I have a small dog, a Chihuahua, and I know exactly when we got her. It was during O.J., and the reason I know this is that for a while, we thought about naming the dog Rosa Lopez. Rosa Lopez, in case you've forgotten, was the housekeeper who lived across the street from O.J. Simpson, on Rockingham; she testified in a famously incoherent way at the first trial. I remember her name because of the dog we didn't name her after, but I've managed to forget nearly everything else I ever knew about the Simpson murder case, and let me tell you, I knew a lot, I knew just about all there was to know, and every bit of it was lodged in my head, in a part of my brain that I now think of as the grassy knoll.
The O.J. Simpson case was not the beginning of my life on the grassy knoll; Watergate was. I never really got it about the actual, original, mother-of-all-grassy-knolls - the grassy knoll itself, in Dallas, Texas. I was a reporter at the New York Post the day JFK was shot, and for years afterwards I believed that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, acting alone. At the time, in 1963, I was a journalist, and I had an instinctive contempt for conspiracy theory. Most things that were thought of as conspiracies were -- in my opinion -- a series of incompetent acts coming together in a perfect storm. (It was especially easy to believe in the power of incompetent acts if you worked at the New York Post in that period.) So I never became a student of trajectories and how many bullet fragments and the role of Carlos Marcello and any of the rest of it, even after certain aspects of a conspiracy theory became somewhat compelling.
Then along came Watergate. Watergate was a revelation. It was an honest-to-God conspiracy, and the detail that clinched it was the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. When the people behind the Watergate burglary turned out to be behind the break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's months earlier, I realized that my natural antipathy to conspiracy was something I would probably have to give up: life was coming up with way too much evidence on the other side. My brain instantly expanded and made room for vast quantities of sheer speculation, narrative scenarios that led nowhere, and useless bits of information. I knew the name of Chuck Colson's wife, I knew the details of Ken Clawson's circumcision, and I knew so much about Howard Hunt that I eventually came to believe it was a shame I had never really become an expert on the Kennedy assassination because, no question, he was involved in it but it was too late for me to figure out how. Howard Hunt was truly Zelig, it seemed to me, and if you turned over almost any rock in American life from November 22, 1963 to the Watergate break-in on June 17, l972, you'd find him lurking underneath.
(Eventually, I came to believe the same thing about Lucianne Goldberg, who first crossed my consciousness in the early days of the women's movement, when she was one member of a two- member organization that opposed feminism and whose motto was "A lamp chop, not a karate chop." Later she popped up in Watergate, as part of a dirty-tricks team, and then of course she was a key figure in Monicagate, which it's no exaggeration to say would never have happened but for her.)
Anyway, this week, as I welcomed Plamegate back to the news cycle - and back to my brain -- I realized that I'd somehow managed to forget exactly what Scooter Libby was under indictment for. Yes, I know: lying. But about what? I couldn't remember. I couldn't believe it. Back in October I knew everything about Plamegate, I even knew the name of Judy Miller's new dog, and now I'd forgotten exactly what it was Libby was under indictment for.
My grassy knoll is full. It is crammed to bursting. Jared Michael Stern just turned up, and he's trying to sell Anita Busch a T-shirt, but she's busy because she just found a dead fish on her car windshield. There's a Woodstock typewriter, and a pumpkin patch, both left there by my parents, and somewhere David Greenglass is lurking. Leslie Abrahamson just wandered off; where did she go? What happened to her? Jean Harris will be here soon, under the influence of drugs given to her by Dr. Herman Tarnower. Kato Kaelin is doing a commercial for No Excuses jeans. Monica is on the way, wearing a purple thong. Ron Perelman isn't going to hire her; he's giving the job to Richard Johnson's fiancé instead. Hillary is upstairs in the residential quarters, she's just discovered a big box of papers she thought she'd lost. In some way, Tim Russert is involved, but no one knows how; meanwhile, let's blame him for asking the wrong questions on Sunday. Will Anthony Pellicano rat out Bert Fields? Is Bert Fields upset because Howard Weitzman walked out of his law firm? Will Michael Ovitz go to jail? Is Katie Holmes pregnant or is it a beach ball? Did George Bush have a clue what Scooter Libby was going to say to Judy Miller? Is Dick Cheney behind everything? Does Richard Perle ever lose a night's sleep? Does Jack Bauer ever go to the bathroom? I'm dizzy. I'm overloaded. Too much is happening.