Thirty-Three Years of Fear and Loathing
I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 recently. I haven’t read it in years, but I always liked it better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his most well-known work. Unlike the latter, you kind of have to be a political junkie to appreciate it.
The parallels to where we find ourselves today stand out: A disastrous imperial war supported by both major parties. An arrest that MIGHT turn into a scandal for one of the most corrupt administrations in American history (the arrest of the Watergate burglars took place the summer of the conventions, but the scandal did not really take off until after the election). An economy about to run off the rails but being maintained on life support long enough to reelect the incumbent.
Given the timing of that campaign, thirty-three years ago, many junior people involved in the various campaigns are now senior people in American politics. Bill and Hillary Clinton worked on the McGovern campaign. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other vile Neocons were working for the Henry Jackson campaign, a Democratic incubator of neocon careers. Bush senior was with Nixon as was Donald Rumsfeld. 1972 was the year that George W. Bush began to drift away from his National Guard service by applying for a transfer in May of that year to Alabama so he could work on the Senate campaign of Winton Blount .
Thompson followed the McGovern campaign, which was an insurgent, anti-war campaign derided by the mainstream media and establishment politicians as naïve and radical. McGovern, however, built an excellent organization and beat the crap out of the old-guard dinosaurs of the Democratic party like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, many of whom supported the Vietnam war for years and didn’t like the counterculture at all. These types have never forgiven McGovern to this day and blame him for “ruining” the Democratic party. Reading Thompson’s book provides a corrective to that by showing just how ruined the party was by the beginning of the campaign.
There was another insurgent, popular campaign that year which also drove a stake into the old Democratic coalition: the George Wallace campaign. Wallace, the governor of Alabama was an unabashed segregationist running a right-populist campaign with clear racist overtones. So in the 1972 Democratic primary campaigns you can see the elements that Reagan was able to put together: Take one part George Wallace (racist white southerners and religious fundamentalists), one part Henry Jackson (neocon Likudniks and war-mongering cold war nationalists) and one part Richard Daley/George Meany (the so-called Reagan Democrats: socially conservative, blue-collar northern Catholics) and you have Reagan’s coalition.
Interestingly, George Wallace fell victim that year to another “Lone Nut,” Arthur Bremer, who shot and crippled Wallace, thereby eliminating him as a serious factor although that wasn’t apparent at the time. It is clear many years later that many signs point to the involvement of Nixon’s people in the assassination. Nixon was very anxious about what the investigators found in Bremer’s apartment and was VERY anxious about the reporting after the shooting as can be seen in the Nixon Tapes. There was even a cover set up, since they had Bremer shadow the Nixon campaign before shooting Wallace so it would look like he might have shot Nixon intead. As for the Who Benefits, think about how difficult it would have been for Nixon to win in 1972 if Wallace had split off as a third party candidate after the Democratic convention. That would completely take away Nixon’s Southern Strategy of appealing to racist whites disaffected with Liberalism and the counterculture (a Northern Strategy as well given the popularity of Wallace in northern white working class areas like South Boston). That would have been McGovern’s best chance to win. As it turned out, though, McGovern lost by a landslide.
The amazing thing about the Wallace shooting story in Thompson’s book, is that, as much of a crazed Nixon-hater as Thompson was, it never entered his mind that Nixon would actually do such a thing.
The parallels to where we find ourselves today stand out: A disastrous imperial war supported by both major parties. An arrest that MIGHT turn into a scandal for one of the most corrupt administrations in American history (the arrest of the Watergate burglars took place the summer of the conventions, but the scandal did not really take off until after the election). An economy about to run off the rails but being maintained on life support long enough to reelect the incumbent.
Given the timing of that campaign, thirty-three years ago, many junior people involved in the various campaigns are now senior people in American politics. Bill and Hillary Clinton worked on the McGovern campaign. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other vile Neocons were working for the Henry Jackson campaign, a Democratic incubator of neocon careers. Bush senior was with Nixon as was Donald Rumsfeld. 1972 was the year that George W. Bush began to drift away from his National Guard service by applying for a transfer in May of that year to Alabama so he could work on the Senate campaign of Winton Blount .
Thompson followed the McGovern campaign, which was an insurgent, anti-war campaign derided by the mainstream media and establishment politicians as naïve and radical. McGovern, however, built an excellent organization and beat the crap out of the old-guard dinosaurs of the Democratic party like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, many of whom supported the Vietnam war for years and didn’t like the counterculture at all. These types have never forgiven McGovern to this day and blame him for “ruining” the Democratic party. Reading Thompson’s book provides a corrective to that by showing just how ruined the party was by the beginning of the campaign.
There was another insurgent, popular campaign that year which also drove a stake into the old Democratic coalition: the George Wallace campaign. Wallace, the governor of Alabama was an unabashed segregationist running a right-populist campaign with clear racist overtones. So in the 1972 Democratic primary campaigns you can see the elements that Reagan was able to put together: Take one part George Wallace (racist white southerners and religious fundamentalists), one part Henry Jackson (neocon Likudniks and war-mongering cold war nationalists) and one part Richard Daley/George Meany (the so-called Reagan Democrats: socially conservative, blue-collar northern Catholics) and you have Reagan’s coalition.
Interestingly, George Wallace fell victim that year to another “Lone Nut,” Arthur Bremer, who shot and crippled Wallace, thereby eliminating him as a serious factor although that wasn’t apparent at the time. It is clear many years later that many signs point to the involvement of Nixon’s people in the assassination. Nixon was very anxious about what the investigators found in Bremer’s apartment and was VERY anxious about the reporting after the shooting as can be seen in the Nixon Tapes. There was even a cover set up, since they had Bremer shadow the Nixon campaign before shooting Wallace so it would look like he might have shot Nixon intead. As for the Who Benefits, think about how difficult it would have been for Nixon to win in 1972 if Wallace had split off as a third party candidate after the Democratic convention. That would completely take away Nixon’s Southern Strategy of appealing to racist whites disaffected with Liberalism and the counterculture (a Northern Strategy as well given the popularity of Wallace in northern white working class areas like South Boston). That would have been McGovern’s best chance to win. As it turned out, though, McGovern lost by a landslide.
The amazing thing about the Wallace shooting story in Thompson’s book, is that, as much of a crazed Nixon-hater as Thompson was, it never entered his mind that Nixon would actually do such a thing.
posted by Donald Hunt at 7:28 AM
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