“Watch what's happening, goddamnit! Here's another true Son of the South. First it was Thompson. . . now Talmadge. . . and then we'll get that half-wit pimp from Florida.”

“Gurney?”

I nodded, staring fixedly at the big blueish eye of the permanently malfunctioned “color TV” set that I hauled back from Washington last summer, when I finally escaped from the place. . . But now I was using it almost feverishly, day after day, to watch what was happening in Washington.

The Watergate Hearings -- my daily fix, on TV. Thousands of people from all over the country are writing the networks to demand that this goddamn tedious nightmare be jerked off the air so they can get back to their favorite soap operas: As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, The Price Is Right and What Next for Weird Betty? They are bored by the spectacle of the Watergate hearings. The plot is confusing, they say; the characters are dull, and the dialogue is repulsive.

The President of the United States would never act that way -- at least not during baseball season. Like Nixon's new White House chief of staff, Melvin Laird, said shortly before his appointment: “If the President turns out to be guilty, I don't want to hear about it.”

This is the other end of the attitude-spectrum from the comment I heard, last week, from a man in Denver: “I've been waiting a long time for this,” he said. “Maybe not as long as Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan Douglas. . . and I never really thought it would happen, to tell you the truth.” He flashed me a humorless smile and turned back to his TV set. “But it is, by god! And it's almost too good to be true.”

My problem -- journalistically, at least -- has its roots in the fact that I agree with just about everything that laughing, vengeful bastard said that day. We didn't talk much. There was no need for it. Everything Richard Milhous Nixon ever stood for was going up in smoke right in front of our eyes. And anybody who could understand and appreciate that, I felt, didn't need many words to communicate. At least not with me.

(The question is: what did he stand for, and what next for that? Agnew? Reagan? Rockefeller? Even Percy? Nixon was finally “successful” for the same reason he was finally brought low. He kept pushing, pushing, pushing -- and inevitably he pushed too far.)

Noon -- Tuesday, June 26th

The TV set is out on the porch now -- a move that involved much cursing and staggering.

Weicker has the mike -- mono a mono on Dean -- and after 13 minutes of apparently aimless blathering he comes off no better than Talmadge. Weicker seemed oddly cautious -- a trifle obtuse, perhaps.

What are the connections? Weicker is a personal friend of Pat Gray's. He is also the only member of the Select Committee with after-hours personal access to John Dean.