Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Hunter S. Thompson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451691580
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 50th anniversary edition of "the best account yet published of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process" ( The New York Times Book Review ) featuring a new foreword from Johnny Knoxville. A half-century after its original publication, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 remains a cornerstone of American political journalism and one of the bestselling campaign books of all time. Thompson's searing account of the battle for the 1972 presidency—from the Democratic primaries to the eventual showdown between George McGovern and Richard Nixon—is infused with the characteristic wit, intensity, and emotional engagement that made Thompson "the flamboyant apostle and avatar of gonzo journalism" ( The New York Times ). Hilarious, terrifying, insightful, and compulsively readable, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is an epic political adventure that captures the feel of the American democratic process better than any other book ever written—and that is just as relevant to the many ills and issues roiling the nation today. As Johnny Knoxville writes in his foreword to this 50th anniversary edition: "Hunter predicted it all."

December 1971

Is This Trip Necessary?… Strategic Retreat into National Politics… Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike… Setting Up the National Affairs Desk… Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace?… Fear and Loathing in Washington…

Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days… even more than the Alsop brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life—all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp—and also a fifty watt “boombox” for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball… a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.

One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the “Westward Movement” in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk… and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown… which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed… for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.

Where indeed?

At 5:30 in the morning I can walk outside to piss casually off my stoop and watch the lawn dying slowly from a white glaze of frost… Nothing moving out here tonight; not since that evil nigger hurled a three-pound Washington Post through the shattered glass coachlight at the top of my stone front steps. He offered to pay for it, but my Dobermans were already on him.

Life runs fast & mean in this town. It’s like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear. Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto in the Northwest quadrant of town—which seems to have made things a lot easier for the black marauders who have turned places like chic Georgetown and once-stylish Capitol Hill into hellishly paranoid Fear Zones.

Washington Post columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon/Mitchell administration—seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost—seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C., has become the “Rape Capital of the World.”

One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial townhouses with cut-glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument… When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.

“Good God, man!” said my friend from the liberal New York Post. “You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!”

Crime figures for “The District” are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover.¹ Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the two hundred and fifty murders this year, only thirty-six have been solved… and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.

Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District—a few blocks from the Capitol—in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as “hall passes.” So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet—fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.

This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 magnum. But in Washington you get the impression—if you believe what you hear from even the most “liberal” insiders—that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.

Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet… but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.

All this sounds incredible—and that was my reaction at first: “Come on! It can’t be that bad!”

“You wait and see,” they said. “And meanwhile, keep your doors locked.” I immediately called Colorado and had another Doberman shipped in. If this is what’s happening in this town, I felt, the thing to do was get right on top of it… but paranoia gets very heavy when there’s no more humor in it; and it occurs to me now that maybe this is what has happened to whatever remains of the “liberal power structure” in Washington. Getting beaten in Congress is one thing—even if you get beaten a lot—but when you slink out of the Senate chamber with your tail between your legs and then have to worry about getting mugged, stomped, or raped in the Capitol parking lot by a trio of renegade Black Panthers… well, it tends to bring you down a bit, and warp your Liberal Instincts.

There is no way to avoid “racist undertones” here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks—not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, “Why the fuck did you do that?” And I tell myself, “Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see.” And sometimes I do, but not always…

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs… humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel piss-ant; dragging a massive orange U-haul trailer full of books and “important papers”… feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.

It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving… but not even this new, six-cylinder super-Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado, to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown… still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezewood in Pennsylania; I’d stopped there to ponder the drug question with two freaks I met on the Turnpike.

They had blown a tire east of Everett, but nobody would stop to lend them a jack. They had a spare tire—and a jack, too, for that matter—but no jack-handle; no way to crank the car up and put the spare on. They had gone out to Cleveland, from Baltimore—to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit… and they’d picked up this ’66 Ford Fairlane for $150.

I was impressed.

“Shit,” they said. “You can pick up a goddamn new Thunderbird out there for seven-fifty. All you need is cash, man; people are desperate! There’s no work out there, man; they’re selling everything! It’s down to a dime on the dollar. Shit, I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Baltimore.”

I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business, if things were as good as they said. They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland area and places like Baltimore, Philly and Washington. “All you need,” they said, “is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars.”

“Right,” I said. “And some jack-handles.”

“What?”

“Jack-handles—for scenes like these.”

They laughed. Yeah, a jack-handle or so might save a lot of trouble. They’d been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by… and in truth I only stopped because I couldn’t quite believe what I thought I’d just seen. Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade—running easily, for a change—when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.

I hit the brakes and pulled over. What the fuck was that? I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days… and you don’t really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.

A white bear? Agnew’s other son?

At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not? Check it out.

But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer… so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn’t back up.

But I was still curious. So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a .357 magnum in the other. No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought—by wild beasts or anything else. My instincts were purely humanitarian—but what about that Thing I was going back to look for? You read about these people in the Reader’s Digest: blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.

Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather. You never know… and that warning works both ways. Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle… and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a .357 magnum in his hand.

A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help. For all they knew I was half-mad on PCP and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials… nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.

But this time things worked out—as they usually do when you go with your instincts—and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half-frozen heads with a blowout… and the “white bear” rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop. At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said: “I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane—even a Cop Car; this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me… shit, they’re supposed to help people, right…?”

Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the car until we started cranking it up. The Volvo jack wouldn’t work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.

When Lester finally got out he didn’t say much; but finally his head seemed to clear and he helped put the tire on. Then he looked up at me wh...