Dick Dougherty, a former L.A. Times newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action, was so shaken by the news of Hughes’ defection that he didn’t even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just got the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate’s. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking “Nevermore . . .”
By chance, I found George downstairs in the men’s room, hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the gray marble tiles.
“Say . . . ah . . . I hate to mention this,” I said. “But what about this thing with Hughes?”
He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his head and mumbling something about “a deal for the vice presidency.” I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together.
“Why do you think he did it?” I said.
He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. “Well . . .” he said finally. “I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re all surprised.”
He looked very tired, and I didn’t see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room. This proved to be my undoing because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I’d entered with the senator . . . but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pin-striped suit.
Enter, the Shadow
I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip—which was, after all, a long-shot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than thirty to one.
What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available, this time around, and I was sorry I couldn’t get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wish he would say a lot more—or maybe something different.
Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?
Well . . . that would take a lot of time and space I don’t have now, but for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been “against the War in Vietnam since 1963”—especially when your name is not one of the two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and when you’re talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early ’65.
A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned—but, as usual, the politicians are usually much slower than the people they want to lead.
This is an ugly portent for the twenty-five million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five who may or may not vote in 1972. And many of them probably will vote. The ones who go to the polls in ’72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the “best minds of my generation,” as Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in “Howl.” There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the “Youth Vote” will get a lot of people out to the polls in ’72. If you give twenty-five million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.
But what about next time? Who is going to explain, in 1976, that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should “try again” for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations—between the ages of twenty-two and forty—who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson-Goldwater to Humphrey-Nixon to Nixon-Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.
This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto “Live Free or Die” inscribed above the numbers.
The highways are full of good mottoes. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about . . . what was it? Have these dangerous drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this: