Ah, memories, memories. . . and here we go again, back on the same old trip: digressions, tangents, crude flashbacks. . . When the '72 presidential campaign ended I planned to give up this kind of thing. . .

But what the hell? Why not? It's almost dawn in San Francisco now, the parking lot outside this building is flooded about three inches deep with another drenching ran, and I've been here all night drinking coffee & Wild Turkey, smoking short Jamaican cigars and getting more & more wired on the Allman Brothers' “Mountain Jam,” howling out of four big speakers hung in all four corners of the room.

Where is the MDA? With the windows wide open and the curtains blowing into the room and the booze and the coffee and the smoke and the music beating heavy in my ears, I feel the first rising edge of a hunger for something with a bit of the crank in it

Where is Mankiewicz tonight?

Sleeping peacefully?

No. . . probably not. After two years on The Edge, involuntary retirement is a hard thing to cope with. I tried it for a while, in Woody Creek, but three weeks without even a hint of crisis left me so nervous that I began gobbling speed and babbling distractedly about running for the U.S. Senate in '74. Finally, on the verge of desperation, I took the bush-plane over to Denver for a visit with Gary Hart, McGovern's ex-campaign manager, telling him I couldn't actually put him on the payroll right now, but that I was counting on him to organize Denver for me.

He smiled crookedly but refused to commit himself. . . and later that night I heard, from an extremely reliable source, that Hart was planning to run for the Senate himself in 1974.

Why? I wondered. Was it some kind of subliminal, un-focused need to take vengeance on the press?

On me? The first journalist in Christendom to go on record comparing Nixon to Adolf Hitler?

Was Gary so blinded with bile that he would actually run against me in The Primary? Would he risk splitting the “Three A's” vote and maybe sink us both?

I spent about twenty-four hours thinking about it, then flew to Los Angeles to cover the Super Bowl -- but the first person I ran into down there was Ed Muskie. He was wandering around in the vortex of a big party on the main deck of the Queen Mary, telling anybody who would listen that he was having a hell of a hard time deciding whether he was for the Dolphins or the Redskins. I introduced myself as Peter Sheridan, “a friend of Donald Segretti's.” “We met on the 'Sunshine Special' in Florida,” I said. “I was out of my head. . .” But his brain was too clouded to pick up on it. . . so I went up to the crow's nest and split a cap of black acid with John Chancellor.