High Times issue is September 1977.

HST on:

the role of the President:

Well, I think the feeling that I've developed since '72 is that an ideological attachment to the presidency or the president is very dangerous. I think the president should be a businessman; probably he should be hired. It started with Kennedy, where you got sort of a personal attachment to the president, and it was very important that he agree with you and you agree with him and you knew he was on your side. I no longer give a f--k if the president's on my side, as long as he leaves me alone or doesn't send me off to any wars or have me busted. The president should take care of business, mind the f--king store and leave people alone.

on Jimmy Carter:

I think I've lost my sense that it's a life or death matter whether someone is elected to this, that or whatever. Maybe it's losing faith in ideology or politicians - or maybe both. Carter, I think, is an egomaniac, which is good because he has a hideous example of what could happen if he f--ks up. I wouldn't want to follow Nixon's act, and Carter doesn't either. He has a whole chain of ugly precedents to make him careful - Watergate, Vietnam, The Bay of Pigs - and I think he's very aware that even the smallest blunder on his part could mushroom into something that would queer his image forever in the next generation's history texts...if there is a next generation. . . . I'm not saying this in defense of the man, but only to emphasize that anybody in Congress or anywhere else who plans to cross Jimmy Carter should take pains to understand the real nature of the beast they intend to cross. He's on a very different wavelength than most people in Washington. That's one of the main reasons he's president, and also one of the first things I noticed when I met him in Georgia in 1974 - a total disdain for political definition or conventional ideologies.

His concept of populist politics is such a strange mix of total pragmatism and almost religious idealism that every once in a while - to me at least, and especially when I listen to some of the tapes of conversations I had with him in 1974 and '75 - that he sounds like a borderline anarchist...which is probably why he interested me from the very beginning; and why he still does, for that matter. Jimmy Carter is a genuine original...He won't keep any enemies list on paper; but only because he doesn't have to; he has a memory like a computerized elephant. . . . Compared to most other politicians, I do still like Carter. Whether I agree with him on everything, that's another thing entirely. He'd put me in jail in an instant if he saw me snorting coke in front of him. He would not, however, follow me into the bathroom and try to catch me snorting it. It's little things like that.

on Garry Trudeau:

RR: Did Garry Trudeau consult you before he started including you as the Uncle Duke character in "Doonesbury"?

HT: No. I never saw him; I never talked to him. It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I'd been inside the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, "Uncle Duke," I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn't seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the f--k they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant.. It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the sitars, and I thought: "What in the f--k madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.

why he didn't cover the 1976 campaign:

I was going to write a book on the '76 campaign, but even at the time I was doing research, I started to get nervous about it. I knew if did another book on the campaign, I'd somehow be trapped.

I was the most obvious journalist - coming off my book on the 1972 campaign - to inherit Teddy White's role as a big-selling chronicler of presidential campaigns. I would have been locked into national politics as a way of life, not to mention as a primary source of income..And there's no way you can play that kind of Washington