Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (54 page)

Wonderful. Who can argue with a battle plan like that? And it is worth remembering that Richard Nixon spent many Sundays, during all those long and lonely autumns between 1962 and ’68, shuffling around on the field with Vince Lombardi at Green Bay Packer games.

Nixon still speaks of Lombardi as if he might suddenly appear, at any moment, from underneath one of the larger rocks on the White House lawn ... And Don Shula, despite his fairly obvious distaste for Nixon, has adopted the Lombardi style of football so effectively that the Dolphins are now one of the dullest teams to watch in the history of pro football.

But most of the others are just as dull—and if you need any proof, find a TV set some weekend that has pro football, basketball, and hockey games on three different channels. In terms of pure action and movement, the NFL is a molasses farm compared to the fine sense of crank that comes on when you get locked into watching a team like the Montreal Canadiens or the Boston Celtics.

One of the few sharp memories I still have from the soggy week in Houston is the sight of the trophy that would go to the team that won the Big Game on Sunday. It was appropriately named after Vince Lombardi: “The Lombardi Trophy,” a thick silver fist rising out of a block of black granite.

The trophy has all the style and grace of an ice floe in the North Atlantic. There is a silver plaque on one side of the base that says something about Vince Lombardi and the Super Bowl ... but the most interesting thing about it is a word that is carved, for no apparent or at least no esthetic reason, in the top of the black marble base:

“Discipline.”

That’s all it says, and all it needs to say.

The ’73 Dolphins, I suspect, will be to pro football what the ’64 Yankees were to baseball, the final flower of an era whose time has come and gone. The long and ham-fisted shadow of Vince Lombardi will be on us for many more years . . . But the crank is gone . . .

Should we end the bugger with that?

Why not? Let the sportswriters take it from here. And when things get nervous, there’s always that smack-filled $7-a-night motel room down on the seawall in Galveston.

October 10, 1974

. . . before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

Well ... this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knucklehead refugee from a 1969 “Mister Clean” TV commercial has just done what only the most cynical and paranoid kind of malcontent ever connected with national politics would have dared to predict . . .

If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician—
any
politician—and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window ... flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence, then soak him down with Mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high-powered “Bull Buster” cattle prod.

But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that—at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.

About five hours after I’d sent the final draft of a massive article on
The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the Mojo Wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a “full, free, and absolute” presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.

Ford sprung his decision with no advance warning at 10:40 on a peaceful Sunday morning in Washington, after emerging from a church service with such a powerful desire to dispense mercy that he rushed back to the White House—a short hump across Lafayette Park—and summoned a weary Sunday-morning skeleton crew of correspondents and cameramen to inform them, speaking in curiously zombielike tones, that he could no longer tolerate the idea of ex-president Nixon suffering in grief-crazed solitude out there on the beach in San Clemente, and that his conscience now compelled him to end both the suffering of Nixon and the national
angst
it was causing by means of a presidential edict of such king-sized breadth and scope as to scourge the poison of “Watergate” from our national consciousness forever.

Or at least that’s how it sounded to me when I was jolted out of a sweat-soaked coma on Sunday morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. “Ford
pardoned
the bastard!” he screamed. “I warned you, didn’t I? I buried him twice, and he came back from the dead both times ... Now he’s done it again; he’s running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert.”

I fell back on the bed, moaning heavily. No, I thought. I didn’t
hear
that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Washington press corps and the national TV audience with his carefully considered refusal to interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s legal duty to proceed on the basis of evidence and “prosecute any and all individuals.” Given the context of the question, Ford’s reply was widely interpreted as a signal to Jaworski that the former president should not be given any special treatment ... And it also meshed with Ford’s answer to a question in the course of his confirmation hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he’d said, “I don’t think the public would stand for it,” when asked if an appointed vice president would have the power to pardon the president
who’d appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal circumstances.

I recalled these things Ford had said, but I was not so sure I’d heard Dick Tuck correctly—or if I’d really heard him at all. I held my right hand up in front of my eyes, trying to remember if I’d eaten anything the night before that could cause hallucinations. If so, my hand would appear to be transparent, and I would be able to see all the bones and blood vessels very clearly.

But my hand was not transparent. I moaned again, bringing Sandy in from the kitchen to find out what was wrong. “Did Tuck just call?” I asked.

She nodded: “He was almost hysterical. Ford just gave Nixon a full pardon.”

I sat up quickly, groping around on the bed for something to smash. “No!” I shouted. “That’s impossible!”

She shook her head. “I heard it on the radio, too.”

I stared at my hands again, feeling anger behind my eyes and noise coming up in my throat: “That stupid, lying bastard! Jesus! Who votes for these treacherous scumbags! You can’t even trust the dumb ones! Look at Ford! He’s too goddamn stupid to arrange a deal like that! Hell, he’s almost too stupid to lie.”

Sandy shrugged. “He gave Nixon all the tapes, too.”

“Holy shit!” I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. “What’s Goodwin’s number in Washington? That bonehead Rotarian sonofabitch made a deal? Maybe Dick knows something.”

But it was twenty-four hours later when I finally got hold of Goodwin, and by that time I had made a huge chart full of dates, names, and personal connections—all linked and cross-linked by a maze of arrows and lines. The three names on the list with far more connections than any others were Laird, Kissinger, and Rockefeller. I had spent all night working feverishly on the chart, and now I was asking Goodwin to have a researcher check it all out.

“Well,” he replied, “a lot of people in Washington are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt there was some kind of arrangement, but—” He paused. “Aren’t we pretty damn close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you’ll never be able to check all that stuff before—”

“Mother of babbling god!” I muttered. The word
deadline
caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about fifteen more hours ... With about 90 percent of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent Richard Nixon’s conviction. The only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he’d said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon “until the legal process has run its course.”

Cazart! I hung up the phone and tossed my chart across the room. That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning so close to the deadline that I almost had a nervous breakdown while failing completely ... And now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon, leaving me with less than twenty-four hours to revise completely a fifteen-thousand-word story that was already set in type.

It was absolutely impossible, no hope at all—except to lash as many last-minute pages as possible into the mojo and hope for the best. Maybe somebody in San Francisco would have time, when the deadline crunch came, to knit the two versions together ... But there was no way at all to be sure, so this will be an interesting article to read when it comes off the press . . .

Indeed ... cast your bread on the waters ... why not?

I have very dim memories of Tuck’s call. Less than five hours earlier, I had passed out very suddenly in the bathtub, after something like 133 hours of nonstop work on a thing I’d been dragging around with me for two months and revising in ragged notebooks and on rented typewriters in hotels from Key Biscayne to Laguna Beach, bouncing in and out of Washington to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado ... before heading back to Washington again, where the pressure valves finally blew all at once in early August, catching me in a state of hysterical exhaustion and screeching helplessly for speed when Nixon suddenly caved in and quit, ambushing
me on the brink of a deadline and wasted beyond the help of anything but the most extreme kind of chemotherapy.

It takes about a month to recover physically from a collapse of that magnitude, and at least a year to shake the memory. The only thing I can think of that compares to it is that long, long moment of indescribably intense sadness that comes just before drowning at sea, those last few seconds on the cusp when the body is still struggling but the mind has given up ... a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it that makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful. Getting rescued at that point is far more painful than drowning: recovery brings back terrifying memories of struggling wildly for breath . . .

This is precisely the feeling I had when Tuck woke me up that morning to say that Ford had just granted Nixon “full, free, and absolute” pardon. I had just written a long, sporadically rational brief, of sorts—explaining how Nixon had backed himself into a corner and why it was inevitable that he would soon be indicted and convicted on a felony “obstruction of justice” charge, and then Ford would pardon him, for a lot of reasons I couldn’t agree with, but which Ford had already stated so firmly that there didn’t seem to be much point in arguing about it. The logic of sentencing Nixon to a year in the same cell with John Dean was hard to argue with on either legal or ethical grounds, but I understood politics well enough by then to realize that Nixon would have to plead guilty to something like the rape/murder of a Republican senator’s son before Gerald Ford would even consider letting him spend any time in jail.

I had accepted this, more or less. Just as I had more or less accepted—after eighteen months of total involvement in the struggle to get rid of Nixon—the idea that Gerald Ford could do just about anything he felt like doing, as long as he left me alone. My interest in national politics withered drastically within hours after Nixon resigned.

After five and a half years of watching a gang of fascist thugs treating the White House and the whole machinery of the federal government like a conquered empire to be used like the spoils of war for any purpose that served either the needs or whims of the victors, the prospect of some harmless, half-bright jock like Jerry Ford running a cautious, caretaker-style government for two or even six years was almost a welcome relief.
Not even the ominous sight of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller hovering a heartbeat away from the presidency had much effect on my head.

After more than ten years of civil war with the White House and all the swine who either lived or worked there, I was ready to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any president who acted half human and had enough sense not to walk around in public wearing a swastika armband.

Well ... the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the Bowery—exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of “innocent bystanders” who still don’t know what happened . . .