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Hunter S. Thompson Was a Weird Visionary Before Drugs and Politics Ate His Brain

In 1972, he was a wounded, disillusioned political observer who turned a beating in Chicago into a potent source of rage at the machine

by
Jeff Weiss
October 23, 2024
Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson drawing, 1982

© Ralph Steadman Art Collection Ltd.

Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson drawing, 1982

© Ralph Steadman Art Collection Ltd.

In the fall of 2004, Hunter S. Thompson visited Los Angeles for a signing at a place on the Sunset Strip called Book Soup. Even though he’d barely written anything worthwhile since I’d been born, he remained one of my few heroes still breathing. A mythic artifact of an analogue culture on the verge of extinction.

So on a rainy and miserable October night, I left my entry-level job on the outer rings of journalism to fight an hour of rush hour traffic. By the time I arrived in West Hollywood, the line already stretched three blocks long. I didn’t have an umbrella, but I took a number, and headed to the back of the queue. The crowd was what you’d expect: self-styled eccentrics sipping flasks of rotgut whiskey, smoking dirt weed spliffs, and proudly showing each other their Gonzo-related tattoos.

After an hour and a half, I strolled up to the windows to see if I could glimpse the Good Doctor. Some commotion was brewing inside and the security guards quickly shut the door. Within a few minutes, a clerk came out to tell us that “Mr. Thompson had to leave. No more books will be signed at this time.” Someone exiting from the shop cracked that he’d seen Thompson start uncontrollably puking. He’d been openly guzzling a bottle of champagne while hanging with Benicio del Toro. Once he got sick, the pair quickly escaped into a white stretch limousine.

Today, this is the Thompson that most people remember. The slurring and vulgar Halloween costume caricature idolized for his overindulgence.

But over half a century ago, he produced one of the most memorable feats of political writing in American history: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. In retrospect, it was the last of his three full-length masterpieces. He was just 35 on publication day.

This was the Hunter S. Thompson transformed by the “Battle of Chicago” at the 1968 Democratic convention, where he watched thousands of anti-war protesters get cornered and clubbed like Russian harp seals under the paternal watch of Mayor Richard Daley. A patriot who reviled nationalism and a serious writer with a deceptively sensitive streak. The journalist claimed that witnessing the assault permanently tweaked his brain chemistry. For a month afterward, the 31-year-old was crippled by inconsolable angst and hysteria. “It changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it,” Thompson wrote nearly two full decades later. “There was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago.”

After several years living in the Bay Area at the height of the acid era, Thompson saw the nation’s soul as locked in a Manichean struggle where his side—“The Good Guys”—were destined to prevail. Then Martin Luther King Jr. and Thompson’s chosen candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, were murdered two months apart in the spring of ’68. The chaos led him to Chicago in search of material for a never-delivered book called “The Death of the American Dream.”

Despite avoiding the worst of the violence, Thompson still received a night stick to the solar plexus while trying to cross a police barricade with his press pass. All in all, the Louisville native considered himself lucky, having witnessed at least 10 officer-inflicted beatdowns far worse than anything he’d ever seen the Hells Angels crank out. But the psychic scars never healed. For years, the Smith & Wesson-strapped “outlaw journalist” burst into tears every time he attempted to tell anyone what he’d witnessed. His first wife claimed that it was one of two times she ever saw him cry. He understood Chicago as a fatal rupture—a radicalizing jackboot stomp that abused him of any lingering doubts about the storm troopers-and-storm-clouds future of the republic.

While the written word has natural limitations, it offers a staggering capacity for revenge. And Thompson was highly flammable, filled with rage and venom toward the traitors behind this state-sponsored attack. While he couldn’t pursue legal or physical retribution from the 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, Thompson could describe him in Rolling Stone four years later as a “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”

None of Thompson’s Molotov tangents convinced Humphrey’s VP candidate, Edmund Muskie, to reevaluate his Vietnam position. But he could spark a rumor that a Brazilian witch doctor had furnished “the man from Maine” with a mysterious African root hallucinogen called ibogaine. And this “rumor” could be rereported to where it significantly damaged Muskie’s prospects in the ’72 Democratic primary.

On the Campaign Trail is best understood as a road map of spiritual tragedy and cultural decline. 

In some respects, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a savage one-man counterinsurgency. Thompson’s bimonthly Rolling Stone dispatches—later collected in book form—offered space to not only flay his favorite villain Richard Nixon, but also the double-speaking Democratic Party hacks hatching their own cynical propaganda and calculations. Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics. A death letter directed at the schizophrenic duality of the national character, the slimy stock poltergeists who chronically haunt us, and our credulous need for both authenticity and artifice. It’s also a hysterical slapstick about meeting a deranged ex-Dead roadie turned acid casualty in a hotel bar, offering him your press credential, and letting the “Boohoo” run amok on Muskie’s Sunshine Special train across Florida.

At its most straightforward On the Campaign Trail remains an essential history for its shrewd political insight, guillotine prose, and immersive reporting. McGovern’s campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the “least accurate and most truthful” book about the election. But it’s best understood as a road map of spiritual tragedy and cultural decline. A bildungsroman about human limitation, our allergy to the truth, and the importance of trusting your instincts.

Things started with cautious optimism. In letters, Thompson told his Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner that they needed to create an underground movement to unseat Nixon. In 1971, the United States passed a constitutional amendment allowing 18-year-olds the right to vote, and Thompson imagined a generational awakening that embraced both the “latent & massive Kesey-style voter with the 18-21 types.”

From the first missives, Thompson mocked the folly of pure objectivity (“the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction.”) His guiding principle was H.L. Mencken’s adage that “the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” But over the months shadowing the candidates, Thompson practically became a McGovern surrogate. Without compromising his honesty, the writer quixotically tried to tip the election toward the son of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, described by Bobby Kennedy as “the most decent man in the Senate.”

On the Campaign Trail is a tragic comedy, too. For all of the sleepless nights flailing at the typewriter in a Ballantine and amphetamines trance, the malfunctioning Bavarian nightmare motels in Milwaukee, and Thompson’s own fight to keep his dim faith alive, Nixon still won 49 of 50 states, along with more than 60% of the popular vote. It was one of the most brutal landslides in history.

That’s why the epigraph is taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: “between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.” This is a nervous wail of volcanic anguish, immaculate shit-talking, and vanishing illusions. The growing awareness that this imperfect reality will only become more flawed. The slow twilight will be filled with broken shadows.

At a 1971 Big Sur retreat for Rolling Stone staffers, Wenner floated the idea of a writer moving to Washington, D.C., to cover the campaign between Nixon and whoever emerged from the Democratic scrum. The smart money was on Maine Sen. Muskie or Ted Kennedy—although the latter allegedly wasn’t running because of the Chappaquiddick incident. No one but Thompson wanted the assignment.

In the aftermath of Chicago, politics had become the writer’s obsession. Thompson’s Rolling Stone debut in October 1970 chronicled his stint managing the Aspen mayoral bid of a biker-lawyer named Joe Edwards. His near victory convinced the Hells Angels author that a political revolution was brewing among an unlikely coalition of bikers, dropouts, ski bums, acid heads, Black and Chicano radicals, and lunch-pail stiffs angered by the exploitative excesses of technocratic capitalism. Freak Power was the answer.

Thompson soon embarked on his own quest to be the sheriff of Pitkin County. He’d sunk his book royalties into a “heavily fortified compound” in Woody Creek, a remote, snow-capped postcard not far from Aspen. But shortly after he arrived in the Rockies, his red-cliff paradise began to be terraformed into slope-side luxury resorts for the wealthy.

The Freak Power candidacy was about retaliation. Shaving his head bald, Thompson started referring to his Dragnet-looking, law-and-order rival as “my long-haired opponent.” If Thompson won, he’d rip up all the city streets with jackhammers and fill them with sod. Drug sales would be controlled and dishonest dealers placed in the stocks. Only residents could hunt or fish. No sheriff’s deputies would be armed in public. And Aspen would be renamed “Fat City” to “prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals” from capitalizing on its name. A new and honest populism where “these swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land.”

Hunter S. Thompson, right, on a panel at Yale University held to discuss the influence of the press on the presidential election. Also on the panel are, from left, Charles Wheeler, chief U.S. correspondent for the BBC, Edwin Diamond, writer for New York magazine, professor Dahl of Yale, Frank Mankiewicz, campaign manager for George McGovern.
Hunter S. Thompson, right, on a panel at Yale University held to discuss the influence of the press on the presidential election. Also on the panel are, from left, Charles Wheeler, chief U.S. correspondent for the BBC, Edwin Diamond, writer for New York magazine, professor Dahl of Yale, Frank Mankiewicz, campaign manager for George McGovern.

Getty Images

It nearly worked. Thompson won the city of Aspen proper, but the rural gentry thwarted his attempted coup. Nonetheless, Thompson was determined to take this energy and these lessons over to the presidential campaign. And unlike almost every national correspondent, this would only be a one-year gig, meaning that Thompson could freely burn bridges (“the last thing I cared about was long-term connections on Capitol Hill”).

If politics is property, political journalism is about acquiring a set of keys. It helped that Thompson had a gambler’s intuition and bet on George McGovern to win the Democratic nomination. When he first rented a two-story brick house on the wrong side of Rock Creek Park in December of ’71, McGovern was considered a far-left longshot given no chance of winning the Democratic nomination by members of the D.C. press club. “He’d be a fine president,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.” For Thompson, the South Dakota senator was “the only candidate in either party worth voting for.” 

McGovern began as a single issue candidate: He’d end the Vietnam War immediately and offer amnesty to draft dodgers. Then the decorated ex-World War II bomber pilot would chop the military budget.

After the ’68 convention, McGovern had helped rewrite the Democratic primary rules to make the process more inclusive and diverse. And this awareness helped him build a meticulously organized grassroots movement to bypass the party machine. As soon as McGovern’s victory seemed believable, Warren Beatty started throwing benefit fundraisers. A Simon and Garfunkel reunion sold out Madison Square Garden for McGovern. Even the Dead did a show in support. I can’t find the tape, but I’m sure it didn’t do much to alter his perception as the “amnesty, acid, and abortion” candidate.

A half-century before politicians bragged about pop star Instagram endorsements, McGovern was the first to leverage celebrity co-signs in search of the “youth vote.” Rolling Stone was still considered subversive when the idea actually meant something. And with the publication of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas in the summer of ’72, Thompson was rapidly becoming one of the most famous writers in America, at a time when America actually had famous writers. The circumstances helped broker access to McGovern and his inner circle—as much as they could trust a reporter who claimed that one of his main opponents (Humphrey) was on an “exotic brand of speed known as wallot.”

In McGovern, Thompson identified with that integral part of any worthwhile writer: self-damaging, unequivocal honesty. But from the beginning of the campaign, he was aware what an Achilles’ heel this was.

“[McGovern] lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies,” Thompson wrote. “The ‘McGovern problem’ looks like the ultimate proof-positive for his liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true … We are not a nation of truth lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps saying these terrible things anyway.”

The ’72 election was only the fourth in which electronic mass media had warped the perceptions and expectations of the electorate. And the body politic had little immunity to this latest mutation. In 1968’s The Selling of the President, Roger Ailes became renowned as the 28-year ex-Mike Douglas Show producer turned television guru for “The New Nixon.” This was the same Ailes who controlled Fox News until a sexual misconduct scandal dethroned him in 2016. In his final act of voodoo, he helped prepare Trump for the 2016 debates. Shortly thereafter, he died from bleeding of the brain.

If Nixon had a sinister genius for grasping the paranoiac mind spirals that would define the future, his opponent ran as a vestige of a simpler, pre-imperial America. A history Ph.D. like Woodrow Wilson, McGovern wrote his doctoral thesis about the “Ludlow massacre,” one of the most ignominious incidents of Wilson’s first term. In this little-remembered 1914 labor relations tragedy, National Guardsmen and private security broke a strike against deadly conditions in the southern Colorado coalfields. Twenty-one perished in this attack on a tent colony of 1,200 miners and their families, including workers’ wives and children.

In his post-campaign autopsy, Thompson realized too late that McGovern had run a ’60s campaign in the ’70s. But this was a central part of the appeal. The napalm vitriol and swaggering bombast was a smoke screen to conceal Thompson’s natural romantic slant. This was a writer who once typed out The Great Gatsby to understand its rhythm and musicality. And like the namesake of that book, Thompson always dreamed of repeating the past. But rather than win back Daisy Buchanan, the animating fantasy was a return to the Edenic possibilities of San Francisco in the mid-’60s—before the vultures and the violence and the exhumation of Richard Nixon.

Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics. A death letter directed at the schizophrenic duality of the national character, the slimy stock poltergeists who chronically haunt us, and our credulous need for both authenticity and artifice.

Even from the start of On the Campaign Trail, Thompson acknowledged that something had fundamentally cracked in the national psyche. “For all his integrity, [McGovern] is still talking to the Politics of the Past,” Thompson wrote. “He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent with a good voting record on ‘the issues’—is a natural man for the White House.”

Every stone cold loser in modern political history has succumbed to this weakness. Since the introduction of television, the conqueror is always the candidate who exhibits the most ease in front of the camera—or at least the one who most ingeniously manipulates it via invented narrative, incendiary sloganeering, and branded visual deception. And Thompson was no fool; he remained clear-eyed that the uncharismatic McGovern had little margin for error. On the small screen, McGovern presented exactly like the former social studies teacher he was.

“McGovern been widely ridiculed in the press as the ideal anti-media candidate,” Thompson wrote. “He looks wrong, talks wrong, and even acts wrong—by conventional TV standards.”

But to psychoanalyze the split personality of American politics requires understanding our paradoxical and irrational temperament. In 2016, the “political wizards” were bewildered that Trump and Bernie Sanders attracted the same alienated working-class swath of the electorate. But it wasn’t much of a surprise. Their policy positions and personal dispositions were polar opposites, but their message was qualitatively identical. Whether it was the fault of the swamp in Washington or the big banks, they sold the belief that the little man was getting ruthlessly fucked over and only drastic change could fix our irredeemably corrupt system.

McGovern was the proto-Sanders: a leftist senator from an obscure state running an unorthodox candidacy that existentially threatened the centrist old guard. And the explicit connections between Trump and Nixon went far beyond a reliance on Roger Ailes and Roger Stone. For both of these Republican standard bearers, the media and protesters were poisoning the state. But Trump’s political style is actually a shambolic triangulation of Nixon and the segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whom Thompson describes as a “performer not a mingler … a rock star … working on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones.” Wallace rooted his sales pitch in raw sirloin populism and scarcely concealed racism. And he won more Democratic primaries in ’72 than anyone but McGovern. Then in May, an assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed and forced him to drop out.

If you read this book in any given election cycle, something different will glow out at you from its pages. In this one, it’s the Wallace sections. These paragraphs could have been written at any point in the last eight years. All you need to do is substitute a few proper nouns.


The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy—and then doing exactly that, by howling down from that podium that he had an instant overnight cure for all their worst afflictions.

Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn’t want the problems solved, so they wouldn’t be put out of work.

The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems—much less come up with any honest solutions—but the “Fighting Little Judge” has never lost much sleep from guilty feelings about his personal creditability gap.

George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy.

There is one particular scene at Serb Hall on the southside of Milwaukee, where crowds of Schlitz-drinking laborers pack into the small bowling alley/auditorium. Electricity crackles before Wallace’s speech starts. Previously indifferent to politics, the new converts describe Wallace as the “most important man in America.” “He doesn’t beat around the bush, he comes out and says it.” Thompson compares it to a Janis Joplin concert.

“Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime,” Thompson writes. “He jerked this crowd around … like he had them all in wires … Laughing, shouting, hacking each other on the back … a flat-out fire and brimstone performance.”

It’s these voters who Thompson sees as up for grabs, the swing voters more interested in empathy than ideology. In the primaries, McGovern tells these undereducated undecideds in the “hardhat wards,” that he feels their frustration, but unlike Wallace he’s proposing “constructive solutions.” These are the blue-collar workers whose sons will be abandoned by NAFTA, who feel disenfranchised and condescended to by politicians. And this undercurrent of desperation makes them easy prey.

Demagogues usually never got past the regional level in American politics. Something just didn’t translate on the big stage. But in our atomized and nerve-damaged age, personality cults are now part of the natural order of business. Messianic delusions and a narcissistic disorder are harbingers of future success—a marketing necessity in everything from politics to sports to the arts. And when what’s being sold as real seems almost as fake as the alternative, most people wind up just looking for action.

Richard Nixon was Hunter Thompson’s slippery nemesis and fabled muse. He once dedicated an entire anthology to him “for never letting me down.” Nixon represents the “dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. [A] Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children.”

For most of the text, Nixon plays the lurking executioner, sharpening his blade directly off-screen. In his lone week following the president, Thompson barely even glimpses the Grendel in the flesh. Nixon’s PR man Ron Ziegler, “who trained for the job doing press for Disneyland,” largely keeps “the boss” away from the members of the fourth estate.

Thompson’s only reported impression of Nixon—the only thing that leads him to believe that the president may be vulnerable to anything but a silver bullet—comes via flashbacks of a 30-minute conversation from four years earlier. During the ’68 New Hampshire primaries, no reporter but Thompson knew anything about football. So an aide threw the two NFL junkies into the backseat of a town car for a “relaxing” conversation on the way to the airport. No politics allowed. Strictly pigskin. And for all of his outright revulsion of Nixon’s character, Thompson begrudgingly respected the gridiron fanaticism of the former Whittier College benchwarmer. Then at the end of the trip, after they got out of the car, Thompson lit a cigarette near the plane’s fuel tank and nearly blew everyone up. He and Nixon never spoke again.

The first 60% of the book revolves around a feel-good tale of an underdog who might restore fundamental decency to American politics. But that optimism is shattered by the “Dark Interlude” of the Eagleton affair—an 18-day catastrophe that permanently derails the McGovern campaign.

In an attempt to moderate his image and appease the party’s power base, McGovern nominated Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. Thompson described the Missouri senator as “exactly the kind of VP candidate that Muskie or Humphrey would have chosen: a harmless, Catholic, neo-liberal Rotarian nebbish … A ‘progressive young centrist’ with more ambition than brains.”

If the Eagleton selection seemed like savvy Beltway maneuvering, it undermined and ultimately doomed the candidate of the “New Politics.” A few days after the Democratic convention in Miami, word leaked about three Eagleton visits to psychiatric hospitals between 1960 and 1966, where doctors treated him with electric shock therapy for “depression, nervous exhaustion, and fatigue.” McGovern initially backed his running mate but swiftly had misgivings. After two shaky weeks, Eagleton stepped down. But it confirmed many voter’s suspicion that the dovish McGovern was indecisive, feckless, and untrustworthy on matters of national security.

When the Republican convention rolled around in August of ’72, a Nixon victory appeared inevitable. He’d wielded the full imperial power of the incumbency: diplomatic trips to China and Russia, teasing the final withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, and taking every step possible to juice the economy.

The GOP Lupercalia was an “ugly low-level trip that hovered somewhere in that grim indefinable limbo between dullness and obscenity.” In one of the most absurd and funny scenes, Thompson crashed a “spontaneous demonstration” of Nixon Youth while wearing a McGovern button. That week in Miami also supplied the emotional nucleus of the book—a reminder that the wrathful approach masked abject horror.

Thompson has no patience for most of the anti-war demonstrators on South Beach: “a useless mob of ignorant chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest.” They’re disorganized, devoid of purpose, and “so wasted on grass, wine, and downers that they couldn’t say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego.” The lone exception is the Vietnam Vets Against the War, who camp out in a far corner of the park and construct a sealed-off tent city, impenetrable to outsiders.

On a humid Tuesday afternoon, while most of the press cover a byzantine squabble over seating delegates or watch “three thousand well-rehearsed ‘Nixon Youth’ robots welcome the President” at the airport, Thompson heads to the far end of Key Biscayne for a swim. But on his way there, he spots the vets marching 1,200 deep in battle fatigues, helmets, and combat boots. Some are being pushed down Collins Avenue in wheelchairs. At their sides, platoon leaders silently give “stop, start,” “fast, slow,” “left, right” commands via hand signal.

In his eight years of covering Vietnam protests, Thompson claims that he’s never seen the cops this intimidated. Waving peace signs, the protesters intend to go all the way to the steps of the Fontainebleau—a hotel so opulent that it will be a set piece in Scarface a decade later, and a conspicuous consumption name-check for generations of rappers thereafter. In August ’72, it’s where the pink-faced and sweaty power brokers are staying.

The vets are aiming to remind the masters of war of the revenants produced by their domino theory abstractions. To confront them with the evidence of the hundreds of thousands maimed. Ron Kovic, the paraplegic ex-Marine who will later be played by Tom Cruise in an Oliver Stone film, gives a speech on the hotel steps. His words “lash the crowd like a wire whip.”

For a writer prone to hyperbole and bestial metaphor, Thompson’s greatest strength—at least early in his career—was his ability to alternate flash with restraint. The ether binges and Johnny Depp biopics allowed him to live on dorm room walls for eternity, but his careful observations gave his writing a genuine pathos. Watching the march through South Beach, Thompson became so affected that he decided to join. In his words:


No, “joined” is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue … all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach.

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

More than half of the book revolves around a feel-good tale of an underdog who might restore fundamental decency to American politics. But that optimism is shattered by the “Dark Interlude” of The Eagleton Affair – an 18-day catastrophe that permanently derails the McGovern campaign.

A sense of loss is inescapable. There is the central defeat of McGovern, who Thompson views as one of the last hopes to recalibrate the wayward tilt of a country of “220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” The Watergate saga drums softly in the background. But when the final election results are tallied, nearly half of young voters break for Nixon. Thompson’s dream of a Freak Power movement—a rare transformational opportunity to reroute the mind-bending breakthroughs of the ’60s into a better world—faces a brutal reckoning. All of the hours writing on deadline in a “last-minute teeth-grinding frenzy” feel like a futile waste.

Reading it in 2024, it’s impossible to ignore the total collapse of the institutions and context in which an On the Campaign Trail could have even existed. From the first primaries in New Hampshire, the Democratic candidates are followed by a shambling retinue of beat reporters from nearly every major newspaper in America, back when most cities supported at least two dailies. Monthly glossy magazines enjoyed massive circulation and their pages were bloated with ads. The alternative and underground press flourished. The power of the written word was at its apogee. Even Rolling Stone, a nascent rock magazine then still based in San Francisco, could afford to put up Thompson for a full year in D.C.—and pay his travel around the country, including exorbitantly expensive hotels and first-class airfare. At this year’s Democratic convention, the party showed their outright contempt for the press by giving floor spots and lake cruises to partisan influencers eager to uncover whether coconut is the most brat fruit of all.

It was obvious then as now that the vast majority of working journalists were bleating careerists, but this was a short-lived golden age supported by a public desire for idiosyncratic style and outsider perspective—as well as the editorial budgets and editing talent to cultivate it. For the ’68 convention alone, Esquire sent Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern (Allen Ginsberg was their unofficial sherpa). Norman Mailer’s reports from Chicago and Miami for Harper’s and Commentary wound up becoming the foundational blueprint for Thompson’s opus. Even Thompson’s 25-year-old assistant/minder, Timothy Crouse, wrote The Boys on the Bus about his experiences on the ’72 trail, which remains a canonical piece of campaign literature.

Many of the most rewarding sections of On the Campaign Trail would almost certainly never be published today, not because of any inherent bias, but because no one is reading (or paying for) regular 10,000 word tangents about politics—published two weeks after the fact—that include sidewinding odysseys of picking up stoned, egomaniacal hippie hitchhikers while drunk-driving on the icy roads of New Hampshire.

It’s true that Thompson’s first-person run-and-gun inspired more terrible prose than practically any other writer in history, but it’s equally correct to point out that the taupe tote bag tyranny of The New Yorker house style has made modern “prestige” journalism feel like enduring a quarterly teeth cleaning. Also, Thompson at his best was most definitely the equal of any of his “haute lit” peers. Little captures the dead-end dawn of the ’70s better than this desultory passage where Thompson rolls his rented red Chevy Impala down to South Beach to cop a couple of six packs at a dive called Dixie’s Doll House. It’s a room “full of old winos, middle-aged hookers and aging young hustlers who looked like either junkies or Merchant Marine rejects; bearded geeks in grey t-shirts staggering back and forth along the bar, six nasty-looking pimps around a blue-lit pool table in the rare, and right next to me at the bar a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler snarling drunkenly at her nervous escort for the night: ‘Don’t gimme me that horseshit, baby! I don’t want a goddamn ONE DOLLAR dinner! I want a TEN DOLLAR dinner!’”

Rereading On the Campaign Trail means ruminating on an America that hadn’t yet become totally flambéed; but it’s clear that a postmodern nihilism was already simmering among its citizenry. For Thompson, there is an equal opportunity disdain. If Nixon is his principal antagonist, the Democratic Party receives no quarter. If they win, he predicts that the IRS will collect a “20 percent national Loser’s Tax on all incomes under $25,000 per annum—for the National Defense Emergency.”

For a 500-page book about politics, there is very little discussion or debate about actual policy. Part of this is that the second you talk about marginal tax rates and environmental regulations, people fall asleep. Part of it is that the Democrats and Republicans weren’t actually all that far apart. Under Nixon, top earners tithed roughly 70% of their income to the government. The most reviled Republican president of the last century created OSHA, the EPA, Title IX, and ended the draft. He instituted price controls and freezes to fight inflation, an idea that historically has come from the left. By contemporary political standards, the California native who first came to fame as an anti-communist zealot, would be considered a communist.

For most of the text, Nixon plays the lurking executioner, sharpening his blade directly off-screen.

But Thompson understood the world in terms of values, symbols, and vibrations. In Nixon, he saw the “greedy little hustler” who represented the shadow side of the American spirit. Toward the end, Thompson includes the entirety of the Robinson Jeffers poem “Be Angry at the Sun” to console himself that our modern culture of corruption and prevarication is part of an ancient human continuum. But it barely tempers his fury that when presented with a clear-cut morality choice, the American people happily chose evil.

It’s tempting but perhaps foolish to extrapolate about what Thompson would say about this upcoming election—a race characterized by dread, horror, and the widespread suspicion that no matter what happens, we will all somehow lose. It’s almost certain that Thompson would abhor Trump’s all-consuming propensity for lies, bullying, and his land baron’s desire to destroy the wild habitats that the Woody Creek native held sacred. Yet it is similarly difficult to picture Thompson having much enthusiasm for the Democratic Party alternative. Kamala Harris’ muddled centrism and “happy warrior/politics of joy” would have inevitably given him acid reflux flashbacks of Hubert Humphrey. In 2004, shortly before blowing his brains out, Thompson wrote that ” if Nixon was running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.”

It’s possible that On the Campaign Trail was the breaking wheel that irrecoverably shattered Thompson. Much of what he wrote afterward felt like a cheap self-parody. Of course, fame did him few favors. Neither did the cocaine habit that began in the mid-1970s, and by most accounts, continued for the remainder of his life.

But this theory is only half true. In ’74, Thompson witnessed Jimmy Carter give such a powerful speech at the University of Georgia’s law school that he threw his full weight behind the governor’s presidential run. And in ‘84, Thompson stumped for his longtime friend Walter Mondale before Ronald Reagan decimated him (Reagan makes a brief cameo in On the Campaign Trial for giving an RNC speech that makes Nixon look like a “bleeding heart liberal”). Despite the pain, Thompson never abandoned his addiction to politics, even titling a largely unreadable 1994 collection of faxes disguised as a book, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

Toward the end of his life, he published a compendium of his ESPN.com page 2 columns called Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness. It was more of the same uninspired mad libs and Book of Revelations quotes that characterized the last two decades of his career.

This was the collection that brought me to Book Soup on that October night in 2004. I’d brought with me the draft of a novel I was working on then, along with a note that I’d written to pass on to him. It was modeled on a letter he’d written to William Styron in the late ‘50s, when Thompson was a young writer struggling to survive and publish fiction.

But in the wake of his embarrassing retreat, I couldn’t think about him without disgust. I felt like he’d squandered his talent and abandoned his fans. Showing up to a book reading in a limousine with a Hollywood movie star felt like a corny betrayal of the populist renegade, the outsider from the West who raged against all the greedy waterheads. It seemed like he’d become a symbol of everything that he had loathed.

Four months later, on Feb. 20, 2005, he killed himself in Woody Creek. He was 67 years old. When I learned about his suicide, I saw it all in a different light. This was a man in pain, who made that fact abundantly clear on the page. His crippling addictions were symptomatic of a more turbid unrest. His futile search for the American dream was grounded in a frustration with a country that he loved—one that had abandoned its professed ideals to stagger further and further into the rabid wilderness. If the encephalitis began in ’68, it became acute on the campaign trail. And even if there was plenty of anesthetic, there was no cure.

At the time of Thompson’s death, McGovern paid tribute to him in the Los Angeles Times. In his eulogy, the former presidential nominee mentioned a picture that appeared in the book jacket of the first edition of On the Campaign Trail. Thompson captioned it: “Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination.”

“In retrospect, I wish I had,” McGovern wrote. “Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively.”

In the aftermath of the campaign, McGovern mentions how disheartened Thompson had been. Over the years, the pair remained friends and it ironically fell on the presidential also-ran to persuade one of the most successful writers of all time not to give up on what he called this “fucked up country.”

McGovern wrote his requiem during the bloody misadventure of the Iraq War—only a year after Abu Ghraib. He’d lived long enough to see America blunder into another senseless foreign conflict. Yet the failed candidate lamented that he had never given Thompson a genuine reason for optimism. A reminder that even if the nation was tainted by base falsehoods and bitter impurities, the boundless possibility of the individual remained.

“What I didn’t get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original,” McGovern wrote. “A Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis … or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson.”


Jeff Weiss, the editor of Passion of the Weiss, is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, the LA Times, and Pitchfork. His Twitter feed is @Passionweiss.