Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(62)

Another Nixon-Humphrey horror would almost certainly cause a “Fourth Party” uprising and guarantee Nixon’s reelection—which might bring the hounds of hell down on a lot of people for the next four very long years.

But personally I think I’d be inclined to take that risk. Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current. The idea of Humphrey running for president again makes a mockery of a lot of things that it would take me too long to explain or even list here. And Hubert Humphrey wouldn’t understand what I was talking about anyway. He was a swine in ’68 and he’s worse now. If the Democratic Party nominates Humphrey again in ’72, the party will get exactly what it deserves.





The Campaign Trail: Bad News from Bleak House: Total Failure in Milwaukee . . . with a Few Quick Thoughts on the Shocking Victory of Double-George . . .



April 27, 1972

Failure comes easy at a time like this. After eight days in this fantastic dungeon of a hotel, the idea of failing totally and miserably in my work seems absolutely logical. It is a fitting end to this gig—not only for me, but for everyone else who got trapped here, especially journalists.

The Wisconsin primary is over now. It came to a shocking climax a few hours ago when George McGovern and George Wallace ran a blitz on everybody.

The results were such a jolt to the Conventional Wisdom that now—with a cold gray dawn bloating up out of Lake Superior and Hubert Humphrey still howling in his sleep despite the sedatives in his room directly above us—there is nobody in Milwaukee this morning, including me, who can even pretend to explain what really went down last night. The McGovern brain trust will deny this, but the truth of the matter is that less than twenty-four hours ago it was impossible to get an even-money bet in McGovern headquarters that their man would finish first. Not even Warren Beatty, who is blossoming fast in his new role as one of McGovern’s most valuable and enthusiastic organizers, really believed that George would finish any better than a close second.

A week earlier it would have been considered a sign of madness, among those who knew the score, to bet McGovern any better than a respectable third—but toward the end of the final week the word went out that George had picked up a wave and was showing surprising strength in some of the blue-collar, hard-hat wards that had been more or less conceded to either Humphrey or Muskie. David Broder of the Washington Post is generally acknowledged to be the ranking wizard on the campaign trail this year, and five days before the election he caused serious shock waves by offering to bet—with me, at least—that McGovern would get more than 30 percent, and Wallace less than 10.

He lost both ends of that bet, as it turned out—and I mean to hunt the bastard down and rip his teeth out if he tries to welsh—but the simple fact that Broder had that kind of confidence in McGovern’s strength was seen as a main signal by the professional pols and newsmen who’d been saying all along that the Wisconsin primary was so hopelessly confused that nobody in his right mind would try to predict the outcome.

The lead article in Sunday’s Washington Post echoed the unanimous conviction of all the five or six hundred big-time press/politics wizards who were gathered here for what they all called “the crunch”—the showdown, the first of the national primaries that would finally separate the sheep from the goats, as it were.

After a month of intense research by some of the best political journalists in America, the Post had finally concluded that (1) “The Wisconsin primary election seems likely to make dramatic changes in the battle for the 1972 presidential nomination” . . . and (2), that “an unusually high degree of uncertainty remains as the contest nears its climax.”

In other words, nobody had the vaguest idea what would happen here, except that some people were going to get hurt—and the smart-money consensus had Muskie and Lindsay as the most likely losers. The fact that Lindsay was almost totally out of money made him a pretty safe bet to do badly in Wisconsin, but Muskie—coming off a convincing victory in Illinois that at least partially redeemed his disastrous failure in Florida—looked pretty good in Wisconsin, on paper, but there was still something weak and malignant in the spine of the Muskie campaign. There was a smell of death about it. He talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.

Two weeks before the election the polls had Muskie running more or less even with Humphrey and well ahead of McGovern—but not even his staffers believed it; they kept smiling, but their morale had been cracked beyond repair in Florida, when Muskie called a meeting the day after the primary to announce that he was quitting the race. They had managed to talk him out of it, agreeing to work without pay until after Wisconsin, but when word of the candidate’s aborted withdrawal leaked out to the press . . . well, that was that. Nobody published it, nobody mentioned it on TV or radio—and, from that point on, the only thing that kept the Muskie campaign alive was a grim political version of the old vaudeville idea that “the show must go on.”