Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Under different circumstances I might have been able to send you something better, but this thing just boiled up by accident & I figured Why Not? As a total literary entity, “the incredible Mint 400” could use a few stiff shots of something or other before I’d want it to go into the archives—but in retrospect I guess I’ve felt that way about everything I’ve ever sent off.

  What we need to do now is first find out quick if the piece interests you at all—either Lynn’s version, or mine, which would take a bit longer. After that, we can figure out how to deal with the fucker.

  All I need at the moment is an immediate reply of some kind. Probably the phone would be best—late afternoon, your time. Or call anytime at all & leave a message with whoever might happen to answer the phone here during morning hours. I never know who might answer when I’m asleep, but the rule is that they have to take all messages word for word … and it tends to work out, for good or ill.

  Unless I hear something from you ASAP, as it were, I’ll assume that I might as well go ahead and let SI chop the thing up for captions. Let’s say I won’t do anything with the bugger until July 9. That gives you a week to brood on the idea, get the piece from Lynn, and call if it interests you.

  OK for now, and thanx …

  Hunter S. Thompson

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  Silberman had asked Thompson whether Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was journalism or fiction.

  June, 1971

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  Under normal circumstances it should never be necessary for a writer to explain how his work should be read. In theory, all literature & even journalism should be taken on its own intrinsic merits—above & beyond (or even below) the confusing contexts of whatever reality surrounded the act of writing. This was the keystone of the New Criticism, a now-discredited “school” of elitist/academic criticism that flourished in the 1950s and largely accounted for the massive loss of interest in all forms of “fiction” writing by the end of the 1960s—or at least all forms of “fiction” except what some managed to peddle as “new journalism.”

  This is a term that Tom Wolfe has been trying to explain, on the lecture-stump, for more than five years … and the reason he’s never been able to properly define “the new journalism” is that it never actually existed, except maybe in the minds of people with a vested personal interest in the “old journalism”—editors, professors and book reviewers who refused to understand that some of the best of the country’s young writers no longer recognized “the line” between fiction and journalism.

  Where the senile strictures of the New Criticism made traditional “fiction” irrelevant, the hopeless stagnancy of traditional journalism—the Hearst/Hecht mentality—made it impossible for anybody who took himself seriously as a Writer to work for a newspaper or even a magazine. In 1960 the pinnacle of journalism was an editor’s slot at Time Inc., and the pinnacle of fiction was selling tone poems about the bird-baths of your doomed youth to The New Yorker.

  The choice was pretty grim. You could either “get involved in reality” and be a rewrite hack for Time, or you could hunker down with your intensely private memories and be a star on the cocktail/fiction circuit. But, either way, you were fucked—particularly if you were 20 years old and inclined to take the real world seriously. There was simply no room, no way to make a living, in that twilight of the Eisenhower Era, for anybody who might want to bring a writer’s fine eye & perspective to the mundane “realities” of journalism.

  Probably the first big breakthrough on this front was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—a long rambling piece of personal journalism that the publisher (Viking) called “fiction” because if they’d said it was “journalism” no Literary Critic would touch it. Not even the book editors for Time and The New York Times. And if they ignored it, the book would die on the vine.

  As it was, On the Road had sold less than 20,000 copies in hardcover at the peak of its infamy … and it was only after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl got busted for Obscenity and the trial was covered by Life that Kerouac became notorious as “the spokesman for the Beat Generation.” And, with that, the mass media had a profitable excuse to recognize what they called “a whole new style of writing.”

  But the only thing new about it was the sudden official sanction for novelists and poets to focus on the world we were all living in. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s savage description of a testimonial dinner for “good ole Ike” was written in the form of a poem,32 but it was really not a hell of a lot different from Harrison Salisbury’s articles, on the front page of The New York Times, about Eisenhower’s aborted “good will trip” to Japan in 1960. It was clear that both Ferlinghetti and Salisbury were calling the President of the United States a jibbering, ignorant old fool, surrounded at all times by thieves and flunkies and self-serving advisors who were either hit-men for the Captains of Commerce or in some cases the Captains, themselves—like Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, or Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, one of America’s most powerful oil barons.

  The “Beat” writers were a main force in the national uprising of 1960 that resulted in the shocking defeat of Richard Nixon, the incumbent vice president, by a relatively unknown senator named John F. Kennedy. The same people who instinctively identified with the mad angst of Howl and the high speed underground rebellion of On the Road also understood—personally, if not politically—the importance of beating Nixon. Because it was clear, even then, that he represented what Robert Kennedy, in early 1968, called “the dark side of the American character.” Both Kennedys understood this—which was easier for them than for most of the rest of us, because in the protracted combat of a political campaign you are forced to know your opponent—because every move you make, every word you say (even privately, because any sign of weakness or pessimism in a candidate might demoralize everybody around him) … your whole lifestyle is geared, hyper-critically, to dealing with the enemy, which means you get to know him pretty well. Perhaps not personally, because even in scenes like Debates and Personal Confrontations the campaign machinery intrudes and overwhelms … in the same sense that the frenzied public machinery surrounding a Heavyweight Championship Bout makes it just about impossible for anybody involved in it to act human. At least not on a public level. The roles are not created for the actors, no more. And mystery is always in vogue.

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  In one day, Thompson sent Silberman three detailed missives—on “The Battle of Aspen,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and “The Death of the American Dream”—as he struggled to combine the themes into a worthwhile book.

  July 12, 1971

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  I see two very distinct & different ways to go with the AD book:

  1) To do it as a series of chronological scenes, using Advertisements for Myself type bridges to jump from “Nixon in New Hampshire” to “Chicago” to “Gun Control” & then “The Battles of Aspen.”

  This would pretty obviously amount to a line-up of old articles, laced together by freshly-written bridges. This notion worked pretty well for [Norman] Mailer; at least in retrospect—I don’t know how it sold. But under the circumstances I think we might be better off going with …

  2) Which would start with the Battle of Aspen piece (almost verbatim out of Rolling Stone), then flash back to New Hampshire, etc…. and then finish with my still unfinished Aspen/Sheriff piece that’s titled “The Politics of Armageddon.”

  In other words, to use the two Aspen pieces as the framework, with the other stuff as background. That way, we could call it “The Battle of Aspen” & give the structure a unity that I think it would lack if we did it as a chronological series, with bridges.

  The problem with #2 is mainly time. It would take a lot of rewriting to work New Hampshire, for instance, into “The Battle of Aspen.”

  Unless maybe we completely reversed the Adve
rtisements for Myself idea and used the dated articles as bridges. In other words, the nut of the book would be two separate accounts of Aspen elections with things like the Nixon Inaugural laced into the narrative in italics. This would require some skillful editing, but if we could do it right I think it would make a better book.

  The narrative would begin & end in Aspen—structured around the ’69 and ’70 elections (two separate stories), but the real story, on a different level, would be in the scenes (like New Hampshire & Chicago, etc.) that drove me so far into activist politics that I found myself actually running for sheriff.

  Chronologically, this would make for numerous digressions & a fairly scrambled time sequence, but I think we could keep this under control by editing the thing so that it moved, overall, from the first stirrings of political rebellion here in Sept ’69 … to the terrible doomed frenzy of our Freak Power campaign here in Sept/Oct/Nov of ’70. And then, as a sort of epitaph, The Aftermath … when they mopped us up in the Spring of ’71.

  In this way, it would be the story of a genuinely indigenous political rebel-lion—so starkly contemporary that I could run for sheriff on the Mescaline Ticket & still get 45% of the vote—with the moral of the story being that if you challenge the bastards on that level you had damn well better win; because if you lose, you’re fucked.

  What this would amount to is “The Political Education of Hunter S. Thompson (or Raoul Duke)”—how a classic example of the late-’60s dropout culture (one of the original, 1964–65, settlers of the Haight-Ashbury, SF, Acid-Rock world) finally drifted so far into activist politics that he finally found himself riding the crest of an energy wave that he never knew existed.

  The nut of the story, I think, is the weird truth that I began that Aspen/Sheriff campaign as a joke & a smokescreen … only to find, once it got rolling, that I had accidentally touched one of those long-lost nerve-ends in the American Dream, a concept that appealed very intensely to a hell of a lot of people. Far more than I ever thought possible.

  The “Battle of Aspen” piece in Rolling Stone drew a fantastic amount of mail from all over the country & indeed all over the world. I still have a huge pile of letters on the floor behind me, that I’ve never answered … none of them are especially profound, but the thread that ties them all together is a sense of excitement at the idea that “freaks” are finally beginning to take political power into their own hands.

  This is something we demonstrated pretty heavily in that last election, even though we lost—and it’s also a thing that could have a heavy bearing on the ’72 and even ’76 elections. I keep pounding on this theme with everybody I talk to.

  Mike Murphy, the president of Esalen Institute, was just out here for a week & I’ve finally convinced him—after ten years of mean argument—that even Esalen must get into politics. Jann Wenner, RStone, is here now for a week, and he’s agreed to work with Murphy to set up a Politics of Armageddon conference at Esalen in September—with the ultimate idea being to mobilize the new 18–21 vote, along with millions of now-stagnant votes of the 1960s’ Dropout Culture…in order to drastically change the whole power-balance of electoral politics in 1972. Ideally, the Esalen conference would result in a radically different (but not necessarily “radical” in the old political sense) platform—a document that would represent the interests of the 40 or 50 million potential voters who won’t go to the polls at all, unless we can jerk them out of the mire with some kind of heavy/wild trip like the Freak Power campaign in Aspen.

  I think ’76 might be too late for this kind of uprising. Four more years of Nixon’s mob will make the Presidency not worth winning. It will be like winning a civil damages lawsuit against a man who long since went bankrupt.

  In any case, it will be imperative to make a strong run at the bastards in ’72, in order to muster the energy/action for ’76. We learned that in Aspen. You have to convince the long-term drop-outs that their votes are critical. We did that in ’69—which accounted for our incredible 45% showing in ’70.

  ***

  Anyway, I trust you see the drift of my thinking—which is also why I prefer AD/book option #2. I suspect the Battle of Aspen might blossom into a savagely relevant book, while a collection of old HST articles—even with beautifully written bridges—would probably get lost in the shuffle.

  I know I’m right on this score. There are more of us than there are of them. We can beat the bastards, but only if we can shake off the old-liberal death-wish that has haunted every liberal-type “loyal opposition” candidate since Adlai Stevenson. Except the Kennedys, and of course they were killed.

  They threatened that in Aspen, too—death & dynamite if I won, & even if I refused to drop out of the race—but we ran it straight back at them: We brought in vicious political bikers from Madison, black belt karate politicos from Denver, a pro-football drop-out like Dave Meggyesy from SF … along with a mind-boggling media presence from almost everywhere.

  And all this worked. We (almost) beat the bastards at their own rotten, mafia-style game, in addition to stomping them totally on the ideological level. We forced a coalition of the two political parties; we forced each party to sacrifice one of their two main candidates—and even then they could only muster a 55% nut.

  ***

  Well, no point in this long ramble about politics. You asked for my “table of contents,” and I guess the only real answer is the same question I’ve been hurling back at you for three years: What the fuck is this book about? A table of contents for what?

  What we’ve done, thus far, is amass a bundle of articles that don’t add up to much unless we can lash them together. We have the New Hampshire [article, “Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll,” July 1968] (about half of which appeared in Pageant); we have the Nixon Inaugural piece from The Boston Globe; we have that 150 page odyssey on the Gun Control question that was done for Esquire; we have the Killy/Chicago piece that appeared, minus most of the Chicago section, in Scanlan’s after Playboy bounced it. We have that Test Pilots thing that was chopped up for Pageant [“Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines,” September 1969], and also “Election Day in LA” that was done at the same time & never published anywhere.

  There is also the “Murder of Ruben Salazar” and a first-draft of that “America’s Cup” piece that I was doing for Scanlan’s when the crash came … along with the American Legion Convention in Portland, which mixed with the Sky River Rock Festival….

  And also the Kentucky Derby piece.

  But the main one, I think, is the Battle of Aspen, in conjunction with the followup piece that is still not finished. That strikes me as the only one of the lot that will be just as ripe in the spring of ’72 as it was in the fall of ’70. The other stuff is important, I think, but I suspect it was more important to me, personally, than it will be to the book. If I hadn’t gone to Chicago, for instance, I would never have launched the “Joe Edwards for Mayor” campaign that led me to run for sheriff.

  What we lack, at this point, is the saga of the Aspen/Sheriff campaign … but most of this is written; not entirely put together, but virtually all of it done in first draft. About 20,000 words already done, in addition to the 10 or 15 thousand in the Rolling Stone piece.

  That gives us a working nut of about 40,000 words—even before we start thinking about which sections to use out of the collected articles. The Nixon Inaugural piece, for instance, is short enough to run verbatim as a kind of section-breaker—while the Gun Control thing and even the Killy/Chicago piece are both too long to run except if we chop out the pertinent excerpts.

  The overall idea, then, is to frame the book as the story of two political campaigns in Aspen … and then somehow fit in all the stories that led (me) up and into these campaigns … with the lesson being that the Two-Party system is the lie that is choking America …and the articles you have, in carbon & clips, are the story of those scenes & events that created the two-part, Aspen Elections narrative.

  I hope this is clear. The trick
will be in devising a format to fit the articles & old carbons into the 2-section Aspen-based narrative.

  I see no real problem in this, except time. The real problem, as always, is getting you to tell me something except what a wonderful goddamn amusing writer I am. This shit about the American Dream has gone on long enough. Since we signed that original contract I have lived the fucking thing more intensely than anybody I can think of. I have gone to the mat with the bastards for two years in a row. And I think we learned (even proved) enough here to begin exporting it. This is what I’m working on now with the Esalen confer-ence—and it’s also what I’d like to write a book about while I’m still wired.

  So for fuck’s sake let’s do it. If you don’t like this notion, let’s argue about it. My research is finished. What I want to do now is write a book.

  I’m enclosing a very loose & tentative outline, based on the idea described above: Two main sections, two Aspen elections—interspersed with background chunks from ’68 thru ’70. In other words—reversing the Mailer Ad/ Myself structure—the main narrative will be in the first person, cut here & there by third-person or maybe even retrospective first-person accounts of scenes that explain why, and how, I came to do the foul things I did.

  By this formula, I might run about 41 pages of straight chronological narrative about the “Edwards for Mayor” campaign in ’69, then flash back to 5 or 10 italicized pages on New Hampshire in ’68 …then 33 more pages of the Aspen ’69 narrative … then cut to 13 pages on the Chicago convention … then more on Aspen, slashed to the Nixon inaugural … then back to the climax & finish of the Edwards for Mayor campaign. A six-vote loss.

  End Section One.

  Section Two, in the same format, would be framed by the Aspen/Sheriff campaign—incorporating flashbacks to things like the Kentucky Derby, Election Day in LA, Gun Control & America’s Cup—along with a sense of epitaph (with details) for rock festivals and Haight Street.