Tell Me, Mr. McGovern... (Z-Z-Z-ZIP)

HUNTER S. THOMPSON, Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, is like the Creature from the Bottom of the Deep. Dripping with the swampy, polluted waters of the seventies, shaking off the slime and lurching out on to the land, he is by now one of the most exciting journalistic voices in America. As a victim of our time he has learned to speak its language--of drugs, of violent energy, of The Fear. And then, turning upon it enraged, with instincts born out of the furtive life of the underground mind, he pounces on the most visceral and alarming rhythms of the age. He embodies our most hysterical fantasies and fears, and gives expression to the outer limits of our paranoia and despair.

At the same time he is an excellent writer--outrageously imaginative, hilariously funny, refreshingly honest and strangely accurate. He can make Armageddon fascinating, and even his most psychotic visions are driven by a tough, even slightly old-fashioned sensibility--somehow we sense a practical aptitude for survival in his crazed, technicolor world of fear and loathing. What is rather disconcerting about the manic charm of his apocalyptic perception is that the line between reality and his hallucinatory interpretation of it is getting thinner every day.

Dr. Thompson came to Radcliffe this Spring, looking like a jaded and somewhat exotic ex-athlete--humble, but with the manner of a restless mountain lion. He walked into the stiffly gracious common room at 6:30 in the evening, plunked a six-pack on the coffee table, mumbled "well, this is breakfast," and proceeded to give one of the most lucid and intelligent analyses of last fall's presidential campaign that we have ever heard.

Thompson's writing career began as a sportswriter in Louisville, Ky., before he published his first book: Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. In the mid-sixties he ran with the Angels virtually as a friend, writing relatively sympathetically about them and eventually being stomped by them. Later he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the Freak Power ticket, whose platform included a decidedly unviable stand on the question of mescaline use. He almost won. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas followed this: it is a brilliant documentary novel about Hunter's and his attorney's monumentally stoned sojourn on the Strip with an expense account, in search of the American Dream. And now, as National Correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, Thompson has collected last year's bi-weekly articles on the campaign into a book.

THE 1972 CAMPAIGN was tired, stale and plastic almost from the beginning. One of the candidates did not even put in an appearance. When Thompson was refused a White House press pass ("Rolling what?" said the officials), he wrote that "getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club;" following Nixon at all "is like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn;" and "the difference between traveling with McGovern and traveling with Nixon is just like the difference between going on tour with the Grateful Dead and going on tour with the Pope." Curtains are certainly coming down now, but Thompson ripped down a few veneers of his own last fall, both politically and journalistically, by displaying a calculated disregard for any and all hallowed rules of responsible reporting. He also cut through a lot of hypocrisy along the way.

When Dr. Thompson went to cover the campaign full time in late 1971, he was in a peculiar position. Rolling Stone was not noted for being bound by ties with Washington, and they could leave Thompson--the best thing they'd ever had--with a completely free hand. He ran wild with it--interviewing George McGovern at a urinal, throwing objectivity out the window, junking any semblance of "off-the-record," refusing to repress an obvious bias (pro-McGovern), and drawing no line at the point where the facts ended and his imaginative insanity began. For example, he gets into some very heavy slander: NBC's John Chancellor (who he seems to like) is a "dope-addled fascist bastard," Muskie is "a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches," and Hubert Humphrey is a "treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current." He doesn't pretend to cover the campaign thoroughly: he ignores some events and deals with others in detail, looking for an essence rather than a careful report.

But there is some strong political savvy and a deeply-imbedded moral idealism to Hunter Thompson that makes him a serious commentator the whole way through. He was about the only journalist who had the license to publish unabridged articles from a whole year of reporting, simply because he made so few mistakes and so many shrewd prophecies. He predicted a first-ballot victory for McGovern at the convention when the Senator had only 95 delegates to his name and he was opposed to Eagleton as a "cheap hustler" from the beginning. In fact, of fifty or sixty bets with fellow reporters during the campaign, Thompson lost only two.

Ralph Steadman, as with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, provides perfect illustrations--snarling scratches that bear the same relationship to conventional caricature that Thompson's writing does to The National Review. These drawings are accompanied by photographs, some of which are interesting, but we could have done without the high-school yearbook technique of supplying "funny" captions to the pictures. There is some disadvantage to converting bi-weekly articles into a collection (only a couple of chapters were added) in that Thompson has to repeat himself sometimes. An extended interview with Rick Stearns and Dick Dougherty about convention tactics wasn't worth the 28 pages that it commanded.

BUT THIS is bickering, because this book stands a good chance of leaving the umpteen other books that this campaign will spew forth holding their hats. There are, of course, probably valid objections to Thompson's tampering with the truth with such unabashed glee, but his metaphysical point of view is so seductive--so right, that it's hard to notice. It should by rights be simple to tell when Dr. Thompson is jettisoning the truth, yet the fact is that his fantasies are close to ringing true, not so much because he is being irresponsibly unclear, but because the campaign, and the world at large, approach his level of craziness to an alarming degree. It's a cliche to say that we don't know what to believe anymore.

In one of his more constructive moods, Hunter Thompson suggests that what a man like George McGovern needs is "at least one dark kinky streak of Mick Jagger in his soul." In the final analysis, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail makes it clear that something like this, something is necessary to beat the man who:

represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Out Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us: the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close...