The Great Shark Hunt, page 43
So, with the need for sleep coming up very fast now, we want to look at two main considerations: 1) The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself… and 2) The absolutely vital necessity of filling the vacuum that the Nixon impeachment will leave, and the hole that will be there in 1976.
Rolling Stone, #164, July 4, 1974
I. Quote from Robert C. Odle, office administrator for CREEP.
Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises
… before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Well… this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knucklehead refugee from a 1969 “Mister Clean” TV commercial has just done what only the most cynical and paranoid kind of malcontent ever connected with national politics would have dared to predict.…
If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician—any politician—and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window… flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high-powered “Bull Buster” cattle prod.
But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that—at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.
About five hours after I’d sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the mojo wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a “full, free and absolute” presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.
Ford sprung his decision with no advance warning at 10:40 on a peaceful Sunday morning in Washington, after emerging from a church service with such a powerful desire to dispense mercy that he rushed back to the White House—a short hump across Lafayette Park—and summoned a weary Sunday-morning skeleton crew of correspondents and cameramen to inform them, speaking in curiously zombielike tones, that he could no longer tolerate the idea of ex-President Nixon suffering in grief-crazed solitude out there on the beach in San Clemente, and that his conscience now compelled him to end both the suffering of Nixon and the national angst it was causing by means of a presidential edict of such king-sized breadth and scope as to scourge the poison of “Watergate” from our national consciousness forever.
Or at least that’s how it sounded to me, when I was jolted out of a sweat-soaked coma on Sunday morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. “Ford pardoned the bastard!” he screamed. “I warned you, didn’t I? I buried him twice, and he came back from the dead both times.… Now he’s done it again; he’s running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert.”
I fell back on the bed, moaning heavily. No, I thought. I didn’t hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Washington press corps and the national TV audience with his carefully considered refusal to interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s legal duty to proceed on the basis of evidence and “prosecute any and all individuals.” Given the context of the question, Ford’s reply was widely interpreted as a signal to Jaworski that the former president should not be given any special treatment.… And it also meshed with Ford’s answer to a question in the course of his confirmation hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he’d said, “I don’t think the public would stand for it,” when asked if an appointed vice-president would have the power to pardon the president who’d appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal circumstances.
I recalled these things Ford had said, but I was not so sure I’d heard Dick Tuck correctly—or if I’d really heard him at all. I held my right hand up in front of my eyes, trying to remember if I’d eaten anything the night before that could cause hallucinations. If so, my hand would appear to be transparent, and I would be able to see all the bones and blood vessels very clearly.
But my hand was not transparent. I moaned again, bringing Sandy in from the kitchen to find out what was wrong. “Did Tuck just call?” I asked.
She nodded: “He was almost hysterical. Ford just gave Nixon a full pardon.”
I sat up quickly, groping around on the bed for something to smash. “No!” I shouted. “That’s impossible!”
She shook her head. “I heard it on the radio, too.”
I stared at my hands again, feeling anger behind my eyes and noise coming up in my throat: “That stupid, lying bastard! Jesus! Who votes for these treacherous scumbags! You can’t even trust the dumb ones! Look at Ford! He’s too goddamn stupid to arrange a deal like that! Hell, he’s almost too stupid to lie.”
Sandy shrugged. “He gave Nixon all the tapes, too.”
“Holy shit!” I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. “What’s Goodwin’s number in Washington? That bonehead Rotarian sonofabitch made a deal? Maybe Dick knows something.”
But it was 24 hours later when I finally got hold of Goodwin, and by that time I had made a huge chart full of dates, names and personal connections—all linked and cross-linked by a maze of arrows and lines. The three names on the list with far more connections than any others were Laird, Kissinger and Rockefeller. I had spent all night working feverishly on the chart, and now I was asking Goodwin to have a researcher check it all out.
“Well,” he replied. “A lot of people in Washington are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt there was some kind of arrangement, but—” He paused. “Aren’t we pretty damn close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you’ll never be able to check all that stuff before—”
“Mother of babbling god!” I muttered. The word “deadline” caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about 15 more hours.… With about 90% of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent Richard Nixon’s conviction. The only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he’d said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon “until the legal process has run its course.”
Cazart! I hung up the phone and tossed my chart across the room. That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning so close to the deadline that I almost had a nervous breakdown while failing completely.… And now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon, leaving me with less than 24 hours to revise completely a 15,000 word story that was already set in type.
It was absolutely impossible, no hope at all—except to lash as many last-minute pages as possible into the mojo and hope for the best. Maybe somebody in San Francisco would have time, when the deadline crunch came, to knit the two versions together.… But there was no way at all to be sure, so this will be an interesting article to read when it comes off the press.…
Indeed… cast your bread on the waters… why not?
* * *
I was brooding on this and cursing Nixon, more out of habit than logic, for his eerie ability to make life difficult for me.… when it suddenly occurred to me that the villain this time was not Nixon, but Gerald Ford. He was the one who decided to pardon Nixon (for reasons we can hopefully deal with later) on August 30th, when he instructed his White House counsel, Philip Buchen, to work out the legal details and consult with Nixon’s new defense lawyer, John Miller, one-time campaign aide to Robert Kennedy.
Incredibly, Miller informed Buchen that he would have to make sure a presidential pardon was “acceptable” to Nixon; and 24 hours later he came back with word that the ex-president, whose condition had been publicly described by anonymous “friends” that week as almost terminally “disturbed and depressed” at the prospect of his imminent indictment by Jaworski’s grand jury—had been able to get a grip on himself long enough to decide that he would not be offended by the offer of a full presidential pardon—just as long as the offer also granted Nixon sole ownership and control of all the White House tapes.
Ford quickly agreed, a concession that could mean $5 million or more to Nixon: He can milk them for the bulk of his presidential memoirs, for which his new agent claims already to have been offered a $2 million advance, and after that he has the legal right either to destroy the tapes or sell them to the highest bidder.
Arrangements for the presidential pardon were not completed until Friday, September 6th—and only then after President Ford sent his personal emissary, Benton L. Becker, out to San Clemente to make sure things went smoothly. Becker, a vaguely sinister Washington attorney who is currently under investigation by the IRS for alleged tax evasion, describes himself as an “unpaid legal adviser” to President Ford and also a personal friend.
They first met in 1969, Becker says, when he volunteered to help then Congressman Ford in his ill-advised campaign to persuade the House of Representatives to impeach U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. That effort failed miserably, and Ford now seems embarrassed at the memory of it, but he still defends Becker as “a man of the highest professional ethics.”
There is some disagreement on this. According to The Washington Post, “Justice Department sources said they were astounded when they learned that Becker had been used by the White House to negotiate with the former president. ‘My God, doesn’t Ford know about this case?’ said one source. ‘The guy’s under investigation.’ ”
Which is not necessarily a bad sign, in this day and age. Most of my friends have been “under investigation” at one time or another in the past ten years or so, and my own FBI file dates back at least to 1958, when I refused to accept a security clearance from the Air Force, on the grounds that I didn’t honestly consider myself a good security risk because I disagreed strongly with the slogan: “My Country, Right or Wrong.”
My clearance was not granted, but I was never hassled about it—and instead of being sent to a top-secret radar installation near the Arctic Circle, I was passed over for promotion and placed in a job as sports editor of a base newspaper on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Ah… but we seem to be wandering here.… I was talking about Benton Becker and his delicate task of negotiating the details of a full presidential pardon for Richard Nixon, whose tragic mental condition was even then being slandered almost daily, at this stage of the pardon, by unnamed friends and advisers. At this point in the pardon negotiations, both Ford and Nixon had learned that Jaworski’s grand jury planned to indict the ex-president on as many as ten counts—an ugly prospect that led Ford to suggest that Nixon might temper the grand jury’s aggressive attitude by “volunteering” to admit at least some small measure of guilt for his role in the Watergate cover-up, in exchange for the pardon that would give him total immunity from prosecution anyway, regardless of what he admitted.
This suggestion almost torpedoed the negotiations. Nixon “angrily rejected” it, says one of Ford’s White House advisers, and Becker was hard-pressed to keep the deal on its rails. By Friday evening, however, Nixon’s mood had improved to the point where he agreed to accept both the pardon and the tapes. Becker was elated; he flew back to Washington and reported to Ford that his mission had been 100% successful. The new president received the news gratefully, and scheduled a short-notice press conference on Sunday to lay the fine news on his public.
* * *
Yeah… I know: There is something just a little bit weird about that story, but I don’t have any time to check on it right now. All the details, however, have appeared in one form or another in either The Washington Post or The Washington Star-News.
I cite those sources only because the story makes no sense at all, on its face.… But then none of the other stories in the New York or Washington papers on the Monday after the announcement of the Ford/Nixon treaty made much sense, either… primarily because Sunday is a very hard day to find anybody in Washington who doesn’t want to be found; which includes just about everybody with good sense except the kind of man who calls a press conference at 10:30 on Sunday morning and drones out a stone-faced announcement that he knows will have half the nation howling with rage before nightfall.… But by nightfall, Ford’s version of the pardon was spread all over the country on the wires, while enraged editors at the Times, the Post and the Star were still trying to pry their hotrod investigative reporters out of weekend cabins in the Virginia mountains and beachhouses on the Maryland shore.
* * *
I have very dim memories of Tuck’s call. Less than five hours earlier, I had passed out very suddenly in the bathtub, after something like 133 hours of non-stop work on a thing I’d been dragging around with me for two months and revising in ragged notebooks and on rented typewriters in hotels from Key Biscayne to Laguna Beach, bouncing in and out of Washington to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado… before heading back to Washington again, where the pressure valves finally blew all at once in early August, catching me in a state of hysterical exhaustion and screeching helplessly for speed when Nixon suddenly caved in and quit, ambushing me on the brink of a deadline and wasted beyond the help of anything but the most extreme kind of chemo-therapy.
It takes about a month to recover physically from a collapse of that magnitude, and at least a year to shake the memory. The only thing I can think of that compares to it is that long, long moment of indescribably intense sadness that comes just before drowning at sea, those last few seconds on the cusp when the body is still struggling but the mind has given up… a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it that makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful. Getting rescued at that point is far more painful than drowning: Recovery brings back terrifying memories of struggling wildly for breath.…
This is precisely the feeling I had when Tuck woke me up that morning to say that Ford had just granted Nixon “full, free and absolute” pardon. I had just written a long, sporadically rational brief, of sorts—explaining how Nixon had backed himself into a corner and why it was inevitable that he would soon be indicted and convicted on a felony “obstruction of justice” charge, and then Ford would pardon him, for a lot of reasons I couldn’t agree with, but which Ford had already stated so firmly that there didn’t seem to be much point in arguing about it. The logic of sentencing Nixon to a year in the same cell with John Dean was hard to argue with on either legal or ethical grounds, but I understood politics well enough by then to realize that Nixon would have to plead guilty to something like the rape/murder of a Republican senator’s son before Gerald Ford would even consider letting him spend any time in jail.
I had accepted this, more or less. Just as I had more or less accepted—after 18 months of total involvement in the struggle to get rid of Nixon—the idea that Gerald Ford could do just about anything he felt like doing, as long as he left me alone. My interest in national politics withered drastically within hours after Nixon resigned.
After five and a half years of watching a gang of fascist thugs treating the White House and the whole machinery of the federal government like a conquered empire to be used like the spoils of war for any purpose that served either the needs or whims of the victors, the prospect of some harmless, half-bright jock like Gerry Ford running a cautious, caretaker-style government for two or even six years was almost a welcome relief. Not even the ominous sight of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller hovering a heartbeat away from the presidency had much effect on my head.
After more than ten years of civil war with the White House and all the swine who either lived or worked there, I was ready to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any president who acted half human and had enough sense not to walk around in public wearing a swastika armband.
* * *
This is more or less what I wrote, I think, after Nixon resigned and I was faced with the obligation to fill enough space to justify all those expenses I ran up while chasing Nixon around the country and watching him sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of his own excrement. In the early stages of the Death watch, there was a definite high in watching the Congress reluctantly gearing up for a titanic battle with Richard Nixon and his private army of fixers who had taken over the whole executive branch of the government by the time he sailed triumphantly into his second term.
By the middle of last summer, the showdown had become inevitable and when Nixon looked at the balance sheet in August and saw both the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government joining forces against him, he knew he was finished.
On August 9th, he quit and was gone from Washington 12 hours later in a cloud of disgrace. He was finished: There was no doubt about it. Even his ranking staffers were muttering about his dangerously irrational state of mind toward the end, and his farewell speech to the Cabinet and White House staff was so clearly deranged that even I felt sorry for him.… And when the helicopter whisked him off to exile in California, an almost visible shudder of relief swept through the crowd on the White House lawn that had gathered for the sad spectacle of his departure.
