Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  It was Nixon’s turn to grow impatient. He wanted her to get back to Hunt, whom he’d been concerned about since the plane crash. Colson thought he was the type who might become unhinged.

  “Kim knew Hunt in Cairo,” Mrs. Longworth explained, “during a period in the fifties when Nasser was preparing to give exiled old Zog the boot. Farouk had been kind to him, and that was reason enough for Nasser to be otherwise. It fell to Kim and Hunt to plead the case for his being able to stay. In the event they failed, there was a place waiting for Zog on Long Island. Muttontown! You know, when we lived at Sagamore Hil—”

  Nixon knew Mrs. L well enough to understand that, with a story of this nature, she would be grateful if he brought her back to the point. “What was Hunt’s exact part in all this?”

  “Forgery!” cried Alice. “He concocted some cables showing why the Israelis hated Zog for one reason or another—thinking that, in Nasser’s mind, the Jews’ dislike of Zog would trump Farouk’s approval of him, and that Zog would thereby get to stay in Egypt.”

  “Didn’t do the trick?” asked Nixon.

  “No,” said Alice. “And when he got thrown out, Zog wound up going to France instead of Muttontown. But the episode convinced my nephew that Mr. Hunt can be very creative, and that he has a tendency to start believing in his own fantastical ruses.”

  She could see Nixon’s eyes moving. The president was remembering the cables that Hunt had been forging in order to pin the Diem assassination on Kennedy. Dean had found them in that damned safe.

  Alice continued: “Kim says that his and Mr. Hunt’s former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, is rather worried about being tarnished if its name gets bandied about at the burglars’ trial.”

  Nixon hesitated. He would love to be able to tell her about his and Haldeman’s own attempt to use the Agency in this matter. Days after the break-in they’d passed word to the CIA that it needed to shut down the FBI’s Watergate investigation, on the grounds that a serious probe might open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, given the history of Hunt and his Cuban cronies. The ploy had been a good one—it might have made the whole goddamned thing go away—but after a moment’s worth of cooperation, Helms, who was slippery even for a spy, had balked.

  “The point is,” said Alice, who had been watching Nixon resist the temptation to spill these beans into her lap, “the OSS—sorry, CIA, I’m dating myself—were worried that Hunt might try something foolish even before his wife died in that crash. That’s why I wrote to you last month. His superiors gave him a long leash for many years, let him write his books and so forth, but he was judged an odd duck even by that collection of very odd ducks. Indeed, to hear Kim tell it, Mr. Hunt is odder than Kim himself, and that’s saying plenty. Their former colleagues are currently agitated by one element of Mr. Hunt’s mentality that they’ve been very aware of from years of observation. A very dangerous and rather unusual facet.”

  “What’s that?” asked Nixon.

  “He loved his wife. Inordinately, I would say.” She paused, before adding, “Don’t be surprised if some new ‘document’ turns up and changes this little Watergate calamity into something even worse.”

  Alice decided to let the president chew on this.

  Her chief exasperation was with herself. She’d scoffed at the prankish burglary back in June, but had adjusted her thinking since. She wondered if Dick had adjusted his. She looked over toward Kissinger, still chatting up Mrs. Armstrong, and decided that, after ignoring him all evening, she ought to say at least something. She beckoned him to lean across the table, and when he was within whispering distance, she asked, in a voice no lower than her usual one: “Tell me, Dr. Kissinger, did you and Rockefeller ever trade impressions of what it was like to sleep with Mrs. Braden?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  JANUARY 18, 1973

  KQED-TV, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  Howard Hunt explained, in flat tones, that “critical commitments made by high officials of the United States government” had simply not been kept.

  William F. Buckley, Jr., responded with a quizzical grin, as if wondering whether his guest might be thinking of something other than the subject at hand. Hunt was not on Firing Line to discuss Watergate; the subject was U.S. policy toward Cuba, and he was appearing together with the exile Mario Lazo. Both of them were explaining the Bay of Pigs.

  It was decent of Bill—that bright boy Hunt had supervised in the Agency more than twenty years ago—to fly him out to San Francisco for the taping, if only to take his mind off Dorothy and try to ease the terrible depression that all Hunt’s friends knew he had fallen into. Even the small appearance fee would be helpful, but the invitation to be on the program was also Bill’s way of reminding people that Howard Hunt had had a career before Watergate, that he had done important and honorable things with his life. The court’s permission for him to make this trip, while he was between conviction and sentencing, seemed to validate that idea.

  Buckley raised his eyebrows—a signal for Hunt to lift his voice above a murmur as he finished detailing the CIA’s long-ago efforts against Castro.

  Like Buckley, Mario Lazo seemed determined to help Hunt out, venturing as far into Watergate as the other man’s legal situation would allow. Specifically, he managed to work in a suggestion that Castro’s regime had been funneling money to the Democratic Party, the reason for the break-in that Hunt had given Bernie and the boys eight months ago.

  As Buckley tried to keep the discussion from spilling over the boundaries that had been agreed to, he also kept his eye on Hunt, whose dazed lack of animation was worrying him. The host began to wonder whether the invitation, however well-intentioned, had been a good idea. Hunt looked like a convalescent who’d been severely overtaxed by an outing he’d been asked to make much too early.

  When the taping ended, there was no time for the two of them to have even a drink. The terms of the court’s permission required Hunt to return to his hotel immediately, pick up his suitcase and head straight back to the airport for a flight to D.C. As he left the studio, he managed only a quick thanks to Bill, for having him on the program and for agreeing to serve as executor of Dorothy’s estate. Hunt’s new status as a convicted felon prohibited him from a good many civic activities, including suing United Airlines on his dead wife’s behalf.

  An hour later, as the rains came down and he waited for a cab under the Palace Hotel marquee, a reporter recognized him and asked, as always, what he had to say for himself—and whether he could reveal anything about anyone higher up. Hunt was almost too exhausted to get the usual words out, but he finally succeeded: “Anything I may have done I did for what I believed to be the best interests of my country.”

  Once aloft, in the skies over the Rockies, he started thinking about the plane trips he’d made six weeks before, between Washington and Chicago. He recalled landing at Midway while smoke from United 553 still rose over the wreckage and the runway. And he remembered his trip to the Cook County morgue, his hope against hope that Dorothy’s first-class seat at the front of the plane—Papa, you said I could, just this once—might have allowed her to survive with the dozen or two on board who were believed to have made it.

  In the morgue’s linoleum corridor he had sketched the jewelry she’d left the house with, thinking that if worse came to worst she could be identified by any of the items she’d worn: his mother’s diamond ring, the cameo locket, the charm bracelet, the jade brooch. As it turned out, the solitaire had been looted from Dorothy’s finger by some crooked fireman or medical technician. The jade brooch was gone, too. But the locket, fused shut by the fire, served to confirm that one of the blackened bodies was his wife’s. He had thrown it away once its work was done, but had decided to keep the equally grotesque bracelet, its charms melted just enough to render the sexes of his children indistinguishable.

  At the moment he slipped the bracelet into his pocket, he had decided to plead guilty. What was the point in fighting?

  His depression
had deepened in the weeks before Christmas, but the government’s lawyers had insisted he was well enough to endure all the trial’s preliminaries and proceedings. Even so, he kept expecting his body to drop to the ground the way Dorothy’s plane had dropped from the sky. He’d known even before the crash that there was no real chance of acquittal. When he and his lawyer had been allowed to examine the contents of his White House safe, already available to the prosecutor, he could see that his Hermès notebooks had conveniently gone missing. Without their jottings about the Watergate operation, there would be no chance for anyone to see the break-in for what it had been. The same U.S. Attorney’s office that had callously publicized his CIA career—violating the strict secrecy that kept every operative alive—was now even trying to strip him of his Agency pension.

  At the trial, just eight days ago, the Italian judge, probably mobbed-up, had allowed him to enter his guilty plea only after the government got to lay out its case, so that it would appear he’d decided to cave only upon feeling the crushing weight of the prosecution’s arguments.

  Now, flying eastward, Hunt sipped a glass of milk for his ulcer and thought about the jury with whom he might have taken his chances—most of its members old and black and filled with a lifetime of grievance. No, there had been no point in doing anything but what he’d done. Liddy, delighting in his own mute defiance, would no doubt end up serving whatever maximum time the Wop could dish out.

  Maybe, when his own sentencing took place some weeks from now, he would get off easy, as a reward for knuckling under to the judge. Perhaps, by some miracle, he’d come away with only probation. But either way, from within jail or without, in order to pay for all his life’s obligations and extravagances, he would have to keep playing the game that Dorothy had played so much better.

  After landing at National, he walked through the terminal building, full of those coming to town to see Richard Nixon be inaugurated one last time, thirty-six hours from now. His own mind continued to project itself backwards, forty or so days, to the December afternoon he had rushed here in his car after trying to silence the sobs of his nine-year-old son.

  He had at the present moment no more desire to return to his house than he’d felt after his trip to Chicago and the morgue; or after the funeral; or after the family’s miserable Christmas in Florida (Sirica’s one mercy); or after the shamefaced mea culpa in the same judge’s courtroom.

  He forced himself to retrieve his car from the long-term lot and make the trip home. As the windshield wipers scraped and ticked, he pondered the odd or atrocious behavior of so many people over the past several weeks, conduct that had made the time seem all the more hurtful and unreal. Colson had sent a letter of sympathy rather than show up for the funeral. McCord, looking rumpled and mismatched, had appeared at the house after the rites, with nothing but the holy Agency on his mind and lips, as if he feared its besmirching by Watergate more than he feared going to prison.

  Hunt’s own mind still sometimes went back to McCord’s peculiar absence at crucial moments on the night of the break-in. Had he been doing the bidding of someone else entirely? Dorothy had always had her suspicions. Then, and now, he seemed to be reading a different script from the one that Hunt and Liddy and Bernie were.

  Whatever the case, James McCord was now the key to things. During the last hour of his just-completed flight, sipping his milk and fighting his mental fog, Hunt had begun to craft a plan, a kind of nuclear option that he could put into play if the White House—after one last squeeze he intended to apply—should let him go to jail without a prior, massive infusion of cash.

  He hung up his raincoat in the sepulchral house and went into his study to concoct a document. Unlike most forgeries in his career, this letter would be composed over his own signature, and rather than backdated it would be written from a time still several weeks away. And if it was ever sent at all, it would not be sent to the addressee.

  Hunt began to type:

  Dear Bill,

  Much time has now passed since the Firing Line taping, and I again want to thank you for both the opportunity to appear and for the much greater—indeed profound—kindness of agreeing to serve as my children’s legal guardian should I enter prison, as now seems likely.

  Many rumors reach my ears. The latest and most sickening (and I’m afraid most reliable) indicates that the White House will soon try to suggest—slyly and deniably—that the CIA brought down the plane on which Dorothy died, because she was somehow getting ready to talk about the agency’s involvement in the burglary.

  The Administration will first try to implicate McCord, saying that he was acting at the behest of the agency during the break-in—and that the rest of us were somehow doing his bidding rather than the other way around.

  Then, with whatever evidence it can fabricate, the WH will try to use even the plane crash in order to shift blame for Watergate over to the agency I proudly supervised you in more than twenty years ago.

  If any of this fiction reaches your ears while I am in jail, I urge you not to give it any credence—just as I ask you not to come visit me, however much your Christian impulses push you in that direction. Please, instead, allow my children to visit you from time to time during my absence, so that they may have the benefit of your kindness and counsel as well as a sense of the caliber of man with whom their father associated for most—if, alas, not all—of his career.

  With the highest possible regard,

  Howard

  If his last approach to the White House failed, he would get this letter into the hands of James McCord, not Bill Buckley. He would secretly drop it off at McCord’s Rockville home, along with a forged cover note in which an unidentified CIA agent would claim to have found the letter—addressed to Buckley, stamped but not postmarked—in Hunt’s own roadside mailbox, awaiting pickup by the next mailman to make his rounds.

  McCord, awaiting his own sentencing, would be in a bind. Upon reading the letter, he would feel compelled to strike out against the White House, and yet he would be unwilling to implicate the Agency even in so small a thing as the surveillance of Hunt and a theft from his mailbox. And so, McCord would be left with only the truth for a weapon: he would tell Sirica that higher-ups had ordered the break-in and covered it up. The judge’s lust for punishment would then be directed at the White House, and Hunt’s own desire for revenge against that faithless entity would be satisfied—without his even having to appear disloyal.

  Bone tired once more, he sealed the letter and placed it inside his desk, wondering if he would ever put it into McCord’s possession. He wondered, too, whether the White House had had a hand in bringing down Dorothy’s plane. He no longer knew what to think, did not even understand some of his own actions on the night of the break-in—such as how he’d left behind that check made out to his country club for $6.36. He had intended to mail it before he and Liddy had gone to their room at the Watergate Hotel; but he had somehow forgotten to, and then, by leaving it behind—deliberately?—he’d linked himself to the operation as surely as if he’d plastered his fingerprints all over Larry O’Brien’s telephone.

  Now he looked blankly at the manuscript Dorothy had never finished typing. Its bottom pages, with their unhappy ending written in a Christmas daze, remained in his own handwriting, as did a few of the pages at the top of the stack. He reached for them now, looking first at the dedication, with its arithmetic of heartbreak:

  TO MY BELOVED WIFE, DOROTHY

  TWENTY-THREE YEARS, THREE MONTHS AND ONE DAY

  He then turned to the epigraph he had chosen from Jean Galtier-Boissière:

  It is in the political agent’s interest to betray all parties who use him and to work for them all at the same time, so that he may move freely and penetrate everywhere.

  Then he replaced the title page—The Berlin Ending—atop the manuscript and picked up Dorothy’s scorched charm bracelet from the candy dish in which he kept it. He jingled it like a pocketful of change, closed his eyes, and began one of the
Transcendental Meditation exercises he had been teaching himself—from a book his daughter had left lying around when she was home for the holidays. Always a quick study, he had mastered the steps with ease. He followed them now, amazed at their efficacy, until he felt himself penetrate a cloud of unknowing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  JANUARY 20, 1973; INAUGURATION DAY

  THE NATIONAL MALL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Old Man’s amplified voice traveled on a raw twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind: We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years.

  LaRue stood beneath the West Front of the Capitol, on the other side of the building from the president, and thought that it was not a morning fit for new beginnings. The weather was awful, fifteen degrees colder than what had been promised, and the climate within the White House remained even chillier. Having pled guilty, Hunt was making everyone nervous over what he might say next on television, whether to Bill Buckley or somebody else. Meanwhile Liddy and McCord, refusing to cut a deal, continued to drag out the burglary trial. God knew what dangers still lay in that. How the hell would Magruder handle himself on the stand when he testified three days from now? Was he really smart enough to lie his way through a cross-examination?

  Clapping his gloved but still-freezing hands together, LaRue guessed that the platform on the other side of the Capitol was dotted with space heaters. Well, on this side, it was just too goddamned cold to keep standing around listening to the loudspeakers. So to warm himself up he began walking westward toward the Mall. Before long he was running into tens of thousands of demonstrators giving antiwar protest one last long-haired college try.