Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  Rebozo turned to Nixon. “There’s only one thing you could have improved upon.”

  The president smiled and asked, “What would that be?” Feeding Bebe straight lines was one of his few forms of relaxation.

  “You should have brought Richardson up here to mix the cocktails. They’d have been a little stronger.”

  Word had gotten around Washington of Haig’s phone call to the well-lit attorney general the night before the so-called Massacre.

  Nixon laughed. “You know, Elliot’s crowd are now saying we’ve deliberately been spreading the word about his boozy run-ins with the law. Not true.”

  “I’ve only been around him a couple of times,” said Rebozo. “But let me tell you, he was so marinated, I thought, If this guy opts for cremation over burial, the body’s going to burn for six months.”

  Pat looked at Tricia, the crueler of her daughters, who was laughing. She herself liked Bebe just fine; it was better for Dick to have one friend than no friends, as had been the case when they married, but she didn’t want this—the two of them joking as if they still had the upper hand. Black humor she could understand; this was just stupid.

  “I tell you, though,” said Nixon. “Haig’s made no bones about calling Elliot a liar, and I’m all for getting that out. He was there. He welshed on an agreement that he’d made himself.”

  Pat imagined what would be happening if Richardson had kept his word. John Stennis would be spending Thanksgiving with his hand cupped to his ear, leaning in to listen to all those half-audible tapes and going out of his mind.

  “What have you got for us tonight?” the president asked the steward, who would know what movie they were rigging up.

  “The Snows of Kilimanjaro, sir.”

  Pat laughed, sardonically. “Gregory Peck.”

  Nixon looked puzzled.

  “He’s on your enemies list.”

  The president smirked. “My list. I never even heard of the thing until Dean mentioned it. If it belonged to anybody, it was Colson’s list.”

  Pat rose from the table and, without excusing herself, walked off to her bedroom. To her considerable surprise, Dick followed to see what was the matter. For a moment she was touched, but she knew the flash of gratitude would not be enough to cap the gusher of rage that seemed at last ready to escape. It had been building for months, and had nearly burst forth during the helicopter ride up here.

  “Anything wrong, honey?” her husband asked. “I thought we’d call Rose and say hello. I was sort of hoping you’d get on the line.”

  “Do you know why Rose isn’t here?”

  Nixon laughed, effortfully. “Well, Rose has become a city girl.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a reporter,” Pat snapped. “I told her months ago that we’d have Thanksgiving in the White House, but then the horns started honking and we had to come here so we didn’t go out of our minds like three years ago. And Rose would have come here—not liking Camp David is just something she says—but she didn’t want to come because she’s too nervous. Do you know where she is spending Thanksgiving? ”

  Nixon looked down at his wing-tipped shoes. “With one of her brothers, I assumed.”

  Pat threw a balled-up tissue into the wastebasket. “She’s with the family of her lawyer. It’s the first time she’s ever had a lawyer. After dinner they’re going to work on getting her ready for court on Monday.”

  The attorney had been retained several days ago, when Fred Buzhardt had discovered—Oh, by the way—that Sirica’s subpoena for the tape Rose messed up did in fact cover the conversation with Haldeman as well as Ehrlichman. He’d also discovered that the gap—he called it a “phenomenon”—went on for eighteen and a half minutes, not four or five. The story of the blank stretch had broken yesterday, just after the president had assured a meeting of Republican governors that there would be no more nasty Watergate surprises. And Rose had been ordered to court for a fact-finding session about the maimed recording.

  “Well,” said Nixon, still regarding his shoes, “Rhyne is a good man. A good lawyer, too.” They’d gotten Rose his old Duke classmate who’d served a year as president of the American Bar Association.

  “She was lucky to get anyone,” said Pat. “Every lawyer in town is booked up with Watergate clients, from John Mitchell to John Dean!”

  “Pat, calm down.” As he spoke the words, Nixon realized that he’d never before had to use them in thirty-three years of married life.

  She was realizing the same thing. It was all too much, and it was killing her. Five days ago, in front of the press, who were now spreading lies about their tax returns, he’d let slip the phrase “I’m not a crook.” He’d said it more in desperation than defiance—but the awful vulgarity of it! Like some line in a gangster picture being made on the Warner Brothers lot. She could feel the winds beginning to shred the starched curtains she had managed to keep over the windows of the miner’s shack for the past fifty years. Her whole life was giving way.

  At a loss for anything more to say about Rose, Nixon remarked, almost airily: “I called Jackie Kennedy this morning.”

  With her back to him, looking out the window and down the mountain, furious at the change of subject and disgusted by the simple sound of his voice, Pat responded: “Why don’t you call her on Jack’s birthday sometime?” She whirled around and showed him an expression he’d never seen, a strange but discernible mixture of deep sympathy and high-octane rage.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, even now not raising her voice. “I know they’re to blame.” She didn’t have to tell him who they were: the Kennedys and everyone else who’d made him into the archfiend since the days of Jerry Voorhis and Helen Douglas, and who’d flung five times the mud and brimstone he had. “I would have made an enemies list twice as long as yours and Colson’s, and I would have done something to get the people on it. Anything to be rid of them forever—the way I thought they were gone from our lives after ’60, and then ’62, and then—surely!—at this time last year. I hate your enemies, but you love them. You love their existence; they’re what gives you your own. That’s why I’m sick with anger at you: for bringing us to the top of this awful mountain. We’re never going to get back down without being devoured!”

  The slightest narrowing of her eyes was usually enough to drive him from a room. But he just stood there, for one more long moment, as if looking into an atomic blast. Finally, he turned to leave.

  “I want to go home,” said Pat.

  He turned back to face her, aware that his own eyes were glistening with tears the same as hers. “Where’s home?” he asked, hoping to ingratiate himself with a sheepish shrug, to gain forgiveness by reminding her of how they’d held on together for the whole long, improbable ride, from one coast to the other and back, and then back again.

  “I know exactly where home is!” cried Pat, before turning back to the window, turning her back on him, willing him out of the room. She was shaking, and wouldn’t be able to breathe until she’d had a cigarette. If he didn’t leave right now, she feared she would tell him everything, that home was a widower’s apartment on upper Madison Avenue and that she hadn’t seen it in six years.

  But doing that would only add Tom Garahan to the stack of victims who were piling up like a cord of wood.

  Once Dick was gone, she sat on the bed and smoked three cigarettes in the dark room. Half an hour went by before she came out and quietly took a seat with everyone else, Dick included, beneath the snows of Kilimanjaro. She watched the gangrene eat away at Gregory Peck’s leg, and she watched the vultures circle.

  She felt calm returning. The storm that had gathered inside her for months had, in the space of an hour, spent itself. She knew that she would be with him to the end.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  NOVEMBER 27, 1973

  WATERGATE WEST

  “Cheer up, Rose,” said Charles Rhyne, the following Tuesday afternoon. “Tomorrow should be only half a day, and that ought to do it. At
least for a while.”

  She smiled as gamely as she could.

  “And just promise me you’ll think about it,” her lawyer importuned.

  Rose shook her head sternly; what they’d been discussing was out of the question. “Charlie, there’s about as much chance of that happening as of me making that peach cobbler recipe your wife gave me on Thanksgiving. But thanks anyway, to both of you.”

  Rhyne smiled, but tried to indicate with a tilt of his head that he would at some point again be bringing up the subject. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. Now let me out of here,” she said, managing a laugh as she fumbled with the passenger-door handle inside the lawyer’s big sedan. Instead of leaving her at the clam-shelled entrance to Watergate West, he’d driven into the complex’s underground garage, private property, where the press, who had already today given chase at the courthouse, wouldn’t be allowed.

  Rose’s day and a half on the witness stand—in combat with that miniskirted bitch from the prosecutor’s office—had been humiliating enough, but before long the legal principals would have to reassemble in her White House office, in front of some still cameras, so that she could reenact her explanation of how the tape had gotten erased. She had already pantomimed it in the courtroom, maintaining that she’d pushed RECORD instead of STOP—and then held the pedal with her foot—when she leaned over to answer the phone. “But you just now took your foot off the pedal, didn’t you?” asked snide Mrs. Volner. And Rose realized, horribly enough, that she’d in fact done exactly that.

  At last out of Rhyne’s car, she waved goodbye and watched the attorney pull away. She was left to look around the garage in confusion. Her own car, which she’d not taken today, was in a far-off spot on the other side. While searching for the exit, she recognized only one other automobile: Ed Brooke’s blue Mercedes, which he was immensely proud of, though he always took care to tell people that the dealer had given him a good break on a demonstration model. He’d once given Rose a spin in it; the two of them lived on the same floor here, and he’d shouted “Hop in!” one Saturday after spotting her walking on Virginia Avenue.

  In the garage’s half-light, her admiration of the beautiful car quickly curdled into anger at its owner. The anger then accelerated with a speed that stunned her—like the “zero to sixty” they cited in the car commercials. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Brooke had called for the boss’s resignation on Issues and Answers, and he’d repeated his suggestion to Richard Nixon’s face at one of the little cocktail gatherings the president had started to have for Republican senators, buttering them up in case things came to an impeachment trial.

  Al Haig had called to tell her about the incident—that was the only word for it—the night it happened. She’d been so steamed she nearly marched down the hall, from her apartment to Ed’s, to give her favorite dancing partner a piece of her mind. There was no risk of having his wife open the door—they’d been separated for years—but his TV-reporter girlfriend might be there, and Rose had finally decided she didn’t want to risk having her witness a little altercation.

  Up from the parking garage, safe inside her apartment, she took off her coat and mixed a drink. She’d decided she was off the wagon until Sirica’s court finished with her; but nothing was going to help her relax tonight. She’d had a horrible moment leaving the courthouse, when somebody shouted, “Hey, Stretch!” And here she was now, personal secretary to the president of the United States and afraid to put on the television news! She was likewise dreading next week’s newsmagazines: God knows what the pictures they’ll be taking at her desk will turn out like. The outfit she had on today was a mistake: the colors were too loud and the fabric too clingy, and she’d been worried about midriff bulge all through the reenactment.

  She sat on her sofa, fiddling with the Harry Winston ring that Don had given her, a small ruby set inside the sharp-edged gold petals of a rose, and she wondered how long this would go on. A panel of scientists was now supposed to study the “integrity” of the tape, and no one expected their report for at least a month.

  Tomorrow, once court finished and she got back to the office, she would again have to confront all the telegrams that had been piling up like yellow sand dunes ever since Cox’s firing. No instruction had been given about when they could be destroyed, or what sort of sampling had to be saved and sent to the Archives.

  She looked at the light now coming through the crack beneath the apartment’s front door, as if it were beckoning her into the hallway that could still take her to Ed Brooke. She was drinking her cocktail too fast, swirling the ice cubes and wondering what it was with these supposed Republicans from Massachusetts like him and Richardson. The boss had campaigned for Brooke when he won his seat in ’66; he’d encouraged him to run for it in the first place. In fact, Ed had once told her that Martin Luther King voted for Ike in ’56 because Richard Nixon, solid on civil rights, was on the ticket. And here was Ed’s gratitude!

  Before she even realized it—in almost the same way she had struck the RECORD button up at Camp David—she was on her feet and out the apartment door. She heard it shut behind her, with its modern metal thud, as she strode the carpeted hallway to Brooke’s residence. Ignoring the little push-button doorbell, she rapped on the painted surface with Don’s sharp-edged ring.

  Brooke opened it almost immediately, in his shirtsleeves, with a drink in his hand. “Terpsichore!” he cried, in delighted surprise. “I was just watching you on TV!” She could see him noticing that she had yet to change her dress, and, much worse, she could feel the horrible words that were rising to her lips: You black bastard. She thanked God they didn’t escape, and hated herself for even thinking them. But she hated him more. She was so purple with rage that she couldn’t get any words out.

  Brooke, slow to register her agitation, tried to mollify her. “Rose, come in for a glass of wine. I know you’ve had an awful day.”

  “You ought to drink alone! That way you can’t stab anybody in the back.”

  “I haven’t done that to anyone, Rose.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Rose, Jim Buckley—not exactly a liberal inside the party—agrees with me, and he told the president so at that same meeting.”

  “Then you’re both backstabbers!”

  “Come inside, Rose. Please.”

  His fastidious aversion to a scene only swelled her contempt for him. But in the midst of her own extreme upset, she could still appreciate how bad it would be for the boss if someone were to overhear all this and go to the press.

  She stepped into Brooke’s apartment, but declined the offer of a drink. She also refused to sit.

  “You—and Elliot! The biggest backstabber of all! Why don’t you just get off your high horses and admit you’re no better than the rest of the human race? Did you hear him the other day, when somebody pointed out that it was his word against Haig’s? He came back with ‘I haven’t told a lie since I was thirteen.’ Anybody who says such a thing is the biggest liar you’ll ever meet!”

  Brooke smiled, indulgently. “It’s funny that you should think of me and Elliot as two such peas in a pod. We’ve been rivals nearly forever.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Please nothing. Go back to 1962.”

  “Not my favorite year,” Rose replied.

  “Well, it was certainly mine! I won the state attorney general’s race in Massachusetts that fall. But only after knocking Elliot Richardson’s block off in the Republican primary.”

  Rose laughed straight into his face, imagining this primary battle to have been about as fierce as a game of bridge at the club.

  “There’s very little he and I ever really agreed on,” Brooke explained, softly. “Unless you count that,” he added, pointing to a Boston newspaper that lay open on the couch. “When I went to the Senate in ’67 and he at last got the state AG’s job, I handed that little problem over to him.” Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, had been killed inside a Massachusetts prison
two nights before. Rose now saw his face staring up from the Globe.

  “They stabbed him in the heart, six times,” Brooke said matter-of-factly.

  The shift in subject proved strangely calming, as if Rose were a restive child being soothed with a scary story beside the campfire.

  “Neither Richardson nor I was ever sure he did it,” said Brooke, as he and Rose both regarded DeSalvo’s old mug shot. “We finally put him away on another charge entirely. But I can tell you one thing for sure. The stranglings ended once he was arrested.”

  Rose could remember reading about each one of them in the Daily News during the law-firm years in New York. Every time she did, no matter that she was two hundred miles from Boston, she would get up to check the deadbolt on her front door, before scolding herself for acting like an idiot.

  “At least he got stabbed in the front,” she said, recovering her anger.

  Exasperated now, Brooke sighed. “I’d like you to tell the president—whom I still like, and still admire—”

  “Oh, spare me, Ed.”

  “I’d like you to pass on to him a piece of advice. He ought to get Lee Bailey to replace Charles Alan Wright.”

  Rose could not believe her ears. The president of the United States should hire the lawyer for the Boston Strangler!

  “The president says he’s not a crook,” Brooke explained. “I’d still like to believe him. But if being a crook is now the issue, then he needs a powerhouse criminal lawyer like Bailey instead of a constitutional scholar like Wright.”

  As evenly as she could, through her fury, Rose responded, “I’m sure the president will speak to you again. He’ll have to, on some occasion or other. But I never will.”

  She stormed out, wishing the door were the old-fashioned wooden kind that could still be slammed. With the blood pounding in her ears, she marched toward the elevators instead of her apartment. As she went, Charlie Rhyne’s words repeated themselves inside her head: Promise me you’ll think about it.