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

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It’s a damned shame all this has happened to George, because I don’t know how long it will be until we have a President who feels like that.

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. I didn’t think there were major gaps being made in the campaign, but there were some right at the beginning that haunted us all the way through. 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. I spent about two weeks in Washington talking to 15 or 20 of the key people in the campaign, and I was surprised at the lack of any kind of consensus – no hard figures or any kind of real analysis – except the kind of things that McGovern said in his interviews which were mainly speculation. Journalists, pundits, commentators and tastemakers use this extremely flimsy material to amuse themselves over the airwaves and on our screens for years ahead of the final vote.

It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns… At every hotel, wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press. When I see men dutifully gazing at the screens in some bar, I think of them as doing their “man homework. There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that’s the way all the rest of my presidential campaign coverage was written. But the part of the quote that interested me more was where he said he wasn’t sure if they should be put back together.

All too often, Hunter Thompson's remarkable and vast journalistic production has been overwhelmed and deluded by his famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado and win, would you then consider running for the presidency itself?What Nixon did was pick up a tremendous amount of mainly young, not necessarily liberal Democrats – but young, sort of educated, relatively sophisticated voters who would have stayed with McGovern, according to the polls… according to the answers they gave the poll-takers, if it had not been for the Eagleton disaster. Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was coming on with … a new … a different type of politician … a person who actually would grab the system by the ears and shake it.