Chapin, having gotten the president’s message, fabricated a bit of urgent business that caused him to touch the political advisor’s elbow and propel him, with a whisper, back into the hall.
It was Rose’s moment to stand by the desk and discuss the text of the speech about meat imports. “Wish we had something a little more momentous to show ’em,” the president said to her, before the cameraman resumed rolling. “Even so,” he added to the film crew, making them feel trusted and important, “I hope you fellows won’t leak any of this before it’s released next week.”
“No, sir.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Good,” said Nixon. “What about zooming in on that?” he suggested, pointing to a page of Rose’s typing, which made the words do a zigzag down the page, a system of spacing and capitalization known only to the two of them that indicated just the right speechmaking cadence.
“No one will get it,” said Haldeman from several feet away. “It will only confuse people.”
“I guess you’re right,” the president replied, picking up the typescript so that its blank back pages met the eyes of the now-active camera. He tapped the text, made a polite, knowing mutter about a phrase that “could probably go,” to which Rose responded, “Yes, you’re right.”
When her moment ended, she decided to linger by the wall for a bit, and just as she took up her position Kissinger walked in, a genuinely unscheduled arrival. He pretended to regret interrupting and, as the cameraman continued to film, he told the president about his latest, just-completed trip to China.
“Too many banquets,” said the national security advisor, patting his stomach.
“How were the dancing girls?” asked Nixon.
“They were all wearing tunics and carrying rifles. You’ve seen the ballets. It is always like watching the Rockettes invade Normandy.”
Nixon made himself laugh, but then told the production man, “Better leave that on the cutting-room floor. And then make sure you sweep up!”
Kissinger seemed to wonder if he’d made a tactical error.
“You know, Roland,” the president continued, impressing the cameraman by this use of his name, “Rose back there is a terrific dancer. She’s single, too. But be careful. Her brother will have you arrested if you get fresh. He’s a sheriff.”
Joe Woods hadn’t been the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, for two years, not since he’d left the post to run a losing race for head of the Board of Supervisors. But Joe had been plenty helpful on election night in ’68. As the Republican sheriff, he’d been able to delay reports of the count from pro-Nixon suburban precincts. Fortified by his sister’s still-fresh memories of 1960, he’d waited and waited, confusing Mayor Daley, who wound up undervoting the Democratic dead and never made up the shortfall. And thus did Richard Daley fail to steal the state a second time from Richard Nixon.
Rose almost found herself wishing they had an opponent tougher than George McGovern, a man for whom Daley didn’t even want to turn out the living. (In fact, she and the president would bet their bottom dollars that not only Daley but LBJ himself would be voting for Richard Nixon this November.) What Rose really wanted was a third thrill ride, one last harrowing, protracted hairsbreadth election night, just like ’60 and ’68. Throughout his whole eight years “in the wilderness,” she’d always known that the boss would reach this office. She’d known it even at the most tearful, rock-bottom moment of all, when she was driving her convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway, the morning after they’d lost the governor’s race in ’62, and over the car radio she heard the horrible “last press conference”—You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore—which he’d promised her he wouldn’t give.
“Rose,” the president now said, as the cameraman set up one more shot. “You’ll help Mrs. Nixon with her part of this filming, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You know,” he told the crew, “way back when, in California, my wife worked as an extra in the movies.”
Out came the stories of Becky Sharp, and while they were being told, Rose’s mind went to another time and place entirely, to the years in New York, between that morning on the Pacific Coast Highway and the start of the ’68 campaign. Pat may have loved that period, but Rose had hated the whole five years. As she sat amongst the Nixons at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, she could feel herself waiting for the day when he would get up and once more be fighting, and she would be fighting with him, never giving up, just as she hadn’t given up when they told her she had less than twelve months to live—a high school girl with cancer! She’d fought it and beat it. And she hadn’t given up when Billy, her beautiful, basketball-playing fiancé, went off to the war and was killed. She’d gotten up from her bed of grief, the same way she’d gotten up from the operating table, and come to Washington to start a new life with twenty thousand other government girls.
“You know,” the president said, as the production assistant experimented with a slightly more mussed look for the desk, “Rose more or less hired me.”
It was a story he told more often than the tale of Mrs. Nixon’s time on the fringes of RKO.
“Rose was working for the Herter Committee, which was helping to straighten out the Marshall Plan, and I was one of the congressmen on it.”
“The only one,” she now said, completing the story from across the room, “who filed expense reports that weren’t an unholy mess. His were neatly typed and checked out to the penny. I was impressed.”
All eyes turned to her as she continued. Though the staff had heard this story many times, every one of them, except for HRH, smiled. Rose paused, waited a beat, and said, “I suspect Mrs. Nixon had a little to do with the perfect typing.”
The president tilted his head back and laughed, as if hearing the penultimate line of the story for the first time. He then supplied the kicker: “So when I got to the Senate a couple of years later, Rose decided she could stand running my office.”
The laughter might be practiced, but his mood was awfully good, Rose thought. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The news had been so good these past few months: China and Russia had been just the beginning. Inflation had fallen below three percent, and the Supreme Court’s abolition of the death penalty, expected any time now, would be one more millstone to tie around McGovern’s skinny neck. What fun it would be to keep forcing him to say he agreed with the ruling.
Her own mood would be better if Bob Haldeman weren’t standing just in front of her. He, too, like Ehrlichman next to him, was noticing the boss’s genuine high spirits.
“So what is it?” Ehrlichman whispered.
“He’s relieved to be taking action,” Haldeman replied. “Walters is going to call the FBI and tell them CIA wants them to stay the hell away from investigating the burglary thing. National security.”
Ehrlichman chuckled.
“Mitchell’s idea, actually,” said Haldeman.
Now Ehrlichman snorted. “Even he’s right once or twice a year.” After a pause, he added, casually, “I’ve told Dean to deep-six the briefcase.”
“Briefcase?”
“The one that was in Hunt’s safe.”
Neither of them worried about Rose’s hearing this exchange. They both knew that when it came to things like this—and there were always things like this—her instincts were more ruthless than theirs.
She looked at both their collars, appraisingly, and thought: If someone ever told them they had less than twelve months to live, they’d crumble.
Chapter Six
JULY 12, 1972, 4:30 P.M.
HOME OF MR. AND MRS. E. HOWARD HUNT, POTOMAC, MARYLAND
Hunt heard Dorothy’s car pull into the driveway. He got up from his desk, covered the half-composed letter in his typewriter, and went downstairs to greet his wife, who had just returned from the Potomac Village Shopping Center.
Her dark complexion could not hide a flush, and she was slightly out of breath, as if she were carrying grocery bags instead of
just her black patent-leather purse.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve talked to ‘Mr. Rivers.’ ”
Her husband nodded, welcoming this pseudonymous newcomer to the company of cutouts and code names with whom he’d transacted so much of his life.
“What’s he like?” Hunt asked Dorothy, knowing she had made the man’s acquaintance only over the shopping-center pay phone that Mr. Rivers had said he would call.
“He’s like one of the Dead End Kids.”
“Was he faking the voice? ‘Dese, dem, and dose’?”
“No,” said Dorothy. “The accent was too real, and it never varied. He’s a genuine meatball.”
Hunt nodded.
“I agreed to be the conduit,” she said.
Her husband looked at her admiringly, aware of the pressures she would now be under.
“I’ve got to get a pad and pencil,” said Dorothy, walking toward the kitchen counter. “I’m going to draw up a budget. For us; for Bernie and Clarita; for everybody else.”
“I’ll get Bernie on board,” said Hunt, as if offering to wash the dishes while she dried. “And he can figure out the numbers for the boys.”
“If you call him from Potomac Village, try to find a different phone booth from the one I used near Montgomery Ward. It’s got no door.”
She went off to the kitchen to start calculating the Hunts’ share of the payments. Her husband continued looking at her for a few moments, trying to decide whether she was newly energized or ready to crack.
Back upstairs, he resumed drafting the letter he intended to send Chuck Colson, recounting all that had happened in the three weeks since his own name had first appeared in the Post, a paper he never read regularly. He would try to avoid any allusions to The Odyssey (he doubted Chuck had done as well as he had in classics at Brown), but he’d been peripatetic to say the least.
After leaving Washington on June 19, he’d spent a single night in New York before heading to Los Angeles, where he lay low at the house of his old war buddy, Anthony Jackson. But his presence soon made Jackson nervous, and as the days passed with no word about money or legal representation, Hunt himself had started feeling hopeless. Then, unexpectedly, Liddy—who even now wasn’t publicly connected to the break-in—had arrived, with cheering assurances that John Mitchell would take care of everyone, even though the administration appeared to be going along with the police investigation. In fact, Hunt could not get over the degree of their cooperation: in more than twenty years, the only element of the government ever to acknowledge his connection to the CIA had turned out to be the White House.
Before June was over, he’d flown to Miami, hoping to see Bernie, who was at last out on bail. But the vans and cameras of the local news stations were all around the Barkers’ house, so he’d given up and gotten the next plane back to L.A. As July Fourth approached, weary of imposing on Jackson, he’d gone to Chicago to stay with Dorothy’s cousins. It was from there that he’d finally made arrangements with a lawyer, William Bittman, a connection of Jackson’s who, conveniently enough, lived and worked here in Potomac.
At that point he’d flown home under a false name and been picked up by Dorothy, who had returned from England. They went straight from the airport to Bittman’s office and paid him the first thousand dollars of his retainer with money from the EOB safe. Considerably more, twenty-five grand, soon arrived from somewhere—Mitchell, presumably, if Liddy could be believed. And then “Mr. Rivers” was calling Bittman and asking to speak to “the writer’s wife.”
Involving Dorothy had been their idea, whoever “they” were; presumably her movements would attract less notice than Hunt’s own. Either way, she was perfectly willing. Today at lunch, as she made herself memorize what she would tell Mr. Rivers over the pay phone, she had been febrile with purpose and determination.
Through the study’s open door, he could now hear her downstairs, talking to their daughter Kevan, who was on her way back to Smith in a couple of months. (Would John Mitchell be picking up the tuition, too? Along with his other daughter’s medical bills?) Hunt rose from his desk and went to listen at the landing, hoping to make certain Dorothy wasn’t telling Kevan anything she shouldn’t. He also hoped to convince himself that his wife really felt as content with everything as she claimed to be.
He did not like what he heard. He’d almost rather they be discussing “Mr. Rivers” than the subject they were on: some pamphlet sent by the Smith College health services that seemed to be practically an advertisement for the availability of contraception.
His only disagreements with Dorothy involved the grubby new world in which their children were coming of age. It angered him that his wife took the same relaxed view of sex and pot that he would expect from some hip divorcée or social worker. She and Kevan were scandalizing the Guatemalan maid by reading aloud passages from the pamphlet.
To avoid hearing any more laughter from the whole feminine trio downstairs, he closed the study door and turned on the portable television near his desk. There was no escape: live from the Democratic convention that would nominate McGovern tonight, some harridan in blue jeans was complaining about how the party’s platform committee had been insufficiently deferential to “welfare mothers.” The term was proving even more detestable to his ears for the way it somehow seemed to encompass Dorothy, who’d now be living a life of envelopes and handouts.
She had stood by him through every secret turn his life had taken for more than twenty years, even when that meant living over a whorehouse, as they’d done while he was station chief in Mexico City—where on top of everything else he’d been extortively accused of hit-and-run. They’d met only a couple of years before all that, in Paris, after her French divorce from her first husband, when they were both on the staff of Averell Harriman’s Economic Cooperation Administration—the only two non-left-wingers in the Paris office.
He was getting nowhere with this letter in front of him. What he’d really like to do is call Colson, but that, of course, was impossible. As he looked at the unusable phone, it, too, seemed one more conveyance toward yesteryear, reminding him of the weeks he’d spent in Vienna, in 1948, while Dorothy remained in Paris. Each time he’d tried to call her, all the taps on the line between the two capitals would siphon the current and sever the connection.
They’d get away from here in a few weeks. Bittman, thank God, had managed to keep him free on bail. In a week or so he’d have to be fingerprinted, and give a handwriting sample at the courthouse downtown, but after that there’d be a brief judicial lull, when he and Dorothy could go down to Florida. He pictured it now: fishing off a dock in the Keys with Bernie, neither of them saying much, though Bernie would be saying it in English, and he would be saying it in Spanish.
By that point, phone or no phone, Colson should have things fixed for good.
Chapter Seven
JULY 21, 1972, 5:15 P.M.
WATERGATE WEST 310, APARTMENT OF FRED LARUE
“Tony,” LaRue asked softly, “what can I get you?”
“Just a cuppa coffee, Mr. LaRue. Just a cuppa coffee. I’m not stayin’ long. You’re busy, for one thing.” He pointed to LaRue’s little oven, whose timer was clicking as his dinner cooked.
“I’m happy to meet you, Tony.” LaRue fetched some milk and sugar for his unexpected guest. “I’ve been hearing from Herb Kalmbach about how enterprising you’ve been. Still,” he added, with as much of his natural politeness as he could, “I didn’t really have this in mind.” By “this” he meant a personal visit, and he could see that Ulasewicz, rough around the edges but no dope, got his drift.
“You’re right, Mr. LaRue. It’s irregular. It’s not what anybody had in mind.”
“So how worrisome is what you’re bringing me? We’ve got worries enough already.”
LaRue turned his head, reflexively, in the direction of the Mitchells’ apartment far across the complex. The General had resigned as head of the CRP on July 1, pleading personal difficulties, which ever
yone took to mean Martha. This amounted to more truth than a Washington letter of resignation typically contained, but it was still less than half of it. The Mitchells were mostly in New York these days, but even now LaRue checked in with his old boss every afternoon.
“I’m worried myself, Mr. LaRue,” said Ulasewicz.
“So Herb tells me.” Kalmbach, the president’s personal attorney, was quietly raising money for the burglars and their lawyers. LaRue, through Ulasewicz, had been helping to distribute what was already on hand at the Committee or available inside the White House.
“I told Mr. Kalmbach—more than once, Mr. LaRue—that something’s not kosher here.”
LaRue wasn’t sure if Ulasewicz was Jewish, but he was certainly New York. You would take him for a guy out of the squad room in Naked City even if he hadn’t once actually been a cop. The two of them had never met before now, but he knew that Tony had been doing stuff for the White House as far back as Chappaquiddick, nosing around for dirt on Teddy Kennedy. It was more or less inevitable that Ulasewicz would become “Mr. Rivers,” shuttling between the money men and “the writer’s wife.”
“I’m sure you’ve got another word for it in your part of the country,” said Ulasewicz.
LaRue realized that he’d been lost in thought. “I’m sorry. You mean ‘kosher’?”
“Let’s just say it’s not right. Let’s just say it don’t smell like no magnolias.”
LaRue paused, before asking. “Why have you come to me, Tony?”
“Because I can’t get through to Mr. Kalmbach. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very nice gentleman. But he’s the president’s lawyer. He’s used to dealing with people who sign contracts and even stick by them. This whole thing’s a different kettle of fish.”
“What specifically is the problem?” asked LaRue.
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