Things were never the same after that. A cloud of hellish intensity had come down on the McGovern campaign by the time it rolled into California. Mandates came down from the top, warning staffers to beware of the press. The only exceptions were reporters who were known to have a decent respect for things said “in confidence,” and I didn’t fit that description.

  And so much for all that. The point I meant to make here—before we wandered off on that tangent about jackrabbits—is that everything in this book except the footnotes was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

  I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary—and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the fifty or sixty bets I made between February and November. My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern’s staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35 percent of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37.5 percent. But from that point on, I won steadily—until November 7, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct.

  The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? I blew that one, along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven’t changed anything else in this mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can’t find any excuse for changing my final prediction. Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which—in addition to the publisher’s desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those twelve frantic months—was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening: from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.

  So this is more a jangled campaign diary than a record or reasoned analysis of the ’72 presidential campaign. Whatever I wrote in the midnight hours on rented typewriters in all those cluttered hotel rooms along the campaign trail—from the Wayfarer Inn outside Manchester to the Neil House in Columbus to the Wilshire Hyatt House in L.A. and the Fontainebleau in Miami—is no different now than it was back in March and May and July when I was cranking it out of the typewriter one page at a time and feeding it into the plastic maw of that goddamn Mojo Wire to some hash-addled freak of an editor at the Rolling Stone news-desk in San Francisco.

  What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history. There will be no shortage of books covering that end. The last count I got was just before Christmas in ’72, when ex-McGovern speech writer Sandy Berger said at least nineteen people who’d been involved in the campaign were writing books about it—so we’ll eventually get the whole story, for good or ill.

  Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in twenty-four hours… but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter. About four fingers of king-hell Crank would do the trick, but I am not optimistic. There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage Crank on the market these days—and according to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington, that’s solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

  Well… thank Jesus for that. I was beginning to think we were never going to put the arm on that crowd. But the people in Washington say we’re finally making progress. And if anybody should know, it’s them. So maybe this country’s about to get back on the Right Track.

  —HST

  Sunday, January 28, 1973

  San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn

  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, San Francisco, Straight Arrow Books, 1973

  June, 1972: The McGovern Juggernaut Rolls On

  The press room was crowded—two dozen or so ranking media wizards, all wearing little egg-shaped ID tags from the Secret Service: Leo Sauvage/La Figaro, Jack Perkins/NBC, R. W. Apple/N.Y. Times… the McGovern campaign went big-time, for real, in California. No more of that part-time, secondary coverage. McGovern was suddenly the front-runner, perhaps the next President, and virtually every room in the hotel was filled with either staff or media people… twelve new typewriters in the press suite, ten phones, four color TV sets, a well-stocked free bar, even a goddamn Mojo Wire.I

  The gossip in the press room was heavier than usual that night: Gary Hart was about to be fired as McGovern’s campaign manager; Fred Dutton would replace him… Humphrey’s sister had just been arrested in San Diego on a warrant connected with Hubert’s campaign debts… Muskie was offering to support McGovern if George would agree to take over $800,000 of his (Muskie’s) campaign debt… But Crouse was nowhere in sight. I stood around for a while, trying to piece together a few grisly unsubstantiated rumors about “heavy pols preparing to take over the whole McGovern campaign”… Several people had chunks of the story, but nobody had a real key; so I left to go back down to my room to think for a while.

  * * *

  That was when I ran into Mankiewicz, picking a handful of thumb-tacked messages off the bulletin board outside the door.

  “I have a very weird story for you,” I said.

  He eyed me cautiously. “What is it?”

  “Come over here,” I said motioning him to follow me down the corridor to a quiet place… Then I told him what I had heard about Humphrey’s midnight air-courier to Vegas. He stared down at the carpet, not seeming particularly interested—but when I finished he looked up and said, “Where’d you hear that?”

  I shrugged, sensing definite interest now. “Well, I was talking to some people over at a place called The Losers, and—”

  ‘With Kirby?” he snapped.

  “No,” I said. “I went over there looking for him, but he wasn’t around.” Which was true. Earlier that day Kirby Jones, McGovern’s press secretary, had told me he planned to stop by The Losers Club later on, because Warren Beatty had recommended it highly… but when I stopped by around midnight there was no sign of him.

  Mankiewicz was not satisfied. “Who was there?” he asked. “Some of our people? Who was it?”

  “Nobody you’d know,” I said. “But what about this Humphrey story? What can you tell me about it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at a burst of yelling from the press room. Then: “When’s your next issue coming out?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Before the election?”

  “Yeah, and so far I don’t have anything worth a shit to write about—but this thing sounds interesting.”

  He nodded, staring down at the floor again, then shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “You could cause a lot of trouble for us by printing a thing like that. They’d know where it came from, and they’d jerk our man right out.”

  “What man?”

  He stared at me, smiling faintly.

  * * *

  At this point the story becomes very slippery, with many loose ends and dark shadows—but the nut was very simple: I had blundered almost completely by accident on a flat-out byzantine spook story. There was nothing timely or particularly newsworthy about it, but when your deadline is every two weeks you don’t tend to worry about things like scoops and newsbreaks. If Mankiewicz had broken down and admitted to me that night that he was actually a Red Chinese agent and that McGovern had no pulse, I wouldn’t have known how to handle it—and the tension of trying to keep that kind of heinous news to myself for the next four days until Rolling Stone went to press would almost certainly have caused me to lock myself in my hotel room with eight quarts of Wild Turkey and all the Ibogaine I could get my hands on.

  So this strange tale about Humphrey & Vegas was not especially newsworthy, by my standards. Its only real value, in fact, was the rare flash of contrast it provided to the insane tedium of the surface campaign. Important or not, this was something very different: midnight flights to Vegas, mob money funneled in from casinos to pay for Hubert’s TV spots; spies, runners, counterspies; cryptic phone calls from airport phone booths… Indeed; the dark underbelly of big-time politics. A useless story, no doubt, but it sure beat the hell out of getting back on that goddamn press bus and being hauled out to some shopping center in Gardena and watching McGovern shake hands for two hours with lumpy housewives.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, all I really knew about what I called the U-13 story was the general outline and just enough key points to convince Mankiewicz that I might be irresponsible enough to go ahead and try to write the thing anyway. All I knew—or thought I knew—at that point was that somebody very close to the top of the Humphrey campaign had made secret arrangements for a night flight to Vegas in order to pick up a large bundle of money from unidentified persons presumed to be sinister, and that this money would be used by Humphrey’s managers to finance another one of Hubert’s eleventh-hour fast-finish blitzkriegs.

  Even then, a week before the vote, he was thought to be running ten points and maybe more behind McGovern—and since the average daily media expenditure for each candidate in the California primary was roughly $30,000 a day, Humphrey would need at least twice that amount to pay for the orgy of exposure he would need to overcome a ten-point lead. No less than a quick $500,000.

  The people in Vegas were apparently willing to spring for it, because the plane was already chartered and ready to go when McGovern’s headquarters got word of the flight from their executive-level spy in the Humphrey campaign. His identity remains a mystery—in the public prints, at least—but the handful of people aware of him say he performed invaluable services for many months.

  His function in the U-13 gig was merely to call McGovern headquarters and tell them about the Vegas plane. At this point, my second- or third-hand source was not sure what happened next. According to the story, two McGovern operatives were instantly dispatched to keep around-the-clock watch on the plane for the next seventy-two hours, and somebody from McGovern headquarters called Humphrey and warned him that they knew what he was up to.

  In any case, the plane never took off and there was no evidence in the last week of the campaign to suggest that Hubert got a last-minute influx of money, from Vegas or anywhere else.

  That is as much of the U-13 story as I could piece together without help from somebody who knew the details—and Mankiewicz finally agreed, insisting the whole time that he knew nothing about the story except that he didn’t want to see it in print before election day, that if I wanted to hold off until the next issue he would put me in touch with somebody who would tell me the whole story, for good or ill.

  “Call Miles Rubin,” he said, “and tell him I told you to ask him about this. He’ll fill you in.”

  That was fine, I said. I was in no special hurry for the story, anyway. So I let it ride for a few days, missing my deadline for that issue… and on Wednesday I began trying to get hold of Miles Rubin, one of McGovern’s top managers for California. All I knew about Rubin before I called was that several days earlier he had thrown Washington Post correspondent David Broder out of his office for asking too many questions—less than twenty-four hours before Broder appeared on Rubin’s TV screen as one of the three interrogators on the first Humphrey/McGovern debate.

  My own experience with Rubin turned out to be just about par for the course. I finally got through to him by telephone on Friday, and explained that Mankiewicz had told me to call him and find out the details of the U-13 story. I started to say we could meet for a beer or two sometimes later that afternoon and he could—

  “Are you kidding?” he cut in. “That’s one story you’re never going to hear.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no point even talking about it,” he said flatly. Then he launched into a three-minute spiel about the fantastic honesty and integrity that characterized the McGovern campaign from top to bottom, and why was it that people like me didn’t spend more time writing about The Truth and The Decency and The Integrity, instead of picking around the edge for minor things that weren’t important anyway?

  “Jesus Christ!” I muttered. Why argue? Getting anything but pompous bullshit and gibberish out of Rubin would be like trying to steal meat from a hammerhead shark.

  “Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  * * *

  That night I found Mankiewicz in the press room and told him what had happened.

  He couldn’t understand it, he said. But he would talk to Miles tomorrow and straighten it out.

  I was not optimistic; and by that time I was beginning to agree that the U-13 story was not worth the effort. The Big Story in California, after all, was that McGovern was on the brink of locking up a first-ballot nomination in Miami—and that Hubert Humphrey was about to get stomped so badly at the polls that he might have to be carried out of the state in a rubber sack.

  The next time I saw Mankiewicz was on the night before the election and he seemed very tense, very strong into the gila monster trip… and when I started to ask him about Rubin he began ridiculing the story in a VERY LOUD VOICE, so I figured it was time to forget it.

  Several days later I learned the reason for Frank’s bad nerves that night. McGovern’s fat lead over Humphrey, which had hovered between 14 and 20 percentage points for more than a week, had gone into a sudden and apparently uncontrollable dive in the final days of the campaign. By election eve it had shrunk to five points, and perhaps even less.

  * * *

  The shrinkage crisis was a closely guarded secret among McGovern’s top command. Any leak to the press could have led to disastrous headlines on Tuesday morning: Election Day… MCGOVERN FALTERS; HUMPHREY CLOSING GAP… a headline like that in either the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle might have thrown the election to Humphrey by generating a last minute Sympathy/Underdog turnout and whipping Hubert’s field workers into a frenzied “get out the vote” effort.

  But the grim word never leaked, and by noon on Tuesday an almost visible wave of relief rolled through the McGovern camp. The dike would hold, they felt, at roughly five percent.

  The coolest man in the whole McGovern entourage on Tuesday was George McGovern himself—who had spent all day Monday on airplanes, racing from one critical situation to another. On Monday morning he flew down to San Diego for a major rally; then to New Mexico for another final-hour rally on the eve of the New Mexico primary (which he won the next day—along with New Jersey and South Dakota)… and finally on Monday night to Houston for a brief, unscheduled appearance at the National Governors’ Conference, which was rumored to be brewing up a “stop McGovern” movement.

  After defusing the crisis in Houston he got a few hours’ sleep before racing back to Los Angeles to deal with another emergency: His 22-year-old daughter was having a premature baby and first reports from the hospital hinted at serious complications.

  * * *

  But by noon the crisis had passed, and somewhere sometime around one he arrived with his praetorian guard of eight Secret Service agents at Max Palevsky’s house in Bel Air, where he immediately changed into swimming trunks and drove into the pool. The day was grey and cool, no hint of sun, and none of the other guests seemed to feel like swimming.

  For a variety of tangled reasons—primarily because my wife was one of the guests in the house that weekend—I was there when McGovern arrived. So we talked for a while, mainly about the possibility of either Muskie or Humphrey dropping out of the race and joining forces with George if the price was right… and it occurred to me afterward that it was the first time he’d ever seen me without a beer can in my hand or babbling like a loon about Freak Power, election bets, or some other twisted subject… but he was kind enough not to mention this.

  It was a very relaxed afternoon. The only tense moment occurred when I noticed a sort of narrow-looking man with a distinctly predatory appearance standing off by himself and glowering down at the white telephone as if he planned to jerk it out by the root if it didn’t ring within ten seconds and tell him everything he wanted to know.

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked, pointing across the pool at him.

  “That’s Miles Rubin,” somebody replied.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I should have guessed.”

  Moments later my curiosity got the better of me and I walked over to Rubin and introduced myself. “I understand they’re going to put you in charge of press relations after Miami,” I said as we shook hands.

  He said something I didn’t understand, then hurried away. For a moment I was tempted to call him back and ask if I could feel his pulse. But the moment passed and I jumped into the pool, instead.II

  The rest of the day disintegrated into chaos, drunkenness, and the kind of hysterical fatigue that comes from spending too much time racing from one place to another and being shoved around in crowds. McGovern won the Democratic primary by exactly five percent—45 to 40—and Nixon came from behind in the GOP race to nip Ashbrook by 87 to 13.