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

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Or, as history podcaster Dan Carlin often puts it: “I want a country that matches the marketing material. Any incumbent President is unbeatable, except in a time of mushrooming national crisis or a scandal so heinous – and with such obvious roots in the White House – as to pose a clear and present danger to the financial security and/or physical safety of millions of voters in every corner of the country. Which is probably why I made that disastrous bet, although there wasn’t a reporter in the press corps who thought that George would lose by more than ten points… except Joe Alsop; he said McGovern wouldn’t get more than 40% of the vote. The Eagleton thing is worth looking at for a second in terms of the difference between perception and reality.

It was a rough consensus among the polls in July that Nixon had 52% of the vote, McGovern had 37%, and 11% were undecided. 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.His incisive wit is promently displayed and his knack of being in the right place (or the wrong in some cases) gives him the chance to view certain activities from a perspective that most people don't get a chance to see. B. Cooper door that drops down from the tail – 50 or 60 drunken journalists were lurching around in the aisles, spilling drinks on each other and rolling spools of raw TV film towards the rear of the plane where two smiling stewardesses were strapped down by their safety belts, according to regulations. He did it with very… considerable elan… He moved up right next to this guy and he said: “I have a secret for you – kiss my ass. I think if we’d have gotten off to a better start just like a – I remember when I was at Northwestern there was a great hurdler that was supposed to win the US competition and probably win the Olympics, and he hit the first hurdle with his foot, and then he hit about the next four in a row, you know, and just petered out.

And then other factors began to operate, the “peace is at hand” business, the negotiations sort of blunted and killed it; actually, I think the war issue was working for the President. And the fact is people like Nixon – candidates like Nixon – have a running start which gives them a tremendous advantage. The cockpit had millions of lights all around it: green lights… red lights… all kinds of blinking things – a wonderful place to be.

But I was told by Ramsey Clark that the FBI had a very complete medical file on Eagleton, and that he [Clark] knew it at the time he was attorney general. It was sort of a giant auditorium… where a big crowd of mainly young people were waiting for McGovern… and all the national press and the network cameras. I think he was orchestrating a lot of things that were designed to tap the Wallace voters, and he got most of them. The book focuses almost exclusively on the Democratic Party's primaries and the breakdown of the party as it splits between the different candidates such as Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.

And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. Ed: And you think that this is the kind of energy which will bring forward a new candidate in ’76 who could win?

You might know anything about Muskie or McGovern or even Gary Hart but the sheer excitement of the campaign trail as described by Thompson beats any sports show out there. I knew he was lying because I had all the facts from other people in the campaign whose names I couldn’t use. Thompson takes on a dizzying journey from hotel room to hotel room across the country lauding his man McGovern and railing against his enemy Richard Nixon.