Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(53)

In Worchester, Ernest Gruening approached the stage like a slow-moving golem. He is eighty-five years old, and his legs are not real springy—but when he got behind the podium he spoke like the Grim Reaper.

“I’ve known Ed Muskie for many years,” he said. “I’ve considered him a friend . . . but I can’t help remembering that, for all those years, while we were getting deeper and deeper into that war, and while more and more boys were dying . . . Ed Muskie stayed silent.”

Gruening neglected to say where McGovern had been on the day of the Tonkin Gulf vote . . . but I remember somebody saying, up on the press platform near the roof of the Assumption College gym, that “I can forgive McGovern for blowing that Tonkin thing, because the Pentagon lied—but what’s his excuse for not voting against that goddamn wiretapping bill?” The Omnibus Crime Control & Safe Streets Act of 1968, a genuinely oppressive piece of legislation—even Lyndon Johnson was shocked by it, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to veto the bugger—for the same reasons cited by the many senators who called the bill “frightening” while refusing to vote against it because they didn’t want to be on record as having voted against “safe streets and crime control.” (The bare handful of senators who actually voted against the bill explained themselves in very ominous terms. For details, see Justice by Richard Harris.)



I had thought about this, but I had also thought about all the other aspects of this puzzling and depressing campaign—which seemed, a few months ago, to have enough weird and open-ended possibilities that I actually moved from Colorado to Washington for the purpose of “covering the campaign.” It struck me as a right thing to do, at the time—especially in the wake of the success we’d had with two back-to-back Freak Power runs at the heavily entrenched Money/Politics/Yahoo establishment in Aspen.

But things are different in Washington. It’s not that everybody you talk to is aggressively hostile to any idea that might faze their well-ordered lifestyles; they’d just rather not think about it. And there is no sense of life in the Underculture. On the national/reality spectrum, Washington’s Doper/Left/Rock/Radical community is somewhere between Toledo and Biloxi. “Getting it on” in Washington means killing a pint of Four Roses and then arguing about Foreign Aid, over chicken wings, with somebody’s drunken congressman.

The latest craze on the local highlife front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia, in Washington, is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom—and the people who actually live and thrive here, in the great web of government, are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the party affiliation of the next president won’t make any difference at all, except on the surface.

The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same. So just lie back and live with it. To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about “getting things done in Washington” is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers “Stop Duane Thomas!”

Dope Saves the Cowboys

That is one aspect of the ’72 Super Bowl that nobody has properly dealt with: What was it like for those humorless, god-fearing Alger-bent Jesus Freaks to go out on that field in front of one hundred thousand people in New Orleans and get beaten like gongs by the only certified dope freak in the NFL? Thomas ran through the Dolphins like a mule through corn-stalks.

It was a fine thing to see; and it was no real surprise when the Texas cops busted him, two weeks later, for Possession of Marijuana . . . and the Dallas coach said Yes, he’d just as soon trade Duane Thomas for almost anybody.

They don’t get along. Tom Landry, the Cowboys’ coach, never misses a chance to get up on the platform with Billy Graham whenever The Crusade plays in Dallas. Duane Thomas calls Landry a “plastic man.” He tells reporters that the team’s general manager, Tex Schramm, is “sick, demented, and vicious.” Thomas played his whole season, last year, without ever uttering a sentence to anyone on the team: not the coach, the quarterback, his blockers—nobody; dead silence.

All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number—which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over; the purse is safe in the vault; and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession.