Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  She couldn’t bring herself to move until it was past three o’clock. Only then did she go to the little room with the safe and reach in for the money, some of it in neatly banded stacks, some of it in wadded fistfuls. It took her a half hour to count up nearly a hundred thousand dollars, her coral nail polish flashing against the bills, over and over, before she put them into three manila envelopes, interoffice mailers whose string ties she looped as tightly as she could.

  The envelopes sat on her desk for the next hour and a half, beside the letters to Sammy Davis’s band. If she passed the money on, would she be committing a crime? Would the lack of a specific instruction to have done so make her less guilty—or more? All her instincts spoke of the danger and foolishness of what she was about to do, but if this was the boss’s chosen course, she wasn’t going to second-guess him. She would do what had to be done, demonstrating even more loyalty and initiative than the great degrees of both already attributed to her. She would take this step even if it lowered her to the level of the Chicago ballot-box stuffers, the ones who’d prevailed in ’60 and then been thwarted by her brother Joe eight years later.

  The action would put her heroically far out on a limb, farther out than HRH, whom she’d heard the boss trying to protect on the tape. Looking through the loose pages of shorthand, she found the part about the burglary itself:

  JD: I had no knowledge that they were going to do this.

  RN: Bob didn’t either.

  At five-thirty she called the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, which remained in business across the street, dealing mostly with subpoenas these days. She asked for Mr. LaRue and was told he had already gone home. With no hesitation now, she grabbed her coat—still sporting its St. Patrick’s Day pin—and swept through the outer office, the three heavy envelopes held against her chest like a schoolgirl’s books. “I’ve got to go check on a neighbor,” she told Lorraine and Marje.

  She knew that LaRue lived in her own building, Watergate West. After parking her car, she walked over to the clamshell canopy, said hello to the doorman, and got the apartment number from him. She found LaRue cooking steaks for two gentlemen seated at his kitchen table. He was clearly startled by her arrival; after opening the door, he tipped his glasses down from his high forehead and onto his nose.

  “Miz Woods,” he said. He was one of the few on staff who didn’t first-name her.

  A tilt of Rose’s head indicated that she would be more comfortable talking out in the hall.

  “Millican, keep those steaks from burning,” called LaRue, still not losing the softness of his voice. He stepped out of the apartment and guided Rose toward two club chairs by the elevator.

  “A couple of friends,” he explained. “One’s an old business associate who’s in town. The other’s … working on something more current.”

  “Would it involve Howard Hunt?” Rose asked, struck by how she sounded like Dorothy Kilgallen playing What’s My Line?

  “Yes,” said LaRue, unable to hide his surprise. Rose could see him wondering if she might have been sent here by Richard Nixon himself. She stared at him, waiting for more information.

  “I’ve talked to John Dean and John Mitchell,” LaRue said, finally. “Mr. Millican, one of the fellows in there, will make a delivery to Hunt’s lawyer tonight, out in Potomac.”

  “It’s not too late?” Rose asked.

  “I hope not,” LaRue murmured. “The sentencing’s Friday.”

  “Do you have what you need?”

  “Barely.”

  Rose thrust the envelopes toward him. “You can add this to it.”

  The glance they exchanged came not from a quiz show but the last reel of a movie—the kind where you knew that the explosive device would, very soon, either be disarmed or go off.

  …there is no assurance—

  That it won’t bust.

  “I’d better get back to the stove,” said LaRue, nodding his thanks.

  Forty-eight hours later, Howard Hunt swatted a cockroach as it approached the piece of orange rind he’d carelessly left on his bunk in cellblock No. 1 of the District of Columbia Jail. Having earlier today been given a provisional sentence of thirty-five years—his cooperation with the grand jury and Ervin Committee might get it reduced—he now found himself wondering whether he would ever again see the gray business suit he had donned when he got up this morning.

  Before leaving the house for Judge Sirica’s courtroom, he conducted a solemn conversation with his children. While he was gone, for however long, they must understand that they would not lack for fathers: a whole battery of strong men, from the Bay of Pigs’ Manuel Artime to Bill Buckley, stood willing to assist in their protection and upbringing.

  He had arrived at the courthouse somehow still hoping to get away with probation. But, hedging his bets, he’d brought along a shaving kit and extra underwear, all of which had been seized with the gray suit. A few hours after sentencing he had been sent to block No. 4, the last of the defendants to arrive there from court. Liddy had greeted him warmly—“Welcome, amigo!”—and remarked admiringly, as if they were in the locker room at a men’s club, on the weight he’d lost. Bernie, in a tender act of respect, had already made up a bunk for him.

  Then, inexplicably, without having committed any infraction, he’d been sent far below ground into this disciplinary hellhole. He’d tried stopping his ears and nostrils with wet toilet paper, but the plugs were proving useless against the belfry-like din and the smell of vomit. The blare of four televisions, each tuned to a different station, made a screaming soup of sound that was eventually pierced by a radio, closer than any of the TVs. A newscaster informed listeners that the president had gone for the weekend to Key Biscayne.

  Back to where it all began, thought Hunt. Exactly one week less than a year ago, somebody—and it could only be John Mitchell himself—had approved Gordon’s quarter-million-dollar budget.

  “You really know the Big Dick?” asked an unshaven transvestite, strolling past Hunt’s cell in denim overalls that had been cut down to make hot pants.

  Hunt closed his eyes and didn’t answer. Amidst the cacophony, he realized that, for the first time since Dorothy’s death, he couldn’t hear planes flying overhead. He was too far below ground, with too many stone layers of bedlam between him and the sky. There was no way to call out into the world: the dimes he’d sewn into the extra underwear he’d brought were gone, too, confiscated, joined with Dorothy’s diamond ring in some cosmic closet full of petty officialdom’s lootings.

  His lawyer, Bittman, had delivered the money to him yesterday morning—just past the deadline he himself had set. The envelope had been forty-five thousand short of what he’d demanded, as if to show they were still trying to exert some control over him. But he had never really expected full compliance—not the way they had let Dorothy down all last year. Which is why four days ago he’d jumped his own deadline for bringing John Ehrlichman—and who knew who else—to his knees.

  He’d driven out to McCord’s mailbox in Rockville on Monday night and left the phony letter to Bill Buckley (“Many rumors reach my ears …”). The effect had been precisely as hoped: McCord immediately wrote his own letter to Sirica, the one read in court today, absolving the Company and placing blame for the burglary high up within the administration: “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent … Others involved in the operation were not identified … The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation.” Without naming those who had committed it, McCord insisted that perjury had taken place—an assertion that, once read in court, provoked a comic scramble of reporters toward pay phones.

  Most of the newsmen never made it back to hear Hunt’s own plea for leniency, which he’d insisted to Bittman on writing himself: “For twenty-six years I served my country honorably and with devotion … Had I not lost my employment because of Watergate involvement, my wife would not have sought investment security for our family in Chicago, and fou
r children would not be without a mother. For the last nine months I have suffered an ever-deepening consciousness of guilt. I pray that this court and the American people can accept my statement today that my motives were not evil. The real victims of the Watergate conspiracy, Your Honor, are, as it has turned out, the conspirators themselves.”

  Typing this last rhetorical flourish had given him a familiar pleasure, the sort he had when writing his novels, and it seemed to him now, however real his love for Dorothy remained, that he had at last fallen into one of those books. Earlier this afternoon, he’d begun a meditation exercise up in cellblock No. 4, and gotten a what-the-hell-is-that look from Liddy. But right now he was feeling the need to do it again, no matter what catcalls might ensue once he got into the proper position.

  He sat on the floor and imagined all tension and responsibility dissipating from his body, falling off his shoulders and out of his hands.

  Whatever he tells the grand jury will not matter. He knows that they will now get all the information without him. The reporters, who this morning had leapt like birds from a rooftop at the crack of a rifle, will get to it even before the prosecutors. Everything will now fall to the ground without him.

  And yet: he had been the one to ensure that the trail would lead back to the White House—not just by the trick he’d played on McCord, but by what he’d done on the night they were caught. With the clarity of mind that meditation provides, he can now see himself back in room 214 of the Watergate Hotel, can hear Bernie’s voice—They got us!—coming over the radio. He can see himself racing out of the room, spotting the check on the bureau, the one waiting to be mailed—Pay to the Order of Lakewood Country Club, $6.36, E. Howard Hunt. And he can now, at last, for the first time, remember the split second in which he decided to leave it there, like a fingerprint or a shell casing.

  A part of him had always wanted to take up citizenship in some other place entirely, in a life not his own, and now the doorway to that place seemed to be right here in the gathering dark, just beyond the bars, where the quizzical eyes of the jail’s calico cat were looking straight at him—sympathetically, he thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  APRIL 14, 1973

  WASHINGTON HILTON HOTEL

  “I’ll have you back home and in bed by ten-thirty. It’s a promise,” said Richard Nixon to his wife.

  Their limousine pulled away from the White House grounds at 8:58 p.m., and Pat smiled. “This is an awful lot of hair and makeup for ninety minutes.”

  “You look beautiful,” the president responded. “Julie thought so, too. Of course, it’ll be wasted on this crowd.”

  “Fina even took in the waist, half an inch.”

  Nixon looked out the window as the car proceeded up Connecticut Avenue toward the annual banquet of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Had Pat ever been this thin? he wondered. The last few weeks’ headlines—MCCORD: HUSH MONEY CAME FROM HUNT’S WIFE … MITCHELL GOT TRANSCRIPTS OF “BUG” RESULTS … CONSTITUENTS CLAMOR TO CONGRESS ABOUT WATERGATE REVELATIONS—had taken a bad toll. The papers always called her “skinny,” whereas of course Paley’s wife and Jackie got described as “marvelously thin.” Soon they would say she was sick.

  “You know,” he said, “you looked awfully pretty in that blue-and-white dress this afternoon.” He’d come out to greet the tour group she was leading—the black mayor of Washington and some local civic-improvement types—through the White House gardens.

  Pat looked up from the novel she had open under the limousine’s yellow ceiling light. She smiled. “Did you know I put that little bed of snapdragons in myself? They’re blazing.” She snapped the book shut on Dick’s hand, in playful imitation of the flower’s blossoms.

  The Nixons’ arrival at the dinner had been worked out for 9:05 p.m., so that they could avoid being present when the correspondents conferred an award on the two Post metro reporters, the ones who’d refused to let go of the Watergate story before McCord’s letter tore everything open.

  The car phone rang. It was Ziegler, who had to face these press clowns every day. “They’re through with the Post guys,” he reported from the Hilton.

  “Good,” said Nixon. “Then I won’t tell the driver to slow down. But I’ll tell you that this is the last year we do this goddamned event.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ziegler, who knew the president had made the same vow two years ago. “I should warn you that the atmosphere here is rough. Sirica is a guest at one of the tables, and the emcee earlier made a point of ‘introducing’ some of our guys to him—saying they’d no doubt be getting better acquainted soon.”

  The president did not laugh. “I’m assuming Mrs. Nixon will be sitting on my right. Who’s on my left?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Good. Is Dean there?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. See you in a couple of minutes.”

  The president put down the phone and Pat clicked off the reading light. After a moment’s hesitation, she spoke: “Rose says that Martha reached her on the phone this afternoon.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. And that last night she was ranting and raving to one of the girls on the switchboard.”

  “What did she want today?” asked Nixon.

  “Supposedly to find out when John would be coming home. I’m sure she really just wanted to find out whether you’d seen him in person.”

  Pat and her husband often employed indirection with each other as a matter of considerateness, a method for softening bad news or criticism. Nixon knew that this casual-sounding mention of Mitchell’s afternoon visit to the White House—and his own avoidance of a face-to-face meeting—was really meant to scold. But he felt guilty enough already.

  The whole thing had bust. Since the meeting with Dean on March 21, they’d stopped trying to cover up the burglary. They were now trying to cover up the cover-up, and it was by no means certain that Dean remained part of the effort. Magruder was believed to have spent most of today, a Saturday, with the prosecutors. God knew what else he was saying, but for sure he was fingering Dean and Mitchell for being present when Liddy first proposed his crazy ideas in Mitchell’s office at Justice.

  Only this morning, but once and for all, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had decided that Mitchell had to take the rap—had to step forward and claim responsibility for everything that had happened, so that it could all disappear in the orgy of self-congratulation the press would throw themselves for having caught such a big fish.

  But when Ehrlichman put the proposition to Mitchell, the answer was a polite, emphatic no. However depressed and seedy he’d gotten, he wasn’t going to be bamboozled. He didn’t come down from New York, on the shuttle, until after lunch, and he’d probably gotten home to Martha, as she knew he would, before dinnertime.

  This may have been everyone’s last chance, and it was gone.

  The president resumed speaking to his wife when the limousine turned into the driveway of the Hilton. “I let Ehrlichman talk to him. Not very successfully.”

  “Did you consider seeing him yourself?”

  “I couldn’t do it. And besides—”

  The rest of his sentence disappeared in a burst of flashbulbs.

  The hotel’s International Ballroom was a vast underground and airless modern space; it gave Nixon the feeling that he was in steerage on some giant spaceship. A small band played “Hail to the Chief” as he and Pat made their way down a head table many times longer than the one for the Last Supper. He said hello to Rogers and Richardson and to Cap Weinberger, the Reagan man they now had at HEW.

  Ted Knap, the fellow from Scripps Howard about to become the association’s president, welcomed the first couple with a please-dig-in gesture toward the dessert now being served. At the direction of the White House, a bowl of consommé, rather than strawberry shortcake, had been set in front of Nixon, who believed he never got credit for remaining trim in a town where half the men, by the time they turned forty, were shaped like bowlin
g pins; Ehrlichman was a good example. No, Pat was just “skinny,” and he himself got mocked for eating cottage cheese with ketchup.

  Sweets had ruined his teeth, not his torso. Today had started with yet another visit to Dr. Chase on Eighteenth Street, to deal with some rot underneath a lower-right crown. He and the dentist both put the blame on his three years’ worth of nickel breakfasts while at Duke: a Milky Way bar, economical and energizing, every morning he awoke inside Whippoorwill Manor, the off-campus dump he’d shared with a bunch of other law students.

  Did he need a criminal lawyer now? Someone other than Dean, who these last three weeks had felt less like his counsel than a mole? Sure as shooting, he would follow Magruder to the prosecutors and make a deal, if he hadn’t already.

  The president looked at the three Washington Post tables just below the dais—a whole little government-in-exile presided over by Bradlee, Jack Kennedy’s fellow cocksman; the two of them had fornicated their way into middle age like Harvard boys still panting outside the burlesque stage door in Boston.

  He also caught sight of Mrs. Longworth, sitting with her cousin Alsop at a table slightly farther back. He rose from his chair and made a courtly bow, remembering all of a sudden her Christmastime warnings about Hunt. He realized he’d never followed up on them, but how, in any case, would that have been possible? And what damage could Hunt have done by forgery, beyond what he’d accomplished with plain and simple blackmail?

  “They’ll be ready for you in about five minutes,” said Ziegler.

  Nixon nodded. “Did Mitchell’s little trip down here make it onto the wires?”

  Ziegler laughed. “I heard he wound up sitting next to Daniel Schorr on the shuttle back to New York. Needless to say, he didn’t reveal anything.”

  “Old Stone Face,” said Nixon, alarmed by the surge of affection that speaking Mitchell’s nickname brought. But, goddammit, how could John have let the bugging idea continue beyond that preposterous meeting in the DOJ? It was goddamn Martha’s fault, driving the man further toward distraction every year. He thanked God for Pat, who was graciously nodding to some butch gal from the Philadelphia Bulletin as she took another tiny forkful of cake.