It was pure advocacy journalism delivered with a feint that tilted toward the absurd, and those who played along got off easier than the ones who didn’t. A few interview subjects, such as Mankiewicz, got into the spirit of things with the writer after a few primaries. “If Hunter asked a left-field question, I’d give him a cockamamie answer.” Thompson had more respect for guys like Mankiewicz, who maintained a healthy respect for the process but still regarded it as a game, just another beloved American pastime that never amounted to anything but mediocrity and deceit at the highest levels of government.
As journalists who had engaged in bids for public office on fairly radical platforms, Thompson and Norman Mailer, who was covering the campaign for Life, had little tolerance for mainstream politics. But while Mailer’s experience had convinced him to stick to his strengths, Thompson had not given up on proselytizing from within. He buttonholed Mankiewicz on a few occasions during the primary campaign and drilled him on the salient points of his Freak Power political philosophy, but Mankiewicz just shrugged it off—a sure sign, Thompson thought, of myopia on the McGovern side.
Thompson was fortunate that Mankiewicz felt so charitable toward some of his more spurious reporting, particularly one incident in New Hampshire in which Thompson claimed to have been cold-cocked by Mankiewicz in the driveway of the Wayfarer Hotel—a contract hit apparently set up by Crouse, who tipped off Mankiewicz in exchange for a White House job. “All that talk about me chasing him with a tire iron is patently false,” said Mankiewicz, “but there’s a spirit of passion in there that clicks.”
Jules Witcover, who was covering the campaign for the Los Angeles Times, found fault with Thompson’s shoot-from-the-hip-flask reporting, which he felt was willfully fallacious and unfair to its subjects. “Hunter was a total screwball, a whirling dervish on the trail,” said Witcover. “I understood what he was after and I found it amusing, but he didn’t read people that well. He dealt in exaggeration, and I don’t think it really ever did Muskie or anyone else any real damage. He was an entertainer first and foremost.”
Bob Semple, who was covering the Nixon campaign for the New York Times, wasn’t entertained. Semple and Thompson had forged a casual relationship while covering Nixon in New Hampshire, driving frantically from speech to speech across black ice with the Los Angeles Times’s Don Irwin in tow, nipping from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to keep themselves warm. “I feared for my life in that car,” said Semple. “I’ve never been closer to my maker.” Semple even managed to obtain White House plane press credentials for Thompson after reassuring Nixon’s assistant for domestic affairs, John Erlichman, that Thompson “wouldn’t harm a flea.” (Erlichman was convinced that Thompson was a homicidal maniac.) But Semple felt betrayed by Thompson’s description of him in his story “Fear and Loathing: The Fat City Blues,” which ran in Rolling Stone’s October 26 issue, particularly a passage in which Thompson expressed revulsion at the sycophancy of Nixon beat reporters such as Semple, who whimpered around “kissing [White House press secretary] Ron Ziegler’s ass.”
“I understood that Hunter was looking for deeper truths, and that his reporting was part fiction, but it really pissed me off,” said Semple. “I had gone out of my way to help him. I just didn’t know what he had in mind.”
Thompson was just trying to keep himself entertained, staving off the mind-numbing tedium of twenty-three primaries in five months, the boilerplate stump speeches, the glad-handing rituals, the horrid food in dingy motel rooms. With a mandate to file a story every two weeks, Thompson fulminated out loud in his stories about buckling under the weight of his burden.
“I am growing extremely weary of writing about politics,” he wrote in “Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance” for Rolling Stone’s July 6, 1972, issue. “My brain has become a steam-vat; my body is turning to wax and bad flab; impotence looms; my fingernails are growing at a fantastic rate of speed—they are turning into claws; my standard-size clippers will no longer cut the growth, so now I carry a set of huge toenail clippers and sneak off every night around dusk, regardless of where I am … to chop off another quarter of an inch or so off all ten fingers.”
Every story that Thompson filed was an painful and protracted ritual of false starts and piecemeal construction. Thompson would agonize over a lead and toss it in the trash, only to have his wife, Sandy, iron out the wrinkles by hand and send it over. Thompson had to transmit every page though the telefax, which he nicknamed the “Mojo Wire”—an antediluvian creaker that transmitted one page every three minutes onto thermal paper at the receiving end. Invariably, the copy would be fired off at an ungodly hour of the morning, and it was Charles Perry’s job to stand by and receive it as it moved though the phone lines.
“I had to wait for the call, which could come at any time,” said Perry. The stories, which often ran to eight thousand words and more, came in sections, which Perry would then have to reconstruct according to Thompson’s alphabetical system of inserts. “We’d shuffle it all around and arrange a story one way or another,” said Perry. “Hunter could drive editors to tears,” said David Felton. “He would be up on speed and write for three days in a row, producing a paragraph an hour, and Charles Perry would have to stay up for three days and retrieve it, and we’d have to fix it. And if he didn’t like what you did, he would scream and yell at you.”
In his stories Thompson laid waste to all of the Democratic contenders. Ed Muskie “talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop”; Humphrey was “a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack,” an unprincipled panderer who didn’t seem aware that “his gibberish is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class blacks.” Only George Mc-Govern gave Thompson hope, however faint, that a decent candidate might emerge from such a mediocre field, but even Thompson conceded that the South Dakota senator was perhaps too timid and too earnest to be taken seriously as a national contender. “Crowds turn him off instead of on,” Thompson wrote in his dispatch from the New Hampshire primary. “He lacks that sense of drama—that instinct for timing and orchestration that is the real secret of success in American politics.”
Norman Mailer had a less charitable view of McGovern. Mailer shared Thompson’s opinion of McGovern as a decent and principled politician, but virtue was not enough for him to support the ticket. McGovern’s emergence was emblematic, for Mailer, of the Democratic party’s transformation from a vibrant and sometimes chaotic alembic of ideas into a quiescent repository of uninspiring cant. In fact, McGovern was just as beige as Nixon; he projected “that same void of charisma which can prove more powerful than charisma itself.”
Everywhere he turned at the Miami Democratic convention, Mailer saw the dissipated remnants of the youth movement that had galvanized the left in the sixties, coddled suburban kids lulled into a “complacent innocence altogether near to arrogance.” The passions of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, in which the clash of ideologies played out in a bloody street fight between Mayor Daley’s cops and antiwar protesters, had died out. Television had asserted its control over the tenor and timbre of the event, leaving the dissenting protestors entirely out of frame, but also inducing an acquiescence to proper decorum. If TV didn’t want a circus, then it wouldn’t get one. The new, professional class of delegates made sure of it.
At McGovern headquarters at the Doral Hotel, Mailer mingled with the candidate’s supporters, “Phi Beta Kappas with clean faces and hornrimmed glasses, their presence to offer clear statement of a physiology which had little taste for liquor and much taste for good marks,” as well as “suburban youth with long hair and the sense of boredom of waiting another evening for some tribal left wind to touch the hair of their nostrils.” Mailer felt a twinge of nostalgia for the back-room horse trading of previous conventions; an utterly benign convention left little for Mailer to decode. Even Nixon disappointed him. The president’s old, simmering misanthropy had be
en ground down to digestible gruel. He was now the perfect TV president,“a bland drone of oscillating ideological dots” preaching a policy of middle-class entitlement to “the wad,” those Zenith supplicants out there in America’s living rooms who tacitly approved a policy that spent almost twice as much on the Vietnam War as it did on welfare.
If Mailer was disheartened by the lack of intrigue in Miami, he wasn’t as quick to dismiss the other major candidates as Thompson, who ranked them a notch above low-rent carnival barkers. In Thompson’s view, the Democratic convention was nothing more than a procession of “shameless dingbats who saw no harm in cadging some free exposure on national TV by nominating each other for vice-president.” So much convention time was devoted to chest-thumping rhetoric and jostling over the choice for the vice-presidential nominee on nomination night that McGovern didn’t give his acceptance speech until three-thirty in the morning, by which time most of the TV audience had gone to sleep. As for the delegates, they were zonked out on booze and liquid THC administered by a “smiling freak” who “was giving free hits to anybody who still had the strength to stick their tongues out.”
Mailer’s reporting from the two conventions, which would be published in his book St. George and the Godfather, was more generous and nuanced than Thompson’s, more willing to concede that a vestige of decency could be excavated if one looked hard enough. It was a waste of his time to write about subjects that weren’t worthy of his consideration, that didn’t have some latent complexity to be unearthed, and Mailer had complete confidence in his ability to tease out the superego from the id simply from standing on the sidelines with his notebook.
Unlike Thompson, who believed in absolute numbers and what they revealed, statistics weren’t as important to Mailer as were the methods used to attain and broker power. The selection of a running mate, for example, was more or less a search for the perfect brand name: “Recognize that a man named Proctor running for President would look for Gamble to go along.” Billboard euphony, the pleasing sound of the two names when combined, was more important than political compatibility, and thus McGovern, after being rejected by the likes of Boston mayor Kevin White, Ted Kennedy, and Florida governor Ruben Askew (“a perfect name! Govern and Ask-You”), settled on Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, whose name “had connotations of the American Eagle, a stern virtue, a modest plus.” But Eagleton would prove to be McGovern’s undoing when it was revealed that he had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion and had received electroshock therapy on two separate occasions.
Here was intrigue, at last, but Mailer was careful not to arrive at any easy conclusions about Eagleton, who had agreed to an interview with Mailer on the afternoon of his resignation. He accepted the fact that Eagleton had perhaps not given his past any serious thought when his name was being mentioned as a vice-presidential nominee, having whipped “a miserable recollection from shell to shell” so many times that he’d ceased to worry about it. He was a fallen character that might have stepped from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Mailer maintained that Eagleton’s sharp patrician features gave him a passing resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald (was Eagleton, like Jay Gatsby, a man who had learned to suppress his mysterious past?), but when Eagleton responded by telling him that The Great Gatsby was one of his favorite books, Mailer could sense the disingenuous pandering of the professional vote beggar, and the disappointing realization that politicians were “no more magnificent” than himself.
Thompson had dismissed Eagleton as a hack from the outset and chided McGovern for sharing the ticket with such an uninspired old-school pol. Eagleton’s replacement, Sargent Shriver, the former head of the Peace Corps and a Kennedy in-law, was only a marginal improvement, a safe bet that inspired no one. McGovern’s MO was being shanghaied by the entrenched party operatives; the liberal fire brand of the primaries who had fended off a last-minute parliamentary challenge by an anti-McGovern contingent on the floor of the convention in July had given way to the party pragmatist, working his inexorable way toward the old minority-and-union alliances that might prop him up high enough to level the playing field with Nixon come November. What had begun as a rekindling of the old Eugene McCarthy spirit of insurrection had curdled into business as usual. McGovern’s vacillation regarding Eagleton’s fate, his indecisiveness in the face of the campaign’s first real crisis, was a red flag for Thompson, a indication of the McGovern staff’s disorganization and incompetence. Nixon was many things, but he wasn’t dumb: his gift for political maneuvering and strategy was Napoleonic. Things looked awfully grim indeed.
The action, or lack thereof, swirling around the Republican convention the week of August 18 was an apt metaphor for the enervated energy level of the election in general. In Flamingo Park (near the Fontainebleau Hotel, which served as an informal headquarters for the press), Thompson witnessed a clutch of demonstrators pathetically trying to summon up a head of steam. “With the exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant, chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest,” Thompson wrote in “Nixon Bites the Bomb,” which ran in Rolling Stone’s September 28 issue. “They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted on grass, wine, and downers that they couldn’t say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego.”
Thompson found the Nixon supporters to be far more effective demonstrators and recruiters. Just prior to the formal nominating roll call, Rolling Stone’s intrepid reporter, who was en route to the free press bar, was waylaid by a throng of Nixon Youth wranglers. Seizing an opportunity to get close to the belly of the beast, Thompson merged with the mob and found himself in a holding room where preparations were being made for a demonstration. Thompson regarded ready-made placards with slogans such as FOUR MORE YEARS AND NO COMPROMISE laid out on a table, and chose one to carry out on the convention floor: GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME.
The ruse worked like a charm, until one of the demonstrators spotted the Village Voice’s Ron Rosenbaum running toward Thompson in an attempt to avoid being kicked out of the ready room.
I looked up and shuddered, knowing my cover was blown. Within seconds, they were screaming at me, too. “You crazy bastard,” I shouted at Rosenbaum. “You fingered me! Look what you’ve done!”
“No press!” they were shouting. “OUT! Both of you!”
I stood up quickly and put my back to the wall, still cursing Rosenbaum. “That’s right!” I yelled. “Get that bastard out of here! No press allowed!”
“Well, I didn’t point him out, and I don’t think he would say that I did so,” said Rosenbaum. “That part was made up for fun, but we were never at odds about this. That story was just consistent with that unique genre of Hunterism, between fact and fiction.”
Thompson convinced the Nixon loyalists that he was merely a failed politician who had unsuccessfully run for sheriff in Colorado, and now he wanted to see what it was like to be on the inside of a winning campaign. Then someone noticed his McGovern button, which was affixed to his press badge. Using his finely honed instinct for wriggling out of awkward situations, Thompson avoided expulsion and walked right onto the floor of the convention with a few thousand Nixon Youth, where he wore a red, white, and blue plastic hat and carried his GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME placard for the delectation of whatever television viewers might have been tuned in at that moment. But when the throng began chanting “Four more years,” Thompson doffed his plastic hat and bailed.
The eventual reelection of Nixon by a record-breaking landslide (he won more than 60 percent of the national vote) confirmed what Thompson and Mailer had suspected all along—that Nixon appealed to the worst instincts of “The Wad,” and that McGovern was perhaps too virtuous to fight in the trenches with such a seasoned and unscrupulous battler. “This may be the year,” Thompson wrote in his article “Fear and Loathing: The Fat City
Blues,” “when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
If many among the mainstream press corps were chagrined by Thompson’s advocacy journalism, they soon realized that his aggressively subjective reporting was closer to the truth than the hard facts in the family newspapers and the mass circulation newsweeklies, which didn’t really elucidate anything at all. “He hated that war in Vietnam with a passion,” said George McGovern. “And he hated the hypocrisy of the establishment. Basically, I think he wanted to see this country live up to its ideals. And he wanted us to do better.”
Watergate was still a whisper when Nixon was reelected. When the break-in at the Democratic party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel had occurred on June 17, the New York Times. On October 10, the Washington Post ran a story by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that revealed a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.” Still, many newspapers chose to ignore the story or else downplayed their coverage; Vice President Spiro Agnew’s relentless campaign against the Post, a paper that he characterized as a liberal elitist organ with a political agenda, did much to silence or cow many press outlets into submission.
But Thompson knew better than to lap up the spin Agnew was spoon-feeding the press corps. He had an innate and absolute distrust of Nixon, whom he regarded as evil to the rotten core of his soul. Well before the Washington Post broke the story of the Nixon team’s complicity in Watergate, Thompson wrote a story for Rolling Stone in which he wondered aloud at the mass delusion of a populace that would vote for a man as constitutionally dishonest as Nixon. “‘Ominous’ is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Martin Bormann.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 33