HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Fear and Loathing:
On the Campaign Trail ’72
Illustrated by Ralph Steadman
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2005
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo as a Modern Classic in 1994
Copyright © Hunter S. Thompson 1973
PS section copyright © Travis Elborough 2005
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Hunter S. Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007204489
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440009
Version: 2017-10-17
To Sandy, who endured almost a year of grim exile in Washington, D.C. while this book was being written.
Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.
December 1971
Is This Trip Necessary? … Strategic Retreat into National Politics … Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike … Setting Up the National Affairs Desk … Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? … Fear and Loathing in Washington …
Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days … even more than the Alsop brothers.
When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life – all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp – and also a fifty watt ‘boombox’ for the FM car radio.
You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball … a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.
One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the ‘Westward Movement’ in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk … and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.
Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown … which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.
There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed … for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.
Where indeed?
At 5:30 in the morning I can walk outside to piss casually off my stoop and watch the lawn dying slowly from a white glaze of frost … Nothing moving out here tonight; not since that evil nigger hurled a three-pound Washington Post through the shattered glass coachlight at the top of my stone front steps. He offered to pay for it, but my Dobermans were already on him.
Life runs fast & mean in this town. It’s like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear. Washington is about 72 percent black; the shrinking white population has backed itself into an elegant-looking ghetto in the Northwest quadrant of town – which seems to have made things a lot easier for the black marauders who have turned places like chic Georgetown and once-stylish Capitol Hill into hellishly paranoid Fear Zones.
Washington Post columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon/Mitchell administration – seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost – seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C. has become the ‘Rape Capital of the World.’
One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial town-houses with cut-glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument … When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.
‘Good God, man!’ said my friend from the liberal New York Post. ‘You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!’
Crime figures for ‘The District’ are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover.[1] Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the two hundred and fifty murders this year, only thirty-six have been solved … and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.
Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District – a few blocks from the Capitol -in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as ‘hall passes.’ So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet -fearful, with good reason,