Fear and loathing: on the campaign trail'72

I've seen in some of the ad copy for this book that "only Hunter Thomp son could forge such an astounding breakthrough in political realism." Which is ludicrous bullshit, because anybody could do it-and the reasons why they don't still puzzle me, even after more than a year of total personal and professional involvment in one of the strangest presidential campaigns in American history.
Another chunk of the ad copy says: "Never before has a professional journalist written with such candor, irreverence and humor about the personalities and machinations of our realpolitic...." Which is prob ably true, for reasons that puzzle me no less than that gibberish about "astounding breakthrough." This book is nothing more or less than a scrambled account of what it was like for one human being to cover (more or less journalistically) a presidential campaign run by other human beings. It was a king-hell bitch of a year. Some of the things we did worked out very nicely, and others were total disasters-but on balance it was a very special kind of High, and if this book conveys nothing else but that I'll figure it was worth doing.
If not... well... shit; there's al ways Teddy White. He's a very nice fellow, they say. I never saw him much, ecause we moved in differ ent circles and I'm sure his account of "Campaign 72" will be as differ ent from mine as it will be from Gary Hart's or Pat Caddell's.

Which hardly matters. This is the way the campaign was for me and for the people it wound me up with McGovern, Mankiewicz, Hubert, Nixon and even Peter Sheridan, the gin-crazed Boo-Hoo who cracked Muskie's spirit in the critical Florida primary.
In retrospect, it was not a hell of a lot different from that year I spent with the Hell's Angels, or running amok in Las Vegas or even running for Sheriff on the Freak Power Ticket in Aspen, Colorado. The faces change, but the trip is pretty consistent. Which is fine with me. Every year I feel more and more like a wino turned loose in the tasting room and if that doesn't come through in this book, try backing off a bit and reading a little tighter between the lines.