Sixteen Reasons Why I Killed Richard M. Nixon 

by 

L. A. Heberlein

        A crisis line volunteer is puzzled by the insistent callers who confess to killing Richard M. Nixon-even years after the President’s natural death. What gives? You’ll find out in this story-novel as it appraises the violence in America, confession after confession. A "sweet sixteen" in all.
    It was not enough for my critics to say that I had made terrible mistakes. They seemed driven to prove that I represented the epitome of evil itself.

Richard M. Nixon

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ISBN 0-942979-29-X, cloth, $23.95

Excerpt from the book:

People have been telling me why they killed Richard Nixon ever since 1974. ....

—It brought our family together again, T.J., just when I thought commercialism had broken us down into irredeemable fragments. That night was the reemergence of the magical for us. We all disrobed. I realized with shame that my children had never seen me naked. We painted one another’s bodies. My son Jack and I had never shared anything like the moment when I held up Nixon’s hair and Jack ran the rough flint knife around his head to lift the scalp. We washed the skull out together, the four of us, our eight hands bumping into each other in the utility sink. Such a powerful feeling to find Suzy’s hand in the gore. To slip my fingers between hers, lubricated with the blood of Nixon himself. It saved us, T.J. Once a week we take down the drum we made of his skull, we build a fire, and we dance all night together. When I think of how close we were to coming apart . . .
    I suppose it must be something about me. If you keep waking up married to abusive alcoholics, eventually you have to admit you must be seeking them out, looking for the incipient drunk in the sweet, smiling face. So many Nixon stories would not find me did I not need them. And as I have little interest in the merely violent—I don’t watch sports or American movies—and as no one seeks me out to tell me why they killed anyone else, I suppose it must be about Nixon.
    Richard M. Nixon, in the words of one journalist who covered his 1972 campaign for President 'represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.’