The Democratic Party that emerged 50 years ago from its national convention in Chicago was a party so badly bloodied, and so riven by its factions and hatreds, that it never stood a chance that fall when Richard Nixon sailed past Hubert Humphrey like a hurricane in August.
I'll be thinking about that convention this Saturday at the annual GonzoFest held in Kentucky to honor the late author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who died in 2005. I'll be part of a panel talking about the '68 convention, and have been thinking about Thompson and his legacy a lot this season. When Richard Nixon died in 1994, Thompson wrote that "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and jabbering dupe of a president."
Thompson conceded such language was out of place for a journalist. "People will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point," he wrote.
"It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."It makes me wonder, as many others have, what Thompson might have written had he still been alive to consider the 2016 election or the early days of the Trump administration. Would his kind of Subjective have allowed him to see Trump better than those of us still keeping watch?
It's hard to know. Thompson was a bag of contradictions and a maddening mix of genius and disappointment.I first met Hunter S. Thompson when I was a 21-year-old stringer for The Associated Press, having hitched a ride from the college town where I was then living to Louisville, my hometown and Thompson's too. The news editor in Kentucky had agreed to pay me $25 to cover a reading the famed outlaw journalist, well past his prime, was giving that night.
His comments about Texas, and his prediction that Bill Clinton would win the 1992 election, would make news all over the country.
When I arrived at the Kentucky Center for the Arts that night, the place was packed with hometown swells in tuxedos. I was in an ill-fitting brown suit that I probably hadn't worn since 10th grade. Thompson was no where to be seen, but I wandered backstage (thinking of course of Where the Buffalo Roam: "See this pass, sucker?") and saw the man himself sitting in a green room with his mother, Virginia, next to him in a wheelchair. On the table beside them was a bucket of ice and a bottle of Chivas Regal. No one else was around. I sat outside and listened for a while. The conversation was about normal, family catching-up, oddly muffled by his mumbling speech pattern. Both were drinking steadily.
When Thompson got up to go to the stage, I intercepted him. There were plenty of questions about politics and literature I should have asked him to make a story, but all I really wanted to know is how he felt being back home in Louisville. I hadn't yet learned all his history with the city — he had been driven out as an 18-year-old after a stint in jail — but it was a connection I felt deeply, perhaps because by then I was living out of town, too.
"Terrified," he told me. I thought he was kidding around, but he wasn't. Just nervous as hell, getting ready to walk out on stage. It was the summer of 1992, and he'd been world famous for 20 years, easy. But he was terrified of the crowd in his hometown. "Is it safe out there?" he mumbled. I allowed that it looked safe to me.
When he walked out onto the stage in that weird gait of his, there was a new bucket of ice by the chair and a fresh bottle, too. He would drink throughout the event. He was too drunk, or maybe too shy, or both, to do the reading he was there for. He asked the emcee to read it for him.
It was hilarious. It was a memo to Ed Turner, one of the founding forces of CNN, about coverage of the political campaign.
Later, after I had become a kind of expert on Thompson's work and life, I realized that he had other people read his pieces not because, or not just because, he was drinking or because he was shy.
He wanted to listen to the cadence of the words, just like he had done as a teenager in Louisville, typing out word-for-word fiction by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He would frequently stop a reader in midsentence. Read that again, he'd say. Slow down. He would tell me later that above all, he was "a sucker for the music."
The event went well that night in Louisville, better than others I'd see him at later on. At the end, someone asked him about a freelance journalist whose name I didn't recognize. Thompson paused, standing in the stage lights with a glass in his hand and a smoke in another. Freelance writing, he said, with nothing to depend on except the words you can muscle into print, was a tough gig. Not many survived it.
Someone else shouted out a question: What would he do if President George H.W. Bush won the '92 election over Clinton?
"I expect to win this time," he said. "If we don't win, we're going to move Rolling Stone to Paraguay and have a colony down there. It's got the worst points of both Brazil and Argentina and none of the best. There's no place like it in the United States except maybe west Texas."
There are dozens of versions of the little story I wrote about that evening, preserved in newspaper morgues all over the English-speaking world. It wasn't much of a story, but then they were only paying me $25 , so I'd say The AP made out all right that night.
The next summer Thompson's book, Better than Sex, was published. It was a thin little book, with only a few gems in it. Among them was his memo to the news desk at CNN to Ed Turner. It was good, but not as hilarious as it had been that night in full, unedited form.
Also in the book? My little story for The AP, photostatted — included no doubt to fill a page en route to filling his contract with the publisher. No matter; I was pleased with myself. By chance that next week, I was filling in as a stand-in Scoutmaster for my old Boy Scout troop, and had brought the book to read. I showed a couple of the kids. Hey, look at this. My story about Hunter Thompson is in his book!
Who's that, came the reply. And: If you wrote it, where's your name? All it said in the way of a byline was (AP.) Little monsters.
All we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing ...Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
Still, all's fair. The story wasn't much and truthfully neither was the book. Two years later, when Richard Nixon died, Thompson pulled himself together in his mountain retreat to write an obituary that remains the only thing written or said that week after the death of Nixon to be remembered today. It's a brilliant polemic. But by then such outbursts by Thompson were exceptions.
What no one seemed ever to say until after his death was that Thompson was a raging alcoholic and drug addict. It ate away his capacity for travel, for work, for creativity. For God's knows what else.
After his suicide in 2005, Jann Wenner published an oral history of Thompson that, while flattering, made clear that he had offered Thompson enormous inducements to get out on the campaign trail to reprise the classic body of work he had written for Rolling Stone for the '72 campaign. But Thompson would not leave his home. He was simply too far gone. That's too bad, especially given that some of his work from the 1980s was incredibly well done. His introduction to Generation of Swine remains a favorite.
"Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing ... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get."
Four years after the event in Louisville, an alt-weekly asked me to write a cover story on Thompson's career and legacy. He was set to receive an all-star tribute from the city that had exiled him, and his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his 1971 classic, had just been accepted into the Modern Library 25 years after it hit American journalism like a tidal wave. The pay was 10 cents a word, and I cobbled together 4,000 of them. Not much, really, but a good chunk more than the rent I was paying while living in a hip little two-bedroom apartment atop an antiques store on East Market Street with a roommate I was probably, when it all comes down to it, in love with. My mother had just died, now that I think back on it. Things were in flux, you might say.
Well, the story was due in a couple days. I arranged to talk to Thompson — at midnight, naturally. We had a nice couple of chats about literature and politics. I think the only reason he stayed on the phone was that I said something intelligent about The Great Gatsby, though a second chat the next night ended with him cursing at me and slamming the phone down. Before that happened, he had told me that he'd never again vote for "the lesser of two evils." He was done with Clinton and claimed to have voted for Ralph Nader. We also talked about suicide. I noted he had written in the December 1977 that he contemplated jumping off out of his publisher's New York City office and out across Fifth Avenue into the Plaza Fountain far below.
"Nobody could follow that act. Not even me ... and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live (13 years longer, in fact) and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning."
I suspected he knew even then that his best work was behind him. Did he regret it sticking around?
No, he told me. I'd have missed a lot of fun.
I called up historian Douglas Brinkley (he's the editor of Thompson's astounding collection of letters; he was then at Tulane in New Orleans, but now teaches at Rice University in Houston) and asked whether Thompson hadn't burned up his talent. Brinkley told me — and this is loose paraphrase — we expect too much of our literary heroes. "What's wrong with three classics of American literature, a mountain of beautiful letters, and 40 years of journalism that reshaped the industry?"
These are the thoughts that'll be dancing in my head Saturday as we gather to discuss this singular American''s legacy.
Let the good times roll.
Michael Lindenberger is a member of the Dallas Morning News editorial board. Email: mlindenberger@dallasnews.com
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