If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would
have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into
the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a
jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed
servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral
was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been
burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President
Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse
things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him
repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange
every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was
an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical
reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or
morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except
maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him
mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
...
For Nixon, the loss of [J. Edgar] Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It
meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady
named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time
Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel
John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon,
who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and
went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention
spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human
treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to
clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after
all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he
went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he
told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out,
knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was
Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was
caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover
was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than
any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon
trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just
as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong.
Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick
German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power
structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly,
all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and
Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know
about the Age of Nixon.
Geez, now I'm getting all teary-eyed.
This reminds me of a
But the was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became
hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian
Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room,
standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me;
I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they
wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.
What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as
everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians
ocassionally loose their belts and belch amiably; I have known some who, on off days, were very benignant.
One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought - that his career in this
world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this
conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him;
now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into this theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's
burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.
hus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. He bit
right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning
was to keep his yokels heated up - to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. The foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon
seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured
Bryan into a folly almost incredible.
...
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career
brought him in contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignormuses. It was hard to believe,
watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of
state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of
all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a
gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
Those unfamiliar with this might want to brush up on the
