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Gary Hart and Gonzo’s Ghost

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Matt Bai's new book
Matt Bai’s new book All the Truth Is Out

A drugged-out shadow hangs over American political journalism: Hunter S. Thompson, spleen of the long ‘60s, id to Woodward and Bernstein’s tag team superego. When he put an end to things in 2005, he sucked his shtick right out the door with him. He was, as Matt Taibbi once pointed out, a one-man genre: “There aren’t other examples of gonzo journalism.” So gonzo died—gunshot wound to the head—almost a decade ago. But a roman candle that burns that bright, burns retinas. Dr. Thompson, as he liked to be called, was one nasty trip, and this has been a year for flashbacks.

Matt Bai’s new indictment of scandal politics, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (Knopf, 288 pages, $26.95), is a portrait of the world the good doctor didn’t win, and a study in the fact that we’re all worse off for it. Bai’s subject is former senator Gary Hart (D-CO), the man who had everything—the kind of mind that comes around just once in a generation, a beeline to the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and what he once described publicly as a “reform marriage.”

But then the bastard spawn of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got ahold of him.

Hart had been fooling around for years, in the grand tradition of Kennedy, FDR, LBJ, etc., and it weighed on his political career not at all–not because the media didn’t know, but because the media had long considered that sort of thing None of Our Business. A generational shift, though, was in the works. For young gumshoes working after Watergate, Bai writes, “there was simply no one you could want to become more than Woodward or Bernstein, which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be….”

Dangerous game, this. Once adopted, all it took to strip Hart of his turn in the Oval Office was a yacht called “Monkey Business,” a blonde named Donna Rice, and The Miami Herald’s decision to run photos of Ms. Rice in the senator’s lap.

Hence Bai’s subtitle, “The Week Journalism Went Tabloid.” We went tabloid—Bai is shaking his head here—and we never came back. Ever since, we’ve committed to running the gifted out of politics, should they happen to harbor a moral failing or two. The subtitle might as well have been “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” Hart warned us, after all, paraphrasing Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.” It’s Gary Hart’s post-apocalypse; we’re all just living in it.

Back to that shadow. What does this have to do with a dope-fiend who wanted to be Governor of American Samoa? Though Bai doesn’t much mention Thompson here (he earns just a handful of throwaway references), the doctor looms large in the book’s rear-view mirror. Reporters chased the Watergate model, collided with poor Hart, and barreled on into the impoverished political culture we enjoy today. But gonzo journalism’s Technicolor aftertaste still hangs around, a souvenir of the road not taken.

In the early 1970s, Americans faced a choice between two anti-Nixonian lines of attack (ignoring the vast, silent majority that reelected him). One was that of Thompson, who despised with great verve and no apology: “Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.” The other was that of Woodward and Bernstein, and we know how that turned out. So it’s worth imagining a world where gonzo captured more hearts and minds.

Thompson may have been an absolute loon, but he was also a brutal poet and a brilliant political mind. His sense of engagement was a phenomenal creative engine. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, his account of the Nixon v. McGovern bloodbath, is as evocative a campaign book as you’ll ever find, and his monthly dispatches for Rolling Stone had an uncanny way of compressing bullshit into diamonds. He knew his way around a Harley, but he also had an obsessive interest in parliamentary procedure. All this was as much method as madness, boiling down to one commitment: Screw the facts, report the truth. He went after wisdom sidelong, and he usually got it, both the big picture and the nitty gritty.

Thompson won dozens of bets on primary and caucus outcomes because he always knew who would come out on top. But he never lost sight of why it mattered: because McGovern was battling a man “so crooked that he needed servants to screw his pants on every morning,” who represented “that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise.” This is a kind of clarity worth having on retainer.

Maybe the model wasn’t replicable; we can’t start prescribing Quaaludes en masse to the press corps. Thompson, in any case, burned out quickly, and his productivity dropped sharply not long after Nixon embarrassed McGovern in forty-nine states. But his essential insight aged well: Not everything important is, in a narrow-minded sense, factual. Data journalism will not save us. As Thompson put it, “eulogizing” Nixon, “Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism–which is true, but they miss the point…. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.” And Hart’s warning sounds prescient too: Not everything factual is important.These lessons should be tattooed on the American forehead.

But these aren’t easy ideas to implement writ large, so Bai’s concern is justified: what if this is as good as it gets? Thompson’s admirers—and Bai counts himself one of them—are outnumbered, encircled all ‘round by the disciples of Woodward and Bernstein. Then again, Thompson was always a partisan in the original sense, and his output was always an asymmetric war on the mainstream.

Gonzo doesn’t traffic in decisive victories. But to resume hostilities would be a start.