Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(43)

To Democratic chairman Larry O’Brien, the specter of a McCarthy candidacy in ’72 must be something like hearing the Hound of the Baskervilles sniffing and pissing around on your porch every night. A left-bent Fourth Party candidate with a few serious grudges on his mind could easily take enough left/radical votes away from either Muskie or Humphrey to make the Democratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them.

Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind, but the possibilities are ominous, and anybody who thought he was kidding got snapped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Muskie within hours after the Maine senator made his candidacy official.

The front page of the Washington Post carried photos of both men, along with a prominent headline and McCarthy’s harsh warning that he was going to hold Muskie “accountable” for his hawkish stance on the war in Vietnam prior to 1968. McCarthy also accused Muskie of being “the most active representative of Johnson administration policy at the 1968 convention.”

Muskie seemed genuinely shaken by this attack. He immediately called a press conference to admit that he’d been wrong about Vietnam in the past, but that now “I’ve had reason to change my mind.” His new position was an awkward thing to explain, but after admitting his “past mistakes” he said that he now favored “as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible.”

McCarthy merely shrugged. He had done his gig for the day, and Muskie was jolted. The senator focused all his efforts on the question of his altered Vietnam stance, but he was probably far more disturbed by McCarthy’s ugly revenge-tainted reference to Muskie’s role in the ’68 Democratic Convention. This was obviously the main bone in McCarthy’s throat, but Muskie ignored it and nobody asked Gene what he really meant by the charge ... probably because there is no way to understand what happened to McCarthy in Chicago unless you were there and saw it yourself.

I have never read anything that comes anywhere close to explaining the shock and intensity I felt at that convention ... and although I was right in the middle of it the whole time, I have never been able to write about it myself. For two weeks afterward, back in Colorado, I couldn’t even talk about it without starting to cry—for reasons I think I finally understand now, but I still can’t explain.

Because of this: because I went there as a journalist, with no real emotional attachment to any of the candidates and only the barest of illusions about the outcome ... I was not personally involved in the thing, so there is no point in presuming to understand what kind of hellish effect Chicago must have had on Gene McCarthy.

I remember seeing him cross Michigan Avenue on Thursday night—several hours after Humphrey had made his acceptance speech out at the Stockyards—and then wandering into the crowd in Grant Park like a defeated general trying to mingle with his troops just after the Surrender. But McCarthy couldn’t mingle. He could barely talk. He acted like a man in deep shock. There was not much to say. The campaign was over.

McCarthy’s gig was finished. He had knocked off the president and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley’s police, who burst into McCarthy’s private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.

Perhaps McCarthy has placed that whole scene in its proper historical and poetic perspective, but if he has I didn’t read it ... or maybe he’s been hanging onto the manuscript until he can find a right ending. McCarthy has a sharp sense of drama, along with his now kinky instinct for timing. But nobody appears to have noticed, until now, that he might also have a bull-sized taste for revenge.



Maybe not. In terms of classic journalism, this kind of wandering, unfounded speculation will have a nasty effect on that asshole from Ireland who sent word across The Waters to nail me for bad language and lack of objectivity. There have been numerous complaints, in fact, about the publisher allowing me to get away with calling our new Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist a “swine.”

Well ... shit, what can I say? Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by, these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way? The only man who comes to mind, right offhand, is my good friend and colleague on the Sports Desk, Raoul Duke. Most journalists only talk about objectivity, but Dr. Duke grabs it straight by the fucking throat. You will be hard pressed to find any argument, among professionals, on the question of Dr. Duke’s Objectivity.