“The bastards are winning” – that was my first thought after learning that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson had dispatched himself Hemingway-style from his fortified compound near Woody Creek, Colo. on Sunday. In a country that increasingly rewards conformity and lack of personal courage, Thompson spoke for an eternal American war for independence. His commitment to liberty was uncompromising. He loved good combat, gave no quarter, and expected none from his enemies. The man “stomped on the terra.”

“Death before dishonor and drugs before lunch” was one of the professional slogans he attached to the gonzo journalism he pioneered. Another was “the truth is never told during 9 to 5 hours.” There are those who, in an attempt to discredit the influence of the recently deceased, try to dismiss Thompson as a late 1960s caricature of wanton self-abuse and incoherent complaint. But he was no tie-died whiner. He was a giant of American journalism, one of the best and least appreciated political writers our country has produced.

Much attention is rightly given to his classic “On the Road”-update, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” but perhaps his finest work was “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.” Named as one of the100 best examples of American journalism in the 20th century by New York University, the book captures the absurdity of the sprint for power, leading McGovern press secretary Frank Mankiewicz to describe it as “the least accurate but most truthful” account of that campaign.

Thompson reached beyond press releases to coax the chaotic dimensions of history made in moment, embracing the theater and sport of politics. Accordingly, he recalled Spiro Agnew as a “a flat out knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed,” and described Edmund Muskie trying to revive his floundering campaign in Wisconsin as resembling “a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.”

Special venom and gladiatorial respect was given to his fellow political junkie and football fan, Richard Nixon, with Thompson writing, “for years, I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.”

He made reading about politics fun, and that is a civic service because it opens up the democratic process to people who might otherwise not be interested. Unlike many professional observers, he also cared enough to run against the odds himself, campaigning for sheriff of Aspen in 1969 on the self-created Freak Power ticket. His central plank was changing the name of the burgeoning ski resort to “Fat City,” with the impeccable logic that no society ski bunnies would want to brag to their friends over lunch that they’d vacationed in Fat City over the holidays. Thompson shaved his head and promised not to do mescaline while on the job. He narrowly lost.

He remained loved by the community. In his Aspen Daily News obituary, local attorney Gerry Goldstein remembered Hunter as “not only a national treasure, but the conscience of this little village. He kept us all honest.” Neighbors recalled civility punctured by frequent gunfire.

In recent decades, the quality and frequency of his output perhaps inevitably declined, but compilations like “Generation of Swine” and “Songs of the Doomed” illuminated otherwise gray political debate. He could still come out with strong lines, such as “there are people in Washington who will tell you that Ted Kennedy would be president of the United States today if he’d ever learned to drive,” and “recent polls indicate that the only people who feel optimistic about the future are first year law students who expect to get rich by haggling over the ruins… they are probably right.”

The last election found him in fine fighting form, attacking President Bush with an efficiency that over-compensated Democratic strategists couldn’t match. “In four short years he has turned a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war,” Thompson wrote, “If Nixon were running for president today he would be seen as a liberal candidate … I would happily vote for him.”

Like a late-20th-century Pecos Bill, Thompson stories were told among friends amid amazement and laughter even when he was alive. Most cannot be repeated in what aspires to be a family friendly newspaper. We’d often talk about a making a pilgrimage to the Woody Creek Tavern where he was known to hold court, but perhaps held off because I suspected the reality could not live up to the character I already considered a friend and compatriot.

In the day after his death, we can only assume that the weight of trying to keep pace with his legend ultimately wore him down. No one can sustain the expectations of being a 24-hour party person for 67 years, and even brilliantly manic behavior conceals a darkness.

But that was not ultimately what made Thompson an American legend worth remembering – it was the writing, the determination to puncture the pretenses of the powerful with ruthless humor, a loyalty to deeper truth, and a hatred of hypocrisy. Beneath what could be called amoral behavior there was in fact an inflexible moral code. The intensity of his writing unsentimentally highlighted the real stakes of this life.

And while uptight, self-righteous patriots may view him as a disrespectful libertine, his life was an expression of the essential American promise: independence of thought and freedom of action. In that sense, he believed in our country more purely than many of its leaders.

As Hunter himself wrote, “Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the ‘rat race’ is not yet final.” Amen. H.S.T., R.I.P: 1937-2005.