51 years ago, Hunter S. Thomp­son wrote Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72, which “is still con­sid­ered a kind of bible of polit­i­cal report­ing,” not­ed Matt Taib­bi in a 40th anniver­sary edi­tion of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal writ­ing for many rea­sons. But if you’re look­ing for one bot­tom-line expla­na­tion, it prob­a­bly comes down to this: Says Taib­bi, “Thomp­son stared right into the flam­ing-hot sun of shame­less lies and cyn­i­cal horse­shit that is our pol­i­tics, and he described exact­ly what he saw—probably at seri­ous cost to his own men­tal health, but the ben­e­fit to us was [his leg­endary book].” Thomp­son may have reached some jour­nal­is­tic apogee with his cov­er­age of the ’72 Nixon-McGov­ern cam­paign. But his polit­i­cal writ­ing hard­ly stopped there. The Gonzo jour­nal­ist cov­ered the ’76 elec­tion for Rolling Stone mag­a­zine. And inevitably he crossed paths with Jim­my Carter (RIP), the even­tu­al win­ner of the elec­tion. Above, Thomp­son recalls the day when Carter first made an impres­sion upon him. It hap­pened at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia School of …