An early fax machine was procured for Thompson after he inquired about the device while visiting venture capitalist Max Palevsky, who concurrently served as chairman of Xerox and Rolling Stone for several years in the early 1970s. HST: I wanted to tell you why Mankiewicz was afraid to break the… or help anyone else break the story on Eagleton’s mental history.

He was a great lover of guns, an occasional political candidate and lover of narcotics who eventually committed suicide in 2005. Journalists, pundits, commentators and tastemakers use this extremely flimsy material to amuse themselves over the airwaves and on our screens for years ahead of the final vote. He was told by True Davis, who had run against Eagleton in the Democratic primary for senator in 1968 in Missouri, that the records were in a box in an office in St. I didn’t think there were major gaps being made in the campaign, but there were some right at the beginning that haunted us all the way through. The cockpit had millions of lights all around it: green lights… red lights… all kinds of blinking things – a wonderful place to be.If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once,” he offers at one point. it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” Thompson wrote the month before the 1972 vote. They had heard all these terrible things, they’d read stories about how people in dark corners gathered to pass drugs around, and they always thought that it happened in urine-soaked doorways around Times Square. After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom – that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lint-heads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place…. HST: Well, there was a very sad kind of… welcome-home rally for George McGovern and… One final note on the Zoo Plane.

HST: One of the weird unanswered questions is whether McGovern actually said1000% to anyone but Eagleton.The Watergate break-in had already occurred when Nixon won with the widest ever popular vote margin in American history. There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage Crank on the market these days – and according to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington, that’s solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

But all of a sudden here we were covering a presidential campaign and there were joints being passed up and down the aisle: weird people in the cockpit… drug addicts… lunatics… crowding into the cockpit just to get high and wired on the lights.It was a rough consensus among the polls in July that Nixon had 52% of the vote, McGovern had 37%, and 11% were undecided.

Just why the American electorate gave the present administration such an overwhelming mandate in November remains something of a mystery to me. At that point True Davis was the president of a bank owned by the United Mine Workers in Washington. McGovern: Yeah, it was, but it happened far enough ahead so that the impact of it began to sink in then.

Their reaction to a horde of thugs charging through the crowd towards the Governor’s Box would be safely predictable, I felt.