Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  God, he’d loved Martha when he’d first met her in ’68. She’d felt familiar, like the girls he’d known in Jackson and Biloxi, even if she came from all the way over in Arkansas. “Pleased to meet you,” he’d said, when Mitchell presented her. “Well, I hope you’ll never LaRue it, honey,” she’d responded, just like that. But she was beyond control now, drinking more than ever, and wearing out John, who let her drink until she passed straight through agitation into something like calm, or until she just passed out, period.

  No, he’d wait until morning, when he’d also call his wife and children back home in Mississippi. He decided to skip the ten o’clock news, which was mostly local anyway and would probably lead with whatever colored guy had just killed another one over in southeast Washington. He’d go down to the People’s Drugstore instead—below the fancy bridal shop and past the Chinese restaurant and the barbershop and the Safeway and all the other stores that made the Watergate a whole damned world unto itself—and he’d get himself another pouch of tobacco.

  “Still nothing?” asked Howard Hunt.

  “No, sir, I’m afraid not,” replied the Watergate Hotel’s desk clerk.

  “All right. I thought I’d check.”

  “We might have increased availability within a few days.”

  Hunt left without even nodding. Increased availability. When had people started talking this way? It irritated him profoundly, if profound irritation wasn’t a contradiction in terms. These days he might only be writing his spy novels, but he’d once had a Guggenheim and published a short story in the New Yorker, and it offended his ears to hear this sort of abstract claptrap coming out of hotel clerks and thirty-year-old White House special assistants with more status in the administration than he had.

  After exiting the hotel, he looked up at the adjacent Watergate office building. Eighteen years ago he’d been overthrowing a government in Guatemala, and here he was now, overmanned and overfinanced for an operation to bug the phone of a party hack.

  Barker opened the driver’s door of the car, which was idling on Virginia Avenue.

  “No hay lugar en el mesón, Bernie,” said Hunt, getting in behind the wheel. “But I’ve got a backup plan.”

  “Any place will be fine, Eduardo,” replied Bernard Barker, who always preferred English.

  Hunt turned toward the backseat and looked at three of the men he’d just collected at the airport. Two of them were Cubans recruited by Bernie. They merely nodded. He’d heard of Sturgis, the American, but not met him. It was with Barker that he felt well acquainted and simpático, going back as they did all the way to Operation Zapata. He hated dragging him into this penny-ante crap, the same way he’d dragged him into the break-in last year in L.A. Now, like then, he’d be deluding Bernie—and himself!—into believing this burglary had some purpose and importance outside of whatever was in Liddy’s head, and Colson’s.

  “Bernie,” he said, as he drove the car down Virginia, “this will be a nice little piece of revenge.” He pointed to the letters, aglow with moonlight and fluorescence, affixed to the boxy white building beyond the Watergate: JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.

  From the backseat, Sturgis followed Hunt’s pointing finger before raising a fist and shouting, too loudly for a closed car full of people, “Brigada Dos Cinco Cero Seis!”

  Barker pursed his lips, needing no further reminder of Kennedy’s failure to support Brigade 2506 with adequate arms, air cover, or even a decent place to come ashore. More than a decade had passed since the Bay of Pigs, and even more time than that since Barker had first met Everette Howard Hunt. “Eduardo”—Barker still used the old code name—had been trying to organize a Cuban government-in-exile in Coconut Grove.

  “Coño!” cried Sturgis from the backseat, in his Americano’s Spanish. “Sólo ocho aviones!”

  “Yes,” Barker replied in a soothing near whisper. “We know. Only eight fucking planes.” That’s all they’d been given—plus a zero hour that fell during darkness instead of light. As Eduardo used to put it, dryly, “They apparently wanted the populace to rise in support of an invasion that wouldn’t attract any notice.”

  The car angled eastward, and Hunt continued his motivational tour. “The architecture gets even worse,” he said, pointing to the right. He was indicating, Barker realized, the State Department.

  Hunt decided to say nothing more; he was starting to feel guilty about stoking Bernie’s long grief and confusion over his adopted country’s half-hearted anti-Castroism. He was also trying to conceal the fact that he was slightly lost, unsure how to find Pennsylvania Avenue.

  He’d been lost for ten years, really, as unmoored as Bernie since the April of the invasion, his career shot down like the unsupported freedom fighters. It had been the same for anyone in the Agency associated with Operation Zapata. In his own case, what had followed were too many deskbound days at Langley writing Fodor’s travel guides for East Bloc tourism, and too many nights at home composing his Peter Ward novels, into which he displaced the derring-do that might have kept filling his own career had there been more than those eight planes in the air.

  It had been two years since he left the CIA, and God knew how many more would pass before the Agency let him publish Give Us This Day, his impassioned manuscript about the invasion’s promise and betrayal. Like Bernie, he had real grievances, ones that burned off stomach lining, not the pseudo-resentments of the preposterous, swaggering Liddy, who was plenty of fun when he told his tall tales amidst the carelessly stacked and more-or-less useless top-secret documents in room 16 of the EOB but who increasingly got on Hunt’s nerves. There was a screw loose in the guy, the way he would rush over to the Hunts’ house in Potomac to play a just-acquired recording of Hitler seducing some hysterical crowd. His lips were even looser than whatever screw was about to fall out of his head. On the way home from Los Angeles, having accomplished the magnificent feat of messing up a few papers in the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, he had gotten half-loaded on the plane and started talking to a stewardess who, under her jaunty cap, looked as if she might be able to put two and two together.

  All right, they were on Pennsylvania at last, in sight of the White House, lit up even brighter than the Kennedy Center. One could be sure that, behind the floodlights, Chuck Colson’s desk lamp was burning the midnight oil.

  “So much light, with the boss not home?” asked Bernie, tightening his lips, perplexed over why the anti-Communist Nixon should be drinking champagne in Moscow with the men who armed and bankrolled Castro year after year.

  “Wheels within wheels,” replied Hunt, trying to suggest the intricacy of Nixon’s stratagems. “Even tonight, while he makes nice with Brezhnev, there are a lot more than eight planes over Hanoi.”

  Did he believe it all himself? That Nixon actually knew where things were heading, and remained motivated by the kind of zeal that had sent Bernie’s comrades and Howard Hunt’s career to their deaths? As far as Hunt could tell, the president spent no more time at the geopolitical chessboard with Kissinger than he did drinking with Colson, who had once said he would run over his own grandmother if it would advance his boss’s reelection. During these drinking sessions, Chuck would serve Nixon a new harebrained scheme as if it were just another ice cube or olive. A week ago tonight he had lubricated the president with the idea that they should send him, Hunt, out to the Milwaukee apartment of the kid arrested for shooting Wallace, so that he could plant some left-wing leaflets that would make the boy look like a McGovern acolyte instead of a nut job. “And I’m supposed to accomplish this even though the FBI will have sealed the place off?” he’d had to ask Colson, who even after that couldn’t let go of the possibility.

  Three years ago, the two of them, Charles Wendell Colson ’53 and Everette Howard Hunt ’43, had been president and vice president of the Brown Club of Washington, D.C. Then one day, Chuck, knowing about his special skills, aware of his dry dock and frustration, had brought him around to see Ehrlichman.
Soon after came Liddy and room 16 and “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1,” which had led them to the utterly beside-the-point contents of that L.A. shrink’s filing cabinet. Which Bernie, standing in the shambles of the doctor’s office, had unquestioningly photographed.

  When Hunt had seen the pictures, he had found himself thinking only that he would like to be on Dr. Fielding’s couch, to ask him about the strange waverings and loss of certainty that he’d started to experience from time to time.

  “Amigos,” said Hunt, “you’re here.”

  The Manger-Hamilton Hotel, at the corner of Fourteenth and K, had seen better days, but at least there was a room waiting for each Cuban. When he’d called here yesterday, after learning that the Watergate had nothing, he’d been told this place hadn’t been full since Hoover’s funeral almost three weeks ago. And indeed, it looked like the sort of modest spot where sentimental old FBI agents living on fixed incomes in Davenport and Des Moines might book a room in order to come east and say goodbye to their old chief.

  Bernie had come to town then, too—to participate, at Hunt and Liddy’s request, in a raucous demonstration that would counter the one Ellsberg had planned for the steps of the Capitol while Hoover’s corpse cooled in the Rotunda. A little heckling and scuffling turned out to be the only result, but Bernie’s trip up from Miami had given Hunt a chance to explain that their next job would be bugging Larry O’Brien, a big Kennedy man, postmaster generalísimo, now head of the Democrats’ national committee. Bernie never asked what they’d be looking for, but Hunt had told him anyway: evidence that money was coming McGovern’s way from Havana, out of Fidel’s own coffers, which were swollen with expropriations from every exile Bernie knew in Miami.

  Hunt now handed him an inch-thick bundle of cash and said he’d be in touch tomorrow. He began the drive home to Potomac, wondering if he himself believed there was the least chance of finding out something so momentous from a lousy tap on O’Brien’s phone. If by some stretch of the imagination there was—he could feel himself trying to catch Bernie’s own wishful train of thought—McGovern would be finished off beyond recognition, and maybe the Marines would be allowed to go in and get rid of Castro once and for all. Credit for the break-in and wiretap could easily be transferred from the White House to the Agency; an illegal act would become an intelligence triumph, and the past decade of his own career would be transformed from a dead end to a mere detour.

  As Hunt’s car passed 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, the lone occupant of the house’s third-floor bedroom, having heard from the television that Nixon might make Brezhnev the gift of a Cadillac, tried to recall what the Czar of Russia had given her for a wedding present in 1906. She remembered Edward VII sending a snuffbox with his face on it; she and Nick had never figured out whether it was intended for the bride or groom or both of them. But the czar? Maybe nothing. It seemed to the still-sharp memory of Alice Roosevelt Longworth that that was right. Father had not long before made peace between the Russians and the Japanese, and the Russians had gotten rather the short end of the big stick. Yes, that was why the Japanese had outdone themselves with their present—bolt after bolt of that golden chrysanthemum-patterned silk. Not too different from the United Mine Workers sending that boxcar loaded with coal. Again, all about Father and not about Alice: the miners had still been happy with the way he settled the coal strike in ’02.

  Pat looked well, thought Mrs. Longworth, gazing over the top of her eyeglasses at the TV. The first lady’s hair might be teased a bit too high on her head, but she never got sufficient credit for being pretty—much prettier than Tricia, whom all the newspapers, no matter how they hated Dick, continually described as looking like a fairy princess. With that ridiculous retroussé version of Dick’s ski-nose? All wrong. And not an interesting word out of her, ever.

  Pat Nixon’s televised image was gone too quickly for Mrs. Longworth to get a good look at her coat, which might still be cloth but would have come, at the very least, from Elizabeth Arden. Even back in ’60, some of Pat’s outfits had cost more than Jackie’s, not that the press ever had the wit to see it. Mrs. L, as she was resigned to being called, liked both of them, always had; it was Jackie’s mother-in-law, the detestable Rose, with that helmet of dyed black hair, who got on her nerves. Six years Alice’s junior but forever babbling about how she’d met McKinley, as if he were Moses or Methuselah. Well, Alice Roosevelt had met Benjamin Harrison, and didn’t feel the need to squawk about it to every reporter who came along.

  And those lamentable Lilly Pulitzer dresses Rose wore around Palm Beach! Polka-dotted knee-length muumuus that could be shower curtains, for all anyone knew. And which just hung against the form. She herself, since the second mastectomy, might be the world’s best-known topless octogenarian (her own line, and a good one, too), but a bit of tailoring never hurt, even if it wound up accentuating one’s deformity.

  Mrs. Longworth now realized that she would be in Florida in just three months for the convention, and that it would be hot. She needed to make a note, if she could find a pencil on the night table, to get a few outfits other than those Lilly Potatosacks to keep her cool.

  Well, good for Dick, who for once would arrive in the convention hall as president and not just candidate, and who these days appeared to be accomplishing something. She liked him, too. She’d told the newsmen, all through his early days, that he, unlike McCarthy, could actually think, sometimes even think big. The thing Dick couldn’t do well was listen, an odd incapacity in one who curried favor so dutifully, tried so hard, at least with her. He was still always sending her books, and he made sure they were serious ones, ever since years ago he’d given her something by that elfin spook Mrs. Lindbergh and she’d told him it had gone straight into the shopping bag of discards for the Junior League sale.

  The two men she’d really like to have gotten around her dining room table, together, were Dick and Bobby. Well, too late for that, as it was for most things. Bobby had been even smarter than Dick, and nearly as damaged, but he’d had the ability to approach her without neediness. Awe, yes, and who didn’t like that? But he didn’t come wanting to earn her esteem or affection. As if one could ever earn those things, from anybody; as if they were meted out according to some fair scale of prorated hourly wages that Eleanor had drawn up. (The thought of her distant cousin now made Mrs. Longworth buck out her teeth, as she’d done a thousand times in imitation of her.) No, one was paid esteem and affection according to the whims of the payer, whether one had shown up to work in the vineyard early or late. She was sure Dick knew no more of the Bible than what he got from Billy Graham over some prayer breakfast. Too bad. He might have some small sense of irony if he did; and, having read it, he would at least know enough not to believe in God.

  But there was a secret, fifteen years old, that the two of them shared—and the substance of it still made up for a lot of his cartoonable deficiencies, in Alice’s mind.

  Mrs. Longworth got up to raise the window, and felt certain she could smell the honeysuckle coming up three stories from the garden below. She had a sprig of it on the night table beside the locket containing Father’s hair, which she now regarded. She’d often thought she would enjoy having his actual head mounted on the dining room wall, like one of the old elks at Sagamore Hill.

  Of course the czar had never sent a present. Father had never sent her to the czar. To Japan, yes; but not to Russia. The closest she’d ever gotten to it were those letters from Willard Straight, on whom she’d had such a nice off-and-on Platonic case, until the flu made off with him after the First War. You who are fond of the game would love it here, he’d written her from Moscow as the workers began their revolt, the year before her wedding. (Perhaps, it now occurred to her, the czar had just been too distracted to send a present.)

  She was sure that Willard’s letters were still in that bottom drawer, with the pearls from Cuba and the bracelet from the kaiser, the one whose diamonds had been stolen out of their settings that night a half dozen years ago
when she went up to New York for Capote’s party and so stupidly let the papers know in advance that she’d be out of town.

  The television turned its attention to the weather, whose forecast bored Mrs. Longworth more than the weather’s actual and never very varied arrival. Yes, she thought, shutting off the set and reaching for her book and letting her mind travel toward Willard Straight: I would have loved Russia in 1905, once the shooting started.

  In her room inside the czar’s apartments, Pat Nixon, jet-lagged at 4:30 a.m., lay awake and looked toward a crack in the velvet curtains. The White Nights wouldn’t really come for another month, and Moscow wasn’t Leningrad, but the glow outside had nothing to do with dawn. It was the same strange silvery light that had persisted all night and been shining even when the state dinner ended at ten-thirty. The sky reminded her, oddly enough, of the ones she used to walk beneath in the Bronx on rainy autumn twilights back in the early thirties, looking south toward Manhattan. She’d leave the X-ray machine she’d tended all day and, with her coat pulled tight and never more than a dollar in her pocket, head down Johnson Avenue in search of dinner, often just a slice of apple pie and coffee. She could no longer remember the names of the nuns she’d lived with atop the TB hospital, but could still recall what she would think while walking on nights that looked like this one: Maybe I won’t try to get back to California; maybe I’ll seek my life right here.

  She wondered whether Mrs. Khrushchev, now a widow, still lived in the dacha she and Dick had lunched at back in ’59. There was probably no more chance of her having been allowed to keep it than there had been of her being at the dinner tonight. When Pat had raised that second possibility with Kissinger, he’d pompously informed her that it was out of the question, and that she should be grateful for the political progress signified by Nikita Khrushchev’s having been merely retired instead of shot.