This book may have been written about one campaign, but it is timeless in the way that “the more things change the more they stay the same.”
Too many parts of this book are relevant to all of the subsequent elections since. Even worse, most of this book is remarkably relevant to all of the elections from 2000 onward.
The book chronicles author Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s on-the-ground coverage of the 1972 campaign. It begins with the Democratic primary race, which led to Senator George McGovern facing incumbent Republican President Richar Nixon in the general election. For those unfamiliar, Nixon won the general election in a landslide. Eventually, we learned about Watergate and the unraveling of Nixon’s presidency, but that’s something for another time.
So is this book for you? If nothing else, does the following excerpt make sense to you?
“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy–then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight–assuming it was straight in the first place.”
If it does, perhaps this is the book for you.
Oh, look, do you think political campaigning in this country is any different than it was back then? Wrong! It’s been this way for well over five decades!
“The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator–or even a President–is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.”
The politics of divisiveness is brutal and ugly, and most of it today has less truth than you’d expect or prefer from anyone. While the truth may have taken a vacation, the brutality of politics and its ugliness have been around since before 1972. The magnifying glass Thompson puts on that campaign exposes just how bad it can be. And that’s not just the politicians.
“Am I turning into a political junkie? It is not a happy thought–particularly when I see what it’s done to all the others.” This was written in September 1972 after about nine months covering the Democratic primary and subsequent general election campaigns. If that’s Thompson’s view of it with still almost a month before the votes would be cast and counted, there’s not much hope for anyone but those with the steeliest of stomachs. To hear him further describe it later in the book, a political junkie is up there with drug addict, and that’s not something I would have ever considered before.
But this is a collection of thoughts to make you think, and Thompson has got my mind going.
They say that whoever doesn’t learn from history is destined to repeat it. Well, whoever they are, this book has enlightened me to the fact that there must be a subset of people who learn from history in order to repeat it. This is not something I had considered before this book.
Is it that Thompson wrote this book and his way of thinking is out there? Or is it that some of the poor decisions and directions of the past have come back with vengeance in such a direct way that you can’t help but think there is no way this is anything other than intentional?
Perhaps that’s my naivete showing, but then against the harsh light of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, we’re all probably more naive than usual.
I recently read Collision of Power and waiting on my shelf is All the President’s Men, so I’m in a small non-fiction political bent of late. These books are worth your time if you have any interest in them.
The politics displayed on mainstream media might be further from the actual politics than ever before. But in these books, and perhaps even more so with Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, you’ll get a first-hand perspective from as close as possible. While it’s not always pretty, and you may not even agree with the text, they are absolutely worth consuming.