Fear and loathing in 2020

Hunter S. Thompson made campaign reporting a contact sport.

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I’m currently reading Wilberforce by H.S. Cross and No Rules Rules, the new management book by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and coauthor Erin Meyer. (I’m almost always reading something fiction and something nonfiction at the same time.)

If you’re new here, my prior edition was a big look at four baseball novels. The newsletter launched with a piece on The Sport of Kings.

But today, no sports. Today: political writing, which is its own sport.

Hunter S. Thompson in Aspen, Colorado, in May 1990. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In case you haven’t heard, the 2020 presidential election is two days away.

Over the past four years (really since June 2015, when Donald J. Trump announced his presidential candidacy), amid the attempts to cover candidate Trump and now President Trump in any sort of straight, just-the-facts way, and amid the endless debate over whether journalists should even try to do that, I have wished we could read Hunter S. Thompson on Trump.

HST died in 2005, at age 67, when he shot himself while on the phone with his wife. (His widow said “he wanted to leave on top of his game.”) But what a body of work he left behind. If you’ve never read him, you probably know him first as the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1971 book that became the 1988 movie (Johnny Depp plays Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke.)

But the other Fear and Loathing is equally good: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. When I revisit it now, it stands up, even though presidential campaigns have changed so meaningfully thanks to technology and social media. (In so many other fundamental ways, they haven’t changed.)

HST started out as a sportswriter, not a political reporter. He got a job as a sports editor for a paper in Pennsylvania, then covered sports for an English-language newspaper in Puerto Rico. (That’s when he wrote his novel The Rum Diary, which also became a ((skippable)) Johnny Depp movie.) Much later in life, he’d get a sports column at ESPN. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was borne out of an assignment to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race; his most famous sports piece, which I cannot recommend highly enough, is “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” from 1970 in Scanlan’s Monthly.

His 1972 campaign coverage was an assignment for Rolling Stone, and Thompson focused on the Democratic primary. The central characters (victims?) of HST’s reporting were incredible: George McGovern (who would win the nomination, though the party did not want him); Hubert Humphrey; Ed Muskie; and George Wallace.

Thompson, in his dispatches from the campaign trail, never sounds like a political reporter. As he writes in the introduction to the book, “All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example.” He mentions that reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times were filing pieces daily, while he only had to file twice a month and still barely made his deadlines.

HST also refused to play the game. “As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as ‘off the record,’” he writes. “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.”

Today, little has changed. Reporters get scoops from chummy sources who always have some personal motivation in their parceling out of intel; the practice of allowing powerful politicians to comment anonymously, and plant stories they want to see, has become a hot debate in the media world in the Trump Era. (You might recall it was also Frank Underwood’s modus operandi in “House of Cards.”) Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine has a great piece this month about the problem of high-ranking Republicans willing to trash Trump anonymously but not take any action publicly.

“Unlike most other correspondents,” HST writes, “I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me—because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill.” (This is particularly funny since HST ran for sheriff of Aspen in 1970.)

His treatment of one Richard Milhous Nixon, the incumbent the Dems were all running against, is one very famous example of burning bridges.

HST spares no one in his book, but Nixon in particular he repeatedly massacres with his typewriter. He calls Nixon “a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a hyena.” He writes that Nixon “represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.”

(Much later, in 1994, HST would pen an indelible, screeching obit of Nixon. One sampling: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”)

From the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, HST observes “the gung-ho, breast-beating arrogance of the Nixon delegates themselves. That was the real story of the convention: the strident, loutish confidence of the whole GOP machinery, from top to bottom. Looking back on that week, one of my clearest memories is that maddening “FOUR MORE YEARS!” chant from the Nixon Youth gallery in the convention hall. NBC’s John Chancellor compared the Nixon Youth cheering section to the Chicago “sewer workers” who were herded into the Stockyards convention hall in Chicago four years ago to cheer for Mayor Daley. The Nixon Youth people were not happy with Chancellor for making that remark on camera. They complained very bitterly about it, saying it was just another example of the “knee-jerk liberal” thinking that dominates the media.”

Remind you of anyone else’s political rallies? Just imagine how Hunter S. Thompson would have covered Donald Trump.

HST’s refusal to toe the line of faux “objectivity” he summed up thusly: “Write about it the same way I’d write about anything else—as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.”

From that remark, I took the title for my senior thesis paper in college: “Close to the Bone.” It was an 86-page exploration of the “New New Journalism” focusing on Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and Jon Krakauer. (Writing a college thesis about DFW was not yet the embarrassing stereotype it would quickly become, and I am not an Infinite Jest fan boy—what I loved was Wallace’s nonfiction essays. Check out the books Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. And if you’re interested, a DFW-focused chunk from my thesis ran at Salon in 2010.) Anyway, I digress.

A centerpiece in my thesis was a scene in Campaign Trail ‘72 when HST, desperate to corner McGovern alone, finds him in the men’s room, vulnerable, standing at a urinal. HST proceeds to ask McGovern about a touchy subject: his friend Harold Hughes endorsing Ed Muskie instead of him. “He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his hand and mumbling something about ‘a deal for the vice-presidency.’ I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it.” HST pushes further, asking McGovern why he thinks Hughes did it. “Well… I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re all surprised.”

That is relentless reporting. He got the quote no one else could get. He got the quote by cornering the candidate at a urinal.

HST also wasn’t afraid to start rumors or throw around unsubstantiated claims. In the book, he floats a theory that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine, an obscure drug that comes from an African root. “Word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with ‘some kind of strange drug’ that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of… I immediately recognized The Ibogaine Effect—from Muskie’s tearful breakdown on the flatbed truck in New Hampshire, the delusions and altered thinking… and finally the condition of ‘total rage’ that gripped him in Wisconsin. There was no doubt about it: The Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort.”

Hw wasn’t fully serious. The idea that Muskie, the most boring candidate in the race, could be addicted to Ibogaine was a joke. But the press began to spread the rumor, which stunned Thompson, though he didn’t go out of his way to clarify that he wasn’t fully serious or fully sure.

Behavior like this does not sit well with journalism purists. I understand that. There are critics who said Thompson could never be called a real journalist, since he takes such extreme liberties. In 2011, this same debate erupted about David Foster Wallace, after his ‘friend’ Jonathan Franzen told David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival that DFW sometimes invented dialogue in his nonfiction essays. But as DFW told Charlie Rose in 1997 about his nonfiction: “If there’s a shtick, the shtick is, Oh gosh, look at me, not a journalist, who’s been sent to do all these journalistic things.” DFW dipped his toe into political reporting for one big admiring piece on John McCain in 2000, which was repackaged in 2008, when McCain was again a presidential candidate, as a book titled McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.

Thompson’s critics always pointed to two misdeeds as the basis for not taking his journalism seriously: his exaggeration of facts and his drug use. But those things were kind of the whole point of his writing.

Clay Felker, the New York Magazine editor who launched so many careers and was central to the New Journalism movement, once said about HST, “He was making things up… Wolfe never makes anything up. Hunter Thompson was kind of an out-of-control buffoon… who managed to capture a crazy moment in American history, which is past, and as a result he passed.”

New Journalism icon Gay Talese took issue with Felker and others who had such black-and-white notions of fact and fiction: “I believe that the editorial choices about what appears in newspapers and magazines are so subjective that you almost never get the whole truth,” he said. (Of course, Talese has also come under fire recently for his own reporting methods.)

All of this led to people labeling Thompson’s writing, usually admiringly but sometimes derisively, “gonzo journalism.” The journalist Bill Cardoso is credited with coining the term in 1970. I always saw it as an unfair label.

HST did not like the “gonzo” term at first—a little-known fact—but eventually embraced it. Sandy Thompson, his first wife, said, “When ‘gonzo’ first happened, Hunter’s first reaction to it was terrible… just terrible. They didn’t get it… He thought it was gibberish.” (That comes from Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Jann Wenner in 2007.)

And in 1997, Thompson told The Atlantic: “You know, Gonzo Journalism is a term that I've come to dislike because of the way it's been cast: inaccurate, crazy.” Indeed, the term “gonzo” will never go away, because it does feel perfect for describing Thompson the writer and Thompson the man—crazy, drugged out, rebellious. But it’s not my favorite. In the same interview, HST said: “I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.” He was never lying; if anything, there was more truth in a lot of his portrayals than in the traditional, cautious reporting of his peers at that time.

Anyway, you can certainly enjoy HST’s campaign book without pondering any of these journalistic procedure questions. And you should.

In the wake of whatever happens on Nov. 4, 2020, you might find that having Hunter S. Thompson’s voice in your head is soothing, in an insane kind of way.

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Coming up next time: The Second Civil War.