The Great Shark Hunt, page 37
“What a rotten thing to do.”
“Well, it was him or me, Ralph… as a matter of fact I worried about it when we didn’t see Tim at the restaurant later on. But we were late because we did some high-speed driving exercises in the Southeast area of Washington—flashing along those big empty streets going into corners at 80 miles an hour and doing 180s… it was a sort of thunder road driving trip, screwing it on with that big Cutlass.”
“Enormous car?”
“A real monster, extremely overpowered…”
“How big is it? The size of a bus?”
“No, normal size for a big car, but extremely powerful—much more, say, than a Mustang or something like that. We did about an hour’s worth of crazed driving on these deserted streets, and it was during this time that I mentioned that we should probably go out and have a word with Mr. Colson—because during a conversation earlier in the evening, the consensus among the reporters at McGovern’s party was that Colson was probably the only one of Nixon’s first-rank henchmen who would probably not even be indicted.”
“Why’s that?”
“He had managed to keep himself clean, somehow—up to that point anyway. Now, he’s been dragged into the ITT hassle again, so it looks like he might go down with all the others.
“But at that point, we thought, well, Colson really is the most evil of those bastards, and if he gets off there is really no justice in the world. So we thought we’d go out to his house—luckily none of us knew where he lived—and beat on his door, mumbling something like: ‘God’s mercy on me! My wife’s been raped! My foot’s been cut off!’ Anything to lure him downstairs… and the minute he opened the door, seize him and drag him out to the car and tie him by the ankles and drag him down to the White House.”
“He could identify you…”
“Well, he wouldn’t have time to know exactly who it was—but we thought about it for a while, still driving around, and figured a beastly thing like that might be the only thing that could get Nixon off the hook, because he could go on television the next afternoon, demanding to make a nationwide emergency statement, saying: ‘Look what these thugs have done to poor Mr. Colson! This is exactly what we were talking about! This is why we had to be so violent in our ways, because these thugs will stop at nothing! They dragged Mr. Colson the length of Pennsylvania Avenue at four in the morning, then cut him loose like a piece of meat!’ He would call for more savage and stringent security measures against ‘the kind of animals who would do a thing like this.’ So we put the plot out of our heads.”
“Well, it would have been a bit risky… wouldn’t have done the Democratic party any good at all, would it?”
“Well, it might have created a bit of an image problem—and it would have given Nixon the one out he desperately needs now, a way to justify the whole Watergate trip by raving about ‘this brutal act.’… That’s an old Hell’s Angels gig, dragging people down the street. Hell’s Angels. Pachucos, drunken cowboys.
“But I thought more about it later, when I finally got back to the hotel after that stinking accident I’m still trying to explain… and it occurred to me that those bastards are really mean enough to do that to Colson, themselves—if they only had the wits to think about it. They could go out and drag him down the street in a car with old McGovern stickers on the bumpers or put on false beards and wave a wine bottle out the window as they passed the White House and cut him loose. He’d roll to a stop in front of the Guard House and the Guard would clearly see the McGovern sticker on the car screeching off around the corner and that’s all Nixon would need. If we gave them the idea, they’d probably go out and get Colson tonight.”
“He’d be babbling, I’d think—”
“He’d be hysterical, in very bad shape. And of course he’d claim that McGovern thugs had done it to him—if he were still able to talk. I really believe Nixon would do a thing like that if he thought it would get him out of the hole… So I thought about it a little more, and it occurred to me what we should do was have these masks made up—you know those rubber masks that fit over the whole head.”
“Ah yes, very convincing.…”
“Yeah, one of them would have to be the face of Haldeman, one the face of Ehrlichman and one the face of Tony Ulasewicz.”
“Yes, the meanest men on the Nixon Staff.”
“Well, Colson’s the meanest man in politics, according to Pat Buchanan. Ulasewicz is the hit man, a hired thug. I thought if we put these masks on and wore big overcoats or something to disguise ourselves and went out to his house and kind of shouted: ‘Tex, Tex! It’s me, Tony. Come on down. We’ve got a big problem.’ And the minute he opens the door, these people with the Haldeman and Ehrlichman masks would jump out from either side and seize him by each arm—so that he sees who has him, but only for two or three seconds, before the person wearing the Ulasewicz mask slaps a huge burlap sack over his head, knots it around his knees and then the three of them carry him out to the car and lash him to the rear bumper and drag him down the street—and just as we passed the White House Guard Station, slash the rope so that Colson would come to a tumbling bloody stop right in front of the guard… and after two or three days in the Emergency Ward, when he was finally able to talk, after coming out of shock, he would swear that the people who got him were Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Ulasewicz—and he would know they were mean enough to do it, because that’s the way he thinks. He’s mean enough to do it himself. You’d have to pick a night when they were all in Washington, and Colson would swear that they did it to him, no matter what they said. He would know it, because he had seen them.”
“Brilliant, brilliant. Yes, he’d be absolutely convinced—having seen the men and the faces.”
“Right. But of course you couldn’t talk—just seize him and go. What would you think if you looked out and saw three people you recognized, and suddenly they jerked you up and tied you behind a car and dragged you 40 blocks? Hell, you saw them. You’d testify, swear under oath… which would cause Nixon probably to go completely crazy. He wouldn’t know what to believe! How could he be sure that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Ulasewicz hadn’t done it? Nobody would know, not even by using lie detectors.… But that’s a pretty heavy act to get into—dragging people around the street behind rented Avis cars, and we never quite got back to it, anyway, but if we hadn’t had that accident we might have given it a little more thought although I still have no idea where Colson lives and I still don’t want to know. But you have to admit it was a nice idea.”
“That’s a lovely thing, yes.”
“You know Colson had that sign on the wall in his office saying ONCE YOU HAVE THEM BY THE BALLS, THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS WILL FOLLOW.”
“Right.”
“He’s an ex-Marine captain. So it would be a definite dose of his own medicine.”
“Do you really think he deserves that kind of treatment?”
“Well, he was going to set off a firebomb in the Brookings Institution, just to recover some papers.… Colson is not one of your friendlier, happier type of persons. He’s an evil bastard, and dragging him down the street would certainly strike a note of terror in that crowd; they could use some humility.”
“Poetic justice, no?”
“Well, it’s a little rough… it might not be necessary to drag him 40 blocks. Maybe just four. You could put him in the trunk for the first 36 blocks, then haul him out and drag him the last four; that would certainly scare the piss out of him, bumping along the street, feeling all his skin being ripped off.…”
“He’d be a bloody mess. They might think he was just some drunk and let him lie there all night.”
“Don’t worry about that. They have a guard station in front of the White House that’s open 24 hours a day. The guards would recognize Colson… and by that time of course his wife would have called the cops and reported that a bunch of thugs had kidnapped him.”
“Wouldn’t it be a little kinder if you drove about four more blocks and stopped at a phone box to ring the hospital and say, ‘Would you mind going around to the front of the White House? There’s a naked man lying outside in the street, bleeding to death….’ ”
“… and we think it’s Mr. Colson.”
“It would be quite a story for the newspapers, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’d see some headlines on that one.”
PART II
Flashbacks & Time Warps… Scrambled Notes and Rude Comments from the High Country… Dean vs. Haldeman in the Hearing Room;… A Question of Perjury… Ehrlichman Sandbags an Old Buddy… Are the Sharks Deserting the Suckfish?
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the following section was lashed together at the last moment from a six-pound bundle of documents, notebooks, memos, recordings and secretly taped phone conversations with Dr. Thompson during a month of erratic behavior in Washington, New York, Colorado and Miami. His “long-range plan,” he says, is to “refine” these nerve-wracking methods, somehow, and eventually “create an entirely new form of journalism.” In the meantime, we have suspended his monthly retainer and canceled his credit card. During one four-day period in Washington he destroyed two cars, cracked a wall in the Washington Hilton, purchased two French Horns at $1100 each and ran through a plate-glass door in a Turkish restaurant.
Compounding the problem was the presence in Washington, for the first time, of our artist Ralph Steadman—an extremely heavy drinker with little or no regard for either protocol or normal social amenities. On Steadman’s first visit to the Watergate Hearing Room he was ejected by the Capitol Police after spilling beer on a TV monitor and knocking Sam Ervin off his feet while attempting to seize a microphone to make a statement about “the rottenness of American politics.” It was only the timely intervention of New York Post correspondent John Lang that kept Steadman from being permanently barred from the Hearing Room.
In any case, the bulk of what follows appears exactly as Dr. Thompson wrote it originally in his notebooks. Given the realities of our constant deadline pressure, there was no other way to get this section into print.
The Notebooks
“Jesus, this Watergate thing is unbelievable. It’s terrible, like finding out your wife is running around but you don’t want to hear about it.”
—Remark of a fat man from Nashville sharing a taxi with Ralph Steadman.
Tuesday morning 6/26/73: 8:13 AM in the Rockies.…
Bright sun on the grass outside my windows behind this junk TV set and long white snowfields, still unmelted, on the peaks across the valley. Every two or three minutes the doleful screech of a half-wild peacock rattles the windows. The bastard is strutting around on the roof, shattering the morning calm with his senseless cries.
His noise is a bad burden on Sandy’s nerves. “God damnit!” she mutters. “We have to get him a hen!”
“Fuck him; we got him a hen—and she ran off and got herself killed by coyotes. What the crazy bastard needs now is a bullet through the vocal cords. He’s beginning to sound like Herman Talmadge.”
“Talmadge?”
“Watch what’s happening, goddamnit! Here’s another true Son of the South. First it was Thompson… now Talmadge… and then we’ll get that half-wit pimp from Florida.”
“Gurney?”
I nodded, staring fixedly at the big blueish eye of the permanently malfunctioned “color TV” set that I hauled back from Washington last summer, when I finally escaped from the place… But now I was using it almost feverishly, day after day, to watch what was happening in Washington.
The Watergate Hearings—my daily fix, on TV. Thousands of people from all over the country are writing the networks to demand that this goddamn tedious nightmare be jerked off the air so they can get back to their favorite soap operas: As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, The Price Is Right and What Next for Weird Betty? They are bored by the spectacle of the Watergate hearings. The plot is confusing, they say; the characters are dull, and the dialogue is repulsive.
The President of the United States would never act that way—at least not during baseball season. Like Nixon’s new White House chief of staff, Melvin Laird, said shortly before his appointment: “If the President turns out to be guilty, I don’t want to hear about it.”
* * *
This is the other end of the attitude-spectrum from the comment I heard, last week, from a man in Denver: “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” he said. “Maybe not as long as Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan Douglas… and I never really thought it would happen, to tell you the truth.” He flashed me a humorless smile and turned back to his TV set. “But it is, by god! And it’s almost too good to be true.”
My problem—journalistically, at least—has its roots in the fact that I agree with just about everything that laughing, vengeful bastard said that day. We didn’t talk much. There was no need for it. Everything Richard Milhous Nixon ever stood for was going up in smoke right in front of our eyes. And anybody who could understand and appreciate that, I felt, didn’t need many words to communicate. At least not with me.
(The question is: what did he stand for, and what next for that? Agnew? Reagan? Rockefeller? Even Percy? Nixon was finally “successful” for the same reason he was finally brought low. He kept pushing, pushing, pushing—and inevitably he pushed too far.)
* * *
Noon—Tuesday, June 26th
The TV set is out on the porch now—a move that involved much cursing and staggering.
Weicker has the mike—mano a mano on Dean—and after 13 minutes of apparently aimless blathering he comes off no better than Talmadge. Weicker seemed oddly cautious—a trifle obtuse, perhaps.
What are the connections? Weicker is a personal friend of Pat Gray’s. He is also the only member of the Select Committee with after-hours personal access to John Dean.
“—Live from Senate Caucus Room—”
—flash on CBS screen
Live? Rehearsed? In any case, Dean is livelier than most—not only because of what he has to say, but because he—unlike the other witnesses—refused to say it first in executive session to Committee staffers before going on TV.
Strange—Dean’s obvious credibility comes not from his long-awaited impact (or lack of it) on the American public, but from his obvious ability to deal with the seven Senatorial Inquisitors. They seem awed.
Dean got his edge, early on, with a mocking lash at the integrity of Minority Counsel Fred Thompson—and the others fell meekly in line. Dean radiates a certain very narrow kind of authority—nothing personal, but the kind of nasal blank-hearted authority you feel in the presence of the taxman or a very polite FBI agent.
Only Baker remains. His credibility took a bad beating yesterday. Dean ran straight at him, startling the TV audience with constant references to Baker’s personal dealings with “the White House,” prior to the hearings. There was no need to mention that Baker is the son-in-law of that late and only half-lamented “Solon” from the Great State of Illinois, Sen. Everett Dirksen.
Dean is clearly a shrewd executive. He will have no trouble getting a good job when he gets out of prison.
Now Montoya—the flaccid Mex-Am from New Mexico. No problem here for John Dean.… Suddenly Montoya hits Dean head on with Nixon’s bogus quote about Dean’s investigation clearing all members of White House staff. Dean calmly shrugs it off as a lie—“I never made any investigation.”
—Montoya continues with entire list of prior Nixon statements.
Dean: “In totality, there are less than accurate statements in that… ah… those statements.”
Montoya is after Nixon’s head! Is this the first sign? Over the hump for Tricky Dick?
***Recall lingering memory of Miami Beach plainclothes cop, resting in armory behind Convention Center on night of Nixon’s renomination—(“You tell ’em, Tricky Dick.”)—watching Nixon’s speech on TV… with tear gas fumes all around us and demonstrators gagging outside.
4:20 EDT
As usual, the pace picks up at the end. These buggers should be forced to keep at it for 15 or 16 straight hours—heavy doses of speed, pots of coffee, Wild Turkey, etc., force them down to the raving hysterical quick. Wild accusations, etc.…
Dean becomes more confident as time goes on—a bit flip now, finding his feet.
Friday morning, June 29… 8:33 AM
Jesus, this waterhead Gurney again! You’d think the poor bugger would have the sense to not talk anymore… but no, Gurney is still blundering along, still hammering blindly at the receding edges of Dean’s “credibility” in his now-obvious role as what Frank Reynolds and Sam Donaldson on ABC-TV both described as “the waterboy for the White House.”
Gurney appears to be deaf; he has a brain like a cow’s udder. He asks his questions—off the typed list apparently furnished him by Minority (GOP) counsel, Fred J. Thompson—then his mind seems to wander, his eyes roam lazily around the room while Thompson whispers industriously in his ear, his hands shuffle papers distractedly on the table in front of his microphone… and meanwhile, Dean meticulously chews up his questions and hands them back to him in shreds; so publicly mangled that their fate might badly embarrass a man with good sense.…
But Gurney seems not to notice: His only job on this committee is to Defend the Presidency, according to his instructions from the White House—or at least whatever third-string hangers-on might still be working there—and what we tend to forget, here, is that it’s totally impossible to understand Gurney’s real motives without remembering that he’s the Republican Senator from Florida, a state where George Wallace swept the Democratic primary in 1972 with 78% of the vote, and which went 72% for Nixon in November.
In a state where even Hubert Humphrey is considered a dangerous radical, Ed Gurney’s decision to make an ignorant yahoo of himself on national TV makes excellent sense—at least to his own constituency. They are watching TV down in Florida today, along with the rest of the country, and we want to remember that if Gurney appears in Detroit and Sacramento as a hideous caricature of the imbecilic Senator Cornpone—that’s not necessarily the way he appears to the voters around Tallahassee and St. Petersburg.
