storm upon storm

"The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963..." wrote Hunter Thompson in his 1973 book about the 1972 presidential campaign.
{excerpt}--------------- Back in 1960 most Americans still believed that whoever lived in the White House was naturally a righteous and upstanding man. Otherwise he wouldn't be there. . . .

This was after 28 years of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who were very close to God. Harry Truman, who had lived a little closer to the Devil, was viewed more as an accident than a Real President.

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The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas...

...When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration [in 1969] will have to be ranked Number One. Altamont was a nightmare, Chicago was worse, Kent State was so bad that it's still hard to find the right words for it . . . but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes, a wild kind of momentary high, before the shroud came down.

The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I've ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it.
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And when he refers to a "shittrain," he isn't even talking about Watergate!! Seriously. When this account was written Watergate hadn't -- well it had happened, but it wasn't widely known; the writing of this book, or keeping of this diary and these notes ran parallel to the unfolding of facts and situations surrounding the break-in at the Watergate -- little did this wired-up, "gonzo" journalist know, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et. al. were adding boxcars to the shittrain, behind the scenes (if I can mix megaphors).

Too much. Too much. Stop the train. Pull the cord.

And what I want -- what I want is, I want to know, to discover, or more fully imagine What Was Happening before the -- shittrain, as it were -- "left the station." ...

{excerpt, Dallek - Lone Star Rising}----------------- [1960 Dem. Convention] The next day, before delivering their acceptance speeches, Kennedy and Johnson met with black delegates at the Biltmore Hotel. Although the Kennedys had encouraged the convention to approve the most liberal civil rights plank in Democratic party history, liberals saw Johnson's selection as evidence of backtracking or an intention to accommodate the South. To dispel the belief that Kennedy was adopting a "Southern strategy," Lyndon assured black delegates that he was "going to run on the platform that this convention adopted. . . . I assure you from the bottom of my heart that I have done my dead-level best to make progress in the field of civil rights -- that I have done it against great odds, both in the Senate and at home, at times." He promised that if they were elected in November, "you will find . . . that you have made more progress in 4 years than you have made in the last 104 years. . . . I want to campaign from coast to coast on the platform of this convention."

Liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that if the Democrats had nominated a northern liberal for Vice President after adopting so strong a civil rights plank, it would have "confirmed the South in its sense of isolation and persecution. But the nomination of a southern candidate who accepted the platform, including the civil rights plank, restored the Democrats as a national party and associated the South with the pursuit of national goals."

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