“And he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“Until then, it had not been considered entirely fashionable to go around calling ex-Attorney General John Mitchell a “prophet” because of his smiling prediction, in the summer of 1970, that “This country is going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it.””

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“A scene like that wouldn’t normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one—something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap—a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“I have a peculiar affection for McCarthy; nothing serious or personal, but I recall standing next to him in the snow outside the “exit” door of a shoe factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, in February of 1968 when the five o’clock whistle blew and he had to stand there in the midst of those workers rushing out to the parking lot. I will never forget the pain in McCarthy’s face as he stood there with his hand out, saying over and over again: “Shake hands with Senator McCarthy… shake hands with Senator McCarthy… shake hands with Senator McCarthy…,” a tense plastic smile on his face, stepping nervously toward anything friendly, “Shake hands with Senator McCarthy”… but most of the crowd ignored him, refusing to even acknowledge his outstretched hand, staring straight ahead as they hurried out to their cars.

There was at least one network TV camera on hand that afternoon, but the scene was never aired. It was painful enough, just being there, but to have put that scene on national TV would have been an act of genuine cruelty”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“But what the hell? All that is history now, and after roaming around the new McGovern headquarters building for a week or so, the only refrigerator I found was up in finance director Henry Kimmelman’s office on the sixth floor. I went up there with Pat Caddell one afternoon last week to watch the Cronkite/Chancellor TV news (every afternoon at 6:30, all activity in the building is suspended for an hour while the staff people gather around TV sets to watch “the daily bummer,” as some of them call it) and Kimmelman has the only accessible color set in the building, so his office is usually crowded for the news hour.

But his set is fucked, unfortunately. One of the color tubes is blown, so everything that appears on the screen has a wet purple tint to it. When McGovern comes on, rapping out lines from a speech that somebody watching one of the headquarters’ TV sets just wrote for him a few hours earlier, his face appears on the set in Kimmelman’s office as if he were speaking up from the bottom of a swimming pool full of cheap purple dye.

“It is not a reassuring thing to see, and most of the staffers prefer to watch the news on the black & white sets downstairs in the political section….”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“He nodded. “Shit, they tried to make us rehearse cheers! They put us all in a big room and told us to synchronize our watches so we would all start singing that goddamn ‘Nixon Now’ song at exactly 1:17 P.M., when his car pulled up to the door.””

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"His pithy remarks were broadcast out to the press mob in the hallway by means of loudspeakers."

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“It was a perfectly rational notion—and that was the flaw, because a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it.”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I’ve ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it. Standing there on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching our New President roll by in his black/armored hearse, surrounded by a trotting phalanx of Secret Service men with their hands in the air, batting away the garbage thrown out of the crowd.”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn’t walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President’s car passed by.

But it was hard to be sure which one it was. The Secret Service ran a few decoys down the line, from time to time, apparently to confuse the snipers and maybe draw some fire… but nothing serious happened: just the normal hail of rocks, beer cans, and wine bottles… so they figured it was safe to run the President through.

Nixon came by—according to the TV men—in what appeared to be a sort of huge, hollowed-out cannonball on wheels. It was a very nasty looking armored car, and God only knows who was actually inside it.

I was standing next to a CBS-TV reporter named Joe Benti and I heard him say, “Here comes the President….” “How do you know?” I asked him. It was just barely possible to detect a hint of human movement through the slits that passed for windows.

“The President is waving to the crowd,” said Benti into his mike.

“Bullshit!” said Lennox Raphael who was standing beside me[...]”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“But the main, middle-American bulk of the national TV audience tends to wither away around midnight, and anybody still glued to the tube at 3:30 A.M. Miami time is probably too stoned or twisted to recognize McGovern anyway. ”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“That probably will go down in the annals of political history. Jesus! What an incredibly byzantine gig! Imagine trying to understand it on TV—not even Machiavelli could have handled that.”

Thompson, Hunter S Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“He raged incoherently at the Tube for eight minutes without drawing a breath, then suddenly his face turned beet red and his head swelled up to twice its normal size. Seconds later—while his henchmen looked on in mute horror—Meany swallowed his tongue, rolled out of his chair like a log, and crawled through a plate glass window.”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public”

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.