The Great Shark Hunt, page 44
Nixon was about 30,000 feet over St. Louis in Air Force One when his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, took the oath. Ford had been selected, by Nixon, to replace Spiro Agnew, convicted several months earlier of tax fraud and extortion… and Nixon himself, before quitting, had tacitly admitted his guilt in a felony conspiracy to obstruct justice.
I left Washington the day after Ford was sworn in, too tired to feel anything but a manic sense of relief as I staggered through the lobby at National Airport with about 200 pounds of transcripts of the Senate Watergate and House Judiciary Committee Hearings that had been rendered obsolete as evidence by Nixon’s forced resignation two days earlier. I was not quite sure why I wanted them, but evidence of any kind is always reassuring to have, and I felt that after two or three months of sleep I might be able to use them in some way.
Now, almost exactly four weeks later, that suitcase full of transcripts is still lying open beside my desk… and now that Gerald Ford has granted Nixon a presidential pardon so sweeping that he will never have to stand trial for anything, those books of evidence that would have guaranteed his impeachment if he hadn’t resigned are beginning to pique my interest.…
Honky Tonk Tunes and a Long-Remembered Dream… Constant Haggling, Useless Briefings and a Howling Voice at the Door
American politics will never be the same again.
—Senator George McGovern, Acceptance Speech, July 13th, 1972,
Miami, Florida
Another hot, heavy rain in Washington, at 4:33 on a wet Wednesday morning, falling like balls of sweat against my window.… Twelve feet wide and six feet tall, the high yellow eye of the National Affairs Suite looking out across the rotting roofs of our nation’s capital at least a mile away through the haze and the rain to the fine white marble spire of the Washington Monument and the dark dome of the Capitol.… Hillbilly music howling out of the radio across the room from the typewriter.
… And when it’s midnight in Dallas, I’ll be somewhere on a big jet plane.… If I could only understand you, maybe I could cope with the loneliness I feel.…
Honky-tonk tunes and a quart of Wild Turkey on the sideboard, ripped to the tits on whatever it was in that bag I bought tonight from the bull fruit in Georgetown, looking down from the desk at yesterday’s huge Washington Post headline:
PRESIDENT ADMITS WITHHOLDING DATA
TAPES SHOW HE APPROVED COVER-UP
Every half-hour on the half-hour, WXRA—the truckers’ station over in Alexandria—keeps babbling more and more hideous news of “rapidly dissolving” support in the House and the Senate. All ten members of the House Judiciary Committee who voted against the articles of impeachment on national TV last week have now reversed themselves, for the record, and said they plan to vote for impeachment when—or if—it comes to a vote in the House on August 19th. Even Barry Goldwater has leaked (and then denied) a UPI report that he thinks Nixon should resign, for the good of the country… and also for the good of Goldwater and everybody else in the Republican party, such as it is.
Indeed. The rats are deserting the ship at high speed. Even the dingbat senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick—the GOP claghorn who nominated Nixon for the Nobel Peace Prize less than two years ago—has called the president’s 11th-hour admission of complicity in the Watergate cover-up “sorrowful news.”
We will not have Richard Nixon to kick around much longer—which is not especially “sorrowful news” to a lot of people, except that the purging of the cheap little bastard is going to have to take place here in Washington and will take up the rest of our summer.
One day at a time, Sweet Jesus.… That’s all I’m askin’ from you.…
And now the Compton Brothers with a song about “… when the wine ran out and the jukebox ran out of tunes…”
Jesus, we need more ice and whiskey here. Fill the bag with water and suck down the dregs. The rain is still lashing my window, the dawn sky is still black and this room is damp and cold. Where is the goddamn heat switch? Why is my bed covered with newspaper clips and U.S. Government Printing Office evidence books from the Nixon impeachment hearings?
Ah… madness, madness. On a day like this, not even the prospect of Richard Nixon’s downfall can work up the blood. This is stone, flat-out fucking weather.
On another day like this, a long time ago, I was humming across the bridge out of Louisville, Kentucky, in an old Chevy with three or four good ole boys who worked with me at a furniture factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana.… The tires were hissing on the wet asphalt, the windshield wipers were lashing back and forth in the early morning rain and we were hunkered down in the car with our lunch bags and moaning along with a mean country tune on the radio when somebody said:
“Jesus Christ: Why are we going to work on a day like this? We must be goddamn crazy. This is the kind of day when you want to be belly-to-belly with a good woman, in a warm bed under a tin roof with the rain beating down and a bottle of good whiskey right next to the bed.”
Let me be there in your mornin’, let me be there in your night.… Let me be there when you need me… and make it right.
Ah, this haunting, honky music.… I am running a serious out-of-control fever for that long-remembered dream of a tin-roof, hard-rain, belly-to-belly day with a big iron bolt on the door and locked away in a deep warm bed from every connection to the outside world except a $14.95 tin radio wailing tunes like “I Smell a Rat” and “The Wild Side of Life.”
This is not your ideal flying weather. Both National and Dulles airports are “closed for the rest of the morning,” they say.… But despite all that I find myself on the phone demanding plane reservations back to Colorado. Fuck the weather…
Whoever answered the phone at United Airlines said the weather was “expected to be clear” by early afternoon and there were plenty of seats open for the 4:40 flight to Denver.
“Wonderful,” I said, “but I want a first-class seat in the smokers’ section.”
“I’ll check,” she said, and moments later she was back with bad news: “The smoking seats are all taken, sir, but if it makes no difference to you—”
“It does,” I said. “I must smoke. I insist on it.”
She checked again and this time the news was better: “I think we can open a smoking seat for you, sir. Could I have your name?”
“Nader,” I said. “R. Nader.”
“How do you spell that?”
I spelled it for her, then set my alarm for two and fell asleep on the couch, still wearing my wet swimming trunks. After two months on the Nixon Impeachment Trail, my nerves were worn raw from the constant haggling and frustrated hostility of all those useless, early morning White House press briefings and long, sweaty afternoons pacing aimlessly around the corridors of the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill, waiting for crumbs of wisdom from any two or three of those 38 luckless congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee hearing evidence on the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon.
It was an eerie spectacle: The whole Nixonian empire—seemingly invincible less than two years ago—was falling apart of its own foul weight right in front of our eyes. There was no denying the vast and historic proportions of the story, but covering it on a day-to-day basis was such a dull and degrading experience that it was hard to keep a focus on what was really happening. It was essentially a lawyer’s story, not a journalist’s.
* * *
I never made that plane. Sometime around noon I was jolted awake by a pounding on my door and a voice shouting, “Wake up, goddamnit, the whole town’s gone crazy—the sonofabitch has caved in—he’s quitting.”
“No!” I thought. “Not now! I’m too weak to handle it.” These goddamn rumors had kept me racing frantically around Washington day and night for almost a week—and when the shitrain finally began, I was helpless. My eyes were swollen shut with chlorine poisoning and when I tried to get out of bed to open the door, I almost snapped both ankles. I had fallen asleep wearing rubber-soled basketball shoes, which had wedged themselves between the sheets at the foot of the bed so firmly that my first thought was that somebody had strapped me down on the bed.
The howling voice at my door was Craig Vetter, another ROLLING STONE writer who had been in town for two weeks trying to make some kind of connection with Nixon’s priest.… But the priest was finished now and the town was going wild. A Washington Post reporter said he had never seen the newsroom so frantic—not even when John Kennedy was murdered or during the Cuban missile crisis. The prevailing rumors on Capitol Hill had Nixon either addressing a joint session of Congress at 4:30 that afternoon or preparing a final statement for delivery at 7:00 on all three networks… but a call to the White House pressroom spiked both these rumors, although the place was filling up with reporters who’d picked up an entirely different rumor: That either Ziegler or Nixon himself would soon appear in the pressroom to make a statement of some kind.
Six more calls from the National Affairs Suite churned up at least six more impossible rumors. Every switchboard in town that had any connection with either journalism or politics was jammed and useless. Later that night, even the main White House switchboard jammed up for the first time most reporters could remember, and for the next two days almost everybody who worked in the White House—even private secretaries—kept their home phones off the hook because of the chaos.
It was about 1:30 on Wednesday afternoon when I got through to Marty Nolan in the White House pressroom. We compared rumors and killed both lists very quickly. “This is all crazy bullshit,” said Nolan. “We’re just being jerked around. He’s not going to do anything serious today, but just on the chance that he might, I don’t dare leave this goddamn dungeon.”
I had been on the verge of going down there, but after arranging with Nolan and about six other people in strategic positions in different parts of town to call me instantly if anything started to happen, I decided that the best thing to do was to take both the TV set and the FM radio down to a table by the pool and have all my calls transferred down to the lifeguard’s telephone.… Which turned out to be the best of all possible solutions: Vetter and I set up a totally efficient communications post beside the pool, and for the next 48 hours we were able to monitor the whole craziness from our table beside the pool.
The Suck-Tide Reaches San Clemente… Ziegler Brings the News to the Boss… General Haig and the Bag of Dimes… The Sybaritic Priest and the Mentally Retarded Rabbi… More Talk of the ‘Suicide Option’
Well… the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the Bowery—exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of “innocent bystanders” who still don’t know what happened.…
… And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully incomplete quality about the whole thing. All over Washington tonight is the stench of a massive psychic battle that nobody really won. Richard Nixon has been broken, whipped and castrated all at once, but even for me there is no real crank or elation in having been a front-row spectator at the final scenes, the Death watch, the first time in American history that a president has been chased out of the White House and cast down in the ditch with all the other geeks and common criminals.…
Looking back on the final few months of his presidency, it is easy to see that Nixon was doomed all along—or at least from that moment when Archibald Cox first decided to force a showdown on the “executive privilege” question by sending a U.S. marshal over to the White House with a subpoena for some of the Oval Office tapes.
Nixon naturally defied that subpoena, but not even the crazed firing of Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus could make it go away. And when Jaworski challenged Nixon’s right to defy that subpoena in the U.S. Supreme Court, the wheels of doom began rolling. And from that point on, it was clear to all the principals except Nixon himself that the Unthinkable was suddenly inevitable; it was only a matter of time.… And it was just about then that Richard Nixon began losing his grip on reality.
Within hours after Jaworski and Nixon’s “Watergate lawyer” James St. Clair had argued the case in a special session of the Court, I talked to Pat Buchanan and was surprised to hear that Nixon and his wizards in the White House were confident that the verdict would be 5–3 in their favor. Even Buchanan, who thinks rationally about 79% of the time, apparently believed—less than two weeks before the Court ruled unanimously against Nixon—that five of the eight justices who would have to rule on that question would see no legal objection to ratifying Nixon’s demented idea that anything discussed in the president’s official office—even a patently criminal conspiracy—was the president’s personal property, if he chose to have it recorded on his personal tape-recording machinery.
The possibility that even some of the justices The Boss himself had appointed to the Court might not cheerfully endorse a concept of presidential immunity that mocked both the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta had apparently been considered for a moment and then written off as too farfetched and crazy even to worry about by all of Nixon’s personal strategists.
It is still a little difficult to believe, in fact, that some of the closest advisers to the president of a constitutional democracy in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-four might actually expect the highest court in any constitutional democracy to crank up what is probably the most discredited precedent in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence—the “divine right of kings”—in order to legalize the notion that a president of the United States or any other would-be democracy is above and beyond “the law.”
That Nixon and his personal Gestapo actually believed this could happen is a measure of the insanity quotient of the people Nixon took down in the bunker with him when he knew the time had come to get serious.
* * *
But even as they raved, you could hear a hollow kind of paranoid uncertainty in their voices, as if they could already feel the ebb tide sucking around their ankles—just as Nixon must have felt it when he walked alone on the beach at San Clemente a few weeks earlier, trudging slowly along in the surf with his pantlegs rolled up while he waited in angry solitude for the results of the Supreme Court vote on his claim of “executive privilege.” That rush of sucking water around his ankles must have almost pulled him out to sea when Ziegler called down from the big dune in front of La Casa Pacifica: “Mister President! Mister President! We just got the news! The vote was unanimous—eight to zero.”
Nixon whoops with delight: He stops in his waterfilled tracks and hurls out both arms in the twin-victory sign. “Wonderful!” he shouts. “I knew we’d win it, Ron! Even without that clown Renchburg. It wasn’t for nothing that I appointed those other dumb farts to the Court!”
Ziegler stares down at him, at this doomed scarecrow of a president down there on the edge of the surf. Why is he grinning? Why does he seem so happy at this terrible news?
“No!” Ziegler shouts. “That is not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all!” He hesitates, choking back a sob. “The vote was eight to zero, Mister President—against you.”
“What?” The scarecrow on the beach goes limp. His arms collapse, his hands flap crazily around the pockets of his wet pants. “Those dirty bastards!” he screams. “We’ll break their balls!”
“Yes sir!” Ziegler shouts. “They’ll wish they’d never been born!” He jerks a notebook out of his inside coat pocket and jots: “Break their balls.”
By this time the wet president is climbing the dune in front of him. “What happened?” Nixon snarls. “Did somebody get to Burger?”
Ziegler nods. “What else? Probably it was Edward Bennet Williams.”
“Of course,” says Nixon. “We should never have left that dumb sonofabitch back there in Washington by himself. We know he’ll do business: That’s why we put him there.” He kicks savagely at a lone ice plant in the sand. “Goddamnit! Where was Colson? Burger was his assignment, right?”
Ziegler winces. “Colson’s in jail, sir. Don’t you remember?”
Nixon stares blankly, then recovers. “Colson? In jail? What did he do?” He picks up a kelp head and lashes it against his shin. “Never mind, I remember now—but what about Ehrlichman? He can jerk Burger and those other clowns around like a goddamn Punch and Judy show!”
Ziegler stares out to sea for a moment, his eyes cloud over. “Well, sir… John’s not much good to us anymore. He’s going to prison.”
Nixon stiffens, dropping the kelp head in the sand. “Holy shit, Ron! Why should John go to prison? He’s one of the finest public servants I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing!”
Ziegler is weeping openly now, his emaciated body is wracked by deep sobs. “I don’t know, sir. I can’t explain it.” He stares out to sea again, fighting to gain control of himself. “These are terrible times, Mister President. Our enemies are closing in. While you were out there on the beach, the Avis agency in Laguna called and canceled our credit. They took my car, Mister President! My gold Cadillac convertible! I was on the phone with Buzhardt—about the Supreme Court business, you know—when I looked out the window and saw this little nigger in an Avis uniform driving my car out the gate. The guards said he had a writ of seizure, signed by the local sheriff.”
“My God!” Nixon exclaims. “We’ll break his balls! Where’s a telephone? I’ll call Haldeman.”
“It’s no use, sir,” Ziegler replies. “We can’t make any outgoing calls until we pay the phone company $33,000. They sent a man down to fix the lines so we can only take incoming calls—for the next 86 hours, and then we’ll be cut off entirely. If you want to call Washington, we’ll have to walk to the San Clemente Inn and use a pay phone. I think General Haig has a bag of dimes in his room.”
