Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (44 page)

There may not be much difference between Democrats and Republicans; I have made that argument myself—with considerable venom, as I recall—over the past ten months . . . But only a blind geek or a water-head could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon. Granted, they are both white men; and both are politicians—but the similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so vast that anybody who can’t see it deserves whatever happens to them if Nixon gets reelected due to apathy, stupidity, and laziness on the part of potential McGovern voters.

The tragedy of this campaign is that McGovern and his staff wizards have not been able to dramatize what is really at stake on November 7. We are not looking at just another dim rerun of the ’68 Nixon-Humphrey trip, or the LBJ-Goldwater fiasco in ’64. Those were both useless drills. I voted for Dick Gregory in ’68, and for “No” in ’64 . . . but this one is different, and since McGovern is so goddamn maddeningly inept with the kind of words he needs to make people understand what he’s up to, it will save a lot of time here—and strain on my own weary head, to remember Bobby Kennedy’s ultimate characterization of Richard Nixon, in a speech at Vanderbilt University in the spring of ’68, not long before he was murdered.

“
Richard Nixon
,” he said, “
represents the dark side of the American spirit
.”

I don’t remember what else he said that day. I guess I could look it up in the
New York Times
speech morgue, but why bother? That one line says it all.

Anybody who doubts it should go out and catch the president’s act, the next time he swoops into the local airport. Watch the big silver-and-blue custom-built 707 come booming down the runway and roll up in front of the small but well-disciplined crowd of Nixon Youth
cheerleaders singing the “Nixon Now” song, waving their freshly printed red-white-and-blue “Re-Elect the President” signs and then pausing, in perfect spontaneous unison, before intimidating every TV crew on the runway with the stylish “Four more years!” chant.

Watch the president emerge from the belly of the plane, holding hands with the aging Barbie doll known as his wife, and ooze down the rolling VIP stairway while the 105th Division Rolling Thunder Women & Children Classic Napalm U.S. Army Parade Band whips the crowd higher & higher with a big-beat rendition of “God Save the Freaks.”

See the generals strut down from the plane behind the president. Take a long look at the grinning “local dignitaries” who are ushered out, by armed guards, to greet him. See the White House press corps over there about two hundred yards away, herded into that small corral behind heavy ropes stretched around red-white-and-blue painted oil drums. Why are they smiling?

The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked, at this time. A spectacular Come From Behind win is still possible—on paper and given the right circumstances—but the underlying realities of the campaign itself would seem to preclude this. A cohesive, determined campaign with the same kind of multi-level morale that characterized the McGovern effort in the months preceding the Wisconsin primary might be a good bet to close a 20-point gap on Nixon in the last month of this grim presidential campaign.

As usual, Nixon has peaked too early—and now he is locked into what is essentially a Holding Action. Which would be disastrous in a close race, but—even by Pat Caddell’s (partisan) estimate—Nixon could blow 20 points off his lead in the next six weeks and still win. (Caddell’s figures seem in general agreement with those of the most recent Gallup poll, ten days ago, which showed that Nixon could blow 30 points off his lead and still win.)

My own rude estimate is that McGovern will steadily close the gap between now and November 7, but not enough. If I had to make book right now, I would try to get McGovern with 7 or 8 points, but I’d probably go with 5 or 6, if necessary. In other words, my guess at the moment is that McGovern will lose by a popular vote margin of 5.5 percent—and probably far worse in the electoral college.

The tragedy of this is that McGovern appeared to have a sure lock on the White House when the sun came up on Miami Beach on the morning of Thursday, July 13. Since then he has crippled himself with a series of almost unbelievable blunders—Eagleton, Salinger, O’Brien, etc.—that have understandably convinced huge chunks of the electorate, including at least half of McGovern’s own hard-core supporters, that the candidate is a gibbering dingbat. His behavior since Miami has made a piecemeal mockery of everything he seemed to stand for during the primaries.

Possibly I’m wrong on all this. It is still conceivable—to me, at least—that McGovern might actually win. In which case I won’t have to worry about my P.O. Box at the Woody Creek general store getting jammed up with dinner invitations from the White House. But what the hell? Mr. Nixon never invited me, and neither did Kennedy or LBJ.

I survived those years of shame, and I’m not especially worried about enduring four more. I have a feeling that my time is getting short anyway, and I can think of a hell of a lot of things I’d rather find in my mailbox than an invitation to dinner in the Servants’ Quarters.

Let those treacherous bastards eat by themselves. They deserve each other.

Terminal Campaign Bloat?

Ah, Jesus! The situation is out of hand again. The sun is up, the deal is down, and that evil bastard Mankiewicz just jerked the kingpin out of my finely crafted saga for this issue. How long, O Lord, how long? My brain has gone numb from this madness. After squatting for thirteen days in this scum-crusted room on the top floor of the Washington Hilton—writing feverishly, night after night, on the homestretch realities of this goddamn wretched campaign—I am beginning to wonder what in the name of Twisted Jesus ever possessed me to come here in the first place. What kind of madness lured me back to this stinking swamp of a town?

Am I turning into a politics junkie? It is not a happy thought—particularly when I see what it’s done to all the others. After two weeks
in Woody Creek, getting back on the press plane was like going back to the cancer ward. Some of the best people in the press corps looked so physically ravaged that it was painful to even see them, much less stand around and make small talk.

Many appeared to be in the terminal stage of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenaline glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again . . . and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat . . . The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.

I would like to think—or at least
claim
to think, out of charity if nothing else—that Campaign Bloat is at the root of this hellish angst that boils up to obscure my vision every time I try to write anything serious about presidential politics.

But I don’t think that’s it. The real reason, I suspect, is the problem of coming to grips with the idea that Richard Nixon will almost certainly be reelected for another four years as president of the United States. If the current polls are reliable—and even if they aren’t, the sheer size of the margin makes the numbers themselves unimportant—Nixon will be reelected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam.

The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.

Well . . . maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes
and all of his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government,” is really one of the few men who’ve run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

November 9, 1972

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I would rather not write anything about the 1972 presidential campaign at this time. On Tuesday, November 7, I will get out of bed long enough to go down to the polling place and vote for George McGovern. Afterward, I will drive back to the house, lock the front door, get back in bed, and watch television as long as necessary. It will probably be a while before The Angst lifts—but whenever it happens I will get out of bed again and start writing the mean, cold-blooded bummer that I was not quite ready for today. Until then, I think Tom Benton’s “Re-elect the President” poster says everything that needs to be said, right now, about this malignant election. In any other year I might be tempted to embellish the Death’s Head with a few angry flashes of my own. But not in 1972. At least not in the sullen numbness of these final hours before the deal goes down—because words are no longer important at this stage of the campaign; all the best ones were said a long time ago, and all the right ideas were bouncing around in public long before Labor Day.

That is the one grim truth of this election most likely to come back and haunt us: the options were clearly defined, and all the major candidates except Nixon were publicly grilled, by experts, who demanded to know where they stood on every issue from Gun Control and Abortion to the Ad Valorem Tax. By mid-September both candidates had staked out their own separate turfs, and if not everybody could tell you what each candidate stood for,
specifically,
almost everyone likely to vote in November understood that Richard Nixon and George McGovern were two very different men: not only in the context of politics, but also their
personalities, temperaments, guiding principles, and even their basic lifestyles . . .

There is almost a yin/yang clarity in the difference between the two men; a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models, in the national politics arena, for the legendary
duality
—the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts—that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his boxful of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . . .

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .

Ah . . . nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The president of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the president of the United States was presiding over “a complex, far-reaching, and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization . . .involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families, and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation.”

Well, that ugly description of Nixon’s staff operations comes from a
New York Times
editorial on Thursday, October 12. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady 2–1 lead over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the
Times
/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible 20 points (57 percent to 37 percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy described as “the most decent man in the Senate.”

“Ominous” is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in Nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Adolph Eichmann.

How long will it be before “demented extremists” in Germany, or maybe Japan, start calling us a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? “No comment”? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?