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

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I suspect that there should have been more discussion in the campaign of the everyday frustrations and problems of working people, conditions under which they work, maybe more of an effort made to identify with them…. 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,” he offers at one point.

HST: Primarily the provable damage that the Eagleton Affair did to the actual numbers of the McGovern constituency – the potential constituency. He was told by True Davis, who had run against Eagleton in the Democratic primary for senator in 1968 in Missouri, that the records were in a box in an office in St. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. HST: Not heavily, but he wasn’t worried about walking up to the bar and saying… uh… let me have… a… vodka and orange juice. The campaign plane would fly into a state and the staffers would have conflicting things set up for him to do.

I think Thompson didn’t so much believe in McGovern himself — who comes off as a bit feckless both in Thompson’s glowing reviews and in speeches I’ve seen on YouTube — as the coalition of kids and misfits who came together to get him the nomination. Or, as history podcaster Dan Carlin often puts it: “I want a country that matches the marketing material. That was Mankiewicz talking, and here’s the explanation he gave for why he lied to all the reporters, including me, who had asked him about this… Because I knew… I had that exact quote from several people on the McGovern staff, who wanted to release it.

Is that the sharpest Edge that you’ve personally experienced and would like to continue to experience? That’s when his image as a different kind of politician, an anti-politician, just cracked and shattered and there was no way to put it back together. McGovern: Well, it seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coalition, but maybe not. HST: One of the weird unanswered questions is whether McGovern actually said1000% to anyone but Eagleton.

McGovern said that “half of the Nixon vote, given the chance, would have gone even further to the right! Despite his irreverence, Thompson does at times wrap himself in the hope he finds in George McGovern, a mild-mannered senator from South Dakota who was the favourite among the holdover dregs of 1960’s counterculture. If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone. An early fax machine was procured for Thompson after he inquired about the device while visiting venture capitalist Max Palevsky, who concurrently served as chairman of Xerox and Rolling Stone for several years in the early 1970s.

I think those people do have to be brought back into the Democractic party if it’s going to survive as a party that can win national elections. To think that after all that stuff in California, that we might possibly end up with a McGovern/Humphrey ticket. HST: Yeah: In the Haynes Johnson story Mankiewicz said that he was speaking both for himself and Gary Hart when he went to McGovern right after they found out about the information on Eagleton, the initial information, the stuff that was published. About three weeks after the election, though, Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post wrote a long series on the Eagleton Affair, and here’s the way he explains how Mankiewicz reacted to the initial shock of this information about Eagleton… He’s talking about the fact that two reporters from the Knight newspapers got hold of the information about the same time as Gary and Frank did.We were winning those primaries on a reform program and rather blunt outspoken statements of what we were going to do. One of his best and most illuminating books, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, is written with the cutting commentary and breakneck pace so recognizable as Thompson. 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. Ed: I’d like to interrupt you now to ask what was the prevailing mood of the McGovern staff at this point…flying back to Sioux Falls… a day before the election, November 6th?

This made him a pioneer in a type of journalism he dubbed “gonzo,” wherein he often exaggerated or even made up events to hit at some kind of deeper literary truth. Louis trying to dig up Eagleton’s medical record out of the Barnes Hospital, or actually the Rennard Hospital in the Washington University Medical Center.So Anderson had every reason to believe that he would have the actual drunk driving records or xeroxes of them in his hands by the time he broke the story. The bussing issue was the most pronounced one, but also the attacking on the welfare program and the way the President handled that issue. 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…. Thompson still despises him and his views, but by peeling away a layer, he can expose things that lay beneath the surface. HST: What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it’s really a party of expediency, something that’s put together every four years?