Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (25 page)

After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Phillips Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.

I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the
Rolling Stone
bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said—no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets—so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick,
the famous neo-Nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender “Jim,” which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as “Mr. Reynolds.”

Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. “My name’s not Reynolds, goddamn it! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the
Washington Evening Star.
” Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.

The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his campaign manager in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa—Senator Harold Hughes—had just announced that he was endorsing Ed Muskie.

This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes-McGovern–Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who’ve been crisscrossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him “untouchable.” If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.

Hughes had grown a beard; he didn’t mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then—and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry O’Brien’s personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the national convention.

Dick Dougherty, a former
L.A. Times
newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action, was so shaken by the news of Hughes’ defection that he didn’t even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just got the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate’s. When we got to the
Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking “Nevermore . . .”

By chance, I found George downstairs in the men’s room, hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the gray marble tiles.

“Say . . . ah . . . I hate to mention this,” I said. “But what about this thing with Hughes?”

He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his head and mumbling something about “a deal for the vice presidency.” I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together.

“Why do you think he did it?” I said.

He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. “Well . . .” he said finally. “I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re
all
surprised.”

He looked very tired, and I didn’t see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room. This proved to be my undoing because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I’d entered with the senator . . . but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pin-striped suit.

Enter, the Shadow

I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip—which was, after all, a long-shot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than thirty to one.

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available, this time around, and I was sorry I couldn’t get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wish he would say a lot more—or maybe something different.

Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?

Well . . . that would take a lot of time and space I don’t have now, but
for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been “against the War in Vietnam since 1963”—especially when your name is not one of the two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and when you’re talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early ’65.

A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned—but, as usual, the politicians are usually much slower than the people they want to lead.

This is an ugly portent for the twenty-five million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five who may or may not vote in 1972. And many of them probably
will
vote. The ones who go to the polls in ’72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the “best minds of my generation,” as Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in “Howl.” There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the “Youth Vote” will get a lot of people out to the polls in ’72. If you give twenty-five million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.

But what about next time? Who is going to explain, in 1976, that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should “try again” for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations—between the ages of twenty-two and forty—who will not give a hoot in hell about
any
election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson-Goldwater to Humphrey-Nixon to Nixon-Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.

This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto “Live Free or Die” inscribed above the numbers.

The highways are full of good mottoes. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about . . . what was it? Have these dangerous drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this:

“Between the Idea and the Reality . . . Falls the Shadow.”

The Shadow? I could almost
smell
the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night, and tomorrow’s schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida—except for Sam Yorty, and I didn’t feel ready for that.

The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhiker I saw was an eighteen-year-old kid with long black hair who was going to Reading—or “Redding,” as he said it—but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in November, he looked at me like I’d said something crazy.

“What election?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “I was only kidding.”

One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than a year now—a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked but not
well
-liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.

A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase—to the “White side” of Rock Creek Park—to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small, loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slumped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to “the McGovern problem.”

For more than a year now, he’s been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963; he’s for amnesty now; his alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5 billion Space Shuttle program, thereby croaking thousands of new jobs in the depressed Cape Kennedy–Central Florida area.

He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon-Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument
by midsummer—one of those wild-eyed fire-and-brimstone issues that scares the piss out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it . . . but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it’s desirable, but it’s “among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.”

This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year—especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando . . . or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of
Niggers
.

McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: he is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.

On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted—along with McGovern and most of his backers—that “American politics” is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and the Loyal Opposition.

That’s the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry O’Brien has decided to go with this year—and he says he can’t for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren’t bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.

Getting It On in D.C.

The most recent Gallup poll says Nixon & Muskie are running Head to Head, but on closer examination the figures had Muskie trailing by a bare 1 percent—so he quickly resigned his membership in the “Caucasians Only” Congressional Country Club in the horsey suburbs near
Cabin John, Maryland. He made this painful move in late January, about the same time he began hammering Nixon’s “end the war” proposal.