HST: Gary Hart said the other day that…
Ed: Gary Hart?
HST: Yeah, he said that the only person he could think of who might have been able to do it this year—who could have won by being “radical” but without being perceived as a left, knee-jerk liberal—was Harold Hughes, because he has a kind of kinky anarchistic streak in him…. Maybe Wallace with a little help this year—if he’d gotten his campaign organized two years ago, like McGovern did, and if he’d changed his racist tune a bit—would have been very dangerous. But he never got his act together; he’s finished now.
Ed: Wallace is finished in politics?
HST: Yeah, but a candidate like Wallace could be very dangerous in ’76—like any candidate who can convince the voters that he really intends to change the system drastically, in almost any direction, could be dangerous. I think what most people seem to be tired of are the sort of lint-headed, wooly-minded—what a lot of people call do-gooders—people who would like to do the right thing, but who just can’t get it up. That kind of candidate is going out of style. I don’t think Ted Kennedy, for instance, is going to win in ’76. He’s too much of an “old politician,” in the sense that McGovern eventually ended up an “old potitician.” All this running around the country endorsing Hanrahan and Hicks. For instance, in Minnesota, Mondale was one of the people that…
Ed: He’s the Senator from Minnesota? Fritz Mondale?
HST: Mondale ran almost 15 points ahead of McGovern in Minnesota, but on paper there’s very little difference between their points of view or in what they stand for.
Ed: Are you considering running for office yourself?
HST: Yeah, I was thinking of running for the Senate in Colorado.
Ed: The Senate in Colorado?
HST: Yeah—the U.S. Senate from Colorado. But I might end up running against Gary Hart in the primary. That would be interesting…. I might not run as a Democrat, or I might not at all. It’s a grueling, rotten ordeal to go through.
Ed: Well, you’ve run for office before… on the Freak Power ticket, when you were running for Sheriff in Aspen. What were your campaign promises during that election?
HST: There were several. I was going to rip up the streets for one.
Ed: Rip up the streets?
HST: With jackhammers.
Ed: With jackhammers?
HST: Send a horde of freaks into the streets on the morning after the election to tear up the streets and sod them… use all the asphalt to build a huge parking lot at the edge of town…. And there was a certain heavy drug element in the campaign which the Washington Post was responsible for.
Ed: Did you make any campaign promises regarding the legalization of any drugs?
HST: Well, under state law I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t arrest people for breaking the law. However I agreed—in three consecutive debates with the incumbent Sheriff, I found myself in front of huge audiences defending the use of mescaline by the sheriff; saying that… well, finally I made one compromise: I said I wouldn’t eat mescaline while on duty, if I won.
Ed: What were the final numbers on that election?
HST: I won the city of Aspen.
Ed: You won the city of Aspen, but you lost the election?
HST: I lost heavily in the suburbs, the Agnew vote.
Ed: What was the final percentage?
HST: I think it was something like I got 44 percent of the vote as opposed to the 51 percent for the incumbent Democrat. What the bastards did was—which I’ll never forget and I think everyone should keep it in mind in terms of trying to run a third party candidacy nationally or anywhere else—rather than see us win… the other two parties did a massive telephone blitz the night before the election, and combined their votes against us.
Ed: If you were to run for Senate in Colorado what kind of a campaign would you conduct? Would you run as a Democrat?
HST: Only if proved to be absolutely impossible to win as a third party candidate. I’d have to check and see. I don’t see any point in running for anything any more unless I was serious about winning.
Ed: And what would your platform be?
HST: I haven’t thought about it. But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind…. Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.
Ed: Lash things around?
HST: That’s one of the secrets. The other… well, it depends on who you’re running against. But because of the Eagleton thing, Nixon didn’t really have to run at all. Any candidate who’d offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon—someone with a different concept of the presidency—could have challenged him and come very close to beating him. That was the prevailing theory among the Democrats all along in the primaries, which is why there were so many people getting into it early… Nixon was so vulnerable, he was such a wretched President, that almost any Democrat could beat him.
Ed: If you were to run for Senate in Colorado and win, would you then consider running for the presidency itself?
HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President—although I wouldn’t really want to be President. As a matter of fact, early on in the ’72 campaign, I remember telling John Lindsay that the time had come to abolish the whole concept of the presidency as it exists now, and get a sort of City Managertype President…. We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up—this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback—and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England—or the Queen—and have the real business of the presidency conducted by… a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.
Ed: One last question, Dr. Thompson, will you be covering the 1976 election as a journalist if you are not actually a candidate?
HST: I think so, yeah. There’s a sort of weird, junkie, addictive quality about covering a presidential campaign. You can see it in almost everybody in the press corps. I noticed it particularly in Tim Crouse who got hooked so fast it was just like somebody getting hooked on one shot of heroin…. I doubt if Crouse will miss another campaign as long as he lives; there’s a tremendous adrenaline rush, a hell of a high in politics, particularly when you’re winning or you think you have a chance to win….
Ed: Even for the reporter?
HST: Yeah. There’s an excitement and a pace to the presidential campaign that definitely keeps you wired. It’s a grueling trip, but that insane kind of zipping from place to place… on the Monday before the election we did Kansas and both coasts…. I crossed over my own house in Colorado three times. It’s frantic, kind of chasing after the Golden Fleece, and probably a lot more fun if you don’t win or if you have no real stake in it…. Yeah, it’s one of the best assignments I can think of.
* * *
Here’s a thing I want to hit—one of the unanswered questions of this campaign—a real key question is whether or not the potential McGovern vote came out. So far nobody’s been able to say. I don’t think it did. But if it did—if all the people who were likely to vote for McGovern actually voted for him—then the implications are nasty. There’s no hope for that kind of candidacy again. Something totally different will have to be done.
Ed: Haven’t Caddell’s statistics proven that, in fact, the McGovern vote did not come out? Either it didn’t vote at all, or it changed its vote to Nixon.
&nbs
p; HST: It’s hard to say exactly who the potential McGovern vote was. Pat’s theory is based on the assumption that McGovern could appeal in the end to the people who might have voted for Wallace, and the Humphrey Democrats. Forty-eight percent of the people who said they voted for Humphrey in California in the primary, ended up voting for Nixon in the general election. Pat says those figures are kinky… he say it’s more like 30 percent, but even so that’s a hell of a defection.
Ed: But you don’t seriously believe that the McGovern vote came out, do you? The people who might have voted for the candidate McGovern wasn’t didn’t really come out did they?
HST: Maybe the McGovern constituency came out, but I doubt it. The people who might have voted for the candidate McGovern wasn’t, like you said, they didn’t turn out. Half the people I know didn’t vote….
Ed: Half the people you know didn’t vote?
HST: Yeah. And besides that, the black vote was very low, the Chicano vote was negligible… and it was only 47 percent of the new voters voting. McGovern was counting on at least two-thirds of those people… and he was getting it consistently in the primaries, but of course those were Democratic primaries…. One of the odd things about the McGovern campaign is that nobody has any figures to explain the disastrous result. Nobody involved in the campaign seems to really have the will to understand. I don’t think we learned much from the McGovern campaign.
Ed: How many months were you on the road? Nearly a year?
HST: It was almost exactly a year….
Ed: Nevertheless you plan to do this again in ’76. Why?
HST: I cursed and groaned and shouted and actually quit as National Affairs Editor about four times but… that’s because your nerves get stretched so raw, you get so hellishly tense… that… like anything else when you’re that wired, good things are very good and bad things are very bad. It’s a strange kind of high… that’s the reason you get so many volunteers into politics: campaign groupies, politics junkies, people all around with all this energy and talent.
Ed: Would you describe yourself as a political junkie?
HST: I guess I have the potential for it. At the moment I’m not, but now I’m just exhausted… you know… you know… any time you’ve been involved in it, I mean really involved in it… on a level where you have some control over it… that Sheriff’s campaign in Aspen was a high that I’ve never gotten from any kind of a drug. It’s mainly an adrenaline high, that’s what it is…
Ed: The other day I reread the end of Hell’s Angels, one of my favorite books… and you talked about The Edge… you know… that moment that I’ve experienced… I was a… minor league bike-rider in my youth… that moment of being on the edge… and you talk about that a lot throughout your coverage this past year. You said the candidates… the staff, and the press… were all on The Edge… is politics the greatest Edge you’ve discovered? Is that the sharpest Edge that you’ve personally experienced and would like to continue to experience? Politics?
HST: That depends on what kind of campaign it is. I couldn’t think of anything… it’d be hard to imagine anything stranger or weirder or higher or closer to that Edge you’re talking about than a flat-out Freak Power campaign for President of the United States. The energy you could put behind that… the frenzy you’d stir up would probably get you killed, but Jesus Christ, it would be something that nobody’d ever forget. In Aspen, that theme song we had… Herbie Mann’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Ed: That was the theme song of your campaign?
HST: I used it on all spots…
Ed: Radio spots?
HST: There is no local television in Aspen, so we used the radio. And we got the people very frightened by that song…. Like I say, the two parties combined against us. All the incumbents won. Both the Democrats and the Republicans dumped their challengers, to make sure the Freak Power candidates didn’t win.
My thinking was based on the assumption of a natural constituency of about 35 percent, so if we could make it a three-way race, all we had to do was get about 10 percent more… which we did but it never occurred to me that the bastards would actually combine against us. I doubt if they could do that nationally, but it’s easy in a small town. Not even on the state level. That’s one of the factors I’m considering in terms of running for the Senate. I’ve been talking to people like Rick Stearns, Carl Wagner, Sandy Berger—some of the best people in the McGovern campaign, and sort of half-seriously asking if they’d like to come out and run a neo-Freak Power campaign for the U.S. Senate in Colorado. I don’t think we’d have to talk about eating mescaline on the Senate floor… but… there’s a tremendous void between the outright Freak Power and conventional politics. In Aspen I had a set of stocks built….
Ed: Stocks? You mean the old-fashioned hands and legs and…
HST: Rights, stocks—three holes, one for the neck, one for each wrist. They were going to be installed on the courthouse lawn for dishonest drug dealers.
Ed: Stocks for dishonest drug dealers? What else was in the platform?
HST: Immediate and unceasing harassment of real estate developers… anybody who fouled the air with asphalt smoke or dumped scum into the river. And people went along with this platform even though—on top of everything else—I’d shaved my head completely bald. The people who voted against me thought I was the Anti-Christ, finally come back… finally arrived once again on earth—right there in Aspen, Colorado.
Ed: So the Edge we’re talking about would be really the greatest if one were the candidate himself?
HST: Yeah, but then the punishment would be the greatest too… it’s much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate.
Ed: How about writing about it?
HST: That actually isn’t much fun, writing about it… the High is in the participation, and particularly if you identify with one candidate…. I don’t think that I could do it if I didn’t care who won. It’s the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don’t care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams if only a huge bet. You’d be surprised how fast the adrenaline comes up, if you stand to lose $1,000 every time the ball goes up in the air. That’s why the Aspen Freak Power campaign developed all that fantastic voltage. Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach…. There are a lot of people just walking around bored stupid….
The author discussing the 1974 race in Colorado with Carl Wagner, “one of the best field organizers in the business,” according to Senator McGovern.
Bad Losers. STUART BRATESMAN
Ed: Any kind of campaign that taps that energy would…
HST: Would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.
Ed: And would ultimately for you be another paramount experience—out there on the Edge?
HST: Oh, absolutely. But you know you’d be killed, of course, and that would add to it considerably—never knowing when the bullet was coming.
Epitaph
Four More Years… Nixon Uber Alles… Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl…
President Nixon will be sworn into office for a second term today, emboldened by his sweeping electoral triumph of last November and a Vietnam peace settlement apparently within his grasp… In the most expensive inauguration in American history—the cost is officially estimated at more than $4 million—Mr. Nixon will once again take the oath on a temporary stand outside the east front of the Capitol, then ride in a parade expected to draw 200,000 people to Pennsylvania Avenue and its environs, and millions more to their television sets… It will be the President’s first statement to the American people since his television appearance on November 6, election eve. Since then the peace talks have collapsed, massive bombing of North Vietnam has been instituted and then called off, and the talks have resumed without extended public comment from Mr. Nixon…
—San Francisco Chronicle, January 20, 1973
When the Great Scorer comes to write
against your name—he marks—
Not that you won or lost—
But how you played the game.
—Grantland Rice: who was known—prior to his death in the late fifties—as “The Dean of American Sportswriters,” and one of Richard Nixon’s favorite authors.
They came together on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in heat.
Under a brown California sky, the fierceness of their struggle brought tears to the eyes of 90,000 God-fearing fans.
They were twenty-two men who were somehow more than men.
They were giants, idols, titans….
Behemoths.
They stood for everything Good and True and Right in the American Spirit.
Because they had guts.
And they yearned for the Ultimate Glory, the Great Prize, the Final Fruits of a long and vicious campaign.
Victory in the Super Bowl: $15,000 each.
They were hungry for it. They were thirsty. For twenty long weeks, from August through December, they had struggled to reach this Pinnacle… and when dawn lit the beaches of Southern California on that fateful Sunday morning in January, they were ready.
To seize the Final Fruit.
They could almost taste it. The smell was stronger than a ton of rotten mangoes. Their nerves burned like open sores on a dog’s neck. White knuckles. Wild eyes. Strange fluid welled up in their throats, with a taste far sharper than bile.
Behemoths.
Those who went early said the pre-game tension was almost unbearable. By noon, many fans were weeping openly, for no apparent reason. Others wrung their hands or gnawed on the necks of pop bottles, trying to stay calm. Many fist-fights were reported in the public urinals. Nervous ushers roamed up and down the aisles, confiscating alcoholic beverages and occasionally grappling with drunkards. Gangs of Seconal-crazed teenagers prowled through the parking lot outside the stadium, beating the mortal shit out of luckless stragglers….