Phase Three, campaign financing, is the one both the White House and the Senate would prefer to avoid—and, given this mutual distaste for exposing the public to the realities of campaign financing, this is the phase of the Watergate hearings most likely to be cut from the schedule. “Jesus Christ,” said one Ervin committee investigator, “we’ll have Fortune’s 500 in that chair, and every one of those bastards will take at least one congressman or senator down with him.”
The axis of Nixon’s new and perhaps final strategy began to surface with the first mention of “the tapes,” and it has developed with the inevitability of either desperation or inspired strategy ever since. The key question is whether the “constitutional crisis” Nixon seems determined to bring down on himself by forcing the Tape Issue all the way to the Supreme Court is a crisis that was genuinely forced on him by accident—or whether it is a masterpiece of legal cynicism that bubbled up at some midnight hour many weeks ago from the depths of attorney John Wilson’s legendary legal mind.
The conventional press wisdom—backed up by what would normally be considered “good evidence,” or at least reliable leaks from the Ervin committee—holds that the existence of the presidential tapes & the fact that Nixon has been systematically bugging every conversation he’s ever had with anybody, in any of his offices, ever since he got elected, was a secret that was only unearthed by luck, shrewdness, and high-powered sleuth-work. According to unofficial but consistently reliable sources, Alex Butterfield—current head of the Federal Aviation Administration and former “chief for internal security” at the White House—was privately interviewed “more or less on a hunch” by Ervin committee investigators, and during the course of this interview talked himself into such an untenable position while trying to explain the verbatim-accuracy of some Oval Office logs that he finally caved in and spilled the whole story about Nixon’s taping apparatus.
According to one of the investigators who conducted the private interview—in the ground-floor bowels of the Ervin committee’s “boiler room” in the Old Senate Office Building—Butterfield couldn’t explain why the logs of Nixon’s conversations in his own office were so precise that they included pauses, digressions, half sentences, and even personal speech patterns.
“When I finally asked him if maybe these logs had been transcribed from tapes,” said the investigator, “he sort of slumped back in his chair and said, ‘I wish you hadn’t asked me that.’ And then he told us the whole thing.”
I was sitting in the hearing room about twenty-four hours later when word began buzzing around the press tables, just before lunch, that the next person to face the committee would be an unscheduled “mystery witness”—instead of Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who was officially scheduled to appear when Ervin and his cohorts came back from lunch. I walked across the street to the air-conditioned bar in the Capitol Hill Hotel and heard some of the press people speculating about a man named Alex Butterfield who was going to tell the committee that Nixon had made tape recordings of all the disputed conversations referred to in John Dean’s testimony.
“Well, that should just about wrap it up,” somebody said.
“Bullshit,” said another voice. “He’ll burn those tapes before he gives them to Ervin.”
“Why?”
“Shit, if he thought they’d be any good to him, the committee would have had them a long time ago. [J. Fred] Buzhardt would have turned them over personally to Sam Dash five minutes after Dean finished reading his opening statement.”
The conversation rambled on, punctuated by the arrival of beer and sandwiches. The only other comment that sticks in my head from that lunch break before Butterfield came on was a rumor that the “mystery witness” had been “dug up” by staffers on the Republican side of the Ervin committee. It hardly seemed worth wondering about at the time . . . but that was before either Butterfield or Haldeman had testified about the tapes, and also before Nixon’s carefully considered announcement that he couldn’t release the tapes to anybody—despite subpoenas from both the Ervin committee and the special prosecutor—for fear of undermining the whole foundation of American government.
The president has made it absolutely clear that he has no intention of releasing those tapes—not even to an elite panel of judges who would hear them in strict privacy to determine their relevance—unless the U.S. Supreme Court compels him to do so, with a “definitive order.”
The reelection of Mr. Nixon, followed so quickly by the Watergate revelations, has compelled the country to re-examine the reality of our electoral process . . .
The unraveling of the whole White House tangle of involvement has come about largely by a series of fortuitous events, many of them unlikely in a different political context. Without these events, the cover-up might have continued indefinitely, even if a Democratic administration vigorously pursued the truth . . .
In the wake of Watergate may come more honest and thorough campaign reform than in the aftermath of a successful presidential campaign which stood for such reform. I suspect that after viewing the abuses of the past, voters in the future will insist on full and open debate between the candidates and on frequent, no-holds-barred press conferences for all candidates, and especially the President.
And I suspect the Congress will respond to the fact that Watergate happened with legislation to assure that Watergate never happens again. Today the prospects for further restrictions on private campaign financing, full disclosure of the personal finances of the candidates, and public finance of all federal campaigns seem to me better than ever—and even better than if a new Democratic administration had urged such steps in early 1973. We did urge them in 1972, but it took the Nixon landslide and the Watergate exposé to make the point.
I believe there were great gains that came from the pain of defeat in 1972. We proved a campaign could be honestly financed. We reaffirmed that a campaign could be open in its conduct and decent in its motivation. We made the Democratic party a place for people as well as politicians. And perhaps in losing we gained the greatest victory of all—that Americans now perceive, far better than a new President could have persuaded them, what is precious about our principles and what we must do to preserve them. The nation now sees itself through the prism of Watergate and the Nixon landslide; at last, perhaps, we see through a glass clearly.
Because of all this, it is possible that by 1976, the 200th anniversary of America’s birth, there will be a true rebirth of patriotism; that we will not only know our ideals but live them; that democracy may once again become a conviction we keep and not just a description we apply to ourselves. And if the McGovern campaign advanced that hope, even in defeat, then, as I said on election night last November, “Every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort . . . was worth the entire sacrifice.”
—George McGovern in the Washington Post, August 12, 1973
Jesus . . . Sunday morning in Woody Creek, and here’s McGovern on the minitube beside my typewriter, looking and talking almost exactly like he was in those speedy weeks between the Wisconsin and Ohio primaries, when his star was rising so fast that he could barely hang onto it. The sense of déjà vu is almost frightening: here is McGovern speaking sharply against the system, once again, in response to questions from CBS’s Connie Chung and Marty Nolan from the Boston Globe, two of the most ever-present reporters on the ’72 campaign trail . . . and McGovern, brought back from the dead by a political miracle of sorts, is hitting the first gong of doom for the man who made him a landslide loser nine months ago: “When that [judicial] process is complete and the Supreme Court rules that the president must turn over the tapes—and he refuses to do so—I think the Congress will have no recourse but to seriously consider impeachment.”
Cazart! The fat is approaching the fire—very slowly, and in very cautious hands, but there is no ignoring the general drift of things. Sometime between now and the end of 1973, Richard Nixon may have to bite that bullet he’s talked about for so long
. Seven is a lucky number for gamblers, but not for fixers, and Nixon’s seventh crisis is beginning to put his first six in very deep shade. Even the most conservative betting in Washington these days has Nixon either resigning or being impeached by the autumn of ’74—if not for reasons directly connected to the “Watergate scandal,” then because of his inability to explain how he paid for his beach-mansion at San Clemente, or why Vice President Agnew—along with most of Nixon’s original White House command staff—is under indictment for felonies ranging from extortion and perjury to burglary and obstruction of justice.
Another good bet in Washington—running at odds between two and three to one, these days—is that Nixon will crack both physically and mentally under all this pressure, and develop a serious psychosomatic illness of some kind: maybe another bad case of pneumonia.
This is not so wild a vision as it might sound—not even in the context of my own known taste for fantasy and savage bias in politics. Richard Nixon, a career politician who has rarely failed to crack under genuine pressure, is under more pressure now than most of us will ever understand. His whole life is turning to shit, just as he reached the pinnacle . . . and every once in a while, caving in to a weakness that blooms in the cool, thinking hours around dawn, I have to admit that I feel a touch of irrational sympathy for the bastard. Not as The President: a broken little bully who would sacrifice us all to save himself—if he still had the choice—but the same kind of sympathy I might feel, momentarily, for a vicious cheap-shot linebacker whose long career comes to a sudden end one Sunday afternoon when some rookie flanker shatters both his knees with a savage crackback block.
Cheap-shot artists don’t last very long in pro football. To cripple another person intentionally is to violate the same kind of code as the legendary “honor among thieves.”
More linebackers than thieves believe this, but when it comes to politics—to a twenty-eight-year career of cheap shots, lies, and thievery—there is no man in America who should understand what is happening to him now better than Richard Milhous Nixon. He is a living monument to the old army rule that says: “The only real crime is getting caught.”
This is not the first time Richard Nixon has been caught. After his failed campaign for the governorship of California in 1962 he was formally convicted—along with H. R. Haldeman, Maurice Stans, Murray Chotiner, Herb Klein, and Herb Kalmbach for almost exactly the same kind of crudely illegal campaign tactics that he stands accused of today.
But this time, in the language of the sergeants who keep military tradition alive, “he got caught every which way” . . . and “his ass went into the blades.”
Not many people have ever written in the English language better than a Polack with a twisted sense of humor who called himself Joseph Conrad. And if he were with us today, I think he’d be getting a fine boot out of this Watergate story. Mr. Kurtz, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, did his thing.
Mr. Nixon also did his thing.
And now, just as surely as Kurtz, “Mistah Nixon, he dead.”
Letter from JSW to HST
March 7, 1973
Hunter:
1) Re-edit “The End of the Campaign Trail For Now” plus a 250 word introduction immediately. Due no later than March 12.
2) “Dr. Thompson’s first-hand guide to motorcycles.” Due April 23. (Remember, you must immediately send me a marked-up copy of one or two motorcycle magazines so I can set up all the demonstrations for you in L.A. right after the Yorty piece.)
3) “Sam Yorty vs The Powers of Evil” (first look at the L.A. Mayor race) Due April 9 (issue 134, expect 2500–4000 words—a column).
4) The L.A. Mayors Race—feature article due June 4 (138).
5) The N.Y. Mayors Race (long column or feature article). Due June 18 (139).
In addition I expect you to be looking into two other pieces for feature treatment:
1) The Rev. Ike
2) Professional Wrestling
Further, I would like you to let me know when you think you would like to do a long piece (or series) on Texas so I can begin to work out a schedule with Ralph Steadman. I would like the Texas article to be one or two of the leading features this fall. Please confirm.
Jann
Editor’s note: None of these assignments came to fruition.
Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl
February 28, 1974
. . . and whosoever was not found written into the book of life was cast into the lake of fire . . .
—Revelations 20:15
This was the theme of the sermon I delivered off the twentieth-floor balcony of the Hyatt Regency in Houston on the morning of Super Bowl VIII. It was just before dawn, as I recall, when the urge to speak came on me. Earlier that day I had found—on the tile floor of the men’s room on the hotel mezzanine—a religious comic book titled A Demon’s Nightmare, and it was from the text of this sleazy tract that I chose the words of my sermon.
The Houston Hyatt Regency—like others designed by architect John Portman in Atlanta and San Francisco—is a stack of one thousand rooms, built around a vast lobby at least thirty stories high, with a revolving “spindletop” bar on the roof. The whole center of the building is a tower of acoustical space. You can walk out of any room and look over the indoor balcony (twenty floors down, in my case) at the palm-shrouded, wood and naugahyde maze of the bar/lounge on the lobby floor.
Closing time in Houston is two o’clock. There are after-hours bars, but the Hyatt Regency is not one of them. So—when I was seized by the urge to deliver my sermon at dawn—there were only about twenty ant-sized people moving around in the lobby far below.
Earlier, before the bar closed, the whole ground floor had been jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion), and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd—as casually as possible—with an eye to picking up a last-minute sucker bet from some poor bastard half mad on booze and willing to put some money, preferably four or five big ones, on “his boys.”
The spread, in Houston, was Miami by 6, but by midnight on Saturday almost every one of the two thousand or so drunks in the lobby of the Regency—official headquarters and media vortex for this eighth annual Super Bowl—was absolutely sure about what was going to happen when the deal went down on Sunday, about two miles east of the hotel on the fog-soaked artificial turf of Rice University Stadium.
Ah . . . but wait! Why are we talking about gamblers here? Or thousands of hookers and drunken sportswriters jammed together in a seething mob in the lobby of a Houston hotel?
And what kind of sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday?
I had not planned a sermon for that morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter ... But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it. Probably it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon, and the National Football League: the three had long since become inseparable in my mind, a sort of unholy trinity that had caused me more trouble and personal anguish in the past few months than Ron Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey, and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail.
Or perhaps it had something to do with my admittedly deep-seated need to have public revenge on Al Davis, general manager of the Oakland Raiders ... Or maybe an overweening desire to confess that I had been wrong, from the start, to have ever agreed with Richard Nixon about anything, and especially pro football.
In any case, it was apparently something I’d been cranking myself up to deliver for quite a while ... and, for reasons I still can’t be sure of, the eruption finally occurred on the dawn of Super Sunday.
I howled at the top of my lungs for almost thirty minutes, raving and screeching about all those who would soon
be cast into the lake of fire for a variety of low crimes, demeanors, and general ugliness that amounted to a sweeping indictment of almost everybody in the hotel at that hour.
Most of them were asleep when I began speaking, but as a Doctor of Divinity and an ordained minister in the Church of the New Truth, I knew in my heart that I was merely a vessel—a tool, as it were—of some higher and more powerful voice.
For eight long and degrading days I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast ... and finally, on Sunday morning about six hours before the opening kickoff, I was racked to the point of hysteria by a hellish interior conflict.
I was sitting by myself in the room, watching the wind & weather clocks on the TV set, when I felt a sudden and extremely powerful movement at the base of my spine. Mother of Sweating Jesus! I thought. What is it—a leech? Are there leeches in this goddamn hotel, along with everything else? I jumped off the bed and began clawing at the small of my back with both hands. The thing felt huge, maybe eight or nine pounds, moving slowly up my spine toward the base of my neck.
I’d been wondering, all week, why I was feeling so low and out of sorts ... but it never occurred to me that a giant leech had been sucking blood out of the base of my spine all that time; and now the goddamn thing was moving up toward the base of my brain, going straight for the medulla ... and as a professional sportswriter I knew that if the bugger ever reached my medulla I was done for.
It was at this point that serious conflict set in, because I realized—given the nature of what was coming up my spine and the drastic effect I knew it would have, very soon, on my sense of journalistic responsibility—that I would have to do two things immediately: first, deliver the sermon that had been brewing in my brain all week long, and then rush back into the room and write my lead for the Super Bowl story . . .