The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (42 page)

It wasn’t an obvious fit for the magazine. “There was a lot of big talent in that room,” said Thompson. “But when it came to politics, I was the only one that raised my hand. No one wanted to touch it except me.” A political project on the scale of what Thompson was proposing might turn off the magazine’s core rock-and-roll readership—an audience that Wenner had been aggressively courting with a strong emphasis on rock-and-roll coverage to the exclusion of political coverage—but Thompson had become a favorite of the
Rolling Stone
editor, and this election, in Wenner’s view, just might deliver on the long-deferred notion of a powerful youth electorate. There had been press coverage about the registration rolls swelling with twenty-five million young voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who were perhaps ready to scuttle Nixon’s chances at a second term. As the most influential print media outlet of that youth voting bloc,
Rolling Stone
might have an opportunity to nudge a national election to the left side of the ledger.

Only one other writer expressed any interest in covering the campaign, and he was the youngest and least experienced journalist in the room. Timothy Crouse was a Harvard graduate, the son of successful Broadway playwright Russell Crouse, and a Peace Corps veteran who had apprenticed as a cub reporter for the
Gloucester Daily Times
and the
Boston Herald-Traveler
before Wenner hired him to be a contributing editor in 1971. A presidential campaign for a young reporter such as Crouse was too exciting to pass up, and so Wenner mapped out a game plan: Thompson would handle the heavy lifting and record his impressions of the campaign, while Crouse would provide backup stories that would add factual ballast to Thompson’s pieces. Thompson would file a new story every two weeks on the road; Crouse would carry bail money, in case Thompson got into any heavy trouble.

Trailing a U-Haul filled with books and a telefax machine that Wenner had procured for him, Thompson, his wife, Sandy, two Dobermans named Benji and Darwin, and his seven-year-old son, Juan, drove crosscountry from Colorado to Washington in December, setting up shop in a two-story brick house on Juniper Street in the Rock Creek section of the city, a down-at-the-heels district far removed from tonier neighborhoods such as Georgetown, where many mainstream reporters resided. That’s just how Thompson wanted it; he had contempt for the Washington press corps, who he felt coddled the city’s power players at the expense of doing their jobs responsibly. It was unfathomable to him that a reporter with his eyes wide open could live in Washington and not deride it at every turn. The political process was corrupt and noxious, and Thompson was going to call it the way he saw it. “In twenty-eight papers,” Thompson would write, “only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest … but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the jump (or “Cont. on …”) page.”

In early February, Crouse and Thompson decamped to New Hampshire for the first Democratic primary. In his blue jeans, sneakers, hunting jacket, and blue-tinted sunglasses,
Rolling Stone’s
correspondent stuck out like a Klansman at a Rotary Club mixer. The press corps dressed much like the politicians they were covering—wing-tip loafers, Windsor-knotted ties, navy blue sport coats. Thompson thought they dressed like bank tellers, but he was also aware that professional attire and comportment were essential for access to the candidates.

He couldn’t get press credentials for the White House (“Rolling what?” the press office had asked him), and his bid to join the press pool for the primaries was still being decided upon. This assignment would have to be handled like all the other stories in which Thompson couldn’t obtain the traditional entrée to subjects—it would be a pure stealth operation, with Thompson and Crouse working by their wits, relying on Thompson’s instinct for winding up in the right situations at the most opportune times.

That methodology was a far cry from the approach that Theodore H. White had pursued while reporting for his book
The Making of the President 1960
. White’s project was a touchstone for American journalism—the first time that a reporter had canvassed the primaries and the two conventions and assimilated all of his information in a narrative that captured the dramatic sweep and suspense of a presidential election. White had initially forged his reputation as China bureau chief for
Time
during World War II. After the war, he lived in Europe and contributed articles on politics to just about every major American periodical, including the
Reporter
, one of the magazines where Thompson worked in the early sixties. By the time he covered the 1960 election, White was one of the most revered journalists in the country, a trusted guardian of sanctified facts.

When it was published in 1961,
The Making of the President 1960
was regarded as an insider’s revelation, but history hasn’t been kind to it. Granted, the book is as scrupulous a breakdown of the electoral process as has ever been published. White witnesses the quiet tension of the Kennedy team as they await the Wisconsin returns; follows Kennedy as he assures the coal miners of West Virginia that he will fight for their dignity in the White House; graphs the complex machinations behind the choosing of vice presidential nominees at the conventions, traces the historical voting tendencies of both parties through an accretion of socioeconomic numbers and statistics.

And yet reading White today, one feels that something is being held back, that cracks and fissures are being glossed over. While White was an astute judge of character (of Nixon he writes, “It was as if the changing unsettled society of Southern California in which he grew up had imparted to him some of its own essential uncertainty”), he regards politicians as essentially well-intentioned men, conducting the nation’s business with probity and a stern stoicism. Despite his claims to objectivity,
White’s regard for Kennedy as a fair-haired
Übermensch
is evident; the book’s cardinal sin is perhaps its risible pretense of impartiality. (Not that it affected sales: The book shot straight to the number one spot on the
New York Times
bestseller list and stayed there for a year. White published subsequent volumes for the 1964, 1968, and 1972 campaigns, also big sellers.)

In 1961, most Americans didn’t think twice about whether White’s book was too hagiographic. When Kennedy was elected, the First Lady invited the reporter to visit the White House for a
Life
magazine profile. White, in turn, became the first journalist to write about “Camelot,” thus becoming one of the chief architects of the Kennedy myth.

Eleven years after
The Making of the President 1960
, eight years after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, it was apparent to Thompson that standing on ceremony at the altar of some political deity was not going to advance the cause of either responsible journalism or social reform. His mandate in following the campaign trail would be radically different from White’s. “I went in with the same attitude I take anywhere as a journalist: hammer and tongs—and God’s mercy on anybody who gets in the way,” he said. He held out little hope for anything the Democratic party had to offer, and he had no qualms about saying so in his articles. The party itself was in trouble, in Thompson’s view, unless it was purged of the hacks and toadies, organized-labor money, and the “peace with honor” prevarications that echoed the Nixon administration’s Vietnam policy. “The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator—or even a President—is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.”

Thompson was well aware that the press corps covering the ’72 campaign included some of the savviest political journalists in the country, including David Broder and Haynes Johnson of the
Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
’s Jules Witcover, and the
New York Times’s
R. W “Johnny” Apple—men not likely to be cowed by a handler’s clumsy political spin. If Washington neophyte Thompson wanted to cover this campaign properly, he would have to use all of his skill and cunning to do so. “Nineteen seventy-two was a hinge between two tendencies in political reporting,” said Frank Mankiewicz, the son of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and a former director of the Peace Corps who ran
South Dakota senator George McGovern’s campaign. “We went from straight and serious reporting to highly opinionated reporting. Nixon had a lot to do with that, of course. And so did Hunter.”

At the outset, the 1972 election didn’t look as if it would provide the same drama as the 1968 campaign, where Hunter had been harrassed by Chicago’s finest. President Nixon was a popular incumbent, and an unimpressive crew of Democratic sloggers would have to jockey for position all the way to the convention, which would be held in Miami in August. Maine senator Edmund Muskie, who was Hubert Humphrey’s running mate when the Minnesota senator came within a hairbreadth of defeating Nixon in 1968, was the de facto front-runner. Humphrey was also having another go, Eugene McCarthy was pondering a fourth-party run, and New York mayor John Lindsay, Alabama governor George Wallace, and George McGovern were also angling for a chance to defeat Nixon.

Thompson wasn’t obligated to report on the minutiae of the campaign and so was freed up to roam and wander, a method that helped him get some of his best material. His first face-to-face with McGovern was a chance meeting in the bathroom of the Exeter Inn in New Hampshire, right after the McGovern campaign had received word that Iowa senator Harold Hughes, a longtime McGovern ally, would be endorsing Muskie. As the two men stood at urinals, Thompson began asking McGovern questions:

That was all Thompson would get for the time being; McGovern retreated to the dining room for dinner, while Thompson was shunted off to the bar by McGovern’s operatives.

Many of the “straight” journalists weren’t averse to a few drinks after hours—the two-martini lunch was still alive and well—but Thompson’s prodigious appetite for alcohol and drugs was a little too derelict for many of them; it reeked of the hippie crash pad, not the briefing room. “Certainly there were people who disapproved of him,” said Nicholas von Hoffman, who was covering the campaign for the
Washington Post
, “but I don’t think it was professional disdain so much as personal. He was drinker and a doper, and he banged around a lot—made a lot of noise. I was very fond of him, but I didn’t want to be too closely associated with the rule breaking and such.”

David Broder met Thompson for the first time in the bar at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee during the Wisconsin campaign and found him “wild and captivating,” though in subsequent meetings in other cities Broder wasn’t sure which Thompson he would get—the perspicacious diviner of political agendas or the barely coherent tippler. “I would never underestimate Hunter’s wild streak,” said Broder. “He would sort of just disappear, miss the press plane, and then we’d find him later in the next city.”

To those campaign staffers who became friendly with Thompson, the wild streak was overplayed, but Thompson knew better than to burn bridges with those who could get him close to the candidates. Thomas B. Morgan, who was taking a respite from writing to work as the press secretary for Democratic candidate John Lindsay, never saw Thompson take a drink over the course of many late-night discussions. “Hunter was always well-mannered on the campaign bus, on the stops,” said Morgan. “He never once stood up and said, you know, ‘I’m Hunter Thompson, and you’re all a bunch of shit.’ I found that I could count on him to get the story straight.”

Politics was blood sport to Thompson (shades of Breslin and Mailer, who frequently used sports metaphors when writing about politics), and he reveled in the gamesmanship of the primaries: taking wagers on who would win, place, and show with Frank Mankiewicz and Morgan, sizing up the candidates like prizefighters—who was against the ropes, who was coming out with both fists flying? “When Big Ed [Muskie] arrived in Florida for The Blitz,” Thompson later wrote,

Thompson had a strong distaste for Muskie. Despite early victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, McGovern’s strong second-place showing in both states appeared to weaken Muskie’s resolve. He seemed wimpy and ineffectual to Thompson, and now he was self-destructing before the writer’s eyes. In New Hampshire, Muskie had appeared to weep openly while making a speech defending his wife’s honor a day after the
Manchester Union Leader
had written an article describing her as emotionally unstable. A man given to fits of pique on the stump and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, Muskie was a singularly uninspiring and bumbling campaigner. “When Ed tried to shade something, everyone knew he was doing it,” said Muskie’s campaign manager Burl Bernard. “He wasn’t a very good actor.” What, Thompson mused, could possibly account for his erratic behavior? Shortly after the Wisconsin primary in April, in which McGovern had emerged victorious and Muskie was scrambling for momentum, Thompson posited a potential theory: