So, he was indeed capable of drawing threats from government officials, and I knew he had recently started focusing on the federal level. He mentioned once that he was maintaining his own surveillance on the home of a regional official of the Secret Service. Another time he gave me a hilarious description of a clandestine meeting in a Chinatown restaurant with an F.B.I. agent. When I asked him why he was meeting with the FBI, he wouldn’t tell me. Another secret.
Actually, I never knew him when he didn’t have some grandiose secret. And indeed he had shared secrets that, when I heard them, seemed to have historical significance. Once, when I was living in the bucolic farm town of Petaluma in Sonoma County, he drove fifty minutes at night from the City (I deliberately didn’t have a phone) to share something monumental.
Inside my cottage, he convinced me that he indeed had something worth hearing, but he wouldn’t tell it to me except outside in the parking area. I knew without being told that he feared my cottage, because he was a frequent visitor, might have hidden government microphones. I was barefoot and expecting him to go only a few steps over the gravel. Instead, I had to follow him in the dark, my irritation increasing with each step, to what he decided was the suitable distance of sixty or so feet.
He leaned toward me and whispered: “I found a thpeech Nikthon (speech Nixon) made to a bunch of bithnethmen in Dallath two dayth befoh Kennedy wath athathinated (businessmen in Dallas two days before Kennedy was assassinated). He thaid, I quote: ‘We weeoh do whatevuh ith nethethawy to weemove the Kennedy-th fwom offith’ (We will do whatever is necessary to remove the Kennedys from office).”
I was impressed. “How do you know this?” I asked at a normal volume.
“I wead (read) it in the New Yohk Timeth (New York Times) of Novembuh twentieth nineteen thikthty thwee (sixty three),” he answered, also at a normal volume.
“What in the world were you doing with a New York Times from way back then?”
The only light was what dimly reached us from my kitchen window, but I could see his face when he caught himself before answering me and smiled a familiar smile that said he couldn’t say. This information about Nixon was very impressive though and I would have stayed impressed if I hadn’t read it in a story by another writer in Esquire a month later.
