Dr. Thompson’s Wars

In the brilliant but little-known essay “Post Munich,” E. M. Forster wrote that “unpractical people often foresee the future more clearly than do those who are engaged in shaping it.” The late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) was such a person. During the unmemorable public appearance when I last saw him speak, he was truly incoherent—barely audible, in fact—by all appearances a wreck of a man, and that was over ten years ago. Whatever he was in person or as a person, though, Thompson was a writer. I suspect that some will try to deny him, relegating his work to the literary equivalent of a Doors poster in a sophomore college dorm. Even the most glowing retrospectives of his career still make him seem like a sixties throwback.

Thompson was much better than that. For one thing, he cared about style. “I’m a word freak,” he once wrote. “I like words.” Reflecting on a subject through writing, he said, “you can’t avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.” This is good Writing 101 stuff, and even a little standard and sentimental, which is strange because he is describing the impact of writing about the Hells Angels. The thing is, he really means it; like all satirists from Juvenal on he is broken up about the march of folly.

Thompson’s art comes from the basic insight that American political life has become so “peculiar and baroque,” and our media so inured to accepted rituals, that if an ordinary person were to set down in words what they saw politicians saying and doing offstage, it would appear hallucinatory, as if our leaders had just stepped off a spaceship. That’s the essence of his post-factual journalistic style, which has the crispness, wit, and visceral impact of eighteenth-century court satire. Between Thompson and Norman Mailer, an entirely novel method of covering Presidential conventions came into existence during the late 1960s and early 1970s, generating a great deal of extremely good nonfiction which was really a kind of subjective delving into the cultural psyche. The portraits of Richard Nixon’s strong and very real allure drawn by both writers endure as a way in to a distasteful but deeply rooted dimension of American life, an aggrieved paranoia and almost Spartan militarism that have now found their apotheosis in the George W. Bush version of the “war on terror.”

You really have no idea which details to believe but there is a pattern of truth at work. Consider the psychosis of the Vietnam dispatches Thompson sent from the Fall of Saigon....