He still lingers here. You can smell him before you hear him — that ghostly musk of flop sweat, Old Spice, and moral rot baked into the wallpaper of the West Wing. Richard Milhous Nixon, spectral and swollen with grievance, still pacing the Oval Office at 3 a.m., muttering about “the press” and “the Jews” and the long con of American virtue. The lights flicker when he’s near. The portraits turn their faces toward the wall. Even Andrew Jackson won’t look at him. Every administration since has pretended they buried him, but Nixon never went underground — he went systemic. His ghost isn’t haunting Washington; he is Washington. He’s the unkillable architecture of paranoia that powers the republic now — the data-mining, the black budgets, the men who believe the law is just a suggestion until someone leaks it. The only thing that’s changed since Watergate is that now, the bugs are in our pockets and we pay monthly for the privilege. He materialized to me last night, just after midnight, whe...
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