The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972: Difference between revisions

{{dc|dc=B|oth 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.”{{sfn|Burke|1969|p=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.{{sfn|Burke|1969|p=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.

Meanwhile, Thompson, in an attempt to capitalize on the success of his book on the [[w:Hell’s Angels|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.”{{Sfn|Thompson|1979|p=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.{{sfn|Thompson|1990|p=128}} Chicago had radicalized Thompson, who had followed the admonition to think globally and act locally.