I started reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail today. So far, I love it (about 50 pages in).
It’s hard to imagine a book like that being written today, partly because the the Liebling/Thompson (sure I’m leaving out out others) style of magazine writing has been completely extinguished, but mostly because I can’t imagine someone like Hunter S. Thompson getting that kind of access today.
I don’t know that politics has changed for the worse the past 40 years but when you compare Halperin’s awful new book to Thompson or Timothy Crouse, it is clear that things have changed drastically in the politico-media world.
Paul
It can be sloppily edited depending on which edition you read (I have one or two paperback Straight Arrow Books editions from the late 70s or so that are shockingly messy), but it is a truly indispensible record of where we come from and, depressingly, how little we’ve changed. Except it all goes faster, now.
dave
by far thompsons best book and possibly the best book ive ever read. just wait until u get to ibogaine and muskies whistle stop train tour.
beltane
We now have a media culture that stifles all expression of talent and originality. This is a problem that extends way beyond journalism.
Raenelle
Matt Taibbi’s not a bad successor to Thompson at R.S.
Kryptik
We don’t have political journalism these days.
We have political stenography. That’s the whole problem we have.
TR
Great book. The description of the George Wallace rally is a classic.
andynotadam
I believe Taibbi’s the closest thing to an heir we’ve got today, kind of a much more sober (like that would be hard!) cross of Hunter’s jubilant profanity and investigative journalism.
Alex S.
A little off-topic, but actually not that much:
The Chicago Wars II – The Village strikes back:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/core-chicago-team-sinking_b_452664.html
No wonder Steve Clemons claims to be a friend of Mike Allen.
MikeJ
@Raenelle: Matt Taibbi couldn’t lift Thompson’s jock strap. HST wasn’t great because he said the word fuck a lot.
“Teehee! I’m being transgressive!”
licensed to kill time
I first read it in Rolling Stone and Hunter was a lightning bolt of truth and insanity. He perfectly fit the times. Read the “wave speech” at the end of the 8th chapter to get a feeling of what is was like to be living in the ’60’s.
HST wouldn’t have been allowed within a hundred miles of any Republican candidate today. Or probably Dem, for that matter.
DougJ
I like Matt Taibbi. But I don’t think his articles are so much in the style of Thompson and Liebling. He probably is the closest thing we have to HST, but I don’t think he’s that similar. And he’d never get the access HST did.
Doctor Gonzo
That’s the book that got me interested in politics, no joke.
I bet you can’t tell by my name though.
John O
One of my all time favorite books.
HST helped me understand those times. If you like it so far, you’ll love the rest.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Raenelle:
Now you’ve done it.
edit: See?
McGeorge Bundy
Great book.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: I agree.
There’s no sense wondering if they’re the same, I can’t imagine any journalist actually wanting to be told he’s a clone of someone else.
Taibbi has a history that’s just as interesting as Thompson’s, in a way, while again being completely different.
valdivia
@Alex S.:
I saw that and thought exactly what you did. The Village still seething that those upstarts from Chicago are doing things their way.
JD Rhoades
After nearly every election (save the last one), I end up going back to Dr. Thompson’s cri de coeur:
WereBear
It’s a great book.
And it prepares you for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
As if anything could.
Joel
Thompson gets sidetracked occasionally, with more than a few gratuitous anecdotes, but it’s an excellent book overall.
dr. bloor
@licensed to kill time:
I’ve always wondered what his piece on being able to attend political rallies packing heat might have looked like.
More to the point of the thread, I don’t think you can hold HST up as the exemplar of his generation and compare today’s reportage negatively. Frankly, the bulk of politcal writing back then was status-quo, passing-along-what-the-old-white-guy-says bullshit, too.
CaseyL
I first read that book when I was first becoming a political activist, at age 16 in the early 70s. It had a huge impact on me – though some of his fantasy excursions, like the whole ibogaine thing, took me years to recognize as not!true.
What made the most impact on me was his comment that American politics in 1972 were what they were mostly thanks to Sirhan Sirhan. He was writing as a witness to the political upheavals and activism of the time, and writing for other witnesses/survivors of the political upheavals and activism of the time. You can feel the rage and grief on every page – or at least I could because, even though I had been too young to participate in the huge demonstrations and marches, I was old enough to remember the assassinations of 1968 and knew what they meant, what we’d lost.
Shell Goddamnit
I love Thompson’s stuff, and I think the Campaign Trail is some of his finest work. What a bitter treat it would be to read that thing for the first time now. I envy and don’t envy you.
I have said Taibbi’s the closest thing we had to an heir to HST’s throne – it is the finely-honed sense of outrage (I think that’s from Thompson btw) that does it. Taibbi’s not got quite the genius turn of phrase, perhaps, but he also doesn’t treat his journalism gig as a by-the-way while waiting to become the next Wallace Stegner.
Also, Taibbi has not fucked himself up so much that he was not able to do his work when we really, really needed him – as Thompson did.
Oh dear, I’m sure we’ll all be demolishing each other right & left over Thompson for years yet. I miss him; I’ve been missing him for fifteen years now, I think. Maybe more.
Andy K
@MikeJ:
Thompson marked his territory in a way that no one else could possibly ever claim it as their own. His disdain for and outspokenness about politicians/power structures weren’t original- Thompson was most definitely an heir to Mencken- but the style in which he speculated hyperbolically or hallucinated vividly (Muskie’s tears in New Hampshire, the urinal interview with Nixon) were what separated him from his peers. I don’t think that Taibbi would ever try to duplicate that style, but he’s still an effective gadfly.
licensed to kill time
@dr. bloor:
Oh, God – he would have been at the vanguard, waving his piece. Heh.
(ETA – “wave speech” was in F&L Las Vegas, oops)
c u n d gulag
That was a great political book.
I miss Hunter every day. I didn’t start reading him until the early 80’s, and then couldn’t stop.
“Generation of Swine” is another great one. But there’ll never be a funnier book than “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Any book that can make you laugh out loud, and not be able to stop, on the NY City subway is a dangerous book!!!
Shell Goddamnit
Urinal interview was McGovern IIRC.
Thompson’s story about Nixon was being stuffed into Nixon’s limo to discuss football.
“That’s right, by god! The Miami boy!”
SEK
It’s hard to imagine a book like that being written today
That’s because it was written then. Had he not written it, not only would reporters have a lot more access to candidates, but a different/better breed of reporters would have it. I lost my notes in a recent move, but when I taught it in “The Ethics and Evolution of Literary Journalism” course, I paired it with some later interviews with McGovern, who loved Thompson, loved the book, but said that its effect on American political has been nothing but pernicious. After its publication, he said, both parties phased out the system whereby the news organizations selected who would be following whom, and started making demands by threatening to withhold access.
(Also, this bit of silliness might be of interest.)
mcd410x
Wonderful book. HST hits the nail on the head when he talks about Nixon yanking the party as far right as possible to get re-elected, the election in 4 more years be damned.
Andy K
@Shell Goddamnit:
McGovern is correct.
Tres Chouette
Awesome. I’m reading this right now. I feel cool.
Ironically, reading it has given me a bit of perspective on the travails of the modern Democratic Party. Corruption was a lot more institutionalized and machine politics still reigned supreme, even though the primary system had just been reformed (with the help of McGovern, which is why the machine Dems hated him). Just read the chapter on the Ohio primary, with entire congressional districts full of ethnic Poles and African-Americans voting overwhelmingly for Humphrey, voting machines staying open late into the night, to see what I mean. It’s hard to imagine someone like Barack Obama succeeding at an insurgent campaign in that sort of environment. There has been a good deal of progress made in terms of grassroots organizing, bottom-up politics, etc.
But yeah, Thompson had unparalleled access, and his rancor at Nixon looks almost naive in the context of what has happened over the ensuing 40 years or so. Maybe living under him would have given me a different perspective, but Nixon looks like an amateur compared to Bush II. If HST hadn’t burnt himself out so early it would have been great (and terrifying) to hear him dish on Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes from this kind of reporting angle, to say nothing of the teabaggers!
Mike in NC
If only Thompson had had the patience to stick around to see the era of Palin and the Teabaggers. Today he’d be blogging live from their little convention.
Van
I think this was his best book. And one of the best books on politics ever.
J. Michael Neal
I’ve said this before, but didn’t get a response. As my father taught me, that clearly means no one saw it, and I need to repeat it.
I don’t understand the love for Hunter S. Thompson. Granted, I have read very little of his stuff, but that’s because, after reading a few of his columns, I picked up Hell’s Angels, which was recommended as a good place to start his book length works.
I put it down shortly thereafter, too disgusted to read any farther. Early on, he describes what, if you read between the lines, was a gang rape of a young woman. He doesn’t call it that, of course, because he’s too busy praising the bikers for transgressing
bourgeoiseborgeoisieburgoisiemiddle class sensibility. That the young woman’s parents objected to this drew his scorn, and he lamented that it turned into a court case.I simply couldn’t go on, and really don’t have much desire to pick up anything else he wrote.
dr. bloor
@SEK:
Whatever the impact of his book might have had following publication–what, four decades ago, now?–this assertion is hopelessly simplistic and naive. Dick Cheney, Ed Meese, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Ed Rollins et al are not the bastard children of Gonzo journalism.
licensed to kill time
@J. Michael Neal:
Gang rape was an initiation rite for women in the Hell’s Angels (and the women who chose to hang out with them knew it) and HST was describing what he saw. He also said:
It was an uncomfortable book to read. I would urge you to try his Fear and Loathing books instead.
Joe Lisboa
Favorite of mine. Can’t believe you haven’t read it yet, Doug! No offense intended, just surprised. I picked it up again during the summer of the ’08 campaign: the more things change, etc. Wish HST were here to comment on the Palin marketing package.
Alex S.
@valdivia:
I commented on the article and said it was a hit-job. But I got censored. Of course, Arianna Huffington used the Huffington Post to get exactly what she wants: a place on Sally Quinn’s guest list.
Honus
@licensed to kill time:
The wave speech you’re thinking of is in fear and loathing in Las Vegas. But memory lapses can be excused in those of us that dared to suck a sleeve.
conumbdrum
The first half of the book, describing the three-ring circus that was the Democratic primaries and convention, is stellar stuff, as is his scathing coverage of the Repub swinefest in Miami.
It falls apart at the end (because Hunter came apart from the stress and general insanity and had to piece the end together on the fly), but this is still a definitive account of how sausage gets made, packaged and shipped to Washington D.C.
Next on your reading list should be H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the many political conventions he attended… less profane than HST, no doubt, but every inch as corrosive and a true virtuoso of the English language to boot. Thompson was great, but Mencken was the genius.
mclaren
You keep saying there’s nobody like Hunter Thompson today, but have you read Carl Hiaasen’s stuff? He covers the unbelievably corrupt and lunatic south Florida political scene at least as well as Thompson covered the Milhousian lunacy.
Dino
My favorite parts are when he gives his press pass to Wavy Gravy, who tries to unhook the Muskie train, the football interview with Nixon and piece where he is fed up with the whole process and writes about anything but politics.
Shell Goddamnit
There’s no question that Thompson was no feminist ally. He was a product of his time, and having lived through most of it, I don’t either like or excuse his failure there. But Hell’s Angels is not a testament to the transgressive wonder of the Angels. It’s definitely conflicted – obviously Thompson ended up liking a few of these people very much, but he also sees them pretty clearly and they did beat him bloody without explanation or excuse. In the end the book is something of a dismissal of the Angels as much as the people – the police, and what we would now call “the media” – who lie about them…and they did lie, oh yes they did.
Hell’s Angels is not so relevant now that “bikers” on choppers are mostly technicians and accountants and people fear them mainly for the hearing loss from the loud pipes – but Thompson’s wild sociological screed on the Linkhorns from Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side applies directly to a pretty noisy segment of our body politic, and I recommend reading it if you can find it online.
And one other thing Thompson’s book will tell you: do not mistake 1%ers – actual Angels & their ilk and some who are too crusty for any “club” – for accountants in costume. These are two very different beasties. Treat the 1%ers politely but warily, and don’t hang around.
And go and read The Campaign Trail. It’s really all the Thompson you actually need. The rest is icing, IMO. He’ll offend you right out of the box, but I can’t help that; it’s up to you whether you want to try to get past it or not.
chrome agnomen
i still clutch RS #95 & 96 to my bosom with the original fear and loathing articles. when i still believed this country had a chance.
SEK
@dr. bloor
This doesn’t make any sense: Cheney, in particular, learned that no matter how much Nixon wanted to talk football with HST, granting HST access so he could yell “Robots for Nixon! Humans for McGovern!” to his face was a bad idea. If anything, the continued presence of Nixon acolytes in Republican politics guarantees that the soft ban on not-with-the-program reporters will persist. McGovern’s said that both parties reacted to that book’s publication by becoming “more professional,” because a non-micromanaged campaign could easily blow up in a candidate’s face. There are, of course, cases of incompetence, but it’s machine-like incompetence, e.g. the Couric-Palin interview, in which the machine wrongly assumed Palin could handle Couric’s 50 m.p.h. fastball.
Anne Laurie
@SEK:
Doubt that. McGovern was a very nice man, and every inch the product of his upbringing — he didn’t like the vicious mutants of the Nixon campaign, but he also didn’t believe that women and colored people and DFHs were fit, i.e., “ready” to have an equal say in American politics. McGovern may have thought that if the CREEPsters had just been a little less virulent, “we” (the Sensible White Men In Charge) could have restricted mainstream political journalism to nice Ivy-League white “boys” like Crouse. But Hunter S. Thompson and his ilk were every bit as natural a sociological reaction to the death throes of Machine Politics as it was then practiced as the criminals surrounding both Nixon and the Daley machine. The Democrats’ giant failure during the period around the 1972 campaign was assuming that they could keep the poltical world from changing if only they could resist the “incursion” of scary/unworthy people like Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, and Abbie Hoffman. And, yeah, they managed in the short term to hang onto the Levers of Power… McGovern got to be the 1972 Democratic Candidate… but only by crippling the party’s ability to change with the changing demographics.
Shell Goddamnit
??
McGovern got to be the 1972 Democratic Candidate… but only by crippling the party’s ability to change with the changing demographics.
I’m not getting it – the alternative to McGovern was Humphrey or Muskie, right? How would not-McGovern have helped the Dems ability to change with the changing demographics? There was never any chance that the white guys would lose control of the levers of power, it was only a question of *which* white guy.
I could be wrong here, my political memory of that time is sketchy and probably relies on Thompson for cues too much.
RD
@Doctor Gonzo:
Same here.
Lex
HST’s career body of work is incredibly uneven, but I think anyone serious about understanding presidential politics in the Nixon era will still be reading F&L a century from now. Nixon and Thompson had a weirdly symbiotic relationship: The worst in Nixon brought out the best in Thompson — righteous outrage over what Nixon’s ilk was doing to a country that, cynical veneer aside, Thompson dearly loved and believed in.
No, Thompson didn’t attempt to intervene in a Hell’s Angels gang rape. But as a writer, he tried to intervene in the rape of America. That’s a morally ambiguous epitaph … but one with which I think he, at least, would be comfortable.