Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Thompson Hunter S

Author:Thompson, Hunter S. [Thompson, Hunter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-25T20:00:00+00:00

State Vote Aids M’Govern:

Senator’s Slates Win By Large Margin

In The Suburbs

That was the Times’s big headline on Wednesday morning. The “3 A’s candidate” (Acid, Abortion, Amnesty) had definitely improved his position by carrying the suburbs. The bulk of the political coverage on page one had to do with local races—“Ryan, Badillo, Rangel Win: Coller is in Close Battle”… “Delegates Named”… “Bingham Defeats Scheuer; Rooney Apparent Winner.”

Down at the bottom of the page was a block of wire-photos from the National Mayors’ Conference in New Orleans—also on Tuesday—and the choice shot from down there showed a smiling Hubert Humphrey sitting next to Mayor Daley of Chicago with the Mayor of Miami Beach leaning into the scene with one of his arms around Daley and the other around Hubert.

The caption said, “Ex-Mayor Is Hit with Mayors.” The “details, Page 28” said Humphrey had definitely emerged as the star of the Mayors’ conference. The two losers were shown in smaller photos underneath the Daley/Humphrey thing. Muskie “received polite applause,” the caption said, and the camera had apparently caught him somewhere near the beginning of a delayed Ibogaine rush: his eyes are clouding over, his jaw has gone slack, his hair appears to be combed back in a DA.

The caption under the McGovern photo says, “He, too, received moderate response.” But McGovern at least looked human, while the other four looked like they had just been trucked over on short notice from some third-rate wax museum in the French Quarter. The only genuinely ugly face of the five is that of Mayor Daley: He looks like a potato with mange—it is the face of a man who would see nothing wrong with telling his son to go out and round up a gang of thugs with bullhorns and kick the shit out of anybody stupid enough to challenge the Mayor of Chicago’s right to name the next Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

I started at the front page for a long time; there was something wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite fix on the problem until… yes… I realized that the whole front page of the June 21st New York Times could just as easily have been dated March 8th, the day after the New Hampshire primary.

“Pacification” was failing again in Vietnam; Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was demanding more bombers; ITT was beating another illegal stock-sales rap… but the most striking similarity was in the overall impression of what was happening in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Apparently nothing had changed. Muskie looked just as sick and confused as he had on that cold Wednesday morning in Manchester four months ago. McGovern looked like the same tough but hopeless underdog—and there was nothing in the face of either Daley or Humphrey to indicate that either one of those correct and vicious old screws had any doubt at all about what was going to happen in Miami in July. They appeared to be very pleased with whatever the Mayor of Miami Beach was saying to them….

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