Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72: 40th Anniversary Edition

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Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more Court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.

Comments on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979), p. 109Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County Jail,” he writes from Milwaukee. “They are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won’t drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer.”

Jim Flug says he’d rather not talk about Kennedy running for President—at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast. Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who “matters” in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup Polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon—almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates. edit ] For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. It’s a political gig,” I said. “I’m going to Washington to cover the ’72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone.” In her new book, The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Thompson says her husband built his career with a tireless dedication to the craft of reporting, a keen awareness of his own shortcomings and his personal blend of patriotism: loving his country while mistrusting authority. … Her book, published by Fulcrum Publishing, depicts the man who used the pseudonym Raoul Duke in his famous Fear and Loathing as a relentless researcher and a voracious reader. He viewed politics as both worthy and necessary to get things done, the book says, and he believed nothing could be accomplished without friends and allies.

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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.C. (a situation he compared to "living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear"). Over the next twelve months, in voluminous detail, he covered every aspect of the campaign, from the smallest rally to the raucous conventions. With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began three years ago. Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed.