Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (40 page)

Each candidate was entitled to a fifteen-minute nominating speech and two five-minute seconding speeches. The nightmare dragged on for four hours, and after the first forty minutes there was not one delegate in fifty, on the floor, who either knew or cared who was speaking. No doubt there were flashes of eloquence, now and then: probably Mike Gravel and Sissy Farenthold said a few things that might have been worth hearing, under different circumstances . . . but on that long Thursday night in Miami, with Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri waiting nervously in the wings to come out and accept the vice presidential nomination that McGovern had sealed for him twelve hours earlier, every delegate in the hall understood that whatever these other seven candidates were saying up there on the rostrum, they were saying for reasons that had nothing to do with who was going to be the Democratic candidate for vice president in November . . . and it was
not
going to be ex–Massachusetts governor “Chub” Peabody, or a grinning dimwit named Stanley Arnold from New York City who said he was The Businessman’s Candidate, or some black Step ’n’ Fetchit–style Wallace delegate from Texas called Clay Smothers.

But these brainless bastards persisted nonetheless, using up half the night and all the prime time on TV, debasing the whole convention with a blizzard of self-serving gibberish that drove whatever was left of the national TV audience to bed or the
Late Late Show
.

Thursday was not a good day for McGovern. By noon there was not much left of Wednesday night’s Triumphant Warrior smile. He spent most of Thursday afternoon grappling with a long list of vice presidential possibilities, and by two, the Doral lobby was foaming with reporters and TV cameras. The name had to be formally submitted by 3:59 PM, but it was 4:05 when Mankiewicz finally appeared to say McGovern had decided on Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri.

There is a very tangled story behind that choice, but I don’t feel like writing it now. My immediate reaction was not enthusiastic, and the staff people I talked to seemed vaguely depressed—if only because it was a concession to “the Old Politics,” a nice-looking Catholic boy from Missouri with friends in the Labor Movement. His acceptance speech that night was not memorable—perhaps because it was followed by the long-awaited appearance of Ted Kennedy, who had turned the job down.

Kennedy’s speech was not memorable either: “Let us bury the hatchet, etc. . . . and Get Behind the Ticket.” There was something hollow about it, and when McGovern came on, he made Kennedy sound like an old-timer.

Later that night, at a party on the roof of the Doral, a McGovern staffer asked me who I would have chosen for VP. I finally said I would have chosen Ron Dellums, the black congressman from Berkeley.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. “That would be suicide!”

I shrugged.

“Why Dellums?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said. “He offered it to Mayor Daley before he called Eagleton.”

“No!” he shouted. “Not Daley! That’s a lie!”

“I was in the room when he made the call,” I said. “Ask anybody who was there—Gary, Frank, Dutton—they weren’t happy about it, but they said he’d be good for the ticket.”

He stared at me. “What did Daley say?” he asked finally.

I laughed. “Christ, you
believed
that, didn’t you?”

He had, for just an instant. After all, there was a lot of talk about “pragmatism” in Miami, and Illinois was a key state . . . I decided to try the Daley rumor on other staff people, to see their reactions.

But I never got around to it. I forgot all about it, in fact, until flipping through my notebook on the midnight jet from Atlanta. I came across a statement by Ron Dellums. It depressed me, for some reason, but it seems like a good way to end this goddamn thing. Dellums writes pretty good, for a politician. It’s part of the statement he distributed when he switched his support from Shirley Chisholm to McGovern:

The great bulk of that coalition committed to change, human freedom, and justice in the country has moved actively and powerfully behind the candidacy of Senator McGovern. That coalition of hope, conscience, morality, and humanity—of the powerless and the voiceless—that did not exist in 1964, that expressed itself in outrage and frustration in 1968, and in 1972 began to form and welded itself imperfectly but courageously and lifted a man to the brink of the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States, and within a short but laborious step from the Presidency of the United States. The coalition that has formed behind Senator McGovern has battled the odds, baffled the pollsters, and beat the bosses. It is my conviction that when that total coalition of the victims in this country is ever formed, this potential for change would be unheralded, for it could pose a real alternative to expediency and status quo politics in America.

—Ron Dellums, July 9, 1972

September 28, 1972

The summer is over, the harvest is in, and we are not saved.

—Isaiah circa 8:21

Miami Beach, August 28, 1972—Earlier tonight I drove down the beach to a place called Dixie’s Doll House, for two six-packs of Ballantine ale. The place was full of old winos, middle-aged hookers, and aging young hustlers who looked like either junkies or Merchant Marine rejects; bearded geeks in gray T-shirts staggering back and forth along the bar, six nasty-looking pimps around a blue-lit pool table in the rear, and right next to me at the bar a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler snarling drunkenly at her nervous escort for the night: “Don’t gimmie that horseshit, baby! I don’t want a goddamn
one-dollar
dinner! I want a
ten-dollar
dinner!”

Life gets heavy here on the Beach from time to time. So I paid $2.70 each for my six-packs and then wheeled my big red Chevy Impala convertible back home to the Fontainebleau, about forty blocks north through the balmy southern night to the edge of the fashionable section.

“Bobo,” the master pimp and carmeister who runs what they call “the front door” here in these showplace beachfront hotels, eyed me curiously as I got out of the car and started dragging wet brown bags full of beer bottles out of the backseat. “You gonna need the car again tonight?” he asked.

“Probably,” I said. “But not for a while. I’ll be up in the room until
about midnight.” I looked at my watch. “The Rams–Kansas City game is on in three minutes. After that, I’ll work for a while and then go out for something to eat.”

He jerked the car door open, sliding fast behind the wheel to take it down to the underground garage. With his hand on the shift lever he looked up at me: “You in the mood for some company?”

“No,” I said. “I’m way behind. I’ll be up all night with that goddamn typewriter. I shouldn’t even take time to watch the game on TV.”

He rolled his eyes and looked up at what should have been the sky, but which was actually the gold-glazed portico roof above the entrance driveway: “Jesus, what kind of work do you
do
? Hump typewriters for a living? I thought the convention was over!”

I paused, tucking the wet beer bags under the arm of my crusty brown leather jacket. Inside the lobby door about twenty feet away I could see what looked like a huge movie-set cocktail party for rich Venezuelans and high-style middle-aged Jews: my fellow guests in the Fontainebleau. I was not dressed properly to mingle with them, so my plan was to stride swiftly through the lobby to the elevators and then up to my hideout in the room.

The Nixon convention had finished on Thursday morning, and by Saturday the hundreds of national press/media people who had swarmed into this pompous monstrosity of a hotel for convention week were long gone. A few dozen stragglers had stayed on through Friday, but by Saturday afternoon the style and tone of the place had changed drastically, and on Sunday I felt like the only nigger in the governor’s box on Kentucky Derby Day.

Bobo had not paid much attention to me during the convention, but now he seemed interested. “I know you’re a reporter,” he said. “They put ‘press’ on your house-car tag. But all the rest of those guys took off yesterday. What keeps
you
here?”

I smiled. “Christ, am I the only one left?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, there’s you and two others. One guy has that white Lincoln Continental—”

“He’s not press,” I said quickly. “Probably one of the GOP advance men, getting things settled with the hotel.”

He nodded. “Yeah, he acted like he was part of the show. Not like a reporter.” He laughed. “You guys are pretty easy to spot, you know that?”

“Balls,” I said. “Not me. Everybody else says I look like a cop.”

He looked at me for a moment, tapping his foot on the accelerator to keep the engine up. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. You could pass for a cop as long as you kept your mouth shut.”

“I’m usually pretty discreet,” I said.

He smiled. “Sure you are. We’ve all noticed it. That other press guy that’s still here asked me who you were the other day, when you were bad-mouthing Nixon . . .”

“What’s his name?” I was curious to know who else in the press corps would endure this kind of shame and isolation.

“I can’t remember now,” Bobo said. “He’s a tall guy with gray hair and glasses. He drives a blue Ford station wagon.”

I wondered who it could be. It would have to be somebody with a very compelling reason to stay on, in this place. Everybody with good sense or a reasonable excuse had left as soon as possible. Some of the TV network technicians had stayed until Saturday, dismantling the maze of wires and cables they’d set up in the Fontainebleau before the convention started. They were easy to spot because they wore things like Levi’s and sweatshirts—but by Sunday I was the only guest in the hotel not dressed like a PR man for Hialeah Racetrack on a Saturday night in mid-season.

It is not enough, in the Fontainebleau, to look like some kind of a weird and sinister cop; to fit in here, you want to look like somebody who just paid a scalper $200 for a front row seat at the Johnny Carson show.

Bobo put the car in gear, but kept his foot on the brake pedal and asked: “What are you writing? What did all that bullshit come down to?”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s just what I’ve been trying to put together upstairs. You’re asking me to compress about two hundred hours of work into sixty seconds.”

He grinned. “You’re on
my
time now. Give it a try. Tell me what happened.”

I paused in the driveway, shifting the beer bags to my other arm, and thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Nixon sold out the party for the next twenty years by setting up an Agnew-Kennedy race in ’76, but he knew exactly what he was doing and he did it for the same reason he’s
done everything else since he first got into politics—to make sure he gets elected.”

He stared at me, not grasping it.

I hesitated, trying to put it all in a quick little capsule. “Okay,” I said finally, “the reason Nixon put Agnew and the Goldwater freaks in charge of the party this year is that he knows they can’t win in ’76—but it was a good short-term trade; they have to stay with him this year, which will probably be worth a point or two in November—and that’s important to Nixon, because he thinks it’s going to be close: fuck the polls. They always
follow
reality instead of predicting it . . . But the
real
reason he turned the party over to the Agnew-Goldwater wing is that he knows most of the old-line Democrats who just got stomped by McGovern for the nomination wouldn’t mind seeing George get taken out in ’72 if they know they can get back in the saddle if they’re willing to wait four years.”

Bobo laughed, understanding it instantly. Pimps and hustlers have a fine instinct for politics. “What you’re saying is that Nixon just cashed his whole check,” he said. “He doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens once he gets reelected—because once he wins, it’s all over for him anyway, right? He can’t run again . . .”

“Yeah,” I said, pausing to twist the top off one of the ale bottles I’d been pulling out of the bag. “But the thing you want to understand is that Nixon has such a fine understanding of the way politicians think that he
knew
people like Daley and Meany and Ted Kennedy would go along with him—because it’s in
their
interest now to have Nixon get his second term, in exchange for a guaranteed Democratic victory in 1976.”

“God damn!” he said. “That’s beautiful! They’re gonna trade him four years now for eight later, right? Give Nixon his last trip in ’72, then Kennedy moves in for eight years in ’76 . . . Jesus, that’s so rotten I really have to admire it.” He chuckled. “Boy, I thought
I
was cynical!”

“That’s not cynical,” I said. “That’s pure, nut-cutting politics . . . And I advise you to stay out of it; you’re too sensitive.”

He laughed and hit the accelerator, leaping away with a sharp screech of rubber and just barely missing the taillight of a long gold Cadillac as he turned down the ramp.

I pushed through the revolving door and crossed the vast lobby to the elevators, still sipping my ale as I thought about what I’d just said. Had
Nixon really sold the party down the river? Was it a conscious act, or pure instinct? Had he made a deal with Meany during one of their golf games? Was Daley in on it? Ted Kennedy? Who else?