Sitting out here on the porch, naked in a rocking chair in the half-shade of a dwarf juniper tree -- looking out at snow-covered mountains from this hot lizard's perch in the sun with no clouds at 8000 feet -- a mile and a half high, as it were -- it is hard to grasp that this dim blue tube sitting on an old bullet-pocked tree stump is bringing me every uncensored detail -- for five or six hours each day from a musty brown room 2000 miles east -- of a story that is beginning to look like it can have only one incredible ending -- the downfall of the President of the United States.

Six months ago, Richard Nixon was the most powerful political leader in the history of the world, more powerful than Augustus Caesar when he had his act rolling full bore -- six months ago.

Now, with the passing of each sweaty afternoon, into what history will call “the Summer of '73,” Richard Nixon is being dragged closer and closer -- with all deliberate speed, as it were -- to disgrace and merciless infamy. His place in history is already fixed: He will go down with Grant and Harding as one of democracy's classic mutations.

9:22 PM

Billy Graham Crusade on both TV channels. . . But what? What's happening here? An acid flashback? A time warp? CBS has Graham in Orange County, raving about “redemption through blood .” Yes, God demands Blood! . . . but ABC is running the Graham Crusade in South Africa, a huge all-white Afrikaner pep rally at Johannesburg's Wanderers Stadium. (Did I finally get that right, are these mushrooms deceiving me?)

Strange. . . on this eve of Nixon's demise, his private preacher is raving about blood in Los Angeles (invoking the actual bloody images of Robert Kennedy's brain on the cold concrete floor of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen and Jack Kennedy's blood on his widow's dress that tragic day in Dallas. . . and the blood of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony in Memphis).

But wait? Is that a black face I see in the crowd at Wanderers Stadium. Yes, a rapt black face, wearing aviator shades and a green army uniform. . . stoned on Billy's message, along with all the others: “Your soul is searching for God! [Pause, body crouched, both fists shaking defiantly in the air. . .] They tore his flesh! They pulled his beard out.” Graham is in a wild Charlton Heston fighting stance now: “And while they were doing that, 72 million avenging angels had to be held back. . . yes. . . by the bloody arm of the Lord. . . from sweeping this planet into hell .”

Cazart! Seventy-two million of the fuckers, eh? That threat would never make the nut in L.A. It would have to be 72 billion there. But South Africa is the last of the white nazi bush-leagues, and when you mention 72 million of anything ready to sweep across the planet, they know what you mean in South Africa.