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

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I don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was designed for ordinary men – not for a succession of so many larger-than-life men on horseback.

Ed: Sioux Falls, excuse me, and that you were actually standing in the cockpit with a joint in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniel’s in the other. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Some of the scenes in this twisted saga will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them.HST: Yeah: In the Haynes Johnson story Mankiewicz said that he was speaking both for himself and Gary Hart when he went to McGovern right after they found out about the information on Eagleton, the initial information, the stuff that was published. If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone. HST: One of the weird unanswered questions is whether McGovern actually said1000% to anyone but Eagleton. There are some surface similarities between the 1972 and 2020 campaigns: a polarizing candidate (Nixon/Trump) mired in allegations of criminal activity and electoral meddling (soliciting Ukrainian interference/bugging the Democratic National Convention), a challenger with some serious flaws (McGovern/Biden) and the bitter wind-down of a long and rather pointless war (Vietnam/Afghanistan). All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives – even if it meant turning the whole state of Nevada into a concentration camp for hippies, niggers, dope fiends, do-gooders, and anyone else who might threaten the status quo.

They had heard all these terrible things, they’d read stories about how people in dark corners gathered to pass drugs around, and they always thought that it happened in urine-soaked doorways around Times Square. Ed: So the public’s perception of McGovern was distorted – but you think that McGovern essentially was at the root of that distortion. Usually I’m suspicious of these “history repeats itself” cliches, but sub “Trump” in for “Nixon” in the above passage and it reads just as true and grimly entertaining. C. to his final pondering on power and the nature of the political beast known as the presidential candidate, Thompson is right on the money.The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern’s image – not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war – but as a person who couldn’t get those things done even though he wanted to.