Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Well, it’s gone now, and—”

  “There’s so damned much that’s not Watergate on those tapes. Anyone who listens can hear that it was one percent of this presidency. Which ought to be reason enough to save them.”

  Haig murmured agreement, though he knew that for the past several months the figure was nearer one hundred percent than one.

  Nixon closed his eyes and continued speaking. “I’ve been remembering a record my brother Harold made for my mother, not a month before he died, in Los Angeles. There was a place on Sunset Boulevard that you could go into, step up to a microphone, and come out with a hard waxy record you could play on any Victrola. Harold made one singing ‘Street of Dreams,’ and he was going to give it to Mother for her birthday. He died before he could. So when Mother’s birthday came around, I went to get it from the closet shelf where we’d hidden the thing, and found out that my old man had gotten rid of it. ‘Morbid,’ he called it. And there went the last trace of Harold.”

  “You’re tired, Mr. President.” It was the only thing Haig could think of to say.

  “Yes,” said Nixon, opening his eyes. His thoughts had begun chasing, overriding, and recycling themselves—probably an effect of the medication. But when he looked through the window, at the deepening nighttime darkness, he knew with finality that he would keep the tapes. Inertia would win: he would fight for them in court, however hopelessly, rather than trigger a vast convulsion—and maybe impeachment—by their destruction. He himself had always loved the big play, the bold move, but he didn’t have the crazy courage to light Connally’s bonfire.

  He looked at the window ledge and thought of Forrestal in his pajamas. With a surprising sadness, he realized that he also lacked, at least for now, whatever strange bravery it would take to leap from the window.

  “Al, I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  Chapter Thirty

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1973

  WATERGATE WEST 310; MONTGOMERY COUNTY DETENTION CENTER, ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

  Out on the balcony with her second cup of coffee, Clarine was reading The Optimist’s Daughter. Over her first cup, she had told LaRue that the book’s author, Miss Welty, had once years ago stopped into the Jackson law firm in order to have something notarized.

  LaRue had only nodded. He and Clarine weren’t due at the Montgomery County Detention Center for a couple of hours, but he was considerably more nervous than she about the visit they’d be making there in order to pursue a scheme of Clarine’s devising.

  A scam was actually more like it, and as its execution approached, LaRue could feel the need for a couple of strong pops. But he resisted: it was only eleven a.m. and he had to do the driving. In her thirty-eight years, Clarine had experienced little trouble navigating the world, but she had never managed to obtain a license.

  Her plan had been formulated a few weeks ago, while LaRue was back in Jackson. She had clipped a review of Howard Hunt’s latest novel from the Books section of the Washington Post and then written to the novelist in prison, saying that she, unlike the reviewer, did not regard Hunt as “a loser with a humid fantasy life who was subsidized by the American taxpayer.” In addition to expressing her enjoyment of The Berlin Ending, Clarine’s letter mentioned a longstanding and entirely untrue interest in the life of King Zog, the Albanian monarch whose exile Hunt and the CIA had long ago tried to manage. In fact, she’d told Hunt that, after years of working among lawyers and politicians, she was writing a biography of the late king, who she understood from recent press reports may long ago have commanded his attention. She included a picture of herself and signed the letter with her full, real, and almost-never-used name, Helen C. Lander.

  Clarine had told LaRue all of this over the phone, while he was in Jackson trying to make a first round of repairs on his family life. That work was difficult, since he was also contemplating what roles prison and Clarine Lander might play in the life ahead of him. During his time at home, the television had provided a steadily unsettling background music: Jeb Magruder had taken his turn pleading guilty to obstruction of justice; and on a trip to New Orleans, Nixon had succumbed to accumulated frustrations by giving his press secretary a hard shove in full view of the cameras.

  Considered against everything else, Larrie’s caper seemed fraught with unnecessary peril. Her hope was to wangle a prison visit with Hunt, and to explore—delicately, she promised—whether the MOOT envelope might have gotten scooped up during the first burglary of the DNC. She had reminded LaRue that, if it had, there was probably no way Hunt could connect him to it: an initial letter from their Canadian contact—she distinctly remembered its arrival, along with Ike LaRue’s bird gun—had promised that the investigators would communicate about the “incident” without mentioning any names or any identifiable circumstances.

  The whole idea was mildly crazy, thought LaRue, but Larrie would not be deterred.

  And then she’d gotten a reply from Hunt, the envelope from Danbury sporting a new “Progress in Electronics” stamp that some wit in the prison PO had sold to the convicted wiretapper. The letter said that Hunt would enjoy meeting her at the Montgomery County Detention Center outside Washington, his prison home away from home, where they had him stay whenever he was needed in the capital for testimony before a grand jury or committee. He was pleased to say that Miss Lander, as a reader and fellow writer, was permitted to visit him. Only journalists were not allowed, and even that restriction was breachable: Time’s David Beckwith had gotten in by saying he was a lawyer—which he was.

  So that’s where they were due, at the “MCDC,” at one o’clock. LaRue wished they were already on the road, and his nervousness only increased when the phone rang. But as soon as he recognized the caller to be John Mitchell, gloom replaced his jitters.

  “I’ve got a new telephone number to give you,” said the former attorney general.

  LaRue wrote it down.

  “I’m at the Essex House, but it’s a private line,” Mitchell explained.

  “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  “Yes,” said Mitchell.

  While Clarine continued to read and smoke out on the balcony, Mitchell informed LaRue that he had finally left 1030 Fifth Avenue, and Martha, after she’d smashed a mirror in the apartment and brushed Ajax onto his oil portrait. If her drinking got any worse, he could expect to have his actual face assaulted.

  “Okay, pal,” was all LaRue could manage to say. He was touched—and god-awfully sorrowful—that Mitchell should want to maintain a thread of connection to him, a man making things worse for his old boss with every visit to the special prosecutor’s office.

  LaRue hung up thinking yet again that he himself might have kept Watergate from ever happening—if down in Key Biscayne a year and a half ago he’d just raised his voice of protest a couple of decibels and said they would be nuts to give Gordon Liddy one thin dime.

  Clarine stayed calm as could be all the way to the Detention Center. LaRue sensed folly in what they were doing, but he was soothed by the spell of her confidence. There was also this to consider: Risky as her retrieval operation might be, was it any worse than allowing that old investigative report to float free in the world? And, aside from all else: however peculiar Clarine’s scheme, participation in it kept him from the kind of brooding he had done back home in Jackson.

  “You got your alibi?” he asked her. He was worried about the warden and the guards, no matter that the visit had been approved.

  “I’ve even got my lipstick,” she replied, putting on a fresh coat of it once he parked the car.

  As it happened, no one asked her a single inconvenient question. The guard in the visitors’ room stayed mostly out of earshot and let her sit across a small table from Hunt, without even a wire mesh between them. The inmate was permitted to bring a folder of papers with him. Even so, despite such leniencies, Clarine could now say she understood what prison pallor is. Hunt was even thinner than she had imagined; he bore no resemblance to any of his
fictional heroes and fantasy projections.

  “It’s very good of you to see me, Mr. Hunt.”

  “I was delighted to get your letter. I thought it discerning and very generous.”

  “How are you getting on here—and up in Connecticut?”

  Hunt laughed, hoarsely. “It’s a long commute, and I’m not exactly on the Eastern Shuttle. Handcuffed in the back of a van, you know. I’m more or less a professional witness these days, like one of those doctors whose career consists of testifying for the insurance companies.”

  “Are you writing another novel?”

  “Kind of you to ask,” said Hunt. “But no. Not at the moment. I’m at work on two pieces of nonfiction. The lesser of them is my opening statement for the Ervin Committee. I’ll be testifying the week after next.” He extracted several sheets of paper from his folder, as if they actually were the pages of a novel-in-progress and he was asking an admirer if she’d like to hear any of it. When Clarine indicated she would, he recited the following passage from the statement he was preparing: “I have been incarcerated for six months. For a time I was in solitary confinement. I have been physically attacked and robbed in jail. I have suffered a stroke. I have been transferred from place to place, manacled and chained, hand and foot. I am isolated from my four motherless children. The funds provided me and others who participated in the break-in have long since been exhausted.”

  Clarine shook her head sadly, without overdoing it, the kind of gesture that had once made a drama coach at Bailey Junior High School tell her she could go far. “And your reviewers accuse you of having no sense of proportion,” she said.

  Hunt took another set of stapled papers from the folder, a draft of the motion to vacate his conviction.

  “Please,” said Clarine. “Go ahead.”

  He scanned it and selected the crux of his argument: “Whether or not the evidence, unexposed because of now notorious corruption by government officials, would have established the defendant’s innocence, such misconduct so gravely violated his constitutional rights as to require dismissal of the proceedings.”

  Clarine nodded. To make sure she understood, Hunt offered some extemporaneous explanation: “They burned the notebooks I kept in my White House safe. John Dean let the acting head of the FBI do it.”

  Clarine again nodded, wondering if the MOOT envelope had gone up in the same blaze.

  “A thirty-five-year sentence for abetting a burglary,” Hunt intoned, with the Ancient Mariner’s practiced repetition. “Given to a man with no prior criminal record.”

  “How do you pass your time?” Clarine asked. “Aside from working on your statements.”

  “Here I more or less just go to court. In Danbury I’m one of the prison librarians.”

  Clarine wondered if LaRue’s poor vision would doom him to manual labor once he went away. If so, maybe he could help to maintain the tennis courts she’d heard Danbury had. He might like that; Fred played a surprisingly aggressive game, tracking the ball with an animal instinct beyond the weak powers of his eyes and ears. Her curiously durable feeling for him now made her get down to business with Hunt. She removed her lime-green jacket with its three-quarter-length sleeves, revealing Dorothy Hunt’s jade brooch clipped to her white blouse. She noted Hunt’s immediate recognition of it.

  “You’re not a writer,” he said, with equal flashes of anger and confusion. But he was too intrigued to alarm the guard by raising his voice.

  Clarine repressed a sarcastic urge to say “Neither are you.” She silently removed the pin and passed it across the table. The guard remained engrossed in his magazine.

  “I don’t understand,” said Hunt. “Who gave you this? Somebody in the Chicago morgue?”

  “I’ve never been to Chicago in my life,” replied Clarine, who had decided it made sense to cultivate an air of maximum mystery.

  “Why are you giving this to me?” asked Hunt.

  “Because I want something in return.” She paused. “Did you ever possess an envelope with the word ‘MOOT’ written across it?”

  Hunt peered at Clarine, trying to figure out who might have sent her here. Not Justice or the White House—neither would dare—but the Agency? For reasons swathed in a dozen different layers of camouflage? A decided possibility. But could she also be some mysterious friend of his wife’s, one of several he suspected Dorothy had made, during those six months of stress, without telling him?

  Clarine could tell from the look in Hunt’s eyes that the MOOT envelope had not gone up in smoke with his notebooks, that it still existed. She decided to challenge him directly: “Wherever you put that envelope, it’s still there, isn’t it?”

  “Suppose I could get it for you,” said Hunt. “Why give me the pin now, instead of after I’ve delivered?”

  “The pin is lovely, but it’s not very expensive, or important. You’re not going to do anything for me because of it.”

  “So then why would I? Do anything for you, that is.”

  Clarine made an effort to sound like a character in The Berlin Ending. “Don’t think about this little jade pin,” she said. “Think of the Rosetta Stone.” However preposterous, she wanted him to believe that’s what she was.

  And he was regarding her—this sudden apparition, beautiful and duplicitous—as if she might indeed, somehow, be what would deliver him from the whole fifteen-month nightmare of shame, embarrassment, and death. Could she be the person able to demonstrate that no one—from Richard Nixon to the special prosecutor to himself—had ever known what this affair was really about?

  “I think I know where to find what you want,” he said at last.

  “Good,” said Clarine. “Think about it.”

  Eager not to overplay her hand, hoping to retain her aura, she got up and put her jacket on, then signaled to the drowsy guard that she was ready to be let out.

  “How can I contact you?” asked Hunt.

  “You have an address and phone number. Use one of them when you figure out how to get the envelope.”

  She saw him look at her with a reasonable certainty that she had nothing to do with the authorities currently oppressing him. In return, she knew that he would not talk, that he was seeing fine possibilities in her that must not be put at risk.

  Once she was in the car, LaRue, who had imagined her running a gauntlet of thugs, asked, “Wolf whistles?”

  “Not a one. Not even from him.”

  “Really? Even when he must have realized that the picture you sent doesn’t do you justice?”

  “He doesn’t have the strength to whistle,” Clarine explained, with unexpected sadness.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  SEPTEMBER 30, 1973

  CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

  Kissinger had at last become secretary of state, and Rose had a new title, too—Executive Assistant to the President. She was thoroughly indifferent to it. “Personal secretary” had been fine, and this new moniker wasn’t saving her from some of the worst scut work she’d ever been asked to perform. Here it was, past five o’clock on a Sunday, and here she was, amidst the mosquitoes of Camp David, a place she couldn’t stand, trying to transcribe eight of the “White House tapes” so that their side would know exactly what it was arguing about with Sirica.

  She had been at it for two days on a Sony 800B with no pedal. She’d yet to complete a single reel and she had a splitting headache. Three aspirin hadn’t killed it, and she didn’t think she could wait another fifteen minutes for cocktails. She had the TV on in the background, and the one station they got up here in Hooterville was broadcasting some week-in-review program. Agnew, filmed yesterday out in Los Angeles, was bellowing to a Republican women’s luncheon—“I will not resign if indicted! I will not resign if indicted!”—and by the time he finished, some of the gals were standing on the tables, roaring approval and waving napkins.

  Agnew was sleek as a seal in a circus, comfortable in his body and expensive suit, and always beautifully groomed. From the moment Rose first saw him
in ’68, she’d spotted him for an excellent dancer, and she’d not been disappointed the couple of times they’d been out on the floor together. She remained sympathetic to this bluff, manly character, even if he’d turned out to be a little crooked. Right now he was being killed, deliberately, by leaks from Richardson and all the career Democrats at Justice, and even if she didn’t rise to her feet here inside Dogwood Cottage, Rose liked the sound of him fighting back.

  Howard Hunt, whose testimony the TV was now showing, did nothing for her: a real oddball, like some disappointed professor or severe, scholarly priest. Liddy was supposed to be even stranger, but he still refused to testify, period, and that, in Rose’s book, made him the most stand-up guy of all.

  God, these tapes. The other day, when the boss approached her with the project, he’d made it sound like a piece of cake. “Rose, you’re such a fast typist. I’ll bet you have all eight of them done before we head back to Washington Monday morning.” Fat chance! It was agony: listening to a few inches at a time; pressing the PAUSE button; each squeaky rewinding like a dentist’s drill. She had to strain to make out one voice from another when everybody talked at once, and it was impossible to hear anybody’s words over the rattle of coffee cups, the tapping of pencils, or an airplane passing overhead. The whole thing made her despair. And having to do it here only made it worse. She’d give anything to be home inside the cozy hive of Watergate West, ready to spend Sunday night by herself.

  “How’s it coming?” asked Richard Nixon.

  “Jesus, you scared me,” said Rose, before laughing.

  The president had just come back from the pool. He was wearing a short-sleeved madras shirt above his still-wet swim trunks. Tufts of chest hair, more black than gray, sprouted from his open collar, showing off a virility he usually took pains to hide. Rose had always thought his visits to the barber bordered on the compulsive; he’d been afraid of his own five o’clock shadow long before people said it had cost him the debates with Kennedy.