Another Excerpt from my newest, “Venoms”
Abe chased me down on rounds in the ICU. He leaned on the counter near the entryway and said, “The Washington Post has reported that burglars were caught at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building. Evidently doing espionage for Nixon, they bugged the office and were rifling papers. They’re connected with White House security.”
“I hadn’t heard about that. I’m too busy preparing for the Joint Commission and helping Mary Francis.”
“This is big! They arrested James McCord, the head of security for the White House.”
“What?”
“All of the other burglars are Cuban nut cases, except for an American nut case, Gordon Liddy. Shades of the JFK assassination. Were they in Dallas in sixty-three?”
“Theories on JFK proliferate, as the principal characters are dead, like Oswald and Ruby—and of course JFK himself. Pick a theory and run with it.”
Abe said, “The Post claims that E. Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson were involved in planning the heist of the Democratic headquarters.”
“Who is Hunt? I know about Colson.”
“E. Howard Hunt is an ex-CIA spook that works for Nixon.”
“Aside from gathering intelligence, I wonder what they were after.”
“Evidence of Nixon’s sabotage of the 1968 Paris Peace Talks.”
“What? That’s flimsy conjecture. I’ve never heard any evidence that he undermined the talks, although it makes sense.”
“LBJ knew and kept it secret for fear of causing a civil war.”
“How do you know that?”
“Deductive reasoning. Why else would Nixon risk a break-in of the Democratic headquarters? A rumor is out there that Johnson tape-recorded conversations with Nixon regarding sabotage of the peace talks.”
“Well, it’s not out of character. Tricky Dick has been a proven scoundrel since his initial run for the Congress against Helen Gahagen Douglas.”
“I suspect that he used an intermediary with the South Vietnamese government offering a better deal when he became president if they withdrew from the peace talks.”
“Better deal than what? A bullet in the brain.”
“I wish that LBJ would speak up. My family says that his health is failing.”
“Nixon has not improved on the shit show causing untold suffering in Vietnam.”
“It never was meant to be a country called South Vietnam. Millions of Vietnamese have died because John Foster Dulles undermined the Geneva Accords.”
“The domino theory and the Red Menace, our foreign policy is embarrassingly simple minded.”
“I hope that Kissinger can deliver a peace treaty. Without our involvement, the south has no leverage—and a worthless military. When we leave, they will go down the tubes.”
“We’ll stick around and bomb the VC and NVA. It’s the American way of war, commuting to anonymous killing from the sky. I understand they don’t hear the B-52s, only the
explosions if they aren’t blown to bits.”
