I had been on the verge of going down there, but after arranging with Nolan and about six other people in strategic positions in different parts of town to call me instantly if anything started to happen, I decided that the best thing to do was to take both the TV set and the FM radio down to a table by the pool and have all my calls transferred down to the lifeguard's telephone. . . Which turned out to be the best of all possible solutions: Vetter and I set up a totally efficient communications post beside the pool, and for the next 48 hours we were able to monitor the whole craziness from our table beside the pool.
The Suck-Tide Reaches San Clemente. . . Ziegler Brings the News to the Boss. . . General Haig and the Bag of Dimes. . . The Sybaritic Priest and the Mentally Retarded Rabbi. . . More Talk of the 'Suicide Option'
Well. . . the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the Bowery -- exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of "innocent bystanders" who still don't know what happened. . .
. . . And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully incomplete quality about the whole thing. All over Washington tonight is the stench of a massive psychic battle that nobody really won. Richard Nixon has been broken, whipped and castrated all at once, but even for me there is no real crank or elation in having been a front-row spectator at the final scenes, the Deathwatch, the first time in American history that a president has been chased out of the White House and cast down in the ditch with all the other geeks and common criminals. . .
Looking back on the final few months of his presidency, it is easy to see that Nixon was doomed all along -- or at least from that moment when Archibald Cox first decided to force a showdown on the "executive privilege" question by sending a U.S. marshal over to the White House with a subpoena for some of the Oval Office tapes.
Nixon naturally defied that subpoena, but not even the crazed firing of Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus could make it go away. And when Jaworski challenged Nixon's right to defy that subpoena in the U.S. Supreme Court, the wheels of doom began rolling. And from that point on, it was clear to all the principals except Nixon himself that the Unthinkable was suddenly inevitable; it was only a matter of time. . . And it was just about then that Richard Nixon began losing his grip on reality.
Within hours after Jaworski and Nixon's "Watergate lawyer" James St. Clair had argued the case in a special session of the Court, I talked to Pat Buchanan and was surprised to hear that Nixon and his wizards in the White House were confident that the verdict would be 5-3 in their favor. Even Buchanan, who thinks rationally about 79% of the time, apparently believed -- less than two weeks before the Court ruled unanimously against Nixon -- that five of the eight justices who would have to rule on that question would see no legal objection to ratifying Nixon's demented idea that anything discussed in the president's official office -- even a patently criminal conspiracy -- was the president's personal property, if he chose to have it recorded on his personal tape-recording machinery.
The possibility that even some of the justices The Boss himself had appointed to the Court might not cheerfully endorse a concept of presidential immunity that mocked both the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta had apparently been considered for a moment and then written off as too farfetched and crazy even to worry about by all of Nixon's personal strategists.
It is still a little difficult to believe, in fact, that some of the closest advisers to the president of a constitutional democracy in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-four might actually expect the highest court in any constitutional democracy to crank up what is probably the most discredited precedent in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence -- the "divine right of kings" -- in order to legalize the notion that a president of the United States or any other would-be democracy is above and beyond "the law."
That Nixon and his personal Gestapo actually believed this could happen is a measure of the insanity quotient of the people Nixon took down in the bunker with him when he knew the time had come to get serious.
But even as they raved, you could hear a hollow kind of paranoid uncertainty in their voices, as if they could already feel the ebb tide sucking around their ankles -- just as Nixon must have felt it when he walked alone on the beach at San Clemente a few weeks earlier, trudging slowly along in the surf with his pantlegs rolled up while he waited in angry solitude for the results of the Supreme Court vote on his claim of "executive privilege." That rush of sucking water around his ankles must have almost pulled him out to sea when Ziegler called down from the big dune in front of La Casa Pacifica: "Mister President! Mister President! We just got the news! The vote was unanimous -- eight to zero."
Nixon whoops with delight: He stops in his waterfilled tracks and hurls out both arms in the twin-victory sign. "Wonderful!" he shouts. "I knew we'd win it, Ron! Even without that clown Renchburg. It wasn't for nothing that I appointed those other dumb farts to the Court!"
Ziegler stares down at him, at this doomed scarecrow of a president down there on the edge of the surf. Why is he grinning? Why does he seem so happy at this terrible news?
"No!" Ziegler shouts. "That is not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all!" He hesitates, choking back a sob. "The vote was eight to zero, Mister President -- against you."
"What?" The scarecrow on the beach goes limp. His arms collapse, his hands flap crazily around the pockets of his wet pants. "Those dirty bastards!" he screams. "We'll break their balls!"
"Yes sir!" Ziegler shouts. "They'll wish they'd never been born!" He jerks a notebook out of his inside coat pocket and jots: "Break their balls."
By this time the wet president is climbing the dune in front of him. "What happened?" Nixon snarls. "Did somebody get to Burger?"
Ziegler nods. "What else? Probably it was Edward Bennet Williams."
"Of course," says Nixon. "We should never have left that dumb sonofabitch back there in Washington by himself. We know he'll do business: That's why we put him there." He kicks savagely at a lone ice plant in the sand. "Goddamnit! Where was Colson? Burger was his assignment, right?"
Ziegler winces. "Colson's in jail, sir. Don't you remember?"
Nixon stares blankly, then recovers. "Colson? In jail? What did he do?" He picks up a kelp head and lashes it against his shin. "Never mind, I can remember now -- but what about Ehrlichman? He can jerk Burger and those other clowns around like a goddamn Punch and Judy show!"
Ziegler stares out to sea for a moment, his eyes cloud over. "Well, sir. . . John's not much good to us anymore. He's going to prison."
Nixon stiffens, dropping the kelp head in the sand. "Holy shit, Ron! Why should John go to prison? He's one of the finest public servants I've ever had the privilege of knowing!"
Ziegler is weeping openly now, his emaciated body is wracked by deep sobs. "I don't know, sir. I can't explain it." He stares out to sea again, fighting to gain control of himself. "These are terrible times, Mister President. Our enemies are closing in. While you were out there on the beach, the Avis agency in Laguna called and canceled our credit. They took my car, Mister President! My gold Cadillac convertible! I was on the phone with Buzhardt -- about the Supreme Court business, you know -- when I looked out the window and saw this little nigger in an Avis uniform driving my car out the gate. The guards said he had a writ of seizure, signed by the local sheriff."
"My God!" Nixon exclaims. "We'll break his balls! Where's a telephone? I'll call Haldeman."
"It's no use, sir," Ziegler replies. "We can't make any outgoing calls until we pay the phone company $33,000. They sent a man down to fix the lines so we can only take incoming calls -- for the next 86 hours, and then we'll be cut off entirely. If you want to call Washington, we'll have to walk to the San Clemente Inn and use a pay phone. I think General Haig has a bag of dimes in his room."
>
Nixon stiffens again; his brain is mired in deep thought. Then his eyes light up and he grabs Ziegler by the arm, dragging him toward the house. "Come on, Ron," he snaps, "I have an idea."
Ziegler stumbles along behind the president: He feels the energy flowing into him -- The Boss is on the move.
Nixon is talking as he runs: "I think I've isolated our problem, Ron. We need credit, right? OK, Where's that Jew?"
"Jew?"
"You know who I mean, goddamnit -- that rabbi. They can always get credit, can't they? A rabbi? We'll send some of the Secret Service boys up there to Laguna to round him up. He's probably in the bar up there on top of the Surf and Sand; that's where he hangs out." Nixon laughs wildly now. "Shit, nobody questions a rabbi's credit! You tell the SS boys to pick him up and throw a real scare into him, then bring him down here and I'll stroke him."
Now Ziegler is laughing. His eyes are bright and he is writing fast in his notebook. "It's a wonderful idea, sir, just wonderful! First we stonewall the bastards, then we outflank them with a Jew!"
Nixon nods happily. "They'll never know what hit 'em, Ron. You know what I've always said: 'When the going gets tough, the tough get going.' "
"That's right, sir. I remember when Coach Lombardi --"
Nixon cuts him off with a sudden clap of his wet hands; the sound causes two Secret Service agents in the nearby shrubbery to go for their guns. "Hold on, Ron! Just hold it right there! You know who taught Coach Lombardi everything he knew?" He smiles deeply. "Me! The President!"
Ziegler wrings his hands, his eyeballs bulge, his face is twisted with reverence. "I remember that, sir -- I remember!"
"Good, Ron, good! Only losers forget. . . And you know what Coach Lombardi said about that." Nixon seizes his press secretary by both elbows and comes up close to his face: His breath is foul, his eyeballs are bloodshot, his pupils are dangerously dilated, his words come in short, high-pitched barks like a rabid hyena: "You show me a good loser, Ron -- and I'll show you a loser!"
Ziegler is overwhelmed: His eyes are so wide that he can't even blink; his body is rigid but his soul is on fire. His face is a mask of pure zeal: Ron Ziegler -- left-hand man to a doomed and criminal president, the political flip side of every burned-out acid freak who voted for Goldwater and then switched to Tim Leary until the pain got too bad and the divine light of either Jesus or Maharaj Ji lured him off in the wake of another Perfect Master.
Ah, poor Ron. I knew him well enough. It was Ziegler, in fact, who tipped me off many months ago that Nixon was finished. This was back in July, in that lull before the storm when the wizards in Washington were beginning to nod glumly at each other whenever somebody suggested that the impeachment drive seemed to be faltering and that maybe Nixon was bottoming out, that in fact he had already bounced off the bottom and was preparing to take the offensive once again.
These were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon's Goebbels -- ex-White House "communications director" Ken Clawson -- was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon's year-long slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy-headline-grabbing attacks on "professional Nixon-haters" in the press, and "unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress." At that point in time, most of Nixon's traditional allies were beginning to hear the death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at night, and even Billy Graham had deserted him. So Clawson, in a stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a mentally retarded rabbi on the payroll and sent them forth to do battle with the forces of Evil.
Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, wallowed joyfully in his role as "Nixon's priest" for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House chief of staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.
But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another, holy man -- the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flaky presence to anything Clawson aimed him at. Under the banner of something called the "National Citizens' Committee for Fairness to the President," he "organized" rallies, dinner parties and press conferences all over the country. One of his main financial backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.
Only a month ago, the storms of destiny seemed to be subsiding for President Nixon. Among the Knowledgeable in Washington, the conviction was growing that the impeachment campaign against him had spent its moment. . . [But] it is now clear that the Knowledgeable were wrong, that they mistook a break in the clouds for lasting sunshine. . .
-- R. W. Apple Jr., The New York Times, July 28th, 1974
In fact, however, Nixon was already doomed by the time the Rodino committee got around to voting. The unanimous Supreme Court vote on the question of "executive privilege" with regard to the 64 disputed tapes was the beginning of the end. Nixon had known all along that the release of those tapes would finish him -- but he had consistently lied about their contents: not only to the press and the public, but also to his wife and his daughters and all the hardcore loyalists on his staff. He lied about the tapes to Barry Goldwater and Gerry Ford, to Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, to Al Haig and Pat Buchanan and even to his own attorney, James St. Clair -- who was stupid enough, like the others, to have believed him when he swore that the tapes he refused to let anybody listen to would finally prove his innocence.
Both of his lawyers, in fact, had done everything in their power to avoid hearing the goddamn things. It finally required a direct order from Judge Sirica, on two separate occasions, to compel Buzhardt and St. Clair to listen to the tapes. Buzhardt was first, and within hours after hearing the fatal conversation with Haldeman of June 23rd, 1972, he was rushed to the intensive care ward of a private hospital in Virginia with a serious "heart attack" that rendered him incommunicado for almost two months.
I was sitting in a bar called the Class Reunion, about two blocks from the White House, when I heard the tragic news. . . And I recall saying to Boston Globe correspondent Marty Nolan: "We'll never see Buzhardt again. They can't afford to let him live. If he survives whatever Ziegler put in his coffee when he was listening to those tapes, Haldeman will go out there and stick a hatpin up his nose while he's wasted on Demerol, jam it straight into his brain when the nurse gets out of the room. Take my word for it, Marty. I know how these people operate. Buzhardt will never leave that hospital alive."
Nolan nodded, oblivious to Buzhardt's grim fate. At that point, almost every journalist in Washington assigned to the Nixon Deathwatch had been averaging about two hours sleep a night since the beginning of summer. Many were weak and confused, succumbing to drink or drugs whenever possible. Others seemed to hover from day to day on the brink of terminal fatigue. Radio and TV reporters in the White House pressroom were reduced to tearing articles out of the nearest newspaper and reading them verbatim straight over the air -- while the newspaper and magazine people would tape the live broadcasts and then transcribe them word for word under their own bylines. By the end of July, the prospect of having to cover an impeachment debate in the House and then a trial in the Senate for three or four months without relief was almost unbearable. As August began and Nixon still showed no signs of giving up,
there was more and more talk of "the suicide option."
Last Breakfast at the White House. . . The Scumbag I Passed to a New Generation. . . Cold Turkey Swoops Down & Panic for Watergate Junkies
Sometime around dawn on the Friday morning of Richard Milhous Nixon's last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks and a red rain parka, laced my head with some gray Argentine snuff, and took an elevator down to the big pool below my window in the National Affairs Suite at the Washington Hilton. It was still raining, so I carried my portable TV set, a notebook and four bottles of Bass Ale in a waterproof canvas bag.
The lower lobby was empty, except for the night watchman -- a meaty black gentleman whose main duty was to keep people like me out of the pool at night, but we had long since come to a friendly understanding on the subject. It was against the rules to swim when the pool was closed but there was no rule to prevent a Doctor of Divinity from going out there to meditate on the end of the diving board.
"Mornin', Doc," said the watchman. "Up a little early, ain't you? Especially on a nasty day like this."
"Nasty?" I replied. "What are you -- some kind of goddamn Uncle Tom Republican? Don't you know who's leaving town today?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cracked into a grin. "You're right, by god! I almost forgot. We finally got rid of that man, didn't we, Doc?" He nodded happily. "Yes, sir, we finally got rid of him."
I reached into my bag and opened two Bass Ales. "This is a time for celebration," I said, handing him one of the bottles. I held mine out in front of me. "To Richard Nixon," I said, "may he choke on the money he stole."
The watchman glanced furtively over his shoulder before lifting his ale for the toast. The clink of the two bottles coming together echoed briefly in the vast, deserted lobby.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 44