Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Sorry,” said Nixon. “And sorry this is turning out to be such awful work.” He put a towel over one of the chair cushions and sat down.

  She smiled. “You’re always talking about ‘three yards and a cloud of dust.’ Well, this is six inches of tape and a bunch of static.”

  “You mind?” asked the president, putting his finger on the PLAY button.

  “Be my guest.”

  A cacophony of cross talk emerged from the speaker. After about twenty seconds Nixon shut it off.

  “Three voices?” he asked.

  “Yes,” answered Rose. “You, Bob, and John. As soon as I’m sure John has left the room, I can stop transcribing this one. Al called back a couple of hours ago, after double-checking: the subpoena only calls for the part of this conversation that’s between you and John.”

  Nixon nodded. “When is this one from?”

  “Three days after the break-in. Just before lunch on a Tuesday.” She pressed the button to play a little more.

  “Who just whistled?” asked the president.

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  But both could now hear Nixon mentioning Ely, Nevada, the first lady’s birthplace. He was responding to Haldeman, who’d just brought up a campaign trip Pat had finished making to South Dakota. Nixon was noting that her parents had been married in that state before moving to Ely.

  He pressed the STOP button. “Take a break. Let’s go have a drink and dinner.”

  “No arguments from me,” said Rose.

  Everyone at the table was so sympathetic to her ordeal that they practically sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” But what really cheered her up, along with a third glass of Riesling, was a change in plans: they’d be going back to Washington late tonight instead of early tomorrow morning. The helicopter would leave around nine-thirty, after a movie. Refreshed by the prospect of sleeping in her own bed, she decided to go back to work and complete at least this first bear of a tape while the rest of them watched the film.

  She took her coffee back to Dogwood, switched on the IBM Selectric, and hit PLAY on the Sony. She somehow hoped to hear Ehrlichman’s absence, if not his actual exit, but it was like proving a negative. Was he still there while HRH and the president remarked on how the EOB ought to be checked for Democrat bugs? Or when they expressed disbelief that anybody could equate this bit of campaign hijinx with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers? As she listened to this portion of the conversation, she actually hoped Ehrlichman was still in the room: what was being said, if under subpoena, could actually help. The boss and Haldeman sounded surprised about the burglary, and their remarks showed a sense of proportion that the other side had long since lost.

  Even so, Rose did not enjoy having to hear HRH’s voice for the first time in months. She’d not even watched his Ervin testimony, and as she listened to more of this tape—not transcribing now, just searching for a hint of Ehrlichman’s whereabouts—it was to Richard Nixon’s voice that she more naturally inclined:

  RN: Pat was telling me about the fundraiser at Taft Schreiber’s place. Reagan was a big hit, but our own guys were acting sort of odd.

  HRH: Well, they’d gotten word of this break-in thing just before.

  The boss clearly didn’t want to pursue the subject:

  RN: She told me about looking down the hill from Schreiber’s mansion. How it got her remembering the streetcar from Whittier into L.A. Well, she hasn’t done badly for a girl from Ely. “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

  HRH, who didn’t smoke, drink, go to doctors, or watch much TV, didn’t seem to get the reference to the advertising catchphrase. The boss let it pass:

  RN: Jesus, you know, I keep thinking about us in California ten years ago—one awful day after another on that campaign, everything ending at the Beverly Hilton.

  Rose, too, remembered every day of ’62’s horrible grind, right through the “last press conference.”

  RN: And now we’ve got Lew Wasserman and the rest of Hollywood eating out of our hands—if we don’t screw things up! Jesus, back in ’62 I think we had Adolphe Menjou and Irene Dunne.

  He laughed at the antiquity of these celluloid names, but Haldeman still said nothing, as if not wanting to revisit ten-year-old emotions he probably hadn’t felt in the first place. Nixon was left to monologize:

  RN: You know, I’m not sure I want to go back to San Clemente in ’77. Even with all we’ve done on the house. I’ll be sixty-four, and I think I’d rather write the book and do everything else from New York. I certainly wouldn’t have any trouble selling Pat on that idea.

  Even now no response:

  RN: Where do you see yourself, Bob?

  Startled to be asked, Haldeman finally came to verbal life:

  HRH: Back at J. Walter Thompson, I guess. Back in L.A.

  RN: Really? You don’t want to write your own book? Or lecture? Christ, you’ve got a lot more to teach in the way of political science than a bunch of professors at Harvard and Yale.

  HRH: I never really saw this as my life’s work. It was a chance to serve you—

  RN: And I’ve put you through some long hauls: ’60, ’62. Even ’56 couldn’t have been that much fun.

  HRH: Well, those were just intervals between everything else. I never wanted to solder myself to you like Rose.

  The boss said nothing for a moment. She waited for words in her defense, but they never came.

  RN: Well, it takes its toll, this life. The one I really worry about, because of Martha’s drinking, is Mitchell. I mean, how the hell did he let this break-in happen? He’s not himself, and it’s because of her. She’s taken over his whole attention span.

  HRH: Oh, for sure.

  Rose hated the idea of Nixon being led to thoughts of Martha Mitchell by HRH’s mention of her. Above all, she hated the idea of Haldeman as the standard of mental health: I never wanted to solder myself to you like Rose.

  Looking down at the turning reels and fearing whatever she might hear next, she experienced a sudden fury, a desire to get rid of this tape, or at least this portion of it, which she realized she could do, since the continuing absence of Ehrlichman’s voice by now did prove a negative. He couldn’t possibly still be in that room.

  Pushing her coffee cup to one side, and feeling the effects of the wine, she rewound the tape to the point at which they began talking of Ely, Nevada, and then she struck the RECORD button, a gesture more satisfying than popping a balloon. She let the button up but then pressed it back down, five more times, until this whole personal, irrelevant conversation was finished and the two men, the president and his chief of staff, began to discuss the Democrats’ convention, which in the frozen world of the tapes was still approaching.

  Ninety minutes later she was buckling herself into a seat on the helicopter next to Pat.

  “How was the movie?” she asked the first lady.

  “Horse manure in the living room.”

  Rose laughed, knowing Pat put up with all the westerns only for her husband’s sake. “Which one?”

  “Lonely Are the Brave.”

  Rose sighed. “Ain’t it the truth?”

  The helicopter rose above Catoctin Mountain. The air was already crisp with fall, and the leaves would be blazing in another week or two.

  “We’ve got to get you some help with this awful transcription job,” said Pat. “But who else can we trust?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind.”

  Pat touched Rose’s hand. “It’s going to be a terrible few months for everybody. Will you come for Thanksgiving?”

  “Here?”

  “No,” said Pat, with a laugh, well aware that Rose disliked Camp David. “At the White House.”

  “Oh, absolutely. That’d be swell. Thank you.”

  “Do you want to bring Bob Gray?”

  Lately, the PR man had been filling Don Carnevale’s old role.

  “No,” said Rose, after a moment’s thought, “but it’s sweet of you to ask.”

  “I teased him about
you at some reception last week.”

  “I’ll brain you,” said Rose, laughing.

  “I asked him, ‘Has she cooked for you yet?’ ”

  “Yeah?”

  “And he said, ‘She’s great with ice cubes.’ ”

  The two women laughed, playing out the fiction that Gray, another confirmed bachelor, was a serious suitor. The pretense was designed to build Rose up, to make it appear she was playing the field, and to keep the lilac dust of spinsterhood from settling on her.

  “It would be nice,” said Pat, “to have Thanksgiving at a restaurant some year. Of course it’d be way too much bother. And if we commandeer the whole place to ourselves—well, what’s the point? Besides, the only restaurant Dick ever wants to go to, whatever the city, is Trader Vic’s.”

  “Where would you go?” asked Rose. “If you could pick any place.”

  “Oh, somewhere simple and festive. Like Gino’s, up in New York, over on Lexington Avenue.” She seemed to catch herself. “You know,” she said. “We’ve lunched there.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Rose.

  “Oh, sure we did,” insisted Pat, a bit too brightly. Rose could see she was afraid to show she’d been thinking of some happy memory that involved another person entirely.

  “Anyway,” Pat went on, eager to finish with the subject, “it’s an idle fantasy.” She closed her eyes, as if needing to doze.

  Rose gave no more thought to Thanksgiving. She leaned back in her seat and felt a cold draft of air coming through some microscopic space between a window and the helicopter’s fuselage. The last of the Riesling’s glow had worn off. She was stone sober and beginning to feel a terrible unease. Looking toward the metal strongbox with the tapes, which rested at the feet of the military aide, she wondered about what she had done. She tried to nap, but it was no use. Her eyes went back to the metal box, and her mind rehearsed the same anxious thoughts until the helicopter landed on the South Lawn.

  Eleven sleepless hours later, she was back in the office, working off a different tape recorder—one with a pedal—that Steve Bull had gotten hold of. With this fancy Uher 5000, she was determined to see the whole job, all eight tapes, through to completion. But she could not concentrate. She had already, twice, deliberately re-erased the erasure, as if it were telltale. Angry over last night’s loss of control, she had vowed not to have so much as a glass of wine between now and New Year’s.

  But nothing could get rid of the guilty, apprehensive feeling. When she could stand it no longer, she got up from her chair and walked to the Oval Office, slipping in between appointments the president had with Ziegler and Haig.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she confessed.

  Nixon looked at her blankly, prompting her to explain that she’d just been reviewing the last part of the June twentieth tape—to make absolutely certain Ehrlichman had left the room and it was safe to stop transcribing. “You know, just to be triple-sure. And then I got distracted by a phone call. I think I hit the RECORD button instead of STOP, and I must have kept my foot on the pedal. I now realize the tape kept running and erasing itself. Oh God.”

  “For how long?” Nixon asked calmly.

  “Four or five minutes.”

  This was a stupid, dangerous fib. She hadn’t timed it, but she knew the gap was considerably longer than that. Still, five minutes sounded more believable and less embarrassing than fifteen or twenty, and thus she decided to place one lie atop another. “I feel like such a fool,” she said, with real distress. “This is awful. In all my years of working with your Dictabelts, I’ve never done something like this.”

  “Rose,” said Nixon, “don’t be hard on yourself. You’re exhausted, and you’re doing a tremendous job. This is a mistake of no consequence. They don’t even want that part of the tape.”

  She looked at him with heartfelt gratitude, if not exactly relief. He was always this way when face-to-face with a subordinate who’d let him down. It might just be part of that loathing for confrontation he shared with Pat, but if you were the subordinate, it felt like genuine tenderness, even nobility.

  “Thank you,” said Rose, her voice catching. “I know you’re right. But they always want more and more. I mean Cox and Sirica and Ervin. I’m afraid that eventually they’ll ask for everything—including the part of the conversation with just Bob.”

  “Well,” said Nixon, with the reassurance of an older brother, “we’re going to fight not to give ’em anything. And we’re gonna win, Rose.”

  She reached over and patted his arm. “Thank you, Mr. President.” She left without another word, and with no trace of last night’s disappointment that he hadn’t defended her to Haldeman.

  A half hour later, Haig was walking the halls of the West Wing, as he always did, pepping people up, stoking their morale. Rose could imagine him as the department-store floorwalker he’d been long ago, before entering the army. She sometimes teased him about it and had once stuck a boutonnière in his lapel. When he entered her office, she smiled, but her hands were still trembling.

  “The boss tells me you’re upset,” he said.

  “I’m very, very peeved with myself. I don’t usually burst in there like I did. I like to let you know.” Even HRH had never been allowed to keep her out, but dropping in on the president was a privilege she rarely exercised. That she’d used it this morning to lie about something so stupid only added to her shame.

  “Well,” said Haig. “I just talked to Buzhardt in our little legal shop, and he says they’ve definitely asked for only the Ehrlichman stuff on that one. He checked the subpoena same as I did, so stop worrying that strawberry-blond head about it.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She executed their Colonel Woods–General Haig routine as cheerfully as she could, but when he left the room she began to cry.

  If anyone later claimed to have seen her in tears, she would deny that, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  OCTOBER 12, 1973

  1100 CREST DRIVE, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA; EAST ROOM OF THE WHITE HOUSE

  At 6:50 p.m., while the television murmured from the other side of his large study, Elliot Richardson continued painting his watercolor of a buff-breasted sandpiper. The brown dots he was applying to the bird’s head briefly brought to mind the crew cut of Bob Haldeman, who now seemed to belong to a remote political era.

  Richardson rinsed his brush and looked up to read the inscription on a new plaque hanging in this same section of the study where he kept his easel. The engraved quotation came from his August speech to the American Bar Association:

  Finding myself a citizen of the Watergate era, I have decided that one direct contribution I can make to countering suspicion of political influence in the Department of Justice is not only to forswear politics for myself but to ask my principal colleagues to do the same.

  The editorials that had followed the speech—“A strong man has brought a new day”—were, he’d modestly remarked as they came out, “extremely gratifying.”

  Anne poked her head in. “Guess what? The White House operator just called. They want us in the East Room tonight—eight forty-five the absolute latest.”

  Both of them looked at Richardson’s third martini, which stood not far from the paint box.

  “A driver’s coming at eight-fifteen,” said Anne, before she rushed off to put herself together.

  Nixon’s announcement of a new vice president—surely the event prompting this Friday-night summons—had been necessitated by the resignation of Spiro T. Agnew, which Richardson had personally overseen on Wednesday. He’d traveled up to Baltimore to represent the government in the courtroom where Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax-evasion charge. As late as Monday, the attorney general had been hoping to send him to prison, but he’d finally had to settle for the resignation, thanks to a growing fear of “double impeachment.” As Haig had liked putting it, Nixon needed to “outlast” his own VP; otherwise, if the Democrats forced Nixon out first, Agnew would succeed to the presidency and
then have to be removed as well.

  Richardson had argued for jail because the crimes merited it—taking cash right inside the White House! Maryland contractors had gone on paying Agnew for business he’d steered their way years before while governor. The gravity of a jail term would also diminish any appearance that Richardson’s real goal was to sweep aside a rival for the ’76 presidential nomination. As it was, some clever local law professor had filed a conflict-of-interest brief on Agnew’s behalf.

  But “double impeachment” had remained a formidable specter, and so on Wednesday Richardson had stood before the judge in Baltimore to offer three reasons why Spiro Agnew should be disgraced but not imprisoned: respect for the office of the vice presidency; human compassion; appreciation for Agnew’s taking the deal and sparing the nation a lengthy trial on the charges at hand.

  Three reasons; three lies. Richardson had no more respect for the vice presidency than he had for Spiro Agnew. Rarely in fact had a man and an office been so well matched. And the only person the bastard was sparing was himself, from certain conviction.

  When Richardson had spoken with the president on Wednesday evening, reporting to him on the resignation arrangements, he’d tried to lighten things by saying he hoped the deal wasn’t an example of “permissiveness,” one of Agnew’s great themes during his glory days on the stump. The joke had fallen flat. “Thank you for doing your job” was all Nixon said, quite solemnly, as if having to remove Agnew, rather than showing him leniency, had been the distasteful task.

  As it was, this tepid “thank you” exceeded any presidential praise Richardson had received after that ABA speech. Things between him and Nixon had been frosty to the point of incivility ever since he’d suggested that the time might have arrived for the president to be using a personal attorney, and not the White House counsel, to handle his Watergate defense.