“The Dex machine.” Jesus! Learning that Nixon and his people use this -- instead of the smaller, quicker, more versatile (and portable) Mojo Wire -- was almost the final insult: coming on the heels of the Gross sense of Injury I felt when I saw that my name was not included on the infamous “Enemies of the White House” list.

I would almost have preferred a vindictive tax audit to that kind of crippling exclusion. Christ! What kind of waterheads compiled that list? How can I show my face in the Jerome Bar, when word finally reaches Aspen that I wasn't on it?

Fortunately, the list was drawn up in the summer of '71 -- which partially explains why my name was missing. It was not until the autumn of '72 that I began referring to The President, in nationally circulated print, as a Cheapjack Punk and a Lust-Maddened Werewolf, whose very existence was (and remains) a bad cancer on the American political tradition. Every ad the publishers prepared for my book on the 1972 Campaign led off with a savage slur on all that Richard Nixon ever hoped to represent or stand for. The man is a walking embarrassment to the human race -- and especially, as Bobby Kennedy once noted, to that high, optimistic potential that fueled men like Jefferson and Madison, and which Abe Lincoln once described as “the last, best hope of man.”

There is slim satisfaction in the knowledge that my exclusion from the (1971) list of “White House enemies” has more to do with timing and Ron Ziegler's refusal to read Rolling Stone than with the validity of all the things I've said and written about that evil bastard.

I was, after all, the only accredited journalist covering the 1972 presidential campaign to compare Nixon with Adolf Hitler. . . I was the only one to describe him as a congenital thug, a fixer with the personal principles of a used-car salesman. And when these distasteful excesses were privately censured by the docile White House press corps, I compounded my flirtation with Bad Taste by describing the White House correspondents as a gang of lame whores & sheep without the balls to even argue with Ron Ziegler -- who kept them all dancing to Nixon's bogus tune, until it became suddenly fashionable to see him for the hired liar he was and has been all along.

The nut of my complaint here -- in addition to being left off The List -- is rooted in a powerful resentment at not being recognized (not even by Ziegler) for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics -- or perhaps even “sportsmanship” -- and I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down. Not afterwards -- though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.