Your Daily HST

Still reading “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.” It’s still engrossing and still racist. On page 124 I came to this:

. . . Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Bobby Kennedy in June, then Nixon was nominated in July, and in August Democrats went to Chicago for the final act. By Labor Day it was all over. “The Movement” was finished . . .

This was 1968! The radical movement was anything but finished. The radical movement was going great guns from ‘68 to ‘72, the period to which HST is referring. Of course it fell apart, but in 1972 there was no way to foresee that. SDS had split up, but its components kept busy. The Panthers were growing until the wave of police and FBI repression. May 1, 1971 saw mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., for me a peak in history and personally.

There has been a lot of wishful speculation about that miracles in race relations that Bobby Kennedy would have achieved as president. There is no way to know.

It’s clear that for HST, Bobby Kennedy was “The Movement,” attesting to HST’s political ordinaryness.

As a side note, the tales of HST taking advantage of his editors are exploited by him as some kind of rebellious, defiant independence. I would just call it dick behavior.