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

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I think Thompson didn’t so much believe in McGovern himself — who comes off as a bit feckless both in Thompson’s glowing reviews and in speeches I’ve seen on YouTube — as the coalition of kids and misfits who came together to get him the nomination.

He was told by True Davis, who had run against Eagleton in the Democratic primary for senator in 1968 in Missouri, that the records were in a box in an office in St.

From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of “Seal Rock” looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline 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. 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. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair.

Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future. As Frank Mankiewicz — McGovern’s campaign manager and a main character in On the Campaign Trail ‘72 — later said of the book, it was the “the least factual, most accurate account” of the election. HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at a country club reception … it was the first time I’d ever seen him drinking… sort of casually and openly in public .I suppose maybe I should have gone on television earlier with thoughtful question and answer sessions, the kind of speeches I was doing there the last few weeks. So Anderson was left with a story that almost every journalist in Washington still believes to be true. 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 50 or 60 bets I made between February and November. McGovern ended up turning to the center in the general election, but simultaneously failed to win over Nixon voters while alienating himself from the coalition Thompson dubs the “Freak Power Ticket” that got him there in the first place. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got.

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 . Thompson, having closely studied politics for innumberable years illustrates waves and trends throughout American politics, from 1964-72, with numerous and ultimately accurate predictions for the future. Anything that gets the adrenaline moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . But for Americans, politics is just another sport: a long, drawn-out and essentially boring game puffed up to importance with pomp and pageantry and a maddening ocean of statistics. I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns… At every hotel, wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press.The campaign plane would fly into a state and the staffers would have conflicting things set up for him to do.

I think those people do have to be brought back into the Democractic party if it’s going to survive as a party that can win national elections. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.After Anderson had broken the story both on the radio and in his column… his syndicated column… he got desperate for the records because he knew he was going to be challenged. McGovern was perceived as a cold-hearted, political pragmatist who dumped this poor, neurotic, good guy from Missouri because he thought people wouldn’t vote for him because they were afraid that shock treatments in the past might have some kind of lingering effect on his mind. Meanwhile McGovern lost 13 points of his vote, his original 37%… But the McGovern loss was apparently, according to the figures, almost entirely due to the Eagleton Affair, whereas the Nixon loss would have happened anyway, because they were mainly people who in July had said that they were Democrats – Humphrey Democrats – who refused to vote for McGovern, but as the election drew closer they began to filter back. HST: Here’s what Mankiewicz told Haynes Johnson after the election was over, when it no longer mattered: “As Mankiewicz says, they had come up with a very incoherent and largely unpublishable memo full of rumors and unsubstantiated material – but a memo that was clearly on the right track. I thought that it wasn’t just a matter of personality differences with me or ideological differences with me.