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I
Courage and Politics
This is a book about that most admirable of human virtues -- courage.
"Grace under pressure,"
Ernest Hemingway defined it. And these are the stories of the pressures experienced by eight United States Senators and the grace with which they endured them -- the risks to their careers, the unpopularity of their courses, the defamation of their characters, and sometimes, but sadly only sometimes, the vindication of their reputations and their principles.
A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or reward that quality in its chosen leaders today --
and in fact we have forgotten. We may remember how John Quincy Adams became President through the political schemes of Henry Clay, but we have forgotten how, as a young man, he gave up a promising Senatorial career to stand by the nation. We may remember Daniel Webster for his subservience to the National Bank throughout much of his career, but we have forgotten his sacrifice for the national good at the close of that career. We do not remember -- and possibly we do not care.
"People don't give a damn,"
a syndicated columnist told millions of readers not so many years ago, "what the average Senator or Congressman says. The reason they don't care is that they know what you hear in Congress is
99% tripe, ignorance and demagoguery and not to be relied upon...."
Earlier a member of the Cabinet had recorded in his diary:
While I am reluctant to believe in the total depravity
of the Senate, I place but little dependence on the honesty and truthfulness of a large portion of the Senators. A majority of them are small lights, mentally weak, and wholly unfit to be Senators. Some are vulgar demagogues . . . some are men of wealth who have purchased their position . . . [some are] men of narrow intellect, limited comprehension, and low partisan prejudice. . . .
And still earlier a member of the Senate itself told his colleagues that "the confidence of the people is departing from us, owing to our unreasonable delays."
The Senate knows that many Americans today share these sentiments. Senators, we hear, must be politicians -- and politicians must be concerned only with winning votes, not with
statesmanship or courage. Mothers may still want their favorite sons to grow up to be President, but according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, they do not want them to become politicians in the process.
Does this current rash of criticism and disrespect mean the quality of the Senate has declined? Certainly not. For of the three statements quoted above, the first was made in the twentieth century, the second in the nineteenth and the third in the eighteenth (when the first Senate, barely underway, was debating where the Capitol should be located).
Does it mean, then, that the Senate can no longer boast of men of courage?
Walter Lippmann, after nearly half a century of careful observation, rendered in his recent book a harsh judgment both on the politician and the electorate:
With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature,
successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately.
I am not so sure, after nearly ten years of living and working in the midst of "successful democratic politicians," that they are all "insecure and intimidated men." I am convinced that the complication of public business and the competition for the public's attention have obscured
innumerable acts of political courage -- large and small -- performed almost daily in the Senate Chamber.
I am convinced that the decline -- if there has been a decline -- has been less in the Senate than in the public's appreciation of the art of politics,
of the nature and necessity for compromise and balance,
and of the nature of the Senate as a legislative chamber. And, finally, I am convinced that we have criticized those who have followed the crowd --
and at the same time criticized those who have defied it --
because we have not fully understood the responsibility of a Senator to his constituents or recognized the difficulty facing a politician conscientiously desiring, in Webster's words, "to push [his] skiff from the shore alone" into a hostile and turbulent sea.
Perhaps if the American people more fully comprehended the terrible pressures which discourage acts of political courage, which drive a Senator to abandon or subdue his conscience, then they might be less critical of those who take the easier road -- and more appreciative of those still able to follow the path of courage.
-------------------- [excerpt. beginning of Chapter I in Profiles In Courage. Author: John F. Kennedy. 1955.]
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When the car carrying President and Mrs. Kennedy rolled through Dealey Plaza they were on their way to the Trade Mart in Dallas where the president would have delivered a speech; you can read the prepared text of that speech online.
The thing that jumped out at me when I looked at it was when the pres. would have referred to "the Sixties"... When we say "The Sixties" we mean bell-bottom slacks, psychedelic posters, the Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Woodstock, peaceful demonstrations, frightening riots, horrific assassinations, Vietnam War, exuberant joy, profound creativity and hope, and desolate, battering horrors and disappointments. The Sixties began to be referred to as "The Sixties" when it still was the Sixties. '68, '69. ...As Bob Dylan wrote, "You know something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...."
However, when President Kennedy would have said, "the sixties" in his Trade Mart speech, he wouldn't have meant any of that stuff because it hadn't happened yet -- when he said, "The sixties" he meant, "these modern times that we're living in, right now." Like when we, now, say "21st century"....
In the online Times Tribune.com, Herb Linnen (former AP reporter) wrote, as a guest columnist,
= = = = I have written often about President John F. Kennedy in The Times-Tribune. I did it because he mattered and what he said mattered. It's relevant during the country's current uneasy passage and fevered politics.
I hope people remember him more for how he led the country than for how he died Nov. 22, 1963. Recently I read the speech he never got to deliver before Dallas business leaders that day....He is gone but his oratory is a major reason why his legacy persists.
In the prepared text, he said:
"There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Their voices are inevitable. But today other voices are heard in the land -- voices preaching doctrines, wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the Sixties, doctrines which assume words will suffice for weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness.
"... We can't expect that everyone ... will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is a matter of slogans is nothing but nonsense."
He said America must stay alert to events beyond its shores. He said, "we, in this country, in this generation -- by destiny rather than choice -- are watchmen on the walls of world freedom." He said peace must be the goal "and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as it was written long ago, 'except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.'"
I met and interviewed him during his 1960 presidential campaign. You never forget it. Quick of intellect and wit, steeped in history from his youth and beyond, a war hero, a member of Congress for 14 years were formidable assets. Yet when he ran for president, few Democratic leaders initially thought he could win. He prevailed by the force of his personality, knowledge of issues, and his ability to move people.
I don't know what he would make of America today. He called himself "an idealist without illusions." He urged people to reach higher and avoid standing still. In his last State of the Union address to Congress, he said:
"...At home and abroad, there may be a temptation to relax. For the road has been long, the burden heavy, and the pace consistently urgent. But we cannot be satisfied to rest here. This is the side of the hill, not the top. The mere absence of war is not peace. The mere absence of recession is not growth. We have made a beginning but we have only begun."
[article written by Herb Linnen in the Times-Tribune.com.]
-------------------
..."There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing
opposition without alternative
finding fault but never favor
perceiving gloom on every side and
seeking influence without responsibility."
Umh. -- cable news channels, anyone? ...
"and the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit...is nothing but nonsense."
?
Huh -- I didn't know "deficit-mongering" was used clear back then...
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I find the prose of Hunter Thompson irresistible, and (or, as Hunter would write, "&") I find the music of Fleetwood Mac irresistible, and so the two seem to go together.
Fleetwood Mac's music "goes with" Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72.
And for some reason, upon investigation and experimentation, Jim Croce's music was found to "go with" Watergate. "Was found to" by me, that is. All those songs from the greatest hits album were written by Jim Croce during the years when Watergate and related events were evolving. Or -- devolving, 1971 - 1974.
= = = = = = = = =
Because November 22nd this coming Friday will mark 50 years since the murder of President Kennedy, I had a desire to write things about him when he was alive, and to "stay away" from the assassination.
And I love to think about music, too, so one day I researched popular music from the main decades of JFK's life -- the 1940s to the early sixties and selected songs to put with excerpts and stories about him. Had a whole list -- and then, when it came to writing about President Kennedy, I couldn't "get into" using music. It just did not seem to fit.
I don't mean to deprive President Kennedy of music. He listened to music. But when I discuss him here, Music just doesn't seem to fit in.
So I have this whole list of songs with nothing to do with them...Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, The Andrews Sisters -- aahhugh!
In The New Yorker on Nov. 4, 2013, Jeff Shesol wrote an article titled "Talk Not: J.F.K. And The Case For Quiet"-------------------- [excerpt] --------------------- "As for TR," Schlesinger wrote his father,
JFK said he talked a lot but didn't do very much. He could not see why TR rated above Polk or Truman. What is most interesting is that his criterion is obviously that of concrete achievement rather than political education. People who educate the nation, without achieving all their goals, like Wilson and TR, evidently seem to him to rate under people with a record of practical accomplishment, like Polk and Truman, even if they do little to transform the intellectual climate of the nation.
The irony is how precisely this anticipates one of the critiques of Kennedy's Presidency: that he talked a lot but accomplished little. This is plain wrong,
as Alan Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and many other historians have established. Kennedy's achievements were institutional (the Peace Corps, the space program) and existential (the narrow escape from nuclear war), and his effect on the public mindset, on everything from religious tolerance to public service, cannot (or at least should not) be understated. Yet there can be little denying that fifty years after his death, J.F.K. is remembered more for what he said than what he did....
...Kennedy began his political career as an ineffective speaker
(one of his early speechwriters complained that after all he had labored over a draft, J.F.K. "would not do it justice" at the podium, draining it of life and rhythm),
but he worked assiduously at it for more than a decade:
studying recordings of Churchill, consulting a voice coach, and devouring, again and again, a volume of great speeches that Sorensen had given him, marking passages for future use. The power of political oratory was, to Kennedy, self-evident.
Still, he retained a certain skepticism. He liked to quote from "Henry IV, Part I":
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you do call for them?
A speech, to Kennedy, had no inherent, incantatory power. He never believed, as romantics do, that oratory is alchemy....Speech was, instead, an augury, and precursor of action, never a substitute for it, and Kennedy was disinclined (sometimes, as in the case of civil rights, much too disinclined)
to say anything until he was ready to do something.
Otherwise it was just "talk" -- and talking too much, he once cautioned Sorensen, would only bore the public (and, one suspects, Kennedy himself)....
Words alone are not enough," Kennedy planned to say that day in Dallas, in a speech he never had the chance to deliver. "If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help." Polk could not have said it better himself.
In this (as in remarkably few things), Kennedy seems a relic of a distant age.
Our Presidents, like T.R., talk a lot.
They talk, they tweet,
they offer daily color commentary on international affairs, congressional negotiations, pop-cultural events, and national anniversaries. To choose a month at random, in October of 2011 President Obama honored the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears and the 2011 N.C.A.A. women's basketball champion Texas A. & M. Aggies, issued statements on the deaths of Steve Jobs and Muammar Qaddafi, proclaimed Leif Erikson Day and National Character Counts Week, and appeared on "The Tonight Show,"
among numerous other examples of talking and not doing.
In fairness, presidents now inhabit a 24 / 7 news cycle; Kennedy had the benefit of an 8 / 5 one.
Presidents no longer have the luxury of going quiet. For if they do, they create a vacuum their opponents rush to fill -- recall the Tea Party Summer of 2010. At the same time, we have strayed farther than we need have from Kennedy's more restrained, more purposeful use of the bully pulpit. We have allowed the connection between speech and action to attenuate.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told me in the late nineteen-nineties that political speech had become "a particularly low form of rhetoric." What he meant was not simply that the quality of writing had diminished since the Kennedy years, though it had; he also meant that the power of Presidential words had declined as their volume increased, cheapening the currency.
Of course, that devaluation is also due to the
erosion of faith in the institution of the Presidency (along with the institution of pretty much everything else) in the long wake of November 22, 1963 --
yet another reason this anniversary has resonance....
Let us evoke something of the era. Let it not be Kennedy's clipped cadence, or the "reversible raincoat" sentences ("Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate").... Let it, instead, be the idea that Presidencies are above all for practical accomplishment, and that words, by and large, ought to be reserved for moments of meaning.---------------- [end excerpt].
--written by Jeff Shesol
The New Yorker
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I am feeling a little desperate about getting out of this hotel. Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail. The place is run by old Germans. ------------------ [Hunter Thompson excerpt, campaign trail '72] ----------------- The whole staff is German. Most of them speak enough English to make themselves understood in a garbled, menacing sort of way . . . and they are especially full of hate this week because the hotel has just been sold and the whole staff seems to think they'll be fired just as soon as the election crowd leaves.
So they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won't drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer.
The manager explained that they were "runnig oud ze inventory" -- selling off everything in stock, including all the booze and almost every item on the menu except things like cabbage and sauerbrauten. The first wave of complaints were turned aside with a hiss and a chop of the hand, but after two days and nights of this Prussian madness the manager was apparently caused to know pressure from forces beyond his control....
But the root ambience of the place never changed. Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern, has stayed here several times in the past and calls it "the worst hotel in the world."
Ah yes . . . I can hear the Mojo Wire humming frantically across the room. Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it. Greg Jackson, the ABC correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us along like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York and now we are left on our own.
The pressure is building up. The copy no longer makes sense. Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another. Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast.
And now the bastard is beeping . . . beeping . . . beeping, which means it is hungry for this final page, which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary. But that can wait, I think. We have a three-week rest now before the next one of these goddamn nightmares . . . which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here. Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now.
The real surprise of this campaign, according to Theodore White on CBS-TV last night, is that "George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics."
But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again. So this page will have to go, for good or ill . . . and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel like rats from a burning ship.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've been alone
all the years
so many ways to count the tears
I never change
I never will
I'm so afraid -- the way I feel
Days -- when the rain and the sun are gone
black as night
agony's torn at my heart too long
so afraid
slip and fall and I die
I've been alone
always down
no one cared to stay around
I never change
I never will
I'm so afraid
the way I feel
Days when the rain and the sun are gone
black as night
agony's torn at my heart too long
so afraid
slip and fall and I die
===================
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. Hunter Thompson. Copyright 1973}
{song: "I'm So Afraid" -- written by Lindsey Buckingham. Fleetwood Mac, 1975, Reprise.}
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...his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.
<^>
There is nothing in McGovern's campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. -------------- [Hunter Thompson excerpt-campaign '72] --------------- For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent -- with a good voting record on "the issues" -- is a natural man for the White House.
But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon) . . . and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.
McGovern's failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign. They all sense an untouched constituency. Chisholm's campaign manager, a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson, calls it the "Sleeping Giant vote."
"Nobody's reaching them," he said. "We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...all that I want is
someone to take care of me
I'm not asking for love
just a little sympathy...
==============
{book excerpt: Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. Hunter Thompson. Copyright 1973.}
{song excerpt: "Sugar Daddy" - written by Christine McVie. Fleetwood Mac, 1975, Reprise.}
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FEBRUARY
---------------- [campaign '72, H.S. Thompson] ----------- The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his "political director" in Washington, that McGovern's old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa -- Senator Harold Hughes -- had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie.
This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes / McGovern / Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who were criss-crossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn't bothered with Hughes, because they considered him "un-touchable." If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.
Hughes had grown a beard; he didn't mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then -- and a few months earlier he had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry O'Brien's personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the national convention.
Dick Dougherty, a former Los Angeles Times newsman who is handling McGovern's national press action in New Hampshire, was so shaken by the news of Hughes' defection that he didn't even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just gotten the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate's. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking "Nevermore. . . ."
..."Why do you think he did it?" I said.
He [McGovern] was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. "Well . . . ," he said finally. "I guess I shouldn't say this, Hunter, but I honestly don't know. I'm surprised; we're all surprised."
He looked very tired....
A lot has been written about McGovern's difficulties on the campaign trail, but most of it is far off the point. The career pols and press wizards say he simply lacks "charisma," but that's a cheap and simplistic idea that is more an insult to the electorate than to McGovern. The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator -- or even a President -- is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.
McGovern, they say, doesn't make it on this level. Which is probably true. But McCarthy was worse. His '68 campaign had none of the surface necessities. He had no money, no press, no endorsements, no camera-presence . . . his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Everybody's trying to say I'm wrong
I just wanna be
back where I belong
World turning.....
I gotta get my feet back on the ground
World turning......
Everybody's got me down
Maybe I'm wrong, but
Who's to say what's right?
I need somebody
to help me through the night --------------
======================
{book excerpt: Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. Written by Hunter S. Thompson. Copyright 1973.}
{song: "World Turning." Written by Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. Fleetwood Mac, 1975, Reprise.}
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----------[Hunter Thompson excerpt]-------------- What happened after that, between April and November of 1968, plunged a whole generation of hyper-political young Americans into a terminal stupor. Nixon blamed it on communist drugs and said he had The Cure, but what he never understood was that the simple stark fact of President Nixon was the problem, or at least the main symbol. It is hard to even remember precisely -- much less explain -- just what a terrible bummer the last half of '68 turned into.
Actuallly, it took less than three months. Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Bobby Kennedy in June . . . then Nixon was nominated in July, and in August the Democrats went to Chicago for the final act.
By Labor Day it was all over. "The Movement" was finished, except for the trials, and somebody else was dealing. The choice between Nixon & Humphrey was no choice at all -- not in the context of what had already gone down, between Selma and Chicago. To be offered Hubert Humphrey as a sort of withered booby prize for all those bloody failures seemed more like a deliberate insult than a choice.
Milwaukee Journal, April 4, 1972:
McGovern Wins;
Strong Wallace Vote Edges Humphrey;
Fourth Place Finish Staggers Ex-Frontrunner Muskie;
Lindsay Quits Race
Failure comes easy at a time like this. After eight days in this fantastic dungeon of a hotel, the idea of failing totally and miserably in my work seems absolutely logical. It is a fitting end to this gig -- not only for me, but for everyone else who got trapped here, especially journalists.
The Wisconsin primary is over now. It came to a shocking climax a few hours ago when George McGovern and George Wallace ran a blitz on everybody.
The results were such a jolt to the Conventional Wisdom that now -- with a cold grey dawn bloating up out of Lake Michigan and Hubert Humphrey still howling in his sleep despite the sedatives in his room directly above us -- there is nobody in Milwaukee this morning, including me, who can even pretend to explain what really went down last night....
A week earlier it would have been considered a sign of madness, among those who knew the score, to bet McGovern any better than a respectable third -- but toward the end of the final week the word went out that George had picked up a wave and was showing surprising strength in some of the blue-collar hardhat wards that had been more or less conceded to either Humphrey or Muskie.
...I was sorely tempted to pickup some easy money from Tom Morgan, Lindsay's press secretary, who emptied his pockets one afternoon in the Schroeder hotel bar and came up with $102 to back his conviction that Lindsay would get between 10 and 15 percent -- but I had to back off because I had come to like Lindsay; he struck me as the most interesting of all the Democratic candidates in the sense that he seemed open to almost any kind of idea . . . so I regretfully declined Morgan's bet on the grounds that I would feel uncomfortable by profiting from Lindsay's misfortune....
But this was not the story I meant to write -- or avoid writing -- here; the idea was to say only that we suffered a terrible disaster on election night. All our finely laid plans were blasted into offal by the TV network computers before the night even got into first gear.
When the polls closed at eight, Tim Crouse and I were still sitting idly around the T-shaped bar and desk in our National Affairs Suite at the Sheraton-Shroeder Hotel, laying detailed plans for what we assumed would be the next five or six hours of hellish suspense while the votes were being counted. It would be at least midnight, we felt, before the results would begin to take shape . . . and if it looked at all close we were prepared to work straight through until dawn or even noon, if necessary.
The lead article in Sunday's Washington Post echoed the unanimous conviction of all the five or six hundred big-time press/politics wizards who were gathered here for what they all called "the crunch" -- the showdown, the first of the national primaries that would finally separate the sheep from the goats, as it were.
After a month of intense research by some of the best political journalists in America, the Post had finally concluded that (1) "The Wisconsin primary election seems likely to make dramatic changes in the battle for the 1972 presidential nomination" . . . and (2) that "an unusually high degree of uncertainty remains as the contest nears its climax."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I took my love, I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you get bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too
Oh, take my love, take it down
Climb a mountain and turn around
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well the landslide will bring it down
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well the landslide will bring it down.
======================
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 -- Hunter Thompson -- 1973.}
{song: "Landslide" -- Stevie Nicks. Fleetwood Mac, 1975. Reprise.}
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