Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 Quotes
"When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life."
"You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk."
"There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off."
"Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto."
"Washington, D.C., has become the 'Rape Capital of the World.'"
"The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing."
"Crime figures for 'The District' are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover."
"For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car."
"In Washington you get the impression... that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse."
"The thing the political bosses want most is for young people to drop out… because they know the young people can change the system, and the bosses don’t want any change."
"There is not much room for politics in the Amnesty argument. It boils down to an official admission that the American Military Establishment—acting in spiritual concert with the White House and the national Business Community—was Wrong."
"Between the Idea and the Reality… Falls the Shadow."
"If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once."
"The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct."
"One of the worst things about the trip was the fact that the candidate spent the whole time sealed off in his private car with a traveling zoo of local Party bigwigs."
"George McGovern is probably the most honest big-time politician in America."
"The only small point I meant to make when I jackknifed into this trip was that McGovern is unusual, for a politician, in that he is less impressive on TV than he is in person."
"Muskie bombed in New Hampshire, on what even the candidate admitted was his own turf."
"The reason people didn’t vote for Ed Muskie here is that they didn’t have any reason to."
"Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mention this kind of thing—for all the obvious reasons: general humanity, good taste, relevance, etc."
"Ed Muskie was generally conceded—even by his political opponents—to be within an eyelash or two of having the Democratic nomination so skillfully locked up that the primaries wouldn’t even be necessary."
"Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers."
"Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor."
"Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine."
"The idea that George McGovern has the Democratic nomination locked up by mid-April will not be an easy thing for most people to accept."
"The McGovern organization may never reach full flower again."
"If McGovern wins California and New York—and Mankiewicz says they have both of those already wired—he will go to Miami with enough delegates to come very close to winning on the first ballot."
"There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the campaign trail."
"The only way a man can walk straight with no Big Toes is to use a very complex tripod mechanism, five or six retractable aluminum rods strapped to each arm, moving around like a spider instead of a person."
"I am growing extremely weary of writing constantly about politics."
"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."
"He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones."
"I predict regretfully that you in California will see one of the dirtiest campaigns in the history of this state—and you have had some of the dirtiest."
"In my own country I am in a far-off land. I am strong but have no force or power. I win all yet remain a loser."
"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 moment I finish this goddamn thing I have to rush off to New York for the June 20th primary, then back to Washington to get everything packed for the move home to Colorado… and after that to Miami for the Democratic Convention."
"My only objection is that I disagree with almost everything he said."
"Decadence decadence... Sooner or later it was bound to come to this."
"I’ve been hearing a lot about how the McGovern campaign is finally turning dishonest, but I didn’t believe it until now."
"These bastards are getting out of hand."
"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."
"Jesus Christ! I thought. The Candidate! That crouching figure up there at the food table is George McGovern."
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light." – Dylan Thomas
"The bedrock truths of the McGovern convention were not aired on TV."
"Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenaline high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign."
"The only real question in Miami was whether or not McGovern might be stripped of more than half of the 271 delegates he won in the California primary."
"The old bulls never quit until the young bulls run them out. The old bulls are dead, but don’t forget that the young bulls eventually become old bulls too." – James H. Rowe
"Every airport has a ‘VIP Lounge.’ The one in Atlanta is an elegant neo-private spa behind a huge wooden door near Gate 11."
"Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying—even if it’s all stone crazy."
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen the ocean. Oh, I saw it out in California, but not like this. Not close up."
"You're asking me to compress about two hundred hours of work into sixty seconds."
"Nixon sold the party for the next twenty years by setting up an Agnew/Kennedy race in ’76."
"Politics is a rotten, frequently degrading business that corrupts everybody who steps in it."
"The real reason why so many Old Guard Democrats are backing away from McGovern is a powerful desire to regain their control of the Democratic Party."
"He understands that politics is a rotten, frequently degrading business that corrupts everybody who steps in it, but this knowledge no longer bothers him."
"A win would retire him automatically, and a loss would probably shatter his personality along with his ego."
"Nixon sees his margin of safety on November 7th in the number of anti-McGovern Democrats he can coax across the line to vote for him."
"You don't have the look of a man who's been to the well. I can see it in your face!"
"I wanted to see what it was like on the inside of a winning campaign."
"It was just about then that somebody noticed my 'press' tag was attached to my shirt by a blue and white MCGOVERN button."
"They seemed to feel I was mocking their efforts in some way… and at that point the argument became so complex and disjointed that I can’t possibly run it all down here."
"I politely dismissed all suggestions that I remove my MCGOVERN button, but I agreed to carry a sign and wear a plastic hat like everybody else."
"Don’t worry," I assured them. "You’ll be proud of me. There’s a lot of bad blood between me and John Chancellor. He put acid in my drink last month at the Democratic Convention, then he tried to humiliate me in public."
"All I remember is the first rush: It came up my spine like nine tarantulas… drilled me right to the bar stool for two hours; I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink my eyes."
"You mean John Chancellor goes around putting LSD in people’s drinks? He takes it himself?… He’s a dope addict…?"
"These poor, ignorant young water heads. Would they pass this weird revelation on to their parents when they got back home to Middletown, Shaker Heights, and Orange County?"
"I was ready for some good clean fun at that point, and by the time we got the signal to start moving I was seized by a giddy conviction that we were all about to participate in a spectacle that would go down, as it were, in history."
"But a little bit of that bullshit goes a long way, and I quickly tired of it."
By the time I got to the "periodical press" exit I was almost overcome with a sense of déjà vu. I had seen all this before.
"Jesus," I said finally. "Look at all those goddamn sea otters. I thought they were extinct."
"Not mine," I said. "Not with these U-joints like they are."
"Checking into the Wayfarer was difficult, but not in the way we expected."
"The Wayfarer is one of my favorite places: a rambling, woodsy barracks with big rooms, good food, full ice machines, and… yes… a brief history of pleasant memories."
"That is the odd magic of the New Hampshire primary, and I didn’t really appreciate it until about two months later when I realized that every time McGovern wanted to piss, at least nine Secret Service agents would swoop into the nearest men’s room and clear it completely."
"If George McGovern had a speech writer half as eloquent as Sitting Bull, he would be home free today."
"Given these two depressing options, I figured Tuesday was as good a day as any to get away from politics and act like a human being for a change."
The drug action in Flamingo Park, the official campground for "non-delegates" and other would-be "protesters," was so bottom-heavy with downers that it was known as "Quaalude Alley."
"When the magic words of approval finally zipped across the phone line from the White House to my room on the top floor of the Washington Hilton, my brain went limp with pride."
"There is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group in America today with the psychic leverage of the VVAW."
"The ego is the crucial factor here, but ego is a hard thing to put on paper—especially on that 3x5 size McGovern recommends."
"If McGovern wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants."
"Seldom has the public perception of a major political figure changed so rapidly."
"The National Affairs Suite on the top floor of the Washington Hilton."
"You know, I finally figured out why McGovern’s gonna get his ass beat this year: He doesn’t have half the class of the people who work for him."
"The mood at McGovern’s grim headquarters building at 1910 K Street, NW, in Washington is oddly schizoid these days."
"The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked at this time."
"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 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."
"Let those treacherous bastards eat by themselves. They deserve each other."
"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."
"Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"
"Due to circumstances beyond my control, I would rather not write anything about the 1972 presidential campaign at this time."
"That is the one grim truth of this election most likely to come back and haunt us: The options were clearly defined."
"Our Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde."
"The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season."
"I recall once when I wanted to talk to McGovern, I traded with John Holum who had a girlfriend on the Zoo Plane."
"I was standing at the bar in the clubhouse at Churchill Downs on Derby Day with Ralph Steadman."
"How long will it be before 'demented extremists' in Germany, or maybe Japan, start calling us A Nation of Pigs?"
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." - Jeremiah 8:20
"This country is going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it."