To compensate for the loss of what is widely regarded as one of the fattest and heaviest jobs in journalism, the Times gave Wicker a column -- his own chunk of turf, as it were -- and that unexpected burst of freedom seemed to have an almost consciousness-expanding effect on his head. When I met him for the first time in Miami in that star-crossed political summer of 1972, he was writing one of the sanest columns on the market and he talked like a happy man.
We were sitting at a beach table near the surf, outside the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, taking a break from the chaos of the Democratic Convention, and I took the opportunity to tell him about my reaction to his long-ago comment on Nixon.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that, but --"
"No," I said. "You were right."
He stared at me, looking puzzled.
It was one of those days that we all hit once in a while when everything you mean to say sounds wrong when you hear it coming out of your mouth. I tried briefly to explain what I really meant, but even the explanation came out bent, so I decided to drop the subject. . . What I had in mind, I think, was the idea that Nixon really was "one of us" -- not in Conrad's sense of that term, or my own, but as an almost perfect expression of "the American way of life" that I'd been so harshly immersed in for the past eight or nine months of traveling constantly around the country to cover the presidential primaries.
Jesus! This idea seems just as tangled tonight as it did two years ago when I was trying to explain it to Wicker -- so I think I'll let it drop, once again, and move on to something else. . . But not without a final backward glance at the election results in November of '72, when Richard Nixon was re-elected to the White House by the largest margin of any president since George Washington. There is no way to erase that ominous fact from the record books -- any more than Nixon will ever be able to erase from the history books the fact that he was the first American president to be driven out of the White House because of admittedly criminal behavior while in office.
Looking back on that crippled conversation with Wicker in Miami, it occurs to me that maybe almost everybody in the country -- except possibly Wicker -- might have been spared what General Ford called "our national nightmare" if Tom had been kept on as The New York Times Washington Bureau chief in 1968, instead of being converted to a columnist. The social and political pressures of the job would have driven him half crazy, but his then emerging sense of outrage at the whole style and content of the Nixon administration might have been contagious enough, within the bureau, to encourage a more aggressive kind of coverage among the Times reporters he would have been assigning to look behind Nixon's facade.
As it turned out, however, those fascist bastards had to be given so much rope that they came close to hanging all the rest of us along with themselves, before The Washington Post finally filled the power vacuum created by The New York Times's sluggish coverage of those four years when Nixon and his fixers were organizing vengeful plans like John Dean's list of "our enemies" to be harassed by the IRS, and the Tom Charles Huston "Domestic Intelligence Plan" that amounted to nothing less than the creation of a White House Gestapo.
But the climate of those years was so grim that half the Washington press corps spent more time worrying about having their telephones tapped than they did about risking the wrath of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Colson by poking at the weak seams of a Mafia-style administration that began cannibalizing the whole government just as soon as it came into power. Nixon's capos were never subtle; they swaggered into Washington like a conquering army, and the climate of fear they engendered apparently neutralized The New York Times along with all the other pockets of potential resistance. Nixon had to do everything but fall on his own sword before anybody in the Washington socio-political establishment was willing to take him on.
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 seemed 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 15 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 12 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 ten-dollar 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 p
lace 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 15 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 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 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 the kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the "radic-libs" and "liberal elitists" of the "eastern media establishment" -- the "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Jesus! Those were the days, eh?
STRANGE INTERLUDE: An Aborted Prediction, for the Record. . . Grim Dispatches from San Clemente: A Pitiful Basket Case, a Chronic Bed-Wetter. . . The Millionaire Felon on the Federal Dole. . . The Sudden News from Mister Ford
Won't you fly O eagle fly
You better run little cottontail run
I hope you both live long enough
To see the setting sun
-- Marshall Tucker Band
September 6th, 1974
The headline in today's Washington Post says Richard Nixon is "lonely and depressed" down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. He sucks eggs for breakfast and wanders back and forth on the beach, spitting frequently into the surf and brooding about some vicious Polack whose name he can't remember. . . Some low-life friend of John Connally from Houston; the same white-haired little bugger who caused all the trouble with the Supreme Court, and now he has a runaway Grand Jury full of uppity niggers who -- in Nixon's own words -- "want to pick the carcass."
Indeed. . . What the hell is a carcass good for anyway, except to pick at? Gnaw the skull, suck the bones, then soak the bastard with gasoline and toss a match on it.
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-a-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 cellblock 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 ground swell of public sympathy to back him up.
So we may as well get braced for a daily dose of extremely grim news out of San Clemente, once Nixon is formally indicted. We will hear reports that the ex-president frequently bursts into tears for no reason at all, that he utters heartrending screams every night in his sleep, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner will quote an unnamed "prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist" who will describe Nixon as a "pitiful basket case" and "a chronic bedwetter." And if Ford still seems reluctant to let Nixon go free, we will start seeing front-page "exclusive photos" of Nixon alone on the beach, staring soulfully at the sunset with tears drooling out of his eyes.
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 the 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.