if things were as good as they said

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists.  [Hunter Thompson excerpt]  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 Pennsylvania; 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?"--------------- [end excerpt]

=====================
Listen to the wind blow
Watch the sun rise
Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain
And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

Listen to the wind blow
Down comes the night
Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence
Damn the dark, damn the light

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain
And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)}
{song -- "The Chain" -- written by Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, Stevie Nicks.  Rumours - Fleetwood Mac - 1977 (Warner Bros.)}

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in the warm Pacific dusk

[Hunter Thompson book, Campaign trail '72 - excerpt]---------

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? ----------------------- [end excerpt]

=========================

For you, there'll be no more crying,
For you, the sun will be shining,
And I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right, I know it's right

To you, I'll give the world
to you, I'll never be cold
'Cause I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right -- I know it's right.

And the songbirds are singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before.

And I wish you all the love in the world,
But most of all, I wish it from myself.

And the songbirds keep singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before...Like never before. ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)
{song -- "Songbird," by Christine McVie.  Rumours album.  Fleetwood Mac.  Warner Bros.  1977.}

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baby I'd give you my world

[excerpt-Hunter Thompson]-------------
...and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening:  from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.

So this is more a jangled campaign diary than a record or reasoned analysis of the '72 presidential campaign.  Whatever I wrote in the midnight hours on rented typewriters in all those cluttered hotel rooms along the campaign trail -- from the Wayfarer Inn outside Manchester to the Neil House in Columbus to the Wilshire Hyatt House in L.A. and the Fontainebleau in Miami -- is no different now than it was back in March and May and July when I was cranking it out of the typewriter one page at a time and feeding it into the plastic maw of that goddamn Mojo Wire to some hash-addled freak of an editor at the Rolling Stone news-desk in San Francisco.

What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history.  There will be no shortage of books covering that end.  The last count I got was just before Christmas in '72, when ex-McGovern speech writer Sandy Berger said at least nineteen people who'd been involved in the campaign were writing books about it -- so we'll eventually get the whole story, for good or ill.

Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in twenty-four hours . . . . but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter.  About four fingers of king-hell Crank would do the trick, but I am not optimistic.  There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage Crank on the market these days -- and according to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington, that's solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

Well . . . thank Jesus for that.  I was beginning to think we were never going to put the arm on that crowd.  But the people in Washington say we're finally making progress.  And if anybody should know, it's them.  So maybe this country's about to get back on the Right Track.

---HST
Sunday, January 28, 1973
San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn-------------------[end first excerpt]

===============================
Loving you
Isn't the right thing to do
How can I ever change things
that I feel

If I could
Maybe I'd give you my world
How can I
When you won't take it from me

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

Tell me why
Everything turned around
Packing up
Shacking up is all you wanna do

If I could
Baby I'd give you my world
Open up
Everything's waiting for you

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "Author's Note/Introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song -- "Go Your Own Way," written by Lindsey Buckingham -- Rumours, Fleetwood Mac, (Warner Bros.) 1977}

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rejecting the luxury of hindsight

[Hunter Thompson excerpt]-------------- ... thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.

Things were never the same after that.  A cloud of hellish intensity had come down on the McGovern campaign by the time it rolled into California.  Mandates came down from the top, warning staffers to beware of the press.  The only exceptions were reporters who were known to have a decent respect for things said "in confidence," and I didn't fit that description.

And so much for all that.  The point I meant to make here -- before we wandered off on that tangent about jackrabbits -- is that everything in this book except the footnotes was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

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 fifty or sixty bets I made between February and November.  My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern's staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35 percent of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37.5 percent.  But from that point on, I won steadily -- until November 7, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct.

The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? 

I blew that one,

along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven't changed anything else in this mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can't find any excuse for changing my final prediction.  Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which -- in addition to the publisher's desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those twelve frantic months -- was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening:  from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.-----------------[end excerpt]

====================
[song excerpt]----Don't stop,
thinking about tomorrow,
Don't stop, it'll soon be here,
It'll be -- better than before,
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.

Why not think about times to come,
And not about the things that you've done,
If your life was bad to you,
Just think what tomorrow will do.

Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Don't stop, it'll soon be here,
It'll be-e -- better than before,
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone....

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "Author's Note / Introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{second excerpt, "Don't Stop" by Christine McVie -- Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album, Warner Bros., released Feb. 1977}

-30-

dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts

...you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them -- and to keep them as sources of private information -- you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.

This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the '72
----------[Hunter Thompson excerpt]---------- presidential campaign.  As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as "off the record."  The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby / cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists -- in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. 

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.

A classic example of this syndrome was the disastrous "Eagleton Affair."  Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps knew Eagleton was a serious boozer with a history of mental breakdowns -- but none of them had ever written about it, and the few who were known to have mentioned it privately clammed up 1000 percent when McGovern's harried staffers began making inquiries on that fateful Thursday afternoon in Miami. 

Any Washington political reporter who blows a Senator's chance for the vice-presidency might as well start looking for another beat to cover -- because his name will be instant Mud on Capitol Hill.

When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap.  Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me -- because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill.  I went there for two reasons:  (1) to learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign, and (2) to write about it the same way I'd write about anything else -- as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.

It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well -- but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach.  The most obvious and least serious of these was the fact that even the few people I considered my friends in Washington treated me like a walking bomb; some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and utter words that would almost certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. 

The other, more complex, problem had to do with my natural out-front bias in favor of the McGovern candidacy -- which was not a problem at first, when George was such a hopeless underdog that his staffers saw no harm in talking frankly with any journalist who seemed friendly and interested -- but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very uncomfortable position. 

Some of the friends I'd made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern winning the Democratic nomination seemed almost as weird as the appearance of a full-time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail, were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I'd been hanging around with for entirely personal reasons, but key people in a fast-rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not only of winning the party nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.

McGovern's success in the primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who were running his campaign -- especially those who had come to know me well enough to sense that my contempt for the time-honored double standard in political journalism might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly pragmatic style of politics that George was getting into. 

And their apprehension increased measurably as it became obvious that dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone.  Not long after McGovern's breakthrough victory in the Wisconsin primary, arch-establishment mouthpiece Stewart Alsop went out of his way to quote some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey in his Newsweek column, thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.

Things were never the same after that.---------------------- [end excerpt]

========================
She broke down and let me in
Made me see where I've been

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

You don't know what it means to win
Come down and see me again

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "author's note/inroduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song:  "Never Going Back Again" - written, Lindsey Buckingham - Rumours album - Fleetwood Mac - Warner Bros. - released Feb. 1977}

-30-

...I keep my visions to myself

--------------...and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.--------------

[Hunter Thompson excerpt]

------------------ There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of the book was written.  From December '71 to January '73 -- in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country -- there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. 

There was never enough time. 

Every deadline was a crisis. 

All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example.  Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day -- while my own deadline fell every two weeks -- but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that.  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. . . . On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness.  But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines:  eat, [make love], sleep, hop around a bush now & then. . . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while;

there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

Why not?  Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . . . but too many adrenalin rushes in any given time-span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain:  after a while you start burning out the circuits.

When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed -- and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.

Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them.  Politics has its own language, which is often so complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate -- to make sense of the partisan bullshit that even your friends will lay on you -- without crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. 

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."  In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them -- and to keep them as sources of private information -- you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print....------------------------------------- {end excerpt}

================
...Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Say .. Women ... they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean .. you'll know

Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me
Who wants -- to wrap around your dreams and ...
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness ...
Like a heartbeat ... drives you mad ...
In the stillness of remembering what you had ...
And what you lost ...
and what you had ...
And what you lost

Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "author's note / introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{second excerpt, "Dreams," written by Stevie Nicks, Rumours album, recorded by Fleetwood Mac, Warner Bros. label, released Feb. 1977.}

-30-

one thing I think you should know

-------------------------Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now:  6:09 A.M.  I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn . . . out here at the far end of Geary Street:  this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.  From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of "Seal Rock" looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light.------------------

[excerpt, "Author's Note" at the beginning of Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter Thompson (Copyright 1973, Straight Arrow Books) -- the author's note / introduction written Jan., 1973]----------------

-------------- About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night.  Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound.  Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking -- racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window, howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs . . . off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds, I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami; but that one will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank's chest.

That dog will not enter this room again.  He came in with the book-editor, who went away about six hours ago with thirteen finished chapters -- the bloody product of fifty-five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless, high-speed editing.  But there was no other way to get the thing done.  I am not an easy person to work with, in terms of deadlines.  When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office . . . but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn't show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing:  move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.

One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded aobut forty 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.  There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders -- in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.

We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer's Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone -- pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my head.  When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel . . . and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.

=====================
...One thing -- I think you should know...
I ain't gonna miss you when you go.
Been down so long,
I've been tossed around enough...
Oh, won't you just let me go down
and do my stuff?

I know -- you're hoping to find
Someone who's gonna give you peace of mind.
When times go bad,
when times go rough...

{outtake from "Second Hand News" - Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac.  Rumours album -- Feb. 1977}

-30-