Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (23 page)

“I didn’t think you were going to,” he said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I knew we were doomed.”

“But I
did
stand,” I said. “I figured, hell, I’m Dave’s guest—why not stand and make it easy for him? But I never even thought about my goddamn hat.”

Actually, I was happy to get out of that place. The Redskins were losing, which pleased me, and we were thrown out just in time to get back to Burgin’s house for the 49er game on TV. If they won this one, they would go against the Redskins next Sunday in the playoffs—and by the end of the third quarter I had worked myself into a genuine hate frenzy; I was howling like a butcher when the 49ers pulled it out in the final moments with a series of desperate maneuvers, and the moment the gun sounded I was on the phone to TWA, securing a seat on the Christmas Nite Special to San Francisco. It was extremely important, I felt, to go out there and do everything possible to make sure the Redskins got the mortal piss beaten out of them.

Which worked out. Not only did the 49ers stomp the jingo bastards and knock them out of the playoffs, but my seat companion for the flight from Dallas to San Francisco was Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary trial lawyer, who is also president of the Washington Redskins.

“Heavy duty for you people tomorrow,” I warned him. “Get braced for a serious beating. Nothing personal, you understand. Those poor bastards couldn’t have known what they were doing when they croaked a Doctor of Journalism out of the press box.”

He nodded heavily and called for another drink. “It’s a goddamn shame,” he muttered. “But what can you really expect? You lie down with pigs and they’ll call you a swine every time.”

“What? Did you call me a
swine
?”

“Not me,” he said. “But this world is full of slander.”

We spent the rest of the evening on politics. He is backing Muskie,
and as he talked I got the feeling that he felt he was already at a point where, sooner or later, we would all be. “Ed’s a good man,” he said. “He’s honest. I respect the guy.” Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. “But the main reason I’m working for him,” he said, “is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.” He stabbed the arm again. “If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” hold actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the forty million I tend to agree with a chance to vote
for
something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

I have been through three presidential elections now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote
for.
In 1964 I refused to vote at all, and in ’68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory.

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

Not even James Reston, the swinging Calvinist, claims to see any light at the end of the tunnel in ’72. Reston’s first big shot of the year dealt mainly with a grim “memo” by former JFK strategist Fred Dutton, who is now a Washington lawyer.

There are hints of hope in the Reston-Dutton prognosis, but not for the next four years. Here is the rancid nut of it: “The 1972 election
probably is fated to be a dated, weakening election, an historical curio, belonging more to the past than to the new national three- or four-party trend of the future.”

Reston either ignored or overlooked, for some reason, the probability that Gene McCarthy appears to be gearing up almost exactly the kind of “independent third force in American politics” that both Reston and Dutton see as a wave of the future.

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 clichés raked up from old speeches by ... yes ... Himself, Richard Milhous Nixon.

In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brainrooms 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.”

March 2, 1972

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; not many cars out tonight, 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 best speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchanan.

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 near Nashua where Nixon had
just made a speech and the airport up in Manchester where a Learjet 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 Learjet 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 backward, 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, “Goddamn it, 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 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.”