Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  41. Dana was William Kennedy’s wife.

  42. Bromley was a biker who showed up at Freak Power campaign headquarters in Aspen and volunteered his services as Thompson’s bodyguard as well as to procure any explosives the candidate might want. He turned out to have been hired by incumbent sheriff Earl Whitmire for reasons that remain unclear.

  43. The narrator of Richard Brautigan’s nonlinear 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, uses that title phrase as various character names as well as to describe places and moods, usually as metaphors for innocence under threat of being lost.

  44. Robert Kingsbury was Jann Wenner’s brother-in-law and Rolling Stone’s first full-time art director.

  45. Nguyen Cao Ky was prime minister of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1967 and then its figurehead vice president until 1971, when he was eased out of power by Nguyen Van Thieu and fled to California, where he opened a liquor store in 1975.

  46. The complete specifics of Raoul Duke’s list of the ten best record albums of the 1960s are as follows: 1) Herbie Mann’s 1969 Memphis Underground; 2) Bob Dylan’s March 1965 Bringing It All Back Home; 3) Dylan’s August 1965 Highway 61 Revisited; 4) the Grateful Dead’s June 1970 Workingman’s Dead; 5) the Rolling Stones’ December 1969 Let It Bleed; 6) Buffalo Springfield’s January 1967 Buffalo Springfield; 7) Jefferson Airplane’s February 1967 Surrealistic Pillow; 8) jazz innovator Roland Kirk’s albums in general; 9) jazz great Miles Davis’s 1959 Sketches of Spain; and 10) multi-instrumental overdubbing virtuoso Sandy Bull’s July 1965 Inventions (for Guitar, Banjo, OUD, Fender Bass Guitar, Electric Guitar).

  1. Liberal writer Richard Elman had reviewed Thompson’s Hell’s Angels for The New Republic.

  2. Kennedy’s good friend Denne Petitclerc was a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  3. San Francisco financier and MJB Coffee Chairman Arthur Rock was Rolling Stone’s landlord and a member of the board of directors of Wenner’s Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.

  4. Former associate editor John Lombardi, who left for Esquire in the summer of 1970, had been instrumental in bringing Thompson on board at Rolling Stone.

  5. Harvey Cohen was a staff editor at Scanlan’s.

  6. Freak Power candidate Ned Vare had narrowly lost the race for Pitkin County commissioner in November 1970.

  7. Multimillionaire and LSD enthusiast William Hitchcock had turned over his Millbrook, New York, estate to Timothy Leary, whose drug experiments Hitchcock considered a holy quest.

  8. Louisville native Billy Noonan, a friend of Thompson’s brother Davison, had been the Freak Power candidate for Pitkin County coroner in 1970.

  9. John Sack was a contributing editor at Esquire.

  10. Marshall Frady was a contributing editor at Harper’s.

  11. William F. Buckley, Jr., hosted the TV talk show Firing Line on PBS.

  12. Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969.

  13. Environmental activist David Ross Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969, cofounded Friends of the Earth in 1969.

  14. Rock songs by (Mike) Brewer and (Tom) Shipley and the Rolling Stones, respectively.

  15. Tom Braden wrote a liberal political column for the Washington Star.

  16. Mid-nineteenth century American author Horatio Alger wrote more than one hundred boys’ books featuring heroes who rise from rags to riches through hard work and virtuous living.

  17. Ed Bastian is Thompson’s neighbor in Woody Creek.

  18. Multi-instrumental, overdub, and improvisational virtuoso Sandy Bull would release his last album, Demolition Derby, in 1972.

  19. The Anarchist Cookbook, written by William Powell and published in 1971, provided instructions for making Molotov cocktails and other low-level terrorist devices.

  20. Camelot, the city the Knights of the Round Table called home in the legend of England’s King Arthur, was the term used to describe the idealization of President John F. Kennedy’s administration.

  21. Guillermo Restrepo was a twenty-eight-year-old reporter and newscaster for East L.A.’s KMEX-TV when the station’s news director, Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, was murdered by a sheriff’s deputy on August 29, 1970.

  22. Danny Villanueva, a former kicker for the Los Angeles Rams, was general manager of KMEX-TV, a bilingual, Mexican-American station.

  23. Aztlan is the part of the nineteenth-century Mexican nation that was occupied by the U.S. government and broken into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the southern half of California. As Thompson wrote in his April 29, 1971, Rolling Stone article on the murder of Ruben Salazar, “The word ‘Chicano’ was forged as a necessary identity for the people of Aztlan—neither Mexicans nor Americans, but a conquered Indian/Mestizo nation sold out like slaves by its leaders and treated like indentured servants by its conquerors.”

  24. Louisiana State star guard Pete Maravich set the NCAA basketball single-season scoring record of 44.5 points per game in 1970.

  25. Lionel Olay, a freelance journalist and screenwriter Thompson befriended in Big Sur in 1960, had died of a stroke in November 1966.

  26. American International Pictures (AIP), an independent production company founded in 1955, put out a slew of profitable low-budget horror movies by director Roger Corman throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

  27. Orson Welles, the renowned actor, writer, producer, and director of such classic movies as 1941’s Citizen Kane, received an honorary Academy Award in 1971 “for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.”

  28. William J. Kennedy.

  29. Republican congressman Pete McCloskey of California would threaten to introduce an impeachment resolution against President Nixon in the U.S. House of Representatives in June 1973.

  30. Peter J. Prescott was a well-known literary critic.

  31. The Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers came out in March 1971.

  32. Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of San Francisco’s renowned City Lights bookstore, published “Tentative Description of a Dinner Given To Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower” in 1958.

  33. Birch Bayh was a Democratic senator from Indiana; George McGovern was the Democratic senator from South Dakota who would be the party’s 1972 presidential nominee.

  34. Prominent California attorney Melvin Belli represented numerous celebrity clients and appeared as an evil alien on an episode of NBC’s Star Trek in 1968.

  35. Comedian Pat Paulsen mounted a mock campaign for president in 1968.

  36. Ian Ballantine was publisher of Ballantine Books, now a division of Random House.

  37. J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from its founding in 1924 to his death in 1972; John Dillinger was a notorious gangster responsible for sixteen killings in the Midwest in 1933–34; Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated soldier in World War II, became a Hollywood leading man in the 1950s; Ira Hayes was one of the U.S. Marines who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima in February 1945; and labor contractor Juan Corona was sentenced to twenty-five terms of life imprisonment after being convicted of the murders of twenty-five Mexican migrant workers in Yuba County, California, in 1970–71.

  38. Studebaker was a popular make of American car throughout the mid-twentieth century.

  39. General William C. Westmoreland was U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and U.S. Army chief of staff from 1968 to 1972; Walt Rostow, a close adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, played a key role in planning the U.S. intervention in Vietnam; Dean Rusk was U.S. secretary of state from 1961 to 1969; and General Maxwell Taylor, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1955 to 1959, was U.S. ambassador to Vietnam from 1964 to 1965.

  40. Dunkirk, a seaport in northern France on the English Channel, was the site from which 337,000 trapped World War II Allied troops were evacuated between May 27 and June 4, 1940.

  41. Benito Mussolini was the Fascist dictator of Italy from 1924 to 1943; Adolf Hitler was Germany’s Naz
i dictator from 1933 to 1945.

  42. General Creighton W. Abrams was commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972.

  43. Dan Greene was a young Washington correspondent for The National Observer.

  44. Rudy Sanchez was Oscar Acosta’s “quiet little bodyguard”; Benny Luna and Frank were fellow Chicano activists.

  45. Pendejo is Spanish for “fool.”

  46. Abbie Hoffman was a leader of the radical Youth International (Yippie) Party and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

  47. Thompson shared office space in Washington, D.C., with New York Post reporter Tony Prisendorf.

  48. In 1967, rock music producer Sylvester Stewart took the name “Sly Stone” and formed the “psychedelic soul” group Sly and the Family Stone.

  49. Saul Steinberg was a well-known cartoonist for The New Yorker.

  50. Ronald Ziegler was the Nixon administration’s White House press secretary.

  51. Charles Perry, Rolling Stone’s brilliant, multilingual copy editor since 1968, had been LSD guru Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s roommate when both were students at the University of California at Berkeley.

  1. Boston-based Jon Landau was Rolling Stone’s chief music critic; Timothy Crouse and former New York Post reporter Timothy Ferris were among the magazine’s writers.

  2. San Franciscan Carol Doda was a pioneering recipient of silicone breast implants.

  3. Republican congressman Pete McCloskey of California, who had won the Navy Cross, Silver Star, and Purple Heart during the Korean War, sided with the liberal antiwar stance on Vietnam.

  4. The “Rad/Lib Caucus” in Worcester was organized to unify Massachusetts liberals in anticipation of the state’s April 25 Democratic presidential primary; George McGovern bested Eugene McCarthy in the informal ballot by nearly three to one.

  5. “West Egg” was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional Great Gatsby version of Long Island’s posh Westhampton.

  6. Gambling expert “Jimmy the Greek” Snyder was a Las Vegas newspaper columnist.

  7. British author Anthony Burgess’s satirical novel A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962; director Stanley Kubrick’s movie version was released in 1971.

  8. Lawrence O’Brien was chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

  9. Gravel-voiced “mod” rock singer Rod Stewart.

  10. Sadie Thompson was the oft-drenched South Seas island trollop in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1928 short story “Rain.”

  11. Quoted from the Rolling Stones song “Wild Horses,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

  12. Colorful bank robber Willie Sutton nabbed an estimated $2 million by bluffing his way into bank vaults in guises including fireman, Western Union messenger, and policeman. Despite his many successful jailbreaks, Sutton spent most of his life behind bars.

  13. Theodore H. White wrote the seminal Making of the President series of presidential campaign books.

  14. Movie actor Warren Beatty organized fund-raising concerts by the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul and Mary that brought some $1.5 million into George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

  15. Frank Mankiewicz joined the 1972 McGovern campaign as press secretary.

  16. Rick Stearns, in 1972 a twenty-eight-year-old Rhodes Scholar out of Stanford, was a top McGovern campaign strategist.

  17. Future U.S. senator Gary Hart was McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager.

  18. Chicago-based folksinger and songwriter John Prine has thrived as one of rock’s wittiest lyricists and most musically sophisticated composers.

  19. Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills was chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974.

  20. Thompson’s “Stearns/Beach tape” of his conversation with Rick Stearns and fellow McGovern confidant Bill Dougherty was recorded in Miami on Saturday, July 15, two days after the close of the 1972 Democratic National Convention. A near-verbatim transcript appears in the July 1972 section of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.

  21. 1969 and 1972 Super Bowl MVPs respectively, Joe Namath played quarterback for the New York Jets and L.A. Rams from 1965 to 1977, Roger Staubach for the Dallas Cowboys from 1969 through 1979. Staubach was the NFC’s leading passer five times between 1971 and 1979; Namath never was, in either NFL conference.

  22. Douglas Kiker was a political correspondent for NBC News.

  23. McGovern supporter Pat Lucey was the governor of South Carolina.

  24. Longtime McGovern adviser Bill Dougherty was South Dakota’s Democratic lieutenant governor.

  25. Jonathan Cape was Steadman’s prospective British book publisher.

  26. Gerald L. Warren was deputy press secretary in the Nixon White House.

  27. Dapper and gentlemanly Tyler “Ted” Knapp was the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain’s innocuous top political reporter and a onetime Ralph “Nader Raider.”

  28. Washington lawyer Fred Dutton, a close adviser to Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign, was a top aide to McGovern in 1972.

  29. Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968. Gerald R. Ford would appoint him vice president in 1974.

  30. The Magic Christian, starring Peter Sellers, was British director Joseph McGrath’s hilarious 1969 movie adaptation of Terry Southern’s manic novel.

  31. Canadian actor Lorne Greene starred as Ponderosa ranch patriarch Ben Cartwright in NBC’s TV Western Bonanza from 1959 to 1973.

  32. American Independent candidate George C. Wallace won 13.6 percent of the popular vote for president in 1968.

  33. Left-fringe 1968 presidential candidates Eldridge Cleaver and Dick Gregory—both representing the Peace and Freedom Party—tallied 0.01 and 0.06 percent of the popular vote, respectively.

  34. Joseph Kraft was a syndicated Washington-based newspaper columnist.

  35. Tom Morgan, New York mayor John Lindsay’s press secretary, told Thompson late in the summer of 1972, “We all admired that stuff you wrote about the Lindsay blueprint. But there was one thing you didn’t know—there was no Lindsay blueprint. There wasn’t even any Lindsay strategy. We just winged it all the way from the start.”

  36. Al Barkan was right-hand man to AFL-CIO chief George Meany.

  37. Republican Peter Dominick was one of Colorado’s incumbent U.S. senators.

  38. Colorado Democrats Gary Hart and Richard Lamm would be elected U.S. senator and governor, respectively, in 1974.

  39. George McGovern called 1972 campaign aide Carl Wagner “one of the best field organizers in the business.”

  40. Gene Pokorny, who had worked for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign, and Eli Segal were two of McGovern’s key managers in 1972.

  41. Ted Van Dyk was another earnest young McGovern campaign staffer.

  42. Mike Royko was a populist columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

  43. The Jackson Five were a bouncy five-brother pop group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.

  44. Samuel W. Yorty was mayor of Los Angeles.

  45. William “Boz” Scaggs was a San Francisco Bay area rock/pop/soul singer and rhythm guitarist who played on two Steve Miller Band albums in 1967 and 1968. His 1969 solo album Boz Scaggs was produced by Jann Wenner. Scaggs would achieve greater success with his more disco-oriented 1976 album, Silk Degrees.