This book is haphazard hodgepodge about political campaigning in 1972. BORing. I read this with a CO-ED book club. Only 2 people in the club said they liked it. Everyone else LOATHED it. Most were not able to finish. HST is funny and witty and he has a few moments that are great, but they are tucked into words, words and more useless words.

I don't think this is his best work. I think this book is better for those who are already familiar with HST and have already developed a love for his writing style. It's not a great way to start your journey with this author.

Forget Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics. Even forget All the President's Men and The Selling of the President. Especially forget the overrated Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. The greatest book on a political campaign of all time is Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Any author can look back at a campaign, but Thompson, despite being drunk or high or hung over for the duration of the election, predicted the future. He foresaw the Reagan Revolution of 1980. His only error was that he thought it would happen in 1976. He couldn't know that Watergate and its aftermath would set the calendar back one election cycle and four years. That man was a political genius.

I just wish Thompson were alive to write the definitive book on the 2008 election. Who knows? Maybe Alex Pareene or Matt Taibbi will be the new Hunter Thompson.

It Wasn’t the End
5 February 2019

tOne of the things that I kept wandering as I read this book was how did people perceive Nixon prior to the Watergate Scandal blowing up in his face. I wonder whether he was as much of a polarising President as a certain one today, and did people view the ascension of Nixon in the same way that they viewed the ascension of Trump, that is whether it would be the end of the United States as they knew it. Well, they have lasted at least another fifty years, but I guess back in the day people didn’t have the perspective that we have now.

tThe interesting thing is that between 1932 and 1968 the Republicans had only had a President for eight of those years, which basically means that there had been a Democrat in the Oval Office for literally a quarter of a century. As such it is probably not all that surprising that after 28 years, the Democrats were probably getting on the nose somewhat. Actually, despite the Watergate Scandal, the Democrats, between 1968 and 1992 were only in office for 4 of those years, which means that there was a Republican President for 20 years, though since that time it has been eight years for each of the succeeding presidents.

tThompson talks about this idea of the pendulum, in which voters will tend to swing between the two parties depending on how long they had been on office. This is what I believe to be the strengths of a properly functioning democracy, and that is that it prevents a single party from becoming entrenched. Of course, the conservative parties, particularly these days, seem to have the edge over the more progressive parties namely because they tend to have more friends in high places, such as the media, which can in turn saturate the airwaves with propaganda, despite the fact that the people in power generally don’t care for the average punters. Oh, and there is also the myth of them being the better economic managers.

tThompson obviously spends some time dissecting the results of the election, even as he was on the campaign trail. Mind you, I suspect a bulk of the book was written in hindsight, namely because we know how much of a smashing the Democrats received in this election. In a way, there was this rather dark overtone to the whole book, particularly since Thompson spent most of his time following the Democrats around as opposed to the Republicans.

tIn a way that isn’t surprising considering that the Republicans already had a man in the White House, and as such there probably wasn’t all that much to see when it came to their primaries or their convention. The other thing was that Nixon was very cunning when it came to the press – he hated them, which is why they had incredibly limited access to him during the entire campaign. Then again, When he lost to Kennedy in 1960 he did blame the press for all of the negative publicity that he received.

tThe interesting thing though was that Nixon was very much a centrist. Once again, Hunter suggests that this was a tactic that he used to bring people over to his side. Thompson’s theory was that Nixon pretty much pushed most of the Republicans to the right so that when it came to vote, he would receive all of the votes from the moderates. As for the Democrats, well, it appeared that at this stage the party was so dysfunctional that it was surprising that they actually won the one state they did, namely because all of the states that should have gone to them went to Nixon instead. Then again, California also went to Reagan when he ran as president.

tIt makes me wonder whether this whole Nixon debacle is the reason why the Republicans went so far to the right. In a sense probably, but a part of me also feels that they do pick up a lot of the nationalistic vote. Then again, by the time 1980 had rolled around, the economy had become so stagnated that it was no doubt time to move away from the Keynesian system to a much more extreme free market system (which moved further to the right than the classical system of Adam Smith and such, which suggested that governments needed to provide funding for loss making enterprises that were essential to the functioning of a strong economy). However, the whole HMO debacle that we see today seems to have come about through Nixon who, in an effort to cut back on government spending, instituted employer mandated health insurance, and left Medicare and Medicaid for only the poorest of the poor. The other interesting this is that Nixon was also a champion of the environment, creating an EPA with teeth while he was in office.

tWe can’t forget Vietnam though, which no doubt was a major sore point at the time. Nixon originally campaigned on bringing the war to an end, but his tactic was to basically carpet bomb Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – and we all know how well that worked out. Yet he didn’t earn the moniker Tricky Dicky for nothing. In the run up to the 1972 election, he started making overtures of peace to the North Vietnamese, though we never actually knew what was going on in those closed room meetings. However, once he won, the carpet bombing began again. Yet we shouldn’t forget that he was the one who eventually brought the American troops home, though it turned out that those fifteen years were pretty much all in vein because once the Americans had left the NVA pretty much invaded, conquered, and reunited Vietnam.

tReading this book does make me wonder what Thompson thought of the next lot of Presidents, and the elections as well. Mind you, at the end he does point out that he had pretty much become a politics junkie, and this resulted him in becoming the politics editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, which makes me wonder how many of his writings are out there, because it would be very interesting to hear his thoughts on Reagan, Carter, Clinton, and to an extent Bush (though he actually thought that Nixon was much, much better than the Bush administration). Obviously, due to his death in 2005 we aren’t going to hear anything about Obama or Trump.

tAnother, and the final thing, that I found interesting is Thompson’s political persuasion. Being the gun nut that he is, one would have thought that he would have been Republican through and through. Then again, I suspect that back in those days there wasn’t as big a problem with gun violence as there is today. In fact, the whole mass shooting phenomena is a relatively new phenomena. Yet there are a lot of aspects to Hunter’s personality that clearly puts him on the left side of politics, and the copious amounts of drugs that he takes is only one of them. For instance he actually supports minority rights and such, and of course, he could never see that happening under a Republican president, or at least as they have since turned out. Then again, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did turn out to be aberrations (and Roosevelt was never meant to be President anyway).

”Pimps and hustlers have a fine instinct for politics.”

”With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 is where Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism reached its pinnacle. Replete with HST’s signature crazed, debauched rantings, it nevertheless delivered a serious, journalistic story of importance that was both informative and insightful.

Covering the 1972 Democratic Primary for Rolling Stone, Thompson delivered backstage campaign gossip, devastating character analysis of the candidates, campaign strategies, and blow by blow breakdown of results. He combined this with lurid (and possibly exaggerate?) descriptions of what life was like for the press covering the campaign, and threw in some basic analysis of the American political system for good measure:

”Nixon’s gig was financed from the start by big business, and Humphrey’s by big labor. And what both of them stand for today is the de facto triumph of a one party system in American politics.”

”Fuck the polls! They always follow reality instead of predicting it.”

Because he rejected the hackneyed myth of objective journalism, Thompson was free to give his honest opinions on the many Democrats running for president in 1972, and to let us know exactly where he stood on them. He was clearly taken with Senator McGovern’s spunky, long shot candidacy, while He identified the early front runner, Senator Edmund Muskie, as a tired old establishment hack, along with Senator Scoop Jackson and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He was particularly vicious in his description of Humphrey:

”There’s no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the straight, objective reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate. Hubert Humphrey, for one, would go crazy with rage and attempt to strangle his press secretary if he ever saw in print what most reporters say about him during midnight conversations around barroom tables in all those Hiltons and Sheratons.”

In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 Thompson gave us one of the greatest, most informative, and most entertaining campaign books ever written. Despite the fact that it covered a presidential campaign now more than fifty years in the past, it remains scintillatingly relevant. It is Hunter Thompson’s masterpiece.

excellent.

How does one classify a book which is ostensibly a journalistic account of the 1972 presidential campaign but is actually more about its author, both essayist about (Thompson is loose, very loose, with the facts) and participant in the events he describes? With misgivings, I classify this as autobiography--albeit, again, loose, very loose, with the facts.

This is not Thompson's best book. Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in LasVegas are both better. Indeed, it is pretty clear that this was a hack job. Playing off the success of Vega, Thompson was in it for the money and so was Rolling Stone Magazine, for whom he wrote it.

Still, if you enjoy the kind of amphetaminic excess exhibited by Thompson's "mature" style, you will probably enjoy this one. If you have interest in him as a person you might find Campaign exceptional in that in it, despite himself, his actual character is fleetingly revealed: he actually seemed to care for McGovern and what he stood for.

I picked this up on a whim expecting the non-fiction version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was surprised and delighted to be wrong. While there are some similarities, Campaign Trail stands head and shoulders above its fictional and more famous peer.

The main reason for this, I think, is its structure. It’s not actually a book but a series of articles Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone while covering the 1972 US presidential election. Beyond adding a few footnotes for the compilation, Thompson didn’t alter the articles themselves when putting this together. In other words, he does not afford himself the luxury of hindsight.

This gives the book an authentic feel that I found very gripping and which turns the work, 50 years later, into a fascinating historical artefact. Following along as Thompson reports, projects, predicts, analyses, pontificates and fulminates was almost always extremely interesting and very often quite funny.

It did take me a few chapters to really start enjoying it, as the book begins with the early stages of the Democratic primaries in ‘72, and my knowledge of and zeal for this subject were both pretty scant. But once we got past the most minute of the minutiae, it was a grand old ride to the end, with the exception of the “transcript” portions.

Thompson, as you might expect, gets off a number of great zingers against various politicians (notably though not only Nixon) and America’s general political climate. But these are by no means his only targets. For instance, in the epilogue his attention turns to sports writers: “With a few rare exceptions, … sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicise & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover.”

I did wonder, while reading, if all of the book could really be called non-fiction. I’m sure the factual and political stuff is true, but some of the stuff Thompson says about himself and the way the articles were produced really strained credulity. The amount of drug and alcohol use seemed fantastical, and I also struggled to believe that Thompson really produced the last few chapters the way he describes. He claims that, having run out of time, Rolling Stone sent a crack team of editors to assist him and he wound up dictating large portions of the later parts of the book directly to them. Long passages revert to Q&A transcript format between Thompson and an unnamed editor. I found these somewhat interesting at the start and then they quickly descended to tedium.

It’s difficult to imagine someone writing something similar to Campaign Trail today, if for no other reason than anyone who tries to mimic Thompson’s drug consumption now is likely to die of an opioid overdose.

Anyway in general I really enjoyed reading this. It’s in a real sweet spot as far as historical sources go. Let’s end with Thompson’s famous lamentation as Nixon’s landslide win looms into view:

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it–that we really are just a nation of 220 million used car salesman with all the money need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

“The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes … is one of the few men who’ve run for the President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

“McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

“Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Re-read. HST is an acquired taste, I get that, and he was never this good again. It’s my all-time favorite book on U.S. politics, and nice and timely right now. Underneath all the gonzo stuff, this is an unflinching and unsentimental book about America.

This book is a hilarious and poignant take on the 1972 presidential campaign as seen through the eyes of Gonzo Journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. During this time, Dr. Thompson was the "National Affairs Editor" for Rolling Stone magazine. This book is essentially an annotated compilation of the articles he was writing for Rolling Stone during the course of the campaign. It offers a first hand account of the insane amount of thought and organization that goes into a national election. Add to this the fact that the 1972 election turned out to be one of the most interesting of the second half of the 20th century (Vietnam War reaching its peak, Nixon seeking re-election despite the Watergate break-in story having come out months earlier, George Wallace shot on the campaign trail) and Hunter's knack for opportunistic candid interviews, from his 'urinal chat' with George McGovern to his limo ride with Nixon (they talked pro football), and you've got a modern journalistic masterpiece from Dr. Gonzo himself.

I re-read this in early 2016 out of a dim memory and a curious urge to compare the present-day Presidential campaign circus to the 1972 Presidential campaign zoo.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

The first time I read this I was young, in my mid-twenties. I didn't recognize the names. I laughed some and moved on. I didn't appreciate its savagery, or its brutal honesty. I just dismissed it as a longer version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a different city. My eyes were closed to politics--Washington was too remote, too dull. We had just elected Obama and as a college-educated liberal youngster I figured the very ideas of Hope and Change would be enough to lead us into permanent prosperity. 8 years later and I'm that much wiser (that much older, anyhow) and now I'm closely following the 2016 presidential campaigns with a mixture of disgust, disbelief, discomfort, and dismay. So, I figured it was the most appropriate time to return to this old chestnut and see how it's held up.

It's held up fine, thank you very much.

Hunter S Thompson was a national treasure, a wild animal incapable of domestication. He writes with passion, goddammit, a hydrogen bomb blast with an adrenaline chaser. His words are thunderous. His ideas are radical. His actions are outrageous. He carries you along through his narrative with fevered energy and twisted humor, making a tedious topic engrossing by peeling back the bullshit and revealing the humans behind the curtain as their ugly, brutish, true selves. Warts and all? More like all warts. And still he CARES, he cares with every fiber of his being about some Very Important Stuff like Liberty and Truth. In the end, though, even an iconoclast like Thompson had to admit that ideas are great, but nothing gets done by ideas alone. Godammit.

But the book itself is a chore to read cover to cover. Somewhere around page 180 I started to glaze over, lost track of who's who, and had to refer to Internet timelines and summaries to keep it in perspective and make sense of it all. Perhaps a chapter at a time, over the course of many months, to mimic its original serialized magazine publication would be the best way to approach this now.

3 stars out of 5.

I felt like I needed to offer a quick explanation for the scathing score I gave this book.

It is a genre that I enjoy, I wanted to really like it, and I did for about 200 pages. That was despite not realising that it was a collection of HST’s articles, as opposed to a book that was crafted to be read as one entity (and certainly not intended to be read 50 years later). I found that, eventually, my lack of contextual knowledge caught up with me. I can cope with not understanding pop culture references, but HST’s style of mixing fiction with fact gradually wore me down – I just couldn’t understand what he was talking about. In particular I became really frustrated with not being able to understand the tactical masterstroke apparently played by the McGovern campaign during the Democratic party national convention. I just felt it wasn’t explained properly. When the book later became a collection of transcripts, I felt it was borderline unreadable. It’s a shame, because I agree with HST’s attitude toward Nixon and what it shows about the system that he could win 1972 in a landslide.

I miss Hunter S Thompson. He may have been a mad drug crazed writer, but his turn of phrase and his descriptions of decadence have always appealed to me. Any time I see Wild Turkey in a bar I order a shot as a secret tribute to him, even though whiskey isn't usually my thing.


Reading Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail seems like more of an insight into what it must have been like to prize work out of Hunter S Thompson than anything else. I didn't really learn anything about American Politics reading it. The whole candidate selection process is still a mystery to me but this is only to be expected. Thompson was writing for Rolling Stone, an audience you would assume already understands the intricacies of the electoral system. There's a whole chapter on the Democratic Convention and voting that sounds amazing but goes straight over my head.


At the end Thompson describes riding the campaign like being on drugs and the book is a trip too. It starts neutrally, a bit of anger and frustration, but as the campaigns take hold, as he finds his hero in McGovern, (the candidate who eventually won the Democratic nomination and went on to be beaten almost to death in the Presidential election), Thompson begins to enjoy the ride. But no high can last for ever and the come down is palatable. Thompson's disappointment in McGovern is familiar to anyone who believed, as I once did, that a Labour government would make things better . As his disillusionment grows so his journalism dies. His first missed deadline is early on in the book, a great start degenerates into what he calls 'pure Gonzo journalism' when notes are transcribed straight from his notebook, the article finished with dry reports from his Rolling Stone Colleague.


Any true attempt at straight journalism dies after McGovern is forced to loose his running mate, Eagleton due to an undisclosed mental condition. Thompson seems to loose interest, he tries a stint on Nixon's trail but finds it boring after the ride with McGovern. Election day comes and the depression is clear in his writing. The final few chapters of the book are transcribed interviews. The first with his editor, the second with McGovern, picking over the bones of the campaign, discussing what had gone wrong, Thompson believes that McGovern lost because the perception of him as an anti-politician was lost, everyone else puts it down to the Eagleton affair. The final interview with his editor again has Thompson craving the drug of another campaign, agreeing to cover the next presidential election whilst toying with the idea of standing for election as State Governor himself. You begin to wonder why the Rolling Stone would hire him again, he essentially failed his assignment but then you realise, as you read the transcribed interviews that he is not only amazingly talented writer who makes you laugh, cringe and crave hard drugs, he is also extremely intelligent, what seems like his madness gives him the tools to delve deeply into a story and turn up something different and often amusing.


There are hints in this book of the energy from Fear & Loathing in Los Vegas, there are tales of crazyness, moments when his only reportage is of being beaten by hidden monsters, or long descriptions of the shots he is getting from his personal physician. There is a whole chapter when Thompson puts down the behavior of one of the Democratic candidates to a drug that it is clear that he is experimenting with himself, but on the whole this is a straight book. It's a shame he didn't write a follow up on the '76 election, although there are snippits from this campaign in his other works I would have like to have seen how he fell in love with Jimmy Carter and how Carter managed to hold his attention for a full campaign.