Who Let the Dogs In? (49 page)

In this, the era of ideologues, that is a most unfashionable position. There are seventy-three Republican freshmen and one Speaker in the House who consider compromise treachery. And Phil Gramm considered compromise treachery before compromise-as-treachery was cool. I suppose we should give him credit for being ahead of his time; Texans always have liked a hard-ass.

Now that
politician
is a dirty word (not that it was ever reminiscent of roses), it seems awfully dated to bring up names like Sam Rayburn, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, and Barbara Jordan. But they were politicians. They fought hard and they compromised because they thought it was for something quaintly called the greater good. Or maybe they just wanted to move the ball. In any case, in the phrase of the kindergarten report card, they worked and played well with others. And no one ever considered them sissies because of it.

Phil Gramm does not work or play well with others. Never has. And I don’t think that works well for Texas. “Go along to get along” is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash ’em in for your home state? No, I’d say we could ask for more than that from our senators. But I’ve never seen Phil Gramm collect or cash a chit for anyone except Phil Gramm. And that is one in the ribs to a man who’s down. God forgive me.

February 1996

Morris Udall

T
UCSON, ARIZ
.
— damn, life’s a funny ol’ female-dog, idn’t she? Here I am, back in Tucson, one of my favorite places in the U.S. of A. and also the place of one of my most bitter professional regrets.

I did a man wrong here one time. I didn’t mean to, and it didn’t make much difference, but there it is. The man’s name is Morris Udall, representative from Tucson, and the year was 1976.

Six, I think it was, Democrats were scrapping for the presidential nomination that year. Ol’ Jerry Ford looked beatable. Among the less likely contenders were Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia with the charisma of a day-old pizza, and Mo Udall, an ace guy with the misfortune to be from Arizona (three electoral votes).

The New York Times Sunday Magazine
was fixing to run profiles on each of these six candidates, and they called me to profile Udall—I think because I, in Texas, was the farthest-West journalist they’d ever heard of. Texas, Arizona—it all looks the same from New York.

In those days, I was what is known in our trade as “hungry,” which is supposed to mean “fiesty, ambitious, willin’ to go after a story like a starvin’ dog.” Actually, I was plain hungry: Six years at
The Texas Observer
left me below the poverty line, and I jumped at that assignment.

So I came over to Arizona and investigated Mo Udall’s life, times, finances, family life, psychological health, and public record back to Year Aught. I’ll tell you now what I should have told you then: Morris Udall is a man of exceptional decency, integrity, courage, honesty, and intelligence. On top of that, he’s funny. If you could have forced Congress to take a vote at that time just on the question of who was the finest human being then serving—secret ballot, no consequences, just vote your conscience—I swear to you that Udall would have won hands down.

And did I report this? Hell, no. I was looking for warts; I wanted dirt. Besides, I was afraid of being conned, of looking like a naïve hick. I dug through his campaign contributions. (I found union money! Do you know how brave you have to be to support unions in Arizona?) I dug through his psychohistory. (The Udalls are a famous Mormon family. Mo split from the church and became a Jack Mormon after commanding an all-black troop in the army). I wrote about his being one-eyed. (At one point, he was a one-eyed professional basketball player—some handicap.)

Faced with the disgusting reality of a truly decent politician, I did my dead-level best to be nasty. I didn’t cut him an inch of slack; I thought that was my job, the way they did it in the big leagues.

My grudging report that I hadn’t been able to find anything actually wrong with Udall duly appeared in print. Imagine my surprise when
The New York Times’
famed political correspondent R. W. Apple followed my reserved appraisal of Udall with a puff piece about Jimmy Carter. (Johnny Apple, you know perfectly well that was a puff piece.) Every venial sin of Udall’s that I had held up to the merciless light of day, Apple glossed over gaily in the case of Carter. The profiles appeared from one Sunday to the next, but the politicians described in them were not judged by a single standard. To put it mildly.

Well, Jimmy Carter turned out to be a man of character and decency, too—he just wasn’t much of a politician, and Mo Udall was a good one.

My continuing regret is that what I wrote was accurate, but it wasn’t
true.
I was trying so hard to prove I could be a major-league, hard-hitting journalist that I let the real story go hang itself.

The real story is the sheer decency of Morris Udall. When I am asked if there are any heroes left in politics, I always think of Udall. He’s retired now, victim of a sad, slow, wasting disease. I suppose you could say that Udall is to Arizona liberals what Barry Goldwater is to Arizona conservatives: an incurably honest man of principle. Or you could say that Morris Udall is to Arizona liberals what Ev Mecham is to Arizona kooks. I think he’d like to have it end with a joke.

Speaking of remarkable figures from the past, those of us in the small but select circle that follows South Dakota politics were delighted to see Bill Janklow with the nomination for governor again. Last time Janklow was governor, he contributed greatly to the public entertainment. Among the more colorful charges leveled against him were that he wore a rabbit suit and carried a machine gun in his car trunk. (I can’t remember if any of that is true or not, I just recall the offbeat charm of it all.) The thing to remember about Dakota politics is that the Dakotas only
look
normal—underneath is a wide streak of Dakota weirdness. For normal, you have to go to Nebraska.

June 1994

Richard Nixon

Q
UEL
TRIOMPH
for the old Trickster. One last time we got a new Nixon. The Dead Nixon was, according to all those glowing tributes on television, a man of vision, courage, and leadership. For those of you thinking you must have lost your marbles lately to have forgotten what a great American Richard Nixon was, here’s a little pop quiz to refresh your memories.

How did Bob Haldeman, who was Nixon’s closest aide in the White House, describe Nixon in writing from prison?

“Dirty, mean, coldly calculating, devious, craftily manipulative, the weirdest man ever to live in the White House.”

What did Nixon think of the Supreme Court?

He nominated two men, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, to the Court, both of whom were found unfit to serve there by the United States Senate. According to Haldeman, if Nixon had gotten a single vote on the Court, he would have defied its order to turn over the Watergate tapes. “When the Court ruled 8-to-0 against Nixon, it unknowingly averted what might have been a supremely critical confrontation between the executive and judiciary powers.”

How did Nixon see the executive branch?

According to John Ehrlichman, shortly before the 1972 election Nixon called a “landmark meeting” at Camp David to plan the “capture” of the executive branch. “It was Nixon’s intent to repopulate the bureaucracy with our people. We would seek new laws to permit the dead and disloyal wood to be cast out.” Nixon admired John Dean because “he had the kind of steel and really mean instinct we needed to clean house after the election in various departments and to put the IRS and Justice Department on the kind of basis it should be on.” The IRS was to be used to get those on the enemies list.

In his diary Nixon wrote, “There simply has to be a line drawn at times with those who are against us, and then we have to take action to deal with them effectively.” Of a bureaucrat who had failed to knuckle under to the White House, Nixon said, “We’re going to get him . . . there are many unpleasant places a bureaucrat can be sent.” At other times, Nixon ranted about the “Jewish cabal” in the bureaucracy he was convinced was trying to make him look bad, and ordered a head count of Jews in certain sections of the government.

“The Democrats have the Jews and the Negroes, and let them have them. In fact, tie them around their necks,” Nixon said. He hated the “Jewish press” (i.e., the major newspapers) and warned an aide to “stay away from the arts—the arts are full of Jews.” He used the word
nigger
and believed blacks were genetically inferior.

What did Nixon think of reformers?

Hated them. Those who harped on honesty in government were “hypocrites, little bastards, sanctimonious frauds, people who couldn’t butter a piece of bread.”

And what did Nixon think of the American people?

He told Theodore White about campaigning, “All the while you’re smiling, you want to kick them in the shins.”

How many Americans died in Vietnam after Richard Nixon ran on a platform of having a “secret plan” to end the war and promised to get us out within six months of his inauguration?

Twenty-one thousand.

What was the Huston Plan and who felt it threatened civil liberties?

The Huston Plan was intended to control Nixon’s enemies by wiretapping their phones, opening their mail, burglarizing their homes and offices. J. Edgar Hoover was horrified by it. It was the official policy of the administration and suspended the Fourth Amendment.

How did historian Barbara Tuchman describe Nixon’s legacy?

“An accumulated tale of cover-up, blackmail, suborned testimony, hush money, espionage, sabotage, use of federal powers for the harassment of ‘enemies,’ and a program by some fifty hired operators to pervert and subvert the campaigns of Democratic candidates by ‘dirty tricks,’ or what in the choice language of the White House crew was referred to as ‘ratfucking.’ The final list of indictable crimes would include burglary, bribery, forgery, perjury, theft, conspiracy, and obstructing justice.”

How did Charles Colson describe George McGovern’s 1972 campaign?

“Just about the dirtiest, meanest presidential campaign in this nation’s history.”

Richard Nixon has been described by his biographer as “a humorless man”; did he ever say anything funny?