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• 1 2014-04-13T19:18:47-07:00 Funeral for a Tyrant, 1994 80 For Hunter S. Thompson image_header 2017-07-28T11:29:39-07:00
  I journeyed by night with my collaborator, the filmmaker Fax Bahr, to the funeral of Richard M. Nixon, staged on 27 April 1994, at the shrine that he built for himself, like Hadrian's Tomb: The Richard M. Nixon Birthplace and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.  We went to verify that he was "not only merely dead" but "really, most sincerely dead."[1] 
  
  It is said that when the news spread on 8 August 1974 that Richard Nixon had resigned in a live televised address from the Oval Office, a spontaneous parade surged forth from the neighborhoods of Cambridge, Mass, where a throng sang "Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead, the Wicked Witch..." as they marched toward Harvard Square.  Nixon did die politically that day, the worst political death of any U.S. president.  Nixon was very good at breaking records, and being the "first," as in the first president to resign.  
   
  When we arrived at 4:00 AM, crowds had already been massing in the cold damp air for hours, stretching now for miles and by the thousands, queueing to view Nixon's closed casket.  We had arrived at the funeral of the most powerful man in all of human history.  We brought video and still camera equipment, to interview, photograph, and videotape the mourners, many of whom, flashing Nixon's trademark "V" finger-signs and cheering our cameras, were not particularly sad. This was the year of the "Republican Revolution," or "Gingrich Revolution," in which the Republican Party won a majority of House seats for the first time since 1956.  The "Contract with America" was the crowning achievement of a movement launched by Nixon, and carried-through by Reagan and the Gingrich Congress, Republican in both the House and Senate by 1995.
   
  This was not the first time that grieving citizens stood for hours, through the night, or in the rain, to pay their last respects, say farewell, or perhaps primarily to say that they had "taken part in history."  William McKinley's casket-viewing in 1901 would be the closest comparison among the fallen Republican presidents.  Lincoln, champion of democracy and union, was Nixon's opposite.   Garfield was slain by an office-seeking patronage loser.  Political corruption, in the sense of money-making through office holding and the distribution of patronage rewards, has been a problem throughout U.S. history, but Nixon's presidency, crowned in its tyranny by Watergate, stands as an eternal example of that more serious form of corruption warned against by the Founders: "power corrupts."  McKinley, like Nixon a standard-bearer for the right wing of the Republican party, was slain by the Anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz. Nixon slew himself, of course, but he had spent his political lifetime battling the other leftist menace, Communism.
   
  This triumphant mood was clearly evident among the many who were clearly too young to remember Watergate.   As the confident, faithful Orange County Republicans, they came like the soldiers in a victorious war, to celebrate in the center of that movement's birthplace--the Southern California of Richard Milhaus Nixon, Ronald Reagan, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, the 1993 Rodney King Uprising, Plain-Folk Evangelicals, and the Crystal Cathedral.
   
  What better place to mark this triumph than the autobiographical shine, a place of sheer vanity designed by Nixon for his own rehabilitation, outside of the official Presidential Library system?  Nixon was indispensable for bringing America's most reactionary ideology to maximum power. Nixon did not just aspire to be the President of the United States, but to be a great World Leader.  To remind the world after his political death, that he had once stood eye-to-eye with nearly all the world's greatest leaders, he had bronze statues cast of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, Charles De Gaulle, and Nikita Khrushchev, all of whom were shorter than he.  He could walk among them in is later years, re-asserting his superiority. 
  In fact, while president, he had achieved supremacy.  In the balance of a bi-polar Cold War world, Nixon was master of the United States's marginally larger global coalition and military might, Nixon was the most powerful man in the world during his presidency, from 1969-1974.  Compared with all other powerful men, including Chinese and Roman emperors or Napoleon, Nixon commanded far greater forces and had control over many more lives.  We was quite literally the most powerful man who ever lived.
   
  Nixon's political rebirth by the early 1990s was apparent from his role as foreign policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the tour-de-force attendance of five living U.S. presidents at this funeral.  All five: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton endorsed Nixon's legitimacy on that day, powerfully cleansing a tyrant's record.  How could anyone have imagined, at this juncture, that Nixon did more damage to the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and to the democratic ideals for which it stands,  than any other president.  From Ford's pardon to this, the presidents rallied together to protect the privilege of choosing to exercise nearly unlimited power: Nixon's breathtaking violation of human and civil rights at home and abroad: foreign coups, U.S.-minted dictatorships, assassinations, domestic spying, mass slaughter in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodian the name of National Security.
   
  If the Establishment closed ranks around its onetime renegade foe,  then it was left to ordinary citizens like ourselves to ensure that at least the biological Nixon was not only merely dead, but really most sincerely so.  In the Yippie spirit of Jerry Ruben, and the Gonzo sprit of Hunter S. Thompson, we loaded our cameras with fresh film and proceeded to crash the funeral, hoping to get close enough to the coffin to lift the lid and take a peek.
   
  As we worked the line capturing the faces of the Silent Majority in the predawn gloaming, we found the hard perimeter of the presidential casket: Ringed by junior Secret Service bodyguards, faces fresh from college to join the Young Republicans.  (This president no longer needed protection, so they assigned twenty-something rookies to the relatively easy task of preventing Nixon's assassination).
   
  As we approached the door, with Nixon's funereal portrait, the Junior Secret Servicepersons took us to be journalists, which saved us the trouble of claiming press credentials.  Of course, it was ethically justified to infiltrate Nixon's funeral with subterfuge.  We did that "in his honor"--always using the word "honor" advisedly in regard to Nixon.
   
  Once inside, we set to work.  I used my mini-tripod on the floor to steady my 35-mm Nikon FE, having just a minute to expose two very crisp but vey wide-angle shots, when Bahr, methodically videotaping the entire scene, finally caught the attention of the body guards.  Video was verboten! We may have earned the honor of Alger Hiss: the last of the subversives exposed under the Nixon purge.
   
  But we got away, and dedicate these words, for the sake of humane values and democratic justice, to the ever-present task of driving stakes into the undead spirit of Richard the 37th.
   
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  NOTES:
   
  1.   Wizard of Oz, M-G-M, Script by Noel Langley Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allen Woolf, 1939.