Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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People you’d never expect to break down … stumbled off the plane in tears, and… it was… I don’t know like a … funeral after a mass murder or something… there was no way to describe it, a kind of … falling apart. I talked to him earlier that day on the way from Wichita to Long Beach and I could tell… he loosened up so much that it was clear something happened in his head… This was shortly after he told a heckler in I think it was… Grand Rapids, “Kiss my ass. HST: Do you think it would be possible to, say, discount … if you could just wipe out the whole Eagleton thing, and assume that, say, Mondale or Nelson had taken it and there had been no real controversy, and try to remove the vice presidential thing as a factor.

Like his earlier book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson employed a number of unique literary styles in On the Campaign Trail, including the use of vulgarity and the humorous exaggeration of events. Dubbing it "the mojo wire", Thompson used the nascent technology to capitalize on the freewheeling nature of the campaign and extend the writing process precariously close to printing deadlines, often haphazardly sending in notes mere hours before the magazine went to press. Particularly the press corps… A weird relationship develops when you follow a candidate for a long time. Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future. Each of those demographics can be extrapolated to determine which candidate they might vote for — if they vote at all — and which messages might reach them if they cared to listen.And the climb angle is something like 40 or 50 degrees… and then all these green lights blinking and these dials going and things buzzing and humming… and looking down seeing the lights here and there… and cities passing and mountain ranges… a wonderful way to go.

I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary – and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the 50 or 60 bets I made between February and November.He was a great lover of guns, an occasional political candidate and lover of narcotics who eventually committed suicide in 2005. Ed: By “the Eagleton disaster,” do you mean the question of McGovern’s competence in handling the affair?

Look at what happened to Jack Anderson when he went on the air… on the Mutual Radio Network with a story of Eagleton’s drunk driving arrests. McGovern: So those two factors were related and the Eagleton thing upset the morale of the staff and people were blaming each other, and there was no chance to recover from the fatigue of the campaign for the nomination – we had to go right into that Eagleton battle, and so I think that – if there was a chance, at that point, to win the election – we probably lost it right there. That’s the kind of language Mankiewicz used all through the campaign when he got confused and started treading water. When you add all of those things up, none of them, in my opinion, comes anywhere near as serious as the fact that the Republicans were caught in the middle of the night burglarizing our headquarters. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland .If we assume that your term “new politics” had any validity, your choice of Eagleton was the point where it turned around and you decided that the time had come to make friends with the people you’d been fighting the whole time. It was a rough consensus among the polls in July that Nixon had 52% of the vote, McGovern had 37%, and 11% were undecided. C. to his final pondering on power and the nature of the political beast known as the presidential candidate, Thompson is right on the money. That was Mankiewicz talking, and here’s the explanation he gave for why he lied to all the reporters, including me, who had asked him about this… Because I knew… I had that exact quote from several people on the McGovern staff, who wanted to release it. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected district attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.

But aside from those little morsels, hope is conspicuously absent from Thompson’s account of life on the campaign trail. HST: Was it true that he actually told you at one point not to worry about those pills, because the prescription was in his wife’s name? Anything that gets the adrenaline moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . Over the next twelve months, in voluminous detail, he covered every aspect of the campaign, from the smallest rally to the raucous conventions. It scared the hell out of me … But we made it to the terminal and I bought a ticket for Denver, and… just got the hell out of Washington.It would seem that most Thompson readers fail to see that Thompson's works, far from being one esoteric drug opus, range the spectrum of popular cultre, politics, and to a great extent a large segment of American history. We got off – we broke stride on that thing right after the convention, and from then on in, I think millions of people just kind of turned us off. They would club the bleeding shit out of anybody who looked even halfway weird, and then make mass arrests….