dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts

...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
----------[Hunter Thompson excerpt]---------- 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.---------------------- [end excerpt]

========================
She broke down and let me in
Made me see where I've been

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

You don't know what it means to win
Come down and see me again

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "author's note/inroduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song:  "Never Going Back Again" - written, Lindsey Buckingham - Rumours album - Fleetwood Mac - Warner Bros. - released Feb. 1977}

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