Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

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I was as guilty as all the others, that year, of treating the McCarthy campaign as a foredoomed exercise in noble futility. We had talked about it a lot – not only in the Wayfarer bar, but also in the bar of the Holiday Inn where Nixon was staying – and the press consensus was that the only Republican with a chance to beat Johnson was Nelson Rockefeller … and the only other possible winner was Bobby Kennedy, who had already made it clear – both publicly and privately – that he would definitely not run for President in 1968.

I was remembering all this as I cranked the big green Cougar along U.S. 93 once again, four years later, to cover another one of these flakey New Hampshire primaries. The electorate in this state is notoriously perverse and unpredictable. In 1964, for instance, it was a thumping victory in the New Hampshire primary that got the Henry Cabot Lodge steamroller off to a roaring start … and in ’68, Gene McCarthy woke up on the morning of election day to read in the newspapers that the last minute polls were nearly unanimous in giving him between six and eight percent of the vote … and even McCarthy was stunned, I think, to wake up twenty-four hours later and find himself with 42 percent.

Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East’s psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico – big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old-timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists – people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service – who’ve been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhikers you find along these narrow twisting highways look like the people you see on the roads around Boulder and Aspen or Taos.

The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her. ‘I guess it sounds crazy,’ she explains. ‘We don’t even sleep together. He’s just a friend. But I’m happy when I’m with him because he makes me like myself.’

Jesus, I thought. We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now – six months out of college – she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn’t even know she’s coming.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.

The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.

She tried to be polite but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don’t keep moving.

Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days – and then he’d be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.

It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlboro and I saw she was crying which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about ‘junkies’ and ‘loonies’ and ‘doomfreaks.’

Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.

These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.

This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.

We couldn’t find the commune. The directions were too vague: ‘Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree … proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines …’

After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck … but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place on a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was OK.

I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really ‘OK.’ I was tempted to take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us … checking into the Wayfarer at 3:30, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast, and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.

Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nymphet who thought politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.

No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I’d always thought 1 was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.

Earlier that night, in Cambridge – over dinner at a bogus Mexican restaurant run by Italian junkies – several people had asked me why I was wasting my time on ‘this kind of bullshit.’ McGovern, Muskie, Lindsay, or even Gene McCarthy. I had just come back from a long day at the Massachusetts ‘Rad/Lib Caucus’ in Worcester, billed as a statewide rally to decide which Democratic candidate to support in the Massachusetts primary on April 25th.

The idea, said the organizers, was to unify and avoid a disastrous vote-splitting orgy that would splinter the Left between McGovern, Lindsay & McCarthy – thus guaranteeing an easy Muskie win. The Caucus organizers were said to be well-known McCarthy supporters, who’d conceived the gathering as a sort of launching pad for Gene in ’72 … and McCarthy seemed to agree; he was the only candidate to attend the Caucus in person, and his appearance drew a booming ovation that gave every indication of a pending victory.

The night before, at a crowded student rally in Hogan Student Center at Holy Cross, McCarthy had responded to a questioner who asked if he was ‘really a serious candidate’ by saying: ‘You’ll see how serious I am after tomorrow’s Caucus.’

The crowd at Holy Cross responded with a rolling cheer. The median age, that night, was somewhere around nineteen and McCarthy was impressively sharp and confident as he drew roar after roar of applause with his quietly vicious attack on Nixon, Humphrey, and Muskie. As I stood there in the doorway of the auditorium, looking across the shoulders of the overflow crowd, it looked like 1968 all over again. There was a definite sense of drama in seeing McCarthy back on the stump, cranking up another crusade.

But that high didn’t last long. The site of Saturday’s Caucus was the gym at Assumption College, across town, and the crowd over there was very different. The median age at the Caucus was more like thirty-three and the results of the first ballot were a staggering blow to McCarthy’s newborn crusade.

McGovern cleaned up, beating McCarthy almost three to one. When the final tally came in, after more than eight hours of infighting, McGovern’s quietly efficient grass-roots organizers had locked up 62 percent of the vote – leaving McCarthy to split the rest, more or less equally, with Shirley Chisholm. Both Muskie and Lindsay had tried to ignore the Caucus, claiming it was ‘stacked’ against them, and as a result neither one got enough votes to even mention.

The outcome of the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus was a shock to almost everybody except the busloads of McGovern supporters who had come there to flex their muscle in public for the first time. McCarthy – who had left early to fly back to Washington for an appearance the next day on Meet the Press – was seriously jolted by the loss. He showed it the next morning on TV when he looked like a ball of bad nerves caught in a crossfire of hostile questions from Roger Mudd and George Herman. He was clearly off-balance; a nervous shadow of the rising-tide, hammerhead spoiler he had been on Friday night for the rally at Holy Cross.

To make things worse, one of the main organizers of the Rad/ Lib Caucus was Jerry Grossman, a wealthy envelope manufacturer from Newton, in the Boston suburbs, and a key McCarthy fundraiser in the ’68 campaign … but after the Rad/Lib Caucus, Grossman went far out of his way, along with Mudd & Herman, to make sure McCarthy was done for.

He immediately endorsed McGovern, saying it was clear that ‘Massachusetts liberals no longer believe in McCarthy’s leadership quotient.’ What this meant, according to the unanimous translation by political pros and press wizards, was, ‘McCarthy won’t get any more of Grossman’s money.’

Grossman ignored the obvious fact that he and other pro-McCarthy heavies had been beaten stupid, on the grass-roots organizing level, by an unheralded ‘McGovern machine’ put together in Massachusetts by John Reuther – a nephew of Walter, late president of the UAW. I spent most of that afternoon wandering around the gym, listening to people talk and watching the action, and it was absolutely clear – once the voting started -that Reuther had everything wired.

Everywhere I went there was a local McGovern floor manager keeping people in line, telling them exactly what was happening and what would probably happen next … while the McCarthy forces – led by veteran Kennedy/Camelot field marshal Richard Goodwin – became more and more demoralized, caught in a fast---rising pincers movement between a surprisingly organized McGovern block on their Right, and a wild-eyed Chisholm uprising on the Left.

The Chisholm strength shocked everybody. She was one of twelve names on the ballot – which included almost every conceivable Democratic candidate from Hubert Humphrey to Patsy Mink, Wilbur Mills, and Sam Yorty – but after Muskie and Lindsay dropped out, the Caucus was billed far and wide as a test between McGovern and McCarthy. There was no mention in the press or anywhere else that some unknown black woman from Brooklyn might seriously challenge these famous liberal heavies on their own turf … but when the final vote came in, Shirley Chisholm had actually beaten Gene McCarthy, who finished a close third.

The Chisholm challenge was a last-minute idea and only half-organized, on the morning of the Caucus, by a handful of speedy young black politicos and Women’s Lib types – but by 6:00 that evening it had developed from a noisy idea into a solid power bloc. What began as a symbolic kind of challenge became a serious position after the first ballot – among this overwhelmingly white, liberal, affluent, well-educated, and over-thirty audience – when almost half of them refused to vote for George McGovern because he seemed ‘too conventional,’ as one long-haired kid in a ski parka told me.

They had nothing against McGovern; they agreed with almost everything he said – but they wanted more; and it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the same people who showed up at McCarthy’s Holy Cross rally on Friday night had come out to Assumption on Sunday.

There were not many Youth/Freak vote types at the Rad/Lib Caucus; perhaps one out of five, and probably not even that. The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a ‘registration fee’ of two dollars before you got a vote.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t pay it myself, so I can’t vote.’ He shrugged. ‘But this Caucus doesn’t mean anything, anyway. This is just a bunch of old liberals getting their rocks off Manchester, New Hampshire, is a broken down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington, D.C.

I checked into the Wayfarer just before dawn and tried to get some music on my high-powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries, in Portsmouth.

It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his hand-grabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain, above which hung a sign saying ‘Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work.’

The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything – and a lot of hissing & humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.

The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-class liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern’s public appearances: The crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age gap didn’t hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was … even at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three, that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five & thirty-five.

After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.

I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said – no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets – so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender ‘Jim,’ which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as ‘Mr. Reynolds.’

Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. ‘My name’s not Reynolds, goddamnit! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star.’ Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.

The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his ‘political director’ in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa – Senator Harold Hughes – had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie.

This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes/McGovern/Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who were criss-crossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him ‘un-touchable.’ If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.

Hughes had grown a beard; he didn’t mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then – and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry o’Brien’s personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the national convention.

Dick Dougherty, a former Los Angeles Times newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action in New Hampshire, was so shaken by the news of Hughes’ defection that he didn’t even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just gotten the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate’s. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking ‘Nevermore …’

By chance, I found George downstairs in the Men’s Room, hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the grey marble tiles.

‘Say … ah … I hate to mention this,’ I said. ‘But what about this thing with Hughes?’

He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his head and mumbling something about ‘a deal for the vice-presidency.’ I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together.

‘Why do you think he did it?’ I said.

He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. ‘Well …’ he said finally. ‘I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re all surprised.’

He looked very tired, and I didn’t see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room.

This proved to be my un-doing, because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I’d entered with The Senator … but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pinstripe suit.

A lot has been written about McGovern’s difficulties on the campaign trail, but most of it is far off the point. The career pols and press wizards say he simply lacks ‘charisma,’ but that’s a cheap and simplistic idea that is more an insult to the electorate than to McGovern. The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator – or even a President – is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.

McGovern, they say, doesn’t make it on this level. Which is probably true. But McCarthy was worse. His ’68 campaign had none of the surface necessities. He had no money, no press, no endorsements, no camera-presence … his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.

There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naive enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent – with a good voting record on ‘the issues’ – is a natural man for the White House.

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon) … and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

McGovern’s failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign. They all sense an untouched constituency. Chisholm’s campaign manager, a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson, calls it the ‘Sleeping Giant vote.’

‘Nobody’s reaching them,’ he said. ‘We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for.’

Ron Dellums, the black Congressman from Berkeley, called it ‘the Nigger vote.’ But he wasn’t talking about skin pigment.

‘It’s time for somebody to lead all of America’s Niggers,’ he said at the Capitol Hill press conference when Shirley Chisholm announced she was running for President. ‘And by this I mean the Young, the Black, the Brown, the women, the Poor – all the people who feel left out of the political process. If we can put the Nigger Vote together, we can bring about some real change in this country.’

Dellums is probably the only elected official in America who feels politically free enough to stare at the cameras and make a straight-faced pitch to the ‘Nigger Vote.’ But he is also enough of a politician to know it’s out there … maybe not in the Exeter Inn, but the hills north and west of Manchester are teeming with Niggers. They didn’t turn out for the speech-making, and they probably won’t vote in the primary – but they are there, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

Looking back on that week in New Hampshire, it was mainly a matter of following George McGovern around and watching him do his thing – which was pleasant, or at least vaguely uplifting, but not what you’d call a real jerk-around.

McGovern is not one of your classic fireballs on the stump. His campaign workers in New Hampshire seem vaguely afflicted by a sense of uncertainty about what it all means. They are very decent people. They are working hard, they are very sincere, and most of them are young volunteers who get their pay in room & board … but they lack something crucial, and that lack is painfully obvious to anybody who remembers the mood of the McCarthy volunteers in 1968.

Those people were angry. The other side of that ‘Clean for Gene’ coin was a nervous sense of truce that hung over the New Hampshire campaign. In backroom late night talks at the Wayfarer there was no shortage of McCarthy staffers who said this would probably be their final trip ‘within the system.’ There were some who didn’t mind admitting that, personally, they’d rather throw firebombs or get heavy into dope – but they were attracted by the drama, the sheer balls, of McCarthy’s ‘hopeless challenge.’

McCarthy’s national press man at the time was Seymour Hersh, who quit the campaign in Wisconsin and called Gene a closet racist.

(#ulink_8dcd5869-580b-52f7-a45b-f2594b0c6b67) Two years later, Sy Hersh was back in the public ear with a story about a place called My Lai, in South Vietnam. He was the one who dragged it out in the open.

McCarthy’s state-level press man that year was a hair-freak named Bill Gallagher, who kept his room in the Wayfarer open from midnight to dawn as a sort of all-night refuge for weed fanciers. A year later, when I returned to New Hampshire to write a piece on ski racer Jean-Claude Killy, I got off the cocktail circuit long enough to locate Gallagher in a small Vermont hamlet where he was living as the de facto head of a mini-commune. He had dropped out of politics with a vengeance; his beard was down to his belt and his head was far out of politics. ‘The McCarthy thing’ had been ‘a bad trip,’ he explained. He no longer cared who was President.

You don’t find people like Hersh and Gallagher around McGovern’s headquarters in Manchester this year. They would frighten the staff. McGovern’s main man in New Hampshire is a fat young pol named Joe Granmaison, whose personal style hovers somewhere between that of a state trooper and a used-car salesman.

Granmaison was eager to nail Muskie: ‘If we elect a President who three years ago said, “Gee, I made a mistake” … well, I think it’s about time these people were held accountable for those mistakes.’

Indeed. But Granmaison backed away from me like he’d stepped on a rattlesnake when I asked him if it were true that he’d been a Johnson delegate to the Chicago convention in ’68.

We met at a McGovern cocktail party in a downstate hamlet called Keene. ‘Let’s talk about this word “accountable,” I said. ‘I get the feeling you stepped in shit on that one …’

‘What do you mean?’ he snapped. ‘Just because I was a Johnson delegate doesn’t mean anything. I’m not running for office.’

‘Good,’ I said. We were standing in a short hallway between the kitchen and the living room, where McGovern was saying, ‘The thing the political bosses want most is for young people to drop out … because they know the young people can change the system, and the bosses don’t want any change.’

True enough, I thought. But how do you ‘change the system’ by hiring a young fogey like Granmaison to wire up your act in New Hampshire? With a veteran Judas Goat like that in charge of the operation, it’s no wonder that McGovern’s Manchester headquarters is full of people who talk like nervous PoliSci students on job-leave.

Joe didn’t feel like discussing his gig at the ’68 Convention. Which is understandable. If I had done a thing like that, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. I tried to change the subject, but he crammed a handful of potato chips into his mouth and walked away.

Later that night, after the cocktail party, we drove out to the Student Union hall at Keene State College, where McGovern addressed a big and genuinely friendly crowd of almost 3000, jammed into a hall meant for 2000 tops. The advance man had done his work well.

The big question tonight was ‘Amnesty,’ and when McGovern said he was for it, the crowd came alive. This was, after all, the first time any active candidate for the presidency had said ‘Yes’ on the Amnesty question – which is beginning to look like a time-bomb with almost as much Spoiler Potential as the busing issue.

They both have long and tangled roots, but it is hard to imagine any question in American politics today that could have more long-range impact than the argument over ‘Amnesty,’ – which is nothing more or less than a proposal to grant presidential pardon to all draft dodgers and U.S. military deserters, on the grounds that history has absolved them. Because if the Vietnam War was wrong from the start – as even Nixon has tacitly admitted – then it is hard to avoid the logic of the argument that says the Anti-War Exiles were right for refusing to fight it.

There is not much room for politics in the Amnesty argument. It boils down to an official admission that the American Military Establishment – acting in spiritual concert with the White House and the national Business Community – was Wrong.

Almost everybody except Joe Alsop has already admitted this, in private … but it is going to be a very painful thing to say in public.

It will be especially painful to the people who got their sons shipped back to them in rubber sacks, and to the thousands of young Vets who got their arms and their legs and balls blown off for what the White House and Ed Muskie now admit was ‘a mistake.’

But 60,000 Americans have died for that ‘mistake,’ along with several million Vietnamese … and it is only now becoming clear that the ‘war dead’ will also include hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais. When this war goes into the history books, the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.

Richard Nixon is flatly opposed to a general amnesty for the men who refused to fight this tragic war. Muskie agrees, but he says he might change his mind once the war ends … and Lindsay, as usual, is both for and against it.

The only ‘candidates’ in favor of Amnesty are McGovern and Ted Kennedy. I watched McGovern deal with the question when it popped out of that overflow student audience at Keene State. He was talking very sharp, very confident, and when the question of Amnesty came up, he got right on it, saying ‘Yes, I’m in favor …’

This provoked a nice outburst of cheers and applause. It was a very strong statement, and the students clearly dug it.

Then, moments later, somebody tossed out the fishhook -asking McGovern if he had any plans, pro or con, about supporting Muskie, if Big Ed got the nod in Miami.

McGovern paused, shifted uneasily for a second or so at the podium, then said: ‘Yes, I’m inclined to that position.’ I was standing behind him on the stage, looking out at the crowd through a slit in the big velvet curtain, and according to the red-inked speed-scrawl in my notebook, the audience responded with … ‘No cheering, confused silence, the audience seems to sag …’

But these were only my notes. Perhaps I was wrong – but even making a certain allowance for my own bias, it still seems perfectly logical to assume that an audience of first-time voters might be at least momentarily confused by a Left/Champion Democratic candidate who says in one breath that his opponent is dead wrong on a very crucial issue … and then in the next breath says he plans to support that opponent if he wins the nomination.

I doubt if I was the only person in the hall, at that moment, who thought: ‘Well, shit… if you plan to support him in July, why not support him now, and get it over with?’

Moments later, the speech ended and I found myself out on the sidewalk shooting up with Ray Morgan, a veteran political analyst from the Kansas City Star. He was on his way to the airport, with McGovern, for a quick flight on the charter plane to Washington, and he urged me to join him.

But I didn’t feel up to it. 1 felt like thinking for a while, running that narrow, icy, little highway back to Manchester just as fast as the Cougar would make it and still hold the road – which was not very fast, so I had plenty of time to brood, and to wonder why I felt so depressed.

I had not come to New Hampshire with any illusions about McGovern or his trip – which was, after all, a longshot underdog challenge that even the people running his campaign said was not much better than 30 to 1.

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn’t get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more – or maybe something different.

Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.?

Well … that would take a lot of time and space I don’t have now, but for openers I think maybe it is no longer enough to have been ‘against the War in Vietnam since 1963’ – especially when your name is not one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and when you’re talking to people who got their first taste of tear gas at anti-war rallies in places like Berkeley and Cambridge in early ’65.

A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned – but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.

This is an ugly portent for the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 who may or may not vote in 1972. And many of them probably will vote. The ones who go to the polls in ’72 will be the most committed, the most idealistic, the ‘best minds of my generation,’ as Allen Ginsberg said it fourteen years ago in ‘Howl.’ There is not much doubt that the hustlers behind the ‘Youth Vote’ will get a lot of people out to the polls in ’72. If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.

But what about next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should ‘try again’ for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations – between the ages of 22 and 40 – who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson/Goldwater to Humphrey/Nixon to Nixon/Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.

This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto ‘Live Free or Die’ inscribed above the numbers.

The highways are full of good mottos. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about … what was it? Have these Dangerous Drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this: