Free Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

there. He would later be reprimanded for lying under oath of Congress. H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson and John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, were there. They, too, would be jailbirds by and by.
    I had been up all the previous night, drafting and redrafting my suggestions as to what the President might say about the Kent State tragedy. The guardsmen, I thought, should be pardoned at once, and then reprimanded, and then discharged for the good of the service. The President should then order an investigation of National Guard units everywhere, to discover if such civilians in soldiers’ costumes were in fact to be trusted with live ammunition when controlling unarmed crowds. The President should call the tragedy a tragedy, should reveal himself as having had his heart broken. He should declare a day or perhaps a week of national mourning, with flags flown at half-mast everywhere. And the mourning should not be just for those who died at Kent State, but for all Americans who had been killed or crippled in any way, directly or indirectly, by the Vietnam War. He would be more deeply resolved than ever, of course, to press the war to an honorable conclusion.
    But I was never asked to speak, nor afterward could I interest anyone in the papers in my hand.
    My presence was acknowledged only once, and then only as the butt of a joke by the President. I was so nervousas the meeting wore on that I soon had three cigarettes going all at once, and was in the process of lighting the fourth.
    The President himself at last noticed the column of smoke rising from my place, and he stopped all business to stare at me. He had to ask Emil Larkin who I was.
    He then gave that unhappy little smile that invariably signaled that he was about to engage in levity. That smile has always looked to me like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer. The joke he made was the only genuinely witty comment I ever heard attributed to him. Perhaps that is my proper place in history—as the butt of the one good joke by Nixon.
    “We will pause in our business,” he said, “while our special advisor on youth affairs gives us a demonstration of how to put out a campfire.”
    There was laughter all around.

       4
    A DOOR in the prison dormitory below me opened and banged shut, and I supposed that Clyde Carter had come for me at last. But then the person began to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as he clumped up the stairway, and I knew he was Emil Larkin, once President Nixon’s hatchet man. This was a big man, goggle-eyed and liver-lipped, who had been a middle linebacker for Michigan State at one time. He was a disbarred lawyer now, and he prayed all day long to what he believed to be Jesus Christ. Larkin had not been sent out on a work detail or assigned any housekeeping task, incidentally, because of what all his praying on hard prison floors had done to him. He was crippled in both legs with housemaid’s knee.
    He paused at the top of the stairs, and there were tears in his eyes. “Oh, Brother Starbuck,” he said, “it hurt so bad and it hurt so good to climb those stairs.”
    “I’m not surprised,” I said.
    “Jesus said to me,” he went on, “‘You have one last chance to ask Brother Starbuck to pray with you, and you’ve got to forget the pain it will cost you to climb those stairs, because you know what? This time Brother Starbuckis going to bend those proud Harvard knees, and he’s going to pray with you.’”
    “I’d hate to disappoint Him,” I said.
    “Have you ever done anything else?” he said. “That’s all I used to do: disappoint Jesus every day.”
    I do not mean to sketch this blubbering leviathan as a religious hypocrite, nor am I entitled to. He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile. In my time at the White House I had feared him as much as my ancestors must have feared Ivan the Terrible, but now I could be as impudent as I