“Ah, we were drunk yes. We'd been to a party at McGovern's.”

“McGovern's? Drinking? Who was with you?”

“Drinking heavily, yes. It was Warren Beatty and Pat Caddell, McGovern's poll wizard, and myself and for some reason it occurred to me that the thing to do that hour of the morning was to go out and get Colson.”

“My God, that's crazy! You must have been stoned and drunk -- especially by four in the morning.”

"Well, we left McGovern's at about 2:30 and we were supposed to meet Crouse at this restaurant downtown. . . McGovern lives somewhere in the Northwest part of town and it had taken me two hours to find the damn house and I figured it would take me another two hours to get out again unless I could follow somebody. Crouse was about a block ahead of me when we left. I could see his taillights but there was another car between me and Crouse and I was afraid I'd lose him in that maze of narrow little streets, almost like country lanes.

" 'We can't let Crouse get away,' I said. So I slammed it into passing gear and passed the car right in front of me in order to get behind Crouse, and all of a sudden here was a car coming the other direction on this street about 15 feet wide -- just barely enough room for two cars to pass and certainly not enough room for three cars to pass, one of them going about 70 miles an hour with a drunk at the wheel.

“I thought, hmmmm, well. . . I can either slow down or stomp on it and squeeze in there, so I stomped on it and forced the oncoming car up over the curb and onto the grass in order to avoid me as I came hurtling back into my own lane, and just as I flashed past him I happened to look over and saw that it was a police car. Well, I thought, this is not the time to stop and apologize; I could see him in my rear view mirror, stopping and beginning to turn around. . . So instead of following Crouse, I took the first left I could, turned the lights off and drove like a bastard -- assuming the cop would probably chase Crouse and run him down and arrest him, but as it happened he didn't get either of us.”

“What a rotten thing to do.”

“Well, it was him or me, Ralph. . . as a matter of fact I worried about it when we didn't see Tim at the restaurant later on. But we were late because we did some high-speed driving exercises in the Southeast area of Washington -- flashing along those big empty streets going into corners at 80 miles an hour and doing 180s. . . it was a sort of thunder road driving trip, screwing it on with that big Cutlass.”

“Enormous car?”