A Treasury of Great American Scandals (28 page)

The next morning: “We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy that are using any means [the president says, pounding his desk repeatedly]. We are going to use any means. Is that clear? Did they get the Brookings Institute [sic] raided last night? Get it done! I want it done! I want the Brookings safe cleared out.” (The president's order, coming a year before the Watergate break-in, apparently was never carried out.)

 

“I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he'll do what he's told, that every income tax return I want to see, I see. That he'll go after our enemies, not our friends. . . . Now, it's as simple as that. If he isn't, he doesn't get the job.”

 

“You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns. That's been going on for years, centuries, but when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in—I don't know, three or four centuries ago—it was homosexual. . . . Now, that's what happened to Britain, it happened earlier to France. And let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root them out, they don't let 'em hang around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them.”

 

“Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell, no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us.”

 

“You know, it's a funny thing. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews. . . . What is the matter with them? I suppose because most of them are psychiatrists.”

 

“I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”

 

“Archie's sitting here in his sloppy clothes and here's his hippie son-in-law who's married to his screwball-looking daughter. The son-in-law obviously is—apparently goes both ways.”

 

Referring again to Meathead's imagined bisexuality on
All in the Family
: “The point that I make is that, goddamn it, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. And the reason you don't glorify it . . . any more than you glorify whores. It outrages me because I don't want to see this country go that way. Well, in other countries, you know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.”

 

“Look, people get drunk. People chase girls. And the point is, it's a hell of a lot better for them to get drunk than to take drugs. It's better to chase girls than boys.”

 

“Listen, the lawyers in government are damn Jews.”

 

“The problem is the U.N. The United States is getting kicked around by a bunch of goddamned Africans and cannibals and horrible people and the rest.”

“. . . a pain in the neck, very difficult to handle.”

 

“With blacks you can usually settle for an incompetent, because there are just not enough competent ones, and so you put incompetents in and get along with them, because the symbolism is vitally important. You have to show you care.”

 

“That's the problem, finding a Mexican that is honest. And Italians have somewhat the same problem.”

 

“Goddamn it, the military, they're a bunch of greedy bastards. They want more officers' clubs and more men to shine their shoes. The sons of bitches are not interested in this country.”

 

“I'm sick of the whole bunch. The others are a bunch of goddamned cowards. The staff, except for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, screw them. The cabinet, except for [Treasury Secretary John B.] Connolly, the hell with them.”

 

“I'd rather use the nuclear bomb.”

 

“Goddammit, I'm never going to discuss this son of a bitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never.” (Nixon resigned the following year.)

Murder, Madness, and Just Plain Strange Episodes

 

In the great melting pot that is America, a few odd-balls are bound to bubble up—some deranged, others just a bit weird. A number have had quite an impact on the nation. Following is a survey of some of the most unsettling personalities and episodes in American history.

Bewitched

 

 

 

 

The English Puritans brought a little of the Old World with them when they settled in America during the seventeenth century, including that quaint old custom of killing accused witches. Though the slaughter never reached the epic scale it did in Europe, many innocent women and men lost their lives across New England, perhaps most infamously in a small Massachusetts hamlet called Salem Village. It was here that a band of attention-starved girls, all claiming to be tormented by witches, actually gained enough power through their hysterical performances to send twenty of their neighbors to the gallows. Adolescent angst was never so lethal.

The girls who launched the witch hunt in 1692 were, in all probability, just plain bored. Salem Village was not the most exciting place to grow up, and the strict Puritan ethic that suffused the town only made things more unbearable. Any respite from such an oppressive environment surely would be embraced by the children living in it. For some young women, this came at the feet of a strange woman named Tituba, a slave in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris, the town's minister. Tituba's superstitious tales entranced the girls, and the more they gathered around to hear her speak of the occult, the closer Salem came to madness.

Samuel Parris's daughter Betty, nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven, were the first to exhibit signs that all was not well in Salem, barking like dogs, for instance, and screaming in agony during prayer services. Others were quick to copy them, and soon the girls became known to the town as “the afflicted ones.” The devil was clearly at work, and all of Salem's collective energy was directed at rooting out his minions. The girls would have to lead the way. And with everyone's attention focused on them—a welcome change from their normal invisibility—“the afflicted ones” had to start producing. The strange storyteller was an obvious target. “Tituba . . . she . . . oh Tituba!” wailed Betty Parris in apparent delirium. The other girls immediately echoed her, and came up with a few more witches as well: Sarah Good, a tough, pipe-smoking woman who had fallen on hard times, and Sarah Osburne, a moderately well-to-do widow who had earned the scorn of the town for having lived with her second husband before marrying him. The three accused witches were arrested and imprisoned to await an official inquiry into their evil activities.

The two magistrates assigned to conduct the pretrial examinations were diligent in their preparations, learning all they could about the ways of witchcraft. The one unquestioned legal precept was the Biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not permit a witch to live,” but the good book was short on specifics. For the details, the magistrates turned to the available literature of the day, including works by Cotton Mather, the contemporary Puritan expert on the devil. All the research resulted in a number of rational, well-conceived principles of evidence. Proof of guilt would include the “devil's mark,” which meant any “unnatural” blight upon the body. People with psoriasis or eczema, therefore, might have found themselves in big trouble. Also, if an accused witch had been in a dispute with a neighbor and anything untoward happened to that neighbor, like a wheel breaking off his cart or his livestock falling ill, witchcraft was surely at work. The most important principle was that of “spectral evidence,” in which a person could be condemned if their spirit, or “shape,” visited an accuser with the intention of causing mischief—never mind that providing an alibi for the activities of one's “shape” would be impossible.

The magistrates were most judicious in determining what would be allowed as evidence, disregarding, for example, the medieval water test—in which an accused witch was tossed into a body of water and if she sank and drowned, she was proved innocent, but if she floated, she was condemned and executed. Either way, the defendant ended up dead. This test, the judges wisely concluded, was superstitious and unchristian.

The initial inquiry of the accused women began on March 1, 1692. Most of Salem Village, and many from surrounding towns, took the day off to witness such a momentous event in their midst. Sarah Good was brought into the crowded meetinghouse first, and as she arrived, her accusers, sitting in a place of honor in the front row, trembled and went into fits and convulsions. Few doubted this unsavory crone, feisty as ever in the face of the magistrates, was the devil's own. Why, the judges asked, did she not attend church? “For want of clothes,” she snapped. Sarah Good had a contemptuous answer to every question aimed at her and was eventually escorted out of the room. Sarah Osburne, ailing and in need of assistance, was next. Her best defense was that she was as tormented and afflicted as the girls writhing and shrieking in her presence. It was a desperate gambit that did no good. But Sarah Osburne successfully avoided a public execution: She died in prison two months later.

The much anticipated appearance of Tituba, the last of the three accused, was greeted with even louder howls of frenzy from the girls in the front row. Here, it seemed, was the wickedest witch of them all. Tituba didn't deny it, and this, perversely enough, was her salvation. A sound thrashing by her master, Reverend Parris, had helped elicit the “truth” from her before the inquest, and Tituba, having discovered that an admission of guilt was the only way to stop the torture, carried this lesson into the courtroom. For three days she told the people of Salem exactly what they wanted to hear. Conjuring for them episodes of unspeakable evil, she stunned even her histrionic accusers into silence. There was, she said, a thing she could describe only as “something like a cat,” with wings and a woman's face, that ordered her to serve it. It was Sarah Osburne's creature, she said. Other denizens of Hell came to her, too—red cats and red rats, all with one order: “Serve me.” The devil's creatures demanded that she send her shape to torment the girls. Sometimes she resisted, like when she was told to harm young Betty Parris. “I could not hurt Betty,” she insisted. “I loved Betty.” But Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne always forced her to comply.

Tituba told tales of witches' sabbaths, and of a “tall man”—presumably the devil himself—who came to her often and offered her “pretty things.” The tall man, “he tell me he God and I must believe and serve him six years,” Tituba testified. “The first time I believe him God and he was glad.” The most startling of Tituba's revelations was that the tall man had a book signed by nine other witches whose names she could not read. The audience gasped at this development. It meant there were others out there, and Salem was facing an epidemic of evil.

Tituba had by her “apparently witless wanderings . . . laid down a pattern which would wreck the peace of mind of Massachusetts for months and even years to come,” writes historian Marion L. Starkey. But she had saved herself by illuminating the evil in Salem and turning her back on it with her confession. When the girls, quiet during most of Tituba's testimony, started acting up again, she was asked, “Who hurts the children now?” In responding, Tituba wisely stepped into her new role as an ex-witch who had renounced her calling. “I am blind now,” she said. “I cannot see.”

Tituba's revelation that there were more witches to be identified gave the girls a renewed sense of purpose, and they quickly settled on their next victim. Martha Cory, a respectable matron and prominent member of the congregation, was an unlikely witch, but any presumption of innocence was erased after her haughty dismissal of the accusation. “I don't believe that there are witches,” she told two members of the community who had come to her home to warn her that she had been named. This was blatant heresy. In the Puritan universe, the devil was every bit as real as God himself. To deny his existence, or that of his earthly servants, would be to deny God. When her visitors demanded to know how she she could deny the existence of witches when three had already been identified (though not yet formally tried), Martha Cory remained obstinate. “Well, if they are,” she snorted, “I could not blame the devil for making witches of them, for they are idle slothful persons and minded nothing that was good.” Besides, she demanded, what did they have to do with her, a pillar of faith, a woman of the gospel? “Woman,” one of the visitors pronounced before leaving, “outward profession of faith cannot save you.”