Written during the "Stills-Young" tour on the bus. Sort of a modern day Cortez, you know. Neil Young Decade liner notes 1977

One afternoon during a tour several years ago, Young sat in his manager's hotel room. The phone kept ringing, tour crew members bustled in an out . . . and through it all, Young sat on the bed with his son Zeke, peacefully watching the news. The broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin. Pat Nixon had suffered a stroke, an announcer said over a filmed report of the sad and beaten Richard Nixon tearily moving through the hospital's revolving doors. After a time, Young got up and disappeared into his bus in the parking lot. Onstage several hours later, Young played the song he had written: Hospitals have made him cry But there's always a freeway in his eye Though his beach got too crowded for a stroll. Roads stretch out like healthy veins And wild gift horses strain the reins Where even Richard Nixon has got soul. The song was a first called "Requiem for a President." Young later changed the name to "Campaigner," and placed it on his three-record retrospective album, Decade. "Guess I felt sorry for [Nixon] that night," he said of the song while traveling on his bus the next year, just as 300,000 copies of Decade were being prepared for release within the week. "That album was a chance to use some of the unreleased material. Hopefully it's a greatest-hits album that's more like an album." Young laughed. "Should be timeless." Neil Young/Cameron Crowe Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe February 8, 1979

BF: You showed a great deal of sympathy for Nixon in "Campaigner" (Decade), at a time when everybody was kicking him. NY: Oh yeah, that's the human side. No matter how bad his ideals were or how he mishandled the trust of the country, he is still a human being. Neil Young Interview with Bill Flanagan 1985

[talking about the Hitchhiker recording session at Indigo Ranch on August 11, 1976] I started with Pocahontas, a song I had recently written. I previously tried it, recording with Crazy Horse for an album called Zuma, but that version did not make the cut. Then came another capo change for Powderfinger, which I had also tried for Zuma with The Horse and not captured well enough to use. Then, came Captain Kennedy, a complete (???) I had never played before, followed by Hawaii and Give Me Strength, two songs written around my recent breakup with Carrie Snodgress, mother of my first son Zeke. At this time, Briggs joined us in the playing room and we stopped the proceeding to do some more libations. That accomplished, Briggs returned to the control room; "Rolling!" he announced. We continued with Ride My Lama, another outtake from Zuma, followed by Hitchhicker. You may be able to hear the drugs kicking in here… Then came Campaigner, a song I had written about politics and Nixon. Human Highway was next. At that point we moved my vocal microphone to the piano outside in the main studio for the last song, The Old Country Waltz. Briggs did not want to change the mic, so we had to carry it out there. It was the same mic I had sung into; he wanted the songs to all be consistent without any unnecessary distractions or changes. He was mixing live as the songs went down, and my vocal mic was part of the sound. Neil Young KOTO FM radio Telluride CO September 1, 2017