Crooked (21 page)

Do I maintain my innocence? It’s complicated. It’s a difficult word to use in the face of what I’ve seen and done, and there are many ways you can be innocent. Of wrongdoing, of bad intention, or of facts about the world.

But whatever happened later, I’ll argue before any court there has ever been or will be that I hoped I would be a good president. Even I, even Nixon, daydreamed then about what I’d do now that I’d made it. Eisenhower gave us the golden age of America. Kennedy brought us the New Frontier, a bold era of science and social reform. And then Johnson’s Great Society reforms of civil rights and Medicare, which was a messy and expensive and angry business, but it mattered, anyone could see that. What would they call the great wave of Nixonian reforms?

There’s a diary entry left over from late on my first night as president that reads (I had time for only a few fragmentary thoughts):

Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous…Zest for the job (not lonely but awesome). Goals—reorganized govt. Idea magnet…

Mrs. RN—glamour, dignity…

Open Channels, for Dissent…Progress—Participation, Trustworthy, Open-minded.

Most powerful office. Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone. Need to be good to do good…the nation must be better in spirit at the end of term. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration.

That’s what went into the presidential archives anyway. There were a few extra pages, and I remember writing,
I will discover the secret mystical force locked within the
presidential residence and/or West Wing thereof.
I will become Eisenhower. Oh God and Jesus, what am I going to do now?
And there were several pages after that, the kind of thing that is, I suppose, why the Oval Office has a working fireplace.

For anyone interested
in the policy decisions of my first hundred days, or thousand, or the whole two thousand–odd mornings, afternoons, evenings, and regrettable midnights, I refer you to any of the estimable scholarly works on the subject or the public record. It may not surprise you to learn that with the benefit of hindsight, I would do some of it a bit differently.

We were a Republican administration but the Democrats held both the House and Senate against me. I’d gotten a bare plurality, 43.4 percent of votes cast, less than a percentage point over the opposition. I’d lost Texas and New York, and it was a good thing I was born in California. These electoral numbers didn’t look like a mandate; in fact, it was on the border of historical accident.

I’d campaigned on the slogan “Bring Us Together” and it already seemed like a bad joke. I checked the Gallup opinion polls almost daily, and on the day I took office there was a substantial bounce: Approve: 59 percent; Disapprove: 5 percent; No Opinion: 35 percent. Then again, people threw beer cans at my inaugural parade. They shrieked and jeered at me and burned pictures of me. The moment I swore that oath I became, basically, a powerless minor god; I was the grinning, capering effigy of everything that was wrong with their lives. I’d be burned at the stake, caricatured, my name uttered as a curse word. They would wear my face.

I sat down at the Wilson desk and, after some agonizing over the mot juste, wrote at the top of the page the heading
ENEMIES.
And then:

Communists.
In the years since I’d been out of office the Soviets had replaced Khrushchev with a new general secretary, Brezhnev, who had rolled tanks through Prague six months ago to crush dissent.

Since I’d left office they’d increased their nuclear stockpile tenfold, matched us in ICBMs, greatly outmatched us in conventional forces. In the occult war they’d left us far behind: hybridization, extradimensional capability, exobacterial-weapons payloads, and those were only the ones Henry knew about. We were fighting a proxy war in Southeast Asia and political battles in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Egypt, Libya, every region in the civilized world. The Soviets were digging in Antarctica.

Gregor.
Malevolent and uncontrollable; evidently he changed his face at will and had intervened in a dozen proxy wars that we knew of.

China.
A vast unknown. Communist, of course, but they had clashed with the Soviets. But then they were actively supplying the North Vietnamese.

Hippies.
Campus radicals, antiwar protesters, beatniks…who were these people? The young men were like exotic bearded foreigners to me. Even Henry had only theories, but he believed they possessed a supernatural potential unknown to us. Harmless children? A malign occultist fifth column for the Soviets? Or something else entirely, a powerful force with no known motive? Well, one known motive: hatred of me. Enemies.

Hollywood.
Everyone apart from John Wayne, evidently.

Musicians.
Beloved of hippies, q.v.

The Media.
The television news ran a continual apocalyptic montage of street violence and rampant inflation. The less said about the
New York Times,
the better.

The Intelligentsia.
Whoever they were. Academics? Poets? Unclear.

And then, after a long pause:

Pat.
I didn’t like to think about it. She did what she needed to in the election but we were nearly strangers. We slept apart, sat apart on the campaign airplane and bus. In private, we barely spoke. But she watched me, and there were even times when I’d found my belongings disturbed as if they’d been searched. Maybe not an enemy. But not a friend. Wife.

And I had no powers. No fucking powers. All that madness outside, and I had four small sections of the Constitution to work with; three, really, given that the fourth was nothing but thirty-one bleak words: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” No help there.

What did I have? Yes, the unauthorized domestic wiretapping, coordinated smear campaigns, secret funds, physical surveillance, obstruction of federal agencies, blood rituals, and flagrant abuses of power, which is to say, the aforementioned Crimes and Misdemeanors. But apart from these, what?

The one thing I could count on? The thing that really might Bring Us Together: In June of that year, on my watch, America was going to change the world, change man’s very relationship to the cosmos. It was going to make my presidency unique in all of history.

“Only a few short weeks ago, we shared the glory of man’s first sight of the world as God sees it, as a single sphere reflecting light in the darkness,” I’d announced in my inaugural address. In March there would be Apollo 9, the next in a planned series that was going to send us to the Earth’s satellite. Three men put the lunar module through its paces with exacting care, and everything went perfectly. We were going to the moon. I assumed that this part could not be screwed up too badly. We’d been working on it for nine years now.

Week by week, the scaffolding at Cape Canaveral mounted. By day it steamed in the Florida heat, and in the bloodred moonlight, it shimmered. Altar to the god of prophecy.

If you want to know what it’s like to become president, think about one of those horror movies, the kind where a happy family moves into an old house in which terrible crimes have been committed, only no one knows it. There’s the first part, where there are home movies of everyone smiling and waving at the camera. People run all over the house and find the rooms they want to stay in. They hug and talk about the future and about how everything’s going to be absolutely perfect. Maybe there was some trouble in the past, a secret affair or a failure at a job, but they’ve left that behind. A new beginning. What could possibly go wrong?

And then, for at least a little while, it really
is
perfect. The shadows of the past have been banished. The husband’s new job is working out great. Everybody’s happy. So far, so good.

Sooner or later, though, it always happens: the happy, perfect family starts to notice one or two little things, nothing terribly obvious but just a tiny bit odd.

I started a notebook where I kept track of anything out of the ordinary.

Like that the White House was supposed to be a residence but it looked and smelled like a hotel, and a lot of people had lived there but only for a short time. And it’s great, and you can call it your home, but you know the staff is always thinking ahead to the next guest, and you know that more than a few people have died here; you’re just not sure which rooms it happened in.

Like that the servants in the White House were oddly silent. I watched them move with exaggerated care, as if they were afraid of startling someone. They averted their eyes when I passed them. I wondered what Johnson had told them about me before he left.

Like that the door to the Lincoln Bedroom was stuck fast, and a tiny plaque informed me that it had been closed off for decades. People had been disappearing into the nondescript Victorian bedchamber and not returning ever since the late 1880s. The last man to enter did so in 1922, armed with camping gear, climbing equipment, two pistols, and a month’s worth of provisions. Several months later he was heard crying out for assistance in the hallway near a third-floor closet, but when the walls were broken through, there was no trace of him, and then the voice went silent forever.

Like that no one has ever heard of or mentioned a North Wing at the White House.

Anyway, as the movie goes on, the father in the family gets crazier and more obsessive and secretive. But by this time the family is unable to leave the house. Perhaps it’s financial, or perhaps it’s because leaving will do no good, the strangeness will follow them forever. No matter how compelling the reason to go, they cannot leave.

Late one night I stood on the lawn and watched the house while Secret Service agents eyed me curiously. The mansion sat there, mute and hunched and squat and elephantine in the way its facade distended toward me. An Irish architect named James Hoban had designed it. Washington ordered it built and supervised its construction but he never lived there.

Was the building itself dangerous? A day’s research told me that two presidents and three First Ladies had died there. A son and a daughter, two fathers, and a mother. A press secretary. The kingdom of Hawaii’s minister to the United States. Hardly enough for a mass grave, not over a span of a hundred seventy–odd years. No trail of bodies here. Ghost sightings were similarly paltry, given the possibilities. People saw Lincoln’s ghost slouching around the place, which felt a little too predictable to me, like a madman claiming to be Napoleon. People saw Lincoln everywhere. It was just a house.

Except for the color, naturally. I remembered Melville’s diatribe in
Moby-Dick
on the subject of the color white, how it was part of the peculiarly terrifying quality of the polar bear and the great white shark. I looked up his words: the
vague, nameless horror
of the white whale. He can’t get over it.
And yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

I understood his feelings. The house was all colors and no color at once, the blind blankness of the End of Days, the white rays of an annihilating sun. They’d built a throneless palace for a country without a king—what other color could they have chosen? I looked up to the sky above the house and to the other grayish-white shape dominating the scene.

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

I waited to
enter last, just the way Eisenhower used to do. It used to enrage me as a piece of petty one-upmanship but now it seemed the only possible way to play it if you were the president. The opinion polling for the week had just come in: Approve: 62 percent; Disapprove: 10 percent; No Opinion: 27 percent.
Stay on top
, a little voice told me.
Keep them down
.

I came in to find them seated around the broad circular table I had had installed in one of the wide empty chambers below the White House. There’s a surprising amount of space down there and after a while you get tired of being disappointed that there isn’t a cavernous secret room with a circular table and a giant map with blinking lights on it that you can go to for discussions like this, so I had one built. It’s sealed now, silent and cold and forgotten, the access stairway bricked up, my lost architectural legacy. Every president has left his own stamp on the White House. Rutherford B. Hayes installed the first telephone. Chester A. Arthur had Louis Tiffany redecorate the interior, his work now tragically lost. Truman gave us the Truman Balcony; Edith Wilson, the China Room. What I’m remembered for is giving the White House its second bowling alley. Not even the first one—Truman’s was first. So I fucked that up too.

They were mostly military types at this meeting. Senators with an interest in defense and intelligence. Melvin Laird, secretary of defense. William Rogers, secretary of state. Alexander Haig, a four-star general, advising on defense. Hard faces, gray suits, military insignia I’d never learned to read, racks of medals brought to the party. I tried to repress the instinctive helplessness and deference that a civilian feels toward senior people in the armed forces. They all knew, and I knew, that I’d gotten to be their commander in chief by winning a very dubiously certified popularity contest.

But there I was in the center seat. At the last minute, I’d added two cherry-red telephones that might plausibly have been linked to something interesting. In fact, they connected to a number that told the correct time.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I have asked you here so you can receive a briefing by our national security adviser, the distinguished Dr. Kissinger, formerly of Harvard University, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the RAND Corporation.” (Translation: The dubious-popularity-contest winner is here to introduce you to his even more dubious friend, who is going to tell you your business.)

Most of the military guys looked frankly bored to be sent back to school at nine a.m. on a Monday. Kissinger stood in the corner like a talent-show competitor waiting to be introduced. He was doing a weird thing with his fingers, touching all the tips together in order, and I wanted to tell him to cut it out.

“Now—now, just a minute,” someone said. Senator Kennedy. “Before we get started I’m going to need to talk about Operation Menu, and, yes, I know about it. We’ve got B Fifty-Twos over Cambodia now? Who authorized this?” There was a rising murmur behind him. He was not the only one here who wanted to talk about this. The bombings in Laos and Cambodia were intended to destroy ammunition supplies, although the fact that there were reports of Gregor’s presence in the area was not incidental.

“I want you to understand,” I went on, “that Dr. Kissinger has my full confidence in all such matters. Dr. Kissinger will inform you of a national security crisis of which you may not presently be aware. Dr. Kissinger? The floor is yours.”

Sensing a challenge, the military men shifted in their seats, square heads swiveling back and forth in confusion, harrumphing into their little microphones.

Henry could not have looked more pleased, there in the center of the room, evidently unaware that my administration’s credibility was resting on his wide flabby shoulders.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I wish to begin by reminding you that this meeting is classified top secret ultra, a new clearance level applying only to the people in this room. Also that there are lawyers at work developing new penalties that will be applied should you ever speak of what I am about to discuss. I trust we understand this? Good, then.”

“Mr. Kissinger, really,” one of the senators said.

“
Nein
—excuse me—I will ask you to please hold questions for the moment,” he said. His singsong accent seemed borrowed from a German burlesque show: hissed sibilants, misplaced emphases, whip-cracked
t
’s and
k
’s. With his voice and his slight stoop, he was like a figure from a fairy tale, a quaint little tinker passing from town to town, peddling his magical wares. The setting seemed to fill itself in behind him: rustic houses and churches leaning in over narrow streets, peaked roofs shadowing the town at all hours. Little Heinz Alfred Kissinger playing barefoot on the cobblestones, collecting firewood, learning Latin and Greek from Papa Kissinger’s modest library. One day, perhaps, discovering an old volume carelessly left out, beginning to read the forbidden words, the words to his horrible songs. And then comes National Socialism, and the war, and an American soldier—Eisenhower?—who sees Kissinger’s value, and then the long chain of deeds and ambition that brought him here. Was that how it happened?

“You are all familiar with the small trickle of anomalous intelligence that arrives from various fronts of our prolonged global rivalry. Fringe reports that may strike you as impossible or the product of battle fatigue. Accounts of anomalous biological samples. Friendly units destroyed or subverted en masse without explanation. Sickening and dying, perhaps? Wounds of unidentifiable source, without visible origin. Does this sound familiar? You have many of you been in the field yourselves. Seen things that cannot be perhaps explained away so easily.” Why was he smiling? No one could tell why he was smiling.

“You will accept it when I offer as plausible that just as the Manhattan Project was developed in secret, so were other equally destructive avenues of research. You all know the Third Reich had its paranormal inquiries, yes? In our country these took place under the rubric of Blue Ox, officially disavowed and forbidden under classified UN agreement of 1946. Yes? No? You do not.”

“Mr. Kissinger—” Kennedy again.

“Doctor.”

“Doctor, then. I’ve gotta ask you what this little talk is about. How much of this do you really expect us to believe?”

“I am not speaking on matters of faith, Senator Kennedy. I am here to demonstrate to you that recent shifts in the Soviet high command reflect a heightened commitment to this strategic modality, the deployment of weaponized supernatural forces.

“Our principal opponent, the Soviet Union, has many forms of xeno-, exo-, and cryptobiological ordnance to draw upon. Some that emanate from the distant Precambrian past, and some from the far-distant apocalyptic future. Those that lie sleeping, and those that do not sleep and are ever vigilant.”

“Mr. Kissinger!” It was Alexander Haig. “You are asking a great deal of us right now. Most of us are military men. Many of us are scientifically trained.”

“It is Dr. Kissinger, please. And I understand, and do bear with me as I come to the point.”

“Please do.”

“If I may? We display the film now. It is ready, yes?” He nodded, and a waiting projector I hadn’t noticed was pushed to the center of the room and threw a small square of color on the far wall.

The image was of a small room with a window looking into another room or cell. An observation area, I realized, with one-way glass through which one could see a small test chamber. On our side of the glass, two young technicians in white shirts and military haircuts looked into the other room.

The test chamber had two occupants. The young man had a cocky, nervous, eager manner, like a star athlete fresh from high school waiting to show the college coaches what he could do, knowing they’d never seen anything like him. He had a couple of electrodes taped to him, wires leading to a small box on a table. An older man stood over him. It was Colonel McAllister.

“You know what we’re asking you to do, son?” the colonel said.

“Yes, sir.” He nodded crisply.

“You know what Blue Ox is.”

“They told me it’s some kind of weapons research program, sir. Like the A-bomb? I’ve got a master’s in aeronautical engineering; they said that was a plus.”

“Good man. I can see you’ll do fine. First thing we do is a little test of your eyesight, okay?”

“Fine, sir, but it’s been tested, on day one. I’m twenty-ten; they say you can’t do any better.”

“That’s all right, son, that’s real good, but we’ve got to follow procedure. So you’re going to read what’s on this paper here.” He opened a folder liberally stamped with classified warnings and brought out a single typewritten sheet of paper.

“Kinda funny writing. Is that…do I say it ‘
Yogso
—’”

“Well, Jesus, son, not yet!” The colonel cut him off. For some reason the two techs watching were half out of their seats, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying; there was no microphone. “Wait till I give the goddamn word.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Just count ten seconds after I shut the door and then start. I’m going to be in the next room, right next door, okay?” the colonel said, backing away. “We’ll be watching over the closed circuit. We’ll see the whole thing.”

None of the text was in English. Standing behind the one-way glass, McAllister and the techs watched the young man read it, slowly and clearly, stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables. In a couple of places the audio cut right out, although his mouth kept moving. The two technicians flinched in unison at a few key passages. During one of those, the glass window rippled a little, as if bowed inward by a change in air pressure. After two minutes the boy finished and lifted his head expectantly.

“That all right?” he said, not sure where to look. The colonel pressed the intercom button.

“That’s just fine, son. Real good. We’ll be in in a second.”

Here there was a rushing sound like a jet engine revving, cutting in and out. The recruit didn’t seem to hear, just waited, staring forward curiously. I couldn’t see the techs anymore, or the colonel. The camera lurched as someone nudged the tripod.

“Sir—” the recruit said just as an alarm klaxon began far off in the distance. “Sir, what’s happening?”

There was a loud bang as something heavy hit the metal door of the test room.

“Sir?” The bang came again. “You locked out, sir?”

The recruit reached for the doorknob but the film skipped, and then, without warning, it was over, leaving only an afterimage of its final frame, the door standing open and what was visible on the other side. In the darkness, Henry spoke.

“What you have seen here is film recovered from the Pawtuxet Farm facility several years after it ceased to become operational.”

Henry paused, perhaps waiting for a question that didn’t come.

“The Soviet program, which has been in place much longer, has met with considerably more success. We have limited information about their progress but I would like to share with you a few slides. As you know, on March fifteenth, there was an altercation across the Sino-Soviet border at the Ussuri River—”

“We know.” Haig spoke now, interrupting, shaking off the mood. “We all have access to the relevant briefing materials. The matter’s closed.”

“There are a few items I did not think should be shared but which I now present to you,” Henry said, grinning as if withholding intelligence from the Defense Department were a cute idea of his. “These photographs came off one of the KH satellites.”

There was a pause while a slide projector was set up. He showed us a view of a forested hillside with a road cutting across it, a line of vehicles ascending, and then the same scene apparently following a mudslide or fire.

“The effect recorded happened inside a four-hour window during the conflict. The Chinese attributed it to a chemical agent but I have other theories based on firsthand accounts of the event.”

The blurry image of a horned humanoid figure against the tree line, the scale disturbingly ambiguous.

“But the important thing is the Soviet division present at the scene, the Thirty-First Army Engineers.”

Another slide: a group of men and women standing at attention outdoors while a line of enormous military trucks passed behind them. A May Day parade. The people were notable only for being older and thinner than the typical Soviet paragons on display, more like the graduating class of a doctoral program in medieval history. They stared straight ahead, perhaps twenty of them, assembled behind their unit’s banner, which showed a circle with a wobbly five-sided polygon within.

“What is that—is that a constellation?” somebody asked.

“That is correct,” Henry said. “A configuration of stars, but a curious one indeed. If you were to wait another million years you might see it in the skies over the Southern Hemisphere. But I do not think you would enjoy the ambience.” He chuckled, evidently at a private joke.

One final image. A bearded Caucasian man, shirtless and smiling, posed by a half-track next to two smaller Asian men flourishing AK-47s. The half-track was painted with the same unit insignia. The man was unmistakably the one who’d been shot five times in a shabby little office in Manhattan twenty-one years ago.

“Taken in Laos in the past year. Elements of the Thirty-First are deployed in the Southeast Asian theater, embedded with NVA divisions. I do not—quite—understand their capabilities. They might summon inhuman intelligences, or cooperate with them in some fashion, or perhaps they have been hybridized in that regard.”

“Why the hell would the Russians do a thing like that?” Haig said. “Even supposing it’s real. This is thin, Dr. Kissinger, awful thin.”

“This Cold War involves far more horrific ideas than the nuclear bomb and radioactive fallout, General. It is only what we ourselves wished to do. But without Eisenhower to direct them, our domestic programs failed or destroyed themselves, yes? That is what took place.”