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

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Dismissing 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey as a "hopeless old hack" and presumed nominee Senator Edmund Muskie, whose campaign Thompson says exudes a "stench of death", Thompson was vindicated in his choice of McGovern. The cockpit had millions of lights all around it: green lights… red lights… all kinds of blinking things – a wonderful place to be. From December 1971 until the election Thompson wrote monthly synopsises of what was happening in the Democratic party. I don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was designed for ordinary men – not for a succession of so many larger-than-life men on horseback.

HST: Yeah: In the Haynes Johnson story Mankiewicz said that he was speaking both for himself and Gary Hart when he went to McGovern right after they found out about the information on Eagleton, the initial information, the stuff that was published. 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. That surge of power in a jet… you don’t get any real sense of it back in the passenger seats, but the feeling… up in front is like riding God’s own motorcycle. Anything that gets the adrenaline moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . 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.The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern’s image – not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war – but as a person who couldn’t get those things done even though he wanted to.

Despite the unconventional style, the book is still considered a hallmark of campaign journalism and helped to launch Thompson's role as a popular political observer. Eagleton struck me as being a cheap hack and … he still does, you know, he strikes me as being a useless little bastard… When I went up to St.McGovern: Well, see, nobody’ll ever know that for sure, ’cause those records are never gonna be available. People you’d never expect to break down … stumbled off the plane in tears, and… it was… I don’t know like a … funeral after a mass murder or something… there was no way to describe it, a kind of … falling apart. Writing as an outsider he manages to make this campaign 30 years in the past into a vibrant and exciting epic. I think that element of indecisiveness, and the willingness – as he said in his interview – to do anything possible to forge a “winning coalition” didn’t do him any good at all. When we got to the Washington National Airport, we landed at a… I think it was a Coast Guard terminal somewhere away from the commercial terminal and all of the McGovern national staff people from Washington were there… it was easily the worst scene of the campaign … I’d thought that election night was the worst thing I’d been through.

Like his earlier book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson employed a number of unique literary styles in On the Campaign Trail, including the use of vulgarity and the humorous exaggeration of events. See, once we got into the Eagleton thing, they seemed to feel almost a constraint to report that everything was unfortunate about the campaign. Ed: The other day I reread the end of Hell’s Angels, one of my favorite books… and you talked about The Edge… you know… that moment that I’ve experienced … I was a … minor league bike-rider in my youth… that moment of being on the edge… and you talk about that a lot throughout your coverage this past year. While this might seem a bizarre way to conduct journalism, it produces brilliant insights into whatever he chooses to study at the time.Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach… There are a lot of people just walking around bored stupid. I suspect that there should have been more discussion in the campaign of the everyday frustrations and problems of working people, conditions under which they work, maybe more of an effort made to identify with them…. HST: Yeah, I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.