Kingdom of Fear (14 page)

HST and Oscar Acosta on election night in Aspen, November 1970 (Bob Krueger)

. . .

On election night Oscar’s small room in the Jerome filled quickly with people—both locals and “outsiders”—who shared his dreary conviction that this Aspen election had serious implications in the context of national politics. From the very beginning it had been a strange and unlikely test case, but toward the end—when it looked like a Radical/Drug candidate might actually win a head-on clash with the Agnew people—the Aspen campaign suddenly assumed national importance as a sort of accidental trial balloon that might, if it worked, be tremendously significant—especially to the angry legions of New Left/Radical types who insisted, on good evidence, that there was no longer any point in trying to achieve anything “within the system.”

But obviously, if an essentially Republican town like Aspen could elect a sheriff running on a radical Freak Power platform, then the Vote might still be a viable tool . . . and it might still be possible to alter the mean, fascist drift of this nation without burning it down in the process. This was the strange possibility that had brought Dave Meggyesy out of San Francisco. Meggyesy, a former linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals, had recently abandoned pro football and plunged into radical politics. . . . The first serialization of his book,
Out of Their League,
was on the newsstands in
LOOK
that week, and he had just come back from a New York gig on
The Dick Cavett Show.
But
LOOK
was a bit too cerebral for the kind of people who voted against us in Aspen; to them, Dave Meggyesy was just another one of those “dirty Communist outsiders that Thompson was importing to take over the town.”

It’s hard to communicate when they don’t speak your language, so Meggyesy reverted to type and signed on as a bodyguard, along with Teddy Yewer, the wild young biker from Madison; Paul Davidson, the Black Belt White Panther from Denver; and Gene Johnson, a super-wiggy ex-painting contractor from Newport Beach . . . all Communists, of course, every one of them on salary from Peking.

These treacherous perverts—and others—were among those who gathered in Oscar’s room that night to ponder the wreckage of Amerika’s first Freak Power campaign.

. . .

There was certainly no shortage of reasons to explain our defeat. A few were so brutally obvious that there is not much point in listing them except for the record—which is crucial, because the record will also show that, despite these apparently suicidal handicaps, we actually carried the city of Aspen and pulled roughly 44 percent of the vote in the entire county. This was the real shocker. Not that we lost, but that we came so close to winning.

The record will also show that we learned our political lessons pretty well, after coming to grips with the reasons for Joe Edwards’s six-vote loss in 1969. Our mistake, of course—which was actually my mistake—was in publishing what we learned in a national magazine that hit the newsstands just in time to become a millstone around our necks in 1970. The local appearance of the October 1, 1970, issue of
Rolling Stone
was a disaster of the first magnitude, for several reasons: 1) because it scared the mortal shit out of our opposition; 2) because it got here just a week or so too late to be effective in our crucial “freak-registration” campaign; and 3) because it outlined our campaign strategy in such fine detail that the enemy was able to use it against us, with hellish effectiveness, all the way to the end.

Among other damaging revelations, the article went into great detail to show that we couldn’t possibly win in 1970 unless the Democrats and the Republicans effectively split the “establishment vote,” as they had a year earlier. Here is a word-for-word excerpt from “The Battle of Aspen”
(Rolling Stone
#67, October 1, 1970):

The root point is that Aspen’s political situation is so volatile—as a result of the Joe Edwards campaign—that any Freak Power candidate is now a possible winner.

In my case, for instance, I will have to work very hard—and spew out some really heinous ideas during my campaign—to get less than 30 percent of the vote in a three-way. And an underground candidate who really wanted to win could assume, from the start, a working nut of about 40 percent of the electorate—with his chances of victory riding almost entirely on the Backlash Potential: or how much active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the burghers who have controlled local candidates for so long.

With Sandy, in Aspen (Bob Krueger)

. . .

So it was no surprise, when it finally became apparent that the Freak Power slate was going to get no less than 40 percent of the vote, to find our local GOP brain trust scrambling to arrange a last-minute emergency compromise with their “archenemies” in the other party. The difference, in Aspen, was like the difference between Nixon and LBJ on the national level: Beyond the personalities and patronage squabbles, there was no real difference at all. Not on the issues.

What happened, however, is that about halfway through the campaign both establishment parties found themselves hawking a local version of the Black Panthers’ “theory of the greater fear.” As much as they might detest each other personally, they hated “freak power” more—and they agreed that it had to be stopped, by any means necessary.

The unholy agreement they forged, less than 48 hours before the election, was that each party would sacrifice one of its two major candidates (in the sheriff and county commissioner races) so as not to split the vote. This assured massive bipartisan support for both incumbents: Sheriff Carrol Whitmire, a Democrat, and Commissioner J. Sterling Baxter.

The trade-off was effected by a sort of chain-letter telephone campaign on election eve, an effort so frantic that one man, a Republican, got eighteen calls that night telling him that the final word from headquarters was to “split your ticket; we’re dumping [GOP sheriff candidate] Ricks and the Democrats are dumping Caudhill.”

. . .

What we learned in Aspen was that if you “work within the system,” you’d damn well better win—because “the system” has a built-in wipe-out mechanism for dealing with failed challengers.

If the Freak Power brain trust learned anything serious in that election, it was that “working within the system” is merely a lame euphemism for “playing by their rules.” Once you do this, and lose—especially in a small town with a voting population of just under 2,500—you’re expected to hunker down like a natural gentleman/politician and take your beating, the inevitable consequences of running a failed challenge on a deeply entrenched Power Structure.

Like the laws of Physics, the laws of Politics in America seem based on the notion that every force creates a counterforce of exactly equal strength. Our bizarre voter-registration campaign mobilized a vast number of local “freaks” who had never registered, before, to vote for anything—and many of them said afterward that they would never register again. They insisted all the way to the voting booths that they “hated politics” and especially “politicians.”

But the Freak Power platform—and indeed the whole campaign—was so far above and beyond anybody’s idea of “politics” that in the end we found most of our strength among people who were proud to call themselves Non-Voters. In a town where no candidate for any public office had ever considered it necessary to pull more than 250 votes, a stone-bald and grossly radical Freak Power candidate for sheriff pulled 1,065 votes in 1970, yet lost by nearly 400 votes.

The Freak Power election so polarized Aspen that we managed, in the end, to frighten up enough Negative/Scare votes to offset our shocking and unprecedented success in mobilizing the “freak” vote. We frightened the bastards so badly that on Election Day they rolled people in wheelchairs—and even on stretchers—into the polling places to vote against us. They brought out people, young and old, who thought “Ike” Eisenhower was still president of the U.S.A. “It was the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” said one of our poll watchers. “I was out there in Precinct One, where we thought things were cool, and all of a sudden they just rolled over us like a sheep drive. I’ve never seen so many pickup trucks in my life.”

We are still seeing those pickups. And anybody who challenges them had better be ready to die. That’s what they told me, over and over again, when I ran for sheriff: That even if I won, I would never live to take office. And when I lost, they instantly got down to making sure that nobody like me could ever run for office again.

With George McGovern in Washington, 1972 (Stuart Bratesman)

Sunday night at the Fontainebleau: Hot wind on Collins Avenue. Out in front of the hotel, facing the ocean, teams of armed guards and “police dogs” were patrolling the beach & pool area to make sure nobody sneaked in to feel the water. Not even the guests. It was illegal to use the ocean in Miami Beach at night. The beach itself was technically public property, but the architects of this swinish “hotel row” along what the local Chamber of Commerce called the “Gold Coast” had managed to seal off both the beach and the ocean completely by building the hotels so they formed a sort of Berlin Wall between Collins Avenue and the sea.

There were ways to get through, if you didn’t mind climbing a few wire fences and seawalls, or if you knew where to find one of the handful of tiny beach areas the city fathers had quietly designated as “public,” but even if you made it down to the beach, you couldn’t walk more than 50 or 60 yards in either direction, because the hotels had sealed off their own areas . . . and the “public” areas were little more than rocky strips of sand behind hotel parking lots, maintained as a grudging, token compliance with the law that said hotels had no legal right to fence the public away from the ocean. This was a touchy subject in Miami then, because many of the hotels had already built so close to the high-tide line that their pools and cabanas were on public land, and the last thing they wanted was a lawsuit involving their property lines.

The Doral, for instance—headquarters for both George McGovern and Richard Nixon in that mean “Convention summer” of 1972—had been built so close to the sea that at least half of its beachfront cabanas and probably half of its so-called Olympic-size pool were built on public property. A test case on this question could have precipitated a financial disaster of hellish proportions for the Doral, but the owners were not losing much sleep over it. They had me arrested on four consecutive nights during the Democratic Convention that August for swimming in the pool “after hours.” Usually around three or four in the morning.

After the first two days it got to be a ritual. I would appear on the moonlit patio and say hello to the black private cop while I took off
my clothes and piled them on a plastic chair near the diving board. Our conversation on the first night was a model for all the others:

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” the private cop said. “This area is closed at night.”

“Why?” I said, sitting down to take off my shoes.

“It’s against the law.”

“What law?”