In San Francisco, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson writes furiously to meet an imminent deadline. A “huge paranoid poodle” (11) scattered his papers, delaying him further. Powered by a lack of sleep and food, large quantities of alcohol and “enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls” (12), he races toward his deadline. He is finishing up his work on a book written between December 1971 and January 1973, in which he covered the 1972 reelection of Richard Nixon as US president.

For Thompson, politics is different from his usual subject (sports). Politics has “its own language” (13), and those involved often lose their minds. Thompson resolved to cover politics in a different way than other journalists. He had no pretense of objectivity but no desire to nurture the close personal and professional relationships that cause journalists to go easy on politicians. He could “afford to burn [his] bridges” (14), he explains, and for this he was treated like a walking bomb. Thompson makes no effort to hide his preference for the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, or hide his intense loathing of Republican President Richard Nixon. Rather than revise his articles for Rolling Stone magazine, he aims to convey a sense of how it felt to experience the campaign.