In December 1967, following the success of his first book, Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson sold to Random House a project he called The Joint Chiefs—but which the publisher and editor wanted him to title The Death of the American Dream or Who Killed the American Dream? As summer drew near, though, Thompson was already hopelessly bogged down and felt an acute lack of focus. He wrote to Jim Silberman, his editor at Random House, on June 9 to update him on the project. Complaining about the inability to absorb the information he deemed necessary before beginning to write, Thompson then suggested a possible method of composition:

[T]he idea that came to me tonight took the form of a query letter (a form letter of sorts) to perhaps 30 of the people I might be dealing with in this investigation sort of “Dear Sir, I’m investigating a rumor that somebody killed the American Dream and since the neighbors recently reported screams from your apartment, I thought I’d ask if you might possibly be able to suggest an explanation for these rumors, and perhaps name a few suspects.” [. . .] Let’s make the bastards answer: 1) Is the American Dream still pertinent? 2) If so, how does it apply in re: The War in Vietnam? The US Balance of Payment? Andy Warhol? The Politics of Joy? The editorial policies of the New York Times? Ed Sullivan?

In order to jumpstart the halting project, Thompson convinced Silberman to obtain him press credentials for the Democratic Convention in August. Mingling among the protesters outside the convention and mixing among journalists covering the event, Thompson witnessed police violence, which would forever scar his psyche and become a constructive factor in virtually all his subsequent writing. When Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut called on Mayor Richard Daley to halt the “Gestapo tactics,” Daley responded (in full view of news cameras): “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch. You lousy motherfucker!” After the convention, Thompson wrote a forlorn letter on September 22, thanking Ribicoff for being “a bedrock of decency” and opined: “I went to Chicago to research a part of a book on the ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ and needless to say my trip was a rotten success.”

In a letter to his middle brother Davidson, written on October 16, Thompson described the effect of the police violence in Chicago. “It was a real Hitler scene, the air smelled of fear and desperation,” he wrote. “I’m trying to write about it now, as part of my alleged new book, but it’s hard to explain except as a final loss of faith in whatever this country was supposed to stand for, all that bullshit in the history books.” Here, there is no hint of Gonzo, none of the overstatement or wild exaggeration or self indulgence which would become Thompson’s trademark style. There is merely abject anger, frustration, and despair. This mood stuck with Thompson for most of the following year and came to a head at the end of the summer when he wrote Silberman on August 30, 1969:

I see a lot of connection in my head that I can’t make on paper, and consequently I have no real image of what I’m doing. That “American Dream” notion becomes increasingly meaningless—mainly because it fits everything I write, and most of what I read. You might as well have told me to write a book about Truth and Wisdom. The slower I come to the necessity of linking Nixon, Chicago & the NRA, the more I wonder why—and if—anybody should waste their time reading this kind of bullshit . . . .

Thompson’s struggle to shape a coherent manuscript from his thoughts on an unraveling nation occurred four decades ago (and was chronicled in the second volume of Fear and Loathing in America: The Gonzo Letters in 2000), but the problems he saw then are more striking now than ever—and more than superficial. Our government is currently engaged in enormously costly and seemingly unending foreign warfare (on two fronts), involved in internal surveillance rivaling the days of McCarthyism, has just purchased somewhere around one-third of the entire domestic auto industry, and taken a controlling stake in the largest insurance company in the country. (It already owned the largest mortgage lenders.)

If Thompson was outraged at what he saw as a faceless cabal of the Military Industrial Complex personified by the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ruling the country, then I perceive that many of my generation are equally concerned—just drop the epithet Military. Industry and Bankers are now the faceless power behind the throne. Four years at West Point is no longer the quick avenue to real power and influence; in the twenty-first century it is four years at Goldman Sachs. But my concern stems not from the fact that bankers and industrial executives have grasped the reins of influence and power. My concern flows from a different fount.

There has always been a politics of envy in Britain, a genuinely Marxian desire to revolt against those who have. This polity has never existed in America. The old joke was that in Britain if someone saw a Rolls Royce parked on the street he would key it, while in America the same person would wonder how he could earn enough to own one. But over the past twelve months I have watched a polity of envy against the haves emerge in America and coalesce into an inchoate zeitgeist, and its existence frightens me. Envy is very different from anger—and an admission of the real death of the American Dream.