Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. He said that he’d recently visited Washington, intending to write about Reagan; however, “we got there and said, ‘What the hell?’ I don’t give a damn … To be in Washington—jeez, what a horrible way to live.” He had depleted his capacity for outrage: “To keep writing angry, damn-you stuff can drive you mad.”. ""Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him. Originally published in Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. . I described that dinner to Denevi. 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. Reserved. 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. Of all the critics of Nixon's presidency, Thompson may have been at the top of the list. 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. Hunter S. Thompson > Quotes > Quotable Quote “It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in … It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. Memorable Quotes by Hunter S. Thompson. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.". They called him Rude, but he went anyway. Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all...It was pitiful...I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mr. . Together they defined his Presidency. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg. But so what? He was not only a crook but a fool. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. That's why God made dachshunds. Even his funeral was illegal. His outspoken hatred was so brutal that Nixon banned Thompson from visiting the White House. Thompson later wrote, “I remember feeling genuinely frightened at the violent reaction … As the human thunder kept building, they mounted their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth—and finally they began picking up those chairs with both hands and bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on.”, He was similarly frightened and fascinated by George Wallace, the Alabama governor who twice sought the presidency with demagogic pitches to Americans who felt they’d been left behind in a time of profound cultural and technological change. Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. 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. Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. Thompson said they were motivated by an “ethic of total retaliation.” He wrote: “They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”, A year earlier, in 1964, he’d covered the Republican convention and captured the first populist rumblings that culminated in Trump’s nomination 52 years later. Posted on May 1, 2006 by raincoaster Really, there's nothing like a writer who knows his stuff inside and out, has made the English language his bitch, and refuses to hold back in the name of "impartiality." The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. All Rights Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. 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. It was Nixon's last war, and he won. Daniel Kurtzman is a political journalist turned satirist. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The leer on his face was almost frightening. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, and the founder of the gonzo journalism movement. Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. An old film canister labeled “Hunter Thompson for Sheriff” turned up in artist Travis Fulton’s barn off Ute Avenue in Aspen three years ago, setting off a series of archival discoveries that have shed new light on the gonzo journalist’s influential 1970 campaign and led to the new documentary “Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb.” They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. "He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time." Hunter S. Thompson. Read: An interview with Hunter S. Thompson, Nor does everyone in the news business endorse Thompson’s flagrant participatory style (hence the term Gonzo); in 1974, he told Playboy magazine, “I like to get right in the middle of whatever I’m writing about, as personally involved as possible”—which arguably skewed the reality he was covering. ""Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. 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. I had to have him taken away." Daniel Kurtzman is a political journalist turned satirist. During his Rolling Stone stint at the 1972 Republican convention, he infiltrated a Youth for Nixon rally and told the kids that NBC News’s John Chancellor loved to drop acid. He was, in a sense, America’s first blogger, and his tone seems eerily contemporary. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. 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. The old man was the real tip-off. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him? The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's. ", "Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?". Read: The Hunter S. Thompson you don’t know, “That’s what we saw with the Vietnam War, with the Nixon administration and Watergate, with what Thompson saw as shameless, ruthless criminality. All rights reserved. Love it or leave it." 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. As Thompson once riffed, “Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.” That’s either wise or incoherent. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. 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. 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.". Copyright © 1994 by Hunter S. Thompson. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful. 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. '""Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? He has been widely cited as a political humor expert and authored two books on the subject. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. 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. –on Richard Nixon"Jesus! But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all. 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. The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. President,' and then I felt ashamed." . Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon: the greatest obituary ever written! Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. He hung out for a year with the ’60s Hell’s Angels, and his descriptions—of white guys without college degrees, “rendered completely useless in a highly technical economy”—bring to mind Trump’s so-called forgotten Americans. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. 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. Nixon liked to remind people of that. –on Richard Nixon's life after resignation"Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. I think Thompson would look at the shameless criminality in the Trump administration, and he would’ve been able to dramatize the trauma of the situation, using the New Journalistic techniques.”. He was queer in the deepest way. He frequently jabbed at the president’s ability to lead the country using vulgar and hyper-critical statements. –on George W. Bush"Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. His new book, Freak Kingdom, tracks Thompson’s peak professional years, from 1963 to 1974, but in truth, Denevi says, “Trump is present on every page, even though he’s never mentioned once.”. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. 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. He is the President of the United States, and you're not. 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. ""There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. He was scum. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. 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. Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. 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. That’s how Thompson reported on Richard Nixon back in his Rolling Stone ’70s heyday, when his anarchic attitude broke the rules of objectivity and bonded with his fans in … Funny Political Quotes and Classic One-Liners, The Funniest Political Quotes of All Time. A scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994. Hunter Thompson, the national-affairs editor for. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Because the kids hated the media, they believed his fake LSD rumor—which arguably heightened the reality he was covering, because it exposed the Nixon kids’ naïveté. Used by permission. 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. (“Golly,” he quotes a girl as saying about Chancellor, “that explains a lot, doesn’t it?”), Denevi defends Thompson’s immersive subjectivity, which was developed only after years of objective reportorial spadework; today, by contrast, “too many people have decided that the more opinions they have, the more likely they’ll get noticed. We want to hear what you think about this article. ""Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University. But there’s no inherent worth to the opinions … Tucker Carlson [on Fox News] thinks he’s Hunter Thompson, whereas in reality, he’s not reporting; he’s just an opinion who’s trying to further Trump’s power.”, The keepers of Thompson’s flame contend that his shoe-leather reporting provided ballast for observations that today seem prescient. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. 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. We want to hear what you think about this article. If Hunter S. Thompson were still alive—if the so-called Gonzo journalist hadn’t killed himself in 2005, his ashes subsequently propelled from a cannon in a ceremony financed by Johnny Depp—the odds are high that he’d be linking Donald Trump to “that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character,” and contending that Trump “speaks for the Werewolf in us.”, That’s how Thompson reported on Richard Nixon back in his Rolling Stone ’70s heyday, when his anarchic attitude broke the rules of objectivity and bonded with his fans in that divisive era. When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, 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.