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

[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.

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.

the weird truth is that Washington is the only place in the country where the Watergate story seems dull. I can sit up here in Boston and get totally locked into it, on the tube, but when I go down there to that goddamn Hearing Room I get so bored and depressed I can't think.

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.

He was reluctant to bet on the game, even when I offered to take Miami with no points. A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily -- but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start.

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: (1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers, and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze. . . and: (2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.