Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Dick & Jowl

2025-Aug-06

Seeing as how the fredlambuth.com blog is basically a poorly planned, meandering memoir with an obviously unreliable narrator, let’s get down to brass tacks. Richard Milhous Nixon. With only a face a mother could love. I found him peculiar-looking from the get-go. A character that could be easily caricatured. The jowls. The nose. The eyebrows. A figure like that cuts an indelible image. One that can be easily identified among the cartoon depictions I’d see in the pages of MAD Magazine. (I read those often in my childhood.) This figure got to be memorable because he is a one-and-a-half-term U.S. president!

Choosing Dick Nixon as a blog topic is not an editorial that charters this blog’s espoused politics. (That has already been done. It’s anarcho-syndicalism for life!) On this blog we will not have a Dick Nixon to kick around—unless he ought to be. He is far from my favorite president. I know he did plenty of things that call for a good kicking. However, he is far from being my least favorite guy to hold the top political office of the USA. What I’d like to make clear is that we will not be championing Nixon here. Despite his efforts to appear tough on Communism, and… umm… his groundbreaking work in… getting himself elected to office? What was it that Nixon was proud of achieving? That thing with China?

No, Nixon is the subject of this blog post because of his inescapable presence in my childhood, adolescent, and adult psyche. He’s a face you do not forget. Unquestionable when you see him. Along with the strikingly peculiar appearance, he has that throaty voice. With those croaks, he’d deliver lines I did not understand as a kid (“Sock it to me, baby”). Despite not understanding the context, something about that man put a hold on me. A fixation. A peculiarity? A fetish? I do not agree with much of his decisions. Wondering what motivates him is where the fun can be had from studying Dick Nixon.

Why is Nixon at the forefront of my mind all the way up to—and especially—today? He shows up in a few books I had recently read. Books that ought to be the actual direct topic for a good blog post. That is, they would be better subjects for blog posts for a more urbane blog. One that is dedicated to sophisticated discussion on politics and/or history. One that rises to the challenge of creating ten thousand words in response to reading a huge volume on U.S. presidential history.

That’s not the type of blog we have here. This is about Nixon the meme, not the thirty-seventh person to hold the office of The President of the United States of America. This post is about Tricky Dick Nixon howling at the moon, not about the anti-Communist junior senator from California. The presidents before and after him each have reasons to be remembered, yet they did not reach the cultural commodification that Nixon reached. Young Fred Lambuth knew plenty of Nixon jokes by the time he was ten years old, but maybe one joke apiece for Lyndon Baines Johnson or Gerald Ford.

Unlike those two presidents mentioned, Nixon won two national elections. Ran in three. Despite that increase in administration longevity, I doubt that is the reason he was mentioned more in jokes than other presidents of his era. Why is Nixon more remarkable in Americana than any president in between Kennedy and Trump? Had I to guess, it would be because he was a weird-looking dude and made the exceptional mistake among U.S. presidents—the kind of sin the American voting public cannot accept in their national leader: getting caught.

Growing up, Nixon was easy to pin down as a “bad guy.” He was removed from office in ignominious terms. A kid would know that saying “I’m not a crook” is often the first thing you know to say when getting caught doing something crooked. Back then, I believed the people assuming the office of the U.S. Presidency were supposed to be these upright exemplars of virtue. Nixon was the exception because he sullied the office, the people noticed, so he recognized he botched the job badly enough that he had to quit. That’s how I had it figured out from stitching together the punchlines on Murphy Brown, Saturday Night Live, and Jay Leno monologue jokes.

The character of Richard M. Nixon made its first big purchase into my adolescent psyche when I watched the Hollywood adaptation of the semi-journalistic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. By the time I had watched this movie (it was repeated often on Showtime in the late ’90s), I was making an effort to be an effective brooding teenager—one with a larger-than-average appetite for book reading. The more subversive the books, the more I was intrigued.

It was not the political undertones of Fear and Loathing that lured me in. To be frank, it was the bawdy talk of heavy drug use. At that time, I had no drug experience to speak of, other than sneaking drinks at family gatherings. The idea of a whole big-budget movie production about people taking hallucinatory drugs, with a skilled director handling the effects, sounded like it was worth my time. I was an adolescent scanning the cable movie channels. I had plenty of time on my hands. The idea of the drugs being used in the movie could be scary, but not enough to diminish my curiosity into visual effects in general.

I had seen plenty of drug use on screen by this time. I had cable TV for as far as I could remember. What made this movie different was its trailer advertising an effort to represent these hallucinatory sensations on screen—not just having an actor play out the motions of some mystery drug.

As a young teenager, I had also heard tales of LSD, or more often heard as “acid.” Of what this drug could do. That one sounded different. Fun on a superficial level. Mystical on an inner level. A level I didn’t want to talk about at that age.
Almost all the drugs I saw in movies were coke and dope. Rarely did those cinematic depictions make the use of coke and dope look amusing to use recreationally. This acid seemed to offer something… different. Inner seeking.

Before we get too far into the deep entrenchment of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’s effect on me, let’s stick with how Nixon pertains to all this Gonzo muck. He was the bad guy in most of Hunter Thompson’s writings. An easy target. Although he was an enemy professionally, Thompson painted Nixon as an enemy that he ultimately could respect—one that could be empathized with. The representation of so much of what can be found in the “silent majority” of Americans that were tired of being kicked around by people telling them how to be better. In Thompson’s writing, I saw Nixon painted as a working man that spread himself too thin chasing the presidency. My first taste of who the man was behind the caricatures.

In the third act of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the voice of Nixon droning over and over is used as a device for haunting the protagonist when he was feeling the strong effects of adrenochrome. From there, I drew the idea that Nixon was definitely not the kind of guy who endorses acid—or the people who espouse it. The damn hippies.

The book was written in 1971, year three of the first Nixon administration. A year when the U.S. involvement in Vietnam had to demur from being an almost-all-out military conflict with the North Vietnamese. Instead, the U.S. quietly returned to offering an advisory role to the Southern Vietnamese military. By advisory, I mean with less ground action but an increase in bombings.

About that same time in my brooding teenage years, Futurama had premiered on the Fox channel. Dick Nixon was president in the year 2999, and I was loving all the reference jokes that nobody else my age would understand! Boy, it made me feel smart. I came to Futurama because it gave me the impression that it was a thinly veiled sequel of The Simpsons, in the world of tomorrow! Also, the sci-fi implied in the world of tomorrow. There were so many jokes that felt like rewards to all my book reading.

What I knew about Nixon’s foibles had really made me feel like I was getting the good kind of adult humor that Futurama was advertised to offer—not just jokes about drinking, violence, sex, or farts. Those were actually starting to falter in hilarity to my uppity teenage sensibilities. Now that I knew how sweet the fruits were from digging up facts to understand jokes in The Simpsons, Seinfeld, et al., that was all I wanted to enjoy. Bender was still funny, though, despite playing to my more childish tastes. I think the Futurama writers knew that too.

Of course, I did not get every joke the headless body of Nixon was throwing out in Futurama. I knew just enough to make a juicy bite into the meta-jokes that pervaded the series. The very idea of Richard Nixon once again singing and dancing for votes, despite being so obviously somebody that is not good with people. Also with his curiously named Vice President doing all his physical dirty work.

On Futurama, Nixon once again easily filled the role of a recurring villain. A spoiler to anything fun or ultimately good. Nixon’s floating head in a jar was a cartoon version of what Hunter Thompson hated on the surface: a crude, ugly man willing to burn a village if it means it will play well in Peoria. The ogre who made sure the ’60s did not end with the hippies winning.

The adult grasp of Nixon came with the very, very big single-volume history book Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. This writer had been mentioned before on the blog, a few posts back when I finally got around to reading the very, very big single-volume story of Barry Goldwater going for the top job in 1964—the year Nixon did not run. I think I remarked at the time that I already knew I should re-read the Goldwater book to grasp more of what it was saying.

I have not re-read a book in quite some time. Novelty is often my pursuit, so going back to the same book requires some coercion. Right before I started Nixonland again (up to page 100 as of this writing), I finished Playing with Fire by Lawrence O’Donnell. He’s a contemporary TV news guy who I guess is also a U.S. presidential history scholar. I actually picked up this book when I thought it was written by Lawrence Wright, the Texas journalist who wrote Going Clear, the Scientology book.

Anyways, it was a good book. Even I could tell it could not exactly feel great. The writing felt rife with pronouncements. I usually can't enjoy history books with sentences that make normative statements. The year 1968, in the U.S. or the world, is teeming with several novels’ worth of content. This book was supposed to be about the presidential race that year. Felt a little bit like a paean to Eugene McCarthy. Suits me well enough. I didn’t know too much about his side of the 1968 story.

Not being a big fan of normative statements in non-fiction is why I guess I can hold Nixon in less-than-derisive esteem. I just don’t think he is that bad of a guy. When measuring against his peers, he just has the misfortune of looking nefarious. Yeah, I guess Ford might be a saint, but I don’t see him getting a lot of things done if he ever got tested as president.

The producer over there just told me we are running out of time. Join us next time when I get around to finishing the pre-presidency Reagan book that was published by Perlstein—the one after Nixonland. That blog post will be full of Reaganomical asides. Judging by how I read these big fat history books, I estimate that blog post will be ready around Christmas. We’ll have peace with honor. I swear it! By Christmas!