Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  The long pointless session was at last over, and the troops began a slow shuffle through the too-few exits. Richardson found himself standing next to Ehrlichman, like two schoolboys frustrated by the lunch line at Milton Academy.

  “You know, Elliot, just yesterday the Old Man was telling me that every Cabinet ought to have at least one future president in it.”

  Richardson pretended to smile. “I wonder who he believes that would be now that Connally is gone.”

  “Oh, I think he meant you, Elliot. He said this just the other day, satisfied that we were filling the bill.”

  “Well, there’s no sweeter smell than the perfume of flattery.” He wasn’t going to fall for it a second time from Ehrlichman.

  “The president intended no flattery, believe me. There was only ‘fear and loathing’ in his voice, as our countercultural friends like to say.”

  The remark was a serious insult, not the towel snap it might have been if uttered by, say, Mitchell. Ehrlichman knew that all the job switching and musical chairs bound to take place after the election would be a mere warm-up to the jockeying to succeed Nixon himself. Richardson maintained his smile but fixed his gaze on the narrow backs of the two Haldeman flunkies who were shuffling forward an inch or two ahead of him.

  “Dean thinks he’s going to be an ambassador,” said one to the other.

  “I know. When you pass his office you can hear him playing how-to-learn-French tapes.”

  “If he has to stay here, he’s supposed to become the new Colson.”

  “Where does that leave the old Colson?”

  “Same as before—with Nixon reporting to him.”

  As the two of them laughed, the bottleneck still showed no sign of clearing. Richardson turned his head and saw Rose Woods, who’d actively detested him since his uninvited visit to San Clemente last summer, when he’d actually succeeded in getting her boss to change his mind about something.

  Rose, too, was listening to the Haldeman boys, the kind who were dispatched as spies even to White House parties. The morning after, some poor dress-uniformed Marine on the social staff would be terrified to get a memo reprimanding him for something inappropriate he’d been overheard to say while waltzing with a secretary from the Costa Rican embassy.

  As the line finally began moving, Rose fell into step beside nice quiet Fred LaRue. Before they could say hello, Colson and Magruder cut in front of them, much to her annoyance—though Magruder, whom Colson regarded as unqualified to run a candy store, let alone a campaign, had no choice in the matter. Colson was squeezing his elbow, propelling him, insisting the press needed to know that McGovern had recently insulted Katharine Graham. “They asked him about what Mitchell said”—that the Post’s publisher had better keep out of Watergate lest she get her tit caught in a wringer—“and McGovern, for once taking off his preacher’s collar, responded by saying, ‘Having seen her figure, I don’t think there’s much danger of that.’ ”

  Rose asked LaRue, who looked awfully low, if he’d heard that.

  LaRue didn’t want to comment on a sexual remark, even if the lady had brought it up herself. He replied in a whisper: “You know, Mitchell says that Colson’s constituency consists of the president’s worst instincts.”

  Rose bristled for a moment—long enough to make clear she didn’t think the president had any bad instincts—but then she laughed. She knew that Colson’s ability to absorb hours of the boss’s ventings made HRH’s life easier; the provision of such a service was reason enough for her to dislike Colson too. The line was moving fast now, and the only other word she heard out of Colson’s mouth was “Hunt,” before she strode ahead of him toward the West Wing.

  Back at her desk she found a stamped, sealed envelope with a cobweb of black handwriting and a return address that she recognized. Alice Longworth was one of the few people—Mamie was another—whose letters didn’t have to go through “the system,” so long as there was somebody in the mailroom sharp-eyed enough to spot them. Haldeman wasn’t interested in Mrs. L, but the letter’s evasion of his maw still pleased Rose, as if it were a secret message flung over the battlements without the castle’s ogre having noticed.

  She set it aside for a moment to look at a folder that interested HRH very much, one marked “Oslo,” containing a plan of action to be implemented should the president win the Nobel Peace Prize. If he secured the Vietnam deal on top of China and Russia, how, Rose wondered, could he not get it? Inside the file were variant schedules: one had the boss visiting a few allied capitals before picking up the prize; another had him doing that afterwards. She and Dwight Chapin and someone politically reliable at State (a rare bird) were rigging up the itineraries amidst Haldeman’s constant warnings against letting any of this get into the press, where it would be made to look like some active effort to get Nixon the award.

  All of Rose’s current worries seemed to be of this second-level, can’t-win-for-losing kind. Among them was the fear that next month’s victory would be diluted by everyone’s saying it reflected only McGovern’s incompetence and represented no tribute to Richard Nixon.

  She wouldn’t think about that now. Don Carnevale, in town from New York, was taking her to lunch today, and her overnight bag, packed and standing in the corner, was ready for an unusual midweek trip to Camp David. She would love to be taking a beau up with her—separate cabins, of course—though she doubted the wisdom of pushing her luck, or testing Don’s ardor, beyond lunch or dinner.

  Though it was only October, she suspected that Mrs. L might be writing in regard to one of the Christmas parties. TR’s daughter was welcome at any or all of them, and it would be like her to tell the White House in advance what dates she could not make, so that the schedule could dance to her tune. Rose slit open the thick old envelope—the stationery must be forty years old—and prepared to get a kick out of whatever Mrs. Longworth had to say. She’d heard how the old girl had confounded Miss Priss Richardson in Miami; maybe she’d be giving it to him again on paper.

  What Rose found instead was something quite different, cause for a bit of first-level worry. But she’d gotten only halfway through the letter when Marje Acker came in and gave her the passenger manifest for tonight’s helicopter ride to Camp David.

  “Cheer up,” said Marje. “You’ll be sitting next to Julie, not Tricia.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  OCTOBER 23–24, 1972, 11:30 P.M.–12:45 A.M.

  OVAL OFFICE AND LINCOLN SITTING ROOM

  Nixon’s leg was bothering him. He’d been on and off planes and in and out of limousines the whole day—a long one of campaigning—and it wasn’t over yet. As the helicopter landed on the South Lawn, he could see that the lights in the West Wing had been left on, as he’d instructed. While Pat headed upstairs to the residence, he made his way to Woodrow Wilson’s old desk in the Oval Office.

  He’d had the desk taken out of mothballs at the beginning of his term, determined to outdo the president of his early childhood in rearranging the world. And then Safire told him the goddamned thing had belonged to Henry Wilson, one of Grant’s vice presidents. Well, so be it. He continued to tell himself that he was sitting just where Woodrow Wilson had remade the map. He would do the same, but he would do it with toughness instead of preaching, and he would do it alone, without a League of Nations or even the goddamned United States Congress, which Wilson had let break him in body and spirit. If necessary, he would do it without even Kissinger, whom he could now hear somewhere down the hall, joking with the female assistant he’d brought with him.

  As Nixon looked at his watch and waited, he thought some more about Wilson, whom even Alice Longworth, for all the squawking she’d done against the League, hadn’t really hated. She’d once admitted that she hated only Wilson’s sanctimony, along with the way he’d more or less stolen the idea of the League from her father. Wilson, she swore, had grown a long beard in his last, paralyzed years, and slept with it over the covers instead of under—an image that now brought to Nixon’s
mind a picture of crazy Howard Hughes in his Las Vegas hotel, or wherever he’d gone since.

  The president shook his leg and stomped it a few times on the carpet, hoping his present discomfort wasn’t a flare-up of that long-ago goddamned phlebitis. He made a vow to swim and walk each day during the second term, so that he wouldn’t wind up having a stroke like Wilson or Kennedy’s old man. Even so, he’d rather drive himself toward something like that than content himself with a presidency like the one conducted by Eisenhower, still the laziest white man he’d ever seen. It was probably easier to get Hughes out of bed in the morning.

  How happy he’d have been if Hunt’s gang of idiots had managed to get inside the DNC without getting caught and had somehow found Hughes’s connection to Larry O’Brien. Well, maybe they’d find it yet, in some other place, during the second term—which was likely to be over before Kissinger got his ass in here.

  “Mr. President,” the national security advisor, feigning breathlessness, said at last upon entering the office. “Pocantico Hills is really something, no?”

  Nixon snorted, to make clear he had not been overly impressed by Rockefeller’s baronial lair, where he’d been having dinner five hours ago. “Ziegler told me he spotted two fireplaces inside the indoor tennis court.”

  Hesitating between fealty toward his former patron and his current one, Kissinger said nothing, and Nixon decided to let the silence hang in the air for a few seconds. While it rested there, he pondered how he had almost liked Nelson tonight. Their long rivalry, with himself now triumphant, had at last been put to rest. Rockefeller had seemed to say as much, with his champagne toast about the honor Nixon had done the house as the first president to step inside it. During dessert Nixon had watched Rose Woods sitting next to Ann Whitman, once Ike’s secretary and now Nelson’s, and had thought about the peculiarities of fate.

  It was Kissinger who had asked to meet at this late hour, and while Nixon daydreamed for another few seconds, the national security advisor tried getting down to business. “Mr. President, it is urgent that we conclude the agreement before the election.”

  Nixon sighed. He and Haig, Kissinger’s own deputy, thought otherwise. He was weary of this discussion, tired of hashing the thing out after every temporary development in Paris or Saigon or Hanoi. But mostly he was worn out from the day of barnstorming. He and Pat had motorcaded through Westchester, sticking their heads out the limousine’s roof every ten minutes like cuckoos in a clock, and after the dinner at Rockefeller’s he’d talked himself hoarse to five thousand people in some coliseum on Long Island.

  Kissinger said nothing more.

  “It’ll look awfully fishy, Henry. I’m telling you that for the dozenth time. For Chrissakes, in ’68 we had Julie and David hold off their wedding until after the election because we thought it would look as if we were trolling for votes from old ladies. By comparison, this goddamned thing—”

  “It’s not just politics, Mr. President. The North Vietnamese have more incentives to make concessions now instead of later. They may change their minds and decide to keep fighting after the election.”

  “Henry, even they know we’ve already won this election. Which means they know we’re not going to try and convert a bunch of McGovern’s voters by going soft. And I’m not going to dent the big majority we can roll up by pulling some jackass stunt that will turn people off.”

  Kissinger grumbled. “Well, there are other problems that may give you this delay you want. Thieu would not budge all day today, in cable after cable. He thinks the proposed ‘National Council of Reconciliation’ will turn into a coalition government.”

  Nixon snorted. “If they’re lucky!” He added, more somberly, “It’s really not much of an agreement, is it?”

  The president knew that one way or another, within several years, the Communists would be in Saigon. But if by that point he’d achieved the big realignments he wanted, especially with China, it wouldn’t matter. The whole goddamned, tormenting Vietnam War would be as forgotten as the Spanish-American one.

  He didn’t wait for Kissinger’s silent rumination to become a spoken reply. He replaced his first question with a second, more specific, one. “You honestly think those North Vietnamese units will ‘wither away’ if they’re left in the South?”

  “Yes,” Kissinger said, with such force it was clear he had yet to convince himself. “They will not be able to get reinforcements or supplies.”

  “It’s a nice dream, Henry. Keep selling it to Thieu.”

  “You know,” said Kissinger, with respect to the South Vietnamese president, “he’s been encouraged to remain stubborn by what Julie said.” A reporter had tricked the president’s daughter into declaring that she would be willing to die for the Saigon regime if asked, just like any boy being drafted.

  Tenderly, Nixon offered his analyis of this particular: “I think that’s her way of saying she’d die for me.” He paused for a moment and then toughened up his voice: “Henry, once this agreement comes through, either before the election or after, not even King Timahoe is going to be dying for Thieu.”

  Kissinger, who needed a moment to remember that Nixon was referring to his dog, knew that the president was reaching the point—he was, too—where he hated the South Vietnamese even more than the North.

  “Let’s call it a night,” said Nixon.

  It was past twelve when the president reached the Lincoln Sitting Room in the residence; not too late to call Colson, who would still be up at home.

  “This Baldwin character has been talking about you,” said Nixon, without even a hello once his advisor came on the line. “According to the damned paper.”

  Colson dismissed what the burglars’ listening-post operator was rumored to be saying to the prosecutors. “The Post is playing up my name because they want to give Justice a basis for calling me to testify at the trial. They figure once I’m on the stand the government can go to town with all kinds of questions about all kinds of things, which will give the paper a chance to follow up with all kinds of crazy stories.”

  “Yeah,” said Nixon.

  “I think they’re in for a big disappointment,” Colson continued. He then paused—not to think, but so that his next remark would be a separate unit, its message of reassurance underlined. “I’m going to talk to Hunt after the election. I’m going to find him something to do—a job he’ll know he can count on keeping even if he has to spend a few months in jail. If he feels secure, this whole thing really will go away before the inauguration. For all of us.”

  The mention of jobs made Nixon think about all the firing and shuffling he intended to do after the election. He pictured himself down in Key Biscayne, happily attending to the task, a clipboard in hand and his feet on a hassock; he only hoped he wasn’t tempting fate with such comfortable imagining of the near future. He’d been oddly worried about his safety all afternoon, as if part of himself believed he wouldn’t be allowed to see the coming landslide—not on top of Russia, China, and the winding-down of Vietnam. Rose had recently passed him an astrological warning from Jeane Dixon, who had once claimed to see Kennedy’s end coming. Ridiculous, of course, but he allowed the anxiety some oblique expression in what he next said to Colson: “I was worried about Pat today, every time we put our heads up through the roof of the car. I was surprised the Secret Service allowed it.”

  Colson responded quickly: “If—God forbid—something had happened, the press would have made it seem less bad than Segretti’s having a dozen pizzas delivered to Muskie’s headquarters.”

  Satisfied by a renewed feeling of ill-treatment, the president concluded the call.

  But he felt too tired to sleep, and so he reached into the drawer of the end table, where Rose always put papers that required extra-personal attention, the sort of items he liked to ponder during his regular late nights in this room. Among them he spotted Alice Longworth’s letter, which had been in the drawer, opened but unread, for a couple of weeks. Exhausted as he was, he decided he mig
ht as well attend to the tall black handwriting now.

  Dear Dick,

  Surely you remember old man Meyer, Kay Graham’s father, who died in ’59. Years and years before that, before you ever came to town, he said to me, “You say more things with more finality and less foundation than anyone I know”—a remark I found hilarious.

  You’ll note he didn’t say I was wrong, and I don’t think I’m wrong about what follows. Not long ago Kay told my cousin Joe: “I hate him”—meaning, of course, you—“and I’m going to do all I can to defeat him.” Joe cannot of course write or even “leak” this remark for the obvious reason that Kay’s awful paper still pays his bills. But I urge you to think of what it means. Once McGovern is finished off, all of his supporters will be like fleas who’ve lost their dog. Their mournfulness will motivate them. And they will wage war against you by other means.

  I suspect that the boys at Kay’s paper know a bit more than they’ve already printed, but they don’t know something I do—something I shall wait to pass on until I have the chance to see you in person—probably just after the fleas have started jumping off the hound’s carcass.

  In the meantime, send my greetings to Pat and to the girls.

  Alice

  The president guessed that what she had to impart wasn’t so much fresh information as her shrewd assessment of different persons’ motives. It would be all worth listening to, but it was hard to tell—Mrs. L being such a creature of whim—what degree of urgency really attached to this preview. She herself said it could wait until after the election, so he would not press for anything now. Still, he wouldn’t forget to ask once he saw her.