Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Thank you.” Pat listened for the civilized click that assured her there was no one listening in, that for the next several minutes her conversation with Tom would only shine as a small red light amidst all the switches and wires downstairs.

  “I want to tell you what I’ve been thinking of,” she said to him. She was alarmed by the strain she could hear in her own voice.

  “Tell me,” he said, gently.

  “I’m remembering a day late in ’68. A few weeks after the election. We were going from New York to Key Biscayne, and Johnson gave us Air Force One for the trip. We got on it together for the first time. And you know what he did? Dick?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He picked me up by the waist and spun me around. Twice. He hadn’t done that when we got the house in Whittier or even the one on Tilden Street, just a couple of miles from here. But that plane. That was carrying me over a threshold he could appreciate.”

  She didn’t have to ask if Tom was listening; she knew his silence indicated patience, a willingness for her to tell this story at her own pace. And she didn’t have to worry that he was hearing anything in it but a tormented affection for her husband.

  “We thought we were alone,” she continued. “Later I found out that Ron Ziegler was near the back of the cabin and had seen the whole thing.” Her eyes were still dry, but she didn’t know for how much longer.

  “I haven’t been myself since Easter,” she said, briskly, straightening her shoulders. “The most horrible weekend we ever spent in Florida. I couldn’t make myself open the newspapers. Julie’s down there now, giving a speech to the Girl Scouts. She won’t be back here for this one tonight. I’m sorry; I’m rambling.”

  “Ramble.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to go. I can hear the helicopter coming toward the lawn.”

  Suddenly Tom Garahan roared with Irish laughter—over this absurdly grandiose version of the Oh-my-God-he’s-home-early moment that each of them had seen a hundred times at the movies. Pat herself couldn’t keep from smiling.

  “Back in October,” she said, “you told me that I’d be the one coming to you next time. A month or so later I told myself that sending the little Art Buchwald column didn’t count.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “But I guess this does, and so I guess you were right.”

  “My being right doesn’t matter. But I can tell you what does, Victoria. What matters is that much, much worse is yet to come. I suppose you still don’t risk offending Agnew by watching the network news, but the reporters on it are so worked up you’d think it was D-Day.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Their liberation is in store.”

  “Find a way to get up here.”

  She said nothing, just hung up, hoping he would think that the rotors had drowned out her reply.

  Three hours later, Rose handed the president one of the messages the switchboard had sent up to the Lincoln Sitting Room, where she and Steve Bull were fielding things.

  MR. HALDEMAN CALLED.

  She wondered if HRH was testing the system, trying to find out whether his suggestion had been heeded. Well, she would get his message to the president—and thereby let him know that his advice had been rejected. She’d been through dozens of televised speeches with Richard Nixon and knew he needed phoned-in accolades the way an outfield needs chatter. “Crank him up,” indeed. Let the cranking begin—and plenty of it!

  Nixon took the slip of paper and waited for Rose to return to the mahogany work table across the room. At his spoken instruction, the White House operator immediately reached Haldeman at his home.

  “I hope I didn’t let you down,” the president said to the chief of staff he’d just dismissed on national television.

  “No, sir,” said Haldeman, his voice neutral as ever. “You got your points across, and you’re right where you ought to be. You did what you had to do, and now it’s time to move on.”

  Nixon had never doubted that Haldeman would act the good soldier, but he was moved nonetheless. He took a large swallow of 100 Pipers and said, “I’m never going to discuss this goddamn son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Haldeman, with the kind of brisk nine a.m. energy Nixon knew he would soon be missing.

  “Interesting thing, Bob. The only Cabinet member who’s called, and this is fifty minutes after the thing is over, is Cap Weinberger, bless his soul. All the rest, you know, are waiting to see what the polls show.” He took another swallow of his drink. “Goddamn strong Cabinet, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you should check, sir. The board may be operating under the instruction that it’s not supposed to put all the calls through tonight.”

  “No, no,” said Nixon, sensing some rare bit of confusion in Haldeman. “They know how to get through. They know, believe me, they know.” He could hear the sing-song slur in his own voice and made an effort to speak more crisply. “You’re a strong man, Bob, goddammit, and I love you, so keep the faith. You’re going to win this son of a bitch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He waited a few moments.

  “I don’t suppose you could call around and get any reactions to the speech and call me back, like the old days? Would you mind?”

  “I don’t think I can, Mr. President. I’m in an odd spot here—”

  “Of course, of course. I agree. Don’t call a goddamned soul. The hell with it. God bless you, boy. I love you, as you know. Like my brother. Keep the faith.”

  He hung up the phone. He was getting drunk, and he knew it. Christ: Keep the faith? Where had that come from? Adam Clayton Powell? He pushed the empty glass across the table and vowed to pull himself together, as if the red eye of the camera were coming on again, and would stay on until he was in bed with the lights out.

  You’re going to win this son of a bitch. “You’re” instead of “we’re.” He’d been talking about Haldeman’s legal jeopardy, as if none remained for himself. And Like my brother—had he meant Arthur or Harold? He wasn’t sure which, but it was one of those two—the dead ones to which he was bonded, not the two that were living.

  Another conversation now came back to his mind. We have a cancer—within, close to the presidency.

  It was never cancer that scared him; only tuberculosis could do that. There was no shame in cancer, but TB? It was something that came from the squalor of tenements, or, in the case of the Nixon brothers—he couldn’t prove it, but he believed it even now—the goddamned unpasteurized milk his crackpot old man had insisted they drink.

  Was it possible his presidency might not be dying of cancer, but be sick with TB? Harold had gone on for ten years with it, his own nursing paid for by the nursing his mother gave to those four tubercular boys in Arizona. They had all died, one by one, but Harold survived through that whole time—besieged, rallying, then beset even worse—until the end came, suddenly, three days after Roosevelt moved into this house. Could he be in for such a siege, long and scarifying but something he could weather until he walked out of here in ’77?

  Rose put another message onto the table. “You’d probably better attend to this one. Your new attorney general.”

  He nodded. “Like a goddamned revolving door up there yesterday afternoon.” He said it cheerfully, to buck Rose up and placate what he knew was her dislike for Richardson. He, too, would have preferred Rogers in the job. But if he sent Rogers’s name up to the Senate, all the left-wingers would get the chance to do an autopsy on the whole Vietnam thing, with endless questions about Rogers’s four years at State. He needed somebody over at Justice now, and Richardson was what they had available. “Revolving door” was no exaggeration: yesterday he’d barely had time to can Kleindienst—who’d known too much from day one—before he found Richardson sitting down next to him, ready to say yes to Kleindienst’s job. He’d later heard that the two of them had gone back to Washington on the same helicopter.

  “Thank you for calling back,” said
Richardson, once he was on the line. “I thought your speech was really great, top drawer.”

  “You’re very kind to say that.”

  “Your finest hour.”

  “Well, I want you to know that you can always get through to me directly, Elliot. I want you to know that. You can always get through.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I was very moved and touched by what you said about me. I won’t let you down.” Richardson went on to explain that while the president had been speaking, he’d been hosting a party for some military aides about to depart the Pentagon. Most of the Joint Chiefs were at his house; they’d actually been watching together—“and I don’t think I’ve ever been with a group of people who were more moved by an occasion like this.”

  “Really?” asked Nixon, wondering exactly when there’d been an occasion like this before. “Well, as you know, Elliot, it came from the heart.” He sighed, and waved for Manolo to refill his drink. “You’re my man, and by God, Elliot, I’ll back you up to the hilt.”

  “I understand that, I do. And really, I won’t let you down, Mr. President.”

  “Oh, I know that, I know that. That’s why I named you!” He heard himself nearly giggling as he said it, and held up his thumb and index finger, squeezed together, to indicate that Manolo should make it a small one. Normally, a little slurring wouldn’t matter with Richardson, who tended to be half in the bag by seven o’clock, but tonight he seemed peculiarly alert. Maybe the Joint Chiefs had drunk up all his booze and left him dry. “That’s why I named you,” Nixon repeated, as if the real reason weren’t that Richardson’s Harvard sanctimony guaranteed quick confirmation.

  “I think I can do it right, Mr. President. I really do.”

  “Of course you can. Of course you can.” He paused. “Elliot, the one thing they’re going to be hitting you on is the special prosecutor. But I’m not sure you need one. I’m not sure you shouldn’t say, once you get over there, that you’ve assumed responsibility for the prosecution.” There was no response. “But whatever you want. Good God, if you want to exhume Charles Evans Hughes, just do it, I don’t mind.”

  He heard a general burst of laughter from Richardson’s living room. Had one of the Joint Chiefs just told a dirty joke? Or was he himself perhaps on speakerphone?

  “I’ll think about it some,” Richardson said.

  “Do what you want and I’ll back you to the hilt. Get to the bottom of this son of a bitch. Do your job, my boy. It may take you all the way.” He knew, after he spoke it, that this last sentence was the only one the two of them both believed, and that right now both were receiving a mental picture of the Capitol steps, upon which Warren Burger, one snowy, sunny morning less than four years away, was swearing in President Elliot Richardson.

  “Thank you for calling, Elliot. And give my best to your lovely wife.”

  What was her name again? Did Rose have it written on the back of the phone message, the sort of reminder she often put there? He should have checked, but it didn’t matter now. The call was over, and Richardson could go back to yukking it up with the Joint Chiefs, who—yes, thanks to Dean—wouldn’t be losing any sleep having to wait up for any B-52s to return from runs over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  “Rose,” he called across the room. “No more calls.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He had the strange sense, not unpleasant, of a new beginning, of something unknown. He wanted to be by himself here, to put on the Victory at Sea records, as if he really believed what he’d told Haldeman, that he’d never have to discuss Watergate again. Deep down, of course, he knew better, which is why, amidst this odd feeling of possibility, he couldn’t banish from his mind all the thoughts he’d been having of Harold and Arthur, named like him for the kings of England.

  Mother. The idea that Quakers were peaceful! Pacifist, yes, but turbulent, with that sense of God always rumbling up from inside them. People only knew the movie Quakers, thanks in part to his cousin Jessamyn West, who’d written all that Friendly Persuasion crap. That was what they’d seen, that and Grace Kelly, the Quaker wife in High Noon, sick of the guns before they even went off.

  He got out of his chair and headed upstairs to the Solarium, without telling Rose or Bull just where he was going or if he’d be back. Through one of that room’s huge half-moon windows, he looked out toward the Washington Monument, before sitting down at the piano and starting to play one of the hundred or so pieces of music he still had by heart. He didn’t so much as murmur the song’s lyrics, but he heard himself singing them, in his head: Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin’. He knew that he was singing not to his mother, or to Pat, whom he’d still not seen since Friday night, but to that odd, invisible part of himself, the darkest and the weakest, which he would now have to rely on as if it were another person altogether.

  Part Two

  SEEK

  MAY 18, 1973–SEPTEMBER 8, 1974

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  MAY 18, 1973, 6:35 P.M.

  WATERGATE WEST 310

  Fred LaRue was lighting his pipe on the balcony when Clarine Lander tapped her very large sapphire ring against its sliding glass door.

  LaRue couldn’t understand why she still wore the ring now that she’d separated from her second husband, but Clarine’s summons was so urgent—three more hard taps of the sapphire—that there was no time to think about the matter. The glass would soon be scratched if he didn’t get back inside.

  “You need to see this,” said Clarine, her voice much calmer than her signal had been. She gestured toward the television.

  Martha Mitchell filled the screen. Her hair was in a wild ponytail, an instant’s gathering of yellow straw, and her sunglasses half-covered a face she’d not bothered to make up. She stood, LaRue realized, by the Fifth Avenue sidewalk canopy he’d looked down onto two months before.

  “Who do you think Mr. Mitchell has been protecting?” Martha shouted at the reporters. “Mr. President, that’s who! Mr. Mitchell and I went to Washington to help this country. We didn’t make one iota of profit from anything! Where do you think all this originated? Do you think my husband is that stupid?” The breathlessness of the tirade, spreading out over the whole NBC network, allowed no moment for reporters to answer the questions she was pelting them with.

  “You can place all the blame right where it belongs—on Mr. President and his White House!”

  “Dear God,” murmured LaRue.

  Clarine, lying once more on the bed where they’d spent most of the afternoon, lit a cigarette and laughed her low, growling laugh.

  “Is this live?” LaRue asked her.

  “ ‘Live’? She’s the only one in your whole criminal caboodle who is. I just love her to death.”

  LaRue imagined Mitchell, ten stories above his wife, listening helplessly as she reached her crescendo: “My husband tells me that if anything happens to the president this country will fall apart. Well, it would be a darned sight better for Mr. President to resign than for him to get impeached!”

  LaRue’s chin sank to his chest. “Turn it off, Larrie.” He walked back to the sliding glass door. Out on the balcony again, he looked in the direction of John and Martha’s old apartment, where he’d so often headed for dinner at just this time of evening.

  Mitchell had to be past his limit now. No amount of leftover love for his crazy belle could let him stand for this, unless he’d slipped farther down into the bottle than Martha herself. And why shouldn’t he? Eight days ago he’d been indicted for something that didn’t even cover Watergate: his supposed attempt to block an investigation into the two hundred thousand dollars that weird Bob Vesco, from whatever country he was hiding out in, had contributed to the Old Man.

  “I’m going to make you a drink,” Clarine called.

  LaRue came back inside and watched her move from the unmade bed to the little kitchen bar. As she plunged some tongs into the ice bucket, he regarded the black hair falling past her shoulders, almost halfway toward the skirt she’d just put b
ack on; the garment was so short it could scarcely be called a skirt at all. He made himself remember the way she’d looked fifteen years ago at her receptionist’s desk in Jackson, with a cardigan sweater over her shirtwaist dress. He felt himself aroused by the tangle of the old memory and the present sight.

  She was here every few evenings, and sometimes, like today, for the morning and afternoon as well. She appeared to be her own law at the DNC, which had recently departed the Watergate for cheaper premises across town: the burglars had made the complex so famous that rents were being jacked up for all the offices and retailers. As it was, Clarine would soon be leaving the National Committee altogether. The McGovernites who’d led the party to defeat were being replaced by moderate types not at all to her liking. So she would be “going away”—her words—saying goodbye to her job and the District as she’d said goodbye to her second husband. She didn’t say where she was going, and LaRue had yet to ask her destination, fearing such a simple question might put a match to the atmosphere inside the apartment, which for the past four weeks he’d been breathing like pure oxygen.

  If he didn’t have a morning appointment with his lawyer or the prosecutors, and if Clarine weren’t still here, he’d head off to the CRP, where even now, however ridiculously, he remained on the staff roster. He’d putter around with what those in the office called, even more ridiculously, “loose ends,” as if they were on top of instead of beneath things. From time to time he’d even have to deal with the Democrats’ civil suit, flipping through documents that contained the name of Clarine Lander on lists of employees whose rights had been violated by the burglars.

  As Larrie now threw lime wedges into the cocktails, LaRue thought of all the things that might have set Martha off today. On top of the Vesco indictment, there had been this morning’s Ervin Committee testimony by Jim McCord, a man she had liked. There was also the deposition Martha had just finished giving in the civil suit.