Plan B Forum

For some reason The Atlantic has reminded us of Hunter S Thompson's obituary of Nixon from 25 years and a couple of months ago. Really, it's worth seven minutes of your time to read it.

A sample:

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.

Obviously Thompson was not overfond of Nixon. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, HST's account of Nixon's 1972 campaign, is a great book. I miss Thompson: I wonder what he would have made of Trump.

Thompson was a wonderfully colorful and expressive writer with a brilliant talent for creating mental imagery, and I always enjoyed his work (I read both his "Fear and Loathing" books many years ago; when I moved out here in the late 80s he was writing a regular column for the San Francisco Examiner...)

But subtlety and nuance were not Hunter's strong suit, (in fact part of his appeal lay in his complete rejection of subtlety and nuance) and in fairness to Mr. Nixon, he was just a tad more complex than Thompson's version of him would have one believe...

I wonder what he would have made of Trump.

I would guess that the answer to that question would be "a fine mist"....

Jim--I m trying to recall what Thompson's problem with Nixon's funeral was; I think it had something to do with where he was buried (near his library as I recall) but I'm not sure.

I've never been a fan of Nixon, and he got away with more than most people could ever dream of, but we have had far worse people in office, even as the president, than him.

Actually, Nixon's funeral was fairly understated by Presidential standards...

Legally he was entitled to a full-dress state funeral, (the lying-in-state, the horse-drawn caisson down Pennsylvania Ave, the whole bit) but to his credit he decided under the circumstances to forgo all that, in favor of just a single funeral ceremony on the library grounds in Yorba Lind:

A public memorial service was held on April 27, attended by world dignitaries and all five living Presidents of the United States, the first time that five U.S. presidents attended the funeral of another president. [It remains the largest assemblage of Presidents ever at a public event.]

Nixon's state funeral is unique among recent presidential state funerals in that, in accordance with his own wishes, none of the elements of the state ceremonies occurred in the nation's capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and ... hard_Nixon

Nothing illegal there; and if he is buried beside Pat there should be nothing illegal there either. I wonder what Thompson was referring to.

Maybe it was the age I was when I read "Hells Angels" and later on "the "Fear and loathing" books but I think of his writing as a sort of brilliant juvenalia. I try to think better of him especially when I see the regard George McGovern and Tom Wolfe had for him but its difficult. His ideas are not that good and he cannot be trusted (like Noam Chomsky).

And a lot of the F and L writing were just him trying to embellish his 'myth of himself'.

So I think of him as "fun, occasionally" but light entertainment overall.

He used to write for Car and Driver "back in the day" too.

yrs,
rubato