Westmoreland, William C., 92, 437–39
White, Theodore H., 17, 102, 478–79, 719
“White Rabbit” (Great Society), xiv, 9
Whitmire, Earl, 45–46, 286, 308–9, 330, 340n
Whitney, John Hay “Jock,” 65
Wicker, Tom, 128, 410–13, 654
Wilcock, John, 176–77, 232–40
Wilde, Oscar, 50n
Will, George F., 550
Williams, Edward Bennett, 655
Williams Energy Company, 700–701, 713–14
Wills, Garry, 549–51
Wise, Michael, 685–86
Witker, Kristi, 539–40, 543–44, 547
Wolfe, Thomas, 94
Wolfe, Tom, xv, xix, 43–44, 54, 138–39, 142–43, 174, 182, 193–94, 198–99, 266n, 267, 310, 337–39, 347, 369, 371–73, 375–76, 420, 448, 526, 547, 549, 579, 603–4
Woody Creek, Colo., xvii, xx–xx, xxiv–xxiv, 2, 5, 12, 15, 17–18, 21–22, 24–25, 33–34, 37, 49–50, 56–58, 61, 66, 68–69, 76, 78–82, 90, 92, 106–7, 109, 111, 128, 131, 136–38, 141–42, 144, 157, 174, 178–79, 182–84, 208, 229, 241, 250, 255, 272–73, 277, 280, 301, 309, 392–93, 396, 408, 414–15, 417, 427, 443, 451, 454–55, 501–2, 506, 551–53, 674, 682–83, 703
Woollcott, Alexander, 82
W. S. Darley & Co., 323
Yorty, Sam, 88
Ziegler, Ronald, 317, 456, 579, 668n
Zion, Sidney M., xxi, 297, 304, 338, 340–41, 357–59, 369, 371–72, 396, 413–14, 491, 576, 592, 611
About the Author
Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, The Curse of Lono, Songs of the Doomed, Better Than Sex, The Proud Highway, The Rum Diary, and Fear and Loathing in America. He died in February 2005.
About the Editor
Douglas Brinkley is the director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey (1993), Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992), The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House (1998), American Heritage History of the United States (1998), and Rosa Parks (2000). Professor Brinkley is also an American culture commentator on National Public Radio and a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
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1. Lead singer in the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
2. Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937 short story about a mid-nineteenth-century New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul for earthly gain—then gets out of the contract by convincing legendary lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster to take the devil on in court.
3. The Diggers were a group of benignly radical Haight-Ashbury street performers and pamphleteers.
4. An upper-middle-class, self-styled Marxist, Paul Semonin had been a year ahead of Thompson at Louisville Male High School.
5. Thompson’s youngest brother, Jim, was thirteen years his junior.
6. Students for a Democratic Society.
7. Walter Jenkins, a longtime aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, had been arrested on a “morals charge” involving a homosexual act in a men’s room on federal property shortly before the 1964 presidential campaign season.
8. Dean Rusk was U.S. secretary of state from 1961 to 1968.
9. Paul Krassner edited The Realist, a Los Angeles counterculture magazine.
10. Theodore White’s campaign book The Making of the President, 1964, and Richard Nixon’s 1962 memoir, Six Crises.
11. Richard M. “Lord” Buckley, a wild-living nightclub comedian who had been doing a hilariously boozy aristocrat act since the 1930s, became a Beat Generation favorite and an influence on Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan, among others.
12. Paul Nitze was a well-known U.S. diplomat and a major investor in the Aspen Ski Corporation.
13. Tammany Hall leader “Big Tim” Sullivan had pushed an early-1900s bill through Albany limiting women to a fifty-four-hour workweek, because “we ought to help these gals by giving ’em a law which will prevent ’em from being broken down while they’re still young.”
14. Members of the far-right John Birch Society.
15. Nazi Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo’s “Jewish Division.”
16. Internationally renowned Baptist evangelist Billy Graham has been befriended by U.S. presidents from Eisenhower on.
17. James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection on the civil rights movement, The Fire Next Time, warned of coming violence; Michael Harrington’s passionate 1962 book, The Other America, used statistics to paint a bitter portrait of poverty in an affluent nation; and anthropologist Oscar
18. George Plimpton, now editor of the Paris Review, was known for his participatory, first-person New Journalism.
19. Juez is Spanish for “judge.”
20. Multa is Spanish for “fine.”
21. Petey was Charles Kuralt’s wife.
22. Eugene McGarr had been Thompson’s fellow copyboy at Time magazine a decade earlier.
23. Marco was Oscar Acosta’s young son.
24. John Macauley Smith was an old friend of Thompson’s from Louisville.
25. Democrat Edward R. Roybal was a U.S. congressman from California.
26. The California Youth Administration or the state penitentiary at San Quentin.
27. New Hampshire held 1968’s first presidential primary on March 12.
28. Nixon campaign speechwriter Raymond K. Price.
29. Don Irwin was a national political reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
30. GOP presidential candidate George Romney was governor of Michigan.
31. Neal Cassady was the model for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.
32. Lynn Nesbit was Thompson’s literary agent.
33. Alfred B. Nobel was the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite in 1866 and founded the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.
34. Quoted from English poet William Blake’s 1804 “Auguries of Innocence.”
35. Norman Mailer, in his 1967 book Why Are We in Vietnam?
36. Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s chief personal assistant, is believed to have fled to South America before his conviction as a war criminal at the 1946 Nuremberg Trials. He was sentenced to death in absentia.
37. Thompson’s friend Tom Benton was a local Aspen artist.
38. Schwein is German for “pigs.”
39. Mexican Indian revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.
40. Nelson Algren was the author of The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel about a heroin addict.
41. LeRoi Jones was a New York Beat turned black nationalist poet of the 1950s and ’60s.
42. Walter Reuther was president of the United Automobile Workers, Lionel Trilling an author and literary critic, and William J. Brennan a leading liberal justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
43. Nixon campaign aide and later White House speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan would mount archconservative presidential bids of his own in 1992, 1996, and 2000.
44. The doomed antihero of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose portrait ages and decays while he does not.
45. The doomed antihero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which Thompson considers the Great American Novel.
46. Davison was the middle Thompson brother.
47. La Raza is Spanish for “The Race.”
48. Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills was chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974.
49. Former Cuban president Fulgencio Batista had been driven off the i
sland by Fidel Castro’s rebels on New Year’s Day, 1959.
50. In September 1966, South Carolina Democrat and U.S. House Armed Services Committee chairman Mendel Rivers had urged that the United States “flatten Hanoi if necessary” and “let world opinion go fly a kite.”
51. Pat Nugent was a celebrated dealer in psychedelic narcotics.
52. G. David Schine and Roy M. Cohn, aides to Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, had been sent abroad by their red-baiting boss in the mid-1950s to look for possible communists at the State Department’s precursor to the U.S. Information Agency.
53. Caltech and MIT are the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, respectively.
54. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison had indicted CIA-connected import–export business owner Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Shaw would be acquitted in March 1969.
55. Stewart Udall was U.S. secretary of the interior from 1961 to 1969.
56. Publisher and former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s John Hay “Jock” Whitney was chairman of the International Herald Tribune.
57. L.A. Times publisher Norman Chandler, Sr., and his wife, Buffy.
58. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith had argued in his 1967 book, The New Industrial State, that giant corporations are not necessarily evil by definition.
59. Nicholas von Hoffman was a reporter for The Washington Post.
60. Arizona senator and right-wing 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater had proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
61. Englishman Edmond Hoyle wrote a number of popular eighteenth-century handbooks on the rules of “indoor games.”
62. George Sand was the pen name of nineteenth-century French novelist Aurore Dupin Dudevant, who left her husband in favor of liaisons with the likes of poet Alfred de Musset and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.
63. Billy Sol Estes was at the center of some of the Johnson administration’s shadiest financial scandals.
64. Ramsey Clark of Texas was U.S. attorney general from 1967 to 1969 and played a key role in civil rights law enforcement.
65. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey would be the Democrats’ 1968 presidential nominee.
66. 1930s movie musical star Nelson Eddy died in 1967. It was French writer Joseph de Maistre who said, “Every nation has the government it deserves,” in 1811.
67. Critic Alexander Woollcott made the remark at a People’s Party rally on January 23, 1943.
68. New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater disappeared without a trace on August 6, 1930.
69. John Ray was Thompson’s maternal uncle.
70. Palestinian Sirhan Bishara Sirhan would be convicted of the June 5, 1968, murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1969.
71. Lee Berry was a freelance journalist from Albany, New York, who had been introduced to Thompson by their mutual friend William J. Kennedy.
72. George Meany was president of the AFL-CIO; Tom Kuchel a U.S. senator from California; Dr. Benjamin Spock the author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care; Abe Fortas a U.S. Supreme Court justice; Cassius Clay the heavyweight boxing champion who would change his name to Muhammad Ali, and Hugh Hefner the publisher of Playboy magazine.
73. New York pop artist Andy Warhol was celebrated in the 1960s for his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, and excruciating “experimental films.”
74. Ed Sullivan hosted a popular TV variety show aired by CBS on Sunday nights from 1948 through 1971.
75. Thomas Wolfe was the author of Look Homeward, Angel and other richly descriptive novels of the 1920s and ’30s.
76. Ben Hecht was a newspaper reporter who switched in the 1930s to writing plays and movie scripts characterized by snappy dialogue.
77. Richard Nixon grew up in Whittier, California, a small town thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles.
78. Human Events is a right-wing social policy journal.
79. In 1968 the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into possible antitrust violations led eccentric billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes to withdraw his offer to buy a fourth gambling casino in Las Vegas.
80. U.S. Navy admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1953 through 1957, had advocated using massive American force in Vietnam as early as 1954.
81. Democratic U.S. senator and gun-control advocate Thomas Dodd of Connecticut had been censured by the Senate in 1967 for misuse of funds.
82. Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s research on the conditioned reflex showed that dogs salivated at the sound of a bell if it had been rung when they were fed before.
83. Jay Gould was a nineteenth-century American railroad tycoon and financier, Amy Snopes a member of one of novelist William Faulkner’s greedier fictional families.
84. Thompson lived in a tiny, black-walled sub-basement apartment on Perry Street in New York’s Greenwich Village from April 1958 to January 1959.
85. Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate, murdered eleven people on an eight-day killing spree from Lincoln, Nebraska, to eastern Wyoming in January 1958.
86. W. Marvin Watson was U.S. postmaster general in 1968.
87. New Republic columnist Richard L. Strout wrote under the pseudonym “TRB” from 1943 into the 1980s.
88. California’s Democratic Speaker of the Assembly Jesse M. Unruh and U.S. senator Alan Cranston.
89. THC is the psychoactive compound in marijuana; Bull Durham is a roll-your-own cigarette tobacco.
90. Angina pectoris is the paroxysmal chest pain caused by a lack of oxygen to the heart.
91. Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychology professor and LSD guru who, it turned out, became an FBI informant in 1974; Lester Maddox had been elected governor of Georgia in 1966 after campaigning on the slogan “Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It!”
92. German field marshal Erwin Rommel was known as the “Desert Fox” for his tactics while commanding the Afrika Korps from 1941 to 1943.
93. Birmingham, Alabama, police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor had turned fire hoses on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in the early 1960s with the tacit approval of Governor George C. Wallace; Paul “Bear” Bryant was the revered University of Alabama football coach who still holds the record for wins in the top collegiate division.
94. Witty folk singer Tom Paxton’s May 1968 album, Morning Again, included the song “Talking Vietnam Pot Luck Blues.”
95. The sweet, daydreaming would-be hero of a 1942 James Thurber story that was made into the 1947 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Danny Kaye.
96. Director Sidney Lumet’s 1965 movie of Edward Lewis Wallant’s novel starred Rod Steiger as a Jewish pawnbroker in Harlem haunted by his memories of a Nazi prison camp.
97. Los Angeles Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel would be named the National Football League’s Most Valuable Player in 1969.
98. Classically trained guitar soloist John Fahey was among those responsible for the 1968 blues revival.