BOB GARFIELD:
In addition to being a chronicler of the renegade biker gang, the Hells Angels, a vocal proponent of drug use and an autobiographical magician who turned his own fear and loathing into at least two American classics, Hunter S. Thompson was a campaign reporter. Of course, he treated politics like he did his other subjects, with foul language, bad behavior and an intimacy that had nothing to do with objectivity.

He was the antihero journalist who sloppily swallowed the 1972 presidential campaign and then regurgitated it in the pages of Rolling Stone. And so, as the current horserace comes to a finish, we thought we'd look back now at how Thompson covered the sport.

William McKeen is the chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida and author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. Bill, welcome to the show.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Thanks for having me.
BOB GARFIELD:
Most people believe that Hunter Thompson’s political writing started with the 1972 presidential campaign but, in fact, he wrote about Richard Nixon well before that, in 1968. Tell me about that piece.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Well, it was a piece he wrote for Pageant Magazine, which I recall being something kind of like The Reader’s Digest, sort of a bland coffee table magazine you'd find in your folks’ house or your grandparents’ house.

And so, when I looked back and started reading Hunter’s writing for Pageant, and he wrote four pieces, I was kind of surprised at the bile he had for Nixon that made it into the print - because he says here, “Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream.”

BOB GARFIELD:
Seeing that in Pageant Magazine would be the equivalent of maybe seeing someone described as a scum-sucking pig on the cover of Parade Magazine today.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Right. But he did have his famous interview with Richard Nixon then. It’s just that the subject was limited to pro football.
BOB GARFIELD:
What was famous about the interview?
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Well, not many people got a private audience with Nixon then. Nixon was the master of creating that control-your-environment approach to the campaign, where he'd have these staged, televised town hall meetings and everyone in the audience was handpicked, so the press was really frustrated that it couldn't get close to him.

And Hunter was one of those reporters following Nixon around in the early days of the primary. And after an event one night in New Hampshire he was getting juiced at the bar with some of his other reporters when one of the Nixon aides came in and said, listen, the old man has a 75-minute drive to the airport to catch his private Lear jet. He wants to talk football. None of us know football. Thompson, you know football. Will you sit with the President and talk to him? And the minute you bring up any other subject but football, we're dumping you out the car by the side of the road in the frozen tundra of New Hampshire. So he said, okay.
BOB GARFIELD:
[LAUGHS] Thompson had begun his journalism career as a sports writer for the Air Force base newspaper in Florida.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Right, and he'd always been interested in sports, saw himself as an athlete until he sort of fell under the spell of booze and tobacco. But afterward he said, “I went to New Hampshire with the idea that Richard Nixon was a monster. And although I left New Hampshire with a strange affection for the man as a man, I still tremble at the prospect of President Nixon.” And that was another one of the things he managed to sneak into Pageant Magazine.
BOB GARFIELD:
That Pageant piece was kind of a foreshadowing of his coverage three or four years hence, when he got the assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the campaign. How did Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, come to assign this loose cannon to such a momentous story?
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Jann Wenner didn't really want to do politics in Rolling Stone. He wanted to stay away from it. But after Hunter had published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone in the fall of 1971, he basically said to Hunter, well, what do you want to do?

And Hunter was under the thumb of this longstanding contract to write this book called The Death of the American Dream, which, you know, sounds awfully ponderous, and he couldn't figure out how to get a handle on this. And so he thought, well, maybe the American Dream is trapped inside this monster called politics. And so he asked Wenner if he could cover that campaign.

And at that point, you know, Wenner would have said, go cover a cockfighting match or something, he was so enamored of Hunter. So he gave him kind of carte blanche, knowing he might be a little, oh, shall we say unreliable. So he assigned [LAUGHS] another reporter to go with him, another Rolling Stone reporter, basically to serve as Hunter’s babysitter, to make sure that, you know, he woke up on time, he got on the campaign bus on time and that he filed his stories on time.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, the babysitter was a guy named Timothy Crouse, who, as a result of babysitting Hunter Thompson, was one of the boys on the bus and would write a book called The Boys on the Bus about the experience of covering the campaign. As a boy on the bus himself, Thompson both appalled and inspired the rest of the press corps essentially by writing all the things that they were thinking but never would have thought to put in print.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
In the early days of the campaign, all the other reporters on the bus, they'd be ready to leave the campaign site in the morning to go to the candidate’s first speech of the day or whatever, and they're waiting, you know. Why the hell aren't we leaving? We're behind schedule. Why aren't we leaving?

And then the bus would come. This thug in a bucket hat, you know, with a cigarette holder carrying a six-pack of ale, noisily grumbling his way down the aisle and bumping people, and this thing around his neck, his press pass that said Rolling Stone, but the magazine wasn't that well known, and so they figured, oh, it’s some kind of rock n' roll star.

A couple of weeks into the campaign, Hunter’s articles begin appearing in Rolling Stone, and suddenly they put two and two together and they see that this thug that they despise so much, in the back of the bus, is the guy that’s writing all this great prose. And so, they really began to buddy up to him but, you know, Hunter held a grudge.

And so, he gave Timothy Crouse the assignment – and I think the germ of the book that became a classic, The Boys on the Bus – he said, Tim, watch those swine day and night. Every time they have their hand up their [BLEEP], every time they [BLEEP] someone who isn't their wife, write it down. We'll lay it on 'em in October.

It was a brilliant idea to just turn around and instead of watching the candidate, watch the press watch the candidate.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, he was over the top.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Mm-hmm [AFFIRMATIVE].
BOB GARFIELD:
He was a character in his own writing. He was quintessentially unobjective. He was all of the things that traditional journalists weren't supposed to be. And he even – he even just made stuff up.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
One of the people I interviewed for my book was Frank Mankiewicz, who was running the McGovern campaign, and he said that Hunter’s book was the least factual but most accurate account of that campaign. You know, who was behind the curtain, who was manipulating, who were the people within the campaign that actually were writing the speeches and shaping the policy? Hunter Thompson came along, and that was the subject of his stories.
BOB GARFIELD:
Can you give me a passage from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail that you think is Hunter S. Thompson in his purest form?
WILLIAM McKEEN:
There’s this beautiful passage that I love. “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves, finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all of his imprecise talk about new politics and honesty in government, is really one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if only we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.”

And I really believe that Nixon was his muse. And then when Nixon died, Hunter wrote one of his masterpieces, his obituary of Richard Nixon called, simply, He was a Crook.
BOB GARFIELD:
Could you read from that obituary, because the affection that you mentioned earlier in the football interview seemed to have run its course.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Hunter was in New Orleans when he learned of Nixon’s death, and he was with the historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, and also with Ed Bradley of CBS News. And so, they went out to honor Nixon by getting drunk in the French Quarter. And every bar they went into, Hunter would stick his head in and said, “Nixon’s dead, does anyone want acid?”

And [BOB LAUGHS] at the same time he realized that this was a real challenge for him, because he knew that he would have to write about it. He would have to put Nixon to rest. He also knew that one of the most hideous things ever written by one human being about another human being was H.L. Mencken’s obituary for William Jennings Bryan when he died in 1925, right after the monkey trial. So he said to Douglas Brinkley that night, over drinks, I have to out-Mencken Mencken. And I think he did.

“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man [BLEEP]-ing in his own nest, but he also [BLEEP] in our nests. And that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.”
BOB GARFIELD:
Bill, thank you very much for joining us.
WILLIAM McKEEN:
Thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD:
William McKeen is chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida. He is the author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.
[CLIP]:
[CROWD HUBBUB]
HUNTER S. THOMPSON:
Richard Nixon stands to me for everything that I would not want to have happen to myself, or be, or be around. He stands for everything that I not only have contempt for but dislike and think should be stomped out.
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BOB GARFIELD:
That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips and Nazanin Rafsanjani and edited – by Brooke. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and more engineering help from Zach Marsh and John DeLore. We also had help from Michael Bernstein. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield.