Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  TO CAREY McWILLIAMS, THE NATION:

  The Nation had run an editorial supporting Aspen’s Freak Power Uprising.

  November 23, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Carey …

  Thanks for the letters and especially the editorial in the recent issue. You may have a point. We actually won the city (Aspen proper), and only lost the whole county by about 60/40 … which is a hell of a lot better than any Freak/Left/Weird/Radical/New/Young/Etc. candidates did in most parts of the country. Consider P&F in Calif., Raza Unida in Colo. or even the liberals in NY. What neither the Times nor The National Observer said, incidentally, is that we ran straight at the bastards with an out-front Mescaline platform. My drug tastes were discussed quite openly, not only in the newspaper but also in mass public forums … and through it all I refused to say I’d stop eating mescaline if I got elected. Marijuana got lost in that scramble; we completely jumped over it—to the extent that I probably could have won if I’d compromised to the extent of forswearing mescaline if they’d let me keep smoking grass. But we refused to compromise at all, on any issue … and we still won the city. Which is weird … and certainly worth thinking about. The question now is whether to go even further in the May ’71 City elections (Mayor & Council), or whether to back off a bit and try to consolidate local strength with some kind of sure-fire, non-frightening slate that won’t scare out such a brutal negative vote. They were totally terrified this time; people came out in wheel-chairs & on stretchers to vote against me. Not for anybody or anything else; just against the Freaks.

  Anyway, as far as doing a piece for you is concerned, I think I can probably do something fairly short and focusing on one aspect of the campaign, rather than the overall thing—because I’m doing that for Rolling Stone, as a sort of follow-up on the Battle of Aspen. Jann Wenner asked me for it about midway in the campaign … and since he also offered to pay about twice what he paid for the last one I really didn’t have to grapple with the idea very long before getting down to it.

  I just got off the phone with Warren Hinckle in SF—a last-ditch midnight effort to salvage some of the funds they owe me for things I did for Scanlan’s before the crunch. Today I got “Final Notice Before Seizure” from the IRS, telling me I have to raise $2200 before midnight on Saturday or they’re coming out here to attach everything I own. I’m also about to lose my American Express card—which was very hard to get—and which will make my free-lance life very difficult in the future if I lose the bastard.

  So you see the problem. As always, I’d like to write a good long piece for you, but I always seem to be in the position of a wild boar in a running battle with a pack of hounds & I never seem to have time to do the kind of things I want to do. Beyond that, I’m trying to learn to play the flute because it strikes me that most of today’s real literature pops up in music instead of in fiction or even personal journalism. For instance at the moment my writing room is full of “New Speedway Boogie” by the Grateful Dead. It says more than anything I’ve read in five years.

  But what the hell? I’ll send you a campaign poster … and plan on getting you a piece (say 2500 words) in 2/3 weeks. I have a hell of a lot to write. All at once. I think the time has come to Do It. OK for now.

  Ciao …

  Hunter

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  Tom Wolfe had sent a note of encouragement to Thompson, who was still being pursued by the IRS.

  November 25, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  Here’s an addendum to my last, long letter … and maybe something you’ll want to keep in your file. Tom Wolfe’s new book came today (Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers) and on the title page was a hand-written note, to wit:

  “Dear Hunter, I present this book in homage after reading the two funniest stories of all time—J.C. Killy and The Derby—(Scanlan’s). You are The Boss! Not the sheriff, maybe, but you are The Boss!”

  Tom Wolfe, Nov 16, 1970

  For whatever it’s worth. If nothing else, it makes me feel good. Particularly right now in the shadow of the Tax Man. The IRS mogul in Denver was extremely surly when Joe Edwards called him yesterday … saying my case had already been assigned to a “field agent” who would be “calling on (me) shortly.” So we are now in the process of stripping the house of all money-valuable items: guns, amplifiers, motorcycle, sculpture, etc. And both typewriters (this one belongs to the new Community School, in town).

  Anyway, I trust you see why I’m very much interested, right now, in getting The Book concept settled … so I can seize that opening $5000. Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated.

  Sincerely,

  The Boss

  TO TOM WOLFE:

  Wolfe’s fourth book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, satirized the cynical self-interest of activists and do-gooders on both sides of America’s racial divide.

  November 25, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Tom …

  Your new book came today & I read the whole first section before Sandy mentioned that you’d written something up front. She read it as something like, “You are one of the boys …” but I deciphered your arcane script and dug it immensely—despite the massive lack of evidence to support your idea. At the moment I think you’re running way out front, and not just because you’ve sent more books to the press. With the possible and perhaps fading exception of [Ken] Kesey, you’re about the only writer around that I figure I can learn from. Very quick into Radical Chic I suddenly understood that one of the main strengths of your weird, super-detailed style is a definite dramatic tension that comes with the idea that something very brutal and final might happen to the subject on the very next page, or maybe the next paragraph. You convey a kind of doomsday confidence in your evidence that almost precludes the necessity for summing it up …a sort of mercifully suspended judgement that amounts, in the end, to a horrifying indictment … maybe Guilt by Detailed Suggestions is the right phrase. Whatever … it works. I found myself hungering for the Axe to fall. …

  Or maybe I’m just projecting some of my political wisdom, gleaned from the last campaign. We used the same technique—given that one of our opponents was a moral junkie and the other a twice-convicted felon illegally running for office. We managed to taint them savagely by floating rumors that we then refused to discuss in public, thereby implying that we were “Above That Sort of Thing.” It worked very nicely … although not quite nicely enough.

  Indeed. We lost. And you missed a hell of a good story. I thought about calling you early on, but my position seemed to preclude that kind of out-front hustling. As it was, I was heavily damned for “the publicity,” even though I spent about half the campaign trying to avoid it because I could see it was killing us. Now I understand that Agnew was Right about the press. They are a gang of cheap swine—even the ones who try to help and be friendly. What the campaign needed—in retrospect—was somebody with a kind of super Third Ear (or Eye); somebody who could sense, somehow, what was happening and Why.

  But nobody like that showed up … and now it’s left for me to write the Epitaph for Freak Power. At the moment I’m doing a follow-up for Rolling Stone, and given my current financial circumstances I suspect I’ll also try to whip something up for Random House. The Tax Man is after me in a very serious way, demanding 2 grand by midnight on Saturday or we go to war. Seizure proceedings. Those cocksuckers. I called Warren Hinckle the other night to get the 5 grand Scanlan’s owes me and he said my payment hangs on a shipment of some 100,000 copies of the long-delayed “next issue” getting across the border from Canada this weekend. In other words, if the whole shipment is seized at customs—which it certainly will be—then Scanlan’s is doomed and croaked. And I think that’s a foregone conclusion. That gang of Pigs on the NY end: Zion, [Bob] Arum, Roy Cohn, etc., should be hung by their fucking heels & beaten with wire whips.

  But fuck all that. It’s making me crazy.
I shall, of course, prevail. But it’s wearing me down. I dig the battles, but I don’t have much stomach for The War. The shitheads keep on breeding, multiplying. You croak one & two more slither out to replace it—like getting rid of Johnson and gaining Nixon/Agnew. Jesus, what next? Where will it end? I think maybe Kesey is right.

  Ciao,

  Hunter

  TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY:

  Kennedy had sent Thompson his own account of the night he had spent standing guard outside Thompson’s campaign headquarters.

  December 5, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Bill …

  I just read your piece again & it seems a lot better than it did before…although at that point I probably wouldn’t have liked anything I read, no matter what the fuck it said. But I still don’t like the lead; it takes a long time to overcome. Actually, that word “Kibbitzer” might be what puts me off. I’ve always deplored your penchant for those rotten, cute little words—like “bolly,” etc. But we’ve talked about that, so to hell with it.

  My own piece—for Rolling Stone—is still laboring along. I missed the first deadline & it’s beginning to look like I might miss the second—which would get it out about the middle of January, with yours, and for that reason I’m going over yours again to match up loose details …like the temperature outside on that savage Wednesday nite when you did guard duty. You had 18 and my first draft said 12, so I guess I’ll go with 18, since I really didn’t check at the time. (There was another mistake, I think: You quoted that “SDS” note as saying “This will only be used on Hunter Thompson if he is elected sheriff.” The tape says “This will only be used if HT is elected. …” A definite difference.) There was another one where you quoted me saying, “My blood ran cold. …” Which of course I’d never say … but what the hell?

  Anyway, here are two photos I thought you’d like. We have about 7 million to sift through, but these are dupes so I thought I’d send them along—to Dana.41

  I assume you got straight with Harper’s & that the thing will be in the Feb issue. Let me know if I’m wrong, because I’ll want to get some extra copies & Aspen only gets about six, in all.

  Meanwhile, in addition to the RS piece, I seem to be drifting toward using this Aspen political scene as the basic framework for “the book.” Silberman seems to dig it, and right now I’m inclined to write just about anything he’ll give me quick money for. The taxman is after me for real: “Final Notice Before Seizure” & that sort of thing, which is grim. I wonder if this has any connection to Bromley’s42 employment with a division of the IRS? Paranoia? After that election?

  OK for now. Send word. …

  H

  TO SIDNEY ZION, SCANLAN’S MONTHLY:

  Sidney E. Zion was coeditor of Scanlan’s Monthly and apparently in charge of its editorial budget. Thompson thus attached an invoice of his fees and expenses for the three articles he had done for the magazine.

  December 8, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Sidney …

  After several weeks of extensive and increasingly anguished phone conversations with Warren (Hinckle) and (atty.) John Clancy in San Francisco—and (atty.) Leon Friedman in New York, I was advised tonight by Leon that the reason I have not received a sizeable cheque from Scanlan’s is that my bill (statement, money demand, etc.) was never received by you in the New York office. And that once you received my bill there would of course be no problem at all in effecting prompt payment … to me … in order that I might transfer these monies, at once, to American Express and the Internal Revenue Service.

  As Leon has probably told you, and as Clancy has certainly told Warren, the American Express computer has red-lined my number to the tune of $1,035.30 (all incurred in the course of that disastrous month on the road for Scanlan’s) … and the IRS has sent me a “Final Warning Before Seizure,” which means their next step is to come out here and sell everything I own at a public auction. These developments have naturally disturbed me—coming, as they did, hard on the heels of my tragic loss at the polls.

  But what the hell … eh? No point in boring you with the details of these rotten, stinking, fiendish fucking nightmares that I somehow got myself into. The point right now is to get out of them … and to that end I’m enclosing a bill/statement I sent Warren about a month ago. That one was the end result of a settlement worked out between him and Clancy, and I assumed it had been passed on to the NY office for payment.

  I realize, of course, that your normal procedures have been even further addled, of late, by elements of fascist insanity relating to printers, unions, customs, Mounties and that sort of thing … and I understood, Sidney, I sympathized … despite the soaking sweats that occasionally seized me when I recalled that conversation at Sardi’s about … what was it? Something about establishing nerve damage? Brain damage? Goddamn …I have it on the tip of my tongue … but again, what the hell?

  In any case, the enclosed statement is necessarily a summary of all the items I’ve tried to pull together since that heinous trip—the original purpose of which was to put off the Taxman and lay in at least a minimal cash reserve to cover my campaign expenses. What happened, however, was a total disaster on all fronts—including the loss of what small cash reserves I had at the time I took off for SF & Portland (that’s the $559.80 item). I should have listened to Steadman, who’d been warned by one of your guilt-plagued operatives to do nothing at all until he got money ahead. Consequently, when we had to charter a bi-plane out of Newport to avoid arrest at dawn, I had to put Steadman’s fare on my AmExp card & also give him enough cash to get into town from La Guardia. That whole twisted scene at Newport was so rotten, so bad, so crazy and unreal from start to finish that even now I hate to think what it actually cost me … overall.

  …I ask you, Sidney, where will it end? Who can you trust these days? Even in publishing?

  And so much for all that—just a touch of the natural wigginess, to clear my head for a final statement. Which naturally concerns money … and I need that money at once. Any delays might prove disastrous. The Taxman has already assigned his “field agent” to my case, and the first thing he’ll try to seize is my car … and that will cause me real problems. Which I’d much prefer to avoid, and even a partial payment from your end would get me off that hook and make my life human again. I have every reason to believe, in fact, that a quick shot of $2500 or so would stymie the buggers completely … and then we could haggle about the rest. Because all I want right now is to get these swine off my back … and since you owe me enough money to get that done (absolutely no question about your owing at least that much), well … that seems like the thing to do right now. At least that’s the way it seems to be.

  So let me know something at once. It’s imperative. Yes …speed is of the essense. Essence? Essense? Whatever … after all these words, I trust you get the point …& spelling be damned.

  Thanks,

  Hunter

  TO JOHN LOMBARDI, ROLLING STONE:

  John Lombardi, the Rolling Stone editor assigned to Thompson’s Freak Power campaign article, unwittingly prompted “Raoul Duke” to put together his list of the ten best albums of the 1960s.

  December 11, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear John …

  The Aspen photo packet will be delayed a day, so I can skulk around town & find whatever photog calls himself “Trout Fishing in America.”43 He’s the one who got the shot of the guy voting on the stretcher—which I have—but I want to find the person who actually got the photo. Otherwise, I’m sending about 25 shots—maybe even 30, depending on the final mix—so Kingsbury44

  can fuck around with a layout all the way from zero to super-heavy. If the selection I send seems a bit rife with shots of HST … well, I worked with the two main campaign photogs in an effort to show the chronology of the action, as we all saw it … so a lot of the photos inevitably show my skull from many angles. But what the fuck? All I ask is that you return any and all fotos y
ou don’t use. The caption-list contains a few comments inre: my own favorites, but these merely reflect my own taste … and I know Kingsbury has his own, so to hell with all that too. Whatever’s right ….

  On other fronts, I enjoyed our long talk the other night … and after I hung up I realized that was the first human conversation I’d had with anybody since the election … since the advent of the Deep Funk that came down almost instantly afterward, not because we lost so much as the Taxman & the Bill Collectors & the Scanlan’s fuckaround & the local shitheads running wild with their victory leverage and mainly, I think, the final rotten understanding that America is really Amerika … for different and deeper, more final reasons than the Panthers ever figured. Those poor bastards are just brushing the nerve-ends right now; they have no idea what’s going to come down on them when they really start scaring the Right People. There’ll be a nigger hanging on every telephone pole … along with a lot of Blacks, too.

  This is what my half-born piece is about. If I can get a tentative lead together—and maybe the shape of an ending—I’ll send them along with the photos, FYI … and if you need an excuse to keep the thing timely, keep in mind that Phil Hill is due to “take office” in Lawrence (Kan.) on Jan 11. But he won’t. Those fuckers will abolish every JP office in the state, rather than let a certified freak into office. And that’s the whole story, as I see it. The cocksuckers are into a Rule or Ruin gig, and the only kind of Voting they’ll tolerate is the same kind Marshall Ky45 says he’s for in Vietnam. Only as long as it’s a means to the Right End. …

  Right? right … which gets back to that gun control article I mentioned, and the main problem aside from the length was that I changed my whole mind on the subject somewhere around midstream, and since then not much has happened to bring me back around … except that now it’s 24 hours later & I’ve spent the last few hours talking with an Esquire writer/photog team who flew in to do (part of) a feature on “the politics of costume” … or maybe “the costume of politics” … or some such flaky bullshit. But it hardly matters what they want. I learned my lesson about the press during the campaign … so tomorrow I’m going to set up my own photo for the fuckers: The New Posse, posed & armed to the teeth on the courthouse steps—as a heinous mockery of that shot RS used in the pre-election story. No more of this free-form press-relations fuckaround; from now on it’s the iron fist.