April 29, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Rust …
I liked the zap and spirit of your Esquire piece on Norman Podhoretz, but I suspect you walked right into his snare. You gave him another billboard; the book deserved one of those hard, one-page shots you were always talking about at Columbia. Jesus, what a really horrible and degrading book … and what a horrible and degrading way of life it describes. I didn’t sense much emphasis on that connection in your piece … but, shit, I guess a man has to be careful. Norman’s harmless, but some people in that family, well … they have a bit of clout, right?
I’ll be interested to see your new book. The last I heard, you were driving a cab in Stamford and writing radio spots for Nixon as a sideline. And growing a neck-beard. It just goes to show that some folks will lie about a man.
Anyway, I liked the tone of the article. The best line was in Part III, to wit: “But the impulse and motive seem to have come first.” I thought you were moving in for a critic-type kill, there, but you backed off and only hinted at it. I think you lack the killer-instinct, Rust … that’s a very mean gig that Norman is into, and he seems to be pretty good at it. Which side are you on? Viva la Raza and pie in the sky buy American, right?
Hunter S. Thompson
TO BUD PALMER, KREX-TV:
Located 150 miles away in Grand Junction, Colorado, KREX was the only station Thompson’s TV could receive in pre-satellite-dish Woody Creek.
April 30, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Bud Palmer
KREX-TV
Grand Junction, Colo.
Dear Mr. Palmer:
I’ve been meaning to write you ever since that night you made the statement on the death of Martin Luther King. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing on KREX; it was a hell of a fine thing.
Since then, however, KREX-TV has appeared to be under the direction of Eric Starvo Galt. You may have taken a cheap, outback station and made it even cheaper and more provincial than it was under that freak who is now working for Nixon. I’ve had about all I can stomach of Chinchillas, Cushman golf carts, Smoky Mountain travelogues, Insight, Romp and Walter Cronkite at mid-afternoon. Somebody told me in Aspen the other day that you’d scheduled the Smothers Brothers at noon on Sunday, and I believed it. That’s a very bad atmosphere to have to live in—especially when Bil Dunaway’s Aspen Times cable is only 10 miles away. It’s a nightmare to confront your (my) TV set and know that the programming is 20 years behind reality.
Yeah, I know all about the advertisers and the local culture and the rest of that Madison Avenue bullshit. And it all made sense in the context of [Palmer’s predecessor] Rex Howe. But how did you come out from Chicago, with all your liberal credentials, just to perpetuate a cheap carnival? Are you that contemptuous of the people you’ve come out here to “entertain”? You know some of us can actually spell and read … like I get The New York Times every day including the sabbath; and I get the San Francisco Chronicle every day excepting the sabbath, and I get all the local papers too … but the curse of my life, on a day to day basis, is the total abdication of responsibility in broadcasting that I find in the programming of KREX-TV. This is understandable, to some extent, in that you brought some waterhead from small-town Pennsylvania to whip us yokels into line for the sponsors. I notice you even have your newscasters reading commercials for the camera … and, man, you can’t get much cheaper than that.
I’ve heard—from Dunaway—that you’re the bright young man from the big city who’s supposed to be getting this crippled station back on its feet … but I’ll be damned if I’ve seen any evidence that you’re doing anything but whipping it down to its knees. You’ve done a spectacular job of mangling the sequence of your programming—to the point where it’s impossible to know what’s coming at any given hour or any day—but the overall level of programming is noticeably lower than it was in the Howe era. Not much lower … but that shouldn’t be the point.
What I see, when I look at my one-channel set, is an unctuous liberal who came out here for some fresh air and a good investment and to give the local folks what he thinks they want. But what are your credentials for deciding that the KREX audience is so goddamn eager to watch half-hour advertisements in prime weekend time? Do you really believe we’re all so dense and primitive that we don’t realize that all that garbage about chinchillas and golf carts and Smoky Mountain tourist delights doesn’t cost you a penny? Whereas a good movie or a decent network special would cost you something? There’s plenty of good, interesting stuff available on TV this year—the Denver listings are evidence of that—and as an independent station, KREX should be able to pick and choose for a first-class format. But you’ve apparently chosen to go with Whatever’s Cheapest. I guess I’ll have to take your word for your claim that you knew “Doc” King, but if the KREX programming is any indication of the way you think, I can’t believe you ever had the faintest understanding of what Martin Luther King was talking about.
Regardless of what you (or I, or we) thought about the man, there was no denying his courage or his faith in the ultimate goodness of even the people who hurled rocks and eggs and insults at him. Dr. King didn’t patronize anybody; he was wrong at times, and even foolish, but I think he believed what he preached and I envy him for his faith in men who gave him damn little reason for it. The style of his death was a testament to his ignorance. He felt he was an honest man, and that even potential murderers would be neutralized by this honesty … but of course he was wrong, and in retrospect his faith in this country seems like a tragic delusion.
Your personal eulogy, on the night of his assassination, would have been more appreciated by Dr. King, I think, if it had not been such a rare and startling departure from the normal run of crude, cheap and degrading commercialism that KREX-TV dumps on its captive audience night after night. To my mind it’s unfortunate—like you get to get off with one-shot hypocritical weepings that, in the context of those other 364 days of the year, are more a mockery of the living than a tribute to the dead.
Most sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO JIM BELLOWS, LOS ANGELES TIMES:
Because of legal concerns, Thompson’s long article for the Los Angeles Times on oil shale development in the West was never published.
May 7, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Jim …
I just got back from Denver & the Oil Shale Symposium—which turned out to be an oil company pep rally, instead of the free-wheeling dialogue that I naively expected to fall into … on the basis of a small notice I saw in The Denver Post … which turns out to have been a press release from the Colorado School of Mines … which is to the oil and mining industries what CalTech and MIT are to the defense industry53 … so I spent three days and about $150 in the grip of one of the most high-powered lobbies in this nation or any other … jesus, you should have heard them talking about the student-action at Columbia; they wanted to make soap out of the faculty, lampshades out of “the niggers,” and a corpse out of Bobby Kennedy. These are weird people, Jim … and after listening to them for three days I think I’m inclined to take Garrison’s New Orleans action54 a bit more seriously than I have in the past. I drank with some of the more articulate of these oil freaks for two straight nights, and I haven’t had conversations like that since I was hanging around with the Hell’s Angels. Strange, dehumanized concepts, highly technical one moment and insanely callous the next. When I was an hour late for dinner on Saturday I explained that I’d been haggling over the purchase of a shotgun, and they thought that was fine.
The point of all this is to advise you that we’re into a very heavy subject, involving some very heavy people and some very heavy investments (like $7 million in one case that I know of, and $10 million in another) that are hanging, right now, in a Udall55-created limbo … and the investors are highly sensitive to the possibility of uncontrolled exposure in such press as the L.A. Times. The enclosed pos
tcard, for instance, is from the Jim Smith who was assistant secy. of the Navy under Ike and is now a prime mover of some sort in the oil shale gig. He lives in Aspen, but he doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. Nevertheless, this card was in my mailbox on Monday, and I got back from Denver late Sunday night. When I called him today I asked how he knew I was writing something on oil shale, and he said “somebody from the Oil Shale Symposium told me.” The odd thing about that is that I told the people over there that I was from the L.A. Times and let it go at that; the only indicators that I was from Colorado were my hotel reservation and my car license plate. You’ll note that the card is addressed to me in Aspen, not L.A. … it was Gov. Love’s official adviser on oil shale, who is also a paid consultant to several oil companies and whom I shall certainly see again after I talk at length with Smith. Wild connections … for instance Smith told me on the phone today that Western Oil, which invested some $10 million in oil shale research by the early 1950s, abandoned their research when Union was bought out by Gulf, which is controlled to some large extent by a man named Ludwig who also has a massive interest in the oil tanker (shipping) industry … which may or may not account for Gulf/Union’s current emphasis on imported oil, instead of research and exploration on the domestic scene.
This is just a small example of what this story will get into. What I see—at a quick and running glance—is that the whole U.S. oil industry is in trouble, but that some companies are in more trouble than others. So that the real action in this thing is not in the conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, or Exploiters and Conservationists—but for the time being it’s a fight for survival within the oil industry. Nobody denies that U.S. petroleum reserves are inadequate, but this poses two questions: 1) Where will the U.S. get its crude oil after 1975? and/or 2) Will some other fuel replace petroleum (or begin to replace it) in the near future? Both questions are rife with menace to the oil industry—and when an industry that size feels threatened, people get jerked around. Right? Remember what happened when Jock Whitney’s56 auditors got nervous? Yeah.
I’m telling you all this to let you know that this is going to be a complicated and time-consuming piece … but beyond that it has the look of something that might not generate real amusement in Norman Sr. and Buffy’s57 circle of friends. I thought I should warn you about this—as much for my sake as yours, because to do this thing right I’m going to have to put a lot more time into it than I intended to at the start, and I’m going to have to spend either a lot or a little more than that $200 expense allowance. On this type of story I have to learn so much, so fast, that I’m mentally exhausted for days and I can’t say anything definite right now in terms of time and expenses—and I don’t mean to hassle you with either item because neither one of them is going to worry me if this thing turns into the Fat/Heavy story that it smells like. But I don’t see any sense in putting that kind of time, effort and money into it unless I can feel pretty certain that I’m writing for publication (and payment), rather than the censor’s hole. In other words, I don’t need the $250 guarantee enough to work my ass off on a doomed piece.
Don’t take any of this personally. I know you want the piece. But how confident are you that the Times is going to hang out the oil industry’s dirty linen in WEST? Like I said, we’re not talking about a standard Ramparts-type Right vs. Left thing here… we’re talking about weird Darwinian realities such as Standard of N.J. putting the death-squeeze on Standard of Calif. in order to starve Texaco and, as a left-handed adjunct to it all, using John Galbraith58 for leverage against Stewart Udall.
You see what we’re into? The figure that’s being tossed around at the moment is TWO TRILLION barrels. That’s a Bureau of Mines calculation of what’s potentially available out here, in terms of oil reserves. The oil industry hoots at that figure, but they concede (according to the WS Journal) that “… 100 billion to 500 billion or more barrels of oil could be economically processed from the shale. The latter figure exceeds the world’s known petroleum reserves. …”
That “latter figure” is also the one that most oil men seemed to take for granted at the Oil Shale Symposium. So, give or take a billion here and there, we’re dealing with the biggest potential oil strike in the history of man. The biggest so far—the Sarir Field in Libya—is estimated to have reserves of 15 billion, which is three times the size of the East Texas field, the biggest in the U.S.
Jesus … I think I hear shots outside; they’re shooting my Dobermans. Ludwig has driven his gunboat up the Woody Creek road. I’m beginning to see why you wanted this story. These people make the Hell’s Angels seem like a bunch of manacled pansies. The Angels rob a gas station to buy a Smith & Wesson .38 Special from a punk in a tavern … but these people buy the whole goddamn Smith & Wesson—or was it Winchester or Western or Olin Mathieson—just to pick up the Mace Gas patent. What you ought to do now, for maximum commercial benefit on this story, is assign somebody like Nick von Hoffman59 to cover this lunatic research: “Horrible Hunter, formerly of the Frisco Angels, comes to grips with the Big Hammer, in the form of the world’s top ten Oil Combines … or, Truth in the Shalestones, and let the Devil take the Hindmost.”
OK … I think you see what I’m getting at here. I’ll proceed full bore unless I get some sort of damper words from you. I don’t see the Times often enough to make my own fine judgements in this area, so I leave it to you—on the huge assumption that you somehow knew what you were doing when you started all this.
Ciao,
Hunter
TO VIRGINIA THOMPSON:
William J. Kennedy, Thompson’s literary confidant and barmate since their days together at the San Juan Star, had just sold his first novel, The Ink Truck.
May 8, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Mom …
Let’s just assume all the usual apologies for lateness, etc., so I can write without going through all the guilty-feeling motions that I’d rather not try to explain right now. The terrible truth is that I very, very rarely write a personal letter these days. By that, I mean the kind of letter that doesn’t pertain to something current and unavoidable, questions that demand to be answered, money threats, psychic horrors—that sort of thing. I no longer enjoy reading my mail, much less writing it. Every message that comes in here is depressing … with extremely rare exceptions, such as last afternoon Bill Kennedy called to say Dial Press had bought his novel. This is the Bill Kennedy from San Juan and Albany, NY. He’s one of the best people I know and the novel he sold is a far-expanded version of an unpublished short story I once read; afterwards I was in his living room and told him I thought it was the best thing he’d ever written and that he should push it as far as he could. Which he did … so if you see a novel called The Ink Truck by Wm. Kennedy on a list next fall, try to buy it. He may have changed the title, but I’ll let you know in time to look for the new one.
As for me, I just lost $10,000 when Johnson quit the race. That’s one of the contracts I arranged in NY—a quick paperback on LBJ, to appear this summer … but two weeks after I signed the contract, he quit, and there went the book. And my income … so I agreed to write an article for the L.A. Times on Oil Shale, which sounds harmless until you start getting into it, and then it becomes a political and economic atom bomb with ramifications beyond the ken of any normal man. That’s what I’m working on right now—trying to make sense of one of the most complicated and politically loaded subjects I’ve ever encountered. It involves the largest single oil field ever discovered by man—right here in western Colorado, and every oil company in the world is trying to get their hands on it. People who’ve investigated it in the past have been shot at, threatened, and generally scared off the story. It’s the most volatile and high-powered thing I’ve ever been onto, and my only concern right now is that the Los Angeles Times won’t print the type of story I’m starting to put together.
So I can’t say for certain that you’ll ever see the story in print. But until the Times pulls me
off of it I’ll be working on this for the next month or so, at least. I regard this sort of thing as another chapter in my education; at age 50 I’ll decide what kind of degree to ask for. At the moment it looks like Mineral Engineering is the best bet; I spent three days in Denver last week at a fiendishly technical conference of oil engineers. Here’s a wandering writer who couldn’t even pass Algebra at Male High, sitting in on Oil Shale sessions with some of the highest-paid, mathematically-oriented mineral experts in the world. And I have to understand at least enough so that they can’t try to talk around me—which they would if they thought I was incapable of dealing with them.
So that’s what I’m into right now, and it’s totally exhausting. As for other things, I got letters from both Davison and Jim the other day, and the general effect was alarming. Jim wrote to thank me for some small checks and other items I’d sent in lieu of a birthday present … and Davison wrote to say that Jim was in serious academic trouble and on the verge of being drafted. I’m not sure how to look at all this; my only flat conviction is that I don’t want to see Jim drift into the cannon fodder mill, and especially right now when every life lost in Vietnam is a waste and a mockery of human reason. It’s all mechanical now; the talks are getting started and we all know the war’s over, in terms of the power struggle, but people will go on being killed right up to the final flag-whistling ceremony. I don’t see much point in [him] joining that stupid, tragic list of last-minute casualties, and this is why I’ve told him he should stay in school at least until the goddamn killing stops, and then he can flunk as spectacularly as he wants to. I don’t really think it matters what sort of “record” he compiles at UK, except that he should have enough sense to realize that the alternatives of the moment are far more deadly than the alternatives of six months from now. But of course this is his life, and if he doesn’t care enough to understand these things and try to cope with them … I know from experience that other people’s advice won’t make a hair of difference. I don’t know Jim well enough, as a person, to try to lay any wisdom on him. Maybe he should come out here for a week or so right after school ends; I could help pay his fare if he couldn’t get a car to drive, but I suspect if he wants to come out he’ll find a way. I’ll help with whatever he suggests.