Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “I’d say the problem is that this ain’t all about legal fees and grocery bills. I’d say this money ain’t all for ‘humanitarian purposes,’ as Mr. Kalmbach likes to say.”

  “What would you say it’s about?”

  “I’d say it’s blackmail. You can dress it up, but that ain’t gonna change it.”

  “Quid pro quo?” LaRue suggested.

  “Yeah,” said Ulasewicz. “That’s the term Mr. Kalmbach uses when he thinks he’s being realistic. But all that Latin don’t manage to call a spade a spade.” He hesitated for a moment. “I can tell you who don’t mince any words.”

  “Who?”

  “The writer’s wife.”

  “Miz Hunt?”

  “Yeah, Dorothy. By now we’re practically buddies. And let me tell you, Mr. LaRue, this is one tough cookie. This ain’t a lady making ‘humanitarian’ collections for the Community Chest.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m sure of that. Never even met the lady face-to-face, but I’ve watched her from a distance, stood by the Eastern Airlines counter at National and seen her take the money from the locker I told her to go to.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Good-looking, tall. Ladylike. Dark skin. Part Sioux Indian, she tells me. We get to ramblin’ a little on the phone.”

  “So how do you know she’s so tough?”

  “The proof is in the pudding, Mr. LaRue. And there’s the pudding.” He pointed to the shopping bag on the other side of the coffee table. His host looked at it quizzically.

  “I’m no technical genius, Mr. LaRue—though, truth is, the boys you employed for that job next door, including the writer’s wife’s husband, don’t seem to have been, either. In any case, I know how to record a conversation off a pay phone, well enough to pick up what I’m saying into the mouthpiece along with what I’m hearin’ out the receiver.” He extracted a little rubber-sided microphone from the pocket of his jacket. “It clips on just below your ear, right onto the handset.”

  LaRue was unsure what to say. Ulasewicz got up, went to the shopping bag, and pulled out a portable tape recorder, no thicker than a book.

  “This’ll play it for you,” he said. “I bought it myself, and I don’t even care if Mr. Kalmbach approves the expense. The tape’s already sittin’ on the spindles.”

  “You want me to play it now?”

  “No, I’m going to leave the whole kit and caboodle with you. I shouldn’t be here in the first place. I’m going to leave and let you work things out with Mr. Kalmbach and with Dean.”

  LaRue was surprised that Ulasewicz even knew John Dean’s name. Hearing it made him want to end this meeting even more.

  “Well, Tony, I appreciate it.”

  “You won’t like what you hear, but better you should know.” Ulasewicz tugged on his narrow-brimmed fedora. “I hope we never meet again, Mr. LaRue. And I trust you’ll take that the right way.”

  “Understood, Tony. Thank you.”

  They shook hands and he was gone. LaRue sat down, noting that his dinner had ten minutes left to cook. Too little time to return a phone call from one of his teenaged children in Jackson, which was fine: if he put it off long enough, maybe their mother would handle whatever the situation was. He took two sips of his drink, put his glasses on, and wondered if ten minutes would be enough for him to listen to the tape, which had the diameter of a small doughnut.

  He plugged in the machine and hit the button. The conversation that came out was startling in its immediacy, as if Tony had begun taping all of a sudden, in the middle of things. The voices seemed to be speaking inside the same room instead of two different phone booths.

  —Mrs. Hunt, you sound like a pit boss. This ain’t a casino.

  —And it isn’t some nice legal department inside a charitable foundation.

  —I’ve told you, I’m a middleman. I can’t negotiate the thing. I leave that to the higher-ups.

  —Well, I’m not leaving the security of my husband and family to the same men who got him into this.

  —I don’t know who employed him.

  —Oh yes you do!

  LaRue could hear her snort, while from Tony’s end of the conversation there came the clicking sound of quarters being ejected from a bus driver’s coin dispenser. They dropped into the pay phone, jangling the conversation into an additional three minutes of life.

  —Every time I talk to you, you’re uppin’ the ante, Mrs. Hunt. You’re now talkin’ four hundred and fifty thousand dollars altogether in these five payments you keep harpin’ on.

  —You know why the monthly budget’s been multiplied by five.

  —I’m afraid I do not, Dorothy.

  —Do the arithmetic. Five months will take us through November, after which, once they’re reelected, they’ll wash their hands of us.

  —You think so?

  —I know so, and so do you. Once we’re past November the seventh, we’ve got no leverage. Until then, I’d say we’ve got plenty.

  LaRue could hear Ulasewicz emitting a long, low whistle. He himself now pondered what distinction there might be between the terms “quid pro quo” and “blackmail.”

  —You’d better get used to these numbers, Mr. Rivers. They don’t even include what you’re going to be paying Gordon Liddy.

  —Hold your horses. I haven’t even heard that name yet.

  —You will. He’s got a very nice wife who is very very scared. They’re coming to our house for dinner on Saturday night, as a matter of fact. She’s a schoolteacher, and she’s going to lose her job when this comes out. I’ve already lost mine, along with my medical insurance.

  —I didn’t know you worked, Dorothy.

  There was skepticism in his voice. Mrs. Hunt paused. Another two quarters went into the pay phone.

  —There’s a lot you don’t know, Tony.

  —I keep telling you that. You think I’ve got the power to authorize these big figures you’re demanding. I don’t. Less than five days ago I gave you forty thousand dollars. You already burned through that?

  —There are five other men and their families that it’s going to. I’m distributing it.

  —I don’t suppose you’re getting receipts?

  —No, not any more than you’re getting ones from me. But let me tell you, Tony, you’re not aware of the extent of Mr. Barker’s problems. You should keep them in mind, even if you don’t know what they are.

  —You’re skippin’ around, Dorothy. First tell me more about Liddy.

  —You can make your own arrangements with him.

  —Are you tryin’ to deal him in or deal him out?

  —That’s enough casino metaphors.

  Ulasewicz, uncertain what “metaphors” meant, was silent.

  —Let’s talk round numbers, Mr. Rivers. One hundred. There are just about that many days until the election.

  —I’m gettin’ the feeling that you want about a grand a day for yourself. Or would that be just for starters?

  —Let’s talk about the real round number, Tony—not one hundred days, or even four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Let’s talk about the thirty years my husband could go away for.

  —Thirty years is a long time, Dorothy.

  —Well, there are only those hundred days in which to make sure he doesn’t wind up spending those thirty years away from his family.

  Ulasewicz said nothing, and when Mrs. Hunt resumed speaking, LaRue could hear new traces of fear and wistfulness in her voice.

  —When you next talk to your overlords, try to imagine that you’re dropping a big uncooked sixteen-pound turkey onto their desks.

  —I don’t follow you, Dorothy.

  —When I first met Mr. Hunt, I stood in line at the Paris PX for the Thanksgiving turkey he’d picked out and wanted me to cook—even though he knew my oven was too small for it. Once I got the turkey, I deposited it on the desk in his office. He could figure out what to do with it.

  —Did he get it cooked?


  —Badly. It wound up stinking like sulfur. He forgot to remove its guts.

  —The point, Dorothy? Is this another “metaphor”?

  —The point is, you don’t want me to dump everything I know on somebody else’s desk.

  —What do you know? And whose desk are we talkin’?

  —I know everything that Howard knows. And the desk would be Earl Silbert’s.

  At this mention of the Assistant U.S. Attorney, LaRue turned off the tape recorder. Tony might be wise in the ways of the precinct house and street, but it seemed clear that he didn’t know much about women, or at least the particular category of woman to which Dorothy Hunt belonged. Where Tony heard a tough cookie, LaRue heard a frightened woman pretending to drive the train that was barreling down the track to which she was tied. She was trying in some twisted way to be magnificent, to be Joan of Arc. Whether she wanted to shine in the eyes of her husband or the ones that looked back at her from the mirror, he wasn’t sure.

  He went over to the window and looked down Virginia Avenue to the sixth-floor terrace of the Watergate Office Building. Even now, whenever he saw the headquarters of the DNC, he had trouble regarding them as the bull’s-eye of the mess they were all in. When he looked at them he thought of Clarine Lander. To him, the DNC remained, still and above all, her place of work. Right now it was the voice of Dorothy Hunt bringing Larrie to mind, the way something did most every day.

  Fifteen years had passed since he first met her, after the hunting accident, when he walked into the law office in Jackson. He’d come at night, through the back door, scared to death of what jeopardy he might be in, not at all certain some Canadian prosecutor wouldn’t soon try to extradite him back to the woodsy scene of what the police had decided was a crime instead of a bad, bad hunting mishap.

  He couldn’t even remember the name of the lawyer, but he could remember Clarine, looking like Lilli Palmer, sitting behind the secretary’s desk, having kept the office open late for his surreptitious appointment with her boss. After a half minute’s chat, he’d known she was a girl who wanted to go places, an unusual thing for any girl in Jackson in 1957.

  And she had. A couple of years later she wound up in Senator Eastland’s office on Capitol Hill. When he himself went up there these days, carrying news of another half dozen southerners appointed to the federal bench, people in the office still talked about Clarine Lander, though she’d been gone from it for nearly ten years—a sultry apostate who’d discovered civil rights and all the problems of the colored, who’d thrown her lot in with Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely Carmichael and all the Jew carpetbaggers who tried to get themselves seated as the “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” at the ’64 convention that nominated LBJ.

  People in Eastland’s office spoke of Larrie as if she were a cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Henry Fonda’s daughter, but they always spoke of her warmly, without so much as a shake of the head; a kind of awed mystery trumped any disapproval they might be feeling. “That girl had a voice like smoke, and she was just as hard to get hold of,” one old-timer had recently told him, actually grasping a handful of thin air, as if to make one last try.

  Looking out the window of Watergate West 310, LaRue’s nearsighted squint could discern little more than the curves of the complex’s half dozen clustered beehives. Every day now some reporter or prosecutor took a new poke at the place, hoping to rile up another stream of bees that would sting everyone from Mrs. Hunt right up to the Old Man himself. Somewhere on the sixth floor of the office building—for the past three or four years, he’d been told—sat Clarine Lander. How he’d love for her to come to the window right now, even if, wearing his best glasses, he wouldn’t be able to see her.

  Chapter Eight

  AUGUST 21–23, 1972

  REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION, MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA

  “If I have to hear that song one more time, I may go join the Yippies in that ‘Puke-In,’ ” whispered Pat Nixon to Ed Cox, one of the two sons-in-law flanking her in the spectators’ box.

  Reachin’ out across the sea!

  Makin’ friends where foes used to be!

  Givin’ hope to humanity!

  More than ever, Nixon now, for you and me!

  Tricia Cox found her mother’s reference to the convention’s most outrageous protest nearly as disgusting as the protest itself, but Eddie laughed. Both of the boys seemed to “get” Pat better than her own daughters did. Coming into the hall, she and David had caught sight of a banner that some small plane was trailing overhead—and they’d managed to enjoy it, whereas Julie had immediately begun worrying who’d paid for the thing and what Sally Quinn or James Reston might say in tomorrow’s papers.

  The Miami Beach Convention Center was advertising itself as “Seven Acres of Politics Under One Roof,” but on this first night of the GOP’s gathering, Pat almost felt she was back at the little movie house in Artesia, in the twenties, on one of those rare Saturday afternoons she was able to go off with Myrtle and Louise Raine to watch a string of one-reelers. With no significant business to transact, the delegates were being kept occupied by one little movie after another—there’d been something on everybody from Alf Landon to Mamie Eisenhower—and each time the lights went down Pat could feel herself nodding off for a minute or two. She’d been doing state delegations and caucuses all morning and afternoon, hopping from the Fontainebleau to the Diplomat to the Doral to shake hands with the Hoosiers, the Lithuanians, the elderly, and the blind.

  The air conditioning in the hall seemed to cut out every ten minutes, and the rumored explanation—which Julie insisted could not be true—had it that they were trying to keep whiffs of Mace, being used outside against demonstrators, from drifting through the ventilation system.

  But it wasn’t going to upset Pat. This was hardly the spring of 1970, when after the Kent State business they were virtually trapped at the White House, sitting inside it with that ring of old metal buses protecting the grounds like a moat, until Dick had finally given up and gone to Camp David. It was there that they gave Julie and David a graduation dinner to make up for the ceremonies they couldn’t possibly attend at Smith and Amherst.

  No, she thought, this didn’t compare. The war, and the dead, were finally tapering off, and the whole country was starting to simmer down. She waved at some of the YVPs—Young Voters for the President—who had been organized into red, white, and blue teams and looked almost like kids from ten years ago. Most of them weren’t old enough to have much idea of Jimmy Stewart, but even so, they cheered as he took a place on the podium beside Dole and Jerry Ford and the little rabbi who would later give the opening-night benediction.

  A demonstration on her own behalf broke out on cue as Stewart recited the first lady’s accomplishments. PAT’S OUR GIRL! said one sign; NO GENERATION GAP HERE! read another. Both signs were hand-painted, but not, one could tell, by the people waving them. They were the campaign’s doing, and looked like the self-conscious folk art that people from the NEA were always urging on the White House. She almost preferred the mass-produced NOW MORE THAN EVER banners.

  She looked past Eddie and Tricia to Rose Woods, whom she’d seen earlier in the day at the “Women of Achievement” luncheon for all the gals Dick had appointed to office. She mugged a modest Can-you-believe-all-this expression, which Rose overruled with a look that said, You enjoy this; you deserve it.

  “WE WANT PAT! WE WANT PAT!” they kept shouting, until the lights finally went down for the little movie (yet another!) in which she was not an extra but the star, walking on top of the Great Wall of China; waving from a Conestoga wagon in support of grit and volunteerism; being wrapped in a headdress somewhere in Liberia. The several minutes’ worth of biography sped by like someone else’s life entirely.

  The Secret Service agent gave her a gentle signal, and the two of them, in the dark, walked to the podium so that she could be there, arms outstretched in thanks, when the lights came up. The gesture, when she executed it, seemed a bit too Ev
a Perón, but she’d never heard such cheering, at least not for herself.

  “Thank you, thank you,” she said, the microphones wildly amplifying the twang that had never left her voice. And still they kept cheering. She thought back to Chicago in ’52, to the great surprise of the vice-presidential nomination, when she’d first stood in front of a national convention in that polka-dot dress and planted a great big smacker of a kiss, a real smooch, on Dick’s cheek. From the corner of her eye, she’d spotted Eisenhower, their sudden patron, cheerful as a Popsicle and just as cold. He was taking note of the kiss—and not entirely approving, she’d realized.

  “WE LOVE PAT! WE LOVE PAT!”

  From the moment she’d caught that glimpse of the general, she had stiffened into a twenty-year salute, teaching herself to wave for but never quite at the crowds and cameras. She’d vowed never to let them see her smoke or cry. For two decades she’d succeeded at the first and faltered only once when it came to the second, on that awful night in ’60 when Jack Kennedy had stolen the election and Dick had put them in front of a screaming, anxious crowd of supporters for that not-quite-a-concession speech. If the present trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States. As the tears started coming, she had felt a surge of revulsion that surpassed even Caracas, two years before, when she’d seen the mob start rushing the car. They had done their worst with rocks and fists and spit, and succeeded in breaking the windows, but they’d soon been dispersed, whereas those tears from 1960 were forever still falling, inside every film vault of every television network and on every page of Life bound up in a library.

  “Thank you! Thank you!” she repeated, just as the teleprompter’s screen, complete with exclamation points, urged her to. Jerry Ford handed her a jokey giant gavel, which she pretended to bang. But still they kept cheering: “WE LOVE PAT! WE LOVE PAT!”

  “Thank you, Chairman Ford, Senator Dole …” The pronunciation of names, as if she were calling the roll at Whittier Union High, had a magical effect. Deciding that lovely Miss Ryan now meant business, the crowd fell into an obedient silence.