Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (30 page)

The final straw, for Muskie, was the result of an unpublished but carefully leaked poll, taken by Oliver Quayle at the behest of Senator Jackson and the local AFL-CIO that showed Muskie losing 70 percent of his support in Wisconsin in a period of two weeks. According to the Quayle poll, the onetime front-runner slipped from 39 percent to 13 percent, while McGovern was virtually doubling
his
figure from 12 percent to 23 percent in the same period—which put McGovern ahead of Humphrey, who had dropped about 5 points to 19 percent.

The same poll showed George Wallace with 12 percent, which convinced both the governor and organized labor that it would not be necessary to mount a serious effort to short-circuit the Wallace threat. Both the governor and the state labor bosses had been worried about Wallace stomping into Wisconsin and embarrassing everybody by pulling off another one of those ugly, Florida-style upsets.

It is still very hard to understand how the polls and the pols and especially a wizard like Broder could have so drastically underestimated the Wallace vote. Perhaps the threat of an anti-Wallace backlash by organized
labor led the visiting press to think the other was safely boxed in. Wisconsin’s Big Labor brain trust had come up with a theory that said Wallace got a huge boost, in Florida, by the fact that the liberal opposition got so hysterical about him that he got twice as many votes as he would have if the other candidates had simply ignored him and done their own things.

So they decided to turn the other cheek in Wisconsin. They ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few TV spots—and every one of his rallies attracted far more people than the hall could hold.

I went to one at a place called Serb Hall on the South Side of Milwaukee—a neighborhood the pols said was locked up for Muskie. Serb Hall is a big yellow-brick place that looks like an abandoned gymnasium, across the street from Sentry Supermarket on Oklahoma Street, about five miles from downtown Milwaukee. One half of the hall is a “Lounge & Bowling Alley,” and the other half is a fair-sized auditorium with a capacity of about three hundred.

The Serb Hall rally was a last-minute addition to the Wallace schedule. His main rally that night was scheduled for a much bigger hall in Racine, about fifty miles south, at seven thirty . . . but one of his handlers apparently decided to get him warmed up with a five o’clock gig at Serb Hall, despite the obvious risk involved in holding a political rally at that hour of the evening in a neighborhood full of Polish factory-workers just getting off work.

I got there at four thirty, thinking to get in ahead of the crowd and maybe chat a bit with some of the early arrivals at the bar . . . but at four thirty the hall was already packed and the bar was so crowded that I could barely reach in to get a beer. When I reached in again to pay for it, somebody pushed my hand back and a voice said “It’s already taken care of, fella—you’re a
guest
here.”

For the next two hours I was locked in a friendly, free-wheeling conversation with about six of my hosts who didn’t mind telling me that they were there because George Wallace was the most important man in America. “This guy is the real thing,” one of them said. “I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain’t the same as the others. He don’t sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and
says
it.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen Wallace in person. There were no
seats in the hall; everybody was standing. The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel, I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert. Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back . . . It was a flat-out fire-and-brimstone
performance
.

Ah yes . . . I can hear the Mojo wire humming frantically across the room. Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it. Greg Jackson, the ABC correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us along like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York, and now we are left on our own.

The pressure is building up. The copy no longer makes sense. Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another. Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast.

And now the bastard is beeping . . . beeping . . . beeping, which means it is hungry for this final page, which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary. But that can wait, I think. We have a three-week rest now, before the next one of these goddamn nightmares . . . which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here. Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now.

The real surprise of this campaign, according to Theodore White on CBS-TV last night, is that “George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics.”

But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again. So this page will have to go, for good or ill . . . and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel like rats from a burning ship.

The only other problem will be to figure out the meaning of the strange relationship between George McGovern and George Wallace . . . but that will take some time. Selah.

May 11, 1972

Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: How then art thou turned into a degenerate plant of a strange vine to me?

—Jeremiah 2:21

The arrival of Secret Service personnel has changed the campaign drastically. Sometime around seven on Friday night—three days before the Wisconsin primary—I left my dreary suite in the Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel and drove across town to McGovern headquarters at the Milwaukee Inn, a comfortably obscure sort of motor hotel in a residential neighborhood near Lake Michigan. The streets were still icy from a snowstorm earlier in the week, and my rented purple Mustang had no snow tires.

The car was extremly unstable—one of those Detroit “scrap” classics, apparently assembled by junkies to teach the rest of us a lesson. I had already been forced to remove the air filter, in order to manipulate the automatic choke by hand, but there was no way to cure the unnerving accelerator delay. It was totally unpredictable. At some stoplights the car would move out normally, but at others it would try to stall, seeming to want more gas—and then suddenly leap ahead like a mule gone amok from a bad sting.

Every red light was a potential disaster. Sometimes I would take off slowly, with the rest of the traffic . . . but at about every third light the goddamn worthless machine would hang back for a second or so, as if to give the others a head start, and then come thundering off the line at top
speed with no traction at all and the rear end fishtailing all over the street about halfway to the next corner.

By the time I got to the Milwaukee Inn, I had all three lanes of State Street to myself. Anybody who couldn’t get safely ahead of me was lagging safely behind. I wondered if anyone had taken my license number, in order to turn me in as a dangerous drunk or a dope addict. It was entirely possible that by the time I got back to the car every cop in Milwaukee would be alerted to grab me on sight.

Sheriff! Sheriff!

I was brooding on this as I entered the dining room and spotted Frank Mankiewicz at a table near the rear. As I approached the table, he looked up with a nasty grin and said, “Ah ha, it’s you; I’m surprised you have the nerve to show up over here—after what you wrote about me.”

I stared at him, trying to get my brain back in focus. Conversation ceased at every table within ten feet of us, but the only one that really concerned me was a knot of four Secret Service men who suddenly shifted into Deadly Pounce position at their table just behind Mankiewicz and whoever else he was eating with.

I had come down the aisle very fast, in my normal fashion, not thinking about much of anything except what I wanted to ask Mankiewicz—but his loud accusation about me having “the nerve to show up” gave me a definite jolt. Which might have passed in a flash if I hadn’t realized, at almost the same instant, that four thugs with wires in their ears were so alarmed at my high-speed appearance that they were about to beat me into a coma on pure instinct, and ask questions later.

This was my first confrontation with the Secret Service. They had not been around in any of the other primaries, until Wisconsin, and I was not accustomed to working in a situation where any sudden move around a candidate could mean a broken arm. Their orders are to
protect the candidate
, period, and they are trained like high-strung guard dogs to reach with Total Force at the first sign of danger. Never hesitate. First crack the wrist, then go for the floating rib . . . and if the “assassin” turns out to be just an oddly dressed journalist: well, that’s what the SS boys
call “tough titty.” Memories of Sirhan Sirhan are still too fresh, and there is no reliable profile on potential assassins . . . so
everybody
is suspect, including journalists.

All this flashed through my head in a split second. I saw it all happening, but my brain had gone limp from too much tension. First the car, now this . . . and perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was the fact that I’d never seen Mankiewicz even
smile
.

But now he was actually laughing, and the SS guards relaxed. I tried to smile and say something, but my head was still locked in neutral.

“You better stay away from my house from now on,” Mankiewicz was saying. “My wife hates your guts.”

Jesus, I thought. What’s happening here? Somewhere behind me I could hear a voice saying “Hey, Sheriff! Hello there! Sheriff!”

I glanced over my shoulder to see who was calling, but all I saw was a sea of unfamiliar faces, all staring at me . . . so I turned quickly back to Mankiewicz, who was still laughing.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “What did I do to your wife?”

He paused long enough to carve a bite out of what looked like a five- or six-pound Prime Rib on his plate, then he looked up again. “You called me a rumpled little man,” he said. “You came over to my house and drank my liquor and then you said I was a rumpled little man who looked like a used car salesman.”

“Sheriff! Sheriff!” That goddamn voice again; it seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t want to turn around and find all those people staring at me.

Then the fog began to lift. I suddenly understood that Mankiewicz was
joking
—which struck me as perhaps the most shocking and peculiar development of the entire ’72 campaign. The idea that anybody connected with the McGovern campaign might actually laugh in public was almost beyond my ken. In New Hampshire nobody had ever even smiled, and in Florida the mood was so down that I felt guilty even hanging around.

Even Mankiewicz, in Florida, was acting like a man about to take the bastinado . . . so I was puzzled and even a little nervous to find him grinning like this in Milwaukee.

Was he stoned? Had it come down to that?

“
Sheriff! Sheriff!
”

I spun around quickly, feeling a sudden flash of anger at some asshole mocking me in these rude and confusing circumstances. By this time I had forgotten even what I’d wanted to ask Mankiewicz. The night was turning into something out of Kafka.

“
Sheriff!
“

I glared at the table behind me, but nobody blinked. Then I felt a hand on my belt, poking at me . . . and my first quick instinct was to knock the hand away with a full-stroke hammer-shot from about ear level; really crack the bastard . . . and then immediately apologize: “Oh! Pardon
me
, old sport! I guess my nerves are shot, eh?”

Which they almost were, about thirty seconds later, when I realized that the hand on my belt—and the voice that had been yelling “Sheriff”—belonged to George McGovern. He was sitting right behind me, an arm’s length away, having dinner with his wife and some of the campaign staffers.

Now I understood the Secret Service presence. I’d been standing so close to McGovern that every time I turned around to see who was yelling “Sheriff!” I saw almost every face in the room except the one right next to me.

He twisted around in his chair to shake hands, and the smile on his face was the smile of a man who has just cranked off a really wonderful joke.

“God damn!” I blurted. “It’s you!” I tried to smile back at him, but my face had turned to rubber and I heard myself babbling: “Well . . . ah . . . how does it look?” Then quickly: “Excellent, eh? Yeah, I guess so. It certainly does look . . . ah . . . but what the hell, I guess you know all this . . .”