Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (47 page)

I have just finished making out a report addressed to somebody named Charles R. Roach, a claims examiner at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Headquarters of Avis Rent a Car in Arlington, Virginia. It has to do with a minor accident that occurred on Connecticut Avenue, in downtown Washington, shortly after George [McGovern] and his wife had bade farewell to the last staggering guests at the party he’d given on a hot summer night in July commemorating the first anniversary of his seizure of the presidential nomination in Miami.

The atmosphere of the party itself had been amazingly loose and pleasant. Two hundred people had been invited—twice that many showed up—to celebrate what history will record, with at least a few asterisks, as one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns in American history. Midway in the evening I was standing on the patio, talking to Carl Wagner and Holly Mankiewicz, when the phone began ringing and whoever answered it came back with the news that President Nixon had just been admitted to the nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital with what was officially announced as “viral pneumonia.”

Nobody believed it, of course. High-powered journalists like Jack Germond and Jules Witcover immediately seized the phones to find out what was
really
wrong with Nixon . . . but the rest of us, no longer locked into deadlines or the fast-rising terrors of some tomorrow’s Election Day, merely shrugged at the news and kept on drinking. There was nothing unusual, we felt, about Nixon caving in to some real or even psychosomatic illness. And if the truth was worse than the news . . . well . . . there would be nothing unusual about that either.

One of the smallest and noisiest contingents among the two hundred invited guests was the handful of big-time journalists who’d spent most of last autumn dogging McGovern’s every lame footstep along the campaign trail, while two third-string police reporters from the
Washington Post
were quietly putting together the biggest political story of 1972 or any other year—a story that had already exploded, by the time of McGovern’s “anniversary” party, into a scandal that has even now burned a big hole for itself in every American history textbook written from 1973 till infinity.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Watergate story has been the way the press has handled it: what began in the summer of 1972 as one of the great media-bungles of the century has developed, by now, into what is probably the most thoroughly and most professionally covered story in the history of American journalism.

When I boomed into Washington last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs desk once again, I expected—or in retrospect, I
think
I expected—to find the high-rolling
news-meisters
of the capital press corps jabbering blindly among themselves, once again, in some stylish sector of reality far-removed from the Main Nerve of “the story” . . . like climbing aboard Ed Muskie’s Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding every media star in the nation sipping Bloody Marys and convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with “the candidate” . . . or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn on Election Day with a half-dozen of the heaviest press wizards and coming away convinced that McGovern couldn’t possibly lose by more than 10 points.

My experience on the campaign trail in 1972 had not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-à-vis the wisdom of the national press corps . . . so I was seriously jolted when I arrived in Washington to find that the bastards had this Watergate story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity—from “Watergate” and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon’s lies about the financing for his San Clemente beach-mansion, and even the long-dormant “Agnew Scandal.”

There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo Journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the
Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The
Washington Post
has a half dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The
New York Times
, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hot rods from its bureaus all over the country to overcome the
Post
’s early lead. Both
Time
’s and
Newsweek
’s Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks, and leads in this story that was unraveling so fast that
nobody
could stay on top of it . . . And especially not the three (or four) TV networks, whose whole machinery was geared to visual/action stories rather than skillfully planted tips from faceless lawyers who called on private phones and then refused to say anything at all in front of the cameras.

The only standard-brand visual “action” in the Watergate story had happened at the very beginning—when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes cops with drawn guns—and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.

The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities—particularly at a time when almost every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their “first teams” out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments—Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et al.—on September 15. And by Election Day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news.

It was rarely if ever mentioned among the press people following the campaign. A burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters seemed relatively minor compared to the action in Miami. It was a “local” (Washington) story, and the “local staff” was handling it . . . but I
had
no local staff, so I made the obvious choice.

Except on two occasions, and the first of these still haunts me. On the night of June 17, I spent most of the evening in the Watergate Hotel:
from about eight o’clock until ten I was swimming laps in the indoor pool, and from ten thirty until a bit after one I was drinking tequila in the Watergate bar with Tom Quinn, a sports columnist for the now-defunct
Washington Daily News
.

Meanwhile, upstairs in room 214, Hunt and Liddy were already monitoring the break-in, by walkie-talkie, with ex-FBI agent Alfred Baldwin in his well-equipped spy-nest across Virginia Avenue in room 419 of the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. Jim McCord had already taped the locks on two doors just underneath the bar in the Watergate garage, and it was probably just about the time that Quinn and I called for our last round of tequila that McCord and his team of Cubans moved into action—and got busted less than an hour later.

All this was happening less than one hundred yards from where we were sitting in the bar, sucking limes and salt with our Sauza Gold and muttering darkly about the fate of Duane Thomas and the pigs who run the National Football League.

Neither Bob Woodward nor Carl Bernstein from the
Post
were invited to McGovern’s party that night—which was fitting, because the guest list was limited to those who had lived through the day-to-day nightmare of the ’72 campaign . . . People like Frank Mankiewicz, Miles Rubin, Rick Stearns, Gary Hart, and even
Newsweek
correspondent Dick Stout, whose final dispatch on the doomed McGovern campaign very nearly got him thrown out of the Dakota Queen II at thirty thousand feet over Lincoln, Nebraska, on the day before the election.

This was the crowd that had gathered that night in July to celebrate his last victory before the Great Disaster—the slide that began with Eagleton and ended, incredibly, with “Watergate.” The events of the past six months had so badly jangled the nerves of the invited guests—the staffers and journalists who had been with McGovern from New Hampshire all the way to Sioux Falls on Election Day—that nobody really wanted to go to the party, for fear that it might be a funeral and a serious bummer.

By the end of the evening, when the two dozen bitter-enders had forced McGovern to break out his own private stock—ignoring the departure of the caterers and the dousing of the patio lights—the bulk of
the conversation was focused on which one or ones of the Secret Service men assigned to protect McGovern had been reporting daily to Jeb Magruder at CREEP (the Committee for the Re-election of the President), and which one of the ten or twelve journalists with access to the innards of George’s strategy had been on CREEP’s payroll at $1,500 a month. This journalist—still publicly unknown and un-denounced—was referred to in White House memos as “Chapman’s Friend,” a mysterious designation that puzzled the whole Washington press corps until one of the president’s beleaguered ex-aides explained privately that “Chapman” is a name Nixon used, from time to time, in the good old days when he was able to travel around obscure Holiday Inns under phony names . . .

R. Chapman, Pepsi-Cola salesman, New York City . . . with a handful of friends carrying walkie-talkies and wearing white leather shoulder-holsters . . . But what the hell? Just send a case of Pepsi up to the suite, my man, and don’t ask questions; your reward will come later—call the White House and ask for Howard Hunt or Jim McCord; they’ll take care of you.

Right. Or maybe Tex Colson, who is slowly and surely emerging as the guiding light behind Nixon’s whole arsenal of illegal, immoral, and unethical “black advance” or “dirty tricks” department. It was Colson who once remarked that he would “walk over his grandmother for Richard Nixon” . . . and it was Colson who hired head “plumber” Egil “Bud” Krogh, who in 1969 told Daniel X. Friedman, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago: “Anyone who opposes us, we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us, we’ll destroy.”

Colson, the only one of Nixon’s top command to so far evade Watergate’s legal noose, is the man who once told White House cop Jack Caulfield to put a firebomb in the offices of the staid/liberal Brookings Institution, in order to either steal or destroy some documents he considered incriminating. Colson now says he was “only joking” about the firebomb plan, but Caulfield took it so seriously that he went to then White House counsel John Dean and said he refused to work with Colson any longer, because he was “crazy.”

Crazy? Tex Colson?

Never in hell. “He’s the meanest man in American politics,” says Nixon’s speechwriter Pat Buchanan, smiling lazily over the edge of a beer can beside the pool outside his Watergate apartment. Buchanan is one of the few people in the Nixon administration with a sense of humor. He is so far to the right that he dismisses Tex Colson as a “Massachusetts liberal.” But for some reason, Buchanan is also one of the few people—perhaps the only one—on Nixon’s staff who has friends at the other end of the political spectrum. At one point during the campaign I mentioned Buchanan at McGovern headquarters, for some reason, and Rick Stearns, perhaps the most hardline left-bent ideologue on McGovern’s staff, sort of chuckled and said, “Oh yeah, we’re pretty good friends. Pat’s the only one of those bastards over there with any principles.” When I mentioned this to another McGovern staffer, he snapped: “Yeah, maybe so . . . like Joseph Goebbels had principles.”