His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter ... Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.
Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms—but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms went up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back; and a marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.
I was so close that the noise hurt my ears. The rotor blades were invisible now, but the wind was getting heavier; I could feel it pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets. For an instant I thought I could see Richard Nixon’s face pressed up to the window. Was he smiling? Was it Nixon? I couldn’t be sure. And now it made no difference.
The wind blast from the rotors was blowing people off balance now; photographers were clutching their equipment against their bodies, and Gerald Ford was leading his wife back toward the White House with a stony scowl on his face.
I was still very close to the helicopter, watching the tires. As the beast began rising, the tires became suddenly fat; there was no more weight on them ... The helicopter went straight up and hovered for a moment, then swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then angled up into the fog. Richard Nixon was gone.
The end came so suddenly and with so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that the scumbag had been passed to what will have to pose for now as another generation. The main reaction to Richard Nixon’s passing—especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years—was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, postcoital sort of depression that still endures.
Within hours after Nixon’s departure, every bar in downtown Washington normally frequented by reporters was a sinkhole of gloom. Several hours after Gerald Ford was sworn in, I found ex-Kennedy speechwriter Dick Goodwin in a bar not far from the Rolling Stone office across the street from the White House. He was slumped in a booth by himself, staring blankly into his drink like a man who had just had his teeth ripped out by a savage bill collector.
“I feel totally drained,” he said. “It’s like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest-running continuous entertainment this city ever had.” He waved his arm at the waitress for another drink. “It’s the end of an era. Now I know how all those rock freaks felt when they heard the Beatles were breaking up.”
I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come from the White House pressroom, where a smoglike sense of funk—or “smunk,” as somebody over there might describe it—had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won—or at least the Bad Guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing.
We all knew it was coming—the press, the Congress, the “public,” all the backstage handlers in Washington, and even Nixon’s own henchmen—but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect ... In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.
Like the black teenage burglars who are terrorizing chic Georgetown these days, Nixon conquered so easily that he soon lost any fear of being caught. Washington police have noted a strange pattern involving burglaries in Georgetown and other posh neighborhoods in the white ghetto of the city’s northwest sector: a home that has been robbed once is far more likely to be hit again than a home that has never been hit at all. Once they spot an easy mark, the burglars get lazy and prefer to go back for seconds and even thirds, rather than challenge a new target.
The police seem surprised at this pattern, but, in fact, it’s fairly traditional among amateurs—or at least among the type I used to hang around with. About fifteen years ago, when I was into that kind of thing, I drifted into Lexington, Kentucky, one evening with two friends who shared my tastes; we moved into an apartment across the street from a gas station which we broke into and robbed on three consecutive nights.
On the morning after the first hit, we stood transfixed at the apartment window, drinking beer and watching the local police “investigating” the robbery ... And I remember thinking, now that poor fool over there has probably never been hit before, and what he’s thinking now is that his odds of being hit again anytime soon are almost off the board. Hell, how many gas stations have ever been robbed two nights in a row?
So we robbed it again that night, and the next morning we stood at the window drinking beer and watched all manner of hell break loose between the station owner and the cops around the gas pumps across the street. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the proprietor was waving his arms crazily and screaming at the cops, as if he suspected them of doing it.
Christ, this is wonderful, I thought. If we hit the bugger again tonight he’ll go stark raving mad tomorrow morning when the cops show up ... which was true: on the next morning, after three consecutive robberies, the parking lot of that gas station was like a war zone, but this time the cops showed up with reinforcements. In addition to the two police cruisers, the lot filled up with chromeless, dust-covered Fords and crew-cut men wearing baggy brown suits and shoes with gum-rubber soles. While some of them spoke earnestly with the proprietor, others dusted the doorknobs, window latches, and the cash register for fingerprints.
It was hard to know, from our window across the street, if we were watching the FBI, local detectives, or insurance agency investigators at work ... But in any case, I figured they’d have the whole station ringed with armed guards for the next few nights, so we decided to leave well enough alone.
About six in the evening, however, we stopped there and had the tank filled up with ethyl. There were about six bony-faced men hanging around the office, killing the time until dark by studying road maps and tire-pressure charts. They paid no attention to us until I tried to put a dime in the Coke machine.
“It ain’t workin’,” one of them said. He shuffled over and pulled the whole front of the machine open, like a broken refrigerator, and lifted a Coke bottle out of the circular rack. I gave him the dime and he dropped it into his pocket.
“What’s wrong with the machine?” I asked, remembering how hard it had been to rip the bastard open with a crowbar about twelve hours earlier to reach the money box.
“No concern of yours,” he muttered, lighting up a Marvel and staring out at the pump where the attendant was making change for a $10 bill after cleaning our windshield and checking the oil. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s some folks gonna be a lot worse off than that there machine before this night’s out tonight.” He nodded. “This time we’re ready for them sonsabitches.”
And they were. I noticed a double-barreled shotgun standing in a corner by the rack full of oil cans. Two big coon hounds were asleep on the greasy linoleum floor, with their collar chains looped around the base of the chewing gum machine. I felt a quick flash of greed as I eyed the glass bulb filled with all those red, white, blue, and green gum balls. We had looted the place of almost everything else, and I felt a pang of regret at having to leave the gum machine untouched: all those pennies just sitting there with nobody to fondle them . . .
But in
retrospect, I think that moment was the beginning of wisdom for me. We had pushed our luck far enough with that place, and the world was full of colorful gum-ball machines. There was a weird and menacing edge in the man’s voice that it took me a long time to forget.
We drove downtown and cruised around drinking warm beer for a while, then we robbed a crowded liquor store on Main Street by starting a fight with the clerks and then cleaning out the cash register while they struggled to defend themselves.
We got less than $200 out of that one, as I recall—about the same as we’d picked up from three hits on the gas station—and on the way out of town I remember thinking that maybe I could do something a little better in this life than robbing gas stations and liquor stores. After taking enough crazy risks to put all three of us in prison for at least five years, we had about $135 apiece to show for it, and about half of that was already spent on gas, food, beer, and hiring winos to buy whiskey for us because we were too young to get served, and the winos were charging double for anything they bought for us.
That weekend crime spree in Lexington was my last haul, as they say; I even gave up shoplifting, which altered my lifestyle pretty severely for a while, because it had taken me several years to master the kind of skill and mental attitude it takes to walk into a jewelry store and come out with six watches, or in the front door of a tavern and hassle the bartender with a false ID long enough to let a friend slip out the back door with a case of Old Forester ... But when I quit that gig, I quit it completely; and after fifteen years on the wagon, my skills are so hopelessly atrophied that now I can’t even steal a newspaper from an open rack on the street.
Ah ... mother of jabbering god, how in the hell did I get off on that tangent about teenage street crime? This is supposed to be a deep and serious political essay about Richard Nixon . . .
Although maybe that wasn’t such a tangent after all. The original point, I think, had to do with the street-punk mentality that caused Nixon to push his luck so far that it was finally almost impossible not to get himself busted. For a while, he had the luck and arrogance of a half-smart amateur. From their base in the White House, Nixon and the L.A. account execs he brought with him treated the old-line Washington power structure with the same kind of contempt that the young burglars casing Georgetown seem to have for the forts of the rich and powerful—or that I had for that poor bastard who owned the gas station in Lexington.
This is a very hard thing for professional cops, journalists, or investigators to cope with. Like doctors and lawyers, most of the best minds in police work have been trained since puberty to think in terms of patterns and precedents: anything original tends to have the same kind of effect on their investigative machinery as a casually mutilated punch card fed into a computer. The immediate result is chaos and false conclusions ... But both cops and computers are programmed to know when they’ve been jammed by a wild card or a joker, and in both cases there are usually enough competent technicians standing by to locate the problem and get the machinery working again pretty quickly.
Right ... and now we have gone off on a dangerous compound tangent. And it has mushroomed into something unmanageable ... But before we zoom off in whatever direction might come next, it would be unfair not to mention that the Times was the first paper to break the Pentagon Papers story, a command decision that forced Nixon and his would-be enforcers to come out in the open with fangs bared, snarling threats to have everybody connected with the publication of the Pentagon Papers either lashed into jail or subpoenaed into so many courtrooms that all their minds would snap before they finally wound up in the poorhouse.
As it turned out, however, the Times management strapped on its collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one—a surprisingly tough stance that was almost instantly backed up by influential papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ... And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky, caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried loose from his kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the “radiclibs” and “liberal elitists” of the “eastern media establishment”—the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Jesus! Those were the days, eh?
The headline in today’s Washington Post says Richard Nixon is “lonely and depressed” down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. Jesus! How much more of this cheapjack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he’s lonely and depressed out there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.
But, no—he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret Service agents and still communicating with the outside world through an otherwise unemployable $40,000-a-year mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler ... and still tantalizing the national press with the same kind of shrewdly programmed leaks that served him so well in the last months of his doomed presidency . . .
“He’s terribly depressed, with much to be depressed about,” says a friend. “Anyone would be depressed in his situation. I don’t mean he’s going off the deep end. I just mean that everything happened to him, seemingly all at once, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.”
Well ... shucks. I’d be tempted to put my mind to the task of helping the poor bastard figure out “what to do about” this cruel nutcracker that he somehow stumbled into ... but I have a powerful suspicion that probably that gang of mean niggers in Washington has already solved Nixon’s problem for him. They are going to indict the bastard and try to put him on trial.
Nixon knows this. He is not the kind of lawyer you’d want to hire for anything serious, but the reality of his situation vis-à-vis the Watergate grand jury is so bleak that even he has to grasp it ... and this is the reason, I think, for the more or less daily front-page comments on his half-mad and pathetically crippled mental condition. He has devised another one of his famous fourth-down game breakers—the same kind of three-fisted brainstorm that climaxed with his decision to defuse the whole impeachment process by releasing his own version of “the tapes,” or the time he figured out how to put a quick lid on the Watergate burglary investigation by blaming the whole thing on John Dean.
According to one Washington topsider, widely respected as an unimpeachable source and a shrewd judge of presidential character: “Dick Nixon is in a league all by himself when you’re talking about style and grace under pressure. His instincts when the crunch comes are absolutely amazing.”
Nobody will argue with that—although his strategy since leaving the White House has been marked by an unnatural focus on subtlety. The savage warrior of old now confronts us in the guise of a pitiful, frightened old pol—a whipped and broken man, totally at the mercy of his enemies and baffled by the firestorm of disasters that drove him out of the White House.
Which may even be partially true: He will probably go to his grave believing he was not really guilty of anything except underestimating the power of his enemies ... But the fact remains that Jaworski will very likely break the news of Nixon’s formal indictment before this article appears on the newsstands, and when that happens there will be only one man in the country with the power to arbitrarily short-circuit the legal machinery that in theory could land Richard Nixon in the same cell block with John Dean.
That man is Gerald Ford, but he will have a hard time justifying a blanket presidential pardon for an admitted felon without at least the appearance of a groundswell of public sympathy to back him up.
It will be a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign in the classic Nixon tradition. Ziegler will hold daily press briefings and read finely crafted descriptions of the former president’s pitiful condition from the typewriter of Ray Price, Nixon’s former chief speechwriter at th
e White House. Both Price and Pat Buchanan, the left and right forks of Nixon’s tongue ever since he decided to make his move on the White House back in 1965, showed up at the San Clemente fortress in early September, both insisting they had just come out to say hello and “check up on the old man.” As it happened, however, they both appeared about the same time rumors began surfacing in New York about a $2 million advance that Nixon had been offered for his memoirs.
Neither Price nor Buchanan claimed to know anything definite about the book offer, but in New York Spiro Agnew’s literary agent was telling everybody who asked that the Nixon deal could be closed momentarily for at least $2 million, and maybe more.
That is a hell of a lot of money for anybody’s memoirs—even people who might reasonably be expected to tell the truth. But even a ridiculously fraudulent version of his five and a half wretched years in the White House and his own twisted view of the scandal that finished him off would be an automatic best seller if the book-buying public could be conned somehow into believing Richard Nixon was actually the author.