Huntergate

When will the blogosphere get off its ass?

BY MOLLY LAMBERT

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Illustration by Caroline Hu
Hunter

DEEP IN THE WILDS of the internet, where any hare-brained goofjob with a blog can find an audience for his ramblings, it seems fitting that Hunter S. Thompson's recent suicide would be honored with a conspiracy theory. Thompson's unorthodox methods of documentation apparently struck a chord with the faceless virtual diary masses littering the blogosphere. For out of the mire of hackneyed internet eulogies and tributes, a Thompson-esque rumor began circulating that the infamous gun-toting journalist may have been Watergate's mythic stoolie Deep Throat.

Coincidental timing germinated the fledgling paranoia about Thompson's possible secret identity. In the first week of February, former Nixon counsel John Dean wrote an op-ed in the LA Times, which claimed that Bob Woodward "has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Deep Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary." (Woodward and Carl Bernstein have publically stated that they will reveal Deep Throat's identity upon his death.) Then on February 20, at the age of 67, Hunter S. Thompson allegedly committed suicide via a shotgun blast to the head.

Fodder For American History Students

Thompson is best known now for his most famous fictionalized work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the classic odyssey of a drug-sodden road trip through the tackiest enclave of the American West. However, it was his bizarre journalistic endeavors that first brought him into the national consciousness. Pioneering a new style of writing he termed "gonzo," he was a purveyor of the "new journalism" that dominated Rolling Stone, as well as Harpers, the New Yorker, and other literary publications in the 1960s and 70s.

Thompson, along with his freak brethren Lester Bangs and Ralph Gleason at Rolling Stone, led the charge of writers on heavy drugs weighing heavy issues. He wasn't as much of a music journalist as the rest of the staff, but his writing fit neatly with the rock 'n' roll culture that dropped in when acid did. Yet despite his deep association with the counterculture, Thompson knew how to get along with people even in the most uptight of uptight worlds: politics. His reports on the Nixon administration gave a revisionist account of the White House that contradicted the blank praise allotted by other media sources at the time. By the time of the election in 1972, most voters were unfamiliar with the Watergate scandal. Nixon won in a landslide.

Thompson documented Nixon's 1972 campaign in a book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. He was always particularly virulent about politics, and his anti-Nixon tirades proved premonitory. As he wrote in 1968, "I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."

In 1973 he quipped, "All the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war we could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years." And then in 1974, Thompson wrote what was possibly his coup de grace: "If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark."

Transcripts of Nixon's conversations in the oval office have since validated Thompson's critiques. "You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them," Nixon said on a recently released White House tape. "Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates....Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns. That's been going on for years-centuries." As more White House tapes poured out, the public soon learned that Nixon was just as nasty about African-Americans, Jews, women, young people, and most everyone short of property-owning white male Republicans.

What is most notable about Thompson's alternative journalism is just how close to the rotten core of the Nixon administration he was able to get. Rather than being barred at the door, he was given access to the inner machinations of the whole crooked operation. During his coverage of the '72 campaign, Thompson struck up an unlikely friendship with paleoconservative television commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who was then a speechwriter for Nixon. Buchanan, another candidate on the short list of suspected Deep Throats, was a good friend of Thompson's for the 30 years since. (How's that for a sitcom set-up?) During the campaign, Buchanan went out of his way to get Thompson an interview with Nixon. Nixon granted the interview, on the rather limiting terms that they were only allowed to talk about football.

I Know How These Bastards Think.

Thompson said he hated Bush even more than he hated Nixon, and his Technicolor rants continued to be published recently on ESPN.com and occasionally in Rolling Stone, though they had begun to sound more and more like the garbled complaints of a raving old man.

After the suicide, a few small news sources and the ever-reliable Page Six gossip column ran stories about the suicide being a possible set-up. Despite his "gonzo" persona, Thompson was hardly unstable. Why would Thompson, a respected journalist and family man at the age of 67, decide to take his own life? Some have speculated that he had been suffering from a life-threatening illness, but these rumors have not been verified.

Thompson was apparently on the phone with his wife Anita when he fired the shot. Thompson's son Juan was home with him at the time, and said that he thought a book had fallen off the shelf when the gun went off. Thompson was apparently working on a story about September 11 that claimed to have hard evidence that the Twin Towers had been destroyed by charges detonated in the basements of the buildings.

Paul William Roberts, a journalist friend of Thompson's, wrote a commemorative piece about Thompson for the Toronto Globe and Mail that began: "Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: 'They're gonna make it look like suicide,' he said. 'I know how these bastards think . . .' "

And so, through the magic of technology, a conspiracy theory was born with just enough plausible evidence that it seems very strange that Thompson really just plonked himself out of his misery. What if Hunter S. Thompson was Deep Throat and then he figured out 9/11 was an inside job and was killed by the government? It's amazing how the internet lets all the crazy people find one another and combine knowledge and speculation. We can only hope that it inspires the computer-potato community to find out what happens when you get off your ass and do some real investigative journalism. As Hunter S. Thompson discovered, there are always people who want to exonerate themselves by telling the truth. It's about time for some new "new journalism," and we can't all stay inside reading newspapers online forever. So who knows, maybe some hipster blogolite who finally leaves their apartment will strike up a conversation with Condi Rice and break the story that ends up breaking Bush.

In the end, however, Thompson probably wasn't Deep Throat. But you've got to wonder what he talked to Pat Buchanan about all that time.

Molly Lambert B'05 is hotter than Andrew Sullivan

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