THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 3Clockwise from top:
Hunter S. Thompson,
right, at a Yale
journalism panel in
- Thompson with
presidential
candidate George
McGovern during the
’72 campaign. Peter
Richardson’s “Savage
Journey: Hunter S.
Thompson and the
Weird Road to
Gonzo.” Photographs
clockwise from top by
Bettmann Archive/
Getty Images;
Everett/Shutterstock;
University of
California Press
the craft — he considered you a brother.”
“Thompson was one of the great
satirists of American literature,” Jeff
Sartain, managing editor of the academic
American Book Review and a modern
literature scholar, told me by email. “In
Thompson’s writing, truth is often
revealed through the tools of fiction,
things like hyperbole, imagery and
subjective perspective. His language,
especially when he curses, has an almost
poetic sense of sound and timing to go
with his acerbic wit.”
Crouse says that he and Thompson
were delighted by the drip-drip-drip of
The Washington Post’s Watergate
reporting but that there sadly was never a
four-way sit-down between The Post and
Rolling Stone partners. Strange as it is to
consider, though, there may be some
alternate reality out there in which
Thompson might have shared The Post’s
pages with Woodstein.
Thompson’s archives are in the hands
of a private consortium led by Thompson
fan and friend Johnny Depp, so for his
book, Richardson necessarily relied on
historian Douglas Brinkley’s authorized
two-volume set of Thompson’s letters.
Among Richardson’s exhumations:
correspondence in 1963 between a 26-
year-old Thompson and legendary
Washington Post and Newsweek
publisher Philip Graham, in whichGraham showed signs of mentoring Thompson into a job.
Perhaps even more mind-boggling: Thompson’s initial note
to Graham is a case study in calumny. “He’s clearly angling for a
job covering Latin America, and he does it not only by
criticizing the Newsweek’s coverage, calling it an ‘abomination’
and a ‘fraud,’ but Graham himself, and personally, calling him a
‘phony’ who’s ‘overpaid.’ ”
Yet Graham clearly found the approach if not charming, at
least engaging enough to ask Thompson for a “somewhat less
breathless letter, in which you tell me about yourself.” And, he
added, “don’t make it more than two pages single space —
which means a third draft and not a first draft.”
Had Graham lived, might Thompson have ended up toiling
at The Post? Unlikely, says Richardson. “He lost every job he
ever managed to land.”Jason Vest lives in California.