Fear and Loathing in America
Page 104
99. John Clancy was an old lawyer friend Thompson had met at Columbia University.
1. Sitio is Spanish for “a space of one’s own.”
2. The National Prohibition Act, introduced by Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota and passed by Congress in 1919 over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, provided for enforcement of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale, manufacture, or transport of intoxicating liquors in the United States.
3. Chris Cerf was the son of Random House founder Bennett Cerf, and at the time was an editor at the company.
4. Paul Jacobs was an editor at Esquire magazine.
5. Gideon’s Trumpet was New York Times law reporter Anthony Lewis’s narrative history of the case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling, in Gideon v. Wainwright, that indigent defendants have a right to legal counsel, if necessary at state expense.
6. Major General Curtis LeMay, head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957 and a hawk on Vietnam since his retirement from the Air Force in 1965, had been American Independent presidential candidate George Wallace’s running mate in 1968.
7. Democratic U.S. representative Carl Albert of Oklahoma would be elected Speaker of the House in 1971.
8. Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book, The Medium Is the Massage, presaged a “global village” in which printed books would be replaced by electronic versions.
9. Max Rafferty was California’s superintendent of education; former movie actor and future conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan was governor of California from 1967 to 1975.
10. Actor Tim Thibeau was a friend of both Thompson’s and Acosta’s.
11. Peter Collier was Thompson’s editor at Ramparts magazine.
12. Leon Friedman was Thompson’s literary lawyer in New York.
13. Hinckle kept a pet monkey and a parrot in his office.
14. Susan Lydon was the book review editor at Ramparts magazine.
15. Texas oilman H. L. Hunt self-published a number of ultra-right-wing political tracts in the 1960s.
16. Originally a reformist group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had turned revolutionary in 1962 and then splintered apart in 1969, with one faction turning underground into the terrorist Weathermen.
17. Frederick Exley’s 1968 novel, A Fan’s Notes, tells the story of a man—also named Frederick Exley—who wrecks much of his life via failings from excessive drinking to his obsession with University of Southern California and New York Giants football star Frank Gifford.
18. William Styron won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictionalized account of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by the real-life Turner, who was executed for his actions.
19. In 1967 Bernard Malamud won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his novel The Fixer, about a poor Jewish handyman in early twentieth-century Russia who is arrested for a crime he did not commit.
20. Dick Gregory was a prominent African-American civil rights activist and comedian.
21. Comedian Jack Benny was seventy-five years old in 1969.
22. LBJ’s close personal aides Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins had been hauled up on financial and morals charges, respectively.
23. Harold Hayes, formerly of the New York Herald Tribune, was editor of Esquire magazine.
24. Argentine fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges.
25. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg had coined the 1960s term “flower power.”
26. Like others in tiny rural markets, KREX-TV was “shared” by the major networks, allowing the station to air both the CBS Morning News and ABC’s prime-time programs Judd, for the Defense (about a flashy, liberal-leaning lawyer) and the country music/variety Johnny Cash Show.
27. Judd, for the Defense star Carl Betz won the 1969 Emmy Award for outstanding continued performance by a lead actor in a TV drama series.
28. Studs Terkel was an author and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Eric Hoffer a San Francisco–based socialist writer.
29. Folksinger Joan Baez; trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd; former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; Columbia University senior and SDS chapter head Mark Rudd; and U.S. Army general Lewis Hershey, who in 1965 had tried to initiate “punitive reclassification” into the draft for antiwar protesters with deferments who had been arrested.
30. In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in Stockholm on December 10, 1950, William Faulkner claimed that “the basest of all things is to be afraid.”
31. The United States Information Agency is a branch of the Department of State.
32. Melvin R. Laird served as U.S. secretary of defense during President Nixon’s first term.
33. Liberal Democrat Estes Kefauver of Tennessee led the U.S. Senate’s 1951 investigation into organized crime.
34. Shirley Jackson’s chilling 1948 short story about small-town brutality, The Lottery, and German director Bernhard Wicki’s 1964 movie of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, about a woman who returns to her European hometown to offer a fabulous reward for the murder of the first man who seduced her.
35. Democrat Joseph Tydings was a U.S. senator from Maryland.
36. General Motors Corporation.
37. Gabacho is Spanish for “Frenchman” or “Frenchified Spaniard.”
38. Richard Salant was president of CBS News.
39. Thompson’s former landlord Robert Craig, who once made Life magazine’s list of America’s 100 Most Promising Young Men, was executive director of the Aspen Institute, a posh think tank best known for its pricey “executive seminars,” from 1953 to 1963; former Oberlin College president and U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, William E. Stevenson was the Aspen Institute’s president from 1967 to 1969.
40. Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, Joe McCarthy the notorious red-baiting Wisconsin senator.
41. Frank Stanton was president of CBS, Inc.
42. Nicholas Johnson headed the Federal Communications Commission.
43. Mike Wallace was a CBS News correspondent; George Herman hosted the network’s Sunday morning public affairs talk show Face the Nation.
44. Daniel Cohn-Bendit led the massive May 1968 student protests that closed France’s University of the Sorbonne and then paralyzed Paris and other French cities when millions of workers joined in the demonstrations.
45. Mike Royko was a popular columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.
46. Kenneth O’Donnell had been JFK’s appointments secretary and occasional hatchet man; Lawrence O’Brien, the Kennedy administration’s chief of congressional liaison, was now chairman of the Democratic National Committee; controversial nightclub comedian Lenny Bruce had died in 1966.
47. Bill Stout was a CBS News correspondent.
48. Socorro was Oscar Acosta’s wife.
49. A moderate, even progressive, Republican, New York City mayor John V. Lindsay was touted as a coalition-builder and his 1968 presidential bid supported even by his state’s Liberal Party.
50. Leon Uris was the author of historical novels including 1959’s best-selling fiction book, Exodus, published in 1958.
51. A number of Freedom Riders and other civil rights activists had been murdered in Alabama beginning in 1961.
52. Dugald Stermer was the art director at Ramparts magazine.
53. Sonny Liston was heavyweight boxing champion from 1962 to 1964.
54. Norman Mailer had pledged to use the money from his 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for his book The Armies of the Night as “the first contribution” to his campaign for the Democratic nomination in New York City’s mayoral race.
55. More than 400,000 mostly young music fans had assembled August 15–17, 1969, at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, for the notably peaceful Woodstock Music and Art Fair, featuring Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and other major rock acts.
56. Bil Dunaway was publisher of
the Aspen Times.
57. The Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit” featured soaring vocals by Grace Slick.
58. Former United Mine Workers president W. A. “Tony” Boyle was convicted of responsibility for the December 31, 1969, murders of rival UMW leader Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter.
59. Music promoter Bill Graham owned the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York.
60. Spade Cooley and Mitch Greenhill were folk musicians.
61. University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley was a regular Florence Nightingale in some respects.
1. Jay Presson Allen had adapted Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for the stage in 1966.
2. Dennis Hopper’s groundbreaking 1969 movie, Easy Rider, cowritten with Terry Southern and costar Peter Fonda, told the counterculture tale of two bikers in search of “the real America.”
3. Bob Gover, author of One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, was now trying to make a movie about what he believed was America’s impending revolution.
4. Aspen Times columnist Peggy Clifford owned a local bookstore.
5. Medium Cool was director/writer Haskell Wexler’s innovative 1969 movie about a TV cameraman who stays detached from the events he’s covering, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
6. Hell’s Angels hired to provide security at a free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway near Livermore, California, on December 6, 1969, had gone berserk and murdered a young African-American fan.
7. Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang was published in 1968.
8. Norman Mailer’s 1959 book, Advertisements for Myself.
9. Some conspiracy theorists insisted that the July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 moon landing had actually been a staged government hoax.
10. Renowned early-1960s folk–blues singer Eric Von Schmidt left music for a career in graphic arts after recording his second album in 1965, returning with a third release in 1969.
11. Folksinger Rosalie Sorrels.
12. Gordon Lightfoot was a popular Canadian folksinger.
13. Terry the Tramp was one of the Hell’s Angels featured in Thompson’s 1967 book about the biker gang.
14. Thompson’s friend Chuck Alverson, a Wall Street Journal reporter, had given him police documents about the Hell’s Angels to use in his book.
15. New York Times columnist and Washington bureau chief James “Scotty” Reston was a close friend of many of the Democratic politicians he covered.
16. British illustrator and cartoonist Ronald Searle was known for his satirical cartoons in Punch and The New Yorker as well as his grim drawings of his experiences in a World War II Japanese POW camp.
17. The Berkeley Barb, a left-wing political weekly, reached its peak circulation of 85,000 in July 1969.
18. Bill Mauldin won Pulitzer Prizes for Editorial Cartooning in 1945 for his World War II drawings for United Feature Syndicate and in 1959 for his political cartoons in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
19. Donald Goddard was managing editor of Scanlan’s Monthly.
20. Sidney Zion was listed on the Scanlan’s masthead as Hinckle’s coeditor.
21. Charles Evers, along with Fannie Lou Hamer and Hodding Carter III, had led the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s regular slate of racist delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
22. Director Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and director Victor Fleming’s classic 1939 epic film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War novel, Gone With the Wind.
23. Leonel Brizola was the arch-leftist, anti-American brother-in-law of Brazilian president Joao Belchoir Marques Goulart, who was overthrown in a 1964 military coup after his economic policies sent the country’s inflation rate soaring.
24. Carmine DeSapio was boss in the 1950s of the Society of Tammany, a corrupt but generally effective fraternal organization–cum–political machine that had controlled the New York state Democratic Party since the middle of the nineteenth century. Ironically, DeSapio himself brought about Tammany’s downfall—and his own—by reforming its autocratic system in favor of direct elections of local party officials by the rank and file.
25. The McCarran Internal Security Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1950 over the veto of President Harry S Truman, drastically curtailed the legal rights of Americans accused of being communists.
26. Lou Stein was a mutual friend of Thompson and De Onis when all three worked as Latin America correspondents based in Brazil.
27. O. Henry was the pseudonym of renowned short-story writer William Sydney Porter, who began spinning tales noted for their surprise endings while he was imprisoned in Ohio for embezzlement.
28. Democrat John Stennis of Mississippi was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1947 and kept the seat until 1989. As Armed Services Committee chairman, he backed U.S. involvement in Vietnam but called for limits on the president’s powers to commit troops.
29. Illustrator David Levine was known for his pen-and-ink caricatures in The New York Review of Books.
30. Craig Barnes was a member of the board of directors of the Colorado chapter of the liberal lobbying group Common Cause.
31. British artist Gerald Scarfe was known for his magazine illustrations, particularly of his friends the Beatles, such as his sketchy portrait of the band for the cover of the September 22, 1967, issue of Time magazine.
32. Conservative Party leader Edward Heath became prime minister of Great Britain in 1970. He brought Britain into the Common Market and instituted austerity measures against inflation. He was turned out of office in 1974.
33. George Meany was president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from 1955 to 1979.
34. Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) founded and in 1886 became the first president of the American Federation of Labor; the Wobblies were members of the radical socialist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, which sought not better labor conditions but a workers’ revolution.
35. Roy M. Cohn, chief assistant to Joseph McCarthy during the Wisconsin senator’s communist witch hunt in 1953–54, had become a controversial corporate lawyer. Cohn would be disbarred in 1986.
36. Local housepainter Michael Solheim, one of the three original members of Aspen’s Freak Power Party, became Thompson’s campaign manager.
37. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the National Rifle Association, respectively.
38. Among the Freak Power Party’s 1970 candidates, George Kimball won the Lawrence, Kansas, Democratic primary contest for sheriff running unopposed, but was trounced in the general election; Stewart Albert lost his bid for sheriff of Berkeley, California, but did get 65,000 votes; and Oscar Acosta tallied 110,000 out of some 2,000,000 votes cast in the race for L.A. County sheriff.
39. James Buckley was the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York.
40. Thompson’s article “The Battle of Aspen,” about his 1970 Freak Power campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, ran in Rolling Stone#67.