Depp.

The Rum Diary, based on another literary punch-out by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, was made three years ago, shelved in some musty editing room where unreleasable movies go, and looks it. The dust still shows.

Johnny Depp is dismally miscast as the alter ego of the rebellious author with the “screw you” attitude—a wasted, beat-up alcoholic who goes to Puerto Rico to work for a doomed newspaper called the San Juan Star whose faltering editor (Richard Jenkins, unrecognizable in a gray wig) is helpless to draw much attention to world events on a lawless island overwhelmed by gangsters and riots. Aaron Eckhart is an American P.R. mogul selling off pieces of pristine beachfront used for U.S. military target practice to rich corporate powers to build hotel towers, condos and ugly villas. After getting hired on to write promotional copy for brochures, the protagonist falls for his gorgeous girlfriend (Amber Heard) and a scene-stealing turtle named Harry with a jeweled shell. In no time, he gets fired, smashed to hamburger and left in a drunken stupor on a fly-specked floor. To Hunter S. Thompson fans—little boys weaned on comic books who never grew up to crave bare breasts and bare-knuckle beatings—it’s a call to arms. “There is no dream—just a piss puddle of greed, spreading throughout the world” is the cynical philosophy of the author, and the movie. With no job, no money, no girl and no future, the protagonist sees that the way to redeem himself as a journalist is to write an exposé of the criminal activities in San Juan—a sort of rum diary of corruption—and publish it. But how do you get your old mojo back when your paper is already closed down?

In an attempt to distract the viewer from the fact that there is nothing going on here, director Bruce Robinson cobbles in cockfights, sexual tension, a red convertible racing at breakneck speed, a traveling carnival, endless bottles of rum and a hermaphrodite witch doctor who drives a garbage truck. It’s all window dressing for an empty ruin, haunted by the hungover ghost of a mostly forgotten writer who died in 2005. The oddest thing about The Rum Diary, though, is all those half-nude shots of Mr. Depp, who is covered with tattoos, trying to camouflage them with Max Factor. Everyone has seen them, so if you’ve gone that far to abuse your body already, why not let it all hang out? In a role that is practically a beachcomber, the sun on that much greasepaint looks like he’s got spotted fever.

rreed@observer.com

THE RUM DIARY

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Bruce Robinson

Directed by Bruce Robinson

Starring Johnny Depp, Giovanni Ribisi and Aaron Eckhart

2/4

In June, the 42-year-old proprietor of Highbar, Amalia and Aspen Social Club plans to open his second rooftop nightspot in the past year with the debut of Ajaxx, high atop Vikram Chatwal’s 10-story Stay hotel on West 47^th Street.

“If you want to experience New York, you cannot be in a more central location than this,” Mr. Brier, dressed in a blazer and Ben Sherman-designed t-shirt emblazoned with a big bull’s-eye, told the Daily Transom from his new perch upon the unfinished roof space last week.

“That’s the Barclays trading floor,” he said, pointing directly north at a glassy high-rise in the distance. “Once they see our cocktail waitresses, they’re going to be out the door.”

Veteran club designer Steve Lewis is handling the decor, which Mr. Brier described as a scene straight out of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi epic Blade Runner. (Albeit with better refreshments.)

The entire three-level space will be lit up with vintage neon.

“The whole idea is bringing you back to Times Square, 1972,” Mr. Brier said. “We’ve got a guy who pulled all these old retro porno signs, like, ‘Live Nude Girls,’ ‘Girls, Girls, Girls,’ from the original Times Square.”

He even salvaged the “trapeze girl” from the recently demolished Playpen Theater. “The top of the bar is actually done in glass,” Mr. Brier said, “you look down and that’s where the Playpen piece is. Underneath the bar, the girl is kicking her leg.”

Black-and-white TVs, hanging from the ceiling of an enclosed bar area, will flicker with old B-movies and sexploitation films. “Nothing hardcore,” Mr. Brier noted.

Patrons will access Ajaxx via a tiny elevator inside Mr. Brier’s Aspen Social Club, located on the ground floor of the same hotel. Given the limited transport, each guest will get a “lift ticket” ensuring them discounted drinks while they wait for the next trip up. “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” Mr. Brier said, quoting Hunter S. Thompson as he is wont to do. (An entire room at Mr. Brier’s Flatiron club Aspen is dedicated to the late gonzo journalist.)

It’s all part of Mr. Brier’s overarching aim to make midtown cool again. "A lot of people don’t want to come to Times Square because of the whole tourist aspect," he said. "This takes you above the fray but not so far away that you’re so far removed. You still feel like you’re a part of it."

Rooftop bar and restaurant construction has been quite rampant in recent years, perhaps rivaling the retro speakeasy for most ubiquitous hospitality trend in town.

Ever since the eccentric impresario Steven Greenberg first tossed the old mattresses off the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel and outfitted the outdoor space with more comfortable seating in 2002, it seems, the local liquor industry has been increasingly reaching for the heavens.

Even the midtown strip club Rick’s Cabaret recently opened its own rooftop smoking deck and garden.

Naturally, Mr. Brier insisted that his new apex party spot is unique.

“There are a lot of rooftop decks and they’re all doing the same thing,” he told the Daily Transom. “They’re all recreating this staid kind of lounge atmosphere, you know, Café del Mar, Hotel Costes, Buddha Bar-type vibe. This is going to feel very much like real New York… Whether you’re a tourist, a downtown hipster, whatever, everybody’s going to dig this shit.”

How did Robin Meade, lead anchor of CNN Headline News' Morning Express land the big freed FARC detainees interview, wonders Felix Gillette. Ms. Meade says, "It wasn’t expected. ... It’s one of those things, it comes at you. I haven’t had time to sit around and think, how’s this going to rank? I’m honored that they trusted me and that they feel like the audience got their story."

Pat Dorman returns to Hyperion and Leon Neyfakh writes, "Ms. Dorman was a prize for Hyperion. They wanted her so badly, in fact, that they deployed the old 'give them their own imprint' trick, a sort of trump card publishing houses play when they want to make it really hard for whomever they’re after to say no." Plus: 17-Year-Old Firebrand Novelist Does New York; Pitchfork: The Book.

Plus: Hunter S. Thompson ... Steve Guttenberg ... Jane Mayer.

More than any other American writer in recent memory, Hunter S. Thompson demonstrated that, yes, sometimes the road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom—just before it dead-ends at the cul-de-sac of regret. After a stunning, swift period of brilliance, his style, as the old joke goes, became substance abuse; it was seductive, it was fun, and for the type of person who confuses a drinking problem with literary talent, it was intoxicating. But as even the most casual observer knows, the persona soon eclipsed the writing.

Typically, Alex Gibney’s thoughtful new documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, has difficulty prying the mask from the face and evaluating Thompson the writer. The film depicts him as a charismatic rogue with political opinions, cocaine and a typewriter. Worse, the recent rash of Thompson biographies were scribbled into existence by people who wanted to be him, or at least be very much like him. Victims of the fallacy of imitative form, these writers adopted personas—à la Raoul Duke, Thompson’s alter ego—or studded the biographies with their own drug-fueled exploits.

Thankfully, William McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist avoids most of these pratfalls. Written with an eye toward coherence and comprehensiveness, His sober, admiring book provides the best record to date of Thompson’s life: It presents a louche moralist, an opponent of convention, an enemy of good sense; and it tallies the cost of the bargain he made with corrosive fame.

By deemphasizing the legendary decadence, Mr. McKeen provides space for an essential, hitherto neglected aspect of Thompson’s career: his conflicted, combative relationship with the craft of journalism. As someone who repeatedly compares Thompson’s talent and decadence to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Mr. McKeen obviously thinks he deserves another look.

Thompson’s literary reputation rests primarily on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), books that shattered convention with their propulsive immediacy, even by the standards of New Journalism. "Fear and Loathing" became the Thompson mantra, applied when he ramped up, as he did throughout his career, to conduct an inquest into the American Dream, the death of which he considered the direct effect of the nation’s betrayal of the ’60s. Vivid with savage descriptions of the nation’s political hypocrites and "atavistic throwbacks," these books were Thompson’s apoplectic response. With their fractured chronologies that mimic the fluctuations in perception ushered in by rage and Thompson’s daily diet of cocaine, rum or ether, the books sit easily with both failed optimists and born cynics.

As Mr. McKeen demonstrates, Thompson’s manic style was born of expediency, not strategy: Against a deadline, or too stoned to write, he often faxed in random sections of notebooks, forcing editors to stitch together Frankenstein texts. This pattern began early in his career, with "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." The Derby piece is quite amazing, and it introduces the "mature" Thompson, if that word applies, including his centrality to the narrative, his dipsomania, his hallucinogens and his sidekick (in this case the artist Ralph Steadman). It was also the first time Thompson choked.

Under deadline pressure for the Derby piece, Thompson abandoned coherent narrative and began wildly filing pages of "half-formed thoughts" and "semilucid notes" from his notebook. "When I first sent one down with the copy boy," Mr. McKeen quotes Thompson as saying, "I thought the phone was going to ring any minute with some torrent of abuse. I was full of grief and shame." The abuse never came, and the piece, jagged edges and visible seams, was published to small yet significant acclaim.

Thompson’s admission of shame is revealing. As Outlaw Journalist explains in strong sections about Thompson’s youth in Louisville, Ky., from his first byline—at age 11, when he tore himself away from vandalism long enough to write a sports story for another precocious fourth-grader’s community newspaper, the Southern Star—he viewed writing as his calling. It’s a cliché of a different stripe for Thompson, but when he writes to William Faulkner about the writer’s duty, you can tell that he’s in earnest. (Compare Thompson’s later epistolary warning to Tom Wolfe: The "filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!")

By the time he felt himself floundering with the Derby piece, Thompson had spent the better part of a decade writing about sports for the Air Force and for third-rate papers in New York and Puerto Rico, where he also wrote The Rum Diary (a novel deemed at the time unpublishable), and he’d sold his blood in San Francisco to support his wife and child. And now, after publishing his first book, the still-impressive Hell’s Angels (1966), he was toiling as a freelancer, on the verge of losing it all. It’s poignant to see such a celebrated maverick fight for years only to suffer typical writerly fears on the eve of his aesthetic breakthrough. But obviously Thompson’s deadline crack-up paid off; for the rest of his career, including the two Fear and Loathing books, he had a model.

So yes, Thompson in Gonzo mode dramatized a fractious moment in American history, but that was part intuition, part drunkenness, part accident.

That’s O.K., though: Authenticity is accidental. Thompson’s problem post-Fear and Loathing was his myopic understanding of the "authentic" Thompson. For most fans, Thompson had more to do with recklessness off the page than with the works’ satire. Thompson, too, bought that ticket, took that ride. His hunger became mere appetite; his talent, equal parts obsession and improvisation until then, lost balance and failed. In a characteristic passage, Mr. McKeen writes, "[Thompson] admitted that he hadn’t done a second draft of anything since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If readers lapped up whatever he wrote, no matter how many breakdowns and chronological shifts he threw their way, why try for polish?"

It’s well known that Thompson’s last years were riven by bitterness, but here, too, Mr. McKeen sheds new light. Like many young journalists, he thought of himself as a novelist paying the bills with journalism, and this belief remained with him until way too late. How many people have heard of, let alone read, a Thompson novel other than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—which he himself referred to as a "failed experiment in Gonzo journalism"? (Watching the Johnny Depp movie doesn’t count.)

LIKE ITS SUBJECT, Outlaw Journalist has flaws: It’s light on Thompson’s emotional and physical brutality, and many passages lack depth. And where’s the fun? After all, the Thompson legend isn’t rumor-based. This biography should therefore be read alongside one of the Fear and Loathing books, or Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, a Jann Wenner-edited oral history, published soon after Thompson’s suicide in 2005.

William McKeen expertly demonstrates that Thompson failed to become a writer of significance. He became "Hunter S. Thompson." That was both a brilliant thing to be and a crushing disappointment.

Michael Washburn is the associate director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Raised in Louisville, he’s a Kentucky Colonel, just like Hunter S. Thompson. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, narrated by Johnny Depp, gets so far inside the tortured soul of its subject through his writings, musings and media sightings that it is amazing how much of the outside world breaks in to illuminate the political and social convulsions Hunter both reported and embodied. Indeed, Gonzo turns out to be the most absorbing film, fiction or nonfiction, I have seen this year. Thompson was certainly no plaster saint. Aside from his manic consumption of drugs, liquor and many forms of hallucinogens, he was a proud member of the National Rifle Association and the possessor of more than a score of firearms, one of which he used to kill himself in 2005.

Still, Tom Wolfe, who coined the terms “radical chic” and “the Me decade,” called Hunter “our greatest comic writer.” Mr. Wolfe is one of 19 admiring A-list interviewees, ranging from former Nixon speechwriter and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan on the right to George McGovern on the left. Sandy Thompson (now Sondi Wright), his first wife, and Anita Thompson, his second wife, are both on hand with compassionate comments on the often outrageous, but never boring, man in their lives.

I must confess at this point that the journalistic legend that was Hunter Thompson never clicked for me. Too much fear and loathing in Las Vegas and everywhere else for my repressed taste. Yet I was moved in the film by young Hunter’s taking his admiration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the extreme, copying down every word of those exquisite sentences so that he could learn to write. The crucial biographical subtext for Hunter was that he, in Kentucky, like Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minn., was on the outside looking in on all his rich classmates and their upper-class frolics, but whereas Fitzgerald pathetically pressed his nose against the window, Hunter resolved to blow up all these bastions of privilege.

What I didn’t know before I saw Gonzo was how much influence Hunter exerted in the 1972 nomination of George McGovern over Edmund Muskie, whom he loathed with such a strange passion that he spread a rumor that Muskie was taking an exotic Brazilian drug that supposedly explained his often bizarre behavior on the stump. If that isn’t a dirty trick worthy of Karl Rove, I don’t know what is. Less strange was Hunter’s post-Bobby Kennedy disgust with Hubert Humphrey and Mayor Daley’s broken-bones brokered 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, which led to the election of Richard Nixon. I have always been a lesser-evil type myself, and so I cannot empathize with Hunter’s unending and unyielding purity of purpose.

I was more on his side in his decisive efforts to place Jimmy Carter in the White House. I never knew Hunter, but after Mr. Gibney’s insightful melding of Hunter’s eloquent words with the heartfelt tributes of everyone who knew him—especially his son, Juan Thompson, and his two wives—I feel that I have learned enough about him to like him enormously, if only in retrospect.

There is a loony freeform look to the film that is fitting for the surreal spasms of the Nixon and Bush years. Mr. Gibney and all his collaborators have surpassed even Gibney’s much-honored Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side. Gonzo is a must-see for everyone.

asarris@observer.com

Those awkward photos of Sean Avery standing shirtless in a fashion closet at Men's Vogue mysteriously disappeared from the magazine's Web site. [Radar]

Graydon Carter, Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Buffet, Gay Talese and others gathered at the Waverly Inn on Wednesday to celebrate Gonzo, a Carter-produced documentary about the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson. [WWD]

Raffaello Follieri's friends reportedly want Anne Hathaway to come get the chocolate lab the couple bought together. [P6]

Bill Clinton was reportedly less than friendly to Obamaphile Oprah Winfrey at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday on Wednesday night. [P6]

At the Alma luxury condos on West 21st Street, a sommelier will pick out seasonal wines for you, while a master confectioner will create custom chocolates to go on your pillow. [P6]

It would be hard today to explain the anticipation and excitement I felt over each new issue. New York magazine was not sold where I lived, so I had to wait until its best writers started producing books to discover them. The magazines were artfully designed temples of the written word, filled with language, people, places, events and ideas that were intoxicating and new. They helped shape my experience of those tumultuous years every bit as much as pop music and marijuana. My first taste of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was so thrilling that for weeks I wanted to read it out loud to everyone I met. I restrained myself, but Tom Wolfe’s book gave me an inestimable gift: I knew after the first 10 pages what I wanted to do with my life.

There have been many attempts to describe the kind of journalism popularized during this period—work that tells a true story using novelistic techniques; journalism where the writer is present in the narrative, whether as a character or as a voice; reporting that rejects “objectivity” and is infused with point of view—and all of them contain a piece of an overall definition. To me, what distinguishes the writing of Mr. Wolfe, John Hersey, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and the others is their ambition to create not just journalism, but art.

As has often been pointed out, the “New Journalism” was neither new nor, in many cases, journalism, in the usual sense of the term—that is, the practice of gathering and reporting the news. It was a particularly vivid flowering of a movement that had actually been growing for more than a century, and which thrives today—indeed, it rivals fiction and “self-help” as one of the most popular literary forms. There are reasons why this genre arose and flourishes that go well beyond the borders of Marc Weingarten’s excellent history, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, but his account well captures how the social upheavals of the 60’s and a few dozen superb editors, reporters and writers joined to lay siege to the conventions of the profession.

The term “New Journalism” (the title of an anthology that Tom Wolfe co-edited in 1973) is typically brilliant Wolfean hyperbole and self-promotion. In a devilishly provocative essay of the same title, he argued that journalists of a certain stripe (the most notable of them favored white suits and spats) were toppling the sacred traditions not just of journalism, but of literature. Mr. Weingarten’s scope is narrower. He’s concerned with the explosion of colorful personalities and powerful work that sprung primarily from the old New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, which spun off after the newspaper’s demise to become New York magazine, but which spilled over into the better national magazines and eventually into Jann Wenner’s San Francisco countercultural upstart, Rolling Stone.

Mr. Weingarten captures the swirl of youthful energy and excitement that produced profiles, yarns, essays and, as with Mr. Wolfe’s notorious “Tiny Mummies,” the prose equivalent of hand grenades. He reaches back to give homage to the great George Orwell and rightly commends The New Yorker, William Shawn, Hersey, Capote and Lillian Ross for generating the first modern nonfiction masterpieces, but he gives primary credit to Clay Felker, who for more than a decade found ways to sustain the rambunctious herd of writers who so stretched and electrified the form.

I’m embarrassed to confess that I learned from Mr. Weingarten of two early books in the genre that I’d never heard of before: Picture (1952), by Ms. Ross, and M (1967), by John Sack—the latter a particularly inexcusable personal oversight because, prior to writing my book Black Hawk Down, I actually went looking for examples of narrative nonfiction about war.

The best thing about The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight is the way it captures the sense of complete license that writers felt during this period, a willingness to try anything, including extremely self-destructive behavior, in the pursuit of a good piece. Mr. Weingarten is particularly good at rendering Mr. Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Mr. Mailer and Thompson, whose writing eventually became a parody of the form. We’re usefully reminded of how much this school—actually a subgenre of literary journalism—was a product of a particular historical moment. It was one of the various gaudy postwar “revolutions” that divided American society into an entrenched, strictly hierarchical, excessively rational and wrong-headed adult establishment and a romantic, hip, wildly unstructured, intuitive, often irrational youth subculture. The finest writers produced work that stands on its own 40 years later, but much of it—I’m thinking of Thompson in particular—can only be understood in the context of the era.

Mr. Weingarten pays a lot of attention to Thompson, and who can blame him, the material is so rich. But once the King of Gonzo hit his stride, he was always more of a humorist than a journalist. He was a spoof of a reporter, one whose defiant outlaw stance and dedication to creative substance abuse caught the spirit of the day. Perhaps in this age of blogs, it’s easy to imagine a time when the rantings of a stoned madman—no matter how irrational and imaginary—seemed more credible than White House statements and the careful analytical journalism of The New York Times. But Thompson needs Nixon, Vietnam and the rebellious mood of his heyday to be fully understood.

If you think of Mark Twain as a gonzo journalist—no drug abuse but plenty of travel reporting artfully mixed with fantasy—you recognize at once that Twain played more to the universal foibles of human nature than on any dark political currents of his time. Both Twain and Thompson got rich poking fun at the society that rewarded them, but there’s a sweetness to Twain’s bile that escaped Thompson, who ultimately seemed to lose himself completely in the dark corners of his nightmare.

My only quarrel with Mr. Weingarten’s book is his apparent acquiescence to the practice of making things up. He duly notes it when Michael Herr invents a colorful character to dress up his dispatches from Vietnam, or when Gail Sheehy does the same when writing about prostitutes in New York, but he registers no strong sense that something essential was thereby lost. When the legal department of Esquire raised concerns about potentially libelous descriptions of an unnamed general in Mr. Herr’s story “Hell Sucks”—he’s seen “leaving the house of a famous courtesan in Dalat, driving off in a jeep with a Swedish K across his lap”—the writer cabled back to his editor, Harold Hayes:

“He’s fiction—I hoped that would be obvious—made up out of a dozen odd types I’ve run into around Vietnam, most especially a Special Forces colonel I knew in the Delta who was a Persian scholar and a fanatic about things like the late Beethoven quartets (‘The purest thing in all of music!’).”

Why on earth the fictional nature of the general would be “obvious,” especially after having been described in such a specific moment, is beyond me. I am even suspicious of Mr. Herr’s explanation: a “dozen” odd types? The “late” Beethoven quartets? The whole thing has the smell of a too richly embellished lie. And why on earth would a writer who finds a Persian-studying, Beethoven-listening colonel not write him into his story?

“Hayes signed off on it,” notes Mr. Weingarten, and the clear sense to me in the passage is that we’re supposed to applaud him for doing so. I think he should have killed the piece immediately, or demand that Mr. Herr redo it with real characters, scenes and dialogue. The editor did not do the writer a favor: Instead of pushing to keep a talented reporter honest, he published fiction masquerading as fact, and today everything that Mr. Herr wrote about Vietnam with such passion and skill cannot be regarded as anything but reasonably well-informed fiction.

Here’s an important rule about journalism: Reporters do not make things up because they have done too much work (as Mr. Herr implies), but because they have done too little.

Truth is never less interesting than fiction, and is usually more so. All of us go through life with a general idea about people, places and events that we’ve never seen. That general idea is based on guesswork and is tainted by presupposition, bias, received wisdom, etc., etc. Real reporting replaces such guesswork with a solid, firsthand account, and in my experience nearly always demonstrates that what we thought was true was wrong, in ways large and small. Our world and the people who populate it are infinitely various and complex and are always changing, so a truthful account of anything ought to be, by definition, surprising. That’s why reporting has inherent value: There are things fiction can do that journalism cannot, but truthfulness is the thing journalism has over fiction. A made-up general or prostitute can offer me many things in the hands of a great writer, but it cannot replace the intrinsic value of a well-drawn portrait of the real thing. When a writer embellishes reporting with his imagination, whether by creating composites, rearranging the sequence of events or inventing dialogue, he creates something that is not just a fraud, but which is less than either fiction or fact.

Mr. Weingarten doesn’t dwell very much on why journalism morphed into something new in the last half of the 20th century, other than to place the phenomenon alongside the wider upheavals of the decade. The stories we tell reflect the world we live in. The era of epic poetry and popular drama predated the printing press, which freed lovers of stories and myths from the need to memorize stanzas or see literature performed. The printed word enabled longer and more complex work, and right from the beginning the appetite for true stories was strong. The earliest novels often pretended to be true, and much of the greatest fiction is thinly disguised fact. Literary journalism taps into the craving to know what really happened, how people really are. Today, we are all bombarded with facts from a variety of media; we learn very little about a lot. Every day we catch fragments of intriguing stories, often just enough to whet our appetite—to make us wonder, for instance, how a group of relatively inexperienced climbers found themselves fatally stranded on the top of Mount Everest. What happens to a man inside the bubble of a campaign for President of the United States? Why would two drifters with no apparent motive coldly execute a small family in Kansas? What decisions weigh on the mind of the manager of the Saint Louis Cardinals in the ninth inning of a critical game? Why was a mob of angry Somalis dragging the bodies of dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu? It’s a peculiarity of modern times that we even have such questions in our head. Journalism becomes art when it attempts to give a full answer, when it tries to plumb the nuances of character and motivation in the way that novelists have always done. Now and then, the answer is so subtle and well knit that it entirely transcends the circumstances of its birth to become a thing of lasting beauty.

Mr. Weingarten closes his book and the epoch with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of New York magazine in 1977: Money devouring Art. The episodes he describes of dedicated journalists first thrashing around fruitlessly and then gathering to mourn are all too reminiscent of the scenes being enacted today at newspapers all over America, which are being gutted by ambitious corporate executives trying to please profit-hungry investors. The immediate legacy of Clay Felker and those terrific magazines of the 60’s were dozens of regional and city magazines, and the creative newspapers and their Sunday magazines that nurtured the next generation of literary journalists. Their work, alongside the mature talents of the originals, dot the best-seller lists and are regularly turned into feature films.

Great nonfiction storytelling will survive all these changes. It will endure in books and smart magazines and on the Internet in forms that combine print, images and sound in ways the medium has only begun to explore. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight captures the moment this kind of work caught fire, and helped me better understand a phenomenon that changed my life.

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down (Penguin), is a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly.

It would be hard today to explain the anticipation and excitement I felt over each new issue. New York magazine was not sold where I lived, so I had to wait until its best writers started producing books to discover them. The magazines were artfully designed temples of the written word, filled with language, people, places, events and ideas that were intoxicating and new. They helped shape my experience of those tumultuous years every bit as much as pop music and marijuana. My first taste of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was so thrilling that for weeks I wanted to read it out loud to everyone I met. I restrained myself, but Tom Wolfe’s book gave me an inestimable gift: I knew after the first 10 pages what I wanted to do with my life.

There have been many attempts to describe the kind of journalism popularized during this period—work that tells a true story using novelistic techniques; journalism where the writer is present in the narrative, whether as a character or as a voice; reporting that rejects “objectivity” and is infused with point of view—and all of them contain a piece of an overall definition. To me, what distinguishes the writing of Mr. Wolfe, John Hersey, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and the others is their ambition to create not just journalism, but art.

As has often been pointed out, the “New Journalism” was neither new nor, in many cases, journalism, in the usual sense of the term—that is, the practice of gathering and reporting the news. It was a particularly vivid flowering of a movement that had actually been growing for more than a century, and which thrives today—indeed, it rivals fiction and “self-help” as one of the most popular literary forms. There are reasons why this genre arose and flourishes that go well beyond the borders of Marc Weingarten’s excellent history, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, but his account well captures how the social upheavals of the 60’s and a few dozen superb editors, reporters and writers joined to lay siege to the conventions of the profession.

The term “New Journalism” (the title of an anthology that Tom Wolfe co-edited in 1973) is typically brilliant Wolfean hyperbole and self-promotion. In a devilishly provocative essay of the same title, he argued that journalists of a certain stripe (the most notable of them favored white suits and spats) were toppling the sacred traditions not just of journalism, but of literature. Mr. Weingarten’s scope is narrower. He’s concerned with the explosion of colorful personalities and powerful work that sprung primarily from the old New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, which spun off after the newspaper’s demise to become New York magazine, but which spilled over into the better national magazines and eventually into Jann Wenner’s San Francisco countercultural upstart, Rolling Stone.

Mr. Weingarten captures the swirl of youthful energy and excitement that produced profiles, yarns, essays and, as with Mr. Wolfe’s notorious “Tiny Mummies,” the prose equivalent of hand grenades. He reaches back to give homage to the great George Orwell and rightly commends The New Yorker, William Shawn, Hersey, Capote and Lillian Ross for generating the first modern nonfiction masterpieces, but he gives primary credit to Clay Felker, who for more than a decade found ways to sustain the rambunctious herd of writers who so stretched and electrified the form.

I’m embarrassed to confess that I learned from Mr. Weingarten of two early books in the genre that I’d never heard of before: Picture (1952), by Ms. Ross, and M (1967), by John Sack—the latter a particularly inexcusable personal oversight because, prior to writing my book Black Hawk Down, I actually went looking for examples of narrative nonfiction about war.

The best thing about The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight is the way it captures the sense of complete license that writers felt during this period, a willingness to try anything, including extremely self-destructive behavior, in the pursuit of a good piece. Mr. Weingarten is particularly good at rendering Mr. Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Mr. Mailer and Thompson, whose writing eventually became a parody of the form. We’re usefully reminded of how much this school—actually a subgenre of literary journalism—was a product of a particular historical moment. It was one of the various gaudy postwar “revolutions” that divided American society into an entrenched, strictly hierarchical, excessively rational and wrong-headed adult establishment and a romantic, hip, wildly unstructured, intuitive, often irrational youth subculture. The finest writers produced work that stands on its own 40 years later, but much of it—I’m thinking of Thompson in particular—can only be understood in the context of the era.

Mr. Weingarten pays a lot of attention to Thompson, and who can blame him, the material is so rich. But once the King of Gonzo hit his stride, he was always more of a humorist than a journalist. He was a spoof of a reporter, one whose defiant outlaw stance and dedication to creative substance abuse caught the spirit of the day. Perhaps in this age of blogs, it’s easy to imagine a time when the rantings of a stoned madman—no matter how irrational and imaginary—seemed more credible than White House statements and the careful analytical journalism of The New York Times. But Thompson needs Nixon, Vietnam and the rebellious mood of his heyday to be fully understood.

If you think of Mark Twain as a gonzo journalist—no drug abuse but plenty of travel reporting artfully mixed with fantasy—you recognize at once that Twain played more to the universal foibles of human nature than on any dark political currents of his time. Both Twain and Thompson got rich poking fun at the society that rewarded them, but there’s a sweetness to Twain’s bile that escaped Thompson, who ultimately seemed to lose himself completely in the dark corners of his nightmare.

My only quarrel with Mr. Weingarten’s book is his apparent acquiescence to the practice of making things up. He duly notes it when Michael Herr invents a colorful character to dress up his dispatches from Vietnam, or when Gail Sheehy does the same when writing about prostitutes in New York, but he registers no strong sense that something essential was thereby lost. When the legal department of Esquire raised concerns about potentially libelous descriptions of an unnamed general in Mr. Herr’s story “Hell Sucks”—he’s seen “leaving the house of a famous courtesan in Dalat, driving off in a jeep with a Swedish K across his lap”—the writer cabled back to his editor, Harold Hayes:

“He’s fiction—I hoped that would be obvious—made up out of a dozen odd types I’ve run into around Vietnam, most especially a Special Forces colonel I knew in the Delta who was a Persian scholar and a fanatic about things like the late Beethoven quartets (‘The purest thing in all of music!’).”

Why on earth the fictional nature of the general would be “obvious,” especially after having been described in such a specific moment, is beyond me. I am even suspicious of Mr. Herr’s explanation: a “dozen” odd types? The “late” Beethoven quartets? The whole thing has the smell of a too richly embellished lie. And why on earth would a writer who finds a Persian-studying, Beethoven-listening colonel not write him into his story?

“Hayes signed off on it,” notes Mr. Weingarten, and the clear sense to me in the passage is that we’re supposed to applaud him for doing so. I think he should have killed the piece immediately, or demand that Mr. Herr redo it with real characters, scenes and dialogue. The editor did not do the writer a favor: Instead of pushing to keep a talented reporter honest, he published fiction masquerading as fact, and today everything that Mr. Herr wrote about Vietnam with such passion and skill cannot be regarded as anything but reasonably well-informed fiction.

Here’s an important rule about journalism: Reporters do not make things up because they have done too much work (as Mr. Herr implies), but because they have done too little.

Truth is never less interesting than fiction, and is usually more so. All of us go through life with a general idea about people, places and events that we’ve never seen. That general idea is based on guesswork and is tainted by presupposition, bias, received wisdom, etc., etc. Real reporting replaces such guesswork with a solid, firsthand account, and in my experience nearly always demonstrates that what we thought was true was wrong, in ways large and small. Our world and the people who populate it are infinitely various and complex and are always changing, so a truthful account of anything ought to be, by definition, surprising. That’s why reporting has inherent value: There are things fiction can do that journalism cannot, but truthfulness is the thing journalism has over fiction. A made-up general or prostitute can offer me many things in the hands of a great writer, but it cannot replace the intrinsic value of a well-drawn portrait of the real thing. When a writer embellishes reporting with his imagination, whether by creating composites, rearranging the sequence of events or inventing dialogue, he creates something that is not just a fraud, but which is less than either fiction or fact.

Mr. Weingarten doesn’t dwell very much on why journalism morphed into something new in the last half of the 20th century, other than to place the phenomenon alongside the wider upheavals of the decade. The stories we tell reflect the world we live in. The era of epic poetry and popular drama predated the printing press, which freed lovers of stories and myths from the need to memorize stanzas or see literature performed. The printed word enabled longer and more complex work, and right from the beginning the appetite for true stories was strong. The earliest novels often pretended to be true, and much of the greatest fiction is thinly disguised fact. Literary journalism taps into the craving to know what really happened, how people really are. Today, we are all bombarded with facts from a variety of media; we learn very little about a lot. Every day we catch fragments of intriguing stories, often just enough to whet our appetite—to make us wonder, for instance, how a group of relatively inexperienced climbers found themselves fatally stranded on the top of Mount Everest. What happens to a man inside the bubble of a campaign for President of the United States? Why would two drifters with no apparent motive coldly execute a small family in Kansas? What decisions weigh on the mind of the manager of the Saint Louis Cardinals in the ninth inning of a critical game? Why was a mob of angry Somalis dragging the bodies of dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu? It’s a peculiarity of modern times that we even have such questions in our head. Journalism becomes art when it attempts to give a full answer, when it tries to plumb the nuances of character and motivation in the way that novelists have always done. Now and then, the answer is so subtle and well knit that it entirely transcends the circumstances of its birth to become a thing of lasting beauty.

Mr. Weingarten closes his book and the epoch with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of New York magazine in 1977: Money devouring Art. The episodes he describes of dedicated journalists first thrashing around fruitlessly and then gathering to mourn are all too reminiscent of the scenes being enacted today at newspapers all over America, which are being gutted by ambitious corporate executives trying to please profit-hungry investors. The immediate legacy of Clay Felker and those terrific magazines of the 60’s were dozens of regional and city magazines, and the creative newspapers and their Sunday magazines that nurtured the next generation of literary journalists. Their work, alongside the mature talents of the originals, dot the best-seller lists and are regularly turned into feature films.

Great nonfiction storytelling will survive all these changes. It will endure in books and smart magazines and on the Internet in forms that combine print, images and sound in ways the medium has only begun to explore. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight captures the moment this kind of work caught fire, and helped me better understand a phenomenon that changed my life.

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down (Penguin), is a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly.

But Mr. Tanabe's body is brand-free. The D.C. native, who is of Japanese-Belgian descent, buys sneakers by the obscure Italian label Fessura, clothes from the East Village store Ohmash, and swears he hasn't worn a brand since the Doc Martens era of high school. "My wardrobe," he said, "is actually pretty Pattern Recognition."

Pattern Recognition, now two years old, was the first straight fiction novel by renowned sci-fi author William Gibson, about a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard who is allergic to fashion. Her authenticity radar-precisely what makes her an apt marketer-also renders her woozy at the sight of brand logos, particularly the Michelin Man or a Tommy Hilfiger rack. To protect herself, she dresses exclusively in what her ex-boyfriend dubs "CPUs" or Cayce Pollard Units: unbranded, unadorned and ageless items in black, white and gray with all the labels and logos torn, razor-bladed or rubbed off. The book sold decently, but its real influence lurks in the minds and consumption patterns of its readers: Many of the same people who disliked Mr. Gibson's attempt to strip the "science" from his "science fiction" also surreptitiously use Pattern Recognition as a fashion Bible.

"I do wear logoless clothes as my default," said Seth Stevenson, a Slate and New York Times magazine contributor who studies marketing. Mr. Stevenson wasn't a fan of Pattern Recognition; nevertheless, he readily admits to cutting the labels off clothing, most recently from a North Face jacket given to him as a holiday gift. The Gibson novel, while ultimately in his eyes a "failure," made him think harder about brand choices (though he decided against removing the New Balance "N" from his sneakers). "The idea of her character," he said, "was actually brilliant."

Mr. Stevenson is one of many writers, designers, marketers and generally over-observant city dwellers who have come to view "coolhunting" as a significant, if unfortunate, part of their job descriptions. It all started with Malcolm Gladwell's 1997 New Yorker story, "The Coolhunt," about a couple of marketers paid by clothing companies to keep abreast of "trend-setting" teenagers in urban high schools. Last year Scott Westerfeld, a science-fiction writer, published a young-adult novel, So Yesterday, about a 17-year-old coolhunter named "Hunter," who's employed by a giant sneaker company but finds himself relating to what he calls the "Logo Exiles"-kids who are, like Cayce, turned off by logos and marketing.

Such teens and twentysomethings are increasingly common in New York, said Matt Marcus, a 32-year-old "trend strategist." In fact, the students of his "Cool Hunting" class at Parson's School of Design last semester started noticing so many fastidiously inconspicuous types, they gave the consumer class a name: "Easy Street."

"They know what's up, they just choose not to participate," Mr. Marcus said. "The American Apparels of this world exploit that image."

John Harvey, a Jersey City painter and sometime filmmaker with a day job animating promotional spots for the Soho firm EyeballNYC, has found himself taking the "Easy Street" in recent years. As with Cayce, a near-autistic awareness of trends in fashion, design and marketing are part of Mr. Harvey's vocation, and arguably his genetic makeup. He seeks solace in unbranded gray and black clothes. But the impetus to boycott color and logos should not be confused with some sort of Naomi Klein–inspired anti-corporate rebellion, Mr. Harvey cautioned. Rather, it's mere exhaustion.

"When you're in design and your whole life is coming up with this stupid crap, floral patterns and whatnot, you just can't handle it-you need to cut it out," he said.

Mr. Harvey, 32, admits he couldn't help but make a fashion muse out of Mr. Gibson's fictional Cayce. "After I read the book, I remember Googling her jacket," he said, referring to the Japanese Buzz Rickson's military jacket that Pollard wears throughout the novel. "I wanted that jacket."

Mr. Harvey has fallen off the anti-brandwagon before; a few weekends ago, he shelled out $190 for a pair of pony-hair-adorned sneakers at the new boutique in Soho that sells clothes by the Japanese label A Bathing Ape (or Bape, for short).

"I don't really wear the Bape shoes," he said. "You can't just wear them around."

Josh Rubin, the Soho-based designer behind the Web site Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting, said that Pattern Recognition didn't so much change his behavior or buying habits as it provided a "label" for his madness. Mr. Rubin said he experiences a "gut response" to logos.

"I'll be razor-blading off a label and think, 'That's so Cayce Pollard,'" he said. "Like the other day, I cut out the embroidery of a logo off my snowboarding bag. It was just this small company's name in cursive with a little swooshy thing, and it looked so bad, it just offended me."

Mr. Rubin's personal nemesis is the revived logo Von Dutch, recently popularized by the likes of Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake. "I'm not sure I've gotten physically ill or wanted to vomit … but I don't understand it," he said. "It doesn't resonate or make sense to me in any way. I definitely have the recoiling thing with Von Dutch."

Like many such coolhunters, New York trend watcher Faith Popcorn, who prefers the title "futurist," was struck by the similarities between Cayce and herself. "Not only does she have an intuitive reaction to bad branding, her father was in the C.I.A.," she said. "And my father was in the C.I.A.!"

Ms. Popcorn, who calls Pattern Recognition her "favorite book," even employs a Cayce Pollardesque dress code at her trend-forecasting firm, BrainReserve: There are no visible brands, patterns, colors or loud jewelry allowed. BrainReservists are allowed to dress out of code on Fridays, but Ms. Popcorn (real name: Faith Plotkin) said they usually show up in code anyway.

"People just feel better in black-and when that's all they have, it becomes comfortable," she added.

A former Reservist, who requested anonymity, was hesitant to laud the BrainReserve dress code, but agreed that being so intimately involved in evaluating and carrying out guerrilla marketing campaigns had made her appreciate the purity of clothes that hadn't been marketed to her.

"Once you know how the whole branding machine works, you just hate it," the former Reservist said. "I'm totally allergic."

Ms. Popcorn herself has no need to sandpaper the labels off her clothing: Her wardrobe consists entirely of black Issey Miyake and Giorgio Armani (her dog is named Miyake). But she rattled off seven trends that Pattern Recognition –style dressing was consistent with, among them "icon toppling" and "rip and stitch," before finally concluding: "People are just sick of it."

What people are sick of, said Mr. Marcus, the Parson's professor of coolhunting, is Malcolm Gladwell-or at least Malcolm Gladwell–inspired marketing campaigns. Mr. Marcus traces his own "subdued," mostly monochrome sartorial tendencies to the day he first heard a word to describe what he did-the day he read Mr. Gladwell's New Yorker article.

"Malcolm Gladwell defining the way trends start and spread destroyed the whole thing, because it created companies and pundits and people, like myself, who are paid to create trends that way," he said. "Now it's everywhere. Even the President, when he paid that guy to write about his 'No Child Left Behind' policies-that's whisper marketing. So you naturally no longer want to be a part of it." Mr. Marcus added that his wardrobe these days tends toward anonymous black H. and M. pieces.

To some, of course, the appeal of the code of Cayce isn't so complex.

"There's a reason black is black," said Chris Garvin, a design professor and Pattern Recognition fan. "It's easier to take care of. It goes with everything. Cayce Pollard had taste."

Not every jaded designer who eschews colors and logos is reacting to something; for some, the act of dressing colorlessly and brandlessly is simply common sense.

"I dress like Einstein dressed: gray sweater, gray pants. It is a sign of intelligence," declared Zoran, the mononymic designer whose zipper- and button-free black-and-gray collections have been cult hits at Saks for 30 years. In Zoran's view, Madame Jiang Qing, the late wife of Mao Zedong who imposed the navy blue "Mao suit" uniform upon the People's Republic of China, is the quintessential fashion icon.

"She got a billion people to dress in that outfit, and they looked great! Now you go to China and they are all so confused," he said from Milan, where he keeps one of his four houses. To Zoran, simplicity of dress denotes security, whereas colors and pattern indicate that a person-particularly a woman-is insecure and confused, that her priorities are out of order.

"Just look at the subway," he said. "Look at all the women on the subway dressing for each other, dressed like Sex and the City, like Barbie dolls. They look great, and then they go home and they eat spam for dinner!"

Indeed, Ms. Popcorn-Plotkin concurred, "I've noticed the Desperate Housewives all wear very glitzy clothing-maybe because they're not very Zen."

Of course, these days it can involve as much aggravation to dress in Cayce Pollard Units as it does to look like a desperate housewife. While most amateur and professional coolhunters had taken the simple brand-removal step of switching their iPods' white "earbuds" for black ones, no one had gone so far as to sandpaper the buttons of his Levis buttons, as Mr. Gibson describes Cayce doing.

Alex Wipperfürth, a San Francisco–based marketer and author of the new book Brand Hijack, who confessed to a "huge crush on Cayce," bemoaned the effort it required to sandpaper the G-Star logo off his new jeans. (To be sure, though, his girlfriend was sandpapering them for him.)

Really the only way out of the brandosphere, said Mr. Rubin the coolhunter, is "buying your own goat. Or moving to Amish country."

-Maureen Tkacik

Memories of Mr. Thompson

It was 1996; I'd heard about a party on the Upper East Side celebrating the 25th anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I decided to crash. I bumped into the movie star Johnny Depp and his date, the glamorous supermodel Kate Moss, at the coat check; I followed them up a staircase, but the bouncers told me to scram. I spotted rock star Mick Jagger whooping it up with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and the dapper best-selling author Tom Wolfe.

I loitered outside. All of a sudden, Hunter Thompson (banana-shaped canvas hat, aviator shades, blue blazer, satanic-looking medallion, shorts, sneakers, drink in hand) appeared. I introduced myself. He smacked me on top of my head with a wooden mallet, then climbed into the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz with a floozy for awhile. When they exited, the floozy yelled at me, saying I couldn't come inside and that I was "going to burn out!" Eventually, I was allowed in and tried to interview Mr. Thompson. A security guy appeared and gave me a warning.

"He's O.K.-he's from Kansas!" the actor Matt Dillon said in my defense. But then a bouncer confiscated the batteries from my tape recorder.

"Paranoia!" Kate Moss said with a smile.

In 1997, I attended a party for Mr. Thompson's first collection of letters, The Proud Highway. NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw told me a Hunter story: "Hunter used to come to Washington and go on all these all-night drinking binges with Pat Buchanan. And he called Buchanan the greatest right-wing propagandist since Goebbels."

Sexy chanteuse Phoebe Legere had been chatting with the guest of honor. "I told him, 'Hunter, this is your shining hour, this is your great moment-this is wonderful,'" she said. "And he said, 'But why do I still feel so miserable?'"

Ms. Legere had just spent three days at his ranch in Woody Creek, Colo., and had a peacock feather in her hair as a souvenir. "I think he has some nerve damage in the muscles of his mouth, but I don't think the mind has been affected," she said. "He's the smartest person I know and the most perceptive, and so sensitive and so articulate that I'd go anywhere to just talk to him for 10 minutes."

How did she get to know him so well?

"I give a very good blowjob."

Mr. Thompson got onstage, said he was overwhelmed by the reception and that the publication of his letters was tantamount to "eating a bunch of acid … So here I am," he said. "Hanging more or less together, right now. But you never know-tomorrow's always a different day."

In 1998, I talked to Mr. Thompson on the phone before he gave a reading in New York from his novel, The Rum Diary. His friend Earl Biss, the famous American-Indian artist, had just died at 51.

"Went out easy, that fucker," Mr. Thompson told me. "He was a wild boy. He's been under arrest ever since I've known him, and so have I. The last time, he punched out the teeth of a cop. Earl was wonderful when he was alive, but now that he's dead, he's really caused us a lot of trouble."

I said I was sorry about his Indian pal, then asked him if it was a good thing that my girlfriend had just purchased an electronic 'Lady Bug' to use during intercourse. "Absolutely-it's a very good thing," he assured me. "I know the Lady Bug. You happened to have stumbled across a subject I know very well. I guarantee the Lady Bug is good for you, me, your girlfriend, for mankind in general."

I asked what would happen after his appearance at Barnes and Noble.

"Let me ask you something," he said. "I'm just about to call Plimpton to see if he can arrange this. I was thinking that is there any way to rent a double-decker bus in New York? Is that feasible? I would think so. I think it would be a very visible target, and therefore we'd have to have some entertainment on top-maybe some live naked dancers. Simon and Schuster will pay for this. We'll force this on them. There will be a double-decker bus."

I found a rentable double-decker bus and called him back. But he'd decided perhaps it wasn't the best idea.

In 2003, I went to Mr. Thompson's suite at the Carlyle Hotel. He'd just finished a week of promoting his latest book, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. He looked worn-out. Chinese food was everywhere. He was drinking an Italian liqueur, a "hangover remedy" he said he'd heard about from Sean Penn. Facing him on a table was the head of a pretty mannequin.

"C'mere, you little beauty," he said, kissing "Lisa" on the lips. His pretty wife Anita laughed.

He said he wouldn't be coming back to New York for a while. "The no-smoking law is bad enough," he said. "Did you say you could possibly get me some weed? Speaking of that, Anita, where are those joints? It's just the same old story: I've been eking out a joint or two a day, but Jesus Christ, it's really annoying. They always say, 'Don't travel with drugs! Are you nuts? Don't worry, we have plenty-all you need. You can get anything in New York.' This is probably the first time I've been here I had to think more than once about any kind of drug. Speaking of that, I've had an incredible time buying a pipe in this town."

Mr. Thompson put some pot into a pipe and took a long hit. "I know, not moderate," he said.

Then an old friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer William Kennedy, showed up.

Mr. Thompson turned to me and said, "Time's up."

-George Gurley

Protesting at The Gates

For years, my friend George has been complaining: "Why doesn't anyone protest the treatment of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay?"

One day I answered, "Why don't we do it?"

George hesitantly agreed.

So on Monday, Presidents' Day, George and I met on the F train and rode to Columbus Circle. George had a sign, RESTORE DUE PROCESS, and I made a sign: GUANTANAMO SHAME. I had printed out an essay from the Internet written by Vanessa Redgrave called "Guantánamo's Torture Regime Is a Shameful Disgrace" to show to anyone who was curious. This was our Celebrity Endorsement.

We got out at Columbus Circle and stood around the tent selling souvenirs of The Gates. A man with a 10-year-old son walked up to us: "How long did it take to make your signs?"

We told him.

"What was the last sign you carried?" he persisted.

George couldn't remember if he'd had a sign while protesting the Republican National Convention. All I could remember was that mine was in French.

Our questioner continued asking about signs and finally said: "Thank you for letting me stand in your radiance." Then he and his silent son left.

"Was he an undercover cop?" George asked me.

"No, he was a right-winger who was charmed by us," I answered.

"But is that enough-to personally charm the right?" George replied.

"Yes," I said.

A young African-American woman stopped. "Do you have a Web site?" she asked.

"No, we're just two friends," I explained. Then I showed her the one copy of our flier: "But if you want to see this essay, just Google 'Vanessa Redgrave' and 'torture.'"

She thanked us and left.

"It's time for us to begin our march," George announced.

We began walking uptown, through The Gates. Almost immediately, we met a man dressed in a bright orange cap, orange coat and orange pants. "Is this your Gates outfit?" I asked him.

"Yes," he replied, modeling it for us.

He told us he was born in a village in northern Burma but now lives in the Bronx. "Do you support Aung San Suu Kyi?" I asked.

"Of course, of course," he answered. "She won the Nobel Peace Prize!"

I explained our demonstration to him. "What do you expect when you elect a stupid cowboy to be President?" he observed.

George and I continued our march. When people stared at us, I would explain our mission. One man shrugged his shoulders and gave a helpless look, which reminded me of the joke one sees in jokebooks for 12-year-olds:

Teacher: "Who signed the Declaration of Independence?"

Student in back row: "Not me!"

We met one political adversary-a man with two small sons.

"We have to fight!" he said in a thick Eastern European accent. "There are bad people, and we have to fight!"

"But we must stay within the law," George replied.

"There is no more law!" the man countered.

"Yes, there is," said George.

George and I came to two men holding poles with tennis balls attached to the end. They wore The Gates sweatshirts.

"What are those sticks for?" I asked.

"Those are to untangle the curtains if they get twisted."

"We're waiting for a wind," said the other one.

"Are you making $6.50 an hour?" I asked.

"Actually, $6.25," one of them answered.

"We started at $5.75," the other volunteered, "but they raised it, because the city raised its minimum wage."

"Are Christo and Jean-Claude assholes?" I wondered.

"No," they're very nice," one of them said.

"That's what I heard," I said.

George and I turned to leave. "Wait a moment," I said. "Do those tools have names?"

"No, they're just poles with balls at the end," one of the men said.

George and I ended our protest. We agreed that we might have a second demonstration-and this time invite other people. (See this space for details.)

-Sparrow

It's the Night of the Big Defeat, Election Night 1972, at McGovern campaign headquarters in the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, S.D., and after drinking a little too much, I decide it's necessary for me to put in a call to Alf Landon in Kansas. You might recall good old Alf, who up to then had been the Biggest Loser in Presidential history off his disastrous 1936 run against F.D.R.

I felt someone ought to give Alf (then 85) the good news: that he was no longer the Biggest Loser in history. George McGovern was, in the sense that Landon had won only two states, while McGovern had won only one (and the District of Columbia). At least that's one way of looking at it. I've come to think that George McGovern wasn't a loser at all, that he didn't break my heart-as he seems to have broken Nicholas Kristof's-by losing big. That whether you agree with him or not, he's someone who deserves admiration for conducting a principled campaign against an unprincipled opponent. In addition, I think there is a fundamental misconception about McGovern's loss: blaming it on his fidelity to principles in the first place.

I think that's why certain of the Dean-McGovern comparisons flying around now from concerned Democrats and gleeful Republicans are flawed. They're premised on the belief that Dean will replicate the McGovern defeat because of his rigid adherence to principles. I'm not sure of that, precisely because Dean seems far more a canny opportunist than McGovern, less attached to his principles and more attached to winning. After all, as one snarky blogger suggested in the wake of Saddam's capture, wouldn't strict adherence to principle by those who denounced the war as a terrible mistake require them to call for Saddam's restoration to power, now that we know he's alive? (After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found yet, just mass graves, and maybe those 300,000 people in mass graves all committed suicide.) And yet Dean was quick to say that the capture was "a great day."

Perhaps the Saddam capture will mean the ultimate letdown for Dean's supporters. ("I can't believe this," Carrie B. posted on a Dean Web site. "I'm crying here. I feel that we now don't have a chance in this election.") But I have to admit, I'd been feeling a kind of envy for the experience the Deanites had been going through up till now, the sudden exhilaration of participating in what seemed like a successful insurgency in a Presidential primary campaign. I had a taste of that feeling covering the McGovern campaign from its insurgent beginnings when I was just starting out as a reporter, and it's a thrill that has stayed with me. As has my admiration for George McGovern.

It's an admiration that I'd come to feel as early as 1968 at the Chicago Hilton, the Democratic Party convention headquarters, in the midst of the riot and the beatings on the street. In a dank banquet room reeking of mildew and tear gas, McGovern gave a sparsely attended press conference, in which he calmly but forthrightly spoke out against the violent treatment of anti-war demonstrators in the streets. He was one of the few Democratic Senators to do so.

It was an admiration that grew four years later as I began covering his campaign as one of the low-ranking "Boys on the Bus" in '72 (when the gifted observer Tim Crouse coined the term). An experience that came to an end with my Election Night phone call to Alf Landon.

My memory is of having just spent the previous couple of hours drinking with Hunter Thompson and some other reporters in the revolving restaurant on the roof of the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn, letting the magnitude of the defeat sink in, sharing doom-laden scenarios of the Nixon years to come. (At least I think it was a revolving restaurant-come to think of it, my own room seemed to be revolving too, and that couldn't be right.)

Anyway, I don't know how I managed to track Alf Landon down at such short notice, but I summoned up some dim memory of his hometown in Kansas from Arthur Schlesinger's F.D.R. bio and it turned out he was listed (Alf, not Arthur Schlesinger). It wasn't like the networks were beating down his door, so he didn't seem to mind chatting.

Nevertheless, Alf didn't seem to be as overjoyed as I expected at the news that he would no longer be a kind of punchline to political jokes about Big Losers. He was quite affable, despite some puzzlement about the motives of his caller. He was comfortable with the campaign he'd run (he was, in fact, a relatively progressive Republican, only recently being given credit for having saved his party from the crypto-fascist forces among the F.D.R.-haters). He said he ran on issues he believed in and didn't regret the loss because he stayed true to his principles, didn't think of himself as a punchline to a joke, and he also had kind words for his fellow big loser, George McGovern.

And, in fact, McGovern hasn't become a punchline so much as a warning sign: Don't run a principled campaign or you'll end up winning only Massachusetts. But maybe it's a misleading warning. Perhaps his loss was foreordained, but I'm not convinced the landslide was. As the campaign was going on, Nixon's bagmen were meeting surreptitiously with the Watergate burglars to deliver wads of hush money from illegal campaign cash. The Watergate cover-up, few knew then, was hanging by a thread at the time of the election, and would only last four months more, when James McCord started spilling the beans to Judge Sirica and the truth about the whole sordid scheme began to emerge. If that truth had come out before the vote … who knows? Would Americans re-elect Richard Nixon as President if they knew the facts that would force him to resign less than two years later?

There was another factor in McGovern's loss, one unrelated to his running a principled campaign: the George Wallace shooting. If Wallace had continued in the direction he seemed to be heading-a strong third-party run-before the bullet struck and paralyzed him, it might have sabotaged Nixon's "Southern strategy" by splitting the race-and-busing bloc that Nixon counted on in both the North and the South. So it's not necessarily true that running on issues made George McGovern such a big loser: It was bagmen and a bullet.

Anyway, I don't regret my call to Alf Landon. The great Murray Kempton always said that the best stories are to be found in the losing locker rooms of history, that you learn more from losers than winners. I had spoken to McGovern earlier that day at some Election Day photo op in which, as I recall, he spoke wistfully of the hunting season coming up and the preference of South Dakota hunters for bagging "early mourning doves." He said-I swear this is true-he liked the sound of their "cooing."

And now I had bagged Alf Landon: two great losers in one day. Little did we know that the Biggest Loser of Them All, now celebrating victory, would be out on his ear in less than two years, the first President to resign in disgrace.

I took the whole McGovern ride, covering the campaign as it rose from nowhere, went Somewhere, and descended into nowhere again that night at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn. From the time he was using rickety old Ozark Air Lines charter jets, to the point where he had a virtual fleet of campaign planes at his command.

I didn't see it coming in my first trip with McGovern; I didn't think he had much of a chance and made snarky comments in my dispatch about now-deceased Ozark Air Lines. But when it began to happen, it happened fast and it was breathtaking.

The press traveling with Howard Dean must have felt it-might still be feeling it. The boys on the McCain bus surely felt it for a brief moment. But suddenly, crowds were coming out in increasing numbers to greet McGovern at wintry Midwest airstrip stops. First-string national reporters were bigfooting lesser types like myself, who were demoted to the new plane added on, the one that came to be called the "Zoo Plane" (not without cause).

You recall the set-up: Richard Nixon running for re-election with big money and a badly divided Democratic Party, and only Woodward and Bernstein (and later a partly muzzled Cronkite) in the media caring much about Watergate. McGovern, to his credit, did bring up Watergate repeatedly once The Washington Post's first big Woodstein stories ran, but it was looked upon as the desperation of a loser.

Meanwhile, there was the war-you know, the one in Vietnam, which Nixon claimed to be "Vietnamizing." A war which even those, like Robert McNamara, who believed in confronting Soviet ambitions had realized years earlier was senselessly squandering lives and, in effect, undermining any larger purpose as well. (McNamara's confession on that point is one of the many things that makes my friend Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War so important; see my column in the Sept. 29, 2003, issue.)

And there was an anti-war movement that had driven a President from office in 1968 (and, paradoxically, probably helped elect Nixon by denying Humphrey their vote, sort of like the Naderites of 2000 who put the nail in Al Gore's coffin). The wing of the anti-war movement that still had a taste for electoral politics in 1972 (many no longer did) had become very smart and very adept organizers by then; they began capturing caucuses in the winter of '71 and ended up capturing the party in '72. That's one of the nuts-and-bolts journalistic insights beneath the Electric Kool-Aid of Hunter Thompson's prose in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, his collected real-time dispatches: Early on, he picked up on the way a savvy grassroots strategy was giving the McGovern campaign a stealth edge. Like Dean's, the McGovern insurgency leapt into the lead by innovative organizing, by out-organizing their opponents, and they made the McGovern campaign the anti-war movement's campaign.

So it was a movement campaign, like the Goldwater insurgency was a movement campaign. A campaign on issues, an anti-war campaign led by a World War II bomber pilot and prairie populist who came out of nowhere. What impressed me about McGovern was a kind of preternatural calm, which I somehow connected with his having flown through Axis anti-aircraft fire in the war. He didn't have charisma, but his sense of conviction did. And he was so unlike the other candidates.

I'd watched front-runner Ed Muskie sweatily pander to corrupt party bosses and wiseguy union big shots in Cherry Hill, N.J. I'd traveled with the insanely desperate Humphrey campaign, which featured the scariest campaign plane I'd ever traveled in, a loose-bolted prop job that was forever stalling and losing altitude, honking klaxon warnings which went off like shrieking waterfowl as we dipped perilously close to the frightened inhabitants below, though it turned out that almost everyone else on the plane was unnaturally calm, having been sedated by the traveling pharmacy of Humphrey's accommodating personal doctor. (I think I used the honking klaxons as a metaphor for Humphrey's unfortunate rhetorical style, but Hunter Thompson probably put it best when he described Humphrey's campaign personality as akin to "a hen on amyls.")

And then the party had to stop: I was with the Humphrey campaign a few dozen miles away in Maryland when George Wallace was shot, and the whole narrative of the campaign darkened. It was also a reminder of the way that, since 1963, the irrational and the violent have repeatedly intervened in "the process" to change American political history. I did the vigil at Wallace's hospital, and he wasn't the only victim that day. Rent The Parallax View someday, and you'll get a feeling for the shadow of paranoia that repeated assassinations and assassination attempts cast over the national psyche for a long time afterward.

And then there was the bizarre scene at the Democratic National Convention in Miami, starting with the gloriously tacky mirrored glitz of the Fontainebleau Hotel, which served as the convention headquarters.

The Democratic convention itself was a deceptive mirror-image of grim Chicago: the people in the streets then, now in the aisles of the convention hall seizing the party. I remember watching with awe as McGovern floor general Willie Brown (then a San Francisco assemblyman, later mayor) exercised his political wizardry. I was there in the California delegation when the McGovern command made their one pragmatic, non-principled decision. It was some obscure rules issue supported by women's groups that threatened McGovern's momentum. I could hear the anguished discussion: Pulling the rug out from under it might enable McGovern to win a first-ballot victory with dispatch, though at the cost of betraying his allies. And so they did it. When can you say of a campaign that you actually remember its only unprincipled move? Perhaps that was what doomed McGovern: For someone who set the bar so high, perhaps his one instance of being cynical came back to haunt him karmically.

And then the Republican convention, the coronation of Richard Nixon, held in the same town-but Miami was a different city this time, a Secret Service–saturated, police- and National Guard–infested, barbed-wire and tear-gas city.

Re-reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, I was reminded of a peculiarly absurdist moment in that spectacle: when I decided to infiltrate the Youth for Nixon march on the convention floor. Hunter Thompson, it turned out, had the same idea. What actually happened was that I noticed him, he noticed me, we nodded and kept our disguises secure, and eventually both of us marched onto the convention floor with the Nixon Youth to the cheers of the delegates, all on national TV.

Here's the "gonzo" version of the Youth for Nixon march, as Thompson remembered it: "For the first ten minutes I was getting very ominous Hell's Angels flashbacks-all alone in a big crowd of hostile, cranked-up geeks in a mood to stomp somebody."

Then, he says, "I … saw Ron Rosenbaum from The Village Voice, coming at me in a knot of Nixon Youth wranglers. 'No press allowed!' they were screaming …. They had nailed Rosenbaum at the door-but instead of turning back and giving up, he plunged into the crowded room and made a beeline for the back wall, where he'd already spotted me sitting in peaceful anonymity. By the time he reached me he was gasping for breath and about six fraternity/jock types were clawing at his arms."

I like the heroic, battling image of myself, but it didn't happen; nor did the events that Thompson says ensued, in which my cry for help threatens to blow his cover, and Thompson turns on me and tells the Nixon Youth, "Get that bastard out of here!"-at which point, "Rosenbaum stared at me. There was shock and repugnance in his eyes as if he had just recognized me as a lineal descendant of Judas Iscariot."

It's much more entertaining than what happened, but I didn't get as exercised about these embellishments as some did about Thompson's approach to reporting. I thought he was just an amazingly talented writer who wrote an American classic in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (a demonic inversion of Gatsby) and ought to be allowed to do what he did best, a sui generis prose that didn't fit easily into the categories of fiction or nonfiction, but was somehow more true to the reality of that year than the still-dutifully-mimetic prose of the regular White House reporters. Thompson opened up Presidential campaign reporting to the vision of absurdity, the way Norman Mailer had opened it up to a vision of metaphysics. I think in some ways Thompson was more influential, because while Mailer worked aloof, Thompson did much in many ways to "loosen up" (let's say) the rest of the "Boys on the Bus." He gave voice to some of the skepticism the press corps felt about the candidates, and it eventually began to surface in their prose in later campaigns-mostly for the better, I think.

But back to McGovern's campaign. First there was the Vice Presidentialdebacle-remember, McGovern's V.P. choice, Thomas Eagleton, had chosen not to reveal electro-shock treatments for depression that when they were finally disclosed, led him to resign his candidacy and made the McGovern campaign itself a candidate for what the budding cutthroat politico Lee Atwater would call the "jumper cables."

And then there was the crash, the fall campaign. Give George McGovern credit: He stuck to his anti-war message, he tried to make people care about Watergate, he stuck to his principles. The final crushing blow: Henry Kissinger's deceptive proclamation that, as a result of his secret diplomacy, "peace is at hand." Bye-bye, peace issue. It wasn't until after the election that it turned out peace was not really at hand at all. In fact, many more Americans and Vietnamese would die before the end. One can disagree with him on principle (and some of my thinking has changed). But was McGovern wrong to run a principled campaign on this issue? If you think so, you don't believe in the American democratic process.

Anyway, I was there for McGovern's final desperate cross-country dash, whose final leg-from Long Beach to a post-midnight landing in Sioux Falls-was a memorable debauch fueled by (among other things) wild delusory hope and the intimations of the landslide about to hit.

And then, less than two years later, I was there in Washington for the Nixon impeachment hearings, when the full truth about what was going on behind the scenes in that campaign from beginning (the phony letter that led to the demise of Ed Muskie's campaign) to end (the bagmen and the blackmail) finally emerged.

And I was there in the East Room of the White House as a weeping Richard Nixon left by the back door, disgraced.

That was the real end of the McGovern campaign. In some ways, you could say that ultimately he won. His opponent certainly lost. But even if McGovern was the Big Loser who eclipsed Alf Landon, he won my respect because he didn't lose his soul. He demonstrated that it was possible to run a campaign which focused the electorate's attention on the real issue of the day-Vietnam. I may disagree with Dean's supporters, but they have the right to have a candidate who expresses their views faithfully. Howard Dean won't break his supporters' hearts by losing the election; he'll break their hearts if he abandons his principles. Comparing Howard Dean to George McGovern shouldn't be an insult; it's something to live up to.