This is a 'mini'-timeline (it's still about twelve thousand words long), mostly focused on the doings of Hunter S. Thompson throughout an alternate 1968 and beyond. There will be two parts; one today, the finale posted tomorrow. This first chapter focuses on events in 1968, up to the election. I hope you enjoy.
On New Year's Day 1968, Hunter S. Thompson had just finished packing for a trip to cover the Nixon campaign when news arrived that the man himself had died. It was not a flashy or especially interesting death. Nobody had killed him. He had not died in the company of a mistress or chin deep into a pile of cocaine. Richard Nixon had simply, in the middle of a strategy talk with H.R. Haldeman and others, clawed briefly at his temple and then fallen. He was dead before he hit the floor, the victim of a one in a million aneurysm.
This left the Republican field wide open. Governor George Romney was polling highest, running a campaign which focused mainly on delivering stern, fatherly lectures to the American people on the nature of national service and duty. It was all very Eisenhower...if Ike had run a Detroit car company before becoming President instead of all the armies of the free world. Nelson Rockefeller was also on the cusp of running. The conservatives, who had lined up behind Nixon, seemed to have been caught flat footed. Some vowed to find an alternative—not a sure thing this late in the game. Others resigned themselves to supporting the very moderate Romney.
Thompson went to cover Nixon's funeral, if only to make sure that the man was actually dead, but couldn't get closer than half a mile. The next day, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner called him with an idea. Why not go and cover Romney? With Nixon dead, the genial little Mormon was currently the frontrunner to take on LBJ in the fall. And since LBJ himself was not doing any campaigning (he was instead spending a lot of time badgering his generals to go kill more VietCong), there was precious little alternative.
Thompson went, with no great enthusiasm, and was surprised to find himself roundly embraced by the Romney camp. The man himself, confident of inevitable victory in the upcoming primaries, was determined to make a run at winning the youth vote in the general election. This made Thompson, who wrote for the very hip Rolling Stone magazine, a valuable resource. For a surreal few days Thompson was allowed to travel directly with the governor, who did his very best to seem not like a square. George Romney tried, bless his heart, but was simply too earnest to really pull it off.
Thompson found himself wondering, with an ever more worrying fixation, what might happen if he talked Romney into eating a few grams of peyote or even a single tab of good Owsley acid. Instead, Thompson gave Romney a few perfunctory motorcycle lessons and convinced him that riding a very loud Harley into a rally would be good for his image. Romney did so, wobbling down the road atop his majestic steel machine (closely chaperoned by a few motorcycle cops, just in case), and only nearly crashed twice. The crowd roared with laughter and applause as Romney put down the kickstand on his hog and then marched up to the stage, bowlegged and jittering with nerves. The governor's poll numbers did not improve, but they also did not fall.
Thompson, watching the whole thing while rolling on an inadvisably humungous dose of acid, produced eight pages of halfway legible but very enthusiastic script in his notebook and then permanently scarred Romney afterwards with tales of his Hell's Angels days. Suddenly, the governor decided that being around Hunter S. Thompson was not worth winning the youth vote after all. For years to come Thompson would sometimes awaken in the night, paralyzed with intense regrets that he had not dosed George Romney right then and there with a dozen tabs of the strongest acid money could buy.
Nelson Rockefeller entered the race in late January and Illinois senator Charles Percy thought about it before deciding that he didn't want to split the liberal Republican vote any further. He did make it clear that he was available as a compromise candidate in the event of a contested convention.
Then, on the first day of February, a sun tanned and very smiley Ronald Reagan emerged from the governor's mansion and announced that he too was seeking the presidency. Keen observers might have noticed the occasional glances he made in the direction of two men standing off to one side. These were F. Clifton White, an arch-Goldwater supporter who had later served as Reagan's campaign manager for his 1966 California gubernatorial run, and Thomas Reed, who was rich and had almost singlehandedly bought Reagan the governorship.
Behind the scenes, they had needed to do some arm-twisting in order to convince Reagan to run. Reagan himself was already quite busy—running the biggest state in the union was sorta tough, as it turned out—and also facing some political troubles at home. He'd recently signed a bill legalizing abortion in California, which had upset the Catholics, and he'd banned the open carry of firearms as well. Ronald Reagan, while he did sometimes shoot guns (though only when there were cameras aimed in his direction), did not appreciate that Black Panthers also shot guns. He liked the fact that they picketed the state capital while open carrying rifles a lot less.
But, as White and Reed had told him, being President would negate all of that. Petty Californian squabbles would magically fade away if only he had the powers of the executive branch at his beck and call.
Still not totally convinced, Reagan had talked with Nancy, who had in turn consulted with her astrologer. The astrologer, reckoning that she might get paid more if she was working for the wife of a President, quickly gave the thumbs up. As it turned out, Venus was in an excellent position for facilitating sudden political moves made by inexperienced Californian conservatives.
So Reagan grinned and, all across America, millions of Republicans found themselves very relieved to have an option other than George Romney. Especially when the California governor, upon being asked a question about George Wallace, answered that he thought the Alabaman's attention to law and order was admirable.
Hunter S. Thompson perked up as well. Now that Ronald Reagan was running for President, the Republican primary had suddenly become very interesting. And Reagan was interesting too, in the way he smiled and spoke thinly veiled crypto-fascism. Thompson immediately took leave of the Romney camp, leaving poor George to deal with a faint but persistent phobia both of motorcycles and Rolling Stone magazine.
Reagan's people had been keeping an eye on their rivals, including the odd things occurring within the Romney camp, and so held Thompson at arm's length when he arrived. Reagan himself, who did not know Hunter S. Thompson at all, went cheerily on his way. He was like Goldwater, Thompson concluded, if Goldwater had been capable of manufacturing anything that resembled human warmth and joy. And Reagan’s smile was so wide, a great big empty gawp of a grin that soothed the beholder and imbued the Gipper with a veneer of confidence and capability.
In spring the Tet Offensive came and LBJ went. Bobby Kennedy took Gene McCarthy to the mat while Hubert Humphrey was floated gently towards the Democratic nomination by corrupt flights of Chicagoan angels. Thompson, observing from afar, contemplated the situation. Reagan had stirred up some controversy and was constantly being compared to Goldwater by the liberal wing of the Republican party (he wanted to end Medicare, after all. Very unpopular, even amongst the more consistently sociopathic conservative base voters). However, this did not stop him from sewing up the right wing of the party. People like John Tower and Strom Thurmond had gone to his side, all but guaranteeing the Republican south. Curtis LeMay, a darling of war-hawks everywhere, had also offered himself to the Reagan camp as a military advisor and possible running mate…though nobody took that last part seriously.
Someone who remained quiet, oddly enough, was Barry Goldwater himself. Though Reagan and Goldwater occupied a similar ideological space, Goldwater was a principled enough man that when he saw Reagan accepting favors from people like Strom Thurmond, he began to feel uncertain about the Californian's ability to properly bring forth the truth of the cause. Conservatism was meant to be about liberty, not venal pandering to cheap bigots and paranoid Bircher scum.
Quietly, Goldwater began to worry that he had just been outmoded.
The first few Republican primaries went about as expected. Romney narrowly won New Hampshire and Reagan won everything else, while Rockefeller floundered and made desperate plans to consolidate at the convention and ensure a victory for the liberal wing of the party (meaning: himself).
On the fourth of April, something horrible happened in Memphis. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., hero of the civil rights movement and champion of the forgotten American underclass, was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room, speaking to friends in the parking lot below. The shot had come from across the street, from a boarding house perhaps thirty meters away (or the shadows in front of it, where there were bushes for a gunman to hide). A white man in a suit was observed running around the corner of the boarding house by several witnesses. He stepped into a waiting black Cadillac and was whisked away.
The Memphis police, helpfully advised by senior members of the FBI, quickly arrived and took control of the scene. They arrested a perennial failure named James Earl Ray. Ray had been staying in the boarding house, in a room with a window that looked out onto King's balcony. The fact that this window was blocked by a cypress tree was ignored by the police...at least until the tree was helpfully cut down the night after the murder by some very well dressed city workers. Ray himself was held up as a white supremacist with a grudge. It was a good story, brief and easily digestible. No mention was made of the mysterious man in the suit and anyone who had seen him received visits from government agents who made them very aware of the legal penalties that existed for doing a silly thing likecontradicting the FBI telling lies on the stand.
Riots erupted across the country. The candidates all performed their due diligence. Bobby Kennedy made an impassioned plea for peace and generally acted like a person who had not ordered King's phone wiretapped during his time as Attorney General. Gene McCarthy urged calm and got hit in the face by a thrown cabbage. Romney rushed back to Michigan and spent the next few days alternating his time between patrolling the street with the police and meeting with local civil rights leaders. Detroit narrowly avoided going up in flames.
Reagan, meanwhile, spoke some very nice words about how peaceful and conscientious Dr. King had been…which he never would have done had King still been alive. California's big cities were blanketed with tear gas and the state national guard, which had increasingly come to resemble the shock troops of an unstable Latin American military regime, were unleashed onto the street. Berkley in particular was savaged and dozens of students ended up in the hospital or worse.
Into the aftermath of this big shock of national violence came a tense period of calm. As spring advanced to summer Reagan did battle with the liberal wing of the Republican party and also a growing number of left wing hecklers, some of whom were savagely beaten by his supporters. Reagan shared folksy anecdotes and rubbed shoulders with quite a few Birchers and White Citizen's Council veterans as he toured the south. Rockefeller and Romney squabbled. Romney insisted that he should be the anti-Reagan lynchpin, while Rockefeller begged to differ. He was, after all, Nelson Rockefeller, a man with an ego to match his prodigious net worth.
Meanwhile, the Democrats fought each other as well, while some of their more unscrupulous strategists began to hope that Reagan took the nomination. In Reagan they saw another Goldwater. These calculations, however, were knocked askew when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a tragic killing, committed by a disturbed man (the soon to be infamous Sirhan Sirhan) who did not appreciate Kennedy's warmth towards Israel. A young political aide named Jerry Springer, who had the misfortune of being right next to Kennedy at the time, was paralyzed from the waist down. A few people claimed that they had seen other shooters, or at least somebody guiding Sirhan into the kitchen so that he could take a shot at Kennedy, but none of these allegations ever went anywhere.
Sirhan Sirhan was taken into custody and swiftly convicted. As it so happened, him and James Earl Ray eventually ended up in the same cell block…though Ray did not ask Sirhan to tag along when he later escaped from prison and vanished forever into the great American aether (or very possibly just the north Tennessee wilderness—his body was never found).
In August, Ronald Reagan entered the Republican National Convention as the clear favorite to win the nomination. George Romney attempted to organize a general anti-Reagan coalition, but was stymied by Rockefeller. So the liberal Republicans fell apart and Ronald Reagan accomplished a narrow first ballot win. Just as Goldwater had seized the nomination four years earlier, so now had Ronald Wilson Reagan. A few small riots erupted outside of the RNC and there was open talk of rebellion by some of the party leaders, but Reagan seemed unbothered by all of it.
In the audience, a certain Californian astrologer clapped very hard and grinned from ear to ear. Venus had been right, as it turned out. Now, the retrograde of Jupiter seemed to be advising that she bump her rates up a little bit. Just enough to afford a new Cadillac and a heated swimming pool.
Perhaps Reagan was right not to be worried, because he quickly soothed some of the moderates by making a surprising running mate selection. Charles Percy, Rockefeller loyalist, would surely be a good sop to the left of the party. Right?
Rockefeller himself was too bitter to acknowledge this proposal, but Percy quickly accepted, wanting to prevent a party schism. Besides, Reagan was a political neophyte. It would be a pretty good gig if he could successfully hitch himself to such a charismatic, friendly face. Perhaps even the presidency would be within reach in 1976.
And so a civil war within the GOP was avoided. Barely.
On the Democratic side of the presidential race, Hubert Humphrey took the nomination in Chicago, to the surprise of no one but the outrage of many. Riots erupted on the streets outside and Mayor Richard Daley's police beat the ever-loving hell out of a great many hippies, yippies, leftists and other assorted countercultural figures.
Still, it could have been worse. Everyone had half an eye cocked towards the RNC and the very real prospect of a Reagan presidency. And Humphrey did bow to the crippled Kennedy faction by selecting Fred Harris as his running mate. The young Oklahoman senator was exciting, charismatic and had enough progressive credos to keep most of the peaceniks on side. Still, left wing enthusiasm for Humphrey was muted. A surprising number of counterculture figures decided instead to cast their votes for Wallace. The Alabaman was a motherfucker, but at least he disliked the political establishment.
Reagan was at first dismissed by many as a joke, a B-list actor who had crawled from movies into the even more farcical world of politics. People laughed and made cracks about the Democrats recruiting Gregory Peck in 1972, but the chuckles were noticeably quieter in California. Reagan was on the move, speechifying, winning endorsements and promising the world to his supporters. Specifics were few and far between, but that was part of the charm...apparently. He met devotedly with Strom Thurmond and assured the old ghoul that Charles Percy would simply be a figurehead, someone to use as a veneer of liberal respectability whenever the establishment started squealing too loudly. Thurmond was appeased by this.
Hunter S. Thompson, by now banned from going within five hundred yards of the Reagan campaign headquarters, found himself drifting instead to the Humphrey camp. The Hube did not really know him and instinctively distrusted Rolling Stone, but Fred Harris was savvy enough to have picked up on Thompson's previous adventures and happily agreed to an interview. The interview turned into a long discussion on the merits of the Dallas Cowboys, then a few scotches, then quite suddenly they were in Iowa and Harris had to go out and do some campaigning. Thompson decided, from his place on the floor, that he quite admired the plucky young Oklahoman. If nothing else, Fred Harris was a world class champ at holding his liquor.
[a note from the author: this is true, by the way. I had the pleasure of meeting Fred Harris once. He told me a number of stories about acting as the designated driver for Bobby and Ted Kennedy. The Kennedy brothers still expected him to match them drink for drink though, so he quickly developed an iron liver]
As the summer progressed, the polls tilted more and more in Reagan's favor. Barry Goldwater gave the Gipper a tepid endorsement but did not campaign for him. Charles Percy was mostly sent to the northwest and other bastions of liberal conservatism. He hobnobbed with country club types, downed oysters with distant Rockefeller cousins and got very good at wincing and acting tastefully embarrassed when the conversation turned to whatever horrible thing Ronald Reagan had said that week. Don't worry, he would assure his hosts, he listens to me. He doesn't actually know anything about politics, so I make all the real decisions. I'm practically his boss.
This wasn't actually true, but nobody had to know about that. Charles Percy found that he got the best mileage out of promising that Reagan would be good for law and order. The assurance that Reagan would beat the hell out of some longhaired hippy scum was usually enough to make the country club set warm to him, even if they were fashionably dismayed by his rustic appearance and new money manners.
Hubert Humphrey, in the meantime, traversed the nation and tried desperately to hold together the fraying remnants of the New Deal coalition. Labor fell in line easily enough; the hard hat types might have voted for Nixon or even Wallace, but they had no great love for a right-to-work ghoul like Ronald Reagan. The Teamsters in particular backed Humphrey to the hilt and it was not uncommon to see burly longshoremen and truck drivers doing battle with Republican organizers. One particularly vivid skirmish ended with a pair of Teamsters hoisting a Reagan precinct captain by his belt and hefting him bodily into a fountain.
It was harder to win over southern conservatives. Texas in particular looked worryingly weak, but LBJ assured Humphrey that Reagan's reputation as a plutocratic shill for the business elite would turn people the right way come November. Additionally, work was proceeding nicely on peace talks between North and South Vietnam. They would be hosted in Paris. LBJ was even prepared to offer a bombing freeze if it would coax the North Vietnamese to the table.
Watching this with some cold interest was a German born Harvard professor and foreign policy specialist named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had originally belonged to the Nixon camp but was currently something of a free agent. He gave the Johnson administration advice sometimes (it was through these connections that he knew about the peace talks), but was very deliberately remaining aloof from the electioneering. Kissinger as a person did not actually believe in anything but power itself...and the necessity of somebody like him owning as much of that power as possible.
He watched and waited. Quietly. Patiently.
In October everything finally came together for the Humphrey campaign. The peace talks were announced and the governments of the two Vietnams officially began their negotiations. It had been a real motherfucker to force ARVN President Thieu to the table—Thieu seemed convinced that the peace talks were purely a political move and that the US would withdraw all troops once a ceasefire was declared—…but it had been done. There was a bombing freeze in place also, and the North Vietnamese had paused lethal operations for the time being as a show of good faith. The American people watched this with some cautious hope. Could it be that the war was finally ending?
Reagan's camp dismissed the talks as a stunt. Worse, they were soft. Would peace really be worth the humiliation of sitting down at a table and treating communists like equals?
Despite this public tough talk, Reagan became very worried. Suddenly it looked like the Johnson administration, and Humphrey by default, were on the cusp of ending the war. It seriously undercut all of the fantasies he’d spun about winning the war with one huge shock of all-American violence.
So Reagan blitzed across the nation. He went all through Texas, telling folksy stories (now with a nervous edge) and saying racist things, sometimes even by accident. He also made fringe promises as well, ensuring conservative true believers that he would keep testing American nuclear weapons and wouldn't let the environmentalist weaklings push him around. He even whipped out a line from his days as a motivational speaker for the General Electric corporation and reminded people that trees caused pollution. Or...wait a minute, that hadn't been right...ah shit. Too late, Reagan could see grins spreading across the faces of all the verminous liberal reporters following his campaign. Still, it could have been worse. His supporters cheered just as heartily as ever, no matter what he said. They loved it when he promised to crack down on the Black Panthers and all the other assorted race-hustling liberal scum that were clogging the streets of America's great cities. They especially loved it when he smiled and promised them that American greatness would soon be restored. The fact that liberals called him stupid, uninformed and autocratic was only more proof that he was right.
But his poll numbers were stagnant and Humphrey had made up some serious ground. The Hube had worked himself nearly to death (to the point that Thompson had to retreat to Colorado for a few weeks in order to eat a bunch of mescaline and unwind)…but it all seemed to be paying off.
Then President Thieu torpedoed the peace talks. Officially, his reasoning for doing this was because of seating. The VietCong representative had been seated separately from the North Vietnamese representative, which was obvious proof that the talks were rigged in favor of the communists. So he refused to continue negotiations, and the North Vietnamese walked off in turn.
In actuality, Thieu's actions were more coldly logical. He did not like or trust Lyndon Johnson, and he especially did not trust Hubert Humphrey. In contrast, Ronald Reagan seemed like a much more amenable partner. Reagan wouldn't withdraw American troops or subject him to humiliating and useless peace talks with dastardly communists.
Johnson was apoplectic, but there was not much he could do. Thieu strolled back to Saigon, whistling all the way.
A few days later the American people voted. It surprised nobody when Ronald Reagan won, though the results were narrower than almost everyone had expected. Humphrey hung on to New Jersey, Delaware and Illinois, while Reagan cleaned up in the south. Wallace's vote share was decimated. He lost Louisiana, Arkansas and Georgia (even though he'd reluctantly picked infamous Georgia blowhard Lester Maddox to serve as his running mate), all to Reagan. In the end, Wallace only picked up Mississippi and Alabama, and he did not deadlock the electoral college as he'd hoped.
More shockingly, Reagan took Texas. His win was narrow, by a quarter of one percent, but it delivered him every one of Texas's twenty five electoral votes and, with them, the presidency.
Humphrey reacted with Zen calm. Fred Harris stalked into an empty room in campaign headquarters and then, instead of smashing furniture, punching the wall or even cussing a blue streak, he just stood there with his hands on his hips and felt extremely bleak.
Overall, Reagan had lost the popular vote by about two hundred thousand ballots nationwide, but that didn't seem to matter very much. He was President now, just as the stars had foretold. He celebrated with an ecstatic Nancy and happily granted her astrologer another pay bump. She would go on to buy a boat, a pedigree dog and a Tiffany chandelier.
Hunter S. Thompson sat amidst the detritus of the Humphrey campaign headquarters the following morning, an unlit cigarette sticking crookedly from between his lips. He felt sore, as though he'd been physically beaten. Concession speeches had already been made and everyone but the janitors had gone home. Fred Harris was off to Oklahoma and the Hube was limping back to Washington to lick his wounds.
After a while someone politely kicked Thompson out of the building, so he caught a plane to Grand Junction, then drove to his little rented house in Woody Creek and set up his typewriter in grim silence. For a long moment the page remained blank. Then, in a feverish burst of snarling motion, he typed out a torrent which went something like:
Then the ink ribbon broke, so he had to pause in order to fix it. Thompson took a deep breath, examined the angry, ink spattery marks where his typewriter's keys had brutalized the paper, then lit a cigarette and ruminated on events. It was with a hint of bitter surprise that he found himself missing Richard Nixon.
Thompson thought about burning the paper, but tacked it to his wall instead.
It was a start.
____________________
Part One: The Death of the American Dream
Part One: The Death of the American Dream
On New Year's Day 1968, Hunter S. Thompson had just finished packing for a trip to cover the Nixon campaign when news arrived that the man himself had died. It was not a flashy or especially interesting death. Nobody had killed him. He had not died in the company of a mistress or chin deep into a pile of cocaine. Richard Nixon had simply, in the middle of a strategy talk with H.R. Haldeman and others, clawed briefly at his temple and then fallen. He was dead before he hit the floor, the victim of a one in a million aneurysm.
This left the Republican field wide open. Governor George Romney was polling highest, running a campaign which focused mainly on delivering stern, fatherly lectures to the American people on the nature of national service and duty. It was all very Eisenhower...if Ike had run a Detroit car company before becoming President instead of all the armies of the free world. Nelson Rockefeller was also on the cusp of running. The conservatives, who had lined up behind Nixon, seemed to have been caught flat footed. Some vowed to find an alternative—not a sure thing this late in the game. Others resigned themselves to supporting the very moderate Romney.
Thompson went to cover Nixon's funeral, if only to make sure that the man was actually dead, but couldn't get closer than half a mile. The next day, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner called him with an idea. Why not go and cover Romney? With Nixon dead, the genial little Mormon was currently the frontrunner to take on LBJ in the fall. And since LBJ himself was not doing any campaigning (he was instead spending a lot of time badgering his generals to go kill more VietCong), there was precious little alternative.
Thompson went, with no great enthusiasm, and was surprised to find himself roundly embraced by the Romney camp. The man himself, confident of inevitable victory in the upcoming primaries, was determined to make a run at winning the youth vote in the general election. This made Thompson, who wrote for the very hip Rolling Stone magazine, a valuable resource. For a surreal few days Thompson was allowed to travel directly with the governor, who did his very best to seem not like a square. George Romney tried, bless his heart, but was simply too earnest to really pull it off.
Thompson found himself wondering, with an ever more worrying fixation, what might happen if he talked Romney into eating a few grams of peyote or even a single tab of good Owsley acid. Instead, Thompson gave Romney a few perfunctory motorcycle lessons and convinced him that riding a very loud Harley into a rally would be good for his image. Romney did so, wobbling down the road atop his majestic steel machine (closely chaperoned by a few motorcycle cops, just in case), and only nearly crashed twice. The crowd roared with laughter and applause as Romney put down the kickstand on his hog and then marched up to the stage, bowlegged and jittering with nerves. The governor's poll numbers did not improve, but they also did not fall.
Thompson, watching the whole thing while rolling on an inadvisably humungous dose of acid, produced eight pages of halfway legible but very enthusiastic script in his notebook and then permanently scarred Romney afterwards with tales of his Hell's Angels days. Suddenly, the governor decided that being around Hunter S. Thompson was not worth winning the youth vote after all. For years to come Thompson would sometimes awaken in the night, paralyzed with intense regrets that he had not dosed George Romney right then and there with a dozen tabs of the strongest acid money could buy.
Nelson Rockefeller entered the race in late January and Illinois senator Charles Percy thought about it before deciding that he didn't want to split the liberal Republican vote any further. He did make it clear that he was available as a compromise candidate in the event of a contested convention.
Then, on the first day of February, a sun tanned and very smiley Ronald Reagan emerged from the governor's mansion and announced that he too was seeking the presidency. Keen observers might have noticed the occasional glances he made in the direction of two men standing off to one side. These were F. Clifton White, an arch-Goldwater supporter who had later served as Reagan's campaign manager for his 1966 California gubernatorial run, and Thomas Reed, who was rich and had almost singlehandedly bought Reagan the governorship.
Behind the scenes, they had needed to do some arm-twisting in order to convince Reagan to run. Reagan himself was already quite busy—running the biggest state in the union was sorta tough, as it turned out—and also facing some political troubles at home. He'd recently signed a bill legalizing abortion in California, which had upset the Catholics, and he'd banned the open carry of firearms as well. Ronald Reagan, while he did sometimes shoot guns (though only when there were cameras aimed in his direction), did not appreciate that Black Panthers also shot guns. He liked the fact that they picketed the state capital while open carrying rifles a lot less.
But, as White and Reed had told him, being President would negate all of that. Petty Californian squabbles would magically fade away if only he had the powers of the executive branch at his beck and call.
Still not totally convinced, Reagan had talked with Nancy, who had in turn consulted with her astrologer. The astrologer, reckoning that she might get paid more if she was working for the wife of a President, quickly gave the thumbs up. As it turned out, Venus was in an excellent position for facilitating sudden political moves made by inexperienced Californian conservatives.
So Reagan grinned and, all across America, millions of Republicans found themselves very relieved to have an option other than George Romney. Especially when the California governor, upon being asked a question about George Wallace, answered that he thought the Alabaman's attention to law and order was admirable.
Hunter S. Thompson perked up as well. Now that Ronald Reagan was running for President, the Republican primary had suddenly become very interesting. And Reagan was interesting too, in the way he smiled and spoke thinly veiled crypto-fascism. Thompson immediately took leave of the Romney camp, leaving poor George to deal with a faint but persistent phobia both of motorcycles and Rolling Stone magazine.
Reagan's people had been keeping an eye on their rivals, including the odd things occurring within the Romney camp, and so held Thompson at arm's length when he arrived. Reagan himself, who did not know Hunter S. Thompson at all, went cheerily on his way. He was like Goldwater, Thompson concluded, if Goldwater had been capable of manufacturing anything that resembled human warmth and joy. And Reagan’s smile was so wide, a great big empty gawp of a grin that soothed the beholder and imbued the Gipper with a veneer of confidence and capability.
In spring the Tet Offensive came and LBJ went. Bobby Kennedy took Gene McCarthy to the mat while Hubert Humphrey was floated gently towards the Democratic nomination by corrupt flights of Chicagoan angels. Thompson, observing from afar, contemplated the situation. Reagan had stirred up some controversy and was constantly being compared to Goldwater by the liberal wing of the Republican party (he wanted to end Medicare, after all. Very unpopular, even amongst the more consistently sociopathic conservative base voters). However, this did not stop him from sewing up the right wing of the party. People like John Tower and Strom Thurmond had gone to his side, all but guaranteeing the Republican south. Curtis LeMay, a darling of war-hawks everywhere, had also offered himself to the Reagan camp as a military advisor and possible running mate…though nobody took that last part seriously.
Someone who remained quiet, oddly enough, was Barry Goldwater himself. Though Reagan and Goldwater occupied a similar ideological space, Goldwater was a principled enough man that when he saw Reagan accepting favors from people like Strom Thurmond, he began to feel uncertain about the Californian's ability to properly bring forth the truth of the cause. Conservatism was meant to be about liberty, not venal pandering to cheap bigots and paranoid Bircher scum.
Quietly, Goldwater began to worry that he had just been outmoded.
The first few Republican primaries went about as expected. Romney narrowly won New Hampshire and Reagan won everything else, while Rockefeller floundered and made desperate plans to consolidate at the convention and ensure a victory for the liberal wing of the party (meaning: himself).
On the fourth of April, something horrible happened in Memphis. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., hero of the civil rights movement and champion of the forgotten American underclass, was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room, speaking to friends in the parking lot below. The shot had come from across the street, from a boarding house perhaps thirty meters away (or the shadows in front of it, where there were bushes for a gunman to hide). A white man in a suit was observed running around the corner of the boarding house by several witnesses. He stepped into a waiting black Cadillac and was whisked away.
The Memphis police, helpfully advised by senior members of the FBI, quickly arrived and took control of the scene. They arrested a perennial failure named James Earl Ray. Ray had been staying in the boarding house, in a room with a window that looked out onto King's balcony. The fact that this window was blocked by a cypress tree was ignored by the police...at least until the tree was helpfully cut down the night after the murder by some very well dressed city workers. Ray himself was held up as a white supremacist with a grudge. It was a good story, brief and easily digestible. No mention was made of the mysterious man in the suit and anyone who had seen him received visits from government agents who made them very aware of the legal penalties that existed for doing a silly thing like
Riots erupted across the country. The candidates all performed their due diligence. Bobby Kennedy made an impassioned plea for peace and generally acted like a person who had not ordered King's phone wiretapped during his time as Attorney General. Gene McCarthy urged calm and got hit in the face by a thrown cabbage. Romney rushed back to Michigan and spent the next few days alternating his time between patrolling the street with the police and meeting with local civil rights leaders. Detroit narrowly avoided going up in flames.
Reagan, meanwhile, spoke some very nice words about how peaceful and conscientious Dr. King had been…which he never would have done had King still been alive. California's big cities were blanketed with tear gas and the state national guard, which had increasingly come to resemble the shock troops of an unstable Latin American military regime, were unleashed onto the street. Berkley in particular was savaged and dozens of students ended up in the hospital or worse.
Into the aftermath of this big shock of national violence came a tense period of calm. As spring advanced to summer Reagan did battle with the liberal wing of the Republican party and also a growing number of left wing hecklers, some of whom were savagely beaten by his supporters. Reagan shared folksy anecdotes and rubbed shoulders with quite a few Birchers and White Citizen's Council veterans as he toured the south. Rockefeller and Romney squabbled. Romney insisted that he should be the anti-Reagan lynchpin, while Rockefeller begged to differ. He was, after all, Nelson Rockefeller, a man with an ego to match his prodigious net worth.
Meanwhile, the Democrats fought each other as well, while some of their more unscrupulous strategists began to hope that Reagan took the nomination. In Reagan they saw another Goldwater. These calculations, however, were knocked askew when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a tragic killing, committed by a disturbed man (the soon to be infamous Sirhan Sirhan) who did not appreciate Kennedy's warmth towards Israel. A young political aide named Jerry Springer, who had the misfortune of being right next to Kennedy at the time, was paralyzed from the waist down. A few people claimed that they had seen other shooters, or at least somebody guiding Sirhan into the kitchen so that he could take a shot at Kennedy, but none of these allegations ever went anywhere.
Sirhan Sirhan was taken into custody and swiftly convicted. As it so happened, him and James Earl Ray eventually ended up in the same cell block…though Ray did not ask Sirhan to tag along when he later escaped from prison and vanished forever into the great American aether (or very possibly just the north Tennessee wilderness—his body was never found).
In August, Ronald Reagan entered the Republican National Convention as the clear favorite to win the nomination. George Romney attempted to organize a general anti-Reagan coalition, but was stymied by Rockefeller. So the liberal Republicans fell apart and Ronald Reagan accomplished a narrow first ballot win. Just as Goldwater had seized the nomination four years earlier, so now had Ronald Wilson Reagan. A few small riots erupted outside of the RNC and there was open talk of rebellion by some of the party leaders, but Reagan seemed unbothered by all of it.
In the audience, a certain Californian astrologer clapped very hard and grinned from ear to ear. Venus had been right, as it turned out. Now, the retrograde of Jupiter seemed to be advising that she bump her rates up a little bit. Just enough to afford a new Cadillac and a heated swimming pool.
Perhaps Reagan was right not to be worried, because he quickly soothed some of the moderates by making a surprising running mate selection. Charles Percy, Rockefeller loyalist, would surely be a good sop to the left of the party. Right?
Rockefeller himself was too bitter to acknowledge this proposal, but Percy quickly accepted, wanting to prevent a party schism. Besides, Reagan was a political neophyte. It would be a pretty good gig if he could successfully hitch himself to such a charismatic, friendly face. Perhaps even the presidency would be within reach in 1976.
And so a civil war within the GOP was avoided. Barely.
On the Democratic side of the presidential race, Hubert Humphrey took the nomination in Chicago, to the surprise of no one but the outrage of many. Riots erupted on the streets outside and Mayor Richard Daley's police beat the ever-loving hell out of a great many hippies, yippies, leftists and other assorted countercultural figures.
Still, it could have been worse. Everyone had half an eye cocked towards the RNC and the very real prospect of a Reagan presidency. And Humphrey did bow to the crippled Kennedy faction by selecting Fred Harris as his running mate. The young Oklahoman senator was exciting, charismatic and had enough progressive credos to keep most of the peaceniks on side. Still, left wing enthusiasm for Humphrey was muted. A surprising number of counterculture figures decided instead to cast their votes for Wallace. The Alabaman was a motherfucker, but at least he disliked the political establishment.
Reagan was at first dismissed by many as a joke, a B-list actor who had crawled from movies into the even more farcical world of politics. People laughed and made cracks about the Democrats recruiting Gregory Peck in 1972, but the chuckles were noticeably quieter in California. Reagan was on the move, speechifying, winning endorsements and promising the world to his supporters. Specifics were few and far between, but that was part of the charm...apparently. He met devotedly with Strom Thurmond and assured the old ghoul that Charles Percy would simply be a figurehead, someone to use as a veneer of liberal respectability whenever the establishment started squealing too loudly. Thurmond was appeased by this.
Hunter S. Thompson, by now banned from going within five hundred yards of the Reagan campaign headquarters, found himself drifting instead to the Humphrey camp. The Hube did not really know him and instinctively distrusted Rolling Stone, but Fred Harris was savvy enough to have picked up on Thompson's previous adventures and happily agreed to an interview. The interview turned into a long discussion on the merits of the Dallas Cowboys, then a few scotches, then quite suddenly they were in Iowa and Harris had to go out and do some campaigning. Thompson decided, from his place on the floor, that he quite admired the plucky young Oklahoman. If nothing else, Fred Harris was a world class champ at holding his liquor.
[a note from the author: this is true, by the way. I had the pleasure of meeting Fred Harris once. He told me a number of stories about acting as the designated driver for Bobby and Ted Kennedy. The Kennedy brothers still expected him to match them drink for drink though, so he quickly developed an iron liver]
As the summer progressed, the polls tilted more and more in Reagan's favor. Barry Goldwater gave the Gipper a tepid endorsement but did not campaign for him. Charles Percy was mostly sent to the northwest and other bastions of liberal conservatism. He hobnobbed with country club types, downed oysters with distant Rockefeller cousins and got very good at wincing and acting tastefully embarrassed when the conversation turned to whatever horrible thing Ronald Reagan had said that week. Don't worry, he would assure his hosts, he listens to me. He doesn't actually know anything about politics, so I make all the real decisions. I'm practically his boss.
This wasn't actually true, but nobody had to know about that. Charles Percy found that he got the best mileage out of promising that Reagan would be good for law and order. The assurance that Reagan would beat the hell out of some longhaired hippy scum was usually enough to make the country club set warm to him, even if they were fashionably dismayed by his rustic appearance and new money manners.
Hubert Humphrey, in the meantime, traversed the nation and tried desperately to hold together the fraying remnants of the New Deal coalition. Labor fell in line easily enough; the hard hat types might have voted for Nixon or even Wallace, but they had no great love for a right-to-work ghoul like Ronald Reagan. The Teamsters in particular backed Humphrey to the hilt and it was not uncommon to see burly longshoremen and truck drivers doing battle with Republican organizers. One particularly vivid skirmish ended with a pair of Teamsters hoisting a Reagan precinct captain by his belt and hefting him bodily into a fountain.
It was harder to win over southern conservatives. Texas in particular looked worryingly weak, but LBJ assured Humphrey that Reagan's reputation as a plutocratic shill for the business elite would turn people the right way come November. Additionally, work was proceeding nicely on peace talks between North and South Vietnam. They would be hosted in Paris. LBJ was even prepared to offer a bombing freeze if it would coax the North Vietnamese to the table.
Watching this with some cold interest was a German born Harvard professor and foreign policy specialist named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had originally belonged to the Nixon camp but was currently something of a free agent. He gave the Johnson administration advice sometimes (it was through these connections that he knew about the peace talks), but was very deliberately remaining aloof from the electioneering. Kissinger as a person did not actually believe in anything but power itself...and the necessity of somebody like him owning as much of that power as possible.
He watched and waited. Quietly. Patiently.
In October everything finally came together for the Humphrey campaign. The peace talks were announced and the governments of the two Vietnams officially began their negotiations. It had been a real motherfucker to force ARVN President Thieu to the table—Thieu seemed convinced that the peace talks were purely a political move and that the US would withdraw all troops once a ceasefire was declared—…but it had been done. There was a bombing freeze in place also, and the North Vietnamese had paused lethal operations for the time being as a show of good faith. The American people watched this with some cautious hope. Could it be that the war was finally ending?
Reagan's camp dismissed the talks as a stunt. Worse, they were soft. Would peace really be worth the humiliation of sitting down at a table and treating communists like equals?
Despite this public tough talk, Reagan became very worried. Suddenly it looked like the Johnson administration, and Humphrey by default, were on the cusp of ending the war. It seriously undercut all of the fantasies he’d spun about winning the war with one huge shock of all-American violence.
So Reagan blitzed across the nation. He went all through Texas, telling folksy stories (now with a nervous edge) and saying racist things, sometimes even by accident. He also made fringe promises as well, ensuring conservative true believers that he would keep testing American nuclear weapons and wouldn't let the environmentalist weaklings push him around. He even whipped out a line from his days as a motivational speaker for the General Electric corporation and reminded people that trees caused pollution. Or...wait a minute, that hadn't been right...ah shit. Too late, Reagan could see grins spreading across the faces of all the verminous liberal reporters following his campaign. Still, it could have been worse. His supporters cheered just as heartily as ever, no matter what he said. They loved it when he promised to crack down on the Black Panthers and all the other assorted race-hustling liberal scum that were clogging the streets of America's great cities. They especially loved it when he smiled and promised them that American greatness would soon be restored. The fact that liberals called him stupid, uninformed and autocratic was only more proof that he was right.
But his poll numbers were stagnant and Humphrey had made up some serious ground. The Hube had worked himself nearly to death (to the point that Thompson had to retreat to Colorado for a few weeks in order to eat a bunch of mescaline and unwind)…but it all seemed to be paying off.
Then President Thieu torpedoed the peace talks. Officially, his reasoning for doing this was because of seating. The VietCong representative had been seated separately from the North Vietnamese representative, which was obvious proof that the talks were rigged in favor of the communists. So he refused to continue negotiations, and the North Vietnamese walked off in turn.
In actuality, Thieu's actions were more coldly logical. He did not like or trust Lyndon Johnson, and he especially did not trust Hubert Humphrey. In contrast, Ronald Reagan seemed like a much more amenable partner. Reagan wouldn't withdraw American troops or subject him to humiliating and useless peace talks with dastardly communists.
Johnson was apoplectic, but there was not much he could do. Thieu strolled back to Saigon, whistling all the way.
A few days later the American people voted. It surprised nobody when Ronald Reagan won, though the results were narrower than almost everyone had expected. Humphrey hung on to New Jersey, Delaware and Illinois, while Reagan cleaned up in the south. Wallace's vote share was decimated. He lost Louisiana, Arkansas and Georgia (even though he'd reluctantly picked infamous Georgia blowhard Lester Maddox to serve as his running mate), all to Reagan. In the end, Wallace only picked up Mississippi and Alabama, and he did not deadlock the electoral college as he'd hoped.
More shockingly, Reagan took Texas. His win was narrow, by a quarter of one percent, but it delivered him every one of Texas's twenty five electoral votes and, with them, the presidency.
Humphrey reacted with Zen calm. Fred Harris stalked into an empty room in campaign headquarters and then, instead of smashing furniture, punching the wall or even cussing a blue streak, he just stood there with his hands on his hips and felt extremely bleak.
Overall, Reagan had lost the popular vote by about two hundred thousand ballots nationwide, but that didn't seem to matter very much. He was President now, just as the stars had foretold. He celebrated with an ecstatic Nancy and happily granted her astrologer another pay bump. She would go on to buy a boat, a pedigree dog and a Tiffany chandelier.
Hunter S. Thompson sat amidst the detritus of the Humphrey campaign headquarters the following morning, an unlit cigarette sticking crookedly from between his lips. He felt sore, as though he'd been physically beaten. Concession speeches had already been made and everyone but the janitors had gone home. Fred Harris was off to Oklahoma and the Hube was limping back to Washington to lick his wounds.
After a while someone politely kicked Thompson out of the building, so he caught a plane to Grand Junction, then drove to his little rented house in Woody Creek and set up his typewriter in grim silence. For a long moment the page remained blank. Then, in a feverish burst of snarling motion, he typed out a torrent which went something like:
fuck fuckfuckingfuckfkcfuckcowboyactorfascistfuckingfuckinwhitehousefuck -goddamngrinmotherfucker
Then the ink ribbon broke, so he had to pause in order to fix it. Thompson took a deep breath, examined the angry, ink spattery marks where his typewriter's keys had brutalized the paper, then lit a cigarette and ruminated on events. It was with a hint of bitter surprise that he found himself missing Richard Nixon.
Thompson thought about burning the paper, but tacked it to his wall instead.
It was a start.