Part 34 (2/2)

”We have the Democrats on a marvelous hook because thus far most of them have defended the release of the doc.u.ments,” Colson said. Take down Ellsberg and you took down those Democrats, too-perhaps took down the opposition party itself. ”I have not yet thought through all the subtle ways in which we can keep the Democratic Party in a constant state of civil warfare,” Colson summed, ”but I am convinced that with some imagination and creative thought it can be done.”

Such talk got Richard Nixon's creative juices flowing. Provide top-secret doc.u.ments to an infiltrator in one of the peace groups, which could then get caught ”peddling them around,” he suggested on Monday the twenty-third. (Haldeman a.s.sured him they were already working on it.) The next day Nixon proposed that an ”Ellsberg who's on our side” could dig up preWorld War II doc.u.ments to decla.s.sify-Richard Nixon's own pumpkin papers-to prove that FDR knew about the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance. The Democratic Party would be ”gone without a trace if we do this correctly,” Nixon p.r.o.nounced l.u.s.tily. Haldeman thought that a fine idea, too, but suggested they start with doc.u.ments from the Cuban missile crisis or Bay of Pigs instead: ”Those are the ones that are likely to get lost the fastest.” The president, who salved his basest guilts by presuming everyone else as venal as himself, caught his drift right off: Democrats all over town were by then ”probably burning stuff and hiding stuff as fast as they can.”

The work proceeded amid smoldering political frustration. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield had an amendment to the Selective Service reorganization bill-Nixon's crucial bid to turn down antiwar sentiment by removing young people's fear of getting drafted-that would require withdrawal of all troops once Hanoi released all prisoners of war. Mansfield's amendment pa.s.sed the Senate by a vote of 5742. Nixon called the majority leader to the White House for breakfast and threats: if the Paris peace talks and the strategic arms negotiations collapsed by the end of the month, he would go on television and blame Mansfield personally-and escalate the bombing to boot. Then he warned Speaker Carl Albert that if the House pa.s.sed a similar resolution, he would scuttle the Paris talks himself, saying Congress had given him no other choice.

But the bluffs were not working. Given the ongoing Pentagon Papers revelations, the antiwarriors held all the cards.

Then Nixon hit on the idea of finding evidence that the Kennedys ordered the 1963 a.s.sa.s.sination of South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem, CIA complicity in Diem's pre-a.s.sa.s.sination overthrow having been one of the Pentagon Papers' most explosive revelations. Said Haldeman, ”Huston swears to G.o.d there's a file on it at Brookings”-the Brookings Inst.i.tution think tank, their imagined Kennedy government-in-exile.

Nixon, straightening bolt upright: ”Now, if you remember Huston's plan. I want it implemented. G.o.ddammit it, get in there and get those files. Go in and get those files.”

Nixon repeated the order every day, frustrated that no one was carrying it out: ”I want Brookings. I want them to just break in and take it out.... Do you understand? Do you understand?”

Haldeman pointed out a delicacy that might hold them up: ”You have to find somebody to do it.”

Where, in other words, do you find a figure of the cunning and criminal skill, with omerta omerta-like loyalty to a Republican president, who still had no lingering loyalties to the meddlesome bureaucrats of the CIA or FBI?

That became the next obsession. Edgar Hoover was too squeamish. (Robert Mardian was busy on a project to blackmail him into retiring by exposing the illegal wiretap transcripts Hoover had helped them obtain in 1969.) They batted around Caulfield and Ulasewicz, the former New York cops. (They weren't up to the magnitude of the task.) Richard V. Allen, the Kissinger staffer? (He might not be trustworthy enough.) Pat Buchanan? (He was offered the job and turned it down because he thought the project's ”dividends” didn't ”justify the magnitude of the investment recommended.”) Huston? (He was too toxic to the intelligence Establishment and didn't have the public relations skills to ”move it to the papers.”) Ehrlichman? (More of a lawyer than a dirty trickster.) John Dean? (Too much the ”little old lady.”) Colson? (Plate too full: infiltrating the Muskie campaign; trying to catch Ted Kennedy en flagrante with a hooker; lining up ant.i.trust threats against ABC, NBC, CBS; preparing John O'Neill for a debate with now-congressional candidate John Kerry on the d.i.c.k Cavett Show. d.i.c.k Cavett Show.) Colson suggested E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent, a friend of the Buckley family: ”He's a brilliant writer. He's written forty books on espionage.”

Hunt's name had floated around the White House for various projects since 1970. Nixon worried if the fifty-three-year-old had the energy for the eighteen-hour days. But Nixon liked that Hunt had run the Bay of Pigs for the CIA: ”He told me a long time ago,” Colson said, ”that if the truth were ever known, Kennedy would be destroyed.”

Nixon asked Colson and Haldeman if they had any compunctions about the avenues they were exploring. Colson: ”Oh, h.e.l.l no.” Haldeman: ”We've got to be repressive.” The president contributed his own two cents: ”They did that to me.... I want to go in and crack that safe.”

And yet for a time they vacillated, approaching the abyss, then hanging back-until the possibility of keeping the Pentagon Papers from the public was foreclosed, on June 30, when the Supreme Court, after a labyrinthine court battle, ruled 63 that they could be published freely. Justice Brennan's decision argued that press reports that embarra.s.s the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Justice Black concurred: ”Every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment.... [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the Federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says.” Just in case the court ruled the other way, the previous evening Mike Gravel, the forty-one-year-old senator from Alaska, had called an extraordinary two-man night ”hearing” of his Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds. He began reading aloud from a four-thousand-page typescript-the historical narrative portion of the Pentagon Papers, provided to him by an anonymous source.

He started at 9:45 p.m. ”The story is a terrible one,” Gravel warned. ”It is replete with duplicity, connivance against the public. People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you. Arms are being severed; metal is cras.h.i.+ng through human bodies.” Then, he began to weep.

Word of mouth spread; aides and reporters working late started filtering into the hearing room. Gravel read for three hours and then recessed, noting to reporters he might be risking expulsion from the Senate. He stopped at 1:12 a.m., promising to continue the next day. By then, he had broken out in sobs once more.

Gravel kept his Senate seat and was able to introduce the entire doc.u.ment into the Congressional Record. Congressional Record. That turned it into public property. Congressmen have extraordinary privileges. That turned it into public property. Congressmen have extraordinary privileges.

Which was why, the next day, Nixon discussed as his next move recruiting ”another Senator McCarthy”-some right-wing exuberant to crush the conspiracy as only someone with congressional immunity against libel and slander could do. They brought up John Ashbrook, the former Draft Goldwater leader; Illinois's Phil Crane, a former leader of Young Americans for Freedom; the John Birch Society members in Congress, John G. Schmitz and John Rousselot. (”Mean, tough, ruthless,” Nixon praised Rousselot, a protege. ”He'll lie, do anything.”) They regretted that Senator Dole of Kansas was already preoccupied as RNC chief. (He did the best he could for the team, telling reporters the Pentagon Papers' disclosure had left heads of state around the world ”at the mercy of sensation-seeking newspapers.”) The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Const.i.tution pa.s.sed that same day. No one had expected it that fast: the Supreme Court had only struck down Ted Kennedy and Mike Mansfield's gambit to lower the voting age by congressional statute the previous December; the Times Times had predicted a const.i.tutional amendment would ”almost certainly not be effective in a presidential election before 1976.” Now eighteen-year-olds would be able to vote in time for 1972. Samuel Lubell, the prescient electoral a.n.a.lyst, wrote in had predicted a const.i.tutional amendment would ”almost certainly not be effective in a presidential election before 1976.” Now eighteen-year-olds would be able to vote in time for 1972. Samuel Lubell, the prescient electoral a.n.a.lyst, wrote in Look: Look: ”As of now, the nation's newest voters would defeat Nixon.... Crammed into my interview notebooks are angry outbursts from business-oriented youths who say, 'The Republicans are better for my career,' but vow, 'I'll vote for almost any Democrat to end the war.'” Some spoke to him of their gratefulness that younger friends would be turned from a revolutionary path by their ability to vote. The early reports out of California were that despite predictions of widespread youth apathy, or that kids would mimic their parents, 90 percent of eligible high school students were registering, mostly as Democrats. ”As of now, the nation's newest voters would defeat Nixon.... Crammed into my interview notebooks are angry outbursts from business-oriented youths who say, 'The Republicans are better for my career,' but vow, 'I'll vote for almost any Democrat to end the war.'” Some spoke to him of their gratefulness that younger friends would be turned from a revolutionary path by their ability to vote. The early reports out of California were that despite predictions of widespread youth apathy, or that kids would mimic their parents, 90 percent of eligible high school students were registering, mostly as Democrats.

The White House seemed to question its earlier easy a.s.sumption that Republicans wouldn't be hurt by the eighteen-year-old vote. Haldeman started worrying about strange things, such as the obscure new art-house doc.u.mentary on Nixon's career by Emile de Antonio, Millhouse: A White Comedy. Millhouse: A White Comedy. John Caulfield was tasked with studying de Antonio's FBI file for leakable information, lest his film turn the kids off from Nixon. John Caulfield was tasked with studying de Antonio's FBI file for leakable information, lest his film turn the kids off from Nixon.

Meanwhile, on the Ellsberg front, trusty Chuck Colson arrived at a new idea: firebomb Brookings, then get G-men posing as firemen to rush in and retrieve the Diem file from Leslie Gelb's safe.

If they only knew Leslie Gelb didn't have a safe and kept his office door unlocked, Jack Caulfield wouldn't have had to burst into John Dean's office, face flushed, in a panic: ”Jesus Christ, John! You've got to help me! This guy Colson is crazy! He wants me to firebomb a G.o.dd.a.m.n building, and I can't do it!”

On Thursday night, July 15, the president went on TV for three minutes: ”I have requested this television time tonight to announce a major development in our efforts to build a lasting peace in the world”-he would be traveling to China to seek normalization of the relations between the two countries.

No one stormed the White House; there wasn't even much protest from the right (whom Nixon, planning the announcement, had referred to as ”the animals”). It was experienced like a healing spring rain, as if suddenly enemies were a thing of the past. All those decades of tension: Nixon made this one announcement, and there it was-gone. Love: just as the hippies said. Peace: just as the hippies said. ”I really believe life is simple. It's all the other people that make things complicated.” ”I really believe life is simple. It's all the other people that make things complicated.”

Meanwhile the White House operationalized its longtime goal of expanding its internal secret-policing capacity. They called it ODESSA, or the Special Investigations Unit, or the Room 16 Project, for its suite number in the White House bas.e.m.e.nt. It contained the kind of ”sterile” telephones used by the CIA (a Secret Service agent used an IBM card to enter the access code every morning) and a safe that required three combinations to open. A doddering elderly relative of the coleader of the operation was proud to learn her boy was working on ”leaks”: ”Your grandfather,” she said, ”was a plumber.” In jest, he put up a sign on his office door: MR. YOUNG-PLUMBER. MR. YOUNG-PLUMBER. The Plumbers was the name by which the group became known. The Plumbers was the name by which the group became known.

Mr. Young-David Young-had been Kissinger's personal a.s.sistant. His superior in the enterprise, Egil ”Bud” Krogh, thirty-two, grew up with John Ehrlichman and saw him as a father figure. Both, like Haldeman, were Christian Scientists. An acquaintance described Krogh as ”a brisk, polite, dynamic young executive.... Never mussed, never damp, absolutely spick-and-span.” Though some in the White House had taken to calling him ”Evil” Krogh. This healthy right-wing exuberant was so proud watching his president rap with student demonstrators on the Mall in 1970 that he decided he was willing to take a bullet for him.

On July 19 they hired on another staffer, a former FBI agent, a.s.sistant district attorney, and failed congressional candidate from Dutchess County, New York. As an FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy had been pushed out because he was, in the words of a superior, ”a wild man” and a ”superklutz.” As a.s.sistant DA he had fired a pistol at the ceiling while summing up a case before a jury. When he lost a Republican congressional primary in 1968 (slogan: ”Gordon Liddy doesn't bail them out-he puts them in”) but won the Conservative Party's line, he was rewarded for throwing the race with a job at the Treasury Department-which he lost, in 1971, for speaking against the administration's gun-control bill at an NRA convention. He liked to show off his toughness by putting his hand in a candle flame. He also liked to demonstrate the best way to a.s.sa.s.sinate a man with office supplies: a puncture to the neck with a freshly sharpened pencil, directly above the Adam's apple. He confessed an admiration for Adolf Hitler and wrote in his memoirs about the Pledge of Allegiance, ”I enjoyed enjoyed the ma.s.s salute and performed it well, unexcelled in speed of thrust and an iron-shaft steadiness throughout the remainder of the pledge. That habit became so deeply ingrained that even today, at a.s.semblies where the pledge is made or the national anthem played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.” the ma.s.s salute and performed it well, unexcelled in speed of thrust and an iron-shaft steadiness throughout the remainder of the pledge. That habit became so deeply ingrained that even today, at a.s.semblies where the pledge is made or the national anthem played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.”

Such was the caliber of the men now called to work in the Executive Mansion.

Colson had wanted Howard Hunt to lead the Plumbers, but Ehrlichman had other plans for him. Furnished with a red wig, a CIA-issue voice modifier, and ”pocket litter” in the name of Edward J. Warren, he was a.s.signed to the Ted Kennedy floozy watch. Meanwhile, from newspaper clippings and interviews with Ellsberg's first wife and a restaurant owner whose mistress Ellsberg had apparently hit on, Hunt was ama.s.sing ”all available overt, covert, and derogatory information.” He was also poring over the Pentagon Papers to find a portal to tie the Kennedy brothers to Diem's a.s.sa.s.sination, and ghostwriting purple prose for use by a friendly Detroit News Detroit News writer about Ellsberg's defense attorney: ”The art of espionage, of course, is seldom conducted in the open.... Nevertheless, it has been said with some certainty that over the years Leonard Boudin”-a prominent left-wing lawyer-”has been a contact of both the Czech and Soviet espionage agencies, the latter best known by its initials, KGB.” writer about Ellsberg's defense attorney: ”The art of espionage, of course, is seldom conducted in the open.... Nevertheless, it has been said with some certainty that over the years Leonard Boudin”-a prominent left-wing lawyer-”has been a contact of both the Czech and Soviet espionage agencies, the latter best known by its initials, KGB.”

By the end of July the distinction between Hunt's projects and the Plumbers' dissolved. Each new scheme spun off others; best not to duplicate efforts, especially since Hunt and Liddy got along famously. The Ellsberg witch hunt had reached a snag. From FBI reports Hunt knew Ellsberg saw a shrink, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding. Perhaps they could do to Ellsberg what had been done to Barry Goldwater in 1964: discredit him as a madman. Perhaps they could figure out this mysterious figure's mysterious motives: money, fame, ideological loyalty to the Soviet Union? Some vicious blackness deep within his soul?

(Some angles they didn't consider: conscience, patriotism.) FBI agents visited Dr. Fielding July 20. The doctor wouldn't hand over his records. The CIA did a psychological profile based on publicly available information. Its utility proved limited. It was time, the Plumbers decided, to plan a black-bag job. Ehrlichman brought the proposal to the president. ”Krogh should, of course, do whatever he considered necessary to get to the bottom of the matter,” the president replied, ”to learn what Ellsberg's motives and potential further harmful action might be.” His only complaint was that the plan wasn't aggressive enough.

Young and Krogh filed the action memo, with the customary boxes for ”approve” and ”disapprove.” Ehrlichman scrawled his initials in the former and added, ”if done under your a.s.surance that it is not traceable.”

Hunt approached a Cuban friend, Bernard Barker, whom he'd worked with at the Bay of Pigs. There was ”a matter of national security” to carry out, Hunt apprised him, for an organization ”above both the FBI and CIA,” against ”a traitor to this country who had given information to a foreign emba.s.sy.”

The team Barker recruited moved out to California in late August, casing a shrink's office in Beverly Hills in the service of their president, reporting back to David Young, ”I think we have a perfect situation here for clandestine entry.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

The Coven A PULP THRILLER OF RELEVANCE TO THE PULP THRILLER OF RELEVANCE TO THE W WHITE H HOUSE SITUATION came out in 1971. It was called came out in 1971. It was called The Coven. The Coven. The author was David St. John, and his hero was a Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., private investigator named Jonathan P. Gault (kind of like the protagonist of Ayn Rand's The author was David St. John, and his hero was a Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., private investigator named Jonathan P. Gault (kind of like the protagonist of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Atlas Shrugged), who lived in a Georgetown that had become a warren of head shops and strung-out fourteen-year-old junkies: ”The Aquarians had taken over.” So had venal union bosses ripping off honest workingmen, and the kind of young defense lawyer who charges ”police brutality” at the drop of a handkerchief and ”affects a storefront desk in the ghetto and lunches at the Metropolitan Club where he feels more comfortable.”

The detective's favorite old-time jazz joint was now polluted with the stylings of a sort of Afro-voodoo songstress named Andree Lescaut. The old Bojangles-like hoofer she's put out of work winds up murdered in the alley out back, then the temptress Lescaut herself. Suspicion falls on two hippies, Stud and Hugehead. The gumshoe cases their commune: ”Peeling pink paint, sagging steps that suggested active termites...fingerpaintings, Day-Glo posters and scrawls instructing pa.s.sers-by to undertake unnatural connection with the President, and murder a pig a day. About average for the humanistic lifestyle within.”

He questions one of the denizens: ”He shrugged elaborately, scratched at the beaded headband, and wiped more dribble from his mouth.... 'What's his problem?' 'Hash. He has no mind left.'”

It arrives that the mastermind behind the crime is Senator Newborn Vane, who resembled a certain libertine solon from Ma.s.sachusetts, and his glamorous wife. Mrs. Vane ”gets her jollies from the artists, writers, and beach boy types Vane gets public grants for,” and procures prost.i.tutes for her husband, and tosses down c.o.c.ktails after toasting in Russian. The senator flies his own plane ”to save time getting between here and the gra.s.s-the gra.s.s roots.”

A clue-a pack of tarot cards, the same kind the real-life hippie murderer of Dr. Victor Ohta in Santa Cruz in 1970 left at the scene of the crime-leads Gault to a bizarre ritualistic scene staged out of a government-funded ”Community Involvement Center.” Black men and women ”naked except for a loincloth” dance maniacally before Lescaut's coffin. A priestess shrieks, ”In the name of Belial, Sasa, Behemoth, Asmodeus, Obayifo, Lilith, Nahemah, Set, Thoth, and the Black Goat, we beseech thee, Master, to sanctify this sacrifice.” Then, the heroic gumshoe surrept.i.tiously looking on, the senator's wife ”dipped into the throat and drew a b.l.o.o.d.y line across her pelvis, then tossed the dead pullet under the bier and stood with arms lifted and outstretched, displaying the inverted cross painted against her flesh.”

Gault lays it all out before the skeptical cop: ”Suppose I told you New-bold Vane was a devil-wors.h.i.+pper?”

So much for the senator's presidential ambitions.

”David St. John” was E. Howard Hunt, writing, like a good spook, under a pseudonym. He had started writing novels out of boredom from being put on ice at the CIA. He was quite successful at it, too.

The Coven provided a window into the mind of a Plumber. Everette Howard Hunt believed, as many in the White House believed, that behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil. George Gordon Battle Liddy suspected Daniel Ellsberg was a KGB agent, or that the provided a window into the mind of a Plumber. Everette Howard Hunt believed, as many in the White House believed, that behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil. George Gordon Battle Liddy suspected Daniel Ellsberg was a KGB agent, or that the Times Times had acquired the Pentagon Papers through a black-bag job. In their minds, every evil was linked. Liddy gave over twelve pages in his memoirs to an account of his involvement in a raid on the home of Timothy Leary-”one more problem of the sick '60s.” When he moved to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1970, Liddy noted his neighbors as ”career Democrat-liberal bureaucrats who hated Richard Nixon and had a laissez-faire att.i.tude toward the raising of their children”-so he threatened one of these children with ”a restraining hold I had learned before in the FBI.” For, ”To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the '60s movement to achieve power and become the official way of life of the United States was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career j.a.panese soldier in 1945.” had acquired the Pentagon Papers through a black-bag job. In their minds, every evil was linked. Liddy gave over twelve pages in his memoirs to an account of his involvement in a raid on the home of Timothy Leary-”one more problem of the sick '60s.” When he moved to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1970, Liddy noted his neighbors as ”career Democrat-liberal bureaucrats who hated Richard Nixon and had a laissez-faire att.i.tude toward the raising of their children”-so he threatened one of these children with ”a restraining hold I had learned before in the FBI.” For, ”To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the '60s movement to achieve power and become the official way of life of the United States was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career j.a.panese soldier in 1945.”

And when he considered the 1972 presidential election-”in view of the thousands of bombings, burnings, riots, and lootings of the '60s, to say nothing of the murders of police just because they were police, the killing of judges, and the general disintegration of the social order”-he realized that for Nixon to fight according to the normal procedures of democratic politics would have been just such a surrender. It was like one of the agents in a novel by Howard Hunt said: ”We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law-semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others.”

These men were not aliens. They were Americans-in a time when millions of Americans agreed with Joe Joe and resonated enough with E. Howard Hunt's dank anxieties to turn him into a bestselling author. and resonated enough with E. Howard Hunt's dank anxieties to turn him into a bestselling author.

Some scenes from sea to s.h.i.+ning sea: The International a.s.sociation of Chiefs of Police reported that ninety-one cops were killed in the line of duty during the first nine months of 1971. In Philadelphia, former police chief Frank Rizzo campaigned for mayor as ”the toughest cop in America.” The iconic photograph of Chief Rizzo showed a nightstick poking out of his c.u.mmerbund at a black-tie banquet, the iconic act his club-swinging raid on what he was sure was a drug den (his evidence was the poetry, beards, and h.o.m.os.e.xuals). He won the 1971 Democratic nomination against two liberals who split the vote. In November he won the general election defending the police department practice of ”turf drops”: instead of charging black kids, they were left to fend for themselves in the toughest white neighborhoods. ”He should build jails, not schools,” one of his cabdriver supporters told a reporter. ”Ninety percent of the kids are no good.”

In New York vigilantes shouting ”Never again!”-the slogan of the Jewish Defense League-firebombed the office of a talent booker who handled Soviet acts. (One secretary died.) A cabdriver in Queens rammed fifty welfare rights picketers calling for affordable day care: ”I have a wife and four kids to support!” he cried before revving the accelerator. Down the Jersey Turnpike, an investigative journalist, Ron Porambo, came out with a book on the Newark riots, No Cause for Indictment, No Cause for Indictment, which doc.u.mented, in numbing and irrefutable detail, the cold-blooded killing of innocents and the systematic tras.h.i.+ng of black-owned businesses by police and guardsmen. Two attempts on his life followed; in their wake, the Newark police accused him of shooting himself. In that same city the Newark Boys Chorus School, 80 percent of whose students were black, moved into a three-story Georgian mansion in an upper-middle-cla.s.s neighborhood. A homemade firebomb was tossed though a side window in September, doing no damage; a second attempt, over Thanksgiving, took out the entire top floor; in January, vandals torched the integrated school's buses. No one reported the fire to authorities. which doc.u.mented, in numbing and irrefutable detail, the cold-blooded killing of innocents and the systematic tras.h.i.+ng of black-owned businesses by police and guardsmen. Two attempts on his life followed; in their wake, the Newark police accused him of shooting himself. In that same city the Newark Boys Chorus School, 80 percent of whose students were black, moved into a three-story Georgian mansion in an upper-middle-cla.s.s neighborhood. A homemade firebomb was tossed though a side window in September, doing no damage; a second attempt, over Thanksgiving, took out the entire top floor; in January, vandals torched the integrated school's buses. No one reported the fire to authorities.

Defiling school buses was a nationwide trend. Michigan was the vanguard after Judge Damon J. Keith, the federal district's only black jurist, rent de facto segregation's most sacrosanct taboo, the line between city and suburb, by ordering the white town of Pontiac to accept black students from Detroit. ”What burns me to the bottom of my bones is that I paid an excessive amount of money so that my son could walk to school,” one working-cla.s.s resident told the New York Times. New York Times. ”I'm not going to pay big high school taxes and pay more for a home so that somebody can s.h.i.+p my son thirty miles away to get an inferior education.” Then one hot evening just before the start of the school year, two terrorists slipped inside a depot and lit dynamite atop the fuel tanks of six school buses. Thousands of townspeople rallied to the terrorists' support, just as they used to do down South after lynchings. ”Pontiac is the new South,” a state legislator said. ”I'm frankly ashamed to say right now that I am a citizen of this city.” ”I'm not going to pay big high school taxes and pay more for a home so that somebody can s.h.i.+p my son thirty miles away to get an inferior education.” Then one hot evening just before the start of the school year, two terrorists slipped inside a depot and lit dynamite atop the fuel tanks of six school buses. Thousands of townspeople rallied to the terrorists' support, just as they used to do down South after lynchings. ”Pontiac is the new South,” a state legislator said. ”I'm frankly ashamed to say right now that I am a citizen of this city.”

In Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, speaking at Catholic University, speculated over whether the Blessed Virgin Mary had been ”knocked up.” Enraged, William F. Buckley's sister Patricia raced onto the stage and started a.s.saulting her. In Mountain Home, Idaho, residents decided they'd had enough of the GI coffeehouse in their midst and burned it to the ground. In New Mexico, in the rugged town of Ruidoso, the set the previous year for the John Wayne picture Chisum, Chisum, barefoot Nancy Crowe Tapper and bearded Paul Edward Green, both of surburban Wheaton, Maryland, were a young couple living together without benefit of clergy. The town was well sick of hippies; Paul was arrested for falling afoul of Ruidoso's rarely enforced 125-year-old ”lewd cohabitation” law. The statutory punishment for a first offense was supposed to be a verbal warning. The judge-who displayed a sign on his office door reading barefoot Nancy Crowe Tapper and bearded Paul Edward Green, both of surburban Wheaton, Maryland, were a young couple living together without benefit of clergy. The town was well sick of hippies; Paul was arrested for falling afoul of Ruidoso's rarely enforced 125-year-old ”lewd cohabitation” law. The statutory punishment for a first offense was supposed to be a verbal warning. The judge-who displayed a sign on his office door reading JUDGE PRITCHETT: THE LAW WEST OF THE RIO RUIDOSO JUDGE PRITCHETT: THE LAW WEST OF THE RIO RUIDOSO-gave him thirty days instead. Paul didn't take his confinement particularly seriously; when given a chance to call a lawyer, he allegedly ambled away from the jailhouse. The second of two ”warning shots” caught him in the back of the head. They said the hippie was running, yet Green had recently been injured and could barely walk. Charges were never pressed against the officer. This was only the latest in an epidemic of hippie lynchings in New Mexico: the nineteen-year-old heroin addict shot while handcuffed behind the back (ruled justifiable homicide) in Santa Fe; the sixteen-year-old girl who pa.s.sed a bad check shot by a storekeeper in the parking lot (no charges filed) in Albuquerque; communes razed, vans dynamited-young people, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported on January 16, 1972, ”beaten, raped, and killed.” reported on January 16, 1972, ”beaten, raped, and killed.”

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