THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

A dead man slumps fully dressed in a red plush chair placed incongruously in a hotel bathtub. The scene of the crime is New York's Waldorf Astoria, and the political setup is pure Semtex. The apartment belongs to America's most powerful political broker, Dick Beteaut, employed by the Felsenburshe family of Rockefeller-type wealth and clout. The blood-soaked body is that of the ex-vice president of the United States, Walter Slurrie. Led by Lieutenant Galagher, the police are staggered by the forensic reconstruction. No sooner was Slurrie shot dead than the murderer must have picked up the bleeding corpse, dragged it back to the armchair, executed him for the second time, then reseated the mangled shell to restage the execution all over again …

Death of a Politician is a book-length riddle about the death, but even more about the life of a politician modelled in remarkable detail on Richard Milhous Nixon. Corruption segues into fully fledged conspiracy with the liquid celerity of animator's cels, leaving readers grasping for a fulcrum on which to recalibrate their bearings. Wartime requisitions fraud and postwar defence-contract scams are punctuated by communist-baiting at home and abroad, all manufactured to misinform the public, fleece the taxpayer and keep outsiders away from the political trough. Among these byzantine goings-on, a venal plot to invade Castro's Cuba in order to liberate the lucrative casinos is an oasis of sanity.

Condon's revisionist history is at times alternative history. Thus, in the novel, Castro's revolution takes place a decade earlier than it actually did, and Slurrie's children are fathered by his bosom friend, Eddie Cardozo.Footnote ⁷ Among such plays of imagination – interlaced with historical record which is often as difficult to believe – it is imperative to wrest fact from speculative fiction. And the nonfiction novel is a perfect medium for the writer to take on his perennial bêtes noires: organized politics, organized crime and organized money, all jockeying for power under the protection of America's secret police.

Even as Condon employs all the ins and outs of black comedy, he has no use for the Sidney-type ontological bracket of “the poet nothing affirmeth.” To make his intentions clear, Death of a Politician is stylized and even typeset as a documentary, with office memos in plodding bureaucratese, police blotter prose, and interview transcripts alternating with dry official reports from the chief investigating officer. Signed and countersigned at the bottom, the opening report is even set in roman numerals as a nonfictional preface would be. Reminiscent of the police procedurals of Ed McBain, all sections are prefaced by typewritten headers and reproductions of Arrest and Crime Coding Section forms or secret police institutional stamps.Footnote ⁸

Yet Death of a Politician is a procedural with a difference. Far from a pretext for dispensing forensic lore and gore, the ghastly assassination is rather a summons to a moral trial in the manner of Citizen Kane. Indeed, in a bow to Orson Welles, the narrative is chopped up into a mosaic of debriefing reports secured from people who used to consort with Slurrie. Even the untouchables, Governor Beteaut and capo di capi “Nudey” Danzig – both exempted from the drug-enhanced interrogations administered by the CIA's Langley (in the novel, Semley) goons – go on the record. Gradually, as with Charles Foster Kane, the postmortem collage coalesces into a complex and incongruous picture of the dead man.

Condon's literary skill has never been more in evidence for, even if the testimonials had been left nameless, each would be instantly identifiable by its speaker's verbal tics. Danzig is all slang, always looking for an angle. Beteaut is brusque to the point of being contemptuous. Cardozo's thick Latin accents hides the easygoing manner of a born mixer and raconteur. Hines's non-sequiturs meander in and out of reality. Slurrie's wife and mother chattily defend their crusading hero. Still, like a Greek chorus in a classical tragedy, for all their mannerisms they all speak in the same voice, laying a political myth to rest with the man. Where Horatio Alger's hero, Ragged Dick, owed his fortune to pluck and luck, Walter's confrères leave no illusion that the life and career of this Tricky Dicky look-alike was nothing but a con job.

When it comes to the linchpin of the roman-à-clef – the key with which to decipher the political allusions – different writers resort to different means to help readers reconstruct real life from the clues in the text. One way to give the game away is by allegorical name-tagging. No one will have trouble cross-referencing the cast of Philip Roth's Our Gang (Starring Trick E. Dixon and His Friends): John F. Charisma, Robert F. Charisma, General Poppapower, J. Edgar Heehaw, and, of course, Tricky Dixon. Condon himself is not averse to giveaway monikers. His pairings of Cardozo/Rebozo, Horace Hind/Howard Hughes, Huggems/Kissinger, Nils/Nelson (Felsenburshe/Rockefeller) are as suggestive as the Polish assonance of Danzig/Lansky.

Condon can play the self-referential game as well as anyone else, and his allusions run not only from fiction to life, but from fiction to fiction. Often his intentions seem merely ludic, as when he gives the name Kullers to diverse characters in several novels (Winter Kills, Death of a Politician, The Emperor of America). In a similar vein Partanna, a mere extra in Death of a Politician, becomes the centrepiece of the entire Prizzi saga. A more twisted and more interesting example of such hyperreferentiality is the Pickering Commission. Condon alludes – this time consistently throughout all his novels – both to the Warren Commission and tongue-in-cheek to his mother, whose maiden name was Pickering. A riddle within a riddle, it alerts readers to look for the real world in the fiction.Footnote ⁹

Like every genre, roman-à-clef is an invitation to a literary game, in this case one of mapping fictional events and characters onto Nixon's life and his political retinue. A procession of Walter's controllers, fixers, sponsors, spinners, movers and shakers continuously enter and exit this biographical faction. But even though all of them are hidden behind fictitious names, in every case Condon leaves enough clues to decipher their real-life identity. Abner Danzig, for example, is Meyer Lansky, Miami's Jewish crime boss (a prototype for Hayman Roth in Puzo's The Godfather). Touted to be the best business mind that organized crime has ever produced, Lansky is notorious for the remark that the American Mafia is bigger than the US Steel. Historically, Lansky's covert financing of Nixon went back at least to the mid-1940s, casting a deep shadow on the relation between the godfather, the politician and the latter's confidant, Bebe Rebozo.Footnote ¹⁰

In the novel, this grey eminence of the underworld and politics is Slurrie's puppet-master, even as both rake in profits from the Cold War arms race. In real life Nixon's red-baiting and Dulles's brinkmanship were, indeed, extremely profitable. Research shows that throughout the 1950s investments in firms specializing in defense contracts brought nearly twice the return of any others. Watching the fictional Danzig scam his tithe from the federal defence contracts, it is hard to resist a feeling that today the same unholy alliance is raking it in from the war in Iraq. In Death of a Politician the jackpot, of course, is not Saddam's oil but Lansky's casinos, shut down by Castro's revolution. But the fictional course of action is not that different from the historical 1950s when – to get the Cuban dictator out of the way of lucrative profits – the real Meyer Lansky turned for help to none other than Vice President Nixon.Footnote ¹¹

In the novel, Eddie Cardozo is a charismatic Latino businessman, a protégé of Danzig's, and a partner in graft of the OPA procurer–congressman–senator and finally vice president Walter Slurrie. In real life Cardozo stands for the Cuban real-estate-dealer-turned-banker Bebe (Charles G.) Rebozo, infamous for his mix-up in the $100,000 cash “gift” from Howard Hughes to the President. Nixon loyalist, business partner and confidant, and the only person to participate in intimate family celebrations, Bebe was kept out of the limelight from his first encounter with Nixon in the early 1950s. When his mob connections began to surface in the 1970s, in an effort to stifle exposure Bebe sued the Washington Post for libel – and lost.Footnote ¹²

Another “factional” rogue bears the odd, if telltale, name of Horace Riddle Hind. As emerges from his own autobiographical sketches, he is a self-made inventor, aviator, Hollywood starlet collector, and defence-contract magnate. There is, of course, only one real-life figure who fits the bill: Howard Hughes, paranoid tycoon notorious for using money as a passkey to both sides of the political aisle. In Death of a Politician his money buys him Walter Bodmor Slurrie, lock, stock and two barrels. In real life, his handwritten agenda for the year 1968 speaks for itself: “I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted … who knows the facts of political life.”Footnote ¹³ As if his own and Nixon's venality and corruption were not explicit enough, Hughes follows it with this entry in his agenda: “If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure, knows the facts of life.”

Historically, news of Nixon's hush-hush slush funds first began to surface in 1952, during his nomination as Eisenhower's running mate. As has been documented since, private billionaires and public corporations donated still undisclosed sums not just for his campaign expenses but, despite his hat-over-the-heart act, personal expenses. To get an idea of who may have been so generous, we can turn again to Death of a Politician. In the novel the main source of these contributions is the richest family in the world who, among others, subsidize the New York State Republican Party to the point where it is little more than a family subsidiary. The scion of these real policymakers in America – who, despite thrice losing the Republican nomination, continues to harbour presidential ambitions – is Nils Felsenburshe, alter ego of Nelson Rockefeller (in real life a staunch Nixon ally).Footnote ¹⁴

“Pre-lecting” presidential candidates might sound like one of Condon's conspiratorial fantasies if it were not for numerous precedents set domestically and internationally. Take, for instance, the super-secretive Bilderberg Group. Since 1952, this covey of the world's richest and most powerful – accused of being an unelected world government representing only the global elite – has met annually to promote integration of transnational business and politics. Its flexible membership has included the heads of the World Bank and the European Central Bank, chairmen of the biggest multinationals, MPs, cabinet ministers, high-ranking senators, European commissioners, military brass, even royalty. Bilderberg unerringly invites to its sessions politicians just before they make the big leagues. Bill Clinton, for example, was invited a year before be became President, and Tony Blair a year before becoming Labour leader, on the way to 10 Downing Street. All the recent presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg sessions before being appointed. Concidence?

Of course, empire-builders never wash their linen in public – they just buy a new set of sheets. For that, the fictional Felsenburshes hire political kingmakers like Richard T. Beteaut. The pint-sized Beteaut is a former gang-busting DA, governor of New York, two-time presidential loser, and the most powerful Republican throughout the 1950s. In real life he is none other than Thomas E. Dewey, the legendary crimebuster, New York governor and Republican kingmaker, equally admired and feared for his “when in Rome” courtroom and boardroom tactics. A very close ally of Nixon's, he was pivotal in strong-arming the 1952 Republican nomination for the Eisenhower–Nixon ticket, thereafter moving in the administration's innermost circles and shoring up the beleagured Veep.Footnote ¹⁵

Beteau's right-hand man is another “factional” enabler, Charles Coffey. Son of a Tammany Hall Democrat, he is a brutal political fixer, also on the payroll of the Felsenburshes. Still, Condon makes sure to give the devil his partisan due. Tammany may today be synonymous with political corruption but, in Charley's mind, it stands for the clothing and feeding of the immigrant masses, not to mention child labour and sweatshop legislation. On the other hand, Charley's education in political chicanery comes straight from his Pop: “You know and I know that it makes no difference which party we work for, any more than it makes any difference which party is elected.”Footnote ¹⁶

Identified by Condon as the vice president's law-school roommate and campaign manager, Charley is modelled in part on Murray Chotiner, Nixon's campaign alter ego and smear artist extraordinaire. On the other hand, he owes at least as much to the fictional Jack Burden in All the King's Men, another unlicensed troubleshooter with a flawed moral compass. A man divided, he is talented and not intrinsically evil, but rotten to the core by fraud and self-deception. Together with Cardozo's, his account not only dominates the story but is more personal than anyone else's. At one point he even recalls a World War II beach assault in which he meets a nurse who becomes his wife and conscience. In passages of cadenced lean prosody that bring to mind Farewell to Arms, the couple bring each other back from the brink of death to forge a separate peace.

Coffey is a tragic figure, a traitor to his party, to his principles and to the woman he loves. When his wife denounces him and his world, it is hard to shake off the feeling that she is, to some extent, her creator's mouthpiece:

It is only when she leaves him and tragically dies in an accident, however, that Coffey flips into belated repentance.

Slurrie and Beteaut are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, Coffey – before he joins them – is a three-generation Democrat, but all that is beside the point. In politics there are no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests, and the latter do not care at all who is in the driver's seat as long as they hold the wheel. Eviscerating America's political machinery, Condon is an equal-opportunity prosecutor. Corruption, he points out, has no ideology and no partisan colouration. And it certainly didn't start with Watergate. It was the Democrats, for example, who pioneered the tactics later adopted by the Christian Coalition on behalf of the Republicans – using chartered nonpartisan organizations to run covert partisan campaigns.Footnote ¹⁸

THE MURKY CURRENTS AND RIPTIDES OF HISTORY

Death of a Politician is structured around the riddle of the death of a man who is not only the greatest riddle, but the greatest ellipsis of all. The procession of informants and interviewees makes the narrative absence of the protagonist only more glaring. Bisexual, asexual, masochistic and grotesque, Walter Bodmor Slurrie is a pathetic figure both in the English and in the classical Greek sense. Like a champagne cork, he rides the murky currents and riptides of history, buffeted by forces apparently outside his control. This schmo with the killer instinct and moral conscience of a crocodile epitomizes what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

The portrayal of America's thirty-seventh President as a frontman for big-league financial and political mafias proved too much for some critics. Sounding like they relished the thought, however, others simply observed that Slurrie “matches Nixon's political career almost event after event.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, the historical record fully substantiates the latter judgement. In almost every way but the name, Slurrie is Nixon incarnate. Not to look too far, Slurrie is a self-styled anticommunist crusader who grinds his way through law school, disastrously bungles his first case, and works in the tire-rationing division of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). In 1943 he is shipped by the Navy as an operations officer to the Pacific, where he excels in playing poker.Footnote ²⁰ Retiring as a lieutenant commander, he is raced by the Republican party for Congress, mounting a slanderous campaign and clinching it with a last-minute anonymous and malicious phoning by proxy.

In 1950 he joins the Senate after another campaign that breaks new ground in mud slinging. Two years later, backed by a New York governor-cum-Republican deal-maker, he begins an eight-year stint as vice president under an ex-general with a German name, who is wooed to run for President in his headquarters outside Paris. Like Ike Eisenhower, Dad Kampferhaufe keeps his number two at arm's length until 1960, when the Veep runs for President himself. He fails to succeed in his first stab at the Oval Office, losing by a whisker to a charismatic Catholic President who is shot dead in Dallas before his term is up. Despite this setback, he is poised to run again in 1968.

Even when their lives diverge, they are the same. Slurrie has two sons, Nixon two daughters. Slurrie is from Texas, Nixon from California, but both launch their political careers in 1947 in their home states. Checkers, the cocker spaniel from Nixon's ill-famed nationwide telecast, becomes Chessie the pet raccoon. Where Nixon pretended to reach for an emotional crescendo with his wife's “respectable Republican cloth coat,” Walter lays it on thick with his mother's “four-dollar Republican shoes.”Footnote ²¹ Slurrie's career screeches to a halt on 9 August 1964, when he is triply executed in a Waldorf Astoria bathtub. Nixon's political death came on 9 August 1974, when he resigned after the House Judiciary Committee voted to accept three of the four Articles of Impeachment.

If it is hard to tell their red-baiting, corrupt anticorruption campaigns, financial frauds and all other crimes apart, it is because Condon's disdain for politics is isotropic. It is perhaps best to let Death of a Politician speak for itself. On elections:

On an ideal politician:

On anti-communism:

On Slurrie and the Cold War:

On his character:

Though Nixon swore that he “has never profited from public service,” in fact he stole almost as liberally as Slurrie did. Among other things, he diverted seventeen million of taxpayer's dollars for security upgrades on his private estates in San Clemente and Key Biscayne (drowned in this largesse were items for “the president's personal benefit”).Footnote ²⁷ He also took more than half a million in tax reduction for some of his papers, and used the $1.6 million left over from the 1968 campaign for his own secret political fund – all with blithe disregard for the law and blessed subsequently by a full presidential pardon from Gerald Ford.Footnote ²⁸Plus ça ne change pas, le plus c'est la même chose, and, if any proof is needed, to date, in more than half a century on the statue books, the Corrupt Practices Act has led to not one single prosecution.

A file named “Political Enemies Project” was opened in 1971 with the 575 names on Nixon's black list, including newspaper critics and presidents of Yale and the Harvard Law School.Footnote ²⁹ The President okayed a million-dollar budget to Gordon Liddy, the chief legal counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President Campaign (CREEP). One part of what became known as the “Liddy Plan” was to kidnap leaders of the demonstrations at the Republican Convention and hijack them to Mexico until the convention was over. Another was to use hookers to seduce the Democrats onto yachts equipped with hidden cameras.

What elevates Death of a Politician from a mere biographical thriller to a work of art, however, is the psychopathology of the protagonist. Condon charted the inner catacombs of his politician some years before the appearance of Fawn M. Brodie's exhaustive monograph Richard Nixon: The Shaping of his Character. Yet one can judge the acuity of the novelist by the footnotes of the historian, for Walter Slurrie looms from the pages of the roman-à-clef in every trait later documented by Brodie: tortured, divided, insecure, assiduous, obsessive, fantastically frugal and fanatically greedy – a puritanical moralist, a social outsider, a prodigious organizer, a consummate politician and a Hall of Ill Fame liar.

There is a curious similarity between Charles Coffey, a man rent by his angels and his devils, and Walter Slurrie, a man rent by his aspirations and his character. In a moment of insight, perhaps even epiphany, Coffey gets the measure of the vice president and, unwittingly, of himself: “He dreamed enormous dreams but he seemed to understand that, no matter how close he might approach them, the malevolent thing which would always stand in the way of his ever finding them would be himself.”Footnote ³⁰ As for Richard Nixon, his Dr. Jekyll, Henry Kissinger, himself acknowledged that “he'd never known another man who combined such great gifts with such a capacity for depravity and such a drive toward self-destruction.”Footnote ³¹

In the tradition of Doctor Faustus, in Death of a Politician the final redemption must be bought with life. Indeed, Walter's executor may also be his saviour when he murders the politician three times over. Three is the magic number, an exorcism against evil, and one can only imagine the killer wishing for a silver bullet. What wrenches this scene from emotional overkill and puts it on par with Aeschylean tragedy is Walter's reaction. “When he knew what I was going to do,” confesses the shooter, “he seemed happy about it. He asked me if he could be seated in the bathtub when it happened so that he wouldn't make another mess of his life.”Footnote ³²

Condon's villain is horribly flawed but in the end shows a measure of dignity, perhaps even remorse. Not Nixon. Harry Truman had this to say about the Watergate President: he “not only doesn't give a damn about the people; he doesn't know the difference between telling the truth and lying.” As if on cue, in 1978 Nixon demurred: “I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.”Footnote ³³ This megalomaniacal, almost narcissistic, complaisance may perhaps explain the results of a fanciful opinion poll conducted by the firm of Widgery and Associates. Asked about Richard Nixon's ultimate fate, only 35 percent of Americans said he went to heaven; 59 percent said they believed he went “somewhere else.”Footnote ³⁴

“Politics is a form of high entertainment and low comedy,” Condon wrote. “It has everything: it's melodramatic, it's sinister and it has wonderful villains.” The villains, he might have added, are so influential because they are legally invested with power and authority: the ability to reach certain ends and the legitimacy to do so. But to get there, first they need to sell their future stock to the higest bidder. The former House speaker “Tip” O'Neil made no bones about it. “There are four parts to any campaign: the candidate, the issues … the campaign organization, and the money. Without money you can forget the other three.”Footnote ³⁵

Research shows that in the twenty-nine presidential elections between 1860 and 1972 the winner outspent the loser twenty-one times.Footnote ³⁶ This does not mean, of course, that the victors had no other cards to play. The race does not always go to the richer, or else the Republicans would have won every time since World War II. But, statistically, spending does correlate significantly with who wins elections, and American politics remains the province of the rich. But the influence of money does not stop there. Corporate donors who ply candidates with money do not part with these enormous sums merely for the sake of expressing their political convictions, expecting nothing in return.

Corruption and campaign finance have always been two sides of the political coin. Even though Watergate brought about a series of anticorruption measures, in the years since – much as in the years before – candidates and contributors displayed great ingenuity in skirting legal restrictions. Cartoons aside, corruption is not about men skulking in the shadows of the Capitol clutching briefcases under sweaty arms. Political scandals that ring out with the regularity of Big Ben often involve America's best-known corporations who violate public contracts, public property, public funds, zoning and land use, tax assessment and collection, the legislative and elective processes, law enforcement, and the administration of public services.

As far as elections go, there are three types of funding: hard, soft and slushy. Hard money, regulated by the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), demands, among other things, that the recipients of these public funds refuse contributions from other sources. However – and it is a big however – FECA allows national and state party committees to spend soft money on behalf of candidates. Given that soft money is the sworn enemy of political integrity, it is shocking, though hardly surprising, that, in the four years between 1992 and 1996 alone, soft spending by both parties skyrocketed by 200 percent.Footnote ³⁷

Despite being amended in 1974, 1979 and 1991, FECA has loopholes big enough for an elephant (and a donkey) to waltz through. To take but one example, sales of ambassadorships are proverbial cash cows, especially to classy, non-Third World locations. For his 1972 re-election campaign, reports George Benson in Political Corruption in America, Nixon pocketed no less than $1,324,442 in donations from the embassy heads he appointed to Western Europe. After the re-election, “Nixon made ambassadors of a further eight individuals, each of whom had given no less than USD 25,000, and in aggregate USD 796,000.”Footnote ³⁸

No need to stop at Nixon either. Campaign contributions from Big Oil made Reagan deregulate gasoline prices. Thanks to oil companies' millions in campaign contributions between 1997 and 1999, in 1999 Congress turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol. Bush Senior favoured oil corporations with “special dispensations on regulatory and legal matters.” Bush Junior gave the green light to the automobile industry for the Freedom Car that would release more toxins into the air.Footnote ³⁹ Needless to say, what works for the oil trust also works for arms makers. Lockheed Martin, the biggest military manufacturer on earth and donor of $1.1 million to Republican committees in 2000 alone, got it back a thousandfold: $1.1 billion in Pentagon contracts for military operations in the Balkans (not to mention $2.3 billion in government loans) in 2001.Footnote ⁴⁰

One must wonder how many promises Barack Obama made in order to amass his record-breaking electoral war chest, and how many of these promises will be called in once he is in the office. American politics, Condon would argue, is the epitome of free-market enterprise in which the desired commodity (preferential treatment) goes to the highest bidder, though not in accordance with any open and equitable bidding system. This is a cynical view from a writer who made cynicism the backbone of his artistic success, fully consistent with his oeuvre in which corruption and ideological sellout is not a matter of a few rotten apples but rather the ethos of a system in which integrity has become a liability.

Intent on bridging the gap between serious and popular culture, Condon mined a formula in which historical fact and historical fiction add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As if on cue, late in his life George Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to Upton Sinclair,

This is, in essence, why we continue to read historical fiction even when histories abound, and why we will continue to read Death of a Politician.