Quotes from HST in late 1969:

I've been reading "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," which is Hunter S. Thompson's collected correspondence from 1968 - 78. Here are some choice bits I came across last night that seemed to echo with contemporary relevance:

On The New Journalism:

But the whole concept of "new journalism" is bogus -- unless we admit that honesty in a journalist is something new. The old, Hearst-style journalists had a privileged relationship with power -- and they paid fr that privilege by keeping a lot of warts and chancres off the public record. This tradition is still strong, especially with big-city newspapers, TV news departments and national newsmagazines...

So the "new journalism" is nothing more than a repudiation of the whole concept of privileged communication between newsmen and their sources... Nixon learned this lesson in 1960 and '62. This year he treated the press like a bunch of scorpions, playing "influential" reporters off against each other and awarding private interviews like gold stars for good behavior. I spent 10 days following him around New Hampshire and by the time I was finally granted an audience I felt almost lucky. This feeling passed very quickly, however, and now -- on the basis of what I wrote -- I have no illusions about getting a job as a White House correspondent. For the same reasons, I'll have a jaundiced view of any correspondent who seems "close to Nixon."

On The First Freak Power Campaign

Hunter and his Aspen-based cohort of anti-development refugees from the coastal cities launched a spur of the moment takeover bid, and came within a few votes of installing a 29-year-old hippie lawyer and motorcycle racer as mayor. This near victory set the stage for Hunter's own campaign for Sheriff.

The idea was to first mobilize our hidden vote -- Freak Power -- and then, using that as a power base, go after the small but very vocal "liberal vote." I was convinced that we could win by putting these two blocks together... and as it turned out I was right: That combination would have won by at least 100 votes out of 1,200 -- but it never occurred to me that most of the local "liberals" would back off at the last moment, leaving us with what amounted, in the end, to an "under-30 vote" and a hundred or so defectors from the old, failed-liberal camp who said, "Fuck it, let's run flat out this time..."

...

Electoral politics is such a foul and rotten game that only a fool would play it except to win and move on to something better.