Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  “I don’t expect to be given anything for free,” Rockefeller interrupted.

  “Please, I think you all forget the crucial demographic here,” Henry broke in. “You forget the silent majority. I think that is the phrase.”

  “Henry means the middle class,” I said. “The conservative middle class who aren’t grabbing the mainstream press coverage the way the hippies are.”

  “The silent majority,” Henry intoned. And then, bafflingly, he began to sing.

  “What is he doing?” Reagan asked. It wasn’t a pleasant song—a high, soft chant. Part of it sounded as if it had been recorded and played backward. Part of it sounded as if more than one person might be singing. The air in the room seemed to solidify into a clear, hard substance that prevented any of us from moving until the music was done. I remember Ronald Reagan’s anguished, confused stare as the song explained to him in words he would never remember why he would not become president in 1969.

  My speech in Miami wasn’t a long or good one. Cheap metaphors and easy shots. I declared war on the loan sharks and Mafiosi and drug dealers. I talked about the face of a child. “Tonight…I see the face of a child” were my exact words. Pat’s face, though, is the one I remember. Shocked and smiling, the doll’s face smiling as the world broke.

  We all remember the Chicago riots and the shooting of Robert Kennedy but that was earlier. It shook out to a three-way race, me, the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, and right-wing Southern firebrand George Wallace. History records it as a wrenching, divisive violent election cycle.

  I remember it as a numb, angry, sour blur of days and weeks hurrying from place to place. After the Democratic Convention I was ahead by double digits. I didn’t debate either of the other candidates—why bother? Why bother doing any of it?

  In October the numbers shifted again, the weight of inarticulate discontent slowly and measurably turning back to Humphrey, like an unstoppably vast sleeping animal shifting as it dreamed.

  There was a darkness overseas and only I could prevent it. I spent four hours thinking of that darkness while I recorded dialogue for a comic variety show. “Sock it to me?” “Sock it to me?” “Sock it to me!” They thought it was hilarious.

  But this was my fourth time in a real presidential campaign: 1952, 1956, 1960, and now 1968. I ran a series of expertly managed press and media events choreographed around a candidate in a paroxysm of terror and urgent loneliness. I knew on some level—we all did—that everyone would learn from this and that we would leave the world a far more Nixonian place.

  Pat campaigned for me, shaking hands on the rope line for hours every day. I knew she hated smiling and grandstanding and shouted conversations. I wondered why she was there, hour after hour. Did she think I was going to be a good president? Did she like me after all?

  We were in danger, I knew that much. A handful of times, I saw—or maybe I didn’t—a misshapen figure watching me from the back of the crowd. It might have been Gregor; it might have been no one. I would look again and it would be an ordinary man, somebody silhouetted wrong against a second person, somebody leaning at an odd angle, someone in a hat. And once, another time, I saw my brother Arthur watching me from an upper-story window as I spoke to reporters. Saw him distinctly, mind you. I stopped speaking and looked, maybe four seconds of silence and eye contact. At the very end, he gave a negative shake of his head and then one of my press secretaries jostled me and the window was empty again.

  I asked Henry about it, and he said only that we would know when the time came. That the enemy would not hide its face. Henry wasn’t officially part of the campaign at all. He wasn’t on the schedule, or on the buses and planes. He arrived at all hours to give his odd little instructions, usually words or phrases to include in the next day’s speech. At times I wondered if the other people in the campaign could see him. He’d stand looking over Pat’s shoulder; I’d spot him in crowds peering quizzically up at me through his thick glasses.

  We slept on buses, trains, in hotels, but what I remember were the airplane rides by night, the DC-3s that would shake and pop and vault into the air. Then the lights would dim, and I would settle deeper into my seat with a coat draped over me and try to sleep. In the darkness, I felt the least like Nixon that I ever would again. You couldn’t see my absurd-looking face, the caricature that had fixed me in the world, in history.

  Months passed and it seemed impossible that the world wasn’t seeing through this. Could this possibly be how a world power worked? A grim farce at the heart of it? Kissinger was managing the whole thing with some subtle sorcery, from my campaign speech to my cameo on Laugh-In to election night itself, when my campaign volunteers and smiling, bewildered Spiro Agnew and even Pat seemed on some level pleased. I had, I realized, lost track of whether I was a centrist Republican stalwart, a right-wing anti-Communist demagogue, a mole for Soviet intelligence, the proxy candidate for a Bavarian sorcerer, or the West’s last hope against an onrushing tide of insane chthonic forces. No one seemed to notice that Tricky Dick was himself a trick.

  In the few genuinely spontaneous public moments, I found there was a strange angry charge in the world. The middle twentieth century was a terrible, menacing environment and it seemed as if on some level that truth had penetrated. As Garry Wills would later write, “As I stood, bewildered like most reporters, in the insane din of that Wallace rally…I realized at last what had not sunk in at Miami’s riot, or Chicago’s. I realized this is a nation that might do anything. Even elect Nixon.”

  We were doing what we had to do. There were terrible and vast forces outside our control that necessitated a Nixon presidency. I knew that, but I also knew a few other things by then. I knew that I was getting what I most wanted in the world. I was getting my heart’s desire, a gift out of all proportion to merit or fairness. But I knew on what terms I was getting it. I was winning it all, but in such a way as to ensure it would never mean anything. So maybe people don’t change after all.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  January 1969

  The Southeast went to Wallace and Texas went to Humphrey. I won Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and then California. One by one the great names fell and it was decided. I was going to have it.

  But when I took the oath, would I become someone different? How was it going to feel? What would I know that I hadn’t known before? Would I feel a new power? Eisenhower had known something, but Kennedy hadn’t, and Truman hadn’t. Probably not Johnson either, but he was far too cunning to guess at.

  The time came. White-haired Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke the words into the cold morning air and I answered him, clearly and precisely.

  “I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear…that I will faithfully execute the office…of president of the United States.”

  This was it, I thought, right at the moment. I was saying it. I tried to feel every bit of it as it happened, to feel myself changing from civilian into the thirty-seventh president. To become, finally, something other than shitty Tricky Dick.

  “And will to the best of my ability…preserve, protect, and defend…”

  Nobody was ever going to fuck with me again. I was president! I tried to feel what Eisenhower felt, to take on that power. Eisenhower folded space, shrugged off bullets. Eisenhower was going to save the world. And now there was no Eisenhower. It would have to be me. This time it’s going to be different, I told myself. A brand-new Nixon.

  “…the Constitution of the United States…”

  It was almost over. It was ending. I was changing. Wasn’t I?

  “…so help me God.”

  I looked out at an entire planet staring back at me. I’d just become the most important person in the world, and not just to myself. There they all were. I wanted to rise into the air, the immanent Nixon, and stare fire from my eyes down at them. I waited for it to happen.

  I walked off the stage as the exact same person I’d been when I walked onto it. Only a little bit surprised at how m
uch I’d gotten my hopes up. At that, and at how, when the oath was concluded, the chief justice whispered a single word, so low that only I could hear: “Good-bye.”

  Afterward, the inaugural parade, in which Pat and I rode down Pennsylvania Avenue while protesters threw rocks, sticks, garbage, and firecrackers at us. Called me a liar and a villain. I hear they held their own ceremony and inaugurated a pig in my place, proclaimed me an impostor. Pat was composed and angry; the Secret Service was polite, worried, and apologetic; all I could think was Of course I am. But how did they know?

  Chapter Thirty

  January 1969

  When the fairy-tale round of dinners and dances and toasts and cheering concluded, at one thirty in the morning, Pat and I moved into our new house. The chief of the housekeeping staff walked us to the door but wouldn’t follow us inside, not after midnight. A staff tradition, she explained, glancing nervously up at the empty windows.

  The doors closed behind us. We’d been there dozens of times, but never like this. The entrance hall is two stories high with white columns. Our footsteps pinged off it and echoed. The house was cold and empty. Pat led the way as we stumbled from room to room, neither of us speaking. Eight years gone. All of a sudden, tears were running down my cheeks and dripping onto the lapel of my inaugural suit.

  George Washington himself oversaw the laying of the first stones, a hundred and seventy-five years ago, and now we lived here. The entrance hall was shining checkered marble. Here was the State Dining Room again. I remembered how much I’d resented sitting in the back. Now I’d sit at the head table with everyone looking up at me.

  We had a ballroom that seemed to stretch on for blocks, an inland sea of pale hardwood floor. I sat down at the Steinway grand piano and sent “Moon River” tinkling through the halls of government, liquid and immaculately pitched, as if the instrument had been tuned that morning and every morning. There was a map room, and a library, archipelagos of sitting rooms and pantries, doors disclosing new rooms with others visible beyond them rambling onward through archways and interior windows. We spilled from one to another, each a little jewel box or tiny world. James Polk’s Red Room dripped with baroque imperial opulence; low, crimson divans begged to be lounged on in depraved, melancholy attitudes. I had no idea how strict Puritan ideals had allowed this room to come into being—perhaps Benjamin Franklin had inspired it? A side deal with the Marquis de Lafayette? I struck a Napoleonic pose and almost got a smile from Pat.

  I staggered upstairs, through a yellow oval chamber—why always ovals?—and onto the Truman Balcony, looking south onto Pennsylvania Avenue and the real world.

  When Pat wandered off I tried out the armchairs in every room. Struck attitudes at windows as if weighing the fate of the universe. This wasn’t just the White House; people would call it the Nixon White House, a moment in history. No matter how I’d gotten here, I had the chance to make it great. What wouldn’t they say about the Nixon White House by the time we were done? Whatever was past, I could still be the man who saved the twentieth century, who saved the world. There was still time.

  I came through a doorway and saw Pat again. She never liked to show her real smile; she thought it made a mess of her face, and she used to turn away when she absolutely couldn’t help grinning, but I’d see the corner of it and know it was there. But she’d long since taken absolute control over her face, and she knew how to smile the way she wanted to.

  But now she was facing away from me. She was standing perfectly erect and hugging a pillow taken from one of the four-poster beds. She might have been happy, just trying to hold herself together and have the moment. Was she so happy she was trying to convince herself it was all real? I doubted it. She looked like someone unutterably weary who had forgotten how to find her way into sleep and was trying to figure it out again.

  However, shortly before dawn, there was one final formality to observe. I went to a storage room just two floors below the ground, the lowest place on the White House grounds. A small room, metal shelves with folded towels, linens, tablecloths. Henry was waiting. He had a small table set up.

  “It’s time, Mr. President.”

  “I’m here.”

  “The last ritual. They have sworn you in but we have a little more to do. I apologize for what comes next; there will be some pain.” He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves.

  “What is it we’re doing?”

  “We weaponize the chief executive, yes? We must begin. You will be missed soon enough.”

  He arranged several candles on the table and lit them and turned off the overhead light. He spoke rapidly under his breath, intent on his work, punching certain consonants, but I didn’t understand any of it. After some minutes he looked back up at me. “You must take off your jacket and shirt, Mr. President.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It is what I need if I am to help you. You must be marked. Your—er, your flesh.” He unrolled a cloth bundle containing needles, scalpels, typewritten notes.

  “I’m going to get a tattoo?”

  “Your back, yes.” The candles were making the air uncomfortably warm. “Sit, please.”

  “Wait, what are you putting on me?”

  He showed it to me, a photocopy of a slightly blurred daguerreotype of a man’s naked back. The man was lying down, his head not shown. “What you see here is not generally available. It was taken by one of the men who prepared Lincoln’s body for burial.”

  “This is a photograph of…”

  A version of the presidential seal, covering almost his entire back. The seal, but not. The eagle was primitive, more lizard than bird, the staring eye just a dot, crude wings raised rampant toward strange stars. Tiny stick figures arranged around the periphery. No one, Henry explained, knew who had tattooed Abraham Lincoln.

  “It is for the presidency, sir.”

  I took off my tie, my jacket, my shirt. It was close in the room, and we were neither of us small men. Henry sprinkled dried herbs into a glass ashtray and set them alight.

  “You will perhaps wish to close your eyes,” Henry said.

  Henry chanted again as he worked, first in what I guessed was Old High German, then something harsh and unrecognizable. Through it all his hands moved, swift and cool and sure, and I wondered where he had learned the craft of it. It took maybe half an hour, a burning prickling across my back, my arms, my shoulders.

  He sang and I realized I knew the song, my mother’s song. And I remembered now what had happened when she sang it. We smelled it on the wind, something like rotten meat, and then we heard it running—fast! Right at the house, right to the eaves, and it stopped. She kept singing, and I think maybe it listened. The next morning footprints circled the house, over and over, then went away toward the reservoir. We kicked dirt over them as the sun came up but I remember how small they were—a child’s footprints, or a small woman’s.

  I never learned what it was, or whether the song kept it away or brought it to us, or why. And did she learn the words in California, or in Ohio, or in another place? I’ll never know. A saint, I realized now, but of what dark church?

  I came to myself as Kissinger’s song grew louder and more rhythmic, punctuated with cries of “Iä! Iä!” I opened my eyes for a moment to see Kissinger chanting, his eyes closed, shirt sweated through. After a few minutes he stopped, panting, opened his eyes and focused, and he was Henry again, Harvard political consultant.

  “It has worked,” he said at last.

  He marked my forehead with something cold, then a sudden and frightfully incongruous touch of dry lips between two older men who were past their most attractive years, and it was done.

  “We are together in this, you and I,” he said. “I gamble on you, and you do likewise. We are friends, yes? Against all of them.”

  Afterward I examined myself in the long wide mirror of the palatial bathroom upstairs. The markings were runic characters and odd curving geometries. They extended down my arms and up my neck almost to t
he collar line. I would never dress informally in public again and it was a good thing Pat and I slept apart these days. I craned my neck to see what was on my back. A great circle and that awful rearing figure, face crude as a child’s drawing, wings outstretched, eyes to the stars.

  I was fifty-eight, sore and bloody; I had been elected vice president and then president. For the first time I felt changed.

  The next morning I walked the colonnade that led to the West Wing, not even feeling the January cold. A guard stood at attention and I saw, peripherally, one watchful Secret Service agent hand me off to another. I had, I remembered, a job to do. Maybe the swearing-in hadn’t done the trick by itself, but there was still a great deal to explore. Doors that opened only to the sworn president? Hidden messages that appeared only to my eyes? My nerves buzzed with it.

  The West Wing is just a bunch of slightly cramped offices, except for the Oval Office itself, which is marvelous. I tried to remember the last time I’d been in there completely alone. Not since the night I’d shot at Eisenhower, maybe. I let myself in, closed the door, and inhaled, smelled the freshly cleaned carpets. I’d be president for four whole years, at the very least. I had time.

  I walked around the room, making sure it was all in place. The new desk, the two low couches, the coffee table with the flowers on it. It was all mine. Nobody could kick me out of here. I sat at the desk and surveyed the room where the fate of the world might be decided. Checks and balances, yes, but who was kidding whom? This was where they kept the red phone.

  Okay, but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Shouldn’t I have magical powers now? I remembered Eisenhower standing at the desk, standing on this spot, glaring at the little man in front of him. He’d brought his hand down as if tearing away a curtain between us, and it had shredded the world outside. I made the same motion and only disturbed the chilled air of the West Wing.