November 19, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Ron Dorfman …
You asked for some words on “how the news media and folks like the Hell’s Angels feed on each other,” but …I have a feeling I did that once, in a book called Hell’s Angels. The Angels were an obvious “story”: they were physical, tangible, weird, loud, menacing … and so hostile, so strange and threatening, that few reporters ever tried to confront them as human beings. There was, after all, no need to. The Angels were a “good story,” even from a distance. They loved publicity, but only when they dictated the style and content; covering the Angels was like trying to make sense of an Eisenhower press conference—it was easier, and funnier, in the long run, to simply write it the way it looked and sounded. Both Ike and the Hell’s Angels managed to soft-con the press for quite a few years. Finally, in 1959, people like [James] Reston and [Harrison] Salisbury on the NY Times began writing the rude truth about Eisenhower. Salisbury’s coverage of Ike’s aborted trip to Japan—when threatened demonstrations caused him to terminate his mission in Okinawa—was a new kind of journalism for the ’50s. And mine on the Angels, I suppose, was part of what is called the “New Journalism” of the ’60s.
But the whole concept of a “new journalism” is bogus—unless we admit that honesty in a journalist is something new. The old, Hearst-style journalists had a privileged relationship with power—and they paid for that privilege by keeping a lot of warts and chancres off the public record. This tradition is still strong—especially with big-city newspapers, TV news departments and national newsmagazines. The first issue of the Chicago Journalism Review cites a few good examples of this, i.e. 1) One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and 2) Giving Readers the Business.
So the “new journalism” is nothing more than a repudiation of the whole concept of privileged communication between newsmen and their sources. The Hell’s Angels were outraged when I called them “losers.” They were, and still are—yet I only knew this because they took me into their confidence. In the same way, none but a handful of trusted aides would have known that Hubert Humphrey “planted a wet kiss on the TV screen” the night of his nomination—if he hadn’t allowed a few reporters into his suite while he watched the balloting. Nixon learned this lesson in 1960 and ’62. This year he treated the press like a bunch of scorpions, playing “influential” reporters off against each other and awarding private interviews like gold stars for good behavior. I spent 10 days following him around in New Hampshire and by the time I was finally granted an audience I felt almost lucky. This feeling passed very quickly, however, and now—on the basis of what I wrote—I have no illusions about getting a job as a White House correspondent. For the same reasons, I’ll have a jaundiced view of any correspondent who seems “close to Nixon.”
The first issue of the CJReview cited this same problem in another context: “Are the Media Provoking Violence?” The article concluded: “Right now—whether editorial writers like it or not—violence is paying off in publicity as well as political response.”
Well, I guess that’s true to some extent—but I don’t think it calls for a “new Policy,” as the article suggested. I was in Chicago for that week of the Democratic Convention; I had press credentials for the Amphitheatre, a room at the Blackstone and a motorcycle helmet for the streets … and none of the incredible violence I saw was provoked by the media. The violence was an integral part of that scene; it had been building for years, all over the country, and Chicago was only an outlet. A CBS newsman who’d covered the April 27 peace march in Chicago said the local police were just as brutal then as they were on Wednesday night in front of the Hilton. It’s been my experience, in fact, that the presence of cameras and TV lights usually forestalls violence. This was certainly true in the Bay Area, where I covered most of the anti-war demonstrations and “free speech” action from 1964 to ’67. Police violence was always muted by the presence of the media … and if the “antis” were provoked in any way, it was usually to verbal excess. The whole purpose of a demonstration, after all, is to score points for The Cause—to convince the great mass of neutral witnesses that the protest is Right.
A prime intention of any left/radical demonstration is to provoke the minions of the establishment (the police) to violence, and thus expose the “brutality” and “hypocrisy” of an establishment that claims to stand for “peace and democracy.” On these terms, the reaction of the Chicago police was a great victory for the demonstrators. They made their point.
Admittedly, the news media played a major role. Scenes of violence and police brutality were photographed, written about, and shown on TV screens from coast to coast. And why not? It happened; there was nothing twisted or untrue in the TV coverage. Mayor Daley’s refusal to allow the networks to broadcast live from the streets forced them to work with film, and gave me the luxury of first being part of a scene and then watching the same thing later on a screen somewhere. In retrospect, some of the worst scenes I witnessed in person were never filmed. None of the really vicious beatings I saw occurred in front of the Hilton … that Wednesday night scene was only the tip of the iceberg.
Can anyone honestly say that Chicago would have been non-violent if the news media had ignored everything except the official program at the Amphitheatre? Can all those murders in Alabama51 be traced to excessive news coverage? Did the news media provoke the Detroit race riot in 1943?
There is all manner of violence going on in this country every night of every week, and only a small percentage of it shows up on TV screens. Check the police blotter in any big city newspaper; it’s a horror show. Probably there were fewer serious injuries during the whole week of the Democratic Convention than on any Saturday night in metropolitan Chicago. While working on the Hell’s Angels book I spent a lot of time in the new-slums of East Oakland, and I still tremble at the casual acceptance of violence that prevailed in that world. The kind of violence the news media are accused of provoking is usually the showbiz variety; the TV scenes from Chicago featured police charges and quick billy-club action. …I didn’t see any films of ten-minute beatings with teeth being kicked out or four-on-one groin stompings.
Should the news media deal with this kind of violence? I think so. A middle-class voyeur who gets his kicks from watching [TV-show characters] Mannix or Marshal Dillon punch people around should be given the chance to watch a real beating—a terrified man, like himself, screaming and crying for help with blood in his eyes and not able to breathe.
Right …a bit of that on TV, or detailed descriptions in print, would drain a lot of the charm from our fantasy-violence. Or maybe not; this is an old notion when you consider that traffic offenders have been forced to watch gory-accident films for years, in almost every state—and it hasn’t made much difference. More than 50,000 people will die this year on the highways.
It also begs the question about “media provoking violence” in situations that are essentially political. I spent election day and the rest of that week in Los Angeles, where an old friend of mine is deeply involved in the Chicano/ Mexican Brown Power movement. He wanted me to write about it—and even though I didn’t want to, I tried to interest two national “serious” magazines and they turned it down. One of these, the NY Times Sunday Mag, had called me the day after a bunch of Black Panthers walked into the California state capitol carrying guns, and asked me to rush out to the coast to do a story—on the Black Panthers. But, a year later, the same editor wasn’t interested in a story on the still-peaceful Brown Berets in Los Angeles—from me or anyone else.
My friend, a lawyer working full-time in the Chicano movement, was first depressed and then bitter … he couldn’t understand why the Black Panthers were such a hot story and the Chicanos weren’t. I could explain the editors’ lack of interest very simply and cynically: “Your people have to kill somebody,” I said. “You need a good riot, with a lot of burning.” Which was true, I’m afraid. A Mexican riot in east Los Angeles—on the scale of Watts—
would very definitely get a lot of nationwide coverage. And it may happen. “It’s coming,” my friend told me. “That’s the last thing we want, but if that’s what it takes we’ll do it. We have a lot of people who think we should have done it a long time ago.” The next day he brought one of those people up to my hotel room—a stocky, flinty-eyed little Mexican who smoked a lot of grass and talked very casually about having blown up a building a few weeks earlier. “Dynamite’s easy to get,” he said. “At first we were scared like hell, but once we got started it was fun. We blew that place all apart.”
I was interested, amused and generally sympathetic—but I still didn’t want to do an article on the Brown Power thing. The Chicanos couldn’t understand my attitude: they would give me all the help I needed, they said. I would have the “inside word,” the real truth; I’d be privy to all their action. And there was the hook, the other end of the Hearst ethic. I was being offered a privileged relationship with Brown Power—but what would they say when I wrote about marijuana and dynamite and petty in-fighting, power-struggles within The Movement, stupid statements that would make them sound like a gang of teenage freaks if they ever appeared in print?
The Hell’s Angels had presented the same kind of problem—the assumption that my privileged communication carried the obligation of not writing anything “bad” about them. They never understood that I saw myself as a journalist, not a special pleader. They seemed to feel I should lie for them in print like their lawyers lied for them in court.
My leverage, with the Angels, was the fact that I was writing a book, a one-shot thing over which they had no control because when I finished the book I’d also be finished with the Angels. They understood this, and seemed to accept it. I laughed off all suggestions that I “join the club,” if only because by joining I’d have compromised myself as surely as if they’d hired me as a public relations man. My gig would have been blown just as badly as if I’d written any articles about them before I finished the book.
The November 18 issue of The Nation carries an article by Kenneth Gross, a reporter for the NY Post, on the difficulties of covering the recent New York City teachers strike. “In the beginning,” he says, “Ocean Hill appeared to be available to journalism, but as the story grew, as the attention focused with more intensity, we became locked in. Eventually, physically locked in. …The cops were on one side, and since they stood with us, it was superficially concluded, we must be on that side, too. … Reporters who managed to establish a rapport with the governing board or the community also faced a test. They were not able to perform as journalists, but were expected to become agents. It was natural. The united Federation of Teachers behaved in exactly the same way, but the intimidation at Ocean Hill was thought to be greater. A group of white reporters were sitting in the office of the unit administrator when a group of black toughs appeared. They studied everyone’s press card and jotted down our names and affiliations. ‘We’re going to be watching what you write,’ one of the kids said. ‘You’d better not come back here if we don’t like it.’”
Hunter S. Thompson
TO WARREN HINCKLE, SCANLAN’S MONTHLY:
Unlike Playboy , Warren Hinckle’s bold new Scanlan’s Monthly eagerly accepted Thompson’s no-holds-barred first-person take on the Jean-Claude Killy phenomenon.
December 6, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Warren …
Here’s the Killy piece. I have a clean copy around here somewhere—right here in this goddamn room, for that matter—but I’ve been looking for the bastard for two days and nights and I can’t find it.
Meanwhile, this half-ass copy should be enough for you to make some kind of initial judgement. I’ve had so many different comments on it that I’ve lost track. Some people dig it for the word-action; others hate it for the style and tone. The editors of Playboy really despised it: Their edit/memos ranged from “This is a good Esquire piece” to “Thompson’s ugly, stupid arrogance is an insult to everything we stand for” and “This is our last adventure with H. Thompson; from now on we’ll read his prose in book-form, or not at all. …”
David Butler, the editor who assigned the piece—despite my assurance that it would never see print (in Playboy)—confirmed my ho-ho phone assumption that I am now on Playboy’s blacklist. Butler’s own comment was, “I don’t really like the piece, but that’s not the point—which is that N. Mailer shouldn’t be the only writer who can get away with saying what he really thinks. …”
Butler’s a decent sort and I don’t want to blow his gig any worse than I already have. He told me, for instance, that [Hugh] Hefner has been trying for 5 years to get Chevrolet to advertise in “the book.” I knew, from the start, that the whole thing was a terrible bummer. On my first night in Chicago I was drinking with one of the Chevy PR people when he was suddenly joined by his old friend, Vince Tajiri, Playboy’s picture editor, who had dropped by the hotel to invite Killy’s PR team over to “Hef’s House” for a swimming party … which didn’t include me. No room in the pool for a writer assigned by Tajiri’s magazine to write a long profile on the person they really wanted on the scene that night—for photos—J.-C. Killy, who didn’t show up.
So all I missed, as it turned out, was a few hours in the company of a gang of assholes. But the point is that nobody knew, when they told me that my services wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the night, that Killy wasn’t going to grace the scene they were setting up. Tajiri didn’t know me from a dog in the manger, but he knew I was working on assignment from Playboy … yet the cocksucker told me to get lost when he wanted to use my subject for a night of orgy/promo pix … and he did it in the presence of Killy’s main PR hooker, which queered my act for good.
Looking for parallels, well … let’s say that 2 years ago [Ramparts editor Peter] Collier assigned me to write a profile on Eric Hoffer, who didn’t particularly dig it, but who went along with the act until one night in a bar we ran into Stermer,52 who said, “Say Eric, let’s you and me bug off to some real action, and dump this bum. …”
Anyway, I trust you see what I mean. I’ve done a lot of weird shit in 10 years of free-lancing, running a lot of heavy gauntlets with no real credentials and only the grease of human decency to get me through (like conning Sonny Liston,53 Ted Sorensen and the President of Peru into long exclusive interviews when I wasn’t even working for anybody) … but never, under any circumstances, have I been shit on so totally as I was in the course of this Playboy/ Killy thing. That whole goddamn magazine is a conspiracy of anemic masturbators … scurvy fist-fuckers to the last man. Like a gang of wild whores or the inmates of some terrible peg house, the editors of Playboy roam the world by telephone, trying to get everybody down in the same bad hole where they are.
Yeah … and to hell with all that. I have a bundle of letter-carbons, discussing the horrors of working for those jackals. Maybe that would put a bit of wild hair on the piece. I don’t see any chance of getting Butler to yield up those confidential memos; he read them to me, on the phone, as a personal favor—or maybe for reasons of his own. Anyway, I insisted on knowing why they wouldn’t print it. One memo, for instance, said: “Publication of this article would certainly cause Head Ski to drop us permanently from their ad schedule, and cost us any chance we might have with Chevrolet … etc.” Oddly enough, there was one ranking editor who wanted to publish the thing. Butler wouldn’t tell me who he was & I wasn’t really that curious, but in fairness I should say that there was one….
Which hardly matters, for now. Read the thing and do what you will. Naturally I’d prefer to see the thing done whole, but it’s obvious even to me that it’s cuttable. I knew, all along, that it wasn’t going to run, so I didn’t worry about length, redundancies, or constant focus. There are obvious chunks that can be dropped with no real loss to the Main Theme, as it were. …
I think I’ve noted (or marked) some of the cuttable chunks on the margin—although some of the most obvious chops contain some of the things
I like best … like the whole link with the Stockyards and August ’68 … or the optional lead—marked with letters “A” through “M,” instead of numbers. The A–M section might fit anywhere, or nowhere. … Why don’t you read the whole thing and see what you think, then we can haggle, if necessary.
Unfortunately, the last 26 pages had to be xeroxed off this goddamn orange paper, which for some reason defies xeroxing. If you want to run the thing, maybe you can make your own copy and return all of these orange pages to me, as soon as possible—in case I can’t locate my other copy. For the moment, you have the only copy of pages A through M and 1–77.
Another potential hang-up is that Skiers’ Gazette, a trade tabloid, is talking about serializing the whole thing, as is, for $200 a chunk … and although that sounds unlikely, it’s a definite possibility because the editor of SG is a left-bent dope freak who hates skiing and skiers. They’ve run some really foul, insulting shit, so this Killy thing might be right up their tube.
I don’t see any problem with conflict of interest on this score, but let me know if I’m wrong. In any case, there’s no point in haggling until you’ve read the piece … so do that first, and then we can fuck with details. (My apologies for the dim xerox of pages 78–101, but it was either that or nothing. …)
On other fronts … MaryAnn mentioned a 2000 word shot on the recent Aspen election. I hope to get that done in a day or so. Right now I’m trying to work it into this stinking book that I have to deliver to Random House in order to pay many debts and get free of what has come to be a fuckawful nightmare. The election was a bummer; we came within 6 votes (out of 1200) of taking over the town, and in the process we scared the shit out of all the Fat-backs who’ve been running this town since 1945. I’m enclosing a screed I did for one of the local papers (owned by the same lad who own