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

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This made him a pioneer in a type of journalism he dubbed “gonzo,” wherein he often exaggerated or even made up events to hit at some kind of deeper literary truth.

If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once,” he offers at one point.Perceive” is the word that became in the ’72 campaign what “charisma” was for the 1960, ’64 and even the ’68 campaigns. I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary – and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the 50 or 60 bets I made between February and November. And while On the Campaign Trail ‘72 is chock-full with the kind of horse-race thinking and analysis that must have surrounded him at the time, Thompson’s coverage is unique because it zooms out a little. out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. He had told a group of reporters who flew down to talk with him at Henry Kimmel man’s house in the Virgin Islands that he wasn’t sure if the two wings of the party could be put back together….

Ed: So the public’s perception of McGovern was distorted – but you think that McGovern essentially was at the root of that distortion. The point I meant to make here – before we wandered off on that tangent about jack-rabbits – is that everything was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening. And I think it hurt him with the Wallace-type Democrats that I talked to up in Serb Hall in Milwaukee that day; who disagreed with him, but perceived him – that word again – as a straight, honest, different type of politician, a person who would actually do what he said, make some real changes. One afternoon about three days ago the Editorial Enforcement Detail from the Rolling Stone office showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about 40 pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls.McGovern said that “half of the Nixon vote, given the chance, would have gone even further to the right! HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? And then other factors began to operate, the “peace is at hand” business, the negotiations sort of blunted and killed it; actually, I think the war issue was working for the President.

McGovern: Well, I was really talking about this organized group rather than the defection of large numbers of blue-collar workers, which I regard as a serious problem. There was never any question of winning, but the shock set in when people began to sense the dimensions of it, how bad it was…. That’s the kind of language Mankiewicz used all through the campaign when he got confused and started treading water.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. He stayed out of the public eye, and he had all the money he needed to hire people to work on direct mail and everybody got a letter tailored to their own interests and their own groove, and I think their negative TV spots were effective in painting a distorted picture of me. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota.

Writing as an outsider he manages to make this campaign 30 years in the past into a vibrant and exciting epic.

Senator William Fulbright, discussing McGovern’s misfortunes with a half-dozen fellow Democrats one evening late in the campaign, said he wanted a McGovern presidency ‘because George is such an ordinary man….