2 May 15 , 2022Opening Lines
Book explores how Hunter S. Thompson
influenced political and media reportingby Jason Vest’72,” forever liberated campaign journalism from deferential
conventions and obligations to objectivity, and Thompson’s
ostensible assistant Timothy Crouse’s Rolling Stone reporting
on the campaign press corps, as collected in “The Boys on the
Bus,” was the ground zero for modern media reporting.
“Thompson sees the overall problem with politics; Crouse
reports on and analyzes the press as part of the problem in
depth,” Richardson, also a lecturer at San Francisco State
University, told me. “Thompson’s supposed to have Crouse as
an assistant but treats him like a teammate, going back to the
room every night, going over what they learned during the day.
Thompson feels disrespected by the Washington press corps,
and tells Crouse, ‘You know, maybe that should be the focus of
your work: Watch those people, make them the story.’ Out of
this, they both produce reporting and two very different kinds
of books that completely change journalism forever.”
Thompson, he says, rightfully looms large for demolishing
the idea that covering a campaign has to be objective day to day,
or with the winner automatically cast as the hero a la Theodore
White’s “The Making of the President” books. Along with
unabashed drug taking, hoaxing other reporters, and honing a
cultivated but nonetheless genuinely menacing edge,
Thompson quickly grasped the fact and advantage of being
shunned by press corp heavyweights. “Thompson’s determined
to turn liabilities into assets: ‘I’m not gonna do what everyone
else is doing. I’m gonna write about what I see, present the
unvarnished truth as I understand it,’ ” Richardson says. That
truth still resonates, he explains, and is perhaps best summed
up in this from Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon in
Rolling Stone:
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are
wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss
the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules
and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House
in the first place. ... You had to get Subjective to see Nixon
clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
That Thompson’s Rolling Stone dispatches were off-putting
to older campaign reporters but resonant with younger ones,
sometimes to the point of reverence, also signaled that
generational change was beginning to affect assumptions and
standards. Thompson was causing such ripples while inspiring
as much awe for his drug and alcohol consumption, which
made it an especially fun year to decide to report on the press
corps, recalls Crouse, long out of journalism but still reveling in
the memories.
“There were a lot of younger press guys in the mainstream
press, who became our friends and we’d smoke dope with them,
but Hunter. ... Hunter’s genius, for me, was calibrating uppers
and downers to keep getting exactly to the place he wanted to
be, and I wasn’t — that was just not something I was capable of
doing,” Crouse, 75, told me. “But he was such a mentor in such a
natural way. If you were a writer — if you were serious aboutI
t was presidential campaign reporting unlike anything
seen before. The reporter made it clear: He had no desire
to join the permanent Washington press corps, or ever
cover politics full time, and indeed he never did. He was
contemptuous of Democratic centrists and unabashed
about a sitting Republican president’s depravity, and said so in
prose that sounded like a punch-drunk H.L. Mencken spoiling
for a bar fight. (“A treacherous, gutless old wardheeler who
should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the
Japanese current,” he said of Dem presidential aspirant Hubert
Humphrey. And the incumbent in the White House? “The dark,
venal and incurably violent side of the American character that
almost every country in the world has learned to fear and
despise. ... A drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and
the head of giant hyena.”)
This is the unmistakable prose of the late Hunter S.
Thompson, who had high hopes that a one-off gig covering
national politics 50 years ago — really a sop from his editor at a
music magazine — might help him go from journalist to
novelist. He already had two nonfiction bestsellers under his
belt, one of which he’d reported out over years as an embed,
covering an outfit at least as amoral as any in Washington: the
Hell’s Angels.
But if the Washington political establishment, including the
press, thought the assignment was going to merit only a couple
of magazine pieces, they had another thing coming. Thompson
influenced a new generation of political correspondents, says
Peter Richardson, author of the newly published “Savage
Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo,”
a consideration of Thompson’s literary influences and influence.
The campaign of 1972 was remarkable not only for
investigative reporting but also for political and media
coverage. That Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are
deservedly lionized and still wearing out shoe leather and
breaking scoops 50 years later only reminds us of Watergate’s
watershed status. But those weren’t the only journalistic
foundations in 1972 that were shaken and stayed shook.
Another duo also sparked journalistic revolutions that year.
Thompson, whose Rolling Stone dispatches were
recapitulated in “Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign TrailHis Life on the
‘Road to Gonzo’