Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(38)

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker carpool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs . . . humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel pissant; dragging a massive orange U-Haul trailer full of books and “important” papers . . . feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.

It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving . . . but not even this new, six-cylinder “super-Volvo” is up to hauling two thousand pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado, to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown.



“Welcome to Washington D.C.” That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall—a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.

It is not considered fashionable to live in “The District” itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged-brick townhouse with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists, and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pinepaneled bars and “singles only” discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.

I live on the “black side” of Rock Creek Park, in what my journalistic friends call “a marginal neighborhood.” Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the “white side” of the park, toward Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.

The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximately a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only two people I know who live down there are Nicholas von Hoffman, a columnist for the Washington Post, and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyperactive Legislative Assistant. But von Hoffman seems to have had a bellyful of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco . . . and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.

McGovern & the Press Wizards

With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began about two years ago.

Jim Flug says he’d rather not talk about Kennedy running for president—at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who “matters” in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon—almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.

There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck—and beaten once again—with some tried-and-half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie . . . and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustration limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington press corps. “He’d be a fine president,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.”

Why not?

Well . . . the wizards haven’t bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern president—that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists, & dazed dropouts—won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on Election Day.

Maybe so . . . but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called “The McGovern Vote” to the polls if they actually represented it.

It sure as hell wasn’t the AFL-CIO that ran LBJ out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn’t Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson . . . and it wasn’t George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade “radical” organizer from the UAW.