The Democratic primaries in 1968 and 1972 saw the party's liberal wing clash with the party establishment over the Vietnam War, which Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had begun in 1964. In the '68 primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ for the Democratic nomination, campaigning against the war. Although as the sitting president LBJ should have walked to the nomination, McCarthy nearly beat him in New Hampshire and was polling ahead of him in Wisconsin; other candidates, including Bobby Kennedy, entered the race on an antiwar platform. Realizing that he had lost the support of the party due to the war, Johnson eventually withdrew.
At the '68 Democratic Convention, after Bobby Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles, LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination in a deal brokered by party insiders. Outside the convention hall, Chicago police used tear gas and truncheons against antiwar protesters, many of whom supported McCarthy's anti-war campaign; the networks carried live footage of the clash.
While the police were beating down the protesters outside, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff gave a speech in the convention hall in support of George McGovern's late-starting bid for the nomination. Ribicoff claimed that with McGovern as the nominee Chicago cops wouldn't be using Gestapo tactics against the protesters outside the hall. TV cameras didn’t record the audio of Mayor Richard J. Daley's response to Ribicoff, but his lips could be read, saying, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!"
In the general election, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Humphrey by a margin of 0.7% of the popular vote, with one-time Democrat George Wallace carrying five southern states. Had the white Democrats who defected to Wallace voted for Humphrey instead, he would have won.
In a hilarious flashback to Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, Thompson imagined the crowd showering abuse on the inaugural parade as it proceeded through D.C.:
Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corp ... and as one time Presidential candidate George Romney [Mitt Romney's father] passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"Three years later, the candidates vying for the Democratic Party's nomination to challenge Nixon in November 1972 included Hubert Humphrey, the unsuccessful nominee from '68; George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota; and Ed Muskie, the Maine senator who'd won the support of organized labor and big city bosses like Mayor Daley. In February, during the New Hampshire primary, which Muskie was supposed to walk away with, Thompson came out as a strong supporter of McGovern, who was then a dark horse candidate. McGovern had opposed the Vietnam War from the start (although he had grudgingly voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964). He supported amnesty for draft dodgers and campaigned as an anti-politician who said what he believed rather than what served his political interests. To the consternation of party bigwigs, McGovern established himself as a serious contender for the nomination by nearly beating Muskie in New Hampshire and easily winning Wisconsin.
Thompson hated Muskie and the party establishment that he represented. During the Florida primary, Thompson gave his Muskie press pass to a drunk, acid-fried jailbird, the Boohoo, who used Thompson's credentials to enter the chartered train that carried Muskie on a whistle-stop tour to Miami. When Muskie gave a speech from the balcony of the caboose in Miami, the Boohoo pulled on Muskie’s leg and shouted for the "old fart" to go inside and get him another gin. The Muskie campaign revoked Thompson's press pass in retaliation for the Boohoo incident.
Thompson said that Muskie sounded like he had spent decades trying to overcome a speech impediment only to end up talking like someone in a narcotic stupor. On first hearing a Muskie radio spot, Thompson thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. He wrote in Rolling Stone that Muskie was secretly addicted to ibogaine, a hallucinogen that's used in African spiritual rites. He was amused when this baseless claim was taken seriously by other journalists.
Because of Thompson's enthusiasm for intoxicating drugs and his hatred of the political establishment, he felt like a foreigner in his native country. But he realized that this "sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new." He opened the chapter on the California primary by quoting a 15th-century poem in which Francois Villon said, "In my own country I am in a far-off land / I am strong but I have no force or power." Thompson had used the same poem as the epigraph for Hell's Angels, which dealt with a chapter of the motorcycle gang that Thompson shadowed for a year. According to Thompson, motorcycle outlaws are socially useless losers who "make good copy" only because of their uncontrollable propensities toward rape, violence, and mayhem. But I think Thompson respected the outlaw's independence, however stupid and impulsive he is. At least while he is at large, the outlaw is the state's equal, not its subject. He recognizes no authority that limits his freedom of action.
Thompson drank a lot on the campaign trail, but the booze didn't cloud his account of the candidates' election strategies. It didn't get him arrested for DUI either, although a lot of his drinking took place behind the wheel. When he moved to D.C. in December 1971 to cover the campaign, he got half drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey on the drive from Chicago to Altoona. (28). Later he drove a rented sports car from Boston to New Hampshire for the February primary, with "a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling onto [his] lap on every turn." (58). At the smorgasbord lunch for the few journalists covering McGovern during the New Hampshire primary, he had three Budweisers. After McGovern sewed up the nomination in Miami, Thompson drank himself into a mean-drunk stupor and swam in the ocean, where a rip-tide swept him out to sea. (318). In May, on visiting McGovern's original campaign headquarters in D.C., he picked up some Ballantine ale at the liquor store next door; the clerk was willing to charge it to McGovern's campaign but Thompson paid anyway. (407). Before sitting down to write his piece on the Republican convention in Miami, he picked up two six packs of Ballantine ale at a beachside shop. (337). He finished the book’s final chapter during an all-nighter at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco, drinking Wild Turkey and coffee and smoking short Jamaican cigars, with the Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" blasting out of four speakers hung from the ceiling. (503).
By the time Nixon trounced McGovern in the general election, winning 48 of 50 states, Thompson was exhausted from the campaign but also hopelessly hooked on politics. He said he would definitely cover the 1976 presidential election, and he was going to look into trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Colorado. He did neither.
On the book’s final page, Thompson described coming across a McDonald's advertisement that featured inspirational remarks about persistence. Without it, the ad claimed, talent, genius, and education were useless. Thompson mocked this message. After discussing it with McGovern's campaign director on the phone he headed out to a bar called the Loser's Club. Thus the book ended. The ending struck me as a statement that Thompson had given up on influencing American politics. Nixon's reelection also may have caused him to give up any ambition of writing serious books. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 marked the end of his peak period. Between 1960 and 1974, he had written four major pieces of literature that were as funny as Mark Twain's best stuff; in the three decades of his life that followed, he produced nothing of comparable quality.
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