Crooked (28 page)

The ride went from dream to memory, it seemed to me—the old man of the bayou thinking of his past. Now we witnessed the terrifying sack of a Caribbean port. Pirates ransacked the city, tortured its inhabitants, auctioned the rest into sexual slavery. The situation worsened. Now the marauders set the city afire and got roaringly drunk. The other passengers looked charmed. The winding river of debauchery at last took us beneath the city into its dungeons, past prisoners certain to die. Even its supporting timbers were on fire, on the point of collapse, as drunken pirates, singing, laughingly shot at one another in a subterranean room full of gunpowder in a scene of blackest nihilism.

And the final pirate perched on top of a pile of gold, drunk as I wanted to be, clearly the double of the earlier skeleton.
You will die, Mr. Nixon, just as I have,
it seemed to say.
Rich as I am, powerful as you are
. This was entertainment? I stumbled out of the boat, mocked by piratical laughter. I couldn’t leave fast enough. I was going to die, I knew.

The children ran to and fro and I took Pat’s arm, pulled her down one of the narrow streets of the absurdly faux-sordid New Orleans French Quarter, into an empty little forecourt. We were alone, just for a moment.

“I have to talk to you,” I said.

“What is it?” She sounded more surprised and annoyed than interested.

“I know you don’t really love me anymore,” I said. What was the point in lying?

“What?” Pat said.

“I know it—I’ve known it for a while. Years. I know I’ve turned into—”

“Sir, excuse me,” said a voice. It was Gary. “We may have a crisis.”

What followed took half an hour and $11.85 fed into a pay phone when the radiophone died, the money curried from Secret Service agents, journalists, and passersby. Ultimately it was, I think, sunspots and not a partial preemptive launch.

That took us on to the Haunted Mansion, which I had been avoiding. Surely if the ghost of Agent Reindeer was going to pull a fast one, that would be the venue. I sat with two tiny cousins who bounced up and down with anticipation. I waited glumly through a nonsensical introduction that included (could they be serious?) a staged suicide. I thought of the haunted mansion waiting for me at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Was Walt trying to tell me something?

The ride that followed was meant as, I guess, a sort of musical carnivalesque romp through an accursed plantation home, but the farther we got, the stranger it seemed. After a portentous front hallway, we lost all architectural coherence and seemed to be sliding into a terrifying vision of the afterlife. A ruined dining room; an attic cluttered with the debris of countless atrocities. And then I stared into a black abyss out of which spirits ascended in a never-ending throng. We had left the house now—were we outside? How was this possible? We trundled through a graveyard alight with singing dead men and women. This was Disney World? A clockwork abattoir? I felt I’d been returned to Pawtuxet Farm.

Pat caught my hand to slow me down.

“Try to have a little fun, Dick,” Pat said. “Act normal, maybe? We’re at Disney World. You’re the president.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About what I said earlier…”

“Come on, the fireworks are starting in a minute. We just have time to get to Main Street.”

Julie and Tricia had wandered off together, taking the children, and Pat and I fled toward the exit as explosions began behind us. I turned and saw fireworks towering above the illuminated castle. We stopped in the town square to watch. I’ve never liked fireworks, but I felt a patriotic duty to look attentive and happy. Everyone was watching me, after all. This was the people’s moment to see fireworks a few weeks before Christmas at Disney World with Richard Nixon, whatever his approval rating. And I felt, maybe, a little of what I was supposed to feel. It was a stage set and we were supposed to be in the mythical small-town America I’d grown up reading about. Not the dusty, miserable housing development of Yorba Linda, but a town out in the plains somewhere, far from any oceans, far from conspiracies and lies. A place you could grow up in and not want to leave. A place with springs, summers, falls, and winters instead of rain and mud and sun.

And finally the music came to a crescendo and the fireworks did the enormous airburst that signals the end of the show. But when it fell silent, I heard a hissing above us and then felt a cool prickling on my face. What was happening now?

It was, impossibly, snow, falling past the mock-ups of buildings with their forced perspective frontages and—wait…where were we? We weren’t in California. Where were we? Pat took my hand, smiling. Just a clever piece of theater, I thought, as my features convulsed and I looked down, hiding sudden tears. And then I sobbed, ducking the cameras as an unfamiliar feeling swept through me. I felt homesick for a place that had never been and I felt another thing, the impossible sorcery that Agent Reindeer had placed here for me to find. Absolution.

In March of 1974 a grand jury indicted Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and a host of others for their role in covering up the break-in at the Watergate. I was, legally, an “unindicted coconspirator.” None of them ever spoke to me again.

The subpoenas continued to come. I gave them transcripts, made and edited under my supervision. Why not? And I took my case to the Supreme Court, that mystic body now invisible to me but apparently still present to the rest of the world.

I was with Henry when we received the news. The Supreme Court had unanimously voted to overrule our claim of executive privilege.

Henry looked to me, his blue eyes liquid and of infinite depth. I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the man who had won me the presidency, who was, in fact, loyal almost to the end.

“I do not understand,” Henry said. “How can they connect you with this? How can you let them do this?”

I shook my head. “I always thought we could win this one.” Was I performing a mournful shame, or feeling it, or both? It was impossible to know.

“The impeachment will come,” he said.

“Pray with me, Henry.”

“What?”

Once I was on the floor he really had no choice. Two grown men kneeling on the carpet in the room where Lincoln had held his last reception. Did we actually pray? I certainly didn’t know how, or what to pray to. Of Henry, I can only speculate about whom or what he might have called upon. I couldn’t even quite laugh at him, he looked so earnest and awkward and sorry. I was his only chance at power and he’d just never conceived I’d be this bad at it. He had, in his way, been the one who believed in me the most.

“I have never
been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interests of America first…Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.”

Beyond the camera lens, I could see, Kissinger was scowling, and I believe it was in that moment that he understood what we’d done to him.

The recording sessions took place over several grueling months, produced between one and four in the morning daily, aided by Arkady’s and Tatiana’s unheralded abilities as mimics and their gifts for improvisation.

Thus was born the true Nixon, the behind-closed-doors, off-the-record Nixon. We invented him and his voice on the tapes we’d made during all those late nights, halfway or fully drunk, declaiming into the microphones, standing or sitting or lying on our backs in the Oval Office. His brusque misanthropy, his legalistic diction, his vocabulary utterly impoverished except in the area of profanity. He was a chimera of Pat and me, Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Haig, of my mother’s sly secretiveness and my father’s warmth-less profane jocularity with his customers.

We created the long lie by which the world would always know me. We’d do three or four tapes in a session, carefully noting the notional place in the timeline of evasion, venality, criminality, and cowardice among the off-the-cuff diatribes against Jews and blacks and homosexuals, liberals and hippies and reporters. Pat was the silent partner but displayed a particular genius at urging the rest of them on by scribbling lines on a legal pad or miming the next twist in the conversation in a Harpo Marx turn. We’d made it all up, solemnly or, more often, doubled up with silent laughter, laughing until we cried at the buffoon we were making for ourselves. I’m proudly the funniest president, a punch line for as long as the great Republic stands, but we were always our best audience. And then, inch by inch, we let them tear the tapes from us, savagely battling while inviting the legislature and the judiciary to come and rip our guts out. They’d trapped Gregor and Henry and most of all me, and like Samson in the Temple, I brought the house down.

Now Pat stood behind Kissinger and watched without expression as I spoke to the camera.

“As I recall the high hopes for America with which we began this second term, I feel a great sadness that I will not be here in this office working on your behalf to achieve those hopes in the next two and a half years.”

Could I even do this? Just by saying the words, could I cease to be president? None of the former presidents I knew could answer this. Johnson never knew what he had. Kennedy was shot down. Eisenhower’s mind was ruined. Roosevelt died in harness. Most who left this office were dead a few years later.

“But in turning over direction of the government to Vice President Ford, I know, as I told the nation when I nominated him for that office ten months ago, that the leadership of America will be in good hands.”

I would go, Ford would speak the oath, and probably history would continue. Would the dark power leave me? Would it chase me to the end of my legal term in office? Or to the end of my life?

The speech trailed off; I mouthed regrets, hopes of peace, best wishes, and have-a-good-summer-everyone. In twenty-four hours I would have no political existence beyond the ability to vote in federal and local elections.

I signed the letter, which read, in its entirety,
Dear Mr. Secretary: I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.
Henry shuddered and signed as well, witnessing as the power departed us both, leaving him with nothing but his preternatural rhetorical powers and a shared Nobel Peace Prize.

And with the pardon in place there wouldn’t be a trial and I’d never get to testify in my own defense. Soon it would all become muddled in the collective mind and I’d be viewed as not quite guilty, neither a traitor nor an innocent man, just an infamous kind of weasel, a national regret, a comedy gangster. A crook forever.

Arkady and Tatiana disappeared into the uncharted bureaucratic vastness of the Soviet Union. I’ve been largely cut off from my intelligence sources, but lately several declassified papers have hinted at the existence of a true shadow czarina of the old blood roaming the outback with her bodyguard and counselor, righting wrongs, investigating mysteries, and still waiting for the moment the once and future savior of a troubled nation will be found.

I had my own nation and I continued to haunt it, not least the Republican Party. They gasped to see me and Pat arrive, erect and defiant, to ruin political fund-raisers and photo opportunities. Our mere presence made a joke of things. Pat in particular, I think, enjoyed the pained expressions that propagated through the crowd.

And no pain was more acute and baffled than Ronald Reagan’s, the one they’d praise as a saint, the man who lost to me, the slack-jawed impostor who never managed to grasp the historical coincidence he lucked into. None of them did; the great secret of the Cold War was kept, and that is its own sort of victory. Meanwhile, I angled myself into every conceivable formal photograph and no one quite had the gall to keep me out. Give me an asterisk if you must; I was once the president.

It was at one of these occasions that Mikhail Gorbachev, deep in conversation with someone, caught my eye and—I will always believe it happened—raised his glass an infinitesimal amount in my direction. The knowing tribute of a man who, six years later, would disassemble his own empire and bring the great ridiculous drama to a close. Just as he was the last of the general secretaries, I am the last of the American sorcerer-presidents—the line ends with me.

Or at least it stands in abeyance until the fated day that I read of in the sealed chamber, the day when Richard Nixon’s true successors at long last will arrive. I, for one, await their coming.

It was a
wintry morning in the late fall of 1983. I looked up from my window at an iron-gray sky.

I’d been gone for a little over nine years. Nine years since the entire planet had tuned in to watch me quit my job as leader of the free world, walk to the helicopter, and vanish into the sky over Washington, DC, crowds cheering and waving their fists and razzing my departure. And today I would go back to public life. The nation had had nine years to get over it.

I prepared alone, fussing until the knot in my tie was perfect, my hair combed and dyed to a pristine blackness. I turned to the mirror and faced what I had to face, the daily reality, the famous visage, a commedia dell’arte mask crafted for avarice and comedy. The Secret Service men followed me into the elevator, and there were a last few seconds of peace before the long midmorning trek across the lobby of the hotel.

And there it was, the bow wave of astonishment that rolled out before me when I passed through public space anywhere on planet Earth. Hotel staff glanced up and then looked away, but civilians stared in open amazement. In nine years I’d become a figure from a tall tale, like Ichabod Crane or Rip van Winkle.
Trick or treat, ladies and
gentlemen,
I thought.
Happy Halloween.

Pat was waiting for me, and we walked out to the limousine that was idling by the curb in the light snow, the driver barely out of his teens. A crow cawed at me and I flinched, even after all these years. I caught the driver’s smirk in the rearview mirror.

He let us out into a puddle of slush at the foot of the broad icy steps of a modest Georgian building where the mayor of Des Moines waited with a cluster of assistants and school officials.

“Mr. President and First Lady, it’s an honor.” She stumbled over it, caught in the basilisk gaze of celebrity. I took that for a good sign. This was an easy one, a softball venue for a man like me.

They led me in by a side entrance, took me through quiet corridors to a steel door. I could hear the hum and chatter of the excited crowd as the mayor went in and gave them one last reminder of who they were about to see. She told it well. The Environmental Protection Agency. Title IX. Peace in Vietnam; détente; the voyage to China. Then, as usual, a slight faltering through last bits, edging past the salient details like a man on a narrow ledge.

And then: “Please welcome our thirty-seventh president, Richard Milhous Nixon.”

I squared my shoulders and made my entrance, walked solemnly to the lectern on the podium. There was a hush as I looked out at the eighth-grade class of the Des Moines Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.

I saw Pat standing at the back of the gymnasium, watching it happen. I let the silence drop and settle, breathed in, and leaned forward slightly to the microphone. And then, as I pronounced the first syllable, every nonadult person in the room began to yell at the top of his or her lungs.

I was looking up into a solid wall of gyrating arms and bellowing faces and children screaming at me. I’d miscalculated badly.

At first I couldn’t hear individual words. But then, I didn’t need to, did I? Every single monstrous one of them was in the same identical pose. Arms locked rigid overhead, second and third digit of each hand spread in an ecstasy of inspired mockery. Shoulders hunched, shaking phantom jowls. All shouting the same thing. Chanting it. Saying it like I’d never said it: Not. Crook. I am not a crook. I am
not
a crook. I am not a
crook.
I. Am not. A crook.

“Boys and girls,” I began. It was like speaking into a high wind. I stood stranded on the podium, waiting for the deluge to recede. If anything, it grew louder. I looked down at the cheap wood of the lectern. I remembered other, better lecterns.

“Boys and girls,” I started again. It just kicked them into higher gear, but I kept on. “It’s an honor to be here today at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. It’s truly marvelous. I couldn’t possibly be any happier.

“I was once just like you. I went to a small school in Yorba Linda, California, in a time long distant, but my hopes and dreams were the same as yours. I worked hard, and in 1946 I was elected to Congress.” The sound was dying down a little.

“In 1948 I was catapulted to national—”

“Tricky Dick!”
yelled a red-faced boy, and the cry was taken up and mere anarchy was again loosed upon the gymnasium. The boy wore a T-shirt with the word
Supertramp
on it. What the hell did that mean? The principal hopped onto the stage and made as if to take over, but I waved her off.

Down below, children ran left and right and objects were thrown and offenders were dragged from the room, the Chicago riots in miniature. They had Richard Nixon himself here, and they were going to make the most of it.

“It’s all right,” I told the principal. “They’re just having a little fun.” It wasn’t her fault. If I hadn’t wanted to be mocked by young teenagers, I could have protected and defended the Constitution like I’d said I would.

“You know, boys and girls, I like a joke as much as the next man, I really do,” I said. “Politics is a tough business, and you don’t get through without a thick skin. It’s—it’s not always easy. I ran for vice president in 1952 with Dwight Eisenhower, and, well…we had our own trouble with the Communists in those days.” Did eighth-graders know who Eisenhower was? They had at least heard the word
Communist,
a sort of socialist goblin to the Reagan youth.

“We faced great—great challenges. A nation divided against itself. The Soviet Union threatening to expand everywhere. Spies on our doorstep. Nuclear missiles. The Cold War. But so much opportunity. To come to power then…” I groped for words. What could I tell them? What did these kids know? I looked out at the blank half-pubescent faces. They knew Reagan, the ignorant pretender. They didn’t know who Eisenhower was. Or Stalin. Or me.

“For Christ’s sake, I was president!” I shouted into the microphone to a howl of feedback. In the back of the room, Pat winced and made a slight shushing motion with a pale and trembling hand. But I wasn’t done. Who knew the truth now? No one but her and Kissinger, a creature so far from human as to scarcely matter. A being who might never die at all. No, I had to tell them the story.

“Your mothers and fathers voted to make me their supreme leader. The highest office in the land, the most venerated position an American can aspire to. Laugh if you want to, but believe it, you little shits, I was your fucking president!”

When had the crowd gone silent? I heard the last words ring three times through the gymnasium, like Peter denying Jesus.

And all at once, I understood them. At their age I didn’t even know what a president was, really. Just that the people of our country decided who the best person in all of America was, and that person got to make the decisions. And I, the boy they’d one day call Tricky Dick, wanted to be that person. God, I wanted it, and I cannot tell a lie. I don’t know why, but I did.

So I knew why they were laughing. I’d taken the idea of the presidency and I’d turned it into a joke. And it’s not that it wasn’t funny, because whatever else I am, I am history’s funniest president. But these children were laughing at me to turn the thrust of a disappointment. They were laughing at me because I had hurt them in a very personal way. I was president the year they were born, the president their parents gave them. The best person in America turned out to be me, and they were still trying to laugh me off.

After I signed the letter of resignation, Pat and I walked to a waiting helicopter clutching our suitcases like newlyweds, and the concrete chambers beneath the White House were then sealed forever. I am the last chief executive ever to have seen them or practiced the vile sorceries to which they gave me access.

I looked at Pat. She shook her head no. Leave it. The Cold War was a lie, and far beyond the Iron Curtain, the blacked-out science cities lay frozen and empty.

There are truths so awful they can’t be told, and words so dense and alien and malign that they take eighteen and a half minutes to say and even digital tape cannot reproduce their accursed sounds. The runes of the sealed chamber hold all these truths—last and least among them, that once I wanted to be the president, defender of the Republic, the true one that was promised long ago, holder of the highest office in all the land. Even if I am a crook.