Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72

In a brief interlude, Thompson presents the poem Be Angry At The Sun by Robinson Jeffries. The poem condemns politicians’ dishonesty and the corruption and imperialism of the US.

Thompson flies over New York City in a small plane. Also aboard is Frank Mankiewicz. With the plane stuck in a holding pattern over the city, the pilot offers to take Thompson on a low-altitude tour of the city, even though he is not supposed to do so. They fly acrobatically low over the city, much to the unwitting Mankiewicz’s displeasure. As they fly, Thompson speculates about possibly running for the US Senate.

Thompson reflects on the failure of the McGovern campaign, now that several weeks have passed since Nixon’s reelection. Different members of McGovern’s campaign offer different explanations for what went wrong. Mankiewicz has come around to the position that Nixon’s victory represents “a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate” (438). Others blame the Eagleton issue. Regardless, the Democratic Party is careening to the right, and the McGovern staffers are being purged after their brief period of control of the party. McGovern himself seems to have concluded that the campaign was “doomed from the start” (439) due to Nixon’s status as an incumbent president and the right-leaning mood of the nation. McGovern was not necessarily shocked by the loss, Thompson notes, but he was shocked by the size of it.

Thompson interviews McGovern after the purge. They talk frankly about the issues that plagued the campaign. McGovern describes how, after he received the nomination, the electorate saw him differently. He was no longer the outsider taking on the party establishment: He was the party establishment. The Eagleton controversy and “attacks on [him] as a radical” (444) also hurt his reputation in the eyes of the electorate, he claims, especially since the coverage of the convention featured prominent women and racial minorities. McGovern and Thompson agree that they were optimistic in the immediate wake of the convention, but the impact of the Eagleton issue and the convention coverage immediately worked against McGovern. Meanwhile, Nixon had promised a breakthrough in his efforts to end the Vietnam war, which undermined McGovern’s promise to bring an end to the war. Nixon stayed out of the public eye, while McGovern was constantly playing defense, even as the Watergate scandal gathered steam. Only 3% of the electorate cared about Watergate at the time, Thompson notes. Thompson also notes the “perceived shift” (448) in McGovern’s positions. Even if McGovern did not radically alter his platform after securing the nomination, the public came to believe that he had done so due to the Eagleton issue, among other things. Thompson hints at a theory that the FBI leaked the Eagleton issue. McGovern admits to his surprise at the “landslide proportions” of the defeat. The two agree that Nixon’s election in 1968 signaled the end of the “activism of the sixties” (452) and people may have wanted to put such activism in the past by sticking with Nixon, who McGovern predicts will struggle in the coming years.

At this point, the editor intervenes to note that the taped conversation between McGovern and Thompson abruptly ends. The book transitions to a conversation between Thompson and the editor. Thompson notes that he is surprised by the “lack of any kind of consensus” (454) regarding McGovern’s loss. Those involved in the campaign seem unwilling at this point to delve too deeply into why they lost. One theory, Thompson explains, is that the Eagleton issue was particularly damaging to McGovern because he had no way to “prove that he was not as dangerously incompetent as the Eagleton affair made him seem” (456). The Eagleton affair, Thompson theorizes, stripped McGovern’s ability to present himself as “a different kind of politician, an anti-politician” (458). While McGovern tried to wrestle back control of the narrative of the race, Nixon hid and was “never put under any sort of pressure” (459).

Thompson is unsure whether McGovern could have won with any sort of campaign, even without the Eagleton issue. He believes that no politician like McGovern can win an American election. Thompson believes that liberalism has failed because it has “been too often compromised by the people who represented it” (461). Conversation turns to Thompson’s failed run to become Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket. The Republicans and the Democrats, he claimed, conspired to undermine his campaign. They look ahead to Thompson’s proposed campaign for the senate and discuss the 1976 presidential election. Thompson describes the “weird, junkie, addictive quality about covering a presidential campaign” (467), which is unlike anything else and which he will crave in the future. By now, Thompson has the potential to be a “political junkie” (469).

Richard Nixon is about to be sworn into office for the second time, and Thompson describes his post-election thoughts. The proposed peace settlement that Nixon hinted at before the election has come to naught; the Vietnam War continues. Thompson references an American sportswriter named Grantland Rice, whose writing inspired men like Thompson because of his “spare & lean” (473) prose. He reflects on his own sports writing career as he sips whiskey and listens to the rain. He feels “the first rising edge of a hunger for something with a bit of the crank in it” (476). At a Super Bowl, he compares the Miami victory to Nixon’s victory. Both seemed crushingly inevitable. After calling Mankiewicz and warning him not to “draw any conclusions from anything [he sees or hears]” (480), Thompson drinks more gin while listening to a Dolly Parton record. Later, he walks down the street to the Losers’ Club.