It takes about a month to recover physically from a collapse of that magnitude, and at least a year to shake the memory. The only thing I can think of that compares to it is that long, long moment of indescribably intense sadness that comes just before drowning at sea, those last few seconds on the cusp when the body is still struggling but the mind has given up ... a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it that makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful. Getting rescued at that point is far more painful than drowning: recovery brings back terrifying memories of struggling wildly for breath . . .
This is precisely the feeling I had when Tuck woke me up that morning to say that Ford had just granted Nixon “full, free, and absolute” pardon. I had just written a long, sporadically rational brief, of sorts—explaining how Nixon had backed himself into a corner and why it was inevitable that he would soon be indicted and convicted on a felony “obstruction of justice” charge, and then Ford would pardon him, for a lot of reasons I couldn’t agree with, but which Ford had already stated so firmly that there didn’t seem to be much point in arguing about it. The logic of sentencing Nixon to a year in the same cell with John Dean was hard to argue with on either legal or ethical grounds, but I understood politics well enough by then to realize that Nixon would have to plead guilty to something like the rape/murder of a Republican senator’s son before Gerald Ford would even consider letting him spend any time in jail.
I had accepted this, more or less. Just as I had more or less accepted—after eighteen months of total involvement in the struggle to get rid of Nixon—the idea that Gerald Ford could do just about anything he felt like doing, as long as he left me alone. My interest in national politics withered drastically within hours after Nixon resigned.
After five and a half years of watching a gang of fascist thugs treating the White House and the whole machinery of the federal government like a conquered empire to be used like the spoils of war for any purpose that served either the needs or whims of the victors, the prospect of some harmless, half-bright jock like Jerry Ford running a cautious, caretaker-style government for two or even six years was almost a welcome relief. Not even the ominous sight of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller hovering a heartbeat away from the presidency had much effect on my head.
After more than ten years of civil war with the White House and all the swine who either lived or worked there, I was ready to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any president who acted half human and had enough sense not to walk around in public wearing a swastika armband.
Well ... the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the Bowery—exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of “innocent bystanders” who still don’t know what happened . . .
... And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully incomplete quality about the whole thing. All over Washington tonight is the stench of a massive psychic battle that nobody really won. Richard Nixon has been broken, whipped, and castrated all at once, but even for me there is no real crank or elation in having been a front-row spectator at the final scenes, the Deathwatch, the first time in American history that a president has been chased out of the White House and cast down in the ditch with all the other geeks and common criminals . . .
Looking back on the final few months of his presidency, it is easy to see that Nixon was doomed all along—or at least from that moment when Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox first decided to force a showdown on the “executive privilege” question by sending a U.S. marshal over to the White House with a subpoena for some of the Oval Office tapes.
Nixon naturally defied that subpoena, but not even the crazed firing of Cox, [Elliot] Richardson, and [William] Ruckelshaus could make it go away. And when Jaworski challenged Nixon’s right to defy that subpoena in the U.S. Supreme Court, the wheels of doom began rolling. And from that point on, it was clear to all the principals except Nixon himself that the Unthinkable was suddenly inevitable; it was only a matter of time ... And it was just about then that Richard Nixon began losing his grip on reality.
Within hours after Jaworski and Nixon’s “Watergate lawyer” James St. Clair had argued the case in a special session of the court, I talked to Pat Buchanan and was surprised to hear that Nixon and his wizards in the White House were confident that the verdict would be five to three in their favor. Even Buchanan, who thinks rationally about 79 percent of the time, apparently believed—less than two weeks before the court ruled unanimously against Nixon—that five of the eight justices who would have to rule on that question would see no legal objection to ratifying Nixon’s demented idea that anything discussed in the president’s official office—even a patently criminal conspiracy—was the president’s personal property, if he chose to have it recorded on his personal tape-recording machinery.
The possibility that even some of the justices The Boss himself had appointed to the court might not cheerfully endorse a concept of presidential immunity that mocked both the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta had apparently been considered for a moment and then written off as too farfetched and crazy even to worry about by all of Nixon’s personal strategists.
It is still a little difficult to believe, in fact, that some of the closest advisers to the president of a constitutional democracy in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-four might actually expect the highest court in any constitutional democracy to crank up what is probably the most discredited precedent in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence—the “divine right of kings”—in order to legalize the notion that a president of the United States or any other would-be democracy is above and beyond “the law.”
That Nixon and his personal gestapo actually believed this could happen is a measure of the insanity quotient of the people Nixon took down in the bunker with him when he knew the time had come to get serious.
But even as they raved, you could hear a hollow kind of paranoid uncertainty in their voices, as if they could already feel the ebb tide sucking around their ankles—just as Nixon must have felt it when he walked alone on the beach at San Clemente a few weeks earlier, trudging slowly along in the surf with his pantlegs rolled up while he waited in angry solitude for the results of the Supreme Court vote on his claim of “executive privilege.” That rush of sucking water around his ankles must have almost pulled him out to sea when Ziegler called down from the big dune in front of La Casa Pacifica: “Mister President! Mister President! We just got the news! The vote was unanimous—eight to zero.”
Nixon whoops with delight: he stops in his water-filled tracks and hurls out both arms in the twin-victory sign. “Wonderful!” he shouts. “I knew we’d win it, Ron! Even without that clown Renchburg [Rehnquist]. It wasn’t for nothing that I appointed those other dumb farts to the court!”
Ziegler stares down at him, at this doomed scarecrow of a president down there on the edge of the surf. Why is he grinning? Why does he seem so happy at this terrible news?
“No!” Ziegler shouts. “That is not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all!” He hesitates, choking back a sob. “The vote was eight to zero, Mister President—against you.”
“What?” The scarecrow on the beach goes limp. His arms collapse, his hands flap crazily around the pockets of his wet pants. “Those dirty bastards!” he screams. “We’ll break their balls!”
“Yes sir!” Ziegler shouts. “They’ll wish they’d never been born!” He jerks a notebook out of his inside coat pocket and jots: “Break their balls.”
Ah, poor Ron. I knew him well enough. It was Ziegler, in fact, who tipped me off many months ago that Nixon was finished. This was back in July, in that lull before the storm when the wizards in Washington were beginning to nod glumly at each other whenever somebody suggested that the impeachment drive seemed to be faltering and that
maybe Nixon was bottoming out, that in fact he had already bounced off the bottom and was preparing to take the offensive once again.
These were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon’s Goebbels—ex–White House “communications director” Ken Clawson—was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon’s yearlong slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy, headline-grabbing attacks on “professional Nixon haters” in the press, and “unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress.” At that point in time, most of Nixon’s traditional allies were beginning to hear the death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at night, and even Billy Graham had deserted him. So Clawson, in a stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a mentally retarded rabbi on the payroll and sent them forth to do battle with the forces of Evil.
Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, reveled joyfully in his role as “Nixon’s priest” for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but Father John McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House chief of staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.
But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another holy man—the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flakey presence to anything Clawson aimed him at. Under the banner of something called the “National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency,” he “organized” rallies, dinner parties, and press conferences all over the country. One of his main financial backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.
Only a month ago, the storms of destiny seemed to be subsiding for President Nixon. Among the Knowledgeable in Washington, the conviction was growing that the impeachment campaign against him had spent its moment . . . [But] it is now clear that the Knowledgeable were wrong, that they mistook a break in the clouds for lasting sunshine . . .
—R. W. Apple Jr., New York Times, July 28, 1974
In fact, however, Nixon was already doomed by the time the Rodino committee got around to voting. The unanimous Supreme Court vote on the question of “executive privilege” with regard to the sixty-four disputed tapes was the beginning of the end. Nixon had known all along that the release of those tapes would finish him—but he had consistently lied about their contents: not only to the press and the public, but also to his wife and his daughters and all the hard-core loyalists on his staff. He lied about the tapes to Barry Goldwater and Jerry Ford, to Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, to Al Haig and Pat Buchanan, and even to his own attorney, James St. Clair—who was stupid enough, like the others, to have believed him when he swore that the tapes he refused to let anybody listen to would finally prove his innocence.
At that point, almost every journalist in Washington assigned to the Nixon Deathwatch had been averaging about two hours’ sleep a night since the beginning of summer. Many were weak and confused, succumbing to drink or drugs whenever possible. Others seemed to hover from day to day on the brink of terminal fatigue. Radio and TV reporters in the White House pressroom were reduced to tearing articles out of the nearest newspaper and reading them verbatim straight over the air—while the newspaper and magazine people would tape the live broadcasts and then transcribe them word for word under their own bylines. By the end of July, the prospect of having to cover an impeachment debate in the House and then a trial in the Senate for three or four months without relief was almost unbearable. As August began and Nixon still showed no signs of giving up, there was more and more talk of “the suicide option.”
Sometime around dawn on the Friday morning of Richard Milhous Nixon’s last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks and a red rain parka, laced my head with some gray Argentine snuff, and took an elevator down to the big pool below my window in the National Affairs Suite at the Washington Hilton. It was still raining, so I carried my portable TV set, a notebook, and four bottles of Bass ale in a waterproof canvas bag.
The lower lobby was empty, except for the night watchman—a meaty black gentleman whose main duty was to keep people like me out of the pool at night, but we had long since come to a friendly understanding on this subject. It was against the rules to swim when the pool was closed, but there was no rule to prevent a Doctor of Divinity from going out there to meditate on the end of the diving board.
“Mornin’, Doc,” said the watchman. “Up a little early, ain’t you? Especially on a nasty day like this.”
“Nasty?” I replied. “What are you—some kind of goddamn Uncle Tom Republican? Don’t you know who’s leaving town today?”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cracked into a grin. “You’re right, by God! I almost forgot. We finally got rid of that man, didn’t we, Doc?” He nodded happily. “Yes sir, we finally got rid of him.”
I reached into my bag and opened two Bass ales. “This is a time for celebration,” I said, handing him one of the bottles. I held mine out in front of me: “To Richard Nixon,” I said. “May he choke on the money he stole.”
The watchman glanced furtively over his shoulder before lifting his ale for the toast. The clink of the two bottles coming together echoed briefly in the vast, deserted lobby.
“See you later,” I said. “I have to meditate for a while, then hustle down to the White House to make sure he really leaves. I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes.”
The flat surface of the pool was pocked with millions of tiny raindrops beating steadily down on the water. There was a chain lock on the gate, so I climbed over the fence and walked down to the deep end, where I located a dry spot under a tree near the diving board. The CBS Morning News would be on in about twenty minutes; I turned on the TV set, adjusted the aerial, and turned the screen so I could see it from the pool about twenty feet away. It was a system I’d worked out last summer at the Senate Watergate hearings: after every two laps, I could look over the edge of the pool and check the screen to see if Hughes Rudd’s face had appeared yet. When it did, I would climb out of the water and lie down on the grass in front of the set—turn up the sound, light a cigarette, open a fresh Bass ale, and take notes while I watched the tiny screen for a general outline of whatever action Sam Ervin’s Roman circus might be expected to generate that day.
I stayed out there by the pool for almost two hours, sliding into the water to swim a few laps and then back out to stretch out on the grass to make a note now and then on the news. Not much was happening, except for a few kinky interviews down by the White House gate with people who claimed to have been on the Deathwatch for three days and nights without sleeping ... But very few of them could even begin to explain why they were doing it. At least half the crowd around the White House during those last few days looked like people who spend every weekend prowling the demolition derby circuit.
The only other action on the news that Friday morning was an occasional rerun of Nixon’s official resignation speech from the night before. I had watched it with Craig Vetter in the Watergate bar. It seemed like a good place to be on that night, because I had also been there on the night of June 17, 1972—while the Watergate burglary was happening five floors above my head.
But after I’d watched Nixon’s speech for the third time, a strange feeling of nervousness began working
on me, and I decided to get out of town as soon as possible. The movie was over—or at least it would be over in two or three hours. Nixon was leaving at ten o’clock, and Ford would be sworn in at noon. I wanted to be there on the White House lawn when Nixon was lifted off. That would be the end of my movie.
It was still raining when I left, and the pool was still empty. I put the TV set back in the canvas bag and climbed over the gate by the lifeguard shack. Then I stopped and looked back for a moment, knowing I would never come back to this place, and if I did it would not be the same. The pool would be the same, and it would be easy enough to pick up a case of Bass ale or a battery TV set ... And I could even come down here on rainy summer mornings and watch the morning news . . .
No ... even with the pool and the ale and the grass and the portable TV set, the morning news will not be the same without the foul spectre of Richard Nixon glaring out of the tube. But the war is over now, and he lost ... Gone but not forgotten, missed but not mourned; we will not see another one like him for quite a while. He was dishonest to a fault, the truth was not in him, and if it can be said that he resembled any other living animal in this world, it could only have been the hyena.
I took a cab down to the White House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the guardhouse window. The cop inside glanced at my card, then looked up—fixing me with a heavy-lidded Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer to open the gate. The pressroom in the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden, where a big olive-drab helicopter was perched on the lawn, about one hundred feet out from the stairs. The rain had stopped, and a long red carpet was laid out on the wet grass from the White House door to the helicopter. I eased through the crowd of photographers and walked out, looking back at the White House, where Nixon was giving his final address to a shocked crowd of White House staffers. I examined the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I heard a loud rumbling behind me; I turned around just in time to see Richard and Pat coming toward me, trailing their daughters and followed closely by Gerald Ford and Betty. Their faces were grim and they were walking very slowly; Nixon had a glazed smile on his face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden Indian full of Thorazine.