Fear & Loathing, 1972 - 2006

Miss Liberty, Rolling Stone Magazine, Issue 101, February 3, 1972

Thinking nothing has changed is a mistake. A lot has changed.

Hunter S. Thompson is dead for one thing. Habeas corpus too.

But laws can be changed and Thompson’s shithammer will not stop striking. There is still fear and loathing in Washington; it splashes over the nation and the world, and the awkward and luridly evil characterization of Miss Liberty I drew with a crow quill nib in 1972 has only decayed beyond the merely Nixonian limits of those clownish times into the Bushite terror of these: it’s all just yellowed like the old newsprint page to more extreme reaches of the same imperial jaundice; the deadly, the federal, the very gothic and cancerous rocaille on the liver, the lungs and the heart of The Sacred Homeland.

In 1968 I was a skinny and terrified Draft resister, convinced I’d be dead in Viet Nam if the Army caught me, running back and forth between islands of refuge, not unlike so many boys that year, taking my chances with shrinks, lost paper trails and finally a bottle of Sominex swallowed in front of the induction center flag, no braver than any other.

Richard M. Nixon/Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968, oil on canvas, 32x28 inches, (detail)
From the collection of Marsha and Mike Skinner

I painted Richard Nixon in a makeshift basement studio on Parker Street in Berkeley in the spring, and he looks like Lyndon Johnson. I think I was kind to the two of them, and I used Mars black and cadmium yellow to give them a woody, homespun glow. So many curtains and sofa fabrics were then colored in that strange rusty green.

The government letter with the 4-5 classification came on June 6, 1968, the 24th anniversary of D-Day, the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated, the day my mother would die 13 years later.

In 1972 I was a lucky young man from a fortunate and loving family living at the far end of Western civilization. An intelligent and beautiful young woman loved me. We lived in a decidedly romantic enclave of the contemporary, and revolutionary culture. The moon had only a flag and footprints then. We were not hippies; we were not particularly radical. We were rather middle class expressions of our times, and our times like always, ruled the universe. We were good, we were smart and we loved music and dogs. Many of us were artists, and we’d begun to pursue that adventurous life along heavily trafficked routes and our own self-made roads.

I’d met Robert Greenfield three years earlier; we’d become friends. He was from Brooklyn; he was a writer, the associate editor of the London office of Rolling Stone Magazine. He watched me draw Miss Liberty and he told me to take it to Robert Kingsbury, the art director at the Rolling Stone San Francisco office on Third Street. I showed Miss Liberty and a few other drawings to Kingsbury, who showed them to Jan Wenner, and I was asked into Wenner’s office, and Wenner asked me how much I wanted for Miss Liberty and I asked him what he wanted to do with the drawing.

“Publish it”, he said, “Run it with an essay by Hunter Thompson”.

“Ok”. I said, not knowing who the writer was or the depths of the waters I was treading, “Ok”… $350”.

“Whoa”, said Wenner, “I’ll give you $250.

“But uh…no”, I said, “you make me feel like I’m talking to William Randolph Hearst and worth it, I want $350”, and he laughed and said, “Ok, I’ll give you three”.

I took it.

Rolling Stone published Miss Liberty and later, another drawing of a nervous and sweating George McGovern for Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in New Hampshire, and they published three or four poem illustrations, but Ralph Steadman began drawing his brilliant cartoons for Thompson and my career as a political cartoonist came to an end.

I wasn’t unhappy to see it go. I was proud to be published and thrilled have my work in Rolling Stone, but I’d looked at enough Beardsley cobwebs in my early twenties, and I wanted to be a painter.

Vote Democrat or Abstain.