But I was wrong. Nixon knows pro football. He'd taken Oakland and six points in the Super Bowl, he said, because Vince Lombardi had told him up in Green Bay that the AFL was much stronger than the sportswriters claimed. Nixon cited Oakland's sustained drive in the second half as evidence of their superiority over the Kansas City team that had challenged the Packers in 1967 and had totally collapsed in the second half. “Oakland didn't fold up,” he said. “That second-half drive had Lombardi worried.”

I remembered it, and mentioned the scoring play -- a sideline pass to an unknown receiver named Bill Miller.

Nixon hesitated for a moment, then smiled broadly and slapped me on the leg. “That's right,” he said. “Yes, the Miami boy.” I couldn't believe it; he not only knew Miller, but he knew what college he'd played for. It wasn't his factual knowledge of football that stunned me; it was his genuine interest in the game. “You know,” he said, “the worst thing about campaigning, for me, is that it ruins my whole football season. I'm a sports buff, you know. If I had another career, I'd be a sportscaster -- or a sportswriter.”

I smiled and lit a cigarette. The scene was so unreal that I felt like laughing out loud -- to find myself zipping along a New England freeway in a big yellow car, being chauffeured around by a detective while I relaxed in the back seat and talked about football with my old buddy Dick Nixon, the man who came within 100,000 votes of causing me to flee the country in 1960. I was on the verge of mentioning this to him, but just then we came to the airport and drove out on the runway, where his chartered Lear Jet was waiting to zap him off to the wild blue yonder of Miami for a “think session” with his staff. (There he rises early and works a 20-hour day. He skimps on food -- breakfast is juice, cereal, and milk; lunch is a sandwich, and dinner might be roast beef or steak, which he often doesn't finish -- and keeps his weight at a constant 175 pounds. He swims some, suns a lot, yet rarely seems to stop working. “I'll say this -- he has enough stamina to be President,” says William P. Rogers, an old friend. “He has the most stamina of any man I have ever known.”)

We talked for a while beside the plane, but by that time I'd thought better of saying anything rude or startling. It had been exceptionally decent of him to give me a ride and an hour of his time, so I controlled the almost irresistible urge to gig him on his embryonic sense of humor.