Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Which is not true, of course—given the gang-bang nature of the ’74 Senate race in Colorado—but after brooding on that remark for many months I find it popping up in my head almost every time I start thinking about politics. And especially about the elections in 1976—which, until the unexpected demise of Spiro Agnew,6 I was inclined to view in very extreme and/or apocalyptic terms. Prior to Agnew’s departure from the White House and (presumably) from the ’76 presidential scene, I saw the 1976 elections as either a final affirmation of the Rape of the “American Dream” or perhaps the last chance any of us would ever have to avert that rape—if only temporarily—or perhaps even drive a stake of some kind into the heart of that pieced-off vampire that Agnew would have been in ’76, if “fate” had not intervened.

  But things have changed now. Agnew is gone, Nixon is on the ropes, and in terms of realpolitik the Republican Party is down in the same ditch with the Democrats—they are both looking back into their own loyalist ranks for names, ideas & possibilities: The GOP has been stripped all the way back to 1964, with Goldwater/Reagan vs. [Republican New York governor Nelson A.] Rockefeller & maybe Percy7 on the outside … but in fact Nixon’s mind-bending failure has effectively castrated the aggressive/activist core of the GOP (all the Bright Young Men, as it were), and barring totally unforeseen circumstances between now & Nov ’76, the GOP looks at a future of carping opposition until at least 1984.

  This may be good news for professional Democrats, but it is not likely to be viewed as a Great Victory by those of us who share what seems to be a very active and potentially massive sentiment among the erstwhile “youth generation” (between ages 25 & 40 now) to the effect that all career politicians should be put on The Rack—in the name of either poetic or real justice, and probably for the Greater Good.

  This sentiment, reflected in virtually all age, income & other demographic groups, is broad & deep enough now—and entirely justified, to my mind—to have a decisive effect on the ’76 elections, which might in turn have a decisive effect on the realities of life in America for the next several generations, and also on the life-expectancy of the whole concept of Participatory Democracy all over the globe.

  As a minor & maybe even debatable forerunner of this, we can look back at what happened in South America (in the time-span of 5 or 6 years) when it suddenly became obvious in the mid-1960s the new Democratic Administration had scuttled the Alliance for Progress,8 in favor of the war in Vietnam. In half a decade, we saw a whole continent revert to various forms of fascism—an almost instinctive reversion that was more inevitable than programmed, and which will take at least five decades to cure.

  Ah … that word again: “Cure.”

  Manifest Destiny.

  The question raised by the ostensibly complex but essentially simple reality of what happened in South America in the late Sixties—and also in Africa and most of Asia, for the same basic reasons—is only now beginning to seriously haunt the so-called “civilized” or at least “industrialized” nations in Europe and the northern Americas. President [Ferdinand] Marcos of the Philippines put it very bluntly about a year ago in a quote I can’t find now—but I think it went something like this: “Your idea of ‘democracy’ was right for your development, but it’s not what we need for ours.”

  I’ve been meaning to go to the Philippines to see what kind of working alternative Marcos had in mind, but I haven’t had the time.

  Maybe later. If we decide even tentatively here in Elko that Marcos was right, I want to spend some time over there very soon—because, regardless of what happens in the Philippines, the question Marcos raised has a nasty edge on it.

  Was Thomas Jefferson a dingbat?

  Ten days before he died, on July 4, 1826, Jefferson wrote his own valedictory, which included the following nut:

  “All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God….”9

  President Marcos would probably agree, but he would also probably argue that Jefferson’s reality was so different from what was happening 100 years later in Russia or 200 years later in the Philippines that his words, however admirable, are just as dated and even dangerous now as Patrick Henry’s wild-eyed demand for “liberty or death.”10

  Ah … madness, madness … where will it end?

  I think I know, with regard to the way I live and intend to keep on living my own life—but as I grow older and meaner and uglier it becomes more & more clear to me that only a lunatic or an egomaniacal asshole would try to impose the structure of his own lifestyle on people who don’t entirely understand it, unless he’s ready to assume a personal responsibility for the consequences.

  When the price of liberty includes the obligation to be drafted and have your legs blown off at the age of 22 in a place called Veet-Naam for some reason that neither Democratic nor Republican presidents can finally claim to understand, then maybe death is not such an ugly alternative. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, but there is nothing in history to indicate that he routinely sacrificed any of their lives & limbs for the sake of his fiscal security.

  Jesus, here we go again. Is there anyone in this star-crossed group with access to a Doctor of psychic-focus drugs? If so, please meet me in the northwest corner of the Commercial Hotel casino at dawn on Saturday.

  Meanwhile, I want to wind this thing out & down as quickly as possible … and, since I asked most of the other people here to bring some kind of Focus-Document for the rest of us to cope with, I think this will have to be mine, if only because it’s Wednesday morning now and I’ve already sunk six pages into what seems like a single idea, and it also strikes me as an idea (or question) that rarely if ever gets mentioned at political “conferences.”

  This is the possibility that maybe we’re all kidding ourselves about the intrinsic value of taking politics seriously in 1970s America; and that maybe we (or the rest of you, anyway—since I’m a doktor of journalism) are like a gang of hired guns on New Year’s Eve in 1899. Things changed a bit after that, and the importance of being able to slap leather real fast at High Noon on Main Street seemed to fade very precipitously after 1900. A few amateurs hung on in places like San Diego and Seattle until The War came, but by 1920 the Pros took over for real.

  Which is getting off the point, for now. What I want to do is raise the question immediately—so we’ll have to deal with it in the same context as all the others—as to whether Frank Mankiewicz was talking in the past, present or future when he said, in the intro to his book on Nixon, that he learned from Robert Kennedy that “the practice of American politics … can be both joyous and honorable.”

  Whether or not Frank still agrees with that is not important, for now—but in the context of why we’re all out here in this god-forsaken place I think it’s important not to avoid the idea that reality in America might in fact be beyond the point where even the most joyous & honorable kind of politics can have any real effect on it. And I think we should also take a serious look at the health/prognosis for the whole idea of Participatory Democracy, in America or anywhere else.

  That, to me, is an absolutely necessary cornerstone for anything else we might or might not put together—because unless we’re honestly convinced that the Practice of Politics is worth more than just a short-term high or the kind of short-term money that power-pimps pay for hired guns, my own feeling is that we’ll be a lot better off avoiding all the traditional liberal bullshit and just saying it straight out: That we’re all just a bunch of fine-tuned Politics Junkies and we’re ready to turn Main Street into a graveyard in the name of anybody who’ll pay the price & even pretend to say the Right Things.

  But we don’t want to get carried away with this Olde West gig—except to recognize a certain connection between politics/campaign Hit Men in 1974 and hired guns
all over the West in 1874. It’s just as hard to know for sure what Matt Dillon11 thought he was really doing back then as it is, today, to know what the fuck Ben Wattenberg12 might claim as the “far, far better thing” he has in mind.

  One of the primary ideas of this conference, in my own mind, is to keep that kind of brutal option open—if that’s what we seem to agree on. Maybe tilting at windmills really is the best & most honorable way to go, these days. I get a definite kick out of it, myself—but I have a feeling that my time is getting a bit short, and I’m getting unnaturally curious about how much reality we’re really dealing with.

  This is what the rest of you are going to have to come up with. My only role in this trip, as I see it right now, is to eventually write the introduction to some kind of book-form statement that the rest of you (& probably a few others) will eventually crank out. We are dealing with a genuinely ominous power-vacuum right now, in terms of political reality. Both major parties seem to be curling back into an ill-disguised fetal crouch—and the stuporous horror of a [Scoop] Jackson–[Gerald] Ford race in ’76 is as easily conceivable as the barely-avoided reality of another Nixon-Humphrey contest was in 1972.

  There is no way to get away from names and personalities in any serious talk about the ’76 election—but if that’s all we can talk about, I think we should write this whole project off, as of Sunday, as a strange bummer of sorts that never got un-tracked. We’d be better off at the crap tables, or watching the Keno balls, than haggling over who should be given command of a sinking ship.

  On the other hand, I don’t think we’re here to write some kind of an all-purpose Platform for a (presumably) Democratic candidate in ’76. There are plenty of people around who are already into that.

  What we might do, I think, is at least define some of the critical and unavoidable questions that any presidential candidate will have to deal with, in order to be taken seriously in ’76. We have a long list of these goddamn things to deal with, in the very short space of two days, and the best we can do for right now is: 1) Decide if the patient is worth saving … 2) What’s basically wrong with the patient … and 3) If the saving is worth the effort, how to define & begin dealing with the basics.

  At the same time, we want to keep in mind that a really fearful (or “fearsome”) chunk of the voting population is in a very vengeful & potentially-dangerous mood with regard to national or even local politics. If George Metesky, the infamous “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York in the 1950s, decided to run for the Senate in NY against Javits13 this year, I suspect he would do pretty well….

  And, for the same reason(s), I’m absolutely certain I could fatally cripple any Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado by merely entering the race as a serious Independent … but that would only guarantee Dominick’s re-election, I think, and besides that I have a great fear of having to move back to Washington.

  Which is neither here nor there. My only real concern is to put something together that will force a genuine alteration of consciousness in the realm of national politics, and also in the heads of national politicians. Given the weird temper of all the people I’ve talked to in the past year, this is the only course that could possibly alter the drift of at least a third of the electorate away from politics entirely … and without that third, the White House in ’76 is going to become the same kind of mine-field that Gracie Mansion14 became about 10 years ago, and for many of the same reasons.

  Okay for now. I have to get this bastard xeroxed and then catch the bush-plane for Elko in two hours. The agenda will have to wait—not only in terms of time, but also for people who will hopefully have a much better sense of priorities than I do.

  If not, you bastards are going to wish you never heard the word “Elko.”

  Sincerely,

  Hunter S. Thompson

  FROM PATRICK J. BUCHANAN, THE WHITE HOUSE:

  Thompson had proposed that Buchanan write an article on the future of American conservatism for Rolling Stone.

  March 2, 1974

  Washington, D.C.

  PERSONAL

  Dear Hunter:

  Sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you sooner; but all leaves and furloughs have been canceled for the last sixty days, on orders of the General Staff. At the appropriate time, I may well deliver myself of the recommended “hammerhead screed,” but I must say I was disillusioned to learn that Rolling Stone had exercised the bad judgement to throw away three good pages on Richard Goodwin. As the Old Man said in the final days of that wonderful year, 1968, it is “getting down to the nut-cutting.” Tell your liberal friends we expect to be treated with all the deference and respect as outlined in the Geneva Conventions on the handling of prisoners of war.

  Best,

  Patrick J. Buchanan

  Special Consultant to the

  President

  MEMO FROM THE SPORTS DESK:

  On May 9, 1974, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, chaired by New Jersey Democrat Peter J. Rodino, would open impeachment hearings against President Richard M. Nixon.

  April 17, 1974

  Woody Creek, CO

  TO: H. THOMPSON

  FROM: R. DUKE

  INRE: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES / NIXON IMPEACHMENT

  The returns from Michigan’s 8th Congressional District are in now, and tonight is as good a time as any to schedule our work for the rest of the year. We had a bad stroke of luck last night when Nixon’s numbwit palace guard let the press get a fateful step on them in the interpretation of (Demo) Bob Traxler’s 3% victory over (Rep) James Sparling in that special election in Michigan’s 8th district. By 8:00 a.m. EDT it was all over & Nixon had lost his last chance to deflate the notion that his administration—and his continuing presence in the White House—is a disastrous millstone around the neck of the GOP in the upcoming elections, 1976 as well as ’74.

  So we might as well figure, now, on spending most of the rest of this year in and out of Washington. As a result of last night’s GOP loss in Michigan being interpreted as a deathblow to Nixon, & his value to the party, it seems almost certain that the Rodino committee will hand up (or out, or whatever) a bill of impeachment for the House to deal with in late May or June. The impeachment vote in the House will presumably be public & televised—but you should find out immediately from Louise Crow (Senate Periodical Press) if you’ll need special credentials for any impeachment proceedings. Hopefully, Mankiewicz can handle this & keep us ahead of any credentials crunch. If not, he should be fed to the sharks.

  The tentative schedule right now looks like Impeachment in June or early July, then a 6 to 8 week lull while Nixon prepares his defense, and then a Senate Trial in early August or September. With any luck at all, we’ll get most of July & August off, while Nixon prepares for the crunch.

  Without luck, the cheap bastard will slip the noose and resign on some kind of sloppy pretext between now and July. If this happens, it will blow one of the best stories of the last 200 years because The Impeachment Of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the whole American Dream. Because the importance of Nixon now is not merely to get rid of him; that’s a strictly political consideration…. The real question now is: Why is the American political system being forced to impeach a president elected less than two years ago by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections?

  So, with the need for sleep coming up very fast now, we want to look at two main considerations: 1) The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself … and 2) The absolutely vital necessity of filling that vacuum that the Nixon impeachment will leave, the lanced boil—and the hole that will be there in 1976.

  TO ALAN RINZLER, STRAIGHT ARROW BOOKS:

  Thompson was tossing around the possibility of writing a book on his coverage of the Nixon impeachment proceedings.

  May 18, 1974

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dea
r Alan:

  I’m not at all sure what kind of a future we’re dealing with here, but I suspect we ought to come to grips with it sometime soon. At the moment I’m trying to balance the (potential) impact of “Guts Ball” against the apparent necessity of covering Nixon’s Impeachment & the concomitant possibility of getting a book out of that.

  And, just to keep things straight, I’ve spoken with Silberman about the latter—although at the moment we’re not beyond the “hot damn!” stage, and I haven’t even talked to Lynn about it.

  I have, however, kept Jann advised of everything I’m either into or thinking about.

  No decisions (or no mutual ones, at any rate) have been reached on any front—except for the obvious necessity of my gearing down tonight to write that goddamn introduction for Ralph’s book. Which I’m trying to do at the moment….

  And so much for the moment; call when you feel like it.

  Cazart,

  Hunter

  TO RICHARD N. GOODWIN:

  Dick Goodwin was probably the heaviest hitter at Rolling Stone’s Elko Conference in February 1974. Beneath his rough bluster, Goodwin had an impeccable background in liberal politics: he had graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School in 1958, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, written speeches for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and established himself as a “player” in mid-1960s Washington, one of many such Democrats without portfolio in the Nixon years.

  May 18, 1974

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Dick:

  This is to confirm—as per Jann’s implicit request—my absolute & wholly instinctive (if not entirely thought-out) decision that you’re the best person to deal, from now on, with whatever evolves from the “Elko” or née “A-76” situation. It seems to me that the thing is now on a level that is far more in tune with your lifestyle, abilities and connexions, than mine—all of which should be no more prohibitive to continuing neo-active participation in the project than to the inescapable responsibility of composing my own Minority Report, if I ever feel up to it….