Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

by Hunter S. Thompson

  But what about next time? Who is going to explain, in 1976, that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should “try again” for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations—between the ages of twenty-two and forty—who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson-Goldwater to Humphrey-Nixon to Nixon-Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election.

  This is the gibberish that churned in my head on the drive back from Manchester. Every now and then I would pass a car with New Hampshire plates and the motto “Live Free or Die” inscribed above the numbers.

  The highways are full of good mottoes. But T. S. Eliot put them all in a sack when he coughed up that line about . . . what was it? Have these dangerous drugs fucked my memory? Maybe so. But I think it went something like this:

  “Between the Idea and the Reality . . . Falls the Shadow.”

  The Shadow? I could almost smell the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night, and tomorrow’s schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida—except for Sam Yorty, and I didn’t feel ready for that.

  The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhiker I saw was an eighteen-year-old kid with long black hair who was going to Reading—or “Redding,” as he said it—but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in November, he looked at me like I’d said something crazy.

  “What election?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I was only kidding.”

  One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than a year now—a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked but not well-liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.

  A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase—to the “White side” of Rock Creek Park—to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small, loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slumped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to “the McGovern problem.”

  For more than a year now, he’s been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963; he’s for amnesty now; his alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5 billion Space Shuttle program, thereby croaking thousands of new jobs in the depressed Cape Kennedy–Central Florida area.

  He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon-Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument by midsummer—one of those wild-eyed fire-and-brimstone issues that scares the piss out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it . . . but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it’s desirable, but it’s “among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.”

  This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year—especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando . . . or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of Niggers.

  McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: he is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.

  On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted—along with McGovern and most of his backers—that “American politics” is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and the Loyal Opposition.

  That’s the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry O’Brien has decided to go with this year—and he says he can’t for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren’t bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.

  Getting It On in D.C.

  The most recent Gallup poll says Nixon & Muskie are running Head to Head, but on closer examination the figures had Muskie trailing by a bare 1 percent—so he quickly resigned his membership in the “Caucasians Only” Congressional Country Club in the horsey suburbs near Cabin John, Maryland. He made this painful move in late January, about the same time he began hammering Nixon’s “end the war” proposal.

  Watching Muskie on TV that week, I remembered the words of ex-senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) when he appeared at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in his role as the official spokesman for McGovern. Gruening was one of the two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964—the resolution that gave LBJ carte blanche to do Everything Necessary to win the war in Vietnam. (Wayne Morse of Oregon was the only other “nay” vote: . . . and both Gruening and Morse were defeated when they ran for reelection in 1966.)

  In Worchester, Ernest Gruening approached the stage like a slow-moving golem. He is eighty-five years old, and his legs are not real springy—but when he got behind the podium he spoke like the Grim Reaper.

  “I’ve known Ed Muskie for many years,” he said. “I’ve considered him a friend . . . but I can’t help remembering that, for all those years, while we were getting deeper and deeper into that war, and while more and more boys were dying . . . Ed Muskie stayed silent.”

  Gruening neglected to say where McGovern had been on the day of the Tonkin Gulf vote . . . but I remember somebody saying, up on the press platform near the roof of the Assumption College gym, that “I can forgive McGovern for blowing that Tonkin thing, because the Pentagon lied—but what’s his excuse for not voting against that goddamn wiretapping bill?” The Omnibus Crime Control & Safe Streets Act of 1968, a genuinely oppressive piece of legislation—even Lyndon Johnson was shocked by it, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to veto the bugger—for the same reasons cited by the many senators who called the bill “frightening” while refusing to vote against it because they didn’t want to be on record as having voted against “safe streets and crime control.” (The bare handful of senators who actually voted against the bill explained themselves in very ominous terms. For details, see Justice by Richard Harris.)

  I had thought about this, but I had also thought about all the other aspects of this puzzling and depressing campaign—which seemed, a few months ago, to have enough weird and open-ended possibilities that I actually moved from Colorado to Washington for the purpose of “covering the campaign.” It struck me as a right thing to do, at the time—especially in the wake of the success we’d had with two back-to-back Freak Power runs at the heavily entrenched Money/Politics/Yahoo establishment in Aspen.

  But things are different in Washington. It’s not that everybody you talk to is aggressively hostile to any idea that might faze their well-ordered lifestyles; they’d just rather not think about it. And there is no sense of life in the Underculture. On the national/reality spectrum, Washington’s Doper/Left/Rock/Radical community is somewhere between Toledo and Biloxi. “Getti
ng it on” in Washington means killing a pint of Four Roses and then arguing about Foreign Aid, over chicken wings, with somebody’s drunken congressman.

  The latest craze on the local highlife front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia, in Washington, is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom—and the people who actually live and thrive here, in the great web of government, are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the party affiliation of the next president won’t make any difference at all, except on the surface.

  The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same. So just lie back and live with it. To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about “getting things done in Washington” is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers “Stop Duane Thomas!”

  Dope Saves the Cowboys

  That is one aspect of the ’72 Super Bowl that nobody has properly dealt with: What was it like for those humorless, god-fearing Alger-bent Jesus Freaks to go out on that field in front of one hundred thousand people in New Orleans and get beaten like gongs by the only certified dope freak in the NFL? Thomas ran through the Dolphins like a mule through corn-stalks.

  It was a fine thing to see; and it was no real surprise when the Texas cops busted him, two weeks later, for Possession of Marijuana . . . and the Dallas coach said Yes, he’d just as soon trade Duane Thomas for almost anybody.

  They don’t get along. Tom Landry, the Cowboys’ coach, never misses a chance to get up on the platform with Billy Graham whenever The Crusade plays in Dallas. Duane Thomas calls Landry a “plastic man.” He tells reporters that the team’s general manager, Tex Schramm, is “sick, demented, and vicious.” Thomas played his whole season, last year, without ever uttering a sentence to anyone on the team: not the coach, the quarterback, his blockers—nobody; dead silence.

  All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number—which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over; the purse is safe in the vault; and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession.

  Nobody really expects him to serve time, but nobody seems to think he’ll be playing for Dallas next year, either . . . and a few sporting people who claim to know how the NFL works say he won’t be playing for anybody next year; that the commissioner is outraged at this mockery of all those government-sponsored “Beware of Dope” TV shots that dressed up the screen last autumn.

  We all enjoyed those spots, but not everyone found them convincing. Here was a White House directive saying several million dollars would be spent to drill dozens of Name Players to stare at the camera and try to stop grinding their teeth long enough to say they hate drugs of any kind . . . and then the best running back in the world turns out to be a goddamn uncontrollable drug-sucker.

  The Five W’s

  Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered out on another tangent. But why not? Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly, Old Politics trip, or it will drive you kicking the walls and hurling AR 3 speakers into the fireplace.

  This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe the feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk: seven Washington Posts, seven Washington Stars, seven New York Times, six Wall Street Journals, and one Suck . . . to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated . . . and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street to freak the neighbors.

  After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with the man who said “No news is good news.” In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest . . . but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the Jump (or “Cont. on . . .”) page . . .

  The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa. The Star will say the same thing, and the Journal will say nothing at all. But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like: “When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental woman who seemed to be in control.”

  Now that’s good journalism. Totally objective; very active, and straight to the point. But we need to know more. Who was that woman? Why did they fight? Where was Muskie taken? What was he saying when the microphone broke?

  Jesus, what’s the other one? Every journalist in America knows the “Five W’s.” But I can only remember four. “Who, What, Why, Where,” . . . and, yes, of course . . . “When!”

  But what the hell? An item like that tends to pinch the interest gland, so you figure it’s time to move out. Pack up the $419 Abercrombie & Fitch elephant-skin suitcase; send the phones and the scanner and the tape viewers by Separate Float, load everything into the weightless Magnesium Kitbag . . . then call for a high-speed cab to the airport; load on and zip off to wherever The Word says it’s happening.

  The public expects no less. They want a man who can zap around the nation like a goddamn methedrine bat: racing from airport to airport, from one crisis to another—sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the “Five W’s” in a package that makes perfect sense. Why not? With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree. Or fly off and write nothing at all; get a room on the edge of Chicago and shoot up for about sixteen straight days—then wander back to Washington with a notebook full of finely honed insights on “The Mood of the Midwest.”

  Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Washington—waiting for the next plane to anywhere and wondering what in the name of sweet Jesus ever brought me here in the first place. This is not what us journalists call a “happy beat.”

  At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn’t plugged in. But then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn’t take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because the contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week.

  At that point I tried talking to some of the people that even the wizards said were “right on top of things.” But they all seemed very depressed; not only about the ’72 election, but about the whole, long-range future of politics and democracy in America.

  Which is not exactly the kind of question we really need to come to grips with right now. The nut of the problem is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it’s just barely tolerable . . . and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.

  The Campaign Trail: The View from Key Biscayne

  March 16, 1972

  One of the main marks of success in a career politician is a rooty distrust of The Press—and this cynicism is usually reciprocated, in spades, by most reporters who have covered enough campaigns to command a fat job like chronicling the Big Apple. Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken laid down the dictum that “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.”

  This notion is still a very strong factor in the relationship between politicians and the big-time press. On lower levels you find a tendency—among people like “national editors” on papers in Pittsburgh and Omaha—to treat successful politicians with a certain amount of awe and respect. But the prevailing attitude among journalists with enough status to work presidential campaigns is that all politicians are congenital thieves and liars.

  This is usually true. Or at least as valid as the consensus opinion among politicians that The Press is a gang of swine. Both sides
will agree that the other might occasionally produce an exception to prove the rule, but the overall bias is rigid . . . and, having been on both sides of that ugly fence in my time, I tend to agree. . . .

  Which is neither here nor there, for right now. We seem to have wandered off again, and this time I can’t afford the luxury of raving at great length about anything that slides into my head. So, rather than miss another deadline, I want to zip up the nut with a fast and extremely pithy five hundred words because that’s all the space available, and in two hours I have to lash my rum-soaked red convertible across the Rick-enbacker Causeway to downtown Miami and then to the airport—in order to meet John Lindsay in either Tallahassee or Atlanta, depending on which connection I can make: it is nearly impossible to get either in or out of Miami this week. All flights are booked far in advance, and the hotel/motel space is so viciously oversold that crowds of angry tourists are “becoming unruly”—according to the Miami Herald—in the lobbies of places that refuse to let them in.

  Fortunately, I have my own spacious suite attached to the new National Affairs office in the Royal Biscayne Hotel.

  When things got too heavy in Washington I had no choice but to move the National Affairs desk to a place with better working conditions. Everybody agreed that the move was long overdue. After three months in Washington I felt like I’d spent three years in a mine-shaft underneath Butte, Montana. My relations with the White House were extremely negative from the start; my application for press credentials was rejected out of hand. I wouldn’t be needing them, they said. Because Rolling Stone is a music magazine, and there is not much music in the White House these days.

  And not much on Capitol Hill either, apparently. When I called the Congressional Press Gallery to ask about the application (for press credentials) that I’d filed in early November ’71, they said they hadn’t got around to making any decision on it yet—but I probably wouldn’t be needing that one either. And where the hell did I get the gall to apply for “press” status at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer?