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

Product Information

To my mind, free-flowing sports like soccer and rugby are far more entertaining to watch, but the lack of trackable statistics make them suspicious to the American mind. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists. Written while Thompson was still at the top of his game, Hunter reveals all in a slash and burn book about what goes on during a presidential campaign. And then the accommodation of – at least the beginning of the accommodation of Peking and Moscow seemed to disarm a lot of moderates and liberals who might otherwise have been looking in another direction.

We were discussing the difference between “perception” and “reality” in the handling of the Eagleton Affair. I talked to him earlier that day on the way from Wichita to Long Beach and I could tell… he loosened up so much that it was clear something happened in his head… This was shortly after he told a heckler in I think it was… Grand Rapids, “Kiss my ass. The best people in the campaign were technicians: At the staff command level there was almost constant confusion, and McGovern’s indecisiveness compounded that confusion and left the technicians often wandering around in circles wondering what the hell to do … He had people who could do the work and could turn the vote out, but they weren’t always sure what he was doing.

McGovern: So those two factors were related and the Eagleton thing upset the morale of the staff and people were blaming each other, and there was no chance to recover from the fatigue of the campaign for the nomination – we had to go right into that Eagleton battle, and so I think that – if there was a chance, at that point, to win the election – we probably lost it right there.

Each of those demographics can be extrapolated to determine which candidate they might vote for — if they vote at all — and which messages might reach them if they cared to listen. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England – or the Queen – and have the real business of the presidency conducted by … a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years.

HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? HST: Yeah, but then the punishment would be the greatest too… it’s much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate. The author takes time to explore each candidate, although concentrating mostly on the Democratic Party, discussing their platforms on the major issues of the time: amnesty, the de-escalation of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, etc.

HST: On paper it indicates no change, but what it doesn’t show is … Nixon lost 9% of, his vote in that period of time … 9 out of the original 52. He was going to take them to one mailbox in Washington and dump them all in there… Then they were going to film the behavior of the postman when he opened the box and found 5000 hotel keys… it must have weighed 200 pounds… that was the kind of twisted humor that prevailed on the Zoo Plane. People you’d never expect to break down … stumbled off the plane in tears, and… it was… I don’t know like a … funeral after a mass murder or something… there was no way to describe it, a kind of … falling apart. According to the Hart/Caddell theory, if that hadn’t happened, the race would have been at least very close…. You can feel that incredible… at takeoff… that incredible surge of power behind you… in the 727 the engines are way back in the back and you feel like you’re just being lifted off the ground by some kind of hellish force.It scared the hell out of me … But we made it to the terminal and I bought a ticket for Denver, and… just got the hell out of Washington. I couldn’t think of anything… it’d be hard to imagine anything stranger or weirder or higher or closer to that Edge you’re talking about than a flat-out Freak Power campaign for President of the United States. But from that point on, I won steadily – until November 7th, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct. They were skeptical and I think the mood of the country was much more conservative than we had been led to believe in the primaries. HST: Well, that doesn’t mean another candidate with the same views as McGovern might not have been able to win … or even a candidate with views more radical than McGovern’s.