Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  She would not think about it, even for her own protection. Rhyne wanted her to tell the press that “certain people” were bent on making her a scapegoat. Yes, that would throw dust in the eyes of the prosecutors, would cast further doubt on the whole sorry erasure “phenomenon,” and help to set up “reasonable doubt” if she were ever charged. But it would also increase suspicion of Richard Nixon himself.

  She pressed the button for the parking-garage level, and her stomach dropped along with the elevator while she remembered the worst moment of all in court. One of the other prosecutors, not bitchy Mrs. Volner, had pointed out that anything she said could be used in later proceedings against her. She was being read her rights.

  She was the one who needed Bailey. If they’d been ready to go after Judy Agnew over the veep’s taxes, they would certainly go after the president’s secretary.

  For a moment, after the elevator doors opened, she just stood still and thought: she would never be able to bear a prosecution; she would rather be strangled by an intruder in her bedroom. Hesitating to step into the dark underground space, she wondered, staring, if she should go back to Ohio, as if she might somehow be safe there. No; even if it were possible, that would be the cowardly thing to do. According to Al Haig, those had been the boss’s words to Brooke in reply to the suggestion that he quit.

  Finally, she walked forward. Her own heels sounded terrifyingly loud and seemed to belong to someone else. She kept expecting Albert DeSalvo to come out from behind one of the concrete pillars, holding a necktie or a rope in his hands. But she pressed on, moved ahead, until she reached Senator Edward Brooke’s blue Mercedes.

  She looked around—no one was in sight—and then she took Don’s sharp-edged ring to the driver’s door, raking it as deeply as she could, leaving a gash that no one would ever fully be able to erase.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  JANUARY 27, 1974

  POTOMAC, MARYLAND, AND WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Inside his second-floor study, Howard Hunt put down the glass of milk he was drinking for his ulcer and rubbed the bursitis in his elbow. He told himself, in the deliberate inner voice he’d learned from Transcendental Meditation, that he was enjoying “a normal Sunday morning at home.” And yet, despite the calm insistence with which he thought the words, he could not, a mere three weeks since his release from prison, fully believe that they were true. Still, the comforting facts remained: a higher court than the Wop’s had deemed his motion for appeal worthy of consideration, and, moreover, declared him entitled to his freedom until a final decision about a new trial could be rendered.

  He was all alone here in Potomac. His daughter Kevan had returned to Smith and his two other grown children, Lisa and St. John, were sharing an apartment over in Kensington. They’d been moved there before Christmas by William Snyder, the new young lawyer Bill Buckley had secured for him. The plan at that point was to sell the Potomac house, since nobody, least of all Hunt himself, had been anticipating his sudden release.

  David, his youngest son, would remain in Miami with Manuel Artime—almost squaring a circle, given that a decade ago, after his release from a Cuban prison for participation in the Bay of Pigs, Artime had spent time with the Hunts. David would be better off around Manuel’s young children than inside this big gloomy house with his mother’s ghost—not to mention the likelihood of his father’s reimprisonment: Leon Jaworski, Cox’s replacement as special prosecutor, had called the appeal “frivolous” and would probably get his way before long.

  Thinking about all this, Hunt realized that he’d forgotten to put the business of Manuel’s long-ago stay with his family into the proposal for an autobiography that he would soon be shopping. Ed Chase at Putnam had told him the book might command six figures, leaving politely unspoken his hope that a memoir by Hunt would recoup some of what the publisher had lost on The Berlin Ending.

  He was hard at the book each day, either here in the study or down in the basement, where he’d set up a work table near the giant imperial flag brought home as a souvenir of his Agency posting to Japan. He was determined that these memoirs would outperform the ones being written by Jeb Magruder and Mitchell’s wife, let alone the book Elliot Richardson was under contract to produce, a surefire snorer on the American political system.

  He left off rubbing his elbow and finished the glass of milk. Unfortunately, the silence of the study seemed even worse than what surrounded him in the basement. The Afghan hound, glad to have him back, occasionally wandered in but didn’t say much. Hunt had put away almost all tangible reminders of Dorothy, including the jade pin from Helen C. Lander, which he’d managed to keep hidden in prison until he got one of his daughters to take it home. He’d explained that the piece of jewelry had only lately been discovered by an honest attendant in the Chicago morgue.

  Since his release he’d wondered almost continually about what Miss Lander had told him. And because the terms of his release allowed him unsupervised movement within the District of Columbia, he had decided that today would be the day to do a little investigation of what she had suggested.

  He rose and went into the bathroom and lightly powdered his hair, adding five years to the five that prison had already etched into him. The powder certainly provided a more subtle transformation than the wig he’d used in the ITT operation a couple of years back—another fiasco that you could lay at the feet of Chuck Colson.

  Putting on a pair of dark glasses, he exited the front door of 11120 River Road and made the long walk to his car. He was soon driving east, past Potomac’s split-rail fences and toward Washington. The fences, alas, reminded him of the five thousand cows whose pastures he had recently had to tend at Allenwood federal prison, a miserable job performed at five a.m., with the flimsiest of coats to protect him from the cold.

  His period as a commuter witness from Danbury had ended when the government decided it was more convenient to park him for a couple of months at Fort Holabird, here in Maryland, where a dozen or so Mafia canaries had proved more appealing company than Jeb Magruder. Holabird’s best feature had been a typewriter that the government provided. He’d at last been able to answer the more rational and interesting of the letters that still came his way, including two additional cryptic communications from Miss Lander.

  But as winter approached he’d been uprooted once more, dispatched to Allenwood, where he might have died from the misery and cold—a “country club,” the journalists called it—had his work detail not eventually been changed from the pastures to a clerical job inside a barn. And then on January 2, twenty-five days ago, he’d been recalled to life, like Dickens’s Dr. Manette, and hustled off to Washington, D.C., whose downtown he was now approaching in a spirit of contentment, actually taking pleasure in the cold air hitting his face through the open car window.

  Although the streets were deserted on this Sunday afternoon, he parked more than two blocks from his destination and purposely left his overcoat in the front seat. Walking south, he looked across Seventeenth Street to the EOB and could almost imagine it was early ’72 and that he was ready to do his mental hopscotch over the black-and-white floor tiles of the building’s corridors, on his way to an afternoon of b.s. and bombast with Gordon Liddy.

  He had to remind himself that his current destination was neither the EOB nor the CRP, which had occupied a third corner at this intersection. He was headed for 1700 Pennsylvania, the site of his old cover job at Robert R. Mullen Company.

  Once inside the lobby, he had no trouble getting past the bored security guard, who left him a bit crestfallen by not asking for the pictureless ID card he’d recently forged, with someone else’s name, at his basement work table. He was soon entering the Mullen offices with the same key he’d used from ’70 through ’72, and which no one had ever thought to ask him to return.

  The premises, where he’d never spent much time, contained not a soul this afternoon, a development that relieved him but also renewed his disappointment. He would have no chance to use the dialo
gue he’d rehearsed in the bathroom mirror at home, no need to tell anyone that he, Harvey Leonard, had just now come down from the firm a floor above, hoping to use the Mullen Company Xerox machine, which Bob Bennett had told him he was welcome to whenever their own was on the fritz. If he ran into someone he actually knew, someone who saw through the powdered hair, his plan was to say that he’d come back, after all this time, simply to return his key, an action just strange enough to comport with the odd personality the newspapers now attributed to him.

  Atop a desk not far from where his own had been, he thought he recognized a few framed pictures of somebody’s children, the color drained from their faces by the photos’ exposure to sunlight, the way his own complexion had faded last year from a lack of the same element. The two buff-colored file cabinets he was seeking were not in the exact place he remembered, but he soon spotted them. He opened the bottom drawer of the nearest one and found inside it a broken stapler, a fold-up umbrella, and—yes, just as it had reappeared to his memory in prison—an interoffice-mail envelope that was secured with a little red string.

  He undid the fastener, reached in, and found another envelope, white and legal-sized and quite thick, which bore a 1957 Canadian postmark. It was addressed to a law firm in Jackson, Mississippi, and had the word “MOOT” written boldly across it, front and back. Too big for the breast pocket of his suit, it fit more comfortably into the right-hand one where he had his keys. He now replaced the outer envelope inside the drawer, slid it shut, and prepared to exit the premises—though not before feeling the old Kilroy-was-here temptation to leave his mark. Not the self-destructive calling card of that personal check left behind in the Watergate Hotel; just some small sign of an improbable job well accomplished. He hated the reputation as a bumbler that he’d acquired in the press.

  But he couldn’t think of anything that would be intelligible. So he shut the single light he’d put on and made his way down to the lobby, past the guard who was now actually dozing, and out onto the street, wondering as he went if he now had the Rosetta Stone to the whole Watergate affair in his jacket pocket. Walking up Seventeenth Street, he passed a magazine store that still had Sirica’s Man of the Year Time cover in its window. The issue might be weeks old, but there would still be some tourist wanting to bring it home as a memento of time spent in the edgy, scandalized capital.

  On November 9, the Man of the Year had given him a final sentence of eight years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. During the proceedings, Hunt had refused to shake hands with McCord—a good piece of playacting that made him appear as angry as Liddy over the way McCord’s March letter to Sirica had broken open the case. Whereas, of course, Hunt remained happy that McCord had written it, just the way Hunt knew he would after receiving that other letter in his mailbox: The WH will try to use even the plane crash in order to shift blame for Watergate over to the agency …

  Crossing the street now, he pulled the lapels of his jacket a little closer, even as he continued to enjoy the cold air. In fact, he wondered at this moment how he could ever have been angry enough at the White House, or even at the Wop, to pull that ruse and thus tip over the whole china cabinet. Right now he was suffused with goodwill toward everyone—Jim McCord, Chuck Colson, and Richard Nixon included!

  Was it perhaps time to jump back onto the black squares?

  He stood still on the sidewalk for several seconds: How had it all begun? Why had Liddy asked them to go into the DNC? The radio had this morning mentioned that Brezhnev would be visiting Cuba this week. Détente or no détente, the fundamentals still applied. Maybe there had been Cuban money going to the DNC. For the first time, standing here by a curb, Hunt asked himself: Had Manuel Artime—wasn’t he a friend of Rebozo’s?—somehow been connected to the burglary? Perhaps even been its prime mover? Had Manuel asked him to do it?

  He was certain of nothing. While outlining his memoirs, he had noticed how speculations kept getting tangled in actualities, how he sometimes disappeared into several narratives concurrently and ended up unsure of which one he’d really lived.

  He resumed walking.

  “You’ve never before thought it might be Manuel, have you?”

  He moved along without answering. The questioner was Dorothy, and until he reached his car he felt quite sure she was actually there.

  An hour later, Fred LaRue was sitting in the courtyard of the Old French House in Biloxi, his bulky knit sweater more than enough protection against the Gulf Coast’s January weather. Mary Mahoney, the restaurant’s proprietor, had just brought him a plate of fried catfish to go along with his glass of bourbon.

  “Thanks, darlin’,” said LaRue.

  “That bottle back there’s got your name on it. So don’t drink it all up, or there’ll be nothin’ left when you come out.”

  She meant out of jail, and LaRue laughed softly. He was still more at home with this kind of humor, directed at oneself and one’s friends, than he was with the sort that prevailed in Washington, where jokes generally required the vivisection of people one disliked or didn’t even know.

  “Mary,” said Fred, pointing to his food, “with all the testifyin’ I’ve got to do first, by the time they even send me away this catfish is gonna have evolved into a dolphin.” The grand jury hadn’t yet even indicted Mitchell, and nobody knew exactly when the former AG and the rest of the higher-ups would come to trial.

  Mary retreated inside, laughing as she went, and as LaRue watched her he felt the desire to come home for good from his long, peculiar sojourn in the District of Columbia. His love of the political game had long since faded, though he sometimes toyed with the notion that once he’d done his prison stint Eastland might find something for him to do down here.

  He took a bite of the catfish and sat back in his chair, letting the oak tree that dominated this eighteenth-century courtyard shield his sparse head of hair from the sun. In some ways, he’d come to realize, his reinvolvement with Clarine was connected with this wish to turn back the clock and come home; it was, he suspected, the same with Clarine herself, notwithstanding her sympathies for the Negro race and George McGovern. Of course, if he truly wanted to be home he’d be back in Jackson, not here in Biloxi, trying to do an oil deal; and Clarine’s nature, more restless than his, would again soon enough lead her away from both him and home, should she even come back at all. But right now he had a sharp desire to be down here with her, to take more complete advantage of whatever in her had decided, after ten feckless years, to find safe harbor in his hangdog face.

  Neither one of them was on a normal timeline or path in life. He was forty-five and looked sixty, running on another clock and compass altogether from the ones he should be using. And yet these peculiar instruments of his somehow synchronized with Larrie’s, by way of an old magnetism he was disinclined to question. Something in her was newly drawn to his burden of doubt, which he carried like original sin, no matter that it had fallen upon him seventeen years ago and not at birth. And something in him was once again beseeching her for absolution, or damnation. Or just asking to be held in a kind of wild abeyance, what the two of them had always floated through during their nights of lovemaking—amidst the old breezes of Gulf Hills and, more lately, inside the small, curved perimeter of his Watergate apartment.

  The Watergate centrifuge—the swirling building and the churning scandal—would soon enough stop spinning. Both he and Larrie would be thrown from it, and they would land in different places. She would get right to her feet, and he, bruised and broken, would rise more slowly, or not at all.

  One of Mary’s pretty waitresses now came out to the courtyard carrying some tartar sauce. “I’m so sorry! I should’ve brought this out before!” She put down the little dish as if it were a more urgent matter than the message she was also bearing. “And, Mr. LaRue, there’s a telephone call for you at the bar—long distance, I think.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  LaRue left the catfish to cool and carried his bourbon inside,
passing under the high old ceiling on his way toward a stool near the phone. Had somebody on Jaworski’s staff found him here? To summon him back, earlier than planned, for yet one more session in front of the grand jurors?

  But it was someone else entirely.

  “I just had a call,” said Clarine.

  “Oh?” asked LaRue, suddenly alert and uncomfortable. “Who from?” Aside from the people in Eastland’s office, there wasn’t a single acquaintance the two of them shared.

  “An old client of yours.”

  LaRue knew she was not teasing him into a game of twenty questions. Clarine was smart enough not to trust the phone.

  “Oh?” he asked.

  “The client found that envelope I thought he might have.”

  LaRue let out a long low whistle and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty.” He picked up a short pencil from the bar and nervously wrote “MOOT” on a cocktail napkin.

  “Has he got any plans to get this envelope to you?” he asked Clarine.

  “We didn’t get that far,” she answered.

  LaRue laughed. “Well, he’s got a history of askin’ for lots of money. Did he ask for any in exchange for this?”

  “No,” said Clarine. “He doesn’t know what he wants. So, Hound, you’ve got to stay in limbo for at least a little while more.”

  “Where exactly is he?” asked LaRue.

  “He’s fallen into one of his own books. But someone’s shuffled the chapters. He doesn’t know where he is—let alone who.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  FEBRUARY 12, 1974

  2009 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Mrs. Longworth had instructed the waiters and Janie that no one was to be admitted without a present—not even Richard Nixon, who arrived at 5:20 p.m. to help Alice celebrate her ninetieth birthday with about two hundred other guests.

  The president, in fact, showed up with two presents. The first one that he handed Mrs. L was a tiny music box sporting an enamel presidential seal, one of several choice items the Nixons had acquired for special gift giving from Don Carnevale, before the jeweler’s death fourteen months ago. Mrs. Longworth opened the little mechanism and was relieved to hear it begin playing a Strauss waltz instead of “Alice Blue Gown,” which she’d been putting up with for too many decades. Still, there seemed something cruel, not just crass, in having that presidential seal affixed to the box’s tiny lid—like a jewel embedded into the shell of a turtle.