So I was not entirely overcome at the invitation to spend an hour alone with Richard Nixon. He was, after all, a Born Loser – even if he somehow managed to get the Republican nomination I figured he didn’t have a sick goat’s chance of beating Lyndon Johnson.
I was as guilty as all the others, that year, of treating the McCarthy campaign as a foredoomed exercise in noble futility. We had talked about it a lot – not only in the Wayfarer bar, but also in the bar of the Holiday Inn where Nixon was staying – and the press consensus was that the only Republican with a chance to beat Johnson was Nelson Rockefeller … and the only other possible winner was Bobby Kennedy, who had already made it clear – both publicly and privately – that he would definitely not run for President in 1968.
I was remembering all this as I cranked the big green Cougar along U.S. 93 once again, four years later, to cover another one of these flakey New Hampshire primaries. The electorate in this state is notoriously perverse and unpredictable. In 1964, for instance, it was a thumping victory in the New Hampshire primary that got the Henry Cabot Lodge steamroller off to a roaring start … and in ’68, Gene McCarthy woke up on the morning of election day to read in the newspapers that the last minute polls were nearly unanimous in giving him between six and eight percent of the vote … and even McCarthy was stunned, I think, to wake up twenty-four hours later and find himself with 42 percent.
Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East’s psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico – big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old-timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists – people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service – who’ve been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhikers you find along these narrow twisting highways look like the people you see on the roads around Boulder and Aspen or Taos.
The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her. ‘I guess it sounds crazy,’ she explains. ‘We don’t even sleep together. He’s just a friend. But I’m happy when I’m with him because he makes me like myself.’
Jesus, I thought. We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now – six months out of college – she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn’t even know she’s coming.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.
She tried to be polite but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don’t keep moving.
Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days – and then he’d be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.
It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlboro and I saw she was crying which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about ‘junkies’ and ‘loonies’ and ‘doomfreaks.’
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.
These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.
This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.
We couldn’t find the commune. The directions were too vague: ‘Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree … proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines …’
After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck … but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place on a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was OK.
I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really ‘OK.’ I was tempted to take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us … checking into the Wayfarer at 3:30, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast, and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.
Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nymphet who thought politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.
No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I’d always thought 1 was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
Earlier that night, in Cambridge – over dinner at a bogus Mexican restaurant run by Italian junkies – several people had asked me why I was wasting my time on ‘this kind of bullshit.’ McGovern, Muskie, Lindsay, or even Gene McCarthy. I had just come back from a long day at the Massachusetts ‘Rad/Lib Caucus’ in Worcester, billed as a statewide rally to decide which Democratic candidate to support in the Massachusetts primary on April 25th.
The idea, said the organizers, was to unify and avoid a disastrous vote-splitting orgy that would splinter the Left between McGovern, Lindsay & McCarthy – thus guaranteeing an easy Muskie win. The Caucus organizers were said to be well-known McCarthy supporters, who’d conceived the gathering as a sort of launching pad for Gene in ’72 … and McCarthy seemed to agree; he was the only candidate to attend the Caucus in person, and his appearance drew a booming ovation that gave every indication of a pending victory.
The night before, at a crowded student rally in Hogan Student Center at Holy Cross, McCarthy had responded to a questioner who asked if he was ‘really a serious candidate’ by saying: ‘You’ll see how serious I am after tomorrow’s Caucus.’
The crowd at Holy Cross responded with a rolling cheer. The median age, that night, was somewhere around nineteen and McCarthy was impressively sharp and confident as he drew roar after roar of applause with his quietly vicious attack on Nixon, Humphrey, and Muskie. As I stood there in the doorway of the auditorium, looking