The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (24 page)

Sales were brisk right off the bat. By April over fifty thousand copies were in print. Demand was such that Random House couldn’t print books fast enough, much to the dismay of its author. A handful of the bookstores that Thompson visited on his thirty-five-day publicity tour had sold out and had neglected to order more copies, leaving its author shilling a product that wasn’t available. “I didn’t realize it was a hit,” said Thompson. “I thought that Random House had fucked up. They had dingbats and interns handling the publicity, so I was worried that no one was receiving copies.”

Thompson lashed out at Jim Silberman, who assured him that the book was indeed being placed in stores and selling briskly. “The sales force was very enthusiastic about the book,” said Silberman. “And the book advanced in stores pretty well. It was a success from the beginning. In those days, before the chain stores, you might run into a situation where certain stores didn’t have the book, but no one was surprised when it hit the bestseller list. It was a hot topic, and a brand-new voice.”

It was a curious way to sell a book: using the sensational tabloid hook (“long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome, jamming crazy through traffic at 90 miles an hour like a burst of dirty thunder,” the paperback jacket copy screamed) for a story that didn’t resort to cheap scare tactics. The Hell’s Angels had been exploited in so many ways—by the mainstream media, in tawdry B-movies and pulp novels—but only Thompson had bothered to work his way through the fabrications, to hang in there long enough to gain their confidence and ask them questions. As if to prove the veracity of his reporting versus the distortions of the press, Thompson devoted the first third of the book to a systematic debunking of Angels myths—the Lynch Report in particular, which Thompson called “a piece of gold that fell into my lap.” In Thompson’s view, the Lynch Report poisoned the well; its fallacies were
taken as gospel truth by reporters who were all too eager to perpetuate them.

“There is not much argument about basic facts,” Thompson writes in regard to
Newsweek’s
distorted coverage of an Angels run to Porterville, California, “but the disparities in emphasis and content are the difference between a headline and a filler in most big-city newspapers.” If the public perception of the Hell’s Angels as an authentic menace proved anything, it was “the awesome power of the New York press establishment.”

Thompson went back to George Orwell’s 1931 book
Down and Out in Paris and London
, one of his favorites, in which Orwell recounted his experience living among London’s poor. There is a clear-eyed candor at work in Orwell’s reportage, a reluctance to pass judgment or moralize, that Thompson took to heart, even if it seemed that the Angels would be a thornier subject with which to empathize. Thompson wanted neither sympathy nor opprobrium from his readers; he just wanted them to respect the truth, to understand the Angels in their proper historical context as a peculiar phenomenon of American history.

The Hell’s Angels didn’t emerge fully formed out of nowhere. Rather, they were a product of the country’s nomadic forebears: the Dust Bowlers of the 1930s in search of arable land, the World War II vets who opted out of the G.I. Bill for something less settled and predictable, in short the whole western tradition of boundless exploration and adventure. The Angels weren’t un-American but rather “as uniquely American as jazz … a human hangover from the era of the Wild West.” Cowboys with hogs instead of horses.

But where there’s danger, there’s excitement—vertiginous, full-throttle excitement. Thompson was able to capture in his mad-dog prose what the Angels knew all along: that a speed trip down an empty freeway on a motorcycle is something like an ecstatic awakening, or a very good drug experience:

Despite his best efforts not to oversell the Angels, many readers felt a strong kinship with them. Thompson received countless letters from fans inquiring about club membership. To one teenage fan, Thompson provided strong cautionary words. “The best of the Angels,” he wrote in a letter dated July 6, 1967, “the guys you might want to sit down and talk to, have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who left are almost all the kind who can’t do anything else, and they’re not much fun to talk to. They’re not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They’re just Old Punks, and that’s a lot worse than being a Young Punk.”

The Angels reveled in the attention, particularly since Thompson had at least some of their story right. “That book was helpful in putting us on the road to where we are today,” said Sonny Barger, “but he embellished.” There are indeed touches of gloss throughout. Thompson describes Barger as a “six-foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland” when in fact Barger measured five foot nine and weighed 140 pounds. Thompson also described the initiation ritual as a dousing of a prospective member in dung and urine collected from other members, but no such ritual existed. Those were niggling facts, however; by completing the rough draft of the Angels’ history, Thompson had produced a riveting chronicle of an American tribe without a homeland, displaced by the mainstream and lost in perpetual exile. By doing so, he had brought himself out of freelance exile, finally; magazine editors would know who the hell he was, all right.

INTO THE ABYSS

T
o the small coterie of countercultural trendspotters on the left, the Hell’s Angels were right out there on the front lines of social revolt. But they represented a blank slate upon which idealists such as Kesey could fill in whatever notions of rebellion appealed to them. As an outsider who had stumbled into an uneasy role as the Angels’ emissary to the mainstream, Hunter Thompson knew better. He had spent too much time with them, witnessed too much ugliness, to think of the Angels as anything but unenlightened thugs. The Angels’ final break with Kesey, and by extension the counterculture, came on October 16, 1965, when Sonny Barger and a handful of bikers crashed a Get Out of Vietnam rally at the Oakland-Berkeley line, a formal protest in which both Kesey and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg participated.

In recounting the incident near the end of
Hell’s Angels
, Thompson wrote:

The fragile alliance between the Pranksters and the Angels was torn apart by sharply divergent attitudes toward the Vietnam War. In a few years’ time, that conflict would fan out across the country like brushfire.

From the start, the nature and scope of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam had been shrouded in secrecy and obfuscation. The Southeast Asian country had been repeatedly jostled by the tides of history. The area that came to be known as South Vietnam was conquered by the French in 1863, and France grabbed control of the North in 1883. In 1940, the Japanese occupied mainland Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. After the Japanese surrendered to Allied forces in 1945, control of North Vietnam was ceded to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of a band of Communist insurrectionaries who formed a provisional government, with the French stubbornly clinging to the South.

The balkanization of Vietnam was, for the most part, transpiring under the news radar; the majority of Americans at the time couldn’t even locate Vietnam on a map. In the fall of 1961 President Kennedy, under the guise of a counterinsurgency policy called Project Beef-Up, sent advisors, including a detachment of the 440th Combat Crew Training Squadron, to fight alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) against the newly formed National Liberation Front, or Vietcong. Most news organizations barely flinched, but a handful of correspondents sensed that Vietnam might become an important Cold War crucible. “We have to confront them,” Kennedy confided to the
New York Times’s
Washington bureau chief, James Reston. “The only place we can do that is in Vietnam. We have to send more people over there.”

“You couldn’t believe anybody,” the
New York Times’s
Homer Bigart recalled years later. “Half the time the Americans didn’t even know where they were, let alone know what to tell you, and the South Vietnamese government made the Kremlin look like an open society.” The information embargo imposed by military leadership considerably hampered efforts to piece together the most fundamental news stories. American field advisors, disgruntled over the fact that the military rank and file was ignoring their negative reports on the war’s progress, turned to journalists to get the word out. Military subterfuge was now being countered by a kind of press-driven counterinsurgency conducted by stealth and prodigious legwork.

In short, it was an ideal reporter’s war. The official line diverged so sharply from reality that it left enterprising journalists a lot of material to work with; every aspect of the war was fair game and open to debate.
Hundreds of reporters converged on Saigon, setting up camp in the two de facto press lodgings in Saigon, the Hotel Continental Palace and the Caravelle Hotel, and each one set out to stake his or her own claim on a story so rich in intrigue that it verged on the mythic.

In the early years of America’s involvement, events in Vietnam were shape-shifting at a rapid rate, and early correspondents—including David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and freelancer Stanley Karnow—had the story to themselves. Halberstam’s earliest dispatches for the
New York Times
were hugely influential among his contemporaries, straightforward assessments of the war’s grinding futility straight from the newspaper of record.

Harold Hayes was both a fan and a casual friend of Halberstam’s, and assigned a profile of the writer for the January 1964 issue of
Esquire
. Written by George Goodman, “Our Man in Saigon” included an introductory sidebar called “Background for Revolution” that summarized developments for uninformed readers and pointed out that Halberstam’s dispatches were not regarded as gospel by a large portion of the mainstream press. Old-line flag-flyers resented Halberstam’s seditious reporting. Hearst columnist Frank Conniff called Halberstam’s work a “political time bomb” that could mislead the president and destabilize the war effort on the battlefield. Never mind the twisted logic of a news reporter somehow nudging policy makers into ill-informed decision making; Halberstam, according to Conniff, was subverting the inexorable progress of civilized democracy.

With its three-month lead time,
Esquire
couldn’t possibly keep pace with the news developments in Vietnam, particularly the chaotic period leading up to and following South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination. Nor did Hayes and Gingrich view the magazine as espousing any political point of view. Hayes thought of Vietnam as a minor skirmish, a war that would quickly resolve itself. “I never heard Harold passionately discuss politics,” said George Lois, the design guru behind
Esquire’s
great covers of the era. “I considered him a liberal, but he wasn’t a very vocal liberal. We used to have arguments about Vietnam, because he was convinced that it would be a short skirmish, and he was worried about running covers on the war that might be out of date by the time they were published.”

For
Esquire’s
Christmas issue in 1962, Lois suggested that the magazine run a picture of the one hundredth GI killed in Vietnam, but Hayes
resisted the idea. “What if we wind up with egg on our face,” Hayes asked Lois, and the war was over before the issue ran? The cover was killed.

But Hayes threw Vietnam into the editorial mix just the same, treating it much the way
Esquire
treated all of the incipient developments of the decade—with a heavy dose of irreverent humor. Early satirical pieces such as “An Armchair Guide to Guerilla Warfare” were snarky attacks,
Catch-22
style, against the very absurdity of war itself.

“Well, I don’t think any of us were too heads-up about the war at first,” said former senior editor Robert Sherrill. “But it wasn’t like we were sitting around laughing our heads off about it, either. That kind of funny skepticism can be a very effective weapon.” Former editor Tom Ferrell felt that the magazine spread “an overlay of irony” over its early war coverage, a safe and tenable position for both Hayes and the magazine’s advertisers. It was easy at the outset to treat Vietnam as Lyndon Johnson’s folly, but by 1965 the United States had committed two hundred thousand troops to the war, and Operation Rolling Thunder, the three-year air bombing campaign against North Vietnam, had begun in earnest. America had both feet in now.