The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  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.

  Meanwhile, with either Price or Buchanan or both standing ready to write his memoirs for him, Nixon was pondering an offer from Reader's Digest to sign on as a "consulting editor" at a salary of $100,000 a year. . . And Thursday of that week, President Ford made headlines by urging the Congress to appropriate $850,000 to cover Nixon's pension, living expenses and other costs of the painful transition from the White House to San Clemente. When the $850,000 runs out, he will have to scrimp until July 1st of next year, when he will pick up another $400,000 that will have to last him until July 1st, 1976. For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole forever at $400,000 a year -- $60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills and $100,000 for "miscellaneous."

  On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon's 24-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives -- a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or 12 full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands, as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses -- and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year. . . and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will presumably derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000 a year stipend from Reader's Digest, and the $5000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.

  So. . . what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon; a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent 28 years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95% of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the "Former Presidents' Act" by resigning. . . But a president who gets impeached, convicted and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by the "Former Presidents' Act." If Nixon had fought to the end and lost-- which had become absolutely inevitable by the tune he resigned-- he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole. . . So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.

  Most of this annual largesse will come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. All of the taxpayers. Even George and Eleanor McGovern will contribute a slice of their income to Richard Nixon's retirement fund. . . And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to strip him not only of his right to vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal Treasury -- which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything but announce the date for when he will grant the pardon.

  The White House announced yesterday a negotiated agreement with Richard M. Nixon under which the former president and the U.S. government will have joint custody of White House tapes and presidential documents but with Mr. Nixon determining who shall have access to them.

  In the letter of agreement making him the "sole legal owner of the papers and tapes until their future donation to the government," Mr. Nixon specifically asserted his legal title to "all literary rights" accompanying possession of the materials. Mr. Nixon has reportedly been told that a book of memoirs would be worth at least $2 million.

  The Washington Post, September 9th, 1974

  President Ford virtually made up his mind five days ago to grant a pardon to former-President Richard M. Nixon.

  On Wednesday, presidential counsel Philip Buchen met with Herbert Miller, Nixon's attorney, at the White House and disclosed that Ford was considering executive clemency.

  Would Nixon accept a pardon? Buchen asked.

  Miller responded that he did not know, according to Buchen. But after checking with Nixon by telephone -- the ex-president was at his home in San Clemente, California -- Miller reported that a pardon was acceptable.

  With that, the pardon was set, though Ford was unable to announce the pardon publicly until yesterday morning because it took several days to complete the arrangements.

  The Washington Star-News, September 9th, 1974

  Only ten days ago, in the first formal press conference of his administration, Mr. Ford had said that it would be "unwise and untimely" of him to make any commitment to a pardon until legal action was taken.

  But the president was aware that political reaction was building in favor of prosecution of Mr. Nixon, a point dramatically confirmed by a Gallup Poll last week which showed that 56% of the American people thought that Mr. Nixon should be tried while only 37% opposed such action.

  The Washington Post, September 9th, 1974

  Powerful Men Brought Weeping to Their Knees. . . The Stinking Realities of Richard Nixon's Place in History. . . The Mushwit Son-ln-Law and the Last Tape

  THE EX-PRESIDENTS GIFTS

  To the Editor:

  The letter of Sylvia Wallace (August 23rd), warning that "we may yet see a Nixon renascent," caused me such grave concern that I immediately consulted the ineffable wisdom of the I Ching for some clue to the future of Mr. Nixon. I was unerringly directed to the Po Hexagram and the learned commentaries thereon. The book confirmed my worst fears: "Its strong subject, notwithstanding the attempts against him, survives and acquires fresh vigor. The people again cherish their sovereign and the plotters have wrought to their own overthrow."

  The "legal steps" that your correspondent suggests to prevent Nixon's rebirth could prove woefully ineffective. I suggest that, after hanging, the body be drawn, quartered and burned and the ashes buried in an unmarked grave in a distant field guarded by an elite corps, lest his hardcore followers come and steal the remains and proclaim: He is risen!

  Please! If Mr. Nixon regains popular favor, it will not be through any "revisionism" or reworking of the facts supporting the charges of guilt. It will probably be that coming events will force a careful re-evaluation of his contributions to the nation and crystallize an awareness of the misfortune suffered by the nation in the loss of his special gifts in these critical times. We may come to feel like the shepherd who had no sooner been conned by some pointy-eared gentleman into getting rid of his mean, tough sheep dog because of its fleas than the wolves reappeared on the scene.

  Theodore P. Daly

  Somers, New York

  Letters to the Editor

  The New York Times

  September 4th, 1974

  A prominent San Clemente supporter of Mr. Nixon since he went to Congress in 1946, who asked not to be identified, said he had heard that the Lincoln Club of Orange County, made up largely of wealthy industrialists who contributed millions of dollars to Republican campaign coffers, including Mr. Nixon's, had invited the former president to become a member of the select and influential group.

  "You won't find Mr. Nixon living the life of a recluse," the Republican informant said. "Now that he is clear of any criminal prosecution, don't be surprised if he comes back into California politics. I th
ink he should. I'd like to see him run for Senator John V. Tunney's seat in 1976."

  The New York Times, September 9th, 1974

  We are still too mired in it now to fit all the pieces together and understand what really happened in these last two frenzied years. . . or to grasp that the Real Meaning of what our new president calls the "national nightmare" and what historians will forever refer to as "Watergate" will probably emerge not so much from the day-to-day events of The Crisis, or even from its traumatic resolution -- but more from what the survivors will eventually understand was prevented from happening.

  I was out there on the crowded concrete floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center in August of 1972 when that howling mob of Republican delegates confirmed Richard Nkon's lust for another term in the White House with their constant, thunderous chant of "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"

  It was bad enough, just listening to that demagogic swill -- but I doubt if there were more than a dozen people in Miami that week who really understood what that cheap, demented little fascist punk had in mind for his Four More Years. It involved the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for, except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.

  The tip of the iceberg began emerging about six months after Nixon took his second oath of office, when Senator Sam Ervin took his initially harmless-looking "Watergate Committee" act on national TV. It didn't catch on, at first; the networks were deluged with letters from angry housewives, cursing Ervin for depriving them of their daily soap operas -- but after two or three weeks the Senate Watergate hearings were the hottest thing on television.

  Here, by god, was a real soap opera; tragedy, treachery, weird humor and the constant suspense of never knowing who was lying and who was telling the truth. . . Which hardly mattered to the vast audience of political innocents who soon found themselves as hooked on the all-day hearings as they'd previously been on the soaps and the quiz shows. Even Hollywood scriptwriters and apolitical actors were fascinated by the dramatic pace and structure of the hearings.

  The massive complexities of the evidence, the raw drama of the daily confrontations and the deceptively elfin humor of "Senator Sam" came together in the multileveled plot that offered something to almost everybody -- from bleeding hearts and Perry Mason fans to S&M freaks and the millions of closet Hell's Angels whose sole interest in watching the hearings was the spectacle of seeing once-powerful men brought weeping to their knees.

  Consider John Mitchell, for instance -- a millionaire Wall Street lawyer and close friend of the president, an arrogant, triple-chinned Roman who was Nixon's campaign manager in '68 and attorney general of the United States for four years until his old buddy put him in charge of the Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972. . . Here was a 61-year-old man with more money than he could count and so much power that he saw nothing unusual in treating the FBI, the Secret Service and every federal judge in the country like serfs in his private police force. . . who could summon limousines, helicopters or even Air Force One to take him anywhere he wanted to go by merely touching a buzzer on his desk. . .

  And suddenly, at the very pinnacle of his power, he casually puts his initials on a memo proposing one of at least a dozen or so routine election-year bits of "undercover work" -- and several months later while having breakfast in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, he gets a phone call from some yo-yo named Liddy, whom he barely knows, saying that four Cubans he's never even met have just been caught in the act of burglarizing the office of the Democratic National Committee located in an office building about 200 yards across the plaza below his own balcony in the Watergate apartments. . .

  Which seems like a bad joke, at first, but when he gets back to Washington and drops by the White House to see his old buddy, he senses that something is wrong. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman are in the Oval Office with Nixon; the president greets him with a nervous smile but the other two say nothing. The air reeks of tension. What the hell is going on here? Mitchell starts to sit down on the couch and call for a drink but Nixon cuts him off: "We're working on something, John. I'll call you at home later on, from a pay phone."

  Mitchell stares at him, then picks up his briefcase and quickly says goodbye. Jesus Christ! What is this? On the way out to the limousine in the White House driveway, he sees Steve Bull's secretary reading a late edition of The Washington Star-News and idly snatches it out of her hands as he walks by. . . Moments later, as the big Cadillac rolls out into traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue, he glances at the front page and is startled by a large photo of his wife; she is packing a suitcase in the bedroom of their Watergate apartment. And next to the photo is a headline saying something like "Martha on the Rampage Again, Denounces 'Dirty Business' at White House."

  "Good God!" he mutters. The Secret Service man in the front seat glances back at him for a moment, then looks away. Mitchell scans the story on Martha: She has freaked out again. Where does she keep getting that goddamn speed? he wonders; her eyes in the photo are the size of marbles. According to the story, she called UPI reporter Helen Thomas at four in the morning, cursing incoherently about "Mister President" and saying she has to get out of Washington at once, go back to the apartment in New York for a few days of rest.

  Wonderful, Mitchell thinks. The last thing I need right now is to have her screaming around the apartment all night with a head full of booze and speed. Mitchell hates speed. In the good old days, Martha would just drink herself into a stupor and pass out. . . But when they moved down to Washington she began gobbling a pill here and there, just to stay awake at parties, and that's when the trouble started. . .

  Then his eyes shift up to the lead story and he suddenly feels his balls contract violently, crawling straight up into his belly. "WATERGATE BURGLARY CONNECTED TO WHITE HOUSE," says the headline, and in the first graph of the story he sees the name of E. Howard Hunt, which he recognizes instantly -- and a few graphs lower, goddamnit, is Gordon Liddy's name.

  No need to read any further. Suddenly it all makes sense. He hears himself moan and sees the agent glance back at him again, saying nothing. He pulls the paper up in front of his face, but he is no longer reading. His finely tuned lawyer's mind is already racing, flashing back over all the connections: phone calls to Hunt, arguments with Liddy, secret meetings in Key Biscayne, Larry O'Brien, Cuban burglars with CIA connections, Howard Hughes. . .

  He is fucked. It has taken less than 30 seconds for his brain to connect all the details. . . And yes, of course, that's what Nixon was talking about with those bastards, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They knew. The president knew. Hunt and Liddy knew. . . Who else? Dean, Magruder? LaRue? How many others?

  The limousine slows down, making the turn off Virginia Avenue and into the Watergate driveway. Instinctively, he glances up at the fifth floor of the office building and sees that all the lights are still on in O'Brien's office. That was where it had happened, right here in his own goddamn fortress. . .

  His mind is still racing when the agent opens the door. "Here we are, sir. Your luggage is in the trunk; we'll bring it right up."

  John Mitchell crawls out of the bright black Cadillac limousine and walks like a zombie through the lobby and into the elevator. Dick will be calling soon, he thinks. We'll have to act fast on this goddamn thing, isolate those dumb bastards and make sure they stay isolated.

  The elevator stops and they walk down the soft, red-carpeted hall to his door. The agent goes in first to check all the rooms. Mitchell glances down the hall and sees another Secret Service man by the door to the fire exit. He smiles hello and the agent nods his head. Jesus Christ! What the hell am I worried about? We'll have this thing wrapped up and buried by ten o'clock tomorrow morning. They can't touch me, goddamnit. They wouldn't dare!

  The agent inside the apartment is giving him the all-clear sign. "I put your briefcase on the coffee table,
sir, and your luggage is on the way up. We'll be outside by the elevator if you need anything."

  "Thanks," Mitchell says. "I'll be fine." The agent leaves, closing the door softly behind him. John Mitchell walks over to the TV console and flips on the evening news, then pours himself a tall glass of scotch on the rocks and stretches out on the sofa, watching the tube, and waits for Nixon to call -- from a pay phone. He knows what that means and it has nothing to do with dimes.

  That was John Mitchell's last peaceful night in Washington. We will probably never know exactly what he and Nixon talked about on the telephone, because he was careful to make the call from one of the White House phones that was not wired into the tape-recording system. . . Mitchell had not been told, officially, about the president's new tape toy; the only people who knew about it, officially, were Nixon, Haldeman, Larry Higby, Steve Bull, Alex Butterfield and the three Secret Service agents responsible for keeping it in order. . . But unofficially almost everybody with personal access to the Oval Office had either been told on the sly or knew Richard Nixon well enough so they didn't need to be told. . . In any case, there is enough testimony in the files of the Senate Watergate committee to suggest that most of them had their own recording systems and taped most of what they said to each other, anyway.

  Neither John Ehrlichman nor Charles Colson, for instance, were "officially" aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had constructed for President Nixon. According to Alex Butterfield's testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon told Chief SS agent Wong to have his electronics experts wire every room, desk, lamp, phone and mantelpiece inside the White House grounds where The President was likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject