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Written by
Jason Mosser

BOTH NORMAN MAILER’S ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER (1972) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, ’72 (1973) deal with the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race. As a way of situating St. George and Campaign Trail in their aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts, I want to appropriate Kenneth Burke’s history-as-drama metaphor. To Burke, the terms dramatic and dialectic are closely related, for history, as he explains in The Philosophy of Literary Form, “is a ‘dramatic’ process, involving dialectical oppositions” (109). In 1972, rival political interests, Democrats and Republicans, as well as their presidential nominees, Richard Nixon and George McGovern assumed that the roles of antagonists and protagonists engaged in an ideological conflict between the dominant, pro-war establishment culture and an emergent, anti-war counterculture. Burke argues that “human affairs being dramatic, the discussion of human affairs [as in campaign journalism] becomes dramatic criticism,” a rhetorical act (Philosophy 116). Sometimes, however, what promises at first to be a dramatically charged event, like a political campaign, can fail to live up to the participants’ expectations, and such was the case with the major parties’ conventions in 1972. As literary journalists, then, each the central character and shaping the consciousness of his own narrative, Mailer and Thompson adopted their own characteristic strategies to meet the challenge of creating compelling narratives in the relative absence of real-life drama.

Especially compared to the 1968 Democratic convention, which both Mailer and Thompson attended, the 1972 conventions were uneventful. Mailer had begun covering presidential campaigns with the Democratic convention in 1960, which resulted in his groundbreaking journalistic essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (originally titled “Superman Comes to the Supermart”). Four years later, during the Republican campaign in 1964, he followed with “In the Red Light” about the Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. In the following years, the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement further divided the country while millions of white, middle-class kids were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon records that, in the summer of 1968, Mailer believed that “the Republic hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism, and lines of police on file to the horizon”(405); thus, the campaigns gave promise of drama on a historic scale. While the Republicans were all but certain to support a Nixon candidacy, the Democrats were divided over the pro and anti-war forces within the party and were reeling from the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. while Mayor Daley’s police and National Guard brutalized protestors in the streets. As a witness to the scene, Mailer described the Democratic convention as “martial, dramatic, bloody, vainglorious, riotous, noble, tragic, corrupt, vicious, vomitous, appalling,[and] cataclysmic”(3).In the aftermath of both conventions that year, Mailer, writing at characteristically breakneck speed, responded with a ground-breaking book-length report, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968).

Meanwhile, Thompson, in an attempt to capitalize on the success of his book on the Hell’s Angels, was pitching to publishers an ambitious but ultimately doomed project to write a book about the death of the American Dream. Deciding that presidential politics offered an appropriate place to begin, Thompson first ventured into campaign journalism by traveling to New Hampshire in 1968 to interview primary candidate Richard Nixon, an encounter which resulted in a now-legendary episode in which he was granted access to Nixon on a long car ride under the condition that they limit their conversation strictly to football. Thompson nevertheless turned that experience into an article called “Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model)” in which he described the “new Nixon” as a “plastic man in a plastic bag,” a slicker, PR-managed version of the “old Nixon” (185). His American Dream project then led him to approach Random House for press credentials to cover the Democratic convention. While Mailer came out of the debacle in Chicago relatively unscathed, guiltily witnessing the clash between police and protestors below from the elevated perspective of his hotel room, Thompson suffered personal violence during a confrontation with the Chicago P.D. Traumatized by his experience, Thompson claimed that his post-convention depression rendered him unable to write about the event, and even decades later, in a posthumously published piece called “Chicago 1968: Death to the Weird,” Thompson says only that the whole experience was a “crushing defeat” which, for a time, convinced him to devote his energy to the more manageable task of transforming local politics in his own Aspen, CO (128). Chicago had radicalized Thompson, who had followed the admonition to think globally and act locally.

Lennon relates that Mailer anticipated that the ’72campaign would be the “most exciting American election in my memory,” optimistically sensing a “new mood” in the country (454). Having arrived at the scene in Miami, however, he noted the “absence of theater” at both conventions (3). The Republican convention, he predicted, already committed to Four More Years of Nixon, “promises to be an exhibit without suspense, conflict, or the rudiments of a narrative line” (125). Neither event had the potential to satisfy Mailer’s desire for dramatic surprises or revelations. He recalled feeling “that with this convention he might finally discover something about politics which had eluded him until now, some mystery, yes, would be at least discovered” (10), but the ineffable never materialized. As a novelist who characteristically imagined life as art, he found that the conventions offered comparatively little for his imagination to process with the same intensity as he had experienced in Chicago in ’68. Mailer typically limited his campaign coverage to at least one of the major parties’ conventions, both of which were held in Miami that year, while Thompson, as his own first-person narrator and protagonist, covered the entire ’72 campaign from beginning to end, crisscrossing the country on buses and planes with scores of newspaper reporters. Thompson’s narrative arc traces his persona from his early coverage as the jaded journalist embittered by the failure of ‘60s idealism to the McGovern convert who clings desperately to the dim hope that the South Dakotan senator’s populist campaign might radically reinvigorate American politics, to the prophet of doom and defeat as McGovern stumbles over the Eagleton affair, runs a poor campaign characterized by the Right as advocating Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion, and suffers a catastrophic loss. The tedium and boredom of actually covering the campaign, the buses, hotels, and bad food, the endless speeches, and photo ops, took their toll on Thompson who, as a stylistic strategy to cope with his physical and emotional breakdown, resorted to Gonzo journalism, dramatizing his desperate attempts to meet deadlines and to cope with the horrible prospect of another Nixon presidency.

In his 1973 manifesto on New Journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote that for the literary journalists of his era, “the basic reporting unit was no longer the datum, the piece of information, but the scene,” the zeitgeist of an event (50). As early as 1960, when Mailer covered the Democratic convention, he invited readers to think about a presidential convention without getting bogged down in “housing projects of fact and issue” (3). Mailer was nevertheless scrupulous in the reporting of facts, unlike Thompson, who openly admitted to some satirical fabrications like the infamous Ibogaine episode in which he repeated a rumor, which he started, that the senator from Maine’s erratic behavior was due to his use of an exotic Brazilian drug. However, both writers foregrounded their subjectivities. Mailer’s reporting was highly intuitive and imaginative. He makes his subjective reactions to events, which have their own phenomenal reality as conscious thoughts and impressions, a major focus of his account. As a novelist, he was sensitive to nuances of human behavior and attuned to motives both conscious and unconscious: “We engage in politics,” he observed in 1960, “to hide from ourselves,” as the nicotine addict hides behind the cigarette (3). Mailer both psychologizes and figuratively re-imagines history. In Campaign Trail, Thompson adopted a strategy he began to employ in 1970 with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” considered the first example of Gonzo Journalism. Back in his hometown of Louisville to cover the Derby, he almost immediately abandoned the idea of reporting on the race itself, choosing instead to focus on the decadent spectacle of Kentucky colonels behaving like drink-maddened beasts and to place his own participation at the center of his autobiographical account. One year later, he traveled to Vegas on assignment for Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400, a motorcycle and dune buggy race in the Nevada desert, but when the race quickly disappeared from view in a cloud of dirt, he re-strategized, fictionalizing his experience as a mock quest for that same elusive American Dream. In Campaign Trail, he again situated himself at the center of his narrative, a rhetorical move establishment readers considered a case of journalistic malpractice; Wayne C. Booth, for example, titled his review “Loathing and Ignorance on the Campaign Trail.”

As leftists and as literary journalists, both writers openly displayed their subjectivities, but neither fully identified with the Democratic Party, choosing instead to think and write independently. Mailer, in fact, consistently labeled himself as a Left Conservative, and Thompson heaped a roughly equal amount of abuse on members of both major parties. The experience of George Orwell, a committed leftist but never a declared Socialist, offers a paradigm here. When Orwell was commissioned by The Left Book Club to write The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a work of literary journalism dealing with the lives of England’s working poor, his account was criticized by some readers who expected a doctrinaire Marxist analysis. Richard Filloy argues that Orwell’s reliance on personal experience and development of his rhetorical ethos is his “chief means of persuasion,” claiming that for Orwell, “immediacy of experience is a kind of shorthand induction,” that is, it functions as anecdotal evidence which may be more persuasive than second-hand accounts or facts gathered through research (54–55). Filloy explains, in Burkean terms, that the “writer’s character, insofar as it is the means by which the reader and writer are shown to be ‘consubstantial,’ is basic to persuasion” (59). Both Mailer and Thompson constructed compelling literary personae over their careers which lent their writing considerable rhetorical power. Mailer had achieved celebrity status early in his career with the publication of The Naked and the Dead (1948) and had generated heated controversy based on his notoriously bellicose behavior and outspoken opposition to feminism. Mailer adopted a unique third-person approach to most of his literary journalism, appearing as “the reporter” in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” as “Mailer” in The Armies of the Night (1968), and as “Aquarius” in St. George, and yet all these personae are Norman Mailer who, as a novelist, preferred to situate himself as a character detached from himself as an author, but all the third person protagonists in Mailer’s campaign narratives are really first-person narrators in disguise. By 1972, following the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Thompson had become an iconic personality, a rock star, a countercultural sensation, associated in readers’ minds with the grotesque caricatures provided by illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Works Cited

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• Burke, Kenneth (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. U of California, 1969. p. 340.
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