Way back at the beginning of the year, when we were still living in the golden age of Good King Barack and had not yet descended into the hell-hole that America has become under his much-despised successor, The New York Times ran a curious piece by Peter Baker claiming that, after almost half a century, the long-dead former President Richard M. Nixon had finally been rumbled. There it was, in black and white: the long-desired, long-anticipated smoking gun (to mix our metaphors) proving that the long-rumored “October Surprise” of the 1968 election—by which Nixon had supposedly attempted to sabotage the Paris Peace talks with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in order to boost his own presidential campaign—had been factual. So said Mr. Baker anyway, doubtless in the spirit of the “truth” which the Times has lately been claiming as its exclusive property.
And what did Mr. Baker and the Timessuppose this fuliginous firearm to be? Why, the word “monkey wrench,” used as a transitive verb, though with only the pronoun “it” as its object. Pay close attention now. The tell-tale verb appeared in handwritten notes taken by Nixon’s aide H. R. Haldeman (later Nixon’s chief-of-staff and one of the chief fall-guys of Watergate) of a telephone conversation he had with candidate Nixon about then-President Johnson’s bombing halt in Vietnam. (Forgive me for all this ancient history, but I’ll soon come to the point.) Nixon, not implausibly, saw Johnson’s stopping of the air campaign as a gimmick—an