Thy Neighbor's Wife (43 page)

R
ICHARD NIXON
had come to the White House convinced that the spirit of America was being eroded by domestic radicals, degenerate hippies, and exploitative pornographers; and as part of his campaign to purge the nation of its lurid temptations, and to restore law and order on the campuses and in the cities, Nixon advocated a “citizens’ crusade against the obscene.” Although most of the sex films and hard-core photographs sold in the nation had emanated from the region of his birth, Nixon neither appreciated nor understood the appeal of such material, nor had he ever identified with the loose, laid-back, self-indulgent life-style that had seduced so many other natives of Southern California.

Nixon grew up as an indoor man in an outdoor state, a Puritan born in an impoverished farm town outside Los Angeles that was closer to the Grapes of Wrath than to the hills of Hollywood. His father, a frostbitten streetcar motorman from a barren region of Ohio who had migrated West in 1906 and had failed as a lemon rancher, was a cantankerous, frustrated man and a harsh disciplinarian of his children. Nixon’s mother, Hannah Milhous, who had come to Southern California at the age of twelve with her Quaker parents from Indiana, and had been reared in the religious community of Whittier—founded by New England Quakers in the late 1800s at the same time that James Towner’s free-love
Oneidans were moving into nearby Santa Ana—was a righteous woman of fortitude and faith who, in order to afford the medical care of one of Richard Nixon’s tubercular brothers, worked outside the home for three years as a cook and scrubwoman.

Richard Nixon labored after school at various jobs, had little time for laxity or leisure, and grew up to be a dutiful, humorless young man who played the piano in the Friends Church on weekends and was a top student and aggressive debater at Whittier College, a Quaker institution dedicated to the training of Christian leadership. After graduating on scholarship from the Duke University Law School, and serving as an officer in the Navy, he successfully ran for Congress in 1946 against a California Democrat whose liberal views he attacked as sympathetic to communism; and while this scathing campaign, and similar ones that followed, would propel Nixon into the national limelight as a patriot and moral inquisitor, he would rarely feel truly accepted and admired by his constituents, nor would he often be, even in the Oval Office of the White House, secure within himself.

If he could have controlled the nation over which he presided, he would have extended through cities and towns the ethos of Whittier College, a place where order and conformity had prevailed and where there had been respect for hard work, religion, and moral rectitude. As President, he brought to Washington two Californians who shared his view that such traditions should be preserved, and these men became his top domestic advisers. Both were nondrinking, nonsmoking Christian Scientists who had attended UCLA; both were conservative Republicans, patriots, and family men who were appalled by the clamorous counterculture, the spreading sexual permissiveness, and the pornographic trend in films and publications. One of the men, a tall, crew-cut, autocratic former advertising executive named H. R. Haldeman, would become the Chief of Staff of Nixon’s White House. The other man, attorney John D. Ehrlichman, a former Eagle Scout and decorated Air Force navigator who flew in twenty-six bombing missions over Germany, would serve as Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. After Daniel Ells
berg had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, Ehrlichman would retaliate by organizing the “plumbers” brigade that would raid the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building.

In addition to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, President Nixon would bolster his “crusade against the obscene” by appointing as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—following the retirement of the liberal Earl Warren—a majestic white-haired exemplar of high-minded Methodist morality named Warren Burger. A former Assistant United States Attorney General and an Eisenhower appointee to the Court of Appeals, Burger was known to be supportive of government wire-tapping privileges against domestic radicals, to be restrictive of freedom of the press, and to be repulsed by pornography.

Soon the President was able to place three more conservatives on the high tribunal, following the deathbed retirements of Hugo Black and John Harlan, and the pressured departure of Abe Fortas in the wake of publicized allegations of financial improprieties. The Nixon replacements were William Rehnquist, a tough-minded, forty-seven-year-old Goldwater Republican from Milwaukee who had been working in the Nixon Justice Department and was known to favor capital punishment and to oppose abortion; Harry Blackmun, a teetotaling, straitlaced Harvard-educated Minnesota resident who had gone to the same grade school and church in St. Paul as Chief Justice Burger, had been the best man at Burger’s wedding, and, in response to one of Nixon’s questions during a prenomination interview for the Court position, had assured the President that none of the three Blackmun children were “hippie types” and Lewis F. Powell, a proper Virginian and former ABA president who, shortly after his Supreme Court appointment, was shocked at having to sit in the Court’s screening room one day and watch, as relevant evidence in an obscenity case, a nude blond Swedish actress performing lickerishly in a sex movie entitled
Without a Stitch
.

With such sexually prudish justices added to the Court, Nixon anticipated considerable support for his drive against pornog
raphy; and he also expected help from the recently established Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, an eighteen-member group appointed by former President Johnson in 1968 to determine what effect hard-core material was having on American society and, if the situation warranted it, to suggest corrective action. It had long been contended by the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, and many congressmen and church leaders, that exposure to hard-core sexual magazines and films prompted crimes of violence and rape; but until the formation of the commission, to which Congress appropriated $2 million for the research that would take two years to complete, there had not been a federal attempt to produce the evidence that would test such claims.

When one member of the commission—the group included distinguished educators, scientists, clergymen, lawyers, and businessmen—resigned in 1969 to accept an overseas diplomatic assignment, Nixon was able to appoint an individual of his own choice, a man he knew was one of the most fanatical foes of pornography in America. He was Charles H. Keating, a lean, blondish, determinedly Catholic, six-foot four-inch Cincinnati attorney whose many years of lobbying against sex films and books had caused Cincinnati headline writers to call him “Mr. Clean.”

As the father of six children, a former All-American intercollegiate swimming champion, a naval fighter pilot during World War II, and a top executive with a large financial company, Charles Keating was a formidable presence in his community; and after he had become offended during the 1950s by the expanding display of girlie magazines and porno paperbacks on the city newsstands, he convinced several civic boosters, business leaders, and churchgoers to join his antismut crusade and to donate funds to the tax-exempt society that he had founded called the Citizens for Decent Literature.

The main goal of the CDL was to apply community pressure on local politicians and lawmen to close down the bookshops and
cinemas that exploited sex in Cincinnati, and to inspire letter-writing campaigns and even economic boycotts against the proprietors of general stores that sold sex magazines, and against the sponsors of television and radio shows that tolerated sex-oriented programs or other broadcasts that might be construed as inappropriate for a moral family audience. The CDL, in essence, was reviving the prewar tactics of the old Catholic Legion of Decency that had once terrified the Hollywood film industry until boldly challenged by such independent producers as Howard Hughes and Otto Preminger; and while many civil libertarians initially dismissed Keating’s CDL as anachronistic, the society nonetheless continued to grow throughout the sixties into a national organization with thirty-two chapters in twenty states, and an estimated 350,000 active supporters of sexual restraint and censorship. Its honorary members included eleven United States senators, four governors, and more than one hundred members of the House of Representatives. It was supported by many municipal leaders, district attorneys, and the Catholic archbishops of Cincinnati, St. Louis, Washington, and Los Angeles. Dozens of big-city daily newspapers, which otherwise would have opposed censorship, endorsed the CDL’s “clean-up” programs and agreed to restrict, subdue, or ban entirely the advertising of X-rated sex films. Among the papers that did this were the Cincinnati
Enquirer
(where Keating’s younger brother was the company president), the Miami
News
, the San Francisco
Examiner
, the Los Angeles
Times
, the Detroit
News
, the New Orleans
Times Picayune
, the Chicago
Daily News
. And eventually, even the New York
Times
would be influenced by the trend.

The CDL’s own bimonthly periodical, the
National Decency Reporter
, enthusiastically recounted each new raid against “dirty” bookshops by alert police departments around the country and eagerly announced the courtroom verdicts of pornographers’ convictions; it also printed in each issue a flattering biographical sketch and photograph of a law-enforcement official who had recently inflicted punishment upon the “merchants of
smut,” and this individual was hailed under the headline: “Prosecutor of the Month.”

The muckraking editor of the
National Decency Reporter
was a bespectacled, stocky, ruddy-complexioned man in his fifties named Raymond Gauer, who, before being discovered by Keating, had worked obscurely in Los Angeles as an accountant with a milk company and as a systems analyst with a firm that manufactured chain saws. Gauer was exactly the kind of man that Keating wished to recruit into the CDL: He was a political conservative, a Catholic family man with seven children, a naval veteran who had struggled for decades to eke out a modest living for his large family while repressing his resentment against the nation’s welfare cheats, the privileged campus radicals, and the sexual degenerates who were committing every imaginable sin against God and nature.

Gauer had come to Keating’s attention in a circuitous way. One Sunday evening while walking toward a Chinese restuarant to pick up an order of food to take home to his family, Gauer found himself standing wide-eyed in front of a sex shop that had recently opened in his Hollywood neighborhood. In the window, and on the front cases, he saw racks of paperbacks with lurid titles, arrangements of electric vibrators and rubber dill does, French ticklers, cock rings, tubes of lubricants, garter belts, and many magazines on the pages of which were full-color photographs of young women posing in the nude with their legs spread, their arms extended, their mouths open. Though Gauer grunted disapprovingly to himself, he felt a stirring of excitement, a loathsome awareness of illicit desire. Immediately he walked away, embarrassed that he had lingered as long as he had.

Later that night, after his wife and children were asleep, the reflections of the evil store window persisted in his mind. Troubled by the images, he was restless, agitated; but he also felt summoned by the spirit of the Lord, a feeling he had not felt since his altar boy days in his native Chicago, and he recognized within himself a pious passion, a wish to confront and overcome the demonic allure of the despicable pornographers. He got little
sleep that night, and the next day he composed an angry letter to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, protesting the presence of such a store near his home. Within a week he had received a letter of thanks, promising that the police would be notified. A few days later, he read in the newspapers that the store had been raided by the authorities and was now closed.

Impressed and encouraged, and experiencing for the first time in his life the power to exert his influence within the tawdry world around him, Raymond Gauer proceeded to drive around the city in his spare time and note the names and addresses of other sex shops. In downtown Los Angeles, near City Hall, he counted six places that seemed to be thriving, and he wrote to the mayor questioning how such places could be legally tolerated in the shadow of the mayor’s own office and the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Days later Gauer received a telephone call from an officer with the city’s vice squad who said, “Mr. Gauer, watch the papers tomorrow.” On the following day the front pages of the Los Angeles press reported a simultaneous raid on the six establishments, the arrests of several salesclerks, and the confiscation of seven tons of obscenity.

Not long after this a representative of the CDL contacted Raymond Gauer, and, during one of Charles Keating’s speaking engagements in Los Angeles, it was arranged that he and Gauer should meet. In style and appearance, the two men were strikingly dissimilar. Keating was tall, impeccably neat, commanding. Gauer was plain, craggy-featured, and of sufficient girth to strain the seams of his tight-fitting suits. But in their mutual abhorrence of sinful sex they were kindred spirits; and as the men became better acquainted, Keating perceived in Gauer a loquacious simplicity that he thought could be converted into a convincing voice for the CDL.

Soon Keating’s instincts about Gauer were put to a test: Due to a prior commitment, a regular CDL lecturer on sex was unable to accept a lecture date with a Los Angeles service club, and Gauer was persuaded to take his place. Although Gauer was initially very nervous and self-conscious about having to stand before a
crowded room, he nevertheless proceeded in plain terms, but with disarming conviction, to express to his audience his objection to the pornographers’ public desecration of the private and sacred act of love. He did not deny the appeal of pornography. He admitted, in fact, that he was as vulnerable as most men to its stimulation. But he said it was potentially corruptive, it was a sickening substitute for the genuine affection that sexual union should symbolize. If the sex peddlers were allowed to continue to circulate their filthy material in the future with the freedom they enjoyed at present, their pollution would not only contaminate the deserving victims who consumed it but also spread indiscriminately to the society at large, thus weakening the fiber of family life and the moral health of the nation.