Compounding the problem was the presence in Washington, for the first time, of our artist Ralph Steadman -- an extremely heavy drinker with little or no regard for either protocol or normal social amenities. On Steadman's first visit to the Watergate Hearing Room he was ejected by the Capitol Police after spilling beer on a TV monitor and knocking Sam Ervin off his feet while attempting to seize a microphone to make a statement about "the rottenness of American politics." It was only the timely intervention of New York Post correspondent John Lang that kept Steadman from being permanently barred from the Hearing Room.
In any case, the bulk of what follows appears exactly as Dr. Thompson wrote it in his notebooks. Given the realities of our constant deadline pressure, there was no other way to get this section into print.
The Notebooks
"Jesus, this Watergate thing is unbelievable. It's terrible, like finding out your wife is running around but you don't want to hear about it."
-- Remark of a fat man from Nashville sharing a taxi with Ralph Steadman.
Tuesday morning 6/26/73 8:13 AM in the Rockies. . .
Bright sun on the grass outside my windows behind this junk TV set and long white snowflelds, still unmelted, on the peaks across the valley. Every two or three minutes the doleful screech of a half-wild peacock rattles the windows. The bastard is strutting around on the roof, shattering the morning calm with his senseless cries.
His noise is a bad burden on Sandy's nerves. "God damn it!" she mutters. "We have to get him a hen!"
"Fuck him; we got him a hen -- and she ran off and got herself killed by coyotes. What the crazy bastard needs now is a bullet through the vocal cords. He's beginning to sound like Herman Talmadge."
"Talmadge?"
"Watch what's happening, goddamnit! Here's another true Son of the South. First it was Thompson. . . now Talmadge. . . and then we'll get that half-wit pimp from Florida."
"Gurney?"
I nodded, staring fixedly at the big blueish eye of the permanently malfunctioned "color TV" set that I hauled back from Washington last summer, when I finally escaped from the place. . . But now I was using it almost feverishly, day after day, to watch what was happening in Washington.
The Watergate Hearings -- my daily fix, on TV. Thousands of people from all over the country are writing the networks to demand that this goddamn tedious nightmare be jerked off the air so they can get back to their favorite soap operas: As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, The Price Is Right and What Next for Weird Betty? They are bored by the spectacle of the Watergate hearings. The plot is confusing, they say; the characters are dull, and the dialogue is repulsive.
The President of the United States would never act that way -- at least not during baseball season. Like Nixon's new White House chief of staff, Melvin Laird, said shortly before his appointment: "If the President turns out to be guilty, I don't want to hear about it."
This is the other end of the attitude-spectrum from the comment I heard, last week, from a man in Denver: "I've been waiting a long time for this," he said. "Maybe not as long as Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan Douglas. . . and I never really thought it would happen, to tell you the truth." He flashed me a humorless smile and turned back to his TV set. "But it is, by god! And it's almost too good to be true."
My problem -- journalistically, at least -- has its roots in the fact that I agree with just about everything that laughing, vengeful bastard said that day. We didn't talk much. There was no need for it. Everything Richard Milhous Nixon ever stood for was going up in smoke right in front of our eyes. And anybody who could understand and appreciate that, I felt, didn't need many words to communicate. At least not with me.
(The question is: what did he stand for, and what next for that? Agnew? Reagan? Rockefeller? Even Percy? Nixon was finally "successful" for the same reason he was finally brought low. He kept pushing, pushing, pushing -- and inevitably he pushed too far.)
Noon -- Tuesday, June 26th
The TV set is out on the porch now -- a move that involved much cursing and staggering.
Weicker has the mike -- mono a mono on Dean -- and after 13 minutes of apparently aimless blathering he comes off no better than Talmadge. Weicker seemed oddly cautious -- a trifle obtuse, perhaps.
What are the connections? Weicker is a personal friend of Pat Gray's. He is also the only member of the Select Committee with after-hours personal access to John Dean.
"-- Live from Senate Caucus Room --"
-- flash on CBS screen
Live? Rehearsed? In any case, Dean is livelier than most -- not only because of what he has to say, but because he -- unlike the other witnesses -- refused to say it first in executive session to Committee staffers before going on TV.
Strange -- Dean's obvious credibility comes not from his long-awaited impact (or lack of it) on the American public, but from his obvious ability to deal with the seven Senatorial Inquisitors. They seem awed.
Dean got his edge, early on, with a mocking lash at the integrity of Minority Counsel Fred Thompson -- and the others fell meekly in line. Dean radiates a certain very narrow kind of authority -- nothing personal, but the kind of nasal blank-hearted authority you feel in the presence of the taxman or a very polite FBI agent.
Only Baker remains. His credibility took a bad beating yesterday. Dean ran straight at him, startling the TV audience with constant references to Baker's personal dealings with "the White House," prior to the hearings. There was no need to mention that Baker is the son-in-law of that late and only half-lamented "Solon" from the Great State of Illinois, Sen. Everett Dirksen.
Dean is clearly a shrewd executive. He will have no trouble getting a good job when he gets out of prison.
Now Montoya -- the flaccid Mex-Am from New Mexico. No problem here for John Dean. . . Suddenly Montoya hits Dean head on with Nixon's bogus quote about Dean's investigation clearing all members of White House staff. Dean calmly shrugs it off as a lie -- "I never made any investigation."
-- Montoya continues with entire list of prior Nixon statements.
Dean: "In totality, there are less than accurate statements in that. . . ah. . . those statements."
Montoya is after Nixon's head! Is this the first sign? Over the hump for Tricky Dick?
*** Recall lingering memory of Miami Beach plainclothes cop, resting in armory behind Convention Center on night of Nixon's renomination -- ("You tell 'em, Tricky Dick.") -- watching Nixon's speech on TV. . . with tear gas fumes all around us and demonstrators gagging outside.
4:20 EDT
As usual, the pace picks up at the end. These buggers should be forced to keep at it for 15 or 16 straight hours -- heavy doses of speed, pots of coffee, Wild Turkey, etc., force them down to the raving hysterical quick. Wild accusations, etc. . .
Dean becomes more confident as time goes on-- a bit flip now, finding his feet.
Friday morning, June 29. . . 8:33 AM
Jesus, this waterhead Gurney again! You'd think the poor bugger would have the sense to not talk anymore. . . but no, Gurney is still blundering along, still hammering blindly at the receding edges of Dean's "credibility" in his now-obvious role as what Frank Reynolds and Sam Donaldson on ABC-TV both described as "the waterboy for the White House."
Gurney appears to be deaf; he has a brain like a cow's udder. He asks his questions -- off the typed list apparently furnished him by Minority (GOP) counsel, Fred J, Thompson -- then his mind seems to wander, his eyes roam lazily around the room while Thompson whispers industriously in his ear, his hands shuffle papers distractedly on the table in front of his microphone. . . and meanwhile, Dean meticulously chews up his questions and hands them back to him in shreds; so publicly mangled that their fate might badly embarrass a man with good sense. . .
But Gurney seems not to notice: His only job on this committee is to Defend the Presidency, according to his instructions from the White House -- or at least whatever third-string hangers-on might still be working there -
- and what we tend to forget, here, is that it's totally impossible to understand Gurney's real motives without remembering that he's the Republican Senator from Florida, a state where George Wallace swept the Democratic primary in 1972 with 78% of the vote, and which went 72% for Nixon in November.
In a state where even Hubert Humphrey is considered a dangerous radical, Ed Gurney's decision to make an ignorant yahoo of himself on national TV makes excellent sense -- at least to his own constituency. They are watching TV down in Florida today, along with the rest of the country, and we want to remember that if Gurney appears in Detroit and Sacramento as a hideous caricature of the imbecilic Senator Cornpone -- that's not necessarily the way he appears to the voters around Tallahassee and St. Petersburg.
Florida is not Miami -- contrary to the prevailing national image -- and one of the enduring mysteries in American politics is how a humane & relatively enlightened politician like Reubin Askew could have been elected Governor of one of the few states in the country where George Wallace would have easily beaten Richard Nixon -- in a head-to-head presidential race -- in either 1968 or 1972. Or even 1976, for that matter. . .
And so much for all that. Gurney is off the air now -- having got himself tangled up in a legal/constitutional argument with Sam Ervin and Dean's attorney. He finally just hunkered down and passed the mike to Senator Inouye, who immediately re-focused the questioning by prodding Dean's memory on the subject of White House efforts to seek vengeance on their "enemies."
Which Senators -- in addition to Teddy Kennedy -- were subjects of surveillance by Nixon's gumshoes? Which journalists -- in addition to the man from Newsday who wrote unfavorable things about Bebe Rebozo -- were put on The List to have their tax returns audited? Which athletes and actors -- in addition to Joe Namath and Paul Newman -- were put on the list to be "screwed"?
Dean's answers were vague on these things. He's not interested in "interpreting the motives of others," he says -- which is an easy thing to forget, after watching him on the tube for three days, repeatedly incriminating at least half the ranking fixers in Nixon's inner circle: Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Magruder, Strachan, Ziegler, Moore, LaRue, Katabach, Nofziger, Krogh, Liddy, Kleindienst. . . and the evidence is "mind-boggling," in Senator Baker's words, when it comes in the form of verbatim memos and taped phone conversations.
The simple-minded vengefulness of the language seems at least as disturbing as the vengeful plots unveiled.
5:55 PM
Sitting out here on the porch, naked in a rocking chair in the half-shade of a dwarf juniper tree -- looking out at snow-covered mountains from this hot lizard's perch in the sun with no clouds at 8000 feet -- a mile and a half high, as it were -- it is hard to grasp that this dim blue tube sitting on an old bullet-pocked tree stump is bringing me every uncensored detail -- for five or six hours each day from a musty brown room 2000 miles east -- of a story that is beginning to look like it can have only one incredible ending -- the downfall of the President of the United States.
Six months ago, Richard Nixon was the most powerful political leader in the history of the world, more powerful than Augustus Caesar when he had his act rolling full bore -- six months ago.
Now, with the passing of each sweaty afternoon, into what history will call "the Summer of '73," Richard Nixon is being dragged closer and closer -- with all deliberate speed, as it were -- to disgrace and merciless infamy. His place in history is already fixed: He will go down with Grant and Harding as one of democracy's classic mutations.
9:22 PM
Billy Graham Crusade on both TV channels. . . But what? What's happening here? An acid flashback? A time warp? CBS has Graham in Orange County, raving about "redemption through blood." Yes, God demands Blood!. . . but ABC is running the Graham Crusade in South Africa, a huge all-white Afrikaner pep rally at Johannesburg's Wanderers Stadium. (Did I finally get that right, are these mushrooms deceiving me?)
Strange. . . on this eve of Nixon's demise, his private preacher is raving about blood in Los Angeles (invoking the actual bloody images of Robert Kennedy's brain on the cold concrete floor of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen and Jack Kennedy's blood on his widow's dress that tragic day in Dallas. . . and the blood of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony in Memphis).
But wait? Is that a black face I see in the crowd at Wanderers Stadium. Yes, a rapt black face, wearing aviator shades and a green army uniform. . . stoned on Billy's message, along with all the others: "Your soul is searching for God! [Pause, body crouched, both fists shaking defiantly in the air. . .] They tore his flesh! They pulled his beard out." Graham is in a wild Charlton Heston fighting stance now: "And while they were doing that, 72 million avenging angels had to be held back. . . yes. . . by the bloody arm of the Lord. . . from sweeping this planet into hell."
Cazart! Seventy-two million of the fuckers, eh? That threat would never make the nut in L.A. It would have to be 72 billion there. But South Africa is the last of the white nazi bush-leagues, and when you mention 72 million of anything ready to sweep across the planet, they know what you mean in South Africa.
Niggers. The avenging black horde. . . and suddenly it occurs to me that Graham's act is extremely subtle; he is actually threatening this weeping crowd of white-supremist burghers. . . Indeed. . . Redemption Thru Fear! It knocked 'em dead in Houston, so why not here?
10:05
The news, and John Dean again -- that fiendish little drone. (Did the president seem surprised when you gave him this information?) "No sir, he did not."
The junkies are rolling up the tents at Camp David tonight. Mister Nixon has cashed his check. Press reports from "the Western White House" in San Clemente say the President has "no comment" on Dean's almost unbelievably destructive testimony.
No comment. The boss is under sedation. Who is with him out there on that lonely western edge of America tonight. Bebe Rebozo? Robert Abplanalp, W. Clement Stone?
Probably not. They must have seen what Nixon saw today -- that the Ervin committee was going to give Dean a free ride. His victims will get their shots at him tomorrow -- or next week -- but it won't make much difference, because the only ones left to question him are the ones he publicly ridiculed yesterday as tools of the White House. Baker's credibility is so crippled -- in the wake of Dean's references in his opening statement to Baker's alleged "willingness to cooperate" with the Nixon brain-trust in the days before these hearings -- that anything Baker hits Dean with tomorrow will seem like the angry retaliation of a much-insulted man.
And what can poor Gurney say? Dean contemptuously dismissed him -- in front of a nationwide TV audience of 70 million cynics -- as such a hopeless yo-yo that he wouldn't even have to be leaned on. Gurney was the only one of the seven senators on the Ervin committee that Nixon's strategists figured was safely in their pocket, before the hearings started. Weicker, the maverick Republican, was considered a lost cause from the start.
"We knew we were in trouble when we looked at that line-up," Dean testified. There was something almost like a smile on his face when he uttered those words. . . the rueful smile of a good loser, perhaps? Or maybe something else. The crazy, half-controlled flicker of a laugh on the face of a man who is just beginning to think he might survive this incredible trip. By 4:45 on Tuesday, Dean had the dazed, still hyper-tense look of a man who knows he went all the way out to the edge, with no grip at all for a while, and suddenly feels his balance coming back.
Well. . . maybe so. If Dean can survive tomorrow's inevitable counter-attack it's all over. The Harris poll in today's Rocky Mountain News -- even before Dean's testimony -- showed Nixon's personal credibility rating on the Watergate "problem" had slipped to a fantastic new low of 15 -- 70% negative. If the Ervin committee lets even half of Dean's testimony stand, Richard Nixon won't be able to give away dollar bills in Times Square on the Fourth of July.
Monday, July 15th, 2:10 PM
Watergate Hearings
Old Senate Office Build
ing
* Mystery witness -- Alex Butterfield. Impossible to see witness' face from periodical seat directly behind him.
* Rufus (pipe) Edmisten, Ervin's man, the face behind Baker and Ervin. "Politically ambitious -- wants to run for Attorney General of North Carolina" -- always sits on camera.
Butterfield regales room with tales of elaborate taping machine in Oval Office (see clips). Nixon's official bugger -- "liaison to SS."
BF: -- sharp dark blue suit -- Yes sir -- it was a great deal more difficult to pick up in the cabinet room.
Talmadge: Who installed the devices?
BF: SS -- Tech. Security Div. . . To record things for posterity.
T: Why were these devices installed?
BF: Constant taping of all conversations in Oval Office for transcriptions for Nixon library. Voice activated mikes all over Nixon's office. . . With time delay, so as not to cut out during pauses.
Fred Thompson looks like a Tennessee moonshiner who got rich -- somebody sent him to a haberdasher when he heard he was going to Washington.
Four 6x6 chandeliers -- yellow cut glass -- hanging from ceiling, but obscured by banks of Colortran TV lites. Stan Tredick and other photogs with cardboard shields taped over lenses to cut out TV lights from above.