Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [100]
The concert was unlike anything I had ever attended. Bernstein conducted members of the National Symphony and other orchestras in Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War.” It was a haunting, beautiful work of classical music, and I noticed the sadness on the faces of many around me. There were readings and poems, and it deeply moved the twenty-five hundred who were present (another twenty-five thousand listened on loudspeakers outside on the lawn of the cathedral).
On Inauguration Day we got there early so we could try to get a glimpse of Nixon’s limo before he went to Capitol Hill. Security was very tight, but we got close enough to see the armored car and jeer at it and hold our signs so he could see them. As he passed, he waved, and we waved back, though not with the entire hand. I was a long way from the seminary.
The rally on the Ellipse by the Washington Monument was not as large as previous antiwar rallies, but it was still populated by upwards of seventy-five thousand people. It was the largest crowd I had ever been in, and it was intense and angry. People were fed up with Nixon and his murderous ways. We stood on top of the hill at the base of the Washington Monument, looking out across the demonstration and to the White House, hoping Nixon was back and looking out the window.
After about two hours, some of the demonstrators decided it was time for more aggressive action. The Washington Monument is encircled by fifty United States flags. A group of students thought the flags might look better if they were flown upside down. And that’s what they did. The National Parks police were outnumbered and called for reinforcements. Within minutes, in rode the cavalry. Dozens of cops on horseback ascended the hill to the monument. As we were not participating in this sidebar demo, we weren’t worried about anything happening to us. Wrong assumption. The horsemen started attacking anyone in sight with their clubs. We took off, like most of the crowd, running down the hill. The police decided to pursue us. I did not know it was humanly possible to outrun a horse, but somehow we shot down that hill like bullets. I could hear one horse right behind me, and at that moment I figured I could do something instantly that the horse couldn’t do.
Stop.
As I stopped dead in my tracks, the horse just kept going. There were plenty of other protesters to chase. I yelled at the others in our group to follow me, and we moved out to the right side of the crowd where there were no police. Out of breath, we all agreed that was too close a call and decided that we had done enough to make our voices heard. We flipped off the White House one last time (“Did you see him in the window?” “Yes, I think I saw him!”), and headed back to Michigan.
ACT III: Bad Axe
I had worked for him, I had protested him. And now I wanted closure. I wanted to say good-bye.
It was clear that Nixon wasn’t long for the White House. By the late spring of 1974, after the break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party, after the Senate Watergate hearings and John Dean’s revelations, after Alexander Butterfield admitted Nixon taped every conversation in the Oval Office, after the White House authorized the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, after Nixon lost at the Supreme Court and the Pentagon Papers were published, and after he tried to cover it all up, President Richard Milhous Nixon was hanging on by a thread when he decided to pay a visit to three small towns northeast of Flint, Michigan.
He had been hiding in the White House, drinking, talking to old paintings on the wall, afraid to go out and be with the public, the majority of whom now wanted him to either leave the presidency of his own volition or be the first president to be tossed out. He wanted neither. He was a fighter. He never gave up, even when all his chips were down, many times before. He was Dick Nixon of Yorba Linda, California, and he wasn’t going anywhere but where destiny intended him to be.
Forced to have to say during a press conference, “I’m not a crook” (the