The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  After three or four days of this scam, however, I realized that there was really no point in going to the Hearing Room at all. Every time I came speeding down the hall and across the crowded floor of the high-domed, white-marble rotunda where a cordon of cops kept hundreds of waiting spectators penned up behind velvet ropes, I felt guilty. . . Here was some ill-dressed geek with a bottle of Carlsberg in his hand, waving a press pass and running right through a whole army of cops, then through the tall oak doors and into a front row seat just behind the witness chair -- while this mob of poor bastards who'd been waiting since early morning, in some cases, for a seat to open up in the SRO gallery.

  After a few more days of this madness, I closed up the National Affairs Desk and went back home to brood.

  PART III

  To the Mattresses. . . Nixon Faces History, and to Hell with The Washington Post. . . The Hazy Emergence of a New and Cheaper Strategy. . . John Wilson Draws 'The Line'. . . Strange Troika & a Balance of Terror. . . McGovern Was Right

  "When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only in order to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition."

  -- Josef Goebbels

  What will Nixon do now? That is the question that has every Wizard in Washington hanging by his or her fingernails -- from the bar of the National Press Club to the redwood sauna in the Senate Gymnasium to the hundreds of high-powered cocktail parties in suburbs like Bethesda, MacLean, Arlington, Cabin John and especially in the leafy white ghetto of the District's Northwest quadrant. You can wander into Nathan's tavern at the corner of M Street & Wisconsin in Georgetown and get an argument about "Nixon's strategy" without even mentioning the subject. All you have to do is stand at the bar, order a Bass Ale, and look interested: The hassle will take care of itself; the very air in Washington is electric with the vast implications of "Watergate."

  Thousands of big-money jobs depend on what Nixon does next; on what Archibald Cox has in mind; on whether "Uncle Sam's" TV hearings will resume full-bore after Labor Day, or be either telescoped or terminated like Nixon says they should be.

  The smart money says the "Watergate Hearings," as such, are effectively over -- not only because Nixon is preparing to mount a popular crusade against them, but because every elected politician in Washington is afraid of what the Ervin committee has already scheduled for the "third phase" of the hearings.

  Phase Two, as originally planned, would focus on "dirty tricks" -- a colorful, shocking and essentially minor area of inquiry, but one with plenty of action and a guaranteed audience appeal. A long and serious look at the "dirty tricks" aspect of national campaigning would be a death-blow to the daily soap-opera syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation's housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every soap-opera scriptwriter in America.

  Phase Three/Campaign Financing is the one both the White House and the Senate would prefer to avoid -- and, given this mutual distaste for exposing the public to the realities of Campaign Financing, this is the phase of the Watergate Hearings most likely to be cut from the schedule. "Jesus Christ," said one Ervin committee investigator, "we'll have Fortune's 500 in that chair, and every one of those bastards will take at least one Congressman or Senator down with him."

  At the end of Phase One -- the facts & realities of the Watergate affair itself -- the seven Senators on the Ervin committee took an informal vote among themselves, before adjourning to a birthday party for Senator Herman Talmadge, and the tally was 4-3 against resuming the hearings in their current format. Talmadge cast the deciding vote, joining the three Republicans -- Gurney, Baker and Weicker -- in voting to wrap the hearings up as soon as possible. Their reasons were the same ones Nixon gave in his long-awaited TV speech on August 15th, when he said the time had come to end this Daily Bummer and get back to "The business of the people."

  Watching Nixon's speech in hazy color on the Owl Farm tube with New York Mayor John Lindsay, Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin and former Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Wolinsky, I half expected to hear that fine old Calvin Coolidge quote: "The business of America is business."

  And it only occurred to me later that Nixon wouldn't have dared to use that one, because no president since Hubert Hoover has been forced to explain away the kind of root-structural damage to the national economy that Nixon is trying to explain today. And Hoover at least had the excuse that he "inherited his problems" from somebody else -- which Nixon can't claim, because he is now in his fifth year as president, and when he goes on TV to explain himself he is facing an audience of 50 to 60 million who can't afford steaks or even hamburger in the supermarkets, who can't buy gasoline for their cars, who are paying 15 and 20% interest rates for bank loans, and who are being told now that there may not be enough fuel oil to heat their homes through the coming winter.

  This is not the ideal audience for a second-term president, fresh from a landslide victory, to confront with 29 minutes of lame gibberish about mean nit-pickers in Congress, the good ole American way, and Let's Get on with Business.

  Indeed. That's the first thing Richard Nixon and I have ever agreed on, politically -- and what we are dealing with now is no longer hard ideology, but a matter of simple competence. What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dreams of King Midas. . . and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war he could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years. Nixon's hand-picked Vice President is about to be indicted for Extortion and Bribery; his former campaign manager and his former Secretary of Commerce & personal fund-raiser have already been indicted for Perjury, two of his ranking campaign managers have already pleaded guilty to Obstruction of Justice, the White House counsel is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have room to list here, and before the trials are finished. . .

  Sen. Talmadge: "Now, if the President could authorize a covert break-in and you do not know exactly where that power would be limited, you do not think it could include murder, do you?" John Ehrlichman: "I do not know where the line is, Senator."

  With the first phase of the Watergate hearings more or less ended, one of the few things now unmistakably clear, as it were, is that nobody in Nixon's White House was willing to "draw the line" anywhere short of re-electing the President in 1972. Even John Mitchell -- whose reputation as a super-shrewd lawyer ran afoul of the Peter Principle just as soon as he became Nixon's first Attorney General -- lost his temper in an exchange with Sen. Talmadge at the Watergate hearings and said, with the whole world watching, that he considered the re-election of Richard Nixon in '72 "so important" that it out-weighed all other considerations.

  It was a classic affirmation of the "attorney-client relationship" -- or at least a warped mixture of that and the relationship between an ad agency executive and a client with a product to sell -- but when Mitchell uttered those lines in the hearing room, losing control of himself just long enough to fatally confuse "executive loyalty" with "executive privilege," it's fair to assume that he knew he was already doomed. . . He had already been indicted for perjury in the Vesco case, he was f
acing almost certain indictment by Archibald Cox, and previous testimony by John Dean had made it perfectly clear that Nixon was prepared to throw John Mitchell to the wolves, to save his own ass.

  This ominous truth was quickly reinforced by the testimony of John Ehrlichman and Harry "Bob" Haldeman, whose back-to-back testimony told most of the other witnesses (and potential defendants) all they needed to know. By the time Haldeman had finished testifying -- under the direction of the same criminal lawyer who had earlier represented Ehrlichman -- it was clear that somebody in the White House had finally seen fit to "draw the line."

  It was not quite the same line Mitchell and Ehrlichman had refused to acknowledge on TV, but in the final analysis it will be far more critical to the fate of Richard Nixon's presidency. . . and, given Mitchell's long personal relationship with Nixon, it is hard to believe he didn't understand his role in the "new strategy" well before he drove down from New York to Washington, by chauffeured limousine, for his gig in the witness chair.

  The signs were all there. For one, it had been Haldeman and Ehrlichman -- with Nixon's tacit approval -- who had eased Mitchell out of his "Number One" role at the White House. John Mitchell, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer until he got into politics, was more responsible than any other single person for the long comeback that landed Nixon in the White House in 1968. It was Mitchell who rescued Nixon from oblivion in the mid-Sixties when Nixon moved east to become a Wall Street lawyer himself -- after losing the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960 and then the Governorship of California to Pat Brown in '62, a humiliating defeat that ended with his "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" outburst at the traditional loser's press conference.

  The re-election of Mr. Nixon, followed so quickly by the Watergate revelations, has compelled the country to re-examine the reality of our electoral process. . .

  "The unraveling of the whole White House tangle of involvement has come about largely by a series of fortuitous events, many of them unlikely in a different political context. Without these events, the cover-up might have continued indefinitely, even if a Democratic administration vigorously pursued the truth. . .

  "In the wake of Watergate may come more honest and thorough campaign reform than in the aftermath of a successful presidential campaign which stood for such reform. I suspect that after viewing the abuses of the past, voters in the future will insist on full and open debate between the candidates and on frequent, no-holds-barred press conferences for all candidates, and especially the President.

  "And I suspect the Congress will respond to the fact that Watergate happened with legislation to assure that Watergate never happens again. Today the prospects for further restrictions on private campaign financing, full disclosure of the personal finances of the candidates, and public finance of all federal campaigns seem to me better than ever -- and even better than if a new Democratic administration had urged such steps in early 1973. We did urge them in 1972, but it took the Nixon landslide and the Watergate expose to make the point.

  "I believe there were great gains that came from the pain of defeat in 1972. We proved a campaign could be honestly financed. We reaffirmed that a campaign could be open in its conduct and decent in its motivation. We made the Democratic party a place for people as well as politicians. And perhaps in losing we gained the greatest victory of all -- that Americans now perceive, far better than a new President could have persuaded them, what is precious about our principles and what we must do to preserve them. The nation now sees itself through the prism of Watergate and the Nixon landslide; at last, perhaps, we see through a glass clearly.

  "Because of all this, it is possible that by 1976, the 200th anniversary of America's birth, there will be a true rebirth of patriotism; that we will not only know our ideals but live them; that democracy may once again become a conviction we keep and not just a description we apply to ourselves. And if the McGovern campaign advanced that hope, even in defeat, then, as I said on election night last November, 'Every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort. . . was worth the entire sacrifice."

  -- George McGovem in the Washington Post, August 12th, 1973

  Jesus. . . Sunday morning in Woody Creek and here's McGovern on the mini-tube beside my typewriter, looking and talking almost exactly like he was in those speedy weeks between the Wisconsin and Ohio primaries, when his star was rising so fast that he could barely hang onto it. The sense of deja vu is almost frightening: Here is McGovern speaking sharply against the system, once again, in response to questions from CBS's Connie Chung and Marty Nolan from the Boston Globe, two of the most ever-present reporters on the '72 campaign trail. . . and McGovern, brought back from the dead by a political miracle of sorts, is hitting the first gong of doom for the man who made him a landslide loser nine months ago: "When that [judicial] process is complete and the Supreme Court rules that the President must turn over the tapes -- and he refuses to do so -- I think the Congress will have no recourse but to seriously consider Impeachment."

  Cazart! The fat is approaching the fire -- very slowly, and in very cautious hands, but there is no ignoring the general drift of things. Sometime between now and the end of 1973, Richard Nixon may have to bite that bullet he's talked about for so long. Seven is a lucky number for gamblers, but not for fixers, and Nixon's seventh crisis is beginning to put his first six in very deep shade. Even the most conservative betting in Washington, these days, has Nixon either resigning or being impeached by the autumn of '74 -- if not for reasons directly connected to the "Watergate scandal," then because of his inability to explain how he paid for his beach-mansion at San Clemente, or why Vice President Agnew -- along with most of Nixon's original White House command staff -- is under indictment for felonies ranging from Extortion and Perjury to Burglary and Obstruction of Justice.

  Another good bet in Washington -- running at odds between two and three to one, these days, is that Nixon will crack both physically and mentally under all this pressure, and develop a serious psychosomatic illness of some kind: Maybe another bad case of pneumonia.

  This is not so wild a vision as it might sound -- not even in the context of my own known taste for fantasy and savage bias in politics. Richard Nixon, a career politician who has rarely failed to crack under genuine pressure, is under more pressure now than most of us will ever understand. His whole life is turning to shit, just as he reached the pinnacle. . . and every once in a while, caving in to a weakness that blooms in the cool, thinking hours around dawn, I have to admit that I feel a touch of irrational sympathy for the bastard. Not as The President: a broken little bully who would sacrifice us all to save himself -- if he still had the choice -- but the same kind of sympathy I might feel, momentarily, for a vicious cheap-shot linebacker whose long career comes to a sudden end one Sunday afternoon when some rookie flanker shatters both his knees with a savage crackback block.

  Cheap-shot artists don't last very long in pro football. To cripple another person intentionally is to violate the same kind of code as the legendary "honor among thieves."

  More linebackers than thieves believe this, but when it comes to politics -- to a 28-year career of cheap shots, lies and thievery -- there is no man in America who should understand what is happening to him now better than Richard Milhous Nixon. He is a living monument to the old Army rule that says: "The only real crime is getting caught."

  This is not the first time Richard Nixon has been caught. After his failed campaign for the Governorship of California in 1962 he was formally convicted -- along with H.R. Haldeman, Maurice Stans, Murray Chotiner, Herb Klein and Herb Kalmbach for almost exactly the same kind of crudely illegal campaign tactics that he stands accused of today.

  But this time, in the language of the sergeants who keep military tradition alive, "he got caught every which way". . . and "his ass went into the blades."

  Not many people have ever written in the English language better than a Polack with a twisted sense of humor who called himself
Joseph Conrad. And if he were with us today I think he'd be getting a fine boot out of this Watergate story. Mr. Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, did his thing. Mr. Nixon also did his thing.

  And now, just as surely as Kurtz: "Mistah Nixon, he dead."

  Rolling Stone #144, September 27,1973

  Fear and Loathing in Washington:

  The Boys in the Bag

  It was a Nice Place. They Were Principled People, Generally.

  -- Quote from Robert C. Odle, office administrator for CREEP.

  "Mr. McGovern described the president personally as a 'blob out there' of no constant principle except opportunism and political manipulation, a man 'up to his ears in political sabotage' who was 'afraid of the people' and regularly favored the 'powerful and greedy' over the public interest. The president's defense programs were 'madness'; he had 'degraded the Supreme Court' and, on three occasions at least, Mr. McGovern drew parallels between the president and his government and Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich. As for the Nixon administration, it was the 'most morally bankrupt, the most morally corrupt, the trickiest, most deceitful. . . in our entire national history.' "

  -- White House speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, in The New York Times, November 24th, 1972

  "'When I am attacked' Richard Nixon once remarked to this writer, 'it is my instinct to strike back.' The president is now clearly in a mood to obey his instincts. . . So on Wednesday, July 18th, at a White House meeting, it was agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released. This decision, to use the sports cliches to which the president is addicted, meant an entirely new ball game, requiring a new game plan. The new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back, in accord with the presidential instinct, rather than a policy of attempted accommodation. . ."