In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brainrooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we’re all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can’t bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for president ... John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed ... and, well, that just about wraps up the trip, right?
Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street ... peel back the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his “Fan letter to Nixon.”
“I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.”
The Campaign Trail: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire
March 2, 1972
It was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester—driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars that gets rubber for about twenty-nine seconds in Drive, and spits hot black divots all over the road in First or Second . . . a terrible screeching and fishtailing through the outskirts of Boston heading north to New Hampshire, back on the Campaign Trail . . . running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.
Not much of a moon tonight, but a sky full of very bright stars. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills . . . running about seventy-five or eighty through a landscape of stark naked trees and stone fences; not many cars out tonight, and no lights in the roadside farmhouses. People go to bed early in New England.
Four years ago I ran this road in a different Mercury, but I wasn’t driving then. It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s best speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchanan.
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late—almost midnight then, too—and the cop was holding the big Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech and the airport up in Manchester where a Learjet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Learjet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been . . . and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands . . .
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backward, here we go . . . “Watch out!” somebody was shouting. “Get the cigarette!” A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, “Goddamn it, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!”
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. “What worries me,” he said, “is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the Boss . . .”
“Very bad show,” I said, “especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones . . . you people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.”
“Not you,” he said. “Egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.” He smiled. “You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach—because I am, after all, a professional.”