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

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Whose fault that is I don’t know … I found in the field a lot of confusion about who was really in charge, pushing and pulling as to where you got things cleared, who had the final authority. 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. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. But that’s not what I mean here, because she wanted to dump him in Miami, about two minutes after she heard he’d been selected to be on the ticket.

The book spends very little time on the actual votes, and instead dwells in the day-to-day life of a journalist covering the campaign — the dreary hotels and constant flights back and forth across the continent, which must have seemed a frightfully claustrophobic existence for a man who usually lived in the woods outside the Colorado ski town of Aspen.

Any candidate who’d offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon – someone with a different concept of the presidency – could have challenged him and come very close to beating him. Barger stared, not blinking, but Mankiewicz smiled his cold lizard’s smile and they moved slowly through the drunken crowd to put themselves between us and the doorway. Some of the scenes in this twisted saga will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them. But for Americans, politics is just another sport: a long, drawn-out and essentially boring game puffed up to importance with pomp and pageantry and a maddening ocean of statistics. To watch either of them on television is to track seven or eight different scorecards at the same time — how many points each team has, how many yards until the next “down,” how many yards has that running back covered this season, how many hits has that batter made this year and how does it compare with a similar batter who last played 30 years ago, how often has that quarterback been “sacked,” how will that last innings affect that pitcher’s shutout average.

B. Cooper door that drops down from the tail – 50 or 60 drunken journalists were lurching around in the aisles, spilling drinks on each other and rolling spools of raw TV film towards the rear of the plane where two smiling stewardesses were strapped down by their safety belts, according to regulations. HST: Yeah, but then the punishment would be the greatest too… it’s much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate. Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in 24 hours… but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter.

HST: Frank knew the name of that anaesthesiologist, that woman who gave him the gas during one of the shock treatments, but he wouldn’t tell me. Although a different work than Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas, a very interesting and personal look at American politics and Thompson the journalist. Our Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. The campaign plane would fly into a state and the staffers would have conflicting things set up for him to do. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair.

We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up – this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback – and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years.

He deconstructs the 1972 campaigns of idealist George McGovern and political hack Richard Nixon, ending up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic.