And yet it was a thrilling year in 1974 when we began to dislodge what we thought was the tyranny. . . but then found the greater one, the intelligence community one, which really we cannot dislodge. The American people have lost the will to combat this tyranny; it has lasted too long, and we are tired. I am tired. As the disclosures came about the CIA and FBI, I could not believe them. What could I do? What could anyone do? It was not a question of one particular evil president, but all the presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt: even our heroic ones, such as Kennedy. Freedom won only a limited victory in August 1974 when Nixon was forced out of office; the political police apparatus remains and will remain, and we cannot vote on this issue. I myself have given up, as our newspapers say most Americans have, with a sense that we are helpless. True, under the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the CIA to admit that they had indeed opened my mail to the Soviet Union and photographed it, and also I obtained my file from the FBI, or anyhow portions of it; I would have to go to court to get the rest. At that point, perhaps only a coincidence, I suffered my heart attack, as if my body had given up. As if my body was saying, “No more. It is futile.” Now the thirty-day time limit is past; I can’t go to court. And perhaps it’s just as well. Perhaps my days of being a fighter for freedom are over, due to age, due to worry, but due mostly to the discovery — and existence — of the enormity of the secret political police apparatus that has so long existed in this country, and the dreadful things they have done (e.g., to Dr. King, for instance, who was a hero to me).
Personally, back in March 1974, I had the overwhelming conviction that God Himself had decided to depose Nixon. Few of my friends believe in God, much less that He would or was actually intervening. I mentioned it to Marcel Thaon of Robert Laffont publishers, France, and he wrote in an article accompanying their printing of my novel Eye in the Sky:
On sait combien l’affaire Watergate a frappe qui a ete en butte par ailleurs a de nombreuses agressions voilees de I’administration Nixon. Comme le disait Klein a I’epoque, Dick propose que le decrochage systematique de I’ordre etabli — par la desobtissance civique par exemple — pent seul faire tehee au pouvoir. II pense par ailleurs que c’est Dieu qui un jour en a eu assez de Nixon et s’en est debarrasse — melangeant une fois de plus politique et religion.
[One knows how much the Watergate affair affected those who were exposed, in addition, to the other hidden aggressions of the Nixon administration. As Klein said at the time, Dick proposes that the blowing up of the established order — by civil disobedience, for example — could only check their power. He thinks, in addition, that God had had enough of Nixon and got rid of him — blending politics and religion one more time.]
I write this to my German friends and not to my American friends because my American friends, like myself, have become too weary to fight or care anymore. We fought a wonderful battle to dislodge Nixon, but our energy was gone, then. Perhaps, as I truly believe, that energy came directly from God, Who inspired and animated us, Who hurled us into battle. But what now? Months of depression have fallen over us here, we who were the activists. On TV, Senator Frank Church (God bless him) said that the U.S. intelligence organizations had become as bad as the KGB. Ach Weh!
So my novel in progress [ultimately crystallized as Valis (1981)] has nothing to do with politics; it has to do with the mystery religions of the first century B.C. and what they had discovered about restoring the faculties that man possessed before the Fall (Calvin spoke of man once having “supernatural faculties which were stripped away,” and this fascinates me as the basis for a novel). But I am no longer politically active, and this will show up in my writing. This is sad, but I grow old; I grow old. I have not made my peace with the “straight” society, but at the same time I am too weak, too worn out by illness and fear, to do anything but try to make financial ends meet; I mean, to pay the water bill and gas bill and electricity bill. Perhaps it will not be the political secret police who will get me in the end but the district attorney for failure to pay back child support, an entirely unpolitical crime!
And yet. . . God may return, and inspire us again, to fight when the time is right. In my heart I wait for that day. Will it be long in coming? “Wenn kommst du mein Heil. . . Ich komme dein Teil.” (When comes my salvation. . . I come as your portion.) And meanwhile I say to myself, “Hab’ Mut!” (Have courage!)
[The following letter, to the editor of the fanzine Scintillation, in which this essay was first published, was attached as an epilogue.]
Just within the last two days I’ve read two separate articles, one in Rolling Stone, the other the editorial in the May 17, 1976, New Yorker, which so horribly bear out my fears expressed in the last three pages I sent you that I want to call them to your attention. Hopefully, you can call them to your readers’ attention. The RS piece is titled: “The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA from WWII to Watergate,” by Howard Kohn. Look for it. Anyhow, the article suggests, incredibly, that Nixon may have been set up by the CIA, since “Deep Throat,” who provided all the leaked secrets to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post, turns out to be Robert Bennett, a CIA front man. . . which Woodward and Bernstein never realized. There seem to have been crucial segments of the puzzle that Woodward and Bernstein never got on to.
Carl, I think we were sold another crock; the exposure of the cover-up was itself a cover-up! What the RS piece points to is truly dreadful, far beyond what Woodward and Bernstein found. Would you believe that “Watergate,” as they found it, was a CIA red herring? Incredible.
“Strange Memories of Death” (1979, 1984)
I woke up this morning and felt the chill of October [1979] in the apartment, as if the seasons understood the calendar. What had I dreamed? Vain thoughts of a woman I had loved. Something depressed me. I took a mental audit. Everything was in fact fine; this would be a good month. But I felt the chill.
Oh, Christ, I thought. Today is the day they evict the Lysol Lady.
Nobody likes the Lysol lady. She is insane. No one has ever heard her say a word and she won’t look at you. Sometimes when you are descending the stairs she is coming up and she turns wordlessly around and retreats and uses the elevator instead. Everybody can smell the Lysol she uses. Magical horrors contaminate her apartment, apparently, so she uses Lysol. God damn! As I fix coffee I think, maybe the owners have already evicted her, at dawn, while I still slept. While I was having vain dreams about a woman I loved who dumped me. Of course, I was dreaming about the hateful Lysol Lady and the authorities coming to her door at 5:00 A.M. The new owners are a huge firm of real estate developers. They’d do it at dawn.
The Lysol Lady hides in her apartment and knows that October is here, October first is here, and they are going to bust in and throw her and her stuff out in the street. Now is she going to speak? I imagine her pressed against the wall in silence. However, it is not as simple as that. Al Newcum, the sales representative of South Orange Investments, has told me that the Lysol Lady wants Legal Aid. This is bad news because it screws up our doing anything for her. She is crazy but not crazy enough. If it could be proved that she did not understand the situation a team from Orange County Mental Health could come in as her advocates and explain to South Orange Investments that you cannot legally evict a person with diminished capacity. Why the hell did she get it together to go to Legal Aid?
The time is 9:00 A.M. I can go downstairs to the sales office and ask Al Newcum if they’ve evicted the Lysol Lady yet, or if she is in her apartment, hiding in silence, waiting. They are evicting her because the building, made up of fifty-six units, has been converted to condominiums. Virtually everyone has moved, since we were all legally notified four months ago. You have one hundred and twenty days to leave or buy your apartment and South Orange Investments will pay $200 of your moving costs. This is the law. You also have first refusal on your rental unit. I am buying mine. I am staying. For $52,000 I get to be around when they evict the Lysol Lady who is crazy and doesn’t have $52,000. Now I wish I had moved.