The Great Shark Hunt, page 46
I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come from the White House pressroom, where a smoglike sense of funk—or “smunk” as somebody over there might describe it—had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won—or at least the Bad Guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing. Within hours after Richard Nixon left Washington, it was painfully clear that Frank Mankiewicz had spoken too soon when he’d predicted, just a few weeks before The Fall, that Washington would be “the Hollywood of the Seventies.” Without Nixon to stir up its thin juices, the Washington of the Seventies could look forward to the same grim fate as Cinderella’s gilded coach at the stroke of midnight. It would turn back into a pumpkin, and any mysterious shoes left lying around on the deserted ballroom floors of the Watergate era would not interest a genial pragmatist like Gerald Ford. He would not have much time, for a while, to concern himself with anything but the slide into national bankruptcy that Nixon had left him to cope with.… And, despite all its menacing implications, the desperate plight of the national economy was not a story that called up the same kind of journalistic adrenaline that Washington and most of the country had been living on for so long that the prospect of giving it up caused a serious panic in the ranks of all the Watergate junkies who never even knew they were hooked until the cold turkey swooped into their closets.
* * *
We all knew it was coming—the press, the Congress, the “public,” all the backstage handlers in Washington and even Nixon’s own henchmen—but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect.… In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.
The bolts came so fast that it was hard to keep count. On the Wednesday morning after the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend his impeachment, Richard Nixon was a beleaguered Republican president with powerful Republican (and Southern Democratic) allies in both the House and the Senate: His impeachment seemed almost certain, but the few people in Washington crass enough to bet money on a thing like this were still calling his chances of conviction in the Senate “just about even.” This prognosis held for about 72 hours, which was time enough for almost everybody in Washington to start gearing down for an endless summer—a humid nightmare of booze, sweat and tension, of debate in the House, delay in the courts and finally a trial in the Senate that might drag on until Christmas.
It was an ugly prospect, even for those of us who openly welcomed the prospect of seeing Richard Nixon in the dock. On the last afternoon of the Judiciary hearings, I found myself leaning against a tree on the grass of the U.S. Capitol lawn, hopelessly stoned, staring up at the huge golden dome (while loud knots of tourists wearing Bermuda shorts and Insta-matic cameras climbed the marble steps a hundred yards in front of me) and wondering, “What in the fuck am I doing here? What kind of sick and twisted life have I fallen into that would cause me to spend some of the best hours of my life in a cryptlike room full of cameras, hot lights and fearful politicians debating the guilt or innocence of Richard Milhous Nixon?”
The Politician and the Pawnbroker… The New York Times Hits the Trenches, The Washington Post Opens a Multi-Pronged Panzer Offensive… Lessons of a Crime Spree in Lexington… A Compound Tangent Mushrooms Dangerously
Innocence? It is difficult even to type that word on the same page with Nixon’s name. The man was born guilty—not in the traditional Vatican sense of “original sin,” but in a darker and highly personalized sense that Nixon himself seems to have recognized from the very beginning.
Nixon’s entire political career—and in fact his whole life—is a gloomy monument to the notion that not even pure schizophrenia or malignant psychosis can prevent a determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange society we have built for ourselves in the name of “democracy” and “free enterprise.” For most of his life, the mainspring of Richard Nixon’s energy and ambition seems to have been a deep and unrecognized need to overcome, at all costs, that sense of having been born guilty—not for crimes or transgressions already committed, but for those he somehow sensed he was fated to commit as he grappled his way to the summit. If Nixon had been born Jewish, instead of Black Irish, he would probably have been a pawnbroker instead of a politician, not only because the suburbs of Los Angeles would never have elected a Jewish congressman in 1946, but because running a big-league pawnshop would have fueled him with the same kind of guilt-driven energy that most of our politicians—from the county assessor level all the way up to the White House—seem to thrive on.
On any given morning, both the politician and the pawnbroker can be sure that by sundown the inescapable realities of their calling will have forced them to do something they would rather not have to explain, not even to themselves. The details might vary, but the base line never changes: “I will feel more guilty tomorrow than I felt yesterday.… But of course I have no choice: They have made me what I am and by god, they’ll pay for it.”
So the cycle runs on. Both the politician and the pawnbroker are doomed to live like junkies, hooked on the mutant energy of their own unexplainable addictions.
In this baleful sense, Richard Nixon is definitely “one of us”—as New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, in a very different context, back in the early Sixties. The phrase was Conrad’s, from Lord Jim: “He was one of us…”—and when I read Wicker’s piece more than a decade ago I remember feeling angry that The New York Times had the power to hire another one of these goddamn gothic Southern sots and turn him loose to stumble around Washington and spew out this kind of bullshit.
Anybody stupid enough to identify with Richard Nixon the same way Conrad’s Marlow identified with Lord Jim was beyond either help or any hope of credibility, I felt, and for the next seven or eight years I dismissed everything Wicker wrote as the mumblings of a hired fool.… And when Wicker’s point of view began swinging very noticeably in the direction of my own, in the late 1960s, I was almost as disturbed—for entirely different reasons—as the Times editors in New York who also noticed the drift and swiftly deposed him from his heir-apparent role to James Reston as the new chief of the paper’s Washington Bureau.
The masthead of The New York Times’s Washington Bureau is a reliable weathervane for professional observers of the changing political climate. Control of the bureau is usually in the hands of somebody the magnates in New York believe is more or less on the same wavelength as the men in control of the government. Arthur Krock, for instance, got along fine with Eisenhower, but he couldn’t handle the Kennedys and was replaced by Reston, a JFK partisan in 1960 and a “Roosevelt coalition” neopopulist who also got along well with Lyndon Johnson. But when Johnson quit in 1968 and the future looked very uncertain, Reston was promoted to a management job in New York and was succeeded by Wicker at about the same time Robert Kennedy was deciding to make his move for the presidency; but when Bobby was killed and McCarthy collapsed, the Times hedged its bet on Humphrey by deposing Wicker and replacing him with Max Frankel, a smooth and effective diplomat/journalist who could presumably get along with either Hubert or Nixon.… But not even Frankel could handle Four More Years, apparently, and the Nixon/Agnew landslide in 1972 forced the admittedly anti-Nixon Times into a stance of agonizing reappraisal. Frankel moved up to New York, and since the most obvious candidates for his job were relatively liberal young turks like Bob Semple, Anthony Lewis or Johnny Apple, who were clearly out of step with the mandate of vengeance that Nixon claimed by virtue of his shattering victory over McGovern, the Times management in New York made a fateful policy decision that would soon come back to haunt them:
On the theory that the best offense, at that point, was a good defense, they pulled in their editorial horns for the duration and sent an elderly, conservative mediocrity named Clifton Daniel down from the executive backwaters of New York to keep the aggressive Washington Bureau under control. At almost the same time, they hired one of Nixon’s top speechwriters, Bill Safire, and gave him a prominent ranking columnist’s spot on the Times editorial pages. Both of these moves were thinly veiled concessions to the prospect of a revenge-hungry Nixon/Agnew juggernaut that had already telegraphed its intention to devote as much of its second (and final) term energies to their “enemies” in the “national media” as they had already successfully devoted in the first term to scuttling the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was clearly a management decision, safely rooted in the Times concept of itself as “a newspaper of record,” not advocacy—and when you’re in the business of recording history, you don’t declare war on the people who’re making it. “If you want to get along, go along.” That is an ancient political axiom often attributed to Boss Tweed, the legendary “pol” and brute fixer who many journalists in Washington insist still sits on the editorial board of The New York Times.
Which is probably not true, if only because the Times got burned so badly by going along with Tweed’s crude logic in the winter of 1972–73 that the whole Washington Bureau—except perhaps Clifton Daniel—is still reeling from the beating they took from The Washington Post on the Nixon/Watergate story. While the Times was getting down in the trenches and methodically constructing its own journalistic version of a Maginot line against the inevitable Nixon/Agnew offensive, the Post was working 25 hours a day on a multipronged panzer-style offensive that would soon become one of the most devastating scoops in the history of American journalism.
Rather than be cowed by Nixon and his army of power-crazed thugs, the Post elected to meet them head-on, hitting both flanks and the center all at once—and when the bloody dust began settling, just a few weeks ago, with both Agnew and Nixon having resigned in disgrace, The Washington Post had unquestionably replaced The New York Times as the nation’s premier political newspaper.
* * *
To compensate for the loss of what is widely regarded as one of the fattest and heaviest jobs in journalism, the Times gave Wicker a column—his own chunk of turf, as it were—and that unexpected burst of freedom seemed to have an almost consciousness-expanding effect on his head. When I met him for the first time in Miami in that star-crossed political summer of 1972, he was writing one of the sanest columns on the market and he talked like a happy man.
We were sitting at a beach table near the surf, outside the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, taking a break from the chaos of the Democratic Convention, and I took the opportunity to tell him about my reaction to his long-ago comment on Nixon.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that, but—”
“No,” I said. “You were right.”
He stared at me, looking puzzled.
It was one of those days that we all hit once in a while when everything you mean to say sounds wrong when you hear it coming out of your mouth. I tried briefly to explain what I really meant, but even the explanation came out bent, so I decided to drop the subject.… What I had in mind, I think, was the idea that Nixon really was “one of us”—not in Conrad’s sense of that term, or my own, but as an almost perfect expression of “the American way of life” that I’d been so harshly immersed in for the past eight or nine months of traveling constantly around the country to cover the presidential primaries.
Jesus! This idea seems just as tangled tonight as it did two years ago when I was trying to explain it to Wicker—so I think I’ll let it drop, once again, and move on to something else.… But not without a final backward glance at the election results in November of ’72, when Richard Nixon was re-elected to the White House by the largest margin of any president since George Washington. There is no way to erase that ominous fact from the record books—any more than Nixon will ever be able to erase from the history books the fact that he was the first American president to be driven out of the White House because of admittedly criminal behavior while in office.
* * *
Looking back on that crippled conversation with Wicker in Miami, it occurs to me that maybe almost everybody in the country—except possibly Wicker—might have been spared what Gerald Ford called “our national nightmare” if Tom had been kept on as The New York Times Washington Bureau chief in 1968, instead of being converted to a columnist. The social and political pressures of the job would have driven him half crazy, but his then emerging sense of outrage at the whole style and content of the Nixon administration might have been contagious enough, within the bureau, to encourage a more aggressive kind of coverage among the Times reporters he would have been assigning to look behind Nixon’s facade.
As it turned out, however, those fascist bastards had to be given so much rope that they came close to hanging all the rest of us along with themselves, before The Washington Post finally filled the power vacuum created by The New York Times’s sluggish coverage of those four years when Nixon and his fixers were organizing vengeful plans like John Dean’s list of “our enemies” to be harassed by the IRS, and the Tom Charles Huston “Domestic Intelligence Plan” that amounted to nothing less than the creation of a White House Gestapo.
* * *
But the climate of those years was so grim that half the Washington press corps spent more time worrying about having their telephones tapped than they did about risking the wrath of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Colson by poking at the weak seams of a Mafia-style administration that began cannibalizing the whole government just as soon as it came into power. Nixon’s capos were never subtle; they swaggered into Washington like a conquering army, and the climate of fear they engendered apparently neutralized The New York Times along with all the other pockets of potential resistance. Nixon had to do everything but fall on his own sword before anybody in the Washington socio-political establishment was willing to take him on.
Like the black teenage burglars who are terrorizing chic Georgetown these days, Nixon conquered so easily that he soon lost any fear of being caught. Washington police have noted a strange pattern involving burglaries in Georgetown and other posh neighborhoods in the white ghetto of the city’s northwest sector: A home that has been robbed once is far more likely to be hit again than a home that has never been hit at all. Once they spot an easy mark, the burglars get lazy and prefer to go back for seconds and even thirds, rather than challenge a new target.
The police seem surprised at this pattern but in fact it’s fairly traditional among amateurs—or at least among the type I used to hang around with. About 15 years ago, when I was into that kind of thing, I drifted into Lexington, Kentucky, one evening with two friends who shared my tastes; we moved into an apartment across the street from a gas station which we broke into and robbed on three consecutive nights.
On the morning after the first hit, we stood transfixed at the apartment window, drinking beer and watching the local police “investigating” the robbery.… And I remember thinking, now that poor fool over there has probably never been hit before, and what he’s thinking now is that his odds of being hit again anytime soon are almost off the board. Hell, how many gas stations have ever been robbed two nights in a row?
So we robbed it again that night, and the next morning we stood at the window drinking beer and watched all manner of hell break loose between the station owner and the cops around the gas pumps across the street. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the proprietor was waving his arms crazily and screaming at the cops, as if he suspected them of doing it.
Christ, this is wonderful, I thought. If we hit the bugger again tonight he’ll go stark raving mad tomorrow morning when the cops show up… which was true: On the next morning, after three consecutive robberies, the parking lot of that gas station was like a war zone, but this time the cops showed up with reinforcements. In addition to the two police cruisers, the lot filled up with chromeless, dust-covered Fords and crew-cut men wearing baggy brown suits and shoes with gum-rubber soles. While some of them spoke earnestly with the proprietor, others dusted the doorknobs, window latches and the cash register for fingerprints.
It was hard to know, from our window across the street, if we were watching the FBI, local detectives or insurance agency investigators at work.… But in any case I figured they’d have the whole station ringed with armed guards for the next few nights, so we decided to leave well enough alone.
About six in the evening, however, we stopped there and had the tank filled up with ethyl. There were about six bony-faced men hanging around the office, killing the time until dark by studying road maps and tire-pressure charts. They paid no attention to us until I tried to put a dime in the Coke machine.
“It ain’t workin’,” one of them said. He shuffled over and pulled the whole front of the machine open, like a broken refrigerator, and lifted a Coke bottle out of the circular rack. I gave him the dime and he dropped it into his pocket.
“What’s wrong with the machine?” I asked, remembering how hard it had been to rip the bastard open with a crowbar about 12 hours earlier to reach the money box.
“No concern of yours,” he muttered, lighting up a Marvel and staring out at the pump where the attendant was making change for a ten-dollar bill after cleaning our windshield and checking the oil. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s some folks gonna be a lot worse off than that there machine before this night’s out tonight.” He nodded. “This time we’re ready for them sonsabitches.”
And they were. I noticed a double-barreled shotgun standing in a corner by the rack full of oil cans. Two big coon hounds were asleep on the greasy linoleum floor, with their collar chains looped around the base of the chewing gum machine. I felt a quick flash of greed as I eyed the glass bulb filled with all those red, white, blue and green gum balls. We had looted the place of almost everything else, and I felt a pang of regret at having to leave the gum machine untouched: All those pennies just sitting there with nobody to fondle them.…
