Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing (at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago)

The Greek Courier

Hunter S. Thompson describes his experiences at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. in a letter to a friend (and later included it in his collected works, such as Fear and Loathing in America)

"I witnessed at least ten beatings in Chicago that were worse than anything I ever saw the Hell’s Angels do; at one point I stood about 20 yards off, while four cops beat a photographer who was rolling around on the sidewalk screaming “Help, Help!” … and all I could do was stand there, constantly watching around me to make sure I had running room if they came after me. A half hour later I was talking about what I’d seen in a bar when I suddenly started crying…the whole week was that way: fear and tension and super-charged emotions, sore legs from running, no sleep, and a sense of disaster pervading it all."

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"I'd just come back from the Democratic Convention in Chicago and been beaten by vicious cops for no reason at all. I’d had a billy club rammed into my stomach and I’d seen innocent people beaten senseless and it really jerked me around."

"It was the ultimate horror. The final groin-shot that only a beast like Daley would stoop to deliver. It was an LBJ-style trick: no rest for the losers, keep them on the run and if they fall, kick the shit out of them."

"I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry…"

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[After the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago Hunter Thompson wrote the “wild flashback” below. It is the first time he uses the character Raoul Duke as his alter ego]

August 29, 1968

Woody Creek, CO

"Sometime after midnight on Wednesday I was standing in Grant Park about ten feet in front of the National Guard’s bayonet picket fence and talking to some Digger-types from Berkeley. There were three of them, wearing those Milwaukee truck-driver hats with mustaches instead of beards, and their demeanor—their vibes, as it were—made it clear that I was talking to some veteran counter-punchers. They were smelling around for a fight, but they weren’t about to start one; they had a whole park to kill time in, but for their own reasons they’d chosen to stand on the front line of the Mob, facing the Guardsman across ten feet of empty sidewalk. Behind the line of bayonets, Michigan avenue was a crowded no-man’s land full of cops, TV cameras and barbed-wire covered jeeps … and on the other side of that moat was the Conrad Hilton, its entrance surrounded by a wall of blue police helmets and big sheets of plywood covering the windows of the street-level Haymarket Bar—where, several hours earlier, the plate glass had been shattered by human bodies pushed completely into the bar by the crazed police-charge.

The Berkeley digger-types were convinced that the earlier action was only a preview of a clash that would probably come before dawn. “The bastards are getting ready to finish us off,” said one. I nodded, thinking he was probably right and not even wondering—as I do now—why he included me. I was, after all, a member of the official, total-access press. I had that prized magnetic badge around my neck—the same one that, earlier that day, had earned me a billy-club shot in the stomach when I tried to cross a police line: I’d showed the badge and kept on walking, but one of the cops grabbed my arm. “That’s not a press pass,” he said. I held it under his face. “What the hell do you think it is?” I asked … and I was still looking at the snarl on his face when I felt my stomach punched back against my spine; he used his club like a spear, holding it with both hands and hitting me right above the belt. That was the moment, in Chicago, when I decided to vote for Nixon.

The Berkeley trio had noticed the press tag at once, and asked who I worked for. “Nobody.” I said. “I’m just sort of getting the feel of things; I’m writing a book.” They were curious, and after a jangled conversation of bluffs, evasions, challenges and general bullshit, I introduced myself and we shook hands. “Thompson,” said one of them. “Yeah … you’re the guy who wrote that book on the Hell’s Angels, aren’t you?” I nodded. The one closest to me grinned and reached into his jacket, pulling out a messy-looking cigarette. “Here,” he said, “have a joint.”

He held it out to me, and suddenly, with no warning, I was into one of those definitive instants, a moment of the Great Fork. Here I was in Chicago, in a scene that had all the makings of a total Armageddon, with my adrenaline up so high for so long that I knew I’d collapse when I came down … ten feet in front of a row of gleaming bayonets and with plain-clothes cops all around me and cameras popping every few seconds at almost everybody … and suddenly this grinning, hairy-faced little bugger from Berkeley offers me a joint. I wonder now, looking back on it, if McGovern would have accepted a joint from McCarthy on the podium at the Ampitheatre … because I felt, at that moment, a weird mixture of panic and anticipation. For two days and nights I’d been running around the streets of Chicago, writing longhand notebook wisdom about all the people who were being forced, by the drama of this convention, to take sides in a very basic way … (“once again,” I had written on Monday night, “we’re back to that root-question: Which Side are You on?”) And now, with this joint in front of my face, it was my turn … and I knew, when I saw the thing, that I was going to smoke it; I was going to smoke a goddamned lumpy little marijuana cigarette in front of the National Guard, the Chicago police and all three television networks—with an Associated Press photographer standing a few feet away. By the time I lit the joint I was already so high on adrenaline that I thought I would probably levitate with the first puff. I was sure, as I looked across that sidewalk at all those soldiers staring back at me, that I was about to get busted, bayoneted and crippled forever. As always, I could see the headlines: “Writer Arrested on Marijuana Charges at Grant Park Protest.”

Yet the atmosphere in the Grant Park that night was so tense, so emotionally-hyped and flatly convinced that we would all be dead or maimed by morning … that it never occurred to me not to smoke that joint in a totally public and super-menacing scene where, as the demonstrators had chanted earlier, “The Whole World is Watching.” It seemed, at the time, like a thing that had to be done. I didn’t want to be busted; I didn’t even agree with these people—but if the choice was between them or those across the street, I knew which side I was on, and to refuse that joint would have been—in my own mind—a fatal equivocation. As I lit the thing I realized that I’d lost the protection of the press pass, or at least whatever small immunity it carried in Chicago, if any. That billy-club jolt in the stomach had altered my notions of press-leverage.

With the joint in my hand, glowing in the night as I inhaled, I figured, well, I may as well get as numb as I can. Then, in a moment of fine inspiration, I took a nice lungfull and handed the joint to the AP photographer standing next to me. His face turned to putty; I might as well have given him a live hand grenade … and then … then … like a man stepping up on the gallows, he put the thing to his lips and inhaled …

… and I knew I was home free, or at least I wasn’t going to be busted. He’d been standing there very cool and observant waiting for something to happen on the front lines while he stayed on the balls of his feet ready to run when the bayonets came; I could almost feel him over there, a heady presence, vaguely amused at this flagrant felony being committed under the eyes of the National Guard and taking sides, himself, by declining to photograph us … it would have been a fine Chicago Tribune-style photo: “Drug-Crazed Hippies Defy the Flag” … and then, it was his turn. When he put the joint to his lips and drew on it very skillfully I knew he had measured the balance of terror and decided that it was safe, under the circumstance, to smoke a joint in public.

I admired the man, and liked him even better than I had the night before when he’d bought me a drink out on Wells street. We had both been caught in a police charge, and instead of running with the mob we had both ducked into a bar, letting the cops sweep on by. Now, 24 hours later, he was sitting on another flash point, smoking a joint—a strange gig for a press photographer. They are a weird breed, estranged in every way from pointy-headed reporters and editorial writers. If reporters are generally liberal in their thinking, photographers are massively conservative. They are the true professionals of journalism: the End, the photo, justifies anything they have to say, do or think in order to get it. Police brutality, to a good press photographer, is nothing more or less than a lucky chance for some action shots. Later, when his prints are drying in the darkroom, he’ll defend the same cops he earlier condemned with his lens.

All this was running through my head as the joint came back to me and my sense of humor returned along with my sense of taste and I realized, after three or four tokes, that I was smoking really retrograde shit. “Jesus,” I said, “this is awful stuff, where did you get it. Lake Michigan?”

The fellow who’d given it to me laughed and said “Hell, that’s THC. What you’re tasting is old Bull Durham. It’s chemical grass synthetic stuff. We soaked it in THC and dried it out.”

Bull Durham! Synthetic grass! I was tempted to jam the butt of the thing into the little bastard’s eye … all those terrible charges and I wasn’t even smoking grass, but some kind of neo-legal bastardised Bull Durham that tasted like swamp corn.

It was just about then I got the first rush. THC, DMZ, OJT—the letters didn’t matter, I was stoned. Those bayonets suddenly looked nine feet tall and the trees above the park seemed to press down on us; the lights across the street grew brighter, and bluer, and they seemed to track me as I wandered off to see what was happening in the rest of the park.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d blown my keen-eyed observer thing for that night, and that I should get the hell out of the park while I could still walk … The scene was bad enough with a perfectly straight head; peripheral vision was the key to survival—you had to know what was happening all around you and never get out of range of at least one opening to run through when the attack came. Which was no place to be with a fuzzy head … I aimed for the stoplight at Balboa street and lurched across to the Hilton bar. A 500 pound cop with blue fangs stopped me at the hotel entrance and demanded to see my neon magnetic hotel press pass. It was all I could manage to find the thing and show it to him, then I aimed myself across the lobby toward the bar, where it suddenly occurred to me—I had promised to meet Duke at midnight.

Now, as closing time neared, the bar was three-deep with last minute drinkers. The desperate scene outside seemed light-years away; only the plywood windows reminded those of us inside that the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away.

Duke was sitting with Susan at a table across from the bar. They didn’t see me and I stopped for a moment around a corner, standing in a dark spot near a table full of Humphrey delegates with their badges and straw boaters and noisy homefolks chatter … waiting for my head to clear; “nobody gets stoned on Bull Durham,” I muttered. “What’s that?” said one of the men at the Humphrey table. “Bull Durham,” I replied … and he turned away.

Duke was hunched down on the table, with both hands on his drink and talking very easily. She—Susan—the girl with that electric memory, was sitting next to him, watching his hands as he talked … smiling that same vague smile I remembered from … what? Five years ago? Yes—almost six now—in San Juan.

She looked thinner, not much older but her eyes were bigger and her cheekbones were sharp … a woman’s face, no more of that wistful virgin thing. I gave my head a quick snap—an acrobat’s trick, they say, to stop the whirling fluids that keep us balanced in those little horseshoes of the inner ear … and then I advanced on the table, feeling perfectly balanced.

Duke looked up, and for an instant I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then he smiled: “Goddamn,” he said. “It’s about time.” I nodded and sat down in the booth, with words piling up in my head and saying nothing, looking across the table at Susan and smiling, or at least trying to. I felt very obvious—as if everybody in the place was watching me, waiting to hear what I’d say. Susan smiled, “Hello,” and I nodded, croaking out an echo, then looking away and calling for a drink. “Some dope fiend from Berkeley just got me stoned,” I muttered. “I’ll get my head straight in a minute—just ignore me.”

She laughed, reaching across the table to touch my wrist—and I jumped, just as the waitress arrived and I ordered a beer. “What kind?” she asked, but I waved her off: “Any goddamn kind, just a beer, a large bottle, terrible thirst … ”

Duke was watching me with a flat, undecided sort of half-stare; I could see it without looking at him, but when I leaned back and faced him he smiled instantly. “You’re a traitor to your class,” he said, “sneaking in here to drink with the over-thirty generation.”

“I’m thirty,” I said. “This is my time, my perfect moment … ” And I suddenly felt straight; the THC fog was gone, a bottle of beer appeared in front of me and my world came together again. I looked at Susan and smiled. “I saw you at the Fillmore last year,” I said. “But when I tried to get backstage they threw me out.”

“Oh … ” her face was confused. “You should have called me, or told them you were … or something … ” Her eyes flicked up at me, then away, looking down at her drink … confused, like me, by five years of living in different worlds. The last time I’d talked to her, in San Juan, she was hysterical at the airport, waiting for the plane that would take her back home to Connecticut for a rest, a hideout, a refuge—away from that nightmare scene of the beach house and the Carnival and Duke, and even me … I felt like touching her, to say hello in a better way than I had—but it seemed like the wrong thing to do. Duke was curling down on the table like a cold wire, sipping his drink without lifting it off the formica. The scene was too weird, too heavy—none of us could handle it, too much had happened, and too far apart.

“Well … ” Duke shrugged and sat up straight in the booth. “What the hell is wrong with us? Can’t we talk like human beings?” He looked at Susan: “Let’s do it like an interview, sweetie. You’re famous now, and we’re just a couple of rude journalists … where’s your public manner?”

She looked at him, not quite smiling, then turned to me: “Are you as uptight as he is?”

I shrugged, fishing in my pockets for a match. “Yeah,” I said.

~ HST