Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Which do you think is tougher in this world?” he asked. “To be blind or to be black?”

  “These days? Oh, to be blind, definitely,” said Colson.

  Nixon would not have agreed, but having forgotten his own question, he said nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1972

  EOB; U.S. DISTRICT COURTHOUSE; SENATE OFFICE BUILDING; WATERGATE WEST

  Fred LaRue straightened his tie, hoping its Rhodesian-flag crests would be a welcome touch at a meeting on his schedule later this afternoon. Nothing, alas, could brighten the meeting about to start in John Dean’s office.

  Herb Kalmbach, waiting with LaRue for Dean to open his door, nervously crossed and uncrossed his legs on the two-seater couch by the secretary’s desk.

  “By the way,” said Herb. “Tony Ulasewicz says hello.”

  “Tell him the same,” said LaRue, who the other night had finally thrown away the tape recording of Dorothy Hunt and “Mr. Rivers.”

  “Guys,” said Dean, opening the door and adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses. “Come on in.”

  Kalmbach wasted no time once they sat down. “Here,” he said, pushing a manila envelope across Dean’s desk. “Twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus,” said Dean.

  “Yeah,” agreed Kalmbach. “As Tony would say, ‘That’s a lot of cabbage.’ ”

  LaRue asked, softly, “Herb, are you all right? I’ve been wondering, ever since I talked to Tony.” I already told Mr. Kalmbach—more than once, Mr. LaRue—that something’s not kosher here.

  “No,” said Kalmbach, his voice strained from months of tension and the certainty that his news would displease Dean. “I want out.”

  LaRue’s poor eyesight could barely distinguish Dean from half a dozen young men over at the Committee, and his hearing wasn’t much better, but he had no trouble perceiving that Herb’s strangulated message was final.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he murmured.

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Dean, less tolerantly. “To say the least.”

  The news felt personal to LaRue. Almost twelve weeks had passed since he first met with Herb to organize the cover-up payments. He’d developed a liking for the president’s refined, low-key lawyer and by now thought of him as a kind of partner in the small business they were running. They joked about being the Bradford Brothers, since each used that coded surname when leaving messages for the other. LaRue had come to understand Tony Ulasewicz’s protectiveness toward Kalmbach, who would never survive prison if things came to that. And they might. The men in the White House and over at the Committee were so happy about those who’d not been indicted that they were starting to forget about the unpredictable characters who had.

  What about LaRue himself? If everything fell apart, could he survive prison? He fiddled with the Rhodesian tie and for a second or two wondered if he would hold up the way his father had, coming out of the clink with a smile on his face after doing a few years for bank fraud, picking up right where he’d left off as a wildcatter and going on to make his biggest score ever—becoming truly rich as an ex-con.

  “There appears to be enough money for a while,” said Dean, somewhat ridiculously, thought LaRue, as if he were Irene Dunne talking about Mama’s bank account.

  “I’m worn out,” pleaded Kalmbach, who had already helped to raise and distribute—to or through the Hunts—two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. “The FBI is calling me, and my nerves are shot,” he said, addressing Dean. “I only got into this because Ehrlichman told me it was all right. My Barbara and I have been friends with John and Jeannie for years. I could hardly say no to him. But I don’t see any end to this.” He paused before adding, “I’m sorry to leave Fred holding the bag.”

  “Almost literally,” said LaRue, who knew he’d end up being called the cover-up’s “bagman” if any of this ever came out. While he didn’t like to think of the Bradford Brothers turning into a one-man operation, he meant the two words as a gentle joke that might relax Herb. There was certainly no relaxing Dean, who sucked hard on a Winston and said nothing.

  “Here’s my accounting,” said Herb, handing Dean a slip of paper the size of an index card. Dean shook his head to indicate there was no need of that from a man of Kalmbach’s integrity; he handed the paper to LaRue, who then reached for Dean’s ashtray. With the lighter he carried for his pipe, LaRue set fire to the column of figures, and the three men watched “Bradford Brothers” go out of business in a little plume of smoke.

  Once out on Pennsylvania Avenue, LaRue decided he would walk to his next appointment, on Capitol Hill. It was a hot day, but not Mississippi hot, and his old linen suit would keep him comfortable on a long eastward stroll past the Justice Department and the Archives. When he neared the corner of Constitution Avenue he saw a cluster of reporters racing over a lawn to the front doors of the U.S. District Courthouse.

  Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans, having at last been arraigned, were coming out and heading toward cars, leaving their lawyers to face the microphones. LaRue moved just close enough to the action to get a look at Bittman, whose legal services were costing so much.

  Though past forty, the attorney still had the build of the linebacker he’d once been. He was explaining to the reporters that Hunt was now ten thousand dollars lighter—the price of bail. He also expressed dismay that John Sirica, the court’s chief judge, had decided to assign the Watergate trial to himself. LaRue could see the newspeople turning their heads and craning their necks, hoping that Liddy, who had lately established himself as the case’s star oddball, might somehow come back into view and make himself available.

  LaRue’s concentration remained on Bittman. Could this onetime prosecutor who’d sent Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Baker to prison keep Howard Hunt out of it? There was a grudge-match element to the whole tangled situation: Edward Bennett Williams, representing the Democrats in their civil suit, had been Baker’s lawyer; he lived across the street from Bittman, and by all accounts detested the man who’d beat him in that earlier case. Swell, LaRue had thought upon finding this out—as if regular political passions hadn’t risen high enough without adding a personal pissing contest!

  No, the prosecutors hadn’t gotten to Jeb, and Kleindienst was assuring everybody there was no way the burglars could be tried before the election, but LaRue, resigned to trouble by nature and experience, saw plenty of it ahead. He resumed his walk and in another ten minutes reached his destination on the Hill.

  He was quickly made to feel more at home in Senator Eastland’s outer office than he’d been in Dean’s inner one.

  “Hi, there, Mr. LaRue,” said the pretty girl at the desk. “He says he’ll be with you in two or three little old minutes.”

  LaRue smiled. Eastland had finally let the Judiciary Committee he chaired hire one or two blacks, but his own staff remained lily-white. As the girl busied herself with some typing, LaRue paced a little and looked at the familiar items on the wall. He’d been coming here from the White House for the whole four years, bringing hurricane relief funds and then sympathetic judicial nominees. The latter job had been easier when Mitchell was the General; now Haldeman gave him his marching orders up the Hill toward this office decorated with two signed photos of Ian Smith and a small-scale model of a Titan missile, which—Eastland liked to point out—could be made more cheaply now that Nixon had lifted the chrome boycott against the white Rhodesian government. The domestic roots of the senator’s foreign policy could be found in the framed yellowing text of a speech he’d given back home seventeen years ago: “On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court’s decision. You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent.”

  LaRue’s personal connection to Eastland could be found in an object hanging from the ceiling: a big blue marlin that the senator had caught way out in the Gulf with LaRue’s father one summer during the mid-1950s, around the time the Constitution was getting dest
royed and shortly after Ike LaRue had gotten out of jail.

  “Freddie!” cried Eastland, his round face preceded through the doorway by the cigar between his lips. “You lookin’ at that fine old fish? I don’t think Ike ever landed a bigger one in the precious little time he had left to him, God rest his soul. Come on in and sit down. You here with the name of another appointment as good as Charlie Clark? He’s bringin’ the Fifth Circuit back to somethin’ like sanity, if I do say so myself. That was our finest hour, Freddie, our finest hour!” Eastland was chuckling over the memory of how he’d been able to ram the conservative Clark’s nomination through the Senate on a day when one of the Vietnam “Moratorium” protests had taken most of the liberals out of town to address campus rallies back home.

  “I’m not here with a nomination, Senator, but I’ve got some good news nonetheless. Bob Haldeman tells me that the president is urging his daughter to endorse you when she campaigns for her father next week in Mississippi. The Committee can make the arrangements if you’re interested.”

  “Which daughter is that?”

  “Tricia.”

  “Pretty as a princess,” said Eastland with a smile. “Why don’t you have her come right through Sunflower County and speak her piece to my home folks? ”

  “I’m sure she’ll be happy to go wherever you think best,” said LaRue, who still couldn’t get over how Eastland, after thirty years in the Senate, now found himself in a tight race. Nixon was so far out in front of McGovern that he was pulling the senator’s unknown Republican opponent up with him. The voters needed some indirect reminders—short of an actual presidential endorsement—that Richard Nixon would be just fine having Jim Eastland, the Democrat, stay right where he was in the Senate. They didn’t want the Judiciary chairmanship slipping into the hands of some northern left-winger, as it might if Eastland lost, did they? So the White House and the Committee had been finding little ways to help him, such as not letting his Republican foe join the rest of the GOP Senate hopefuls on the podium in Miami. And now they would have Tricia say she just couldn’t help pulling for Senator Eastland, Democrat though he might be, given all the support he’d been giving her daddy these past four years.

  “Well, Freddie, I truly appreciate it. I can use all the help I can get. After all, I’m still really just a planter, not a politician. Always been better at countin’ soybeans than votes.”

  LaRue laughed. Eastland clung to his five thousand acres the way he’d been clinging to the committee chairmanship for fifteen years. His parliamentary skills were lately getting him one Charlie Clark after another, and finally getting the White House, after its own early stumbles with Supreme Court nominees, a justice like Rehnquist.

  “Yes, Freddie,” said the senator, as if reading LaRue’s mind. “We don’t win ’em all, but we have fun even with the ones we go losin’. Best losin’ battle I ever fought was just a few years before your time here, trying to keep the NAACP’s own nigger lawyer off the highest court in the land.” He shook his head, disbelieving even now that the ascension of Thurgood Marshall had come to pass. “Stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam Ervin on that one. Good man in a clutch, none better.” He smiled and sighed. “Well, if your Miss Tricia don’t stave off my losin’, I’m gonna get back to the full-time cultivatin’ of soybeans and cotton down in Sunflower County.”

  “Oh, we’ve got some victories up ahead,” said LaRue. “And I don’t mean just the president’s.”

  “You mean on busin’? Oh, yes, we’re gonna win that one sweetly and completely. Give the northerners a taste of their own medicine and you’ll see how quickly they withdraw that particular ‘remedy’ to their ‘de facto segregation’—which is just another name for human nature, isn’t it, Freddie? People wantin’ to live and get schooled among their own kind?”

  LaRue wondered if a hymn to Rhodesia might be in the offing, but then saw Eastland reaching into his drawer.

  “Almost forgot to give you this,” said the senator, handing him an envelope. “It’s from Betty Boyd. I’ve already seen it. She had to be out of the office today and told me to be sure I gave it to you when you stopped by.”

  As LaRue opened the envelope, Eastland told him what he was looking at.

  “Betty had lunch with fiery old Clarine Lander about a month ago. They took some snaps of themselves outside the restaurant and Betty wanted to give you one of ’em. She tells me you were always a little sweet on Clarine, that you knew her back home.” He allowed himself a knowing chuckle.

  LaRue regarded the photograph and immediately saw not its cheerful Polaroid image but his own mental picture of Larrie, one fall night a dozen years ago, lying naked by his side, a bottle of bourbon between them, in room 205 at the old Gulf Hills Dude Ranch that he’d owned with his brother. The picture in his head started to move: the breeze rustled the curtains; Larrie reapplied her lipstick. But it was a hard picture to keep in focus. Larrie had been gone for years, and the dude ranch had burned down last Christmas.

  “I must say,” Eastland declared, “Clarine’s no less pretty for all the questionable company she’s been keepin’ these last years.”

  “You’ll have to thank Betty for this,” said LaRue, putting the picture in his pocket.

  “And you’ll have to thank the president for suggestin’ such a nice gesture to his little girl.” The senator looked at a button that had lit up on his phone. “Well, I’d best be gettin’ to the floor for a vote.” He rose from his chair and shook LaRue’s hand. “Freddie, you get back here soon with another good judge for me, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said LaRue.

  Eastland walked him to the door, gave him a wink and patted the jacket pocket into which he’d seen him put the picture—as if to tell LaRue that his little romantic secret involving Clarine Lander was safe with Senator James Oliver Eastland.

  What the senator did not know, and what LaRue never forgot, was how Clarine Lander remained the keeper of a much bigger secret, remained the one person in the world who could tell him what had really happened, fifteen years before, in the Canadian duck blind where Ike LaRue met his death.

  LaRue took a cab back to Foggy Bottom. There were no more Tuesday-night dinners at the Mitchells’ apartment, as there’d been in what he already thought of as “happier days.” So inside Watergate West 310, his own place, he began heating some leftovers for dinner, wondering as he did if there’d been any truly happy days since the long-ago ones he’d stolen with Larrie.

  He heard an unexpected knock. With the first of the day’s meetings still on his mind, he felt a momentary fear that this might be Ulasewicz. But he opened the door to find Mrs. Anna Chennault, another Watergate resident, the beautiful still-young Chinese widow of the American general whose “Flying Tigers” had fought the Japs for Chiang Kai-shek. Mrs. Chennault had continued to champion Taiwan in all the years since her husband’s death, but even after the president’s trip to Red China, she remained an ardent supporter of Richard Nixon. She was an important fundraiser and back channel and, by one or two accounts—which LaRue didn’t believe—the only woman who had ever made the president stray from Pat. LaRue himself had met her several times at the Mitchells’.

  “I won’t come in,” she said quickly, batting a fine pair of false eyelashes. “But I wanted to give you this for the Committee. I hear you have some special needs, and this comes from some grateful foreign nationals who are not permitted to contribute by check.”

  She handed him an envelope, the third one he’d seen today, and then waved to a man halfway down the hall, asking him to please hold the elevator. She dashed off as if she’d just dropped by to return a cup of sugar.

  As his dinner cooked, LaRue spread the envelope’s contents on his coffee table. He counted thirty thousand dollars in cash.

  Chapter Eleven

  OCTOBER 4, 1972

  WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY

  Pat Nixon looked out the hotel window eighteen floors above Park Avenue. It was ridiculous for the ca
mpaign to be shelling out for this suite of rooms in which she’d spend less than an hour before the event downstairs and a late-evening flight back to Washington. But there was apparently money to burn, so she let herself stop thinking about it, kicked off her shoes, and called Connie Stuart in the room they’d taken for her.

  “Can you get hold of Julie for me?” the first lady asked. “And tell her I’m thinking that maybe tomorrow afternoon we could take that same walk we took a week ago? On that little island near the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge?”

  Mrs. Stuart said she’d track Julie down.

  “Thanks, Connie. I’ll be ready here whenever they come for me.”

  The little island in the Potomac was, in most ways, a good bet. The drive from the White House, in a regular car with just two agents, took only five minutes, and the trail, once you got there, was as pretty as any at Camp David. Almost no one would be around, and the agents stayed far enough behind that she and Julie could have an actual non-whispered conversation. And yet, last week the two of them had never quite relaxed. The Watergate complex, on the east side of the river, had glowered like some enemy fortress, and Julie had not been able to stop talking about how the campaign’s headquarters in Phoenix had burned to the ground. (In what little had been reported, the blaze was said to be “suspicious.” As Rose had said the other day: “Gee, you think so?”)

  Well, maybe this time she and Julie could look west instead of east, and rise above things. A walk outdoors would still be better than sitting in the Solarium yet again, or going down to the basement bowling alley, where she was beginning to find the speckled red ball too heavy for her arthritic—slightly arthritic—right hand.