On May 18, 8:09=EF=BF=BDam, Guillermo el Gato <devn...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I'm sitting in Dulles waiting for my flight back to Olde Yurp, and I
> overheard a woman say something like "Bush <mumble> McCain <mumble>"
> which pulled me out of my issue of The Economist. She then went on to
> say how great Nixon was as president and what a shame it was that he
> "got watergated." She then went on to describe him as a
> hyperintelligent man and some other things that put him as the little
> known fourth corner of the Trinity.
>
> I didn't have the heart to tell her that she'd be best voting for
> Clinton this time around. It wouldn't have made a difference anyhow.
>
> I thought it interesting that being caught for crimes committed would
> be considered "being watergated." I also thought it interesting that
> exactly those persons on Nixon's team learned their lesson that they
> would never be "watergated" again.
>
> It's good to be back in Olde Yurp. The scandals here are so mundane.
"Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real
thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very
dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at
the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his
family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned
Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout.
Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one
of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because
I pardoned Richard Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relation****p with Nixon for many years, but I
am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already
been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon
had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we
developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have
hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates
Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too,
am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone,
I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was
politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could
always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need
to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting
instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on
its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures
them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is
usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast
that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy
and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a
lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God
made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of
his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William
F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate
family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the
dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas
sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off
the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse
could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the
potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed
burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of
the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions
to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their
hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable --
some with liberal cranks *****ing about corpus delicti and habeas
corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off
on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was
sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his
own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese
interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-
stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket
would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that
empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a
man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he
needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his
funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should
have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President
Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse
things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked
him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog
with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was
scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon
was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the
physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly
without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody
trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest
historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to
get back on the ****p.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American
people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that
shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently
disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another
unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was
brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,"
said one. "And it ****s up my children's sense of values."
Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was
nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president
sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons.
It was Nixon's last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly
dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The
Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was
billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996
GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete
Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll
numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow
seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-
serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-
runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert
Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as
governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry
Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous
revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with
a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving ****trait of Nixon as even
more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike
accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger,
who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new
book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great
minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see
Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be
saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has
already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance
that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen
like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These
revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American
Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century
is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature.
"He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke
University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was
a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston
Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who
bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army
lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death.
When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the
bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from
the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for
Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was
the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed
Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so
good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He
seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able
to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get
Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was
often painful.
Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice
presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come
along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers"
speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about
it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon
finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential
campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard
Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona.
Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio
thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a
truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the
first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a
smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels
of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening
lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped
like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they
both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led
directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover
gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's
ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Wa****ngton.
Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how
Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It
permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of
Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an
unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in
hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered
White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled
over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's
relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front
of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished
attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a
textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked
free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton
says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why
he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he
quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't
be illegal."
****. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-
crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's
vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught
red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the
night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S.
District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery
and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax
evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and
tried to get a Coors distributor****p. He never spoke to Nixon again
and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but
he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like
salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was
scum, but it didn't bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover
was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse
than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard
Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes,
just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be
wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler
with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the
top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K
exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and
Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know
about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether
you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or
Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your
fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and
his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a
generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was
to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a
classic case of a smart man ****ing in his own nest. But he also ****
in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his
memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the
United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard
Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."
HS Thompson, May 1, 1994
|
