Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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And I think it hurt him with the Wallace-type Democrats that I talked to up in Serb Hall in Milwaukee that day; who disagreed with him, but perceived him – that word again – as a straight, honest, different type of politician, a person who would actually do what he said, make some real changes. HST: Primarily the provable damage that the Eagleton Affair did to the actual numbers of the McGovern constituency – the potential constituency.

I suppose maybe I should have gone on television earlier with thoughtful question and answer sessions, the kind of speeches I was doing there the last few weeks. But this was the most depressing experience I’ve had in a long, long time… Far more depressing than, for instance, than getting beaten myself, in any kind of political race in Colorado. I suspect that’s really one of the roots of the thinking of at least half of the ranking staff people in McGovern’s campaign, even now…. Whereas, in fact, despite denials of the McGovern staff in the last days of the campaign – when I was one of the five or six reporters who were pushing very aggressively to find out more about Eagleton and the real nature of his mental state – I spent about ten days in late September, early October, in St.

get a head full of really dangerous chemicals, and GET THE STORY; even if you have to create it yourself along the way.

Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in 24 hours… but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England – or the Queen – and have the real business of the presidency conducted by … a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. Whose fault that is I don’t know … I found in the field a lot of confusion about who was really in charge, pushing and pulling as to where you got things cleared, who had the final authority.The energy you could put behind that… the frenzy you’d stir up would probably get you killed, but Jesus Christ, it would be something that nobody’d ever forget. And despite those hours and hours of waiting around for seven seconds of mildly exciting activity, the Yanks can’t get enough of it.

And the fact is people like Nixon – candidates like Nixon – have a running start which gives them a tremendous advantage. I tried to explain it away by telling him I’d had a bit of trouble that morning: A girl had been arrested in my suite at the Washington Hilton.

People you’d never expect to break down … stumbled off the plane in tears, and… it was… I don’t know like a … funeral after a mass murder or something… there was no way to describe it, a kind of … falling apart. It scared the hell out of me … But we made it to the terminal and I bought a ticket for Denver, and… just got the hell out of Washington. The book spends very little time on the actual votes, and instead dwells in the day-to-day life of a journalist covering the campaign — the dreary hotels and constant flights back and forth across the continent, which must have seemed a frightfully claustrophobic existence for a man who usually lived in the woods outside the Colorado ski town of Aspen.

The author takes time to explore each candidate, although concentrating mostly on the Democratic Party, discussing their platforms on the major issues of the time: amnesty, the de-escalation of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, etc. HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President – although I wouldn’t really want to be President. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. Louis for, and this was the part that was quoted, ‘severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies.

Each of those demographics can be extrapolated to determine which candidate they might vote for — if they vote at all — and which messages might reach them if they cared to listen. When that happened, he went on, he would try to arrange either an exclusive interview with Eagleton or give them a news cycle break on the Eagleton medical story. With brutal honesty Thompson narrates the smallest decisions on what speech to give where (from school gymnasiums for young voters, to public halls in heavily Polish districts of Milwaukee, to the attemp No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels. I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary – and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the 50 or 60 bets I made between February and November.