In the meantime, | am, at long last, completely at peace with myself. It has been worth all the struggle. Postscript: After “A Sneak Preview of Richard Nixon’ s Memoirs” was published, syndicated columnist Liz Smith—who hadn’ t seen that piece—wrote that H.R. Haldeman had been in the Oval Office with Nixon, and that his trousers were down to his ankles. Hoping to smoke out the truth, | retyped one page of the manuscript, inserting a phrase (shown in italics) in this sentence: “When the incident was over, | simply returned to my desk, and although the tension of vulnerability was still in the air and my trousers were still around my ankles, we resumed our discussion as if nothing had occurred.” | then photocopied the manuscript and sent it to Liz Smith. | had assumed she would check with her source. Instead, she wrote in her column that she had been fooled by me, implying that her source had based that revelation on my article. Somehow my hoax on Liz Smith backfired. | had become a victim of my own satirical prophecy. In his memoirs, | had Nixon insisting that Watergate was a setup to get rid of him as president. A decade later, Nixon himself made that claim in a network television interview. Furthermore, Haldeman in his book, 7he Ends of Power, would reveal that Nixon used code words when talking HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015130