As long as I've lived in America I've enjoyed the comic ritual known as the "hunt for the smoking gun," a process by which our official press tries to inoculate itself and its readers against political and economic realities.

The big smoking-gun question back in 1973 and 1974 concerned Richard Nixon. Back and forth the ponderous debate raged in editorial columns and news stories: Was this or that disclosure a "smoking gun"? Fairly early in the game, it was clear to about 95 percent of the population that Nixon was a liar, a crook and guilty as charged. But the committee rooms on Capitol Hill and the Sunday talk shows were still filled with people holding up guns with smoke pouring from the barrel telling one another solemnly that no, the appearance of smoke and stench of recently detonated cordite notwithstanding, this was not yet the absolute, definitive smoking gun.

So it became clear that the great smoking-gun hunt was really about timing, about gauging the correct temperature of the political waters. Then suddenly, in the late summer of 1974, that impalpable entity known as elite sentiment sensed that the scandal was becoming subversive of public order, that it was time to throw Nixon overboard and move on. A "new" tape--though hundreds of others had already made Nixon's guilt plain--was swiftly identified as "the smoking gun" and presto! Nixon was on the next plane to California.

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