Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach… There are a lot of people just walking around bored stupid. HST: His whole image of being a… first a maverick, anti-politician and then suddenly becoming an expedient, pragmatic hack… kind of a… Well, he began talking like a used car salesman, sort of out of both sides of his mouth, in the eyes of the public, and he was no longer… either a maverick or an anti-politician… he was… he was no better than Hubert Humphrey and that’s not a personal judgment, that’s how he was perceived… and that’s an interesting word. but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time-span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: After a while you start burning out the circuits . The following McGovern/HST interview is a verbatim transcript of their conversation that day – totally unedited and uncorrected by the author, editor, or anyone else.

Senator William Fulbright, discussing McGovern’s misfortunes with a half-dozen fellow Democrats one evening late in the campaign, said he wanted a McGovern presidency ‘because George is such an ordinary man….C. to his final pondering on power and the nature of the political beast known as the presidential candidate, Thompson is right on the money. I thought that it wasn’t just a matter of personality differences with me or ideological differences with me. HST: What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it’s really a party of expediency, something that’s put together every four years? The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern’s image – not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war – but as a person who couldn’t get those things done even though he wanted to.

So Anderson was left with a story that almost every journalist in Washington still believes to be true. He had told a group of reporters who flew down to talk with him at Henry Kimmel man’s house in the Virgin Islands that he wasn’t sure if the two wings of the party could be put back together…. Say… ah… Ralph, I think maybe you should finish your drink and get that camera strap off your neck real fast. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day – while my own deadline fell every two weeks – but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

Ed: I’d like to interrupt you now to ask what was the prevailing mood of the McGovern staff at this point…flying back to Sioux Falls… a day before the election, November 6th? Perceive” is the word that became in the ’72 campaign what “charisma” was for the 1960, ’64 and even the ’68 campaigns. But this was the most depressing experience I’ve had in a long, long time… Far more depressing than, for instance, than getting beaten myself, in any kind of political race in Colorado. We were leaning left now, heading east, and I hooked an elbow in the cockpit doorway to keep from falling… looking down on the beach cities – Newport, Laguna, San Clemente – and a thin, sharp white line along the coast that was either US 101 or the Pacific Ocean surf.

To my mind, free-flowing sports like soccer and rugby are far more entertaining to watch, but the lack of trackable statistics make them suspicious to the American mind. After McGovern won the nomination, he analyzes how he won it and how it caused the schizm in the democratic party.He deconstructs the 1972 campaigns of idealist George McGovern and political hack Richard Nixon, ending up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic. Dismissing 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey as a "hopeless old hack" and presumed nominee Senator Edmund Muskie, whose campaign Thompson says exudes a "stench of death", Thompson was vindicated in his choice of McGovern. There were states… where he compared Humphrey’s margin or his loss – whatever the figures were in ’68 – to the number of new voters coming into the electorate this time around… and there were an incredible number of states where Pat’s figures showed that even if McGovern could get at least half of them, he’d carry something like 12 states with this Youth Vote. Which is probably why I made that disastrous bet, although there wasn’t a reporter in the press corps who thought that George would lose by more than ten points… except Joe Alsop; he said McGovern wouldn’t get more than 40% of the vote.