Gonzo 1 - The Great Shark Hunt

PART 2

Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll

(Overhauled 1968 Model)

No interview with Richard Nixon will end until he refers to himself, at least once, as a “political man.” His opponents, by implication, are mere “politicians.” Especially the man Nixon plans to defeat this November. . . for the Presidency of the United States. Selah.

The major polls and surveys in the country suggest that Nixon may be right, despite the outraged howls of all those voters who insist that a choice between Nixon and Johnson is no choice at all. Sen. Eugene McCarthy has called it “a choice between obscenity and vulgarity.” Yet McCarthy is the political heir of Adlai Stevenson, who said that “People get the kind of government they deserve.” If this is true, then 1968 is probably the year in which the great American chicken will come home to roost. . . either for good or for ill.

So it was with a sense of morbid curiosity that I went to New England not long ago to check on “the real Richard Nixon.” Not necessarily the “new Nixon,” or even the newest model of the old “new Nixon,” who is known to the press corps that follows him as “Nixon Mark IV.” My assignment was to find the man behind all these masks, or maybe to find that there was no mask at all -- that Richard Milhous Nixon, at age 55, was neither more nor less than what he appeared to be -- a plastic man in a plastic bag, surrounded by hired wizards so cautious as to seem almost plastic themselves. . . These political handlers were chosen this time for their coolness and skill for only one job: to see that Richard Nixon is the next President of the United States.

One of the handlers, Henry Hyde, presumably felt I was a threat to the Nixon camp. He called Pageant to check me out. This was after he got into my room somehow -- while I was away, eating breakfast -- and read my typewritten notes. The Nixon people, who wore baggy, dark-colored suits and plenty of greasy kid stuff (they looked like models at an Elks Club style show), seemed to feel I was disrespectful because I was dressed like a ski bum. Pageant reassured Mr. Hyde as to the purity of my mission and intentions in spite of my appearance.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.