It may not be particularly difficult to write an obituary for Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist extraordinaire, as he provides quite a wealth of material, but I recall as I take up my pen that Thompson himself wrote by far the most remarkable obituary I've ever read, for Richard Nixon, for Rolling Stone magazine back in 1994.
In that piece, Thompson wrote of the former President, "I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum." He compared Nixon to a vicious badger which doesn't fight fair and concluded, "He has poisoned our water forever...by disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."
Nixon was Thompson's favorite sparring partner. Thompson didn't exactly fight fair either. Publishing a vision of the sitting President of the United States as a stalking werewolf wasn't something Woodward and Bernstein would have done, but perhaps it got as close to the truth of the matter as a journalist could without the legal injunctions that that pair's more traditional reporting eventually led to.
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism?which is true, but they miss the point," wrote Thompson in the obit, in a passage that works as the Good Doctor's mission statement. "It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper...that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
Thompson was a real political junkie, as his hefty and detailed Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 shows. But this was but one side of a curious and legendary figure. Thompson was a counter-culture icon probably best known for his consumption of illegal substances, but he was also a fine, and in his own unique way disciplined, journalist, and a Southern gentleman with a great love of guns and football. Nixon once gave his enemy the coveted seat next to him on the way to a campaign event, with the ground rule that they talk exclusively about football, a passion for both men.
Most people from my generation probably got their first taste of Thompson through Terry Gilliam's 90s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. Depp moved in with Thompson for six months prior to filming and nailed the caricature. But the highlight of the work is Thompson's incredible voice which comes through in lines from the book, which is Thompson's definitive work and the place to start for those new to the Good Doctor. Built out of Rolling Stone assignments on a car race and an anti-drug conference, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a uproarious drug narrative and a defining example of New Journalism which beats the hell out of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (to state the obvious, Thompson knew drugs a hell of a lot better than Wolfe).
Thompson's most out-there and splenetic observations may be the most fun and quotable, but he was a serious writer, a liberal idealist who took the American Dream very seriously. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he wrote of the Sixties youth movement, "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark?the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." In a campaign book, written a year later, Thompson savagely attacked early Democratic frontrunners Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey, was elated at the ascent of his favorite candidate George McGovern, and despaired as Nixon was reelected.
While sad, suicide fits Thompson better than most people. If you believe in heaven, Hunter probably didn't have worry about going there anyway. The gonzo journalist had already rode off into the sunset, publishing only rarely in the Stone, but more consistently writing a sports column "Hey Rube" for ESPN.com (his hilarious final piece was about a new sport he had created, "shotgun golf"). I would guess that Thompson just decided it was time, and the Hemingway solution appealed to him. The days since the news of his death have revealed that failing health likely factored into the decision. Thompson's friends and family hope to be able to send him off as he requested, his remains shot from a cannon.
I'll miss his words. The man was as fine a prose stylist as the 20th century produced, and one of my greatest heroes.