The Great Shark Hunt, page 26
So now, a year later, I was going to Washington to see my President inaugurated. “Bring us together again.” Well… good luck, old sport… but I think I’ll just drop out for a while. Give me a ring when you get the others together… I’ll come over and take a group photo with my snorkel camera.
* * *
At the Baltimore airport I ran into Bob Gover, arriving from New Orleans with a new wife and a big movie camera. Gover is a writer (One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, among others), but he’s into a film gig now, making a movie of the impending revolution that he thinks will be out in the open before 1970. Not everyone involved in “The Movement” is that optimistic; the timetable varies from six months to four years, but there is near-unanimous agreement that some kind of shattering upheaval will occur before 1972… not just riots, or closing down universities, but a violent revolution.
This ominous prospect has already cracked the fragile solidarity of the “new left.” Until now, the war in Vietnam has been a sort of umbrella-issue, providing a semblance of unity to a mixed bag of anti-war groups with little else in common. The “counter-inaugural” in Washington showed, very clearly, that this alliance is breaking down.
Indeed, the whole scene is polarizing. With Nixon and John Mitchell on the Right, drumming for Law and Order… and with the Blacks and the Student Left gearing down for Revolution… the Center is almost up for grabs. The only centrist-style heavyweight these days is Senator Ted Kennedy, who seems to be playing the same kind of Build and Consolidate game that Richard Nixon perfected in 1966.
Kennedy began to haunt Nixon even before he was sworn in. On Saturday, two days before the Inauguration, Teddy dominated local newscasts by unveiling a bust of his murdered brother, Robert, in the courtyard of the Justice Department. Then, two days after the Inaugural, Teddy was the star of a big-name fund raising rally at the Washington Hilton. The idea was to pay off Robert’s campaign debts, but a local newspaper columnist said it “looked like the kickoff of Teddy’s campaign.” The senator, ever-cautious, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying he hadn’t picked a Vice President yet, for 1972. Nixon’s reaction to this boffo was not reported in the press. The only public comment came from Raoul Duke, a visiting dignitary, who said: “Well… nobody laughed when Banquo’s ghost came to the party… and remember the Baltimore Colts.”
* * *
In any case, the battle is joined… Revolution versus the Wave of the Past. Rumors persist that Mr. Nixon remains confident—for reasons not apparent to anyone under 50, except cops, evangelists and members of the Liberty Lobby. The rest of us will have to start reading fiction again, or maybe build boats. The demands of this growing polarization—this banshee screaming “Which side are you on?”—are going to make the Johnson years seem like a Peace Festival. Anybody who thinks Nixon wrote that soothing inaugural speech should remember the name, Ray Price. He is Nixon’s Bill Moyers, and—like Moyers—a good man to watch for signs of a sinking ship. Price is Nixon’s house liberal, and when he quits we can look for that era of bloody chaos and streetfighting… and perhaps even that Revolution the wild turks on the New Left are waiting for. President Nixon has moved into a vacuum that neither he nor his creatures understand. They are setting up, right now, in the calm eye of a hurricane… and if they think the winds have died, they are in for a bad shock.
And so are the rest of us, for we are all in that eye—even the young militants of the New Left, who are now more disorganized than even the liberal Democrats, who at least have a figurehead. The Washington protest was a bust, despite the claims of the organizers… and for reasons beyond mud and rain. Jerry Rubin was right: it was probably “the last demonstration”—or at least the last one in that older, gentler and once-hopeful context.
* * *
On Monday night, around dusk, I went back to the big circus tent that had been the scene, just 20 hours earlier of MOBE’s Counter-Inaugural Ball. On Sunday night the tent had been a mob scene, with thousands of laughing young dissidents smoking grass and bouncing balloons around in the flashing glare of strobe-lights and rock-music. Phil Ochs was there, and Paul Krassner… and Judy Collins sent a telegram saying she couldn’t make it but “keep up the fight.”… the crowd dug it all, and passed the hat for a lot of dollars to pay for the tent rental. A casual observer might have thought it was a victory party.
Then, after Nixon’s parade, I went back to the tent to see what was happening… and it was gone, or at least going. A six-man crew from the Norfolk Tent Co. had taken down everything but the poles and cables. Thick rolls of blue and white canvas lay around in the mud, waiting to be put on a truck and taken back to the warehouse.
As the tent disappeared, piece by piece, young girls with long hair and boys carrying rucksacks drifted by and stopped to watch. They had come back, like me, half-expecting to find something happening. We stood there for a while, next to the Washington Monument… nobody talking, not even the tent-company crew… and then we drifted off in different directions. It was cold, and getting colder. I zipped up my ski jacket and walked fast across the Mall. To my left, at the base of the monument, a group of hippies was passing a joint around… and off to the right a mile or so away, I could see the bright dome of the Capitol… Mr. Nixon’s Capitol.
Suddenly I felt cold, and vaguely defeated. More than eight years ago, in San Francisco, I had stayed up all night to watch the election returns… and when Nixon went down I felt like a winner.
Now, on this Monday night in 1969, President Nixon was being honored with no less than six Inaugural Balls. I brooded on this for a while, then decided I would go over to the Hilton, later on, and punch somebody. Almost anybody would do… but hopefully I could find a police chief from Nashville or some other mean geek. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but go back to the hotel and watch the news on TV… maybe something funny, like film clips of the bastinado.
The (Boston) Globe, February 23, 1969
II
Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model)
No interview with Richard Nixon will end until he refers to himself, at least once, as a “political man.” His opponents, by implication, are mere “politicians.” Especially the man Nixon plans to defeat this November… for the Presidency of the United States. Selah.
The major polls and surveys in the country suggest that Nixon may be right, despite the outraged howls of all those voters who insist that a choice between Nixon and Johnson is no choice at all. Sen. Eugene McCarthy has called it “a choice between obscenity and vulgarity.” Yet McCarthy is the political heir of Adlai Stevenson, who said that “People get the kind of government they deserve.” If this is true, then 1968 is probably the year in which the great American chicken will come home to roost… either for good or for ill.
So it was with a sense of morbid curiosity that I went to New England not long ago to check on “the real Richard Nixon.” Not necessarily the “new Nixon,” or even the newest model of the old “new Nixon,” who is known to the press corps that follows him as “Nixon Mark IV.” My assignment was to find the man behind all these masks, or maybe to find that there was no mask at all—that Richard Milhous Nixon, at age 55, was neither more nor less than what he appeared to be—a plastic man in a plastic bag, surrounded by hired wizards so cautious as to seem almost plastic themselves… These political handlers were chosen this time for their coolness and skill for only one job: to see that Richard Nixon is the next President of the United States.
One of the handlers, Henry Hyde, presumably felt I was a threat to the Nixon camp. He called PAGEANT to check me out. This was after he got into my room somehow—while I was away, eating breakfast—and read my typewritten notes. The Nixon people, who wore baggy, dark-colored suits and plenty of greasy kid stuff (they looked like models at an Elks Club style show), seemed to feel I was disrespectful because I was dressed like a ski bum. PAGEANT reassured Mr. Hyde as to the purity of my mission and intentions in spite of my appearance.
Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.
After 1960, though, I no longer took him seriously. Two years later he blew his bid for the governorship of California and made it overwhelmingly clear that he no longer took himself seriously—at least not as a politician. He made a national ass of himself by blaming his defeats on the “biased press.” He called a press conference and snarled into the microphone: “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my final press conference.”
There is no avoiding the fact that Richard Nixon would not be running for President in 1968 if John Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated five years earlier… and if the GOP hadn’t nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964… which guaranteed the election of Lyndon Johnson, who has since done nearly everything wrong and botched the job so that now even Nixon looks good beside him.
The situation is so obvious that Nixon, “the political man,” can’t resist it. And who can blame him for taking his luck where he finds it? He’s back on the “fast track” that he likes to talk about, with the Presidency to gain and nothing at all to lose. He’s obviously enjoying this campaign. It’s a bonus, a free shot, his last chance to stand eyeball to eyeball again with the high rollers.
Richard Nixon has been in politics all his life; for 21 years he has rolled about as high as a politician can in this country, and his luck has been pretty good. His instincts are those of a professional gambler who wins more often than he loses; his “skill” is nine parts experience to one part natural talent, and his concept of politics is entirely mechanical.
Nixon is a political technician, and he has hired technicians to help him win this time. As a campaign team, they are formidable. They have old pros, young turks, crippled opponents, and a candidate who once came within an eyelash of beating the late John F. Kennedy.
The “new Nixon” is above anger, and he rarely has time for casual conversation. His staffers explain to the grumbling press that “Mr. Nixon is busy writing tonight’s speech.” He is grappling in private, as it were, with the subtle contradictions of the Asian mind. (He slipped once in public during a late February trip to Wisconsin. “This country cannot tolerate a long war,” he said. “The Asians have no respect for human lives. They don’t care about body counts.” The implied racial slur was a departure from his carefully conceived campaign oratory.)
At one point I asked Ray Price, one of Nixon’s chief braintrusters, why the candidate was having such difficulty finding words to echo Dean Rusk’s views on Vietnam. Nixon’s speeches for the past four nights had been straight out of the Johnson-Rusk handbook on the “domino theory.”
Price looked hurt. “Well,” he said slowly, “I really wish you’d done your homework on this. Mr. Nixon has gone to a lot of trouble to clarify his views on Vietnam, and I’m only sorry that—well…” He shook his head sadly, as if he couldn’t bring himself to chastise me any further on the hallowed premises of a Howard Johnson’s motel.
We went to his room, where he dug up a reprint of an article from the October 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs. The title was “Asia After Vietnam,” and the author was Richard M. Nixon. I was hoping for something more current, but Price was suddenly called off on other business. So I took the article to the bar and went through it several times without finding anything to clear my head. It was thoughtful, articulate, and entirely consistent with the thinking of John Foster Dulles.
I was disappointed with Price—for the same reason I’d been disappointed all week with Nixon. In various ways they both assumed that I—and all the other reporters—would fail to understand that Nixon was not only being evasive with regard to Vietnam that week but that he was doing it deliberately and for good reason. George Romney’s campaign was obviously on its last legs; New Hampshire was sewed up for Nixon, and the best way to maintain that lead was to stay visible and say nothing more controversial than “God Bless America.” Romney tried desperately to provoke an argument, but Nixon ignored every challenge.
Nixon did confess that he had a way to end the war, but he wouldn’t tell how. Patriotically he explained why: “No one with this responsibility who is seeking office should give away any of his bargaining positions in advance.” (Nixon’s wife, Pat, has confidence in his ability to cope with Vietnam. “Dick would never have let Vietnam drag on like this,” she says.)
Both Romney and McCarthy had their Manchester headquarters at the Wayfarer, an elegant, woodsy motel with a comfortable bar and the best dining room in the area. Nixon’s Holiday Inn command post was on the other side of town, a grim-looking concrete structure. I asked one of Nixon’s advisers why they had chosen such a dreary place. “Well,” he replied with a smile, “our only other choice was the Wayfarer—but we left that for Romney when we found out that it’s owned by one of the most prominent political operators in the state—a Democrat, of course.” He chuckled. “Yeah, poor George really stepped into that one.”
Nixon’s pros had won another point; there was nothing newsworthy about it, but those who mattered in the state political hierarchy understood, and they were the people Nixon needed to win New Hampshire. Small victories like this add up to delegates. Even before the votes were counted in New Hampshire, GOP strategists said Nixon had already gathered more than 600 of the 667 votes he would need to win the nomination.
There is no denying his fine understanding of the American political process. I went to New Hampshire expecting to find a braying ass, and I came away convinced that Richard Nixon has one of the best minds in politics. He understands problems very quickly; you can almost hear his brain working when he’s faced with a difficult question. He concentrates so visibly that it looks like he’s posing, and his answer, when it flows, will nearly always be right, for the situation—because Nixon’s mind is programmed, from long experience, to cope with difficult situations. The fact that he often distorts the question—and then either answers it dishonestly or uses it to change the subject—is usually lost in the rhetoric. “I’m really better at dialogue,” he says. “The question-and-answer format is good for me. I like it on TV. The set speech is one of those things like the Rotary Club luncheon. I can do it, but if I had my druthers, I’d make it all Q and A.” The “old Nixon” would argue in public; the “new Nixon” won’t. He has learned this lesson well, even if painfully.
The “new Nixon” is a very careful man when it comes to publicity; he smiles constantly for the cameras, talks always in friendly platitudes, and turns the other cheek to any sign of hostility. His press relations are “just fine,” he says, and if anyone mentions that “final press conference” he held in 1962, Nixon just smiles and changes the subject. He is making a conscious effort to avoid antagonizing reporters this time, but he is still very leery of them. Nixon takes all his meals in his room, which he never leaves except to rush off to one of his “drills”—the term he and his staffers use to mean any speech or public appearance. His staffers sometimes join reporters in the bar, but never Nixon. He neither drinks nor smokes, they say, and bars make him nervous. Humphrey Bogart would have taken a dim view of Nixon. It was Bogart who said, “You can’t trust a man who doesn’t drink.” And it was Raoul Duke who said, “I’d never buy a used car from Nixon unless he was drunk.”
People who talk like that are not the sort that Nixon likes to have around, especially when he’s engaged in something else and can’t keep an eye on them. Perhaps this explains why his staffers got so upset when I tried to attend a taping session one afternoon at a TV station in Manchester. Nixon was scheduled to make some television commercials, featuring himself and a group of citizens in a question-and-answer session. The press had not been invited; I wanted to watch Nixon, however, in a relaxed and informal setting.
My request to sit in on the tape session was flatly denied. “This is a commercial taping,” said Henry Hyde. “Would Procter & Gamble let you into their studios? Or Ford?” Hyde was a gear and sprocket salesman in Chicago before he became Nixon’s press aide, so I wasn’t surprised at his weird analogy. I merely shrugged and took a cab that afternoon down to the TV station—half expecting to be thrown out the moment I showed up. This didn’t happen, perhaps because a CBS camera crew was already there and muttering darkly about Nixon’s refusal to see them. They left shortly after I arrived, but I hung around to see what would happen.
The atmosphere was very sinister. Nixon was off in another room, as usual, rehearsing with his cast. They spent an hour getting all the questions right. Meanwhile Hyde and other staffers took turns watching me. None of them knew who the “citizens” who were to appear on the program were, or who had chosen them. “They’re just people who want to ask him questions,” said Hyde.
Whoever they were, they were shrouded in great secrecy—despite the fact that their faces would soon be appearing on local TV screens with monotonous regularity. At one point I was making notes near the studio door when it suddenly flew open and two of Nixon’s staffers came at me in a very menacing way. “What are you writing?” snapped one.
“Notes,” I said.
