The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  -- columnist Stewart Alsop, Newsweek, August 6th, 1973

  "The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about 'new policies' and 'honesty in government' is one of the few men who've run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?"

  --Rolling Stone correspondent Hunter S. Thompson, writing on the Nixon-McGovern campaign, September 1972

  "The Third Reich, which was born on January 30th, 1933, Hitler boasted would endure a thousand years, and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as 'The Thousand Year Reich.' It lasted 12 years and four months. . ."

  -- author William Shirer, from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

  For reasons that will never be clear to anyone -- and especially not to the management and other guests in this place -- the National Affairs Desk is operating once again at the Royal Biscayne Hotel, about 900 crooked meters from the Nixon/Rebozo compound on the other side of the island. The desk itself is a round slab of what appears to be low-grade jacaranda wood.

  The centerpiece is a bright orange electric typewriter that I rented several days ago from a business-machine store on 125th Street in North Miami. It is a Swedish "Facit" -- a deceptively sharp-looking machine about five times slower in both directions than the IBM Selectric and totally useless for any kind of speed-lashed gonzo work. For all its style and voltage, the Facit is about as quick in the hands as one of those 1929-model Underwoods that used to be standard equipment in the city room of the New York Mirror. Nobody knows exactly what happened to all those old Underwoods when the Mirror died of bad age, but one rumor in the trade says they were snapped up at a dime on the dollar by Norman Cousins and then resold at a tidy profit to the Columbia Journalism Review.

  Which is interesting, but it is not the kind of thing you normally want to develop fully in your classic Pyramid Lead. . . and that's what I was trying to deal with, when I suddenly realized that my typewriter was as worthless as tits on a boar hog.

  Besides that, there were other mechanical problems: no water, no ice, no phone service, and finally the discovery of two Secret Service men in the room right next to me.

  I was getting a little paranoid about the phone situation. It followed a series of unsettling events that caused me to think seriously about going back to Washington when Nixon left the next day, rather than staying on in order to open a special account in Bebe Rebozo's bank over in the shopping center across Ocean Drive. The Key Biscayne Bank seems like as good a place as any to do business, primarily because of the unusual investment opportunities available to special clients.

  I have applied for "special" status, but recent developments have made me less than optimistic. Several days ago, on my first visit to the Nixon compound, I got no further than the heavily guarded gatehouse on Harbor Drive. "Are they expecting you?" the state trooper asked me.

  "Probably not," I said. "I thought I'd just drop by for a drink or two, then have a look around. I've never seen the place, you know. What goes on in there?"

  The trooper seemed to stiffen. His eyes narrowed and he stared intently at the black coral fist hanging on a chain around my neck. "Say. . . ah. . . I'd like to see your identification, fella. You carrying any?"

  "Of course," I said. "But it's out there in the car. I don't have any pockets in these trunks." I walked across the hot asphalt road, feeling my bare feet stick to the tar with every step, and vaulted into the big bronze convertible without opening the door. Looking back at the gatehouse, I noticed that the trooper had been joined by two gentlemen in dark business suits with wires coming out of their ears. They were all waiting for me to come back with my wallet.

  To hell with this, I thought, suddenly starting the engine. I waved to the trooper. "It's not here," I shouted. "I guess I left it back at the hotel." Without waiting for an answer, I eased the car into gear and drove off very slowly.

  Almost immediately, the big railroad-crossing-style gate across Nixon's road swung up in the air and a blue Ford sedan rolled out. I slowed down even more, thinking he was going to pull me over to the side, but instead he stayed about 100 feet behind me -- all the way to the hotel, into the parking lot, and around the back almost into the slot behind my room. I got out, thinking he was going to pull up right behind me for a chat -- but he stopped about 50 feet away, backed up, and drove away.

  Later that afternoon, sitting in the temporary White House press room outside the Four Ambassadors Hotel in downtown Miami about 10 miles away, I told New York Times correspondent Anthony Ripley about the incident. "I really expected the bastard to follow me right into my room."

  Ripley laughed. "That's probably where he is right now -- with about three of his friends, going through all your luggage."

  Which may have been true. Anybody who spends much time around the Secret Service and acts a little bent has to assume things like that. . . especially when you discover, by sheer accident, that the room right next to yours is occupied by two S.S. agents.

  That was the second unsettling incident. The details are vaguely interesting, but I'd prefer not to go into them at this point -- except to say that I thought I was becoming dangerously paranoid until I got hold of a carbon copy of their room-registration receipt. Which made me feel a little better about my own mental health, at least. It is far better to know the Secret Service is keeping an eye on you than to suspect it all the time without ever being sure.

  It was the third incident, however, that caused me to start thinking about moving the Desk back to Washington at once. I was awakened in the early hours of the morning by a telephone call and a strange voice saying, "The president is going to church. You'll have to hurry if you want to catch him."

  What? My mind was blank. What president? Why should I want to catch him? Especially in a church?

  "Who the hell is this?" I said finally.

  "Tony," said the voice.

  I was reaching around in the darkness for a light switch. For a moment I thought I was still in Mexico. Then I found a light switch and recognized the familiar surroundings of the National Affairs Suite. Jesus! I thought. Of course! Key Biscayne. President Nixon. It all made sense now: The bastards were setting me up for a bust on some kind of bogus assassination attempt. The agents next door have probably already planted a high-powered rifle in the trunk of my car, and now they're trying to lure me over to some church where they can grab me in front of all the press cameras as soon as I drive up and park. Then they'll "find" the rifle in the trunk about two minutes before Nixon arrives to worship -- and that'll be it for me. I could already see the headlines: NIXON ASSASSINATION PLOT FOILED; SHARPSHOOTER SEIZED AT KEY BISCAYNE CHURCH. Along with front-page photos of state troopers examining the rifle, me in handcuffs, Nixon smiling bravely at the cameras. . .

  The whole scene flashed through my head in milliseconds; the voice on the phone was yelling something at me. Panic fused my brain. No! I thought. Never in hell.

  "You crazy son of a bitch!" I yelled into the phone. "I'm not going near that goddamn church!" Then I hung up and went instantly back to sleep.

  Later that afternoon, Ripley stopped by the hotel and we had a few beers out by the beach-bar. "Jesus Christ!" he said. "You were really out of your mind this morning, weren't you?"

  "What?"

  He laughed. "Yeah. You screamed at me. Hell, I just thought you might like to catch the scene over at Nixon's church."

  "For Christ's sake don't call me with any more tips for a while."

  "Don't wo
rry," he replied. "We're leaving today, anyway. Will you be on the plane?"

  "No," I said. "I'm going to sleep for two days, then take a boat back to Washington. This has not been a good trip for me. I think I'll give up covering Nixon for a while -- at least until I can whip this drinking problem."

  "Maybe what you should do is get into a different line of work, or have yourself committed."

  "No." I said. "I think I'll get a job teaching journalism."

  In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of "lead" -- the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.

  What?

  Do we have a libel suit on our hands?

  Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously -- and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to considerable lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.

  "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." George Bernard Shaw said that, for good or ill, and I only mention it here because I'm getting goddamn tired of being screeched at by waterheads. Professors are a sour lot, in general, but professors of journalism are especially rancid in their outlook because they have to wake up every morning and be reminded once again of a world they'll never know.

  THUMP! Against the door. Another goddamn newspaper, another cruel accusation. THUMP! Day after day, it never ends. . . Hiss at the alarm clock, suck up the headlines along with a beaker of warm Drano, then off to the morning class. . . To teach Journalism: Circulation, Distribution, Headline Counting and the classical Pyramid Lead.

  Jesus, let's not forget that last one. Mastery of the Pyramid Lead has sustained more lame yoyos than either Congress or the Peacetime Army. Five generations of American journalists have clung to that petrified tit, and when the deal went down in 1972 their ranks were so solid that 71% of the newspapers in this country endorsed Richard Nixon for a second term in the White House.

  Now, 18 months later, the journalistic establishment that speaks for Nixon's erstwhile "silent majority" has turned on him with a wild-eyed, coast-to-coast venom rarely witnessed in the American newspaper trade. The only recent example that comes to mind is Nixon's own blundering pronouncement of Charles Manson's guilt while Manson was still on trial in Los Angeles.

  In addition to introducing the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote as the wave of the future in journalism, I have some other ideas to get into: mainly about Richard Nixon, and some of these are ugly. . . or ugly by my standards, at any rate, because most of them revolve around the very distinct possibility that Nixon might survive his Seventh Crisis -- and in surviving leave us a legacy of failure, shame and corruption beyond anything conceivable right now.

  This is a grim thing to say, or even think, in the current atmosphere of self-congratulations and renewed professional pride that understandably pervades the press & politics circuit these days. Not only in Washington but all over the country wherever you find people who are seriously concerned with the health and life expectancy of the American Political System.

  The baseline is always the same: "We almost blew it," they say, "but somehow we pulled back from the brink." Names like Sirica, Woodward, Bernstein, Cox, Richardson, Ruckelshaus are mentioned almost reverently in these conversations, but anybody who's been personally involved in "the Watergate affair" and all its nasty sidebars for any length of time knows that these were only the point men -- invaluable for their balls and their instincts and their understanding of what they were doing in that never-ending blizzard of Crucial Moments when a single cop-out might have brought the whole scene down on top of them all. But there were literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of others who came up to those same kinds of moments and said, "Well, I wasn't really planning on this, but if that's the way it is, let's get it on."

  There are a lot of people in this country -- editors, congressmen and lawyers among others -- who like themselves a lot better today for the way they reacted when the Watergate octopus got hold of them.

  There are also a lot of people who got dragged down forever by it -- which is probably just as well, for the rest of us, because many of them were exposed as either dangerous bunglers, ruthless swine or both. Others -- many of them peripherally involved in one aspect or another of "Watergate" but lucky enough not to get caught -- will probably be haunted by a sense of nervous guilt for a while, but in a year or two they will forget all about it. These, in a way, are almost as dangerous as the ones who are going to jail -- because they are the "good germans" among us, the ones who made it all possible.

  I've been trying to finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for at least the last three months; hauling the huge bugger along in my baggage to places like Buffalo, Oakland, Ann Arbor, Houston, and finally all the way down to the jungles and lost fishing villages of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. . .

  But things have been happening too fast, and there was never enough time or privacy to get seriously into the thing -- not even down in the Yucatan, lying around in big hammocks in 50-peso-a-night hotels where we had to keep the Hong Kong-built ceiling fans cranked up to top speed for enough wind in the room to drive the roaches back into the corners.

  At one point, I tried to read it in a hotel room near the ruins of the Mayan civilization at Chichen Itza -- thinking to get a certain weird perspective on American politics in the Seventies by pondering the collapse of "The Thousand Year Reich" while sitting on the stone remnants of another and totally different culture that survived for more than a thousand years before anybody in Europe even knew that a place called "America" existed. The Aztec socio-political structure was a fine-tuned elitest democracy that would have embarrassed everybody connected with either the French or American revolutions.

  The ancient Greeks and Romans seem like crude punks compared to what the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas put together in Mexico and South America in the 20 or so centuries between 500 BC and the ill-fated "Spanish Conquest" in 1525. The Mayan calendar, devised several centuries before the birth of Christ, is still more precise than the one we use today: They had the solar year broken down to exactly 365.24 days, and 12 lunar months of 29.5 days each. None of this sloppy "leap year" business, or odd-numbered months.

  According to most military experts, Adolf Hitler went over the hump somewhere around the middle of 1942. At that point -- even according to Albert Speer, his personal architect and all-round technical wizard -- the Reich was spread too thin: militarily, financially, industrially, politically and every other way. Speer had all the blueprints, the plans, the figures, and an almost daily fix on what was happening to boiling Hitler's head. Given all that, Speer says, he knew in his heart they were headed downhill after the summer of '42.

  But it was almost three years and at least three million deaths later that Hitler finally admitted what Speer, one of his closest "friends" and advisers, says he knew all along -- or at least during those last three years when Albert and all the others in the Führer's inner circle were working 20, 22 and sometimes 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep the Reich propped up on an ever-eroding base of conquered slave labor and frenzied schemes to create a "super-weapon" that would somehow turn the tide.

  None of this rotten madness worked out, of course, and as a reward for his stupid loyalty to Hitler, Albert Speer spent 20 years of his life locked up in Spandau Prison as one of Germany's major war criminals. Hitler was consistent to the end. He had no stomach for jail cells or courtrooms -- unless they were his -- so as soon as he got word that Russo-American tanks were rumbling into the suburbs of Berlin, he went down in his private bunker and killed both himself and his faithful mistress, Eva Braun, with what some people say was a very elegant, gold-plated Walther machine-pistol.

  Nobody knows for sure, because the bunker was ravaged by fire soon after
ward. . . and the only alleged witness to Hitler's death was his personal aide and adviser, Martin Bormann, who either escaped at the last moment or was burned to such an unrecognizable cinder that his body was never found.

  Everybody who knew Bormann hated and feared him -- even Hitler, who apparently treated him like a pet cobra -- and few of the Reich's survivors ever accepted the fact of his death in that fiery bunker. He was too evil and crafty for that, they insisted, and the general assumption was that Bormann had kept his personal escape plan finely organized, on a day-to-day basis, since the winter of '43.

  West German military intelligence now lists him as officially dead, but not many people believe it -- because he keeps turning up, now and then, in places like Asuncion, Paraguay, the Brazilian Matto Grosso, or high in the Argentine lake country.

  Bormann was the Tex Colson of his time, and his strange relationship with Hitler seems not much different from the paranoid fragments of the Nixon-Colson relationship that emerged from the now-infamous "White House Transcripts" of April 1974.

  We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd have expected to pick up The New York Times a week later and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page by Pat Buchanan, and then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some of Colson's hired thugs in an alley behind the National Press Building -- a long stone's throw, as it were, from the White House.

  But like Tommy Rush says, "Times ain't now, but like they used to be. . ."

  Which is true. There is not much doubt about that. But after watching the TV news on all three networks last night and then reading all the Nixon stories in today's Washington Post, I have an eerie feeling that the times ain't now quite like they appear to be, either.