And that’s about it for now, Jann. Christmas is on us and it’s all downhill from here on ... At least until Groundhog Day, which is soon ... So, until then, at least, take my advice, as your family doctor, and don’t do anything that might cause either one of us to have to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States. If you know what I’m saying . . .
Yes. He is Up There, Jann. The Judge. And he will be there for a long time, waiting to gnaw on our skulls ... Right. Put that in your leather pocket the next time you feel like jumping on your new motorcycle and screwing it all the way over thru traffic and passing cop cars at 140.
Remember F. X. Leach. He crossed the Judge, and he paid a terrible price ... And so will you, if you don’t slow down and quit harassing those girls in your office. The Judge is in charge now, and He won’t tolerate it. Beware.
__ __ __ __
Hunter’s Clinton Problem
On Friday, July 31, 1992, in the heat of that year’s presidential campaign, the Rolling Stone National Affairs team—Hunter, Jann, William Greider, P. J. O’Rourke, and Eric Etheridge—sat down with Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton at Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock, Arkansas. The result was a lively roundtable discussion about issues and policy, personalities and music for all involved—except, perhaps, Hunter, who walked in the place hoping for a kind of rapport with the candidate or, barring that, hoping to engage Clinton in the kind of extended, unguarded, revealing conversation that was Hunter’s specialty. What he found was a polished candidate adept at playing a low-risk political strategy that was, in his eyes, no fun. Having had his early questions quickly debunked or dismissed by the candidate, Hunter simply got up from the table and headed for a perch at the bar, where he sat and watched the rest of the interview take place from a distance. From this moment on, his attitude toward candidate, and soon president, Clinton was fixed; Hunter tried to chalk it up to his policies, or even a supposed run-in decades earlier, when Hunter claimed to have driven his car across the lawn of the house that Bill and Hillary rented in Washington, DC, on his way home from a George McGovern staff party in 1972. It wasn’t that complicated, really; Hunter spelled it out in the introduction to his story on the lunch meeting: “Bill Clinton has no Sense of Humor.”
Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood
September 17, 1992
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: August 4th, ’92
FROM: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
SUBJECT: The Three Stooges Go to Little Rock ... Tall Gibberish at Doe’s Café . . . Where Were You When the Fun Stopped? . . . Mean Is Not Enough; Say Hello to President Clinton.
I have just returned, as you know, from a top-secret Issues Conference in Little Rock with our high-riding Candidate, Bill Clinton—who is also the five-term governor of Arkansas and the only living depositor in the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh who wears a Rolling Stone T-shirt when he jogs past the hedges at sundown.
Ah, yes—the hedges. How little is known of them, eh? And I suspect, in fact, that the truth will never be known ... I wanted to check them out, but it didn’t work. My rented Chrysler convertible turned into a kind of Trojan Horse in reverse—and frankly, I was deeply afraid to stay for even one night in Little Rock, by myself, for fear of being tracked and seized and perhaps even jailed and humiliated, on instructions from some nameless Clinton factotum.
It was ugly, Bubba. We were under intense surveillance the whole time, despite our desperate efforts to act like just another gang of Good Ol’ Boys for Clinton ... Which we were, I guess, since our eager, farseeing Editor had already decided on his formal RS endorsement for Clinton and already scheduled Big Bill for the cover ... And since Clinton and his People understood this, our efforts to deal mercilessly with the candidate were pretty much neutered from the start.
We were like the Three Stooges. Clinton already had the endorsement and cover, so anything he said to us—me, P.J. O’Rourke, and “Dollar Bill” Greider—was pretty much a matter of Filigree.
We flew down to Little Rock in high style. The six of us lounging around on a jet plane the size of a Greyhound bus—with only six seats, two telephones, and gold-plated fixtures in a bathroom larger than some of the editorial offices at Rolling Stone.
We were the Strike Force, the Rolling Stone Blue Ribbon Presidential Forum—zooming into Little Rock at six hundred miles an hour to confront Clinton and see who he really was.
It is hard to know exactly what an RS cover is worth to a front-running candidate—but there was no question at all about the shitrain of Ugliness that could happen if the luncheon got out of hand. These drunken, brain-damaged brutes might do anything.