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

  I would like to think—or at least claim to think, out of charity if nothing else—that Campaign Bloat is at the root of this hellish angst that boils up to obscure my vision every time I try to write anything serious about presidential politics.

  But I don’t think that’s it. The real reason, I suspect, is the problem of coming to grips with the idea that Richard Nixon will almost certainly be reelected for another four years as president of the United States. If the current polls are reliable—and even if they aren’t, the sheer size of the margin makes the numbers themselves unimportant—Nixon will be reelected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam.

  The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.

  Well . . . maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

  The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all of his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government,” is really one of the few men who’ve run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

  McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

  Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

  Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls . . .

  November 9, 1972

  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I would rather not write anything about the 1972 presidential campaign at this time. On Tuesday, November 7, I will get out of bed long enough to go down to the polling place and vote for George McGovern. Afterward, I will drive back to the house, lock the front door, get back in bed, and watch television as long as necessary. It will probably be a while before The Angst lifts—but whenever it happens I will get out of bed again and start writing the mean, cold-blooded bummer that I was not quite ready for today. Until then, I think Tom Benton’s “Re-elect the President” poster says everything that needs to be said, right now, about this malignant election. In any other year I might be tempted to embellish the Death’s Head with a few angry flashes of my own. But not in 1972. At least not in the sullen numbness of these final hours before the deal goes down—because words are no longer important at this stage of the campaign; all the best ones were said a long time ago, and all the right ideas were bouncing around in public long before Labor Day.

  That is the one grim truth of this election most likely to come back and haunt us: the options were clearly defined, and all the major candidates except Nixon were publicly grilled, by experts, who demanded to know where they stood on every issue from Gun Control and Abortion to the Ad Valorem Tax. By mid-September both candidates had staked out their own separate turfs, and if not everybody could tell you what each candidate stood for, specifically, almost everyone likely to vote in November understood that Richard Nixon and George McGovern were two very different men: not only in the context of politics, but also their personalities, temperaments, guiding principles, and even their basic lifestyles . . .

  There is almost a yin/yang clarity in the difference between the two men; a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models, in the national politics arena, for the legendary duality—the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts—that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his boxful of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . . .

  At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .

  Ah . . . nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The president of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the president of the United States was presiding over “a complex, far-reaching, and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization . . .involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families, and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation.”

  Well, that ugly description of Nixon’s staff operations comes from a New York Times editorial on Thursday, October 12. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady 2–1 lead over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the Times/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible 20 points (57 percent to 37 percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy described as “the most decent man in the Senate.”

  “Ominous” is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in Nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Adolph Eichmann.

  How long will it be before “demented extremists” in Germany, or maybe Japan, start calling us a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? “No comment”? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?

  Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami

  August 2, 1973

  There is no joy in Woody Creek tonight—at least not in the twisted bowels of this sinkhole of political iniquity called the Owl Farm—because, two thousand miles away in the swampy heat of Washington, D.C., my old football buddy, Dick Nixon, is lashing around in bad trouble . . . The vultures are coming home to roost—like he always feared they would, in the end—and it hurts me in a way nobody would publish if I properly described it, to know that I can’t be with him on the sweaty ramparts today, stomping those dirty buzzards like Davy Crockett bashing spics off the walls of the Alamo.

  “Delta Dawn . . . What’s that flower you have on?”

  Fine music on my radio as dawn comes up on the Rockies . . . But suddenly the music ends and ABC (American Entertainment Network) News interrupts: Martha Mitchell is demanding that “Mister President” either resign or be impeached, for reasons her addled tongue can only hint at . . . and Charles “Tex” Colson, the president’s erstwhile special counsel, is denying all statements & sworn testimony, by anybody, linking him to burglaries, fire-bombings, wire-tappings, perjuries, payoffs, and other routine felonies in connection with his job at the White House . . . and President Nixon is relaxing, as it were, in his personal beac
h-front mansion at San Clemente, California, surrounded by the scuzzy remnants of his once imperial guard . . . Indeed, you can almost hear the rattle of martini-cups along the airwaves as Gerald Warren—Ron Ziegler’s doomed replacement—cranks another hastily rewritten paragraph (Amendment No. 67 to Paragraph No. 13 of President Nixon’s original statement denying everything) . . . into the overheated Dex machine to the White House, for immediate release to the national media . . . and the White House pressroom is boiling with guilt-crazed journalists, ready to pounce on any new statement like a pack of wild African dogs, to atone for all the things they knew but never wrote when Nixon was riding high . . .

  Why does Nixon use the clumsy Dex, instead of the Mojo? Why does he drink martinis, instead of Wild Turkey? Why does he wear boxer shorts? Why is his life a grim monument to everything plastic, de-sexed, and nonsensual? When I look at Nixon’s White House, I have a sense of absolute personal alienation. The president and I seem to disagree on almost everything—except pro football, and Nixon’s addiction to that has caused me to view it with a freshly jaundiced eye, or what the late John Foster Dulles called “an agonizing reappraisal.” Anything Nixon likes must be suspect. Like cottage cheese and catsup . . .

  “The Dex machine.” Jesus! Learning that Nixon and his people use this—instead of the smaller, quicker, more versatile (and portable) Mojo Wire—was almost the final insult: coming on the heels of the Gross Sense of Injury I felt when I saw that my name was not included on the infamous “Enemies of the White House” list.

  I would almost have preferred a vindictive tax audit to that kind of crippling exclusion. Christ! What kind of waterheads compiled that list? How can I show my face in the Jerome Bar when word finally reaches Aspen that I wasn’t on it?

  Fortunately, the list was drawn up in the summer of ’71—which partially explains why my name was missing. It was not until the autumn of ’72 that I began referring to the president, in nationally circulated print, as a Cheapjack Punk and a Lust-Maddened Werewolf, whose very existence was (and remains) a bad cancer on the American political tradition. Every ad the publishers prepared for my book on the 1972 campaign led off with a savage slur on all that Richard Nixon ever hoped to represent or stand for. The man is a walking embarrassment to the human race—and especially, as Bobby Kennedy once noted, to that high, optimistic potential that fueled men like Jefferson and Madison, and which Abe Lincoln once described as “the last, best hope of man.”

  There is slim satisfaction in the knowledge that my exclusion from the (1971) list of “White House enemies” has more to do with timing and Ron Ziegler’s refusal to read Rolling Stone than with the validity of all the things I’ve said and written about that evil bastard.

  I was, after all, the only accredited journalist covering the 1972 presidential campaign to compare Nixon with Adolf Hitler . . . I was the only one to describe him as a congenital thug, a fixer with the personal principles of a used-car salesman. And when these distasteful excesses were privately censured by the docile White House press corps, I compounded my flirtation with Bad Taste by describing the White House correspondents as a gang of lame whores & sheep without the balls to even argue with Ron Ziegler—who kept them all dancing to Nixon’s bogus tune until it became suddenly fashionable to see him for the hired liar he was and has been all along.

  The nut of my complaint here—in addition to being left off The List—is rooted in a powerful resentment at not being recognized (not even by Ziegler) for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics—or perhaps even “sportsmanship”—and I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down. Not afterward—though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.

  And I feel no more guilt about it than I would about setting a rat trap in my kitchen, if it ever seemed necessary—and certainly no more guilt than I know Nixon would feel about hiring some thug like Gordon Liddy to set me up for a felony charge, if my name turned up on his List.

  When they update the bugger, I plan to be on it. My attorney is even now preparing my tax records, with an eye to confrontation. When the next list of “White House enemies” comes out, I want to be on it. My son will never forgive me—ten years from now—if I fail to clear my name and get grouped, for the record, with those whom Richard Milhous Nixon considered dangerous.

  Dick Tuck feels the same way. He was sitting in my kitchen, watching the TV set, when Sam Donaldson began reading The List on ABC-TV.

  “Holy shit!” Tuck muttered. “We’re not on it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said grimly. “We will be.”

  “What can we do?” he asked.

  “Kick out the jams,” I said. “Don’t worry, Dick. When the next list comes out, we’ll be there. I guarantee that.”

  MEMO:

  FROM:

  Raoul Duke, Sports Editor

  TO:

  Main/Edit Control

  C.C.:

  Legal, Finance, Security, et al.

  SUBJECT:

  Imminent emergence of Dr. Thompson from the Decompression Chamber in Miami, and probable inability of the Sports Desk or anyone else to control his movements at that time . . . especially in connection with his ill-conceived plan to move the National Affairs desk back to Washington and bring Ralph Steadman over from England to cause trouble at the Watergate hearings . . .

  EDITORS’ NOTE:

  The following intra-corporate memo arrived by Mojo Wire from Colorado shortly before deadline time for this issue. It was greeted with mixed emotions by all those potentially afflicted . . . and because of the implications, we felt a certain obligation to lash up a quick, last-minute explanation . . . primarily for those who have never understood the real function of Raoul Duke (whose official title is “sports editor”), and also for the many readers whose attempts to reach Dr. Thompson by mail, phone, & other means have not borne fruit.

  The circumstances of Dr. Thompson’s removal from the Public World have been a carefully guarded secret for the past several months. During the last week of March—after a strange encounter with Henry Kissinger while on “vacation” in Acapulco—Dr. Thompson almost drowned when his scuba tanks unexplainably ran out of air while diving for black coral off the Yucatán Coast of Mexico, at a depth of some three hundred feet. His rapid emergence from these depths—according to witnesses—resulted in a near-fatal case of the bends, and an emergency-chartered/night-flight to the nearest decompression chamber, which happened to be in Miami.

  Dr. Thompson was unconscious in the decompression chamber—a round steel cell about twelve feet in diameter—for almost three weeks. When he finally regained his wits, it was impossible to speak with him, except by means of a cracked loudspeaker tube & brief handwritten notes held up to the window. A television set was introduced into The Chamber at his insistence and, by extremely complicated maneuvering, he was able to watch the Watergate hearings . . . but, due to the dangerous differences in pressurization, he was unable to communicate anything but garbled notes on his impressions to Duke, his long-time friend and associate, who flew to Miami immediately, at his own expense.

  When it became apparent that Dr. Thompson would be in The Chamber indefinitely, Duke left him in Miami—breathing easily in The Chamber with a TV set & several notebooks—and returned to Colorado, where he spent the past three months handling The Doktor’s personal & business affairs, in addition to organizing the skeletal framework for his 1974 senate race.

  It was a familiar role for Duke, who has been Dr. Thompson’s close friend & adviser since 1968—after fourteen years of distinguished service in the CIA, the FBI, and the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Police Intelligence Unit. His duties, since hiring on with Dr. Thompson, have been understandably varied. He has been described as “a weapons expert,” a “ghostwriter,” a “bodyguard,” a “wizard,” and a “brutal fixer.”

  “Compared to the things I’ve done for Thompson,” Duke says, “both Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were stone pun
ks.”

  It is clear, from this memo, that Duke has spent a good bit of his time in Colorado watching the Watergate hearings on TV—but it is also clear that his tentative conclusions are very different from the ones Dr. Thompson reached, from his admittedly singular vantage point in that decompression chamber in downtown Miami.

  The editors of Rolling Stone would prefer not to comment on either of these viewpoints at this time, nor to comment on the nightmare/blizzard of expense vouchers submitted, by Duke, in connection with this dubious memo. In accordance with our long tradition, however, we are placing the Public Interest (publication of Duke’s memo, in this case) on a plane far above and beyond our inevitably mundane haggling about the cost of breakfast and lunch.

  What follows, then, is a jangled mix of Duke’s official communications with this office, and Thompson’s “Watergate Notes” (forwarded to us, by Duke) from his decompression chamber in Miami. The chronology is not entirely consistent. Duke’s opening note, for instance, reflects his concern & alarm with Dr. Thompson’s decision to go directly from Miami—once the doctors have confirmed his ability to function in normal air-pressures—to the harsh & politically volatile atmosphere in Washington, D.C. Unlike Duke, he seems blindly obsessed with the day-to-day details of the Watergate hearings . . . and what is also clear from this memo is that Dr. Thompson has maintained regular contact (despite all medical and physical realities, according to the doctors in charge of his Chamber in Miami) with his familiar, campaign trail allies, Tim Crouse and Ralph Steadman. An invoice received only yesterday from the manager of the Watergate Hotel indicates that somebody has reserved a top-floor river-view suite, under the names of “Thompson, Steadman & Crouse” . . . four adjoining rooms at $277 a day, with a long list of special equipment and an unlimited in-house expense authorization.