Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Illustrated by Ralph Steadman

Copyright

William Collins

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This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2005

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo as a Modern Classic in 1994

Copyright © Hunter S. Thompson 1973

PS section copyright © Travis Elborough 2005

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Hunter S. Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440009

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To Sandy, who endured almost a year of grim exile in Washington, D.C. while this book was being written.

Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.

December 1971

Is This Trip Necessary? … Strategic Retreat into National Politics … Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike … Setting Up the National Affairs Desk … Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? … Fear and Loathing in Washington …

Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days … even more than the Alsop brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life – all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp – and also a fifty watt ‘boombox’ for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball … a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.

One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the ‘Westward Movement’ in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk … and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown … which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed … for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.

Where indeed?

At 5:30 in the morning I can walk outside to piss casually off my stoop and watch the lawn dying slowly from a white glaze of frost … Nothing moving out here tonight; not since that evil nigger hurled a three-pound Washington Post through the shattered glass coachlight at the top of my stone front steps. He offered to pay for it, but my Dobermans were already on him.

Life runs fast & mean in this town. It’s like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear. Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto in the Northwest quadrant of town – which seems to have made things a lot easier for the black marauders who have turned places like chic Georgetown and once-stylish Capitol Hill into hellishly paranoid Fear Zones.

Washington Post columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon/Mitchell administration – seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost – seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C. has become the ‘Rape Capital of the World.’

One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial town-houses with cut-glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument … When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.

‘Good God, man!’ said my friend from the liberal New York Post. ‘You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!’

Crime figures for ‘The District’ are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover.[1] Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the two hundred and fifty murders this year, only thirty-six have been solved … and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.

Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District – a few blocks from the Capitol -in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as ‘hall passes.’ So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet -fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.

This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 magnum. But in Washington you get the impression – if you believe what you hear from even the most ‘liberal’ insiders – that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.

Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet … but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.

All this sounds incredible – and that was my reaction at first: ‘Come on! It can’t be that bad!’

‘You wait and see,’ they said. ‘And meanwhile, keep your doors locked.’ I immediately called Colorado and had another Doberman shipped in. If this is what’s happening in this town, I felt, the thing to do was get right on top of it … but paranoia gets very heavy when there’s no more humor in it; and it occurs to me now that maybe this is what has happened to whatever remains of the ‘liberal power structure’ in Washington. Getting beaten in Congress is one thing – even if you get beaten a lot - but when you slink out of the Senate chamber with your tail between your legs and then have to worry about getting mugged, stomped, or raped in the Capitol parking lot by a trio of renegade Black Panthers … well, it tends to bring you down a bit, and warp your Liberal Instincts.

There is no way to avoid ‘racist undertones’ here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks – not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ And I tell myself, ‘Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see.’ And sometimes I do, but not always …

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs … humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel piss-ant; dragging a massive orange U-haul trailer full of books and ‘important papers’ … feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.

It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving … but not even this new, six-cylinder super-Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown … still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezewood in Pennsylvania; I’d stopped there to ponder the drug question with two freaks I met on the Turnpike.

They had blown a tire east of Everett, but nobody would stop to lend them a jack. They had a spare tire – and a jack, too, for that matter – but no jack-handle; no way to crank the car up and put the spare on. They had gone out to Cleveland, from Baltimore to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit … and they’d picked up this ’66 Ford Fairlane for $150.

I was impressed.

‘Shit,’ they said. ‘You can pick up a goddamn new Thunderbird out there for seven-fifty. All you need is cash, man; people are desperate! There’s no work out there, man; they’re selling everything! It’s down to a dime on the dollar. Shit, I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Baltimore.’

I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business, if things were as good as they said. They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland area and places like Baltimore, Philly and Washington. ‘All you need,’ they said, ‘is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘And some jack-handles.’

‘What?’

‘Jack-handles – for scenes like these.’

They laughed. Yeah, a jack-handle or so might save a lot of trouble. They’d been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by … and in truth I only stopped because I couldn’t quite believe what I thought I’d just seen. Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade -running easily, for a change – when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.

I hit the brakes and pulled over. What the fuck was that? I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days … and you don’t really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.

A white bear? Agnew’s other son?

At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not? Check it out.

But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer … so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn’t back up.

But I was still curious. So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a .357 magnum in the other. No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought – by wild beasts or anything else. My instincts were purely humanitarian – but what about that Thing I was going back to look for? You read about these people in the Reader’s Digest: blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.

Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather. You never know … and that warning works both ways. Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle … and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a .357 magnum in his hand.

A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help. For all they knew I was half-mad on PCP and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials … nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.

But this time things worked out – as they usually do when you go with your instincts – and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half-frozen heads with a blowout … and the ‘white bear’ rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop. At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said: ‘I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane – even a Cop Car; this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me … shit, they’re supposed to help people, right …?’

Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the car until we started cranking it up. The Volvo jack wouldn’t work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.

When Lester finally got out he didn’t say much; but finally his head seemed to clear and he helped put the tire on. Then he looked up at me while Jerry tightened the bolts and said: ‘Say, man, you have anything to smoke?’

‘Smoke?’ I said. ‘Do I look like the kind of person who’d be carrying marrywanna?’

Lester eyed me for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Well, shit,’ he said. ‘Let’s smoke some of ours.’

‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Those blue lights about a hundred yards from where my car’s parked is a State Police barracks. Let’s get some coffee down in Breezewood; there’s bound to be a truckstop.’

Jerry nodded. ‘It’s cold as a bastard out here. If we want to get loaded, let’s go someplace where it’s warm.’

They gave me a ride down to the Volvo, then followed me into Breezewood to a giant truckstop.

‘This is terrible shit,’ Lester muttered, handing the joint to Jerry. ‘There’s nothin‘ worth a damn for sale these days. It’s got so the only thing you can get off on is smack.’

Jerry nodded. The waitress appeared with more coffee. ‘You boys are sure laughin’ a lot,’ she said. ‘What’s so funny at this hour of the morning?’

Lester fixed her with a front-toothless smile and two glittering eyes that might have seemed dangerous if he hadn’t been in such a mellow mood. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I used to be a male whore, and I’m laughin’ because I’m so happy that I finally found Jesus.’

The waitress smiled nervously as she filled our cups and then hurried back to her perch behind the counter. We drank off the coffee and traded a few more stories about the horrors of the latterday drug market. Then Jerry said they would have to get moving. ‘We’re heading for Baltimore,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

‘Washington,’ I said.

‘What for?’ Lester asked. ‘Why the fuck would anybody want to go there?’

I shrugged. We were standing in the parking lot while my Doberman pissed on the wheel of a big Hard Brothers poultry truck. ‘Well … it’s a weird sort of trip,’ I said finally. ‘What happened is that I finally got a job, after twelve years.’

‘Jesus!’ said Lester. ‘That’s heavy. Twelve years on the dole! Man, you must of been really strung out!’

I smiled. ‘Yeah … yeah, I guess you could say that.’

‘What kind of a job?’ Jerry asked.

Now the Doberman had the driver of the Hard Brothers truck backed up against his cab, screeching hysterically at the dog and kicking out with his metal-toed Army boots. We watched with vague amusement as the Doberman – puzzled by this crazy outburst – backed off and growled a warning.

‘O God Jesus,’ screamed the trucker. ‘Somebody help me!’ It was clear that he felt he was about to be chewed up and killed, for no reason at all, by some vicious animal that had come out of the darkness to pin him against his own truck.

‘OK, Benjy!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t fool with that man – he’s nervous.’ The trucker shook his fist at me and yelled something about getting my license number.

‘Get out of here, you asshole!’ Lester screamed. ‘It’s pigs like you that give Dobermans a bad name.’

Jerry laughed as the trucker drove off. ‘You won’t last long on the job with a dog like that,’ he said. ‘Seriously – what kind of work do you do?’

‘It’s a political gig,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Washington to cover the ’72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jerry muttered. ‘That’s weird! The Stone is into politics?’

I stared down at the asphalt, not sure of what to say. Was ‘The Stone’ into politics? Or was it just me? I had never really wondered about it … but suddenly on the outskirts of Washington, in the cold grey dawn of this truckstop near Breezewood just north of the Maryland line, it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t really say what I was doing there – except heading for D.C. with an orange pig-shaped trailer and a Doberman Pinscher with bad bowels after too many days on the road.

‘It sounds like a stinking goddamn way to get back into work,’ said Lester. ‘Why don’t you hang up that bullshit and we’ll put something together with that car shuttle Jerry told you about?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I want to at least try this trip,’ I said.

Lester stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. ‘God damn!’ he said. ‘What a bummer. Why would anybody want to get hung up in a pile of shit like Politics?’

‘Well …’ I said, wondering if there was any sane answer to a question like that: ‘It’s mainly a personal trip, a very hard thing to explain.’

Jerry smiled. ‘You talk like you’ve tried it,’ he said. ‘Like maybe you got off on it.’

‘Not as far as I meant to,’ I said, ‘but definitely high.’

Lester was watching me now with new interest. ‘I always thought that about politicians,’ he said. ‘Just a gang of goddamn power junkies, gone off on their own strange trips.’

‘Come on now,’ said Jerry. ‘Some of those guys are OK.’

‘Who?’ Lester asked.

‘That’s why I’m going to Washington,’ I said. ‘To check out the people and find out if they’re all swine.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Lester. ‘They are. You might as well go looking for cherries in a Baltimore whorehouse.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you when I make it over to Baltimore.’ I stuck out my hand and Jerry took it in a quick conventional handshake – but Lester had his thumb up, so I had to adjust for the Revolutionary Drug Brothers grip, or whatever that goddamn thing is supposed to mean. When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston.

‘He’s right,’ said Jerry. ‘Those bastards wouldn’t even be there if they weren’t rotten.’ He shook his head without looking at us, staring balefully across the parking lot. The grey light of dawn was getting brighter now; Thursday night was dying and the highway at the other end of the parking lot was humming with cars full of people going to work on Friday morning.

Welcome to Washington, D.C. That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall – a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.

It is not considered fashionable to live in ‘The District’ itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged brick town-house with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors, smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pine-paneled bars and ‘singles only’ discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.

I live on the ‘black side’ of Rock Creek park, in what my journalistic friends call ‘a marginal neighborhood.’ Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the ‘white side’ of the park, towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.

The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximating a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only people I know who live down there are Nicholas Von Hoffman and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyper-active Legislative Assistant. But Von Hoffman seems to have had a belly-full of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco … and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.

With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began three years ago.