Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (28 page)

All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train—and which also explains why his “up-top friend” (who
WWD
later identified as Rich Evans, one of Muskie’s chief tacticians) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan—who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.

“To hell with that,” I said. “Take the train with
us
. It’s the presidential express—a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Rich’s is a friend of Ed’s, I guess—but since you can’t find Rich at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, perhaps you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard.”

“I think you’re right,” he said.

“I am,” I replied. “And besides, I paid thirty dollars for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life.”

He smiled, accepting the card. “Maybe I can put it to better use,” he said.

Which was true. He did—and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my “credentials” to fall into foreign hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster “Sheridan”—and also with Jerry Rubin—to “sabotage” Muskie’s wind-up gig in Miami, and that “Sheridan’s” beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippie brain trust.

This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers, who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten—but they tried to give me a break, and now look what I done to ’em. Planted a human bomb on the train.

A story like this one is very hard to spike, because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devious behavior on all fronts—including the press—that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would I
give my credential
to some booze-maddened jailbird?

Well . . . why indeed?

Several reasons come quickly to mind, but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whistle-stop speeches through central Florida.

We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads
of black teenagers and some middle-aged ladies from one of the local union halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, “It’s time for the
good
people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”

After that, we went down to Delano—about a two-hour run—where Muskie addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who’d been let out of school to hear the candidate say, “It’s about time the good people of America got
together
behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”

And then we eased down the tracks to Sebring, where a feverish throng of about 150 senior citizens were on hand to greet the Man from Maine and pick up his finely honed message. As the train rolled into the station, Roosevelt Grier emerged from the caboose and attempted to lead the crowd through a few stanzas of “Let the Sunshine In.”

Then the candidate emerged, acknowledging Grier’s applause and smiling for the TV cameramen who had been let off a hundred yards up the track so they could get ahead of the train and set up . . . in order to film Muskie socking it to the crowd about how “It’s about time we
good
people, etc., etc. . . .”

Meanwhile, the Muskie girls—looking very snappy in their tricolored pre-war bunny suits—were mingling with the folks; saying cheerful things and handing out red, white, and blue buttons that said “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie.”

Meanwhile, back on the train, a goodly chunk of the press roster were over the hump into serious boozing. A few had already filed, but most had scanned the prepared text of Big Ed’s “whistlestop speech” and said to hell with it. Now, as the train headed south again, the Muskie girls were passing out sandwiches and O. B. McClinton, “the Black Irishman of Country Music,” was trying to lure people into the lounge car for a “singalong thing.”

It took awhile, but they finally collected a crowd. Then one of Muskie’s college-type staffers took charge. He told the Black Irishman what to play, cued the other staff people, then launched into about nineteen straight choruses of Big Ed’s newest campaign song: “He’s got the whole state of Florida . . . In his hands . . .”

I left at that point. The scene was pure Nixon—so much like a pep rally at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. “You know,” he said, “it’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.” He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. “I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,” he continued, “but I’ve never felt out of place before—never personally uncomfortable with the people.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s obvious—and I’ve finally figured out
why
.” He chuckled and glanced at the Muskie people again. “You know what it is?” he said. “It’s because these people act like goddamn Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me awhile, but I finally figured it out.”

On Monday morning, the day before the Florida primary, I flew down to Miami with Frank Mankiewicz, who runs the McGovern campaign.

We hit the runway in Key Biscayne at just over two hundred miles an hour in a strong crosswind, bouncing first on the left wheel and then—about one hundred yards down the runway—on the right wheel . . . then another long bounce, and finally straightening out just in front of the main terminal at Miami’s International Airport.

Nothing serious. But my Bloody Mary was spilled all over Monday’s
Washington Post
on the armrest. I tried to ignore it and looked over at Frank Mankiewicz (who was sitting next to me) . . . but he was still snoring peacefully.

I poked him. “Here we are,” I said. “Down home in Fat City again. What’s the schedule?”

Now he was wide awake, checking his watch. “I think I have to make a speech somewhere,” he said. “I also have to meet Shirley MacLaine somewhere. Where’s a telephone? I have to make some calls.”

Soon we were shuffling down the corridor toward the big baggage-claim merry-go-round. Mankiewicz had nothing to claim. He has learned to travel light. His “baggage,” as it were, consisted of one small canvas bag that looked like an oversize shaving kit.

My own bundle—two massive leather bags and a Xerox telecopier strapped into a fiberglass Samsonite suitcase—would be coming down the
baggage-claim chute any moment now. I tend to travel heavy; not for any good reason, but mainly because I haven’t learned the tricks of the trade.

“I have a car waiting,” I said. “A fine bronze-gold convertible. Why? Do you need a ride?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I have to make some calls first. You go ahead, get your car and all that goddamn baggage, and I’ll meet you down by the main door.”

I nodded and hurried off. The Avis counter was only about fifty yards away from the wall-phone where Mankiewicz was setting up shop with a handful of dimes and a small notebook. He made at least six calls and a page of notes before my bags arrived . . . and by the time I began arguing with the car rental woman the expression on Mankiewicz’s face indicated that he had everything under control.

I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist and central intelligence behind the McGovern for President campaign—a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work “Pre-owned Car” salesman—putting McGovern’s Florida Primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.

Mankiewicz—a forty-seven-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968—has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got underway last year. For a while he was the “Press Secretary,” then he was called the “Campaign Manager”—but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of “Political Director.” Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern’s alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon—the Man behind the Man.

Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote. This was long before Ed Muskie’s infamous “breakdown scene” on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester
Union Leader
.

When Frank laid his prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job—trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last-minute surge for
McGovern, the only candidate in the ’72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called Kennedy Machine.

Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the
Washington Post
before he quit to run McGovern’s campaign—and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing such a claim. Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own . . . even those who go off on hopeless tangents.

So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and “front-runner” Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.

New Hampshire in ’72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in ’68 jolted LBJ. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like “the champ,” and reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all,
Won
in New Hampshire.

Just like LBJ, who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.

But Muskie had only
one
week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already in . . . he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a “last-minute blitz” . . . shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie” and “Muskie Talks Straight” . . .

When Muskie arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who’d been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled, in his head, that I couldn’t raise a bet on him among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the ringside seats on fight night.

I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn’t want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got underway.