Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “She’d been drying out a couple of weeks ago,” LaRue explained to Clarine as they both sat down. “But she went right back to pills and all the rest the day she got home.”

  “Well,” said Clarine, poking at her lime wedge with a long, clear-polished fingernail, “one more piece of the world’s now gone officially upside down. Martha is out of love with ‘Mr. President.’ ” She drank the first full inch of her gin and tonic. “I’ll tell you what’s also seriously upside down. This whole investigation. As soon as you boys started turnin’ yourselves in, all those overeducated sleuths got so enthralled by the cover-up that they stopped investigating the crime itself. By which I mean what went on down there.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the Democrats’ old offices. “They seem to have lost interest in why your pals broke in there in the first place.”

  She appeared to be starting a serious conversation, maybe the one she’d come to have with him on April 16, under the umbrella. But twenty minutes after she reentered his existence they’d wound up here in bed, alive to things that had happened eleven years, not eleven months, before. And now that she at last seemed ready to rekindle the initial conversation, he felt like a green piece of wood that couldn’t take the flame.

  “Martha’s right about money,” he said. “Money may have been my whole part in it, but you can’t name me one other political scandal where nobody had money as his motive, at least at the start.” He was practically quoting a column, by one of the Alsop brothers, from which he’d taken comfort.

  “That makes you boys worse, not better,” said Clarine, annoyed that the lime wedge was now too far down the glass to be stabbed with her fingernail. “You-all were interested in nothin’ but power. In tyranny.” Forgoing the lime, she picked up a Subpoena Duces Tecum—the prosecutors’ latest request for documents—from the coffee table. She played with it absently, as if it were a coaster. Then, seeing LaRue’s hangdog expression, she looked at him more sympathetically.

  “Hound,” she finally asked, using an old nickname, “do you remember the envelope?”

  “I do,” said LaRue, who knew she wasn’t talking about any of the hush money he had spent the past year collecting and distributing. She was talking about the envelope that had come to the law office in Jackson fifteen years ago, the one containing a report from the Canadian investigators on what had happened in the duck blind where Daddy died. As soon as she’d shown him the unopened envelope, twenty-two-year-old Larrie had written “MOOT” straight across it. Money had already been paid to a person who’d been able to get things called off, and the secret report had been sent merely on what today would be called “an FYI basis.” They’d even returned Daddy’s bird gun, now mounted on the wall not ten feet away! He and Larrie, already involved, had never opened the envelope, preferring not to know whatever forensic truths it contained. But they had decided she would keep it. Possessing it gave her a kind of power over him, one that both of them enjoyed her having. She became the guardian of his most awful secret, without either one of them knowing exactly what it was.

  LaRue now tried to smile. “One day early last year I was up in Eastland’s office and your old friend Betty Boyd started joking about ‘Clarine’s mementos’—all the photographs and Cracker Jack prizes, all the ‘little boxes and envelopes’ you kept stuffed in your bottom drawer back when you worked with her.”

  He looked at Clarine, and she looked back at him. “Yes, it was there. With all those other things.” She had never kept it in any of the homes she’d shared with a man.

  “The trinkets and tokens of my successors,” said LaRue.

  Clarine laughed and sipped, and then just looked with mild interest toward the glass door.

  LaRue had for weeks been piecing together her last decade, assembling a timeline as if he were one of the prosecutors, albeit without subpoena power or even the right to ask questions. He knew that after bolting Eastland’s office for the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, she’d gone to work for SNCC, staying until the blacks more or less threw out the whites from the organization. She’d even had a black boyfriend during this period between her two husbands, one a lawyer and the other a professor, both of them Jews—all of this before ’69, when she came to the DNC. By that point Humphrey had lost to the Old Man and she could foresee the rise of the party’s lefties.

  As he sat here now and watched her heart-shaped face—its widow’s peak dipping and rising ever so slightly as she munched a peanut—LaRue thought of all the times he thought he’d seen her these last few years: in a wire-service photo of some May Day protest against the war; in a wide-angle TV shot of the floor demonstration for McGovern in Miami; and in the distance, with his own eyes, as he watched a gaggle of women’s libbers tote a bedsheet banner past the EOB.

  “You never did open it, did you?” he asked. “The envelope.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He now felt certain that this was what she’d come to talk about last month. At the moment he could see the same look she’d had in April, under the umbrella. She was edging up to the subject, as if newly urged toward it by Martha’s crazy performance, and as if his old secret might somehow be connected to Watergate itself. But now that she looked ready to speak, he feared her words would put a sudden end to the past month’s idyll.

  Over the past four weeks, in the midst of all else, he had told Larrie much of what he’d done in connection with the cover-up, notwithstanding his occasional suspicion that she’d planted herself here as an agent of the DNC. But what would be the point of that—or of his being reticent? The prosecutors already knew the lion’s share of what he’d told her. In return, of course, she had told him approximately nothing, about herself or anything else. But he liked the imbalance, the way it added to the power she retained through holding on to that envelope.

  He looked now at her big sapphire ring, knowing he would never have her fully or for long, wondering if a Jewish doctor would be next.

  On impulse, he went over to the top desk drawer and pulled out Dorothy Hunt’s jade pin. The airport encounter was the only thing he had told to Clarine but not the prosecutors. And now he felt the urge to place this piece of jewelry, a macabre tribute, atop his revelation.

  “Hunt’s wife put this in the locker with the money. She said she felt overdressed. Like I told you, she was trying to rattle me and I couldn’t make her out. Is it worth a lot?” He handed the pin to Clarine.

  “Maybe more than you think,” she said.

  “Keep it.”

  Clarine looked more thoughtful than startled. “Why not give it to the prosecutors?” she asked. “Isn’t it evidence?”

  “There’s enough evidence already,” said LaRue, even more softly than usual. He thought he could continue to keep the airport meeting from Silbert’s men: all the money in the locker had eventually found its way to the burglars, so there seemed no need for the prosecutors to find out about its brief layover. There was also, of course, no practical reason why LaRue, having told them everything else, shouldn’t tell them about this as well. But some piece of him rebelled against being written into the story of Dorothy Hunt’s incineration.

  “I suppose this really belongs to Howard Hunt,” said Clarine, declining to put on the jade pin. She just fingered it, the way she had the subpoena, while LaRue once again tried to reassure himself that not even Dorothy’s husband knew of the meeting at National.

  “Maybe it’s only fair that you have it,” said Clarine. “Because I think he may have something of yours.” She put the pin on the coffee table.

  LaRue laughed. “You mean all the money I funneled his way? Big lot o’ good it wound up doing anybody.”

  “I don’t mean the money.”

  LaRue blinked a couple of times and exhaled. He realized she had finally gotten to whatever she’d come here about last month.

  “I don’t have the envelope anymore,” said Clarine.

  He didn’t reply.

  “After your pals got caught,” she continued,
“everyone at the office beavered away looking for anything that might be missing. Almost nothing was, except from me. And I wasn’t going to tell them what it was.”

  “The envelope?” asked LaRue, with the same nauseated sensation he’d had upon hearing of the plane crash.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think they took it?”

  She laughed. “What did those peabrains expect to hear when they tapped Larry O’Brien’s telephone? That he prefers the Caesar salad at Duke Ziebert’s to what he can get at the Sans Souci? Who knows why they took it?” She paused. “I’ll tell you what I think happened, Hound. If you listened to McCord’s testimony this morning, you know that Hunt was never on the DNC premises, not the first time they went in or the second. Well, maybe the Cuban who was photographing things in my desk saw this big ol’ envelope marked MOOT and decided it looked too thick to photograph page by page, but too interesting not to show to Big Chief Spy, Señor Hunt, back in his hotel room next door. And maybe Señor Hunt, having written one too many of his novels, thought MOOT sounded like a code name for something, and so he put the envelope in his pocket, thinking he’d look at it later, when things were a little less frantic.”

  “So where do you think it is now?” asked LaRue, automatically, as if talking about something to which he had no personal connection.

  “I have no idea,” said Clarine. “Someplace as unlikely as an airport locker?” She reached for Dorothy’s pin and began to twirl it between her index and middle fingers.

  LaRue wondered if the envelope might be in the prosecutor’s office, ready to be thrust toward him at some crucial moment he hadn’t figured on. Or maybe it had been in Hunt’s White House safe—before going up in flames in Pat Gray’s fireplace, when the hapless interim FBI director fulfilled Ehrlichman’s wish to get rid of the safe’s contents. Could it even have been in the little pile of stuff Mitchell asked Jeb to burn just three nights after the burglary? Perhaps he himself had failed to notice the envelope amidst those transcripts and memos that Jeb almost left behind when he rushed off from Mitchell’s apartment to play tennis with Agnew.

  Or maybe it was still intact, in Hunt’s own desk out in Potomac, the contents waiting for their new owner to return from prison.

  “Do you know how much I detest ‘Mr. President’?” asked Clarine.

  “I think I do.”

  “No, you don’t. There were moments, like Cambodia and Kent State, when I thought I might open that envelope and see what the Canadians had had to say all those years ago about your daddy’s mishap. If it were bad, I reasoned, well, Jack Anderson might be interested in knowing what manner of man Mr. President had on his staff. Might be interested in runnin’ an item that would put one little dent, just a BB’s worth, in the presidential hide. Hound, I’d have been willing to ruin your life just to make Mr. President endure one uncomfortable page-twelve story.”

  LaRue didn’t flinch. He himself had thought about something like that happening. He hadn’t been able to relieve his mind of the thought that the envelope’s contents might be worth a small something to the Old Man’s enemies, enough to let them wreck his own life as heedlessly as Larrie claimed she’d been willing to do.

  “If you felt that way, why’d you come here?” He almost said “back” instead of “here.” Staring, he pressed for an answer. “Why’d you come here last month?”

  “Because I heard you’d just been to the prosecutor. We hear everything in the office.”

  “And?”

  “I came to warn you. I decided I didn’t want you to get any more than you deserve.”

  She looked at the coffee table, lost for a moment in these second thoughts. After lighting another cigarette, she fastened Dorothy Hunt’s pin to a ruffle on her blouse.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  MAY 25, 1973

  THE WHITE HOUSE AND KEY BISCAYNE, FLORIDA

  “Ignore the scandal, think of the country!” said General Haig, playfully tapping the shoulder of a new West Wing typist Rose was introducing him to.

  The president’s secretary was crazy about the new chief of staff, and she now invited him to step into her office for a few minutes prior to the eleven a.m. Cabinet meeting. The boss was running a bit late in any case, taping a Memorial Day message for whatever radio stations in the South and Midwest would bother to play it.

  Rose poured Haig some coffee. Neither of them had had anything like enough sleep last night, but for once the reason was joyous. The welcome-home dinner for the POWs had brought a thousand guests to the White House, and a handful of couples continued dancing until a quarter to five in the morning. The smell of a dozen extra corsages—bought for the men’s wives and mothers with the Nixons’ own money—still filled Rose’s office. As Haig shook some Cremora into his coffee, she looked out the window to see whether the sun was at last drying off the South Lawn. Yesterday’s rains had made a soggy mess, but the enormous white tent had held up beautifully. She could spot a few sling-back shoes that the younger women had abandoned to muddy revelry in the wee hours. Pointing to a couple of soldiers dismantling one of the army field kitchens, she asked, “Does that make you nostalgic for the battlefield, Al?”

  Haig shook his head. “No, but Rose, I must tell you: during the entire battle of Ap Gu, I never had a cup of coffee as bad as this one.”

  She roared, thrilled again to have this funny, manly, Shakespeare-quoting replacement for HRH on the premises. A Catholic, too—with a priest for a brother!—instead of one more Christian Scientist.

  “Do you know,” she asked, full of wonder at the fact, “that I danced with a man last night who’d also been a POW during World War Two?” The officer may not have had Don Carnevale’s smooth moves, and she’d had to relinquish him soon enough to his wife, but a few minutes with him had given her a wonderful feeling, as if this were her basketball-playing Billy somehow come back to life and they were celebrating victory in the big, real war of long ago instead of stalemate in this grubby eight-year business that had just ended.

  “There was another guy who’d been penned up in Korea,” said Haig.

  Rose shook her head, amazed.

  “You know,” said the new chief of staff, trying to sound wistful and reluctant, “it’s not a good idea for a military man to have this job I’m now in.”

  “Oh yes it is!” Rose responded, happy to say just what he wanted her to. “You’re exactly what we need right now. Tough. Organized. Upbeat.” All of which didn’t include the wonderful fringe benefits he brought along, like the spectacle of Henry’s having to report to a former member of his own staff. “So you’re here ‘for the duration’!” exclaimed Rose. “Until we ‘win this son of a bitch,’ if I may quote the boss. Here,” she added, rummaging behind the corsages to retrieve a plaque the president had been given last night. “Take this in with you to the meeting.”

  Those weak sisters in the Cabinet could do with seeing how brave men appreciated their commander in chief. TO OUR LEADER—OUR COMRADE—RICHARD THE LION-HEARTED. Every last POW and every one of their wives knew that only Richard Nixon’s guts had freed them. One fellow had even told Rose that the Christmas bombs sounded like the voice of his mother calling him home for supper.

  “Put this thing right in the middle of the table,” said Rose.

  “Yes, sir,” Haig replied.

  God, she loved this guy! As he left the room and the two of them went back to the new, grinding war that devoured every day, she realized that she was counting on him, not the boss, to get them out of it alive.

  When the president entered the Cabinet Room and saw the assembled members admiring the plaque, he felt a moment of vexation. Last night he had thrilled to its eerie fulfillment of his mother’s royal choice for his name—but he now feared the object would trump the item he himself had brought to the meeting.

  He took his seat at the middle of the long table, giving a protocol-driven nod to Agnew and then winking, more warmly, at Cap Weinberger. He paused a moment before speaki
ng.

  “Most of you know what a night we just had. I can say without question that it was the most gratifying evening I have ever spent in my long public life.” A bit too stentorian, he decided. He would lighten the tone, and smile: “I gave instructions that the orchestra should keep playing as long as anybody remained on the dance floor. As some of you know, I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to dancing. I managed to loosen up the Quakers at Whittier College on that issue when I was student-body president forty years ago.”

  No, that was too light, given what he had in his hand. When the laughter ended, he took things back down a notch: “I’m holding something I thought you all might be interested to see, a present from Lieutenant Colonel John Dramesi, one of the POWs, who was here with his mother from Blackwood, New Jersey.” He held up a handkerchief onto which the imprisoned officer had secretly embroidered a small American flag. “The blue threads came from an old sweater, and he got the red ones from a pair of underwear. He managed to hide the flag from the North Vietnamese while he was making it, and managed to sneak it out with him when he was released.” Nixon handed Bill Rogers the little piece of cloth, as if it were one of the letters from world leaders that he sometimes passed around the table. “I think it’s important to remember that while some young Americans were burning their country’s flag, there were others still willing to risk torture and death so that they could have a flag to salute.”

  The men around the table were gravely respectful as the handkerchief made its way from hand to hand. Two or three bowed their heads when it reached them, and Connally—back among them as a special advisor, having at last switched parties in the GOP’s hour of maximum need—exercised his talent for the theatrical and snapped off a salute.

  Nixon pushed his chair back from the table. He wasn’t in the mood to talk about the bankrupt Penn Central or the price of gasoline. Nor did he feel like yielding the floor to Kissinger for a long sonorous description of all the national security advisor was doing to prepare for Brezhnev’s Washington visit.