Pam's Book Log

16 December, 2003

It took me forever to read this book (I was reading it concurrently with my Foreign Policy textbook and all the lightweight stuff I've been reading of late), and to write it up (due to the fact that it's a pretty substantial piece of writing, and took a while to write up).

So, first a summary: Hunter S. Thompson covered the 1972 presidential campaign (the primary as well as the general) for Rolling Stone magazine. After it was all over, his monthly dispatches were collected, smoothed out a little bit, and published as a book. So, this book is not just a history of that (now infamous) election, it's a record that was written pretty much as it was all happening.

Second, a political note. What with an election coming up and all, this book is definitely relevant to current events. It's particularly so, what with pundits and bloggers declaring that some candidate or other (usually Howard Dean) is "another McGovern" who will lead the Democratic Party to humiliating defeat at the hands of ~~Nixon~~ Bush. "McGovern" in these cases is usually just shorthand for "too liberal for the American public, and will lose in a landslide" a shorthand which reveals a great deal of ignorance on the part of the pundit. As shown in this book, the reasons why McGovern lost so badly are many and varied, and have as much to do with campaign strategies and intra-Democratic Party power struggles as with George McGovern's political views. I could go on and on about this topic, but this is not a politics blog, so I won't.

Now, about the book. It is mostly very good. (Qualifier explained below.) In spite of his inherent weirdness, Thompson demonstrates keen political insight; it's hard to believe he was writing this for Rolling Stone. Maybe Rolling Stone didn't suck back then. Because it was being written as it all happened, it reads more like a novel than a nonfiction book. The writing is infused with a sense of uncertainty and excitement (at least in the parts dealing with the Democratic primaries and convention--the chapters on the general election are pretty depressing). Thompson is not an objective journalist by any means--he's completely up front on how much he hates Nixon and Hubert Humphrey--but his political analysis is almost always on-target. He doesn't spare his favorites, and some of his criticism is really harsh. He's got a sense of wit which he wields not so much like a rapier as like a machete.

One nice thing about Thompson's writing is that he has a tendency to go off on tangents, and spend a few pages discussing things which have very little, if anything, to do with the political process. For the modern reader, this is a feature, not a bug. It gives one a sense of what America was like in 1972, a cultural context that is key to understanding the rise and fall of the McGovern campaign.

One of the most memorable parts of the book is Thompson's haunting description of a Vietnam Veterans Against the War march during the Republican National Convention:

My own plan for that afternoon was to drive far out to the end of Key Biscayne and find an empty part of the beach where I could swim by myself in the ocean, and not have to talk to anybody for a while. I didn't give a fuck about watching the rules fight, a doomed charade that the Nixon brain-trust had already settled in favor of the conservatives...and I saw no point in going out to the airport to watch three thousand well-rehearsed "Nixon Youth" robots "welcome the President."

Given these two depressing options, I figured Tuesday was as good a day as any to get away from politics and act like a human being for a change--or better still, like an animal. Just get off by myself and drift around naked in the sea for a few hours...

But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets.... They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots...a few carried full-size plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow-moving wheelchairs, other walking jerkily on crutches.... But nobody spoke; all the "stop, start," "fast, slow," "left, right" commands came from "platoon leaders" walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals.

One look at that eerie procession killed my plan to go swimming that afternoon. I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march.... No, "joined" is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and "joined." Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue...all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach.

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. there were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

[...]

For the first and only time during the whole convention, the cops were clearly off balance. The Vets could have closed all six lanes of Collins Avenue if they'd wanted to, and nobody would have argued. I have been covering anti-war demonstrations with depressing regularity since the winter of 1964, in cities all over the country, and I have never seen cops so intimidated by demonstrators as they were in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel on that hot Tuesday afternoon in Miami Beach.

There was an awful tension in that silence. Not even that pack of rich sybarites out there on the foredeck of the Wild Rose of Houston could stay in their seats for this show. They were standing up at the rail, looking worried, getting very bad vibrations from whatever was happening over there in the street. Was something wrong with their gladiators? Were they spooked? And why was there no noise?

After five more minutes of harsh silence, one of the VVAW platoon leaders suddenly picked up a bullhorn and said: "We want to come inside."

Nobody answered, but an almost visible shudder ran through the crowd.

When Thompson's on, he's on. Fortunately, he's on for almost the whole book. However, there are a few bits where he was running up hard against a deadline, and he punts, going into "the straight gonzo mode." That mostly consists of transcribing his notebook, recorded conversations, or Q&A sessions with his editor. These bits are less than stellar, and some of them are less than comprehensible. Such are the dangers of writing under a monthly deadline, I guess. These bits only comprise maybe 10% of the book, and the other 90% is so good that it's well worth slogging through the messy bits.

It's worth noting that, while the book ends on a depressing note, the sequel to Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 is All the President's Men.