Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  Richardson tried somehow to indicate and to hide, all at once, that he was aghast. He wanted Nixon to see he thought this a terrible idea, both morally and politically—they’d just won a landslide by declaring that peace was at hand—but he also wished Nixon to see him subordinating his own feelings for the good of the team in a manful, disciplined way. He would not be a dissenting prima donna, and he would not pee all over the carpet with enthusiastic assent, the way Bush would.

  He nodded again, silently recalling how Kissinger had remarked to him on the pointless butchery of the president’s call for mass resignations. He decided he would change the subject.

  “I saw Mrs. Nixon before coming in. She looks wonderful.”

  Nixon’s smile clicked into place. “I’m hoping they’ll make her grand marshal of the Rose Parade this year. Did you tell Ehrlichman to get on that?” he asked Haldeman.

  Richardson allowed himself to doodle while the president went on to talk about Pasadena and USC football. Glancing occasionally at Haldeman, Richardson wondered whether the chief of staff himself might not, perhaps by choice, be on the way out. There had been speculation, of a decidedly guarded kind.

  The conversation meandered for ten or fifteen minutes more, until Haldeman mentioned that George Shultz would soon be coming in. Richardson took his cue to start back to the helipad, where he would be lifted away from Camp David just as he’d descended on it, without having to go through the gate and be spotted by reporters at the end of the one road leading in and out of the compound.

  “I need to phone Colson,” said the president, once he and Haldeman were alone.

  “Let me make the call,” said the chief of staff. “Before you get into anything else with him, I’d like him to play you a tape he made of a call he had, about a week ago, from Howard Hunt. Dean played a copy of it for me and Ehrlichman up here the other day.”

  “You want me to listen to it?” asked Nixon.

  “Yeah. You’ll hear Colson making a taped record of his own noninvolvement with Watergate—it’s quite a performance. He gave Dean a Dictabelt of it. He’s very pleased with himself. But I’d like you to really pay attention to what Hunt says.”

  Haldeman dialed the White House and had Colson play the Dictabelt. It was soon audible over the speakerphone in Laurel Lodge.

  On the tape, amidst expressions of sympathy toward Hunt, Colson could be heard asking for the continuation of his own blameless ignorance: “I don’t want to get in the position of knowing something that I don’t now know for the reason that I want to be perfectly free to help you … people around here know I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Hunt, for all his apparent friendliness (“congratulations on your victory”), made several sharp points: “There’s a great deal of financial expense here that is not being covered. What we’ve been getting has been coming in minor dribs and drabs…this thing must not break apart for foolish reasons…we’re protecting the guys who were really responsible. Now that’s of course a continuing requirement, but at the same time, this is a two-way street…surely the cheapest commodity available is money.”

  Once the Dictabelt finished (“Give my love to Dorothy, will you, Howard?”), Haldeman told Colson that the president would call him back in a few minutes.

  Nixon had been entertained by Colson’s caginess, the way he’d betrayed discomfort only when Hunt observed that Mitchell might already have lied to investigators. What the president mostly seemed to hear were Colson’s reassurances that everything would turn out fine, along with Hunt’s agreement that the president’s reelection was cause for thanking God.

  Haldeman, on the other hand, had been worried by the tape as soon as he first listened to it. Money was hardly the cheapest commodity, whatever Hunt might say: after he and Ehrlichman had heard the recording, they’d sent Dean to New York to get Mitchell to raise more cash. The possibility that all of this could go on for years, whether the burglars were found guilty or not, seemed to strike Nixon as just one more element of the approaching second term, a matter perhaps requiring some reorganization, but nothing one should expect to see disappear, any more than the State Department and Pentagon might themselves vanish.

  “I waited to have Colson play this for you until a day when you’d be having meetings here in Laurel,” explained Haldeman. “Because Aspen, you may remember, has been wired same as the White House since May. I didn’t want a tape recorder over there to pick up your listening to Colson’s tape.”

  Nixon nodded and paced a little before saying anything. “You know what those tapes are going to show years from now?”

  Haldeman waited for the president to answer his own question.

  “That I ran the goddamned show when it came to Russia and China and, for that matter, Vietnam. Not Henry.”

  “Yes, but—,” said Haldeman.

  “You know, we need to have the navy guys get this lodge wired, too.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  DECEMBER 8, 1972, 12:05 P.M.

  NATIONAL AIRPORT, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Sweetheart, I still don’t have an ending,” confessed Howard Hunt, as he turned into the airport parking lot. “Which is more of a problem than it otherwise might be, given that the novel is called The Berlin Ending.”

  “Let the bad guys win,” advised Dorothy, while she tightened one of her earrings.

  “The bad guys aren’t supposed to win in this genre.”

  That, of course, was what he wrote now, what the publishing trade called “genre fiction,” cartoon versions of the serious stuff he used to write in the days of his Guggenheim Fellowship. Somehow, at some point, if he survived legally and financially, he would get back to being an honest-to-God literary man.

  “Well,” said Dorothy, as her husband searched for a parking space, “try bringing a little verisimilitude to that genre.” She checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact. “In fact, Papa, when I get home, if I flip to the last pages and see the good guy getting the girl and saving the Free World, I won’t type the rest of the manuscript.”

  Hunt laughed, but his mind was even more troubled than it had been in June. A month had now passed since he’d heard Colson covering his ass during their postelection phone call, making him realize that the White House wanted to wash its hands of him and Bernie and the rest of the boys. Ever since, try as he might to focus on next month’s trial, his thoughts had been as circular and blocked as his literary labors.

  As he continued to look for a parking space, Dorothy opened her purse and playfully fanned a packet of hundred-dollar bills that she extracted. The ten grand here came not from “Mr. Rivers” but their own savings, and when she got to Chicago she would give it to her cousin’s husband. Hal Carlstead had promised that in exchange for this stake Howard would derive good income from a Holiday Inn near the city. Moreover, once the trial finished, the whole family could regroup in the Midwest and Howard could go to work for Hal, who’d told him, “Heck, Holiday Inn gave John Glenn a new start when he came back down to Earth.”

  But Dorothy well knew that ten thousand dollars wouldn’t take care of the mortgage or her daughter’s medical bills, or even payments on the Pontiac. The White House would have to cover all that.

  And in a few minutes she would know whether or not they had. If the news was good, she would keep it from Howard for a few days, until she could get back from Chicago and enjoy the surprise on his face.

  She put the ten thousand dollars back into her purse and took out her plane ticket.

  “Milady,” said Howard, noticing its first-class stamp.

  Dorothy laughed. “Papa, you said I could, just this once.” The first-class fare had been only thirty dollars more than coach. “And when I’m back, you’re going to take me to the Potomack for popovers and Bloody Marys.”

  Hunt smiled, guiltily. He ought to be making this trip himself, but the terms of his bail wouldn’t allow him to travel that far out of Washington. The other day Dorothy had asked him to appeal to the co
urt for permission to take the family to Key West for Christmas, and he’d had to tell her that Sirica would never consent, particularly if it looked like he was trying to consort with Bernie down there. Besides, he’d added, they couldn’t afford it. To which Dorothy had oddly, serenely, replied, “I think you’ll find that we can.”

  Hunt at last found a space near the aging white terminal. His wife kissed him goodbye and said, “Remember, no happy endings.”

  “All right,” he replied.

  LaRue sat in a chair across from the Eastern Shuttle counter, reading the paper and waiting for his rendezvous. Watergate had lately been absent from the Post, but the paper was beginning to fill up with the administration’s darker, related secrets, some of which LaRue had found out from Liddy a few days after the break-in. A White House secretary, he now read, was admitting the existence of the leak-plugging “Plumbers.”

  Its most important member may have been the writer, whose wife LaRue was supposed to meet, for the first time, ten minutes from now.

  The only good news to reach him this week had come from Eastland, who’d confided that Mike Mansfield, the majority leader, wanted Sam Ervin heading whatever committee the Senate Democrats formed to investigate the break-in. An old, unenergetic southerner who lacked any particular animus toward Nixon, Ervin smiled upon the conservative judicial appointments LaRue had been shepherding up to the Hill through Eastland. He wouldn’t dig too deep.

  Sitting in the row of fake leather chairs, LaRue watched a plane take off. He would be happy to stay here all day, just puffing his pipe and gazing. Only the tight grip he kept on a Hecht’s shopping bag gave away his lack of calm. Inside the bag was a single envelope filled with two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, a pile of White House cash in nontraceable, nonsequential bills that Haldeman’s boy Gordon Strachan had cobbled together and delivered to LaRue’s Watergate apartment about ten days ago. LaRue had taken care to wear rubber gloves when receiving the money and when packing it up this morning.

  Lord knew where they’d be able to get any more. Even the flushest contributors now wanted to know why a White House that had just won a landslide reelection, thanks to a campaign operation that had finished up well in the black, needed more of their money. LaRue had been scouring his brain for the names of people who might not ask too many questions. There was Tom Pappas up in Boston, but—Christ, LaRue had hoped to be doing oil business with Tom before too long, not dragging him into this briar patch.

  He wanted out, the way Kalmbach had wanted out back in September. Just the other day Dean, who never seemed the worse for wear, had told him he looked like a zombie. But he would not leave Mitchell in the lurch.

  And there she was, the writer’s wife, entering his peripheral vision five minutes ahead of schedule, and most definitely looking like she was not to be denied. Her phone calls—made, LaRue felt pretty sure, without the writer’s knowledge—had put fear into them all, and his first actual sighting of her confirmed Tony Ulasewicz’s assessment of her good looks: dark skin; high, sort-of Indian cheekbones; a coat that matched her dress; and the exact, identifying hat she’d promised to be wearing. Everything together suggested an older, more pained version of Clarine Lander.

  LaRue nodded, and she nodded back. He stood up and walked to a spot that would be out of anyone’s earshot. She followed him.

  “Miz Hunt,” he said, once they got there.

  “The ‘friend of Mr. Rivers,’ I presume,” she replied.

  “ ‘The writer’s wife,’ I take it,” he added, with a little bow, trying to lighten the mood. But she wouldn’t crack a smile or feed him another line. So he said, “You’re early,” hoping it came out as a compliment and not a scolding.

  “My husband drives fast,” she replied, evenly.

  LaRue pulled a big yellow envelope from the Hecht’s bag and unwound the string on its clasp. He opened it wide enough so that Mrs. Hunt could see the top stack of rubber-banded bills it contained. “Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars,” he said.

  “That’s not a Missouri bankroll?” she asked.

  “I’m not familiar with the term.”

  “How do I know there’s not just a bunch of newspaper under that one layer of bills?”

  “I’ve stuck to the deal we made,” he assured her.

  “Yes, the deal we’ve made—for now.” She took the envelope.

  “For now,” he agreed, thinking of all that lay ahead, and sighing.

  Mrs. Hunt held the envelope and gestured with it toward a row of lockers. The sign above them said 24 HOURS/75 CENTS. “I’m afraid I don’t have any change. Would you mind?”

  LaRue replied with a look of astonishment.

  “I’ll be back soon enough,” she explained. “And I’d rather not be carrying this around Chicago for three days.”

  Without protest, LaRue rented a locker from the man at the counter and took the receipt for $2.25. He wondered why Dorothy had this need to keep him off balance. Did exhibit have the same need with the writer himself? She could, after all, have told her husband to wait in the car for this package—but only if she’d told him in the first place that she was about to pick up all this cash.

  LaRue helped her put the whole Hecht’s bag, with the envelope, into the locker. The two of them looked like a couple trying to lighten their load before a day of sightseeing in the nation’s capital. For good measure, Mrs. Hunt removed a jade brooch from her dress and put it in the bag with the money. “I’ve got enough jewelry on without this, I think.”

  LaRue noted the locker number—J20—and stored it in his head; who knew what game she was playing and whether he might need it? He handed her the little key, which she put inside a large cameo-covered locket she was wearing. Then both of them walked off toward the boarding gate for United Airlines Flight 553.

  They proceeded with no sound but the click of her high heels, until LaRue, whose life had been transformed by insurance, pointed to the kiosk where it was sold. “Five dollars?” he asked. “For two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of coverage?” He put the question to her with a grin that tried to combine hucksterism and black humor—anything that might make their encounter feel the least bit friendly.

  “If the plane crashes,” she replied, without any smile, “I’ll still be thirty grand behind.”

  LaRue gave up and turned his gaze toward the ground as they resumed walking to the gate. After a few more steps, however, she stopped, and with the smallest hint of a thaw said, “You’re right. It’s only good sense.” She opened her purse and took out her wallet, without letting him see her own ten-thousand-dollar stack of bills. She nodded goodbye and made her way back to the insurance kiosk, on her own.

  Sixty other people were flying to Chicago with Dorothy, and from her seat in first class she noticed a couple of them reading about Howard and the Plumbers in this morning’s Washington Post. Forgoing any conversation with her seatmate, she fiddled with her diamond solitaire, which had come from Howard’s mother, and which she’d worn through all the years of their marriage. Today she was also sporting a charm bracelet, with little dangling boys’ and girls’ heads, one for each of her children, as well as a few carved nuggets representing some of Howard’s old postings: Mount Fuji for their days in Japan; the Fountain of the Athletes in Montevideo for their too-brief time in Uruguay. Would there soon be a charm for the Windy City?

  She completed a tactile inventory of her jewelry by fingering the big cameo locket hiding the key. She thought of the money that would be waiting for her back in Washington along with the little jade brooch she’d left behind. She had already decided how to divide it up, and she would not tell Howard the figures. The Hunts would keep one hundred and eighty thousand dollars for themselves; they had risked and lost more than anyone else, and if any of the Cubans, even Bernie and Clarita, complained—tough. Getting this money had been Dorothy’s doing, and its distribution would be her decision. She had been managing things for months and might have to manage them for
years beyond the trial.

  Ever since talking to Colson, her husband had worried about being followed. Chuck had suggested as much over the phone, and after their conversation Howard had begun to assume that anyone he saw lurking was a low-level agent from Langley and not just some reporter from the Post. His old employer, he now felt sure, was keeping tabs on him. For all she knew, he was right; the possibility had started her worrying about McCord, Liddy’s choice to perform the wiretapping, another retired CIA man whose scattershot résumé, a series of implausible covers, gave Dorothy the creeps. His whole manner never added up—part preacher, part village idiot, part eccentric professor.

  The plane was coming in through a peculiar mid-afternoon fog. Dorothy checked her watch, already set to central time, and saw that it was 2:26 p.m.; outside the window it looked more like night. She searched for lights and shapes below, hoping to feel a tug from them, a sensation that she was being drawn in by her new home. She twisted the diamond ring and reviewed her resolves: she would make the deal with her cousin’s husband; she and Howard would get past the trial; with the money in the locker they would get past the bills. And compensation from the White House—“compensation” was exactly the right word—wouldn’t stop even then.