The Great Shark Hunt Part 21

But not all. There are still some people around town who remind you that Houston, Jaworski's home, is a breeding ground for some of the most vicious golf-hustlers in the country -- the kind who will lose the first 15 holes to you for $100 each, then whack you for $5000 a hole on the last three.

Which may be true. But if it is, Leon is cutting his margin pretty thin; he will have to play his last three holes all at once on July 8th, when he argues his tape subpoena case in front of what Was.h.i.+ngton lawyers call a "bobtailed" U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice William Rehnquist, the fourth and most virulently conservative of the four Nixon appointees, has been either pressured or cajoled by the others to remove himself from the case because of his previous a.s.sociation with the Nixon administration. Rehnquist was an a.s.sistant attorney general in John Mitch.e.l.l's Justice Department before Nixon picked him up by his jackboots and hoisted him onto the Court.

This leaves an interesting line-up to decide the (legal) fate of the tapes; The three right-bent Nixon appointees -- Burger, Blackmun and Powell -- to balance the three-man "liberal bloc": Douglas, Marshall and Brennan. The two critical swing votes will be Byron White, a closet-fascist appointed by John Kennedy and Eisenhower nominee Potter Stewart, a sort of libertarian conservative who recently shocked many of his friends and philosophical brethren by publicly denouncing Nixon's blatant "politicalization" of the Court.

Stewart, far more than White, seems genuinely and even personally offended at finding himself grouped with what he plainly considers four half-bright political hacks who don't know the law from a leach-field. If Jaworski can mount a sound enough legal argument to convince Stewart that Nixon has no basic or inalienable right to withhold the tapes, he will probably win the case even if White goes along once again with Nixon's gunsels. Because there will only be three of them, this time -- with Rehnquist brooding darkly on the sidelines -- and in the case of a 4-4 tie, Jaworski wins. He has already won a verdict on essentially the same question in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and when a lower court verdict is carried up as high as it can go and results in a tie vote, the lower court verdict stands.

Whatever the verdict, it will almost certainly come before the House of Representatives votes on impeachment. . . and if Nixon loses and then decides to defy the Supreme Court, that will give many of the publicly "undecided" congressmen a hard nudge in the direction of voting against him. The final vote will probably come sometime in late August, and if I had to bet on the outcome now I'd guess the margin will be almost 2-1 against the president, although a simple majority would do it.

Nixon would probably agree with me on that, and also on the idea that betting on the outcome of the House impeachment vote right now is more a matter of the point spread than simple winning or losing.

The real test will come in the Senate, where Nixon can afford afford a 2-1 point spread against him and still win the verdict. Out of 100 votes in the Senate, Nixon will need only 34 to beat the whole rap. . . which is not a really formidable nut to have to make, given the nature of politicians and the ever-increasing likelihood that the final vote in the Senate -- the savage climax to "the whole enchilada" -- will happen no earlier than mid-October, about two weeks before Election Day on the first Tuesday in November. a 2-1 point spread against him and still win the verdict. Out of 100 votes in the Senate, Nixon will need only 34 to beat the whole rap. . . which is not a really formidable nut to have to make, given the nature of politicians and the ever-increasing likelihood that the final vote in the Senate -- the savage climax to "the whole enchilada" -- will happen no earlier than mid-October, about two weeks before Election Day on the first Tuesday in November.

Exactly one-third of the Senate -- just one vote less than Nixon needs for acquittal -- will be running for reelection this November, and every one of them (either 33 or 34, because three into 100 won't go) is reportedly terrified at the prospect of having to campaign for reelection back home, while at the same time having to partic.i.p.ate in a nationally televised trial on one of the heaviest questions in American history, and then being forced to cast a monumentally public vote either for or against President Nixon on the very eve of their own election days.

If it comes down to that, in terms of timing, the Public Opinion Polls will no doubt be a much more potent factor than they have been up to now -- for the same reason that Congress waited until The Polls climbed over 50% in favor of impeachment before getting the process underway. . . and there is not much Nixon can do now to affect The Polls enough to change the House vote on impeachment.

But his ability to affect the outcome of the Senate/Conviction vote is a hard thing to argue with. For one thing, he plans to spend most of the summer flas.h.i.+ng around Europe, Israel, Egypt, Russia and anywhere else where they'll talk to him, in what will probably be a fairly effective effort to grab enough headlines to keep "the impeachment story" at least below the fold on most front pages.

Meanwhile, the haggard remnants of his presidential staff will be working about 18 hours a day to suppress and deflate any new evidence that might affect either his standing in The Polls or the outcome of his Senate/Conviction trial. Less than half of those 34 votes he needs for acquittal are up for reelection in '74, and any inc.u.mbent president -- even one who's already been impeached -- has a ma.s.sive amount of leverage when it comes to using the political pork barrel.

There is not much doubt, on the numbers question, that at least 20 the 100 senators will not vote to convict Nixon under any any circ.u.mstances. . . unless he violates that old law of Indiana politics about being "found in bed with either a live man or a dead woman." circ.u.mstances. . . unless he violates that old law of Indiana politics about being "found in bed with either a live man or a dead woman."

Nixon is not one of your more vulnerable politicians in this area. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine him being in bed at all-- and especially not with anything human.

So we can scratch 20 votes, for starters -- which means he needs only 14 more, and we want to remember here that he'll be dealing almost entirely with Yahoo Republicans and Redneck Southern Democrats. Given the 34/66 cut, he can afford to ignore every man in the Senate who has ever been even remotely suspected of anti-Nixon sympathies. . . so he can write off at least 50 votes with one stroke, which means he will not be far off if he a.s.sumes a mathematical base of 50 votes definitely against him, 20 definitely for him, and 30 undecided.

Of those 30, he needs only 14 -- and any man who has spent his entire adult life dealing on the ethical fringes of Was.h.i.+ngton politics should feel fairly comfortable with those numbers. Any president who can't piece off 14 senators would never have made it to the White House in the first place.

And Nixon has two extremely heavy hole cards: (1) He has personal control over most of the potentially fatal evidence that might be used against him if he ever conies to trial (the Oval Office tapes, which he retains the option to destroy now or later, if he hasn't already done that. . .) and (2) he has become such a personal embarra.s.sment and political millstone around the neck of the Republican party that he could easily buy at least ten of those votes by agreeing, in secret, to resign the presidency in a gesture of splendid martyrdom within 48 hours after the Senate votes not not to convict him on the House impeachment charges. to convict him on the House impeachment charges.

This solution would get a lot of people off the hook -- especially Nixon, who has nothing to gain from hanging on for another two years in the White House. His effectiveness as president was a wasted hope from the very beginning -- but it has taken five years, two elections and one mind-bending scandal to make the cheap little b.a.s.t.a.r.d understand it.

Even Nixon should understand, now, that the only hope for his salvation in the history books is to somehow become a martyr and the most obvious way to do that, at this point in the saga, is to make some kind of a deal with the heavies in his own party to get him off their backs as quickly as possible by trading the guarantee of a dignified resignation for a vote of acquittal in the Senate.

This is a pretty good bet, I think, and unless the Rodino committee comes up with some unnaturally strong evidence before the House votes on impeachment, I don't have much faith in a Senate vote for conviction. A working figure, for now, would be about 60-40 against against Nixon. . . but 60-40 is not enough; it has to be 67-33 again, and that will be a hard nut to make. Nixon. . . but 60-40 is not enough; it has to be 67-33 again, and that will be a hard nut to make.

In addition to the leverage it gives Nixon with the gurus of his own party, the "Resignation in exchange for Acquittal" strategy has a certain appeal for the Democrats -- but only if it can be arranged and finished off before January 20th of 1975. If Gerald Ford a.s.sumes the presidency before that date, he will only be legally eligible to run for one more term. But if Ford becomes president anytime after January of '75, he'll be eligible for two two terms, and most Democrats in the Senate would prefer to short-circuit that possibility. terms, and most Democrats in the Senate would prefer to short-circuit that possibility.

So Nixon is not without options, when it comes down to nut-cutting time. There is very little chance that he will finish his second term, but the odds for a scenario of impeachment in the House, acquittal in the Senate and then a maudlin spectacle of martyred resignation before January 20th of next year are pretty good.

One of the very few drastic developments that could alter that timetable would be an unexpected crunch of some kind that would force Nixon to yield up his tapes. But nothing in the recent behavior of either the president or his lawyers shows any indication of that. As long as he clings to the tapes, Nixon has a very strong bargaining position vis-a-vis both the people who insist on hearing them and those few whose physical freedom depends on n.o.body n.o.body hearing them. hearing them.

At least a half-dozen voices on those tapes belong to people who are scheduled to go on trial, very soon, on serious felony charges. . . and they are the same ones, presumably, who attended that secret meeting in the White House, last July, when it was decided that the tapes should never be released.

It is safe to a.s.sume that there were probably some very strong and pragmatic reasons for that decision -- particularly in the cases of "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, whose fate in the courts is considered to be almost entirely dependent on Nixon's resolve to hang on to those tapes at all costs. . . Or, failing that, to destroy them if that ever seems necessary.

Nixon understands this. On the basis of his own crudely edited transcripts, there is enough evidence on those tapes to have Nixon impeached, convicted and jailed for his own protection before the first football Sunday in September. For some reason that probably not even Nixon understands now, he gave seven of these tapes to Judge Sirica last winter. Two or three of them at least were found to be unaltered originals, and Sirica eventually turned these over to the House Judiciary Committee as evidence in the impeachment inquiry.

So there are a hundred or more people wandering around Was.h.i.+ngton today who have heard "the real stuff," as they put it -- and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that n.o.body who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House Transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in the truck of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence.

Yes. . . looking back at that line I just wrote, it occurs to me that almost half the people I know have been feeling that kind of compulsion almost steadily for the last eight or nine years. My friend Yail Bloor, for instance, claims to have thrown a whole garbage can full of live rats, roaches and a.s.sorted small vermin over the White House fence about a week before Lyndon Johnson announced his retirement in 1968. "It was a wonderful feeling," he says, "but only because it was Johnson. I knew, for some reason, that he would really hate hate the sight of big rats on the White House lawn." He paused and reached for his snuffbox, taking a huge hit of Dr. Johnson's best in each nostril. the sight of big rats on the White House lawn." He paused and reached for his snuffbox, taking a huge hit of Dr. Johnson's best in each nostril.

"I'm not sure why," he went on, "but I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of doing a thing like that to Nixon. He might actually like like rats." rats."

Mother of babbling G.o.d, I just took a break from this gibberish long enough to watch the evening news. . . and there was the face and voice of Tex Colson, jolting a Was.h.i.+ngton courtroom with a totally unforeseen confession of guilt on one count of obstruction of justice in return -- on the basis of an elaborately covered TV statement on the subject of his own guilt and deep involvement in almost every aspect of Watergate -- for the opportunity to take whatever punishment he deserves and purge himself once and for all by "telling everything I know" about "many things I have not been able to talk freely about until now."

Colson -- of all people! First he converts to Jesus, and now he's copping a plea and holding a press conference on national TV to announce that he intends to confess everything. Which means, apparently, that he is now available to testify for the prosecution in every Watergate-related trial from now until all his old friends and conspirators are either put behind bars with a Gideon Bible in their hands or standing in line at a soup kitchen in b.u.t.te, Montana.

What will Nixon make of this this freak-out? Tex Colson, one of the most unprincipled thugs in the history of American politics, was supposed to be a main link in that unbreakable and fatally interdependent Inner Circle -- along with Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon -- who wouldn't think twice about stonewalling G.o.d himself. Not even Richard Nixon, at the peak of his power and popularity, felt comfortable with the knowledge that a monster like Colson had an office in the White House. Nixon felt so strongly about Colson's savagery, in fact, that he went out of his way to defame him by deliberately publis.h.i.+ng some of his own harsh judgments on Colson's total lack of freak-out? Tex Colson, one of the most unprincipled thugs in the history of American politics, was supposed to be a main link in that unbreakable and fatally interdependent Inner Circle -- along with Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon -- who wouldn't think twice about stonewalling G.o.d himself. Not even Richard Nixon, at the peak of his power and popularity, felt comfortable with the knowledge that a monster like Colson had an office in the White House. Nixon felt so strongly about Colson's savagery, in fact, that he went out of his way to defame him by deliberately publis.h.i.+ng some of his own harsh judgments on Colson's total lack of any any sense of ethics or morality in the official White House Transcripts. sense of ethics or morality in the official White House Transcripts.

And Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, widely regarded as one of the most aggressive, hardline right-wingers since Josef Goebbels, once described Colson as "the meanest man in American politics". . . which is no small compliment, coming from Buchanan, who has spent the better part of his last decade working with some of the the meanest and most congenitally fascistic b.a.s.t.a.r.ds ever to work for meanest and most congenitally fascistic b.a.s.t.a.r.ds ever to work for any any government. government.

I will have to call Buchanan tomorrow and ask him what he thinks about Tex Colson now. As a matter of fact, I will have to call a lot of people tomorrow about this thing -- because if Colson really is serious about telling everything he knows, Richard Nixon is in very deep trouble. He may as well go out on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow and start peddling those tapes to the highest bidder, because Colson knows enough ugly stories about the Nixon regime to make most of the talk on those tapes seem like harmless c.o.c.ktail gossip.

At a glance, there are two ways to view Colson's breakdown: One is to take his conversion to Jesus seriously, which is difficult. . . and the other is to take it as a warning that even the president should have better sense than to cross "the meanest man in American politics."

There is another way to interpret it, but that will have to wait for later -- along with a lot of other things. This is not the kind of story to try to cope with while roaming back and forth across the country in jet airliners. . . although there is nothing in any of the current journalism out of Was.h.i.+ngton, on the tube or in print, to indicate that it is any easier to cope with there than in Key Biscayne, Calgary, or even Mexico City. The entire Was.h.i.+ngton Press Corps seems at least temporarily paralyzed by the sheer magnitude and complexity of the thing. . .

It will be a nasty story to cover, especially in the swamp-like humidity of a Was.h.i.+ngton summer. . . but it is definitely worth watching, and perhaps even being a part of, because whatever kind of judgment and harsh reality finally emerges will be an historical landmark in the calendar of civilizations and a beacon, for good or ill, to all the generations that will inherit this earth -- or whatever we leave of it -- just as surely as we inherited it from the Greeks and the Romans, the Mayans and the Incas, and even from the "Thousand Year Reich."

The impeachment of Richard Nixon will end in a trial that will generate an interminable blizzard of headlines, millions-of-dollars' worth of media coverage, and a verdict that will not matter nearly as much to the defendant as it will to the jurors. By the time the trial starts -- a.s.suming that Nixon can sustain his lifelong appet.i.te for humiliation that has never been properly gratified -- the fate of Nixon himself will have shrunk to the dimensions of a freakish little side effect. The short-lived disaster of his presidency is already neutralized, and the outcome of his impeachment ordeal will have very little effect on his role in tomorrow's history texts. He will be grouped, along with presidents like Grant and Harding, as a corrupt and incompetent mockery of the American Dream he praised so long and loud in all his speeches. . . not just as a "crook," but so crooked that he required the help of a personal valet to screw his pants on every morning.

By the time Richard Milhous Nixon goes on trial in the Senate, the only reason for trying him will be to understand how he ever became president of the United States at all. . . and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American Political System.

The trial of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto de facto trial of the American Dream. The importance of Nixon now is trial of the American Dream. The importance of Nixon now is not not merely to get rid of him; that's a strictly political consideration. . . The real question is why we are being forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections. merely to get rid of him; that's a strictly political consideration. . . The real question is why we are being forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections.

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 #164, July 4, 1974 Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Sc.u.m 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. 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 Heart of Darkness Well. . . this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knuckle-head 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 any politician -- and hurl the G.o.dd.a.m.n machine through his front window. . . flush the b.u.g.g.e.r 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. politician -- and hurl the G.o.dd.a.m.n machine through his front window. . . flush the b.u.g.g.e.r 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 ma.s.sive 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 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. 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 d.i.c.k Tuck. "Ford pardoned pardoned the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" 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." the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" 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 hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Was.h.i.+ngton press corps and the national TV audience with his carefuly 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 circ.u.mstances. that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Was.h.i.+ngton press corps and the national TV audience with his carefuly 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 circ.u.mstances.

I recalled these things Ford had said, but I was not so sure I'd heard d.i.c.k 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Jesus! Who votes for these treacherous sc.u.mbags! You can't even trust the dumb ones! Look at Ford! He's too G.o.dd.a.m.n stupid to arrange a deal like that! h.e.l.l, he's almost too stupid to lie."

Sandy shrugged. "He gave Nixon all the tapes, too."

"Holy s.h.i.+t!" I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. "What's G.o.dwin's number in Was.h.i.+ngton? That bone-head Rotarian sonofab.i.t.c.h made a deal? Maybe d.i.c.k 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 Was.h.i.+ngton are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt there was some kind of arrangement, but --" He paused. "Aren't we pretty d.a.m.n close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you'll never be able to check all that stuff before --"

"Mother of babbling G.o.d!" 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 a.s.sumption 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, s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 owners.h.i.+p and control of all all the White House tapes. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 embarra.s.sed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Post, The Was.h.i.+ngton 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 G.o.d, doesn't Ford know about this case?' said one source. The guy's under investigation.' " "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 G.o.d, 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 ha.s.sled about it -- and instead of being sent to a top-secret radar installation near the Arctic Circle, I was pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Post The Was.h.i.+ngton Post or or The Was.h.i.+ngton Star-News. The Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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, Times, the the Post Post and the and the Star Star were still trying to pry their hotrod investigative reporters out of weekend cabins in the Virginia mountains and beach-houses on the Maryland sh.o.r.e. were still trying to pry their hotrod investigative reporters out of weekend cabins in the Virginia mountains and beach-houses on the Maryland sh.o.r.e.

I have very dim memories of Tuck's call. Less than five hours earlier, I had pa.s.sed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado. . . before heading back to Was.h.i.+ngton 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, ambus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Deathwatch, there was a definite high in watching the Congress reluctantly gearing up for a t.i.tanic 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 rea.s.suring 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, at 4:33 on a wet Wednesday morning, falling like b.a.l.l.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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, 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 t.i.ts 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post headline: 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 against the articles of impeachment on national TV last week have now reversed themselves, for the record, and said they plan to vote the articles of impeachment on national TV last week have now reversed themselves, for the record, and said they plan to vote for 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. 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 s.h.i.+p at high speed. Even the dingbat senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick -- the GOP claghorn who nominated Nixon for the n.o.bel 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d is going to have to take place here in Was.h.i.+ngton 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 las.h.i.+ng my window, the dawn sky is still black and this room is damp and cold. Where is the G.o.dd.a.m.n 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, flatout f.u.c.king weather.

On another day like this, a long time ago, I was humming across the bridge out of Louisville, Kentucky, in an old Chevy and 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 winds.h.i.+eld wipers were las.h.i.+ng 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 work on a day like this? We must be on a day like this? We must be G.o.dd.a.m.n crazy. G.o.dd.a.m.n 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." 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."