Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(55)
The Campaign Trail: The View from Key Biscayne
March 16, 1972
One of the main marks of success in a career politician is a rooty distrust of The Press—and this cynicism is usually reciprocated, in spades, by most reporters who have covered enough campaigns to command a fat job like chronicling the Big Apple. Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken laid down the dictum that “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.”
This notion is still a very strong factor in the relationship between politicians and the big-time press. On lower levels you find a tendency—among people like “national editors” on papers in Pittsburgh and Omaha—to treat successful politicians with a certain amount of awe and respect. But the prevailing attitude among journalists with enough status to work presidential campaigns is that all politicians are congenital thieves and liars.
This is usually true. Or at least as valid as the consensus opinion among politicians that The Press is a gang of swine. Both sides will agree that the other might occasionally produce an exception to prove the rule, but the overall bias is rigid . . . and, having been on both sides of that ugly fence in my time, I tend to agree. . . .
Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered off again, and this time I can’t afford the luxury of raving at great length about anything that slides into my head. So, rather than miss another deadline, I want to zip up the nut with a fast and extremely pithy five hundred words because that’s all the space available, and in two hours I have to lash my rum-soaked red convertible across the Rick-enbacker Causeway to downtown Miami and then to the airport—in order to meet John Lindsay in either Tallahassee or Atlanta, depending on which connection I can make: it is nearly impossible to get either in or out of Miami this week. All flights are booked far in advance, and the hotel/motel space is so viciously oversold that crowds of angry tourists are “becoming unruly”—according to the Miami Herald—in the lobbies of places that refuse to let them in.
Fortunately, I have my own spacious suite attached to the new National Affairs office in the Royal Biscayne Hotel.
When things got too heavy in Washington I had no choice but to move the National Affairs desk to a place with better working conditions. Everybody agreed that the move was long overdue. After three months in Washington I felt like I’d spent three years in a mine-shaft underneath Butte, Montana. My relations with the White House were extremely negative from the start; my application for press credentials was rejected out of hand. I wouldn’t be needing them, they said. Because Rolling Stone is a music magazine, and there is not much music in the White House these days.
And not much on Capitol Hill either, apparently. When I called the Congressional Press Gallery to ask about the application (for press credentials) that I’d filed in early November ’71, they said they hadn’t got around to making any decision on it yet—but I probably wouldn’t be needing that one either. And where the hell did I get the gall to apply for “press” status at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer?
Where indeed? They had me dead to rights. I tried to save face by arguing that political science has never conclusively proven that music and politics can’t mix—but when they asked for my evidence I said, “Shucks, you’re probably right. Why shit in your own bed, eh?”
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I didn’t really want the goddamn things, anyway.”
Which was true. Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club. There are definite advantages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that.
The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida
April 13, 1972
The whistle-stops were uneventful until his noon arrival in Miami, where Yippie activist Jerry Rubin and another man heckled and interrupted him repeatedly. The Senator at one point tried to answer Rubin’s charges that he had once been a hawk on (Vietnam) war measures. He acknowledged that he had made a mistake, as did many other senators in those times, but Rubin did not let him finish.
Muskie ultimately wound up scolding Rubin and fellow heckler Peter Sheridan, who had boarded the train in West Palm Beach with press credentials apparently obtained from Rolling Stone’s Washington correspondent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
—Miami Herald, 2/20/72
Chitty and the Boohoo
This incident has haunted me ever since it smacked me in the eyes one peaceful Sunday morning a few weeks ago as I sat on the balmy screened porch of the National Affairs Suite here in the Royal Biscayne Hotel. I was slicing up grapefruit and sipping a pot of coffee while perusing the political page of the Herald when I suddenly saw my name in the middle of a story on Ed Muskie’s “Sunshine Special” campaign train from Jacksonville to Miami.