The Great Shark Hunt Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1

Strange Tales From A Strange

Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

From Nixon to napalm, Carter to cocaine, Hunter S. Thompson

captures the crazy, hypocritical,

degenerate, and worthwhile aspects

of American society with razor-

sharp insight and greater clarity than anyone writing today.

Always fresh, irreverent, original, brilliant, and on-the-edge,

Thompson hurls himself headfirst

into each assignment and situation

and comes back with a story only he could write. He aims for the naked

truth and hits the nation's jugular vein. There is no one quite like

Thompson; he is unique, and we are

all richer for it.

"No other reporter reveals how much we have to fear and loathe,

yet does it so hilariously." --

Chicago Tribune

THE GREAT SHARK HUNT

This book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

Published by Fawcett Popular Library, a unit of

CBS Publications, the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc., by arrangement with Summit

Books, a Simon & Schuster Division of Gulf & Western Corporation,

and Rolling Stone Press

Copyright © 1979 by Hunter S. Thompson Bibliography © 1979 by Kihm Winship All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form ISBN: 0-445-04596-5

Printed in the United States of America First Fawcett Popular Library printing: September 1980

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint the articles and excerpts listed:

BOSTON GLOBE

"Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in Washington" by Hunter S. Thompson, February 23, 1969; reprinted by permission of the Boston Globe.

DOW JONES & COMPANY, INC.

"A Footloose American in a Smugglers' Den" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

"Chatty Letters During a Journey from Aruba to Rio" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

"Democracy Dies in Peru, But Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National

Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

"Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

"The Catch Is Limited in Indians' 'Fish-in'" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

"The Inca of the Andes" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1963; all rights reserved.

"What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

"When the Beatniks Were Social Lions" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights

reserved.

"Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border" by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer,

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1963; all rights reserved.

THE NATION

"The Nonstudent Left" by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1965 by Hunter Thompson; originally appeared in The Nation.

THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY, INC.

"Fear and Loathing in the Bunker" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1974 by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The New York Times.

"The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1967 by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The New York Times.

PLAYBOY PRESS

"The Great Shark Hunt" by Hunter S.

Thompson,

copyright © 1974 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally appeared in Playboy magazine.

RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1972 by Hunter Thompson, reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc.

Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1966, 1967 by Hunter S. Thompson; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

THE REPORTER

"A Southern City with Northern Problems" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1963 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by The Reporter.

ROLLING STONE

America by Ralph Steadman, copyright © 1974 by Ralph Steadman; reprinted by permission of Rolling Stone Press.

"The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat" by Hunter S. Thompson,

copyright © 1977 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"The Battle of Aspen" by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1970 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1974 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched" by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone

magazine.

"Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag" by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Fear and Loathing at Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check" by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1973 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1976 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room" by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1978 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room" by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1978 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Memo from the Sports Desk: The So-called

'Jesus-Freak' Scare" by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1971 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Depression Chamber in Miami" by Hunter S. Thompson,

copyright © 1973 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Strange Rumblings in Aztlan" by Hunter Thompson,

copyright © 1971 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; originally published in Rolling Stone

magazine.

STRAIGHT ARROW BOOKS

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

by Hunter S. Thompson,

copyright © 1973 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by Straight Arrow Books.

"To Juan and. . ."

"To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down."

H.S.T.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

-- Raoul Duke

Contents

PART ONE

Author's Note

Fear and Loathing in the Bunker

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent

and Depraved

A Southern City with Northern Problems

Fear and Loathing at the Super

Bowl

The Temptations of Jean-Claude

Killy

The Ultimate Free Lancer

Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog

"Genius 'Round the World Stands Hand in Hand, and One Shock of

Recognition Runs the Whole Circle

'Round" -- ART LINKLETTER

Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the

Heart of the American Dream

A Conversation on Ralph Steadman

and His Book, America, with Dr.

Hunter S. Thompson

Strange Rumblings in Aztlan

Freak Power in the Rockies

Memo from the Sports Desk: The So-Called "Jesus Freak" Scare Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in

Washington

PART TWO

Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll

(Overhauled 1968 Model)

Author's Note

June, 1972: The McGovern

Juggernaut Rolls On

Later in June

September

October

Epitaph

Memo from the Sports Desk &

Rude Notes from a Decompression

Chamber in Miami

Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check

Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag

Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The

Scum Also Rises

PART THREE

Traveler Hears Mountain Music

Where It's Sung

A Footloose American in a

Smugglers' Den

Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often

Blow South of the Border Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few

Seem to Mourn Its Passing

The Inca of the Andes: He Haunts

the Ruins of His Once-Great

Empire

Brazilshooting

Chatty Letters During a Journey

from Aruba to Rio

What Lured Hemingway to

Ketchum?

Living in the Tune of Alger,

Greeley, Debs

Marlon Brando and the Indian Fish-

In

The "Hashbury" Is the Capital of the Hippies

When the Beatniks Were Social

Lions

The Nonstudent Left

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines. . .

Ain't What They Used to Be!

The Police Chief

PART FOUR

The Great Shark Hunt

Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of

Faith Address by Jimmy Carter on

Law Day: University of Georgia,

Athens, GA

The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat

The Hoodlum Circus and the

Statutory Rape of Bass Lake

Ashes to Ashes & Dust to Dust: The Funeral of Mother Miles

Welcome to Las Vegas: When the

Going Gets Weird the Weird Turn

Pro

Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and

Loathing in the Near Room

Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room

Bibliography of Works by Dr.

Hunter S. Thompson, by Kihm

Winship

Bibliography of Works on Dr.

Hunter S. Thompson, by Kihm

Winship

NEWS RELEASE

AIR PROVING GROUND

COMMAND

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, FLORIDA

OFFICE OF INFORMATION

SERVICES

Telephone 26111-2622

EGLIN AFB, FLORIDA-(Nov8)-

S/Sgt. Manmountain Dense, a

novice Air Policeman, was

severely injured here today, when a wine bottle exploded inside the AP

gatehouse at the west entrance to the base. Dense was incoherent for

several hours after the disaster, but managed to make a statement which

led investigators to believe the

bottle was hurled from a speeding

car which approached the gatehouse

on the wrong side of the road,

coming from the general direction

of the SEPARATION CENTER.

Further investigation revealed that, only minutes before the incident at the gatehouse, a reportedly

"fanatical" airman had received his separation papers and was rumored

to have set out in the direction of the gatehouse at a high speed in a

mufflerless car with no brakes. An

immediate search was begun for

Hunter S. Thompson, one-time

sports editor of the base newspaper and well-known "morale problem."

Thompson was known to have a

sometimes over-powering affinity

for wine and was described by a

recent arrival in the base

sanatorium as "just the type of bastard who would do a thing like

that."

An apparently uncontrollable iconoclast, Thompson was

discharged today after one of the

most hectic and unusual Air Force

careers in recent history. According to Captain Munnington Thurd, who

was relieved of his duties as base

classification officer yesterday and admitted to the neuropsychological

section of the base hospital,

Thompson was "totally

unclassifiable" and "one of the most savage and unnatural airmen I've

ever come up against."

"I'll never understand how he got this discharge," Thurd went on to say. "I almost had a stroke

yesterday when I heard he was

being given an honorable discharge.

It's terrifying -- simply terrifying."

And then Thurd sank into a

delerium.

HEADQUARTERS

AIR PROVING GROUND

COMMAND

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

Eglin Air Force Base, Florida

ADDRESS REPLY

ATTN: Base Staff Personnel

Officer

Personnel Report: A/2C Hunter S.

Thompson

23 Aug 57

1. A/2C Hunter S. Thompson,

AF15546879, has worked in the Internal Information Section, OIS,

for nearly one year. During this time he has done some outstanding sports writing, but ignored APGC-OIS

policy.

2. Airman Thompson possesses

outstanding talent in writing. He has imagination, good use of English,

and can express his thoughts in a

manner that makes interesting

reading.

3. However, in spite of frequent

counseling with explanation of the reasons for the conservative policy on an AF base newspaper, Airman

Thompson has consistently written

controversial material and leans so strongly to critical editorializing that it was necessary to require that all his writing be thoroughly edited before release.

4. The first article that called

attention to the writing noted above was a story very critical of Base

Special Services. Others that were

stopped before they were printed were pieces that severely criticized Arthur Godfrey and Ted Williams

that Airman Thompson extracted

from national media releases and

added his flair for the innuendo and exaggeration.

5. This Airman has indicated poor

judgment from other standpoints by

releasing Air Force information to

the Playground News himself, with

no consideration for other papers in the area, or the fact that only

official releases, carefully censored by competent OIS staff members,

are allowed.

6. In summary, this Airman,

although talented, will not be

guided by policy or personal advice and guidance. Sometimes his rebel

and superior attitude seems to rub

off on other airmen staff members.

He has little consideration for

military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want out as soon as possible.

7. Consequently, it is requested that Airman Thompson be assigned to

other duties immediately, and it is recommended that he be earnestly

considered under the early release

program.

8. It is also requested that Airman Thompson be officially advised that he is to do no writing of any kind

for internal or external publication unless such writing is edited by the OIS staff, and that he is not to

accept outside employment with any

of the local media.

W. S. EVANS, Colonel, USAF

Chief, Office of Information

Services

PART 1

Author's Note

"Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off."

-- J. Conrad

Well. . . yes, and here we go again.

But before we get to The Work, as

it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant

typewriter -- (and, yes, it appears that I do) -- so why not make this

quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05

to Denver? Indeed. Why not?

But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a

very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge

building on Fifth Avenue in New

York at one o'clock in the morning

on the night before Christmas Eve,

2000 miles from home, and

compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in

an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking

down on The Plaza Fountain.

Very strange.

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my

own tombstone. . . and when I

finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories

below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act.

Not even me. . . and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie

situation at all is to make a

conscious decision that I have

already lived and finished the life I planned to live -- (13 years longer, in fact) -- and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different

thing, a gig that ends tonight and

starts tomorrow morning.

So if I decided to leap for The

Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly

clear -- I would genuinely love to

make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a

failed opportunity, one of the very

few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons),

and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas

and then have to live for 100 more

years with all this goddamn

gibberish I'm lashing together.

But, Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out. . . and if I do you

bastards are going to owe me a

king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is

"salute," goddamnit -- and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could). . .

But you know I could, if I had just a little more time.

Right?

Yes.

HST #I, R.I.P.

12/23/77

Fear and Loathing in the Bunker

". . . the milkman left me a note yesterday.

Get out of this town by noon,

You're coming on way too soon

And besides that

we never liked you anyway. . ."

-- John Prine

Woody Creek, Col.-- Strange epitaph for a strange year and no

real point in explaining it either. I haven't had a milkman since I was

ten years old. I used to ride around on the route with him, back in

Louisville. It was one of those

open-door, stand-up vans that you

could jump in and out of on the run.

He would creep that rancid-

smelling truck along the street from house to house while I ran back and forth with the goods.

I was the runner, the mule, and occasionally the bagman when some

poor wretch behind on her milk bill had to either pay up or drink water for breakfast that morning.

Those scenes were always

unsettling -- some half-awake,

middle-aged housewife yelling at

me in her bathrobe through the

screen door. But I was a cold-

hearted little bastard in those days.

"Sorry ma'am, but my boss out there in the truck says I can't leave these

bottles here unless you give me $21.16. . ."

No argument ever fazed me. I doubt

that I even heard the words. I was

there to collect, not to listen and I didn't give a hoot in hell if they paid or not; all I really cared about was the adrenalin rush that came with

sprinting across people's front

lawns, jumping hedges, and hitting

that slow-rolling truck before it had to stop and wait for me.

There is some kind of heavy

connection between that memory and the way I feel right now about

this stinking year that just ended.

Everybody I talk to seems very

excited about it. "God damn, man! it was a fantastic year," they say.

"Maybe the most incredible year in our history."

Which is probably true. I remember

thinking that way, myself, back on

those hot summer mornings when

John Dean's face lit my tube day

after day. . . incredible. Here was

this crafty little ferret going down the pipe right in front of our eyes, and taking the President of the

United States along with him.

It was almost too good to be true.

Richard Milhous Nixon, the main

villain in my political

consciousness for as long as I can

remember, was finally biting that

bullet he's been talking about all

those years. The man that not even

Goldwater or Eisenhower could

tolerate had finally gone too far --

and now he was walking the plank, on national TV, six hours a day --

with The Whole World Watching,

as it were.

That phrase is permanently etched

on some grey rim on the back of my

brain. Nobody who was at the

corner of Michigan and Balboa on

that Wednesday night in August of

1968 will ever forget it.

Richard Nixon is living in the White House today because of what

happened that night in Chicago.

Hubert Humphrey lost that election by a handful of votes -- mine among them -- and if I had to do it again I would still vote for Dick Gregory.

If nothing else, I take a certain pride in knowing that I helped spare the

nation eight years of President

Humphrey -- an Administration that

would have been equally corrupt

and wrongheaded as Richard

Nixon's, far more devious, and

probably just competent enough to

keep the ship of state from sinking

until 1976. Then with the boiler about to explode from eight years of blather and neglect, Humphrey's

cold-war liberals could have fled

down the ratlines and left the

disaster to whoever inherited it.

Nixon, at least, was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity

that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking

command. By bringing in hundreds

of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, he was able to

crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis.

About the only disaster he hasn't

brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or

both. . . but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long. But we will get to that point in a moment.

For now, we should make every

effort to look at the bright side of the Nixon Administration. It has

been a failure of such monumental

proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable,

or even safe, among millions of

people who only two years ago

thought that anybody who disagreed

openly with "the Government" was either paranoid or subversive.

Political candidates in 1974, at

least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate

that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit. The

Watergate spectacle was a shock,

but the fact of a millionaire

President paying less income tax than most construction workers

while gasoline costs a dollar in

Brooklyn and the threat of mass

unemployment by spring tends to

personalize Mr. Nixon's failures in a very visceral way. Even Senators

and Congressmen have been shaken

out of their slothful ruts, and the possibility of impeachment is

beginning to look very real. Given

all this, it is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White

House speechwriter Patrick

Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus,"

he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain. . . and it

rolled right back down on us."

Well. . . shucks. It makes a man's

eyes damp, for sure. But I have a lot of confidence in Pat, and I suspect he won't have much trouble finding

other rocks to roll.

I have not read "The Myth of

Sisyphus" for a while, but if

memory serves there is nothing in

that story to indicate that the poor bugger ever gave any thought to the real nature or specific gravity of

that rock that would eventually roll back on him -- which is

understandable, perhaps, because

when you're locked into that kind of do-or-die gig, you keep pushing and ask questions later.

If any of those six hundred valiant fools who rode in The Charge of the Light Brigade had any doubts about

what they were doing, they kept it to

themselves. There is no room in Crusades, especially at the

command level, for people who ask

"Why?" Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor

Pat Buchanan had the time or any

real inclination to question what

they were doing. They were Good

Soldiers, True Believers. . . and

when the orders came down from

above they did what had to be done: Execute.

Which is admirable in a queer kind

of way. . . except that Sisyphus got mashed, the Light Brigade

slaughtered, and Pat Buchanan will

survive in the footnotes of history as a kind of half-mad Davy Crockett

on the walls of Nixon's Alamo -- a

martyr, to the bitter end, to a

"flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative

politics that has done more damage

to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies

could have done in two or three

decades.

When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon's five years

of unrestrained power in the White

House, it will show that he had the same effect on

conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hells

Angels had on hippies and flower

power. . . and the ultimate damage, on both fronts, will prove out to be just about equal.

Or maybe not -- at least not on the scale of sheer numbers of people

affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trips affected very few people directly,

while the greedy, fascistic

incompetence of Richard Nixon's

Presidency will leave scars on the

minds and lives of a whole

generation -- his supporters and

political allies no less than his

opponents.

Maybe that's why the end of this

incredible, frantic year feels so

hollow. Looking back on the sixties,

and even back to the fifties, the fact of President Nixon and everything

that has happened to him -- and to

us -- seem so queerly fated and

inevitable that it is hard to reflect on those years and see them

unfolding in any other way.

One of the strangest things about

these five downhill years of the

Nixon Presidency is that despite all the savage excesses committed by

the people he chose to run the

country, no real opposition or

realistic alternative to Richard Nixon's cheap and mean-hearted

view of the American Dream has

ever developed. It is almost as if

that sour 1968 election rang down

the curtain on career politicians.

This is the horror of American

politics today -- not that Richard

Nixon and his fixers have been

crippled, convicted, indicted,

disgraced and even jailed -- but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim

collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.

How long, oh Lord, how long? And

how much longer will we have to

wait before some high-powered

shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with

the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?

Is the democracy worth all the risks

and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be

happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn't worked out, to hell with it.

That milkman who made me his

bagman was no fool. I took my

orders from him and it never

occurred to me to wonder where his

came from. It was enough for me to

cruise those elm-lined streets in a big, bright-colored van and deliver

the goods. But I was ten years old then and I didn't know much. . . or at least not as much as I know now.

But every once in a while, on

humorless nights like these, I think about how sharp and sure I felt

when I was sprinting across those

manicured lawns, jumping the

finely-trimmed hedges and hitting

the running board on that slow-

cruising truck.

If the milkman had given me a pistol and told me to put a bullet in the

stomach of any slob who haggled about the bill, I would probably

have done that, too. Because the

milkman was my boss and my

benefactor. He drove the truck --

and as far as I was concerned he

might as well have been the Pope or the President. On a "need to know"

basis, the milkman understood that I was not among the needy. Nor was

he, for that matter. We were both a lot happier just doing what we were told.

George Orwell had a phrase for it.

Neither he nor Aldous Huxley had

much faith in the future of

participatory democracy. Orwell

even set a date: 1984 -- and the

most disturbing revelation that

emerged from last year's Watergate

hearings was not so much the

arrogance and criminality of

Nixon's henchmen, but the

aggressively totalitarian character of his whole Administration. It is

ugly to know just how close we

came to meeting Orwell's deadline.

Meanwhile, it is tempting to dismiss the ominous fact that Richard Nixon is still the President. The spectre of impeachment lends more and more

weight to the probability of his

resignation. If I were a gambling

person-- which I am, whenever

possible-- I would bet that Nixon

will resign for "reasons of health"

within the next six months.

It will be a nasty gig when it

happens; a maudlin spectacle in

prime time on all four TV networks.

He will kick out the jams in a desperate bid for martyrdom, and

then he will fly off, forever, to a life of brooding isolation-- perhaps on

one of Robert Abplanalp's private

islands in the Bahamas.

There will be all-night poker games on the palm-screened patio, with

other wealthy exiles like Howard

Hughes and Robert Vesco and

occasionally Bebe Rebozo. . . and

Nixon, the doomed exile, will

spend the daylight hours dictating

his memoirs in a permanent state of high fever and vengefulness to his

faithful secretary and companion,

Rose Mary Woods. The only other

residents on the island will be

Secret Service guards assigned on a six-month rotation basis by Acting

President Gerald Ford.

That is one scenario, and the odds

would seem to favor it. But there

are quite a few others-- all based on the grim possibility that Richard

Nixon might have no intention at all

of resigning. He just may have already sketched out a last-ditch, DDay style battle plan that would turn the tide with one stroke and scuttle any move for impeachment.

Which brings us back to the

question of nuclear war, or at least a quick nuclear zap against China,

with the full and formal support of our old ally, Russia.

There is a fiendish simplicity in this plan, a Hitieresque logic so awful

that I would not even think about

printing it unless I were absolutely certain that Nixon was at least a

year ahead of me in the plan and all its details. Even now, I suspect, he spends the last half hour of each day keeping it constantly up to date on one of his yellow legal pads.

So here it is -- the Final Solution to Almost All Our Problems:

1) A long-term treaty with Russia,

arranged by Henry Kissinger,

securing Moscow's support of an

American invasion, seizure and

terminal occupation of all oil-producing countries in the Middle

East. This would not only solve the

"energy crisis" and end

unemployment immediately by

pressing all idle and able-bodied

males into service for the

invasion/occupation forces. . . but it would also crank up the economy to

a wartime level and give the

Federal Government unlimited

"emergency powers."

2) In exchange for Russian support

for our violent seizure of all Middle East oil reserves, the United States would agree to support the USSR in

a "pre-emptive nuclear strike"

against targets in China, destroying at least 90 per cent of that nation's industrial capacity and reducing the population to a state of chaos, panic and famine for the next hundred

years. This would end the Kremlin's worries about China, guarantee

peace in Indochina for the

foreseeable future, and insure a

strong and friendly ally, in Japan, as

kingpin of the East.

These are merely the highlights of

the Final Solution. No doubt there

are other and uglier aspects, but my time and space are too limited for

any long screeds on the subject. The only real question is whether Mr.

Nixon is mad enough to run the risk of paralyzing both the Congress and the people by resorting to such

drastic measures.

There is no doubt at all, in my own mind, that he is capable of it. But it

will not be quite as easy for him now as it would have been last

year.

Six months ago I was getting a daily rush out of watching the nightmare

unfold. There was a warm sense of

poetic justice in seeing "fate" drive these money-changers out of the

temple they had worked so hard to

steal from its rightful owners. The word "paranoia" was no longer mentioned, except as a joke or by

yahoos, in serious conversations

about national politics. The truth was turning out to be even worse

than my most "paranoid ravings"

during that painful 1972 election.

But that high is beginning to fade, tailing down to a vague sense of

angst. Whatever happens to Richard

Nixon when the wolves finally rip

down his door seems almost beside

the point, now. He has been down

in his bunker for so long, that even his friends will feel nervous if he tries to re-emerge. All we can

really ask of him, at this point, is a semblance of self-restraint until

some way can be found to get rid of him gracefully.

This is not a cheerful prospect, for Mr. Nixon or anyone else -- but it

would be a hell of a lot easier to

cope with if we could pick up a

glimmer of light at the end of this foul tunnel of a year that only mad dogs and milkmen can claim to have

survived without serious brain

damage.

Or maybe it's just me. It is ten below zero outside and the snow

hasn't stopped for two days. The sun has apparently been sucked into

orbit behind the comet Kohoutek. Is this really a new year? Are we

bottoming out? Or are we into The

Age of The Fear?

The New York Times, January 1, 1974

The Kentucky Derby Is

Decadent and Depraved

I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the

dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering

into a steam bath. Inside, people

hugged each other and shook hands.

. . big grins and a whoop here and

there: "By God! You old bastard!

Good to see you, boy! Damn good. .

. and I mean it!"

In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his

name was something or other -- "but

just call me Jimbo" -- and he was here to get it on. "I'm ready for anything, by God! Anything at all.

Yeah, what are you drinkin?" I ordered a Margarita with ice, but he wouldn't hear of it: "Naw, naw. . .

what the hell kind of drink is that for Kentucky Derby time? What's

wrong with you, boy?" He grinned and winked at the bartender.

"Goddamn, we gotta educate this boy. Get him some good whiskey. .

."

I shrugged. "Okay, a double Old Fitz on ice." Jimbo nodded his approval.

"Look." He tapped me on the arm to make sure I was listening. "I know this Derby crowd, I come here

every year, and let me tell you one thing I've learned -- this is no town to be giving people the impression

you're some kind of faggot. Not in

public, anyway. Shit, they'll roll you in a minute, knock you in the head

and take every goddam cent you

have."

I thanked him and fitted a Marlboro into my cigarette holder. "Say," he said, "you look like you might be in the horse business . .. am I right?"

"No," I said. "I'm a photographer."

"Oh yeah?" He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. "Is that what you got there -- cameras?

Who you work for?"

"Playboy," I said.

He laughed. "Well, goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of --

nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you'll

be workin' pretty hard when they

run the Kentucky Oaks. That's a race just for fillies." He was laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid too!"

I shook my head and said nothing;

just stared at him for a moment,

trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the

riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day.

The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the

newspapers?"

The grin on his face had collapsed.

"What the hell are you talkin about?"

"Well. . . maybe I shouldn't be

telling you. . ." I shrugged. "But hell, everybody else seems to know.

The cops and the National Guard

have been getting ready for six

weeks. They have 20,000 troops on

alert at Fort Knox. They've warned

us -- all the press and

photographers -- to wear helmets

and special vests like flak jackets.

We were told to expect shooting. .

."

"No!" he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between

us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his

fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The

Kentucky Derby!" He kept shaking his head. "No! Jesus! That's almost too bad to believe!" Now he

seemed to be sagging on the stool,

and when he looked up his eyes

were misty. "Why? Why here?

Don't they respect anything?"

I shrugged again. "It's not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of

white crazies are coming in from all over the country-- to mix with the

crowd and attack all at once, from

every direction. They'll be dressed like everybody else. You know --

coats and ties and all that. But when the trouble starts. . . well, that's why the cops are so worried."

He sat for a moment, looking hurt

and confused and not quite able to

digest all this terrible news. Then he cried out: "Oh. . . Jesus! What in the name of God is happening in this

country? Where can you get away from it?"

"Not here," I said, picking up my bag. "Thanks for the drink. . . and good luck."

He grabbed my arm, urging me to

have another, but I said I was

overdue at the Press Club and

hustled off to get my act together for the awful spectacle. At the airport newsstand I picked up a Courier-Journal and scanned the front page headlines: "Nixon Sends GI's into

Cambodia to Hit Reds". . . "B-52's Raid, then 2,000 GI's Advance 20

Miles". . . "4,000 U.S. Troops Deployed Near Yale as Tension

Grows Over Panther Protest." At the bottom of the page was a photo

of Diane Crump, soon to become

the first woman jockey ever to ride in the Kentucky Derby. The

photographer had snapped her

"stopping in the barn area to fondle her mount, Fathom." The rest of the paper was spotted with ugly war

news and stories of "student unrest."

There was no mention of any trouble brewing at a university in

Ohio called Kent State.

I went to the Hertz desk to pick up my car, but the moonfaced young

swinger in charge said they didn't

have any. "You can't rent one

anywhere," he assured me. "Our Derby reservations have been

booked for six weeks." I explained that my agent had confirmed a white Chrysler convertible for me that

very afternoon but he shook his

head. "Maybe we'll have a cancellation. Where are you

staying?"

I shrugged. "Where's the Texas crowd staying? I want to be with my people."

He sighed. "My friend, you're in trouble. This town is flat full.

Always is, for the Derby."

I leaned closer to him, half-

whispering: "Look, I'm from

Playboy. How would you like a

job?"

He backed off quickly. "What?

Come on, now. What kind of a

job?"

"Never mind," I said. "You just blew it." I swept my bag off the counter and went to find a cab. The bag is a valuable prop in this kind of work; mine has a lot of baggage

tags on it -- SF, LA, NY, Lima,

Rome, Bangkok, that sort of thing --

and the most prominent tag of all is a very official, plastic-coated thing

that says "Photog. Playboy Mag." I bought it from a pimp in Vail,

Colorado, and he told me how to

use it. "Never mention Playboy until you're sure they've seen this thing first," he said. "Then, when you see them notice it, that's the

time to strike. They'll go belly up every time. This thing is magic, I

tell you. Pure magic."

Well. . . maybe so. I'd used it on the poor geek in the bar, and now,

humming along in a Yellow Cab

toward town, I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's

brains with that evil fantasy. But

what the hell? Anybody who

wanders around the world saying,

"Hell yes, I'm from Texas,"

deserves whatever happens to him.

And he had, after all, come here

once again to make a nineteenth-

century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout

with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition." Early in our chat, Jimbo had told me that he

hasn't missed a Derby since 1954.

"The little lady won't come

anymore," he said. "She just grits her teeth and turns me loose for this one. And when I say 'loose' I do

mean loose! I toss ten-dollar bills around like they were goin' outa

style! Horses, whiskey, women. . .

shit, there's women in this town

that'll do anything for money."

Why not? Money is a good thing to

have in these twisted times. Even

Richard Nixon is hungry for it. Only

a few days before the Derby he said, "If I had any money I'd invest it in the stock market." And the market, meanwhile, continued its

grim slide.

The next day was heavy. With only

thirty hours until post time I had no press credentials and -- according

to the sports editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal -- no hope at all of getting any. Worse, I needed two sets; one for myself and another for Ralph Steadman, the English

illustrator who was coming from London to do some Derby

drawings. All I knew about him was

that this was his first visit to the United States. And the more I

pondered that fact, the more it gave me the fear. How would he bear up

under the heinous culture shock of

being lifted out of London and

plunged into a drunken mob scene at the Kentucky Derby? There was no

way of knowing. Hopefully, he

would arrive at least a day or so

ahead, and give himself time to get

acclimated. Maybe a few hours of peaceful sightseeing in the

Bluegrass country around

Lexington. My plan was to pick him

up at the airport in the huge Pontiac Ballbuster I'd rented from a used-car salesman named Colonel Quick,

then whisk him off to some peaceful setting that might remind him of

England.

Colonel Quick had solved the car

problem, and money (four times the

normal rate) had bought two rooms

in a scumbox on the outskirts of town. The only other kink was the

task of convincing the moguls at

Churchill Downs that Scanlan's

was such a prestigious sporting

journal that common sense

compelled them to give us two sets

of the best press tickets. This was not easily done. My first call to the publicity office resulted in total

failure. The press handler was

shocked at the idea that anyone

would be stupid enough to apply for press credentials two days before

the Derby. "Hell, you can't be serious," he said. "The deadline was two months ago. The press box

is full; there's no more room. . . and what the hell is Scanlan's Monthly anyway?"

I uttered a painful groan. "Didn't the London office call you? They're

flying an artist over to do the

paintings. Steadman. He's Irish, I

think. Very famous over there. Yes.

I just got in from the Coast. The San Francisco office told me we were

all set."

He seemed interested, and even

sympathetic, but there was nothing

he could do. I nattered him with

more gibberish, and finally he

offered a compromise: he could get

us two passes to the clubhouse

grounds but the clubhouse itself and especially the press box were out of the question.

"That sounds a little weird," I said.

"It's unacceptable. We must have access to everything. All of it. The

spectacle, the people, the pageantry and certainly the race. You don't

think we came all this way to watch the damn thing on television, do

you? One way or another we'll get

inside. Maybe we'll have to bribe a guard -- or even Mace somebody."

(I had picked up a spray can of

Mace in a downtown drugstore for

$5.98 and suddenly, in the midst of that phone talk, I was struck by the hideous possibilities of using it out at the track. Macing ushers at the

narrow gates to the clubhouse inner

sanctum, then slipping quickly inside, firing a huge load of Mace

into the governor's box, just as the race starts. Or Macing helpless

drunks in the clubhouse restroom,

for their own good. . .)

By noon on Friday I was still

without credentials and still unable to locate Steadman. For all I knew

he'd changed his mind and gone

back to London. Finally, after

giving up on Steadman and trying

unsuccessfully to reach my man in

the press office, I decided my only hope for credentials was to go out

to the track and confront the man in person, with no warning --

demanding only one pass now,

instead of two, and talking very fast with a strange lilt in my voice, like a man trying hard to control some

inner frenzy. On the way out, I

stopped at the motel desk to cash a check. Then, as a useless

afterthought, I asked if by any wild chance a Mr. Steadman had checked

in.

The lady on the desk was about fifty years old and very peculiar-looking; when I mentioned

Steadman's name she nodded,

without looking up from whatever

she was writing, and said in a low

voice. "You bet he did." Then she favored me with a big smile. "Yes, indeed. Mr. Steadman just left for

the racetrack. Is he a friend of

yours?"

I shook my head. "I'm supposed to be working with him, but I don't

even know what he looks like.

Now, goddammit, I'll have to find

him in that mob at the track."

She chuckled. "You won't have any trouble finding him. You could pick that man out of any crowd."

"Why?" I asked. "What's wrong with him? What does he look like?"

"Well. . ." she said, still grinning,

"he's the funniest looking thing I've seen in a long time. He has this. . .

ah. . . this growth all over his face.

As a matter of fact it's all over his head." She nodded. "You'll know him when you see him; don't worry

about that."

Creeping Jesus, I thought. That

screws the press credentials. I had a vision of some nerve-rattling geek

all covered with matted hair and

string-warts showing up in the press office and demanding Scanlan's

press packet. Well. . . what the

hell? We could always load up on

acid and spend the day roaming

around the clubhouse grounds with big sketch pads, laughing

hysterically at the natives and

swilling mint juleps so the cops

wouldn't think we're abnormal.

Perhaps even make the act pay: set

up an easel with a big sign saying,

"Let a Foreign Artist Paint Your Portrait, $10 Each. Do It NOW!"

I took the expressway out to the

track, driving very fast and jumping the monster car back and forth

between lanes, driving with a beer

in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a

Volkswagen full of nuns when I

swerved to catch the right exit.

There was a slim chance, I thought, that I might be able to catch the ugly Britisher before he checked in.

But Steadman was already in the

press box when I got there, a

bearded young Englishman wearing

a tweed coat and RAF sunglasses.

There was nothing particularly odd

about him. No facial veins or

clumps of bristly warts. I told him about the motel woman's

description and he seemed puzzled.

"Don't let it bother you," I said.

"Just keep in mind for the next few days that we're in Louisville,

Kentucky. Not London. Not even

New York. This is a weird place.

You're lucky that mental defective

at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you." I laughed, but he looked worried.

"Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin," I said. "If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace." I showed him the can of "Chemical Billy,"

resisting the urge to fire it across the room at a rat-faced man typing

diligently in the Associated Press

section. We were standing at the

bar, sipping the management's

Scotch and congratulating each

other on our sudden, unexplained

luck in picking up two sets of fine press credentials. The lady at the

desk had been very friendly to him, he said. "I just told her my name and she gave me the whole works."

By midafternoon we had everything

under control. We had seats looking down on the finish line, color TV

and a free bar in the press room,

and a selection of passes that would take us anywhere from the

clubhouse roof to the jockey room.

The only thing we lacked was

unlimited access to the clubhouse

inner sanctum in sections "F&G". . .

and I felt we needed that, to see the whiskey gentry in action. The

governor, a swinish neo-Nazi hack

named Louie Nunn, would be in

"G," along with Barry Goldwater and Colonel Sanders. I felt we'd be legal in a box in "G" where we could rest and sip juleps, soak up a bit of atmosphere and the Derby's

special vibrations.

The bars and dining rooms are also

in "F&G," and the clubhouse bars on Derby Day are a very special

kind of scene. Along with the politicians, society belles and local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any

pretensions to anything at all within five hundred miles of Louisville

will show up there to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and

generally make himself obvious.

The Paddock bar is probably the

best place in the track to sit and

watch faces. Nobody minds being

stared at; that's what they're in there for. Some people spend most of

their time in the Paddock; they can hunker down at one of the many

wooden tables, lean back in a

comfortable chair and watch the

ever-changing odds flash up and

down on the big tote board outside

the window. Black waiters in white

serving jackets move through the

crowd with trays of drinks, while

the experts ponder their racing

forms and the hunch bettors pick

lucky numbers or scan the lineup for right-sounding names. There is a

constant flow of traffic to and from

the pari-mutuel windows outside in the wooden corridors. Then, as post time nears, the crowd thins out as

people go back to their boxes.

Clearly, we were going to have to

figure out some way to spend more

time in the clubhouse tomorrow. But the "walkaround" press passes to F&G were only good for thirty

minutes at a time, presumably to

allow the newspaper types to rush

in and out for photos or quick

interviews, but to prevent drifters

like Steadman and me from spending all day in the clubhouse,

harassing the gentry and rifling the odd handbag or two while cruising

around the boxes. Or Macing the

governor. The time limit was no

problem on Friday, but on Derby

Day the walkaround passes would

be in heavy demand. And since it

took about ten minutes to get from

the press box to the Paddock, and

ten more minutes to get back, that

didn't leave much time for serious

people-watching. And unlike most

of the others in the press box, we didn't give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had

come there to watch the real beasts perform.

Later Friday afternoon, we went out on the balcony of the press box and I tried to describe the difference

between what we were seeing today

and what would be happening

tomorrow. This was the first time

I'd been to a Derby in ten years, but before that, when I lived in

Louisville, I used to go every year.

Now, looking down from the press

box, I pointed to the huge grassy

meadow enclosed by the track.

"That whole thing," I said, "will be jammed with people; fifty thousand

or so, and most of them staggering

drunk. It's a fantastic scene --

thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey

bottles. We'll have to spend some

time out there, but it's hard to move around, too many bodies."

"Is it safe out there? Will we ever come back?"

"Sure," I said. "We'll just have to be careful not to step on anybody's

stomach and start a fight." I

shrugged. "Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting

angrier and angrier as they lose

more and more money. By

midafternoon they'll be guzzling

mint juleps with both hands and

vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be

jammed with bodies, shoulder to

shoulder. It's hard to move around.

The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being

stomped. Drunks pissing on

themselves in the betting lines.

Dropping handfuls of money and

fighting to stoop over and pick it

up."

He looked so nervous that I

laughed. "I'm just kidding," I said.

"Don't worry. At the first hint of trouble I'll start pumping this

'Chemical Billy' into the crowd."

He had done a few good sketches,

but so far we hadn't seen that

special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I'd seen a thousand times at every Derby I'd ever been to. I

saw it, in my head, as the mask of

the whiskey gentry-- a pretentious

mix of booze, failed dreams and a

terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much

inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any

other kind of thoroughbred is that

close inbreeding tends to magnify

the weak points in a bloodline as

well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a

definite risk in breeding two fast

horses who are both a little crazy.

The offspring will likely be very

fast and also very crazy. So the trick

in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised,

particularly in a narrow Southern

society where the closest kind of

inbreeding is not only stylish and

acceptable, but far more convenient

-- to the parents -- than setting their offspring free to find their own

mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. ("Goddam, did you hear about Smitty's daughter? She

went crazy in Boston last week and

married a nigger!") So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was

a symbol, in my own mind, of the

whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it

is.

On our way back to the motel after

Friday's races I warned Steadman

about some of the other problems

we'd have to cope with. Neither of

us had brought any strange illegal

drugs, so we would have to get by

on booze. "You should keep in mind," I said, "that almost everybody you talk to from now on

will be drunk. People who seem

very pleasant at first might suddenly swing at you for no reason at all."

He nodded, staring straight ahead.

He seemed to be getting a little

numb and I tried to cheer him up by inviting him to dinner that night,

with my brother.

Back at the motel we talked for a

while about America, the South,

England -- just relaxing a bit before dinner. There was no way either of

us could have known, at that time,

that it would be the last normal

conversation we would have. From

that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We

both went completely to pieces. The main problem was my prior

attachment to Louisville, which

naturally led to meeting with old

friends, relatives, etc., many of

whom were in the process of falling apart, going mad, plotting divorces,

cracking up under the strain of terrible debts or recovering from

bad accidents. Right in the middle

of the whole frenzied Derby action, a member of my own family had to

be institutionalized. This added a

certain amount of strain to the

situation, and since poor Steadman

had no choice but to take whatever

came his way, he was subjected to

shock after shock.

Another problem was his habit of

sketching people he met in the

various social situations I dragged him into-- then giving them the

sketches. The results were always

unfortunate. I warned him several

times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some

perverse reason he kept doing it.

Consequently, he was regarded with

fear and loathing by nearly

everyone who'd seen or even heard

about his work. He couldn't

understand it. "It's sort of a joke,"

he kept saying. "Why, in England it's quite normal. People don't take

offense. They understand that I'm just putting them on a bit."

"Fuck England," I said. "This is Middle America. These people

regard what you're doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult. Look what happened last night. I thought my

brother was going to tear your head off."

Steadman shook his head sadly.

"But I liked him. He struck me as a very decent, straightforward sort."

"Look, Ralph," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. That was a very horrible drawing you gave him. It was the

face of a monster. It got on his

nerves very badly." I shrugged.

"Why in hell do you think we left the restaurant so fast?"

"I thought it was because of the Mace," he said.

"What Mace?"

He grinned. "When you shot it at the headwaiter, don't you remember?"

"Hell, that was nothing," I said. "I missed him. . . and we were

leaving, anyway."

"But it got all over us," he said.

"The room was full of that damn gas. Your brother was sneezing and

his wife was crying. My eyes hurt

for two hours. I couldn't see to draw when we got back to the motel."

"That's right," I said. "The stuff got on her leg, didn't it?"

"She was angry," he said.

''Yeah. . . well, okay. . . Let's just figure we fucked up about equally

on that one," I said. "But from now on let's try to be careful when we're around people I know. You won't

sketch them and I won't Mace them.

We'll just try to relax and get

drunk."

"Right," he said. "We'll go native."

It was Saturday morning, the day of the Big Race, and we were having

breakfast in a plastic hamburger

palace called the Fish-Meat

Village. Our rooms were just across the road in the Brown Suburban

Hotel. They had a dining room, but

the food was so bad that we

couldn't handle it anymore. The

waitresses seemed to be suffering

from shin splints; they moved

around very slowly, moaning and

cursing the "darkies" in the kitchen.

Steadman liked the Fish-Meat place

because it had fish and chips. I

preferred the "French toast," which was really pancake batter, fried to

the proper thickness and then chopped out with a sort of cookie

cutter to resemble pieces of toast

Beyond drink and lack of sleep, our only real problem at that point was the question of access to the

clubhouse. Finally we decided to go ahead and steal two passes, if

necessary, rather than miss that part of the action. This was the last

coherent decision we were able to

make for the next forty-eight hours.

From that point on -- almost from

the very moment we started out to the track -- we lost all control of events and spent the rest of the

weekend churning around in a sea

of drunken horrors. My notes and

recollections from Derby Day are

somewhat scrambled.

But now, looking at the big red

notebook I carried all through the

scene, I see more or less what

happened. The book itself is

somewhat mangled and bent; some

of the pages are torn, others are

shriveled and stained by what appears to be whiskey, but taken as a whole, with sporadic memory

flashes, the notes seem to tell the story. To wit:

Rain all nite until dawn. No sleep.

Christ, here we go, a nightmare of

mud and madness. . . but no. By

noon the sun burns through --

perfect day, not even humid.

Steadman is now worried about

fire. Somebody told him about the

clubhouse catching on fire two

years ago. Could it happen again?

Horrible. Trapped in the press box.

Holocaust. A hundred thousand

people fighting to get out. Drunks

screaming in the flames and the

mud, crazed horses running wild.

Blind in the smoke. Grandstand

collapsing into the flames with us

on the roof. Poor Ralph is about to crack. Drinking heavily, into the

Haig & Haig.

Out to the track in a cab, avoid that terrible parking in people's front

yards, $25 each, toothless old men on the street with big signs: PARK

HERE, flagging cars in the yard.

"That's fine, boy, never mind the tulips." Wild hair on his head, straight up like a clump of reeds.

Sidewalks full of people all moving in the same direction, towards

Churchill Downs. Kids hauling

coolers and blankets, teenyboppers

in tight pink shorts, many blacks. . .

black dudes in white felt hats with leopard-skin bands, cops waving

traffic along.

The mob was thick for many blocks

around the track; very slow going in the crowd, very hot. On the way to

the press box elevator, just inside the clubhouse, we came on a row of

soldiers all carrying long white riot sticks. About two platoons, with

helmets. A man walking next to us

said they were waiting for the

governor and his party. Steadman

eyed them nervously. "Why do they have those clubs?"

"Black Panthers," I said. Then I remembered good old "Jimbo" at the airport and I wondered what he

was thinking right now. Probably

very nervous; the place was teeming with cops and soldiers. We pressed

on through the crowd, through many

gates, past the paddock where the

jockeys bring the horses out and

parade around for a while before

each race so the bettors can get a

good look. Five million dollars will be bet today. Many winners, more

losers. What the hell. The press gate

was jammed up with people trying to get in, shouting at the guards,

waving strange press badges:

Chicago Sporting Times, Pittsburgh

Police Athletic League. . . they

were all turned away. "Move on, fella, make way for the working

press." We shoved through the

crowd and into the elevator, then

quickly up to the free bar. Why not?

Get it on. Very hot today, not feeling well, must be this rotten climate.

The press box was cool and airy,

plenty of room to walk around and

balcony seats for watching the race or looking down at the crowd. We

got a betting sheet and went outside.

Pink faces with a stylish Southern

sag, old Ivy styles, seersucker coats and buttondown collars.

"Mayblossom Senility" (Steadman's phrase). . . burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first

place. Not much energy in these

faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor

the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why

not?

The grim reaper comes early in this league. . . banshees on the lawn at night, screaming out there beside

that little iron nigger in jockey

clothes. Maybe he's the one who's

screaming. Bad DT's and too many

snarls at the bridge club. Going

down with the stock market. Oh

Jesus, the kid has wrecked the new

car, wrapped it around the big stone

pillar at the bottom of the driveway.

Broken leg? Twisted eye? Send him

off to Yale, they can cure anything up there.

Yale? Did you see today's paper?

New Haven is under siege. Yale is

swarming with Black Panthers. . . I tell you, Colonel, the world has

gone mad. Why, they tell me a

goddamn woman jockey might ride

in the Derby today.

I left Steadman sketching in the

Paddock bar and went off to place

our bets on the fourth race. When I came back he was staring intently at a group of young men around a table not far away. "Jesus, look at the corruption in that face!" he

whispered. "Look at the madness, the fear, the greed!" I looked, then quickly turned my back on the table he was sketching. The face he'd

picked out to draw was the face of

an old friend of mine, a prep school football star in the good old days

with a sleek red Chevy convertible

and a very quick hand, it was said,

with the snaps of a 32B brassiere.

They called him "Cat Man."

But now, a dozen years later, I

wouldn't have recognized him

anywhere but here, where I should

have expected to find him, in the

Paddock bar on Derby Day. . . fat

slanted eyes and a pimp's smile,

blue silk suit and his friends looking like crooked bank tellers on a

binge. . .

Steadman wanted to see some

Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn't

sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse

men's rooms and look for men in

white linen suits vomiting in the

urinals. "They'll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts

of their suits," I said. "But watch the shoes, that's the tip-off. Most of

them manage to avoid vomiting on

their own clothes, but they never

miss their shoes."

In a box not far from ours was

Colonel Anna Friedman Goldman,

Chairman and Keeper of the Great Seal of the Honorable Order of

Kentucky Colonels. Not all the 76

million or so Kentucky Colonels

could make it to the Derby this year, but many had kept the faith, and

several days prior to the Derby they gathered for their annual dinner at the Seelbach Hotel.

The Derby, the actual race, was

scheduled for late afternoon, and as the magic hour approached I

suggested to Steadman that we

should probably spend some time in the infield, that boiling sea of

people across the track from the

clubhouse. He seemed a little

nervous about it, but since none of the awful things I'd warned him

about had happened so far -- no

race riots, firestorms or savage

drunken attacks -- he shrugged and

said, "Right, let's do it."

To get there we had to pass through many gates, each one; a step down

in status, then through a tunnel under

the track. Emerging from the tunnel was such a culture shock that it took us a while to adjust. "God

almighty!" Steadman muttered.

"This is a. . . Jesus!" He plunged ahead with his tiny camera, stepping over bodies, and I followed, trying to take notes.

Total chaos, no way to see the race, not even the track. . . nobody cares.

Big lines at the outdoor betting

windows, then stand back to watch

winning numbers flash on the big

board, like a giant bingo game.

Old blacks arguing about bets;

"Hold on there, I'll handle this"

(waving pint of whiskey, fistful of dollar bills); girl riding piggyback, T-shirt says, "Stolen from Fort Lauderdale Jail." Thousands of teen-agers, group singing "Let the Sun Shine In," ten soldiers guarding the American flag and a huge fat

drunk wearing a blue football jersey (No. 80) reeling around with quart

of beer in hand.

No booze sold out here, too dangerous. . . no bathrooms either.

Muscle Beach. . . Woodstock. . .

many cops with riot sticks, but no

sign of a riot. Far across the track the clubhouse looks like a postcard from the Kentucky Derby.

We went back to the clubhouse to

watch the big race. When the crowd

stood to face the flag and sing "My Old Kentucky Home," Steadman

faced the crowd and sketched

frantically. Somewhere up in the

boxes a voice screeched, "Turn around, you hairy freak!" The race itself was only two minutes long,

and even from our super-status seats and using 12-power glasses, there

was no way to see what was really

happening. Later, watching a TV

rerun in the press box, we saw what happened to our horses. Holy Land,

Ralph's choice, stumbled and lost

his jockey in the final turn. Mine, Silent Screen, had the lead coming

into the stretch, but faded to fifth at the finish. The winner was a 16-1

shot named Dust Commander.

Moments after the race was over,

the crowd surged wildly for the

exits, rushing for cabs and buses.

The next day's Courier told of violence in the parking lot; people were punched and trampled,

pockets were picked, children lost, bottles hurled. But we missed all

this, having retired to the press box for a bit of post-race drinking. By this time we were both half-crazy

from too much whiskey, sun fatigue,

culture shock, lack of sleep and general dissolution. We hung

around the press box long enough to watch a mass interview with the

winning owner, a dapper little man

named Lehmann who said he had

just flown into Louisville that

morning from Nepal, where he'd

"bagged a record tiger." The sportswriters murmured their

admiration and a waiter filled

Lehmann's glass with Chivas Regal.

He had just won $127,000 with a

horse that cost him $6,500 two

years ago. His occupation, he said, was "retired contractor." And then he added, with a big grin, "I just retired."

The rest of that day blurs into

madness. The rest of that night too.

And all the next day and night. Such horrible things occurred that I can't bring myself even to think about

them now, much less put them down

in print. Steadman was lucky to get out of Louisville without serious

injuries, and I was lucky to get out

at all. One of my clearest memories of that vicious time is Ralph being attacked by one of my old friends in the billiard room of the Pendennis

Club in downtown Louisville on

Saturday night. The man had ripped

his own shirt open to the waist

before deciding that Ralph was

after his wife. No blows were

struck, but the emotional effects

were massive. Then, as a sort of

final horror, Steadman put his

fiendish pen to work and tried to

patch things up by doing a little

sketch of the girl he'd been accused of hustling. That finished us in the Pendennis.

Sometime around ten-thirty Monday

morning I was awakened by a

scratching sound at my door. I

leaned out of bed and pulled the

curtain back just far enough to see Steadman outside. "What the fuck do you want?" I shouted.

"What about having breakfast?" he said.

I lunged out of bed and tried to open the door, but it caught on the night-chain and banged shut again. I

couldn't cope with the chain! The

thing wouldn't come out of the track

-- so I ripped it out of the wall with a vicious jerk on the door. Ralph

didn't blink. "Bad luck," he muttered.

I could barely see him. My eyes

were swollen almost shut and the

sudden burst of sunlight through the door left me stunned and helpless

like a sick mole. Steadman was mumbling about sickness and

terrible heat; I fell back on the bed and tried to focus on him as he

moved around the room in a very

distracted way for a few moments,

then suddenly darted over to the

beer bucket and seized a Colt .45.

"Christ," I said. "You're getting out of control."

He nodded and ripped the cap off,

taking a long drink. "You know, this is really awful," he said finally. "I

must get out of this place. . ." he shook his head nervously. "The plane leaves at three-thirty, but I don't know if I'll make it."

I barely heard him. My eyes had

finally opened enough for me to

focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of

recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought

somebody with him -- a model for

that one special face we'd been

looking for. There he was, by God -

- a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature. . . like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot

in some once-proud mother's family

photo album. It was the face we'd

been looking for -- and it was, of

course, my own. Horrible, horrible.

. .

"Maybe I should sleep a while

longer," I said. "Why don't you go on over to the Fish-Meat place and

eat some of those rotten fish and

chips? Then come back and get me

around noon. I feel too near death to hit the streets at this hour."

He shook his head. "No. . . no. . . I think I'll go back upstairs and work on those drawings for a while." He leaned down to fetch two more cans

out of the beer bucket. "I tried to work earlier," he said, "but my hands keep trembling. . . It's

teddible, teddible."

"You've got to stop this drinking," I said.

He nodded. "I know. This is no good, no good at all. But for some

reason it makes me feel better. . ."

"Not for long," I said. "You'll probably collapse into some kind of hysterical DT's tonight-- probably

just about the time you get off the plane at Kennedy. They'll zip you

up in a straitjacket and drag you

down to the Tombs, then beat you

on the kidneys with big sticks until you straighten out."

He shrugged and wandered out,

pulling the door shut behind him. I went back to bed for another hour

or so, and later -- after the daily grapefruit juice run to the Nite Owl Food Mart -- we had our last meal

at Fish-Meat Village: a fine lunch of dough and butcher's offal, fried in heavy grease.

By this time Ralph wouldn't even

order coffee; he kept asking for

more water. "It's the only thing they have that's fit for human

consumption," he explained. Then,

with an hour or so to kill before he had to catch the plane, we spread

his drawings out on the table and

pondered them for a while,

wondering if he'd caught the proper spirit of the thing. . . but we couldn't make up our minds. His hands were

shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision

was so blurred that I could barely

see what he'd drawn. "Shit," I said.

"We both look worse than anything you've drawn here."

He smiled. "You know -- I've been thinking about that," he said. "We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves

and all that. . . and now, you know what? It's us. . ."

Huge Pontiac Ballbuster blowing

through traffic on the expressway.

A radio news bulletin says the

National Guard is massacring

students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The

journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked

after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window,

trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with the

beer he's been using to rinse the

awful chemicals off his flesh. The

front of his woolen trousers is

soaked with vomit; his body is

racked with fits of coughing and

wild choking sobs. The journalist

rams the big car through traffic and

into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the

door on the passenger's side and

shoves the Englishman out, snarling:

"Bug off, you worthless faggot! You twisted pigfucker! [Crazed

laughter.] If I weren't sick I'd kick your ass all the way to Bowling

Green -- you scumsucking foreign

geek. Mace is too good for you. . .

We can do without your kind in

Kentucky."

Scanlan's Monthly, vol. I, no. 4,

June 1970

A Southern City With

Northern Problems

LOUISVILLE

Quino's Cafe is on Market Street,

two blocks up the hill from the river in the heart of Louisville's legal and financial district, and often in the long, damp Ohio Valley afternoons

a lot of people who might ordinarily avoid such a place will find

themselves standing at Quino's white formica counter, drinking a

Fehrs or a Falls City beer, and

eating a "genuine twenty cent

beercheese sandwich" while they skim through an early edition of the Louisville Times. If you stand at the counter and watch the street you

will see off-duty cops and

courthouse loafers, visiting farmers with five children and a pregnant

wife in the cab of a pickup truck,

and a well-fed collection of

lawyers and brokers in two-button

suits and cordovan shoes. You will also see quite a few Negroes, some

of them also wearing business suits and cordovan shoes. Louisville

takes pride in its race relations, and the appearance of well-dressed

Negroes in the Courthouse-City

Hall district does not raise any

eyebrows.

This city, known as "Derbytown,"

and "The Gateway to the South,"

has done an admirable job in

breaking down the huge and

traditional barriers between the black man and the white. Here in

the mint julep country, where the

Negro used to be viewed with all

the proprietary concern that men

lavish on a good coon hound

("Treat him fine when he works good -- but when he acts lazy and

no-count, beat him till he hollers"), the integration of the races has made encouraging headway.

Racial segregation has been

abolished in nearly all white public

places. Negroes entered the public schools in 1956 with so little

trouble that the superintendent of

schools was moved to write a book

about it, called The Louisville Story. Since then, restaurants, hotels, parks, movie theaters,

stores, swimming pools, bowling

alleys, and even business schools

have been opened to Negroes. As a

clincher, the city recently passed an ordinance that outlaws racial

discrimination in any public

accommodation. This has just about

done the deed; out of ninety-nine establishments "tested" by NAACP

workers, there were only four

complaints -- two from the same

East End bar. Mayor William

Cowger, whose progressive

Republican administration has

caused even Democrats to mutter

with admiration, spoke for most of

his fellow citizens recently when he said, "The stories of violence in other citites should make us proud

to live in Louisville. We enjoy

national prestige for sane and

sensible race relations."

All this is true -- and so it is all the more surprising to visit Louisville and find so much evidence to the

contrary. Why, for instance, does a local Negro leader say, "Integration here is a farce"? Why, also, has a local Negro minister urged his

congregation to arm themselves?

Why do Louisville Negroes bitterly

accuse the Federal urban-renewal

project of creating "de facto

segregation"? Why can't a Negro

take out a mortgage to buy a home in most white neighborhoods? And

why is there so much bitterness in

the remarks of Louisvillians both

black and white? "Integration is for poor people," one hears; "they can't afford to buy their way out of it."

Or, "In ten years, downtown

Louisville will be as black as

Harlem."

What is apparent in Louisville is

that the Negro has won a few

crucial battles, but instead of

making the breakthrough he expected, he has come up against

segregation's second front, where

the problems are not mobs and

unjust laws but customs and

traditions. The Louisville Negro,

having taken the first basic steps, now faces a far more subtle thing

than the simple "yes" or "no" that his brothers are still dealing with in most parts of the South. To this

extent, Louisville has integrated

itself right out of the South, and now faces problems more like those of a

Northern or Midwestern city.

The white power structure has

given way in the public sector, only to entrench itself more firmly in the private. And the Negro -- especially the educated Negro -- feels that his victories are hollow and his

"progress" is something he reads about in the newspapers. The

outlook for Louisville's Negroes

may have improved from "separate but equal" to "equal but separate."

But it still leaves a good deal to be

desired.

The white power structure, as

defined by local Negroes, means the men who run the town, the men who

control banking and industry and

insurance, who pay big taxes and

lend big money and head important

civic committees. Their names are

not well known to the average

citizen, and when they get publicity at all it is likely to be in the society sections of the one-owner local

press. During the day, their

headquarters is the Pendennis Club on downtown Walnut Street, where

they meet for lunch, squash, steam

baths, and cocktails. "If you want to get things done in this town,"

according to a young lawyer very

much on the way up, "you'd better belong to the Pendennis." On

evenings and weekends the scene

shifts to the Louisville Country Club far out in the East End, or clear

across the county line to Harmony

Landing, where good polo and good

whiskey push business out of sight

if not out of mind.

Anybody who pays dues to at least

two of these clubs can consider

himself a member in good standing

of the white power structure. This is the group that determines by quiet

pressure, direct action, and

sometimes even default just how far and fast Louisville will move

toward integration. Among

themselves, it is clear, they are no more integrated now than they were

ten years ago, and they are not

likely to be at any time in the near future. They have for the most part taken their sons and daughters out of the public schools or moved to

suburban areas where the absence

of Negroes makes integration an

abstract question. The only time

they deal actively with Negroes is

when they give the maid a ride to

the bus stop, get their shoes shined, or attend some necessary but

unpleasant confrontation with a

local Negro spokesman. Despite an

ancient conditioning to prejudice,

however, they are in the main, a far more progressive and enlightened

lot than their counterparts in

Birmingham or even in a lot of

cases than their own sons and

daughters.

There is a feeling in liberal circles, especially in New York and

Washington, that the banner of

racial segregation has little appeal to the younger generation. And

Murray Kempton has written that

the special challenge of the 1960's

"is how to appease the Negro without telling the poor white." But neither theory appears to apply in

Louisville. Some of the bitterest

racists in town belong to the best

families, and no Mississippi dirt

farmer rants more often against the

"niggers" than do some of Louisville's young up-and-coming

executives just a few years out of

college. At Bauer's, a fashionable

pine-paneled tavern much

frequented by the young bucks of the social set, the sentiment is

overwhelmingly anti-Negro. Late in the evening some of the habitues

may find themselves carried along

in the confusion of drink and good-

fellowship toward Magazine Street

in the heart of the colored section.

There, at Oliver's and Big John's

and the Diamond Horseshoe, the

action goes on until dawn and a

carload of jovial racists are as

welcome as anybody else, black or

white. The Negroes suspend their

resentment, the whites suspend their prejudice, and everybody enjoys the

music and the entertainment. But there is little or no mingling, and the activities of the night are quite

separate from those of the day.

You get a feeling, after a while, that the young are not really serious

either about denouncing the "nigger"

for "not knowing his place" or about ignoring the color line for nocturnal visits to Magazine Street. Both are luxuries that will not last, and the young are simply enjoying them

while they can. Mayor Cowger

likes to say: "People are different here. We get along with each other

because we don't like trouble."

Others will tell you that Louisville has no overt racial problem because the greatest commitment of the

majority of white citizens is simply to maintain the status quo, whatever it happens to be.

In such a society, of course, it might be argued that almost anything can

happen as long as it happens slowly and inconspicuously without getting

people stirred up. All of which naturally frustrates the Negro, who has said that he wants freedom now.

If the Negro were patient -- and

who can tell him he should be? -- he would have no problem. But

"freedom now" is not in the white Louisville vocabulary.

A good example of the majority

viewpoint shows up in the housing

situation, which at the moment is

inextricably linked with urban

renewal. As it happens, the urban-

renewal project centers mainly in the downtown Negro district, and

most of the people who have to be

relocated are black. It also happens that the only part of town to which Negroes can move is the West End,

an old and tree-shaded

neighborhood bypassed by progress

and now in the throes of a selling

panic because of the Negro influx.

There is a growing fear, shared by

whites and Negroes alike, that the

West End is becoming a black

ghetto.

Frank Stanley, Jr., the Negro leader who said "Integration here is a farce," blames urban renewal for the problem. "All they're doing is moving the ghetto, intact, from the middle of town to the West End."

Urban-renewal officials reply to

this by claiming the obvious: that

their job is not to desegregate

Louisville but to relocate people as quickly and advantageously as

possible. "Sure they move to the West End," says one official.

"Where else can they go?"

It is a fact that whites are moving out of the West End as fast as they can. A vocal minority is trying to

stem the tide, but there is hardly a block without a "For Sale" sign, and some blocks show as many as ten.

Yet there is "hardly any" race prejudice in the West End. Talk to a man with his house for sale and

you'll be given to understand that he is not moving because of any

reluctance to live near Negroes. Far from it; he is proud of Louisville's progress toward integration. But he

is worried about the value of his property; and you know, of course,

what happens to property values

when a Negro family moves into an

all-white block. So he's selling now to get his price while the getting is good.

Depending on the neighborhood, he

may or may not be willing to sell to Negroes. The choice is all his, and will be until Louisville passes an

"open housing" ordinance to eliminate skin as a factor in the

buying and selling of homes. Such an ordinance is already in the

planning stage.

Meanwhile, the homeowner who

will sell to Negroes is a rare bird --

except in the West End. And

arguments are presented with great

feeling that those who will show

their homes only to whites are not

prejudiced, merely considerate of

their neighbors. "Personally, I have nothing against colored people," a seller will explain. "But I don't

want to hurt the neighbors. If I sold my house to a Negro it would knock

several thousand dollars off the

value of every house on the block."

Most Negro realtors deny this,

citing the law of supply and

demand. Good housing for Negroes

is scarce, they point out and prices are consequently higher than those

on the white market, where demand

is not so heavy. There are,

however, both white and Negro

real-estate speculators who engage

in "block busting." They will work to place a Negro in an all-white

block, then try to scare the other

residents into selling cheap. Quite often they succeed -- then resell to Negroes at a big profit.

According to Jesse P. Warders, a

real-estate agent and a long-time

leader in Louisville's Negro

community, "What this town needs is a single market for housing -- not two, like we have now." Warders is counting on an "open housing"

ordinance, and he maintains that the biggest obstacle to open housing

without an ordinance is the lack of Negroes on Louisville's Real Estate board.

In order to be a "realtor" in Louisville, a real-estate agent has to be a member of "the Board," which does not accept Negroes. Warders

is a member of the Washington-

based National Institute of Real

Estate Brokers, which has about as

much influence here as the French

Foreign Legion.

Louisville, like other cities faced with urban decay, has turned to the building of midtown apartments as a means of luring suburbanites back

to the city center. In the newest and biggest of these, called "The 800,"

Warders tried to place a Negro

client. The reaction was a good

indicator of the problems facing

Negroes after they break the barrier of outright racism.

"Do me a favor," the builder of The

800 told Warders. "Let me get the place fifty per cent full-- that's my breakeven point-- then I'll rent to your client."

Warders was unhappy with the

rebuff, but he believes the builder will eventually rent to Negroes; and that, he thinks, is real progress.

"What should I say to the man?" he asked. "I know for a fact that he's refused some white people, too.

What the man wants is prestige

tenants; he'd like to have the mayor

living in his place, he'd like to have the president of the board of

aldermen. Hell, I'm in business, too, I might not like what he says, but I see his point."

Warders has been on the firing line long enough to know the score. He

is convinced that fear of change and the reluctance of most whites to act in any way that might be frowned on by the neighbors is the Negroes'

biggest problem in Louisville. "I know how they feel, and so do most

of my clients. But do you think it's right?"

The 800 was built with the

considerable help of an

FHA-guaranteed loan, which places

the building automatically in the

open housing category.

Furthermore, the owner insists that he is color-blind on the subject of tenants. But he assumes none the

less that the prestige tenants he

wants would not consider living in

the same building with Negroes.

It is the same assumption that motivates a homeowner to sell to

whites only-- not because of race

prejudice but out of concern for

property values. In other words,

almost nobody has anything against

Negroes, but everybody's neighbor

does.

This is galling to the Negroes.

Simple racism is an easy thing to

confront, but a mixture of guilty

prejudice, economic worries and

threatened social standing is much

harder to fight. "If all the white people I've talked to had the

courage of their convictions," one Negro leader has said, "we

wouldn't have a problem here."

Louisville's lending institutions

frustrate Negroes in the same way.

Frank Stanley, Jr., claims that

there's a gentlemen's agreement

among bankers to prevent Negroes

from getting mortgages to buy

homes in white neighborhoods. The

complaint would seem to have a

certain validity, although once again less sinister explanations are

offered. The lending agencies cite

business reasons, not race

prejudice, as the reason for their

stand. Concern for the reaction of

their depositors seems to be a big

factor, and another is the allegation that such loans would be a poor risk

-- especially if the institution holds mortgages on other homes in the

neighborhood. Here again is the

fear of falling property values.

There is also the question whether a Negro would have any more

difficulty getting a mortgage to buy a home in a white upper-class

neighborhood than would a member

of another minority group -- say, a plumber named Luciano, proud

possessor of six children, a dirty

spitz that barks at night, and a ten-year-old pickup truck with "Luciano Plumbing" painted on the side.

Mayor Cowger, a mortgage banker

himself, insists that a Negro would

have no more trouble than the hypothetical Mr. Luciano. Another

high-ranking occupant of City Hall

disagrees: "That's what the mayor would like to think, but it just isn't true. Nobody in Rolling Fields, for instance, would want an Italian

plumber for a neighbor, but at least they could live with him, whereas a Negro would be unthinkable

because he's too obvious. It

wouldn't matter if he were a doctor or a lawyer or anything else. The

whites in the neighborhood would

fear for the value of their property and try to sell it before it dropped."

Another common contention is that

Negroes "don't want to move into an all-white neighborhood." The East End, for instance, remains solidly

white except for alley dwellings

and isolated shacks. The mayor,

who lives in the East End, has said,

"Negroes don't want to live here. It wouldn't be congenial for them.

There are some fine Negro

neighborhoods in the West End --

beautiful homes. They don't try to buy homes where they won't be

happy. People just don't do things

like that." Some people do,

however, and it appears that almost without exception they get turned

down flat. One Negro executive

with adequate funds called a white

realtor and made an appointment to

look at a house for sale in the East End. Things went smoothly on the

telephone, but when the Negro

arrived at the realtor's office the man was incensed. "What are you

trying to do?" he demanded. "You know I can't sell you that house.

What are you up to, anyway?"

No realtor however, admits to

racial prejudice, at least while

talking to strangers. They are, they point out, not selling their own

homes but those of their clients. In the same fashion, mortgage bankers

are quick to explain that they do not lend their own money. A man

making inquiries soon gets the

impression that all clients,

investors, and depositors are vicious racists and dangerous

people to cross. Which is entirely

untrue in Louisville -- although it is hard to see how a Negro, after

making the rounds of "very

sympathetic" realtors, could be expected to believe anything else.

Housing ranks right at the top among Louisville's racial problems.

According to Frank Stanley, Jr.,

"Housing is basic; once we have whites and Negroes living together,

the rest will be a lot easier." Jesse P. Warders, the real-estate agent,

however, rates unemployment as the

No. 1 problem area, because

"Without money you can't enjoy the other things."

The Louisville Human Relations

Commission, one of the first of its kind in the nation, agrees that

although the city has made vast

strides in the areas of education and public accommodations, the

problems of housing and

employment are still largely unsolved because "These areas are much more complex and confront

long-established customs based on

a heritage of prejudice." Of the two, however, the commission sees

housing as a bigger problem. J.

Mansir Tydings, executive director

of the commission, is optimistic

about the willingness of merchants

and other employers to hire

Negroes: "Already -- and much

sooner than we expected -- our

problem is training unemployed

Negroes to fill positions that are open."

Yet there is still another big hurdle, less tangible than such, factors as housing and employment but

perhaps more basic when it comes

to finding an ultimate solution. This is the pervasive distrust among the white power structure of the Negro

leadership's motives. Out in the

dove-shooting country, in the

suburbs beyond the East End,

Stanley is viewed as an

"opportunist politician" and a

"black troublemaker." Bishop Ewbank Tucker, the minister who

urged his congregation to arm

themselves, is called an extremist

and a Black Muslim. The

possibility that some of the Negro

leaders do sometimes agitate for the sake of agitation often cramps the

avenues of communication between

white and Negro leaders.

Even among Negroes, Stanley is

sometimes viewed with uneasiness

and Bishop Tucker called a racist.

A former president of the Louisville NAACP, on hearing the statement

that local Negroes "resent the national publicity concerning

Louisville's progress in race

relations," laughed and dismissed Stanley as a "very nice, very smart young fella with a lot to learn."

(Stanley is twenty-six.)

"He wants things to go properly,"

said the NAACP man. "But difficult things never go properly -- life isn't

that way." He smiled nervously.

"Forty years ago I came back here thinking I could be a Black Moses -

- I thought I was going to set my

people free. But I couldn't do it then and it can't be done now. It's not a thing you can do overnight -- it's

going to take years and years and

years."

Nearly everyone agrees with that,

and even with all its problems,

Louisville looks to be a lot further along the road to facing and solving

the "Negro problem" than many other cities. Even Stanley, who

appears to make a cult of militant

noncompromise, will eventually

admit to a visitor that he threatens far more demonstrations than he

ever intends to produce.

"The white power structure here tries to cling to the status quo. They keep telling me not to rock the boat, but I rock it anyway because it's the only way to make them move. We

have to keep the pressure on them

every minute, or we dissipate our strength.

"Louisville isn't like Birmingham,"

he adds. "I think there's a conviction here that this thing is morally wrong

-- without that, we'd have real

trouble."

The Reporter, vol. 29, December 19, 1963

Fear and Loathing at the

Super Bowl

Grim Notes of a Failed Fan. . .

Mano a Mano with the Oakland

Raiders. . . Down and Out in

Houston. . . Is Pro Football over the Hump?. . . A Vague &

Vengeful Screed on Texas, Jesus, and the Political Realities of the NFL. . . Will Ron Ziegler Be the Next Commissioner?

I

". . . and whosoever was not found written into the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. . ."

-- Revelations 20:15

This was the theme of the sermon I

delivered off the 20th floor balcony of the Hyatt Regency in Houston on

the morning of Super Bowl VIII. It

was just before dawn, as I recall,

when the urge to speak came on me.

Earlier that day I had found -- on the tile floor of the Men's Room on the hotel mezzanine -- a religious comic book titled "A Demon's Nightmare,"

and it was from the text of this

sleazy tract that I chose the words

of my sermon.

The Houston Hyatt Regency -- like

others designed by architect John

Portman in Atlanta and San

Francisco -- is a stack of 1000

rooms, built around a vast lobby at least 30 stories high, with a

revolving "spindletop" bar on the roof. The whole center of the

building is a tower of acoustical

space. You can walk out of any

room and look over the indoor

balcony (20 floors down, in my

case) at the palm-shrouded, wood and naugahyde maze of the

bar/lounge on the lobby floor.

Closing time in Houston is 2:00

AM. There are after-hours bars, but the Hyatt Regency is not one of

them. So -- when I was seized by

the urge to deliver my sermon at

dawn -- there were only about 20

ant-sized people moving around in

the lobby far below.

Earlier, before the bar closed, the whole ground floor had been

jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering

geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion), and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the

country who roamed through the

drunken, randy crowd -- as casually as possible -- with an eye to picking up a last-minute sucker bet from

some poor bastard half-mad on

booze and willing to put some

money, preferably four or five big

ones, on "his boys."

The spread, in Houston, was Miami by six, but by midnight on Saturday almost every one of the two-thousand or so drunks in the lobby

of the Regency -- official

headquarters and media vortex for

this eighth annual Super Bowl --

was absolutely sure about what was

going to happen when the deal went

down on Sunday, about two miles

east of the hotel on the fog-soaked artificial turf of Rice University

stadium.

Ah. . . but wait! Why are we talking about gamblers here? Or thousands

of hookers and drunken

sportswriters jammed together in a

seething mob in the lobby of a

Houston hotel?

And what kind of sick and twisted

impulse would cause a professional

sportswriter to deliver a sermon

from the Book of Revelations off

his hotel balcony on the dawn of

Super Sunday?

I had not planned a sermon for that

morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter. . . But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it.

Probably it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the

extremely twisted nature of my

relationship with God, Nixon and

the National Football League: The

three had long since become

inseparable in my mind, a sort of

unholy trinity that had caused me

more trouble and personal anguish

in the past few months than Ron

Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail.

Or perhaps it had something to do

with my admittedly deep-seated

need to have public revenge on Al

Davis, general manager of the

Oakland Raiders. . . Or maybe an

overweening desire to confess that I had been wrong, from the start, to

have ever agreed with Richard

Nixon about anything, and

especially pro football.

In any case, it was apparently something I'd been cranking myself

up to deliver for quite a while. . .

and, for reasons I still can't be sure of, the eruption finally occurred on the dawn of Super Sunday.

I howled at the top of my lungs for almost 30 minutes, raving and

screeching about all those who

would soon be cast into the lake of fire, for a variety of low crimes,

misdemeanors and general ugliness

that amounted to a sweeping

indictment of almost everybody in the hotel at that hour.

Most of them were asleep when I

began speaking, but as a Doctor of

Divinity and an ordained minister in the Church of The New Truth, I

knew in my heart that I was merely

a vessel -- a tool, as it were -- of some higher and more powerful

voice.

For eight long and degrading days I had skulked around Houston with

all the other professionals, doing

our jobs -- which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our

bodies, courtesy of the National

Football League, and listen to an

endless barrage of some of the

lamest and silliest swill ever

uttered by man or beast. . . and

finally, on Sunday morning about

six hours before the opening

kickoff, I was racked to the point of hysteria by a hellish interior

conflict.

I was sitting by myself in the room, watching the wind & weather

clocks on the TV set, when I felt a sudden and extremely powerful

movement at the base of my spine.

Mother of Sweating Jesus! I thought.

What is it -- a leech? Are there

leeches in this goddamn hotel, along with everything else? I jumped off

the bed and began clawing at the

small of my back with both hands.

The thing felt huge, maybe eight or nine pounds, moving slowly up my

spine toward the base of my neck.

I'd been wondering, all week, why I was feeling so low and out of sorts.

. . but it never occurred to me that a giant leech had been sucking blood

out of the base of my spine all that time; and now the goddamn thing

was moving up towards the base of

my brain, going straight for the

medulla. . . and as a professional

sportswriter I knew that if the

bugger ever reached my medulla I

was done for.

It was at this point that serious

conflict set in, because I realized --

given the nature of what was

coming up my spine and the drastic

effect I knew it would have, very

soon, on my sense of journalistic

responsibility -- that I would have to do two things immediately: First, deliver the sermon that had been

brewing in my brain all week long,

and then rush back into the room

and write my lead for the Super

Bowl story. . .

Or maybe write my lead first, and

then deliver the sermon. In any case, there was no time to lose. The thing was about a third of the way up my

spine now, and still moving at good speed. I jerked on a pair of L.L.

Bean stalking shorts and ran out on the balcony to a nearby ice machine.

Back in the room I filled a glass full of ice and Wild Turkey, then began

flipping through the pages of "A Demon's Nightmare" for some kind of spiritual springboard to get the sermon moving. I had already

decided -- about midway in the ice-run -- that I had adequate time to

address the sleeping crowd and

also crank out a lead before that

goddamn bloodsucking slug reached

the base of my brain -- or, even

worse, if a sharp dose of Wild

Turkey happened to slow the thing

down long enough to rob me of my

final excuse for missing the game

entirely, like last year. . .

What? Did my tongue slip there?

My fingers? Or did I just get a fine

professional hint from my old buddy, Mr. Natural?

Indeed. When the going gets tough,

the tough get going. John Mitchell

said that -- shortly before he quit his job and left Washington at 90 miles an hour in a chauffeur-driven

limousine.

I have never felt close to John

Mitchell, but on that rotten morning in Houston I came as close as I ever will; because he was, after all, a

pro. . . and so, alas, was I. Or at

least I had a fistful of press badges that said I was.

And it was this bedrock sense of

professionalism, I think, that quickly solved my problem. . . which, until that moment when I recalled the foul spectre of Mitchell, had seemed to

require a frantic decision between

either delivering my sermon or

writing my lead, in the space of an impossibly short time.

When the going gets weird, the

weird turn pro.

Who said that?

I suspect it was somebody from the

Columbia Journalism Review, but I

have no proof. . . and it makes no

difference anyway. There is a bond, among pros, that needs no

definition. Or at least it didn't on that Sunday morning in Houston, for reasons that require no further

discussion at this point in time. . .

because it suddenly occurred to me

that I had already written the lead for this year's Super Bowl game; I

wrote it last year in Los Angeles, and a quick rip through my fat

manila folder of clips labeled

"Football '73" turned it up as if by magic.

I jerked it out of the file, and

retyped it on a fresh page slugged:

"Super Bowl/Houston '74." The only change necessary was the

substitution of "Minnesota Vikings"

for "Washington Redskins." Except for that, the lead seemed just as

adequate for the game that would

begin in about six hours as it was for the one that I missed in Los

Angeles in January of '73.

"The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Minnesota Vikings today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack

stops around both ends. . ."

The jangling of the telephone

caused me to interrupt my work. I jerked it off the hook, saying nothing to whoever was on the other end,

and began flashing the hotel

operator. When she finally cut in I spoke very calmly. "Look," I said.

"I'm a very friendly person and a minister of the gospel, to boot -- but I thought I left instructions down

there to put no calls -- NO CALLS,

GODDAMNIT! -- through to this

room, and especially not now in the middle of this orgy. . . I've been

here eight days and nobody's called

me yet. Why in hell would they start now?. . . What? Well, I simply can't accept that kind of flimsy reasoning, operator. Do you believe in Hell?

Are you ready to speak with Saint

Peter?. . . Wait a minute now, calm down. . . I want to be sure you

understand one thing before I get back to my business; I have some

people here who need help. . . But I want you to know that God is Holy!

He will not allow sin in his presence! The Bible says: 'There is none righteous. No, not one. . . For

all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.' That's from the

book of Romans, young lady. . ."

The silence at the other end of the line was beginning to make me

nervous. But I could feel the sap

rising, so I decided to continue my sermon from the balcony. . . and I

suddenly realized that somebody

was beating on my door. Jesus god,

I thought, it's the manager; they've come for me at last.

But it was a TV reporter from

Pittsburgh, raving drunk and demanding to take a shower. I

jerked him into the room.

"Nevermind the goddamn shower,"

I said. "Do you realize what I have on my spine?" He stared at me, unable to speak. "A giant leech," I said. "It's been there for eight days, getting fatter and fatter with blood."

He nodded slowly as I led him over

to the phone. "I hate leeches," he muttered.

"That's the least of our problems," I

said. "Room service won't send any beer up until noon, and all the bars are closed. . . I have this Wild

Turkey, but I think it's too heavy for the situation we're in."

"You're right," he said. "I got work to do. The goddamn game's about to

start. I need a shower."

"Me too," I said. "But I have some work to do first, so you'll have to make the call."

"Call?" He slumped into a chair in

front of the window, staring out at the thick grey mist that had hung on the town for eight days -- except

now, as Super Sunday dawned, it

was thicker and wetter than ever.

I gave him the phone: "Call the manager," I said. "Tell him you're Howard Cosell and you're visiting

up here with a minister in 2003;

we're having a private prayer

breakfast and we need two fifths of his best red wine, with a box of

saltine crackers."

He nodded unhappily. "Hell, I came here for a shower. Who needs the

wine?"

"It's important," I said. "You make the call while I go outside and get started."

He shrugged and dialed "0" while I hurried out to the balcony, clearing my throat for an opening run at

James 2:19:

"Beware!" I shouted, "for the Devils also believe, and tremble!"

I waited for a moment, but there was no reply from the lobby, 20

floors down -- so I tried Ephesians 6:12, which seemed more

appropriate:

"For we wrestle not," I screamed,

"against flesh and blood -- but against principalities, against

powers, against the rulers of the

darkness of this world -- and, yes --

against spiritual wickedness in high places!"

Still there was no response except

the booming echoes of my own voice. . . but the thing on my spine was moving with new vigor now,

and I sensed there was not much

time. All movement in the lobby had ceased. They were all standing still down there -- maybe 20 or 30

people. . . but were they listening?

Could they hear?

I couldn't be sure. The acoustics of these massive lobbies are not

predictable. I knew, for instance,

that a person sitting in a room on the

11th floor, with the door open, could hear -- with unnerving clarity

-- the sound of a cocktail glass

shattering on the floor of the lobby.

It was also true that almost every

word of Gregg Allman's "Multi-

Colored Lady" played at top

volume on a dual-speaker Sony TC-

126 in an open-door room on the

20th floor could be heard in the

NFL press room on the hotel

mezzanine. . . but it was hard to be sure of the timbre and carrying-power of my own voice in this

cavern; it sounded, to me, like the deep screaming of a bull elk in the rut. . . but there was no way to

know, for sure, if I was really

getting through.

"Discipline!" I bellowed.

"Remember Vince Lombardi!" I paused to let that one sink in --

waiting for applause, but none

came. "Remember George

Metesky!" I shouted. "He had discipline!"

Nobody down in the lobby seemed

to catch that one, although I sensed the first stirrings of action on the balconies just below me. It was

almost time for the Free Breakfast

in the Imperial Ballroom

downstairs, and some of the early-

rising sportswriters seemed to be

up and about. Somewhere behind

me a phone was ringing, but I paid

no attention. It was time, I felt, to bring it all together. . . my voice was giving out, but despite the

occasional dead spots and bursts of high-pitched wavering, I grasped

the railing of the balcony and got braced for some flat-out raving:

"Revelations, Twenty-fifteen!" I screamed. "Say Hallelujah! Yes!

Say Hallelujah!"

People were definitely responding

now. I could hear their voices, full of excitement -- but the acoustics of the place made it impossible to get a good fix on the cries that were

bounding back and forth across the

lobby. Were they saying

"Hallelujah"?

"Four more years!" I shouted. "My friend General Haig has told us that the Forces of Darkness are now in

control of the Nation -- and they

will rule for four more years!" I paused to sip my drink, then I hit it again: "And Al Davis has told us that whosoever was not found

written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!"

I reached around behind me with my

free hand, slapping at a spot

between my shoulder blades to

slow the thing down.

"How many of you will be cast into the lake of fire in the next four

years? How many will survive? I have spoken with General Haig, and

--"

At this point I was seized by both

arms and jerked backwards,

spilling my drink and interrupting

the climax of my sermon. "You

crazy bastard!" a voice screamed.

"Look what you've done! The

manager just called. Get back in the

room and lock the fucking door!

He's going to bust us!"

It was the TV man from Pittsburgh,

trying to drag me back from my

pulpit. I slipped out of his grasp and returned to the balcony. "This is Super Sunday!" I screamed. "I want every one of you worthless bastards down in the lobby in ten minutes so we can praise God and sing the

national anthem!"

At this point I noticed the TV man

sprinting down the hall toward the

elevators, and the sight of him running caused something to snap in my brain. "There he goes!" I shouted. "He's headed for the lobby!

Watch out! It's Al Davis. He has a

knife!"

I could see people moving on all the balconies now, and also down in

the lobby. Then, just before I

ducked back in my room, I saw one

of the glass-walled elevators

starting down, with a single figure inside it. . . he was the most visible

man in the building; a trapped and crazy animal descending slowly --

in full view of everybody from the

busboys in the ground-floor coffee-

shop to Jimmy the Greek on the

balcony above me -- to certain

captivity by that ugly crowd at the bottom.

I watched for a moment, then hung

the DO NOT DISTURB sign on my

doorknob and double-locked the

door. That elevator, I knew, would

be empty when it got to the lobby.

There were at least five floors, on the way down, where he could jump

out and bang on a friendly door for safe refuge. . . and the crowd in the lobby had not seen him clearly

enough, through the tinted-glass

wall of the elevator, to recognize

him later on.

And there was not much time for

vengeance, anyway, on the odd

chance that anyone cared.

It had been a dull week, even by

sportswriters' standards, and now

the day of the Big Game was finally on us. Just one more free breakfast, one more ride, and by nightfall the thing would be over.

The first media-bus was scheduled

to leave the hotel for the stadium at 10:30, four hours before kickoff, so I figured that gave me some time to relax and act human. I filled the

bathtub with hot water, plugged the tape recorder with both speakers

into a socket right next to the tub, and spent the next two hours in a

steam-stupor, listening to Rosalie Sorrels and Doug Sahm, chewing

idly on a small slice of Mr. Natural, and reading the Cocaine Papers of Sigmund Freud.

Around noon I went downstairs to

the Imperial Ballroom to read the

morning papers over the limp dregs

of NFL's free breakfast, then I

stopped at the free bar for a few

bloody marys before wandering

outside to catch the last bus for the stadium -- the CBS special --

complete with more bloody marys, screwdrivers and a roving wagon-meister who seemed to have

everything under control.

On the bus to the stadium I made a

few more bets on Miami. At that

point I was picking up everything I could get, regardless of the points.

It had been a long and jangled night, but the two things that needed to be done before game-time -- my

sermon and my lead -- were already

done, and the rest of the day looked

easy: Just try to keep out of trouble and stay straight enough to collect on all my bets.

The consensus among the 1600 or

so sportswriters in town favored

Miami by almost two to one. . . but there are only a handful of

sportswriters in this country with

enough sense to pour piss out of

their own boots, and by Saturday

night there was an obvious drift

among the few "smart" ones to Minnesota, with a seven-point

cushion. Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post, author of A

Thinking Man's Guide to Pro

Football and the sportswriting fraternity's scaled-down answer to

the Washington Post's political guru David Broder, had organized his

traditional pressroom betting pool -

- where any sportswriter who felt

up to it could put a dollar in the pot and predict the final score (in

writing, on the pressroom bulletin

board, for all the world to see). . .

and whoever came closest would

pick up a thousand or so dollars.

Or at least that was the theory. But in reality there were only about 400

writers willing to risk a public

prediction on the outcome of a game that -- even to an amateur like me --

was so obvious that I took every bet I could get against the Vikings,

regardless of the spread. As late as 10:30 on Sunday morning I was

calling bookies on both coasts,

doubling and tripling my bets with

every point I could get from five to

seven. . . and by 2:35 on Sunday afternoon, five minutes after the

kickoff, I knew I was home free.

Moments later, when the Dolphins

drove the length of the field for

another touchdown, I began

collecting money. The final outcome was painfully clear less than

halfway through the first quarter--

and shortly after that, Sport

Magazine editor Dick Schapp

reached over my shoulder in the

press section and dropped two bills

-- a five and a twenty -- in my lap.

I smiled back at him. "Jesus," I said.

"Are you giving up already? This game is far from over, my man.

Your people are only 21 points

down, and we still have a whole

half to go."

He shook his head sadly.

"You're not counting on a second-half rally?" I asked, pocketing his money.

He stared at me, saying nothing. . .

then he rolled his eyes up toward

the soupy mist above the stadium

where the Goodyear Blimp was

hovering, almost invisible in the

fog.

When I began this doom-struck

story many months ago, the idea

was to follow one team all the way

to the Super Bowl and, in the

process, try to document the alleged

-- or at least Nixonian --

similarities between pro football

and politics. The problem, at that time, was to decide which team to

follow. It had to be one with a good chance of going all the way, and

also a team I could get along with

over an extended period of time.

That was in early November, and

the list of possibilities included

about half the League, but, I

narrowed it down to the four teams

where I already knew some of the

players: Los Angeles, Miami,

Washington and Oakland. . . and

after many days of brooding I chose Oakland.

There were two main factors

involved: 1) I had already made a

large bet, at 8-1 odds, on Oakland

to go all the way -- as opposed to a 4-1 bet on the Redskins and 2-1

against Minnesota. . . and 2) When I checked with Dave Burgin, a

former San Francisco Examiner and

Washington Star-News sports

editor, he said there were only two teams in the whole League flakey

enough for me to identify with in any kind of personal or human way:

One was Pittsburgh and the other

was Oakland.

Well. . . it is three months later

now, and the question that still

haunts me, is, which jail, morgue or asylum would I be in today if I'd

happened to pick one of the other teams.

Even now -- almost 2000 miles and

two months removed from the

Raider headquarters in Oakland -- I

still want to reach for an icepick every time I see a football. . . and my only consolation, looking back

on that nightmare, is that I might

have decided to "cover" the Dallas Cowboys. Just before talking to

Burgin, in fact, I read a savage

novel called North Dallas Forty, by ex-Cowboy flanker Pete Gent,

and it had cranked up my interest in both Dallas and the Cowboys

enough so that I was right on the

brink of dumping Oakland and

heading for Texas. . .

Fortunately, I was shrewd enough to choose Oakland -- a decision that

resulted, less than three weeks after I made it, in a series of personal

and professional disasters ranging

from massive slander and a beating

by stadium-cops outside the Raider

dressing room, to total banishment

from the field, locker room, press

box, and for all practical purposes -

- because of the dark assumptions

that would inevitably be made about any player seen with me in public --

from any bar, restaurant, zoo or

shotgun store in the Bay Area frequented by any Raider players.

The reasons for all this are still not entirely clear -- or maybe they are, and I still can't grasp the real

meaning of what happened. Perhaps

it was merely a case of the chickens coming home to roost, accompanied

by three giant condors.

II

The Raiders kicked you out? For what? Drug rumors? [Laughter]

Well, it's nice to know they're starting to give writers the same kind of underhanded chickenshit they've been laying on players for ten years. . . Yeah, it varies from team to team: Like, for me, getting traded to Pittsburgh after all that time in Oakland was like finally coming up for air. As a matter of general philosophy, though, the National Football League is the last bastion of fascism in America.

-- Tom Keating, Defensive tackle

for the Pittsburgh Steelers To reach the Oakland Raiders'

practice field you drive from San

Francisco across the Bay Bridge

and then south on U.S. 17 to Exit 98

at Hegenberger Road at the south

end of Alameda Bay. . . turn right at the off-ramp that leads to the

Oakland International Airport;

glance back at the Edgewater Inn

and the squat-white concrete-block

building right next to the Edgewater that says "Oakland Raiders" and

then swing north again.

About six miles past the Airport

entrance, the Oakland Hilton and a

speedboat raceway -- the road gets

narrow and seems to be heading

downhill, through a wet desert of

stunted jack-pines (or scrub-oaks,

or whatever they call those useless little trees that grow on the edge of swamplands all over the country,

near places like Pensacola and

Portland). . . but this is Oakland, or at least San Leandro, and when you

drive 20 miles out of San Francisco to a lonesome place like this, you

want a pretty good reason.

. . . Or at least a decent excuse.

The only people who make this run

regularly, in the autumn months

between late August and December,

are Bay Area sportswriters and

people on the payroll of the

Oakland Raiders -- players,

trainers, coaches, owners, etc. --

and the only reason they make this

grim trip day after day is the

nervous fact that the Raiders'

practice field and daily

headquarters is located, for good or ill, out here on this stinking estuary across the bay from San Francisco.

It is a hard place to find unless you know exactly where to look. The

only sure giveaway sign, from the

highway, is a sudden rise of thin

steel scaffolding looming out of the jack-pines about 200 yards west of

the road -- and two men in cheap

plastic ski jackets on a platform at

the top of the tower, aiming big grey movie cameras down at whatever's

happening on the other side of that tree-fence.

Turn left just beyond the film-tower, park in a muddy lot full of new

Cadillacs and flashy sports cars,

and walk up a grassy bank to a one-

story concrete-block building that

looks like a dog-kennel or a Pepsi-

Cola warehouse in St. Louis. . .

push through a big metal fire-door

& along a naked corridor decorated

on both sides with black and grey helmets, sharp-edged footballs, red-white-and-blue NFL stickers. . . and finally around a corner into the

weight-room, a maze of

fantastically-complicated machinery with signs all around warning

"unauthorized persons" to keep their goddamn hands off of everything.

One of the weight-machines costs

$6500 and is designed to do nothing but stretch knots out of trapezius

muscles; another, costing $8800, is a maze of steel cables, weights and

ankle-hooks that will -- if used properly -- cure kinks, rips and

contusions out of every muscle from the hip to the achilles tendon. There are other machines for problems of

the feet, neck and elbows.

I was tempted to get physically

involved with every machine in the

building -- just to know how it felt to get jerked around by all that

fantastic machinery. I was also

tempted to speak with the trainers

and sample whatever medications

they had to offer -- but pro football locker rooms are no longer the

wholesale drug dispensaries that

they were in the past. National

Football League Commissioner

"Pete" Rozelle -- along with

"President" Nixon and the network TV moguls -- have determined that

drugs and pro football won't mix; at least not in public.

On my first visit to the locker room

-- and on all other visits, for that matter -- I avoided both the weight

machines and the trainers. There was no point, I felt, in

compromising the story early on;

although if I'd known what kind of

shitrain I was heading into I would have sprung every machine in the

building and gobbled every pill I

could get my hands on.

But I felt a certain obligation, back then, to act in a "professional"

manner. . . and, besides, for my first look at the Raider practice field I was accompanied by a friendly

little fellow named Al LoCasale, who had told me when I called on

the phone that he was "executive assistant" to the Raiders' general manager and would-be owner, Al

Davis.

LoCasale led me through the locker

room, past the weights and the

trainers, and out through another

small door that opened onto a long

green pasture enclosing two

football fields, four goal posts,

many blocking sleds and tackling

dummies, and about 60 men moving around very actively, gathered in

four separate groups on both fields.

I recognized John Madden, the head

coach, running the offensive unit

through short-pass drills on the field to my right. . . and on the other field, about 50 yards to my left, another

coach was running the defensive

unit through some kind of drill I

couldn't recognize.

Far down at the other end of the

field where the defensive unit was

working, I could see George Blanda, the Raiders' 46-year-old

reserve quarterback and premier

place-kicker, working with his own

set of handlers and banging one kick after another "through the uprights" -

- from the 30 or 35 yard line.

Blanda and his small crew were

paying no attention to what was

happening on the offensive and

defensive fields. Their job was to

keep George sharp on field goals,

and during the two hours I was

there, that afternoon, he kicked at

least 40 or 50, and I never saw him miss one.

There were two other solitary

figures moving around on the

field(s) beyond the small enclosure near the locker-room door where

LoCasale and several assistants

made sure the half-dozen local

sportswriters stayed. One was Ray

Guy, the rookie punter and number

one draft choice from Mississippi,

who spent all afternoon kicking one ball after another in tall spiraling

arcs above the offensive unit to a brace of ballboys just in front of the sportswriters' huddle. . . and the

other was a small wiry man in a tan golf jacket with a greasy duck-tail haircut who paced along the

sidelines of both fields with a

speedy kind of intensity that I never really noticed until he suddenly

appeared very close to me and I

heard him ask a sportswriter from

the San Francisco Chronicle who I

was and what I was doing there. . .

The conversation took place within 10 yards of me, and I heard most of it.

"Who's the big guy over there with the ball in his hand?" asked the man with the DA.

"His name's Thompson," replied Chronical sportswriter Jack Smith.

"He's a writer for ROLLING STONE."

"The Rolling Stones? Jesus Christ!

What's he doing here? Did you bring him?"

"No, he's writing a big article.

ROLLING STONE is a magazine, Al.

It's different from the Rolling

Stones; they're a rock music group. .

. Thompson's a buddy of George

Plimpton's, I think. . . and he's also a friend of Dave Burgin's -- you

remember Burgin?"

"Holy shit! Burgin! We ran him out of here with a cattle prod!"

I saw Smith laugh at that point, then he was talking again: "Don't worry, Al. Thompson's okay. He wrote a

good book about Las Vegas."

Good god! I thought. That's it. . . If they read that book I'm finished. By this time I'd realized that this

strange-looking bugger named "Al,"

who looked like a pimp or a track-

tout, was in fact the infamous Al

Davis-- general manager and de

facto owner (pending settlement of

a nasty lawsuit scheduled for courtaction early this year) of the whole Oakland Raider operation.

Davis glanced over his shoulder at

me, then spoke back to Smith: "Get the bastard out of here. I don't trust him."

I heard that very clearly -- and if I'd had any sense I'd have abandoned

the whole story right then, for

reasons of extreme and unnatural

prejudice; call the office and say I couldn't handle the bad vibes, then jump the next plane to Colorado. . .

I was watching Davis very closely

now, and it occurred to me that the fiendish intensity of his speech and

mannerisms reminded me very strongly of another Oakland badass

I'd spent some time with, several

years earlier -- ex-Hell's Angels

president Ralph "Sonny" Barger, who had just beaten a multiple-murder rap and then copped out,

they said, to some kind of minor

charge like "Aggravated Assault with Intent to Commit Murder," or

"Possession of Automatic

Weapons" (submachine-guns),

"Possession of Heroin (four

pounds) with Intent to Sell, and

Sexual Assault on Two Minors with Intent to Commit Forcible Sodomy".

. .

I had read these things in the

Chronicle. . . but. . . What the hell?

Why compound these libels? Any

society that will put Barger in jail and make Al Davis a respectable

millionaire at the same time is not a society to be trifled with.

In any case, the story of my strange and officially ugly relationship with Al Davis is too complicated for any

long explanations at this point. I spent several days pacing the

sidelines of the Raider practice

field with him -- prior to the

Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Kansas

City games -- and the only thing I

remember him talking about is

"Environmental Determinism." He spoke at considerable length on that subject, as I recall, but there is

nothing in my notes to indicate

precisely what he said about it.

Shortly after I heard him tell Smith

to get rid of me on that first afternoon, I walked over to him and somehow got wound up in a

conversation about how he was

having trouble buying property in

Aspen because "some people out there," thought his money was

"dirty" because of his known connections in Las Vegas. "Hell, that's no problem," I told him. "I once ran for sheriff in Aspen; I

know the place pretty well, and I

can tell you for sure that at least half the money out there is dirtier than

any you're likely to come up with."

He stopped and eyed me curiously.

"You ran for sheriff?" he said. "In Aspen, Colorado?"

I nodded. "Yeah, but I'd rather not talk about it. We didn't lose by

much, but losing in politics is like losing in football, right? One vote, one point --"

He smiled crookedly, then began

pacing again. "I don't give a damn about politics," he said as I hurried

along the white-lime sideline to keep up with him. "The only things that interest me are economics and

foreign affairs."

Jesus christ! I thought. Economics, foreign affairs, environmental

determinism -- this bastard is sandbagging me.

We paced back and forth a while

longer, then he suddenly turned on

me: "What are you after?" he snapped. "Why are you out here?"

"Well. . ." I said. "It would take me a while to explain it. Why don't we have a beer after practice tomorrow and I'll --"

"Not tomorrow," he said quickly. "I only come out here on Wednesdays

and Thursdays. They get nervous

when I'm around, so I try to stay

away most of the time."

I nodded -- but I didn't really

understand what he meant until an

hour or so later, when Coach

Madden signaled the end of that

day's practice and Davis suddenly rushed onto the field and grabbed

the quarterback, Ken Stabler, along with a receiver and a defensive

back I didn't recognize, and made

them run the same pass pattern -- a quick shot from about 15 yards out

with the receiver getting the ball

precisely at the corner of the goal line and the out-of-bounds line-- at least twelve consecutive times until they had it down exactly the way he wanted it.

That is my last real memory of Al Davis: It was getting dark in

Oakland, the rest of the team had

already gone into the showers, the

coach was inside speaking sagely

with a gaggle of local sportswriters, somewhere beyond the field-fence a

big jet was cranking up its

afterburners on the airport runway. .

. and here was the owner of the flakiest team in pro football,

running around on a half-dark

practice field like a king-hell speed freak with his quarterback and two

other key players, insisting that they run the same goddamn play over

and over again until they had it

right.

That was the only time I ever felt

that I really understood Davis. . .

We talked on other days, sort of

loosely and usually about football, whenever I would show up at the

practice field and pace around the

sidelines with him. . . and it was

somewhere around the third week

of my random appearances, as I

recall, that he began to act very nervous whenever he saw me.

I never asked why, but it was clear that something had changed, if only back to normal. . . After one of the midweek practices I was sitting

with one of the Raider players in

the tavern down the road from the

fieldhouse and he said: "Jesus, you know I was walking back to the

huddle and I looked over and, god

damn, I almost flipped when I saw

you and Davis standing together on

the sideline. I thought, man, the world really is changing when you see a thing like that -- Hunter

Thompson and Al Davis -- Christ,

you know that's the first time I ever saw anybody with Davis during practice; the bastard's always alone out there, just pacing back and forth like a goddamn beast. . ."

In the meantime, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen, I was

trying to learn as much as possible about the real underbelly of pro

football by watching a film of the Denver-Dallas game with several

Raider players who provided a

running commentary on the action --

trying to explain, in language as

close as they could cut it for the

layman's slow eye, what was

happening on the screen and how it

might or might not relate to the

Denver-Oakland game coming up

next Sunday.

The purpose of the film-session was to show me some of the things -- in

slow motion and repeated instant replay -- that nobody in the stands or the press box will ever

understand. It was done as a

personal favor, at a time when

neither I nor any of the Oakland

players realized that I was about to be banished. If I'd been writing a

story on Evel Knievel at the time, I would have asked him to do the

same thing -- sit down for an

evening with some films of his

jumps, and explain each one step-

by-step, along with whatever was

going through his head at any given moment.

What follows, then, is a random

commentary by some pro football

players just a few games away from

the Super Bowl, watching a film of

a game between two teams -- one of

which they will have to beat on

Sunday, to make the playoffs, and

another they might have to beat in

the Super Bowl itself. The film we

were watching was the Denver-

Dallas game on December 2nd.

Dallas won, 22-10 -- which hardly matters, because pro football

players don't watch game-films to

see who won or lost. They watch

for patterns, tendencies and

individual strengths or weaknesses.

. . and in this case they were trying to translate their reactions into

language I could get a personal grip on, which accounts for some of the

awkward moments.

Under normal circumstances I'd

identify all of the voices in this

heavily-edited tape transcript -- but for reasons that will soon become

obvious if they aren't already, I

decided that it would probably be

more comfortable for all of us if I lumped all the player voices under

one name: "Raider." This takes a bit of an edge off the talk, but it also makes it harder for the NFL security watchdogs to hassle some good

people and red-line their names for hanging around with a Dope Fiend.

III

Do NOT MISTAKE ME FOR ANY

OTHER READER

I have come here to help to save the suffering. You know God works in

a mysterious way. If you have faith in God, don't fail to see:

MOTHER ROBERTS

PSYCHIC READER AND ADVISOR

THE ONE & ONLY GIFTED HEALER

was born with the God-given

powers to help humanity and has devoted her life to this work. Tells your friends' and enemies' names

without asking a single word. She

will tell you what you wish to know regarding health, marriage, love,

divorce, courtship, speculations and business transactions of all kinds.

She will tell you of any changes you should or shouldn't make, good or

bad. She removes evil influences

and bad luck of all kinds. She never fails to reunite the separated, cause

speedy and happy marriages. She lifts you out of sorrow and darkness and starts you on the way to

success, and happiness. She will

give sound and important advice on

all affairs of life, whatever they

may be. You will find her superior

to any other reader you have

consulted in the past. A place to

bring your friends and feel no

embarrassment.

1/2 PRICE WITH THIS SLIP

OPEN DAILY & SUNDAYS -- 8

AM TO 10 PM

1609 W. ALABAMA PHONE JA

3-2297

NO APPOINTMENT

NECESSARY -- LOOK

FOR ADDRESS

Ah yes, Mother Roberts. . . I found her card on the bus and jammed it

into one of my pockets, thinking that maybe I would give her a call on

Monday and make an appointment. I

had a lot of heavy questions to lay on her like "Why am I here, Mother Roberts? What does it all mean?

Have I finally turned pro? Can this really be the end? Down and out in

Houston with --

"No, I was just kidding. Mother Roberts, just putting you on -- just working a bit of the test on you,

right? Yes, because what I was

really leading up to is this

extremely central question. . . No, I'm not shy; it's just that I come from

way up north where people's lips are frozen about ten months every

year, so we don't get used to talking until very late in life. . . what? Old?

Well, I think you just put your finger or your wand or whatever, right

smack on the head of the nail,

Mother Roberts, because the

godawful truth of the whole matter

is that I've been feeling extremely old this past week, and. . . What?

Wait a minute now, goddamnit, I'm

still getting up to the main question, which is. . . What? No, I never

curse, Mother Roberts; that was a cry of anguish, a silent scream from the soul, because I feel in serious trouble down here in this goddamn

town, and. . . Yes, I am a white person, Mother Roberts, and we

both know there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Are you

prejudiced?. . . No, let's not get into that. Just let me ask you this

question, and if you can give me a

straight and reasonable answer I

promise I won't come out to your

place. . . because what I want you to

tell me, Mother Roberts -- and I mean this very seriously -- is why

have I been in Houston for eight

days without anybody offering me

some cocaine?. . . Yes, cocaine,

that's what I said, and just between you and me I'm damn serious about

wanting some. . . What? Drugs? Of course I'm talking about drugs!

Your ad said you could answer my

questions and lift me out of sorrow and darkness. . . Okay, okay, I'm

listening. . . Yeah, yeah. . . But let me tell you something, Mother

Roberts: My name is Al Davis and I'm the Editor of Reader's Digest. . .

Right, and I can have you busted

right now for false advertising. . .

Yeah, well I think I might pick up

some of my people and come out to

see you later on today; we want

some explanations for this kind of

anti-christ bullshit. This country's in enough trouble, goddamnit, without

people like you running around

selling drugs like cocaine to people in serious trouble. . ."

Mother Roberts hung up on me at that point. Christ only knows what

she thought was about to come

down on her when dusk fell on

Houston. . . Here was the Editor of the Reader's Digest coming out to

her house with a goon squad, and

all of them apparently stone mad for cocaine and vengeance. . . a terrible situation.

It was not until Monday afternoon

that I actually spoke with Mother

Roberts on the telephone, but the

idea of going over to Galveston and dealing with the whole Super Scene

story from some rotten motel on the edge of the seawall had been

wandering around in my head

almost from the first hour after I

checked into my coveted press-

room at the Hyatt Regency.

And in dull retrospect now, I wish I had done that. Almost anything

would have been better than that

useless week I spent in Houston

waiting for the Big Game. The only

place in town where I felt at home was a sort of sporadically violent

strip joint called the Blue Fox, far out in the country on South Main.

Nobody I talked to in Houston had

ever heard of it, and the only two

sportswriters who went out there

with me got involved in a wild riot that ended up with all of us getting maced by undercover vice-squad

cops who just happened to be in the middle of the action when it

erupted.

Ah. . . but that is another story, and we don't have time for it here.

Maybe next time. There are two

untold sagas that will not fit into this story: One has to do with Big

Al's Cactus Room in Oakland, and

the other concerns the Blue Fox in

Houston.

There is also -- at least in the minds of at least two dozen gullible

sportswriters at the Super Bowl --

the ugly story of how I spent three or four days prior to Super Week

shooting smack in a $7 a night motel room on the seawall in Galveston.

I remember telling that story one

night in the press lounge at the Hyatt Regency, just babbling it off the top of my head out of sheer boredom. . .

Then I forgot about it completely

until one of the local sportswriters approached me a day or so later and said: "Say man, I hear you spent some time in Galveston last week."

"Galveston?"

"Yeah," he said. "I hear you locked yourself in a motel over there and

shot heroin for three days."

I looked around me to see who was

listening, then grinned kind of

stupidly and said "Shucks, there wasn't much else to do, you know --

why not get loaded in Galveston?"

He shrugged uncontrollably and

looked down at his Old Crow and

water. I glanced at my watch and

turned to leave.

'Time to hit it," I said with a smile.

"See you later, when I'm feeling back on my rails."

He nodded glumly as I moved away

in the crowd. . . and although I saw him three or four times a day for the rest of that week, he never spoke to me again.

Most sportswriters are so blank on

the subject of drugs that you can

only talk to them about it at your

own risk -- which is easy enough,

for me, because I get a boot out of

seeing their eyes bulge; but it can be disastrous to a professional football player who makes the casual

mistake of assuming that a

sportswriter knows what he's

talking about when he uses a word

like "crank." Any professional athlete who talks to a sportswriter about "drugs" -- even with the best and most constructive intentions --

is taking a very heavy risk. There is a definite element of hysteria about drugs of any kind in pro football

today, and a casual remark -- even a

meaningless remark -- across the table in a friendly hometown bar

can lead, very quickly, to a seat in the witness chair in front of a

congressional committee.

Ah. . . drugs; that word again. It was a hard word to avoid in NFL circles last year -- like the "missile gap" in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election,

or "law and order" in 1968.

1973 was a pretty dull press-year

for congressmen. The Senate's

Watergate Committee had managed,

somehow, to pre-empt most of the ink and air-time. . . and one of the few congressmen who managed to

lash his own special gig past that

barrier was an apparently senile

67-year-old ex-sheriff and football coach from West Virginia named

Harley Staggers.

Somewhere in the spastic interim

between John Dean and "Bob"

Haldeman, Congressman Staggers

managed to collar some story-

starved sportswriter from the New

York Times long enough to announce that his committee -- the

House Subcommittee on

Investigations -- had stumbled on

such a king-hell wasps' nest of

evidence in the course of their

probe into "the use of drugs by athletes" that the committee was prepared -- or almost prepared, pending further evidence -- to come to grips with their natural human

duty and offer up a law, very soon, that would require individual

urinalysis tests on all professional

athletes and especially pro football players.

These tests would be administered

by professional urinalysists -- paid by the federal government, out of

tax-monies -- and if any one of these evil bastards passed urine that

turned red (or green, or blue, or

whatever), they would be. . . ah. . .

well. . . the Staggers Committee is still mulling on the question of

penalties.

Maybe studying is a better word.

Or pondering. . . That's right, they're still pondering it. . . and God's mercy on any muscle-bound

degenerate whose piss turns red if

Harley ever passes his law. The

rumor on Capitol Hill is that Rep.

Staggers is even now in the process of arranging for the construction of a model, medium security

JOCK/DRUG PENITENTIARY

AND REHABILITATION

CENTER on the site of an

abandoned missile base near

Tonopah, Nevada.

Meanwhile, the Vice President of the United States has been lashed

out of office and disbarred in his

home state of Maryland, the

President himself is teetering on the brink of a Burglary/Conspiracy

indictment that will mean certain

impeachment, and the whole

structure of our government has

become a stagnant mockery of itself and everybody who ever had faith

in it.

What all this means to Harley

Staggers is hard to say. I am tempted to call him: It is 7:02 in

Washington and I suspect he's wide

awake, administering the daily

beating to his pit-bulls in the

backyard garage and waiting for

calls from reporters:

"What's up Harley? Who's gonna get it?"

"Well. . . let me say this: We know, for a fact, that the situation is out of control and I mean to put a stop to it or fall down trying. . ."

"A stop to what, Harley?"

"Nevermind that. You know what I mean." (pause) "Let me ask you something: Does a phrase like 'The

playing fields of West Virginia'

mean anything to you?" (pause)

"Wait a minute -- where were you raised? What's wrong with --"

(click). . .

Ah, Jesus. . . another bad tangent.

Somewhere in the back of my mind

I recall signing a contract that said I would never do this kind of thing

again; one of the conditions of my turning pro was a clause about

swearing off gibberish. . .

But, like Gregg Allman says: "I've wasted so much time. . . feelin

guilty. . ."

There is some kind of back-door

connection in my head between

Super Bowls and the Allman

Brothers -- a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn

stories no matter where I'm finally forced into a corner to write them.

The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the

balcony of my dim-lit hotel room

just down from the Sunset Strip in

Hollywood. . . and more rain

through the windows of the San

Francisco office building where I

finally typed out "the story."

And now, almost exactly a year

later, my main memory of Super

Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and

grey mist outside another hotel

window, with the same strung-out

sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable

speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.

There was not much else worth

remembering from either game-- or

at least not much that needs writing about, and the clock on the wall

reminds me, once again, that a final deadline looms and there is hungry

space to fill out there in San

Francisco. . . Which means no more

thinking about rain and music, but a

quick and nasty regression to

"professionalism."

Which is what it's all about.

Indeed, I tend, more and more, to

forget these things. Or maybe just to ignore them.

But what the hell? Retirement is just around the corner, so why not

wander a bit?

"You grow up fast in Texas

and you got to lay it down Or you'll be working for somebody way cross town."

-- Doug Sahm

The floor of the Hyatt Regency

men's room was always covered,

about three-inches deep, with

discarded newspapers -- all

apparently complete and unread,

except on closer examination you

realized that every one of them was

missing its sports section. This bathroom was right next to the hotel newsstand and just across the

mezzanine from the crowded NFL

"press lounge," a big room full of telephones and free booze, where

most of the 1600 or so sportswriters assigned to cover The Big Game

seemed to spend about 16 hours of

each day, during Super Week.

After the first day or so, when it

became balefully clear that there

was no point in anybody except the

local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged "player interviews," that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez

described as "like going to the dentist every day to have the same

tooth filled," the out-of-town writers began using the local types as a sort of involuntary "pool". . .

which was more like an old British

Navy press gang, in fact, because

the locals had no choice. They

would go out, each morning, to the

Miami and Minnesota team hotels,

and dutifully conduct the daily interviews. . . and about two hours later this mass of useless gibberish would appear, word for word, in

the early editions of either the Post or the Chronicle.

You could see the front door of the hotel from the balcony of the press lounge, and whenever the newsboy

came in with his stack of fresh

papers, the national writers would

make the long 48-yard walk across

to the newsstand and cough up 15

cents each for their copies. Then, on the way back to the press lounge,

they would stop for a piss and dump the whole paper -- except for the

crucial sports section -- on the floor of the men's room. The place was

so deep, all week, in fresh

newsprint, that it was sometimes

hard to push the door open.

Forty yards away, on comfortable

couches surrounding the free bar,

the national gents would spend

about two hours each day scanning

the local sports sections -- along with a never-ending mass of almost

psychotically detailed information

churned out by the NFL publicity

office -- on the dim chance of

finding something worth writing

about that day.

There never was, of course. But

nobody seemed really disturbed

about it. The only thing most of the sportswriters in Houston seemed to

care about was having something to write about. . . anything at all, boss:

a peg, an angle, a quote, even a goddamn rumor.

I remember being shocked at the

sloth and moral degeneracy of the

Nixon press corps during the 1972

presidential campaign -- but they

were like a pack of wolverines on

speed compared to the relatively

elite sportswriters who showed up

in Houston to cover the Super

Bowl.

On the other hand, there really was no story. As the week wore on, it

became increasingly obvious that we were all "just working here."

Nobody knew who to blame for it,

and although at least a third of the sportswriters who showed up for

that super-expensive shuck knew

exactly what was happening, I doubt if more than five or six of them ever actually wrote the cynical and

contemptuous appraisals of Super

Bowl VIII that dominated about half the conversations around the bar in the press lounge.

Whatever was happening in Houston that week had little or

nothing to do with the hundreds of

stories that were sent out on the

news-wires each day. Most of the

stories, in fact, were unabashed

rewrites of the dozens of official

NFL press releases churned out

each day by the League publicity

office. Most of the stories about

"fantastic parties" given by Chrysler, American Express and

Jimmy the Greek were taken from

press releases and rewritten by

people who had spent the previous evening at least five miles from the scenes described in their stories.

The NFL's official Super Bowl

party -- the "incredible Texas Hoe-Down" on Friday night in the

Astrodome -- was as wild,

glamorous and exciting as an Elks

Club picnic on Tuesday in Salina,

Kansas. The official NFL press

release on the Hoe-Down said it

was an unprecedented extravaganza

that cost the League more than

$100,000 and attracted people like Gene McCarthy and Ethel Kennedy.

. . Which might have been true, but I spent about five hours skulking

around in that grim concrete barn

and the only people I recognized

were a dozen or so sportswriters

from the press lounge.

Anybody with access to a

mimeograph machine and a little

imagination could have generated at least a thousand articles on "an orgy of indescribable proportions" at

John Connally's house, with Allen Ginsberg as the guest of honor and

13 thoroughbred horses slaughtered

by drug-crazed guests with

magnesium butcher knives. Most of

the press people would have simply

picked the story off the big table in the "workroom," rewritten it just enough to make it sound genuine,

and sent it off on the Wire without a second thought.

The bus-ride to the stadium for the game on Sunday took more than an

hour, due to heavy traffic. I had made the same six-mile drive the

night before in just under five

minutes. . . but that was under very different circumstances; Rice

Stadium is on South Main Street,

along the same route that led from

the Hyatt Regency to the Dolphin

headquarters at the Marriott, and

also to the Blue Fox.

There was not much to do on the

bus except drink, smoke and

maintain a keen ear on the babble of

conversations behind me for any talk that might signal the presence of some late-blooming Viking fan with

money to waste. It is hard to stay

calm and casual in a crowd of

potential bettors when you feel

absolutely certain of winning any

bet you can make. At that point,

anybody with even a hint of partisan enthusiasm in his voice becomes a

possible mark -- a doomed and

ignorant creature to be lured, as

carefully as possible, into some

disastrous last-minute wager that

could cost him every dollar he owns.

There is no room for mercy or the

milk of human kindness in football

betting-- at least not when you're

prepared to get up on the edge with every dollar you own. One-on-one betting is a lot more interesting than dealing with bookies, because it

involves strong elements of

personality and psychic leverage.

Betting against the point spread is a relatively mechanical trip, but

betting against another individual can be very complex, if you're

serious about it -- because you want to know, for starters, whether you're betting against a fool or a wizard, or maybe against somebody who's

just playing the fool.

Making a large bet on a bus full of sportswriters on the way to the

Super Bowl, for instance, can be a

very dangerous thing; because you

might be dealing with somebody

who was in the same fraternity at

Penn State with one of the team doctors, and who learned the night

before -- while drinking heavily

with his old buddy -- that the

quarterback you're basing your bet

on has four cracked ribs and can

barely raise his passing arm to

shoulder level.

Situations like these are not

common. Unreported injuries can

lead to heavy fines against any team that fails to report one -- especially in a Super Bowl -- but what is a

$10,000 fine, compared to the amount of money that kind of crucial knowledge is worth against a big-time bookie?

The other side of that coin is a

situation where a shrewd coach

turns the League's "report all injuries" rule into a psychological advantage for his own team -- and

coincidentally for any bettor who

knows what's happening -- by

scrupulously reporting an injury to a star player just before a big game,

then calling a press conference to explain that the just-reported injury is of such a nature -- a pulled

muscle, for instance -- that it might or might not heal entirely by game

time.

This was what happened in Houston

with the Dolphins' Paul Warfield,

widely regarded as "the most

dangerous pass receiver in pro

football." Warfield is a game-

breaker, a man who commands

double-coverage at all times

because of his antelope running style, twin magnets for hands, and a weird kind of adrenaline instinct

that feeds on tension and high

pressure. There is no more beautiful sight in football than watching Paul Warfield float out of the backfield on a sort of angle-streak pattern

right into the heart of a "perfect"

zone defense and take a softly

thrown pass on his hip, without

even seeming to notice the arrival

of the ball, and then float another 60

yards into the end zone, with none

of the frustrated defensive backs ever touching him.

There is an eerie kind of certainty about Warfield's style that is far

more demoralizing than just another six points on the Scoreboard. About half the time he looks bored and

lazy -- but even the best pass

defenders in the league know, in some nervous corner of their hearts, that when the deal goes down

Warfield is capable of streaking

right past them like they didn't exist.

. .

Unless he's hurt; playing with some kind of injury that might or might not be serious enough to either slow

him down or gimp the fiendish

concentration that makes him so

dangerous. . . and this was the

possibility that Dolphin coach Don

Shula raised on Wednesday when

he announced that Warfield had

pulled a leg muscle in practice that afternoon and might not play on Sunday.

This news caused instant action in gambling circles. Even big-time

bookies, whose underground

information on these things is

usually as good as Pete Rozelle's,

took Shula's announcement

seriously enough to cut the spread

down from seven to six-- a decision worth many millions of betting

dollars if the game turned out to be close.

Even the rumor of an injury to Warfield was worth one point (and

even two, with some bookies I was never able to locate). . . and if

Shula had announced on Saturday

that Paul was definitely not going to play, the spread would probably

have dropped to four, or even three.

. . Because the guaranteed absence

of Warfield would have taken a

great psychological load off the

minds of Minnesota's defensive

backs.

Without the ever-present likelihood of a game-breaking "bomb" at any

moment, they could focus down much tighter on stopping Miami's

brutal running game -- which

eventually destroyed them, just as it had destroyed Oakland's nut-cutting defense two weeks earlier, and one

of the main reasons why the Vikings failed to stop the Dolphins on the

ground was the constant presence of Paul Warfield in his customary

wide-receiver's spot.

He played almost the whole game,

never showing any sign of injury;

and although he caught only one pass, he neutralized two Minnesota

defensive backs on every play. . .

and two extra tacklers on the line of scrimmage might have made a hell

of a difference in that

embarrassingly decisive first

quarter when Miami twice drove

what might as well have been the

whole length of the field to score 14

quick points and crack the Vikings'

confidence just as harshly as they

had cracked the Redskins out in Los Angeles a year earlier.

It is hard to say, even now, exactly why I was so certain of an easy

Dolphin victory. The only reason I

didn't get extremely rich on the

game was my inability to overcome

the logistical problems of betting

heavily, on credit, by means of

frantic long-distance phone calls

from a hotel room in Houston. None

of the people I met in that violent, water-logged town were inclined to

introduce me to a reliable

bookmaker -- and the people I

called on both coasts, several hours

before the game on Sunday morning, seemed unnaturally nervous when I

asked them to use their own credit

to guarantee my bets with their local bookies.

Looking back on it now, after

talking with some of these people

and cursing them savagely, I see that the problem had something to do

with my frenzied speech-pattern that morning. I was still in the grip of whatever fiery syndrome had

caused me to deliver that sermon off

the balcony a few hours earlier --

and the hint of mad tremor in my

voice, despite my attempts to

disguise it, was apparently

communicated very clearly to all

those I spoke with on the long-

distance telephone.

How long, O lord, how long? This

is the second year in a row that I

have gone to the Super Bowl and

been absolutely certain -- at least 48 hours before gametime -- of the

outcome. It is also the second year

in a row that I have failed to capitalize, financially, on this

certainty. Last year, betting mainly with wealthy cocaine addicts, I

switched all my bets from

Washington to Miami on Friday

night -- and in the resulting

confusion my net winnings were

almost entirely canceled by

widespread rancor and personal

bitterness.

This year, in order to side-step that problem, I waited until the last

moment to make my bets -- despite the fact that I knew the Vikings were doomed after watching them

perform for the press at their star-crossed practice field on Monday

afternoon before the game. It was

clear, even then, that they were

spooked and very uncertain about

what they were getting into -- but it was not until I drove about 20 miles around the beltway to the other side of town for a look at the Dolphins

that I knew, for sure, how to bet.

There are a lot of factors intrinsic to the nature of the Super Bowl that

make it far more predictable than

regular season games, or even

playoffs -- but they are not the kind of factors that can be sensed or

understood at a distance of 2000 or even 20 miles, on the basis of any

wisdom or information that filters

out from the site through the rose-

colored booze-bent media-filter that passes for "world-wide coverage"

at these spectacles.

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the

factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every

other way. . . Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people

who own and control the game,

because it is this finely managed

distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its

"national pastime" pedestal in less

than 15 years.

There were other reasons for

baseball's precipitous loss of

popularity among everybody except

old men and middle-aged

sportswriters between 1959 and

now -- just as there will be a

variety of reasons to explain the

certain decline of pro football

between now and 1984 -- but if

sporting historians ever look back

on all this and try to explain it, there will be no avoiding the argument

that pro football's meteoric success in the 1960's was directly

attributable to its early marriage

with network TV and a huge, coast-

to-coast audience of armchair fans

who "grew up" -- in terms of their personal relationships to The Game

-- with the idea that pro football

was something that happened every

Sunday on the tube. The notion of

driving eight miles along a crowded freeway and then paying $3 to park

the car in order to pay another $10

to watch the game from the vantage

point of a damp redwood bench 55

rows above the 19-yard line in a

crowd of noisy drunks was entirely

repugnant to them.

And they were absolutely right.

After ten years of trying it both

ways-- and especially after

watching this last wretched Super

Bowl game from a choice seat in

the "press section" very high above the 50-yard line -- I hope to christ I never again succumb to whatever

kind of weakness or madness it is

that causes a person to endure the incoherent hell that comes with

going out to a cold and rainy

stadium for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and trying to get involved with whatever seems to be

happening down there on that far-

below field.

At the Super Bowl I had the benefit of my usual game-day aids:

powerful binoculars, a tiny portable radio for the blizzard of audio-details that nobody ever thinks to

mention on TV, and a seat on the good left arm of my friend, Mr.

Natural. . . But even with all these aids and a seat on the 50-yard line, I would rather have stayed in my

hotel room and watched the

goddamn thing on TV; or maybe in

some howling-drunk bar full of

heavy bettors -- the kind of people who like to bet on every play: pass or run, three to one against a first down, twenty to one on a turnover. .

.

This is a very fast and active style of betting, because you have to

make a decision about every 25

seconds. The only thing more

intense is betting yes or no on the next shot in something like a pro

basketball game between the

Celtics and the Knicks, where you

might get five or six shots every 24

seconds. . . or maybe only one, but in any case the betting is almost as exhausting as being out there on the floor.

I stayed in Houston for two days after the game, but even with things calmed down I had no luck in

finding the people who'd caused me

all my trouble. Both Tom Keating

and Al LoCasale were rumored to

be in the vicinity, but -- according to some of the New York

sportswriters who'd seen them --

neither one was eager to either see or be seen with me.

When I finally fled Houston it was a cold Tuesday afternoon with big

lakes of standing water on the road to the airport. I almost missed my

plane to Denver because of a hassle with Jimmy the Greek about who

was going to drive us to the airport and another hassle with the hotel

garage-man about who was going to

pay for eight days of tending my

bogus "Official Super Bowl Car" in the hotel garage. . . and I probably wouldn't have made it at all if I

hadn't run into a NFL publicity man

who gave me enough speed to jerk me awake and lash the little white

Mercury Cougar out along the

Dallas freeway to the airport in

time to abandon it in the

"Departures/Taxis Only" area and hire a man for five dollars to rush my bags and sound equipment up to

the Continental Airlines desk just in time to make the flight.

Twenty-four hours later I was back

in Woody Creek and finally, by

sheer accident, making contact with

that twisted bastard Keating -- who bent my balance a bit by calmly

admitting his role in my Problem

and explaining it with one of the

highest left-handed compliments

anybody ever aimed at me. . .

"I got nothing personal against Thompson," he told another NFL

player who happened to be skiing in Aspen at the time: "But let's face it, we've got nothing to gain by talking to him. I've read all his stuff and I know how he is; he's a goddamn

lunatic -- and you've got to be careful with a bastard like that,

because no matter how hard he

tries, he just can't help but tell the truth."

When I heard that I just sort of

slumped down on my bar-stool and

stared at myself in the mirror. . .

wishing, on one level, that Keating's harsh judgment was right. . . but

knowing, on another, that the

treacherous realities of the worlds I especially work in forced me to

abandon that purist stance a long time ago. If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about

600 people -- including me --

would be rotting in prison cells

from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous

commodity in the context of

professional journalism.

What was easily the most

provocative quote of that whole

dreary week came on the Monday

after the game from Miami

linebacker Doug Swift. He was talking in his usual loose "What?

Me worry?" kind of way with two or three sports-writers in the

crowded lobby of the Marriott.

Buses were leaving for the airport, Dolphin supporters and their wives

were checking out, the lobby was

full of stranded luggage, and off in one of the corners, Don Shula was

talking with another clutch of

sportswriters and ridiculing the

notion that he would ever get rid of Jim Kiick, despite Kiick's obvious

unhappiness at the prospect of riding the bench again next year

behind all-pro running back

Mercury Morris.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the lobby, Doug Swift was going along

with a conversation that had turned, along with Shula's, to money and

next year's contracts. Swift listened for a while, then looked up at

whoever was talking to him and

said:

"You can expect to see a lot of new

faces on next year's [Miami] team.

A lot of important contracts are

coming up for renewal, and you can

bet that the guys will be asking for more than management is willing to

pay."

Nobody paid much attention to the

decidedly unnatural timing of

Swift's matter-of-fact prediction

about "a lot of new faces next year,"

but it was not the kind of talk

designed to tickle either Shula's or Joe Robbie's rampant humours that

morning. Jesus, here was the team's Player Representative -- a star

linebacker and one of the sharpest

& most politically conscious people in the League -- telling anyone who cared to listen, not even 12 hours

after the victory party, that the

embryo "Dolphin Dynasty" was already in a very different kind of trouble than anything the Vikings or the Redskins had been able to lay

on them in two straight Super

Bowls.

Swift's comment was all the more ominous because of his nature as the team's spokesman in the NFL

Players' Association -- a long-

dormant poker club, of sorts, that in recent years has developed genuine

muscle. Even in the face of what

most of the player reps call a

"legalized and unregulated

monopoly" with the power of what amounts to "life or death" over their individual fates and financial

futures in the tight little world of the National Football League, the

Players' Association since 1970 has managed to challenge the owners on

a few carefully chosen issues. . .

The two most obvious, or at least

most frequently mentioned by

players, are the Pension Fund

(which the owners now contribute

to about twice as heavily as they

did before the threatened strike in 1970) and the players' unilateral

rejection, last year, of the

"urinalysis proposal" which the owners and Rozelle were

apparently ready and willing to

arrange for them, rather than risk any more public fights with

Congress about things like TV

blackouts and antitrust exemptions.

According to Pittsburgh tackle Tom

Keating, an articulate maverick who seems to enjoy a universal affection and respect from almost everybody

in the League except the owners and owner-bent coaches, the Players'

Association croaked the idea of

mass-urinalysis with one quick

snarl. "We just told them to fuck it,"

he says. "The whole concept of mass urine tests is degrading! Jesus, can you imagine what would happen

if one of those stadium cops showed up in the press box at half-time with a hundred test tubes and told all the writers to piss in the damn things or turn in their credentials for the rest of the season? I'd like to film that goddamn scene."

I agreed with Keating that mass-

urinalysis in the press box at halftime would undoubtedly cause

violence and a blizzard of vicious assaults on the NFL in the next

mornings' papers. . . but, after

thinking about it for a while, the

idea struck me as having definite

possibilities if applied on a broad enough basis:

Mandatory urine-tests for all

congressmen and senators at the end of each session, for instance. Who

could predict what kind of

screaming hell might erupt if Rep.

Harley Staggers was suddenly

grabbed by two Pinkerton men in a hallway of the US Capitol and

dragged-- in full view of tourists, newsmen and several dozen of his

shocked and frightened colleagues -

- into a nearby corner and forced to piss in a test tube?

Would Staggers scream for help?

Would he struggle in the grip of his captors? Or would he meekly

submit, in the interest of National Security?

We will probably never know,

because the present Congress does not seem to be in the mood to start passing "Forced Urinalysis" laws --

although the Agnew-style Supreme

Court that Nixon has saddled us

with would probably look with

favor on such a law.

In any case, the threat of mandatory urinalysis for professional athletes will probably be hooted out of

Congress as some kind of stupid

hillbilly joke if Staggers ever gets serious about it. He is not viewed,

in Washington, as a heavy Shaker and Mover.

When Doug Swift made that

comment about "a lot of new faces on next year's team," he was not thinking in terms of a player-revolt against forced urinalysis. What he

had in mind, I think, was the fact

that among the Dolphin contracts

coming up for renewal this year are those of Larry Csonka, Jake Scott,

Paul Warfield, Dick Anderson and

Mercury Morris -- all established

stars earning between $30,000 and $55,000 a year right now, and all

apparently in the mood to double

their salaries next time around.

Which might seem a bit pushy, to

some people -- until you start

comparing average salary figures in the National Football League

against salaries in other pro sports.

The average NFL salary (according

to figures provided by Players'

Association general counsel, Ed

Garvey) is $28,500, almost five

grand less than the $33,000 average for major league baseball players,

and about half the average salary (between $50,000 and $55,000) in

the National Hockey League. . . But when you start talking about

salaries in the National Basketball Association, it's time to kick out the jams: The average NBA salary is $92,500 a year. (The NBA Players'

Association claims that the average salary is $100,000.) Against this

steep-green background, it's a little easier to see why Larry Csonka

wants a raise from his current salary of $55,000 -- to $100,000 or so, a figure that he'd probably scale down pretty calmly if Joe Robbie

offered him the average NBA salary

of $92,500.

(A quick little sidelight on all these figures has to do with the price TV

advertisers paid to push their

products during time-outs and

penalty-squabbles at the Super

Bowl: The figure announced by the

NFL and whatever TV network

carried the goddamn thing was $200,000 per minute. I missed the

telecast, due to factors beyond my

control -- which is why I don't

know which network sucked up all

that gravy, or whether it was

Schlitz, Budweiser, Gillette or even King Kong Amyl Nitrites that

coughed up $200,000 for every 60

seconds of TV exposure on that

grim afternoon.)

But that was just a sidelight. . . and the longer I look at all these figures,

my watch, and this goddamn stinking mojo wire that's been

beeping steadily out here in the

snow for two days, the more I tend

to see this whole thing about a

pending Labor Management crunch

in the NFL as a story with a spine of its own that we should probably

leave for later.

The only other thing -- or maybe

two things -- that I want to hit,

lashing the final pages of this

bastard into the mojo, has to do

with the sudden and apparently serious formation of the "World Football League" by the same

people whose record, so far, has

been pretty good when it comes to

taking on big-time monopolies. Los

Angeles lawyer Gary Davidson is

the same man who put both the

American Basketball Association

and the World Hockey League

together-- two extremely

presumptuous trips that appear to

have worked out very nicely, and

which also provided the

competition factor that caused the huge salary jumps in both basketball and hockey.

Perhaps the best example of how

the competition-factor affects player salaries comes from the ledger-books of the NFL. In 1959, the

average salary in pro football was

$9500 a year. But in 1960, when the newly formed AFL began its big-money bidding war against pro

football's Old Guard, the average

NFL salary suddenly jumped to

$27,500-- and in the 13 years since then it has crept up another $1000 to the current figure of $28,500.

The explanation for all this --

according to Garvey and all the

players I've talked to about it -- is rooted entirely in the owner-arranged merger between the NFL

and the AFL in 1966. "Ever since then," says Garvey, "it's been a buyer's market, and that's why the

NFL's average salary figure has

remained so stagnant, compared to

the other sports."

Garvey said he'd just as soon not

make any public comment on the

possibility of a players' strike next summer -- but there is a lot of

private talk about it among

individual players, and especially

among the player reps and some of

the politically oriented hard rockers like Swift, Keating, and Kansas

City's Ed Podolak.

The only person talking publicly about a players' strike is Gary

Davidson, president of the new World Football League -- who

called a press conference in New

York on January 22nd to announce

that the WFL was not going after the top college players and the 35 or so NFL veterans who played out their

options last year -- but, in a sudden reversal of policy that must have

sent cold shots of fear through every one of the 26 plush boardrooms in

the NFL, Davidson announced that

the WFL will also draft "all pro football players, even those under

contract," and then begin draining talent out of the NFL by a simple

device called "future contracts."

If the Boston Bulls of the WFL, for instance, decided to draft Dolphin

quarterback Bob Griese this year

and sign him to a future contract for 1975, Griese would play the entire

"74 season for Miami, and then --

after getting a certified deposit slip for something like $2 million in

gold bullion from his bank in Zurich

-- he would have a round of

farewell beers with Robbie and Shula before catching the plane for Boston, where he would open the

1976 season as quarterback for the

Bulls.

This is only one of several hundred weird scenarios that could start

unfolding in the next few months if the WFL franchise-owners have

enough real money to take

advantage of the NFL players' strike that Gary Davidson says he's

waiting for this summer.

Why not? Total madness on the money front: Huge bonuses, brutal

money raids on NFL teams like the

Dolphins and the Raiders; wild-

eyed WFL agents flying around the

country in private Lear jets with

huge sacks of cash and mind-

bending contracts for any player

willing to switch. . .

The only sure loser, in the end, will be the poor bastard who buys a

season ticket for the Dolphins '76

season and then picks up the Miami

Herald the next day to find a red banner headline saying: GRIESE,

KJICK, CSONKA, SCOTT,

ANDERSON JUMP TO WFL.

Which is sad, but what the hell?

None of this tortured bullshit about the future of pro football means

anything, anyway. If the Red

Chinese invaded tomorrow and

banned the game entirely, nobody

would really miss it after two or

three months. Even now, most of the games are so fucking dull that it's

hard to understand how anybody can even watch them on TV unless

they have some money hanging on

the point spread, instead of the final score.

Pro football in America is over the hump. Ten years ago it was a very

hip and private kind of vice to be

into. I remember going to my first

49er game in 1965 with 15 beers in

a plastic cooler and a Dr. Grabow

pipe full of bad hash. The 49ers

were still playing in Kezar stadium

then, an old grey hulk at the western end of Haight Street in Golden Gate Park. There were never any

sellouts, but the 30,000 or so

regulars were extremely heavy

drinkers, and at least 10,000 of

them were out there for no other

reason except to get involved in

serious violence. . . By halftime the place was a drunken madhouse, and

anybody who couldn't get it on

anywhere else could always go

underneath the stands and try to get into the long trough of a "Men's

Room" through the "Out" door; there were always a few mean drunks

lurking around to punch anybody

who tried that. . . and by the end of the third quarter of any game,

regardless of the score, there were always two or three huge brawls

that would require the cops to clear out whole sections of the

grandstand.

But all that changed when the 49ers moved out to Candlestick Park. The

prices doubled and a whole new

crowd took the seats. It was the same kind of crowd I saw, last

season, in the four games I went to at the Oakland Coliseum: a sort of

half-rich mob of nervous doctors,

lawyers and bank officers who

would sit through the whole game

without ever making a sound -- not

even when some freak with a head

full of acid spilled a whole beer

down the neck of their grey-plastic ski jackets. Toward the end of the

season, when the Raiders were

battling every week for a spot in the

playoffs, some of the players got so pissed off at the stuporous nature of their "fans" that they began making public appeals for "cheering" and

"noise."

It was a bad joke if you didn't have to live with it-- and as far as I'm concerned I hope to hell I never see the inside of another football

stadium. Not even a free seat with

free booze in the press box.

That gig is over now, and I blame it on Vince Lombardi.

The success of his Green Bay approach in the '60's restructured

the game entirely. Lombardi never

really thought about winning; his trip was not losing. . . Which worked, and because it worked the

rest of the NFL bought Lombardi's

whole style: Avoid Mistakes, Don't

Fuck Up, Hang Tough and Take No

Chances. . . Because sooner or later the enemy will make a mistake and

then you start grinding them down,

and if you play the defensive

percentage you'll get inside his 30-

yard line at least three times in each half, and once you're inside the 30

you want to be sure to get at least three points. . .

Wonderful. Who can argue with a

battle-plan like that? And it is worth remembering that Richard Nixon

spent many Sundays, during all

those long and lonely autumns

between 1962 and '68, shuffling

around on the field with Vince

Lombardi at Green Bay Packer

games.

Nixon still speaks of Lombardi as if he might suddenly appear, at any

moment, from underneath one of the

larger rocks on the White House

lawn. . . And Don Shula, despite his fairly obvious distaste for Nixon,

has adopted the Lombardi style of

football so effectively that the

Dolphins are now one of the dullest teams to watch in the history of pro football.

But most of the others are just as

dull -- and if you need any proof,

find a TV set some weekend that has pro football, basketball and

hockey games on three different

channels. In terms of pure action

and movement, the NFL is a

molasses farm compared to the fine

sense of crank that comes on when

you get locked into watching a team like the Montreal Canadiens or the

Boston Celtics.

One of the few sharp memories I

still have from that soggy week in

Houston is the sight of the trophy

that would go to the team that won the Big Game on Sunday. It was

appropriately named after Vince

Lombardi: "The Lombardi Trophy,"

a thick silver fist rising out of a block of black granite.

The trophy has all the style and

grace of an ice floe in the North

Atlantic. There is a silver plaque on one side of the base that says

something about Vince Lombardi

and the Super Bowl. . . but the most interesting thing about it is a word

that is carved, for no apparent or at least no esthetic reason, in the top of the black marble base:

"DISCIPLINE"

That's all it says, and all it needs to say.

The '73 Dolphins, I suspect, will be to pro football what the '64 Yankees were to baseball, the final flower of an era whose time has come and

gone. The long and ham-fisted

shadow of Vince Lombardi will be

on us for many more years. . . But the crank is gone. . .

Should we end the bugger with that?

Why not? Let the sportswriters take it from here. And when things get

nervous, there's always that smack-

filled $7-a-night motel room down

on the seawall in Galveston.

Rolling Stone #128, February 15, 1973

The Temptations of Jean-

Claude Killy

Gray day in Boston. Piles of dirty

snow around the airport. . . My

cocktail flight from Denver was

right on time, but Jean-Claude Killy was not there to meet me.

Bill Cardoso lurked near the gate,

grinning through elegant rimless

glasses, commenting on our way to

the bar that I looked like a

candidate for a serious dope bust.

Sheepskin vests are not big in

Boston these days.

"But look at these fine wing-tips," I said, pointing down at my shoes.

He chuckled. "All I can see is that goddamn necklace. Being seen with

you could jeopardize my career. Do

you have anything illegal in that

bag?"

"Never," I said. "A man can't travel around on airplanes wearing a

Condor Legion neck-piece unless

he's totally clean. I'm not even

armed. . . This whole situation

makes me feel nervous and weird and thirsty." I lifted my sunglasses to look for the bar, but the light was too harsh.

"What about Killy?" he said. "I thought you were supposed to meet

him."

"I can't handle it tonight," I said.

"I've been chasing all over the country for 10 days on this thing:

Chicago, Denver, Aspen, Salt Lake

City, Sun Valley, Baltimore. Now

Boston and tomorrow New

Hampshire. I'm supposed to ride up there with them tonight on the Head Ski bus, but I'm not up to it; all

those hired geeks with their rib-

ticklers. Let's have a drink, then I'll cancel out on the bus trip."

It seemed like the only decent thing to do. So we drove around to the

airport hotel and went inside, where the desk clerk said the Head Ski

people were gathered in Room 247.

Which was true; they were in there, perhaps 30 in all, standing around a

cloth-covered table loaded with beer and diced hotdogs. It looked

like a cocktail party for the local Patrolmen's Benevolent

Association. These were the Head

Ski dealers, presumably from

around the New England area. And

right in their midst, looking fatigued and wretchedly uncomfortable --

yes, I couldn't quite believe it, but there he was: Jean-Claude Killy,

the world's greatest skier, now

retired at age 26 with three Olympic gold medals, a fistful of golden

contracts, a personal manager and ranking-celebrity status on three

continents. . .

Cardoso nudged me, whispering,

"Jesus, there's Killy." I hadn't expected to find him here; not in a dim little windowless room in the

bowels of a plastic motel. I stopped just inside the door. . . and a dead silence fell on the room. They

stared, saying nothing, and Cardoso said later that he thought we were

going to be attacked.

I hadn't expected a party. I thought we were looking for a private

room, containing either "Bud"

Stanner, Head's Marketing Director, or Jack Rose, the PR man. But

neither one was there. The only

person I recognized was Jean-

Claude, so I waded through the

silence to where he was standing,

near the hotdog table. We shook

hands, both of us vibrating

discomfort in this strange

atmosphere. I was never quite sure

about Killy, never knowing if he

understood why I was embarrassed for him in those scenes.

A week earlier he'd seemed

insulted when I smiled at his

pitchman's performance at the

Chicago Auto Show, where he and

O.J. Simpson had spent two days

selling Chevrolets. Killy had seen

no humor in his act, and he couldn't understand why I did. Now,

standing around in this grim, beer-

flavored sales meeting, it occurred to me that maybe he thought I felt

uncomfortable because I wasn't wearing a red tie and a Robert Hall blazer with brass buttons like most of the others. Maybe he was

embarrassed to be seen with me, a

Weird Person of some sort. . . and

with Cardoso, wearing granny

glasses and a big grin, wandering

around the room mumbling, "Jesus, where are we? This must be Nixon

headquarters." We didn't stay long. I introduced Cardoso as an editor of

the Boston Globe, and that stirred a bit of interest in the dealer-

salesmen ranks -- they are wise in the ways of publicity -- but my

neckpiece was obviously more than

they could handle. Their faces

tensed when I reached into the beer tub; nothing had been offered and

my thirst was becoming acute. Jean-

Claude just stood there in his

blazer, smiling nervously. Outside

in the hallway, Cardoso erupted

with laughter. "What an incredible scene! What was he doing with those bums?"

I shook my head. Killy's hard-sell scenes no longer surprised me, but

finding him trapped in a beer and

hotdog gig was like wandering into

some housing-project kaffeeklatsch

and finding Jacqueline Kennedy

Onassis making a straight-faced

pitch for Folger's instant-brewed.

My head was not straight at that

stage of the investigation. Two

weeks of guerrilla warfare with

Jean-Claude Killy's publicity

juggernaut had driven me to the

brink of hysteria. What had begun in Chicago as a simple sketch of a

French athlete turned American

culture-hero had developed, by the

time I got to Boston, into a series of maddening skirmishes with an

interlocking directorate of public

relations people.

I was past the point of needing any more private time with Jean-Claude. We had already done our

thing -- a four-hour head-on clash

that ended with him yelling: "You

and me, we are completely different. We are not the same kind of people! You don't understand!

You could never do what I'm doing!

You sit there and smile, but you

don't know what it is! I am tired.

Tired! I don't care anymore -- not

on the inside.or the outside! I don't care what I say, what I think, but I have to keep doing it. And two weeks from now I can go back

home to rest, and spend all my

money."

There was a hint of decency --

perhaps even humor -- about him,

but the high-powered realities of the world he lives in now make it hard

to deal with him on any terms

except those of pure commerce. His

handlers rush him from one

scheduled appearance to the next;

his time and priorities are parceled out according to their

dollar/publicity value; everything

he says is screened and

programmed. He often sounds like a

prisoner of war, dutifully repeating

his name, rank and serial number. . .

and smiling, just as dutifully, fixing his interrogator with that wistful, distracted sort of half-grin that he knows is deadly effective because his handlers have showed him the

evidence in a hundred press-

clippings. The smile has become a

trademark. It combines James Dean,

Porfiro Rubirosa and a teen-age

bank clerk with a foolproof

embezzlement scheme.

Killy projects an innocence and a

shy vulnerability that he is working very hard to overcome. He likes the carefree, hell-for-leather image that he earned as the world's best ski

racer, but nostalgia is not his bag, and his real interest now is his new commercial scene, the high-rolling

world of the Money Game, where

nothing is free and amateurs are

called Losers. The wistful smile is still there, and Killy is shrewd

enough to value it, but it will be a hard thing to retain through three

years of Auto Shows, even for

$100,000 a year.

We began in Chicago, at some

awful hour of the morning, when I

was roused out of a hotel stupor and hustled around a corner on

Michigan Avenue to where

Chevrolet's general manager John Z.

DeLorean was addressing an

audience of 75 "automotive writers"

at a breakfast press conference on

the mezzanine of the Continental

Plaza. The room looked like a bingo parlor in Tulsa -- narrow, full of

long formica tables with a makeshift bar at one end serving coffee,

Bloody Marys and sweet rolls. It

was the morning of the first big

weekend of the Chicago Auto

Show, and Chevrolet was going

whole-hog. Sitting next to DeLorean at the head table were Jean-Claude

Killy and O. J. Simpson, the

football hero.

Killy's manager was there-- a tall, thick fellow named Mark

McCormack, from Cleveland, a

specialist in rich athletes and probably the only man alive who

knows what Killy is worth. Figures

ranging from $100,000 to $500,000

a year are meaningless in the

context of today's long-term high

finance. A good tax lawyer can

work miracles with a six-figure

income. . . and with all the fine

machinery available to a man who

can hire the best money-managers,

Killy's finances are so skillfully

tangled that he can't understand them himself.

In some cases, a big contract -- say, $500,000 -- is really a 5-year

annual salary of $20,000 with a

$400,000 interest-free loan,

deposited in the star's account,

paying anywhere from 5 per cent to

20 per cent annually, depending on

how he uses it. He can't touch the

principal, but a $400,000 nut will

yield $30,000 a year by accident --

and a money-man working for 30

percent can easily triple that figure.

With that kind of property to

protect, McCormack has assumed veto-power over anyone assigned to

write about it for the public prints.

This is compounded in its foulness

by the fact that he usually gets away with it. Just prior to my introduction he had vetoed a writer from one of

the big-selling men's magazines --

who eventually wrote a very good

Killy article anyway but without

ever talking to the subject.

"Naturally, you'll be discreet," he told me.

"About what?"

"You know what I mean." He smiled. "Jean-Claude has his

private life and I'm sure you won't want to embarrass him or anyone

else -- including yourself, I might add -- by violating confidence."

"Well. . . certainly not," I replied, flashing him a fine eyebrow shrug to cover my puzzlement. He seemed

pleased, and I glanced over at

Killy, who was chatting amiably

with DeLorean, saying, "I hope you

can ski with me sometime at Val d'Isère."

Was there something depraved in

that face? Could the innocent smile mask a twisted mind? What was

McCormack hinting at? Nothing in

Killy's manner seemed weird or

degenerate. He spoke earnestly --

not comfortable with English, but

handling it well enough. If anything, he seemed overly polite, very

concerned with saying the right

thing, like an Ivy League business

school grad doing well on his first job interview -- confident, but not quite sure. It was hard to imagine

him as a sex freak, hurrying back to his hotel room and calling room

service for a cattle prod and two

female iguanas.

I shrugged and mixed myself

another Bloody Mary. McCormack

seemed satisfied that I was giddy

and malleable enough for the task at hand, so he switched his attention to a small, wavy-haired fellow named

Leonard Roller, a representative of one of Chevrolet's numerous public

relations firms.

I drifted over to introduce myself.

Jean-Claude laid his famous smile

on me and we talked briefly about

nothing at all. I took it for granted that he was tired of dealing with

writers, reporters, gossip-hustlers and that ilk, so I explained that I was more interested in his new role as salesman-celebrity -- and his

reactions to it -- than I was in the

standard, question/answer game. He seemed to understand, smiling

sympathetically at my complaints

about lack of sleep and early-

morning press conferences.

Killy is smaller than he looks on

television, but larger than most ski racers, who are usually short and

beefy, like weight-lifting jockeys

and human cannonballs. He is

almost 6-feet tall and claims to

weigh 175 pounds -- which is easy

enough to believe when you meet

him head-on, but his profile looks nearly weightless. Viewed from the

side, his frame is so flat that he

seems like a life-size cardboard

cut-out. Then, when he turns to face you again, he looks like a scaled-down Joe Palooka, perfectly built.

In swimming trunks he is almost

delicate, except for his thighs --

huge chunks of muscle, the thighs of an Olympic sprinter or a pro

basketball guard. . . or a man who

has spent a lifetime on skis.

Jean-Claude, like Jay Gatsby, has

"one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or

five times in life. It faced -- or

seemed to face -- the whole external world for an instant, and then

concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

It understood you just as far as you would like to believe in yourself,

and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." That

description of Gatsby by Nick Carraway -- of Scott, by Fitzgerald

-- might just as well be of J.-C.

Killy, who also fits the rest of it:

"Precisely at that point [Gatsby's smile] vanished -- and I was

looking at an elegant young

roughneck, whose elaborate

formality of speech just missed

being absurd. . ."

The point is not to knock Killy's

English, which is far better than my French, but to emphasize his

careful, finely coached choice of words. "He's an amazing boy," I was told later by Len Roller. "He works at this [selling Chevrolets]

just as hard as he used to work at

winning races. He attacks it with the same concentration you

remember from watching him ski."

The assumption that I remembered

Killy on skis came naturally to

Roller. Jean-Claude is on TV so

often, skiing at selected resorts all over the world, that it is nearly

impossible to miss seeing him. This

is The Exposure that makes him so valuable; every TV appearance

adds dollars to his price. People

recognize Killy, and they like his image -- a sexy daredevil, booming

downhill toward a cushion of naked

snowbunnies. This is why

Chevrolet pays him a salary far

larger than Nixon's to say, over and over again, "For me, zee Camaro is a fine foreign sports car. I own one, you know. I keep it in my garage at Val d'Isère" (Killy's hometown in the French Alps).

Jean-Claude emerged from the 1968

Winter Olympics with an incredible

three gold medals and then he

retired, ending his "amateur" career like a human skyrocket. There was

nothing left to win; after two World Cups (the equivalent of two straight Heisman Trophies in U. S.

collegiate football) and an

unprecedented sweep of all three

Olympic skiing events (the

equivalent of a sprinter winning the 100, 220, and 440), Killy's career

reads as if his press agent had

written the script for it -- a series of spectacular personal victories,

climaxed by the first triple-crown

triumph in the history of skiing

while the whole world watched on

TV.

The nervous tedium of forced

retirement obviously bothers Killy, but it comes as no surprise to him.

He was looking over the hump even

before his final triumph in the '68

Olympics. Between training

sessions at Grenoble he talked like

a character out of some early Hemingway sketch, shrugging

blankly at the knowledge that he

was coming to the end of the only

thing he knew: "Soon skiing will be worn out for me," he said. "For the last 10 years I have prepared myself to become the world champion. My

thoughts were only to better my

control and my style in order to

become the best. Then last year

[1967] I became the world

champion. I was given a small

medal and for two days after that it

was hell. I discovered that I was still eating like everybody else,

sleeping like everybody else -- that I hadn't become the superman I

thought my title would make me.

The discovery actually destroyed

me for two days. So when people

speak to me about the excitement of becoming an Olympic champion this

year -- should it happen -- I know it will be the same thing all over

again. I know that after the races at Grenoble the best thing for me is to stop."

For Killy, the Olympics were the end of the road. The wave of the

future crashed down on him within

hours after his disputed Grand

Slalom victory over Karl Schranz

of Austria. Suddenly they were on

him -- a chattering greenback

swarm of agents, money-mongers

and would-be "personal reps" of every shape and description. Mark

McCormack's persistence lent

weight to his glittering claim that he could do for Killy what he had

already done for Arnold Palmer.

Jean-Claude listened, shrugged, then ducked out for a while -- to

Paris, the Riviera, back home to Val d'Isère -- and finally, after weeks of half-heartedly dodging the

inevitable, signed with

McCormack. The only sure thing in

the deal was a hell of a lot of

money, both sooner and later.

Beyond that, Killy had no idea what he was getting into.

Now he was showing us how much

he'd learned. The Chevvy press

breakfast was breaking up and Len Roller suggested that the three of us go downstairs to the dining room.

J.-C. nodded brightly and I smiled

the calm smile of a man about to be rescued from a Honker's

Convention. We drifted downstairs,

where Roller found us a corner

table in the dining room before

excusing himself to make a phone

call. The waitress brought menus,

but Killy waved her off, saying he

wanted only prune juice. I was on

the verge of ordering huevos

rancheros with a double side of bacon, but in deference to J.-C.'s

apparent illness I settled for

grapefruit and coffee.

Killy was studying a mimeographed

news release that I'd grabbed off a table at the press conference in lieu of notepaper. He nudged me and

pointed at something in the lead

paragraph. "Isn't this amazing?" he asked. I looked: The used side of

my notepaper was headed: NEWS. .

. from Chevrolet Motor Division. . .

CHICAGO -- Chevrolet began its

"spring selling season" as early as January first this year, John Z.

DeLorean, general manager, said

here today. He told newsmen

attending the opening of the Chicago Auto Show that Chevrolet sales are

off to the fastest start since its

record year of 1965. "We sold

352,000 cars in January and

February," DeLorean said. "That's 22 per cent ahead of last year. It

gave us 26.9 per cent of the

industry, compared to 23 per cent a

year ago. . ."

Killy said it again: "Isn't this amazing?" I looked to see if he was smiling but his face was deadly

serious and his voice was pure

snake oil. I called for more coffee, nodding distractedly at Killy's

awkward hustle, and cursing the

greedy instinct that had brought me into this thing. . . sleepless and illfed, trapped in a strange food-cellar with a French auto salesman.

But I stayed to play the game,

gnawing on my grapefruit and soon following Roller out to the street, where we were scooped up by a

large nondescript car that must have been a Chevrolet. I asked where we

were going and somebody said,

"First to the Merchandise Mart, where he'll do a tape for Kup's

show, and then to the Auto Show --

at the Stockyards."

That last note hung for a moment,

not registering. . . Kup's show was bad enough. I had been on it once,

and caused a nasty scene by calling Adlai Stevenson a professional liar when all the other guests were there to publicize some kind of Stevenson Memorial. Now nearly two years

later, I saw no point in introducing myself. Kup was taking it easy this time, joking with athletes. Killy was overshadowed by Bart Starr,

representing Lincoln-Mercury, and

Fran Tarkenton, wearing a Dodge

blazer. . . but with Killy in eclipse the Chevrolet team still made the

nut with O. J. Simpson, modestly

admitting that he probably wouldn't tear the National Football League

apart in his first year as a pro. It was a dull, low-level discussion,

liberally spotted with promo

mentions for the Auto Show.

Jean-Claude's only breakthrough

came when Kup, cued by a story in

that morning's Tribune, asked what

Killy really thought about the whole question of "amateur" athletic status. "Is it safe to assume," Kup asked, "that you were paid for using

certain skis in the Olympics?"

"Safe?" Killy asked.

Kup checked his notes for a new

question and Killy looked relieved.

The hypocrisy inherent in the whole concept of "amateurism" has always annoyed Killy, and now, with the

immunity of graduate status, he

doesn't mind admitting that he views the whole game as a fraud and a

folly. During most of his career on the French ski team he was listed,

for publicity reasons, as a

Government-employed Customs Inspector. Nobody believed it, not

even officials of the Fédération

Internationale de Ski (FIS), the

governing body for world-class

amateur ski competition. The whole

idea was absurd. Who, after all,

could believe that the reigning

world ski champion -- a

hero/celebrity whose arrival in any airport from Paris to Tokyo drew

crowds and TV cameras -- was

actually supporting himself on a

salary gleaned from his off-season

efforts in some dreary customs shed at Marseilles?

He spoke with a definite humility,

as if he felt slightly embarrassed by all the advantages he'd had. Then,

about two hours later when our talk had turned to contemporary things --

the high-style realities of his new jet-set life -- he suddenly blurted:

"Before, I could only dream about these things. When I was young I

had nothing, I was poor. . . Now I can have anything I want!"

Jean-Claude seems to understand, without really resenting it, that he is being weaned away from the frank

unvarnished style of his amateur

days. One afternoon at Vail, for

instance, he listened to a

sportscaster telling him what a great run he'd just made, and then, fully aware that he was talking for a live broadcast, Jean-Claude laughed at

the commentary and said he'd just

made one of the worst runs of his

life -- a complete-disaster, doing

everything wrong. Now, with the

help of his professional advisers, he has learned to be patient and polite

-- especially in America, with the

press. In France he is more secure, and far more recognizable to the

people who knew him before he

became a salesman. He was in

Paris last spring when Avery

Brundage, 82-year-old president of

the International Olympic

Committee, called on Jean-Claude

and several other winners of gold

medals at the 1968 Winter

Olympics to return them. Brundage,

a tunnel-visioned purist of the Old School, was shocked by disclosures

that many of the winners --

including Killy -- didn't even know what the word "amateur" meant. For years, said Brundage, these faithless poseurs had been accepting money

from "commercial interests" ranging from equipment manufacturers to

magazine publishers.

One of these gimmicks made

headlines just prior to the start of the Games, if memory serves, and

was awkwardly resolved by a quick ruling that none of the winners

could either mention or display

their skis (or any other equipment) during any TV interview or press

exposure. Until then, it had been

standard practice for the winner of any major race to make the brand-name on his skis as prominent as

possible during all camera sessions.

The "no-show" ruling worked a hardship on a lot of skiers at

Grenoble, but it failed to satisfy

Avery Brundage. His demand that

the medals be returned called up memories of Jim Thorpe, who was

stripped of everything he won in the 1912 Olympics because he had

once been paid to play in a semi-

pro baseball game. Thorpe went

along with the madness, returning

his medals and living the rest of his life with the taint of "disgrace" on his name. Even now, the nasty

Olympics scandal is the main

feature of Thorpe's biographical

sketch in the new Columbia

Encyclopedia.

But when a Montreal Star reporter asked Jean-Claude how he felt

about turning in his Olympic

medals, he replied: "Let Brundage come over here himself and take

them from me."

It was a rare public display of "the old Jean-Claude." His American personality has been carefully

manicured to avoid such outbursts.

Chevrolet doesn't pay him to say

what he thinks, but to sell

Chevrolets -- and you don't do that

by telling self-righteous old men to fuck off. You don't even admit that the French Government paid you to

be a skier because things are done

that way in France and most other

countries, and nobody born after

1900 calls it anything but natural. . .

when you sell Chevrolets in

America you honor the myths and

mentality of the marketplace: You

smile like Horatio Alger and give

all the credit to Mom and Dad, who

never lost faith in you and even

mortgaged their ingots when things

got tough.

Anyone watching our departure

from the Kup show must have

assumed that J.-C. traveled with

five or six bodyguards. I'm still not sure who the others were. Len

Roller was always around, and a

hostile, burr-haired little bugger

from whichever of Chevvy's PR

agencies was running the Auto

Show, who took me aside early on

to warn me that Roller was "only a guest -- I'm running this show."

Roller laughed at the slur, saying,

"He only thinks he's running it." The others were never introduced; they

did things like drive cars and open doors. They were large, unconfident men, very polite in the style of

armed gas-station attendants.

We left the Merchandise Mart and

zapped off on a freeway to the Auto Show -- and suddenly it registered: The Stockyards Amphitheatre. I was

banging along the freeway in that

big car, listening to the others trade

bull/fuck jokes, trapped in the back seat between Killy and Roller,

heading for that rotten

slaughterhouse where Mayor Daley

had buried the Democratic party.

I had been there before, and I

remembered it well. Chicago -- this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard

of a city; an elegant rockpile

monument to everything cruel and

stupid and corrupt in the human

spirit.

The public is out in force to view the new models. Jean-Claude makes

his pitch for Chevrolet every two

hours on the button: 1-3-5-7-9. The even numbered hours are reserved

for O. J. Simpson.

Barker: "Tell me, O. J., are you faster than that car over there?"

O. J.: "You mean that groovy

Chevrolet? Naw, man, that's the

only thing I know that's faster than me. . . ho, ho. . ."

Meanwhile, slumped in a folding chair near the Killy exhibit,

smoking a pipe and brooding on the

spooks in this place, I am suddenly confronted by three young boys

wearing Bass Weejuns and

Pendleton shirts, junior-high types, and one of them asks me: "Are you Jean-Claude Killy?"

"That's right," I said.

"What are you doing?" they asked.

Well, you goddamn silly little

waterhead, what the hell does it look like I'm doing? But I didn't say that. I gave the question some

thought. "Well," I said finally, "I'm just sitting here smoking marijuana."

I held up my pipe. "This is what makes me ski so fast." Their eyes swelled up like young grapefruits.

They stared at me -- waiting for a

laugh, I think -- then backed away.

Five minutes later I looked up and

found them still watching me,

huddled about 20 feet away behind

the sky-blue Z-28 Chevvy on its

slow-moving turntable. I waved my pipe at them and smiled like Hubert Humphrey. . . but they didn't wave

back.

Killy's Auto Show act was a

combination interview/autograph

thing, with the questions coming

from Roller and a silver-blonde

model in rubberized stretch pants.

The Chevvy people had set up a

plywood podium next to the Z-28 --

which they said was a new and

special model, but which looked

like any other Camaro with a (Head) ski rack on top.

Not far away, on another platform,

O. J. Simpson fielded questions

from a ripe little black girl, also dressed in tight ski pants. The acts remained segregated except in

moments of unexpected crowd

pressure, when the black model

would occasionally have to

interview Killy. The blonde girl

was never cast with O. J. -- at least not while I was there. Which hardly

matters, except as casual evidence that Chevvy's image-makers still

see racial separatism as good

business, particularly in Chicago.

On the way in, Roller had rehearsed Jean-Claude on the Q. and A.

sequence: "Okay, then I'll say, 'I see an interesting looking car over

there, Jean-Claude -- can you tell us something about it?' And then you

say. . . what?"

J.-C.: "Oh, yes, that is my car, the new Z-28. It has seat covers made

of Austrian ski sweaters. And you notice my special license plate,

JCK. . ."

Roller: "That's fine. The important thing is to be spontaneous."

J.-C. (puzzled): "Spuen-tan-EUS?"

Roller (grinning): "Don't worry --

you'll do fine."

And he did. Killy's public pitch is very low-key, a vivid contrast to O.

J. Simpson, whose sales technique

has all the subtlety of a power-slant on third and one. . . O. J. likes this scene. His booming self-confidence

suggests Alfred E. Neuman in

blackface or Rap Brown selling

watermelons at the Mississippi

State Fair. O. J.'s mind is not

complicated; he has had God on his

side for so long that it never occurs to him that selling Chevrolets is any less holy than making touchdowns.

Like Frank Gifford, whose shoes he

finally filled in the USC backfield, he understands that football is only

the beginning of his TV career. O. J.

is a Black Capitalist in the most

basic sense of that term; his

business sense is so powerful that

he is able to view his blackness as a mere sales factor -- a natural intro to the Black Marketplace, where a

honky showboat like Killy is

doomed from the start.

There are some people in "the

trade," in fact, who can't understand why the Chevrolet wizards consider

Killy as valuable -- on the image-

selling scale -- as a hotdog American folk hero like O. J.

Simpson.

"What the hell were they thinking about when they signed that guy for three hundred grand a year?"

muttered a ranking "automotive journalist" as he watched Killy's act on Saturday afternoon.

I shook my head and wondered,

remembering DeLorean's owlish

confidence that morning at the press breakfast. Then I looked at the

crowd surrounding Killy. They were white and apparently solvent,

their average age around 30 -- the

kind of people who could obviously

afford to buy skis and make

payments on new cars. O. J.

Simpson drew bigger crowds, but

most of his admirers were around

12 years old. Two-thirds of them

were black and many looked like

fugitives from the Credit Bureau's

garnishee file.

Mark McCormack signed to manage

Arnold Palmer a decade ago-- just prior to the Great Golf Boom. His

reasons for betting on Killy are just as obvious. Skiing is no longer an

esoteric sport for the idle rich, but a fantastically popular new winter

status-game for anyone who can

afford $500 for equipment. Five

years ago the figure would have

been three times that, plus another loose $1,000 for a week at Stowe

or Sun Valley, but now, with the

advent of snow-making machines,

even Chattanooga is a "ski-town."

The Midwest is dotted with icy

"week-night" slalom hills, lit up like the miniature golf courses of

the Eisenhower age.

The origins of the ski boom were

based entirely on economics and the appeal of the sport itself. . . no

freaky hypes or shoestring

promotion campaigns. . . the Money

Boom of the 1960's produced a

sassy middle class with time on its hands, and suddenly there was a

mushrooming demand for things like

golf clubs, motorboats and skis. In retrospect, the wonder of it is that it took people like McCormack so

long to grab a good thing. Or maybe the problem was a lack of ski

heroes. Does anyone remember, for

instance, who won Gold Medals at

the '64 Winter Olympics? It was the prominence of Jean-Claude Killy

(as a hot racer in 1966 and as a

press hero in '67 and '68) that

suddenly gave skiing an image.

Jean-Claude emerged from the '68

Olympics as a sort of sauve Joe

Namath, a "swinging Frenchman"

with the style of a jet-set maverick and the mind of a Paris bartender.

The result was inevitable: a super-

priced French import, tailored

strictly for the fast-growing U.S.

leisure market, the same people

who suddenly found themselves

able to afford Porsches, Mercedes

and Jaguars. . . along with MG's and Volkswagens.

But not Fords or Chevvys. "Detroit iron" didn't make it in that league. . .

mainly because there is no room in the brass ranks of the U.S. auto

industry for the kind of executive

who understands why a man who

can afford a Cadillac will buy a

Porsche instead. There was simply

no status in owning a $10,000 car

with no back seat and a hood only

five feet long.

So now we have a DeLorean-style

blitz for Chevrolet, and it's doing beautifully. Booming Chevvy sales

are mainly responsible for GM's

spurt to a plus-50 per cent of the whole auto market. The strategy has been simple enough: a heavy focus

on speed, sporty styling and the

"youth market." This explains Chevvy's taste for such image-makers as Simpson, Glen Campbell

and Killy. (Speculation that

DeLorean was about to sign Allen

Ginsberg proved to be false:

General Motors doesn't need poets.) Killy has spent his entire adult life in the finely disciplined cocoon that

is part of the price one pays for membership of the French ski team.

As a life style, it is every bit as demanding as that of a pro football quarterback. In a sport where the

difference between fame and total

obscurity is measured in tenths of a second, the discipline of constant, rigid training is all important.

Championship skiers, like karate

masters, need muscles that most

men never develop. The karate

parallel extends, beyond muscles, to the necessity for an almost

superhuman concentration -- the ability to see and remember every

bump and twist on a race course,

and then to run it without a single mistake: no mental lapses, no

distractions, no wasted effort. The only way to win is to come down

that hill with maximum efficiency,

like a cannonball down a one-rail

track. A skier who thinks too much

might make points in conversation,

but he seldom wins races.

Killy has been accused, by experts,

of "lacking style." He skis, they say, with the graceless desperation of a man about to crash, fighting to keep his balance. Yet it's obvious, even to a rank amateur, that Killy's whole secret is his feverish concentration.

He attacks a hill like Sonny Listen used to attack Floyd Patterson --

and with the same kind of awesome

results. He wants to beat the hill, not just ski it. He whips through a slalom course like O. J. Simpson

through a jammed secondary -- the

same impossible moves; sliding,

half-falling, then suddenly free and pumping crazily for the finish line to beat that awful clock, the only judge in the world with the power to send him home a loser.

Shortly after I met him, I told Killy he should see some films of O. J.

Simpson running with a football.

Jean-Claude didn't know the game,

he said, but I insisted that wouldn't matter. "It's like watching a drunk run through traffic on a freeway," I said. "You don't have to know the

game to appreciate O. J.'s act -- it's a spectacle, a thing to see. . ."

That was before I understood the

boundaries of Kilty's curiosity. Like Calvin Coolidge, he seems to feel

that "the business of America is business." He comes here to make money, and esthetics be damned. He

wasn't interested in anything about O. J. Simpson except the size of his Chevrolet contract -- and only

vaguely in that.

Throughout our numerous,

distracted conversations, he was puzzled and dimly annoyed with the

rambling style of my talk. He

seemed to feel that any journalist

worthy of his profession would

submit 10 very precise questions,

write down 10 scripted Killy

answers and then leave. No doubt

this reflected the thinking of his PR

advisers, who favor such concepts

as "input," "exposure" and "the Barnum Imperative."

My decision to quit the Killy story

came suddenly, for no special reason. . . an irrational outburst of red-eyed temper and festering angst with the supplicant's role I'd been playing for two days, dealing with a gang of cheap-jack footmen whose

sense of personal importance

seemed to depend entirely on the

glitter of their hired French

property.

Some time later, when I had calmed

down enough to consider another

attempt at cracking the PR barrier, I

talked to Jean-Claude on the telephone. He was in Sun Valley,

allowing himself to be

photographed for a magazine feature on the "Killy style." I called to explain why I hadn't made the night with him, as planned, from Chicago

to Sun Valley. "You've made some funny friends in the past year," I said. "Doesn't it make you nervous to travel around with a bunch of

cops?"

He laughed quietly. "That's right,"

he said. "They are just like cops, aren't they? I don't like it, but what can I do? I am never alone. . . This is my life, you know."

I have a tape of that conversation, and I play it now and then for

laughs. It is a weird classic of sorts

-- 45 minutes of failed

communication, despite heroic

efforts on both ends. The over-all

effect is that of a career speed-freak jacked up like the Great

Hummingbird, trying to talk his way

through a cordon of bemused ushers and into a free, front-row seat at a sold-out Bob Dylan concert.

I had made the call, half-grudgingly, after being assured by Millie

Wiggins Solheim, the Style Queen

of Sun Valley, that she had learned through the Head Ski hierarchy that Jean-Claude was eager for a soul-talk with me. What the hell? I

thought Why not? But this time on

my terms -- in the midnight style of the Great Hummingbird. The tape is

full of laughter and disjointed ravings. Killy first suggested that I meet him again at the Auto Show in

Chicago, where he was scheduled

for a second weekend of Chevvy

gigs on the same 1-3-5-7-9

schedule.

"Never in hell," I replied. "You're paid to hang around with those pigs, but I'm not. They acted like they

expected me to sneak up and steal

the battery out of that goddamn ugly car you were selling."

He laughed again. "It's true that they pay me for being there. . . but you get paid for writing the article."

"What article?" I said. "As far as I know, you don't exist. You're a life-size dummy made of plastic foam. I

can't write much of an article about how I once saw Jean-Claude Killy

across a crowded room at the

Stockyards Amphitheatre."

There was a pause, another quiet

chuckle, then: "Well, maybe you could write about how hard it is to

write about me."

Oh ho, I thought. You sneaky bugger

-- there's something in your head,

after all. It was the only time I ever felt we were on the same

wavelength -- and then for only an

instant. The conversation

deteriorated rapidly after that.

We talked a while longer and I

finally said, "Well, to hell with it.

You don't need publicity and I sure as hell don't need this kind of

fuckaround. . . They should have

assigned this story to an ambitious dwarf hooker with gold teeth. . ."

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Then: "Why don't you call Bud Stanner, the manager

from Head Ski. He is here in the

Lodge tonight. I think he can arrange something."

Why not? I thought. By the time I got hold of Stanner it was 1 A.M.

I assured him that all I needed was a bit of casual conversation and

some time to watch Killy in action.

"I'm not surprised Jean-Claude wouldn't talk to you tonight," he said with a knowing chuckle. "I happen to know he's being. . . ah. . .

entertained at the moment."

"That's weird," I said, "I just finished a 45-minute talk with him."

"Oh. . . ?" Stanner pondered my words for a moment, then, like a

skilled politician, he ignored them.

"It's the damnedest thing you ever

saw," he continued cheerfully.

"Goddamn broads won't give him any peace. It's embarrassing

sometimes, the way they come on

him. . ."

"Yeah," I said. "I've heard."

Actually, I'd heard it so often that I recognized it now as part of the

program. Killy has a very obvious,

natural kind of sex appeal -- so

obvious that I was getting a little tired of hustlers nudging me to make sure I noticed. McCormack had set

the tone at our first encounter, with his odd warning about "discretion."

Moments later, replying to

somebody who'd asked him if Killy

had any plans for a film career,

McCormack had grinned and said,

"Oh, we're not in any hurry; he's had plenty of offers. And every time he says no, the price goes up."

Killy himself says nothing. Straight interviews bore him anyway, but he

usually tries to be civil, even

smiling, despite the brain-curdling

tedium of answering the same questions over and over again. He

will cope with almost any kind of

giddy ignorance, but his smile snaps off like a dead lightbulb when he

senses a carnal drift in the

conversation. If the interviewer

persists, or launches a direct

question like, "Is there any truth in this rumor about you and Winnie

Ruth Judd?", Killy will invariably change the subject with an angry

shrug.

His reluctance to talk about women seems genuine, leaving

disappointed reporters no choice

but to hunker down in misty

speculation. "Killy has a reputation as a skiing Romeo," wrote the

author of a recent magazine article.

"Typically French, though, he

remains discreet about his swinging love life, saying little more than, yes, he has a girl friend, a model."

Which was true. He had spent a

quiet vacation with her in the

Bahamas the week before I met him in Chicago, and at first I got the

impression that he was fairly

serious about her. . . Then, after

listening to his pitchmen for a

while, I wasn't sure what I thought.

The "discretion" that would have been the despair of any old-style,

low-level press agent has become,

in the hands of McCormack's cool

futurists, a mysterious and half-

sinister cover story, using Killy's awkward "no comment" behavior to enhance whatever rumor he refuses

to talk about.

Jean-Claude understands that his

sex-life has a certain publicity

value, but he hasn't learned to like it. At one point I asked him how he felt about that aspect of his image.

"What can I say?" he shrugged.

"They keep talking about it. I am normal. I like girls. But what I do is really my own business, I think. . ."

(Shortly after that phone talk with him in Sun Valley, I learned that he really was being "entertained" when

I called, and I've never quite understood why he spent 45 minutes

on the phone in those circumstances.

What a terrible scene for a girl. . .) I tried to be frank with Stanner.

Early on, in our talk, he said:

"Look, I'll give you all the help I can on this thing, and I think I'm in a position to give you the kind of help you need. Naturally, I'd expect some play for Head Skis in your photo

coverage and of course that's my

job. . ."

"Fuck the skis," I replied. "I couldn't give a hoot in hell if he skis on metal bowls; all I want to do is talk to the man, in a decent human

manner, and find out what he thinks about things."

This was not the kind of thing

Stanner wanted to hear, but under

the circumstances he handled it

pretty well. "O.K." he said, after a brief pause. "I think we understand each other. You're looking for input that's kind of offbeat, right?"

"Input?" I said. He had used the term several times and I thought I'd better clarify it.

"You know what I mean," he snapped, "and I'll try to set it up for you."

I started making plans to go up to

Sun Valley anyway but then Stanner

disrupted everything by suddenly

offering to arrange for me -- instead of Ski Magazine's editor -- to

accompany J.-C. on that Eastbound

flight. "You'll have a whole day

with him," Stanner said, "and if you want to come to Boston next week

I'll save you a seat on the company bus for the ride to Waterville

Valley in New Hampshire. Jean-

Claude will be along, and as far as I'm concerned you can have him all

to yourself for the whole trip. It

takes about two hours. Hell, maybe

you'd rather do that, instead of

working your ass off to make that

cross-country flight with him. . ."

"No," I said. "I'll do it both ways --

first the flight, then the bus ride; that should give me all the offbeat input I need."

He sighed.

Killy was there in Salt Lake, red-

eyed and jittery with a Coke and a

ham sandwich in the airport cafe. A man from United Airlines was

sitting with him, a waitress stopped to ask for his autograph, people

who had no idea who he was

paused to nod and stare at "the celebrity."

The local TV station had sent out a camera crew, which caused a

crowd to gather around the gate

where our plane was waiting. "How do these people know when I'm

here?" he muttered angrily as we hurried down the corridor toward

the mob.

I smiled at him. "Come on," I said,

"you know damn well who called them. Do we have to keep playing

this game?"

He smiled faintly, then lined it out

like a veteran. "You go ahead," he said. "Get our seats on the plane while I talk to these camera

people."

Which he did, while I boarded the

plane and instantly found myself

involved in a game of musical

chairs with the couple who were

being moved back to the tourist

compartment so Jean-Claude and I

could have their First Class seats.

"I've blocked these two off for you,"

the man in the blue uniform told me.

The dowdy little stewardess told the victims how sorry she was --

over and over again, while the man

howled in the aisle. I hunkered

down in the seat and stared straight ahead, wishing him well. Killy

arrived, ignoring the ruckus and

slumping into his seat with a weary groan. There was no doubt in his

mind that the seat was being saved

for Jean-Claude Killy. The man in

the aisle seemed to recognize that

his protest was doomed: his seats

had been seized by forces beyond

his control. "You sons of bitches!"

he yelled, shaking his fist at the

crewmen who were pushing him

back toward the tourist section. I

was hoping he would whack one of

them or at least refuse to stay on the plane but he caved in, allowing

himself to be hustled off like a noisy beggar.

"What was that about?" Killy asked me.

I told him. "Bad scene, eh?" he said.

Then he pulled a car racing

magazine out of his briefcase and focused on that. I thought of going back and advising the man that he

could get a full refund on his ticket if he kept yelling, but the flight was delayed for at least an hour on the runway and I was afraid to leave

my seat for fear it might be grabbed by some late-arriving celebrity.

Within moments, a new hassle

developed. I asked the stewardess

for a drink and was told that it was against the rules to serve booze

until the plane was airborne. Thirty minutes later, still sitting on the runway, I got the same answer.

There is something in the corporate manner of United Airlines that

reminds me of the California

Highway Patrol, the exaggerated

politeness of people who would be

a hell of a lot happier if all their customers were in jail -- and

especially you, sir.

Flying United, to me, is like

crossing the Andes in a prison bus.

There is no question in my mind that somebody like Pat Nixon personally

approves every United stewardess.

Nowhere in the Western world is

there anything to equal the

collection of self-righteous shrews who staff the "friendly skies of United." I do everything possible to avoid that airline, often at

considerable cost and personal

inconvenience. But I rarely make

my own reservations and United

seems to be a habit -- like Yellow

Cabs -- with secretaries and PR

men. And maybe they're right. . .

My constant requests for a drink to ease the delay were rebuked with

increasing severity by the same

stewardess who had earlier

defended my right to preempt a first class seat. Killy tried to ignore the argument but finally abandoned his

magazine to view the whole scene

with nervous alarm. He lifted his

dark glasses to wipe his eyes --

red-veined balls in a face that

looked much older than 26. Then a

man in a blue blazer confronted us, shoving a little girl ahead of him.

"Probably you don't remember me, Jean-Claude," he was saying. "We met about two years ago at a

cocktail party in Vail."

Killy nodded, saying nothing. The

man shoved an airline ticket

envelope at him, grinning self-

consciously: "Could you autograph this for my little girl, please? She's all excited about being on the same plane with you."

Killy scrawled an illegible signature on the paper, then stared blankly at the cheap camera the girl was aiming at him. The man backed

away, unnerved by Killy's failure to remember him. "Sorry to bother you," he said. "But my little girl, you know. . . since we seem to be

delayed here. . . well, thanks very much."

Killy shrugged as the man backed

off. He hadn't said a word and I felt a little sorry for the reject, who

appeared to be a broker of some kind.

The moppet came back with the

camera, wanting a second shot "in case the first one doesn't come out."

She took one very quickly, then

asked J.-C. to remove his glasses.

"No!" he snapped. "The light hurts my eyes." There was a raw,

wavering note in his voice, and the child, a shade more perceptive than her father, took her picture and left without apologies.

Now, less than a year later, Killy is making very expensive and

elaborate commercials for United

Airlines. He was in Aspen recently

"secretly" filming a ski race for showing, months later, on national

TV. He didn't ring me up. . .

Killy refused both the drink and the meal. He was clearly on edge and I

was pleased to find that anger made him talkative. By this time I had

disabused myself of the notion that we had any basic rapport; his habit-

smiles were for people who asked habit-questions -- fan-magazine

bullshit and pulp philosophy: How

do you like America? (It is truly

wonderful. I would like to see it all in a Camaro.) How did it feel to

win three gold medals in the

Olympics? (It felt truly wonderful. I plan to have them mounted on the

dashboard of my Camaro.)

Somewhere in the middle of the

flight, with our conversation lagging badly, I reverted to a Hollywood-

style of journalism that Killy instantly picked up on. "Tell me," I said. "What's the best place you know? If you were free to go

anyplace in the world right now --

no work, no obligation, just to enjoy yourself -- where would it be?"

His first answer was "home," and after that came Paris and a clutch of French resort areas -- until I had to revise the question and eliminate

France altogether.

Finally he settled on Hong Kong.

"Why?" I asked. His face relaxed in a broad, mischievous grin.

"Because a friend of mine is head of the police there," he said, "and when I go to Hong Kong I can do

anything I want."

I laughed, seeing it all on film -- the adventures of a filthy-rich French

cowboy, turned loose in Hong Kong

with total police protection. With

J.-C. Killy as the hellion and maybe Rod Steiger as his cop-friend. A

sure winner. . .

Looking back, I think that Hong Kong note was the truest thing Jean-Claude ever said to me. Certainly it was the most definitive -- and it

was also the only one of my

questions he obviously enjoyed

answering.

By the time we got to Chicago I'd

decided to spare us both the agony

of prolonging the "interview" all the way to Baltimore. "I think I'll get off here," I said as we left the plane.

He nodded, too tired to care. Just

then we were confronted by a heavy blonde girl with a clipboard.

"Mister Killy?" she said. J.-C.

nodded. The girl mumbled her name

and said she was there to help him

make connections to Baltimore.

"How was Sun Valley?" she asked.

"Was it good skiing?" Killy shook his head, still walking very fast up the corridor. The girl was half

trotting beside us. "Well, I hope the other activities were satisfactory,"

she said with a smile. Her emphasis was so heavy, so abysmally raw,

that I glanced over to see if she was drooling.

"Who are you?" she asked suddenly.

"Never mind," I said. "I'm leaving."

Now, many months later, my

clearest memory of that whole Killy scene is a momentary expression on

the face of a man who had nothing

to do with it. He was a drummer

and lead singer in a local jazz-rock band I heard one night at a New

Hampshire ski resort where Killy

was making a sales appearance. I was killing time in a dull midnight bistro when this nondescript little bugger kicked off on his own

version of a thing called "Proud Mary" -- a heavy blues shot from Creedence Clearwater. He was

getting right into it, and somewhere around the third chorus I recognized the weird smile of a man who had

found his own rhythm, that rumored

echo of a high white sound that most men never hear. I sat there in the

dark smoke of that place and

watched him climb. . . far up on some private mountain to that point where you look in the mirror and

see a bright bold streaker, blowing all the fuses and eating them like

popcorn on the way up.

That image had to remind me of

Killy, streaking down the hills at

Grenoble for the first, second and

third of those incredible three gold medals. Jean-Claude had been

there -- to that rare high place where only the snow leopards live;

and now, 26-years-old with more dollars than he can use or count,

there is nothing else to match those peaks he has already beaten. Now it is all downhill for the world's

richest ski bum. He was good

enough -- and lucky -- for a while, to live in that Win-Lose, Black-White, Do-or-Die world of the

international super TV athlete. It

was a beautiful show while it

lasted, and Killy did his thing better than anyone else has ever done it

before.

But now, with nothing else to win, he is down on the killing floor with the rest of us -- sucked into strange and senseless wars on unfamiliar

terms; haunted by a sense of loss

that no amount of money can ever

replace; mocked by the cotton-

candy rules of a mean game that still awes him. . . locked into a gilded

life-style where winning means

keeping his mouth shut and reciting, on cue, from other men's scripts.

This is Jean-Claude Killy's new

world: He is a handsome middle-

class French boy who trained hard and learned to ski so well that now his name is immensely saleable on

the marketplace of a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hotdogs and honors them on

about the same level.

His TV-hero image probably

surprises him more than it does the rest of us. We take whatever heroes come our way, and we're not

inclined to haggle. Killy seems to

understand this, too. He is taking

advantage of a money-scene that never existed before and might

never work again -- at least not in his lifetime or ours, and maybe not even next year.

On balance, it seems unfair to

dismiss him as a witless greedhead, despite all the evidence.

Somewhere behind that wistful

programmed smile I suspect there is something akin to what Norman

Mailer once called (speaking of

James Jones) "an animal sense of

who has the power." There is also a brooding contempt for the American system that has made him what he

is. Killy doesn't understand this

country; he doesn't even like it --

but there is no question in his mind about his own proper role in a

scene that is making him rich. He is his manager's creature, and if Mark McCormack wants him to star in a

geek film or endorse some kind of

skin-grease he's never heard of. . .

well, that's the way it is. Jean-

Claude is a good soldier; he takes

orders well and he learns quickly.

He would rise through the ranks in

any army.

Killy reacts; thinking is not his gig.

So it is hard to honor him for

whatever straight instincts he still cultivates in private -- while he

mocks them in public, for huge

amounts of money. The echo of

Gatsby's style recalls the truth that Jimmy Gatz was really just a rich

crook and a booze salesman. But

Killy is not Gatsby. He is a bright

young Frenchman with a completely original act. . . and a pragmatic

frame of reference that is better

grounded, I suspect, than my own.

He is doing pretty well for himself, and nothing in his narrow, highpowered experience can allow him

to understand how I can watch his

act and say that it looks, to me, like a very hard dollar-- maybe the

hardest.

A Final Note from the Author

OWL FARM

Please insert this quote at beginning or end of Killy piece. -- Thompson.

"No eunuch flatters his own noise more shamefully nor seeks by more

infamous means to stimulate his

jaded appetite, in order to gain

some favor, than does the eunuch of industry."

-- The quote, as I have it, is

attributed to one Billy Lee

Burroughs. . . but if memory serves, I think it comes from the writings of K. Marx. In any case, I can trace it

down if need be. . .

Scanlan's Monthly, vol 1, no. 1, March 1970

The Ultimate Free Lancer

You asked me for an article on

whatever I wanted to write about

and since you don't pay I figure that gives me carte blanche. I started out tonight on an incoherent bitch about the record business. . . I was

looking at the jacket copy on the

"Blues Project" album. . . but the

"producer's" name was in huge script on the back, and underneath it were four or five other names. . .

punks and narks and other ten-

percenters who apparently had

more leverage than the musicians

who made the album, and so

managed to get their names on the

record jacket.

I was brooding about this -- which

I'll write about sometime later --

when I picked up the latest Free

Press and read an obituary for a

three-year-old kid named "Godot". .

. which was nice, but as I read it I was reminded again of Lionel Olay

and how the Free Press

commemorated his death with a

small block of unsold advertising

space that had to be used anyway,

so why not for Lionel? I'm also

reminded that I've asked you twice

for a copy of his article on Lenny

Bruce (in which Lionel wrote his

own obituary), and that you've

disregarded both queries. Maybe

there's no connection between this

and the fact that the Blues Project people were fucked out of any

mention except photos on their own

album, but I think there is. I see it as two more good examples of the

cheap, mean, grinning-hippie

capitalism that pervades the whole

New Scene. . . a scene which

provides the Underground Press

Syndicate with most of its copy and income. Frank Zappa's comments on

rock joints and light shows (FP

1230) was a welcome piece of

heresy in an atmosphere that is

already rigid with pre-public senility. The concept of the UPS is too right to argue with, but the

reality is something else. As Frank Zappa indicated, if only in a

roundabout way, there are a lot of

people trying to stay alive and

working WITHIN the UPS

spectrum, and not on the ten-percent fringes. That's where Time

magazine lives. . . way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge,

peering through the keyhole and

selling what they see to the wide

world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public

prints.

Which brings us back to Lionel,

who lived and died as walking

proof that all heads exist alone and at their own risk. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe his funeral procession on the Sunset Strip was enough to bring

even cops to their knees. . . but

since I didn't hear anything about

that action, I have to doubt it. I

suspect Lionel died pretty much as

he lived: as a free lance writer hustler, grass-runner and general

free spirit. I'm sure a lot of people knew him better than I did, but I

think I knew him pretty well. I first met him in Big Sur in 1960, when

we were both broke and grubbing

for rent money. After that we did a lot of writing back and forth, but

we'd only meet (usually at the Hot

Springs in Big Sur) after long

months of different action in very

different worlds (he was broke

somewhere in New England when I

was in Peru, and later in Rio I got a letter from him with a Chicago

postmark). . . when I got back to

New York he wrote from L.A.,

saying he'd decided to settle there because it was the "only home we had."

I've never been sure if he included me in that definition, but I know he was talking about a lot of people

beyond himself and his wife,

Beverly. Lionel saw the West Coast

of the 1960's as Malcolm Cowley

saw New York after World War One -- as "the homeland of the uprooted." He saw his own orbit as something that included Topanga,

Big Sur, Tijuana, the Strip and

occasional runs up north to the Bay Area. He wrote for Cavalier, and the Free Press and anyone who

would send him a check. When the

checks didn't come he ran grass to

New York and paid his rent with

LSD. And when he had something

that needed a long run of writing

time he would take off in his

Porsche or his Plymouth or any one of a dozen other cars that came his way, and cadge a room from Mike

Murphy at Hot Springs, or in

brother Dennis' house across the

canyon. Lionel and Dennis were old

friends, but Lionel knew too much -

- and insisted on saying it -- to use that friendly leverage as a wedge to the screen-writing business, where

Dennis Murphy was making it big.

Lionel had already published two

novels and he was a far-better plot-maker than most of the Hollywood

hacks, but every time he got a shot at the big cop-out money he blew it with a vengeance. Now and then

one of the New York editors would

give him enough leeway to write

what he wanted, and a few of his

articles are gems. He did one for

Cavalier on the soul of San Francisco that is probably the best thing ever written on that lovely,

gutless town. Later he wrote a

profile on Lenny Bruce (for the Free Press) that -- if I ran a newspaper --

I'd print every year in boldface

type, as an epitaph for free lancers everywhere.

Lionel was the ultimate free lancer.

In the nearly ten years I knew him, the only steady work he did was as

a columnist for the Monterey

Herald. . . and even then he wrote

on his own terms on his own

subjects, and was inevitably fired.

Less than a year before he died his willful ignorance of literary politics led him to blow a very rich

assignment from Life magazine,

which asked him for a profile on Marty Ransahoff, a big name

Hollywood producer then fresh

from a gold-plated bomb called

"The Sandpiper." Lionel went to London with Ransahoff ("the first-cabin all the way," as he wrote me from the S.S. United States) and

after two months in the great man's company he went back to Topanga

and wrote a piece that resembled

nothing so much as Mencken's

brutal obituary on William Jennings Bryan. Ransahoff was described as

a "pompous toad" -- which was not exactly what Life was looking for.

The article naturally bombed, and

Lionel was back on the bricks

where he'd spent the last half of his forty-odd years. I'm not sure how

old he was when he died, but it

wasn't much over forty. . .

according to Beverly he suffered a

mild stroke that sent him to the

hospital, and then a serious stroke that finished him.

Word of his death was a shock to

me, but not particularly surprising since I'd called him a week or so

before and heard from Beverly that

he was right on the edge. More than anything else, it came as a harsh

confirmation of the ethic that Lionel had always lived but never talked

about. . . the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.

Like his Basque anarchist father in Chicago, he died without making

much of a dent. I don't even know

where he's buried, but what the

hell? The important thing is where

he lived.

Now, what? While the new wave

flowered, Lenny Bruce was

hounded to death by the cops. For

"obscenity." Thirty thousand people (according to Paul Krassner) are

serving time in the jails of this vast democracy on marijuana charges,

and the world we have to live in is controlled by a stupid thug from

Texas. A vicious liar, with the

ugliest family in Christendom. . .

mean Okies feeling honored by the

cheap indulgence of a George Hamilton, a stinking animal

ridiculed even in Hollywood. And

California, "the most progressive state," elects a governor straight out of a George Grosz painting, a

political freak in every sense of the word except California politics. . .

Ronnie Reagan, the White Hope of

the West.

Jesus, no wonder Lionel had a

stroke. What a nightmare it must

have been for him to see the honest

rebellion that came out of World War Two taken over by a witless

phony like Warhol. . . the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Lights, Noise,

Love the Bomb! And then to see a

bedrock madman like Ginsberg

copping out with tolerance poems

and the same sort of swill that

normally comes from the Vatican.

Kerouac hiding out with his "mere"

on Long Island or maybe St.

Petersburg. . . Kennedy with his

head blown off and Nixon back

from the dead, running wild in the

power vacuum of Lyndon's hopeless bullshit. . . and of course Reagan, the new dean of Berkeley. Progress

Marches On, courtesy, as always of

General Electric. . . with sporadic assists from Ford, GM, ATT,

Lockheed and Hoover's FBI.

And there's the chill of it. Lionel was one of the original anarchist-head-beatnik-free lancers of the

1950's. . . a bruised fore-runner of Leary's would-be "drop-out

generation" of the 1960's. The Head

Generation. . . a loud, cannibalistic gig where the best are fucked for the worst reasons, and the worst make a pile by feeding off the best.

Promoters, hustlers, narks, con men

-- all selling the New Scene to Time magazine and the Elks Club. The

handlers get rich while the animals either get busted or screwed to the floor with bad contracts. Who's

making money off the Blues

Project? Is it Verve (a division of MGM), or the five ignorant bastards who thought they were getting a

break when Verve said they'd make them a record? And who the fuck is

'Tom Wilson," the "producer"

whose name rides so high on the

record jacket? By any other name

he's a vicious ten-percenter who

sold "Army Surplus commodities"

in the late 1940's, "Special-

Guaranteed Used Cars" in the

1950's, and 29 cent thumb-prints of John Kennedy in the 1960's. . . until he figured out that the really big

money was in drop-out revolution.

Ride the big wave: Folk-rock, pot

symbols, long hair, and $2.50

minimum at the door. Light shows!

Tim Leary! Warhol! NOW!

The Distant Drummer, vol. I, no. I, November 1967

Collect Telegram from a

Mad Dog

Not being a poet, and drunk as well, leaning into the diner and dawn

and hearing a juke box mockery of

some better

human sound

I wanted rhetoric

but could only howl the rotten truth Norman Luboff

should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork.

Then howled around like a man

with the

final angst,

not knowing what I wanted there

Probably the waitress, bend her

double

like a safety pin,

Deposit the mad seed before they

tie off my tubes

or run me down with Dingo dogs

for not voting

at all.

Suddenly a man with wild eyes

rushed

out from the wooden toilet

Foam on his face and waving a

razor

like a flag, shouting

It's Starkweather god damn I Know

that voice

We'll take our vengeance now!

McConn, enroute from L.A. to some

rumored home,

killing the hours till the bars opened stranded on Point Richmond when

they closed

the night before,

thinking finally he had come among friends

or at least one.

We rang for Luboff

on the pay phone, but there was

no contact

Some tortured beast of a bad loser

has already

croaked him, said McConn

We'll have a drink.

But the Mariners' Tavern was not

open

for twenty minutes, so we read

a newspaper

and saw where just about

everybody

had been fucked in the face

or some other orifice

or opening, or possibility for one good reason or another

by the time the Chronicle went to

press

before last midnight.

We rang for the editor

but the switchboard clamped him

off.

Get a lawyer, I said. These swine

have gone

far enough.

But the lawyers were all in bed

Finally we found one, limp from an

orgy and

too much sleep

Eating cheese blintzes with sour

cream and gin

on a redwood balcony with a

fine exposure.

Get your ass up, I said. It's Sunday and

the folks are in church. Now is the time to

lay a writ on them,

Cease and Desist

Specifically Luboff and the big

mongers,

the slumfeeders, the perverts and the pious.

The legal man agreed

We had a case and indeed a duty to

Right these Wrongs, as it were

The Price would be four thousand

in front and

ten for the nut.

I wrote him a check on the Sawtooth National Bank,

but he hooted at it

While rubbing a special oil on

his palms

To keep the chancres from itching

beyond endurance

On this Sabbath.

McConn broke his face with a running

Cambodian chop, then we

drank his gin, ate his blintzes

But failed to find anyone

to rape

and went back to the Mariners'

Tavern

to drink in the sun.

Later, from jail

I sent a brace of telegrams

to the right people,

explaining my position.

Spider Magazine vol. I, no. 7, October 13, 1965

"Genius 'Round the World

Stands Hand in Hand, and

One Shock of Recognition

Runs the Whole Circle

'Round"

-- ART LlNKLETTER

I live in a quiet place where any

sound at night means something is

about to happen: You come awake

fast -- thinking, what does that mean?

Usually nothing. But sometimes. . .

it's hard to adjust to a city gig where the night is full of sounds, all of

them comfortably routine. Cars, horns, footsteps. . . no way to relax; so drown it all out with the fine

white drone of a cross-eyed TV set.

Jam the bugger between channels

and doze off nicely. . .

Ignore that nightmare in the

bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some

doom-struck gimp who couldn't

handle the pressure. My attorney

has never been able to accept the

notion -- often espoused by

reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on

probation -- that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

And neither have I, for that matter.

But I once lived down the hill from Dr. ------ on ------ Road,* a former acid guru who later claimed to have made that long jump from chemical

frenzy to preternatural

consciousness. One fine afternoon

in the first rising curl of what would soon become the Great San

Francisco Acid Wave I stopped by the Good Doctor's house with the

idea of asking him (since he was

even then a known drug authority)

what sort of advice he might have

for a neighbor with a healthy

curiosity about LSD.

* Names deleted at insistence of publisher's lawyer.

I parked on the road and lumbered

up his gravel driveway, pausing

enroute to wave pleasantly at his

wife, who was working in the

garden under the brim of a huge seeding hat. . . a good scene, I

thought: The old man is inside

brewing up one of his fantastic

drug-stews, and here we see his

woman out in the garden, pruning

carrots, or whatever. . . humming

while she works, some tune I failed to recognize.

Humming. Yes. . . but it would be

nearly ten years before I would

recognize that sound for what it

was: Like Ginsberg far gone in the

Om ------ was trying to humm me off.

That was no old lady out there in

that garden; it was the good doctor himself -- and his humming was a frantic attempt to block me out of

his higher consciousness.

I made several attempts to make

myself clear: Just a neighbor come

to call and ask the doctor's advice about gobbling some LSD in my

shack just down the hill from his

house. I did, after all, have

weapons. And I liked to shoot them

-- especially at night, when the great blue flame would leap out, along

with all that noise. . . and, yes, the bullets, too. We couldn't ignore that.

Big balls of lead/alloy flying

around the valley at speeds up to

3700 feet per second. . . But I

always fired into the nearest hill or, failing that, into blackness. I meant no harm; I just liked the explosions.

And I was careful never to kill

more than I could eat.

"Kill?" I realized I could never properly explain that word to this

creature toiling here in its garden.

Had it ever eaten meat? Could it

conjugate the verb "hunt?" Did it understand hunger? Or grasp the

awful fact that my income averaged

around $32 a week that year?

No. . . no hope of communication in this place. I recognized that -- but not soon enough to keep the drug

doctor from humming me all the

way down his driveway and into my

car and down the mountain road.

Forget LSD, I thought. Look what

it's done to that poor bastard.

So I stuck with hash and rum for

another six months or so, until I

moved into San Francisco and

found myself one night in a place

called "The Fillmore Auditorium."

And that was that. One grey lump of sugar and BOOM. In my mind I was

right back there in the doctor's

garden. Not on the surface, but

underneath -- poking up through

that finely cultivated earth like some kind of mutant mushroom. A victim

of the Drug Explosion. A natural

street freak, just eating whatever

came by. I recall one night in the

Matrix, when a road-person came in

with a big pack on his back,

shouting: "Anybody want some L. . .

S. . . D. . . ? I got all the makin's right here. All I need is a place to cook."

The manager was on him at once,

mumbling, "Cool it, cool it, come

on back to the office." I never saw him after that night, but before he was taken away, the road-person

distributed his samples. Huge white spansules. I went into the men's

room to eat mine. But only half at first, I thought. Good thinking, but a hard thing to accomplish under the

circumstances. I ate the first half, but spilled the rest on the sleeve of my red Pendleton shirt. . . And then, wondering what to do with it, I saw one of the musicians come in.

"What's the trouble," he said.

"Well," I said. "All this white stuff on my sleeve is LSD." He said

nothing. Merely grabbed my arm

and began sucking on it. A very

gross tableau. I wondered what

would happen if some Kingston

Trio/young stockbroker type might

wander in and catch us in the act.

Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of

luck, it'll ruin his life -- forever thinking that just behind some

narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are

getting incredible kicks from things

he'll never know. Would he dare to suck a sleeve? Probably not. Play it safe. Pretend you never saw it. . .

Strange memories on this nervous

night in Las Vegas. Five years

later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San

Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant

something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . but no explanations, no mix

of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it

meant. . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even

without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think

that every now and then the energy

of a whole generation comes to a

head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at

the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually

happened.

My central memory of that time

seems to hang on one or five or

maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going

home, aimed the big 650 Lightning

across the Bay Bridge at a hundred

miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean

shorts and a Butte sheepherder's

jacket. . . booming through the

Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and

Richmond, not quite sure which

turn-off to take when I got to the

other end (always stalling at the

tollgate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change). . . but being absolutely certain that no

matter which way I went I would

come to a place where people were

just as high and wild as I was: No

doubt at all about that. . .

There was madness in any

direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La

Honda. . . You could strike sparks

anywhere. There was a fantastic

universal sense that whatever we

were doing was right, that we were winning. . .

And that, I think, was the handle --

that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in

any mean or military sense; we

didn't need that. Our energy would

simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs.

We had all the momentum; we were

riding the crest of a high and

beautiful wave. . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the

right kind of eyes you can almost

see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke

and rolled back.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,

New York, Random House, 1972

Jacket Copy for Fear &

Loathing in Las Vegas:

A Savage Journey to the

Heart of the American

Dream

The book began as a 250-word

caption for Sports Illustrated. I was down in LA, working on a very

tense and depressing investigation

of the allegedly accidental killing of

a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept -- and after a week or so on

the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next). . . and I needed

some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people

shaking butcher knives in my face

all the time.

My main contact on that story was

the infamous Chicano lawyer Oscar

Acosta -- an old friend, who was under bad pressure at the time, from his super-militant constituents, for even talking to a gringo/gabacho journalist. The pressure was so

heavy, in fact, that I found it

impossible to talk to Oscar alone.

We were always in the midst of a

crowd of heavy street-fighters who

didn't mind letting me know that

they wouldn't need much of an

excuse to chop me into hamburger.

This is no way to work on a very

volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my

rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel -- away from

his bodyguards, etc. -- and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the

pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as "leader of the militants" made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.

I understood this. . . and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports

Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the

weekend, at their expense, and

writing a few words about a

motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a

few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk

and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar Murder story.

So I called Sports Illustrated --

from the patio of the Polo Lounge --

and said I was ready to do the

"Vegas thing." They agreed. . . and from here on in there is no point in running down details, because

they're all in the book.

More or less. . . and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no

particular reason, I've decided to

call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction

is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best

journalists have always known this.

Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily "more true" than Journalism -- or vice versa -- but

that both "fiction" and "journalism"

are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same

end. This is getting pretty heavy. . .

so I should cut back and explain, at this point, that Fear & Loathing in

Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to

buy a fat notebook and record the

whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication

-- without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera.

The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive -- but once the image was written, the words

would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is

always (he says) the full-frame

negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping,

no spotting. . . no editing.

But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an

essentially fictional framework on

what began as a piece of

straight/crazy journalism. True

Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an

artist/photographer and the heavy

balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene,

while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film

director/producer who writes his

own scripts, does his own camera

work and somehow manages to film

himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

The American print media are not

ready for this kind of thing, yet.

Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I

could get the Vegas book published.

I sent Sports Illustrated 2500

words -- instead of the 250 they

asked for -- and my manuscript was

aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses. .

.

But to hell with all that. I seem to be drifting away from the point -- that Fear & Loathing is not what I thought it would be. I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn -

- in a place called Arcadia, California -- up the road from

Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I

was there during the first week of

the Spring Racing -- and the rooms

all around me were jammed with

people I couldn't quite believe.

Heavy track buffs, horse trainers,

ranch owners, jockeys & their

women. . . I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and

writing all night on the Salazar

article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so,

cooling out, by letting my head

unwind and my fingers run wild on

the big black Selectric. . . jotting down notes about the weird trip to

Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece -- plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn't, and Oscar

had finally relaxed enough to talk to me straight. Flashing across the

desert at 110 in a big red

convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged

or overheard.

But we stayed in Vegas a bit longer than we'd planned to. Or at least I did. Oscar had to get back for a nine o'clock court appearance on

Monday. So he took a plane and I

was left alone out there -- just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn't pay, and the treacherous reality of that scene caused me to

spend about 36 straight hours in my

room at the Mint Hotel. . . writing feverishly in a notebook about a

nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from.

These notes were the genesis of

Fear & Loathing. After my escape from Nevada and all through the

tense work week that followed

(spending all my afternoons on the

grim streets of East LA and my

nights at the typewriter in that

Ramada Inn hideout). . . my only

loose & human moments would

come around dawn when I could relax and fuck around with this

slow-building, stone-crazy Vegas

story.

By the time I got back to the Rolling Stone Hq. in San Francisco, the

Salazar story was winding out at

around 19,000 words, and the

strange Vegas "fantasy" was running on its own spaced energy and

pushing 5000 words -- with no end

in sight and no real reason to

continue working on it, except the

pure pleasure of unwinding on paper. It was sort of an exercise --

like Bolero and it might have stayed that way -- if Jarin Wenner, the

editor of Rolling Stone, hadn't liked the first 20 or so jangled pages

enough to take it seriously on its

own terms and tentatively schedule

it for publication-- which gave me

the push I needed to keep working

on it.

So now, six months later, the ugly

bastard is finished. And I like it --

despite the fact that I failed at what I was trying to do. As true Gonzo

Journalism, this doesn't work at all

-- and even if it did, I couldn't

possibly admit it. Only a goddamn

lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true. The

week the first section of Fear & Loathing appeared in Rolling Stone I found myself applying for White

House press credentials -- a plastic pass that would give me the run of

the White House, along with at least theoretical access to the big oval

room where Nixon hangs out, pacing back & forth on those fine thick taxpayers' carpets and

pondering Sunday's pointspread.

(Nixon is a serious pro football freak. He and I are old buddies on

this front: We once spent a long

night together on the Thruway from

Boston to Manchester, disecting the pro & con strategy of the Oakland-Green Bay Super Bowl game. It

was the only time I've ever seen the bugger relaxed -- laughing,

whacking me on the knee as he

recalled Max McGee's one-handed catch for the back-breaking

touchdown. I was impressed. It was like talking to Owsley about Acid.) The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked. . . and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around:

Especially as President.

And so much for all that. . . I have all of 1972 to fuck around with

Nixon, so why hassle it here?

Anyway, the main point I want to make about Fear & Loathing is that although it's not what I meant it to be, it's still so complex in its failure that I feel I can take the risk of

defending it as a first, gimped effort in a direction that what Tom Wolfe

calls "The New Journalism" has been flirting with for almost a

decade.

Wolfe's problem is that he's too

crusty to participate in his stories.

The people he feels comfortable

with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate

him as a writer are so weird that

they make him nervous. The only

thing new and unusual about

Wolfe's journalism is that he's an

abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a

peripheral understanding of what

John Keats was talking about when

he said that thing about Truth & Beauty. The only reason Wolfe

seems "new" is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of

American journalism very badly when it was just getting started. All Tom Wolfe did -- after he couldn't

make it on the Washington Post and couldn't even get hired by the

National Observer -- was to figure out that there was really not much

percentage in playing the old

Colliers' game, and that if he was ever going to make it in

"journalism," his only hope was to make it on his own terms: By being

good in the classical -- rather than the contemporary -- sense, and by

being the kind of journalist that the American print media honor mainly

in the breach. Or, failing that, at the funeral. Like Stephen Crane, who

couldn't even get a copyboy's job on today's New York Times. The only difference between working for the

Times and Time magazine is the difference between being a third-string All-American fullback at

Yale instead of Ohio State.

And again, yes, we seem to be

rambling -- so perhaps I should

close this off.

The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare -- for me, at least,

because I've always considered

writing the most hateful kind of

work. I suspect it's a bit like

fucking, which is only fun for

amateurs. Old whores don't do

much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it -- over & over, again & again --

or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in

retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish. . .

and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac

gibberish seems genuinely weird;

like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.

So maybe there's hope. Or maybe

I'm going mad. These are not easy

things to be sure of, either way. . .

and in the meantime we have this

failed experiment in Gonzo

Journalism, the certain truth of

which will never be established.

That much is definite. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas will have to be chalked off as a frenzied

experiment, a fine idea that went

crazy about halfway through. . . a

victim of its own conceptual

schizophrenia, caught & finally crippled in that vain, academic

limbo between "journalism" &

"fiction." And then hoist on its own petard of multiple felonies and

enough flat-put crime to put

anybody who'd admit to this kind of stinking behavior in the Nevada

State Prison until 1984.

So now, in closing, I want to thank everybody who helped me put this

happy work of fiction together.

Names are not necessary here; they

know who they are -- and in this

foul era of Nixon, that knowledge

and private laughter is probably the

best we can hope for. The line between martyrdom and stupidity

depends on a certain kind of tension in the body politic -- but that line disappeared, in America, at the trial of the "Chicago 7/8," and there is no point in kidding ourselves, now,

about Who Has the Power.

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile -- and the rest

of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to

Win, but mainly to keep from

Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a

nation of panicked sheep. . . but we owe it especially to, our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long-term consequences.

I don't want my son asking me, in

1984, why his friends are calling

me a "Good German."

Which gets down to a final point

about Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I have called it, only half

sarcastically, "a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties," and I think it is. This whole twisted saga is a sort of Atavistic Endeavor, a

dream-trip into the past -- however recent -- that was only half

successful. I think we both

understood, all along, that we were running a hell of a risk by laying a sixties trip on Las Vegas in 1971. . .

and that neither one of us would

ever pass this way again.

So we pushed it as far as we could,

and we survived -- which means something, I guess, but not much

beyond a good story and now,

having done it, written it, and

humping a reluctant salute to that

decade that started so high and then went so brutally sour, I don't see

much choice but to lash down the

screws and get on with what has to

be done. Either that or do nothing at all -- fall back on the Good

German, Panicked Sheep syndrome,

and I don't think I'm ready for that.

At least not right now.

Because it was nice to be loose and crazy with a good credit card in a

time when it was possible to run totally wild in Las Vegas and then

get paid for writing a book about it.

. . and it occurs to me that I

probably just made it, just under the wire and the deadline. Nobody will

dare admit this kind of behavior in print if Nixon wins again in '72.

The Swine are gearing down for a

serious workout this time around.

Four more years of Nixon means

four more years of John Mitchell --

and four more years of Mitchell

means another decade or more of

bureaucratic fascism that will be so entrenched, by 1976, that nobody

will feel up to fighting it. We will feel too old by then, too beaten, and by then even the Myth of the Road

will be dead -- if only for lack of exercise. There will not be any

wild-eyed, dope-sucking anarchists

driving around the country in

fireapple red convertibles if Nixon wins again in '72.

There will not even be any convertibles, much less any dope.

And all the anarchists will be

locked up in rehabilitation pens.

The internaional hotel-chain lobby

will ram a bill thru congress, setting mandatory death penalties for

anyone jumping a hotel bill -- and

death by castration & whipping if the deed is done in Vegas. The only legal high will be supervised

Chinese acupuncture, in government

hospitals at $200 a day -- with

Martha Mitchell as Secretary of

Health, Education & Welfare, operating out of a luxurious

penthouse on top of the Walter Reed Army Hospital.

So much, then, for The Road -- and

for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas & living to tell the tale. But maybe we won't really miss it. Maybe Law & Order is

really the best way to go, after all.

Yeah. . . maybe so, and if that's the way it happens. . . well, at least I'll know I was there, neck deep in the

madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild

that I felt like a two-ton Manta Ray jumping all the way across the Bay

of Bengal.

It was a good way to go, and I

recommend it highly -- at least for those who can stand the trip. And

for those who can't, or won't, there is not much else to say. Not now,

and certainly not by me, or Raoul

Duke either. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas marks the end of an era. .

. and now, on this fantastic Indian summer morning in the Rockies, I

want to leave this noisy black

machine and sit naked on my porch

for a while, in the sun.

Previously unpublished

A Conversation on Ralph

Steadman and His Book,

America, with Dr. Hunter S.

Thompson

HST: I'm sitting here looking at Ralph's book. It's terrible a really rotten thing to publish. . .

ED.: What's wrong with it?

HST: It's embarrassing. I hate to go into the details. This scatological scene here, with sex organs and

things. . .

ED.: You've worked with Ralph

Steadman quite a bit, Dr.

Thompson. Some of the material in

this book came out of assignments

and trips you made together. How did you two hook up in the first

place?

HST: Ah, let's see. . . I ran into him at the Kentucky Derby in May of

1969. I had been looking around for an artist to go the Derby with me. I called Warren Hinckle, the editor at Scanlan's, and said, "We need somebody with a really peculiar

sense of humor, because this is

going to be a very twisted story. It'll require somebody with a serious

kink in his brain." So Hinckle thought for a while and said, "I know just the person for you. He's

never been published over here

before. His name is Ralph

Steadman, he works for Private Eye in London and we'll get him over

there right away." So I went down there thinking that whatever showed up would be pretty hard to cope

with.

Ralph was a day late; he checked

into the wrong room, at the wrong

hotel. . . this was his first visit to this country, by the way, the

Kentucky Derby. He's had four

basic reasons for coming to this

country, which might explain

something about the nature of the

drawings in this book. His first visit was for the Kentucky Derby in

1969. . . he hadn't been here before that. His second gig -- also for

Scanlan's -- was the America's Cup yacht race at Newport, Rhode

Island, in 1970. The third was the

1972 Democratic Convention in

Miami for Rolling Stone. And the fourth was the Watergate hearings

in Washington in the summer of '73.

He went to a few other places in

conjunction with those trips --

places like Dallas, Disneyland,

Santa Fe -- but those were mainly

side trips. The assignments that set the psychological tone for his

reaction to this country were the

Kentucky Derby, the America's

Cup, Miami Beach for the

Convention and Watergate. That's a

pretty heavy series of shocks, I

think, for an artist in his late twenties who never wanted to work

over here in the first place.

ED.: Why not?

HST: I dont' think he ever even

liked the idea of this country, much less the reality.

ED.: That shows. He seems to be

horrified by America.

HST: Yeah. That's one of the

reasons he's fun to work with -- he

has a really fine, raw sense of horror.

ED.: What is it about America that

horrifies him?

HST: Everything. The only time I've ever seen him relaxed and peaceful

in this country was when he and his wife came out to my place in

Colorado for a while. . . But, of

course, that's total isolation; Ralph is very sensitive about his privacy.

ED.: How does he behave in public

when you've been with him?

HST: He's deceptively mild in

public, although every once in a

while he'll run amok. He behaved

pretty well at the Derby, even

though he was drunk the whole time.

ED.: Drunk?

HST: He's constantly drunk, in

public --

ED.: Does he draw on the spot?

HST: Well he sketches on the spot, he takes a lot of photographs. He

uses a little sort of Minox-type

camera. I didn't see him taking that many photos in Miami and

Washington. He used to do more of

that in the old days. Now he

sketches on the spot, but then he

goes back to the hotel and has the

whole assignment finished that same night.

ED.: So he's very fast?

HST: Yes, it's shocking to work

with him. Just about the time I'm starting to sit down and get to work, he's finished. It's depressing. It took me three weeks to write that

Kentucky Derby story, but Steadman

did his drawings in three days. He's not really a serious boozer, you

know, but when he comes over here

and gets involved in these horrible scenes, it causes him to drink

heavily.

ED.: What happened at America's

Cup?

HST: Well we met in New York, flew to Newport, and on the way I. .

. uh. . . I had a whole bunch of these little purple pills somebody had

given me. I knew it was going to be a beastly goddamn assignment and I

had definite plans for keeping it as unhinged as possible. . . kind of off-balance, off-center. I had no

intention of getting a serious story out of it. Our idea was to drive this boat we'd chartered right into the

race, right into the course. It was a 50-foot sloop -- not a racing boat,

but a pretty big sailing yacht.

Unfortunately, the weather was so

horrible that the bastards only raced one day out of three and the scene

was still going on when we had to

leave. . . for a very specific reason.

On the way up, I took one of these

purple pills, which turned out to be psilocybin I think. They were just

about right. I ended up taking two or three a day, for general research

purposes. . . Steadman doesn't get at all into drugs usually -- He smokes

a little now and then, but he's horrified of anything psychedelic.

He had a kind of personal drug

crisis up there in Newport. We

spent the first two days just waiting for the weather to lift so the boats could go out. It was intolerably

dull, and on the third day he said,

"You seem to be having a

wonderful time in this nightmare. I can't figure it out." And I said,

"Well, I rely on my medicine to keep totally twisted. Otherwise, I

couldn't stand this bullshit." And he

said, "Well, maybe I'll try one." At this point, I was up to about four a day. . . So he tried one -- I think he got it down about six o'clock at

night in one of those bars in town, a yachting crowd bar on the pier. And by midnight he was completely

berserk. He stayed that way for

about ninety-six hours, during which time we had to leave, had to charter a plane and flee because the police were looking for us.

ED.: Why?

HST: Well, at some point the morning after we took that first pill

-- or it might have been the next

morning, I'm not sure -- Ralph was

in an insane condition for three or four straight days -- but at one point I decided that, in order to get things moving a bit, we'd sneak over to the Australian yacht, the challenger

Gretel, and paint "Fuck the Pope"

on the side in huge letters, as big as we could make them. So that when

Gretel boomed out of the harbor in the morning, this brutal graffiti

would be painted in such a way that people on board, the crew

members, couldn't see it because

"Fuck the Pope" would be below the deck on the water line. . .

whereas everybody else woutd see it immediately from the press and

spectator boats.

But there was no way to get in

there, to do the paint job. It was like trying to get into Fort Knox. The

boats were guarded so well that the only way to get near them was to

come in from the sea. Even that was sort of guarded, because it was all lit up, and no boat of any size or any reason to be out there at night could have made it in by sea.

So we got a dinghy off the boat we

were chartering. I hadn't rowed a

boat at all for about ten years, and I don't think Ralph had ever rowed one. I ended up rowing. The boat

was just about big enough for the

two of us to fit in -- a very small dinghy. And we came in kind of

around the pilings on the sea-side.

We were sneaking from piling to

piling. We'd bought these six cans

of red spray paint from the

hardware store in the town and --

no, I actually bought them in New

York, come to think of it. So, I

guess I knew what we were going to do. Ralph was going to be the artist and I was just rowing the boat.

Somehow we managed to get right

next to the Australian yacht. It

looked like a huge, silver knife in

the water; just a giant blade, a racing machine -- not good for

anything else, absolutely stark and menacing. Particularly when you

find yourself down at the water line right next to the hull -- with all the spotlights and guards around it, up above.

We could hear people talking

further back, at the entrance to the dock. It never occurred to them that anyone would come in from the sea.

I was trying to hold the dinghy

against the side without making any noise, while Ralph stood up and

painted. And you know those spray-

paint cans have a little ball in them, and in order to mix the paint up, you have to shake it -- the little ball bangs around inside, and it hisses

just before the paint catches and it starts to work.

It was the goddamn little ball that got us. Because it was so quiet in

the harbor -- the sound of that ball bouncing around inside as Ralph

shook the can up. . . And then when he started cursing as the hissing got going, this really alarmed whoever

was up there, and they began to

shout.

Somebody looked over the side and

yelled, "What are you guys doing down there?" And I said something like "Nothing, nothing at all," and told Ralph to keep going. And then

they began to shout and a Land-

Rover came speeding down the

length of the dock, lights went on

everywhere, all over the damn slip.

It was a pretty tough stretch to row across with all these lights on us.

But we realized we were going to

have to do it -- or get jailed

immediately -- so Ralph just hung

on and we took off toward the

darkness and the open sea in this

dinghy with all these people yelling at us -- and Ralph still in a terrible psychological condition. . .

Because this was real fear that came on top of everything else.

When the spotlights hit us, I thought they might start shooting. They were almost insanely serious about the

security.

We got away by heading out to sea,

then doubling back into the darkness of the piling across the harbor. But we knew we had only gotten away

temporarily, because by this time

they'd seen us. . . We were in a

yellow dinghy belonging to a

yellow boat, and by dawn there

would be no question as to where

we'd come from.

We were fucked; there was no

doubt about it. Steadman was raving incoherently as we rowed back to

our boat; he hates violence of any

kind. . . But I figured he'd hate jail even worse, so when we got to our

boat I told him to pack his gear

while I took a big flare-gun up on

deck and fired three huge parachute flares up into the night-- these

brutes that cost about ten dollars

apiece; they go up about 100 yards,

then explode into four falling fireballs. . . the kind of things you're never supposed to use except for

serious emergencies at sea.

Anyway, I fired three of these while Ralph was packing -- twelve orange

fireballs that went off like twelve shotgun blasts and lit up the whole harbor. . . Some of them fell on

boats and started fires, people were shouting, leaping out of their bunks and grabbing fire extinguishers. . .

There was total chaos in the harbor.

I went below and got my own stuff together, then we hailed a passing

motor launch -- it was almost dawn

by this time -- and whoever was

running that launch agreed to give us a ride into the shore for twenty

dollars.

From there we got a cab straight to the airport and chartered a small

plane to Boston. Ralph was still in a really fiendish condition. He was barefooted, out of his mind and his only refuge was New York. I called

down there and found out that Scanlan's had folded yesterday, but a friend of Steadman's would meet

him at the airport. I said, "Now look, you have to meet him, because he's in terrible condition. . . I have to be back in Colorado today in

order to file to run for sheriff". . .

that was the deadline. So this guy

agreed to meet Ralph at La Guardia.

He went into a raving frenzy,

cursing me, cursing America. . .

ED.: Cursing?

HST: Oh yes. He was very bitter about it -- having lost his shoes, his dignity, his sanity -- all that sort of thing. . . I put him on the plane to New York, then flew off to

Colorado. . . and the next time I

heard from him was about a month

later, when I got a letter saying he'd never come to this country again,

and certainly not as long as I was here.

What had happened was -- I found

out later -- there was nobody at the

airport in New York City. Nobody met him. He had no shoes, no

money, he didn't know anything

about New York. The Scanlan's

office was closed, he couldn't even get in there, nobody answered the

phone. He borrowed ten dollars for

the cab from a bartender on Forty-

fifth Street. . . By this time his mind was coming apart. I talked to one of the people in the hotel that

Scanlan's used and they

remembered this strange, wild-eyed

Britisher pacing around the lobby,

kicking the walls with his bare feet and cursing everybody who came

near him. Finally, he remembered

some editor -- a friend of a friend, I think -- that he had some connection with. By this time his face and head had turned completely purple, his

feet were bleeding. It was about

twenty-four hours after he arrived

that he finally got to this editor's apartment somehow, in a state of

shattered nervous hysteria. She sort of nursed him back to health, and I think he had a return ticket -- he

never leaves home unless the money and a ticket are all brought to the house and handed to him. He has no

faith in expense reimbursement,

which I think is very wise.

ED.: Have all his experiences in

America been like that?

HST: Well, he fled Miami after two

days. He came over to cover the

Democratic Convention, but he

couldn't handle Miami.

ED.: He also covered the

Republican Convention. . .

HST: No, he watched that on

television in London. He refused to come back to Miami, for any

reason.

ED.: Why?

HST: He couldn't stand Miami

Beach. The shock was too great.

There's a drawing in the book that

explains why. . .

ED.: Why does he submit himself to

this kind of rape?

HST: I think he gets a perverse kind of kick out of it. His best drawings come out of situations where he's

been most anguished. So I

deliberately put him into shocking

situations when I work with him.

I've always found that that's when

he does his best stuff. . . I took him into the Watergate hearings

completely drunk. And then we had

to sit down at a press table in an

aisle where the senators came in

and out during the voting breaks.

Ralph leaped up during one of the

intermissions with a beer in his

hand and knocked Sam Ervin off his

feet. He almost got my press pass

pulled, almost got us thrown out of the hearings permanently.

Sometimes he seems unconscious of

the things he's doing. People think he doesn't quite know what's going

on. The real trouble he generates

comes later, when people realize

what he's done.

ED.: When they look at his drawings.

HST: Yes. When they realize they

were very nice to him, and then they see themselves horribly caricatured.

. . He did that to my brother once.

ED.: Your brother?

HST: Yeah, we were down there at

the Derby. Davison went to college

on a football scholarship as a

linebacker -- he encouraged Ralph

to do a sketch of him, sitting in a

restaurant in Louisville -- and Ralph did it. I thought we were in

serious trouble. At that point, I

maced the waiter at the restaurant

and we had to leave.

ED.: Mace? You maced him?

HST: Yeah, I maced the waiter. He

was a surly bastard, and I figured a shot of Mace would be good for

him -- and for us, too.

ED.: What provoked you?

HST: It was just an argument we got into with the waiter. I'm not sure

how it developed. I maced him right after Ralph had done this drawing

of my brother. All of a sudden we

had something new to cope with. In

fact, we had to leave the restaurant immediately.

ED.: Ralph's kinda like Clark Kent, you know. He has that mild-mannered disguise.

HST: Yes. I wonder what would

show on his chest if we could do a

drawing of him ripping back the shirt. . . maybe an adder or an

iguana or a Gila monster. . .

ED.: Yes. The kind that sits still for hours and then kills you.

HST: With a flip of the tongue. . .

yes, I think a Gila monster would be appropriate. A gila monster with a

ballpoint pen for a tongue.

ED.: Ralph works in ball-point?

HST: I'm not sure. . . As I recall, he

uses chalk and big, bright pencils; and when he's carrying those big

pads around with him, it sets him

off from almost anybody he's near.

ED.: Do people go up and look at

what he's doing?

HST: No, because he works so fast

and he concentrates so intensely. It would be like harassing a TV

cameraman. There's something

about Steadman that warns people

not to interfere with him when he's working.

ED.: Why do you like to work with him? Would you rather work with

Ralph than a photographer?

HST: Definitely. Photographers

generally get in the way of stories.

Steadman has a way of becoming

part of the story. And I like to see things through his eyes. He gives me a perspective that I wouldn't

normally have because he's shocked

at things I tend to take for granted.

Photographers just run around

sucking up anything they can focus

on and don't talk much about what they're doing. Photographers don't

participate in the story. They all can act, but very few of them think.

Steadman thinks more like a writer; I can communicate with him. He

comes to grips with a story sort of the same way I do. . . I don't mean that we always agree on what

somebody looks like. But we can go to the Watergate hearings, for

instance, and he'll be shaken and

repulsed by something that happens

and once he points it out to me, I'll

agree with him.

ED.: What is it about America that

you think shocks him most?

HST: I think it's the lack of subtlety and the lack of the traditional

British attempt to cover up the

warts, or explain them away

somehow. In America, we decorate

the warts, sell them, cultivate them.

. . I'm looking at this drawing he did in Vegas of all those cops standing in the lobby.

ED.: Is it the people who shock him?

HST: Yeah. The extreme types --

cowboys and burr-haired cops,

horrible Southern drunkards at the

Kentucky Derby and gross

degenerates in Miami beach. Of

course that's all he's seen on these experiences.

ED.: He's had a one-sided look at

things, traveling with you.

HST: That's true. It's been pretty

hard for him. . .

ED.: Couldn't be worse.

HST: Only if he'd traveled with

Charlie Manson, somebody like

that. . . Ralph seems to work much

better when he's genuinely offended.

And I've learned now I can just

kinda chuckle when I see something, and even if it's not worth writing, I'll think, "Ah-hah, this'll really give the bastard a jolt. . ." So I'll make sure he has to confront it.

ED.: He needs to be in jeopardy?

HST: I think that's part of the reason the Vegas book worked so well.

That sense of being in jeopardy ran all through it. I think he identified very strongly with it. There's no

substitute for that horrified

adrenalin rush.

There's a paranoid flash in a lot of his works too. He has a paranoid

side to him: "People are lying to me; that cant be true. . . if Thompson says I should turn right here,

probably I should turn left. . ." He gets very confused about things like that. But he's fun to work with. I

think he deliberately gets himself in situations that I have to get him out of, so I have to worry about him.

That thing at the Watergate is a

perfect example, although I didn't

rescue him then, I knew what was

going to happen.

ED.: You didn't rescue him?

HST: Well, I pulled him out after a while -- but not when he jumped up

and crashed through a line of marshals around Ervin and knocked

him into the TV cameras. It was a

narrow aisle between the press

table and the TV. . . it was all their machinery really, all the hardware.

ED.: Who would you compare him

to in the history of art? What do you think of him, objectively?

HST: George Grosz, I guess. That's

who I think of right away. And. . .

Hogarth. . . or maybe Pat Oliphant

today. . .

ED.: Do you think he's given us an accurate portrait of America?

HST: Well, I'm not sure Hogarth

was entirely objective but, yes,

there's an element of reality, even in Ralph's most grotesque drawings.

He catches things. Using a sort of

venomous, satirical approach, he

exaggerates the two or three things that horrify him in a scene or

situation. . . And you can say that these people didn't look exactly like that, but when you can look at them

again it seems pretty damn close.

All the cops in the Vegas hotel

lobby are wearing the same plaid

Bermuda shorts, and they're uglier

than any group of mutants you'd see at a bad insane asylum -- you know, for the criminally insane. But I look back on that scene and I know they

weren't much different, really. They had on different colored shirts and they weren't all crazy and dangerous-looking -- but he caught

the one or two distinguishing

characteristics among them: the

beady eyes, burr haircuts, weasel teeth, beer bellies. If you exaggerate those four characteristics, you get a pretty grizzly drawing. . .

ED.: He is a realist, then. . .

HST: Oh yes. By way of

exaggeration and selective

grotesquery. His view of reality is not entirely normal. Ralph sees

through the glass very darkly. He

doesn't merely render a scene, he

interprets it, from his own point of view. For instance, he felt the

senators should be on trial at the Watergate hearings. He was

convinced that they were totally

corrupt. Corruption in its broadest sense seems to be the thing that

shocks him and gets him cranked

more than anything else. . .

congenital corruption. . . on a level far beyond police payoffs or

political bribery. . . deeply corrupt people, performing essentially

corrupt actions, in the name of law and order.

ED.: Do you plan any further projects together?

HST: The trial of Nixon would be a

nice trip for Steadman.

ED.: In the Senate?

HST: Yes. Nixon doesn't have to be

in the dock -- according to law --

but it's possible that he might be. . .

and I think that would be an ideal

story for Ralph. Or maybe a very

expensive wedding in the South --

Old, incestuous families, things like

that -- or a carnival scene, like a traveling carnival, with sideshows

at country fairs. . . and I think he could get off pretty harshly on an

L.A. gang rape or a sex orgy on

Beekman Place in New York. . .

There's a kind of wild theme in his drawings: decadence, corruption,

immorality. . . like these horrible people in plastic hats standing

outside the Kennedy Memorial in

Dallas. Obscenity in its broadest

sense is another hallmark of the

things that shock him. . . I think he

sees all of Dallas and Texas and even all of America as obscene, or

at least a mockery of what it should be -- the way it claims to be, from his point of view. He probably

thinks it was doomed from the start.

He has that King-George-III notion

of America.

ED,: Yes, as an Englishman. . . We

fucked up from the beginning. We

should have stayed with those guys.

HST: Right. A bunch of crude

upstarts -- couldn't make it work.

Maybe Ralph should spend more time at Shriners conventions. I

notice he caught one of those in

Dallas. We should lock him in a

hotel at the National Shriners

Convention in Duluth for a whole

week. . . Jesus, that might be a

terminal shock. . . or he'd come up with some fantastic drawings. He

works best when you put him in a

situation where he's bordering on

flipping out, but not quite, you know

-- where he can still function.

ED.: It's the old edge.

HST: Why not? It's a nice place to

work. . . When he's comfortable and not stunned or appalled at what he's seeing, then he doesn't do his best stuff. . . it's not bad, but it doesn't have that. . .

ED.: Doesn't have the bite.

HST: Well, that's probably true, but you can't expect a mind like Ralph's to stay up on the wire all the time; it's too fucking painful, even when

you do it in short doses. But Steadman has pretty good sense

about that, so I figure he'll keep his edge for a while. . . which is a good thing for me, because there's nobody I'd rather work with.

-- June 1974

America by Ralph Steadman, San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Press, 1974

Strange Rumblings in Aztlan

The. . . Murder. . . and Resurrection of Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. . . Savage

Polarization & the Making of a Martyr. . . Bad News for the

Mexican-American. . . Worse

News for the Pig. . . And Now the New Chicano. . . Riding a Grim

New Wave. . . The Rise of the

Batos Locos. . . Brown Power and a Fistful of Reds. . . Rude Politics in the Barrio. . . Which Side Are You On. . . Brother?. . . There Is

No More Middleground. . . No Place to Hide on Whittier

Boulevard. . . No Refuge from the Helicopters. . . No Hope in the

Courts. . . No Peace with the

Man. . . No Leverage Anywhere. .

. and No Light at the End of This Tunnel. . . Nada. . .

Morning comes hard to the Hotel

Ashmun; this is not a place where

the guests spring eagerly out of bed to greet the fresh new day. But on

this particular morning everybody

in the place is awake at the crack of dawn: There is a terrible pounding

and shrieking in the hallway, near

room No. 267. Some junkie has

ripped the doorknob off the

communal bathroom, and now the

others can't get in -- so they are

trying to kick the door down. The

voice of the manager wavers

hysterically above the din: "Come on now, fellas -- do I have to call the sheriff?" The reply comes hard and fast: "You filthy gabacho pig!

You call the fuckin sheriff and I'll

cut your fuckin throat." And now the sound of wood cracking, more

screaming, the sound of running feet outside my door, No. 267.

The door is locked, thank Christ --

but how can you say for sure in a

place like the Hotel Ashmun?

Especially on a morning like this

with a mob of wild junkies locked

out of the hall bathroom and maybe

knowing that No. 267 is the only

room within lunging distance that

has a private bath. It is the best in

the house, at $5.80 a night, and the lock on the door is brand new. The

old one was ripped out about 12

hours earlier, just before I checked in.

The desk clerk had gone to a lot of trouble to get me into this room. His key wouldn't fit the new lock.

"Jesus Christ!" he kept muttering.

"This key has to fit! This is a brand new Yale lock." He stared balefully at the bright new key in his hand.

"Yeah," I said. "But that key is for a

Webster lock."

"By God you're right!" he exclaimed. And he rushed off,

leaving us standing there in the

hallway with big chunks of ice in

our hands. "What's wrong with that guy?" I asked. "He seems out of control -- all this sweating and

grappling and jabbering. . ."

Benny Luna laughed. "Man, he's nervous! You think it's normal for him to be lettin four nasty lookin

Chicanos into his best room at three

in the morning? With all of us carryin chunks of ice and funny-lookin leather bags?" He was

staggering around the hall,

convulsed with laughter. "Man, this guy is freaked! He doesn't know what's goin on!"

"Three Chicanos," said Oscar.

"And one hillbilly."

"You didn't tell him I was a writer, did you?" I asked. I'd noticed Oscar talking to the man, a tall sort of

defeated looking Germanic type, but

I hadn't paid much attention.

"No, but he recognized me," Oscar replied. "He said, 'You're the lawyer, aren't you?' So I said 'That's right, and I want your best room for this gabacho friend of mine.'" He grinned. "Yeah, he knows

something's wrong with this scene, but he doesn't know what. These

guys are scared of everything now.

Every merchant on Whittier

Boulevard is sure he's living on

borrowed time, so they go all to

pieces at the first sign of anything strange going on. It's been this way ever since Salazar."

The room clerk/manager/keeper/etc,

suddenly rounded the hallway

corner with the right key, and let us into the room. It was a winner -- a run-down echo of a place I stayed

in a few years ago in the slums of

Lima, Peru. I can't recall the name of that place, but I remember that all the room keys were attached to big

wooden knobs about the size of

grapefruits, too big to fit in a pocket. I thought about suggesting

this to our man in the Hotel Ashmun, but he didn't wait around for tips or small-talk. He was gone in a flash, leaving us alone to deal with a quart of rum and God only knows what

else. . . We put the ice in a basin next to the bed and chopped it up

with a huge rigging knife. The only music was a tape cassette of Let It Bleed.

What better music for a hot night on

Whittier Boulevard in 1971? This has not been a peaceful street, of

late. And in truth it was never peaceful. Whittier is to the vast

Chicano barrio in East Los Angeles what the Sunset Strip is to

Hollywood. This is where the street action lives: The bars, the hustlers, the drug market, the whores -- and

also the riots, the trashings, killings, gassings, the sporadic bloody

clashes with the hated, common

enemy: The cops, the Pigs, the Man, that blue-crusted army of fearsome

gabacho troops from the East L.A.

Sheriff's Department.

The Hotel Ashmun is a good place

to stay if you want to get next to

whatever's happening on Whittier

Boulevard. The window of No. 267

is about 15 feet above the sidewalk and just a few blocks west on the

Silver Dollar Cafe, a nondescript

tavern that is not much different

from any of the others nearby. There is a pool table in the rear, a pitcher of beer sells for a dollar, and the

faded Chicano barmaid rolls dice with the patrons to keep the jukebox going. Low number pays, and

nobody seems to care who selects

the music.

We had been in there earlier, when

not much was happening. It was my

first visit in six months, since early September when the place was still

rancid with the stench of CS gas and fresh varnish. But now, six months

later, the Silver Dollar had aired

out nicely. No blood on the floor,

no ominous holes in the ceiling. The only reminder of my other visit was a thing hanging over the cash

register that we all noticed

immediately. It was a black gas

mask, staring blindly out at the

room-- and below the gas mask was

a stark handprinted sign that said:

"In memory of August 29, 1970."

Nothing else, no explanation. But no explanation was necessary -- at

least not to anybody likely to be

found drinking in the Silver Dollar.

The customers are locals: Chicanos and barrio people -- and every one

of them is acutely aware of what

happened in the Silver Dollar Cafe

on August 29, 1970.

That was the day that Ruben

Salazar, the prominent "Mexican-American" columnist for the Los Angeles Times and News Director for bilingual KMEX-TV, walked

into the place and sat down on a

stool near the doorway to order a

beer he would never drink. Because

just about the time the barmaid was sliding his beer across the bar a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy

named Tom Wilson fired a tear gas

bomb through the front door and

blew half of Ruben Salazar's head

off. All the other customers escaped out the back exit to the alley, but Salazar never emerged. He died on

the floor in a cloud of CS gas -- and when his body was finally carried

out, hours later, his name was

already launched into martyrdom.

Within 24 hours, the very mention

of the name "Ruben Salazar" was enough to provoke tears and fist-shaking tirades not only along

Whittier Boulevard but all over

East L.A.

Middle-aged housewives who had

never thought of themselves as

anything but lame-status "Mexican-Americans" just trying to get by in a mean Gringo world they never

made suddenly found themselves

shouting "Viva La Raza" in public.

And their husbands -- quiet

Safeway clerks and lawn-care salesmen, the lowest and most

expendable cadres in the Great

Gabacho economic machine -- were

volunteering to testify; yes, to stand up in court, or wherever, and

calling themselves Chicanos. The

term "Mexican-American" fell massively out of favor with all but the old and conservative -- and the rich. It suddenly came to mean

"Uncle Tom." Or, in the argot of East L.A. -- "Tio Taco." The difference between a Mexican-

American and a Chicano was the difference between a Negro and a

Black.

All this has happened very

suddenly. Too suddenly for most

people. One of the basic laws of

politics is that Action Moves Away

from the Center. The middle of the

road is only popular when nothing

is happening. And nothing serious

has been happening politically in

East L.A. for longer than most

people can remember. Until six

months ago the whole place was a colorful tomb, a vast slum full of

noise and cheap labor, a rifle shot away from the heart of downtown

Los Angeles. The barrio, like

Watts, is actually a part of the city core-- while places like Hollywood

and Santa Monica are separate

entities. The Silver Dollar Cafe is a ten-minute drive from City Hall.

The Sunset Strip is a 30-minute

sprint on the Hollywood Freeway.

Whittier Boulevard is a hell of a

long way from Hollywood, by any measure. There is no psychic

connection at all. After a week in

the bowels of East L.A. I felt

vaguely guilty about walking into

the bar in the Beverly Hills Hotel

and ordering a drink -- as if I didn't quite belong there, and the waiters all knew it. I had been there before, under different circumstances, and

felt totally comfortable. Or almost.

There is no way to. . . well, to hell with that. The point is that this time I felt different. I was oriented to a

completely different world -- 15

miles away.

MARCHA FOR LA JUSTICIA

THERE ARE NO POLICE

COMMUNITY RELATIONS IN THE

CHICANO COMMUNITIES. No, EVER

SINCE THE POLICE RIOT ON

AUGUST 29th IT HAS BECOME TOO

OBVIOUS TO IGNORE THE FACT

THAT THE LAPD, THE SHERIFFS,

AND THE HIGHWAY PATROL HAVE

FOR YEARS BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY

TRYING TO DESTROY THE TRUE

SPIRIT OF OUR PEOPLE. IN THE

PAST, POLICE HAVE BROKEN UP

EVERY ATTEMPT OF OUR PEOPLE

TO GET JUSTICE, THEY HAVE

BEATEN YOUNG STUDENTS

PROTESTING POOR EDUCATION,

RAIDED OFFICES, ARRESTED

LEADERS, CALLED US

COMMUNISTIC AND GANGSTERS IN

THE PRESS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE

ON THE STREETS WHEN THE PRESS

WAS GONE.

EVEN MORE INSIDIOUS THAN THE

DIRECT POLITICAL REPRESSION

AGAINST LEADERS AND

DEMONSTRATIONS IS THE

CONTINUOUS ATTACKS ON THE

EVERYDAY LIFE OF PEOPLE IN THE

BARRIOS. ALMOST EVERY MONTH

EACH BARRIO HAS SUFFERED

THROUGH AT LEAST ONE CASE OF

SEVERE BRUTALITY OR MURDER

AND THEN STRUGGLED TO DEFEND

FRIENDS AND WITNESSES WHO FACE

BUM RAPS. ONE WEEK IT'S SAN

FERNANDO, THEN LINCOLN

HEIGHTS, EAST L.A., VENICE, THE

HARBOR AND POMONA. . . THEY

HIT ONE BARRIO AT A TIME,

TRYING TO BREAK OUR UNITY AND

SPIRIT.

ON AUGUST 29th, THROUGH ALL

OF OUR BARRIOS WERE

DEMONSTRATIONS FOR PEACE AND

JUSTICE AND THE POLICE RIOTED

AND ATTACKED. OUT OF FEAR,

THEY INSTALLED MARTIAL LAW,

ARRESTING AND ABUSING

HUNDREDS OF COMMUNITY PEOPLE.

THEY KILLED GILBERTO DIAZ,

LYNN WARD, AND RUBEN

SALAZAR, THE MAN WHO COULD

TELL OUR STORY TO THE NATION

AND THE WORLD.

WE MUST NOT FORGET THE LESSON

OF AUGUST 29TH, THAT THE MAJOR

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ISSUE WE

FACE IS POLICE BRUTALITY. SINCE

THE 29TH POLICE ATTACKS HAVE

BEEN WORSE, EITHER THE PEOPLE

CONTROL THE POLICE, OR WE ARE

LIVING IN A POLICE STATE.

WE MUST NOT ALLOW THE POLICE

TO BREAK OUR UNITY. WE MUST

CARRY ON THE SPIRIT OF RUBEN

AND SALAZAR AND EXPOSE THIS

BRUTALITY TO THE NATION AND

THE WORLD. THE CHICANO

MORATORIUM COMMITTEE CALLS

UPON YOU TO SUPPORT OUR NON-

VIOLENT MARCH FOR JUSTICE

THROGH THE BARRIOS OF THE

GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA.

CARAVANS WILL BE COMING FROM

DOZENS OF CITIES AND AROUND

OUR BARRIOS. WE WILL ALL MEET

AT THE E.L.A. SHERIFF'S SUBSTATION ON 3rd STREET BETWEEN

FETTERLY AND WOODS. AT 11:00

AM JANUARY 31, 1971. Join your

local caravan. For further

information calL 268-6745.

-- Handbill from the National

Chicano Moratorium Committee

My first night in the Hotel Ashmun

was not restful. The others had left around five, then there was the

junkie eruption at seven. . .

followed an hour later by a

thundering, low-fidelity outburst of wailing Norteno music from the

jukebox in the Boulevard Cafe

across the street. . . and then, about nine-thirty, I was jerked up again by a series of loud whistles from the

sidewalk right under my window,

and a voice calling, "Hunter! Wake-up, man! Let's get moving."

Holy jesus! I thought. Only three

people in the world know where I

am right now, and they're all asleep.

Who else could have tracked me to

this place? I bent the metal slats of the Venetian blind apart just enough to look down at the street and see

Rudy Sanchez, Oscar's quiet little

bodyguard, looking up at my

window and waving urgently:

"Come on out, man, it's time. Oscar and Benny are up the street at the

Sweetheart. That's the bar on the

corner where you see all those

people in front. We'll wait for you there, OK? You awake?"

"Sure I'm awake," I said. "I've been

sitting here waiting for you lazy criminal bastards. Why do

Mexicans need so much fucking

sleep?"

Rudy smiled and turned away.

"We'll be waiting for you, man.

We're gonna be drinkin a hell of a

lot of bloody marys and you know

the rule we have down here."

"Never mind that," I muttered. "I need a shower."

But my room had no shower. And

somebody, that night, had managed to string a naked copper wire

across the bathtub and plug it into a socket underneath the basin outside the bathroom door. For what

reason? Demon Rum, I had no idea.

Here I was in the best room in the

house, looking for the shower and

finding only an electrified bathtub.

And no place to righteously shave --

in the best hotel on the strip. Finally I scrubbed my face with a hot towel and went across the street to the

Sweetheart Lounge.

Oscar Acosta, the Chicano lawyer, was there; leaning on the bar,

talking idly with some of the

patrons. Of the four people around

him -- all in their late twenties --

two were ex-cons, two were part-

time dynamite freaks and known

fire-bombers, and three of the four were veteran acid-eaters. Yet none

of this surfaced in the conversation.

The talk was political, but only in terms of the courtroom. Oscar was

dealing with two hyperpolitical

trials at the same time.

In one, the trial of the "Biltmore Six," he was defending six young Chicanos who'd been arrested for

trying to burn down the Biltmore

Hotel one night about a year ago,

while Governor Ronald Reagan

was delivering a speech there in the ballroom. Their guilt or innocence

was immaterial at this point,

because the trial had developed into a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system.

In the preceeding months, Acosta

had subpoenaed every Superior

Court Judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them

at length, under oath, on the subject of their "racism." It was a wretched affront to the whole court system,

and Acosta was working overtime

to make it as wretched as possible.

Here were these hundred and nine

old men, these judges, compelled to take time out from whatever they

were doing and go into another

courtroom to take the stand and

deny charges of "racism" from an attorney they all loathed.

Oscar's contention, throughout, was that all Grand Juries are racist,

since all grand jurors have to be

recommended by Superior Court

Judges -- who naturally tend to

recommend people they know

personally or professionally. And

that therefore no ratbastard Chicano street crazy, for instance, could

possibly be indicted by "a jury of his peers." The implications of a victory in this case were so

obvious, so clearly menacing to the court system, that interest in the

verdict had filtered all the way down to places like the Boulevard,

the Silver Dollar and the

Sweetheart. The level of political

consciousness is not normally high

in these places -- especially on

Saturday mornings -- but Acosta's

very presence, no matter where he

goes or what he seems to be doing,

is so grossly political that anybody who wants to talk to him has to

figure out some way to deal on a

meaningful political level.

"The thing is to never talk down,"

he says. "We're not trying to win votes out here. Hell, that trip's been done, it's over. The idea now is to make people think. Force them to think. And you can't do that by

walking around slapping strangers

on the back and buying them beers."

Then grinning. "Unless you happen to be babbling drunk or stoned.

Which is certainly not my style; I

want to make that one thing very

clear."

But today the talk was easy, with no ulterior politics. "Say, Oscar,"

somebody asked. "How do we

stand on that Grand Jury thing?

What's our chances?"

Acosta shrugged. "We'll win.

Maybe not on this level, but well

win on appeal."

"That's good, man. I hear you're really workin out on the bastards."

"Yeah, we're fuckin em over. But that one might take another year.

Right now we have to think about Corky's trial. It starts Tuesday."

"Corky's in town?" The interest is obvious. Heads turn to listen. Rudy eases back a few feet so he can

watch the whole bar, scanning the

faces for any that might be too interested. Paranoia is rampant in

the barrio: Informers. Narcs.

Assassins -- who knows? And

Rudolfo "Corky" Gonzales is a definite heavy, prime target for a

frame or a set-up. A scholarly, soft-

spoken ex-boxer, his Denver-based

"Crusade for Justice" is one of the few viable Chicano political organizations in the country.

Gonzales is a poet, a street-fighter, a theorist, an organizer, and the

most influential "Chicano leader" in the country next to Cesar Chavez.

Whenever Corky Gonzales appears

in East L.A. -- if only to stand trial on a misdemeanor weapons bust --

the level of political tension rises noticeably. Gonzales has a very

intense following in the barrio.

Most of his supporters are young:

Students, dropouts, artists, poets, crazies -- the people who respect Cesar Chavez, but who can't really

relate to church-going farmworkers.

"This weekend is going to be hell,"

Oscar had told me the night before.

"Whenever Corky's in town, my

apartment turns into a fucking zoo. I have to go to a motel to get any

sleep. Shit, I can't stay all night arguing radical politics when I have

to be in court the next morning.

These wild-eyed fuckers show up at

all hours; they bring wine, joints, acid, mescaline, guns. . . Jesus,

Corky wouldn't dare take that kind

of risk. He's already here, but I

don't know where he's staying. He's checked into some kind of goddamn

Holiday Inn or something, about

five miles out on Rosemeade, but he won't tell anybody where it is -- not even me, his lawyer." He smiled,

"And that's pretty shrewd, because if I knew where he was I might go

over some night all twisted and crazy about calling a general strike at dawn, or some other dangerous

bullshit that would freak him."

He nodded, smiling lazily down at

his drink. "As a matter of fact, I have been thinking about calling a general strike. The movement is so

goddamn splintered right now that

almost anything would help. Yeah,

maybe I should write Corky a

speech along those lines, then call a press conference for tomorrow

afternoon in the Silver Dollar." He laughed bitterly and called for

another bloody mary.

Acosta has been practicing law in

the barrio for three years. I met him a bit earlier than that, in another era which hardly matters here, except

that it might be a trifle less than fair to run this story all the way out to the end without saying at least once, for the record, that Oscar is an old friend and occasional antagonist. I first met him, as I recall, in a bar

called "The Daisy Duck" in Aspen, when he lumbered up to me and

started raving about "ripping the system apart like a pile of cheap

hay," or something like that. . . and I remember thinking, "Well, here's another one of those fucked-up,

guilt-crazed dropout lawyers from

San Francisco -- some dingbat who

ate one too many tacos and decided

he was really Emiliano Zapata."

Which was OK, I felt, but it was a

hard act to handle in Aspen in that

high white summer of 1967. That was the era of Sergeant Pepper, the Surrealistic Pillow and the original Buffalo Springfield. It was a good

year for everybody -- or for most people, anyway. There were

exceptions, as always. Lyndon

Johnson was one, and Oscar Acosta

was another. For entirely different reasons. That was not a good

summer to be either the President of the United States or an angry

Mexican lawyer in Aspen.

Oscar didn't hang around long. He washed dishes for a while, did a bit of construction work, bent the

County Judge out of shape a few

times, then took off for Mexico to

"get serious." The next thing I heard, he was working for the public

defender's office in L.A. That was

sometime around Christmas of

1968, which was not a good year

for anybody -- except Richard

Nixon and perhaps Oscar Acosta.

Because by that time Oscar was

beginning to find his own track. He

was America's only "Chicano lawyer," he explained in a letter, and he liked it. His clients were all Chicanos and most were "political criminals," he said. And if they were guilty it was only because they were "doing what had to be done."

That's fine, I said. But I couldn't really get into it. I was all for it, you understand, but only on the

basis of a personal friendship. Most of my friends are into strange things I don't totally understand -- and with

a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't

change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with

another friend who wants to buy a

single-shot Remington Fireball so

he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?

Whatever's right, I say. Never fuck with a friend's head by accident.

And if their private trips get out of

control now and then -- well, you do what has to be done.

Which more or less explains how I

suddenly found myself involved in

the murder of Ruben Salazar. I was

up in Portland, Oregon, at the time, trying to cover the National

American Legion Convention and

the Sky River Rock Festival at the

same time. . . and I came back to my secret room in the Hilton one night to find an "urgent message" to call Mr. Acosta in Los Angeles.

I wondered how he had managed to track me down in Portland. But I

knew, somehow, what he was

calling about. I had seen the L.A.

Times that morning, with the story of Salazar's death, and even at a

distance of 2000 miles it gave off a powerful stench. The problem was

not just a gimp or a hole in the

story; the whole goddamn thing was

wrong. It made no sense at all.

The Salazar case had a very special hook in it: Not that he was a

Mexican or a Chicano, and not even Acosta's angry insistence that the

cops had killed him in cold blood

and that nobody was going to do

anything about it. These were all

proper ingredients for an outrage,

but from my own point of view the

most ominous aspect of Oscar's

story was his charge that the police had deliberately gone out on the

streets and killed a reporter who'd been giving them trouble. If this was true, it meant the ante was being

upped drastically. When the cops

declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any

scene of "unlawful protest" a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day -- and not just for journalists.

For thirteen devastated blocks, darkened stores stood gaping,

show windows smashed. Traffic

signs, spent shotgun shells, chunks of brick and concrete littered the pavement. A pair of sofas, gutted by fire, smouldered at a curbside splashed with blood. In the hot

blaze of police flares, three Chicano youths swaggered down

the ruined street. "Hey brother,"

one yelled to a black reporter,

"was this better than Watts?"

-- Newsweek, Feb. 15, 71

Ruben Salazar is a bonafide martyr

now -- not only in East L.A., but in Denver and Santa Fe and San

Antonio, throughout the Southwest.

The length and breadth of Aztlan --

the "conquered territories" that came under the yoke of Gringo

occupation troops more than 100

years ago, when "vendido

politicians in Mexico City sold out to the US" in order to call off the invasion that Gringo history books

refer to as the "Mexican-American War." (Davy Crockett, Remember the Alamo, etc.)

As a result of this war, the US

government was ceded about half of

what was then the Mexican nation.

This territory was eventually

broken up into what is now the

states of Texas, New .Mexico, Arizona and the southern half of

California. This is Aztlan, more a

concept than a real definition. But even as a concept it has galvanized a whole generation of young

Chicanos to a style of political

action that literally terrifies their Mexican-American parents.

Between 1968 and 1970 the

"Mexican-American Movement"

went through the same drastic

changes and heavy trauma that had

earlier afflicted the "Negro Civil

Rights Movement" in the early Sixties. The split was mainly along generational lines, and the first

"young radicals" were

overwhelmingly the sons and

daughters of middle-class Mexican-

Americans who had learned to live

with "their problem."

At this stage, the Movement was

basically intellectual. The word

"Chicano" was forged as a necessary identity for the people of Aztlan -- neither Mexicans nor

Americans, but a conquered Indian/Mestizo nation sold out like slaves by its leaders and treated

like indentured servants by its

conquerers. Not even their language was definable, much less their

identity. The language of East L.A.

is a speedy sort of cholo mixture of Mexican Spanish and California

English. You can sit in the

Boulevard Cafe on Whittier on a

Saturday morning and hear a young

Chicano ex-con explaining to his

friends: "This goddamn gabacro

parole officer tells me I have to get the sewing machine back. I talked to that goddamn vendido and the vieja

tambien, and they tell me don't

worry, we won't say nothing that

would send you back to the joint.

But the gabacho keeps pushin me.

What can I do?" And then, suddenly noticing a vagrant gringo nearby, he finishes the whole story in rapid,

angry Spanish.

There are a lot of ex-cons in the

Movement now, along with a whole

new element -- the "Batos Locos."

And the only difference, really, is that the ex-cons are old enough to

have done time for the same things

the batos locos haven't been arrested for, yet. Another difference is that the ex-cons are old enough to frequent the action bars along

Whittier, while most of the batos locos are still teenagers. They drink heavily, but not in the Boulevard or the Silver Dollar. On Friday night

you will find them sharing quarts of sweet Key Largo in the darkness of

some playground in the housing project. And along with the wine,

they eat Seconal -- which is

massively available in the barrio,

and also cheap: a buck or so for a

rack of five reds, enough to fuck

anybody up. Seconal is one of the few drugs on the market (legal or

otherwise) that is flat guaranteed to turn you mean. Especially with wine on the side and a few

"whites," bennies, for a chaser. This is the kind of diet that makes a man want to go out and stomp people. . .

the only other people I've ever seen heavily into the red/white/wine diet are the Hell's Angels.

The results are about the same. The Angels would get loaded and then

snarl around looking for somebody

to chain-whip. The batos locos get loaded and start looking for their

own kind of action (burning a store, rat-packing a nigger, or stealing

some cars for a night of high-speed cruising on the freeways). The

action is almost always illegal,

usually violent -- but only recently has it become "political."

Perhaps the main Movement/focus

in the barrio these days is the

politicalization of the batos locos.

The term translates literally as

"crazy guys," but in harsh political terms it translates as "street crazies," teenage wildmen who

have nothing to lose except their

hostility and a vast sense of doom

and boredom with the world as they

know it. "These guys aren't afraid of

the pigs," a Chicano activist told me. "Hell, they like a fight with the pigs. They want it. And there's a hell of a lot of 'em, man. Maybe two hundred thousand. If we can

organize these guys, man, we can

move on anybody."

But the batos locos are not easily organized. For one thing, they're

hopelessly ignorant about politics.

They hate politicians -- even

Chicano politicians. They are also

very young, very hostile, and when

you get them excited they are likely to do almost anything -- especially when they're full of wine and reds.

One of the first overt attempts to

bring the batos locos into the new Chicano politics was the mass rally against police brutality last January 31st. The organizers took great care to make sure the thing would be

peaceful. The word went out all

over the barrio that "this one has to be cool -- no riot, no violence." A truce was arranged with the East

L.A. sheriff's department; the cops

agreed to "keep a low profile," but they nonetheless sand-bagged and

barricaded the sheriff's substation right next to the site of the rally in Belvedere Park.

Writing in The Nation, a Chicago

priest named David F. Gomez

described the scene as the rally

gathered steam: "Despite the

tension, a fiesta atmosphere

prevailed as Chicanos sat on the

scarred grass of the park's soccer

field and listened while barrio

speakers aired grievances of police brutality and the gringo occupation of Aztlan. Oscar Acosta gave the

most rousing talk of the afternoon.

'Ya es tiempo. The time is now!

There's only one issue. Not police

abuse. We are going to be clubbed

over the head for as long as we live because we're Chicanos! The real

issue is nuestra tierra, our land.

Some people call us rebels and

revolutionaries. Don't believe it.

Emiliano Zapata was a

revolutionary because he fought

against other Mexicans. But we are not fighting our own people but

gringos! We are not trying to

overturn our own government. We

don't have a government! Do you

think there would be police

helicopters patrolling our

communities day and night if

anybody considered us real citizens with rights!'"

The rally was peaceful -- all the

way to the end. But then, when

fighting broke out between a handful

of Chicanos and jittery cops, nearly a thousand young batos locos

reacted by making a frontal assault on the cop headquarters with rocks, bottles, clubs, bricks and everything else they could find. The cops

withstood the attack for about an

hour, then swarmed out of the place with a stunning show of force that

included firing deadly buckshot

balls out of 12-gauge shotguns

straight into the crowd. The

attackers fled through the

backstreets to Whittier Boulevard,

and trashed the street again. The cops pursued, firing shotguns and

pistols at point blank range. After two hours of street warfare, the toll was one dead, 303 serious injuries

and a little less than a half million dollars' worth of damage --

including 78 burned and battered

police cars.

The entire L.A. power structure was outraged. And the Chicano

Moratorium Committee was aghast.

The rally's main organizer -- 24-

year-old Rosalio Munoz, a former president of the UCLA student body

-- was so shocked by the outburst

that he reluctantly agreed -- with the sheriff -- that any further mass

rallies would be too dangerous.

"We will have to find a new way of expressing grievances," said a spokesman for the more moderate

Congress of Mexican-American

Unity. "From now on the course will be to play a low profile."

But nobody spoke for the batos

locos -- except maybe the sheriff.

"This violence was not caused by outsiders," he said, "but by members of the Chicano community!

They can't say we provoked them

this time." This was a definite switch from the standard-brand

cop-analysis of "Mexican

violence." In the past they had always blamed it on "Communists and Outside Agitators." But now, it seemed, the sheriff was finally

catching on. The real enemy was the same people his men had to deal

with every goddamn day of the week, in all kinds of routine

situations -- on street-corners, in bars, domestic brawls and car

accidents. The gente, the street-people, the ones who live there. So in the end, being a sheriff's deputy in East L.A. was not much different from being a point man for the

American Division in Vietnam.

"Even the kids and old women are VC."

This is the new drift, and everybody

in East L.A. who's willing to talk about it uses the term "since

Salazar." In the six months since the murder and the unsettling coroner's inquest that followed it up, the

Chicano community has been

harshly sundered by a completely

new kind of polarization, another

painful amoeba-trip. But the split

this time was not between the young militants and the old Tio Tacos; this time it was between student-type

militants and this whole new breed

of super-militant street crazies. The

argument was no longer whether to fight -- but When, and How, and

with What Weapons.

Another awkward aspect of the new

split was that it was had been

painful, but essentially simple: now it was more no longer a simple

matter of "the generation gap" --

more than a conflict of life-styles and attitudes; the division this time was more along economic, or class lines. And this was painfully

complex. The original student

activist had been militant, but also reasonable -- in their own eyes, if not in the eyes of the law.

But the batos locos never even pretended to be reasonable. They

wanted to get it on, and the sooner the better. Anytime, anywhere: Just give us a reason to work out on the pig, and we're ready.

This attitude created definite

problems within the movement. The

street people had right instincts,

said the leadership, but they were

not wise. They had no program; only violence and vengeance --

which was wholly understandable,

of course, but how could it work?

How could the traditionally stable

Mexican-American community gain

anything, in the long run, by

declaring total war on the gabacho

power structure and meanwhile

purging its own native vendidos?

AZTLAN! Love it or leave it.

-- sign at Chicago rally

Ruben Salazar was killed in the wake of a Watts-style riot that

erupted when hundreds of cops

attacked a peaceful rally in Laguna Park, where 5000 or so

liberal/student/activist type

Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of "Aztlan citizens" to fight for the US in Vietnam. The police

suddenly appeared in Laguna Park,

with no warning, and "dispersed the crowd" with a blanket of tear gas, followed up by a Chicago-style

mop-up with billyclubs. The crowd

fled in panic and anger, inflaming hundreds of young spectators who

ran the few blocks to Whittier

Boulevard and began trashing every

store in sight. Several buildings

were burned to the ground; damage

was estimated at somewhere around

a million dollars. Three people

were killed, 60 injured -- but the

central incident of that August 29th, 1970 rally was the killing of Ruben Salazar.

And six months later, when the

National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for

another mass rally, they called it to

"carry on the spirit of Ruben

Salazar."

There is irony in this, because

Salazar was nobody's militant. He

was a professional journalist with

ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal

Los Angeles Times. He was a

nationally known reporter, winning

prizes for his work in places like

Vietnam, Mexico City and the Dominican Republic. Ruben

Salazar was a veteran war

correspondent, but he had never

shed blood under fire. He was

good, and he seemed to like the

work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him

back from the war zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering

"local affairs."

He focused on the huge barrio just

east of city hall. This was a scene

he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But

he locked into it almost instantly.

Within months, he had narrowed his

work for the Times down to a once-

a-week column for the newspaper,

and signed on as News Director for

KMEX-TV -- the "Mexican-

American station," which he quickly transformed into an energetic,

aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His

coverage of police activities made

the East Los Angeles sheriffs

department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of

running private argument with this

man Salazar, this Spic who refused

to be reasonable. When Salazar got

onto a routine story like some

worthless kid named Ramirez

getting beaten to death in a jail-

fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything -- including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries

strongly suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the

jailers. In the summer of 1970

Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to "tone down his coverage." And each time he told them to fuck off.

This was not common knowledge in

the community until after he was

murdered. When he went out to

cover the rally that August afternoon he was still a "Mexican-American journalist." But by the time his body was carried out of the Silver

Dollar, he was a stone Chicano

martyr. Salazar would have smiled

at this irony, but he would not have seen much humor in the way the

story of his death was handled by

the cops and the politicians. Nor

would he have been pleased to

know that almost immediately after

his death his name would become a

battle cry, prodding thousands of

young Chicanos who had always

disdained "protest" into an undeclared war with the hated

gringo police.

His paper, the L.A. Times, carried

the account of its former foreign correspondent's death on its

Monday front page: "Mexican-

American newsman Ruben Salazar

was killed by a bullet-like tear gas shell fired by a sheriff's deputy into a bar during rioting Saturday in East Los Angeles." The details were hazy, but the new, hastily revised

police version was clearly

constructed to show that Salazar

was the victim of a Regrettable

Accident which the cops were not

aware of until many hours later.

Sheriff's deputies had cornered an armed man in a bar, they said, and

when he refused to come out -- even after "loud warnings" (with a bull horn) "to evacuate" -- "the tear gas shells were fired and several

persons ran out the back door."

At that time, according to the

sheriff's nervous mouthpiece, Lt.

Norman Hamilton, a woman and

two men -- one carrying a 7.65

automatic pistol -- were met by

deputies, who questioned them. "I

don't know whether the man with the gun was arrested on a weapons

violation or not," Hamilton added.

Ruben Salazar was not among those

persons who ran out the back door.

He was lying on the floor, inside,

with a huge hole in his head. But the police didn't know this, Lieutenant Hamilton explained, because, "they didn't enter the bar until

approximately 8 PM, when rumors

began circulating that Salazar was

missing," and "an unidentified man

across the street from the bar" told a deputy, "I think there's an injured man in there." "At this point," said Hamilton, "deputies knocked down the door and found the body." Two and a half hours later at 10:40 PM, the sheriff's office admitted that "the body" was Ruben Salazar.

"Hamilton could not explain," said the Times, "why two accounts of the incident given to the Times by avowed eyewitnesses differed from

the sheriff's accounts."

For about 24 hours Hamilton clung grimly to his original story -- a

composite, he said, of firsthand

police accounts. According to this

version, Ruben Salazar had been

"killed by errant gunfire. . . during the height of a sweep of more than

7000 people in (Laguna) Park when

police ordered everyone to

disperse." Local TV and radio

newscasts offered sporadic

variations on this theme -- citing

reports "still under investigation"

that Salazar had been shot

accidentally by careless street-snipers. It was tragic, of course, but tragedies like this are inevitable

when crowds of innocent people

allow themselves to be manipulated

by a handful of violent, cop-hating anarchists.

By late Sunday, however, the

sheriff's story had collapsed

completely -- in the face of sworn

testimony from four men who were

standing within ten feet of Ruben

Salazar when he died in the Silver

Dollar Cafe at 4045 Whittier Boulevard, at least a mile from

Laguna Park. But the real shocker

came when these men testified that

Salazar had been killed -- not by

snipers or errant gunfire -- but by a cop with a deadly tear gas bazooka.

Acosta had no trouble explaining

the discrepancy. "They're lying," he said. 'They murdered Salazar and now they're trying to cover it up.

The sheriff already panicked. All he can say is, 'No comment.' He's

ordered every cop in the county to say nothing to anybody --

especially the press. They've turned the East L.A. sheriff's station into a fortress. Armed guards all around

it." He laughed. "Shit, the place looks like a prison -- but with all the cops inside!"

Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess refused to talk to me when I called. The rude

aftermath of the Salazar killing had apparently unhinged him

completely. On Monday he called

off a scheduled press conference and instead issued a statement,

saying, "There are just too many conflicting stories, some from our

own officers, as to what happened.

The sheriff wants an opportunity to digest them before meeting with

newsmen."

Indeed. Sheriff Pitchess was not

alone in his inability to digest the garbled swill that his office was

doling out. The official version of the Salazar killing was so crude and

illogical -- even after revisions --

that not even the sheriff seemed

surprised when it began to fall apart even before Chicano partisans had a chance to attack it. Which they

would, of course. The sheriff had

already got wind of what was

coming: many eyewitnesses, sworn

statements, first-hand accounts -- all of them hostile.

The history of Chicano complaints

against cops in East L.A. is not a

happy one. "The cops never lose,"

Acosta told me, "and they won't lose this one either. They just

murdered the only guy in the

community they were really afraid

of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter."

I could accept that. But it was

difficult, even for me, to believe

that the cops had killed him

deliberately. I knew they were

capable of it, but I was not quite

ready to believe they had actually

done it. . . because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill

anybody who seemed to be

annoying them. Even me.

As for Acosta's charge of murder, I knew him well enough to

understand how he could make that

charge publicly. . . I also knew him well enough to he sure he wouldn't

try to hang that kind of monstrous

bullshit on me. So our phone talk

naturally disturbed me. . . and I fell

to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had

told me the truth.

On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case -- either pro or con -- from my bundle of notes and

news-clips relating to Salazar's

death. By that time at least six

reportedly reliable witnesses had

made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial

points, with the original police

version -- which nobody believed

anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff's

account of that accident; it wasn't even a good lie.

Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben

Salazar had in fact been killed by

cops -- rather than street-snipers --

the sheriff unleashed a furious

assault on "known dissidents" who had flocked into East Los Angeles

that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-

American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours,

"thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions."

Pitchess did not identify any

"known dissidents," but he insisted that they had committed "hundreds of provocative acts." For some reason the sheriff failed to mention that his deputies had already jailed one of the most prominent Chicano

militants in the nation. "Corky"

Gonzales had been arrested during

Saturday's riot on a variety of

charges that the police never really explained. Gonzales, fleeing the

combat zone on a flatbed truck with 28 others, was arrested first for a traffic violation, then on a

concealed weapons charge and

finally for "suspicion of robbery"

when police found $300 in his

pocket. Police Inspector John

Kinsling said it was a "routine"

booking. "Any time we stop a traffic

case and find that there is a weapon in the car and that its occupants

have a sizeable amount of money,"

he said, "we always book them for suspicion of robbery."

Gonzales ridiculed the charge,

saying, "Anytime a Mexican is

found with more than $100 he's

charged with a felony." The police had originally claimed he was

carrying a loaded pistol and more

than 1000 rounds of ammunition,

along with many spent cartridges --

but by Wednesday all felony charges had been dropped. As for

"robbery," Gonzales said, "Only a lunatic or a fool could believe that 29 people would rob a place and

then jump on a flatbed truck to make their getaway." He had climbed aboard the truck with his two

children, he said, to get them away from the cops who were gassing the

rally, to which he'd been invited as one of the main speakers. The $300, he said, was expense money for

himself and his children -- for

meals in L.A. and three round-trip bus tickets from Denver to L.A.

That was the extent of Corky

Gonzales' involvement in the

Salazar incident, and at a glance it seems hardly worth mentioning --

except for a rumor on the Los

Angeles lawyers' grapevine that the robbery charge was only a ruse, a

necessary holding action, to set

Gonzales up for a "Chicano Seven"

conspiracy bust -- charging that he came from Denver to Los Angeles

with the intention of causing a riot.

Both Sheriff Pitchess and Los

Angeles Police Chief Edward

Davis were quick to seize on this

theory. It was the perfect tool for this problem: not only would it

frighten the local Chicanos and

hamstring nationally-known

militants like Gonzales, but it could also be used to create a sort of "red menace" smokescreen to obscure the nasty realities of the Ruben

Salazar killing.

The sheriff fired the first salvo, which earned him a giant banner

headline in Tuesday's L.A. Times

and a heavy pro-police editorial in Wednesday's Herald-Examiner.

Meanwhile, Chief Davis launched a

second blast from his listening post in Portland, where he had gone to

vent his wisdom at the American

Legion convention. Davis blamed

all the violence, that Saturday, on a

"hard core group of subversives who infiltrated the anti-war rally

and turned it into a mob," which

soon ran wild in a frenzy of burning and looting. 'Ten months ago," he explained, "the Communist Party in California said it was giving up on the blacks to concentrate on the

Mexican-Americans."

Nowhere in the Herald editorial --

and nowhere in either statement by

the sheriff and the police chief --

was there any mention of the name

Ruben Salazar. The Herald, in fact, had been trying to ignore the

Salazar story from the very

beginning. Even in Sunday's first story on the riot -- long before any

"complications" developed -- the classic Hearst mentality was

evident in the paper's full-page

headline: "East Los Angeles Peace Rally Explodes in Bloody Violence.

. . Man Shot to Death; Buildings

Looted, Burned." Salazar's name appeared briefly, in a statement by a spokesman for the L.A. County

sheriff's department -- a calm and

confident assertion that the "veteran reporter" had been shot in Laguna

Park, by persons unknown, in the midst of a bloody clash between

police and militants. So much for

Ruben Salazar.

And so much for the Los Angeles

Herald-Examiner -- a genuinely

rotten newspaper that claims the

largest circulation of any afternoon daily in America. As one of the few remaining Hearst organs, it serves a perverted purpose in its role as a

monument to everything cheap,

corrupt and vicious in the realm of

journalistic possibility. It is hard to understand, in fact, how the

shriveled Hearst management can

still find enough gimps, bigots and deranged Papists to staff a rotten

paper like the Herald. But they

manage, somehow. . . and they also

manage to sell a lot of advertising in the monster. Which means the

thing is actually being read, and

perhaps taken seriously, by

hundreds of thousands of people in

America's second largest city. At

the top of Wednesday's editorial

page -- right next to the Red Menace warning -- was a large cartoon

titled "At the Bottom of it All." It showed a flaming Molotov cocktail

crashing through a window, and on

the bottom (bottom, get it?) of the bottle is a hammer and sickle

emblem. The editorial itself was a

faithful echo of the Davis-Pitchess charges: "Many of the dissidents came here from other cities and

states to join agitators in Los

Angeles to set off a major riot,

which was planned in advance. . .

That the holocaust did not erupt into greater proportions is due to the

bravery and tactics of the sheriff's deputies. . . Those arrested should be "prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Precautions must be

doubled to prevent a recurrence of

such criminal irresponsibility." The continued existence of the Hearst

Examiner explains a lot about the

mentality of Los Angeles -- and

also, perhaps, about the murder of

Ruben Salazar.

So the only way to go was to reconstruct the whole thing on the

basis of available eyewitness

testimony. The police refused to say anything at all -- especially to the press. The sheriff was saving "the truth" for the official coroner's inquest.

Meanwhile, evidence was building

up that Ruben Salazar had been

murdered -- either deliberately or

for no reason at all. The most

damaging anti-cop testimony thus

far had come from Guillermo Restrepo, a 28-year-old reporter

and newscaster for KMEX-TV,

who was covering the "riot" with Salazar that afternoon, and who had gone with him into the Silver Dollar Cafe "to take a leak and drink a quick beer before we went back to

the station to put the story together."

Restrepo's testimony was solid

enough on its own to cast a filthy

shadow on the original police

version, but when he produced two

more eyewitnesses who told exactly

the same story, the sheriff abandoned all hope and sent his

scriptwriters back to the sty.

Guillermo Restrepo is well known

in East L.A. -- a familiar figure to every Chicano who owns a TV set,

Restrepo is the out-front public face of KMEX-TV news. . . and Ruben

Salazar, until August 19, 1970, was the man behind the news -- the

editor.

They worked well together, and on

that Saturday when the Chicano

"peace rally" turned into a Watts-style street riot, both Salazar and Restrepo decided that it might be

wise if Restrepo -- a native

Colombian -- brought two of his

friends (also Colombians) to help

out as spotters and de facto

bodyguards.

Their names were Gustavo Garcia,

age 30, and Hector Fabio Franco,

also 30. Both men appear in a

photograph (taken seconds before

Salazar was killed) of a sheriff's

deputy pointing a shotgun at the front door of the Silver Dollar Cafe.

Garcia is the man right in front of the gun. When the picture was taken he had just asked the cop what was

going on, and the cop had just told him to get back inside the bar if he didn't want to be shot.

The sheriff's office was not aware

of this photo until three days after it was taken -- along with a dozen

others -- by two more eyewitnesses, who also happened to be editors of

La Raza, a militant Chicano newspaper that calls itself "the voice of the East L.A. barrio."

(Actually, it is one of several: The Brown Berets publish a monthly

tabloid called La Causa. The

National La Raza Law Students'

Association has its own monthly --

Justicia O! The Socialist Workers

Party covers the barrio with The

Militant and the East L.A. Welfare

Rights Organization has its own

tabloid -- La Causa de los Pobres.

There is also Con Safos -- a

quarterly review of Chicano Art and Literature.)

The photographs were taken by

Raul Ruiz, a 28-year-old teacher of Latin American studies at San

Fernando Valley State College.

Ruiz was on assignment for La Raza

that day when the rally turned into a street war with police. He and Joe

Razo -- a 33-year-old law student

with an M.A. in psychology -- were

following the action along Whittier Boulevard when they noticed a task

force of sheriff's deputies preparing to assault the Silver Dollar Cafe.

Their accounts of what happened

there -- along with Ruiz's photos --

were published in La Raza three

days after the sheriff's office said Salazar had been killed a mile away in Laguna Park, by snipers and/or

"errant gunfire."

The La Raza spread was a

bombshell. The photos weren't

much individually, but together --

along with Ruiz/Razo's testimony --

they showed that the cops were still lying when they came up with their

second (revised) version of the

Salazar killing.

It also verified the Restrepo-

Garcia-Franco testimony, which

had already shot down the original

police version by establishing,

beyond any doubt, that Ruben

Salazar had been killed, by a deputy sheriff, in the Silver Dollar Cafe.

They were certain of that, but no more. They were puzzled, they said,

when the cops appeared with guns and began threatening them. But they decided to leave anyway -- by the

back door, since the cops wouldn't

let anybody out of the front -- and that was when the shooting started, less than 30 seconds after Garcia

was photographed in front of that

shotgun barrel on the sidewalk.

The weakness in the Restrepo-

Garcia-Franco testimony was so

obvious that not even the cops could miss it. They knew nothing beyond

what had happened inside the Silver Dollar at the time of

Salazar's death. There was no way

they could have known what was

happening outside, or why the cops started shooting.

The explanation came almost

instantly from the sheriffs office --

once again from Lt. Hamilton. The

police had received an "anonymous report," he said, that "a man with a gun" was inside the Silver Dollar Cafe. This was the extent of their

"probable cause," their reason for doing what they did. These actions, according to Hamilton, consisted of

"sending several deputies" to deal with the problem. . . and they did so by stationing themselves in front of the Silver Dollar and issuing "a loud warning" with a bullhorn

calling all those inside to come

outside with their hands above their heads.

There was no response, Hamilton

said, so a deputy then fired two tear

gas projectiles into the bar through the front door. At this point two men and a woman fled out the back and

one of the men was relieved by

waiting deputies of a 7.65 caliber

pistol. He was not arrested -- not

even detained -- and at that point a deputy fired two more tear gas

projectiles through the front door of the place.

Again there was no response, and

after a 15-minute wait one of the

braver deputies crept up and

skillfully slammed the front door --

without entering, Hamilton added.

The only person who actually

entered the bar, according to the

police version, was the owner, Pete Hernandez, who showed up about

half an hour after the shooting and asked if he could go inside and get his rifle.

Why not? said the cops, so

Hernandez went in the back door and got his rifle out of the rear

storeroom -- about 50 feet away

from where Ruben Salazar's body lay in a fog of rancid CS gas.

Then, for the next two hours, some

two dozen sheriffs deputies

cordoned off the street in front of the Silver Dollar's front door. This naturally attracted a crowd of

curious Chicanos, not all of them

friendly -- and one, an 18-year-old girl, was shot in the leg with the

same kind of tear gas bazooka that

had blown Ruben Salazar's head

apart.

This is a fascinating tale. . . and perhaps the most interesting thing

about it is that it makes no sense at all, not even to a person willing to accept it as the absolute truth. But who could possibly believe it?

Here, in the middle of a terrible riot in a hostile ghetto with a Chicano

population of more than a million,

the Los Angeles sheriff's department had put every available man on the

streets in a vain attempt to control the mass looting and arson by angry mobs. . . but somehow, with the

riots still running in high gear, at least a dozen deputies from the elite Special Enforcement Bureau (read

TAC Squad) are instantly available

in response to an "anonymous

report" that "a man with a gun" is holed up, for some reason, in an

otherwise quiet cafe more than ten

blocks away from the vortex of the

actual rioting.

They swoop down on the place and

confront several men trying to

leave. They threaten to kill these

men -- but make no attempt to either arrest or search them -- and force

them all back inside. Then they use a bullhorn to warn everybody inside to come out with their hands up.

And then, almost instantly after

giving the warning, they fire --

through the open front door of the

place and from a distance of no

more than 10 feet -- two

highpowered tear gas projectiles

designed "for use against

barricaded criminals" and capable of piercing a one-inch pine board at

300 feet.

Then, when a man carrying an

automatic pistol tries to flee out the back door, they take his gun and tell him to get lost. Finally, after firing two more gas bombs through the

front door, they seal the place up --

without ever entering it -- and stand around outside for the next two

hours, blocking a main boulevard

and attracting a large crowd. After two hours of this madness, they

"hear a rumor" -- again from an

anonymous source -- that there might be an injured man inside the

bar they sealed off two hours ago.

So they "break down the door" and find the body of an eminent

journalist -- "the only Chicano in East L.A.," according to Acosta,

"that the cops were really afraid of."

Incredible as it seems, the sheriff decided to stick with this story --

despite a growing body of

eyewitness accounts that contradict

the police version of "probable cause." The police say they went to the Silver Dollar Cafe to arrest that

"man with a gun." But eight days after the killing they were still

trying to locate the source of this fatal tip.

Two weeks later at the coroner's

inquest, the sheriff's key witness on this critical point mysteriously

appeared. He was a 50-year-old

man named Manuel Lopez who

claimed all credit for the tip with

his tale of having seen two armed men -- one with a revolver and one

carrying a rifle in the port arms

position -- go into the Silver Dollar shortly before Salazar was killed.

Lopez quickly "motioned to" the sheriff's officers stationed nearby, he said, and they responded by

parking a patrol car directly across the six-lane boulevard from the

Silver Dollar's front door. Then

using a loud bullhorn, the deputies gave two distinct warnings for

everybody in the bar to "throw out

their weapons and come out with their hands over their heads."

Then, after a five- or ten-minute

wait, Lopez said, three rounds of

tear gas were fired at the bar, with one projectile glancing off the front doorway and two whooshing

through a black curtain that was

hanging a couple of feet back from

the open doorway. It was too dark

to see what was happening inside

the bar, Lopez added.

By his own admission at the

inquest, Lopez' behavior on the afternoon of Saturday, August 29th, was somewhat singular. When the

riot broke out and mobs began

looting and burning, Mr. Lopez took off his shirt, donned a fluorescent red hunting vest and stationed

himself in the middle of Whittier

Boulevard as a volunteer cop. He

played the role with such zeal and

fanatic energy that by nightfall he found himself famous. At the height of the violence he was seen

dragging a bus bench into the

middle of the boulevard in order to block all traffic and divert it off to side streets. He was also seen

herding bystanders away from a

burning furniture store. . . and later, when the riot-action seemed over,

he was observed directing a group

of sheriff's deputies toward the

Silver Dollar Cafe.

Indeed, there was no arguing with

his claim two weeks later that he

had been right in the middle of

things. His testimony at the inquest

sounded perfectly logical and so finely informed that it was hard to understand how such a prominent

extroverted witness could possibly

have escaped being quoted -- or at

least mentioned-- by the dozens of

newsmen, investigators and

assorted tipsters with access to the Salazar story. Lopez' name had not

even been mentioned by the sheriff's office, which could have saved

itself a lot of unnecessary public

grief by even hinting that they had a witness as valuable as Manuel

Lopez. They had not been reluctant to display their other two "friendly"

witnesses -- neither of whom had

seen any "men with guns," but they both backed the Lopez version of

the actual shooting sequence. Or at least they backed it until the cops produced Lopez. Then the other two

witnesses refused to testify at the coroner's inquest and one of them

admitted that his real name was

David Ross Ricci, although the

police introduced him originally as

"Rick Ward."

The Salazar inquest rumbled on for 16 days, attracting large crowds and live TV coverage from start to

finish. (In a rare demonstration of non-profit unity, all seven local TV

stations formed a combine of sorts, assigning the coverage on a rotating basis, so that each day's

proceedings appeared on a different channel.) The L.A. Times coverage

-- by Paul Houston and Dave Smith

-- was so complete and often so rife with personal intensity that the

collected Smith/Houston file reads

like a finely-detailed non-fiction novel. Read separately, the articles are merely good journalism. But as

a document, arranged

chronologically, the file is more

than the sum of its parts. The main theme seems to emerge almost

reluctantly, as both reporters are

driven to the obvious conclusion

that the sheriff, along with his

deputies and all his official allies, have been lying all along. This is never actually stated, but the

evidence is overwhelming.

A coroner's inquest is not a trial. Its purpose is to determine the

circumstances surrounding a

person's death -- not who might

have killed him, or why. If the

circumstances indicate foul play,

the next step is up to the D.A. In

California a coroner's jury can

reach only two possible verdicts:

That the death was "accidental," or that it was "at the hands of another."

And in the Salazar case, the sheriff and his allies needed a verdict of

"accidental." Anything else would

leave the case open -- not only to the possibility of a murder or

manslaughter trial for the deputy,

Tom Wilson, who finally admitted

firing the death weapon; but also to the threat of a million dollar

negligence lawsuit against the

County by Salazar's widow

The verdict finally hinged on

whether or not the jury could

believe Wilson's testimony that he

fired into the Silver Dollar -- at the ceiling -- in order to ricochet a tear

gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to

come out the front door. But

somehow Ruben Salazar had

managed to get his head in the way

of that carefully aimed shell.

Wilson had never been able to

figure out, he said, what went

wrong.

Nor could he figure out how Raul

Ruiz had managed to "doctor" those photographs that made it look like

he and at least one other deputy

were aiming their weapons straight into the Sivler Dollar, pointing them directly at people's heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His

testimony at the inquest was no

different than the story he had told me just a few days after the murder.

And when the inquest was over

there was nothing in the 2025 pages of testimony -- from 61 witnesses

and 204 exhibits -- to cast any

serious doubt on the "Chicano

Eyewitness Report" that Ruiz wrote for La Raza when the sheriff was

still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by "errant gunfire"

during the violence at Laguna Park.

The inquest ended with a split

verdict. Smith's lead paragraph in

the October 6th Times read like an

obituary: "Monday the inquest into the death of newsman Ruben

Salazar ended. The 16-day inquiry,

by far the longest and costliest such affair in county history, concluded with a verdict that confuses many,

satisfies few and means little. The

coroner's jury came up with two verdicts: death was 'at the hands of another person' (four jurors) and

death was by 'accident' (three

jurors). Thus, inquests might appear to be a waste of time."

A week later, District Attorney

Evelle Younger-- a staunch Law & Order man-- announced that he had

reviewed the case and decided that

"no criminal charge is justified,"

despite the unsettling fact that two of the three jurors who had voted

for the "death by accident" verdict were now saying they had made a

mistake.

But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community

had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and

all the rest of the testimony only

reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash.

When the D.A. announced that no

charges would be filed against

Wilson, several of the more

moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation.

The militants called for an uprising.

And the cops said nothing at all.

There was one crucial question,

however, that the inquest settled

beyond any reasonable doubt.

Ruben Salazar couldn't possibly

have been the victim of a conscious, high-level cop conspiracy to get rid of him by staging an "accidental death." The incredible tale of half-mad stupidity and dangerous

incompetence on every level of the law enforcement establishment was

perhaps the most valuable thing to

come out of the inquest. Nobody

who heard that testimony could

believe that the Los Angeles County sheriffs department is capable of

pulling off a delicate job like killing a newsman on purpose. Their handling of the Salazar case -- from the day of his death all the way to the end of the inquest -- raised

serious doubts about the wisdom of

allowing cops to walk around loose

on the street. A geek who can't hit a 20 foot wide ceiling is not what you need, these days, to pull off a nice clean first-degree murder.

But premeditation is only necessary to a charge of first degree murder.

The Salazar killing was a second-

degree job. In the terms of Section 187 of the California Penal Code

and in the political context of East Los Angeles in 1970, Ruben

Salazar was killed "unlawfully" and

"with malice aforethought." These

are treacherous concepts, and no doubt there are courts in this

country where it might be argued

successfully that a cop has a

"lawful" right to fire a deadly tear gas bazooka point-blank into a

crowd of innocent people on the

basis of some unfounded suspicion

that one of them might be armed. It might also be argued that this kind of crazed and murderous assault can be accomplished without "malice aforethought."

Maybe so. Maybe Ruben Salazar's death can be legally dismissed as a

"police accident," or as the result of

"official negligence." Most middle-class, white-dominated juries

would probably accept the idea.

Why, after all, would a clean-cut

young police officer deliberately

kill an innocent bystander? Not

even Ruben Salazar -- ten seconds

before his death -- could believe

that he was about to have his head

blown off by a cop for no reason at all. When Gustavo Garcia warned

him that the cops outside were about to shoot, Salazar said, "That's impossible; we're not doing

anything." Then he stood up and caught a tear gas bomb in his left

temple.

The malignant reality of Ruben

Salazar's death is that he was

murdered by angry cops for no

reason at all -- and that the L.A.

sheriff's department was and still is prepared to defend that murder on

grounds that it was entirely

justified. Salazar was killed, they say, because he happened to be in a bar where police thought there was

also a "man with a gun." They gave him a chance, they say, by means of a bullhorn warning. . . and when he didn't come out with his hands up,

they had no choice but to fire a tear gas bazooka into the bar. . . and his head got in the way. Tough luck. But what was he doing in that place,

anyway? Lounging around a noisy

Chicano bar in the middle of a

communist riot?

What the cops are saying is that Salazar got what he deserved -- for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he happened to be in their way

when they had to do their duty. His death was unfortunate, but if they

had to do it all over again they

wouldn't change a note.

This is the point they want to make.

It is a local variation on the

standard Mitchell-Agnew theme:

Don't fuck around, boy -- and if you want to hang around with people

who do, don't be surprised when the bill comes due -- whistling in

through the curtains of some

darkened barroom on a sunny

afternoon when the cops decide to

make an example of somebody.

The night before I left town I

stopped by Acosta's place with

Guillermo Restrepo. I had been

there earlier, but the air was

extremely heavy. As always, on

stories like this, some of the troops were getting nervous about The

Stranger Hanging Around. I was standing in the kitchen watching

Frank put some tacos together and

wondering when he was going to

start waving the butcher knife in my face and yelling about the time I

Maced him on my porch in

Colorado (that had been six months

earlier, at the end of a very long

night during which we had all

consumed a large quantity of cactus products; and when he started

waving a hatchet around I'd figured Mace was the only answer. . .

which turned him to jelly for about 45 minutes, and when he finally

came around he said, "If I ever see you in East Los Angeles, man,

you're gonna wish you never heard

the word 'Mace,' because I'm gonna

carve it all over your fuckin body.") So I was not entirely at ease

watching Frank chop hamburger on

a meat block in the middle of East

L.A. He hadn't mentioned the Mace,

not yet, but I knew we would get to it sooner or later. . . and I'm sure we

would have, except that suddenly out in the living room some geek

was screaming: "What the hell is this goddamn gabacho pig writer

doing here? Are we fuckin crazy to be letting him hear all this shit?

Jesus, he's heard enough to put

every one of us away for five

years!"

Longer than that, I thought. And at that point I stopped worrying about Frank. A firestorm was brewing in

the main room -- between me and

the door -- so I decided it was about time to drift around the corner and meet Restrepo at the Carioca.

Frank gave me a big smile as I left.

A man police say preyed on elderly women was charged Tuesday with

one count of murder and 12 of

robbery. Frazier DeWayne Brown, 44, a 6-foot, 2-inch, 230-pound former Los Angeles county

sheriff's deputy, was arraigned in the same Hall of Justice courtroom where he once worked as a bailiff.

Police had long been seeking a man who befriended elderly

women at bus stops and later

attacked and robbed them.

Evidence against Brown included possessions taken from victims of strong-arm robberies and found in his home.

L. A. Times 3/31/71

Several hours later we came back.

Guillermo wanted to talk to Oscar

about putting pressure on the

KMEX-TV management to keep him

(Restrepo) on the air. "They want to get rid of me," he explained. "They started the pressure the day after

Ruben was killed -- the next fuckin day!"

We were sitting on the floor in the living room. Outside, overhead, the police helicopter was looping

around in the sky above Whittier

Boulevard, sweeping the

neighborhood with a giant

searchlight beam that revealed

nothing -- and served no purpose

except to drive the Chicanos below into a seething rage. "Those sons of bitches!" Acosta muttered. "Look at that goddamn thing!" We had all gone out in the yard to stare up at the monster. There was no way to

ignore it. The noise was bad

enough, but the probing searchlight was such an obvious, outrageous

harassment that it was hard to

understand how even a cop could

explain it away as anything but

deliberate mockery and

provocation.

"Now tell me," said Acosta. "Why are they doing a thing like this?

Why? You think they don't know

what effect it has on us?"

"They know," said Restrepo. He lit a cigarette as we went back inside.

"Listen," he said, "I get about fifteen telephone calls every day from

people who want to tell me stories

about what the police have done to

them -- terrible stories. I've been hearing them for a year and a half, every goddamn day -- and the funny

thing is, I never used to believe these people. Not completely. I

didn't think they were lying, just exaggerating." He paused, glancing around the room, but nobody spoke.

Restrepo is not entirely trusted in these quarters; he is part of the

establishment -- like his friend,

Ruben Salazar, who bridged that

gap the hard way.

"But ever since Ruben," Restrepo continued, "I believe these stories.

They're true! I realize that, now --

but what can I do?" He shrugged, nervously aware that he was talking to people who had made that

discovery a long time ago. "Just the other night," he said, "I got a call from a man who said the cops killed his cousin in the yail. He was a

homosexual, a young Chicano,

nobody political -- and the police

report said he hung himself in his

cell. Suicide. So I checked it out.

And, man, it made me sick. This

guy's body was all bruises, black and blue marks all over him -- and

right across his forehead he had 16

fresh stitches.

"The police report said he tried to escape so they had to dominate him.

They got him sewed up at the

hospital, but when they took him to yail, the warden or yailer or

whatever they call the bastard

wouldn't accept him, because he was bleeding so bad. So they took

him back to the hospital and got a

doctor to sign some paper saying he was OK to be put in the yail. But

they had to carry him. And the next day they took a picture of him

hanging from the end of the top bunk with his own shirt tied around his

neck.

"You believe that? Not me. But you tell me -- what can I do? Where do I look for the truth? Who can I ask?

The sheriff? Goddamn, I can't go on the air with a story about how the

cops killed a guy in the yail unless I know something for proof! Jesus Christ, we all know. But just to

know is not enough. You understand that? You see why I never made that story on TV?"

Acosta nodded. As a lawyer, he

understood perfectly that evidence

is necessary -- on the air and in print, as well as in the courtroom.

But Frank was not convinced. He

was sipping from a quart of sweet

Key Largo wine, and in fact he

didn't even know who Restrepo

was. "Sorry, man," he'd said earlier. "But I don't watch the news

on TV."

Acosta winced. He watches and reads everything. But most of the people around him think The News

-- on the TV or radio or newspapers or wherever -- is just another rotten gabacho trick. Just another bad

shuck, like the others. "The news,"

to them, is pure propaganda -- paid for by the advertisers. "Who pays the bill for that bullshit?" they ask.

"Who's behind it?"

Who indeed? Both sides seemed

convinced that the "real enemy" is a vicious conspiracy of some kind.

The Anglo power structure keeps

telling itself that "the Mexican problem" is really the work of a small organization of well-trained

Communist agitators, working 25

hours a day to transform East L.A.

into a wasteland of constant

violence -- mobs of drug-crazed

Chicanos prowling the streets at all times, terrorizing the merchants,

hurling firebombs into banks,

looting stores, sacking offices and

massing now and then, armed with Chinese sten pistols, for all-out

assaults on the local sheriff's

fortress.

A year ago this grim vision would

have been a bad joke, the crude

ravings of some paranoid hysterical Bircher. But things are different

now; the mood of the barrio is

changing so fast that not even the

most militant of the young Chicano

activists claim to know what's

really happening. The only thing

everybody agrees on is that the mood is getting ugly, the level of

tension is still escalating. The

direction of the drift is obvious.

Even Gov. Reagan is worried about

it. He recently named Danny

Villanueva, one-time kicking

specialist for the Los Angeles Rams and now general manager of

KMEX-TV, as the Governor's

personal ambassador to the whole

Chicano community. But, as usual,

Regan's solution is part of the

problem. Villanueva is

overwhelmingly despised by the very people Reagan says he's

"trying to reach." He is the classic vendido. "Let's face it," says a Chicano journalist not usually

identified with the militants, "Danny is a goddamn pig. Ruben Salazar

told me that. You know KMEX used

to be a good news station for

Chicanos. Ruben was the one who

did that, and Danny was afraid to

interfere. But within 24 hours after Ruben was murdered, Villanueva

started tearing up the news

department. He wouldn't even let Restrepo show films of the cops

gassing people in Laguna Park, the

day after Ruben died! Now he's

trying to get rid of Restrepo, cut the balls off the news and turn KMEX-TV back into a safe Tio Taco station. Shit! And he's getting away with it."

The total castration of KMEX-TV

would be a crippling blow to the

Movement. A major media voice

can be an invaluable mobilizing

tool, particularly in the vast urban sprawl of Los Angeles. All it takes is a sympathetic news director with enough leverage and personal

integrity to deal with the news on

his own terms. The man who hired

Ruben Salazar, former station

director Joe Rank, considered him

valuable enough to out-bid the blue-chip Los Angeles Times for the

services of one of that paper's

ranking stars -- so nobody argued

when Salazar demanded absolute

independence for his KMEX news

operation. But with Salazar dead, the station's Anglo ownership

moved swiftly to regain control of

the leaderless news operation.

Guillermo Restrepo, Salazar's heir

apparent, suddenly discovered that

he had no leverage at all. He was

muscled into a straight newscaster's role. He was no longer free to

investigate any story that he felt was important. . . If the Chicano

Moratorium Committee called a

press conference to explain why

they were organizing a mass rally against "police brutality," for instance, Restrepo had to get

permission to cover it. And Chicano activists soon learned that a two-minute news feature on KMEX was

crucial to the success of a mass

rally, because TV was the only way

to reach a mass Chicano audience in a hurry. And no other TV station in L.A. was interested in any kind of

Chicano news except riots.

"Losing Ruben was a goddamn

disaster for the Movement," Acosta said recently. "He wasn't really with us, but at least he was interested. Hell, the truth is I never really liked the guy. But he was the only journalist in L.A. with real

influence who would come to a

press conference in the barrio.

That's the truth. Hell, the only way we can get those bastards to listen to us is by renting a fancy hotel

lounge over there in West

Hollywood or some bullshit place

like that -- where they can feel

comfortable -- and hold our press conference there, with free coffee

and snacks for the press. But even

then, about half the shitheads won't come unless we serve free booze,

too. Shit! Do you know what that

costs?"

This was the tone of our

conversation that night when

Guillermo and I went over to

Oscar's pad for a beer and some

talk about politics. The place was

unnaturally quiet. No music, no

grass, no bad-mouth bato loco types hunkered down on the pallets in the front room. It was the first time I'd seen the place when it didn't look

like a staging area for some kind of hellish confrontation that might

erupt at any moment.

But tonight it was deadly quiet. The only interruption was a sudden

pounding on the door and voices

shouting: "Hey, man, open up. I got some brothers with me!" Rudy hurried to the door and peered out

through the tiny eyewindow. Then he stepped back and shook his head

emphatically. "It's some guys from the project," he told Oscar. "I know them but they're all fucked up."

"God damn it," Acosta muttered.

"That's the last thine I need tonight.

Get rid of them. Tell them I have to be in court tomorrow. Jesus! I have to get some sleep!"

Rudy and Frank went outside to

deal with the brothers. Oscar and

Guillermo went back to politics --

while I listened, sensing a down hill drift on all fronts. Nothing was going right. The jury was still out on Corky's case, but Acosta was not

optimistic. He was also expecting a decision on his Grand Jury

challenge in the "Biltmore Six"

case. "We'll probably lose that one, too," he said. "The bastards think they have us on the run now; they

think we're demoralized -- so they'll keep the pressure on, keep pushing."

He shrugged. "And maybe they're right. Shit. I'm tired of arguing with

them. How long do they expect me to keep coming down to their

goddamn courthouse and begging

for justice? I'm tired of that shit.

We're all tired." He shook his head slowly then ripped the poptop out of a Budweiser that Rudy brought in

from the kitchen. "This legal

bullshit ain't makin' it," he went on.

"The way it looks now, I think we're just about finished with that game. You know at the noon recess

today I had to keep a bunch of these goddamn batos locos from stomping

the D.A. Christ! That would fuck me for good. They'll send me to the

goddamn pen for hiring thugs to

assault the prosecutor!" He shook his head again. "Frankly, I think the whole thing is out of control. God

only knows where it's heading, but I know it's going to be heavy, I think maybe the real shit is about to come down."

There was no need to ask what he

meant by "heavy shit." The barrio is already plagued by sporadic fire-

bombings, explosions, shootings and minor violence of all kinds. But the cops see nothing "political" in these incidents. Just before I left town I talked on the phone with a

lieutenant at the East L.A. sheriff's office. He was anxious to assure me that the area was totally pacified.

"You have to remember," he said,

"that this has always been a high-crime area. We have a lot of trouble with teen-age gangs, and it's getting worse. Now they're all running

around with .22 rifles and handguns,

looking for fights with each other. I guess you could say they're sort of like the Blackstone Rangers in

Chicago, except that our gangs are

younger."

"But they're not into politics like the black gangs in Chicago?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?" he replied. "The only political thing the Blackstone Rangers ever did was con

somebody out of a federal grant for a lot of money."

I asked him about some of the stories I'd heard about bombings,

etc. But he quickly dismissed them

as rumors. Then, during the next half hour of random talking about things that had happened in the past few

weeks, he mentioned one

dynamiting and a building burned

down at East Los Angeles College,

and also the firebombing of a local vendido politician's real estate office. "But they hit the wrong guy,"

the Lt. said with a chuckle. "They bombed another realtor who

happened to have the same name as the guy they were after."

"Que malo," I mumbled, lapsing into my own dialect. "But aside from all that, you people don't see real trouble brewing? What about

these rallies that keep turning into riots?"

"It's always the same bunch of troublemakers," he explained.

"They take a crowd that's gathered for other reasons, and then they

subvert it."

"But that last rally was called to protest police brutality," I said.

"And then it turned into a riot. I saw the films -- 50 or 60 police cars

lined up bumper to bumper on

Whittier Boulevard, deputies firing shotguns into the crowd. . ."

"That was necessary," he replied.

"That mob was out of control. They attacked us."

"I know," I said.

"And let me tell you something else," he went on. "That rally wasn't really about 'police brutality.' The guy who organized it, Rosalio

Munoz, told me he was just using

that slogan to get people out to the park."

"Well, you know how they are," I

said. Then I asked him if he could give me the names of any Chicano

leaders I should talk to if I decided to write an article about the scene in East L.A.

"Well, there's Congressman

Roybal," he said. "And that real estate man I told you about. . ."

"The one who got fire-bombed?"

"Oh, no," he replied. "The other guy

-- the one they intended to firebomb."

"OK," I said. "I'll write those names down. And I guess if I decide to

look around the barrio you guys

could help me out, right? Is it safe to walk around out there, with all

these gangs running around shooting at each other?"

"No problem," he said. "We'll even let you ride around in a radio car

with some of the officers."

I said that would be fine. What

better way, after all, to get the

inside story? Just spend a few days

touring the barrio in a cop car.

Particularly right now, with

everything calm and peaceful.

"We see no evidence of any

political tension," the Lt. had told me. "We have a great deal of

community support." He chuckled.

"And we also have a very active intelligence bureau."

"That's good," I said. "Well, I have to hang up now, or I'll miss my

plane."

"Oh, then you've decided to do the story? When will you be in town?"

"I've been here for two weeks," I said. "My plane leaves in ten

minutes."

"But I thought you said you were calling from San Francisco," he said.

"I did," I said. "But I was lying."

(click)

It was definitely time to leave. The

last loose end in the Salazar case had been knotted up that morning

when the jury came back with a

"guilty" verdict for Corky Gonzales.

He was sentenced to "40 days and 40 nights" in the L.A. County jail for possession of a loaded revolver on the day of Salazar's death. "We'll appeal," said Acosta, "but for political purposes this case is

finished. Nobody's worried about

Corky surviving 40 days in jail. We wanted to confront the gabacho

court system with a man the whole

Chicano community knew was technically innocent, then let them draw their own conclusions about

the verdict.

"Hell, we never denied that

somebody had a loaded pistol in that truck. But it wasn't Corky. He wouldn't dare carry a goddamn gun

around with him. He's a leader. He doesn't have to carry a gun for the same goddamn reason Nixon

doesn't."

Acosta had not stressed that point in

the courtroom, for fear of alarming the jury and inflaming the gringo

press. Not to mention the cops. Why give them the same kind of flimsy

excuse to shoot at Gonzales that

they already used to justify shooting Ruben Salazar?

Corky merely shrugged at the

verdict. At 42, he has spent half his life gouging Justice out of The Man, and now he views the Anglo court

system with the quiet sort of

fatalistic humor that Acosta hasn't

learned yet. But Oscar is getting there fast. The week of April Fools Day, 1971, was a colossal bummer

for him; a series of bad jolts and

setbacks that seemed to confirm all his worst suspicions.

Two days after Corky's conviction,

Superior Court Judge Arthur

Alarcon -- a prominent Mexican-

American jurist -- rejected Acosta's carefully-constructed motion to

quash the "Biltmore Six"

indictments because of

"subconscious, institutional racism"

in the Grand Jury system. This effort had taken almost a year of hard

work, much of it done by Chicano

law students who reacted to the

verdict with a bitterness matching

Acosta's.

Then, later that same week, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors

voted to use public funds to pay all legal expenses for several

policemen recently indicted "for accidentally" killing two Mexican

nationals -- a case known in East L.A, as "the murder of the Sanchez brothers." It was a case of mistaken identity, the cops explained. They

had somehow been given the wrong

address of an apartment where they

thought "two Mexican fugitives"

were holed up, so they hammered

on the door and shouted a warning

to "come out of there with your hands over your head or we'll come

in shooting." Nobody came out, so the cops went in shooting to kill.

But how could they have known that they'd attacked the wrong

apartment? And how could they

have known that neither one of the

Sanchez brothers understood

English? Even Mayor Sam Yorty

and Police Chief Ed Davis admitted

that the killings had been very

unfortunate. But when the Federal

D.A. brought charges against the

cops, both Yorty and Davis were

publicly outraged. They both called press conferences and went on the

air to denounce the indictments -- in

language that strangely echoed the American Legion outcry when Lt.

Galley was charged with murdering

women and children in My Lai.

The Yorty/Davis tirades were so

gross that a District Court judge

finally issued a "gag order" to keep them quiet until the case comes to

trial. But they had already said

enough to whip the whole barrio

into a rage at the idea that Chicano tax dollars might be used to defend some "mad dog cops" who frankly

admitted killing two Mexican nationals. It sounded like a replay of the Salazar bullshit: same style, same excuse, same result -- but this time with different names, and

blood on a different floor. "They'll put me in jail if I won't pay taxes,"

said a young Chicano watching a

soccer game at a local playground,

"then take my tax money and use it defend some killer pig. Hell, what

if they had come to my address by

mistake? I'd be dead as hell right

now."

There was a lot of talk in the barrio about "drawing some pig blood for a change" if the Supervisors

actually voted to use tax funds to

defend the accused cops. A few

people actually called City Hall and mumbled anonymous threats in the

name of the "Chicano Liberation Front." But the Supervisors hung tough. They voted on Thursday, and

by noon the news was out: The city

would pick up the tab.

At 5:15 PM on Thursday afternoon

the Los Angeles City Hall was rocked by a dynamite blast. A bomb

had been planted in one of the

downstairs restrooms. Nobody was

hurt, and the damage was officially described as "minor." About $5000

worth, they said -- small potatoes, compared to the bomb that blew a

wall out of the District Attorney's office last fall after Salazar died.

When I called the sheriff's office to ask about the explosion they said

they couldn't talk about it. City Hall

was out of their jurisdiction. But they were more than willing to talk when I asked if it was true that the bomb had been the work of the

Chicano Liberation Front.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"From the City News Service."

"Yeah, it's true," he said. "Some woman called up and said it was

done in memory of the Sanchez

brothers, by the Chicano Liberation Front. We've heard about those

guys. What do you know about them?"

"Nothing," I said. "That's why I called the sheriff. I thought your

intelligence network might know

something."

"Sure they do," he said quickly.

"But all that information is

confidential."

Rolling Stone, #81, April 29, 1971

Freak Power in the Rockies

A Memoir and Rambling Discussion (with Rude Slogans) of Freak Power in the Rockies. . . on the Weird Mechanics of Running

a Takeover Bid on a Small Town.

. . and a Vulgar Argument for

Seizing Political Power and Using It like a Gun Ripped Away from a Cop. . . with Jangled Comments

on the Uncertain Role of the

Head and the Awful Stupor

Factor. . . and Other Disorganized Notes on "How to Punish the Fatbacks," How to Make Sure

that Today's Pig Is Tomorrow's Offal. . . and Why This Crazed

New World Can Only Be Dealt

with by. . . A New Posse!

-- or--

"Just how weird can you stand it, brother -- before your love will crack?"

-- Mike Lydon in Ramparts, March, 1970

Two hours before the polls closed

we realized that we had no headquarters -- no hole or Great

Hall where the faithful could gather for the awful election-night

deathwatch. Or to celebrate the

Great Victory that suddenly seemed

very possible.

We had run the whole campaign

from a long oaken table in the

Jerome Tavern on Main Street,

working flat out in public so anyone could see or even join if they felt ready. . . but now, in these final

hours, we wanted a bit of privacy; some clean, well-lighted place, as it were, to hunker down and wait. . .

We also needed vast quantities of

ice and rum -- and a satchel of

brain-rattling drugs for those who

wanted to finish the campaign on the highest possible note, regardless of the outcome. But the main thing we

needed, with dusk coming down and

the polls due to close at 7 PM, was an office with several phone lines, for a blizzard of last-minute calls to

those who hadn't yet voted. We'd collected the voting lists just before 5:00 -- from our poll-watcher teams who'd been checking them off since

dawn -- and it was obvious, from a

very quick count, that the critical Freak Power vote had turned out in

force.

Joe Edwards, a 29-year-old head,

lawyer and bike-racer from Texas,

looked like he might, in the waning hours of Election Day in November

1969, be the next mayor of Aspen,

Colorado.

The retiring mayor, Dr. Robert

"Buggsy" Barnard, had been broadcasting vicious radio

warnings for the previous 48 hours, raving about long prison terms for

vote-fraud and threatening violent

harassment by "phalanxes of poll-watchers" for any strange or freaky-looking scum who might dare to

show up at the polls. We checked

the laws and found that Barnard's

radio warnings were a violation of

the "voter intimidation" statutes, so I called the District Attorney and

tried to have the mayor arrested at once. . . but the D.A. said, "Leave me out of it; police your own

elections."

Which we did, with finely-

organized teams of poll-watchers:

two inside each polling place at all times, with six more just outside in vans or trucks full of beef, coffee, propaganda, check lists and bound

Xerox copies of all Colorado

voting laws.

The idea was to keep massive

assistance available, at all times, to our point men inside the official voting places. And the reasoning

behind this rather heavy public act -

- which jolted a lot of people who

wouldn't have voted for Edwards

anyway -- was our concern that the

mayor and his cops would create

some kind of ugly scene, early on,

and rattle the underground

grapevine with fear-rumors that

would scare off a lot of our voters.

Most of our people were fearful of

any kind of legal hassle at the polls, regardless of their rights. So it

seemed important that we should

make it very clear, from the start, that we knew the laws and we

weren't going to tolerate any

harrassment of our people. None.

Each poll-watcher on the dawn shift was given a portable tape-recorder

with a microphone that he was

instructed to stick in the face of any

opposition poll-watcher who asked anything beyond the legally-allowable questions regarding

Name, Age and Residence. Nothing

else could be asked, under penalty

of an obscure election law relating to "frivolous challenge," a little brother to the far more serious

charge of "voter intimidation."

And since the only person who had

actually threatened to intimidate

voters was the mayor, we decided

to force the confrontation as soon as

possible in Ward I, where Buggsy had announced that he would

personally stand the first poll-

watching shift for the opposition. If the buggers wanted a confrontation, we decided to give it to them.

The polling place in Ward I was a

lodge called the Cresthaus, owned

by an old and infamous Swiss/Nazi

who calls himself Guido Meyer.

Martin Bormann went to Brazil, but

Guido came to Aspen -- arriving

here several years after the Great

War. . . and ever since then he has spent most of his energy (including two complete terms as City

Magistrate) getting even with this

country by milking the tourists and having young (or poor) people

arrested.

So Guido was watching eagerly

when the Mayor arrived in his

parking lot at ten minutes to 7,

creeping his Porsche through a

gauntlet of silent Edwards people.

We had mustered a half-dozen of

the scurviest looking legal voters we could find -- and when the

Mayor arrived at the polls these

freaks were waiting to vote. Behind them, lounging around a coffee-dispenser in an old VW van, were

at least a dozen others, most of them large and bearded, and several so

eager for violence that they had

spent the whole night making chain-

whips and loading up on speed to

stay crazy.

Buggsy looked horrified. It was the

first time in his long drug experience that he had ever laid

eyes on a group of non-passive,

super-aggressive Heads. What had

got into them? Why were their eyes

so wild? And why were they

yelling: "You're fucked, Buggsy. . .

We're going to croak you. . . Your

whole act is doomed. . . We're

going to beat your ass like a gong."

Who were they? All strangers?

Some gang of ugly bikers or speed-

freaks from San Francisco? Yes. . .

of course. . . that bastard Edwards had brought in a bunch of ringers.

But then he looked again. . . and

recognized, at the head of the group, his ex-drinkalong bar-buddy Brad

Reed, the potter and known gun

freak, 6'4" and 220, grinning down through his beard and black hair-flag. . . saying nothing, just smiling.

. . Great God, he knew the others,

too. . . there was Don Davidson, the accountant, smooth shaven and quite normal-looking in a sleek maroon

ski parka, but not smiling at all. . .

and who were those girls, those ripe blond bodies whose names he

knew from chance meetings in

friendlier times? What were they

doing out here at dawn, in the midst of this menacing mob?

What indeed? He scurried inside to

meet Guido, but instead ran into

Tom Benton, the hairy artist and

known Radical. . . Benton was

grinning like a crocodile and

waving a small black microphone,

saying: "Welcome, Buggsy. You're

late. The voters are waiting outside.

. . Yes, did you see them out there?

Were they friendly? And if you

wonder what I'm doing here, I'm Joe Edwards' poll-watcher. . . and

the reason I have this little black machine here is that I want to tape every word you say when you start

committing felonies by harassing

our voters. . ."

The Mayor lost his first

confrontation almost instantly. One of the first obvious Edwards-voters

of the day was a blond kid who looked about 17. Buggsy began to

jabber at him and Benton moved in

with the microphone, ready to

intervene. . . but before Benton

could utter a word the kid began

snarling at the Mayor, yelling: "Go fuck yourself, Buggsy! You figure out how old I am. I know the

goddam law! I don't have to show

you proof of anything! You're a dying man, Buggsy! Get out of my way. I'm ready to vote!"

The Mayor's next bad encounter was with a very heavy young girl

with no front teeth, wearing a baggy grey T-shirt and no bra. Somebody

had brought her to the polls, but

when she got there she was crying -

- actually shaking with fear -- and she refused to go inside. We weren't allowed within 100 feet of the door, but we got word to Benton and he

came out to escort the girl in. She voted, despite Buggsy's protests,

and when she came outside again

she was grinning like she'd just

clinched Edwards' victory all by herself.

After that, we stopped worrying

about the Mayor. No goons had

shown up with blackjacks, no cops

were in evidence, and Benton had

established full control of his turf around the ballot box. Elsewhere, in Wards 2 and 3, the freak-vote was

not so heavy and things were going

smoothly. In Ward 2, in fact, our

official poll-watcher (a drug person with a beard about two feet long)

had caused a panic by challenging dozens of straight voters. The city attorney called Edwards and

complained that some ugly lunatic

in Ward 2 was refusing to let a 75-

year-old woman cast her ballot until she produced a birth certificate. We were forced to replace the man; his zeal was inspiring, but we feared he might spark a backlash.

This had been a problem all along.

We had tried to mobilize a huge

underground vote, without

frightening the burghers into a counterattack. But it didn't work --

primarily because most of our best

people were also hairy, and very

obvious. Our opening shot -- the

midnight registration campaign --

had been ramrodded by bearded

heads: Mike Solheim and Pierre

Landry, who worked the streets and

bars for head voters like wild

junkies, in the face of near-total

apathy.

Aspen is full of freaks, heads, fun-

hogs and weird night-people of every description. . . but most of

them would prefer jail or the

bastinado to the horror of actually registering to vote. Unlike the main bulk of burghers and businessmen,

the dropout has to make an effort to use his long-dormant vote. There is not much to it, no risk and no more than ten minutes of small talk and

time -- but to the average dropout

the idea of registering to vote is a very heavy thing. The psychic

implications, "copping back into the

system," etc., are fierce. . . and we learned, in Aspen, that there is no point even trying to convince

people to take that step unless you can give them a very good reason.

Like a very unusual candidate. . . or a fireball pitch of some kind.

The central problem that we

grappled with last fall is the gap

that separates the Head Culture

from activist politics. Somewhere

in the nightmare of failure that

gripped America between 1965 and

1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb

conviction that it made more sense

in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the

bastards on anything even vaguely

resembling their own terms.

Our ten-day registration campaign

had focused almost entirely on

Head/Dropout culture; they wanted

no part of activist politics and it had been a hellish effort to convince

them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren't at all concerned

with being convicted of vote-fraud -

- they simply didn't want to be

hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being

able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own

front porch I have a palm tree

growing in a blue toilet bowl. . .

and on occasion I like to wander

outside, stark naked, and fire my .44

magnum at various gongs I've

mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and

turn my amplifier up to 110

decibels for a taste of "White Rabbit" while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the

Continental Divide.

Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud

music and firepower -- but not for

long. I lived a block above Haight

Street for two years but by the end

of '66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad

sideshow. Between the narcs and

the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.

What happened in the Haight

echoed earlier scenes in North

Beach and the Village. . . and it

proved, once again, the basic

futility of seizing turf you can't

control. The pattern never varies; a low-rent area suddenly blooms new

and loose and human -- and then

fashionable, which attracts the press and the cops at about the same time.

Cop problems attract more

publicity, which then attracts fad-

salesmen and hustlers -- which

means money, and that attracts

junkies and jack-rollers. Their bad action causes publicity and -- for

some perverse reason -- an influx of bored, upward mobile types who

dig the menace of "white ghetto"

life and whose expense-account

tastes drive local rents and street prices out of reach of the original

settlers. . . who are forced, once again, to move on.

One of the most hopeful

developments of the failed

Haight/Ashbury scene was the

exodus to rural communes. Most of

the communes failed -- for reasons

that everybody can see now, in

retrospect (like that scene in Easy Rider where all those poor freaks were trying to grow their crops in

dry sand) -- but the few that

succeeded, like the Hog Farm in

New Mexico, kept a whole generation of heads believing that

the future lay somewhere outside

the cities.

In Aspen, hundreds of Haight-

Ashbury refugees tried to settle in the wake of that ill-fated "Summer of Love" in 1967. The summer was a wild and incredible dope orgy

here, but when winter came the

crest of that wave broke and drifted on the shoals of local problems

such as jobs, housing and deep

snow on the roads to shacks that, a few months earlier, had been easily accessible. Many of the West Coast

refugees moved on, but several

hundred stayed; they hired on as

carpenters, waiters, bartenders,

dish-washers. . . and a year later

they were part of the permanent

population. By mid-'69 they

occupied most of Aspen's so-called

"low-cost housing" -- first the tiny mid-town apartments, then out-lying shacks, and finally the trailer courts.

So most of the freaks felt that voting wasn't worth the kind of bullshit that went with it, and the mayor's illegal threats only reinforced their notion that politics in America was

something to be avoided. Getting

busted for grass was one thing,

because the "crime" was worth the risk. . . but they saw no sense in

going to court for a "political technicality," even if they weren't guilty.

(This sense of "reality" is a

hallmark of the Drug Culture, which values the Instant Reward -- a

pleasant four-hour high -- over

anything involving a time lag

between the Effort and the End. On

this scale of values, politics is too difficult, too "complex" and too

"abstract" to justify any risk or initial action. It is the flip side of the "Good German" syndrome.) The idea of asking young heads to

"go clean" never occurred to us.

They could go dirty, or even naked,

for all we cared. . . all we asked them to do was first register and then vote. A year earlier these same people had seen no difference

between Nixon and Humphrey.

They were against the war in

Vietnam, but the McCarthy crusade

had never reached them. At the

grass-roots of the Dropout-Culture, the idea of going Clean for Gene

was a bad joke. Both Dick Gregory

and George Wallace drew

unnaturally large chunks of the vote in Aspen. Robert Kennedy would

probably have carried the town, if he hadn't been killed, but he

wouldn't have won by much. The

town is essentially Republican:

GOP registrations outnumber

Democrats by more than two to one.

. . but the combined total of both

major parties just about equals the number of registered Independents,

most of whom pride themselves on

being totally unpredictable. They

are a jangled mix of Left/Crazies

and Birchers; cheap bigots, dope

dealers, nazi ski instructors and

spaced off "psychedelic farmers"

with no politics at all beyond self-preservation.

At the end of that frenzied ten-day hustle (since we kept no count, no

lists or records) we had no way of

knowing how many half-stirred

dropouts had actually registered, or how many of those would vote. So

it was a bit of a shock all around

when, toward the end of that

election day, our poll-watchers'

tallies showed that Joe Edwards

had already cashed more than 300

of the 486 new registrations that had just gone into the books.

The race was going to be very

close. The voting lists showed

roughtly 100 pro-Edwards voters

who hadn't showed up at the polls,

and we figured that 100 phone calls might raise at least 25 of these

laggards. At that point it looked like 25 might make the nut, particularly in a sharply-divided three-way

mayor's race in a town with only

1623 registered voters.

So we needed those phones. But

where? Nobody knew. . . until a girl who'd been working on the phone

network suddenly came up with a

key to a spacious two-room office

in the old Elks Club building. She

had once worked there, for a local

businessman and ex-hipster named

Craig, who had gone to Chicago on

business.

We seized Craig's office at once,

ignoring the howls and curses of the

mob in the Elks bar -- where the out-going mayor's troops were

already gathering to celebrate the

victory of his hand-picked

successor. (Legally, there was

nothing they could do to keep us out of the place, although later that night they voted to have Craig evicted. . .

and he is now running for the State Legislature on a Crush the Elks

platform.) By six o'clock we had the new headquarters working nicely.

The phone calls were extremely

brief and direct: "Get off your ass,

you bastard! We need you! Get out and vote!"

About six people worked the lists

and the phones. Others went off to

hustle the various shacks, lodges,

hovels and communes where we

knew there were voters but no

phones. The place filled up rapidly, as the word went out that we finally had a headquarters. Soon the whole

second-floor of the Elks Club was

full of bearded freaks yelling

frantically at each other; strange-

looking people rushing up and down the stairs with lists, notebooks,

radios, and cases of Budweiser. . .

Somebody stuck a purple spansule

in my hand, saying, "Goddamn, you look tired! What you need is a hit of this excellent mescaline." I nodded absently and stuck the thing in one of the 22 pockets in my red

campaign parka. Save this drug for

later, I thought. No point getting

crazy until the polls close. . . keep checking these stinking lists,

squeeze every last vote out of them.

. . keep calling, pushing, shouting at the bastards, threaten them. . .

There was something weird in the

room, some kind of electric

madness that I'd never noticed

before. I stood against a wall with a beer in my hand and watched the

machinery working. And after a

while I realized what the difference was. For the first time in the

campaign, these people really

believed we were going to win --

or at least that we had a good chance. And now, with less than an

hour to go, they were working like a gang of coal-miners sent down to

rescue the survivors of a cave-in.

At that point -- with my own role

ended -- I was probably the most

pessimistic person in the room; the others seemed entirely convinced

that Joe Edwards would be the next

Mayor of Aspen. . . that our wild-

eyed experiment with Freak Power

was about to carry the day and

establish a nationwide precedent.

We were in for a very long night --

waiting for the ballots to be counted by hand -- but even before the polls closed we knew we had changed

the whole structure of Aspen's

politics. The Old Guard was

doomed, the liberals were

terrorized and the Underground had

emerged, with terrible suddenness,

on a very serious power trip.

Throughout the campaign I'd been

promising, on the streets and in the bars, that if Edwards won this Mayor's race I would run for Sheriff

next year (November, 1970). . . but it never occurred to me that I would actually have to run; no more than

I'd ever seriously believed we

could mount a "takeover bid" in Aspen.

But now it was happening. Even

Edwards, a skeptic from the start,

had said on election eve that he

thought we were going to "win big."

When he said it we were in his

office, sorting out Xerox copies of the Colorado election laws for our

poll-watching teams, and I recall being stunned at his optimism.

"Never in hell," I said. "If we win at all it's going to be damn close --

like 25 votes." But his comment had jangled me badly. God damn! I

thought. Maybe we will win. . . and what then?

Finally, at around 6:30, I felt so

useless and self-conscious just

hanging around the action that I said what the hell, and left. I felt like Dagwood Bumstead pacing back

and forth in some comic-strip version of a maternity-ward waiting room. Fuck this, I thought. I'd been awake and moving around like a

cannonball for the last 50 hours, and now -- with nothing else to confront

-- I felt the adrenalin sinking. Go home, I thought, eat this mescaline and put on the earphones, get away

from the public agony. . .

At the bottom of the long wooden

stairway from Craig's office to the street I paused for a quick look into

the Elks Club bar. It was crowded and loud and happy. . . a bar full of winners, like always. They had

never backed a loser. They were the backbone of Aspen: shop-owners,

cowboys, firemen, cops,

construction workers. . . and their leader was the most popular mayor

in the town's history, a two-term

winner now backing his own hand-

picked successor, a half-bright

young lawyer. I flashed the Elks a

big smile and a quick V-fingered

"victory" sign. Nobody smiled. . .

but it was hard to know if they realized that their man was already croaked; in a sudden three-way race he had bombed early, when the

local Contractors' Association and

all their real estate allies had made the painful decision to abandon

Gates, their natural gut-choice, and devote all their weight and leverage to stopping the "hippie candidate,"

Joe Edwards. By the weekend

before election day it was no longer a three-way campaign. . . and by

Monday the only question left was

how many mean-spirited, Right-bent shitheads could be mustered to vote against Joe Edwards.

The other alternative was a 55-

year-old lady shopkeeper backed by

author Leon Uris and the local

Republican majority. . . Eve

Homeyer, a longtime functionary in

the Colorado GOP, had spent

thousands of dollars on a super-

chintzy campaign to re-create

herself in the boneless image of

Mamie Eisenhower. She hated stray

dogs and motorcycles made her ears ring. Progress was nice and

Development was good for the

local economy. Aspen should be

made safe for the annual big-

spending visits of the Atlanta Ski

Club and the Texas Cavaliers --

which meant building a four-lane

highway through the middle of town

and more blockhouse condominiums

to humor more tourists.

She played Nixon to Gates' Agnew.

If the sight of naked hippies made

her sick, she wasn't quite ready to cut their heads off. She was old and cranky, but not quite as mean as

Gates' vigilante backers who

wanted a mayor who would give

them free rein to go out and beat the living shit out of anybody who

didn't look like natural material for the Elks' and Eagles' membership

drives. And where Gates wanted to

turn Aspen into a Rocky Mountain

version of Atlantic City. . . Eve

Homeyer only wanted to make it a

sort of St. Petersburg with a

Disneyland overlay. "She agreed halfway, with everything Lennie Oates stood for. . . but she wanted it made damn clear that she viewed

Joe Edwards' candidacy as pure

demented lunacy -- a form of surly

madness so wrong and rotten that

only the Wretched and the Scum of

the Earth could give it a moment's

thought.

We had already beaten Oates, but I

was too tired to hassle the Elks

right then, and in some strange way

I felt sorry for them. They were about to be stomped very badly by a candidate who agreed with them

more than they knew. The people

who had reason to fear the Edwards

campaign were the sub-dividers,

ski-pimps and city-based land-

developers who had come like a

plague of poison roaches to buy and sell the whole valley out from under the people who still valued it as a good place to live, not just a good investment.

Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons

completely out of the valley: to

prevent the State Highway

Department from bringing a four-

lane highway into the town and in

fact to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where

everybody, even freaks, could do

whatever's right. The cops would

become trash collectors and

maintenance men for a fleet of

municipal bicycles, for anybody to

use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the

view, from any downtown street, of

anybody who might want to look up

and see the mountains. No more

land-rapes, no more busts for "flute-playing" or "blocking the sidewalk". . . fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the

greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people

could live like human beings,

instead of slaves to some bogus

sense of Progress that is driving us

all mad.

Joe Edwards' platform was against

the developers, not the old-timers

and ranchers -- and it was hard to

see, from their arguments, how they could disagree in substance with

anything we said. . . unless what

they were really worried about was

the very good chance that a win by

Edwards would put an end to their

options of selling out to the highest bidder. With Edwards, they said,

would come horrors like Zoning

and Ecology, which would cramp their fine Western style, the buy

low, sell high ethic. . . free

enterprise, as it were, and the few people who bothered to argue with

them soon found that their nostalgic talk about "the good old days" and

"the tradition of this peaceful valley" was only an awkward cover for their fears about "socialist-thinking newcomers."

Whatever else the Edwards

campaign may or may not have

accomplished, we had croaked that stupid sentimental garbage about the

"land-loving old-timers."

I left the Elks Club building and

stopped on Ayman St. for a moment

to look up at the tall hills around the town. There was already snow on

Smuggler, to the north. . . and on

Bell, behind Little Nell, the ski

trails were dim white tracks. . .

steel toll-roads, waiting for

Christmas and the blizzard of fat-

wallet skiers who keep Aspen rich:

Eight dollars a day to ski on those hills, $150 for a pair of good skis, $120 for the Right boots, $65 for a Meggi sweater, $75 for a goose-down parka. . . and $200 more for

poles, gloves, goggles, hat, socks, and another $70 for a pair of ski

pants. . .

Indeed. The ski industry is a big

business. And "apres-ski" is bigger: $90 a day for an apartment in the

Aspen Alps, $25 apiece for a good

meal & wine in the Paragon. . . and

don't forget the Bates Floaters (official apres-ski boot of the US

Olympic team -- the worst kind of

flimsy shit imaginable for $30 a

pair).

It adds up to something like an

average figure of $500 a week for

the typical midwest dingbat who

buys both his gear and his style out of Playboy. Then you multiply $100

a day by the many skier days logged in 1969-70 by the Aspen Ski Corp,

and what you get is a staggering

winter gross for a Rocky Mountain village with a real population of

just over 2000.

Which is only half the story: The

other half is an annual 30-35

percent growth/profit jump on all

money fronts. . . and what you see

here (or saw, prior to Nixon's economic adjustments) is/was a

king-hell gold-mine with no end in

sight. For the past ten years Aspen has been the showpiece/money-hub

of a gold rush that has made

millionaires. In the wake of World War II, they flocked in from Austria and Switzerland (never from

Germany, they said) to staff the

embryo nerve/resort centers of a

sport that would soon be bigger than golf or bowling. . . and now, with

skiing firmly established in

America, the original German

hustlers are wealthy burghers. They own restaurants, hotels, ski slopes and especially vast chunks of real

estate in places like Aspen.

After a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6)

votes, out of 1200. Actually we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our

absentee ballots didn't get here in time -- primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and

Nepal and Guatemala) five days

before the election.

We came very close to winning

control of the town, and that was the crucial difference between our

action in Aspen and, say, Norman

Mailer's campaign in New York --

which was clearly doomed from the

start. At the time of Edwards'

campaign we were not conscious of

any precedent. . . and even now, in calm retrospect, the only similar

effort that comes to mind is Bob

Scheer's 1966 ran for a US

Congress seat in Berkeley/Oakland

-- when he challenged liberal

Jeffrey Cohelan and lost by

something like two per cent of the

vote. Other than that, most radical attempts to get into electoral

politics have been colorful, fore-doomed efforts in the style of the

Mailer-Breslin gig.

This same essential difference is

already evident in 1970, with the

sudden rash of assaults on various

sheriffs' fiefs. Stew Albert got

65,000 votes in Berkeley, running

on a neo-hippie platform, but there was never any question of his

winning. Another notable exception

was David Pierce, a 30-year-old

lawyer who was actually elected

mayor of Richmond, California (pop. 100,000 plus) in 1964. Pierce mustered a huge black ghetto vote--

mainly on the basis of his lifestyle and his promise to "bust Standard Oil." He served, and in fact ran, the city for three years -- but in 1967 he suddenly abandoned everything to

move to a monastery in Nepal. He

is now in Turkey, en route to Aspen and then California, where he plans to run for Governor.

Another was Oscar Acosta, a

Brown Power candidate for Sheriff of Los Angeles County, who pulled

110,000 votes out of something like two million.

Meanwhile in Lawrence, Kansas,

George Kimball (defense minister

for the local White Panther party)

has already won the Democratic

primary -- running unopposed -- but he expects to lose the general

election by at least ten to one.

On the strength of the Edwards

showing, I had decided to surpass

my pledge and run for sheriff, and when both Kimball and Acosta

visited Aspen recently, they were

amazed to find that I actually expect to win my race. A preliminary canvass shows me running well

ahead of the Democratic incumbent,

and only slightly behind the

Republican challenger.

The root point is that Aspen's

political situation is so volatile --

as a result of the Joe Edwards

campaign -- that any Freak Power

candidate is now a possible winner.

In my case for instance, I will have to work very hard -- and spew out

some really heinous ideas during

my campaign -- to get less than 30

percent of the vote in a three-way

race. And an underground candidate

who really wanted to win could

assume, from the start, a working

nut of about 40 percent of the

electorate -- with his chances of

victory riding almost entirely on his Backlash Potential; or how much

active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the

burghers who have controlled local

candidates for so long.

The possibility of victory can be a heavy millstone around the neck of

any political candidate who might

prefer, in his heart, to spend his

main energies on a series of

terrifying, whiplash assaults on

everything the voters hold dear.

There are harsh echoes of the Magic Christian in this technique: The

candidate first creates an impossible psychic maze, then he

drags the voters into it and flails them constantly with gibberish and

rude shocks. This was Mailer's

technique, and it got him 55,000

votes in a city of 10 million people

-- but in truth it is more a form of vengeance than electoral politics.

Which is not to say that it can't be effective, in Aspen or anywhere

else, but as a political strategy it is tainted by a series of disastrous

defeats.

In any event, the Magic Christian concept is one side of the "new politics" coin. It doesn't work, but it's fun. . . unlike that coin's other face that emerged in the presidential campaign of Gene McCarthy and

Bobby Kennedy in 1968. In both

cases, we saw establishment

candidates claiming conversion to some newer and younger state of

mind (or political reality) that

would make them more in tune with

a newer, younger and weirder

electorate that had previously

called them both useless.

And it worked. Both conversions

were hugely successful, for a while.

. . and if the tactic itself seemed cynical, it is still hard to know, in either case, whether the tactic was father to the conversion, or vice-versa. Which hardly matters, for

now. We are talking about politicalaction formats: if the Magic

Christian concept is one, then the

Kennedy/McCarthy format has to

qualify as another. . . particularly as

the national Democratic Party is already working desperately to

make it work again in 1972, when

the Demos' only hope of unseating

Nixon will again be some shrewd

establishment candidate on the brink of menopause who will suddenly

start dropping acid in late '71 and then hit the rock-festival trail in the summer of '72. He will doff his

shirt at every opportunity and his

wife will burn her bra. . . and

millions of the young will vote for him, against Nixon.

Or will they? There is still another format, and this is the one we

stumbled on in Aspen. Why not

challenge the establishment with a

candidate they've never heard of?

Who has never been primed or

prepped or greased for public

office? And whose lifestyle is

already so weird that the idea of

"conversion" would never occur to him?

In other words, why not run an

honest freak and turn him loose, on

their turf, to show up all the

"normal" candidates for the worthless losers they are and

always have been? Why defer to the

bastards? Why assume they're

intelligent? Why believe they won't crack and fold in a crunch? (When

the Japs went into Olympic

volleyball they ran a blitz on

everybody using strange but

maddeningly legal techniques like

the "Jap roll," the "dink spike" and the "lightning belly pass" that reduced their taller opponents to

screaming jelly.)

This is the essence of what some

people call "the Aspen technique"

in politics: neither opting out of the system, nor working within it. . . but calling its bluff, by using its strength to turn its back on itself. . . and by always assuming that the people in

power are not smart. By the end of

the Edwards campaign, I was

convinced, despite my lifelong bias to the contrary, that the Law was

actually on our side. Not the cops,

or the judges or the politicians --

but the actual Law, itself, as printed in the dull and musty lawbooks that we constantly had to consult

because we had no other choice.

But in November of '69 we had no

time for this kind of theory-talk or thinking. I remember a list of books I wanted to get and read, in order to learn something about politics, but I barely had time to sleep, much less to do any reading. As the de facto

campaign manager, I felt like a man

who had started some kind of bloody gang-fight by accident. . .

and as the Edwards campaign grew

crazier and more vicious, my only

real concern was to save my own

ass by warding off a disaster. I

didn't know Edwards at all, but by

mid-October I felt personally

responsible for his future -- and his prospects, at that point, were not

good. Bill Dunaway, the "liberal"

publisher of the Aspen Times, told me on the morning of election that I had "singlehandedly destroyed Joe

Edwards' legal career in Aspen" by

"forcing him into politics."

This was the liberal myth -- that

some drug-addled egomaniac writer

from Woody Creek had run amok on

horse-tranquilizers, and then laid

his bad trip on the local Head

population. . . who were normally

quite peaceful and harmless, as long as they had enough drugs. But now,

for some goddamn reason, they had

gone completely wild -- and they

were dragging poor Edwards down

with them.

Right. . . poor Edwards: He was

recently divorced and living with

his girlfriend in a local garret, half-starving for income in a town full of lame dilettante lawyers, and his

name was completely unknown

except as "that bastard who sued the city" a year earlier, on behalf of two longhairs who claimed the cops

were discriminating against them.

Which was true, and the lawsuit had a terrible effect on the local police.

The Chief (now a candidate for sheriff) had quit or been fired in a rage, leaving his patrolmen on

probation to a federal judge in

Denver -- who put the suit in limbo, while warning the Aspen cops that

he would bust the city severely at

the first sign of "discriminatory law enforcement" against hippies.

This lawsuit had severe

repercussions in Aspen: The mayor

was shackled, the City Council lost its will to live, the City Magistrate,

Guido Meyer, was fired instantly --

even before the Police Chief -- and the local cops suddenly stopped

busting longhairs for the things like

"blocking the sidewalk," which carried a 90-day jail sentence that summer, along with a $200 fine.

That bullshit stopped at once, and it has stayed stopped -- thanks entirely to Edwards' lawsuit; the local

liberals called an ACLU meeting,

and let it go at that. So only a

waterhead could have been

surprised when, a year later, a handful of us in search of a mayor

candidate decided to call on Joe

Edwards. Why not? It made perfect

sense -- except to the liberals, who were not quite comfortable with a

Freak Power candidate. They didn't

mind Edwards, they said, and they

even agreed with his platform --

which we had carefully carved to

their tastes -- but there was

something very ominous, they felt,

about the "rabble" support he was getting: Not the kind of people one

really wanted to sip vichyssoise with -- wild heads, bikers and

anarchists who didn't know

Stevenson and hated Hubert

Humphrey. Who were these people?

What did they want?

What indeed? The local

businessmen's bund was not

puzzled. Joe Edwards, to them, was

the leader of a Communist drug plot to destroy their way of life, sell

LSD to their children and Spanish

Fly to their wives. Never mind that

many of their children were already selling LSD to each other, and that most of their wives couldn't get

humped on a bad night in Juarez. . .

that was all beside the point. The

point was that a gang of freaks was about to take over the town.

And why not? We had never denied

it. Not even in the platform -- which was public, and quite mild. But

somewhere around the middle of the

Edwards campaign even the

liberals got a whiff of what his

platform really meant. They could see a storm gathering behind it, that our carefully reasoned words were

only an opening wedge for drastic

action. They knew, from long

experience, that a word like

"ecology" can mean almost anything

-- and to most of them it meant

spending one day a year with a

neighborhood clean-up crew,

picking up beer cans and sending

them back to Coors for a refund that would be sent, of course, to their

favorite charity.

But "ecology," to us, meant something else entirely: We had in

mind a deluge of brutally restrictive actions that would permanently

cripple not only the obvious

landrapers but also that quiet cabal of tweedy liberal speculators who

insist on dealing in private, so as not to foul up the image. . . Like

Armand Bartos, the New York "art patron" and jet-set fashion-pacer often hummed in Women's Wear

Daily. . . who is also the

owner/builder and oft-cursed

landlord of Aspen's biggest and ugliest trailer court. The place is called "Gerbazdale," and some of the tenants insist that Bartos raises their rents.every time he decides to buy another Pop Art Original.

"I'm tired of financing that asshole's art collection," said one. "He's one of the most blatant goddam

slumlords in the Western World. He

milks us out here, then gives our

rent money to shitheads like

Warhol."

Bartos is in the same league with Wilton "Wink" Jaffee Jr. -- a New York stockbroker recently

suspended for unethical

manipulation of the market. Jaffee

has taken great pains to cultivate his image, in Aspen, as that of an arty-progressive Eastern aesthete. But

when the SEC zapped him, he

responded by quickly leasing a

chunk of his vast ranch -- between

Aspen and Woods Creek -- to a

high-powered gravel-crushing

operation from Grand Junction,

which immediately began grinding up the earth and selling it, by the ton, to the State Highway

Department. And now, after

destroying the earth and fouling the Roaring Fork River, the swine are

demanding a zoning variance so

they can build an asphalt plant. . .

on the elegant Aspen estate that

Wink Jaffee no doubt describes

quite often to his progressive

friends on Wall Street.

These, and others like them, are the

kind of shysters and horsey hypocrites who pass for "liberals"

in Aspen. So we were not surprised

when many of them made a point of

withdrawing their support about

halfway through Edwards'

campaign. At first they had liked

our words and our fiery underdog

stance (fighting the good fight in

another hopeless cause, etc.), but

when Edwards began looking like a

winner, our liberal allies panicked.

By noon on election day, the only

real question was How Many Liberals had Hung On. A few had

come over, as it were, but those few were not enough to form the other

half of the nervous power base we

had counted on from the start. The

original idea had been to lash

together a one-shot coalition and

demoralize the local money/politics establishment by winning a major

election before the enemy knew

what was happening. Aspen's

liberals are a permanent minority

who have never won anything,

despite their constant struggles. . .

and Aspen's fabled "underground"

is a far larger minority that has

never even tried to win anything.

So power was our first priority. The platform -- or at least our public

version of it -- was too intentionally vague to be anything but a flexible, secondary tool for wooing the

liberals and holding our coalition.

On the other hand, not even the

handful of people in the powernexus of Joe Edwards' campaign could

guarantee that he would start sodding the streets and flaying the sheriff just as soon as he got

elected. He was, after all, a lawyer

-- an evil tirade, at best -- and I think we all knew, although nobody

ever said it, that we really had no idea what the bastard might do if he got elected. For all we knew he

could turn into a vicious monster

and have us all jailed for sedition.

None of us even knew Joe Edwards.

For weeks we had joked about our

"ghost candidate" who emerged from time to time to insist that he was the helpless creature of some

mysterious Political Machine that

had caused his phone to ring one

Saturday at midnight, and told him

he was running for Mayor.

Which was more or less true. I had

called him in a frenzy, full of booze and resentment at a rumor that a

gaggle of local powermongers had

already met and decided who

Aspen's next mayor would be -- a

giddy old lady would run unopposed behind some kind of

lunatic obscenity they called a

"united front," or "progressive solidarity" -- endorsed by Leon Uris, who is Aspen's leading stag

movie fan, and who writes books,

like Exodus, to pay his bills. I was sitting in Peggy Clifford's living

room when I heard about it, and, as I recall, we both agreed that the

fuckers had gone too far this time.

Someone suggested Ross Griffin, a

retired ski-bum and lifelong mountain beatnik who was going

half-straight at the time and talking about running for the City Council. .

. but a dozen or so trial-balloon

calls convinced us that Ross wasn't quite weird enough to galvanize the street vote, which we felt would be absolutely necessary. (As it turned out, we were wrong: Griffin ran for the Council and won by a huge

margin in a ward full of Heads.)

But at the time it seemed necessary

to come up with a candidate whose Strange Tastes and Para-Legal

Behavior were absolutely beyond

question. . . a man whose candidacy would torture the outer limits of

political gall, whose name would

strike fear and shock in the heart of every burgher, and whose massive

unsuitability for the job would

cause even the most apolitical drug-child in the town's most degenerate commune to shout, "Yes! I must vote for that man!"

Joe Edwards didn't quite fill that bill. He was a bit too straight for the acid-people, and a little too

strange for the liberals-- but he was the only candidate even marginally

acceptable on both ends of our un-

tried coalition spectrum. And 24

hours after our first jangled phone talk about "running for Mayor," he said, "Fuck it, why not?"

The next day was Sunday and The Battle of Algiers was playing at the Wheeler Opera House. We agreed

to meet afterwards, on the street, but the hookup was difficult, because I didn't know what he looked like. So we ended up milling around for a

while, casting sidelong glances at

each other, and I remember thinking, Jesus, could that be him over there?

That scurvy-looking geek with the

shifty eyes? Shit, he'll never win

anything. . .

Finally after awkward

introductions, we walked down to

the old Jerome Hotel and ordered

some beers sent out to the lobby, where we could talk privately. Our

campaign juggernaut, that night,

consisted of me, Jim Salter, and

Mike Solheim -- but we all assured

Edwards that we were only the tip

of the iceberg that was going to

float him straight into the sea-lanes of big-time power politics. In fact, I sensed that both Solheim and Salter were embarrassed to find

themselves there -- assuring some

total stranger that all he had to do was say the word and we would

make him Mayor of Aspen.

None of us had even a beginner's

knowledge of how to run a political campaign. Salter writes screenplays (Downhill Racer) and books (A Sport and a Pastime). Solheim used to own an elegant bar called

Leadville, in Ketchum, Idaho, and

his Aspen gig is housepainting. For my part, I had lived about ten miles out of town for two years, doing

everything possible to avoid

Aspen's feverish reality. My

lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any

small-town political establishment.

They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable

exceptions -- both lawyers), and

consistently ignored all rumors of

madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided

writing about Aspen. . . and in my

very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a

hermit and a wolverine, a thing best

left alone as long as possible.

So the '69 campaign was perhaps a

longer step for me than it was for

Joe Edwards. He had already tasted

political conflict and he seemed to dig it. But my own involvement

amounted to the willful shattering of what had been, until then, a very

comfortable truce. . . and looking

back I'm still not sure what

launched me. Probably it was

Chicago -- that brainraping week in August of '68. I went to the

Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving

beast.

For me, that week in Chicago was

far worse than the worst bad acid

trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain

chemistry, and my first new idea --

when I finally calmed down -- was

an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster

like Chicago. Suddenly, it seemed imperative to get a grip on those

who had somehow slipped into

power and caused the thing to

happen.

But who were they? Was Mayor

Daley a cause, or a symptom?

Lyndon Johnson was finished,

Hubert Humphrey was doomed,

McCarthy was broken, Kennedy

was dead, and that left only Nixon, that pompous, plastic little fart who would soon be our President. I went

to Washington for his Inauguration, hoping for a terrible shitrain that would pound the White House to

splinters. But it didn't happen; no shitrain, no justice. . . and Nixon was finally in charge.

So in truth it was probably a sense of impending doom, of horror at

politics in general, that goaded me into my role in the Edwards

campaign. The reasons came later,

and even now they seem hazy. Some

people call politics fun, and maybe

it is when you're winning. But even then it's a mean kind of fun, and

more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or

pleasant. Real happiness, in

politics, is a wide-open hammer

shot on some poor bastard who

knows he's been trapped, but can't

flee.

The Edwards campaign was more

an uprising than a movement. We

had nothing to lose: we were like a bunch of wild-eyed amateur

mechanics rolling a homemade racing car onto the track at

Indianapolis and watching it

overtake a brace of big

Offenhausers at the 450 pole. There were two distinct phases in the

month-long Edwards campaign. For

the first two weeks we made a lot

of radical noise and embarrassed

our friends and discovered that

most of the people we had counted

on were absolutely useless.

So nobody was ready for the second

phase, when the thing began coming together like a conquered jigsaw

puzzle. Our evening strategy

meetings in the Jerome Bar were

suddenly crowded with people

demanding a piece of the action. We were inundated with $5 and $10

contributions from people whom

none of us knew. From Bob

Krueger's tiny darkroom and Bill

Noonan's angry efforts to collect

enough money to pay for a full-page ad in Dunaway's liberal Times, we suddenly inherited all the facilities

of the "Center of the Eye"

Photography School and an

unlimited credit-line (after

Dunaway fled to the Bahamas) from

Steve Herron at the Times-owned

radio station, then the only one in town. (Several months after the

election a 24-hour FM station began broadcasting -- with daytime Muzak

balanced off against a late-night

freak-rock gig as heavy as anything in S.F. or L.A.). With no local

television, the radio was our

equivalent of a high-powered TV

campaign. And it provoked the same kind of surly reaction that has been shrugged off, on both coasts,

by US Senate candidates such as

Ottinger (N.Y.) and Tunney (Calif.).

That comparison is purely

technical. The radio spots we ran in Aspen would have terrified

political eunuchs like Tunney and

Ottinger. Our theme song was

Herbie Mann's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which we ran over and over again -- as a doleful

background to very heavy raps and evil mockery of the retrograde

opposition. They bitched and

groaned, accusing us in their

ignorance of "using Madison

Avenue techniques," while in truth it was pure Lenny Bruce. But they

didn't know Lenny; their humor was

still Bob Hope, with a tangent taste for Don Rickles here and there

among the handful of swingers who

didn't mind admitting that they dug the stag movies, on weekends, at

Leon Uris' home on Red Mountain.

We enjoyed skewering those bastards. Our radio wizard, an ex-nightclub comic, Phil Clark, made

several spots that caused people to foam at the mouth and chase their

tails in impotent rage. There was a thread of high, wild humor in the

Edwards campaign, and that was

what kept us all sane. There was a

definite satisfaction in knowing that, even if we lost, whoever beat us

would never get rid of the scars. It was necessary, we felt, to

thoroughly terrify our opponents, so

that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise

until the next election.

This worked out nicely -- or at least effectively, and by the spring of

1970 it was clear on all fronts, that Aspen's traditional power structure was no longer in command of the

town. The new City Council quickly

broke down to a permanent 3-4

split, with Ned Vare as the

spokesman for one side and a

Bircher-style dentist named

Comcowich taking care of the other.

This left Eve Homeyer, who had

campaigned with the idea that the

mayor was "only a figurehead," in the nasty position of having to cast a tie-breaking vote on every

controversial issue. The first few

were minor, and she voted her

Agnew-style convictions in each

case. . . but the public reaction was ugly, and after a while the Council lapsed into a kind of nervous

stalemate, with neither side anxious to bring anything to a vote. The

realities of a small-town politics are so close to the bone that there is no way to avoid getting cursed in

the streets, by somebody, for any

vote you cast. An alderman in

Chicago can insulate himself almost completely from the people he votes against, but there is no escape in a place the size of Aspen.

The same kind of tension began

popping up on the other fronts: The local high school principal tried to fire a young teacher for voicing a

left-wing political bias in the classroom, but her students went on strike and not only forced the

teacher's reinstatement but very

nearly got the principal fired.

Shortly after that, Ned Vare and a

local lawyer named Shellman

savaged the State Highway

Department so badly that all plans

to bring the four-lane highway

through town were completely de-

funded. This drove the County

Commissioners into a filthy funk;

the Highway had been their pet

project, but suddenly it was screwed, doomed. . . by the same

gang of bastards who had caused all the trouble last fall.

The Aspen Medical Center was

filled with cries of rage and

anguish. Comcowich the twisted

dentist rushed out of his office in that building and punched a young

freak off his bicycle, screeching:

"You dirty little motherfucker we're going to run you all out of town!"

Then he fled back inside, to his

office across the hall from that of the good Dr. Barnard (Buggsy) and

his like-minded cohort Dr. J.

Sterling Baxter.

For five years these two had

controlled Aspen's affairs with a

swagger that mixed sports cars and

speed with mistresses and teeny-

boppers and a cavalier disdain for

the amenities of the medical

profession. Buggsy handled the

municipal action, while Baxter ran

the County, and for five fairly

placid years the Aspen Medical Center was Aspen's Tammany Hall.

Buggsy dug his Mayor's act

immensely. From time to time he

would run amok and abuse his

power disgracefully, but in general he handled it well. His friends were many and varied -- ranging from

dope dealers and outlaw bikers to

District Judge and horse-traders. . .

even me, and in fact it never

crossed my mind that Buggsy would

be anything but a tremendous help

when we kicked off the Edwards

campaign. It seemed entirely logical that an old freak would want to pass the torch to a young freak. . .

Instead, he refused to go gracefully, and rather than helping Edwards he

tried to destroy him. At one point

Barnard actually tried to get back

into the race himself, and when that didn't work he shoved in a last-minute dummy. This was poor

Gates, who went down -- along

with Buggsy -- to an ignominious

defeat. We beat them stupid, and

Barnard couldn't believe it. Shortly after the polls closed, he went down to City Hall and stared balefully at the blackboard when the clerk

started posting the returns. The first figures stunned him visibly, they

said, and by ten o'clock he was

raving incoherently about "fraud"

and "recounts" and "those dirty bastards who turned on me."

One of his friends who was there

recalls it as a very heavy scene. . .

although Dylan Thomas might have

dug it, for the Mayor is said to have raged horribly against the dying of the light.

And so much for what might have

been a very sad story. . . except that Buggsy went home that night and

began laying feverish plans to

become Mayor of Aspen again. His

new power base is a thing called

the "Taxpayers' League," a sort of reverse-elite corps of the booziest Elks and Eagles, whose only real

point of agreement is that every

animal in this world that has walked on two legs for less than 50 years is evil, queer and dangerous. The

Taxpayers' League is really a

classic example of what

anthropologists call an "atavistic endeavor." On the scale of political development, they are still flirting with Senator Bilbo's dangerously

progressive proposal to send all the niggers back to Africa on a fleet of iron barges.

This is Buggsy's new constituency.

They are not all vicious drunks, and not all mental defectives either.

Some are genuinely confused and

frightened at what seems to be the

End of the World as they know it.

And this is sad, too. . . but the

saddest thing of all is that, in the context of this article, the

Taxpayers' League is not irrelevant.

In the past six months this group has emerged as the most consistently

effective voting bloc in the valley.

They have beaten the liberals

handily in every recent encounter

(none crucial) that came down, in the end, to a matter of who had the muscle.

Who indeed? The liberals simply

can't get it up. . . and since the end of the Edwards campaign we have

deliberately avoided any effort to

mobilize the Freak Power bloc. The

political attention span of the

average dropout is too short, we

felt, to blow it on anything minor.

Nearly everyone who worked on

the Edwards gig last year was

convinced that he would have won easily if the election had been held on November 14th instead of

November 4th. . . or if we'd started whipping our act together even a

week earlier.

Maybe so, but I doubt it. That idea assumes that we had control of the thing -- but we didn't. The campaign was out of control from beginning to end and the fact that it peaked on

election day was a perfect accident, a piece of luck that we couldn't

have planned. By the time the polls opened we had fired just about

every shot we had. There was

nothing left to do, on election day, except deal with Buggsy's threats --

and that was done before noon.

Beyond that, I don't recall that we did much -- until just before the

polls closed -- except drive around town at high speed and drink vast

amounts of beer.

There is no point even hoping for

that kind of luck again this year. We

began organizing in mid-August --

six weeks earlier than last time --

and unless we can pace the thing

perfectly we might find ourselves

limp and burned out two weeks

before the election. I have a

nightmare vision of our whole act

coming to a massive orgiastic

climax on October 25th: Two

thousand costumed freaks doing the

schottische, in perfect unison, in

front of the County Courthouse. . .

sweating, weeping, chanting. . .

"Vote NOW! Vote NOW."

Demanding the ballot at once, completely stoned on politics, too

high and strung out to even

recognize their candidate, Ned

Vare, when he appears on the

courthouse steps and shouts for

them all to back off: "Go back to your homes! You can't vote for ten

more days!" The mob responds with a terrible roar, then surges forward.

. . Vare disappears. . .

I turn to flee, but the Sheriff is there with a huge rubber sack that he

quickly flips over my head and places me under arrest for felony

conspiracy. The elections are

canceled and J. Sterling Baxter

places the town under martial law,

with himself in total command. . .

Baxter is both the symbol and the

reality of the Old/Ugly/Corrupt

political machine that we hope to

crack in November. He will be

working from a formidable power

base: A coalition of Buggsy's

"Taxpayers" and Comcowich's

right-wing suburbanites -- along with heavy institutional support

from both banks, the Contractors'

Association and the all-powerful

Aspen Ski Corporation. He will

also have the financing and

organizing resources of the local

GOP, which outnumbers the

Democrats more than two to one in

registrations.

The Democrats, with an eye on the

probability of another Edwards-

style uprising on the Left, are

running a political transvestite, a middle-aged realtor whom they will

try to promote as a "sensible

alternative" to the menacing

"extremes" posed by Baxter and Ned Vare. The incumbent Sheriff is

also a Democrat.

Vare is running as an Independent

and his campaign symbol, he says,

will be "a tree." For the Sheriff's campaign, my symbol will be either

a horribly-deformed cyclops owl,

or a double-thumbed fist, clutching

a peyote button, which is also the symbol of our general strategy and

organizing cabal, the Meat Possum

Athletic Club. At the moment I am

registered as an Independent, but

there is still the possibility --

pending the outcome of current

negotiations for campaign financing

-- that I may file for office as a

Communist. It will make no

difference which label I adopt; the die is already cast in my race -- and the only remaining question is how

many Freaks, heads, criminals,

anarchists, beatniks, poachers, Wobblies, bikers and Persons of

Weird Persuasion will come out of

their holes and vote for me. The

alternatives are depressingly

obvious: my opponents are hopeless

bums who would be more at home

on the Mississippi State Highway

Patrol. . . and, if elected, I promise to recommend them both for the

kinds of jobs they deserve.

Ned Vare's race is both more

complex and far more important

than mine. He is going after the dragon. Jay Baxter is the most

powerful political figure in the

county. He is the County

Commissioner; the other two are

echoes. If Vare can beat Baxter that will snap the spine of the local/

money/politics establishment. . .

and if Freak Power can do that in

Aspen, it can also do it in other

places. But if it can't be done here, one of the few places in America

where we can work off a proven

power base -- then it is hard to

imagine it working in any other place with fewer natural

advantages. Last fall we came

within six votes, and it will

probably be close again this time.

Memories of the Edwards campaign

will guarantee a heavy turnout, with a dangerous backlash factor that

could wipe us out completely unless the Head population can get itself

together and actually vote. Last year perhaps the Heads voted; this year

we will need them all. The

ramifications of this election go far

beyond any local issues or candidates. It is an experiment with a totally new kind of political

muscle. . . and the results, either way, will definitely be worth

pondering.

Tentative Platform

Thompson for Sheriff

Aspen, Colorado, 1970

1) Sod the streets at once. Rip up

all city streets with jack-hammers

and use the junk asphalt (after melting) to create a huge parking

and auto-storage lot on the outskirts of town -- preferably somewhere

out of sight, like between the new

sewage plant and McBride's new

shopping center. All refuse and

other garbage could be centralized

in this area -- in memory of Mrs.

Walter Paepke, who sold the land

for development. The only

automobiles allowed into town

would be limited to a network of

"delivery-alleys," as shown in the

very detailed plan drawn by architect/planner Fritz Benedict in 1969. All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force.

2) Change the name "Aspen," by public referendum, to "Fat City."

This would prevent greedheads,

land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name

"Aspen." Thus, Snowmass-at-Aspen

-- recently sold to Kaiser/Aetna of Oakland -- would become

"Snowmass-at-Fat City." Aspen Wildcat -- whose main backers

include The First National City

Bank of New York and the First

Boston Capital Corp. -- would have

to be called "Fat City Wildcat." All road-signs and roadmaps would

have to be changed from Aspen to

"Fat City." The local Post Office and Chamber of Commerce would

have to honor the new name.

"Aspen," Colo, would no longer exist -- and the psychic alterations of this change would be massive in

the world of commerce: Fat City Ski Fashions, the Fat City Slalom

Cup, Fat City Music Festival, Fat

City Institute for Humanistic

Studies. . . etc. And the main

advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no

major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here

because it's a good place to live.

What effect the name-change might

have on those who came here to buy

low, sell high and then move on is

fairly obvious. . . and eminently

desirable. These swine should be fucked, broken and driven across

the land.

3) Drug Sales must be controlled.

My first act as Sheriff will be to

install, on the courthouse lawn, a

bastinado platform and a set of

stocks -- in order to punish

dishonest dope dealers in a proper

public fashion. Each year these

dealers cheat millions of people out of millions of dollars. As a breed, they rank with subdividers and used

car salesmen and the Sheriffs Dept.

will gladly hear complaints against dealers at any hour of the day or

night, with immunity from

prosecution guaranteed to the

complaining party -- provided the

complaint is valid. (It should be

noted, on this point in the platform, that any Sheriff of any County in

Colorado is legally responsible for enforcing all State Laws regarding drugs -- even those few he might

personally disagree with. The

statutes provide for malfeasance

penalties up to $100 in each instance, in cases of willful

nonenforcement. . . but it should

also be noted that the statutes

provide for many other penalties, in many other strange and unlikely

circumstances, and as Sheriff I shall make myself aware of all of them, without exception. So any vengeful, ill-advised dingbat who might

presume to bring malfeasance

charges against my office should be quite sure of his/her facts. . .) And in the meantime, it will be the

general philosophy of the Sheriff's office that no drug worth taking

should be sold for money. Nonprofit sales will be viewed as borderline

cases, and judged on their merits.

But all sales for money-profit will be punished severely. This

approach, we feel, will establish a unique and very human ambiance in the Aspen (or Fat City) drug culture

-- which is already so much a part

of our local reality that only a

falangist lunatic would talk about

trying to "eliminate it." The only

realistic approach is to make life in this town very ugly for all

profiteers -- in drugs and all other fields.

4) Hunting and fishing should be

forbidden to all nonresidents, with the exception of those who can

obtain the signed endorsement of a

resident -- who will then be legally responsible for any violation or

abuse committed by the nonresident

he has "signed for." Fines will be heavy and the general policy will

be Merciless Prosecution of All Offenders. But -- as in the case of the proposed city name-change --

this "Local Endorsement" plan should have no effect on anyone

except greedy, dangerous kill-freaks who are a menace wherever they

go. This new plan would have no

effect on residents -- except those who chose to endorse visiting

"sportsmen." By this approach --

making hundreds or even thousands

of individuals personally

responsible for protecting the

animals, fish and birds who live here -- we would create a sort of de facto game preserve, without the

harsh restrictions that will

necessarily be forced on us if these blood-thirsty geeks keep swarming

in here each autumn to shoot

everything they see.

5) The Sheriff and his Deputies

should never be armed in public.

Every urban riot, shoot-out and

blood-bath (involving guns) in

recent memory has been set off by

some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy. And no cop in Aspen has

had to use a gun for so many years

that I feel safe in offering a $12

cash award to anybody who can

recall such an incident in writing.

(Box K-33, Aspen). Under normal

circumstances a pistol-grip Mace-

bomb, such as the MK-V made by

Gen. Ordnance, is more than enough

to quickly wilt any violence-

problem that is likely to emerge in Aspen. And anything the MK-V

can't handle would require

reinforcements anyway. . . in which case the response would be geared

at all times to Massive Retaliation: a brutal attack with guns, bombs,

pepper-foggers, wolverines and all

other weapons deemed necessary to

restore the civic peace. The whole

notion of disarming the police is to lower the level of violence -- while guaranteeing, at the same time, a

terrible punishment to anyone stupid enough to attempt violence on an

unarmed cop.

6) It will be the policy of the Sheriff's office savagely to harass all those engaged in any form of

land-rape. This will be done by

acting, with utmost dispatch, on any and all righteous complaints. My

first act in office -- after setting up the machinery for punishing dope-dealers -- will be to establish a

Research Bureau to provide facts

on which any citizen can file a Writ of Seizure, a Writ of Stoppage, a

Writ of Fear, of Horror. . . yes. . .

even a Writ of Assumption. . .

against any greedhead who has managed to get around our

antiquated laws and set up a tar-vat, scum-drain or gravel-pit. These

writs will be pursued with

overweening zeal. . . and always

within the letter of the law. Selah.

Rolling Stone #67, October 1, 1970

Memo from the Sports

Desk:

The So-Called "Jesus

Freak" Scare A recent emergency survey of our

field-sources indicates a firestorm of lunacy brewing on the neo-religious front. Failure to prepare for this madness could tax our

resources severely -- perhaps to the breaking point. During the next few months we will almost certainly be

inundated, even swamped, by a

nightmare-blizzard of schlock,

gibberish, swill & pseudo-religious bullshit of every type and

description. We can expect no relief until after Christmas. This problem will manifest itself in many

treacherous forms -- and we will

have to deal with them all. To wit: 1) The mailroom will be paralyzed

by wave after wave of pamphlets,

records, warnings and half-mad

screeds from Persons and/or

Commercial Organizations

attempting to cash in on this grisly shuck. So we have already made

arrangements to establish an

alternative mailroom, to handle our serious business.

2) We expect the main elevators to

be jammed up, day and night, by a

never-ending swarm of crazies

attempting to drag huge wooden

crosses and other over-sized

gimcracks into the building. To

circumvent this, we are even now in the process of installing a powerful glass/cube electric lift on the

exterior of the building for employee/business & general

editorial use. The ingress/egress door will be cut in the east wall,

behind Dave Felton's cubicle. The

ground-floor door will be disguised as a huge packing crate in the

parking lot. An armed guard will be on duty at all times.

3) We expect the phone lines to be

tied up almost constantly by hired

and/or rabid Jesus Freaks

attempting to get things like 'Today's Prayer Message," etc., into our editorial columns. Our policy will

be not to reject these things: No, we will accept them. They will all be switched to a special automated

phone-extension in the basement of

the building. Yail Bloor, the

eminent theologist, has prepared a

series of recorded replies for calls of this nature. Any callers who

resist automation can leave their

names & numbers, so Inspector

Bloor can return their calls and deal with them personally between the

hours of 2 and 6 AM.

These are only a few of the specific horrors that we will have to come

to grips with between now and

September. There will, of course,

be others -- less tangible and far

more sensitive -- such as

Subversion of Key Personnel. As

always, there will be a few

brainless scumbags going under --

succumbing, as it were -- to the lure of this latest cult. We expect this, and when these organizational

blow-holes appear, they will be

plugged with extreme speed &

savagery.

It is the view of the Sports Desk that a generation of failed dingbats and closet-junkies should under no

circumstances be allowed to foul

our lines of communication at a time when anybody with access to a

thinking/nationwide audience has an almost desperate obligation to

speak coherently. This is not the year for a mass reversion to

atavistic bullshit -- and particularly not in the pages of ROLLING STONE.

We expect the pressure to mount in geometric progressions from now

until December, & then to peak

around Christmas. Meanwhile, it is

well to remember the words of Dr.

Heem, one of the few modern-day

wizards who has never been wrong.

Dr. Heem was cursed by

Eisenhower, mocked by Kennedy,

jeered by Tim Leary and threatened

by Eldridge Cleaver. But he is still on the stump. . . still hustling.

"The future of Christianity is far too

fragile," he said recently, "to be left in the hands of the Christians --

especially pros."

The Sports Desk feels very strongly about this. Further warnings will

issue, as special problems arise.

Which they will. We are absolutely

certain of this, if nothing else. What we are faced with today is the same old Rising Tide that's been coming

for the past five years or more. . .

the same old evil, menacing, frog-

eyed trip of a whole generation run

amok from too many failures.

Which is fine. It was long overdue.

And once again in the words of Dr.

Heem, "Sometimes the old walls are so cockeyed that you can't even fit a new window." But the trouble with the Jesus Freak outburst is that it is less, a window than a gigantic Spanish Inquisition, the Salem

Witch Trials, the Rape of the Congo and the Conquest of the Incas, the

Mayans, and the Aztecs. Entire

civilizations have been done in by

vengeful monsters claiming a special relationship with "God."

What we are dealing with now is

nothing less than another Empire on the brink of collapse -- more than

likely of its own bad weight &

twisted priorities. This process is already well underway. Everything

Nixon stands for is doomed, now or

later.

But it will sure as hell be later if the best alternative we can mount is a generation of loonies who've

given up on everything except a revival of the same old primitive

bullshit that caused all our troubles from the start. What a horror to think that all the fine, high action of the Sixties would somehow come

down -- ten years later -- to a gross

& mindless echo of Billy Sunday.

This is why the Sports Desk insists that these waterheads must be kept

out of the building at all costs. We have serious business to deal with, and these fuckers will only be in the

way.

Sincerely,

Raoul Duke

Rolling Stone, #90, September 2, 1971

Memoirs of a Wretched

Weekend

in Washington

One of my clearest memories of that

wretched weekend is the sight of Jerry Rubin standing forlornly on

the steps of a marble building near the Capitol, watching a gang fight at the base of a flagpole. The

"counter-inaugural" parade had just ended and some of the marchers had

decided to finish the show by raping the American flag. Other marchers

protested, and soon the two factions were slugging it out.

The flag slipped down the pole a

few feet, then went back up as a

group of anti-war patriots formed a sort of human anchor on the main

pulley-rope. These defenders of the flag were part of the Mobilization

Committee to End the War in

Vietnam (MOBE), organizers of the

"counter-inaugural". . . the liberal, pacifist collegiate wing of the

protest. The attackers, screaming

"Tear the damn thing down," were a wild and disorganized hellbroth of

young streetfighters, ranging from

local SDS militants to a motorcycle gang called the "Huns." There were

blacks on both sides of the argument, but most of the fist-action involved young whites.

As I backed away from the brawl,

two dogs began fighting behind me

and a march leader shouting

"Peace!" into his bullhorn was attacked by a freak wearing a

Prussian helmet. The anti-war

parade had turned savagely on

itself.

Rubin, a Yippie organizer and

veteran of every major protest since

the first Berkeley uprising in 1964, was staring at the chaos around the flag-pole. "Awful," he muttered:

"This whole thing is depressing. . .

no life, no direction. . . this may be the last demonstration."

His words echoed a notion I'd just

scribbled in my notebook: "No

more singing, no more speeches,

farewell to all that. . ." I understood what Rubin meant; our paths had

crossed constantly in the past four years, from the Bay Area to

Chicago. . . always on different levels of involvement, he as a

central figure and I as a journalist. .

. but now, in 1969, it was obvious

to both of us that the scene had

changed drastically.

Violence and confrontation are the

themes now. The whole concept of

"peaceful protest" died in Chicago, at the Democratic Convention.

Nobody invited Joan Baez to

Washington; nobody sang "We Shall Overcome." There were other,

newer slogans here, like "Kill the Pigs!" "---- the War," and "Two-Four-Six-Eight. . . Organize to

Smash the State!"

Vicious dissidence is the style.

Nobody goes limp. They throw

rocks at the cops, then run. . . and two minutes later they pop up

somewhere else and throw more

rocks. We have come a long way

from Berkeley and the Free peech

Movement. There is a new

meanness on both sides. . . and no

more humor.

For Rubin, the change is bitterly

personal. As a result of the police riot in Chicago, he is now free on

$25,000 bail, charged with

solicitation to commit mob action, a felony carrying a possible five-year prison sentence. In the good old

days, three months in jail was

considered harsh punishment for a

protest leader. Now, in the Nixon

era, people like Rubin are

candidates for the bastinado.

As for me. . . well, the change is not yet physical. With press credentials, I usually manage to avoid arrest. . .

although I suspect that, too, will

change in the new era. A press

badge or even a notebook is coming

to be a liability in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of these civil conflicts. Neutrality is obsolete.

The question now, even for a

journalist, is "Which side are you on?" In Chicago I was clubbed by police: In Washington I was

menanced by demonstrators.

The Inauguration weekend was a king-hell bummer in almost every

way. The sight of Nixon taking the

oath, the doomed and vicious tone

of the protest, constant rain, rivers of mud, an army of rich swineherds

jamming the hotel bars, old ladies

with blue hair clogging the

restaurants. . . a horror-show, for sure. Very late one night, listening to the radio in my room I heard a

song by The Byrds, with a refrain

that went: "Nobody knows. . . what trouble they're in; Nobody thinks. .

. it might happen again." It echoed in my head all weekend, like a

theme song for a bad movie. . . the Nixon movie.

My first idea was to load up on

LSD and cover the Inauguration that way, but the possibilities were

ominous: a scene that bad could

only be compounded to the realm of

mega-horrors by something as

powerful as acid. No. . . it had to be done straight, or at least with a few joints in calm moments. . . like fast-

stepping across the Mall, bearing down on the Smithsonian Institution with a frenzied crowd chanting

obscenities about Spiro Agnew. . .

mounted police shouting "Back!

Back!". . . and the man next to me, an accredited New York journalist,

hands me a weird cigarette, saying,

"Why not? It's all over anyway. . ."

Indeed. He was right. From my

point of view -- and presumably

from his -- it was all over. Richard Nixon had finally become

President. All around us these 18

and 19 year old loonies were

throwing firecrackers and garbage

at the mounted police. From inside

the Smithsonian, Agnew's people

were looking out, crowded against

the doorway glass, watching the

mob as it menaced late-arriving

guests. A cop lost his temper and

rushed into the crowd to seize an

agitator. . . and that was the last we saw of him for about three minutes.

When he emerged, after a dozen

others had rushed in to save him, he

looked like some ragged hippie. . .

the mob had stripped him of

everything except his pants, one

boot, and part of his coat. His hat was gone, his gun and gunbelt, all

his badges and police decorations. .

. he was a beaten man and his name

was Lennox. I know this because I

was standing beside the big

plainclothes police boss who was

shouting, "Get Lennox in the van!"

Lennox was not in full control of

himself; he was screaming around

like a guinea hen just worked over by a pack of wild dogs. The

supervisor bore down on him,

raging at the spectacle of a chewed-up cop running around in full view

of the press and the mob. . . adding insult to injury. They put Lennox in the van and we never saw him

again.

How could this happen? With Spiro

Agnew and his guests looking out

from the elegant museum on the eve

of his inauguration as Vice-

President of the U.S., a mob of dissident "pacifists" mauls a cop assigned to protect the party. This man Lennox had read too many old

newspapers, too many reports about

"cowardly, non-violent

demonstrators." So he rushed in to grab one of them -- to enforce The

Law -- and they nearly did him in.

A man standing next to the action

said: "They took turns kicking him in the head. They tore everything off of him -- thirty more seconds and

they'd have stripped him completely

naked."

Rotten behavior, no doubt about it.

Several hours later, riding in a cab in another part of Washington, I told the black cabbie what had

happened. "Beautiful, beautiful," he said. "I used to be on The Force and I was ready to go back. . . but not now; hell, I don't want to be a

public enemy."

I went to the Inauguration for

several reasons, but mainly to be

sure it wasn't a TV trick. It seemed

impossible that it could actually happen: President Nixon. Enroute to Washington, crossing the Rockies in a big jet with a drink in my hand I wrote in my notebook: "One year later, flying east again to cover

Nixon. . . last time it was to New

York and then on the Yellowbird

Special to Manchester, New

Hampshire. . . to Nixon

headquarters at the Holiday Inn,

greeted by speechwriter Pat

Buchanan who didn't approve of my

garb. . . Mistah Nixon, he doan like

ski jackets, boy -- and Where's yore tie? Buchanan, a rude suspicious

geek, Liberty Lobby type. . . but

now he's in Washington, and so is

"The Boss."

All the staffers called him "the boss." His speeches and campaign appearances were called "drills."

I'm not sure what they called me,

but it must have been ugly. Here is an excerpt from the article I wrote after following him around New

Hampshire for ten days:

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people. He was. . . a man with no soul, no inner

convictions. . . The "old Nixon"

didn't make it. Neither did earlier models of the "new Nixon." So now we have "Nixon Mark IV," and as a journalist I suppose it's only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in

some ways. But as a customer, I

wouldn't touch it -- except with a

long cattle prod.

At the Baltimore airport I ran into Bob Gover, arriving from New

Orleans with a new wife and a big

movie camera. Gover is a writer

(One Hundred Dollar

Misunderstanding, among others), but he's into a film gig now, making a movie of the impending revolution that he thinks will be out in the open before 1970. Not everyone

involved in "The Movement" is that optimistic; the timetable varies from six months to four years, but there is near-unanimous agreement that

some kind of shattering upheaval will occur before 1972. . . not just riots, or closing down universities, but a violent revolution.

This ominous prospect has already

cracked the fragile solidarity of the

"new left." Until now, the war in Vietnam has been a sort of

umbrella-issue, providing a

semblance of unity to a mixed bag

of anti-war groups with little else in common. The "counter-inaugural" in Washington showed, very clearly,

that this alliance is breaking down.

Indeed, the whole scene is

polarizing. Wtih Nixon and John

Mitchell on the Right, drumming for Law and Order. . . and with the

Blacks and the Student Left gearing down for Revolution. . . the Center is almost up for grabs. The only

centrist-style heavyweight these

days is Senator Ted Kennedy, who

seems to be playing the same kind

of Build and Consolidate game that

Richard Nixon perfected in 1966.

Kennedy began to haunt Nixon even before he was sworn in. On

Saturday, two days before the

Inauguration, Teddy dominated

local newscasts by unveiling a bust of his murdered brother, Robert, in the courtyard of the Justice

Department. Then, two days after

the Inaugural, Teddy was the star of a big-name fund raising rally at the Washington Hilton. The idea was to

pay off Robert's campaign debts,

but a local newspaper columnist

said it "looked like the kickoff of

Teddy's campaign." The senator, ever-cautious, was quoted in the

Washington Post as saying he hadn't picked a Vice President yet, for

1972. Nixon's reaction to this boffo was not reported in the press. The

only public comment came from

Raoul Duke, a visiting dignitary,

who said: "Well. . . nobody laughed when Banquo's ghost came to the

party. . . and remember the

Baltimore Colts."

In any case, the battle is joined. . .

Revolution versus the Wave of the Past. Rumors persist that Mr. Nixon remains confident -- for reasons not apparent to anyone under 50, except cops, evangelists and members of

the Liberty Lobby. The rest of us

will have to start reading fiction

again, or maybe build boats. The

demands of this growing

polarization -- this banshee

screaming "Which side are you on?"

-- are going to make the Johnson

years seem like a Peace Festival.

Anybody who thinks Nixon wrote

that soothing inaugural speech should remember the name, Ray

Price. He is Nixon's Bill Moyers,

and -- like Moyers -- a good man to watch for signs of a sinking ship.

Price is Nixon's house liberal, and when he quits we can look for that

era of bloody chaos and

streetfighting. . . and perhaps even that Revolution the wild turks on the New Left are waiting for. President Nixon has moved into a vacuum that

neither he nor his creatures

understand. They are setting up,

right now, in the calm eye of a hurricane. . . and if they think the winds have died, they are in for a

bad shock.

And so are the rest of us, for we are all in that eye -- even the young

militants of the New Left, who are

now more disorganized than even

the liberal Democrats, who at least have a figurehead. The Washington

protest was a bust, despite the

claims of the organizers. . . and for reasons beyond mud and rain. Jerry

Rubin was right: it was probably

"the last demonstration" -- or at least the last one in that older,

gentler and once-hopeful context.

On Monday night, around dusk, I

went back to the big circus tent that had been the scene, just 20 hours

earlier, of MOBE's Counter-

Inaugural Ball. On Sunday night the tent had been a mob scene, with

thousands of laughing young

dissidents smoking grass and

bouncing balloons around in the

flashing glare of strobe-lights and rock-music. Phil Ochs was there

and Paul Krassner. . . and Judy

Collins sent a telegram saying she

couldn't make it but "keep up the fight.". . . the crowd dug it all, and passed the hat for a lot of dollars to pay for the tent rental. A casual

observer might have thought it was

a victory party.

Then, after Nixon's parade, I went

back to the tent to see what was

happening. . . and it was gone, or at

least going. A six-man crew from the Norfolk Tent Co. had taken

down everything but the poles and

cables. Thick rolls of blue and

white canvas lay around in the mud, waiting to be put on a truck and

taken back to the warehouse.

As the tent disappeared, piece by

piece, young girls with long hair

and boys carrying rucksacks drifted by and stopped to watch. They had

come back, like me, half-expecting

to find something happening. We

stood there for a while, next to the Washington Monument. . . nobody

talking, not even the tent-company

crew. . . and then we drifted off in different directions. It was cold,

and getting colder. I zipped up my

ski jacket and walked fast across

the Mall. To my left, at the base of the monument, a group of hippies

was passing a joint around. . . and off to the right a mile or so away, I could see the bright dome of the

Capitol. . . Mr. Nixon's Capitol.

Suddenly I felt cold, and vaguely defeated. More than eight years ago, in San Francisco, I had stayed up all night to watch the election returns. .

. and when Nixon went down I felt

like a winner.

Now, on this Monday night in 1969,

President Nixon was being honored

with no less than six Inaugural

Balls. I brooded on this for a while, then decided I would go over to the Hilton, later on, and punch

somebody. Almost anybody would

do. . . but hopefully I could find a police chief from Nashville or some other mean geek. In the meantime,

there was nothing to do but go back to the hotel and watch the news on

TV. . . maybe something funny, like film clips of the bastinado.

The (Boston) Globe, February 23, 1969

PART 2

Presenting: The Richard

Nixon Doll

(Overhauled 1968 Model)

No interview with Richard Nixon

will end until he refers to himself, at least once, as a "political man."

His opponents, by implication, are

mere "politicians." Especially the man Nixon plans to defeat this

November. . . for the Presidency of the United States. Selah.

The major polls and surveys in the

country suggest that Nixon may be

right, despite the outraged howls of all those voters who insist that a

choice between Nixon and Johnson

is no choice at all. Sen. Eugene

McCarthy has called it "a choice between obscenity and vulgarity."

Yet McCarthy is the political heir

of Adlai Stevenson, who said that

"People get the kind of government they deserve." If this is true, then 1968 is probably the year in which

the great American chicken will

come home to roost. . . either for

good or for ill.

So it was with a sense of morbid curiosity that I went to New

England not long ago to check on

"the real Richard Nixon." Not necessarily the "new Nixon," or even the newest model of the old

"new Nixon," who is known to the press corps that follows him as

"Nixon Mark IV." My assignment was to find the man behind all these masks, or maybe to find that there

was no mask at all -- that Richard

Milhous Nixon, at age 55, was

neither more nor less than what he

appeared to be -- a plastic man in a plastic bag, surrounded by hired

wizards so cautious as to seem

almost plastic themselves. . . These political handlers were chosen this time for their coolness and skill for only one job: to see that Richard

Nixon is the next President of the

United States.

One of the handlers, Henry Hyde,

presumably felt I was a threat to the Nixon camp. He called PAGEANT to check me out. This was after he got

into my room somehow -- while I was away, eating breakfast -- and

read my typewritten notes. The

Nixon people, who wore baggy,

dark-colored suits and plenty of

greasy kid stuff (they looked like

models at an Elks Club style show), seemed to feel I was disrespectful

because I was dressed like a ski

bum. PAGEANT reassured Mr. Hyde as to the purity of my mission and

intentions in spite of my

appearance.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For

years I've regarded his very

existence as a monument to all the

rancid genes and broken

chromosomes that corrupt the

possibilities of the American

Dream; he was a foul caricature of

himself, a man with no soul, no

inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was

absolutely humorless; I couldn't

imagine him laughing at anything

except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but

couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

After 1960, though, I no longer took him seriously. Two years later he

blew his bid for the governorship of California and made it

overwhelmingly clear that he no

longer took himself seriously -- at least not as a politician. He made a national ass of himself by blaming

his defeats on the "biased press."

He called a press conference and snarled into the microphone: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick

around anymore, because,

gentlemen, this is my final press

conference."

There is no avoiding the fact that

Richard Nixon would not be

running for President in 1968 if

John Kennedy hadn't been

assassinated five years earlier. . .

and if the GOP hadn't nominated

Barry Goldwater in 1964. . . which

guaranteed the election of Lyndon Johnson, who has since done nearly

everything wrong and botched the

job so that now even Nixon looks

good beside him.

The situation is so obvious that

Nixon, "the political man," can't resist it. And who can blame him

for taking his luck where he finds

it? He's back on the "fast track" that he likes to talk about, with the

Presidency to gain and nothing at all to lose. He's obviously enjoying this

campaign. It's a bonus, a free shot, his last chance to stand eyeball to eyeball again with the high rollers.

Richard Nixon has been in politics

all his life; for 21 years he has

rolled about as high as a politician can in this country, and his luck has been pretty good. His instincts are those of a professional gambler

who wins more often than he loses;

his "skill" is nine parts experience to one part natural talent, and his concept of politics is entirely

mechanical.

Nixon is a political technician, and he has hired technicians to help him win this time. As a campaign team,

they are formidable. They have old

pros, young turks, crippled

opponents, and a candidate who

once came within an eyelash of

beating the late John F. Kennedy.

The "new Nixon" is above anger, and he rarely has time for casual

conversation. His staffers explain to the grumbling press that "Mr. Nixon

is busy writing tonight's speech."

He is grappling in private, as it

were, with the subtle contradictions of the Asian mind. (He slipped once in public during a late February trip to Wisconsin. "This country cannot tolerate a long war," he said. "The Asians have no respect for human

lives. They don't care about body

counts." The implied racial slur was a departure from his carefully

conceived campaign oratory.)

At one point I asked Ray Price, one

of Nixon's chief braintrusters, why the candidate was having such

difficulty finding words to echo

Dean Rusk's views on Vietnam.

Nixon's speeches for the past four

nights had been straight out of the Johnson-Rusk handbook on the

"domino theory."

Price looked hurt. "Well," he said slowly, "I really wish you'd done your homework on this. Mr. Nixon

has gone to a lot of trouble to

clarify his views on Vietnam, and

I'm only sorry that -- well. . ." He shook his head sadly, as if he

couldn't bring himself to chastise

me any further on the hallowed

premises of a Howard Johnson's

motel.

We went to his room, where he dug

up a reprint on an article from the October 1967 issue of Foreign

Affairs. The title was "Asia After Vietnam," and the author was

Richard M. Nixon. I was hoping for

something more current, but Price

was suddenly called off on other business. So I took the article to the bar and went through it several

times without finding anything to

clear my head. It was thoughtful,

articulate, and entirely consistent with the thinking of John Foster

Dulles.

I was disappointed with Price -- for the same reason I'd been

disappointed all week with Nixon.

In various ways they both assumed

that I -- and all the other reporters --

would fail to understand that Nixon was not only being evasive with

regard to Vietnam that week but that he was doing it deliberately and for good reason. George Romney's

campaign was obviously on its last

legs; New Hampshire was sewed

up for Nixon, and the best way to

maintain that lead was to stay

visible and say nothing more

controversial than "God Bless

America." Romney tried

desperately to provoke an argument, but Nixon ignored every challenge.

Nixon did confess that he had a way to end the war, but he wouldn't tell how. Patriotically he explained

why: "No one with this

responsibility who is seeking office should give away any of his

bargaining positions in advance."

(Nixon's wife, Pat, has confidence

in his ability to cope with Vietnam.

"Dick would never have let

Vietnam drag on like this," she says.)

Both Romney and McCarthy had

their Manchester headquarters at the Wayfarer, an elegant, woodsy motel

with a comfortable bar and the best dining room in the area. Nixon's

Holiday Inn command post was on

the other side of town, a grim-

looking concrete structure. I asked one of Nixon's advisers why they

had chosen such a dreary place.

"Well," he replied with a smile,

"our only other choice was the Wayfarer -- but we left that for

Romney when we found out that it's

owned by one of the most prominent

political operators in the state -- a Democrat, of course." He chuckled.

"Yeah, poor George really stepped into that one."

Nixon's pros had won another point; there was nothing newsworthy

about it, but those who mattered in the state political hierarchy

understood, and they were the

people Nixon needed to win New

Hampshire. Small victories like this add up to delegates. Even before the votes were counted in New

Hampshire, GOP strategists said Nixon had already gathered more

than 600 of the 667 votes he would

need to win the nomination.

There is no denying his fine

understanding of the American

political process. I went to New

Hampshire expecting to find a

braying ass, and I came away

convinced that Richard Nixon has

one of the best minds in politics. He understands problems very quickly;

you can almost hear his brain

working when he's faced with a difficult question. He concentrates so visibly that it looks like he's

posing, and his answer, when it

flows, will nearly always be right, for the situation -- because Nixon's mind is programmed, from long

experience, to cope with difficult situations. The fact that he often

distorts the question -- and then

either answers it dishonestly or uses it to change the subject -- is usually lost in the rhetoric. "I'm really better at dialogue," he says, "The

question-and-answer format is good for me. I like it on TV. The set

speech is one of those things like

the Rotary Club luncheon. I can do

it, but if I had my druthers, I'd make it all Q and A." The "old Nixon"

would argue in public; the "new Nixon" won't. He has learned this lesson well, even if painfully.

The "new Nixon" is a very careful man when it comes to publicity; he

smiles constantly for the cameras,

talks always in friendly platitudes,

and turns the other cheek to any sign of hostility. His press relations are

"just fine," he says, and if anyone mentions that "final press

conference" he held in 1962, Nixon just smiles and changes the subject.

He is making a conscious effort to

avoid antagonizing reporters this

time, but he is still very leery of them. Nixon takes all his meals in

his room, which he never leaves

except to rush off to one of his

"drills" -- the term he and his staffers use to mean any speech or

public appearance. His staffers sometimes join reporters in the bar, but never Nixon. He neither drinks

nor smokes, they say, and bars make him nervous. Humphrey Bogart

would have taken a dim view of

Nixon. It was Bogart who said,

"You can't trust a man who doesn't drink." And it was Raoul Duke who said, "I'd never buy a used car from Nixon unless he was drunk."

People who talk like that are not the sort that Nixon likes to have around,

especially when he's engaged in something else and can't keep an

eye on them. Perhaps this explains

why his staffers got so upset when I tried to attend a taping session one afternoon at a TV station in

Manchester. Nixon was scheduled

to make some television

commercials, featuring himself and

a group of citizens in a question-

and-answer session. The press had

not been invited; I wanted to watch Nixon, however, in a relaxed and

informal setting.

My request to sit in on the tape session was flatly denied. "This is a commercial taping," said Henry Hyde. "Would Procter & Gamble let you into their studios? Or Ford?"

Hyde was a gear and sprocket

salesman in Chicago before he

became Nixon's press aide, so I

wasn't surprised at his weird

analogy. I merely shrugged and took a cab that afternoon down to the TV

station -- half expecting to be

thrown out the moment I showed up.

This didn't happen, perhaps because

a CBS camera crew was already there and muttering darkly about

Nixon's refusal to see them. They

left shortly after I arrived, but I hung around to see what would happen.

The atmosphere was very sinister.

Nixon was off in another room, as

usual, rehearsing with his cast. They spent an hour getting all the

questions right. Meanwhile Hyde

and other staffers took turns

watching me. None of them knew

who the "citizens" who were to

appear on the program were, or who had chosen them. "They're just people who want to ask him

questions," said Hyde.

Whoever they were, they were

shrouded in great secrecy -- despite the fact that their faces would soon be appearing on local TV screens

with monotonous regularity. At one

point I was making notes near the

studio door when it suddenly flew

open and two of Nixon's staffers

came at me in a very menacing way.

"What are you writing?" snapped one.

"Notes," I said.

"Well, write them on the other side of the room," said the other. "Don't stand around this door."

So I went to the other side of the

room and made some more notes

about the strange, paranoid

behavior that had puzzled me for the past few days. And then I went back to the Holiday Inn and waited for

the next "drill."

Nixon's speeches that week are

hardly worth mentioning -- except

as indisputable proof that the "old Nixon" is still with us. On Vietnam he echoes Johnson: on domestic

issues he talks like Ronald Regan.

He is a champion of "free

enterprise" at home and "peace with honor" abroad. People with short memories say he sounds in speeches

like a "milder version of

Goldwater," or a "Johnson without

a drawl." But those who recall the 1960 campaign know exactly whom

he sounds like: Richard Milhous

Nixon.

And why shouldn't he? Nixon's

political philosophy was formed

and tested by the time he became

Vice-President of the United States at age 40. It served him well enough for the next eight years, and in 1960

nearly half the voters in the country wanted him to be the next President.

This is not the background of a man

who would find any serious reason, at age 55, to change his political

philosophy.

He has said it himself: "All this talk about 'the new Nixon.' Maybe it's

there, but perhaps many people

didn't know the old one." He

understandably dislikes the

implications of the term: The

necessity for a "new Nixon" means there must have been something

wrong with the old one, and he

strongly disputes that notion.

There is probably some truth in what he says, if only to the extent that he will now talk candidly with individual reporters -- especially

those from influential papers and

magazines. Some of them have

discovered to their amazement, that the "private Nixon" is not the monster they'd always assumed him

to be. In private he can be friendly and surprisingly frank, even about

himself. This was never the case

with the "old Nixon."

So there is no way of knowing if the

"private Nixon" was always so different from the public version.

We have only his word, and -- well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man.

After several days of watching his

performance in New Hampshire I

suspected that he'd taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public

relations firm to give him a new

image. Henry Hyde denied this

emphatically, "That's not his style,"

he said. "Mr. Nixon runs his own

campaigns. You'd find that out pretty quick if you worked for him."

"That's a good idea," I said. "How about it?"

"What?" he asked humorlessly.

"A job. I could write him a speech that would change his image in

twenty-four hours."

Henry didn't think much of the idea.

Humor is scarce in the Nixon camp.

The staffers tell jokes now and then,

but they're not very funny. Only Charley McWhorter, the resident

political expert, seems to have a

sense of the absurd.

Oddly enough, Nixon himself shows

traces of humor. Not often in public, despite his awkward attempts to

joke about how bad he looks on

television and that sort of thing. ("I understand the skiing is great here,"

he told one audience. "I've never skied, but" -- he touched his nose --

"I have a personal feeling about it.")

Every now and then he will smile spontaneously at something, and it's not the same smile that he beams at photographers.

At one point I had a long

conversation with him about pro

football. I'd heard he was a fan, and earlier that night in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce banquet he'd

said that he'd bet on Oakland in the Super Bowl. I was curious, and

since Ray Price had arranged for

me to ride back to Manchester in

Nixon's car, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. Actually, I

suspected that he didn't know

football from pig-hustling and that he mentioned it from time to time

only because his wizards had told

him it would make him seem like a

regular guy.

But I was wrong. Nixon knows pro football. He'd taken Oakland and

six points in the Super Bowl, he

said, because Vince Lombardi had

told him up in Green Bay that the

AFL was much stronger than the sportswriters claimed. Nixon cited

Oakland's sustained drive in the

second half as evidence of their

superiority over the Kansas City

team that had challenged the

Packers in 1967 and had totally

collapsed in the second half.

"Oakland didn't fold up," he said.

"That second-half drive had

Lombardi worried."

I remembered it, and mentioned the

scoring play -- a sideline pass to an

unknown receiver named Bill Miller.

Nixon hesitated for a moment, then

smiled broadly and slapped me on

the leg. "That's right," he said. "Yes, the Miami boy." I couldn't believe it; he not only knew Miller, but he knew what college he'd played for.

It wasn't his factual knowledge of

football that stunned me; it was his genuine interest in the game. "You know," he said, "the worst thing about campaigning, for me, is that it

ruins my whole football season. I'm a sports buff, you know. If I had

another career, I'd be a sportscaster

-- or a sportswriter."

I smiled and lit a cigarette. The

scene was so unreal that I felt like laughing out loud -- to find myself zipping along a New England

freeway in a big yellow car, being

chauffeured around by a detective

while I relaxed in the back seat and talked about football with my old

buddy Dick Nixon, the man who

came within 100,000 votes of causing me to flee the country in

1960. I was on the verge of

mentioning this to him, but just then we came to the airport and drove

out on the runway, where his

chartered Lear Jet was waiting to

zap him off to the wild blue yonder of Miami for a "think session" with his staff. (There he rises early and works a 20-hour day. He skimps on

food -- breakfast is juice, cereal, and milk; lunch is a sandwich, and

dinner might be roast beef or steak,

which he often doesn't finish -- and keeps his weight at a constant 175

pounds. He swims some, suns a lot,

yet rarely seems to stop working.

"I'll say this -- he has enough stamina to be President," says William P. Rogers, an old friend.

"He has the most stamina of any man I have ever known.")

We talked for a while beside the

plane, but by that time I'd thought better of saying anything rude or

startling. It had been exceptionally

decent of him to give me a ride and an hour of his time, so I controlled the almost irresistible urge to gig him on his embryonic sense of

humor.

It was almost midnight when the

sleek little plane boomed down the

runway and lifted off toward

Florida. I went back to the Holiday Inn and drank for a while with Nick Ruwe, the chief advance man for

New Hampshire.

"I almost had a heart attack tonight

when I looked over and saw you poking around that jet engine with a cigarette in your mouth," Ruwe said. He shook his head in

disbelief. "My God, what a

nightmare!"

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't realize I was smoking."

But I remembered leaning on the

wing of the plane, an arm's length

away from the fully loaded fuel

tank. Somebody should have

mentioned the cigarette, I thought,

and the fact that nobody did makes me wonder now if Nixon's human

machinery is really as foolproof as it seems to be. Or perhaps they all noticed I was smoking and -- like

Ruwe -- said nothing at all.

Or perhaps that's beside the point.

Senator McCarthy's success in New

Hampshire can hardly be attributed

to the hard-nosed professionalism

of his staff. . . and in his broader context the Nixon campaign seems

flawed. There is a cynicism at the

core of it, the confident assumption that success in politics depends

more on shrewd technique than on

the quality of the product. The "old Nixon" didn't make it. Neither did earlier models of the "new Nixon."

So now we have "Nixon Mark IV,"

and as a journalist I suppose it's

only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even

better in some ways. But as a

customer, I wouldn't touch it --

except with a long cattle prod.

Granted, the "new Nixon" is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow. But I

recognize the man who told a

student audience at the University of New Hampshire that one of his

biggest problems in politics has

always been "that I'm not a good actor, I can't be phony about it, I still refuse to wear makeup. . ."

Three weeks later this same man,

after winning the New Hampshire

primary, laughingly attributed his

victory to the new makeup he'd been wearing. He thought he was being

funny -- at least on one level -- but on another level he was telling the absolute truth.

Pageant, July 1968

Author's Note

Dawn is coming up in San

Francisco now: 6:09 A.M. I can

hear the rumble of early morning

buses under my window at the Seal

Rock Inn. . . out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything

else, the western edge of America.

From my desk I can see the dark

jagged hump of "Seal Rock"

looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About two hundred

seals have been barking out there

most of the night. Staying in this

place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound. Last

night we had a huge paranoid

poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of

control when the seals started

barking -- racing around the room

like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window,

howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking

the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully

organized stacks of campaign

photographs. . . off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor

between the beds. I can see an 8x10

print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling

into a telephone at the Democratic

Convention in Miami; but that one

will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank's chest.

That dog will not enter this room

again. He came in with the book-

editor, who went away about six

hours ago with thirteen finished

chapters -- the bloody product of

fifty-five consecutive hours of

sleepless, foodless, high-speed

editing. But there was no other way to get the thing done. I am not an

easy person to work with, in terms

of deadlines. When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me

downtown at the Rolling Stone

office. . . but I have a powerful

aversion to working in offices, and when I didn't show up for three or

four days they decided to do the

only logical thing: move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.

One afternoon about three days ago

they showed up at my door, with no

warning, and loaded about forty

pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four

quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the

outcome of six Super Bowls. There

was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of

oak firewood and three tape

recorders -- in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally

have to resort to verbal

composition.

We came to this point sometime

around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer's

Block and began dictating big

chunks of the book straight into the microphone -- pacing around the

room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came

into my head. When we reached the

end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel. . . and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to

pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where

unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.

There is a comfortable kind of

consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of the book was written. From

December '71 to January '73 -- in

airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country -- there is hardly a

paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute,

teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline

was a crisis. All around me were

experienced professional

journalists meeting deadlines far

more frequent than mine, but I was

never able to learn from their

example. Reporters like Bill

Greider from the Washington Port

and Jim Naughton of the New York

Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex

stories every day -- while my own deadline fell every two weeks --

but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they

would try to console me about the

terrible pressure I always seemed

to be laboring under.

Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist

could probably explain this

problem to me in thirteen or

fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. 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. . . On the other

hand, it might easily be something

as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last

possible second to dart across the

road in front of a speeding car.

People who claim to know

jackrabbits will tell you they are

primarily motivated by Fear,

Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit

country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are

bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now

& then. . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a

powerful adrenalin 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.

Why not? Anything that gets the

adrenalin moving like a 440 volt

blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol. . . but too many

adrenalin rushes in any given time-

span have the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start

burning out the circuits.

When a jackrabbit gets addicted to

road-running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed -- and

when a journalist turns into a

politics junkie he will sooner or

later start raving and babbling in

print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly

understand.

Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody

except the people who were

involved in them. Politics has its

own language, which is often so

complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to

translate -- to make sense of the

partisan bullshit that even your

friends will lay on you -- without

crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot

different from getting a long-term

assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a

campaign promise to "crack down

on Organized Crime." In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them -

- and to keep them as sources of

private information -- you wind up

knowing a lot of things you can't

print, or which you can only say

without even hinting at where they

came from.

This was one of the traditional

barriers I tried to ignore when I

moved to Washington and began

covering the '72 presidential

campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing

as "off the record." The most consistent and ultimately damaging

failure of political journalism in

America has its roots in the

clubby/cocktail personal

relationships that inevitably

develop between politicians and

journalists -- in Washington or

anywhere else where they meet on a

day-to-day basis. When

professional antagonists become

after-hours drinking buddies, they

are not likely to turn each other in. .

. especially not for "minor

infractions" of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions

suddenly become Major, there is

panic on both ends.

A classic example of this syndrome

was the disastrous "Eagleton

Affair." Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press

corps knew Eagleton was a serious

boozer with a history of mental breakdowns -- but none of them had

ever written about it, and the few

who were known to have mentioned

it privately clammed up 1000

percent when McGovern's harried

staffers began making inquiries on

that fateful Thursday afternoon in

Miami. Any Washington political

reporter who blows a Senator's

chance for the vice-presidency

might as well start looking for

another beat to cover -- because his name will be instant Mud on

Capitol Hill.

When I went to Washington I was

determined to avoid this kind of

trap. Unlike most other

correspondents, I could afford to

burn all my bridges behind me --

because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections

on Capitol Hill. I went there for two reasons: (1) to learn as much as

possible about the mechanics and

realities of a presidential campaign,

and (2) to write about it the same way I'd write about anything else --

as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.

It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well --

but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach. The most

obvious and least serious of these

was the fact that even the few

people I considered my friends in

Washington treated me like a

walking bomb; some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and

utter words that would almost

certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. The other, more

complex, problem had to do with

my natural out-front bias in favor of the McGovern candidacy -- which

was not a problem at first, when

George was such a hopeless

underdog that his staffers saw no

harm in talking frankly with any

journalist who seemed friendly and

interested -- but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very

uncomfortable position. Some of the friends I'd made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern

winning the Democratic nomination

seemed almost as weird as the

appearance of a full-time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail, were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I'd been hanging around with for

entirely personal reasons, but key

people in a fast-rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not

only of winning the party

nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.

McGovern's success in the

primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who

were running his campaign --

especially those who had come to

know me well enough to sense that

my contempt for the time-honored

double standard in political

journalism -- might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly

pragmatic style of politics that

George was getting into. And their

apprehension increased measurably

as it became obvious that dope

fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat

dropouts were not the only people

who read the political coverage in

Rolling Stone. Not long after McGovern's breakthrough victory in

the Wisconsin primary, arch-

establishment mouthpiece Stewart

Alsop went out of his way to quote

some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey

in his Newsweek column, thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a

winner.

Things were never the same after

that. A cloud of hellish intensity had come down on the McGovern

campaign by the time it rolled into California. Mandates came down

from the top, warning staffers to

beware of the press. The only exceptions were reporters who

were known to have a decent

respect for things said "in

confidence," and I didn't fit that description.

And so much for all that. The point I meant to make here -- before we

wandered off on that tangent about

jackrabbits -- is that everything in this book except the footnotes was

written under savage deadline

pressure in the traveling vortex of a

campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the

participants claimed to know what

was happening.

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 convential

wisdom, I managed to win all but

two of the fifty or sixty bets I made

between February and November.

My first loss came in New

Hampshire, where I felt guilty for

taking advantage of one of

McGovern's staffers who wanted to

bet that George would get more than 35 percent of the vote; and I lost

when he wound up with 37.5

percent. But from that point on, I

won steadily -- until November 7,

when I made the invariably fatal

mistake of betting my emotions

instead of my instinct.

The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? I blew that one, along with a lot of other people

who should have known better, and

since I haven't changed anything

else in this mass of first-draft

screeds that I wrote during the

campaign, I can't find any excuse for changing my final prediction. Any

re-writing now would cheat the

basic concept of the book, which --

in addition to the publisher's

desperate idea that it might sell

enough copies to cover the fantastic

expense bills I ran up in the course of those twelve frantic months --

was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening: from an eye in the eye of the

hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.

So this is more a jangled campaign

diary than a record or reasoned

analysis of the '72 presidential

campaign. Whatever I wrote in the midnight hours on rented

typewriters in all those cluttered

hotel rooms along the campaign

trail -- from the Wayfarer Inn

outside Manchester to the Neil

House in Columbus to the Wilshire

Hyatt House in L.A. and the

Fontainebleau in Miami -- is no

different now than it was back in

March and May and July when I

was cranking it out of the typewriter one page at a time and feeding it

into the plastic maw of that

goddamn Mojo Wire to some hash-addled freak of an editor at the

Rolling Stone news-desk in San Francisco.

What I would like to preserve here

is a kind of high-speed cinematic

reel-record of what the campaign

was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how

it fits into history. There will be no shortage of books covering that end.

The last count I got was just before Christmas in '72, when ex-

McGovern speech writer Sandy Berger said at least nineteen people who'd been involved in the

campaign were writing books about

it -- so we'll eventually get the

whole story, for good or ill.

Meanwhile, my room at the Seal

Rock Inn is filling up with people

who seem on the verge of hysteria

at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling

introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses

scheduled to start rolling in twenty-four hours. . . but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with

extremely powerful speed, there

might not be any Final Chapter.

About four fingers of king-hell

Crank would do the trick, but I am

not optimistic. There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage

Crank on the market these days --

and according to recent statements

by official spokesmen for the

Justice Department in Washington,

that's solid evidence of progress in

Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

Well. . . thank Jesus for that. I was beginning to think we were never

going to put the arm on that crowd.

But the people in Washington say

we're finally making progress. And

if anybody should know, it's them.

So maybe this country's about to get back on the Right Track.

-- HST

Sunday, January 28, 1973

San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn Fear and Loathing: On the

Campaign Trail,

San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Books, 1973

June, 1972:

The McGovern Juggernaut

Rolls On

The press room was crowded --

two dozen or so ranking media

wizards, all wearing little egg-shaped ID tags from the Secret

Service: Leo Sauvage/ La Figaro, Jack Perkins/NBC, R. W.

Apple/N.Y. Times. . . the

McGovern campaign went big-time,

for real, in California. No more of that part-time, secondary coverage.

McGovern was suddenly the front-

runner, perhaps the next President, and virtually every room in the

hotel was filled with either staff or media people. . . twelve new

typewriters in the press suite, ten

phones, four color TV sets, a well-stocked free bar, even a goddamn

Mojo Wire.*

* aka Xerox Telecopier. We have many inquiries about this. "Mojo Wire" was the name originally given the machine by its inventor, Raoul Duke. But he signed away the patent, in the throes of a drug frenzy, to Xerox board chairman Max Palevsky, who claimed the invention for himself and renamed it the "Xerox Telecopier." Patent royalties now total $100

million annually, but Duke receives none of it. At Palevsky's insistence he remains on the Rolling Stone payroll, earning $50 each week, but his

"sports column" is rarely printed and he is formally barred by court order, along with a Writ of Permanent Constraint, from Palevsky's house

& grounds.

The gossip in the press room was

heavier than usual that night: Gary Hart was about to be fired as

McGovern's campaign manager;

Fred Dutton would replace him. . .

Humphrey's sister had just been

arrested in San Diego on a warrant

connected with Hubert's campaign

debts. . . Muskie was offering to

support McGovern if George would

agree to take over $800,000 of his

(Muskie's) campaign debt. . . But

Crouse was nowhere in sight. I

stood around for a while, trying to piece together a few grisly

unsubstantiated rumors about

"heavy pols preparing to take over the whole McGovern campaign". . .

Several people had chunks of the

story, but nobody had a real key; so I left to go back down to my room to think for a while.

That was when I ran into

Mankiewicz, picking a handful of

thumbtacked messages off the

bulletin board outside the doors.

"I have a very weird story for you,"

I said.

He eyed me cautiously. "What is it?"

"Come over here," I said motioning him to follow me down the corridor

to a quiet place. . . Then I told him what I had heard about Humphrey's

midnight air-courier to Vegas. He

stared down at the carpet, not

seeming particularly interested --

but when I finished he looked up

and said, "Where'd you hear that?"

I shrugged, sensing definite interest now. "Well, I was talking to some people at a place called The

Losers, and --"

"With Kirby?" he snapped.

"No," I said. "I went over there looking for him, but he wasn't

around." Which was true. Earlier that day Kirby Jones, McGovern's

press secretary, had told me he

planned to stop by The Losers Club

later on, because Warren Beatty had recommended it highly. . . but when

I stopped by around midnight there was no sign of him.

Mankiewicz was not satisfied.

"Who was there?" he asked. "Some of our people? Who was it?"

"Nobody you'd know," I said. "But what about this Humphrey story?

What can you tell me about it?"

"Nothing," he said, glancing over his shoulder at a burst of yelling

from the press room. Then: "When's your next issue coming out?"

"Thursday."

"Before the election?"

"Yeah, and so far I don't have anything worth a shit to write about

-- but this thing sounds interesting."

He nodded, staring down at the

floor again, then shook his head.

"Listen," he said. "You could cause a lot of trouble for us by printing a thing like that. They'd know where

it came from, and they'd jerk our

man right out."

"What man?"

He stared at me, smiling faintly.

At this point the story becomes very slippery, with many loose ends and

dark shadows -- but the nut was

very simple: I had blundered almost completely by accident on a flat-out byzantine spook story. There was

nothing timely or particularly

newsworthy about it, but when your

deadline is every two weeks you

don't tend to worry about things like scoops and newsbreaks. If

Mankiewicz had broken down and admitted to me that night that he was actually a Red Chinese agent and

that McGovern had no pulse, I

wouldn't have known how to handle

it -- and the tension of trying to keep that kind of heinous news to myself for the next four days until Rolling Stone went to press would almost certainly have caused me to lock

myself in my hotel room with eight

quarts of Wild Turkey and all the

Ibogaine I could get my hands on.

So this strange tale about Humphrey

& Vegas was not especially

newsworthy, by my standards. Its only real value, in fact, was the rare flash of contrast it provided to the insane tedium of the surface

campaign. Important or not, this was something very different: midnight

flights to Vegas, mob money

funneled in from casinos to pay for Hubert's TV spots; spies, runners,

counterspies; cryptic phone calls

from airport phone booths. . .

Indeed; the dark underbelly of big-

time politics. A useless story, no doubt, but it sure beat the hell out of getting back on that goddamn press

bus and being hauled out to some

shopping center in Gardena and

watching McGovern shake hands

for two hours with lumpy

housewives.

Unfortunately, all I really knew

about what I called U-13 story was

the general outline and just enough key points to convince Mankiewicz

that I might be irresponsible enough

to go ahead and try to write the thing anyway. All I knew -- or

thought I knew -- at that point was that somebody very close to the top of the Humphrey campaign had

made secret arrangements for a

night flight to Vegas in order to pick up a large bundle of money from

unidentified persons presumed to be sinister, and that this money would be used by Humphrey's managers to

finance another one of Hubert's

eleventh-hour fast-finish blitzkriegs.

Even then, a week before the vote, he was thought to be running ten

points and maybe more behind

McGovern -- and since the average

daily media expenditure for each

candidate in the California primary was roughly $30,000 a day,

Humphrey would need at least

twice that amount to pay for the

orgy of exposure he would need to

overcome a ten-point lead. No less

than a quick $500,000.

The people in Vegas were

apparently willing to spring for it, because the plane was already

chartered and ready to go when

McGovern's headquarters got word

of the flight from their executive-

level spy in the Humphrey

campaign. His identity remains a

mystery -- in the public prints, at least -- but the handful of people

aware of him say he performed

invaluable services for many

months.

His function in the U-13 gig was

merely to call McGovern headquarters and tell them about the Vegas plane. At this point, my

second- or third-hand source was

not sure what happened next.

According to the story, two

McGovern operatives were

instantly dispatched to keep around-the-clock watch on the plane for the next seventy-two hours, and

somebody from McGovern

headquarters called Humphrey and

warned him that they knew what he

was up to.

In any case, the plane never took off and there was no evidence in the

last week of the campaign to suggest that Hubert got a last-minute influx of money, from Vegas or anywhere

else.

This is as much of the U-13 story as I could piece together without help from somebody who knew the

details -- and Mankiewicz finally

agreed, insisting the whole time that he knew nothing about the story

except that he didn't want to see it in

print before election day, that if I wanted to hold off until the next

issue he would put me in touch with somebody who would tell me the

whole story for good or ill.

"Call Miles Rubin," he said, "and tell him I told you to ask him about this. He'll fill you in."

That was fine, I said. I was in no

special hurry for the story, anyway.

So I let it ride for a few days,

missing my deadline for that issue. .

. and on Wednesday I began trying

to get hold of Miles Rubin, one of McGovern's top managers for

California. All I knew about Rubin

before I called was that several

days earlier he had thrown

Washington Post correspondent David Broder out of his office for

asking too many questions - less

than twenty-four hours before

Broder appeared on Rubin's TV

screen as one of the three

interrogators on the first

Humphrey/McGovern debate.

My own experience with Rubin turned out to be just about par for the course. I finally got through to him by telephone on Friday, and

explained that Mankiewicz had told

me to call him and find out the

details of the U-13 story. I started to say we could meet for a beer or two sometime later that afternoon and he could --

"Are you kidding?" he cut in.

"That's one story you're never going to hear."

"What?"

"There's no point even talking about it," he said flatly. Then he launched into a three-minute spiel about the fantastic honesty and integrity that characterized the McGovern

campaign from top to bottom, and

why was it that people like me

didn't spend more time writing

about The Truth and The Decency

and The Integrity, instead of picking around the edge for minor things

that weren't important anyway?

"Jesus Christ!" I muttered. Why argue? Getting anything but

pompous bullshit and gibberish out

of Rubin would be like trying to

steal meat from a hammerhead

shark.

"Thanks," I said, and hung up.

That night I found Mankiewicz in

the press room and told him what

had happened.

He couldn't understand it, he said.

But he would talk to Miles

tomorrow and straighten it out.

I was not optimistic; and by that

time I was beginning to agree that

the U-13 story was not worth the

effort. The Big Story in California, after all, was that McGovern was

on the brink of locking up a first-

ballot nomination in Miami -- and

that Hubert Humphrey was about to

get stomped so badly at the polls

that he might have to be carried out of the state in a rubber sack.

The next time I saw Mankiewicz

was on the night before the election and he seemed very tense, very

strong into the gjla monster trip. . .

and when I started to ask him about Rubin he began ridiculing the story in a VERY LOUD VOICE, so I

figured it was time to forget it.

Several days later I learned the

reason for Frank's bad nerves that

night. McGovern's fat lead over

Humphrey, which had hovered

between 14 and 20 percentage

points for more than a week, had

gone into a sudden and apparently uncontrollable dive in the final days of the campaign. By election eve it had shrunk to five points, and

perhaps even less.

The shrinkage crisis was a closely

guarded secret among McGovern's

top command. Any leak to the press

could have led to disastrous

headlines on Tuesday morning:

Election Day. . . MCGOVERN

FALTERS; HUMPHREY CLOSING GAP. . .

a headline like that in either the Los

Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle might have thrown the election to Humphrey by generating

a last minute Sympathy/Underdog

turnout and whipping Hubert's field workers into a frenzied "get out the vote" effort.

But the grim word never leaked,

and by noon on Tuesday an almost

visible wave of relief rolled

through the McGovern camp. The

dike would hold, they felt, at

roughly five percent.

The coolest man in the whole McGovern entourage on Tuesday

was George McGovern himself --

who had spent all day Monday on

airplanes, racing from one critical situation to another. On Monday

morning he flew down to San Diego

for a major rally; then to New

Mexico for another final-hour rally on the eve of the New Mexico

primary (which he won the next day

-- along with New Jersey and South

Dakota). . . and finally on Monday

night to Houston for a brief,

unscheduled appearance at the National Governors' Conference,

which was rumored to be brewing

up a "stop McGovern" movement.

After defusing the crisis in Houston he got a few hours' sleep before

racing back to Los Angeles to deal

with another emergency: His 22-

year-old daughter was having a

premature baby and first reports

from the hospital hinted at serious complications.

But by noon the crisis had passed,

and somewhere sometime around one he arrived with his praetorian

guard of eight Secret Service agents at Max Palevksy's house in Bel Air, where he immediately changed into

swimming trunks and dove into the

pool. The day was grey and cool,

no hint of sun, and none of the other guests seemed to feel like

swimming.

For a variety of tangled reasons --

primarily because my wife was one

of the guests in the house that

weekend -- I was there when McGovern arrived. So we talked

for a while, mainly about the

possibility of either Muskie or

Humphrey dropping out of the race

and joining forces with George if

the price was right. . . and it

occurred to me afterward that it was the first time he'd ever seen me

without a beer can in my hand or

babbling like a loon about Freak

Power, election bets, or some other twisted subject. . . but he was kind enough not to mention this.

It was a very relaxed afternoon. The only tense moment occurred when I

noticed a sort of narrow-looking

man with a distinctly predatory

appearance standing off by himself

and glowering down at the white

telephone as if he planned to jerk it out by the root if it didn't ring within ten seconds and tell him everything he wanted to know.

"Who the hell is that?" I asked, pointing across the pool at him.

"That's Miles Rubin," somebody

replied.

"Jesus," I said. "I should have guessed."

Moments later my curiosity got the

better of me and I walked over to

Rubin and introduced myself. "I understand they're going to put you in charge of press relations after

Miami," I said as we shook hands.

He said something I didn't

understand, then hurried away. For

a moment I was tempted to call him

back and ask if I could feel his pulse. But the moment passed and I

jumped into the pool, instead.*

* Later in the campaign, when Rubin and I became reasonably good friends, he told me that the true story of the "U-13" was essentially the same as the version I'd pieced together in California. The only thing I didn't know, he said, was that Humphrey eventually got the money anyway. For some reason, the story as I originally wrote it was almost universally dismissed as "just another one of Thompson's Mankiewicz fables."

The rest of the day disintegrated

into chaos, drunkenness, and the

kind of hysterical fatigue that comes from spending too much time racing

from one place to another and being shoved around in crowds.

McGovern won the Democratic

primary by exactly five percent --

45 to 40 -- and Nixon came from

behind in the GOP race to nip

Ashbrook by 87 to 13.

She was gonna be an actress and I

was gonna learn to fly

She took off to find the footlights and I took off to find the sky

-- Taxi by Harry Chapin George McGovern's queer idea that

he could get himself elected

President on the Democratic ticket

by dancing a muted whipsong on the

corpse of the Democratic Party is

suddenly beginning to look very

sane, and very possible. For the last five or six days in California,

McGovern's campaign was covered

from dawn to midnight by fifteen or twenty camera crews, seventy-five

to a hundred still photographers,

and anywhere from fifty to two hundred linear/writing press types.

The media crowd descended on

McGovern like a swarm of wild

bees, and there was not one of them who doubted that he/she was

covering The Winner. The sense of

impending victory around the pool

at the Wilshire Hyatt House was as

sharp and all-pervasive as the

gloom and desperation in Hubert

Humphrey's national staff

headquarters about ten miles west at

the far more chick and fashionable Beverly Hilton.

In the McGovern press suite the

big-time reporters were playing

stud poker -- six or eight of them, hunkered down in their shirt-sleeves and loose ties around a long white-cloth-covered table with a

pile of dollar bills in the middle

and the bar about three feet behind Tom Wicker's chair at the far end.

At the other end of the room, to

Wicker's left, there were three more

long white tables, with four identical big typewriters on each

one and a pile of white legal-size

paper stacked neatly beside each

typewriter. At the other end of the room, to Wicker's right, was a

comfortable couch and a giant

floor-model 24-inch Motorola color

TV set. . . the screen was so large that Dick Cavett's head looked

almost as big as Wicker's, but the

sound was turned off and nobody at

the poker table was watching the

TV set anyway. Mort Sahl was

dominating the screen with a seemingly endless, borderline-hysteria monologue about a bunch

of politicians he didn't have much

use for -- (Muskie, Humphrey,

McGovern) -- and two others

(Shirley Chisholm and former New

Orleans DA Jim Garrison) that he

liked.

I knew this, because I had just come up the outside stairway from my

room one floor below to get some

typing paper, and I'd been watching

the Cavett show on my own 21-inch Motorola color TV.

I paused at the door for a moment,

then edged around to the poker table towards the nearest stack of paper.

"Ah, decadence, decadence. . ." I muttered. "Sooner or later it was bound to come to this."

Kirby Jones looked up and grinned.

"What are you bitching about this time, Hunter? Why are you always

bitching?"

"Never mind that," I said. "You owe me $20 & I want it now."

"What?" he looked shocked.

"Twenty dollars for what?"

I nodded solemnly. "I knew you'd try to welsh. Don't tell me you don't remember that bet."

"What bet?"

"The one we made on the train in Nebraska," I said. "You said Wallace wouldn't get more than 300

delegates. . . But he already has 317, and I want that $20."

He shook his head. "Who says he has that many? You've been reading

the New York Times again." He chuckled and glanced at Wicker,

who was dealing. "Let's wait until the convention, Hunter, things might be different then."

"You pig," I muttered, easing toward the door with my paper.

"I've been hearing a lot about how the McGovern campaign is finally

turning dishonest, but I didn't believe it until now."

He laughed and turned his attention back to the game. "All bets are payable in Miami, Hunter. That's

when we'll count the marbles."

I shook my head sadly and left the

room. Jesus, I thought, these

bastards are getting out of hand.

Here we were still a week away

from D-day in California, and the

McGovern press suite was already

beginning to look like some kind of

Jefferson-Jackson Day stag dinner. I glanced back at the crowd around

the table and realized that not one of them had been in New Hampshire.

This was a totally different crowd, for good or ill. Looking back on the first few weeks of the New

Hampshire campaign, it seemed so

different from what was happening

in California that it was hard to

adjust to the idea that it was still the same campaign. The difference

between a sleek front-runner's act in Los Angeles and the spartan, almost

skeletal machinery of an underdog operation in Manchester was almost

more than the mind could deal with

all at once.*

* California was the first primary where the McGovern campaign was obviously well-financed. In Wisconsin, where McGovern's money men had told him privately that they would withdraw their support if he didn't finish first or a very close second, the press had to pay fifty cents a beer in the hospitality suite.

Four months ago on a frozen grey

afternoon in New Hampshire the

McGovern "press bus" rolled into

the empty parking lot of a motel on the outskirts of Portsmouth. It was 3:30 or so, and we had an hour or

so to kill before the Senator would arrive by air from Washington and

lead us downtown for a hand-

shaking gig at the Booth fishworks.

The bar was closed, but one of

McGovern's advance men had

arranged a sort of beer/booze and

sandwich meat smorgasbord for the

press in a lounge just off the lobby. .

. so all six of us climbed out of the

bus, which was actually an old three-seater airport limousine, and I went inside to kill time.

Of the six passengers in the "press bus," three were local McGovern volunteers. The other three were

Ham Davis from the Providence

Journal, Tim Crouse from the Rolling Stone Boston Bureau, and me. Two more media/press people

were already inside: Don Bruckner

from the Los Angeles Times, and Michelle Clark from CBS.*

* The New Hampshire primary was Michelle's first assignment in national politics. "I don't have the vaguest idea what I'm doing," she told me. "I think they're just letting me get my feet wet."

Three months later, when McGovern

miraculously emerged as the front-runner, Michelle was still covering him. By that time her star was rising almost as fast as McGovern's. At the Democratic Convention in Miami, Walter Cronkite announced on the air that she had just been officially named "correspondent." On December 8, 1972, Michelle Clark died in a plane crash at Midway Airport in Chicago -- the same plane crash that killed the wife of Watergate defendant Howard Hunt.

There was also Dick Dougherty,

who has just quit his job as chief of

the L.A. Times New York bureau to become George McGovern's press

secretary, speechwriter, main fixer, advance man, and all-purpose

traveling wizard. Dougherty and

Bruckner were sitting off by

themselves at a corner table when

the rest of us straggled into the

lounge and filled our plates at the smorgasbord table: olives, carrots, celery stalks, salami, deviled eggs. .

. but when I asked for beer, the

middle-aged waitress who was also

the desk clerk said beer "wasn't

included" in "the arrangements,"

and that if I wanted any I would

have to pay cash for it.

"That's fine," I said. "Bring me three Budweisers."

She nodded. "With three glasses?"

"No. One glass."

She hesitated, then wrote the order down and lumbered off toward

wherever she kept the beer. I

carried my plate over to an empty

table and sat down to eat and read the local paper. . . but there was no salt and pepper on the table, so I

went back up to the smorgasbord to

look for it & bumped into somebody in a tan garbardine suit who was

quietly loading his plate with

carrots & salami.

"Sorry." I said.

"Pardon me," he replied.

I shrugged and went back to my

table with the salt and pepper. The

only noise in the room was coming from the L.A. Times corner.

Everybody else was either reading

or eating, or both. The only person in the room not sitting down was the man in the tan suit at the

smorgasbord table. He was still

fumbling with the food, keeping his back to the room. . .

There was something familiar about

him. Nothing special -- but enough

to make me glance up again from my

newspaper; a subliminal

recognition-flash of some kind, or maybe just the idle journalistic

curiosity that gets to be a habit after a while when you find yourself

drifting around in the nervous murk of some story with no apparent

meaning or spine to it. I had come

up to New Hampshire to write a

long thing on the McGovern

campaign -- but after twelve hours

in Manchester I hadn't seen much to indicate that it actually existed, and I was beginning to wonder what the

fuck I was going to write about for

that issue.

There was no sign of communcation

in the room. The press people, as

usual, were going out of their way

to ignore each other's existence.

Ham Davis was brooding over the

New York Times, Crouse was re-arranging the contents of his

knapsack, Michelle Clark was

staring at her fingernails, Bruckner and Dougherty were trading Sam

Yorty jokes. . . and the man in the tan suit was still shuffling back and

forth at the smorgasbord table --

totally absorbed in it, studying the carrots. . .

Jesus Christ! I thought. The

Candidate! That crouching figure up there at the food table is George

McGovern.

But where was his entourage? And

why hadn't anybody else noticed

him? Was he actually alone?

No, that was impossible. I had

never seen a presidential candidate

moving around in public without at least ten speedy "aides" surrounding him at all times. So I watched him

for a while, expecting to see his

aides flocking in from the lobby at any moment. . . but it slowly

dawned on me that The Candidate

was by himself: there were no aides, no entourage, and nobody

else in the room had even noticed

his arrival.

This made me very nervous.

McGovern was obviously waiting

for somebody to greet him, keeping his back to the room, not even

looking around -- so there was no

way for him to know that nobody in

the room even knew he was there.

Finally I got up and walked across

to the food table, watching

McGovern out of the corner of one

eye while I picked up some olives,

fetched another beer out of the ice bucket. . . and finally reached over to tap The Candidate on the arm and introduce myself.

"Hello, Senator. We met a few weeks ago at Tom Braden's house

in Washington."

He smiled and reached out to shake

hands. "Of course, of course," he said. "What are you doing up here?"

"Not much, so far," I said. "We've been waiting for you."

He nodded, still poking around with the cold cuts. I felt very uneasy. Our last encounter had been somewhat

jangled. He had just come back

from New Hampshire, very tired and depressed, and when he arrived

at Braden's house we had already

finished dinner and I was getting

heavily into drink. My memory of

that evening is somewhat dim, but

even in dimness I recall beating my gums at top speed for about two

hours about how he was doing

everything wrong and how helpless

it was for him to think he could

even accomplish anything with that

goddamn albatross of a Democratic

Party on his neck, and that if he had

any real sense he would make drastic alterations in the whole style

& tone of his campaign and remodel it along the lines of the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, specifically, along the lines of my own extremely

weird and nerve-rattling campaign

for Sheriff of Pitkin County,

Colorado.

McGovern had listened politely, but two weeks later in New Hampshire

there was no evidence to suggest

that he had taken my advice very

seriously. He was sitll plodding along in the passive/underdog role, still driving back & forth across the state in his lonely one-car

motorcade to talk with small groups of people in rural living rooms.

Nothing heavy, nothing wild or

electric. All he was offering, he

said, was a rare and admittedly

lonsghot opportunity to vote for an honest and intelligent presidential candidate.

A very strange option, in any year --

but in mid-February of 1972 there were no visible signs, in New

Hampshire, that the citizenry was

about to rise up and drive the swine out of the temple. Beyond that, it

was absolutely clear -- according to the Wizards, Gurus, and Gentlemen

Journalists in Washington -- that

Big Ed Muskie, the Man from

Maine, had the Democratic

nomination so deep in the bag that it was hardly worth arguing about.

Nobody argued with the things

McGovern said. He was right, of course -- but nobody took him very

seriously, either. . .

7:45 A.M. . . The sun is fighting

through the smog now, a hot grey

glow on the street below my

window. Friday morning business-

worker traffic is beginning to clog Wilshire Boulevard and the

Glendale Federal Savings parking

lot across the street is filling up with cars. Slump-shouldered girls

are scurrying into the big Title

Insurance & Trust Company and Crocker National Bank buildings,

rushing to punch in on the time

clock before 8:00.

I can look down from my window

and see the two McGovern press

buses loading. Kirby Jones, the

press secretary, is standing by the door of the No. 1 bus and herding

two groggy CBS cameramen aboard

like some kind of latter-day Noah

getting goats aboard the ark. Kirby is responsible for keeping the

McGovern press/media crowd happy -- or at least happy enough to make sure they have the time and

facilities to report whatever

McGovern, Mankiewicz, and the

other Main Boys want to see and

read on tonight's TV news and in

tomorrow's newspapers. Like any

other good press secretary, Kirby

doesn't mind admitting -- off the

record -- that his love of Pure Truth is often tempered by circumstances.

His job is to convince the press that everything The Candidate says is

even now being carved on stone tablets.

The Truth is whatever George says;

this is all ye know and all ye need to know. If McGovern says today

that the most important issue in the California primary is abolition of

the sodomy statues, Kirby will do

everything in his power to convince everybody on the press bus that the sodomy statues must be abolished. .

. and if George decides tomorrow

that his pro-sodomy gig isn't making

it with the voters, Kirby will get behind a quick press release to the effect that "new evidence from previously obscure sources" has convinced the Senator that what he

really meant to say was that sodomy itself should be abolished.

This kind of fancy footwork was

executed a lot easier back there in the early primaries than it is now.

Since Wisconsin, McGovern's

words have been watched very

carefully. Both his mushrooming

media entourage and his dwindling number of opponents have pounced

on anything even vaguely

controversial or potentially

damaging in his speeches, press

conferences, position papers, or

even idle comments.

McGovern is very sensitive about

this sort of thing, and for excellent reason. In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska &

California) he has spent an

alarmingly big chunk of his

campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is

really a sort of Trojan Horse

candidate -- coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat

while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a

Red-bent hellbroth of radicals,

Dopers, Traitors, Sex Fiends,

Anarchists, Winos, and "extremists"

of every description.

The assault began in Ohio, when the

Senator from Boeing (Henry Jackson, D-Wash.) began telling

everybody his advance man could

round up to listen to him that

McGovern was not only a

Marijuana Sympathizer, but also a

Fellow Traveler. . . Not exactly a dope-sucker and a card-carrying

Red, but almost.

In Nebraska it was Humphrey, and

although he dropped the Fellow

Traveler slur, he added Amnesty

and Abortion to the Marijuana

charge and caused McGovern considerable grief. By election day the situation was so grim in

traditionally conservative, Catholic Omaha that it looked like

McGovern might actually lose the Nebraska primary, one of the

kingpins in his Coverall strategy.

Several hours after the polls closed the mood in the Omaha Hilton

Situation Room was extremely

glum. The first returns showed

Humphrey well ahead, and just

before I was thrown out I heard Bill

Dougherty -- Lt. Gov. of South Dakota and one of McGovern's

close friends and personal advisors

-- saying: "We're gonna get zinged tonight, folks."

It was almost midnight before the

out-state returns began offsetting

Hubert's big lead in Omaha, and by

2:00 A.M. on Wednesday it was

clear that McGovern would win --

although the final 6 percent margin was about half of what had been

expected ten days earlier, before

Humphrey's local allies had fouled the air with alarums about Amnesty, Abortion, and Marijuana.

Sometime around 11:30 I was

readmitted to the Situation Room --

because they wanted to use my

portable radio to get the final

results -- and I remember seeing

Gene Pokorny slumped in a chair

with his shoes off and a look of

great relief on his face. Pokorny, the architect of McGovern's

breakthrough victory in Wisconsin,

was also the campaign manager of Nebraska, his home state, and a loss there would have badly affected his future. Earlier that day in the hotel coffee shop I'd heard him asking

Gary Hart which state he would be

assigned to after Nebraska.

"Well, Gene," Hart replied with a thin smile. "That depends on what happens tonight, doesn't it?"

Pokorny stared at him, but said

nothing. Like almost all the other

key people on the staff, he was

eager to move on to California.

"Yeah," Hart continued. "We were planning on sending you out to

California from here, but recently

I've been thinking more and more

about that slot we have open in the Butte, Montana office."

Again, Pokorny said nothing. . . but two weeks later, with Nebraska

safely in the bag, he turned up in

Fresno and hammered out another

McGovern victory in the critically

important Central Valley. And that

slot in Butte is still open. . .

Which is getting a bit off the point here. Indeed. We are drifting badly

-- from motorcycles to Mankiewicz

to Omaha, Butte, Fresno. . . where

will it end?

The point, I think, was that in both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries,

back to back, McGovern was

confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit-punch and the groin shot, and in both states he

found himself dangerously

vulnerable to this kind of thing.

Dirty politics confused him. He was not ready for it -- and especially not from his fine old friend and

neighbor, Hubert Humphrey.

Toward the end of the Nebraska

campaign he was spending most of

his public time explaining that he

was Not for abortion on demand.

Not for legalized Marijuana, Not

for unconditional amnesty. . . and

his staff was becoming more and

more concerned that their man had

been put completely on the

defensive.

This is one of the oldest and most

effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even

been elevated to the level of

political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson's early

campaigns in Texas. The race was

close and Johnson was getting

worried. Finally he told his

campaign manager to start a

massive rumor campaign about his

opponent's life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his

own barnyard sows.

"Christ, we can't get away with calling him a pig-fucker," the campaign manager protested.

"Nobody's going to believe a thing like that."

"I know," Johnson replied. "But let's make the sonofabitch deny it."

McGovern has not learned to cope

with this tactic yet. Humphrey used

it again in California, with different issues, and once again George

found himself working overtime to

deny wild, baseless charges that he was: (1) Planning to scuttle both the Navy and the Air Force, along with

the whole Aerospace industry, and

(2) He was a sworn foe of all Jews, and if he ever got to the White

House he would immediately cut off

all military aid to Israel and sit on his hands while Russian-equipped

Arab legions drove the Jews into

the sea.

McGovern scoffed at these charges, dismissing them as "ridiculous lies," and repeatedly explained his position on both issues -- but when they counted the votes on election

night it was obvious that both the

Jews and the Aerospace workers in

Southern California had taken

Humphrey's bait. All that saved

McGovern in California was a

long-overdue success among black

voters, strong support from

chicanos, and a massive pro-

McGovern Youth Vote.

This is a very healthy power base, if he can keep it together -- but it is not enough to beat Nixon in

November unless McGovern can

figure out some way to articulate his tax and welfare positions a hell of a lot more effectively than he did in California. Even Hubert Humphrey

managed to get McGovern tangled

up in his own economic proposals

from time to time during their TV

debates in California -- despite the fact that toward the end of that

campaign Humphrey's senile

condition was so obvious that even I began feeling sorry for him.

Indeed. Sorry. Senile. Sick.

Tangled. . . That's exactly how I'm beginning to feel. All those words

and many others, but my brain is too numb to spit them out of the memory bank at this time. No person in my

condition has any business talking

about Hubert Humphrey's behavior.

My brain has slowed down to the

point of almost helpless stupor. I no longer even have the energy to grind

my own teeth.

So this article is not going to end the way I thought it would. . . and looking back at the lead I see that it didn't even start that way either. As for the middle, I can barely

remember it. There was something

about making a deal with

Mankiewicz and then Seizing

Power in American Samoa, but I

don't feel ready right now. Maybe

later. . .

Way out on the far left corner of this

desk I see a note that says "Call Mankiewicz -- Miami Hotel

rooms."

That's right. He was holding three

rooms for us at the convention.

Probably I should call him right

away and firm that up. . . or maybe not.

But what the hell? These things can wait. Before my arms go numb there

were one or two points I wanted to

make. This is certainly no time for any heavy speculation or long-range

analysis -- on any subject at all, but especially not on anything as

volatile and complex as the

immediate future of George

McGovern vis-à-vis the Democratic

Party.

Yet it is hard to avoid the idea that McGovern has put the Party through

some very drastic changes in the

last few months. The Good Ole

Boys are not pleased with him. But

they can't get a grip on him either --

and now, less than three weeks

before the convention, he is so close to a first-ballot victory that the old hacks and ward-heelers who

thought they had total control of the Party less than six months ago find themselves skulking around like old winos in the side alleys of

presidential politics -- first stripped of their power to select and control delegations, then rejected as

delegates themselves when Big Ed

took his overcrowded bandwagon

over the high side on the first lap. . .

and now, incredible as it still seems

to most of them, they will not even be allowed into the Party

convention next month.

One of the first people I plan to

speak with when I get to Miami is

Larry O'Brien: shake both of his

hands and extend powerful

congratulations to him for the job he has done on the Party. In January of 1968 the Democratic Party was so

fat and confident that it looked like they might keep control of the White House, the Congress, and in fact the

whole U.S. Government almost indefinitely. Now, four and a half

years later, it is a useless bankrupt hulk. Even if McGovern wins the

Democratic nomination, the Party

machinery won't be of much use to

him, except as a vehicle.

"Traditional Politics with a

Vengeance" is Gary Hart's phrase --

a nutshell concept that pretty well describes the theory behind

McGovern's amazingly effective

organization.

"The Politics of Vengeance" is a very different thing -- an essentially psychotic concept that Hart would

probably not go out of his way to

endorse.

Vehicle. . . vehicle. . . vehicle -- a very strange looking word, if you

stare at it for eight or nine minutes. .

. "Skulking" is another interesting-looking word.

And so much for that.

The morning news says Wilbur

Mills is running for President again.

He has scorned all invitations to

accept the Number Two spot with

anyone else -- especially George

McGovern. A very depressing

bulletin. But Mills must know what

he's doing. His name is said to be

magic in certain areas. If the Party rejects McGovern, I hope they give

it to Mills. That would just about

make the nut.

Another depressing news item -- out of Miami Beach this time -- says an

unnatural number of ravens have been seen in the city recently.

Tourists have complained of being

kept awake all night by "horrible croaking sounds" outside their hotel windows. "At first there were only a few," one local businessman

explained. "But more and more

keep coming. They're building big

nests in the trees along Collins

Avenue. They're killing the trees

and their droppings smell like dead flesh."

Many residents say they can no longer leave their windows open at

night, because of the croaking. "I've always loved birds," said another resident. "But these goddamn ravens are something else!"

Later in June

Mass Burial for Political Bosses in New York. . . McGovern over the

Hump. . . The Death by Beating of a Six-Foot Blue-Black Serpent. . .

What Next for the Good Ole

Boys?. . . Anatomy of a Fixer. . .

Treachery Looms in Miami. . .

It is now clear that this once small devoted band has become a great surging multitude all across this country -- and it will not be denied.

-- George McGovern, on the night

of the New York primary

The day after the New York

primary I woke up in a suite on the twenty-fourth floor of Delmonico's

Hotel on Park Avenue with a hellish wind tearing both rooms apart and

rain coming in through all the open windows. . . and I thought: Yes,

wonderful, only a lunatic would get out of bed on a day like this; call room service for grapefruit and

coffee, along with a New York

Times for brain food, and one of those portable brickdome fireplaces full of oil-soaked sawdust logs that they can roll right into the suite and fire up at the foot of the bed.

Indeed. Get some heat in the room, but keep the windows open -- for

the sounds of the wind and the rain and the far-off honking of all those taxi horns down on Park Avenue.

Then fill a hot bath and get

something like Memphis

Underground on the tape machine.

Relax, relax. Enjoy this fine rainy day, and send the bill to Random

House. The budget boys won't like

it, but to hell with them. Random

House still owes me a lot of money

from that time when the night watchman beat my snake to death on

the white marble steps leading up to the main reception desk.

I had left it overnight in the editor's office, sealed up in a cardboard box with a sacrificial mouse. . . but the mouse understood what was

happening, and terror gave him

strength to gnaw a hole straight

through the side of the box and

escape into the bowels of the

building.

The snake followed, of course--

through the same hole-- and

somewhere around dawn, when the

night watchman went out to check

the main door, he was confronted

with a six-foot blue-black serpent

slithering rapidly up the stairs,

flicking its tongue at him and hissing a warning that he was sure --

according to his own account of the incident -- was the last sound he

would ever hear.

The snake was a harmless Blue

Indigo that I'd just brought back from a reptile farm in Florida. . .

but the watchman had no way of

knowing; he had never seen a snake.

Most natives of Manhattan Island

are terrified of all animals except cockroaches and poodles. . . so

when this poor ignorant bastard of a watchman suddenly found himself

menaced by a hissing, six-foot

serpent coming fast up the stairs at him from the general direction of

Cardinal Spellman's quarters just

across the courtyard. . . he said the

sight of it made him almost crazy with fear, and at first he was totally paralyzed.

Then, as the snake kept on coming,

some primal instinct shocked the

man out of his trance and gave him

the strength to attack the thing with the first weapon he could get his

hands on -- which he first described as a "steel broom handle," but which further investigation revealed to have been a metal tube jerked out of a nearby vacuum cleaner.

The battle apparently lasted some twenty minutes: a terrible clanging and screaming in the empty marble

entranceway, and finally the

watchman prevailed. Both the

serpent and the vacuum tube were

beaten beyond recognition, and later that morning a copy editor found the watchman slumped on a stool in the

basement next to the xerox machine, still gripping the mangled tube and unable to say what was wrong with

him except that something horrible

had tried to get him, but he finally

managed to kill it.

The man has since retired, they say.

Cardinal Spellman died and

Random House moved to a new

building. But the psychic scars

remain, a dim memory of corporate

guilt that is rarely mentioned except in times of stress or in arguments

over money. Every time I start

feeling a bit uneasy about running

up huge bills on the Random House

tab, I think about that snake -- and then I call room service again.

STATE VOTE AIDS MCGOVERN: SENATOR'S SLATES WIN BY LARGE

MARGIN

IN THE SUBURBS

That was the Times's big headline on Wednesday morning. The "3 A's candidate" (Acid, Abortion,

Amnesty) had definitely improved

his position by carrying the suburbs.

The bulk of the political coverage

on page one had to do with local

races -- "Ryan, Badillo, Rangel Win: Coller is in Close Battle". . .

"Delegates Named". . . "Bingham Defeats Scheuer; Rooney Apparent

Winner."

Down at the bottom of the page was

a block of wire-photos from the National Mayors' Conference in

New Orleans -- also on Tuesday --

and the choice shot from down there showed a smiling Hubert Humphrey

sitting next to Mayor Daley of

Chicago with the Mayor of Miami

Beach leaning into the scene with

one of his arms around Daley and

the other around Hubert.

The caption said, "Ex-Mayor Is Hit With Mayors". The details, Page 28, said Humphrey had definitely

emerged as the star of the Mayors'

conference. The two losers were

shown in smaller photos underneath

the Daley/Humphrey thing. Muskie

"received polite applause," the caption said, and the camera had

apparently caught him somewhere

near the beginning of a delayed

Ibogaine rush: his eyes are clouding over, his jaw has gone slack, his

hair appears to be combed back in a DA.

The caption under the McGovern

photo says, "He, too, received moderate response." But McGovern at least looked human, while the

other four looked like they had just been trucked over on short notice

from some third-rate wax museum

in the French Quarter. The only

genuinely ugly face of the five is

that of Mayor Daley: He looks like

a potato with mange -- it is the face of a man who would see nothing

wrong with telling his son to go out and round up a gang of thugs with

bullhorns and kick the shit out of

anybody stupid enough to challenge the Mayor of Chicago's right to

name the next Democratic candidate

for President of the United States.

I stared at the front page for a long time: there was something wrong

with it, but I couldn't quite fix on the problem until. . . yes. . . I realized that the whole front page of the June 21st New York Times could just as easily have been dated March 8th,

the day after the New Hampshire

primary.

"Pacification" was failing again in Vietnam; Defense Secretary Melvin

Laird was demanding more

bombers; ITT was beating another

illegal stock-sales rap. . . but the most striking similarity was in the overall impression of what was

happening in the fight for the

Democratic presidential

nomination.

Apparently nothing had changed.

Muskie looked just as sick and

confused as he had on that cold

Wednesday morning in Manchester four months ago. McGovern looked

like the same tough but hopeless

underdog -- and there was nothing

in the face of either Daley or

Humphrey to indicate that either one of those corrupt and vicious old

screws had any doubt at all about

what was going to happen in Miami

in July. They appeared to be very

pleased with whatever the Mayor of

Miami Beach was saying to them. . .

An extremely depressing front page,

at first glance -- almost rancid with a sense of dejá vù. There was even

a Kennedy story: Will he or Won't

he?

This was the most interesting story on the page, if only because of the timing. Teddy had been out of the

campaign news for a few months,

but now -- according to the Times's R.W. Apple Jr. -- he was about to

make his move:

"City Councilman Matthew J. Troy Jr. will announce today that he is

supporting Senator Edward M.

Kennedy for the Democratic vice-

presidential nomination, informed

sources said last night Mr. Troy, a long-time political ally of the

Kennedy family, was one of the

earliest supporters of Senator

George McGovern for the

Presidency. As such, he would be

unlikely to propose a running mate

for the South Dakotan unless both

men had indicated their approval."

Unlikely.

Right. The logic was hard to deny.

A McGovern/Kennedy ticket was

probably the only sure winner

available to the Democrats this

year, but beyond that it might solve all of Kennedy's problems with one

stroke. It would give him at east

four and probably eight years in the spotlight; an unnaturally powerful

and popular vice-president with all the advantages of the office and

very few of the risks. If McGovern

ran wild and called for the abolition of Free Enterprise, for instance,

Kennedy could back off and shake his head sadly. . . but if McGovern did everything right and won a

second term as the most revered and successful President in the nation's history, Teddy would be right there beside him -- the other half of the team; so clearly the heir apparent

that he would hardly have to bother about campaigning in public in

1980.

Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come

out as hated as ever.

-- Saul Alinsky to his staff shortly before his death, June 1972

The primaries are finally over now: twenty-three of the goddamn things -

- and the deal is about to go down.

New York was the last big

spectacle before Miami Beach, and

this time McGovern's people really

kicked out the jams. They stomped

every hack, ward-heeler, and "old-line party boss" from Buffalo to Brooklyn. The Democratic Party in

New York State was left in a frightened shambles.

Not even the state party leader, Joe Crangle, survived the McGovern

blitz. He tried to pass for

"uncommitted" -- hoping to go down to Miami with at least a small

remnant of the big-time bargaining

power he'd planned on when he

originally backed Muskie -- but

McGovern's merciless young street-

fighters chopped Crangle down

with the others. He will watch the

convention on TV, along with Brooklyn Party boss Meade

Esposito and once-powerful Bronx

leader Patrick Cunningham.

Former New York Governor

Averell Harriman also wound up on

the list of ex-heavies who will not attend the convention. He too was

an early Muskie supporter. The last time I saw Averell he was

addressing a small crowd in the

West Palm Beach railroad station --

framed in a halo of spotlights on the

caboose platform of Big Ed's

"Sunshine Special". . . and the Man from Maine was standing tall

beside him, smiling broadly,

looking every inch the winner that

all those half-bright party bosses

had assured him he was definitely

going to be.

It was just about dusk when

Harriman began speaking, as I

recall, and Muskie might have

looked a little less pleased if he'd had any way of knowing that -- ten

blocks away, while Ave was still talking -- a human threshing

machine named Peter Sheridan was

eagerly hitting the bricks after two weeks in the Palm Beach jail on a

vagrancy rap.

Unknown to either Big Ed or Peter,

their paths were soon destined to

cross. Twelve hours later, Sheridan

-- the infamous wandering Boohoo

for the Neo-American church --

would board the "Sunshine Special"

for the last leg of the trip into

Miami.

That encounter is already legend. I am not especially proud of my role

in it -- mainly because the nightmare developed entirely by accident --

but if I could go back and try it all over again I wouldn't change a note.

At the time I felt a bit guilty about it: having been, however innocently, responsible for putting the Demo

front-runner on a collision course

with a gin-crazed acid freak -- but that was before I realized what kind

of a beast I was dealing with.

It was not until his campaign

collapsed and his ex-staffers felt

free to talk that I learned that

working for Big Ed was something

like being locked in a rolling

boxcar with a vicious 200-pound

water rat. Some of his top staff

people considered him dangerously

unstable. He had several identities, they said, and there was no way to

be sure on any given day if they

would have to deal with Abe

Lincoln, Hamlet, Captain Queeg, or Bobo the Simpleminded. . .

Many strange Muskie stories, but

this is not the time for them. Perhaps after the convention, when the

pressure lets off a bit -- although not even that is certain, now: Things are getting weird.

The only "Muskie story" that interests me right now is the one

about how he managed to con those

poor bastards into making him the

de facto party leader and also the

bosses' choice to carry the party colors against Nixon in November.

I want to know that story, and if

anybody who reads this can fill me

in on the details, by all means call at once c/o Rolling Stone, San Francisco.

The Muskie nightmare is beginning

to look more and more like a major

political watershed for the

Democratic Party. When Big Ed

went down he took about half of the national power structure with him.

In one state after another -- each time he lost a primary -- Muskie

crippled and humiliated the local

Democratic power-mongers:

Governors, Mayors, Senators,

Congressmen. . . Big Ed was

supposed to be their ticket to

Miami, where they planned to do

business as usual once again, and

keep the party at least livable, if not entirely healthy. All Muskie had to do, they said, was keep his mouth

shut and act like Abe Lincoln.

The bosses would do the rest. As for that hare-brained bastard

McGovern, he could take those

reformist ideas he'd been working

on, and jam them straight up his ass.

A convention packed wall to wall

with Muskie delegates -- the rancid cream of the party, as it were --

would make short work of

McGovern's Boy Scout bullshit.

That was four months ago, before

Muskie began crashing around the

country in a stupid rage and

destroying everything he touched.

First it was booze, then Reds, and

finally over the brink into Ibogaine.

. . and it was right about that time that most of the Good Ole Boys

decided to take another long look at Hubert Humphrey. He wasn't much;

they all agreed on that -- but by May he was all they had left.

Not much, for sure. Any political

party that can't cough up anything

better than a treacherous brain-

damaged old vulture like Hubert

Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don't hardly make 'em

like Hubert any more -- but just to be on the safe side, he should be

castrated anyway.

Castrated? Jesus! Is nothing sacred? Four years ago Hubert

Humphrey ran for President of the

United States on the Democratic

ticket -- and he almost won.

It was a very narrow escape. I

voted for Dick Gregory in '68, and

if somehow Humphrey manages to

slither onto the ticket again this year I will vote for Richard Nixon.

But Humphrey will not be on the

ticket this year -- at least not on the Democratic ticket. He may end up

running with Nixon, but the odds are against him there, too. Not even

Nixon could stoop to Hubert's level.

So what will Humphrey do with

himself this year? Is there no room at the top for a totally dishonest

person? A United States Senator?

A loyal Party Man?

Well. . . as much as I hate to get away from objective journalism,

even briefly, there is no other way to explain what that treacherous

bastard appears to be cranking

himself up for this time around,

except by slipping momentarily into the realm of speculation.

But first, a few realities: (1) George McGovern is so close to a first-ballot nomination in Miami that

everybody except Hubert

Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Shirley

Chisholm, and Ed Muskie seems ready to accept it as a foregone

conclusion. . . (2) The national

Democratic Party is no longer

controlled by the Old Guard, Boss-

style hacks like George Meany and

Mayor Daley -- or even by the Old

Guard liberal-manque types like

Larry O'Brien, who thought they had things firmly under control as

recently as six months ago. . . (3) McGovern has made it painfully

clear that he wants more than just

the nomination; he has every

intention of tearing the Democratic Party completely apart and

rebuilding it according to his own

blueprint. . . (4) If McGovern beats Nixon in November he will be in a

position to do anything he wants

either to or with the party structure.

. . (5) But if McGovern loses in

November, control of the

Democratic Party will instantly

revert to the Ole Boys, and

McGovern himself will be labeled

"another Goldwater" and stripped of any power in the party.

The pattern is already there, from 1964, when the Nixon/Mitchell

brain-trust -- already laying plans for 1968 -- sat back and let the GOP

machinery fall into the hands of the Birchers and the right-wing crazies for a few months. . . and when

Goldwater got stomped, the

Nixon/Mitchell crowd moved in

and took over the party with no

argument from anybody. . . and four years later Nixon moved into the

White House.

There have already been a few rumblings and muted threats along

these lines from the Daley-Meany

faction. Daley has privately

threatened to dump Illinois to Nixon in November if McGovern persists

in challenging Daley's eighty-five-

man slave delegation to the

convention in Miami. . . and Meany

is prone to muttering out loud from time to time that maybe Organized

Labor would be better off in the

long run by enduring another four

years under Nixon, rather than

running the risk of whatever radical madness he fears McGovern might

bring down on him.

The only other person who has said

anything about taking a dive for

Nixon in November is Hubert

Humphrey, who has already

threatened in public -- at the party's Credentials Committee hearings in

Washington last week -- to let his

friend Joe Alioto, the Mayor of San Francisco, throw the whole state of California to Nixon unless the party

gives Hubert 151 California delegates -- on the basis of his

losing show of strength in that

state's winner-take-all primary.

Hubert understood all along that

California was all or nothing. He

continually referred to it as "The Big One," and "The Super Bowl of the Primaries". . . but he changed his mind when he lost. One of the

finest flashes of TV journalism in

many months appeared on the CBS

evening news the same day

Humphrey formally filed his claim to almost half the California

delegation. It was a Walter Cronkite interview with Hubert in California, a week or so prior to election day.

Cronkite asked him if he had any

objections to the winner-take-all

aspect of the California primary,

and Humphrey replied that he

thought it was absolutely wonderful.

"So even if you lose out here -- if you lose all 271 delegates -- you

wouldn't challenge the winner-take-

all rule?" Cronkite asked.

"Oh, my goodness, no," Hubert said.

"That would make me sort of a

spoilsport, wouldn't it?"

On the face of it, McGovern seems

to have everything under control

now. Less than twenty-four hours

after the New York results were

final, chief delegate-meister Rick

Stearns announced that George was

over the hump. The New York blitz

was the clincher, pushing him over

the 1350 mark and mashing all but

the flimsiest chance that anybody would continue to talk seriously

about a "Stop McGovern"

movement in Miami. The

Humphrey/Muskie axis had been

desperately trying to put something together with aging diehards like

Wilbur Mills, George Meany, and

Mayor Daley -- hoping to stop

McGovern just short of 1400 -- but

on the weekend after the New York

sweep George picked up another

fifty or so from the last of the non-primary state caucuses and by

Sunday, June 25th, he was only a hundred votes away from the 1509

that would zip it all up on the first ballot.

At that time the number of officially

"uncomittted" delegates was still hovering around 450, but there had

already been some small-scale

defections to McGovern, and the

others were getting nervous. The

whole purpose of getting yourself

elected as an Uncommitted delegate

is to be able to arrive at the

Convention with bargaining power.

Ideology has nothing to do with it.

If you're a lawyer from St. Louis,

for instance, and you manage to get yourself elected as an Uncommitted

delegate for Missouri, you will

hustle down to Miami and start

scouting around for somebody to

make a deal with. . . which won't

take long, because every candidate

still in the running for anything at all will have dozens of his own

personal fixers roaming around the

hotel bars and buttonholing Uncommitted delegates to find out

what they want.

If your price is a lifetime

appointment as a judge on the U.S.

Circuit Court, your only hope is to deal with a candidate who is so

close to that magic 1509 figure that he can no longer function in public because of uncontrollable drooling.

If he is stuck around 1400 you will probably not have much luck getting that bench appointment. . . but if he's

already up to 1499 he won't hesitate to offer you the first opening on the U.S. Supreme Court. . . and if you

catch him peaked at 1505 or so, you can squeeze him for almost anything you want.

The game will get heavy sometimes.

You don't want to go around putting the squeeze on people unless you're absolutely clean. No skeletons in the closet: no secret vices. . .

because if your vote is important

and your price is high, the Fixer-

Man will have already checked you out by the time he offers to buy you a drink. If you bribed a traffic-court clerk two years ago to bury a drunk driving charge, the Fixer might

suddenly confront you with a

photostat of the citation you thought had been burned.

When that happens, you're fucked.

Your price just went down to zero,

and you are no longer an

Uncommitted delegate.

There are several other versions of

the Reverse-Squeeze: the fake hit-and-run; glassine bags found in your hotel room by a maid; grabbed off

the street by phony cops for

statutory rape of a teenage girl you never saw before. . .

Every once in a while you might hit on something with real style, like

this one: On Monday afternoon, the

first day of the convention, you --

the ambitious young lawyer from St.

Louis with no skeletons in the closet and no secret vices worth worrying

about -- are spending the afternoon by the pool at the Playboy Plaza,

soaking up sun and gin/tonics when

you hear somebody calling your

name. You look up and see a

smiling, rotund chap about thirty-

five years old coming at you, ready to shake hands.

"Hi there, Virgil," he says. "My name's J. D. Squane. I work for

Senator Bilbo and we'd sure like to count on your vote. How about it?"

You smile, but say nothing --

waiting for Squane to continue. He will want to know your price.

But Squane is staring out to sea,

squinting at something on the

horizon. . . then he suddenly turns back to you and starts talking very fast about how he always wanted to

be a riverboat pilot on the

Mississippi, but politics got in the way. . . "And now, goddamnit, we must get these last few votes. . ."

You smile again, itching to get

serious. But Squane suddenly yells

at somebody across the pool, then turns back to you and says: "Jesus, Virgil, I'm really sorry about that, but I have to run. That guy over

there is delivering my new Jensen

Interceptor." He grins and extends his hand again. Then: "Say, maybe we can talk later on, eh? What room are you in?"

"1909."

He nods. "How about seven, for dinner? Are you free?"

"Sure."

"Wonderful," he replies. "We can take my new Jensen for a run up to

Palm Beach. . . It's one of my

favorite towns."

"Mine too," you say. "I've heard a lot about it."

He nods. "I spent some time there last February. . . but we had a bad act, dropped about twenty-five

grand."

Jesus! Jensen Interceptor; twenty-five grand. . . Squane is definitely big-time.

"See you at seven," he says, moving away. ""

The knock comes at 7:02 -- but

instead of Squane it's a beautiful

silver-haired young girl who says J.

D. sent her to pick you up. "He's having a business dinner with the

Senator and he'll join us later at the Crab House."

"Wonderful, wonderful -- shall we have a drink?"

She nods. "Sure, but not here. We'll drive over to North Miami and pick

up my girlfriend. . . but let's smoke this before we go."

"Jesus! That looks like a cigar!"

"It is!" she laughs. "And it'll make us both crazy."

Many hours later, 4:30 A.M. Soaking wet, falling into the lobby, begging

for help: No wallet, no money, no ID. Blood on both hands and one

shoe missing, dragged up to the

room by two bellboys. . .

Breakfast at noon the next day, half sick in the coffee shop -- waiting

for a Western Union money order

from the wife in St. Louis. Very

spotty memories from last night.

"Hi there, Virgil."

J. D. Squane, still grinning. "Where were you last night, Virgil?" I came

by right on the dot, but you weren't in."

"I got mugged -- by your girlfriend."

"Oh? Too bad. I wanted to nail down that ugly little vote of yours."

"Ugly? Wait a minute. . . That girl you sent; we went someplace to

meet you."

"Bullshit! You double-crossed me, Virgil! If we weren't on the same

team I might be tempted to lean on

you."

Rising anger now, painful throbbing in the head. "Fuck you, Squane! I'm on nobody's team! If you want my vote you know damn well how to

get it -- and that goddamn dope-

addict girlfriend of yours didn't help any."

Squane smiles heavily. "Tell me, Virgil -- what was it you wanted for the vote of yours? A seat on the

federal bench?"

"You're goddamn fuckin'-A right!

You got me in bad trouble last night, J. D. When I got back there my

wallet was gone and there was

blood on my hands.

"I know. You beat the shit out of her."

"What?"

"Look at these photographs, Virgil.

It's some of the most disgusting stuff I've ever seen."

"Photographs?"

Squane hands them across the table.

"Oh my god!"

"Yeah, that's what I said, Virgil."

"No! This can't be me! I never saw that girl! Christ, she's only a child!"

"That's why the pictures are so disgusting, Virgil. You're lucky we didn't take them straight to the cops and have you locked up." Pounding

the table with his fist. "That's rape, Virgil! That's sodomy! With a child!"

"No!"

"Yes, Virgil -- and now you're going to pay for it."

"How? What are you talking

about?"

Squane smiling again. "Votes, my friend. Yours and five others. Six

votes for six negatives. Are you

ready?"

Tears of rage in the eyes now. "You evil sonofabitch! You're

blackmailing me!"

"Ridiculous, Virgil. Ridiculous. I'm talking about coalition politics."

"I don't even know six delegates.

Not personally, anyway. And

besides, they all want something."

Squane shakes his head. "Don't tell me about it, Virgil. I'd rather not

hear. Just bring me six names off this list by noon tomorrow. If they all vote right, you'll never hear

another word about what happened

last night."

"What if I can't?"

Squane smiles, then shakes his head sadly. "Your life will take a turn for the worse, Virgil."

Ah, bad craziness. . . a scene like that could run on forever. Sick

dialogue comes easy after five

months on the campaign trail. A sense of humor is not considered

mandatory for those who want to get heavy into presidential politics.

Junkies don't laugh much; their gig is too serious -- and the politics

junkie is not much different on that score than a smack junkie.

The High is very real in both

worlds, for those who are into it --

but anybody who has ever tried to

live with a smack junkie will tell

you it can't be done without coming

to grips with the spike and shooting up, yourself.

Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political

campaign -- especially when you're

running against big odds and

starting to feel like a winner.

As far as I know, I am the only

journalist covering the '72

presidential campaign who has

done any time on the other side of

that gap -- both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level --

and despite all the obvious

differences between running on the

Freak Power ticket for Sheriff of

Aspen and running as a well-

behaved Democrat for President of

the United States, the roots are

surprisingly similar. . . and

whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about,

compared to the massive,

unbridgeable gap between the

cranked-up reality of living day

after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign -- and the friendish

ratbastard tedium of covering that

same campaign as a journalist, from the outside looking in.

For the same reason that nobody

who has never come to grips with

the spike can ever understand how

far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives. . . there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on

inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself.

Very few of the press people

assigned to the McGovern

campaign, for instance, have

anything more than a surface

understanding of what is really

going on in the vortex. . . or if they do, they don't mention it, in print or on the air: And after spending half a year following this goddamn zoo

around the country and watching the machinery at work I'd be willing to

bet pretty heavily that not even the most privileged ranking insiders

among the campaign press corps are

telling much less than they know.

Fear and Loathing: On the

Campaign Trail,

San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Books, 1973

September

Fat City Blues. . . Fear and

Loathing on the White House

Press Plane. . . Bad Angst at McGovern Headquarters. . .

Nixon Tightens the Screws. . .

"Many Appeared to Be in the Terminal Stages of Campaign

Bloat". . .

Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race -- small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and

overbearing. Strangely enough

they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a

disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not.

They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

-- Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877

If George McGovern had a speech

writer half as eloquent as Sitting

Bull, he would be home free today -

- instead of twenty-two points

behind and racing around the

country with both feet in his mouth.

The Powder River Conference

ended ninety-five years ago, but the old Chief's baleful analysis of the White Man's rape of the American

continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came

back from the dead and said it for

the microphones on prime-time TV.

The ugly fallout from the American

Dream has been coming down on us

at a pretty consistent rate since

Sitting Bull's time -- and the only real difference now, with Election

Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of

ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.

Sitting Bull made no distinction

between Democrats and

Republicans -- which was probably

just as well, in 1877 or any other

year -- but it's also true that Sitting Bull never knew the degradation of

traveling on Richard Nixon's press

plane; he never had the bilious

pleasure of dealing with Ron

Ziegler, and he never met John Mitchell, Nixon's king fixer.

If the old Sioux Chief had ever done these things, I think -- despite his angry contempt for the White Man

and everything he stands for -- he'd be working overtime for George

McGovern today.

These past two weeks have been

relatively calm ones for me.

Immediately after the Republican

Convention in Miami, I dragged

myself back to the Rockies and tried

to forget about politics for a while -

- just lie naked on the porch in the cool afternoon sun and watch the

aspen trees turning gold on the hills around my house; mix up a huge

cannister of gin and grapefruit juice, watch the horses nuzzling each other in the pasture across the road, big logs in the fireplace at night; Herbie Mann, John Prine, and Jesse Colin

Young booming out of the speakers.

. . zip off every once in a while for a fast run into town along a back

road above the river: to the health-

center gym for some volleyball, then over to Benton's gallery to get caught up on whatever treacheries

the local greedheads rammed

through while I was gone, watch the late TV news and curse McGovern

for poking another hole in his own

boat, then stop by the Jerome on the way out of town for a midnight beer with Solheim.

After two weeks on that peaceful

human schedule, the last thing I

wanted to think about was the grim,

inescapable spectre of two more frenzied months on the campaign

trail. Especially when it meant

coming back here to Washington, to

start laying the groundwork for a

long and painful autopsy job on the McGovern campaign. What went

wrong? Why had it failed? Who

was to blame? And, finally, what

next?

That was on project. The other was

to somehow pass through the fine

eye of the White House security

camel and go out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, to watch

him waltz in -- if only to get the

drift of his thinking, to watch the moves, his eyes. It is a nervous

thing to consider: Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics -- completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about

who might or might not vote for him the next time around.

If he wins in November, he will

finally be free to do whatever he wants. . . or maybe "wants" is too strong a word for right now. It

conjures up images of Papa Doc,

Batista, Somoza; jails full of

bewildered "political prisoners"

and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your

door off its hinges at four A.M.

There is no point in kidding

ourselves about what Richard

Nixon really wants for America.

When he stands at his White House

window and looks out on an antiwar demonstration, he doesn't see

"dissenters," he sees criminals.

Dangerous parasites, preparing to

strike at the heart of the Great

American System that put him

where he is today.

There may not be much difference

between Democrats and

Republicans; I have made that

argument myself -- with

considerable venom, as I recall --

over the past ten months. . . But only

a blind geek or a waterhead could miss the difference between

McGovern and Richard Nixon.

Granted, they are both white men,

and both are politicians -- but the similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so

vast that anybody who can't see it

deserves whatever happens to them

if Nixon gets re-elected due to

apathy, stupidity, and laziness on

the part of potential McGovern

voters.

The tragedy of this campaign is that McGovern and his staff wizards

have not been able to dramatize

what is really at stake on November 7th. We are not looking at just

another dim rerun of the '68

Nixon/Humphrey trip, or the

LBJ/Goldwater fiasco in '64. Those

were both useless drills. I voted for Dick Gregory in '68, and for "No"

in '64. . . but this one is different, and since McGovern is so goddamn

maddeningly inept with the kind of

words he needs to make people

understand what he's up to, it will save a lot of time here -- and strain on my own weary head -- to

remember Bobby Kennedy's

ultimate characterization of Richard Nixon, in a speech at Vanderbilt

University in the spring of 1968, not long before he was murdered.

"Richard Nixon," he said,

"represents the dark side of the American spirit."

I don't remember what else he said

that day. I guess I could look it up in

the New York Times speech morgue, but why bother? That one

line says it all.

The mood at McGovern's grim

headquarters building at 1910 K

Street, NW, in Washington is oddly

schizoid these days: a jangled mix

of defiance and despair --

tempered, now and then, by quick

flashes of a lingering conviction that George can still win.

McGovern's young staffers, after

all, have never lost an election

they expected to win, at the outset

-- and they definitely expected to

win this one. They are accustomed

to being far behind in the public

opinion polls. McGovern has

almost always been the underdog,

and -- except for California -- he

has usually been able to close the

gap with a last-minute stretch run.

Even in the primaries he lost --

New Hampshire, Ohio,

Pennsylvania -- he did well enough

to embarrass the pollsters, humiliate

the pols, and crank up his staff morale another few notches.

But that boundless blind faith is

beginning to fade now. The Curse of Eagleton is beginning to make itself felt in the ranks. And not even Frank Mankiewicz, the Wizard of Chevy

Chase, can properly explain why

McGovern is now being sneered at

from coast to coast as "just another politician." Mankiewicz is still the main drivewheel in this hamstrung

campaign; he has been the central

intelligence from the very beginning

-- which was fine all around, while it worked, but there is not a hell of a lot of evidence to suggest that it's working real well these days, and it is hard to avoid the idea that Frank is just as responsible for whatever is happening now as he was six

months ago, when McGovern came

wheeling out of New Hampshire

like the Abominable Snowman on a

speed trip.

If George gets stomped in

November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him.

The blame will trace straight back

to his brain-trust, to whoever had

his ear tight enough to convince him that all that bullshit about "new politics" was fine for the primaries, but it would never work again

against Nixon -- so he would have

to abandon his original power base, after Miami, and swiftly move to

consolidate the one he'd just

shattered: the

Meany/Daley/Humphrey/Muskie

axis, the senile remnants of the Democratic Party's once-powerful

"Roosevelt coalition."

McGovern agreed. He went to

Texas and praised LBJ; he revised

his economic program to make it

more palatable on Wall Street; he

went to Chicago and endorsed the

whole Daley/Democratic ticket,

including State's Attorney Ed

Hanrahan, who is still under

indictment on felony/conspiracy

(Obstruction of Justice) charges for

his role in a police raid on local Black Panther headquarters three

years ago that resulted in the murder of Fred Hampton.

In the speedy weeks between March

and July, the atmosphere in

McGovern's cramped headquarters

building on Capitol Hill was so

high that you could get bent by just hanging around and watching the

human machinery at work.

The headquarters building itself

was not much bigger than

McGovern's personal command post in the Senate Office Building, five blocks away. It was one big

room about the size of an Olympic

swimming pool -- with a grocery

store on one side, a liquor store on the other, and a tree-shaded

sidewalk out front. The last time I was there, about two weeks before

the California primary, I drove my

blue Volvo up on the sidewalk and

parked right in front of the door.

Crouse went inside to find

Mankiewicz while I picked up some

Ballantine ale.

"Is this a charge?" the booze-clerk asked.

"Right," I said. "Charge it to George McGovern."

He nodded, and began to write it

down.

"Hey, wait a minute!" I said. "I was just kidding. Here -- here's the

cash."

He shrugged and accepted the three bills. . . and when I got to Frank's office and told him what had

happened, he didn't seem surprised.

"Yeah, our credit's pretty good," he said, "in a lot of places where we never even asked for it."

That was back in May, when the

tide was still rising. But things are different now, and the credit is not so easy. The new K Street

headquarters is an eight-story tomb once occupied by the "Muskie for

President" juggernaut. Big Ed abandoned it when he dropped out

of the race for the Democratic

nomination, and it stood empty for a month or so after that -- but when

McGovern croaked Humphrey in

California and became the nominee-

apparent, his wizards decided to get a new and larger headquarters.

The Muskie building was an

obvious choice -- if only because it was available very cheap, and

already wired for the fantastic maze

of phone lines necessary for a presidential campaign headquarters.

The Man from Maine and his army

of big-time backers had already

taken care of that aspect; they had plenty of phone lines, along with all those endorsements.

Not everybody on the McGovern

staff was happy with the idea of

moving out of the original

headquarters. The decision was

made in California, several days

before the primary, and I remember

arguing with Gary Hart about it. He insisted the move was necessary,

for space reasons. . . and even in

retrospect my argument for keeping

the original headquarters seems

irrational. It was a matter of karma, I said, psychic continuity. And

besides, I had spent some time in

the Muskie building on the night of the New Hampshire primary, when

the atmosphere of the place was

strongly reminiscent of Death Row

at Sing Sing. So my memories of

that building were not pleasant --

but my reasons, as usual, had a noticeably mystic flavor to them.

And Gary, as usual, was thinking in terms of hard lawyer's logic and

political pragmatism.

So the McGovern headquarters was

moved, after Miami, from the

original base between the liquor

store and the grocery store on

Capitol Hill to the Muskie tomb on

K Street, in the fashionable

downtown area. It was a central

location, they said with a big

parking lot next door. It also had two elevators and sixteen

bathrooms.

The original headquarters had only

one bathroom, with a cardboard

arrow on the door that could be

moved, like a one-armed clock, to

three different positions: MEN,

WOMEN or EMPTY.

There was also a refrigerator. It

was small, but somehow there were

always a few cans of beer in it,

even for visiting journalists.

Nobody was in charge of stocking it, but nobody drank the last beer

without replacing it, either. . . (or maybe it was all a shuck from the

start; maybe they had a huge stash

outside the back door, but they only kept two or three cans in the

refrigerator, so that anybody who

drank one would feel so guilty that he/she would bring six to replace it, the next time they came around. . .

but I doubt it; not even that devious Arab bastard Rick Stearns would

plot things that carefully).

But what the hell? All that is history now, and after roaming around the

new McGovern headquarters

building for a week or so, the only refrigerator I found was up in

finance director Henry

Kimmelman's office on the sixth

floor. I went up here with Pat

Caddell one afternoon last week to

watch the Cronkite/Chancellor TV

news (every afternoon at 6:30, all

activity in the building is suspended for an hour while the staff people

gather around TV sets to watch "the

daily bummer," as some of them call it) and Kimmelman has the only accessible color set in the building, so his office is usually crowded for the news hour.

But his set is fucked, unfortunately.

One of the color tubes is blown, so everything that appears on the

screen has a wet purple tint to it.

When McGovern comes on, rapping

out lines from a speech that

somebody watching one of the

headquarters' TV sets just wrote for

him a few hours earlier, his face appears on the set in Kimmelman's

office as if he were speaking up

from the bottom of a swimming pool

full of cheap purple dye.

It is not a reassuring thing to see, and most of the staffers prefer to

watch the news on the black &

white sets downstairs in the

political section. . .

What? We seem to be off the track

here. I was talking about my first

encounter with the refrigerator in

Henry Kimmelman's office -- when I was looking for beer, and found

none. The only thing in the icebox

was a canned martini that tasted like brake fluid.

One canned martini. No beer. A

purple TV screen. Both elevators

jammed in the basement; fifteen

empty bathrooms. Seventy-five

cents an hour to park in the lot next door. Chaos and madness in the

telephone switchboard. Fear in the

back rooms, confusion up front, and

a spooky vacuum on top -- the eighth floor -- where Larry O'Brian is supposed to be holding the gig

together. . . what is he doing up

there? Nobody knows. They never

see him.

"Larry travels a lot," one of the speech writers told me. "He's

Number One, you know -- and when

you're Number One you don't have

to try so hard, right?"

The McGovern campaign appears

to be fucked at this time. A

spectacular Come From Behind win is still possible -- on paper and

given the right circumstances -- but the underlying realities of the

campaign itself would seem to

preclude this. A cohesive,

determined campaign with the same

kind of multi-level morale that

characterized the McGovern effort

in the months preceding the

Wisconsin primary might be a good

bet to close a twenty-point gap on

Nixon in the last month of this grim presidential campaign.

As usual, Nixon has peaked too early -- and now he is locked into

what is essentially a Holding

Action. Which would be disastrous

in a close race, but -- even by Pat Caddell's partisan estimate -- Nixon could blow twenty points off his

lead in the next six weeks and still win. (Caddell's figures seem in

general agreement with those of the most recent Gallup Poll, ten days

ago, which showed that Nixon

could blow thirty points off his lead and still win.)

My own rude estimate is that McGovern will steadily close the

gap between now and November

7th, but not enough. If I had to make book right now, I would try to get

McGovern with seven or eight

points, but I'd probably go with five or six, if necessary. In other words, my guess at the moment is that

McGovern will lose by a popular

vote margin of 5.5 percent -- and

probably far worse in the electoral college.*

* I was somewhat off on this prediction. The

final margin was almost 23%. At this point in the campaign I was no longer functioning with my usual ruthless objectivity. Back in May and June, when my head was still clear, I won vast amounts of money with a consistency that baffled the experts. David Broder still owes me $500 as a result of his ill-advised bet on Hubert Humphrey in the California primary. But he still refuses to pay on the grounds that I lost the 500

back to him as a result of a forfeited foot-race between Jim Naughton and Jack Germond in Miami Beach.

The tragedy of this is that

McGovern appeared to have a sure

lock on the White House when the

sun came up on Miami Beach on the

morning of Thursday, July 13th.

Since then he has crippled himself

with a series of almost unbelievable blunders -- Eagleton, Salinger,

O'Brien, etc. -- that have

understandably convinced huge

chunks of the electorate, including at least half of his own hard-core

supporters, that The Candidate is a gibbering dingbat. His behavior

since Miami has made a piecemeal

mockery of everything he seemed to

stand for during the primaries.

Possibly I'm wrong on all this. It is still conceivable -- to me at least --

that McGovern might actually win.

In which case I won't have to worry about my P.O. Box at the Woody

Creek general store getting jammed

up with dinner invitations from the White House. But what the hell?

Mr. Nixon never invited me, and

neither did Kennedy or LBJ.

I survived those years of shame, and I'm not especially worried about

enduring four more. I have a feeling

that my time is getting short, anyway, and I can think of a hell of a lot of things I'd rather find in my mailbox than an invitation to dinner in the Servants' Quarters.

Let those treacherous bastards eat

by themselves. They deserve each

other.

Ah, Jesus! The situation is out of

hand again. The sun is up, the deal is down, and that evil bastard

Mankiewicz just jerked the kingpin

out of my finely crafted saga for this

issue. My brain has gone numb from this madness. After squatting for

thirteen days in this scum-crusted

room on the top floor of the

Washington Hilton -- writing

feverishly, night after night, on the home-stretch realities of this

goddamn wretched campaign -- I

am beginning to wonder what in the

name of Twisted Jesus ever

possessed me to come here in the

first place. What kind of madness

lured me back to this stinking

swamp of a town?

Am I turning into a politics junkie?

It is not a happy thought --

particularly when I see what it's

done to all the others. After two

weeks in Woody Creek, getting

back on the press plane was like

going back to the cancer ward.

Some of the best people in the press corps looked so physically ravaged

that it was painful to even see them, much less stand around and make

small talk.

Many appeared to be in the terminal

stages of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected

somehow with failing adrenal

glands. The swelling begins within

twenty-four hours of that moment

when the victim first begins to

suspect that the campaign is

essentially meaningless. At that

point, the body's entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the

gizzard, and nothing either

candidate says, does, or generates

will cause it to rise again. . . and

without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood

and grow smaller in the face, the

jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog's throat. . . The brain fills with noxious waste

fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.

I would like to think -- or at least claim to think, out of charity if

nothing else -- that Campaign Bloat is at the root of this hellish angst that boils up to obscure my vision

every time I try to write anything

serious about presidential politics.

But I don't think that's it. The real reason, I suspect, is the problem of coming to grips with the idea that

Richard Nixon will almost certainly be re-elected for another four years as President of the United States. If the current polls are reliable -- and even if they aren't, the sheer size of

the margin makes the numbers themselves unimportant -- Nixon

will be re-elected by a huge

majority of Americans who feel he

is not only more honest and more

trustworthy than George McGovern,

but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam.

The polls also indicate that Nixon

will get a comfortable majority of

the Youth Vote. And that he might

carry all fifty states.

Well. . . maybe so. This may be the

year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we

need to buy guns, and no qualms at

all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us

uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that

George McGovern, for all his

mistakes and all his imprecise talk about "new politics" and "honesty

in government," is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who

really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might

have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little

hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid

mistakes, but in context they seem

almost frivolous compared to the

things Richard Nixon does every

day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect

expression of everything he stands

for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low

do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

Fear and Loathing: On the

Campaign Trail,

San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Books, 1973

October

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls.

. .

Due to circumstances beyond my

control, I would rather not write

anything about the 1972 presidential campaign at this time. On Tuesday,

November 7th, I will get out of bed long enough to go down to the

polling place and vote for George

McGovern. Afterwards, I will drive

back to the house, lock the front

door, get back in bed, and watch television as long as necessary. It will probably be a while before

The Angst lifts -- but whenever it

happens I will get out of bed again and start writing the mean, cold-blooded bummer that I was not

quite ready for today. Until then, I think Tom Benton's "re-elect the President" poster says everything that needs to be said right now

about this malignant election. In any other year I might be tempted to

embellish the Death's Head with a

few angry flashes of my own. But not in 1972. At least not in the

sullen numbness of these final hours before the deal goes down --

because words are no longer

important at this stage of the

campaign; all the best ones were

said a long time ago, and all the

right ideas were bouncing around in public long before Labor Day.

That is the one grim truth of this

election most likely to come back

and haunt us: The options were

clearly defined, and all the major candidates except Nixon were

publicly grilled, by experts who

demanded to know exactly where

they stood on every issue from Gun

Control and Abortion to the Ad

Valorem Tax. By mid-September

both candidates had staked out their own separate turf and if not

everybody could tell you what each

candidate stood for specifically, almost everyone likely to vote in

November understood that Richard

Nixon and George McGovern were

two very different men: not only in the context of politics, but also in their personalities, temperaments,

guiding principles, and even their

basic lifestyles. . .

There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity

in the difference between the two

men, a contrast so stark that it

would be hard to find any two

better models in the national

politics arena for the legendary

duality -- the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts -

- that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for

granted as the key to our National

Character. This was not what

Richard Nixon had in mind when he

said, last August, that the 1972

presidential election would offer

voters "the clearest choice of this century," but on a level he will never understand he was probably

right. . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and

incurably violent side of the

American character almost every

other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our

Barbie doll President, with his

Barbie doll wife and his boxful of

Barbie doll children is also

America's answer to the monstrous

Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the

Werewolf in us; the bully, the

predatory shyster who turns into

something unspeakable, full of

claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too

close. . .

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed

beast with the legs of a man and a

head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South

Wing of the White House and leaps

fifty feet down to the lawn. . .

pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the

darkness. . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through

the alleys behind Pennyslvania

Avenue, and trying desperately to

remember which one of those four

hundred identical balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's

apartment. . .

Ah. . . nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of

the United States would never act

that weird. At least not during

football season. But how would the

voters react if they knew the

President of the United States was

presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on

the part of White House aides and

the Nixon campaign organization. . .

involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their

families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation."

That ugly description of Nixon's

staff operations comes from a New

York Times editorial on Thursday, October 12th. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady two-to-one lead

over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the

Times/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible

twenty points (57 percent to 37

percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy

described as "the most decent man in the Senate."

"Ominous" is not quite the right word for a situation where one of

the most consistently unpopular

politicians in American history

suddenly skryockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have

embarrassed Martin Bormann. How

long will it be before "demented extremists" in Germany or maybe Japan, start calling us A Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? "No comment"? And how would the

popularity polls react if he just

came right out and admitted it?

Fear and Loathing: On the

Campaign Trail, San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Books, 1973

Epitaph

Four More Years. . . Nixon Uber

Alles. . . Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl. . .

President Nixon will be sworn into office for a second term today, emboldened by his sweeping

electoral triumph of last November

and a Vietnam peace settlement apparently within his grasp. . . In the most expensive inauguration in American history -- the cost is officially estimated at more than $4 million -- Mr. Nixon will once again take the oath on a temporary stand outside the east front of the Capitol, then ride in a parade

expected to draw 200,000 people to Pennsylvania Avenue and its

environs, and millions more to

their television sets. . . It will be the President's first statement to

the American people since his television appearance on

November 6, election eve. Since then the peace talks have

collapsed, massive bombing of

North Vietnam has been instituted and then called off, and the talks have resumed without extended

public comment from Mr. Nixon . .

.

-- San Francisco Chronicle,

January 20, 1973

When the Great Scorer comes to

write

against your name -- he marks --

Not that you won or lost --

But how you played the game.

-- Grantland Rice: who was known

-- prior to his death in the late

fifties -- as "The Dean of American Sportswriters," and one of Richard Nixon's favorite authors.

They came together on a hot

afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in heat. Under a brown

California sky, the fierceness of

their struggle brought tears to the eyes of 90,000 God-fearing fans.

They were twenty-two men who

were somehow more than men.

They were giants, idols, titans. . .

Behemoths.

They stood for everything Good and

True and Right in the American Spirit.

Because they had guts.

And they yearned for the Ultimate

Glory, the Great Prize, the Final

Fruits of a long and vicious

campaign.

Victory in the Super Bowl: $15,000

each.

They were hungry for it. They were

thirsty. For twenty long weeks, from

August through December, they had struggled to reach this Pinnacle. . .

and when dawn lit the beaches of

Southern California on that fateful Sunday morning in January, they

were ready.

To seize the Final Fruit.

They could almost taste it. The

smell was stronger than a ton of

rotten mangoes. Their nerves

burned like open sores on a dog's

neck. White knuckles. Wild eyes.

Strange fluid welled up in their

throats, with a taste far sharper than bile.

Behemoths.

Those who went early said the pre-

game tension was almost

unbearable. By noon, many fans

were weeping openly, for no

apparent reason. Others wrung their hands or gnawed on the necks of

pop bottles, trying to stay calm.

Many fist-fights were reported in

the public urinals. Nervous ushers

roamed up and down the aisles,

confiscating alcoholic beverages and occasionally grappling with

drunkards. Gangs of Seconal-crazed

teenagers prowled through the

parking lot outside the stadium,

beating the mortal shit out of

luckless stragglers. . .

What? No. . . Grantland Rice would

never have written weird stuff like that: His prose was spare & lean; his descriptions came straight from the gut. . . and on the rare and ill-advised occasions when he wanted

to do a "Think Piece," he called on the analytical powers of his

medulla. Like all great

sportswriters, Rice understood that his world might go all to pieces if he ever dared to doubt that his eyes were wired straight to his lower

brain -- a sort of de facto lobotomy, which enables the grinning victim to operate entirely on the level of

Sensory Perception. . .

Green grass, hot sun, sharp cleats in the tuft, thundering cheers from the

crowd, the menacing scowl on the face of a $30,000-a-year pulling

guard as he leans around the corner on a Lombardi-style power sweep

and cracks a sharp plastic shoulder into the line-backer's groin. . .

Ah yes, the simple life: Back to the roots, the basics -- first a

Mousetrap, then a Crackback & a Buttonhook off a fake triple-reverse Fly Pattern, and finally The Bomb. .

.

Indeed. There is a dangerous kind

of simple-minded Power/Precision worship at the root of the massive

fascination with pro football in this country, and sportswriters are

mainly responsible for it. With a

few rare exceptions like Bob

Lypstye of The New York Times

and Tom Quinn of the (now-

defunct) Washington Daily News, sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist

drunks whose only real function is

to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to

cover. . .

Which is a nice way to make a

living, because it keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all. The two keys to success as a

sportswriter are: (1) A blind

willingness to believe anything

you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers, and other "official

spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze. . . and: (2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and

adjectives twice in the same paragraph.

Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with

a lead that said: "The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami

Dolphins stomped the balls off the

Washington Redskins today by

stomping and hammering with one

precise jackthrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint

precision passes into the flat and

numerous hammer-jack stomps

around both ends. . ."

Right. And there was the genius of

Grantland Rice. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that "The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen"

never echoed more than once in the

same paragraph, and the "Granite-grey sky" in his lead was a "cold dark dusk" in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping

stories. . .

There was a time, about ten years

ago, when I could write like

Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty

bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that

anybody was willing to pay for.

And none of the people I wrote

about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I

wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence. . . At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three

competing papers at the same time,

under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in

the morning, sports editor for

another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling

promoter, writing incredibly

twisted "press releases" that I would plant, the next day, in both

papers.

It was a wonderful gig, in

retrospect, and at times I wish I

could go back to it -- just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes

and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of

conscience, things like: "The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is

gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been cancelled and

Chief Bloor is said to be drilling

his men for an Emergency Alert

situation on Friday and Saturday

night -- because those are the nights when 'Kazika, The Mad Jap,' a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his

first -- and no doubt his last --

appearance in Fish-head

Auditorium. Local wrestling

impresario Lionel Olay is known to

have spoken privately with Chief

Bloor, urging him to have 'every

available officer' on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad

Jap's legendary temper and his

invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit,

Kazika ran amok and tore the

spleens out of three ringside

spectators, one of whom allegedly

called him a 'yellow devil.' "

"Kazika," as I recall, was a big half-bright Cuban who once played

third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about

100 miles away -- but on the fish-

head circuit he had no trouble

passing for a dangerous Jap

strangler, and I soon learned that

pro wrestling fans don't give a fuck anyway.

Ah, memories, memories. . . and

here we go again, back on the same

old trip: digressions, tangents, crude flashbacks. . . When the '72

presidential campaign ended I

planned to give up this kind of thing.

. .

But what the hell? Why not? It's

almost dawn in San Francisco now,

the parking lot outside this building is flooded about three inches deep

with another drenching ran, and I've been here all night drinking coffee

& Wild Turkey, smoking short

Jamaican cigars and getting more &

more wired on the Allman Brothers'

"Mountain Jam," howling out of four big speakers hung in all four

corners of the room.

Where is the MDA? With the

windows wide open and the

curtains blowing into the room and

the booze and the coffee and the

smoke and the music beating heavy

in my ears, I feel the first rising edge of a hunger for something with a bit of the crank in it

Where is Mankiewicz tonight?

Sleeping peacefully?

No. . . probably not. After two

years on The Edge, involuntary

retirement is a hard thing to cope

with. I tried it for a while, in

Woody Creek, but three weeks

without even a hint of crisis left me so nervous that I began gobbling

speed and babbling distractedly

about running for the U.S. Senate in

'74. Finally, on the verge of

desperation, I took the bush-plane

over to Denver for a visit with Gary

Hart, McGovern's ex-campaign manager, telling him I couldn't

actually put him on the payroll right now, but that I was counting on him to organize Denver for me.

He smiled crookedly but refused to

commit himself. . . and later that

night I heard, from an extremely

reliable source, that Hart was

planning to run for the Senate

himself in 1974.

Why? I wondered. Was it some kind

of subliminal, un-focused need to

take vengeance on the press?

On me? The first journalist in Christendom to go on record

comparing Nixon to Adolf Hitler?

Was Gary so blinded with bile that

he would actually run against me in The Primary? Would he risk

splitting the "Three A's" vote and maybe sink us both?

I spent about twenty-four hours

thinking about it, then flew to Los Angeles to cover the Super Bowl --

but the first person I ran into down there was Ed Muskie. He was

wandering around in the vortex of a big party on the main deck of the

Queen Mary, telling anybody who

would listen that he was having a

hell of a hard time deciding whether he was for the Dolphins or the

Redskins. I introduced myself as

Peter Sheridan, "a friend of Donald Segretti's." "We met on the

'Sunshine Special' in Florida," I said. "I was out of my head. . ." But his brain was too clouded to pick

up on it. . . so I went up to the crow's nest and split a cap of black acid with John Chancellor.

He was reluctant to bet on the game, even when I offered to take Miami

with no points. A week earlier I'd

been locked into the idea that the

Redskins would win easily -- but

when Nixon came out for them and

George Allen began televising his

prayer meetings I decided that any

team with both God and Nixon on

their side was fucked from the start.

So I began betting heavily on Miami-- which worked out nicely,

on paper, but some of my heaviest

bets were with cocaine addicts, and they are known to be very bad risks when it comes to paying off. Most

coke freaks have already blown

their memories by years of over-

indulgence on marijuana, and by the time they get serious about coke

they have a hard time remembering

what day it is, much less what kind of ill-considered bets they might or might not have made yesterday.

Consequently -- although I won all my bets -- I made no money.

The game itself was hopelessly dull

-- like all the other Super Bowls --

and by half time Miami was so

clearly in command that I decided

to watch the rest of the drill on TV

at Cardoso's Hollywood

Classic/Day of the Locust-style

apartment behind the Troubadour. . .

but it was impossible to keep a fix on it there, because everybody in

the room was so stoned that they

kept asking each other things like

"How did Miami get the ball? Did we miss a kick? Who's ahead now?

Jesus, how did they get 14 points?

How many points is. . . ah. . .

touchdown?"

Immediately after the game I

received an urgent call from my

attorney, who claimed to be having

a terminal drug experience in his

private bungalow at the Chateau

Marmont. . . and by the time I got

there he had finished the whole jar.

Later, when the big rain started, I got heavily into the gin and read the Sunday papers. On page 39 of

California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the

McDonald's Hamburger

Corporation, one of Nixon's big

contributors in the '72 presidential campaign:

PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN

THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE

PLACE OF PERSISTENCE.

TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING

IS MORE COMMON THAN

UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH

TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT:

UNREWARDED GENIUS IS

ALMOST A PROVERB.

EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT:

THE WORLD IS FULL OF

EDUCATED DERELICTS.

PERSISTENCE AND

DETERMINATION ALONE ARE

OMNIPOTENT.

I read it several times before I

grapsed the full meaning. Then,

when it came to me, I called Mankiewicz immediately.

"Keep your own counsel," he said.

"Don't draw any conclusions from anything you see or hear."

I hung up and drank some more gin.

Then I put a Dolly Parton album on

the tape machine and watched the

trees outside my balcony getting

lashed around in the wind. Around

midnight, when the rain stopped, I

put on my special Miami Beach

nightshirt and walked several

blocks down La Cienega Boulevard to the Losers' Club.

Fear and Loathing: On the

Campaign Trail,

San Francisco, Straight Arrow

Books, 1973

Memo from the Sports Desk

& Rude Notes

from a Decompression

Chamber in Miami

There is no joy in Woody Creek tonight -- at least not in the twisted bowels of this sink-hole of political iniquity called the Owl Farm --

because, 2000 miles away in the

swampy heat of Washington, D.C.,

my old football buddy, Dick Nixon,

is lashing around in bad trouble. . .

The vultures are coming home to

roost -- like he always feared they would, in the end -- and it hurts me in a way nobody would publish if I

properly described it, to know that I can't be with him on the sweaty

ramparts today, stomping those dirty buzzards like Davy Crockett

bashing spies off the walls of the

Alamo.

"Delta Dawn. . . What's that flower you have on?"

Fine music on my radio as dawn

comes up on the Rockies. . . But

suddenly the music ends and ABC

(American Entertainment Network)

News interrupts: Martha Mitchell is demanding that "Mister President"

either resign or be impeached, for

reasons her addled tongue can only

hint at. . . and Charles 'Tex" Colson, the President's erstwhile special counsel, is denying all statements &

sworn testimony, by anybody, linking him to burglaries, firebombings, wire-tappings, perjuries, payoffs and other routine felonies in connection with his job at the White House. . . and President Nixon is

relaxing, as it were, in his personal beach-front mansion at San

Clemente, California, surrounded

by the scuzzy remnants of his once

imperial guard. . . Indeed, you can almost hear the rattle of martini-cups along the airwaves as Gerald

Warren -- Ron Ziegler's doomed

replacement -- cranks another hastily rewritten paragraph

(Amendment No. 67 to Paragraph

No. 13 of President Nixon's original statement denying everything. . .)

into the overheated Dex machine to

the White House, for immediate

release to the national media. . . and the White House press room is

boiling with guilt-crazed

journalists, ready to pounce on any new statement like a pack of wild

African dogs, to atone for all the

things they knew but never wrote

when Nixon was riding high. . .

Why does Nixon use the clumsy

Dex, instead of the Mojo? Why

does he drink martinis, instead of

Wild Turkey? Why does he wear

boxer shorts? Why is his life a grim monument to everything plastic, de-sexed and non-sexual? When I look

at Nixon's White House I have a

sense of absolute personal alienation. The President and I seem to disagree on almost everything --

except pro football, and Nixon's

addiction to that has caused me to view it with a freshly jaundiced

eye, or what the late John Foster

Dulles called "an agonizing

reappraisal." Anything Nixon likes must be suspect. Like cottage cheese and catsup. . .

"The Dex machine." Jesus! Learning that Nixon and his people use this --

instead of the smaller, quicker,

more versatile (and portable) Mojo

Wire -- was almost the final insult: coming on the heels of the Gross

sense of Injury I felt when I saw that my name was not included on the

infamous "Enemies of the White House" list.

I would almost have preferred a

vindictive tax audit to that kind of crippling exclusion. Christ! What

kind of waterheads compiled that

list? How can I show my face in the Jerome Bar, when word finally

reaches Aspen that I wasn't on it?

Fortunately, the list was drawn up

in the summer of '71 -- which

partially explains why my name was missing. It was not until the

autumn of '72 that I began referring to The President, in nationally

circulated print, as a Cheapjack

Punk and a Lust-Maddened

Werewolf, whose very existence

was (and remains) a bad cancer on

the American political tradition.

Every ad the publishers prepared

for my book on the 1972 Campaign

led off with a savage slur on all that Richard Nixon ever hoped to

represent or stand for. The man is a

walking embarrassment to the human race -- and especially, as

Bobby Kennedy once noted, to that

high, optimistic potential that fueled men like Jefferson and Madison,

and which Abe Lincoln once

described as "the last, best hope of man."

There is slim satisfaction in the

knowledge that my exclusion from

the (1971) list of "White House enemies" has more to do with

timing and Ron Ziegler's refusal to

read Rolling Stone than with the validity of all the things I've said and written about that evil bastard.

I was, after all, the only accredited journalist covering the 1972

presidential campaign to compare

Nixon with Adolf Hitler. . . I was

the only one to describe him as a

congenital thug, a fixer with the

personal principles of a used-car

salesman. And when these

distasteful excesses were privately censured by the docile White House

press corps, I compounded my flirtation with Bad Taste by

describing the White House

correspondents as a gang of lame

whores & sheep without the balls to even argue with Ron Ziegler -- who

kept them all dancing to Nixon's

bogus tune, until it became suddenly fashionable to see him for the hired liar he was and has been all along.

The nut of my complaint here -- in

addition to being left off The List --

is rooted in a powerful resentment

at not being recognized (not even by Ziegler) for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics --

or perhaps even "sportsmanship" --

and I take a certain pride in

knowing that I kicked Nixon before

he went down. Not afterwards --

though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.

And I feel no more guilt about it

than I would about setting a rat trap in my kitchen, if it ever seemed

necessary -- and certainly no more guilt than I know Nixon would feel

about hiring some thug like Gordon

Liddy to set me up for a felony

charge, if my name turned up on his List.

When they update the bugger, I plan to be on it. My attorney is even now preparing my tax records, with an

eye to confrontation. When the next list of "White House enemies"

comes out, I want to be on it. My

son will never forgive me -- ten

years from now -- if I fail to clear my name and get grouped, for the

record, with those whom Richard

Milhous Nixon considered

dangerous.

Dick Tuck feels the same way. He

was sitting in my kitchen, watching the TV set, when Sam Donaldson

began reading The List on ABC-TV.

"Holy shit!" Tuck muttered. "We're not on it."

"Don't worry," I said grimly. "We

will be."

"What can we do?" he asked.

"Kick out the jams," I said. "Don't worry, Dick. When the next list

comes out, we'll be there. I guarantee that."

-- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

"Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami". . . June '73

FROM : Raoul Duke, Sports Editor

TO: Main/Edit Control C.C.: Legal, Finance, Security, et

al.

SUBJECT: Imminent emergence of

Dr. Thomspon from the

Decompression Chamber in Miami,

and probably inability of the Sports Desk or anyone else to control his

movements at that time. . .

"especially in connection with his ill-conceived plan to move the

National Affairs Desk back to

Washington and bring Ralph

Steadman over from England to cause trouble at the Watergate

Hearings. . .

EDITOR'S NOTE:

The following intra-corporate memo arrived by Mojo wire from Colorado shortly before deadline time for this issue. It was greeted with mixed emotions by all those potentially afflicted. . . and because of the implications, we felt a certain obligation to lash up a quick, last-minute explanation. . . primarily for those who have never understood the real function of Raoul Duke (whose official title is "sports editor"), and also for the many readers whose attempts to reach Dr. Thompson by mail, phone & other means have not borne fruit.

The circumstances of Dr. Thompson's removal from the Public World have been a carefully guarded secret for the past several months.

During the last week of March -- after a strange encounter with Henry Kissinger while on

"vacation" in Acapulco -- Dr. Thompson almost drowned when his SCUBA tanks unexplainably ran out of air while diving for black coral off the Yucatan Coast of Mexico, at a depth of some 300 feet. His rapid emergence from these depths -- according to witnesses -- resulted in a near-fatal case of the Bends, and an emergency-chartered night-flight to the nearest decompression chamber, which happened to be in Miami.

Dr. Thompson was unconscious in the decompression chamber -- a round steel cell about 12 feet in diameter -- for almost three

weeks. When he finally regained his wits it was impossible to speak with him, except by means of a cracked loudspeaker tube & brief handwritten notes held up to the window. A television set was introduced into the chamber at his insistence and, by extremely complicated maneuvering, he was able to watch the Watergate hearings. . . but, due to the dangerous differences in pressurization, he was unable to communicate anything but garbled notes on his impressions to Duke, his long-time friend and associate who flew to Miami immediately, at his own expense.

When it became apparent that Dr. Thompson would be in the chamber indefinitely, Duke left him in Miami -- breathing easily in the chamber with a TV set & several notebooks -- and returned to Colorado, where he spent the past

three months handling the Doktor's personal & business affairs, in addition to organizing the skeletal framework for his 1974 Senate Race.

It was a familiar role for Duke, who has been Dr. Thompson's close friend & adviser since 1968 -- after 14 years of distinguished service in the CIA, the FBI and the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Police Intelligence Unit. His duties, since hiring on with Dr. Thompson, have been understandably varied. He has been described as "a weapons expert," a "ghost-writer," a "bodyguard," a

"wizard" and a "brutal fixer."

"Compared to the things I've done for Thompson," Duke says, "both Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were stone punks."

It is clear, from this memo, that Duke has spent

a good bit of his time in Colorado watching the Watergate hearings on TV -- but it is also clear that his tentative conclusions are very different from the ones Dr. Thompson reached, from his admittedly singular vantage point in that decompression chamber in downtown Miami.

The editors of ROLLING STONE would prefer not to comment on either of these viewpoints at this time, nor to comment on the

nightmare/blizzard of Expense Vouchers submitted, by Duke, in connexion with this dubious memo. In accordance with our long tradition, however, we are placing the Public Interest (publication of Duke's memo, in this case) on a plane far above and beyond our inevitably mundane haggling about the cost of breakfast and lunch.

What follows, then, is a jangled mix of Duke's official communications with this office, and Thompson's "Watergate Notes" (forwarded to us, by Duke) from his decompression chamber in Miami. The chronology is not entirely consistent. Duke's opening note, for instance, reflects his concern & alarm with Dr.

Thompson's decision to go directly from Miami -

- once the doctors have confirmed his ability to function in normal air-pressures -- to the harsh

& politically volatile atmosphere in Washington, D.C. Unlike Duke, he seems blindly obsessed with the day-to-day details of the Watergate hearings. . . and what is also clear from this memo is that Dr. Thompson has maintained regular contact (despite all medical and physical realities, according to the doctors in charge of his Chamber in Miami) with his familiar campaign trail allies, Tim Crouse and Ralph

Steadman. An invoice received only yesterday, from the manager of the Watergate Hotel, indicates that somebody has reserved a top-floor river-view suite, under the names of "Thompson, Steadman & Crouse". . . four adjoining rooms at $277 a day, with a long list of special equipment and an unlimited in-house expense authorization.

Needless to say, we will. . . but, why mention that now? The dumb buggers are already into it, and something is bound to emerge. We save the bargaining for later. . .

-- The Editors

Duke Memo No. 9, July 2,1973

Gentlemen:

This will confirm my previous warnings in re: the dangerously

unstable condition of Dr.

Thompson, whose most recent

communications leave no doubt in

my mind that he still considers

himself the National Affairs Editor of ROLLING STONE -- and in that capacity he has somehow made

arrangements to fly immediately

from Miami to Washington, upon

his release, to "cover" the remaining episodes of the

Watergate Hearings. I have no idea

what he really means by the word

"cover" -- but a phone talk late last night with his doctors gave me

serious pause. He will leave The

Chamber at the end of this week,

and he's talking in terms of

"saturation coverage." According to the doctors, there is no way to

communicate with him in the

Chamber except by notes held up to

the glass window -- but I suspect he has a phone in there, because he has obviously communicated at length

with Crouse, Steadman,

Mankiewicz and several others. A person resembling Crouse was seen

loitering around the Chamber last

Monday night around 3:30 AM. . .

and a call to Steadman's agent in

London confirmed that Ralph has

left his hideout in the south of

France and is booked on a Paris-

Washington flight next Thursday, the day before Thompson's release.

Mankiewicz denies everything, as

usual, but I talked to Sam Brown in Denver yesterday and he said the

word around Washington is that Frank is "acting very nervous" and also ordering Wild Turkey "by the case" from Chevy Chase Liquors.

This indicates, to me, that Frank

knows something. He has probably

been talking to Crouse, but Tim's

number in Boston won't answer, so

I can't confirm anything there.

Dr. Squane, the Bends Specialist in Miami, says Thompson is

"acceptably rational" -- whatever that means -- and that they have no

reason to keep him in The Chamber beyond Friday. My insistence that

he be returned at once to Colorado -

- under guard if necessary -- has not been taken seriously in Miami. The

bill for his stay in The Chamber --

as you know -- is already over

$3000, and they are not anxious to

keep him there any longer than

absolutely necessary. I got the

impression, during my talk with

Doc Squane last night, that

Thompson's stay in The Chamber

has been distinctly unpleasant for

the staff. "I'll never understand why he didn't just wither up and die,"

Squane told me. "Only a monster could survive that kind of trauma."

I sensed disappointment in his

voice, but I saw no point in arguing.

We've been through this before,

right? And it's always the same gig.

My only concern for right now -- as Thompson's de facto personal

guardian -- is to make sure he

doesn't get involved in serious

trouble, if he's serious about going

to Washington.

Which he is, I suspect -- and that means, if nothing else, that he'll be running up huge bills on the ROLLING

STONE tab. Whether or not he will write anything coherent is a moot

point, I think, because whatever he writes -- if anything -- will

necessarily be long out of date by

the time it appears in print. Not

even the Washington Post and the

New York Times, which arrive

daily (but three days late) out here

in Woody Creek, can compete with the spontaneous, brain-boggling

horrors belching constantly out of

the TV set.

Last Saturday afternoon, for

instance, I was sitting here very

peacefully -- minding the store, as it were -- when the tube suddenly

erupted with a genuinely obscene conversation between Mike

Wallace and John Ehrlichman.

I was sitting on the porch with Gene Johnston -- one of Dr. Thompson's

old friends and ex-general manager of the Aspen Wallposter -- when

Sandy called us inside to watch the show. Ehrlichman's face was so

awful, so obviously mired in a

lifetime of lies and lame treachery, that it was just about impossible to watch him in our twisted condition.

"Jesus Christ, look at him!"

Johnston kept muttering. "Two

months ago, that bastard was

running the country." He opened a beer and whacked it down on the

table. "I never want to hear the word 'paranoid' again, goddamnit!

Not after seeing that face!" He reeled towards the front door,

shaking his head and mumbling:

"God damn! I can't stand it!"

I watched the whole thing, myself,

but not without problems. It

reminded me of Last Exit to

Brooklyn -- the rape of a bent whore -- but I also knew Dr.

Thompson was watching the show

in Miami, and that it would fill him

with venom & craziness. Whatever small hope we might have had of

keeping him away from Washington

during this crisis was burned to a

cinder by the Wallace-Ehrlichman

show. It had the effect of reinforcing Thompson's conviction that Nixon

has cashed his check -- and that

possibility alone is enough to lure him to Washington for the deathwatch.

My own prognosis is less drastic, at this point in time [sic], but it's also

a fact that I've never been able to share The Doktor's obsessive

political visions -- for good or ill.

My job has to do with nuts & bolts, not terminal vengeance. And it also occurs to me that there is nothing in the Watergate revelations, thus far, to convince anyone but a stone

partisan fanatic that we will all be better off when it's finished. As I see it, we have already reaped the

real benefits of this spectacle -- the almost accidental castration of

dehumanized power-mongers like

Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Tom Charles Huston, that vicious young

jackal of a lawyer from

Indianapolis that Nixon put in

charge of the Special Domestic

Intelligence operation.

Dumping thugs like these out of

power for the next three years gives us all new room to breathe, for a

while -- which is just about all we can hope for, given the nature of the entrenched (Democratic)

opposition. Nixon himself is no

problem, now that all his ranking thugs have been neutralized. Just

imagine what those bastards might

have done, given three more years

on their own terms.

Even a casual reading of White

House memorandums in re:

Domestic Subversives & Other

White House Enemies (Bill Cosby,

James Reston, Paul Newman, Joe

Namath, et al.) is enough to queer

the faith of any American less

liberal than Mussolini. Here is a

paragraph from one of his (September 21, 1970) memos to

Harry "Bob" Haldeman:

"What we cannot do in a courtroom via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities of some of these

groups, IRS [the Internal Revenue

Service] could do by administrative action. Moreover, valuable

intelligence-type information could be turned up by IRS as a result of

their field audits. . ."

Dr. Thompson -- if he were with us

& certifiably de-pressurized at this point in time -- could offer some

first-hand testimony about how the

IRS and the Treasury Department

were used, back in 1970, to work

muscle on Ideological Enemies like

himself. . . and if Thompson's

account might be shrugged off as

"biased," we can always compel the testimony of Aspen police chief,

Dick Richey, whose office safe still holds an illegal sawed-off shotgun

belonging to a US Treasury

Department undercover agent from

Denver who fucked up in his efforts to convince Dr. Thompson that he

should find a quick reason for

dropping out of electoral politics.

That incident came up the other

afternoon at the Jerome Bar in

Aspen, when Steve Levine, a young

reporter from Denver, observed that

"Thompson was one of the original victims of the Watergate syndrome -

- but nobody recognized it then; they called it Paranoia."

Right. . . But that's another story,

and well leave it for the Doktor to tell. After three months in the

Decompression Chamber, he will

doubtless be cranked up to the fine peaks of frenzy. His "Watergate notes from the Chamber" show a powerful, brain-damaged kind of

zeal that will hopefully be brought under control in the near future. . .

and I'm enclosing some of them

here, as crude evidence to show

he's still functioning, despite the tragic handicap that comes with a

bad case of the Bends.

In closing, I remain. . . Yrs. in Fear

& Loathing:

Raoul Duke, Spts. Ed.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

What follows is the unfinished mid-section of Dr. Thompson's Notes from the Decompression Chamber. This section was written in his notebook on the day after convicted Watergate burglar James McCord's appearance before the Ervin committee on national TV. It was transcribed by a nurse who copied Dr.

Thompson's notes as he held them up, page by page, through the pressure-sealed window of his Chamber. It is not clear, from the text, whether he deliberately wrote this section with a "Woody

Creek, Colorado" dateline, or whether he planned to be there by the time it was printed.

In either case, he was wrong. His case of the Bends was severe, almost fatal. And even upon his release these is no real certainty of recovery.

He might have to re-enter the Decompression Chamber at any time, if he suffers a relapse.

None of which has any bearing on what follows

-- which was published exactly as he wrote it in the Chamber:

Jesus, where will it end? Yesterday I turned on my TV set -- hungry for some decent upbeat news -- and

here was an ex-Army Air Force

colonel with 19 years in the CIA under his belt admitting that he'd

willfully turned himself into a

common low-life burglar because

he thought the Attorney General and The President of the US had more

or less ordered him to. Ex-Colonel McCord felt he had a duty to roam

around the country burglarizing

offices and ransacking

private/personal files -- because the security of the USA was at stake.

Indeed, we were in serious trouble

last year -- and for five or six years before that, if you believe the muck those two vicious and irresponsible young punks at the Washington Post

have raked up.

"Impeachment" is an ugly word, they say. Newsweek columnist

Shana Alexander says "all but the vulture-hearted want to believe him ignorant." A week earlier, Ms.

Alexander wrote a "love letter" to Martha Mitchell: "You are in the best tradition of American

womanhood, defending your country, your flag. . . but most of all, defending your man."

Well. . . shucks. I can hardly choke back the tears. . . and where does

that leave Pat Nixon, who

apparently went on a world cruise

under a different name the day after McCord pulled the plug and wrote

that devastating letter to Judge

Sirica.

The public prints -- and especially Newsweek -- are full of senile

gibberish these days. Stewart Alsop wakes up in a cold sweat every

morning at the idea that Congress

might be forced to impeach "The President."

For an answer to that, we can look

to Hubert Humphrey -- from one of

the nine speeches he made during

his four-and-a-half hour campaign

for Democratic candidate George

McGovern in the waning weeks of

last November's presidential

showdown -- Humphrey was talking

to a crowd of hardhats in S.F., as I recall, and he said, "My friends, we're not talking about re-electing the President -- we're talking about re-electing Richard Nixon."

Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. Humphrey's voice just

belched out of my radio, demanding

that we get to the bottom of this Watergate mess, but meanwhile we have to make sure the Ruskies

understand that we all stand firmly behind The President.

Right. As far behind him as possible, if GOP standard-bearers

like B. Goldwater and Hugh Scott

are any measure of the party's

allegiance to the frightened

unprincipled little shyster they were calling -- when they nominated him

for re-canonization ten months ago

in Miami -- "one of the greatest Presidents in American History."

We will want those tapes for

posterity because we won't hear

their like again -- from Scott,

Goldwater, Duke Wayne, Martha,

Sammy Davis, Senator Percy or anyone else. Not even George

Meany will join a foursome with

Richard Nixon these days. The

hallowed halls of the White House

no longer echo with the happy

sound of bouncing golf balls. Or

footballs either, for that matter. . .

or any other kind.

The hard-nosed super-executives

Nixon chose to run this country for us turned on each other like rats in a slum-fire when the first signs of

trouble appeared. What we have seen in the past few weeks is the

incredible spectacle of a President of the United States either firing or being hastily abandoned by all of

his hired hands and cronies -- all

the people who put him where he is

today, in fact, and now that they're gone he seems helpless. Some of his closest "friends" and advisers are headed for prison, his once-helpless Democratic Congress is verging on

mutiny, the threat of impeachment

looms closer every day, and his

coveted "place in history" is even now being etched out in acid by

eager Harvard historians.

Six months ago Richard Nixon was

Zeus himself, calling firebombs and shitrains down on friend and foe

alike -- the most powerful man in

the world, for a while -- but all that is gone now and nothing he can do

will ever bring a hint of it back.

Richard Nixon's seventh crisis will be his last. He will go down with

Harding and Grant as one of

America's classically rotten presidents.

Which is exactly what he deserves -

- and if saying that makes me "one of the vulture-hearted," by Ms.

Alexander's lights. . . well. . . I think I can live with it. My

grandmother was one of those

stunned old ladies who cried when

the Duke of Windsor quit the Big

Throne to marry an American

commoner back in 1936. She didn't

know the Duke or anything about

him. But she knew -- along with millions of other old ladies and

closet monarchists -- that a Once

and Future King had a duty to keep

up the act. She wept for her lost

illusions -- for the same reason

Stewart Alsop and Shana Alexander

will weep tomorrow if President

Richard M. Nixon is impeached and

put on trial by the US Senate.

Our Congressmen will do

everything possible to avoid it,

because most of them have a deep

and visceral sympathy, however denied and reluctant, for the "tragic circumstances" that led Richard Nixon to what even Evans and

Novak call "the brink of ruin." The loyal opposition has not

distinguished itself in the course of this long-running nightmare. Even

Nixon's oldest enemies are lying

low, leaving the dirty work to hired lawyers and faceless investigators.

Senators Kennedy, McGovern and

Fulbright are strangely silent, while Humphrey babbles nonsense and

Muskie hoards his energy for beating back personal attacks by

Strom Thurmond. The only

politicians talking publicly about

the dire implications of the

Watergate iceberg are those who

can't avoid it -- the four carefully selected eunuch/Democrats on the

Senate Select Investigating

Committee and a handful of

panicked Republicans up for re-

election in 1974.

The slow-rising central horror of

"Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant

impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political

career has been a monument to the

same kind of cheap shots and

treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to

learn something from it.

Already -- with the worst news yet

to come -- there is an ominous tide of public opinion that says whatever Nixon and his small gang of

henchmen and hired gunsels might have done, it was probably no

worse than what other politicians

have been doing all along, and still are.

Anybody who really believes this is a fool -- but a lot of people seem to, and that evidence is hard to ignore.

What almost happened here -- and

what was only avoided because the

men who made Nixon President and

who were running the country in his name knew in their hearts that they

were all mean, hollow little bastards who couldn't dare turn

their backs on each other -- was a

takeover and total perversion of the American political process by a

gang of cold-blooded fixers so

incompetent that they couldn't even pull off a simple burglary. . . which tends to explain, among other things, why 25,000 young Americans died

for no reason in Vietnam while

Nixon and his brain trust were

trying to figure out how to admit the whole thing was a mistake from the

start.

At press time, the National Affairs Suite in Washington had been re-opened and prepared for "total coverage." Thompson arrived there July 7th, and we expect his reports soon.

Rolling Stone, #140, August 2, 1973

Fear and Loathing at the

Watergate:

Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His

Check

PART I

The Worm Turns in Swamptown. .

. Violent Talk at the National

Affairs Desk. . . A Narrow Escape for Tex Colson. . . Heavy Duty in The Bunker. . . No Room for

Gonzo? "Hell, They Already

Have This Story Nailed Up and

Bleeding from Every Extremity."

Reflecting on the meaning of the last presidential election, I have decided at this point in time that Mr. Nixon's landslide victory and

my overwhelming defeat will probably prove to be of greater value to the nation than would the victory my supporters and I

worked so hard to achieve. I think history may demonstrate that it was not only important that Mr.

Nixon win and that I lose, but that the margin should be of stunning proportions. . . The shattering Nixon landslide, and the even more shattering exposure of the

corruption that surrounded him, have done more than I could have

done in victory to awaken the nation. . . This is not a comfortable conclusion for a self-confident --

some would say self-righteous --

politician to reach. . .

-- George McGovern in the

Washington Post: August 12, 1973

Indeed. But we want to keep in

mind that "comfortable" is a very relative word around Washington

these days -- with the vicious

tentacles of "Watergate" ready to wrap themselves around almost

anybody, at any moment -- and when McGovern composed those

eminently reasonable words in the

study of his stylish home on the

woodsy edge of Washington, he had

no idea how close he'd just come to being made extremely

"uncomfortable."

I have just finished making out a

report addressed to somebody

named Charles R. Roach, a claims

examiner at the Mid-Atlantic

Regional Headquarters of Avis

Rent-a-Car in Arlington, Virginia. It has to do with a minor accident that occurred on Connecticut Avenue, in

downtown Washington, shortly after

George and his wife had bade

farewell to the last staggering guests at the party he'd given on a hot

summer night in July

commemorating the first

anniversary of his seizure of the

presidential nomination in Miami.

The atmosphere of the party itself

had been amazingly loose and

pleasant. Two hundred people had been invited -- twice that many

showed up -- to celebrate what

history will record, with at least a few asterisks, as one of the most

disastrous presidential campaigns

in American history. Midway in the

evening I was standing on the patio, talking to Carl Wagner and Holly

Mankiewicz, when the phone began

ringing and whoever answered it

came back with the news that

President Nixon had just been

admitted to the nearby Bethesda

Naval Hospital with what was officially announced as "viral pneumonia."

Nobody believed it, of course.

High-powered journalists like Jack

Germond and Jules Witcover

immediately seized the phones to

find out what was really wrong with Nixon. . . but the rest of us, no longer locked into deadlines or the fast-rising terrors of some

tomorrow's election day, merely

shrugged at the news and kept on

drinking. There was nothing unusual, we felt, about Nixon

caving in to some real or even

psychosomatic illness. And if the

truth was worse than the news. . .

well. . . there would be nothing

unusual about that either.

One of the smallest and noisiest

contingents among the 200 invited

guests was the handful of big-time

journalists who'd spent most of last autumn dogging McGovern's every

lame footstep along the campaign

trail, while two third-string police reporters from the Washington Post

were quietly putting together the

biggest political story of 1972 or

any other year -- a story that had

already exploded, by the time of

McGovern's "anniversary" party, into a scandal that has even now

burned a big hole for itself in every American history textbook written

from 1973 till infinity.

One of the most extraordinary

aspects of the Watergate story has

been the way the press has handled it: What began in the summer of

1972 as one of the great media-

bungles of the century has

developed, by now, into what is

probably the most thoroughly and

most professionally covered story

in the history of American

journalism.

When I boomed into Washington

last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs Desk once

again I expected -- or in retrospect I

think I expected -- to find the high-rolling news-meisters of the capital press corps jabbering blindly

among themselves, once again, in

some stylish sector of reality far-

removed from the Main Nerve of

"the story". . . like climbing aboard Ed Muskie's Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding

every media star in the nation

sipping Bloody Marys and

convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with "the candidate". . . or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux

Falls Holiday Inn on election day with a half-dozen of the heaviest

press wizards and coming away

convinced that McGovern couldn't

possibly lose by more than ten

points.

My experience on the campaign

trail in 1972 had not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-a-vis the

wisdom of the national press corps.

. . so I was seriously jolted, when I arrived in Washington, to find that the bastards had this Watergate

story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity -- from "Watergate"

and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon's lies about

the financing for his San Clemente

beach-mansion, and even the long-

dormant "Agnew Scandal."

There was not a hell of a lot of

room for a Gonzo journalist to

operate in that high-tuned

atmosphere. For the first time in

memory, the Washington press

corps was working very close to the

peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington

Post has a half-dozen of the best

reporters in America working every

tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next

connection. The New York Times,

badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hotrods from its bureaus

all over the country to overcome the Post's early lead. Both Time's and

Newsweek's Washington bureaus

began scrambling feverishly to find

new angles, new connections, new leaks and leads in this story that

was unraveling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it. . . And

especially not the three (or four) TV

networks, whose whole machinery

was geared to visual/action stories, rather than skillfully planted tips from faceless lawyers who called

on private phones and then refused

to say anything at all in front of the cameras.

The only standard-brand visual

"action" in the Watergate story had happened at the very beginning --

when the burglars were caught in

the act by a squad of plain-clothes cops with drawn guns -- and that

happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand,

much less a TV camera.

The network news moguls are not

hungry for stories involving weeks

of dreary investigation and

minimum camera possibilities --

particularly at a time when almost

every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one

aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling

feverishly when the Watergate

break-in occurred on June 17th. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton

fiasco kept the Watergate story

backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their

"first teams" out on the campaign trail until long after the initial

indictments -- Liddy, Hunt,

McCord, et al. -- on September

15th. And by election day in November, the Watergate story

seemed like old news. It was rarely if ever mentioned among the press

people following the campaign. A

burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters seemed relatively

minor, compared to the action in

Miami. It was a "local"

(Washington) story, and the "local staff" was handling it. . . but I had no local staff, so I made the obvious choice.

Except on two occasions, and the first of these still haunts me. On the night of June 17th I spent most of the evening in the Watergate Hotel:

From about eight o'clock until ten I was swimming laps in the indoor

pool, and from 10:30 until a bit

after 1:00 AM I was drinking

tequila in the Watergate bar with

Tom Quinn, a sports columnist for

the now-defunct Washington Daily

News.

Meanwhile, upstairs in room 214,

Hunt and Liddy were already monitoring the break-in, by walkie-talkie, with ex-FBI agent Alfred

Baldwin in his well-equipped spy-

nest across Virginia Avenue in

room 419 of the Howard Johnson

Motor Lodge. Jim McCord had

already taped the locks on two

doors just underneath the bar in the Watergate garage, and it was

probably just about the time that

Quinn and I called for our last

round of tequila that McCord and

his team of Cubans moved into

action -- and got busted less than an hour later.

All this was happening less than

100 yards from where we were

sitting in the bar, sucking limes and salt with our Sauza Gold and

muttering darkly about the fate of

Duane Thomas and the pigs who run

the National Football League.

Neither Bob Woodward nor Carl

Bernstein from the Post were

invited to McGovern's party that

night -- which was fitting, because

the guest list was limited to those who had lived through the day-today nightmare of the '72 campaign. .

. People like Frank Mankiewicz,

Miles Rubin, Rick Sterns, Gary

Hart and even Newsweek

correspondent Dick Stout, whose

final dispatch on the doomed

McGovern campaign very nearly

got him thrown out of the Dakota Queen II at 30,000 feet over Lincoln, Nebraska, on the day

before the election.

This was the crowd that had gathered that night in July to

celebrate his last victory before the Great Disaster -- the slide that

began with Eagleton and ended,

incredibly, with "Watergate." The events of the past six months had so badly jangled the nerves of the

invited guests -- the staffers and

journalists who had been with

McGovern from New Hampshire

all the way to Sioux Falls on

election day -- that nobody really

wanted to go to the party, for fear

that it might be a funeral and a serious bummer.

By the end of the evening, when the two dozen bitter-enders had forced

McGovern to break out his own

private stock -- ignoring the

departure of the caterers and the

dousing of the patio lights -- the

bulk of the conversation was

focused on which one or ones of the Secret Service men assigned to

protect McGovern had been

reporting daily to Jeb Magruder at

CREEP, and which one of the ten or 12 journalists with access to the

innards of George's strategy had

been on CREEP'S payroll at $1500

a month. This journalist -- still

publicly unknown and undenounced

-- was referred to in White House

memos as "Chapman's Friend," a mysterious designation that puzzled the whole Washington press corps

until one of the President's

beleaguered ex-aides explained

privately that "Chapman" is a name Nixon used, from time to time, in

the good old days when he was able to travel around obscure Holiday

Inns under phony names. . .

R. Chapman, Pepsi-Cola salesman,

New York City. . . with a handful of friends carrying walkie-talkies and wearing white leather shoulder-holsters. . . But what the hell? Just send a case of Pepsi up to the suite, my man, and don't ask questions;

your reward will come later -- call the White House and ask for

Howard Hunt or Jim McCord;

they'll take care of you.

Right. Or maybe Tex Colson, who

is slowly and surely emerging as the guiding light behind Nixon's whole

arsenal of illegal, immoral and

unethical "black advance" or "dirty tricks" department. It was Colson who once remarked that he would

"walk over his grandmother for Richard Nixon". . . and it was Colson who hired head "plumber"

Egil "Bud" Krogh, who in 1969 told Daniel X. Friedman, chairman of

the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago: "Anyone who opposes us, we'll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn't

support us, we'll destroy."

Colson, the only one of Nixon's top command to so far evade

Watergate's legal noose, is the man who once told White House cop

Jack Caulfield to put a firebomb in the offices of the staid/liberal

Brookings Institution, in order to

either steal or destroy some

documents he considered incriminating. Colson now says he

was "only joking" about the firebomb plan, but Caulfield took it so seriously that he went to the

White House counsel John Dean

and said he refused to work with

Colson any longer, because he was

"crazy."

Crazy? Tex Colson?

Never in Hell. "He's the meanest man in American politics," says Nixon's speechwriter Pat Buchanan,

smiling lazily over the edge of a beer can beside the pool outside his Watergate apartment. Buchanan is

one of the few people in the Nixon

administration with a sense of

humor. He is so far to the right that he dismisses Tex Colson as a

"Massachusetts liberal." But for some reason, Buchanan is also one

of the few people -- perhaps the

only one -- on Nixon's staff, who

has friends at the other end of the political spectrum. At one point

during the campaign I mentioned

Buchanan at McGovern Headquarters, for some reason, and

Rick Sterns, perhaps the most

hardline left-bent ideologue on

McGovern's staff, sort of chuckled

and said, "Oh yeah, we're pretty good friends. Pat's the only one of those bastards over there with any

principles." When I mentioned this to another McGovern staffer, he

snapped: "Yeah, maybe so. . . like Josef Goebbels had principles."

My own relationship with Buchanan

goes back to the New Hampshire primary in 1968 when Nixon was

still on the dim fringes of his

political comeback. We spent about

eight hours one night in a Boston

hotel room, finishing off a half

gallon of Old Crow and arguing

savagely about politics: As I recall, I kept asking him why a person who

seemed to have good sense would

be hanging about with Nixon. It was clear even then that Buchanan

considered me stone crazy, and my

dismissal of Nixon as a hopeless

bum with no chance of winning anything seemed to amuse him more

than anything else.

About eight months later, after one of the strangest and most brutal

years in American history, Richard

Nixon was President and Pat

Buchanan was one of his top two

speechwriters along with Ray

Price, the house moderate. I didn't see Pat again until the McGovern

Campaign in '72 when Ron Ziegler

refused to have me on the Nixon

Press Plane and Buchanan intervened to get me past the White House Guard and into what turned

out to be a dull and useless seat on the plane with the rest of the White House press corps. It was also

Buchanan who interviewed Garry

Wills, introducing him into the

Nixon Campaign of 1968 -- an act

of principle that resulted in an

extremely unfriendly book called

Nixon Agonistes.

So it seemed entirely logical, I

thought -- going back to Washington in the midst of this stinking

Watergate summer -- to call

Buchanan and see if he felt like

having 13 or 14 drinks on some

afternoon when he wasn't at the

White House working feverishly in

what he calls "the bunker." Price and Buchanan write almost

everything Nixon says and they are

busier than usual these days,

primarily figuring out what not to say. I spent most of one Saturday

afternoon with Pat lounging around

a tin umbrella table beside the Watergate pool and talking lazily

about politics in general. When I

called him at the White House the

day before, the first thing he said was "Yeah, I just finished your book."

"Oh Jesus," I replied, thinking this naturally meant the end of any

relationship we'd ever have. But he laughed. "Yeah, it's one of the funniest things I've ever read."

One of the first things I asked him

that afternoon was something that had been simmering in my head for

at least a year or so and that was

how he could feel comfortable with

strange friends like me and Rick

Sterns, and particularly how he

could possibly feel comfortable

sitting out in the open -- in plain sight of the whole Watergate crowd

-- with a known monster whose

affection for Richard Nixon was a

matter of fairly brutal common

knowledge -- or how he felt

comfortable playing poker once or

twice a week sometimes with Rick Sterns, whose political views are

almost as diametrically opposed to

Buchanan's as mine are. He

shrugged it off with a grin, opening another beer. "Oh, well, we

ideologues seem to get along better than the others. I don't agree with Rick on anything at all that I can

think of, but I like him and I respect his honesty."

A strange notion, the far left and far right finding some kind of odd

common ground beside the Watergate pool and particularly

when one of them is a top Nixon

speechwriter, spending most of his

time trying to keep the Boss from

sinking like a stone in foul water, yet now and then laughingly

referring to the White House as The Bunker.

After the sixth or seventh beer, I

told him about our abortive plot

several nights earlier to seize

Colson out of his house and drag

him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile

Cutlass. He laughed and said

something to the effect that

"Colson's so tough, he might like it."

And then, talking further about

Colson, he said, "But you know he's not really a Conservative."

And that's what seems to separate

the two GOP camps, like it

separates Barry Goldwater from

Richard Nixon. Very much like the

difference between the Humphrey

Democrats and the McGovern Democrats. The ideological wing

versus the pragmatists, and by

Buchanan's standards it's doubtful

that he even considers Richard

Nixon a Conservative.

My strange and violent reference to Colson seemed to amuse him more

than anything else. "I want to be very clear on one thing," I assured him. "If you're thinking about having me busted for conspiracy on this,

remember that I've already

deliberately dragged you into it."

He laughed again and then

mentioned something about the "one overt act" necessary for a

conspiracy charge, and I quickly

said that I had no idea where Tex

Colson even lived and didn't really want to know, so that even if we'd

wanted to drag the vicious bastard

down Pennsylvania Avenue at 60

miles per hour behind a gold

Oldsmobile Cutlass we had no idea,

that night, where to find him, and

about halfway into the plot we

crashed into a black and gold Cadillac on Connecticut Avenue

and drew a huge mob of angry

blacks who ended all thought of

taking vengeance on Colson. It was

all I could do to get out of that scene without getting beaten like a gong

for the small crease our rented

Cutlass had put in the fender of the Cadillac.

Which brings us back to that

accident report I just wrote and sent off to Mr. Roach at Avis Mid-

Atlantic Headquarters in Arlington.

The accident occurred about 3:30 in the morning when either Warren

Beatty or Pat Caddell opened the

door of a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass

I'd rented at Dulles airport earlier that day, and banged the door

against the fender of a massive

black & gold Cadillac roadster

parked in front of a late-night

restaurant on Connecticut Avenue

called Anna Maria's. It seemed like a small thing at the time, but in

retrospect it might have spared us

all -- including McGovern -- an extremely nasty episode.

Because somewhere in the late

hours of that evening, when the

drink had taken hold and people

were jabbering loosely about

anything that came into their heads, somebody mentioned that "the worst and most vicious" of Nixon's

backstairs White House hit men --

Charles "Tex" Colson -- was probably the only one of the dozen

or more Nixon/CRP functionaries

thus far sucked into "the Watergate scandal" who was not likely to do any time, or even be indicted.

It was a long, free-falling

conversation, with people

wandering in and out, over a time-

span of an hour or so -- journalists, pols, spectators -- and the focus of it, as I recall, was a question that I was trying to get some bets on:

How many of the primary Watergate

figures would actually serve time in prison?

The reactions ranged from my own guess that only Magruder and Dean

would live long enough to serve

time in prison, to Mankiewicz's flat assertion that "everybody except Colson" would be indicted,

convicted, sentenced and actually

hauled off to prison.

(Everybody involved in this

conversation will no doubt deny any connection with it -- or even

hearing about it, for that matter --

but what the hell? It did, in fact,

take place over the course of some two or three days, in several

locations, but the seed of

speculation took root in the final

early-morning hours of McGovern's

party. . . although I don't remember that George himself was involved

or even within earshot at any time.

He has finally come around to the

point where his friends don't mind

calling him "George" in the friendly privacy of his own home, but that is not quite the same thing as getting him involved in a felony-

conspiracy/attempted murder charge that some wild-eyed, Nixon-appointed geek in the Justice

Department might try to crank up on the basis of a series of boozy

conversations among journalists,

politicians and other half-drunk

cynics. Anybody who has spent any

time around late-night motel bars

with the press corps on a

presidential campaign knows better

than to take their talk seriously. . .

but after reading reviews of my

book on the '72 campaign, it occurs

to me that some people will believe almost anything that fits their preconceived notions.)

And so much for all that.

August 2nd Patio Bar beside the Washington Hilton Swimming Pool Steadman and his wife had just

arrived from England. Sandy had

flown in the day before from

Colorado and I had come up from

Miami after a long vacation in the

decompression chamber. It was a

Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, I think, and the Watergate Hearings

were in progress but we'd decided

to take the first day off and get

ourselves under control. One of the first things I had to do was make out a long overdue accident report for

that night, two weeks earlier, when the door of my rented car smacked

into the Cadillac at four in the

morning. The Avis people were

threatening to cut off my coverage

for "non-cooperation" so I'd brought the insanely complicated accident

report down to the patio table by the pool, thinking to fill it out with the help of eight or nine Carlsbergs.

Steadman was already sketching

distractedly, swilling beers at a

feverish rate and muttering darkly to himself about the terrible conditions in the hotel and how earlier that

morning while passing thru the

coffee shop, a huge ceiling lamp

had fallen from the ceiling and

nearly killed him.

It was "teddible teddible," he said,

"the damn thing came so close that it knocked my briefcase full of

drawings out of my hand. Six inches closer and it would have caved in

my head!"

I nodded sympathetically, thinking it was just another one of those ugly

twists of luck that always seem to

affect Ralph in this country, and I kept on grappling with the accident report.

Steadman was still babbling. "God, it's hot. . . Ah, this teddible thirst. . .

what's that you've got there?"

"The goddamn accident report. I've got to make it out."

"Accident report?"

"Yeah, I had a small wreck the last time I was here about two weeks

ago. . ."

"Alright, alright. . . Yes, two more Carlsbergs."

". . . And the car blew up the next

night and I had to abandon it in Rock Creek Park at four in the

morning. I think they're still billing me for it."

"Who?"

"The Avis people."

"My God, that's teddible."

"I only had it two nights. The first night I had this wreck, and the next night it blew up."

"What were you doing in this wretched city at four in the

morning?"

"Well, actually we were thinking about going out to Tex Colson's

house and jerking him out of bed,

tying him behind the car with a big rope and dragging him down

Pennsylvania Avenue. . . then

cutting him loose in front of the

White House Guard Gate."

"You're kidding. . . You don't really mean that. You wouldn't do a thing

like that, would you?"

"Of course not. That would be a conspiracy to commit either murder

or aggravated assault, plus

kidnapping. . . and you know me,

Ralph; that's not my style at all."

"That's what I mean. You were

drunk perhaps, eh?"

"Ah, we were drunk yes. We'd been to a party at McGovern's."

"McGovern's? Drinking? Who was

with you?"

"Drinking heavily, yes. It was Warren Beatty and Pat Caddell,

McGovern's poll wizard, and

myself and for some reason it

occurred to me that the thing to do that hour of the morning was to go

out and get Colson."

"My God, that's crazy! You must have been stoned and drunk --

especially by four in the morning."

"Well, we left McGovern's at about

2:30 and we were supposed to meet Crouse at this restaurant downtown.

. . McGovern lives somewhere in

the Northwest part of town and it

had taken me two hours to find the

damn house and I figured it would

take me another two hours to get out again unless I could follow

somebody. Crouse was about a

block ahead of me when we left. I

could see his taillights but there

was another car between me and

Crouse and I was afraid I'd lose him in that maze of narrow little streets,

almost like country lanes.

" 'We can't let Crouse get away,' I said. So I slammed it into passing

gear and passed the car right in

front of me in order to get behind

Crouse, and all of a sudden here

was a car coming the other

direction on this street about 15 feet wide -- just barely enough room for two cars to pass and certainly not

enough room for three cars to pass, one of them going about 70 miles an hour with a drunk at the wheel.

"I thought, hmmmm, well. . . I can either slow down or stomp on it and squeeze in there, so I stomped on it and forced the oncoming car up

over the curb and onto the grass in order to avoid me as I came hurtling back into my own lane, and just as I flashed past him I happened to look over and saw that it was a police

car. Well, I thought, this is not the time to stop and apologize; I could see him in my rear view mirror,

stopping and beginning to turn

around. . . So instead of following

Crouse, I took the first left I could, turned the lights off and drove like a bastard -- assuming the cop would

probably chase Crouse and run him

down and arrest him, but as it

happened he didn't get either of us."

"What a rotten thing to do."

"Well, it was him or me, Ralph. . .

as a matter of fact I worried about it when we didn't see Tim at the

restaurant later on. But we were

late because we did some high-

speed driving exercises in the

Southeast area of Washington --

flashing along those big empty

streets going into corners at 80

miles an hour and doing 180s. . . it was a sort of thunder road driving

trip, screwing it on with that big

Cutlass."

"Enormous car?"

"A real monster, extremely

overpowered. . ."

"How big is it? The size of a bus?"

"No, normal size for a big car, but extremely powerful -- much more,

say, than a Mustang or something

like that. We did about an hour's

worth of crazed driving on these

deserted streets, and it was during this time that I mentioned that we

should probably go out and have a

word with Mr. Colson -- because

during a conversation earlier in the evening, the consensus among the

reporters at McGovern's party was

that Colson was probably the only

one of Nixon's first-rank henchmen

who would probably not even be indicted."

"Why's that?"

"He had managed to keep himself clean, somehow -- up to that point

anyway. Now, he's been dragged

into the ITT hassle again, so it looks like he might go down with all the

others.

"But at that point, we thought, well, Colson really is the most evil of

those bastards, and if he gets off

there is really no justice in the world. So we thought we'd go out to his house -- luckily none of us knew where he lived -- and beat on his

door, mumbling something like:

'God's mercy on me! My wife's

been raped! My foot's been cut off!'

Anything to lure him downstairs. . .

and the minute he opened the door,

seize him and drag him out to the

car and tie him by the ankles and

drag him down to the White House."

"He could identify you. . ."

"Well, he wouldn't have time to know exactly who it was -- but we

thought about it for a while, still driving around, and figured a

beastly thing like that might be the only thing that could get Nixon off the hook, because he could go on

television the next afternoon,

demanding to make a nationwide

emergency statement, saying: 'Look

what these thugs have done to poor

Mr. Colson! This is exactly what

we were talking about! This is why

we had to be so violent in our ways,

because these thugs will stop at nothing! They dragged Mr. Colson

the length of Pennsylvania Avenue

at four in the morning, then cut him loose like a piece of meat!' He

would call for more savage and

stringent security measures against

'the kind of animals who would do a thing like this.' So we put the plot out of our heads."

"Well, it would have been a bit risky. . . wouldn't have done the

Democratic party any good at all,

would it?"

"Well, it might have created a bit of an image problem -- and it would

have given Nixon the one out he

desperately needs now, a way to

justify the whole Watergate trip by raving about 'this brutal act.'. . .

That's an old Hell's Angels gig,

dragging people down the street.

Hell's Angels. Pachucos, drunken

cowboys.

"But I thought more about it later, when I finally got back to the hotel

after that stinking accident I'm still trying to explain. . . and it occurred to me that those bastards are really mean enough to do that to Colson

themselves -- if they only had the

wits to think about it. They could go out and drag him down the street in a car with old McGovern stickers

on the bumpers or put on false

beards and wave a wine bottle out

the window as they passed the

White House and cut him loose.

He'd roll to a stop in front of the Guard House and the Guard would

clearly see the McGovern sticker on the car screeching off around the

corner and that's all Nixon would

need. If we gave them the idea,

they'd probably go out and get

Colson tonight."

"He'd be babbling, I'd think --"

"He'd be hysterical, in very bad shape. And of course he'd claim that McGovern thugs had done it to him

-- if he were still able to talk. I really believe Nixon would do a

thing like that if he thought it would

get him out of the hole. . . So I thought about it a little more, and it occurred to me what we should do

was have these masks made up --

you know those rubber masks that

fit over the whole head."

"Ah yes, very convincing. . ."

"Yeah, one of them would have to be the face of Haldeman, one the

face of Ehrlichman and one the face of Tony Ulasewicz."

"Yes, the meanest men on the Nixon

Staff."

"Well, Colson's the meanest man in politics, according to Pat Buchanan.

Ulasewicz is the hit man, a hired

thug. I thought if we put these masks on and wore big overcoats or

something to disguise ourselves and went out to his house and kind of

shouted: 'Tex, Tex! It's me, Tony.

Come on down. We've got a big

problem.' And the minute he opens

the door, these people with the

Haldeman and Ehrlichman masks

would jump out from either side and seize him by each arm -- so that he sees who has him, but only for two

or three seconds, before the person wearing the Ulasewicz mask slaps a

huge burlap sack over his head,

knots it around his knees and then

the three of them carry him out to

the car and lash him to the rear

bumper and drag him down the

street -- and just as we passed the White House Guard Station, slash

the rope so that Colson would come

to a tumbling bloody stop right in

front of the guard. . . and after two or three days in the Emergency

Ward, when he was finally able to

talk, after coming out of shock, he would swear that the people who

got him were Haldeman,

Ehrlichman and Ulasewicz -- and he

would know they were mean enough to do it, because that's the way he thinks. He's mean enough to do it

himself. You'd have to pick a night when they were all in Washington,

and Colson would swear that they

did it to him, no matter what they

said. He would know it, because he had seen them."

'"Brilliant, brilliant. Yes, he'd be absolutely convinced -- having seen the men and the faces."

"Right. But of course you couldn't talk -- just seize him and go. What would you think if you looked out

and saw three people you

recognized, and suddenly they

jerked you up and tied you behind a car and dragged you 40 blocks?

Hell, you saw them. You'd testify,

swear under oath. . . which would cause Nixon probably to go

completely crazy. He wouldn't

know what to believe! How could he be sure that Haldeman,

Ehrlichman and Ulasewicz hadn't

done it? Nobody would know, not

even by using lie detectors. . . But that's a pretty heavy act to get into --

dragging people around the street

behind rented Avis cars, and we

never quite got back to it, anyway, but if we hadn't had that accident

we might have given it a little more

thought although I still have no idea where Colson lives and I still don't want to know. But you have to

admit it was a nice idea."

"That's a lovely thing, yes."

"You know Colson had that sign on the wall in his office saying ONCE

YOU HAVE THEM BY THE

BALLS, THEIR HEARTS AND

MINDS WILL FOLLOW."

"Right."

"He's an ex-Marine captain. So it would be a definite dose of his own medicine."

"Do you really think he deserves that kind of treatment?"

"Well, he was going to set off a firebomb in the Brookings

Institution, just to recover some

papers. . . Colson is not one of your friendlier, happier type of persons.

He's an evil bastard, and dragging

him down the street would certainly strike a note of terror in that crowd;

they could use some humility."

"Poetic justice, no?"

"Well, it's a little rough. . . it might not be necessary to drag him 40

blocks. Maybe just four. You could

put him in the trunk for the first 36

blocks, then haul him out and drag

him the last four; that would

certainly scare the piss out of him, bumping along the street, feeling all his skin being ripped off. . ."

"He'd be a bloody mess. They might

think he was just some drunk and let him lie there all night."

"Don't worry about that. They have a guard station in front of the White House that's open 24 hours a day.

The guards would recognize

Colson. . . and by that time of

course his wife would have called

the cops and reported that a bunch

of thugs had kidnapped him."

"Wouldn't it be a little kinder if you drove about four more blocks and

stopped at a phone box to ring the

hospital and say, 'Would you mind going around to the front of the

White House? There's a naked man

lying outside in the street, bleeding to death. . .' "

". . . and we think it's Mr. Colson."

"It would be quite a story for the newspapers, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, I think it's safe to say we'd see some headlines on that one."

PART II

Flashbacks & Time Warps. . .

Scrambled Notes and Rude

Comments from the High

Country. . . Dean vs. Haldeman in the Hearing Room. . . A Question of Perjury. . . Ehrlichman

Sandbags an Old Buddy. . . Are

the Sharks Deserting the

Suckfish?

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the following section was lashed together at the last moment from a six-pound bundle of documents, notebooks, memos, recordings and secretly

taped phone conversations with Dr. Thompson during a month of erratic behavior in Washington, New York, Colorado and Miami.

His "long-range-plan," he says, is to "refine"

these nerve-wracking methods, somehow, and eventually "create an entirely new form of journalism." In the meantime, we have suspended his monthly retainer and canceled his credit card. During one four-day period in Washington he destroyed two cars, cracked a wall in the Washington Hilton, purchased two French Horns at $1100 each and ran through a plate-glass door in a Turkish restaurant.

Compounding the problem was the presence in Washington, for the first time, of our artist Ralph Steadman -- an extremely heavy drinker with little or no regard for either protocol or normal social amenities. On Steadman's first visit to the

Watergate Hearing Room he was ejected by the Capitol Police after spilling beer on a TV

monitor and knocking Sam Ervin off his feet while attempting to seize a microphone to make a statement about "the rottenness of American politics." It was only the timely intervention of New York Post correspondent John Lang that kept Steadman from being permanently barred from the Hearing Room.

In any case, the bulk of what follows appears exactly as Dr. Thompson wrote it in his notebooks. Given the realities of our constant deadline pressure, there was no other way to get this section into print.

The Notebooks

"Jesus, this Watergate thing is unbelievable. It's terrible, like finding out your wife is running around but you don't want to hear about it."

-- Remark of a fat man from

Nashville sharing a taxi with Ralph Steadman.

Tuesday morning 6/26/73 8:13 AM

in the Rockies. . .

Bright sun on the grass outside my

windows behind this junk TV set

and long white snowflelds, still unmelted, on the peaks across the

valley. Every two or three minutes

the doleful screech of a half-wild

peacock rattles the windows. The

bastard is strutting around on the

roof, shattering the morning calm

with his senseless cries.

His noise is a bad burden on

Sandy's nerves. "God damn it!" she mutters. "We have to get him a hen!"

"Fuck him; we got him a hen -- and

she ran off and got herself killed by coyotes. What the crazy bastard

needs now is a bullet through the

vocal cords. He's beginning to

sound like Herman Talmadge."

"Talmadge?"

"Watch what's happening,

goddamnit! Here's another true Son

of the South. First it was Thompson.

. . now Talmadge. . . and then we'll get that half-wit pimp from

Florida."

"Gurney?"

I nodded, staring fixedly at the big blueish eye of the permanently

malfunctioned "color TV" set that I hauled back from Washington last

summer, when I finally escaped

from the place. . . But now I was

using it almost feverishly, day after day, to watch what was happening in Washington.

The Watergate Hearings -- my daily

fix, on TV. Thousands of people

from all over the country are

writing the networks to demand that this goddamn tedious nightmare be

jerked off the air so they can get

back to their favorite soap operas: As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, The Price Is Right and What Next for Weird Betty? They are bored by the spectacle of the

Watergate hearings. The plot is

confusing, they say; the characters are dull, and the dialogue is

repulsive.

The President of the United States

would never act that way -- at least not during baseball season. Like

Nixon's new White House chief of

staff, Melvin Laird, said shortly

before his appointment: "If the President turns out to be guilty, I don't want to hear about it."

This is the other end of the attitude-spectrum from the comment I heard,

last week, from a man in Denver:

"I've been waiting a long time for this," he said. "Maybe not as long as Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan

Douglas. . . and I never really thought it would happen, to tell you the truth." He flashed me a

humorless smile and turned back to

his TV set. "But it is, by god! And it's almost too good to be true."

My problem -- journalistically, at

least -- has its roots in the fact that I agree with just about everything that laughing, vengeful bastard said that day. We didn't talk much. There

was no need for it. Everything

Richard Milhous Nixon ever stood

for was going up in smoke right in front of our eyes. And anybody who

could understand and appreciate

that, I felt, didn't need many words to communicate. At least not with

me.

(The question is: what did he stand for, and what next for that?

Agnew? Reagan? Rockefeller?

Even Percy? Nixon was finally

"successful" for the same reason he was finally brought low. He kept

pushing, pushing, pushing -- and

inevitably he pushed too far.) Noon -- Tuesday, June 26th The TV set is out on the porch now

-- a move that involved much

cursing and staggering.

Weicker has the mike -- mono a

mono on Dean -- and after 13

minutes of apparently aimless

blathering he comes off no better

than Talmadge. Weicker seemed

oddly cautious -- a trifle obtuse,

perhaps.

What are the connections? Weicker is a personal friend of Pat Gray's.

He is also the only member of the

Select Committee with after-hours

personal access to John Dean.

"-- Live from Senate Caucus Room

--"

-- flash on CBS screen

Live? Rehearsed? In any case, Dean

is livelier than most -- not only

because of what he has to say, but

because he -- unlike the other

witnesses -- refused to say it first in executive session to Committee

staffers before going on TV.

Strange -- Dean's obvious

credibility comes not from his long-awaited impact (or lack of it) on the American public, but from his

obvious ability to deal with the

seven Senatorial Inquisitors. They

seem awed.

Dean got his edge, early on, with a mocking lash at the integrity of

Minority Counsel Fred Thompson --

and the others fell meekly in line.

Dean radiates a certain very narrow kind of authority -- nothing

personal, but the kind of nasal blank-hearted authority you feel in the presence of the taxman or a very polite FBI agent.

Only Baker remains. His credibility took a bad beating yesterday. Dean

ran straight at him, startling the TV

audience with constant references to Baker's personal dealings with "the White House," prior to the hearings.

There was no need to mention that Baker is the son-in-law of that late and only half-lamented "Solon"

from the Great State of Illinois, Sen.

Everett Dirksen.

Dean is clearly a shrewd executive.

He will have no trouble getting a

good job when he gets out of prison.

Now Montoya -- the flaccid Mex-

Am from New Mexico. No problem

here for John Dean. . . Suddenly

Montoya hits Dean head on with

Nixon's bogus quote about Dean's

investigation clearing all members of White House staff. Dean calmly

shrugs it off as a lie -- "I never made any investigation."

-- Montoya continues with entire

list of prior Nixon statements.

Dean: "In totality, there are less than accurate statements in that. . .

ah. . . those statements."

Montoya is after Nixon's head! Is this the first sign? Over the hump for Tricky Dick?

*** Recall lingering memory of Miami Beach plainclothes cop,

resting in armory behind

Convention Center on night of

Nixon's renomination -- ("You tell

'em, Tricky Dick.") -- watching Nixon's speech on TV. . . with tear gas fumes all around us and

demonstrators gagging outside.

4:20 EDT

As usual, the pace picks up at the

end. These buggers should be

forced to keep at it for 15 or 16

straight hours -- heavy doses of speed, pots of coffee, Wild Turkey, etc., force them down to the raving hysterical quick. Wild accusations, etc. . .

Dean becomes more confident as

time goes on-- a bit flip now, finding his feet.

Friday morning, June 29. . . 8:33

AM

Jesus, this waterhead Gurney again!

You'd think the poor bugger would

have the sense to not talk anymore. .

. but no, Gurney is still blundering along, still hammering blindly at the receding edges of Dean's

"credibility" in his now-obvious role as what Frank Reynolds and

Sam Donaldson on ABC-TV both

described as "the waterboy for the White House."

Gurney appears to be deaf; he has a brain like a cow's udder. He asks

his questions -- off the typed list apparently furnished him by

Minority (GOP) counsel, Fred J, Thompson -- then his mind seems to

wander, his eyes roam lazily around the room while Thompson whispers

industriously in his ear, his hands shuffle papers distractedly on the

table in front of his microphone. . .

and meanwhile, Dean meticulously

chews up his questions and hands

them back to him in shreds; so

publicly mangled that their fate

might badly embarrass a man with

good sense. . .

But Gurney seems not to notice: His only job on this committee is to

Defend the Presidency, according to his instructions from the White

House -- or at least whatever third-string hangers-on might still be

working there -- and what we tend

to forget, here, is that it's totally impossible to understand Gurney's

real motives without remembering

that he's the Republican Senator

from Florida, a state where George

Wallace swept the Democratic

primary in 1972 with 78% of the

vote, and which went 72% for Nixon in November.

In a state where even Hubert

Humphrey is considered a

dangerous radical, Ed Gurney's

decision to make an ignorant yahoo

of himself on national TV makes

excellent sense -- at least to his own constituency. They are watching TV

down in Florida today, along with

the rest of the country, and we want to remember that if Gurney appears

in Detroit and Sacramento as a

hideous caricature of the imbecilic Senator Cornpone -- that's not

necessarily the way he appears to

the voters around Tallahassee and

St. Petersburg.

Florida is not Miami -- contrary to the prevailing national image -- and one of the enduring mysteries in

American politics is how a humane

& relatively enlightened politician like Reubin Askew could have been

elected Governor of one of the few

states in the country where George

Wallace would have easily beaten Richard Nixon -- in a head-to-head

presidential race -- in either 1968

or 1972. Or even 1976, for that

matter. . .

And so much for all that. Gurney is off the air now -- having got himself tangled up in a legal/constitutional argument with Sam Ervin and

Dean's attorney. He finally just

hunkered down and passed the mike

to Senator Inouye, who immediately

re-focused the questioning by

prodding Dean's memory on the subject of White House efforts to

seek vengeance on their "enemies."

Which Senators -- in addition to

Teddy Kennedy -- were subjects of

surveillance by Nixon's gumshoes?

Which journalists -- in addition to the man from Newsday who wrote

unfavorable things about Bebe

Rebozo -- were put on The List to

have their tax returns audited?

Which athletes and actors -- in

addition to Joe Namath and Paul

Newman -- were put on the list to be "screwed"?

Dean's answers were vague on

these things. He's not interested in

"interpreting the motives of others,"

he says -- which is an easy thing to forget, after watching him on the

tube for three days, repeatedly

incriminating at least half the

ranking fixers in Nixon's inner

circle: Colson, Haldeman,

Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Magruder,

Strachan, Ziegler, Moore, LaRue,

Katabach, Nofziger, Krogh, Liddy, Kleindienst. . . and the evidence is

"mind-boggling," in Senator Baker's words, when it comes in the form of verbatim memos and taped phone

conversations.

The simple-minded vengefulness of

the language seems at least as

disturbing as the vengeful plots

unveiled.

5:55 PM

Sitting out here on the porch, naked

in a rocking chair in the half-shade of a dwarf juniper tree -- looking

out at snow-covered mountains

from this hot lizard's perch in the sun with no clouds at 8000 feet -- a mile and a half high, as it were -- it is hard to grasp that this dim blue tube sitting on an old bullet-pocked tree stump is bringing me every

uncensored detail -- for five or six hours each day from a musty brown

room 2000 miles east -- of a story

that is beginning to look like it can have only one incredible ending --

the downfall of the President of the United States.

Six months ago, Richard Nixon was

the most powerful political leader

in the history of the world, more

powerful than Augustus Caesar

when he had his act rolling full bore

-- six months ago.

Now, with the passing of each

sweaty afternoon, into what history will call "the Summer of '73,"

Richard Nixon is being dragged

closer and closer -- with all

deliberate speed, as it were -- to disgrace and merciless infamy. His

place in history is already fixed: He will go down with Grant and

Harding as one of democracy's

classic mutations.

9:22 PM

Billy Graham Crusade on both TV

channels. . . But what? What's

happening here? An acid flashback?

A time warp? CBS has Graham in

Orange County, raving about

"redemption through blood." Yes,

God demands Blood! . . . but ABC is running the Graham Crusade in

South Africa, a huge all-white

Afrikaner pep rally at

Johannesburg's Wanderers Stadium.

(Did I finally get that right, are these mushrooms deceiving me?)

Strange. . . on this eve of Nixon's demise, his private preacher is

raving about blood in Los Angeles (invoking the actual bloody images

of Robert Kennedy's brain on the

cold concrete floor of the

Ambassador Hotel kitchen and Jack Kennedy's blood on his widow's

dress that tragic day in Dallas. . .

and the blood of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony in Memphis).

But wait? Is that a black face I see in the crowd at Wanderers Stadium.

Yes, a rapt black face, wearing

aviator shades and a green army

uniform. . . stoned on Billy's

message, along with all the others:

"Your soul is searching for God!

[Pause, body crouched, both fists

shaking defiantly in the air. . .] They tore his flesh! They pulled his

beard out." Graham is in a wild Charlton Heston fighting stance

now: "And while they were doing that, 72 million avenging angels had to be held back. . . yes. . . by the bloody arm of the Lord. . . from

sweeping this planet into hell."

Cazart! Seventy-two million of the

fuckers, eh? That threat would

never make the nut in L.A. It would have to be 72 billion there. But

South Africa is the last of the white nazi bush-leagues, and when you

mention 72 million of anything

ready to sweep across the planet,

they know what you mean in South Africa.

Niggers. The avenging black horde.

. . and suddenly it occurs to me that Graham's act is extremely subtle; he is actually threatening this weeping crowd of white-supremist burghers.

. . Indeed. . . Redemption Thru

Fear! It knocked 'em dead in

Houston, so why not here?

10:05

The news, and John Dean again --

that fiendish little drone. (Did the president seem surprised when you gave him this information?) "No sir, he did not."

The junkies are rolling up the tents at Camp David tonight. Mister

Nixon has cashed his check. Press

reports from "the Western White House" in San Clemente say the

President has "no comment" on Dean's almost unbelievably

destructive testimony.

No comment. The boss is under

sedation. Who is with him out there on that lonely western edge of

America tonight. Bebe Rebozo?

Robert Abplanalp, W. Clement

Stone?

Probably not. They must have seen

what Nixon saw today -- that the

Ervin committee was going to give

Dean a free ride. His victims will

get their shots at him tomorrow -- or next week -- but it won't make much difference, because the only ones

left to question him are the ones he publicly ridiculed yesterday as

tools of the White House. Baker's

credibility is so crippled -- in the wake of Dean's references in his

opening statement to Baker's

alleged "willingness to cooperate"

with the Nixon brain-trust in the

days before these hearings -- that

anything Baker hits Dean with

tomorrow will seem like the angry

retaliation of a much-insulted man.

And what can poor Gurney say?

Dean contemptuously dismissed him

-- in front of a nationwide TV

audience of 70 million cynics -- as such a hopeless yo-yo that he

wouldn't even have to be leaned on.

Gurney was the only one of the

seven senators on the Ervin

committee that Nixon's strategists

figured was safely in their pocket, before the hearings started.

Weicker, the maverick Republican,

was considered a lost cause from the start.

"We knew we were in trouble when we looked at that line-up," Dean testified. There was something

almost like a smile on his face when he uttered those words. . . the rueful smile of a good loser, perhaps? Or

maybe something else. The crazy,

half-controlled flicker of a laugh on the face of a man who is just

beginning to think he might survive this incredible trip. By 4:45 on

Tuesday, Dean had the dazed, still hyper-tense look of a man who

knows he went all the way out to the edge, with no grip at all for a while, and suddenly feels his balance

coming back.

Well. . . maybe so. If Dean can

survive tomorrow's inevitable

counter-attack it's all over. The

Harris poll in today's Rocky

Mountain News -- even before

Dean's testimony -- showed Nixon's

personal credibility rating on the

Watergate "problem" had slipped to a fantastic new low of 15 -- 70%

negative. If the Ervin committee lets even half of Dean's testimony stand, Richard Nixon won't be able to give away dollar bills in Times Square

on the Fourth of July.

Monday, July 15th, 2:10 PM

Watergate Hearings

Old Senate Office Building

* Mystery witness -- Alex

Butterfield. Impossible to see witness' face from periodical seat

directly behind him.

* Rufus (pipe) Edmisten, Ervin's

man, the face behind Baker and

Ervin. "Politically ambitious --

wants to run for Attorney General of North Carolina" -- always sits on camera.

Butterfield regales room with tales of elaborate taping machine in Oval Office (see clips). Nixon's official bugger -- "liaison to SS."

BF: -- sharp dark blue suit -- Yes sir -- it was a great deal more difficult to pick up in the cabinet room.

Talmadge: Who installed the devices?

BF: SS -- Tech. Security Div. . . To record things for posterity.

T: Why were these devices

installed?

BF: Constant taping of all

conversations in Oval Office for transcriptions for Nixon library.

Voice activated mikes all over

Nixon's office. . . With time delay, so as not to cut out during pauses.

Fred Thompson looks like a

Tennessee moonshiner who got rich

-- somebody sent him to a

haberdasher when he heard he was

going to Washington.

Four 6x6 chandeliers -- yellow cut

glass -- hanging from ceiling, but

obscured by banks of Colortran TV

lites. Stan Tredick and other photogs with cardboard shields

taped over lenses to cut out TV

lights from above.

2:34 -- Voting warning signal?

Ah ha! Butterfield will produce

Dean-Nixon tape from September

15th?

T: No warning signal?

BF: No sir, not to my knowledge.

T: This taping was solely to serve historical purposes?

BF: Yes sir, as far as I know.

??: Key Biscayne and San

Clemente?

BF: No recording devices there --

at least not by me.

NY Post headline: NIXON BUGS

SELF (full page).

* The most obvious difference

between being in the hearing room and watching TV is the scale --

sense of smallness like a football

stadium. The players seem human-

sized and the grass seems real (in

some cases). Room 318 is only

about 100 x 100 -- unlike the vast

theater it looks on TV.

* Constant stream of students being run in and out behind us.

Kalmbach sitting right in front of me

-- waiting to testify. $300 grey linen suit -- $75 wing tips -- lacquered

black hair and tailored shirt -- thin blue stripes on off-white. Large,

rich. Sitting with silver-haired

lawyer.

* Ervin reads letter from Buzhardt.

Sends buzz through room -- says

LBJ did some taping.

Interesting -- sitting directly behind witness chair -- you can look right at Ervin and catch his facial

expressions -- as if he was looking at me. Nodding -- fixed stare --

occasional quick notes with yellow

pencil.

* Kalmbach/Ulasewicz phone calls

-- from phone booth to phone booth

-- like Mafia operations. -- Check

Honor Thy Father for similar.

"Kalmbach ". . . It was about this time that I began to have a degree of concern about this assignment."

4:50: Tedium sets in

Sudden vision of reaching out with

Ostrich Lasso and slipping it around

Kalmbach's neck then tightening it up and jerking him backwards.

Sudden uproar in gallery

-- Cameras clicking feverishly as

Kalmbach struggles with piano wire noose around his neck

-- falling backwards

Unable to control laughter at this

image. . . forced to leave hearing

room, out of control, people staring at me. . .

* Ron MacMahon, Baker's press Sec., ex-Tennessee newsman, "How can they not give 'em to us? [Nixon office tapes] Down in Tennessee

we used to have a courthouse fire

now and then. . ."

Burnhardt J. Leinan, 27, Jerseyville, Illinois 62052. Came to D.C. by

train -- 13 cars pulled by steam

locomotive, coal tender. With 100

people Chi-Wash. Private train --

Southern R.R. Independence

Limited ("Watergate Special").

"Most people in Jerseyville only got interested when Dean produced

the enemies list."

-- Why?

"Because they couldn't understand why certain names were on it --

Newman, Streisand, Channing,

Cosby -- they couldn't understand

why such a list was kept."

* Carol Arms Bar -- like a tavern

full of football fans -- with the game across the street. Hoots of laughter

in bar at LaRue's dead-pan account of Liddy's offer to "be on any street corner at any time -- and we could

have him assassinated."

All Watergate Groupies seem to be anti-Nixon -- both in the hearing

room and bars around Old Senate

Building. Like fans cheering the

home team -- "the seven Blocks of Jelly."

Tuesday July 24th Benton's studio, 8:00 PM

PBS in Aspen is off again -- even worse than PBS in D.C.

* Ehrlichman takes the oath with

Heil Hitler salute/no laughter from spectators.

-- Boredom in hearing room, tedium

at press tables.

Ehrlichman's face --

ARROGANCE. Keep the fucker on

TV -- ten hours a day -- ten straight days.

E: We saw very little chance of getting FBI to move. . . very serious problem.

[Right! The nation's crawling with

communists, multiplying like rats.]

Ehrlichman must have seen himself

on Sixty Minutes -- so he knows how he looks on TV -- keeps glancing sideways at camera.

Ehrlichman's "faulty memory". . .

Brookings -- didn't remember who

authorized fire-bombing -- didn't remember who he called to cancel

Brookings bomb plot.

(Same backgrounds -- Civic Club,

Country Club, JCC, USC/UCLA --

law school, law firms, ad

agencies.)

* Attitudes of Thomp-Baker &

Gurney are critical -- they related to Nixon's survival chances -- rats

sneaking off a sinking ship.

* E has insane gall to challenge

Ervin on constitutional issues --

Nixon's right to authorize Ellsberg

burglary.

Dan Rather says Nixon wants a

confrontation NOW -- and also wants Cox to resign -- Nixon, by

withholding tapes, makes

conviction of Haldeman,

Erhlichman, Dean, etc. impossible. .

. thus holding this over their heads -

- to keep them from talking.

"Hang together or hang separately."

-- Ben Franklin

EDITOR'S NOTE:

The following conversation between Ehrlichman and Herb Kalmbach arrived as a third generation Xerox in a package with Dr.

Thompson's notebooks. The transcript was released by Ehrlichman himself -- he hadn't told Kalmbach he was taping their phone call for possible use in his defense. This was not one of those documents ferreted out by the Select Committee investigators. According to Thompson, the following transcript is "the single most revealing chunk of testimony yet in terms of the morality of these people. It's like suddenly being plunged into the middle of the White House."

Conversation with Herb Kalmbach

-- April 19th, 1973, 4:50 PM.

E: Ehrlichman

K: Kalmbach

E: Hi, how are you?

K: I'm pretty good. I'm scheduled

for two tomorrow afternoon.

E: Where -- at the jury or the US

Attorney?

K: At the jury and I'm scheduled at

5:30 this afternoon with Silver.

E: Oh, are you?

K: Yeah. I just wanted to run

through quickly several things, John, in line with our conversation. I got in here last night and there was a

call from O'Brien. I returned it,

went over there today and he said

the reason for the call is LaRue has told him to ask him to call me to say that he had to identify me in

connection with this and he wanted

me to know that and so on.

E: Did he tell you about Dean?

K: Nope.

E: Well Dean has totally

cooperated with the US Attorney in

the hopes of getting immunity. Now

what he says or how he says nobody

seems to be able to divine but he.

K: The whole enchilada?

E: He's throwing on on Bob and me

heavily.

K: He is?

E: Yep.

K: He is.

E: And taking the position that he

was a mere agent. Now on your

episode he told me before he left,

so to speak, he, Dan, told me that

really my transaction with him

involving you was virtually my only area of liability in this thing and I said, well, John, what in the world are you talking about? He said, well

I came to you from Mitchell and I said Mitchell needs money could

we call Herb Kalmbach and ask

him to raise some. And I said, and

Dean says to me, and you said yes.

And I said yep, that's right. And he said well that does it And I said

well that's hard for me to believe. I don't understand the law but I don't think Herb entered into this with any guilty intent and I certainly didn't and so I said I just find that hard to imagine. Now since then I've

retained counsel.

K: Oh, you have?

E:. . . very good and who agrees

with me that it is the remotest kind of nonsense but the point that I think has to be clarified, that I'm going to clarify if I get a chance, is that the reason that Dean had to come to me

and to Bob where you were

concerned is that we had promised

you that you would not be run pillar to post by Maurice Stans.

K: And also that you knew I was

your friend and you knew I was the

President's attorney.

E: Sure.

K: Never do anything improper,

illegal, unethical or whatever.

E: Right.

K: And. . .

E: But the point is that rather than Mitchell calling you direct Mitchell knew darn well that you were no

longer available.

K: Yep.

E: Now this was post April 6th,

was it not?

K: Yep, April 7th.

E: So that Mitchell and Stans both

knew that there wasn't any point in calling you direct because we had

gotten you out of that on the pretext that you were going to do things for us.

K: That's right.

E: And so it was necessary for Dean to come to me and then in turn to Bob and plead a very urgent case without really getting into any

specifics except to say you had to

trust me, this is very important, and Mitchell is up his tree, or, you

know, I mean is really worked, he

didn't use that phrase, but he is

really exercised about this. And;

John if you tell me it's that

important, why yes.

K: You know, when you and I

talked and it was after John had given me that word, and I came in to ask you, John is this an assignment I have to take on? You said, yes it is period and move forward. Then that

was all that I needed to be assured that I wasn't putting my family in

jeopardy.

E: Sure.

K: And I would just understand that you and I are absolutely together on that.

E: No question about it, Herb, that I would never knowingly have put

you in any kind of a spot.

K: Yeah. Well, and when we talked

you knew what I was about to do,

you know, to go out and get the

dough for this purpose; it was

humanitarian.

E: It was a defense fund.

K:. . . to support the family. Now

the thing that was disquieting and

this thing with O'Brien was that he

said that there is a massive campaign evidently under way to

indict all the lawyers including you and me, and I was a little shocked

and I guess what I need to get from you, John, is assurance that this is not true.

E: Well, I don't know of any attempt to target you at all. My hunch is that they're trying to get at me, they're trying to corroborate. See what they said to Dean is that he gets no

consideration from them unless they

can corroborate Haldeman and my liability.

K: God, if I can just make it plain that it was humanitarian and nothing else.

E: Yeah, and the point that I

undoubtedly never expressed to you

that I continually operated on the

basis of Dean's representation to

me.

K: Yep. It was not improper.

E: Right.

K: And there was nothing illegal

about it

E: See, he's the house lawyer.

K: Yep, exactly and I just couldn't believe that you and Bob and the

President, just too good friends to ever put me in the position I would be putting my family on the line.

K: And it's just unbelievable,

unthinkable. Now shall I just -- I'll

just if I'm asked by Silver I'll just lay it out just exactly that way.

E: Yeah, I wouldn't haul the

President into it if you can help it.

K: Oh, no, I will not.

E: But I think the point that which I will make in the future if I'm given the chance that you were not under

our control in any sort of a slavery sense but that we had agreed that

you would not be at the beck and

call of the committee.

K: And, of course, too, that I acted only on orders and, you know, on

direction and if this is something

that you felt sufficiently important and that you were assured it was

altogether proper, then I would take it on because I always do it and

always have. And you and Bob and

the President know that.

E: Yeah, well, as far as propriety is concerned I think we both were

relying entirely on Dean.

K: Yep.

E: I made no independent judgment.

K: Yep. Yep.

E: And I'm sure Bob didn't either.

K: Nope and I'm just, I just have the feeling, John, that I don't know if this is a weak reed, is it?

E: Who, Dean?

K: No, I mean are they still going to say well Herb you should have

known.

E: I don't know how you could have. You didn't make any

inquiries.

K: Never. And the only inquiries I

made, John, was to you after I

talked to John Dean.

E: And you found that I didn't know just a whole helluva lot.

K: You said this is something I have to do and. . .

E: Yeah, and the reason that I said

that, as you know, was not from any personal inquiry but was on the

basis of what had been represented

to me.

K: Yeah, and then on -- to provide

the defense fund and to take care of the families of these fellas who

were then. . .

E: Indigent.

K: Not then been found guilty or not guilty.

E: And the point being here without attempting to induce them to do a

damn thing.

K: Absolutely not and that was

never, that was exactly right.

E: OK.

K: Now, can I get in to see you

tomorrow before I go in there at

two?

E: If you want to. They'll ask you.

K: Will they?

E: Yep.

K: Well, maybe I shouldn't.

E: They'll ask you to whom you've

spoken about your testimony and I

would appreciate it if you would

say you've talked to me in

California because at that time I

was investigating this thing for the President.

K: And not now?

E: Well, I wouldn't ask you to lie.

K: No, I know.

E: But the point is. . .

K: But the testimony was in

California.

E: The point is. Well, no, your

recollection of facts and so forth.

K: Yes, I agree.

E: See, I don't think we were ever

seen together out there but at some point I'm going to have to say that I talked to O'Brien and Dean and

Magruder and Mitchell and you and

a whole lot of people about this

case.

K: Yeah.

E: And so it would be consistent.

K: Do you feel, John, that calling it straight shot here, do you feel

assured as you did when we were

out there that there's no culpability

here?

E: Yes.

K: And nothing to worry about?

E: And Herb, from everything I hear they're not after you.

K: Yes, sir.

E: From everything I hear.

K: Barbara, you know.

E: They're out to get me and they're out to get Bob.

K: My God. All right, well, John,

it'll be absolutely clear that there was nothing looking towards any

cover-up or anything. It was strictly for the humanitarian and I just want.

. . when I talked to you I just wanted you to advise me that it was all right on that basis.

E: On that basis.

K: To go forward.

E: That it was necessary. . .

K: And that'll be precisely the way it is.

E: Yeah, OK. Thanks, Herb. Bye.

5:00 PM Monday, July 30th

Hearing Room

Old Senate Office Building

* Haldeman opening statement

-- Terrible heat from TV lights turned back towards press and

gallery. Barking (sounds of dog

kennel) in press room as Haldeman

comes on. Not on Nat TV, but

audible in hallway.

"Nor did I ever suggest. . . [The Super Eagle Scout wounded tone of

voice-- ] I had full confidence in

Dean as did the President at that

time. . ."

Haldeman's 1951 burr-cut seems as

out of place -- even weird -- in this

room as a bearded Senator would have seemed in 1951. Or a nigger in Beta Theta Phi fraternity in the late 1940s.

Haldeman's head on camera looks

like he got bashed on the head with a rake.

Total tedium sets in as Haldeman

statement drones on. . . his story is totally different than Dean's on

crucial points. . . definite perjury here. . . which one lying?

" If the recent speech [August 15th]

does not produce the results the President wants, he will then do what he has already come to

doing. He will use all the awe-

inspiring resources of his office to

'come out swinging with both fists.'

Divisive will be a mild way of

describing the predictable

results."

-- Joe Alsop, Washington Post,

8/17/73

"The clear warning: Mr. Nixon

will not do any more to clear himself of the taints of Watergate because he cannot: If the

Democrats do not allow him to get back on the job of President, but continue what one high

presidential aide called the

'vendetta' against him, his next move will be full retaliation."

-- Evans & Novak, Washington Past, 8/17/73

"'When I am attacked,' Richard Nixon once remarked to this

writer, 'it is my instinct to strike back.' The President is now clearly in a mood to obey his instinct. . .

So on Wednesday, July 18th, at a White House meeting, it was

agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released. This

decision, to use the sports cliches to which the President is addicted, meant an entirely new ball game, requiring a new game plan. The

new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back, in accord with the presidential instincts, rather than

a policy of attempted accommodation. . . "

-- Stewart Alsop, Newsweek,

8/6/73

Cazart! It is hard to miss the

message in those three shots. . .

even out here in Woody Creek, at a

distance of 2000 miles from the

source, a joint-statement, as it were, from Evans & Novak and both

Alsop brothers hits the nerves like a blast of summer lightning across the mountains. Especially when you

read them all in the same afternoon, while sifting through the mail-heap that piled up in my box, for three

weeks, while I was wasting all that time back in Washington, once

again, trying to get a grip on the

thing.

Crouse had warned me, by phone,

about the hazards of coming east. "I know you won't believe this," he said, "so you might as well just get on a plane and find out for yourself

-- but the weird truth is that

Washington is the only place in the country where the Watergate story

seems dull. I can sit up here in Boston and get totally locked into it, on the tube, but when I go down

there to that goddamn Hearing

Room I get so bored and depressed

I can't think."

Now, after almost a month in that

treacherous swamp of a town, I

understand what Crouse was trying

to tell me. After a day or so in the hearing room, hunkered down at a

press table in the sweaty glare of those blinding TV lights, I

discovered a TV set in the bar of

the Capitol Hill Hotel just across

the street from the Old Senate

Office Building, about a three-

minute sprint from the Hearing

Room itself. . . so I could watch the action on TV, sipping a Carlsberg

until something looked about to

happen, then dash across the street and up the stairs to the Hearing

Room to see whatever it was that

seemed interesting.

After three or four days of this scam, however, I realized that there was really no point in going to the Hearing Room at all. Every time I

came speeding down the hall and

across the crowded floor of the

high-domed, white-marble rotunda

where a cordon of cops kept

hundreds of waiting spectators

penned up behind velvet ropes, I

felt guilty. . . Here was some ill-

dressed geek with a bottle of

Carlsberg in his hand, waving a

press pass and running right through

a whole army of cops, then through the tall oak doors and into a front row seat just behind the witness

chair -- while this mob of poor

bastards who'd been waiting since

early morning, in some cases, for a seat to open up in the SRO gallery.

After a few more days of this

madness, I closed up the National

Affairs Desk and went back home to

brood.

PART III

To the Mattresses. . . Nixon Faces History, and to Hell with The

Washington Post. . . The Hazy

Emergence of a New and

Cheaper Strategy. . . John Wilson Draws 'The Line'. . . Strange

Troika & a Balance of Terror. . .

McGovern Was Right

" When democracy granted

democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system.

However, we National Socialists

never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only in

order to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would

deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition."

-- Josef Goebbels

What will Nixon do now? That is

the question that has every Wizard

in Washington hanging by his or her fingernails -- from the bar of the

National Press Club to the redwood

sauna in the Senate Gymnasium to

the hundreds of high-powered

cocktail parties in suburbs like

Bethesda, MacLean, Arlington,

Cabin John and especially in the

leafy white ghetto of the District's Northwest quadrant. You can

wander into Nathan's tavern at the

corner of M Street & Wisconsin in Georgetown and get an argument

about "Nixon's strategy" without

even mentioning the subject. All you have to do is stand at the bar, order a Bass Ale, and look interested:

The hassle will take care of itself; the very air in Washington is

electric with the vast implications of "Watergate."

Thousands of big-money jobs

depend on what Nixon does next; on

what Archibald Cox has in mind; on

whether "Uncle Sam's" TV hearings will resume full-bore after Labor

Day, or be either telescoped or

terminated like Nixon says they should be.

The smart money says the

"Watergate Hearings," as such, are effectively over -- not only because Nixon is preparing to mount a

popular crusade against them, but

because every elected politician in Washington is afraid of what the

Ervin committee has already

scheduled for the "third phase" of the hearings.

Phase Two, as originally planned,

would focus on "dirty tricks" -- a colorful, shocking and essentially

minor area of inquiry, but one with plenty of action and a guaranteed

audience appeal. A long and serious look at the "dirty tricks" aspect of national campaigning would be a

death-blow to the daily soap-opera

syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation's housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every

soap-opera scriptwriter in America.

Phase Three/Campaign Financing is the one both the White House and

the Senate would prefer to avoid --

and, given this mutual distaste for exposing the public to the realities of Campaign Financing, this is the

phase of the Watergate Hearings

most likely to be cut from the

schedule. "Jesus Christ," said one Ervin committee investigator, "we'll have Fortune's 500 in that chair, and every one of those bastards will

take at least one Congressman or

Senator down with him."

At the end of Phase One -- the facts

& realities of the Watergate affair itself -- the seven Senators on the Ervin committee took an informal

vote among themselves, before

adjourning to a birthday party for

Senator Herman Talmadge, and the

tally was 4-3 against resuming the hearings in their current format.

Talmadge cast the deciding vote,

joining the three Republicans --

Gurney, Baker and Weicker -- in

voting to wrap the hearings up as

soon as possible. Their reasons

were the same ones Nixon gave in his long-awaited TV speech on

August 15th, when he said the time

had come to end this Daily Bummer

and get back to "The business of the people."

Watching Nixon's speech in hazy

color on the Owl Farm tube with

New York Mayor John Lindsay,

Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin

and former Bobby Kennedy

speechwriter Adam Wolinsky, I half

expected to hear that fine old Calvin

Coolidge quote: "The business of America is business."

And it only occurred to me later that Nixon wouldn't have dared to use

that one, because no president since Hubert Hoover has been forced to

explain away the kind of root-

structural damage to the national

economy that Nixon is trying to

explain today. And Hoover at least

had the excuse that he "inherited his problems" from somebody else --

which Nixon can't claim, because

he is now in his fifth year as president, and when he goes on TV

to explain himself he is facing an

audience of 50 to 60 million who

can't afford steaks or even

hamburger in the supermarkets, who

can't buy gasoline for their cars,

who are paying 15 and 20% interest

rates for bank loans, and who are

being told now that there may not be enough fuel oil to heat their homes through the coming winter.

This is not the ideal audience for a

second-term president, fresh from a landslide victory, to confront with 29 minutes of lame gibberish about

mean nit-pickers in Congress, the

good ole American way, and Let's

Get on with Business.

Indeed. That's the first thing Richard Nixon and I have ever agreed on,

politically -- and what we are

dealing with now is no longer hard

ideology, but a matter of simple

competence. What we are looking at

on all our TV sets is a man who

finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners,

armored cars, personal mansions

and estates on both coasts and

control over a budget beyond the

wildest dreams of King Midas. . .

and all the dumb bastard can show

us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national

economy, disastrous defeat in a war he could have ended four years ago

on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked

personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose

collective criminal record will

blow the minds of high-school

American History students for the

next 100 years. Nixon's hand-picked Vice President is about to be

indicted for Extortion and Bribery; his former campaign manager and

his former Secretary of Commerce

& personal fund-raiser have already been indicted for Perjury, two of his ranking campaign managers have

already pleaded guilty to

Obstruction of Justice, the White

House counsel is headed for prison

on more felony counts than I have

room to list here, and before the

trials are finished. . .

Sen. Talmadge: "Now, if the President could authorize a covert break-in and you do not know

exactly where that power would be

limited, you do not think it could include murder, do you?" John Ehrlichman: "I do not know where the line is, Senator."

With the first phase of the

Watergate hearings more or less

ended, one of the few things now

unmistakably clear, as it were, is

that nobody in Nixon's White House

was willing to "draw the line"

anywhere short of re-electing the

President in 1972. Even John

Mitchell -- whose reputation as a

super-shrewd lawyer ran afoul of the Peter Principle just as soon as he became Nixon's first Attorney

General -- lost his temper in an

exchange with Sen. Talmadge at the

Watergate hearings and said, with

the whole world watching, that he

considered the re-election of

Richard Nixon in '72 "so important"

that it out-weighed all other

considerations.

It was a classic affirmation of the

"attorney-client relationship" -- or

at least a warped mixture of that and the relationship between an ad

agency executive and a client with a product to sell -- but when Mitchell uttered those lines in the hearing

room, losing control of himself just long enough to fatally confuse

"executive loyalty" with "executive privilege," it's fair to assume that he knew he was already doomed. . .

He had already been indicted for

perjury in the Vesco case, he was

facing almost certain indictment by Archibald Cox, and previous

testimony by John Dean had made it perfectly clear that Nixon was

prepared to throw John Mitchell to

the wolves, to save his own ass.

This ominous truth was quickly

reinforced by the testimony of John Ehrlichman and Harry "Bob"

Haldeman, whose back-to-back

testimony told most of the other

witnesses (and potential

defendants) all they needed to

know. By the time Haldeman had

finished testifying -- under the

direction of the same criminal lawyer who had earlier represented

Ehrlichman -- it was clear that

somebody in the White House had

finally seen fit to "draw the line."

It was not quite the same line

Mitchell and Ehrlichman had

refused to acknowledge on TV, but

in the final analysis it will be far more critical to the fate of Richard Nixon's presidency. . . and, given

Mitchell's long personal

relationship with Nixon, it is hard

to believe he didn't understand his role in the "new strategy" well before he drove down from New

York to Washington, by chauffeured

limousine, for his gig in the witness chair.

The signs were all there. For one, it had been Haldeman and Ehrlichman

-- with Nixon's tacit approval --

who had eased Mitchell out of his

"Number One" role at the White House. John Mitchell, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer until he got into

politics, was more responsible than any other single person for the long comeback that landed Nixon in the

White House in 1968. It was

Mitchell who rescued Nixon from

oblivion in the mid-Sixties when

Nixon moved east to become a Wall

Street lawyer himself -- after losing the presidency to John Kennedy in

1960 and then the Governorship of

California to Pat Brown in '62, a

humiliating defeat that ended with

his "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" outburst at

the traditional loser's press conference.

The re-election of Mr. Nixon,

followed so quickly by the

Watergate revelations, has

compelled the country to re-

examine the reality of our electoral process. . .

"The unraveling of the whole White House tangle of involvement has

come about largely by a series of

fortuitous events, many of them

unlikely in a different political

context. Without these events, the cover-up might have continued

indefinitely, even if a Democratic

administration vigorously pursued

the truth. . .

"In the wake of Watergate may

come more honest and thorough

campaign reform than in the

aftermath of a successful

presidential campaign which stood

for such reform. I suspect that after viewing the abuses of the past,

voters in the future will insist on

full and open debate between the candidates and on frequent, no-holds-barred press conferences for

all candidates, and especially the

President.

"And I suspect the Congress will respond to the fact that Watergate

happened with legislation to assure that Watergate never happens again.

Today the prospects for further

restrictions on private campaign

financing, full disclosure of the

personal finances of the candidates,

and public finance of all federal campaigns seem to me better than

ever -- and even better than if a new Democratic administration had

urged such steps in early 1973. We

did urge them in 1972, but it took

the Nixon landslide and the

Watergate expose to make the point.

"I believe there were great gains that came from the pain of defeat in 1972. We proved a campaign could

be honestly financed. We reaffirmed that a campaign could be open in its

conduct and decent in its motivation. We made the

Democratic party a place for people as well as politicians. And perhaps in losing we gained the greatest

victory of all -- that Americans now perceive, far better than a new

President could have persuaded

them, what is precious about our

principles and what we must do to

preserve them. The nation now sees

itself through the prism of

Watergate and the Nixon landslide;

at last, perhaps, we see through a

glass clearly.

"Because of all this, it is possible that by 1976, the 200th anniversary of America's birth, there will be a true rebirth of patriotism; that we will not only know our ideals but

live them; that democracy may once

again become a conviction we keep

and not just a description we apply to ourselves. And if the McGovern

campaign advanced that hope, even

in defeat, then, as I said on election night last November, 'Every minute

and every hour and every bone-crushing effort. . . was worth the

entire sacrifice."

-- George McGovem in the

Washington Post, August 12th, 1973

Jesus. . . Sunday morning in Woody

Creek and here's McGovern on the

mini-tube beside my typewriter,

looking and talking almost exactly

like he was in those speedy weeks

between the Wisconsin and Ohio

primaries, when his star was rising

so fast that he could barely hang onto it. The sense of deja vu is almost frightening: Here is

McGovern speaking sharply

against the system, once again, in response to questions from CBS's

Connie Chung and Marty Nolan

from the Boston Globe, two of the

most ever-present reporters on the

'72 campaign trail. . . and

McGovern, brought back from the

dead by a political miracle of sorts, is hitting the first gong of doom for the man who made him a landslide

loser nine months ago: "When that

[judicial] process is complete and

the Supreme Court rules that the

President must turn over the tapes --

and he refuses to do so -- I think the Congress will have no recourse but

to seriously consider Impeachment."

Cazart! The fat is approaching the

fire -- very slowly, and in very

cautious hands, but there is no

ignoring the general drift of things.

Sometime between now and the end

of 1973, Richard Nixon may have to

bite that bullet he's talked about for so long. Seven is a lucky number for gamblers, but not for fixers, and

Nixon's seventh crisis is beginning to put his first six in very deep

shade. Even the most conservative

betting in Washington, these days,

has Nixon either resigning or being impeached by the autumn of '74 -- if not for reasons directly connected

to the "Watergate scandal," then because of his inability to explain how he paid for his beach-mansion

at San Clemente, or why Vice

President Agnew -- along with most of Nixon's original White House

command staff -- is under

indictment for felonies ranging from Extortion and Perjury to Burglary

and Obstruction of Justice.

Another good bet in Washington --

running at odds between two and

three to one, these days, is that

Nixon will crack both physically

and mentally under all this pressure, and develop a serious

psychosomatic illness of some kind:

Maybe another bad case of pneumonia.

This is not so wild a vision as it

might sound -- not even in the

context of my own known taste for

fantasy and savage bias in politics.

Richard Nixon, a career politician

who has rarely failed to crack under genuine pressure, is under more

pressure now than most of us will

ever understand. His whole life is

turning to shit, just as he reached the pinnacle. . . and every once in a

while, caving in to a weakness that blooms in the cool, thinking hours

around dawn, I have to admit that I feel a touch of irrational sympathy for the bastard. Not as The

President: a broken little bully who would sacrifice us all to save

himself -- if he still had the choice -

- but the same kind of sympathy I

might feel, momentarily, for a

vicious cheap-shot linebacker

whose long career comes to a

sudden end one Sunday afternoon

when some rookie flanker shatters

both his knees with a savage crackback block.

Cheap-shot artists don't last very

long in pro football. To cripple

another person intentionally is to

violate the same kind of code as the legendary "honor among thieves."

More linebackers than thieves

believe this, but when it comes to

politics -- to a 28-year career of

cheap shots, lies and thievery --

there is no man in America who

should understand what is

happening to him now better than Richard Milhous Nixon. He is a

living monument to the old Army

rule that says: "The only real crime is getting caught."

This is not the first time Richard

Nixon has been caught. After his

failed campaign for the

Governorship of California in 1962

he was formally convicted -- along

with H.R. Haldeman, Maurice

Stans, Murray Chotiner, Herb Klein

and Herb Kalmbach for almost

exactly the same kind of crudely illegal campaign tactics that he

stands accused of today.

But this time, in the language of the sergeants who keep military

tradition alive, "he got caught every which way". . . and "his ass went into the blades."

Not many people have ever written

in the English language better than a Polack with a twisted sense of

humor who called himself Joseph

Conrad. And if he were with us

today I think he'd be getting a fine boot out of this Watergate story. Mr.

Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of

Darkness, did his thing. Mr. Nixon also did his thing.

And now, just as surely as Kurtz:

"Mistah Nixon, he dead."

Rolling Stone # 144, September 27,1973

Fear and Loathing in

Washington:

The Boys in the Bag It was a Nice Place. They Were

Principled People, Generally.

-- Quote from Robert C. Odle,

office administrator for CREEP.

"Mr. McGovern described the president personally as a 'blob out there' of no constant principle except opportunism and political manipulation, a man 'up to his

ears in political sabotage' who was 'afraid of the people' and

regularly favored the 'powerful and greedy' over the public

interest. The president's defense programs were 'madness'; he had

'degraded the Supreme Court' and, on three occasions at least, Mr.

McGovern drew parallels between the president and his government and Adolf Hitler and his Third

Reich. As for the Nixon

administration, it was the 'most morally bankrupt, the most

morally corrupt, the trickiest, most deceitful. . . in our entire national

history.' "

-- White House speechwriter

Patrick J. Buchanan, in The New York Times, November 24th, 1972

"'When I am attacked' Richard Nixon once remarked to this

writer, 'it is my instinct to strike back.' The president is now clearly in a mood to obey his instincts. . .

So on Wednesday, July 18th, at a White House meeting, it was

agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released. This

decision, to use the sports cliches to which the president is addicted, meant an entirely new ball game, requiring a new game plan. The

new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back, in accord with the presidential instinct, rather than a policy of attempted

accommodation. . . "

-- columnist Stewart Alsop,

Newsweek, August 6th, 1973

"The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his

mistakes and all his imprecise talk about 'new policies' and 'honesty in government' is one of the few men who've run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a

fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we

could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like

Richard Nixon. McGovern made

some stupid mistakes, but in

context they seem almost frivolous

compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to

stoop in this country to be

president?"

-- Rolling Stone correspondent Hunter S. Thompson, writing on the

Nixon-McGovern campaign,

September 1972

"The Third Reich, which was born

on January 30th, 1933, Hitler boasted would endure a thousand years, and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as 'The Thousand Year Reich.' It lasted 12 years and four months. . ."

-- author William Shirer, from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich For reasons that will never be clear to anyone -- and especially not to

the management and other guests in

this place -- the National Affairs

Desk is operating once again at the

Royal Biscayne Hotel, about 900

crooked meters from the

Nixon/Rebozo compound on the

other side of the island. The desk

itself is a round slab of what

appears to be low-grade jacaranda

wood.

The centerpiece is a bright orange

electric typewriter that I rented

several days ago from a business-

machine store on 125th Street in

North Miami. It is a Swedish

"Facit" -- a deceptively sharp-

looking machine about five times slower in both directions than the

IBM Selectric and totally useless

for any kind of speed-lashed gonzo

work. For all its style and voltage, the Facit is about as quick in the

hands as one of those 1929-model

Underwoods that used to be

standard equipment in the city room of the New York Mirror. Nobody knows exactly what happened to all

those old Underwoods when the

Mirror died of bad age, but one rumor in the trade says they were

snapped up at a dime on the dollar by Norman Cousins and then resold

at a tidy profit to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Which is interesting, but it is not the kind of thing you normally want to

develop fully in your classic

Pyramid Lead. . . and that's what I was trying to deal with, when I

suddenly realized that my

typewriter was as worthless as tits on a boar hog.

Besides that, there were other

mechanical problems: no water, no ice, no phone service, and finally

the discovery of two Secret Service men in the room right next to me.

I was getting a little paranoid about the phone situation. It followed a

series of unsettling events that

caused me to think seriously about

going back to Washington when

Nixon left the next day, rather than staying on in order to open a special account in Bebe Rebozo's bank over

in the shopping center across Ocean

Drive. The Key Biscayne Bank seems like as good a place as any to do business, primarily because of

the unusual investment opportunities available to special clients.

I have applied for "special" status, but recent developments have made

me less than optimistic. Several

days ago, on my first visit to the

Nixon compound, I got no further

than the heavily guarded gatehouse

on Harbor Drive. "Are they

expecting you?" the state trooper

asked me.

"Probably not," I said. "I thought I'd just drop by for a drink or two, then have a look around. I've never seen the place, you know. What goes on

in there?"

The trooper seemed to stiffen. His

eyes narrowed and he stared

intently at the black coral fist

hanging on a chain around my neck.

"Say. . . ah. . . I'd like to see your identification, fella. You carrying any?"

"Of course," I said. "But it's out there in the car. I don't have any

pockets in these trunks." I walked across the hot asphalt road, feeling my bare feet stick to the tar with

every step, and vaulted into the big bronze convertible without opening

the door. Looking back at the

gatehouse, I noticed that the trooper had been joined by two gentlemen

in dark business suits with wires

coming out of their ears. They were all waiting for me to come back

with my wallet.

To hell with this, I thought, suddenly starting the engine. I

waved to the trooper. "It's not here,"

I shouted. "I guess I left it back at the hotel." Without waiting for an answer, I eased the car into gear

and drove off very slowly.

Almost immediately, the big

railroad-crossing-style gate across Nixon's road swung up in the air

and a blue Ford sedan rolled out. I slowed down even more, thinking

he was going to pull me over to the

side, but instead he stayed about 100 feet behind me -- all the way to the hotel, into the parking lot, and around the back almost into the slot behind my room. I got out, thinking he was going to pull up right behind me for a chat -- but he stopped

about 50 feet away, backed up, and

drove away.

Later that afternoon, sitting in the temporary White House press room

outside the Four Ambassadors

Hotel in downtown Miami about 10

miles away, I told New York Times correspondent Anthony Ripley

about the incident. "I really

expected the bastard to follow me

right into my room."

Ripley laughed. "That's probably where he is right now -- with about three of his friends, going through all your luggage."

Which may have been true.

Anybody who spends much time

around the Secret Service and acts a little bent has to assume things like

that. . . especially when you discover, by sheer accident, that the room right next to yours is occupied by two S.S. agents.

That was the second unsettling

incident. The details are vaguely

interesting, but I'd prefer not to go into them at this point -- except to say that I thought I was becoming

dangerously paranoid until I got

hold of a carbon copy of their

room-registration receipt. Which

made me feel a little better about

my own mental health, at least. It is far better to know the Secret Service is keeping an eye on you

than to suspect it all the time

without ever being sure.

It was the third incident, however, that caused me to start thinking

about moving the Desk back to

Washington at once. I was

awakened in the early hours of the

morning by a telephone call and a

strange voice saying, "The president is going to church. You'll have to

hurry if you want to catch him."

What? My mind was blank. What

president? Why should I want to

catch him? Especially in a church?

"Who the hell is this?" I said finally.

"Tony," said the voice.

I was reaching around in the

darkness for a light switch. For a

moment I thought I was still in

Mexico. Then I found a light switch

and recognized the familiar surroundings of the National Affairs Suite. Jesus! I thought. Of course!

Key Biscayne. President Nixon. It

all made sense now: The bastards

were setting me up for a bust on

some kind of bogus assassination

attempt. The agents next door have

probably already planted a high-

powered rifle in the trunk of my car, and now they're trying to lure me

over to some church where they can

grab me in front of all the press

cameras as soon as I drive up and

park. Then they'll "find" the rifle in the trunk about two minutes before

Nixon arrives to worship -- and

that'll be it for me. I could already see the headlines: NIXON

ASSASSINATION PLOT FOILED;

SHARPSHOOTER SEIZED AT KEY

BISCAYNE CHURCH. Along with

front-page photos of state troopers examining the rifle, me in handcuffs, Nixon smiling bravely at the

cameras. . .

The whole scene flashed through my

head in milliseconds; the voice on

the phone was yelling something at me. Panic fused my brain. No! I

thought. Never in hell.

"You crazy son of a bitch!" I yelled into the phone. "I'm not going near that goddamn church!" Then I hung up and went instantly back to sleep.

Later that afternoon, Ripley stopped by the hotel and we had a few beers out by the beach-bar. "Jesus

Christ!" he said. "You were really out of your mind this morning,

weren't you?"

"What?"

He laughed. "Yeah. You screamed at me. Hell, I just thought you might like to catch the scene over at

Nixon's church."

"For Christ's sake don't call me with any more tips for a while."

"Don't worry," he replied. "We're leaving today, anyway. Will you be

on the plane?"

"No," I said. "I'm going to sleep for

two days, then take a boat back to Washington. This has not been a

good trip for me. I think I'll give up covering Nixon for a while -- at

least until I can whip this drinking problem."

"Maybe what you should do is get into a different line of work, or

have yourself committed."

"No." I said. "I think I'll get a job teaching journalism."

In the context of journalism, here,

we are dealing with a new kind of

"lead" -- the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism

Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.

What?

Do we have a libel suit on our

hands?

Probably not, I think, because

nobody in his right mind would take

a thing like that seriously -- and especially not that gang of senile

hags who run the Columbia

Journalism Review, who have gone to considerable lengths in every

issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.

"Those who can, do. Those who

can't, teach." George Bernard Shaw said that, for good or ill, and I only mention it here because I'm getting goddamn tired of being screeched at

by waterheads. Professors are a sour lot, in general, but professors of journalism are especially rancid in their outlook because they have

to wake up every morning and be

reminded once again of a world

they'll never know.

THUMP! Against the door. Another

goddamn newspaper, another cruel

accusation. THUMP! Day after day,

it never ends. . . Hiss at the alarm clock, suck up the headlines along

with a beaker of warm Drano, then

off to the morning class. . . To teach Journalism: Circulation,

Distribution, Headline Counting and the classical Pyramid Lead.

Jesus, let's not forget that last one.

Mastery of the Pyramid Lead has

sustained more lame yoyos than

either Congress or the Peacetime

Army. Five generations of

American journalists have clung to

that petrified tit, and when the deal went down in 1972 their ranks were

so solid that 71% of the newspapers

in this country endorsed Richard Nixon for a second term in the

White House.

Now, 18 months later, the

journalistic establishment that

speaks for Nixon's erstwhile "silent majority" has turned on him with a wild-eyed, coast-to-coast venom

rarely witnessed in the American

newspaper trade. The only recent

example that comes to mind is

Nixon's own blundering

pronouncement of Charles Manson's

guilt while Manson was still on trial in Los Angeles.

In addition to introducing the

Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote as the

wave of the future in journalism, I have some other ideas to get into:

mainly about Richard Nixon, and

some of these are ugly. . . or ugly by my standards, at any rate, because

most of them revolve around the

very distinct possibility that Nixon might survive his Seventh Crisis --

and in surviving leave us a legacy

of failure, shame and corruption beyond anything conceivable right

now.

This is a grim thing to say, or even think, in the current atmosphere of self-congratulations and renewed

professional pride that

understandably pervades the press

& politics circuit these days. Not only in Washington but all over the country wherever you find people

who are seriously concerned with

the health and life expectancy of the

American Political System.

The baseline is always the same:

"We almost blew it," they say, "but somehow we pulled back from the

brink." Names like Sirica,

Woodward, Bernstein, Cox,

Richardson, Ruckelshaus are

mentioned almost reverently in

these conversations, but anybody

who's been personally involved in

"the Watergate affair" and all its nasty sidebars for any length of time knows that these were only the point

men -- invaluable for their balls and their instincts and their

understanding of what they were

doing in that never-ending blizzard of Crucial Moments when a single

cop-out might have brought the

whole scene down on top of them

all. But there were literally

hundreds, maybe thousands, of

others who came up to those same

kinds of moments and said, "Well, I wasn't really planning on this, but if that's the way it is, let's get it on."

There are a lot of people in this country -- editors, congressmen and lawyers among others -- who like

themselves a lot better today for the way they reacted when the

Watergate octopus got hold of them.

There are also a lot of people who

got dragged down forever by it --

which is probably just as well, for the rest of us, because many of them were exposed as either dangerous

bunglers, ruthless swine or both.

Others -- many of them peripherally

involved in one aspect or another of

"Watergate" but lucky enough not to get caught -- will probably be

haunted by a sense of nervous guilt for a while, but in a year or two

they will forget all about it. These, in a way, are almost as dangerous

as the ones who are going to jail --

because they are the "good

germans" among us, the ones who made it all possible.

I've been trying to finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for at

least the last three months; hauling the huge bugger along in my

baggage to places like Buffalo,

Oakland, Ann Arbor, Houston, and

finally all the way down to the

jungles and lost fishing villages of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. . .

But things have been happening too

fast, and there was never enough

time or privacy to get seriously into the thing -- not even down in the

Yucatan, lying around in big

hammocks in 50-peso-a-night hotels

where we had to keep the Hong Kong-built ceiling fans cranked up

to top speed for enough wind in the room to drive the roaches back into the corners.

At one point, I tried to read it in a hotel room near the ruins of the

Mayan civilization at Chichen Itza -

- thinking to get a certain weird

perspective on American politics in the Seventies by pondering the

collapse of "The Thousand Year Reich" while sitting on the stone

remnants of another and totally different culture that survived for more than a thousand years before anybody in Europe even knew that a

place called "America" existed.

The Aztec socio-political structure was a fine-tuned elitest democracy

that would have embarrassed

everybody connected with either the French or American revolutions.

The ancient Greeks and Romans

seem like crude punks compared to

what the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas

put together in Mexico and South America in the 20 or so centuries

between 500 BC and the ill-fated

"Spanish Conquest" in 1525. The Mayan calendar, devised several

centuries before the birth of Christ, is still more precise than the one we use today: They had the solar year

broken down to exactly 365.24

days, and 12 lunar months of 29.5

days each. None of this sloppy

"leap year" business, or odd-numbered months.

According to most military experts, Adolf Hitler went over the hump

somewhere around the middle of

1942. At that point -- even

according to Albert Speer, his

personal architect and all-round

technical wizard -- the Reich was

spread too thin: militarily,

financially, industrially, politically and every other way. Speer had all

the blueprints, the plans, the figures, and an almost daily fix on what was happening to boiling Hitler's head.

Given all that, Speer says, he knew

in his heart they were headed downhill after the summer of '42.

But it was almost three years and at least three million deaths later that Hitler finally admitted what Speer, one of his closest "friends" and advisers, says he knew all along --

or at least during those last three years when Albert and all the others in the Führer's inner circle were

working 20, 22 and sometimes 24

hours a day, seven days a week, to

keep the Reich propped up on an

ever-eroding base of conquered slave labor and frenzied schemes to create a "super-weapon" that would somehow turn the tide.

None of this rotten madness worked

out, of course, and as a reward for his stupid loyalty to Hitler, Albert Speer spent 20 years of his life

locked up in Spandau Prison as one

of Germany's major war criminals.

Hitler was consistent to the end. He had no stomach for jail cells or

courtrooms -- unless they were his -

- so as soon as he got word that Russo-American tanks were

rumbling into the suburbs of Berlin, he went down in his private bunker

and killed both himself and his

faithful mistress, Eva Braun, with

what some people say was a very

elegant, gold-plated Walther

machine-pistol.

Nobody knows for sure, because the

bunker was ravaged by fire soon

afterward. . . and the only alleged witness to Hitler's death was his

personal aide and adviser, Martin Bormann, who either escaped at the

last moment or was burned to such

an unrecognizable cinder that his

body was never found.

Everybody who knew Bormann

hated and feared him -- even Hitler, who apparently treated him like a

pet cobra -- and few of the Reich's survivors ever accepted the fact of his death in that fiery bunker. He

was too evil and crafty for that, they insisted, and the general assumption

was that Bormann had kept his personal escape plan finely

organized, on a day-to-day basis,

since the winter of '43.

West German military intelligence

now lists him as officially dead, but not many people believe it --

because he keeps turning up, now

and then, in places like Asuncion,

Paraguay, the Brazilian Matto

Grosso, or high in the Argentine

lake country.

Bormann was the Tex Colson of his

time, and his strange relationship with Hitler seems not much

different from the paranoid

fragments of the Nixon-Colson

relationship that emerged from the

now-infamous "White House

Transcripts" of April 1974.

We are drifting into some ugly

parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd have expected to pick up The New York Times a week later and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page by

Pat Buchanan, and then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by

some of Colson's hired thugs in an

alley behind the National Press

Building -- a long stone's throw, as it were, from the White House.

But like Tommy Rush says, "Times ain't now, but like they used to be. .

."

Which is true. There is not much

doubt about that. But after watching the TV news on all three networks

last night and then reading all the

Nixon stories in today's Washington Post, I have an eerie feeling that the times ain't now quite like they appear to be, either.

There was something oddly hollow

and out of focus about last night's main TV-news story on the U.S.

Supreme Court's dramatic and

potentially ominous decision to

postpone its traditional June recess and stay on through July to render

what will clearly be an historic

judgment, one way or another, on

Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's either bold or desperate leapfrog

attempt to force an immediate High

Court decision on President Nixon's right to ignore a subpoena -- for 64

tape recordings and other White

House documents -- from a special

prosecutor appointed under

extremely sensitive circumstances

by the U.S. Senate with his

independence explicitly guaranteed

by the new U.S. attorney general as a condition of his taking office.

All three networks treated this latest development in The Strange and

Terrible Saga of Richard Nixon as

a staggering and perhaps even fatal blow to his chances of survival in

the White House. The mere fact that the Court was willing to stay over

and hear Jaworski's argument, they

implied, was a sure sign that at least four of the justices (enough, in this case) were prepared to rule, just as soon as the question is formally

presented, against Nixon's claim of

"executive privilege" with regard to

Jaworski's subpoena. The special prosecutor had apparently won a

major victory, and the president

was in very deep trouble. Only

David Schumacher on ABC hinted,

very briefly, that there had been no victory celebrations among

Jaworski's staff people that

afternoon. But he didn't say why. . .

And, frankly, I'll be fucked if I can either. I brooded on it for a while, but all that came to mind was some

half-remembered snarl from the lips

of President Andrew Jackson when the Supreme Court ruled against him on some kind of question involving

a federal land grant to the Seminole Indians. Jackson, a veteran Indian-fighter, took the ruling as a personal insult. "Well," he said, "the judges have made their decision -- now let them enforce it."

Josef Stalin, about 100 years later, had similar views with regard to the Roman Catholic Church. He had

gone into one of his rages,

according to the story as I heard it, and this one had something to do

with a notion that seized him, after five days and nights in a brutal

vodka orgy, that every Catholic in

Moscow should be nailed up on a

telephone pole by dawn on Easter

Sunday. This announcement caused

genuine fear in the Kremlin,

because Stalin -- like Colson -- was known by his staff to be "capable of almost anything." When he calmed down a bit, one of his advisers

suggested that a mass crucifixion of

Russian Catholics -- for no reason at all -- would almost certainly

raise hackles in the Vatican and no doubt anger the pope.

"Fuck the pope," Stalin mumbled.

"How many divisions does he

have?"

These stories are hard to nail down with any real certainty, but there is a mean kind of consistency in the

punch lines that makes them hard to forget. . . especially when you start pondering the spectacle of a

borderline psychotic with the brain of a small-time chiseler and the

power to literally blow up the

world never more than 60 seconds

away from his gnawed-red

fingertips, doing everything he can to force a hellish confrontation with the highest judicial and legislative authorities in his own country.

This is what Nixon has been trying

to do for at least the past three

months -- and, if Stewart Alsop was right, since July 18th of last year.

That was the Wednesday meeting at the White House, he said, when "it was agreed unanimously that the

tapes should not be released."

I would like to have talked with

Stewart Alsop about that meeting,

but he died last month of leukemia -

- after writing very candidly and

even casually, at times, about his

impending death from a disease that he had known for at least two years was slowly and steadily killing him.

I didn't know him personally and as

a journalist I rarely agreed with him, but there was an uncommon

sense of integrity and personal

commitment in everything he wrote.

. . and an incredible sense of style, strength and courage in the way he

chose to die.

Stewart Alsop, for all his

experience in politics and all his

friends in every eyrie in

Washington, seemed baffled all the

way to his grave by the reality of

"Watergate" and its foul

implications for some of the ideas and people he believed in. As one

of Washington's ranking journalists, he was privy to things like that

meeting last July in the White

House, where Nixon and a handful

of others sat down and gave serious thought to all their possible options with regard to those reels of

harmless looking celluloid that had suddenly turned into time bombs.

Alsop could understand all the facts of a scene like that, but not the

Reality. Like most of the people he

grew up with, Stewart Alsop was born a Republican.

It was as much a way of life as a

thought-out political philosophy,

and along with all the privileges

came a certain sense of noblesse

oblige.

Alsop understood these things --

which explains probably better than anything else why it was almost

genetically impossible for him to

come to grips with the idea that the Oval Office of the White House --

under a second-term Republican president who had also been a

Republican vice-president, senator

and congressman -- was in fact a

den of thieves, fixers and felons.

This kind of savage reality was too much for 60-year-old elitist

Republicans like Stewart Alsop to

cope with. It was like showing up at the White House for your monthly

chat with The President on some

normal afternoon and finding the

Oval Office full of drunken Hell's

Angels. . . and The President so stoned on reds that he can't even

recognize you, babbling distractedly and shoveling big mounds of white

powder around on his desk with the

butt of a sawed-off shotgun.

There are not many senior political columnists in Washington who

could handle a scene like that. Their minds would refuse to accept it. . .

for the same reason they still can't accept the stark and fearful truth that President Richard Milhous Nixon is

not only going to be impeached, but he actually wants to be impeached.

Immediately.

This is probably the one simple

fact, right now, in a story that is going to become so heinously

complicated in the next few months

that every reporter assigned to it

will need both a shrewd criminal

lawyer and scholar in the field of

constitutional law right next to him or her at all times.

There is no question at all -- even

now, in these last moments of calm before the shitrain starts -- that this

"Nixon impeachment" saga is going to turn some of the best minds in

American journalism to mush

before it's over. . .

And that statement will just have to sit there; I refuse to even try to

explain it. There will be plenty of time for that; thousands of hours in God only knows how many

courtrooms. And Nixon will

eventually be impeached, if only

because he has the leverage to put the House of Representatives in a

position where it will have no other choice.

Nixon's lawyers -- who have

already cost the taxpayers nearly

$400,000 in legal fees -- have now

abandoned all pretense in their

efforts to insult and provoke

Congressman Peter Rodino's House

Judiciary Committee into exactly

the kind of quick, angry and ill-

considered vote for impeachment

that Rodino and committee counsels John Doar and Albert Jenner have

been bending over backward to

avoid. . . until they can put together enough evidence -- before the

hearings are opened to the public

and the full House convenes on TV

to hear the charges -- to build a far more solid and serious case for

impeachment than the one they

appear to have now. Nixon would

like nothing better than to stampede the House of Representatives into a televised Yea or Nay showdown,

based on charges no more serious than Contempt of Congress,

Contempt of Court(s) and, by

implication, the grossest kind of

contempt for everybody in the

country with an I.Q. higher than 50.

But not even Ron Ziegler is

counting on a farce of that

magnitude. On May 27th, the UPI

wire carried an official statement

by Ziegler, from Key Biscayne, to

the effect that formal impeachment

proceedings against The Boss

would "come as no surprise" to him. Nor would impeachment itself,

he implied. So why don't they just

get on with it?

Why indeed?

One of the main reasons has to do

with all those tapes that Nixon

apparently decided quite a while

ago that he would never turn over to anybody, anywhere, for any reason

at all. Thus far, he has shrugged off subpoenas for more than 100 of his

taped conversations -- 64 from

Jaworski and about 50 from the Rodino committee. Many of these

are overlapping, and nobody in

Washington seems to know which

set of subpoenas would have legal

preference -- or even who will have to decide that question, if it ever comes up in real life.

If Nixon hangs tough on his

"stonewalling" strategy with regard to the tapes, not even a definitive ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court

can force him to give them up.

Noncompliance would put him in contempt of the highest court in the land and constitute further grounds for impeachment -- but why should

that worry him? The Court has no

more divisions than the pope did in Stalin's time -- and no more real

power over Nixon than it did over

Andrew Jackson.

It is hard to imagine Chief Justice Burger signing a "no-knock" search warrant and sending a squad of U.S.

marshals over to the White House

with instructions to kick down the door and tear the place apart until they "find those goddamn tapes."

Special Prosecutor Jaworski is

aware of all this, but it doesn't seem to bother him. He wants a ruling

from the High Court, anyway, and

before the end of July he will have one. It may not make any tangible

difference, in the end, but at the

very least it will be one more nail in Nixon's plastic coffin. . . and

another piece of sharp, hard-nosed

legal work by Jaworski, who must be feeling about nine feet tall today

-- after replacing Archibald Cox in a cloud of almost universal scorn

and suspicion that he was nothing

but a hired fixer brought in by

Nixon and Connally to "put the cap on the bottle."

Jaworski was a definite sleeper, or at least that's the way it looks from outside his amazingly leakless

operation. If he's a Nixon-Connally fixer, he's been pretty clever about

it so far and he's fooled a lot of people, including some of the most

cynical heads in Washington.

But not all. There are still some

people around town who remind

you that Houston, Jaworski's home,

is a breeding ground for some of the most vicious golf-hustlers in the

country -- the kind who will lose

the first 15 holes to you for $100

each, then whack you for $5000 a

hole on the last three.

Which may be true. But if it is, Leon

is cutting his margin pretty thin; he will have to play his last three holes all at once on July 8th, when he

argues his tape subpoena case in

front of what Washington lawyers

call a "bobtailed" U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice William Rehnquist, the fourth and most virulently

conservative of the four Nixon

appointees, has been either

pressured or cajoled by the others

to remove himself from the case

because of his previous association with the Nixon administration.

Rehnquist was an assistant attorney general in John Mitchell's Justice

Department before Nixon picked

him up by his jackboots and hoisted him onto the Court.

This leaves an interesting line-up to decide the (legal) fate of the tapes; The three right-bent Nixon

appointees -- Burger, Blackmun and

Powell -- to balance the three-man

"liberal bloc": Douglas, Marshall and Brennan. The two critical

swing votes will be Byron White, a

closet-fascist appointed by John

Kennedy and Eisenhower nominee

Potter Stewart, a sort of libertarian conservative who recently shocked

many of his friends and

philosophical brethren by publicly

denouncing Nixon's blatant

"politicalization" of the Court.

Stewart, far more than White, seems genuinely and even personally

offended at finding himself grouped with what he plainly considers four half-bright political hacks who don't know the law from a leach-field. If Jaworski can mount a sound enough

legal argument to convince Stewart

that Nixon has no basic or

inalienable right to withhold the

tapes, he will probably win the case

even if White goes along once again with Nixon's gunsels. Because there will only be three of them, this time

-- with Rehnquist brooding darkly

on the sidelines -- and in the case of a 4-4 tie, Jaworski wins. He has

already won a verdict on essentially the same question in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and when a lower court

verdict is carried up as high as it can go and results in a tie vote, the lower court verdict stands.

Whatever the verdict, it will almost

certainly come before the House of Representatives votes on

impeachment. . . and if Nixon loses and then decides to defy the

Supreme Court, that will give many

of the publicly "undecided"

congressmen a hard nudge in the

direction of voting against him. The final vote will probably come

sometime in late August, and if I

had to bet on the outcome now I'd

guess the margin will be almost 2-1

against the president, although a

simple majority would do it.

Nixon would probably agree with me on that, and also on the idea that betting on the outcome of the House impeachment vote right now is more

a matter of the point spread than

simple winning or losing.

The real test will come in the

Senate, where Nixon can afford a 2-1 point spread against him and

still win the verdict. Out of 100

votes in the Senate, Nixon will need only 34 to beat the whole rap. . .

which is not a really formidable nut

to have to make, given the nature of politicians and the ever-increasing likelihood that the final vote in the Senate -- the savage climax to "the whole enchilada" -- will happen no earlier than mid-October, about two weeks before Election Day on the

first Tuesday in November.

Exactly one-third of the Senate --

just one vote less than Nixon needs for acquittal -- will be running for reelection this November, and

every one of them (either 33 or 34,

because three into 100 won't go) is reportedly terrified at the prospect of having to campaign for reelection back home, while at the same time

having to participate in a nationally televised trial on one of the heaviest questions in American history, and

then being forced to cast a

monumentally public vote either for or against President Nixon on the

very eve of their own election days.

If it comes down to that, in terms of timing, the Public Opinion Polls

will no doubt be a much more potent factor than they have been up to now -- for the same reason that

Congress waited until The Polls

climbed over 50% in favor of

impeachment before getting the

process underway. . . and there is

not much Nixon can do now to

affect The Polls enough to change

the House vote on impeachment.

But his ability to affect the outcome of the Senate/Conviction vote is a

hard thing to argue with. For one

thing, he plans to spend most of the summer flashing around Europe,

Israel, Egypt, Russia and anywhere

else where they'll talk to him, in

what will probably be a fairly

effective effort to grab enough

headlines to keep "the impeachment story" at least below the fold on most front pages.

Meanwhile, the haggard remnants of

his presidential staff will be

working about 18 hours a day to

suppress and deflate any new

evidence that might affect either his standing in The Polls or the

outcome of his Senate/Conviction

trial. Less than half of those 34

votes he needs for acquittal are up for reelection in '74, and any

incumbent president -- even one

who's already been impeached --

has a massive amount of leverage

when it comes to using the political pork barrel.

There is not much doubt, on the

numbers question, that at least 20

the 100 senators will not vote to convict Nixon under any

circumstances. . . unless he violates that old law of Indiana politics

about being "found in bed with either a live man or a dead woman."

Nixon is not one of your more

vulnerable politicians in this area. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine him being in bed at all-- and especially not with anything human.

So we can scratch 20 votes, for

starters -- which means he needs

only 14 more, and we want to remember here that he'll be dealing almost entirely with Yahoo

Republicans and Redneck Southern

Democrats. Given the 34/66 cut, he

can afford to ignore every man in

the Senate who has ever been even

remotely suspected of anti-Nixon

sympathies. . . so he can write off at least 50 votes with one stroke,

which means he will not be far off

if he assumes a mathematical base

of 50 votes definitely against him, 20 definitely for him, and 30

undecided.

Of those 30, he needs only 14 -- and any man who has spent his entire

adult life dealing on the ethical

fringes of Washington politics

should feel fairly comfortable with those numbers. Any president who

can't piece off 14 senators would

never have made it to the White

House in the first place.

And Nixon has two extremely heavy

hole cards: (1) He has personal

control over most of the potentially

fatal evidence that might be used against him if he ever conies to trial (the Oval Office tapes, which he

retains the option to destroy now or later, if he hasn't already done that. .

.) and (2) he has become such a

personal embarrassment and

political millstone around the neck of the Republican party that he

could easily buy at least ten of those votes by agreeing, in secret, to

resign the presidency in a gesture of splendid martyrdom within 48 hours

after the Senate votes not to convict

him on the House impeachment charges.

This solution would get a lot of

people off the hook -- especially

Nixon, who has nothing to gain from hanging on for another two years in the White House. His effectiveness

as president was a wasted hope

from the very beginning -- but it has taken five years, two elections and one mind-bending scandal to make

the cheap little bastard understand it.

Even Nixon should understand, now, that the only hope for his

salvation in the history books is to somehow become a martyr and the

most obvious way to do that, at this point in the saga, is to make some

kind of a deal with the heavies in

his own party to get him off their

backs as quickly as possible by

trading the guarantee of a dignified resignation for a vote of acquittal in the Senate.

This is a pretty good bet, I think,

and unless the Rodino committee comes up with some unnaturally

strong evidence before the House

votes on impeachment, I don't have

much faith in a Senate vote for

conviction. A working figure, for

now, would be about 60-40 against Nixon. . . but 60-40 is not enough; it has to be 67-33 again, and that will be a hard nut to make.

In addition to the leverage it gives Nixon with the gurus of his own

party, the "Resignation in exchange

for Acquittal" strategy has a certain appeal for the Democrats -- but only if it can be arranged and finished off before January 20th of 1975. If

Gerald Ford assumes the

presidency before that date, he will only be legally eligible to run for one more term. But if Ford becomes

president anytime after January of

'75, he'll be eligible for two terms, and most Democrats in the Senate

would prefer to short-circuit that

possibility.

So Nixon is not without options, when it comes down to nut-cutting

time. There is very little chance that he will finish his second term, but the odds for a scenario of

impeachment in the House, acquittal in the Senate and then a maudlin

spectacle of martyred resignation

before January 20th of next year are pretty good.

One of the very few drastic

developments that could alter that

timetable would be an unexpected

crunch of some kind that would force Nixon to yield up his tapes.

But nothing in the recent behavior of either the president or his lawyers shows any indication of that. As

long as he clings to the tapes, Nixon has a very strong bargaining

position vis-a-vis both the people

who insist on hearing them and

those few whose physical freedom

depends on nobody hearing them.

At least a half-dozen voices on

those tapes belong to people who

are scheduled to go on trial, very soon, on serious felony charges. . .

and they are the same ones,

presumably, who attended that

secret meeting in the White House,

last July, when it was decided that the tapes should never be released.

It is safe to assume that there were probably some very strong and

pragmatic reasons for that decision

-- particularly in the cases of "Bob"

Haldeman and John Ehrlichman,

whose fate in the courts is

considered to be almost entirely dependent on Nixon's resolve to

hang on to those tapes at all costs. .

. Or, failing that, to destroy them if that ever seems necessary.

Nixon understands this. On the basis of his own crudely edited

transcripts, there is enough

evidence on those tapes to have

Nixon impeached, convicted and

jailed for his own protection before the first football Sunday in

September. For some reason that

probably not even Nixon understands now, he gave seven of

these tapes to Judge Sirica last

winter. Two or three of them at

least were found to be unaltered

originals, and Sirica eventually

turned these over to the House

Judiciary Committee as evidence in

the impeachment inquiry.

So there are a hundred or more

people wandering around

Washington today who have heard

"the real stuff," as they put it -- and

despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises,

there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who

felt shocked, depressed or angry

after reading the edited White

House Transcripts should ever be

allowed to hear the actual tapes,

except under heavy sedation or

locked in the truck of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real

stuff without feeling a compulsion

to do something like drive down to

the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence.

Yes. . . looking back at that line I just wrote, it occurs to me that

almost half the people I know have

been feeling that kind of compulsion almost steadily for the last eight or nine years. My friend Yail Bloor,

for instance, claims to have thrown a whole garbage can full of live

rats, roaches and assorted small

vermin over the White House fence

about a week before Lyndon

Johnson announced his retirement in 1968. "It was a wonderful feeling,"

he says, "but only because it was Johnson. I knew, for some reason,

that he would really hate the sight of big rats on the White House

lawn." He paused and reached for his snuffbox, taking a huge hit of Dr.

Johnson's best in each nostril.

"I'm not sure why," he went on, "but I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of doing a thing like that to Nixon. He might actually like rats."

Mother of babbling God, I just took a break from this gibberish long

enough to watch the evening news. .

. and there was the face and voice

of Tex Colson, jolting a Washington courtroom with a totally unforeseen confession of guilt on one count of obstruction of justice in return -- on the basis of an elaborately covered TV statement on the subject of his

own guilt and deep involvement in

almost every aspect of Watergate --

for the opportunity to take whatever punishment he deserves and purge

himself once and for all by "telling everything I know" about "many things I have not been able to talk freely about until now."

Colson -- of all people! First he

converts to Jesus, and now he's

copping a plea and holding a press

conference on national TV to

announce that he intends to confess everything. Which means,

apparently, that he is now available to testify for the prosecution in

every Watergate-related trial from

now until all his old friends and conspirators are either put behind

bars with a Gideon Bible in their

hands or standing in line at a soup kitchen in Butte, Montana.

What will Nixon make of this freakout? Tex Colson, one of the most

unprincipled thugs in the history of American politics, was supposed to

be a main link in that unbreakable

and fatally interdependent Inner

Circle -- along with Haldeman,

Ehrlichman and Nixon -- who

wouldn't think twice about stonewalling God himself. Not even

Richard Nixon, at the peak of his

power and popularity, felt

comfortable with the knowledge

that a monster like Colson had an

office in the White House. Nixon

felt so strongly about Colson's

savagery, in fact, that he went out of his way to defame him by

deliberately publishing some of his own harsh judgments on Colson's

total lack of any sense of ethics or morality in the official White House

Transcripts.

And Nixon speechwriter Pat

Buchanan, widely regarded as one

of the most aggressive, hardline

right-wingers since Josef Goebbels, once described Colson as "the

meanest man in American politics".

. . which is no small compliment,

coming from Buchanan, who has

spent the better part of his last

decade working with some of the meanest and most congenitally

fascistic bastards ever to work for

any government.

I will have to call Buchanan

tomorrow and ask him what he

thinks about Tex Colson now. As a

matter of fact, I will have to call a lot of people tomorrow about this

thing -- because if Colson really is serious about telling everything he knows, Richard Nixon is in very

deep trouble. He may as well go out on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow

and start peddling those tapes to the highest bidder, because Colson

knows enough ugly stories about the Nixon regime to make most of the

talk on those tapes seem like

harmless cocktail gossip.

At a glance, there are two ways to

view Colson's breakdown: One is

to take his conversion to Jesus

seriously, which is difficult. . . and the other is to take it as a warning that even the president should have better sense than to cross "the meanest man in American politics."

There is another way to interpret it,

but that will have to wait for later --

along with a lot of other things. This is not the kind of story to try to cope with while roaming back and forth

across the country in jet airliners. . .

although there is nothing in any of the current journalism out of

Washington, on the tube or in print, to indicate that it is any easier to cope with there than in Key

Biscayne, Calgary, or even Mexico

City. The entire Washington Press

Corps seems at least temporarily

paralyzed by the sheer magnitude

and complexity of the thing. . .

It will be a nasty story to cover,

especially in the swamp-like

humidity of a Washington summer. .

. but it is definitely worth watching, and perhaps even being a part of,

because whatever kind of judgment

and harsh reality finally emerges

will be an historical landmark in the calendar of civilizations and a

beacon, for good or ill, to all the generations that will inherit this

earth -- or whatever we leave of it -

- just as surely as we inherited it from the Greeks and the Romans,

the Mayans and the Incas, and even

from the "Thousand Year Reich."

The impeachment of Richard Nixon

will end in a trial that will generate an interminable blizzard of

headlines, millions-of-dollars'

worth of media coverage, and a

verdict that will not matter nearly as much to the defendant as it will to the jurors. By the time the trial

starts -- assuming that Nixon can

sustain his lifelong appetite for humiliation that has never been

properly gratified -- the fate of

Nixon himself will have shrunk to

the dimensions of a freakish little side effect. The short-lived disaster of his presidency is already

neutralized, and the outcome of his impeachment ordeal will have very

little effect on his role in

tomorrow's history texts. He will be grouped, along with presidents like Grant and Harding, as a corrupt and incompetent mockery of the

American Dream he praised so long and loud in all his speeches. . . not just as a "crook," but so crooked that he required the help of a

personal valet to screw his pants on every morning.

By the time Richard Milhous Nixon

goes on trial in the Senate, the only reason for trying him will be to

understand how he ever became

president of the United States at all.

. . and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American

Political System.

The trial of Richard Nixon, if it

happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream. The

importance of Nixon now is not

merely to get rid of him; that's a

strictly political consideration. . .

The real question is why we are

being forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections.

So, with the need for sleep coming

up very fast now, we want to look

at two main considerations: 1) The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the

Nuremberg trials forced Germany to

confront itself. . . and 2) The

absolutely vital necessity of filling the vacuum that the Nixon

impeachment will leave, and the

hole that will be there in 1976.

Rolling Stone, #164, July 4, 1974

Fear and Loathing in

Limbo:

The Scum Also Rises

. . . before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a

mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored?

What did it matter who was

manager? One gets sometimes

such a flash of insight. The

essentials of this affair lay deep

under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of

meddling.

-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of

Darkness

Well. . . this is going to be difficult.

That sold-out knuckle-head refugee

from a 1969 "Mister Clean" TV

commercial has just done what only

the most cynical and paranoid kind

of malcontent ever connected with

national politics would have dared

to predict. . .

If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this

typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician --

any politician -- and hurl the goddamn machine through his front

window. . . flush the bugger out

with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run

him naked down Main Street in

Aspen with a bell around his neck

and black lumps all over his body

from the jolts of a high-powered

"Bull Buster" cattle prod.

But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point

where I will probably not do that --

at least not today, because that

blundering dupe in the White House

has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.

About five hours after I'd sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off

on the mojo wire and into the cold

maw of the typesetter in San

Francisco, Gerald Ford called a

press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a

"full, free and absolute"

presidential pardon, covering any

and all crimes Richard Nixon may

or may not have committed during

the entire five and a half years of his presidency.

Ford sprung his decision with no

advance warning at 10:40 on a

peaceful Sunday morning in

Washington, after emerging from a

church service with such a powerful

desire to dispense mercy that he rushed back to the White House -- a short hump across Lafayette Park --

and summoned a weary Sunday-

morning skeleton crew of

correspondents and cameramen to

inform them, speaking in curiously

zombielike tones, that he could no

longer tolerate the idea of ex-

President Nixon suffering in grief-

crazed solitude out there on the

beach in San Clemente, and that his conscience now compelled him to

end both the suffering of Nixon and

the national angst it was causing by means of a presidential edict of

such king-sized breadth and scope

as to scourge the poison of

"Watergate" from our national consciousness forever.

Or at least that's how it sounded to me, when I was jolted out of a

sweat-soaked coma on Sunday

morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. "Ford pardoned the bastard!" he screamed. "I warned you, didn't I? I buried him

twice, and he came back from the dead both times. . . Now he's done

it again; he's running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert."

I fell back on the bed, moaning

heavily. No, I thought. I didn't hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press

conference, to impress both the

Washington press corps and the

national TV audience with his

carefuly considered refusal to

interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's legal

duty to proceed on the basis of

evidence and "prosecute any and all individuals." Given the context of the question, Ford's reply was

widely interpreted as a signal to

Jaworski that the former president

should not be given any special

treatment. . . And it also meshed

with Ford's answer to a question in the course of his confirmation

hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he'd said, "I don't

think the public would stand for it,"

when asked if an appointed vice-

president would have the power to

pardon the president who'd

appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal

circumstances.

I recalled these things Ford had

said, but I was not so sure I'd heard Dick Tuck correctly -- or if I'd

really heard him at all. I held my

right hand up in front of my eyes,

trying to remember if I'd eaten

anything the night before that could cause hallucinations. If so, my hand would appear to be transparent, and I would be able to see all the bones and blood vessels very clearly.

But my hand was not transparent. I

moaned again, bringing Sandy in

from the kitchen to find out what

was wrong. "Did Tuck just call?" I asked.

She nodded: "He was almost

hysterical. Ford just gave Nixon a

full pardon."

I sat up quickly, groping around on the bed for something to smash.

"No!" I shouted. "That's impossible!"

She shook her head. "I heard it on the radio, too."

I stared at my hands again, feeling anger behind my eyes and noise

coming up in my throat: "That

stupid, lying bastard! Jesus! Who

votes for these treacherous

scumbags! You can't even trust the

dumb ones! Look at Ford! He's too

goddamn stupid to arrange a deal like that! Hell, he's almost too

stupid to lie."

Sandy shrugged. "He gave Nixon all the tapes, too."

"Holy shit!" I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. "What's Godwin's number in Washington?

That bone-head Rotarian

sonofabitch made a deal? Maybe

Dick knows something."

But it was 24 hours later when I

finally got hold of Goodwin, and by that time I had made a huge chart

full of dates, names and personal

connections -- all linked and cross-linked by a maze of arrows and

lines. The three names on the list

with far more connections than any

others were Laird, Kissinger and

Rockefeller. I had spent all night

working feverishly on the chart, and now I was asking Goodwin to have

a researcher check it all out.

"Well," he replied. "A lot of people

in Washington are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt

there was some kind of

arrangement, but --" He paused.

"Aren't we pretty damn close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you'll never be able to check all that stuff before

--"

"Mother of babbling god!" I muttered. The word "deadline"

caused my brain to seize up

momentarily. Deadline? Yes.

Tomorrow morning, about 15 more

hours. . . With about 90% of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent

Richard Nixon's conviction. The

only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my

assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he'd said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a

presidential pardon for Richard

Nixon "until the legal process has run its course."

Cazart! I hung up the phone and

tossed my chart across the room.

That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning

so close to the deadline that I

almost had a nervous breakdown

while failing completely. . . And

now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon,

leaving me with less than 24 hours

to revise completely a 15,000 word story that was already set in type.

It was absolutely impossible, no

hope at all -- except to lash as many last-minute pages as possible into

the mojo and hope for the best.

Maybe somebody in San Francisco

would have time, when the deadline

crunch came, to knit the two

versions together. . . But there was no way at all to be sure, so this will be an interesting article to read

when it comes off the press. . .

Indeed. . . cast your bread on the waters. . . why not?

I was brooding on this and cursing

Nixon, more out of habit than logic, for his eerie ability to make life

difficult for me. . . when it suddenly occurred to me that the villain this time was not Nixon, but Gerald

Ford. He was the one who decided

to pardon Nixon (for reasons we

can hopefully deal with later) on

August 30th, when he instructed his White House counsel, Philip

Buchen, to work out the legal details and consult with Nixon's

new defense lawyer, John Miller,

one-time campaign aide to Robert

Kennedy.

Incredibly, Miller informed Buchen

that he would have to make sure a

presidential pardon was

"acceptable" to Nixon; and 24 hours later he came back with word that

the ex-president, whose condition

had been publicly described by

anonymous "friends" that week as

almost terminally "disturbed and depressed" at the prospect of his imminent indictment by Jaworski's

grand jury -- had been able to get a grip on himself long enough to

decide that he would not be

offended by the offer of a full

presidential pardon -- just as long as the offer also granted Nixon sole ownership and control of all the White House tapes.

Ford quickly agreed, a concession

that could mean $5 million or more

to Nixon: He can milk them for the bulk of his presidential memoirs,

for which his new agent claims

already to have been offered a $2

million advance, and after that he

has the legal right either to destroy the tapes or sell them to the highest bidder.

Arrangements for the presidential

pardon were not completed until

Friday, September 6th -- and only

then after President Ford sent his

personal emissary, Benton L.

Becker, out to San Clemente to make sure things went smoothly.

Becker, a vaguely sinister

Washington attorney who is

currently under investigation by the IRS for alleged tax evasion,

describes himself as an "unpaid legal adviser" to President Ford and also a personal friend.

They first met in 1969, Becker says, when he volunteered to help then

Congressman Ford in his ill-

advised campaign to persuade the

House of Representatives to impeach U.S. Supreme Court

Justice William O. Douglas. That

effort failed miserably, and Ford

now seems embarrassed at the

memory of it, but he still defends

Becker as "a man of the highest professional ethics."

There is some disagreement on this.

According to The Washington Post,

"Justice Department sources said they were astounded when they

learned that Becker had been used

by the White House to negotiate with the former president. 'My God, doesn't Ford know about this case?'

said one source. The guy's under

investigation.' "

Which is not necessarily a bad sign, in this day and age. Most of my

friends have been "under

investigation" at one time or another in the past ten years or so, and my own FBI file dates back at least to 1958, when I refused to accept a

security clearance from the Air

Force, on the grounds that I didn't honestly consider myself a good

security risk because I disagreed

strongly with the slogan: "My

Country, Right or Wrong."

My clearance was not granted, but I was never hassled about it -- and

instead of being sent to a top-secret radar installation near the Arctic

Circle, I was passed over for

promotion and placed in a job as

sports editor of a base newspaper

on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Ah. . . but we seem to be wandering here. . . I was talking about Benton Becker and his delicate task of

negotiating the details of a full

presidential pardon for Richard

Nixon, whose tragic mental

condition was even then being

slandered almost daily, at this stage of the pardon, by unnamed friends

and advisers. At this point in the

pardon negotiations, both Ford and

Nixon had learned that Jaworski's

grand jury planned to indict the ex-president on as many as ten counts -

- an ugly prospect that led Ford to suggest that Nixon might temper the grand jury's aggressive attitude by

"volunteering" to admit at least some small measure of guilt for his role in the Watergate cover-up, in

exchange for the pardon that would

give him total immunity from

prosecution anyway, regardless of

what he admitted.

This suggestion almost torpedoed

the negotiations. Nixon "angrily rejected" it, says one of Ford's

White House advisers, and Becker was hard-pressed to keep the deal

on its rails. By Friday evening,

however, Nixon's mood had

improved to the point where he

agreed to accept both the pardon

and the tapes. Becker was elated; he flew back to Washington and

reported to Ford that his mission

had been 100% successful. The new

president received the news

gratefully, and scheduled a short-

notice press conference on Sunday

to lay the fine news on his public.

Yeah. . . I know: There is something just a little bit weird about that

story, but I don't have any time to check on it right now. All the

details, however, have appeared in

one form or another in either The Washington Post or The Washington Star-News.

I cite those sources only because the story makes no sense at all, on its face. . . But then none of the other stories in the New York or

Washington papers on the Monday

after the announcement of the Ford/Nixon treaty made much

sense, either. . . primarily because Sunday is a very hard day to find

anybody in Washington who doesn't

want to be found; which includes

just about everybody with good

sense except the kind of man who

calls a press conference at 10:30 on Sunday morning and drones out a

stone-faced announcement that he

knows will have half the nation

howling with rage before nightfall. .

. But by nightfall, Ford's version of

the pardon was spread all over the country on the wires, while enraged editors at the Times, the Post and the Star were still trying to pry their hotrod investigative reporters out of weekend cabins in the Virginia

mountains and beach-houses on the

Maryland shore.

I have very dim memories of Tuck's

call. Less than five hours earlier, I had passed out very suddenly in the bathtub, after something like 133

hours of non-stop work on a thing

I'd been dragging around with me for two months and revising in

ragged notebooks and on rented

typewriters in hotels from Key

Biscayne to Laguna Beach,

bouncing in and out of Washington

to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado. . . before

heading back to Washington again,

where the pressure valves finally

blew all at once in early August,

catching me in a state of hysterical exhaustion and screeching

helplessly for speed when Nixon suddenly caved in and quit,

ambushing me on the brink of a

deadline and wasted beyond the

help of anything but the most

extreme kind of chemo-therapy.

It takes about a month to recover

physically from a collapse of that

magnitude, and at least a year to

shake the memory. The only thing I

can think of that compares to it is that long, long moment of

indescribably intense sadness that

comes just before drowning at sea, those last few seconds on the cusp

when the body is still struggling but the mind has given up. . . a sense of absolute failure and a very clear

understanding of it that makes the

last few seconds before blackout

seem almost peaceful. Getting

rescued at that point is far more

painful than drowning: Recovery

brings back terrifying memories of

struggling wildly for breath. . .

This is precisely the feeling I had

when Tuck woke me up that morning to say that Ford had just

granted Nixon "full, free and

absolute" pardon. I had just written a long, sporadically rational brief, of sorts -- explaining how Nixon

had backed himself into a corner

and why it was inevitable that he

would soon be indicted and

convicted on a felony "obstruction of justice" charge, and then Ford would pardon him, for a lot of

reasons I couldn't agree with, but

which Ford had already stated so

firmly that there didn't seem to be much point in arguing about it. The logic of sentencing Nixon to a year in the same cell with John Dean

was hard to argue with on either

legal or ethical grounds, but I

understood politics well enough by

then to realize that Nixon would

have to plead guilty to something

like the rape/murder of a

Republican senator's son before

Gerald Ford would even consider

letting him spend any time in jail.

I had accepted this, more or less.

Just as I had more or less accepted -

- after 18 months of total

involvement in the struggle to get

rid of Nixon -- the idea that Gerald Ford could do just about anything he felt like doing, as long as he left me alone. My interest in national

politics withered drastically within hours after Nixon resigned.

After five and a half years of

watching a gang of fascist thugs

treating the White House and the

whole machinery of the federal government like a conquered

empire to be used like the spoils of war for any purpose that served

either the needs or whims of the

victors, the prospect of some

harmless, half-bright jock like

Gerry Ford running a cautious,

caretaker-style government for two

or even six years was almost a

welcome relief. Not even the

ominous sight of Vice President

Nelson Rockefeller hovering a

heartbeat away from the presidency

had much effect on my head.

After more than ten years of civil

war with the White House and all

the swine who either lived or

worked there, I was ready to give

the benefit of the doubt to almost

any president who acted half human

and had enough sense not to walk

around in public wearing a swastika armband.

This is more or less what I wrote, I think, after Nixon resigned and I

was faced with the obligation to fill

enough space to justify all those expenses I ran up while chasing

Nixon around the country and

watching him sink deeper and

deeper in the quicksand of his own

excrement. In the early stages of the Deathwatch, there was a definite

high in watching the Congress

reluctantly gearing up for a titanic battle with Richard Nixon and his

private army of fixers who had

taken over the whole executive

branch of the government by the

time he sailed triumphantly into his

second term.

By the middle of last summer, the

showdown had become inevitable

and when Nixon looked at the

balance sheet in August and saw

both the legislative and judicial

branches of the federal government

joining forces against him, he knew he was finished.

On August 9th, he quit and was gone from Washington 12 hours later in a cloud of disgrace. He was finished: There was no doubt about it. Even

his ranking staffers were muttering about his dangerously irrational

state of mind toward the end, and

his farewell speech to the Cabinet

and White House staff was so

clearly deranged that even I felt

sorry for him. . . And when the

helicopter whisked him off to exile in California, an almost visible

shudder of relief swept through the crowd on the White House lawn

that had gathered for the sad

spectacle of his departure.

Nixon was about 30,000 feet over St. Louis in Air Force One when,

his chosen successor, Gerald Ford,

took the oath. Ford had been

selected, by Nixon, to replace Spiro Agnew, convicted several months

earlier of tax fraud and extortion. . .

and Nixon himself, before quitting, had tacitly admitted his guilt in a felony conspiracy to obstruct

justice.

I left Washington the day after Ford was sworn in, too tired to feel

anything but a manic sense of relief as I staggered through the lobby at National Airport with about 200

pounds of transcripts of the Senate Watergate and House Judiciary

Committee Hearings that had been

rendered obsolete as evidence by

Nixon's forced resignation two days earlier. I was not quite sure why I wanted them, but evidence of any

kind is always reassuring to have,

and I felt that after two or three

months of sleep I might be able to

use them in some way.

Now, almost exactly four weeks later, that suitcase full of transcripts is still lying open beside my desk. .

. and now that Gerald Ford has

granted Nixon a presidential pardon so sweeping that he will never have to stand trial for anything, those

books of evidence that would have

guaranteed his impeachment if he

hadn't resigned are beginning to

pique my interest. . .

Honky Tonk Tunes and a Long-

Remembered Dream. . . Constant

Haggling, Useless Briefings and a Howling Voice at the Door

American politics will never be the same again.

-- Senator George McGovern,

Acceptance Speech, July 13th,

1972, Miami, Florida

Another hot, heavy rain in

Washington, at 4:33 on a wet

Wednesday morning, falling like

balls of sweat against my window. .

. Twelve feet wide and six feet tall,

the high yellow eye of the National Affairs Suite looking out across the rotting roofs of our nation's capital at least a mile away through the

haze and the rain to the fine white marble spire of the Washington

Monument and the dark dome of the

Capitol. . . Hillbilly music howling out of the radio across the room

from the typewriter.

. . . And when it's midnight in

Dallas, be somewhere on a big jet

plane. . . If I could only understand

you, maybe I could cope with the loneliness I feel. . .

Honky-tonk tunes and a quart of

Wild Turkey on the sideboard,

ripped to the tits on whatever it was in that bag I bought tonight from the bull fruit in Georgetown, looking

down from the desk at yesterday's

huge Washington Post headline: PRESIDENT ADMITS WITHHOLDING

DATA

TAPES SHOW HE APPROVED COVER-UP

Every half-hour on the half-hour, WXRA -- the truckers' station over

in Alexandria -- keeps babbling

more and more hideous news of

"rapidly dissolving" support in the House and the Senate. All ten

members of the House Judiciary

Committee who voted against the articles of impeachment on national TV last week have now reversed

themselves, for the record, and said they plan to vote for impeachment when -- or if -- it comes to a vote in the House on August 19th. Even

Barry Goldwater has leaked (and then denied) a UPI report that he

thinks Nixon should resign, for the good of the country. . . and also for the good of Goldwater and

everybody else in the Republican

party, such as it is.

Indeed. The rats are deserting the

ship at high speed. Even the dingbat senator from Colorado, Peter

Dominick -- the GOP claghorn who

nominated Nixon for the Nobel

Peace Prize less than two years ago

-- has called the president's 11th-hour admission of complicity in the Watergate cover-up "sorrowful

news."

We will not have Richard Nixon to

kick around much longer -- which is not especially "sorrowful news" to a lot of people, except that the

purging of the cheap little bastard is going to have to take place here in Washington and will take up the rest of our summer.

One day at a time, Sweet Jesus. . .

That's all I'm askin' from you. . .

And now the Compton Brothers

with a song about ". . . when the wine ran out and the jukebox ran out of tunes. . ."

Jesus, we need more ice and

whiskey here. Fill the bag with

water and suck down the dregs. The

rain is still lashing my window, the dawn sky is still black and this

room is damp and cold. Where is

the goddamn heat switch? Why is

my bed covered with newspaper

clips and U.S. Government Printing Office evidence books from the

Nixon impeachment hearings?

Ah. . . madness, madness. On a day

like this, not even the prospect of Richard Nixon's downfall can work

up the blood. This is stone, flatout fucking weather.

On another day like this, a long time ago, I was humming across the

bridge out of Louisville, Kentucky, in an old Chevy and three or four

good ole boys who worked with me

at a furniture factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana. . . The tires were hissing on the wet asphalt, the windshield wipers were lashing

back and forth in the early morning rain and we were hunkered down in

the car with our lunch bags and

moaning along with a mean country

tune on the radio when somebody

said:

"Jesus Christ. Why are we going to work on a day like this? We must be goddamn crazy. This is the kind of

day when you want to be belly-to-belly with a good woman, in a

warm bed under a tin roof with the

rain beating down and a bottle of

good whiskey right next to the bed."

Let me be there in your mornin', let me be there in your night. . . Let me be there when you need me. . . and

make it right.

Ah, this haunting, honky music. . . I am running a serious out-of-control fever for that long-remembered

dream of a tin-roof, hard-rain,

belly-to-belly day with a big iron bolt on the door and locked away in a deep warm bed from every

connection to the outside world

except a $14.95 tin radio wailing

tunes like "I Smell a Rat" and "The Wild Side of Life."

This is not your ideal flying

weather. Both National and Dulles

airports are "closed for the rest of the morning," they say. . . But despite all that I find myself on the phone demanding plane

reservations back to Colorado.

Fuck the weather. . .

Whoever answered the phone at

United Airlines said the weather

was "expected to be clear" by early afternoon and there were plenty of

seats open for the 4:40 flight to

Denver.

"Wonderful," I said, "but I want a first-class seat in the smokers'

section."

"I'll check," she said, and moments

later she was back with bad news:

"The smoking seats are all taken, sir, but if it makes no difference to you --"

"It does," I said. "I must smoke. I insist on it."

She checked again and this time the news was better: "I think we can open a smoking seat for you, sir.

Could I have your name?"

"Nader," I said. "R. Nader."

"How do you spell that?"

I spelled it for her, then set my

alarm for two and fell asleep on the couch, still wearing my wet

swimming trunks. After two months

on the Nixon Impeachment Trail, my

nerves were worn raw from the

constant haggling and frustrated

hostility of all those useless, early morning White House press

briefings and long, sweaty

afternoons pacing aimlessly around

the corridors of the Rayburn Office

Building on Capitol Hill, waiting for crumbs of wisdom from any two

or three of those 38 luckless

congressmen on the House Judiciary

Committee hearing evidence on the

possible impeachment of Richard

Nixon.

It was an eerie spectacle: The

whole Nixonian empire --

seemingly invincible less than two

years ago-- was falling apart of its own foul weight right in front of our eyes. There was no denying the vast

and historic proportions of the story, but covering it on a day-today basis was such a dull and

degrading experience that it was

hard to keep a focus on what was

really happening. It was essentially a lawyer's story, not a journalist's.

I never made that plane. Sometime

around noon I was jolted awake by

a pounding on my door and a voice

shouting, "Wake up, goddamnit, the whole town's gone crazy -- the

sonofabitch has caved in -- he's

quitting."

"No!" I thought. "Not now! I'm too weak to handle it." These goddamn rumors had kept me racing

frantically around Washington day

and night for almost a week -- and

when the shitrain finally began, I

was helpless. My eyes were

swollen shut with chlorine

poisoning and when I tried to get

out of bed to open the door, I almost snapped both ankles. I had fallen

asleep wearing rubber-soled

basketball shoes, which had wedged themselves between the

sheets at the foot of the bed so

firmly that my first thought was that somebody had strapped me down

on the bed.

The howling voice at my door was

Craig Vetter, another ROLLING

STONE writer who had been in town for two weeks trying to make some

kind of connection with Nixon's

priest. . . but the priest was finished now and the town was going wild.

A Washington Post reporter said he had never seen the newsroom so

frantic -- not even when John

Kennedy was murdered or during

the Cuban missile crisis. The

prevailing rumors on Capitol Hill

had Nixon either addressing a joint session of Congress at 4:30 that

afternoon or preparing a final

statement for delivery at 7:00 on all three networks. . . but a call to the White House pressroom spiked both

these rumors, although the place

was filling up with reporters who'd

picked up an entirely different rumor: That either Ziegler or Nixon himself would soon appear in the

pressroom to make a statement of

some kind.

Six more calls from the National

Affairs Suite churned up at least six more impossible rumors. Every

switchboard in town that had any

connection with either journalism or politics was jammed and useless.

Later that night, even the main

White House switchboard jammed

up for the first time most reporters could remember, and for the next

two days almost everybody who

worked in the White House -- even

private secretaries -- kept their

home phones off the hook because

of the chaos.

It was about 1:30 on Wednesday

afternoon when I got through to

Marty Nolan in the White House

pressroom. We compared rumors

and killed both lists very quickly.

"This is all crazy bullshit," said

Nolan. "We're just being jerked around. He's not going to do

anything serious today, but just on the chance that he might, I don't dare leave this goddamn dungeon."

I had been on the verge of going

down there, but after arranging with Nolan and about six other people in strategic positions in different parts of town to call me instantly if

anything started to happen, I

decided that the best thing to do was to take both the TV set and the FM

radio down to a table by the pool and have all my calls transferred

down to the lifeguard's telephone. . .

Which turned out to be the best of

all possible solutions: Vetter and I set up a totally efficient

communications post beside the

pool, and for the next 48 hours we

were able to monitor the whole

craziness from our table beside the pool.

The Suck-Tide Reaches San

Clemente. . . Ziegler Brings the

News to the Boss. . . General Haig and the Bag of Dimes. . .

The Sybaritic Priest and the

Mentally Retarded Rabbi. . .

More Talk of the 'Suicide Option'

Well. . . the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday

afternoon with all the grace and

meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the

Bowery -- exploding on the

sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones

who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of

"innocent bystanders" who still don't know what happened. . .

. . . And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully

incomplete quality about the whole

thing. All over Washington tonight

is the stench of a massive psychic

battle that nobody really won.

Richard Nixon has been broken,

whipped and castrated all at once,

but even for me there is no real

crank or elation in having been a front-row spectator at the final

scenes, the Deathwatch, the first

time in American history that a

president has been chased out of the White House and cast down in the

ditch with all the other geeks and

common criminals. . .

Looking back on the final few

months of his presidency, it is easy to see that Nixon was doomed all

along -- or at least from that moment when Archibald Cox first decided

to force a showdown on the

"executive privilege" question by sending a U.S. marshal over to the

White House with a subpoena for

some of the Oval Office tapes.

Nixon naturally defied that

subpoena, but not even the crazed

firing of Cox, Richardson and

Ruckelshaus could make it go away.

And when Jaworski challenged

Nixon's right to defy that subpoena in the U.S. Supreme Court, the

wheels of doom began rolling. And

from that point on, it was clear to all the principals except Nixon

himself that the Unthinkable was

suddenly inevitable; it was only a

matter of time. . . And it was just about then that Richard Nixon began losing his grip on reality.

Within hours after Jaworski and

Nixon's "Watergate lawyer" James St. Clair had argued the case in a

special session of the Court, I

talked to Pat Buchanan and was

surprised to hear that Nixon and his

wizards in the White House were confident that the verdict would be 5-3 in their favor. Even Buchanan,

who thinks rationally about 79% of

the time, apparently believed -- less than two weeks before the Court

ruled unanimously against Nixon --

that five of the eight justices who would have to rule on that question would see no legal objection to

ratifying Nixon's demented idea that anything discussed in the president's official office -- even a patently

criminal conspiracy -- was the

president's personal property, if he chose to have it recorded on his

personal tape-recording machinery.

The possibility that even some of

the justices The Boss himself had

appointed to the Court might not

cheerfully endorse a concept of

presidential immunity that mocked

both the U.S. Constitution and the

Magna Carta had apparently been

considered for a moment and then

written off as too farfetched and

crazy even to worry about by all of

Nixon's personal strategists.

It is still a little difficult to believe, in fact, that some of the closest

advisers to the president of a

constitutional democracy in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-four

might actually expect the highest

court in any constitutional democracy to crank up what is

probably the most discredited

precedent in the history of Anglo-

American jurisprudence -- the

"divine right of kings" -- in order to

legalize the notion that a president of the United States or any other

would-be democracy is above and

beyond "the law."

That Nixon and his personal

Gestapo actually believed this

could happen is a measure of the

insanity quotient of the people

Nixon took down in the bunker with

him when he knew the time had

come to get serious.

But even as they raved, you could

hear a hollow kind of paranoid

uncertainty in their voices, as if they could already feel the ebb tide

sucking around their ankles -- just as Nixon must have felt it when he

walked alone on the beach at San

Clemente a few weeks earlier,

trudging slowly along in the surf

with his pantlegs rolled up while he waited in angry solitude for the

results of the Supreme Court vote

on his claim of "executive

privilege." That rush of sucking water around his ankles must have

almost pulled him out to sea when

Ziegler called down from the big dune in front of La Casa Pacifica:

"Mister President! Mister

President! We just got the news!

The vote was unanimous -- eight to

zero."

Nixon whoops with delight: He

stops in his waterfilled tracks and hurls out both arms in the twin-victory sign. "Wonderful!" he shouts. "I knew we'd win it, Ron!

Even without that clown Renchburg.

It wasn't for nothing that I appointed

those other dumb farts to the Court!"

Ziegler stares down at him, at this doomed scarecrow of a president

down there on the edge of the surf.

Why is he grinning? Why does he

seem so happy at this terrible news?

"No!" Ziegler shouts. "That is not what I meant. That is not what I

meant at all!" He hesitates, choking back a sob. "The vote was eight to zero, Mister President -- against you."

"What?" The scarecrow on the beach goes limp. His arms collapse, his hands flap crazily around the

pockets of his wet pants. "Those dirty bastards!" he screams. "We'll break their balls!"

"Yes sir!" Ziegler shouts. "They'll wish they'd never been born!" He jerks a notebook out of his inside

coat pocket and jots: "Break their balls."

By this time the wet president is

climbing the dune in front of him.

"What happened?" Nixon snarls.

"Did somebody get to Burger?"

Ziegler nods. "What else? Probably it was Edward Bennet Williams."

"Of course," says Nixon. "We should never have left that dumb

sonofabitch back there in

Washington by himself. We know

he'll do business: That's why we put him there." He kicks savagely at a lone ice plant in the sand.

"Goddamnit! Where was Colson?

Burger was his assignment, right?"

Ziegler winces. "Colson's in jail, sir. Don't you remember?"

Nixon stares blankly, then recovers.

"Colson? In jail? What did he do?"

He picks up a kelp head and lashes

it against his shin. "Never mind, I can remember now -- but what

about Ehrlichman? He can jerk

Burger and those other clowns

around like a goddamn Punch and

Judy show!"

Ziegler stares out to sea for a

moment, his eyes cloud over. "Well,

sir. . . John's not much good to us anymore. He's going to prison."

Nixon stiffens, dropping the kelp

head in the sand. "Holy shit, Ron!

Why should John go to prison? He's

one of the finest public servants I've ever had the privilege of knowing!"

Ziegler is weeping openly now, his

emaciated body is wracked by deep

sobs. "I don't know, sir. I can't explain it." He stares out to sea again, fighting to gain control of

himself. "These are terrible times,

Mister President. Our enemies are closing in. While you were out there on the beach, the Avis agency in

Laguna called and canceled our

credit. They took my car, Mister President! My gold Cadillac

convertible! I was on the phone

with Buzhardt -- about the Supreme

Court business, you know -- when I

looked out the window and saw this

little nigger in an Avis uniform

driving my car out the gate. The

guards said he had a writ of seizure, signed by the local sheriff."

"My God!" Nixon exclaims. "We'll break his balls! Where's a

telephone? I'll call Haldeman."

"It's no use, sir," Ziegler replies.

"We can't make any outgoing calls until we pay the phone company

$33,000. They sent a man down to

fix the lines so we can only take

incoming calls -- for the next 86

hours, and then we'll be cut off

entirely. If you want to call

Washington, we'll have to walk to

the San Clemente Inn and use a pay

phone. I think General Haig has a bag of dimes in his room."

Nixon stiffens again; his brain is

mired in deep thought. Then his

eyes light up and he grabs Ziegler

by the arm, dragging him toward the house. "Come on, Ron," he snaps, "I have an idea."

Ziegler stumbles along behind the

president: He feels the energy

flowing into him -- The Boss is on

the move.

Nixon is talking as he runs: "I think I've isolated our problem, Ron. We

need credit, right? OK, Where's that Jew?"

"Jew?"

"You know who I mean, goddamnit

-- that rabbi. They can always get

credit, can't they? A rabbi? We'll

send some of the Secret Service

boys up there to Laguna to round

him up. He's probably in the bar up there on top of the Surf and Sand;

that's where he hangs out." Nixon

laughs wildly now. "Shit, nobody questions a rabbi's credit! You tell the SS boys to pick him up and

throw a real scare into him, then

bring him down here and I'll stroke him."

Now Ziegler is laughing. His eyes

are bright and he is writing fast in his notebook. "It's a wonderful idea, sir, just wonderful! First we

stonewall the bastards, then we

outflank them with a Jew!"

Nixon nods happily. "They'll never

know what hit 'em, Ron. You know what I've always said: 'When the

going gets tough, the tough get

going.' "

"That's right, sir. I remember when Coach Lombardi --"

Nixon cuts him off with a sudden

clap of his wet hands; the sound

causes two Secret Service agents in the nearby shrubbery to go for their guns. "Hold on, Ron! Just hold it right there! You know who taught

Coach Lombardi everything he

knew?" He smiles deeply. "Me! The President!"

Ziegler wrings his hands, his

eyeballs bulge, his face is twisted with reverence. "I remember that, sir -- I remember!"

"Good, Ron, good! Only losers forget. . . And you know what

Coach Lombardi said about that."

Nixon seizes his press secretary by both elbows and comes up close to

his face: His breath is foul, his

eyeballs are bloodshot, his pupils

are dangerously dilated, his words come in short, high-pitched barks

like a rabid hyena: "You show me a good loser, Ron -- and I'll show you a loser!"

Ziegler is overwhelmed: His eyes

are so wide that he can't even blink; his body is rigid but his soul is on fire. His face is a mask of pure zeal: Ron Ziegler -- left-hand man to a

doomed and criminal president, the

political flip side of every burned-out acid freak who voted for

Goldwater and then switched to Tim Leary until the pain got too bad and the divine light of either Jesus or Maharaj Ji lured him off in the

wake of another Perfect Master.

Ah, poor Ron. I knew him well

enough. It was Ziegler, in fact, who tipped me off many months ago that

Nixon was finished. This was back

in July, in that lull before the storm when the wizards in Washington

were beginning to nod glumly at

each other whenever somebody

suggested that the impeachment drive seemed to be faltering and

that maybe Nixon was bottoming

out, that in fact he had already

bounced off the bottom and was

preparing to take the offensive once again.

These were the salad days of early

summer, before the fateful Supreme

Court decision, when Nixon's

Goebbels -- ex-White House

"communications director" Ken Clawson -- was creating a false

dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon's year-long slide in the public opinion

polls with a daily drumbeat of

heavy-headline-grabbing attacks on

"professional Nixon-haters" in the press, and "unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress." At that point in time, most of Nixon's traditional allies were beginning to hear the

death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at

night, and even Billy Graham had

deserted him. So Clawson, in a

stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a

mentally retarded rabbi on the

payroll and sent them forth to do

battle with the forces of Evil.

Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, wallowed joyfully in his role as

"Nixon's priest" for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more

than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the

church were horrified, but McLaughlin gave them the back of

his hand and, instead, merely

cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson

could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was

planning to marry his girlfriend.

This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House chief of staff,

whose brother was a legitimate

priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin

disappeared very suddenly, after six

giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him

since.

But Clawson was ready for that. No

sooner had the priest been deep-

sixed than he unveiled another, holy man -- the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a

genuine dingbat with barely enough

sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flaky presence to anything Clawson

aimed him at. Under the banner of

something called the "National

Citizens' Committee for Fairness to the President," he "organized"

rallies, dinner parties and press

conferences all over the country.

One of his main financial backers

was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious

fascist and the father of New York

Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one

of the Republican swing votes on

the House Judiciary Committee who

quietly voted for impeachment.

Only a month ago, the storms of destiny seemed to be subsiding for

President Nixon. Among the Knowledgeable in Washington, the conviction was growing that the impeachment campaign against

him had spent its moment. . . [But]

it is now clear that the

Knowledgeable were wrong, that

they mistook a break in the clouds for lasting sunshine. . .

-- R. W. Apple Jr., The New York Times, July 28th, 1974

In fact, however, Nixon was

already doomed by the time the

Rodino committee got around to voting. The unanimous Supreme

Court vote on the question of

"executive privilege" with regard to the 64 disputed tapes was the

beginning of the end. Nixon had

known all along that the release of those tapes would finish him -- but he had consistently lied about their contents: not only to the press and the public, but also to his wife and his daughters and all the hardcore

loyalists on his staff. He lied about the tapes to Barry Goldwater and

Gerry Ford, to Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, to Al Haig and Pat

Buchanan and even to his own

attorney, James St. Clair -- who

was stupid enough, like the others, to have believed him when he

swore that the tapes he refused to

let anybody listen to would finally prove his innocence.

Both of his lawyers, in fact, had

done everything in their power to

avoid hearing the goddamn things. It finally required a direct order from

Judge Sirica, on two separate occasions, to compel Buzhardt and

St. Clair to listen to the tapes.

Buzhardt was first, and within hours after hearing the fatal conversation with Haldeman of June 23rd, 1972,

he was rushed to the intensive care ward of a private hospital in

Virginia with a serious "heart attack" that rendered him

incommunicado for almost two

months.

I was sitting in a bar called the

Class Reunion, about two blocks from the White House, when I heard

the tragic news. . . And I recall

saying to Boston Globe

correspondent Marty Nolan: "We'll never see Buzhardt again. They

can't afford to let him live. If he survives whatever Ziegler put in his coffee when he was listening to

those tapes, Haldeman will go out

there and stick a hatpin up his nose while he's wasted on Demerol, jam

it straight into his brain when the nurse gets out of the room. Take my

word for it, Marty. I know how these people operate. Buzhardt will never leave that hospital alive."

Nolan nodded, oblivious to

Buzhardt's grim fate. At that point, almost every journalist in

Washington assigned to the Nixon

Deathwatch had been averaging

about two hours sleep a night since the beginning of summer. Many

were weak and confused,

succumbing to drink or drugs

whenever possible. Others seemed

to hover from day to day on the brink of terminal fatigue. Radio and TV reporters in the White House

pressroom were reduced to tearing

articles out of the nearest

newspaper and reading them

verbatim straight over the air --

while the newspaper and magazine

people would tape the live

broadcasts and then transcribe them word for word under their own

bylines. By the end of July, the

prospect of having to cover an

impeachment debate in the House

and then a trial in the Senate for three or four months without relief was almost unbearable. As August

began and Nixon still showed no

signs of giving up, there was more

and more talk of "the suicide

option."

Last Breakfast at the White

House. . . The Scumbag I Passed

to a New Generation. . . Cold

Turkey Swoops Down & Panic for Watergate Junkies

Sometime around dawn on the

Friday morning of Richard Milhous Nixon's last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks

and a red rain parka, laced my head with some gray Argentine snuff, and took an elevator down to the big

pool below my window in the

National Affairs Suite at the

Washington Hilton. It was still

raining, so I carried my portable TV

set, a notebook and four bottles of Bass Ale in a waterproof canvas

bag.

The lower lobby was empty, except for the night watchman -- a meaty

black gentleman whose main duty

was to keep people like me out of

the pool at night, but we had long

since come to a friendly

understanding on the subject. It was against the rules to swim when the

pool was closed but there was no

rule to prevent a Doctor of Divinity from going out there to meditate on the end of the diving board.

"Mornin', Doc," said the watchman.

"Up a little early, ain't you?

Especially on a nasty day like this."

"Nasty?" I replied. "What are you --

some kind of goddamn Uncle Tom

Republican? Don't you know who's

leaving town today?"

He looked puzzled for a moment,

then his face cracked into a grin.

"You're right, by god! I almost forgot. We finally got rid of that

man, didn't we, Doc?" He nodded happily. "Yes, sir, we finally got rid of him."

I reached into my bag and opened two Bass Ales. "This is a time for celebration," I said, handing him one of the bottles. I held mine out in front of me. "To Richard Nixon," I said, "may he choke on the money he stole."

The watchman glanced furtively

over his shoulder before lifting his ale for the toast. The clink of the two bottles coming together echoed

briefly in the vast, deserted lobby.

"See you later," I said. "I have to

meditate for a while, then hustle down to the White House to make

sure he really leaves. I won't

believe it until I see it with my own eyes."

The flat surface of the pool was

pocked with millions of tiny

raindrops beating steadily down on

the water. There was a chain lock

on the gate, so I climbed over the

fence and walked down to the deep

end, where I located a dry spot

under a tree near the diving board.

The CBS Morning News would be on in about 20 minutes; I turned on the TV set, adjusted the aerial and turned the screen so I could see it from the pool about 20 feet away. It was a system I'd worked out last

summer at the Senate Watergate

hearings: After every two laps, I

could look over the edge of the pool and check the screen to see if

Hughes Rudd's face had appeared

yet. When it did, I would climb out of the water and lie down on the

grass in front of the set -- turn up the

sound, light a cigarette, open a fresh Bass Ale and take notes while I

watched the tiny screen for a

general outline of whatever action

Sam Ervin's Roman circus might be

expected to generate that day.

I stayed out there by the pool for

almost two hours, sliding in and out of the water to run a few laps and

then back out to stretch out on the grass to make a note now and then

on the news. Not much was

happening, except for a few kinky

interviews down by the White House gate with people who

claimed to have been on the

Deathwatch for three days and

nights without sleeping. . . But very few of them could even begin to

explain why they were doing it. At

least half the crowd around the

White House during those last few

days looked like people who spend

every weekend prowling the

Demolition Derby circuit.

The only other action on the news

that Friday morning was an occasional rerun of Nixon's official resignation speech from the night

before. I had watched it with Vetter in the Watergate bar. It seemed like a good place to be on that night,

because I had also been there on the night of June 17th, 1972 -- while the Watergate burglary was happening

five floors above my head.

But after I'd watched Nixon's

speech for the third time, a strange feeling of nervousness began

working on me and I decided to get out of town as soon as possible.

The movie was over -- or at least it would be over in two or three

hours. Nixon was leaving at 10:00,

and Ford would be sworn in at

noon. I wanted to be there on the

White House lawn when Nixon was

lifted off. That would be the end of my movie.

It was still raining when I left and the pool was still empty. I put the TV set back in the canvas bag and

climbed over the gate by the lifeguard shack. Then I stopped and looked back for a moment, knowing

I would never come back to this

place, and if I did it would not be the same. The pool would be the

same, and it would be easy enough

to pick up a case of Bass Ale or a

battery TV set. . . And I could even come down here on rainy summer

mornings and watch the morning

news. . .

But there would not be this kind of

morning anymore, because the main ingredient for that mix was no

longer available in Washington; and if you asked any of the people who

were known to have a real taste for it, the hard-core Nixon aficionados, they all understood that it would not be available again for a hell of a

long time and probably never.

Nobody even talks about substitutes or something almost exactly the

same. The mold disappeared about

three minutes after they made that

evil bastard. . . and although there was never any doubt about who

stole it, nobody had any proof.

No. . . even with the pool and the

ale and grass and the portable TV

set, the morning news will not be

the same without the foul specter of Richard Nixon glaring out of the

tube. But the war is over now and

he lost. . . Gone but not forgotten, missed but not mourned; we will

not see another one like him for

quite a while. He was dishonest to a

fault, the truth was not in him, and if it can be said that he resembled any other living animal in this world, it could only have been the hyena.

I took a cab down to the White

House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the

guardhouse window. The cop inside

glanced at my card, then looked up -

- fixing me with a heavy-lidded

Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer

to open the gate. The pressroom in

the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden,

where a big olive-drab helicopter

was perched on the lawn, about 100

feet out from the stairs. The rain had stopped and a long, red carpet was

laid out on the wet grass from the

White House door to the helicopter.

I eased through the crowd of

photographers and walked out,

looking back at the White House,

where Nixon was giving his final

address to a shocked crowd of

White House staffers. I examined

the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I

heard a loud rumbling behind me; I

turned around just in time to see

Richard and Pat coming toward me,

trailing their daughters and

followed Closely by Gerald Ford

and Betty. Their faces were grim

and they were walking very slowly;

Nixon had a glazed smile on his

face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden

Indian full of Thorazine.

His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and

nodded hello but he didn't seem to

recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the

door of the helicopter. . . Then he spun around very suddenly and

threw his arms straight up in the

famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the

crowd at the White House.

Nobody was talking. A swarm of

photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms-- but his

body had spun around too fast for

his feet, and as his arms wents up I saw him losing his balance. The

grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and

stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and

Ziegler were already inside; Ed

Cox and Tricia went in quickly

without looking back, and a Marine

in dress blues shut the door and

jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine

cranked up to a dull, whining roar.

I was so close that the noise hurt my ears. The rotor blades were

invisible now, but the wind was

getting heavier; I could feel it

pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets. For an instant I thought I could see Richard Nixon's face

pressed up to the window. Was he

smiling? Was it Nixon? I couldn't

be sure. And now it made no

difference.

The wind blast from the rotors was

blowing people off-balance now; photographers were clutching their

equipment against their bodies and

Gerald Ford was leading his wife

back toward the White House with

a stony scowl on his face.

I was still very close to the

helicopter, watching the tires. As

the beast began rising, the tires

became suddenly fat; there was no

more weight on them. . . The

helicopter went straight up and

hovered for a moment, then

swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then

angled up into the fog. Richard

Nixon was gone.

The end came so suddenly and with

so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the

White House had sent up a

mushroom cloud to announce that

the scumbag had been passed to

what will have to pose for now as

another generation. The main

reaction to Richard Nixon's passing

-- especially among journalists who had been on the Death-watch for

two years -- was a wild and

wordless orgasm of long-awaited

relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of

depression that still endures.

Within hours after Nixon's

departure, every bar in downtown

Washington normally frequented by

reporters was a sinkhole of gloom.

Several hours after Gerald Ford

was sworn in, I found ex-Kennedy

speechwriter Dick Goodwin in a bar not far from the ROLLING STONE

office across the street from the

White House. He was slumped in a

booth by himself, staring blankly

into his drink like a man who had

just had his teeth ripped out by a

savage bill collector.

"I feel totally drained," he said. "It's like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest running

continuous entertainment this city

ever had." He waved his arm at the

waitress for another drink. "It's the end of an era. Now I know how all

those rock freaks felt when they

heard the Beatles were breaking

up."

I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as

soon as possible. I had just come

from the White House pressroom,

where a smoglike sense of funk --

or "smunk" as somebody over there might describe it -- had settled on the room within minutes after Ford

took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had

been purged and the Good Guys had

won -- or at least the Bad Guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing. Within hours after Richard

Nixon left Washington, it was

painfully clear that Frank

Mankiewicz had spoken too soon

when he'd predicted, just a few

weeks before The Fall, that

Washington would be "the

Hollywood of the Seventies."

Without Nixon to stir up its thin

juices, the Washington of the Seventies could look forward to the same grim fate as Cinderella's

gilded coach at the stroke of

midnight. It would turn back into a pumpkin, and any mysterious shoes

left lying around on the deserted

ballroom floors of the Watergate

era would not interest a genial

pragmatist like Gerald Ford. He

would not have much time, for a

while, to concern himself with

anything but the slide into national bankruptcy that Nixon had left him

to cope with. . . And, despite all its menacing implications, the

desperate plight of the national

economy was not a story that called up the same kind of journalistic

adrenaline that Washington and

most of the country had been living on for so long that the prospect of giving it up caused a serious panic in the ranks of all the Watergate

junkies who never even knew they

were hooked until the cold turkey

swooped into their closets.

We all knew it was coming -- the press, the Congress, the "public,"

all the backstage handlers in

Washington and even Nixon's own

henchmen -- but we all had our own

different timetables, and when his

balloon suddenly burst on that

fateful Monday in August, it

happened so fast that none of us

were ready to deal with it. The

Nixon presidency never really had

time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect. . . In reality, it

disintegrated, with all the speed

and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly

blasted to splinters by chain

lightning.

The bolts came so fast that it was

hard to keep count. On the

Wednesday morning after the House

Judiciary Committee voted to

recommend his impeachment,

Richard Nixon was a beleaguered

Republican president with powerful

Republican (and Southern

Democratic) allies in both the

House and the Senate: His impeachment seemed almost

certain, but the few people in

Washington crass enough to bet

money on a thing like this were still calling his chances of conviction in the Senate "just about even." This prognosis held for about 72 hours,

which was time enough for almost

everybody in Washington to start

gearing down for an endless

summer -- a humid nightmare of

booze, sweat and tension, of debate in the House, delay in the courts and

finally a trial in the Senate that might drag on until Christmas.

It was an ugly prospect, even for

those of us who openly welcomed

the prospect of seeing Richard

Nixon in the dock. On the last

afternoon of the Judiciary hearings, I found myself leaning against a tree on the grass of the U.S. Capitol

lawn, hopelessly stoned, staring up at the huge golden dome (while loud knots of tourists wearing Bermuda

shorts and Instamatic cameras

climbed the marble steps a hundred yards in front of me) and

wondering, "What in the fuck am I doing here? What kind of sick and

twisted life have I fallen into that would cause me to spend some of

the best hours of my life in a

cryptlike room full of cameras, hot lights and fearful politicians

debating the guilt or innocence of

Richard Milhous Nixon?"

The Politician and the

Pawnbroker. . . The New York

Times Hits the Trenches, The Washington Post Opens a MultiPronged Panzer Offensive. . .

Lessons of a Crime Spree in

Lexington. . . A Compound

Tangent Mushrooms Dangerously

Innocence? It is difficult even to type that word on the same page

with Nixon's name. The man was

born guilty -- not in the traditional Vatican sense of "original sin," but in a darker and highly personalized sense that Nixon himself seems to

have recognized from the very beginning.

Nixon's entire political career --

and in fact his whole life -- is a

gloomy monument to the notion that

not even pure schizophrenia or

malignant psychosis can prevent a

determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange

society we have built for ourselves in the name of "democracy" and

"free enterprise." For most of his life, the mainspring of Richard

Nixon's energy and ambition seems to have been a deep and

unrecognized need to overcome, at

all costs, that sense of having been born guilty -- not for crimes or transgressions already committed, but for those he somehow sensed he

was fated to commit as he grappled

his way to the summit. If Nixon had been born Jewish, instead of Black

Irish, he would probably have been

a pawnbroker instead of a

politician, not only because the

suburbs of Los Angeles would

never have elected a Jewish congressman in 1946, but because

running a big-league pawnshop

would have fueled him with the

same kind of guilt-driven energy

that most of our politicians -- from the county assessor level all the

way up to the White House -- seem

to thrive on.

On any given morning, both the

politician and the pawnbroker can

be sure that by sundown the

inescapable realities of their calling

will have forced them to do something they would rather not

have to explain, not even to

themselves. The details might vary, but the base line never changes: "I will feel more guilty tomorrow than I felt yesterday. . . But of course I have no choice: They have made me what I am and by god, they'll pay for it."

So the cycle runs on. Both the

politician and the pawnbroker are

doomed to live like junkies, hooked

on the mutant energy of their own unexplainable addictions.

In this baleful sense, Richard Nixon is definitely "one of us" -- as New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, in a very different context, back in the early Sixties. The phrase was Conrad's, from Lord Jim: "He was one of us. . ." -- and when I read Wicker's piece more than a

decade ago I remember feeling

angry that The New York Times had the power to hire another one of

these goddamn gothic Southern sots and turn him loose to stumble

around Washington and spew out

this kind of bullshit.

Anybody stupid enough to identify

with Richard Nixon the same way

Conrad's Marlow identified with

Lord Jim was beyond either help or

any hope of credibility, I felt, and for the next seven or eight years I dismissed everything Wicker wrote

as the mumblings of a hired fool. . .

And when Wicker's point of view

began swinging very noticeably in the direction of my own, in the late 1960s, I was almost as disturbed --

for entirely different reasons -- as the Times editors in New York who also noticed the drift and swiftly

deposed him from his heir-apparent

role to James Reston as the new

chief of the paper's Washington

Bureau.

The masthead of The New York

Time's Washington Bureau is a reliable weathervane for

professional observers of the changing political climate. Control of the bureau is usually in the hands of somebody the magnates in New

York believe is more or less on the same wavelength as the men in

control of the government. Arthur

Krock, for instance, got along fine with Eisenhower, but he couldn't

handle the Kennedys and was

replaced by Reston, a JFK partisan

in 1960 and a "Roosevelt coalition"

neopopulist who also got along

well with Lyndon Johnson. But

when Johnson quit in 1968 and the future looked very uncertain, Reston was promoted to a management job

in New York and was succeeded by

Wicker at about the same time

Robert Kennedy was deciding to

make his move for the presidency;

but when Bobby was killed and

McCarthy collapsed, the Times

hedged its bet on Humphrey by

deposing Wicker and replacing him

with Max Frankel, a smooth and

effective diplomat/journalist who

could presumably get along with

either Hubert or Nixon. . . But not even Frankel could handle Four

More Years, apparently, and the

Nixon/Agnew landslide in 1972

forced the admittedly anti-Nixon

Times into a stance of agonizing reappraisal. Frankel moved up to

New York, and since the most

obvious candidates for his job were relatively liberal young turks like Bob Semple, Anthony Lewis or

Johnny Apple, who were clearly out

of step with the mandate of

vengeance that Nixon claimed by

virtue of his shattering victory over McGovern, the Times management in New York made a fateful policy

decision that would soon come back

to haunt them:

On the theory that the best offense, at that point, was a good defense,

they pulled in their editorial horns for the duration and sent an elderly, conservative mediocrity named

Clifton Daniel down from the

executive backwaters of New York

to keep the aggressive Washington

Bureau under control. At almost the same time, they hired one of Nixon's top speechwriters, Bill Safire, and gave him a prominent ranking

columnist's spot on the Times

editorial pages. Both of these

moves were thinly veiled

concessions to the prospect of a

revenge-hungry Nixon/Agnew

juggernaut that had already

telegraphed its intention to devote as much of its second (and final)

term energies to their "enemies" in the "national media" as they had

already successfully devoted in the first term to scuttling the U.S.

Supreme Court.

It was clearly a management

decision, safely rooted in the Times concept of itself as "a newspaper of record," not advocacy -- and when you're in the business of recording history, you don't declare war on

the people who're making it. "If you want to get along, go along." That is an ancient political axiom often

attributed to Boss Tweed, the

legendary "pol" and brute fixer who many journalists in Washington

insist still sits on the editorial board of The New York Times.

Which is probably not true, if only because the Times got burned so badly by going along with Tweed's

crude logic in the winter of 1972-73

that the whole Washington Bureau -

- except perhaps Clifton Daniel -- is still reeling from the beating they took from The Washington Post on the Nixon/Watergate story. While

the Times was getting down in the trenches and methodically

constructing its own journalistic

version of a Maginot line against

the inevitable Nixon/Agnew

offensive, the Post was working 25

hours a day on a multipronged

panzer-style offensive that would

soon become one of the most

devastating scoops in the history of American journalism.

Rather than be cowed by Nixon and

his army of power-crazed thugs, the

Post elected to meet them head-on, hitting both flanks and the center all at once -- and when the bloody dust began settling, just a few weeks

ago, with both Agnew and Nixon

having resigned in disgrace, The Washington Post had

unquestionably replaced The New York Times as the nation's premier political newspaper.

To compensate for the loss of what

is widely regarded as one of the

fattest and heaviest jobs in

journalism, the Times gave Wicker a column -- his own chunk of turf,

as it were -- and that unexpected

burst of freedom seemed to have an

almost consciousness-expanding

effect on his head. When I met him

for the first time in Miami in that star-crossed political summer of

1972, he was writing one of the

sanest columns on the market and he talked like a happy man.

We were sitting at a beach table

near the surf, outside the

Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, taking a break from the

chaos of the Democratic

Convention, and I took the

opportunity to tell him about my

reaction to his long-ago comment on Nixon.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that, but

--"

"No," I said. "You were right."

He stared at me, looking puzzled.

It was one of those days that we all hit once in a while when everything you mean to say sounds wrong when

you hear it coming out of your

mouth. I tried briefly to explain

what I really meant, but even the

explanation came out bent, so I

decided to drop the subject. . . What I had in mind, I think, was the idea that Nixon really was "one of us" --

not in Conrad's sense of that term, or my own, but as an almost perfect expression of "the American way of life" that I'd been so harshly

immersed in for the past eight or nine months of traveling constantly around the country to cover the

presidential primaries.

Jesus! This idea seems just as

tangled tonight as it did two years ago when I was trying to explain it to Wicker -- so I think I'll let it drop, once again, and move on to

something else. . . But not without a final backward glance at the

election results in November of '72, when Richard Nixon was re-elected

to the White House by the largest margin of any president since

George Washington. There is no

way to erase that ominous fact from the record books -- any more than

Nixon will ever be able to erase

from the history books the fact that he was the first American president to be driven out of the White House because of admittedly criminal

behavior while in office.

Looking back on that crippled

conversation with Wicker in Miami,

it occurs to me that maybe almost everybody in the country -- except

possibly Wicker -- might have been

spared what General Ford called

"our national nightmare" if Tom had been kept on as The New York

Times Washington Bureau chief in 1968, instead of being converted to a columnist. The social and

political pressures of the job would have driven him half crazy, but his then emerging sense of outrage at

the whole style and content of the

Nixon administration might have

been contagious enough, within the bureau, to encourage a more

aggressive kind of coverage among

the Times reporters he would have been assigning to look behind

Nixon's facade.

As it turned out, however, those

fascist bastards had to be given so much rope that they came close to

hanging all the rest of us along with themselves, before The Washington Post finally filled the power vacuum created by The New York

Times's sluggish coverage of those four years when Nixon and his

fixers were organizing vengeful

plans like John Dean's list of "our enemies" to be harassed by the IRS, and the Tom Charles Huston

"Domestic Intelligence Plan" that amounted to nothing less than the

creation of a White House Gestapo.

But the climate of those years was

so grim that half the Washington

press corps spent more time

worrying about having their

telephones tapped than they did about risking the wrath of

Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Colson

by poking at the weak seams of a

Mafia-style administration that

began cannibalizing the whole

government just as soon as it came

into power. Nixon' s capos were never subtle; they swaggered into

Washington like a conquering army,

and the climate of fear they

engendered apparently neutralized

The New York Times along with all the other pockets of potential

resistance. Nixon had to do everything but fall on his own

sword before anybody in the

Washington socio-political

establishment was willing to take

him on.

Like the black teenage burglars who are terrorizing chic Georgetown

these days, Nixon conquered so

easily that he soon lost any fear of being caught. Washington police

have noted a strange pattern

involving burglaries in Georgetown

and other posh neighborhoods in the white ghetto of the city's northwest sector: A home that has been

robbed once is far more likely to be hit again than a home that has never been hit at all. Once they spot an

easy mark, the burglars get lazy and prefer to go back for seconds and

even thirds, rather than challenge a new target.

The police seemed surprised at this pattern but in fact it's fairly

traditional among amateurs -- or at

least among the type I used to hang around with. About 15 years ago,

when I was into that kind of thing, I drifted into Lexington, Kentucky,

one evening with two friends who

shared my tastes; we moved into an

apartment across the street from a

gas station which we broke into and robbed on three consecutive nights.

On the morning after the first hit, we stood transfixed at the apartment

window, drinking beer and

watching the local police

"investigating" the robbery. . . And I remember thinking, now that poor

fool over there has probably never

been hit before, and what he's

thinking now is that his odds of

being hit again anytime soon are

almost off the board. Hell, how

many gas stations have ever been

robbed two nights in a row?

So we robbed it again that night,

and the next morning we stood at the window drinking beer and watched

all manner of hell break loose

between the station owner and the cops around the gas pumps across

the street. We couldn't hear what

they were saying, but the proprietor was waving his arms crazily and

screaming at the cops, as if he

suspected them of doing it.

Christ, this is wonderful, I thought.

If we hit the bugger again tonight

he'll go stark raving mad tomorrow

morning when the cops show up. . .

which was true: On the next

morning, after three consecutive

robberies, the parking lot of that gas station was like a war zone, but this time the cops showed up with

reinforcements. In addition to the

two police cruisers, the lot filled up with chromeless, dust-covered

Fords and crew-cut men wearing

baggy brown suits and shoes with

gum-rubber soles. While some of

them spoke earnestly with the

proprietor, others dusted the

doorknobs, window latches and the

cash register for fingerprints.

It was hard to know, from our window across the street, if we

were watching the FBI, local

detectives or insurance agency

investigators at work. . . But in any case I figured they'd have the whole station ringed with armed guards for the next few nights, so we decided

to leave well enough alone. About

six in the evening, however, we

stopped there and had the tank filled up with ethyl. There were about six bony-faced men hanging around the

office, killing the time until dark by

studying road maps and tire-pressure charts. They paid no

attention to us until I tried to put a dime in the Coke machine.

"It ain't workin'," one of them said.

He shuffled over and pulled the

whole front of the machine open,

like a broken refrigerator, and lifted a Coke bottle out of the circular

rack. I gave him the dime and he

dropped it into his pocket.

"What's wrong with the machine?" I asked, remembering how hard it had

been to rip the bastard open with a crowbar about 12 hours earlier to

reach the money box.

"No concern of yours," he muttered, lighting up a Marvel and staring out at the pump where the attendant was making change for a ten-dollar bill after cleaning our windshield and

checking the oil. "Don't worry," he said. "There's some folks gonna be a lot worse off than that there

machine before this night's out

tonight." He nodded. 'This time

we're ready for them sonsabitches."

And they were. I noticed a double-

barreled shotgun standing in a

corner by the rack full of oil cans.

Two big coon hounds were asleep

on the greasy linoleum floor, with

their collar chains looped around

the base of the chewing gum

machine. I felt a quick flash of

greed as I eyed the glass bulb filled with all those red, white, blue and green gum balls. We had looted the

place of almost everything else, and

I felt a pang of regret at having to leave the gum machine untouched:

All those pennies just sitting there with nobody to fondle them. . .

But in retrospect I think that moment was the beginning of wisdom for

me. We had pushed our luck far

enough with that place and the

world was full of colorful gum-ball machines. There was a weird and

menacing edge in the man's voice

that it took me a long time to forget.

We drove downtown and cruised

around drinking warm beer for a while, then we robbed a crowded

liquor store on Main Street by

starting a fight with the clerks and then cleaning out the cash register while they struggled to defend

themselves.

We got less than $200 out of that

one, as I recall -- about the same as we'd picked up from three hits on

the gas station -- and on the way out of town I remember thinking that

maybe I could do something a little

better in this life than robbing gas stations and liquor stores. After

taking enough crazy risks to put all three of us in prison for at least five years, we had about $135 apiece to

show for it and about half of that

was already spent on gas, food,

beer and hiring winos to buy

whiskey for us because we were

too young to get served and the

winos were charging double for

anything they bought for us.

That weekend crime spree in

Lexington was my last haul, as they say; I even gave up shoplifting,

which altered my lifestyle pretty

severely for a while because it had taken me several years to master the kind of skill and mental attitude it takes to walk into a jewelry store

and come out with six watches, or

in the front door of a tavern and

hassle the bartender with a false ID

long enough to let a friend slip out the back door with a case of Old

Forester. . . But when I quit that gig, I quit it completely; and after 15

years on the wagon my skills are so hopelessly atrophied that now I

can't even steal a newspaper from

an open rack on the street.

Ah. . . mother of jabbering god, how in the hell did I get off on that

tangent about teenage street crime?

This is supposed to be a deep and

serious political essay about

Richard Nixon. . .

Although maybe that wasn't such a

tangent, after all. The original point, I think, had to do with street-punk

mentality that caused Nixon to push his luck so far that it was finally almost impossible not to get himself busted. For a while he had the luck and arrogance of a half-smart

amateur. From their base in the

White House, Nixon and the L.A.

account execs he brought with him

treated the old-line Washington

power structure with the same kind

of contempt that young burglars

casing Georgetown seem to have

for the forts of the rich and

powerful -- or that I had for that

poor bastard who owned the gas station in Lexington.

This is a very hard thing for

professional cops, journalists or

investigators to cope with. Like

doctors and lawyers, most of the

best minds in police work have

been trained since puberty to think in terms of patterns and precedents: Anything original tends to have the same kind of effect on their

investigative machinery as a

casually mutilated punch-card fed

into a computer. The immediate result is chaos and false

conclusions. . . But both cops and

computers are programmed to know

when they've been jammed by a

wild card or a joker, and in both

cases there are usually enough

competent technicians standing by

to locate the problem and get the

machinery working again pretty

quickly.

Right. . . and now we have gone off on a dangerous compound tangent.

And it has mushroomed into something unmanageable. . . But

before we zoom off in whatever direction might come next, it would be unfair not to mention that the

Times was the first paper to break the Pentagon Papers story, a

command decision that forced

Nixon and his would-be enforcers

to come out in the open with fangs

bared, snarling threats to have

everybody connected with the

publication of the Pentagon Papers

either lashed into jail or

subpoenaed into so many courtrooms that all their minds

would snap before they finally

wound up in the poorhouse.

As it turned out, however, the Times management strapped on its

collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one -- a

surprisingly tough stance that was

almost instantly backed up by

influential papers like the Los Angeles Times, The Washington

Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky,

caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried

loose from the kickback racket and

sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the "radic-libs" and "liberal elitists" of the

"eastern media establishment" -- the

"nattering nabobs of negativism."

Jesus! Those were the days, eh?

STRANGE INTERLUDE: An

Aborted Prediction, for the Record. . . Grim Dispatches from San Clemente: A Pitiful Basket

Case, a Chronic Bed-Wetter. . .

The Millionaire Felon on the

Federal Dole. . . The Sudden

News from Mister Ford

Won't you fly O eagle fly

You better run little cottontail run I hope you both live long enough To see the setting sun

-- Marshall Tucker Band September 6th, 1974

The headline in today's Washington Post says Richard Nixon is "lonely and depressed" down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. He

sucks eggs for breakfast and

wanders back and forth on the

beach, spitting frequently into the surf and brooding about some

vicious Polack whose name he can't

remember. . . Some low-life friend

of John Connally from Houston; the

same white-haired little bugger who caused all the trouble with the

Supreme Court, and now he has a

runaway Grand Jury full of uppity

niggers who -- in Nixon's own

words -- "want to pick the carcass."

Indeed. . . What the hell is a carcass good for anyway, except to pick at?

Gnaw the skull, suck the bones, then soak the bastard with gasoline and

toss a match on it.

Jesus! How much more of this

cheapjack bullshit can we be

expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if

he's lonely and depressed out there in San Clemente? If there were any

such thing as true justice in this

world, his rancid carcass would be

somewhere down around Easter

Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.

But, no -- he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret

Service agents and still communicating with the outside

world through an otherwise

unemployable $40,000-a-year

mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler. . .

and still tantalizing the national

press with the same kind of

shrewdly programmed leaks that

served him so well in the last

months of his doomed presidency. .

.

"He's terribly depressed, with much to be depressed about," says a

friend. "Anyone would be depressed in his situation. I don't mean he's going off the deep end. I just mean that everything happened

to him, seemingly all at once, and he doesn't know what to do about it."

Well. . . shucks. I'd be tempted to put my mind to the task of helping

the poor bastard figure out "what to do about" this cruel nutcracker that he somehow stumbled into. . . but I have a powerful suspicion that

probably that gang of mean niggers

in Washington has already solved Nixon's problem for him. They are

going to indict the bastard and try to put him on trial.

Nixon knows this. He is not the kind of lawyer you'd want to hire for

anything serious, but the reality of his situation vis-a-vis the Watergate grand jury is so bleak that even he has to grasp it. . . and this is the reason, I think, for the more or less daily front-page comments on his

half-mad and pathetically crippled

mental condition. He has devised another one of his famous fourth-down game breakers -- the same

kind of three-fisted brainstorm that climaxed with his decision to

defuse the whole impeachment

process by releasing his own

version of "the tapes," or the time he figured out how to put a quick lid on the Watergate burglary

investigation by blaming the whole

thing on John Dean.

According to one Washington

topsider, widely respected as an unimpeachable source and a shrewd

judge of presidential character:

"Dick Nixon is in a league all by himself when you're talking about

style and grace under pressure. His instincts when the crunch comes are absolutely amazing."

Nobody will argue with that --

although his strategy since leaving the White House has been marked

by an unnatural focus on subtlety.

The savage warrior of old now

confronts us in the guise of a pitiful, frightened old pol -- a whipped and broken man, totally at the mercy of his enemies and baffled by the

firestorm of disasters that drove him out of the White House.

Which may even be partially true:

He will probably go to his grave

believing he was not really guilty of anything except underestimating the power of his enemies. . . But the

fact remains that Jaworski will very likely break the news of Nixon's

formal indictment before this article appears on the newsstands, and

when that happens there will be

only one man in the country with the power to arbitrarily short-circuit

the legal machinery that in theory

could land Richard Nixon in the

same cellblock with John Dean.

That man is Gerald Ford, but he

will have a hard time justifying a

blanket presidential pardon for an

admitted felon without at least the appearance of a ground swell of

public sympathy to back him up.

So we may as well get braced for a

daily dose of extremely grim news

out of San Clemente, once Nixon is

formally indicted. We will hear

reports that the ex-president

frequently bursts into tears for no reason at all, that he utters

heartrending screams every night in his sleep, and the Los Angeles

Herald-Examiner will quote an unnamed "prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist" who will describe

Nixon as a "pitiful basket case" and

"a chronic bedwetter." And if Ford still seems reluctant to let Nixon go free, we will start seeing front-page

"exclusive photos" of Nixon alone on the beach, staring soulfully at the sunset with tears drooling out of his eyes.

It will be a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign in the

classic Nixon tradition. Ziegler will hold daily press briefings and read finely crafted descriptions of the

former president's pitiful condition from the typewriter of Ray Price,

Nixon's former chief speechwriter

at the White House. Both Price and

Pat Buchanan, the left and right

forks of Nixon's tongue ever since

he decided to make his move on the

White House back in 1965, showed

up at the San Clemente fortress in

early September, both insisting they had just come out to say hello and

"check up on the old man." As it happened, however, they both

appeared about the same time

rumors began surfacing in New York about a $2-million advance

that Nixon had been offered for his memoirs.

Neither Price nor Buchanan claimed

to know anything definite about the book offer, but in New York Spiro

Agnew's literary agent was telling

everybody who asked that the Nixon

deal could be closed momentarily

for at least $2 million and maybe

more.

That is a hell of a lot of money for

anybody's memoirs -- even people who might reasonably be expected

to tell the truth. But even a

ridiculously fraudulent version of

his five and a half wretched years in the White House and his own

twisted view of the scandal that

finished him off would be an

automatic best seller if the book-

buying public could be conned

somehow into believing Richard

Nixon was actually the author.

Meanwhile, with either Price or

Buchanan or both standing ready to write his memoirs for him, Nixon

was pondering an offer from

Reader's Digest to sign on as a

"consulting editor" at a salary of $100,000 a year. . . And Thursday

of that week, President Ford made

headlines by urging the Congress to appropriate $850,000 to cover

Nixon's pension, living expenses

and other costs of the painful

transition from the White House to

San Clemente. When the $850,000

runs out, he will have to scrimp

until July 1st of next year, when he will pick up another $400,000 that

will have to last him until July 1st, 1976. For as long as he lives,

Richard Nixon will be on the

federal dole forever at $400,000 a

year -- $60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries,

$40,000 for travel, $21,000 to

cover his telephone bills and

$100,000 for "miscellaneous."

On top of his $300,000 annual

expense account, Nixon's 24-hour-

a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between

$500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives -- a conservative figure,

considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats,

walkie-talkies and car telephones,

along with salaries and living

expenses for ten or 12 full-time

agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands, as a ranking public servant. Add

another $30,000 to $50,000 each

for personal aides like Stephen Bull

and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses --

and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year. . . and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will presumably

derive from things like the $2

million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000 a year stipend from

Reader's Digest, and the $5000 a

crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture

circuit.

So. . . what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and

admitted felon; a congenital thief

and pathological liar who spent 28

years on the public sugar tit and

then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he

would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95% of the $400,000 annual

allowance he became qualified for

under the "Former Presidents' Act"

by resigning. . . But a president who

gets impeached, convicted and dragged out of the White House by

U.S. marshals is not covered by the

"Former Presidents' Act." If Nixon had fought to the end and lost--

which had become absolutely

inevitable by the tune he resigned--

he would have forfeited all but

about $15,000 a year from the

federal dole. . . So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal

balance sheet The difference

between resignation and being

kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.

Most of this annual largesse will

come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. All of the taxpayers. Even George and

Eleanor McGovern will contribute

a slice of their income to Richard

Nixon's retirement fund. . . And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to

strip him not only of his right to

vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal

Treasury -- which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything

but announce the date for when he

will grant the pardon.

The White House announced

yesterday a negotiated agreement

with Richard M. Nixon under which

the former president and the U.S.

government will have joint custody

of White House tapes and

presidential documents but with Mr.

Nixon determining who shall have access to them.

In the letter of agreement making

him the "sole legal owner of the papers and tapes until their future donation to the government," Mr.

Nixon specifically asserted his

legal title to "all literary rights"

accompanying possession of the

materials. Mr. Nixon has reportedly been told that a book of memoirs

would be worth at least $2 million.

The Washington Post, September

9th, 1974

President Ford virtually made up

his mind five days ago to grant a

pardon to former-President Richard

M. Nixon.

On Wednesday, presidential

counsel Philip Buchen met with

Herbert Miller, Nixon's attorney, at the White House and disclosed that

Ford was considering executive

clemency.

Would Nixon accept a pardon?

Buchen asked.

Miller responded that he did not

know, according to Buchen. But

after checking with Nixon by

telephone -- the ex-president was at his home in San Clemente,

California -- Miller reported that a pardon was acceptable.

With that, the pardon was set,

though Ford was unable to announce

the pardon publicly until yesterday morning because it took several

days to complete the arrangements.

The Washington Star-News, September 9th, 1974

Only ten days ago, in the first

formal press conference of his

administration, Mr. Ford had said

that it would be "unwise and

untimely" of him to make any

commitment to a pardon until legal

action was taken.

But the president was aware that

political reaction was building in

favor of prosecution of Mr. Nixon,

a point dramatically confirmed by a

Gallup Poll last week which showed that 56% of the American

people thought that Mr. Nixon

should be tried while only 37%

opposed such action.

The Washington Post, September 9th, 1974

Powerful Men Brought Weeping

to Their Knees. . . The Stinking Realities of Richard Nixon's Place in History. . . The Mushwit Son-ln-Law and the Last Tape

THE EX-PRESIDENTS GIFTS

To the Editor:

The letter of Sylvia Wallace

(August 23rd), warning that "we may yet see a Nixon renascent,"

caused me such grave concern that I immediately consulted the ineffable wisdom of the I Ching for some clue to the future of Mr. Nixon. I

was unerringly directed to the Po

Hexagram and the learned

commentaries thereon. The book

confirmed my worst fears: "Its

strong subject, notwithstanding the attempts against him, survives and

acquires fresh vigor. The people

again cherish their sovereign and

the plotters have wrought to their

own overthrow."

The "legal steps" that your correspondent suggests to prevent

Nixon's rebirth could prove

woefully ineffective. I suggest that, after hanging, the body be drawn,

quartered and burned and the ashes

buried in an unmarked grave in a

distant field guarded by an elite corps, lest his hardcore followers

come and steal the remains and

proclaim: He is risen!

Please! If Mr. Nixon regains

popular favor, it will not be through any "revisionism" or reworking of the facts supporting the charges of guilt. It will probably be that

coming events will force a careful

re-evaluation of his contributions to the nation and crystallize an

awareness of the misfortune

suffered by the nation in the loss of his special gifts in these critical times. We may come to feel like the shepherd who had no sooner been

conned by some pointy-eared

gentleman into getting rid of his

mean, tough sheep dog because of

its fleas than the wolves reappeared on the scene.

Theodore P. Daly

Somers, New York

Letters to the Editor

The New York Times September 4th, 1974

A prominent San Clemente

supporter of Mr. Nixon since he

went to Congress in 1946, who

asked not to be identified, said he had heard that the Lincoln Club of

Orange County, made up largely of

wealthy industrialists who

contributed millions of dollars to

Republican campaign coffers,

including Mr. Nixon's, had invited

the former president to become a

member of the select and influential group.

"You won't find Mr. Nixon living the life of a recluse," the

Republican informant said. "Now that he is clear of any criminal

prosecution, don't be surprised if he comes back into California politics.

I think he should. I'd like to see him run for Senator John V. Tunney's

seat in 1976."

The New York Times, September 9th, 1974

We are still too mired in it now to fit all the pieces together and

understand what really happened in

these last two frenzied years. . . or to grasp that the Real Meaning of

what our new president calls the

"national nightmare" and what historians will forever refer to as

"Watergate" will probably emerge not so much from the day-to-day

events of The Crisis, or even from

its traumatic resolution -- but more from what the survivors will

eventually understand was

prevented from happening.

I was out there on the crowded

concrete floor of the Miami Beach

Convention Center in August of

1972 when that howling mob of

Republican delegates confirmed

Richard Nkon's lust for another term in the White House with their

constant, thunderous chant of

"FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR

MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE

YEARS!"

It was bad enough, just listening to

that demagogic swill -- but I doubt if there were more than a dozen

people in Miami that week who

really understood what that cheap,

demented little fascist punk had in mind for his Four More Years. It

involved the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for, except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to

build jails for anybody who

complained about it.

The tip of the iceberg began emerging about six months after

Nixon took his second oath of

office, when Senator Sam Ervin

took his initially harmless-looking

"Watergate Committee" act on national TV. It didn't catch on, at first; the networks were deluged

with letters from angry housewives, cursing Ervin for depriving them of their daily soap operas -- but after two or three weeks the Senate

Watergate hearings were the hottest thing on television.

Here, by god, was a real soap opera; tragedy, treachery, weird

humor and the constant suspense of

never knowing who was lying and

who was telling the truth. . . Which hardly mattered to the vast audience of political innocents who soon

found themselves as hooked on the

all-day hearings as they'd

previously been on the soaps and

the quiz shows. Even Hollywood

scriptwriters and apolitical actors were fascinated by the dramatic

pace and structure of the hearings.

The massive complexities of the evidence, the raw drama of the

daily confrontations and the

deceptively elfin humor of "Senator Sam" came together in the

multileveled plot that offered

something to almost everybody --

from bleeding hearts and Perry

Mason fans to S&M freaks and the millions of closet Hell's Angels

whose sole interest in watching the hearings was the spectacle of seeing once-powerful men brought

weeping to their knees.

Consider John Mitchell, for instance -- a millionaire Wall Street lawyer and close friend of the

president, an arrogant, triple-

chinned Roman who was Nixon's

campaign manager in '68 and

attorney general of the United States for four years until his old buddy

put him in charge of the Committee

to Re-elect the President in 1972. . .

Here was a 61-year-old man with

more money than he could count and

so much power that he saw nothing

unusual in treating the FBI, the

Secret Service and every federal judge in the country like serfs in his private police force. . . who could summon limousines, helicopters or

even Air Force One to take him

anywhere he wanted to go by

merely touching a buzzer on his

desk. . .

And suddenly, at the very pinnacle

of his power, he casually puts his

initials on a memo proposing one of at least a dozen or so routine

election-year bits of "undercover

work" -- and several months later while having breakfast in the Polo

Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel,

he gets a phone call from some yo-

yo named Liddy, whom he barely

knows, saying that four Cubans he's never even met have just been

caught in the act of burglarizing the office of the Democratic National

Committee located in an office

building about 200 yards across the plaza below his own balcony in the

Watergate apartments. . .

Which seems like a bad joke, at first, but when he gets back to

Washington and drops by the White

House to see his old buddy, he

senses that something is wrong.

Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman are

in the Oval Office with Nixon; the

president greets him with a nervous smile but the other two say nothing.

The air reeks of tension. What the

hell is going on here? Mitchell

starts to sit down on the couch and call for a drink but Nixon cuts him off: "We're working on something,

John. I'll call you at home later on, from a pay phone."

Mitchell stares at him, then picks up his briefcase and quickly says

goodbye. Jesus Christ! What is this?

On the way out to the limousine in

the White House driveway, he sees

Steve Bull's secretary reading a late edition of The Washington Star-News and idly snatches it out of her hands as he walks by. . . Moments

later, as the big Cadillac rolls out into traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue,

he glances at the front page and is startled by a large photo of his wife; she is packing a suitcase in the

bedroom of their Watergate

apartment. And next to the photo is a headline saying something like

"Martha on the Rampage Again,

Denounces 'Dirty Business' at White House."

"Good God!" he mutters. The Secret Service man in the front seat

glances back at him for a moment,

then looks away. Mitchell scans the

story on Martha: She has freaked out again. Where does she keep

getting that goddamn speed? he

wonders; her eyes in the photo are

the size of marbles. According to

the story, she called UPI reporter

Helen Thomas at four in the

morning, cursing incoherently about

"Mister President" and saying she has to get out of Washington at

once, go back to the apartment in

New York for a few days of rest.

Wonderful, Mitchell thinks. The last

thing I need right now is to have her screaming around the apartment all

night with a head full of booze and speed. Mitchell hates speed. In the good old days, Martha would just

drink herself into a stupor and pass out. . . But when they moved down

to Washington she began gobbling a

pill here and there, just to stay

awake at parties, and that's when

the trouble started. . .

Then his eyes shift up to the lead

story and he suddenly feels his balls

contract violently, crawling straight up into his belly. "WATERGATE

BURGLARY CONNECTED TO WHITE

HOUSE," says the headline, and in the first graph of the story he sees the name of E. Howard Hunt, which he

recognizes instantly -- and a few

graphs lower, goddamnit, is Gordon

Liddy's name.

No need to read any further.

Suddenly it all makes sense. He

hears himself moan and sees the

agent glance back at him again,

saying nothing. He pulls the paper

up in front of his face, but he is no longer reading. His finely tuned

lawyer's mind is already racing,

flashing back over all the

connections: phone calls to Hunt,

arguments with Liddy, secret

meetings in Key Biscayne, Larry

O'Brien, Cuban burglars with CIA

connections, Howard Hughes. . .

He is fucked. It has taken less than 30 seconds for his brain to connect all the details. . . And yes, of

course, that's what Nixon was

talking about with those bastards, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They

knew. The president knew. Hunt

and Liddy knew. . . Who else?

Dean, Magruder? LaRue? How

many others?

The limousine slows down, making

the turn off Virginia Avenue and

into the Watergate driveway.

Instinctively, he glances up at the fifth floor of the office building and sees that all the lights are still on in O'Brien's office. That was where it

had happened, right here in his own goddamn fortress. . .

His mind is still racing when the

agent opens the door. "Here we are, sir. Your luggage is in the trunk;

we'll bring it right up."

John Mitchell crawls out of the

bright black Cadillac limousine and walks like a zombie through the

lobby and into the elevator. Dick

will be calling soon, he thinks.

We'll have to act fast on this

goddamn thing, isolate those dumb

bastards and make sure they stay isolated.

The elevator stops and they walk

down the soft, red-carpeted hall to his door. The agent goes in first to check all the rooms. Mitchell

glances down the hall and sees

another Secret Service man by the

door to the fire exit. He smiles hello and the agent nods his head. Jesus

Christ! What the hell am I worried

about? We'll have this thing

wrapped up and buried by ten

o'clock tomorrow morning. They can't touch me, goddamnit. They wouldn't dare!

The agent inside the apartment is

giving him the all-clear sign. "I put your briefcase on the coffee table, sir, and your luggage is on the way up. We'll be outside by the elevator if you need anything."

"Thanks," Mitchell says. "I'll be fine." The agent leaves, closing the door softly behind him. John

Mitchell walks over to the TV

console and flips on the evening news, then pours himself a tall glass of scotch on the rocks and stretches out on the sofa, watching the tube, and waits for Nixon to call -- from a pay phone. He knows what that

means and it has nothing to do with dimes.

That was John Mitchell's last

peaceful night in Washington. We

will probably never know exactly

what he and Nixon talked about on

the telephone, because he was

careful to make the call from one of the White House phones that was

not wired into the tape-recording

system. . . Mitchell had not been

told, officially, about the president's new tape toy; the only people who

knew about it, officially, were

Nixon, Haldeman, Larry Higby,

Steve Bull, Alex Butterfield and the three Secret Service agents

responsible for keeping it in order. .

. But unofficially almost everybody with personal access to the Oval

Office had either been told on the

sly or knew Richard Nixon well enough so they didn't need to be

told. . . In any case, there is enough testimony in the files of the Senate Watergate committee to suggest that most of them had their own

recording systems and taped most of what they said to each other,

anyway.

Neither John Ehrlichman nor

Charles Colson, for instance, were

"officially" aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden

bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had

constructed for President Nixon.

According to Alex Butterfield's

testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee,

Nixon told Chief SS agent Wong to

have his electronics experts wire

every room, desk, lamp, phone and

mantelpiece inside the White House

grounds where The President was

likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject

I've been using tape recorders in all kinds of journalistic situations for almost ten years, all kinds of

equipment, ranging from ten-inch

studio reels to raisin-sized mini-

bugs -- but I have never even seen anything like the system Wong's

Secret Service experts rigged up for Nixon in the White House. In

addition to dozens of wireless,

voice-activated mikes about the size of a pencil eraser that he had built into the woodwork, there were also

custom-built sensors, delay

mechanisms and "standby" switches wired into telephones that either

Bull or Butterfield could activate.

In the Cabinet Room, for instance,

Nixon had microphones built into

the bases of the wall lamps that he could turn on or off with harmless-looking buzzers labeled

"Haldeman" and "Butterfield" on the rug underneath the cabinet table in front of his chair. The tapes and recording equipment were installed

in a locked closet in the basement of

the West Wing, but Nixon could start the reels rolling by simply

pressing on the floor buzzer marked

"Butterfield" with the toe of his shoe -- and to stop the reels, putting the machinery back on standby, he

could step on the "Haldeman"

button. . .

Any serious description of Nixon's

awesome tape-recording system

would take thousands of words and

boggle the minds of most laymen,

but even this quick capsule is

enough to suggest two fairly obvious but rarely mentioned

conclusions: Anybody with this

kind of a tape system, installed and maintained 24 hours a day by Secret Service electronics experts, is

going to consistently produce

extremely high quality voice

reproductions. And since the White

House personnel office can hire the best transcribing typists available, and provide them with the best

tape-transcribing machinery on the

market, there is only one

conceivable reason for those thousands of maddening,

strategically spotted

"unintelligibles" in the Nixon version of the White House Tapes.

Any Kelly Girl agency in the

country would have given Nixon his

money back if their secretaries had done that kind of damage to his

transcripts. Sloppiness of that

magnitude can only be deliberate,

and Nixon is known to have

personally edited most of those tape transcripts before they were typed

for the printer. . . Which doesn't mean much, now that Nixon's

version of the transcripts is no

longer potential evidence but

sloppy artifacts that are no longer even interesting to read except as an almost criminally inept contrast to the vastly more detailed and

coherent transcripts that House

Judiciary Committee transcribers

produced from the same tapes. The

only people with any reason to

worry about either the implications of those butchered transcripts or the

ham-fisted criminal who did the final editing jobs are the editors at whichever publishing house decides

to pay Richard Nixon $2 million for his presidential memoirs, which

will be heavily dependent on that

vast haul of Oval Office tapes that Gerald Ford has just decreed are

the personal property of Richard

Nixon. He will have the final edit

on those transcripts, too -- just before he sends the final draft of his memoirs to the printer. The finished book will probably sell for $15;

and a lot of people will be stupid enough to buy it.

The second and more meaningful

aspect vis-à-vis Nixon's tape

system has to do with the way he

used it. Most tape freaks see their toys as a means to bug other people, but Nixon had the SS technicians

install almost every concealed bug

in his system with a keen eye for its proximity to Richard Nixon.

According to Butterfield, Nixon

was so obsessed with recording

every move and moment of his presidency for the history books that he often seemed to be thinking of

nothing else. When he walked from

the White House to his office in the EOB, for instance, he would carry a small tape recorder in front of his mouth and maintain a steady

conversation with it as he moved in his stiff-legged way across the

lawn. . . And although we will

never hear those tapes, the mere fact that he was constantly making them, for reasons of his own, confirms

Alex Butterfield's observation that Richard Nixon was so bewitched

with the fact that he really was The President that his only sense of himself in that job came from the

moments he could somehow record

and squirrel away in some safe

place, for tomorrow night or the

ages.

There is a bleeding kind of irony in this unnatural obsession of Nixon's with his place in history when you

realize what must have happened to

his mind when he finally realized, probably sometime in those last few days of his doomed presidency, just exactly what kind of place in history was even then being carved out for

him.

In the way it is usually offered, the sleazy little argument that "Nixon has been punished enough" is an ignorant, hack politician cliche. . .

But that image of him walking

awkward and alone across the

White House lawn at night,

oblivious to everything in front or on either side of him except that

little black and silver tape recorder that he is holding up to his lips,

talking softly and constantly to

"history," with the brittle intensity of a madman: When you think on

that image for a while, remember

that the name Nixon will seem to

give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next 300 years, and in every history book written

from now on, "Nixon" will be synonymous with shame, corruption

and failure.

No other president in American

history has been driven out of the

White House in a cloud of disgrace.

No other president has been forced

to preside over the degrading

collapse of his own administration

or been forced to stand aside and

watch helplessly -- and also guiltily

-- while some of his close friends

and ranking assistants are led off to jail. And finally, no president of the United States has ever been so

vulnerable to criminal prosecution, so menaced by the threat of

indictment and trial, crouched in the dock of a federal courtroom and so

obviously headed for prison that

only the sudden grant of presidential pardon from the man he appointed

to succeed him could prevent his

final humiliation.

These are the stinking realities that will determine Richard Nixon's

place in American history. . . And

in this ugly context, the argument

that "Richard Nixon has been punished enough" takes on a

different meaning. He will spend

many nights by himself in his study out there in San Clemente, listening over and over to those tapes he

made for the ages and half-

remembering the feel of thick grass on the Rose Garden lawn adding a

strange new spring to his walk,

even making him talk a bit louder as he makes his own knotty, plastic

kind of love to his sweet little

Japanese bride, telling it over and

over again that he really is The President, The Most Powerful Man

in the World -- and goddamnit, you

better never forget that!

Richard Nixon is free now. He

bargained wisely and well. His

arrangement with Ford has worked

nicely, despite that week or so of

bad feeling when he had to get a

little rough with Gerry about the

pardon, threatening to call in the

L.A. Times man and play that quick little tape of their conversation in

the Oval Office -- the one where he offered to make Gerry the vice-president, in exchange for a

presidential pardon whenever he

asked for it -- and he had known, by then, that he would probably need it a lot sooner than Gerry realized.

Once their arrangement was made

(and taped), Nixon just rode for as long as he could, then got off in time to sign up for his lifetime dole as a former president.

He will rest for a while now, then

come back to haunt us again. His mushwit son-in-law, David

Eisenhower, is urging him to run for the U.S. Senate from California in

1976, and Richard Nixon is

shameless enough to do it. Or if not in the Senate, he will turn up

somewhere else. The only thing we

can be absolutely sure of, at this

point in time, is that we are going to have Richard Milhous Nixon to kick

around for at least a little while

longer.

Rolling Stone #111, October 10,1974

PART 3

Traveler Hears Mountain

Music Where It's Sung

Renfro Valley, Ky.-- The Bluegrass

country is cold and brown in the

winter. Night comes early and the

horses are taken inside to sleep in heated barns. The farmers sit

around pot bellied stoves and pass

the time with a banjo and a jug and sometimes a bit of talk. Not many

visitors in the winter. Not much to do, either.

Here in Rock Castle county the

biggest event of the week is the

Saturday night show in a little spot on the map called Renfro Valley, a

big barn and a recording studio on

U. S. highway 25, about 50 miles

south of Lexington.

Ten years ago they flocked to this

place like pilgrims to the shrine--

not just from the nearby Bluegrass towns, but from all over the nation.

They came for the country music

and the All-Day Sings and to get a

look at the Old Kentucky Barn

Dance they'd heard so often on their radios at home. It got so big that

15,000 people showed up one

summer Saturday night, and a

national magazine sent down a team

of cameras to record the scene for

posterity.

Now perhaps 150 will show up.

They come down from Berea and Crab Orchard, and Preachersville,

and from places like Egypt and

Shoulderblade across the

mountains. Not many from out of

state. Not even enough to justify

using the barn, which is closed until spring, when the crowds will pick

up again.

Only the locals show up in the

winter. They come with guitars and

bass fiddles and old songbooks, and they gather in the studio to do a

radio show that you can still hear in some cities, but not in so many as

you could a few years back. The

show starts around 7 and winds up

at 9:30 -- just about the time the

hillbilly singers and the Bluegrass banjo champs are warming up at

Gerde's in New York's Greenwich

Village.

Folks around here don't have much

time for strangers. You ask what

goes on at Renfro Valley and they

shrug and say, "Not much." You

want to find a restaurant after 8 p.m.

and -- if you can find anybody to

ask -- they'll direct you to

Lexington, an hour's drive.

You have a thirst and they tell you,

"This here's a dry county." Pause.

"Yep, dry county." Another pause.

"Maybe if you go up the road a piece to where you find a sort of

restaurant, maybe somebody there

can fix you up."

So if you want entertainment in

these parts, you go to Renfro Valley

and you go early. The studio is warm and the music is every bit as

real as the people who sing it.

"Well, now, for all you folks out there in radioland, I want to say that we got a little gal visitin' with us this evenin'. Little Brenda Wallen, from up in Winchester, I believe. .

."

And little Brenda sings:

"Beeyooteeful lies, beeyooteeful lies. . . each one a heartbreak. . . in perfect disguise. . ."

Then the Hibbard Brothers quartet, lean mountain faces and huge hands

poking out of gabardine sleeves --

"O, what a time we will have up in heaven. . ."

A murmur of approval from the

audience. A flashbulb pops near the back of the room. Things are

picking up. The Farmer Sisters take their turn at the mike, with a

rippling version of "You're the Reason."

A few cheers from the crowd, a

quick burst of fiddle music from a man beside the piano, then

somebody holds up a hand for

silence. Time for the commercial.

"This here's a long one," says the announcer, glancing at a yellow

script in his hand, "so let's do it all at once and get it over with."

Snickers from the audience.

Everybody grins as the commercial

is read very earnestly into the mike that will carry it out to the Good

Lord only knows where.

The announcer finishes and heaves a sigh of relief, also into the mike.

Everybody laughs and the show

goes on. Meanwhile, the Greenbriar

Boys are tuning their instruments at Gerde's; in a few hours there will

be a long, button down line outside the hungry i in San Francisco,

waiting to hear the latest hillbilly sensation.

It's 9:30 in Rock Castle county and the Old Kentucky Barn dance is

over until next week. Only a few

people remain in the studio. One of them is John Lair, a local boy and a onetime Chicago disk jockey who

came back home to put Renfro

Valley on the map. Red Foley got

his start here. So did the Coon

Creek Sisters, from a place back in the hills called Pinch 'Em Tight

Holler.

Lair seems genuinely puzzled by the term, "Bluegrass music." He thinks it's a misnomer.

"It's plain old mountain music," he

insists. "Same stuff they've been singing for more than a hundred

years." He chuckles and shakes his head. "You go up to Lexington and call it Bluegrass music and you'll

have a fight on your hands."

Lair says goodnight and leaves to

go home. Outside, the parking lot is almost empty. A visitor has two

choices -- drive up to Lexington for something to eat and maybe a good

fight, or hurry to the nearest motel.

A few miles up the road is a town

called Nicholasville, where motel owners won't even answer the door

after what they consider a decent

hour. When I stopped a man on the

street and asked him why this was,

he said he was the chief of police

and offered to rent me a bed in his house.

I went back to one of the motels,

went into the office, turned on the light, picked a key off the desk and located a cabin by myself. The next morning it took me 20 minutes to

find somebody to pay -- and then I was told I wouldn't be welcome

there in the future because my car

had a license plate from Louisville.

They don't care much for city boys, specially when they're roamin'

around late at night.

If you drive thru Kentucky and plan to spend the night, get your room

early. And if you like a toddy

before bedding down, remember

that 86 of the 120 counties are bone dry until you make friends. Grog

shops are few and far between, and a man without foresight will usually go to bed thirsty.

Winter mornings are bleak. Almost

always you wake up to a gray sky

and a good country breakfast: fried sausage or ham, fried eggs, fried

potatoes, and a plate of biscuits

with butter and apple jelly. Then,

after a pot of coffee, you move on.

No matter which way you go you'll

drive thru a lot of cold, barren

country to get there. North, thru the

heart of the Bluegrass, west toward Louisville, east into the mountains, or south to Tennessee.

Not much speed on those narrow

highways, plenty of time to look off across the white fences and wonder

how the cows find anything to eat in the frozen fields. Time to listen to the sermons on the radio or the

lonely thump of a shotgun

somewhere back from the road.

Not much to hurry about in the

Bluegrass, specially in the winter

when the trees are bare and the barns are white with frost and most folks are inside by the stove.

The Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1962

A Footloose American in a

Smugglers' Den

In Puerto Estrella, Colombia, there is little to do but talk. It is difficult to say just what the villagers are

talking about, however, because

they speak their own language -- a

tongue called Guajiro, a bit like Arabic, which doesn't ring well in a white man's ear.

Usually they are talking about

smuggling, because this tiny village with thatched roof huts and a total population of about 100 South

American Indians is a very

important port of entry. Not for

humans, but for items like whisky

and tobacco and jewelry. It is not

possible for a man to get there by

licensed carrier, because there are

no immigration officials and no customs. There is no law at all, in fact, which is precisely why Puerto Estrella is such an important port.

It is far out at the northern tip of a dry and rocky peninsula called La

Guajira, on which there are no

roads and a great deal of overland

truck traffic. The trucks carry

contraband, hundreds of thousands

of dollars worth of it, bound for the interiors of Colombia and

Venezuela. Most of it comes from

Aruba, brought over at night on fast trawlers and put ashore at Puerto

Estrella for distribution down the

peninsula on the trucks.

I arrived at dusk on a fishing sloop from Aruba. And since there is no

harbor I was put ashore in a tiny

rowboat. Above us, on a sharp cliff, stood the entire population of the

village, staring grimly and without much obvious hospitality at Puerto

Estrella's first tourist in history.

In Aruba, the Guajiro Indians are

described as "fierce and crazy and drunk all day on coconut whisky."

Also in Aruba you will hear that the men wear "nothing but neckties, knotted just below the navel." That sort of information can make a man

uneasy, and as I climbed the steep

path, staggering under the weight of my luggage, I decided that at the

first sign of unpleasantness I would begin handing out neckties like

Santa Claus -- three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.

As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag

began screeching, and the men just

stared. Here was a white man with

12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $500 worth of camera

gear slung over his shoulders,

hauling a typewriter, grinning,

sweating, no hope of speaking the

language, no place to stay -- and

somehow they were going to have

to deal with me.

There was a conference, and then a

small man stepped forward and made motions indicating that I

should put my gear on an ancient

truck which started with a crank. I was taken to an abandoned hospital, where I was given a sort of cell

with a filthy mattress and broken

windows to let in the air.

There is not much for the tourist in Puerto Estrella, no hotels,

restaurants, or souvenirs. Nor is the food palatable. Three times a day I faced it -- leaves, maize, and

severely salted goat meat, served up with muddy water.

The drinking was a problem too, but in a different way. At the crack of dawn on the day after my arrival I

was awakened and taken before a

jury of village bigwigs. Its purpose was to determine the meaning of my

presence. These gentlemen had

gathered in the only concrete-block house in town, and before them on

the table was a cellophane-wrapped

bottle of Scotch whisky.

After an hour or so of gestures, a few words of Spanish, and nervous

demonstrations of my camera

equipment, they seemed to feel a

drinking bout was in order. The

Scotch was opened, five jiggers

were filled, and the ceremony

began.

It continued all that day and all the next. They tossed it off straight in jiggers, solemnly at first and then with mounting abandon. Now and

then one of them would fall asleep

in a hammock, only to return a few hours later with new thirst and

vigor. At the end of one bottle they would proudly produce another,

each one beautifully wrapped in

cellophane.

As it turned out, three things made my visit a success. One was my size and drinking capacity (it was fear --

a man traveling alone among

reportedly savage Indians dares not get drunk); another was the fact that I never turned down a request for a

family portrait (fear, again); and the third was my "lifelong

acquaintance" with Jacqueline

Kennedy, whom they regard as

some sort of goddess.

With the exception of a few

sophisticates and local bigwigs,

most of the men wore the necktie --

a Guajiro version of the time-

honored loin-cloth. The women,

again with a few exceptions, wore

dull and shapeless long black

gowns.

A good many of the men also wore two and three hundred dollar wrist

watches, a phenomenon explained

by the strategic location of Puerto Estrella and the peculiar nature of its economy. It would not be fair to say that the Indians arbitrarily take a healthy cut of all the contraband that passes through their village, but

neither would it be wise to arrive

and start asking pointed questions, especially since anyone arriving on his own is wholly dependent on the

good will of the Indians to get him

out again.

Trying to leave can turn a man's hair white. You are simply stuck until

one of the Indians has to run some

contraband down the peninsula to

Maicao.

There is nothing to do but drink, and after 50 hours of it I began to lose hope. The end seemed to be

nowhere in sight; and it is bad

enough to drink Scotch all day in

any climate, but to come to the

tropics and start belting it down for

three hours each morning before breakfast can bring on a general

failure of health. In the mornings we had Scotch and arm wrestling; in the afternoons, Scotch and dominoes.

The break came at dusk on the third day, when the owner of a truck

called the Power Wagon rose

abruptly from the drinking table and said we would leave immediately.

We had a last round, shook hands

all around, and shoved off. The

truck was fully loaded, and I rode in

back with my gear and a young Indian girl.

The drive from Puerto Estrella to

Maicao is 10 to 12 hours,

depending on which rut you take,

but it seems like 40 days on the

rack. On top of the heinous

discomfort, there is the distinct

possibility of being attacked and

shot up by either bandits or the law.

As far as the Contrabandista is concerned, one is as bad as the

other.

The smugglers travel armed but they put their faith in speed, punishing both truck and passengers

unmercifully as they roar through

dry river beds and across long

veldt-like plains oh a dirt track

which no conventional car could

ever navigate.

We rumbled into Maicao at three in

the afternoon. They dropped me at

the airport, where my luggage was

thoroughly searched by a savage-

looking gendarme before I was

allowed on the plane for Barranquilla. An hour later, there

was another search at the

Barranquilla airport. When I asked

why, they replied I was coming

from an area called Guajira, known

to be populated by killers and

thieves and men given over to lives of crime and violence.

I had a feeling that nobody really

believed I had been there. When I

tried to talk about Guajira, people would smile sympathetically and

change the subject. And then we would have another beer, because

Scotch is so expensive in

Barranquilla that only the rich can afford it.

National Observer, August 6, 1962

Why Anti-Gringo Winds

Often Blow South of the

Border

One of my most vivid memories of

South America is that of a man with

a golf club -- a five-iron, if memory serves -- driving golf balls off a

penthouse terrace in Cali,

Colombia. He was a tall Britisher,

and had what the British call "a stylish pot" instead of a waitsline.

Beside him on a small patio table

was a long gin-and-tonic, which he

refilled from time to time at the

nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of

his shots carried low and long out

over the city. Where they fell,

neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was

in a residential section on the edge of the Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere

below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe

blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the

roofs -- golf balls, "old practice duds," so the Britisher told me, that were "hardly worth driving away."

In the weeks that followed, when I became more aware of the attitude a good many Colombians have

towards that nation's Anglo-Saxon

population, I was glad nobody had

traced the source of those well-hit mashies. Colombians, along with

their Venezulean neighbors, may

well be the most violent people on

the continent, and a mixture of insult and injury does not rank high as a

national dish.

It is doubtful that the same man

would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London.

But is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There,

where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and

where Anglo-Saxons are

automatically among the elite, the

concept of noblesse oblige is

subject to odd interpretations.

The attitude, however, does not go

unnoticed; the natives consider it

bad form indeed for a foreigner to

stand on a rooftop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a

sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the

man who promises to rid the nation

of "arrogant gringo imperialists."

Whether the candidate in question is a fool, a thief, a Communist, or even all three does not matter much when emotions run high -- and few

elections south of the Rio Grande are won on the basis of anything but blatant appeals to popular emotion.

The North American presence in

South America is one of the most

emotional political questions on the continent. In most countries,

especially Argentina and Chile,

there is a considerable European

presence as well. But with recent

history as it is, when the winds of anti-gringo opinion begin to blow,

they blow due north, toward the

United States, which to the Latin American is more easily

identifiable with capitalism and

imperialism than any other country

in the world.

With this in mind, a traveler in

South America gets one shock after

another at the stance generally taken by his fellow gringos -- and

sometimes a worse shock at the

stance he takes himself. One young

American put it this way: "I came down here a real gung-ho liberal, I

wanted to get close to these people and help them -- but in six months I turned into a hardnose conservative.

These people don't know what I'm

talking about, they won't help

themselves, and all they want is my money. All I want to do now is get

out."

It is a sad fact that living for any length of time in a Latin American

country has a tendency to do this to many Americans. To avoid it takes

tremendous adaptability, idealism,

and faith in the common future.

Take the example of a young man

named John, a representative in a

Latin American country for an

international relief organization.

His work consists mainly in

distributing surplus food to the

poor. He works hard, often going

out on field trips, for three or four days of rough driving, bad food,

primitive living, and dysentery.

But the people he has to work with

bother him. He can't understand why

the principal of a back-country school would steal food earmarked

for the pupils and sell it to

speculators. He can't understand

why his warehouse -- lying in the

middle of a district where food is

distributed regularly -- is constantly being looted by the very people

who were standing in line the week

before to get their regular share.

He broods on these things and

wonders if he is really

accomplishing anything, or just

being taken for a sucker. Then, one day when he is in a particularly bad mood over some new evidence of

callousness or corruption, he hears below his window the shouting of a

mob. A man is standing on the steps of a fountain, shouting hoarsely

about "the rights of the people" and what should be done to secure them.

And the crowd happily roars an

answer -- "down with the capitalist swine!"

Our man, standing at his window,

suddenly loses his temper and shakes his fist. Abajo del pueblos!

he yells. Meaning, "Down with the people." Then he quickly ducks back inside.

But the Latin family next door,

standing at their window, hears the gringo abusing the crowd. Word

gets around, and several days later our man is insulted as he walks to

the corner cantina for a pack of cigarillos. He speaks good Spanish, and curses back, not understanding

why his neighbors are no longer friendly. But it makes him even

more bitter, and once the tide starts running in that direction, it is hard to reverse.

One day a new American appears in

town, a trainee for one of the United States banks that have branches in

South America. Our man John meets

him at the Anglo-American Club

and, in the course of conversation, tells him what to expect from the

nationals -- "a bunch of rotten

ingrates, stupid and corrupt to the last man."

The newcomer hears other gringos

say the same kind of thing. At night, in his new and unfamiliar

apartment, he begins to think the

neighbors are making noise on

purpose, to wear on his nerves.

Soon he is as bitter as most of the others.

When the inevitable bank strike

comes along -- as it does at regular intervals in most Latin American

countries -- our newcomer takes the advice of an older gringo employee

and shows up at work with a pistol, which he puts on his desk like a

paperweight to show the employees

he means business.

The reaction of the nationals hardly needs to be cataloged. Our trainee

is chalked up as one more bit of

two-legged evidence that gringos

are vicious fools. The net result --

as far as both John and the young

banker are concerned -- is a

grievous setback for the hope that North and South America will come

to understand each other, and thus

avoid a split-up that would wreck

the Western Hemisphere.

The young American in a Latin

American country faces other

hazards. For one thing, he has to

contend with the American colony

that blooms in every city of any

size.

Americans living in Latin American

countries are often more snobbish

than the Latins themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American

standards, and he rarely sees a

countryman who doesn't. An

American businessman who would

think nothing of being seen in a

sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended

at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie. The same man --

often no more than 30 years old --

might have been living in a

prefabricated tract house in the States, but in Rio he will live on

Copacabana beach with two maids,

servants' quarters, and a balcony

overlooking the sea.

Some people say that the American

is fouling his own image in South

America -- that instead of being a

showpiece for "democracy," he not only tends to ape the wealthy,

antidemocratic Latins, but

sometimes beats them at their own

game. Suddenly finding himself

among the elite, the nervous American is determined to hold his

own -- and, unlike the genuine

aristocrat who never doubts his

own worth, the newcomer to status

seeks to prove it at every turn.

Others, though, repeat the old,

familiar, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." In South America, so the thinking goes, the lower classes have no grasp of equality and take

informality for weakness. So the

only alternative is to make them

respect you. "I know it's silly to shout at the maid every time she

makes a mistake," said one

American housewife in Brazil. "But she's lazy and I want her to know

I'm watching her. With these

people, it's either discipline or

anarchy."

Another problem that plagues the

gringo is drink. Because he never

really feels at home in a foreign

language; because his income is

usually embarrassingly large by

local standards; because he worries continually about being cheated

whenever he buys anything; because

he never gets over the feeling that most upper-class Latins consider

him a boob from a country where

even the boobs are rich; and

because he can never understand

why people don't seem to like him

for what he is -- just a good guy

who feels a bit out of place among

these strange surroundings and

customs -- because of all these

tensions and many more of the same

kind, he tends to drink far more than he does at home.

"To relax" is the usual excuse, but sometimes there is almost no

choice. In Rio, for instance, the

evening traffic jams are so bad that getting from the business district out to Copacabana -- where

"everybody" lives -- is almost impossible between the hours of 5

and 8. One of the first things a new arrival is told is: "If you can't get out of town by five, forget about it

and settle down to serious drinking until eight." This hiatus in the day is termed "the drinking hour."

With many people, the "drinking hour" soon becomes a necessary habit. Sometimes it leads to

disaster. Often an American will

arrive home broke and bleary-eyed

at 3 or 4 in the morning, still lugging his briefcase and cursing the long-gone traffic.

Because of things like the drinking hour and other, purely local,

situations, a man returning to the States after a stay in Latin America is often struck dumb by the question,

"What can we do about that place?"

He has no idea, because he has

never had time enough to relax and

give it much thought. His concern

has been survival. Objectivity is

one of the first casualties of "culture shock" -- a term for the malady that appears when a North American,

with his heritage of Puritan

pragmatism, suddenly finds himself

in a world with different traditions and a different outlook on life.

It is an odd feeling to return from a year in South America and read a

book by some expense-account

politician who toured the continent in six weeks and spoke only with

presidents, cabinet ministers, and

other "leading figures" like himself.

The problems and the issues

suddenly become quite clear -- as

they never were when you were

right there in the midst of them.

Now, looking back on that man with the golf club, it is easy to see him as a fool and a beast. But I recall quite well how normal it seemed at the

time, and how surprised I would

have been if any of the dozen

people on the terrace had jumped up to protest.

National Observer, August 19, 1963

Democracy Dies in Peru,

but

Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing

The "death of democracy" has not left much of a vacuum in Peru. It

was more like the death of

somebody's old uncle, whose name

had been familiar in the household

for many years, but who died,

where he had always lived, in some

far-off town the family never quite got around to visiting -- although

they had always meant to, or at least that's what they said.

If there is one profound reality in Peruvian politics it is the fact that this country has absolutely no

democratic tradition, and any

attempt to introduce one is going to meet violent opposition. The people who need democracy don't even

know what the word means; the

people who know what it means

don't need it and they don't mind

saying so. If the Alliance for

Progress requires that democracy in Peru become a fact instead of just a pleasant word, then the Alliance is

in for rough sledding too.

This is the basis of the current

"misunderstanding" between Washington and Lima. If the

Peruvian people were as concerned

about democracy as is President

Kennedy, this country would right

now be in the throes of a violent

civil war. What happened in Lima

on July 18 was more than enough to

touch off armed conflict in many

countries of the world, but

democracy has never been a reality

in Peru, and for that reason it goes largely unmourned; especially in

Lima, which voted heavily for the

return of an ex-dictator.

On July 24, the un-elected

government of Peru issued a

Decree-Law, assuming all

executive and legislative powers,

and the third largest country in

South America passed officially

into the hands of the military. The second largest, Argentina, had

provided an easy-to-follow

example some five months before.

Next on the list, according to

current speculation in Washington

and other Hemisphere capitals, will be Venezuela -- and what might be

precipitated by Brazil's

congressional elections in October

is anybody's guess.

It requires little guesswork,

however, to see what this trend

means for the Alliance for Progress, and also for the future of democracy in South America. The outlook is

dreary at best, and as the pressure from Washington mounts the

reaction will mount just as fast.

Peru was a good example.

Even so, after all these months of

tension, all this talk and

campaigning, all the space devoted

in newspapers to the Peruvian

elections, a visitor to Lima arrives with a feeling that there is bound to be some evidence that the whole

thing was a bust -- that it was all a put-up job, because the Armed

Forces did exactly what they said they were going to do all along.

When the American Popular

Revolutionary Alliance (APRA)

won the recent elections, the

military called it a "fraud," took over the government, annulled what

was undeniably the most honest and

least fraudulent election in Peru's history, and installed a four-man

junta that is a military dictatorship no matter which way you look at it.

Yet life goes on in Lima as if

nothing had happened. The evening streets are full of pretty girls and slick-haired men in business suits, the opulent shops that flank the

trolleys on Avenida Peirola are full of silver and alpaca and the soft

rustle of money changing hands, and the all night cantinas still sound as if their frenzied pisco-swilling patrons had abandoned all hope of

ever seeing another dawn.

This is Lima, democracy or no

democracy, dictators or no

dictators. The city is full of people, in fact, who say that what happened is precisely nothing at all. They

point out that the people in power

now are those who have always

been in power and that those faces

on the outside, looking in, are the same faces that have been there for as long as anyone in Peru can

remember. It is foolish, they say, to talk about the Junta "seizing the reins," because the Junta is nothing more than a dress-uniform version

of the same power bloc that has

held the reins for centuries.

It is only in times of crisis that it puts on the jackboots and goes into the street with truncheons. In times of peace it wears mufti and busies

itself with other, less militant

pursuits -- primarily that of

maintaining itself in the style to

which it has long been accustomed.

It is as old as the Incas and every bit as ruthless with opposition. Its counterpart in the U.S. has been

labelled The Power Elite. In Peru it

is called the Forty Families, an all-powerful aristocracy that makes its North American cousin look weak

and tame by comparison.

"That's what Kennedy doesn't

understand," explained one Lima-based American businessman. "You just can't have democracy down

here. The people don't understand

it. Loeb was the same way: he went

out to the futbol game and sat down in the grandstand with the common

people -- I saw him myself, with his

feet propped up on the rail and the top of his hose showing -- why, they thought he was crazy. It was

absolutely incomprehensible, even

to the people he was trying to make friends with. If you want to get

anywhere down here, you have to

make people respect you."

However sad a commentary that

may be on a lot of things --

American businessmen included --

it is sadder still because there is a lot of truth in it. From the beginning

of their history the Peruvian people have been conditioned to

understand that these are only two

kinds of human beings in this world

-- the Ins and the Outs, and a vast gulf in between. In a book called

The Ancient Civilizations of Peru you read that "The Inca state insured the people against hunger,

exploitation, undue hardship and all kinds of want, but regimented them

rigorously and left them no choice, independence or initiative. . . There was a large class of nobles and

priests, supported by the masses.

Heavy tribute in the form of labor

was demanded of the peasants, who

profited very little from it."

That was in 1438, and little has

changed since then except that the

peasants are no longer insured

against hunger, exploitation, undue hardship and all kinds of want.

There is ample evidence of all

those conditions even in Lima,

which differs from the rest of Peru much like Manhattan differs from

the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

The strange assumption in Lima's

business community -- Americans

and Peruvians alike -- is that

President Kennedy would join them

in their endorsement of The System

in Peru "if he could only understand it, and stop paying so much attention to Loeb."

U.S. Ambassador James Isaac Loeb

is undoubtedly the most second-

guessed man in recent Peruvian

history. There is not a man at the

Bankers' Club, among other places, who cannot tell you where he went

wrong and exactly what he should

have done instead. The most

common criticism is that he tried to force-feed democracy to a people

who had not the faintest idea what

he was talking about.

The nominal chief of the Junta,

General Manuel Perez Godoy, has

flatly called Loeb "an Aprista,"

which is tantamount now to being

called an enemy of the state. He is

sure to be declared "persona non grata" if he returns to Lima, and in business circles it is Loeb who

draws most of the blame for the

U.S. refusal to recognize the Junta.

The general sentiment is that

Kennedy has been "misled." Gen.

Perez is of the same mind; in a

recent statement on the U.S. stand, he called the whole thing "a

misunderstanding."

Gen. Perez has impressed foreign

journalists in Lima with his unique

feeling for words and their fundamental meanings. He is no

mean orator, and in his first

statement after the takeover he

explained it this way: "We have seen a fraudulent electoral process in which not even the most basic

and elementary rights of the citizens have been respected. The Armed

Forces have seen with pain, with

anxiety, with tight lips and dry eyes, this sacrifice of our people, of our country, of our future."

The fact that the Armed Forces had been able to dig up only 70

fraudulent ballots out of a total of some 2 million did not deter Gen.

Perez from going on TV to amplify

and reiterate his feelings.

'To the humble, to the forgotten

worker, to the voter who has been

deprived in many cases of the

elementary social, economic and

cultural benefits, it is now being

attempted to take from him also his only hope -- that of gaining the

progress and social justice he deserves, to wipe out his liberty to vote with fraud.

"We will not consent to it. A

military imperative forces on us the hard obligation of assuming the

functions of government that

normally should be in civilian

hands, in order to establish peace, order and respect for the laws that rule the republic.

"We are stirred by a great ambition to save democracy."

Earlier in the same speech Gen.

Perez had talked of "the great electoral fraud," said "the people have been grossly cheated,"

accused the National Elections

Board of an attempt "to cover up this conduct," and explained that ex-President Prado -- then languishing on a prison ship -- had showed a

"lack of objectivity" for not having annulled the elections himself.

This was a little hard for some

people to take, notably those

600,000 or so humbled and forgotten voters who had cast their ballots for APRA and Dr. Victor

Raul Haya de la Torre. Gen. Perez

drew praise, however, from those

quarters where it had not been

previously understood that

democracy is best preserved by

installing a military dictatorship. He was also admired for his eloquent

attack on those who would tamper

with the people's right to express

themselves by means of the ballot.

What is more than obvious in Lima is that the biggest fraud in the whole affair was the military's attempt to explain and justify the coup. It is hard to find anyone who seriously

believes they took over because of

"a great electoral fraud." The National Elections Board, a group

of respected jurists with no ties to APRA, investigated the charges and

found that, although there had been isolated cases of false registration and multiple voting, the sum of the infractions was far too small to

have any effect on the outcome.

President Prado agreed -- and was

exiled to Paris for his efforts when the military decided to back its

charges with a Sherman tank and a

U.S.-trained ranger battalion.

The Junta has scheduled new

elections for June 9, 1963, but the only people in Lima who seem to

believe it are taxi drivers, hotel

clerks and a varied assortment of

small jobholders who voted for

Gen. Manuel Odria, dictator from

1948 to 1956. In the circle most heartily in agreement with the

takeover -- namely, the business and finance community -- the betting is against elections next year. "These boys are in to stay," said the president of a U.S. businessmen's

society. "Once they get the taste of sugar on their tongues they're not

going to give it up."

Nor was he much alarmed by the

prospect. "These people are like children," he explained. "They'll

complain all day about discipline, but deep down they like it. They

need it.

"Let's be smart about it," he added.

"The rich people are running this country. They're running the country back home. Why not face facts and

be thankful for what stability we

have? These people are anti-

Communist. Let's recognize the

Junta, keep the aid flowing, and get on with it." He smiled indulgently.

"We think young Kennedy up there

just flew off the handle. Now he's out on a limb and he doesn't know

how to get back."

Nearly everybody who wears a tie

in Lima feels the same way.

Business is good in Peru -- it is the only South American country

without a balance of payments

deficit -- and the vested interests want to keep it that way. Even the

taxi driver, who is making a good

living because there are enough

people on the streets with money in

their pockets, does not particularly care who sits in the Presidential

Palace as long as they don't upset

the apple cart.

This is what almost happened.

APRA is more than just another

political party; it is a genuine threat to a way of life that was 500 years old when the U.S. was born. To say

that the takeover came simply

because of the military's

longstanding feud with APRA is to

gloss over the fact that the entire

ruling class in Peru regards APRA as more dangerous than

communism. APRA has an ally in

the Alliance for Progress and

therefore an ally in the U.S.

Communism has never been more

than a minor threat in Peru and is

more a convenient whipping boy

than anything else.

If anyone has carried the battle to the Communists, it is Haya de la

Torre. One of his most popular

campaign slogans was "APRA, si!

Communismo, no!" Fernando Belaunde Terry, who finished

second in the presidential race, was not noted for any savage tirades

against the Red Menace. Nor was

Gen. Odria. Local Communists,

however, have given the Junta their full-fledged support, although the

party is still illegal and will

undoubtedly remain that way.

APRA, primarily because of its

appeal to the millions of voteless, illiterate Indians, is by long odds

the main threat to Peru's status quo.

At the moment, the party is still

reeling from the jolt of having its hard-fought election victory

annulled. When the soldiers pulled

out of the Casa del Pueblos (House

of the People) which is APRA's

headquarters, the place was a total wreck. On August 7, after two

weeks of occupation, it was

returned to the party, and a vast,

silent crowd was on hand to view

the remains. There were bullet

holes in the walls and ceiling, doors

and windows had been smashed and party records destroyed, and the

entire building -- nearly a city block of offices and facilities -- was a

shambles of glass, broken furniture and water-soaked paper. Among the

smashed or stolen items were: the

only dentist drill, all medicine from the clinic and drugs from the

pharmacy, typewriters, a radio

transmitter, all phonograph records, sculpture in the art workshop,

instruments for the children's band, food and plates from the dining hall,

records from the credit union, and just about everything else that

human beings could put to any use at all.

Those who passed through the Casa

del Pueblos that night, in what

seemed like a huge funeral

procession, could not be numbered

in that alleged "vast majority" of Peruvians who "fully support the Junta." The air was heavy with bitterness and defeat. They were

anxious to know what the U.S. was

going to do about the takeover, and the only American there could only

shake his head and say that it was

too early to tell, although it seemed inevitable that the hue and cry for recognition would sooner or later

have its effect.

This is the other side of the

"misunderstanding." APRA

represents some 600,000 of Peru's

2,000,000 voters, plus a vast

majority of the 53 percent of the

population which neither reads,

writes nor votes. Haya de la Torre got 14,000 more votes than any

other candidate, and in a democratic country a man who did that well

could expect to have at least some

say in the government.

In Peru, however, the figures don't necessarily add up to the score. The will of the people is subject to the veto of that class for which armies have been the strong right arm ever since armies were invented. To

these people, democracy means

chaos. It will loosen their grip on the national purse strings, shatter the foundations of society, and send the rabble pouring into the vaults. A

whole way of life would collapse if democracy became a reality in

Peru. The military takeover was no

accidental trodding on Washington's toes. It was a step taken with full deliberation and plenty of warning

beforehand. The military -- and the oligarchy which supports the

military -- were, and still are,

bound and determined not to let

APRA get its hands on the throttle.

It follows then, that if the U.S.

reaction to the takeover is a

misunderstanding, the whole

Alliance for Progress is a

misunderstanding, because the

Alliance is based rather firmly on

the assumption that Progress will

not come at the expense of

democracy. Mr. Kennedy has said

this over and over again, but it is a concept that has not gained wide

acceptance in Peru. Not among the

people who count, anyway.

National Observer, August 27, 1962

The Inca of the Andes:

He Haunts the Ruins of His

Once-Great Empire

Cuzco, Peru.

When the cold Andean dusk comes

down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the Venetian blinds in the

lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the

Indians come up on the stone porch

and stare at the people inside. It

tends to make tourists

uncomfortable, so the blinds are

pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room

immediately seems more cheerful.

The Indians press their faces

between the iron bars that protect

the windows. They tap on the glass, hiss, hold up strange gimcracks for sale, plead for "monies," and

generally ruin the tourist's appetite for his inevitable Pisco Sour.

It wasn't always this way. Until

1532 this city of crisp air and cold nights in the Andes Mountains

served as the gold-rich capital of

the Inca empire, the Indian society that South American expert Harold

Osborne has called "the only

civilization which has succeeded in making the Andes genuinely

habitable to man." Many of Cuzco's buildings still rest on Inca

foundations -- massive walls of stone that have lasted through 400

years of wars, looting, erosion,

earthquakes, and general neglect.

Today, the Indian is as sad and

hopeless a specimen as ever

walked in misery. Sick, dirty,

barefoot, wrapped in rags, and

chewing narcotic coca leaves to

dull the pain of reality, he limps

through the narrow cobblestone

streets of the city that once was the capital of his civilization.

His culture has been reduced to a pile of stones. Archeologists point out it's an interesting pile, but the Indian doesn't have much stomach

for poking around in his own ruins.

In fact, there's something pathetic about an Indian child leading you

across a field to see what he calls ruinas. For this service he wants

"monies," and then he'll be quiet unless you aim a camera at him,

which will cost you about 10 cents

a shot.

Probably one Indian in a thousand has any idea why people come to

Cuzco to look at ruinas. The rest have other things to think about, like getting enough to eat, and this has made Cuzco one of the continent's

liveliest hotbeds of Communist

agitation.

Communist-inspired "peasant

uprisings" are old-hat in Cuzco, dating back to the early 1940s.

Indeed, they're familiar all over

Peru. At one point during World

War II, Communists took over Cuzco and built a giant hammer and

sickle out of whitewashed stones on a hill overlooking the city.

The pattern hasn't changed too much since then. Last winter peasant

leader Hugo Blanco organized an

Indian militia in the Convencion

Valley near here and carried out a

series of hit-and-run harassments.

At about the same time, there were

strikes and fighting at the United

States-owned Cerro de Pasco

mines.

But the phenomenon is restricted

neither to the cities nor to Peru

alone. It's also seen in the

countryside and in the other two

Andean countries, Ecuador and

Bolivia. Of the three nations, only Bolivia has made any attempt to

bring the Indians into the national life. Peru has taken some nervous

and tentative steps, and Ecuador has done almost nothing.

Yet the combined populations of the

three countries total some 18,500,000, of which about 10

percent are white. About 40 per

cent are pure Indian, and the rest are mixed-blood cholos, or mestizos. If the Indians and cholos join and develop their full power, the shape of northern South America may

never be the same.

Communism, though, isn't the only

persuasion that can rouse the

normally placid Indians to violence.

Another is the powerful chicha

beer, the Andes' answer to home brew, which they drink in heavy

amounts. In 1953 an anthropological field survey in Bolivia reported 979

bottles were consumed in one

province for every adult man and

woman, an average of 2½ bottles a

day.

Another agitating influence is

extreme conservatism. One

example: Last fall in Ecuador, a

sanitation unit from the U.N.-

sponsored Andean Indian Mission

was attacked by Indians who'd been told the men were "Communist

agents." A doctor and his assistant were killed, and the doctor's body

was burned. The Ecuadorian press,

pointing out the Communists

certainly didn't tell the Indians the U.N. officials were "Communist agents," called the incident "a tragic consequence of the rivalry between

the extreme left and the extreme

right to win Indian support."

This incident and many others like it

were blamed on conservative elements opposed to land reform or

any other change in the status quo.

The example of Bolivia has shown

that once the Indian begins voting, he has little common cause with

large landowning or industrial

interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian

ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.

And the Indians, living mainly on a barren plateau that ranges from

10,000 feet above sea level in Ecuador to 15,000 in Bolivia

(Denver, by contrast, is 5,280 feet above), are curiously receptive to

this conservatism. Ever since the

Spaniards' destruction of his empire in the mid-Sixteenth Century, the

Indian has viewed all change as for the worse -- except, sometimes, the changes advocated by his

Communist-inspired "peasant

leaders." The word "government,"

for him, has been synonymous with

"exploitation."

A fine old Indian tradition, now on the wane, was to greet all strangers with a hail of stones, because they invariably meant trouble. Until very recently any man arriving on

"official business" might have meant an entire village was being

sent into the mines to labor for the rest of their lives.

Even when convinced somebody is

trying to help him, the Indian is

loath to change his ways. Arnaldo

Sanjines, a Bolivian working for the

Inter-American Agricultural Service in La Paz, tells of stopping at a tiny farm to demonstrate a steel plow to an Indian using the same

primitive plow his ancestors used

500 years ago. The old man tried

the new plow and was obviously

convinced of its superiority, but

finally handed it back.

"Ah, senor," he said, "this is a wonderful plow, but I like my old

wooden one and I think I will die

with it."

Mr. Sanjines shakes his head sadly as he talks of the 12 years he has

spent with the service, trying to

convince the Indians to give up their ancient methods of farming. One of

the main stumbling blocks, he says, is that the Indian lives almost

entirely outside the money economy; he exists, as he always has, on a

system of barter. One Indian, after walking for miles to a village

market, returned home to say he'd

been cheated out of all his produce because all he got for it was money.

There is a sharp distinction, however, between "city Indians"

and those who stay in the mountains.

From Bogota south, the Andean

cities are overrun with Indian

beggars, who have no qualms about

lying on a downtown sidewalk and

grabbing at the legs of any passers-by who look prosperous.

One of the most effective groups

now working with the Indians in

Bolivia is the Maryknoll Fathers, a Catholic order based in La Paz.

Says one priest: "Bolivia hasn't got a chance unless the Indians join the country. We're making some

progress here -- more than the

others, anyway. In Peru and

Ecuador all they do is make the

necessary concessions."

In 1957, Father Ryan, one of the

Maryknoll veterans, started Radio Penas, which broadcasts lessons in Spanish to the millions of Indians

who speak only Quechua or

Aymara. With 3,000 fixed-

frequency receivers, donated by Bloomingdale's in New York, the

Maryknollers have taught about

7,000 Indians in the past five years to speak the language of the country.

There is one class a day, but it is difficult to get the Indians to tune in at the right hour, because they tell time by the sun.

The focus of the "Indian problem" is Peru -- the golden magnet that

brought the Spaniards to South

America in the Sixteenth Century.

(In the first six months of the conquest, Francisco Pizarro and his men looted Inca temples of over

$200,000,000 in gold ornaments,

which they melted and sent back to

Spain.) Peru was the scene of most

of the conquest's bloody battles. In Peru, Pizarro chose to build Lima,

his "City of Kings" from which the Spanish Viceroys ruled the Andes

until they were driven out in 1821.

Today the "wealth of the Andes" is no longer gold, but the political

power lying dormant in the Indian population. This explains the long

and bitter struggle for Indian

support between Peru's Communists

and the American Popular

Revolutionary Alliance (APRA),

the country's broadest-based

political party.

Bolivia's 1952 revolution against

dictatorial interests took the Indian pressure off that country; it gave the Indian land, a vote, and at least the beginnings of a say in the

government. Nor does Ecuador seem immediately menacing; the

boiling point there probably is still several years away.

But in Peru the pressure is on as it never has been before, and the main pressure point is here in Cuzco.

And whoever consolidates Indian

support in this nation will not only rule Peru but will influence events in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Today in Cuzco, though, tourists

still wander about town and pay

ragged Indians to pose for photos.

They still take the little train to Machu Picchu to look at the fabled

ruinas. They still sit in the comfortable old hotel and drink

Pisco Sours while the waiters pull

the blinds. But the Indians are still outside the windows, and if recent

events are any indication, they are getting tired of having the blinds

pulled on them.

National Observer, June 10, 1963

Brazilshooting

Rio DE JANEIRO.

Brazilian police have a reputation

for extreme leniency, and the

Brazilian army is said to be the

most stable and democratically

inclined in all of Latin America, but in recent weeks the administration

of "justice" has taken on a new look in Brazil, and many people are

beginning to wonder just what the

army and the police exist for.

On a recent night, with the

temperature at its normal 95 and air conditioners humming all over the

city, an American journalist was

awakened by a telephone call at

4:30 in the morning. It was a friend, calling from the nightclub district of Copacabana.

"Get down here as fast as you can!"

the voice shouted. "Bring your camera! The Army is all over the

streets with machine guns! They've

blown the Domino all to pieces and

they're killing people right outside

the bar where I'm sitting -- we've locked the door, but they may break it down!"

Ten minutes later the half-dressed

journalist jumped out of a cab a

block away from the action. He

walked quickly, but very casually,

toward the Domino Club, with his

camera and flashgun cradled in one

arm like a football. In a Latin

American country nervous with talk

of revolution, no man with good

sense runs headlong into a shooting

party, because he is likely to get stitched across the chest with Czech machine gun slugs.

But at 4:45 the Domino Club was

quiet. It is -- or was -- a well-

known clip joint, catering mainly to American tourists and wealthy

Brazilians. The lure was girls --

some young and pretty, others

slightly piggy and painted after long years of service.

Now the Domino is a shell, a dark

room full of broken glass and bullet

holes. The doorman is dead; he was cut down by gunfire as he fled

toward a nearby corner. The

bartender is in the hospital with a bullet-crease down the side of his

skull, and several patrons are

wounded. Most observers say

another man is dead, but the bodies were taken away so quickly that

nobody can be sure.

What happened? The Correio de

Manhã, one of Rio's best papers, explained it this way: In an editorial

entitled, "Battlefield Copacabana,"

the paper said: "Copacabana was the scene of a military operation on Friday. A detachment of

paratroopers under the command of

two lieutenants sealed off a street in order to assault a nightclub with

machine guns, hand grenades and

tear gas. . ."

Correio went on to say: "These arms have been acquired by the

nation with the money of taxpayers

and put at the disposal of the armed

forces for the defense of the country, protection of the

constitutional powers, and

maintenance of the legal order. . . in the Copacabana case, they were not

used for these purposes. . ."

That was not all of it. The attack on the Domino, carried out by

uniformed paratroopers wearing

black greasepaint on their faces,

was a case of pure and simple

vengeance. Several weeks ago an

Army sergeant was beaten to death

as a result of a dispute over the size of his bill in the Domino. A few

days later an Army captain stopped

in the club to say that the Army

intended to even the score. He was

severely beaten by the doorman and

several others. About ten days

passed without incident, then the

Army evened the score.

When the journalist arrived, the

street was cordoned off at both ends by soldiers with fixed bayonets and machine guns. Several bodies --

some dead, others still alive --

were being put into trucks. There

was a large crowd around the

entrance to the Domino. The

journalist took a few photos, then

slipped through the cordon -- only

to be nailed immediately by a

captain, who escorted him out.

"But the Brazilian press is in there,"

the American protested.

"Maybe so," the Captain replied,

"but you're not Brazilian."

The journalist went around the block and slipped in from the other end, but by this time it was all over.

The sky was getting light, and

several blocks away a few early

risers were out on Copacabana

beach. In the middle of Rua

Carvalho de Mendonça, where the

body of the doorman had lain, was a large smear of blood and trampled

flowers. Several cars were riddled

with bullet holes. Near one corner, the cracks in the mosaic sidewalk

were filled with blood, and there

was a long smear across the sidewalk where a body had been

dragged to a truck in the street. A drugstore had bullet holes in its

windows, merchandise and glass

counters inside. Concrete and

marble walls on both sides of the

street were pocked with bullet

chips. On the sidewalk in front of

the Domino lay a hand grenade that

had failed to explode.

Had the grenade gone off inside the club, it could hardly have helped

but kill at least one American -- the Domino was always full of them --

and the resulting furor would have

been hard for Brazil to handle.

Even without the grenade, it is a

wonder more people weren't killed

in the attack. The soldiers burst

through the door, ordered

everybody to lie down on the floor, and sprayed the entire room with

machine gun fire. The owner of the

Domino, who was the main target of

the raid, escaped into another

nightclub. One patron grabbed a soldier's weapon and shot him with

it. Another patron fled, they pulled a pistol and wounded one of the

pursuing soldiers. Several

witnesses say this man was the

other dead body hauled off with that of the luckless doorman. But

nobody knows for sure -- except the Army, and the flow of information

from that quarter has all but ceased.

The Rio police were not in on the

Domino attack. They have problems

of their own. In recent weeks the newspapers have reported a half-dozen cases of police killing

vagrants and beggars, then dumping

the bodies into nearby rivers that

flow into Guanabara Bay. So far

two policemen have been arrested.

One confessed, and officials

assured the press that both would be dismissed from the force.

A columnist on the Brazil Herald, Rio's English-language daily,

observed that, "The method adopted

by several members of the police to tackle the social problem and do

away with misery by dumping

beggars into a river. . . is not

meeting with general approval,

despite undeniable efficacy."

The Jornal do Brasil called for an immediate investigation, saying that policemen are suspected of

"summarily applying the death

penalty to individuals considered

bad elements. . ." And, "The people

[of Rio] imagine the terror used in

some police departments to be normal treatment not only for

dangerous criminals, but mere

suspects and possibly even personal enemies of policemen."

One man voiced the opinion that

"Dismissal from the force cannot in any way be considered cruel or

unusual punishment for policemen

who kill beggars and vagrants who

bother them and get in their way

while they are trying to do their job

-- which mainly consists of making

the rounds to collect payoffs."

It was also pointed out that

policemen dismissed from the force

often go to work as doormen or

bouncers for clubs like the Domino.

Brazilian nightclubs, in fact, are not known for an excess of patience or

generosity. A "ballerina" named Maria, recently fired from a club in a small town near Rio, made a

complaint to the police, accusing

the owner of the place of

"transforming the backyard of his

joint into a cemetery." The girl reported that "Customers who

cannot pay the bill, or protest the amount, are invited to have a talk

with him in the backyard, where

they are shot and buried." The police promised to investigate.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk in Rio over the Domino incident. It

was not the first time that the Army has taken commando-style

vengeance on an unfriendly

nightclub, but this was the first time

anyone was machine-gunned. The question in most people's minds is,

"What next?"

Said one Copacabana club-owner:

"What am I supposed to do the next time a solider causes trouble in

here? I have to treat him with kid

gloves or they'll come in here and

shoot me like an animal."

An American wondered what the

reaction would be if soldiers from

Ft. Knox, Kentucky, shot up a bar in Louisville where a soldier had been

cheated, beaten or even killed some weeks before. "I can't even

conceive of it," he said, "but if it ever happened I bet they'd all hang."

Another American said, "Hell,

when I was a lieutenant [in the U.S.

Army] I could probably have

requisitioned two trucks from the

motor pool if I wanted to get back at some clip-joint, but I know damn

well I could never have got two

platoons of armed men to follow

me."

There is the nut of the problem, and one of the biggest differences

between the United States and not

only Brazil, but all Latin American countries. Where civil authority is weak and corrupt, the Army is king

by default. Even the words "Justice"

and "Authority" take on different meanings. After the Domino attack,

the Jornal do Brazil ran a follow-up story, headlined: "Army Sees No Crime in Its Action."

Or, as George Orwell observed, "In

the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

National Observer, February 11, 1963

Chatty Letters During a

Journey from Aruba to Rio

During the past seven months, journalist Hunter S. Thompson has been roaming through South America. His informative dispatches on social, economic, and political conditions there have been appearing in The National Observer.

But there's another side to reporting that seldom

shows up in formal dispatches -- the personal experiences of the digging, inquisitive newsman.

These often give fascinating insights on the land and people. Witness these excerpts from Mr.

Thompson's personal letters to his editor in Washington.

ARUBA.

I am leaving by smuggling boat for Colombia in a few hours and am

rushing to get this off before I go.

[Article on Aruba, The National

Observer, July 16.] It is probably

too late and too long for you, but I hope not, because I think it is a

good and valid look at island

politics, personalities, etc.

In about three days I plan to be in Barranquilla, Colombia. After

Barran, I plan to go up the

Magdalena River to Bogota, thence

to Peru in time for the June 10

elections. But this is tentative.

BOGOTA, COLUMBIA.

Here is a sort of offbeat travel

piece that might interest you

[Article on Guajira, The National

Observer, Aug 6]. In Aruba, they

are probably announcing the

election results right about now and I imagine there are a lot of people digging holes in the bleak Aruba

landscape.

If you can think of anything else you might want, let me know. By the

time I get to Ecuador I will have

seen most of Colombia at close

range. If nothing else, I will have a lot of photos and, hopefully, an

immunity to dysentery, which is

now on me in full force.

The Valencia piece [Article on

Colombia, The National Observer,

June 24] will be in the mail

tomorrow if they will stop ringing

these bells -- a mad clanging every

five or ten minutes. Sometimes it goes on for 20, and bounces me

around the hotel room the whole

while. Between the dysentery, the

bells, and the unceasing

loudspeakers in the street I am half mad. (Ah, here go the bells again.) Ten minutes of it now; a lunatic in the belfry and worms in the

stomach. What a town!

CALI, COLUMBIA.

My figures sent earlier on the price of Colombian coffee on the world

market are correct, but not nearly as dramatic as the following: Ninety

cents a pound in 1954, 39 cents a

pound in 1962. As I said, Colombia

depends on coffee for 77 percent of its export earnings.

Incidentally, Colombia gets another 15 percent of its export earnings

from petroleum. That leaves 8

percent as a base to begin

"diversifying" with. Not much, eh?

Some good minds are just about at

the end of their tether with the

problem.

While I'm talking here, the Alliance for Progress thing is a toughie,

because most of the hard-nose

opposition to it is sulky and silent.

In a lot of cases, the Alliance faces a problem not unlike that of trying to convince Jay Gould that he is not

acting in the best interests of his country.

Incidentally, Rojas Pinilla is

without doubt the only dictator

whose name is in the phone book in

the capital city over which he once held sway. He lives in the best

section of Bogota.

CALI, COLUMBIA.

There is an alarming tendency (in

Colombia, anyway) to view the

problems of the local economies as

essentially a thing for the Alliance to deal with. Almost like, "Thank God, Big Brother has finally come

to the rescue -- let him handle it."

This is, of course, a generalization, but there is a lot of truth in it.

Another ominous note is the attitude of a lot of American businessmen I

have talked to -- "Sure, we'd like to help, but business is business, you know. . ." And everything they say makes sense on at least one level:

Fears of arbitrary government price controls, expropriation, mounting

labor difficulties, and the risks of long-term investments vs. the near-certainty of the short.

QUITO, ECUADOR.

The sun is shining to Quito, the

mountains are green and sparkling around the town, and my mind is

running to high gear.

Most everything I have to say,

however, revolves in one way or

another around questions of money.

There seems to be a universal

impression that I am on some sort of Divine Dole, and the theory that I

often require money in order to

make money has not gained wide

acceptance. I trust you have

sufficient background in Personal

Economics to grasp the full meaning of this.

I could toss in a few hair-raising

stories about what happens to poor

Yanquis who eat cheap food, or the

fact that I caught a bad cold to

Bogota because my hotel didn't

have hot water, but that would only depress us both. As it is, I am

traveling at least half on gall. But in the course of these travels I have

discovered that gall is not always

the best currency, and there are

times when I would be far better off with the other kind.

I am throwing this thing in your lap though I don't expect anyone to

agree -- at a distance of several

thousand miles -- with my certain

knowledge that I am a paragon of

wisdom, courage, decency, and

visionary talent. On the other hand, I am working on my fourth case of

dysentery, my stomach feels like a

tree is growing in it, and I am

medically forbidden to touch so

much as a single beer.

Well, this is the longest letter I've written since I was in the Air Force and was sending love letters to a

girl in Tallahassee. I don't expect you to be altogether happy with this one, but then the girl wasn't always happy with hers, either, and we both survived.

Ah, it is noon now, check-out time, and I can hear the clang of the cash register across the patio as they

rack up another $7 to Senor

Thompson, the gringo with the messy room.

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.

Things are not going well here, my

man. I limped in Saturday night after a spine-cracking train ride, and on Sunday discovered to my horror that the president and all the Guayaquil money men are leaving Wednesday

for Washington. For this reason I

am having a time seeing anyone --

or at least the right people.

Aside from that problem, I am beset by other forms of plague. One, I

have not had any word from my

New York secretary in two weeks

so I have no idea how I stand at the bank. Thus I am afraid to cash a

check. The first time I bounce one

down here I might as well give up

and go back to the States.

The moneyed community on this

continent, which is what you have to deal with when you want to cash

checks, is like Melville's circle of

Genius -- which "all over the world stands hand to hand, and one shock

of recognition runs the whole circle round." Which means, in my case, that if I bounce a check in Cali my reputation as a crook will precede

me to Buenos Aires. So I have to be careful.

Optimism is a rare commodity here,

and the daily harassments of life in Guayaquil are just about as much as a man should have to bear.

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.

This is to confirm my not particularly pointed observations

during yesterday's phone call,

which I appreciated a whale of a lot and all the more because I suspect

you did it primarily to keep me from feeding myself to the giant turtles.

Now I feel better in the head, if not in the stomach. On Monday I will

fly to Lima. I could go before that but Saturday and Sunday are

holidays and we just finished a

five-day lull having to do with

Ecuadorian history. These holidays are maddening; every time you turn

around they are rolling down the

store fronts and locking the offices.

That, in addition to a noon to 4 p.m.

lunch hour, makes work just about

impossible.

I understand that while I was in

Quito my secretary told you I was to Talara, Peru. I think the New York

summer has affected her reason.

Just for the record, I have never

been near Talara and will do

everything in my power to avoid it in the future.

LIMA, PERU.

I have a good peg on Peru. It may

seem like heresy in Washington, but it is a fact that democracy is just about as popular here as eating live goldfish. I tell you now so you'll

have time to ponder. (Some S½&?

& has been throwing rocks at my window all night and if I hadn't sold my pistol I'd whip up the blinds and crank off a few rounds at his feet.

As it is, all I can do is gripe to the desk.) The street outside is full of thugs, all drunk on pisco. In my

weakened condition I am not about

to go out there and tackle them like Joe Palooka.

It is all I can do to swing out of bed in the mornings and stumble to the

shower, which has come to be my

only pleasure. I am beginning to

look like the portrait of Dorian

Gray; pretty soon I am going to have to have the mirrors taken out.

LIMA, PERU.

First, I want to assure you that I

exist. There is at present 171

pounds of me -- down from 189 in

Aruba -- and just about the same

weight in luggage spread out around this room. I am barred once again

from touching even a single beer,

any fried foods, spices, pepper, and just about everything else except

broiled meat and mineral water.

(Now this hotel doesn't have any

more mineral water -- How long, O

Lord, how long?)

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA.

I blew in yesterday in unholy shape.

This awful spate of pain and

sickness puts the fear of God in a

man. The latest was the sting of a

poison insect in Cuzco, paralyzing

my leg as if I'd been hit by a 50-

pound sting-ray. Anyway, after two

visits to the clinic, much cortisone, many infrared lamps, and the

inevitable drink-prohibiting

antibiotics I was at least able to

walk with a cane fashioned out of one of the legs of my camera tripod.

That is the state I am in now. I

hobble around La Paz like a vet

from the Indian wars, averaging

about 100 yards an hour on the flats and more like a turtle on the hills.

At the end of this week there will

be no electricity in La Paz. Now it is rationed to the point where the

United States Embassy, for one, has elevator service only every other

day. This means I have to go up five

flights of stairs on one leg, so I have been impressed with the gravity of

the situation.

They work it so that every section

of the city gets a turn at having

electricity. So on some days you

have hot water, elevators, lights,

etc., and on some days you don't. If the electricity goes off completely, however, I may have to flee. It is

bad enough having to walk up the

stairs on the cane, without having no lights or hot water when I get here.

Or heat, I might add, and La Paz is cold at Christmas.

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL.

I've been trying to get off a letter for about a week now, but have been

hopping across jungle and Matto

Grosso, touring oil camps, and

spending all my money on

antibiotics.

I figure, though, that every week I've spent in these countries is a week I won't have to spend the next time I

go back. An investment, as it were, and now that I've survived this

much of the thing I think I'd be

kicking myself right now if I'd just skimmed through.

I definitely mean to base here -- for a while, anyway. It is about time I lived like a human being for a

change.

National Observer, December 31, 1962

What Lured Hemingway to

Ketchum?

KETCHUM, IDAHO

"That poor old man. He used to walk out there on the road in the

evenings. He was so frail and thin

and old-looking that it was

embarrassing to see him. I was

always afraid a car would hit him,

and that would have been an awful

way for him to go. I was tempted to go out and tell him to be careful,

and I would have if it had been

anyone else. But with Hemingway it

was different."

The neighbor shrugged and glanced

at Ernest Hemingway's empty

house, a comfortable looking chalet with a big pair of elk horns over the front door. It is built on a hillside looking down on the Big Wood

River, and out across the valley at the Sawtooth Mountains.

A mile or so away, in a small

graveyard at the north end of town, is Hemingway's simple grave, lying

in the afternoon shadow of Baldy

Mountain and the Sun Valley ski runs.

Beyond Baldy are the high pastures

of the Wood River National Forest,

where thousands of sheep graze in

the summer, tended by Basque

sheepherders from the Pyrenees. All winter long the grave is covered

with deep snow, but in the summer

tourists come out and take pictures of each other standing beside it.

Last summer there was a problem

with people taking chunks of earth

for souvenirs.

When news of his death made

headlines in 1961 there must have

been other people besides myself

who were not as surprised by the

suicide as by the fact that the story was date-lined Ketchum, Idaho.

What was he doing living there?

When had he left Cuba, where most

people assumed he was working,

against what he knew was his last

deadline, on the long-promised Big

Novel?

The newspapers never answered those questions -- not for me, at any rate -- so it was with a feeling of long-restless curiosity that I came, last week, up the long bleak road to Ketchum, over the drainage divide

between the Magic and the Wood

River valleys, through Shoshone

and Bellevue and Hailey -- Ezra

Pound's hometown -- past Jack's

Rock Shop on U.S. 93, and into

Ketchum itself, population 783.

Anybody who considers himself a

writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America's most famous

writer. He had been coming here off and on since 1938, until finally, in 1960, he bought a home just outside of town, and, not incidentally a 10-minute drive from Sun Valley,

which is so much a part of Ketchum

that they are really one and the

same.

The answers might be instructive --

not only as a key to Hemingway, but to a question he often pondered,

even in print. "We do not have great writers," he explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa.

"Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. . . You see we make our writers into something

very strange. . . We destroy them in many ways." But Hemingway

himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being

"destroyed," and so he never

understood how to avoid it.

Even so, he knew something had

gone wrong with both himself and

his writing, and after a few days in Ketchum you get a feeling that he

came here for exactly that reason.

Because it was here, in the years

just before and after World War II, that he came to hunt and ski and

raise hell in the local pubs with

Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and

all the other celebrities who came

to Sun Valley when it still loomed

large on cafe society's map of diversions.

Those were "the good years," and Hemingway never got over the fact

that they couldn't last. He was here with his third wife in 1947, but then he settled in Cuba and 12 years

went by before he came again -- a

different man this time, with yet

another wife, Mary, and a different view of the world he had once been

able "to see clear and as a whole."

Ketchum was perhaps the only

place in his world that had not changed radically since the good

years. Europe had been completely

transformed, Africa was in the

process of drastic upheaval, and

finally even Cuba blew up around

him like a volcano. Castro's

educators taught the people that

"Mr. Way" had been exploiting them, and he was in no mood in his

old age to live with any more

hostility than was necessary.

Only Ketchum seemed unchanged,

and it was here that he decided to dig in. But there were changes here too; Sun Valley was no longer a

glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a

tough league. "People were used to him here," says Chuck Atkinson, owner of a Ketchum motel. "They didn't bother him and he was

grateful for it. His favorite time was the fall. We would go down to

Shoshone for the pheasant shooting, or over on the river for some ducks.

He was a fine shot, even toward the end, when he was sick."

Hemingway didn't have many

friends in Ketchum. Chuck Atkinson

was one of them, and when I saw

him one morning in his house on a

peak overlooking the town, he had

just received a copy of A Moveable Feast. "Mary sent it from New York," he explained. "I read part of it after breakfast; it's good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff."

Another friend was Taylor

"Beartracks" Williams, a veteran guide who died last year and was

buried near the man who gave him

the original manuscript of For

Whom the Bell Tolls. It was

"Beartracks" who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days

when "Papa" was still a meat-hunter.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway has

acquired quite a few friends since

his death. "You're writing a story on Ketcbum?" asked a bartender. "Why don't you do one on all the people

who knew Hemingway? Sometimes

I get the feeling I'm the only person in town who didn't."

Charley Mason, a wandering

pianist, is one of the few people

who spent much time with him,

mainly listening, because "When Ernie had a few drinks he could

carry on for hours with all kinds of stories. It was better than reading

his books."

I met Mason in the Sawtooth Club

on Main Street, when he came in to

order coffee over the bar. He is off the booze these days and people

who know him say he looks 10

years younger. As he talked, I had

an odd feeling that he was somehow

a creation of Hemingway's, that he

had escaped from one of the earlier short stories.

"He was a hell of a drinker," Mason said with a chuckle. "I remember

one time over at the Tram [a local pub] just a few years ago; he was

with two Cubans -- one was a great

big Negro, a gun-runner he knew

from the Spanish Civil War, and the other was a delicate little guy, a

neurosurgeon from Havana with

fine hands like a musician. That was a three-day session. They were

blasted on wine the whole time and

jabbering in Spanish like

revolutionaries. One afternoon

when I was there, Hemingway

jerked the checkered cloth off the

table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They'd whirl and jerk the cloth around -- it was a hell of a sight."

On another evening, out at Sun

Valley, Mason took a break on the

stand and sat down for a while at

Hemingway's table. In the course of the conversation Mason asked him

what it took "to break in on the literary life, or anything else

creative, for that matter."

"Well," said Hemingway, "there's only one thing I live by -- that's

having the power of conviction and

knowing what to leave out." He had said the same thing before, but

whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another

matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to

leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of

conviction survived the war.

That power of conviction is a hard

thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes

conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to

his music; Faulkner's conviction

faltered when he had to confront

Twentieth Century Negroes instead

of the black symbols in his books;

and when Dos Passos tried to

change his convictions he lost all

his power.

Today we have Mailer, Jones, and

Styron, three potentially great

writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway's, by the mean

nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.

It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims

because the function of art is

supposedly to bring order out of

chaos, a tall order even when the

chaos is static, and a superhuman

task in a time when chaos is

multiplying.

Hemingway was not a political

man. He did not care for

movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on

individuals in a world that seemed

far less complex, prior to World

War II, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts -- to blacks and whites, as it were, and

he was not comfortable with the

multitude of gray shadings that seem

to be the wave of the future.

It was not Hemingway's wave, and

in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says

Mason, why he hadn't been killed

years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the

globe. Here, at least, he had

mountains and a good river below

his house; he could live among

rugged, non-political people and

visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came

up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth

Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he

could get away from the pressures

of a world gone mad, and "write truly" about life as he had in the past.

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big

Two Hearted River, and he wrote

his own epitaph in the story of the

same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book

called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a

world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how

distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an

effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older,

and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle

of Ketchum it is easy to see the

connection Hemingway must have

made between this place and those

he had known in the good years.

Aside from the brute beauty of the

mountains, he must have recognized

an atavistic distinctness in the

people that piqued his sense of

dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village,

especially in the off season with

neither winter skiers nor summer

fishermen to dilute the image. Only the main street is paved; most of the others are no more than dirt and

gravel tracks that seem at times to run right through front yards.

From such a vantage point a man

tends to feel it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole. Like many another

writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing

on something solid -- like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of

conviction.

Perhaps he found what he came here

for, but the odds are huge that he

didn't. He was an old, sick, and

very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not

enough for him -- not even when his friends came up from Cuba and

played bullfight with him in the

Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of

reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

National Observer, May 25, 1964

Living in the Time of Alger,

Greeley, Debs

Old-Time Boomers Still Stomp the West, but Air Conditioning's Better PIERRE, S.D.

I had met the tramp digger the night

before. And because he was broke and I wasn't, I bought him a hotel

room so he wouldn't have to sleep

in the grass beside the road to

Spokane. But instead of traveling

the next day, he took what was left of his cash and sat by himself on a stool at the Thunderbird Bar in

downtown Missoula, sullenly

nursing his drinks as he had the

night before, and putting his change in the juke box, which can be a very expensive machine for those who

need steady noise to keep from

thinking.

It was four in the morning when he

knocked on the door of my hotel

room. "Sorry to bother you, pard,"

he said. "I heard your typewriter going, but I just got lonely, you

know -- I had to talk to somebody."

"Well," I said, not really surprised to find him still in town, "I guess we could both use some coffee. Let's go to the Oxford, it's open all night."

We went down the stairs of the

silent hotel and through the lobby

where a sleepy desk clerk looked up and wondered, with that bailiff s leer that desk clerks have been

cultivating since the beginning of

time, just what sort of a journalist I was if it was necessary to have

vagrants calling on me at this rude hour on a chill Montana morning.

Which may be a valid question. But

then somebody else might ask what

sort of a journalist would spend six weeks traveling around the West

and not write about Bobby Cleary,

the tramp digger with no home and a downhill run to a guaranteed early

grave; Bob Barnes, the half-deaf

wildcat trucker who never

understood that his life was a

desperate game of muscial chairs;

or the lean, stuttering redhead from Pennsylvania who said his name

was Ray and had hitchhiked West to

find a place "where a man can still make an honest living."

You will find them along the

highways, in the all-night diners,

and in the old brass-rail bars that still serve 10-cent beer -- a motley, varied, and always talkative legion of men who fit no pattern except that they all seem like holdovers from

the days of the Great Depression.

You will not find them any place

where men wear suits and ties or

work at steady jobs. These are the

boomers, the drifters, the hard

travelers, and the tramp diggers

who roam the long highways of the

West as regularly and as stoically

as other men ride the subways of

New York City. Their work is where they find it, their luggage is rarely more than one small suitcase or a paper sack, and their view of

the future is every bit as grim as it is limited.

These are the people who never got

the message that rugged

individualism has made some

drastic adjustments in these hyper-

organized times. They are still

living in the era of Horace Greeley, Horatio Alger and in some cases,

Eugene Debs. They want no part of

"city living," but they have neither the education nor the interest to

understand why it is ever more

difficult for them to make a living

"out here in the open." The demise of the easy-living, independent

West has made them bitter and

sometimes desperate. In the old

days a man with abnormal variety

of skills could roll into any Western hamlet or junction and find an odd

job or two that would pay his way

and usually provide a little margin

to spend with the local sports.

Today it takes a union card before

you can talk turkey with most

construction foremen, and many of

the big companies have a hard core

of regulars who move from one

project to another. You see them on the highways in Wyoming,

Colorado, and the Dakotas,

caravans of pickups pulling house

trailers, flat-beds hauling

bulldozers, and hard-faced men

from California and Texas with

their families in the cab and their automobiles riding high in the beds of big dump trucks en route from an interstate highway job in Montana,

for instance, to a dam-building

project in Colorado.

This is the well-paid elite of the

transient construction industry that is getting fat on Federal projects

that more and more Western states

are coming to view as economic

necessities.

Some people accuse Western

governors, senators, and representatives of dipping into the

"pork barrel," but others say these projects are no more than prudent

allocations of the taxpayers' money for necessary construction that

Western states either cannot or will not afford. At any rate it is a big industry in the West, a money tree

for a lot of people including the

foremen and the skilled heavy-

equipment operators who make up

the construction elite -- and a

massive source of both hope and

frustration to the boomers, drifters, and other free-lance laborers who

go high on the hog when they get

hired, and live like hobos when they don't.

"Bud," the broad-shouldered, potbellied cat driver, was not unhappy with life when I met him in a big

dance hall in Jackson, Wyo. He was

wearing an expensive gray Stetson

and a pair of fancy cowboy boots

that had not made much of a dent in his $200-a-week salary on the road-

building job outside of town. In the course of an hour he asked about 30

girls to dance, got turned down by

at least 25, and spent the rest of his time posing regally at the bar,

dispensing wisdom and humor in

every direction. At one point he let his gaze flash over the crowd and

pronounced in the manner of a man

long-skilled in the squandering of

vast sums: "These damn silly

tourists think they're big spenders!

Ha! We'll see." At that, he swept his change off the bar and disappeared.

The tramp digger in Missoula had not been so lucky. He wore a cheap, frayed windbreaker that was all but useless in the bitter nights of a late Rocky Mountain spring. He was

tall, with the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a man who works with

his back, but his eyes were dull in a slack face, and he walked with a

weary shuffle that made him seem

like an old man at 26.

As we walked along the deserted

sidewalks of Higgins Avenue I

asked him what plans he had. "I don't know, pard," he said with a shrug and a half smile, "maybe California, maybe Utah, it's all the same. I'll just hit the road when it gets light. There's always work for a good hard-rock digger."

Bobby Cleary was a specialist of

sorts; as a tramp digger he is a body for hire in any kind of dangerous,

underground work. He had come

over from Butte where he said he

was black-listed in the mines

because he had quit too often. There was no work in Missoula, he was

stone broke, and his prospects for

the immediate future were not real

bright. Now he looked up at the sky that was already getting gray, took the butt of an old cigaret from

behind his ear, lit it, and recited what seemed to be his motto:

"That's the way it goes -- first your money, then your clothes."

He had said it several times the

night before, when we had struck up

a conversation in the Thunderbird after he had frightened everybody

else at the bar with a loud diatribe on "justice for the working man, by Jesus. My old man fought for the

union and one of these days I'm

gonna write it all down like Jack

London. By Jesus he cared. He

knew what it was like, and how

about another whisky here, fella, for a no-count tramp digger!"

In the Oxford Cafe -- or "The Ox,"

as it is called by its generally

unemployed and often homeless habitues -- I ordered coffee, and

Cleary asked for "a bowl of beans."

He looked at me and grinned: "I figure you're buyin', pard.

Otherwise I'd have ordered a glass

of water and crackers," he nodded.

"Starch and water, it fills the belly."

I reached in the pocket of my leather sheepherder's jacket, pulled out a

black, passport-sized wallet, and

put two dollars on the counter. In

the dreary dawn of a hobo's

breakfast at the Oxford Cafe, that wallet seemed as out of place as a

diplomatic pouch or a pair of

cashmere Levi's.

It was a week or so later when the

wallet embarrassed me again. I had

picked up an elderly hitchhiker

named Bob Barnes on Interstate 90

near the cattle town of Miles City, Mont. We stopped for gas at the

North Dakota line, and I left the

wallet on the dashboard while I

wired up a defective muffler. When

I got back in the car he said very quietly: "That's a real nice wallet; where did you get it?"

"Buenos Aires," I said, then immediately added, "Things are cheap down there." But I had not been quick enough and it showed in

his face; here was a young punk

with a fat black wallet, idly pulling rank on an old man who felt himself going down and out, for some

reason that was either senseless or cruel, or both.

Bob Barnes was an ex-truck driver, who looked like an aging school-teacher. He was too old now for

any chance of a job with the big

hauling companies, but still able to work as a "wildcatter," which is like saying a pitcher cut loose by

the Yankees might still catch on

with the Mets. He had borrowed

some money to come out from

Minneapolis to Great Falls, Mont.,

where he had an old friend who

owned a small trucking firm and

would give him a job. But the friend

had moved to California and nothing else was available -- at

least not before his money ran out, and when that happened he began

riding his thumb back to

Minneapolis with not even a

toothbrush or a pack of cigarets for luggage, and not a dime in his

pocket.

When I picked him up around noon

on Saturday, he had not eaten since Friday morning. "Every time I

walked past one of those highway

restaurants I thought about going in and asking if I could wash dishes

for a meal," he said, "but I just couldn't do it. I'm not a bum and I don't know how to act like one."

We were together all afternoon, a

long hot drive across the plains and the badlands to Bismark, but it was late in the day before he finally got around to admitting that his trip was not a lark of some kind.

When he finally began talking about himself, I wished he hadn't. His

wife had been killed two years earlier in an automobile accident.

Since then he had been a drifter, but it was a hard dollar for a man in his 50s, and this wild stab at a job in Montana was his last real idea what to do with himself. When he got

back to Minneapolis he thought he

could "arrange a loan until things get better."

Unlike the other boomers I met, Bob Barnes has gone the whole route

and found it pretty barren in the

homestretch. He has pushed big timber trucks through blizzards in

northern Minnesota and driven

straight through from Florida to

Chicago with a load of tomatoes

that would spoil if he stopped to

sleep. He has driven every kind of

rig on every major highway in the

nation. He knows the names of

waitresses in truck stops in Virginia and Texas and Oregon. And he can

tell you how to get from New York

to Los Angeles with a heavyweight

load by taking back roads and

avoiding the truck scales; there is only one route left, and only a few veteran wildcatters know it.

I dropped him at the Salvation

Army in Bismarck, where he could

get a bowl of soup and a cot for the night before striking out again in the morning for Minneapolis. We shook

hands and wished each other good

luck. I felt like a pious hypocrite and drove off rapidly, without

looking back.

Several days later, on the flat black

ribbon that runs from Bismarck down the prairie to Pierre, I picked up a young, happy-go-lucky type

from Pennsylvania. He had just quit a hay-hauling job in North Dakota

and was on his way to Los Angeles,

where he felt sure of getting a job.

Maybe so, I thought, but I hope I

don't have to pick you up in 10

years when they've really tightened the screws, because the day of the

boomer is rapidly coming to an end.

In the age of automation and job

security, a touch of the wanderlust is the kiss of death. In any count of the chronically unemployed the

boomers will be very prominent;

they have never sought security, but only work; they have never saved,

but only earned and spent --

participating, as it were, in an

increasingly technological economy

that has less and less room for their sort with every passing year.

When we got to Pierre I dropped

the young optimist and his blue

plastic suitcase on the south side of town. He got out in the middle of a small dust storm and pointed his

thumb toward Los Angeles.

I returned to the Holiday Inn --

where they have a swimming pool

and air-conditioned rooms -- to

consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who

preach the glories of rugged

individualism from the security of

countless corporate sinecures, and

so little to that diminishing band of

yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless

style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

National Observer, July 13, 1964

Marlon Brando and the Indian Fish-In

OLYMPIA, WASH.

"As an actor, he's not much of a field general." That was the

consensus here last week after

Marlon Brando's well-publicized

but futile and disorganized attempt to help local Indians "regain"

fishing rights granted them more

than 100 years ago under treaties

with the U.S. Government.

The old Governor Hotel, just down the street from the State Capitol,

was almost taken over by Indians

who came from every corner of the

nation to protest "encroachment" on their historic treaty rights. The show was billed as the turning point for the American Indian in this century.

Said one of the leaders: "Up to now we've always been on the

defensive, but now we've reached a

point where it's life or death for the Indian culture, and we've decided to take the offensive."

Early rumors had it that not only Mr. Brando, but Paul Newman,

James Baldwin, and Eugene

Burdick would be on hand to offer

moral support and draw publicity.

But of the four only Mr. Brando

showed up, along with writers Kay

Boyle and Paul Jacobs from San

Francisco, and the Rev. John J.

Yaryan, canon precenter of San

Francisco Grace Cathedral. The

canon arrived with a white bucket

marked "bait," and the blessing of his bishop, James A. Pike. The idea

was to stage a "fish-in" for the Indian cause.

More than 50 tribes were

represented by some 500 Indians at

the gathering, and one of the leaders said happily that it was the first

time Indians had demonstrated any

unity since the battle of Little Big Horn.

This time, though, things didn't go so well for the red man. Mr. Brando led the Indians in three separate

assaults against "the forces of

injustice," and they lost all three. By week's end, the show had fizzled

out and Mr. Brando was off in the

wilderness of the northwest

Olympic Peninsula, trying to get

himself arrested again and prove

some point that had long since been lost in the chaos that characterized the affair from beginning to end.

Even so, the thing was a qualified

success almost in spite of itself.

Among the important results were:

-- A new feeling of unity among

Indians, where previously there had been none.

-- Plenty of publicity for the Indian cause, thanks largely to Mr.

Brando's presence.

-- The emergence of a new,

dynamic leadership in the form of

the National Indian Youth Council.

-- Emergence of the fact that the

Indian wants no part of the Negro

civil-rights cause and will make

every effort to detach himself from

it.

-- The inescapable conclusion that

the Indians still have a long way to go before they can speak with one

voice, or even make themselves

heard effectively without the help of people like Mr. Brando.

The aim of the whole affair was to

protest the state of Washington's

forbidding the Indians to fish with nets on certain areas outside their tiny reservations.

The Indians point out that the Treaty of Medicine Creek, signed in 1854

by representatives of Washington

state Indians and the U.S.

Government, deprived them of their

reservations but permitted them to

fish in "usual and accustomed

places." So, they claim, did other treaties of similar vintage.

The most "usual" place for these Indians -- mostly members of the

Nisqually and Puyalhip tribes -- has been the Nisqually River, fed by a

Mt. Rainier glacier and cutting 60

miles to enter Puget Sound a few

miles south of Tacoma.

In recent years they have used nylon gill nets and other increasingly

effective gear of the white man -- to the discomfiture of sportsmen

restricted to rod and reel,

commercial fishermen banned from

the river entirely, and fisheries

officials who fear complete loss of salmon and steelhead trout runs.

So last month the State Supreme

Court ruled that the state can restrict off-reservation Indian net-fishing in areas it deems the more necessary

to protect salmon and steelhead

runs. The state did so, and the

Indians promptly claimed this

action violated the Treaty of

Medicine Creek.

Says Janet McCloud, Tulalip Indian

whose husband fishes the

Nisqually: "They [the original treaty-makers] promised us we

could fish for eternity -- as long as

the mountain stands, the grass grows green, and the sun shines. . ." The State Game Department, she said,

thinks the steelhead belongs to the white man. "They must think the steelhead swam over behind the

Mayflower."

Since the state restricted their

fishing, the Indians have been

organizing in protest. The state, by way of defense of its action, points to the majority decision of the

Supreme Court, which said, "None

of the signatories to the original treaty contemplated fishing with a

600-foot nylon gill net, which could prevent the escapement of any fish

up the river for spawning

purposes."

The Indians deny this. They say

such factors as pollution and dam-

building are contributing heavily to depletion of Washington's fish, and add that only 30 per cent of fish

caught in Washington are caught by

Indians -- the rest going to

sportsmen and white commercial fishermen.

That was the background to last

week's developments. For the

Indians, the week began well and

became progressively worse. On

Monday Mr. Brando and Canon

Yaryan got themselves arrested for

using a drift net to catch two

steelheads in the Puyallup River

near Tacoma, where a recently

issued injunction forbids net-fishing by Indians or anyone else. They

also got a lot of half-serious publicity, but to Mr. Brando's

chagrin the charges were quickly

dropped. Said Pierce County

Prosecutor John McCutcheon:

"Brando is no fisherman. He was here to make a point. There's no use prolonging this thing."

And so, reluctantly, the rest of the day was taken up with a series of

strategy meetings dominated by Mr.

Brando and a bevy of lawyers, one

of whom gave a nearly superhuman

performance by managing to appear in almost as many news

photographs as did Mr. Brando.

So the "fish-in" proved nothing except that a Hollywood actor and

an Episcopal minister can fish

illegally in Washington and get

away with it. The Indians were no

better off, and the only one who

took the risk of fishing with Mr.

Brando and the canon now faces a

contempt-of-court charge for

defying an injunction.

Nor did a mass demonstration at the State Capitol on Tuesday help the

cause. Gov. Albert D. Rosellini,

along with about 1,500 others,

listened to several fiery speeches

and a "proclamation of protest"

concerning "harassment" of Indians, then gave a flat "no" to proposals that Indians be given greater

freedom to fish in "the usual and accustomed places." To do so, said the governor, would be to condone

a "hazard" to state fish resources.

Mr. Brando called the governor's stand "unsatisfactory" and said he would step up his efforts on behalf of the Indians. "We're prepared to go all the way to the wall with this thing," he told reporters. "I'll keep on fishing, and if it means going to jail, I'll go to jail."

All of which made good copy for

the local press, but nobody seemed

to know what good would come of

it. At one point, a lynx-eyed young lady in a very tight dress asked the

actor if it was true that some of the Indians resented his new role as

"the Indian spokesman."

Her question was merely the public

echo of a feeling that quite a few

people had expressed in private.

There was no doubt that Mr.

Brando's presence at the affair drew a lot of public attention, but much of it was irrelevant and led to

speculation -- some in print -- that he was "doing the whole thing for personal publicity."

He wasn't, but he so completely dominated the scene that many of

the Indians felt lucky when anyone

noticed them at all. The issue came to a head when a television network scheduled an interview with several leaders of the youth council. It was a chance for the Indians to present their point of view to a nationwide audience that is largely ignorant of their problems. But Mr. Brando

vetoed the interview because he had plans for another "fish-in" on the same day, and wanted all the

Indians with him.

Unfortunately, he couldn't convince the press to drive four hours through a rainstorm to cover an event that

seemed to have no news value.

Contrary to his expectations, the

publicity effort was a flop.

In all, the whole affair suffered

badly from lack of organization. Mr.

Brando was undoubtedly sincere in

his effort; he talked persuasively

and at great length about Indian

problems, but he seemed to have no

strategy except to get himself arrested.

Only three or four people among the several hundred involved seemed to

have any idea what was happening

from one hour to the next. An air of mystery and intrigue pervaded the

whole affair. Mr. Brando explained

it as being necessary to keep the

authorities in the dark, but the

authorities were several jumps

ahead of him at every turn, and the only people really in the dark were

the reporters, who were generally sympathetic at first; the Indians,

many of whom had taken time off

from their jobs to come to Olympia

and accomplish something; and the

lawyers, whose laboriously

contrived strategy proved

ineffective at every showdown.

Aside from lack of organization,

another root problem was the

Indians' fear of getting their "cause"

identified in the public mind with

the Negro civil-rights movement.

"We're happy to have Marlon on our side," said one Indian leader.

"But he's one of our big problems, too, because he keeps making

statements comparing Indians and

Negroes; the two movements are

entirely different. The Negroes don't have the law on their side yet and

they have a lot of popular prejudice against them, while the Indians'

problem is the Federal bureaucracy; we already have the law on our side in the form of treaties, and all we ask the white man to do is live up to

those treaties."

A press statement explaining why a

proclamation of protest was being

presented to the governor was very

explicit on this subject: "The presentation shall be conducted in

such a manner as to insure that the great pride and dignity of the Indian people will be upheld." Many

Indians are very touchy about their pride, and regard the Negro effort

as crude and undignified.

Here in Washington state, in fact, a

"splinter group" of Indians has caused a schism in Indian ranks by

retaining Jack Tanner, president of the Tacoma Branch of the National

Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP), to

represent them. Mr. Tanner, a

Negro, called the Olympia protest

"ridiculous," and on Wednesday had five clients stage a separate

"fish-in" of their own, for which they were immediately arrested.

As the Indians press their fight, the

youth council probably will do much of the fighting, and its

emergence here was a major event.

Up to now the relation between

these "young Turks" and the Indians'

traditional tribal councils has been roughly the same as once existed

between young Negroes and the

NAACP -- the youths often felt they were "on the outside." But last week they were clearly running the

Indian show.

"Sure, we made a lot of mistakes,"

says Clyde Warrior, one of the most aggressive of the young Turks, "so now we know what not to do next

time. This was just a beginning.

Wait until we get rolling."

Which will take a bit of time. The

youth council operates on a

financial shoestring, and its

members hold down full-time jobs

to support themselves. Most are

college graduates, more articulate

than their elders, and much more

willing to "offend a few people," as

Mr. Warrior says, in order to get things done.

The significant thing about last

week's events here, in fact, was just that: The Indians, young and old,

were willing "to offend a few

people." Throughout the country, Indians are doing battle with

Federal and state governments over

a variety of causes. And even

though last week's "fish-in" and assorted protests here resulted only in a stand-off, the attitudes they

represented could have wide-ranging repercussions.

National Observer, March 9, 1964

The "Hashbury" Is the

Capital of the Hippies

SAN FRANCISCO.

In 1965 Berkeley was the axis of

what was just beginning to be

called the "New Left." Its leaders were radical, but they were also

deeply committed to the society they

wanted to change. A prestigious faculty committee said the Berkeley activists were the vanguard of "a moral revolution among the young,"

and many professors approved.

Now, in 1967, there is not much

doubt that Berkeley has gone

through a revolution of some kind,

but the end result is not exactly what the original leaders had in mind.

Many one-time activists have

forsaken politics entirely and turned to drugs. Others have even forsaken

Berkeley. During 1966, the hot center of revolutionary action on the Coast began moving across the bay

to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury

district, a run down Victorian

neighborhood of about 40 square

blocks between the Negro/Fillmore

district and Golden Gate Park.

The "Hashbury" is the new capital of what is rapidly becoming a drug

culture. Its denizens are not called radicals or beatniks, but "hippies" -

- and perhaps as many as half are

refugees from Berkeley and the old North Beach scene, the cradle and

the casket of the so-called Beat

Generation.

The other half of the hippy

population is too young to identify with Jack Kerouac, or even with

Mario Savio. Their average age is

about 20, and most are native

Californians. The North Beach

types of the late nineteen-fifties

were not nearly as provincial as the Haight-Ashbury types are today.

The majority of beatniks who flocked into San Francisco 10 years ago were transients from the East

and Midwest. The literary-artistic

nucleus -- Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al

-- was a package deal from New

York. San Francisco was only a

stop on the big circuit: Tangier,

Paris, Greenwich Village, Tokyo

and India. The senior beats had a

pretty good idea what was going on

in the world; they read newspapers, traveled constantly and had friends all over the globe.

The world "hip" translates roughly as "wise" or "tuned-in." A hippy is somebody who "knows" what's really happening, and who adjusts

or grooves with it. Hippies despise phoniness; they want to be open,

honest, loving and free. They reject the plastic pretense of 20th-century America, preferring to go back to

the "natural life," like Adam and Eve. They reject any kinship with

the Beat Generation on the ground

that "those cats were negative, but our thing is positive." They also

reject politics, which is "just another game." They don't like money, either, or any kind of

aggressiveness.

A serious problem in writing about

the Haight-Ashbury is that most of

the people you have to talk to are

involved, one way or another, in the drug traffic. They have good reason to be leery of strangers who ask

questions. A 22-year-old student

was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover

narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. "Love" is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is

everywhere. People smoke it on the

sidewalks, in doughnut shops,

sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park.

Nearly everyone on the streets

between 20 and 30 is a "head," a user, either of marijuana, LSD, or

both. To refuse a proffered "joint"

is to risk being labeled a "nark" --

narcotics agent -- a threat and a

menace to almost everybody.

With a few loud exceptions, it is

only the younger hippies who see

themselves as a new breed. "A

completely new thing in this world, man." The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making

money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that

everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed -

- like North Beach and the Village -

- in a wave of publicity and

commercialism.

Haight Street, the Great White Way

of what the local papers call

"Hippieland," is already dotted with stores catering mainly to the

tourist trade. Few hippies can

afford a pair of $20 sandals or a

"mod outfit" for $67.50. Nor can they afford the $3.50 door charge at

the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, the twin wombs

of the "psychedelic, San Francisco, acid-rock sound." Both the Fillmore and the Avalon are jammed every

weekend with borderline hippies

who don't mind paying for the music and the light shows. There is

always a sprinkling of genuine,

barefoot, freaked-out types on the

dance floor, but few of them pay to get in. They arrive with the

musicians or have other good

connections.

Neither of the dance palaces is within walking distance of the

Hashbury, especially if you're

stoned, and since only a few of the hippies have contacts in the

psychedelic power structure, most

of them spend their weekend nights

either drifting around on Haight

Street or loading up on acid -- LSD

-- in somebody's pad. Some of the

rock bands play free concerts in

Golden Gate Park for the benefit of those brethren who can't afford the dances. But beyond an occasional

Happening in the park, the Haight-Ashbury scene is almost devoid of

anything "to do" -- at least by conventional standards. An at-home

entertainment is nude parties at

which celebrants paint designs on

each other.

There are no hippy bars, for

instance, and only one restaurant

above the level of a diner or a lunch counter. This is a reflection of the drug culture, which has no use for

booze and regards food as a

necessity to be acquired at the least possible expense. A "family" of hippies will work for hours over an exotic stew or curry in a communal

kitchen, but the idea of paying $3

for a meal in a restaurant is out of the question.

Some hippies work, others live on

money from home and many are

full-time beggars. The Post Office

is a major source of hippy income.

Jobs like sorting mail don't require much thought or effort. A hippy

named Admiral Love of the Psychedelic Rangers delivers

special-delivery letters at night. The admiral is in his mid-20's and

makes enough money to support an

apartmentful of younger hippies

who depend on him for their daily

bread.

There is also a hippy-run

employment agency on Haight Street

and anyone needing part-time labor

or some kind of specialized work

can call and order as many freaks as

he needs; they might look a bit weird, but many are far more

capable than most "temporary help,"

and vastly more interesting to have around.

Those hippies who don't work can

easily pick up a few dollars a day

panhandling along Haight Street.

The fresh influx of curiosity-seekers has proved a great boon to the

legion of psychedelic beggars.

During several days of roaming

around the area, I was touched so

often that I began to keep a supply of quarters in my pocket so I

wouldn't have to haggle over

change. The panhandlers are usually barefoot, always young and never

apologetic. They'll share what they collect anyway, so it seems entirely reasonable that strangers should

share with them.

The best show on Haight Street is

usually on the sidewalk in front of the Drag Store, a new coffee bar at the Corner of Masonic Street. The

Drog Store features an all-hippy revue that runs day and night. The

acts change sporadically, but

nobody cares. There will always be

at least one man with long hair and sunglasses playing a wooden pipe

of some kind. He will be wearing

either a Dracula cape, a long

Buddhist robe, or a Sioux Indian

costume. There will also be a hairy blond fellow wearing a Black Bart

cowboy hat and a spangled jacket

that originally belonged to a drum

major in the 1949 Rose Bowl

parade. He will be playing the bongo drums. Next to the drummer

will be a dazed-looking girl

wearing a blouse (but no bra) and a plastic mini-skirt, slapping her

thighs to the rhythm of it all.

These three will be the nucleus of

the show. Backing them up will be

an all-star cast of freaks, every one of them stoned. They will be

stretched out on the sidewalk,

twitching and babbling in time to

the music. Now and then somebody

will fall out of the audience and join the revue; perhaps a Hell's

Angel or some grubby, chain-

draped impostor who never owned

a motorcycle in his life. Or maybe a girl wrapped in gauze or a thin man with wild eyes who took an

overdose of acid nine days ago and

changed himself into a raven. For

those on a quick tour of the

Hashbury, the Drog Store revue is a must.

Most of the local action is beyond

the reach of anyone without access to drugs. There are four or five bars a nervous square might relax in, but one is a Lesbian place, another is a hangout for brutal-looking leather

fetishists and the others are old

neighborhood taverns full of

brooding middle-aged drunks. Prior

to the hippy era there were three

good Negro-run jazz bars on Haight

Street, but they soon went out of

style. Who needs jazz, or even beer, when you can sit down on a public

curbstone, drop a pill in your

mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for

that you can hear the Universal

Symphony, with God singing solo

and the Holy Ghost on drums.

Drugs have made formal

entertainment obsolete in the

Hashbury, but only until somebody

comes up with something

appropriate to the new style of the neighborhood. This summer will

see the opening of the new Straight

Theater, formerly the Haight Theater, featuring homosexual

movies for the trade, meetings,

concerts, dances. "It's going to be a kind of hippy community center,"

said Brent Dangerfield, a young

radio engineer from Salt Lake City

who stopped off in San Francisco

on his way to a job in Hawaii and

now is a partner in the Straight.

When I asked Dangerfield how old

he was he had to think for a minute.

"I'm 22," he said finally, "but I used to be much older."

Another new divertissement, maybe, will be a hippy bus line

running up and down Haight Street,

housed in a 1930 Fagol bus -- a

huge, lumbering vehicle that might

have been the world's first house

trailer. I rode in it one afternoon with the driver, a young hippy

named Tim Thibeau who proudly

displayed a bathtub under one of the rear seats. The bus was a spectacle even on Haight Street: people

stopped, stared and cheered as we

rumbled by, going nowhere at all.

Thibeau honked the horn and waved. He was from Chicago, he

said, but when he got out of the

Army he stopped in San Francisco

and decided to stay. He was living, for the moment, on unemployment

insurance, and his plans for the

future were hazy. "I'm in no hurry,"

he said. "Right now I'm just taking it easy, just floating along." He smiled and reached for a beer can in the

Fagol's icebox.

Dangerfield and Thibeau reflect the

blind optimism of the younger hippy element. They see themselves as the vanguard of a new way of life in

America -- the psychedelic way --

where love abounds and work is fun

and people help each other. The

young hippies are confident that

things are going their way.

The older hippies are not so sure.

They've been waiting a long time

for the world to go their way, and

those most involved in the hip scene are hedging their bets this time.

"That back to nature scene is okay when you're 20," said one. "But when you're looking at 35 you want

to know something's happening to

you."

Ed Denson, at 27, is an ex-beatnik, ex-Goldwaterite, ex-Berkeley

radical and currently the manager of a successful rock band called

Country Joe and the Fish. His home

and headquarters is a complex of

rooms above a liquor store in

Berkeley. One room is an art studio,

another is an office; there is also a kitchen, a bedroom and several

sparsely furnished areas without

definition.

Denson is deeply involved in the

hippy music scene, but insists he's not a hippy. "I'm very pessimistic about where this thing is going," he said. "Right now it's good for a lot of people. It's still very open. But I have to look back at the Berkeley

scene. There was a tremendous

optimism there, too, but look where

all that went. The Beat Generation?

Where are they now? What about

hula-hoops? Maybe this hippy thing

is more than a fad; maybe the whole world is turning on but I'm not

optimistic. Most of the hippies I

know don't really understand what

kind of a world they're living in. I get tired of hearing about what

beautiful people we all are. If the hippies were more realistic they'd

stand a better chance of surviving."

Most hippies take the question of

survival for granted, but it's becoming increasingly obvious as

the neighborhood fills with

penniless heads, that there is simply not enough food and lodging to go

around. A partial solution may

come from a group called the

"Diggers," who have been called the "worker-priests" of the hippy movement and the "invisible

government" of the Hashbury. The Diggers are young and aggressively

pragmatic; they have set up free

lodging centers, free soup kitchens

and free clothing distribution centers. They comb the

neighborhood soliciting donations

of everything from money to stale

bread to camping equipment.

Diggers' signs are posted in local

stores, asking for donations of

hammers, saws, shovels, shoes and

anything else that vagrant hippies

might use to make themselves at

least partially self-supporting.

The name and spirit derive from

small groups of 17th-century

English rural revolutionaries, called both Diggers and True Levelers,

who had a number of Socialist

ideas. Money should be abolished,

communal farms could support all

those willing to work them, and

individual ownership of land would

be outlawed. The Diggers were

severely harassed and the

movement eventually caved in

under the weight of public

opprobrium.

The Hashbury Diggers have fared a

bit better, but the demand for food and lodging is beginning to exceed

the supply. For a while, the Diggers were able to serve three meals,

however meager, each afternoon in

Golden Gate Park. But as the word

got around, more and more hippies

showed up to eat, and the Diggers

were forced to roam far afield to

get food. Occasionally there were

problems, as when Digger chieftain

Emmett Grogan, 23, called a local

butcher a "Fascist pig and a

coward" when he refused to donate

meat scraps. The butcher whacked Grogan with the flat side of his meat cleaver.

The Digger ethic of mass sharing

goes along with the American

Indian motif that is basic to the

Hashbury scene. The cult of

"tribalism" is regarded by many of the older hippies as the key to

survival. Poet Gary Snyder, a hippy guru, sees a "back to the land"

movement as the answer to the food

and lodging problem. He urges

hippies to move out of the cities, form tribes, purchase land and live communally in remote areas. He

cites a hippy "clan" calling itself the Maha-Lila as a model (though the

clan still dwells in the Hashbury):

"Well, now," Snydar says, "like, you are asking how it's going to

work. Well, the Maha-Lila is a

group of about three different

families who have sort of pooled

their resources, which are not very great. But they have decided to pay

together and to work together and to take care of each other and that

means all of them have ways of

getting a small amount of bread,

which they share. And other people

contribute a little money when it

comes in. And then they work

together on creative projects, like they're working together on a light-show right now for a poetry reading that we're going to give. And they

consider themselves a kind of

extended family or clan.

"That's the model. They relate it to a larger sense of the tribe, which is loose, but for the time being

everybody has to be able -- from

time to time -- to do some little job.

The thing that makes it different is that you don't have a very tight

monogamous family unit, but a

slightly larger unit where the

sharing is greater."

The tribal concept makes a lot

better sense than simply depending

on the Diggers. There are

indications, however, that the youthful provincialism of the

Haight-Ashbury is due for a forced

consciousness-expansion. For the

past few months, the scene has been filled up with would-be hippies

from other parts of the country,

primarily Los Angeles and New

York. The real influx is expected

this summer. The city is rife with

rumors, reliable and otherwise, that anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000

"indigent young people" will descend on San Francisco as soon

as the school year ends.

The Diggers are appalled at the

prospect. "Where are they going to stay?" says one. "What are they going to do?" A girl who works in one of the Digger kitchens shrugs

and says: "The Diggers will

continue to receive the casualties of the love generation." Local

officials, from the Mayor down, are beginning to panic. Civic leaders in the Haight-Ashbury have suggested

that sleeping facilities be provided

in Golden Gate Park or in nearby Kezar Stadium but Police Chief

Tom Cahill said no.

"Law and order will prevail," he insisted. "There will be no sleeping in the park. There are no sanitation facilities and if we let them camp

there we would have a tremendous

health problem. Hippies are no

asset to the community. These

people do not have the courage to

face the reality of life. They are

trying to escape. Nobody should let

their young children take part in this hippy thing."

In March, the city's Health Director, Dr. Ellis Sox, sent a task force of inspectors on a door-to-door sweep

of the Haight-Ashbury. Reports of

as many as 200 people living in one house or 50 in one apartment had

stirred rumors of impending

epidemics in the neighborhood. In a two-day blitz, eight teams of

inspectors checked roughtly 1,400

buildings and issued a total of 65

deadline notices to repair sanitation faults. But only 16 of the 65 notices, according to The San Francisco

Chronicle, were issued to occupants

"whose bizarre dress and communal living habits could class them as

hippies."

Dr. Sox had no choice but to back

off. "The situation is not as bad as we thought," he said. "There has been a deterioration [of sanitation]

in the Haight-Ashbury, but the

hippies did not contribute much

more to it than other members of the neighborhood." Dr. Sox went on to deny that his mass inspection was

part of a general campaign against

weirdos, but nobody seemed to

believe him.

The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood

Council, a nonhippy group of

permanent residents, denounced Dr.

Sox for his "gratuitous criticism of our community." The council

accused city officials of "creating an artificial problem" and harassing

the hippies out of "personal and official" prejudice.

As recently as 1962, the Haight-

Ashbury was a drab, working-class

district, slowly filling with Negroes and so plagued by crime and

violence that residents formed

vigilante patrols. Housewives were

mugged on the way to the grocery

store, teenagers were slashed and

stomped in gang rumbles, and every

drunk on Haight Street was fair

game for local jack-rollers.

Now, with the coming of the drug culture, even the squarest of the

neighborhood old-timers say the

streets are safer than they have been for years. Burglaries are still a

problem but violence is

increasingly rare. It is hard to find anyone outside the hippy community

who will say that psychedelic drugs have made the neighborhood a

better place to live. But it's even harder to find a person who

wouldn't rather step over a giggling freak on the sidewalk than worry

about hoodlums with switch-blades.

The fact that the hippies and the

squares have worked out such a

peaceful coexistence seems to

baffle the powers at City Hall.

A lot of cheap labels describe what is happening in the Hashbury, but

none make much sense: the Love

Generation, the Happening

Generation, the Combine

Generation and even the LSD

Generation. The last is the best of the lot, but in the interest of

accuracy it should probably be amended to the Head Generation.

A "head," in the language of hip, is a user of psychedelic drugs: LSD,

marijuana ("grass"), mescaline, peyote, methedrine, benzedrine, and a half-dozen others that are

classified in the trade as mind-

stimulating, consciousness-

expanding, or "head" drugs. At the other end of the spectrum are

"body" drugs: opium, heroin, barbiturates and even alcohol.

These are basically depressants, while head drugs are stimulants. But neither type comes with a

manufacturer's guarantee, and the

Hashbury is full of people whose

minds have been jerked around

savagely by drugs that were

supposed to induce peaceful

euphoria.

Another hazard is the widespread

tendency to mix two or three drugs

at one time. Acid and alcohol can

be a lethal combination, causing fits

of violence, suicidal depression and a general freak-out that ends in jail or a hospital.

There is widespread concern, at

least in San Francisco, about the

dangers of so many people using so

much LSD. A doctor at San

Francisco General Hospital says

there are at least 10,000 hippies in the Haight-Ashbury, and that about

four of them a day wind up in a

psychiatric ward on bad trips. He

estimates that acidheads make up

only 1½ per cent of the city's population, but that the figure for the Haight-Ashbury is more like 100

per cent.

The estimate is absurd; if every

hippy in the Hashbury took acid

every day, the percentage of users

in the neighborhood would still be

less than 50 per cent. Many of the

local squares try grass from time to time, but few have worked up an

appetite for LSD; the difference in potency is roughly the same as the

difference between beer and grain alcohol. Even among hippies,

anything more than one dose of acid a week is considered excessive.

Most heads are relatively careful

about their drug diets, but in recent months the area has attracted so

many young, inexperienced hippies

that public freak-outs are a fairly routine thing. Neighborhood cops

complain that acidheads throw

themselves in front of moving cars, strip naked in grocery stores and

run through plate-glass windows.

On weekdays, the action is about on a par with Macdougal Street in

Greenwich Village, but weekend

hippies and nervous voyeurs from the suburbs make Saturdays and

Sundays a nightmarish traffic jam.

The sidewalks are so crowded that

even a mild freak-out is likely to

cause a riot.

Municipal buses no longer use

Haight Street on weekends; they

were rerouted after mobs of hippies

staged sit-down strikes in the street, called mill-ins, which brought all

traffic to a standstill. The only

buses still running regularly along Haight Street are those from the

Gray Line, which recently added

"Hippieland" to its daytime sightseeing tour of San Francisco. It was billed as "the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States" and was an

immediate hit with tourists who

thought the Haight-Ashbury was a

human zoo. The only sour note on

the tour was struck by the occasional hippy who would run

alongside the bus, holding up a

mirror.

Last year in Berkeley, hard-core

political radicals who had always

viewed hippies as spiritual allies

began to worry about the long-range implications of the Haight-Ashbury

scene. Students who once were

angry activists were content to live back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana

smoke -- or, worse, to dress like clowns or American Indians and

stay zonked for days at a time on

LSD.

Even in Berkeley, political rallies during 1966 had overtones of

music, madness and absurdity.

Instead of picket signs and

revolutionary slogans, more and

more demonstrators carried

flowers, balloons and colorful

posters featuring slogans from Dr.

Timothy Leary, the high priest of

acid. The drug culture was spreading faster than political

activists realized. Unlike the

dedicated radicals who emerged

from the Free Speech Movement,

the hippies were more interested in dropping out of society than they

were in changing it. They were

generally younger than the political types, and the press dismissed them as the "pot left," a frivolous gang of druggies and sex kooks who were

only along for the ride.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected Governor by almost a million-vote

plurality. Shortly afterward, Clark Kerr was fired as president of the

University of California -- a direct result of Reagan's victory. In that same November, the G.O.P. gained

50 seats in Congress and served a

clear warning on the Johnson

Administration that despite all the headlines about Berkeley and the

New Left, most of the electorate

was a lot more hawkish, hard-nosed

and conservative than the White

House antennae had indicated.

The lesson was not lost on the

hippies, many of whom still

considered themselves at least parttime political activists. One of the most obvious casualities of the

1966 elections was the New Left's

illusion of its own leverage. The

radical-hippy alliance had been

counting on the voters to repudiate the "right-wing, warmonger"

elements in Congress, but instead it was the "liberal" Democrats who

got stomped.

So it is no coincidence that the

Haight-Ashbury scene developed

very suddenly in the winter of

1966-1967 from the quiet, neo-

Bohemian enclave that it had been

for four or five years to the

crowded, defiant dope fortress that it is today. The hippies, who had

never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the

election returns as brutal

confirmation of the futility of

fighting the establishment on its own terms.

There had to be a whole new scene,

they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move -- either

figuratively or literally -- from

Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury,

from pragmatism to mysticism, from

politics to dope, from the hangups

of protest to the peaceful

disengagement of love, nature and

spontaneity.

The credo of the Haight-Ashbury

was expressed, about as well as it can be, by Joyce Francisco, 23-year-old advertising manager of the new hippy newspaper, The San

Francisco Oracle. She was talking a few months ago to a columnist from

the establishment press, trying to

explain what the hippy phenomenon

meant: "I love the whole world,"

she said. "I am the divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything."

"How do you live?" the columnist

asked.

"From meal to meal. I have no

money, no possessions. Money is

beautiful only when it's flowing;

when it piles up it's a hang-up. We take care of each other. There's

always something to buy beans and

rice for the group, and someone

always sees that I get grass or acid.

I was in a mental hospital once

because I tried to conform and play the game. But now I'm free and

happy."

Next question: "Do you use drugs often?"

"Fairly. When I find myself

becoming confused I drop out and

take a dose of acid. It's a short cut to reality; it throws you right into it.

Everyone should take it, even

children. Why shouldn't they be

enlightened early, instead of waiting till they're old? Human beings need total freedom. That's where God is

at. We need to shed hypocrisy,

dishonesty, phoniness and go back

to the purity of our childhood values."

The columnist then asked if Miss

Francisco ever prayed.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with

its energy so I can spread my love

and beauty and nourish others. I

never pray for anything; I don't need anything. Whatever turns me on is a sacrament: LSD, sex, my bells, my

colors. . . that is the holy

communion, you dig?"

The columnist wasn't sure if she did or not, but she passed on the

interview for the benefit of those

readers who might. Many did.

Anyone who thinks all the hippies

in the Bay Area are living in the

Hashbury might just as well leave

his head in the sand.

In normal circumstances, the

mushrooming popularity of

psychedelics would be a main

factor in any article on hippies. But the vicious excesses of our drug

laws make it impossible, or at least inhuman, to document the larger

story. A journalist dealing with

heads is caught in a strange

dilemma. The only way to write

honestly about the scene is to be

part of it. If there is one quick

truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Yet to write from experience is an

admission of felonious guilt; it is

also a potential betrayal of people whose only "crime" is the smoking of a weed that grows wild all over

the world but the possession of

which, in California, carries a

minimum sentence of two years in

prison for a second offense and a

minimum of five years for a third.

So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of

unregenerate heads -- just as many

journalists were hard drinkers

during Prohibition -- it is not very likely that the frank, documented

truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.

If I were to write, for instance, that I recently spent 10 days in San

Francisco and was stoned almost

constantly. . . that in fact I was

stoned for nine nights out of 10 and that nearly everyone I dealt with

smoked marijuana as casually as

they drank beer. . . and if I said

many of the people I talked to were

not freaks and dropouts, but competent professionals with bank

accounts and spotless reputations. .

. and that I was amazed to find

psychedelic drugs in homes where I

would never have mentioned them

two years ago -- if all this were

true, I could write an ominous

screed to the effect that the hippy phenomenon in the Haight-Ashbury

is little more than a freak show and a soft-sell advertisement for what is happening all around them. . . that drugs, orgies and freak-outs are

almost as common to a much larger and more discreet cross section of

the Bay Area's respectable,

upward-mobile society as they are

to the colorful drop-outs of San

Francisco's new Bohemia.

There is no shortage of

documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is

only the orgiastic tip of a great

psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and

uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable heads who want nothing so much as peaceful

anonymity. In a nervous society

where a man's image is frequently

more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to

advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.

And these-- for the moment, at

least-- are the young lotus-eaters, the barefoot mystics and hairy

freaks of the Haight-Ashbury -- all

those primitive Christians, peaceful nay-sayers and half-deluded

"flower children" who refuse to participate in a society which looks to them like a mean, calculated and soul-destroying hoax.

As recently as two years ago, many

of the best and brightest of them

were passionately involved in the

realities of political, social and

economic life in America. But the

scene has changed since then and

political activism is going out of

style. The thrust is no longer for

"change" or "progress" or

"revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a

world that might have been --

perhaps should have been -- and

strike a bargain for survival on

purely personal terms.

The flourishing hippy scene is a

matter of desperate concern to the

political activists. They see a whole generation of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept

almost anything as long as it comes with enough "soma."

Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley

activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a

legion of young radicals who know

they have lost their influence but

have no clear idea how to get it

back again. "This alliance between hippies and political radicals is

bound to break up," he said in, a recent letter. "There's just too big a jump from the slogan of 'Flower

Power' to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it."

Decanio spent three months in

various Bay Area jails as a result of his civil rights activities and now he is lying low for a while, waiting for an opening. "I'm spending an amazing amount of time studying,"

he wrote. "It's mainly because I'm

scared; three months on the bottom of humanity's trash heap got to me

worse than it's healthy to admit. The country is going to hell, the left is going to pot, but not me. I still want to figure out a way to win."

Meanwhile, like most other

disappointed radicals, he is grimly amused at the impact the hippies are having on the establishment. The

panic among San Francisco

officialdom at the prospect of

200,000 hippies flocking into the

Hashbury this summer is one of the few things that ex-Berkeley radicals can still laugh at. Decanio's vision of the crisis was not written as

prophecy, but considering the

hidden reality of the situation, it may turn out that way: "I can see Mayor Shelley standing on the steps of the Civic Center and shouting

into TV microphones, 'The people

cry bread! Bread! Let them turn on!'

"

The New York Times Magazine,

May 14, 1967

When the Beatniks Were

Social Lions

SAN FRANCISCO.

What ever happened to the Beat

Generation? The question wouldn't

mean much in Detroit or Salt Lake

City, perhaps, but here it brings

back a lot of memories. As recently as 1960, San Francisco was the

capital of the Beat Generation, and the corner of Grant and Columbus in

the section known as North Beach was the crossroads of the "beat"

world.

It was a good time to be in San

Francisco. Anybody with half a

talent could wander around North

Beach and pass himself off as a

"comer" in the new era. I know, because I was doing it, and so was

a fellow we'll have to call Willard, the hulking, bearded son of a New

Jersey minister. It was a time for

breaking loose from the old codes,

for digging new sounds and new ideas, and for doing everything

possible to unnerve the

Establishment.

Since then, things have died down.

The "beatnik" is no longer a social lion in San Francisco, but a social leper; as a matter of fact, it looked for a while as if they had all left.

But the city was recently startled by a "rent strike" in North Beach and as it turned out, lo and behold, the strikers were "beatniks." The local

papers, which once played Beat Generation stories as if the

foundations of The System were

crumbling before their very eyes,

seized on the rent strike with

strange affection -- like a man

encountering an old friend who

owes him money, but whom he is

glad to see anyway.

The rent strike lasted only about

two days, but it got people talking again about the Beat Generation and its sudden demise from the

American scene -- or at least from the San Francisco scene, because it is still very extant in New York. But in New York it goes by a different

name, and all the humor has gone

out of it.

One of the most surprising things

about the rent strike was the fact

that so few people in San Francisco had any idea what the Beat

Generation was. An interviewer

from a radio station went into the

streets seeking controversy on "the

return of the beatniks," but drew a blank. People remembered the term,

and not much more.

But the Beat Generation was very

real in its day, and it has a definite place in our history. There is a

mountain of material explaining the sociological aspects of the thing,

but most of it is dated and

irrelevant. What remains are the

people who were involved; most of

them are still around, looking back with humor and affection on the

uproar they caused, and drifting by a variety of routes toward debt,

parenthood, and middle age.

My involvement was tangential at

best. But Willard was in there at the axis of things, and in retrospect he stands out as one of the great

"beatniks" of his time. Certainly San Francisco has good cause to

remember him; his one and only

encounter with the forces of law

and order provided one of the

wildest Beat Generation stories of

the era.

Before San Francisco he had been

in Germany, teaching English and

cultivating an oriental-type beard.

On his way out to the coast he

stopped in New York and picked up

a mistress with a new Ford. It was

de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to

me through the recommendation of a

friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. "Willard is a great man," said the letter. "He is an

artist and a man of taste."

As it turned out, he also was a

prodigious drinker in the tradition of Brendan Behan, who was said to

have had "a thirst so great it would throw a shadow." I was making my own beer at the time and Willard

put a great strain on the aging

process; I had to lock the stuff up to keep him from getting at it before

the appointed moment.

Sadly enough, my beer and

Willard's impact on San Francisco

were firmly linked. The story is a classic, and if you travel in the right circles out here you will still hear it told, although not always

accurately. The truth, however, goes like this:

Willard arrived shortly before I

packed up and left for the East; we had a convivial few weeks, and, as

a parting gesture, I left him a five-gallon jug of beer that I did not feel qualified to transport across the

nation. It still had a week or so to

go in the jug, then another few weeks of aging in quart bottles,

after which it would have had a

flavor to rival the nectar of the

gods. Willard's only task was to

bottle it and leave it alone until it was ready to drink.

Unfortunately, his thirst threw a

heavy shadow on the schedule. He

was living on a hill overlooking the southern section of the city, and

among his neighbors were several

others of the breed, mad drinkers

and men of strange arts. Shortly after my departure he entertained

one of these gentlemen, who, like

my man Willard, was long on art

and energy, but very short of funds.

The question of drink arose, as it

will in the world of art, but the

presence of poverty cast a bleak

light on the scene. There was,

however, this five-gallon jug of

raw, unaged home brew in the

kitchen. Of course, it was a crude

drink and might produce beastly and

undesired effects, but. . . well. . .

The rest is history. After drinking half the jug, the two artists laid

hands on several gallons of blue

paint and proceeded to refinish the front of the house Willard was

living in. The landlord, who lived

across the street, witnessed this

horror and called the police. They

arrived to find the front of the house looking like a Jackson Pollack

canvas, and the sidewalk rapidly

disappearing under a layer of

sensual crimson. At this point, something of an argument ensued,

but Willard is 6 feet 4, and 230

pounds, and he prevailed. For a

while.

Some moments later the police

came back with reinforcements, but

by this time Willard and his helper had drunk off the rest of the jug and were eager for any kind of action,

be it painting or friendly violence.

The intrusion of the police had

caused several mottos to be painted

on the front of the house, and they were not without antisocial

connotations. The landlord was

weeping and gnashing his teeth,

loud music emanated from the

ulterior of the desecrated house, and the atmosphere in general was one

of hypertension.

The scene that followed can only be likened to the rounding up of wild

beasts escaped from a zoo. Willard

says he attempted to flee, but

floundered on a picket fence, which

collapsed with his weight and that of a pursuing officer. His friend

climbed to a roof and rained curses and shingles on the unfriendly

world below. But the police

worked methodically, and by the

time the sun set over the Pacific the two artists were sealed in jail.

At this point the gentlemen of the

press showed up for the usual

photos. They tried to coax Willard

up to the front of his cell to pose, but the other artist had undertaken to

tip the toilet bowl out of the floor and smash it into small pieces. For the next hour, the press was held at bay with chunks of porcelain,

hurled by the two men in the cell.

"We used up the toilet," Willard recalls, "then we got the sink. I don't remember much of it, but I can't

understand why the cops didn't

shoot us. We were out of our

heads."

The papers had a field day with the case. Nearly all the photos of the

"animal men" were taken with what is known among press

photographers as "the Frankenstein flash." This technique produces somewhat the same impression of

the subject as a flashlight held under his chin, but instead of a flashlight, the photographer simply holds his

flash unit low, so that sinister

shadows appear on the face of a

subject, and a huge shadow looms

on the wall behind him. It is a

technique that could make Casper

Milquetoast look like the Phantom

of the Opera, but the effect, with Willard, was nothing short of

devastating; he looked like King

Kong.

Despite all the violence, the story has a happy ending. Willard and his friends were sentenced to six

months in jail, but were quickly

released for good behavior, and

neither lost any time in fleeing to New York. Willard now lives in

Brooklyn, where he moves from one

apartment to another as walls fill up

with paintings. His artistic method is to affix tin cans to a wall with tenpenny nails, then cover the wall with lumpy plaster and paint. Some

say he has a great talent, but so far he goes unrecognized -- except by

the long-suffering San Francisco

police, who were called upon to

judge what was perhaps his most

majestic effort.

Willard was as hard to define then

as he is now; probably it is most

accurate to say he had artistic

inclinations and a superabundance of excess energy. At one point in his life he got the message that others of his type were gathering in San

Francisco, and he came all the way

from Germany to join the party.

Since then, things have never been

the same. Life is more peaceful in

San Francisco, but infinitely duller.

That was pretty obvious when the

rent strike cropped up; for a day or so it looked like the action was

back in town, but it was no dice.

One of the "strikers," an unemployed cartoonist with a wife

and a child and a rundown

apartment for which he refuses to

pay rent, summed up the situation.

His landlady had declined to make

repairs on the apartment, and

instead got an eviction order. In the old days, the fellow would have

stayed in the place and gotten tough.

But the cartoonist is taking the path of least resistance. "It takes a long time to get people evicted," he says with a shrug, "and we're thinking of

splitting to New York on a freight train anyway."

That's the way it is these days in the erstwhile capital of the Beat

Generation. The action has gone

East, and the only people who

really seem to mourn it are the

reporters, who never lacked a good

story, and a small handful of those who lived with it and had a few

good laughs for a while. If Willard returned to San Francisco today, he probably would have to settle for a

job as a house painter.

National Observer, April 20, 1964

The Nonstudent Left

BERKELEY.

At the height of the "Berkeley insurrection" press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders,

nonstudents and professional

troublemakers. Terms like "Cal's shadow college" and "Berkeley's hidden community" became part of

the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping

the campus into a frenzy, goading

the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while

working for their own fiendish

ends. You could almost see them

loping along the midnight streets

with bags of seditious leaflets,

strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow,

Peking or Havana. As in

Mississippi and South Vietnam,

outside agitators were said to be

stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.

Something closer to the truth is

beginning to emerge now, but down

around the roots of the affair the fog is still pretty thick. The Sproul Hall sit-in trials ended in a series of

unexpectedly harsh convictions, the Free Speech Movement has

disbanded, four students have been

expelled and sentenced to jail terms as a result of the "dirty word"

controversy, and the principal

leader, Mario Savio, has gone to England, where he'll study and wait for word on the appeal of his four-month jail term -- a procedure

which may take as long as eighteen

months.

As the new semester begins -- with

a new and inscrutable chancellor --

the mood on the Berkeley campus is

one of watchful waiting. The basic

issues of last year are still

unresolved, and a big new one has

been added: Vietnam. A massive

nationwide sit-in, with Berkeley as a focal point, is scheduled for

October 15-16, and if that doesn't

open all the old wounds, then

presumably nothing will.

For a time it looked as though

Govemor Edmund Brown had side-

tracked any legislative investigation of the university, but late in August Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, an

anti-Brown Democrat, named

himself and four colleagues to a

joint legislative committee that will

investigate higher education in California. Mr. Unruh told the press that "there will be no isolated investigation of student-faculty

problems at Berkeley," but in the same period he stated before a

national conference of more than

1,000 state legislators, meeting in Portland, that the academic

community is "probably the greatest enemy" of a state legislature.

Mr. Unruh is a sign of the times. For a while last spring he appeared to

be in conflict with the normally atavistic Board of Regents, which

runs the university, but somewhere

along the line a blue-chip

compromise was reached, and

whatever progressive ideas the

Regents might have flirted with

were lost in the summer lull.

Governor Brown's role in these

negotiations has not yet been made

public.

One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new

"anti-outsider law," designed to keep "nonstudents" off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was

sponsored by Assemblyman Don

Mulford, a Republican from

Oakland, who looks and talks quite

a bit like the "old" Richard Nixon.

Mr. Mulford is much concerned

about "subversive infiltration" on the Berkeley campus, which lies in

his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik

perverts and other godless elements

beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus.

Others in Sacramento apparently

shared this view: the bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and

the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor

Brown signed it on June 2. The

Mulford proposal got a good boost,

while it was still pending, when J.

Edgar Hoover testified in

Washington that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement.

On hearing of this, one student grinned and said: "Well I guess that means they'll send about 10,000

Marines out here this fall. Hell, they sent 20,000 after those fifty-eight Reds in Santo Domingo. Man, that

Lyndon is nothing but hip!"

Where Mr. Hoover got his figure is

a matter of speculation, but the

guess in Berkeley is that it came

from the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper calling itself "The Monarch of the Dailies." The

Examiner is particularly influential among those who fear King George

III might still be alive in Argentina.

The significance of the Mulford law lies not in what it says but in the darkness it sheds on the whole

situation in Berkeley, especially on the role of nonstudents and

outsiders. Who are these thugs?

What manner of man would lurk on

a campus for no reason but to twist student minds? As anyone who lives

or works around an urban campus

knows, vast numbers of students are already more radical than any Red

Mr. Hoover could name. Beyond

that, the nonstudents and outsiders California has legislated against are in the main ex-students, graduates, would-be transfers, and other young activist types who differ from

radical students only in that they

don't carry university registration cards. On any urban campus the

nonstudent is an old and dishonored tradition. Every big city school has its fringe element: Harvard, New

York University, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University

of Caracas. A dynamic university in a modern population center simply

can't be isolated from the realities, human or otherwise, that surround

it. Mr. Mulford would make an

island of the Berkeley campus but,

alas, there are too many guerrillas.

In 1958, I drifted north from

Kentucky and became a non-student

at Columbia. I signed up for two

courses and am still getting bills for

the tuition. My home was a $12-a-week room in an off-campus

building full of jazz musicians,

shoplifters, mainliners, screaming

poets and sex addicts of every

description. It was a good life. I

used the university facilities and at one point was hired to stand in a

booth all day for two days,

collecting registration fees. Twice I walked almost the length of the

campus at night with a big wooden

box containing nearly $15,000. It

was a wild feeling and I'm still not

sure why I took the money to the bursar.

Being a "non" or "nco" student on an urban campus is not only simple

but natural for anyone who is young, bright and convinced that the major he's after is not on the list. Any list.

A serious nonstudent is his own

guidance counselor. The surprising

thing is that so few people beyond

the campus know this is going on.

The nonstudent tradition seems to

date from the end of World War II.

Before that it was a more individual thing. A professor at Columbia told me that the late R.P. Blackmur, one of the most academic and scholarly

of literary critics, got most of his education by sitting in on classes at Harvard.

In the age of Eisenhower and

Kerouac, the nonstudent went about

stealing his education as quietly as possible. It never occurred to him to jump into campus politics; that was part of the game he had already quit.

But then the decade ended. Nixon went down, and the civil rights

sturggle broke out. With this, a

whole army of guilt-crippled

Eisenhower deserters found the war

they had almost given up hoping for.

With Kennedy at the helm, politics

became respectable for a change,

and students who had sneered at the idea of voting found themselves

joining the Peace Corps or standing on picket lines. Student radicals

today may call Kennedy a phony

liberal and a glamorous sellout, but

only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited

enough to want to change the

American reality, instead of just

quitting it. Today's activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac

as the hipsters of the '50s talked

about Hemingway. He was a

quitter, they say; he had good

instincts and a good ear for the

sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing. The new

campus radical has a cause, a

multipronged attack on as many

fronts as necessary: if not civil rights, then foreign policy or

structural deprivation in domestic

poverty pockets. Injustice is the

demon, and the idea is to bust it.

What Mulford's law will do to

change this situation is not clear.

The language of the bill leaves no

doubt that it shall henceforth be a misdemeanor for any nonstudent or

nonemployee to remain on a state

university or state college campus

after he or she has been ordered to

leave, if it "reasonably appears" to the chief administrative officer or the person designated by him to

keep order on the campus "that such person is committing an act likely to interfere with the peaceful conduct of the campus."

In anything short of riot conditions, the real victims of Mulford's law

will be the luckless flunkies

appointed to enforce it. The mind of man could devise few tasks more

hopeless than rushing around this

1,000-acre, 27,000-student campus in the midst of some crowded

action, trying to apprehend and

remove -- on sight and before he

can flee -- any person who is not a Cal student and is not eligible for readmission. It would be a

nightmare of lies, false seizures,

double entries and certain

provocation. Meanwhile, most of

those responsible for the action

would be going about their business in legal peace. If pure justice

prevailed in this world, Don

Mulford would be appointed to keep order and bag subversives at

the next campus demonstrations.

There are those who seem surprised

that a defective rattrap like the

Mulford law could be endorsed by

the legislature of a supposedly

progressive, enlightened state. But these same people were surprised

when Proposition 14, which

reopened the door to racial

discrimination in housing, was

endorsed by the electorate last

November by a margin of nearly 2

to 1.

Meanwhile, the nonstudent in

Berkeley is part of the scene, a fact of life. The university estimates that about 3,000 non-students use the

campus in various ways: working in

the library with borrowed

registration cards; attending

lectures, concerts and student films; finding jobs and apartments via

secondhand access to university

listings; eating in the cafeteria, and

monitoring classes. In appearance they are indistinguishable from

students. Berkeley is full of wild-

looking graduate students, bearded

professors and long-haired English

majors who look like Joan Baez.

Until recently there was no mention of nonstudents in campus politics,

but at the beginning of the Free

Speech rebellion President Kerr

said "nonstudent elements were partly responsible for the

demonstration." Since then, he has

backed away from that stand, leaving it to the lawmakers. Even

its goats and enemies now admit

that the FSM revolt was the work of actual students. It has been a

difficult fact for some people to

accept, but a reliable poll of student attitudes at the time showed that

roughly 18,000 of them supported

the goals of the FSM, and about half that number supported its "illegal"

tactics. More than 800 were willing to defy the administration, the

Governor and the police, rather than

back down. The faculty supported the FSM by close to 8 to 1. The

nonstudents nearly all sided with

the FSM. The percentage of

radicals among them is much higher

than among students. It is invariably the radicals, not the conservatives, who drop out of school and become

activist non-students. But against

this background, their attitude

hardly matters.

"We don't play a big role

politically," says one. "But

philosophically we're a hell of a threat to the establishment. Just the fact that we exist proves that

dropping out of school isn't the end of the world. Another important

thing is that we're not looked down on by students. We're respectable.

A lot of students I know are thinking of becoming nonstudents."

"As a nonstudent I have nothing to lose," said another. "I can work full time on whatever I want, study what interests me, and figure out what's

really happening in the world. That student routine is a drag. Until I quit the grind I didn't realize how many groovy things there are to do around Berkeley: concerts, films, good

speakers, parties, pot, politics,

women -- I can't think of a better

way to live, can you?"

Not all nonstudents worry the

lawmakers and administrators.

Some are fraternity bums who

flunked out of the university, but

don't want to leave the parties and

the good atmosphere. Others are quiet squares or technical types,

earning money between enrollments

and meanwhile living nearby. But

there is no longer the sharp division that used to exist between the

beatnik and the square: too many

radicals wear ties and sport coats; too many engineering students wear

boots and levis. Some of the most

bohemian-looking girls around the

campus are Left puritans, while

some of the sweetest-looking

sorority types are confirmed pot

smokers and wear diaphragms on all occasions.

Nonstudents lump one another --

and many students -- into two very

broad groups: "political radicals"

and "social radicals." Again, the division is not sharp, but in general, and with a few bizarre exceptions, a political radical is a Left activist in one or more causes. His views are

revolutionary in the sense that his idea of "democratic solutions"

alarms even the liberals. He may be

a Young Trotskyist, a De Bois Club organizer or merely an ex-Young

Democrat, who despairs of

President Johnson and is now

looking for action with some friends in the Progressive Labor Party.

Social radicals tend to be "arty."

Their gigs are poetry and folk

music, rather than politics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their

political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good

sex, good sounds and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don't

mind lending their talents to a

demonstration here and there, or

even getting arrested for a good

cause. They have quit one system

and they don't want to be organized into another; they feel they have

more important things to do.

A report last spring by the faculty's Select Committee on Education

tried to put it all in a nutshell: "A

significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as

conventional motivation. Rather

than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society,

they want to be moral men in a

moral society. They want to lead

lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and

responsibility."

The committee was severely

critical of the whole university

structure, saying: "The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too

much an intricate system of

compulsions, rewards and

punishments; too much of our

attention is given to score keeping."

Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring "the moral revolution of the young."

Talk like this strikes the radicals among "the young" as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks' sympathy. To them, anyone

who takes part in "the system" is a hypocrite. This is especially true

among the Marxist, Mao-Castro

element -- the hipsters of the Left.

One of these is Steve DeCanio, a

22-year-old Berkeley radical and

Cal graduate in math, now facing a

two-month jail term as a result of

the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore

immune to the Mulford law. "I

became a radical after the 1962

auto row (civil rights)

demonstrations in San Francisco,"

he says. "That's when I saw the power structure and understood the

hopelessness of trying to be a

liberal. After I got arrested I

dropped the pre-med course I'd

started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being

screwed time and again in the

courts. I'm out on appeal now with

four and a half months of jail

hanging over me."

DeCanio is an editor of Spider, a

wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and

around the Berkeley campus. Once

banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The

eight-man editorial board is

comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is

dedicated, they say, to "sex,

politics, international communism,

drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll."

Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.

DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third

social. He is bright, small, with

dark hair and glasses, cleanshaven, and casually but not sloppily

dressed. He listens carefully to

questions, uses his hands for

emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: "What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn't make sense to take part in

it."

He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a

comfortable house on College

Avenue, a few blocks from campus.

The $120-a-month rent is split six

ways. There are three bedrooms, a

kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty

blonde wants a Soviet army chorus

record, a Tony Perkins type from

the Oakland Du Bois Club wants a

film projector; Art Goldberg -- the

arch-activist who also lives here --

comes storming in, shouting for help on the "Vietnam Days" teach-in arrangements.

It is all very friendly and collegiate.

People wear plaid shirts and khaki

pants, white socks and moccasins.

There are books on the shelves,

cans of beer and Cokes in the

refrigerator, and a manually

operated light bulb in the bathroom.

In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about "bringing

the ruling class to their knees," or

"finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms."

Political conversation in this house would drive Don Mulford right

over the wall. There are riffs of

absurdity and mad humor in it, but

the base line remains a dead-

serious alienation from the

"Repugnant Society" of 20th-century America. You hear the same talk on

the streets, in coffee bars, on the walk near Ludwig's Fountain in

front of Sproul Hall, and in other houses where activists live and

gather. And why not? This is

Berkeley, which DeCanio calls "the center of West Coast radicalism." It has a long history of erratic politics, both on and off the campus. From

1911 to 1913, its Mayor was a

Socialist named Stitt Wilson. It has more psychiatrists and fewer bars

than any other city of comparable

size in California. And there are

249 churches for 120,300 people,

of which 25 percent are Negroes --

one of the highest percentages of any city outside the South.

Culturally, Berkeley is dominated

by two factors: the campus and San

Francisco across the Bay. The

campus is so much a part of the

community that the employment and

housing markets have long since

adjusted to student patterns. A

$100-a-month apartment or cottage

is no problem when four or five

people split the rent, and there are plenty of ill-paid, minimum-strain

jobs for those without money from home. Tutoring, typing, clerking, car washing, hash slinging and baby

sitting are all easy ways to make a subsistence income; one of the

favorites among nonstudents is

computer programing, which pays

well.

Therefore, Berkeley's nonstudents

have no trouble getting by. The

climate is easy, the people are

congenial, and the action never

dies. Jim Prickett, who quit the

University of Oklahoma and flunked out of San Francisco State, is

another of Spider's nonstudent editors. "State has no community,"

he says, "and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in

jail." Prickett came to Berkeley because "things are happening

here." At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. "If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over," he says with a shrug.

Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as Spider's star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. Prickett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers

looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. "Hell, I'll probably sell out," he says with a faint smile. "Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while."

Yet there is something about

Prickett that suggests he won't sell out so easily. Unlike many

nonstudent activists, he has no degree, and in the society that

appalls him even a sellout needs

credentials. That is one of the most tangible realities of the nonstudent; by quitting school he has taken a

physical step outside the system -- a move that more and more students

seem to find admirable. It is not an easy thing to repudiate -- not now, at any rate, while the tide is running that way. And "the system" cannot be rejoined without some painful

self-realization. Many a man has

whipped up a hell of a broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.

The problem is not like that of high school dropouts. They are

supposedly inadequate, but the

activist nonstudent is generally said to be superior. "A lot of these kids are top students," says Dr. David Powellson, chief of Cal's student

psychiatric clinic, "but no univeristy is set up to handle them."

How, then, are these bright

mavericks to fit into the super-bureaucracies of government and

big business? Cal takes its

undergraduates from the top eighth

of the state's high school graduates, and those accepted from out of state are no less "promising." The ones who migrate to Berkeley after

quitting other schools are usually

the same type. They are seekers --

disturbed, perhaps, and perhaps for good reason. Many drift from one

university to another, looking for the right program, the right professor,

the right atmosphere, and right way to deal with the deplorable world

they have suddenly grown into. It is like an army of Holden Caulfields,

looking for a home and beginning to suspect they may never find one.

These are the outsiders, the

nonstudents, and the potential -- if not professional -- troublemakers.

There is something primitive and

tragic in California's effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the

thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will

legislate in ignorance against its

unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is

bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of mass education.

It is a race against time,

complacency and vested interests.

For the Left-activist nonstudent the race is very personal. Whether he is right, wrong, ignorant, vicious,

super-intelligent or simply bored, once he has committed himself to

the extent of dropping out of school, he has also committed himself to

"making it" outside the framework of whatever he has quit. A social

radical presumably has his talent,

his private madness or some other

insulated gimmick, but for the

political radical the only true hope is somehow to bust the system that

drove him into limbo. In this new

era many believe they can do it, but most of those I talked to at Berkeley

seemed a bit nervous. There was a singular vagueness as to the

mechanics of the act, no real sense of the openings.

"What are you going to be doing ten years from now?" I asked a visiting radical in the house where Spider is put together. "What if there's no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?"

"Hell," he said. "I don't think about that: Too much is happening right

now. If the revolution's coming, it

had better come damn quick."

The Nation, vol. 201, September 27, 1965

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines. . .

Ain't What They Used to

Be!

Myths and legends die hard in

America. We love them for the

extra dimension they provide, the

illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and

mold-breaking champions exist as

living proof to those who need it

that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final. Look at Joe Namath,

they say; he broke all the rules and still beat the system like a gong. Or Hugh Hefner, the Horatio Alger of

our time. And Cassius Clay --

Muhammad Ali -- who flew so

high, like the U-2, that he couldn't quite believe it when the drone bees shot him down.

Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot

down over Russia, is now a test

pilot for Lockheed Aircraft, testing

newer, more "invincible" planes in the cool, bright skies above the

Mojave Desert, in the Antelope

Valley just north of Los Angeles.

The valley is alive with aviation

projects, particularly at Edwards

Air Force Base, near Lancaster,

where the Air Force tests its new

planes and breeds a new,

computerized version of the

legendary, hell-for-leather test

pilot. Air Force brass at Edwards is appalled at the persistence of the

old "kick the tire, light the fire, and

away we go" image. The key word in today's Air Force, they insist, is

"professionalism."

This made my visit to the base a bit tricky. It was painfully obvious,

even after an hour or so of casual

talk, that the hard-nosed pros on the flight line resented the drift of my conversation -- particularly when I asked about things like "dueling societies." The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its

career men, and in high-risk fields

like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future

just as surely as an LSD habit.

Test pilots are very straight people.

They are totally dedicated to their work and not accustomed to dealing

with slip-shod civilians who seem

even faintly disorganized --

especially writers. My image was

further queered by a painfully

cracked bone in my right hand,

which forced me to use my left in

all formal introductions.

At one point, while talking to two colonels, I lamely explained that I break my hand about once a year.

"Last time," I said, "it was a motorcycle wreck on a rainy night; I missed a shift between second and

third, doing about seventy on a bad curve."

Zang! That did it. They were horrified. "Why would anybody do a thing like that?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had

just come back from flying the huge

XB-70 acoss the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel

Dean Godwin, who is rated, along

with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong

watch fob.

We were sitting in a sort of gray-

plastic office near the flight line.

Outside, on the cold, gray runway,

sat a plane called the SR-71,

capable of flying 2000 m.p.h. -- or about 3100 feet per second -- in the

thin air on the edge of the earth's atmosphere, nearly 20 miles up. The SR-71 has already made the U-2

obsolete; the thrust of its two

engines equals the power of 45

diesel locomotives and it cruises at an altitude just inside the realm of space flight. Yet neither Sturmthal nor Godwin would have balked for

an instant at the prospect of

climbing into the cockpit of the

thing and pushing it as high and hard as it could possibly go.

The Air Force has been trying for 20 years to croak the image of the

wild-eyed, full-force, "aim it at the ground and see if it crashes" kind of test pilot, and they have finally

succeeded. The vintage-'69 test

pilot is a supercautious, super-

trained, superintelligent monument

to the Computer Age. He is a

perfect specimen, on paper, and so

confident of his natural edge on

other kinds of men that you begin to wonder -- after spending a bit of

time in the company of test pilots --

if perhaps we might not all be better off if the White House could be

moved, tomorrow morning, to this

dreary wasteland called Edwards

Air Force Base. If nothing else, my own visit to the base convinced me

that Air Force test pilots see the rest of us, perhaps accurately, as either physical, mental, or moral rejects.

I came away from Edwards with a

sense of having been to IBM's

version of Olympus. Why had I ever

left that perfect world? I had been

in the Air Force once, and it had struck me then as being a clumsy

experiment in mass lobotomy, using

rules instead of scalpels. Now, ten years later, the Air Force still

benefits from the romantic pilot

myth that its personnel managers

have long since destroyed.

Back in the good old days, when

men were Men and might was Right

and the Devil took the hindmost, the peaceful desert highways in

Antelope Valley were raceways for

off-duty pilots on big motorcycles.

Slow-moving travelers were

frequently blown off the road by

wildmen in leather jackets and

white scarves, two-wheeled human

torpedoes defying all speed limits

and heedless of their own safety.

Motorcycles were very popular

toys with the pilots of that other, older era, and many an outraged

citizen was jerked out of his bed at night by the awful roar of a huge

four-cylinder Indian beneath his

daughter's window. The image of

the daredevil, speedball pilot is preserved in song and story, as it

were, and in films like the Howard

Hughes classic, Hell's Angels.

Prior to World War II, pilots were

seen as doomed, half-mythical

figures, much admired for their

daring, but not quite sane when

judged by normal standards. While

other men rode trains or chugged

around the earth in Model-Ts,

barnstorming pilots toured the

nation with spectacular "aviation

shows," dazzling the yokels at a million county fairs. When their

stunts went wrong, they crashed and often died. The survivors pushed

on, treating death like a churlish, harping creditor, toasting their own legend with beakers of gin and wild parties to ward off the chill. "Live fast, die young, and make a good-locJking corpse." That gag got a lot of laughs at debutante parties, but in aviation circles it seemed a bit raw, a little too close to the bone.

It was especially pertinent to test pilots, whose job it was to find out which planes would fly and which

ones were natural death-traps. If the others took lunatic risks, at least they took them in proved planes.

Test pilots, then and now, put the

products of engineers' theories to

the ultimate test. No experimental

plane is "safe" to fly. Some work beautifully, others have fatal flaws.

The Mojave Desert is pockmarked

with the scars of failure. Only the new ones are visible; the older

scars have been covered over by drifting sand and mesquite brush.

Each funeral means more donations,

from friends and survivors, to the

"window fund." The Test Pilots'

Memorial Window in the chapel is

a wall of colorful stained-glass

mosaics, paid for with donations

that otherwise might have gone into the purchase of short-lived flowers.

The original idea was to have only

one memorial window, but each

year invariably brought more

donations, so that now there are only a few plain windows left. All

the others have been replaced by

stained-glass memorials to the 100

names on the plaque in the chapel

hallway.

Two or three new names are added

each year, on the average, but some years are worse than others. There

were no flight-test fatalities in

either 1963 or 1964. Then, in 1965, there were eight. In 1966, the death count dropped to four, but two of

these occurred on a single day, June 8th, in a mid-air crash between a

single-seat fighter and one of the

only two XB-70 bombers ever

built.

That was a very bad day on

Edwards. Test pilots are very

close: They live and work together

like a professional football team;

their wives are good friends, and

their children are part of the same small world. So a double fatality

shatters everybody. Today's test

pilots and their families live nearly as close to death as the old-time

pilots ever did -- but the new breed fears it more. With rare exceptions, they are married, with at least two children, and in their off-duty hours they live as carefully and quietly as any physics professor. A few ride

little Hondas, Suzukis, and other

midget motorcycles, but strictly for transportation -- or, as one of the pilots explained, "So Mama can use the family car." The flight-line parking lot, where working pilots

leave their cars, looks no different from any supermarket lot in San

Bernardino. Here again, with rare

exceptions, the test pilot's

earthbound vehicle is modest --

probably a five-year-old Ford or

Chevy, perhaps a Volkswagen,

Datsun, or other low-priced import.

At the other end of the flight line, in front of the test pilots' school, the mix is a bit livelier. Of the 46 cars I counted there one afternoon, there

was one Jaguar XKE, one IK-150,

one old Mercedes with a V-8 Chevy

engine, one Stingray; all the rest were clunkers. A cluster of

motorcycles stood near the door,

but the hottest one in the lot was a mild-mannered 250 Yamaha.

The midnight roads around

Antelope Valley are quiet these

days, except for an occasional teenage drag race. Today's test pilots go to bed early, and they regard big

motorcycles with the same

analytical disdain they have for

hippies, winos, and other failure

symbols. They take their risks, on assignment, between dawn and 4:30

P.M. But when their time is their

own, they prefer to hunker down in

the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf

course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent TV dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an

"artist" is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the

officers' club bar for the weekly

"happy hour," where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven,

they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at "the club." After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or

maybe a small combo. Heavy

drinking is out of the question; a

drunken test pilot is viewed with

genuine alarm by the others, who

see any form of social excess --

drink, wenching, late hours, any

"unusual" behavior -- as an indication of some deeper problem,

an emotional cancer of some kind.

Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's -- or Monday's -- hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain

hand at the controls of a $100

million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of

foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the

necessary unknown factor in the

equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its

characteristics, using nothing but

numbers.) And a cool waterhead

knows that an equation with only

one unknown factor is a hell of a lot simpler to cope with than an

equation with two. The idea, then,

is to minimize the chance of a

second unknown factor -- such as an unpredictable pilot -- that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a

scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the

"window fund."

Civilian test pilots, working on

contract for companies like Boeing

or Lockheed, are just as carefully

screened as their soul brothers in

the Air Force. The men who run the

"military-industrial complex" are not about to entrust the fruits of their billion-dollar projects to the kind of pilot who might be tempted to zoom

a new plane under the Golden Gate

Bridge at rush hour. The whole philosophy of research testing is to minimize the risk. Test pilots are sent up with specific instructions.

Their job is to perform a set of

finely plotted maneuvers with the

plane, to assess its performance in specific circumstances -- stability at high speeds, rate of acceleration at certain climb angles, etc. -- and then to bring it down safely and write a detailed report for the engineers.

There are plenty of fine pilots

around, but only a handful can

communicate in the language of superadvanced aerodynamics. The

best pilot in the world -- even if he could land a B-52 on the Number

Eight green at Pebble Beach without taking a divot -- would be useless

on a test-flight project unless he

could explain, in a written report, just how and why the landing could

be made.

The Air Force is very keen on

people who "go by the book," and there is, in fact, a book -- called a

technical order -- on every piece of equipment in use, including planes.

Test pilots can't go by "the book,"

however, because for all practical

purposes, they are the people who

write it. "We push a plane to its absolute limits," said a young major at Edwards. "We want to know

exactly how it performs under every conceivable circumstance. And then

we explain it, on paper, so other

pilots will know what to expect of

it."

He was standing on the flight line in a bright-orange flying suit, a baggy one-piece thing full of special

pockets and zippers and flaps.

These pilots are sporty-looking

people, vaguely resembling a bunch

of pro-football quarterbacks. The

age bracket is early thirties to late forties, with a median around 37 or 38. The average age in the U.S.A.F.

Aerospace Research Pilot School at

Edwards is 30. Nobody over 32 is

accepted; few pilots younger than

29 have logged enough air time to

qualify. From a list of 600 to 1000

applicants each year, the school

picks two classes of 16 men each.

Washouts are rare; the screening

process is so thorough that no

candidate who appears to be even

faintly questionable survives the

final cut. Forty-one of the nation's 63 astronauts are graduates of the

test pilots' school -- a military

version of Cal Tech and M.I.T. --

the ultimate in aviation academics.

A sense of elitism is pervasive

among test pilots. There are less than 100 of them on Edwards, with

several hundred more spread out on

testing projects from coast to coast.

But Edwards is the capital of their world. "It's like the White House,"

says recently retired Colonel

Joseph Cotton. "After Edwards, the only direction a test pilot can go is down; any other assignment is

practically a demotion."

Colonel Cotton is the man who

saved one of the $350 million

experimental XB-70s by short-circuiting a computer with a paper

clip. The huge plane's landing gear had jammed, making it impossible

to land. "You can't argue with a black box," said the colonel, "so we had to fool it." While the plane circled the base and engineers on

the ground radioed careful

instructions, Joe Cotton took a

flashlight and a paper clip and

crawled into the dark landing-gear

bay to perform critical surgery in a maze of wires and relays.

Incredibly, it worked. He managed to short the faulty circuit out of the chain of command, as it were, and

trick the computer into lowering the landing gear. The plane landed with locked brakes and flaming tires, but no serious damage -- and "Joe

Cotton's paper clip" was an instant legend.

I found Colonel Cotton at his new

home in Lancaster, pacing around

his living room while his wife tried to place a call to a fellow pilot

whose teen-age son had been killed the day before in a motorcycle

accident. The funeral was set for the next afternoon, and the whole

Cotton family was going. (The flight line was empty the next day. The

only pilot in the test-operations

building was a visiting Britisher.

All the others had gone to the

funeral.)

Joe Cotton is 47, one of the last of the precomputer generation. By

today's standards, he wouldn't even

quality for test-pilot training. He is not a college graduate, much less a master of advanced calculus with an honors degree in math or science.

But the young pilots at Edwards

speak of Joe Cotton as if he were

already a myth. He is not quite real, in their terms: a shade too complex, not entirely predictable. At a recent symposium for the Society of

Experimental Test Pilots, Colonel

Cotton showed up wearing a

Mickey Mouse wristwatch. All the

other pilots thought it was "great" --

but none of them rushed out to buy one for themselves.

Joe Cotton is a very gentle, small-

boned man with an obsessive

interest in almost everything. We

talked for nearly five hours. In an age of stereotypes, he manages to

sound like a patriotic hippie and a Christian anarchist all at once.

"The greatest quality you can build into a plane," he says, "is the quality of forgiveness." Or: "Having control of that airplane is like

having control of your life; you don't want it wandering around up

there, trying to get into a spin and crash. . .

"Flight testing is a beautiful racket. .

. Being a test pilot on the Mojave

Desert in America is the greatest

expression of freedom I can think

of. . ." And suddenly: "Retiring from the Air Force is like getting

out of a cage. . ."

It is always a bit of a shock to meet an original, unfettered mind, and

this was precisely the difference between Colonel Joe Cotton and the

young pilots I met on the base. The Air Force computers have done

their work well: They have

screened out all but the near-perfect specimens. And the science of

aviation will benefit, no doubt, from the ultimate perfection of the flight-test equation. Our planes will be

safer and more efficient, and

eventually we will breed all our

pilots in test tubes.

Perhaps it will be for the best. Or maybe not. The last question I asked Joe Cotton was how he felt about

the war in Vietnam, and particularly the antiwar protests. "Well," he said, "anytime you can get people emotionally disturbed about war,

that's good. I've been an Air Force pilot most of my life, but I've never thought I was put on earth to kill

people. The most important thing in life is concern for one another.

When we've lost that, we've lost the right to live. If more people in

Germany had been concerned about what Hitler was doing, well. . ." He paused, half-aware -- and only half-caring, it seemed -- that he was no longer talking like a colonel just

retired from the U.S. Air Force.

"You know," he said finally. "When I fly over Los Angeles at night, I

look down at all those lights. . . six million people down there. . . and

that's how many Hitler killed. . ."

He shook his head.

We walked outside, and when Joe

Cotton said good night, he smiled and extended his left hand --

remembering, somehow, after all

that rambling talk, that I couldn't use my right.

The next afternoon, in the officer's club bar, I decided to broach the

same question about the war in a

friendly conversation with a young

test pilot from Virginia, who had

spent some time in Vietnam before

his assignment to Edwards. "Well, I've changed my mind about the

war," he said. "I used to be all for it, but now I don't give a damn. It's no fun anymore, now that we can't

go up north. You could see your

targets up there, you could see what you hit. But hell, down south all you do is fly a pattern and drop a bunch of bombs through the clouds.

There's no sense of

accomplishment." He shrugged and sipped his drink, dismissing the war as a sort of pointless equation, an irrelevant problem no longer

deserving of his talents.

An hour or so later, driving back to Los Angeles, I picked up a

newscast on the radio: Student riots at Duke, Wisconsin, and Berkeley;

oil slick in the Santa Barbara

Channel; Kennedy murder trials in

New Orleans and Los Angeles. And

suddenly Edwards Air Force Base

and that young pilot from Virginia

seemed a million miles away. Who

would ever have thought, for

instance, that the war in Vietnam

could be solved by taking the fun

out of bombing?

Pageant, September 1969

The Police Chief

The Professional Voice of Law

Enforcement

Weapons are my business. You

name it and I know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything

else. Damn few people in the world

know more about weaponry than I

do. I'm an expert on demolition,

ballistics, blades, motors, animals -

- anything capable of causing

damage to man, beast or structure.

This is my profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty.

And for this reason the editors of

Scanlan's have asked me to

comment on a periodical called The Police Chief.

At first I refused. . . but various pressures soon caused me to change

my mind. Money was not a factor in

my decision. What finally spurred

me to action was a sense of duty,

even urgency, to make my voice

heard. I am, as I said, a pro -- and in this foul and desperate hour in

our history I think even pros should speak up.

Frankly, I love this country. And

also, quite frankly, I despise being put in this position -- for a lot of reasons, which I don't mind listing: 1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking

about each other -- no matter what

they thought, or even what they

knew. In the good old days a

newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no

way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse

than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a

"police brutality" case.

2) The reason I know about things

like "malpractice" and "police brutality" is that I used to be a "cop"

-- a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles.

And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada -- and before

that a beat cop in Oakland. So I

know what I'm talking about when I

say most "journalists" are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter

who could even say the word

"corrupt" without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.

3) The third reason for the bad way I feel about this "article" is that I used to have tremendous faith in this magazine called The Police Chief. I

read it cover-to-cover every month, like some people read the Bible,

and the city paid for my

subscription. Because they knew I was valuable to them, and The

Police Chief was valuable to me. I loved that goddamn magazine. It taught me things. It kept me ahead of the game.

But no more. Things are different

now -- and not just for me either. As a respected law enforcement

official for 20 years in the West,

and now as a weapons consultant to a political candidate in Colorado, I can say from long and tremendous

experience that The Police Chief has turned to cheap jelly. As a

publication it no longer excites me, and as a phony Voice of the

Brotherhood it makes me sick with

rage. One night in Oakland, about a dozen years ago, I actually got my

rocks off from reading the

advertisements. . . I hate to admit such a thing, but it's true.

I remember one ad from Smith & Wesson when they first came out

with their double-action .44

Magnum revolver: 240 grains of hot

lead, exploding out of a big pipe in your hand at 1200 feet per second. .

. and super-accurate, even on a

running target.

Up until that time we'd all thought the .357 Magnum was just about the

bee's nuts. FBI-filed tests had

proved what the .357 could do: in

one case, with FBI agents giving

fire-pursuit to a carload of fleeing suspects, an agent in the pursuing

car brought the whole chase to an

end with a single shot from his .357

revolver. His slug penetrated the

trunk of the fleeing car, then the

back seat, then the upper torso of a back seat passenger, then the front seat, then the neck of the driver,

then the dashboard, and finally

imbedded itself in the engine block.

Indeed, the .357 was such a

terrifying weapon that for ten years only qualified marksmen were

allowed to carry them.

So it just about drove me crazy

when -- just after I'd qualified to carry a .357 -- I picked up a new

issue of The Police Chief and saw an ad for the .44 Magnum, a brand-new revolver with twice the velocity and twice the striking power of the "old" .357.

One of the first real-life stories I heard about the .44 Magnum was

from a Tennessee sheriff whom I

met one spring at a law enforcement

conference in St. Louis. "Most men can't handle the goddamn thing," he said. "It kicks worse than a

goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last week I had

to chase a nigger downtown, and

when he got so far away that he

couldn't even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard

with this .44 Magnum and blew the

head clean off his body with one

shot. All we found were some teeth

and one eyeball. The rest was all

mush and bone splinters."

Well. . . let's face it; that man was a bigot. We've learned a lot about

racial problems since then. . . but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in 1970 and see that we haven't learned much about

weapons. Today's beat cop in any

large city is a sitting duck for

snipers, rapers, dope addicts,

bomb-throwers and communist

fruits. These scum are well-armed -

- with U.S. Army weapons -- and

that's why I finally quit official

police work.

As a weapons specialist I saw clearly -- in the years between 1960

and 1969 -- that the Army's

weapons-testing program on the

Indo-Chinese peninsula was making

huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge

developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter .308 to a rapid-fire .223.

That lame old chestnut about

"sharpshooters" was finally muscled aside by the proven value

of sustained-firescreens. The hand-

thrown grenade was replaced, at

long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine and the fiery missile-cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-potential of the individual soldier was

increased from 1.6 per second to

26.4-per second -- or nearly five

KP points higher than Pentagon

figures indicate we would need to

prevail in a land war with China.

So the reason for this nation's

dismal failure on the Indo-Chinese

peninsula lies not in our weapons

technology, but in a failure of will.

Yes. Our G.I.'s are doomed in

Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,

Thailand, Burma, etc. for the same

insane reason that our law

enforcement agents are doomed in

Los Angeles, New York and

Chicago. They have been shackled, for years, by cowardly faggots and

spies. Not all were conscious

traitors; some were morally weak,

others were victims of drugs, and

many were simply crazy. . .

Let's face it. The majority of people in this country are mentally ill. . .

and this illness unfortunately

extends into all walks of life,

including law enforcement. The

illness is manifest in our National Stance from Bangkok to Bangor, to

coin a phrase, but to those of us still dying on our feet in the dry rot of middle America there is no worse

pain -- and no more hideous proof

of the plague that afflicts us all --

than the knowledge of what has

happened to The Police Chief, a

magazine we once loved because it was great.

But let's take a look at it now. The editor-in-chief is an FBI dropout by the name of Quinn Tamm, a middle-aged career cop who ruined his

whole life one day by accidentally

walking on the fighting side of J.

Edgar Hoover's wiretap fetish.

Tamm is legally sane -- by "liberal"

standards -- but in grass-roots

police circles he is primarily

known as the model for Mitch

Greenhill's famous song "Pig in the Stash." The real editor of the magazine is a woman named

Pitcher. I knew her in the old days, but Tamm's son does most of the

work, anyway. . .

One of the most frightening things

about The Police Chief is that it calls itself "The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement." But all it really is, is a house-organ for a

gang of high-salaried pansies who

call themselves the "International

Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc."

How about that? Here's a crowd of

suck-asses putting out this magazine that says it's the voice of cops.

Which is bullshit. All you have to

do is look at the goddamn thing to

see what it is. Look at the

advertising; Fag tools!

Breathalysers, "paralyzers," gas masks, sirens, funny little car radios with voice scramblers so the scum

can't listen in. . . but no ATTACK

WEAPONS!!! Not one! The last really functional weapon that got

mentioned in The Police Chief was the "Nutcracker Flail," a combination club and pincers about

three feet long that can cripple

almost anybody. It works like a

huge pair of pliers: the officer first flails the living shit out of anybody he can reach. . . and then, when a

suspect falls, he swiftly applies the

"nutcracker" action, gripping the victim's neck, extremities or

genitals with the powerful pincers

at the "reaching" end of the tool, then squeezing until all resistance ceases.

Believe me, our city streets would

be a lot safer if every beat cop in the nation carried a Nutcracker

Flail. . . So why is this fine weapon no longer advertised in PC? I'll tell you why: for the same reason they

no longer advertise the .44 Magnum

or the fantastically efficient Stoner rifle that can shoot through brick

walls and make hash of the rabble

inside. Yes. . . and also for the same reason they won't advertise The

Growler, a mobile sound unit that

emits such unholy shrieks and roars that every human being within a

radius of ten city blocks is

paralyzed with unbearable pain:

they collapse in their tracks and curl up like worms, losing all control of their bowels and bleeding from the

ears.

Every PD in the country should

have a Growler, but the PC won't

advertise it because they're afraid of hurting their image. They want to be LOVED. In this critical hour we don't need love, we need

WEAPONS -- the newest and best

and most efficient weapons we can

get our hands on. This is a time of extreme peril. The rising tide is almost on us. . . but you'd never

know it from reading The Police Chief. Let's look at the June 1970

issue:

The first thing we get is a bunch of

gibberish written by the police chief of Miami, Florida, saying "the law enforcement system [in the U.S.A.]

is doomed to failure." Facing this is a full-page ad for the Smith &

Wesson "Street Cleaner," described as a "Pepper Fog tear smoke

generator. . . loaded with a new

Super Strength Type CS [gas] just

developed by Gen. Ordnance." The

"Street Cleaner" with Super CS "not only sends the meanest

troublemakers running. It convinces them not to come back. . . You can

trigger anything from a 1-second puff to a 10 minute deluge. . . Do

you have a Street Cleaner yet?"

In all fairness, the Pepper Fogger is not a bad tool, but it's hardly a weapon. It may convince troublemakers not to come back in ten

minutes, but wait a few hours and the scum will be back in your face

like wild rats. The obvious solution to this problem is to abandon our

obsession with tear gas and fill the Street Cleaner with a nerve agent.

CS only slaps at the problem: nerve gas solves it.

Yet the bulk of all advertising in the PC is devoted to tear gas weapons: Federal Laboratories offers the

201-Z gun, along with the Fed 233

Emergency Kit, featuring "Speed-heat" grenades and gas projectiles guaranteed to "pierce barricades."

The AAI Corporation offers a

"multi-purpose grenade that can't be thrown back." And, from Lake Erie Chemical, we have a new kind of

gas mask that "protects against CS."

(This difference is crucial; the ad explains that army surplus gas

masks do well enough against the

now-obsolete CN gas, but they're

virtually useless against CS -- "the powerful irritant agent that more

and more departments are turning to and that's now 'standard' with the

National Guard.")

Unfortunately, this is about as far as The Police Chief goes, in terms of weapons (or tools) information.

One of the few interesting items in the non-weapons category is a

"scrambler " for "police-band" car radios -- so "the enemy" can't listen in. With the "scrambler," everything will sound like Donald Duck.

The only consistently useful

function of the PC is the old faithful

"Positions Open" section. For instance: Charlotte, N.C., needs a

"firearms identification expert" for the new city-county crime lab.

Ellenville, N.Y. is looking for a

new chief of police, salary "10,500

with liberal fringe benefits."

Indeed. And the U.S. Department of

Justice is "now recruiting Special Agents for the Bureau of Narcotics

and Dangerous Drugs." The ad says they need "a sizeable number" of new agents, to start at $8098 per

annum, "with opportunity for

premium overtime pay to gross up

to $10,000."

(In my opinion, only a lunatic or a dope addict would do narc-work

for that kind of money. The hours are brutal and the risks are worse: I once had a friend who went to work

as a drug agent for the feds and lost both of his legs. A girl he was

trusting put LSD in his beer, then

took him to a party where a gang of vicious freaks snapped his femurs

with a meat-ax.)

Let's face it: we live in savage

times. Not only are "cops" called pigs -- they are treated like swine and eat worse than hogs. Yet the PC

still carries advertising for "P.I.G."

tie-clasps! What kind of two-legged scumsucker would wear a thing like

that?

WHY ARE WE GROVELING?

This is the rootnut question! Why

has the once great Police Chief turned on its rank and file?

Are we dupes? Do the Red Pansies want to destroy us? If not, why do they mock all we believe in?

So it should come as no surprise --

to the self-proclaimed pigs who put out The Police Chief -- that most of us no longer turn to that soggy-pink magazine when we're looking for

serious information. Personally, I

prefer the Shooting Times, or Guns

& Ammo. Their editorials on "gun control" are pure balls of fire, and their classfied ads offer every

conceivable kind of beastly weapon

from brass knuckles and blowguns

to 20 mm. cannons.

Another fine source of weapons

info -- particularly for the private citizen -- is a little known book

titled, How to Defend Yourself, Your Family, and Your Home -- a Complete Guide to Self-Protection.

Now here is a book with real class!

It explains, in 307 pages of fine

detail, how to set booby traps in

your home so that "midnight

intruders" will destroy themselves upon entry; it tells which type of

shotgun is best for rapid-fire work in narrow hallways (a sawed-off

double-barreled 12-gauge; one

barrel loaded with a huge tear gas slug, the other with Double-O

buckshot). This book is invaluable

to anyone who fears that his home

might be invaded, at any moment, by rioters, rapers, looters, dope

addicts, niggers, Reds or any other group. No detail has been spared:

dogs, alarm wiring, screens, bars,

poisons, knives, guns. . . ah yes, this is a wonderful book and highly

recommended by the National

Police Officers Association of

America. This is a very different

group from the police chiefs. Very different.

But why grapple now with a book

of such massive stature? I need time to ponder it and to run tests on the many weapons and devices that

appear in the text. No professional would attempt to deal lightly with

this book. It is a rare combination of sociology and stone craziness,

laced with weapons technology on a

level that is rarely encountered.

You will want this book. But I want

you to know it first. And for that, I need time. . . to deal smartly with the bugger on its own terms. No pro would settle for less.

-- Raoul Duke (Master of

Weaponry)

Scanlan's Monthly, vol. 1, no. 7, JUNE 1970

PART 4

The Great Shark Hunt

Four-thirty in Cozumel now; dawn is coming up on these gentle white beaches looking west at the

Yucatan Channel. Thirty yards

from my patio here at Cabañas del Caribe, the surf is rolling up, very softly, on the beach out there in the darkness beyond the palm

trees.

Many vicious mosquitoes and sand fleas out here tonight. There are 60 units in this rambling beach-front hotel, but my room -- number

129 -- is the only one full of light and music and movement.

I have both my doors and all four windows propped open -- a huge bright magnet for every bug on the island. . . But I am not being

bitten. Every inch of my body --

from the soles of my bleeding

bandaged feet to the top of my sun-scorched head -- is covered with 6-12 Insect Repellent, a cheap foul-smelling oil with no redeeming

social or aesthetic characteristics

except that it works.

These goddamn bugs are all

around -- settling on the notebook, my wrist, my arms, circling the rim of my tall glass of Bacardi Añejo and ice. . . but no bites. It has taken about six days to solve this hellish bug problem. . . which is excellent news on the one level, but, as always, the solution to one problem just peels back another layer and exposes some new and

more sensitive area.

At this stage of the gig, things like mosquitoes and sand fleas are the least of our worries. . . because in about two hours and 22 minutes I have to get out of this hotel

without paying an unnaturally

massive bill, drive about three miles down the coast in a rented VW Safari that can't be paid for, either, and which may not even

make it into town, due to serious mechanical problems -- and then get my technical advisor Yail

Bloor out of the Mesón San Miguel

without paying his bill, either, and then drive us both out to the

airport in that goddamn junk

Safari to catch the 7:50

Aeromexico flight to Mérida and Monterrey, where we'll change

planes for San Antonio and

Denver.

So we are looking at a very heavy day. . . 2000 miles between here and home, no cash at all, ten

brutally expensive days in three hotels on the Striker Aluminum

Yachts credit tab, which just got jerked out from under us when the local PR team decided we were

acting too weird to be what we

claim to be -- and so now we are down to about $44 extra between us -- with my bill at the Cabañas hovering around $650 and Bloor's at the San Miguel not much less --

plus 11 days for that wretched car from the local Avis dealer who

already hit me for $40 cash for a broken windshield, and God only knows how much he'll demand

when he sees what condition his car is in now. . . plus about $400

worth of black coral that we

ordered up from China: doubled-

thumbed fist, coke spoons, sharks'

teeth, etc. . . and that $120 18-kt.-

gold chain at the market. . . also Sandy's black-coral necklace. We will need all available cash for the black-coral deal -- so things like hotel bills and car rentals will have to be put off and paid by

check, if anybody will take one. . .

or charged to Striker Aluminum

Yachts, which got me into this goddamn twisted scene in the first place. But the Striker people are no longer with us; extreme out-front hostility. Bruce, Joyce --

even the bogus lecher Eduardo.

How did we blow the image?

"Dear Mr. Thompson. . . Here's some background information on the

Cozumel cruise and international

fishing tournament. . . Regarding the cruise schedule, about 14 Strikers

will leave Fort Lauderdale on April

23, arriving iin Key West that night, leaving Key West midday on the

25th, to assure skirting the Cuban

coast in the daytime, and arriving in Cozumel midafternoon on the 27th

or 28th. In addition to the proven

sailfishing, there will be a Marlin Only Day on Saturday May sixth, in

the initial attempt on any volume

basis to determine how good the

blue-marlin fishing is. . . Each night during the tournament, there are

cocktail parties with over 250

people attending, mariachi and

island music, etc. . . We are happy you can make the trip. . . Flights

leave Miami daily for Cozumel at

2:45 P.M. You will need a Mexican

tourist card, which you can pick up at the Mexican Tourism

Department, 100 Biscayne

Boulevard, Room 612 Miami.

There are no shots required.

Sincerely,

Terence J.Byrne

Public Relations Representative

Striker Aluminum Yachts Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Indeed. . . no shots: just a tourist card, plenty of Coppertone, a new

pair of Top-siders and a fine gringo smile for the customs officers. The letter called up visions of heavy

sport on the high seas, mono a

mono with giant sailfish and world-record marlin. . . Reeling the

bastards in, fighting off sharks with big gaffs, strapped into a soft white-Naugahyde fighting chair in the

cockpit of a big power cruiser. . .

then back to the harbor at dusk for a brace of gin and tonics, tall drinks in the sunset, lounging around in

cool deck chairs while the crew

chops up bait and a strolling

mariachi band roams on the pier,

wailing mournful Olmec love songs.

.. .

Ah, yes, I was definitely ready for it. Sixteen months of straight

politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous

breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering

politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal that often requires eight or nine shots at once -- twice or three times a week in the peak season --

so this unexpected assignment to

"cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatán coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from

the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.

Right. Things would be different now: hot sun, salt air, early to bed and early to rise. . . This one had all the signs of a high-style bag job: Fly off to the Caribbean as a guest of

the idle rich, hang around on their boats for a week or so, then crank

out a left-handed story to cover

expenses and pay for a new

motorcycle back in the Rockies.

The story itself was a bit on the

hazy side, but the editor at PLAYBOY

said not to worry. Almost

everybody unfortunate enough to

have had any dealings with me since the campaign ended seemed

convinced that I was in serious need of a vacation -- a cooling-out

period, a chance to back off -- and this fishing tournament in Cozumel

looked just about perfect. It would pry my head out of politics, they

said, and force me off in a new

direction -- out of the valley of

death and back toward the land of

the living.

There was, however, a kink: I had

just come back from "vacation." It was the first one I'd ever attempted, or at least the first one I'd tried since I was fired from my last

regular job on Christmas Day in

1958, when the production manager

at Time magazine ripped up my punch card in a stuttering rage and told me to get the fuck out of the

building. Since then I had been

unemployed -- in the formal sense

of that word -- and when you've

been out of work for 14 years, it's almost impossible to relate to a

word like vacation.

So I was extremely nervous when

circumstances compelled me, in the

late winter of '72, to fly to Cozumel with my wife, Sandy, in order to do nothing at all.

Three days later I ran out of air in a rip tide, 90 feet down on Palancar

Reef, and I came so close to

drowning that they said, later, I was lucky to get off with a serious case of the bends. The nearest

decompression chamber was in

Miami, so they chartered a plane and flew me there that same night.

I spent the next 19 days in a

pressurized sphere somewhere in

downtown Miami, and when I

finally came out, the bill was

$3000. My wife finally located my

attorney in a drug commune on the

outskirts of Mazatlan. He flew

immediately to Florida and had the

courts declare me a pauper so I was able to leave without legal

problems.

I went back to Colorado with the idea of resting for at least six

months. But three days after I got

home, this assignment came in to

cover the fishing tournament. It was a natural, they said, because I was already familiar with the island.

And besides, I needed a change

from politics.

Which was true, in a way -- but I

had my own reasons for wanting to

go back to Cozumel. On the evening

before my near-fatal scuba dive on

Palancar Reef, I had stashed 50

units of pure MDA in the adobe

wall of the shark pool at the local aquarium next to the Hotel

Barracuda -- and this stash had been much on my mind while I was

recovering from the bends in the

Miami hospital.

So when the Cozumel assignment

came through, I drove immediately

into town to consult with my old

friend and drug crony Yail Bloor. I explained the circumstances in

detail, then asked his advice.

"It's clear as a fucking bell," he snapped. "We'll have to go down there at once. You'll handle the

fishermen while I get the drugs."

These were the circumstances that

sent me back to Cozumel in late

April. Neither the editor nor the

high-powered sport-fishing crowd

we'd be dealing with had any notion of my real reason for making the

trip. Bloor knew, but he had a

vested interest in maintaining the

cover because I was passing him off, on the tab, as my "technical advisor." It made perfect sense, I felt: In order to cover a highly

competitive situation, you need

plenty of trustworthy help.

When I got to Cozumel, on Monday

afternoon, everybody on the island

with any clout in the tourism

business was half-mad with

excitement at the idea of having a

genuwine, real-life " PLAYBOY

writer" in their midst for a week or

ten days. When I slumped off the plane from Miami, I was greeted

like Buffalo Bill on his first trip to Chicago -- a whole gaggle of

public-relations specialists met the plane, and at least three of them

were waiting for me: What could they do for me? What did I want?

How could they make my life

pleasant?

Carry my bags?

Well. . . why not?

To where

Well. . . I paused, sensing an

unexpected opening that could lead

almost anywhere. . . "I think I'm supposed to go to the Cabañas," I said. "But --"

"No," said one of the handlers, "you have a press suite at Cozumeleno."

I shrugged. "Whatever's right," I muttered. "Let's roll."

I'd asked the travel agent in

Colorado to get me one of those VW Safari jeeps -- the same kind

I'd had on my last trip to Cozumel --

but the PR crowd at the airport

insisted on taking me straight to the hotel. My jeep they said, would be

delivered within the hour, and in the meantime, I was treated like some

kind of high-style dignitary: A few people actually addressed me as

"Mr. Playboy" and the others kept calling me "sir." I was hustled into a waiting car and whisked off along the two-lane blacktop highway

through the palm jungle and out in the general direction of the

American Strip, a cluster of beach-

front hotels on the northeast end of the island.

Despite my lame protests, they took me to the newest, biggest and most

expensive hotel on the island -- a

huge, stark-white concrete hulk that reminded me of the Oakland city

jail. We were met at the desk by the manager, the owner and several

hired heavies who explained that

the terrible hammering noise I heard was merely the workmen putting the

finishing touches on the third floor of what would eventually be a five-story colossus. "We have just ninety rooms now," the manager

explained, "but by Christmas we will have three hundred."

"Jesus God!" I muttered.

"What?"

"Never mind," I said. "This is a hell of a thing you're building here: No

doubt about that -- it's extremely impressive in every way -- but the

odd fact is that I thought I had

reservations down the beach at the

Cabañas." I flashed a nice shrug and a smile, ignoring the awkward chill that was already settling on us.

The manager coughed up a brittle

laugh. "The Cabañas? No, Señor Playboy. The Cozumeleno is very

different from the Cabañas."

"Yeah," I said. "I can see that right off." The Mayan bellboy had

already disappeared with my bags.

"We saved a Junior suite for you,"

said the manager. "I think you'll be satisfied." His English was very precise, his smile was unnaturally

thick. . . and it was clear, from a glance at my high-powered

welcoming committee, that I was

going to be their guest for at least one night. . . And as soon as they

forgot about me, I would flee this

huge concrete morgue and sneak off

to the comfortable run-down palm-

shaded peace of the Cabañas, where I felt more at home.

On the drive out from the airport,

the PR man, who was wearing a

blue baseball cap and a stylish

blue-and-white T-shirt, both

emblazoned with the lightning-flash STRIKER logo, had told me that the

owner of this new, huge

Cozumeleno hotel was a member of

the island's ruling family. "They own about half of it," he said with a grin, "and what they don't own they

control absolutely, with their fuel license."

"Fuel license?"

"Yeah," said the PR man. "They control every gallon of fuel that's sold here -- from the gasoline we're driving on right now in this jeep to the gas in every stove in all the

hotel restaurants and even the

goddamn jet fuel at the airport.

I didn't pay much attention to that talk, at the time. It seemed like the

same kind of sleazy, power-worshiping bullshit you'd expect to hear from any PR man, anywhere, on any subject in any situation. . .

My problem was clear from the

start. I had come down to Cozumel -

- officially, at least -- to cover not just a fishing tournament but a

scene: I'd explained to the editor that big-time sport fishing attracts a certain kind of people and it was

the behavior of these people -- not the fishing -- that interested me. On

my first visit to Cozumel, I'd discovered the fishing harbor

completely by accident one night

when Sandy and I were driving

around the island more or less

naked, finely twisted on MDA, and

the only reason we located the yacht basin was that I took a wrong turn

around midnight and tried -- without realizing where I was going -- to

run a roadblock manned by three

Mexican soldiers with submachine

guns at the entrance to the island's only airport.

It was a hard scene to cope with, as I recall, and now that I look back on it, I suspect that moldy white

powder we'd eaten was probably

some kind of animal tranquilizer

instead of true MDA. There is a lot of PCP on the drug market these

days; anybody who wants to put a

horse into a coma can buy it pretty easily from. . . well. . . why blow that, eh?

In any case, we were bent -- and

after being driven away from the

airport by armed guards, I took the next available open road and we

would up in the yacht basin, where

there was a party going on. I could hear it about a half mile off, so I homed in on the music and drove

across the highway and about 200

yards down a steep grassy

embankment to get to the dock.

Sandy refused to get out of the jeep, saying that these weren't the kind of people she felt ready to mix with,

under the circumstances. . . so I left her huddled under a blanket on the

front seat and walked out onto the dock by myself. It was exactly the

kind of scene I'd been looking for --

about 35 stone-drunk rich honkies

from places like Jacksonville and

Pompano Beach, reeling around in

this midnight Mexican port on their $200,000 power cruisers and

cursing the natives for not providing enough teenage whores to go with

the mariachi music. It was a scene

of total decadence and I felt right at home in it. I began mixing with the crowd and trying to hire a boat for

the next morning -- which proved to be very difficult, because nobody

could understand what I was saying.

What's wrong here? I wondered. Is

there speed in this drug? Why can't these people understand me?

One of the people I was talking to

was the owner of a 60-foot Chris-

Craft from Milwaukee. He'd just

arrived from Key West that

afternoon, he said, and all he

seemed to have any real interest in at the moment was the "Argentine

maid" he was grappling with in the cockpit of his boat. She was about

15 years old, had dark-blonde hair

and red eyes, but it was hard to get a good look at her, because "Cap'n Tom" -- as he introduced himself --

was bending her over a Styrofoam

bait box full of dolphin heads and

trying to suck on her collarbone

while he talked to me.

Finally I gave up on him and found

a local fishing merchant called

Fernando Murphy, whose

drunkenness was so crude and extreme that we were able to

communicate perfectly, even though

he spoke little English. "No fishing at night," he said. "Come to my shop downtown by the plaza tomorrow

and I rent you a nice boat."

"Wonderful," I said. "How much?"

He laughed and fell against a pasty blonde woman from New Orleans

who was too drunk to talk. "For you," he said, "a hundred and forty dollars a day -- and I guarantee

fish."

"Why not?" I said. "I'll be there at dawn. Have the boat ready."

"¡Chingado!" he screamed. He dropped his drink on the dock and

began grappling with his own

shoulder blades. I was taken aback

at his outburst, not understanding for a moment. . . until I saw that a

laughing 300-pound man wearing

Levis and a red baseball hat in the cockpit of a nearby boat called

Black Snapper had hooked the back

of Murphy's shirt with a 30-pound marlin rod and was trying to reel

him in.

Murphy staggered backward,

screaming "¡Chingado!" once again as he fell sideways on the dock and ripped his shirt open. Well, I

thought, no point trying to do

business with this crowd tonight

and, in fact, I never fished on that trip. But the general low tone of that party had stayed with me -- a living caricature of white trash run amuck

on foreign shores; an appalling kind of story, but not without a certain human-interest quotient.

On the first day of the tournament, I spent eight hours at sea aboard the eventual winner -- a 54-foot Striker called Sun Dancer, owned by a

wealthy middle-aged industrialist

named Frank Oliver from Palatka,

Florida.

Oliver ran a fleet of barges on the Inland Waterway out of

Jacksonville, he said, and Sun

Dancer was the only boat in the Cozumel Harbor flying a

Confederate flag. He had "about three hundred and twenty-five

thousand in it" -- including a network of built-in vacuum-cleaner

wall plugs for the deep-pile carpets

-- and although he said he spent

"maybe five weeks out of the year"

on the boat, he was a very serious

angler and he meant to win this

tournament.

To this end, he had hired one of the

world's top fishing captains -- a speedy little cracker named Cliff

North -- and turned Sun Dancer

over to him on a year-round basis.

North is a living legend in the sport-fishing world and the idea that

Oliver would hire him as his

personal captain was not entirely

acceptable to the other anglers. One of them explained that it was like

some rich weekend duffer hiring

Arnold Palmer to shoot the final

round of the Greater Cleveland Elks golf tourney for him. North lives on

the boat, with his wife and two young "mates," who do all the menial work, and during the ten

months of the year when Oliver's

not around, he charters Sun Dancer

out to anybody who can pay the

rate. All Cuff has to do -- in return for this sinecure -- is make sure

Oliver wins the three or four fishing tournaments he finds time to enter

each year.

Thanks to North and his expert boat handling, Frank Oliver is now listed

in the sport-fishing record books as one of the world's top anglers.

Whether or not Oliver would win

any tournaments without North and

Sun Dancer is a subject of

widespread disagreement and

occasional rude opinion among

sport-fishing pros. Not even the

most egotistical anglers will deny

that a good boat and a hot-rod

captain to handle it are crucial

factors in ocean fishing -- but there is a definite division of opinion

between anglers (who are mainly

rich amateurs) and pros (the boat captain and the crews) about the

relative value of skills.

Most of the pros I talked to in

Cozumel were reluctant, at first, to speak on this subject -- at least for the record -- but after the third or fourth drink, they would invariably come around to suggesting that

anglers were more of a hazard than

a help and, as a general rule of

thumb, you could catch more fish by just jamming the rod into a holder

on the rear end of the boat and letting the fish do the work. After two or three days on the boats, the most generous consensus I could get from the pros was that even the best angler is worth about a ten percent advantage in a tournament, and that most are seen as handicaps.

"Jesus God Almighty," said a veteran captain from Fort

Lauderdale one night in a local

hotel bar, "you wouldn't believe the things I've seen these fools do!" He

laughed, but the sound was nervous and his body seemed to shudder as

the memories came back on him.

"One of the people I work for," he said, "has a wife who's just flat-out crazy." He shook his head wearily.

"I don't want you to get me wrong, now -- I love her dearly, as a

person -- but when it comes to

fishing, goddamn it, I'd like to chop her up and toss her out for the

sharks." He took a long hit on his rum and Coke. "Yeah, I hate to say it, but that's all she's good for --

shark bait and nothin else. Jesus, the other day she almost killed herself!

We hooked a big sailfish, and when

that happens, you have to move

pretty fast, you know -- but all of a sudden, I heard her screaming like

crazy, and when I looked down

from the bridge, she had her hair all tangled up in the reel!" He laughed.

"Goddamn! Can you believe that?

She almost got scalped! I had to

jump down, about fifteen feet onto a wet deck in a bad sea, we were

wallowing all around -- and cut the

whole line loose with my knife. She came within about ten seconds of

having all her hair pulled out!"

Few anglers -- and especially

winners like Frank Oliver -- agree

with the pros' 90-10 split. "It's basically a teamwork situation,"

says Oliver, "like a chain with no weak links. The angler, the captain, the mates, the boat -- they're all

critical, they work like gears with each other."

Well. . . maybe so. Oliver won the

tournament with 28 sailfish in the three days that counted. But he was fishing alone on Sun Dancer -- a boat so lavishly outfitted it could have passed for the nautical den in Nelson Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue

apartment -- and with the Arnold

Palmer of sport fishing up on the

bridge. Most of his competition was fishing in twos and threes on charter boats they were assigned to at

random, with wild-tempered,

contemptuous captains they'd never

even met before yesterday morning.

"Fishing against Cliff North is bad enough," said Jerry Haugen, captain of a stripped-down hulk of a boat

called Lucky Striker, "but when you have to go against North and only

one angler, with everything set up exactly the way he wants it, that's just about impossible."

Which is neither here nor there, in the rules of big-time sport fishing. If Bebe Rebozo decided to borrow a

half-million dollars from the

Pentagon at no interest and enter the

Cozumel tournament with the best boat he could buy and a crew of

specially trained U.S. Marines, he

would compete on the same basis

with me, if I entered the thing with a 110 year-old Colorado Riverboat

and a crew of drug-crazed politicos from the Meat Possum Athletic

Club. According to the rules, we'd

be equal. . . And while Bebe could

fish alone on his boat, the

tournament directors could assign

me a nightmarish trio of anglers like Sam Brown, John Mitchell and

Baby Huey.

Could we win? Never in hell. But

nobody connected with that

tournament would ever forget the

experience. . . which is almost what happened anyway, for different

reasons. By the third day of the

tournament, or maybe it was the

fourth, I had lost all control of my coverage. At one point, when Bloor

ran amuck and disappeared for 30

hours, I was forced to jerk a dope

addict out of the island's only night

club and press him into service as a

"special observer" for PLAYBOY. He spent the final day of the tournament aboard Sun Dancer, snorting coke in the head and jabbering wildly at

North while poor Oliver struggled

desperately to maintain his one-fish lead over Haugen's manic crew on

Lucky Striker.

Thursday night was definitely the

turning point. Whatever rapport

Bloor and I had developed with the

Striker people was wearing very

thin after three days of increasingly strange behavior and the antisocial attitude we apparently manifested at the big Striker cocktail party at the Punta Morena beach bar was

clearly unacceptable. Almost

everybody there was staggering

drunk by nightfall and the ugliness threshold was low. Here were all

these heavy anglers -- prosperous

Florida businessmen, for the most

part -- snarling and snapping at one another like East Harlem street

fighters on the eve of a long-

awaited rumble:

"You potbellied asshole! You

couldn't catch a fish in a goddamn

barrel!"

"Watch your stupid lip, fella: That's my wife you just stepped on!"

"Whose wife, fatface? Keep your fuckin' hands to yourself."

"Where's the goddamn waiter? Boy!

Boy! Over here! Get me another drink, will ya?"

"Let me just put it to you this way, my friend. How 'bout a goddamn

fish-off? Just you and me -- for a thousand bucks, eh? Yeah, how

'bout it?"

People were lurching around in the

sand with plates full of cold

macaroni and shrimp sauce. Every

now and then, somebody would jerk

one of the giant turtles out of the tank on the patio and thrust it in the face of some bleary-eyed bystander, laughing wildly and struggling to

hang on to the thing, big green flippers clawing frantically at the air and lashing a spray of stale

turtle water on everybody within a

radius of ten feet. . . "Here: I wantcha to meet my friend! She'll

do a real job on yer pecker. How

horny are ya?"

It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank

heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart. Bloor

became obsessed with the notion

that we'd stumbled into a gathering of drunken greedheads who were

planning to turn Cozumel into "a Mexican Miami Beach" -- which

was true, to a certain extent, but he pursued it with a zeal that churned up angry resentment in every

conversation he wandered into. At

one point, I found him shouting at

the manager of the hotel he was

staying in: "You're just a bunch of goddamn moneygrubbing creeps!

All this bullshit about tourism and development -- what the hell do you

want here, another Aspen?"

The hotel man was baffled. "What is Aspen?" he asked. "What are you talking about?"

"You know goddamn well what I'm talking about, you sleazy bastard!"

Bloor shouted. "These dirty

concrete hotels you're building all over the beach, these dirty little hotdog stands and --"

I hurried across the patio and

grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Never mind Yail," I said, trying to focus at least one of my eyes on

whoever he was talking to. "He's still not adjusted to this altitude." I tried to smile at them, but I could sense it wasn't working. . . a

drugged grimace, wild eyes and

very jerky movements. I could hear

myself talking, but the words made

no sense: "These goddamned

iguanas all over the road. . . we did a one-eighty back there at the U

turn. . . Yail grabbed the emergency brake when he saw all those

lizards, jerked it right out by the root. . . Thank Christ we had those snow tires. We live at five thousand feet, you know, damn little air

pressure up there, but down here at sea level you feel it squeezing your brain like a vise. . . No way to

escape it, you can't even think

straight. . ."

Nobody smiled; I was babbling out

of control and Bloor was still

yelling about "land rapers." I left him and went to the bar. "We're

leaving," I said, "but I want some ice for the road."

The bartender gave me a Pepsi-

Cola cup full of melting shavings.

"We'll need more than that," I said -

- so he filled up another cup. He

spoke no English, but I could grasp what he was trying to tell me: There was no container available for the

amount of ice I wanted and they

were almost out of ice anyway.

My head was beginning to pulsate

violently at this point I could barely

keep a focus on his face. Rather than argue, I went out to the parking lot and drove the Safari through a

screen of small beach trees and up

onto the patio, parking it right in front of the bar and indicating to the stunned bartender that I wanted the back seat filled with ice.

The Striker crowd was appalled.

"You crazy son of a bitch!"

someone yelled. "You mashed about fifteen trees!" I nodded, but the words didn't register. All I could

think about was ice -- throwing one cupload after another into the back seat. The acid, by this time, had

fucked up my vision to the point

where I was seeing square out of

one eye and round out of the other.

It was impossible to focus on

anything; I seemed to have four

hands. . .

The bartender had not been lying:

The Punta Moreña ice vat was

virtually empty. I scraped a few

more cuploads out of the bottom --

hearing Bloor's angry cursing somewhere above and behind me --

then I jumped over the counter and

into the front seat of the jeep.

Nobody seemed to notice, so I

gunned the engine violently and

leaned on the horn as I crept very

slowly in first gear through the

mashed trees and shrubbery. Loud

voices seemed to be looming down

on me from the rear and suddenly

Bloor was climbing over the back,

yelling, "Get moving, goddamn it,

get moving!" I stomped on the accelerator and we fish-tailed out

of the deep-sand parking lot.

Thirty minutes later, after a top-

speed, bug-spattered run all the way to the other side of the island, we rolled into the parking lot of what appeared to be a night club. Bloor

had calmed down a bit, but he was

still in a high, wild condition as we lurched to a stop about five feet

from the front door. I could hear

loud music inside.

"We need a few drinks," I muttered.

"My tongue feels like an iguana's been chewing on it."

Bloor stepped out, "Keep the engine running," he said. "I'll check the place out."

He disappeared inside and I leaned

back on the seat to stare straight up at the star-crazed sky. It seemed

about six feet above my eyes. Or

maybe 60 feet, or 600. I couldn't be sure, and it didn't matter, anyway, because by that time I was

convinced I was in the cockpit of a 727 coming into L.A. at midnight.

Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere

in the back of my brain, I knew I

was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast -- but how could

I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that

I was looking down on the huge

glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the

Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard?

Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?

Who gives a fuck? I thought. It's a fine thing to just lie back and stare up or down at. My eyeballs felt

cool, my body felt rested. . .

Then Bloor was yelling at me again.

"Wake up, goddamn it! Park the car and let's go inside. I've met some

wonderful people."

The rest of that night is very hazy in my memory. The inside of the club

was loud and almost empty --

except for the people Bloor had

met, who turned out to be two half-

mad coke runners with a big silver

can full of white powder. When I

sat down at the table, one of them

introduced himself as Frank and

said, "Here, I think you need

something for your nose."

"Why not?" I said, accepting the can he tossed into my lap, "and I also need some rum." I yelled at the waiter and then opened the can,

despite a rustle of protests around the table.

I looked down at my lap, ignoring

Frank's nervous behavior, and

thought, Zang! This is definitely not Los Angeles. We must be

somewhere else.

I was staring down at what looked

like a whole ounce of pure,

glittering white cocaine. My first

instinct was to jerk a 100-peso note out of my pocket and quickly roll it up for snorting purposes, but by this

time Frank had his hand on my arm.

"For Christ's sake," he was whispering, "don't do that shit here.

Take it into the bathroom."

Which I did. It was a difficult trip, through all those chairs and tables, but I finally managed to lock myself in the toilet stall and start lashing the stuff up my nose with no thought at all of the ominous noise I was

making. It was like kneeling down

on a beach and sticking a straw into the sand; after five minutes or so,

both my nostrils were locked up like epoxy and I hadn't even made a visible depression in the dune right in front of my eyes.

Good God, I thought. This can't be

true. I must be hallucinating!

By the time I staggered back to the table, the other had calmed down. It was obvious that Bloor had already

been into the can, so I handed it

back to Frank with a twisted smile.

"Be careful with this stuff," I mumbled. "It'll turn your brain to

jelly."

He smiled. "What are you people doing here?"

"You'd never believe it," I replied, accepting a tall glass of rum from

the waiter. The band was taking a

break now and two of the musicians

had wandered over to our table.

Frank was saying something about a

party later on. I shrugged, still

fighting to clear my nasal passages with quick sniffs of rum. I sensed

that this latest development might

have serious consequences for the future of my story, but I was no

longer especially concerned about

that. . .

From somewhere down deep in my

memory, I heard a snatch of some

half-remembered conversation

between a construction worker and

a bartender at a bar in Colorado.

The construction man was

explaining why he shouldn't have

another drink: "You can't wallow with the pigs at night and then soar

with the eagles in the morning," he said.

I thought briefly on this, then

shrugged it off. My own situation

was totally different, I felt. In about three hours, I was supposed to be

down on the docks with my camera

and tape recorder to spend another

day on one of those goddamn boats.

No, I thought, that geek in Colorado had it all wrong. The real problem

is how to wallow with the eagles at night and then soar with the pigs in

the morning.

In any case, it made no difference.

For a variety of good reasons, I

missed my boat the next morning

and spent the afternoon passed out

in the sand on an empty beach about ten miles out of town.

By Friday night, it was clear that the story was not only a dry hole but

maybe even a dry socket. Our most

serious problem had to do with the

rat-bastard tedium of spending eight hours a day out at sea in the boiling

sun, being tossed around on the bridge of a high-powered motorboat

and watching middle-aged

businessmen reeling sailfish up to

the side of the boat every once in a while. Both Bloor and I had spent a full day at sea -- on the only boats in the tournament getting any real

action, Sun Dancer and Lucky

Striker -- and by dusk on Friday, we had pretty well come to the

conclusion that deep-sea fishing is not one of your king-hell spectator sports. I have watched a lot of bad

acts in my time, from tag-team pro wrestling in Flomaton, Alabama, to

the Roller Derby on Oakland TV

and intramural softball tournaments at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois -

- but I'm damned if I can remember

anything as insanely fucking dull as that Third Annual International

Cozumel Fishing Tournament. The

only thing that comes close to it, in recent memory, is an afternoon I

spent last March in a traffic jam on the San Diego freeway. . . but even that had a certain adrenaline factor;

by the end of the second hour, I was so crazy with rage that I cracked the top half of the steering wheel off my rented Mustang, then exploded the

water pump by racing the engine at

top speed and finally abandoned the mess altogether in the outside lane about two miles north of the

Newport Beach exit.

It was Saturday afternoon, I think, when the brain fog had cleared

enough for a long, clean focus on

our situation -- which had been

drastically altered, at that point, by three nights of no sleep and a

handful of spastic confrontations

with the Striker crowd. I had been

thrown out of one hotel and moved

to another and Bloor had been

threatened with jail or deportation by the manager of his hotel on the

midtown square.

I had managed another zombielike

day at sea, with massive aid from

Frank's can, but our relationship

with the Striker people was

apparently beyond redemption.

Nobody connected with the

tournament would have anything to

do with us. We were treated like

lepers. The only people we felt

easy with, at that point, were a

motley collection of local freaks,

boozers, hustlers and black-coral

divers who seemed to collect each

afternoon on the porch of the Bal-

Hai, the town's main bar.

They quickly befriended us -- a

sudden shift in old relationships

with the island that caused me to begin signing all the tabs, splitting them about half and half between

Striker and PLAYBOY. Nobody seemed to care, especially the ever-growing crowd of new friends who

came to drink with us. These people understood and were vaguely

amused at the idea that we'd fallen into serious disfavor with the

Strikers and the local power

structure. For the past three

sleepless days, we'd been gathering at the Bal-Hai to brood publicly on

the likelihood of massive retaliation by local jefes, incensed by our rotten behavior.

It was sometime around dusk on

Saturday, hunkered down at a big

round table on the Bal-Hai porch,

that I noticed the pea-green Mustang making its second pass in less than ten minutes. There is only one pea-green Mustang on the island, and

one of the divers had told me it

belonged to the "mayor" -- a heavy-set young pol and an appointed, not

elected, official who looked like a beer-bellied lifeguard on some

beach at Acapulco. We had seen

him often in the past few days,

usually in the late afternoon and

always cruising up and down the

seaside frontera.

"That son of a bitch is beginning to make me nervous," Bloor muttered.

"Don't worry," I said. "They won't shoot -- not as long as we're here in a crowd."

"What?" A gray-haired woman from Miami sitting next to us had caught the word shoot.

"It's the Striker crowd," I explained.

"We hear they've decided to get heavy with us."

"Jesus Christ!" said a retired airline pilot who'd been living off his boat and the Bal-Hai porch for the past

few months. "You don't think they'll start shooting, do you? Not on a peaceful island like this!"

I shrugged. "Not here. They wouldn't shoot into a crowd. But we can't let them catch us alone."

The woman from Miami started to

say something, but Bloor cut her off with an outburst that spun heads the length of the porch:

"They're in for the shock of their goddamn lives, tomorrow," he

snarled. "Wait till they see what gets off that goddamn ferry from

Playa del Carmen in the morning."

"What the hell are you talking about?" the ex-pilot asked.

Bloor said nothing, staring blankly out to sea. I hesitated a moment,

then instinctively picked up the

thread: "Heavies," I said. "We made some calls last night.

Tomorrow morning they'll come off

that boat like a pack of goddamn

wolverines."

Our friends at the table were

glancing nervously at one another.

Violent crime is almost unheard of

on Cozumel; the native oligarchy is into far more subtle varieties. . . and the idea that the Bal-Hai might be

the scene of a Chicago-style shoot-

out was a hard thing to grasp, even for me.

Bloor cut in again, still staring off toward the mainland. "You can hire just about anything you want in

Mérida," he said. "We got these thugs for ten bucks a head, plus

expenses. They'll crack every skull on the island if they have to -- then

burn every one of those goddamn red-neck boats right down to the

waterline."

Nobody spoke for a moment, then

the woman from Miami and the

retired airline pilot got up to leave.

"See you later," the man said stiffly.

"We have to get back to the boat and check things out."

Moments later, the two divers

who'd been sitting with us also left, saying they'd probably see us

tomorrow at the Striker party.

"Don't count on it," Bloor muttered.

They grinned nervously and sped

off down the frontera on their tiny Hondas. We were left alone at the

big round table, sipping margaritas and staring out at the sunset over the Yucatan Peninsula, 12 miles across

the channel. After a few long

moments of silence, Bloor reached

into his pocket and came up with a

hollowed-out glass eye he had

bought from one of the street

peddlers. There was a silver cap on the back and he flipped it up, then

jammed the straw from his margarita into the hole and snorted heavily before handing it over to

me. "Here," he said. "Try some of Frank's best."

The waiter was hovering over us,

but I ignored him -- until I realized I was having problems, then I looked

up from the eyeball in my hand and

asked for two more drinks and a dry straw. "¿Como no?" he hissed, moving quickly away from the

table.

"This thing's all jammed up from the moisture," I said to Bloor, showing him the powder-packed straw.

"We'll have to slice it open."

"Never mind," he said. "There's plenty more where that came from."

I nodded, accepting a fresh drink

and about six dry straws from the

waiter. "You notice how fast our friends left," I said, bearing down on the eyeball again. "I suspect they believed all that gibberish."

He sipped his own new drink and stared at the glass eye in my hand.

"Why shouldn't they?" he mumbled.

"I'm beginning to believe it myself."

I felt a great numbness in the back of my mouth and my throat as I

snapped the cap shut and handed the eyeball back to him. "Don't worry,"

I said. "We're professionals -- keep that in mind."

"I am," he said. "But I'm afraid they might figure that out."

It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank

Oliver had officially won the

tournament -- by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on

Lucky Striker. I wrote this down in my notebook as we roamed round

the dock where the boats were tied

up. Nobody urged us to come

aboard for "a friendly drink" -- as I heard some of the anglers put it to others on the dock -- and, in fact, there were only a few people who

spoke to us at all. Frank and his

friend were sipping beers at the open-air bar nearby, but his kind of hospitality was not in tune with this scene. Jack Daniels and heavy

petting on the foredeck is about as heavy as the Striker crowd gets. . .

and after a week of mounting

isolation from this scene I was

supposed to be "covering," I was hung on the dark and ugly truth that

"my story" was fucked. Not only did the boat people view me with gross

disapproval but most of them no

longer even believed I was working

for PLAYBOY. All they knew, for sure, was that there was something

very strange and off-center, to say the least, about me and all my

"assistants."

Which was true, in a sense, and this feeling of alienation on both sides was compounded, on ours, by a

galloping drug-induced paranoia

that honed each small incident, with every passing day, to a grim and

fearful edge. The paranoid sense of isolation was bad enough -- along

with trying to live in two entirely different worlds at the same time --

but the worst problem of all was the fact that I'd spent a week on this

goddamn wretched story and I still

didn't have the flimsiest notion of what deepsea fishing felt like. I had no idea what it was like to actually catch a big fish. All I'd seen was a gang of frantic red-neck

businessmen occasionally hauling

dark shadows up to the side of

various boats, just close enough to where some dollar-an-hour mate

could cut the leader and score a point for "the angler." During the whole week, I'd never seen a fish

out of the water -- except on the

rare occasions when a hooked

sailfish had jumped for an instant, 100 or so yards from the boat,

before going under again for the

long reeling-in trip that usually took ten or fifteen minutes of silent

struggle and always ended with the

fish either slipping the hook or

being dragged close enough to the

boat to be "tagged" and then cut

loose.

The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn't believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of

some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.

All the rest seemed like dilettante bullshit -- like hunting wild boar

with a can of spray paint, from the safety of a pickup truck. . . and it was this half-crazed sense of

frustration that led me finally to start wandering around the docks

and trying to hire somebody to take me and Bloor out at night to fish for man-eating sharks. It seemed like

the only way to get a real feel for this sport -- to fish (or hunt) for something genuinely dangerous, a

beast that would tear your leg off in an instant if you made the slightest mistake.

This concept was not widely

understood on the dock in Cozumel.

The businessmen-anglers saw no point in getting the cockpits of their expensive tubs messed up with real

blood, and especially not theirs. . .

but I finally found two takers: Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker and a local Mayan captain who worked for

Fernando Murphy.

Both of these efforts ended in

disaster -- for entirely differrent reasons and also at different times; but for the record, I feel a powerful obligation to record at least a brief

observation about our shark-hunting expeditions off the coast of

Cozumel: The first is that I saw

more sharks by accident while

scuba-diving during the daylight

hours than I did during either of our elaborate, big-money nighttime

"hunts" off the fishing boats; and the second is that anybody who buys

anything more complex or

expensive than a bottle of beer on

the waterfront of Cozumel is opting for serious trouble.

Cerveza Superior, at 75 cents a bottle on the porch of the Bal-Hai, is a genuine bargain -- if only

because you know what you're

getting -- compared with the

insanely and even fatally inept

"deep-sea-fishing and scuba-diving tours" offered at dockside shacks like El Timon or Fernando

Murphy's. These people rent boats

to dumb gringos for $140 a day (or

night) and then take you out to sea and dump you over the side with

faulty diving gear in shark-filled

waters during the day, or run you around in circles during the night --

a Fernando Murphy specialty --

while allegedly trolling for sharks about 500 yards offshore. There are plenty of bologna sandwiches while

you wait for a strike, unable to

communicate verbally with the

guilt-stricken Mayan mate or the

Mayan captain up top, who both

understand what kind of a shuck

they are running but who are only

following Fernando Murphy's

orders. Meanwhile Murphy is back

in town playing maître d' at his Tijuana-style night club, La Piñata.

We found Murphy at his night club

after spending six useless hours "at sea" on one of his boats, and came close to getting beaten and jailed

when we noisily ruined the

atmosphere of the place by accusing him of "outright thievery" on the grounds of what his hired fisherman had already admitted he'd done to

us -- and the only thing that kept us from getting stomped by Murphy's

heavies was the timely popping-off of flashbulbs by an American

photographer. There is nothing quite like the sudden white flash of a

professional gringo camera to

paralyze the brain of a Mexican

punk long enough for the potential

victims to make a quick, nonviolent exit.

We were counting on this, and it

worked; a sorry end to the only

attempt we ever made to hire local fishermen for a shark hunt. Murphy

had his $140 cash in advance, we had our harsh object lesson in

commercial dealings on the

Cozumel dock -- and with the

photos in the can, we understood the wisdom of leaving the island at

once.

Our other nighttime shark hunt --

with Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker

-- was a totally different kind of

experience. It was at least an honest value. Haugen and his two-man

crew were the "hippies" of the

Striker fleet, and they took me and Bloor out one night for a serious shark hunt -- a strange adventure

that nearly sunk their boat when they hooked a reef in pitch-darkness

about a mile out at sea and which

ended with all of us up on the

bridge while a four-foot nurse shark flopped crazily around in the

cockpit, even after Haugen had shot it four times in the head with a .45

automatic.

Looking back on all that, my only

feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion.

Hemingway had the right idea when

he decided that a .45-caliber

submachine gun was the proper tool

for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot

innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes

who call themselves "sport

fishermen"?

Our departure from the island was

not placid. The rough skeleton of the plan -- as I conceived it with a head full of MDA on the night

before -- was to wait until about an hour before the first early-morning flight to Mérida on Aeromexico,

then jump both our hotel bills by

checking out in a raving frenzy at

dawn, at the end of the night clerk's shift -- and signing " PLAYBOY/Striker Aluminum Yachts" on both bills. I felt this bogus dual imprimatur

would be heavy enough to confuse

both desk clerks long enough for us

to reach the airport and make the escape.

Our only other problem -- except

for connecting with the black-coral wizard who was expecting at least

$300 cash for the work we'd assigned him -- was dumping the

Avis rental jeep at the airport no

more than three minutes before

boarding time. I knew that the local Avis people would have me under

observation by the same shadowy

observer who'd nailed me on the

broken-windshield charge, but I also knew he'd been watching us

long enough to know we were both

late risers. He would set his

psychic work clock, I felt, to

coincide with our traditional noon-

to-dawn working hours. I also knew

that the hours he'd been keeping for the past week were so far off his

normal wake-sleep schedule that by

now he was probably a nervous,

jabbering mess from trying to keep

up with a gang of wild gringos

fueled from an apparently

bottomless satchel full of speed, acid, MDA and cocaine.

It boiled down to a question of

armaments -- or lack of them -- and their long-term effects in the crunch.

Looking back on my experience

over the years, I was confident of

being able to function at peak-

performance level, at least briefly, after 80 or 90 hours without sleep.

There were negative factors, of

course: 80 or 90 hours of

continuous boozing, along with

sporadic energy/adrenaline sappers like frantic, rock-dodging swims in the high surf at night and sudden,

potentially disastrous confrontations with hotel managers -- but on

balance, I felt, the drug factor gave us a clear-cut advantage. In any 24-hour period, a determined private

eye can muster the energy to keep

pace with veteran drug users. . . but after 48 straight hours, and

especially after 72, fatigue

symptoms begin manifesting

drastically -- hallucinations,

hysteria, massive nerve failure.

After 72 hours, both the body and

the brain are so badly depleted that only sleep will make the nut. . .

while your habitual drag user, long accustomed to this weird and

frenzied pace, is still hoarding at least three hours of high-speed

reserve.

There was no question in my mind -

- once the plane was finally

airborne out of Cozumel -- about

what to do with the drugs. I had

eaten three of the remaining five caps of MDA during the night and

Bloor had given our hash and all but six of his purple pills to the black-coral wizard as a bonus for his all-night efforts. As we zoomed over

the Yucatan Channel at 8000 feet,

we took stock of what he had left:

Two hits of MDA, six tabs of acid,

about a gram and a half of raw

cocaine, four reds and a random

handful of speed. That -- plus $44

and a desperate hope that Sandy had

made and paid for our reservations beyond Monterrey, Mexico -- was

all we had between Cozumel and

our refuge/destination at Sam

Brown's house in Denver. We were

airborne out of Cozumel at 8:13

A.M., Mountain Daylight Time -- and if everything went right, we would

arrive at Denver's Stapleton

International Airport before seven.

We'd been airborne for about eight

minutes when I looked over at

Bloor and told him what I'd been

thinking: "We don't have enough drugs here to risk carrying them

through Customs," I said.

He nodded thoughtfully: "Well. . .

we're pretty well fixed, for poor

boys."

"Yeah," I replied. "But I have my professional reputation to uphold.

And there's only two things I've

never done with drugs: sell them or take them through Customs --

especially when we can replace

everything we're holding for about

ninety-nine dollars just as soon as we get off the plane."

He hunkered down in his seat,

saying nothing. Then he stared

across at me. "What are you saying?

That we should just throw all this

shit away?"

I thought for a moment. "No. I think we should eat it."

"What?"

"Yeah, why not? They can't bust you

for what's already dissolved in your belly -- no matter how weird you're acting."

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered. "We'll go stark raving nuts if we eat all this shit!"

I shrugged. "Keep in mind where we'll be when we hit Customs," I said. "San Antonio, Texas. Are you ready to get busted in Texas?"

He stared down at his fingernails.

"Remember Tim Leary?" I said.

"Ten years for three ounces of grass in his daughter's panties. . ."

He nodded. "Jesus. . . Texas! I'd forgotten about that."

"Not me," I said. "When Sandy went through Customs in San Antonio

about three weeks ago, they tore

everything she was carrying apart. It took her two hours to put it back

together."

I could see him thinking. "Well. . ."

he said finally, "what if we eat this stuff and go crazy -- and they nail us?"

"Nothing," I said. "We'll drink heavily. If we're seized, the

stewardesses will testify we were

drunk."

He thought for a moment, then

laughed. "Yeah. . . just a couple of good ole boys O.D.'d on booze.

Nasty drunks, staggering back into

the country after a shameful

vacation in Mexico -- totally fucked

up."

"Right," I said. "They can strip us down to the skin. It's no crime to

enter the country helplessly drunk."

He laughed. "You're right. What do we start with? We shouldn't eat it

all at once -- that's too heavy."

I nodded, reaching into my pocket

for the MDA and offering him one

as I tossed the other into my mouth.

"Let's eat some of the acid now, too," I said. "That way, we'll be

adjusted to it by the time we have to eat the rest -- and we can save the coke for emergencies."

"Along with the speed," he said.

"How much do you have left?"

"Ten hits," I said. "Pure-white amphetamine powder. It'll

straighten us right out, if things get tense."

"You should save that for the end,"

he said. "We can use this coke if we start getting messy."

I swallowed the purple pill, ignoring the Mexican stewardess

with her tray of sangria.

"I'll have two," said Bloor, reaching across me.

"Same here," I said, lifting two more off the tray.

Bloor grinned at her. "Pay no

attention. Were just tourists -- down here making fools of ourselves."

Moments later we hit down on the

runway at Mérida. But it was a quick and painless stop. By nine

A.M., we were cruising over central Mexico at 20,000 feet, headed for

Monterrey. The plane was half

empty and we could have moved

around if we'd wanted to -- but I

glanced across at Bloor, trying to

use him as a mirror for my own

condition, and decided that

wandering around in the aisles

would not be wise. Making yourself

noticeable is one thing -- but

causing innocent passengers to

shrink off with feelings of shock and repugnance is a different game

entirely. One of the few things that can't be controlled about acid is the glitter it puts in the eyes. No amount of booze will cause the same kind

of laughing, that fine predatory glow that comes with the first rush of acid up the spine.

But Bloor felt like moving.

"Where's the goddman head?" he muttered.

"Never mind," I said. "We're almost

to Monterrey. Don't attract attention.

We have to check through

Immigration there."

He straightened up in his seat.

"Immigration?"

"Nothing serious," I said. "Just turn in our tourist cards and see about

the tickets to Denver. . . But we'll have to act straight. . ."

"Why?" he asked.

I gave it some thought. Why,

indeed? We were clean. Or almost clean, anyway. About an hour out of Mérida we'd eaten another round of

acid -- which left us with two more of those, plus four reds and the coke and the speed. The luck of the split had left me with the speed and the

acid; Bloor had the coke and the

reds. . . and by the time the

ABROCHE SU CINTURON (FASTEN SEAT

BELTS) sign flashed on above

Monterrey, we'd agreed, more or

less, that anything we hadn't eaten by the time we got to Texas would

have to be flushed down the

stainless-steel John in the plane's lavatory.

It had taken about 45 tortured

minutes to reach this agreement,

because by that time, neither one of us could speak clearly. I tried to

whisper, through gritted teeth, but each time I succeeded in uttering a coherent sentence my voice seemed

to echo around the cabin like I was mumbling into a bullhorn. At one

point, I leaned over as close as

possible to Bloor's ear and hissed:

"Reds. . . how many?" But the sound of my own voice was such a shock

that I recoiled in horror and tried to pretend I'd said nothing.

Was the stewardess staring? I

couldn't be sure. Bloor had seemed

not to notice -- but suddenly he was thrashing around in his seat and

clawing frantically underneath

himself with both hands. "What the fuck?" he was screaming.

"Quiet!" I snapped. "What's wrong with you?"

He was jerking at his seat belt, still shouting. The stewardess ran down

the aisle and unbuckled it for him.

There was fear in her face as she

backed off and watched him spring

out of his seat. "Goddamn you

clumsy bastard!" he yelled.

I stared straight ahead. Jesus, I

thought, he's blowing it, he can't

handle the acid, I should have

abandoned this crazy bastard in

Cozumel. I felt my teeth grinding as I tried to ignore his noise. . . then I

glanced across and saw him groping between the seats and coming up

with a smoldering cigarette butt.

"Look at this!" he shouted at me. He was holding the butt in one hand and fondling the back of his thigh with the other. . .

"Burned a big hole in my pants," he was saying. "He just spit this dirty thing right down in my seat!"

"What?" I said, feeling in front of my mouth for the cigarette in my

filter. . . but the filter was empty,

and I suddenly understood. The fog in my brain suddenly cleared and I

heard myself laughing. "I warned you about these goddamn

Bonanzas!" I said. "They'll never stick in the filter!"

The stewardess was pushing him

back down into his seat. "Fasten belts," she kept saying, "fasten belts."

I grabbed his arm and jerked

downward, pulling him off balance

and causing him to fall heavily onto

the back of the seat. It gave way and collapsed on the legs of whoever

was sitting behind us. The

stewardess jerked it quickly back to the upright position, then reached

down to fasten Bloor's seat belt. I saw his left arm snake out and settle affectionately around her shoulders.

Good God! I thought. This is it. I

could see the headlines in

tomorrow's News: "DRUG FRACAS ON

AIRLINER NEAR MONTERREY: GRINGOS

JAILED ON ARSON, ASSAULT

CHARGES."

But the stewardess only smiled and backed off a few steps, dismissing

Bloor's crude advance with a slap

at his arm and an icy professional

smile. I tried to return it, but my face was not working properly. Her

eyes narrowed. She was clearly

more insulted by the demented grin I was trying now to fix on her than

she was by Bloor's attempt to push

her head down into his lap.

He smiled happily as she stalked

away. "That'll teach you," he said.

"You're a goddamn nightmare to travel with."

The acid was leveling out now. I

could tell by the tone of his voice that he was into the manic stage. No more of that jerky, paranoid

whispering. He was feeling

confident now; his face had settled into that glaze of brittle serenity you invariably see on the face of a

veteran acid eater who knows that

the first rush is past and now he can settle down for about six hours of

real fun.

I was not quite there myself, but I knew it was coming -- and we still

had about seven more hours and

two plane changes between now

and Denver. I knew the Immigration

scene at Monterrey was only a

formality -- just stand in line for a while with all the other gringos and not get hysterical when the cop at

the gate asks for your tourist card.

We could ease through that one, I

felt -- on the strength of long

experience. Anybody who's still on the street after seven or eight years of public acid eating has learned to trust his adrenaline gland for getting through routine confrontations with officialdom -- traffic citations,

bridge tolls, airline ticket counters.

. .

And we had one of these coming up:

getting our baggage off this plane

and not losing it in the airport until we found out which flight would

take us to San Antonio and Denver.

Bloor was traveling light, with only two bags. But I had my normal

heavy load: two huge leather

suitcases, a canvas sea-bag and tape recorder with two portable

speakers. If we were going to lose

anything, I wanted to lose it north of the border.

The Monterrey airport is a cool,

bright little building, so

immaculately clean and efficient

that we were almost immediately

lulled into a condition of grinning

euphoria. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. No lost baggage, no sudden outbursts of wild

jabbering at the Immigration desk,

no cause for panic or fits of despair at the ticket counter. . . Our first-class reservations had already been made and confirmed all the way to

Denver. Bloor had been reluctant to blow 32 extra dollars "just to sit up front with the businessmen," but I felt it was necessary. "There's a lot more latitude for weird behavior in first class." I told him. "The

stewardesses back in the tourist section don't have as much

experience, so they're more likely to freak out if they think they have a dangerous nut on their hands."

He glared at me. "Do I look like a dangerous nut?"

I shrugged. It was hard to focus on his face. We were standing in a

corridor outside the souvenir shop.

"You look like a serious dope

addict," I said, finally. "Your hair's all wild, your eyes are glittering,

your nose is all red and --" I suddenly noticed white powder on

the top edge of his mustache. "You swine! You've been into the coke!"

He grinned blankly. "Why not? Just a little pick-me-up."

I nodded. "Yeah. Just wait till you start explaining yourself to the

Customs agent in San Antonio with

white powder drooling out of your

nose." I laughed. "Have you ever seen those big bullet-nosed

flashlights they use for rectal

searches?" He was rubbing his nostrils vigorously. "Where's the drugstore? I'll get some of that

Dristan nasal spray." He reached into his back pocket and I saw his

face turn gray. "Jesus," he hissed.

"I've lost my wallet!" He kept fumbling in his pockets but no

wallet turned up. "Good God!" he moaned. "It's still on the plane!" His eyes flashed wildly around the

airport. "Where's the gate?" he snapped. "The wallet must be under the seat."

I shook my head. "No, it's too late."

"What?"

"The plane. I saw it take off while you were in the rest room, snorting up the coke."

He thought for a moment, then

uttered a loud, wavering howl. "My passport! All my money! I have

nothing! They'll never let me back into the country, with no I.D."

I smiled. "Ridiculous. I'll vouch for

you."

"Shit!" he said. "You're crazy! You look crazy!"

"Let's go find the bar," I said. "We have forty-five minutes."

"What?"

"The drunker you get, the less it'll bother you," I said. "The best thing, right now, is for you to get weeping, falling-down drunk. I'll swear you

staggered in front of a moving plane

on the runway in Mérida and a jet engine sucked the coat right off your back and into its turbine." The whole thing seemed absurd. "Your wallet was in the coat, right? I was a witness. It was all I could do to keep your whole body from being sucked into the turbine."

I was laughing wildly now; the

scene was very vivid. I could

almost feel the terrible drag of the suction as we struggled to dig our

heels into the hot asphalt runway.

Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the wail of a mariachi band

above the roar of the engines,

sucking us ever closer to the

whirling blades. I could hear the

wild screech of a stewardess as she watched helplessly. A Mexican

soldier with a machine gun was

trying to help us, but suddenly he

was sucked away like a leaf in the

wind. . . wild screams all around

us, then a sickening thump as he disappeared feetfirst into the black maw of the turbine. . . The engine

seemed to stall momentarily, then spit a nasty shower of hamburger

and bone splinters all over the

runway. . . more screaming from

behind us as Bloor's coat ripped

away; I was holding him by one arm

when another soldier with a

machine gun began firing at the

plane, first at the cockpit and then at the murderous engine. . . which

suddenly exploded, like a bomb

going off right in front of us; the blast hurled us 200 feet across the tarmac and through a wire-mesh

fence. . .

Jesus! What a scene! A fantastic

tale to lay on the Customs agent in San Antonio: "And then, officer, while we were lying there on the

grass, too stunned to move, another engine exploded! And then another!

Huge balls of fire! It was a miracle that we escaped with our lives. . .

Yes, so you'll have to make some

allowance for Mr. Bloor's unsteady

condition right now. He was badly

shaken, half-hysterical most of the

afternoon. . . I want to get him back to Denver and put him under

sedation. . ."

I was so caught up in this terrible vision that I'd failed to notice Bloor down on his knees until I heard him shout. He'd spread the contents of

his kit bag all over the floor of the corridor rummaging through the

mess, and now he was smiling

happily at the wallet in his hand.

"You found it." I said.

He nodded -- clutching it with both hands, as if it might leap out of his grip with the strength of a half-captured lizard and disappear

across the crowded lobby. I looked

around and saw that people were

stopping to watch us. My mind was

still whirling from the fiery

hallucination that had seized me, but I was able to kneel down and help

Bloor stuff his belongings back into the kit bag. "We're attracting a crowd." I muttered. "Let's get to the bar, where it's safe."

Moments later we were sitting at a table overlooking the runway,

sipping margaritas and watching the ground crew load the 727 that

would take us to San Antonio. My

plan was to stay hunkered down in

the bar until the last moment, then dash for the plane. Our luck had

been excellent, so far, but that scene in the lobby had triggered a wave of paranoia in my head. I felt very

conspicuous. Bloor's mannerisms

were becoming more and more

psychotic. He took one sip of his

drink, then whacked it down onto the table and stared at me. "What is this?" he snarled.

"A double margarita," I said, glancing over at the waitress to see if she had her eye on us.

She did, and Bloor waved at her.

"What do you want?" I whispered.

"Glaucoma," he said.

The waitress was on us before I

could argue. Glaucoma is an extremely complicated mix of about

nine unlikely ingredients that Bloor had learned from some randy old

woman he met on the porch of the

Bal-Hai. She'd taught the bartender there how to make it: very precise

measurements of gin, tequila,

Kahlua, crushed ice, fruit juices,

lime rinds, spices -- all mixed to

perfection in a tall frosted glass.

It is not the kind of drink you want to order in an airport bar with a

head full of acid and a noticeable speech impediment; especially

when you can't speak the local

language and you just spilled the

first drink you ordered all over the table.

But Bloor persisted. When the

waitress abandoned all hope, he

walked over to speak with the

bartender. I slumped in my chair,

keeping an eye on the plane and

hoping it was almost ready to go.

But they hadn't even loaded the

baggage yet: departure time was still 20 minutes away -- plenty of

time for some minor incident to

mushroom into serious trouble. I

watched Bloor talking to the

bartender, pointing to various

bottles behind the bar and

occasionally using his fingers to

indicate measurements. The

bartender was nodding his head

patiently.

Finally, Bloor came back to the

table. "He's making it," he said. "I'll

be back in a minute. I have business."

I ignored him. My mind was drifting again. Two days and nights without

sleep plus a steady diet of mind-

altering drugs and double

margaritas were beginning to affect my alertness. I ordered another

drink and stared out at the hot

brown hills beyond the runway. The

bar was comfortably air

conditioned, but I could feel the

warm sun through the window.

Why worry? I thought. We've survived the worst. All we have to

do now is not miss that plane out

there. Once we're across the border, the worst that can happen is a

nightmarish fuck-around at Customs

in San Antonio. Maybe even a night

in jail, but what the hell? A few

misdemeanor charges -- public

drunkenness, disturbing the peace,

resisting arrest -- but nothing

serious, no felony. All the evidence for that would be eaten by the time we landed in Texas.

My only real worry was the chance that there might already be grand-larceny charges filed against us in Cozumel. We had, after all, jumped

two hotel bills totaling about

15,000 pesos, in addition to leaving that half-destroyed Avis jeep in the airport parking lot -- another 15,000

pesos -- and we had spent the past

four or five days in the constant

company of a flagrant, big-volume

drug runner whose every movement

and contact, for all we knew, might have been watched or even

photographed by Interpol agents.

Where was Frank now? Safe at

home in California? Or jailed in

Mexico City, swearing desperate

ignorance about how all those cans

of white powder got into his

luggage? I could almost hear it:

"You've got to believe me, Captain!

I went down to Cozumel to check on

a land investment. I was sitting in a bar one night, minding my own

business, when all of a sudden these two drunken acid freaks sat down

next to me and said they worked for PLAYBOY. One of them had a handful of purple pills and I was stupid

enough to eat one. The next thing I knew, they were using my hotel

room as their headquarters. They

never slept. I tried to keep an eye on them, but there were plenty of times while I was sleeping when they

could have put almost anything in

my luggage. . . What? Where are

they now? Well. . . I can't say for sure, but I can give you the names of the hotels they were using."

Jesus! These terrible hallucinations!

I tried to put them out of my mind as I finished my drink and called for

another. A paranoid shudder jerked

me out of my slump in the chair. I

sat up and looked around. Where

was that bastard Bloor? How long

had he been gone? I glanced out at

the plane and saw the fuel truck still parked under the wing. But they

were loading the baggage now. Ten

more minutes.

I relaxed again, shoving a handful of

pesos at the waitress to pay for our drinks, trying to smile at her. . .

when suddenly the whole airport

seemed to echo with the sound of

my name being shouted over a

thousand loud-speakers. . . then I

heard Bloor's name. . . a harsh,

heavily accented voice, bellowing

along the corridors like the scream of a banshee. . . "PASSENGERS

HUNTER THOMPSON AND

YAIL BLOOR. REPORT

IMMEDIATELY TO THE

IMMIGRATION DESK. . ."

I was too stunned to move. "Mother of twelve bastards!" I whispered.

"Did I actually hear that?" I gripped both arms of my chair and tried to

concentrate. Was I hallucinating

again? There was no way to be

sure. . .

Then I heard the voice again,

booming all over the airport:

"WILL PASSENGERS HUNTER

THOMPSON AND YAIL BLOOR

REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO

THE IMMIGRATION DESK. . ."

No! I thought. This is impossible! It had to be paranoid dementia. My

fear of being nailed at the last

moment had become so intense that

I was hearing voices! The sun

through the window had caused the

acid to boil in my brain; a huge

bubble of drugs had burst a weak

vein in my frontal lobes.

Then I saw Bloor rushing into the

bar. His eyes were wild, his hands

were flapping crazily. "Did you hear that?" he shouted.

I stared at him. Well. . . I thought, we're fucked. He heard it, too. . . or even if he hadn't, even if we're both hallucinating, it means we've

O.D.'d. . . totally out of control for the next six hours, crazed with fear and confusion, feeling our bodies

disappear and our heads swell up

like balloons, unable to even

recognize each other. . .

"Wake up! Goddamn it!" he yelled.

"We have to make a run for the plane!"

I shrugged. "It's no use. They'll grab us at the gate."

He was frantically trying to zip up his kit bag. "Are you sure those were our names they called? Are you positive?"

I nodded, still not moving.

Somewhere in the middle of my

half-numb brain, the truth was

beginning to stir. I was not

hallucinating; the nightmare was

real. . . and I suddenly remembered the Striker PR man's talk about that

all-powerful jefe in Cozumel who had the fuel license.

Of course. A man with that kind of

leverage would have connections

all over Mexico: police, airlines,

Immigration. It was madness to

think we could cross him and get

away with it. No doubt he

controlled the Avis franchise, too. .

. and he'd gone into action the

minute his henchmen found that

crippled jeep in the airport parking lot, with its windshield shattered

and an 11-day bill unpaid. The phone lines had been humming

20,000 feet beneath us all the way

to Monterrey. And now, with less

than ten minutes to spare, they had ambushed us.

I stood up and slung the seabag over my shoulder just as the waitress

brought Bloor's glaucoma. He

looked at her, then lifted it off the tray and drank the whole thing in

one gulp. "Gracias, gracias," he mumbled, handing her a 50-peso

note. She started to make change, but he shook his head. "Nada, nada, keep the goddamn change." Then he pointed toward the kitchen. "Back door?" he said eagerly. "¿Exito?"

He nodded at the plane about 50

feet below us on the runway. I could see a few passengers beginning to

board. "Big hurry!" Bloor told her.

"¡Importante!"

She looked puzzled, then pointed to the main entrance to the bar.

He stuttered helplessly for a

moment, then began shouting:

"Where's the goddamn back door to this place? We have to catch that

plane now!"

A long-delayed rush of adrenaline

was beginning to clear my head. I

grabbed his arm and lurched toward

the main door. "Let's go," I said.

"We'll run right past the bastards."

My brain was still foggy, but the

adrenaline had triggered a basic

survival instinct. Our only hope was to run like doomed rats for the only

available opening and hope for a miracle.

As we hurried down the corridor, I

jerked one of the PRESS tags off my seabag and gave it to Bloor. "Start waving this at them when we hit the gate," I said, leaping sideways to avoid a covey of nuns in our way

"¡Pardonnez!" I shouted. "¡Prensa!

¡Prensa! ¡Mucho importante!"

Bloor picked up the cry as we

approached the gate, running at full speed and shouting incoherently in

garbled Spanish. The Immigration booth was just beyond the glass

doors leading out to the runway.

The stairway up to the plane was

still full of passengers, but the clock above the gate said exactly 11:20 --

departure time. Our only hope was

to burst past the cops at the desk

and dash aboard the plane just as

the stewardess pulled the big silver door closed. . .

We had to slow down as we

approached the glass doors, waving

our tickets at the cops and yelling

"¡Prensa! ¡Prensa!" at everybody in front of us. I was pouring sweat by this time and we were both

gasping for breath.

A small, muscular-looking cop in a

white shirt and dark glasses moved

out to head us off as we stumbled

through the doors. " Señor Bloor?

Señor Thompson?" he asked sharply.

The voice of doom.

I staggered to a halt and sagged against the desk, but Bloor's

leather-soled Mod boots wouldn't

hold on the marble floor and he

skidded past me at full speed and

crashed into a ten-foot potted palm, dropping his kit bag and mangling

several branches that he grabbed to keep from falling.

"Señor Thompson? Señor Bloor?"

Our accuser had a one-track mind.

One of his assistants had run over to help Bloor keep his feet. Another

cop picked his kit bag off the floor and handed it to him.

I was too exhausted to do anything

but nod my head meekly. The cop

who'd called our names took the

ticket out of my hand and glanced at it -- then quickly handed it back to me. "Ah-ha!" he said with a grin.

"Señor Thompson!" Then he looked at Bloor. "You are Señor Bloor?"

"You're goddamn right I am!" Bloor snapped. "What the hell's going on here? This is a goddamn outrage --

all this wax on these floors! I almost got killed!"

The little cop grinned again. Was

there something sadistic in his

smile? I couldn't be sure. But it

didn't matter now. They had us on

the gaff. I flashed on all the people I knew who'd been busted in Mexico;

dopers who'd pushed their luck too

far, gotten careless. No doubt we

would find friends in prison; I could almost hear them hooting their

cheerful greetings as we were led

into the yard and turned loose.

This scene passed through my head

in milliseconds. Bloor's wild yells were still floating in the air as the cop began pushing me out the door

toward the plane. "Hurry! Hurry!"

he was saying. . . and behind me I

heard his assistant prodding Bloor.

"We were afraid you would miss the plane," he was saying. "We called on the P.A. system." He was grinning broadly now. "You almost missed the plane."

We were almost to San Antonio before I got a grip on myself. The

adrenaline was still pumping

violently through my head; the acid and booze and fatigue had been

totally neutralized by that scene at the gate. My nerves were so jangled as the plane took off that I had to beg the stewardess for two Scotch

and waters, which I used to down

two of our four reds.

Bloor ate the other two, with the

help of two bloody marys. His

hands were trembling badly, his eyes were filled with blood. . . but as he came back to life, he began

cursing "those dirty bastards on the P.A. system" who had caused him to panic and get rid of all the coke.

"Jesus!" he said quietly, "you can imagine what a horror that was! I

was standing there at the urinal,

with my joint in one hand and a

coke spoon in the other -- jamming

the stuff up my nose and trying to

piss at the same time -- when all of

a fucking sudden it just exploded all around me! They have a speaker up

there in the corner of that bathroom, and the whole place is tile!" He took a long hit on the drink. "Shit, I almost went crazy! It was like

somebody had snuck up behind me

and dropped a cherry bomb down

the back of my shirt. All I could

think of was getting rid of the coke.

I threw it into one of the urinals and ran like a bastard for the bar." He laughed nervously. "Hell, I didn't even zip up my pants; I was running

down the hall with my joint hanging out."

I smiled, remembering the sense of

almost apocalyptic despair that

seized me when I heard the first

announcement.

"That's odd," I said. "It never even occurred to me to get rid of the

drugs. I was thinking about all those hotel bills and that goddamn jeep. If they'd nailed us for that stuff, a few pills wouldn't make much

difference."

He seemed to brood for a while. . .

then he spoke, staring fixedly at the seat in front of him. "Well. . . I don't know about you. . . but I don't think I could stand another shock like that one. I had about 90 seconds of pure terror. I felt like my whole life had ended. Jesus! Standing at that urinal with a coke spoon up my nose and

suddenly hearing my name on the

speaker. . ." He moaned softly.

"Now I know how Liddy must have felt when he saw those cops running into the Watergate. . . seeing his

whole life fall apart, from a hot rod in the White House to a twenty-year jailbird in sixty seconds."

"Fuck Liddy," I said. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy." I laughed out loud. "Liddy was the bastard who ran Operation Intercept

-- remember that?"

Bloor nodded.

"What do you think would have

happened if Gordon Liddy had been

standing at the gate when we came

crashing through?"

He smiled, sipping his drink.

"We'd be sitting in a Mexican jail right now," I said. "Just one of these pills" -- I held up a purple acid tab

-- "would have been enough to

drive Liddy into a hate frenzy. He'd have had us locked up on suspicion

of everything from hijacking to dope smuggling."

He looked at the pill I was holding, then reached for it. "Let's finish

these off," he said. "I can't stand this nervousness."

"You're right," I said, reaching into my pocket for the other one. "We're almost to San Antonio." I tossed the pill down my throat and called the

stewardess for another drink.

"Is that it?" he asked. "Are we clean?"

I nodded. "Except for the speed."

"Get rid of it," he said. "We're

almost there."

"Don't worry," I replied. "This acid will take hold just about the time

we land. We should order more

drinks." I unbuckled my seat belt and walked up the aisle to the

lavatory, fully intending to flush the speed down the toilet. . . but when I got inside, with the door locked

behind me, I stared down at the

little buggers resting so peacefully there in my palm. . . ten caps of

pure-white amphetamine powder. . .

and I thought: No, we might need these, in case of another emergency.

I remembered the dangerous

lethargy that had gripped me in

Monterrey. . . Then I looked down

at my white-canvas basketball

shoes and noticed how snugly the

tongues fit under the laces. . . plenty of pressure down there, I thought,

and plenty of room for ten pills. . .

so I put all the speed in my shoes

and went back to the seat. No point mentioning it to Bloor, I thought.

He's clean, and therefore totally

innocent. It would only inhibit his capacity for righteous anger, I felt, if I told him about the speed I was still carrying. . . until we were

safely through Customs and reeling

blindly around the San Antonio

airport; then he would thank me for it.

San Antonio was a cakewalk; no

trouble at all -- despite the fact that we virtually fell off the plane, badly twisted again, and by the time we

got our bags onto the conveyor belt

leading up to the tall black Customs agent, we were both laughing like

fools at the trail of orange

amphetamine pills strung out behind us on the floor of the tin-roofed

Customs shed. I was arguing with

the agent about how much import

tax I would have to pay on the two

bottles of prima tequila I was carrying when I noticed Bloor was

almost doubled over with laughter

right beside me. He had just paid a tax of $5.88 on his own tequila, and now he was cracking up while the

agent fussed over my tax.

"What's the hells's wrong with you?" I snapped, glancing back at him. . . Then I noticed he was

looking down at my feet, fighting so hard to control his laughter that he was having trouble keeping his

balance.

I looked down. . . and there, about six inches from my right shoe, was a bright-orange Spansule. Another

one was sitting on the black-rubber floor mat about two feet behind me.

. . and two feet farther back was another. They looked as big as

footballs.

Insane, I thought. I've left a trail of speed all the way from the plane to this beetle-browed Customs agent --

who was now handing me the

official receipt for my liquor tax. I accepted it with a smile that was

already disintegrating into hysteria as I took it out of his hand. He was staring grimly at Bloor, who was

out of control now, still laughing at

the floor. The Customs man couldn't see what Yail was laughing at

because of the conveyor belt

between us. . . but I could: It was another one of those goddamn

orange balls, resting on the white-

canvas toe of my shoe. I reached

down as casually as I could and put the thing in my pocket. The Customs man watched us with a look of total disgust on his face and we hauled

our bags through the swinging

wooden doors and into the lobby of

the San Antonio airport.

"Can you believe that?" Bloor said.

"He never even looked inside these damn things! For all he knows, we

just came across the border with

two hundred pounds of pure scag!"

I stopped laughing. It was true. My big suitcase -- the elephantskin

Abercrombie & Fitch job with

brass corners -- was still securely locked. Not one of our bags had

been opened for even the laziest

inspection. We had listed the five

quarts of tequila on our declaration

forms -- and that was all that seemed to interest him.

"Jesus Christ!" Bloor was saying.

"If we'd only known."

I smiled, but I was still feeling

nervous about it. There was

something almost eerie about two

laughing, staggering dopers

checking through one of the heaviest drug check points on the Customs

map without even opening their

bags. It was almost insulting. The

more I thought about it, the angrier I

felt. . . because that cold-eyed nigger had been absolutely right.

He had sized us up perfectly with

one glance. I could almost hear him thinking: "Goddamn! Look at these two slobbering honkies. Anybody

this fucked up can't be serious."

Which was true. The only thing we

slipped past him was a single cap

of speed, and even that was an

accident. So, in truth, he had saved himself a lot of unnecessary work

by ignoring our baggage. I would

have preferred not to understand this embarrassment so keenly,

because it plunged me into a fit of depression -- despite the acid, or

maybe because of it.

The rest of that trip was a nightmare of paranoid blunders and the kind of small humiliations that haunt you for many weeks afterward. About

halfway between San Antonio and

Denver, Bloor reached out into the

aisle and grabbed a stewardess by

the leg, causing her to drop a tray of

21 wineglasses, which crashed in a heap at her feet and ignited

rumblings of bad discontent from

the other first-class passengers who had ordered wine with their lunch.

"You stinking, dope-addict

bastard!" I muttered, trying to ignore him in the burst of ugliness that

surrounded us.

He grinned stupidly, ignoring the

howls of the stewardess and fixing

me with a dazed, uncomprehending

stare that confirmed, forever, my

convictions that nobody with even latent inclinations to use drugs should ever try to smuggle them. We were virtually shoveled off the

plane in Denver, laughing and

staggering in such a rotten condition that we were barely able to claim

our luggage.

Months later, I received a letter

from a friend in Cozumel, asking if I were still interesting in buying an interest in some beach acres on the Caribbean shores. It arrived just as

I was preparing to leave for Washington to cover "The

Impeachment of Richard Nixon," the final act in a drama that began, for me, almost exactly a year earlier

when I had bought a News from a newsboy hustling the porch of the

Bal-Hai in Cozumel and read John

Dean's original outcry about

refusing to be the "scapegoat"

Well. . . a lot of madness has

flowed under our various bridges

since then, and we have all

presumably learned a lot of things.

John Dean is in prison, Richard

Nixon has quit and been pardoned

by his hand-picked successor, and

my feeling for national politics is about the same as my feeling for

deep-sea fishing, buying land in

Cozumel or anything else where the

losers end up thrashing around in

the water on a barbed hook.

Playboy Magazine, December 1974

Jimmy Carter and the

Great Leap of Faith Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 76

Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent

Rendezvous

The View from Key West: Ninety

Miles North of Havana and Nine

Hundred Years on the Campaign

Trail. . . Farewell to the Boys on the Bus: Or, Johnny, I Never

Knew Ye. . . Another Rude and

Wistful Tale from the Bowels of

the American Dream, With Notes, Nightmares and Other Strange

Memories from Manchester,

Boston, Miami and Plains,

Georgia. . . And 440 Volts from

Castrato, the Demon Lover of

Coconut Grove

A lot of people will tell you that horses get spooked because they're just naturally nervous and jittery, but that ain't right. What you have to remember is that a horse sees things maybe six or seven times

bigger than we do.

-- BILLY HERMAN, a harness-racing trainer at Pompano Park in Miami This news just came over the radio, followed by a song about "faster horses, younger women, older

whiskey and more money. . ." and then came a news item about a

Polish gentleman who was arrested

earlier today for throwing "more than two dozen bowling balls into

the sea off a pier in Fort

Lauderdale" because, he told

arresting officers, "he thought they were nigger eggs."

. . . We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out.

Which could happen a lot sooner

than even Henry Kissinger thinks. . .

Because this is, after all, another election year, and almost everybody I talk to seems to feel we are

headed for strangeness. . . of one

sort or another. And some people

say we are already deep in the

midst of it. Which may be true. The evidence points both ways. . . But

from my perch in this plastic catbird seat out here on the southernmost

rim of Key West, the barometer

looks to be falling so fast on all

fronts that it no longer matters. And now comes this filthy news in the

latest Gallup Poll that Hubert

Humphrey will be our next

president. . . Or, failing that, he will foul the national air for the next six months and drive us all to smack

with his poison gibberish.

Jesus, no wonder that poor bastard up in Fort Lauderdale ran amok and

decided that all bowling balls were actually nigger eggs that would have to be hurled, at once, into shark-infested waters. He was probably a

desperate political activist of some kind trying to send a message to

Washington.

Last night, on this same radio

station, I heard a warning about "a new outbreak of dog mutilations in

Coconut Grove." The disc jockey

reading the news sounded angry and agitated. "Three more mongrel dogs were found castrated and barely

alive tonight," he said, "and investigating officers said there was no doubt that all three animals were victims of the same bloodthirsty

psychotic -- a stocky middle-aged

Cuban known as 'Castrato' -- who

has terrorized dog owners in

Coconut Grove for the past three

months.

"Today's mutilations, police said,

were executed with the same sadistic precision as all the others.

According to the owner of one

victim, a half-breed chow watchdog

named Willie, the dog was 'minding

his own business, just lying out

there in the driveway, when all of a sudden I heard him start yelping and I looked out the front door just in time to see this dirty little spic

shoot him again with one of those

electric flashlight guns. Then the

sonofabitch grabbed Willie by the

hind legs and threw him into the

back of an old red pickup. I yelled at him, but by the time I got hold of my shotgun and ran out on the porch, he was gone. It all happened so fast that I didn't even get the license

number off the truck.' "

The voice on the radio paused for a long moment, then dipped a few

octaves and went on with the story:

'Several hours later, police said,

Willie and two other dogs -- both

mongrels -- were found in a vacant

lot near the Dinner Key yacht

marina. All three had been expertly castrated. . ."

Another long pause, followed by a

moaning sound as the radio voice

seemed to crack and stutter

momentarily. . . And then it

continued, very slowly: "The nature of the wounds, police said, left no room for doubt that today's

mutilations were the work of the

same fiendish hand responsible for

all but two of the 49 previous dog

castrations in Coconut Grove this

year.

" 'This is definitely the work of Castrato,' said Senior Dog Warden

Lionel Olay at a hastily called press conference late this afternoon. 'Look at the razor work on this mongrel

chow,' Olay told reporters. 'These

cuts are surgically perfect, and so is this cauterization. This man you call

"Castrato" is no amateur, gentlemen.

This is very artistic surgery --

maybe 50 or 55 seconds from start

to finish, assuming he works with a

whip-steel straight razor and a 220-volt soldering iron.'

"Olay ended the press conference on a humorous note, urging

reporters to 'work like dogs until

this case is cracked. And if any of you people own mongrels,' he

added, 'either keep them out of

Coconut Grove or have them put to

sleep.'

"Meanwhile," said the newscaster,

"South Miami police have warned all dog owners in the area to be on

the lookout for a red pickup truck cruising slowly in residential

neighborhoods. The driver, a small

but muscular Cuban between 40 and

50 years old, is known to be armed

with an extremely dangerous, high-

voltage electric weapon called a

'Taser' and is also criminally

insane."

Jesus Christ! I'm not sure I can

handle this kind of news and frantic stimulus at four o'clock in the

morning -- especially with a head

full of speed, booze and Percodan.

It is extremely difficult to

concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these

circumstances. The idea of covering even the early stages of this cynical and increasingly retrograde

campaign has already plunged me

into a condition bordering on

terminal despair, and if I thought I might have to stay with these people all the way to November I would

change my name and seek work as a

professional alligator poacher in the

swamps around Lake Okeechobee.

My frame of mind is not right for

another long and maddening year of

total involvement in a presidential campaign. . . and somewhere in the

back of my brain lurks a growing

suspicion that this campaign is not right either; but that is not the kind of judgment any journalist should

make at this point. At least not in print.

So for the moment I will try to

suspend both the despair and the

final judgment. Both will be massively justified in the next few months, I think -- and until then I can fall back on the firmly held but

rarely quoted conviction of most

big-time Washington pols that

nobody can function at top form on a full-time basis in more than one

presidential campaign. This rule of thumb has never been applied to

journalists, to my knowledge, but

there is ample evidence to suggest it should be. There is no reason to

think that even the best and brightest

of journalists, as it were, can repeatedly or even more than once

crank themselves up to the level of genuinely fanatical energy,

commitment and total concentration

it takes to live in the speeding

vortex of a presidential campaign

from start to finish. There is not

enough room on that hell-bound

train for anybody who wants to

relax and act human now and then. It is a gig for ambitious zealots and

terminal action-junkies. . . and this is especially true of a campaign like

this one, which so far lacks any central, overriding issue like the

war in Vietnam that brought so

many talented and totally dedicated nonpoliticians into the '68 and '72

campaigns.

The issues this time are too varied and far too complex for the instant polarization of a Which Side Are

You On? crusade. There will not be

many ideologues seriously involved

in the '76 campaign; this one is a

technicians' trip, run by and for

politicians. . . Which is not really a hell of a lot different from any other campaign, except that this time it is going to be painfully obvious. This time, on the 200th anniversary of

what used to be called "The

American Dream," we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after

day -- on the tube and in the

headlines -- in this mess we have

made for ourselves.

Today, wherever in this world I meet a man or woman who fought

for Spanish liberty, I meet a kindred soul. In those years we lived our best, and what has come after and what there is to come can never carry us to those heights again.

-- from The Education of a

Correspondent by HERBERT

MATTHEWS

My problem with this campaign

began not quite two years ago, in

May of 1974, when I flew down to

Georgia with Teddy Kennedy and

ran into Jimmy Carter. The meeting was not so much accidental as

inevitable: I knew almost nothing

about Carter at the time, and that

was all I wanted to know. He was

the lame duck governor of Georgia

who had nominated "Scoop"

Jackson at the 1972 Democratic

Convention in Miami, and in the

course of that year I had written

some ugly things about him.

. . .Or at least that's what he told me when I showed up at the governor's

mansion for breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning. I had been

up all night, in the company of

serious degenerates. . . ah, but let's not get into that, at least not quite yet. I just reread that Castrato

business, and it strikes me that I am probably just one or two twisted

tangents away from terminal fusing

of the brain circuits.

Yes, the point: my feeling for

Southern politicians is not

especially warm, even now. Ever

since the first cannonballs fell on Fort Sumter in 1861, Southern

politics has been dominated by

thieves, bigots, warmongers and

buffoons. There were governors

like Earl Long in Louisiana,

"Kissin' Jim" Folsom in Alabama and Orval Faubus in Arkansas. . .

and senators like Bilbo and

Eastland from Mississippi,

Smathers and Gurney from Florida.

. . and Lyndon Johnson from Texas.

Toward the end of the Civil Rights

movement in the 1960s, the governor of Georgia was a white

trash dingbat named Lester Maddox

-- who is still with us, in one crude form or another -- and when the

curtain finally falls on George

Wallace, he will probably go down

in history as the Greatest Thief of them all. Wallace was the first

Southern politician to understand

that there are just as many mean,

stupid bigots above the Mason-

Dixon Line as there are below it,

and when he made the shrewd

decision to "go national" in 1968, he created an Alabama-based

industry that has since made very

rich men of himself and a handful of cronies. For more than a decade,

George Wallace has bamboozled

the national press and terrified the ranking fixers in both major parties.

In 1968, he took enough Democratic

votes from Hubert Humphrey to

elect Richard Nixon, and if he had

bothered to understand the delegate selection process in 1972, he could have prevented McGovern's

nomination and muscled himself into the number two spot on a

Humphrey-Wallace ticket.

McGovern could not have survived

a second-ballot short-fall in Miami that year, and anybody who thinks

the Happy Warrior would not have

made that trade with Wallace is a

fool. Hubert Humphrey would have

traded anything, with anybody, to get the Democratic nomination for

himself in 1972. . . and he'll be

ready to trade again, this year, if he

sees the slightest chance.

And he does. He saw it on the

morning after the New Hampshire

primary, when five percent of the

vote came in as "uncommitted."

That rotten, truthless old freak was on national TV at the crack of dawn, cackling like a hen full of amyls at the "wonderful news" from New Hampshire. After almost four years

of relatively statesmanlike restraint and infrequent TV appearances that

showed his gray hair and haggard

jowls -- four long and frantic years that saw the fall of Richard Nixon, the end of the war in Vietnam and a neo-collapse of the U.S. economy --

after all that time and all those

sober denials that he would never

run for president, all it took to jerk Hubert out of his closet was the

news from New Hampshire that five

percent of the Democratic voters,

less than 4000 people, in that

strange little state had cast their ballots for "uncommitted"

delegates.

To Humphrey, who was not even entered in the New Hampshire

primary, this meant five percent for him. Never mind that a completely unknown ex-governor of Georgia

had won the New Hampshire with more than 30% of the vote; or that

liberal Congressman Morris Udall

had finished a solid but

disappointing second with 24%; or

that liberal Senator Birch Bayh ran third with 16%. . . None of that

mattered to Hubert, because he was

privy to various rumors and force-

fed press reports that many of the

"uncommitted" delegates in New Hampshire were secret Humphrey

supporters. There was no way to be

sure, of course -- but no reason to doubt it, either; at least not in the mushy mind of the Happy Warrior.

His first TV appearance of the '76

campaign was a nasty shock to me. I had been up all night, tapping the

glass and nursing my bets along (I

had bet the quinella, taking Carter and Reagan against Udall and Ford)

and when the sun came up on Wednesday I was slumped in front

of a TV set in an ancient New

England farmhouse on a hilltop near a hamlet called Contoocook. I had

won early on Carter, but I had to

wait for Hughes Rudd and the

Morning News to learn that Ford had finally overtaken Reagan. The

margin at dawn was less than one

percent, but it was enough to blow

my quinella and put Reagan back on

Cheap Street, where he's been ever

since. . . and I was brooding on this

unexpected loss, sipping my coffee and tapping the glass once again,

when all of a sudden I was smacked

right straight in the eyes with the wild-eyed babbling spectacle of

Hubert Horatio Humphrey. His hair

was bright orange, his cheeks were

rouged, his forehead was caked

with Mantan, and his mouth was

moving so fast that the words

poured out in a high-pitched

chattering whine. . . "O my

goodness, my gracious. . . isn't it wonderful? Yes, yes indeed. . . O

yes, it just goes to show. . . I just can't say enough. . ."

No! I thought. This can't be true. Not now! Not so soon! Here was this

monster, this shameful electrified corpse -- giggling and raving and

flapping his hands at the camera

like he'd just been elected

president. He looked like three

iguanas in a feeding frenzy. I stood up and backed off from the TV set,

but the view was no different from

the other side of the room. I was

seeing The Real Thing, and it stunned me. . . Because I knew, in

my heart, that he was real: that even with a five percent shadow vote in

the year's first primary, where his name was not on the ballot, and

despite Jimmy Carter's surprising

victory and four other nationally

known candidates finishing higher

than "uncommitted," that Hubert Humphrey had somehow emerged

from the chaos of New Hampshire

with yet another new life, and

another serious shot at the

presidency of the United States.

This was more than a visceral

feeling, or some painful flash of

dread instinct. It was, in fact, a thing I'd predicted myself at least six

months earlier. . . It was a summer night in Washington and I was

having dinner at an outdoor

restaurant near the Capitol with

what the Wall Street Journal later described as "a half-dozen top operatives from the 1972

McGovern campaign." And at that

point there were already three certain candidates for '76 -- Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall and Fred Harris.

We had just come from a brief and

feisty little session with Carter, and on the way to the restaurant we had run into Udall on the street, so the talk at the table was understandably

"deep politics." Only one person in the group had even a tentative

commitment to a candidate in '76,

and after an hour or two of cruel

judgments and bitter comment, Alan

Baron -- McGovern's press

secretary and a prime mover in the

"new politics" wing of the Democratic party -- proposed a

secret ballot to find out which

candidate those of us at the table

actually believed would be the

party nominee in 1976. "Not who we want, or who we like," Baron stressed, "but who we really think is gonna get it."

I tore a page out of my notebook and sliced it up to make ballots. We

each took one, wrote a name on it,

then folded it up and passed the ballots to Baron, a Farouk-like

personage with a carnivorous sense

of humor and the build of a sumo

wrestler.

(Alan and I have not always been

friends. He was Muskie's campaign

manager for Florida in '72, and he

had never entirely recovered from

his encounter with the Gin-Crazed

Boohoo on Big Ed's "Sunshine

Special". . . and even now, after all this time, I will occasionally catch

him staring at me with a feral glint in his eyes.)

Indeed, and so much for that -- just another bucket of bad blood gone

under the bridge, so to speak, and in presidential politics you learn to

love the bridges and never look

down.

Which gets us back to the vote

count, and the leer on Baron's face when he unfolded the first ballot. "I knew it," he said. "That's two already, counting mine. . . yeah,

here's another one." He looked up and laughed. "It's a landslide for Hubert."

And it was. The final count was

Humphrey 4, Muskie 2 and one vote

for Udall from Rick Stearns, who

was already involved in the

planning and organizing stages of

Udall's campaign. Nobody else at

the table was committed to anything except gloom, pessimism and a sort

of aggressive neutrality.

So much for the idea of a sequel to

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Barring some totally unexpected development, I

will leave the dreary task of

chronicling this low-rent trip to

Teddy White, who is already

trapped in a place I don't want to

be.

But there is no way to escape

without wallowing deep in the first few primaries and getting a feel,

more or less, for the evidence. . .

And in order to properly depress

and degrade myself for the ordeal to come, I decided in early January to resurrect the National Affairs Desk and set up, once again, in the place where I spent so much time in 1972

and then again in 1974. These were

the boom-and-bust years of Richard

Milhous Nixon, who was criminally

insane and also president of the

United States for five years.

Marching through Georgia with

Ted Kennedy. . . Deep, Down and

Dirty; on the Darkest Side of

Shame. . . The Politics of Mystery and Blood on the Hands of Dean

Rusk. . . Jimmy Carter's Law Day Speech, and Why It Was

Shrouded in Secrecy by Persons

Unknown. . . Derby Day in the

Governor's Mansion and the

Strangling of the Sloat Diamond

If any person shall carnally know in any manner any brute animal, or carnally know any male or

female person by the anus or by and with the mouth, or voluntarily

submit to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a felony and shall be confined in the

penitentiary not less than one year nor more than three years.

-- Commonwealth of Virginia Anti-

Sodomy Statute, 1792

One of the most difficult problems

for a journalist covering a

presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to

make confident judgments about

them, because it is just about

impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship

with any candidate who has already

made the big leap from "long shot"

to "serious contender." The problem becomes more and more serious as

the stakes get higher, and by the

time a candidate has survived

enough primaries to convince

himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the

White House Mess for the next four

years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the

inclination to treat any journalist who doesn't already know him

personally as anything but just

another face in the campaign "press corps."

There are many complex theories

about the progressive stages of a

presidential campaign, but for the

moment let's say there are three:

Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire

primary when the field is still

crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most

candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get -- especially media exposure, so they can get

their names in the Gallup Poll;

Stage Two is the "winnowing out,"

the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three

survivors of the early primaries

begin looking like long-distance

runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three

begins whenever the national

media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that

a candidate has picked up enough

irreversible momentum to begin

looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not

rooted in any special wisdom or

scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic

campaigns well enough to make the

point that any journalist who doesn't

get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he's still in Stage One might just as well go with his

or her instincts all the way to

Election Day in November, because

once a candidate gets to Stage Two

his whole lifestyle changes

drastically.

At that point he becomes a public

figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy

begin escalating to the level of

madness. He wakes up every

morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings,

airports, speeches, press

conferences, motorcades and

handshaking. Instead of rambling,

off-the-cuff talks over a drink or

two with reporters from small-town

newspapers, he is suddenly flying

all over the country in his own

chartered jet full of syndicated

columnists and network TV stars. . .

Cameras and microphones follow

him everywhere he goes, and

instead of pleading long and

earnestly for the support of 15

amateur political activists gathered in some English professor's living

room in Keene, New Hampshire, he

is reading the same cliché-riddled

speech -- often three or four times in a single day -- to vast

auditoriums full of people who

either laugh or applaud at all the

wrong times and who may or may

not be supporters. . . And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time

pols who couldn't find the time to

return his phone calls when he was

desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his

phone off the hook within minutes

after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his

managers have booked him into that

night. But they are not calling to

offer their help and support, they

just want to make sure he

understands that they don't plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

It is a very mean game that these

high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United

States may no longer be "the most powerful man in the world," but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody

who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from

the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless

people just to get himself elected.

The power of the presidency is so vast that it is probably a good thing, in retrospect, that only a very few people in this country understood

the gravity of Richard Nixon's

mental condition during his last year in the White House. There were

moments in that year when even his

closest friends and advisers were

convinced that the president of the United States was so crazy with

rage and booze and suicidal despair that he was only two martinis away

from losing his grip entirely and

suddenly locking himself in his office long enough to make that

single telephone call that would

have launched enough missiles and

bombers to blow the whole world

off its axis or at least kill 100

million people.

The sudden, hellish reality of a

nuclear war with either Russia or

China or both was probably the

only thing that could have salvaged Nixon's presidency after the

Supreme Court ruled that he had to

yield up the incriminating tapes that he knew would finish him off.

Would the action-starved generals

at the Strategic Air Command

Headquarters have ignored an

emergency order from their

Commander-in-chief? And how

long would it have taken Pat

Buchanan or General Haig to

realize that 'The Boss" had finally flipped? Nixon spent so much time

alone that nobody else in the White House would have given his

absence a second thought until he

failed to show up for dinner, and by that time he could have made

enough phone calls to start wars all over the world.

A four-star general commandant of

the U.S. Marine Corps with three

wars and 35 years of fanatical

devotion to duty, honor and country in his system would hack off his

own feet and eat them rather than

refuse to obey a direct order from

the president of the United States --

even if he thought the president was

crazy.

The key to all military thinking is a concept that nobody who ever wore

a uniform with even one stripe on it will ever forget: "You don't salute the man, you salute the uniform."

Once you've learned that, you're a

soldier -- and soldiers don't

disobey orders from people they

have to salute. If Nixon's tortured mind had bent far enough to let him think he could save himself by

ordering a full-bore

Marine/Airborne invasion in Cuba, he would not have given the Boom-Boom order to some closet-pacifist

general who might be inclined to

delay the invasion long enough to

call Henry Kissinger for official

reassurance that the president was

not insane.

No West Pointer with four stars on

his hat would take that kind of risk anyway. By the time word got back

to the White House, or to Kissinger, that Nixon had given the order to

invade Cuba, the whole Caribbean would be a sea of fire; Fidel Castro would be in a submarine on his way

to Russia, and the sky above the

Atlantic would be streaked from

one horizon to the other with the

vapor trails of a hundred panic-

launched missiles.

Right. But it was mainly a matter of luck that Nixon's mental

disintegration was so obvious and

so crippling that by the time he

came face to face with his final

option, he was no longer able to even recognize it. When the going

got tough, the politician who

worshiped toughness above all else

turned into a whimpering, gin-

soaked vegetable. . . But it is still worth wondering how long it would

have taken Haig and Kissinger to

convince all those SAC generals out in Omaha to disregard a Doomsday

phone call from the president of the United States because a handful of

civilians in the White House said he was crazy.

Ah. . . but we are wandering off into wild speculation again, so let's

chop it off right here. We were

talking about the vast powers of the presidency and all the treacherous

currents surrounding it. . . Not to mention all the riptides, ambushes, Judas goats, fools and ruthless,

dehumanized thugs that will sooner

or later have to be dealt with by any presidential candidate who still

feels strong on his feet when he

comes to that magic moment for the

leap from Stage Two to Stage

Three.

But there will be plenty of time for that later on. And plenty of other

journalists to write out it. . . But not me. The most active and interesting phase of a presidential campaign is Stage One, which is as totally

different from the Sturm und Drang

of Stage Three as a guerrilla-style war among six or eight Gypsy

nations is totally different from the bloody, hunkered down trench

warfare that paralyzed and

destroyed half of Europe during World War I.

ATHENS, Ala. (AP)-- Iladean

Tribble, who had said she would marry entertainer Elvis Presley on Saturday, confirmed Sunday that the ceremony did not take place.

Mrs. Tribble, a 42-year-old widow with four children, was asked in a telephone interview why the

wedding did not take place. She replied: "This is the Sabbath day and I don't talk about things like

this on the Lord's day."

Well. . . that's fair enough, I guess.

Jimmy Carter had said that he won't talk about his foreign policy until the day he delivers his inaugural

address. Everybody has a right to

their own quirks and personal

convictions -- as long as they don't try to lay them on me -- but just for the pure, meanspirited hell of it, I am going to call Iladean Tribble

when the sun comes up in about

three hours and ask her the same

question the AP reporter insulted her faith by asking on the Sabbath.

By Mrs. Tribble's own logic, I

should get a perfectly straight

answer from her on Tuesday, which

according to my calendar is not a

religious holiday of any kind. . . So in just a few hours I should have the answer, from Iladean herself, to the question regarding her mysterious

nonmarriage to Elvis Presley.

And after I talk to Iladean, I am

going to call my old friend Pat

Caddell, who is Jimmy Carter's pollster and one of the two or three main wizards in Carter's brain trust, and we will have another one of our daily philosophical chats. . .

When I read Mrs. Tribble's quote to Pat earlier tonight, in the course of a more or less bare-knuckled

telephone talk, he said he didn't

know any woman named Iladean in

Athens, Alabama -- and besides that he didn't see any connection

between her and the main topic of

our conversation tonight, which was Jimmy Carter -- who is always the

main topic when I talk to Caddell,

and we've been talking, arguing,

plotting, haggling and generally

whipping on each other almost

constantly, ever since this third-

rate, low-rent campaign circus hit

the public roads about four months

ago.

That was before Pat went to work for Jimmy, but long after I'd been

cited in about 33 dozen journals all

over the country as one of Carter's earliest and most fervent

supporters. Everywhere I went for

at least the past year, from Los

Angeles to Austin, Nashville,

Washington, Boston, Chicago and

Key West, I've been publicly

hammered by friends and strangers

alike for saying that "I like Jimmy Carter." I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits

and other Gucci people; I have been called a brain-damaged geek by

some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on

the night of the Wisconsin primary

when the midnight radio stunned us

both with a news bulletin from a

CBS station in Los Angeles, saying

that earlier announcements by NBC

and ABC regarding Mo Udall's

narrow victory over Carter in

Wisconsin were not true, and that

late returns from the rural districts were running so heavily in Carter's favor that CBS was now calling him

the winner.

Sandy likes Mo Udall; and so do I, for that matter. . . I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of

New Orleans and a lot of other

people I don't necessarily believe

should be president of the United

States. The immense concentration

of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with

good sense to turn his back on. Or

her back. Or its back. . . At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to nil

vacancies on the U.S. Supreme

Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it -- like

Nixon did -- to pack-crowd the

Court of Final Appeal in this

country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently

voted to sustain the commonwealth

of Virginia's ahtisodomy statutes. . .

And anybody who thinks that 6-3

vote against "sodomy" is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that

doesn't really affect them had better hope they never get busted for

anything the Bible or any local

vice-squad cop calls an "unnatural sex act." Because "unnatural" is denned by the laws of almost every

state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the

classic missionary position, for

purposes of procreation only.

Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes

go to prison.

Which won't make much difference

to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago

that I can't remember when I first become a felon -- but I have been

one ever since, and it's way too late to change now. In the eyes of The

Law, my whole life has been one

long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again. .

. God knows, I hate it, but I can't help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says,

"The devil made me do it the first

time. The second time, I done it on my own."

Right And the third time, I did it

because of brain damage. . . And

after that: well, I figured that

anybody who was already doomed

to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.

Anything worth all that risk and

energy almost has to be beyond the

reach of any kind of redemption

except the power of Pure Love. . .

and this flash of twisted wisdom

brings us back, strangely enough, to politics, Pat Caddell, and the 1976

presidential campaign. . . And, not incidentally, to the fact that any

Journal on any side of Wall Street

that ever quoted me as saying "I like Jimmy Carter" was absolutely

accurate. I have said it many times, to many people, and I will keep on

saying it until Jimmy Carter gives

me some good reason to change my

mind -- which might happen about

two minutes after he finishes

reading this article: But I doubt it.

I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probably spent more private, human time with him

than any other journalist on the '76

campaign trail. The first time I met him -- at about eight o'clock on a

Saturday morning in 1974 at the

back door of the governor's mansion in Atlanta -- I was about two

degrees on the safe side of berserk, raving and babbling at Carter and

his whole bemused family about

some hostile bastard wearing a

Georgia State Police uniform who

had tried to prevent me from coming through the gate at the foot of the long, tree-shaded driveway leading

up to the mansion.

I had been up all night, in the

company of serious degenerates,

and when I rolled up to the

gatehouse in the back seat of a taxi I'd hailed in downtown Atlanta, the trooper was not amused by the sight and sound of my presence. I was

trying to act calm but after about 30

seconds I realized it wasn't

working; the look on his face told me I was not getting through to the man. He stared at me, saying

nothing, while I explained from my

crouch in the back seat of the cab

that I was late for breakfast with

"the governor and Ted Kennedy". . .

Then he suddenly stiffened and

began shouting at the cabdriver:

"What kind of dumb shit are you trying to pull, buddy? Don't you know where you are?"

Before the cabbie could answer, the

trooper smacked the flat of his hand down on the hood so hard that the

whole cab rattled. "You! Shut this engine!" Then he pointed at me:

"You! Out of the cab. Let's see some identification." He reached out for my wallet and motioned for me to

follow him into the gatehouse. The

cabbie started to follow, but the

trooper waved him back. "Stay right where you are, good buddy. I'll get to you." The look on my driver's face said we were both going to jail and it was my fault. "It wasn't my

idea to come out here," he whined.

"This guy told me he was invited for breakfast with the governor."

The trooper was looking at the

press cards in my wallet. I was

already pouring sweat, and just as

he looked over at me I realized I

was holding a can of beer in my

hand. "You always bring your own beer when you have breakfast with

the governor?" he asked.

I shrugged and dropped it in a

nearby wastebasket.

"You!" he shouted. "What do you think you're doing?"

The scene went on for another 20

minutes. There were many phone

calls, a lot of yelling, and finally the trooper reached somebody in the

mansion who agreed to locate

Senator Kennedy and ask if he knew

"some guy name of Thompson, I got him down here, he's all beered up

and wants to come up there for

breakfast. . ."

Jesus, I though, that's all Kennedy

needs to hear. Right in the middle of breakfast with the governor of

Georgia, some nervous old darky

shuffles in from the kitchen to

announce that the trooper down at

the gatehouse is holding some

drunkard who says he's a friend of

Senator Kennedy's and he wants to

come in and have breakfast. . .

Which was, in fact, a lie. I had not been invited for breakfast with the governor, and up to that point I had done everything in my power to

avoid it. Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized

reverence that most people

associate with Lunch and Dinner.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and

almost never before noon; anybody

with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor

every 24 hours, and mine is

breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or

at home -- and regardless of

whether or not I have been to bed --

breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed

alone, and in a spirit of genuine

excess. The food factor should

always be massive: four Bloody

Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of

coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-

pound of either sausage, bacon or

corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict a quart of milk, a chopped lemon

for random seasoning, and

something like a slice of key lime

pie, two margaritas and six lines of

the best cocaine for dessert. . .

Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and

messages, a telephone, a notebook

for planning the next 24 hours, and at least one source of good music. .

. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco

who have been waiting all day in a

condition of extreme fear and

anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of "The Meaning of Jimmy Carter" to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and

across 2000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast. . . But like almost

everything else worth

understanding, the explanation for

this is deceptively quick and basic.

After more than ten years of trying

to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have

finally come to the harsh

understanding that there is no way at all -- not even for a doctor of

chemotherapy with total access to

the whole spectrum of legal and

illegal drugs, the physical

constitution of a mule shark and a

brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond -- to function as a political journalist without

abandoning the whole concept of a

decent breakfast. I have worked like

12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too

deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be

reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of

Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a

practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the

First, if we want to use the language of the church). . . Or a vegetarian

pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president

without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or

his New York City pistol permit

that allows him to wear twin six-

guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.

There are some combinations that

nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled

.410 and a head full of jimson weed

is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a

freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover

a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man

team of career political journalists on The New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.

But I had not made the final

decision on that morning when I

rolled up to the gatehouse of the governor's mansion in Atlanta to

have breakfast with Jimmy Carter

and Ted Kennedy. My reason for

being there at that hour was simply to get my professional schedule

back in phase with Kennedy's

political obligations for that day.

He was scheduled to address a

crowd of establishment heavies

who would convene at the

University of Georgia Law School

at 10:30 in the morning to officially witness the unveiling of a huge and

prestigious oil portrait of former secretary of state Dean Rusk, and

his tentative schedule for Saturday called for him to leave the

governor's mansion after breakfast

and make the 60-mile trip to Athens by means of the governor's official airplane. . . So in order to hook up with Kennedy and make the trip

with him, I had no choice but to

meet him for breakfast at the

mansion, where he had spent the

previous night at Carter's invitation.

Oddly enough, I had also been invited to spend Friday night in a

bedroom at the governor's mansion.

I had come down from Washington

with Kennedy on Friday afternoon,

and since I was the only journalist traveling with him that weekend,

Governor Carter had seen fit to

include me when he invited "the Kennedy party" to overnight at the mansion instead of a downtown

hotel.

But I am rarely in the right frame of

mind to spend the night in the house of a politician -- at least not if I can spend it anywhere else, and on the

previous night I figured I would be a lot happier in a room at the

Regency Hyatt House than I would

in the Georgia governor's mansion.

Which may or may not have been

true, but regardless of all that, I still had to be at the mansion for

breakfast if I wanted to get any

work done that weekend, and my

work was to stay with Ted

Kennedy.

The scene at the gate had unhinged me so thoroughly that I couldn't find the door I'd been told to knock on

when I finally got out of my cab at the mansion. . . and by the time I

finally got inside I was in no shape at all to deal with Jimmy Carter and his whole family. I didn't even

recognize Carter when he met me at

the door. All I knew was that a

middle-aged man wearing Levi's

was taking me into the dining room, where I insisted on sitting down for a while, until the tremors passed.

One of the first things I noticed about Carter, after I'd calmed down a bit, was the relaxed and confident way he handled himself with Ted

Kennedy. The contrast between the

two was so stark that I am still

surprised whenever I hear

somebody talking about the "eerie resemblance" between Carter and John F. Kennedy. I have never

noticed it, except every once in a

while in some carefully staged

photograph -- and if there was ever a time when it seems like any such

resemblance should have been impossible to miss, it was that

morning in Atlanta when I walked

into the dining room and saw Jimmy

Carter and Ted Kennedy sitting

about six feet apart at the same

table.

Kennedy, whose presence usually

dominates any room he walks into,

was sitting there looking stiff and vaguely uncomfortable in his dark

blue suit and black shoes. He

glanced up as I entered and smiled

faintly, then went back to staring at a portrait on the wall on the other side of the room. Paul Kirk, his

executive wizard, was sitting next

to him, wearing the same blue suit

and black shoes -- and Jimmy King,

his executive advance man, was off

in a distant corner yelling into a

telephone. There were about 15

other people in the room, most of

them laughing and talking, and it

took me a while to notice that

nobody was talking to Kennedy --

which is a very rare thing to see,

particularly in any situation involving other politicians or even politically conscious people.

Kennedy was obviously not in a

very gregarious mood that morning,

and I didn't learn why until an hour or so later when I found myself in

one of the Secret Service cars with King, Kirk and Kennedy, running at

top speed on the highway to Athens.

The mood in the car was ugly.

Kennedy was yelling at the SS

driver for missing a turnoff that

meant we'd be late for the unveiling.

When we finally got there and I had a chance to talk privately with

Jimmy King, he said Carter had

waited until the last minute -- just before I got to the mansion -- to

advise Kennedy that a sudden

change in his own plans made it

impossible for him to lend Teddy

his plane for the trip to Athens. That was the reason for the tension I

half-noticed when I got to the

mansion. King had been forced to

get on the phone immediately and

locate the Secret Service detail and get two cars out to the mansion

immediately. By the time they

arrived it was obvious that we

would not get to Athens in time for the unveiling of Rusk's portrait --

which was fine with me, but

Kennedy was scheduled to speak

and he was very unhappy.

I refused to participate in any

ceremony honoring a warmonger

like Rusk, so I told King I would

look around on the edge of the

campus for a bar, and then meet them for lunch at the cafeteria for the Law Day luncheon. . . He was

happy enough to see me go, because

in the space of three or four minutes I had insulted a half-dozen people.

There was a beer parlor about ten

minutes away, and I stayed there in relative peace until it was time for the luncheon.

There was no way to miss the

campus cafeteria. There was a

curious crowd of about 200 students

waiting to catch a glimpse of Ted Kennedy, who was signing

autographs and moving slowly up

the concrete steps toward the door

as I approached. Jimmy King saw

me coming and waited by the door.

"Well, you missed the unveiling,"

he said with a smile. "You feel better?"

"Not much," I replied. "They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels."

King started to smile again, but his

mouth suddenly froze and I looked to my right just in time to see Dean Rusk's swollen face about 18 inches away from my own. King reached

out to shake his hand.

"Congratulations, sir," he said.

"We're all very proud of you."

"Balls," I muttered.

After Rusk had gone inside, King

stared at me and shook his head

sadly. "Why can't you give the old man some peace?" he said. "He's harmless now. Jesus, you'll get us in

trouble yet."

"Don't worry," I said. "He's deaf as a rock."

"Maybe so," King replied. "But some of those people with him can

hear okay. One of the women over

there at the ceremony asked me who

you were and I said you were an

undercover agent, but she was still pissed off about what you said.

'You should have Senator Kennedy

teach him some manners,' she told

me. 'Not even a government agent

should be allowed to talk like that in public.' "

"Like what?" I said. "That stuff about the blood on his hands?"

King laughed. "Yeah, that really jolted her. Jesus, Hunter, you gotta remember, these are genteel

people." He nodded solemnly. "And this is their turf. Dean Rusk is a

goddamn national hero down here.

What are his friends supposed to

think when the senator comes down

from Washington to deliver the

eulogy at the unveiling of Rusk's portrait, and he brings some guy

with him who starts asking people

why the artist didn't paint any blood on the hands?"

"Don't worry," I said. "Just tell 'em it's part of my deep cover. Hell,

nobody connects me with Kennedy

anyway. I've been careful to stay a safe distance away from you

bastards. You think I want to be

seen at a ceremony honoring Dean

Rusk?"

"Don't kid yourself," he said as we walked inside. "They know you're with us. You wouldn't be here if

they didn't. This is a very exclusive gathering, my boy. We're the only

ones on the guest list without some kind of very serious title: they're all either judges or state senators or the Right Honorable that. . ."

I looked around the room, and

indeed there was no mistaking the

nature of the crowd. This was not

just a bunch of good ol' boys who

all happened to be alumni of the University of Georgia Law School;

these were the honored alumni, the ranking 150 or so who had earned,

stolen or inherited enough

distinction to be culled from the

lists and invited to the unveiling of Rusk's portrait, followed by a

luncheon with Senator Kennedy,

Governor Carter, Judge Crater and

numerous other hyper-distinguished

guests whose names I forget. . . And Jimmy King was right: this was not

a natural habitat for anybody

wearing dirty white basketball shoes, no tie and nothing except

ROLLING STONE to follow his name on the guest list in that space

reserved for titles. If it had been a gathering of distinguished alumni

from the University of Georgia

Medical School, the title space on

the guest list would have been in

front of the names, and I would have fit right in. Hell, I could even have joined a few conversations and

nobody would have given a second

thought to any talk about "blood on

the hands."

Right. But this was law day in

Georgia, and I was the only Doctor

in the room. . . So I had to be

passed off as some kind of

undercover agent, traveling for

unknown reasons with Senator

Kennedy. Not even the Secret

Service agents understand my role

in the entourage. All they knew was that I had walked off the plane from Washington with Teddy, and I had

been with them ever since. Nobody

gets introduced to a Secret Service agent; they are expected to know who everybody is -- and if they

don't know, they act like they do and hope for the best.

It is not my wont to take undue

advantage of the Secret Service. We have gone through some heavy times

together, as it were, and ever since I wandered into a room in the

Baltimore Hotel in New York one

night during the 1972 campaign and

found three SS agents smoking a

joint, I have felt pretty much at ease around them. . . So it seemed only

natural, down in Georgia, to ask one of the four agents in our detail for the keys to the trunk of his car so I could lock my leather satchel in a

safe place, instead of carrying it

around with me.

Actually, the agent had put the bag in the trunk on his own, rather than give me the key. . . But when I sat down at our table in the cafeteria

and saw that the only available

beverage was iced tea, I remembered that one of the things in my satchel was a quart of Wild

Turkey, and I wanted it. On the

table in front of me -- and everyone else -- was a tall glass of iced tea that looked to be the same color as bourbon. Each glass had a split

slice of lemon on its rim: so I

removed the lemon, poured the tea

into Paul Kirk's water glass, and

asked one of the agents at the next table for the key to the trunk. He

hesitated for a moment, but one of

the law school deans or maybe Judge Crater was already talking

into the mike up there at the

speakers' table, so the path of least disturbance was to give me the key, which he did. . .

And I thought nothing of it until I got outside and opened the trunk. . .

Cazart!

If your life ever gets dull, check out the trunk of the next SS car you

happen to see. You won't need a

key; they open just as easily as any other trunk when a six-foot

whipsteel is properly applied. . .

But open the bugger carefully,

because those gentlemen keep about

69 varieties of instant death inside.

Jesus, I was literally staggered by the mass of weaponry in the back of that car: there were machine guns,

gas masks, hand grenades, cartridge belts, tear gas canisters, ammo

boxes, bulletproof vests, chains,

saws and probably a lot of other

things. . . But all of a sudden I

realized that two passing students had stopped right next to me on the sidewalk and I heard one of them

say, "God almighty! Look at that stuff!"

So I quickly filled my glass with

Wild Turkey, put the bottle back in the trunk and slammed it shut just

like you'd slam any other trunk. . .

and that was when I turned around

to see Jimmy Carter coming at me

with his head down, his teeth bared and his eyes so wildly dilated that

he looked like a springtime bat. . .

What? No. That was later in the

day, on my third or fourth trip to the trunk with the iced-tea glass. I have been sitting here in a frozen,

bewildered stupor for 50 or 55

minutes trying to figure out where

that last image came from. My

memories of that day are extremely

vivid, for the most part, and the

more I think back on it now, the

more certain I am that whatever I

might have seen coming at me in

that kind of bent-over, fast-swooping style of the springtime bat was not Governor Carter. Probably it was a hunchbacked student on his way to final exams in the school of landscaping, or maybe just trying to walk fast and tie his shoes at the

same time. . . Or it could have been nothing at all; there is no mention in my notebook about anything trying

to sneak up on me in a high-speed

crouch while I was standing out

there in the street.

According to my notes, in fact, Jimmy Carter had arrived at the

cafeteria not long after Kennedy --

and if he attracted any attention

from the crowd that had come to see Teddy I would probably have

noticed it and made at least a small note to emphasize the contrast in

style -- something like: "12:09, Carter suddenly appears in slow-moving crowd behind TK. No

autographs, no bodyguards & now a blue plastic suit instead of Levi's. . .

No recognition, no greetings, just a

small sandy-haired man looking for somebody to shake hands with. . ."

That is the kind of note I would

have made if I'd noticed his arrival at all, which I didn't. Because it

was not until around ten o'clock on the night of the New Hampshire

primary, almost two years later, that there was any real reason for a

journalist to make a note on the time and style of Jimmy Carter's arrival for any occasion at all, and

especially not in a crowd that had

come to rub shoulders with big-time heavies like Ted Kennedy and Dean

Rusk. He is not an imposing figure

in any way: and even now, with his

face on every TV screen in the

country at least five nights a week, I'd be tempted to bet $100 to

anybody else's $500 that Jimmy

Carter could walk -- by himself and in a normal noonday crowd -- from

one end of Chicago's huge O'Hare

Airport to the other, without being recognized by anybody. . .

Or at least not by anybody who had never met him personally, or who

had not seen him anywhere except

on TV. Because there is nothing

about Carter that would make him

any more noticeable than anyone

else you might pass in one of those long and crowded corridors in

O'Hare. He could pass for a Fuller

Brush man on any street in America.

. . But if Jimmy Carter had decided, 15 years ago, to sign on as a brush and gim-crack salesman for the

Fuller people, he would be

president of the Fuller Brush Company today and every medicine

chest in the country would be

loaded with Carter-Fuller brushes. .

. And if he had gone into the heroin business, every respectable

household between Long Island and

Los Angeles would have at least

one resident junkie.

Ah. . . but that is not what we need to be talking about right now, is it?

The only thing I remember about the first hour or so of that luncheon was

a powerful sense of depression with the life I was drifting into.

According to the program, we were

in for a long run of speeches,

remarks, comments, etc., on matters connected with the law school.

Carter and Kennedy were the last

two names on the list of speakers,

which meant there was no hope of

leaving early. I thought about going back to the beer parlor and

watching a baseball game on TV,

but King warned me against it. "We don't know how long this goddamn

thing is gonna last," he said, "and that's a hell of a long walk from

here, isn't it?"

I knew what he was getting at. Just as soon as the program was over,

the SS caravan would rush us out to the Athens ariport, where Carter's

plane was waiting to fly us back to Atlanta. Another big dinner banquet was scheduled for 6:30 that night,

and immediately after that, a long

flight back to Washington. Nobody

would miss me if I wanted to go to

the beer parlor, King said; but nobody would miss me when the

time came to leave the airport,

either.

One of the constant nightmares of

traveling with politicians is the

need to keep them in sight at all

times. Every presidential campaign

has its own fearful litany of horror stories about reporters -- and,

occasionally, even a key staff

member -- who thought they had

plenty of time to "run across the

street for a quick beer" instead of hanging around in the rear of some

grim auditorium half-listening to the drone of a long-familiar speech,

only to come back in 20 minutes to

find the auditorium empty and no

sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell him where

they went. These stories are

invariably set in places like Butte, Buffalo or Icepick, Minnesota, on a night in the middle of March. The

temperature is always below zero,

there is usually a raging blizzard to

keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he has

left his wallet in his overcoat on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of ptomaine

poisoning. And then, while

crawling around on his knees in

some ice-covered alley and racked

with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and

whipped on the shins with a night

stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all

night by winos.

These stories abound, and there is just enough truth in them to make

most campaign journalists so fearful of a sudden change in the schedule

that they will not even go looking

for a bathroom until the pain

becomes unendurable and at least

three reliable people have promised to fetch them back to the fold at the first sign of any movement that

could signal an early departure. The closest I ever came to getting left behind was during the California

primary in 1972, when I emerged

from a bathroom in the Salinas railroad depot and realized that the caboose car of McGovern's

"victory train" was about 100 yards further down the tracks than it had been only three minutes earlier.

George was still standing outside

the platform, waving to the crowd,

but the train was moving -- and as I started my sprint through the crowd, running over women, children,

cripples and anything else that

couldn't get out of my way, I thought I saw a big grin on McGovern's

face as the train began picking up speed. . . I am still amazed that I caught up with the goddamn thing

without blowing every valve in my

heart, or even missing the iron

ladder when I made my last-second

leap and being swept under the train and chopped in half by the wheels.

Ever since then I have not been

inclined to take many risks while

traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who

might feel a bit guilty about leaving

me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all

enslaved by their schedules, and

when it comes to a choice between

getting to the airport on time or

waiting for a journalist who has

wandered off to seek booze, they

will shrug and race off to the

airport.

This is particularly true when you

travel with Kennedy, who moves at

all times with a speedy, split-

second precision on a schedule that

nobobdy except a perfectly organized presidential candidate

would even try to keep pace with.

When he is traveling with a detail

of Secret Service agents, the

caravan stops for nothing and waits for nobody. . . The SS agents

assigned to Kennedy are

hypersensitive about anything that

might jack up the risk factor, and

they move on the theory that safety increases with speed.

There was no need for King and

Kirk to warn me that the SS detail would have a collective nervous

breakdown at the prospect of taking Senator Kennedy and the governor

of Georgia through the streets of

downtown Athens -- or any other

city, for that matter -- to search for some notoriously criminal journalist who might be in any one of the half-dozen bars and beer parlors on the

edge of the campus.

So there was nothing to do except

sit there in the university cafeteria,

slumped in my chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk's, and drink one

tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day

luncheon ceremonies were finished.

After my third trip out to the trunk, the SS driver apparently decided

that it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a

disturbance every 15 or 20 minutes

by passing them back and forth. . .

Which made a certain kind of

fatalistic sense, because I'd already had plenty of time to do just about

anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all,

been together for the better part of two days, and the agents were

beginning to understand that there

was no need to reach for their

weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk's

hands, or how easily I could reach

over and cut off his ears with my

steak knife. Most Secret Service

agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear

that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has

managed to stash an apparently

endless supply of powerful whiskey

right in the middle of their trunk

arsenal. That is not one of your

normal, everyday situations in the

SS life; and especially not when

this drunkard who keeps talking

about taking a steak knife to the

head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the

Washington SS headquarters in

addition to having the keys to the SS

car in his pocket.

Carter was already speaking when I

came back from my fourth or fifth

trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the other iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was

beginning to get nervous about the

smell. "Goddamnit Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery," he said.

"Balls," I said. "That's blood you're

smelling."

King winced and I thought I saw

Rusk's head start to swing around

on me, but apparently he thought

better of it. For at least two hours he'd been hearing all this ugly talk about blood coming over his

shoulder from what he knew was

"the Kennedy table" right behind him. But why would a group of

Secret Service agents and Senator

Kennedy's personal staff be talking about him like that? And why was

this powerful stench of whiskey hanging around his head? Were they

all drunk?

Not all -- but I was rapidly closing the gap and the others had been

subjected to the fumes for so long

that I could tell by the sound of their laughter that even the SS agents

were acting a little weird. Maybe it was a contact drunk of some kind,

acting in combination with the

fumes and fiendish drone of the

speeches. We were trapped in that

place, and nobody else at the table liked it any better than I did.

I am still not sure when I began

listening to what Carter was saying, but at some point about ten minutes into his remarks I noticed a marked difference in the style and tone of the noise coming from the speakers'

table and I found myself listening, for the first time all day. Carter had started off with a few quiet jokes

about people feeling honored to pay ten or twelve dollars a head to hear

Kennedy speak, but the only way he could get people to listen to him

was to toss in a free lunch along

with his remarks. The audience

laughed politely a few times, but

after he'd been talking for about 15

minutes I noticed a general

uneasiness in the atmosphere of the room, and nobody was laughing

anymore. At that point we were all

still under the impression that

Carter's "remarks" would consist of a few minutes of friendly talk about the law school, a bit of praise for

Rusk, an introduction to Kennedy, and that would be it. . .

But we were wrong, and the tension

in the room kept increasing as more and more people realized it. Very

few if any of them had supported

Carter when he won the

governorship, and now that he was

just about finished with his four-

year term and barred by law from

running again, they expected him to bow out gracefully and go back to

raising peanuts. If he had chosen

that occasion to announce that he'd decided to run for president in

1976, the reaction would almost

certainly have been a ripple of

polite laughter, because they would know he was kidding. Carter had

not been a bad governor, but so

what? We were, after all, in

Georgia; and besides that, the South already had one governor running

for president. . . Back in the spring of 1974 George Wallace was a

national power; he had rattled the

hell out of that big cage called the

Democratic National Committee in

'72, and when he said he planned to do it again in '76 he was taken very seriously.

So I would probably have chuckled

along with the others if Carter had said something about running for

president at the beginning of his

"remarks" that day, but I would not have chuckled if he'd said it at the end. . . Because it was a king hell bastard of a speech, and by the time it was over he had rung every bell

in the room. Nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of it, but they knew it was sure as hell not

what they'd come to hear.

I have heard hundreds of speeches

by all kinds of candidates and

politicians -- usually against my

will and for generally the same

reasons I got trapped into hearing

this one -- but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that

Saturday afternoon in May 1974. It ran about 45 minutes, climbing

through five very distinct gear

changes while the audience

muttered uneasily and raised their

eyebrows at each other, and one of

the most remarkable things about the speech is that it is such a rare piece of oratorical artwork that it remains vastly impressive, even if you don't necessarily believe Carter was

sincere and truthful in all the things he said. Viewed purely in the

context of rhetorical drama and

political theater, it ranks with General Douglas MacArthur's "old soldiers never die" address to the Congress in 1951 -- which still

stands as a masterpiece of insane

bullshit, if nothing else.

There were, however, a lot of

people who believed every word

and sigh of MacArthur's speech, and they wanted to make him president -

- just as a lot of people who are

still uncertain about Jimmy Carter

would want to make him president

if he could figure out some way to deliver a contemporary version of

his 1974 Law Day speech on

network TV. . . Or, hell, even the

same identical speech; a national

audience might be slightly puzzled

by some of the references to

obscure judges, grade-school

teachers and backwoods Georgia

courthouses, but I think the totality of the speech would have the same

impact today as it did two years

ago.

But there is not much chance of it happening. . . And that brings up

another remarkable aspect of the

law Day speech: it had virtually no impact at all when he delivered it

except on the people who heard it,

and most of them were more

stunned and puzzled by it than

impressed. They had not come there

to hear lawyers denounced as

running dogs of the status quo, and there is still some question in my

own mind -- and in Carter's too, I

suspect -- about what he came there

to say. There was no written text of the speech, no press to report it, no audience hungry to hear it, and no

real reason for giving it -- except that Jimmy Carter had a few serious things on his mind that day, and he figured it was about time to unload them, whether the audience liked it or not. . .

Which gets to another interesting

point of the speech: although Carter himself now says, "That was

probably the best speech I ever

made," he has yet to make another like it -- not even to the extent of lifting some of the best images and ideas of incorporation into his

current speeches -- and his

campaign staff attached so little

importance to it that Carter's only tape recording of his Law Day

remarks got lost somewhere in the

files and, until about two months

ago, the only existing tape of the

speech was the one I made and

carried around with me for two

years, playing it in some extremely

unlikely situations for people who would look at me like I was finally over the hump into terminal brain

damage when I'd say they were

going to have to spend the next 45

minutes listening to a political

speech by some ex-governor of

Georgia.

It was not until I showed up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts for

the '76 primaries and started

playing my tape of the Law Day

speech for a few friends, journalists

and even some of Carter's top staff people who'd never heard it that Pat Caddell noticed that almost

everybody who heard the speech

was as impressed by it as I was. . .

But even now, after Caddell

arranged to dub 50 tape copies off

of my copy, nobody in Carter's

brain trust has figured out what to do with them.

I am not quite sure what I would do with them, myself, if I were Carter, because it is entirely possible that

the very qualities that made the Law Day speech so impressive for me

would have exactly the opposite

effect on Carter's new national

constituency. The voice I hear on

my tape is the same one all those

good conservative folk out there on the campaign trail have found so

appealing, but very few of them

would find anything familiar in

what the voice is saying. The Jimmy Carter who has waltzed so

triumphantly down the middle of the road through one Democratic

primary after another is a cautious, conservative and vaguely ethereal

Baptist Sunday school teacher who

seems to promise, above all else, a return to normalcy, a resurrection of the national self-esteem, and a

painless redemption from all the

horrors and disillusion of

Watergate. With President Carter's

firm hand on the helm, the ship of

state will once again sail a true and steady course, all the crooks and

liars and thieves who somehow got

control of the government during the

turmoil of the Sixties will be driven out of the temple once and for all, and the White House will be so

overflowing with honesty, decency,

justice, love and compassion that it might even glow in the dark.

It is a very alluring vision, and

nobody understands this better than Jimmy Carter. The electorate feels a need to be cleansed, reassured, and revitalized. The underdogs of

yesteryear have had their day, and

they blew it. The radicals and

reformers of the Sixties promised peace, but they turned out to be

nothing but incompetent trouble-

makers. Their plans that had looked so fine on paper led to chaos and

disaster when hack politicians tried to implement them. The promise of

Civil Rights turned into the

nightmare of busing. The call for

law and order led straight to

Watergate. And the long struggle

between the Hawks and the Doves

caused violence in the streets and a military disaster in Vietnam.

Nobody won, in the end, and when the dust finally settled, "extremists"

at both ends of the political

spectrum were thoroughly

discredited. And by the time the

1976 presidential campaign got

under way, the high ground was all

in the middle of the road.

Jimmy Carter understands this, and

he has tailored his campaign image

to fit the new mood almost

perfectly. . . But back in May of '74

when he flew up to Athens to make

his "remarks" at the Law Day ceremonies, he was not as

concerned with preserving his

moderate image as he is now. He

was thinking more about all the

trouble he'd had with judges,

lawyers, lobbyists and other

minions of the Georgia

establishment while he was

governor-- and now, with only six

more months in the office, he

wanted to have a few words with

these people.

There was not much anger in his voice when he started talking. But

halfway through the speech it was

too obvious for anybody in the room to ignore. But there was no way to

cut him short and he knew it. It was the anger in his voice that first

caught my attention, I think, but what sent me back out to the trunk to get my tape recorder instead of another drink was the spectacle of a

Southern politician telling a crowd of Southern judges and lawyers that

"I'm not qualified to talk to you

about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an

engineer and nuclear physicist, not a lawyer. . . But I read a lot and I

listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper

application of criminal justice and the system of equities is from

Reinhold Niebuhr. The other source

of my understanding about what's

right and wrong in this society is

from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of

Hattie Carroll' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' and The Times They Are A-Changin',' I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern

society."

At first I wasn't sure I was hearing him right and I looked over at

Jimmy King. "What the hell did I just hear?" I asked.

King smiled and looked at Paul

Kirk, who leaned across the table

and whispered, "He said his top two advisers are Bob Dylan and

Reinhold Niebuhr."

I nodded and got up to go outside

for my tape recorder. I could tell by the rising anger in Carter's voice

that we were in for an interesting

ride. . . And by the time I got back he was whipping on the crowd

about judges who took bribes in

return for reduced prison sentences, lawyers who deliberately cheated

illiterate blacks, and cops who

abused people's rights with

something they called a "consent

warrant."

"I had lunch this week with the members of the Judicial Selection

Committee and they were talking

about a 'consent search warrant,' "

he said. "I didn't know what a consent search warrant was. They

said, 'Well, that's when two

policemen go to a house. One of

them goes to the front door and

knocks on it and the other one runs around to the back door and yells

come in.'"

The crowd got a laugh out of that one, but Carter was just warming up and for the next 20 or 30 minutes his voice was the only sound in the

room. Kennedy was sitting just a

few feet to Carter's left, listening carefully but never changing the

thoughtful expression on his face as Carter railed and bitched about a

system of criminal justice that

allows the rich and the privileged to escape punishment for their crimes

and sends poor people to prison

because they can't afford to bribe

the judge. . .

(Jesus Babbling Christ! The phone

is ringing again, and this time I

know what it is for sure. Last time it was the Land Commissioner of

Texas, threatening to have my legs

broken because of something I

wrote about him. . . But now it is

the grim reaper; he has come for my final page and in exactly 13 minutes that goddamn mojo wire across the

room will erupt in a frenzy of

beeping and I will have to feed it

again. . . But before I leave this filthy sweatbox that is costing me

$39 a day I am going to deal with

that rotten mojo machine. I have

dreamed of smashing that fucker for five long years, but. . . Okay, okay, 12 more minutes and. . . yes. . .)

So this will have to be it. . . I would need a lot more time and space than I have to properly describe either

the reality or the reaction to Jimmy Carter's Law Day speech, which

was and still is the heaviest and

most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a

politician. It was the voice of an

angry agrarian populist, extremely

precise in its judgments and laced

with some of the most original,

brilliant and occasionally bizarre

political metaphors anybody in that room will ever be likely to hear.

The final turn of the screw was

another ugly example of crime and

degradation in the legal profession, and this time Carter went right to

the top. Nixon had just released his own, self-serving version of "the White House tapes," and Carter was shocked when he read the

transcripts. "The Constitution charges us with a direct

responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be,"

he said. And then, after a long

pause, he went on: "Well. . . I have read parts of the embarrassing

transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney

general who protected his boss, and

now brags of the fact that he tiptoed through a minefield and came out. . .

quote, clean, unquote." Another pause, and then: "You know, I can't imagine somebody like Thomas

Jefferson tiptoeing through a

minefield on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being

clean afterwards. . ."

Forty-five minutes latter, on our

way back to Atlanta in the

governor's small plane, I told Carter I wanted a transcript of his speech.

"There is no transcript," he said.

I smiled, thinking he was putting me on. The speech had sounded like a

product of five or six tortured

drafts. . . But he showed a page and a half of scrawled notes in his legal pad and said that was all he had.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "That was one of the damnedest things I've

ever heard. You mean you just

winged it all the way through?"

He shrugged and smiled faintly.

"Well," he said, "I had a pretty good idea what I was going to say, before I came up here -- but I guess I was a little surprised at how it came out."

Kennedy didn't have much to say

about the speech. He said he'd

"enjoyed it," but he still seemed uncomfortable and preoccupied for

some reason. Carter and I talked

about the time he invited Dylan and some of his friends out to the

governor's mansion after a concert

in Atlanta. "I really enjoyed it," he

said with a big grin. "It was a real honor to have him visit my home."

I had already decided, by then, that I liked Jimmy Carter -- but I had no

idea that he'd made up his mind, a

few months earlier, to run for the

presidency in 1976. And if he had

told me his little secret that day on the plane back to Atlanta, I'm not

sure I'd have taken him seriously. . .

But if he had told me and if I had

taken him seriously, I would

probably have said that he could

have my vote, for no other reason except the speech I'd just heard.

Which hardly matters, because

Jimmy Carter didn't mention the

presidency to me that day, and I had other things on my mind. It was the first Saturday in May -- Derby Day

in Louisville -- and I'd been

harassing Jimmy King since early

morning about getting us back to

Atlanta in time to watch the race on TV. According to the schedule we

were due back at the governor's

mansion around three in the afternoon, and post time for the

Derby was 4:30. . . But I have

learned to be leery of politicians'

schedules; they are about as reliable as campaign promises, and when I'd

mentioned to Kennedy that I felt it was very important to get ourselves back to Atlanta in time for the

Derby, I could tell by the look on

his face that the only thing that might cause him to go out of his way to

watch the Kentucky Derby was a

written guarantee from the Churchill

Downs management that I would be staked down on the track at the

finish line when the horses came

thundering down the stretch.

But Carter was definitely up for it, and he assured me that we would be

back at the mansion in plenty of

time for me to make all the bets I

wanted before post time. "We'll even try to find a mint julep for

you," he said. "Rosalynn has some mint in the garden, and I notice you already have the main ingredient."

When we got to the mansion I found a big TV set in one of the basement guest rooms. The mint juleps were

no problem, but the only bet I could get was a $5 gig with Jody Powell,

Carter's press secretary -- which I won, and then compounded the

insult by insisting that Powell pay off immediately. He had to wander

around the mansion, borrowing

dollars and even quarters from

anybody who would lend him

money, until he could scrape up five dollars.

Later that night we endured another banquet, and immediately afterward

I flew back to Washington with

Kennedy, King and Kirk. Kennedy

was still in a funk about something, and I thought it was probably me. . .

And while it was true that I had not brought any great distinction to the entourage, I had made enough of an

effort to know that it could have

been worse, and just to make sure

he understood that -- or maybe for

reasons of sheer perversity -- I

waited until we were all strapped

into our seats and I heard the stewardess asking Teddy if she

could bring him a drink. He refused, as he always does in public, and

just as the stewardess finished her spiel I leaned over the seat and

said, "How about some heroin?"

His face went stiff and for a moment I thought it was all over for me. But then I noticed that King and Kirk

were smiling. . . So I strangled the sloat and walked back to my hotel

in the rain.

The Last Crazed Charge of the Liberal Brigade: The Shrewdness

of Richard Nixon, the Deep and

Abiding Courage of Hubert

Humphrey and All of His New

Found Friends. . . Jimmy Carter

at Home in Plains, One Year

Later the Leap of Faith

SPECIAL BULLETIN

BEAUMONT, TEXAS (Apr 29) -- Anarchist presidential candidate Hunter S. Thompson announced yesterday during opening ceremonies at the Beaumont Annual Stock Auction that Democratic front-runner Jimmy Carter was "the

only candidate who ever lied to me twice in one day." Thompson's harsh denunciation of Carter -

- who was also at the auction for purposes of wrestling his own bull -- came as a nasty shock to the crowd of celebrities, bull wranglers and other politicos who were gathered to participate in ceremonies honoring Texas Land

Commissioner Bob Armstrong, who followed Thompson's attack on Carter with an unexpected statement of his own, saying he would be the number two man on a dark-horse(s) Demo ticket with Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Armstrong also denounced Carter for "consciously lying to me, about the price of his bull." The Carter-owned animal, a two-year-old peanut-fed Brahman, had been advertised at a price of $2200 -- but when the front-runner showed up in Beaumont to ride his own bull, the price suddenly escalated to $7750. And it was at

this point that both Thompson and Armstrong stunned the crowd with their back-to-back assaults on Carter, long considered a personal friend of both men. . . Carter, who seemed shocked by the attacks, lied to newsmen who questioned him about the reasons, saying, "I didn't hear what they said."

The Law Day speech is not the kind

of thing that would have much

appeal to the mind of a skilled

technician, and that kind of mind is perhaps the only common

denominator among the strategists,

organizers and advisers at the staff-command level of Carter's

campaign. Very few of them seem to have much interest in why Jimmy wants to be president, or even in

what he might do after he wins:

their job and their meal ticket is to put Jimmy Carter in the White

House, that is all they know and all they need to know -- and so far they are doing their job pretty well.

According to political odds-maker

Billy the Geek, Carter is now a

solid 3-2 bet to win the November

election -- up from 50-1 less than

six months ago.

This is another likely reason why Carter's brain trust is not especially concerned with how to put the Law

Day speech to good use: the people

most likely to be impressed or even converted by it are mainly the ones who make up the left/liberal,

humanist/intellectual wing of the

Democratic party and the national

press -- and in the wake of Carter's genuinely awesome blitzkrieg in

Pennsylvania and Texas, destroying

all of his remaining opposition in less than a week, it is hard to argue

with the feeling among his staff-command technicians that he no

longer needs any converts from the left/liberal wing of the party. He got where he is without the help he

repeatedly asked them for during

most of 1975 and early '76, and

now the problem is theirs. The train has left the station, as it were, and anybody who wants to catch up with

it now is going to come up with the air fare. . .

But I have just been reminded by a

terrible screeching on the telephone that the presses will roll in a few hours and that means there is no

more time at ROLLING STONE than there is in the Carter campaign for wondering why about anything. Idle speculation is a luxury reserved for people who are too rich, too poor

or too crazy to get seriously

concerned about anything outside

their own private realities. . . and just as soon as I finish this goddamn wretched piece of gibberish I am

going to flee like a rat down a pipe

into one of those categories. I have maintained a wild and serious

flirtation with all three of them for so long that the flirtation itself was beginning to look like reality. . . But I see it now for the madness it was from the start: there is no way to

maintain four parallel states of

being at the same time. I know from long experience that it is possible to be rich, poor and crazy all at once -

- but to be rich, poor, crazy and also a functioning political journalist at the same time is flat-out impossible,

so the time has come to make a terminal choice. . .

But not quite yet. We still have to finish this twisted saga of

Vengeance and Revelation in the

shade of the Georgia pines. . . So, what the hell? Let's get after it.

There is plenty of room at the top in this bountiful nation of ours for a rich, poor and crazy political

journalist who can sit down at a

rented typewriter in a Texas motel

with a heart full of hate and a head

full of speed and Wild Turkey and lash out a capsule/narrative

between midnight and dawn that

will explain the whole meaning and

tell the whole tale of the 1976

presidential campaign. . .

Hell yes! Let's whip on this thing!

Until I got that phone call a few

minutes ago I would have said it

was absolutely impossible, but now

I know better. . . If only because I have just been reminded that until I saw Hubert Humphrey "quit the

race" a few days ago I was telling anybody who would listen that there was no way to cure an egg-sucking

dog. . . So now is the time to finish this rotten job that I somehow got

myself into, and also to congratulate my old buddy Hubert for having

enough sense to ignore his advisers and keep the last faint glimmer of

his presidential hopes alive by

crouching in the weeds and praying

for a brokered convention, instead

of shooting his whole wad by

entering the New Jersey primary

and getting pushed off the wall and cracked like Humpty Dumpty by

Jimmy Carter's technicians.

I am beginning to sense a distinctly pejorative drift in this emphasis on the word "technician," but it is only half intentional. There is nothing

wrong with technicians, in politics or anywhere else. Any presidential

campaign without a full complement

of first-class political technicians --

or with a drastic imbalance

between technicians and ideologues

-- will meet the same fate that doomed the Fred Harris campaign

in New Hampshire and

Massachusetts. But the question of

balance is critical, and there is

something a little scary about a

presidential campaign run almost

entirely by technicians that can be as successful as Carter's.

"Awesome" is the mildest word I can think of to describe a campaign that can take an almost totally

unknown ex-governor of Georgia

with no national reputation, no power base in the Democratic party

and not the slightest reluctance to tell Walter Cronkite, John

Chancellor and anyone else who

asks that "the most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ" and to have him securely positioned, after only nine of 32 primaries, as an

almost prohibitive favorite to win

the presidential nomination of the

nation's majority political party, and even bet to win the November

election against a relatively popular

GOP president who has managed somehow to convince both Big

Labor and Big Business that he has

just rescued the country from

economic disaster. If the

presidential election were held

tomorrow I would not bet more than

three empty beer cans on Gerald

Ford's chances of beating Jimmy

Carter in November.

. . . What? No, cancel that bet. The Screech on the telephone just

informed me that Time has just

released a poll -- on the day after the Texas primary -- saying Carter

would beat Ford by 48% to 38% if

the election were held now. Seven

weeks ago, according to Time via The Screech, the current figures

were almost exactly reversed. . . I have never been much with math,

but a quick shuffling of these figures seems to mean that Carter has

picked up 20 points in seven weeks, and Ford has lost 20.

If this is true, then it is definitely

time to call Billy the Geek and get something like ten cases of 66 proof Sloat Ale down on Carter, and

forget those three empty beer cans.

In other words, the panic is on and the last survivors of the ill-fated Stop Carter Movement are out in the streets shedding their uniforms and stacking their weapons on street

corners all over Washington. . . And now another phone call from CBS

correspondent Ed Bradley -- who is

covering Carter now after starting

the '76 campaign with Birch Bayh --

saying Bayh will announce at a

press conference in Washington

tomorrow that he has decided to

endorse Jimmy Carter.

Well. . . how about that, eh? Never let it be said that a wharf rat can get off a sinking ship any faster than an 87% ADA liberal.

But this is no time for cruel jokes about liberals and wharf rats.

Neither species has ever been

known for blind courage or

stubborn devotion to principle, so let the rotters go wherever they feel even temporarily comfortable. . .

Meanwhile, it is beginning to look

like the time has come for the rest of us to get our business straight,

because the only man who is going

to keep Jimmy Carter out of the

White House now is Jimmy Carter.

Which might happen, but it is a hard kind of thing to bet on, because

there is no precedent in the annals of presidential politics for a

situation like this: with more than half the primaries still ahead of him, Carter is now running virtually

unopposed for the Democratic

nomination, and -- barring some

queer and unlikely development --

he is going to have to spend the next two months in a holding action until he can go to New York in July and

pick up the nomination.

Just as soon as I can get some sleep and recover from this grim and

useless ordeal I will call him and

find out what he plans to do with all that time. . . And if I were in that nervous position I think I would call a press conference and announce

that I was off to a secret think tank on the Zondo Peninsula to finalize

my plans for curing all the ills of society; because a lot of strange

things can happen to a long-shot

front-runner in two months of forced idleness, and a lot of idle minds are going to have plenty of time for

brooding on all the things that still worry them about living for at least

the next four years with a president who prays 25 times a day and reads

the Bible in Spanish every night.

Even the people who plan to vote

for Jimmy Carter if he can hang on

between now and November are

going to have more time than they

need to nurse any lingering doubts

they might have about him.

I will probably nurse a few doubts

of my own between now and July,

for that matter, but unless something happens to convince me that I

should waste any more time than I already have brooding on the evil

potential that lurks, invariably, in the mind of just about anybody

whose ego has become so

dangerously swollen that he really

wants to be president of the United States, I don't plan to spend much

time worrying about the prospect of seeing Jimmy Carter in the White

House, There is not a hell of a lot I can do about it, for one thing; and for another, I have spent enough

time with Carter in the past two

years to feel I have a pretty good sense of his candidacy. I went down to Plains, Georgia, to spend a few

days with him on his own turf and to hopefully find out who Jimmy

Carter really was before the

campaign shroud came down on him

and he started talking like a

candidate instead of a human being.

Once a presidential aspirant gets

out on the campaign trail and starts seeing visions of himself hunkered

down behind that big desk in the

Oval Office, the idea of sitting

down in his own living room and talking openly with some foulmouthed, argumentative journalist

carrying a tape recorder in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the

other is totally out of the question.

But it was almost a year before the

'76 New Hampshire primary when I

talked to Carter at his home in

Plains, and I came away from that

weekend with six hours of taped

conversation with him on subjects

ranging all the way from the Allman

Brothers, stock car racing and our strongly conflicting views on the

use of undercover agents in law

enforcement, to nuclear submarines, the war in Vietnam and the

treachery of Richard Nixon. When I

listened to the tapes again last week I noticed a lot of things that I had not paid much attention to at the

time, and the most obvious of these was the extremely detailed

precision of his answers to some of the questions that he is now accused of being either unable or unwilling

to answer. There is no question in my mind, after hearing him talk on

the tapes, that I was dealing with a candidate who had already done a

massive amount of research on

things like tax reform, national

defense and the structure of the

American political system by the

time he announced his decision to

run for president.

Nor is there any question that there are a lot of things Jimmy Carter and I will never agree on. I had warned

him, before we sat down with the tape recorder for the first time, that

-- although I appreciated his

hospitality and felt surprisingly

relaxed and comfortable in his

home -- I was also a journalist and that some of the questions I knew I was going to ask him might seem

unfriendly or even downright

hostile. Because of this, I said, I wanted him to be able to stop the

tape recorder by means of a remote-

pause button if the talk got too

heavy. But he said he would just as

soon not have to bother turning the tape on and off; which surprised me at the time, but now that I listen to the tapes I realize that loose talk and bent humor are not among

Jimmy Carter's vices.

They are definitely among mine,

however, and since I had stayed up

most of the night, drinking and

talking in the living room with his sons Jack and Chip Carter and their wives -- and then by myself in the

guest room over the garage -- I was

still feeling weird around noon, when we started talking "seriously,"

and the tape of that first

conversation is liberally sprinkled with my own twisted comments

about "rotten fascist bastards,"

"thieving cocksuckers who peddle their asses all over Washington,"

and "these goddamn brainless fools who refuse to serve liquor in the

Atlanta airport on Sunday."

It was nothing more than my normal

way of talking, and Carter was

already familiar with it, but there are strange and awkward pauses

here and there on the tape where I

can almost hear Carter gritting his teeth and wondering whether to

laugh or get angry at things I wasn't even conscious of saying at the

time, but which sound on the tape

like random outbursts of hostility or pure madness from the throat of a

paranoid psychotic. Most of the

conversation is intensely rational, but every once in a while it slips

over the line and all I can hear is

the sound of my own voice yelling something like "Jesus Christ! What's that filthy smell?"

Both Carter and his wife have

always been amazingly tolerant of

my behavior, and on one or two

occasions they have had to deal

with me in a noticeably bent

condition. I have always been

careful not to commit any felonies

right in front of them, but other than that I have never made much of an

effort to adjust my behavior around

Jimmy Carter or anyone else in his family -- including his 78-year-old mother, Miss Lillian, who is the

only member of the Carter family I

could comfortably endorse for the

presidency, right now, with no

reservations at all.

Whoops! Well. . . we will get to

that in a moment. Right now I have

other things to deal with and. . . No, what the hell? Let's get to it now, because time is running out and so

is that goddamn sloat; so now is the

time to come to grips with my own

"Carter Question."

It has taken me almost a year to

reach this point, and I am still not sure how to cope with it. . . But I am getting there fast, thanks mainly to all the help I've been getting from my friends in the liberal community.

I took more abuse from these

petulant linthead bastards during the New Hampshire and Massachusetts

primaries than I have ever taken

from my friends on any political

question since the first days of the Free Speech Movement in

Berkeley, and that was nearly 12

years ago. . . I felt the same way

about the first wild violent days of the FSM as I still feel about Jimmy Carter. In both cases my initial

reaction was positive, and I have

lived too long on my instincts to

start questioning them now. At least not until I get a good reason, and so far nobody has been able to give me any good reason for junking my first instinctive reaction to Jimmy

Carter, which was that I liked him. .

. And if the editors of Time

magazine and the friends of Hubert

Humphrey consider that "bizarre,"

fuck them. I liked Jimmy Carter the first time I met him, and in the two years that have passed since that

Derby Day in Georgia I have come

to know him a hell of a lot better

than I knew George McGovern at

this point in the '72 campaign, and I still like Jimmy Carter. He is one of the most intelligent politicians I've ever met, and also one of the

strangest. I have never felt comfortable around people who talk

about their feeling for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . .

Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with

either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me.

In a world as weird and cruel as

this one we have made for

ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness

without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness,

either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my

hands on either one of them every

once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.

And so much for all that gibberish.

The bastards are taking the whole

thing away from me now, and anything else I might have wanted to say about Jimmy Carter will have to wait for another time and place. At the moment, failing any new

evidence that would cause me to

change my mind, I would rather see

Jimmy Carter in the White House

than anybody else we are likely to

be given a chance to vote for. And

that narrows the field right down,

for now, to Ford, Reagan and

Humphrey.

Carter is the only unknown quantity of the four, and that fact alone says all I need to know. Admittedly, a

vote for Carter requires a certain

leap of faith, but on the evidence I don't mind taking it. I think he is enough of an ego maniac to bring

the same kind of intensity to the task of doing the job in a way that will allow him to stay as happy with his own mirror in the White House as

he is now with his mirror in Plains.

There is also the fact that I have the

Law Day speech to fall back on, which is a lot better reason to vote for him than anything I've seen or

heard on the campaign trail. I have never thought the problem with

Carter is that he is two-faced in the sense of a two-headed coin. . . But he is definitely a politician above all else right now, and that is the only way anybody gets into the White House. If Carter has two

faces, my own feeling is that they

are mounted one behind the other,

but both looking in the same

direction, instead of both ways at once, as the friends of Hubert

Humphrey keep saying.

It also occurs to me now and then

that many of the people who feel so strongly about keeping Jimmy

Carter out of the White House don't know him at all. And a lot of the

people who accuse him of lying,

dissembling, waffling and being

"hazy" have never bothered to listen very carefully to what he says, or to try reading between the lines now

when Carter comes out with some mawkish statement like the one he

has used to end so many speeches:

"I just want to see us once again with a government that is as honest and truthful and fair and idealistic and compassionate and filled with

love as are the American people."

The first time I heard him say that up in New Hampshire I was

stunned. It sounded like he had

eaten some of the acid I've been

saving up to offer him the first time

he mentions anything to me about bringing Jesus into my life. . . But after I'd heard him say the same

thing five or six more times, it

began to sound like something I'd

heard long before I'd ever heard

Jimmy Carter's name. . .

It took me a while to dig it out of my memory, but when it finally

surfaced I recognized the words of

the late, great liberal, Adlai

Stevenson, who once lashed it all

together in one small and perfect

capsule when he said ". . . in a democracy, people usually get the

kind of government they deserve."

Rolling Stone, #214, June 3, 1976

Address by Jimmy Carter

on Law Day:

University of Georgia,

Athens, GA

MAY 4,1974

Senator Kennedy, distinguished

fellow Georgians, friends of the

Law School of Georgia and

personal friends of mine:

Sometimes even a distinguished

jurist on the Supreme Court doesn't know all of the background on

acceptances of invitations. As a

matter of fact, my wife was

influential in this particular

acceptance, but my son was even

more influential. This was really an

acceptance to repair my ego. There was established in 1969 the L.Q.C.

Lamar Society. I was involved in

the establishment of it, and I think a lot of it. As Governor of Georgia I was invited this year, along with

two distinguished Americans, to

make a speech at the annual meeting which is going on now.

I found out when the program was

prepared that Senator Kennedy was

to speak last night. They charged

$10 to attend the occasion. Senator

William Brock from Tennessee is speaking to the Lamar Society at

noon today. I found out that they

charged $7.50 for this occasion. I

spoke yesterday at noon, and I

asked the Lamar Society officials,

at the last moment, how much they

were charging to come to the

luncheon yesterday. They said they

weren't charging anything. I said,

"You mean they don't even have to pay for the lunch?" They said, "No, we're providing the lunch free."

So, when my son Jack came and said, "Daddy, I think more of you than you thought I did; I'm paying

$7.00 for two tickets to the

luncheon," I figured that a $3.50

lunch ticket would salvage part of

my ego and that's really why I'm

here today.

I'm not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an engineer and a nuclear physicist, not a lawyer. I

was planning, really, to talk to you

more today about politics and the interrelationship of political affairs and law, than about what I'm

actually going to speak on. But after Senator Kennedy's delightful and

very fine response to political

questions during his speech, and

after his analysis of the Watergate problems, I stopped at a room on

the way, while he had his press

conference, and I changed my

speech notes.

My own interest in the criminal

justice system is very deep and heartfelt. Not having studied law,

I've had to learn the hard way. I

read a lot and listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding

about the proper application of

criminal justice and the system of

equity is from reading Reinhold

Niebuhr, one of his books that Bill Gunter gave me quite a number of

years ago. The other source of my

understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a

friend of mine, a poet named Bob

Dylan. After listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of

Hattie Carroll" and "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Times, They Are a Changing," I've learned to

appreciate the dynamism of change

in a modern society.

I grew up as a landowner's son. But, I don't think I ever realized the

proper interrelationship between

the landowner and those who

worked on a farm until I heard

Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna

Work on Maggie's Farm No More."

So I come here speaking to you

today about your subject with a

base for my information founded on

Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.

One of the things that Niebuhr says is that the sad duty of the political system is to establish justice in a sinful world. He goes on to say that there's no way to establish or

maintain justice without law; that

the laws are constantly changing to stabilize the social equilibrium of

the forces and counterforces of a dynamic society, and that the law in its totality is an expression of the structure of government

Well, as a farmer who has now

been in office for three years, I have seen firsthand the inadequacy of my own comprehension of what

government ought to do for its

people. I've had a constant learning process, sometimes from lawyers,

sometimes from practical

experience, sometimes from failures

and mistakes that have been pointed out to me after they were made.

I had lunch this week with the

members of the Judicial Selection

Committee, and they were talking

about a consent search warrant. I

said I didn't know what a consent

search warrant was. They said,

"Well, that's when two policemen go to a house. One of them goes to

the front door and knocks on it, and the other one runs around to the

back door and yells 'come in.' " I

have to admit that as Governor, quite often I search for ways to

bring about my own hopes; not quite so stringently testing the law as that, but with a similar motivation.

I would like to talk to you for a few moments about some of the

practical aspects of being a

governor who is still deeply

concerned about the inadequacies of a system of which it is obvious that you're so patently proud.

I have refrained completely from

making any judicial appointments on the basis of political support or other factors, and have chosen, in

every instance, Superior Court

judges, quite often State judges,

Appellate Court judges, on the basis of merit analysis by a highly

competent, open, qualified group of distinguished Georgians. I'm proud

of this.

We've now established in the

Georgia Constitution a

qualifications commission, which

for the first time can hear complaints from average citizens

about the performance in office of

judges and can investigate those

complaints and with the status and

the force of the Georgia

Constitution behind them can

remove a judge from office or take

other corrective steps.

We've now passed a Constitutional

amendment, which is waiting for the citizenry to approve, that

establishes a uniform Criminal

Justice Court System in this state so that the affairs of the judiciary can be more orderly structured, so that work loads can be balanced and so

that over a period of time there

might be an additional factor of

equity, which quite often does not

exist now because of the wide

disparity among the different courts of Georgia.

We passed this year a judge

sentencing bill for noncapital cases with a review procedure. I've had

presented to me, by members of the Pardons and Paroles Board, an

analysis of some of the sentences

given to people by the Superior

Court judges of this state, which

grieved me deeply and shocked me

as a layman. I believe that over a

period of time, the fact that a group of other judges can review and

comment on the sentences meted out

in the different portions of Georgia will bring some more equity to the

system.

We have finally eliminated the unsworn statement law in Georgia -

- the last state to do it.

This year, we analyzed in depth the structure of the drug penalties in this state. I believe in the future there will be a clear understanding of the seriousness of different crimes

relating to drugs. We've finally been able to get through the legislature a law that removes alcoholism or

drunkenness as a criminal offense.

When this law goes into effect next

year, I think it will create a new sense of compassion and concern

and justice for the roughly 150,000

alcoholics in Georgia, many of

whom escape the consequences of

what has been a crime because of

some social or economic

prominence, and will remove a very

heavy load from the criminal justice system.

In our prisons, which in the past

have been a disgrace to Georgia,

we've tried to make substantive

changes in the quality of those who administer them and to put a new

realm of understanding and hope

and compassion into the

administration of that portion of the system of justice. Ninety-five

percent of those who are presently

incarcerated in prisons will be

returned to be our neighbors. And

now the thrust of the entire program, as initiated under Ellis MacDougall and now continued under Dr. Ault,

is to try to discern in the soul of each convicted and sentenced

person redeeming features that can be be enhanced. We plan a career

for that person to be pursued while he is in prison. I believe that the early data that we have on

recidivism rates indicates the

efficacy of what we've done.

The GBI, which was formerly a

matter of great concern to all those who were interested in law

enforcement, has now been

substantially changed -- for the

better. I would put it up now in

quality against the FBI, the Secret Service or any other crime control

organization in this Nation.

Well, does that mean that everything is all right?

It doesn't to me.

I don't know exactly how to say this, but I was thinking just a few

moments ago about some of the

things that are of deep concern to

me as Governor. As a scientist, I

was working constantly, along with

almost everyone who professes that dedication of life, to probe, probe every day of my life for constant

change for the better. It's completely anachronistic in the makeup of a

nuclear physicist or an engineer or scientist to be satisfied with what we've got, or to rest on the laurels of past accomplishments. It's the

nature of the profession.

As a farmer, the same motivation

persists. Every farmer that I know

of, who is worth his salt or who's

just average, is ahead of the experiment stations and the research agronomist in finding better ways,

changing ways to plant, cultivate,

utilize herbicides, gather, cure, sell farm products. The competition for

innovation is tremendous,

equivalent to the realm of nuclear

physics even.

In my opinion, it's different in the case of lawyers. And maybe this is

a circumstance that is so inherently true that it can't be changed.

I'm a Sunday School teacher, and I've always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian

ethic that you shall love the Lord

your God and your neighbor as

yourself -- a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in

society, as described by Reinhold

Niebuhr and many others, don't

permit us to achieve perfection. We do strive for equality, but not with a fervent and daily commitment. In

general, the powerful and the

influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on

the legislature or the Congress. This creates a reluctance to change

because the powerful and the

influential have carved out for

themselves or have inherited a

privileged position in society, of

wealth or social prominence or

higher education or opportunity for the future. Quite often, those

circumstances are circumvented at a very early age because college

students, particularly

undergraduates, don't have any commitment to the preservation of

the way things are. But later, as

their interrelationship with the

present circumstances grows, they

also become committed to

approaching change very, very

slowly and very, very cautiously,

and there's a commitment to the

status quo.

I remember when I was a child, I

lived on a farm about three miles

from Plains, and we didn't have

electricity or running water. We lived on the railroad -- Seaboard

Coastline railroad. Like all farm

boys I had a flip, a sling shot. They had stabilized the railroad bed with little white round rocks, which I

used for ammunition. I would go out frequently to the railroad and gather the most perfectly shaped rocks of

proper size. I always had a few in

my pockets, and I had others cached away around the farm, so that they

would be convenient if I ran out of my pocket supply.

One day I was leaving the railroad track with my pockets full of rocks and hands full of rocks, and my

mother came out on the front porch -

- this is not a very interesting story but it illustrates a point -- and she had in her hands a plate full of

cookies that she had just baked for me. She called me, I am sure with

love in her heart, and said, "Jimmy, I've baked some cookies for you." I remember very distinctly walking

up to her and standing there for 15

or 20 seconds, in honest doubt

about whether I should drop those rocks which were worthless and

take the cookies that my mother had prepared for me, which between her

and me were very valuable.

Quite often, we have the same

inclination in our everyday lives.

We don't recognize that change can

sometimes be very beneficial,

although we fear it. Anyone who

lives in the South looks back on the last 15 to 20 years with some

degree of embarrassment, including

myself. To think about going back to a county unit system, which

deliberately cheated for generations certain white voters of this state, is almost inconceivable. To revert

back or to forgo the one man, one

vote principle, we would now

consider to be a horrible violation of the basic principles of justice

and equality and fairness and

equity.

The first speech I ever made in the Georgia Senate, representing the

most conservative district in Georgia, was concerning the

abolition of 30 questions that we

had so proudly evolved as a

subterfuge to keep black citizens

from voting and which we used

with a great deal of smirking and

pride for decades or generations

ever since the War between the

States -- questions that nobody

could answer in this room, but

which were applied to every black

citizen that came to the Sumter

County Courthouse or Webster

County Courthouse and said, "I want to vote." I spoke in that chamber, fearful of the news media

reporting it back home, but

overwhelmed with a commitment to

the abolition of that artificial

barrier to the rights of an American citizen. I remember the thing that I used in my speech, that a black

pencil salesman on the outer door of the Sumter County Courthouse could

make a better judgment about who

ought to be sheriff than two highly educated professors at Georgia

Southwestern College.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who

was perhaps despised by many in

this room because he shook up our

social structure that benefited us, and demanded simply that black

citizens be treated the same as

white citizens, wasn't greeted with approbation and accolades by the

Georgia Bar Association or the

Alabama Bar Association. He was

greeted with horror. Still, once that change was made, a very simple but

difficult change, no one in his right mind would want to go back to

circumstances prior to that juncture in the development of our Nation's

society.

I don't want to go on and on, I'm

part of it. But, the point I want to make to you is that we still have a long way to go. In every age or

every year, we have a tendency to

believe that we've come so far now, that there's no way to improve the

present system. I'm sure when the

Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. When the first

atomic bomb was exploded, that

was the ultimate development in

nuclear physics, and so forth.

Well, we haven't reached the

ultimate. But who's going to search the heart and the soul of an

organization like yours or a law

school or state or nation and say,

"What can we still do to restore equity and justice or to preserve it

or to enhance it in this society?"

You know, I'm not afraid to make

the change. I don't have anything to lose. But, as a farmer I'm not

qualified to assess the

characteristics of the 91 hundred

inmates in the Georgia prisons,

50% of whom ought not to be there.

They ought to be on probation or

under some other supervision and

assess what the results of previous court rulings might bring to bear on their lives.

I was in the Governor's Mansion for two years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a

prisoner -- a woman. One day she

came to me, after she got over her

two years of timidity, and said,

"Governor, I would like to borrow $250.00 from you."

I said, "I'm not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much."

She said, "I don't want to hire a lawyer, I want to pay the judge."

I thought it was a ridiculous statement for her; I felt that she was ignorant. But I found out she wasn't.

She had been sentenced by a

Superior Court judge in the state,

who still serves, to seven years or $750. She had raised, early in her

prison career, $500. I didn't lend

her the money, but I had Bill

Harper, my legal aide, look into it.

He found the circumstances were

true. She was quickly released

under a recent court ruling that had come down in the last few years.

I was down on the coast this weekend. I was approached by a

woman who asked me to come by

her home. I went by, and she

showed me documents that

indicated that her illiterate mother, who had a son in jail, had gone to

the County Surveyor in that region

and had borrowed $225 to get her

son out of jail. She had a letter from the Justice of the Peace that showed that her mother had made a mark on

the blank sheet of paper. They paid off the $225, and she has the

receipts to show it. Then they started a 5-year program trying to

get back the paper she signed,

without success. They went to court.

The lawyer that had originally

advised her to sign the paper

showed up as the attorney for the

surveyor. She had put up 50 acres

of land near the county seat as

security. When she got to court she found that instead of signing a

security deed, that she had signed a warranty deed. That case has

already been appealed to the

Supreme Court, and she lost.

Well, I know that the technicalities of the law that would permit that are probably justifiable. She didn't have a good lawyer. My heart feels and

cries out that something ought to be analyzed, not just about the structure of government, judicial

qualification councils and judicial appointment committees and

eliminating the unsworn statement --

those things are important. But they don't reach the crux of the point --

that now we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.

You can go in the prisons of

Georgia, and I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones

who commit crimes, but I do know

they are the only ones who serve

prison sentences. When Ellis

MacDougall first went to

Reidsville, he found people that had been in solitary confinement for ten years. We now have 500

misdemeanants in the Georgia

prison system.

Well, I don't know the theory of

law, but there is one other point I want to make, just for your own

consideration. I think we've made

great progress in the Pardons and

Paroles Board since I've been in

office and since we've reorganized

the government. We have five very

enlightened people there now. And

on occasion they go out to the

prison system to interview the

inmates, to decide whether or not

they are worthy to be released after they serve one-third of their

sentence. I think most jurors and

most judges feel that, when they

give the sentence, they know that

after a third of the sentence has gone by, they will be eligible for careful consideration. Just think for a

moment about your own son or your

own father or your own daughter

being in prison, having served

seven years of a lifetime term and

being considered for a release.

Don't you think that they ought to be

examined and that the Pardons and Paroles Board ought to look them in the eye and ask them a question and, if they are turned down, ought to

give them some substantive reason

why they are not released and what

they can do to correct their defect?

I do.

I think it's just as important at their time for consideration of early

release as it is even when they are sentenced. But, I don't know how to bring about that change.

We had an ethics bill in the State Legislature this year. Half of it

passed -- to require an accounting

for contributions during a campaign

-- but the part that applied to people after the campaign failed. We

couldn't get through a requirement

for revelation of payments or gifts to officeholders after they are in

office.

The largest force against that ethics bill was the lawyers.

Some of you here tried to help get a

consumer protection package passed without success.

The regulatory agencies in

Washington are made up, not of

people to regulate industries, but of representatives of the industries that are regulated. Is that fair and right and equitable? I don't think so.

I'm only going to serve four years as governor, as you know. I think that's enough. I enjoy it, but I think I've done all I can in the Governor's

office. I see the lobbyists in the

State Capitol filling the halls on occasions. Good people, competent

people, the most pleasant,

personable, extroverted citizens of Georgia. Those are the

characteristics that are required for a lobbyist. They represent good

folks. But I tell you that when a

lobbyist goes to represent the

Peanut Warehousemen's

Association of the Southeast, which I belong to, which I helped to

organize, they go there to represent the peanut warehouseman. They

don't go there to represent the customers of the peanut

warehouseman.

When the State Chamber of

Commerce lobbyists go there, they

go there to represent the

businessman of Georgia. They don't

go there to represent the customers of the businessman of Georgia.

When your own organization is

interested in some legislation there in the Capitol, they're interested in the welfare or prerogatives or

authority of the lawyers. They are not there to represent in any sort of exclusive way the client of the

lawyers.

The American Medical Association

and its Georgia equivalent -- they

represent the doctors, who are fine people. But they certainly don't

represent the patients of a doctor.

As an elected governor, I feel that responsibility; but I also know that my qualifications are slight

compared to the doctors or the

lawyers or the teachers, to determine what's best for the client or the patient or the school child.

This bothers me; and I know that if there was a commitment on the part

of the cumulative group of attorneys in this State, to search with a degree of commitment and fervency, to

eliminate many of the inequities that I've just described that I thought of this morning, our state could be

transformed in the attitude of its

people toward the government.

Senator Kennedy described the malaise that exists in this Nation, and it does.

In closing, I'd like to just illustrate the point by something that came to mind this morning when I was

talking to Senator Kennedy about

his trip to Russia.

When I was about 12 years old, I

liked to read, and I had a school

principal, named Miss Julia

Coleman, Judge Marshall knows

her. She forced me pretty much to

read, read, read, classical books.

She would give me a gold star when

I read ten and a silver star when I read five.

One day, she called me in and she

said, "Jimmy, I think it's time for you to read War and Peace." I was completely relieved because I

thought it was a book about

cowboys and Indians.

Well, I went to the library and

checked it out, and it was 1,415

pages thick, I think, written by

Tolstoy, as you know, about Napoleon's entry into Russia in the 1812-1815 era. He had never been

defeated and he was sure he could

win, but he underestimated the

severity of the Russian winter and

the peasants' love for their land.

To make a long story short, the next spring he retreated in defeat. The

course of history was changed; it

probably affected our own lives.

The point of the book is, and what

Tolstoy points out in the epilogue

is, that he didn't write the book about Napoleon or the Czar of

Russia or even the generals, except in a rare occasion. He wrote it

about the students and the

housewives and the barbers and the

farmers and the privates in the

Army. And the point of the book is

that the course of human events,

even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like presidents or governors or senators. They are

controlled by the combined wisdom

and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and

compassion and love and idealism

of the common ordinary people. If

that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France

where they had an emperor, how

much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us

with a direct responsibility for

determining what our government is

and ought to be?

Well, I've read parts of the

embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general, who protected his boss, and now brags on the fact that he tiptoed through a mine field and came out "clean." I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson

tiptoeing through a mine field on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean

afterwards.

I think our people demand more

than that. I believe that everyone in

this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form ought to

remember the oath that Thomas

Jefferson and others took when they practically signed their own death

warrant, writing the Declaration of Independence -- to preserve justice and equity and freedom and

fairness, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred

honor.

Thank you very much.

The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat

Requiem for a Crazed

Heavyweight. . . An Unfinished

Memoir on the Life and Doom of

Oscar Zeta Acosta, First & Last of the Savage Brown Buffalos. . .

He Crawled with Lepers and

Lawyers, but He Was Tall on His

Own Hind Legs When He Walked

at Night with the King. . .

The following memoir by Dr. Thompson is the painful result of a nine-week struggle (between

the Management and the author) regarding the style, tone, length, payment, etc. -- but mainly the subject matter of the National Affairs Desk's contribution to this star-crossed Tenth Anniversary Issue. . .

And in at least momentary fairness to the Management, we should note that the term

"star-crossed" is Dr. Thompson's -- as are all other harsh judgments he was finally compelled to submit. . .

"We work in the dark, we do what we can."

Some poet who never met Werner Erhard said that, but so what?

What began as a sort of riptide commentary on

"the meaning of the Sixties" soon turned into a wild and hydra-headed screed on Truth,

Vengeance, Journalism and the meaning, such as it is, of Jimmy Carter.

But none of these things could be made to fit in the space we had available-- so we were finally forced to compromise with The Doc and his people, who had all along favored a long, dangerous and very costly piece titled: "The Search for the Brown Buffalo."

It was Dr. Thompson's idea to have ROLLING

STONE finance this open-ended search for one of his friends who disappeared under mean and mysterious circumstances in the late months of 1974, or perhaps the early months of 1975. The Brown Buffalo was the nom de plume of the Chicano attorney from East Los Angeles who gained international notoriety as the brutal and relentless "300-pound Samoan attorney" in

Thompson's book, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." -- The Editors

Nobody knows the weirdness I've seen

On the trail of the brown buffalo

--OLD BLACK JOE

I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. 1 have

devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy and set up the

organization. When I have the 1

million Brown Buffalos on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S.

Government and the United

Nations. . . and then I'll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don't want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people.

Moses, Mao and Martin [Luther

King Jr.] are examples. Who's to

say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices.

Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez.

Perhaps that is why I've been

taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique.

-- Oscar Acosta, The

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo Well. . . not me, Old Sport.

Wherever you are and in whatever

shape -- dead or alive or even both, eh? That's one thing they can't take away from you. . . Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: Because

(and, yeah -- let's face it, Oscar) you were not real light on your feet in this world, and you were too

goddamn heavy for most of the

boats you jumped into. One of the

great regrets of my life is that I was never able to introduce you to my

old football buddy, Richard Nixon.

The main thing he feared in this life

-- even worse than Queers and Jews

and Mutants -- was people who might run amok; he called them

"loose cannons on the deck," and he wanted them all put to sleep.

That's one graveyard we never even

checked, Oscar, but why not? If

your classic "doomed nigger" style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to

get you -- but all the people who

thought like Nixon and all the

judges and U.S. attorneys he

appointed in those weird years.

Were there any of Nixon's friends

among all those Superior Court

judges you subpoenaed and mocked

and humiliated when you were

trying to bust the grand jury

selection system in L.A.? How

many of those Brown Beret

"bodyguards" you called "brothers"

were deep-cover cops or

informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were

working on that story about the

killing of Chicano journalist Ruben

Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who

slept on mattresses in your

apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chili-hall pay phone every

morning? Or maybe to the judges

who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn't have

anything else?

Yeah, and so much for the

"Paranoid Sixties." It's time to end this bent seance -- or almost closing

time, anyway -- but before we get back to raw facts and rude lawyer's humor, I want to make sure that at

least one record will show that I

tried and totally failed, for at least five years, to convince my allegedly erstwhile Samoan attorney, Oscar

Zeta Acosta, that there was no such thing as paranoia: At least not in that cultural and political war zone called "East L.A." in the late 1960s and especially not for an

aggressively radical "Chicano

Lawyer" who thought he could stay

up all night, every night, eating acid and throwing "Molotov cocktails"

with the same people he was going

to have to represent in a downtown

courtroom the next morning.

There were times -- all too often, I felt -- when Oscar would show up

in front of the courthouse at nine in the morning with a stench of fresh

gasoline on his hands and a green

crust of charred soap-flakes on the toes of his $300 snakeskin cowboy

boots. He would pause outside the

courtroom just long enough to give the TV press five minutes of crazed rhetoric for the Evening News, then he would shepherd his equally

crazed "clients" into the courtroom for their daily war-circus with the Judge. When you get into bear

baiting on that level, paranoia is

just another word for ignorance. . .

They really are out to get you.

The odds on his being dragged off

to jail for "contempt" were about fifty-fifty on any given day -- which

meant he was always in danger of being seized and booked with a

pocket full of "bennies" or "black beauties" at the property desk. After several narrow escapes he decided

that it was necessary to work in the Courtroom as part of a three-man

"defense team."

One of his "associates" was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered

young Chicano whose only job was

to carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed

Oscar whenever he signaled; the other was not so well-dressed or

mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar --

at which point he would reach out

and grab any pills, powders, shivs

or other evidence he was handed,

then sprint like a human bazooka for the nearest exit.

This strategy worked so well for

almost two years that Oscar and his people finally got careless. They

had survived another long day in court -- on felony arson charges,

this time, for trying to burn down

the Biltmore Hotel during a speech

by then Governor Ronald Reagan --

and they were driving back home to

Oscar's headquarters pad in the

barrio (and maybe running sixty or

sixty-five in a fifty m.p.h. speed

zone, Oscar later admitted) when

they were suddenly jammed to a

stop by two LAPD cruisers. "They acted like we'd just robbed a bank,"

said Frank, looking right down the

barrel of a shotgun. "They made us all lie face down on the street and then they searched the car, and --"

Yes. That's when they found the

drugs: twenty or thirty white pills that the police quickly identified as

"illegal amphetamine tablets,

belonging to Attorney Oscar

Acosta."

The fat spic for all seasons was

jailed once again, this time on what the press called a "high speed drug bust." Oscar called a press

conference in jail and accused the cops of "planting" him -- but not even his bodyguards believed him

until long after the attendant

publicity had done them all so much damage that the whole "Brown

Power Movement" was effectively stalled, splintered and discredited by the time all charges, both Arson and Drugs, were either dropped or

reduced to small print on the back

of the blotter.

I am not even sure, myself, how the

cases were finally disposed of. Not long after the "high speed drug bust," as I recall, two of his friends were charged with Murder One for

allegedly killing a smack dealer in the barrio, and I think Oscar finally copped on the drug charge and pled

guilty to something like "possession of ugly pills in a public place."

But by that time his deal had

already gone down. None of the

respectable Chicano pols in East

L.A. had ever liked him anyway,

and that "high speed drug bust" was all they needed to publicly

denounce everything Left of huevos rancheros and start calling themselves Mexican-American

again. The trial of the Biltmore Five was no longer a do-or-die cause for La Raza, but a shameful crime that a handful of radical dope fiends had

brought down on the whole

community. The mood on Whittier

Boulevard turned sour overnight,

and the sight of a Brown Beret was

suddenly as rare as a cash-client for

Oscar Zeta Acosta -- the ex-Chicago Lawyer.

The entire ex-Chicano political

community went as public as

possible to make sure that the rest of the city understood that they had known all along that this dope

addict rata who had somehow been one of their most articulate and

certainly their most radical, popular and politically aggressive

spokesman for almost two years

was really just a self-seeking

publicity dope freak who couldn't even run a bar tab at the Silver

Dollar Cafe, much less rally friends or a following. There was no

mention in the Mexican-American

press about Acosta's surprisingly

popular campaign for sheriff of L.A.

County a year earlier, which had

made him a minor hero among

politically hip Chicanos all over the city.

No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar's drug

bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his

apartment on three days' notice and his car was either stolen or towed

away from its customary parking

place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his

two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly

rejected. Not even for free, they

said. A dope-addled clown was

worse than no lawyer at all.

It was dumb gunsel thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his

help more than once. So he beat a

strategic retreat to Mazatlan, which he called his "other home," to lick his wounds and start writing the

Great Chicano novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano

lawyer was on his way to becoming

a half-successful writer, a cult

figure of sorts -- then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a

permanently missing person or an

undiscovered corpse.

Oscar's fate is still a mystery, but every time his case seems to be

finally closed, something happens to bring him back to life. . . And one of them just happened again, but it

came in a blizzard of chaos that

caused a serious time warp in my

thinking: my nerves are still too

jangled for the moment to do

anything but lay back and let it blow over.

The Flash Man Cometh. . . Queer

News from Coconut Grove. . .

Murder, Madness & The Battle of Biscayne Bay. . . The Death of a Cigarette Boat & A $48,000

Misunderstanding. . . Res Ipsa

Loquitor. . .

A screech owl the size of a chow

killed two of my peacocks on the

front porch. The county attorney

called the cops on me for interfering with the work of a labor crew

painting yellow stripes on the

Woody Creek Road. The antique

winch-powered crossbow that

Steadman sent over from England was seized and destroyed by

sheriff's deputies and a man named

Drake from Miami spent all

afternoon at the Hotel Jerome,

demanding my phone number from

the bartenders because he claimed

to have a bizarre message for me.

Then Sandy came back from the

store with the mail and the latest

issue of Newsweek, the one with the photo of Caroline Kennedy rolling

Jann through the door of Elaine's on

that custom-built, cut-glass dolly from Neiman-Marcus. Sandy didn't

even recognize him at first; she

thought it was a photo of Caroline

and Bella Abzug on the campaign

trail.

We went out on the porch, where

there was plenty of light, to get a better look at the photos -- but the sun made me blind for a moment,

and just then Tom Benton came

howling into the driveway on his

880 Husquavarna, and when he saw

that story in Newsweek (you know Tom, with that fine artist's eye that he has), he said, "Well I'll be fucked, that's Jann! And look at the wonderful smile on him. Wow! And look what he's done to his hair. . .

and those teeth. No wonder he moved to New York."

Benton was taking off his leathers

as he talked. He'd been riding up on the logging roads in the high

pastures behind his house, looking

for a rogue bear that tore the top off

his jeep and killed his mule last week.

"I just want to hit him with this Taser, then chain him to a tree until we can go up and get him."

"Get him?"

He nodded. "It's that grizzly pup that Noonan turned loose before he left

town. He's about a year and a half

old by now, and he's starting to act crazy."

"Fuck the Taser," I said. "It's not good beyond fifteen feet. We'll need the M-79, with CS grenades, then

drag him down with a jeep."

"No," he said. "I want to get the bugger in a van, then drive him into town and back the van right up to

the side door of that restaurant

where all the lawyers eat lunch.

They'll love him."

"Wonderful," I said. "Shoot him right into that private dining room where they have those Bar

Association luncheons -- feed him a whole bucket full of acid and raw

meat, then take him into town for the meeting."

Benton started to laugh, then

stopped and reached into one of his pockets and handed me a small

envelope. "Speaking of lawyers,"

he said, "I almost forgot -- there's a guy from Miami in town who says

he has a message for you, from

Oscar."

I flinched and stepped back.

"What?" I said. "Who?"

"Yeah," Benton said. "Oscar Acosta, the Brown Buffalo." He shook his head. "This guy has a very very strange story. It's so strange that I wasn't even sure I should

come out here and tell you."

"I know all those stories," I said.

"Hell I wrote most of them -- and besides, Oscar's dead."

Tom opened two more beers and

handed me one.

"Not according to this guy Drake,"

he said quietly. "He says Oscar almost got killed about two months

ago in Florida. They took a

midnight ride out to Bimini in

Drake's boat, and on the way back

they got ambushed at sea and a

friend of Oscar's got killed -- and Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat was

a total wreck; he says it was so full of bullet holes that they almost sunk in midocean."

"Bullshit," I said. "That's

impossible."

He shrugged. "Well, that's what Solheim said. But he talked to

Drake for a long time last night and he says the guy is absolutely

positive. He even had a photo." I suddenly remembered the envelope

I'd been holding. "Let's see what this is," I said, tearing off the end.

Inside was a paperback book cover,

folded lengthwise -- the cover of

Oscar's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, with a picture of the author

on the front and a message scrawled on the blank side. "Dear

Thompson," it said. "Please call me as soon as you can. Very urgent.

Acosta might be in bad trouble.

HEAT! Not much time. Call me in

#353 Hotel Jerome. Thanks.

Drake."

"Jesus," I muttered. "Why the hell does he want to talk to me?"

"He's looking for Oscar," Benton replied. "And so is the Coast Guard

-- and the DEA and the FBI and half

the cops in Miami."

"So what?" I said. "He's been dead for two years."

Tom shook his head. "No, Drake says he's still working in and out of Florida, running a lot of white powder."

"I doubt it," I said.

"Well Drake doesn't," he replied,

"and he's about to turn him over, unless Oscar pays for his boat. He

wants forty grand and he says he knows Oscar has the money."

"Balls," I said. "We should have this bastard locked up for

blackmail."

He shrugged again. "Hang on. You haven't heard the rest of it. Drake's talking about murder, not drugs."

"Murder?"

"Yeah. Drake says the Coast Guard came up with three bodies after that

ambush, and two of them didn't have heads. Oscar ran that Cigarette boat right over the top of a Boston

Whaler with at least two guys in it."

I stared at him for a moment, then

went over to the couch and sat

down. "Jesus Christ!" I said. "Let's go back and run the whole story

again. I must have missed

something."

You are better lost than found.

-- CLEMENT ROBINSON

Which was true. The story I got from Benton was from Mike

Solheim, who got it in spades from

a total stranger who said his name

was Drake and who showed up in

Aspen one afternoon, looking for

me because he thought I could put

him in touch with Oscar Acosta -- a

"dead man" who somehow showed up at Drake's home in Coconut

Grove one night last summer and

offered $5,000 in cash for a

midnight ride out to Bimini and

back in Drake's new $48,000 ocean

racer with no questions asked.

It was not the kind of business

proposition that a veteran dope

smuggler like Drake would have

been likely to misunderstand. There are only two possible reasons for

even owning a thirty-five-foot-long bullet-shaped fiberglass hull with

two 370 horsepower engines on the back: One is to win races in the

open sea at speeds up to 90.555

miles an hour (the current world

record, set by the "World Champion

Cigarette Racing Team" in 1976) and the other has to do with the

virtually priceless peace of mind

that comes with doing business in a boat that will outrun anything the

U.S. Coast Guard can put in the

water.

So there was no need for Drake to

ask why these two cash-heavy Mexicans needed his boat, or even

why one of them came aboard with

a Uzi submachine gun. He had made

this run before, and even on

moonless nights he felt he knew every bump in the water, even at

sixty miles an hour. . .

But he was not ready for what

happened on the way back from

Bimini this time: They were almost home, slowing down to half-speed

or less about a mile off the south tip of Key Biscayne, when he was

suddenly blinded by spotlights

coming into his face from the front and both sides and the whole night

erupted with gunfire. The Mexican

with the Uzi was dead on his feet before Drake even heard the first

shots; the Uzi bounced into the

water and the Mexican sat down in

the cockpit with at least ten big

holes in his chest. Drake felt his

boat shuddering in the water as the hull started coming apart in the

crossfire. "We're surrounded!" he screamed. "They're killing us!"

Then he fell down and tried to hide himself under the dead man just as

Oscar got his hands on both the

wheel and the throttle at the same

time. The big speedboat lunged forward with a roar and the next

thing Drake felt was an airborne jolt as his boat ran straight over the top of a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. . .

and suddenly there was no more

shooting as he felt the boat moving toward Miami at sixty miles an hour with the cockpit six inches deep in blood-colored water and Oscar

screaming in Spanish as they started coming up, too fast, on the lights of Dinner Key.

Drake stood up and took the wheel.

The boat felt like it was coming

apart in his hands as he aimed for a clump of trees on the dark end of the marina. By the time he felt the jolt of a sandbar under his feet, Oscar

was already going over the side

with the small suitcase they had

picked up in Bimini, and that was

the last time Drake saw him.

The boat stayed miraculously afloat long enough for him to hump the

dead man and dump his $48,000

wreck about a half-mile down the beach in a place where he could

drive it up under some branches and watch it sink out of sight in five feet of dark water. Drake covered the

hulk as well as he could, then

slogged out to Biscayne Boulevard

and hitchhiked back to Coconut

Grove where he spent the next

forty-eight hours locked in his

bedroom and trembling with a fear

worse than anything he'd ever felt in his life.

This wild and puzzling story out of Coconut Grove was only the latest

of a dozen or so "Brown Buffalo sightings" in the past two years.

Everybody who knew him as even a

casual friend has heard stories

about Oscar's "secret life" and his high-speed criminal adventures all

over the world. Ever since his

alleged death/disappearance in

1973, '74 or even 1975, he's turned up all over the world -- selling guns in Addis Ababa, buying orphans in

Cambodia, smoking weed with

Henry Kissinger in Acapulco, hanging around the airport bar in

Lima with two or three overstuffed

Pan Am flight bags on both

shoulders or hunched impatiently on the steering wheel of a silver 450

Mercedes in the "Nothing to

Declare" lane on the Mexican side of U.S. Customs checkpoint

between San Diego and Tijuana.

There are not many gypsies on file

at the Missing Persons Bureau --

and if Oscar was not quite the

classic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was

never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery.

By the time he was twenty years

old, Oscar was working overtime

eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.

Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small town kid. A hick from the sticks, a

Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It's the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you

round the curve coming in from

Modesto says THE CITY OF ACTION.

We lived in a two-room shack

without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we

never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which

my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted

every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce.

Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making

the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we'd hauled up from the river on the weekends.

Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the

world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and

Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.

We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world's largest tomato paste cannery.

The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale

Highway to the north and the irrigation canal to the south.

Within that concentration only

Mexicans were safe from the

neighborhood dogs, who

responded only to Spanish

commands. Except for Bob Whitt

and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better

Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt road of our neighborhood.

-- Oscar Acosta, The

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972

The Lawn of Fire and Another

Icepick for Richard Nixon for Old Times' Sake. . . Slow Fadeout for Brown Power & a Salute to

Crazy Ed. . . Poison Fat Goes to Mazatlan; Libel Lawyers Go to

the Mattresses. . . Fear of the

Plastic Fork & a Twisted

Compromise. . .

Oscar Zeta Acosta -- despite any

claims to the contrary -- was a

dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed

for the Truth should expect no

mercy and give none. . .

. . . and that was the difference

between Oscar and a lot of the

merciless geeks he liked to tell

strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty

Arbuckle.

When the great scorer comes to

write against Oscar's name, one of

the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the

courage of his consistently

monstrous convictions. There was

more mercy, madness, dignity and

generosity in that overweight,

overworked and always

overindulged brown cannonball of a

body than most of us will meet in

any human package even three times

Oscar's size for the rest of our lives

-- which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in

court or on the street -- but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a

disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

What finally cracked the Brown

Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving

elegance of his instincts and the

self-destructive carnival of his

reality. He was a Baptist

missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in

Oakland and East L.A., or a

radical-chic author in San

Francisco and Beverly Hills. . . But whenever things got tense or when

he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that

was the governing instinct that

ruined him for anything else. He

was a preacher in the courtroom, a

preacher at the typewriter and a

flat-out awesome preacher when he

cranked his head full of acid.

That's LSD-25, folks -- a certified

"dangerous drug" that is no longer fashionable, due to reasons of

extreme and unnatural heaviness.

The CIA was right about acid:

Some of their best and brightest

operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a

drug that was finally abandoned as

a far too dangerous and

unmanageable thing to be used as a

public weapon. Not even the sacred

minnock of "national security"

could justify the hazards of playing

with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The

professional spook mentality was

far more comfortable with things

like nerve gas and neutron bombs.

But not the Brown Buffalo -- he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered

on worship. When his brain felt

bogged down in the mundane nuts

and bolts horrors of the Law or

some dead-end manuscript, he

would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and

a few days of what he called

"walking with the King." Oscar used acid like other lawyers use

Valium -- a distinctly

unprofessional and occasionally

nasty habit that shocked even the

most liberal of his colleagues and

frequently panicked his clients.

I was with him one night in L.A.,

when he decided that the only way

to meaningfully communicate with a

Judge who'd been leaning on him in

the courtroom was to drive out to

the man's home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire

after soaking it down with ten

gallons of gasoline. . . and then,

instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar

stood in the street and howled

through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs

window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday style sermons on morality

and justice.

The nut of his flame-enraged text, as

I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from

Luke 11:46 -- a direct quote from

Jesus Christ:

"And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with

burdens grievous to be borne, and

ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."

The Lawn of Fire was Oscar's

answer to the Ku Klux Klan's

burning cross, and he derived the

same demonic satisfaction from

doing it.

"Did you see his face?" he shouted as we screeched off at top speed

toward Hollywood. "That corrupt old fool! I know he recognized me but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a Judge's

front yard on fire -- the whole

system would break down if

lawyers could get away with crazy

shit like this."

I agreed. It is not my wont to

disagree with even a criminally

insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never

occurred to me that Oscar was

either insane or a criminal, given

the generally fascist, Nixonian

context of those angry years.

In an era when the Vice President of the United States held court in

Washington to accept payoffs from

his former vassals in the form of big wads of one hundred dollar bills --

and when the President himself

routinely held secretly tape-

recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot

illegal wiretaps, political

burglaries and other gross felonies in the name of a "silent majority," it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer

setting fire to a Judge's front yard at four o'clock in the morning.

I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that -- but of course it would be wrong. . . And my

attorney was Not a Crook and to the best of my knowledge, his mother

was just as much "a saint" as Richard Nixon's.

Indeed. And now -- as an almost

perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice -- I want to enter into the permanent

record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z.

Acosta was never disbarred from

the practice of law in the state of California -- and ex-President

Richard Nixon was.

There are some things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world

where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a

blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.

Or maybe not -- because Oscar was

eventually hurt far worse by

professional ostracism than Nixon

was hurt by disbarment. The Great

Banshee screamed for them both at

almost the same time -- for entirely different reasons, but with

ominously similar results.

Except that Richard Nixon got rich

from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta

got killed. The wheels of justice

grind small and queer in this life

and if they seem occasionally

unbalanced or even stupid and

capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were

probably fixed from the start. And

any Judge who can safely slide into

full pension retirement without having to look back on anything

worse in the way of criminal

vengeance than a few scorched

lawns is a man who got off easy.

There is, after all, considerable

work and risk -- and even a certain art -- to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the

house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier

to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for

dilettantes.

That's how Oscar viewed arson --

anything worth doing is worth doing well -- and I'd watched enough of

his fiery work to know he was right.

If he was a King-Hell Pyromaniac,

he was also a gut politician and

occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his torchings.

Like most lawyers with an IQ

higher than sixty, Oscar learned one definition of Justice in Law school, and a very different one in the

courtroom. He got his degree at some night school on Post Street in San Francisco, while working as a

copy boy for the Hearst Examiner.

And for a while he was very proud

to be a lawyer -- for the same

reasons he'd felt proud to be a

missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band.

But by the time I first met him in the summer of 1967, he was long past

what he called his "puppy love trip with The Law." It had gone the

same way of his earlier missionary zeal, and after one year of casework at an East Oakland "poverty law center" he was ready to dump

Holmes and Brandeis for Huey

Newton and a Black Panther style

of dealing with the laws and courts of America.

When he came booming into a bar

called Daisy Duck in Aspen and

announced that he was the trouble

we'd all been waiting for, he was

definitely into the politics of

confrontation -- and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the

streets, if necessary.

Oscar was not into serious street-

fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of

a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25

is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach -- but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a

profoundly angry Chicano lawyer

with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a

de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three --

just like Jesus Christ -- you have a serious piece of work on your

hands. Specially if the bastard is

already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano

bodyguard on his elbow at all

times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever

his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.

This was the Brown Buffalo in the

full crazed flower of his prime -- a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his

thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado -- with his

faithful bodyguard, Frank -- to rest for a while after his grueling

campaign for Sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million

or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar

had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles

-- where even the most conservative of the old-line "Mexican-Americans" were suddenly calling themselves "Chicanos" and getting their first taste of tear gas at "La Raza" demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature

himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming "Brown Power"

movement that the LAPD called

more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

Which was probably true, at the

time -- but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969

when the sheriff was sending out

fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and

backyards of the barrio with huge

sweeping searchlights that drove

Oscar and his people into fits of

blind rage every time they got

nailed in a pool of blazing white

light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other.

But that is another and very long

story -- and since I've already

written it once ("Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," RS81) and came close to getting my throat slit in the process, I think we'll just ease off and pass on it for right now.

The sad tale of Oscar's fall from

grace in the barrio is still rife with bad blood and ugly paranoia. He

was too stunned to fight back in the

time-honored style of a professional politician. He was also broke,

divorced, depressed and so deep in

public disgrace in the wake of his

"high speed drug bust" that not even junkies would have him for an

attorney.

In a word, he and his dream of "one million brown buffalos" were

finished in East L.A. . . and everywhere else where it counted,

for that matter, so Oscar "took off"

once again, and once again with a

head full of acid.

But. . .

Peacocks Can't Live at This

Altitude. . . New Home for Ebb

Tide, False Dawn in Aztlan and a Chain of Bull Maggots on the

Neck of the Fat Spic from

Riverbank. . . May Leeches

Crawl on his Soul until the Rivers Flow Up from the Sea and the

Grass Grows Down into Hell. . .

Beware of 300-Pound Samoan

Attorneys Bearing Gifts of LSD-

25

Follow not truth too near the

heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.

-- George Herbert, Jacula

Prudentum

Well. . . it is not an easy thing to sit here and keep a straight face while even considering the notion that

there is any connection at all

between Oscar's sorry fate and his

lifelong devotion to defending the

truth at all costs. There are a lot of

people still wandering around, especially in places like San

Francisco and East L.A., who

would like nothing better than to

dash out Oscar's teeth with a ball-

peen hammer for all the weird and

costly lies he laid on them at one

point or another in his frenzied

assaults on the way to his place in the sun. He never denied he was a

lying pig who would use any means

to justify his better end. Even his friends felt the sting. Yet there were times when he took himself as

seriously as any other bush league Mao or Moses, and in moments like

these he was capable of rare

insights and a naive sort of grace in his dealings with people that often touched on nobility. At its best, the Brown Buffalo shuffle was a match

for Muhammad Ali's.

After I'd known him for only three

days he made me a solemn gift of a

crude wooden idol that I am still not sure he didn't occasionally worship in secret when not in the presence

of the dreaded "white ass gabancos." In a paragraph near the end of his autobiography, he

describes that strangely touching

transfer far better than I can.

"I opened my beat-up suitcase and took out my wooden idol. I had him

wrapped in a bright red and yellow

cloth. A San Bias Indian had given

him to me when I left Panama. I

called him Ebb Tide. He was made

of hard mahogany. An eighteen-inch

god without eyes, without a mouth

and without a sexual organ. Perhaps the sculptor had the same hang-up

about drawing the body from the

waist down as I'd had in Miss

Rollins' fourth-grade class. Ebb

Tide was my oldest possession. A

string of small, yellowed wild pig's fangs hung from its neck."

Ebb Tide still hangs on a nail just above my living room window. I

can see him from where I sit now,

scrawling these goddamn final

desperate lines before my head can

explode like a ball of magnesium tossed into a bucket of water. I have never been sure exactly what kind

of luck Ebb Tide was bringing

down on me, over the years -- but

I've never taken the little bastard down or even thought about it, so he must be paying his way. He is

perched just in front of the peacock perch outside, and right now there

are two high-blue reptilian heads

peering over his narrow wooden

shoulders.

Does anybody out there believe that?

No?

Well. . . peacocks can't live at this altitude anyway, like Doberman

pinschers, sea snakes and gun-toting Chicano missionaries with bad-acid

breath.

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

-- Carl Sandburg

Things were not going well in San Francisco or L.A. at that grim point in Oscar's time, either. To him, it must have seemed like open season

on every Brown Buffalo west of the

Continental Divide.

The only place he felt safe was

down south on the warm foreign

soil of the old country. But when he fled back to Mazatlan this time, it was not just to rest but to brood --

and to plot what would be his final crazed leap for the great skyhook.

It would also turn out to be an act of such monumental perversity not

even that gentle presence of Ebb

Tide could change my sudden and

savage decision that the

Treacherous bastard should have

his nuts ripped off with a plastic

fork -- and then fed like big meat

grapes to my peacocks.

The move he made this time was

straight out of Jekyll and Hyde --

the Brown Buffalo suddenly

transmogrified into the form of a

rabid hyena. And the bastard compounded his madness by hiding

out in the low-rent bowels of

Mazatlan like some half-mad leper

gone over the brink after yet another debilitating attack of string warts and Herpes Simplex lesions. . .

This ugly moment came just as my

second book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was only a week or so away from going to press. We were

in the countdown stage and there is no way for anybody who hasn't been

there to understand the tension of having a new book almost on the presses, but not quite there. The

only thing that stood between me

and publication was a last minute

assault on the very essence of the

story by the publishers' libel

lawyers. The book was malignant

from start to finish, they said, with grievous libels that were totally

indefensible. No publisher in his

right mind would risk the nightmare of doomed litigation that a book like this was certain to drag us all into.

Which was true, on one level, but on another it seemed like a harmless joke -- because almost every one of the most devastating libels they

cited involved my old buddy, O. Z.

Acosta; a fellow author, prominent

Los Angeles attorney and an officer of many courts. Specifically they

advised:

We have read the above manuscript

as requested. Our principal legal

objection is to the description of the author's attorney as using and

offering for sale dangerous drugs as well as indulging in other criminal acts while under the influence of

such drugs. Although this attorney is not named, he is identified with

some detail. Consequently, this

material should be deleted as

libelous.

In addition, we have the following

specific comments: Page 3: The

author's attorney's attempt to break and enter and threats (sic) to bomb a salesman's residence is libelous

and should be deleted. Page 4: This page suggests that the author's

attorney was driving at an excessive speed while drunk all of which is

libelous and should be deleted.

Page 6: The incident in which the

author's attorney advised the author to drive at top speed is libelous and should be deleted. The same

applies to the attorney's being party to a fraud at the hotel. Page 31: The statement that the author's attorney will be disbarred is libelous and

should be deleted. Page 40: The

incident in which the author and his attorney impersonated police

officers is libelous and should be

deleted. Page 41: The reference to

the attorney's -----* being a "junkie"

and shooting people is libelous and should be deleted unless it may be

proven true. Page 48: The incident

in which the author's attorney offers heroin for sale is libelous and

should be deleted.

We do not advise -------- to allow

any material in this manuscript

noted above as libelous to remain based upon expectancy of proving

that'll is true by the author's

testimony. Inasmuch as the author

admits being under the influence of illegal drugs at most if not all times, proof of truth would be extremely

difficult through him.

* Deleted at the insistence of ROLLING

STONE'S attorney.

"Balls," I told them. "We'll just have Oscar sign a release. He's no

more concerned about this 'libel'

bullshit than I am.

"And besides, truth is an absolute defense against libel, anyway. . .

Jesus, you don't understand what

kind of a monster we're dealing

with. You should read the parts I

left out. . ."

But the libel wizards were not

impressed -- especially since we

were heaping all this libelous abuse on a fellow attorney. Unless we got a signed release from Oscar, the

book would not go to press.

Okay, I said. But let's do it quick.

He's down in Mazatlan now. Send

the goddamn thing by air express

and he'll sign it and ship it right back.

I think we are in Rats Alley where the dead men lost their bones,

-- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Indeed. So they sent the release off at once. . . and Oscar refused to sign it -- but not for any reason a New

York libel lawyer could possibly

understand. He was, as I'd said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of

course they were all true, he said

when I finally reached him by

telephone at his room in the Hotel

Synaloa.

The only thing that bothered him --

bothered him very badly -- was the

fact that I'd repeatedly described

him as a 300-pound Samoan.

"What kind of Journalist are you?"

he screamed at me. "Don't you have any respect for the truth? I can sink

that whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South

Sea mongrels."

The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. "Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick,"

they wondered, "or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally

identified for all time, with one of the most depraved and degenerate

figures in American literature?"

Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken

seriously? Was it possible that a

well-known practicing attorney

might not only freely admit to all

these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as

the absolute truth?

"Why not?" Oscar answered. And the only way he'd sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a

firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable

photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book's dust cover.

They had never had to cope with a

thing like this -- a presumably sane attorney who flatly refused to

release any other version of his

clearly criminal behavior, except

the abysmal naked truth. The

concession he was willing to make

had to do with his identity

throughout the entire book as a "300

pound Samoan." But he could grit

his teeth and tolerate that, he said, only because he understood that

there was no way to make that many

changes at that stage of the deadline without tearing up half the book. In exchange, however, he wanted a

formal letter guaranteeing that he

would be properly identified on the book jacket

The lawyers would have no part of

it. There was no precedent

anywhere in the law for a bizarre

situation like this. . . but as the

deadline pressures mounted and Oscar refused to bend, it became

more and more obvious that the only choice except compromise was to

scuttle the book entirely. . . and if that happened, I warned them, I had enough plastic forks to mutilate

every libel lawyer in New York.

That seemed to settle the issue in

favor of a last-minute' compromise, and Fear and Loathing in Las

Vegas was finally sent to the printer with Oscar clearly identified on the

back as the certified living model for the monstrous "300-pound

Samoan attorney" who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the

time.

Alcohol, Hashish, Prussic Acid, Strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

-- EMERSON, Society and Solitude The libel lawyers have never

understood what Oscar had in mind

-- and, at the time, I don't understand it myself -- one of the

darker skills involved in the kind of journalism I normally get involved

with has to do with ability to write the Truth about "criminals" without getting them busted -- and, in the

eyes of the law, any person committing a crime is criminal:

whether it's a Hell's Angel laying an oil slick on a freeway exit to send a pursuing motorcycle cop crashing

over the high side, a presidential

candidate smoking a joint in his

hotel room, or a good friend who happens to be a lawyer, an arsonist and a serious drug abuser.

The line between writing truth and

providing evidence is very, very

thin -- but for a journalist working constantly among highly paranoid

criminals, it is also the line between trust and suspicion. And that is the difference between having free

access to the truth and being treated like a spy. There is no such thing as

"forgiveness" on that level; one

fuck-up will send you straight back to sportswriting -- if you're lucky.

In Oscar's case, my only reason for describing him in the book as a

300-pound Samoan instead of a

250-pound Chicano lawyer was to

protect him from the wrath of the

L.A. cops and the whole California

legal establishment he was

constantly at war with. It would not serve either one of our interests, I felt, for Oscar to get busted or

disbarred because of something I

wrote about him. I had my reputation to protect.

The libel lawyers understood that

much; what worried them was that I

hadn't protected "my attorney" well enough to protect also the book

publisher from a libel suit -- just in case my attorney was as crazy as he appeared to be in the manuscript

they'd just vetoed. . . or maybe he was crazy like a fox, they hinted; he was, after all an attorney -- who'd presumably worked just as hard and

for just as many long years as they had -- to earn his license to steal --

and it was inconceivable to them

that one of their own kind, as it

were, would give all that up on

what appeared to be a whim. No,

they said, it must be a trap; not even a "Brown Power" lawyer could afford to laugh at the risk of almost certain disbarment.

Indeed. And they were at least half right -- which is not a bad average for lawyers -- because Oscar Z.

Acosta, Chicano lawyer, very definitely could not afford the shitrain of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to

bring down on himself. There are a

lot of nice ways to behave like a criminal -- but hiring a camera to

have yourself photographed doing it in the road is not one of them. It

would have taken a reputation as

formidable as Melvin Belli's to

survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel

release. He might as well have burned his lawyer's license on the

steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A.

That is what the Ivy League libel

lawyers in New York could not

accept. They knew what that license was worth -- at least to them; it

averaged out to about $150 an hour

-- even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials.

And Oscar had them -- not because

his father and grandfather had gone

to Yale or Harvard Law; he'd paid his dues at night school, the only

Chicano in his class, and his record in the courtroom was better than that of most of his colleagues who

called him a disgrace to their venal profession.

Which may have been true, for

whatever it's worth. . . but what

none of us knew at the time of the

Great Madness that came so close

to making Fear and Loathing in

Las Vegas incurably unfit for

publication was that we were no longer dealing with O.Z. Acosta,

Attorney-at-Law -- but with Zeta,

the King of Brown Buffalos.

Last Train for the Top of the

Mountain, Last Leap for the

Great Skyhook. . . Good

Riddance to Bad Rubbish. . . He

Was Ugly & Vicious and He Sold Little Babies to Sand-Niggers. . .

Mutant Rumors on the Weird

Grapevine, Wild Ghosts on the

Bimini Run, Lights In Fat City. . .

No End to the Story and No Grave for the Brown Buffalo

In retrospect it is hard to know

exactly when Oscar decided to quit

the Law just as finally as he'd once quit being a Baptist missionary --

but it was obviously a lot earlier

than even his few close friends

realized, until long after he'd

already made the move in his mind,

to a new and higher place. The

crazy attorney whose "suicidal behavior" so baffled the N.Y. libel

lawyers was only the locustlike shell of a thirty-six-year-old neo-prophet who was already long

overdue for his gig at the top of the Mountain.

There was no more time to be

wasted in the company of lepers

and lawyers. The hour had finally

struck for the fat spic from

Riverbank to start acting like that one man in every century "chosen to speak for his people."

None of this terminal madness was

easy to see at the time -- not even for me, and I knew him as well as

anyone. . . But not well enough,

apparently, to understand the almost desperate sense of failure and loss that he felt when he was suddenly

confronted with the stark possibility that he had never really been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself -- and even that was

beginning to look like a halfway

impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left.

I had never taken his burning bush trip very seriously -- and I still have moments of doubt about how

seriously he took it himself. . . They are very long moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact I think I feel one coming on right now. . . We

should have castrated that brain-

damaged thief! That shyster! That

blasphemous freak! He was ugly

and greasy and he still owes me

thousands of dollars!

The truth was not in him,

goddamnit! He was put on this earth for no reason at all except to shit in every nest he could con his way into

-- but only after robbing them first, and selling the babies to sand-niggers. If that treacherous fist-

fucker ever comes back to life, he'll wish we'd had the good sense to

nail him up on a frozen telephone

pole for his thirty-third birthday

present.

DO NOT COME BACK OSCAR!

Wherever you are -- stay there!

There's no room for you here anymore. Not after all this maudlin gibberish I've written about you. . .

And besides, we have Werner

Erhard now. So BURROW DEEP,

you bastard, and take all that poison fat with you!

Cazart! And how's that for a left-

handed whipsong?

Nevermind. There is no more time

for questions -- or answers either, for that matter. And I was never

much good at this kind of thing,

anyway.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King

Henry VI

Well. . . so much for whipsongs.

Nobody laughed when Big Bill sat

down to play. He was not into

filigree when it came to dealing

with lawyers.

And neither am I, at this point. That

last outburst was probably unnecessary, but what the hell? Let them drink Drano if they can't take a joke. I'm tired of wallowing around in this goddamn thing.

What began as a quick and stylish

epitaph for my allegedly erstwhile

300-pound Samoan attorney has

long since gone out of control. Not even Oscar would have wanted an

obituary with no end, at least not

until he was legally dead, and that will take four more years.

Until then -- and probably for many years afterward -- the Weird

Grapevine will not wither for lack

of bulletins, warnings and other

twisted rumors of the latest Brown

Buffalo sightings. He will be seen

at least once in Calcutta, buying

nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market. . . and also in Houston, tending bar at a

roadhouse on South Main that was

once the Blue Fox. . . or perhaps

once again on the midnight run to

Bimini; standing tall on his own

hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black Cigarette boat with a

silver Uzi in one hand and a

magnum of smack in the other,

always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old

Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs. . .

It might even come to pass that he

will suddenly appear on my porch

in Woody Creek on some moonless

night when the peacocks are

screeching with lust. . . Maybe so,

and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house,

even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull-maggots around his

neck.

Oscar was one of God's own

prototypes -- a high-powered

mutant of some kind who was never

even considered for mass

production. He was too weird to

live and too rare to die -- and as far as I'm concerned, that's just about all that needs to be said about him

right now. I was tempted for a while to call that poor bastard

Drake, down in Coconut Grove, to

check a little deeper into that

savage tale about Oscar and the

Battle of Biscayne Bay -- the one

that ended with at least one murder and the total destruction of Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat -- but I just don't think I need it right now. . .

Nobody needs it, in fact -- but then nobody really needed Oscar Zeta

Acosta either. Or ROLLING STONE.

Or Jimmy Carter or the Hindenberg.

. . or even the Sloat Diamond.

Jesus! Is there no respect in this

world for the perfectly useless

dead?

Apparently not. . . and Oscar was a lawyer, however reluctant he might

have been at the end to admit it. He had a lawyer's cynical view of the

Truth -- which he felt was not

nearly as important to other people as it was to him; and he was never

more savage and dangerous than

when he felt he was being lied to.

He was never much interested in the concept of truth; he had no time for what he called "dumb Anglo

abstracts."

Condemn'd to drudge, the meanest of the mean and furbish falsehoods for a magazine.

-- LORD BYRON

The truth, to Oscar, was a tool and even a weapon that he was

convinced he could not do without -

- if only because anybody who had more of it than he did would sooner or later try to beat on him with it.

Truth was Power -- as tangible to

Oscar as a fistful of $100 bills or an ounce of pure LSD-25. His formula

for survival in a world full of rich Gabaucho fascists was a kind of

circle that began at the top with the idea that truth would bring him

power, which would buy freedom --

to crank his head full of acid so he could properly walk with the King,

which would naturally put him even

closer to more and finer truths. . .

indeed, the full circle.

Oscar believed it, and that was

what finally croaked him.

I tried to warn the greedy bastard, but he was too paranoid to pay any

attention. . . Because he was

actually a stupid, vicious quack

with no morals at all and the soul of a hammerhead shark.

We are better off without him.

Sooner or later he would have had

to be put to sleep anyway. . . So the world is a better place, now that

he's at least out of sight, if not

certifiably dead.

He will not be missed -- except

perhaps in Fat City, where every

light in the town went dim when we

heard that he'd finally cashed his

check.

One owes respect to the living: To the Dead one owes only the truth.

-- VOLTAIRE

Rolling Stone, #254, December 15, 1977

The Hoodlum Circus and

the

Statutory Rape of Bass

Lake

Man, when you were fifteen or

sixteen years old did you ever

think you'd end up as a Hell's

Angel? How did I get screwed up with you guys anyway?. . . Christ, I

got out of the Army and came back to Richmond, started ridin a bike around, wearin my chinos and

clean sports shirts, even a crash helmet. . . And then 1 met you guys.

I started gettin grubbier and

grubbier, dirtier and dirtier, I couldn't believe it. . . Then I lost my job, started spendin all my time either goin on a run or gettin

ready for one -- Christ, 1 still can't believe it.

-- Fat D., a Richmond Hell's Angel

Whaddayou mean by that word

"right"? The only thing we're concerned about is what's right for us. We got our own definition of

"right."

-- A Hell's Angel sunk in

philosophy

According to Frenchy, the run

would take off at eight A.M. from

the El Adobe, a tavern on East

Fourteenth Street in Oakland. (Until the autumn of 1965 the El Abode

was the unofficial headquarters of

the Oakland chapter and a focal point for all Hell's Angels acitivity in northern California -- but in

October it was demolished to make

way for a parking lot, and the

Angels moved back to the Sinners

Club.)

Early weather forecasts said the

whole state would be blazing hot

that day, but dawn in San Francisco was typically foggy. I overslept,

and in the rush to get moving I

forgot my camera. There was no

time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the

car. . . sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver's seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.

By the time I left my apartment it

was almost eight, and somewhere

on the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge between San Francisco and

Oakland, I heard the first radio

bulletin:

The Sierra community of Bass Lake

is bracing this morning for a

reported invasion of the notorious

Hell's Angels motorcycle gang.

Heavily armed police and sheriff's

deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera

County sheriff, Marlin Young,

reports helicopters and other

emergency forces standing by.

Neighboring law enforcement

agencies, including the Kern County sheriff's Canine Patrol, have been

alerted and are ready to move.

Recent reports say the Hell's Angels are massing in Oakland and San

Bernardino. Stay tuned for further

details.

Among those who made a point of

staying tuned that morning were

several thousand unarmed taxpayers

en route to spend the holiday in the

vicinity of Bass Lake and Yosemite.

They had just got under way, most

of them still irritable and sleepy

from last-minute packing and

hurrying the children through

breakfast. . . when their car radios crackled a warning that they were

headed right into the vortex of what might soon be a combat zone. They

had read about Laconia and other

Hell's Angels outbursts, but in print the menace had always seemed

distant -- terrifying, to be sure, and real in its way, but with none of that

sour-stomach fright that comes with the realization that this time it's you.

Tomorrow's newspapers won't be

talking about people being beaten

and terrorized three thousand miles away, but right exactly where you

and your family are planning to

spend the weekend.

The bridge was crowded with

vacationers getting an early start. I was running late by twenty or thirty minutes, and when I got to the toll plaza at the Oakland end of the

bridge I asked the gatekeeper if any Hell's Angels had passed through

before me. "The dirty sonsabitches are right over there," he said with a wave of his hand. I didn't know

what he was talking about until

some two hundred yards past the

gate, when I suddenly passed a

large cluster of people and

motorcycles grouped around a gray

pickup truck with a swastika

painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on

traffic. There are seventeen eastbound toll gates on the bridge, and traffic coming out of them is

funneled into only three exits, with everyone scrambling for position in a short, high-speed run between the toll plaza and the traffic dividers about a half mile away. This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon,

but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle

suddenly looming beside the road

the scramble was worse than usual.

Horns sounded all around me as

cars swerved and slowed down; heads snapped to the right; it was

the same kind of traffic disruption that occurs near a serious accident, and many a driver went off on the

wrong ramp that morning after

staring too long at the monster rally that -- if he'd been listening to his radio -- he'd been warned about just moments before. And now here it

was, in the stinking, tattooed flesh. .

. the Menace.

I was close enough to recognize the

Gypsy Jokers, about twenty of them, milling around the truck while they waited for late-running stragglers.

They were paying no attention to the traffic but their appearance alone

was enough to give anyone pause.

Except for the colors, they looked

exactly like any band of Hell's

Angels: long hair, beards, black

sleeveless vests. . . and the

inevitable low-slung motorcycles,

many with sleeping bags lashed to

the handlebars and girls sitting

lazily on the little pillion seats.

The outlaws are very comfortable with their inaccessibility. It saves them a lot of trouble with bill

collectors, revenge seekers and

routine police harassment. They are as insulated from society as they

want to be, but they have no trouble locating each other. When Sonny

flies down to Los Angeles, Otto

meets him at the airport. When

Terry goes to Fresno, he quickly

locates the chapter president, Ray --

who exists in some kind of

mysterious limbo and can only be

found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly.

The Oakland Angels find it

convenient to use Barger*s number,

checking now and then for

messages. Some use various

saloons where they are well known.

An Angel who wants to be reached

will make an appointment either to

meet somewhere or to be at a

certain phone at a designated time.

One night I tried to arrange a

contact with a young Angel named

Rodger, a one-time disc jockey. It proved to be impossible. He had no

idea where he might be from one

day to the next. "They don't call me Rodger the Lodger for nothing," he said. "I just make it wherever I can.

It's all the same. Once you start

worrying about it, you get hung up --

and that's the end, man, you're

finished." If he'd been killed that night he'd have left no footprints in life, no evidence and no personal

effects but his bike -- which the

others would have raffled off

immediately. Hell's Angels don't find it necessary to leave wills, and their deaths don't require much

paperwork. . . A driver's license

expires, a police record goes into

the dead file, a motorcycle changes hands and usually a few "personal cards" will be taken out of wallets and dropped into wastebaskets.

Because of their gypsy style of life, their network has to be functional.

A lost message can lead to serious

trouble. An Angel who might have

fled will be arrested; a freshly stolen bike will never reach the

buyer; a pound of marijuana might

miss a crucial connection; or at the very least, a whole chapter will

never get word of a run or a big

party.

The destination of a run is kept

secret as long as possible --

hopefully, to keep the cops

guessing. The chapter presidents

will figure it out by long-distance telephone, then each will tell his

people the night before the run, either at a meeting or by putting the word with a handful of bartenders,

waitresses and plugged-in chicks

who are known contacts. The

system is highly efficient, but it has never been leakproof, and by 1966

the Angels had decided that the only hope was to keep the destination a

secret until the run was actually

under way. Barger tried it once, but the police were able to track the

outlaws by radioing ahead from one

point to another. Radio tracking is

only a device to give the cops an edge, a sense of confidence and

control. Which it does, as long as

no lapses occur. . . but it is safe to predict that on one of these

crowded holidays a convoy of

Angels is going to disappear like a blip shooting off the edge of a radar screen. All it will take is one of

those rare gigs the outlaws are

forever seeking: a ranch or big farm with a friendly owner, a piece of

rural turf beyond the reach of the

fuzz, where they can all get drunk

and naked and fall on each other like goats in the rut, until they all pass out from exhaustion.

It would be worth buying a police

radio, just to hear the panic:

"Group of eighty just passed through Sacramento, going north on U.S. Fifty, no violence, thought to be headed for Lake Tahoe area.

. . " Fifty miles north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys

them with shotguns on both sides

of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient

demand for a report on

Placerville's handling of the crisis.

The chief nervously reports no

contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday.

The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway Patrol

headquarters in Sacramento, says

to sit tight while he checks around.

. . and moments later his voice squawks out of the speaker:

"Schwein! You lie! Vere are dey?"

"Don't call me no swine," says the Placerville chief. "They never got here."

The dispatcher checks all over

northern California, with no

result. Police cars scream up and down the highways, checking every bar. Nothing. Eighty of the state's most vicious hoodlums are

roaming around drunk somewhere between Sacramento and Reno,

hungry for rape and pillage. It will be another embarrassment for

California law enforcement. . . to simply lose the buggers, a whole convoy, right out on a main

highway. . . heads will surely roll.

By now, the outlaws are far up a private road, having left the

highway at a sign saying: OWL

FARM, NO VISITORS. They are

beyond the reach of the law unless

the owner complains. Meanwhile, another group of fifty disappears in the same vicinity. Police search parties stalk the highway, checking for traces of spittle, grime and blood. The dispatcher still rages over his mike; the duty officer's voice cracks as he answers urgent queries from radio newsmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles: "I'm sorry, that's all I can say. They seem to have. . . ah. . . our

information is that they. . . they disappeared, yes, they're gone."

The only reason it hasn't happened is that the Hell's Angels have no

access to private property in the

boondocks. One or two claim to

have relatives with farms, but there are no stories of the others being

invited out for a picnic. The Angels don't have much contact with people who own land. They are city boys,

economically and emotionally as

well as physically. For at least one generation and sometimes two they

come from people who never

owned anything at all, not even a

car.

The Hell's Angels are very

definitely a lower-class

phenomenon, but their backgrounds

are not necessarily poverty-

stricken. Despite some grim

moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to

California either just before or

during World War II. Many have

lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who

claimed to have a home town in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the

Tramp, for instance, is "from"

Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los

Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento.

As a child, he lived all over the

country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action.

His longest bout with stability was a three-year hitch in the Coast

Guard after finishing high school.

Since then he has worked half-

heartedly as a tree-trimmer,

mechanic, bit actor, laborer and

hustler of various commodities. He

tried college for a few months but

quit to get married. After two years, two children and numerous

quarrels, the marriage ended in

divorce. He had another child, by

his second wife, but that union

didn't last either. Now, after two

hugely publicized rape arrests, he

refers to himself as an "eligible

bachelor."

Despite his spectacular rap sheet,

he estimates his total jail time at about six months -- ninety days for trespassing and the rest for traffic offenses. Terry is one of the most

arrest-prone of all the Angels; cops are offended by the very sight of

him, In one stretch, covering 1964

and '65, he paid roughly $2,500 to

bail bondsmen, lawyers and traffic

courts. Like most of the other

Angels he blames "the cops" for

making him a full-time outlaw.

At least half the Hell's Angels are war babies, but that is a very broad term. There are also war babies in

the Peace Corps, in corporate

training programs, and fighting in

Vietnam. World War II had a lot to

do with the Hell's Angels' origins, but you have to stretch the war

theory pretty thin to cover both

Dirty Ed, in his early forties, and Clean Cut from Oakland, who is

twenty years younger. Dirty Ed is

old enough to be Clean Cut's father

-- which is not likely, though he's planted more seeds than he cares to remember.

It is easy enough to trace the Hell's Angels' mystique -- and even their

name and their emblems -- back to

World War II and Hollywood. But

their genes and real history go back a lot further. World War II was not the original California boom, but a rebirth of a thing that began in the thirties and was already tapering off

when the war economy made California a new Valhalla. In 1937

Woody Guthrie wrote a song called

"Do-Re-Mi." The chorus goes like this:

California is a garden of Eden

A Paradise for you and for me,

But believe it or not,

You won't think it's so hot,

If you ain't got the Do-Re-Mi.

The song expressed the frustrated sentiments of more than a million

Okies, Arkies and hillbillies who

made a long trek to the Golden State and found it was just another hard

dollar. By the time these gentlemen arrived, the Westward Movement

was already beginning to solidify.

The "California way of life" was the same old game to musical chairs

-- but it took a while for this news to filter back East, and meanwhile

the Gold Rush continued. Once

here, the newcomers hung on for a

few years, breeding prolifically --

until the war started. Then they

either joined up or had their pick of jobs on a booming labor market.

Either way, they were Californians

when the war ended. The old way

of life was scattered back along

Route 66, and their children grew

up in a new world. The Linkhorns

had finally found a home.

Nelson Algren wrote about them in

A Walk on the Wild Side, but that story was told before they crossed

the Rockies. Dove Linkhorn, son of crazy Fitz, went to hustle for his

fortune in New Orleans. Ten years

later he would have gone to Los

Angeles.

Algren's book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of

American white trash ever written.*

He traces the Linkhorn ancestry

back to the first wave of bonded

servants to arrive on these shores.

These were the dregs of society

from all over the British Isles --

misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and

description -- all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for

ocean passage to the New World.

Once here, they endured a form of

slavery for a year or two -- during which they were fed and sheltered

by the boss -- and when their time

of bondage ended, they were turned

loose to make their own way.

*A story called "Barn Burning," by William Faulkner, is another white-trash classic. It

provides the dimensions of humanity that Algren's description lacks.

In theory and in the context of

history the setup was mutually

advantageous. Any man desperate

enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well

shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new

continent was not to be taken

lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be

free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural

wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the

coastal strip was already settled.

The unclaimed land was west,

across the Alleghenies. So they

drifted into the new states --

Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons

drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas

and Oklahoma.

Drifting became a habit; with dead

roots in the Old World and none in

the New, the Linkhorns were not of

a mind to dig in and cultivate things.

Bondage too became a habit, but it

was only the temporary kind. They

were not pioneers, but sleazy

rearguard camp followers of the

original westward movement. By

the time the Linkhorns arrived

anywhere the land was already

taken -- so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a

violent, boozing limbo between the

pits of despair and the Big Rock

Candy Mountain. They kept drifting

west, chasing jobs, rumors,

homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like

armyworms, stripping it of

whatever they could before moving

on. It was a day-to-day existence,

and there was always more land to

the west

Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there -- in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia

and Tennessee. There were

dropouts along the way: hillbillies,

Okies, Arkies -- they're all the same people. Texas is a living monument

to the breed. So is southern

California. Algren called them

"fierce craving boys" with "a feeling of having been cheated."

Freebooters, armed and drunk -- a

legion of gamblers, brawlers and

whorehoppers. Blowing into town

in a junk Model-A with bald tires,

no muffler and one headlight. . .

looking for quick work, with no

questions asked and preferably no

tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill

up at the cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning

good back-country tunes about home

sweet home, that Bluegrass

sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama's grave.

Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western

highways knows they didn't stay

there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak

California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean -- the end of the road. Things were tough for a

while, but no tougher than they were in a hundred other places. And then came the war -- fat city, big money even for Linkhorns.

When the war ended, California

was full of veterans looking for

ways to spend their separation

bonuses. Many decided to stay on

the Coast, and while their new

radios played hillbilly music they

went out and bought big motorcycles -- not knowing exactly

why, but in the booming, rootless

atmosphere of those times, it

seemed like the thing to do. They

were not all Linkhorns, but the

forced democracy of four war years

had erased so many old distinctions that even Linkhorns were confused.

Their pattern of intermarriage was

shattered, their children mixed

freely and without violence. By

1950 many Linkhorns were

participating in the money economy;

they owned decent cars, and even houses.

Others, however, broke down under

the strain of respectability and

answered the call of the genes.

There is a story about a Linkhorn

who became a wealthy car dealer in

Los Angeles. He married a beautiful Spanish actress and bought a

mansion in Beverly Hills. But after a decade of opulence he suffered

from soaking sweats and was

unable to sleep at night. He began to

sneak out of the house through the servants' entrance and run a few

blocks to a gas station where he

kept a hopped-up '37 Ford with no

fenders. . . and spend the rest of the night hanging around honky-tonk

bars and truck stops, dressed in

dirty overalls and a crusty green Tshirt with a Bardahl emblem on the

back. He enjoyed cadging beers and

belting whores around when they

spurned his crude propositions. One night, after long haggling, he bought several mason jars full of home

whiskey, which he drank while driving at high speed through the

Beverly Hills area. When the old

Ford finally threw a rod he

abandoned it and called a taxi,

which took him to his own

automobile agency. He kicked down

a side door, hot-wiped a

convertible waiting for tune-up and drove out to Highway 101, where

he got in a drag race with some

hoodlums from Pasadena. He lost,

and it so enraged him that he

followed the other car until it

stopped for a traffic light -- where he rammed it from the rear at

seventy miles an hour.

The publicity ruined him, but

influential friends kept him out of jail by paying a psychiatrist to call him insane. He spent a year in a rest home; and now, according to the

stories, he has a motorcycle

dealership near San Diego. People

who know him say he's happy --

although his driver's license has

been revoked for numerous

violations, his business is verging on bankruptcy, and his new wife, a

jaded ex-beauty queen from West

Virginia, is a half-mad alcoholic.

It would not be fair to say that all motorcycle outlaws carry Linkhorn

genes, but nobody who has ever

spent time among the inbred Anglo-

Saxon tribes of Appalachia would

need more than a few hours with the Hell's Angels to work up a very

strong sense of déjà vu. There is the same sulking hostility toward

"outsiders," the same extremes of temper and action, and even the

same names, sharp faces and long-

boned bodies that never look quite

natural unless they are leaning on

something.

Most of the Angels are obvious

Anglo-Saxons, but the Linkhorn

attitude is contagious. The few

outlaws with Mexican or Italian

names not only act like the others

but somehow look like them. Even

Chinese Mel from Frisco and

Charley, a young Negro from Oakland, have the Linkhorn gait and mannerisms.

Ashes to Ashes & Dust to

Dust:

The Funeral of Mother

Miles

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

-- Dr. Johnson

The neighborhood suddenly exploded with excited, morbid

crowds. Hysterical women surged forward in a frenzy, screeching in almost sexual ecstasy, scratching and fighting the agents and police in their attempt to reach the body.

One fat-breasted woman with

stringy red hair broke through the cordon and dipped her

handkerchief in the blood,

clutched it to her sweaty dress and waddled off down the street. . .

-- From an account of the death of John Dillinger

Toward Christmas the action

slowed down and the Angels

dropped out of the headlines. Tiny

lost his job, Sonny got involved in a long jury trial on the attempted-murder charge, and the El Adobe

was demolished by the wrecker's

ball. The Angels drifted from one

bar to another, but they found it

harder to establish a hangout than to maintain one. In San Francisco it

was just as slow. Frenchy spent three months in General Hospital

when a can of gasoline blew up on

him, and Puff went to jail after a

fracas with two cops who raided an

Angel birthday party. Winter is

always slow for the outlaws. Many

have to go to work to stay eligible for next summer's unemployment

insurance, it is too cold for big

outdoor parties, and the constant

rain makes riding an uncomfortable

hazard.

It seemed like a good time to get some work done, so I dropped off

the circuit. Terry came by now and

then to keep me posted. One day he

showed up with a broken arm,

saying he'd wrecked his bike, his

old lady had left him and the niggers had blown up his house. I'd heard

about the house from Barger's wife, Elsie, who was handling the

communications post at their home

in Oakland. During one of the

sporadic flare-ups between the

Hell's Angels and the Oakland

Negroes somebody had thrown a homemade bomb through the

window of the house that Terry was

renting in East Oakland. The fire

destroyed the house and all of

Marilyn's paintings. She was a

pretty girl about nineteen, with long blond hair and a respectable family in one of the valley towns. She'd

been living with Terry for nearly

six months, covering the walls with her artwork, but she had no stomach for bombs. The divorce was

effected soon after they moved to

another dwelling. "I came back one night and she was gone," said Terry.

"All she left was a note: 'Dear Terry, Fuck it.'" And that was that.

Nothing else happened until

January, when Mother Miles got

snuffed. He was riding his bike

through Berkeley when a truck came

out of a side street and hit him head on, breaking both legs and

fracturing his skull. He hung in a

coma for six days, then died on a

Sunday morning, less than twenty-

four hours before his thirtieth birthday -- leaving a wife, two

children and his righteous girl

friend, Ann.

Miles had been president of the

Sacramento chapter. His influence

was so great that in 1965 he moved

the whole club down to Oakland,

claiming the police had made life

intolerable for them by constant

harassment. The outlaws simply

picked up and moved, not

questioning Miles' wisdom. His

real name was James, but the Angels called him Mother.

"I guess it was because he was kind of motherly," said Gut. "Miles was great, great people. He took care of everybody. He worried. You could

always depend on him."

I knew Miles in a distant kind of

way. He didn't trust writers, but

there was nothing mean about him,

and once he decided I wasn't going

to get him locked up somehow, he

was friendly. He had the build of a

pot-bellied stevedore, with a round face and a wide, flaring beard. I

never thought of him as a hoodlum.

He had the usual Hell's Angel

police record: drunk, disorderly,

fighting, vagrancy, loitering, petty larceny and a handful of ominous

"suspicion of" charges that had never gone to trial. But he wasn't

plagued by the same demons that

motivate some of the others. He

wasn't happy with the world, but he didn't brood about it, and his

appetite for revenge didn't extend

beyond the specific wrongs done to the Angels or to him personally.

You could drink with Miles without

wondering when he was going to

swing on somebody or lift your

money off the bar. He wasn't that

way. Booze seemed to make him

more genial. Like most of the

Angels' leaders, he had a quick

mind and a quality of self-control

which the others relied on.

When I heard he'd been killed I

called Sonny to ask about the

funeral, but by the time I finally got hold of him the details were already on the radio and in the newspapers.

Miles' mother was arranging for the funeral in Sacramento. The outlaw

caravan would form at Barger's

house at eleven on Thursday

morning. The Angels have gone to

plenty of funerals for their own

people, but until this one they had never tried to run the procession for ninety miles along a major highway.

There was also a chance that the

Sacramento police would try to

keep them out of town.

The word went out on Monday and

Tuesday by telephone. This was not

going to be any Jay Gatsby funeral; the Angels wanted a full-dress

rally. Miles' status was not the

point; the death of any Angel

requires a show of strength by the

others. It is a form of affirmation --

not for the dead, but the living.

There are no set penalties for not

showing up, because none are

necessary. In the cheap loneliness

that is the overriding fact of every outlaw's life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one. The circle is one link shorter, the enemy jacks up the odds just a

little bit more, and defenders of the faith need something to take off the chill. A funeral is a time for

counting the loyal, for seeing how

many are left. There is no question about skipping work, going without

sleep or riding for hours in a cold wind to be there on time.

Early Thursday morning the bikes began arriving in Oakland. Most of

the outlaws were already in the Bay Area, or at least within fifty or sixty miles, but a handful of Satan's

Slaves rode all of Wednesday night, five hundred miles from Los

Angeles, to join the main caravan.

Others came from Fresno and San

Jose and Santa Rosa. There were

Hangmen, Misfits, Presidents,

Nightriders, Grossmen and some

with no colors at all. A hard-faced little man whom nobody spoke to

wore an olive-drab bombardier's jacket with just the word "Loner" on the back, written in small, blue-inked letters that looked like a

signature.

I was crossing the Bay Bridge when

a dozen Gypsy Jokers came roaring

past, ignoring the speed limit as

they split up to go around me on

both sides of the car. Seconds later they disappeared up ahead in the

fog. The morning was cold and

bridge traffic was slow except for

motorcycles. Down in the Bay there were freighters lined up, waiting for open piers.

The procession rolled at exactly

eleven -- a hundred and fifty bikes and about twenty cars. A few miles

north of Oakland, at the Carquinez

Bridge, the outlaws picked up a

police escort assigned to keep them under control. A Highway Patrol

car led the caravan all the way to

Sacramento. The lead Angels rode

two abreast in the right lane,

holding a steady sixty-five miles an hour. At the head, with Barger, was the scruffy Praetorian Guard:

Magoo, Tommy, Jimmy, Skip, Tiny,

Zorro, Terry and Charger Charley

the Child Molester. The spectacle

disrupted traffic all along the way.

It looked like something from

another world. Here was the "scum of the earth," the "lowest form of animals," an army of unwashed gang rapists. . . being escorted toward

the state capital by a Highway

Patrol car with a flashing yellow

light. The steady pace of the procession made it unnaturally

solemn. Not even Senator Murphy

could have mistaken it for a

dangerous run. There were the same

bearded faces; the same earrings,

emblems, swastikas and grinning

death's-heads flapping in the wind -

- but this time there were no party clothes, no hamming it up for the

squares. They were still playing the role, but all the humor was missing.

The only trouble en route came

when the procession was halted

after a filling-station owner complained that somebody had

stolen fourteen quarts of oil at the last gas stop. Barger quickly took

up a collection to pay the man off, muttering that whoever stole the oil was due for a chain-whipping later

on. The Angles assured each other

that it must have been a punk in one of the cars at the rear of the

caravan, some shithead without any

class.

In Sacramento there was no sign of

harassment. Hundreds of curious spectators lined the route between

the funeral home and the cemetery.

Inside the chapel a handful of Jim

Miles' childhood friends and

relatives waited with his body, a

hired minister and three nervous

attendants. They knew what was

coming -- Mother Miles' "people,"

hundreds of thugs, wild brawlers

and bizarre-looking girls in tight

Levis, scarves and waist-length

platinum-colored wigs. Miles'

mother, a heavy middle-aged

woman in a black suit, wept quietly in a front pew, facing the open

casket.

At one-thirty the outlaw caravan

arrived. The slow rumble of

motorcycle engines rattled glass in the mortuary windows. Police tried

to keep traffic moving as TV

cameras followed Barger and

perhaps a hundred others toward the door of the chapel. Many outlaws

waited outside during the service.

They stood in quiet groups, leaning

against the bikes and killing time with lazy conversation. There was

hardly any talk about Miles. In one group a pint of whiskey made the

rounds. Some of the outlaws talked

to bystanders, trying to explain what was happening. "Yeah, the guy was one of our leaders," said an Angel to an elderly man in a baseball cap.

"He was good people. Some punk ran a stop sign and snuffed him. We came to bury him with the colors."

Inside the pine-paneled chapel the

minister was telling his weird congregation that "the wages of sin is death." He looked like a Norman Rockwell druggist and was

obviously repelled by the whole

scene. Not all the pews were full,

but standing room in the rear was

crowded all the way back to the

door. The minister talked about

"sin" and "justification," pausing now and then as if he expected a

rebuttal from the crowd. "It's not my business to pass judgment on

anybody," he continued. "Nor is it

my business to eulogize anybody.

But it is my business to speak out a warning that it will happen to you! I don't know what philosophy some

of you have about death, but I know the Scriptures tell us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the

wicked. . . Jesus didn't die for an animal, he died for a man. . . What I say about Jim won't change

anything, but I can preach the gospel to you and I have a responsibility to warn you that you will all have to

answer to God!"

The crowd was shifting and sweating. The chapel was so hot

that it seemed like the Devil himself was waiting in one of the

anterooms, ready to claim the

wicked just as soon as the sermon

was over.

"How many of you --" asked the minister, "how many of you asked yourselves on the way up here.

'Who is next?' "

At this point several Angels in the pews rose and walked out, cursing

quietly at a way of life they had long ago left behind. The minister

ignored these mutinous signs and

launched into a story about a

Philippian jailer.

"Holy shit!" mumbled Tiny. He'd been standing quietly in the rear for about thirty minutes, pouring sweat and eying the minister as if he meant to hunt him down later in the day

and extract all his teeth. Tiny's

departure caused five or six others to leave. The minister sensed he

was losing his audience, so he brought the Philippian story to a

quick end.

There was no music as the crowd

filed out. I passed by the casket and was shocked to see Mother Miles

clean-shaven, lying peacefully on

his back in a blue suit, white shirt and a wide maroon tie. His Hell's

Angels jacket, covered with exotic

emblems, was mounted on a stand at

the foot of the casket. Behind it

were thirteen wreaths, some bearing

names of other outlaw clubs.

I barely recognized Miles. He

looked younger than twenty-nine

and very ordinary. But his face was calm, as though he were not at all

surprised to find himself there in a box. He wouldn't have liked the

clothes he was wearing, but since

the Angels weren't paying for the

funeral, the best they could do was make sure the colors went into the

casket before it was sealed. Barger stayed behind with the pallbearers

to make sure the thing was done right

After the funeral more than two

hundred motorcycles followed the

hearse to the cemetery. Behind the

Angels rode all the other clubs,

including a half dozen East Bay

Dragons -- and, according to a

radio commentator, "dozens of teenage riders who looked so solemn

that you'd think Robin Hood had just died."

The Hell's Angels knew better. Not

all of them had read about Robin Hood, but they understood that the

parallel was complimentary.

Perhaps the younger outlaws

believed it, but there is room in

their margin for one or two friendly illusions. Those who are almost

thirty, or more than that, have been living too long with their own

scurvy image to think of themselves as heroes. They understand that

heroes are always "good guys," and they have seen enough cowboy

movies to know that good guys win

in the end. The myth didn't seem to include Miles, who was "one of the best." But all he got in the end was two broken legs, a smashed head

and a tongue-lashing from the

preacher. Only his Hell's Angels

identity kept him from going to the grave as anonymously as any ribbon

clerk. As it was, his funeral got

nationwide press coverage: Life had a picture of the procession

entering the cemetery, TV

newscasts gave the funeral a solemn priority, and the Chronicle headline

said: HELL'S ANGELS BURY THEIR

OWN-- BLACK JACKETS AND AN ODD

DIGNITY. Mother Miles would have

been pleased.

Moments after the burial the

caravan was escorted out of town

by a phalanx of police cars, with

sirens howling. The brief truce was ended. At the city limits the Angels screwed it on and roared back to

Richmond, across the Bay from San

Francisco, where they held an all-

night wake that kept police on edge until long after dawn. On Sunday

night there was a meeting in Oakland to confirm Miles'

successor, Big Al. It was a quiet

affair, but without the grimness of the funeral.

The banshee's wail that had seemed

so loud on Thursday was already

fading away. After the meeting there was a beer party at the Sinners

Club, and by the time the place

closed they had already set the date for the next run. The Angels would

gather in Bakersfield, on the first

day of Spring.

All my life my heart has sought

a thing I cannot name.

-- Remembered line from a long-

forgotten poem

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine -- four hundred pounds

of chrome and deep red noise to

take out on the Coast Highway and

cut loose at three in the morning,

when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked

the bike completely and it took

several months to have it rebuilt.

After that I decided to ride it

differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a

helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit. . . my

insurance had already been

canceled and my driver's license

was hanging by a thread.

So it was always at night, like a

werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine

in my ears, the surf booming up on

the sea wall and a fine empty road

stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only

public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway

Beach.

There was no helmet on those

nights, no speed limit, and no

cooling it down on the curves. The

momentary freedom of the park was

like the one unlucky drink that

shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the

park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign,

wondering if I knew anyone parked

out there on the midnight humping

strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. .

. thirty-five, forty-five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about

green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony-who might be

pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of

room to get around almost anything.

. . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the

beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars

as the bike starts jumping and

wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past

and leaning down for a curve near

the zoo, where the road swings out

to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on

windy nights sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing,

cartwheeling slide and maybe one

of those two-inch notices in the

paper the next day: "An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night

when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I."

Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and

now there's no sound except wind.

Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans

down on a hundred, and wind-

burned eyeballs strain to see down

the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on

there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you

stretch your luck so far that fear

becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely

see at a hundred; the tears blow

back so fast that they vaporize

before they get to your ears. The

only sounds are wind and a dull

roar floating back from the mufflers.

You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . .

letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the

edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where

it is are the ones who have gone

over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as

far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed

down, or did whatever they had to

when it came time to choose

between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of

motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of

definitions.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and

Terrible Saga, Random House, 1966

Welcome to Las Vegas:

When the Going gets Weird,

the Weird Turn Pro

We were somewhere around

Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you

should drive. . ." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what

looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around

the car, which was going about a

hundred miles an hour with the top

down to Las Vegas. And a voice

was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to

facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with

wraparound Spanish sunglasses.

"Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the

shoulder of the highway. No point

mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon

enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go.

They would be tough miles. Very

soon, I knew, we would both be

completely twisted. But there was

no going back, and no time to rest.

We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint

400 was already underway, and we

had to get there by four to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable

sporting magazine in New York had

taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy

convertible we'd just rented off a

lot on the Sunset Strip. . . and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was

already spent on extremely

dangerous drugs. The trunk of the

car looked like a mobile police

narcotics lab. We had two bags of

grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of highpowered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole

galaxy of multi-colored uppers,

downers, screamers, laughers. . .

and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

All this had been rounded up the

night before, in a frenzy of high-

speed driving all over Los Angeles

County -- from Topanga to Watts,

we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we

needed all that for the trip, but once you locked into a serious drug

connection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried

me was the ether. There is nothing

in the world more helpless and

irresponsible and depraved than a

man in the depths of an ether binge.

And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the

next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now --

yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to

keep alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls -- not all at once, but

steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour

through Barstow.

"Man, this is the way to travel,"

said my attorney. He leaned over to

turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the rhythm

section and kind of moaning the

words: "One toke over the line, Sweet Jesus. . . One toke over the

line. . ."

One toke? You poor fool! Wait till

you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio. . . slumped

over on the far side of the seat,

grappling with a tape recorder

turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only

tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the

radio. And also to maintain our

rhythm on the road. A constant

speed is good for gas mileage --

and for some reason that seemed

important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about gas consumption. Avoid those

quick bursts of acceleration that

drag blood to the back of the brain.

My attorney saw the hitchhiker long

before I did. "Let's give this boy a lift," he said, and before I could mount any argument he was stopped

and this poor Okie kid was running

up to the car with a big grin on his face, saying, "Hot damn! I never rode in a convertible before!"

"Is that right?" I said. "Well, I guess you're about ready, eh?"

The kid nodded eagerly as we

roared off.

"We're your friends," said my

attorney. "We're not like the others."

O Christ, I thought, he's gone around the bend. "No more of that talk," I said sharply. "Or I'll put the leeches on you." He grinned, seemed to understand. Luckily, the noise in the car was so awful -- between the

wind and the radio and the tape

machine -- that the kid in the back seat couldn't hear a word we were

saying. Or could he?

How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of

us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This

same lonely desert was the last

known home of the Manson family.

Will he make that grim connection

when my attorney starts screaming

about bats and huge manta rays

coming down on the car? If so --

well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere.

Because it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose. He'll report us at once to some kind of outback

nazi law enforcement agency, and

they'll run us down like dogs.

Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me?

I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious -- watching the

road, driving our Great Red Shark

along at a hundred and ten or so.

There was no sound from the back

seat.

Maybe I'd better have a chat with

this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I

explain things, he'll rest easy.

Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile. .

. admiring the shape of his skull.

"By the way," I said. "There's one thing you should probably

understand."

He stared at me, not blinking. Was

he gritting his teeth?

"Can you hear me?" I yelled.

He nodded.

"That's good," I said. "Because I want you to know that we're on our

way to Las Vegas to find the

American Dream." I smiled. "That's why we rented this car. It was the

only way to do it. Can you grasp

that?"

He nodded again, but his eyes were

nervous.

"I want you to have all the

background," I said. "Because this is a very ominous assignment --

with overtones of extreme personal

danger. . . Hell, I forgot all about this beer; you want one?"

He shook his head.

"How about some ether?" I said.

"What?"

"Never mind. Let's get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty-four hours ago we were

sitting in the Polo Lounge of the

Beverly Hills Hotel -- in the patio section, of course -- and we were

just sitting there under a palm tree when this uniformed dwarf came up

to me with a pink telephone and

said, 'This must be the call you've been waiting for all this time, sir.""

I laughed and ripped open a beer

can that foamed all over the back

seat while I kept talking. "And you know? He was right! I'd been

expecting that call, but I didn't know who it would come from. Do

you follow me?"

The boy's face was a mask of pure

fear and bewilderment.

I blundered on: "I want you to understand that this man at the

wheel is my attorney! He's not just some dingbat I found on the Strip.

Shit, look at him! He doesn't look like you or me, right? That's

because he's a foreigner. I think he's probably Samoan. But it doesn't

matter, does it? Are you

prejudiced?"

"Oh, hell no!" he blurted.

"I didn't think so," I said. "Because in spite of his race, this man is

extremely valuable to me." I

glanced over at my attorney, but his mind was somewhere else.

I whacked the back of the driver's

seat with my fist. "This is

important, goddamnit! This is a true story!" The car swerved sickeningly, then straightened out.

"Keep your hands off my fucking neck!" my attorney screamed. The kid in the back looked like he was

ready to jump right out of the car and take his chances.

Our vibrations were getting nasty --

but why? I was puzzled, frustrated.

Was there no communication in this

car? Had we deteriorated to the

level of dumb beasts?

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely

clear. We had actually been sitting there in the Polo Lounge -- for many

hours -- drinking Singapore Slings with mescal on the side and beer

chasers. And when the call came, I

was ready.

The Dwarf approached our table

cautiously, as I recall, and when he handed me the pink telephone I said nothing, merely listened. And then I hung up, turning to face my attorney.

"That was headquarters," I said.

"They want me to go to Las Vegas at once, and make contact with a

Portuguese photographer named

Lacerda. He'll have the details. All I have to do is check my suite and

he'll seek me out."

My attorney said nothing for a

moment, then he suddenly came

alive in his chair. "God hell! " he exclaimed. "I think I see the

pattern. This one sounds like real trouble!" He tucked his khaki

undershirt into his white rayon

bellbottoms and called for more

drink. "You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is

over," he said. "And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of L.A. for at least forty-eight

hours." He shook his head sadly.

"This blows my weekend, because naturally I'll have to go with you --

and we'll have to arm ourselves."

"Why not?" I said. "If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. We'll need some decent equipment and plenty of cash on the line -- if only for drugs and a super-

sensitive tape recorder, for the sake of a permanent record."

"What kind of story is this?" he asked.

"The Mint 400," I said. "It's the richest off-the-road race for

motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport -- a

fantastic spectacle in honor of some fatback grossero named Del Webb, who owns the luxurious Mint Hotel

in the heart of downtown Las

Vegas. . . at least that's what the

press release says; my man in New York just read it to me."

"Well," he said, "as your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle.

How else can you cover a thing like this righteously?"

"No way," I said. "Where can we get hold of a Vincent Black

Shadow?"

"What's that?"

"A fantastic bike," I said. "The new

model is something like two thousand cubic inches, developing

two hundred brake-horsepower at

four thousand revolutions per

minute on a magnesium frame with

two styrofoam seats and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred

pounds."

"That sounds about right for this gig," he said.

"It is," I assured him. "The fucker's not much for turning, but it's pure hell on the straightaway. It'll outrun

the F-111 until takeoff."

"Takeoff?" he said. "Can we handle that much torque?"

"Absolutely," I said. "I'll call New York for some cash."

Strange Medicine on the Desert. .

. a Crisis of Confidence

I am still vaguely haunted by our

hitchhiker's remark about how he'd

"never rode in a convertible

before." Here's this poor geek

living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he's never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King

Farouk. I was tempted to have my

attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple,

common-law contract whereby we

could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: "Here, sign this and the car's yours." Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some

place like Miami and rent another

huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across

the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West. . . and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving.

But this manic notion passed

quickly. There was no point in

getting this harmless kid locked up -

- and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to

flashing around Las Vegas in the

bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious

drag-racing on the strip: Pull up to

that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic:

"Alright, you chickenshit wimps!

You pansies! When this goddamn

light flips green, I'm gonna stomp

down on this thing and blow every

one of you gutless punks off the

road!"

Right. Challenge the bastards on

their own turf. Come screeching up

to the crosswalk, bucking and

skidding with a bottle of rum in one

hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music. . . glazed eyes

insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades,

screaming gibberish. . . a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the

light to change. . .

How often does a chance like that

come around? To jangle the

bastards right down to the core of

their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive

themselves to death with huge cars.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything

right and true and decent in the

national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic

possibilities of life in this country -

- but only for those with true grit.

And we were chock full of that.

My attorney understood this

concept, despite his racial handicap, but our hitchhiker was not an easy person to reach. He said he understood, but I could see in his

eyes that he didn't. He was lying to me.

The car suddenly veered off the

road and we came to a sliding halt

in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was

slumped over the wheel. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is bat country!"

"My heart," he groaned. "Where's the medicine?"

"Oh," I said. "The medicine, yes, it's right here." I reached into the kit-bag for the amyls. The kid

seemed petrified. "Don't worry," I said. "This man has a bad heart --

Angina Pectoris. But we have the

cure for it. Yes, here they are." I picked four amyls out of the tin box and handed two of them to my

attorney. He immediately cracked

one under his nose, and I did

likewise.

He took a long snort and fell back

on the seat, staring straight up at the sun. "Turn up the fucking music!" he screamed. "My heart feels like an alligator! Volume! Clarity! Bass!

We must have bass!" He flailed his naked arms at the sky. "What's wrong with us? Are we goddamn old ladies?"

I turned both the radio and the tape machine up full bore. "You scurvy shyster bastard," I said. "Watch

your language! You're talking to a doctor of journalism!"

He was laughing out of control.

"What the fuck are we doing out here on this desert?" he shouted.

"Somebody call the police! We

need help!"

"Pay no attention to this swine," I said to the hitchhiker. "He can't handle the medicine. Actually,

we're both doctors of journalism, and we're on our way to Las Vegas

to cover the main story of our

generation." And then I began laughing. . .

My attorney hunched around to face

the hitchhiker. "The truth is," he said, "we're going to Vegas to croak a scag baron named Savage Henry.

I've known him for years, but he

ripped us off -- and you know what

that means, right?"

I wanted to shut him off, but we

were both helpless with laughter.

What the fuck were we doing out here on this desert, when we both

had bad hearts?

"Savage Henry has cashed his

check!" My attorney snarled at the kid in the back seat. "We're going to rip his lungs out!"

"And eat them!" I blurted. "That bastard won't get away with this!

What's going on in this country

when a scumsucker like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of

journalism?"

Nobody answered. My attorney was

cracking another amyl and the kid was climbing out of the back seat,

scrambling down the trunk lid.

"Thanks for the ride," he yelled.

"Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don't worry about me." His feet hit the asphalt and he started running back towards Baker. Out in the middle of the desert, not a tree in sight.

"Wait a minute," I yelled. "Come back and get a beer." But apparently he couldn't hear me. The music was

very loud, and he was moving away

from us at good speed.

"Good riddance," said my attorney.

"We had a real freak on our hands.

That boy made me nervous. Did you

see his eyes?" He was still laughing. "Jesus," he said. "This is good medicine!"

I opened the door and reeled around to the driver's side. "Move over," I said. "I'll drive. We have to get out of California before that kid finds a cop."

"Shit, that'll be hours," said my attorney. "He's a hundred miles from anywhere."

"So are we," I said.

"Let's turn around and drive back to the Polo Lounge," he said. "They'll never look for us there."

I ignored him. "Open the tequila," I yelled as the wind-scream took

over again; I stomped on the

accelerator as we hurtled back onto the highway. Moments later he

leaned over with a map. "There's a place up ahead called Mescal

Springs," he said. "As your attorney, I advise you to stop and

take a swim."

I shook my head. "It's absolutely imperative that we get to the Mint

Hotel before the deadline for press registration," I said. "Otherwise, we might have to pay for our suite."

He nodded. "But let's forget that bullshit about the American

Dream," he said. "The important

thing is the Great Samoan Dream."

He was rummaging around in the

kit-bag. "I think it's about time to chew up a blotter," he said. "That cheap mescaline wore off a long

time ago, and I don't know if I can stand the smell of that goddamn

ether any longer."

"I like it," I said. "We should soak a towel with the stuff and then put it down on the floorboard by the

accelerator, so the fumes will rise up in my face all the way to Las

Vegas."

He was turning the tape cassette

over. The radio was screaming:

"Power to the People -- Right On!"

John Lennon's political song, ten

years too late. "That poor fool should have stayed where he was,"

said my attorney. "Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious."

"Speaking of serious," I said, "I think it's about time to get into the ether and the cocaine."

"Forget ether," he said. "Let's save it for soaking down the rug in the

suite. But here's this. Your half of the sunshine blotter. Just chew it up like baseball gum."

I took the blotter and ate it. My

attorney was now fumbling with the

salt shaker containing the cocaine.

Opening it. Spilling it. Then

screaming and grabbing at the air,

as our fine white dust blew up and

out across the desert highway. A

very expensive little twister rising

up from the Great Red Shark. "Oh, jesus!" he moaned. "Did you see what God just did to us?"

"God didn't do that!" I shouted.

"You did it. You're a fucking narcotics agent! I was on to your

stinking act from the start, you pig!"

"You better be careful," he said.

And suddenly he was waving a fat

black .357 magnum at me. One of

those snub-nosed Colt Pythons with

the beveled cylinder. "Plenty of vultures out here," he said. "They'll

pick your bones clean before morning."

"You whore," I said. "When we get to Las Vegas I'll have you chopped

into hamburger. What do you think

the Drug Bund will do when I show

up with a Samoan narcotics agent?"

"They'll kill us both," he said.

"Savage Henry knows who I am.

Shit, I'm your attorney." He burst into wild laughter. "You're full of acid, you fool. It'll be a goddamn

miracle if we can get to the hotel

and check in before you turn into a wild animal. Are you ready for

that? Checking into a Vegas hotel

under a phony name with intent to

commit capital fraud and a head full of acid?" He was laughing again, then he jammed his nose down

toward the salt shaker, aiming the

thin green roll of a $20 bill straight into what was left of the powder.

"How long do we have?" I said.

"Maybe thirty more minutes," he replied. "As your attorney I advise

you to drive at top speed."

Las Vegas was just up ahead. I

could see the strip/hotel skyline

looming up through the blue desert

ground-haze: The Sahara, the

landmark, the Americana and the

ominous Thunderbird -- a cluster of grey rectangles in the distance,

rising out of the cactus.

Thirty minutes. It was going to be

very close. The objective was the

big tower of the Mint Hotel,

downtown -- and if we didn't get

there before we lost all control, there was also the Nevada State

prison upstate in Carson City. I had been there once, but only for a talk with the prisoners -- and I didn't

want to go back, for any reason at

all. So there was really no choice: We would have to run the gauntlet,

and acid be damned. Go through all

the official gibberish, get the car into the hotel garage, work out on

the desk clerk, deal with the

bellboy, sign in for the press passes

-- all of it bogus, totally illegal, a

fraud on its face, but of course it would have to be done.

"KILL THE BODY

AND THE HEAD WILL DIE"

This line appears in my notebook,

for some reason. Perhaps some

connection with Joe Frazier. Is he

still alive? Still able to talk? I

watched that fight in Seattle --

horribly twisted about four seats

down the aisle from the Governor.

A very painful experience in every

way, a proper end to the sixties: Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge

Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan

clipping coupons in Greenwich

Village, both Kennedys murdered

by mutants, Owsley folding napkins

on Terminal Island, and finally

Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off

his pedestal by a human hamburger,

a man on the verge of death. Joe

Frazier, like Nixon, had finally

prevailed for reasons that people

like me refused to understand -- at least not out loud.

. . . But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the

brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971. A lot of things had changed in those years. And now I

was in Las Vegas as the motor

sports editor of this fine slick

magazine that had sent me out here

in the Great Red Shark for some

reason that nobody claimed to

understand. "Just check it out," they said, "and we'll take it from there. .

."

Indeed. Check it out. But when we finally arrived at the Mint Hotel my attorney was unable to cope artfully with the registration procedure. We were forced to stand in line with all the others -- which proved to be

extremely difficult under the

circumstances. I kept telling myself:

"Be quiet, be calm, say nothing. . .

speak only when spoken to: name,

rank and press affiliation, nothing else, ignore this terrible drug,

pretend it's not happening. . ."

There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lunged up to the clerk and began babbling. All my well-rehearsed lines fell apart

under that woman's stoney glare.

"Hi there," I said. "My name is. . .

ah, Raoul Duke. . . yes, on the list, that's for sure. Free lunch, final

wisdom, total coverage. . . why not?

I have my attorney with me and I

realize of course that his name is not on the list, but we must have that suite, yes, this man is actually my driver. We brought this Red

Shark all the way from the Strip and now it's time for the desert, right?

Yes. Just check the list and you'll see. Don't worry. What's the score

here? What's next?"

The woman never blinked. "Your room's not ready yet," she said. "But there's somebody looking for you."

"No!" I shouted. "Why? We haven't done anything yet!" My legs felt rubbery. I gripped the desk and

sagged toward her as she held out

the envelope, but I refused to accept

it. The woman's face was changing: swelling, pulsing. . .

horrible green jowls and fangs

jutting out, the face of a Moray Eel!

Deadly poison! I lunged backwards

into my attorney, who gripped my

arm as he reached out to take the

note. "I'll handle this," he said to the Moray woman. "This man has a bad heart, but I have plenty of medicine.

My name is Doctor Gonzo. Prepare

our suite at once. We'll be in the

bar."

The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock

crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak. We struggled through the crowded lobby and found two

stools at the bar. My attorney

ordered two cuba libres with beer

and mescal on the side, then he

opened the envelope. "Who's

Lacerda?" he asked. "He's waiting for us in a room on the twelfth

floor."

I couldn't remember. Lacerda? The

name rang a bell, but I couldn't concentrate. Terrible things were

happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing

on a woman's neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge -- impossible

to walk on it, no footing at all.

"Order some golf shoes," I whispered. "Otherwise, we'll never get out of this place alive. You

notice these lizards don't have any trouble moving around in this muck

-- that's because they have claws on their feet."

"Lizards?" he said. "If you think we're in trouble now, wait till you see what's happening in the

elevators." He took off his Brazilian sunglasses and I could see he'd been crying. "I just went upstairs to see this man Lacerda," he said. "I told him we knew what he was up to. He

says he's a photographer, but when I mentioned Savage Henry -- well,

that did it; he freaked. I could see it in his eyes. He knows we're onto

him."

"Does he understand we have magnums?" I said.

"No. But I told him we had a

Vincent Black Shadow. That scared

the piss out of him."

"Good," I said. "But what about our room? And the golf shoes? We're

right in the middle of a fucking

reptile zoo! And somebody's giving

booze to these goddamn things! It won't be long before they tear us to shreds. Jesus, look at the floor!

Have you ever seen so much blood?

How many have they killed already?" I pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us. "Holy shit, look at that bunch over there! They've spotted us!"

"That's the press table," he said.

"That's where you have to sign in for our credentials. Shit, let's get it over with. You handle that, and I'll get the room."

Back Door Beauty. . . & Finally a Bit of Serious Drag Racing on the Strip

Sometime around midnight my attorney wanted coffee. He had

been vomiting fairly regularly as we drove around the Strip, and the right flank of the Whale was badly

streaked. We were idling at a

stoplight in front of the Silver

Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates. . . two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug

Conference to give their wives a

look at Vegas. They looked like

they'd just beaten Caesar's Palace

for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed

for the Circus-Circus to whoop it

up. . .

. . . but suddenly, they found

themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit

and a 300-pound Samoan in a

yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at

them:

"Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?"

No reply. No sign of recognition.

They'd been warned about this kind

of crap: Just ignore it. . .

"Hey, honkies!" my attorney screamed. "Goddamnit, I'm serious!

I want to sell you some pure fuckin'

smack!" He was leaning out of the car, very, close to them. But still nobody answered. I glanced over,

very briefly, and saw four middle-

American faces frozen with shock,

staring straight ahead.

We were in the middle lane. A

quick left turn would be illegal. We would have to go straight ahead

when the light changed, then escape at the next corner. I waited, tapping the accelerator nervously. . .

My attorney was losing control:

"Cheap heroin!" he was shouting.

"This is the real stuff! You won't get hooked! God-damnit, I know what I have here!" He whacked on the side of the car, as if to get their attention

.. . but they wanted no part of us.

"You folks never talked to a vet

before?" said my attorney. "I just got back from Veet Naam. This is

scag, folks! Pure scag!"

Suddenly the light changed and the

Ford bolted off like a rocket. I

stomped on the accelerator and

stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for

cops in the mirror while my

attorney kept screaming at them:

"Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin!

Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it

right into your fucking eyeballs?"

We were approaching the Circus-Circus at high speed and the

Oklahoma car was veering left,

trying to muscle into the turn lane. I stomped the Whale into passing

gear and we ran fender to fender for a moment. He wasn't up to hitting

me; there was horror in his eyes. . .

The man in the back seat lost

control of himself. . . lunging across his wife and snarling wildly: "You dirty bastards! Pull over and I'll kill you! God damn you! You bastards!"

He seemed ready to leap out the window and into our car, crazy with rage. Luckily the Ford was a two-door. He couldn't get out.

We were coming up to the next

stoplight and the Ford was still

trying to move left. We were both

running full bore. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that we'd left

other traffic far behind; there was a big opening to the right. So I

mashed on the brake, hurling my

attorney against the dashboard, and

in the instant the Ford surged ahead I cut across his tail and zoomed into a side-street. A sharp right turn

across three lanes of traffic. But it worked. We left the Ford stalled in the middle of the intersection, hung in the middle of a screeching left

turn. With a little luck, he'd be

arrested for reckless driving.

My attorney was laughing as we

careened in low gear, with the

lights out, through a dusty tangle of back streets behind the Desert Inn.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "Those Okies were getting excited. That

guy in the back seat was trying to

bite me! Shit, he was frothing at the mouth." He nodded solemnly. "I should have maced the fucker. . . a criminal psychotic, total

breakdown. . . you never know

when they're likely to explode."

I swung the Whale into a turn that

seemed to lead out of the maze --

but instead of skidding, the bastard almost rolled.

"Holy shit!" my attorney screamed.

"Turn on the fucking lights!" He was clinging to the top of the

windshield. . . and suddenly he was doing the Big Spit again, leaning

over the side.

I refused to slow down until I was

sure nobody was following us --

especially that Oklahoma Ford:

those people were definitely

dangerous, at least until they calmed down. Would they report that

terrible quick encounter to the

police? Probably not. It had happened too fast, with no

witnesses, and the odds were pretty good that nobody would believe

them anyway. The idea that two

heroin pushers in a white Cadillac

convertible would be dragging up

and down the Strip, abusing total

strangers at stoplights, was prima

facie absurd. Not even Sonny Listen ever got that far out of control.

We made another turn and almost

rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is

not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential

neighborhoods. The handling is

very mushy. . . unlike the Red

Shark, which had responded very

nicely to situations requiring the

quick four-wheel drift. But the

Whale -- instead of cutting loose at the critical moment -- had a

tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening "here we go"

sensation.

At first I thought it was only

because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires

pumped up to fifty pounds each --

which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were

"experimental" tires.

But fifty pounds each didn't help the cornering, so I went back a few

hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy-five. He shook his head nervously. "Not me," he said, handing me the air hose. "Here.

They're your tires. You do it."

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?"

He nodded, moving away as I

stooped to deal with the left front.

"You're damn right," he said,

"Those tires want twenty-eight in the front and thirty-two in the rear.

Hell, fifty's dangerous, but seventy-five is crazy -- They'll explode!"

I shook my head and kept filling the left front. "I told you," I said.

"Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They're special. I could load them up to a hundred."

"God almighty!" he groaned. "Don't do that here."

"Not today," I replied. "I want to see how they corner with seventy-five."

He chuckled. "You won't even get to the corner, Mister."

"We'll see," I said, moving around

to the rear with the air hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones

were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped

on them with the rod. But what the

hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments

on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires. For all I knew, the

thing might start cornering like a

Lotus Elan. If not, all I had to do was call the VIP agency and have

another one delivered. . . maybe

threaten them with a lawsuit because all four tires had exploded on me, while driving in heavy

traffic. Demand an Eldorado, next

time, with four Michelin Xs. And

put it all on the card. . . charge it to the St. Louis Browns.

As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire

pressures. The ride was a trifle

rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller

skates in a gravel pit. . . but the

thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like

driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG,

over the high side, cartwheeling

across the landscape with your head in your hands.

About thirty minutes after our brush with the Okies we pulled into an

all-night diner on the Tonopah

highway, on the outskirts of a mean scag ghetto called "North Las

Vegas." Which is actually outside

the city limits of Vegas proper.

North Vegas is where you go when

you've fucked up once too often on

the Strip, and when you're not even welcome in the cut-rate downtown

places around Casino Center.

This is Nevada's answer to East St.

Louis -- a slum and a graveyard,

last stop before permanent exile to Ely or Winnemuca. North Vegas is

where you go if you're a hooker

turning forty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide you're no longer

much good for business out there with the high rollers. . . or if you're a pimp with bad credit at the Sands.

. . or what they still call, in Vegas,

"a hophead." This can mean almost anything from a mean drunk to a

junkie, but in terms of commercial

acceptability, it means you're

finished in all the right places.

The big hotels and casinos pay a lot of muscle to make sure the high

rollers don't have even momentary

hassles with "undesirables."

Security in a place like Caesar's Palace is super tense and strict.

Probably a third of the people on

the floor at any given time are either shills or watchdogs. Public drunks

and known pickpockets are dealt

with instantly -- hustled out to the parking lot by Secret Service-type

thugs and given a quick, impersonal lecture about the cost of dental

work and the difficulties of trying to make a living with two broken

arms.

The "high side" of Vegas is probably the most closed society

west of Sicily -- and it makes no

difference, in terms of the day to

day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes. In an economy

where Tom Jones can make

$75,000 a week for two shows a

night at Caesar's, the palace guard is indispensable, and they don't care who signs their paychecks. A gold

mine like Vegas breeds its own

army, like any other gold mine.

Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power

poles. . . and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to

protect it.

So once you get blacklisted on the

Strip, for any reason at all, you

either get out of town or retire to nurse your act along, on the cheap, in the shoddy limbo of North Vegas.

. . out there with the gunsels, the hustlers, the drug cripples and all the other losers. North Vegas, for

instance, is where you go if you need to score smack before

midnight with no references.

But if you're looking for cocaine,

and you're ready up front with some bills and the proper code words,

you want to stay on the Strip and get next to a well-connected hooker,

which will take at least one bill for starters.

And so much for all that. We didn't fit the mold. There is no formula for finding yourself in Vegas with a

white Cadillac full of drugs and nothing to mix with properly. The

Fillmore style never quite caught on here. People like Sinatra and Dean

Martin are still considered "far out"

in Vegas. The "underground

newspaper" here -- the Las Vegas Free Press -- is a cautious echo of The People's World, or maybe the National Guardian.

A week in Vegas is like stumbling

into a Time Warp, a regression to

the late fifties. Which is wholly

understandable when you see the people who come here, the Big

Spenders from places like Denver

and Dallas. Along with National

Elks Club conventions (no niggers

allowed) and the All-West

Volunteer Sheepherders' Rally.

These are people who go absolutely

crazy at the sight of an old hooker stripping down to her pasties and

prancing out on the runway to the

big-beat sound of a dozen 50-year-

old junkies kicking out the jams on

"September Song."

It was some time around three when we pulled into the parking lot of the North Vegas diner. I was looking

for a copy of the Los Angeles

Times, for news of the outside world, but a quick glance at the

newspaper racks made a bad joke

of that notion. They don't need the Times in North Vegas. No news is good news.

"Fuck newspapers," said my attorney. "What we need right now is coffee."

I agreed, but I stole a copy of the Vegas Sun anyway. It was

yesterday's edition, but I didn't care.

The idea of entering a coffee shop

without a newspaper in my hands

made me nervous. There was

always the Sports Section; get

wired on the baseball scores and

pro-football rumors: "Bart Starr Beaten by Thugs in Chicago Tavern;

Packers Seek Trade". . . "Namath Quits Jets to be Governor of

Alabama". . . and a speculative piece on page 46 about a rookie

sensation named Harrison Fire, out of Grambling: runs the hundred in

nine flat, 344 pounds and still

growing.

"This man Fire has definite

promise," says the coach.

"Yesterday, before practice, he destroyed a Greyhound Bus with his

bare hands, and last night he killed a subway. He's a natural for color

TV. I'm not one to play favorites,

but it looks like we'll have to make room for him."

Indeed. There is always room on TV for a man who can beat people

to jelly in nine flat. . . But not many of these were gathered, on this

night, in the North Star Coffee

Lounge. We had the place to

ourselves -- which proved to be

fortunate, because we'd eaten two

more pellets of mescaline on the

way over, and the effects were

beginning to manifest.

My attorney was no longer

vomiting, or even acting sick. He

ordered coffee with the authority of a man long accustomed to quick

service. The waitress had the

appearance of a very old hooker

who had finally found her place in

life. She was definitely in charge here, and she eyed us with obvious

disapproval as we settled onto our

stools.

I wasn't paying much attention. The North Star Coffee Lounge seemed

like a fairly safe haven from our

storms. There are some you go into

-- in this line of work -- that you know will be heavy. The details

don't matter. All you know, for sure, is that your brain starts humming

with brutal vibes as you approach

the front door. Something wild and

evil is about to happen; and it's

going to involve you.

But there was nothing in the

atmosphere of the North Star to put me on my guard. The waitress was

passively hostile, but I was

accustomed to that. She was a big

woman. Not fat, but large in every way, long sinewy arms and a

brawler's jawbone. A burned-out

caricature of Jane Russell: big head of dark hair, face slashed with

lipstick and a 48 Double-E chest

that was probably spectacular about twenty years ago when she might

have been a Mama for the Hell's

Angels chapter in Berdoo. . . but

now she was strapped up in a giant

pink elastic brassiere that showed

like a bandage through the sweaty

white rayon of her uniform.

Probably she was married to somebody, but I didn't feel like

speculating. All I wanted from her, tonight, was a cup of black coffee

and a 29¢ hamburger with pickles

and onions. No hassles, no talk --

just a place to rest and re-group. I wasn't even hungry.

My attorney had no newspaper or

anything else to compel his

attention. So he focused, out of

boredom, on the waitress. She was

taking our orders like a robot when

he punched through her crust with a demand for "two glasses of ice water -- with ice."

My attorney drank his in one long

gulp, then asked for another. I

noticed that the waitress seemed

tense.

Fuck it, I thought. I was reading the funnies.

About ten minutes later, when she

brought the hamburgers, I saw my

attorney hand her a napkin with

something printed on it. He did it very casually, with no expression at all on his face. But I knew, from the vibes, that our peace was about to

be shattered.

"What was that?" I asked him.

He shrugged, smiling vaguely at the waitress who was standing about

ten feet away, at the end of the

counter, keeping her back to us

while she pondered the napkin.

Finally she turned and stared. . .

then she stepped resolutely forward

and tossed the napkin at my attorney.

"What is this?" she snapped.

"A napkin," said my attorney.

There was a moment of nasty

silence, then she began screaming:

"Don't give me that bullshit! I know what it means! You goddamn fat

pimp bastard!"

My attorney picked up the napkin,

looked at what he'd written, then

dropped it back on the counter.

"That's the name of a horse I used to own," he said calmly. "What's wrong with you?"

"You sonofabitch!" she screamed. "I take a lot of shit in this space, but I sure as hell don't have to take it off a spic pimp!"

Jesus! I thought. What's happening?

I was watching the woman's hands,

hoping she wouldn't pick up

anything sharp or heavy. I picked up the napkin and read what the

bastard had printed on it, in careful red letters: "Back Door Beauty?"

The Question mark was

emphasized.

The woman was screaming again:

"Pay your bill and get the hell out!

You want me to call the cops?"

I reached for my wallet, but my

attorney was already on his feet,

never taking his eyes off the woman.

. . then he reached under his shirt, not into his pocket, coming up

suddenly with the Gerber Mini-

Magnum, a nasty silver blade which the waitress seemed to understand

instantly.

She froze: her eyes fixed about six feet down the aisle and lifted the

receiver off the hook of the pay

phone. He sliced it off, then brought the receiver back to his stool and

sat down.

The waitress didn't move. I was

stupid with shock, not knowing

whether to run or start laughing.

"How much is that lemon meringue pie?" my attorney asked. His voice was casual, as if he had just

wandered into the place and was

debating what to order.

"Thirty-five cents!" the woman blurted. Her eyes were turgid with

fear, but her brain was apparently

functioning on some basic motor

survival level.

My attorney laughed. "I mean the whole pie," he said.

She moaned.

My attorney put a bill on the

counter. "Let's say it's five dollars,"

he said. "OK?"

She nodded, still frozen, watching

my attorney as he walked around the counter and got the pie out of the

display case. I prepared to leave.

The waitress was clearly in shock.

The sight of the blade, jerked out in the heat of an argument, had

apparently triggered bad memories.

The glazed look in her eyes said her throat had been cut. She was still in the grip of paralysis when we left.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Random House, 1972

Last Tango in Vegas:

Fear and Loathing in the

Near Room

PART I

Muhammad Ali Bites the Bullet,

Leon Spinks Croaks a Legend. . .

Sting Like a Butterfly, Float Like a Bee. . . Wild Notes of a Weird Cornerman

When I'm gone, boxing will be

nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down'll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It's goin' to be back to the fighter who comes to

town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he's in shape. Old hat. 1 was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.

-- Muhammad Ali, 1967

Life had been good to Pat Patterson for so long that he'd almost

forgotten what it was like to be

anything but a free-riding, first-

class passenger on a flight near the top of the world. . .

It is a long, long way from the frostbitten midnight streets around Chicago's Clark and Division to the deep-rug hallways of the Park Lane

Hotel on Central Park South in

Manhattan. . . But Patterson had

made that trip in high style, with

stops along the way in London,

Paris, Manila, Kinshasa, Kuala

Lumpur, Tokyo and almost

everywhere else in the world on

that circuit where the menus list no prices and you need at least three

pairs of $100 sunglasses just to

cope with the TV lights every time you touch down at an airport for

another frenzied press conference

and then a ticker-tape parade along the route to the Presidential Palace and another princely reception.

That is Muhammad Ali's world, an

orbit so high, a circuit so fast and strong and with rarefied air so thin that only "The Champ," "The Greatest," and a few close friends have unlimited breathing rights.

Anybody who can sell this act for

$5 million an hour all over the world is working a vein somewhere

between magic and madness. . . And

now, on this warm winter night in

Manhattan, Pat Patterson was not

entirely sure which way the balance was tipping. The main shock had

come three weeks ago in Las Vegas,

when he'd been forced to sit

passively at ringside and watch the man whose life he would gladly

have given his own to protect, under any other circumstances, take a

savage and wholly unexpected

beating in front of 5000 screaming banshees at the Hilton Hotel and

something like 60 million stunned

spectators on national/network TV.

The Champ was no longer The

Champ: a young brute named Leon

Spinks had settled that matter, and not even Muhammad seemed to

know just exactly what that awful

defeat would mean -- for himself or anyone else; not even for his new

wife and children, or the handful of friends and advisers who'd been

working that high white vein right

beside him for so long that they acted and felt like his family.

It was definitely an odd lot, ranging from solemn Black Muslims like

Herbert Muhammad, his manager --

to shrewd white hipsters like

Harold Conrad, his executive

spokesman, and Irish Gene Kilroy,

Ali's version of Hamilton Jordon: a sort of all-purpose administrative

assistant, logistics manager and

chief troubleshooter. Kilroy and

Conrad are The Champ's answer to

Ham and Jody-- but mad dogs and wombats will roam the damp streets

of Washington, babbling perfect

Shakespearean English, before

Jimmy Carter comes up with his

version of Drew "Bundini" Brown, Ali's alter ego and court wizard for so long now that he can't really

remember being anything else.

Carter's thin-ice sense of humor

would not support the weight of a

zany friend like Bundini. It would

not even support the far more

discreet weight of a court jester like

J.F.K.'s Dave Powers, whose role in the White House was much

closer to Bundini Brown's deeply

personal friendship with Ali than

Jordan's essentially political and

deceptively hard-nosed relationship with Jimmy. . . and even Hamilton

seems to be gaining weight by

geometric progressions these days,

and the time may be just about ripe for him to have a chat with the Holy Ghost and come out as a "born-again Christian."

That might make the nut for a while

-- at least through the 1980

reelection campaign -- but not even Jesus could save Jordan from a fate worse than any hell he'd ever

imagined if Jimmy Carter woke up

one morning and read in the

Washington Post that Hamilton had pawned the Great Presidential Seal

for $500 in some fashionable

Georgetown hockshop. . . eyes for

collateral.

Indeed. . . and this twisted vision

would seem almost too bent for print if Bundini hadn't already

raised at least the raw possibility of it by once pawning Muhammad

Ali's "Heavyweight Champion of the World" gold & jewel studded belt for $500 -- just an overnight

loan from a friend, he said later; but the word got out and Bundini was

banished from The Family and the

whole entourage for eighteen

months when The Champ was told

what he'd done.

That heinous transgression is shrouded in a mix of jive-shame and real black humor at this point: The Champ, after all, had once hurled

his Olympic gold medal into the

Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville --

and what was the difference

between a gold medal and a jewel-

studded belt? They were both

symbols of a "white devil's" world that Ali, if not Bundini, was already learning to treat with a very

calculated measure of public

disrespect. . . What they shared, far beyond a very real friendship, was

a shrewd kind of street-theater

sense of how far out on that limb

they could go, without crashing.

Bundini has always had a finer

sense than anyone else in The

Family about where The Champ

wanted to go, the shifting winds of his instincts, and he has never been worried about things like Limits or Consequences. That was the

province of others, like Conrad or

Herbert. Drew B. has always

known exactly which side he was on, and so has Cassius/Muhammad.

Bundini is the man who came up

with "Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee," and ever since then he has been as close to both Cassius

Clay and Muhammad Ali as anyone

else in the world.

Pat Patterson, by contrast, was a

virtual newcomer to The Family. A

200-pound, forty-year-old black

cop, he was a veteran of the

Chicago Vice Squad before he hired

on as Ali's personal bodyguard.

And, despite the total devotion and relentless zeal he brought to his

responsibility for protecting The

Champ at all times from any kind of danger, hassles or even minor

inconvenience, six years on the job had caused him to understand,

however reluctantly, that there were at least a few people who could

come and go as they pleased

through the wall of absolute security he was supposed to maintain around

The Champ.

Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the

boss "Cassius," or even "Cash" --

while Patterson had never

addressed him as anything but

"Muhammad," or "Champ." He had come aboard at high tide, as it

were, and even though he was now

in charge of everything from

carrying Ali's money -- in a big roll of $100 bills -- to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated

revolver and the lethal fists and feet

of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to

know that Muhammad's capricious

instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably

impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were

too unpredictable: one minute he

would be in an almost catatonic

funk, crouched in the back seat of a black Cadillac limousine with an

overcoat over his head -- and then, with no warning at all, he would

suddenly be out of the car at a red light somewhere in the Bronx,

playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson

had learned to deal with The

Champ's moods but he also knew

that in any crowd around The

Greatest there would be at least a

few who felt the same way about

Ali as they had about Malcolm X or

Martin Luther King.

There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim

religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as a main

spokesman for what the Muslims

were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia -- which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the

White Devils moved quickly to

justify. . .

Yes. But that is a very long story

and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right

now is that Muhammad Ali

somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals

any prominent American has ever

endured as one of the few real

martyrs of that goddamn wretched

war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.

That would come later. . .

The Spinks disaster in Vegas had

been a terrible shock to The Family.

They had all known it had to come

sometime, but the scene had already

been set and the papers already signed for that "sometime" -- a $16

million purse and a mind-boggling,

damn-the-cost television spectacle

with Ali's old nemesis Ken Norton

as the Bogyman, and one last king-

hell payday for everybody. They were prepared, in the back of their hearts, for that one -- but not for the cheap torpedo that blew their whole ship out of the water in Vegas for no payday at all. Leon Spinks crippled a whole industry in one hour on that fateful Wednesday evening in Las

Vegas -- The Muhammad Ali Industry, which has churned out roughly $56 million in over fifteen years and at least twice or three

times that much for the people who

kept the big engine running all this time. (It would take Bill Walton

112 years on an annual NBA salary

of $500,000 to equal that figure.)

1 knew it was too close for

comfort. I told him to stop fooling around. He was giving up too

many rounds. But I heard the

decision and I thought, 'Well, what are you going to do? That's it. I've prepared myself for this day for a long time. I conditioned myself for it. I was young with him and now I feel old with him.'

-- Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer Dundee was not the only person

who was feeling old with

Muhammad Ali on that cold

Wednesday night in Las Vegas.

Somewhere around the middle of

the fifteenth round a whole

generation went over the hump as the last Great Prince of the Sixties went out in a blizzard of pain, shock and angry confusion so total that it was hard to even know how to feel,

much less what to say, when the

thing was finally over. The last shot came just at the final bell, when

"Crazy Leon" whacked Ali with a savage overhand right that almost

dropped The Champ in his tracks

and killed the last glimmer of hope for the patented "miracle finish" that Angelo Dundee knew was his

fighter's only chance. As Muhammad wandered back to his

corner about six feet in front of me, the deal had clearly gone down.

The decision was anticlimactic.

Leon Spinks, a twenty-four-year-old brawler from St. Louis with only

seven professional fights on his

record, was the new Heavyweight

Boxing Champion of the World.

And the roar of the pro-Spinks

crowd was the clearest message of

all: that uppity nigger from

Louisville had finally got what was coming to him. For fifteen long

years he had mocked everything

they all thought they stood for:

changing his name, dodging the

draft, beating the best they could

hurl at him. . . But now, thank God, they were seeing him finally go

down.

Six presidents have lived in the

White House in the time of

Muhammad Ali. Dwight

Eisenhower was still rapping golf

balls around the Oval Office when Cassius Clay Jr. won a gold medal

for the U.S. as a light-heavy-weight in the 1960 Olympics and then

turned pro and won his first fight for money against a journeyman

heavyweight named Tunney

Hunsaker in Louisville on October

29th of that same year.

Less than four years later and

almost three months to the day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was

murdered in Dallas, Cassius Clay --

the "Louisville Lip" by then -- made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the Western world by beating World Heavyweight

Champion Sonny Liston, the

meanest of the mean, so badly that

Liston refused to come out of his

corner for the seventh round.

That was fourteen years ago. Jesus!

And it seems like fourteen months.

Why?

Brain damage.

The Real Story: A Memo With Nails in Both Nostrils. . . by Raoul Duke, Sports Editor

This story is badly bogged down,

and I think I know the reason: Dr.

Thompson has been on it so long --

in the belly of the beast, as it were -

- that he has lost all functional

contact with his sense of humor; and where I come from they call that

condition "insanity."

But there are a lot of high-powered fools where I come from, and it's

been about fifteen years since I took any one of them seriously. . . And in fact it was Thompson himself who

originally made that connection

between humor and sanity; which

changes nothing, because we come

from the same place -- from the

elm-shaded, white-frame

"Highlands" of Louisville, Kentucky, about halfway between

the Cassius Clay residence down on

South Fourth Street and the homes

of the men who originally launched

Cassius Clay Jr. on his long wild

ride on the Great Roller-Coaster of professional boxing and

paraprofessional show business.

They lived out in Indian Hills or on Mockingbird Valley Road near the

Louisville Country Club, and they

owned every bank in the city --

along with both newspapers, all the radio stations that white folks took seriously, and at least half the major distilleries and tobacco companies

that funded the municipal tax base.

They knew a good thing when they

saw one, and in the year of our Lord 1960 the good thing they saw was

an eighteen-year-old local Negro

boxer, a big, fast and impressively intelligent young light-heavyweight named Cassius Clay Jr., who had

just won a gold medal for the

U.S.A. in the 1960 Olympics. . . So ten of these gents got together and made the boy an offer he couldn't

refuse: they were willing to take a long risk on him, they said, just as soon as he gained a few pounds and

decided to fight professionally as

the new morning star among heavyweights.

They would finance his move for

the title in a division that Floyd

Patterson and his crafty manager,

Cus D'Amato, had dominated for so

long -- by means of a new gimmick

known as "closed-circuit TV" --

that a whole generation of what

might have been promising young

heavyweight challengers had died

on the vine while they waited in

line for a chance to fight Patterson,

who didn't really want to fight anybody.

Floyd was "The Champ" and he used that fact as leverage as

Richard Nixon would later learn to

retreat behind the odious truth that

"I am, you know, The President."

Indeed. . . and they were both right for a while; but bad karma tends to generate its own kind of poison,

which -- like typhoid chickens and

rotten bread cast out on the waters -

- will usually come home to either

roost, fester or mutate very close to its own point of origin.

Richard Nixon abused karma,

chickens and even bread for so long that they all came home at once and totally destroyed him. . . And Floyd Patterson's neurotic, anal-compulsive reluctance to get into

the ring with anything at all with

two arms and legs under thirty was

what eventually created the vacuum

that hatched Sonny Liston, an aging ex-con who twice turned poor

Floyd to jelly, just by climbing into the ring.

. . . Hot damn! We may be

approaching a heinous new record

for mixed metaphors in this thing;

the rats have swarmed into the

belfry, and anything sane that

survives will be hurled out to sea

and stomped down like a dwarf in a

shitrain. . .

Why not?

It was never my intention to make

any real sense of this memo. The Sports Desk has never loved logic;

mainly because there is no money in it -- and pro sports without money

is like a Vincent Black Shadow

with no gas. Dumb greed is the

backbone of all sports, except

maybe college wrestling -- which

may or may not be a good & healthy thing for some people, in places

like Kansas and Idaho, but not here.

Those knotty little monsters can

write their own stories, and toss

them in over the transom. . . If we

have enough room or maybe a bad check for a half-page ad from the

Shotgun News or the "Billy Beer"

people, that's when we'll focus the whole twisted energy of the Sports

Desk on a college wrestling feature: UTAH CHAMP DROGO PINS

THREE-ARMED COWBOY

FOR WEST SLOPE TITLE IN NINE-HOUR

CLASSIC

How's that for a stylish headline?

Well. . . shucks; let's try it again,

from the other side of the fence: CRIPPLED COWBOY CHALLENGER

FALLS SHORT IN MAT FINALS;

ANGRY FANS MAUL REF AS MATCH

ENDS;

HUGE DROGO GAINS SPLIT WIN

Jesus! I could get a job writing

sports heads for the Daily News with that kind of feel for the word count. . . Right, with a big salary too, in the core of the Big Apple. . .

But that is not what we had in mind here, is it?

No. We were talking of Sport, and

Big Money. Which gets us back to

pro boxing, the most shameless

racket of all. It is more a Spectacle than a Sport, one of the purest forms of atavistic endeavor still extant in a world that only big-time

politicians feel a need to call

"civilized." Nobody who has ever sat in a front-row, ringside seat less than six feet just below and away

from the sickening thumps and cracks and groans of two desperate, adrenaline-crazed giants who are

whipping and pounding each other

like two pit bulls in a death battle will ever forget what it felt like to be there.

No TV camera or any other kind

will ever convey the almost four-

dimensional reality of total,

frenzied violence of seeing, hearing and almost feeling the sudden WHACK of Leon Spinks' thinly

padded fist against Muhammad Ali's cheekbone so close in front of your own face that it is hard to keep from flinching and trying to duck

backward -- while a whole row of

$200-a-seat ringsiders right behind you are leaping and stomping and

howling for more showers of flying sweat to fall down on them, more droplets of human blood to rain

down on the sleeves and tailored

shoulders of their tan cashmere

sport coats. . . and then, with Leon still pounding and the sweat and

blood still flying, some fist-flailing geek screaming over your shoulder

loses his balance and cracks you

between the shoulder blades with a

shot that sends you reeling into a

cop hanging on to the ring apron --

who reacts with a vicious elbow to

your chest, and the next thing you

see is shoes bouncing inches in

front of your face on a concrete

floor.

"The horror! The horror!. . .

Exterminate all the brutes!"

Mistah Kurtz said that but the smart money called him a joker. . . Ho,

ho, good ole Kurtz, that Prussian

sense of humor will zing you every

time.

I said that. We were sitting in a

sauna at the health spa in the Las

Vegas Hilton -- me and my friend

Bob Arum, the sinister promoter --

when all of a sudden the redwood

door swung open and in comes

Leon Spinks.

"Hi there, Leon," said Arum.

Leon grinned and tossed his towel across the room at the stove full of hot rocks. "What's happenin',

jewboy?" he replied. "I heard you was too stoned to be foolin' around down here with us health freaks."

Arum turned beet red and moved off

toward the corner.

Leon laughed again, and reached for his teeth. "These damn things get hot," he snarled. "Who needs these goddamn teeth, anyway."

He turned to laugh at Arum again, and right then I saw my chance. I

stood up in a sort of linebacker's

crouch and hooked him hard in the

ribs. He fell back on the hot rocks and I hooked him again.

"O my God!" Arum shrieked. "I heard something break!"

Leon looked up from where he was

sitting on the duck-board floor, his face warped with pain. "Well," he said slowly, "now we know you

ain't deaf, Bob." He was leaning

back on both hands, wincing with every breath as he slowly raised his eyes to glare at me.

"Real smart friends you got, Arum,"

he whispered, "but this one's mine, now." He winced again; every

breath was painful and he spoke

very slowly. "Call my brother

Michael," he said to Arum. "Tell him to fix a hook on this honky

bastard's head and hang him up

alongside the big bag, for when I get well."

Arum was kneeling beside him now, gently probing his rib cage. . .

And it was just about then I felt

myself waking up; but instead of

lying down in a bed, I suddenly

realized that something ugly had

happened. My first thought was that I'd passed out from the heat of the sauna: indeed, a quick trip to the

Near Room and some dim memory

of violence, but only as part of a

dream. . .

Or. . . well. . . maybe not. As my

head began to clear and Arum's face came into focus -- his beady eyes,

his trembling hands, the sweat

squirting out of his pores -- I

realized that I was not lying down

or coming out of a faint, but

standing naked in the middle of a

hot wooden cell and staring down

like a zombie at -- ye gods! -- it

was Leon Spinks!

And Bob Arum, his eyes bulged out

like a frog's, was massaging Leon's chest. I stared for a moment, then

recoiled with shock. . . No, I thought, this can't be happening!

But it was. I was wide-awake now,

and I knew this hideous thing was

actually happening, right in front of my eyes. Arum was moaning and

trembling, while his hands stroked

the challenger's chest. Leon was

leaning back with his eyes closed,

his teeth clenched, and his whole

body stiff as a corpse.

Neither one of them seemed to

notice my recovery -- from what

was later diagnosed, by the nervous hotel doctor, as nothing more than a mild Acid Flashback. . . But I didn't learn that until later.

High Risk on the Low Road, New

Boy on Queer Street. . . Five

Million Dollars an Hour, Five

Miles to the Terminal Hotel. . .

The Devil and Pat Patterson. . .

No Nigger Ever Called Me

Hippie. . .

THE NEAR ROOM

When he got in trouble in the ring, Ali imagined a door swung open

and inside he could see neon,

orange and green lights blinking, and bats blowing trumpets and

alligators playing trombones, and he could hear snakes screaming.

Weird masks and actors' clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was

committing himself to destruction.

-- George Plimpton, Shadow Box

It was almost midnight when Pat Patterson got off the elevator and

headed down the corridor toward

905, his room right next door to The Champ's. They had flown in from

Chicago a few hours earlier and

Muhammad had said he was tired

and felt like sleeping. No midnight strolls down the block to the Plaza fountain, he promised, no

wandering around the hotel or

causing a scene in the lobby.

Beautiful, thought Patterson. No

worries tonight. With Muhammad in bed and Veronica there to watch

over him, Pat felt things were under control and he might even have time for a bit of refreshment downstairs, and then get a decent night's sleep for himself. The only conceivable

problem was the volatile presence

of Bundini and a friend, who had

dropped by around ten for a chat

with The Champ about his run for

the Triple Crown. The family had

been in a state of collective shock for two weeks or so after Vegas, but

now it was the first week in March and they were eager to get the big

engine cranked up for the return

bout with Spinks in September. No

contracts had been signed yet, and

every sports-writer in New York

seemed to be on the take from either Ken Norton or Don King or both. . .

But none of that mattered, said Ali, because he and Leon had already

agreed on the rematch, and by the

end of this year he would be the

first man in history to win the

Heavyweight Championship of the

World THREE TIMES.

Patterson had left them whooping

and laughing at each other, but only after securing a promise from Hal

Conrad that he and Bundini leave

early and let The Champ sleep.

They were scheduled to tape a

show with Dick Cavett the next day, then drive for three or four hours up into the mountains of eastern

Pennsylvania to Ali's custom-built

training camp at Deer Lake. Kilroy

was getting the place ready for what

Patterson and all the rest of The Family understood was going to be

some very serious use. Ali had

announced almost immediately after

losing to Spinks in Vegas any talk of his "retiring from the ring was nonsense," and that soon he'd begin training for his rematch with Leon.

So the fat was in the fire: a second loss to Spinks would be even worse

than the first -- the end of the line for Ali, The Family, and in fact the whole Ali industry. No more

paydays, no more limousines, no more suites and crab cocktails from room service in the world's most

expensive hotels. For Pat Patterson and a lot of other people, another

defeat by Spinks would mean the

end of a whole way of life. . . And, worse yet, the first wave of public reaction to Ali's "comeback"

announcement had been anything but

reassuring. An otherwise

sympathetic story in the LOS

Angeles Times described the almost universal reaction of the sporting

press:

"There were smiles and a shaking of hands all around when the thirty-six-year-old ex-champion said after the fight last Wednesday night: 'I'll be back. I'll be the first man to win the heavyweight title three times.'

But no one laughed out loud."

A touch of this doomsday thinking

had even showed up in The Family.

Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who had been

in The Champ's corner for every

fight since he first won the title from

Liston -- except the last one -- had gone on the Tom Snyder show and

said that Muhammad was finished

as a fighter, that he was a shadow of his former self, and that he

(Pacheco) had done everything but

beg Ali to retire even before the Spinks fight.

Pacheco had already been expelled

from The Family for this heresy, but it had planted a seed of doubt that was hard to ignore. "The Doc" was no quack and he was also a

personal friend; did he know something the others didn't? Was it even possible that The Champ was

"washed up"? There was no way to think that by looking at him, or

listening to him either. He looked

sharp, talked sharp, and there was a calmness, a kind of muted intensity, in his confidence that made it sound almost understated.

Pat Patterson believed -- or if he

didn't, there was no way that even

The Champ could guess it. The

loyalty of those close to Muhammad Ali is so profound that it sometimes clouds their own vision. . . But

Leon Spinks had swept those clouds

away, and now it was time to get

serious. No more show business, no

more clowning. Now they had come

to the crunch.

Pat Patterson had tried not to brood on these things, but every

newspaper rack he'd come close to

in Chicago, New York or anywhere

else seemed to echo the baying of

hounds on a blood scent. Every media voice in the country was

poised for ultimate revenge on this Uppity Nigger who had laughed in

their faces for so long that a whole generation of sportswriters had

grown up in the shadow of a

mocking dancing presence that most

of them had never half-understood

until now, when it seemed almost

gone.

Even the rematch with Spinks was

bogged down in the arcane politics

of big-money boxing -- and Pat Patterson, like all the others who

had geared their lives to the

fortunes of Muhammad Ali,

understood that the rematch would

have to be soon. Very soon. And The Champ would have to be ready this time -- as he had not been ready in Vegas. There was no avoiding

the memory of Sonny Liston's grim

fate, after losing again to Ali in a fight that convinced even the

"experts."

But Muhammad Ali was no Liston.

There was magic in his head, as

well as his fists and his feet -- but time was not on his side, this time, and the only thing more important

than slashing the Gordian Knot of

boxing-industry politics that was

already menacing the reality of a

quick rematch with Spinks was the

absolute necessity of making sure

that The Champ would take this next fight as seriously as it was clearly going to be. A whole industry

would be up for grabs -- not to

mention the fate of The Family --

and the bizarre scenes of chaos and wild scrambling for position that

had followed Spinks' first shocking upset would not be repeated if Ali

lost the rematch.

Nobody was ready for Spinks'

stunning victory in Vegas, but every power freak and leverage-monger

with any real-life connection to

boxing would be ready to go either

way on this next one. There would

be no more of this low-rent

political bullshit about

"recognition" by the World Boxing Council (WBC) or the World

Boxing Association (WBA) if Ali

lost the rematch with Leon -- and no more big-money fights for

Muhammad Ali, either. They would

all be pushed over the brink that

was already just a few steps in front of them -- and no "comeback"

would be likely, or even possible.

These things were among the dark

shadows that Pat Patterson would

rather not have been thinking about on that night in Manhattan as he

walked down the corridor to his

room in the Park Lane Hotel. The

Champ had already convinced him

that he would indeed be the first

man in history to win the first Triple Crown in the history of heavyweight boxing -- and Pat Patterson was far from alone in his conviction that

Leon Spinks would be easy prey,

next time, for a Muhammad Ali in

top condition both mentally and

physically. Spinks was vulnerable:

the same crazy/mean style that made him dangerous also made him easy

to hit. His hands were surprisingly fast, but his feet were as slow as

Joe Frazier's and it was only the

crafty coaching of his trainer, the ancient Sam Solomon, that had

given him the early five-round edge in Las Vegas that Ali had refused to understand until he was so far

behind that his only hope was a

blazing last-minute assault and a

knockout or at least a few

knockdowns that he was too tired,

in the end, to deliver.

Leon was dead on his feet in that

savage fifteenth round -- but so was Muhammad Ali, and that's why

Spinks won the fight. . .

Yes. . . but that is no special secret and there will be plenty of time to deal with those questions of ego and strategy later on in this saga, if in fact we ever get there. The sun is

up, the peacocks are screaming with lust, and this story is so far off the game plan that no hope of salvage

exists at this time -- or at least nothing less than a sweeping, allpoints injunction by Judge Crater,

who maintains an unlisted number

so private that not even Bob Arum

can reach him on short notice.

So we are left with the unhurried

vision of Pat Patterson finally

reaching the door of his room,

number 905 in the Park Lane Hotel

in Manhattan -- and just as he pulls the room key out of his pocket on

the way to a good night's sleep, his

body goes suddenly stiff as he picks up the sound of raucous laughter and strange voices in room number 904.

Weird sounds from The Champ's

suite. . . Impossible, but Pat

Patterson knows he's stone sober and nowhere near deaf, so he drops

his key back in his pocket and

moves one step down the hallway,

listening carefully now to these

sounds he hopes are not really

there. . . Hallucinations, bad nerves, almost anything but the sound of a

totally unknown voice -- and the voice of a "white devil," no doubt about that -- from the room where

Ali and Veronica are supposed to

be sleeping peacefully. Bundini and Conrad had both promised to be

gone at least an hour ago. . . But, no!

Not this: not Bundini and Conrad

and the voice of some stranger, too; along with the unmistakable sound of laughter from both The

Champ and his wife. . . Not now, just when things were getting close to intolerably serious.

What was the meaing?

Pat Patterson knew what he had to

do: he planted both feet in the rug in front of 904 and knocked. Whatever was going on would have to be cut

short at once, and it was his job to do the cutting -- even if he had to get rude with Bundini and Conrad.

Well. . . this next scene is so strange that not even the people who were

part of it can recount exactly what happened. . . but it went more or

less like this: Bundini and I had just

emerged from a strategy conference in the bathroom when we heard the

sudden sound of knocking on the

door. Bundini waved us all into

silence as Conrad slouched

nervously against the wall below

the big window that looked out on

the snow-covered wasteland of

Central Park; Veronica was sitting

fully clothed on the king-size bed

right next to Ali, who was stretched out and relaxed with the covers

pulled up to his waist, wearing

nothing at all except. . . Well, let's

take it again from Pat Patterson's view from the doorway, when

Bundini answered his knock:

The first thing he saw when the

door opened was a white stranger

with a can of beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, sitting cross-legged on the bureau that

faced The Champ's bed -- a bad

omen for sure and a thing to be dealt with at once at this ominous point in time; but the next thing Pat Patterson saw turned his face into spastic wax

and caused his body to leap straight back toward the doorway like he'd

just been struck by lightning.

His professional bodyguard's eyes

had fixed on me just long enough to be sure I was passive and with both hands harmlessly occupied for at

least the few seconds it would take him to sweep the rest of the room

and see what was wrong with his

Five-Million-Dollars-an-hour

responsibility. . . and I could tell by the way he moved into the room and

the look on his face that I was suddenly back at that point where

any movement at all or even the

blink of an eye could change my life forever. But I also knew what was

coming and I recall a split second

of real fear as Pat Patterson's drop-forged glance swept past me and

over to the bed to Veronica and the inert lump that lay under the sheets right beside her.

For an instant that frightened us all, the room was electric with absolute

silence -- and then the bed seemed to literally explode as the sheets

leaped away and a huge body with

the hairy red face of the Devil

himself leaped up like some jack-

in-the-box out of hell and uttered a wild cry that jolted us all and sent such an obvious shock through Pat

Patterson that he leaped backward

and shot out both elbows like

Kareem coming down with a

rebound. . .

Rolling Stone, # 264, May 4, 1978

Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the

Far Room

PART II

Wild Ravings of an Autograph

Hound. . . A Threat of Public

Madness. . . the Pantyhose Press Conference

I waited until I was sure the

Muhammad Ali party was well off

the plane and up the ramp before I

finally stood and moved up the aisle, fixing the stewardess at the door with a blind stare from behind two mirror lenses so dark that I

could barely see to walk -- but not so dark that I failed to notice a

touch of mockery in her smile as I

nodded and stepped past her.

"Goodbye, sir," she chirped. "I hope you got an interesting story."

You nasty little bitch! I hope your next flight crashes in a cannibal country. . . But I kept this thought to

myself as I laughed bitterly and stomped up the empty tunnel to a

bank of pay phones, in the

concourse. It was New York's La

Guardia airport, around eight-thirty on a warm Sunday night in the first week of March, and I had just flown in from Chicago -- supposedly

"with the Muhammad Ali party."

But things had not worked out that

way and my temper was hovering

dangerously on the far edge of

control as I listened to the sound of nobody answering the phone in Hal

Conrad's West Side apartment. . .

That swine! That treacherous lying bastard!

We were almost to the ten-ring

limit, that point where I knew I'd

start pounding on things unless I

hung up quickly before we got to

eleven. . . when suddenly a voice

sounding almost as angry as I felt

came booming over the line. "Yeah, yeah, what is it?" Conrad snapped.

"I'm in a hell of a hurry. Jesus! I was just about into the elevator

when I had to come back and answer this goddamn --"

"YOU CRAZY BASTARD!" I

screamed, cutting into his gravelly mumbling as I slammed my hand

down on the tin counter and saw a

woman using the phone next to me

jump like a rat had just run up her leg.

"It's me, Harold!" I shouted. "I'm out here at La Guardia and my whole

story's fucked and just as soon as I find all my baggage I'm going to get

a cab and track you down and slit your goddamn throat!"

"Wait a minute!" he said. "What the hell is wrong? Where's Ali? Not

with you?"

"Are you kidding?" I snarled. "That crazy bastard didn't even know who

I was when I met him Chicago. I

made a GODDAMN FOOL OF

MYSELF, Harold! He looked at me

like I was some kind of autograph hound!"

"No!" said Conrad. "I told him all about you -- that you were a good

friend of mine and you'd be on the

flight with him from Chicago. He

was expecting you."

"Bullshit!" I yelled. "You told me he'd be traveling alone, too. . . So I stayed up all night and busted my

ass to get a first-class seat on that Continental flight that I knew he'd be catching at O'Hare; then I got

everything arranged with the flight crew between Denver and Chicago,

making sure they blocked off the first two seats so we could sit

together. . . Jesus, Harold," I muttered, suddenly feeling very

tired, "what kind of sick instinct would cause you to do a thing like

this to me?"

"Where the hell is Ali?" Conrad shouted, ignoring my question. "I sent a car out to pick you up, both of you!"

"You mean all of us," I said. "His wife was with him, along with Pat

Patterson and maybe a few others --

I couldn't tell, but it wouldn't have made any difference; they all

looked at me like I was weird;

some kind of psycho trying to

muscle into the act, babbling about sitting in Veronica's seat. . ."

"That's impossible," Conrad snapped. "He knew --"

"Well, I guess he forgot!" I shouted, feeling my temper roving out on the edge again. "Are we talking about brain damage, Harold? Are you

saying he has no memory?"

He hesitated just long enough to let me smile for the first time all day.

"This could be an ugly story, Harold," I said. "Ali is so punch-drunk that his memory's all

scrambled? Maybe they should lift

his license, eh? 'Yeah, let's croak all this talk about comebacks,

Dumbo. Your memory's fucked,

you're on queer street -- and by the way, Champ, what are your job

prospects?'"

"You son of a bitch," Conrad muttered. "Okay. To hell with all this bullshit. Just get a cab and meet us at the Plaza. I should have been there a half-hour ago."

"I thought you had us all booked into the Park Lane," I said.

"Get moving and don't worry about it," he croaked. "I'll meet you at the Plaza. Don't waste any time."

"WHAT?" I screamed. "What am I doing right now? I have a Friday

deadline, Harold, and this is Sunday! You call me in the middle

of the goddamn night in Colorado

and tell me to get on the first plane to Chicago because Muhammad Ali

has all of a sudden decided he

wants to talk to me -- after all that lame bullshit in Vegas -- so I take the insane risk of dumping my whole story in a parachute bag and

flying off on a 2000-mile freakout

right in the middle of a deadline

crunch to meet a man in Chicago

who treats me like a wino when I

finally get there. . . And now you're talking to me, you pigfucker, about WASTING TIME?"

I was raving at the top of my lungs now, drawing stares from every

direction -- so I tried to calm down; no need to get busted for public

madness in the airport, I thought; but I was also in New York with no

story and no place to work and only five days away from a clearly

impossible deadline, and now

Conrad was telling me that my long-

overdue talk with Ali had once again "gone wrong."

"Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza," he was saying. "I'll pull this mess together, don't worry. . ."

"Well. . ." I said. "I'm already here in New York and I definitely want to see you, Harold -- so yeah, I'll be there. But --" I paused for a

moment, fascinated by a scene that

was suddenly running very vividly

behind my eyeballs as I stood there at the pay phone in the concourse "-

- let me tell you what I'm going to do at noon tomorrow, if you don't pull this mess together."

"Not now," he said. "I have to get going --"

"Listen!" I yelled. "I want you to understand this, Harold, because it could do serious things to your

image."

Silence.

"What I plan to do when I wake up

in the Plaza at exactly eleven o'clock tomorrow morning," I said calmly, "is have a few Bloody

Marys and then go down to the hotel drugstore and buy some of those

sheer pantyhose, along with a black wig and some shades like yours,

Harold. . . Then I'll go back up to my room and call the Daily News to say they should have a photographer at the Plaza fountain exactly at noon for a press conference with Ali and Bob Arum. . . and, yes that my name is Hal Conrad, the well-known

boxing wizard and executive spokesman for Muhammad Ali."

"And then, Harold," I continued,

"exactly at noon I will leave my room in the Plaza, wearing nothing

but a pair of sheer pantyhose and a wig and black shades. . . and I will take the elevator down to the lobby and stroll very casually outside and across the street and climb into the Plaza fountain, waving a bottle of Fernet Branca in one hand and a

joint in the other. . . And I'll be

SCREAMING, Harold, at anybody who gets in my way or even stops to stare."

"Bullshit!" he snapped. "You'll get yourself locked up."

"No," I said. "I'll get you locked up.

When they grab me I'll say I'm Hal

Conrad and all I wanted to do was

get things organized for the

upcoming Ali-Arum press

conference -- and then you'll have a new picture for your scrapbook, a

frontpage shot in the News of

'famous boxing wizard Harold Conrad.' "

I suddenly saw the whole scene in

that movie behind my eyes. I would

intimidate anybody in the elevator

by raving and screeching at them

about things like "the broken spirit" and "fixers who steal clothes from the poor." That, followed by an outburst of deranged weeping, would get me down to the

lobby where I would quickly get a

grip and start introducing myself to

everybody within reach and inviting them all to the press conference in the fountain. . . and then, when I

finally climbed into the water and

took a real stance for the noon/lunch crowd, I could hear myself

screeching, "Cast out VANITY!

Look at me -- I'm not VAIN! My

name is Hal Conrad and I feel

wonderful! I'm proud to wear pantyhose in the streets of New

York -- and so is Muhammad Ali.

Yes! He'll be here in just a few

moments, and he'll be dressed just

like me. And Bob Arum too!" I would shriek, "He's not ashamed to wear pantyhose."

The crowd would not be

comfortable with this gig; there was not much doubt about that. A naked

man in the streets is one thing, but the sight of the recently dethroned Heavyweight Champion of the

World parading around in the

fountain, wearing nothing but sheer pantyhose, was too weird to

tolerate.

Boxing was bad enough as it was, and wrestling was worse: but not

even a mob of New Yorkers could

handle such a nasty spectacle as

this. They would be ripping up the

paving stones by the time the police arrived.

"Stop threatening me, you drunken freak!" Conrad shouted. "Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza. I'll have everything under control by the time you get there -- we'll go up to his room and talk there."

I shrugged and hung up the phone.

Why not? I thought. It was too late to catch a turnaround flight back to Colorado, so I might as well check

into the Plaza and get rid of another credit card, along with another

friend. Conrad was trying; I knew that -- but I also knew that this time he was grasping at straws, because

we both understood the deep and

deceptively narrow-looking moat

that eighteen years of celebrity

forced Ali to dig between his

"public" and his "private" personas.

It is more like a ring of moats than just one, and Ali has learned the

subtler art of making each one seem like the last great leap between the intruder and himself. . . But there is always one more moat to get across, and not many curious

strangers have ever made it that far.

Some people will settle happily for a smile and joke in a hotel lobby,

and others will insist on crossing

two or even three of his moats

before they feel comfortably

"private" with The Champ. . . But very few people understand how

many rings there really are:

My own quick guess would be

Nine; but Ali's quick mind and his

instinct for public relations can

easily make the third moat seem like the ninth; and this world is full of sporting journalists who never

realized where they were until the

same "private thoughts" and

"spontaneous bits of eloquence"

they had worked so desperately to

glean from The Champ in some rare flash of personal communication

that none other would ever share,

appeared word for word, in cold

black type, under somebody else's

byline.

This is not a man who needs hired pros and wizards to speak for him;

but he has learned how to use them

so skillfully that he can save himself for the rare moments of

confrontation that interest him. . .

Which are few and far between, but

anybody who has ever met Muhammad Ali on that level will

never forget it. He has a very lonely sense of humor, and a sense of

himself so firmly entrenched that it seems to hover, at times, in that

nervous limbo between Egomania

and genuine Invulnerability.

There is not much difference in his mind between a challenge inside the ring, with Joe Frazier, or in a TV

studio with Dick Cavett. He

honestly believes he can handle it

all; and he has almost two decades of evidence to back him up, at this point; so it takes a rare sense of

challenge to get him cranked up. He had coped with everything from the

White Heavies of Louisville to

Sonny Liston and the War in

Vietnam; from the hostility of old

white draft boards to the sullen

enigma of the Black Muslims; from

the genuine menace of Joe Frazier

to the puzzling threat of Ken Norton.

. . and he has beaten every person

or thing that God or even Allah ever

put in his way -- except perhaps Joe Frazier and the Eternal Mystery of

Women. . .

And now, as my cab moved jerkily

through the snow-black streets of

Brooklyn toward the Plaza Hotel, I

was brooding on Conrad's deranged

plot that I felt would almost

certainly cause me another

nightmare of professional grief and personal humiliation. I felt like a rape victim on the way to a

discussion with the rapist on the

Johnny Carson show. Not even Hal Conrad's fine sense of reality could take me past Moat #5 -- which

would not be enough, because I'd

made it clear from the start that I was not especially interested in

anything short of at least #7 or 8.

Which struck me as far enough, for

my purposes, because I understood

#9 well enough to know that if

Muhammad was as smart as I

thought he was, I would never see

or even smell that last moat.

Wilfrid Sheed, an elegant writer who wrote a whole book titled

Muhammad Ali without ever

crossing the sixth or seventh moat, much less the ninth, has described

that misty battlefield far better than I can. . . but he was paid a lot better, too, which tends to bring a certain balance to situations that would

otherwise be intolerable.

In any case, here is Sheed

recounting the agonies of merely

trying to talk to the subject of his

twenty-dollar-per-copy book:

". . . Ali moves so fast that he even outruns his own people, and no one

seems to know for sure where he is.

I am about to head for his training camp in the Poconos one more time

when word arrives that he has

broken camp for good. What?

Where? Rumors of his comings and

goings suddenly rival Patty

Hearst's. His promoters say he's in Cleveland, and the Times says he's in New York, sparring at the Felt

Forum, but he hasn't been seen at either place. It is a game he plays with the world: dancing out of

range, then suddenly sticking out his face and pulling it back again. . .

"Meanwhile, his elusiveness is abetted by one of the cagiest inner circles since Cardinal Richelieu.

Anyone can see him publicly -- I think it is his secret wish to be seen by every man, woman and child on

the planet earth -- but to see him

privately is harder than getting a

visa from the Chinese Embassy."

Well. . . I have beat on both those doors in my time, meeting with

failure and frustration on both

fronts; but I have a feeling that

Sheed never properly understood

the importance of speaking

Chinese. Or at least having the right interpreter; and not many of these

are attached to either Muhammad

Ali or the Chinese Embassy. . . But in Ali's case, I did, after all, have my old buddy Hal Conrad, whose

delicate function as Muhammad's not-quite-official interpreter with the world of white media I was just beginning to understand. . .

I have known Conrad since 1962,

when I met him in Las Vegas at the

second Liston-Patterson fight. He

was handling the press and

publicity for that cruel oddity, and I was the youngest and most ignorant

"sportswriter" ever accredited to cover a heavyweight championship

fight. . . But Conrad, who had total

control of all access to everything, went out of his way to overlook my

nervous ignorance and my total lack of expense money -- including me

along with all "big names" for things like press parties, interviews with the fighters and above all, the awesome spectacle of Sonny Liston

working out on the big bag, to the

tune of "Night Train," at his crowded and carpeted base camp in

the Thunderbird Hotel. . . As the

song moved louder and heavier

toward a climax of big-band, rock

& roll frenzy, Liston would step into the 200-pound bag and hook it

straight up in the air -- where it would hang for one long and

terrifying instant, before it fell back into place at the end of a one-inch logging chain with a vicious

CLANG and a jerk that would shake

the whole room.

I watched Sonny work put on that

bag every afternoon for a week or

so, or at least long enough to think he had to be at least nine feet tall. . .

until one evening a day or so prior to the fight when I literally bumped into Listen, and his two huge

bodyguards at the door of the

Thunderbird Casino, and I didn't

even recognize The Champ for a

moment because he was only about

six feet tall and with nothing but the dull, fixed stare in his eyes to make him seem different from all the

other rich/mean niggers a man could bump into around the Thunderbird

that week.

So now, on this jangled Sunday night in New York -- more than

fifteen years and 55,000 olive-drab tombstones from Maine to

California since I first realized that Sonny Liston was three inches

shorter than me -- it was all coming together, or maybe coming apart

once again, as my cab approached

the Plaza and another wholly

unpredictable but probably doomed

and dumb encounter with the world

of Big Time Boxing. I had stopped

for a six-pack of Ballantine Ale on

the way in from the airport, and I also had a quart of Old Fitzgerald

that I'd brought with me from home.

My mood was ugly and cynical,

tailored very carefully on the long drive through Brooklyn to match my

lack of expectations with regard to anything Conrad might have tried to

"set up" with Ali.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.

-- Muhammad Ali

Indeed. . . And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good

or ill. But I was in no mood for

joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half-drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at

everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing

with Ali, then retire in shame to my eighty-eight-dollar-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.

But this world does not work on

"real plans" -- mine or anyone else's -- so I was not especially

surprised when a total stranger

wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the

Plaza:

"Doctor Thompson?" he said.

"What?" I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there

was no point in denying it. . . He

had the look of a rich undertaker

who had once been the Light-Heavyweight karate champion of

the Italian Navy; a very quiet

presence that was far too heavy for a cop. . . He was on my side.

And he seemed to understand my

bad nervous condition; before I

could ask anything, he was already

picking up my bags and saying --

with a smile as uncomfortable as

my own: "We're going to the Park Lane; Mister Conrad is waiting for

you. . ."

I shrugged and followed him outside to the long black limo that was parked with the engine running

so close to the front door of the

Plaza that it was almost up on the

sidewalk. . . and about three

minutes later I was face to face with Hal Conrad in the lobby of the Park Lane Hotel, more baffled than ever

and not even allowed enough time

to sign in and get my luggage up to the room. . .

"What took you so goddamn long?"

"I was masturbating in the limo," I said. "We took a spin out around Sheepshead Bay and I --"

"Sober up!" he snapped. "Ali's been waiting for you since ten o'clock."

"Balls," I said, as the door opened and he aimed me down the hall. "I'm tired of your bullshit, Harold -- and where the hell is my luggage?"

"Fuck your luggage," he replied as we stopped in front of 904 and he

knocked, saying, "Open up, it's me."

The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands.

'Welcome!" he said. "Come right in, Doc -- make yourself at home."

I was still shaking hands with

Bundini when I realized where I

was -- standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was

laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different

expressions than I'd seen on their faces in Chicago.

Muhammad leaned up to shake

hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: "Is this him?" he asked.

"You sure he's safe?"

Bundini and Conrad were laughing

as I tried to hide my confusion at

this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get

grounded. . . but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of

changes and I heard myself saying,

"What do you mean -- Is this him?

You bastard! I should have you

arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!"

Ali fell back on the pillows and

laughed. "I'm sorry, boss, but I just couldn't recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody,

but --"

"Yeah!" I said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for -- an

autograph?"

Everybody in the room laughed this

time, and I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon and straight into

somebody else's movie. I put my

satchel down on the bureau across

from the bed and reached in for a

beer. . . The pop-top came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam

that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.

"You scared me," Ali was saying.

"You looked like some kind of a

bum -- or a hippie."

"What?" I almost shouted. " A bum?

A hippie?" I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even

thinking about the gross

transgressions I was committing by

smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad

told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with

Muhammad Ali -- and Jesus Christ!

Not -- of all places -- in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at

midnight, where I had no business being in the first place.). . . But I was mercifully and obviously

ignorant of what I was doing.

Smoking and drinking and tossing

off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first -- and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me

about ten minutes of foulmouthed

raving before I began to get a grip on myself.

Everybody else in the room was

obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful hoot out of this bizarre

spectacle -- which was me; and when the adrenalin finally burned

off I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the

bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs

crossed in front of me like some

kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled

budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?.

. . Ah, fuck these wretched idols

with unspellable names -- let's use Budda, and to hell with Edwin

Newman). . . and suddenly I felt just fine.

And why not?

I was, after all, the undisputed

heavyweight Gonzo champion of the

world -- and this giggling yoyo in

the bed across the room from me

was no longer the champion of

anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch

for. . . So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, "Well, shit -- here I am,

and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been. . . Nice view, decent

company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who

were obviously having a good time

with each other as the conversation recovered from my flaky entrance

and got back on the fast-break,

bump-and-run track they were used

to. . ."

Conrad was sitting on the floor with

his back to the big window that looks out on the savage, snow-covered wasteland of Central Park -

- and one look at his face told me

that he was finished working for the night; he had worked a major

miracle, smuggling a hyena into the house of mirrors, and now he was

content to sit back and see what

happened. . .

Conrad was as happy as a serious

smoker without a serious smoke

could have been right then. . . And

so was I, for that matter, despite the crossfire of abuse and bent humor

that I found myself caught in,

between Bundini and the bed.

Ali was doing most of the talking:

his mood seemed to be sort of

wandering around and every once in

a while taking a quick bite out of

anything that caught his interest, like a good-humored wolverine. . .

There was no talk about boxing, as I recall: we'd agreed to save that for the "formal interview" tomorrow

morning, so this midnight gig was a bit like a warmup for what Conrad

described as "the serious bullshit."

There was a lot of talk about

"drunkards," the sacred nature of

"unsweetened grapefruit" and the madness of handling money -- a

subject I told him I'd long since

mastered: "How many acres do you own?" I kept asking him whenever he started getting too high on his

own riffs. "Not as many as me," I assured him. "I'm richer than Midas,

and nine times as shrewd -- whole valleys and mountains of acres," I continued, keeping a very straight

face: "Thousands of cattle,

stallions, peacocks, wild boar,

sloats. . ." And then the final twist:

"You and Frazier just never learned how to handle money -- but for

twenty percent of the nut I can make you almost as rich as I am."

I could see that he didn't believe

me. Ali is a hard man to con -- but when he got on the subject of his

tragic loss of "all privacy," I figured it was time for the frill.

"You really want a cure for your privacy problem?" I asked him, ripping the top out of another

Ballantine Ale.

He smiled wickedly. "Sure boss --

what you got?"

I slid off the bureau and moved

toward the door, "Hang on," I told him. "I'll be right back."

Conrad was suddenly alert. "Where the hell are you going?" he snapped.

"To my room," I said. "I have the ultimate cure for Muhammad's

privacy problem."

"What room?" he asked, "You don't even know where it is, do you?"

More laughter.

"It's 1011," Conrad said, "right upstairs -- but hurry back," he added. "And if you run into Pat, we

never heard of you."

Pat Patterson, Ali's fearfully

diligent bodyguard, was known to

be prowling the halls and putting a swift arm on anything human or

otherwise that might disturb Ali's

sleep. The rematch with Spinks was

already getting cranked up, and it

was Patterson's job to make sure

The Champ stayed deadly serious

about his new training schedule.

"Don't worry," I said. "I just want to go up to the room and put on my

pantyhose. I'll be a lot more comfortable." The sound of raucous laughter followed me down the hall

as I sprinted off toward the fire exit, knowing I would have to be fast or

I'd never get back in that room --

tonight or tomorrow.

But I knew what I wanted, and I

knew where it was in my parachute

bag: yes, a spectacularly hideous

full-head, real-hair, seventy-five-

dollar movie-style red devil mask -

- a thing so fiendishly real and ugly

that I still wonder, in moments like these, what sort of twisted impulse caused me to even pack the

goddamn thing, much less wear it

through the halls of the Park Lane

and back into Muhammad Ali's suite

at this unholy hour of the night

Three minutes later I was back at

the door, with the mask zipped over my head and the neck-flap tucked

into my shirt. I knocked twice, then leaped into the room when Bundini

opened the door, screaming some

brainless slogan like "DEATH TO

THE WEIRD!"

For a second or two there was no

sound at all in the room -- then the whole place exploded in wild

laughter as I pranced around,

smoking and drinking through the

molded rubber mouth and raving

about whatever came into my head.

The moment I saw the expression on

Muhammad's face, I knew my mask

would never get back to Woody

Creek. His eyes lit up like he'd just

seen the one toy he'd wanted all his life, and he almost came out of the bed after me. . .

"Okay," I said, lifting it off my head and tossing it across the room to the bed. "It's yours, my man -- but let me warn you that not everybody

thinks this thing is real funny."

("Especially black people," Conrad told me later. "Jesus," he said, "I just about flipped when you jumped

into the room with that goddamn

mask on your head. That was really

pushing your luck.") Ali put the mask on immediately

and was just starting to enjoy

himself in the mirror when. . . ye

Gods, we all went stiff as the sound of harsh knocking came through the

door, along with the voice of Pat

Patterson. "Open up," he was shouting. "What the hell is going on in there?"

I rushed for the bathroom, but

Bundini was two steps ahead of me.

. . Ali, still wearing the hideous

mask, ducked under the covers and Conrad went to open the door.

It all happened so fast that we all simply froze in position as Patterson came in like Dick Butkus

on a blood scent. . . and that was

when Muhammad came out of the

bed with a wild cry and a

mushroom cloud of flying sheets,

pointing one long brown arm and a

finger like Satan's own cattle prod, straight into Pat Patterson's face.

And that, folks, was a moment that

I'd just as soon not have to live through again. We were all lucky, I think, that Patterson didn't go for his gun and blow Muhammad away in

that moment of madness before he

recognized the body under the mask.

It was only a split second, but it

could easily have been a hell of a

lot longer for all of us if Ali hadn't dissolved in a fit of whooping

laughter at the sight of Pat

Patterson's face. . . And although

Pat recovered instantly, the smile he

finally showed us was uncomfortably thin.

The problem, I think, was not so

much the mask itself and the shock it had caused him but why The Champ was wearing the goddamn thing at

all; where had it come from? And

why? These were serious times, but

a scene like this could have

ominous implications for the future

-- particularly with Ali so pleased with his new toy that he kept it on his head for the next ten or fifteen

minutes, staring around the room and saying with no hint of a smile in his voice that he would definitely

wear it for his appearance on the

Dick Cavett show the next day.

"This is the new me," he told us.

"I'll wear it on TV tomorrow and tell Cavett that I promised Veronica that I won't take it off until I win my title back. I'm gonna wear this ugly thing everywhere I go -- even when

I get into the ring with Spinks next time." He laughed wildly and

jabbed at himself in the mirror.

"Yes indeed!" he chuckled. "They thought I was crazy before, but they ain't seen nothin' yet."

I was feeling a little on the crazy side myself, at that point -- and

Patterson's accusing presence soon

told us it was time to go.

"Okay, boss," Ali said to me on the way out. "Tomorrow we get

serious, right? Nine o'clock in the morning. We'll have breakfast, and

get real serious."

I agreed, and went upstairs to my room for a bit of the good smoke.

Muhammad Speaks. . . A Second

Shot from Spinks. . . The Hippie in the Wing Tips. . . The Triple

Greatest of All Times. . .

I was up at eight-thirty the next day, but when I called Ali's suite,

Veronica said he'd been up since

seven and "was wandering around downstairs somewhere."

I found him in the restaurant, sitting

at one end of a table full of cut glass and silver, dressed almost as

formally as the maitre d' in a dark blue pin-stripe suit and talking very seriously with a group of friends

and very earnest black businessmen

types who were all dressed the

same way he was. It was a

completely different man from the

one I'd been sparring and laughing

with the night before. The

conversation around the table

ranged from what to do about a just received invitation to visit some

new country in Africa, to a bewildering variety of endorsement

offers, to book contracts, real estate and the molecular structure of

crabmeat.

It was midmorning before we

finally went upstairs to his suite "to get serious.". . . And what follows is a ninety-nine percent verbatim

transcript of our conversation for

almost the next two hours.

Muhammad was stretched out on the

bed, still wearing his "senator's

suite," and balancing my tape recorder on his stomach while he

talked. I was sitting cross-legged

right next to him on the bed, with a bottle of Heineken in one hand, a

cigarette in the other and my shoes on the floor beside me.

The room was alive with the

constant comings and goings of

people bearing messages, luggage,

warnings about getting to the Cavett show on time. . . and also a very

alert curiosity about me and what I

was up to. The mask was nowhere in sight, but Pat Patterson was, along with three or four other very serious-looking black gentleman

who listened to every word we

said. One of them actually kneeled

on the floor right next to the bed, with his ear about thirteen inches

away from the tape recorder, the

whole time we talked.

Okay, we might as well get back to what we were talking about

downstairs. You said you're

definitely going to fight Spinks again, right?

I can't say I'm definitely going to fight Spinks again. I think we are.

I'm sure we are -- but I might die, he might die.

But as far as you're concerned, you want to, you're counting on it.

Yeah, he plans to fight me. I gave

him a chance and he will give me a

shot back at it. The people won't

believe he's a true champion until

he beats me twice. See, I had to beat Liston twice, Johansson had to beat Patterson twice, but he didn't.

Randy Turpin had to beat Sugar Ray

twice, but he didn't. If he can beat me twice, then people will really

believe that he might possibly be

the greatest.

Okay, let me ask you. . . at what point, at what time -- I was in Vegas for the fight-- when did you realize that things were getting real serious?

Round twelve.

Up to then you still thought you had control.

I was told that I was probably

losing, but maybe I was even. I had to win the last three and I was too tired to win the last three, then I knew I was in trouble.

But you figured you could pull it off. . . up until round twelve.

Yeah, but I couldn't, 'cause he is

confident, 'cause he is winning and I had to pull it off and he was 197

and I'm 228 and that's too heavy.

Didn't you tell me downstairs at breakfast that you're going to

come in at 205 next time?

I don't know what I'm going to come in at, 205 is really impossible. If I get to 220 I'll be happy. Just be

eight pounds lighter. . . I'll be

happy. I did pretty good at that

weight, to be in condition around

220, even if it's 225, 223, I could

do better.

Well, on a scale of one hundred, what kind of condition were you in for Spinks?

Scale of one hundred? I was eighty.

Where should you have been?

Should have been. . . ninety-eight.

Why didn't you know him better?

You didn't seem ready. . .

Why didn't anybody know him? He slipped up on the press, a ten to one underdog, they called him. He

hadn't gone over ten rounds and

only seven pro fights. What can you know about him?

Okay, let's get to another point: I was down there in Vegas for two weeks and there wasn't much to do except talk and gossip, and there was a lot of talk about whether it would be better for you to come out and zing him right away, take

charge -- or do what I think you did, sort of lay back and. . .

No, you couldn't have said it was

better for me to take charge.

Well, there were two schools of thought: one was you come out

zooming and cracking -- and the other was the sort of slow start, rope-a-dope trip.

No, that wouldn't be wise at my age and my weight to come out zooming

and wear myself out in case I didn't

knock him out. When you don't know a man you got to feel him out.

. . but I know one thing, everybody tires, that's why I laid on the ropes for four, five or six rounds hoping he'd tire, but he didn't. We didn't know he had the stamina and I

wasn't in shape so for me to come

off bing bing bing real fast, I know for sure I'm going to tire but I don't know for sure I'm going to stop him.

But after I tired then I'm in trouble.

How long could you have gone, if

you came out zinging right from the start?

I could have zinged about six

rounds.

So you would have died after six?

No, I wouldn't have died after six, I would have just slowed down and

been on defense, but nobody can tell me how to come out, or how I

should have come out, I did the best thing for my condition.

This may be an odd question but I want to ask you anyway, at the

press conference after the fight I remember Leon saying, "I just wanted to beat this nigger." And it seems to me it was done with a

smile, but when I heard that I felt the whole room get tense.

No, that's okay. I say the same

things. We black people talk about

each other that way, in a humorous

way. "Ah, nig-gah, be quiet." "Ah --

ahh, I can whop that niggah."

"Niggah, you crazy." Those are our expressions. If you say it, I'll slap you. The white man can't call me

nigger like they do.

So it was a joke? It struck me as a very raw note, but. . .

I can't blame you. When I beat

Sonny Listen, I didn't say those

words, but I was glad to win, so I

can't take nothing from Spinks --

he's good, he's a lot better fighter than people thought he was.

Tell me a little about this tri-cornered thing between you and

Norton and Spinks.

Well, Norton feels he deserves the

next shot.

Do you think he does?

No, he deserves a shot a the winner between me and Spinks. I gave

Spinks a shot, he owes me a shot for giving him a shot. The champion

always gets a return. They used to

have return clauses. We didn't have

that, I don't have that. He's giving me a shot 'cause I gave him a break.

I beat Norton twice. Foreman

annihilated Norton, so therefore he's not better than me. I'm the number

one contender, not him.

What did Leon tell you? When I

talked to him in Vegas, I got the feeling he honestly wants to give you a return shot. I think he's ready for that.

Sure he will. By the time this article will come out the fight probably

will have been signed and everything, the date set and we

ready to fight. Don't say yet, but I'm sure it's getting pretty close and I'm the one they'll choose. He makes $5

million with me and $1.5 million

with Norton. Who would you fight?

Anyway, what happens if it turns out that Leon is legally obligated to fight Norton first?

That's all right, I ain't tired. I got four or five more years of good

fighting.

Four or five years?

[Ali nods, grins] Plenty of time, boss. All the time I need.

How do you think Spinks would do against Norton?

I think he'd beat Norton.

Did I hear you say that you were going up to the camp today?

I start training in about two weeks.

And that's going to be straight through for five or six months?

You've never done that before,

have you?

Never in my life, never more than

two months. But this time I'm going to be in there five months, chopping trees, running up hills, I'll be

coming in dancing! Dancing!

[Sudden grin] I'll be winning my title for the third time. . . [Shouting]

The greatest of all times! Of all

times!! [Laughing and jabbing]

Come on now! We're not on TV!

Let's get back to this Norton-

Spinks thing. Why do you say

Spinks will win?

'Cause he's too fast, he's aggressive, he's young, he takes a punch, the

mere fact that he can beat me means he can beat Norton. I'm better than Norton. I pick him, it don't have to be that way, but I pick him.

How about Frazier? Could Leon

have beaten the Joe Frazier of four or five years ago? Around the first

or second time you fought him?

Who does Leon compare to?

Leon, compare to, he compare to

Frazier's style, always coming in,

Spinks. . . Frazier.

Frazier at his best?

Frazier at his best, yeah.

How good is Leon? I don't really know myself.

Leon is unexplored, unknown -- and

after I beat him, he'll come back and win the title and he'll hold it four or five years and he'll go down in

history as one of the great

heavyweights. Not the greatest, but one of the greatest.

So if you fought him one more

time, you think that'd be it? Is that what you're saying?

I'm not sure that'll be it for me. . . I might take another fight -- don't

know yet, according to how I feel

when that time comes.

Did you see Kallie Knoetze, that South African fighter? The one

who beat Bobick?

I heard about him.

Me and Conrad spent a lot of time talking to him before the fight. I was trying to work up a really

serious spectacle between you and him down in South Africa.

He seemed like a nice fellow.

Oh yeah, he was really eager to

have you come down there and fight. Does that interest you, to fight a white cop in South Africa?

On the basis that on that day there'd be equality in the arena where I'm

fighting.

But would that interest you? With all the heavy political overtones?

How do you feel about something like that? Along with a million-dollar gate?

Yeah, I like it. With the approval of

all the other African nations and Moslem countries. I wouldn't go

against their wishes, regardless of how they made the arena that night, if the masses of the country and the world were against it, I wouldn't

go. I know that I have a lot of fans in South Africa, and they want to

see me. But I'm not going to crawl

over other nations to go. The world would have to say: "Well, this case is special, they've given the people justice. His going is helping the

freedom."

There's a dramatic quality to that thing -- I can't think of any other fight that would have that kind of theater. Actually it might even be too much politics. . .

What worries me is gettin' whupped

by a white man in South Africa.

Oh ho Yeah! [Nervous chuckle]

[Room breaks into laughter]

[Laughing] That's what the world needs. . . me getting whupped by a

white man in South Africa! [Still

laughing]

Oh yeah. . .

Getting whupped by a white man

period, but in South Africa? If a white South African fighter beat me. . . ?

Jesus. . .

Oh, Lord. [Chuckles]

Oh, you'd have to win. . . You

would definitely have to win. Did

you see the film of his fight with Bobick? When he took him out in the third round? Was he good?

He was a little slow, but he looked powerful. . . He didn't look to me like you would have any trouble with him, but I'm not an expert. He looked like you'd have to watch it.

. .

Yeah, he took Bobick real hard. I

don't think it would be wise for me to fight him in South Africa. If I beat him too bad and then leave the

country, they might beat up some of the brothers. [Laughter in the

room] Or if he whup me too bad then there might be riots. . . People crazy. You know what I mean? If I

whup him up too bad and look too

good, then the brothers might get

beat up after I leave. I wouldn't fool with it. I'm a representative of black people. . . It'd be good if I don't go to nothing like that. It's too touchy --

it's more than a sport when I get

involved.

But it's the fact that he's white. . .

[Confidentially] Did you know he called me a nigger?

What?

You didn't hear it? The South

African. . .

[Aghast] No!

You was in Vegas, right?

[Confused] Yeah. . . we talked to

him. . .

He said, "That cocky nigger, that's one nigger I want. . ."

[Laughing] Aw, c'mon. He didn't say that. That guy was on his best behavior.

He said: "I want that nigger."

C'mon. . .

[Deep laugh] I was jokin'. . .

He was on best behavior. . . The lawyer said, "You don't understand our country. I mean, it's not like you've heard at all. . ." And Conrad was saying, "Bullshit! You got cages for those black people down there." He was rude.

CONRAD: He gave me a big

argument.

Did he slap you?

CONRAD: Slap me? [Laughs] I had Hunter with me!

I had a can of mace in my pocket. .

.

[Ali, laughing and looking at his watch] Okay, now you've got five minutes.

Let's see. . . five minutes.

I'll give you ten minutes. . . See, see the clock?

Yeah, don't worry, I've got my own clock -- see this magnesium Rolex?

Heavy, eh?. . . And see these? After

you called me a bum and a hippie last night, look what I wore for you this morning [holding up

perforated wing tips].

You're getting a good interview,

man.

Yeah [reached for one of the

shoes], look at that shine too.

Those are some good shoes -- those

shoes must've cost about fifty

dollars.

Yeah. They're about ten years old.

Are they? Same soles?

Yeah, these are my FBI shoes. I only wear them for special

occasions -- nobody's called me a bum and a hippie for a long time.

[Laughs] You're not going to drink your beer? You an alcoholic?

Alcoholic! Bum! Hippie! Remember I've got to write an article about you before Friday!

Heh, heh, heh. You've got the beer. .

. Heh, heh, heh. Bum and a hippie.

Where you going?

Right here, I'll talk louder so you can hear. . . What else you want to ask me?

My head's, uh, I'm still on that South Africa trip, I guess there'd be no way you could go down there without beating Leon first, right?

No, I got to beat Leon first. I will

defeat Leon first. I will go down as the triple greatest of all time.

Oh yeah, I think you might. If you train, if you get serious.

If I get serious? I'm as serious as cancer. Is cancer serious?

Well, yeah, I didn't realize, uh. . .

if you're going to start training now that is serious, that's five months, six months.

I'm going to be ready!

Would you call him a fast fighter. .

. Leon? It seems like a funny word to use for him.

Fast? Yeah he was fast. Faster than I was that night. He's fast period.

Fast hands? Fast feet?

Fast hands. Not as fast as reflexes because of his weight. When I'm

down to my weight that I would like to be I know I'm faster.

I noticed in the third round the

first time I smelled a little bit of trouble was when I saw you

missing him with the jab. . . it would be about six inches.

The one thing I did wrong, I didn't do no boxing hardly before this

fight.

Why?

Well, my belief was at this age, too much pounding and getting hit and

unnecessary training wasn't

necessary.

Well, if too much training would have been bad for that fight, how about the next one, why would it be good for the next fight?

My timing was lost. Well, I'm going to have to box. . . I'm not saying it would have been bad to box; better

for me, see, I wasn't boxing nobody and I was missing a lot of punches

in that fight.

Yeah, I noticed that, that's when I first thought, "Oh oh. . . it'll be a long fight."

That's 'cause I wasn't boxing, I was hitting bad.

You think you could knock Leon

out?. . . I thought you could have in the fifteenth round.

I couldn't follow him up, might

knock him out and might not. . .

Was there any time you thought

maybe you might have. . . did you ever think he was going to knock you out. . . was there any time you thought, oh, oh, he might even put

you down?

No, nothing like that.

Would it be more important next time to get faster?

No, next time it's to be in better

shape, to take him more serious, to know him.

Why the hell didn't you this time?

Didn't know him.

You got some of the smartest people in the business working

with you.

Didn't know him. . . See all of my

worst fights was when I fought

nobodies. Jurgen Blin, Zurich,

Switzerland, seven rounds with

him, didn't look too good. Al Lewis, Dublin, Ireland, a nobody, went

eleven rounds. Jean-Pierre

Coopman, San Juan, Puerto Rico. . .

a nobody.

Bonavena?

He was pretty good. Alfredo Evangelista. A nobody, didn't look

that hot.

Yeah, but Leon, you saw him fight several times, didn't you?

Amateurs, just seven. . . what can

this man do with seven pro fights,

never been over ten rounds. . .

But you had about fifteen or

eighteen pro fights when you

fought Liston the first time.

I don't know.

I think I counted them up the other day. . . nineteen maybe.

I caught him off guard too, I was

supposed to have been annihilated

like this boy was. But my best fights were those fights where I was the

underdog: George Foreman's

comeback, two Liston fights,

Frazier fights, Norton. . .

Is that something in your head?

It makes you hungry, got something to work for. I'm doing good.

Everything is going my way. I'm

eating dinner. I'm living with my

wife and my two children all up to

the fight which ain't that good. Least six weeks before the fight I should get away from my children 'cause

they make you soft. You hug 'em and you kiss them, you know, you 'round babies all day. Day before the fight, I'm babysitting 'cause my wife done some shopping. She didn't mean no

harm.

You can't blame it on her, though.

No. I got to get away from the

babies, I got to get evil. Got to chop trees, run up hills, get in my old log cabin.

You plan to go up there to stay, at the camp, live there until the fight?

Where. . . what fight. . . ?

You say you're going to go up

there and do a monk sort of trip?

No, my wife and babies would be with me, but my babies they cry at

night and they'll be in another cabin.

. .

What about Leon's rib, do you

think you broke his rib?

He got hurt in the fight some kind of way, and I was told after the fight he was hurt and some doctor was

looking at him and that it wasn't that bad, and I guess when it looked like he was going to fight Norton they

had to admit he was hurt 'cause

Norton's a body puncher.

Well, speaking of that, I don't want to bring up any sore subject, but did you see Pacheco on the Tom

Snyder show when he was talking about all athletes getting old. . .?

He seemed to come down pretty

hard. He said physically it would just be impossible for you to get back in shape to beat Leon.

I was fighting years before I knew

Pacheco. He got famous hanging

around me. They all got known. . .

popular. They'd never admit it. . .

and also Pacheco don't know me, he

works in my corner, he's not my real physical doctor.

So you think you can get back in ninety-eight on a scale of a

hundred?

Yeah. What I like, this is what I

love. . . to do the impossible, be the underdog. Pressure makes me go. I

couldn't. . . I didn't beat Frazier the first time, I didn't beat Norton the first time. I gotta beat the animal. I

almost got to lose to keep going. It would be hard for me to keep

getting the spirit up, what have I got to accomplish, who have I got to

prove wrong?

Speaking of that, how did you ever get yourself in the situation where you had so much to lose and so

little to gain by fighting Leon down there?

How did I get in what?

You got yourself in an almost no-

win situation there where you had very little to win and a hell of a lot to lose. It struck me as

strategically bad. . .

That's the way it is, that's the way it's been ever since I held the

crown, I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting Bugner. I didn't have

nothing to gain by fighting Jean-

Pierre Co-opman. I didn't have

nothing to gain by fighting a lot of people.

You sure as hell will next time by

fighting Leon. That will be real pressure.

Oh yeah, I like the pressure, need

the pressure. . . the world likes. . .

people like to see miracles. . .

people like to see. . . people like to see underdogs that do it. . . people like to be there when history is

made.

Raw Eggs and Beer in the Top

Rank Suite. . . A Sea of Noise and Violence. . . An Eerie, Roaring

Chant. . . The Final Bell

One thing that Ernest Hemingway had always told me was that it was a bad idea to get to know an active fighter and become interested in his career. Sooner or later he was going to get hurt in the ring, and beaten, and it would be an almost unbearable thing to see if he were a friend.

-- GEORGE PLIMPTON, Shadow Box

Well. . . I wondered why George

never showed up in Las Vegas.

Muhammad Ali is a friend of

Norman Mailer's, too, and also Budd Schulberg's; along with most

of the other big-time boxing writers who skipped the Spinks fight. I was too strung out on the simple horror of spending two weeks in the Las

Vegas Hilton to understand anything more complex than fear, hunger and

daytime TV, at the time, to grasp my own lack of sensitivity.

And at first I thought it was some

kind of monumental botch on my

part. Sybil Arum tried to reassure

me, but others said I was paranoid.

Day after endless day, I would

check into Top Rank Headquarters

on the fifth floor "Director's Suite"

and ask as casually as possible if

George or Norman had showed up

yet -- and the answer was always

the same.

Or perhaps I was

overcompensating, somehow, for

my shameful malaria freakout in

Zaire by showing up for this one

two weeks earlier than anybody

except Arum and Leon.

After a week or so of feeling so

conspicuously alone in my role of

"behind the scenes fight writer" I finally began passing myself off as the official Top Rank bartender,

instead. I began to get seriously

paranoid about the situation. What

was wrong, I wondered? Had I

chosen the wrong hotel? Were all

the heavies staying somewhere else

like the Aladdin or Caesar's Palace, where the real action was?

Or maybe I was working too hard; doing unnatural things like waking

up at ten o'clock in the morning to attend the daily promo/strategy

meetings down in Arum's Top Rank

"Director's Suite". . . taking voluminous notes on such problems

as the Ghanaian featherweight

challenger's baffling refusal to wear

"Everlast" gloves for his fight with Danny Lopez; and whether the

public should be charged one or

two dollars to attend Ali's daily

workouts -- if and when Ali finally

showed up for any workouts at all; he was not taking the fight seriously, according to rumors out of Dundee's gym in Miami, and to make matters

worse he was also refusing to talk

to anybody except his wife.

There was also the matter of how to cope with a mind-set ranging from

blank apathy to outright mockery on the part of the national boxing press.

The only fight writers who could be counted on for daily ink were locals such as Tommy Lopez from the

Review Journal and Mike Marley from the Las Vegas Sun -- which was good for me, because they both knew a hell of a lot more about the

"fight game" than I did, and between the two of them I was getting a dose of education about the technical

aspects of boxing that I have never known much about. . . But the New

York media continued to dismiss

the fight as either a farce or a fraud

-- or perhaps even a fix, as frustrated challenger Ken Norton

would suggest afterward; and

Arum's humor grew more and more foul as Leon absorbed more and

more bum-of-the-month jokes from

the national boxing press. Arum

was shocked and genuinely

outraged as the prefight coverage

dwindled down to a one-line joke

about "this upcoming mystery match between one fighter who won't

talk, and another who can't."

Spinks wandered in and out of the

suite from time to time, seeming

totally oblivious to what anybody in

the world -- including me and Arum

-- had to say about the fight or

anything else. He was not even

disturbed when his mother arrived

in Las Vegas and told the first

reporter she met that she thought it was "a shame" that her son was going to have to "get beat up on TV"

just to make a bundle of money for

"big business people from New

York."

Leon Spinks is not one of your

chronic worriers. His mind moves

in pretty straight lines, and the more I saw of him in Las Vegas, the more I became convinced that the idea of fighting his boyhood idol for the

Heavyweight Championship of the

World didn't bother him at all, win or lose. "Sure he's The Greatest," he would say to the few reporters who

managed to track him down and ask

him how he felt about Ali, "but he has to give it up sometime, right?"

He was polite with the press, but it was clear that he had no interest at

all in their questions -- and even less in his own answers, which he

passed off as casually as he

dropped two raw eggs in every

glass of beer he drank during

interviews.

Nor did he have any interest in

Arum's desperate scrambling for

pre-fight publicity.

No half-bright presidential

candidate, rock star or

championship boxing promoter

would do anything but fire any

ranking adviser who arranged for him and his wife to spend two

weeks in a small bedroom

adjoining the main suite/bar/war room and the base of all serious

business. . . But this is what Bob

Arum did in Las Vegas, and it was

so entirely out of character for

anybody dealing in Power & Leverage & Money on that scale

that it made me suspicious. Bob and I have been friends long enough for me to be relatively certain he wasn't either dumb or crazy. But I have a

lot of strange friends and I still trust my instincts in this area about

niney-eight percent, despite a few

glaring exceptions in the area of

Southern politicians and black drug dealers wearing Iron Boy overalls,

and until Arum pulls that kind of

switch on me I will still call him my friend and treat him the same way.

Indeed. . . and now that we've

settled that, let's get back to this twisted saga and my feeling in Las

Vegas, as the day of the fight

approached and my lonely perceptions with regard to its

possible meaning and in fact my whole understanding of

professional boxing as either a

sport or a business came more and more into question. . . Well, I began to feel very isolated, down there in the huge Vegas Hilton, and when

even my good friends smiled

indulgently when I said on the

phone that I was having a hell of a hard time getting a bet on Leon

Spinks at ten or even eight to one, I

had a few nervous moments wondering if perhaps I really was as crazy as so much of the evidence suggested.

This was, however, before I'd read Plimpton's book and found out that I was the only writer in America so

cold-hearted as to show up in Las

Vegas to watch Muhammad Ali get

beaten.

Whatever else I might or might not

have been, I was clearly no friend

of The Champ's. . . Which was true

on one level, because I not only showed for the fight, but wallowed

so deep in the quicksands of human

treachery as to bet against him.

At ten to one.

Let's not forget those numbers --

especially not if the difference

between ten and five is really the

difference between a friend and an

enemy.

When the bell rang to start number

fifteen in Vegas, Leon Spinks was

so tired and wasted that he could barely keep his balance for the next three minutes -- and now, after

watching that fight on videotape at least twenty times, I think that even World Lightweight Champ Roberto

Duran could have taken Leon out

with one quick and savage

combination; a hard jab in the eyes to bring his hands up in front of his face just long enough to crack him

under the heart with a right uppercut

-- then another left into the stomach to bring his head forward again, to

that target point in the cross hairs of Ali's brittle but still murderous

bazooka right hand, at twenty or

twenty-one inches. . .

No fighter except Joe Frazier had

ever survived one of Muhammad's

frenzied killer-combinations in a

round as late as the fifteenth; and, until those last, incredibly brutal three minutes in Las Vegas, Leon

Spinks had never gone more than

ten rounds in his life. When he

shuffled half-blindly out of his

corner for number fifteen against The Champ, who was obviously

and terminally behind on points after fourteen, Leon Spinks was

"ready to go," as they say in that merciless, million-dollar-a-minute

world of "the Squared Circle."

. . . But so was Muhammad Ali:

fight films shot from a catwalk

directly above the ring, looking

straight down from the high ceiling of the Hilton Pavilion, show both fighters reeling off balance and

virtually holding on to each other at times, just to keep from falling

down in that vicious final round.

There was no more strategy at that point, and the blood-lust-howl of

the small crowd of 5000 or so

white-on-white pro-Spinks high

rollers who had made the fight a

cynical and almost reluctant sellout in a town where a shrewd promoter

like Arum or Don King or even

Raoul Duke could sell 5000 tickets

to a World Championship Cock

Fight, told Muhammad Ali all he needed to know at that point in time.

The same people who'd been

chanting "All-eee! All-eee!" just a few minutes ago, when it looked

like The Champ had once again

known exactly what he was doing,

all along, as Leon looked to be

fading badly in the late rounds. . .

These same people were now chanting, as if led by some unseen

cheerleader: but they were no

longer saying "All-eee!"

As it became more and more obvious that Muhammad was just as

dead on his feet as Spinks seemed

to be, the hall slowly filled with a new sound. It began late in the

fourteenth, as I recall, and since I was by that time engulfed in the

hell-on-earth chaos that had

overtaken the fifty or so close

friends and Family members in The

Champ's corner where people like

ex-Heavyweight Champ Jimmy

Ellis and Ali's hot-tempered

brother, Rachaman had been

clawing at the ring ropes and screaming doomed advice at

Muhammad ever since Bundini had

become sick and collapsed right

next to Angelo Dundee in the corner at the end of round number twelve,

causing Kilroy and Patterson to start yelling into the mob for a doctor.

Patterson, right in front of me, was holding Bundini with one arm and

waving at Kilroy with the other.

"Drew's had a heart attack," he shouted. "A heart attack."

Ali's corner was a deafening mix of fear, madness and emotional

dysfunction at that point, a sea of noise and violence. . .

Total chaos; and then came the eerie roaring chant from the crowd: ". . .

LEE-ONN! LEE-ONN!. . ." The chant grew louder and somehow

malignant as the fifteenth round

staggered on to its obvious end. . .

"LEE-ONN! LEE-ONN! LEE-

ONN!"

Muhammad Ali had never heard that

chant before -- and neither had Leon Spinks. . .

Or me, either.

Or Angelo, or Bundini, or Kilroy,

or Conrad, or Pat Patterson -- or

Kris Kristofferson either; who was

hanging on to Rita Coolidge just a

few feet away from me and looking

very stricken while the last few seconds ticked off until the bell

finally rang and made every one of

us in that corner feel, suddenly, very old.

Billy the Geek Calls New Orleans: Even Odds & Rancid

Karma

The Ali-Spinks rematch on

September 15th will not be dull.

The early rumor line has Ali a two

to one favorite, but these numbers

will not hold up-- or, if they do,

Spinks as a two to one underdog

will be a very tempting bet, even

for me: and anything higher than that will be almost irresistible.

When I arrived in Las Vegas two

weeks before the last fight I told Bob Arum that I figured Leon had a

twenty percent chance of winning.

That translates into four to one

odds, which even the nickel-and-

dime "experts" said was a bad joke.

The fight was considered such a

gross mismatch that every bookie in Vegas except one had it "Off the Board," meaning no bets at all, because Ali was such a prohibitive

favorite even ten to one was

deemed a sure way to lose money.

As late as the thirteenth round, in

fact, freelance bookies at ringside were still laying eight to one on

Muhammad. My friend Semmes

Luckett, sitting in one of the $200

seats with a gaggle of high rollers, watched the round-by-round

destruction of one poor bastard who lost at least $402,000 in forty-five minutes -- betting on Ali first at ten to one, then down to eight to one

after the first six or seven rounds --

then four to one after eleven, and

finally all the way down to two to

one at the end of thirteen.

The man was in a blathering rage by the time the fight was over. "I was betting on a goddamn legend," he shouted. "I must have been out of my mind."

I have watched the videotape of that fight enough times to risk wondering out loud, at this point, on the subject of what may or may not have been

wrong with Ali's right hand in that fight. It was totally ineffective. The jab was still there, even with five or six pounds of flab to slow it

down. . . and the right was getting through Leon's guard with a

consistency that would have ended

the fight in ten or eleven rounds if Muhammad had been able to land it

with any power at all. Spinks must

have taken twenty-five or thirty

right-hand shots from Ali, and I

doubt if he felt more than one or

two of them.

That was the real key to the fight, and if Ali's right hand is as useless in New Orleans as it was in Las

Vegas, Spinks will win by a TKO

in eight or nine rounds. Both

fighters understand, at this point, that Ali has already tried what he

and his handlers felt was the best strategy for dealing with Leon: that was the time-tested rope-a-dope,

which assumed that a frenzied,

undisciplined fighter like Spinks

would punch himself out in the early rounds, like George Foreman, and

become a tired sitting duck for Ali by the time the bell rang for number ten.

That was a very bad mistake, because Leon did not punch himself out -- and there is no reason to think he will in the rematch. Which means that Ali will have to fight a very

different fight this time: he will

have to risk punching himself out in the first five or six rounds in what Arum is calling "The Battle of New Orleans," and the odds on his

getting away with it are no better

than fifty-fifty. And he will have to be in miraculously top shape, even

then -- because if he can't come

zooming out of his corner at the opening bell and whack Leon off

balance real quick, Muhammad will

not last ten rounds.

If I were a bookie I would make

Leon a sixty-forty favorite, which is exactly the same way Bob Arum

was seeing it, even before the fight finally found a home in New

Orleans.

There are some people in "the Fight Game" who will tell you that Arum doesn't know boxing from

badminton -- but not one of them went on the record last time with

anything riskier than the idea that Leon "might have a chance."

Bob Arum called it sixty-forty Ali

at least six weeks prior to the fight -

- which stunned me at first, because I thought my own twenty percent

figure was borderline madness, at

best.

But Arum stuck with his forty

percent bet on Leon, all the way up to the fight. . . and after watching

Leon for two weeks in Vegas my own figure went up to thirty or

thirty-five percent; or perhaps even forty or forty-five percent on the

day of the fight when I heard Arum

screaming at Spinks on the house

phone at 2:30 in the afternoon,

telling him to stop worrying about

getting tickets for his friends and get ready to do battle against a man that a lot of people including me still

call the best fighter who ever

climbed into a ring. . . and if I had known, before the fight, that Leon

forced his handlers to get him a steak for lunch at 5:00, I would

probably have called the fight even.

That's how The Battle of New

Orleans looks to me now: Dead

Even -- and if the numbers turn up

that way on September 15th, I will

bet on Muhammad Ali, for reasons

of my own. I hate to lose any bet, but losing on this one would not hurt that much. The last twenty years of my life would have been just a little bit cheaper and duller if Muhammad

Ali had not been around to keep me cranked up, and there is no way I

could bet against him this time, in what could well be his last fight. I figure I can afford to bet on him and lose; that is an acceptable risk. . .

But something very deep inside me

curdles at the thought of what kind of rancid karma I could bring down

on myself if I bet against him, and he won.

That is not an acceptable risk.

The Roving Tripod, the Experts

at the Hilton Bar. . . A Final Adventure in Fish-Wrap

Journalism

Muhammad Ali has interested a lot

of different people for a lot of very different reasons since he became a media superstar and a high-energy

national presence almost two

decades ago. . . And he has

interested me, too, for reasons that ranged from a sort of amused

camaraderie in the beginning, to

wary admiration, then sympathy & a

new level of personal respect, followed by a dip into a different

kind of wariness that was more

exasperation than admiration. . . and finally into a mix of all these things that never really surfaced and came together until I heard that he'd

signed to fight Leon Spinks as a

"warmup" for his $16 million swan song against Ken Norton.

This was the point where my

interest in Muhammad Ali moved

almost subconsciously to a new and

higher gear. I had seen all of Leon's fights in the 1976 Montreal

Olympics, and I recall being

impressed to the point of awe at the way he attacked and destroyed

whatever they put in front of him. I had never seen a young fighter who could get away with planting both feet and leaning forward when he

hooked with either hand.

Archie Moore was probably the last

big fighter with that rare combination of power, reflexes and

high tactical instinct that a boxer must have to get away with risking moments of total commitment even

occasionally. . . But Leon did it

constantly, and in most of his fights that was all he did.

It was a pure kamikaze style: The Roving Tripod, as it were -- with

Leon's legs forming two poles of the tripod, and the body of his opponent forming the third. Which is

interesting for at least two reasons: 1) There is no tripod until a punch

off that stance connects with the opponent's head or body, so the

effect of a miss can range from fatal to unnerving, or at the very least it will cause raised eyebrows and

even a faint smile or two among the ringside judges who are scoring the fight. . . and, 2) If the punch

connects solidly, then the tripod is formed and an almost preternatural

blast of energy is delivered at the point of impact, especially if the

hapless target is leaning as far back on the ropes as he can get with his

head ducked in and forward in a coverup stance -- like Ali's rope-a-dope.

A boxer who plants both feet and

then leans forward to lash out with a hook has his whole weight and also his whole balance behind it; he cannot pull back at that point,

and if he fails to connect he will not only lose points for dumb

awkwardness, but he'll plunge his

head out front, low and wide open

for one of those close-in

jackhammer combinations that usually end with a knockdown.

That was Leon's style in the

Olympics, and it was a terrifying

thing to see. All he had to do was

catch his opponent with no place to run, then land one or two of those

brain-rattling tripod shots in the

first round -- and once you get

stunned and intimidated like that in the first round of a three-round

(Olympic) bout, there is not enough time to recover. . .

. . . or even want to, for that matter, once you begin to think that this

brute they pushed you into the ring with has no reverse gear and would

just as soon attack a telephone pole as a human being.

Not many fighters can handle that

style of all-out assault without

having to back off and devise a new game plan. But there is no time for devising new plans in a three-round fight -- and perhaps not in ten,

twelve or fifteen rounds either,

because Leon doesn't give you much time to think. He keeps coming,

swarming, pounding; and he can

land three or four shots from both directions once he gets braced and

leans out to meet that third leg of the tripod.

On the other hand, those poor geeks that Leon beat silly in the Olympics were amateurs. . . and we are all a bit poorer for the fact that he was a light-heavyweight when he won that Gold Medal; because if he'd

been a few pounds heavier he would have had to go against the

elegant Cuban heavyweight

champion, Teofilo Stevenson, who

would have beaten him like a gong

for all three rounds.

But Stevenson, the Olympic

heavyweight champ in both 1972

and '76, and the only modern

heavyweight with the physical and

mental equipment to compete with

Muhammad Ali, has insisted for

reasons of his own and Fidel

Castro's on remaining the "amateur heavyweight champion of the

world," instead of taking that one final leap for the great ring that a fight against Muhammad Ali could

have been for him.

Whatever reasons might have led

Castro to decide that an Ali-

Stevenson match -- sometime in

1973 or '74 after Muhammad had

won the hearts and minds of the

whole world with his win over

George Foreman in Zaire -- was not

in the interest of either Cuba, Castro or perhaps even Stevenson himself,

will always be clouded in the dark

fog of politics and the conviction of people like me that the same low-rent political priorities that heaped a legacy of failure and shame on

every other main issue of this

generation was also the real reason why the two great heavyweight

artists of our time were never

allowed in the ring with each other.

This is one of those private

opinions of my own that even my friends in the "boxing industry" still dismiss as the flaky gibberish of a half-smart writer who was doing

okay with things like drugs,

violence and presidential politics, but who couldn't quite cut the

mustard in their world.

Boxing.

These were the same people who

chuckled indulgently when I said, in Las Vegas, that I'd take every bet I could get on Leon Spinks against

Muhammad Ali at ten to one, and with anybody who was seriously

into numbers I was ready to haggle

all the way down to five to one, or maybe even four. . . but even at

eight to one it was somewhere

between hard and impossible to get

a bet down on Spinks with anybody

in Vegas who was even a fifty-fifty bet to pay off in real money.

One of the few consistent traits

shared by "experts" in any field is that they will almost never bet

money or anything else that might turn up in public on whatever they

call their convictions. That is why they are "experts." They have waltzed through that mine field of

high-risk commitments that

separates politicians from

gamblers, and once you've reached

that plateau where you can pass for an expert, the best way to stay there is to hedge all your bets, private

and public, so artistically that

nothing short of a thing so bizarre that it can pass for an "act of God"

can damage your high-priced reputation. . .

I remember vividly, for instance,

my frustration at Norman Mailer's

refusal to bet money on his almost

certain conviction that George

Foreman was too powerful for

Muhammad Ali to cope with in

Zaire. . . And I also recall being

slapped on the chest by an

Associated Press boxing writer in

Las Vegas while we were talking

about the fight one afternoon at the

casino bar in the Hilton. "Leon Spinks is a dumb midget," he snarled in the teeth of all the other experts who'd gathered on that

afternoon to get each other's fix on the fight. "He has about as much chance of winning the heavyweight

championship as this guy."

"This guy" was me, and the AP

writer emphasized his total

conviction by giving me a swift

backhand to the sternum. . .

I have talked to him since, on this

subject, and when I said I planned to quote him absolutely verbatim with regard to his prefight wisdom

in Vegas, he seemed like a different man and said that if I was going to quote him on his outburst of public stupidity that I should at least be fair enough to explain that he had

"been with Muhammad Ali for so long and through so many wild

scenes that he simply couldn't go against him on this one."

Well. . . this is my final adventure

in fish-wrap journalism and I frankly don't give a fuck whether or not it makes sense to the readers. . .

especially since you chintzy

greedheads tried to put a double-

page, full-color H----* ad right in the middle of this story. . .

* The name of this manufacturer was deleted at the last minute by the publisher after angry & greedy consultations with the RS advertising department.

Somewhere in my files I have a

letter from Honda's U.S. ad agency

that says they would just as soon

avoid any image identification with ROLLING STONE. . . and those lame/tin bastards have heaped

enough abuse on me over the years

to make me wonder what kind of

mentality we're dealing with if

they've come so far around the bend that they now want to put a gigantic Honda ad right in the middle of my article.

Fuck those people. I wouldn't ride a Honda to Richard Nixon's funeral. .

. and in fact the last person I knew

who owned a Honda was Ron Ziegler; that was down in San

Clemente, just before The

Resignation, and I recall that Ron

was eager to lend the thing to me,

for reasons I never quite

understood. . . but I remember a

cocktail party down at Nixon's

house, crazed on mescaline and

bending the casual elbow with Ron,

Henry Kissinger, General Haig and

others of that stripe, who were all very friendly at that point in time.

Even to me. . . Annie Leibovitz was

there and I was negotiating with Ziegler about trading me his Honda

for my Z-Datsun for a few days,

while Ziegler's deputy, Gerald

Warren, was laughing with Annie

about how Kissinger thought I was

"an Air Force Colonel in mufti. . ."

"Tell him he's right," I whispered to Annie. "Then let's trade for

Ziegler's bike and run it straight off the Laguna Beach pier tomorrow

morning. I'll take the bugger out

over the water at top speed while

you get a few good shots, then I'll get off in midair before it hits. . .

Right, and we'll give Ron an

autographed photo from 'The

Colonel.' "

Whoops. . . here we go again,

drifting back to the good old days, when men were men and fun was

fun and a well-mannered Air Force

Doctor could still have cocktails

with the President without causing a scandal.

That was "before the circus left

town," as Dick Goodwin put it so starkly as we sat in a Washington

peg-house on the day of Nixon's

resignation. . . And, indeed,

everything since then has been

downhill. Hamilton Jordan is too fat to ride a motorcycle and Jody

Powell is too slow.

Jesus! How low have we sunk! Was

Ron Ziegler the last free spirit in the White House? Jimmy's sister,

Gloria, rides a big Honda -- but

they won't let her north of

Chattanooga and the rest of the family is laying low, working

feverishly on a formula to convert

peanuts into Swiss francs.

Ah. . . mother of raving God! What

are we into? How did we get down

in this hole! And how can we get

out?

Or -- more on the point -- how can

this cross-eyed story be salvaged,

now that I've spent a whole night

babbling about Ron Ziegler and

Hondas and that crowd of flabby

clubfoots in the White House?

What about the rest of the story?

What about serious journalism?

And decency. . . And truth? and Beauty. . . the Eternal Verities. . .

and Law Day in Georgia? Yes,

that's almost on us again, and this time they want me to deliver the main address. Why not?

For $100,000 I'll do anything, just as long as the cash comes up front. .

. What? Ye Gods! What have I

said? Should we cut that last

outburst? Or maybe just print the bugger and get braced for a Spinks-like assault from the Secret

Service?

No, this shit can't go on. . . it could get me in serious trouble. . . And

what a tragedy it would be if I got locked up now, after ten years of abusing the White House for what

were always good reasons. Ziegler

said it was because I was crazy and Kissinger thought I was some kind

of rogue Air Force Colonel: but my

old friend Pat Buchanan called it "a character defect". . . which may or may not have been true; but if

calling Richard Nixon a liar and a

thief was evidence of a "character defect," what in the hell kind of defect, disease or even brain

damage would cause a man to spend

ten years of his life writing angry, self-righteous speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

"No Vietcong Ever Called Me

'Nigger.' "

Muhammad Ali said that, back in 1967, and he almost went to prison

for it -- which says all that needs to be said right now about justice & gibberish in the White House.

Some people write their novels and

others roll high enough to live them and some fools try to do both -- but Ali can barely read, much less

write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a

third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own

movie.

A brown Jay Gatsby -- not black

and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very

beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby -- an endless

fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for

Wolfsheim, a delicate and

dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby

shuffle for Tom Buchanan and no answers at all for Nick Carraway,

the word junkie.

There are two kinds of counter

punchers in this world: one learns

early to live by his reactions and

quick reflexes, and the other -- the one with a taste for high rolling --

has the instinct to make an

aggressor's art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor's style of the Counter Puncher.

Muhammad Ali decided one day a

long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday that he was not only going to be King of the World

on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else's. . .

Which is very, very High Thinking -

- even if you can't pull it off. Most people can't handle the action on

whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can usually have better sense than to

push their luck any further.

That was always the difference

between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer -- he

came as close as anybody we are

likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Rolling Stone, #265, May 18, 1978

Bibliography of Works by

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,

by Kihm Winship

* NO is used below as an abbreviation for National Observer.

"Renfro Valley" Chicago (Sunday) Tribune; February 18,1962

" 'Leary Optimism' at Home for Kennedy Visitor," National Observer, June 24, 1962, p.

11. On President Valencia of Colombia.

"Nobody Is Neutral Under Aruba's Hot Sun,"

NO, July 16, 1962, p. 14. Bar chat and politics in Aruba, with photo of Thompson on the beach.

"The author, Hunter S. Thompson, is a free lance writer reporting for the National Observer during a lengthy tour of S. America."

"A Footloose American in a Smugglers' Den,"

NO, August 6, 1962, p. 13. Smuggling from

Aruba to Colombia, with photos by Thompson.

"Democracy Dies in Peru, But Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing," NO, August 27,1962, p. 16.

Aftermath of Peruvian election and subsequent coup, with photos by Thompson.

"How Democracy is Nudged Ahead in Equador," NO, September 17, 1962, p. 13. Role of U.S.I.S. in Equador.

"Ballots in Brazil Will Measure the Allure of Leftist Nationalism," NO, October 1, 1962, p. 4.

Upcoming elections in Brazil.

"Operation Triangular: Bolivia's Fate Rides With It," NO, October 15, 1962, p. 13. Tin mining, strikes, etc.

"Uruguay Goes to Polls, With Economy Sagging," NO, November 19, 1962, p. 14.

Politics and economy in Uruguay.

"Chatty Letters During a Journey from Aruba to Rio," NO, December 31,1962, p. 14. Samples of correspondence between Thompson and his editor, with photo of Thompson.

"Troubled Brazil Holds Key Vote," NO, January 7, 1963, p. 1, 10.

"It's a Dictatorship, but Few Seem to Care Enough to Stay and Fight," NO, January 28,1963, p. 17. Paraguay's upcoming election and current situation.

"Brazilian Soldiers Stage a Raid in Revenge,"

NO, February 11, 1963, p. 13. Army soldiers

destroy a clip-joint after some difficulties the week before. "Hunter S. Thompson, author of this account, is a National Observer special correspondent."

"Leftist Trend and Empty Treasury Plague the Latin American Giant," NO, March 11, 1963, p.

11. Economic conditions in Brazil after election.

"A Never-Never Land High Above the Sea,"

NO, April 15, 1963, p. 11. Bolivia's political and economic problems.

"Election Watched as Barometer of Continent's Anti-Democratic Trend," NO, May 20,1963, p.

12. Election in Peru.

"A Time for Sittin', Listenin', and Reverie," NO, June 3, 1963, p. 16 National Folk Festival in

Covington, Ky. A contrast in the music and the following morning's newspapers.

"He Haunts the Ruins of His Once-Great Empire," NO, June 10, 1963, p. 13. Plight of the Inca Indians in Cuzco, Peru.

"Kelso Looks Just Like Any $1,307,000 Horse. .

. A Day With a Champion, . . ." NO, July 15, 1963, p. 1, 7. Visit with Kelso at Belmont Park.

"When the Thumb Was a Ticket to Adventures on the Highway. . . The Extinct Hitchhiker,"

NO, July 22, 1963, p. 12. A super article. "At age 22 I set what I insist is the all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts; 3,700

miles in three weeks."

"Where Are the Writing Talents of Yesteryear?"

NO, August 5, 1963, p. 17. A review of then current novelists; Thompson as literary critic.

"Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border," NO, August 19, 1963, p. 18.

Thompson's comments on Americans he observed while in South America; the "Ugly American" syndrome and its causes.

"An Aussie Paul Bunyan Shows Our Loggers How," NO, September 2, 1963, p. 12. Pacific Coast Loggers Championship in Quincey, California.

"Executives Crank Open Philosophy's Windows," NO, September 9, 1963, p. 13. On Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in Aspen, Colorado.

"One of the Darkest Documents Ever Put Down is 'The Red Lances,' " NO, October 7, 1963, p.

19. Review of Latin American author Arturo Uslar Pietri's The Red Lances.

"Can Brazil Hold Out Until the Next Election?"

NO, October 28, 1963, p. 13.

"Donleavy Proves His Lunatic Humor Is Original," NO, November 11, 1963, p. 17.

Review of A Singular Man by J.P. Donleavy.

"The Crow, a Novelist, and a Hunt; Man in Search of His Primitive Self," NO, December 2,1963, p. 17. Review of Vance Bourjaily's The Unnatural Enemy, a book on bird hunting.

"What Miners Lost in Taking an Irishman," NO, December 16,1963, p. 4. Comment on

kidnapping of USIS official Tom Martin by Bolivian tin-miners.

"When Buck Fever Hits Larkspur's Slopes," NO, December 16, 1963, p. 13. Deer and elk hunting in Colorado; amateurs vs. experienced hunters.

Dateline "Woody Creek."

"Southern City with Northern Problems,"

Reporter, December 19, 1963 (v. 29), p. 26-29.

Study of integration in Louisville, Ky.

(Thompson's hometown). "Mr. Thompson is a free-lance writer."

"And Now a Proletariat on Aspen's Ski Slopes,"

NO, February 10,1964, p. 12. A strike by Aspen's ski patrol brings on Federal arbitration.

"The Catch is Limited in Indians' 'Fish-In,' " NO,

March 9, 1964, p. 13. Marlon Brando's attempt to regain fishing rights for Indians in Washington (State); beginnings of current Indian rights campaign in U.S.

"Dr. Pflaum Looks at the Latins, But His View is Tired and Foggy" NO, March 9, 1964, p. 19.

Review of Arena of Decision by Iriving P.

Pflaum.

"When The Beatniks Were Social Lions," NO, April 20, 1964, p. 1, 14. Memoir of beat scene in San Francisco.

"Brazilian's Fable of a Phony Carries the Touch of Mark Twain," NO, April 20, 1964, p. 17.

Review of Jorge Amado's Home Is the Sailor.

"Golding Tries 'Lord of the Flies' Formula Again,

But It Falls Short," NO, April 27, 1964, p. 16.

Review of William Golding's The Spire.

"What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?" NO, May 25, 1964, p. 1, 13. Haunting consideration of why Hemingway moved to Ketchum, Idaho, and his life there; discussion of writers in America, and the pressures of success.

"Whither the Old Copper Capital of the West?

To Boom or Bust?" NO, June 1, 1964, p. 13.

Thoughts on the future of Butte, Montana.

"The Atmosphere Has Never Been Quite the Same," NO, June 15, 1964, pp. 1, 16. Change and friction on campus in Missoula, Montana; awakening student movement in the U.S.

"Why Montana's 'Shanty Irishman' Corrals

Votes Year After Year," NO, June 22, 1964, p.

12. Mike Mansfield and his Montana supporters.

"Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs,"

NO, July 13,1964, pp. 1,16. Dateline: Pierre, South Dakota -- stories of men he has met while on the road, "boomers" who travel looking for work.

"Bagpipes Wail, Cabers Fly as the Clans Gather," NO, September 14,1964, p. 12. Scottish Gathering and Games in Santa Rosa, California.

"You'd Be Fried Like a Piece of Lean Bacon,"

NO, September 28, 1964, pp. 1, 19. Forest fires in California in late summer of 1964.

"People Want Bad Taste. . . In Everything," NO, November 2,1964, pp. 1,15. Influx of "topless

joints" in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

"A Surgeon's Fingers Fashion a Literary Career," NO, December 21, 1964, p. 17. On Dr.

Robert Geiger, M.D. and novelist and his struggle to be both.

"Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,"

Nation, May 17, 1965 (v. 200), p. 522-26.

Article that eventually turned into the book Hell's Angels; mainly concerned with distorted press coverage of the Angels. Reprinted as:

"Losers And Outsiders" in Violence in the Streets, compiled by Shalom Endleman.

Chicago; Quadrangle Books, 1968, pp. 259-69.

"Nonstudent Left," Nation, September, 27, 1965

(v. 201), pp. 154-58 Study of Berkeley campus,

Free Speech Movement and California's response; the non-student population, its ethos and effects.

"Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog," Spider Magazine, October 13, 1965, Poem.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, New York: Random House, 1966.

"Life Styles: the Cyclist," Esquire, January 1967

(v. 67), pp. 57-63. Excerpt from Hell's Angels.

"Hell's Angels," The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp.

340-55. Excerpt from Hell's Angels, with notes by Tom Wolfe.

"The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies,"

New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967, pp.

28-29+. "The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be a part of it." (p. 124).

"Why Boys Will Be Girls," Pageant, August 1967, pp. 94-101.

"The Ultimate Freelancer," The Distant Drummer, v. 1 no. 1, November 1967.

"Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll," Pageant, July 1968, pp. 6-16.

"Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in Washington," Boston (Sunday) Globe, February 23, 1969, pp. 6-11.

"Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines," Pageant, September 1969, pp. 68-

78.

"The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,"

Scanlan's Monthly, March 1970, v. 1 no. 1, pp.

89-100 Thompson observing the ski champ as he merchandises himself.

"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970, v. 1

no. 4, pp. 1-12. Reputed to be the first piece of

"Gonzo Journalism." Reprinted in The New Journalism (see above) pp. 177-87.

"Police Chief -- The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement" by Raoul Duke. Scanlan's Monthly, September 1970, v. 1 no. 7, pp. 63-66.

Thompson, writing as Duke, airing his weapons fetish.

"The Battle of Aspen," Rolling Stone #67, October 1, 1970, pp. 30-37. Thompson describes his run for sheriff.

"The Aspen Wallposter" (Advertisement), Scanlon's Monthly, January 1971, vol. no. 8, p.

96. Mentions that issues 1-4 are already in print,

#5 coming. Each poster contains graphics by Thomas W. Benton on one side, "screed" by Thompson on the other. Eight Wallposters were eventually published.

"Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," Rolling Stone

#81, April 29, 1971, pp. 30-37. Death/murder of Ruben Salazar and subsequent mood in L.A.

barrio. Describes first meeting with Oscar Zeta Acosta in the "Daisy Duck" in Aspen -- similar to the account in Acosta's book, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.

Liner notes for: Travelin' Lady by Rosalie Sorrels on Sire (Polydor) SI5902. Released August 1971. Thompson's notes on back of album cover.

"Memo From the Sports Desk: The So-Called

'Jesus-Freak' Scare," by Raoul Duke Rolling Stone # 90, September 2, 1971, p. 24.

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,"

by Raoul Duke Rolling Stone #95, November 11, 1971, pp. 36-48; and #96, November 25, 1971, pp. 38-50. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, New York: Random House, 1972.

Thompson's Coverage of the Election

Campaign for Rolling Stone

"Fear & Loathing in Washington: Is This Trip Necessary?" #99, January 6, 1972, pp. 5-8.

"Fear & Loathing In Washington: The Million Pound Shithammer," #101, February 3, 1972, pp.

6-10. Contains his comments on "objective journalism."

"Fear & Loathing in New Hampshire," #103, March 2, 1972, pp. 6-12. Contains car-ride-with-Nixon-talking-football story from 1968

campaign.

"Fear & Loathing: The View from Key Biscayne," #104, March 16, 1972, p. 14. On Nixon.

"Fear & Loathing: The Banshee Screams in Florida," #106, April 13, 1972, pp. 6-14. Florida primary.

"Fear and Loathing in Wisconsin," #107, April 27, 1972, p. 12.

"Fear and Loathing: Late News from Bleak House," #108, May 11, 1972, pp. 26-32.

"Fear & Loathing: Crank-Time on the Low Road," #110, June 8, 1972. pp. 36-40. Nebraska primary.

"Fear & Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance," #112, July 6, 1972, pp. 698

"Fear & Loathing: In the Eye of the Hurricane,"

#113, July 20, 1972, pp. 22-24.

"Fear & Loathing in Miami: Old Bulls Meet the Butcher," #115, August 17, 1972, pp. 30-46.

Democratic convention.

"Fear & Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb" #118, September 28, 1972, pp. 30-46.

"Fear & Loathing: The Fat City Blues," #120, October 26, 1972, pp. 28-30.

"Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls . .." #121, November 9, 1972, p. 48. Final comment on election.

"Fear & Loathing at the Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched. . ." Rolling Stone #128, February 15, 1973, p. 10. Discusses early career as

sportswriter against Superbowl backdrop.

"Time Warp: Campaign 72," Rolling Stone #138, July 5, 1973, pp. 48-62. Excerpts from forthcoming Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.

Collection of reports Thompson sent to Rolling Stone from January 6, 1972 to February 15, 1973 with additions, corrections and introduction.

"Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami,"

Rolling Stone #140, August 2, 1973, pp. 8-10.

Thompson writing as Raoul Duke and himself.

"Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon

Has Cashed His Check" Rolling Stone #144, September 27, 1973, pp. 30-39, 73-92.

Numerous Steadman illustrations.

"Fear and Loathing in the Bunker," The New York Times, January 1, 1974, p. 19. Thompson's comments on 1973 and fearful predictions for 1974.

America by Ralph Steadman, San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1974. Introduction by Thompson.

"Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl," Rolling Stone #155, February 28, 1974, pp. 28-38, 42-52. Later excerpted in Reporting: The Rolling Stone Style edited by Paul Scanlon, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1977, pp. 215-29, with an introduction. Refers to North Dallas

Forty by Pete Gent, a book of some interest to Thompson scholars.

"Fear and Loathing in Washington: It Was a Nice Place. They Were Principled People, Generally." (Cover Title: "The Boys in the Bag.") Rolling Stone #164 July 4, 1974, pp. 42-47

"Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises" Rolling Stone #171, October 10, 1974, pp. 28-36, 49-52. Reaction to Ford's pardon of Nixon.

"The Great Shark Hunt," Playboy, December 1974, p. 183+.

"Fear and Loathing in Saigon: Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk" Rolling

Stone #187, May 22, 1975, pp. 32-34. Thompson in Saigon as the Vietcong close in.

"Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous,"

Rolling Stone #214, June 3, 1976, pp. 54-64, 84-88. Refers to Jimmy Carter's Law Day Speech.

The speech itself is excerpted in Rolling Stone

#228, December 16, 1976, p. 72.

"The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat: Fear and Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird,"

Rolling Stone #254, December 15, 1977, pp.

48-59. On Oscar Zeta Acosta; his past, his disappearance.

"Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room." Rolling Stone #264, May 4, 1978, pp. 40-46; #265, May 18, 1978, pp. 62-68, 98-

101. On the Ali-Spinks championship bout.

To be published in 1979: The Great Shark Hunt New York: Summit Books, 1979. A collection of shorter pieces.

Bibliography of Works on

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,

by Kihm Winship

"What 'The Spire' Inspires Among Reviewers,"

National Observer, June 1, 1964, p. 17.

Mentions Thompson's review of The Spire ( NO, April 27, 1964 p. 16)

"In and Out of Books," Lewis Nichols, The New

York Times Book Review, March 5, 1967, p. 8.

Brief discussion of Thompson's trip to NYC to promote Hell's Angels.

"Thompson, Hunter," Contemporary Authors, Detroit: Gale, 1968, v. 19-20, p. 429-30.

Standard bio.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, New York: Bantam, 1969. 700 Chapter 13: The Hell's Angels pp. 150-51. Describes how Ken Kesey met the Angels through Thompson.

" 'Freak Power' Candidate May Be the Next Sheriff in Placid Aspen, Colorado," Anthony Ripley, photo by David Hiser, The New York Times, October 19, 1970, p. 44.

"Will Aspen's Hippies Elect a Sheriff?" Edwin

A. Roberts, Jr., National Observer, November 2,1970, p. 6. Good photo of Thompson, shaved scalp, can of Bud and large poster of J. Edgar Hoover in background; excellent article.

"Aspen Rejects Bid of Hippie Candidate for Sheriffs Office," The New York Times, November 5, 1970, p. 32. Short AP news release.

"Catcher in the Wry," Newsweek, May 1,1972, p. 65. With photo.

"Covering Politics and Getting High," Women's Wear Daily credit, in San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1972, p. 17. Good photo of Thompson with bottle of Ballantine Ale.

"For Hunter Thompson, Outrage Is the Only

Way Out," Henry Allen, Book World (Washington Post), July 23, 1972, p. 4.

Interview and article.

"The Prince of Gonzo," J. Anthony Lukas, More: A Journalism Review, November 1972, pp. 4-7. Includes photo.

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972. Thompson may be seen in the character of Karl King, Ch 12, 14-15, p. 135-141, 157-181

"A Political Disease," Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harper's Magazine, July 1973, pp. 92, 94. A very fine review.

The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse, New

York: Random House, 1973, pp. 54, 91-92, 159, 260, 261, 311-- 19, 361. Based on writing for Rolling Stone #119, October 12, 1972; discusses Thompson's coverage of 1972

presidential campaign.

Us & Them: How the Press Covered the 1972

Election, James M. Perry, New York: Clarkson N. Potter 1973, pp. 7, 104, 117-18, 171. Brief references to Thompson's political reporting.

"Loathing and Ignorance on the Campaign Trail: 1972," Wayne Booth, Columbia Journalism Review, November 1973, pp. 7-12. Critical discussion of Theodore White's The Making of the President 1972 and Thompson's campaign coverage; sets forth standard conservative objections to Thompson's style, methods, etc.

"Hunter C. Thompson: Commando Journalist," In

"On the Scene," Playboy, November 1973, p.

188. Short paragraph with photo.

"Paranoia and Wild Turkey: Hunter Thompson in Buffalo," Gene Goffin, Buffalo New Times, March 3, 1974. Good, but hard to find, article in a now defunct Buffalo N.Y., weekly paper.

"Playboy Interview: Hunter Thompson," Craig Vetter, Playboy, November 1974, p. 75+. The major biographical source.

"Trudeaumania," Newsweek, January 13, 1975, p. 49. On Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury: "Last week he was parodying Rolling Stone writer Hunter Thompson."

"The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction

in Recent American Prose Narratives,'' Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Journal of American Studies, April 1975, v. 9 no. 1, p. 69. Truth outstripping fiction in work of Mailer, Thompson, Wolfe, etc.

From The Journal of Popular Culture,

Summe r 1975:

"Gonzo," James Green, pp. 204-20.

"The Freaking New Journalism," Kent Jacobson, pp. 183-96 Discusses Kentucky Derby article.

''There Shall Be No Night," Elizabeth Landreth, pp. 197-203. Discusses Thompson's views of Las Vegas as seen in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

"We've Been Had By the New Journalism: A

Put Down," Robert J. VanDellen, p. 219.

Discusses Kentucky Derby article.

"Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone," Sandy Rovner, Washington Post, May 30, 1975, B, p.

3. Short article on Thompson's departure from Rolling Stone.

"Manifest Destiny in Pago Pago," Nicholas von Hoffman & Garry Trudeau, Rolling Stone

#194, August 28, 1975, p. 32+. Pictures and comment on Trudeau's "Uncle Duke," a character in Doonesbury patterned after Thompson.

The Fight, Norman Mailer, Boston: Little, Brown, 1975, pp. 33, 118-21. Mailer comments on Thompson in Zaire to cover Foreman-Ali bout for Rolling Stone.

"Doonesbury: Drawing and Quartering for Fun

& Profit," Time, February 9, 1976, pp. 57-66.

Cover drawing of characters with Uncle Duke in the center; photo, drawing and famous comment by Thompson re: Trudeau, "If I ever catch the little bastard, I'll tear his lungs out."

'Thompson, Hunter," Contemporary Authors, Detroit: Gale, 1976, v. 17-20, First Revision, p.

728. Standard bio, updated from earlier CA.

"Travels Through America," Harrison E.

Salisbury, Esquire, February 1976, p. 28+.

Thompson on pp. 43-44 comments on violence in American history and life.

"Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and a New Psychiatry," Arnold J. Mandell, M.D., Psychiatry Digest, v. 37, pp. 12-17. Reprint

March 1976 by Medical Digest, Inc. Discussion of Thompson's drug intake and its effects on his prose style.

"New Psychiatry," William Stuckey, Science Digest, March 1976, pp. 26-34. Discusses Dr.

Mandell's article. "TRB: What Carter's Not,"

New Republic, June, 1976, p. 2. Opinions on Jimmy Carter, including Thompson's, which is prefaced, "And here is an unusual character witness. . ."

"Fear and Loathing and Ripping Off," T. Griffith, Time, July 1, 1976, pp. 52-53.

"Checking in with Dr. Gonzo," Playboy, November 1976, p. 254. Short article with photo.

"The Rolling Stone Saga, Part Two," Robert

Sam Anson, New Times, December 10, 1976, p.

22+. Longest article available on Thompson's time at Rolling Stone, numerous photos.

"Member of the Lynching," Craig Vetter, Aspen Anthology, Winter 1976, pp. 63-80. A gonzo memoir by the author of the Playboy interview, concerning mutual adventures in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1974.

The Book of Lists, David Wallechinsky, New York: Morrow, 1977. "12 Writers Who Ran (Unsuccessfully) for Public Office," p. 245, "15

People Who Have Taken Peyote or Mescaline,"

p. 404.

"The Last Laugh," George Plimpton. New York Review of Books, August 4, 1977, p. 2.

Plimpton's article is on death & death fantasies;

mentions that Thompson has contributed one to a forthcoming book, Shadow Box.

Shadow Box, George Plimpton, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977. Numerous Thompson stories; the book is indexed, but it's worth the time to read the whole thing.

"Hunter Thompson: The good doctor tells all. . .

about Carter, cocaine, adrenaline and the birth of Gonzo Journalism," Ron Rosenbaum, High Times, September 1977, pp. 31-39.

"Literary Lasagna," Charles T. Powers, Rolling Stone, October 6, 1977, p. 47. Interview with Elaine Kaufman of "Elaine's" in NYC; she describes cashing a check for Thompson as if it were a high-wire act.

"After Begelman: The Whiz Kids Take Over,"

Maureen Orth, New York, June 12, 1978, pp.

59-64. Mentions film in progress on Thompson.

"The Aspen Story," Outside, September/October 1978, p. 25+. Three articles on Aspen, with mentions of Thompson's run for Sheriff; photo on p. 33.

"Notes from the Battle of New Orleans,"

George Plimpton, Rolling Stone #277, November 2, 1978, pp. 52-56. Article on the second Ali-Spinks heavyweight title fight; reference to HST as intended collaborator for this article on p. 55.

Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed

carefully against DT, italics intact.

Many words that typically have special characters in them (such as cafe) were not printed that way in

the book while others (such as

vis-à-vis) sometimes were and

sometimes were not. Everything

was reproduced in this file exactly as it appeared in the book, aside

from several corrections of

obviously transposed letters. In

Fear and Loathing at the Super

Bowl, at the end of Section II, Thompson indicates that there is

going to be a transcript of a

discussion between him and several of the Raiders players. This did not appear in the book I scanned, so I

checked another different edition --

and it did not appear in there either.

You'll have to make it up for

yourself if you want to read it.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART 1

PART 2

PART II

PART 3

part of a general campaign against

PART 4

PART II