“When I pulled the old “Niagara Falls” routine they all fell for it like suckers at a state fair.”

“All the time the attention was on me hamming it up, behind the scenes Armstrong and I were talking about how to get all the gold back from the moon.”

“That damn fuck up Liddy ruined everything.I had planned to coat the Washington monument in moon gold but Liddy actually broke into Watergate when I explicitly told him to make it look like a break in but not go all the way. We could have claimed the commies were responsible and won in a landslide. Over achieving suck up ruined it for everyone.”

“Well, after everything went down NASA and the alien delegation shut me out. I couldn’t even get a return call from X’axnar, the little fucker I taught to golf at the short range at Area 51, much less having Ford get on board with the “space gold train.”

“After that I stayed in the shadows. They all knew the moon was mostly gold but the religious fanatics and the “Mother Earthers” screamed and cried whenever old Dick Nixon made an appearance. We’ll, fuck ’em I say. Let the gold stay up there and if the aliens want to keep immortality to themselves who is Dick Nixon to say otherwise?”

“There was so much gold up there Aldrin nearly shit himself when he saw it. Armstrong was pretty low key but Aldrin told me more than once how he tried to get “Neil” to leave the return module’s outer skin on the moon’s surface to bring back all the gold he could stuff in the LEM. Armstrong wasn’t having it so no Apollo Eleven gold came back on that mission.”

“The other missions were all a cover of course. Thirteen went to the moon and brought back the first “true gold.” The cover up worked pretty well. We kept bringing the stuff back all the way up to the end of the program. The boys kept their mouths shut and the Three Worlds Consortium kept out of the news.”

“At the end we had to make it look good. There was so much going on, the first High Jump missions and “Next Door Portal” openings, when things got hot I knew I had to fall on my sword. What came out was a sideshow and I’d do it all over again just to ensure the country has the edge it now enjoys.”

“I cried and pretended to get drunk and made all the staged calls while Kissinger got the aliens to slow the abduction thing and the Department of Defense got all the true gold stored under Mt. Shasta.  Everyone knew I’d have to chuck it eventually and that day I waved from the helo was the most relaxed of my life.”

“Ford knew most of it and Bush filled him in on the rest. When I left I washed my hands of the whole thing. The impact would happen no matter what I did and if TPTB used the true gold to record a survival reaction in DNA I wasn’t going to stand in their way. I’d played my part and old Dick Nixon was happy to leave the field to the young bucks.”

“I just wanted to sit on the coast and look at the Pacific while it was still blue. Pat understood and Tricia was OK with it. Let the young Turks deal with the crisis. I’d done my time. I hoped I’d be dead before the crust overturn but the way things had gone I didn’t place a bet. Dick Nixon was never a sucker but Fate liked a joke and I’d heard a lot of them up till now.”