Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time > Status Update

Despite all its menacing implications, the desperate plight of the national economy was not a story that called up the same kind of journalistic adrenaline that Washington and most of the country had been living on for so long that the prospect of giving it up caused a serious panic in the ranks of all the Watergate junkies who never even knew they were hooked until the cold turkey swooped into their closets.

The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing -- especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years -- was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression that still endures.

[Nixon] will be grouped, along with presidents like Grant and Harding, as a corrupt and incompetent mockery of the American Dream he praised so long and loud in all his speeches. . . not just as a "crook," but so crooked that he required the help of a personal valet to screw his pants on every morning.

"I think I'll give up covering Nixon for a while -- at least until I can whip this drinking problem."
"Maybe what you should do is get into a different line of work, or have yourself committed."
"No." I said. "I think I'll get a job teaching journalism."

It is far better to know the Secret Service is keeping an eye on you than to suspect it all the time without ever being sure.

Even the most conservative betting in DC has Nixon either resigning or being impeached by the autumn of '74 - if not for reasons connected to the "Watergate scandal," then because of his inability to explain how he paid for his beach-mansion at San Clemente, or why most of his original White House command staff is under indictment for felonies ranging from Extortion and Perjury to Burglary and Obstruction of Justice.

A long and serious look at the "dirty tricks" aspect of national campaigning would be a death-blow to the daily soap-opera syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation's housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every soap-opera scriptwriter in America.

Sitting on this porch, naked in a rocking chair in the shade of a juniper tree - looking out at snow-covered mountains from this hot lizard's perch at 8000 feet - 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 5 or 6 hours a day from 2000 miles east - of a story that is beginning to look like it can only have one incredible outcome:

The following section was lashed together at the last moment from a six-pound bundle of documents, notebooks, memos, recordings and secretly taped phone conversations with Dr. Thompson during a month of erratic behavior in Washington, New York, Colorado and Miami. His "long-range-plan," he says, is to "refine" these nerve-wracking methods, somehow, and eventually "create an entirely new form of journalism."

The nut of my complaint here - in addition to being left off The List - is rooted in a powerful resentment at not being recognized for the insults I heaped on Nixon before he was laid low. This is a matter of journalistic ethics - or perhaps even "sportsmanship" - and I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down. Not afterwards - though I plan to do that, too, as soon as possible.