Thompson, as usual, seems to write from deep inside some kind of barely controlled dementia; for example, he asserts that Democratic candidate Ed Muskie is relying on drugs to stay alert during speeches and is so "far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy" that he sees gila monsters instead of voters at campaign stops. There is also the memorable anecdote of Thompson's private limousine ride with Nixon (during which they discussed football, and after which Thompson came dangerously close to inadvertently blowing up the president's plane with one of his ever-present cigarettes). But the book is much more than series of wacky doper vignettes. Somehow Thompson's off-the-wall approach allows him to tell his stories more vividly -- and ultimately, more accurately -- than a conventional reporter. His far-flung ramblings coalesce to form the definitive chronicle of a decisive turning point in our nation's history -- the moment when the last vestiges of grass-roots politics were swept away in favor of slick, remote-control campaigns.

The decade preceding the '72 elections had blown massive holes in the smooth facade of the American Dream: the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy; the youth uprising and anti-Vietnam war protest movement; the anarchy of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; and the Watergate break-in (which had occurred but had not yet destroyed Nixon as he campaigned for re-election in 1972). Yet political reporters of the time routinely ignored the seamy side of political maneuvering, reporting only the events and statements that were strictly "on the record." Thompson broke all the rules and decided that strange times called for strange methods. He threw himself into the madness and seductiveness of the campaign, reporting everything he saw with his trademark gallows humor -- backroom machinations, blatant flip-flopping on issues, and cynical attempts by hacks like Nixon, Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey to appeal to "the youth vote." Thompson felt that the '72 campaign of idealistic Democratic nominee George McGovern was doomed from the start because McGovern was not sufficiently media savvy or manipulative of the press; his final thoughts on the defeat of the young people's protest movement by the increasingly soulless "swine" who control American politics are at once sad, poignant, eerily prophetic, and, like everything else in the book, savagely hilarious.

"Nixon has never made any secret of his feelings about the press. He rarely holds press conferences and his personal relationship with the working press is almost nonexistent. In the White House and on the road, he "communicates" with the press corps through his mouthpiece, press secretary Ron Ziegler -- an arrogant 33-year-old punk who trained for his current job by working as a PR man for Disneyland, and who treats the White House press corps like a gang of troublesome winos who will only be tolerated as long as they keep out of the boss's hair."
(p. 400)