Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  He went over to the writing table, where he would answer her, fountain pen for fountain pen. Unscrewing the cap of his old Waterman, he looked out the window, toward the south, at the winking Washington Monument, and wondered: Would he have made it here without Mrs. L? Maybe not—not if she hadn’t told him to fight all the Stassens and Herters trying to get Eisenhower to drop him in ’56. He thought back to the January after all that, when she’d come by herself to the house on Tilden Street, just hours after they’d all been at Rock Creek Cemetery burying that odd, stuttering daughter. Paulina: only days before she’d been alive, with her own little girl on Twenty-eighth Street, crazy with religion and still mourning that queer drunk of a husband she’d had.

  Nixon remembered Mrs. L making it clear, once she arrived at the house, that she wanted to talk only to him, not Pat. Mrs. L, however ashamed she might be over her failure as a mother, was implacably convinced that the death had been an accident—no matter the Post’s report about the girl’s having swallowed a bottle of pills. He and Bill Bullitt had gone to see the insurance company, which because of the newspaper story wouldn’t pay out. When, after a little persuading, they did agree to pay, Mrs. L demanded that the Post retract their story. Which of course they did not.

  Odd, thought Nixon—looking back from the window to the blotter and writing the date at the top of the page—how coldly rational the old lady could be about everything but this. She’d always regarded the little task he performed with Bullitt—let alone what he’d convinced her of that night on Tilden Street—as heroic. She’d spent the last fifteen years making things up to the granddaughter, redeeming the cruel botch of an upbringing she’d given her own child.

  Dear Mrs. L—

  I wasn’t too far from Oyster Bay tonight, and I noticed that nearly half the crowd in the Long Island auditorium were Italians, who would all have been voting for Truman twenty-five years ago—before they moved out to the suburbs from Brooklyn, I suppose. I think we’re now going to have them on our side for a generation, maybe more.

  I appreciate your word to the wise about Mrs. Graham and the Post. The paper’s coverage of Pat and the girls, when it’s covered them at all, has been a disgrace, nothing but mockery. And let me tell you this: my man Colson has some interesting ideas about what to do with Mrs. G’s TV licenses once the election is behind us.

  I know, as you do and your father did, that all victories are temporary, but we’ll soon be celebrating together—not just the election but a peace agreement. So keep the television on over the next couple of weeks—even if you’ve got to tune in to a station the Post owns!

  Pat and I have talked about having a little dinner party upstairs in the Residence sometime in December. Rose will be in touch about it, and we’ll hope you can make it. Once you get here, please let me under the brim of your hat so that we can put our heads together over that piece of intelligence you mention.

  Affectionately,

  Dick

  He addressed the envelope and put it on the table from which it would be picked up and sent on its way in the middle of the night. Then, heading to his bedroom, the long day over at last, he found himself wondering: What if she had meant an actual, specific piece of intelligence—and not just her opinion of things?

  But what could she really know? And when could she have come to know it?

  Chapter Fourteen

  NOVEMBER 7, 1972; ELECTION DAY

  Pat Nixon turned around to wave through the car’s rear window. The cluster of poll workers and teachers outside Concordia Elementary began receding as the presidential limousine pulled away. The Nixons had just cast their votes, at 7:10 a.m., too early for any children to be at the school—a small miscalculation that would deny the campaign some warm, last-minute imagery from San Clemente. But Pat now realized she would never again have to worry about such a thing. Over the next four years there would be plenty of hands left to shake, but not one of them would belong to a voter she was trying to sell on Dick Nixon.

  They were heading back to the house for a couple of hours; a flight from El Toro would take them to Washington in time for dinner. For the moment Dick was as quiet as herself, looking out at the Pacific and thinking. But after a minute he pointed toward Red Beach and told her, “When I was swimming out there yesterday, I realized the tide was farther out than I’d ever seen it.”

  Pat lit a cigarette and began humming “Ebb Tide.”

  “Think it was a bad omen?” the president asked.

  She playfully swatted his hand. “You’re acting like Lincoln, pal. Seeing signs and symbols everywhere.”

  Dr. Hutschnecker, her husband’s intermittent psychiatrist, had long ago told him that dreams were not portents, that they were always about the past and never the future. Dick could usually remain persuaded of this, and on occasion, at the breakfast table, would even sift through one of his dreams like a set of election returns, breaking down the details as if they were precinct reports. His talk of dreams with Hutschnecker was the only part of his sessions with the headshrinker that he ever revealed to her, and she wished he wouldn’t share even them. They seemed to invite the reciprocation of some intimacy that was beyond her to give.

  She now pointed to the sandstone cliffs and the giant peace symbol that early in the administration had been painted onto one ridge near the house. The lines of the circle and arrow were faded now, barely discernible, and she took their disappearance to mean not that peace was fading—it was still “at hand,” in Kissinger’s phrase—but that the war itself, especially the one at home, was at last going away.

  As the car reached the driveway of La Casa Pacifica, Pat couldn’t help telling herself, for all its seeming self-indulgence, that peace was at hand for her, too. The girls would be coming to the fore; Martha was gone from Washington; for all she cared, the photographers could catch her smoking now.

  “Let yourself relish it, Dick,” she said, patting his hand.

  It was 10:30 a.m. in the East when Howard Hunt, returning from the polls, pulled into his driveway in Potomac, Maryland. He had feared that the firehouse where he voted might be staked out by photographers on the prowl for “irony.” As it turned out, the TV stations and papers had lacked the cleverness or manpower to send anybody, but early this morning Hunt had decided he would run whatever gauntlet he had to, since this could be the last election in which he exercised his franchise for quite some time. If the trial went badly, he would be stripped of his civil rights—in the strict, old-fashioned sense of that term.

  He had voted for Nixon and Agnew, feeling no enthusiasm for the ticket’s junior partner, who’d been as crooked as any other Maryland governor. Sustained by the belief that Colson would yet come through, Hunt had summoned up a small degree of gusto for Nixon himself.

  Dorothy did not share the feeling. Recent payments to “the writer’s wife” had been pitifully meager. After the Cubans got their cut, barely enough remained to meet the mortgage, let alone Kevan’s tuition at Smith. Dorothy’s summertime fervor, that adrenal emergency, had been replaced by alternating bouts of anger and depression.

  He would spend the rest of the day working on The Berlin Ending. He was about twenty thousand words from finishing the novel, though he’d yet to figure out a way to wind up the plot. After ascending the stairs to his study, he opened the door to his wife’s bedroom just widely enough to find her still under the covers, still asleep in her nightgown.

  “Mr. Secretary,” said the voice coming through the intercom. “Mrs. Richardson called a little while ago. She could only get car service at nine-thirty tonight—earlier than you both wanted, I know. She asks that you figure on having dinner together a little before you’d planned.”

  “Thank you,” said Elliot Richardson, whose frown would have been imperceptible to his assistant even if she were in the same room. He had let his after-hours government driver take Election Day off, forgetting that, with the thousands of people heading to one party or another, private cars would be at a premium ton
ight. He wanted to arrive at the Shoreham with Anne just before Nixon accepted victory, no sooner, and one of the CRP’s precision drill teams had assured cabinet secretaries that that would happen a few minutes after midnight.

  Nine-thirty. Oh my. Richardson did not believe he could stand being in that hotel, amidst the madding crowd, for more than two hours. But if he suggested to Anne that they take their own car, she’d insist that she drive or that he not drink, neither of which possibilities he approved. He would need a stiff one to get through ten minutes of just Nixon himself, and more than that to bear two hours of all the delighted-with-themselves little Magruders—let alone Sammy Davis, Jr., and Sinatra, whose presences at the Shoreham were promised in this morning’s Post.

  “I’ll call Mrs. Richardson in a bit,” he at last replied through the intercom. As soon as he released its lever, he made a decision: he and Anne would not go at all. They would stay home and he would complete one of his bird watercolors, part of the series he was doing from photographs. For all he knew, impolitic absence, a refusal to kiss the presidential derrière up on the dais of the Shoreham, would actually improve his standing with Nixon.

  The half-finished watercolor was not exactly the study of a soaring hawk. Richardson had gotten it into his head that all the highest-level appointees would be expected to supply the chieftain with a little gift commemorating the reelection, something to match the tie clasp or cuff links that would no doubt be coming their way from the president, and toward that end he had begun creating a customized tribute, a painting of a prothonotary warbler, the little yellow-chested, blue-gray-winged creature that long ago had allowed Congressman Richard Nixon to connect Alger Hiss to Whittaker Chambers. The warblers that nested by the Potomac would now be heading south for the winter. Did they, Richardson wondered somewhat preposterously, hate themselves for always coming back to Washington?

  “You want my thoughts?” Rose Woods asked Theodore H. White.

  “Yes,” the author said. “What you’re feeling on this day of days.”

  “I’m feeling,” said Rose, “that I’d better get the president’s speech typed.” The clocks aboard Air Force One had been set forward to eastern time, and even so said only two p.m. It was hardly yet urgent for Rose to push the boss’s brief victory remarks through her IBM, and she realized that her reply to White had come out harsher than it needed to. Still, she couldn’t help herself. She’d read his book about the ’60 campaign and knew that he’d later cooked up the whole Camelot label with Jackie Kennedy; she didn’t see why they had to let him on the plane. But history, of course, trumped everything with the boss, and having White here to write about an imminent landslide was a way for Richard Nixon to further outrun Jack Kennedy, twelve years minus one day after he’d lost to him.

  White smiled and began to move away.

  “Maybe later?” said Rose, trying to sound conciliatory.

  The president was in the plane’s open area, alternately chatting and dozing in a seat beside Haldeman, two away from Kissinger. “Peace is at hand,” Rose muttered to herself, thinking she would believe it when she saw it. As of now, Henry still had two doves in the bush and nothing in his hand. There was no sign of Pat, who must be asleep in her private cabin. Rose had hoped for an invitation to dine with the family tonight, upstairs in the residence, but que será será. Nothing was going to dampen her spirits. As it was, she had an invitation to Alice Longworth’s election-night party, and as soon as the boss was through at the Shoreham she was going to make a beeline over to Dupont Circle. She’d make sure to have one or two belts beforehand, because the old lady served very little booze. Mrs. Longworth liked the conversation sharp, and Rose hoped she could oblige.

  At 8:44 p.m., when the networks called McGovern’s home state of South Dakota for Richard Nixon, the president’s head snapped backwards and he let out a sharp cry.

  “I’m very sorry,” said Dr. Chase, who was nonetheless satisfied that the temporary cap he’d just put on one of Nixon’s front teeth would hold. “I’d avoid apples until we can get something more permanent for you—but champagne and strawberries ought to be fine.” He smiled politely at his preoccupied patient and began gathering up the implements he’d brought along on this unexpected call to the White House’s basement dispensary.

  The original cap, which had been put on Nixon’s tooth the year he came to Congress, had fallen off during dinner—the only bad, or even inconvenient, occurrence of the day. The whole family had been together for supper—David had gotten home from the Mediterranean, without any strings being pulled, a little earlier than expected—and during the meal Pat had let her husband take calls from Colson and Haldeman without any objection. And why not? Each one brought more good news than the last.

  Chapin entered the dispensary as Nixon swigged some Listerine.

  “Mr. President, somebody will come up to the residence to make you up at eleven twenty-five, just before the drive to the Shoreham.”

  They were expecting five thousand people there; he had gotten the speech down to two minutes.

  “Fine,” he told Chapin, who nodded and left.

  He felt an odd desire to go upstairs and find the old cap, which had disappeared into the carpet. It seemed like some telltale clue he had left behind, and he felt, despite the replacement, somehow incomplete without it. Well, a cap wasn’t even a tooth, but it had to indicate something. And if it wasn’t a portent, it wasn’t about the past, either. He’d be too embarrassed to bring it up with Hutschnecker and by the time he saw him again would probably have forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, he could feel a dull pushing sensation where the old real tooth met the new false one; he decided he would let it take his mind off the pain in his leg.

  But he couldn’t take his mind off the letdown he was feeling. Rose was having to fight it, too; he could tell that when he saw her getting off the plane at Andrews. Only Pat seemed genuinely happy. He tried for a moment to think of the election as a gift to her—it meant, after all, no more politics. But he didn’t suppose there was much logic in giving thanks to politics for putting an end to itself; sort of like thanking God for sparing some people in the earthquake He’d just caused. Why not just dispense with the quake to begin with?

  But it was not 1947, and he could not stop the life that he himself had set in motion. He went upstairs to look for the artificial tooth through which he’d spoken his first words in Congress.

  There had been so much good news so early that the CRP team in charge of the Shoreham’s ballroom looked worried about maintaining what their memos called “a suitable level of enthusiasm” until the president arrived. The Nixonettes continued to twirl their batons every time another state was called, and every so often someone would roar “FUCK MASSACHUSETTS!” to diminishing bursts of laughter, as the Bay State remained the only one in the opposition column. McGovern’s concession speech had already been booed, along with Shriver’s, the latter providing a special pleasure, given all the Kennedys up onscreen with him.

  Fred LaRue milled about, nodding hello and sipping his drink and relighting his pipe. He saw Ziegler hug Chapin and Kleindienst kiss Bebe Rebozo, but there wasn’t anything loud or down-home about these encounters. The whole thing felt less like a celebration with your battlefield buddies than some faraway military victory won with long-range missiles.

  LaRue looked at his watch and realized he might have to miss the big moment. The stage was already filling—there was Clark MacGregor and his wife; the Agnew daughters; now Tricia and her husband—but he had no choice except to fight his way out of the ballroom, murmuring “ ’Scuse me, please, ’scuse me” a hundred times, as he swam against a crowd pressing closer to the action.

  He at last made it upstairs to a quiet stretch of carpeted corridor that ran between some empty meeting rooms. He stopped in front of a particular pay phone and pretended to consult his address book while waiting for it to ring. That happened, as agreed upon in advance, precisely at midnight.

  “Yes, ma’am,�
�� he said, picking up the receiver.

  “You’ve gotten five-hundred-plus electoral votes,” said the voice on the line.

  “It looks that way, ma’am.”

  “You must have a great many people to thank.”

  “Indeed,” said LaRue.

  “Tell me, Mr. Friend-of-Mr.-Rivers, how much have you budgeted for canapés at all those inaugural balls?”

  LaRue did not lose patience but tried to convey a smidgen of sternness by using the caller’s name. “I can’t say I really know, Miz Hunt.”

  “I’ll bet you it’s more than is being spent to sustain the defendants’ families until the trial.”

  “I hope it won’t be too much longer before the trial gets under way.”

  “It will probably start right around the time of that inauguration,” said Dorothy Hunt.

  “So they’re sayin’,” said LaRue.

  “You know, the same things that could have lost an election can cripple a presidency.”

  The fearsome bluntness reminded him of Clarine Lander. Appalled, and a little thrilled, he had nothing to say for a moment.

  “I’m looking at the little calendar I keep in my purse,” said Mrs. Hunt. “I’ve circled December eighth on it.”

  LaRue still said nothing.

  “It’s an important day. I’ll be making a trip to Chicago. A trip with its own special requirements.”

  “Special requirements,” said LaRue.

  “That’s right. Ones you’re going to supply, and which you’ll be hearing about closer to the time. Meanwhile, let me remind you that there’s a payment due a week from today.”

  LaRue acknowledged the last point and mentioned the figure. Mrs. Hunt snorted at the sum. “Do you ever talk to the president?” she asked.