Fifty years ago, as Richard Nixon sought to retain hold of the White House in the 1972 US presidential election, Hunter S. Thompson set off for Washington on behalf of Rolling Stone, then a young music magazine making its first major foray into political journalism. Not many were surprised at this change in the magazine’s direction given the diminishing gap between culture and politics in the sixties and early seventies, but more than a few eyebrows were raised over Jann Wenner’s decision to send his Gonzo journalist to do the job. 

At this point, Thompson was well on his way to becoming a countercultural icon. Five years earlier, he had captured the country’s attention with an article and a book about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, then honed his unique form of literary journalism over the intervening years, earning the moniker “Gonzo” for his coverage of the 1970 Kentucky Derby. In November 1971, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was serialised was in Rolling Stone and it would be published by Random House in mid-’72 when Thompson was in the thick of his campaign coverage. 

Famous for his bravery and brashness, not to mention his penchant for mind-altering substances, Thompson was hardly the obvious choice for covering a political campaign. At the time, campaign reporters were comparatively restrained – which is to say that they seldom ate acid or used terms like “scumsucker” when describing candidates – and so the Gonzo writer, it seemed, was more suited to writing about bikers, beatniks, barflies, and other groups on the fringes of society. A presidential campaign was perhaps more suited to Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather.

However, Thompson was not entirely inexperienced in the realm of politics. Ten years earlier, during his tenure at the National Observer, he had written extensively on South American politics, and then in the late sixties had written a handful of political pieces back in the US. In 1970, he had even run his own political campaign, very nearly becoming sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. Still, despite this experience, the news that Thompson would become head of the magazine’s newly formed National Affairs Bureau elicited laughter from the Rolling Stone staff. This had to be a joke, they thought. 

They were wrong, of course, and the resulting articles were a sensation. Compiled after the campaign as a book (titled Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72), many consider this to be Thompson’s finest writing and indeed some of the best – and certainly the most original – political journalism of the twentieth century. Eschewing objectivity, Thompson produced an outrageous collection so unique that it reshaped perceptions of what political journalism could be. He shocked and amused the country, inspired his fellow journalists, and perhaps even influenced the election itself. 

*

To understand how and why Hunter S. Thompson produced such an utterly original book on the campaign, and to better grasp what it actually meant, we need to first look back at how he developed the inimitable style known as Gonzo. 

Thompson’s journalistic career began when he was a teenager. After a few too many brushes with the law, he failed to graduate from high school and wound up in the Air Force. An astonishing bit of luck meant that he was – without any prior experience – appointed sports editor of the Command Courier, the newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle. Here, while learning the basics of reporting, editing, photographing, and laying out copy, Thompson discovered that it wasn’t hard to insert little jokes into his articles or twist stories so that they were somehow more about him than a boring golf competition or basketball game. He had a flair for hyperbole and wasn’t shy about grossly exaggerating or sometimes outright fabricating stories, and in the process he became a popular writer whose comical, whimsical tales amused his fellow airmen. Unsurprisingly, his reporting irritated his superiors and he was soon relieved of his position and kicked out of the Air Force. 

After several years of struggling to make a living as a reporter or editor in various parts of the United States and Puerto Rico, Thompson’s big break came with a stint as the National Observer’s South American correspondent, a position that allowed him an extraordinary amount of freedom. He wandered across the vast continent, turning in articles on whatever interested him – usually Latin American politics. His stories were experimental and personal, but above all they were engaging and humorous. His editors back in Washington DC hoped that they had some truth to them, too. Luckily for Thompson, there was no means of fact-checking much of what he said in the pre-digital era, and so they had to take the young writer at his word. Their faith, however, was misguided. Time and again he exercised his prodigious imagination, inventing scenes, dialogue, and even people to help articulate his views. 

Incredibly, from Thompson’s perspective, this was a valid journalistic technique. “Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t reach,” he explained to one editor. “Facts are lies when they’re added up, and the only kind of journalism I can pay much attention to is something like Down and Out in Paris and London.” In his first book, George Orwell really had slummed it in those two European capitals, but he took serious artistic liberties in order to convey – or perhaps distil – his experiences for the reader, essentially taking what he knew to be truth and putting it into a fictional framework to more effectively convey this truth than he could have through more conventional means. 

Thompson believed that this was reasonable, and so he invented characters that he felt were representative of groups of real people or whom he depicted having conversations that succinctly conveyed ideas he had overheard on his own travels. Of course, all reporters warp reality in some sense. Simply by choosing what to report and what not to report, they are shaping their readers’ perceptions. Thompson was merely going a step further by gathering several people and dozens of conversations, then combining them into one or two voices. To a friend in Spain, he explained this concept with an effective example:

You say, for instance, that Spain will undoubtedly go Communist and you will get a lot of noisy shit, perhaps even from the editor you send it to. If, on the other hand, you tell exactly how one frustrated Spaniard spends his waking hours, damn few people are going to be in a position to say you’re wrong.

Of course, in Thompson’s work that “Spaniard” would be a composite of several or many, but the reader would usually be led to believe that he was a real person. In some articles, though, he subtly acknowledged that what he had reported had not happened in a literal sense, usually adding a little joke as a sort of wink to his reader. Often, he used made-up names that he considered comical, or inserted hyperbole that he felt no one could be foolish enough to mistake for reality. In an attempt to convey the arrogance of wealthy gringos in South America, Thompson wrote of an aristocratic Brit smacking golf balls into a favela whilst sipping a gin and tonic. In a tacit admission that this was fiction, he wrote to a friend that the story “smacked of authenticity.” 

Thompson’s early writings were filled with such fabrications and exaggerations, so it was hardly a surprise when his editors raised questions. One noted that “hyperbole was Hunter’s stock-in-trade, and we understood that” but that over time his articles took on a “fairy-story aura.” Despite his experimental approach, Thompson was defensive whenever questioned about the accuracy of his journalism, alternating between anger and a dismissive attitude towards dull realities such as facts and figures. When it transpired that he had invented and distorted statistics about what he wanted to depict as a dying Western town, he simply replied, “Who cares about these kinds of facts?” Elsewhere, he said, “My concern with accuracy is on a higher level than nickels and dimes, in a word, line by line.” In other words, he would say whatever he felt was necessary to convey his version of reality, and facts be damned. 

With the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy and the violence he witnessed at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Thompson’s writing grew more aggressive and he became more entrenched in his view that journalism could not only feature elements of fiction, but in fact erase the distinction between these categories entirely. This would go far beyond the New Journalism (a genre not named until 1973) concept of utilising the techniques of fiction to present reality, instead deliberately blending the real and the imagined and asking the reader to determine which was true. He also became increasingly politicised and, for several years, he planned a political book that would explore “the Death of the American Dream” through the eyes of his alter ego, Raoul Duke. “I’d have to mix up fact and fantasy so totally that nobody could be sure which was which,” he told one editor. But it was a difficult concept to justify or execute, and the book was never written. 

The 1968 election of Richard Nixon gave Thompson a much-needed nemesis, someone against whom he could focus his literary-journalistic abilities in what he viewed as a fight for the soul of his country. Politicians like Nixon, he recognised, would do or say whatever they needed to gain or maintain power, and the national press was complicit by regurgitating their speeches and press releases. If the people expressed their discontentment, it would be met with violence. In Thompson’s mind, it was therefore perfectly justifiable to use unconventional journalistic tactics, including a deliberate conflation of reality and fantasy, alongside hyperbole and vulgarity, to deal with such people. Whatever it took, basically, to allow a reader to see past the façade and recognise the likes of Nixon for what they really were. It was time to take Gonzo to Washington.   

*

In late 1971, Thompson set off from his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, headed for Washington DC, his base of operations for the duration of the year-long campaign. With virtual carte blanche from a fawning Jann Wenner, he would take all of his journalistic innovations and push them as far as he could in an attempt to explode the conventions of political reportage and peel back the curtain to expose for his readers the ugliness of American politics. Both he and Wenner hoped this revolutionary style of coverage would mobilise the new youth bloc created following the twenty-sixth amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. 

Though many of his reports from the campaign trail would be incendiary, the very earliest ones were comparatively tame. There were a few comical outbursts, but generally he wrote about his own attempts to get acquainted with the candidates and his role. Using made-up characters (Lester and Jerry, presumably named for Lester Bangs and Jerry Garcia) as reader surrogates in order to articulate his intentions, he explained that this would not be an attempt at objective journalism, which he deemed impossible. “The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism,” he wrote, “was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.” His philosophy was that an attempt at objectivity was fundamentally dishonest; it was better to admit your biases up front and then say whatever the hell you wanted. At least then the reader would know whether or not to trust you.

In these relatively restrained reports, he set the scene for his readers and brought them into his world – that of a relative outsider, struggling to wrap his head around the campaign and constantly vying with tyrannical deadlines. In a sense, it was behind-the-scenes coverage, detailing the day-to-day life of a political journalist rather than offering conventional analysis. However, things turned altogether more Gonzo in March, when he inserted himself into the campaign by giving his press credentials to a drunk whom he named “the Boohoo.” The man boarded a train with Senator Ed Muskie, then drunkenly harassed him whenever he attempted to deliver a speech. Thompson gleefully reported the ensuing carnage. 

The following month, he stepped up his assault on Muskie, suggesting that the senator’s allegedly hysterical reaction to “the Boohoo” was due to his use of a rare African drug: 

Not much has been written about The Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the Presidential Campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race—about a week before the vote—word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug” that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

[…]

In retrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was—far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy—suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “the only Democrat who can beat Nixon.”

Thompson had made it clear prior to these reports that he had nothing more than disdain for Ed Muskie, calling him a “neo-Nixon hack,” chastising him for flip-flopping on the Vietnam War as soon as public opinion swayed far enough for that to be a tenable position, and for being present at the ’68 Democratic Convention – an event that had gravely scarred Thompson. But politicians were adept at explaining away the usual accusations, and so he was given the Gonzo treatment. It more effectively implanted in the reader’s mind the image of an incompetent, irrational, and now beleaguered candidate. 

It should go without saying, of course, that Muskie was not wacked-out on Ibogaine. Years later, Thompson admitted this:

It didn’t occur to me until the very end of the book, at the end of the campaign, that people really believed that Muskie was eating Ibogaine. I never said he was. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was. Which was true and I started the rumor.

Still, in order to understand how Thompson really viewed this as anything more than a bizarre and public prank, we need to remember that he was consistently attempting to expose hidden realities for his reader. Muskie’s behaviour during this election had appeared bizarre not only to Thompson but to other journalists, with the Ibogaine suggestion partially a reference to the candidate appearing to cry during a press conference. Thompson felt that his outrageous suggestion was a means of presenting the likely truth behind the weirdness: 

I give the Ibogaine as an example of the Gonzo technique. It’s essentially a “what if.” If Ed Muskie’s acting like this here’s an explanation. But I had to have his behavior down—talking with his innermost staff people. They were telling me things they don’t tell other reporters. Like “Ye gods, man, how did I ever get involved with this campaign?”

In other words, Muskie, a favourite to win the Democratic nomination, was unstable and would be trounced by the incumbent. 

As the campaign continued, it was not only Muskie whom Thompson excoriated. He wrote almost as viciously about the other Democratic candidates. Still, he reserved his most scathing language for Richard Nixon, particularly in the later months of the campaign, as it became clear that he would retain the presidency. Again and again, throughout these reports and much of his career, Thompson savaged Nixon, using every foul image his vast imagination could conjure to present to his reader what he perceived as the reality of this uniquely evil man. At the time, this was far from common in the wider press. Certainly, small publications, typically the mimeo’d magazines coming out of liberal enclaves, like Paul Krassner’s The Realist, would go after politicians with an approach that would test the very limits of free speech, but Thompson was doing this on a much larger scale and that of course brought into question the ethics of his approach. 

His justification was that Nixon and his ilk were masters of manipulation and therefore taking them at their word was a failure of the press. He felt that political journalists mostly repeated what Nixon and his PR people fed them (he called one Washington Post reporter “a human pencil”) and that even the most critical reporters were easily countered by the wily politician with the slick public image. You simply could not report on the likes of Nixon – or his equally corrupt Democratic counterparts, for that matter – with conventional approaches. They were just too slippery. But if you employed the techniques of fiction, or simply did away with conventions, it was easier to show the reader who the villains really were. As Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern’s campaign manager, famously said, “It’s the most accurate and least factual book about the campaign.”

Ultimately, although Nixon won the election by a landslide, Thompson was successful in redefining political journalism and politicising the youth. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 was a tremendous hit and is still revered today. It is hard to imagine the minutiae of a political campaign from a half century ago making for riveting reading, but it does. By making it personal and even conspiratorial, Thompson succeeded in bringing readers inside the campaign, and by making it outrageous and hilarious, he made the political as enthralling as an exciting sports contest. He was perceptive, prophetic, and his rejection of objectivity worked because he was able to cut through the public image and describe the various candidates in ways that regular people could understand, even if that meant slipping into fantastic: 

it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close….

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn… pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness… towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue…

That may be the most famous passage, but the entire book is littered with wonderful instances of vile insults and caricatures. He calls Ed Muskie a “wiggy bastard,” Hubert Humphrey “a swine,” and George Wallace the inbred descendent of criminals-turned-slaver-owners. Presidential candidates, in general, are dismissed as having the mentality of “a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck.” Meanwhile, the most idealistic of Washington players are drugged and tricked into raping children by a man called “the Fixer,” who can then blackmail them on behalf of unnamed nefarious forces… It is dark, it is outrageous, yet somehow it comes closer than most to nailing down the cynical, sadistic, and corrupt elements of a presidential campaign. 

Thompson is rightly applauded for his insights and techniques and his book will likely remain a classic of political journalism for decades to come, but, particularly in light of recent political divisions and media developments, it begs some rather difficult questions. At the time, his writing was revolutionary and his cause was righteous – after all, it would emerge in the following years that Nixon was every bit as awful as Thompson said – but what happens when the rules of have been bent so far that vitriol, hyperbole, and the conflation of fact and fiction have been entirely normalised? Did the Gonzo approach to politics perhaps set us on the road to this era of “alternative facts” and “fake news”? 

In the fifty years since Thompson reported on that election, his influence has spread far beyond the counterculture. He has – directly or otherwise – inspired journalists across the political spectrum and it is not hard to see how his once-revolutionary brand of political reporting has shaped contemporary discourse. Among both professional journalists and amateur commentators, it is now common to eschew objectivity and embrace personal biases, reporting what feels right rather than what can be factually proven, picking and choosing facts or using hyperbole to demonstrate a belief. His no-holds-barred approach to describing politicians, portraying them as nearly demonic simply because he disliked some aspect of their character or politics, is now almost passé. 

Thompson of course had no idea that he had opened this journalistic Pandora’s box, but he certainly recognised the limitations of his innovations, going so far as to express lament for his choices. In 1975, backed into a corner by his own reputation, he told a reporter: 

I did all that craziness because I thought it was funny. But I think a lot of it was definitely harmful. It hurt my effectiveness. Like when I was denouncing Nixon in the terms that I did. That image took the edge off some of the fairly acute judgments that I made.

Most readers would probably disagree. Thompson’s shock tactics were highly effective in focusing a reader’s attention on issues they would otherwise overlook or exposing elements of a politician’s personality that were typically hidden by their carefully manicured public personal. And as for the comedy aspect – what he created was a brand of brutal satire that paradoxically illuminated reality by distorting it.

It may be uncomfortable to note the similarities between Thompson’s style of reportage and certain underhanded tactics unemployed in our present media landscape. The emotive language, the “what if” method of insinuation, the distortion or fabrication of facts and figures, and, often, pure flights of fancy have very much been co-opted for less admirable of intentions. But Thompson’s journalistic innovations were, at the time, radical and effective, and his campaign reporting continues to entertain a full half-century after its creation. It is hard not to re-read his reports and laugh… and laughter is something in short supply these days.