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 embarrassed 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 Washington 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 God, 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 hassled about it -- and instead of being sent to a top-secret radar installation near the Arctic Circle, I was passed 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 attitude 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 Washington 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 Washington Post or The Washington 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 Washington 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 Washington 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, the Post and the Star were still trying to pry their hotrod investigative reporters out of weekend cabins in the Virginia mountains and beach-houses on the Maryland shore.
I have very dim memories of Tuck's call. Less than five hours earlier, I had passed 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 Washington to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado. . . before heading back to Washington 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, ambushing 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 space 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 titanic 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 Washington 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 Washington the day after Ford was sworn in, too tired to feel anything but a manic sense of relief as I staggered through the lobby at National Airport with about 200 pounds of transcripts of the Senate Watergate and House Judiciary Committee Hearings that had been rendered obsolete as evidence by Nixon's forced resignation two days earlier. I was not quite sure why I wanted them, but evidence of any kind is always reassuring to have, and I felt that after two or three months of sleep I might be able to use them in some way.
Now, almost exactly four weeks later, that suitcase full of transcripts is still lying open beside my desk. . . and now that Gerald Ford has granted Nixon a presidential pardon so sweeping that he will never have to stand trial for anything, those books of evidence that would have guaranteed his impeachment if he hadn't resigned are beginning to pique my interest. . .
Honky Tonk Tunes and a Long-Remembered Dream. . . Constant Haggling, Useless Briefings and a Howling Voice at the Door
American politics will never be the same again.
-- Senator George McGovern, Acceptance Speech, July 13th, 1972, Miami, Florida
Another hot, heavy rain in Washington, at 4:33 on a wet Wednesday morning, falling like balls of sweat against my window. . . Twelve feet wide and six feet tall, the high yellow eye of the National Affairs Suite looking out across the rotting roofs of our nation's capital at least a mile away through the haze and the rain to the fine white marble spire of the Washington Monument and the dark dome of the Capitol. . . Hillbilly music howling out of the radio across the room from the typewriter.
. . . And when it's midnight in Dallas, be somewhere on a big jet plane. . . If I could only understand you, maybe I could cope with the loneliness I feel. . .
Honky-tonk tunes and a quart of Wild Turkey on the sideboard, ripped to the tits on whatever it was in that bag I bought tonight from the bull fruit in Georgetown, looking down from the desk at yesterday's huge Washington Post headline:
PRESIDENT ADMITS WITHHOLDING DATA
TAPES SHOW HE APPROVED COVER-UP
Every half-hour on the half-hour, WXRA -- the truckers' station over in Alexandria -- keeps babbling more and more hideous news of "rapidly dissolving" support in the House and the Senate. All ten members of the House Judiciary Committee who voted against the articles of impeachment on national TV last week have now reversed themselves, for the record, and said they plan to vote for impeachment when -- or if -- it comes to a vote in the House on August 19th. Even Barry Goldwater has leaked (and then denied) a UPI report that he thinks Nixon should resign, for the good of the country. . . and also for the good of Goldwater and everybody else in the Republican party, such as it is.
Indeed. The rats are deserting the ship at high speed. Even the dingbat senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick -- the GOP claghorn who nominated Nixon for the Nobel Peace Prize less than two years ago -- has called the president's 11th-hour admission of complicity in the Watergate cover-up "sorrowful news."
We will not have Richard Nixon to kick around much longer -- which is not especially "sorrowful news" to a lot of people, except that the purging of the cheap little bastard is going to have to take place here in Washington and will take up the rest of our summer.
One day at a time, Sweet Jesus. . . That's all I'm askin' from you. . .
And now the Compton Brothers with a song about ". . . when the wine ran out and the jukebox ran out of tunes. . ."
Jesus, we need more ice and whiskey here. Fill the bag with water and suck down the dregs. The rain is still lashing my window, the dawn sky is still black and this room is damp and cold. Where is the goddamn heat switch? Why is my bed covered with newspaper clips and U.S. Government Printing Office evidence books from the Nixon impeachment hearings?
Ah. . . madness, madness. On a day like this, not even the prospect of Richard Nixon's downfall can work up the blood. This is stone, flatout fucking weather.
On another day like this, a long time ago, I was humming across the bridge out of Louisville, Kentucky, in an old Chevy 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 windshield wipers were lashing back and forth in the early morning rain and we were hunkered down in the car with our lunch bags and moaning along with a mean country tune on the radio when somebody said:
"Jesus Christ. Why are we going to work on a day like this? We must be goddamn crazy. This is the kind of day when you want to be belly-to-belly with a good woman, in a warm bed under a tin roof with the rain beating down and a bottle of good whiskey right next to the bed."
Let me be there in your mornin', let me be there in your night. . . Let me be there when you need me. . . and make it right.
Ah, this haunting, honky music. . . I am running a serious out-of-control fever for that long-remembered dream of a tin-roof, hard-rain, belly-to-belly day with a big iron bolt on the door and locked away in a deep warm bed from every connection to the outside world except a $14.95 tin radio wailing tunes like "I Smell a Rat" and "The Wild Side of Life."
This is not your ideal flying weather. Both National and Dulles airports are "closed for the rest of the morning," they say. . . But despite all that I find myself on the phone demanding plane reservations back to Colorado. Fuck the weather. . .
Whoever answered the phone at United Airlines said the weather was "expected to be clear" by early afternoon and there were plenty of seats open for the 4:40 flight to Denver.
"Wonderful," I said, "but I want a first-class seat in the smokers' section."
"I'll check," she said, and moments later she was back with bad news: "The smoking seats are all taken, sir, but if it makes no difference to you --"
"It does," I said. "I must smoke. I insist on it."
She checked again and this time the news was better: "I think we can open a smoking seat for you, sir. Could I have your name?"
"Nader," I said. "R. Nader."
"How do you spell that?"
I spelled it for her, then set my alarm for two and fell asleep on the couch, still wearing my wet swimming trunks. After two months on the Nixon Impeachment Trail, my nerves were worn raw from the constant haggling and frustrated hostility of all those useless, early morning White House press briefings and long, sweaty afternoons pacing aimlessly around the corridors of the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill, waiting for crumbs of wisdom from any two or three of those 38 luckless congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee hearing evidence on the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon.
It was an eerie spectacle: The whole Nixonian empire -- seemingly invincible less than two years ago-- was falling apart of its own foul weight right in front of our eyes. There was no denying the vast and historic proportions of the story, but covering it on a day-to-day basis was such a dull and degrading experience that it was hard to keep a focus on what was really happening. It was essentially a lawyer's story, not a journalist's.
I never made that plane. Sometime around noon I was jolted awake by a pounding on my door and a voice shouting, "Wake up, goddamnit, the whole town's gone crazy -- the sonofabitch has caved in -- he's quitting."
"No!" I thought. "Not now! I'm too weak to handle it." These goddamn rumors had kept me racing frantically around Washington day and night for almost a week -- and when the shitrain finally began, I was helpless. My eyes were swollen shut with chlorine poisoning and when I tried to get out of b
ed to open the door, I almost snapped both ankles. I had fallen asleep wearing rubber-soled basketball shoes, which had wedged themselves between the sheets at the foot of the bed so firmly that my first thought was that somebody had strapped me down on the bed.
The howling voice at my door was Craig Vetter, another Rolling Stone writer who had been in town for two weeks trying to make some kind of connection with Nixon's priest. . . but the priest was finished now and the town was going wild. A Washington Post reporter said he had never seen the newsroom so frantic -- not even when John Kennedy was murdered or during the Cuban missile crisis. The prevailing rumors on Capitol Hill had Nixon either addressing a joint session of Congress at 4:30 that afternoon or preparing a final statement for delivery at 7:00 on all three networks. . . but a call to the White House pressroom spiked both these rumors, although the place was filling up with reporters who'd picked up an entirely different rumor: That either Ziegler or Nixon himself would soon appear in the pressroom to make a statement of some kind.
Six more calls from the National Affairs Suite churned up at least six more impossible rumors. Every switchboard in town that had any connection with either journalism or politics was jammed and useless. Later that night, even the main White House switchboard jammed up for the first time most reporters could remember, and for the next two days almost everybody who worked in the White House -- even private secretaries -- kept their home phones off the hook because of the chaos.
It was about 1:30 on Wednesday afternoon when I got through to Marty Nolan in the White House pressroom. We compared rumors and killed both lists very quickly. "This is all crazy bullshit," said Nolan. "We're just being jerked around. He's not going to do anything serious today, but just on the chance that he might, I don't dare leave this goddamn dungeon."
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 43