Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (42 page)

“Golly,” said the girl. “That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

By this time I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. These
poor, ignorant young waterheads. Would they pass this weird revelation on to their parents when they got back home to Middletown, Shaker Heights, and Orange County? Probably so, I thought. And then their parents would write letters to NBC, saying they’d learned from reliable sources that Chancellor was addicted to LSD-25—supplied to him in great quantities, no doubt, by Communist agents—and demanding that he be jerked off the air immediately and locked up.

I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade—sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard . . .

But before I could get into this one, the men in the red hats began shouting that the magic moment was on us. The Ready Room crackled with tension; we were into the countdown. They divided us into four groups of about five hundred each and gave the final instructions. We were to rush onto the floor and begin chanting, cheering, waving our signs at the TV cameras, and generally whooping it up. Every other person was given a big garbage bag full of twenty-five or thirty helium balloons, which they were instructed to release just as soon as they reached the floor. Our entrance was timed precisely to coincide with the release of the thousands of non-helium balloons from the huge cages attached to the ceiling of the hall . . . so that our balloons would be
rising
while the others were
falling
, creating a sense of mass euphoria and perhaps even weightlessness for the prime-time TV audience.

Indeed. I was ready for some good, clean fun at that point, and by the time we got the signal to start moving I was seized by a giddy conviction that we were all about to participate in a spectacle that would go down in history.

They herded us out of the Ready Room and called a ragged kind of cadence while we double-timed it across the wet grass under the guava trees in back of the hall, and finally burst through a well-guarded access door held open for us by Secret Service men just as the balloons were released from the ceiling . . . it was wonderful; I waved happily to the SS man as I raced past him with the herd and then onto the floor. The hall was so full of balloons that I couldn’t see anything at first, but then I
spotted Chancellor up there in the booth and I let the bastard have it. First I held up my “Garbage Men Demand Equal Time” sign at him. Then, when I was sure he’d noticed the sign, I tucked it under my arm and ripped off my hat, clutching it in the same fist I was shaking angrily at the NBC booth and screaming at the top of my lungs: “You evil scum-sucker! You’re
through
! You limp-wristed Nazi moron!”

I went deep into the foulest backwaters of my vocabulary for that trip, working myself into a flat-out screeching hate-frenzy for five or six minutes and drawing smiles of approval from some of my fellow demonstrators. They were dutifully chanting the slogans that had been assigned to them in the Ready Room—but I was really
into it
, and I could see that my zeal impressed them.

But a little bit of that bullshit goes a long way, and I quickly tired of it. When I realized that my erstwhile buddies were settling into the “
Four more years
!” chant, I figured it was time to move on.

Which was not easy. By this time, the whole crowd was facing the TV booths and screaming in unison. People were trampling each other to get up front and make themselves heard—or at least to get on camera for the homefolks—and the mood of that crowd was not receptive to the sight of a McGovern button in their midst, so I moved against the tide as gently as possible, keeping my elbows close down on my ribs and shouting “Chancellor to the Wall!” every thirty seconds or so, to keep myself inconspicuous.

By the time I got to the “periodical press” exit, I was almost overcome with a sense of
déjà vu
. I had seen all this before. I had been right in the middle of it before—but when?

Then it came to me. Yes. In 1964, at the Goldwater convention in San Francisco, when poor Barry unloaded that fateful line about “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” etc. . . . I was on the floor of the Cow Palace when he laid that one on the crowd, and I remember feeling genuinely frightened at the violent reaction it provoked. The Goldwater delegates went completely amok for fifteen or twenty minutes. He hadn’t even finished the sentence before they were on their feet, cheering wildly. Then, as the human thunder kept building, they mounted their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at
Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth—and finally they began picking up those chairs with both hands and bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on.

It was a memorable performance, etched every bit as clearly in the gray folds of my brain as the police beatings I saw at the corner of Michigan and Balbo four years later . . . but the Nixon convention in Miami was not even in the same league with Chicago in ’68. The blinding stench of tear gas brought back memories, but only on the surface. Around midnight on Wednesday, I found myself reeling around completely blind on Washington Avenue in front of the convention hall, bumping against cops wearing black rubber gas masks and running demonstrators clutching wet towels over their faces. Many of the cops were wearing khaki flak jackets and waving three-foot hickory pick-handles . . . but nobody hit me, and despite the gas and the chaos, I never felt in danger. Finally, when the gas got so bad that I no longer knew what direction I was moving in, I staggered across somebody’s lawn and began feeling my way along the outside of the house until I came to a water faucet. I sat down on the grass and soaked my handkerchief under the tap, then pressed it on my face, without rubbing, until I was able to see again. When I finally got up, I realized that at least a dozen cops had been standing within twenty feet of me the whole time, watching passively and not offering any help—but not beating me into a bloody, screaming coma, either.

That was the difference between Chicago and Miami. Or at least one of the most significant differences. If the cops in Chicago had found me crawling around in somebody’s front yard, wearing a “press” tag and blind from too much gas, they’d have broken half my ribs and then hauled me away in handcuffs for “resisting arrest.” I saw it happen so often that I still feel the bile rising when I think about it.

A Vicious Attack on the Demonstrators . . .
The Silent Siege of the Fontainebleau . . .
“These People Should Go Back Where They Belong”

On Tuesday afternoon my car disappeared. I left it on the street in front of the hotel while I went in to pick up my swimming trunks, and when I
came back out, it was gone. To hell with it, I thought, it was time to get out of Miami.

I went up to my room and thought for a while, sitting with my back to the typewriter and staring out the window at the big ocean-going yachts and luxury houseboats tied up across the street at the piers along Indian Creek. Last week they’d been crawling with people, and many cocktail parties. Every time the Fontainebleau lobby started buzzing with rumors about another crowd of demonstrators bearing down on the hotel from the direction of Flamingo Park, the boats across Collins Avenue would fill up with laughing Republican delegates wearing striped blazers and cocktail dresses. There was no better place, they said, for watching the street action. As the demonstrators approached the front entrance to the hotel, they found themselves walking a gauntlet of riot-equipped police on one side, and martini-sipping GOP delegates on the other.

One yacht—the
Wild Rose,
out of Houston—rumbled back and forth, just offshore, at every demonstration. From the middle of Collins Avenue, you could see the guests lounging in deck chairs, observing the action through high-powered field glasses, and reaching around from time to time to accept a fresh drink from crewmen wearing white serving jackets with gold epaulets.

The scene on the foredeck of the
Wild Rose
was so gross, so flagrantly decadent, that it was hard to avoid comparing it with the kind of bloodthirsty arrogance normally associated with the last days of the Roman Empire: here was a crowd of rich Texans, floating around on a $100,000 yacht in front of a palatial Miami Beach hotel, giggling with excitement at the prospect of watching their hired gladiators brutalize a mob of howling, half-naked Christians. I half expected them to start whooping for blood and giving the thumbs-down signal.

Nobody who was out there on the street with the demonstrators would be naive enough to compare them to “helpless Christians.” With the lone exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant, chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest. They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted
on grass, wine, and downers that they couldn’t say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami, or San Diego.

Five weeks earlier, these same people had been sitting in the lobby of the Doral, calling George McGovern a “lying pig” and a “warmonger.” Their target-hotel this time was the Fontainebleau, headquarters for the national press and many TV cameras. If the Rolling Stones came to Miami for a free concert, these assholes would build their own fence around the bandstand—just so they could have something to tear down and then “crash the gates.”

During both conventions, Flamingo Park was known as “Quaalude Alley,” in deference to the brand of downers favored by most demonstrators. Quaalude is a mild sleeping pill, but—consumed in large quantities, along with wine, grass, and adrenaline—it produces the same kind of stupid, mean-drunk effect as Seconal (“Reds”). The Quaalude effect was so obvious in Flamingo Park that the “Last Patrol” caravan of Vietnam Vets—who came here in motorcades from all parts of the country—refused to even set up camp with the other demonstrators. They had serious business in Miami, they explained, and the last thing they needed was a public alliance with a mob of stoned street crazies and screaming teenyboppers.

The Vets made their camp in a far corner of the park, then sealed it off with a network of perimeter guards and checkpoints that made it virtually impossible to even enter that area unless you knew somebody inside. There was an ominous sense of dignity about everything the VVAW did in Miami. They rarely even hinted at violence, but their very presence was menacing—on a level that the Yippies, Zippies, and SDS street crazies never even approached, despite all their yelling and trashing.

The most impressive single performance in Miami during the three days of the GOP Convention was the VVAW march on the Fontainebleau on Tuesday afternoon. Most of the press and TV people were either down at the convention hall, covering the “liberals vs. conservatives” floor-fight over rules for seating delegates in 1976—or standing around in the boiling mid-afternoon sun at Miami International Airport, waiting for Nixon to come swooping out of the sky in Air Force One.

My own plan for that afternoon was to drive far out to the end of Key Biscayne and find an empty part of the beach where I could swim by myself in the ocean, and not have to talk to anybody for a while. I didn’t give a fuck about watching the rules fight, a doomed charade that the Nixon brain trust had already settled in favor of the conservatives . . . and I saw no point in going out to the airport to watch three thousand well-rehearsed “Nixon Youth” robots “welcome the president.”

Given these two depressing options, I figured Tuesday was as good a day as any to get away from politics and act like a human being for a change—or better still, like an animal. Just get off by myself and drift around naked in the sea for a few hours . . .

But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the vets . . . They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; 1,200 of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots . . . a few carried full-size plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow-moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches . . . But nobody spoke; all the “stop, start” . . . “fast, slow” . . . “left, right” commands came from “platoon leaders” walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals.

One look at that eerie procession killed my plan to go swimming that afternoon. I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march . . . No, “joined” is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue . . . all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach.

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.