If I worked for you, though, could I deal in the Big Business? Or would I be sitting in an office in some kind of a supporting role? I am thinking of the slot of “Number Six Writer.” At the moment, you appear to employ five, of which three are female. That ratio gives me pause, but I suppose you know what you are up to.
But that, luckily, is neither here nor there. My view at this time is that politics in this country for the next nine months is going to resemble nothing more or less than a Nazi cockfight, and I want to be in on it. I don’t mind saying that my primary motive is to keep that man Nixon out of the presidency. No sense trying to hide my bias; it’s nothing personal, I just think he’s the most dangerous political punk who ever lurked in this nation. Especially at a time like this. I have no candidate—I’m even thinking of running, myself—but I know the one man we don’t need is that goddamn vengeful Zero with nine lives.
Certainly I haven’t altered my conviction that this nation is going over the hump. As a matter of fact, I’m now working on a piece called “The View from Woody Creek,” which I hope to send in a week or so. It has to do with The Hump. The Kennedy thing merely underlined my thesis, because I saw him as an historical maverick to queer the odds. But no more. And none of his ilk either. This poor bastard Johnson is sitting on a bomb, and I’m not even sure I wish him good luck. The biggest question now is the U.S. position as “leader of the free world,” and, frankly, it scares the hell out of me to think it may depend on Lyndon Baines Johnson.
So much for all that, too. What I am trying to compose here is not an application for employment, so much as a feeler. It may be that I can do more, in terms of significant writing, by moving to California, as I’d planned, and working like hell as a free-lancer. But right now I’m not sure. Woody Creek is so completely removed from political reality that I might as well be in the Amazon basin. And I’m not at all sure that a mountaintop north of San Francisco would be a lot closer to the action. What I have in mind is steady work, night and day, until after the ’64 election, and then take stock again.
What do you think? Would my special talents and bias do you any good as a hired writer? Could you keep me busy on a free-lance basis? Or should I take my horrible secret to the Observer, where it would probably be treated, upon discovery, in the same manner as a bomb in the White House? I don’t mean to slur the Observer, here. They’ve been pretty decent, all in all, but I hesitate to work for them under the pretense of personal objectivity. Actually, I’m a pretty objective person except when it comes to Nixon. The very sight of the bastard causes me to gnash my teeth and whine.
Well, what the hell? You see what I’m getting at, so consider it and let me know when you can. Considering this 30-day “moratorium,” we at least have a bit of time before the clubs come out in the open. Remember the Spirit of Camp David? Yeah. We got plenty time; everybody hangin’ loose. Meanwhile, all those holding tickets to the cockfight will please go under the grandstand and refrain from acts of public savagery until the gong sounds on January 1. Mr. Nixon has promised not to put any grease on his body until the fifth round; Mr. Kennedy has forsworn use of the pronged mace for the same period of time, and other interested parties have meanwhile taped their weapons to their thighs.
I remain, yours for a clean
and decent fight,
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter, Sandy, and their son, Juan. (COURTESY OF HST COLLECTION)
1. Thompson was interested in writing a National Observer story on the Communist Party in Baja California.
2. Conklin got a discount for working at a travel agency.
* LA Times man—shades of Jack London, eh?
** “Chao” is the (familiar) Spanish term for “Till we meet again.” As in all else down here, you have to know when to be familiar & when not to. “Hasta Luego” is the more formal phrase for the same thing. For instance, you say “Chao” to your friends & “Hasta Luego” to your acquaintances. In Portuguese, the equivalents are “Ciau” and “Ate Logo.” Sometimes it can be tricky. If you say “Chao” to a woman in public she is likely to be greatly offended, because most bystanders will assume you are sleeping with her. This is all well & good if you are, but it can be tense if you’re not. I have had first-hand experience with this problem & can report with great authority. Another awful thing is the sign you make by touching your thumb & forefinger to make a circle; it means “OK” in the U.S. but in Brazil it means “Fuckee, fuckee” or “let’s hump.” I have had trouble with that one, too, but it might come in handy for you if you visit the Brazilian Embassy.
3. Martin sent Thompson material on Ms. Ribero, but Thompson never wrote the story.
4. Thompson wanted Conklin to write Peggy Clifford in Aspen asking her to scout around for a small house for them to live in come July.
5. General Lindley and Zilcri were Peruvian officials in Lima who were helping Thompson get information about the recent junta.
6. Clifford Ridley offered Thompson a full-time desk job in Washington at the National Observer. Thompson declined, saying he preferred reporting from the West.
7. Howard Raush, former copy editor on the Middletown Daily Record who became friends with Thompson and Bone and went to Moscow to report for The Wall Street Journal.
8. Thompson had sent Ridlcy a bcautiful black-and-whitc photograph hc had takcn of an elderly Kentucky banjo playcr.
9. “Where Are the Writing Talents of Yesteryear?” National Observer, August 5, 1963 (a review of then current novelists.)
10. Thompson was trying to help Kennedy get his fiction published.
11. Dubbed “Alliance for Progress” in an October 1960 campaign speech, President John F. Kennedy’s Latin American policy opposed dictatorship and supported democracy, capitalism, and land and price reforms with “long-term development funds, essential to a growing economy.”
*but not in principle
12. Simón Bolívar and José Francisco de San Martín, early nineteenth-century heroes in the struggles of South American nations to free themselves from Spain.
13. Ford Chappell, It Is Time, Lord (New York, 1963).
14. Arturo Uslar Pietri, Red Lances (New York, 1963).
15. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had just been published.
16. Ralph McGill, the associate editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution from 1938 to his death in 1969, was a champion of civil rights for African-Americans.
*Well, I meant to dash off a one-page comment here, but damned if I didn’t run off at the mouth. Hardly much sense in sending it now—too long for the “Letters” column; maybe you’ll take it as an article at your regular rates. Which I doubt. But what the hell? I’ll send the carbon to Jornal do Brasil and tell ’em the U.S. press wouldn’t print it. Ugly, eh?
17. Shelley Berman was a popular comedian at the time. Lionel had left Big Sur and moved to Beverly Glen, a fairly fashionable community next to Beverly Hills.
18. Herbert Gold was a critically acclaimed San Francisco essayist and novelist.
19. Fredrick A. Birmingham was a writer who became editor of Cavalier magazine in 1959; he was also a lecturer at the New School for Social Research, where Thompson had taken classes.
20. A beautiful stone Thompson fashioned into a necklace.
21. Thompson reviewed Vance Bourjaily’s book on bird hunting, The Unnatural Enemy, for the National Observer (December 2, 1963).
22. Subud was a fashionable spiritual movement that Semonin was fascinated by.
23. After reading Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, Thompson developed a theory that all working-class people were “Niggers.”
24. Thompson’s new dog was named after the original Agar, the pup’s uncle.
25. McSorley’s was Thompson’s favorite Manhattan Irish drinking pub.
26. McGarr and Thompson had formed a business partnership to make a documentary and they had been seeking backing through unorthodox channels.
1964
THE JACK LONDO
N PERIOD: MOVING WEST, MOVING CONSTANTLY … DENVER, ASPEN, ELY, BUTTE, GLEN ELLEN, KETCHUM, BIG SUR, SAN FRANCISCO … LETTERS TO LBJ … NAKED AND ALONE ON U.S. 50 … FLIGHT TO CALIFORNIA: WELCOME TO THE GRAPES OF WRATH …
I had met the tramp digger the night before. And because he was broke and I wasn’t, I bought him a hotel room so he wouldn’t have to sleep in the grass beside the road to Spokane. But instead of traveling the next day, he took what was left of his cash and sat by himself on a stool at the Thunderbird Bar in downtown Missoula, sullenly nursing his drinks as he had the night before, and putting his change in the juke box, which can be a very expensive machine for those who need steady noise to keep from thinking.
—Hunter S. Thompson, “Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs,” National Observer, July 13, 1964
TO PAUL SEMONIN:
January 3, 1964
Woody Creek
Dear Young Pioneer:
Sorry to be throwing my wisdom at you in bits and pieces—instead of the long bomber I planned on—but I think we are dealing with too big a thing to try to whip it up into a neat package.
Anyway, it dawned on me that I have been pushed by your zeal and my own disposition to rhetoric into a position I never had any intention of claiming for my own. You accuse me repeatedly of being “anti-Marxist.” I am not, but when dealing with you these days there is no hope but to oppose you on the vocal front, or be sucked in. Thus, we found ourselves arguing quite often where there was really nothing to argue about. It was a tug of war, not a discussion.
My position is and always has been that I distrust power and authority, together with all those who come to it by conventional means—whether it is guns, votes, or outright bribery. There are two main evils in the world today: one is Poverty, the other is Governments. And frankly I see no hope of getting rid of either. So it will have to be a matter of degrees, and that’s where we quarrel. You seem to think you have the answer, that holy second nail. Maybe you do, but I’ll have to see it in writing before I go along. All of my reading about Africa, plus all my experience in South America, plus all I know or think I know about Europe and the U.S. convinces me that the “civilized” nations of this earth have created in the “underdeveloped” lands nothing more or less than a cheap and ragged imitation of their own Big System that has gone by the name of “government” since man invented the word.
Now and then I get the scent of a man with enough balls to try and whip things around to a decent position. Kennedy was one; Betancourt was another; Castro was and may still be; I even go along now and then with Khrushchev. This man Nyerere1 in Tanganyika may be one, but I barely know him. And I’m sure there are others—but that doesn’t really alter my basic feelings about power and government. It’s pretty old to say that “power corrupts,” but I think it does and I don’t think it corrupted Kennedy any more than it has Castro. Or Mao—and certainly your man there.2 Unless he’s being totally misrepresented in the press, he looks to me like another Batista. I’d appreciate some words on his recent actions; all that I get via the press are enough to set up a stench of massive proportions. I presume you know what I refer to here. I don’t want to get you thrown out by detailing them.
You hit a nerve when you said you may have more faith in the U.S. than I do. I think you might, and on top of that I’ll give you another irony—I think I may be much closer to a “ ‘ding dong’ revolutionary” than you are. I know you’ll balk at that, but I reason it this way: No “revolutionary” has any hope as long as he’s willing to deal with the Established Order on its own terms and in its own context. The only Revolution I would bet on would be one that set out to kill the roots and break all the dies of the System that came before. This is what I am pondering now, for at least I think I see the real choice, which I’m not sure you do. But then, as we’ve agreed, you really haven’t put much of your plan on the line except to say that it’s great.
Let me give you an example. As I see it, the best hope for South America is to export every gringo on the continent and sever all ties. But what then? Who would pay the bills? Surely not the Latins, because they don’t have a dime that hasn’t been salted away in Swiss banks. So they try to play it halfway, and they keep losing when the chips go down.
They threaten, they bluff, and they finally take the payoff, in cash or some other form. Maybe the Africans are different, I can’t say. Castro has thrown off one bogeyman, only to be confronted with two more. I read Sartre’s thing3 and agree with it. But he has no answers. In spots, his rhetoric is worse than mine. There isn’t space here on this rotten thing to go into that now. I’m not sure what I’ve said here; maybe it’s just that I won’t play the Big Game until it stops looking phony. The best I can do is keep my tools sharp and wait for the honest opening—and decide, in the meantime, if it makes sense to kill the only roots we have.
HST
TO DWIGHT MARTIN, THE REPORTER:
Thompson was on assignment in Denver for The Reporter; Martin was his editor. This letter was written in the wake of violent clashes between U.S. troops and Panamanian mobs.
January 12, 1964
Heart O’Denver Motor Hotel
Dear Mr. Martin:
By God, it’s nice to have a letterhead for a change. The bill for it will be overwhelming; I will undoubtedly have to get more money from you before I can settle up and leave town.
I trust you accepted my call the other night in the same good spirit in which it was made. I was—needless to say—as drunk as a loon and without a whole hell of a lot to say. You fielded that wild bounce like a christian. I had emerged from a negro jazz club—Denver’s only—and picked up an early edition of the Rocky Mountain News, a typical Scripps-Howard throw-away that circulates out here for the benefit of ex-cowboys on the dole. I read page one as I walked along East Colfax in the snow, and it suddenly dawned on me that our LatAm policy was at an end and that I should attend the funeral in Panama. Upon more sober consideration, however, I came to feel that the real story will be had at the U.N. and at various Latin embassies in Washington—and then only for those with good contacts. We are now at one of those climax points like in the old westerns, when the hero stands up and yells, “All right, this is it, by god—who’s with me?” And then you get that long scriptwriter’s pause that puts everybody in a tense forward lean like Lyndon Johnson must be in right now. Who, indeed, is with us? As far as sentiment is concerned, nobody. Not even Olde England. But there is always dollar diplomacy, and I think we will see some of it before this thing is done. I think also that you may come around in the near future to a point where you will be able to see the pertinence of LatAm stories—or at least pertinent LatAm stories, which are scarce these days, even in places where they use that term, “LatAm.” OK for that.
As for the rest of what we talked about, I am hard pressed to recollect it, except that you liked that one take on Glen Ellen, and that I should call you again before leaving Denver. If I said anything of a violent, abusive or presumptuous nature, I trust it blew away in the midnight winds. I am half mad from the silence I have imposed upon myself in Woody Creek, and when I find myself among human beings I tend to explode.
But I’ve been pretty calm here. Too calm, in fact; for a good story. I need arguments and the chance to carry inflammatory quotes from one side to the other.
The enclosed clip should give you an idea where the story stands right now. Nowhere. The Gov [John Love] is running a delayed buck. He’s in trouble—with both parties—but so far we have no real idea what he’s up to. I have talked to local pundits and drawn a blank. The consensus holds that no action will come until the Budget Message, the date of which has not been announced. Tomorrow I will try to talk to the governor, but I know damn well what I’ll get from him. I still have a chance tonight to get hold of ex-Gov Steve McNichols, due back from Washington in a half-hour or so, and he may give me a peg.
I don’t mean to make it sound worse than it is. At worst, I can do enough research to get a first d
raft done, then update it when the Gov makes his move(s). My contacts so far seem decent in a vague sort of way, and spread from Right to Left on the big spectrum. Out here, however, the spectrum doesn’t even take in what you call the Left in the East. Those people are “Reds.” An official of the Democratic party was just ousted (tentatively) because of a prior association with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I am, of course, keeping my opinions on Señor Nixon close under my bonnet. We are, as you said, an “objective” publication—and it is only after midnight that I let my fangs slip out, and only then in good company. Which is rare out here.
Right after talking to you the other night I thought, “Well, that Martin sounds like a good fellow—I’ll go see him.” So I called United Airlines and arranged for a flight out on Wed. night at $200 round trip. The next morning I cancelled it, citing “business reasons.” But I’ll get there as soon as I can find a good excuse. I have a chance to do some inflammatory copy for the Saturday Evening Post and may use that for an excuse. Or pursuit of that thing that is always just around the corner—that is why I go most places, so it should serve for New York. At least it has in the past. A fellow I know who wrote a book called it “The bright and shining thing, that sense of morning, in a cool sun, before the hot afternoon.” At least that’s more or less what he said.
Which hardly matters, really. The fact is that I will get to New York as soon as I find myself—probably at some unlikely or inconvenient time—with access to the fare. If Wednesday is a warm night, with a touch of the Tulamore Dew [Irish whiskey], I may do it then. At any rate it will have to be soon; I have a sunbeam to catch, and a marriage to prevent. With apologies to your secretary.