just when I thought it was over

[Hunter Thompson excerpt -- campaign '72]--------------(Now, with no warning, another voice cuts into the sermon.  Four minutes after seven on Easter morning . . . and this one is a McGovern spot, talking about "courage" . . . but the voice has a definite flash quality to it:

Bobby Kennedy, come back to haunt us in the midst of this low-level campaign that would never have been necessary except for Sirhan Sirhan's twisted little hand . . . so now we have the taped voice of Robert Kennedy, long before he took a bullet in the brain, endorsing George McGovern on the radio in Milwaukee on Easter morning, four years later . . . )

There is not much talk about this around the McGovern campaign.  It was Frank Mankiewicz's idea to use the thing, and Mankiewicz was very close to Bobby.  He was the one who had to pull himself together on that grim morning in Los Angeles and go out to make The Announcement to a hospital lobby full of stunned reporters:  "Senator Kennedy died tonight. . ."

So the sound of his voice being used as a Paid Political Commercial is just a hair unsettling to some people -- even to those who might agree with the McGovern / Mankiewicz presumption that Robert would have wanted it this way.

Maybe so.  It's a hard thing to argue, and the odds are far better than even that Robert Kennedy would find McGovern preferable to any other candidate for the Democratic nomination at this time.  He never had much of a stomach for Hubert, except as the lesser of evils, and it probably never occurred to him that dim hacks like Muskie and Jackson would ever be taken seriously. ...

But in another sense the 1972 Democratic Campaign mocks the memory of everything Bobby Kennedy represented in '68.  It is hard to imagine that he would be pleased to see that -- four years after his murder -- the Democratic Party would be so crippled and bankrupt on all fronts that even the best of its candidates would be fighting for life by trying to put a good face on positions essentially dictated by Nixon & George Wallace.

In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary '72 campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them . . . but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice -- that speedy, nasal Irish twang that nailed the ear like a shot of Let It Bleed suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic FM station.

There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy's voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones.  They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968, when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn't run for re-election -- that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

It was like driving an evil King off the throne.  Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be a product of the "New Consciousness."  By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, and The War would be over by Christmas . . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Have mercy, baby, on a poor girl like me,
You know I'm falling, falling, falling at your feet.
I'm tingling right from  my head to my toes,
So help me, help me, help me make the feeling go.

'Cause when the loving starts, and the lights go down,
And there's not another living soul around,
Then you woo me until the sun comes up,
And you say that you love me.

Have pity baby,
Just when I thought it was over,
Now you got me running, running, running for cover.
I'm begging you for a little sympathy,
'Cause if you use me again it'll be the end of me.

'Cause when the loving starts -- and the lights go down,
And there's not another livin' soul around,
Then you woo me until the sun comes up,
And you say -- ay that you love me.

Baby, baby, hope you're gonna stay away,
'Cause I'm getting weaker, weaker every day...
I guess I'm not as strong as I used to be,
And if you use me again it'll be the end of me.

'Cause when the loving starts
and the lights go down
And there's not another living soul around,
Then you woo me until the sun comes up
And you say--ay that you love me.
Fallin' - fallin' - fallin'...
Fallin' -- fallin' -- fallin'....

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
{book excerpt:  Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright 1973.  Straight Arrow.  San Francisco}
{song:  "Say You Love Me" - written by Christine McVie - Fleetwood Mac, Reprise, 1975}

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