R. Chapman, Pepsi-Cola salesman, New York City. . . with a handful of friends carrying walkie-talkies and wearing white leather shoulder-holsters. . . But what the hell? Just send a case of Pepsi up to the suite, my man, and don't ask questions; your reward will come later -- call the White House and ask for Howard Hunt or Jim McCord; they'll take care of you.

Right. Or maybe Tex Colson, who is slowly and surely emerging as the guiding light behind Nixon's whole arsenal of illegal, immoral and unethical “black advance” or “dirty tricks” department. It was Colson who once remarked that he would “walk over his grandmother for Richard Nixon”. . . and it was Colson who hired head “plumber” Egil “Bud” Krogh, who in 1969 told Daniel X. Friedman, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago: “Anyone who opposes us, we'll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn't support us, we'll destroy.”

Colson, the only one of Nixon's top command to so far evade Watergate's legal noose, is the man who once told White House cop Jack Caulfield to put a firebomb in the offices of the staid/liberal Brookings Institution, in order to either steal or destroy some documents he considered incriminating. Colson now says he was “only joking” about the firebomb plan, but Caulfield took it so seriously that he went to the White House counsel John Dean and said he refused to work with Colson any longer, because he was “crazy.”

Crazy? Tex Colson?

Never in Hell. “He's the meanest man in American politics,” says Nixon's speechwriter Pat Buchanan, smiling lazily over the edge of a beer can beside the pool outside his Watergate apartment. Buchanan is one of the few people in the Nixon administration with a sense of humor. He is so far to the right that he dismisses Tex Colson as a “Massachusetts liberal.” But for some reason, Buchanan is also one of the few people -- perhaps the only one -- on Nixon's staff, who has friends at the other end of the political spectrum. At one point during the campaign I mentioned Buchanan at McGovern Headquarters, for some reason, and Rick Sterns, perhaps the most hardline left-bent ideologue on McGovern's staff, sort of chuckled and said, “Oh yeah, we're pretty good friends. Pat's the only one of those bastards over there with any principles.” When I mentioned this to another McGovern staffer, he snapped: “Yeah, maybe so. . . like Josef Goebbels had principles.”