One of My Few Life Failures was Tabled

After successfully negotiating the still secret trade agreement with the Martians (fortunately they don’t mind that Twinkies are made of rocks and chemicals), President Nixon asked if I would help with a more difficult negotiation: peace in Vietnam with the People’s Republic of Vietnam, the People’s Republic of China, and some Republican people who were taunting us in the driveway. Our lead negotiator was Dr. Henry Kissinger from Columbia University, a secret university where all students are trained to either work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, or MacDonald’s (who frankly serve billions more people than do the CIA and the State Department).  Dr. Kissinger was previously noted for filling in for Peter Sellers during health problems when Sellers was filming “Dr. Strangelove.”

The meeting with the representatives from North Viet Nam, the Viet Cong, and Burger King (we had MacDonald’s on our side: Burger King went a different route) began ominously when Dr. Kissinger sneezed. The negotiating table was too close to an open window where pollen was entering.  The North Vietnamese representative declared that sneezing is a sign of weakness.  It was his theory that sneezing comes from a reaction from flaked skin and dandruff and that if one sneezed, it meant one was allergic to oneself. He insisted that he never sneezed, because his body was in full acceptance of who he was, as a man, namely a woman who looks wears dresses at night.  He argued that he (and she) never trusted a person who sneezed at what flaked from that person’s body. I tried to point to the ragweed, hay, cut grass, and strong perfume stand had all been strangely located by Bob's Big Boys associates (who we suspected we secretly aligned with Burger King, which is why today you find very few Bob's Big Boys left) in locations close to the open window.

We spent months just arguing over what  the negotiating table should be before we could begin negotiating. We wanted the table moved to the middle of the room. The Burger King representative wanted the table placed in a dark corner next to the kitchen, which made no sense especially since the kitchen staff sang off key Bob Dylan songs in a manner which ironically made them on key. 

Kissinger’s suggestion of bar stools and then bean bags were immediate rejected. The North Vietnamese delegation insisted we stand through the negotiations. We suggested they stand while we sit on massage chairs. They then insisted they get the massage chairs and we stand. We stated they could have the massage chairs if we could have the bar stools. This might have worked yet, unknown to us, the Viet Cong delegation had secretly sold the bar stools to pay a gambling debt with the Burger King delegation.  

The situation escalated when one of the North Vietnamese delegates hung a picture of Chairman Mao in the room. Dr. Kissinger and I thought it was actually a nice photo yet one of the other North Vietnamese delegates insisted on replacing the Mao Tse Tung picture with a picture of Leonid Brezhnez. Frankly, that photo had him in a bathing suit and was not a flattering photograph.  Then one of the North Vietnamese delegates hung up a face shot of Jane Fonda. Kissinger then hung up a poster of Jane Fonda in a bathing suit.  We all finally settled on the photo of Jane Fonda in a bathing suit.

After months of negotiating tables, chairs, photos, who is was that kept cutting the cheese, it was amazing that it then took us only seven minutes to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War.  Unfortunately, just as we were all about to sign it, everything feel apart.

The North Vietnamese representative sneezed. He left the room in shame, and the negotiations were off.

It Was All Watergate Under the Bridge

After the successful secret moon and Mars (that last bit of information is for later, you obviously would not be interested in reading all about that nor the subsequent enormous resulting trade in computer technologies with the Martians), President Nixon and I developed an enormous amount of mutual respect.      He was a man who cultivated that deep loyalty. When an aide stated he would run over his own grandmother to protect President Nixon, I too admitted I also run over that aide’s grandmother to protect Nixon.

We were putting the Martian technology to good use. I started a company we nicknamed DieVote which manufactured voting machines that protected the rights of dead voters to vote for Nixon. What better way to honor our past citizens, I say!  We rigged the machines so Nixon would defeat the wildly popular Georg McGovern by about 20 percentage points. Then, so no one would catch on to our scheme, we formed a bunch of fake pollster organizations that all reported Nixon had an enormous lead so no one would suspect anything was wrong with the machine results.   

Nixon’s fault was that he was enormous paranoid.  For fun, we used to scare him by sneaking up behind him and shouting things like “look, there’s Ted Kennedy” just to watch him jump.  Nixon wanted to make it a condition of his Supreme Court appointees that they would agree to award him the Presidency by Supreme Court order in case he lost the election.  I told him that was preposterous and that scenario could never possibly occur.

A positive attribute was that Nixon was just about the most honest person I ever met.  Why, if found a penny on the street, he would have the FBI get the fingerprints of the person whose penny it was, run the fingerprints through the FBI fingerprint data base, and return the penny to its rightful owner.  This really was not that cost effective and it did draw some Congressional scrutiny. So, after the penny was returned the person was then fined $50 for littering the penny.

One day Nixon came to me in a panic. He told me someone had found an incriminating tape in the files of the late J. Edgar Hoover.  (Technically, Hoover was not dead at that moment, but give it a day and the drug would have taken affect by then. But you don’t want to read about that.)  I started to explain that the tapes of me with Sophia Loren was perfectly innocent when I realized he did not mean those tapes.  It seems there was a film of Nixon getting Elvis Presley drunk enough to assassinate President Kennedy. Someone had mailed copies to CBS, NBC, ABC, and the Democratic National Committee.  We knew we controlled the television networks, so we were not worried about those tapes.  Yet we had never before considered the need to infiltrate and take control of the Democratic National Committee.  The Communist Party, yes. In fact, there were more FBI agents as voting members of the Communist Party than there were Communists in America.  Yet we had never even considered the need to control the Democrats, even though there also were more FBI agents than Democrats in America.

Now it is time for me to write the truth about Watergate. The reason the Nixon burglars were caught inside the Democratic National Committee was that they never could find the tape. They were in there for days. In fact, the Democratic National Committee staff came to work and helped them look for it.  No one could find it anywhere. The Democratic National Committee staff then let the burglars keep looking after hours and told the burglars to just lock up when they were done. The problem was a security guard did not know they were there, found them, called it in, and the rest is history.

Incidentally, the tape had been found by the leadership of the Democratic National Committee.  They thought it was an audition tape of Nixon, playing the prim and proper roommate to Elvis, playing the messy roommate, was hysterical.  They particularly enjoyed the scene where Elvis got so mad at Nixon he took out a gun and shot the TV set.  The Democratic National Committee sent the tape to Garry Marshall.

And that is how “The Odd Couple” came to become a TV series.