Monday, January 29, 2018

“But what the hell? All that is history now, and after roaming around the new McGovern headquarters building for a week or so, the only refrigerator I found was up in finance director Henry Kimmelman’s office on the sixth floor. I went up there with Pat Caddell one afternoon last week to watch the Cronkite/Chancellor TV news (every afternoon at 6:30, all activity in the building is suspended for an hour while the staff people gather around TV sets to watch “the daily bummer,” as some of them call it) and Kimmelman has the only accessible color set in the building, so his office is usually crowded for the news hour.

But his set is fucked, unfortunately. One of the color tubes is blown, so everything that appears on the screen has a wet purple tint to it. When McGovern comes on, rapping out lines from a speech that somebody watching one of the headquarters’ TV sets just wrote for him a few hours earlier, his face appears on the set in Kimmelman’s office as if he were speaking up from the bottom of a swimming pool full of cheap purple dye.

“It is not a reassuring thing to see, and most of the staffers prefer to watch the news on the black & white sets downstairs in the political section….”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

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