The Boys on the Bus

2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Timothy Crouse

Foreword copyright © 2003 by Hunter S. Thompson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book is based upon an article that originally appeared in
Rolling Stone
, issue #119, October 12, 1972.

This book was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc. in 1973.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

ROWLAND EVANS
,
JR
.,
AND ROBERT NOVAK
: Excerpts from five newsletters, copyright © 1973 by the Evans-Novak Political Report Company; excerpt from one column, copyright © Publishers-Hall Syndicate. Reprinted by permission of Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert Novak.

INTERNATIONAL FAMOUS AGENCY
: Excerpt from “Will Ambition Spoil St. George?,” by Richard Reeves, from
New York
, May 8, 1972. Reprinted by permission of International Famous Agency.

The New York Times
: Excerpts from “The McGovern Image,” by James M. Naughton, July 31, 1972, and “Palm Springs Idyll: Agnew and His Pals,” by James Wooten, October 10, 1972. Copyright © 1972 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission of
The New York Times
.

Newsweek
: Excerpt from “McGovern’s Politics of Righteousness,” by Peter Goldman and Richard Stout (
Newsweek
, November 6, 1972), copyright © 1972 by Newsweek, Inc.; excerpt from “My Turn: Richard Dougherty ‘The Sneaky Bumbler’ ” (
Newsweek
, January 8, 1973), copyright © 1973 by Newsweek, Inc. Reprinted by permission of
Newsweek
.

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY AND STERLING LORD AGENCY
: Excerpt from pages 132–133 of
Running: A Nixon-McGovern Campaign Journal
, by Bob Greene, published by Henry Regnery Company (Chicago), copyright © 1973 by Bob Greene. Rights outside of North America are controlled by the Sterling Lord Agency. Reprinted by permission of the Regnery Company and the Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

THE STERLING LORD AGENCY
,
INC
.: Excerpt from “Nixon,” by Nicholas von Hoffman (
New American Review
#11), copyright © 1971 by Nicholas von Hoffman. Reprinted by permission of the Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

The Washington Post
: Excerpts from “The President’s Shield,” by David S. Broder, October 1, 1972; “McGovern’s Emotions Are Showing,” by William Greider, September 10, 1972; “The McGovern Course,” by William Greider, August 1, 1972. All articles copyright © 1972 by the Washington Post.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data is available.

eISBN: 978-0-8041-4983-9

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

v3.1

This book holds a very special place in my heart for at least three excellent reasons, personal, professional and otherwise. I guess you could say I have a
crush
on it, a primitive sort of love that feels almost like parenthood and borders, perhaps, on lust.… Which is true, for good or ill, because I watched
The Boys on the Bus
develop from start to finish, from a brilliant idea to the elegant and legendary political classic that it is today, particularly among smart journalists and professional politics junkies who do little else in their lives except cover Presidential campaigns and major political stories out of Washington. They are big-time people in big-time jobs who like getting Presidents elected (OR DEFEATED) and massively influence public opinion.

Tim Crouse and I are close friends now, but it was not always that way. He was a total stranger when I first laid eyes on him at that fateful
Rolling Stone
editorial conference in the summer of 1971, which seemed like a routine laid-back stag picnic on a secluded mountainside in Big Sur, California, for no particular reason except getting to know each other and pondering the editorial content of the magazine for the coming year. It looked like a free lunch. Ho ho ho.

I was on my way to Saigon at the time, eager to see and feel and know the ugly war that had been such a gigantic part of my life for so many years and for so many violent confrontations with police in what seemed like every city in the nation between Miami Beach and Boston to the streets of L.A. and the lunatic outdoor Rock Festivals in the hills around Portland and Seattle. It was a wild time and those of us who grew up in it were developing into a wild and confrontational breed.

It was a tough crowd to break into. We had already toppled one President of the United States, and we would soon be toppling another. Indeed. We had been to
the Mountain
more than once, and if we hadn’t entirely prevailed, we were nowhere near defeated. We were warriors, and we were not afraid of the White House or anything they could do to us. We were
champions
, and the President was not.

This was the heady world that young Tim Crouse wandered into when he arrived in Big Sur that weekend. The way I recall it, he was still a student at Harvard, and his only experience in professional journalism had been as a low-paid low-ranking stringer writing occasional music stories out of Harvard and Cambridge and the Boston Naval Yard, where rock & roll was just taking root … a punk kid who knew absolutely nothing about Politics, though he did have a knack for the music scene, and a sense of humor.… All right, all right, if you want to be a stickler for accuracy—and Crouse always was, the bastard—he was actually almost three years out of Harvard, and had gone to Morocco with the Peace Corps and then made his bones on a couple of Boston newspapers and joined the staff of Rolling Stone. All of which may be true, but he still looked pretty damn green to me—a grizzled veteran of two wartime Presidential campaigns.

In any case, we live in different times, by different standards, and we have different hopes for our children. They will learn to be afraid of Everything, which is pitiful. Life in the Fourth Reich will not be easy, for most of them. They will ride fast motorcycles and have a lot of sex, and that will be just about it.

The Boys on the Bus
is about what it was like to scramble in the bowels of a U.S.A. Presidential Campaign, and what kind of people you were working with—or
against
—or were afraid of, or despised, or sometimes just
stuck with
, overnight, by accident, against your will, and often with ugly results.

I knew these people, and they are not what we think they are. They are vicious. I knew them, and I know them now. We are
family, in the closer sense of that word, and I am proud to be a part of it (pause, then massive cheering).

We were
not
ghoulish people, but they called us ghouls anyway. We were
good people
, but they gave us a nasty job.

I ran the National Affairs desk in those years mainly because nobody else on the
RS
national staff—except Crouse, as it turned out—wanted to do politics. They were Music journalists, they said. They were hippies, in the main—heavy stoners, acid freaks, naked people—and they wanted nothing to do with Politics. It had nothing to do with
their
lives. They were Flower Children, and they would soon take over the world. It was inevitable.

Exactly
how
they were going to take over the world without knowing, or wanting to know, anything about politics sounded like a pipe dream to me, but I didn’t mind dreaming it from time to time, and I also lived right in the middle of it for four years, and I definitely liked the neighborhood. These were my people—along with the Hell’s Angels, Ken Kesey, Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Sur and all those who have ever lived there.

The list is long, and I love it. San Francisco was clearly the best place in the world to be living in those years—1960–70, to be specific—and my memories of life in that purest of all tornadoes still cause me to babble and jabber and dance.

But that is another story, I think, and the only reason I mention it is that I have always kind of wondered about what it must have been like for Tim Crouse when he was thrust so mercilessly from Harvard Yard, as it were, straight into what was literally and historically the hot rolling center of the 1972 Presidential campaign.

On second thought, the pages that you are about to read give the precocious, witty and, as time has proved, durable answer to that question.

Hunter S. Thompson

Woody Creek, Colorado

May 2003