High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism
By David Wills
(Beatdom Books, 557 pages, $15)
On September 28, 1987, the following appeared in the editorial section of the San Francisco Examiner:
Joe Biden is gone now — or at least gone from the ’88 presidential campaign — and we are all a bit poorer for it. He was a player, and we need those people in politics. They are the ones who have defined us to ourselves as a nation of leapers and dreamers and risk-takers, an awesome world of power with a lover’s sense of adventure. If Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson had been nickled and dimed to death by lawyers and bimbos and preachers, we might be still some kind of rich and stolid British colony like Canada — or just another continuous new-world experiment in mutated democratic gigantism like Brazil. Ben’s lechery made even the French nervous, and Jefferson was known to have an overweening affection for his slaves. But the French are still our allies, and the Louisiana Purchase still looks like a good investment. If “the business of America is business,” like Calvin Coolidge said, then Franklin and Jefferson qualify as good Americans.
Who else could have written such foolishness but Hunter S. Thompson? And it would not be the only dumb thing he ever wrote, said, or did, as David Wills’ biography of Thompson, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism makes clear. In fact, Thompson appears to have been a deeply disturbed man.
After only a month total in Saigon, Thompson fled the city again, as he was, according to Wills, “fearing how the evacuation would play out.”
But first, some facts. Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville Kentucky in July 1937 to middle-class parents. His mother was a librarian. His father worked in insurance, and died of an autoimmune disorder when Thompson was 14; his mother took to drink. At 17, Hunter participated in a robbery and served a month in jail, which prevented him from sitting for the final exams needed to graduate high school. After prison he joined the Air Force, serving from ’55 to ’58. The Force wouldn’t let him fly, though, perhaps finding him mentally unfit. He got stuck working as an electrician. It was in the Air Force that Thompson got his first chance to write in a pseudo-professional capacity, editing the sports page of The Command Courier, base newspaper of Eglin Air Force Base in northwest Florida. One day he made the mistake of balking to a commanding officer that the military limited his personal freedom, and was honorably discharged. (READ MORE from Erik Lewis: 50 Years Ago, Nixon Was Forced to Hand Over Recordings. Biden Should Be Too.)
Free of the military with its rules and encumbrances, Thompson was free to pursue his real dream: to be a big-shot writer. He grew a beard to resemble his idol Ernest Hemingway, penned short stories under the not-inauspicious pseudonym Aldous Miller-Mencken, mostly wildly embellished stories of his own life, and took photos of himself “writing,” as if to document for posterity his budding literary career.
Needing stable employment, the starving artist and Hemingway wannabe began sending out notices to newspapers, along with a false résumé which boasted of an Ivy League education and prior published work in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. None of that was true, nor was the attached letter of reference from a U.S. Senator which Thompson had written himself. He eventually found work at Time, but was fired for insubordination. Then he did a stint with the Middletown Record in upstate New York, but was fired from there, too, after he kicked in the company vending machine when it failed to dispense an item. Thompson took up another letter-writing campaign, Wills says, “pestering half the editors of the Western Hemisphere with arrogant letters, daring them to reply.” Most outlets simply ignored him. One who did reply was William Kennedy, future Pulitzer winner for Ironweed, then Managing Editor of The Star. Kennedy’s tartly worded missive saying thanks but no thanks incensed Thompson and prompted our hero to write back: “Your interpretation of my letter was beautifully typical of the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the american [sic] press.”
Thompson ended up in Puerto Rico writing tourist brochures. Even though he spent only six months on the island, Thompson openly advertised himself as “the preeminent writer or journalist on the island.” While there, he began what he called “the Great Puerto Rican novel,” The Rum Diary, a fictionalized account of his Puerto Rican half-year. The book would not be published till 1998, as a novel, though Thompson would say it was a memoir.
Telling fact from fiction in a Hunter Thompson tale is difficult. Whether in “fiction” or “nonfiction,” truth was not a major concern for him. Thompson’s books, Wills reports, frequently feature “made-up characters, events, and conversations, as well as digressions and fantasy, even though they are allegedly based upon real events.” That such a cavalier attitude toward basic journalistic ethics didn’t square with Thompson’s own oft-stated concern about “the decline of the American press” seems not to have bothered him, who rejected any suggestion that such devices were improper, countering that his style of reporting was merely “personal journalism.” The style, marked by slapdash first-person narration that dealt fast and loose with facts, with the author more often than not serving as the main character, became known as “Gonzo.” While renegade for its time, Gonzo is now very much accepted, encouraged even, by the legacy media, whose presses and TV studios run hot with recognizable fictions.
Whatever the Gonzo style lacked in ethics and believability, it was well-suited to the unscrupulous Thompson. Often the articles he wrote were so entertaining that editors would suspend their disbelief and publish them anyway. During a year-long stint in South America between ’62 and ’63, Thompson managed to get no less than twenty of his travel tales published in the National Observer, some on the front page, despite editors’ reservations about their veracity.
By the late Sixties Thompson had graduated, as it were, from articles to books. Three of them — Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, all published between ’67 and ’73 and all supposedly nonfictions — were bestsellers. Now he was rich and famous. It is during this crucial moment of his career that he began propounding his then-novel theory that the American Dream was a hoax.
One is not quite sure what he meant since his ideas are not clearly articulated. But overall Thompson seems to have believed that the American economy was run by greedy fat cats and stacked against the working man. That working people live better in the U.S. than in any nation on earth, and enjoy almost total personal freedom, do not figure into Thompson’s brash invectives. Nor that personal profit is the aim of all people everywhere, not just the U.S. — to include Hunter S. Thompson, who loved money as much as the next person, and who was gaining a reputation for accepting huge advances for articles and books and never writing them.
That Thompson had been able to make it into the heart of the super-competitive, uber-cliquish literary world and achieve great success there with his made-up stories and perhaps not-overabundant talent should have been enough to demonstrate that the American Dream is no fiction, that, in fact, it does exist, and is generally fair, though it sometimes elevates to higher planes people who don’t deserve it. But the dead American Dream was Thompson’s story, his core mantra, and he stuck with it for the rest of his life.
In 1968, seeking glory and copy for the aforesaid book, Thompson went to Chicago for the Democrat convention, where he claimed he was abused by Mayor Daley’s police forces, tossed through a glass window, and beaten “into a bloody, screaming coma,” an experience which he claimed turned him from a journalist into “a cold-blooded revolutionary.”
David Wills does not contradict Thompson’s claim that he was brutalized, but I am skeptical. Wills writes: “His experiences [at the Convention] compounded the hopelessness he’d felt at Robert Kennedy’s death, confirming for him the fact that the American Dream was dead.” But what did Hunter Thompson know of the Kennedys — the real Kennedys (the thuggishness, nepotism, vote-stealing, corruption, etc.) never covered in the pro-Camelot American press? Nothing, I suspect. And what did Robert Kennedy’s vision, which was based on welfarism and Big Government, have to do with the American Dream? Since the American Dream is about the individual pulling themselves up, not relying on government. This is all too deep for Hunter Thompson, who comes across like a man who just wants to get his face in a historic snapshot before getting drunk again.
The return of Richard Nixon gave Thompson the evil Republican villain he’d been looking for all his professional life. On the eve of the ’68 election, Thompson wrote:
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 … McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where does it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
The “guns” bit is really rich, since Hunter S. Thompson was a known gun collector. How can one be against that which one participates in?
His son Juan went into the kitchen and found his father with his brains blown out.
Thompson’s hatred of Nixon seems petty and overdone. He certainly wanted Nixon’s attention, as was clear in his 1969 article “Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in Washington,” published in the Boston Globe. A caption in the article claims that its author Hunter S. Thompson “has spent the last 12 months with Nixon.” According to Wills, this was a lie.
When Nixon died in 1994, Wills reports that Thompson celebrated the occasion by getting drunk. Thompson wrote in Rolling Stone that the late Nixon was “a political monster” who “lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family.” Black pot, anyone? (READ MORE: Salman Rushdie: Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee)
In 1974, Thompson flew to Zaire, on Rolling Stone’s dime, to produce a story on the upcoming “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, a story he had no intention of writing. He wasn’t even interested in watching the match, either in person or via television. He told a companion, “I didn’t come all this way to watch a couple of niggers beat the shit out of each other.” Instead he spent most of the trip partying, doing cocaine and psychedelic drugs, and hanging out by the hotel pool, into which, he, at one point, dumped a sack of marijuana. Rolling Stone, which Thompson had helped to put on the map with his countercultural dispatches, eventually tired of Thompson’s goofiness … and his outsized expense reports, and put him out to pasture for many years.
In ’75 Thompson went to Vietnam, saying he wanted to write a “last man in Saigon” article as the city fell. “He paid boys to carry around a beer cooler,” Wills reports, “so that he could always have a drink at hand. He took a lot of opium, became familiar with the local prostitutes, and did outrageous things like falling through a bamboo wall and destroying a restaurant’s entire kitchen.”
Five days into the would-be assignment, he left Saigon and flew to Hong Kong, supposedly to buy drugs. But an associate on the ground in Saigon contradicts this claim, saying he fled Saigon because he was scared. After six days Thompson went back to Saigon, where he attempted to dictate his “last man” story into a tape recorder too high on opium to notice there was no tape in the device. After only a month total in Saigon, Thompson fled the city again, as he was, according to Wills, “fearing how the evacuation would play out.” Again, scared. He went to Laos, then to Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, doing drugs as he went. When Saigon finally fell, Thompson was M.I.A., but that did not stop him from writing as though he had been present for the historic event: “In its last hours, [Saigon] became a desperate, overcrowded nightmare full of thieves, losers, pimps, conmen, war junkies and many, many victims. Including me.”
From here it was all downhill for Hunter S. Thompson. He published little else of note for the rest of his life. His counterfactual narratives and performative outrage, not to mention his constant sneering at America, didn’t jive in the patriotic, serious-minded age of Reagan and Bush. Besides that, many editors were now refusing to work with him due to his profligacy with expenditures and lax attitude toward obligations and deadlines. Thompson wrote less, made less money, and dealt with writer’s block. His drunkenness and drug use continued, unabated, and his writing was pretty much limited to columns.
On February 20, 2005, at age 67, Hunter S. Thompson chose the occasion of a family gathering at his Colorado farm to kill himself, calling his wife Anita, who wasn’t on the property at the time, so she could hear him cocking the gun and firing. His son Juan went into the kitchen and found his father with his brains blown out.
According to Wills, Thompson had been in a depression for some time. The reelection of George W. Bush, whom the late writer had declared worse than Nixon, reportedly played a significant role in his stress. Thompson was cremated. Before his death he had requested that, post-cremation, his ashes were to be shot out of a cannon, which they were, on August 20, six months to the day after his suicide. John Kerry and George McGovern were present.
Thus ended the Hunter Thompson Flying Circus, his antics no cuter in death than they had been in life. He was a comic who wanted to be taken seriously as a public intellectual, but who refused to acknowledge the difference between fiction and nonfiction, between lies and truth. This makes him a literary fraudster, and David Wills’ book, while not dwelling on the subject too awfully much, provides a glimpse of the scope of Thompson’s deception. (READ MORE: When Voltaire Fell Victim to France’s Woke Mob)
If I give Hunter Thompson credit for anything, other than writing entertainingly, it is for demonstrating, with his fake-news reports, what conservatives have said for years, lest anyone still need convincing: that what passes for journalism in the liberal press is unbelievably biased, and often totally made up. For that, Hunter S. Thompson was ahead of the curve.
