The Great Shark Hunt, page 45
Nixon stiffens again; his brain is mired in deep thought. Then his eyes light up and he grabs Ziegler by the arm, dragging him toward the house. “Come on, Ron,” he snaps, “I have an idea.”
Ziegler stumbles along behind the president: He feels the energy flowing into him—The Boss is on the move.
Nixon is talking as he runs: “I think I’ve isolated our problem, Ron. We need credit, right? OK, where’s that Jew?”
“Jew?”
“You know who I mean, goddamnit—that rabbi. They can always get credit, can’t they? A rabbi? We’ll send some of the Secret Service boys up there to Laguna to round him up. He’s probably in the bar up there on top of the Surf and Sand; that’s where he hangs out.” Nixon laughs wildly now. “Shit, nobody questions a rabbi’s credit! You tell the SS boys to pick him up and throw a real scare into him, then bring him down here and I’ll stroke him.”
Now Ziegler is laughing. His eyes are bright and he is writing fast in his notebook. “It’s a wonderful idea, sir, just wonderful! First we stonewall the bastards, then we outflank them with a Jew!”
Nixon nods happily. “They’ll never know what hit ’em, Ron. You know what I’ve always said: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ ”
“That’s right, sir. I remember when Coach Lombardi—”
Nixon cuts him off with a sudden clap of his wet hands; the sound causes two Secret Service agents in the nearby shrubbery to go for their guns. “Hold on, Ron! Just hold it right there! You know who taught Coach Lombardi everything he knew?” He smiles deeply. “Me! The President!”
Ziegler wrings his hands, his eyeballs bulge, his face is twisted with reverence. “I remember that, sir—I remember!”
“Good, Ron, good! Only losers forget.… And you know what Coach Lombardi said about that.” Nixon seizes his press secretary by both elbows and comes up close to his face: His breath is foul, his eyeballs are bloodshot, his pupils are dangerously dilated, his words come in short, high-pitched barks like a rabid hyena: “You show me a good loser, Ron—and I’ll show you a loser.”
Ziegler is overwhelmed: His eyes are so wide that he can’t even blink; his body is rigid but his soul is on fire. His face is a mask of pure zeal: Ron Ziegler—left-hand man to a doomed and criminal president, the political flip side of every burned-out acid freak who voted for Goldwater and then switched to Tim Leary until the pain got too bad and the divine light of either Jesus or Maharaj Ji lured him off in the wake of another Perfect Master.
* * *
Ah, poor Ron. I knew him well enough. It was Ziegler, in fact, who tipped me off many months ago that Nixon was finished. This was back in July, in that lull before the storm when the wizards in Washington were beginning to nod glumly at each other whenever somebody suggested that the impeachment drive seemed to be faltering and that maybe Nixon was bottoming out, that in fact he had already bounced off the bottom and was preparing to take the offensive once again.
These were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon’s Goebbels—ex-White House “communications director” Ken Clawson—was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon’s year-long slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy, headline-grabbing attacks on “professional Nixon-haters” in the press, and “unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress.” At that point in time, most of Nixon’s traditional allies were beginning to hear the death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at night, and even Billy Graham had deserted him. So Clawson, in a stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a mentally retarded rabbi on the payroll and sent them forth to do battle with the forces of Evil.
Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, wallowed joyfully in his role as “Nixon’s priest” for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House chief of staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.
But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another holy man—the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flaky presence to anything Clawson aimed him at. Under the banner of something called the “National Citizens’ Committee for Fairness to the President,” he “organized” rallies, dinner parties and press conferences all over the country. One of his main financial backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.
Only a month ago, the storms of destiny seemed to be subsiding for President Nixon. Among the Knowledgeable in Washington, the conviction was growing that the impeachment campaign against him had spent its moment.… [But] it is now clear that the Knowledgeable were wrong, that they mistook a break in the clouds for lasting sunshine.…
—R.W. Apple Jr., The New York Times, July 28th, 1974
In fact, however, Nixon was already doomed by the time the Rodino committee got around to voting. The unanimous Supreme Court vote on the question of “executive privilege” with regard to the 64 disputed tapes was the beginning of the end. Nixon had known all along that the release of those tapes would finish him—but he had consistenly lied about their contents: not only to the press and the public, but also to his wife and his daughters and all the hardcore loyalists on his staff. He lied about the tapes to Barry Goldwater and Gerry Ford, to Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, to Al Haig and Pat Buchanan and even to his own attorney, James St. Clair—who was stupid enough, like the others, to have believed him when he swore that the tapes he refused to let anybody listen to would finally prove his innocence.
Both of his lawyers, in fact, had done everything in their power to avoid hearing the goddamn things. It finally required a direct order from Judge Sirica, on two separate occasions, to compel Buzhardt and St. Clair to listen to the tapes. Buzhardt was first, and within hours after hearing the fatal conversation with Haldeman of June 23rd, 1972, he was rushed to the intensive care ward of a private hospital in Virginia with a serious “heart attack” that rendered him incommunicado for almost two months.
I was sitting in a bar called the Class Reunion, about two blocks from the White House, when I heard the tragic news.… And I recall saying to Boston Globe correspondent Marty Nolan: “We’ll never see Buzhardt again. They can’t afford to let him live. If he survives whatever Ziegler put in his coffee when he was listening to those tapes, Haldeman will go out there and stick a hatpin up his nose while he’s wasted on Demerol, jam it straight into his brain when the nurse gets out of the room. Take my word for it, Marty. I know how these people operate. Buzhardt will never leave that hospital alive.”
Nolan nodded, oblivious to Buzhardt’s grim fate. At that point, almost every journalist in Washington assigned to the Nixon Deathwatch had been averaging about two hours sleep a night since the beginning of summer. Many were weak and confused, succumbing to drink or drugs whenever possible. Others seemed to hover from day to day on the brink of terminal fatigue. Radio and TV reporters in the White House pressroom were reduced to tearing articles out of the nearest newspaper and reading them verbatim straight over the air—while the newspaper and magazine people would tape the live broadcasts and then transcribe them word for word under their own bylines. By the end of July, the prospect of having to cover an impeachment debate in the House and then a trial in the Senate for three or four months without relief was almost unbearable. As August began and Nixon still showed no signs of giving up, there was more and more talk of “the suicide option.”
Last Breakfast at the White House… The Scumbag I Passed to a New Generation… Cold Turkey Swoops Down & Panic for Watergate Junkies
Sometime around dawn on the Friday morning of Richard Milhous Nixon’s last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks and a red rain parka, laced my head with some gray Argentine snuff, and took an elevator down to the big pool below my window in the National Affairs Suite at the Washington Hilton. It was still raining, so I carried my portable TV set, a notebook and four bottles of Bass Ale in a waterproof canvas bag.
The lower lobby was empty, except for the night watchman—a meaty black gentleman whose main duty was to keep people like me out of the pool at night, but we had long since come to a friendly understanding on this subject. It was against the rules to swim when the pool was closed but there was no rule to prevent a Doctor of Divinity from going out there to meditate on the end of the diving board.
“Mornin’, Doc,” said the watchman. “Up a little early, ain’t you? Especially on a nasty day like this.”
“Nasty?” I replied. “What are you—some kind of goddamn Uncle Tom Republican? Don’t you know who’s leaving town today?”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cracked into a grin. “You’re right, by god! I almost forgot. We finally got rid of that man, didn’t we, Doc?” He nodded happily. “Yes sir, we finally got rid of him.”
I reached into my bag and opened two Bass Ales. “This is a time for celebration,” I said, handing him one of the bottles. I held mine out in front of me: “To Richard Nixon,” I said, “may he choke on the money he stole.”
The watchman glanced furtively over his shoulder before lifting his ale for the toast. The clink of the two bottles coming together echoed briefly in the vast, deserted lobby.
“See you later,” I said. “I have to meditate for a while, then hustle down to the White House to make sure he really leaves. I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes.”
The flat surface of the pool was pocked with millions of tiny raindrops beating steadily down on the water. There was a chain lock on the gate, so I climbed over the fence and walked down to the deep end, where I located a dry spot under a tree near the diving board. The CBS Morning News would be on in about 20 minutes; I turned on the TV set, adjusted the aerial and turned the screen so I could see it from the pool about 20 feet away. It was a system I’d worked out last summer at the Senate Watergate hearings: After every two laps, I could look over the edge of the pool and check the screen to see if Hughes Rudd’s face had appeared yet. When it did, I would climb out of the water and lie down on the grass in front of the set—turn up the sound, light a cigarette, open a fresh Bass Ale and take notes while I watched the tiny screen for a general outline of whatever action Sam Ervin’s Roman circus might be expected to generate that day.
I stayed out there by the pool for almost two hours, sliding in and out of the water to run a few laps and then back out to stretch out on the grass to make a note now and then on the news. Not much was happening, except for a few kinky interviews down by the White House gate with people who claimed to have been on the Deathwatch for three days and nights without sleeping.… But very few of them could even begin to explain why they were doing it. At least half the crowd around the White House during those last few days looked like people who spend every weekend prowling the Demolition Derby circuit.
The only other action on the news that Friday morning was an occasional rerun of Nixon’s official resignation speech from the night before. I had watched it with Vetter in the Watergate bar. It seemed like a good place to be on that night, because I had also been there on the night of June 17th, 1972—while the Watergate burglary was happening five floors above my head.
But after I’d watched Nixon’s speech for the third time, a strange feeling of nervousness began working on me and I decided to get out of town as soon as possible. The movie was over—or at least it would be over in two or three hours. Nixon was leaving at 10:00, and Ford would be sworn in at noon. I wanted to be there on the White House lawn when Nixon was lifted off. That would be the end of my movie.
It was still raining when I left and the pool was still empty. I put the TV set back in the canvas bag and climbed over the gate by the lifeguard shack. Then I stopped and looked back for a moment, knowing I would never come back to this place, and if I did it would not be the same. The pool would be the same, and it would be easy enough to pick up a case of Bass Ale or a battery TV set.… And I could even come down here on rainy summer mornings and watch the morning news.…
But there would not be this kind of morning anymore, because the main ingredient for that mix was no longer available in Washington; and if you asked any of the people who were known to have a real taste for it, the hard-core Nixon aficionados, they all understood that it would not be available again for a hell of a long time and probably never.
Nobody even talks about substitutes or something almost exactly the same. The mold disappeared about three minutes after they made that evil bastard… and although there was never any doubt about who stole it, nobody had any proof.
No… even with the pool and the ale and grass and the portable TV set, the morning news will not be the same without the foul specter of Richard Nixon glaring out of the tube. But the war is over now and he lost.… Gone but not forgotten, missed but not mourned; we will not see another one like him for quite a while. He was dishonest to a fault, the truth was not in him, and if it can be said that he resembled any other living animal in this world, it could only have been the hyena.
* * *
I took a cab down to the White House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the guardhouse window. The cop inside glanced at my card, then looked up—fixing me with a heavy-lidded Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer to open the gate. The pressroom in the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden, where a big olive-drab helicopter was perched on the lawn, about 100 feet out from the stairs. The rain had stopped and a long, red carpet was laid out on the wet grass from the White House door to the helicopter. I eased through the crowd of photographers and walked out, looking back at the White House, where Nixon was giving his final address to a shocked crowd of White House staffers. I examined the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I heard a loud rumbling behind me; I turned around just in time to see Richard and Pat coming toward me, trailing their daughters and followed closely by Gerald Ford and Betty. Their faces were grim and they were walking very slowly; Nixon had a glazed smile on his face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden Indian full of Thorazine.
His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter.… Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.
Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms—but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms went up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back, and a Marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.
I was so close that the noise hurt my ears. The rotor blades were invisible now, but the wind was getting heavier; I could feel it pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets. For an instant I thought I could see Richard Nixon’s face pressed up to the window. Was he smiling? Was it Nixon? I couldn’t be sure. And now it made no difference.
The wind blast from the rotors was blowing people off-balance now; photographers were clutching their equipment against their bodies and Gerald Ford was leading his wife back toward the White House with a stony scowl on his face.
I was still very close to the helicopter, watching the tires. As the beast began rising, the tires became suddenly fat; there was no more weight on them.… The helicopter went straight up and hovered for a moment, then swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then angled up into the fog. Richard Nixon was gone.
* * *
The end came so suddenly and with so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that the scumbag had been passed to what will have to pose for now as another generation. The main reaction to Richard Nixon’s passing—especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years—was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression that still endures.
Within hours after Nixon’s departure, every bar in downtown Washington normally frequented by reporters was a sinkhole of gloom. Several hours after Gerald Ford was sworn in, I found ex-Kennedy speech writer Dick Goodwin in a bar not far from the ROLLING STONE office across the street from the White House. He was slumped in a booth by himself, staring blankly into his drink like a man who had just had his teeth ripped out by a savage bill collector.
“I feel totally drained,” he said. “It’s like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest running continuous entertainment this city ever had.” He waved his arm at the waitress for another drink. “It’s the end of an era. Now I know how all those rock freaks felt when they heard the Beatles were breaking up.”
