Chapter Forty-Five
November 17, 1973
What happened in those few seconds birthed the modern idea of the inopportune sound bite, the career-defining gaffe. Millions have watched it, probably hundreds of millions. In a few seconds I made the presidency a joke in a way that the obese Taft or the pathetically corrupt Harding never could.
It was already far from my best day. I would never have gone back to Disney World if I had had a choice. The setting lacked dignity and there has always been something uncanny about the location, one of the nation’s primordial swamps. But the lawyers advised it and Henry was getting desperate. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t gain any ground. So we decided I would do a question-and-answer session at the annual convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, held at the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World.
I’d flown in the night before and had stayed up till dawn looking out at the lagoons, at the strange artificial landscape of the Magic Kingdom, and remembering Agent Reindeer. I arrived at the convention and was shown to the front of a long, low, claustrophobic ballroom, and immediately they clustered around, firing questions. The talk veered from Watergate to the Pentagon Papers to the tapes to illegal surveillance, and I struggled to focus. Watching myself on videotape, I see I was obviously tired, angry, possibly a little drunk. I leaned into the lectern as if into a high wind. I was needled, harangued, cross-examined. I was punch-drunk when it began, that car wreck of a paragraph.
“Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the television audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service—I have earned every cent.” Here it was, the warm-up to the crash, to the fishtail and skid. I still had a decent rhetorical rhythm going but I was stalling; time was slowing down inside me.
“And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice.” Why did I even say this? On the videotape there’s a little head shake for emphasis at the end, as if I’m daring somebody to contradict me, to ask me if I had any idea what constituted justice at that point. As if I’m rhetorically steering straight for the guardrail and the cliff beyond.
“And,” I found myself saying, “I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination.” I welcomed it? This was the fuck-you, and as I said it, I threw up my hands to prove it, essentially saying, Shout me down, if you will, given that I’m virtually staking my career on a doomed lawsuit over the privacy of the executive branch. I said it because I could see what was coming, a lifetime of this hedging and prevaricating, a fighting retreat unto death.
And I said it because I was waiting for the questions that weren’t coming, that no one knew to ask. About Alger Hiss’s true secrets, about Eisenhower’s lost plan. About the terrible truths of our reality, the shattering gulfs of time haunted by alien intelligences. And then the wave broke, and I lost control, and I said the rest of it.
“Because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.” People have accused me of lacking political instincts, of having a tin ear, but I knew at once what I’d done. I could already see the bullies of the press corps light up, the corners of their mouths twitching. They had the purest schoolyard sadists’ instincts for the inadvertent and the off-script, the screwup, but whether or not I was a crook was the question I would be asking for the rest of my life. I said it and then I gave the answer. You’ll see me say it on the video, bitter and resolute, then step back and look at their faces and wait for the laughter. Watch me. Knowing I’d crafted the perfect cover-up at last, the ruse that ensured I’d never be believed, I flung it straight in their teeth and fooled them all.
I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I didn’t even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn’t allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn’t guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division.
I’d met Walt himself in 1954. Eisenhower had called me into his office and introduced me to a gentle, slightly stooped man with a wispy mustache and hair combed straight back. “Meet Agent Reindeer,” he’d said. Reindeer had a weak chin but extraordinary heart-warming eyes, liquid and intelligent and sly. He shook my hand earnestly and said, “How do you do?” Of course I knew him at once.
“Reindeer’s a great technician,” Eisenhower said, “the man in charge of Negate Crystal. He’s building the greatest military fortification the world has ever seen.”
“You’re from California, Mr. Vice President?” Reindeer said. He had a genteel manner from somewhere that I couldn’t place, and the magnetism of a film star. I wondered how he’d been recruited.
“That’s right. Yorba Linda.”
He froze a moment, then looked at me carefully.
“How did you like it?” he asked seriously. Like an examining physician.
“I had my childhood there. Good folk,” I said. It was a presidential answer, the kind I’d been trained to make, impenetrably bland and folksy.
“You didn’t notice any manifestations?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. Manifestations?”
“The soil there…never mind‚ never mind,” he said, but he took a noticeable step back.
“Reindeer’s been active in your area for quite some time. You’ll go out and see the facility when it’s operational,” said Eisenhower. “I can’t explain how it all works. Geomancy is a very technical field. It’s principally a defensive installation, although there may be offensive capabilities down the road.”
I sat through a long briefing then, none of which I understood.
On Reindeer’s way out, I stopped him.
“You do mean the magic…of the imagination, right?” I said. “The look in a child’s eyes and that sort of thing?”
“Oh, no, none of that nonsense,” he said. He glanced down shyly. “I’m a sorcerer, Mr. Nixon. Come see me when my work is complete and you’ve come into your power, and I’ll show you. I’ll show you wonders.”
He’d said that. But then he’d died in 1966, years too early. No magic, no kingdom.
Still, a trip to Disney World couldn’t truly be the worst day of my presidency. Except insofar as, at this point, every day of my presidency seemed to be the worst day.
The management came out and greeted us and we were ushered in through the turnstile. Everything felt wrong. Even the optics were wrong. Shouldn’t we be paying? We looked like visiting royalty, not regular small-town Americans, and that was my brand. And Disney was a byword for the kind of trumped-up sentimental Americana believed in only by children. I’d be “the Disney president” in a hundred penny-ante op-ed pieces this week.
Julie was bored; Tricia was embarrassed. And I walked around feeling like shit, trudging from one cheap photo opportunity to the next, my grinning Nixon mask firmly in place. It was as if the whole operation were designed to make a real person, a grown-up person, feel bad about himself. This is how you’re supposed to feel, it seemed to say, good and wise and pure. See how great that is? How do you feel about yourself now? We’d been handed a few younger children, cousins or friends of cousins, I wasn’t quite sure, and they trotted along. They were locals. Gary was there too, eyes wide and evidently having the time of his life even as he hauled his payload through the amusement park. The straps of his satchel looked a little frayed to me, but I didn’t mention it.
I wanted to like it too; honestly, I did. I wanted at least to feel like I was standing there. Jesus, all I could think of was my approval rating. Haldeman had called; the Gallup poll had come out that morning. A 32 percent approval rating. I’d sat with the phone, feeling the silence stretch, as I tried to think of an answer to 32 percent.
“What—what do they actually ask when they call a person on the phone?” I asked. “What’s the question people are answering?”
“The exact words are ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the way Richard Nixon is handling his job as president?’ And so, that’s the choice.”
“So…disapprove. Not much room for ambiguity there,” I said.
“No.”
I had a list of the things people were unhappy about: Vietnam. The Russians. The Chinese. The protest movement. Now I’d come into my power, and what was the point? Maybe this was Eisenhower’s joke on me.
“What did Eisenhower have this month? End of fifth year?” I asked. I knew Haldeman would know.
“Look, sir, those were different times.”
“Just roughly.”
“He’d had a bump, so…fifty-eight. But Eisenhower was—it was a different metric for someone like him.”
“Someone like him? What does that mean? What about someone like me? How exactly are we different?”
“Never mind, sir.”
“Well, what do we do?”
There were a lot of possible answers to this. A speaking tour with the goal of connecting with ordinary Americans and their concerns and then crafting legislation to address them. Social welfare to the neediest. Sitting down with the warring camps in our divided nation and looking for places to compromise.
“Henry’s got the letter writers going. The Times, the Wall Street Journal. Letters in protest. A couple experts questioning their methodology.”
“Well…well, carry on, then.”
It was how we did things. Approve or disapprove? Honestly, it was hard to say.
“Where do you want to go first?” Pat said, watching me a little cat-like. I don’t think I ever told the truth to a single soul until I met Pat, and I’m not sure I ever regretted it more than I did then, stewing in self-loathing.
When you go into Disney World, it starts with a rustic town square, fire station and city hall and movie theater. A cozy little town of friendly faces and homespun wisdom where no one was ever spat on, where three-toed feet never lurked outside one’s living-room window only to vanish with the dawn. A place I’d never been.
We window-shopped a little as we strolled Main Street, U.S.A., displays of toys and country scenes, eerie Victorian dolls and bric-a-brac. Was this Eisenhower’s childhood? The street opened out into a wide circular plaza, and beyond it, dominating the skyline, was Cinderella’s Castle, absurd and delicate and beautiful.
They’d repurposed the look of a Bavarian folly, a nineteenth-century German monarch’s Romantic idea of an ancestral dwelling. What was it doing here? How was this American at all? Wasn’t the point of America to not have a king? To not have magic? I remembered what Eisenhower said about the place: “It is the engine of our phantasmal dominion. I believe that as long as it stands, America cannot fall.”
We soldiered on through the main plaza, crossed a drawbridge, and entered into Fantasyland, a crammed-in ghetto of folklore. King Arthur’s sword stuck in a rock, Peter Pan’s London town house, and Toad Hall. A wicked queen (monarch of what country?) peered out of a lit window. The crowd was densest here, the atmosphere somehow more crushing. One of the masked dwarfs took my hand in his (hers?) for a photo opportunity and I glanced around to find a Secret Service agent, for a terrifying moment certain he (or she) was dragging me off to either subterranean revelry or ritual punishment, I could scarcely decide which. In fact, we walked a few awkward paces until I pulled away, averting my human eyes from his (or her) platter-size ones. I wondered whether one could buy a drink anywhere on the grounds or how a president might even raise the subject. A king, I supposed, could just raise a jeweled goblet and beckon.
Inevitably, Liberty Square and the Hall of Presidents. I walked there like a prisoner going to trial. This had to be Agent Reindeer’s last shot at me, and a venomous bolt it was.
It was as if Disney knew my ancient nightmare and had rewritten it. A ponderous speech played but I didn’t hear the words; I was just looking at the thirty-six presidents staged like figures in Raphael’s School of Athens, Washington and Lincoln framed by the lesser lights. I set my face in a pious mask, trying to look like a man ennobled by an encounter with his great forebears. They looked at me and I looked at them, the brotherhood. All captured in their most essential aspects. The dying patrician FDR’s noble languor. Andrew Jackson’s foppish menace. James Madison’s hollow-eyed stare, pregnant with mortal knowledge. Taft’s vital glare. A lineage of grotesques and homicides, slavers and geniuses. A fistful of dead presidents. The silent majority.
A crowd of angular faces, scowls and beards and the occasional sly smirk. And they began to speak as the light shifted from one to the other, at first voicing only a chorus of patriotic platitudes.
I seemed to hear more, now in whispers, faster than I could catch. Washington mused, “I will not become a king. I will be…something stranger.” James Polk anxious and unpleasantly fervent: “There is a cancer at the heart of our Republic. Yea, a living god!”
Ulysses S. Grant keening, “Iä! Iä!,” the model staggering to its feet. McKinley stretched out a warning hand: “I fear what I have become. My blood will poison the ones who slay me!”
Teddy Roosevelt stuttered, “It’s s-so bright in here. My eyes—can nothing be done?”
Taft, rapt: “I have made a most extraordinary discovery.”
Eisenhower’s voice, heartbreakingly familiar: “There is one who will come after me.”
At last they fell silent; the lights dimmed and then rose again. No one else seemed disturbed. Had I fallen asleep?
It was getting dark. We were taken to see what was meant to be the showpiece of my visit, two rides that were new since the last time I’d been here. Was this, I wondered, to be the completion of Agent Reindeer’s work? Or were they going to keep building this thing forever? There was a hushed humid bayou, a summer evening. Lanterns glowed over the black water; an old man sat in a rocking chair. We got into a boat and bumped along down a sudden declivity and into a cavern and then rapidly passed a series of allegorical tableaux. Skeletons sprawled on a sandy beach, the outcome of a long-ago frenzied melee. A sunken rowboat. A skeleton posed in the midst of limitless wealth plundered from all the civilizations of the world, studying a map. Each one a memento mori. A dilapidated tavern room where two skeletons faced each other across a chessboard. Was this Cold War symbolism? “Dead men tell no tales,” a voice said. He’s not going to say anything? Then what was I doing here?
The ride went from dream to memory, it seemed to me—the old man of the bayou thinking of his past. Now we witnessed the terrifying sack of a Caribbean port. Pirates ransacked the city, tortured its inhabitants, auctioned the rest into sexual slavery. The situation worsened. Now the marauders set the city afire and got roaringly drunk. The other passengers looked charmed. The winding river of debauchery at last took us beneath the city into its dungeons, past prisoners certain to die. Even its supporting timbers were on fire, on the point of collapse, as drunken pirates, singing, laughingly shot at one another in a subterranean room full of gunpowder in a scene of blackest nihilism.
And the final pirate perched on top of a pile of gold, drunk as I wanted to be, clearly the double of the earlier skeleton. You will die, Mr. Nixon, just as I have, it seemed to say. Rich as I am, powerful as you are. This was entertainment? I stumbled out of the boat, mocked by piratical laughter. I couldn’t leave fast enough. I was going to die, I knew.
The children ran to and fro and I took Pat’s arm, pulled her down one of the narrow streets of the absurdly faux-sordid New Orleans French Quarter, into an empty little forecourt. We were alone, just for a moment.
“I have to talk to you,” I said.
“What is it?” She sounded more surprised and annoyed than interested.
“I know you don’t really love me anymore,” I said. What was the point in lying?
“What?” Pat said.
“I know it—I’ve known it for a while. Years. I know I’ve turned into—”
“Sir, excuse me,” said a voice. It was Gary. “We may h
ave a crisis.”
What followed took half an hour and $11.85 fed into a pay phone when the radiophone died, the money curried from Secret Service agents, journalists, and passersby. Ultimately it was, I think, sunspots and not a partial preemptive launch.
That took us on to the Haunted Mansion, which I had been avoiding. Surely if the ghost of Agent Reindeer was going to pull a fast one, that would be the venue. I sat with two tiny cousins who bounced up and down with anticipation. I waited glumly through a nonsensical introduction that included (could they be serious?) a staged suicide. I thought of the haunted mansion waiting for me at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Was Walt trying to tell me something?
The ride that followed was meant as, I guess, a sort of musical carnivalesque romp through an accursed plantation home, but the farther we got, the stranger it seemed. After a portentous front hallway, we lost all architectural coherence and seemed to be sliding into a terrifying vision of the afterlife. A ruined dining room; an attic cluttered with the debris of countless atrocities. And then I stared into a black abyss out of which spirits ascended in a never-ending throng. We had left the house now—were we outside? How was this possible? We trundled through a graveyard alight with singing dead men and women. This was Disney World? A clockwork abattoir? I felt I’d been returned to Pawtuxet Farm.
Pat caught my hand to slow me down.
“Try to have a little fun, Dick,” Pat said. “Act normal, maybe? We’re at Disney World. You’re the president.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About what I said earlier…”
“Come on, the fireworks are starting in a minute. We just have time to get to Main Street.”
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