Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  She noticed a basket of fruit and flowers on the table and thought she ought to read the card. The envelope was marked with a little green-and-gold harp, symbol of the American Irish Historical Society, the organization honoring her tonight. The flowers were lovely out-of-season ones, and they took her mind back more than thirty years to the May basket in which Dick had hidden her engagement ring.

  She extracted the note, expecting to find greetings from the Society’s president, Mr. Joseph T. P. Sullivan—as always, she’d done her homework—but she discovered something quite different. She recognized the handwriting as much as the names:

  VICTORIA—I’LL BE AT TABLE 28—ROGER

  “Oh my,” she said, the twang in her voice suddenly exaggerated, the way it got when she became tired or elated. Her right hand was also trembling, as if she’d just bowled several frames.

  “Oh my,” she said again, sitting down on the bed and looking out the window toward the part of Manhattan where the two of them had met six years ago. It had been a fall day like this one, early afternoon, when walking home from Elizabeth Arden she had stopped in a Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue.

  Dick had been in the Midwest, speaking for congressional candidates, nine of them on one trip, collecting the IOUs that would get him nominated two years later—doing what he’d sworn he wouldn’t do, if only because it was supposed to be impossible. After the loss in California, the single greatest appeal of New York had been Dick’s assurance that no comeback could be mounted from here because the state party was so firmly in Rockefeller’s grip. A candidate, after all, needed a home-state base, and Nelson wasn’t about to cede his. But as it turned out, all those dozens of candidates he campaigned for in ’64 and ’66 became Dick’s base, made him a new sort of stateless candidate.

  And so, in their way, they’d brought Tom into her life.

  That fall Tricia had been at Finch and Julie at Smith, and she herself had relished having so many hours alone—until for the first time ever she found herself with too little to do. She actually began watching a soap opera, Dark Shadows, late in the afternoons.

  Victoria. Roger.

  She would go out in the mornings by herself, and she never wore dark glasses. In New York she wasn’t often recognized, and when it did happen she was almost always let alone. That day she’d had a big kerchief on, protecting her just-tinted hair, and so she was all the more startled when the Puerto Rican waitress in Schrafft’s brought her a dessert she hadn’t ordered and said, “The gentleman said to tell you that he’s an independent but that everybody likes apple pie.”

  For some reason she hadn’t felt edgy, as she usually did when approached by even the nicest of strangers. She’d started to laugh, and to look around for whoever had sent the pie; she smiled when he nodded at her. She took him in right away, thanks to twenty years’ practice with quick introductions and size-ups: a few years older than herself; Irish, of the laciest-curtained sort. As she would learn in the next hour and over the coming months, he was a widower, an early-retired trust-and-estates lawyer with plenty of money who lent his efforts to so many boards and organizations that she now realized she’d never known the American Irish Historical Society was one of them.

  It was the mischief in his eyes, the kind her father used to have after the first drink but not the second, that made her wave and then beckon him to her table. Before she knew it silver-haired Tom Garahan had sat down and they were talking, for two hours, until she joked that it would soon be time for her to go home and watch Dark Shadows.

  Which is how they became Victoria and Roger, pet-named for two characters on the program.

  All that fall, and during the winter and spring that followed, they would meet on a corner of Park Avenue at whatever time they’d arrange when she called him. If they went to the Frick, and someone did recognize her, people would assume he was a docent; if someone came over while they were in a restaurant having lunch, she would introduce him as one of her Ryan cousins, or a valued old contributor to the California campaigns who was here in the East on a visit. When she went to his apartment on Madison, she did wear dark glasses, and identified herself to the doorman as Miss Ryan, as if she were still answering the telephone in Dick’s Senate office.

  She always got home well before Dick did, and always carried a shopping bag from Rizzoli or Bergdorf’s to show where she’d supposedly been.

  And then the summer of ’67 had arrived, and there was no more denying what would soon be upon her. For three weeks she tried to delay giving Dick the answer—Yes, you can run—that she knew all along she’d be giving in the end. She went out to California to stay with her old pal Helene Drown, pretending for a last little stretch that things might stay the way they were. And then she’d come home and said yes. She gave up Tom, whose merry and hurt way of letting her go made her love herself for the first time in her life.

  They had not seen each other or spoken since. But here he would be at table 28. She willed her heart to slow down, telling herself the two hours ahead would be easier than the hailstorm at Yellowstone or the wind in Billings, both experienced in recent weeks. The campaign had her lightly scheduled, mostly making stops in safe states, but even here in New York Dick seemed to be way ahead.

  She heard the knock, and then Connie’s voice saying “We’re ready.” The agents and the advance man took them downstairs to a little spot outside the ballroom where they had a chair for her to sit on while being photographed.

  “I’m glad you don’t get to see my bony knees,” she said, adjusting the floor-length hem of her emerald-green dress. One gal with a camera laughed—the photographers were always nicer than the writers—and protested that she looked great.

  The reporters had been told “no questions,” but of course that didn’t stop them.

  “Mrs. Nixon, do you have any response to the protesters outside? Several of them have signs saying ‘Irish Blood on Nixon’s Hands.’ They’re referring to American military cooperation with Great Britain.”

  “I haven’t seen them, so I really can’t comment.”

  Actually, she’d seen them through the tinted windows of the car, and heard them even up on the eighteenth floor. She’d thought that “Irish blood” was a nice change from Vietnamese.

  “Do you have any reaction to the latest Watergate developments involving—”

  “Only that I think it’s all been blown out of proportion.” She’d noticed that they no longer used the word “caper”; it was now a “scandal” or at least an “affair,” or just the word by itself. Connie was reminding them about “no questions,” and the female reporter who’d asked about Watergate actually tsked and shook her head. Pat kept smiling. Alice Longworth had once told her that Mrs. Harding used to keep a fat red notebook for the recording of every slight; but didn’t one remember them all, without writing them down?

  Mr. Sullivan said it was time for them to go into the ballroom. As she stood up, she could feel the Lexington Avenue subway line rumbling beneath her feet, and she got a kick out of realizing what it was. She had loved the subway back here in the thirties, and had ridden it again, dozens of times, each one a lark, with the man who would be at table 28.

  The ballroom contained nine hundred guests, and the flowers on the dais weren’t nearly so pretty as the ones Roger had managed to get to Victoria. She had the card in her clutch purse and was glad to realize that the lights, just like at the convention, prevented her from seeing beyond the first row of tables.

  The program listed her as Patricia Ryan Nixon, and the lieutenant governor of New York was now extolling her as “this gracious woman of Irish lineage,” all of which somehow only made her think of her German mother, and of the names she herself had dropped along the way, not just Catherine but Thelma, which she knew—thanks to Rose—Haldeman sometimes called her behind her back. She’d kept things as simple as possible with the girls, given them easy names that sounded like nicknames, and no middle names for either of them. She was counting on them to be m
ore public during the second term, to take over a lot of the things she was doing now. Julie was better prepared and less lazy than her sister, but if both of them helped she might really be able to recede into the kind of privacy Mrs. Truman and Mamie had had.

  “Thank you, thank you,” she heard herself say a few minutes later, while holding up the crystal plate they gave her. Her remarks were no longer than the ones she’d delivered at the convention, and in less than a minute she was back in her seat, eating dinner, chatting with Mr. Sullivan, forcing herself not to look beyond the dais, now that they’d dimmed the lights a bit. As the coffee came, Carmel Quinn and a trio of Irish girls began singing. She wondered if one of them might surprise everyone with a shout of protest over the Irish or Vietnamese blood, take your pick, on Dick’s hands. You never knew. Last January, one of the Ray Conniff Singers, not exactly the Rolling Stones, had done just that in the East Room.

  They had a short after-dinner receiving line for her to work, and that would be it. In twenty minutes she would be back on the plane, sitting down with the Taylor Caldwell novel right where she’d left it in the cabin.

  Would he come through the line? Two of the first dozen hands she shook belonged to men wearing the little gold pin that signified their gift of at least a thousand dollars to the campaign. A couple of nuns now approached, an old-fashioned pair like the ones she remembered from the Bronx, not the habitless girls of today, all big on abortion and against the war.

  As the line moved and shortened she felt her heart beginning to pound—whether from relief or disappointment she couldn’t be sure.

  “What a beautiful green your dress is!”

  “Thank you! I couldn’t have worn anything else. Not tonight—not to this!”

  Like the queen, she always wore bright colors, never black, though she didn’t do it to help the people in crowds struggling for a glimpse of her. It had started with the trousseau for her Mexican honeymoon. She did it for Dick, who’d seen nothing but those awful black Quaker dresses growing up. His mother had still been in them the summer she died, only five years ago, the same summer she herself had had to give up Tom.

  And there he was, right in front of her: a pair of blue eyes instead of brown ones; a jaw that was firm instead of jowled. Not Dick, but Tom, with his slight, good-natured Irish paunch, a man not forcing himself to eat cottage cheese for lunch.

  “Thomas Garahan,” he said, extending his hand with a big grin.

  She smiled and gave the Secret Service man the usual signal, a gently cocked head, to indicate the need for a private word with the person coming through the line. There was always someone special, often recently bereaved, and the agent would take them to a nearby little room that had been secured for this purpose, while Connie told the next people in line that Mrs. Nixon would be back in just a minute.

  “Victoria.”

  “Roger.”

  They didn’t embrace, just sat down on the kind of tufted bench you found in a powder room. By themselves for the first time in five years, they looked at each other.

  “I keep thinking I deserve only half of that crystal platter,” she said. “You know, my German mother.”

  “It’d still be big enough to hold a piece of pie.”

  She laughed, thinking there was nothing in their words or expressions that couldn’t have been exchanged in the receiving line.

  “Well,” he said. “I held out for as long as I could. Then a couple of months ago I decided I was going to throw caution to the winds.”

  “Oh?” she asked. “What made you do that?”

  “That gesture you made down in Miami. Brushing back some phantom hair that wasn’t even out of place. You never do that unless you know I’m looking.”

  She laughed, remembering how this used to thrill her—hearing a man apply his shrewdness to her psychology instead of to a realignment of the nuclear superpowers.

  “I was hoping for a blush,” said Tom. “I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “You watched the convention?”

  “Of course I did. I watch every piece of film the evening news runs of you. You should tell Agnew to let up on the network guys a little. They’ve shown some very pretty pictures of you out West.”

  Now she was blushing and avoiding his gaze. “Kids okay?” she asked.

  “The finest of fettle. Both married off, same as yours. Saw you dancing at Tricia’s wedding, too. I would have cut in if I’d been there.”

  She laughed. “He really is the worst dancer, isn’t he?”

  “I took a vow, you’ll remember, never to criticize him. But Herbert Hoover could cut a better rug.”

  After a moment, she asked, “You want to hear about holding out?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve twice written notes to Rose Woods saying ‘Put Mr. Thomas Garahan of New York City on this or that invitation list’—Boy Scouts, cancer, one or another of your good works. Nobody would have thought twice about your being there.” She paused. “And I almost sent them to her.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Good. Whenever I was with you, I hated seeing a third person in the room, let alone three hundred of them.”

  She thought that she would give anything for it to be five years ago, noontime on a weekday, the two of them sitting over plates of spaghetti at Gino’s.

  She touched his hand and looked down at her lap. “I’ve got to get back out there.”

  He stood up, took both her hands, and gently brought her to her feet.

  She laughed as soon as she noticed his thousand-dollar-donor pin.

  “Kiddo,” he said, “the things I do for you.” He added, softly, “But I promise I won’t pull anything like this again.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “I won’t need to next time.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’ll be the one who does.”

  Chapter Twelve

  OCTOBER 10, 1972, 8:30 A.M.

  STATE DINING ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE

  “Tea, please,” said Elliot Richardson to the waiter coming around with coffee.

  Clark MacGregor, the former congressman who’d replaced Mitchell as CRP chairman, was giving a long-winded update on the campaign to an assembly of Cabinet secretaries, senators, House members, and “surrogates”—speakers, some of them Cabinet wives, who would keep stumping the country for the next four weeks. The event was more a rally than a serious strategy session; many of those in the room had not seen one another since the convention in Miami. While MacGregor remarked upon the health of the campaign’s budget in Ohio and Indiana, Richardson waved to Jerry Ford and a cluster of House Republicans. Trapped between Kleindienst and George Shultz, he guessed that he was even more bored than they.

  A glance over at Ehrlichman showed the president’s domestic advisor to be hard at the doodling habit he shared with the HEW secretary. It was about all they had in common. Richardson now recalled the day last fall when Ehrlichman had had him over to the West Wing to suggest broadly that Nixon would be considering him for the vacant Supreme Court seat—which soon enough went to Rehnquist. The conversation had been designed to ensure that, while he hoped and waited for the seat, he wouldn’t offer congressional liberals any concessions on the administration’s welfare-reform bill, which even Richardson would have admitted was surprisingly liberal to begin with.

  MacGregor now remarked that things looked very good in Kentucky.

  At least this wasn’t a meeting of the Cabinet. During those, Richardson wore himself out trying to find the sweet spot between grandstanding and too-evident boredom. He almost missed the presence of Mitchell, who used to give Nixon a discreet signal, no more than the shake of a wattle, when the president began to ramble. Even so, Richardson could never forgive the former attorney general for joining Nixon and Agnew in what he regarded as a three-way humiliation of him a couple of summers ago. Just after he’d left State for HEW, he’d had to listen to each of them, right there in th
e Cabinet Room, insisting that the South be let down easy when it came to desegregating the schools—as if he’d started flooding the region with carpetbagging bureaucrats!

  Henry, with his Cabinet rank if no Cabinet position, would have witnessed the spectacle had he not been traveling that day, just as he was absent from this morning’s moribund show. Was he in Paris or Saigon? Perhaps even Hanoi? Richardson knew they were struggling to get Thieu to accept a settlement, and that a handful of men in this room, the ones working on it, were divided about whether it would be better to get a deal before the election or after. The latter school of thought held that an announcement of peace just before the country went to the polls would look phony. “So what’s your point?” snorted those from the opposing school. Richardson wondered which school Nixon himself belonged to.

  The president finally stepped up to the microphone to shouts of “Four more years!” While others roared the campaign slogan, Richardson just murmured the words, with enough of a smile that a distant lip-reader might think he was joining in for real.

  After a few tortured football metaphors, Nixon began assaulting the Washington Post’s recent story of how some kid named Segretti, a pal of young Mr. Chapin in the West Wing, had been hired to perform some pranks, “dirty tricks,” against the Democrats running in the primaries last winter.

  “Yes,” said Nixon, mocking the Post’s connection of Segretti and Chapin as fellow USC almuni, “it sounds like a grand conspiracy to me. I’m wondering if they’ve questioned O. J. Simpson about it.” He got a big laugh with that—and an even bigger one with what followed: “Come to think of it, Mrs. Nixon went to USC as well.”

  The president now emphasized how there had been, in contrast to the Truman and Johnson years, “no personal corruption in this administration,” his stress on the adjective creating an unfortunate suggestion that there had been every other kind. He ended his pep talk by promising that the election would represent “the last burp of the Eastern Establishment.” This of course got a tremendous cry of approval, but Richardson refrained from applauding. He locked eyes for a moment with Bill Rogers, his old boss at State, who seemed to be thinking the same thing: the Establishment doesn’t burp, even when dying.