Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (48 page)

My own relationship with Buchanan goes back to the New Hampshire primary in 1968 when Nixon was still on the dim fringes of his political comeback. We spent about eight hours one night in a Boston hotel room, finishing off a half gallon of Old Crow and arguing savagely about politics: as I recall, I kept asking him why a person who seemed to have good sense would be hanging around with Nixon. It was clear even then that Buchanan considered me stone crazy, and my dismissal of Nixon as a hopeless bum with no chance of winning anything seemed to amuse him more than anything else.

About eight months later, after one of the strangest and most brutal years in American history, Richard Nixon was president and Pat Buchanan was one of his top two speechwriters along with Ray Price, the house moderate. I didn’t see Pat again until the McGovern campaign in ’72 when Ron Ziegler refused to have me on the Nixon press plane, and Buchanan intervened to get me past the White House guard and into what turned out to be a dull and useless seat on the plane with the rest of the White House press corps. It was also Buchanan who interviewed Garry Wills, introducing him into the Nixon campaign of 1968—an act of principle that resulted in an extremely unfriendly book called
Nixon Agonistes
.

So it seemed entirely logical, I thought—going back to Washington
in the midst of this stinking Watergate summer—to call Buchanan and see if he felt like having thirteen or fourteen drinks on some afternoon when he wasn’t at the White House working feverishly in what he calls “the bunker.” Price and Buchanan write almost everything Nixon says, and they are busier than usual these days, primarily figuring out what
not
to say. I spent most of one Saturday afternoon with Pat lounging around a tin umbrella table beside the Watergate pool and talking lazily about politics in general. When I called him at the White House the day before, the first thing he said was “Yeah, I just finished your book.”

“Oh Jesus,” I replied, thinking this naturally meant the end of any relationship we’d ever have. But he laughed. “Yeah, it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.”

One of the first things I asked him that afternoon was something that had been simmering in my head for at least a year or so, and that was how he could feel comfortable with strange friends like me and Rick Stearns, and particularly how he could possibly feel comfortable sitting out in the open—in plain sight of the whole Watergate crowd—with a known monster whose affection for Richard Nixon was a matter of fairly brutal common knowledge—or how he felt comfortable playing poker once or twice a week sometimes with Rick Stearns, whose political views are almost as diametrically opposed to Buchanan’s as mine are. He shrugged it off with a grin, opening another beer. “Oh, well, we ideologues seem to get along better than the others. I don’t agree with Rick on anything at all that I can think of, but I like him and I respect his honesty.”

A strange notion, the far left and far right finding some kind of odd common ground beside the Watergate pool, and particularly when one of them is a top Nixon speechwriter, spending most of his time trying to keep the Boss from sinking like a stone in foul water, yet now and then laughingly referring to the White House as The Bunker.

After the sixth or seventh beer, I told him about our abortive plot several nights earlier to seize Colson out of his house and drag him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile Cutlass. He laughed and said something to the effect that “Colson’s so tough, he might like it.” And then, talking further about Colson, he said, “But you know he’s not really a conservative.”

And that’s what seems to separate the two GOP camps, like it separates Barry Goldwater from Richard Nixon. Very much like the difference between the Humphrey Democrats and the McGovern Democrats. The ideological wing versus the pragmatists, and by Buchanan’s standards, it’s doubtful that he even considers Richard Nixon a conservative.

My strange and violent reference to Colson seemed to amuse him more than anything else. “I want to be very clear on one thing,” I assured him. “If you’re thinking about having me busted for conspiracy on this, remember that I’ve already deliberately dragged you into it.” He laughed again and then mentioned something about the “one overt act” necessary for a conspiracy charge, and I quickly said that I had no idea where Tex Colson even lived and didn’t really want to know, so that even if we’d wanted to drag the vicious bastard down Pennsylvania Avenue at sixty miles per hour behind a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass, we had no idea, that night, where to find him, and about halfway into the plot we crashed into a black and gold Cadillac on Connecticut Avenue and drew a huge mob of angry blacks who ended all thought of taking vengeance on Colson. It was all I could do to get out of that scene without getting beaten like a gong for the small crease our rented Cutlass had put in the fender of the Cadillac.

Which brings us back to that accident report I just wrote and sent off to Mr. Roach at Avis Mid-Atlantic Headquarters in Arlington. The accident occurred about three thirty in the morning when either Warren Beatty or Pat Caddell opened the door of a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass I’d rented at Dulles airport earlier that day, and banged the door against the fender of a massive black & gold Cadillac roadster parked in front of a late-night restaurant on Connecticut Avenue called Anna Maria’s. It seemed like a small thing at the time, but in retrospect it might have spared us all—including McGovern—an extremely nasty episode.

Because somewhere in the late hours of that evening, when the drink had taken hold and people were jabbering loosely about anything that came into their heads, somebody mentioned that “the worst and most vicious” of Nixon’s backstairs White House hit men—Charles “Tex” Colson—was probably the only one of the dozen or more Nixon/
CREEP functionaries thus far sucked into “the Watergate scandal” who was not likely to do any time, or even be indicted.

It was a long, free-falling conversation, with people wandering in and out, over a time span of an hour or so—journalists, pols, spectators—and the focus of it, as I recall, was a question that I was trying to get some bets on: How many of the primary Watergate figures would actually serve time in prison?

The reactions ranged from my own guess that only Magruder and Dean would live long enough to serve time in prison, to Mankiewicz’s flat assertion that “everybody except Colson” would be indicted, convicted, sentenced, and actually hauled off to prison.

(Everybody involved in this conversation will no doubt deny any connection with it—or even hearing about it, for that matter—but what the hell? It did, in fact, take place over the course of some two or three days, in several locations, but the seed of the speculation took root in the final early morning hours of McGovern’s party . . . although I don’t remember that George himself was involved or even within earshot at any time. He has finally come around to the point where his friends don’t mind calling him “George” in the friendly privacy of his own home, but that is not quite the same thing as getting him involved in a felony-conspiracy/attempted murder charge that some wild-eyed, Nixon-appointed geek in the Justice Department might try to crank up on the basis of a series of boozy conversations among journalists, politicians, and other half-drunk cynics. Anybody who has spent any time around late-night motel bars with the press corps on a presidential campaign knows better than to take their talk seriously . . . but after reading reviews of my book on the ’72 campaign, it occurs to me that some people will believe almost
anything
that fits their preconceived notions.)

And so much for all that.

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, McLean, Arlington, Cabin John, and especially in the leafy white ghetto
of the district’s northwest quadrant. You can wander into Nathans 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.”

The axis of Nixon’s new and perhaps final strategy began to surface with the first mention of “the tapes,” and it has developed with the inevitability of either desperation or inspired strategy ever since. The key question is whether the “constitutional crisis” Nixon seems determined to
bring down on himself by forcing the Tape Issue all the way to the Supreme Court is a crisis that was genuinely forced on him by accident—or whether it is a masterpiece of legal cynicism that bubbled up at some midnight hour many weeks ago from the depths of attorney John Wilson’s legendary legal mind.

The conventional press wisdom—backed up by what would normally be considered “good evidence,” or at least reliable leaks from the Ervin committee—holds that the existence of the presidential tapes & the fact that Nixon has been systematically bugging every conversation he’s ever had with anybody, in any of his offices, ever since he got elected, was a secret that was only unearthed by luck, shrewdness, and high-powered sleuth-work. According to unofficial but consistently reliable sources, Alex Butterfield—current head of the Federal Aviation Administration and former “chief for internal security” at the White House—was privately interviewed “more or less on a hunch” by Ervin committee investigators, and during the course of this interview talked himself into such an untenable position while trying to explain the verbatim-accuracy of some Oval Office logs that he finally caved in and spilled the whole story about Nixon’s taping apparatus.