If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone. My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-“radical” campaign he ran in the primaries.

HST: Only on the Dakota Queen… the atmosphere on the Zoo Plane became crazier and crazier as the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen became more reserved and more somber. Thompson studies the 1972 Presidential election month by month, following both polls and candidates across the nation. If we assume that your term “new politics” had any validity, your choice of Eagleton was the point where it turned around and you decided that the time had come to make friends with the people you’d been fighting the whole time. Jack Anderson got burned so badly on that, and was so embarrassed publicly that it appeared – for reasons he could never explain – that he was just taking a cheap shot at Eagleton, and Eagleton came off looking better than he had before Anderson had started.I think if we’d have gotten off to a better start just like a – I remember when I was at Northwestern there was a great hurdler that was supposed to win the US competition and probably win the Olympics, and he hit the first hurdle with his foot, and then he hit about the next four in a row, you know, and just petered out. At that point True Davis was the president of a bank owned by the United Mine Workers in Washington. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. It would seem that most Thompson readers fail to see that Thompson's works, far from being one esoteric drug opus, range the spectrum of popular cultre, politics, and to a great extent a large segment of American history.

We got off – we broke stride on that thing right after the convention, and from then on in, I think millions of people just kind of turned us off.Louis for, and this was the part that was quoted, ‘severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies. HST: He promised it for about ten days and finally he said that the psychiatrists wouldn’t release them, the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t release them, the Barnes Hospital wouldn’t release them. Journalists, pundits, commentators and tastemakers use this extremely flimsy material to amuse themselves over the airwaves and on our screens for years ahead of the final vote.

I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by 76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in ’72. Is that the sharpest Edge that you’ve personally experienced and would like to continue to experience?

In this chronicle he follows various democratic hopefuls around the country during their campaigns to win the democratic nomination for the office of the president. HST: Primarily the provable damage that the Eagleton Affair did to the actual numbers of the McGovern constituency – the potential constituency. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Ed: And you think that this is the kind of energy which will bring forward a new candidate in ’76 who could win? The selection of a replacement for Eagleton was one of the most heinous botches in the history of politics.