Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  Through a window on the office’s west side, he watched the sun descend, and he heard Silbert ask, “Mr. LaRue, will you be prepared to testify that during a telephone conversation on March the twenty-first Mr. Mitchell instructed you to meet all or most of Mr. Hunt’s demands?”

  LaRue gave the only acceptable answer, yes, and as he did he began to cry. Lowering his head and closing his eyes, he put himself, yet again, back in that living room in Key Biscayne. He wondered if Mitchell had kept the plan alive, and he had protested it so feebly, because deep down, in what his wife sometimes called the subconscious, both had known it was the kind of thing that might appeal to the Old Man.

  Or had it appealed to something in themselves? To the memory of that afternoon early in the first term, when they’d stood on the DOJ balcony with Martha and looked down at the demonstrators carrying their North Vietnamese flags? The two of them had laughed when Martha called the protesters “the very liberal Communists,” but they had also wanted to spray them with machine-gun fire. Three years later, had Liddy’s array of plots and sabotage operations simply appealed to the bit of Liddy in all of them? The part that longed to pulverize every McGovernite who thought those kids with the flags were okay?

  Or was it just the love of the game, the excitement of the foxhole, that had made him spend most of the last few years up here instead of at home with Joyce in Mississippi, tending to his businesses and the lives of his kids? The swirling bowls of the Watergate and the checkerboard floors of the EOB had been an alternative to all that, a chosen displacement from it and from everything that had happened years ago—first in the Canadian woods, and then at Gulf Hills.

  After today this strange city would no longer be a choice; it would be a jurisdiction, one he could leave only temporarily, whenever the shirtsleeved men across the table deemed that permissible. He looked at them now, aware that he had told them the truth this afternoon, and aware that, by doing so, he’d likely invited a much older truth—a half-known and catastrophic one—to break out of the mental compartment where he tried to keep it stowed.

  By 6:45 LaRue was having a drink on the balcony at Watergate West, looking down Virginia Avenue toward the Washington Monument, whose sky-high pair of little red lights had not yet begun their nighttime winking. April was more than half gone, but the cherry blossoms lingered on the air, and Washington seemed, as it often and oddly had to LaRue, the most pleasant city on earth.

  He had called Mitchell, not ten minutes ago, to tell him where he’d been this afternoon. “I’m sorry, boss,” he’d added, after one of his long pauses.

  “You have to do what you have to do,” Mitchell had answered, with no hint of surprise, between puffs on his pipe.

  “I’m still sorry.”

  And he always would be, whether the two of them ever spoke again or just nodded at each other inside all the committee rooms and courthouses now awaiting them.

  The phone rang. He hoped for a second that it might be Mitchell with something more to say, or even Martha ready to scald his ears off. Is this Mr. Freddy LaRuthless? Mr. Freddy LaTruth?

  But it was only the doorman. “I have a message for you, Mr. LaRue. It doesn’t seem to be signed, but it must have been put on the desk here a few minutes ago, while I was on my break. Whoever left it is waiting for you at one of the umbrella tables down in the shopping plaza.”

  “No name?”

  “No, sir.”

  LaRue felt a wave of dread. Was someone down there who knew he’d been with Silbert? Somebody waiting to punch him in the nose? Maybe even shoot him?

  If he had a pistol here, instead of just Daddy’s bird gun mounted on the wall, he might take it with him. But when he could at last bring himself to leave the apartment, the only defense he brought along was the self-deception that he was really just going downstairs for a pouch of tobacco, and to see whether the barber shop might be open this late.

  He wondered how he would recognize the person, before realizing that hardly mattered. Whoever was there would recognize him. Maybe it would be McCord, still out on bail? Dean? Somebody who’d regard the conversation’s Watergate location as a bit of coincidental black humor? Or would have reasoned that a conspiratorial rendezvous here would be a matter of hiding in plain sight—a case of the purloined letter?

  Once in the shopping plaza, LaRue found no one at the tables except a woman with most of her back to him, and two Chinese boys from the restaurant who were having an early dinner before making their deliveries throughout the complex. The woman had long black hair that fell between her shoulders. She was smoking a cigarette and drawing the panels of her cardigan sweater a little closer, as if, despite the evening’s balminess, the weather wasn’t as warm as the kind to which she was most accustomed. LaRue allowed himself to gaze at her shoulders for a moment before deciding that the summons here had been a hoax. He set off to the drugstore to get some tobacco after all.

  But the woman in the sweater seemed somehow to recognize his footfall. She turned around in her chair under the big picnic umbrella.

  At that point he saw Clarine Lander motion for him to come sit down beside her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  APRIL 28, 1973, 8:30 P.M.

  CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

  “Your family loves you,” said Rose.

  “I suppose they do,” Nixon replied.

  The navy steward poured some California wine and then retreated to a discreet distance, leaving the two of them to their shrimp scampi.

  Last night, the boss had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to come up here—and had shanghaied her along—after a grueling day-trip to Mississippi, where he’d dedicated a new naval air center to John Stennis, who was once more up and around. Rose knew the pillars of the temple were coming down, as in those old biblical movies, and she knew that the president didn’t want his family around during what could only be an awful weekend. This morning, Saturday, she’d found out that Pat and the girls had stayed awake most of Friday night, before deciding to send Tricia, visiting the White House from New York, up here to Camp David. She’d surprised her father at lunchtime, prior to a meeting he had with Bill Rogers, whose reputation for probity appeared to be giving him new value within the ruined administration.

  Rose had never liked Tricia as much as Julie (no one did), but she had to give her credit. She’d arrived in a no-nonsense, acting-her-age outfit and took up no more than fifteen minutes of her father’s time, telling him that his family would support him no matter what he decided. Rose did have to wonder if she’d worked in a brief, special pitch to get rid of Ehrlichman, with whom she’d clashed long ago, and who regarded Tricia as a nasty piece of candy stuck between two teeth.

  But there was no time to dwell on such things. Since getting here Thursday, Rose had been telling herself they could still fight their way out of this, just as they had with the Fund, when Eisenhower dangled the boss over a cliff and a few days later hauled him back in.

  “Reverend Peale called,” she said, as she sliced a shrimp in half. “Around five.”

  Nixon, enough at ease with her to mop up the sauce on his plate with a piece of bread, nodded. “I haven’t been able to return it.”

  “The power of positive thinking.” Rose quoted the pastor’s famous title with a slow emphasis, as if to declare: That’s all you need to survive.

  In the silence that followed, she thought about the March 21 tape, imagining what might be on the hundreds of others made at the Wilson desk. She wanted to tell the president, before the steward brought them their plates of sorbet, that all those tapes needed to be destroyed, immediately. But she couldn’t bring herself to speak: it was presumptuous, and right now the boss’s ego was more fragile than the bubbles sparkling in the wine.

  She had questioned him only once—months before the break-in—about the relentless production of tape. He had mumbled something about “historical importance” and she’d said nothing more. All right, maybe these tapes would just end up locked in some library
vault, but she still couldn’t imagine sending them even that far out into history. It would be like mailing someone a page from her steno pad instead of a typed letter. Maybe the retired president did want them only for help in writing his memoirs. But would he really destroy them afterwards? She doubted it. In truth, she hadn’t thought the matter through any further than he had, because she never wanted to think about turning sixty years old out there in San Clemente, working with him on those memoirs away from everybody else and every other place she knew.

  “You know, Rose, domestically this country can run itself.”

  “Oh, I agree.”

  “But somebody has got to run the rest of things. We should have started bombing North Vietnam two weeks ago. Christ, the cease-fire violations! You should see the satellite pictures: the Ho Chi Minh Trail looks like the San Bernardino Freeway. The amount of supplies and weapons they’re sending south is unbelievable—and you can thank John Dean for that. If we send one plane into the air, the Democrats will scream their heads off that it’s a plan to distract everyone from ‘Nixon’s Watergate troubles.’ ”

  “Then,” said Rose, “I suppose the North Vietnamese can also blame John Dean for not getting their reconstruction aid from Congress. Those louses on the Hill are determined not to support you on anything.”

  Nixon laughed. “You know, I thought I’d be feeling guilty when I met with Thieu out in San Clemente the other week. I mean, I know they got the short end of the agreement. As it turned out, I barely had time to talk to the son of a bitch, let alone feel bad for him. Sorry,” he added, as the steward set dessert in front of them.

  Rose smiled. He always apologized for these slips into profanity, when they both knew her own speech could be more salty than his.

  Eating his sorbet, the president returned to the catastrophes at hand. “Haldeman wants me to put Rogers in as attorney general. Kleindienst certainly can’t keep the job; he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get indicted with Mitchell.” When Rose offered no reply, he pushed the dessert away. “I keep thinking of Arthur,” he said, with a studied softness. “Two days before he passed away. ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take.’ He recited it in my mother’s arms.”

  Rose had often seen him self-pitying—he was entitled!—but this reference to the dead younger brother instead of to Harold, the dead older one, alarmed her. She couldn’t remember him being this maudlin, even at the end of ’62.

  “You need to destroy John Dean,” she said. “And you need to get rid of those tapes.”

  She was eager to get into that practical, emergency mode where she functioned best. Holding her dessert spoon, she could feel the itch to grab paper and pencil and start making a list of all the phones and desks that had been wired back in ’71 and now needed to be disconnected.

  The president, not waiting for the steward, poured himself some more wine. “What about Bob?” he asked.

  She bit her tongue and called upon her will power, deciding that she would not indulge herself. She would recommend only what was best for the man in front of her. “If you get rid of everybody, then the whole pack is guilty—and you look guilty, too. But if you make John Dean out for a liar, everybody else may end up okay.” None of them knew what that fragile-looking little operator had been saying to the prosecutors since he’d gone to them two weeks ago.

  “There’s only one good reason not to get rid of everyone,” said Nixon.

  “Let me hear it.”

  “Because it’d still be too little too late.”

  The following afternoon, Sunday, he fired them anyway—both Haldeman and Ehrlichman, in that order, after summoning them to Camp David by helicopter.

  While he was still with the latter, Rose met HRH on the path near Witch Hazel Cottage. He was carrying Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science book, which she supposed was like the Bible to people of his persuasion. She was trying mightily, and failing, to feel sorry for him. She didn’t know what to say, and she left it to him to speak instead.

  “Rose, I obviously won’t be in anymore, but he’s going to talk from the Oval tomorrow at nine p.m.” He paused, uncertainly, before adding: “He’s exhausted and on edge.”

  She felt her jaw clench. She didn’t need Bob Haldeman to tell her Richard Nixon’s moods.

  “Tomorrow night,” he continued, “I would instruct the switchboard not to put through any calls after the speech. The calls will all be supportive, but they’ll crank him up further, and he’s likely to say something indiscreet that will find its way into the papers.”

  Yes, thought Rose. You would instruct the switchboard, if you were still the chief of staff. But you’re not. She wanted to ask who his replacement would be but even now wouldn’t risk looking inconsequential by admitting she didn’t know.

  She could see him reading the hard look on her face, taking it to mean she would keep the switchboard uninstructed and that calls would keep going through.

  “Bob, I wish you well,” she said at last.

  “Thanks, Rose. The same to you.”

  No embrace, no handshake. He just walked away with Mrs. Eddy. We have a cancer—within, close to the presidency. Did he think they could cure it without a doctor? Get rid of it with prayers to Mrs. Eddy’s version of Christ? The cancer wasn’t even the most pressing danger. There was a blood clot—John Dean—racing toward the boss’s brain.

  She watched Haldeman recede. No, she was not enjoying this moment that she’d imagined so often and in so many ways; his comeuppance was too small a piece of the general calamity. Turning around, she walked toward Aspen Lodge, wondering how much more “exhausted and on edge” the boss would be after getting rid of Ehrlichman, too.

  Ron Ziegler was on the porch. She liked him. He ought to be just another Magruder-style junior executive—he’d even started his work life at Disneyland—but there was a soul, she thought, behind the hooded eyes. As soon as she got up the steps, he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. She’d been to a hundred Irish funerals in her life, and she half-expected him to say, “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  She’d been, as a matter of fact, to a wake in Pittsburgh only two weeks ago, and had learned, when she got back to Washington, that Dean had tried to track her down while she was gone—in order to set up a last appointment with the president without having to go through HRH. At that moment she had known there really was no more administration; the team was scrambling off the field in a dozen different directions, leaving Richard Nixon by himself.

  “Is Ray Price around?” she now asked Ziegler.

  “Yeah. They’re going to start work on the speech before dinner.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “It isn’t,” said Ziegler. “The boss doesn’t have the strength.”

  “He’ll get it back,” said Rose. “But not tonight.”

  After a pause, Ziegler told her that Kleindienst had been fired, too.

  “Who’s the new AG?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure the president knows yet.”

  Rose chewed a corner of her lip and pretended to look at the ship’s model on a table across the room. She’d been hoping to hear that Rogers had been named. Now she had a sick feeling as to why she’d seen Elliot Richardson strolling the grounds an hour or so ago. She’d assumed he was here on some couldn’t-wait Defense Department matter, but that seemed unlikely now.

  A minute later, she and Ziegler were surprised to see the president emerge, alone, from the lodge’s main room. Tears ran down his face, and they realized that Ehrlichman had already gone out the back door.

  “You know what he said?” asked Nixon. “He wanted me to tell him how to explain all this to his children. I couldn’t think of an answer.”

  “You don’t have to,” Rose snapped. “That’s not your job. You need to go on being president, dealing with North Vietnam and Russia, not John Ehrlichman’s kids.”

  “Rose is right, Mr. President,” said Ziegler.

&
nbsp; At this particular moment Nixon’s self-pity was a mere overlay, a kind of plastic transparency protecting the authentic anguish visible beneath. His hurt almost glowed, and it rendered Rose and Ziegler speechless.

  “I told him I’d hoped I wouldn’t wake up today,” the president continued.

  Rose looked at him, wanting to strangle the ghost of little Arthur, which she could sense hovering around. She took a single reflexive step forward, as if she were the corner man in a boxing match, about to lean in and slap the fight back into her boss.

  Nixon turned away from her. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, affecting a sudden indifference. “I may tell Ray to put a line in the speech that says I’m resigning, too.”

  All at once Rose felt remotely hopeful. His theatricality had taken over; he was playing to her and Ron. Maybe he could still find the wherewithal to play to Congress and the country.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  APRIL 30, 1973, 7:40 P.M.

  WHITE HOUSE SOLARIUM

  Pat Nixon stubbed out a cigarette before picking up a phone she was certain had no tape recorder attached to it.

  “Operator,” she said, “this is Mrs. Nixon. Please get me Mr. Thomas A. Garahan in New York.” She gave the Madison Avenue address and hung up, and as she waited for the connection to be made, she pictured Tom behind the tray table in his study, drinking a second cup of coffee after having eaten his dinner with Cronkite.

  She glanced at the clock: there were only eighty minutes until Dick went on the air, and he still wasn’t back from Camp David.

  The phone rang. “I have Mr. Garahan in New York,” said the operator.