Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (58 page)

Few people had been told, officially, about the president’s new tape toy; the only people who knew about it, officially, were Nixon, Haldeman, Larry Higby, Steve Bull, Alex Butterfield, and the three Secret Service agents responsible for keeping it in order ... But unofficially almost everybody with personal access to the Oval Office had either been told on the sly or knew Richard Nixon well enough so they didn’t need to be told ... In any case, there is enough testimony in the files of the Senate Watergate Committee to suggest that most of them had their own recording systems and taped most of what they said to each other anyway.

Neither John Ehrlichman nor Charles Colson, for instance, were “officially” aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had constructed
for President Nixon. According to Alex Butterfield’s testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon told chief SS agent Wong to have his electronics experts wire every room, desk, lamp, phone, and mantelpiece inside the White House grounds where the president was likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject.

I’ve been using tape recorders in all kinds of journalistic situations for almost ten years, all kinds of equipment, ranging from ten-inch studio reels to raisin-sized minibugs—but I have never even
seen
anything like the system the Secret Service experts rigged up for Nixon in the White House. In addition to dozens of wireless, voice-activated mikes about the size of a pencil eraser that he had built into the woodwork, there were also custom-built sensors, delay mechanisms, and “standby” switches wired into telephones that either Bull or Butterfield could activate.

In the Cabinet Room, for instance, Nixon had microphones built into the bases of the wall lamps that he could turn on or off with harmless-looking buzzers labeled “Haldeman” and “Butterfield” on the rug underneath the cabinet table in front of his chair. The tapes and recording equipment were installed in a locked closet in the basement of the West Wing, but Nixon could start the reels rolling by simply pressing on the floor buzzer marked “Butterfield” with the toe of his shoe—and to stop the reels, putting the machinery back on standby, he could step on the “Haldeman” button . . .

Any serious description of Nixon’s awesome tape-recording system would take thousands of words and boggle the minds of most laymen, but even this quick capsule is enough to suggest two fairly obvious but rarely mentioned conclusions: Anybody with this kind of a tape system, installed and maintained twenty-four hours a day by Secret Service electronics experts, is going to consistently produce extremely high quality voice reproductions. And since the White House personnel office can hire the best transcribing typists available and provide them with the best tape-transcribing machinery on the market, there is only one conceivable reason for those thousands of maddening, strategically spotted “unintelligibles” in the Nixon version of the White House Tapes. Any Kelly Girl agency in the country would have given Nixon his money back if their
secretaries had done that kind of damage to his transcripts. Sloppiness of that magnitude can only be deliberate, and Nixon is known to have personally edited most of those tape transcripts before they were typed for the printer ... Which doesn’t mean much, now that Nixon’s version of the transcripts is no longer potential evidence but sloppy artifacts that are no longer even interesting to read except as an almost criminally inept contrast to the vastly more detailed and coherent transcripts that House Judiciary Committee transcribers produced from the same tapes. The only people with any reason to worry about either the implications of those butchered transcripts or the ham-fisted criminal who did the final editing job are the editors at whichever publishing house decides to pay Richard Nixon $2 million for his presidential memoirs, which will be heavily dependent on that vast haul of Oval Office tapes that Gerald Ford has just decreed are the personal property of Richard Nixon. He will have the final edit on
those
transcripts, too—just before he sends the final draft of his memoirs to the printer. The finished book will probably sell for $15, and a lot of people will be stupid enough to buy it.

The second and more meaningful aspect vis-à-vis Nixon’s tape system has to do with the way he used it. Most tape freaks see their toys as a means to bug other people, but Nixon had the SS technicians install almost every concealed bug in his system with a keen eye for its proximity to Richard Nixon.

According to Butterfield, Nixon was so obsessed with recording every move and moment of his presidency for the history books that he often seemed to be thinking of nothing else. When he walked from the White House to his office in the Executive Office Building (EOB), for instance, he would carry a small tape recorder in front of his mouth and maintain a steady conversation with it as he moved in his stiff-legged way across the lawn ... And although we will never hear those tapes, the mere fact that he was constantly making them, for reasons of his own, confirms Alex Butterfield’s observation that Richard Nixon was so bewitched with the fact that he really was
the president
that his only sense of himself in that job came from the moments he could somehow record and squirrel away in some safe place, for tomorrow night or the ages.

There is a bleeding kind of irony in this unnatural obsession of Nixon’s with his place in history when you realize what must have happened
to his mind when he finally realized, probably sometime in those last few days of his doomed presidency, just exactly what kind of place in history was even then being carved out for him.

In the way it is usually offered, the sleazy little argument that “Nixon has been punished enough” is an ignorant, hack politician cliché ... But that image of him walking awkward and alone across the White House lawn at night, oblivious to everything in front or on either side of him except that little black and silver tape recorder that he is holding up to his lips, talking softly and constantly to “history,” with the brittle intensity of a madman: when you think on that image for a while, remember that the name Nixon will seem to give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next three hundred years, and in every history book written from now on, “Nixon” will be synonymous with shame, corruption, and failure.

No other president in American history has been driven out of the White House in a cloud of disgrace. No other president has been forced to preside over the degrading collapse of his own administration or been forced to stand aside and watch helplessly—and also guiltily—while some of his close friends and ranking assistants are led off to jail. And finally, no president of the United States has ever been so vulnerable to criminal prosecution, so menaced by the threat of indictment and trial, crouched in the dock of a federal courtroom and so obviously headed for prison that only the sudden grant of presidential pardon from the man he appointed to succeed him could prevent his final humiliation.

These are the stinking realities that will determine Richard Nixon’s place in American history ... And in this ugly context, the argument that “Richard Nixon has been punished enough” takes on a different meaning. He will spend many nights by himself in his study out there in San Clemente, listening over and over to those tapes he made for the ages and half remembering the feel of thick grass on the Rose Garden lawn adding a strange new spring to his walk, even making him talk a bit louder as he makes his own knotty, plastic kind of love to his sweet little Japanese bride, telling it over and over again that he really
is
The President, The Most Powerful Man in the World—and goddamn it, you better never forget that!

Richard Nixon is free now. He bargained wisely and well. His arrangement with Ford has worked nicely, despite that week or so of bad feeling when he had to get a little rough with Jerry about the pardon, threatening to call in the
L.A. Times
man and play that quick little tape of their conversation in the Oval Office—the one where he offered to make Jerry the vice president in exchange for a presidential pardon whenever he asked for it—and he had known, by then, that he would probably need it a lot sooner than Jerry realized. Once their arrangement was made (and taped), Nixon just rode for as long as he could, then got off in time to sign up for his lifetime dole as a former president.

He will rest for a while, then come back to haunt us again. His mush-wit son-in-law, David Eisenhower, is urging him to run for the U.S. Senate from California in 1976, and Richard Nixon is shameless enough to do it. Or if not in the Senate, he will turn up somewhere else. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of, at this point in time, is that we are going to have Richard Milhous Nixon to kick around for at least a little while longer.

__ __ __ __

With both Hunter and Jann Wenner scouting around for the next epic story for Hunter to cover, Vietnam soon emerged as the obvious elephant in the room, with Saigon on the brink of falling. Hunter waltzed in to the war with thousands of dollars duct-taped to his torso, made a few tentative trips to combat zones, and spent the rest of his time drinking in his hotel’s courtyard with the other war correspondents before fleeing to a hotel by the beach in Laos as Saigon became engulfed in chaos. Hunter’s Vietnam epic was never written; whether due to stress, fear, exhaustion, or a profound kind of writer’s block, Hunter’s confrontation with his generation’s defining war produced only these brief notes and correspondence.

Letter from JSW to HST, 4/22/75

Hunter,

My many years of experience in war coverage and running military press corps, involvement in revolutions, and general talent for blitzkrieg action, tells me that you should make your own decision as to when to leave Saigon for a safe zone. I do not want coverage of Saigon after the official evacutaion and do not want you to stay unless you personally want to. Your insurance expires once the embassy closes. I cannot afford twenty-five grand for a post-evacuation piece. Think it would be unwise and unsafe for you to stay since you don’t know the city or the local citizens or have any time-tested credentials with the soon-to-be new centers.

It’s impossible for us to get a phone call through, otherwise
I would have certainly called up for a speed-crazed chat about what you should do in a situation with which I’m totally familiar, and ... Jesus, the overseas operator just said that all Saigon numbers beginning with nine are now completely out ... So I guess we can’t have that telephone call, and I was looking forward to negotiating the prices and the expenses on the piece.

Would like you to return to San Francisco rather than write in Hong Kong or visit Laos since the piece is on the last days of the American Empire in Saigon, and seeing the half-mad ambassador fleeing with the flag under his arm would make a nice kicker. If you go through Hong Kong, wire and call from there and we can settle deadlines then.

In closing, I wish I was there with you, facing the problem.

Jann

May 22, 1975

We won a military victory over the French and we’ll win it over the Americans too. Yes, their Dien Bien Phu is still to come, and it will come. The Americans will lose the war on the day when their military might is at its maximum and the great machine they’ve put together can’t move any more . . . Because all that money and strength will be a stone around their neck. It’s inevitable.

—General Vo Nguyen Giap, 1969

It is 3:55 on a hot, wet Sunday morning in Saigon, and I am out of ice again. It has been raining most of the night, and the patio bar here in the Hotel Continental closed early. The paper in my notebook is limp, and the blue and white tiles on my floor are so slick with humidity that not even these white-canvas, rubber-soled basketball shoes can provide enough real traction for me to pace back and forth in the classic, highspeed style of a man caving in to The Fear.

This empty silver ice bucket is the least of my problems tonight; all I have to do to get it filled is go out in the darkened hallway and wake up any of the three or four tiny, frail-looking old men in white pajamas who are sleeping uneasily out there on green bamboo mats behind the circular staircase leading down to the lobby. The slightest noise or touch will wake them instantly; and after sleeping outside my room for almost a week, they have learned to live with my nightly ice problem in the same spirit of tolerant fatalism that I have learned to live with the nightly thumping sound of artillery fire outside my window, five or six miles to
the south. It is a sound I have never heard before—not even from a safe distance—so I can never be sure if the faraway, deep-rumbling explosions that rattle the ice in my bucket every night are “outgoing” or “incoming.”

There has been a noticeable lack of distant artillery fire tonight—which is probably an ominous sign, because it means the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops that already surround this doomed volcano of a city on three sides are no doubt spending these peaceful, early morning hours rolling their doomsday 130-mm siege cannons into place out there in the mud just north of Saigon’s defense line around Bien Hoa and the remnants of what was once the biggest U.S. Air Force base outside the continental U.S. The ARVN Eighteenth Division that was supposed to protect Bien Hoa—just fifteen miles north of Saigon, on a four-lane concrete highway—has apparently been ground into hamburger in the weeklong battle for Xuan Loc. Latest reports from the front, as it were, say that two of the Eighteenth’s three regiments no longer exist, for one reason or another, and that the third is down to an effective fighting strength of five hundred men.