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Fear and Loathing in America

Page 107

by Hunter S. Thompson


  4. Los Angeles Times Vietnam correspondent William Tuohy won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

  5. Singer Diana Ross fronted the 1960s Motown trio the Supremes; writer Truman Capote’s works include the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his “nonfiction” crime novel In Cold Blood; Aspen resident and pop singer John Denver wrote and recorded such wholesome songs as “Rocky Mountain High.”

  6. President Nixon appointed Kansas City chief of police Clarence Kelley as FBI director in July 1973.

  7. Philip Caputo, a former Marine Corps platoon leader who became a Vietnam correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, wrote the 1977 memoir A Rumor of War.

  8. Robert Stone won the 1975 National Book Award for fiction for Dog Soldiers, his brutal novel about smugglers of heroin from Vietnam to California.

  9. Werner Erhard was a “self-improvement” guru who in 1971 launched Erhard Seminars Training (est), a pricey, psychobabbling series of long and demeaning behavior-modification sessions that preached the virtues of selfishness.

  10. The University of Notre Dame’s campus is in South Bend, Indiana.

  11. The General Accounting Office (GAO) is a U.S. congressional agency.

  12. Anwar al-Sadat was president of Egypt from 1970 until he was assassinated in 1981.

  13. The exact quote of Kurtz’s command in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 war novel, Heart of Darkness, is: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

  14. Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s famed painting of the Basque town in northern Spain destroyed by German planes fighting for anti-republican General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, hangs in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museo Nacional Centro de Arte.

  15. Washington Star political columnist Jack Germond and his partner Jules Witcover would write the 1981 campaign-analysis book Blue Smoke and Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980.

  16. Carter’s pollster Patrick J. Caddell and campaign manager Hamilton Jordan.

  17. Jody Powell was Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign press secretary, the same job he would hold in the White House.

  18. Martin Nolan was a reporter for The Boston Globe.

  19. French pop singer Claudine Longet shot and killed her boyfriend, champion skier Spider Sabich, in 1976.

  20. Democrat Hugh Carey was governor of New York state.

  21. Ohio freshman senator John Glenn, the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth, in February 1962; veteran Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson; and Idaho Democrat Frank Church, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s 1975–76 investigative hearings on the CIA and its activities.

  22. Ronald Rosenbaum wrote on politics for New York’s alternative weekly The Village Voice.

  23. Longtime Senate Appropriations Committee chairman John McClellan of Arkansas.

  24. Chief Justice of the United States Warren E. Burger, appointed by President Nixon in 1969, led the Supreme Court back to a more conservative approach than the judicial activism of his predecessor Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California appointed to the Court by President Eisenhower in 1953.

  25. Republican senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania was a top staff lawyer on the 1964 Warren Commission, appointed to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy; then congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan was a member of the commission.

  26. Director Bob Rafelson’s 1976 movie of Charles Gaines’s novel Stay Hungry, about bodybuilding in the New South, starred Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  27. Billy the Kid was the nickname of late nineteenth-century Western outlaw William H. Bonney, a notorious cattle thief and murderer who was finally captured and sentenced to hang. He escaped from jail by killing two guards, but was quickly hunted down and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett.

  28. Cyrus R. Vance was U.S. secretary of state from 1977 to 1980.

  29. Lawyer Clark Clifford was a special adviser to Presidents Truman and Kennedy, then U.S. secretary of defense under LBJ from 1968 to 1969; W. Averell Harriman, former chairman of the board of the Union Pacific railroad, served in a host of government appointments, including as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and London and as secretary of commerce under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  30. T. Griffith, in “Fear and Loathing and Ripping Off,” Time, July 19, 1976.

 

 

 


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