Which brings us back to that accident report I just wrote and sent off to Mr. Roach at Avis Mid-Atlantic Headquarters in Arlington. The accident occurred about 3:30 in the morning when either Warren Beatty or Pat Caddell opened the door of a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass I'd rented at Dulles airport earlier that day, and banged the door against the fender of a massive black & gold Cadillac roadster parked in front of a late-night restaurant on Connecticut Avenue called Anna Maria's. It seemed like a small thing at the time, but in retrospect it might have spared us all -- including McGovern -- an extremely nasty episode.

Because somewhere in the late hours of that evening, when the drink had taken hold and people were jabbering loosely about anything that came into their heads, somebody mentioned that “the worst and most vicious” of Nixon's backstairs White House hit men -- Charles “Tex” Colson -- was probably the only one of the dozen or more Nixon/CRP functionaries thus far sucked into “the Watergate scandal” who was not likely to do any time, or even be indicted.

It was a long, free-falling conversation, with people wandering in and out, over a time-span of an hour or so -- journalists, pols, spectators -- and the focus of it, as I recall, was a question that I was trying to get some bets on: How many of the primary Watergate figures would actually serve time in prison?

The reactions ranged from my own guess that only Magruder and Dean would live long enough to serve time in prison, to Mankiewicz's flat assertion that “everybody except Colson” would be indicted, convicted, sentenced and actually hauled off to prison.

(Everybody involved in this conversation will no doubt deny any connection with it -- or even hearing about it, for that matter -- but what the hell? It did, in fact, take place over the course of some two or three days, in several locations, but the seed of speculation took root in the final early-morning hours of McGovern's party. . . although I don't remember that George himself was involved or even within earshot at any time. He has finally come around to the point where his friends don't mind calling him “George” in the friendly privacy of his own home, but that is not quite the same thing as getting him involved in a felony-conspiracy/attempted murder charge that some wild-eyed, Nixon-appointed geek in the Justice Department might try to crank up on the basis of a series of boozy conversations among journalists, politicians and other half-drunk cynics. Anybody who has spent any time around late-night motel bars with the press corps on a presidential campaign knows better than to take their talk seriously. . . but after reading reviews of my book on the '72 campaign, it occurs to me that some people will believe almost anything that fits their preconceived notions.)

And so much for all that.

August 2nd Patio Bar beside the Washington Hilton Swimming Pool