So This is Depravity Read online

  Q: Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln a foot fetishist?

  A: During his career in Illinois politics, Lincoln liked to have women members of the Legislature step on his corns, but he had conquered this vice by the time he became President.

  Q: Who was the famous “horse-faced woman” who was brought into the White House nights during the Grant Administration and led out shortly before dawn through secret underground passages?

  A: President Grant’s famous “horse-faced woman” was not a woman at all, but a horse cleverly got up to look like a woman. Grant devised this scheme to deceive journalists into believing that he was leading a colorful sex life, thus preventing them from discovering that the horse’s saddle bags were being used to carry whiskey into the White House and empties out.

  Q: How do men as busy as Presidents find so much time for adultery?

  A: They don’t. This is a common complaint among women summoned to the White House for adultery. They are kept waiting for hours and then squeezed in between the Secretary of Commerce and lunch at the desk. If war breaks out, they may be left forgotten in secret antechambers for months. The great amount of time available to Vice Presidents for adultery has always been bitterly envied by Presidents, and is a major source of so much of the bad feeling traditional between the two offices.

  Q: Is it true that Martin Van Buren was a very poor lover?

  A: President Van Buren felt the cold more acutely than most men. For this reason, he went to bed every night with two huge hot-water bottles, one on either side of him. These made it difficult to effect intimacies and led to rumors that he was a hard man to get close to. Van Buren’s sex life gradually dwindled down to nothing, and he was not elected to a second term.

  Q: How often should the ideal President have sexual relations?

  A: Never. It is painful for parents to concede that their children have sexual relations and even more painful for children to concede that their parents have sexual relations, but the most painful thing of all is for the American people to concede that their Presidents have sexual relations. Ideal Presidents don’t.

  Q: I have heard that President William Henry Harrison’s nickname—“Old Tippecanoe”—actually derives from a particularly flamboyant and disgusting sexual practice in which he frequently indulged. What was this?

  A: The limitations of family-paper journalism preclude an answer to this question here, but it will be fully described in my forthcoming book, Inside the White House Drawers, which will be even more incredible than Jaws and, I hope, twice as successful.

  Cultivated Killing

  ​In Washington I was put in a room with thin walls.

  A great killer was being entertained in the next room. From time to time laughter was audible through the wall, but the wall was not so thin that you could hear the conversation and know what the laughter was about. I am certain, nevertheless, that the laughter was civilized, and not about killing, for afterwards I went into the corridor and looked at the members of the party, and they were cultivated men.

  Washington, after all, is not Chicago. Although it is a city of great killers, its great killers are cultivated men. You can walk into the corridor and stare at them without fear.

  This particular great killer was no great shakes. Washington has plenty of bigger ones. This one was not even very famous. His name would probably not mean a thing to you. It is unlikely that many of his victims had ever heard of him.

  One could become mawkish about this aspect of it, could argue that being done in by a man you have never heard of is unfair. “But why should this particular man in faraway Washington have been the agent of our deaths?” the slain might ask. “Is it not unfair for such final effect to have no recognizably human cause?” In this instance, however, there is a rough justice, for the author of their dispatch would think it unfair to be thought a killer. Thus is unfairness compounded in the great world at Washington’s disposal.

  My killer was, of course, a Government man. Not a soldier. It is doubtful that he has ever killed in person. Maybe he has never seen blood fall in violence. He wears a business suit to work, a conservative necktie in good taste.

  The laughter he occasions through thin walls would be in good taste, too. He has wit, good education, excellent taste. He would consider it very bad taste for anyone to describe him as a great killer. In Government service a man does his duty, and for small pay, too, considering what his old college classmates are making in corporation boardrooms.

  A good man, you would say. The sort you would like for a neighbor. Civilized, neat, hard-working, cares about the neighborhood, keeps his lawn up, lights out before midnight, works hard for his country.

  Goes to the office and spends the day devising programs for killing people. And not soldiers, either. “Enemy,” he would call them, in the air-conditioned conference room, among colleagues in their good-taste haberdashery.

  Killing “enemy” is decent work, even if they aren’t always in uniform. The famous better world a-coming will a-come that much sooner if good men can steel themselves against false squeamishness and face the ordeal of ordering the disposal of those who long for a worse world.

  Or so, at any rate, the national security bureaucrats tell themselves. President Nixon once referred to the bombing of Hanoi, which he had ordered, as his ordeal.

  It is the easy availability of power in Washington that makes these Government people behave so badly in spite of their commendable neckties. Some years back, all the best people came to bipartisan agreement that the most shameful thing a person could do with power was not use it.

  Since then everybody who wants to get ahead in Washington has made a great show of being a fierce fellow when left alone in the room with a little power. There seems to be a fear that if there is somebody around so low that it is all right to dump the garbage on him, and you hesitate, everybody will call you a sissy, and you will never be invited to lunch with Professor Kissinger.

  Strange values result. Great killers are esteemed for good citizenship. “Not afraid to use power,” people say of them.

  They are entertained by cultivated men in rooms with thin walls. You can hear their laughter. It is civilized. Everything is in good taste. Such good taste.

  As it should be, of course.

  In the nation’s capital.

  Moods of Washington

  1974

  I came to Washington in the high afternoon of the imperial American Presidency, although we did not recognize it as such at the time. Eisenhower, two years into his peaceful occupation of the White House, was a gentle Caesar, more a homespun Marcus Aurelius than great Julius, certainly no Caligula, but the imperial machinery was already in place awaiting the dynamic imperatores, Kennedy and Johnson, and after them the Whittier brooder doomed to inherit the whirlwind.

  Washington today is a far world removed from that pastoral age of simple-minded follies and small-bore Rasputins. We were placid and smug with Eisenhower and, Lord!, life was dull here then, but the sense of stability was overwhelming, and under its slumberous ease we took permanence for granted, deplored pessimists and looked forward to an even more golden age when our children would inherit the good life assured by American wealth and power.

  And now—panic, dismay, fever, despair. The world is turned upside down. The Huns are at the city gates. The Presidency is a ruin, the Congress a dilapidation. Power is ebbing. The good life is flowing away through our fingers. Everything comes unstuck and nothing works. We sit in the gasoline lines and curse, and seek comfort in sour mirth.

  Despite the air of collapse and spoliation, however, or perhaps because of it, the city is also infected with a morbid exhilaration. Washington, after all, is built for murder and cheap melodrama concocted under the shroud. It goes with the imperial territory. Nasty though it is, a taste for it is in the marrow, and Washington can no more resist the appetite than a piney-woods mob can resist attending a lynching.

  Nixon apologists
have noted the cruel assiduity with which the Washington reporters have undone their tormented captain, peeling away the once impenetrable imperial flesh layer by layer, stripping him down to the bare bones of Haig, Ziegler, Kissinger and Shultz.

  Dreadful it may be to the fastidious and the gentlemanly, but, ah, is it not exciting? After the bland porridge of the first Nixon term this garish and awful circus has its compensations. In the Haldeman-Ehrlichman reign, Washington was Des Moines on a Sunday in February. Now it has celebrities again.

  The great celebrities are those with the smell of rascality on them. To see someone who has been indicted, to meet a man who wakes in the night with the clank of jail doors echoing out of his dreams—that is the new delight.

  Rubbernecks lunching at Sans Souci now strain for a glimpse of Jeb Magruder or Maurice Stans. That splendid showcase room falls into reverential awe for a rare appearance by James McCord. Not an archbishop ascending to the altar, but the famous Watergate burglar himself, who first spilled those fateful beans to Judge Sirica.

  Charles Colson, who used to pride himself on such loyalty to Richard Nixon as might stamp his boot marks on his grandmother, is one of Sans Souci’s dependable attractions. Coarse japes circle the room as Colson sits to order, for everyone is mindful that he has publicly turned to Jesus since the likelihood of criminal indictment began to trouble him, and cynicism about timely conversions is part of the city’s adaptation to the disagreeable new reality.

  I do not report this with approval or satisfaction. No great sensitivity is required to recoil from it, but there, nevertheless, are the facts. The obscene and the grotesque have become the commonplace. I was strolling Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House one day recently when the driver leaned from the window of a speeding car and screamed a string of unimaginative sailor’s obscenities at our absent President. A few days earlier, a madman had been killed at the Baltimore airport in the act of stealing an airliner which he had planned to dive, suicidally and homicidally, into the White House.

  Omens of a civilization coming unhinged are not associated exclusively with the Watergate affair. Unrelated breakdowns of the system add to the general sense of Gotterdämmerung just around the corner. The Government has surrendered before inflation, and has nothing to suggest but prayer.

  The Federal Energy Office has six new pronunciamentos every day, and each conflicts with the one before. William Simon, ordering dramatic emergency allocations of gasoline that may or may not exist, is like absurd Glendower boasting, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” to whom fierce Percy—the oil cartel?—replied, “Why, so can I … but will they come when you do call for them?”

  The Pentagon thunders blindly on out of all human control. In this celebrated first year of peace with honor it will spend more money than during any year of the Vietnam war. When peace has become more expensive than war, does it not follow that to cut the budget we must go to war? And if so, can anybody, anybody at all, possibly be in charge here?

  Wild ironies abound. It has been duly observed that Mr. Nixon’s staunchest remaining defenders are those very same heathen Communists he used to denounce as scourges of the planet. The paradox, while amusing, is not inexplicable. His power was once greater than theirs, and the example of its ruin, of how quickly such steel can turn to ash, must wake them in the Kremlin night with visions of rioting in the G.U.M. and graffiti on Lenin’s tomb. At such times the brotherhood of power is more affecting than old theological Billingsgate.

  I went to the Rayburn Building the other day on trifling business. It was an appalling experience. I had forgotten how preposterous the thing is with its pretentious megatonnage of rock and steel spreading acre after acre down the slope of Capitol Hill in sullen defiance to eternity and man.

  It dwarfs the forum of the Caesars. Mussolini would have sobbed in envy.

  Inside, one is compelled to dwell upon the insignificance of humanity. Not a single tiny wisp of beauty, nothing that is graceful, or charming, or eccentric, or human presents itself to the senses. Trying to imagine Clay and Webster in this celebration of the death of the spirit, erected to the glory that was Congress, is an exercise in comic despair.

  What do we have? Banks of stainless-steel elevators. Miracles of plumbing. Corridors of cemetery marble stretching to far horizons under the most artificial light unlimited millions of dollars can create, a light that abides no shadow, grants no privacy, tolerates nothing that is interesting in the slightest degree.

  Occasionally a small figure appeared in the distance, grew larger, then larger, then assumed human proportion, then passed and became smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Two ants had passed in a pyramid.

  And for what? Why, for office space for our House of Representatives. Not for all 435 of them either, although it is big enough for all 435, as well as the Senate’s 100, and the resident population of Syracuse, New York, with room left over in the basements for the Parthenon and the tomb of King Victor Emmanuel.

  I go on about the Rayburn Building because it is such an eloquent expression of the sterile grandiosity which has beset Washington since the modest days of the Eisenhower pastorale. One sees efforts everywhere to emulate its arrogance.

  The Kennedy Center nearly succeeds for barefaced oppression of the individual spirit. Poor Lincoln, down the road a piece in his serene little Greek temple, would be crumpled like a candy wrapper if the Kennedy Center could flex an elbow. The Pentagon of the warlike forties is matched by a monstrous new Copagon, home for the FBI, astride Pennsylvania Avenue. The vast labyrinths bordering the Mall would make a Minotaur beg for mercy.

  My misgivings are not about the wretched architects, who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon the human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities. They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things.

  Those most likely to be affected are men who work in such arrogant surroundings. And so, it is not surprising that of late we have seen a curious tendency for Government people to differentiate between duty to Government and duty to country in a most ominous way.

  It is as if the United States Government were a separate power to which Washington owes prime loyalty, and the people at large an obstreperous ally, a less truculent France, perhaps, to be guardedly eyed and kept in line.

  Government is revered for itself, is conceived even outside Washington among much of the population as a sort of private, almost sacred entity whose business is not necessarily any of the public’s business. Like some vast industrial combine in the soap or processed-food business, the Government now spends hundreds of millions of dollars in public relations and advertising to persuade us of the excellences of its products (war, tax forms, détente, etc.) and to engineer our agreeability to its policies.

  An adventurer like Daniel Ellsberg who betrays the sacred scrolls and the secret handshake is hounded and tormented to give example to potential heretics of the price the Government can exact from whoever dares step out of the lodge.

  At the very top we see President Nixon engaged in public veneration of the office of the Presidency. When he speaks of it as an institution beyond common public obligation to submit to law, one thinks of a bishop contemplating the Trinity.

  John Ehrlichman’s reluctance, under Senator Talmadge’s questions, to draw the line at murder as a proper presidential activity in stringent cases suggests how detached from people Government has become. When it was merely giving itself airs by showing us through Internal Revenue how it could terrorize us out of our last cent it was still tolerable; when it starts telling us it might even have the right to murder us for its own good—national security—one starts to wonder.

  Yet much of the public and even distinguished thinkers hesitate to side with people when the question involves Government’s rights. No less a philosoph
er than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg’s publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have had to filch another man’s private property off a taxicab seat.

  The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Ellsberg’s documents threatened to manipulate opinion adversely. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

  The Rayburn Building, for all its monstrosity, contains, finally, a mouse. It is a monument to Congress, and as Eugene McCarthy used to observe before forsaking the Senate for poetry, monuments exist to memorialize the dead.

  Completed in the 1960’s when Congress had become a spare tire on the imperial presidential machine, the building tells us something about congressional envy of executive power. If Congress was to have little say about which Asiatic countries we would ravage, about how many billions were to be thinned from the citizenry’s purse, about whether we would build a civilized or a barbaric order in the United States or whether we should all risk incineration to save presidential face, it could at least have the biggest house in town.

  A sad and touching monument to impotence. And now, of course, it confronts the monumental question of the age: impeachment.

  It is endlessly fascinating to watch the terror with which Congress edges toward its dreadful trial. One thinks of an old heavyweight, retired these many years, coming out of his easeful dotage to fight the champion. He has no stomach for it, or more correctly, too much stomach for it. Training is an agony, his legs have forgotten how to work, he gasps and pants and chuffs at the big bag, and has nightmares about the moment when he must finally be alone on his own in the ring.