If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

Thompson severed his ties with the Observer after his editor refused to print his review of Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and he moved to San Francisco immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture that was taking root in the area. invasion of Grenada but would not discuss these experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear 20 years later. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

He subsequently joined the United States Air Force before moving into journalism. Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18 1937 – February 20 2005) was an American author and journalist. The work he remains best known for is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972) a rumination on the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement.