The Great Shark Hunt, page 27
“Well, write them on the other side of the room,” said the other. “Don’t stand around this door.”
So I went to the other side of the room and made some more notes about the strange, paranoid behavior that had puzzled me for the past few days. And then I went back to the Holiday Inn and waited for the next “drill.”
Nixon’s speeches that week are hardly worth mentioning—except as indisputable proof that the “old Nixon” is still with us. On Vietnam he echoes Johnson: on domestic issues he talks like Ronald Reagan. He is a champion of “free enterprise” at home and “peace with honor” abroad. People with short memories say he sounds in speeches like a “milder version of Goldwater,” or a “Johnson without a drawl.” But those who recall the 1960 campaign know exactly whom he sounds like: Richard Milhous Nixon.
And why shouldn’t he? Nixon’s political philosophy was formed and tested by the time he became Vice-President of the United States at age 40. It served him well enough for the next eight years, and in 1960 nearly half the voters in the country wanted him to be the next President. This is not the background of a man who would find any serious reason, at age 55, to change his political philosophy.
He has said it himself: “All this talk about ‘the new Nixon.’ Maybe it’s there, but perhaps many people didn’t know the old one.” He understandably dislikes the implications of the term: The necessity for a “new Nixon” means there must have been something wrong with the old one, and he strongly disputes that notion.
There is probably some truth in what he says, if only to the extent that he will now talk candidly with individual reporters—especially those from influential papers and magazines. Some of them have discovered to their amazement, that the “private Nixon” is not the monster they’d always assumed him to be. In private he can be friendly and surprisingly frank, even about himself. This was never the case with the “old Nixon.”
So there is no way of knowing if the “private Nixon” was always so different from the public version. We have only his word, and—well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man. After several days of watching his performance in New Hampshire I suspected that he’d taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public relations firm to give him a new image. Henry Hyde denied this emphatically. “That’s not his style,” he said. “Mr. Nixon runs his own campaigns. You’d find that out pretty quick if you worked for him.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “How about it?”
“What?” he asked humorlessly.
“A job. I could write him a speech that would change his image in twenty-four hours.”
Henry didn’t think much of the idea. Humor is scarce in the Nixon camp. The staffers tell jokes now and then, but they’re not very funny. Only Charley McWhorter, the resident political expert, seems to have a sense of the absurd.
Oddly enough, Nixon himself shows traces of humor. Not often in public, despite his awkward attempts to joke about how bad he looks on television and that sort of thing. (“I understand the skiing is great here,” he told one audience. “I’ve never skied, but”—he touched his nose—“I have a personal feeling about it.”) Every now and then he will smile spontaneously at something, and it’s not the same smile that he beams at photographers.
At one point I had a long conversation with him about pro football. I’d heard he was a fan, and earlier that night in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce banquet he’d said that he’d bet on Oakland in the Super Bowl. I was curious, and since Ray Price had arranged for me to ride back to Manchester in Nixon’s car, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. Actually, I suspected that he didn’t know football from pig-hustling and that he mentioned it from time to time only because his wizards had told him it would make him seem like a regular guy.
But I was wrong. Nixon knows pro football. He’d taken Oakland and six points in the Super Bowl, he said, because Vince Lombardi had told him up in Green Bay that the AFL was much stronger than the sportswriters claimed. Nixon cited Oakland’s sustained drive in the second half as evidence of their superiority over the Kansas City team that had challenged the Packers in 1967 and had totally collapsed in the second half. “Oakland didn’t fold up,” he said. “That second-half drive had Lombardi worried.”
I remembered it, and mentioned the scoring play—a sideline pass to an unknown receiver named Bill Miller.
Nixon hesitated for a moment, then smiled broadly and slapped me on the leg. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, the Miami boy.” I couldn’t believe it; he not only knew Miller, but he knew what college he’d played for. It wasn’t his factual knowledge of football that stunned me; it was his genuine interest in the game. “You know,” he said, “the worst thing about campaigning, for me, is that it ruins my whole football season. I’m a sports buff, you know. If I had another career, I’d be a sportscaster—or a sportswriter.”
I smiled and lit a cigarette. The scene was so unreal that I felt like laughing out loud—to find myself zipping along a New England freeway in a big yellow car, being chauffeured around by a detective while I relaxed in the back seat and talked about football with my old buddy Dick Nixon, the man who came within 100,000 votes of causing me to flee the country in 1960. I was on the verge of mentioning this to him, but just then we came to the airport and drove out on the runway, where his chartered Lear Jet was waiting to zap him off to the wild blue yonder of Miami for a “think session” with his staff. (There he rises early and works a 20-hour day. He skimps on food—breakfast is juice, cereal, and milk; lunch is a sandwich, and dinner might be roast beef or steak, which he often doesn’t finish—and keeps his weight at a constant 175 pounds. He swims some, suns a lot, yet rarely seems to stop working. “I’ll say this—he has enough stamina to be President,” says William P. Rogers, an old friend. “He has the most stamina of any man I have ever known.”)
We talked for a while beside the plane, but by that time I’d thought better of saying anything rude or startling. It had been exceptionally decent of him to give me a ride and an hour of his time, so I controlled the almost irresistible urge to gig him on his embryonic sense of humor.
It was almost midnight when the sleek little plane boomed down the runway and lifted off toward Florida. I went back to the Holiday Inn and drank for a while with Nick Ruwe, the chief advance man for New Hampshire.
“I almost had a heart attack tonight when I looked over and saw you poking around that jet engine with a cigarette in your mouth,” Ruwe said. He shook his head in disbelief. “My God, what a nightmare!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize I was smoking.”
But I remembered leaning on the wing of the plane, an arm’s length away from the fully loaded fuel tank. Somebody should have mentioned the cigarette, I thought, and the fact that nobody did makes me wonder now if Nixon’s human machinery is really as foolproof as it seems to be. Or perhaps they all noticed I was smoking and—like Ruwe—said nothing at all.
Or perhaps that’s beside the point. Senator McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire can hardly be attributed to the hard-nosed professionalism of his staff… and in this broader context the Nixon campaign seems flawed. There is a cynicism at the core of it, the confident assumption that success in politics depends more on shrewd technique than on the quality of the product. The “old Nixon” didn’t make it. Neither did earlier models of the “new Nixon.” So now we have “Nixon Mark IV,” and as a journalist I suppose it’s only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways. But as a customer, I wouldn’t touch it—except with a long cattle prod.
Granted, the “new Nixon” is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow. But I recognize the man who told a student audience at the University of New Hampshire that one of his biggest problems in politics has always been “that I’m not a good actor, I can’t be phony about it, I still refuse to wear makeup…” Three weeks later this same man, after winning the New Hampshire primary, laughingly attributed his victory to the new makeup he’d been wearing. He thought he was being funny—at least on one level—but on another level he was telling the absolute truth.
Pageant, July 1968
Author’s Note
Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 A.M. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn… out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of “Seal Rock” looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound. Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking—racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window, howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs… off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds. I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami; but that one will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank’s chest.
That dog will not enter this room again. He came in with the book-editor, who went away about six hours ago with thirteen finished chapters—the bloody product of fifty-five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless, high-speed editing. But there was no other way to get the thing done. I am not an easy person to work with, in terms of deadlines. When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office… but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn’t show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing: move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.
One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about forty pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders—in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.
We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer’s Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone—pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my head. When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel… and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.
There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that’s the way all the rest of the book was written. From December ’71 to January ’73—in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country—there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn’t produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day—while my own deadline fell every two weeks—but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.
Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don’t have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland.… On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.
People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now & then.… No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.
Why not? Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenalin rushes in any given time-span have the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electroshock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits.
When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed—and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.
Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them. Politics has its own language, which is often so complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate—to make sense of the partisan bullshit that even your friends will lay on you—without crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.” In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them—and to keep them as sources of private information—you wind up knowing a lot of things you can’t print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.
This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the ’72 presidential campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as “off the record.” The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists—in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in… especially not for “minor infractions” of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.
A classic example of this syndrome was the disastrous “Eagleton Affair.” Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps knew Eagleton was a serious boozer with a history of mental breakdowns—but none of them had ever written about it, and the few who were known to have mentioned it privately clammed up 1000 percent when McGovern’s harried staffers began making inquiries on that fateful Thursday afternoon in Miami. Any Washington political reporter who blows a Senator’s chance for the vice-presidency might as well start looking for another beat to cover—because his name will be instant Mud on Capitol Hill.
When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap. Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me—because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill. I went there for two reasons: (1) to learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign, and (2) to write about it the same way I’d write about anything else—as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.
It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well—but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach. The most obvious and least serious of these was the fact that even the few people I considered my friends in Washington treated me like a walking bomb; some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and utter words that would almost certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. The other, more complex, problem had to do with my natural out-front bias in favor of the McGovern candidacy—which was not a problem at first, when George was such a hopeless underdog that his staffers saw no harm in talking frankly with any journalist who seemed friendly and interested—but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very uncomfortable position. Some of the friends I’d made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern winning the Democratic nomination seemed almost as weird as the appearance of a full-time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail, were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I’d been hanging around with for entirely personal reasons, but key people in a fast-rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not only of winning the party nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.
McGovern’s success in the primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who were running his campaign—especially those who had come to know me well enough to sense that my contempt for the time-honored double standard in political journalism might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly pragmatic style of politics that George was getting into. And their apprehension increased measurably as it became obvious that dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone. Not long after McGovern’s breakthrough victory in the Wisconsin primary, arch-establishment mouthpiece Stewart Alsop went out of his way to quote some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey in his Newsweek column, thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.
So I went to the other side of the room and made some more notes about the strange, paranoid behavior that had puzzled me for the past few days. And then I went back to the Holiday Inn and waited for the next “drill.”
Nixon’s speeches that week are hardly worth mentioning—except as indisputable proof that the “old Nixon” is still with us. On Vietnam he echoes Johnson: on domestic issues he talks like Ronald Reagan. He is a champion of “free enterprise” at home and “peace with honor” abroad. People with short memories say he sounds in speeches like a “milder version of Goldwater,” or a “Johnson without a drawl.” But those who recall the 1960 campaign know exactly whom he sounds like: Richard Milhous Nixon.
And why shouldn’t he? Nixon’s political philosophy was formed and tested by the time he became Vice-President of the United States at age 40. It served him well enough for the next eight years, and in 1960 nearly half the voters in the country wanted him to be the next President. This is not the background of a man who would find any serious reason, at age 55, to change his political philosophy.
He has said it himself: “All this talk about ‘the new Nixon.’ Maybe it’s there, but perhaps many people didn’t know the old one.” He understandably dislikes the implications of the term: The necessity for a “new Nixon” means there must have been something wrong with the old one, and he strongly disputes that notion.
There is probably some truth in what he says, if only to the extent that he will now talk candidly with individual reporters—especially those from influential papers and magazines. Some of them have discovered to their amazement, that the “private Nixon” is not the monster they’d always assumed him to be. In private he can be friendly and surprisingly frank, even about himself. This was never the case with the “old Nixon.”
So there is no way of knowing if the “private Nixon” was always so different from the public version. We have only his word, and—well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man. After several days of watching his performance in New Hampshire I suspected that he’d taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public relations firm to give him a new image. Henry Hyde denied this emphatically. “That’s not his style,” he said. “Mr. Nixon runs his own campaigns. You’d find that out pretty quick if you worked for him.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “How about it?”
“What?” he asked humorlessly.
“A job. I could write him a speech that would change his image in twenty-four hours.”
Henry didn’t think much of the idea. Humor is scarce in the Nixon camp. The staffers tell jokes now and then, but they’re not very funny. Only Charley McWhorter, the resident political expert, seems to have a sense of the absurd.
Oddly enough, Nixon himself shows traces of humor. Not often in public, despite his awkward attempts to joke about how bad he looks on television and that sort of thing. (“I understand the skiing is great here,” he told one audience. “I’ve never skied, but”—he touched his nose—“I have a personal feeling about it.”) Every now and then he will smile spontaneously at something, and it’s not the same smile that he beams at photographers.
At one point I had a long conversation with him about pro football. I’d heard he was a fan, and earlier that night in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce banquet he’d said that he’d bet on Oakland in the Super Bowl. I was curious, and since Ray Price had arranged for me to ride back to Manchester in Nixon’s car, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. Actually, I suspected that he didn’t know football from pig-hustling and that he mentioned it from time to time only because his wizards had told him it would make him seem like a regular guy.
But I was wrong. Nixon knows pro football. He’d taken Oakland and six points in the Super Bowl, he said, because Vince Lombardi had told him up in Green Bay that the AFL was much stronger than the sportswriters claimed. Nixon cited Oakland’s sustained drive in the second half as evidence of their superiority over the Kansas City team that had challenged the Packers in 1967 and had totally collapsed in the second half. “Oakland didn’t fold up,” he said. “That second-half drive had Lombardi worried.”
I remembered it, and mentioned the scoring play—a sideline pass to an unknown receiver named Bill Miller.
Nixon hesitated for a moment, then smiled broadly and slapped me on the leg. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, the Miami boy.” I couldn’t believe it; he not only knew Miller, but he knew what college he’d played for. It wasn’t his factual knowledge of football that stunned me; it was his genuine interest in the game. “You know,” he said, “the worst thing about campaigning, for me, is that it ruins my whole football season. I’m a sports buff, you know. If I had another career, I’d be a sportscaster—or a sportswriter.”
I smiled and lit a cigarette. The scene was so unreal that I felt like laughing out loud—to find myself zipping along a New England freeway in a big yellow car, being chauffeured around by a detective while I relaxed in the back seat and talked about football with my old buddy Dick Nixon, the man who came within 100,000 votes of causing me to flee the country in 1960. I was on the verge of mentioning this to him, but just then we came to the airport and drove out on the runway, where his chartered Lear Jet was waiting to zap him off to the wild blue yonder of Miami for a “think session” with his staff. (There he rises early and works a 20-hour day. He skimps on food—breakfast is juice, cereal, and milk; lunch is a sandwich, and dinner might be roast beef or steak, which he often doesn’t finish—and keeps his weight at a constant 175 pounds. He swims some, suns a lot, yet rarely seems to stop working. “I’ll say this—he has enough stamina to be President,” says William P. Rogers, an old friend. “He has the most stamina of any man I have ever known.”)
We talked for a while beside the plane, but by that time I’d thought better of saying anything rude or startling. It had been exceptionally decent of him to give me a ride and an hour of his time, so I controlled the almost irresistible urge to gig him on his embryonic sense of humor.
It was almost midnight when the sleek little plane boomed down the runway and lifted off toward Florida. I went back to the Holiday Inn and drank for a while with Nick Ruwe, the chief advance man for New Hampshire.
“I almost had a heart attack tonight when I looked over and saw you poking around that jet engine with a cigarette in your mouth,” Ruwe said. He shook his head in disbelief. “My God, what a nightmare!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize I was smoking.”
But I remembered leaning on the wing of the plane, an arm’s length away from the fully loaded fuel tank. Somebody should have mentioned the cigarette, I thought, and the fact that nobody did makes me wonder now if Nixon’s human machinery is really as foolproof as it seems to be. Or perhaps they all noticed I was smoking and—like Ruwe—said nothing at all.
Or perhaps that’s beside the point. Senator McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire can hardly be attributed to the hard-nosed professionalism of his staff… and in this broader context the Nixon campaign seems flawed. There is a cynicism at the core of it, the confident assumption that success in politics depends more on shrewd technique than on the quality of the product. The “old Nixon” didn’t make it. Neither did earlier models of the “new Nixon.” So now we have “Nixon Mark IV,” and as a journalist I suppose it’s only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways. But as a customer, I wouldn’t touch it—except with a long cattle prod.
Granted, the “new Nixon” is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow. But I recognize the man who told a student audience at the University of New Hampshire that one of his biggest problems in politics has always been “that I’m not a good actor, I can’t be phony about it, I still refuse to wear makeup…” Three weeks later this same man, after winning the New Hampshire primary, laughingly attributed his victory to the new makeup he’d been wearing. He thought he was being funny—at least on one level—but on another level he was telling the absolute truth.
Pageant, July 1968
Author’s Note
Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 A.M. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn… out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of “Seal Rock” looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound. Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking—racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window, howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs… off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds. I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami; but that one will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank’s chest.
That dog will not enter this room again. He came in with the book-editor, who went away about six hours ago with thirteen finished chapters—the bloody product of fifty-five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless, high-speed editing. But there was no other way to get the thing done. I am not an easy person to work with, in terms of deadlines. When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office… but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn’t show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing: move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.
One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about forty pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders—in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.
We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer’s Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone—pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my head. When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel… and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.
There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that’s the way all the rest of the book was written. From December ’71 to January ’73—in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country—there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn’t produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day—while my own deadline fell every two weeks—but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.
Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don’t have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland.… On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.
People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now & then.… No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.
Why not? Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenalin rushes in any given time-span have the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electroshock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits.
When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed—and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.
Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them. Politics has its own language, which is often so complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate—to make sense of the partisan bullshit that even your friends will lay on you—without crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.” In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them—and to keep them as sources of private information—you wind up knowing a lot of things you can’t print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.
This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the ’72 presidential campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as “off the record.” The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists—in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in… especially not for “minor infractions” of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.
A classic example of this syndrome was the disastrous “Eagleton Affair.” Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps knew Eagleton was a serious boozer with a history of mental breakdowns—but none of them had ever written about it, and the few who were known to have mentioned it privately clammed up 1000 percent when McGovern’s harried staffers began making inquiries on that fateful Thursday afternoon in Miami. Any Washington political reporter who blows a Senator’s chance for the vice-presidency might as well start looking for another beat to cover—because his name will be instant Mud on Capitol Hill.
When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap. Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me—because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill. I went there for two reasons: (1) to learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign, and (2) to write about it the same way I’d write about anything else—as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.
It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well—but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach. The most obvious and least serious of these was the fact that even the few people I considered my friends in Washington treated me like a walking bomb; some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and utter words that would almost certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. The other, more complex, problem had to do with my natural out-front bias in favor of the McGovern candidacy—which was not a problem at first, when George was such a hopeless underdog that his staffers saw no harm in talking frankly with any journalist who seemed friendly and interested—but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very uncomfortable position. Some of the friends I’d made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern winning the Democratic nomination seemed almost as weird as the appearance of a full-time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail, were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I’d been hanging around with for entirely personal reasons, but key people in a fast-rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not only of winning the party nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.
McGovern’s success in the primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who were running his campaign—especially those who had come to know me well enough to sense that my contempt for the time-honored double standard in political journalism might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly pragmatic style of politics that George was getting into. And their apprehension increased measurably as it became obvious that dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone. Not long after McGovern’s breakthrough victory in the Wisconsin primary, arch-establishment mouthpiece Stewart Alsop went out of his way to quote some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey in his Newsweek column, thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.
