So the cycle runs on. Both the politician and the pawnbroker are doomed to live like junkies, hooked on the mutant energy of their own unexplainable addictions.

In this baleful sense, Richard Nixon is definitely “one of us” -- as New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, in a very different context, back in the early Sixties. The phrase was Conrad's, from Lord Jim: “He was one of us. . .” -- and when I read Wicker's piece more than a decade ago I remember feeling angry that The New York Times had the power to hire another one of these goddamn gothic Southern sots and turn him loose to stumble around Washington and spew out this kind of bullshit.

Anybody stupid enough to identify with Richard Nixon the same way Conrad's Marlow identified with Lord Jim was beyond either help or any hope of credibility, I felt, and for the next seven or eight years I dismissed everything Wicker wrote as the mumblings of a hired fool. . . And when Wicker's point of view began swinging very noticeably in the direction of my own, in the late 1960s, I was almost as disturbed -- for entirely different reasons -- as the Times editors in New York who also noticed the drift and swiftly deposed him from his heir-apparent role to James Reston as the new chief of the paper's Washington Bureau.

The masthead of The New York Time's Washington Bureau is a reliable weathervane for professional observers of the changing political climate. Control of the bureau is usually in the hands of somebody the magnates in New York believe is more or less on the same wavelength as the men in control of the government. Arthur Krock, for instance, got along fine with Eisenhower, but he couldn't handle the Kennedys and was replaced by Reston, a JFK partisan in 1960 and a “Roosevelt coalition” neopopulist who also got along well with Lyndon Johnson. But when Johnson quit in 1968 and the future looked very uncertain, Reston was promoted to a management job in New York and was succeeded by Wicker at about the same time Robert Kennedy was deciding to make his move for the presidency; but when Bobby was killed and McCarthy collapsed, the Times hedged its bet on Humphrey by deposing Wicker and replacing him with Max Frankel, a smooth and effective diplomat/journalist who could presumably get along with either Hubert or Nixon. . . But not even Frankel could handle Four More Years, apparently, and the Nixon/Agnew landslide in 1972 forced the admittedly anti-Nixon Times into a stance of agonizing reappraisal. Frankel moved up to New York, and since the most obvious candidates for his job were relatively liberal young turks like Bob Semple, Anthony Lewis or Johnny Apple, who were clearly out of step with the mandate of vengeance that Nixon claimed by virtue of his shattering victory over McGovern, the Times management in New York made a fateful policy decision that would soon come back to haunt them: