Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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Thompson paced about his room – at the end of an 18-foot microphone cord – describing the final days of the doomed McGovern campaign. It’s the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don’t care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet.

But aside from those little morsels, hope is conspicuously absent from Thompson’s account of life on the campaign trail.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.

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.

get a head full of really dangerous chemicals, and GET THE STORY; even if you have to create it yourself along the way. Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado and win, would you then consider running for the presidency itself? I think we’d have gotten off the ground fast, and I think we’d have capitalized on those early trips and that the press would have been more enthusiastic about it and they’d have been reporting the size of the crowds and the enthusiasm instead of looking at the staff problem.

Every state, county, city, neighbourhood and household has its demographics of age, socioeconomic status, religion, race and gender. People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity and Craziness. He shows the effects of the rigors of campaigning on the individuals and the workings of the political machine of the democratic party in the early 1970's. 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.But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind… Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around. You almost have to be a rock star to generate the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics. HST: Do you think it would be possible to, say, discount … if you could just wipe out the whole Eagleton thing, and assume that, say, Mondale or Nelson had taken it and there had been no real controversy, and try to remove the vice presidential thing as a factor. HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at a country club reception … it was the first time I’d ever seen him drinking… sort of casually and openly in public . McGovern: Well, it seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coalition, but maybe not.

McGovern: So those two factors were related and the Eagleton thing upset the morale of the staff and people were blaming each other, and there was no chance to recover from the fatigue of the campaign for the nomination – we had to go right into that Eagleton battle, and so I think that – if there was a chance, at that point, to win the election – we probably lost it right there. My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-“radical” campaign he ran in the primaries.They would club the bleeding shit out of anybody who looked even halfway weird, and then make mass arrests…. C. to his final pondering on power and the nature of the political beast known as the presidential candidate, Thompson is right on the money. HST: Yeah, but then the punishment would be the greatest too… it’s much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate. At that point True Davis was the president of a bank owned by the United Mine Workers in Washington.