Strait is the gate
Christopher Hitchens
- Watergate: The Corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon by Fred Emery
Cape, 448 pp, £20.00, May 1994, ISBN 0 224 03694 7
- The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House by H.R. Haldeman
Putnam, 698 pp, $27.50, May 1994, ISBN 0 399 13962 1
Probably every journalistic wretch in the business has by now tried his or her hand at shoving a ‘gate’ suffix onto the end of some dingy piece of chicanery. There have, admittedly, been a few quite funny examples of the genre. ‘Tailgate’ wasn’t bad for the pantsdown episode in which Senators were found to be fornicating with the boy and girl pages who take messages through the marbled halls. ‘Koreagate’, on the other hand, was a lame effort to define the Washington influence-peddling of the arms-dealer Tongsun Park. The brittle and amoral wits of the new Post-Modern New Republic actually ran a competition to summarise the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get briefly adopted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 16 · 18 August 1994
From Charles Thomas
Towards the end of his review of H.R. Haldeman’s Diaries (LRB, 21 July), Christopher Hitchens comments on Richard Nixon’s fondness for thuggery and the vicarious admiration he had for those who could practise it without the trammel of law. There is no finer illustration of Nixon’s interest in such matters than the following, recorded by Haldeman in his diary on 15 November 1969 (‘P’ is the President):
Vietnam march and mob grew violent tonight as groups tried to march on Vietnamese embassy. Police busted it up with tear gas, but they roamed streets breaking windows etc. We were in Ehrlichman’s office working phones when P came in about 9, stayed until 11. Interested in whole process. Had helpful ideas like using helicopters to blow out their candles, etc. (The marchers were all carrying candles in the night as a dramatic gesture for TV.) Very relaxed. Said was like watching an old movie, keep thinking something interesting will happen.
It is not at all clear which old movies Nixon is referring to, but presumably one can rule out all films in which the White House is burnt to the ground, however interesting that might be.
Fires are a recurring theme of the Nixon Presidency, and of the Haldeman diaries. Two days after Nixon’s Inauguration in 1969, Haldeman lit a fire in his office without realising that the chimney was blocked. Smoke poured into the office. Rose, Nixon’s secretary, ‘was furious, smoke all through the West Wing. Fortunately, I went to the Cabinet meeting and missed it all.’ In October 1970, at the so-called West Coast White House in San Clemente, Nixon called Haldeman up and asked: ‘How are things at your place?’
I said fine and started to talk. He interrupted and said we’re having a fire here. Laughed and said house had caught fire from his den fireplace. Told me to come on over. Place full of smoke, hoses, firemen, and water. Not too much damage. P took me in his bedroom (he was padding around the patio in pajamas, slippers, and a weird bathrobe when I arrived), said there was no problem. It was full of smoke, I could hardly breathe. He said he loved smoke and would sleep there, I talked him into the guest house. Finally to bed about 1.
A really weird day especially the last parts of it.
Ten months later, in August 1971, there was another really weird day, on this occasion at Camp David – no weird bathrobe, however. Nixon ‘had ordered a fire in the fireplace, although it was boiling hot outside, and when I walked in, his study was completely filled with smoke and Manolo’ – Nixon’s valet – ‘was running around with papers trying to get the fireplace to draw. Kind of incongruous in August in Washington.’ Two weeks after Manolo’s efforts as human smoke extractor, ‘the P was down in his study with the lights off and the fire going in the fireplace, even though it was a hot night out. He was in one of his mystic moods.’
A few weeks before he died, Nixon was photographed at his New Jersey home, sitting in an armchair beside a roaring fire, in the fireplace. He did not look especially mystical, but he did look as if he was trying to look like an old man in an old movie. And bearing in mind Nixon’s record with fire, one can’t help thinking something interesting is about to happen.
Charles Thomas
Des Moines, Iowa
Vol. 16 No. 21 · 10 November 1994
From Fred Emery
I have just returned from the US to catch up with Christopher Hitchens’s review of Watergate (LRB, 21 July). Hitchens among his contentions makes two factual mistakes: John Mitchell was not Attorney General in January 1973; he had been succeeded the previous summer by Richard Kleindienst, after resigning to take command of the Committee to Re-elect the President. Hillary Rodham did not work for the Senate Watergate Committee, which did not recommend the impeachment of the President. She worked for the chief counsel’s staff for the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, which did. It also escaped Hitchens’s attention that The Haldeman Diaries (as I wrote in the New York Times on 19 June) contain a unique notation that Mitchell admitted to Haldeman that he and Magruder had ‘signed off on’ (i.e. approved) the Watergate operation – something the ex-Attorney General went to his grave denying.
Fred Emery
London SE26
