Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(60)

I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist and central intelligence behind the McGovern for President campaign—a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work “Pre-owned Car” salesman—putting McGovern’s Florida Primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.

Mankiewicz—a forty-seven-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968—has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got underway last year. For a while he was the “Press Secretary,” then he was called the “Campaign Manager”—but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of “Political Director.” Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern’s alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon—the Man behind the Man.

Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote. This was long before Ed Muskie’s infamous “breakdown scene” on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester union   Leader.

When Frank laid his prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job—trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last-minute surge for McGovern, the only candidate in the ’72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called Kennedy Machine.

Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern’s campaign—and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing such a claim. Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own . . . even those who go off on hopeless tangents.

So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and “front-runner” Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.

New Hampshire in ’72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in ’68 jolted LBJ. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like “the champ,” and reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all, Won in New Hampshire.

Just like LBJ, who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.

But Muskie had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already in . . . he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a “last-minute blitz” . . . shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie” and “Muskie Talks Straight” . . .

When Muskie arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who’d been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled, in his head, that I couldn’t raise a bet on him among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the ringside seats on fight night.

I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn’t want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got underway.

“Two?” Marciano asked with a grin.

I shrugged, and drank one off very quickly as Floyd came out of his corner and turned to wax the first time Liston hit him. Then, with a minute still to go in the first round, Liston bashed him again and Patterson went down for the count. The fight was over before I touched my second beer.



Muskie went the same way to Florida—just as Mankiewicz had predicted, forty-eight hours earlier, in the living room of his suburban Washington home. “Muskie is already finished,” he said then. “He had no base. Nobody’s really for Muskie. They’re only for the front-runner, the man who says he’s the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn’t even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.”



The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile national front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent . . . and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.