American Rhapsody (18 page)

[15]

Nixon Impregnates Monica

“The age difference between us,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “I should tell him I have hearing aids too.”

N
ixon's Monica—Crowley—didn't go down on him. She took notes and ran to her secret diary after their conversations. But by doing that, by giving us the details of the insomniac Night Creature stewing, plotting, and clenching his fist in his palatial New Jersey crypt, she pleased Nixon at least as thoroughly as Monica Lewinsky had pleased Bill Clinton.

Joyfully turning her loose (or out) on the world was Nixon's former speechwriter, William Safire, clothing himself now in the priestly vestments of the
New York Times,
encouraging her to recount the details of what Nixon had said to her to seduce her into being his trick on posterity. Monica Crowley thanked Safire for “his wise counsel and kind support.” Monica Crowley took it all in and Nixon let it all hang out.

But who could ever have imagined a fact as revealing as the Night Creature's admission to his Monica that Halloween was his favorite holiday? Hounds howl, fangs flash in the crepuscular Jersey night on All Soul's Eve . . . and the Night Creature tells Elvira—no, no, Monica!—that he looks “
ghostly
” on TV, that George Bush is a “
bloodless
” Wasp, that Janet Reno is a “partisan
witch.
”

In 1992, as the election with George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot approached, the Night Creature aimed his acidy venom in frothing, bitter, geyserlike eruptions. At George Bush: “Goddamnit, why isn't he showing some leadership? . . . He's a man consumed with petty crap . . . . He's up there in New Hampshire petting cows and raving about God knows what . . . . He's a mushy moderate . . . . I cannot believe that Bush said, ‘We'll kick Saddam's ass,' can you picture Gorbachev saying, ‘We'll kick the Republic's ass'? . . .
I think Bush's handlers are on drugs . . . .
I heard him say the other day ‘A splash of Tabasco!' ‘A splash'? In my day, I heard everyone saying, ‘Wait a sec.' What the hell is a sec? . . . He tries too hard to be one of the people, eating pork rinds and the rest, but he's not . . . . Bush was soft on the whole war in Vietnam.” Ross Perot, he told his Monica, was “a demagogue, an egomaniac. He doesn't keep his word. He doesn't say what he means.” Jesse Jackson “just likes to be around controversy. He's shrewd.” Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was “a jerk,” Secretary of State James Baker “an ass,” and reporter Bob Woodward “that asshole.” Gerry Ford was “Poor Gerry Ford. The pardon was the kiss of death.” Lyndon Johnson “invited the press into his bathroom.” Republican adviser David Gergen “had no problem prostituting himself. He believes in nothing.” Future Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski were “corrupt up to their eyeballs.”

The Night Creature's fist shot into the air and he yelled
whamo
when he spoke about Massachusetts senator John Kerry: “Here's a guy who was carrying placards in front of the White House and protesting.
That son of a bitch threw his medal over the fence at the White House.
Here I was trying to end the goddamn war so that his service wouldn't be in vain, and he's throwing his medal back at me!” His fist went
whamo,
too, when he thought about Bush chief of staff John Sununu—“Sununu? For God's sake! Who the hell is he?”—and of his fellow Republicans—“Very few of our goddamn people are any good!
No one stands up to take the bastards on!
They don't have any guts!”

The Night Creature was as bitter now as he had been in the sixties about “all the libs out there” and “the little bastards and assholes in the media” and “the orgy over the Watergate crap.” He said, “Look what the press did to me, the Herblock cartoons and whatnot . . . . They put the lies in the headlines but the truth they put back with the corset ads . . . . Seventy-eight percent of the media voted for McGovern.” He referred to Watergate as “the Watergate bullshit . . . that silliness . . . that silly, silly thing . . . . I think they just love to wallow in this Watergate crap until they drown . . . who cares about Watergate anymore? It belongs maybe on one of the history channels but not on a major network.” He was as scarily paranoid now, it was clear, as he had been in the sixties. “Those who were after me for Watergate were after me for a long time. They weren't interested in Watergate as much as they were interested in getting me on Vietnam. I gave them what they needed, but believe me, Watergate was just the excuse . . . . One of the greatest tragedies of Watergate was that I couldn't build the new conservative majority. And I was going to start with newspaper reporters. I was going to get conservatives in there to take these people on. That's why in '72 they had to bring me down. They knew I was after them and that I'd succeed.”

Sitting there, in the fetid darkness of his study, wearing his burgundy dinner jacket, the Night Creature spun furry spiderwebs as explanation for what he had done. The devil may have caused the infamous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the deadliest Watergate tape, but JFK and LBJ had caused Watergate itself: “I never wanted to accept the fact that there is a double standard out there. Democrats survive by it, Republicans get killed by it. Kennedy could be as dirty as they come—and my God! He did some outrageous things in there! But he was protected. Johnson—same thing, although to a lesser degree because he wasn't a Kennedy. Somehow I made the mistake of thinking or maybe not even thinking—maybe it was an unconscious thing—that I could act like them.”

Forget his political death; ignore the grimy stake in his heart: The Night Creature knew that he could still run this country. “
Any effective leader has got to be a son of a bitch.
You have to instill the fear of God in your people to get results
 . . . . To be credible, you have to bomb the bejesus out of countries . . . .
War has to be cast in idealistic terms or there is no way the people are going to support it. In Korea, we were fighting the Commies. In Vietnam, it was harder to get the message across . . . . The war in the Gulf was well-run, but I'm afraid it was too short and, frankly, even though one casualty is too much,
this one had too few casualties . . .
There is no grand thinking going on. We need more vision stuff, more mountaintop stuff . . . . We should get the CIA to take out Saddam . . . . I don't go for this exporting democracy crap.
Democracy doesn't belong everywhere.
Not all societies or cultures are meant for it.”

He knew the swamp rats who could rebuild his America: Newt Gingrich: “He's a bomb thrower and we need him.” . . . Dan Quayle: “He's so right on.” . . . His former speechwriter Safire: “just a good guy.” . . . And former speechwriter Pat Buchanan: “He's a bulldog. He'll go after them.” The Night Creature, whose Oval Office meetings had been punctuated with so many racist and anti-Semitic epithets, went out of his way to defend Buchanan: “Buchanan's worried because he has been tagged as anti-semitic, which is totally untrue and unfair. The guy is just not that way.” And he reserved a special slimy passion, which was obviously reciprocal, for Bob Dole: “Damn impressive . . . he is the last great hope for the party in this century.”

Over and over again, the Night Creature praised Bob Dole. “He's a class act, simple and honest . . . . Dole is the only one who can lead. He is by far the smartest politician—and Republican—in the country today . . . . Dole is a man of principle, but in an election year he would not be so stupid as to support what he believed was a losing position.”

Dole relied on the Night Creature for advice and Nixon became, according to Monica, “Dole's chief, though shadow advisor.” “Stay young!” Nixon advised Dole, and he named world leaders who had excelled in their seventies—de Gaulle, Audenauer, Chou En-lai. Nixon wrote a nine-page draft called “The Dole Game Plan” for the 1996 election. He told Dole he had to make “character” the great issue of the campaign. “The character issue will help him tremendously against Clinton,” Nixon told Monica, “basically because Clinton has little or no character.” The Night Creature saw the war hero from Kansas as his soul brother, even though Nixon had not done much more than play poker during his war. “There is no one but Dole!” Nixon shouted at Monica. At another moment, he said, “Dole is the only one out there swinging.”

Bob Dole had always been out there swinging, Richard Nixon knew, agreeing for once with Barry Goldwater's assessment: “Dole's the first man we've had around here in a long time who will grab the other side by the hair and drag them down the hill.”
Grab them by the hair and drag them down the hill!
That was Dole all right, who responded to a colleague's proposal to cut the food stamp program by saying, “Do you put in a burial allowance for the ones who starve?” . . . Dole, who told an amputee that he was jealous after the amputee pointed to Dole's mangled arm at a VA hospital and asked, “Why don't you cut the damn thing off?” And it looked, the Night Creature thought, like Dole's wife, Elizabeth, had the same kind of piss and vinegar in her, too.

Small-town boys from Yorba Linda, California, and Russell, Kansas, they went way back together. Nixon appreciated Dole's odd sense of history. Dole liked to point out, for example, that he'd been wounded in combat “eighty years to the day after Abe Lincoln took
his
bullet.” Nixon chuckled when Dole told him that the day he was born, the train carrying the disgraced Warren G. Harding's body passed through his hometown.

It was Nixon who'd saved Dole in a difficult race in Kansas by campaigning heavily for him and it was Dole who'd slashed away at the
Washington Post
during Watergate, saying, “The greatest political scandal of this campaign is the brazen manner in which, without benefit of clergy, the
Washington Post
has set up housekeeping with the McGovern campaign . . . . The most intensive journalistic rescue and salvage operation in American politics.” Dole added, “There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the
Post
executives and editors. They belong to the same elite, they can be found living cheek by jowl in the same neighborhood, and hobnobbing at the same Georgetown parties . . . . The Republican Party has been the victim of a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner in mud-slinging, the
Washington Post
.” That was loyalty all right, referring to Watergate as “unfounded” and “unsubstantiated,” trying to make Nixon's campaign of lies and illegal acts seem as though he were being victimized by what Nixon called “all the Libs out there.” Dole was out there swinging all right, showing the effects of all the DDT he'd inhaled growing up in the farm fields of Kansas.

Years later, when the Night Creature was buried, it was his soul brother who delivered the eulogy, just as he'd delivered Pale Pat's. “How American?” Bob Dole said of Richard Nixon. “A boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track . . . . The grocer's son who got ahead by working harder and longer than anyone else.” Bob Dole said, “The second half of the twentieth century will be known as
the Age of Nixon.
” And then Bob Dole broke down and sobbed.

As election day 1992 drew closer, the Night Creature was gushing pure bile aimed directly at Bill Clinton: “He's as weak as piss on a rock . . . . He's a goddamned liar . . . . He's a pretty boy who doesn't quite have it together, a waffler and an opportunist . . . . He's a phony baloney . . . . He has little or no character . . . . He's so damned smug . . . . He's a clever bastard . . . . He's Dogpatch . . . . He's damaged merchandise, he's got McGovern's crowd as advisors . . . . He's on media steroids and Bush's people are a bunch of boy scouts . . . . We all have our weaknesses, human nature being what it is. We all succumb to something: Maybe power, maybe money, maybe women or booze or drugs. In Clinton's case, all of the above.”

From the Night Creature's shadowy point of view, Bill Clinton seemed his bête noire. Bill Clinton was the symbol and personification of the generation that had driven him from office. “If Bush loses to Clinton, he will have erased my '72 victory because that was a referendum on Vietnam. A Clinton victory will reverse that by saying that it was okay to have actively opposed the war . . . . If Clinton wins, he will have opened up the office to all those who otherwise would have been disqualified, as late as 1988, with Gary Hart. Most in the media, though, are just like him. They are sympathetic with him on Vietnam; they experimented with drugs and casual sex . . . . Clinton is all for recognizing Vietnam. He's just panting to go to Hanoi and walk through the streets, where he'll be welcomed by millions of Vietnamese. Imagine!
The ultimate Vietnam war draft dodger recognizing Vietnam!
Unbelievable! . . . It's not that he was against the war then—almost everyone his age was. It's the fact that he says he's still against it. Clinton still thinks that North Vietnam's cause was more just . . . . I know why he did what he did to dodge the draft; he didn't want to get his ass shot off. As I was out there trying to end the goddamn war, he was running around, claiming privilege, avoiding service, and demonstrating against it. He was a selfish, spoiled brat. He made my job so much harder, and he sent God knows how many men to their death in his place. I'll tell you one thing; if he is elected President, I will know that this country has finally gone to hell.”

Only weeks before the election, the Night Creature, architect of so many hellish events, knew hell was fast approaching. The polls were showing Bill Clinton with a sizable lead. “The only things,” he told his Monica, “that would be self-destructive to him now would be bombshells, like a letter that showed that he asked to renounce his American citizenship during Vietnam, or an illegitimate child.”