The Boys on the Bus (43 page)

Rolling Stones? Is that the fan magazine of the rock group? Nobody on the campaign trial had ever heard of the magazine back in January of 1972, and it was not an easy publication to define in one or two sentences. The
Time
magazine of the Counter Culture? Well, not exactly. An underground rag? Well, it was too slick, expensive and apolitical really to claim underground status. It was really a music magazine, a hip
Variety
, that made extensive and literate sorties into all kinds of other phenomena—the drug scene, the movie scene, the literary scene, and now … national politics.
Rolling Stone
’s young founder and editor saw himself as the Charles Foster Kane of the seventies; it was his dream that
Rolling Stone
would muster the gigantic, newly enfranchised Youth Vote and throw it to the best man. Things did not exactly shape up that way, but fortunately the editor had the wit to hire Hunter Thompson as political correspondent.

At the time Thompson had two main credentials. First, he had written a book about the Hell’s Angels, based on having lived and ridden with them for almost two years. Although the Angels had beaten Thompson up at the end of his stay, and his book was more critical than sympathetic, still it was clear in many passages that he identified with the Angels; he had the heroic aura of the veteran war correspondent about him, from having lived among the savages and survived. Secondly, he had received national publicity when he ran as the Freak Power Candidate for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on a platform that called for free mescaline for anybody who wanted it; ripping up
the streets and resodding them with grass; and harassing all the corporate “greedheads” and real estate developers who were ruining the beauty of the valley.

Thompson seemed just the man to establish a truly “adversary” relationship with the Presidential candidates. In December 1971, he was dispatched to Washington to open a
Rolling Stone
office and to turn his violent, satirical, epithet-studded style on the men in the Democratic primaries. I also worked for
Rolling Stone
, and they sent me out to write the serious backup pieces, keep Thompson out of trouble, and carry the bail bond money.

It was interesting to watch Thompson and the other reporters get to know each other. Thompson was a tall, lean thirty-five-year-old who wore sneakers, Miami sport-shirts, a motley hunting jacket, and bat-wing blue-tinted sunglasses. He looked more like a Sierra Club back-packing nut than a hippie, but there was no confusing him with the rest of the reporters, all of whom wore suits and ties.

And Hunter wanted no part of them, at least not at first. His memories of the press corps from the 1968 campaign, which he had covered for an aborted book, were all unpleasant. He told me that they had been a bunch of swine, a collection of suspicious reactionary old hacks who cared only about protecting their leads and were hopelessly out of touch with anything interesting that was happening in the country. He had met only one decent person the whole time—Bill Cardoso, who edited the Boston
Globe
Sunday magazine. Cardoso had spotted him as the author of
Hell’s Angels
on the Nixon press bus in New Hampshire and offered him a joint. “Don’t worry,” Cardoso had said, “these fuckers are all so square they won’t know what you’re doing.” He had been right.

For his first outing in 1972—a ride around the New Hampshire hills in the airport limousine that then served as the McGovern press bus—Thompson had come equipped with two sixpacks of ale and a fifth of Wild Turkey. He had smiled with satisfaction when the other reporters turned down his offers to
share the booze, and when James J. Kilpatrick, the conservative columnist, moved uneasily to the front of the limo. At every stop he would turn to me and suggest loudly, “Let’s go to the men’s room and eat some acid” or “Maybe there’ll be enough time here for us to shoot up.” He talked in gruff bursts, like a squawkbox in a squad car. Toward the end of the ride, he began grumbling that he needed “Sex, Dope, and Violence.”

But nothing happened. Nobody threw him off the bus. The press corps was no longer so shockable. As the campaign went on, Thompson began to find kindred spirits without even looking for them. There were usually a few young reporters around with whom he could roll a joint or share a tab of MDA—not to mention the young staffers on the McGovern campaign. Even some of the representatives of the nation’s great newspapers had taken to smoking dope.

But what baffled Thompson was that some of the straightest men on the bus soon began to accept him and to read his articles. The first sign that Hunter had caught on with the straight press was when they began searching newsstands all over the country or phoning their home offices to get them a copy of his lengthy chronicle of the Florida primary. Thompson had loaned his press card to a freak, who had run amuck aboard Muskie’s whistle-stop train, insulting reporters and heckling the candidate when he tried to speak at the final stop in Miami. Many of the reporters, seeing only the badge on the freak’s lapel, had taken him for Hunter S. Thompson of
Rolling Stone
. In the article, Thompson explained the mistake but revelled in its consequences. The piece was a big hit with the press corps, and they soon began to read him regularly. Thompson’s best lines were quoted in
Newsweek
. “Ed Muskie talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow on next year’s crop.” Hubert Humphrey was a “treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddam bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”

Chris Lydon—a
New York Times
reporter who was only thirty-three but dressed like an Exeter headmaster and wore a
James Reston Memorial Bow Tie—admired Thompson and went so far as to quote him in a Sunday
Week in Review
piece to the effect that Humphrey was campaigning “like a rat in heat.” However Lydon worried for weeks afterward about having used the quote; his wife told him she thought it was “unfair.” Wherever the campaign went, local reporters would come up looking for Hunter, wanting to see what he looked like and to congratulate him. “After the revolution, we’ll all write like Hunter,” a local TV man in Los Angeles confided to me. “We’ll stop writing all this Mickey Mouse shit.”

Not many people in the press corps went that far in their admiration. But reading Thompson obviously gave them a vicarious, Mittyesque thrill. Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces. Thompson was free to write the unmentionable—that the campaign was essentially meaningless, that some of the candidates were shams and liars, that the process was unjust and anachronistic. There were times when the other reporters ached to say the same things, but the rules would never allow it. I remember Lydon standing around the Silver Spring hospital in his tweed outfit after George Wallace had been shot, saying with his usual earnestness that “Hunter Thompson should be here to record this for history,” as if only Hunter possessed the license and proper style to capture the grotesqueness of the scene.

Of course, there were no journalists aboard who actually agreed with Thompson’s basic premise that the “only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct.” Even the New York lefty journalists like Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Jack Newfield were fond of the
party. In the late spring of ’72, Hamill had even engineered a meeting between his friend Meade Esposito, the Democratic Boss of Brooklyn, and George McGovern. Hamill, Esposito, and McGovern had breakfasted in the Senate dining room, and Esposito agreed to back McGovern. Later, during the New York primary, Hamill, Breslin, and Newfield had met with McGovern and chewed him out for the condescending way in which his people were treating the New York regular Democrats. Breslin, using language McGovern had never heard in South Dakota, advised the Senator to get out and meet the real Democrats by campaigning at firehouses, police headquarters, and party clubhouses.

But Thompson detested the regulars. This hatred, he explained in print, stemmed from the fact that Larry O’Brien had promised him the governorship of American Samoa in 1968, and then reneged. Thompson claimed to be nursing a desire for revenge, waiting for O’Brien to send the Democrats into a hopeless battle that would “destroy the party by plunging it into a state of financial and ideological bankruptcy from which it would never recover. Wonderful, I thought. I won’t even have to
do
anything. Just watch, and write it all down.”

But Thompson’s real reason for loathing the party was that he felt it excluded outsiders, like himself. There was a touch of Genêt in Thomspon. As a kid, he had grown up in the stifling small-town atmosphere of Louisville, Kentucky, where his father was an insurance man whose only diversion consisted of going out to the track at five every morning to clock the horses. Thompson rebelled and found other means of amusement—mainly knocking off liquor stores and gas stations. The authorities never nailed him for theft, but they managed to put him in jail for thirty days on a phony rape charge. Thompson was just short of eighteen and the whole experience scared the hell out of him. He decided to swear off stealing and channel his criminal energies into writing. He wrote to provoke, shock, protest, and annoy.

His favorite pastime was hoaxing people, and he was forever
springing outlandish rumors on the McGovern people, just to see if they would bite. His greatest triumph came one night late in the campaign at a New York restaurant called Elaine’s, a favorite of the literary set. Thompson walked in and spotted a group of McGovern heavies at one of the tables. He ran over to them, banged his fist on the table and started yelling that Tom Eagleton was in the back room, having a nervous breakdown. “He’s jumping up and down, screaming that McGovern is a sellout and a fraud.” The McGovern staffers were on their feet and heading for the back room before they realized that they had been pranked.

This sort of joke was also a staple of Thompson’s writing. In a column on the Wisconsin primary, he claimed to have discovered that Muskie was taking an obscure Brazilian drug called Ibogaine, which accounted for the Senator’s zombie-like performances on the stump. Many readers, including several journalists, believed this. So in subsequent articles, Hunter telegraphed his punches by writing, “My God, why do I write crazy stuff like this?” at the end of each hoax.

In any case, these hoaxes symptomized Thompson’s antisocial tendencies and his steady identification with outcasts like the Hell’s Angels, blacks, women, Chicanos, freaks, and people below the poverty line. He was looking for a candidate who would really represent these people and fight the greedheads. George McGovern might do it, he thought, but even before the New Hampshire election, his instincts warned him that there was a serious flaw in McGovern. “When the big whistle blows, he’s still a party man,” wrote Thomspon late in March. But McGovern’s first primary victories made a convert of Thompson. McGovern looked like a gutsy crusader for many of the causes that Thompson embraced. His enthusiasm for McGovern peaked around the time of the Wisconsin primary, in April, and he began to become more and more intrigued by the machinery of the campaign, getting to know the staff more closely than any other reporter on the road. He even built up a working relationship with McGovern, and McGovern paid Thompson
the supreme compliment of reading his articles and telling him that they were “brilliant.”

But by the time of the California primary, in June, Thompson began to smell the fat cats latching onto the campaign, and to sense that McGovern would sell much to get the nomination. By midsummer, Thompson had become wholly appalled at McGovern’s effort to woo the old party regulars like Richard Daley and Lyndon Johnson. “McGovern could have won this time if only he’d followed the strategy his own man, Fred Dutton, laid down in his book [
Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970’s
]—tapping the new forces in the land,” said Thompson. “Dutton understood that it’s only at times like these—when you come in with a wild card—that you can play on your own terms. They started that way. But McGovern—or somebody around him—lost his nerve. And I’m going to find out who.”

Throughout the fall, Thompson searched for the “villain” of the campaign, the adviser who was counseling McGovern to sell out. He never found the villain, though he haunted the Washington McGovern Headquarters for several weeks, systematically stalking his prey. His last election piece conceded failure and ended with a painful outcry:

That was without a doubt the most passionate piece of writing that the campaign produced, and more than a few men on the plane probably agreed with it and would have liked to have written it themselves. But they were also keenly aware that you could not sway millions of Middle Americans by sneering at used car dealers. Thompson had the luxury of a limited audience. He could say what he liked because he was talking to his own people. No matter how much the other reporters envied Thompson’s freedom, they also resented him for not having to play by the rules. For when Marty Nolan sat down to write a column, even one that was thoroughly leftish, he reminded himself to write for the “milkman in Dorchester.” When Dan Rather went before the camera, he remembered to address the construction worker in El Paso. And who was Thompson speaking to? A Chicano welfare lawyer, or perhaps a very hip college student. He did not have to learn the very dangerous skill of balancing honesty with tact. The others did.