You don’t have to overlook his vast personal failings or exaggerate his talents to acknowledge his contributions and worth.
I have been having a disagreement with Rick Perlstein on Facebook about the merits of Hunter S. Thompson’s work, particularly with respect to Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 campaign. Perlstein has been fact-checking Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and finding it badly wanting in the accuracy department. So it goes.
For my money, Thompson’s description of Ed Muskie’s whistle stop tour from Jacksonville to Miami is a classic of American reporting, although I might concede that it’s more literature than reporting. Today it’s remembered in part for the false accusation Thompson leveled at Muskie, originally in the pages of Rolling Stone, that the Man from Maine had developed a dependency on Ibogaine.
The drug Hunter claimed Muskie was being treated with was a little-known root called Tabernanthe Iboga or Ibogaine. “It has been used for centuries by natives of Africa, Asia, and South America in conjunction with fetishistic and mythical ceremonies,” reads the excerpt from a study by PharmChem Laboratories, which was included in the Rolling Stone story:
“At a dose of 300 mg., given orally, the subject experiences visions, changes of perception of the environment, and delusions or alterations of thinking,” the study concludes: “Ibogaine produces a state of drowsiness in which the subject does not wish to move, open his eyes, or be aware of his environment.”
The root, which is meant to be consumed by hunters, allowing them to remain completely still for days on end, was the only way to explain Muskie’s stupor and his terrible performance on the trail.
It should be noted that Thompson also, in the same article, stated that “It had been common knowledge for many weeks that [Hubert] Humphrey was using an exotic brand of speed known as Wallot.”
This stuff wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously, but it was believed to be literally true by enough people that a surprised Hunter felt compelled to explain it was bullshit after the election was over. Admittedly, Thompson’s coverage was a new mix of fact and fantasy which was confusing in part for its sheer novelty. It came to be known as Gonzo journalism, and it never made a pretense to fairness. Thompson was openly sympathetic to the campaign of George McGovern, and was savage in his criticism of all McGovern’s competitors, including George Wallace.
In my mind, it’s a mistake to fact check Thompson’s work as if by doing so you can somehow discredit him. For Perlstein, it’s fundamentally dishonest and also a disservice to the reader to make shit up without being explicit about it. And, given that Hunter felt compelled to clear things up later, I suppose he would have agreed that his reporting had some unintended negative effect.
But what’s actually weird, at least for me, is that I am defending Thompson. In truth, my opinion of him has dipped quite a lot, basically from the moment he took his own life in his kitchen while on the phone with his wife. I can forgive him his addictions and some of the resulting behaviors, but he turned out to be lousy person in the end.
Even at his best, he represented a counterestablishmentarianism that became so suspicious of power that it conceded it to the Reagan Right and had no appetite to claw it back. I found this idealism attractive when Thompson was young and optimistic, and tragic when Nixon’s stomping of McGovern broke his heart and destroyed his faith in America and Americans. I can forgive almost all of it, except it’s nothing to emulate and we all had to keep going and pick up the pieces where we could while Thompson wasted the rest of his life and talent in nihilistic thrill-seeking and debauchery.
But I have to give the man his due. He had his moment. Perhaps his greatest moment was his description of Muskie’s ride on the Sunshine Special. The basics of the story are that Thompson overslept in West Palm Beach and was left off the train. In his place, a man named Peter Sheridan, using Thompson’s press credentials, boarded and immediately started drinking heavily and causing mayhem. Many mistook this man for Thompson himself. And it ended badly in Miami when Sheridan, along with Jerry Rubin, heckled Muskie as he attempted to give a speech from the caboose.
But ask yourself, was this supposed to be taken literally?
There was no doubt about it: The Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was “when did he start?” But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Muskie campaign after that incident on the “Sunshine Special” in Florida . . . and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time. Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has frequently challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of TV lights.
But there was none of that in Florida. When the Boohoo [Peter Sheridan] began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin, Big Ed went all to pieces . . . which gave rise to speculation. among reporters familiar with his campaign style in ’68 and ’70, that Muskie was not himself. It was noted, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during TV interviews, that his thought patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisors could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages, or neocomatose funks.
In restrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was — far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy — suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “the only Democrat who can beat Nixon.”
It is entirely conceivable — given the known effects of Ibogaine — that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs. We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the Senator’s disastrous experiments with Ibogaine. I tried to find the Brazilian doctor [who purportedly procured the Ibogaine] on election night in Milwaukee, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone. One of the hired bimbos in Milwaukee’s Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus to Chicago, but we were never able to confirm this. . . .
There was a certain kind of thrill in reading this kind of reporting, but not because it was supposed to convince us that leading Democratic contenders for the 1972 presidential nomination were whacked out on speed and third world hallucinogens. It was a way of contrasting the hip and the square, the straight and the transgressive, and the boring from the exciting. That’s basically why it belonged in a publication like Rolling Stone which catered to a generation that wanted something more than Perry Como and Frank Sinatra.
The truth was more mundane. Muskie’s campaign was faltering. His stump speeches were tame, repetitive and barely newsworthy. He was badly off his game and going to lose as a result. Thompson was telling us why in a way that wasn’t possible for the straight reporters. For that moment in time, it was glorious.
