Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (83 page)

Then the governor dropped the Reed on the table like it was just another half-eaten Potato scrap, brushing it blankly aside and suddenly smiling warmly at all of us, as if he had just emerged from a Pod and was happy to be among friends. “No more music,” he said firmly. “Let’s have some food, I’m
hungry
.” Then he grasped the wicker basket of French Fries with both hands and buried his face in it, making soft snorting sounds as he rooted around in the basket trying vainly to finish it off.

I was afraid, but Jann was quick to recover. “Easy, Governor, easy,” he said in a suave voice. “Let me help you with that, Bill. Hell, we’re
all
hungry.” He smiled and reached out for the half-empty basket of fries, as
if to share the burden—but Clinton snatched it away, clutching it to his chest and turning his back on us—a horrible thing to see.

Somewhere behind me I heard a kind of hissing, moaning sound as Eric, our hapless editor, stood up and bolted out of the room, slamming between two startled SS agents, and then locked himself in the bathroom. I heard a croaking noise, then a rush of water.

Well, I thought. This is probably about as weird as it can get, without all of us going to jail, so why not relax and act normal—or at least try? These things happen. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Welcome to Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood.

The Wisdom

I came away from Little Rock with mixed feelings. Bill Clinton and I did not hit it off real well, but so what? I got into politics a long time ago, and I still believe, on some days, that it can be an honorable trade . . . That is not an easy belief to hang on to after wallowing for thirty years in the belly of a Beast that has beaten and broken more good men and women than Crack and Junk Bonds combined. Politics is a mean Business, and when September rolls around in a campaign, it gets mean on a level that is beyond most people’s comprehension. The White House is the most powerful office in the world, and a lot of people will tell you nothing is over the line when it finally comes down to winning or losing it. Nobody is safe and Nothing is sacred when the stakes get that high. It is the ultimate Fast Lane, and the people still on their feet in September are usually the Meanest of the Mean. The last train out of any station will not be full of Nice guys.

Look at Bush. He has worked overtime to give Politics a bad name. He is a mean-spirited wimp and a career bureaucrat who has arguably committed more high crimes and misdemeanors in and around the Oval Office than Nixon would have been Impeached for if he hadn’t resigned ... Nixon was genetically Dishonest, and so is Bush. They both represent what Bobby Kennedy called “the darker impulses of the American Spirit . . .”

And Bill Clinton does not. That is the nut of it. Clinton is a decent man and a credit to his race ... Ho, ho. That’s a joke, Bubba. Bush
wouldn’t laugh at it, and neither did Mr. Bill when I shook his hand and said it to him with a nice smile. He gave me another one of those weird, sleepy-eyed stares and wished me good Luck for the rest of my life.

I am now going back to the drawing board to come up with a
better
and more valid reason to
vote
for Clinton in November—which I plan to do, but my
reasons
are no more concrete today than they were on the flight down to Little Rock. I like him a little better, but there was nothing in what he said for the record to excite anybody except cops, money mongers, and elitist policy wonks. The rest is all a matter of blind faith and reading between the lines.

Let’s face it, Bubba. The main reason I’ll vote for Clinton is
George Bush
, and it has been that way from the start ... There is no way around it (for me) and no reason to apologize for it. George Bush is a dangerously failed President and a half-bright top-level Nerd who has spent the last four years avoiding grocery stores and gas stations while he tried to keep tabs on the disastrous fallout from the orgy of greed and short selling that was the “Reagan Revolution.”

We still have a problem with my inability to explain why I feel very strongly about voting for Clinton—except that another four years of the Reagan-Bush bund will mean the Death of Hope and the Loss of
any
sense of Possibility in Politics for a whole generation that desperately needs that fix and will wither on the vine without it.

That is reason enough to
vote
for Clinton. It helps that I like him as a person and trust him enough as a quality politician to believe that I can occasionally turn my back on him when he moves into the White House—which he
will
, I think—and I will help him in every way I can, short of guaranteeing in print that President Clinton/Gore will solve all our problems and give forty acres and a mule to everyone who votes for him.

Nobody
is going to do that. And especially not George Bush. But Bill Clinton will at least
try
, and that’s good enough for me. He is a high-stakes gambler, and he can take a punch better than anybody since Muhammad Ali . . .

So what the fuck? Let’s kick those rat-bastards out of the temple and put one of our people in charge. We have nothing to lose except
fun
and the joy of watching a serious brawler go to war with the greedheads. Why not? Let us Rumble.

__ __ __ __

January 27, 1994

T
O
: William Greider
F
ROM
: Hunter S. Thompson
D
ATE
: Nov. 22, 1993

Well, you sure as hell made up for that
giddiness
that gripped you
last time
, eh? Probably you started asking him about that goddamn bank in Bangladesh ... Shit, why is it always
extremes
with you, Bill? Why can’t you find a groove in the middle of the road, like me?

Anyway, it was a magic moment in American journalism—and no doubt in yr. own education, too. I wish I could have been there for it.

But then
it wouldn’t have happened, eh
? No, I would have
handled
him, like a
matador
. He would have focused his dim little eyes on
me
, & you subwonkish bastards would have
roamed Free
—and he would have treated you like Girls, with flirtatious little moves & solemn nods from time to time, massaging your Main Points & playing footsie with you under the table like he did in the dimness of Doe’s . . .

Jesus. How long have we fallen? So much for the Rock & Roll vote, eh? We are down with the UAW & the Wobblies.

And it’s
your fault
. Screwhead. It was YOU that croaked the RAPPORT that a WHOLE GENERATION might have had with the President of the U.S. What kind of berserk hubris led you to pick some kind of stupid PERSONAL FIGHT with the
President when you
knew
that the
FATE OF GENERATIONS
was in your boneless goddamn hands? What
craziness
compelled you to SHIT in THEIR nests?

If I were you, I’d move my whole family to a farm in rural Turkey, and try to write poems for a living. That is all you have left. Sorry. Call me.

__ __ __ __

On April 22, 1994, Richard Milhous Nixon died after suffering a severe stroke a few days earlier. At the time, Hunter was in New Orleans promoting a book, but he extended his stay to hunker down at the St. Charles Tavern, where he watched CNN incessantly and began to write the obituary of the man he’d been obsessed with for more than a quarter century. Nixon was more than Hunter’s antagonist or nemesis; he was a shadow self who served as a living, breathing symbol of the dark side of the American dream, and Hunter’s final send-off required him to rise to the occasion. He pulled no punches.

When Hunter next spoke to his longtime friend George McGovern—who had attended the funeral of his former opponent and ex-president of the United States out of a sense of duty—he accused him of going “in the tank” for the man who was, essentially, the enemy. According to McGovern, “He never forgave me for that.”

June 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

D
ATE
: May 1, 1994
F
ROM
: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
S
UBJECT
: The Death of Richard Nixon: Notes on the Passing of an American Monster ... He was a liar and a quitter, and he should have been buried at sea ... but he was, after all, the President.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

—Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing—a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon
had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive—and he was, all the way to the end—we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back; rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon’s style—and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, Bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon’s immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president’s body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least one hundred miles off the coast and at least one thousand miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the president of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable—some with liberal
cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus, and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

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 was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.