Sitting there, in the fetid darkness of his study, wearing his burgundy dinner jacket, the Night Creature spun furry spiderwebs as explanation for what he had done. The devil may have caused the infamous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the deadliest Watergate tape, but JFK and LBJ had caused Watergate itself: “I never wanted to accept the fact that there is a double standard out there. Democrats survive by it, Republicans get killed by it. Kennedy could be as dirty as they come—and my God! He did some outrageous things in there! But he was protected. Johnson—same thing, although to a lesser degree because he wasn’t a Kennedy. Somehow I made the mistake of thinking or maybe not even thinking—maybe it was an unconscious thing—that I could act like them.”
Forget his political death; ignore the grimy stake in his heart: The Night Creature knew that he could still run this country. “Any effective leader has got to be a son of a bitch. You have to instill the fear of God in your people to get results . . . . To be credible, you have to bomb the bejesus out of countries . . . . War has to be cast in idealistic terms or there is no way the people are going to support it. In Korea, we were fighting the Commies. In Vietnam, it was harder to get the message across . . . . The war in the Gulf was well-run, but I’m afraid it was too short and, frankly, even though one casualty is too much, this one had too few casualties . . . There is no grand thinking going on. We need more vision stuff, more mountaintop stuff . . . . We should get the CIA to take out Saddam . . . . I don’t go for this exporting democracy crap. Democracy doesn’t belong everywhere. Not all societies or cultures are meant for it.”
He knew the swamp rats who could rebuild his America: Newt Gingrich: “He’s a bomb thrower and we need him.” . . . Dan Quayle: “He’s so right on.” . . . His former speechwriter Safire: “just a good guy.” . . . And former speechwriter Pat Buchanan: “He’s a bulldog. He’ll go after them.” The Night Creature, whose Oval Office meetings had been punctuated with so many racist and anti-Semitic epithets, went out of his way to defend Buchanan: “Buchanan’s worried because he has been tagged as anti-semitic, which is totally untrue and unfair. The guy is just not that way.” And he reserved a special slimy passion, which was obviously reciprocal, for Bob Dole: “Damn impressive . . . he is the last great hope for the party in this century.”
Over and over again, the Night Creature praised Bob Dole. “He’s a class act, simple and honest . . . . Dole is the only one who can lead. He is by far the smartest politician—and Republican—in the country today . . . . Dole is a man of principle, but in an election year he would not be so stupid as to support what he believed was a losing position.”
Dole relied on the Night Creature for advice and Nixon became, according to Monica, “Dole’s chief, though shadow advisor.” “Stay young!” Nixon advised Dole, and he named world leaders who had excelled in their seventies—de Gaulle, Audenauer, Chou En-lai. Nixon wrote a nine-page draft called “The Dole Game Plan” for the 1996 election. He told Dole he had to make “character” the great issue of the campaign. “The character issue will help him tremendously against Clinton,” Nixon told Monica, “basically because Clinton has little or no character.” The Night Creature saw the war hero from Kansas as his soul brother, even though Nixon had not done much more than play poker during his war. “There is no one but Dole!” Nixon shouted at Monica. At another moment, he said, “Dole is the only one out there swinging.”
Bob Dole had always been out there swinging, Richard Nixon knew, agreeing for once with Barry Goldwater’s assessment: “Dole’s the first man we’ve had around here in a long time who will grab the other side by the hair and drag them down the hill.” Grab them by the hair and drag them down the hill! That was Dole all right, who responded to a colleague’s proposal to cut the food stamp program by saying, “Do you put in a burial allowance for the ones who starve?” . . . Dole, who told an amputee that he was jealous after the amputee pointed to Dole’s mangled arm at a VA hospital and asked, “Why don’t you cut the damn thing off?” And it looked, the Night Creature thought, like Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, had the same kind of piss and vinegar in her, too.
Small-town boys from Yorba Linda, California, and Russell, Kansas, they went way back together. Nixon appreciated Dole’s odd sense of history. Dole liked to point out, for example, that he’d been wounded in combat “eighty years to the day after Abe Lincoln took his bullet.” Nixon chuckled when Dole told him that the day he was born, the train carrying the disgraced Warren G. Harding’s body passed through his hometown.
It was Nixon who’d saved Dole in a difficult race in Kansas by campaigning heavily for him and it was Dole who’d slashed away at the Washington Post during Watergate, saying, “The greatest political scandal of this campaign is the brazen manner in which, without benefit of clergy, the Washington Post has set up housekeeping with the McGovern campaign . . . . The most intensive journalistic rescue and salvage operation in American politics.” Dole added, “There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the Post executives and editors. They belong to the same elite, they can be found living cheek by jowl in the same neighborhood, and hobnobbing at the same Georgetown parties . . . . The Republican Party has been the victim of a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner in mud-slinging, the Washington Post.” That was loyalty all right, referring to Watergate as “unfounded” and “unsubstantiated,” trying to make Nixon’s campaign of lies and illegal acts seem as though he were being victimized by what Nixon called “all the Libs out there.” Dole was out there swinging all right, showing the effects of all the DDT he’d inhaled growing up in the farm fields of Kansas.
Years later, when the Night Creature was buried, it was his soul brother who delivered the eulogy, just as he’d delivered Pale Pat’s. “How American?” Bob Dole said of Richard Nixon. “A boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track . . . . The grocer’s son who got ahead by working harder and longer than anyone else.” Bob Dole said, “The second half of the twentieth century will be known as the Age of Nixon.” And then Bob Dole broke down and sobbed.
As election day 1992 drew closer, the Night Creature was gushing pure bile aimed directly at Bill Clinton: “He’s as weak as piss on a rock . . . . He’s a goddamned liar . . . . He’s a pretty boy who doesn’t quite have it together, a waffler and an opportunist . . . . He’s a phony baloney . . . . He has little or no character . . . . He’s so damned smug . . . . He’s a clever bastard . . . . He’s Dogpatch . . . . He’s damaged merchandise, he’s got McGovern’s crowd as advisors . . . . He’s on media steroids and Bush’s people are a bunch of boy scouts . . . . We all have our weaknesses, human nature being what it is. We all succumb to something: Maybe power, maybe money, maybe women or booze or drugs. In Clinton’s case, all of the above.”
From the Night Creature’s shadowy point of view, Bill Clinton seemed his bête noire. Bill Clinton was the symbol and personification of the generation that had driven him from office. “If Bush loses to Clinton, he will have erased my ’72 victory because that was a referendum on Vietnam. A Clinton victory will reverse that by saying that it was okay to have actively opposed the war . . . . If Clinton wins, he will have opened up the office to all those who otherwise would have been disqualified, as late as 1988, with Gary Hart. Most in the media, though, are just like him. They are sympathetic with him on Vietnam; they experimented with drugs and casual sex . . . . Clinton is all for recognizing Vietnam. He’s just panting to go to Hanoi and walk through the streets, where he’ll be welcomed by millions of Vietnamese. Imagine! The ultimate Vietnam war draft dodger recognizing Vietnam! Unbelievable! . . . It’s not that he was against the war then—almost everyone his age was. It’s the fact that he says he’s still against it. Clinton still thinks that North Vietnam’s cause was more just . . . . I know why he did what he did to dodge the draft; he didn’t want to get his ass shot off. As I was out there trying to end the godd
amn war, he was running around, claiming privilege, avoiding service, and demonstrating against it. He was a selfish, spoiled brat. He made my job so much harder, and he sent God knows how many men to their death in his place. I’ll tell you one thing; if he is elected President, I will know that this country has finally gone to hell.”
Only weeks before the election, the Night Creature, architect of so many hellish events, knew hell was fast approaching. The polls were showing Bill Clinton with a sizable lead. “The only things,” he told his Monica, “that would be self-destructive to him now would be bombshells, like a letter that showed that he asked to renounce his American citizenship during Vietnam, or an illegitimate child.”
Even as he pondered the miraculous October surprise of a bastard child, the Night Creature found himself with mixed feelings about Hillary. He knew he should have hated her—Hillary, who had been part of the House Judiciary Committee that had forced him from office—and in some ways he did. Hillary “was frightening, her ideas way out there . . . . I still can’t believe it! She was on the goddamn committee to impeach me! She’s a radical! . . . If she gets in, whoa! Everybody had better fasten their seat belts . . . her eyes are ice cold . . . . She really believes this liberal crap . . . . The people around her are all to the radical left. They are going to doom her.” But in other moments, he found himself respecting her, admiring her. “How could she sit there next to him on 60 Minutes knowing what she does about his running around? Humiliating! But she has a higher agenda. She is very sharp, and she just wants to win the goddamn election. Take a little humiliation now and get power later . . . . She’s a master behind-the-scenes manipulator . . . . Hillary’s so steely. She even claps in a controlled way.”
When Bill Clinton was elected the forty-second president of the United States, the thirty-seventh president of the United States said to his Monica, “Clinton has vindicated the anti-Vietnam, draft-dodging, drug-taking behavior of the sixties. Most of that generation was bad, really bad. The Silent Majority was a reaction to that moral decay, but who’s going to do it now? The Clintons are going to be our moral symbols for four years, maybe eight. Four years, and maybe we can recover. Eight, and the damage will be irreparable.”
What he feared had, in his mind, taken place: America had gone to hell. He was talking to Monica about it the day after Bill Clinton’s election, when a bird smashed into the window right above his head.
“My God! What the hell was that?” the Night Creature said, throwing his hand over his bestaked heart.
“A bird hit the window, Mr. President,” Monica said.
“Oh,” he said, “did it fall to the ground?”
“No,” Monica said, “it was stunned for a moment but then recovered and flew away.”
“That’s good,” the Night Creature said, searching the squishy caverns of his mind, trying to find Stygian import in the bird’s action, and shortly after the inauguration, he sat down and wrote President Bill Clinton a letter. He congratulated him for his victory and went so far as to say that Bill Clinton had “the character to lead America” . . . very far indeed, bird or no bird, since he’d called him “as weak as piss on a rock” and “a goddamned liar . . . with little or no character.” The Night Creature parsed his letter to Monica: “I know it goes a bit overboard, particularly on the character stuff, but the guy’s got a big ego and you’ve got to flatter the hell out of him if you’re going to get anywhere.”
President Bill Clinton called Nixon soon after he got his letter. The president spoke to him for forty minutes! The president sought his advice about Russia, and the president invited him—him, the Night Creature—back into the White House for a meeting. “He was very respectful but with no sickening bullshit,” Nixon told his Monica. “In twelve years, neither Reagan nor Bush ever put me on the White House schedule . . . neither Kennedy nor Johnson ever invited Mrs. Nixon and me to the White House . . . . Clinton said things to me that he absolutely would not want made public. I wonder if his wiretaps are working . . . . He never brought up Hillary, not once. And I gave him several lead-ins. He didn’t respond to any of them. Strange.” At dinner with his old Texas politico friend Bob Strauss shortly after his forty-minute chat with the president, Bob Strauss told him that President Clinton had told Bob Strauss that his conversation with Richard Nixon was “the best conversation” he’d had as president.
When the Night Creature returned to the White House for his meet-ing with the president of the United States, they both drank diet Cokes—Clinton from the can, Nixon from a glass. Bill Clinton told him he had put on weight defending himself against Gennifer’s charges in New Hampshire. Bill Clinton used Nixonian words with him: asshole, son of a bitch, bastard. Bill Clinton took him up to the residence to meet Hillary and Chelsea: “The kid ran right to him and never once looked at her mother. I could see that she had a warm relationship with him but was almost afraid of her . . . . Hillary is a piece of work. She was very respectful to me and said all the right things . . . . Hillary told me we had done ‘great things on the domestic side’ although compliments coming from her are like—I don’t know what.”
There may have been a stake through his black heart, but the Night Creature felt alive after his reentry to the White House. He couldn’t stop talking about his visit: “Clinton knows how the game is played . . . the trip was probably the best one I have had to Washington since I left the Presidency . . . it was the best conversation with a president I’ve had since I was president. Better than with Bush and I’ve never had such a conversation with Reagan. It was never a dialogue with the others . . . . Clinton is a fast learner and he’s not afraid to defer to someone else’s expertise. My only concern is that if his numbers are up, he may get cocky and not be as willing to listen to me . . . as long as he’s talking to me, he’ll be okay.” And talking they were. Bill Clinton called him for advice again . . . and again.
The Night Creature’s admiration for Hillary was growing, meanwhile, into near infatuation. “Hillary is becoming an icon . . . . He doesn’t scare anybody. Hillary inspires fear!” He told new Clinton adviser David Gergen: “She’s always there, working with him, working apart from him, pushing him to take on more, taking it on herself. No one can control her!” He even gave Gergen advice to make Hillary look better. “Rein in Hillary’s sharp sides. She can’t continue to appear like those French women at the guillotine during the revolution, just watching, knitting and knitting.” He did a scowling imitation of Madame Defarge for Gergen to make sure Gergen got it. After seeing Hillary testify before Congress about her health plan, he said, “Goddamnit! She has the gift of dazzle! She knocked them dead up there! They swooned over her and gave her a standing ovation. She takes the gloves off but does it with such sickening sweetness that it makes me want to gag.” It was a wonder his Monica didn’t raise an eyebrow the way he carried on about Hillary: “She’s so clever . . . . She’s invisible when the negative stuff erupts . . . . She’s strong and decisive, she’s just good . . . . She’s the tower of strength and intellect around there.”
But if there was a relationship in the making between the Night Creature and the First Lady, all chances of it ended when the Night Creature’s longtime companion, his long-suffering wife, Pale Pat, died. The president of the United States didn’t go to Pale Pat’s funeral; neither did Hillary; neither did any cabinet member. Bill Clinton sent . . . a black man . . . Vernon Jordan, who, a few years later, would try to find Monica Lewinsky a job. The Night Creature, insulted, wounded, horrified, raged! “Vernon Jordan? The Clintons sent Vernon Jordan? Come on! Hillary should have been there! He comes to me for advice to save his ass and he can’t even send a Cabinet member to Mrs. Nixon’s funeral?”
Well fuck them! the Night Creature thought, and immersed himself once again in his vat of bubbling bile, suddenly paying eyebrow-squiggling attention to the developing scandal called Whitewater. “Hillary’s up to her ass in it, they are both guilty as hell . . . . It’s worse than Watergate. In Watergate, we didn�
�t have profiteering, and we didn’t have a body . . . . Clinton and Hillary are guilty of obstruction of justice, maybe more. Period. Our people must not be afraid to grab this thing and shake all of the evidence loose. Watergate was wrong; Whitewater is wrong. I paid the price, the Clintons should pay the price . . . . He’s pretending not to notice Whitewater. Of course I tried that and it doesn’t really work . . . . How dare he bitch about the press coverage? They have treated him with kid gloves. He should be kissing their ass, as Johnson used to say, in Macy’s window . . . . To think that Hillary came after me during Watergate! They are making the same goddamn mistakes we made . . . and here was Hillary on the Impeachment Committee, screaming about the eighteen and a half minutes missing from the tape, and now she’s in Little Rock, shredding.”
As the Night Creature watched the Pope being greeted by the Clintons on television, he snarled, “Well how do you like this? The Pope and the Clintons together! The Saint and the Sinner! What a pair! And Hillary standing there! Oh boy!” Hell hath no fury like a Night Creature’s pale longtime companion’s funeral scorned . . . and in his fury he even called Bob Dole, his soul brother, to tell him to “put someone good” on the select Senate Whitewater Committee—“We can’t have a bunch of dumbos asking the questions.”
But underneath everything, he was profoundly depressed. A shrewd political operative, he knew Whitewater wasn’t going to bring Bill Clinton down, any more than his philandering was. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore,” he glumly told his Monica; “look around—sex, drugs, violence everywhere. Remember when this whole thing got started in the sixties and seventies. Counterculture, they called it. Morals went out the window. Nobody cared about other people, just themselves . . . so you see, the people elected Clinton because they’re surrounded by immorality on all sides. It gets to the point where it doesn’t affect them anymore. So they sit and listen to what he has to say about health care and saving the spotted owl and are tone-deaf when it comes to his personal character.”
American Rhapsody Page 17
