Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Our other present,” said Nixon, as the crowd in the entrance hall pressed close to hear him, “is from the Shah to Pat and from Pat to you.” He handed Alice a big silver spoon with a ribbon on it and, after taking them from the Secret Service, placed two large jars of caviar atop the hall table. “Use that spoon with these—not one of those little forks!”

  “How thoughtful,” said Alice, giving Pat a kiss before the president and first lady ascended to the second-floor drawing room. Once they were gone, she lifted the jars one by one and handed them to Janie, as if they were Christmas fruitcakes. “Passalongs,” she said.

  Senator Percy, next in line to shake her hand, informed Mrs. Longworth that he’d passed up a home-state Lincoln’s Birthday celebration in Springfield in order to be with her. Having to share February 12 with the Railsplitter had always rather annoyed Alice. “When I reach one hundred and sixty-five, you can ignore me and go to Illinois,” she responded.

  Margaret Truman Daniel gave her a very gentle hug and pointed to the press photographer who wanted a picture of the two presidential daughters. “Shall we oblige him?”

  “Yes, right away, otherwise he’ll ask us to wait while he goes off to find Tricia and Lynda Bird, and I don’t know which of them is worse. Do you?”

  Standing in the crowded hallway, Mrs. Daniel, the wife of a newspaperman, declined to comment. After the momentary silence, Alice mused upon the way no one ever seemed to ask children to do much when their politician fathers suddenly died; it was another story with the wives. “When Nick croaked, a lot of people wanted me to take his seat in Congress.”

  Mary McGrory, the liberal columnist who’d watched Nixon pass through the hallway as if he were a bad smell, asked, “Why didn’t you?”

  “An awful idea,” said Mrs. Longworth.

  “Margaret Chase Smith?” offered Miss McGrory, by way of gentle contradiction.

  “I rest my case,” said Alice.

  She pointed Mrs. Daniel’s attention toward Julie and David Eisenhower. “More progeny. Not a very exclusive club we’re in.”

  Janie then reminded her that it was time to go upstairs, according to the schedule that Alice herself, generally punctual, had drawn up. The butler took Mrs. L’s arm and led her to the second floor, where she again saw Pat, who looked both tense and peculiarly exhilarated.

  The first lady was talking with Susan Mary Alsop, now separated from Joe by a whole neighborhood within the city and at least twenty-five feet within this room.

  “I’ve been decorating an apartment,” said Mrs. Alsop, though she didn’t say it was her own.

  “Oh, that’s loads of fun,” responded Pat.

  “It’s tricky figuring out what to do with a curved wall.”

  “Hmm,” said the first lady. “Let me guess where it is.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Alsop, with a slightly horrified look. “I—” Mrs. Nixon laughed. “It’s all right.”

  Strange, Pat thought, that she herself had never been in the Watergate, not to see the Mitchells’ place, or even Rose’s, though Rose of course understood the three-ring circus of presidential logistics and didn’t feel slighted; Martha had always held it against her.

  While Mrs. Alsop said some things about bamboo and chintz, the first lady gripped her purse a little tighter, thinking about the stapled, three-page schedule inside it, wondering what logistical finesse might be required to accomplish one item on the itinerary. A lot more than going to the Watergate would entail.

  Alice was busy ignoring a foreign-service officer peppering her with questions. She allowed her eyes to move back and forth between a picture of Bill Borah and the preoccupied first lady. Suddenly, thanks to Bill, it occurred to her: Could Pat—no, surely not; but why not?—have a lover? Or could she have had one, somewhere? All at once Alice left her interlocutor—“You won’t excuse me, will you?”—to go over to Mrs. Nixon and Susan Mary. “Congratulations,” she said to the latter.

  “Congratulations? You’re the birthday girl.”

  “On being rid of Joe. He’s impossible.”

  She turned to Pat. “How are you, my dear? I didn’t really get a chance to say hello when you came in with all that fish.” She looked at the first lady’s powder-blue suit and noted her extreme slenderness. “Are they feeding you enough in that awful house?”

  Mrs. Alsop gently touched Alice’s sparrow-like frame. “That’s the pot calling the kettle thin,” she said, protectively.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” said the first lady. Even these days she never told anyone anything different. “Dick’s the one going in for a physical tomorrow. And he’ll be fine, too. After that we’re off to Key Biscayne.”

  Her current anxiety had nothing to do with health, or even politics. It centered, as did a furtive happiness, on that item in her purse, the draft itinerary for next month’s trip to South America, where without Dick she would lead a U.S. delegation to two different presidential inaugurations. There on the third page, “Brasília Events,” beside “Hospital/Charity Visit—Location TBD,” she had inked in a suggestion: the Tom Thumb Home for children of tubercular parents. The choice would catch Dick’s approving eye and allow her to hide in plain sight: she knew, if the little American-funded facility got on the schedule, that news of its designation would draw Tom Garahan, the charity’s mainstay, down to the Brazilian capital.

  She hadn’t yet given her suggestion to the staff. So far, full of excitement, and ambivalence, she was just carrying around the list like an unsent love letter. Would she have the nerve to act on her own idea? She was lost in thoughts of the possibility when the pop of a guest’s flashbulb reminded her that she was still in conversation with Mrs. Alsop and Alice, who was now giving the offending picture-taker an especially hard look.

  “My dear,” she then said to Pat, “there’s a bathroom upstairs where you can take a break from this and puff away unseen to your heart’s content.”

  Pat laughed. “You know me too well, don’t you?”

  “The cat’s probably hiding in there. I forget his name, but you’ll like him.”

  Alice decided to toddle over—destestable expression—toward Joe, who was sitting on the velvet mulberry-colored sofa, next to his Post colleague Buchwald and still far away from Susan Mary. She noticed that he had tossed her well-known lettered pillow—IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT SOMEONE, SIT RIGHT HERE BY ME—from the sofa to the floor.

  “I guess that’s why they call it a throw pillow,” she told him.

  Buchwald stood up to kiss Mrs. Longworth’s gloved hand and to offer her his seat. He recalled her presence at his own birthday party on the night of the Saturday Night Massacre and wondered what extramural event could top that tonight.

  “Martial law, I should think,” suggested Alice. “The president could get the ball rolling by firing him,” she said, pointing to Henry Kissinger, who had slid into earshot.

  “Kim!” she cried, to her nephew a few feet away. She tilted her head toward Nixon and gave her relative a what-are-you-waiting-for look.

  As commanded, Kermit Roosevelt moved toward the president, who was discussing Maryland politics, pre- and post-Agnew, with Senator Scott and some friends of Mrs. Longworth’s granddaughter.

  “A word?” said Roosevelt, with the family’s usual lack of shyness.

  Nixon could hardly refuse the grandson of TR and the nephew of his hostess. “Certainly,” he said to Roosevelt, as two Secret Service men created a small, nearly private space beside some bookshelves. The human wall the agents provided was not exactly soundproof, but it seemed forbidding enough to other guests. As it was, the president and Roosevelt spoke to each other in low tones.

  “I hope you know how much fervent support you still have left,” declared the retired CIA agent.

  “That’s very kind of you to say.” Nixon tried to remember what Mrs. L had told him about Roosevelt and Hunt—all of it wrapped up with King Zog—at that dinner more than a year ago. It had been too convoluted to remember, let a
lone follow up on. And yet, sure enough, Hunt was Roosevelt’s subject. “My old colleague,” he was soon saying, “has always been a very malleable man. That made him ‘fungible,’ to use the Agency’s terminology.”

  Christ, it was like talking to Foster Dulles’s brother. “Tell me what you mean,” said the president, politely.

  “Well, the life of Hunt’s imagination sometimes blends, conveniently, into his actual cognitive existence.”

  No, this was worse than Allen Dulles. It was like those ridiculous psy-ops briefings they’d given him in Vietnam in ’65 and ’67, when he’d come calling as both Elder Statesman and Man in the Wings. He was no less malleable than Hunt, if you came down to it; he only wished that Roosevelt would come to his point.

  “With all due respect, sir, I know that there are those who say you paid blackmail to Howard Hunt.”

  Nixon replied crisply: “Hunt himself says he never blackmailed me.”

  “Yes,” said Roosevelt. “It would be helpful for him to emphasize that.”

  “It would.” The president was losing interest; there was nothing new here.

  “It would be even more helpful,” said Roosevelt, “to have him recant his testimony, to indicate that the Watergate burglary was begun and carried out at his own insistence, because of connections he believed to exist between the Democratic Party and Castro’s Cuba. And because he believed the operation to be consistent with the Agency’s longtime overall objectives. The Agency itself would remain blameless for the particular act.”

  Nixon looked back toward the party while wondering what the proportion of craziness to genius might be in Roosevelt, let alone Hunt. With a lot of the old OSS types, it ran about eighty–twenty.

  “He would be contradicting no one,” Roosevelt continued. “No one else has owned up to it, and Mr. Liddy continues to say nothing. If Hunt were to take all responsibility, there would be an enormous shift in the situation—seismic, one might say. Yes, he could concede that there had been a Gemstone plan; and, yes, people had covered up when they shouldn’t have. But the actual, specific event that caused the catastrophe would have been his doing, not something done at the direction of anyone high up in the campaign or White House.”

  “Do you know something I don’t?” asked Nixon.

  “Only about the possibility of Mr. Hunt’s saying something different from what he’s said so far. Of his deciding to come forward and assume, through his recantation, a heroic status with your defenders.”

  “A coerced recantation?” asked Nixon, almost in a whisper, with one eyebrow raised. He knew what Colby, his own CIA director, had been capable of in the Vietnamese jungles.

  “Not coerced. Not even persuaded. Mr. Hunt was always suggestible—and is even more so at this point.”

  Nixon said nothing. Why would Hunt step forward when Mitchell hadn’t been willing to?

  “Just something for you to consider,” said Roosevelt, as if he’d been passing along a stock tip to some fellow commuter on the B&O. “And very good of you to listen. I should let you get back to my aunt’s celebration.”

  As the Secret Service reimmersed Nixon into the crowd, Roosevelt looked at his aunt and indicated with a nod that he had done his duty. Alice, who guessed it was too late to save Dick by the sort of spooky shenanigans Kim had described to her, gave her nephew a weary wave of acknowledgment before turning to notice Averell Harriman standing before two framed cartoons of Franklin and Eleanor. Appearing to take fresh offense at their irreverence, he transferred his regard to a small picture of the Chinese Dowager Empress, who Alice supposed must be striking him as yet another contemporary.

  She next noticed sad Joan Kennedy, standing on her long, unsteady legs and clutching the arm of that other in-law, Mr. Shriver. She looked around for Stew: not here. Nearing the end? she wondered. Dick was giving her a little goodbye salute and Pat was blowing a kiss. Once he was gone from the room, she went over to its front window and waited for him to descend the stairs and depart the house. As the president, he was entitled to a showy goodbye wave from his hostess, and so, at her direction, one of the waiters opened the window, ushering in a marvelous blast of winter air.

  Along with it came the staler sound of Dick’s presidential voice. There on her front walk he was talking to a few of the reporters who had trespassed onto her property.

  “Mrs. Longworth’s secret to a long life?” he asked, repeating the question that had been put to him. “Not being obsessed by the Washington scene,” he replied. “Applying her excellent mind to more than political scandal or the obsession of the moment. You know, I spoke at the Lincoln Memorial today—one of Washington’s other monuments,” he added, pointing back at Alice’s house. “I talked about how vilified Lincoln was in his time, and how he never let himself show he was being hurt by it.” The comparison—between the apelike caricatures of Lincoln and the mad-hunchback ones of himself—was invited but unspoken.

  Russell Baker, the Times columnist standing next to Alice at the window, asked her about what they’d just heard. “Is that true? Is that how you’ve kept yourself so young?”

  “If I had the strength of an actual young person, I should rear my head back and roar with laughter. Not wallow in Watergate? I can’t wait to see what happens next!”

  Despite her semblance of good cheer, she had had enough. She felt suddenly sick of it all—the party, everything. If Dick could even pretend not to know that the essential fact of her life had been a failure to apply her fine mind to anything useful, he was too daft even for politics. She looked around for Janie and began moving toward the stairs. She wanted to get up to the third-floor bedroom and resume her vampire existence. After a nap she would get up and read the Latin grammar that had been taking her through the last several nights. She found a certain symmetry in being the dead student of a dead language, and by the time she opened the book tonight, it would be pitch dark outside. On a normal day, which she now wished this was, Janie would already have drawn the curtains, at sunset, the way she’d done ever since coming to work here in 1957, just after Paulina’s death.

  Sweet Joan Kennedy was all at once standing over her, tremulously trying to kiss her goodbye. Alice flinched, shook her head, and snapped, “That’s why I usually wear a wide-brimmed hat.”

  Mrs. Kennedy looked childlike and stricken. Janie whispered to her: “It’s okay, honey. She just hates being touched.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  MARCH 15, 1974

  THE TOM THUMB HOUSE; BRASÍLIA

  Pat Nixon consulted the mirror in her compact as the limousine pulled away from the Alvorada Palace. The scattered, unobtrusive highlights that Rita had put into her hair made it look almost windblown. The effect was rejuvenating, and she was glad she’d let Rita talk her into doing it just before the start of the trip down here.

  She turned around in the backseat for a last look at the clean white lines of the palace, which resembled a world’s fair pavilion and for a moment made her remember the day in 1959 that she and Dick had opened the monorail at Disneyland. All the oblongs and ziggurats of this new capital looked as if they’d been dropped onto the Brazilian jungle from the sky. No, not Disneyland: what it really made her recall were the big modern towers of midtown Manhattan—her walks with Tom past the Seagram and Pan Am buildings.

  It was a good thing their meeting would come on this last day of the trip. The anticipation had pulled her through the two countries and the long schedules: Venezuela before Brazil; two swearings-in and two parades; four embassy receptions; a half dozen schools and hospitals amidst everything else.

  The inauguration here was faintly ridiculous: they were installing an unelected general who’d already been ruling with the rest of a junta for ten years. But Venezuela had been different: an honest-to-God election, and the new man, Pérez, couldn’t have been nicer. Same with the crowds, who this time, unlike sixteen years ago, had pelted her with flowers instead of rocks. Comments on the improved mood had been almost continual, even if so
me of the Venezuelan politicians thought Jerry Ford, at the least, should have been the American designated to make the trip. But there’d been more press for her than there would have been for him; the papers couldn’t resist running side-by-side photos of now versus ’58. Even Dick had sent word that he was pleased with the coverage.

  Of course nothing really lifted, for very long, the sense that they were free-falling toward doom. Pérez had accepted her invitation to visit the White House, but she had to wonder if she’d be there to greet him by the time he showed up.

  Another sign of final disaster seemed to lurk in the way everything new these days only reminded her of something old, as if she and Dick and Rose and all the rest of them had spent their full allowance of life and could now only bounce checks against the past. A couple of evenings ago at the American embassy reception she’d looked down the hill toward the lights of Caracas and thought of that party at Taft Schreiber’s mansion. Only later did she remember that that had been the night it all began.

  No one seemed to know how the Tom Thumb House, which they were now approaching, had gotten its name. The gingerbread building was festooned with flowers, and the smallest of the kids who lived there were lined up, waving American and Brazilian flags.

  “Estas são para si,” said the little girl handing her a big bunch of gloxinias.

  “ ‘These are for you,’ ” said Mrs. Carvalho, Tom Thumb’s English-speaking director.