MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A

QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER
ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is
fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of
every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION
18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a
political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He
could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to
his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the
unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was
immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell,
has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know Iwill go to
hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am
not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there
with that bastard, andI am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique
ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense
of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My
mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has
brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a
family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel
lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and
he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding the
enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the
evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds.
The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which
confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing
action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a
beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and
seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a

lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why
God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea.
Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert
Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full
naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's

immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the
traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped
and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of
a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles
south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on
American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially
onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body
of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward
questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People
would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court
battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus
delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying
not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and
duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow
faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese
interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized
patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would
have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into
the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a
jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed
servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was
illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned
in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President
Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things
about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him
repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange
every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was
an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality
of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or
any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the
Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat
who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a
clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace
of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children.
Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at
the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole
neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's
sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing
they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards
away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he
won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated
by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham,
still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker,
but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen.
Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted
the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the
stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered
such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the
end of it. Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP
front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert
Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as
governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry
Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with
many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and
spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his
mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them
put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge
publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft
and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see
Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be
saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already
done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already
ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler,
Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have
catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when
the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will
come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according
to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a
Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He
was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to
death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II,
and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State
University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them
attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for
Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the
built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to
slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper
that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-
American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the
cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon
clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in
six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years
earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952
because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines
of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the
TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got
whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were
shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people
who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the
mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and
they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an
election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart
young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the
American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be
President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on
all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both
deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to
Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer
had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal
Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee
felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently
exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It
meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady
named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon
leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean,
who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was
trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to
pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention

spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human
treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear
his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the
President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he
went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he
told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling
thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president
for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking
cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to
Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court,
which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in
exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he
became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors
distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest
at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of
those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn
before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover
was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than
any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon
trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as
he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is
a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and
a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was
one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and
Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about
the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or
Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy
Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk
brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in
front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know
who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic

case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests,
and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By
disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the
White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the
American Dream.
KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent
side of the American character that almost every country in the world has
learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll
wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the
monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the
predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and
bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the

legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in
the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ...
pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the
darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the
alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember
which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's
apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the

United States would never act that weird. At least not during football
season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the
United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12,
presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of
White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving
sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic
candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for
possible blackmail and intimidation?"
The Police Chief
The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement
Scanlan’s Monthly, vol. 1, no. 7, JUNE 1970

Weapons are my business. You name it and I know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire,
knives and everything else. Damn few people in the world know more about
weaponry than I do. I’m an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors,
animals — anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure.
This is my profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty. And
for this reason the editors of Scanlan’s have asked me to comment on a
periodical called The Police Chief.
At first I refused. . . but various pressures soon caused me to change my
mind. Money was not a factor in my decision. What finally spurred me to
action was a sense of duty, even urgency, to make my voice heard. I am, as I
said, a pro — and in this foul and desperate hour in our history I think even
pros should speak up.
Frankly, I love this country. And also, quite frankly, I despise being put in
this position — for a lot of reasons, which I don’t mind listing:

1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about
each other — no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. In the
good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There
was no way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse
than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat
cop squeal on his buddy in a “police brutality” case.
2) The reason I know about things like “malpractice” and “police brutality”
is that I used to be a “cop” — a police chief, for that matter, in a small city
just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada —
and before that a beat cop in Oakland. So I know what I’m talking about
when I say most “journalists” are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter
who could even say the word “corrupt” without pissing in his pants from
pure guilt.

3) The third reason for the bad way I feel about this “article” is that I used
to have tremendous faith in this magazine called The Police Chief. I read it
cover-to-cover every month, like some people read the Bible, and the city
paid for my subscription. Because they knew I was valuable to them, and
The Police Chief was valuable to me. I loved that goddamn magazine. It
taught me things. It kept me ahead of the game.
But no more. Things are different now — and not just for me either. As a
respected law enforcement official for 20 years in the West, and now as a
weapons consultant to a political candidate in Colorado, I can say from long
and tremendous experience that The Police Chief has turned to cheap jelly.
As a publication it no longer excites me, and as a phony Voice of the
Brotherhood it makes me sick with rage. One night in Oakland, about a
dozen years ago, I actually got my rocks off from reading the
advertisements. . . I hate to admit such a thing, but it’s true.
I remember one ad from Smith & Wesson when they first came out with
their double-action .44 Magnum revolver: 240 grains of hot lead, exploding
out of a big pipe in your hand at 1200 feet per second. . . and super-
accurate, even on a running target.
Up until that time we’d all thought the .357 Magnum was just about the
bee’s nuts. FBI-filed tests had proved what the .357 could do: in one case,
with FBI agents giving fire-pursuit to a carload of fleeing suspects, an agent
in the pursuing car brought the whole chase to an end with a single shot
from his .357 revolver. His slug penetrated the trunk of the fleeing car, then
the back seat, then the upper torso of a back seat passenger, then the front
seat, then the neck of the driver, then the dashboard, and finally imbedded
itself in the engine block. Indeed, the .357 was such a terrifying weapon
that for ten years only qualified marksmen were allowed to carry them.
So it just about drove me crazy when — just after I’d qualified to carry a
.357 — I picked up a new issue of The Police Chief and saw an ad for the .44
Magnum, a brand-new revolver with twice the velocity and twice the
striking power of the “old” .357.
One of the first real-life stories I heard about the .44 Magnum was from a
Tennessee sheriff whom I met one spring at a law enforcement conference
in St. Louis. “Most men can’t handle the goddamn thing,” he said. “It kicks
worse than a goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last
week I had to chase a nigger downtown, and when he got so far away that
he couldn’t even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard
with this .44 Magnum and blew the head clean off his body with one shot.
All we found were some teeth and one eyeball. The rest was all mush and
bone splinters.”
Well. . . let’s face it; that man was a bigot. We’ve learned a lot about racial
problems since then. . . but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in
1970 and see that we haven’t learned much about weapons. Today’s beat
cop in any large city is a sitting duck for snipers, rapers, dope addicts,
bomb-throwers and communist fruits. These scum are well-armed — with
U.S. Army weapons — and that’s why I finally quit official police work.

As a weapons specialist I saw clearly — in the years between 1960 and 1969
— that the Army’s weapons-testing program on the Indo-Chinese peninsula
was making huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge
developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter .308 to a rapid-fire .223.
That lame old chestnut about “sharpshooters” was finally muscled aside by
the proven value of sustained-firescreens. The hand-thrown grenade was
replaced, at long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine
and the fiery missile- cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-
potential of the individual soldier was increased from 1.6 per second to
26.4-per second — or nearly five KP points higher than Pentagon figures
indicate we would need to prevail in a land war with China.

So the reason for this nation’s dismal failure on the Indo-Chinese peninsula
lies not in our weapons technology, but in a failure of will. Yes. Our G.I.’s
are doomed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, etc. for the
same insane reason that our law enforcement agents are doomed in Los
Angeles, New York and Chicago. They have been shackled, for years, by
cowardly faggots and spies. Not all were conscious traitors; some were
morally weak, others were victims of drugs, and many were simply crazy. . .

Let’s face it. The majority of people in this country are mentally ill. . . and
this illness unfortunately extends into all walks of life, including law
enforcement. The illness is manifest in our National Stance from Bangkok to
Bangor, to coin a phrase, but to those of us still dying on our feet in the dry
rot of middle America there is no worse pain — and no more hideous proof
of the plague that afflicts us all — than the knowledge of what has
happened to The Police Chief, a magazine we once loved because it was
great.

But let’s take a look at it now. The editor-in-chief is an FBI dropout by the
name of Quinn Tamm, a middle-aged career cop who ruined his whole life
one day by accidentally walking on the fighting side of J. Edgar Hoover’s
wiretap fetish. Tamm is legally sane — by “liberal” standards — but in grass-
roots police circles he is primarily known as the model for Mitch Greenhill’s
famous song “Pig in the Stash.” The real editor of the magazine is a woman
named Pitcher. I knew her in the old days, but Tamm’s son does most of the
work, anyway. .

One of the most frightening things about The Police Chief is that it calls
itself “The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement.” But all it really is, is a
house-organ for a gang of high-salaried pansies who call themselves the
“International Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc.”
How about that? Here’s a crowd of suck-asses putting out this magazine that
says it’s the voice of cops. Which is bullshit. All you have to do is look at the
goddamn thing to see what it is. Look at the advertising; Fag tools!
Breathalysers, “paralyzers,” gas masks, sirens, funny little car radios with
voice scramblers so the scum can’t listen in. . . but no ATTACK WEAPONS!!!
Not one! The last really functional weapon that got mentioned in The Police
Chief was the “Nutcracker Flail,” a combination club and pincers about
three feet long that can cripple almost anybody. It works like a huge pair of
pliers: the officer first flails the living shit out of anybody he can reach. . .
and then, when a suspect falls, he swiftly applies the “nutcracker” action,
gripping the victim’s neck, extremities or genitals with the powerful pincers
at the “reaching” end of the tool, then squeezing until all resistance ceases.

Believe me, our city streets would be a lot safer if every beat cop in the
nation carried a Nutcracker Flail. . . So why is this fine weapon no longer
advertised in PC? I’ll tell you why: for the same reason they no longer
advertise the .44 Magnum or the fantastically efficient Stoner rifle that can
shoot through brick walls and make hash of the rabble inside. Yes. . . and
also for the same reason they won’t advertise The Growler, a mobile sound
unit that emits such unholy shrieks and roars that every human being within
a radius of ten city blocks is paralyzed with unbearable pain: they collapse
in their tracks and curl up like worms, losing all control of their bowels and
bleeding from the ears.

Every PD in the country should have a Growler, but the PC won’t advertise it
because they’re afraid of hurting their image. They want to be LOVED. In
this critical hour we don’t need love, we need WEAPONS — the newest and
best and most efficient weapons we can get our hands on. This is a time of
extreme peril. The rising tide is almost on us. . . but you’d never know it
from reading The Police Chief. Let’s look at the June 1970 issue:

The first thing we get is a bunch of gibberish written by the police chief of
Miami, Florida, saying “the law enforcement system [in the U.S.A.] is
doomed to failure.” Facing this is a full-page ad for the Smith & Wesson
“Street Cleaner,” described as a “Pepper Fog tear smoke generator. . .
loaded with a new Super Strength Type CS [gas] just developed by Gen.
Ordnance.” The “Street Cleaner” with Super CS “not only sends the meanest
troublemakers running. It convinces them not to come back. . . You can
trigger anything from a 1-second puff to a 10 minute deluge. . . Do you have
a Street Cleaner yet?”
In all fairness, the Pepper Fogger is not a bad tool, but it’s hardly a weapon.
It may convince trouble-makers not to come back in ten minutes, but wait a
few hours and the scum will be back in your face like wild rats. The obvious
solution to this problem is to abandon our obsession with tear gas and fill
the Street Cleaner with a nerve agent. CS only slaps at the problem: nerve
gas solves it.
Yet the bulk of all advertising in the PC is devoted to tear gas weapons:
Federal Laboratories offers the 201-Z gun, along with the Fed 233
Emergency Kit, featuring “Speed-heat” grenades and gas projectiles
guaranteed to “pierce barricades.” The AAI Corporation offers a “multi-
purpose grenade that can’t be thrown back.” And, from Lake Erie Chemical,
we have a new kind of gas mask that “protects against CS.” (This difference
is crucial; the ad explains that army surplus gas masks do well enough
against the now-obsolete CN gas, but they’re virtually useless against CS
— “the powerful irritant agent that more and more departments are turning
to and that’s now ’standard’ with the National Guard.”)
Unfortunately, this is about as far as The Police Chief goes, in terms of
weapons (or tools) information. One of the few interesting items in the non-
weapons category is a “scrambler ” for “police-band” car radios — so “the
enemy” can’t listen in. With the “scrambler,” everything will sound like
Donald Duck.
The only consistently useful function of the PC is the old faithful “Positions
Open” section. For instance: Charlotte, N.C., needs a “firearms
identification expert” for the new city-county crime lab. Ellenville, N.Y. is
looking for a new chief of police, salary “10,500 with liberal fringe
benefits.” Indeed. And the U.S. Department of Justice is “now recruiting
Special Agents for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.” The ad
says they need “a sizeable number” of new agents, to start at $8098 per
annum, “with opportunity for premium overtime pay to gross up to
$10,000.”
(In my opinion, only a lunatic or a dope addict would do narc-work for that
kind of money. The hours
are brutal and the risks are worse: I once had a friend who went to work as
a drug agent for the feds and lost both of his legs. A girl he was trusting put
LSD in his beer, then took him to a party where a gang of vicious freaks
snapped his femurs with a meat-ax.)
Let’s face it: we live in savage times. Not only are “cops” called pigs — they
are treated like swine and eat worse than hogs. Yet the PC still carries
advertising for “P.I.G.” tie-clasps! What kind of two-legged scumsucker
would wear a thing like that?
WHY ARE WE GROVELING? This is the rootnut question! Why has the once
great Police Chief turned on its rank and file?
Are we dupes? Do the Red Pansies want to destroy us? If not, why do they
mock all we believe in?

So it should come as no surprise — to the self-proclaimed pigs who put out

The Police Chief — that most of us no longer turn to that soggy-pink
magazine when we’re looking for serious information. Personally, I prefer
the Shooting Times, or Guns & Ammo. Their editorials on “gun control” are
pure balls of fire, and their classfied ads offer every conceivable kind of
beastly weapon from brass knuckles and blowguns to 20 mm. cannons.
Another fine source of weapons info — particularly for the private citizen —
is a little known book titled, How to Defend Yourself, Your Family, and Your
Home — a Complete Guide to Self-Protection. Now here is a book with real
class! It explains, in 307 pages of fine detail, how to set booby traps in your
home so that “midnight intruders” will destroy themselves upon entry; it
tells which type of shotgun is best for rapid-fire work in narrow hallways (a
sawed-off double-barreled 12-gauge; one barrel loaded with a huge tear gas
slug, the other with Double-O buckshot). This book is invaluable to anyone
who fears that his home might be invaded, at any moment, by rioters,
rapers, looters, dope addicts, niggers, Reds or any other group. No detail
has been spared: dogs, alarm wiring, screens, bars, poisons, knives, guns. . .
ah yes, this is a wonderful book and highly recommended by the National
Police Officers Association of America. This is a very different group from
the police chiefs. Very different.

But why grapple now with a book of such massive stature? I need time to
ponder it and to run tests on the many weapons and devices that appear in
the text. No professional would attempt to deal lightly with this book. It is a
rare combination of sociology and stone craziness, laced with weapons
technology on a level that is rarely encountered.

You will want this book. But I want you to know it first. And for that, I need
time. . . to deal smartly with the bugger on its own terms. No pro would
settle for less.

– Raoul Duke (Master of Weaponry)

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in
the passing lane

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for
it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series
of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his
closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter
how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential
debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry
supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of

winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little
freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was
clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for
roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with
no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went
belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered
poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I
heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Karl Rove, the president's political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in
the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove
has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed
miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak
and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St.
Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem: His candidate is a weak-
minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters.

That is an unacceptable failure for hardballers like Rove and Dick Cheney.
On the undercard in Cleveland against John Edwards, Cheney came across as
the cruel and sinister uberboss of Halliburton. In his only honest moment
during the entire debate, he vowed, "We have to make America the best
place in the world to do business."

Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally
had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought up
to date in Florida that night -- except this time the false prince turned back
into a frog.

Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home
in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard
that he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he
chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so
scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."

Ali has seen that look before. Almost three months to the day after John
Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the "Louisville Lip" -- then
Cassius Clay -- made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the
Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston so
badly that he refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.

This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that
his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again.
Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no
doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White
House is finished. NO MAS.

*****
Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and
anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of
the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There
are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they
call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George
Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed and
vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is
not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything
that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident
that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) controls
all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs
who would far rather die than lose the election in November.

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what

happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no
response to "It's the economy, stupid."

Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has
let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation
into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon
comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous "trickle-
down" theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory
goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle down" to the
poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat
nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they
never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male
property owners could vote.

Things haven't changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from.
Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no
zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby
sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich
pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just
about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents of
the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a
handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws
against oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden in
the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with farm
animals.
Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was
running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in
despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they
say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed
him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and
accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal
knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.

His campaign manager was shocked. "We can't say that, Lyndon," he
supposedly said. "You know it's not true."

"Of course it's not true!" Johnson barked at him. "But let's make the bastard
deny it!"

Johnson -- a Democrat, like Bill Clinton -- won that election by fewer than a
hundred votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule Texas
and the U.S. Senate for twenty years and to be the most powerful vice
president in the history of the United States. Until now.

*****

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too

obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them.
Election Day -- especially a presidential election -- is always a wild and
terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look
forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We
are slaves to it.

Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the ones
who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and
the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who emerge
victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy and plunge
each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers
who want to be close to a winner.

That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak
will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and
all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like
suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then
having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in
public.
Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.

"What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It's making me sick."

"That is the smell of a Loser, Senator. He came in to apply for a job, but we
tossed him out immediately. Sgt. Sloat took him down to the parking lot and
taught him a lesson he will never forget."

"Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new Enemies List? I want
them all locked up. They are scum."

"We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most of
them voted against you anyway. I hate those bastards."

"Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel
down. I want to reward you."

That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vici, especially among
Republicans. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to its
knees, more knives are drawn.

*****

Indeed. the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. The
time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. That's exactly
what the debates did. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it energized his
troops. Voting for Kerry is beginning to look like very serious fun for
everybody except poor George, who now suddenly looks like a loser.

That is fatal in a presidential election.

I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional

gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary
to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended
risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush
finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about forty-six percent, plus
five points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court -- which seemed to equal
fifty-one percent. Nobody really believed that, but George W. Bush moved
into the White House anyway.

It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German
Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove
is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while, and it
was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole
world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal biphetamine and stay
awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps & his bombers & his
dope-addled general staff.
They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War -- as long as you are
winning -- and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had created
a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new Hitler
youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at night for
the generals. They were fanatics.

That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are not
much different today. We still love War.

George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country
from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at
war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not.
Love it or leave it.

*****

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the
future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace
and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded
beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened
beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a

practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the
profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like
George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal"

candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but
what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs
from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White
House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the
once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise
up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the
White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it
anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he
stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil
Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a
gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander
around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk
sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize
him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel,
just for laughs.

*****

Even the Fun-hog vote has started to swing for John Kerry, and that is a hard
bloc to move. Only a fool would try to run for president without the
enthusiastic support of the Fun-hog vote. It is huge, and always available,
but they will never be lured into a voting booth unless voting carries a
promise of Fun.

At least thirty-three percent of all eligible voters in this country are

confessed Fun-hogs, who will cave into any temptation they stumble on.
They have always hated George Bush, but until now they had never made
the connection between hating George Bush and voting for John Kerry.

The Fun-hogs are starving for anything they can laugh with, instead of at.
But George Bush is not funny. Nobody except fellow members of the
Petroleum Club in Houston will laugh at his silly barnyard jokes unless it's for
money. When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke
over and over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One
of them still remembers it:
There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.

"It was horrible to hear him tell it," said the classmate, who spoke only on
condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his back
put there by young George. "He burned this into my flesh with a red-hot
poker," he said solemnly, "and I have hated him ever since. That jackass was
born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded. This scar will
be with me forever."

There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page of
the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but nobody
was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he liked it.

*****

I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day,
and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite of
what it says: u.s. transfers sovereignty to Iraqi interim "government." Hot
damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election! It is a deliberate
cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi people than we
are about to stop killing them.

Your neighbor's grandchildren will be fighting this stupid, greed-crazed Bush-

family "war" against the whole Islamic world for the rest of their lives, if
John Kerry is not elected to be the new President of the United States in
November.

The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and
more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want
it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-
cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.

Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the
Rat gods. But not me. No. I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the
bastard out of office on November 2nd.
BULLETIN
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSMENT; DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN
CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILLIS PRESIDENT"
"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,"
the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near
his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for
a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything
we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."

Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts,
went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas Goat with no moral
compass."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in
my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him
be the next President of the United States."

*****

Which is true. I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I
will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man
with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will
tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the
white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including
large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out
to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order,
and he is no fun at all.
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I will not make that mistake again. The
joke is over for Nader. He was funny once, but now he belongs to the dead.
There is nothing funny about helping George Bush win Florida again. Nader
is a fool, and so is anybody who votes for him in November -- with the
obvious exception of professional Republicans who have paid big money to
turn poor Ralph into a world-famous Judas Goat.

Nader has become so desperate and crazed that he's stooped to paying
homeless people to gather signatures to get him on the ballot. In
Pennsylvania, the petitions he submitted contained tens of thousands of
phony signatures, including Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse and John Kerry. A
judge dumped Ralph from the ballot there, saying the forms were "rife with
forgeries" and calling it "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever
perpetrated upon this court."

But they will keep his name on the ballot in the long-suffering Hurricane
State, which is ruled by the President's younger brother, Jeb, who also wants
to be the next President of the United States. In 2000, when they sent Jim
Baker down to Florida, I knew it was all over. The fix was in. In that
election, 97,488 people voted for Nader in Florida, and Gore lost the state
by 537 votes. You don't have to be from Texas to understand the moral of
that story. It's like being out-coached in the Super Bowl. There are no rules
in the passing lane. Only losers play fair, and all winners have blood on their
hands.

*****

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a
quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen,
Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy
campaign contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush's
vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating
Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men
didn't. Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and
we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in
front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to
throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president's
lawn. We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of
us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they
were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on
Richard Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was
fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river. That river
is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal,
and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.
Collect Telegram From A Mad Dog.
First published in Spider magazine, Vol 1, No 7, 13 October 1965.

Not being a poet, and drunk as well, leaning into the diner and dawn and
hearing a juke box mockery of some better human sound. I wanted rhetoric
but could only howl the rotten truth Norman Luboff should have his nuts
ripped off with a plastic fork. Then howled around like a man with the final
angst, not knowing what I wanted there Probably the waitress, bend her
double like a safety pin, deposit the mad seed before they tie off my tubes
or run me down with Dingo dogs for not voting at all.
Suddenly a man with wild eyes rushed out from the wooden toilet Foam on
his face and waving a razor like a flag, shouting It’s Starkweather god damn
I Know that voice We’ll take our vengeance now! McConn, enroute from L.A.
to some rumored home, killing the hours till the bars opened stranded on
Point Richmond when they closed the night before, thinking finally he had
come among friends or at least one.
We rang for Luboff on the pay phone, but there was no contact Some
tortured beast of a bad loser has already croaked him, said McConn We’ll
have a drink. But the Mariners’ Tavern was not open for twenty minutes, so
we read a newspaper and saw where just about everybody had been fucked
in the face or some other orifice or opening, or possibility for one good
reason or another by the time the Chronicle went to press before last
midnight.
We rang for the editor but the switchboard clamped him off. Get a lawyer, I
said. These swine have gone far enough. But the lawyers were all in bed.
Finally we found one, limp from an orgy and too much sleep Eating cheese
blintzes with sour cream and ginon a redwood balcony with afine exposure.
Get your ass up, I said. It’s Sunday and the folks are in church. Now is the
time to lay a writ on them, Cease and Desist Specifically Luboff and the big
mongers, the slumfeeders, the perverts and the pious.
The legal man agreed We had a case and indeed a duty to right these
wrongs, as it wereThe Price would be four thousand in front and ten for the
nut. I wrote him a check on the Sawtooth National Bank, but he hooted at it
While rubbing a special oil on his palms To keep the chancres from itching
beyond endurance On this Sabbath. McConn broke his face with a running
Cambodian chop, then wedrank his gin, ate his blintzes But failed to find
anyone to rape and went back to the Mariners’ Tavern to drink in the sun.
Later, from jail I sent a brace of telegrams to the right people explaining my
position.

In December 1961 Hunter Thompson wrote this article for Rogue

magazine, shortly after writing Burial at Sea for the same magazine. It
was turned down by Rogue. It appears in The Proud Highway. The Picture
above is of the Greenbriar Boys (mentioned in the article) with Bob
Dylan, also in the picture, Ralph Rinzler and John herald.

New York City. The Scene is Greenwich Village, a long dimly lit bar called
Folk City, just east of Washington Square Park. The customers are the usual
mixture, students in sneakers and button-down shirts, overdressed tourists
in for the weekend, “nine to five types” with dark suits and chic dates, and
a scattering of sullen looking “beatnics”. A normal Saturday night in the
Village, two parts boredom, one part local color, and one part anticipation.

This is the way it was at ten-thirty. The only noise was the hum of
conversation and the sparodic clang of the cash register. Most people
approach the Village with the feeling that “things are happening here.” If
you hit a dead spot, you move on as quickly as you can. Because things are
happening–somewhere. Maybe just around the corner.
I’ve been here often enough to know better, but folk city was so dead that
even a change of scenery would have been exciting. So I was just about
ready to move on when things began happening. What appeared on the tiny
bandstand at that moment was one of the strangest sights I’ve ever
witnessed in the Village. Three men in farmer’s garb, grinning, tuning their
instruments, while a suave MC introduced them as “the Greenbriar Boys”
straight from the Grand Ole Opry.”

Gad, I thought. What a hideous joke! It was strange then, but moments
later it was down right eerie. These three grinning men, this weird, country
looking trio, stood square in the heartland of the “avant garde” and burst
into a nasal, twanging rendition of, “We need a whole lot more of Jesus,
and a lot less rock-n-roll”

I was dumbfounded, and could hardly believe my ears when the crowd
cheered mightily, and the Greenbriar boys responded with an Earl Scruggs
arrangement of “Home Sweet Home.” The tourists smiled happily, the
“bohemian” element uniformly decked out in sunglasses, long striped shirts
and Levis- kept time by thumping on the tables, and a man next to me
grabbed my arm and shouted: “What the hell’s going on here? I thought this
was an Irish bar!” I muttered a confused reply, but my voice was lost in the
uproar of the next song–a howling version of “Good Ole Mountain Dew” that
brought a thunderous ovation.

Here in New York they call it “Bluegrass Music” but the link-if any-to the
Bluegrass region of Kentucky is vague indeed. Anybody from the South will
recognise the same old hoot-n-hollar, country jamboree product that put
Roy Acuff in the 90-percent bracket. A little slicker, perhaps; a more
sophisticated choice of songs; but in essence, nothing more or less than
“good old-fashioned” hillbilly music. The performance was neither a joke
nor a spoof. Not a conscious one, anyway-although there may be some irony
in the fact that a large segment of the Greenwich Village population is made
up of people who have “liberated themselves” from rural towns of the South
and Midwest, where hillbilly music is as common as meat and potatoes.

As it turned out, the Greenbriar Boys hadn’t exactly come “straight from
the Grand Ole Opry.” As a matter of fact, they came straight from Queens
and New jersey, where small bands of country music connoisseurs have
apparently been thriving for years. Although there have been several
country music concerts in New York , this is the first time a group of hillbilly
singers have been booked into a recognised night club.
Later in the evening, the Greenbriar Boys were joined by a fiddler named Irv
Weissberg. The addition of a fiddle gave the music a sound that was almost
authentic, it would have taken a real aficionado to turn up his nose and
speak nostalgically of Hank Williams. With the fiddle taking the lead, the
fraudulent farmers set off on “Orange Blossom Special,” then changed the
pace with “Sweet Cocaine”– dedicated, said one “to any junkies in the
audience.” It was this sort of thing-hip talkwith a molasses accent–that gave
the Greenbriar Boys a distinctly un-hillbilly flavour. And when they did a sick
little ditty called , “Happy Landings, Amelia Earhart,” there was a distinct
odour of Lenny Bruce in the room.

In light of the current renaissance in Folk Music, the appearance of the

Greenbriar Boys in Greenwich Village is not really a surprise. The “avant
garde” is taste. They had Brubeck and Kentona long time ago, but dropped
that when the campus crowd took it up. The squares adopted Flamenco in a
hurry, and folk peration, the avant garde is digging hillbilly. The Village is
dedicated to “new sounds,” and todays experiment is very often tomorrow’s
big name. One of the best examples is Harry Belafonte, who sold
hambugers in a little place near Sheridan Square until he got a chance to
sing at the village Vanguard.

Belafonte, however was a genuine “new sound.” If you wanted to hear him ,
there was only one place to go. And if you weren’t there, you simply missed
the boat.

With the Greenbriar boys, it’s not exactly the same. I thought about this as I
watched them. Here I was, at a “night spot” in one of the world’s most
cultured cities, paying close to a dollar for each beer, surrounded by
apparently intelligent people who seemed enthralled by each thump and
twang of the banjo string–and we were all watching a performance that I
could almost certainly see in any roadhouse in rural Kentucky on any given
Saturday night. As Pogo once said–back in the days when mossback editors
were dropping Walt Kelly like a hot pink potato–”it gives a man paws.”
The Motorcycle Gangs
Losers and Outsiders
The Nation May 17, 1965.

Last Labor Day weekend newspapers all over California gave front-page
reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of
Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula. Two girls, aged 14 and 15, were
allegedly taken from their dates by a gang of filthy, frenzied, boozed-up
motorcycle hoodlums called "Hell's Angels," and dragged off to be
"repeatedly assaulted."

A deputy sheriff, summoned by one of the erstwhile dates, said he

"arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire surrounded by cyclists
of both sexes. Then the two sobbing, near-hysterical girls staggered
out of the darkness, begging for help. One was completely nude and
the other had on only a torn sweater."

Some 300 Hell's Angels were gathered in the Seaside-Monterey area at the
time, having convened, they said, for the purpose of raising funds among
themselves to send the body of a former member, killed in an accident,
back to his mother in North Carolina. One of the Angels, hip enough to
falsely identify himself as "Frenchy of San Bernardino," told a reporter who
came out to meet the cyclists: "We chose Monterey because we get treated
good here; most other places we get thrown out of town."
But Frenchy spoke too soon. The Angels weren't on the peninsula twenty-
four hours before four of them were in jail for rape, and the rest of the
troop was being escorted to the county line by a large police contingent.
Several were quoted, somewhat derisively, as saying: "That rape charge
against our guys is phony and it won't stick."

It turned out to be true, but that was another story and certainly no
headliner. The difference between the Hell's Angels in the paper and the
Hell's Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for.
It also raises a question as to who are the real hell's angels.

Ever since World War II, California has been strangely plagued by wild men
on motorcycles. They usually travel in groups of ten to thirty, booming along
the highways and stopping here are there to get drunk and raise hell. In
1947, hundreds of them ran amok in the town of Hollister, an hour's fast
drive south of San Francisco, and got enough press to inspire a film called
The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. The film had a massive effect on
thousands of young California motorcycle buffs; in many ways, it was their
version of The Sun Also Rises.

The California climate is perfect for motorcycles, as well as surfboards,

swimming pools and convertibles. Most of the cyclists are harmless weekend
types, members of the American Motorcycle Association, and no more
dangerous than skiers or skin divers. But a few belong to what the others
call "outlaw clubs," and these are the ones who--especially on weekends and
holidays--are likely to turn up almost anywhere in the state, looking for
action. Despite everything the psychiatrists and Freudian casuists have to
say about them, they are tough, mean and potentially as dangerous as a
pack of wild boar. When push comes to shove, any leather fetishes or
inadequacy feelings that may be involved are entirely beside the point, as
anyone who has ever tangled with these boys will sadly testify. When you
get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, you can generally
count your chances of emerging unmaimed by the number of heavy-handed
allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this
league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools. "I smashed his
face," one of them said to me of a man he'd never seen until the swinging
started. "He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid."

The most notorious of these outlaw groups is the Hell's Angels, supposedly
headquartered in San Bernardino, just east of Los Angeles, and with
branches all over the state. As a result of the infamous "Labor Day gang
rape," the Attorney General of California has recently issued an official
report on the Hell's Angels. According to the report, they are easily
identified:
The emblem of the Hell's Angels, termed "colors," consists of an
embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet. Just
below the wing of the emblem are the letters "MC." Over this is a band
bearing the words "Hell's Angels." Below the emblem is another patch
bearing the local chapter name, which is usually an abbreviation for the city
or locality. These patches are sewn on the back of a usually sleeveless
denim jacket. In addition, members have been observed wearing various
types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of German iron crosses.*
(*Purely for decorative and shock effect. The Hell's Angels are apolitical and
no more racist than other ignorant young thugs.) Many affect beards and
their hair is usually long and unkempt. Some wear a single earring in a
pierced ear lobe. Frequently they have been observed to wear metal belts
made of a length of polished motorcycle drive chain which can be unhooked
and used as a flexible bludgeon... Probably the most universal common
denominator in identification of Hell's Angels is generally their filthy
condition. Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club
members and their female associates, seem badly in need of a bath.
Fingerprints are a very effective means of identification because a high
percentage of Hell's Angels have criminal records.
In addition to the patches on the back of Hell's Angel's jackets, the "One
Percenters" wear a patch reading "1%-er." Another badge worn by some
members bears the number "13." It is reported to represent the 13th letter
of the alphabet, "M," which in turn stands for marijuana and indicates the
wearer thereof is a user of the drug.
The Attorney General's report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and
consistently alarming--just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging
good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels.
Newsweek led with a left hook titled "The Wild Ones," Time crossed right,
inevitably titled "The Wilder Ones." The Hell's Angels, cursing the
implications of this new attack, retreated to the bar of the DePau Hotel
near the San Francisco waterfront and planned a weekend beach party. I
showed them the articles. Hell's Angels do not normally read the news
magazines. "I'd go nuts if I read that stuff all the time," said one. "It's all
bullshit."

Newsweek was relatively circumspect. It offered local color, flashy quotes

and "evidence" carefully attributed to the official report but unaccountably
said the report accused the Hell's Angels of homosexuality, whereas the
report said just the opposite. Time leaped into the fray with a flurry of
blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a
classic of supercharged hokum: "Drug-induced stupors... no act is too
degrading... swap girls, drugs and motorcycles with equal abandon...
stealing forays... then ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid
behavior..."

Where does all this leave the Hell's Angels and the thousands of shuddering
Californians (according to Time) who are worried sick about them? Are these
outlaws really going to be busted, routed and cooled, as the news
magazines implied? Are California highways any safer as a result of this
published uproar? Can honest merchants once again walk the streets in
peace? The answer is that nothing has changed except that a few people
calling themselves the Hell's Angels have a new sense of identity and
importance.

After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell's Angels phenomenon,
both in print and in person, I'm convinced the net result of the general howl
and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a
savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will
be "business as usual" once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will
be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.

Meanwhile, according to Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch's own figures,

California's true crime picture makes the Hell's Angels look like a gang of
petty jack rollers. The police count 463 Hell's Angels: 205 around L.A. and
233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area. I don't know about L.A. but the real
figures for the Bay Area are thirty or so in Oakland and exactly eleven--with
one facing expulsion--in San Francisco. This disparity makes it hard to
accept other police statistics. The dubious package also shows convictions
on 1,023 misdemeanor counts and 151 felonies--primarily vehicle theft,
burglary and assault. This is for all years and all alleged members.
California's overall figures for 1963 list 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated
assaults, 6,257 sex offenses, and 24,532 burglaries. In 1962, the state listed
4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug arrest figures for 1964
showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana arrests over 1963, and
a recent back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, "The venereal
disease rate among [the city's] teen-agers from 15-19 has more than doubled
in the past four years." Even allowing for the annual population jump,
juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 per cent or more each year.

Against this background, would it make any difference to the safety and
peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the
state (all 901, according to the state) were garroted within twenty-four
hours? This is not to say that a group like the Hell's Angels has no meaning.
The generally bizarre flavor of their offenses and their insistence on
identifying themselves make good copy, but usually overwhelm--in print, at
least--the unnerving truth that they represent, in colorful microcosm, what
is quietly and anonymously growing all around us every day of the week.

"We're bastards to the world and they're bastards to us," one of the Oakland
Angels told a Newsweek reporter. "When you walk into a place where people
can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We
are complete social outcasts--outsiders against society."

A lot of this is a pose, but anyone who believes that's all it is has been on
thin ice since the death of Jay Gatsby. The vast majority of motorcycle
outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have
no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a
lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made;
their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really
is. They are out of the ball game and they know it--and that is their
meaning; for unlike most losers in today's society, the Hell's Angels not only
know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.

I went to one of their meetings recently, and half-way through the night I
thought of Joe Hill on his way to face a Utah firing squad and saying his final
words: "Don't mourn, organize." It is safe to say that no Hell's Angel has ever
heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a Bushmaster, but
nevertheless they are somehow related. The I.W.W. had serious plans for
running the world, while the Hell's Angels mean only to defy the world's
machinery. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded
together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework,
for good or ill. There is nothing particularly romantic or admirable about it;
that's just the way it is, strength in unity. They don't mind telling you that
running fast and loud on their customized Harley 74s gives them a power
and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.
Beyond that, their position as self-proclaimed outlaws elicits a certain
popular appeal, however reluctant. That is especially true in the West and
even in California where the outlaw tradition is still honored. The
unarticulated link between the Hell's Angels and the millions of losers and
outsiders who don't wear any colors is the key to their notoriety and the
ambivalent reactions they inspire. There are several other keys, having to
do with politicians, policemen and journalists, but for this we have to go
back to Monterey and the Labor Day "gang rape."

Politicians, like editors and cops, are very keen on outrage stories, and state
Senator Fred S. Farr of Monterey County is no exception. He is a leading
light of the Carmel-Pebble Beach set and no friend to hoodlums anywhere,
especially gang rapists who invade his constituency. Senator Far demanded
an immediate investigation of the Hell's Angels and others of their ilk--
Commancheros, Stray Satans, Iron Horsemen, Rattlers (a Negro club), and
Booze Fighters--whose lack of status caused them all to be lumped together
as "other disreputables." In the cut-off world of big bikes, long runs and
classy rumbles, this new, state-sanctioned stratification made the Hell's
Angels very big. They were, after all, Number One. Like John Dillinger.

Attorney General Lynch, then new in his job, moved quickly to mount an
investigation of sorts. He sent questionnaires to more than 100 sheriffs,
district attorneys and police chiefs, asking for more information on the
Hell's Angels and those "other disreputables." He also asked for suggestions
as to how the law might deal with them.

Six months went by before all the replies where condensed into the fifteen-
page report that made new outrage headlines when it was released to the
press. (The Hell's Angels also got a copy; one of them stole mine.) As a
historical document, it read like a plot synopsis of Mickey Spillane's worst
dreams. But in the matter of solutions it was vague, reminiscent in some
ways of Madame Nhu's proposals for dealing with the Vietcong. The state
was going to centralize information on these thugs, urge more vigorous
prosecution, put them all under surveillance whenever possible, etc.

A careful reader got the impression that even if the Hell's Angels had acted
out this script--eighteen crimes were specified and dozens of others
implied--very little would or could be done about it, and that indeed Mr.
Lynch was well aware he'd been put, for political reasons, on a pretty weak
scent. There was plenty of mad action, senseless destruction, orgies,
brawls, perversions and a strange parade of "innocent victims" that, even on
paper and in careful police language, was enough to tax the credulity of the
dullest police reporter. Any bundle of information off police blotters is
bound to reflect a special viewpoint, and parts of the Attorney General's
report are actually humorous, if only for the language. Here is an excerpt:
On November 4, 1961, a San Francisco resident driving through Rodeo,
possibly under the influence of alcohol, struck a motorcycle belonging to a
Hell's Angel parked outside a bar. A group of Angels pursued the vehicle,
pulled the driver from the car and attempted to demolish the rather
expensive vehicle. The bartender claimed he had seen nothing, but a
cocktail waitress in the bar furnished identification to the officers
concerning some of those responsible for the assault. The next day it was
reported to officers that a member of the Hell's Angels gang had threatened
the life of this waitress as well as another woman waitress. A male witness
who definitely identified five participants in the assault including the
president of Vallejo Hell's Angels and the Vallejo "Road Rats" advised officers
that because of his fear of retaliation by club members he would refuse to
testify to the facts he had previously furnished.

That is a representative item in the section of the report titled "Hoodlum

Activities." First, it occurred in a small town--Rodeo is on San Pablo Bay just
north of Oakland--where the Angels had stopped at a bar without causing
any trouble until some offense was committed against them. In this case, a
driver whom even the police admit was "possibly" drunk hit one of their
motorcycles. The same kind of accident happens every day all over the
nation, but when it involves outlaw motorcyclists it is something else again.
Instead of settling the thing with an exchange of insurance information or,
at the very worst, an argument with a few blows, the Hell's Angels beat the
driver and "attempted to demolish the vehicle." I asked one of them if the
police exaggerated this aspect, and he said no, they had done the natural
thing: smashed headlights, kicked in doors, broken windows and torn various
components off the engine.

Of all their habits and predilections that society finds alarming, this
departure from the time-honored concept of "an eye for an eye" is the one
that most frightens people. The Hell's Angels try not to do anything halfway,
and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he
means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense
or insult, is what makes the Hell's Angels unmanageable for the police and
morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they "don't start
trouble" is probably true more often than not, but their idea of
"provocation" is dangerously broad, and their biggest problem is that nobody
else seems to understand it. Even dealing with them personally, on the
friendliest terms, you can sense their hair-trigger readiness to retaliate.
This is a public thing, and not at all true among themselves. In a meeting,
their conversation is totally frank and open. They speak to and about one
another with an honesty that more civilized people couldn't bear. At the
meeting I attended (and before they realized I was a journalist) one Angel
was being publicly evaluated; some members wanted him out of the club
and others wanted to keep him in. It sounded like a group-therapy clinic in
progress--not exactly what I expected to find when just before midnight I
walked into the bar of the De Pau in one of the bleakest neighborhoods in
San Francisco, near Hunters Point. By the time I parted company with
them--at 6:30 the next morning after an all-night drinking bout in my
apartment--I had been impressed by a lot of things, but no one thing about
them was as consistently obvious as their group loyalty. This is an admirable
quality, but it is also one of the things that gets them in trouble: a fellow
Angel is always right when dealing with outsiders. And this sort of reasoning
makes a group of "offended" Hell's Angels nearly impossible to deal with.
Here is another incident from the Attorney General's report:

On September 19, 1964, a large group of Hell's Angels and "Satan's Slaves"
converged on a bar in the South Gate (Los Angeles County), parking their
motorcycles and cars in the street in such a fashion as to block one-half of
the roadway. They told officers that three members of the club had been
recently asked to stay out of the bar and that they had come to tear it
down. Upon their approach the bar owner locked the doors and turned off
the lights and no entrance was made, but the group did demolish a cement
block fence. On arrival of the police, members of the club were lying on the
sidewalk and in the street. They were asked to leave the city, which they
did reluctantly. As they left, several were heard to say that they would be
back and tear down the bar.
Here again is the ethic of total retaliation. If you're "asked to stay out" of a
bar, you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and
destroy the whole edifice. Similar incidents--along with a number of vague
rape complaints--make up the bulk of the report. Eighteen incidents in four
years, and none except the rape charges are more serious than cases of
assaults on citizens who, for their own reasons, had become involved with
the Hell's Angels prior to the violence. I could find no cases of unwarranted
attacks on wholly innocent victims. There are a few borderline cases,
wherein victims of physical attacks seemed innocent, according to police
and press reports, but later refused to testify for fear of "retaliation." The
report asserts very strongly that Hell's Angels are difficult to prosecute and
convict because they make a habit of threatening and intimidating
witnesses. That is probably true to a certain extent, but in many cases
victims have refused to testify because they were engaged in some legally
dubious activity at the time of the attack.

In two of the most widely publicized incidents the prosecution would have
fared better if their witnesses and victims had been intimidated into
silence. One of these was the Monterey "gang rape," and the other a "rape"
in Clovis, near Fresno in the Central Valley. In the latter, a 36-year-old
widow and mother of five children claimed she'd been yanked out of a bar
where she was having a quiet beer with another woman, then carried to an
abandoned shack behind the bar and raped repeatedly for two and a half
hours by fifteen or twenty Hell's Angels and finally robbed of $150. That's
how the story appeared in the San Francisco newspapers the next day, and it
was kept alive for a few more days by the woman's claims that she was
getting phone calls threatening her life if she testified against her
assailants.

Then, four days after the crime, the victim was arrested on charges of
"sexual perversion." The true story emerged, said the Clovis chief of police,
when the woman was "confronted by witnesses. Our investigation shows she
was not raped," said the chief. "She participated in lewd acts in the tavern
with at least three other Hell's Angels before the owners ordered them out.
She encouraged their advances in the tavern, then led them to an
abandoned house in the rear... She was not robbed but, according to a
woman who accompanied her, had left her house early in the evening with
$5 to go bar-hopping." That incident did not appear in the Attorney
General's report.

But it was impossible not the mention the Monterey "gang rape," because it
was the reason for the whole subject to become official. Page one of the
report--which Time's editors apparently skipped--says that the Monterey
case was dropped because "... further investigation raised questions as to
whether forcible rape had been committed or if the identifications made by
victims were valid." Charges were dismissed on September 25, with the
concurrence of a grand jury. The deputy District Attorney said "a doctor
examined the girls and found no evidence" to support the charges. "Besides
that, one girl refused to testify," he explained, "and the other was given a
lie-detector test and found to be wholly unreliable."
This, in effect, was what the Hell's Angels had been saying all along. Here is
their version of what happened, as told by several who were there:

One girl was white and pregnant, the other was colored, and they were with
five colored studs. They hung around our bar--Nick's Place on Del Monte
Avenue--for about three hours Saturday night, drinking and talking with our
riders, then they came out to the beach with us--them and their five
boyfriends. Everybody was standing around the fire, drinking wine, and
some of the guys were talking to them--hustling 'em, naturally--and soon
somebody asked the two chicks if they wanted to be turned on--you know,
did they want to smoke some pot? They said yeah, and then they walked off
with some of the guys to the dunes. The spade went with a few guys and
then she wanted to quit, but the pregnant one was really hot to trot; the
first four or five guys she was really dragging into her arms, but after that
she cooled off, too. By this time, though, one of their boy friends had got
scared and gone for the cops--and that's all it was.

But not quite all. After that there were Senator Farr and Tom Lynch and a
hundred cops and dozens of newspaper stories and articles in the national
news magazine--and even this article, which is a direct result of the
Monterey "gang rape."

When the much-quoted report was released, the local press--primarily the
San Francisco Chronicle, which had earlier done a long and fairly objective
series on the Hell's Angels--made a point of saying that the Monterey charges
against the Hell's Angels had been dropped for lack of evidence. Newsweek
was careful not to mention Monterey at all, but the New York Times
referred to it as "the alleged gang rape" which, however, left no doubt in a
reader's mind that something savage had occurred. It remained for Time,
though, to flatly ignore the fact that the Monterey rape charges had been
dismissed. Its article leaned heavily on the hairiest and least factual
sections of the report, and ignored the rest. It said, for instance, that the
Hell's Angels initiation rite "demands that any new member bring a woman
or girl [called a 'sheep'] who is willing to submit to sexual intercourse with
each member of the club." That is untrue, although, as one Angel explained,
"Now and then you get a woman who likes to cover the crowd, and hell, I'm
no prude. People don't like to think women go for that stuff, but a lot of
them do."

We were talking across a pool table about the rash of publicity and how it
had affected the Angel's activities. I was trying to explain to him that the
bulk of the press in this country has such a vested interest in the status quo
that it can't afford to do much honest probing at the roots, for fear of what
they might find.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Of course I don't like to read all this bullshit
because it brings the heat down on us, but since we got famous we've had
more rich fags and sex-hungry women come looking for us that we ever had
before. Hell, these days we have more action than we can handle."
William S. Burroughs – Obituary by Hunter S
Thompson
Rolling Stone issue # 769 published 9/18/1997

“William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very
good with them. I remember shooting with him one afternoon at his range
on the outskirts of Lawerence. He had five or six well oiled old revolvers
laid out on a wooden table, covered with a white linen cloth, and he used
whichever one he was in the mood for at the moment. The S&W .45 was his
favorite. “This is my finisher” he said lovingly and then he went into a
crouch and then put five out of six shots through the chest of a human-
silhouette target about 25 yards away.

Hot Damn, I thought, we are in the presence of a seroius Shootist. Nicloe

had been filiming it all with the Hi8, but I took the camera off her and told
her to walk out about 10 yards in front of us and put an apple on her head.
Wiliam smiled wanly and waved her off. “Never mind my dear” he said to
her. “We’ll pass on that trick” Then he picked up the .454 Casul Magnum I’d
brought with me. “But I’ll try this one” He said. “I like the looks of it.” The
.454 is the most powerful hand gun in the World. It is twice as strong as a
.44 Magnum, with a huge scope and a recoil so brutal that I was reluctant to
let an 80-year-old man shoot it. This thing will snap back and crack your
skull if you don’t hold it properly. But William persisted. The first shot lifted
him two or three inches off the ground, but the bullet hit the throat of the
target, two inches high. “Good shot,” I said. “Try a little lower and a click
to the right.” He nodded and braced again.
His next shot punctured the stomach and left nasty red welts on his palms.
Nicole shuddered visibly behind the camera, but I told her we’d only been
kidding about the apple. Then, William emptied the cylinder, hitting once in
the groin and twice just under the heart. I reached out to shake his hand as
he limped back to the table, but he jerked it away and asked for some ice
for his palms. “Well,” he said, “this is a very nasty piece of machinery. I like
it.” I put the huge silver brute in its case and gave it to him. “It’s yours,” I
said. “You deserve it.”

Which was true. William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote- with extreme
precision and no fear. He would have fired a M-60 from the hip that day if
I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.”