Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (61 page)

I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probably spent more private, human time with him than any other journalist on the ’76 campaign trail. The first time I met him—at about eight o’clock on a Saturday morning in 1974 at the back door of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta—I was about two degrees on the safe side of berserk, raving and babbling at Carter and his whole bemused family about some hostile bastard wearing a Georgia State Police uniform who had tried to prevent me from coming through the gate at the foot of the long, tree-shaded driveway leading up to the mansion.

I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates, and when I rolled up to the gatehouse in the backseat of a taxi I’d hailed in downtown Atlanta, the trooper was not amused by the sight and sound of my presence. I was trying to act calm, but after about thirty seconds I
realized it wasn’t working; the look on his face told me I was not getting through to the man. He stared at me, saying nothing, while I explained from my crouch in the backseat of the cab that I was late for breakfast with “the governor and Ted Kennedy” . . . Then he suddenly stiffened and began shouting at the cabdriver: “What kind of dumb shit are you trying to
pull
, buddy? Don’t you know where you
are?
”

Before the cabbie could answer, the trooper smacked the flat of his hand down on the hood so hard that the whole cab rattled. “You! Shut this engine!” Then he pointed at me: “You! Out of the cab. Let’s see some identification.” He reached out for my wallet and motioned for me to follow him into the gatehouse. The cabbie started to follow, but the trooper waved him back. “Stay right where you are, good buddy. I’ll
get
to you.” The look on my driver’s face said we were both going to jail and it was my fault. “It wasn’t
my
idea to come out here,” he whined. “This guy told me he was invited for breakfast with the governor.”

The trooper was looking at the press cards in my wallet. I was already pouring sweat, and just as he looked over at me, I realized I was holding a can of beer in my hand. “You always bring your own beer when you have breakfast with the governor?” he asked.

I shrugged and dropped it in a nearby wastebasket.

“You!” he shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The scene went on for another twenty minutes. There were many phone calls, a lot of yelling, and finally the trooper reached somebody in the mansion who agreed to locate Senator Kennedy and ask if he knew “some guy name of Thompson, I got him down here, he’s all beered up and wants to come up there for breakfast . . .”

Jesus, I thought, that’s all Kennedy needs to hear. Right in the middle of breakfast with the governor of Georgia, some nervous old darky shuffles in from the kitchen to announce that the trooper down at the gatehouse is holding some drunkard who says he’s a friend of Senator Kennedy’s and he wants to come in and have breakfast . . .

Which was, in fact, a lie. I had not been invited for breakfast with the governor, and up to that point I had done everything in my power to avoid it. Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the
same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with lunch and dinner.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert . . . Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music . . . All of which should be dealt with
outside
, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful Mojo Wire and across two thousand miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast . . . But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.

After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all—not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark, and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond—to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like twelve bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in the Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like
a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church) . . . Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 Magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on
Meet the Press
,
Face the Nation
, and all of his press conferences.

There are some combinations that
nobody
can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.

But I had not made the final decision on that morning when I rolled up to the gatehouse of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta to have breakfast with Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. My reason for being there at that hour was simply to get my professional schedule back in phase with Kennedy’s political obligations for that day. He was scheduled to address a crowd of establishment heavies who would convene at the University of Georgia Law School at ten thirty in the morning to officially witness the unveiling of a huge and prestigious oil portrait of former secretary of state Dean Rusk, and his tentative schedule for Saturday called for him to leave the governor’s mansion after breakfast and make the sixty-mile trip to Athens by means of the governor’s official airplane . . . So in order to hook up with Kennedy and make the trip with him, I had no choice but to meet him for breakfast at the mansion, where he had spent the previous night at Carter’s invitation.

Oddly enough, I had also been invited to spend Friday night in a bedroom at the governor’s mansion. I had come down from Washington with Kennedy on Friday afternoon, and since I was the only journalist traveling with him that weekend, Governor Carter had seen fit to include me when he invited “the Kennedy party” to overnight at the mansion instead of a downtown hotel.

But I am rarely in the right frame of mind to spend the night in the house of a politician—at least not if I can spend it anywhere else, and
on the previous night I figured I would be a lot happier in a room at the Regency Hyatt House than I would in the Georgia governor’s mansion. Which may or may not have been true, but regardless of all that, I still had to be at the mansion for breakfast if I wanted to get any work done that weekend, and my work was to stay with Ted Kennedy.

The scene at the gate had unhinged me so thoroughly that I couldn’t find the door I’d been told to knock on when I finally got out of my cab at the mansion . . . and by the time I finally got inside I was in no shape at all to deal with Jimmy Carter and his whole family. I didn’t even recognize Carter when he met me at the door. All I knew was that a middle-aged man wearing Levi’s was taking me into the dining room, where I insisted on sitting down for a while, until the tremors passed.

One of the first things I noticed about Carter, after I’d calmed down a bit, was the relaxed and confident way he handled himself with Ted Kennedy. The contrast between the two was so stark that I am still surprised whenever I hear somebody talking about the “eerie resemblance” between Carter and John F. Kennedy. I have never noticed it, except every once in a while in some carefully staged photograph—and if there was ever a time when it seems like any such resemblance should have been impossible to miss, it was that morning in Atlanta when I walked into the dining room and saw Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy sitting about six feet apart at the same table.

Kennedy, whose presence usually dominates any room he walks into, was sitting there looking stiff and vaguely uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and black shoes. He glanced up as I entered and smiled faintly, then went back to staring at a portrait on the wall on the other side of the room. Paul Kirk, his executive wizard, was sitting next to him, wearing the same blue suit and black shoes—and Jimmy King, his executive advance man, was off in a distant corner yelling into a telephone. There were about fifteen other people in the room, most of them laughing and talking, and it took me a while to notice that nobody was talking to Kennedy—which is a very rare thing to see, particularly in any situation involving other politicians or even politically conscious people.

Kennedy was obviously not in a very gregarious mood that morning, and I didn’t learn why until an hour or so later when I found myself in one of the Secret Service cars with King, Kirk, and Kennedy, running at
top speed on the highway to Athens. The mood in the car was ugly. Kennedy was yelling at the SS driver for missing a turnoff that meant we’d be late for the unveiling. When we finally got there and I had a chance to talk privately with Jimmy King, he said Carter had waited until the last minute—just before I got to the mansion—to advise Kennedy that a sudden change in his own plans made it impossible for him to lend Teddy his plane for the trip to Athens. That was the reason for the tension I half noticed when I got to the mansion. King had been forced to get on the phone immediately and locate the Secret Service detail and get two cars out to the mansion immediately. By the time they arrived it was obvious that we would not get to Athens in time for the unveiling of Rusk’s portrait—which was fine with me, but Kennedy was scheduled to speak, and he was very unhappy.

I refused to participate in any ceremony honoring a warmonger like Rusk, so I told King I would look around on the edge of the campus for a bar, and then meet them for lunch at the cafeteria for the Law Day luncheon . . . He was happy enough to see me go, because in the space of three or four minutes, I had insulted a half-dozen people. There was a beer parlor about ten minutes away, and I stayed there in relative peace until it was time for the luncheon.

There was no way to miss the campus cafeteria. There was a curious crowd of about two hundred students waiting to catch a glimpse of Ted Kennedy, who was signing autographs and moving slowly up the concrete steps toward the door as I approached.

I looked around the room, and indeed there was no mistaking the nature of the crowd. This was not just a bunch of good ol’ boys who all happened to be alumni of the University of Georgia Law School; these were the
honored
alumni, the ranking 150 or so who had earned, stolen, or inherited enough distinction to be culled from the lists and invited to the unveiling of Rusk’s portrait, followed by a luncheon with Senator Kennedy, Governor Carter, Judge Crater, and numerous other hyper-distinguished guests whose names I forget . . . And Jimmy King was right: this was not a natural habitat for anybody wearing dirty white basketball shoes, no tie, and nothing except
Rolling Stone
to follow his name on the guest list in that space reserved for titles. If it had been a gathering of distinguished alumni from the University of Georgia Medical
School, the title space on the guest list would have been in front of the names, and I would have fit right in. Hell, I could even have joined a few conversations and nobody would have given a second thought to any talk about “blood on the hands.”

Right. But this was Law Day in Georgia, and I was the only Doctor in the room . . . So I had to be passed off as some kind of undercover agent, traveling for unknown reasons with Senator Kennedy. Not even the Secret Service agents understood my role in the entourage. All they knew was that I had walked off the plane from Washington with Teddy, and I had been with them ever since. Nobody gets introduced to a Secret Service agent; they are expected to
know
who everybody is—and if they don’t know, they act like they do and hope for the best.