Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  And so it goes. One of my last political acts, in Colorado, was to check in at the Pitkin County courthouse and change my registration from Democrat to Independent. Under Colorado law, I can vote in either primary, but I doubt if I’ll find the time—and it’s hard to say, right now, just what kind of mood I’ll be in on November 7th.

  Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Washington—waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a “happy beat.”

  At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn’t plugged in. But then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn’t take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because their contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.

  At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said “were right on top of things.” But they all seemed very depressed; not only about the ’72 election, but about the whole long-range future of politics and democracy in America.

  Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it’s just barely tolerable … and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.

  Ciao,

  Hunter

  FROM ALAN RINZLER, STRAIGHT ARROW BOOKS:

  In July 1970, major publisher Macmillan Co.’s pop-culture book editor, Alan Rinzler, had packed up his family and left New York for San Francisco, lured by Jann Wenner’s risky offer of the number-two associate publisher slot at Rolling Stone—plus stock options and control of the company’s fledgling Straight Arrow Books division.

  March 3, 1972

  San Francisco, CA

  Dear Hunter:

  I sent you those figures because you asked for them. Nobody’s selling your contract. Find your enemies where they are, and do not thinkest evil unto your friends.

  Kisses to you,

  Alan Rinzler

  TO ALAN RINZLER, STRAIGHT ARROW BOOKS:

  Oscar Acosta had threatened Rolling Stone with a libel lawsuit over Thompson’s heavily fictionalized portrayal of the attorney as a drug-crazed “300-pound Samoan” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  March 7, 1972

  Woody Creek, CO

  Alan:

  No evil thinkest. But what I asked for (perhaps not too respectfully) was a breakdown—not just an amount. (I need to know where the $$$ is going.)

  I assume you have some figures. Otherwise [Doug] Mount couldn’t accuse me of spending “most of it for records.”

  That’s what bugged me: not the letter (especially since I only recall one record purchase of $53 or so—at Tower in SF with Oscar).

  That situation is looming very ugly. I spent today in NY with Silberman & the R.H. house lawyer, Joe Kraft—who is not inclined to either take risks or publish Libel. Nor is he inclined to pass the Vegas book until he knows what Oscar really wants.

  I see no need to stress the potentially brutal fallout that would come from a cancellation or even a postponement of the book itself. The only way I can get this thing straight is to talk to Oscar.

  Do you have an address or phone number for him? I’d appreciate a quick answer on this—& also a copy ASAP of the “Brown Buffalo” galleys.

  Thanx,

  HST

  TO JANN WENNER, ROLLING STONE:

  It wasn’t the rain that left Thompson forlorn and poetic in his Miami hotel room on the eve of the Florida primary: on February 21, 1972, Richard M. Nixon had gone to China and opened U.S. relations with the Communist giant, a masterstroke of both foreign policy and domestic politics that further tightened the president’s virtual lock on reelection.

  Late March, 1972

  Miami, FL

  Campaign Trail

  Dear Jann—

  Cazart! … this fantastic rain outside: a sudden cloudburst, drenching everything. The sound of rain smacking down on my concrete patio about ten feet away from the typewriter, rain beating down on the surface of the big aqua-lighted pool out there across the lawn … rain blowing into the porch and whipping the palm fronds around in the warm night air.

  Behind me, on the bed, my waterproof Sony says, “It’s 5:28 right now in Miami….” Then Rod Stewart’s9 hoarse screech: “Mother don’t you recognize your son …?”

  Beyond the rain I can hear the sea rolling in on the beach. This atmosphere is getting very high, full of strange memory flashes….

  “Mother don’t you recognize me now …?”

  Wind, rain, surf. Palm trees leaning in the wind, hard funk/blues on the radio, a flagon of Wild Turkey on the sideboard …are those footsteps outside? High heels running in the rain?

  Keep on typing … but my mind is not really on it. I keep expecting to hear the screen door bang open and then turn around to see Sadie Thompson10 standing behind me, soaked to the skin … smiling, leaning over my shoulder to see what I’m cranking out tonight … then laughing softly, leaning closer; wet nipples against my neck, perfume around my head … and now on the radio:

  “Wild Horses …We’ll ride them some day….”11

  Perfect. Get it on. Don’t turn around. Keep this fantasy rolling and try not to notice that the sky is getting light outside. Dawn is coming up and I have to fly to Mazatlán in five hours to deal with a drug-fugitive. Life is getting very complicated. After Mazatlán I have to rush back to San Francisco and get this gibberish ready for the printer … and then on to Wisconsin to chronicle the next act in this saga of Downers and Treachery called “The Campaign Trail.”

  Okay,

  Hunter

  FROM ALAN RINZLER, STRAIGHT ARROW BOOKS:

  Straight Arrow Books published Oscar Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo in 1972.

  April 13, 1972

  New York, NY

  Dear Hunter,

  Here is Oscar’s book. You are referred to throughout as Damon Duke. Have a look and see if there’s anything offensive or grossly inaccurate that you’d like us to change. Time is of the essence, naturally, so call me if there’s any problem whatsoever.

  Kisses,

  Alan Rinzler

  TO OSCAR ACOSTA:

  Acosta’s threats of a libel action continued to hold up publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  April 15, 1972

  Washington, D.C.

  Oscar—

  You stupid fuck; send me a mailing address so I can explain what’s happening because of what you’ve done.

  All talk of film sales stopped, for instance, the minute word got around that Vegas was tied up by some kind of mysterious legal problem. Nobody is especially curious about learning the details—all they know is that “the property is not free,” or whatever terms they use.

  At the moment I’m not sure what can be done about this—it’s like being labeled, by Agnew, as “a known communist” while you’re running for office. There’s no way to spike it—because nobody wants to argue.

  At least not for the record—although there is a fairly unanimous private agreement that the name Oscar Acosta now ranks alongside the name of that shithead who blew the whistle on Willie Sutton.12

  You’re a credit to your race, Oscar—just like they said at La Raza.

  Anyway—the R.H. version is coming out with the original foto on the back—Just like I had it laid out from the start.

  In other words, all you’ve managed to do is turn a possible best-seller into a “spooked property” that nobody wants to be a part of. And this is going to cost me about a year’s income even on the book side—not counting whatever a film sale might have brought in.

  I assume you had some excellent, long-stewing reason for doing this cheap, acid-crippled paranoid fuckaround. Remind me to make su
re you’re in the same cage with Clancy the next time I get into politics.

  On other fronts, I want to assure you that your long-awaited autobiography will no doubt crack the literary world wide open. You’ll get all the help you deserve when the time comes.

  Good Luck,

  HST

  MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK:

  An underdog even among the Democratic presidential aspirants of 1972, liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern eked out a surprising early victory in the April 4 Wisconsin primary, with George Wallace finishing second, ahead of Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie.

  April, 1972

  Milwaukee, WI

  Campaign Trail

  Dear Jann—

  I am feeling a little desperate about getting out of this hotel. Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail. The place is run by old Germans. The whole staff is German. Most of them speak enough English to make themselves understood in a garbled, menacing sort of way … and they are especially full of hate this week because the hotel has just been sold and the whole staff seems to think they’ll be fired just as soon as the election crowd leaves.

  So they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won’t drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer. The manager explained that they were “runnig oud ze inventory”—selling off everything in stock, including all the booze and almost every item on the menu except things like cabbage and sauerbraten. The first wave of complaints were turned aside with a hiss and a chop of the hand, but after two days and nights of this Prussian madness the manager was apparently caused to know pressure from forces beyond his control. By Friday the bar was stocked with beer again, and it was once more possible to get things like prime rib and sheep’s head in the dining room.

  But the root ambience of the place never changed. Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern, has stayed here several times in the past and calls it “the worst hotel in the world.”

  Ah yes …I can hear the Mojo Wire humming frantically across the room. [Tim] Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it. Greg Jackson, the ABC correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us along like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York and now we are left on our own.

  The pressure is building up. The copy no longer makes sense. Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another. Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast.

  And now the bastard is beeping … beeping … beeping, which means it is hungry for this final page, which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary. But that can wait, I think. We have a three-week rest now before the next one of these goddamn nightmares … which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here. Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now.

  The real surprise of this campaign, according to Theodore White13 on CBS-TV last night, is that “George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics.” But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again. So this page will have to go, for good or ill … and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel like rats from a burning ship.

  Hunter

  MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK:

  McGovern’s campaign strategy relied on the reforms that came out of the Democrats’ bloody 1968 Chicago convention. The party’s new delegate selection process, which McGovern had helped devise, ensured greater representation of African Americans and other minorities, women, and the new eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old “youth vote,” while limiting the clout of local party bosses, unions, and other political pros. Because the reforms also prompted more states to hold primaries to select their delegates, McGovern focused on getting the nomination by mobilizing a fresh grassroots coalition in those new primary states. The idea was to worry about taking on Nixon later—but charges by rival Democratic candidates Hubert Humphrey and Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson that McGovern was soft on “amnesty, acid, and abortion” soured the party regulars whose support the eventual nominee would need in the general election.

  May, 1972

  Campaign Trail

  Another Wednesday morning, another hotel room, another grim bout with the TV Morning News … and another post-mortem press conference scheduled for 10:00 A.M. Three hours from now. Call room service and demand two whole grapefruits, along with a pot of coffee and four glasses of V-8 juice.

  These goddamn Wednesday mornings are ruining my health. Last night I came out of a mild Ibogaine coma just about the time the polls closed at eight. No booze on election day—at least not until the polls close; but they always seem to leave at least one loophole for serious juicers. In Columbus it was the bar at the airport, and in Omaha we had to rent a car and drive across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, which is also across the state line into Iowa. Every year, on election day, the West End bars in Council Bluffs are jammed with boozers from Omaha.

  Which is fine, for normal people, but when you drink all day with a head full of Ibogaine and then have to spend the next ten hours analyzing election returns … there will usually be problems.

  Last week—at the Neil House Motor Hotel in Columbus, Ohio—some lunatic tried to break into my room at six in the morning. But fortunately I had a strong chain on the door. In every reputable hotel there is a sign above the knob that warns: “For Our Guests’ Protection—Please Use Door Chain at All Times, Before Retiring.”

  I always use it. During four long months on the campaign trail I have had quite a few bad experiences with people trying to get into my room at strange hours—and in almost every case they object to the music. One out of three will also object to the typewriter, but that hasn’t been the case here in Omaha….

  (PROPOSED PHOTO CAPTION)

  Sen. George McGovern (D—S.D.), shown here campaigning in Nebraska where he has spent 23 hours a day for the past six days denying charges by local Humphrey operatives that he favors the legalization of Marijuana, pauses between denials to shake hands for photographers with his “old friend” Hunter S. Thompson, the National Correspondent for Rolling Stone and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, who was recently identified by Newsweek magazine as a vicious drunkard and known abuser of hard drugs.

  A thing like that would have finished him here in Nebraska. No more of that “Hi, sheriff” bullshit; I am now the resident Puff Adder … and the problem is very real. In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost, by a slim 19,000 vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps 10,000 of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty,14 who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by that worthless asshole Sen. Henry Jackson (D—Wash.) and turned into a major issue.

  So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey’s people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the Sheriff and all his Deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.

  Ciao,

  Hunter

  TO JANN WENNER, ROLLING STONE:

  Thompson’s original plan had been to road-test a “genuinely hellish” Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle during his “off hours” while covering the California primary—“but serious problems developed.” They had for McGovern, too: after leading Humphrey in the polls by as much as twent
y percentage points just a week before the California vote, the South Dakota senator would come out on top by only five percent in the winner-take-all primary (for 271 delegates of the 1,509 needed to win).

  June, 1972

  Los Angeles, CA

  Campaign Trail

  Dear Jann—

  Ten days before the election—with McGovern apparently so far ahead that most of the press people were looking for ways to avoid covering the final week—I drove out to Ventura, a satellite town just north of L.A. in the San Fernando Valley, to pick up the bugger and use it to cover the rest of the primary. Greg Jackson, an ABC correspondent who used to race motorcycles, went along with me. We were both curious about this machine. Chris Bunche, editor of Choppers magazine, said it was so fast and terrible that it made the extremely fast Honda 750 seem like a harmless toy.

  This proved to be absolutely true. I rode a factory-demo Honda for a while, just to get the feel of being back on a serious road-runner again … and it seemed just fine: very quick, very powerful, very easy in the hands, one-touch electric starter. A very civilized machine, in all, and I might even be tempted to buy one if I didn’t have the same gut distaste for Hondas that the American Honda management has for Rolling Stone. They don’t like the image. “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” they say—but according to a letter from American Honda to the Rolling Stone ad manager, none of these nicest people have much stomach for a magazine like the Stone.

  Which is probably just as well; because if you’re a safe, happy, nice, young Republican you probably don’t want to read about things like dope, rock music, and politics anyway. You want to stick with Time, and for weekend recreation do a bit of the laid-back street-cruising on your big fast Honda 750 … maybe burn a Sportster or a Triumph here & there, just for the fun of it: But nothing serious, because when you start that kind of thing you don’t meet many nice people.