McGoverning

[Wayside]

Just curious, but I figured the Weathermen have slowed their bombing campaigns given the de-escaltion and reform of the McGovern Admin?

They were already very much on the decline by the early 1970s (COINTELPRO+accidentally blowing up several of their own+living on the run in poverty with weird sex Maoists kinda sucks), and by 1973 were transitioning from bombing places to writing tracts, so yeah, a McGovern administration that was more committed to peace would probably only help hasten their decline. I'd be curious about the FALN and a certain Monsieur Levasseur, though...

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

I imagine that the Carnation Revolution goes ahead as OTL?

 

[CountDVB]

This should be interesting though we do need to update the TVTropes page

 

[THE OBSERVER]

New chapter coming soon?

 

[Asteroid Miner]

Is this timeline going to be updated?

 

[Electric Monk]

There’s teasers in the test thread, but @Yes is writing a timeline in book form with fantastic research—it’s a ton of work lol

More importantly how’s Danny Greene doing?

 

[THE OBSERVER]

Is this timeline going to be updated?

I think a new chapter is in the pipeline right now.

 

[Planita13]

I think a new chapter is in the pipeline right now.

Where can I find that thread?

 

[Rafi_T]

I'm curious, what's gonna happen with the future figures of American (and International) left-wing ideology?
1) How's Jeremy Corbyn doing?
2) Imprisoned Puerto Rican Nationalists (that were historically pardoned under Carter, with the exception of Oscar Lopez Rivera who refused anything but an unconditional pardon, and as such served his full 35-year prison sentence).
3) Bernie Sanders, who both ran for Senator and Governor in January and November of 1972 respectively.
4) Reverend Jesse Jackson (and might he run in 1984?)
5) (Not a left-winger, but still curious) Will Joe Biden's record still be as shitty? Will he be besties with Strom Thurmond, and/or a super drug warrior even with the PoDs?
6) How's Jane Fonda's career doing?
7) Any chance Elvis gets clean and/or gets his intestine operated? (He had an intestine twice as long as normal, and as such, he suffered from massive weight fluctuations to the point where it was noticeable when he had a bowel movement).
8) How's Mike Gravel doing?
9) How's Shirley Chisolm doing? Any chance she might give the Democratic nomination another go?
10) How are the last three liberal Republicans on Earth (George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Pete McCloskey) doing?
11) Any chance you might take some pop culture hints from A Laughin' Place?
12) Do the improvement of conditions for poor people and African-American families, alongside a drawdown in the war on drugs, alongside no Reagan-era pumping of drugs into the African-American community (hopefully), mean that we sadly lose the motivators for gangsta rap as a necessary form of expression of the black experience? (N.W.A., Wu-Tang Clan, and Tupac's political music, etc
13) Any chance the UN gets to an actual, serious hearing of Puerto Rican Independence without US strongarming?
14) Any chance for a Balkan Federation with tacit US approval to ensure Yugoslavia's third status position doesn't have so many enemies, which the USA can pitch as a weakening of Soviet influence, while the USSR can play it as a strengthening of communism. On the same note, any chance Bulgaria's and/or Mongolia's offers for annexation are accepted by the RSFR, and will the RSFR take back Crimea from Ukraine to ensure a lack of conflict in the future?
15) Can anyone please explain to me the situation with Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge? I'm kinda lost, not gonna lie.
16) Any chance for space program cooperation between the US and the USSR, perhaps even the diplomatic and bureaucratic basis for an early ISS, even if the tech isn't there?
17) Any chance Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham get back together in the future?
18) How are the Albert Gore's doing (Sr. and Jr.)?
19) How's Mario Cuomo doing in NY?
20) WHat's Bill de Blasio doing?
21) Does Margaret Thatcher (hopefully not) still have a career?
22) What's John McCain doing?
23) Is John Connally's career dead in the water?
24) How are the giants of the Senate Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond doing? Does Ted Kennedy still get screwed out of Senate leadership by Byrd?
25) How are our favorite Mideastern/North African strongmen Quadaffi and Sadam doing? And how is Pan-Africanism doing?
26) Will the White House officially/non-officially grant Jerusalem to Israel, and/or Kashmir to India?
27) Does Enver Hoxha still go back in his bunker to call everyone a revisionist, or is the future brighter for Albania somehow?
28) Any chance Mao lets go of leadership a bit early to allow Deng Xiaoping an early entry, or does China keep Mao until death does them apart, or is an even more hard-line government the result?
29) Does Ireland still go through as massive Troubles?
30) Any chance for an earlier liberalization of Spain? any chance for a Third Republic?

Sorry for the spam, but I absolutely love this TL, and I can't wait for the new update!

 

[Bomster]

I'm curious, what's gonna happen with the future figures of American (and International) left-wing ideology?
1) How's Jeremy Corbyn doing?
2) Imprisoned Puerto Rican Nationalists (that were historically pardoned under Carter, with the exception of Oscar Lopez Rivera who refused anything but an unconditional pardon, and as such served his full 35-year prison sentence).
3) Bernie Sanders, who both ran for Senator and Governor in January and November of 1972 respectively.
4) Reverend Jesse Jackson (and might he run in 1984?)
5) (Not a left-winger, but still curious) Will Joe Biden's record still be as shitty? Will he be besties with Strom Thurmond, and/or a super drug warrior even with the PoDs?
6) How's Jane Fonda's career doing?
7) Any chance Elvis gets clean and/or gets his intestine operated? (He had an intestine twice as long as normal, and as such, he suffered from massive weight fluctuations to the point where it was noticeable when he had a bowel movement).
8) How's Mike Gravel doing?
9) How's Shirley Chisolm doing? Any chance she might give the Democratic nomination another go?
10) How are the last three liberal Republicans on Earth (George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Pete McCloskey) doing?
11) Any chance you might take some pop culture hints from A Laughin' Place?
12) Do the improvement of conditions for poor people and African-American families, alongside a drawdown in the war on drugs, alongside no Reagan-era pumping of drugs into the African-American community (hopefully), mean that we sadly lose the motivators for gangsta rap as a necessary form of expression of the black experience? (N.W.A., Wu-Tang Clan, and Tupac's political music, etc
13) Any chance the UN gets to an actual, serious hearing of Puerto Rican Independence without US strongarming?
14) Any chance for a Balkan Federation with tacit US approval to ensure Yugoslavia's third status position doesn't have so many enemies, which the USA can pitch as a weakening of Soviet influence, while the USSR can play it as a strengthening of communism. On the same note, any chance Bulgaria's and/or Mongolia's offers for annexation are accepted by the RSFR, and will the RSFR take back Crimea from Ukraine to ensure a lack of conflict in the future?
15) Can anyone please explain to me the situation with Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge? I'm kinda lost, not gonna lie.
16) Any chance for space program cooperation between the US and the USSR, perhaps even the diplomatic and bureaucratic basis for an early ISS, even if the tech isn't there?
17) Any chance Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham get back together in the future?
18) How are the Albert Gore's doing (Sr. and Jr.)?
19) How's Mario Cuomo doing in NY?
20) WHat's Bill de Blasio doing?
21) Does Margaret Thatcher (hopefully not) still have a career?
22) What's John McCain doing?
23) Is John Connally's career dead in the water?
24) How are the giants of the Senate Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond doing? Does Ted Kennedy still get screwed out of Senate leadership by Byrd?
25) How are our favorite Mideastern/North African strongmen Quadaffi and Sadam doing? And how is Pan-Africanism doing?
26) Will the White House officially/non-officially grant Jerusalem to Israel, and/or Kashmir to India?
27) Does Enver Hoxha still go back in his bunker to call everyone a revisionist, or is the future brighter for Albania somehow?
28) Any chance Mao lets go of leadership a bit early to allow Deng Xiaoping an early entry, or does China keep Mao until death does them apart, or is an even more hard-line government the result?
29) Does Ireland still go through as massive Troubles?
30) Any chance for an earlier liberalization of Spain? any chance for a Third Republic?

Sorry for the spam, but I absolutely love this TL, and I can't wait for the new update!

I think Saddam is already dead

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

20) What's Bill de Blasio doing?

Um, he was like 10 at the time of the PoD; not really sure what @Yes could do with him here.

21) Does Margaret Thatcher (hopefully not) still have a career?

She's already the Secretary of State for Education and Science; whether she manages to have a further career in Conservative leadership is another matter entirely.

 

[Steve Brinson]

3) Bernie Sanders, who both ran for Senator and Governor in January and November of 1972 respectively.

Bernie Sanders: Busy at work in Vermont trying to plug the Liberty Union more actively into the People's Party national organization, willing to go slow on his own office-seeking (in the short term) in an effort to take advantage of the McGovern opening and make the Liberty Union more than a dem-soc "ginger group" in the British turn of phrase and more like a wedge force for a broad national movement to (1) keep the McGoverners honest, from a left perspective, and (2) take advantage of the McGovern effect on what we'd call the Overton Window to create opportunities for harder-left office holders.

18) How are the Albert Gore's doing (Sr. and Jr.)?

Al Gore [Jr.]: Has decided to stick it out the extra year and pick up a full M.Div. at Vanderbilt Theological Seminary. He's enjoyed a little taste of Woodward-and-Bernstein-ing with The Tennessean but wants to try and have maximum effect on the social-justice issues that engage him most, and is very much of two minds about his family's insistence that he head on to law school. A searcher, at the moment.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

@Yes Thinking about something else entirely, something struck me about TTL - you have (in one of the bones you threw us earlier) Harold Wilson cobbling together a Lab-Lib coalition government with a very slim majority; it occurs to me that these kind of thin majorities have a way of not lasting very long, so would the UK have called another election, say within a year (in this case, by the end of 1974)?

 

[THE OBSERVER]

@Yes Thinking about something else entirely, something struck me about TTL - you have (in one of the bones you threw us earlier) Harold Wilson cobbling together a Lab-Lib coalition government with a very slim majority; it occurs to me that these kind of thin majorities have a way of not lasting very long, so would the UK have called another election, say within a year (in this case, by the end of 1974)?

Or sooner, if butterflies lead to Norman Scott's dog being shot on the moors, or something else that engulfs the Foreign Secretary and the Liberal Party in scandal.

 

[Expat]

Or sooner, if butterflies lead to Norman Scott's dog being shot on the moors, or something else that engulfs the Foreign Secretary and the Liberal Party in scandal.

I am forming the Save Rinka Committee, who is with me!

 

[Yes]

Tipping the Scales I: Laws and the Man
​

For John Doar believes in everything Richard Nixon does not.
And John Doar is a fearsome opponent.

- Jimmy Breslin, How The Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t
controversial, that means he never stood for anything.

- Richard Nixon

If the president does it, it’s not illegal.

- Richard M. Nixon

If you have the law, pound the law. If you don’t have the law, pound
the facts. If you don’t have the facts, pound the table.

- Old lawyers’ saying

​

Reactions varied. Jimmy Breslin took the measure of sin and fate. “My old parish priest,” said Breslin in the New York rags, “would have stubbed a cigarette and told that sallow Quaker boy from the place where the orange groves fade away that pride and wrath are mortal sins, not venial. Dickens said we wear the chains we forge. All my old Jewish friends on the Lower East Side would tell anybody who’d listen that Nixon, an inveterate macher, was the master blacksmith of the times.”

Bill Buckley was an elegant priest of his convictions. “These events offer no encomium on Richard Nixon as some form of antediluvian reactionary, a Charles X of San Clemente,” read the inseam of that month’s National Review. “Rather they testify that, like a good tragedian, the former president fell prey to the liberal super-state’s temptations.”

With the usual mescaline dexterity Hunter S. Thompson cut straight to the fight card. “Finally, about the sixteenth round, Dick Nixon went and made an unforced error. He stopped donkey-punching Lyndon Johnson’s corpse just long enough for John Doar, lean and subtle in the ring, to at last shank Orange County’s purebred war-weasel under the third rib. Doar then held that raggedy blade in there until the bastard’s knees went at last.”

The journey there was both the story and, in many ways, the true outcome.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>​

The wide, stormfront horizon of litigation that rose up out of the Nixon crew’s misdeeds rolled in over the Potomac as 1972 ended. Court dates were fixed for the mail fraud case against Segretti’s merry pranksters while eager young three-Ls from Harvard and Georgetown Law found themselves eyeball deep in discovery on George Mitchell’s fraud suit. More action portended.

The six-week wonder of Robert Bork’s acting attorney-generalship did very little, besides smiling on deck as the ship went down, to throw brakes on the real work of investigation and prosecution launched in the terrible diesel-turbine depths of the Cold War federal government once Tex Colson torched the goddamn Brookings Institution. Evidence slid and pearled and streaked away from Bork’s grasp like a terrible mercury tide that would kill as well as cure. House Judiciary had subpoenaed Nick Katzenbach’s records as soon as the jungle got too quiet over in the West Wing, a process of re-insurance urged by Judiciary’s incoming chair Pete Rodino. Before the doors were barred by Nixon’s Fibbies dauntless young associates had ferried out work product and documentary evidence on their persons like tunnel dirt in The Great Escape, while other elements of the investigation were ported out to satellite offices that would take longer for the DoJ to run down and so found their way to Rodino’s desk in time.

When it came to several collateral cases — gears in the Nixon machinery — the work lay already under the seal of criminal pursuit, and was done in a range of United States Attorneys’ offices that dappled the East Coast like shells on a beach plus the Central District of California. The Acting Attorney General, prim behind the goatee that made him look like the unlikely love child of Sing Along With Mitch and the NKVD, sought to build a useful future for himself on the right hand side of American politics by sanding the gears that turned to snare Richard Nixon. You couldn’t just wave a pen and kill every legal matter, look how that had worked out down Pennsylvania Avenue, but there had to be ways to refigure prosecutorial discretion and let the Thirty-Seventh President make hard for the border of his tenure then scot-free into private life. The calendar, however, mocked Bork’s stratagems and ground them down like a Russian winter, harried as Bork was already by wars of prevaricating memos with the AUSAs.

The Nixon administration, then, had sinned to late in the day for absolution from friendly priests and walked out the door just a half-step ahead of the legal onslaught. House Judiciary issued a count of impeachment on abuse of power at the Ninety-Second Congress’ midnight hour, too late for any action of substance but, as its partisans argued with sweat and strain, in time for history. That set the tone for the new administration — Congress had told the Executive Branch there was both smoke and fire here that required some action of the law to fix. Everyone involved, from federal investigators to investigative reporters to legislators to gasbags on the Sunday shows, intimated the source of the blaze, not just source but accelerant too. That also spelled out the course for the sober, concerned idealists settling in to the West Wing and its tributaries. They could beleaguer the now-former president with cases against his networks of malice, but in time they’d have to come at the man.

In the matters of its predecessor’s sheer illegality, then, the McGovern administration was born fighting. It inherited the prosecution complex driven by the motivating fires of Brookingsgate and ITT and all that funny milk money and the whole great ratfucking archipelago sprung from CREP’s basement, to which the newborn McGoverners brought a deep and earnest faith in the rule of law not men. It would betray both their better angels and their well honed self-regard if they let the great legal campaign slip away. And the darker ops among them — at least the more calculating, your Mankiewiczes and Stearnses and Caddells and Cliffords — knew with deep surety that any move to let the past lie would sever the new administration utterly from the lean, vital sliver of Americans who truly wanted George McGovern’s presidency, not just Richard Nixon’s ouster. It had to go on, and both ego and circumstances demanded they get it right.

Some of the more pedestrian, or at least straightforward, parts of this landscape of prosecution were already in play, though if they seemed straight at the start, as matters before the law tend to do they went and got interesting. First came the government’s mail fraud prosecution against Dwight Chapin’s merry pranksters, laid out by Chief Postal Inspector Martin McGee with the full weight of Celtic fury and Catholic condemnation behind it. For the defense, the brains as usual among CREP’s band of verbal saboteurs belonged to young Donald Segretti. Segretti took charge of the defense, not directly because as a client he was no fool, but by planting the ratfuckers’ flag on the turf of civil liberties, and making sure more of that milk money went to hire defense lawyers who specialized in that kind of thing. If they helped get the Yippies off, Segretti said, that’s who we want. Because for purposes of this matter, hey, we’re just Yippies in suits.

It was an agile defense, rooted in generations of political pranks, and in the climate of the times as jesters in the public square who held up hypocrisy and corruption, racism or nuclear madness, to ridicule fought block by block through the canon of the law to defend their methods and expand their reach. Chapin reflected that this had been Segretti’s knack ever since they were ratfucking at Southern Cal: the little Italian guy knew how to dress Goliath up like David every time. The defense team marshaled decades of pranks they claimed were comparable, cribbed their case law from the objections raised by political protesters and comics who worked blue, and stuck to the line that neither the Democratic Party nor Martin McGee could take a joke.

Yet like so many other clever legal constructions, the ratfuckers’ claim had the bad luck to run into the wrong judge. William Blakely Jones, a Kennedy appointee in his late sixties, had done a fair bit of private practice but the bulk of his government work was in patent law, chiefly their creation and infringement. It gave him, down a sideways glance, an eye for the subject matter. Judge Blakely Jones heard the ratfuckers’ case — that they were witty, smart young guys who liked to skewer pomposity and overweening power, who put a clever modern spin on parody’s time-honored social good, and anyway you threw elbows in politics, that was just part of the game — and made two holdings in reply.

The first was clear enough: there was no parody. In the ratfuckers’ trade, in fact, parody was the dog that didn’t bark. It was simple enough: no one took credit. Like vaudeville magicians of old political parodists, including activist types who used parody’s form to make a deeper point, telegraphed the action, told you they’d do something, then did it, then showed it off and took the credit, or at least laid a finger aside their nose and smiled. Your Jerry Rubin types crowed about it wherever someone would listen; Hunter S. Thompson wrote up his own straight-man jabs at the Muskie campaign in particular under his Rolling Stone byline. As the ratfuckers fucked away? Silence. Parody, said Blakely Jones, was not just a form or a legal excuse, it required a relationship, between the target and the meaning expressed when the curtain rolled back and the parody was shown for what it was. Ratfucking was done from the shadows, held out as truth, and once the chaos it was meant to cause took hold, in shadow the authors stayed. One name for that was sabotage.

There was, Blakely Jones went on, another name too. Citing the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s 1967 case Blachly v. United States, and in that opinion a pull-quote of Oliver Wendell Holmes’, Blakely Jones pointed out that in the eyes of the law fraud neeeded “no definition; it is as old as falsehood and as versable as human ingenuity.” Parodists and lawful pranksters, said Blakely Jones, claimed and then used their full participation in an open political process. They raised their flag, made sure observers in the public square understood their point, sought to play a part in public decisions through fair use of one of the oldest tools of drama and rhetoric: ridicule. The ratfuckers, on the other hand, relied on fraud, on confusion birthed from falsehood, to damage political campaigns on behalf of their powerful employer.

There was fraud everywhere you looked: in the structural cutouts meant to distance the ratfuckers as individuals first from CREP and further from the Nixon administration, so blame could not be attached in the right places. In falsified documents that spoke not in ridicule but in slander, designed to create spurious news stories represented as truth by the good faith of reporters who believed the lies. In the sheer care they took to create complete, and entirely false, lines of legal reasoning and justification for their acts as parodic, juvenile, or otherwise harmless, the kind of meticulous care taken only by persons who sought to commit fraud and then escape its penalty.

Blakely Jones spoke to a larger issue too. This was not simple fraud — simple in legal terms, a swindle or other scam for money or services. It was what the law called honest-services fraud. It robbed ordinary citizens, whether voters or reporters or campaign workers, of their ability to trust in the probity and fair dealing of public figures, the key ones among them men who held elected office. In line with a series of appeals-court decisions through the middle and later Sixties, Blakely Jones applied a broad view to the federal mail fraud statutes’ language about perpetrating fraud, and held that the ratfuckers’ deprivation of campaigns judged by real data proffered to the public qualified quite nicely, thank you.

And that, in the pregnant pause before the sentencing phase, set the cat among the rats. Segretti pushed hard for motions to strike and to appeal on grounds that the mail-fraud language was unconstitutionally broad in relation to honest-services fraud, and that in any case that fraud should have tangible damage, not just asking politicians not to lie. Segretti needed both motions, and fast; potential felony charges made his fellow fuckers flighty. Two in particular: Segretti’s officially unofficial boss, who’d recruited him in the first place and helped construct the merry band, Dwight L. Chapin, had developed a case of the yips. A clean-cut, churchgoing high achiever from Wichita, Chapin was the public face of bright young Nixonian things, all the more so since his all-American boy bit was a tissue of lies. Chapin had perjured himself already on these very subjects before Sam Ervin’s committee back when it looked like Dick Nixon would brazen out the election and finesse it all in his second term. Chapin’s seal was set, too, on the whole range of ratfucking activities, including his grant of initiative to Segretti et al. to steal letterhead and slander multiple Democratic campaigns where the political press could see.

Then there was Ken Clawson, who’d talked out of school about the Canuck Letter to a pretty girl — who happened to be first of all a Washington Post reporter, and second of all not his wife — then stammered that his claim of authorship was just a golf story, then that he’d never said it at all to Marilyn Berger, a footsoldier in the Post’s investigative campaign who the amorous but anxious Clawson had also told that he — Clawson — had a wife and kids and a dog and a cat. Neither man looked good for a sunny stay at Lompoc and that had Segretti’s nerves up.

Then there was George Mitchell’s little operation, the Loeb et al. civil suit. This made the mail-fraud jaunt look like a child’s garden party. The Loeb suit held the ratfuckers and their employers up for real money, and so as it is when rats are cornered out came tooth and claw. Defense counsel did nice, tidy footwork to keep all the other fucked rats — the shots at Humphrey, Chisholm, Lindsay, and more — out of the evidence process. They grabbed headlines too, as they subpoenaed campaign staff and a raft of delightfully self-regarding major journalists to take the stand and pepper the causal damages claim with as much mud as they could get in the air: the Muskie campaign’s shambolic, top-heavy structure, the candidate’s temper, the failure of Muskie advance men to get inside Loeb’s decision loop on publication, Loeb’s well-aged feud with Muskie, all the rest.

Perhaps their best argument, for its sheer evil charm on behalf of men who would fuck their own grandmothers’ rats for the sake of Dick Nixon, now sat in the Oval Office. President McGovern hadn’t won New Hampshire, Muskie did. Yet McGovern not only came close but went on to sew up the nomination and then win the fall election. Maybe he’d got there fair and square, said counsel, for whom fear, uncertainty, and doubt were heirloom seeds to be sown among jurors.

Mitchell kept cool. Cross-petition aside he had the best possible client: William Loeb would swear from a bed of nails that he believed the Canuck Letter to be true, because it was either that or he no fearless conservative teller of truths, instead just a mean old sonofabitch who hated liberals. Mitchell preferred not to know the truth either way but when you put Loeb on the stand God Himself couldn’t make the publisher say otherwise. For the two-pronged argument that this was either slander or, as the mail-fraud defense had it, parody, but in neither case fraud, Mitchell parried both blades. The letter had opened Muskie to shame and public ridicule from a spurious cause, which could be slander, but what it certainly was, was malicious intent. No parody then, and falsehoods offered with malice to those who then came to rely on those statements, that spelled common-law fraud. The defense could talk about every ugly thing that followed from the letter, and every base motive it quickened, but nothing actually budged three facts: that there was no satire involved, that Loeb trusted the letter, and that it was sent with malice to sow chaos. Like a good lawyer Mitchell plagiarized in good cheer from Judge Blakely Jones’ ruling on honest-services fraud and drove the points home.

Mitchell’s steady feet and causal clarity impressed Hugh Bownes, the tidy jurist for the United States District of New Hampshire, not only an accomplished lawyer and a war hero with the Marines in the South Pacific, but a far rarer thing — a federal New Hampshire judge appointed by Democrats. With some care for the law, Bownes held that for the cross-petition from Muskie’s backers it was impossible to judge all the countervailing factors that made or broke a political campaign, and likewise for a newspaper owner his fortunes might rise and fall by a hundred difference chances or scandals. As a result, Bownes awarded only nominal financial damages in the direct cause of fraud. Mitchell again stayed calm in the still spring up-country air and waited for the “however.” It came. However, Bownes went on, a very specific harm had been done by the Canuck Letter, conducted with fraudulent means but more than that specially, egregiously injurious to the fair practice of open and democratic elections. As a result, Judge Bownes tacked on a punitive bill to the day’s work — a tidy quarter-million for each set of petitioners. With a wry eye Bownes turned directly to William Loeb at the plaintiffs’ table and said, I believe that otherwise Mr. Loeb will have to settle for the good press of being right.

The bulk of other criminal cases generated like spores from Brookingsgate’s blast moved more slowl, y. This was in part the accustomed cycles of court calendars and the tarrying of defense attorneys, in part due to the weight of discoverable material churned up from a criminal enterprise that processed over a million dollars in shady campaign money down dozens of different rivulets and threw up paper in its own defense like the ink of a cuttlefish’s scuttle. That pace also owed to preferences in official Washington. In the autumn of 1972 and the winter at the turn of the year Congress, which like the God of the Hebrews would not be mocked especially by a lame-duck president, wanted very much for Sam Ervin’s Brookingsgate committee to carry on and yield up more choice nuggets for which the legislative branch could take credit. Even the Nixon administration preferred that option: if Ervin’s gaggle got to far into discoverables, the administration could claim it was prejudicial to potential court cases, where if they started to talk about handing things over to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Nixon’s advance men could say these were essentially political questions best put to deliberation and debate, not court.

The climate changed as the days ticked down to inauguration. With the eyes of Congress and the fourth-estate media boring into them, the new crowd would have two options. They could go before a grand jury, empower the public to make up its mind about the culpability of Nixon himself, or they could both justify and avenge the special prosecutor’s office and use that mountain of work to press charges directly. If they did either the Nixon case would dog at the heels of everything the McGoverners sought to do. If they didn’t, they’d never hear the end of it and would be done before they started. For the soon-to-be former president the tiger crouched behind both doors.

Predictably Richard Milhous Nixon did not fuck around. The newly-former president had not put many footsteps between himself and the Capitol rotunda at all on the day of George McGovern’s inauguration when the his elegant and able young aide Diane Sawyer reached out to Nixon’s legal home office during his sojourn in New York, the mighty white-shoe firm Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Talks took not much more than a day; as Nixon then bitched to Bebe Rebozo over a long bottle of rum in the medicinal Florida heat, the negotiations left him with a wish in one hand, shit in the other, and in between them Leonard Garment. Len was no bad guy to have, an accomplished lawyer in his forties and a rising star at Mudge, Rose, handed to Nixon paid-up in full by the president’s old firm. But that was all the Thirty-Seventh President got out of Mudge, Rose and all they intended him to have. Garment had also been the closest thing to a genuine friend Nixon had at work in his New York period, and sending the two men off to do battle together continued the firm’s desire to take just as much of Nixon as did them good and hold the rest at bay.

To go from Chou En-Lai’s handshake to this, well, Dick Nixon was nothing if not good at finding ways around the Establishment’s contempt. After the white heat of it passed through the methodical destruction of at least one armchair at Key Biscayne and pre-dawn hours of self-recriminating agony, Nixon decided that if he was really going to turn the tables on those turgidly upright hippie-coddlers in the West Wing and their school-tie-secret-handshake henchmen in the Justice Department, he’d need Jews to do it.

While learned newsmen droned on all three channels about the McGovern administration’s methodical jury toward convening a grand jury for examination of possible charges against the former president, Dick Nixon dusted himself off, put on a good grey Botany 500 suit and with that leonine smile tacked on for the cameras walked in through the front door of Manhattan’s firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind. Where that lean and agile former judge Simon Rifkind himself, out of the old empire of the tsars by way of City College and Columbia, shook Nixon’s hand, sat in contemplation at Nixon’s words with head cocked a little to the right, then said, Marty. Yes, Mr. President, Rifkind went on. On the letterhead this is a partner’s case and I can’t for the life of me understand why Mudge, Rose would tell you otherwise. Len’s a fine guy, a great guy, you hardly need me to tell you that. It’s a good thing you have him. But we would put all the partners on to this if we could, in practice the first name under your “by and through” will be mine. But in the trenches? You want Marty.

Nixon smiled and nodded. It made sense to him: for a fortysomething son of working-class Jewish Brooklyn, Martin London had cut quite a dash through New York’s courtrooms. Of most note for the former president was how “Marty” had taken up the cudgel for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children and turned the tables on a particularly nasty paparrazo who had not only stalked but actively endangered Jackie’s kids — Jack’s kids, Nixon hastened to qualify. Judge Rifkind nodded attentively. You know, Mr. President, said the canny old judge, I suspect we might just get a little time with Marty as it is, right here. I think he may even be between meetings at the moment — Rifkind was damn sure Marty was out of any meetings, a trio of frightened young secretaries had been sent forth like birds on the storm to run Marty down and keep him free the moment word reached one of the partners that Nixon was on his way from the Plaza. Rifkind knew the tales of Nixon’s social awkwardness and kept up the patter smooth and easy until Marty showed.

Marty strode in like it was nothing more than Tuesday, heart hammering but with some of the best brass in the business, thin but well-cut in a Hickey Freeman glen-plaid, with broad glasses, a tidy mustache, and a toothy smile. He shook hands briskly, knowing the same background as Rifkind and figuring it was best to keep Nixon on the move. An honor, sir, said Marty with the first from his repertory company of grins. I will just go ahead and assume we have the honor of your company because you’ve thought about retaining us? Nixon stammered a little in the answer, mostly as he referred to Jackie’s case. Marty nodded sagely.

Showing his old legal chops Nixon mentioned that lingering chance of a grand jury. Marty’s face rearranged itself smoothly behind the smile. They won’t empanel, he said. They empanel, that loses them their best cause of action on firing Katzenbach and Richardson. And it says Katzenbach’s whole operation wasn’t worth it in the first place. No, they’ll draw up and charge, he said with the particular gift of tone that made these sound like nothing more than facts, not daggers at the heart of Richard Nixon’s whole political and public existence. They’ll charge.

Then, said Marty with a smile almost boyish, I’ll take the subpoenas we draw up this week to depose every reporter who wrote a byline off classified leaks, Nick Katzenbach, Katzenbach’s team, staff counsel of Senator Ervin’s committee, Walt Rostow, former Assistant FBI Director Deke DeLoach, Richard Helms, half the senior staff of the NSA, Clyde Tolson, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the board of directors of the Brookings Institution, and Ben Bradlee. After that we’ll think about how we can start to make it interesting.

Dick Nixon smiled with his eyes this time.

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​

Well, sir, said Marty as he stood up and smiled that wide, toothy smile, I thank you as always. Len and I have to get going, if we’re going to do that deposition on schedule we have a midday flight to make out of Kennedy, Lew Kaplan’s going to meet us there. Direct to LAX, isn’t deregulation grand.

Who’re you flying? Asked Dick Nixon. Continental, replied Marty. Business class. Ah, said Nixon, with that jagged smile like a lion maneuvering a large bite. Bob Six’s birds. Champagne service. Very nice way to go back out there, the former president went on, his face as so often trying constantly to form itself into what he thought his partners in conversation must expect. The three shook hands vigorously and the defense counsels thanked the Secret Service detail as they left the suite. They exchanged only smiles and a quick word about the flight in the elevator or the lobby: elevators could be bugged, lobbies watched. It was when they got outside along Central Park South that Marty turned to Len for real conversation.

That was all right, said Marty. Len you know him much better, Marty went on, how do you think he’s holding up? I mean you have a far better sense than I would what’s typical for the man.

Garment smiled a cockeyed smile. Now that you’ve put it that way, I don’t know that there truly is a typical for him, Garment replied. He can be one way in one conversation or moment and very different the next. He’s always on the move to the point where I’m not certain he ever stays long enough in the present. When he gets a hold of something or wants to get something done he can disappear into it. He can be awkward. Definitely has a temper. Garment paused before the next one — I’d say probably about twenty percent anti-semitic, too.

Marty stepped just ahead of Garment and about-faced so they could see each other head-on. Then Marty smiled the deep and powerfully specific smile lawyers save for the rare moment when they can speak their whole mind without needing to play the angles. It’s sweet how you say twenty, said Marty.

With a little Utica Avenue shrug of the head Marty went on. Don’t knock it, Len. Anti-semites can keep a firm’s lights on; sight unseen they assume we’re the best lawyers. But look. This case may be about the state of the American presidency and what ought to be done about it, but it’s going to be decided by our client, that guy with the big jaw and the shoulder hunch and the mind like a Rube Goldberg machine. Not just his fact pattern but who he is will dictate how we carry through his defense.

Fortunately, said Marty as he hit the upswing, we have each other. This is very good. Sure we have Judge Rifkind too which is invaluable most of all because we need a face for the media. He can be that face, and we can get on with the job. Well, us and Lew Kaplan. Also let me say this is a great thing you’re doing. If I can be frank for a moment you’ve taken what might have been a real “screw you” from our client’s old firm and made of it a true, vigorous representation. That you can hang on to for life. Day to day too, we have each other. We’re both Brooklyn kids. Children of immigrants. We’d both rather be doing this for a Democrat — here Marty flashed the smile again. Sometime, said Marty as he raised a finger but never quite pointed, I want to hear a great deal more about your misspent youth with Woody Herman. The fact he and Stravinsky were friends? Fascinating. We understand each other which is essential, because we have to rely on each other.

With the hook now out, Marty made the pitch. As you do that work, not just the joint defense but work that’s specific to you, I just wanted to … here, let me put it like this. You’re a great lawyer. This man needs you. This is not me telling you how to be his lawyer. Or to step on your toes on any issues of representation that come down to just you and your firm. This is something I think that only you can do for him as his lawyer because you’re his friend. You are. The way he looks to you any time something hairy comes up or he hasn’t figured out yet how he ought to act in order to get what he needs, it’s true. Only you can do this, Len.

I need you, said Marty, to help him make his peace. We can’t get through this, can’t do our part to get him through it or get the country through it, can’t help the law take us there rather than the passions of opposing sides, unless you help him make his peace. It may be that the circumstances of this case mean we have to burn it all, have to fight to the last bullet in our gun, to defend him properly. There will be an inevitable — inevitable — cost to him, to his family, his social situation. The news will never let it go. There could be brawls in the streets. But that might be what has to be done, so he has to have peace with it. Conversely, we both know that often the best thing we can do for our client is bring them to a place where they can take an acceptable plea agreement, or some other kind of negotiated settlement. That, instead, could be what he needs, and where the law leads us. If it is and he’s not ready, it could wound his pride more than he thinks he can bear and that could all go to hell. He has to make peace there too.

Our job, said Marty as he backed away into the philosophical while his advice sank in, is to make sure there’s never another case like this. Maybe it’s the biggest thing we’ll ever do, it sure looks that way, maybe not. Nearly all of it will add up to hard work — I mean we have to be ready against John Doar. Nobody out-prepares John Doar. I believe we can do just as well but we’re not going to gain some vital advantage that way. What will succeed or otherwise shoot this all to hell is helping our client find his way. He decides, but our duty is to create the conditions where he makes the best possible decision.

Now from his repertoire of smiles Marty picked an almost boyish grin. After all, he said as he clapped Len Garment on the shoulder with one hand and waved his grip to hail a cab with the other, we only have the country riding on it. It’s the little things that matter, really.

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When you didn’t have the job and didn’t have the girl then, hell, at least you could fly. Private First Class Robert K. Preston believed that hard this evening, when that seemed so far away. A Gulf Coast Florida kid, Preston had wanted to be a soldier since he was a kid but far more than that he yearned to fly, to swoop and soar and ride the horizon. He’d taken aviation classes at community college, yearned to fly medevac, to be a “dustoff” stick jockey in ‘Nam, the guys who rode their Hueys in hot and picked up the wounded then spirited them to safety. And when so many kids lived in fear of the draft or ran from the idea of a military life he walked right in. It was supposed to be two years of intensive training, get him fully qualified for one of the Army’s birds, then two more years active service doing the job. Get through training and he’d have it made: a warrant officer, a cavalier stick jockey loved by the laides, a bright future of commercial flying ahead once he’d served his country. Just had to get through training.

Only he hadn’t. In fact, thought the compact, vigorous young man with the all-American face, he’d been thoroughly screwed. “Insufficient” in the instrument phase, they said. What the hell kind of word was “insufficient”? Not a damn person in the program, or his chain of command, or MILPERCEN, could tell him exactly what that meant. Only he knew what it meant: ‘Nam was over, he’d missed that boat, and now the Army had more helicopter pilots than it knew what to do with. So now here he was, no warrant officer just a PFC, who tinkered with helicopter parts rather than flew them, stuck in Maryland — Maryland! — a million miles from song and story. Hell, if it was Alaska he’d have the scenery, or West Germany he could play tourist on the weekend. He’d begged — outright begged — his CO, who liked him, thought he was a quiet, regular young guy of the kind that the Army needed many more, to get him transferred to the 82nd Aviation Battalion’s maintenance staff. They had a company over there in Sinai, at the Suez Canal, where the paratroopers were cheek by jowl with the Russkies keeping the Arabs and Israelis from killing each other. It wasn’t a war — yet, anyway — but hell it was interesting! But no, just here in Maryland. Working his way down a dead end enlistment, so close but so far from flight, and now his girl had dumped him too.

So it was that he knocked off early that evening, when the guys asked him down to a local dance club where they liked to mark Friday night time, he shrugged and went the other way. Then got in his green Chevy Nova and drove. As he did, it came to him. Why couldn’t he fly? It wasn’t like it was an actual disability. He knew damn well what he was doing, longed to feel that joy again, that control and that freedom. All that crap from the training evaluation was arbitrary, just a way to kick another pilot off a crowded perch. He damn well could fly and he’d do it — tonight.

Preston drove his Nova back towards Fort Meade, but stopped short at Tipton Field: he knew where he was headed. There they all were, pretty birds all in a row, at least thirty UH-1Bs lined up for National Guard and Reserve pilots to practice on. Preston parked a little ways off, hustled quickly and quietly out onto the hardstands, and found one that looked the part. He got in, ran the pre-flight check, and sure enough she was ready to go, ready to soar. Get away from where everything was dull or crazy or just too much and do what he did naturally. Preston left the collision lights off, running dark, and took her up. Then it was time to have some fun.

PFC Preston’s little jaunt did not go unobserved. A tower controller at Tipton spotted him, spotted the lack of lights, and cross-checked the flight schedule. With nothing on the books, the controller kept his eyes on the sky while his hands dialed the Maryland State Police. By the time an operator had taken down the details Preston was tearing over the treetops toward the restaurant where his buddies meant to stop off before the dance hall. He hovered low, let the whopping, chopping roar of the rotors hang over the place, so close to the roof you could almost touch it, then hopped up gleefully and stopped in a nearby field to think about what he ought to do next. This was big, he thought to himself. Ought to be big. This was a hell of a caper — might as well have as much fun while the fuel holds up as you could. He took his bearings. As he thought about it, Washington, D.C. was about twenty, maybe twenty-five miles south-southwest of him. No time at all in a Huey. Well then, he thought with a grin as he hopped back in the cockpit, time to go see the sights.

Preston kept his free ride as close to treetop level as he could, while the Maryland troopers tried to figure out where to look for him. As he got further into the metro D.C. area, however, he had to pick up the altitude a bit and so it was that he pinged at the control tower for Washington National Airport, perched there on a little spur on the south bank of the Potomac. Aware that there was a rogue chopper out there somewhere, the air-traffic controllers quickly sussed that this was it, and the call went out to the cops. The Maryland troopers put an old Bell 47 on Preston’s tail, a little dragonfly of a chopper, too lightweight and slow to really catch the hotrod kid, just up enough to observe that he’d passed into the restricted airspace over the center of the city. There, PFC Preston marveled in gleeful fascination at the Washington Monument seen from above, the bright lights of the avenues, the Capitol. Couldn’t fly right, huh? He’d show ‘em. He looped around the Washington Monument a few times, like a kid doing doughnuts with his sports car around a parking-lot lamppost, shot off to get a good look at the Capitol and, like an good tourist, figured out what looked like Pennsylvania Avenue and thought he might just give that a go.

Soon enough, the chatter between police cruisers and the Maryland troopers’ little bird and the controllers at National finally squawked the Secret Service command center on the White House grounds where the duty agent, a burly Serbian-American from Chicago’s bungalow belt heard that a helicopter — a helicopter? A helicopter — had violated the no-fly area and was making maneuvers over the major public sites around there, then had changed course on a plumb line for the White House. We’re sure? asked the agent. With urgent politeness the Maryland troopers’ pilot chipped in to say they were. Over the open channel the agent went on: fuck — at this time of night? What do we know? Distance? Intent?

Nobody knew anything. Well, they were starting to know just enough to get into trouble. There was a car by Tipton Field, registered to a young PFC who worked on helicopters. More than that? No. Was he some kind of protester? Some kind of left-wing terrorist mole or closet Klansman in the ranks? Was he depressed? Crazy? Suicidal? Was this the latest faceless, alienated young assassin in American life? Nobody has a goddamn clue, thought the command-center agent to himself. At the same time he knew his job, the whole job of the Secret Service when it came to that guy across the property in the Oval Office: assume the worst. The agent dialed in the watch commander and sounded the alarm.

They heard it go off in that very Oval Office, faintly, almost like a mere worldly problem out on the avenue somewhere. President McGovern had taken a long dinner with several leading steel company execs, at which they discussed what to do about an industry that important that seemed to be in that much trouble as his Secretary of Commerce and Industry, Jim Gavin, got after them like they were a bunch of shiftless privates in one of Gavin’s units back during the war. Well awake after the back-and-forth, McGovern held a private meeting with Admiral Tom Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They talked over the Suez mission a bit, especially the process of wrapping it up and joint disengagement by the Soviets. Then Moorer worked to steer the conversation toward getting a commitment from the president to pay for the third Nimitz-class aircraft carrier to get finished on schedule, while McGovern worked to steer things towards Moorer’s assessment of the admiral’s planned successor as Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. George Brown of the Air Force. It was all going along well enough when the Secret Service agent outside the Oval Office door, a compact, balding, earnest guy who’d been with McGovern since the election campaign, strode in and told the president there was a possible aerial threat to the White House and the agents needed to move both McGovern and Moorer.

Aerial threat? asked the president. A helicopter, said the agent. Military Huey from Maryland they think. A helicopter, said McGovern now with bemusement. The agent, who’d been with the president long enough to understand that the Commander in Chief was an academic at heart and wanted a fact pattern to assess, went on as fast as he could. It’s come down out of Maryland, the agent went on, then it entered the no-fly zone over central Washington and buzzed the Monument, circled the Capitol, doubled back and then took a bee line for us, sir.

Now, against all expectation, the President of the United States grinned. He looked back with a lively eye towards Tom Moorer a moment, then at the agent, then the admiral again. Some young GI in a helicopter took a night ride, and he’s buzzed the tourist sites, now he’s headed here. Tom, McGovern went on, that’s a pilot, said the president with an intonation meant to be shared between the admiral and himself, both men who had flown in combat in World War II. It’s a stunt, added McGovern. A stunt and I will lay dollars to navy beans he’s trying to impress a girl. Moorer grinned a little, warily — the admiral had known thousands of flyboys and that could well be right enough, but this wasn’t procedure. Then the president stood up, as his Secret Service body man had wanted, turned on a heel — and strode out through the French doors. Moorer followed as briskly as his cherubic form could while the agent downright dashed, wondering in a corner of his mind exactly where in the middle of nowhere his next assignment would be as he squawked the watch commander to say that REDWOOD had gone outside.

Out on the wide lawns of the White House, three or four Secret Service agents had trotted into the open with 12-gauges, as another in a mustard-colored shirt and a suit with wide lapels hefted a Smith & Wesson M76 submachine gun. Uniformed White House cops dashed back and forth while a pair with Tommy guns ran to join the agents who scanned the skies. The watch commander had come out, revolver drawn for the sake of it and in his left hand a megaphone — they could hear the chopper clearly now, just about make it out south-southwest around the corner of the property. The commander spotted President McGovern walking quickly over and shot a look of anger and bewilderment; McGovern answered with a drawn, level face and pursed lips like a prairie school teacher whose whole class had just claimed the dog ate their homework. The Huey whooshed across a pattern traced near the perimeter, then back towards where it had started. McGovern held out his hand and after a moment of confusion the watch commander grasped the president’s intent. He handed over the megaphone.

McGovern made a military right-turn with his feet, stood straight as an arrow, and started to talk. “Good evening, son,” said the President of the United States. “I said GOOD EVENING, SON. If you can hear this, please dip that helicopter a little and let these gentlemen with the machine guns know.” Silence, save for the rotors. For what couldn’t have been more than five seconds but felt like always, the whole cast of players waited as Private First Class Robert K. Preston still reveled in the great joyride of his life. Counter-sniper agents on the White House roof ranged in the scopes on their long rifles at the cockpit. Then, for a moment, the nose of the Huey dipped, then picked back up.

“All right, then,” said the president. “Now, son, you’ve had a hell of a caper here. Clearly you’re quite a pilot and frankly I am a little impressed. But this isn’t the proper way to go about it. What I need you to do, as your Commander in Chief, is to return that helicopter. Just, just go ahead and set ‘er down on the South Lawn here, that big patch where we bring Marine One in. I’m sure you’ll do just as well as those pilots. Better, even. Come on down, and then these folks here’ll need to talk to you so just get out slowly and keep your wits about you. Then we can all get on with our evening.”

After what Robert Preston would describe later as the biggest, most profound, and strangely the most glorious, oh-shit moment of his entire life, one that he met with whoops of laughter at finding he had the greatest audience he could ever get, Preston straightened up the bird and took a steady, measured trip down onto the soft earth of the South Lawn as over two dozen loaded barrels tracked him there. Uniformed officers, hands on their holsters, trotted across ducking down below the rotors’ wash as those slowed, then stilled. PFC Preston stepped gingerly out, with the grin of the boy next door who’d just stolen some apples off your tree and gotten away clean, as the White House cops corralled and cuffed him.

President McGovern and Admiral Moorer turned and walked back to the Oval, shielded by a quartet of Secret Service men behind them, sidearms drawn. Mister President, said Tom Moorer in a ruminative tone, I have thought sometimes about what might’ve been if you had kept that uniform on and stuck around when the Army Air Corps turned into the Air Force. After a pause Moorer added: I don’t believe you ever would have made general.

McGovern grinned back, almost impishly. Now Tom, said McGovern, I might want to take that as a compliment.

A look of guarded but friendly sarcasm crossed Moorer’s face. I thought you might, Mister President, said Moorer. The admiral tilted his head a little. You’d have been a fine colonel, though. Just fine.

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​

Officially — well, officially they didn’t even have a name. Someone had once tried “Solicitor General’s Special Prosecutions Task Force” on for size but that didn’t go very well at five-times-fast, so it soon vanished from the tops of memoranda. What the rest of Justice called them, day to day, was The Brookingsgate Irregulars. It scanned, spoke to the middebrow tastes of much of the department, and caught that slightly ragtag quality of these young, or at least youth-adjacent, lawyers roped in mostly though not altogether from Nick Katzenbach’s team from the autumn of ‘72. Bernie Nussbaum again took a lead role — several Justice folks, including Nussbaum’s teammate the ruddy, cheerful Bill Weld, took to calling Nussbaum “Doc,” as a Seven Dwarves reference to the little band of associates — but there were a number of hands to the wheel. That was good, because the Solicitor General’s idea of proper preparation to prosecute a president, not to mention the dozen or more other open prosecutions collateral to that effort, was biblical in scale.

There was, first of all, the paper. Jesus, all the fucking paper, as Bernie liked to say down at his favorite watering hole the two or three hours a week he could get away from the sixty or seventy hours on the job. There were offices on the top floor at Justice big enough to hold a banquet in, now landscaped like Arches monument out in Utah with six- and seven-foot stacks of paper. File boxes’ worth. Manila folders atop each other like parchment accordions, color-tabbed for reference. Fat bales of green-and-white striped printout paper. Neat white Xerox copies that had an edge you could cut with. Paper goddamn everywhere, the whole substance — that they could get at anyway — of the most byzantine family of conspiracies in the history of the United States’ government. A staff architect had been called in to assess the load these rooms bore now, and decided to the childlike delight of Bill Weld that it was necessary to reinforce the floor. Bernie would roll his eyes and say Bill’d told everyone who was anyone in Massachusetts that story, the liberals anyway. Between the proceeds of dozens of search-warrant seizures and the discovery generated in each separate legal matter as the bad guys, many of them corporate attorneys, tried to bury the prosecutors in tangential files to mask their escape, the Irregulars could’ve opened a new wing at the Library of Congress.

The landscape of paper, though, was the beginning, the front end of things. Where that narrowed to a great and terrible end, sharp and with deep purpose, was the note cards. John Doar had favored that particular tool for many years and here they took on a life no humble three-by-five ever had envisioned. These cards laid out ultimate facts, evidence exhibits, points and authorities, proofs of allegations and indictments, grand-jury presentments, all for more than two dozen open prosecutions and investigations. Each card had a complex set of designations and sub-designations in the upper right hand corner that sought to explain how that card related to the matter at hand, and interrelated with the other open cases. When John Doar chatted a little about it one day to Les Thurow of OMB after a luncheon for senior officials — tales of The Cards had rivuleted their way through career government staff in many fields — Thurow pointed out that what the methodical son of Wisconsin had designed was a programmable database and also, predictably, if Doar wanted to get that just-so Thurow knew a guy.

Down came a staff programmer from MIT, who’d turned his back on his law degree because, said he, he’d rather get his immortal soul back. As an added plus Thurow wangled one of those fancy new Altos from Xerox in return for greasing the wheels on an OMB requisitions down-select and the machine came to live in its own doughty little corner of the forests of paper. Soon enough the programmer had a language to file and sort the data — Doar kept his cards, there was something to be said for molding chaos into order you could hold in your hand — and then an architecture that would correlate staff work with active cases. The program grew, through both tinkering and need, and later when he patented the code and formed a company to sell what was by then one of the first reliable pieces of law-practice management software, the programmer reflected that he didn’t know Dick Nixon could be so good for the economy.

As John Doar’s hellhound path towards the man who’d lately been the Thirty-Seventh President narrowed, that direction took the Irregulars, who hurtled along behind their man, toward events that had produced the midnight charge of impeachment from the outgoing House Judiciary Committee of the Ninety-Second Congress. That concerned the swath Nixon cut through this very Department as he hurled Katzenbach and Richardson out the door. Those acts House Judiciary had called abuse of power. Here, in the criminal prosecution business, Doar laid out two charges like the horns of a bull. One, the more obvious, was a federal count of obstruction of justice, particularly what was known as the second prong of 18 U.S.C. section 1503, that the former president while in office had interfered in “the due administration of justice.”

Nixon’s lawyers, notably Marty London who’d run this very patter by Meet the Press, had argued with as much brass as sophistry that the chief executor of justice under the Constitution couldn’t interfere in its due administration because his actions were its due administration, so any interference was the special prosecutor’s fault. That, the Irregulars had tackled with a line proffered one weary late afternoon by their boss as he cleaned his glasses. John Doar pointed out based on Article I’s Impeachment Clause that if a Commander in Chief could in theory commit treason such as would qualify for impeachment, a chief law enforcement officer could obstruct justice. By that night Bernie had new paragraphs bashed out in the state’s response and cases or legal journals in support with proper Harvard Blue Book citations.

The other flanking point of the Solicitor General’s allegations had the same little touch of genius in the night about it as Doar’s knack for getting Klan murderers hard time on civil-rights violations. That was another 18 U.S.C. chestnut: Section 371 specified two or more persons might conspire together “to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.” To the pleasure of the Irregulars no less a judge than William Howard Taft, ex-president and by then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, had written up just what that meant in one of the great precedential cases for federal conspiracy, Hammerschmidt v. United States, back in 1924. One of the Irregulars’ youngest aides, that ex-marine Bob out of UVA Law, pulled the money quote. You could practically hear Taft’s Olympian bulk lay down the law when he set out that you didn’t just have to cheat the feds out of money or do material damage. Instead it only required that the government’s “legitimate official action and purpose shall be defeated by misrepresentation, chicane, or the overreaching of those charged with carrying out the governmental intention.” As for two or more people, they had the witnesses deposed on that — that earnest, worried little man John Dean had been especially helpful. And had Dick Nixon overreached his bounds or subverted the instruments of government in the firings? Damn right he had.

Like so many other facets of this tapestry of prosecutions, that then went and got interesting. If they wanted to nail the King Rat-Fucker, Bill Weld’s favored term on his third or fourth beer of a long night with CREP discovery materials, the Irregulars needed a firm place for a judge to stand. Nixon’s defense team had snarled all the ordinary criminalities of Brookingsgate in an argument from national security. Now the Irregulars needed solid grounds that showed Nixon obstructed justice or otherwise perverted — defrauded — the proper purposes of government with the firings. The motive that best spoke to that was, well, that Nixon acted as he did with corrupt purpose. Not, then, as an incorruptible executive who was always in the right because national security said so, but because he was afraid he’d be impeached or indicted. Impeachment, that London and Garment and the crew could fuzz way out of focus. Impeachment was not a criminal penalty, and didn’t require strictly criminal acts for its pursuit. Nixon’s team could try to pooh-pooh their way past it. The really inescapable motive that would make stick the charges of obstruction and fraud was that Dick Nixon was scared he’d go to jail.

That came with a twist, which like so many other things to do with this whole epochal mess was a “case of first impression” as the judges would say. A place where everybody flew through heavy weather without legal precedent, without a map. The question there ran the length of one sentence: could you indict a sitting president?

In the Articles, and in a penumbra of sources the Constitution’s writers had left that touched on the issue, it was clear criminal law could be applied to presidents in the course of their lives and careers. Simply being impeached and convicted by the Senate didn’t create double jeopardy with civil or criminal charges. But could you charge them while in office? The Irregulars could try to hand-wave past the details to say fear, founded or unfounded, was enough for motive, but this far out in the open blue it’d be nice to give a judge something to buck them up. So somebody had to sit down and figure out if you truly could do it, which stoked not fear alone but certainty, the kind of logic-chain English common law liked to have around the house.

That meant an Irregular, or Irregulars — Bill Weld was fond of calling batches of the team “an Irregularity” — had to sort that out. The right to do that lay at the heart of a very particular plan. One Irregular had worked with relentless diligence and special care to become the obvious choice for the job. Had built up Bernie as the sergeant of the team, occupied with deputized administrative duties and preparing cross for ongoing trials or jetting off to depositions around the country. Had cultivated the junior aides so that they depended on opportunities from this would-be author and weren’t likely to jump the queue for a big gig. Had worked at least four times as hard as Bill Weld or any of the other soft, comfortable, white, Ivy League boys who saw it all as a grand adventure to be parlayed into state legislatures and clubbish ease with wheelers and dealers. No. This task would seal the state’s argument. And that would make history. The important thing, when your whole life you’d ground and ground from the outside in, was not to line a resume or get slapped on the back in ruddy-faced boys’ clubs. It was to stand before the most powerful people in America with the proof you could meet them in their work with equal skill, and be seen. Once seen, power would follow.

It took weeks in the making. Hours clawed away by will from sleep and care, bottomless pots of coffee, walking laps around the building in the midnight cold to beat back the haze and focus, the steady diet of Tylenol that kept headaches at bay, the full measure of youth weighed against not enough food — hardly a new thing, the judgmental gaze of others now only changed causes and intent — and dizzy spells and that swimming fugue you battened down or brushed away to reach out and grab the next step of the argument. Nails chipped and bruised fighting a rattletrap Smith-Corona electric, shoes dappled in white-out stains, paper cuts and back spasms and the screaming fear of failure shoved back down with iron and take-out Chinese. Then it was done.

In the end it had a beauty to it. Bernie didn’t toss around idle flattery — he was a New Yorker from a big Jewish family who could yell-because-he-cared with the best of them, subtle as a knife with witnesses but he’d chew you out to your face if he thought he had cause. And still he called it beautiful. So’d Bob, that ex-marine with the athlete’s build and the methodical Princeton brain, only his language was more cautious, less poetical. But it came around the same. What really mattered was the argument. It laid out everything the defense team had thrown — with some considerable skill — at presidential indictment then crushed it all with the iron surety of a bear trap.

The good reviews mattered. Bernie would get this, not just on Doar’s desk, but to a one-on-one audience where the imperturable Midwesterner would tilt his glasses down a little and read it as a Mandelbrot set of angles hummed in his mind. Bob was a useful audience because he was Republican, and not just a prep-school liberal like Bill Weld. The Solicitor General, himself squarely Lincoln Republican in his youth, had hired Bob because Bob said he hoped to help keep this process honest and by the book. So they sat down together just before the lunch hour on a Wednesday, the author and John Doar, and Doar’s glasses tilted just as advertised.

The memo worked from the grand synoptic down to the crosshairs on Dick Nixon’s fate. The nation’s faith in both essential elements of the rule of law — that those rules would be administered properly and that they’d be applied fairly — had been shaken to the core by Brookingsgate and by the former president’s conduct toward the special prosecutor’s office and the Department of Justice. The actions of Congress, actual or potential, were only a partial remedy to that, taken on in the political sphere in relation to fitness for presidential office. Criminal conduct could inform congressional decisions about that fitness but that wasn’t the same as process of law. The public needed to have disinterested persons independent of presidential command explore any potential charges and guarantee evidence met a strict standard for indictment, or “presentment” that cause existed but a decision had been made not to indict. Grand juries were designed for that, and could work parallel to but separate from Congress.

If a grand jury sought to indict, could a president be prosecuted while in office? The arguments against it were arguments from policy, that it would disable a sitting president’s ability to carry out the duties of the office. Well, the memo went on, the Constitution had an answer to that. The original language of Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 said in plain language that if a president were unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office that the Vice President would take over. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment had refined that less than a decade ago: a president could declare that it had become impossible for them currently to discharge the powers of office, and they could set those powers down to be taken up again later. Or, a vice president acting in concert with senior officials and the Congress could declare such inability, where the president could return to work in time Congress agreed he was fit to do so. So, either a president could decide the powers of office were worth the trouble of soldiering on through prosecution, or he could step aside himself, or a carefully designed quorum of elected and appointed officials could do it for him.

In all cases, the powers and duties of the presidency would carry on, no matter the state and fate of the individual who’d been elected and now, indicted, felt able to govern or not. Like “the King’s two bodies” in old common law, the Presidency could have a life apart from presidents, and rest secure. The proposed Emergency Succession Amendment under debate in Congress would deepen the bench of possible temporary presidents much farther, a guarantee that the office could carry on. As for the chance indictment would depose a president elected by the public’s favor, indictment was a criminal matter subject to the sure impartial rule of criminal law, not a political question about fitness for office or public acclaim. The Constitution’s framers had made clear the hoped the laws of the land would carry on apart from the whims and considerations of men — “whims and considerations” had come one late evening when the new pot of coffee kicked in.

Because the processes of law needed to be constant and certain, a powerful practical motive argued for indictment. That was the need to preserve charges for future prosecution: indictment would toll statutes of limitations, in case prosecutors used their discretion to wait out a president’s term or Congress somehow immunized that president against criminal prosecution while in office. The Constitution’s authors had been clear that impeachment did not substitute for or preclude indictment, so the need to ensure the law could have its timeline and its day made indictment more not less essential.

The defense team then had gone straight for the brain stem, to stir up fear and argue caution: what about a coup? What if a president were hounded by vague charges and persecuted by personal or political foes in lower government posts? That danger, said this memo, was much greater with impeachment than indictment. The base of evidence to indict a president should be clear, specific, direct, and admit no misinterpretation. It should be the kind ready to go before an independent grand jury for consideration, outside the hands of suspect presidents or rogue flunkies both. If the charges were rash and unproven a president should have nothing to fear and no reason to act, unless his persecutors crossed legal lines of procedural misconduct. Nothing done by Nick Katzenbach or Elliot Richardson had reached that level. If there was clear evidence and clear cause, it should go to a grand jury and on if needed to indictment. Because no one was above the law.

Doar read, and read. He shot questions across in the space between heartbeats. Questions about the sequence of Twenty-Fifth Amendment procedures. A dissertation exam’s worth on the infamous note cards, whether the Brookingsgate obstruction evidence stacked up and how, how it met the elements of standard. How the courts’ decision on the White House tapes fed in to accountability for executive action under the separation of powers and the right of judicial process and review. Where the response to the likely, coming, motion to dismiss on obstruction charges would fold in Doar’s own argument from treason in the Impeachment Clause. Then finally it was done.

Doar looked into the middle distance like he’d just awakened, and nodded softly. “All right,” he said. “That may trim the Imperial Presidency down to a size where we can fit it in a courtroom. Yes. That’s very good.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the author, solidly, in her throaty alto. Both of them adjusted their glasses a little, out of habit. “How do you want to proceed from here?”

“You should grab a couple of our, our Irregulars as they call them, and get a team on the answer to motion to dismiss.” Doar paused a bit for emphasis. “You should lead that team. They’ll build off the memo, they need the author to show them where the foundations are so they can work up from there.”

The memo’s author nodded earnestly but a little stiffly, as if trying to rein in the vigorous bob of her head so it wasn’t too much. Doar raised his eyebrows in a friendly way and gave the spindled mimeograph of the memo a little flourish. “This ought to untie several knots.”

“We can all benefit from that,” the author replied.

“Yes. Yes.” Doar started off to his next task then turned over his shoulder and eased his posture.

“Thank you, Ms. Rodham.”

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>​

George McGovern did not like to do business in the Residence. He believed in that right to a quiet life his family had never quite enjoyed in practice once he got bit by the politics bug and enjoyed now even less, as Eleanor was not shy about reminding him. He believed in refuge. But there were other considerations, namely that the West Wing had eyes and ears and a few key news correspondents still had a direct line to San Clemente. A history professor surrounded by lawyers, the president took their advice here that the best thing was to keep shtum in public, even in private where eyes could see. No tells of any kind so opposing counsel had to ready themselves for anything, and Richard Nixon could wear himself out playing the angles inside the prison of his mind. So they met here in secret — there were all kinds of ways of getting around this rabbit’s warren of a building without being seen — with McGovern himself, Vice President Phil Hart, Archie Cox the Attorney General, both Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart who each sat closest to the president’s ear, White House Counsel Ramsey Clark who’d consider the ramifications for the sitting president of what they did to the one just past, and John Doar.

A meeting in the Residence was a kind of respite of its own, McGovern reflected. Too much of this had already gone on in the Oval Office, too much that sullied and saddened and brought the nation low and frankly broke his heart more than a little. Better then to have a private conversation, rather than drag civic duty through the mud yet again.

Lean and self-contained, John Doar laid out the state of play in his cool, marbled Midwestern rumble. The goal at that moment was to get Nixon to plead to a single significant count, not one of the lesser includeds, something that would stick. Doar’s staff had gamed out the options until their brains were sore; it looked like the best choices were either the obstruction charge tied specifically to the Brookingsgate cover-up, or defrauding the government when Dick Nixon frustrated its purposes by firing Elliot Richardson and Nick Katzenbach. Both, said Doar, demonstrated the mens rea that the state needed to prove in order to get some measure of justice for Nixon’s landscape of crimes. Frank Mankiewicz pitched in: the corrupt purpose lets us end-run the national security shtick from Nixon’s lawyers, yes? Doar nodded. It should, said Doar.

Archie Cox pitched in. In reedy, patrician Yankee tones Cox described the logic. We have here simply, said Archie, a carrot and a stick. Both of these we have distilled from early conversations with former president Nixon’s own counselors and our own observations so you might say they’re four parts empiricism to one part hunch. Such as it is the carrot in sentencing is the flexibility we would enjoy with that phase of the process, should former president Nixon agree to a plea deal. Chief among the inducements for him are probably two, one that he might serve a probationary sentence rather than see the inside of a cell, and second that depending on the charge or charges where we haggle down to the plea, he could possibly retain his right to a passport, which we understand has a special importance to him.

On the other hand, Archie went on, you have the stick, or really it’s two sticks when you come to it so — here he tossed off the hint of a grin — you might think of it like the switches some pioneer father broke off to go and discipline unruly kids. The first is the threat that, if he fails to take a reasonable plea deal, any loss he suffered at trial would impose penalties, like that loss of passport rights, that he’s not fully prepared to bear. The second stick seems to be the more potent one, and that’s the tax charges. It’s not just some opinionated judgment but rather a pattern of facts that, over his political career, former president Nixon has fought very hard against the appearance of impropriety in his financial dealings and his personal wealth…

He grew up poor and pretending not to be, said President McGovern. A lot of us did in those days.

Cox picked up again. Now the Solicitor general and I — Archie dipped those famous librarian’s spectacles of his toward John Doar — are in agreement that not only are the potential tax charges against him very solid, but also that it would take some amount of time in court to lay them out and prove them up. That, we suspect, would be a considerable trauma for him, a matter of shame and anger and disgrace. To get caught doing what he’s insisted for a quarter-century he does not do might alienate some of his supporters, and more than that would humiliate him publicly. He’d very much like to avoid that.

We ran into … a similar issue with the former vice president, said John Doar, tartly. Doar’s sheer dislike of Ted Agnew, which ran down into the foundations of the earth, meant Doar preferred to say as little about the Maryland shake-down artist as possible.

Archie straightened his bow tie and resumed. So we’d try to guide the former president in our direction, perhaps herd him a little bit. Our first offer would be a dual plea, to the Brookingsgate obstruction charge and to either or both obstruction and fraud against the government in the firings of that December. Now it is unlikely either Nixon or his lawyers would bite on the first charge, simply because it undercuts their whole argument about national security and a president’s freedoms of action to enforce that. That leaves the second set, obstruction and defrauding the government with respect to the December ‘72 events. Archie practically leapt off the vigorous verbal period at the end of that sentence to his buried lede: that he did both to avoid impeachment and the chance of indictment seems clear…

The spry, weathered kindness of Phil Hart’s voice piped up, Do we have a definite answer from Justice about indicting a sitting president? Ramsey Clark nodded along to show shared interest.

John Doar answered — there are some very practical policy arguments to be made against indictment and trial, though the Twenty-Fifth and now the Twenty-Eighth Amendments offer some ways we could work around those policy issues. But the Constitution and its authors both say quite clearly that presidents remain liable in the courts, and if indictment tolls a statute of limitations to preserve legal options against any delays the case might face due to political processes, we should hold on to that right to indict.

Then we’ve got him, said Gary Hart.

If he’s guilty as sin on the taxes, added Phil Hart, it opens the way for the public to see him as guilty on everything else whether he skates on the charges or not. As a practicing Catholic I can tell you that kind of thing might put a real dent in his public martyrdom.

That’s a fair point Phil, said the president with just enough of a laugh to outline its hollow center. McGovern went on: it’s the private martyrdom that concerns me more. Reports of the dangerous spikes in Nixon’s phlebitis wore on George McGovern. McGovern had a soft spot the size of his selfhood for broken souls, even ones as barbed and fallen in on themselves as Dick Nixon’s. Justice for Nixon’s crimes was one thing; hounding the man to death was another.

We have what may be a more purely tactical consideration to weigh too, said Archie Cox just before an economical sip of his iced tea. We have no real empirical reason to suppose, based on anything we know from or about former president Nixon and his lawyers, that he would not fight any effort to hang the full range of charges on him from the D.C. District right through to the Supreme Court. It’s my view, shared I believe by some other people here present — Archie looked around him a little, chin tucked like a schoolmaster — and on staff at Justice, that we have probably a majority to uphold many of the key charges. In particular, that the civil libertarians on the Court could and would lift us up against the Nixon defense’s arguments from national security on most fronts. That also may give us some leverage to induce a plea settlement.

But, said Archie, wagging a finger. But. We have less confidence that we can make the Logan Act charge stick with the Court in the case of the former president. I suspect that with Mr. Haldeman, or Madame Chennault, who took much more direct actions and who have left more evidence behind, they would weigh the rights and responsibilities of those defendants against the Act and say they’d done wrong, that they crossed its line. To do that with a former president, one who was campaigning for the office at that time, with whom our base of evidence was to some degree compromised at its roots, that could run the risk of encouraging the Court to overturn the Act altogether as unconstitutionally vague or violative of First Amendment rights.

So they’re nervous about shooting the Logan Act at big game, rumbled Frank Mankiewicz.

I can’t see that you can frustrate government designs any more than by burning down the Paris Talks, groused Gary Hart.

We stand to gain more overall advantage if we can convict Haldeman and Mrs. Chennault and settle the Logan Act as law, said John Doar.

Oh I get the strategy, said Gary Hart, never afraid to monologue. Unless he thinks Nixon’s cracked Haldeman will fall on his sword. But Madame Chennault if she gets stuck in a tight pinch will tell her story and whether that’s to say they’re all blameless patriots fighting the good fight or that it’s all Dick Nixon’s fault it’ll serve to confirm our case. Then we get the two of them and a line on any unindicted co-conspirators, and if we set aside Logan Act charges against Nixon in a plea deal we look lenient to political moderates. Our people’ll bitch but we ended the war and we prosecuted Nixon, they’ve got nowhere to go.

It looks to me like we haven’t done much with Dr. Kissinger here, added Frank Mankiewicz.

John Doar replied. There are three issues there. The first is that for a Logan charge he did a fair job muddying the waters on which of his actions were violative or not. The second is that a lot of what we’ve got on his part in this affair is bound up with the problem that we stand to lose much — most — of what’s in the so-called X File at the evidentiary hearings. Third is that our best case that Mr. Kissinger broke the law doesn’t rest on a Logan charge, it lies with statutes on classified materials at least one of which runs from discovery, not the time of the incident. That gives us a calendar to work with. So we’ve held those out there, against the quality of testimony that he might give us in the Logan Act prosecutions. Henry Kissinger strikes me, and most of my people, as a man with a well honed sense of his own interests, said Doar in closing. That drew a puff of sardonic laughter from Gary Hart; older heads smiled and nodded.

Doar picked up again. Mr. President, from our last round of conversation with the Nixon legal team, there is one more thing I should bring up. We discussed plea agreements in some detail — we’ve worked to talk through most of the major hypotheticals in enough detail that we know where we stand. Doar took in a settling breath. If we put charges in front of them for a plea that has sentencing guidelines Mr. Nixon will accept — Doar carried on his long war to knock Dick Nixon’s title down to size — he wants to plead nolo contendere.

The air went right out of the room. The others could hear Phil Hart suck a breath in through his teeth. Fucking gall, spat Hart Gary. He’d said what the group thought. A no-contest plea, a stage play of bowing so as not to get broken by unjust power, done with a flourish in front of Nixon’s “silent majority,” would be the last pure fuck-you of vindictive vanity from the fallen titan, the first shot of the Bicentennial election, the crowning moment in which Dick Nixon would grab the American constitutional system in his gnarled hands and warp it to his purpose, to prove he was the toughest of the tough guys yet also the real victim here, the same burning contradiction that fired a hundred million small American minds.

President McGovern’s cheeks thinned, as they did under stress, and his eyes widened. No, he said. No, I don’t think we could do that. It’s Vietnam, you see. The longer war. This conspiracy —a hint of anger there as he slung the word into the air — of years and years to use bloodshed, conflict, the ruin of three nations for political gain. All the rest, you know, bribery, corruption, dirty tricks, police-state tactics, coverups, all of it, in the end every other awful sorry thing in this business grows out of that poison seed. What that is, is a war crime. Now I understand very well we probably can’t prove that or prosecute it the way a court would need us to do. But that’s a crime whether the letter of the law contains it or not, a crime against the country and, I’ll say this right now, even in the eyes of God. There has to be some measure of justice. If not that specific charge, fine. Several to choose from. There has, though, to be justice. Has to be truth.

McGovern fiddled with his hands a moment and continued. What that probably comes to, John, said the president to the Solicitor General, is you have to go on back over to Dick Nixon’s lawyers and say it won’t fly. Any plea we get has to be guilty.

With the levity of a wake Phil Hart chipped in. John, said the vice president, I’m afraid that means you’ve got the short straw to tell a former President of the United States to go fuck himself.

I wouldn’t indulge the language, said John Doar, but I can endorse the sentiment. Archie Cox nodded thoughtfully. Ramsey Clark stared daggers at the place in his mind’s eye where Nixon stood.

Now I recognize, said President McGovern as he came into it again, that I’m the only one in this conversation who’s not trained as a lawyer, just a history professor out of the Midwest. What I say though is we give him the charges on the December firings. The obstruction and the, the fraud. He can take those as guilty and get his plea deal. Or, he can pick a jury and roll his dice. And in that case we lead with the taxes. John, can we do that? asked the president of John Doar.

Doar nodded. We have time left in the calendar to amend the complaint, he said. In practice hat’d be a couple or three whole nights taken in shifts, but Doar’s staff worked like those possessed.

Just to say, Frank Mankiewicz broke in, simply as the token hack in the room, we’ve considered that those remaining allies of Dick Nixon in the press, or at least enemies of this particular administration, will spend the life of the appeals process shouting from the rooftops about how George McGovern runs a police state — because, as my friend Tom Lehrer says, parody is dead — and is the vindictive stalking horse of Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy family and whoever else the Anaheim League of Women Voters hates that week?

Gary Hart pitched in: they surely will.

Well, said President McGovern with a long breath, Frank I think in this case it gets to be a matter of fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. More than any other thing in this legal process I think he’s assumed — everyone present knew the “he” of the sentence as the president stepped away from Dick Nixon like a plane over its target — more than that he’s right or that he hasn’t really broken any law, more than any of that, I think he’s assumed we’re weak. That we’ll back off, won’t run him to ground because it would be too hard on the country or it’d erode our political position. He needs to see that he’s wrong. This is a hard thing. Terrible thing, all of it. It also has to be done. For the good of the country.

They’ll shout either way, said Ramsey Clark, vocal at last. They haven’t got any particular interest in the good of the country with it. What they want is revenge. Their pound of flesh.

Speaking for American Jews, said Frank Mankiewicz, since it seems we’re all one and the same to the Republican Party, it wouldn’t be the first time that was demanded of us.

Phil Hart stood up slowly, took a couple of steps, and clapped a hand on the seated president’s arm. Well if that gets to be the bitter end I can’t think of a better one, Hart said. Thank you, Mr. President.

George McGovern nodded acknowledgment. John, Archie, you’ll do what needs done here? he asked. There were murmurs of assent. All right then, said the president. It’s Dick Nixon’s ball now. Let’s see where he runs with it.

 

[Yes]

#McGoverningToberVember

 

[thepsyborg]

God, I do love your writing. I haven't seen massive, complex, borderline-run-on sentences wielded with such fluid grace since I quit rereading Dickens every couple years.

I should probably start again, come to think of it.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

So awesome to see this back!

#McGoverningToberVember

Up next: Cleaning the Stables - the trials (geddit? Amirite? ... *taps mic*... is this thing on?...) of Richard Nixon, the complexities of cleansing a secret state you now own, everything's fair game now in primary season, and other such, also... Midterms!! courtesy of the Greek chorus of George McGovern's top political fixers

Spoiler

So I'm guessing part two of this chapter sees Nixon cutting a deal, and how that affects the political climate, including the midterms and the run up to the start of the GOP invisible presidential primary.

Then: Winters of Discontent - In which Yr. Hmbl. Author & C. indulges his Inner Brit by writing an outer chapter that proves yet again hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, inclusive of Lib-Labs and Maggie and oil, oh my, not to mention a Troubled province and something nasty in the Liberal woodshed

Had forgotten about this; I'm guessing then the chapter after next will answer my last post...

 

[mymatedave10]

Another utter delight from your pen, and I burst out laughing at the reveal of the memo's author. Bravo.