Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (57 page)

And they were. I noticed a double-barreled shotgun standing in a corner by the rack full of oil cans. Two big coon hounds were asleep on the greasy linoleum floor, with their collar chains looped around the base of the chewing gum machine. I felt a quick flash of greed as I eyed the
glass bulb filled with all those red, white, blue, and green gum balls. We had looted the place of almost everything else, and I felt a pang of regret at having to leave the gum machine untouched: all those pennies just sitting there with nobody to fondle them . . .

But in retrospect, I think that moment was the beginning of wisdom for me. We had pushed our luck far enough with that place, and the world was full of colorful gum-ball machines. There was a weird and menacing edge in the man’s voice that it took me a long time to forget.

We drove downtown and cruised around drinking warm beer for a while, then we robbed a crowded liquor store on Main Street by starting a fight with the clerks and then cleaning out the cash register while they struggled to defend themselves.

We got less than $200 out of that one, as I recall—about the same as we’d picked up from three hits on the gas station—and on the way out of town I remember thinking that maybe I could do something a little better in this life than robbing gas stations and liquor stores. After taking enough crazy risks to put all three of us in prison for at least five years, we had about $135 apiece to show for it, and about half of that was already spent on gas, food, beer, and hiring winos to buy whiskey for us because we were too young to get served, and the winos were charging double for anything they bought for us.

That weekend crime spree in Lexington was my last haul, as they say; I even gave up shoplifting, which altered my lifestyle pretty severely for a while, because it had taken me several years to master the kind of skill and mental attitude it takes to walk into a jewelry store and come out with six watches, or in the front door of a tavern and hassle the bartender with a false ID long enough to let a friend slip out the back door with a case of Old Forester ... But when I quit that gig, I quit it completely; and after fifteen years on the wagon, my skills are so hopelessly atrophied that now I can’t even steal a newspaper from an open rack on the street.

Ah ... mother of jabbering god, how in the hell did I get off on that tangent about teenage street crime? This is supposed to be a deep and serious political essay about Richard Nixon . . .

Although maybe that wasn’t such a tangent after all. The original point, I think, had to do with the street-punk mentality that caused Nixon to push his luck so far that it was finally almost impossible
not
to get himself busted. For a while, he had the luck and arrogance of a half-smart amateur. From their base in the White House, Nixon and the L.A. account execs he brought with him treated the old-line Washington power structure with the same kind of contempt that the young burglars casing Georgetown seem to have for the forts of the rich and powerful—or that I had for that poor bastard who owned the gas station in Lexington.

This is a very hard thing for professional cops, journalists, or investigators to cope with. Like doctors and lawyers, most of the best minds in police work have been trained since puberty to think in terms of patterns and precedents: anything original tends to have the same kind of effect on their investigative machinery as a casually mutilated punch card fed into a computer. The immediate result is chaos and false conclusions ... But both cops and computers are programmed to know when they’ve been jammed by a wild card or a joker, and in both cases there are usually enough competent technicians standing by to locate the problem and get the machinery working again pretty quickly.

Right ... and now we have gone off on a dangerous compound tangent. And it has mushroomed into something unmanageable ... But before we zoom off in whatever direction might come next, it would be unfair not to mention that the
Times
was the first paper to break the Pentagon Papers story, a command decision that forced Nixon and his would-be enforcers to come out in the open with fangs bared, snarling threats to have everybody connected with the publication of the Pentagon Papers either lashed into jail or subpoenaed into so many courtrooms that all their minds would snap before they finally wound up in the poorhouse.

As it turned out, however, the
Times
management strapped on its collective balls and announced that they were prepared to go to the mat with Nixon on that one—a surprisingly tough stance that was almost instantly backed up by influential papers like the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post,
and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
... And the appearance of that solid front, however shaky, caused serious turmoil in the White House. Spiro Agnew was pried loose from his kickback racket and sent out on the stump to stir up the Silent Majority against the “radiclibs”
and “liberal elitists” of the “eastern media establishment”—the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Jesus! Those were the days, eh?

The headline in today’s
Washington Post
says Richard Nixon is “lonely and depressed” down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. Jesus! How much more of this cheapjack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he’s lonely and depressed out there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.

But, no—he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret Service agents and still communicating with the outside world through an otherwise unemployable $40,000-a-year mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler ... and still tantalizing the national press with the same kind of shrewdly programmed leaks that served him so well in the last months of his doomed presidency . . .

“He’s terribly depressed, with much to be depressed about,” says a friend. “Anyone would be depressed in his situation. I don’t mean he’s going off the deep end. I just mean that everything happened to him, seemingly all at once, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.”

Well ... shucks. I’d be tempted to put my mind to the task of helping the poor bastard figure out “what to do about” this cruel nutcracker that he somehow stumbled into ... but I have a powerful suspicion that probably that gang of mean niggers in Washington has already solved Nixon’s problem for him. They are going to indict the bastard and try to put him on trial.

Nixon knows this. He is not the kind of lawyer you’d want to hire for anything serious, but the reality of his situation vis-à-vis the Watergate grand jury is so bleak that even
he
has to grasp it ... and this is the reason, I think, for the more or less daily front-page comments on his half-mad and pathetically crippled mental condition. He has devised another one of his famous fourth-down game breakers—the same kind of three-fisted brainstorm that climaxed with his decision to defuse the whole impeachment process by releasing his own version of “the tapes,”
or the time he figured out how to put a quick lid on the Watergate burglary investigation by blaming the whole thing on John Dean.

According to one Washington topsider, widely respected as an unimpeachable source and a shrewd judge of presidential character: “Dick Nixon is in a league all by himself when you’re talking about style and grace under pressure. His instincts when the crunch comes are absolutely amazing.”

Nobody will argue with that—although his strategy since leaving the White House has been marked by an unnatural focus on subtlety. The savage warrior of old now confronts us in the guise of a pitiful, frightened old pol—a whipped and broken man, totally at the mercy of his enemies and baffled by the firestorm of disasters that drove him out of the White House.

Which may even be partially true: He will probably go to his grave believing he was not
really
guilty of anything except underestimating the power of his enemies ... But the fact remains that Jaworski will very likely break the news of Nixon’s formal indictment before this article appears on the newsstands, and when that happens there will be only one man in the country with the power to arbitrarily short-circuit the legal machinery that in theory could land Richard Nixon in the same cell block with John Dean.

That man is Gerald Ford, but he will have a hard time justifying a blanket presidential pardon for an admitted felon without at least the
appearance
of a groundswell of public sympathy to back him up.

It will be a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign in the classic Nixon tradition. Ziegler will hold daily press briefings and read finely crafted descriptions of the former president’s pitiful condition from the typewriter of Ray Price, Nixon’s former chief speechwriter at the White House. Both Price and Pat Buchanan, the left and right forks of Nixon’s tongue ever since he decided to make his move on the White House back in 1965, showed up at the San Clemente fortress in early September, both insisting they had just come out to say hello and “check up on the old man.” As it happened, however, they both appeared about the same time rumors began surfacing in New York about a $2 million advance that Nixon had been offered for his memoirs.

Neither Price nor Buchanan claimed to know anything definite about
the book offer, but in New York Spiro Agnew’s literary agent was telling everybody who asked that the Nixon deal could be closed momentarily for at least $2 million, and maybe more.

That is a hell of a lot of money for
anybody’s
memoirs—even people who might reasonably be expected to tell the truth. But even a ridiculously fraudulent version of his five and a half wretched years in the White House and his own twisted view of the scandal that finished him off would be an automatic best seller if the book-buying public could be conned somehow into believing Richard Nixon was actually the author.

Meanwhile, with either Price or Buchanan or both standing ready to write his memoirs for him, Nixon was pondering an offer from
Reader’s Digest
to sign on as a “consulting editor” at a salary of $100,000 a year ... And Thursday of that week, President Ford made headlines by urging the Congress to appropriate $850,000 to cover Nixon’s pension, living expenses, and other costs of the painful transition from the White House to San Clemente. When the $850,000 runs out, he will have to scrimp until July 1 of next year, when he will pick up another $400,000 that will have to last him until July 1, 1976. For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole for $400,000 a year—$60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills, and $100,000 for “miscellaneous.”

On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon’s twenty-four-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1,000 a day for as long as he lives—a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies, and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or twelve full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses—and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year ... and these are merely the
expenses
. His personal income will presumably derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000-a-year stipend from
Reader’s Digest
, and the $5,000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.

So ... what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon: a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent twenty-eight years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he’d promised Julie he would “as long as even one senator believes in me,” he risked losing about 95 percent of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the “Former Presidents Act” by resigning ... But a president who gets impeached, convicted, and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by the Former Presidents Act. If Nixon had fought to the end and lost—which had become absolutely inevitable by the time he resigned—he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole ... So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet. The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.

Most of this annual largesse will come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers.
All
of the taxpayers. Even George and Eleanor McGovern will contribute a slice of their income to Richard Nixon’s retirement fund ... And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to strip him not only of his right to vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal Treasury—which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything but announce the date for when he will grant the pardon.