Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you ever talk to those who do?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” He hadn’t had the heart to call Mitchell tonight, or the stomach to talk to Martha, who would likely have picked up.

  “Well, tell those people to recall how Mr. Nixon not long ago relaxed some of the wage-and-price controls that he himself put on the economy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Tell them that controls are about to be lifted altogether for several key employees.”

  LaRue hesitated, then said, “I’ve made a note of what you just told me.”

  “Tell them there’s a reliable forecast of a surge in inflation. It should arrive in early December.”

  LaRue felt a rumble and then a roar beneath his feet. The whole floor was throbbing, and the pulsations were driving up through his legs. Richard Nixon had taken the stage in the Regency Ballroom, and Mrs. Hunt had hung up the phone.

  Most of Mrs. Longworth’s guests were Democrats, and a few of them groaned when Nixon concluded his brief victory speech on her black-and-white television. But such opposition didn’t keep Joe Alsop from raising a glass to the triumph of his “homme sérieux.”

  “Joe,” called Alice from her seat on the couch. “You remember 1916, don’t you?”

  “I was six years old,” answered Alsop, “but if you’re talking about election night 1916, yes, I do remember it.”

  “I was just telling Mrs. Braden how nothing compares to it—not ’48, not 1960—and certainly not this.” She pointed to the television, and signaled with a snap of her fingers for the live coverage to be extinguished. “We didn’t really have an election night in 1916. It went on for days, while we all waited to see how California had turned out—just clinging to the hope that Professor Wilson had been knocked back to Princeton from Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  A street fiddler from Dupont Circle, whom Alice knew from her errands in the neighborhood, had been asked to provide the evening’s entertainment. He now struck up a plaintive Scottish air while her granddaughter’s friends, off in a corner, did some marijuana-fueled imitations of Nixon’s tormented body language. The whole second floor sported only one red-white-and-blue decoration, an old piece of bunting hung from the jaws of the decaying tiger.

  Alice felt glad that Dick had won so big. But along with regrets about the lack of suspense, she was experiencing a keen awareness that Joe had been right at the beginning of the summer, and that Richard Nixon’s troubles were just getting started.

  “Charles Evans Hughes was the only Supreme Court justice ever to run for president,” Joe was now informing Joan Braden, with a touch of condescension.

  “Perhaps the next Democrat to become president can give the chief justice’s job to McGovern,” Alice mused. “He can do a little ‘legislating from the bench,’ and we’ll get amnesty, acid, and abortion after all.”

  As she spoke, she kept an eye on Stew, who really did look like death.

  Lyndon Johnson’s elder daughter now approached, with her good-looking young husband. What is his name, wondered Alice, who had even been to their wedding. She accepted a box of chocolates from Lynda Bird, her favorites from a specialty shop over in Alexandria. So delighted was she by the gift that she neglected to say thanks before rising from the couch to put a note on the box—DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE EAT THESE. She sent it down the dumbwaiter to Janie in the kitchen.

  On her way back to the couch, she saw Bob Taft, the grandson of her father’s fat protégé-turned-nemesis, now himself a senator from Ohio, chatting with Strom Thurmond’s beauty-queen bride. Thurgood Marshall, eager not to be drawn into that conversation, greeted Alice instead, taking her hand and admiring her Spiro Agnew watch, which had the vice president dressed up like Mickey Mouse and telling the time with little gloved hands. “I told Dick,” she explained, tapping Agnew’s image, “ ‘promise me you’ll always have this one travel on the same plane with you, in case there’s an accident.’ ”

  When Rose Woods arrived, she was offered the most watery cocktail she’d ever tasted. A lot of the crowd here wasn’t really her cup of tea, she soon realized, and the room was too small for dancing. Ever eager to get out on the floor, she wondered if she shouldn’t have stayed at the Shoreham instead—though the hot ticket over there was the party in Agnew’s suite, and she hadn’t been invited.

  She said hello to her hostess. “You’ll be seeing the president and Pat next month?” she asked, helping the old lady resettle herself on the couch.

  “Yes,” said Alice, looking up with a suddenly businesslike stare. Rose wanted to ask about the letter to the boss that she’d opened last month, and Mrs. L. was sly enough to see this.

  “Kim!” cried Alice. “My nephew,” she explained to Rose, as Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., thin and balding and in his fifties, wearing old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses, approached the couch and introduced himself to Richard Nixon’s secretary.

  “Please give the president my congratulations,” he added.

  “I know he’ll be glad to get them,” said Rose. “I’m sure you must know him yourself.”

  “I’ve met him, yes,” said Roosevelt, in an accent just like Joe Alsop’s. “But know him? Not really.”

  “I’ll tell you which White House man Kim does know,” said Alice. “Or I should say former White House man. That’s your Mr. Hunt.”

  “Alice, for Christ’s sake,” said Alsop, who’d been listening to this.

  Kermit Roosevelt looked around the room, as if to decide whether he was among friends, and cautiously explained his aunt’s remark to Miss Woods: “I met Mr. Hunt in Cairo some years ago when we both worked for the same outfit. I learned some very interesting things about him as we tried getting Mr. Nasser to help out poor old King Zog of Albania. It’s rather a long story.” He said this as if speaking of somebody’s complicated business reverses, giving assurances he wouldn’t bore you with the details.

  Rose remained all ears, but Joe Alsop was trying to nudge his relative out of this conversation, asking Kermit Roosevelt if he wouldn’t enjoy saying hello to Stew over there near the television. On top of that, a new guest had just entered the room. Alice rose from the couch yet again. “Play something Asiatic,” she said to the fiddler, as Bob McNamara came over to greet her.

  The Secret Service logs would note that the president had spent twenty-four minutes inside the Shoreham. His real victory celebration took place afterwards, between one and three a.m., in the company of Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson, inside his hideaway office at the EOB.

  Nixon and Colson drank cocktails, while Haldeman sipped a Christian Scientist’s Coca-Cola. Together the three men pored over some wire-service returns from Illinois, usually a cliff-hanging state for Nixon but tonight not even close. “Everything played well in Peoria,” said Haldeman, meaning the whole tumultuous past four years.

  Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages and returned phone calls from Rockefeller and Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s tough-cop mayor, who made Agnew look like Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, “Was Richardson on the platform at the hotel?”

  “Didn’t see him,” said Colson.

  “Probably at some goddamned private party in Georgetown,” the president groused.

  “Rocky and Rizzo,” said Colson, marveling at the combination. “Like Scylla and Charybdis.”

  Haldeman and the president did not respond to the allusion. Colson himself, who only half-knew what the phrase meant, realized he’d picked it up from Hunt.

  “I have Senator Humphrey,” the White House operator said to Nixon.

  Why, he wondered, had he bothered to return Hubert’s call at 1:30 a.m.? From genuine affection? To rub it in? To enjoy the contrast between tonight and four years ago? Actually, he felt far too sharply that the squeaker of ’68 had it all over tonight’s landslide.

  Humphrey burbled some congratulations upon his former foe’s historic victory. Nixon reminded him t
hat he, too, could still make it to the presidency—look how old Churchill had been—and felt a curious envy as he said it.

  The bacon and eggs ordered from the White House kitchen at last arrived, on a cart wheeled in by the normally early-to-bed Manolo Sanchez. This gesture from his personal valet touched Nixon more than anything had tonight. In fact, the only way to banish an audible catch in his voice was to start in again on candyassed Richardson. “Can you believe that guy?” he asked Colson.

  The call he really wanted to make—and needed to be alone for—was the one to Mitchell. He’d put it off until tomorrow, by which time he might convince himself that his old partner really wanted to hear from him. Meanwhile he flipped through the sheaf of phone messages once again: no, nothing from John.

  “Well, there’s no pretending the House results are anything but lousy,” said the president. “You watch what they write tomorrow. ‘Big landslide, no coattails.’ ”

  “Which means,” said Haldeman, “that the next four years aren’t going to be much easier than the past four.”

  Nixon nodded, still wondering why he seemed determined to feel so bad. His mind went once more to Woodrow Wilson, who’d never gotten over feeling like a fraud, even when he was being cheered in the streets of Paris. He looked down at the plate of eggs and felt his appetite waning. Dr. Tkach had been telling him there might actually be something to this research linking heart attacks and high cholesterol. Christ, imagine keeling over like Eisenhower, with goddamned Agnew waiting to take over.

  By three o’clock the president had returned to the residence to listen to his old LP of Victory at Sea, just the way he’d done four years ago at this hour. For a moment, he felt his spirits rally and his energy surge, as if he were pulling far ahead of the convoy of smaller boats that had helped get him here. As the music rose and he closed his eyes, he decided that, yes, tomorrow morning he would tell every last one of them—from Chapin to Ehrlichman to Rogers—that he wanted their resignations.

  Chapter Fifteen

  NOVEMBER 20, 1972, 12:10 P.M. CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

  “Dick, don’t you remember the Checkers speech, the stoning in South America, your defeats in 1960 and 1962? I was the only one who didn’t turn her back on you. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “It does, Pat … I assure you we will take a close look at your record before we make any definite decision.”

  Reading the Post was usually a grim job, but today Pat Nixon laughed out loud over Art Buchwald’s column.

  A lot of the serious commentators had found the president’s postelection request for everybody’s resignation absurd, since staff turnover would probably end up being about the same as in most second terms. Still, the chance of having one’s letter of resignation accepted was real enough to have created, these past two weeks, a peculiar atmosphere at the top of the administration, an air made stranger by the feeling that the president had somehow himself resigned. Almost all his meetings were taking place in Key Biscayne or at Camp David; his absences from the White House seemed to contradict the determination with which he had fought to extend his lease on the address.

  Pat was delighted to be away from the Mansion, and especially to be at Camp David, where everything, not just reading the Post, seemed easier. She’d once, during the vice-presidential years, spotted a black rat snake on the grounds, but on most trips she was untroubled by so much as a mosquito or a fly. She had all of today to herself, and sitting before the mirror, getting ready for a solitary lunchtime hike along the mountain trails, she decided to forgo even her usual splash of Arpège, so that nothing would interfere with the crisp piney scents she was looking forward to.

  Instead of reaching for the atomizer, she opened a drawer and took out a pair of scissors. Buchwald didn’t run in any of the New York papers, did he? Not in the Times, she felt sure. So she clipped the column and put it into a plain envelope, which she addressed herself, feeling a small silly thrill as she wrote Tom’s old apartment number. That was it: no note, and certainly no return address. But he would recognize the handwriting on the envelope, and he would laugh.

  This was the only time she would let herself do something like this.

  To this day she kept a book of stamps in her purse—a housewifely habit that Rose teased her about. Eisenhower’s eight-cent face seemed slightly accusing as she brought him to her lips; FDR, who had gone away with the six-cent denomination last year, might have smiled, she thought, with a certain conspiratorial mischief.

  She gave the envelope to a navy steward as soon as she stepped out of Aspen Lodge to begin her walk. Steam rose off the heated pool that had been built above the bomb shelter, but the thin plumes looked more soothing than sinister. Looking over to Laurel Lodge, she could see Bob Haldeman and Elliot Richardson standing on the porch, waiting to lunch with Dick. They both waved to her as she set off.

  Nixon was finishing up with Ehrlichman and UN ambassador George Bush, telling the latter that he would be replacing Bob Dole as head of the Republican National Committee. Within the administration Bush and Richardson were often viewed as a set of twins: Ivy League scions; young war heroes; good heads of slicked-down hair. But Bush was too gosh-oh-golly and eager-to-please, an overage version of the Magruder crowd, and that’s why he was being kept in sales positions—the UN, the National Committee—rather than moved to the more substantial ones that kept coming his twin’s way.

  Richardson would not have minded another year at HEW, where his administrative reforms had begun to rouse the agency from its paraplegia. But he could hardly say no to the Pentagon, and only ten minutes ago Haldeman had told him that’s what he was getting. Of the two top prizes, he would actually have preferred State, which he supposed would go to Connally once they finally dislodged Rogers. But Defense did have a nice counterintuitive aspect; it wasn’t what people would be expecting for him.

  He hoped there might be a Bloody Mary with lunch, something to warm him halfway back up to the internal temperature he’d enjoyed during five postelection days of swimming and rum in the Virgin Islands. At the moment, outside Laurel Lodge, he was having to blow on his hands to keep off the chill.

  Haldeman spoke for the first time since offering him the job on the walk over here. “He probably forgot to thank you for the bird picture. But I know he liked it.”

  “Ah, good,” replied Richardson, who suspected the watercolor had already been dispatched to the presidential gifts department at the Archives, or to one of the bathrooms at San Clemente.

  The two men were at last ushered into Laurel, where Nixon, in a sport coat, greeted Richardson with a smile but no handshake. “You know, Rose is a Catholic,” he said, pointing toward the Dogwood cabin, where his secretary usually stayed, “and she tells me we ought to get a little machine for the roof here, something that would send up a puff of white smoke, like they do for a new pope, whenever one of you fellows takes one of the big jobs.”

  Pleased by the mild laughter he got in response, the president added, “We ought to tell that to Balzano, Colson’s liaison to the ‘ethnics.’ The Catholics would love it. They’re with us now, and we’re going to keep them.” He paused. “So, have we got ourselves a new secretary of defense?”

  The question was directed more to Haldeman than Richardson.

  “Yes, we do,” answered the chief of staff.

  “Good,” said Nixon, without much enthusiasm.

  The steward brought in lunch; Richardson noticed only coffee and water on the trolley.

  “I’m greatly honored, sir,” he told the president.

  “I want to hold the announcement—and I mean it, no leaks—for about a week. Maybe by then we’ll finally get the damned peace settlement wrapped up. When we present you to the press, I’d like their questions to be about what comes after Vietnam, instead of all about whether Congress is going to cut off funds for the goddamned war.” He continued musing: “The press are always trapped in the past. Like their asking Ziegler if all the personnel shake-ups ha
ve anything to do with Watergate. I mean, for Christ’s sake. The only way we’re going to get hold of and squeeze the career bureaucracy—which is ninety percent Democrats, in every department—is to reorganize the whole political layer on top of it. Things are no different at the Pentagon. Christ, Elliot, some of these generals have more screwed-up ideas than your sociologists over at HEW. I’m counting on you to cut their budgets without losing the Joint Chiefs’ support for SALT.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Richardson, before biting into his tuna sandwich. “I’ve bested the brass once before,” he added, with a self-deprecating laugh. “The only way I could make it into the army was by memorizing the eye chart.”

  Nixon didn’t want to hear about Richardson’s Normandy heroics or Bronze Star. He moved quickly to politics. “Well, you’ll be running the armed forces of the Free World while Agnew handles the bicentennial festivities.” He laughed, to underline how favorably he was positioning Richardson against the vice president for 1976.

  Haldeman did not smile, and Richardson could tell what his expression was trying to convey to the president: The sale has already been made; he’s taken the job; why give him these illusions of special favor when you don’t need to?

  But Nixon continued to talk, as if trying to make Richardson, never an insider, feel part of things. “I had a difficult meeting with Rogers a few days ago,” he said. “It’s going to be harder to change things over there than anywhere else—though our biggest headache at the moment is your friend Kissinger. Jesus Christ, the credit-grabbing. Did you see the interview he gave to that Italian gal?”

  Richardson smiled and nodded.

  “Anything you can do about that?” asked Nixon.

  The president knew that Kissinger would be pleased by Richardson’s shift to the Pentagon. The two men had gotten along fine when Richardson spent the first sixteen months of the administration as an undersecretary at State, the man Henry preferred dealing with to Rogers. “Kissinger needs to understand,” Nixon went on, “that the whole operation looks weak unless the man at the top gets the praise for what’s going right. I don’t say this out of any personal ego at all, and I’m not the slightest bit thin-skinned, as you know. The fact is, Henry hasn’t got a lot to brag about right now, not if he can’t bring Thieu around. Haig is back over in Paris—maybe he can get Henry focused. But I’ll tell you one thing in complete frankness. I’m hours away from cabling him and threatening the North Vietnamese with a resumption of military action. And if I do it, they won’t just get bombed back to the Stone Age, to quote our old friend LeMay. They’ll get bombed off the face of the goddamned Earth. I have had it with every bit of their delays and chickenshit.”