SALLY QUINN, a reporter for the Washington Post, first met Hunter during the 1972 election.
He had this little coterie of people following him around, these worshippers. He was like the Pied Piper. He sort of liked that, and it was fun to watch. We had a number of friends in common—Jann and Pat Caddell were among them, and may have introduced us—and we became very friendly right away. I was working for the Style section of the Post, covering politics and writing features and profiles, and whenever he’d come to Washington, he’d give me a call. I’d heard about him, so I knew what to expect. And I’ve always been attracted to renegades. I was not intimidated by his bad-boy reputation. These kinds of guys are always really sweetie pies underneath, and that’s what I adored about Hunter.
I dated Hunter for a while. We had a sort of relationship, but it was obviously long-distance, because he’d just blow into town now and again. It was not serious. For me it was just fun, but I adored him. He was the sweetest man I’ve ever known. He was absolutely adorable.
He was also the most shy person around women that I’ve ever met. Whenever we’d be together, he’d be absolutely tongue-tied and in a cold sweat he was so nervous. He was a real southern gentleman. He always would open the door for me, and whenever he’d meet me, he’d be standing there with a little bouquet of flowers. There was something so incredibly touching about him. I don’t think I’ve ever been treated as well by anybody as I was by Hunter. On the sidewalk, he would walk on the outside, next to the curb—you know, so that if the horses came by, they wouldn’t splash mud on me. “Courtly” is exactly the word I’d use. He used to kiss my hand all the time and pull the chair out when I sat down. I didn’t know anybody who did that.
The contrast between the way he was with me and his public persona couldn’t have been greater. He was extremely respectful but just really shy and very insecure about himself as a man in a male-female relationship. He didn’t have a lot of confidence in himself that way, so all the bluster and the screaming and yelling and whatever—I just found it amusing. He was always much more comfortable talking about his work, and what he was doing, and other people, and politics. When things got personal, he’d just get sweaty and clammy.
He never talked about his wife. It was mostly about political gossip and who was doing what. It was a most exciting time—the war was going on, and Watergate. We had a lot to talk about. He was always pumping me for information. When he threatened to sue me and all that, it was just bluster. I never took any of it seriously—he was just doing a number. Hunter and I were never not friends.
JANN WENNER
It just seemed like the natural thing for Hunter would be to move from the story of the impeachment to the next big story about America—the fall of Saigon. I could see it, he could see it, everybody could see it. It was preceded by this frantic attempt to get him over there. All the nuttiness of making arrangements for Hunter to travel or go anywhere was now exacerbated by the desperate endgame situation in Vietnam. Once he got there, I started getting all these somewhat frightening faxes from him asking what he should do. Should he go with the retreating army? Should he make contact with the Vietcong? I had no idea what the right move was. I kept saying, “Hunter, you have to make your own decisions. Talk to people there.” And he seemed overwhelmed.
PAUL SCANLON
Hunter and I were supposed to work on “Fear and Loathing in Saigon,” which didn’t amount to much, just one truncated piece. It was mostly me waking him up at four in the morning, Saigon time.
LOREN JENKINS
“Fear and Loathing in Saigon” should have been his masterpiece. I was crushed, because the fall of Saigon was such a nutty time. The only person that could’ve written it was Hunter. I was writing for Newsweek then, dealing with the classic sort of duh-duh-duh-duh-duh Newsweek story, and I kept thinking, “God! I wish I was writing for Rolling Stone,” because it was just that zany madness that would lend itself to a great Rolling Stone story.
It was the end of the war, ’75. April 30 was the evacuation, but there was a period of about six weeks before that when it was clear the end was very near. It was just a matter of whether it happened today, or tomorrow, or next week. The South Vietnamese army started crumbling, and refugees started fleeing south, officers were abandoning troops . . . I mean, terrible chaos.
At some point during this time, Hunter called and said, “I’m coming in. What’s it like there? What’s it all going to be like? Dangerous?” And I said, “Well, shit, it’s a war. It is dangerous, and it’s mad.” My then wife was in Hong Kong, and Hunter came through Hong Kong on his way over and went to visit her because he knew her, and also to get briefed on what was going on.
I needed money—big money—because we saw that the end was coming, and I had a whole staff, and I didn’t know whether we were going to have to buy a plane or how the hell we were going to get out. So I asked Hunter to go by my office in Hong Kong and pick up forty thousand dollars in crisp hundred-dollar bills. I said, “Be sure to tape it to your body—don’t carry it in a bag, because it’ll be searched.” He landed at the airport, a little nervous, and looked up at this sign which said, “Please declare any foreign cash you bring in over a hundred dollars or you’ll be subject to prosecution.” But he got through and made it to the Continental Hotel, where I had my office, and asked for a room. I’d asked for them to get him a room, but now they didn’t have one. Someone told Hunter to wait until I got back from the front and we’d try to figure it out. When I got back, the guy at the desk said, “Hey, there’s some guy looking for you. I think he’s from the CIA.” The CIA in Vietnam always looked really American, and certainly, running around in a Hawaiian shirt with shorts on was not press or the military.
From the moment he arrived, he was going on about his life insurance. I mean, that’s almost all he talked about. “What do you think about flying halfway across the world, going to war, and Jann cancels my life insurance?”
LYNN NESBIT
One day a forty-foot fax unrolled across my office floor—all about Jann and the expenses and “Where is my life insurance?” and “He’s canceled it.”
JANN WENNER
Hunter always needed a foil—a partner or companion or nemesis of some kind—throughout everything he did. Obviously it was Oscar in Vegas and Nixon for much of his political writing. And through all of the long years that we had together, I was the substitute foil whenever there was nobody else around to have a crisis with. I understood it, and I enjoyed it most of the time. There was the schtick about money. If he wanted to have a crisis and complain about something, that would be it—I’d sucked him dry of some amount of money or wouldn’t pay his expenses. We understood that to be laughs and fun, and it mostly never concerned me.
The only thing that really did was when he went around saying I canceled his life insurance. Finally I said, “Hunter, if you say that one more time, I’m going to go out on a campus tour and explain how I was the one who came up with the idea that you should have life insurance, and I was the one who named your wife and child the beneficiaries. Let’s just put that one to rest, because that’s kind of an ugly lie.” So we did.
LOREN JENKINS
Eventually he got installed in the Continental Hotel and went out on a trip. I was his patron. There was a lot of suspicion about Hunter S. Thompson. This was the old, boozy presixties generation of correspondents, and they thought he was a freak—a “druggie” and all that. But everybody—all the troops there, all the Americans—was stoned. The war was a druggie’s war.
Hunter wanted to go to the front. Basically, you just got in a car, drove until you couldn’t drive any further, saw what was happening, and drove back. So he went out with one of our cars—I had all sorts of vehicles and several correspondents and photographers. I think he was with Nick Profitt, one of our correspondents. They loaded up the jeep, and Hunter appeared in the morning with his cooler full of beer, and off they went.
He came back after just a couple of d
ays. There was a curfew every night around seven, and you weren’t supposed to be out, but the Continental Hotel—Graham Greene’s hotel from The Quiet American, this classic French colonial hotel with slow-revolving fans and high ceilings—had an inner courtyard where at night we ate and drank. At this point it was really just the press corps left, and every night after curfew everyone sat around getting drunk and talked about what was happening and wondered what we were all going to do. All these sort of mad debates—“What happens when the North Vietnamese arrive in Saigon?” “Are we gonna stay here? Are they gonna kill us?”
But then after just a couple of days there, Hunter all of a sudden said, “I have to go to Hong Kong,” and jumped on some plane. He bought a footlocker full of electronics on Jann’s tab—walkie-talkies and all this other stuff—and then flew back [to Saigon]. He was trying to distribute all this stuff, to organize us, and of course everyone else in the press was just sort of, “Who gives a shit?” I don’t think anyone took him seriously. I mean, here you’ve got all these really war-hardened foreign correspondents, and they’ve done this sort of thing before. We weren’t going to carry walkie-talkies and talk to the mother ship.
All this fear-talking, and people at night getting drunk and stoned and ranting and raving about commies with horns on their heads and rumblings on the streets—I think Hunter took it all to heart and thought, “Shit, I don’t want to be around for that.” Because all of a sudden he said, “I’m gonna go. I’ve decided that the place to watch all this from is Laos.” Well, the last place you wanted to watch it from was fuckin’ Vientiane! Laos was the middle of nowhere, clearly out of the picture on anything. But he picked up and left. The last thing I think I said to him was “When this is over, the place to go is Bali.” I gave him the address of a little hotel on Sanur Beach called the Tandjung Sari and said, “If I get out of here alive—if I’m not dead in the streets—you can reach me on Sanur Beach.”
From “Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk” Rolling Stone 187; May 22,1975
It is 3:55 on a hot, wet Sunday morning in Saigon, and I am out of ice again. It has been raining most of the night and the patio bar here in the Hotel Continental closed early. The paper in my notebook is limp and the blue and white tiles on my floor are so slick with humidity that not even these white-canvas, rubber-soled basketball shoes can provide enough real traction for me to pace back and forth in the classic, high-speed style of a man caving in to The Fear.
This empty silver ice bucket is the least of my problems tonight; all I have to do to get it filled is go out in the darkened hallway and wake up any of the three or four tiny, frail-looking old men in white pajamas who are sleeping uneasily out there on green bamboo mats behind the circular staircase leading down to the lobby. The slightest noise or touch will wake them instantly; and after sleeping outside my room for almost a week, they have learned to live with my nightly ice problem in the same spirit of tolerant fatalism that I have learned to live with the nightly thumping sound of artillery fire outside my window, five or six miles to the south. It is a sound I have never heard before—not even from a safe distance—so I can never be sure if the faraway, deep-rumbling explosions that rattle the ice in my bucket every night are “outgoing” or “incoming.”
There has been a notable lack of distant artillery fire tonight—which is probably an ominous sign, because it means the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops that already surround this doomed volcano of a city on three sides are no doubt spending these peaceful, early-morning hours rolling their doomsday 130 MM siege cannons into place out there in the mud just north of Saigon’s defense line around Bien Hoa and the remnants of what was once the biggest U.S. Air Force base outside the continental U.S. The ARVN 18th Division that was supposed to protect Bien Hoa—just fifteen miles north of Saigon, on a four-lane concrete highway—has apparently been ground into hamburger in the weeklong battle for Xuan Loc. Latest reports from the front, as it were, say that two of the 18th’s three regiments no longer exist, for one reason or another, and that the third is down to an effective fighting strength of 500 men.
To: Paul Scanlon, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Telex RS 34 0337
From: Hunter Thompson, Global Affairs Desk, Hotel Continental, Saigon, April 20, 1975
Everybody here is becoming very edgy and kind of bone-marrow nervous. Advance units of the NVA are now only five miles out of town and they could immobilize the airport at any moment with artillery fire and that would cut us off from all access to the outside world except by Marine helicopters. It’s also possible that a rocket could hit at any moment near enough to send me running over to UPI with whatever I have, hoping to get it on the wire before they begin operating under emergency conditions and not using their Telex for anything but their own copy. So if you stop receiving from me and don’t understand why, check with UPI and find out if the situation here has turned weird.
Loren Jenkins, the Newsweek bureau chief, just sent his local fixer out to the black market to buy us two flak jackets, two helmets and maybe a few bayonets, which are suddenly a hot item here.
I’ve been trying to buy a revolver, but again for obvious reasons they cannot be had for any price at this time. Some of the press vets are saying we should get some M-16s into this hotel, so the place can be defended—at least until Marine choppers arrive—from rampaging mobs who might figure the last Americans they’ll ever have a chance to get even with, as it were, are the 500 or so correspondents trapped downtown in the Continental and the Caravelle. You might also advise Jann that the three-unit, triangulated walkie-talkie system I brought back from Hong Kong is now being used by other press here in the hotel and in the event of a sudden emergency it will definitely be pressed into service by the people in charge of evacuation. . . . We have only two hours left before curfew, and I can’t get from here to UPI after nine tonight without risking being shot and the people at UPI have advised me not to take the risk because the ARVN troops and police out there in the street have orders to shoot anybody moving around and ask questions later.
There are a lot of people here who think the ARVN will make a gallant last stand and hold for at least a few days at Bien Hoa before fleeing back into the city. . . . But my own feeling is that the battle for Saigon is already over and once the elite 325th NVA Steel Division starts moving they will not even stop for a joint break until they get all the way into Saigon.
. . . Jesus I just got very repeat very reliable word that things have suddenly changed dramatically for the worse and we can expect the big move on Saigon to begin rolling tonight or tomorrow but I can’t give any details via Telex for obvious reasons . . . But you can expect my copy flow to be interdicted, as they say, at any moment from now on and in fact you may have to use this stuff as either the ending for the piece or as some kind of intro/editor’s note, explaining why my story sounds so jerky, garbled and unfinished. We are working under extreme tension here.
LOREN JENKINS
Well, the shit came down, the North Vietnamese came into town, and we all evacuated off the roof of the American embassy in helicopters. I spent four days on a carrier in the South China Sea sailing to Subic Bay in the Philippines and made my way through to Bali, Sanur Beach, the Tandjung Sari Hotel. I checked in to a nice little two-story bungalow with the rooms upstairs and a sort of salon downstairs, right on the beach, with a thatched roof, thinking, “War’s over, all done.”
But on the first night, at about three in the morning, there’s this racket and gunfire and loud sounds and explosions. I jumped up—shit, I’ve been covering the Vietnam war for two and a half years; I’m jumpy!—and there’s Hunter, standing down in the salon with his tape recorder blaring. He’d found the Tandjung Sari in the middle of the fucking night and decided to wake me up with these sounds of war.
We spent the next week or ten days on the beach, talking about our Vietnam War, talking about life. Sandy had arrived from Aspen with a jar full of a concoction that was basically organic mescaline.
We sat on the beach for a good long time.
It was such a good story. It was a classic story. Hunter was always going to write it—he just never got down to it. It really was my great disappointment.
JANN WENNER
I think maybe he just got frightened in Vietnam. It was the first time that Hunter—coming off the campaign trail with his success and this image of himself as a guy who could handle guns and confront the real danger—had to deal with genuine life-and-death consequences that were far more extreme in every way than what he might have seen on the campaign trail or with the Hells Angels. Compare the Hells Angels to the Vietcong for a moment.
He wasn’t a war correspondent, that’s for sure. Maybe he didn’t have time to recover from Watergate. I don’t really know. He left Saigon. I think it was just too much for him. He left town before the story was over and before he could write it. Once he went on vacation—Hong Kong, I think—he just never disciplined himself to write the piece he did have. Like Zaire, he just threw it away.
He couldn’t deliver less-difficult things later, like the Grenada invasion, which was a story handed to him on a plate, and the Ali fight. I had a lot invested in it. Why would he float around in the hotel pool in Kinshasa and not go to the fight? These were all serious failures, and it went on for a decade.
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