Hunter S. Thompson by Hunter S. Thompson

Author:Hunter S. Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

II. SUMMER, 1994

Another expensive hotel suite, this time at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC. Thompson’s new book was Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, a hodgepodge of memos, musings, faxes to the Clinton campaign and his friend Ed Turner, plus clippings, a timeline, quotations set off in bold type and other forms of marginalia, all stitched together with a running commentary on the recent presidential election.

Despite his protests that he was dragged unwillingly into covering the campaign, it energized him. Two decades earlier, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail showed what happened when the bad guys won. Better Than Sex is about the triumph of the good guys, but this does not turn out much happier. The Clintons were the first of Thompson’s generation to achieve power, and their enemies were his enemies. But the writer was ambivalent about Bill and Hillary from the start, and often outright negative. Clinton versus George Bush in 1992, Thompson wrote, was a rerun of 1976: “Another self-righteous, New Age, boll-weevil Southern Democrat against another greedy, dimwit, corrupt, caretaker Republican.”

One of Thompson’s all-time best lines came during the campaign. Clinton admitted he had smoked marijuana but maintained he had not inhaled. Asked about this by The New York Times, Thompson replied, “Only a fool would say a thing like that. It’s just a disgrace to an entire generation.”

Some of the things he wrote in Better Than Sex were not only true then but seem like they always will be, like this: “There is no such thing as paranoia in a presidential campaign. Anything you fear or suspect will almost always turn out to be true, and the fix is always in, somewhere, and the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. And that, for the true campaign junkie, is precisely what makes it fun.”

When this interview took place, the Whitewater controversy—a complicated land deal in backwoods Arkansas that, stoked by the right wing, bedeviled the Clintons forever—had just claimed a major victim. Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman resigned after it came out that he had been less than completely truthful in Congressional testimony about the matter. Thompson had a few things to say about this.

He began by brandishing a toy roach, waving it at me and a few groupies who were also present. Then he used a marker to draw a black box on the suite’s white carpet. He carefully positioned his bug inside the box.

THOMPSON: The trick here is to pretend the roach is a scorpion. Now gentlemen, you have to imagine you’re in the Caribbean. And you have to imagine you just put your coat on, and out through the sleeve came a huge scorpion. I tell you, “Don’t worry about scorpions. Here’s what we do with them here: you grab a stick, and in the sand draw a box around the scorpion.”

The scorpion will rush everywhere, trying to get out, trying to make it over the wall. And scorpions can’t jump. [Laughs wildly.] That popped out of nowhere.

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