Reviewed by Seth Clark Walker

If the idiom “timing is everything” is true, than perhaps there’s no better proof of it than the 1972 delivery of Thompson’s classic political tale. Only then, during the existential counterculture era, would such an irreverent man be allowed to produce such an irreverent book from the inside of a presidential campaign.

Lauded by critics as Mailer and Wolfe-esque “new journalism,” perhaps the only thing really new about it was Thompson’s willingness to apply his “gonzo” style – mixing fact and the insider observations of immersion reporting with deliberately provoking, shocking, upsetting and amusing opinions – to presidential political coverage.

In the book, Thompson calls the sitting President, Richard Nixon, a greedy little hustler and presidential hopeful Senator Hubert Humphrey a “disgusting political animal.” Thompson would help ensure that journalists would never again become so intimate with a President or candidate, and his book helped lay the groundwork for today’s spin-control, no-press-access West Wing milieu.

Campaign Trail ’72 is often described as a wild, rambling narrative. It is. Thompson regularly violates the fundamental rules of storytelling with off-the-track, long-winded personal ruminations and common grammar misfires.

The book is also brilliant to the core. It mixes Ph.D-level research skills (Thompson is Dr. Thompson) and eminent readability with shrewd instincts; in April, Thompson is one of the first to predict McGovern’s nomination; in July, he provides key insights into the undoing of vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton. The genius of the book is that Thompson lets the soul of the characters – including his – shine through in countless uninterrupted anecdotes free of historical context or justification.

Campaign Trail ’72 was Thompson’s third book, following 1966’s Hell’s Angles and 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and helped cement his reputation as a talented if not aberrant member of America’s nonfiction literati. Its powerful anecdotes and quick scene changes hold together well as they weave through the early mornings, late nights and political jockeying of three major periods: the primary races, the party convention and the post-convention campaign. Thompson, who at the time was on assignment for Rolling Stone, proves to be the colorful central figure in each period, which is a key part of the book’s success.

While not a breakthrough presidential campaign exposé – that honor belongs to McGinniss’s The Selling of the President – Thompson’s year-long immersion accounting of the hypocrisy, hysteria and hyperbole of the American political campaign machine should be required reading for all registered voters. It’s an honest and insightful if not jangled saga, and unlike McGovern’s campaign, it never loses steam. It’s raw, in-the-moment, smart and free – just like Thompson himself. Political press coverage was never the same after it, and neither was politics.