SUSPENDED ANIMATION Tricky Dick takes extended White House stay By Chip Benson

Can you imagine if Richard Nixon was still president? This would mean White House china celebrating more than 30 years in the oval office, about the same amount of time that many other Arab leaders, including the recently deposed Saddam Hussein, have ruled their countries. Just think: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger, along with Arafat, Mubarak, and Qaddafi. The sons of Assad (Syria), Saud (Saudi Arabia) and Hussein (Jordan), along with the sons of Nixon’s "sons of bitches." What would America be like if this had been our history? The deadening forces of hereditary rule and tyrannical, paranoid government are a powerful combo, and to fully appreciate what Mideast countries are like, one has to conjure up such a scenario.

According to L.A. Heberlein, the author of Sixteen Reasons Why I Killed Nixon, a 30-year Nixon administration would be a good thing as far as actual public policy. By today’s standard, Nixon’s government was far to the left of the current conservative political path, and the resulting consolidation of corporate power. After all, it was Nixon, the career Republican, who instituted wage price controls and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Ahhhh, but then there’s the Nixon personality, and Heberlein says a 30-year reign would have descended into a Heart of Darkness-like terror. He could see an intense and paranoid Tricky Dick, strung out on prescription drugs, slowly losing contact with reality, remembering every enemy and political slight. The blossoms of Nixon’s paranoia would have yielded some strange flowers. Nixon was an insane anti-communist and despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, he would have refused to recognize Germany after it re-merged with East Germany. He was obsessed with many things, but none more so than the good-looking and well-dressed Kennedy clan. During the 1960 presidential debate, all it took was one look, from Jack at Nixon’s shoes, to turn Dick into a shriveling mess. Who knows how many more mysterious Kennedy deaths and disappearances there would have been had Nixon been in power longer?

Kissinger would be the palace eunuch in a current Nixon administration, and any of the Nixon clan not with him today would be working for a real Tony Soprano; The post-war (WWII) crudity, the suitcases full of cash, the Scotch, football — all would have mixed well, actually, at summit gatherings with Mideast male regime leaders (of the type we just destroyed). Look at the lifestyle being uncovered in Saddam’s bombed-out palaces – it’s straight out of a late 1950s Playboy party.

Stanley Kutler, author of the critical Nixon book, Absolute Power, says incredulously, "What do you mean if we had the same government; We do, different faces, same group of clowns." Kutler then pulled a quote from Nixon’s archive: "I was talking to my aide Don Rumsfeld one day. I told him we would get out of Vietnam. Like the Civil War, with one side starting things, the other settling it. The Democrats got us in, we got us out. Rummy said that Republicans got us out of four Democrat wars in this century. Rummy said that the Democrats mentality is to smother, to intervene, to try to manage things. We try to create, and develop capabilities. Rumsfeld is a serious guy, but he doesn’t have it, in my opinion."

Ahhhh, the paranoia, but Kutler does admit to missing his subject just a little bit.

Although the people in power today are apparatchiks, he says, there’s no real personality like Nixon. "Nixon would look upon the microphone and communication power of the presidency today with much envy," Kutler says, and like former Iraqi information minister Mohammad Said al-Sahaf, Nixon spokesman Ron Ziegler — had he not died in February — would have been in insistent denial on Tricky Dick state-run TV.