Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (26 page)

Watching Muskie on TV that week, I remembered the words of ex-senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) when he appeared at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in his role as the official spokesman for McGovern. Gruening was one of the two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964—the resolution that gave LBJ carte blanche to do Everything Necessary to win the war in Vietnam. (Wayne Morse of Oregon was the only other “nay” vote: . . . and both Gruening and Morse were defeated when they ran for reelection in 1966.)

In Worchester, Ernest Gruening approached the stage like a slow-moving golem. He is eighty-five years old, and his legs are not real springy—but when he got behind the podium he spoke like the Grim Reaper.

“I’ve known Ed Muskie for many years,” he said. “I’ve considered him a friend . . . but I can’t help remembering that, for all those years, while we were getting deeper and deeper into that war, and while more and more boys were dying . . . Ed Muskie stayed silent.”

Gruening neglected to say where McGovern had been on the day of the Tonkin Gulf vote . . . but I remember somebody saying, up on the press platform near the roof of the Assumption College gym, that “I can forgive McGovern for blowing that Tonkin thing, because the Pentagon lied—but what’s his excuse for not voting against that goddamn wiretapping bill?”
The Omnibus Crime Control & Safe Streets Act of 1968, a genuinely oppressive piece of legislation—even Lyndon Johnson was shocked by it, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to veto the bugger—for the same reasons cited by the many senators who called the bill “frightening” while refusing to vote against it because they didn’t want to be on record as having voted against “safe streets and crime control.” (The bare handful of senators who actually voted against the bill explained themselves in very ominous terms. For details, see
Justice
by Richard Harris.)

I had thought about this, but I had also thought about all the other aspects of this puzzling and depressing campaign—which seemed, a few months ago, to have enough weird and open-ended possibilities that I actually moved from Colorado to Washington for the purpose of “covering
the campaign.” It struck me as a right thing to do, at the time—especially in the wake of the success we’d had with two back-to-back Freak Power runs at the heavily entrenched Money/Politics/Yahoo establishment in Aspen.

But things are different in Washington. It’s not that everybody you talk to is aggressively hostile to any idea that might faze their well-ordered lifestyles; they’d just rather not think about it. And there is no sense of life in the Underculture. On the national/reality spectrum, Washington’s Doper/Left/Rock/Radical community is somewhere between Toledo and Biloxi. “Getting it on” in Washington means killing a pint of Four Roses and then arguing about Foreign Aid, over chicken wings, with somebody’s drunken congressman.

The latest craze on the local highlife front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia, in Washington, is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom—and the people who actually live and thrive here, in the great web of government, are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the party affiliation of the next president won’t make any difference at all, except on the surface.

The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same. So just lie back and live with it. To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about “getting things done in Washington” is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers “Stop Duane Thomas!”

Dope Saves the Cowboys

That is one aspect of the ’72 Super Bowl that nobody has properly dealt with: What was it like for those humorless, god-fearing Alger-bent Jesus Freaks to go out on that field in front of one hundred thousand people in New Orleans and get beaten like gongs by the only certified dope freak in the NFL? Thomas ran through the Dolphins like a mule through corn-stalks.

It was a fine thing to see; and it was no real surprise when the Texas
cops busted him, two weeks later, for Possession of Marijuana . . . and the Dallas coach said Yes, he’d just as soon trade Duane Thomas for almost anybody.

They don’t get along. Tom Landry, the Cowboys’ coach, never misses a chance to get up on the platform with Billy Graham whenever The Crusade plays in Dallas. Duane Thomas calls Landry a “plastic man.” He tells reporters that the team’s general manager, Tex Schramm, is “sick, demented, and vicious.” Thomas played his whole season, last year, without ever uttering a sentence to anyone on the team: not the coach, the quarterback, his blockers—nobody; dead silence.

All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number—which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over; the purse is safe in the vault; and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession.

Nobody really expects him to serve time, but nobody seems to think he’ll be playing for Dallas next year, either . . . and a few sporting people who claim to know how the NFL works say he won’t be playing for
anybody
next year; that the commissioner is outraged at this mockery of all those government-sponsored “Beware of Dope” TV shots that dressed up the screen last autumn.

We all enjoyed those spots, but not everyone found them convincing. Here was a White House directive saying several million dollars would be spent to drill dozens of Name Players to stare at the camera and try to stop grinding their teeth long enough to say they hate drugs of any kind . . . and then the best running back in the world turns out to be a goddamn uncontrollable drug-sucker.

The Five W’s

Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered out on another tangent. But why not? Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly, Old Politics trip, or it will drive you kicking the walls and hurling AR 3 speakers into the fireplace.

This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe the
feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk: seven
Washington Posts
, seven
Washington Stars
, seven
New York Times
, six
Wall Street Journals
, and one
Suck
. . . to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated . . . and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street to freak the neighbors.

After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with the man who said “No news is good news.” In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest . . . but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the Jump (or “Cont. on . . .”) page . . .

The
Post
will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa. The
Star
will say the same thing, and the
Journal
will say nothing at all. But the
Times
might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like: “When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental woman who seemed to be in control.”

Now that’s good journalism. Totally objective; very active, and straight to the point. But we need to know more.
Who
was that woman?
Why
did they fight?
Where
was Muskie taken?
What
was he saying when the microphone broke?

Jesus, what’s the other one? Every journalist in America knows the “Five W’s.” But I can only remember four. “Who, What, Why, Where,” . . . and, yes, of course . . . “When!”

But what the hell? An item like that tends to pinch the interest gland, so you figure it’s time to move out. Pack up the $419 Abercrombie & Fitch elephant-skin suitcase; send the phones and the scanner and the tape viewers by Separate Float, load everything into the weightless Magnesium Kitbag . . . then call for a high-speed cab to the airport; load on and zip off to wherever The Word says it’s happening.

The public expects no less. They want a man who can zap around the nation like a goddamn methedrine bat: racing from airport to airport, from one crisis to another—sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the “Five W’s” in a package that makes perfect sense. Why not? With
the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree. Or fly off and write nothing at all; get a room on the edge of Chicago and shoot up for about sixteen straight days—then wander back to Washington with a notebook full of finely honed insights on “The Mood of the Midwest.”

Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Washington—waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet Jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a “happy beat.”

At first I thought it was
me
; that I was missing all the action because I wasn’t plugged in. But then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn’t take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because the contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.

At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said were “right on top of things.” But they all seemed very depressed; not only about the ’72 election, but about the whole, long-range future of politics and democracy in America.

Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it’s just barely tolerable . . . and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.

March 16, 1972

One of the main marks of success in a career politician is a rooty distrust of The Press—and this cynicism is usually reciprocated, in spades, by most reporters who have covered enough campaigns to command a fat job like chronicling the Big Apple. Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken laid down the dictum that “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is
down
.”

This notion is still a very strong factor in the relationship between politicians and the big-time press. On lower levels you find a tendency—among people like “national editors” on papers in Pittsburgh and Omaha—to treat
successful
politicians with a certain amount of awe and respect. But the prevailing attitude among journalists with enough status to work presidential campaigns is that all politicians are congenital thieves and liars.

This is usually true. Or at least as valid as the consensus opinion among politicians that The Press is a gang of swine. Both sides will agree that the other might occasionally produce an exception to prove the rule, but the overall bias is rigid . . . and, having been on both sides of that ugly fence in my time, I tend to agree. . . .

Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered off again, and this time I can’t afford the luxury of raving at great length about anything that slides into my head. So, rather than miss another deadline, I want to zip up the nut with a fast and extremely pithy five hundred words because that’s all the space available, and in two hours I have to lash my rum-soaked red convertible across the Rick-enbacker Causeway to downtown Miami and then to the airport—in
order to meet John Lindsay in either Tallahassee or Atlanta, depending on which connection I can make: it is nearly impossible to get either in or out of Miami this week. All flights are booked far in advance, and the hotel/motel space is so viciously oversold that crowds of angry tourists are “becoming unruly”—according to the
Miami Herald
—in the lobbies of places that refuse to let them in.