The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (44 page)

Thompson had dismissed Eagleton as a hack from the outset and chided McGovern for sharing the ticket with such an uninspired old-school pol. Eagleton’s replacement, Sargent Shriver, the former head of the Peace Corps and a Kennedy in-law, was only a marginal improvement, a safe bet that inspired no one. McGovern’s MO was being shanghaied by the entrenched party operatives; the liberal fire brand of the primaries who had fended off a last-minute parliamentary challenge by an anti-McGovern contingent on the floor of the convention in July had given way to the party pragmatist, working his inexorable way toward the old minority-and-union alliances that might prop him up high enough to level the playing field with Nixon come November. What had begun as a rekindling of the old Eugene McCarthy spirit of insurrection had curdled into business as usual. McGovern’s vacillation regarding Eagleton’s fate, his indecisiveness in the face of the campaign’s first
real crisis, was a red flag for Thompson, a indication of the McGovern staff’s disorganization and incompetence. Nixon was many things, but he wasn’t dumb: his gift for political maneuvering and strategy was Napoleonic. Things looked awfully grim indeed.

The action, or lack thereof, swirling around the Republican convention the week of August 18 was an apt metaphor for the enervated energy level of the election in general. In Flamingo Park (near the Fontainebleau Hotel, which served as an informal headquarters for the press), Thompson witnessed a clutch of demonstrators pathetically trying to summon up a head of steam. “With the exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant, chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest,” Thompson wrote in “Nixon Bites the Bomb,” which ran in
Rolling Stone’s
September 28 issue. “They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted on grass, wine, and downers that they couldn’t say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego.”

Thompson found the Nixon supporters to be far more effective demonstrators and recruiters. Just prior to the formal nominating roll call,
Rolling Stone’s
intrepid reporter, who was en route to the free press bar, was waylaid by a throng of Nixon Youth wranglers. Seizing an opportunity to get close to the belly of the beast, Thompson merged with the mob and found himself in a holding room where preparations were being made for a demonstration. Thompson regarded ready-made placards with slogans such as
FOUR MORE YEARS AND NO COMPROMISE
laid out on a table, and chose one to carry out on the convention floor:
GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME
.

The ruse worked like a charm, until one of the demonstrators spotted the
Village Voice’s
Ron Rosenbaum running toward Thompson in an attempt to avoid being kicked out of the ready room.

“Well, I didn’t point him out, and I don’t think he would say that I did so,” said Rosenbaum. “That part was made up for fun, but we were never at odds about this. That story was just consistent with that unique genre of Hunterism, between fact and fiction.”

Thompson convinced the Nixon loyalists that he was merely a failed politician who had unsuccessfully run for sheriff in Colorado, and now he wanted to see what it was like to be on the inside of a winning campaign. Then someone noticed his McGovern button, which was affixed to his press badge. Using his finely honed instinct for wriggling out of awkward situations, Thompson avoided expulsion and walked right onto the floor of the convention with a few thousand Nixon Youth, where he wore a red, white, and blue plastic hat and carried his
GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME
placard for the delectation of whatever television viewers might have been tuned in at that moment. But when the throng began chanting “Four more years,” Thompson doffed his plastic hat and bailed.

The eventual reelection of Nixon by a record-breaking landslide (he won more than 60 percent of the national vote) confirmed what Thompson and Mailer had suspected all along—that Nixon appealed to the worst instincts of “The Wad,” and that McGovern was perhaps too virtuous to fight in the trenches with such a seasoned and unscrupulous battler. “This may be the year,” Thompson wrote in his article “Fear and Loathing: The Fat City Blues,” “when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

If many among the mainstream press corps were chagrined by Thompson’s advocacy journalism, they soon realized that his aggressively subjective reporting was closer to the truth than the hard facts in the family newspapers and the mass circulation newsweeklies, which didn’t really elucidate anything at all. “He hated that war in Vietnam
with a passion,” said George McGovern. “And he hated the hypocrisy of the establishment. Basically, I think he wanted to see this country live up to its ideals. And he wanted us to do better.”

Watergate was still a whisper when Nixon was reelected. When the break-in at the Democratic party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel had occurred on June 17, the
New York Times
. On October 10, the
Washington Post
ran a story by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that revealed a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.” Still, many newspapers chose to ignore the story or else downplayed their coverage; Vice President Spiro Agnew’s relentless campaign against the
Post
, a paper that he characterized as a liberal elitist organ with a political agenda, did much to silence or cow many press outlets into submission.

But Thompson knew better than to lap up the spin Agnew was spoon-feeding the press corps. He had an innate and absolute distrust of Nixon, whom he regarded as evil to the rotten core of his soul. Well before the
Washington Post
broke the story of the Nixon team’s complicity in Watergate, Thompson wrote a story for
Rolling Stone
in which he wondered aloud at the mass delusion of a populace that would vote for a man as constitutionally dishonest as Nixon. “‘Ominous’ is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Martin Bormann.”

If the sixties didn’t really begin until Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, then they ended in 1972, when the left’s last offensive against Nixon sputtered and fizzled out. It would take a final, epic act of hubris on Nixon’s part for him to be removed from the White House for good, but if Watergate was sweet vindication for Thompson, it was a sobering cautionary tale for Mailer. “Richard Nixon is one of the great American villains, but that is
not
because he tried to cover up a scandal,” Mailer wrote in 1976. “Rather he is a villain by way of the twenty-five years he did his best to murder the English language with a margarine of pieties—he is a
villain because he had a negative charisma.” While it was true that Nixon “was awful—with a force larger than himself,” he was also a a litmus test for liberal forbearance. “The liberals failed. If Richard Nixon had been standing alone on the street and a thousand nonviolent liberals had been standing around him with flails, they would have beaten each other to death in their rush to get at him.” Nixon’s fumbling perfidy had inflamed both the left and the right and had distorted the political discourse beyond recognition: “He had scorched reason a little further out of existence.”

VULGARIAN AT THE GATE

T
he ideological breakdowns of the sixties were a bitter disappointment to Thompson, Mailer, and all of those journalists who truly believed that they just might bear witness to a great American political awakening. But Nixon was reelected, the New Left splintered and faded, and Haight-Ashbury became a seedy countercultural Disneyland. There was a new revolution afoot, but it was directed inward, toward the cultivation of one’s own personality, mental health, and physical well-being. It was the era of encounter sessions, EST, group therapy. Tom Wolfe called it the third great American awakening, a natural evolution arising from the drug experimentation and communal living of the previous decade. The Me Decade, for short. “Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to,” Wolfe wrote in his 1976
New York
story “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “for better or worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American luxury: the luxury enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self.”

This was good news for Clay Felker and
New York
. The magazine, which had positioned itself as an essential how-to manual for well-heeled urban survivalists, only benefited from a cultural movement toward self-fulfillment, as such a trend tended to involve
material
self-fulfillment as well.

New York
had undergone a number of transformations in the five years since Felker had established it as a stand-alone publication, the most significant of which was a move toward service features. Felker ran
stories that rated the best of everything New York had to offer: doctors, pastrami, Chinatown grocery stores, Tiffany lamps, whatever. The magazine provided card-carrying members of the Me Decade with tips for the best yoga classes and African-dance lessons. In converting
New York
into a lifestyle magazine, Felker created an editorial template that would be re-created in regional periodicals all over the country; by 1976, over seventy imitators had sprouted up nationwide.

Many of the writers who had established
New York’s
reputation had defected or found more remunerative homes. Gloria Steinem, whose career as a serious political writer had blossomed at
New York
, was moving toward a determined commitment to fight for women’s reproductive rights and political representation, having campaigned on behalf of the women’s caucus at the 1972 Democratic convention. Steinem was frustrated by Felker’s lack of interest in the women’s liberation movement. It was a curious blind spot for Felker, who did more to advance the cause of female journalists of his time than any other male editor. When Steinem first broached the idea of writing about the struggle for women’s rights, Felker suggested that the magazine do a cover story about the need for more domestic help now that both spouses in many families were working.

New York
eventually did cover women’s issues, but Steinem felt that the magazine equivocated—Steinem wrote pro-equality pieces, while Julie Baumgold and Gail Sheehy argued the opposing view. One such article’s headline read, “Waking Up from Women’s Liberation—Has It Been All It’s Cracked Up to Be?”

And yet when Steinem was struggling mightily to launch a women’s magazine in 1971, Felker came to her aid. After trying for months to raise funds for the start-up with little success, Steinem approached Felker for help. His solution was to run a 30-page excerpt of the proposed magazine in the year-end double issue of
New York
, then publish a 130-page preview of the magazine to test the waters. New York would keep all of the advertising revenue from both the insert and the preview and half the newsstand profits for the market-testing issue. Beyond that,
New York
would have no continuing interest in the venture. Thus
Ms
. was born, and Steinem was on her way to becoming the face of women’s lib.

Tom Wolfe’s output for
New York
had slowed to a trickle. In 1972 he embarked on the most ambitious writing project of his career thus far—a
history of the U.S. space program, from John Glenn to the Apollo missions.
The Right Stuff
, whose eventual historical scope Wolfe truncated considerably, took seven years to complete, but
Rolling Stone
, not
New York
, would publish three excerpts in 1973. The rest of his major magazine pieces of the seventies, with the exception of “The Me Decade,” would run in
Esquire
and
Rolling Stone
.

It wasn’t all bodegas and bialys at
New York
, however. The magazine was still capable of producing trenchant pieces on the machinations of power in City Hall and the boardrooms of Wall Street, and its best writers could sense cultural currents long before the national press caught up. Contributing writer Richard Goldstein’s January 8, 1973, article on the Continental Baths and its star attraction, Bette Midler, alerted the magazine’s readers to a thriving gay subculture in their midst, and Susana Duncan’s piece on anorexia nervosa a few weeks later was one of the earliest mainstream features on the eating disorder. But
New York
was no longer reinventing regional magazine journalism the way it had in the early days. Investigative journalism was being supplanted by a move toward “Top Ten” service features and softer lifestyle stories. Banal covers such as “200 Things You Can Buy for $1” and “The Sound of the Cornball Invasion,” a story on country music in the city whose cover featured Tony Randall with a corncob in his ear, were the rule rather than the exception. It was working, however:
New York
pulled in $9.7 million worth of advertising in 1973.