The election was on the line, key precincts were reporting late, top campaign strategists were hunkered down working the phones, and Hunter S. Thompson brought the beer.
It was May 1972, and the Democratic campaign of Sen. George McGovern was in the process of narrowly losing the Ohio primary to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Frank Mankiewicz, whom Mr. Thompson called the “wizard” of the McGovern campaign, was convinced that Mr. Humphrey’s supporters had perpetrated massive fraud in inner-city Cleveland.
Turning to pollster Pat Caddell, Mr. Mankiewicz said: “We got raped.”
That was just one of many memorable scenes Mr. Thompson reported for Rolling Stone magazine in a series of dispatches collected in “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72,” a chronicle that begins in the snows of New Hampshire and ends with the landslide re-election of President Nixon.
Mr. Thompson died last year at age 67, but his account of the 1972 campaign, recently reissued in paperback by Warner Books,remains timely, said Corey Seymour, a former assistant to the famous “gonzo journalist.”
“I think it holds up really well,” Mr. Seymour said. “It’s about a specific time and a specific place. … What’s remarkable about it is the way it sort of broke open the genre of political reporting.
“Hunter had a way of describing the candidates and the campaign in a way that the layman could understand and relate to, rather than simply spelling out the spin from one side versus the spin from the other side. Hunter had the ability to render a judgment on the candidates and the kind of campaigns they were running.”
And what judgments they were:
• “There is 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 early Democratic front-runner, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, was “a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches.”
• “Nixon himself … represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.”
As viciously as he condemned other candidates, Mr. Thompson wrote with deep admiration for Mr. McGovern, the anti-war candidate who emerged as the upset winner of the Democratic nomination, as “a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota.”
Mr. Thompson “would deny that such a thing as objective journalism was possible,” said Mr. Seymour, who is completing an oral history, “Gonzo: The Oral History of Hunter S. Thompson,” to be published next year. “He simply dispensed with what the other reporters would describe as an attempt to be objective.”
Despite his mocking contempt for the concept of objectivity, Mr. Thompson’s 1972 campaign dispatches were filled with details about the mechanics of politics.
“I think that it’s often underappreciated what a fine grasp he had of the nuts and bolts and specifics of the campaign,” said Mr. Seymour, who worked for Rolling Stone in the 1990s.
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