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

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McGovern: Well, he cut us up in California to the point where we probably never fully recovered from that, either. Thompson began his coverage of the campaign in December 1971, just as the race toward the primaries was beginning, from a rented apartment in Washington, D. It was sort of a giant auditorium… where a big crowd of mainly young people were waiting for McGovern… and all the national press and the network cameras.

But all of a sudden here we were covering a presidential campaign and there were joints being passed up and down the aisle: weird people in the cockpit… drug addicts… lunatics… crowding into the cockpit just to get high and wired on the lights. He’d have somebody else go get it for him… and if anybody asked what he was drinking, he’d say “orange juice. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota. Or, as history podcaster Dan Carlin often puts it: “I want a country that matches the marketing material. 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.

Groups of men with nothing to talk about — say, at a mediocre party — will find common ground in sports statistics.

The campaign plane would fly into a state and the staffers would have conflicting things set up for him to do.And then the accommodation of – at least the beginning of the accommodation of Peking and Moscow seemed to disarm a lot of moderates and liberals who might otherwise have been looking in another direction. You said the candidates… the staff, and the press… were all on The Edge … is politics the greatest Edge you’ve discovered? And right smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic in Washington, right straight across the island … up over this huge bump, in a driving rain, he made a highspeed U-turn right over the island and back into the other lane, and cars were skidding at us, coming sideways and fishtailing, trying to avoid us … That was the kind of mood the McGovern people were in. I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns… At every hotel, wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press.

When I see men dutifully gazing at the screens in some bar, I think of them as doing their “man homework.HST: Frank knew the name of that anaesthesiologist, that woman who gave him the gas during one of the shock treatments, but he wouldn’t tell me.

get a head full of really dangerous chemicals, and GET THE STORY; even if you have to create it yourself along the way.Despite the unconventional style, the book is still considered a hallmark of campaign journalism and helped to launch Thompson's role as a popular political observer. One afternoon about three days ago the Editorial Enforcement Detail from the Rolling Stone office showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about 40 pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. McGovern: I thought it was an effort to maybe bring some of his people back on board who otherwise would go for Nixon or sit out the election.