In this chronicle he follows various democratic hopefuls around the country during their campaigns to win the democratic nomination for the office of the president.

McGovern was perceived as a cold-hearted, political pragmatist who dumped this poor, neurotic, good guy from Missouri because he thought people wouldn’t vote for him because they were afraid that shock treatments in the past might have some kind of lingering effect on his mind. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.

And while On the Campaign Trail ‘72 is chock-full with the kind of horse-race thinking and analysis that must have surrounded him at the time, Thompson’s coverage is unique because it zooms out a little. HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President – although I wouldn’t really want to be President. Especially his reasoning of why he participated as a 35 year old wearing a McGovern for President button alone is worth reading, not to mention the incident on the Sunshine Special that caused him to become persona nongrata on the Muskie campaign.

There wasn’t a lot of talk about racial prejudice and the old-fashioned racial epithet, things like that, but I think it was there. Their polling from July, September to November shows that the Eagleton Affair had hurt McGovern so badly that the fact is the figures went off the board. HST: Was it true that he actually told you at one point not to worry about those pills, because the prescription was in his wife’s name?The best people in the campaign were technicians: At the staff command level there was almost constant confusion, and McGovern’s indecisiveness compounded that confusion and left the technicians often wandering around in circles wondering what the hell to do … He had people who could do the work and could turn the vote out, but they weren’t always sure what he was doing. Just why the American electorate gave the present administration such an overwhelming mandate in November remains something of a mystery to me. 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. HST: He promised it for about ten days and finally he said that the psychiatrists wouldn’t release them, the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t release them, the Barnes Hospital wouldn’t release them. I have heard men with little or no real interest in sports suddenly begin spouting detailed statistics about some obscure linebacker’s performance on grass versus turf.

Each of those demographics can be extrapolated to determine which candidate they might vote for — if they vote at all — and which messages might reach them if they cared to listen. But the part of the quote that interested me more was where he said he wasn’t sure if they should be put back together. Thompson still despises him and his views, but by peeling away a layer, he can expose things that lay beneath the surface.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? Ed: And you think that this is the kind of energy which will bring forward a new candidate in ’76 who could win?