Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (21 page)

February 3, 1972

There are issues enough. What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone.

The failure 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

Bruckner’s article was focused on the mood of Young Blacks, but unless you were reading very closely, the distinction was easy to miss. Because the mood amoung Young Whites is not much different—despite a lot of well-financed publicity about the potentially massive “youth vote.”

These are the twenty-five million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five—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 twenty-five 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 10 percent. That’s the colleges; the other 90 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 want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie 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 twenty-six-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 PBS was there, dressed in a snappy London Fog 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 sink-hole of a city.

As always, the “print people” stood or sat in a timid half circle behind the network TV 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 got 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. Levi’s don’t make it in this town; if you show up wearing Levi’s they figure you’ll either be 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 rap—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. Rella Factor—widow 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, discreetly as possible, between Hubert, Nixon, and maybe—just for the
natural randy 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 “exit” 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 . . . 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 cars.

There was at least one network TV 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 TV 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 ... and God only knows what kind of vengeful energy is driving him this time, but a lot of the people who said he was suffering from brain bubbles when he first mentioned that he might run again in ’72 are beginning to take him seriously: not as a Democratic contender, but as an increasingly possible Fourth Party candidate with the power to put a candidate like Muskie through all kinds of terrible changes between August and November.

To Democratic chairman Larry O’Brien, the specter of a McCarthy candidacy in ’72 must be something like hearing the Hound of the Baskervilles sniffing and pissing 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/radical votes away from either Muskie or
Humphrey to make the Democratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them.

Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind, but the possibilities are ominous, and anybody who thought he was kidding got snapped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Muskie 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 warning that he was going to hold Muskie “accountable” for his hawkish stance on the war 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’d been wrong about Vietnam in the past, but that now “I’ve had reason to change my mind.” His new position was an awkward thing to explain, but after admitting his “past mistakes” he said that he now favored “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 afterward, 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.