Kennedy-Reagan 68


America is still recovering from the smashing, shaking, dark energies of the election of 1968. What a hell of a year. I’ve taken lot of drugs in my life—none since I found Jesus somewhere down the back of a girl’s eyes in a mussed up bed in Chicago---but none of those have had the effect on Hunter J.Mailer, Esq, as that year.

I wasn’t a Kennedy man from the beginning, and I had been taken by Reagan’s sunny charm since he fixed the California budget in 1966. I have to admit that. I liked the lower taxes. But I hated Hubert Humphrey, the doughfaced bouncing gull, and frankly, I would have shot Nixon myself, full to the eyeballs of dope if he’d’ve won. A national choice between those two would have been a national enema with an elephant gun, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve fired those. Nasty.

So what was it that brought us to this path? I guess, looking back, the year was down to one guy; Rockefeller. Had Rocky not entered the race on the Republican side, the party of darkness would have fallen for Nixon. He’d been traipsing up and down the land hawking his wares in a lying competition with Lyndon Johnson since 1962, and I think that he had the market cornered on the ‘electable, dark horse candidate’ stakes. Or at least, he thought he had. George Romney he could have undermined, since Romney was basically too innocent for a smear merchant, but Romney and Rockefeller both running meant that your average son-of-the-desert rube was spoilt for choice. Those two getting in early and staying in stymied Dick like spinach in the teeth on a guaranteed sex date. When the Republicans got to their fortress in Miami to the first of the year’s two brokered conventions, the ground was set for Reagan to come through, and God knows he had the backing.



Reagan had had the sense to get to Strom Thurmond before Nixon did, and to promise him all the crazy federalism and missile-in-space programmes he wanted. With Senator Pecker running interference for him in between interns—literally, I tell you, I know, a guy in an alley told me—Sunny Ron could ally the South to the Goldwaterites and the Moabites and the Lebanites and the rest of the Republican tribes. People forget that Israel wasn’t the leading Jewish Kingdom, Judah was; why? Because Israel won.

Rocky coming in and then coming out against the war, with Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy already calling for it to be over by March had an odd effect on the Democrat side too. It made Lyndon Johnson mad as hell, and made him absolutely determined to get Hubie elected. Hubie, the joyborne cornball, thought this would be done by slavish loyalty, and when Johnson stitched up a bombing halt in Vietnam he thought that meant he should, like his Boss said, stand in Macys and kiss Lyndon’s backside. That was the day before the Nixon team, spooked by the Humphrey bounce, released the information about all that money Lyndon had got from the Greek Colonels. Sirhan didn’t have to miss, then, though he did; it was fairly obvious Humphrey wasn’t going to win on a first ballot in Chicago.

It was also clear that 68 would be the year of the independent Leader, not the follower, not the experienced man. McCarthy was too close to his kids, too poetic, too intense, even if JFK had named an entire administration after a throwaway line of Kahlil Gibran’s. When Daley swung behind Kennedy after California, it was obvious to me that 68 was going to be a year with a Democrat candidate, albeit one running round with a target strapped to both his faces, head and torso, spending squillions with an Irish twinkle once again.

The Conventions were amazing. To his great credit, sneaky little bastard that he was, Robert Francis Kennedy, saw how appealing Reagan was that year. Many of his hangers on didn’t. What Kennedy, the survivor of the Missiles of October had, though, was something Reagan didn’t; credibility as a liberal hawk.

Bob had a record. He’d ordered troops to act for his brother’s administration and enforce the end of segregation in the South and he’d wiretapped Martin Luther King. This mattered in a year when sixty per cent of the Chicago police department self-identified themselves to posters as racists. Kennedy had what some debased fascist age would easily have called a compassionate conservative appeal.



Reagan had his strengths. I liked Ron. Occasionally, late at night, when my mind was snaking out into star trek reruns and the psychotic fare of a hotel TV, the vast plates of lobster I’d ordered on expenses and emptied on auto would arise and look through me and show me the deep secrets of his soul. Salty and light and meaningless with claws hidden somewhere, like Rothko painting a smile. He appealed to some.

I heard him once, playing to a western audience sick of punks and soap-dodgers and kids who just didn’t want to go to Vietnam or General Motors and rioters, and I reflected that, in many of the states west or south of the rockies, the only way that sharia law would ever arise is as a species of liberal reform. Ronald Reagan had the fairground charm of a ride you know, drunk and high and full of some greasy fat sugary thing that makes you feel like a greasy fat sugary thing with wings is bad for you and enticing. Bobby saw that.

I can’t forget the debates of 68. Kennedy and Reagan traveled round the country, Bobby trying to slip his moral stilettos into the pilsbury doughnut boy in a Glenn Ford body, Reagan trying to aim for the knees. The most interesting thing I think about debates that will probably be talked and written about until the end of the Republic is just how classic they were. I mean that in the Greek sense; the debates of 68 laid out, unusually, two utterly different philosophies at their best, and you wanted to do what Roosevelt did to gold speeches—cut them down the middle and stitch them together.

The two of them replaced the lobsters as the ubiquity in my preformed manufactured hotel rooms, especially when I booked one for a week on the publishers card, as I did from time to time, and laid myself out with some Benzedrine, heroin and a couple of boxes of green things I’d been given in Hanoi that had the same effect on my mind as a Beret of the same colour and a half years training had on a Marine’s forearm.

I remember the debate in September particularly well. The debate where the bombs were being discussed, and where the bomb went off. You know what happened as well as I, you saw the pictures—who hasn’t? Bob Kennedy was a red rag to every nut in America. I recall the funeral, the way Teddy was reeling, unable to take the nomination the Democratic National Committee and Lyndon promptly delivered to Hubert; the way Reagan went comatose, and Rockefeller stepped in to run with Romney.




















That bomb deranged this country. It boosted George Wallace and Happy Chandler way above what they could have got, and cut the ground straight out from Humphrey. Even when Rocky announced immediate vietnamisation of the war, without saying what that meant—one final, vast bombing of Cambodia—and started fronting his foreign policy with his flunky Kissinger, we couldn’t stop Rocky. Couldn’t stop the inflation, disillusion and shady spooks who followed in his wake. Couldn’t stop Rockefeller-Romney from winning in 68.

Then they messed up. Funny that; on their own primary rules, the ones Rocky pushed through in '68, but Bobby and Daley kept the Democrats from embracing.

’72 was almost a foregone conclusion. Reagan returned, signed up Maryland’s liberal civil-rights governor, Agnew, beat Muskie, and, well, the rest—the Article V convention that proposed altering the constitution and then went nowhere, the accelerated détente, the opening with China in 76, the ‘premiership’ of Kissinger, the damascene conversion and the opening with Brezhnev, the occupation of the Middle East—all of that’s for another time.

I’m tired of all this. Still, at least it’s nice up here with my guns in Wyoming, smelling faintly the cities burning on all the cheap oil. I’m told to enjoy it. The liberals all tell me there’s an ice age coming, though I guess that will all be a matter for George Bush or Gary Hart next year….