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

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When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in… especially not for “minor infractions” of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends. With the same drug-addled alacrity and jaundiced wit that made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a hilarious hit, Hunter S. We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up – this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback – and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. And then there were some staff squabbles that the press spotlighted, which gave the impression of confusion and disarray and lack of direction, and I think that hurt.

McGovern: There were a number of journalists that were trying to get more information on it, but it’s tough, very hard to do. Eagleton struck me as being a cheap hack and … he still does, you know, he strikes me as being a useless little bastard… When I went up to St.I don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was designed for ordinary men – not for a succession of so many larger-than-life men on horseback. I think, as a matter of fact, he’s the kind of guy that’s always forcing the party to the right and into positions that really turn off more people than he brings with him.

The energy you could put behind that… the frenzy you’d stir up would probably get you killed, but Jesus Christ, it would be something that nobody’d ever forget. It is also a recurring theme in McGovern’s personal analysis of why the voters rejected him so massively last November. Journalists, pundits, commentators and tastemakers use this extremely flimsy material to amuse themselves over the airwaves and on our screens for years ahead of the final vote. 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.Only two other people heard him – one was a Secret Service man, another was Saul Kohler, of the New house papers. All too often, Hunter Thompson's remarkable and vast journalistic production has been overwhelmed and deluded by his famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I think that element of indecisiveness, and the willingness – as he said in his interview – to do anything possible to forge a “winning coalition” didn’t do him any good at all. 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.