Fear and Loathing and Ripping Off

By Thomas Griffith

If your news comes to you only from radio, television and the daily papers, there is a lot of news--or news so-called --that you may not have heard about. Did you know, as the National Enquirer reports, that a girl had a secret romance with Bobby Kennedy in the summers of 1948 and 1949? "My world fell apart," Joan Winmill Brown told the Enquirer. "I had two nervous breakdowns, lived on drugs--even contemplated suicide." This kind of journalism has a lineage in England and America going back to scandal sheets for scullery maids. However bold the headlines, much that appears is a souped-up version of news already in the public domain. But you knew that already, didn't you? How much should you trust similarly sensational news stories about the Kennedys or the CIA that turn up in rock journals, underground papers, skin magazines and other new frontiers of enterprising journalism?

The basic rule surely ought to be: Measure what to believe by where you read it. You really can't demand reliability or balance about public affairs, only shock and cynicism and liveliness, in magazines whose editors are more skilled at judging acid-rock groups. Or in magazines whose editors primarily compete for the latest angle of audacity in photographing naked girls. Still, solemnity isn't the only test of good journalism: more conventional papers and magazines are often incurious about some kinds of news, while journals like Rolling Stone and the early Ramparts --in quite a different league than the Enquirer--have at times uncovered major stories that others later had to pursue. In fact, Rolling Stone sets out to be a literate interpreter of the young generation.

A tone of raffish candor, meant to be ingratiating, often surrounds such performances. The master of self-proclaimed raffishness is Hunter S. Thompson, 39, Rolling Stone national-affairs correspondent and the author of one book on Hell's Angels and two others with "fear and loathing" in their titles.

Since he is the best-known Pied Piper of journalistic commandos, his tune is worth listening to. He introduced his book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, 72 by lovingly cataloguing the amount of beer, gin and speed his publisher had stocked his motel room with to get him to finish his manuscript in a fevered rush. The prose that follows proves that the self-styled "Dr." Thompson has a decided talent for the feigned high.

He has been at it again. Last month in Rolling Stone, he gave "an endorsement, with fear and loathing," to Jimmy Carter. The article takes a long time to get under way, for as he writes, his radio is describing a Cuban sought for wantonly castrating dogs in Coconut Grove, Fla. ("This is, after all, another election year, and almost everyone I talk to seems to feel we are headed for strangeness of one sort or another.") Thompson is at first judicious about this strangeness ("The evidence points both ways"), but not for long: "Jesus Christ! I'm not sure I can handle this kind of news and frantic stimulus at four o'clock in the morning--especially with a head full of speed, booze and Percodan."

Soon, to prove that he has not gone politically softheaded, he opens up on Hubert Humphrey ("that rotten, truthless old freak" whose face he watches on TV--"this monster, this shameful electrified corpse"). What worse could Thompson possibly say about somebody like Nixon? Don't underestimate him or the liberality of the libel laws, or the amount of vilification that a disgraced Nixon now seems required to undergo. To Dr. Thompson, Nixon in his final days was "criminally insane" and "even his closest friends and advisers were convinced ... that he was only two martinis away from [making] that final telephone call that... would have launched enough missiles and bombers to blow the whole world off its axis."

In Jimmy Carter, Hunter Thompson has at last found his epiphany. Two years ago, suitably liquored at the time, Thompson heard Carter give an unforgettable Law Day speech in which Carter talked about abuses of criminal justice and said how much his thinking had been influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan. Ever since hearing the speech, Thompson has been hovering around the forbearing Jimmy Carter. With a tape recorder in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the other, Thompson writes, he once in private sessions got six hours of Carter on tapes, and he was impressed by the "extremely detailed precision of his answers to some of the questions that he is now ac cused of being either unable or unwilling to answer ... I was dealing with a candidate who had already done a massive amount of research on things like tax reform, national defense and the structure of the American political system." At last we are getting down to it!

Instead, Thompson proceeds to quote some of his own inanities and obscenities on the tape to prove that "both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior and on one or two occasions they have had to deal with me in a noticeably bent condition." After all these detours--castrated dogs, Humphrey's face and Nixon's martinis--we wait to hear what Jimmy said during those six hours. And we are given not one sentence.

The interesting question is what the Rolling Stone reader makes of this: Does he think he has been ripped off? Or, since everything is a hype these days, isn't it enough that "it reads good" and is all that the reader wants to hear about politics anyway? Despite Dr. Thompson's political wise-guyism and all the macho whisky-and-drug talk, this is not opium for the masses but Dr. Pepper for the credulous.

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