The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  "See you later," I said. "I have to meditate for a while, then hustle down to the White House to make sure he really leaves. I won't believe it until I see it with my own eyes."

  The flat surface of the pool was pocked with millions of tiny raindrops beating steadily down on the water. There was a chain lock on the gate, so I climbed over the fence and walked down to the deep end, where I located a dry spot under a tree near the diving board. The CBS Morning News would be on in about 20 minutes; I turned on the TV set, adjusted the aerial and turned the screen so I could see it from the pool about 20 feet away. It was a system I'd worked out last summer at the Senate Watergate hearings: After every two laps, I could look over the edge of the pool and check the screen to see if Hughes Rudd's face had appeared yet. When it did, I would climb out of the water and lie down on the grass in front of the set -- turn up the sound, light a cigarette, open a fresh Bass Ale and take notes while I watched the tiny screen for a general outline of whatever action Sam Ervin's Roman circus might be expected to generate that day.

  I stayed out there by the pool for almost two hours, sliding in and out of the water to run a few laps and then back out to stretch out on the grass to make a note now and then on the news. Not much was happening, except for a few kinky interviews down by the White House gate with people who claimed to have been on the Deathwatch for three days and nights without sleeping. . . But very few of them could even begin to explain why they were doing it. At least half the crowd around the White House during those last few days looked like people who spend every weekend prowling the Demolition Derby circuit.

  The only other action on the news that Friday morning was an occasional rerun of Nixon's official resignation speech from the night before. I had watched it with Vetter in the Watergate bar. It seemed like a good place to be on that night, because I had also been there on the night of June 17th, 1972 -- while the Watergate burglary was happening five floors above my head.

  But after I'd watched Nixon's speech for the third time, a strange feeling of nervousness began working on me and I decided to get out of town as soon as possible. The movie was over -- or at least it would be over in two or three hours. Nixon was leaving at 10:00, and Ford would be sworn in at noon. I wanted to be there on the White House lawn when Nixon was lifted off. That would be the end of my movie.

  It was still raining when I left and the pool was still empty. I put the TV set back in the canvas bag and climbed over the gate by the lifeguard shack. Then I stopped and looked back for a moment, knowing I would never come back to this place, and if I did it would not be the same. The pool would be the same, and it would be easy enough to pick up a case of Bass Ale or a battery TV set. . . And I could even come down here on rainy summer mornings and watch the morning news. . .

  But there would not be this kind of morning anymore, because the main ingredient for that mix was no longer available in Washington; and if you asked any of the people who were known to have a real taste for it, the hard-core Nixon aficionados, they all understood that it would not be available again for a hell of a long time and probably never.

  Nobody even talks about substitutes or something almost exactly the same. The mold disappeared about three minutes after they made that evil bastard. . . and although there was never any doubt about who stole it, nobody had any proof.

  No. . . even with the pool and the ale and grass and the portable TV set, the morning news will not be the same without the foul specter of Richard Nixon glaring out of the tube. But the war is over now and he lost. . . Gone but not forgotten, missed but not mourned; we will not see another one like him for quite a while. He was dishonest to a fault, the truth was not in him, and if it can be said that he resembled any other living animal in this world, it could only have been the hyena.

  I took a cab down to the White House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the guardhouse window. The cop inside glanced at my card, then looked up -- fixing me with a heavy-lidded Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer to open the gate. The pressroom in the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden, where a big olive-drab helicopter was perched on the lawn, about 100 feet out from the stairs. The rain had stopped and a long, red carpet was laid out on the wet grass from the White House door to the helicopter. I eased through the crowd of photographers and walked out, looking back at the White House, where Nixon was giving his final address to a shocked crowd of White House staffers. I examined the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I heard a loud rumbling behind me; I turned around just in time to see Richard and Pat coming toward me, trailing their daughters and followed Closely by Gerald Ford and Betty. Their faces were grim and they were walking very slowly; Nixon had a glazed smile on his face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden Indian full of Thorazine.

  His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello but he didn't seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter. . . Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.

  Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms-- but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms wents up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back, and a Marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.

  I was so close that the noise hurt my ears. The rotor blades were invisible now, but the wind was getting heavier; I could feel it pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets. For an instant I thought I could see Richard Nixon's face pressed up to the window. Was he smiling? Was it Nixon? I couldn't be sure. And now it made no difference.

  The wind blast from the rotors was blowing people off-balance now; photographers were clutching their equipment against their bodies and Gerald Ford was leading his wife back toward the White House with a stony scowl on his face.

  I was still very close to the helicopter, watching the tires. As the beast began rising, the tires became suddenly fat; there was no more weight on them. . . The helicopter went straight up and hovered for a moment, then swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then angled up into the fog. Richard Nixon was gone.

  The end came so suddenly and with so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that the scumbag had been passed to what will have to pose for now as another generation. The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing -- especially among journalists who had been on the Death-watch for two years -- was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression that still endures.

  Within hours after Nixon's departure, every bar in downtown Washington normally frequented by reporters was a sinkhole of gloom. Several hours after Gerald Ford was sworn in, I found ex-Kennedy speechwriter Dick Goodwin in a bar not far from the Rolling Stone office across the street from the White House. He was slumped in a booth by himself, staring blankly into his drink like a man who had just had his teeth ripped out by a savage bill collector.

  "I feel totally drained," he said. "It's like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest running continuous entertainment this city ever had." He waved his arm at the waitress for another drink. "It's the end of an era. Now I know how all those rock freaks felt when they heard the Beatles were breaking up."

  I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come from the White House pressroom, where a smoglike sense of funk -- or "smunk" as somebody over there mig
ht describe it -- had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won -- or at least the Bad Guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing. Within hours after Richard Nixon left Washington, it was painfully clear that Frank Mankiewicz had spoken too soon when he'd predicted, just a few weeks before The Fall, that Washington would be "the Hollywood of the Seventies." Without Nixon to stir up its thin juices, the Washington of the Seventies could look forward to the same grim fate as Cinderella's gilded coach at the stroke of midnight. It would turn back into a pumpkin, and any mysterious shoes left lying around on the deserted ballroom floors of the Watergate era would not interest a genial pragmatist like Gerald Ford. He would not have much time, for a while, to concern himself with anything but the slide into national bankruptcy that Nixon had left him to cope with. . . And, despite all its menacing implications, the desperate plight of the national economy was not a story that called up the same kind of journalistic adrenaline that Washington and most of the country had been living on for so long that the prospect of giving it up caused a serious panic in the ranks of all the Watergate junkies who never even knew they were hooked until the cold turkey swooped into their closets.

  We all knew it was coming -- the press, the Congress, the "public," all the backstage handlers in Washington and even Nixon's own henchmen -- but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to crumble, except in hazy retrospect. . . In reality, it disintegrated, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.

  The bolts came so fast that it was hard to keep count. On the Wednesday morning after the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend his impeachment, Richard Nixon was a beleaguered Republican president with powerful Republican (and Southern Democratic) allies in both the House and the Senate: His impeachment seemed almost certain, but the few people in Washington crass enough to bet money on a thing like this were still calling his chances of conviction in the Senate "just about even." This prognosis held for about 72 hours, which was time enough for almost everybody in Washington to start gearing down for an endless summer -- a humid nightmare of booze, sweat and tension, of debate in the House, delay in the courts and finally a trial in the Senate that might drag on until Christmas.

  It was an ugly prospect, even for those of us who openly welcomed the prospect of seeing Richard Nixon in the dock. On the last afternoon of the Judiciary hearings, I found myself leaning against a tree on the grass of the U.S. Capitol lawn, hopelessly stoned, staring up at the huge golden dome (while loud knots of tourists wearing Bermuda shorts and Instamatic cameras climbed the marble steps a hundred yards in front of me) and wondering, "What in the fuck am I doing here? What kind of sick and twisted life have I fallen into that would cause me to spend some of the best hours of my life in a cryptlike room full of cameras, hot lights and fearful politicians debating the guilt or innocence of Richard Milhous Nixon?"

  The Politician and the Pawnbroker. . . The New York Times Hits the Trenches, The Washington Post Opens a Multi-Pronged Panzer Offensive. . . Lessons of a Crime Spree in Lexington. . . A Compound Tangent Mushrooms Dangerously

  Innocence? It is difficult even to type that word on the same page with Nixon's name. The man was born guilty -- not in the traditional Vatican sense of "original sin," but in a darker and highly personalized sense that Nixon himself seems to have recognized from the very beginning.

  Nixon's entire political career -- and in fact his whole life -- is a gloomy monument to the notion that not even pure schizophrenia or malignant psychosis can prevent a determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange society we have built for ourselves in the name of "democracy" and "free enterprise." For most of his life, the mainspring of Richard Nixon's energy and ambition seems to have been a deep and unrecognized need to overcome, at all costs, that sense of having been born guilty -- not for crimes or transgressions already committed, but for those he somehow sensed he was fated to commit as he grappled his way to the summit. If Nixon had been born Jewish, instead of Black Irish, he would probably have been a pawnbroker instead of a politician, not only because the suburbs of Los Angeles would never have elected a Jewish congressman in 1946, but because running a big-league pawnshop would have fueled him with the same kind of guilt-driven energy that most of our politicians -- from the county assessor level all the way up to the White House -- seem to thrive on.

  On any given morning, both the politician and the pawnbroker can be sure that by sundown the inescapable realities of their calling will have forced them to do something they would rather not have to explain, not even to themselves. The details might vary, but the base line never changes: "I will feel more guilty tomorrow than I felt yesterday. . . But of course I have no choice: They have made me what I am and by god, they'll pay for it."

  So the cycle runs on. Both the politician and the pawnbroker are doomed to live like junkies, hooked on the mutant energy of their own unexplainable addictions.

  In this baleful sense, Richard Nixon is definitely "one of us" -- as New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, in a very different context, back in the early Sixties. The phrase was Conrad's, from Lord Jim: "He was one of us. . ." -- and when I read Wicker's piece more than a decade ago I remember feeling angry that The New York Times had the power to hire another one of these goddamn gothic Southern sots and turn him loose to stumble around Washington and spew out this kind of bullshit.

  Anybody stupid enough to identify with Richard Nixon the same way Conrad's Marlow identified with Lord Jim was beyond either help or any hope of credibility, I felt, and for the next seven or eight years I dismissed everything Wicker wrote as the mumblings of a hired fool. . . And when Wicker's point of view began swinging very noticeably in the direction of my own, in the late 1960s, I was almost as disturbed -- for entirely different reasons -- as the Times editors in New York who also noticed the drift and swiftly deposed him from his heir-apparent role to James Reston as the new chief of the paper's Washington Bureau.

  The masthead of The New York Time's Washington Bureau is a reliable weathervane for professional observers of the changing political climate. Control of the bureau is usually in the hands of somebody the magnates in New York believe is more or less on the same wavelength as the men in control of the government. Arthur Krock, for instance, got along fine with Eisenhower, but he couldn't handle the Kennedys and was replaced by Reston, a JFK partisan in 1960 and a "Roosevelt coalition" neopopulist who also got along well with Lyndon Johnson. But when Johnson quit in 1968 and the future looked very uncertain, Reston was promoted to a management job in New York and was succeeded by Wicker at about the same time Robert Kennedy was deciding to make his move for the presidency; but when Bobby was killed and McCarthy collapsed, the Times hedged its bet on Humphrey by deposing Wicker and replacing him with Max Frankel, a smooth and effective diplomat/journalist who could presumably get along with either Hubert or Nixon. . . But not even Frankel could handle Four More Years, apparently, and the Nixon/Agnew landslide in 1972 forced the admittedly anti-Nixon Times into a stance of agonizing reappraisal. Frankel moved up to New York, and since the most obvious candidates for his job were relatively liberal young turks like Bob Semple, Anthony Lewis or Johnny Apple, who were clearly out of step with the mandate of vengeance that Nixon claimed by virtue of his shattering victory over McGovern, the Times management in New York made a fateful policy decision that would soon come back to haunt them:

  On the theory that the best offense, at that point, was a good defense, they pulled in their editorial horns for the duration and sent an elderly, conservative mediocrity named Clifton Daniel down from the executive backwaters of New York to keep the aggressive Washington Bureau under control. At almost the s
ame time, they hired one of Nixon's top speechwriters, Bill Safire, and gave him a prominent ranking columnist's spot on the Times editorial pages. Both of these moves were thinly veiled concessions to the prospect of a revenge-hungry Nixon/Agnew juggernaut that had already telegraphed its intention to devote as much of its second (and final) term energies to their "enemies" in the "national media" as they had already successfully devoted in the first term to scuttling the U.S. Supreme Court.

  It was clearly a management decision, safely rooted in the Times concept of itself as "a newspaper of record," not advocacy -- and when you're in the business of recording history, you don't declare war on the people who're making it. "If you want to get along, go along." That is an ancient political axiom often attributed to Boss Tweed, the legendary "pol" and brute fixer who many journalists in Washington insist still sits on the editorial board of The New York Times.

  Which is probably not true, if only because the Times got burned so badly by going along with Tweed's crude logic in the winter of 1972-73 that the whole Washington Bureau -- except perhaps Clifton Daniel -- is still reeling from the beating they took from The Washington Post on the Nixon/Watergate story. While the Times was getting down in the trenches and methodically constructing its own journalistic version of a Maginot line against the inevitable Nixon/Agnew offensive, the Post was working 25 hours a day on a multipronged panzer-style offensive that would soon become one of the most devastating scoops in the history of American journalism.

  Rather than be cowed by Nixon and his army of power-crazed thugs, the Post elected to meet them head-on, hitting both flanks and the center all at once -- and when the bloody dust began settling, just a few weeks ago, with both Agnew and Nixon having resigned in disgrace, The Washington Post had unquestionably replaced The New York Times as the nation's premier political newspaper.