Understanding Politics

Want to understand how American politics became so dysfunctional that people who disagree can no longer communicate with one another? This trilogy of books is worth reading for a good start.

The Clean Water Act Turns 40

I highly recommend this Paul Greenberg editorial.

The Clean Water Act Turns 40: Is the Law Still Protecting Our Waters? | | AlterNet

"Mistakes have been made"

President Nixon's Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, may have been the politician most notable for deploying what has become a clichéd understatement in politics: "mistakes were made." Following the resignations of John Dean, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman, Ziegler held a press conference. This conference was remembered in his obituary.

"I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein. ... We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was overenthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place," he said at the time. "When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case."
"Watergate Press Secretary Dead at 63," CBS News

Later, President Reagan would use the phrase to brush off Iran-Contra misdeeds. President Clinton would do the same in the wake of a Democratic fund raising scandal, and Senator John McCain would describe missteps in the conduct of the Iraq War with the phrase.

The phrase is used as the title of a Broadway satire, a book about self-deception by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, and a recent novel about the 1990s Seattle Grunge scene: Tyler McMahon, How the Mistakes were Made (2011).

Near the end of eight years in office as President, Ulysses S. Grant used a variation of the phrase in his last State of the Union Address. He admits error, denies intent, and shifts the blame to the advice he received from members of Congress. What else would one want to extract from a non-apologetic apology?

The third paragraph:

Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit, but it seems to me oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid in carrying out the various duties of administering the Government--in nearly every case selected without a personal acquaintance with the appointee, but upon recommendations of the representatives chosen directly by the people. It is impossible, where so many trusts are to be allotted, that the right parties should be chosen in every instance. History shows that no Administration from the time of Washington to the present has been free from these mistakes. But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent. (emphasis added)
Grant, State of the Union Address, 5 December 1876

Every political speech should begin thus. It may be worth suggesting, that the phrase "history shows" always leads to a self-serving fabrication, and one that often defies the evidence. Even so, in this instance, who can argue with Grant that every administration has made errors? But, historians have often suggested that Grant's administration was particularly riddled with corruption. It's not the presence of errors that Grant must defend, but their scale. The same might be said concerning how we entered the Iraq War.

July 1971

On the last day of July 1971, the Grateful Dead played at the Yale Bowl. When this football stadium was built in 1914, it was "the largest amphitheater built since the Roman Colosseum," according to Landmarks in Yale's History. The Dead's performance there was the first of "Sugaree" and "Mr. Charlie," and the final performance of "Darkness Jam." During "Sugar Magnolia," the audience clapped in rhythm with the band, and continued doing so through the next song, "Casey Jones." Some discussion on the Grateful Dead website alleges that rioting outside the stadium that night ended the venue for concerts, but concerts were held there until 1980 when continuing complaints from neighbors brought them to an end. Little River Band was the last group to perform in the Yale Bowl.

Nixon Now!

Rick Perlstein shared this link on Facebook. Campaign songs from former President Richard Nixon's political career proposed as a soundtrack for Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008).

Warning: these songs may induce nausea, particularly for anyone old enough to remember Nixon.

Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care

Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care

by Luke A. Nichter

Whether Vietnam, Iraq, or now Afghanistan, wars come and go, but the real battle is a philosophic one between two sects of conservatives. In The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons from Nixon to Obama, authors Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman challenge readers to examine the role of a little-known Pentagon figure named Fritz G.A. Kraemer. Colodny and Shachtman argue that Kraemer was the leading intellectual behind what became known as the neo-conservative movement, witnessed by the fact that Kraemer influenced so many high-ranking conservative figures over the course of six decades.

Continue reading at History News Network.

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Chess, Checkers, Ping-Pong

Was Richard Nixon a chess player? That's one of many insignificant questions that will join the significant inquiries as I read through Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). The subtitle provokes the first significant question: How did the political ascendancy of Richard Nixon stimulate internal cultural conflict?

This question will wait until I read the text.

Chess was important for a brief moment before the world knew about Watergate, but after some of the crimes had been committed. A lone American had taken on the Soviet Empire in a battle over sixty-four squares. This American, Robert J. "Bobby" Fischer, had a lot of pecularities and was in danger of forfeiting the World Chess Championship match with Boris Spassky. Henry Kissinger called the chess player.

This is the worst player in the world calling the best player in the world.
Kissinger to Fischer*

A glance through the index of Nixonland turns up no evidence that Fischer's chess exploits and Nixon's interest in them is narrated in its more than seven hundred pages. There are nearly a dozen references to checkers, on the other hand, and there is a chapter entitled "Ping-Pong".

Checkers was a dog, and Nixon's Checker's Speech was one of the greatest political speeches in the twentieth century.

Nixon played the pivotal role in the opening of communist China to American enterprise. Someone dubbed it Ping-Pong Diplomacy and the name stuck. American ping-pong players traveled to China for a match in which they got schooled by superior players, but the United States thanked the players for their sacrifice.

I'm paying a lot of attention to chess these days, and logging my dogged support of a Russian player--Vladimir Kramnik--who appears on the verge of a devastating loss to an Indian--Viswanathan Anand. The battle is taking place in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany that also served as capital of a reunited Germany until the government was tranferred back to Berlin in 1998-1999.

Bobby Fischer died in January. But his spirit has a way of inserting itself into contemporary chess events. Can Nixon be far behind?


*Quoted in David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 143.

My Journey to Medieval Spain

When I began reading A Patriot’s History of the United States eight months ago, perusing the footnotes quickly carried me astray. I’ve mentioned repeatedly that a long footnote embedded as a two and one-half page sidebar was the critical prompt the motivated my purchase of this text and the beginning of this blogging project (See especially “Patriot’s and People’s Histories” and “Depopulation and Demography”). Footnotes are central to my focus, but the text itself also beckons. I’ve been neglecting the text during my blogging holiday, but have been reading.

This morning’s coffee went down with a narrative lauding the intellectual contributions of Moses Maimonides, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd (known in European literature as Averroes). Wikipedia describes Ibn Rushd as “the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.” I’m reading a celebration of the development of Western secular thought in a book written by a former Jesuit seminarian whose book on Medieval Spain has much of prescriptive value for the twenty-first century: Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Earlier in this book Lowney delves into two classic European texts, Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) c.1100 and Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of My Cid, or commonly called El Cid) c.1201-1207. Lowney writes, “the confrontation between Christianity and Islam forms a overriding preoccupation of both these semi-legendary tales” (119). His narrative offers brief summaries of these texts, including discussion of how their legends square with history. His chief concern through this section, however, highlights the complexity of El Cid in contrast to the simplistic ideology of Roland.

Roland painted a global struggle between Christian right and Muslim wrong as Charlemagne squared off against Baligant, emir of Babylon. Roland’s universal struggle between good and evil contrasts with El Cid’s personalized study of the noble person. What makes the Cid, or anyone, honorable is neither station in life nor religious beliefs but deeds. … In Roland, honor includes religious creed. Some of Roland’s Christian characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Muslims fail the same standard simply by virtue of their pagan beliefs. … El Cid’s very different outlook is personified in the Muslim Abengalbón, El Cid’s vassal and friend. In a remarkable gesture, the Cid confides his daughters to this Muslim’s care as they journey through Spain’s frontier. Abengalbón serves the Cid’s family “for the love he bore to the Campeador.” In the Cid’s world, so profound a bond as love can even bind Muslim to Christian.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 137.

The more nuanced relationship between Christians and Muslims in El Cid, Lowney argues, reflects the realities of multicultural Spain. But he warns against oversimplification of this point.

It is gross oversimplification to pluck Barbastro and Toledo from the Reconquest’s long history as Exhibit A demonstrating that El Cid offers a more enlightened vision of a multifaith Spain because its authors hailed from Spain, whereas Roland reflects the outsider’s harsher viewpoint. A century separates the epics and three centuries the historical events on which they are based; both bear many authorial fingerprints, from chroniclers determined to advance particular religious or political views to entertainers determined only to tell a good story.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 141.

He goes on to note some practical realities of our world today vis-à-vis Charlemagne’s perspective as depicted in Roland. The notion of a Frankish king invading Spain, driving out the Muslims, and then returning home “is an elegantly simple worldview,” but not one embraced by twelfth- or thirteenth century Spanish monarchs. Yet, “Ferdinand and Isabella’s counselors would goad them into just such a policy and devise ways to make it eminently (if tragically) practical by banishing Jews and Muslims who refused to embrace Christianity” (141).

One is tempted to think that Lowney had the current American adventures in Iraq in mind as he crafted those sentences, and this presumption is borne out on the next page.

[One cannot] forcibly reorder another community’s lives and affairs, then assume, as Charlemagne did, that it will be possible to separate oneself from the consequences and repercussions. To assume the posture of the outsider is as naïve as to imagine that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can today carve out completely separate futures in a world that will continue to grow smaller with each passing generation.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 142.

The Route to Spain from A Patriot’s History

Schweikart and Allen’s A Patriot’s History relies upon Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture for its account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Hanson’s depiction of Cortés’s Spain as exemplar of Western Reason was the source for Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans. Their views caught me by surprise, which led to my preliminary assessment in “Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images.” There I noted that my own knowledge of Spanish history was shamefully deficient, and I alleged that such deficiency was characteristic of Americanist historians as a group with a handful of exceptions. A Patriot’s History drove me to Hanson; Hanson drove me to Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico and other texts, including Lowney’s A Vanished World. I’ve mentioned a few tidbits from Thomas, including his demythologizing of the story that Cortés burned his boats. Lowney adds a piece of information that further contextualizes this legend. The Muslim conqueror of Spain in 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, allegedly burned his boats after landing at Gibraltar—a rock named for him, Jabal Tariq, Tariq’s Mountain.

Chroniclers credit Tariq with the gutsy gesture of burning his ships on the spot and weaving his soldiers’ resulting dilemma into a stirring oratorical exhortation: “Whither can you fly,—the enemy is in your front, the sea at your back. By Allah! There is no salvation for you but in your courage and perseverance.”
Lowney, A Vanished World, 30.

The legend of Cortés in Mexico reveals his debt to legends of the Muslim conquest of his native Spain eight centuries earlier. This legacy is not surprising when we contemplate the degree to which Renaissance Europe, and all that is civilized on that continent, to the extent that it can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, also must be traced through Muslim civilization. During the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, science and reason continued its development in Muslim society. It may be simplistic to assert that Europe’s Crusaders that sought to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims brought home the seeds of the Renaissance, but it is far closer to the truth than to assert that Petrarch reinvented classic learning from sources wholly European.

Roland’s Patriots

In response to my “The Sixties: A Patriot’s History,” Historiann quipped regarding Schweikart and Allen, “They want to mislead their readers into believing that Democrats are all bad, and Republicans are all (or mostly) good (if they are "true conservatives," anyway.)” As she understands A Patriot’s History—and I suspect she’s close to the mark, if not right on,—Schweikart and Allen’s narrative resembles a modern day Chanson de Roland. Paraphrasing Lowney, some of Schweikart and Allen’s Republican characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Democrats fail the same standard simply by virtue of their misguided beliefs. Their simplistic moral tale that distinguishes the true Republicans—Reagan and Bush—from the fallen ones—Nixon and McCain, and all Republicans from Democrats, who can never be right is less nuanced than even that of some of their ideologically driven sources. Hanson, for example, was once a Democrat, and may still be so on paper.

All I can tell you is I'm still a registered Democrat. I have a liberal twin brother who disagrees with everything I write. And I have a far more liberal older brother who not only disagrees with what I write, but I imagine is really bothered by it. I had two conservative Democratic parents who were in the Populist tradition of farmers, sort of William Jennings Bryan types.
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson, The Naval Institute: Proceedings

I will show in blog entries still to come how some of the nuances of Hanson’s history in Carnage and Culture morph into something far more simplistic in the hands of Schweikart and Allen.

Nixonland

Rick Perlstein has a new book coming out in May. According to History News Network, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America is the sequel to Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001).

In my view, Before the Storm is one of the most important books published that addresses the lasting impact of the Sixties. In a nutshell, the ground roots conservative movement that labored to achieve the nomination of Goldwater in 1964--all but written off at the time--forms the foundation of the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, and dictates a large share of our political agenda today.

I expect that Nixonland will be a good read and offer tremendous insights into American politics from Nixon's first run for Congress to the current day.


August 2011 Update

Ezra Klein reported that President Obama is reading Nixonland. Following this story, Rick Perlstein wrote his first article for Time: "How Democrats Win: Defending the Social Safety Net" 18 August 2011.

The Sixties: A Patriot’s History

History is the memory of states.
Henry Kissinger

The chapter, “The Age of Upheaval, 1960-1974,” in A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen takes a long view of the Sixties in the United States, albeit severely circumscribed by the bounds of the history of government. Arthur Marwick also advocates a long view of the Sixties, but emphasizes cultural developments, as well as political and economic. Marwick’s The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998) offers an international perspective that is wholly lacking in A Patriot’s History.

Schweikart and Allen's “The Age of Upheaval” begins with Richard Nixon’s defeat in the Presidential election of 1960 and concludes with his resignation in the wake of Watergate. The authors accuse Kennedy of election fraud in 1960, while they exonerate Nixon’s behavior in 1971-72. They place the Watergate burglary in a context of “Lyndon Johnson bugged Goldwater’s campaign offices in 1964, and nothing was done about it” (716). They mention Daniel Ellsberg’s role in providing “secret documents to the New York Times” (712), but omit the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and nothing of the “rat-fucking” that would be familiar to anyone who had seen All the President’s Men (1976).

Nixon authorized the formation of an investigative unit within the White House and assigned it the job of cracking down on government leakers, starting with Daniel Ellsberg. In September [1971], probably with Nixon’s knowledge, the “Plumbers” broke into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to get information that would help convict Ellsberg, who had been indicted for violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. … Undertaking a campaign of what they called “rat-fucking,” they engaged in a series of dirty tricks to disrupt the campaigns of Democrats who were vying to oppose Nixon in the 1972 election.
Chris Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007), 232.

The authors of A Patriot’s History exhibit bipartisanship in their criticism of President Eisenhower’s role in actions that facilitated the disasters of the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, but as he “was no traditional Republican and more of a moderate … [who] posed no threat to [Franklin] Roosevelt’s legacy” (668), such evenhandedness seems easy. Nixon, on the other hand, seemed more conservative, but “his social and economic programs had far more in common with FDR than with a true conservative like Ronald Reagan” (668).

Pundits use terms like “true conservative,” but historians need to offer better definitions than I’ve found so far in A Patriot’s History. Even the divisive conservative pundit Cal Thomas has recently taken issue with declarations that Arizona Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain is not a “true conservative”:

John McCain, some say, is not a true conservative. Was Reagan? Reagan campaigned as a tax cutter. He cut taxes, but he also raised them. He promised conservative judges and spoke of his opposition to abortion, yet named two justices to the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) who voted to uphold Roe v. Wade.
Thomas, “Redefining Conservatism”

It comes as no surprise that attack dogs have spammed Townhall.com with ad hominems calling Thomas Republican in Name Only (RINO).

Conscience of a Conservative

Schweikart and Allen make it a point to identify the ghostwriters that penned John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Profiles in Courage (1956), while leaving in place the fiction that Barry Goldwater wrote Conscience of a Conservative (1960). My conscience would rebel if I offered this fiction and knew otherwise; Schweikart and Allen certainly should know that Goldwater was not the author if either one of them took the time to read the only text they cite in the paragraph that mentions Conscience of a Conservative as “providing a list of Goldwater’s policy positions” (682). The footnote refers readers to Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001).

At least Kennedy had a hand in the production of Profiles in Courage, even if he did not write the text. Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, on the other hand, was presented to Goldwater for his approval after having been fully written by L. Brent Bozell at the behest of Clarence Manion.

Manion had negotiated the grudging noninterference of Goldwater in their efforts to publish something under his name. … Over the holidays Goldwater skimmed Bozell’s manuscript and pronounced it fine.
Perlstein, Before the Storm, 51, 61.

Schweikart and Allen state that the ideas in Conscience, “were hardly radical positions” (682); Perlstein’s view differs:

The ideas that followed—in chapters like “Freedom for the Farmer,” “Freedom for Labor,” “Taxes and Spending,” “The Welfare State,” “Some Notes on Education,” and “The Soviet Menace”—were radical. Conscience of a Conservative domesticated them.
Perlstein, Before the Storm, 64.

Opinions will differ. Schweikart and Allen deserve credit for offering footnotes to works with perspectives at odds with their narrative. However, the notes appear as documentation not counter argument. Their intent is unclear.

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

The New Journalism

Hunter S. Thompson was representative of the era in which he lived. From his abuse of drugs to his love of guns, he reflects the excesses of American culture at the end of the twentieth century and into the next. It was a time of cultural ferment, well reflected in the character of Thompson from his caricature as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury to his Gonzo journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson aspired to become a novelist like the men he admired, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. His career took a different course. Instead, he became a journalist who, along with others dubbed “The New Journalists,” inserted himself into the center of his stories. Although his work is entirely absent from one anthology sitting on my shelf, Norman Sims, ed., The Literary Journalists (1984), his name often comes up early in discussions of the revolution in reporting. He is included in Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973), and mentioned by Terry Gross in her Fresh Air conversation with Marc Weingarten, who discussed Thompson in The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight (2005). There should be no doubt that Thompson’s Gonzo journalism was significant in the reorientation of subjectivity and objectivity in public discourse.

A Man of Contradictions

Hunter Thompson’s writing in Hell’s Angels (1966) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) created a persona that he struggled to embody. Thompson often then seemed a caricature of himself. At least that is part of the image that appears in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, edited and arranged by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour.

How much of Hunter was spontaneous and how much was arranged was always one of those questions that people would kick around. I found that he was like jazz. The piece was arranged. It was disciplined. But within that, he was a free instrument and he would go off. Curtis Robinson in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, 358.

He adored his grandson, but tried to conceal these tender feelings from his friends, as when he covered the screen of his laptop when Doug Brinkley walked into the room because he was looking at pictures of the child (Gonzo, 371). We are told that he could charm any woman in the room, but those that loved him most learned to fear him.

I think that underneath all of that bravado and violence and anger and fear, though, was an understanding that he was not living the right life—that he was hurting people. He knew he could get what he wanted and that he could make people feel really, really scared and make them tremble. Sandy Thompson in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, 433.

Conservative Perspectives

There are those that cannot find any merit in his writing. William F. Buckley Jr., “One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry, surely, that he stopped writing” (NRO). Others may regret their recollections:

I met Hunter in New Hampshire when he came to interview the old man [Nixon]. … Hunter and I were holed up in some hotel in Nashua on a snowy night and discovered that we were in possession of, I forget, either a gallon or a half-gallon of Wild Turkey. Now I had a lot of stamina in those days, and the two of us stayed up all night arguing fiercely about communism. Pat Buchanan in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, 126-127.

Of course, Thompson’s vehement hatred of Richard Nixon should rile up conservatives, as might his fond memories of Pat Buchanan.

…it is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan’s tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. “It’s like Sisyphus,” he said, “We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain…and it rolled right back down on us.” Well…shucks. It makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure. But I have a lot of confidence in Pat, and I suspect he won’t have much trouble finding other rocks to roll. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker,” in The Great Shark Hunt, 20-21.

Oral Biography

In Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, Wenner and Seymour have arranged a collection of statements from more than one hundred individuals about their experiences with Hunter Thompson. The list of contributors reads as a Who’s Who of late twentieth century cultural politics: Presidential hopefuls Pat Buchanan and George McGovern, as well as President Jimmy Carter; actors Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Anjelica Huston, Sean Penn; writers Norman Mailer, William Greider, William Kennedy, Tom Wolfe; performers Marilyn Manson and Jimmy Buffett; journalists Ed Bradley, Warren Hinckle, Richard Goodwin; and many others. Some that should be included were cut, however, as noted below. The result is a biography rich in contradictory analysis by people that saw different things even when they were in the same room together. These collective reflections present a complex picture of the life of a man.

The difference between Nixon and Clinton is the difference between the Truck and the Traveling Salesman. The Boss was our Satan, and Mr. Bill is our Willy Loman. … He was weird, Bubba. He played in a league where Clinton will never be anything but a batboy. Nixon was a monster with insanely wrong convictions. Clinton is a humorless punk with bad habits. Nixon was so bad that he could get innocent people in to politics, but Clinton is bad in a way that will get all but the worst ones out. Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, 229.

No other writer has connected better than Thompson with my inherent distrust of everything Clinton. His caricature of Clinton as a batboy in the League of Evil is succinct and accurate.

I came late to Thompson’s writings for several reasons, not least because of my self-sheltered childhood as a conservative Republican. When Hell’s Angels was published I was absorbed in rereading Go Dog, Go by P.D. Eastman. When Hunter was on the campaign trail with Nixon and McGovern I followed events through Mad Magazine rather than Rolling Stone. Later, I turned to the output of university presses and literature by dead white males (and Thompson was still living). I’m not yet knowledgeable enough regarding Thompson’s oeuvre to offer the sort of definitive review of Gonzo that might supplement the likes of Marc Weingarten’s Los Angeles Times assessment, but it didn’t take Google long to reveal that Anita Thompson (Hunter’s widow) has issues with the book.

The reason peopled loved him is because he is one of the rare human beings who is essentially decent, with moments of rotten behavior. Anita Thompson, Owl Farm Blog, 2 November 2007

My first clear memory of reading his work was an evening or two of ripping through Better Than Sex the year I finished graduate school, probably shortly after my wife unplugged the cable to our TV so I could no longer watch the trial of California v. O.J. Simpson. Later I read The Rum Diary, Hell’s Angels, and some articles published in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, republished in The Great Shark Hunt, which I bought the first week of September 2001. According to Anita Thompson, a lot of his later work merits attention, too. Perhaps her own The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Hunter S. Thompson should be read alongside Wenner and Seymore’s Gonzo.

Anita Thompson is not among those whose remembrances are included in Wenner and Seymour’s book; she told Wenner in a letter that he should burn the manuscript.

I wish I could appeal to your sense of decency and that you would burn this awful manuscript. It would be the right thing to do. I realize you're probably laughing at me to even suggest it. Oh Well. Anita Thompson, Owl Farm Blog, 2 November 2007

The New York Daily News reports Wenner claiming that her dislike of the book stems from a sense of personal insult.

"She's attacking the book because she's not in it," Wenner told us. "We just took her out. We took her narrative thread out and had other people tell the story. Anita and I get along fine, but she has an exaggerated sense of who she was in terms of Hunter. She had another kind of role." "Widow's fear & loathing over Hunter S. Thompson bio," 21 November 2007

Weingarten, for his part, believes that Jann Wenner made Hunter S. Thompson as much as Thompson made Wenner.

I think the editors are huge. Hayes, Felker, and Wenner gave these writers their heads to let them do their thing, but they also had a vision of how this kind of writing could enliven journalism, make it new. Conversely, writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese had tremendous respect for these editors—they wanted to do good work for them. Weingarten, Mediabistro Q&A, 7 December 2005

He said much the same to Terry Gross when he was reflecting on the relationship between the New Journalism of Thompson, Wolfe, and Joan Didion and the newer New Journalism of the web.

I’m not so impressed with what I read on the web, particularly the blogs, which I think are too hastily written. I think journalists need editors to do the job right. Weingarten to Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 27 February 2006

Aztlán

Whittier Boulevard is a hell of a long way from Hollywood, by any measure. There is no psychic connection at all. After a week in the bowels of East L.A I felt vaguely guilty about walking into the bar in the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordering a drink—as if I didn’t quite belong there, and the waiters all knew it. Thompson, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” in The Great Shark Hunt, 122-23.

I’ve read and taught several accounts of the stirrings towards revolution among Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s, including Oscar Zeta Acosta’s fictional memoir, Revolt of the Cockroach People; Roberto Rodríguez, The X in La Raza; Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos; and F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Thompson’s “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” published in Rolling Stone in 1971, and then reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 still offers a sense of immediacy that with the passage of time dissipates in the others.

Oscar Z. Acosta died young, so there is no tribute to Hunter from him in Gonzo. However, Hunter’s tribute to Acosta is excerpted in the text, as are many other texts—just enough to whet the appetite:

What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer … But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid. Thompson, Rolling Stone 254; rpt. in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, 145.

I think there is no doubt that Hunter S. Thompson was at the top of his game in the late Sixties and early Seventies, but as his widow claims, his insights at the end of the millennium also merit attention.

We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. ... We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic. Hunter S. Thompson, “Prepare for the Weirdness,” ESPN, 20 November 2000

From the days of “fear and loathing” to those of “dazed and confused” we have been living in interesting times, and that brings to mind an ancient Chinese curse.