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

Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 55% done
For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole forever at $400,000 a year -- $60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills and $100,000 for "miscellaneous."
— Jul 07, 2026 07:13PM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

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Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 70% done
Sixteen months of straight politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal, so this unexpected assignment to "cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatán coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.
— 2 hours, 54 min ago
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 67% done
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final.
— Aug 19, 2026 07:41PM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 66% done
What ever happened to the Beat Generation? The question wouldn't mean much in Detroit or Salt Lake City, perhaps, but here it brings back a lot of memories. As recently as 1960, San Francisco was the capital of the Beat Generation, and the corner of Grant and Columbus in the section known as North Beach was the crossroads of the "beat" world.
— Aug 07, 2026 06:01AM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 65% done
A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.
— Aug 06, 2026 05:54PM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 61% done
That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.
— Jul 18, 2026 10:26AM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 60% done
Well, this is the longest letter I've written since I was in the Air Force and was sending love letters to a girl in Tallahassee. I don't expect you to be altogether happy with this one, but then the girl wasn't always happy with hers, either, and we both survived.
— Jul 17, 2026 04:43AM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 59% done
When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the Venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful.
— Jul 14, 2026 06:28PM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 56% done
I was out there on the crowded concrete floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center in August of 1972 when that howling mob of Republican delegates confirmed Richard Nixon's lust for another term in the White House with their constant, thunderous chant of "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"
— Jul 12, 2026 01:25PM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 54% done
Nixon's entire political career -- and in fact his whole life -- is a gloomy monument to the notion that not even pure schizophrenia or malignant psychosis can prevent a determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange society we have built for ourselves in the name of "democracy" and "free enterprise."
— Jul 07, 2026 05:35AM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


Arthur Graham
Arthur Graham is 53% done
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.
— Jul 03, 2026 11:30AM
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)


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message 1: by Arthur (new) - rated it 4 stars
Jul 07, 2026 07:14PM

Arthur Graham (cont.) On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon's 24-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives -- a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or 12 full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands, as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses -- and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year. . . and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will presumably derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000 a year stipend from Reader's Digest, and the $5000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.
So. . . what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon; a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent 28 years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95% of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the "Former Presidents' Act" by resigning. . . But a president who gets impeached, convicted and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by the "Former Presidents' Act." If Nixon had fought to the end and lost-- which had become absolutely inevitable by the tune he resigned-- he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole. . . So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.


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