Post #142661 by ikitnrev on Tue, Feb 22, 2005 10:33 PM

It turnes out that Hunter S Thompson was a fan of Jimmy Carter -- the following is from Rosalynn Carter's 1984 autobiography.

[At] Law Day ceremonies at the University of Georgia ...Jimmy...made some impromptu remarks about our system of justice as he saw it working in Georgia. He described several cases in which people had been cheated or sent to prison just because they were poor and lacked influence, and he criticized the legal establishment soundly for looking the other way while these things were occurring in front of them....

What we did not know at the time was that writer Hunter Thompson, who was visiting that day, was captivated by what Jimmy said. He had been sitting in the back of the audience, quietly sipping Wild Turkey bourbon disguised as iced tea. When Jimmy began speaking, Thompson began to ease toward the exit for a refill, but when he heard the names Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan he stayed to listen. He immediately asked the university to send him a taped copy of the speech, and for months afterward he played the tape over and over for anyone he could force to listen. Later, he came to Plains to visit us, and wrote a long article in Rolling Stone with the Law Day speech as the focal point.

Vern