“Well, he wouldn't have time to know exactly who it was -- but we thought about it for a while, still driving around, and figured a beastly thing like that might be the only thing that could get Nixon off the hook, because he could go on television the next afternoon, demanding to make a nationwide emergency statement, saying: 'Look what these thugs have done to poor Mr. Colson! This is exactly what we were talking about! This is why we had to be so violent in our ways, because these thugs will stop at nothing! They dragged Mr. Colson the length of Pennsylvania Avenue at four in the morning, then cut him loose like a piece of meat!' He would call for more savage and stringent security measures against 'the kind of animals who would do a thing like this.' So we put the plot out of our heads.”

“Well, it would have been a bit risky. . . wouldn't have done the Democratic party any good at all, would it?”

"Well, it might have created a bit of an image problem -- and it would have given Nixon the one out he desperately needs now, a way to justify the whole Watergate trip by raving about 'this brutal act.'. . . That's an old Hell's Angels gig, dragging people down the street. Hell's Angels. Pachucos, drunken cowboys.

“But I thought more about it later, when I finally got back to the hotel after that stinking accident I'm still trying to explain. . . and it occurred to me that those bastards are really mean enough to do that to Colson themselves -- if they only had the wits to think about it. They could go out and drag him down the street in a car with old McGovern stickers on the bumpers or put on false beards and wave a wine bottle out the window as they passed the White House and cut him loose. He'd roll to a stop in front of the Guard House and the Guard would clearly see the McGovern sticker on the car screeching off around the corner and that's all Nixon would need. If we gave them the idea, they'd probably go out and get Colson tonight.”

“He'd be babbling, I'd think --”

“He'd be hysterical, in very bad shape. And of course he'd claim that McGovern thugs had done it to him -- if he were still able to talk. I really believe Nixon would do a thing like that if he thought it would get him out of the hole. . . So I thought about it a little more, and it occurred to me what we should do was have these masks made up -- you know those rubber masks that fit over the whole head.”

“Ah yes, very convincing. . .”

“Yeah, one of them would have to be the face of Haldeman, one the face of Ehrlichman and one the face of Tony Ulasewicz.”

“Yes, the meanest men on the Nixon Staff.”