Barry was also right about Walter Jenkins, whose situation presented a relevant and somewhat analogous issue to ponder in the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment travail. In 1964, White House aide Walter Jenkins was Lyndon Johnson’s closest adviser, his personal assistant. Married and the father of six children, Jenkins was arrested at the YMCA, a block from the White House, for committing a homosexual act—a month before the election. Reporters learned of the arrest and also of a previous arrest for the same act, in which the charge read “Pervert.” Walter Jenkins was a scandalous front-page story in the most fevered days of a presidential election. Against the counsel of his advisers, Barry Goldwater issued orders that Walter Jenkins’s arrest not be used in the campaign. (Johnson, on the other hand, ordered a poll before he issued “a statement of sympathy” for his old friend.)
As much as Hillary and I loved Barry Goldwater, we loathed Richard Nixon, his successor as the Republican standard-bearer, with an equal fervor. “Richard Nixon,” Barry Goldwater had said, “is the most dishonest man I’ve ever met.” Harry Truman agreed. “Richard Nixon,” he said, “is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” Yes, that was exactly right, and it was the basic reason my generation had such a visceral and deep distrust of him. Nixon literally was, as Barry had said, “a four-square liar.”
We had watched Tricky Dick as we grew up, a shadowy presence in a sharkskin suit on our evening news. His body language was stiff and stilted, like Ed Sullivan’s or like Charlie Chaplin burlesquing Hitler in The Great Dictator. His Pinocchio nose seemed longer to us every day, the greasy mangrove of Brylcreem atop his head a nest of crawly things. His muscles moved independently of one another: the arms sweeping up as though jerked by puppet strings, stiffly held V-for-victory fingers thrust at us the way Nelson Rockefeller used to thrust his middle finger at reporters. His smile was the frozen, gleeful smile of the KGB or Gestapo torturer, about to turn up the current. His eyes were the black holes in a mossy Transylvanian graveyard where bats with furry wings cavorted among gorgons, Gothic crosses, and tombstones. His mouth was another, larger black hole, a mass grave tended by a serpentine tongue that spewed lies and (we later discovered) scabrous four-letter racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic words.
That’s how I felt and that’s how my generation felt. We loathed the man. We had seen him on television using his wife’s “Republican cloth coat” to get himself off a hook we were certain he deserved to hang on. This was a man who was even willing to use his dog, Checkers, to elicit our sympathy. (Visually, Bill Clinton would use Buddy the same way.) This was a man willing to persecute Alger Hiss to further his own career. We thought him an empty, ambitious careerist. He had no heart. He was the personification of the word phony to a generation that had grown up believing itself armed with Holden Caulfield’s shit detector.
When JFK beat him, we were . . . in rapture. We were rid of him, free finally of what seemed to have been a childhood disease, a dark-shadowed presence who was a daily depression. And JFK was ours, even though we weren’t of voting age yet, a president with a sense of humor and a real, unstaged laugh, who talked about compassion and the rights of our fellowman, of loving one another, regardless of skin color. As Hubert Humphrey said, JFK “brought form to our amorphous yearnings.”
JFK offered us hope for an America without dark shadows and night creatures prowling the mossy graveyards. The Night Creature, meanwhile, was beaten in California even for governor, a loser in his own state. He said, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Yes, rapture! Nixon was in that hole in the graveyard himself now, politically dead and buried, and we busied ourselves trying to help build the golden place called Camelot.
And then, in one furious apocalyptic moment . . . six gray horses, followed by the traditional riderless black horse. The bats and demons and gorgons from the graveyard were back, and they took JFK from us. After a few years—LBJ and that surreal mink-trimmed ten-gallon Stetson—Nixon crawled out of his political grave. Two other bodies later (Martin and Bobby), Richard Nixon, the Night Creature, was president of the United States. (He beat Humphrey in 1968 with one of the earliest uses of negative television advertising: a shot of Hubert laughing over images of cities burning, protesters being beaten, and stacks of dead GIs in Vietnam.) We were of voting age by then. We were old enough to hurl bricks that broke windows. We were cynical enough to answer his four-letter expletives with our own shrill ones.
Everything he stood for was symbolized to us by the goofy uniforms he designed for the White House police. Double-breasted tunics trimmed with gold braid and gold buttons, worn with helmets that looked like they belonged in the Ukrainian army. Some of us even stopped watching “Laugh-In” when they allowed him on the show. “Sock it to me!” he said, and the sound of exploding TV sets was figuratively heard across the land. Considering the rage we felt toward him, Nixon was lucky some acid-burned, mind-blown one of us didn’t frag him—DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS YOU our signs said. Dick Tuck, our merry political prankster, even hired two obviously pregnant women to march outside the Republican National Convention with a sign that said NIXON’S THE ONE!
We chortled knowingly when novelist Robert Coover revealed the real Nixon to us in The Public Burning. Coover’s Richard Nixon said, “I’m a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don’t show it off. I don’t even like to eat in public . . . .” And we absolutely rejoiced when Coover revealed the scar that made Nixon tick: a brutal anal rape committed by Uncle Sam himself. Nixon: “ ‘No!’ I cried. ‘Stop!’ but too late, he was already lodged deep in my rectum and ramming it in deeper—oh Christ! It felt like he was trying to shove the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass! . . . I lay there on the spare-room floor, gurgling, sweating, half-senseless, bruised and swollen and stuffed like sausage, thinking: ‘Well, I’ve been through the fire . . . . I recalled Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile. I should have guessed.’ ”
No dummy, Nixon knew how fervently we loathed him. He was our enemy and we were his. He described us as “bums” and “derelicts.”
We defined ourselves to be everything that Richard Nixon wasn’t. We were sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We believed in the buttons that adorned our scrawny bodies: TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT; DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY; BURN POT, NOT PEOPLE; MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR; STAMP OUT PAY TOILETS; IF IT MOVES, FONDLE IT.
We traded in our neckties for beads and ankhs. Peace symbols dangled around our necks. We got rid of our blue button-down shirts and wore embroidered denim or denim jackets with an upside-down American flag on our backs. We wore fringed Wild Bill Hickok coats and navy-surplus pea coats. (Bill Clinton had a long one when he came back from Oxford.) Those of us who worked in offices where beards and mustaches were banned bought fake ones for the weekend. We wore no underwear, and the funkier our bell-bottoms looked, the hipper they were, especially if there was a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in the back pocket. We never read the book—it was in sync with yelling, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”—but we kept it in our pockets the way we kept a rubber in our wallets. We were too zonked to read much of anything, although the more scholarly were memorizing passages from Tolkien and Siddhartha and Kahlil Gibran.
We swore by our genitals the way Nixon swore by his “old Quaker mother.” We were our own vast Bay of Pigs—roiled up and flooding the Berlin walls of Puritan resistance. The Stones’ Sticky Fingers cover featured a real zipper with a bulge to the left of it. John and Yoko were naked on the cover of Two Virgins. Yoko made a movie called Bottoms, starring 365 naked ones. Andy Warhol painted with his willard, as did Tom of Finland, who said, “If my cock did not stand up when I was working on a drawing, I could not make the drawing work.” The Plaster Caste
rs turned willards into art objects. One member of the troupe would get a famous rock willard interested; then another caster would quickly dunk the interested willard into a malt shaker of caulk. The plaster willards (Hendrix’s reputed to be the largest) were exhibited as holy relics at underground art shows.
We wore jeans so tight, they cut the circulation off, and we stuffed Kleenex or Kotex or a beanbag down there. Eldridge Cleaver, former minister of information for the Black Panthers, commercialized that idea by manufacturing “Cleavers”—pants with codpieces. (The Panthers, in love with guns, were always willard-focused.) We celebrated the Age of Aquarius by attending be-ins where, within minutes or hours, we usually were in, though we often didn’t know each other’s names. We put our sexual show on the road in comfy Volkswagen campers, which freed us from backseat immobility and leg cramps. We discovered water beds and Slip’N Slide, a twenty-five-foot plastic sheet that we’d wet down and use for intertwined skinny-dipping on summer nights in the backyard. We found more intimate uses for our new electric toothbrushes. We yelled “No!” in chorus when, on-screen, Dustin Hoffman said to Mrs. Robinson, “Do you think we could say a few words to each other first this time?” The Noxzema commercial was our ad—“Take it off! Take it all off!”—the way “Lay Lady Lay” was our song. We made Burt Reynolds a star after he showed a little pubic hair in Cosmopolitan.
The emblematic sixties moment may not have been Woodstock or the Summer of Love, but a scene at a Village club in New York. Hendrix was up onstage, playing his guitar. Morrison and his date, Janis, were in the audience. Jimi was stoned and Morrison and Janis were stoned and drunk. Morrison got up, went to the front of the stage, unzipped Jimi, and put his willard into his mouth. Jimi kept playing. Joplin ran to the stage, tackled Morrison, and the two of them swung at each other. Jimi zipped himself up and kept playing.
When we weren’t flaunting our genitals, we were getting high. Marijuana was as important to us as catsup and cottage cheese were to Nixon. We fired up our doobies with Smile lighters. When we ran out of grass, we smoked dried banana-skin scrapings, oregano, corn husk, and pine needles. Marijuana scented America’s air. Even some of the older folks got into the zeitgeist of it. The socialites Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale hosted a party—their guests: the Jack Bennys, the George Burnses, and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. According to his former executive assistant, Alfred, always a live wire, lit up a joint and passed it around. The governor and Nancy and Jack and George all took a couple of hits, inhaled, and then said, not surprisingly, that they didn’t feel a thing. (The same Ronald Reagan who at the same time was ordering his National Guardsmen to use the same skin-stinging powder against us in the streets that was being used against the Vietcong in the jungle.) It seemed like everybody was getting high somehow: Even the astronauts smuggled minibottles of brandy onto Apollo.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll defined our politics, as well. John Lennon’s words were a manifesto: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.” We burned bras, draft cards, and American flags, burning bridges, we naïvely thought, to the values our parents had taught us. We attended teach-ins, wearing our most serious faces and our tightest jeans, looking for someone to share a joint with and in-depth exploration of our bodies and the body count so gratifyingly far away in Vietnam. Moratorium Day was our callow response to Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. One hundred thousand of us, longhaired and unwashed, streaming past the White House, candles in our hands, as Nixon Peeping-Tommed us from behind his tacky gold-flecked White House drapes. In our juvenile, messianic arrogance, we didn’t care that while we were having fun protesting, getting high, getting laid, our black and farm boy brothers in Vietnam were writing things on their helmets like WE ARE THE UNWILLING, LED BY THE UNQUALIFIED, DOING THE UNNECESSARY, FOR THE UNGRATEFUL.
We were feverishly proud of being part of a political movement—The Movement—but even our politics were intertwined with sex. “The sexual and the political are one,” Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weatherpeople said, and her words came from the horse’s mouth. Because while the media vamped Jane Fonda as the sex symbol of our revolution, we knew that was crap. Jane was a movie star, a movement public-relations commando. Our pinup girl, our real babe in bandoliers, was Bernardine, leading her troops in what she called “Wargasms.” As another Weatherpeople guerrilla, Mark Rudd, said, “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun; power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”
She was twenty-six years old, tall, long-legged, tanned, brown-eyed, voluptuous. She was pouty, in-your-face sensuous. All the men I knew in the sixties and early seventies dreamed of “getting it on” with Bernardine. She appeared on protest stages in front of tie-dyed seas wearing a brown minijumpsuit with thigh-high Florentine leather boots; barefoot in a tight miniskirt, her shirt open to her navel; in a purple skirt with a tight orange sweater with buttons that said CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN; in hip-hugging jeans and a sheer low-cut top, her hair dyed the color of Ho Chi Minh’s flag; in a black motorcycle helmet and tear-gas gloves, playing with a steel pipe the way Mick played with his mike. She staged formal Weatherpeople orgies we were all dying to be invited to. She was our clenched-fist, red-hot Fidelista, who took a breast out one day as a man was looking at it and said, “You like this tit? Take it.” Bernardine was our own sweet thing, our own pink shot, the sex bomb who called herself “a crazy motherfucker” and said she wanted to “scare the shit out of honky America.”
We were a counterculture, an America within Amerika, arrogant, self-righteous, even jingoistic about our values, heroes, and music. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” was our “Battle Hymn of the Republic”; “Sympathy for the Devil” our “Star-Spangled Banner”; Woodstock our D day; Altamont our Pearl Harbor; Dylan our Elvis; Tim Leary our Einstein; Che Guevara our Patrick Henry.
We did not have “our” Richard Nixon. It was a shared faith among us that our generation, committed to letting it all hang out, to the truth setting us free, would never produce a Richard Nixon, a president who would look us in the eye, jab his finger in our faces, and lie.
Yeah, there were a lot of us—a whole lot of us—and the Night Creature knew we were a lot of trouble and turned his worm-encrusted ghouls loose on us . . . Ulasciewicz and Segretti and Liddy and Hunt and Haldeman and Ehrlichman . . . and the cross-dressing, sanctimonious pedophile, J. Edgar Hoover. The Night Creature gave frenzied, polarizing speeches (written by Pat Buchanan and William Safire), whetting the living dead’s appetite for blood—our blood—shed by police batons and billy clubs and National Guardsmen, until they finally shot and killed four of us at Kent State. But it was all starting to come apart by then; Nixon had lived and been resurrected, thanks to his lies, and he was about to die (once again) as a result of them.
Hillary, God bless her, was in the front lines, working for the House Impeachment Committee, working endless hours, helping put together the case that would drive him from office. The Night Creature’s own tapes drove the stake through his heart. Not only did they confirm his role in the Watergate cover-up but they showed America that the Oval Office had become the Night Creature’s rat’s nest—a place of filth and dead fingernails and foul-smelling wetness. It was Barry Goldwater, in poetic justice, who pushed the stake the final inch into the Night Creature’s black heart by telling him he’d be impeached if he didn’t resign and by saying he was going to vote for impeachment himself. (By the nineties, Barry was firmly on our side, saying, “Jesse Helms is off his rocker,” referring to Ronald Reagan as “just an actor,” and warning, “The Religious Right scares the hell out of me.” In 1994, he was named “Civil Libertarian of the Year” by the Arizona ACLU for his support of the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians and his commitment to the reproductive rights of women.)
Driving a
stake through the Night Creature’s heart was such sweet revenge! They had taken JFK from us and then Martin and Bobby . . . and the Night Creature had come out of his darkness and now we’d cast him back there where he belonged. Thanks to the efforts of Hillary and Barry and millions of us who’d united to throw this “four-square liar” out of office. At the moment of his resignation, I had sat in an office at Rolling Stone, with the entire staff there, undrugged for once, watching the Night Creature on TV flipping us his final V-for-victory fingers. Across from me sat a young intern who’d bought champagne for everyone. Bobby Shriver was JFK’s nephew, and as he watched the set, he had tears streaming down his face. I started to cry, too, as I watched Bobby.
I saw Richard Nixon in 1993, months before he died, in the dining room of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. He was dining with friends at a table not far from us and I watched him as he ate.
I had met him once before, as a young reporter covering a campaign stop he was making in the lily white Cleveland suburb of Fairview Park in 1968. He was on remote control that day at a press conference, his eyes dead, until I asked him if he knew that Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers had just won his thirtieth game. Nixon came briefly alive, asking about the score and the number of McLain’s strikeouts, the frozen smile replaced by something faintly human. “I’m a big Denny McLain fan,” he said. Neither of us knew that day in 1968 that McLain would wind up in jail for pimping and gambling and that Nixon would escape jail only thanks to Gerry Ford’s kamikaze pardon. The day his pardon was announced, I was waiting for Evel Knievel, yet another goon, to rocket across the Snake River in Idaho . . . and when word of the Night Creature’s pardon worked its way through the unwashed, longhaired, outlaw crowd, a bit of the old ultraviolence infected the boys: Windows were broken, bonfires lit, teeth smashed out, and women stripped and held high at the edge of the abyss-fronting cliffs so they could watch Knievel fly. Evil was in the air the day Evel crashed.
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