The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  So Nixon is not without options, when it comes down to nut-cutting time. There is very little chance that he will finish his second term, but the odds for a scenario of impeachment in the House, acquittal in the Senate and then a maudlin spectacle of martyred resignation before January 20th of next year are pretty good.

  One of the very few drastic developments that could alter that timetable would be an unexpected crunch of some kind that would force Nixon to yield up his tapes. But nothing in the recent behavior of either the president or his lawyers shows any indication of that. As long as he clings to the tapes, Nixon has a very strong bargaining position vis-a-vis both the people who insist on hearing them and those few whose physical freedom depends on nobody hearing them.

  At least a half-dozen voices on those tapes belong to people who are scheduled to go on trial, very soon, on serious felony charges. . . and they are the same ones, presumably, who attended that secret meeting in the White House, last July, when it was decided that the tapes should never be released.

  It is safe to assume that there were probably some very strong and pragmatic reasons for that decision -- particularly in the cases of "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, whose fate in the courts is considered to be almost entirely dependent on Nixon's resolve to hang on to those tapes at all costs. . . Or, failing that, to destroy them if that ever seems necessary.

  Nixon understands this. On the basis of his own crudely edited transcripts, there is enough evidence on those tapes to have Nixon impeached, convicted and jailed for his own protection before the first football Sunday in September. For some reason that probably not even Nixon understands now, he gave seven of these tapes to Judge Sirica last winter. Two or three of them at least were found to be unaltered originals, and Sirica eventually turned these over to the House Judiciary Committee as evidence in the impeachment inquiry.

  So there are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today who have heard "the real stuff," as they put it -- and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House Transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in the truck of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence.

  Yes. . . looking back at that line I just wrote, it occurs to me that almost half the people I know have been feeling that kind of compulsion almost steadily for the last eight or nine years. My friend Yail Bloor, for instance, claims to have thrown a whole garbage can full of live rats, roaches and assorted small vermin over the White House fence about a week before Lyndon Johnson announced his retirement in 1968. "It was a wonderful feeling," he says, "but only because it was Johnson. I knew, for some reason, that he would really hate the sight of big rats on the White House lawn." He paused and reached for his snuffbox, taking a huge hit of Dr. Johnson's best in each nostril.

  "I'm not sure why," he went on, "but I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of doing a thing like that to Nixon. He might actually like rats."

  Mother of babbling God, I just took a break from this gibberish long enough to watch the evening news. . . and there was the face and voice of Tex Colson, jolting a Washington courtroom with a totally unforeseen confession of guilt on one count of obstruction of justice in return -- on the basis of an elaborately covered TV statement on the subject of his own guilt and deep involvement in almost every aspect of Watergate -- for the opportunity to take whatever punishment he deserves and purge himself once and for all by "telling everything I know" about "many things I have not been able to talk freely about until now."

  Colson -- of all people! First he converts to Jesus, and now he's copping a plea and holding a press conference on national TV to announce that he intends to confess everything. Which means, apparently, that he is now available to testify for the prosecution in every Watergate-related trial from now until all his old friends and conspirators are either put behind bars with a Gideon Bible in their hands or standing in line at a soup kitchen in Butte, Montana.

  What will Nixon make of this freak-out? Tex Colson, one of the most unprincipled thugs in the history of American politics, was supposed to be a main link in that unbreakable and fatally interdependent Inner Circle -- along with Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon -- who wouldn't think twice about stonewalling God himself. Not even Richard Nixon, at the peak of his power and popularity, felt comfortable with the knowledge that a monster like Colson had an office in the White House. Nixon felt so strongly about Colson's savagery, in fact, that he went out of his way to defame him by deliberately publishing some of his own harsh judgments on Colson's total lack of any sense of ethics or morality in the official White House Transcripts.

  And Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, widely regarded as one of the most aggressive, hardline right-wingers since Josef Goebbels, once described Colson as "the meanest man in American politics". . . which is no small compliment, coming from Buchanan, who has spent the better part of his last decade working with some of the meanest and most congenitally fascistic bastards ever to work for any government.

  I will have to call Buchanan tomorrow and ask him what he thinks about Tex Colson now. As a matter of fact, I will have to call a lot of people tomorrow about this thing -- because if Colson really is serious about telling everything he knows, Richard Nixon is in very deep trouble. He may as well go out on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow and start peddling those tapes to the highest bidder, because Colson knows enough ugly stories about the Nixon regime to make most of the talk on those tapes seem like harmless cocktail gossip.

  At a glance, there are two ways to view Colson's breakdown: One is to take his conversion to Jesus seriously, which is difficult. . . and the other is to take it as a warning that even the president should have better sense than to cross "the meanest man in American politics."

  There is another way to interpret it, but that will have to wait for later -- along with a lot of other things. This is not the kind of story to try to cope with while roaming back and forth across the country in jet airliners. . . although there is nothing in any of the current journalism out of Washington, on the tube or in print, to indicate that it is any easier to cope with there than in Key Biscayne, Calgary, or even Mexico City. The entire Washington Press Corps seems at least temporarily paralyzed by the sheer magnitude and complexity of the thing. . .

  It will be a nasty story to cover, especially in the swamp-like humidity of a Washington summer. . . but it is definitely worth watching, and perhaps even being a part of, because whatever kind of judgment and harsh reality finally emerges will be an historical landmark in the calendar of civilizations and a beacon, for good or ill, to all the generations that will inherit this earth -- or whatever we leave of it -- just as surely as we inherited it from the Greeks and the Romans, the Mayans and the Incas, and even from the "Thousand Year Reich."

  The impeachment of Richard Nixon will end in a trial that will generate an interminable blizzard of headlines, millions-of-dollars' worth of media coverage, and a verdict that will not matter nearly as much to the defendant as it will to the jurors. By the time the trial starts -- assuming that Nixon can sustain his lifelong appetite for humiliation that has never been properly gratified -- the fate of Nixon himself will have shrunk to the dimensions of a freakish little side effect. The short-lived disaster of his presidency is already neutralized, and the outcome of his impeachment ordeal will have very little effect on his role in tomorrow's history texts. He will be grouped, along with presidents like Grant and Harding, as a corrupt and incompetent mockery of the American Dream he praised so long and loud in all his speeches. . . not just as a "crook," but so crooked that he required the help of a personal valet to screw his pants on every morning.

  By the time Richard
Milhous Nixon goes on trial in the Senate, the only reason for trying him will be to understand how he ever became president of the United States at all. . . and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American Political System.

  The trial of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream. The importance of Nixon now is not merely to get rid of him; that's a strictly political consideration. . . The real question is why we are being forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections.

  So, with the need for sleep coming up very fast now, we want to look at two main considerations: 1) The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself. . . and 2) The absolutely vital necessity of filling the vacuum that the Nixon impeachment will leave, and the hole that will be there in 1976.

  Rolling Stone, #164, July 4, 1974

  Fear and Loathing in Limbo:

  The Scum Also Rises

  . . . before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.

  -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Well. . . this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knuckle-head refugee from a 1969 "Mister Clean" TV commercial has just done what only the most cynical and paranoid kind of malcontent ever connected with national politics would have dared to predict. . .

  If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician -- any politician -- and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window. . . flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high-powered "Bull Buster" cattle prod.

  But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that -- at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.

  About five hours after I'd sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the mojo wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a "full, free and absolute" presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.

  Ford sprung his decision with no advance warning at 10:40 on a peaceful Sunday morning in Washington, after emerging from a church service with such a powerful desire to dispense mercy that he rushed back to the White House -- a short hump across Lafayette Park -- and summoned a weary Sunday-morning skeleton crew of correspondents and cameramen to inform them, speaking in curiously zombielike tones, that he could no longer tolerate the idea of ex-President Nixon suffering in grief-crazed solitude out there on the beach in San Clemente, and that his conscience now compelled him to end both the suffering of Nixon and the national angst it was causing by means of a presidential edict of such king-sized breadth and scope as to scourge the poison of "Watergate" from our national consciousness forever.

  Or at least that's how it sounded to me, when I was jolted out of a sweat-soaked coma on Sunday morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. "Ford pardoned the bastard!" he screamed. "I warned you, didn't I? I buried him twice, and he came back from the dead both times. . . Now he's done it again; he's running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert."

  I fell back on the bed, moaning heavily. No, I thought. I didn't hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Washington press corps and the national TV audience with his carefuly considered refusal to interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's legal duty to proceed on the basis of evidence and "prosecute any and all individuals." Given the context of the question, Ford's reply was widely interpreted as a signal to Jaworski that the former president should not be given any special treatment. . . And it also meshed with Ford's answer to a question in the course of his confirmation hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he'd said, "I don't think the public would stand for it," when asked if an appointed vice-president would have the power to pardon the president who'd appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal circumstances.

  I recalled these things Ford had said, but I was not so sure I'd heard Dick Tuck correctly -- or if I'd really heard him at all. I held my right hand up in front of my eyes, trying to remember if I'd eaten anything the night before that could cause hallucinations. If so, my hand would appear to be transparent, and I would be able to see all the bones and blood vessels very clearly.

  But my hand was not transparent. I moaned again, bringing Sandy in from the kitchen to find out what was wrong. "Did Tuck just call?" I asked.

  She nodded: "He was almost hysterical. Ford just gave Nixon a full pardon."

  I sat up quickly, groping around on the bed for something to smash. "No!" I shouted. "That's impossible!"

  She shook her head. "I heard it on the radio, too."

  I stared at my hands again, feeling anger behind my eyes and noise coming up in my throat: "That stupid, lying bastard! Jesus! Who votes for these treacherous scumbags! You can't even trust the dumb ones! Look at Ford! He's too goddamn stupid to arrange a deal like that! Hell, he's almost too stupid to lie."

  Sandy shrugged. "He gave Nixon all the tapes, too."

  "Holy shit!" I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. "What's Godwin's number in Washington? That bone-head Rotarian sonofabitch made a deal? Maybe Dick knows something."

  But it was 24 hours later when I finally got hold of Goodwin, and by that time I had made a huge chart full of dates, names and personal connections -- all linked and cross-linked by a maze of arrows and lines. The three names on the list with far more connections than any others were Laird, Kissinger and Rockefeller. I had spent all night working feverishly on the chart, and now I was asking Goodwin to have a researcher check it all out.

  "Well," he replied. "A lot of people in Washington are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt there was some kind of arrangement, but --" He paused. "Aren't we pretty damn close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you'll never be able to check all that stuff before --"

  "Mother of babbling god!" I muttered. The word "deadline" caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about 15 more hours. . . With about 90% of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent Richard Nixon's conviction. The only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he'd said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon "until the legal process has run its course."

  Cazart! I hung up the phone and tossed my chart across the room. That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning so close to the deadline that I almost had a nervous breakdown while failing completely. . . And now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon, leaving me with less than 24 hours to revise completely a 15,000 word story that was already set in type.

  It was absolutely impossible, no hope at all -- except to lash as many last-minute pages as possible into the mojo and hope for the best. Maybe somebody in San Francisco would have time, when the deadline crunch came, to knit the two versions together. . . But there was no way at all to be sure, so
this will be an interesting article to read when it comes off the press. . . Indeed. . . cast your bread on the waters. . . why not?

  I was brooding on this and cursing Nixon, more out of habit than logic, for his eerie ability to make life difficult for me. . . when it suddenly occurred to me that the villain this time was not Nixon, but Gerald Ford. He was the one who decided to pardon Nixon (for reasons we can hopefully deal with later) on August 30th, when he instructed his White House counsel, Philip Buchen, to work out the legal details and consult with Nixon's new defense lawyer, John Miller, one-time campaign aide to Robert Kennedy.

  Incredibly, Miller informed Buchen that he would have to make sure a presidential pardon was "acceptable" to Nixon; and 24 hours later he came back with word that the ex-president, whose condition had been publicly described by anonymous "friends" that week as almost terminally "disturbed and depressed" at the prospect of his imminent indictment by Jaworski's grand jury -- had been able to get a grip on himself long enough to decide that he would not be offended by the offer of a full presidential pardon -- just as long as the offer also granted Nixon sole ownership and control of all the White House tapes.

  Ford quickly agreed, a concession that could mean $5 million or more to Nixon: He can milk them for the bulk of his presidential memoirs, for which his new agent claims already to have been offered a $2 million advance, and after that he has the legal right either to destroy the tapes or sell them to the highest bidder.

  Arrangements for the presidential pardon were not completed until Friday, September 6th -- and only then after President Ford sent his personal emissary, Benton L. Becker, out to San Clemente to make sure things went smoothly. Becker, a vaguely sinister Washington attorney who is currently under investigation by the IRS for alleged tax evasion, describes himself as an "unpaid legal adviser" to President Ford and also a personal friend.