On more specific fronts, I’m already gearing down to make “The Real Nixon” VORTEX/Washington #2 (that name is off the top of my head & might not last, but let’s use it for now as a sort of working title. It conveys a certain amount of urgency & bogus drama that fits in nicely with the activist side of this gig.). From here on in, it’s going to be hard to defend the notion that I’m here to merely write a column.
I think, however, that we have to get away from that phrase “Youth Vote.” It leaves out about two thirds of the people we’re talking to. Ideally, we should come up with something about halfway between “Youth Vote” & “Freak Power.” Something to embrace both the latent (& massive) Kesey-style voter with the 18–21 types.
Now a few important details:
I’ve had a long talk with the mgr. of the newsstand next door to the Nat. Press Bldg (see enc. note with name of the big boss for all six UNIVERSAL NEWS stores) & the man in store #2 says RS invariably sells out “in a few hours.” I told him I wanted it there the next time I came around, so he gave me this man Siebert’s name, which you should pass along to the distributor. OK for that. I haven’t seen a copy of RS for sale since I got here—and that makes life unnecessarily difficult for me. There is—now that I think on it—a first-class FM rock station here that reaches almost the entire young/music type audience. I’ll get the name & send it along. A few spots on that might work wonders. I’ll check around for other possibilities & let you know.
Right now I have to get to bed. It’s 6:30 a.m. & I have to get up before noon, in order to buy a bed & a TV set. (Today is Saturday.) My private phone number just got activated yesterday: It’s 726-8161. Don’t give it to anybody; not even on the master Rollidex [sic]. The RS number is 882-2853 and rings here in the house, and that should be enough for all but the critical few. The point is that I want to have one phone I can always answer, without fear of being fucked around by lunatics . . . and the first time I start getting hassled on that number, I’ll change it. So don’t give it to anybody except [RS investor] Max [Palevsky], [Jann Wenner’s secretary] Stephanie Franklin, etc.
What I’m doing at the moment is feeling my way around & trying to cope with all these unexpected reactions to my gig. The problem, oddly enough, is that things are working out better than I expected . . . but at the same time I’m swamped with vicious little details. The phone man, for instance, got here at 10:00 & left at 4:30. He’s just back from Vietnam, & for a number of reasons that need no explanation it took him six hours to drill through a stone floor & then a stone wall, in order to put two phones in the Fear Room. And then he came back this morning: (to check the phones, he said, but what he really wanted was a copy of #95. Not for Vegas 1, but because of that story on Sly [Stone].) “I’ve been wondering why that sonofabitch is always late,” he said . . . and then he said he’s been reading “the Stone” for 2 yrs in Nam. I figure he’ll be around again—which is okay, I think, because in a city that’s 72% Black it might be nice to have a sharp black friend. When the bastard came back today he was wearing a hat that would have freaked even Sly.
And that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get a column in by Tuesday—but I’m not optimistic about its potential coherence or heaviness. If it looks bad I’ll simply hang it up and make the nut with something else. Don’t worry, either way. This is going to be a good & extremely active gig, but I’ll have to get grounded first. (I assume, by the way—based on the schedule you sent me—that the real deadline for VORTEX #1 is Dec 1, instead of Tuesday 11/22. Is that right?)
Send word,
HST
Undated letter from HST to JSW
Jann/
Can you put me on a list for all new records (at the Rm 1369 address)? That would give me some gravy to lay on Prisendorf for the office rent—for an album a day I can get an actual office, with a desk & a studio couch. Very cheap. He won’t agree to anything that might hang him up—but if we keep it loose & informal, I think it will work . . . & a steady flow of “review albums” will make the nut.
Also, could Stephanie drop a note to the Cellar Door (the main Folk/Rock club here) & say I’ll be a regular visitor. I’ve gone there twice & it cost me $28 the first time, $17 the second (Doug Kershaw & Al Cooper [sic])—I think a letter from the main office would cancel those rotten tabs. It’s kind of a latter-day, high-powered Matrix, & I figure to stop there fairly often . . . & a letter from Hq. could save me $100 a month or so.
Thanx/
HST
Letter from JSW to Cellar Door
November 22, 1971
The Cellar Door
1201 34th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
Gentlemen:
We have recently stationed a correspondent in Washington, D.C., Hunter S. Thompson, who is in the regular employ of Rolling Stone.
We would appreciate any and all courtesies, including admission and access to the backstage area, that you can provide.
Sincerely,
Jann Wenner
Editor
P.S. It is my understanding that there has been somebody in the Washington area claiming to be Raoul Duke, saying that he works for Rolling Stone too. There is, in fact, a real Raoul Duke who does work for us, but he is in semi-retirement in the Virgin Islands at the moment, and should anybody by the name of Raoul Duke claim admission to your club, you might as well just call the police.
cc: Hunter S. Thompson
Letter from JSW to HST
December 13, 1971
Hunter: Please return forthwith the various pre-recorded cassettes you stole from my house or else I’m going to give Acosta a first class ticket to Washington, D.C. and a huge quantity of ugly, bad LSD, plus your private number and your home address.
Yours,
[unsigned]
Undated letter from HST to JSW
You crazy dope addict bastard! Don’t give me any more shit about “stealing your cassettes”! I did a lot of rotten things out there but I didn’t steal your fucking cassettes. The next time you mention this thing, I’ll put [HST attorney and longtime friend John] Clancy on you.
—& while we’re into bummers, you should know that Lee Bailey just offered me a big chunk of stock in “Gallery.”
Heavy duty, eh? First E.B. Williams & now Bailey. Are you ready for that?
Letter from HST to JSW, February 16, 1972
2/16
Royal Biscayne Hotel
555 Ocean Drive
Key Biscayne, Florida 33149
Jann/
—the Fla gig is so far running about 600% better than I could possibly have predicted. After 2 days of steady personal hassling with Lindsay, I think he’s about ready to spring for the Freak Power trip.
—whatever happens, these fuckers will never forget that the campaign of ’72 was “the one that Rolling Stone covered.”
—terrible heavy showbiz; I feel like an alligator in the dog show. I have a clean ’72 version of the Great Red Shark. But the thing that really brings them to their fucking knees is the telecopier.
The poor bastards are totally bamboozled. They can’t grasp it. Here’s some hopelessly out of control freak from Rolling Whatever, running around in a big red convertible with a fucking phone-transmitter in the trunk. It’s wonderful—like putting a big red Twister on them.
OK for now. I’ll call.
—H
Letter from JSW to HST
April 20, 1972
Hunter:
We can no longer go through this deadline scene as we have now with every one of your reports. The late deadlines on the Wisconsin piece and the Florida piece were quite understandable, but your latest piece should have been in no later than Friday evening. I am afraid that you literally have Dan Parker, Charles Perry, Robert Kingsbury, Cindy Ehrlich, Barbara Ziller, Paul, Hank and other members of the editorial staff quite angry about the situation.
Furthermore, the unvarying dullness of the layout and the continued proliferation of minor errors and improper structuring
results only from the fact that you submit it so late. For everybody’s good I think we have got to start considering Friday evening/Saturday early a.m. as the final deadline.
Sincerely,
Jann
bcc: Dan, Charles, Robert, Cindy, Barbara, Paul, Hank, Max, Jane (Wenner), Laurel
Memo to RS staff from HST
Fear & Loathing: CORRECTIONS, RETRACTIONS, APOLOGIES, COP-OUTS, ETC. (undated 1972) [handwritten at top] Jann—this was written before I left to cover the Fla. primary
For various reasons that probably don’t mean shit to anybody but me, I want to get straight—for the record, as it were—with regard to some of the most serious of the typographical errors that have marred the general style, tone & wisdom of “Fear & Loathing.”
I have tried to blame various individuals in the San Francisco office for these things, but each time we trace one of the goddamn things back to its root, it turns out to have been my fault. This is mainly because I never seem to get my gibberish in to [RS copy chief Charlie Perry, aka “Smokestack El Ropo”] El Ropo, who has to cope with it, until the crack of dawn on deadline day—at which time I have to get him out of bed and keep him awake by means of ruses, shocks and warnings while I feed my freshly typed pages into the Mojo Wire, which zaps them across the nation to El Ropo at the rate of one page every four minutes.
This is a fantastic machine, and I carry it with me at all times. All I need is the Mojo Wire and a working telephone to send perfect Xerox copies of anything I’ve written to anybody else with a Mojo Wire receiver . . . and anybody with $50 a month can lease one of these things.
Incredible. What will they think of next?
The only real problem with the Mojo Wire is that it tends to miss or skip a line every once in a while, especially when we get one of those spotty phone connections. If you’re playing “New Speedway Boogie” in the same room, for instance, the Mojo machine will pick up the noise and garble a name like “Jackson” so badly that El Ropo will get it as “Johnson”. . .or “Jackalong” . . . or maybe just a fuzzy grey blank.
Which would not be a problem if we had time to check back & forth on a different phone line—but by the time El Ropo can assemble my gibberish & read it I am usually checked out and driving like a bastard for the nearest airport.
So he has to read the whole thing several times, try to get a grip on the context, and then decide what I really meant to say in that line that came across garbled.
This is not always easy. My screeds tend to wander, without benefit of such traditional journalistic landmarks as “prior references” and “pyramid reverse-build foundations.” I still insist “objective journalism” is a contradiction in terms. But I want to draw a very hard line between the inevitable reality of “subjective journalism” and the idea that any honestly subjective journalist might feel free to estimate a crowd at a rally for some candidate the journalist happens to like personally at 2000 instead of 612 . . . or to imply that a candidate the journalist views with gross contempt, personally, is a less effective campaigner than he actually is.
Hubert Humphrey, for instance: I don’t mind admitting that I think sheep-dip is the only cure for everything Humphrey stands for. I consider him not only a living, babbling insult to the presumed intelligence of the electorate, but also a personally painful mockery of the idea that Americans can learn from history.
But if Hubert meets a crowd in Tampa and 77 ranking business leaders offer him $1000 each for his campaign, I will write that scene exactly as it happened—regardless of the immense depression it would plunge me into.
No doubt I would look around for any valid word or odd touches that might match the scene to my bias. If any of those 77 contributors were wearing spats or monocles I would take care to mention it. I would probably follow some of them outside to see if they had “America—Love it or Leave it” bumper stickers on their cars. And if they did I would definitely make note of it. If one of them grabbed a hummingbird out of the air and bit its head off, I think it’s safe to say I would probably use that . . .
. . . but even if I did all that ugly stuff, and if the compilation of my selected evidence might pursuade a reader here and there to think that Humphrey was drawing his Florida support from a cabal of senile fascists . . .well . . . I probably wouldn’t get much argument from any of the “objective” journalists on the tour, because even the ones who would flatly disagree with my interpretation of what happened would be extremely reluctant to argue that theirs or anyone else’s was the flat objective truth.
You won’t find many working reporters defending the concept of Pure Objectivity. They know better. The only zealous defenders of “objective” reporting are the Editors, Publishers and other diminished-capacity “news executives” who frequent National Journalism Conventions. Or semi-retired “commentators” like [CBS news analyst] Eric Sevareid, who have grown so far away from the sweaty midnight realities of politics that they might as well be looking down from some germ-free eiyre (sp) [aerie] in the Vatican, like the Pope or maybe Howard Hughes. Which is not to say they might not be Right from time to time. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. But it is a little hard on the senses to live thru a decade of getting the News from [NBC anchor] Chet Huntley, and then suddenly find him grinning out of the tube at you and spinning a salespitch for American Airlines.
On the other hand, it’s also true that I will blow a fact here and there. A month ago I wrote that a registered independent in Colorado could vote in either the GOP or Democratic primary—which was true last year, but the law was recently changed. Somebody wrote to curse me for that one, and all I can do is apologize. In 1970 I knew every clause, twist, sub-section & constitutional precedent that had anything to do with voter-eligibility laws in Colorado. (When you run for office on the Freak Power ticket, the first thing you do is learn all the laws.) But when I moved to Washington and got into the Presidential Campaign I stopped keeping track of things like that.
Voter-eligibility laws are changing so fast all over the country this year that in many cases not even the city/county clerks and official registrars in charge of dealing with new voters really know who is eligible. Just because somebody tells you that you’re not eligible to vote doesn’t mean you aren’t. During the Freak Power election in Aspen the county clerk formally and officially disqualified 88 out of 450 new voters. We took them all to court and won 87 out of 88 cases in six hours.
The only other serious error that I feel any need to explain or deal with at this time has to do with a statement about Nixon. What I wrote was: “There is still no doubt in my mind that he could never pass for human . . .”
But somebody cut the word “never.” El Ropo denies it, but our relationship has never been the same. He says the printer did it. Which is understandable, I guess; it’s a fairly heavy statement either way.
Is Nixon “human”? Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. There is no real argument about that. Most juries would accept, prima facie, the idea that the President of the United States is a mammal.
He is surely not an Insect; and not of the lizard family. But “human” is something else. A mammal is not necessarily human. Rodents are mammals. An extremely intelligent Bayou Rat called “Honeyrunner” was once elected to the city council in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Nobody called him “human,” but they say he did okay on the job.
It would take a really sick and traitorous mind to compare the President of the United States to a Bayou Rat, regardless of intelligence. So maybe El Ropo was right. By almost any standard of responsible journalism the President must be referred to as “human.” It is one of those ugly realities—like the Amnesty Question—that we will all have to face & accept.
About five years ago Tom Wicker wrote a column in the New York Times that focused—for reasons I no longer remember—on a whole wasps’ nest of ominous flaws that he (Wicker) had only recently discovered in the character of Richard Milhous Nixon.
Wicker was s
hocked. He called up the memory of Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” and said that he’d always thought Richard Nixon was “one of us.”
This is an impossible concept to explain to anybody who hasn’t brooded over the Meaning & Truth of “Lord Jim.” But to anyone who has, the idea that one of the most eminent journalistic gurus in the nation could ever have thought that “Richard Nixon was one of us” is genuinely unsettling.
Conrad’s “one of us” idea was a sort of primitive version of today’s far-flung belief that a very few people in this world radiate an almost unnaturally “good kaharma” (sp?) [sic]—and that only the ones who can radiate on this special level are capable of recognizing it in others. A sort of Aristocracy of Instinct . . .
Did Tom Wicker once see this special inner glow in Richard Nixon? He has come a long way since he wrote that thing, five years ago, but . . . well, what can you say? Wicker appears to be one of those fast-learning types. He is one of the few big-league journalists in America who still sees his job as a means of furthering his education. Which keeps him interesting . . . but it makes me a little nervous to know that Wicker might still be nursing some secret flash about Nixon being one of the world’s special laid-back fireball truthseekers . . . while I still can’t decide if the bugger is even human.
Which is neither here nor there, for now. Probably we’ll never know anyway. And all I started out to do here was explain away a few of my worst mistakes.
The only other thing I had in mind was to say—to all the people who keep writing me those vicious goddamn letters—is that I get a really fine high boot out of reading them. I read them all, screening the best ones for good lines to steal. About a week ago I got one from somebody in Chicago, calling me a “Cryptofaggot Bulldog-nazi Honky-fascist Pig.”
I can really get behind a letter like that. But most of the stuff is lame. I’m not running a goddamn “Dear Abbey” [sic] service here. Anybody with problems should write to David Felton, Bleeding Heart Editor, at the San Francisco office. He’s paid to get down in the ditch with lunatics. And he likes it.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson Page 12