strange medications with fearsome regularity. The 1972 presidential campaign is beginning to feel more and more like the second day of a Hell’s Angels Labor Day picnic.
And we are only halfway home: Five more months… the moment I finish this goddamn thing I have to rush off to New York for the June 20th primary, then back to Washington to get everything packed for the move home to Colorado… and after that to Miami for the Democratic Convention, which is shaping up very fast these days as one of the most brutal and degrading animal acts of our time.
After Miami the calendar shows a bit of a rest on the political front—but not for me: I have to come back out to California and ride that goddamn fiendish Vincent Black Shadow again, for the road tests. The original plan was to deal with the beast in my off-hours during the California primary coverage, but serious problems developed.
Ten days before the election—with McGovern apparently so far ahead that most of the press people were looking for ways to avoid covering the final week—I drove out to Ventura, a satellite town just north of L.A. in the San Fernando Valley, to pick up the bugger and use it to cover the rest of the primary. Greg Jackson, an ABC correspondent who used to race motorcycles, went along with me. We were both curious about this machine. Chris Bunche, editor of Choppers magazine, said it was so fast and terrible that it made the extremely fast Honda 750 seem like a harmless toy.
This proved to be absolutely true. I rode a factory-demo Honda for a while, just to get the feel of being back on a serious road-runner again… and it seemed just fine: very quick, very powerful, very easy in the hands, one-touch electric starter. A very civilized machine, in all, and I might even be tempted to buy one if I didn’t have the same gut distaste for Hondas that the American Honda management has for Rolling Stone. They don’t like the image. “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” they say—but according to a letter from American Honda to the Rolling Stone ad manager, none of these nicest people have much stomach for a magazine like the Stone.
Which is probably just as well; because if you’re a safe, happy, nice, young Republican you probably don’t want to read about things like dope, rock music, and politics anyway. You want to stick with Time, and for weekend recreation do a bit of the laid-back street-cruising on your big fast Honda 750… maybe burn a Sportster or a Triumph here & there, just for the fun of it: But nothing serious, because when you start that kind of thing you don’t meet many nice people.
Jesus! Another tangent, and right up front, this time—the whole lead, in fact, completely fucked.
What can I say? Last week I blew the whole thing. Total failure. Missed the deadline, no article, no wisdom, no excuse… Except one: Yes, I was savagely and expertly duped by one of the oldest con trips in politics.
By Frank Mankiewicz, of all people. That scurvy, rumpled, treacherous little bastard… If I were running for President I would hire Mankiewicz to handle the press for me, but as a journalist I wouldn’t shed a tear if I picked up tomorrow’s paper and saw where nine thugs had caught poor Frank in an alley near the Capitol and cut off both of his Big Toes, making it permanently impossible for him to keep his balance for more than five or six feet in any direction.
The image is horrible: Mankiewicz gets a phone call from Houston, saying the Texas delegation is on the verge of selling out to a Humphrey/Wallace coalition… he slams down the phone and lunges out of his cubicle in “McGovern for President” headquarters, bouncing off the door-jamb and then grabbing the Coke machine in order to say upright—then lunging again into Rick Stearns’ office to demand a detailed breakdown on the sex lives and bad debts of every member of the Texas delegation… then, trying to catch his breath, gasping for air from the terrible exertion, he finally lunges back down the hall to his own cubicle.
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 impossibly top-heavy, wallowing crazily in the swells, needing outriggers 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 hangup 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 i
s 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 (ITT) 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 IBM typewriter-rental service in Milwaukee—with regard to the $600 Selectric Typewriter I left behind the desk when I checked out. It was gone when the IBM 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 vill of course pay!”
No. Never in hell. Because I have a receipt for that typewriter.1
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 1000cc 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.
The Vincent Black Shadow. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
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 Prine 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 Beachbums, 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 back into time and French poetry for a reminder 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 screeds 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’m up 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 California lashing together this thirty-three-pound satchel of notes, tapes, clippings, propaganda, etc…. 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 squalor 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 forget recently called me a “vicious misanthrope”… or maybe it was a “cynical misanthrope”… but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got 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 involved 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 overcharging 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 lever 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.