A review of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

By Mark Grueter

To prepare for yet another grim political season, my attorney advised me to re-read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. And even though that 300-pound Samoan has the brain of an open sore and the conscience of a virus - due to bad genes and years of depraved living - I still trust the man. So I bought a six-pack of Budweiser (Talls), swallowed an Adirol, and went to town on Hunter Thompson's vertiginous and gut-wrenching collection of screeds, reports, essays, anecdotes and interviews from the 1972 presidential campaign.

It's a discursive work that nevertheless gives more insight into the realities of American politics than anything heard or read inside, say, political science classes. One thing I learned after reading Hunter's political coverage is that politics is an art, not a science, you dumb bastards, and so the only real discoveries are made on the ground, amongst the contenders, the mobs and the chaos.

HUNTER'S PSYCHE

For Hunter, vulgarity and corruption mark the political world, an arena that possesses virtually no redeemable qualities, a universe riddled with hustlers and "scumsuckers" of every stripe. Covering politics gnaws away at Hunter's insides, in part because he has a heightened sense of all that is wrong and bleak about life. Just look at the events he covered best: The Kentucky Derby, Las Vegas, the Hell's Angels and American Politics – all bastions of rough decadence. Can anyone imagine Hunter capturing the light, magical element of, for instance, the Alaskan Dog Sled race? No, he tunes into the negative; he is sometimes risibly pessimistic. All around he sees anarchy, ugliness, brutality. Politics, in Hunter's own words, forever made him “cynical and mean-spirited” toward our world.

To survive the campaign trip, Hunter was compelled to fortify himself with a steady and variegated diet of drugs and alcohol, including “Reds,” Ballantine Ale, Ibogaine, Speed, Grass, Wild Turkey. And he wasn't alone. Most people on the campaign trail, we are told, rely on one substance or another - even it means crushing up seven aspirins into a glass of Coke, which is actually not bad, by the way, if you're looking for something new.

The whole scene is abusive: late nights, early mornings, feverish gambling, revenge and violence. By the end of the campaign, Hunter develops the worst case of anxiety his doctor had ever seen, too rattled to even sit down and type. But the reports had to be completed, so an editor was dispatched to Hunter's hotel room to tape-record his answers on prepared and improvised questions. Pacing frantically around his room Hunter was able to talk us through the Final Analysis, and all else that was just too awful to be put down on paper with his own trembling fingers.

GONZO JOURNALISM

Conventional journalism cannot sufficiently cover politics partly because the trade demands its practitioners to play by a set of tedious and suspect rules; rules that help shield the real events happening inside political campaigns. Journalists are supposed to stick to “the facts” while the politicians they cover never have to. So, from the very beginning, the process is heavily stacked against revelation. And the odds against any would-be muckrakers have only gotten worse.

Journalists are held to a significantly higher standard than the individuals they report upon – the powerful who control and run our society. If a journalist is accused of fabricating anything at all he will probably lose both his job and his reputation. On the other hand, with politicians, society often rewards the greatest actors or the most daring and convincing liars of the lot.

Journalism, as a trade, has become far too professionalized. “Serious” journalism encourages and fosters timidity, masked as even-handedness, and discourages honesty, self-expression or self-inclusion within a story. Today, most journalists have to earn degrees before they start writing for publication. While studying, the sacred rules are inculcated and indoctrinated, tarnishing the minds of even the most stubbornly independent students. But the “Doctor of Journalism” Hunter Thompson didn't earn his degree in a university; he bought it off the street, and got much more mileage out of his purchase than any of the hacks of academe he competed against got out of theirs.

Hunter's bet: the only way to write anything insightful about a campaign is to do the opposite of what is taught in journalism school. The only way to create anything useful or interesting or fair is to invent your own brand of journalism, while constantly challenging the conventional wisdom of political thought. Hunter lived at a distinct angle to the rest of society, trashing its rules while establishing a series of anti-rules for his writing:

1) “Objective” journalism does not exist. “The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.” Everyone else will try to write Responsible, Serious, and Even-handed stories about the race for President. And while they are doing that, Hunter will write the stuff that people actually want to read: raw, fearless and energetic reports about whatever he believes is truly happening, regardless of how one-sided or outrageous it may seem. He finessed his way into campaign inner circles, which allowed him to penetrate the minds of and attribute motives to the actors involved. Indeed, the sheer, high level of access a provocateur like Hunter was able to obtain is somewhat of a historical curiosity.

Hunter's reports are obviously subjective, but so are everyone else's, and that's the point. The difference is that most journalists feign objectivity whereas Hunter does not - just one reason for the latter's superiority. Instead of penning polite critiques of candidates and the system, Hunter turns his targets into personal enemies. We relate to it because it is real, it is instinctual, and it hits upon many profound truths, not just about politics, but life itself.

2) Since politics is twisted and crude, why should political journalism/writing pretend that it is not? Why can't people write about politics and personalities and appearances in the way most smart people would like to talk about these topics? Senator Ed Muskie isn't just a difficult man; working for him, Hunter warns, is like mixing it up with a “200 pound water rat.” Hubert Humphrey is, quite simply, a “gutless old ward-heeler.” And, it is not nearly enough to say that Richard Nixon is a manipulative man engaged in undermining American democracy. Rather, Nixon is,

"…a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."

A certain low-minded critic for the Columbia Journalism Review - for such people, I regret to say, do exist - panned Fear and Loathing for containing “libelous epithets.” The reviewer didn't have the wit to appreciate Hunter's repeatedly announced indifference to such charges. 'Libelous epithets? Sure, what the hell? If that's what you care to call it. It's not technically libel because all these terrible things I'm writing are essentially true, but I don't give a damn what you think anyway. I'm trying to explore ways to overhaul this warped system, you dumb son of a bitch'.

Such pretentious literal-mindedness fails to grasp the notion that Hunter's readers are intelligent enough to recognize his dramatic descriptions are enhanced for an effect. CJR's reproval obviously fails on another note to understand the comedy and irony of Hunter's work. And for that failure, one can only laugh. The truth is that by occasionally writing in – shall we say - hyperbolic terms, Hunter manages to capture the authentically chaotic nature of the events.

“You dirty bastard! You'll pay for this, by God! We'll rip your goddamn teeth out! KILL! KILL! Your number just came up, you communist son of a bitch!” Hunter, surrounded by an ominous gang of young Nixonites, confronts NBC's John Chancellor with this verbal onslaught, partly because he was convinced Chancellor had slipped LSD into his drink during a previous encounter, and partly because he's just trying to scare the hapless newsman into retirement.

During one of Hunter's infamous/famous tangents, he relates a story from the '68 presidential campaign where Lyndon Johnson “told his manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent's lifelong habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.” The campaign manager protests that nobody will believe it. “I know,” Johnson replied. “But let's make the sonofabitch deny it.” Since these sorts of fiendish practices are common aspects of campaigns, Hunter, on the trail in '72, shrewdly and recklessly appropriates the tactic, inventing a strategy for journalists themselves to become actors on the stage. Here's what I mean:

3) Using artistic freedom to render positive change. Hunter is kicked off the Ed Muskie campaign for giving his press pass to some ex-con, “gin-crazed Boohoo” who later ends up terrorizing Muskie and company on a private train trip down the coast of Florida. In retaliation for subsequently having his pass taken away, Hunter, who doesn't like “Big Ed” anyway, begins writing extensively about how it is rumored that Senator Muskie is addicted to the West African drug Ibogaine, an upper of sorts that keeps a person awake in a rather menacing fashion. Hunter speculates that this is probably the reason why Muskie has been acting so “erratic” of late. This is the rumor anyway, Hunter reports; unfortunately, he cannot confirm it one way or the other because he has been banned from the Muskie campaign. Readers and other reporters took the allegation seriously and so questions are put to an enraged Muskie. Long after the campaign was over, Hunter stated that he never actually accused Muskie of using Ibogaine. “I said it was a rumor to that effect,” Hunter explained. “I made up the rumor.”

So, in a single stroke, he turns the tables on the politicians. Fed up, Hunter decides to contrive information about them, since they contrive information about everything else. By showing that two can play at that game, Hunter teaches politicians a lesson on mendacity, demonstrating that what goes around can also come right back around to bite you in the ass. This approach is one facet of Hunter's coined “Gonzo” Journalism, which he applied in several forums.

4) Another anti-rule is that no one, particularly the average American, and nothing is immune from criticism. In Hunter's conception of American culture there are no innocent parties. Frustrated with Americans who continue to support thugs like Nixon and Humphrey, Hunter darkly concludes: “All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives – even if it meant turning the state of Nevada into a concentration camp for hippies, niggers, dope fiends, do-gooders, and anyone else who might threaten the status quo.”

Instead of euphemizing all the foul things that occur in politics and life Hunter emphasizes and enhances the reality in order to more accurately depict the gruesomeness of it all. At a campaign stop in Atlanta, Hunter sets up a scene:

"Fallen pompon girls and ex-cheerleaders from Auburn, 'Bama, and even Ole Miss come to Atlanta to “get into show business,” and those who take the wrong fork wind up being fucked, chewed, and beaten for $100 a day in front of hand-held movie cameras. Donkeys and wolves are $30 extra, and the going rate for gang-bangs is $10 a head, plus “the rate”…There is nowhere else in America where a fuck-flick producer can hire last year's Sweetheart of Sigma Chi to take on twelve Georgia-style Hell's Angels for $220 and lunch."

Why write about cultural decline within the context of a book on politics? First, and simply, because it's crude and unpleasant, and one of the many facts of life Americans face but refuse to deal with. More importantly for Hunter, these images create the perfect atmosphere in which to reasonably discuss an American election. You cannot examine electoral politics in isolation.

America's only hope, however dim, is for someone to rally what Ron Dellums, the black Congressman from Berkeley, called “the Nigger Vote” – this group includes everyone left out of the political process, not just black Americans, but the half of America that never votes. For Hunter, Democratic nominee George McGovern signaled the only chance of invoking Good and of reviving the American Dream. But in the end, and for the majority, McGovern represented a return to the “unstable” period of the 1960's.

EMPATHY

Hunter's appeal goes well beyond the dimension sketched above. A separate layer of attraction involves his ability to feel and cogently reproduce much that is awkward and painful about a presidential campaign vis-à-vis the nature of human interaction. He is hypersensitive to the suffering of others and that's partly why he's always so jaded, but it also makes him particularly suited to elucidate the tensions of the American political system.

He tells one anecdote of encountering the eventual Democratic nominee, George McGovern, when the latter is mired in single-digits in the opinion polls, at the beginning of the campaign. Hunter and a few other bored reporters are in a cafeteria, on the road with some of McGovern's staff. Hunter looks up from his newspaper to see a strange, yet familiar looking man buzzing around the buffet table. The guy is by himself and he just won't seem to leave the food. On his way up to procure another beer, Hunter eyes this peculiar man and suddenly realizes it's The Candidate. Nobody, including his aides, recognize McGovern. “Jesus Christ!” Hunter can't believe a few handlers haven't surrounded him. “This made me very nervous. McGovern was obviously waiting for somebody to greet him,” wrote Hunter.

Hunter feels bad for the candidates. It amazes him to witness some of the terrible things they have to endure. McGovern rises at 5 a.m. to go shake hands with gloomy, stand-offish factory workers. Covering the spectacle, Hunter can only describe it as “Madness” and the sort of event that is “painful enough to watch in person. To write about it or show it on TV would be an act of genuine cruelty.”

Over the years, out on the campaign trail myself, I've witnessed similar brow-crutching episodes. Example: when an ungifted speaker is on the stump, you find yourself rooting for the guy to somehow pull through, to not make an ass of himself, no matter what you think of his politics.

I think one of the more remarkable aspects of campaigns is the absurd and forced enthusiasm that candidate's supporters are required to generate at any given moment. Organizers must persuade enough people to do uncomfortable and unnatural things like hold up signs or chant candidates' slogans ("Go, Dick, Go!"). Acutely awkward scenes pass every day on the trail but no one ever explored this positively weird aspect of campaigns until Hunter did it, and I haven't seen any comparable portrayals since in a major publication.

Also, Hunter's devastating invective, despite the extreme language, does not feel overly vindictive or inappropriate. The playing up of all the substance abuse, the all-nighters, the crashing of events and so forth, throughout the “meta-narrative” somehow softens the tone of his rhetoric. Hunter orders three beers from a waitress in one breath and then calls for Hubert Humphrey to be “castrated” in the next, but it's all innocuous. He's like a half-crazed uncle, but a wonderfully articulate and sarcastic one. We forgive his allegedly libelous epithets because of his irresistible personality. And actually we are enamored by his so-called libelous epithets because he's so goddamn creative and free with them.

Lastly, Hunter has a strong, commanding conscience. Part of Hunter's appeal stems from his insistence that outcasts who lead presumably dissolute and dangerous lifestyles, like himself, can still create a moral code of their own, in order to judge and expose the real moral outrages in our society – those being committed by the powerful.

THEN AND NOW – HUNTER'S POLITICAL INSIGHT

1972 might have been terrible in many ways, but at least then, and in previous and subsequent contests, there was a real fight for the Democratic Party's nomination. Then, it was not known until June, after the California primary, who would win the nomination. Now, party leaders have rigged or “frontloaded” the process desperately hoping that a nominee is decided early on, long before most states even vote. The reason? Too much openness and democracy during the primary season causes too much “infighting” and this is invariably bad. So now most candidates are forced to drop out before the great majority of states vote.

This counterproductive, retrogressive mentality posits that the party has to appear United from the beginning in order to face down the Republicans and to win. The notion that competition and being forced to answer tough questions might actually strengthen primary candidates does not occur to party wizards like Terence McAuliffe.

Can this degradation of the nominating process be correlated to the decline in American journalism? I think so. Certainly, journalists aren't criticizing the system in any way that has created a mandate for change.

Hunter Thompson reminds us that party politics is simply a struggle for power and so anti-democratic changes to the process shouldn't come as a surprise. The Democratic Establishment in 1972 did not even want their nominee, George McGovern, to win against Nixon. They didn't care about whether or not it would be good for the country. All they cared about was retaining control over their party. If McGovern had been elected he would have cleaned house, and so old-guard Dems were openly rooting for Nixon.

And one is tempted to draw parallels regarding the dynamics of both the '72 and 2004 campaigns, between Senators Kerry and McGovern, the pressures to move to the center, the Gulf of Tonkin vs. the Iraqi resolution, the trendy logic of the Beating Nixon and Beating Bush mantras. But one should resist this temptation. These sorts of comparisons might be interesting to note as sidebars but they shouldn't be overplayed or used to formulate deterministic conclusions. Election cycles are marked, much more so by their peculiarities and differences, than by any similarities.

That being said, there are some lessons in Fear and Loathing for the Democratic nominee. As McGovern advisor Pat Caddell correctly noted at the time: McGovern didn't lose the general election because his views were too far to the left. As Hunter notes, McGovern was not seen as some “flaming radical,” rather he became seen as a “dingbat” for bungling too many situations. He lost because he behaved ineptly at all the wrong moments; he didn't act presidential. The Democratic nominee can take the tough left/liberal stands as long as he proves himself sophisticated, consistent and capable of governing at all stages of the campaign. Missteps made by the challenger of a President are always much more damaging than any missteps made by the incumbent. Especially in George W. Bush's case where ineptitude is the norm and where any displays of competence, at all, trigger at least a 5-point bounce in his approval rating.

With his perpetual cynicism and intimate access, Hunter constantly speculates on various campaign scenarios. We might use Hunter's analysis of power politics to explain why Al Gore rashly endorsed pseudo-insurgent Howard Dean. The former Vice President was probably hoping Dean would take the nomination because he knew that poor, stupid Howard would get stomped in a general election, opening the door for another dismal Gore run in 2008. Unless, of course, Gore really is that tone-deaf, to have imagined Dean the best the Democrats had to offer against Bush. Most suspected and knew from the start that John Kerry was the more “electable” candidate, not because he's more of a centrist than Dean (he's not) but because he is more articulate, intelligent, principled and experienced.

And notice how the Clintons have remained calculatingly silent on the subject. It is not a stretch to suggest Hillary is hoping Bush beats Kerry so that she has a shot at the White House some point in the future. Certainly, this is what the spotlight-obsessed Bill wants. There is no way to prove any of this, but to debate these questions and to think about what actually motivates human beings is important; it helps us reach deeper truths.

Political junkies can go back and forth for hours with all of this awfulness - the different scenarios, strategies and hypotheticals surrounding campaigns. Like many of us, Hunter detests it all but, at the same time, cannot resist participating. In fact, he grew to become one of the leading political smack addicts on the trail. Exposure to this grim racket was killing him, but he loved it.

LEGACY?

As noted, Hunter treated politicians and interest groups as personal enemies, not items of examination to be droopingly categorized inside classrooms. Americans should regard presidential candidates the same way the candidates regard the American people: with contempt. He showed outsiders and daring journalists ways to fight back and gave us confidence to experiment with our own ideas for bucking the system. Hunter shattered any lingering, antiquated notions of awe or reverence for politicians and the campaign process. And nobody who covers politics today compares with Hunter. It seems unlikely anyone could even get away with covering politics the way he did.

We do, however, see traces of Hunter in current political observation. The two most popular, liberal political commentators today are probably Michael Moore and Al Franken, two satirists who mix a populist pitch with sneering humor and the ad-hominem attack, to criticize political conservatives. They're both pretty damn good at it too, for whatever it's worth. Also, writers like Neal Pollack and P.J. O'Rourke come to mind as practitioners of Gonzo, but there's no fitting comparison.

But consider this case. How would Hunter-inspired reporters go about addressing the following political ad, put out by the right-wing group “Club for Growth” back when Howard Dean was the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party? The television commercial features an elderly couple, latched together, walking out of a small town, general store. An unseen interviewer asks:

“What do you think of Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year?”

Husband: “Whado I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government expanding, latte drinking, sushi eating, Volvo driving, New York Times reading…

Wife: …body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left wing freak show back to Vermont - where it belongs.”

The writers for comic-cum-political commentator Bill Maher and his HBO show “Real Time” dealt with this curious ad in the only way that made any real sense: by satirizing and exposing it as the piece of silly demagoguery that it is. So they pretended that the following commercial appeared on TV as an enhanced follow-up on the same theme from above. It features the same scene – an old couple, a small town, the unseen reporter:

“Hey! Whada you think of Howard Dean?”

Husband: “Whadoo I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his budget balancing, maple syrup peddling, Bush bashing, draft dodging, Internet masturbating…

Wife: …wife beating, child molesting, human flesh eating, cock sucking freak show and stick it up his ass…”

Sped up voice over: “paid for by Decent Folks against Dean”

Wife: And, his wife's a Jew.”

It is hard not to think of Hunter at inspired moments like these, especially the way the fake commercial flips the critique back onto the rubes. Smearing political opponents is a long-standing, American tradition (recall how Humphrey painted the McGovern campaign as a crusade for “Acid, Amnesty, Abortion”) but would this politically incorrect response have been possible or as comical without the pioneering work of Hunter?

Comedy has become a popular and often effective tool for subverting the dark or conservative side of the American character, hence the recent success of somewhat clownish, though clever, critics like Maher, Franken, Moore and Mo Rocca. There's no doubt in my mind that Hunter's antics helped usher in this era. But Hunter's contribution goes beyond this, given that he was an actual journalist doing first-hand reporting of the deep politics that shape an election. None of these other guys really cover events or do the actual journalism. We could certainly use another Hunter on the ground today, if only to raise the level of contentiousness.

And we might seriously ask why no journalist covering more recent campaigns has delivered anything in the nature of the sort of genuine, visceral and groundbreaking insight that Hunter provided. Was he uniquely capable of creating a space for his sort of journalism to thrive, or was he merely the beneficiary of circumstance? Did the system adapt to thwart the emergence of would-be successors? How did he pull it off?

Young people are still reading the raw, insightful and entertaining Fear and Loathing '72 because there is absolutely nothing else like it, and because it is some of the best political coverage we have ever seen in this country. Indeed, the legend of Hunter S. Thompson rides on, in spite of all the useless garbage he's inflicted on readers since his heyday.