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 shit on his neck, the eminently reasonable, fine old liberal journal, the Washington Post, called Muskie’s official “new beginning/I am now a candidate” speech on national TV a meaningless rehash of old bullshit and stale cliches raked up from old speeches by… yes… Himself, Richard Milhous 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 so much respect for the man that they can’t bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President… John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed… 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 fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street… peel back 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.”
February
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 early 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 Buchannan.
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 Merc 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 Lear 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 lashed 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 tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached 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 sane, 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 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 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 pinpoint style & precision.
He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked 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. 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 i
s 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-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, 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, cofounder 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 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 Marlboro 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 “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 back roads 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 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 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 serious candidate” by saying: “You’ll see how serous 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 in-fighting, 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.