high brain rooms

"Obscene, horrid, repellent...driving, urgent, candid, searing...a fascinating, compelling book!"
is what the New York Post said about
Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.
Kurt Vonegut, Jr. said, "Hunter Thompson is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists."

The New York Times: "Gaze in awe...Hunter Thompson does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity. And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."
------------------ {excerpt, from Thompson / Loathing}
In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brain-rooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we're all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can't bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President...John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed... {January 1971}

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{excerpt - Loathing, May 1971} ------------- The only way to talk to [Ted] Kennedy these days is to spend a lot of time on the Washington cocktail circuit, which is not my beat -- but the society columnists and Gentlemen Journalists who do most of their work in that area are now convinced that Kennedy is ready to crank his weight behind McGovern any time the Senator asks for it.

The only reporter in WAshington who appears to believe that Teddy is marshalling his forces for a last-minute blitz for his own candidacy in '72 is Kandy Stroud of Women's Wear Daily. She says he is sneaking around the country on weekends, lashing together a very ominous coalition. She broke the story in WWD on April 25th, the same day George McGovern swept all 102 delegates in the Massachusetts primary.

"Quietly," she wrote, "as if it were being pulled by cats, the Kennedy bandwagon has begun rolling...."---------------------------
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{excerpt, Jackie Style, by Pamela Clarke Keogh. Copyright 2001. Harper Collins, New York.]----------------
Robert Love, managing editor of Rolling Stone, [remembers] working with Jackie [Kennedy Onassis] on a collection of essays entitled Rolling Stone: 25 Years of Journalism on the Edge. They were first brought together by Jann Wenner, founding editor and editor in chief of Rolling Stone, and a longtime friend of Jackie's. One day, he told Bob he had a surprise for him -- they were going to have lunch with Jackie and the publisher of Doubleday at '21' to discuss book ideas. "So I wore my best Armani suit -- and I walked in and Jann said, 'Jackie, this is Bob Love, he's Hunter Thompson's editor.' And Jackie looked at me and said in that whispery voice, 'You don't look like Hunter's editor.' It was pretty funny."
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I remembered that my cousin Rick in Ohio met Hunter Thompson once, in California, in the 60s or 70s, at a newspaper, or journalism school, or something. With long weekend coming up, will read Fear - Loathing, then write to Rick and ask him to describe the event. Or -- moment.

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