American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas Page A

the most dishonest man I’ve ever met.” Harry Truman agreed. “Richard Nixon,” he said, “is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” Yes, that was exactly right, and it was the basic reason my generation had such a visceral and deep distrust of him. Nixon literally was, as Barry had said, “a four-square liar.”
    We had watched Tricky Dick as we grew up, a shadowy presence in a sharkskin suit on our evening news. His body language was stiff and stilted, like Ed Sullivan’s or like Charlie Chaplin burlesquing Hitler in
The Great Dictator
. His Pinocchio nose seemed longer to us every day, the greasy mangrove of Brylcreem atop his head a nest of crawly things. His muscles moved independently of one another: the arms sweeping up as though jerked by puppet strings, stiffly held V-for-victory fingers thrust at us the way Nelson Rockefeller used to thrust his middle finger at reporters. His smile was the frozen, gleeful smile of the KGB or Gestapo torturer, about to turn up the current. His eyes were the black holes in a mossy Transylvanian graveyard where bats with furry wings cavorted among gorgons, Gothic crosses, and tombstones. His mouth was another, larger black hole, a mass grave tended by a serpentine tongue that spewed lies and (we later discovered) scabrous four-letter racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic words.
    That’s how I felt and that’s how my generation felt. We loathed the man. We had seen him on television using his wife’s “Republican cloth coat” to get himself off a hook we were certain he deserved to hang on. This was a man who was even willing to use his dog, Checkers, to elicit our sympathy. (Visually, Bill Clinton would use Buddy the same way.) This was a man willing to persecute Alger Hiss to further his own career. We thought him an empty, ambitious careerist. He had no heart. He was the personification of the word
phony
to a generation that had grown up believing itself armed with Holden Caulfield’s shit detector.
    When JFK beat him, we were . . . in rapture. We were rid of him, free finally of what seemed to have been a childhood disease, a dark-shadowed presence who was a daily depression. And JFK was ours, even though we weren’t of voting age yet, a president with a sense of humor and a real, unstaged laugh, who talked about compassion and the rights of our fellowman, of loving one another, regardless of skin color. As Hubert Humphrey said, JFK “brought form to our amorphous yearnings.”
    JFK offered us hope for an America without dark shadows and night creatures prowling the mossy graveyards.
The
Night Creature, meanwhile, was beaten in California even for governor, a loser in his own state. He said, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Yes,
rapture
! Nixon was in that hole in the graveyard himself now, politically dead and buried, and we busied ourselves trying to help build the golden place called Camelot.
    And then, in one furious apocalyptic moment . . .
six gray horses, followed by the traditional riderless black horse
. The bats and demons and gorgons from the graveyard were back, and they took JFK from us. After a few years—LBJ and that surreal mink-trimmed ten-gallon Stetson—Nixon crawled out of his political grave. Two other bodies later (Martin and Bobby), Richard Nixon, the Night Creature, was president of the United States. (He beat Humphrey in 1968 with one of the earliest uses of negative television advertising: a shot of Hubert laughing over images of cities burning, protesters being beaten, and stacks of dead GIs in Vietnam.) We were of voting age by then. We were old enough to hurl bricks that broke windows. We were cynical enough to answer his four-letter expletives with our own shrill ones.
    Everything he stood