Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (24 page)

“Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We had a fine time. I enjoyed it—which put me a bit off balance, because I’d figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to football on the stump, but it had never occurred to me that he actually
knew
anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.

But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still no doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass—in the waning moments of a Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland—to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style & precision.

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh and laughed: “That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!”

That was four years ago. LBJ was Our President and there was no real hint, in the winter of ’68, that he was about to cash his check. Johnson seemed every bit as tough and invulnerable then as Nixon seems today . . . and it is slightly unnerving to recall that Richard Nixon, at that point in his campaign, appeared to have about as much chance of getting himself elected to the White House as Hubert Humphrey appears to have today.

When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed, by the pros, as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do. The polls showed him comfortably ahead of George Romney, but according to most of the big-time press wizards who were hanging around Manchester at the time, the Nixon-Romney race was only a drill that would end just as soon as Nelson Rockefeller came in to mop up both of them. The bar at the Wayfarer Motor Inn was a sort of unofficial press headquarters, where the press people hovered in nervous anticipation of the Rockefeller announcement that was said to be coming “at any moment.”

So I was not entirely overcome at the invitation to spend an hour alone with Richard Nixon. He was, after all, a born loser—even if he somehow managed to get the Republican nomination, I figured he didn’t have a sick goat’s chance of beating Lyndon Johnson.

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, but of course he had already dropped out.

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 those 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 6 and 8 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 & a Hitchhiker

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 exactly like the people you see on the roads around Boulder or 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 Marlborough 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 “doom-freaks.”

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 for 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 in a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was okay.

I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really “okay.” 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 three thirty, 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 I 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 home 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.

Harold Hughes Is Your Friend

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 handgrabbing 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-aged 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 diversion 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 and thirty-five.