Even during his tenure as an "objective" reporter--and a pretty competent one--one could see the gonzo straining to get out. In a 1967 New York Times Magazine article on the drug scene, he writes

...A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt...So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.

In August 1968, Thompson attended the Democratic National Convention and its concurrent "police riot." He never published an account of what happened to him there, but occasionally refers to it in darkly veiled hints about viciousness at the corner of Michigan and Balboa. The sixties died there--or were killed--Thompson has written, and it was a turning point in his writing as well. After a couple of transitional pieces, including a bitter account of Nixon's first inauguration, he plunged full-fledged into gonzo with "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Deparaved," a hilarious and brutal tale with Thompson in the starring role, English illustrator Ralph Steadman as side-kick, and the liquor-filled aristocracy of Churchill Downs as the venal side of America.

But Thompson is at his best when he's writing about politics, not everyday debauchery. Alongside his rise to gonzo superstardom was the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Thompson's visceral loathing for Nixon comes through repeatedly, from '68 to '72 to Watergate. They are, as both would gladly admit, opposites. Yet, when it's all over, and Nixon is leaving Washington, even Thompson regrets it a bit; the excitement and intensity of the chase is over.

"The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing, writes Thompson, "--especially among those journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years--was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull post-coital sort of depression that still endures." Since that August day five years ago, Thompson, like the country, has been drifting, waiting for a new target.

BUT EVEN AS HE drifts, Thompson's perspective is valuable. Although a hundred other publications may cover an event, Thompson's "goddamn gibberish" will give it a flavor and texture that wouldn't otherwise get into print. Reading Thompson and no one else won't give readers a "full understanding" of what goes on during a Presidential election, a Super Bowl or a Chicano uprising in L.A. But neither will the calculated "uni-tone" of Time magazine or the caution--sometimes necessary but not always illuminating--of "objective" journalism. The Great Shark Hunt ensures that the "bad craziness" that a lot of people would like to forget will be preserved, and not die on the trash heaps of Rolling Stone's disintegrating bound volumes.