Which he is , I suspect -- and that means, if nothing else, that he'll be running up huge bills on the Rolling Stone tab. Whether or not he will write anything coherent is a moot point, I think, because whatever he writes -- if anything -- will necessarily be long out of date by the time it appears in print. Not even the Washington Post and the New York Times, which arrive daily (but three days late) out here in Woody Creek, can compete with the spontaneous, brain-boggling horrors belching constantly out of the TV set.

Last Saturday afternoon, for instance, I was sitting here very peacefully -- minding the store, as it were -- when the tube suddenly erupted with a genuinely obscene conversation between Mike Wallace and John Ehrlichman.

I was sitting on the porch with Gene Johnston -- one of Dr. Thompson's old friends and ex-general manager of the Aspen Wallposter -- when Sandy called us inside to watch the show. Ehrlichman's face was so awful, so obviously mired in a lifetime of lies and lame treachery, that it was just about impossible to watch him in our twisted condition.

“Jesus Christ, look at him!” Johnston kept muttering. “Two months ago, that bastard was running the country.” He opened a beer and whacked it down on the table. “I never want to hear the word 'paranoid' again, goddamnit! Not after seeing that face!” He reeled towards the front door, shaking his head and mumbling: “God damn! I can't stand it!”

I watched the whole thing, myself, but not without problems. It reminded me of Last Exit to Brooklyn -- the rape of a bent whore -- but I also knew Dr. Thompson was watching the show in Miami, and that it would fill him with venom & craziness. Whatever small hope we might have had of keeping him away from Washington during this crisis was burned to a cinder by the Wallace-Ehrlichman show. It had the effect of reinforcing Thompson's conviction that Nixon has cashed his check -- and that possibility alone is enough to lure him to Washington for the death-watch.

My own prognosis is less drastic, at this point in time [sic], but it's also a fact that I've never been able to share The Doktor's obsessive political visions -- for good or ill. My job has to do with nuts & bolts, not terminal vengeance. And it also occurs to me that there is nothing in the Watergate revelations, thus far, to convince anyone but a stone partisan fanatic that we will all be better off when it's finished. As I see it, we have already reaped the real benefits of this spectacle -- the almost accidental castration of dehumanized power-mongers like Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Tom Charles Huston, that vicious young jackal of a lawyer from Indianapolis that Nixon put in charge of the Special Domestic Intelligence operation.