Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  1. Seconal is a prescription barbiturate.

  2. The Nieman Fellowships are awarded annually to a small group of working journalists deemed worthy to spend a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pursuing the studies of their choice at Harvard University.

  3. Richard Alpert, who later changed his name to Baba Ram Dass, helped his colleague Timothy Leary set up the International Federation for Internal Freedom at a mansion in upstate New York, where they experimented with psychedelic drugs and dabbled in Eastern mysticism.

  4. While vacationing in Acapulco in 1972, then national security adviser Henry Kissinger had been called upon by Mexican foreign minister Emilio Rabasa, who presented his country’s case that excessive salinity in the Colorado River waters flowing into northern Mexico from the United States violated a treaty between the two countries signed during the FDR administration in 1944.

  5. Rolling Stone chief copy editor Charles Perry, traffic coordinator Dan Parker, and managing editor Paul Scanlon.

  6. More magazine was a hip but short-lived national journalism review of the early 1970s.

  7. General Alexander M. Haig, Jr.—whom President Nixon had elevated to four-star rank in January 1973, just four years since then Colonel Haig had joined Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff—was named White House chief of staff after H. R. Haldeman was forced to resign the post on April 30, 1973.

  8. Playboy had commissioned Thompson to write about a shark-hunting competition in Mexico in April 1973.

  9. Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism, with an Anthology Edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, was published by Harper & Row in 1973. Included was a fifteen-page excerpt from Thompson’s Hell’s Angels.

  10. Russ Barnard was the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

  11. David Broder is a veteran national affairs reporter and columnist for The Washington Post.

  12. Adam Walinsky had been Robert F. Kennedy’s head speechwriter both in the U.S. Senate and in his 1968 presidential campaign.

  13. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason was the cofounder of Rolling Stone.

  14. Suzy Knickerbocker was a popular syndicated gossip columnist.

  15. Texan Robert Strauss was chairman of the Democratic National Committee and special trade representative under President Jimmy Carter, and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union under President George Bush; John B. Connally, Jr., was governor of Texas from 1963 to 1969, and U.S. Treasury secretary from 1971 to 1972.

  16. Great Britain’s Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips in the autumn of 1973.

  17. Former Newsweek executive and Thompson high school classmate David Porter Bibb III had been named publisher of Rolling Stone early in 1972. Jann Wenner fired him before the end of the year.

  18. Iquitos is an Amazon River port in northeastern Peru.

  19. Syndicated news-in-brief columnist Bob Considine wrote his “On the Line” newspaper bits from 1933 until he died in September 1975.

  20. Dotson Rader was a well-known drama critic of the 1960s and ’70s.

  21. Dutch postimpressionist painter Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his left ear in a fit of pique in 1888.

  22. Nixon’s White House domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman.

  23. Florida businessman Charles “Bebe” Rebozo was President Nixon’s closest friend.

  24. Independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which exposed the salacious sides of some movie stars’ private lives, was first published in France in 1959 and reissued by Straight Arrow Books in 1975.

  25. Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets tells the sad tale of a young girl degraded by the squalor of her life in the tenements of New York City’s Bowery district.

  26. Liberal magazine writer Garry Wills was occasionally confused with conservative syndicated columnist George F. Will.

  27. Waldemar A. Nielsen was Aspen Institute president Joseph E. Slater’s right-hand man.

  28. Joe Louis was heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949.

  29. NBC’s late-late-night interview program Tomorrow, hosted by veteran radio talk-show host Tom Snyder, aired weeknights from October 1973 through January 1982.

  30. Former Democratic senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, one of the two U.S. senators to have voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution granting the president free rein in the conduct of the Vietnam War, was eighty-five years old and McGovern’s official spokesman at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in Worcester in February 1972; fellow speaker John Reuther was the nephew of late UAW president Walter Reuther.

  31. Martin Peretz owned The New Republic, a small but influential liberal weekly policy magazine.

  32. David Burke was Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy’s chief of staff.

  33. “Corky” Gonzales was a prominent Chicano activist who was arrested on dubious robbery charges during the riot that ensued upon the news of Ruben Salazar’s murder by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.

  34. Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez founded the United Farm Workers of America.

  35. Former Newsday sports editor John Walsh was briefly managing editor of Rolling Stone.

  36. Novelist John Gregory Dunne and his wife and frequent collaborator Joan Didion wrote the scripts for the 1971 movie The Panic in Needle Park and 1972’s Play It As It Lays. Dunne also wrote the novel Playland, chronicling the harsh life of onetime child star and nymphet Blue Tyler.

  37. The Soviet Union’s Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

  38. Thompson’s political commentary “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker” ran in The New York Times on January 1, 1974.

  1. Pat’s wife, Shelley Buchanan, and Nixon advance man Nick Ruwe.

  2. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, with the help of their Indian guide and interpreter Sacagawea and at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, made the first overland American expedition to the Pacific Northwest coast, starting out from St. Louis, Missouri, in 1804 and returning there in 1806.

  3. Former Esquire, Eros, and Fact magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg.

  4. Republican Robert Packwood of Oregon held a seat in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1995, when he opted to resign rather than face expulsion for his grab-ass approach to virtually every woman he came in contact with professionally as well as personally.

  5. Former FBI agent and Watergate burglary co-coordinator G. Gordon Liddy refused to plea bargain and was sentenced to twenty years in prison for his activities on behalf of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).

  6. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned his office on October 10, 1973, pleading no contest to tax-evasion charges dating to his governorship of Maryland from 1967 to 1969.

  7. Republican senator Charles Percy of Illinois.

  8. The Alliance for Progress, instituted by JFK in 1961, was a federal program designed to boost the social and economic development of the twenty-two Latin American countries that joined the United States in signing the Charter of Punta del Este.

  9. Thomas Jefferson actually wrote these lines in a June 24, 1826, letter to his friend Roger C. Weightman.

  10. In a speech to Virginia’s second revolutionary convention on March 23, 1775, Continental Congressman Patrick Henry proclaimed: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

  11. Marshal Matt Dillon, played by James Arness, was the hero of the long-running CBS TV Western series Gunsmoke.

  12. Sociologist Ben J. Wattenberg, co-author with Richard M. Scammon of 1970’s The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate.

  13. Liberal Republican Jacob K. Javits of New York held a seat in the U.S. Senate from 1957 to 1981.

  14. Gracie Mansion is the official residence of the mayor of New York City.

  15. Boston-based folk music
ian Tom Rush had “gone electric” in 1966.

  16. Joe Armstrong was Rolling Stone’s advertising director at the time.

  17. Tad Szulc was a foreign and national affairs correspondent for The New York Times.

  18. Viennese neurologist and psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud’s book of essays on and case studies of cocaine use, The Cocaine Papers, had been reissued in 1974.

  19. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman would fight for the world heavyweight boxing championship in Kinshasa, Zaire, on October 30, 1974.

  20. Robert Pirsig wrote the best-selling 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  21. The essays in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collection The Crack-Up were serialized in Esquire magazine beginning in November 1935—a full ten years after the publication of The Great Gatsby.

  22. The federal government’s General Services Administration.

  1. Attorney William Dixon was a senior Democratic investigator for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

  2. U.S. senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state was one of Carter’s early rivals for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination.

  3. Former U.S. senator from Oklahoma Fred Harris was a Democratic political consultant.

  4. Tom Baker was vice president of Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.

  5. Alexander Cockburn, then a Village Voice political columnist, was hired to cover the 1976 election for Rolling Stone.

  6. Ketamine is a general anesthetic administered intravenously or intramuscularly, usually to large cats or small apes.

  7. Laura Palmer also covered the fall of Saigon on assignment for Rolling Stone.

  8. Graham Martin was the last U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, from 1973 through the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975.

  9. “Huey” is the nickname of the American UH 1-B armed helicopter.

  10. Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam.

  11. Vietcong/North Vietnam Army (Provisional Revolutionary Government).

  12. South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu.

  13. Gordon Strachan, who had been chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s assistant in the Nixon White House, had helped run CREEP’s 1972 dirty-tricks campaign.

  14. Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz.

  15. Camp Pendleton is a U.S. Marine Corps base near Oceanside, California.

  16. Nguyen Cao Ky, South Vietnam’s vice president, was accused of several forms of corruption, including involvement in the heroin trade, but Ky denied the charges.

  17. Quoted from Don McLean’s 1971 hit song, “American Pie,” about the deaths of pioneering rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in a plane crash in Mason City, Iowa, on February 3, 1959.

  18. Eric Sevareid was a distinguished CBS News commentator.

  19. Air America was a CIA subsidiary headquartered on Taiwan and used for covert U.S. air operations across Asia.

  20. Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) was a French mathematical physicist who proposed formulas for defining integrals, probability, and electromagnetic theory.

  21. Former White House counsel John Dean was a key witness for the prosecution in the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee investigation.

  22. Henry A. Kissinger was U.S. secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations from 1973 to 1977.

  23. Nelson A. Rockefeller.

  24. On November 7, 1973, the U.S. Congress overrode President Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, which curbed the chief executive’s power to deploy U.S. troops in potentially dangerous situations abroad without congressional approval.

  25. Arizona congressman Morris K. Udall was in the top tier of candidates vying for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination.

  26. Playboy editor Geoffrey Norman.

  27. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, leader of the final defeat of Napoleon at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, and Britain’s Tory prime minister from 1828 to 1830, is said to have sent back a blackmailing letter from the prospective publisher of courtesan Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs—which included Wellington’s letters to her—with the words “Publish and be damned” scrawled across it.

  28. Neutralist, U.S.-supported Laotian premier Prince Souvanna Phouma capitulated to the Vietcong-backed Pathet Lao in May 1975; the Lao People’s Democratic Republic officially assumed control of the country on December 3, 1975.

  29. Moloch was a Semitic god to whom children were sacrificed by the ancient Ammonites, according to seventeenth-century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost (book i., 392–398).

  30. High-powered D.C. attorney Edward Bennett Williams owned the National Football League’s Washington Redskins; the team’s then-coach, George Allen, still ranks fifth-highest all-time in winning percentage (at .681) among NFL coaches.

  31. California Republican Caspar W. Weinberger, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Nixon administration, was U.S. secretary of health, education, and welfare from 1973 to 1975.

  32. Conservative former White House adviser Tom Charles Huston, who helped formulate the notion of a “New Federalism” that President Nixon advanced in his 1971 State of the Union Address, is better known for coming up a few years later with his unabashedly illegal “Huston Plan” for U.S. counterespionage operations.

  33. Nick Profitt had been a Newsweek correspondent in Southeast Asia.

  34. Adolf Hitler’s close aide and official architect Albert Speer organized the Nazis’ slave labor camps, for which he was sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison at the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials.

  35. Quoted from the closing line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  36. Frank Gannon had been an aide to Nixon White House press secretary Ron Ziegler.

  37. Judith Campbell Exner was revealed to have been romantically involved with both reputed mob boss Sam Giancana and President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.

  38. One of the greatest victories of U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur’s long and flamboyant military career—the September 15, 1950, amphibious landing he commanded at the South Korean port of Inchon near Seoul—put U.S. troops 150 miles behind the North Korean enemy’s lines.

  39. Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia was then chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

  40. Stock-car driver Richard Petty won both the Daytona 500 and the NASCAR national championship seven times between 1964 and 1981.

  1. Robert Arum, a former lawyer (for Scanlan’s Monthly) turned boxing promoter, had urged Thompson to cover the October 30, 1974, Muhammad Ali–George Foreman heavyweight championship fight in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

  2. Pierre Salinger had been JFK’s campaign and then White House press secretary.

  3. Foreign and defense correspondent Neil Sheehan, who in 1971 had obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, would have his scholarly memoir, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, published by Random House in 1988.