In a moment of minor irony last week, while a retro-70's flashback flick called The Assassination Of Richard Nixon still played in America's theatres, the only man who actually once came close to killing Tricky Dick put a bullet in his own head. The death of Hunter S. Thompson came at a moment in time when the hedonistic 60's counterculture he epitomized seemed long ago and very far away. Yet there was an outpouring of heartfelt eulogies from freethinking admirers young and old, plus scorn from conservatives hellbent to treat his suicide as the ultimate just-say-no cautionary tale. The nation's culture wars are alive and well, updated in shades of Red and Blue for the new millennium.
His role as an almost-assassin came in 1968, while he was a freelance writer covering the Republican primary in New Hampshire. The primary over, Thompson was the sole reporter invited to join Nixon on his parting ride to the airport. The candidate wanted to talk about football, and he was the only one in the press corps who seemed to know anything about football.
Indeed, many of Thompson's career highlights were spent covering sporting events. There was his stream-of-consciousness, unedited rant called The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, which appeared in 1971 and launched his one person Gonzo Journalism movement. An all expenses paid trip to Vegas courtesy of Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race turned into a legendary, drug fueled, out-of-control lost weekend that became the inspiration for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Most recently, Thompson published a column called Hey, Rube! that appeared semi-regularly on ESPN.com, mixing sportswriting and prognosticating with acidly brutal political commentary on the criminal follies of George W. Bush & Co.
So there they were, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Nixon, the future President, standing on the airport tarmac. They shook hands and said goodbye, and as Thompson watched Nixon climb the stairs to his Lear jet, he pulled out his Zippo to light a cigarette.
With his trademark cigarette holder and oversized sunglasses, as caricatured by Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury character Uncle Duke, Thompson's public persona was larger than life. He was the only Rolling Stone writer consistently booked for college speaking tours, during which he'd show up drunk, or stoned. As the evenings wore on he'd become progressively more inebriated by pouring himself tumblers of Wild Turkey on stage. He was asked to leave one such engagement at Duke University in 1974, when asked what he thought of Terry Sanford's chances to run for President in two years. Thompson called Sanford a former leader of the Stop McGovern movement, and therefore a "worthless pig-fucker." At the time, unbeknownst to Thompson, Sanford was serving as the President of Duke U.
By most accounts, Thompson became a prisoner of his own Gonzo image in later years, when he realized his fans expected him to always be "on," habitually outrageous, pushing his real life behavior far beyond socially acceptable limits. And years of hard partying began to take their toll. Although at first news of his death conspiracy-minded internet bloggers speculated about dark scenarios, in reality, human frailty was more to blame.
He shot himself with his family close by, his son and daughter-in-law in another room of his Woody Creek, Colorado farmhouse. He had undergone back surgery and hip replacement, and been recently hobbled by a broken leg. Friends described him in pain and increasingly poor physical condition. He was a lifelong admirer of Ernest Hemingway, who turned a shotgun on himself in deteriorating health at the age of 62, five years younger than Thompson lived to be. One of his earliest pieces, from 1964, was titled "What Lured Hemingway To Ketchum?," about the small Idaho town where the writer spent his final years, a town much like Woody Creek.
Back to the story. Two secret servicemen pounced on him in a flash. Thompson thought his lighter been mistaken for a weapon. The truth was, Nixon's plane had been re-fueling, and he was just a few feet from the gas tank. "I could have blown the fucker up and saved this nation a lot of trouble," was how he later described the incident. He was nothing if not blunt, holding little back in his writings or his life. In the end, Hunter S. Thompson died like he lived - dangerously, but on his own terms. Res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself.
