Not entirely, but I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street … peel back the the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography.
As for politics, I think Art Buchwald said it all last month in his Tan letter to Nixon.’
‘I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.’
February
Fear & Loathing in New Hampshire … Back on the Campaign Trail in Manchester, Keene & The Booth Fish Hatcheries … Harold Hughes Is Your Friend … Weird Memories of ’68: A Private Conversation with Richard Nixon … Will Dope Doom the Cowboys? … A First, Massive & Reluctantly Final Judgment on the Reality of George McGovern … Small Hope for the Hammer & No Hope At All for the Press Wizards …
It was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester – driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars that gets rubber for about twenty-nine seconds in Drive, and spits hot black divots all over the road in First or Second … a terrible screeching and fishtailing through the outskirts of Boston heading north to New Hampshire, back on the Campaign Trail … running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.
Not much of a moon tonight, but a sky full of very bright stars. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills … running about seventy-five or eighty through a landscape of stark naked trees and stone fences; the highway is empty and no lights in the roadside farmhouses. People go to bed early in New England.
Four years ago I ran this road in a different Mercury, but I wasn’t driving then. It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s top speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchannan.
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late -almost midnight then, too – and the cop was holding the big Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town somewhere near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech, to the airport up in Manchester where a Lear Jet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain-trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Lear Jet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very-relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been … and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands …
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backwards, Here We Go … ‘Watch Out!’ somebody was shouting. ‘Get the cigarette!’ A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, ‘God damnit, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!’
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. ‘What worries me,’ he said, ‘is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the Boss …’
‘Very bad show,’ I said, ‘especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones … you people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.’
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.’ He smiled. ‘You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach – because I am, after all, a professional.’
‘We know. That’s why you’re along.’
Actually, the reason was very different: I was the only one in the press corps that evening who claimed to be as seriously addicted to pro football as Nixon himself. I was also the only out-front, openly hostile Peace Freak; the only one wearing old Levis and a ski jacket, the only one (no, there was one other) who’d smoked grass on Nixon’s big Greyhound press bus, and certainly the only one who habitually referred to the candidate as ‘the Dingbat.’
So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me - out of the fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who’d been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview – as the one who should share the back seat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.
But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. ‘We want the Boss to relax,’ Ray Price told me, ‘but he can’t relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football.’ He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting to board the press bus, then shook his head sadly. ‘I checked around,’ he said. ‘But the others are hopeless – so I guess you’re it.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
We had a fine time. I enjoyed it – which put me a bit off balance, because I’d figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to things like ‘end runs’ and ‘power sweeps’ on the stump but it never occurred to me that he actually knew anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.
But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon -and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human – he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass – in the waning moments of the 1967 Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland – to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style & precision.
He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh & laughed: ‘That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!’
I was stunned. He not only remembered the play, but he knew where Miller had played in college.
That was four years ago. LBJ was Our President and there was no real hint, in the winter of ’68, that he was about to cash his check. Johnson seemed every bit as tough and invulnerable then as Nixon seems today … and it is slightly unnerving to recall that Richard Nixon, at that point in his campaign, appeared to have about as much chance of getting himself elected to the White House as Hubert Humphrey appears to have now, in February of ’72.
When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do. The polls showed him comfortably ahead of George Romney, but according to most of the big-time press wizards who were hanging around Manchester at the time, the Nixon-Romney race was only a drill that would end just as soon as Nelson Rockefeller came in