Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Thank you! They’re so pretty. And so are all of you!”

  When the Portuguese translation produced some giggles, the first lady added: “I probably should say ‘handsome’ for the boys.”

  “Bonitos,” said Mrs. Carvalho.

  The scrubbed, smooth-skinned children all applauded. There was nothing wrong with them; it was their parents who were sick, isolated somewhere in treatment for TB. The boys and girls—she could remember Tom explaining this to her years ago—would be cared for here until their mothers and fathers were either cured or dead. She felt relief that the girls and boys were so pretty, or handsome. She had consciously begun taking comfort in one fringe benefit of the doom that might be approaching: once Dick left politics, she would never again have to let her heart be assaulted by a malnourished or cleft-palated child being thrust toward her in his Sunday best.

  “I hope you’ll study hard and not give your teachers a tough time. I used to be a schoolteacher myself, so I know! And I hope your parents will be surprised by how much you’ve learned and how tall you’ve gotten when they next see you!”

  The children clapped their hands like fifty butterflies, going on long enough for her to see the man in the doorway. He was joining in the applause and smiling as if to say, “Well done, Victoria.”

  Mrs. Carvalho escorted her inside and showed her the clean, sunny bedrooms, the dining hall, the backyard garden and the soccer field beyond it. Mr. Garahan—“our man at Catholic Charities in New York,” Mrs. Carvalho explained—followed along a couple of steps behind, until he and Mrs. Nixon were ushered into a little office where a private consultation between them had been scheduled. The first lady was offered a chair beside a vase of yellow flowers.

  “Do you want a notetaker?” asked Helen Smith, who’d become her press secretary since Connie Stuart’s departure.

  “No, I can handle Mr. Garahan myself. He’s an old acquaintance.”

  Mrs. Smith nodded. “Ten minutes? Press picture afterwards?”

  “Ten minutes. No picture.”

  As soon as Mrs. Smith left with Mrs. Carvalho, Tom said, “I felt a little like Prince Philip out there. Walking two steps behind.”

  “Welcome to my world, pal. This isn’t typical, believe me.”

  “I heard one of the little boys say ‘dama bonita.’ I agree.”

  Pat laughed. “Clever man. You know, I do remember you telling me about this project—ages ago, when I had to pry tales of your good works out of you.”

  “I didn’t know at the time that this one would come in so handy.”

  “It did—for me. I’m the one who put it on the list.”

  “I figured. I’m glad.”

  “So what can we do for the Tom Thumb House? It’s lovely.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Smith already has a manila folder full of things. Three grant applications and two appropriations bills that you could nudge.”

  “Okay, sir, I’ll nudge.”

  “Good, we’ve done our business and still have eight minutes.”

  “We’re hitting a museum after this. Very much our old speed, you and me. Want to come along?”

  “Nope. I already share you enough as it is.”

  The way he used the present tense for what was supposed to be a thing of the past—them—excited her. She waited to see if he would apologize, the way people do when they find themselves saying “was” instead of “is” about the dying. But he didn’t, and it made her happy. She could see him looking through the pane of glass in the door, checking the space beyond, taking note of the Brazilian soldier having a chat with a Secret Service agent.

  “I want to know if you’re coming home,” he finally said.

  She was unsure of what he meant and could feel her emotions too near the surface. She would rein them in by continuing to banter: “I don’t even get to go home from here. The plane flies to Nashville, not Washington.” Dick was going to open the Grand Ole Opry’s new auditorium, where he would look sillier than Coolidge in an Indian headdress. But his poll numbers in Tennessee were a little higher than elsewhere, so he’d try to rouse his supporters by sitting down at the piano to play “God Bless America” the way he played everything else, in the key of G.

  “By ‘home’ I mean New York,” said Tom.

  He now did look like the head of a charity who had only eight minutes in which to make his pitch. The good cause was himself, was them, and she could see that he was going to go for broke.

  “Let’s forget talking about minutes,” he said. “Let’s talk about months. I give him six, at best.”

  There was no need to identify whom he meant. She said nothing, but thought back to January, to the State of the Union message: I want you to know that I have no intention whatever of walking away from the job that the people elected me to do for the people of the United States. There had actually been hissing in the House chamber.

  “Which means,” Tom continued, “that you’re going to be moving. Have you talked with him about where?”

  “No,” Pat answered, as guarded as if she were talking to one of the ladies of the press.

  He persisted: “Don’t let him take you back to California. Make him come back to New York. It’s better for him. He can write serious books and see serious people. And you can see me sometimes. With a little more subterfuge than we used to have to use. But we’ll manage. And we’ll keep each other alive.”

  His eyes were no longer twinkling and merry. They blazed with urgency—and then embarrassment, as if he’d gotten a glimpse of himself. But he couldn’t return to humor, and he couldn’t stop looking at the clock. “I feel like Bogart at the airport gate in Casablanca. Except his advice doesn’t apply. You know why, Victoria? Because I can’t help feeling that it’s Watergate that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the lives of three little people. Or make that two. You and me. I know I’m the only one involved here who feels that, but there you are. Just tell me that when it’s over you’ll come home—whether that’s in six months or, if he hangs on, for the whole three years. Tell me you’ll come home.”

  “You don’t want it to be six months,” she replied.

  “For your sake, no. For mine, yes.”

  “No, not for your sake, either. Because if it’s six months, it may not be New York or California.”

  “Where, then? Florida? ‘The Key Biscayne Compound’?” He dripped a comical contempt over the words. “You’d rather live next door to Bebe Rebozo than ten blocks from me?”

  To his surprise, she didn’t laugh. “No,” she responded at last. “We wouldn’t be going to Florida. Maybe Pennsylvania. Maybe Arkansas.”

  She was talking about jail, he realized, and he was all at once a little sick with guilt about the conversation, this pressing of his needs upon her.

  “Let’s go,” she said, softly. She got up from her chair, and like Prince Philip he followed suit and rose. They walked toward the spot outside the door where Helen Smith now waited with Mrs. Carvalho and the security men—and thank God no press.

  She stopped him several steps away with a gentle, intimate press of her hand against his arm. She whispered, “For the past ten minutes I’ve been home. Thank you.”

  She smiled at Helen and Mrs. Carvalho. “Mr. Garahan is a very persuasive man. The Tom Thumb House is lucky to have him!”

  “Oh, we know that!” replied Mrs. Carvalho. “And we’re lucky to have you with us. We have a little surprise before you go. We know it’s a little early, but still.” She led everyone into the garden, where the girls in white dresses and the boys in blue serge pants broke into “Happy Birthday to You,” in English.

  She was glad there was no cake. She felt older than Alice Longworth and would have been too weak to blow out the candles. She looked up at a particular blue roof tile that was catching the sun. She made herself concentrate on it, and she did not cry.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  APRIL 17, 1974

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  At 8:20 a.m., Elliot Ric
hardson took his first-class seat on Eastern Airlines Flight 905, Washington to Atlanta, and politely declined the stewardess’s offer of a cup of coffee. Along with the literary agent who’d sold his book proposal, he now had a lecture agent, too. Harry Walker might take twenty-five percent, but he was getting Richardson $2,500 for each appearance and doing a fine job with all the arrangements door-to-door. From the moment the former attorney general leaves his house in McLean until he returns that night or a day later, a steady stream of drivers, airport lounges, and hotel fruit baskets keeps him buoyant and appreciated.

  He’d given Harry four different talks to offer groups interested in booking him. “A Constitution for All Seasons” is probably the best of them, but of course every appearance is really about Watergate. Audiences can never wait to get to the question-and-answer period, when they ask for new details about Saturday, October 20, or for some dark insight into the real Richard Milhous Nixon.

  Harry has gotten him even more than his usual fee for the customized version of “Can the Center Hold?” that he will be delivering at lunchtime today to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an especially choice group. But even the lesser hosts are helpful long-term. Over the past three weeks Richardson has been to Des Moines for Supreme Court Day; to Yale for that Chubb Fellowship business; then on to Providence and, just two days ago, Philadelphia, to deliver “Education and the Community” at Penn. One could fill a doctor’s waiting room with the magazines that have recently run profiles of him or have them in progress. The interviews and photo shoots—for Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Parade—are squeezed in between trips like this one.

  And then there are the job offers—made and declined or still being floated: professorships at Boston University and Kent State (a nice touch, that one); the presidencies of Northeastern and URI. Better not to take anything right now, advises his bright young aide, Dick Darman, who warns that the Richardson résumé already looks like a species of time-lapse photography. Much preferable for the moment just to write the book, accept applause for these speeches, and let the Judiciary Committee go about its work. This is his official public position: the constitutional process is preferable to resignation.

  No one can deny that that process is under way. Jaworski had only yesterday asked Sirica to subpoena sixty-four tapes. And for all that Richardson is hors de combat and biding his time, he has learned from his sources at Justice a stupendous fact of which Richard Nixon himself is not yet aware: the March 1 indictment of Mitchell and Haldeman and the rest of the “Watergate Seven” has named the president an unindicted co-conspirator. Disclosure of this still-secret status, which would lock Nixon into a kind of halfway house, is a card that Jaworski—actually a much sharper character than Cox—can play how and when he wants.

  Richardson fends off the Saran-Wrapped breakfast and snoozes for most of the flight. Arriving at the Hyatt Regency on Peachtree Street, he’s brought to a suite where he can freshen up, until a young man very like Dick Darman comes to take him to the dais in the hotel’s Phoenix Room. His mere entrance provokes the editors’ applause, which reaches a volume nearly as high as the one attained during that “Man of Conscience” dinner he’d been honored at in New York. Which foundation had given it? He can’t quite remember.

  As the introduction begins, he casts his eyes modestly downward and doodles a great horned owl, the same bird he’s drawn for his local YWCA’s recent auction of jottings from the corridors of power. The introducer soon reaches a description of his Normandy heroics, leavening the story with a newspaperman’s joke about some famous typographical errors: the “battle-scarred veteran” who wound up both “battle-scared” and “bottle-scarred” in print.

  Are the editors laughing a bit too pointedly, as if the story were not a mere digression but had some direct relevance to him? Should he allude to the rumors with his own joke? Something that shows his fearlessness of scurrility and innuendo, the kind being practiced by very powerful men who are increasingly desperate? He’ll decide when he gets to the rostrum.

  How much talking he’s already done about Watergate! He’s been speaking of it for as many months as he actually dealt with it at Justice. He imagines that all the memoir-writing felons are experiencing this same sense of disproportion. If the saga leads where he hopes—Do your job, my boy. It may take you all the way—will he look back on this strange in-between period the way Nixon regards his own “wilderness years” in New York?

  There is no denying that the applause he receives before a speech, what he is receiving just now—“Thank you, you’re much too kind”—tends to exceed what comes after. Dick Darman still wants him to hire a coach, but he’s decided that he is getting better enough on his own. Also, the tendency to mumble and shamble a bit—the way Cox does with those scratchy, casual inflections—adds a certain charm and authenticity to the picture.

  “About those ‘battle-scared’ and ‘bottle-scarred’ heroics. Gentlemen, if I’m a hero at all, I would have to agree that ‘battle-scared’ was true. But ‘bottle-scarred’? Well, the Knight newspapers say that is also true.”

  The laughter is loud enough that Haig and Nixon will get wind of it—which is the idea. Let them go ahead with their whisper campaign and see how far they get.

  “I know that my speech-making has been likened to a riot-control weapon”—more laughter, of a healthier kind—“and it’s true that as a New Englander, or, even worse, a Bostonian, I inherited some of the unpleasant characteristics of the preacher and reformer, or even the common scold.”

  Smiles; they’ll be happy with whatever sermon he gives.

  He is soon embarked upon it, drawing his parable from a case of graft he prosecuted during the late fifties in Massachusetts, when the work of a corrupt contractor caused the collapse of a bridge and the deaths of two innocent people. Well, his home state is quite a bit cleaner these days, but he tells his listeners that they may be interested to know how “the description of corruption in Maryland in Richard Cohen and Jules Witcover’s book A Heartbeat Away compares almost point for point with the pattern uncovered by those investigations in Massachusetts fifteen years ago.”

  That is the way—without ever mentioning his name—to remind them of how he saved the country from Agnew. Which now brings him to Watergate and the must-be-faced fact that “free representative self-government is not possible where people cannot trust the truth of what they are told. Imagine walking on an English moor not knowing whether that nice green area just up ahead is grass or pond scum, not knowing whether you’re going to remain on your feet or sink toward oblivion.”

  He looks over the lectern and sees a slight perplexity on the editors’ faces. Is the analogy a bit too patrician—English moors—or just plain confusing? Perhaps Darman can clean it up a bit before he gives this speech in Detroit.

  He’s ready to perorate, to offer his solution to the mess they are all in: “I submit that the only buffer to cynical acid is truth. The only restorer of confidence is scrupulous honesty.” It is time for “a politics of openness,” and time for those who decry “wallowing in Watergate” to realize that, in the investigation of this transcendent scandal, it has been “in the public interest to subordinate considerations of fairness to individuals that should otherwise and in ordinary circumstances have had greater weight.” He cannot of course get into particular cases, cannot tell them who may have been leaned on a bit hard, but, yes, that’s how tough this battle-scarred veteran has been in their service.

  Questions?

  “Gene Patterson of the St. Petersburg Times, sir. If nominated for the presidency, would you accept? And if elected, would you serve?

  The question itself is applauded, and Richardson’s answer—“Yes”—provokes cheers. “Of course, you understand,” he adds, “that doesn’t make me a candidate.”

  That evening, after drinks with the Boston Globe’s Tom Winship—shoring up his favorite-son status—a limousine took Richardson to the airport for a flight to Richmond. He would
spend the night at a Holiday Inn in Ashburn, talk to the students at Randolph-Macon tomorrow afternoon, and hit the University of Virginia Law School tomorrow night, before heading home.

  He leaned back in his seat and sighed. Unemployment was, in its way, more tiring than most of his jobs had been. The backlog of portraits alone! He’d not yet even posed for the one that HEW required, and once he’d done that, there’d still be sittings for Defense and Justice. They couldn’t very well all hang the same canvas. But all those hours behind someone else’s easel would take time from the relentless if inchoate business—there was so much guesswork involved—of positioning himself for ’76.

  He flipped through his calendar as the driver approached the Atlanta Municipal Airport. On Friday he’d be in Chicago for the Bar Association. The Detroit speech, to the local NAACP, came on Sunday. Fordham University, the Cleveland Park Synagogue, and Meet the Press followed in the days after that. If he taped the show on Saturday, he could still get out to Anaheim for the National Association of Elementary School Principals on Sunday, the twenty-eighth.

  Some initiatives required little decision-making. There was, for instance, hardly an argument to be made against doing the Georgetown commencement on May 19. Other requests were trickier, like the two he’d been carrying inside the front flap of his briefcase the past several days. Perhaps he could dispose of them now. He looked at his watch before entering the first-class passengers’ lounge. There was time to find a pay phone and call Darman.

  “Dick, I’m hoping you’re through with your dinner by now.”

  “Yes, sir! How did it go? Did you wow the newsmen?”

  “Oh, it was fine. I just thought that with three or four idle minutes in front of me, I’d try to take care of one or two things hanging fire.”

  “Fire away, sir.”

  “One of them is this Bernstein and Woodward thing.”

  “Yes,” said Darman.

  “Give me the case for going.”