Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (84 page)

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern—but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man—evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him—except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon’s final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. “It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,” said one. “And it fucks up my children’s sense of values.”

Many were incensed about the howitzers—but they knew there was
nothing they could do about it—not with the current president sitting about fifty yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon’s last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the no. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole’s stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for ’96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won’t even be reelected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the no. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments—most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft, and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck, and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the twentieth century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. “He will dwarf FDR and Truman,” according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he
was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like
scum
and
rotten
are wrong for Objective Journalism—which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along ten years earlier. He got away with his sleazy “my dog Checkers” speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in fourteen years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of forty, he was a smart young man on the rise—a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be president. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover’s shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon’s downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover
gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director’s ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon’s right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee’s flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director—who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says—and he is, after all, the president of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn’t argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn’t bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and
Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of
The Godfather
, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that—but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger, and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives—whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancée’s sixteen-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit 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.

__ __ __ __

Sometime around Aspen in the late Eighties, Hunter had developed an infatuation with a (married) polo player named Paula Baxt. When Hunter tried telling her to drop everything to run away with him, she offhandedly replied that she couldn’t, because “polo is my life.” Hunter became fixated with the phrase and the world it conjured up, and began working on a novel that he envisioned along the lines of
The Great Gatsby,
which he’d continue to write, off and on, for years. In 1994 he traveled to the sport’s U.S. Open on Long Island to soak up the culture and gather material. “Polo Is My Life: Fear & Loathing in Horse Country” was planned as a two-part story, although the second installment was abandoned after Hunter ran up almost $40,000 in story expenses (including $7,500 for something listed on a hotel bill as “incinerated sofa”) while writing very little usable material.

This first installment, though, was—along with “Fear and Loathing in Elko”—Hunter’s last extended, evocative narrative; a surreal, gimlet-eyed inside view of the culture of a sport, as he put it, “for the filthy, aggressive rich,” with guest appearances by the ghost of Averell Harriman as well as Belinda, the “all-knowing, dissolute slut horse” who is the sport’s mythical, four-eyed goddess.

Letter from HST to JSW

Woody Creek
ROD & GUN CLUB
HUNTER STOCKTON THOMPSON, EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR

July 13, ’94

Dear Jann,

Here is a quick memo on the story ideas we discussed on the phone yesterday. (which is not to say that my Concept of doing extensive PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS) on a few of the
Finest Motorcycles on the American Road in the Nineties
was a failed & flawed idea ... It has several built-in guaranteed
Fun Factors
, as in: 1) ELEGANT MOTORCYCLES on loan from the factory for me to test-drive all summer, and 2) Writing about them will be Fun to write and Fun to read, and 3) It would establish
RS
(or
MJ
) as a fount of high-end MOTORCYCLE CRITICISM—not only from me, but also from other ranking experts)

And I might do business with regard to the fee . . .

Right. And now back to POLO and MANDATORY SENTENCING—both of which are
do-able
without massive expenses or long-term grief.

I will count on you for research help on the M/S piece, and I see the POLO gig as a sort of Adventure Story: HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, ETC. . . . ME AND RALPH GO TO POLO PRACTICE & DISCOVER THE MEANING OF LIFE. (I can start on this one
today
(Wed 7/13), and Ralph will be here next week—for a summit meeting on the nature of our Final Assignment—and you know how he loves Polo. He can’t get enough of it . . .