The Great Shark Hunt, page 35
My own prognosis is less drastic, at this point in time [sic], but it’s also a fact that I’ve never been able to share The Doktor’s obsessive political visions—for good or ill. My job has to do with nuts & bolts, not terminal vengeance. And it also occurs to me that there is nothing in the Watergate revelations, thus far, to convince anyone but a stone partisan fanatic that we will all be better off when it’s finished. As I see it, we have already reaped the real benefits of this spectacle—the almost accidental castration of dehumanized power-mongers like Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Tom Charles Huston, that vicious young jackal of a lawyer from Indianapolis that Nixon put in charge of the Special Domestic Intelligence operation.
Dumping thugs like these out of power for the next three years gives us all new room to breathe, for a while—which is just about all we can hope for, given the nature of the entrenched (Democratic) opposition. Nixon himself is no problem, now that all his ranking thugs have been neutralized. Just imagine what those bastards might have done, given three more years on their own terms.
Even a casual reading of White House memorandums in re: Domestic Subversives & Other White House Enemies (Bill Cosby, James Reston, Paul Newman, Joe Namath, et al.) is enough to queer the faith of any American less liberal than Mussolini. Here is a paragraph from one of his (September 21, 1970) memos to Harry “Bob” Haldeman:
“What we cannot do in a courtroom via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities of some of these groups, IRS [the Internal Revenue Service] could do by administrative action. Moreover, valuable intelligence-type information could be turned up by IRS as a result of their field audits….”
Dr. Thompson—if he were with us & certifiably de-pressurized at this point in time—could offer some first-hand testimony about how the IRS and the Treasury Department were used, back in 1970, to work muscle on Ideological Enemies like himself… and if Thompson’s account might be shrugged off as “biased,” we can always compel the testimony of Aspen police chief, Dick Richey, whose office safe still holds an illegal sawed-off shotgun belonging to a US Treasury Department undercover agent from Denver who fucked up in his efforts to convince Dr. Thompson that he should find a quick reason for dropping out of electoral politics. That incident came up the other afternoon at the Jerome Bar in Aspen, when Steve Levine, a young reporter from Denver, observed that “Thompson was one of the original victims of the Watergate syndrome—but nobody recognized it then; they called it Paranoia.”
Right… But that’s another story, and we’ll leave it for the Doktor to tell. After three months in the Decompression Chamber, he will doubtless be cranked up to the fine peaks of frenzy. His “Watergate notes from the Chamber” show a powerful, brain-damaged kind of zeal that will hopefully be brought under control in the near future… and I’m enclosing some of them here, as crude evidence to show he’s still functioning, despite the tragic handicap that comes with a bad case of the Bends.
In closing, I remain… Yrs. in Fear & Loathing:
Raoul Duke, Spts. Ed.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
What follows is the unfinished mid-section of Dr. Thompson’s Notes from the Decompression Chamber. This section was written in his notebook on the day after convicted Watergate burglar James McCord’s appearance before the Ervin committee on national TV. It was transcribed by a nurse who copied Dr. Thompson’s notes as he held them up, page by page, through the pressure-sealed window of his Chamber. It is not clear, from the text, whether he deliberately wrote this section with a “Woody Creek, Colorado” dateline, or whether he planned to be there by the time it was printed.
In either case, he was wrong. His case of the Bends was severe, almost fatal. And even upon his release there is no real certainty of recovery. He might have to re-enter the Decompression Chamber at any time, if he suffers a relapse.
None of which has any bearing on what follows—which was published exactly as he wrote it in the Chamber:
* * *
Jesus, where will it end? Yesterday I turned on my TV set—hungry for some decent upbeat news—and here was an ex-Army Air Force colonel with 19 years in the CIA under his belt admitting that he’d willfully turned himself into a common low-life burglar because he thought the Attorney General and The President of the US had more or less ordered him to. Ex-Colonel McCord felt he had a duty to roam around the country burglarizing offices and ransacking private/personal files—because the security of the USA was at stake.
Indeed, we were in serious trouble last year—and for five or six years before that, if you believe the muck those two vicious and irresponsible young punks at the Washington Post have raked up.
“Impeachment” is an ugly word, they say. Newsweek columnist Shana Alexander says “all but the vulture-hearted want to believe him ignorant.” A week earlier, Ms. Alexander wrote a “love letter” to Martha Mitchell: “You are in the best tradition of American womanhood, defending your country, your flag… but most of all, defending your man.”
Well… shucks. I can hardly choke back the tears… and where does that leave Pat Nixon, who apparently went on a world cruise under a different name the day after McCord pulled the plug and wrote that devastating letter to Judge Sirica.
The public prints—and especially Newsweek—are full of senile gibberish these days. Stewart Alsop wakes up in a cold sweat every morning at the idea that Congress might be forced to impeach “The President.”
For an answer to that, we can look to Hubert Humphrey—from one of the nine speeches he made during his four-and-a-half hour campaign for Democratic candidate George McGovern in the waning weeks of last November’s presidential showdown—Humphrey was talking to a crowd of hardhats in S.F., as I recall, and he said, “My friends, we’re not talking about re-electing the President—we’re talking about re-electing Richard Nixon.”
Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. Humphrey’s voice just belched out of my radio, demanding that we get to the bottom of this Watergate mess, but meanwhile we have to make sure the Ruskies understand that we all stand firmly behind The President.
Right. As far behind him as possible, if GOP standard-bearers like B. Goldwater and Hugh Scott are any measure of the party’s allegiance to the frightened unprincipled little shyster they were calling—when they nominated him for re-canonization ten months ago in Miami—“one of the greatest Presidents in American History.” We will want those tapes for posterity because we won’t hear their like again—from Scott, Goldwater, Duke Wayne, Martha, Sammy Davis, Senator Percy or anyone else. Not even George Meany will join a foursome with Richard Nixon these days. The hallowed halls of the White House no longer echo with the happy sound of bouncing golf balls. Or footballs either, for that matter… or any other kind.
The hard-nosed super-executives Nixon chose to run this country for us turned on each other like rats in a slum-fire when the first signs of trouble appeared. What we have seen in the past few weeks is the incredible spectacle of a President of the United States either firing or being hastily abandoned by all of his hired hands and cronies—all the people who put him where he is today, in fact, and now that they’re gone he seems helpless. Some of his closest “friends” and advisers are headed for prison, his once-helpless Democratic Congress is verging on mutiny, the threat of impeachment looms closer every day, and his coveted “place in history” is even now being etched out in acid by eager Harvard historians.
Six months ago Richard Nixon was Zeus himself, calling firebombs and shitrains down on friend and foe alike—the most powerful man in the world, for a while—but all that is gone now and nothing he can do will ever bring a hint of it back. Richard Nixon’s seventh crisis will be his last. He will go down with Harding and Grant as one of America’s classically rotten presidents.
Which is exactly what he deserves—and if saying that makes me “one of the vulture-hearted,” by Ms. Alexander’s lights… well… I think I can live with it. My grandmother was one of those stunned old ladies who cried when the Duke of Windsor quit the Big Throne to marry an American commoner back in 1936. She didn’t know the Duke or anything about him. But she knew—along with millions of other old ladies and closet monarchists—that a Once and Future King had a duty to keep up the act. She wept for her lost illusions—for the same reason Stewart Alsop and Shana Alexander will weep tomorrow if President Richard M. Nixon is impeached and put on trial by the US Senate.
Our Congressmen will do everything possible to avoid it, because most of them have a deep and visceral sympathy, however denied and reluctant, for the “tragic circumstances” that led Richard Nixon to what even Evans and Novak call “the brink of ruin.” The loyal opposition has not distinguished itself in the course of this long-running nightmare. Even Nixon’s oldest enemies are lying low, leaving the dirty work to hired lawyers and faceless investigators. Senators Kennedy, McGovern and Fulbright are strangely silent, while Humphrey babbles nonsense and Muskie hoards his energy for beating back personal attacks by Strom Thurmond. The only politicians talking publicly about the dire implications of the Watergate iceberg are those who can’t avoid it—the four carefully selected eunuch/Democrats on the Senate Select Investigating Committee and a handful of panicked Republicans up for re-election in 1974.
The slow-rising central horror of “Watergate” is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.
Already—with the worst news yet to come—there is an ominous tide of public opinion that says whatever Nixon and his small gang of henchmen and hired gunsels might have done, it was probably no worse than what other politicians have been doing all along, and still are.
Anybody who really believes this is a fool—but a lot of people seem to, and that evidence is hard to ignore. What almost happened here—and what was only avoided because the men who made Nixon President and who were running the country in his name knew in their hearts that they were all mean, hollow little bastards who couldn’t dare turn their backs on each other—was a takeover and total perversion of the American political process by a gang of cold-blooded fixers so incompetent that they couldn’t even pull off a simple burglary… which tends to explain, among other things, why 25,000 young Americans died for no reason in Vietnam while Nixon and his brain trust were trying to figure out how to admit the whole thing was a mistake from the start.
At press time, the National Affairs Suite in Washington had been re-opened and prepared for “total coverage.” Thompson arrived there July 7th, and we expect his reports soon.
Rolling Stone, #140, August 2, 1973
Fear and Loathing at the Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check
PART I
The Worm Turns in Swamptown… Violent Talk at the National Affairs Desk… A Narrow Escape for Tex Colson… Heavy Duty in The Bunker… No Room for Gonzo? “Hell, They Already Have This Story Nailed Up and Bleeding from Every Extremity.”
Reflecting on the meaning of the last presidential election, I have decided at this point in time that Mr. Nixon’s landslide victory and my overwhelming defeat will probably prove to be of greater value to the nation than would the victory my supporters and I worked so hard to achieve. I think history may demonstrate that it was not only important that Mr. Nixon win and that I lose, but that the margin should be of stunning proportions.… The shattering Nixon landslide, and the even more shattering exposure of the corruption that surrounded him, have done more than I could have done in victory to awaken the nation.… This is not a comfortable conclusion for a self-confident—some would say self-righteous—politician to reach.…
—George McGovern in the Washington Post: August 12, 1973
Indeed. But we want to keep in mind that “comfortable” is a very relative word around Washington these days—with the vicious tentacles of “Watergate” ready to wrap themselves around almost anybody, at any moment—and when McGovern composed those eminently reasonable words in the study of his stylish home on the woodsy edge of Washington, he had no idea how close he’d just come to being made extremely “uncomfortable.”
I have just finished making out a report addressed to somebody named Charles R. Roach, a claims examiner at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Headquarters of Avis Rent-a-Car in Arlington, Virginia. It has to do with a minor accident that occurred on Connecticut Avenue, in downtown Washington, shortly after George and his wife had bade farewell to the last staggering guests at the party he’d given on a hot summer night in July commemorating the first anniversary of his seizure of the presidential nomination in Miami.
The atmosphere of the party itself had been amazingly loose and pleasant. Two hundred people had been invited—twice that many showed up—to celebrate what history will record, with at least a few asterisks, as one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns in American history. Midway in the evening I was standing on the patio, talking to Carl Wagner and Holly Mankiewicz, when the phone began ringing and whoever answered it came back with the news that President Nixon had just been admitted to the nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital with what was officially announced as “viral pneumonia.”
Nobody believed it, of course. High-powered journalists like Jack Germond and Jules Witcover immediately seized the phones to find out what was really wrong with Nixon… but the rest of us, no longer locked into deadlines or the fast-rising terrors of some tomorrow’s election day, merely shrugged at the news and kept on drinking. There was nothing unusual, we felt, about Nixon caving in to some real or even psychosomatic illness. And if the truth was worse than the news… well… there would be nothing unusual about that either.
One of the smallest and noisiest contingents among the 200 invited guests was the handful of big-time journalists who’d spent most of last autumn dogging McGovern’s every lame footstep along the campaign trail, while two third-string police reporters from the Washington Post were quietly putting together the biggest political story of 1972 or any other year—a story that had already exploded, by the time of McGovern’s “anniversary” party, into a scandal that has even now burned a big hole for itself in every American history textbook written from 1973 till infinity.
* * *
One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Watergate story has been the way the press has handled it: What began in the summer of 1972 as one of the great media-bungles of the century has developed, by now, into what is probably the most thoroughly and most professionally covered story in the history of American journalism.
When I boomed into Washington last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs Desk once again, I expected—or in retrospect I think I expected—to find the high-rolling news-meisters of the capital press corps jabbering blindly among themselves, once again, in some stylish sector of reality far-removed from the Main Nerve of “the story”… like climbing aboard Ed Muskie’s Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding every media star in the nation sipping Bloody Marys and convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with “the candidate”… or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn on election day with a half-dozen of the heaviest press wizards and coming away convinced that McGovern couldn’t possibly lose by more than ten points.
My experience on the campaign trail in 1972 had not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-a-vis the wisdom of the national press corps… so I was seriously jolted, when I arrived in Washington, to find that the bastards had this Watergate story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity—from “Watergate” and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon’s lies about the financing for his San Clemente beach-mansion, and even the long-dormant “Agnew Scandal.”
There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half-dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The New York Times, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hotrods from its bureaus all over the country to overcome the Post’s early lead. Both Time’s and Newsweek’s Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks and leads in this story that was unraveling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it.… And especially not the three (or four) TV networks, whose whole machinery was geared to visual/action stories, rather than skillfully planted tips from faceless lawyers who called on private phones and then refused to say anything at all in front of the cameras.
The only standard-brand visual “action” in the Watergate story had happened at the very beginning—when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes cops with drawn guns—and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.
The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities—particularly at a time when almost every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17th. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their “first teams” out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments—Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et al.—on September 15th. And by election day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news.
