If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone. According to the Hart/Caddell theory, if that hadn’t happened, the race would have been at least very close…. But for Americans, politics is just another sport: a long, drawn-out and essentially boring game puffed up to importance with pomp and pageantry and a maddening ocean of statistics. Despite his irreverence, Thompson does at times wrap himself in the hope he finds in George McGovern, a mild-mannered senator from South Dakota who was the favourite among the holdover dregs of 1960’s counterculture. If the election had been close Illinois would have been critical, and with Daley coming around there was at least a possibility that Illinois would go for McGovern.

We were leaning left now, heading east, and I hooked an elbow in the cockpit doorway to keep from falling… looking down on the beach cities – Newport, Laguna, San Clemente – and a thin, sharp white line along the coast that was either US 101 or the Pacific Ocean surf. Thompson rides in a limo with his enemy Nixon and they discuss football, which is a passion of both men. You might know anything about Muskie or McGovern or even Gary Hart but the sheer excitement of the campaign trail as described by Thompson beats any sports show out there. I was tempted for a moment to push on with it, to keep a straight face and start mumbling distractedly about strange and unsettling events connected with the arrest – pornographic films that had allegedly been made on the Zoo Plane, Ted Van Dyk busted for pimping at the “Issues” desk – but he seemed so down that I didn’t have the heart to hassle him, even as a friendly joke….

Writing as an outsider he manages to make this campaign 30 years in the past into a vibrant and exciting epic.

Senator William Fulbright, discussing McGovern’s misfortunes with a half-dozen fellow Democrats one evening late in the campaign, said he wanted a McGovern presidency ‘because George is such an ordinary man…. And the climb angle is something like 40 or 50 degrees… and then all these green lights blinking and these dials going and things buzzing and humming… and looking down seeing the lights here and there… and cities passing and mountain ranges… a wonderful way to go.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. HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President – although I wouldn’t really want to be President.

HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at a country club reception … it was the first time I’d ever seen him drinking… sort of casually and openly in public . The bussing issue was the most pronounced one, but also the attacking on the welfare program and the way the President handled that issue. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government,” is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon,” Thompson wrote.Early on he began backing McGovern uncertain that McGovern could win, but noting that people would rather vote for someone rather than vote for the candidate most likely to beat the other guy. The Watergate break-in had already occurred when Nixon won with the widest ever popular vote margin in American history. HST: Yeah, I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command. After McGovern won the nomination, he analyzes how he won it and how it caused the schizm in the democratic party.

I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England – or the Queen – and have the real business of the presidency conducted by … a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example.Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was coming on with … a new … a different type of politician … a person who actually would grab the system by the ears and shake it. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. The Pendulum Theory is very voguish these days, especially among Washington columnists and in the more prestigious academic circles, where the conversion-rate has been running at almost epidemic proportions since the night of November 7th. 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. Every state, county, city, neighbourhood and household has its demographics of age, socioeconomic status, religion, race and gender.