William Scott Morrison

The Energy Caper, or Nixon in the Sky with Diamonds, takes us on a merry romp with a band of idealistic twenty-somethings looking for love and hoping to change the world.

In a luckier universe, in which the Kennedys were not assassinated and the Vietnam War ended before it began, we find President Richard Nixon and Dr. Timothy Leary, the escaped convict Nixon calls “the most dangerous man in the world” for turning America’s youth into no-good hippies. Nixon is the same profane, venal S-O-B that made him such a hit in our universe, but here he is unleashed in a world where there was no Vietnam war to slow him down and Watergate is just a fancy hotel.

Elected on a pledge to wage an unrelenting “war on drugs,” Nixon instead confronts a different kind of war—an energy war. The Arab oil embargo is driving the country toward a second Great Depression as motorists line up for hours to buy gasoline at any price. Desperate for alternatives to oil, Nixon learns of a plant which produces three times more biomass per acre than corn. If it were grown for methanol, good old wood alcohol—the same fuel used in Indianapolis racing cars—America could farm its way to energy independence in just five short years.

A secret weapon has dropped in Nixon’s lap, but he is shocked to learn that, under another name, this secret weapon is the primary target of his War on Drugs. If he can lead America to energy independence by convincing conservatives to legalize cultivation of the plant Thomas Jefferson called “America’s most valuable crop” in the name of national security, the final spot on Mount Rushmore will be his. Nixon knows that only a law-and-order, hippie-bashing conservative like himself could hope to buck America’s richest families and most powerful corporations to pull off a caper this crazy.

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