“Yeah,” he said. “I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that, but --”

“No,” I said. “You were right.”

He stared at me, looking puzzled.

It was one of those days that we all hit once in a while when everything you mean to say sounds wrong when you hear it coming out of your mouth. I tried briefly to explain what I really meant, but even the explanation came out bent, so I decided to drop the subject. . . What I had in mind, I think, was the idea that Nixon really was “one of us” -- not in Conrad's sense of that term, or my own, but as an almost perfect expression of “the American way of life” that I'd been so harshly immersed in for the past eight or nine months of traveling constantly around the country to cover the presidential primaries.

Jesus! This idea seems just as tangled tonight as it did two years ago when I was trying to explain it to Wicker -- so I think I'll let it drop, once again, and move on to something else. . . But not without a final backward glance at the election results in November of '72, when Richard Nixon was re-elected to the White House by the largest margin of any president since George Washington. There is no way to erase that ominous fact from the record books -- any more than Nixon will ever be able to erase from the history books the fact that he was the first American president to be driven out of the White House because of admittedly criminal behavior while in office.

Looking back on that crippled conversation with Wicker in Miami, it occurs to me that maybe almost everybody in the country -- except possibly Wicker -- might have been spared what General Ford called “our national nightmare” if Tom had been kept on as The New York Times Washington Bureau chief in 1968, instead of being converted to a columnist. The social and political pressures of the job would have driven him half crazy, but his then emerging sense of outrage at the whole style and content of the Nixon administration might have been contagious enough, within the bureau, to encourage a more aggressive kind of coverage among the Times reporters he would have been assigning to look behind Nixon's facade.

As it turned out, however, those fascist bastards had to be given so much rope that they came close to hanging all the rest of us along with themselves, before The Washington Post finally filled the power vacuum created by The New York Times's sluggish coverage of those four years when Nixon and his fixers were organizing vengeful plans like John Dean's list of “our enemies” to be harassed by the IRS, and the Tom Charles Huston “Domestic Intelligence Plan” that amounted to nothing less than the creation of a White House Gestapo.