Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (56 page)

I stayed out there by the pool for almost two hours, sliding into the water to swim a few laps and then back out to stretch out on the grass
to make a note now and then on the news. Not much was happening, except for a few kinky interviews down by the White House gate with people who claimed to have been on the Deathwatch for three days and nights without sleeping ... But very few of them could even begin to explain why they were doing it. At least half the crowd around the White House during those last few days looked like people who spend every weekend prowling the demolition derby circuit.

The only other action on the news that Friday morning was an occasional rerun of Nixon’s official resignation speech from the night before. I had watched it with Craig Vetter in the Watergate bar. It seemed like a good place to be on that night, because I had also been there on the night of June 17, 1972—while the Watergate burglary was happening five floors above my head.

But after I’d watched Nixon’s speech for the third time, a strange feeling of nervousness began working on me, and I decided to get out of town as soon as possible. The movie was over—or at least it would be over in two or three hours. Nixon was leaving at ten o’clock, and Ford would be sworn in at noon. I wanted to be there on the White House lawn when Nixon was lifted off. That would be the end of
my
movie.

It was still raining when I left, and the pool was still empty. I put the TV set back in the canvas bag and climbed over the gate by the lifeguard shack. Then I stopped and looked back for a moment, knowing I would never come back to this place, and if I did it would not be the same. The pool would be the same, and it would be easy enough to pick up a case of Bass ale or a battery TV set ... And I could even come down here on rainy summer mornings and watch the morning news . . .

No ... even with the pool and the ale and the grass and the portable TV set, the morning news will not be the same without the foul spectre of Richard Nixon glaring out of the tube. But the war is over now, and he lost ... Gone but not forgotten, missed but not mourned; we will not see another one like him for quite a while. He was dishonest to a fault, the truth was not in him, and if it can be said that he resembled any other living animal in this world, it could only have been the hyena.

I took a cab down to the White House and pushed through the sullen mob on the sidewalk to the guardhouse window. The cop inside glanced
at my card, then looked up—fixing me with a heavy-lidded Quaalude stare for just an instant, then nodded and pushed his buzzer to open the gate. The pressroom in the West Wing was empty, so I walked outside to the Rose Garden, where a big olive-drab helicopter was perched on the lawn, about one hundred feet out from the stairs. The rain had stopped, and a long red carpet was laid out on the wet grass from the White House door to the helicopter. I eased through the crowd of photographers and walked out, looking back at the White House, where Nixon was giving his final address to a shocked crowd of White House staffers. I examined the aircraft very closely, and I was just about to climb into it when I heard a loud rumbling behind me; I turned around just in time to see Richard and Pat coming toward me, trailing their daughters and followed closely by Gerald Ford and Betty. Their faces were grim and they were walking very slowly; Nixon had a glazed smile on his face, not looking at anybody around him, and walked like a wooden Indian full of Thorazine.

His face was a greasy death mask. I stepped back out of his way and nodded hello, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I lit a cigarette and watched him climb the steps to the door of the helicopter ... Then he spun around very suddenly and threw his arms straight up in the famous twin-victory signal; his eyes were still glazed, but he seemed to be looking over the heads of the crowd at the White House.

Nobody was talking. A swarm of photographers rushed the plane as Nixon raised his arms—but his body had spun around too fast for his feet, and as his arms went up I saw him losing his balance. The grimace on his face went slack, then he bounced off the door and stumbled into the cockpit. Pat and Ziegler were already inside; Ed Cox and Tricia went in quickly without looking back; and a marine in dress blues shut the door and jumped away as the big rotor blades began turning and the engine cranked up to a dull, whining roar.

I was so close that the noise hurt my ears. The rotor blades were invisible now, but the wind was getting heavier; I could feel it pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets. For an instant I thought I could see Richard Nixon’s face pressed up to the window. Was he smiling? Was it Nixon? I couldn’t be sure. And now it made no difference.

The wind blast from the rotors was blowing people off balance now;
photographers were clutching their equipment against their bodies, and Gerald Ford was leading his wife back toward the White House with a stony scowl on his face.

I was still very close to the helicopter, watching the tires. As the beast began rising, the tires became suddenly fat; there was no more weight on them ... The helicopter went straight up and hovered for a moment, then swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then angled up into the fog. Richard Nixon was gone.

The end came so suddenly and with so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that the scumbag had been passed to what will have to pose for now as another generation. The main reaction to Richard Nixon’s passing—especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years—was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, postcoital sort of depression that still endures.

Within hours after Nixon’s departure, every bar in downtown Washington normally frequented by reporters was a sinkhole of gloom. Several hours after Gerald Ford was sworn in, I found ex-Kennedy speechwriter Dick Goodwin in a bar not far from the
Rolling Stone
office across the street from the White House. He was slumped in a booth by himself, staring blankly into his drink like a man who had just had his teeth ripped out by a savage bill collector.

“I feel totally drained,” he said. “It’s like the circus just left town. This is the end of the longest-running continuous entertainment this city ever had.” He waved his arm at the waitress for another drink. “It’s the end of an era. Now I know how all those rock freaks felt when they heard the Beatles were breaking up.”

I felt the same way. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of town as soon as possible. I had just come from the White House pressroom, where a smoglike sense of funk—or “smunk,” as somebody over there might describe it—had settled on the room within minutes after Ford took the oath. The Deathwatch was finally over; the evil demon had been purged and the Good Guys had won—or at least the Bad Guys had lost, but that was not quite the same thing.

We all knew it was coming—the press, the Congress, the “public,” all the backstage handlers in Washington, and even Nixon’s own henchmen—but we all had our own different timetables, and when his balloon suddenly burst on that fateful Monday in August, it happened so fast that none of us were ready to deal with it. The Nixon presidency never really had time to
crumble
, except in hazy retrospect ... In reality, it
disintegrated
, with all the speed and violence of some flimsy and long-abandoned gazebo suddenly blasted to splinters by chain lightning.

Like the black teenage burglars who are terrorizing chic Georgetown these days, Nixon conquered so easily that he soon lost any fear of being caught. Washington police have noted a strange pattern involving burglaries in Georgetown and other posh neighborhoods in the white ghetto of the city’s northwest sector: a home that has been robbed once is far more likely to be hit again than a home that has never been hit at all. Once they spot an easy mark, the burglars get lazy and prefer to go back for seconds and even thirds, rather than challenge a new target.

The police seem surprised at this pattern, but, in fact, it’s fairly traditional among amateurs—or at least among the type I used to hang around with. About fifteen years ago, when I was into that kind of thing, I drifted into Lexington, Kentucky, one evening with two friends who shared my tastes; we moved into an apartment across the street from a gas station which we broke into and robbed on three consecutive nights.

On the morning after the first hit, we stood transfixed at the apartment window, drinking beer and watching the local police “investigating” the robbery ... And I remember thinking, now that poor fool over there has probably never been hit before, and what he’s thinking now is that his odds of being hit again anytime soon are almost off the board. Hell, how many gas stations have ever been robbed two nights in a row?

So we robbed it again that night, and the next morning we stood at the window drinking beer and watched all manner of hell break loose between the station owner and the cops around the gas pumps across the street. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the proprietor was waving his arms crazily and screaming at the cops, as if he suspected
them
of doing it.

Christ, this is wonderful, I thought. If we hit the bugger again tonight
he’ll go stark raving mad tomorrow morning when the cops show up ... which was true: on the next morning, after three consecutive robberies, the parking lot of that gas station was like a war zone, but this time the cops showed up with reinforcements. In addition to the two police cruisers, the lot filled up with chromeless, dust-covered Fords and crew-cut men wearing baggy brown suits and shoes with gum-rubber soles. While some of them spoke earnestly with the proprietor, others dusted the doorknobs, window latches, and the cash register for fingerprints.

It was hard to know, from our window across the street, if we were watching the FBI, local detectives, or insurance agency investigators at work ... But in any case, I figured they’d have the whole station ringed with armed guards for the next few nights, so we decided to leave well enough alone.

About six in the evening, however, we stopped there and had the tank filled up with ethyl. There were about six bony-faced men hanging around the office, killing the time until dark by studying road maps and tire-pressure charts. They paid no attention to us until I tried to put a dime in the Coke machine.

“It ain’t workin’,” one of them said. He shuffled over and pulled the whole front of the machine open, like a broken refrigerator, and lifted a Coke bottle out of the circular rack. I gave him the dime and he dropped it into his pocket.

“What’s wrong with the machine?” I asked, remembering how hard it had been to rip the bastard open with a crowbar about twelve hours earlier to reach the money box.

“No concern of yours,” he muttered, lighting up a Marvel and staring out at the pump where the attendant was making change for a $10 bill after cleaning our windshield and checking the oil. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s some folks gonna be a lot worse off than that there machine before this night’s out tonight.” He nodded. “This time we’re
ready
for them sonsabitches.”