Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  Darman explained why, all things considered, the former attorney general should indeed show up at the publication party, on June 13, for a book the Post’s reporters were calling All the President’s Men. “This is not the same as the book about Agnew. You’re not one of the principal subjects in this one—I gather, I’m afraid, that only about three pages of it concern you. So you won’t appear to be gloating if you go. Your appearance will solidify your ‘clean’ image, and it probably won’t be covered in Peoria. Those are the ‘pro’ arguments. And there’s only one ‘con’ argument I can think of—also concerning Peoria.”

  “What’s that?” asked Richardson.

  “Well, it might be covered out there, and that might antagonize the diehard Nixon voters a bit more than you need to—or might, I should say, antagonize them a bit prematurely.”

  “Mm-hmmm,” Richardson replied.

  “What’s the other matter?” asked the highly organized Darman.

  “The ABC thing.”

  “Yes,” said Darman. “Frank Reynolds. Their evening news is doing segments on the ’76 field. It’s desirable—no, essential, sir—to be on the list. At this point you need to seem ‘maximally mentioned’ and ‘minimally seeking.’ A three-minute interview, which is what they want, won’t have you exceeding the limits of the latter category. You should do it, sir, and we should rehearse it. I’ll play Reynolds.”

  Richardson sighed. “All right, Dick. You’ve persuaded me.”

  As Richardson hung up the phone, he noticed a member of the plane crew coming through the lounge with his rollaway suitcase, approaching him for an autograph. Richardson reached for his pen and the calendar that was still open on his lap dropped to the floor. Its pages flipped to July. The destinations “U.S.S.R.” and “JAPAN” were spread, in his secretary’s bold hand, across the grid of dates. He’d be burnishing his foreign-policy credentials in those two nations before a spot of rest in Hawaii, early in August, when even Watergate should be enjoying a summer lull.

  Chapter Forty

  APRIL 25, 1974

  JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  Nixon stood in a holding room off the main stage of the Mississippi Coliseum. A Democratic congressman was telling him, with only slight exaggeration, that twelve thousand people were waiting out front.

  The Democratic governor had met the president’s plane, which Senator Eastland had proudly been aboard. If it came to impeachment, the southern states and their Democratic congressional delegations would be Nixon’s firewall. When color-coded onto the strategic diagram he had sketched with Haig and Bryce Harlow, these friendly territories resembled the pacified circles on the old Vietnam map in the Situation Room.

  Back in the White House, Rose’s most trustworthy girls were this week typing up conversations from the forty-two tapes the Judiciary Committee had subpoenaed on April 11. Jaworski could go fuck himself when it came to his latest request for sixty-four more, but Nixon had decided that four days from now he would release a stack of transcripts that Rose said would exceed a thousand pages. And he would do it on TV, too—in an act of prolonged nakedness, the kind he’d not put himself through since the Checkers speech. It was a long ball, just like the one he’d thrown twenty-two years ago, and his biggest worry didn’t involve any of the supposed evidence he’d be handing the impeachment mob. What bothered him was this phrase “expletive deleted”—a coinage they’d come up with to take care of the curses on the tapes. All the white-gloved churchgoing ladies who’d lined the motorcade route twenty minutes ago, the ones he’s depending on to save his political life, are going to imagine words a lot worse than most of the ones he actually said. But there’s probably no alternative: the ladies wouldn’t like “goddammit” any better than they’d like “cocksucker.”

  Christ, this is what it was coming down to.

  The event here, nominally an address to the Mississippi Economic Council, is really a giant rally put together by the old Democrats for Nixon organization from ’72—men as conservative as they could reasonably be without bolting their party altogether. He might have gotten them to do just that by ’76 if all this chickenshit hadn’t intervened. As it is, he can hear them roaring and stamping their feet out front.

  Eastland came up to present his granddaughter to the president, and to observe: “It’s been more than a year since we had lovely Miss Tricia down here.”

  “Well, Jim, she sends her best.”

  “You say hello to her and to that fine-looking son-in-law you’ve got.”

  Nixon snapped off a little farewell salute, and Eastland turned his attention to the excited young aide who’d just approached him. The walls of the room were beginning to shake while the Democratic governor, doing the introduction, fired up the crowd:

  “Do you believe the president’s in a friendly place right now?”

  “YES!”

  Steve Bull and the Secret Service were ready to get him onstage, but the governor was really stretching out the hog-hollering praise. Strange, thought Nixon, that these southerners, among whom he’d always felt so odd at Duke, should be giving him refuge. Last month at the Grand Ole Opry he’d made a fool of himself playing with Roy Acuff’s yo-yo, but he’d felt the tears come to his eyes when they all started singing “Stay a Little Longer.” The crowd had loved seeing him sit down at the piano to play “Happy Birthday” and “My Wild Irish Rose” to Pat, who’d sat there smiling and clutching some little birthday present, a piece of jewelry she’d been given on the Brazil trip. He’d joked with her later that she looked like an Arab with a string of worry beads, and she’d laughed. “It was in a little box, waiting for me in my cabin, when we took off from Brasília to Nashville.”

  “Mr. President?” asked Eastland, who’d just come back over to him. “One more quick word?”

  Standing at the back of the vast hall, Fred LaRue squinted toward the stage filled with those “regular Democrats” Clarine and her kind had started opposing way back in the “Freedom Summer” of ’64. What his poor eyesight beheld was what he’d spent ten years building, from Goldwater on: a kind of Republican Party right inside the Democratic one.

  The Old Man reached the first applause line in his speech. As the cheering swelled, Clarine, standing beside LaRue, started to hum the theme from Gone with the Wind into the better of his two ears. Whether she meant it to apply to Richard Nixon or to this whole political edifice of Fred LaRue’s construction was not clear. A foot or two away from them a NIXON NOW MORE THAN EVER sign began bobbing furiously, as if someone had detected her treacherous sentiments.

  Clarine had come down to Jackson a few days ago and was staying with an aunt. After this rally LaRue planned to sneak off with her to the Gulf Hills Hotel, down near the old dude ranch that had burned down three Christmases ago. The two of them, here in Mississippi together for the first time since the old days, would see if they could re-create the powerful feeling of room 205.

  While Nixon announced a plan to help increase housing starts, LaRue tried to shut his weak eyes and anticipate tonight’s rendezvous. But the Old Man wouldn’t leave his thoughts. Soon enough he will have to tell the Judiciary Committee the same largely true story he told Ervin’s gang last summer, but this time it will feel like testifying against Nixon in a court of law, since the House committee will be working up to a vote on the president’s removal from office. It will feel as bad in its way as having to testify at Mitchell’s trial, which will also be coming soon.

  In the meantime, Clarine has been continuing her game of cat-and-mouse with Hunt, trying to make him give up the MOOT envelope, tantalizing the old spy with hints of something she “knows,” never letting him realize that she is acquainted with only one minor combatant in the whole Watergate war. For a cat, she has told LaRue, she doesn’t have much power. She is all bluff, and there are even moments when she thinks she might herself be a mouse. She cannot shake the sensation that somebody, maybe one of Hunt’s old paymasters, has become aware of her cryptic dance with him, and taken to wa
tching her.

  Nixon was launching into a list of “America’s great goals,” when a man LaRue recognized as Billy Pope tugged at his sleeve and said, “I thought I saw you.” Billy had been a college kid working for Goldwater in ’64 and had ever since floated between the Republicans and the old-style Democrats. “Can you stay put a minute?” he now asked LaRue. “I’ve got somebody who’d like to see you. I told him I thought I’d seen old Fred LaRue out in the crowd!”

  Clarine, pretending to be a stranger, looked on with amusement.

  “I got nowhere else to go,” said LaRue. “Leastways not for a while.”

  Billy clasped his forearm; he understood that LaRue meant prison. “Stay right here. I’m gonna fetch him.” He hightailed it back toward the front of the Coliseum.

  Clarine asked, “Is this another of those professional sons you’re not even old enough to have sired?” She had come to understand the way so many of the administration’s young men, like Magruder, had made a father of this man who spent his own life wondering if he’d killed his daddy. “Who’s he on his way to fetch, Hound?”

  “No idea,” said LaRue. “Could be any of a dozen guys I had beatin’ the bushes here in ’64 and ’68.”

  Clarine lit a cigarette. “Oh, they beat on more than the bushes.”

  She was back to Freedom Summer, talking about politics in their usual oblique, hit-and-run way. To this day a part of him suspected the killing of those three “civil rights workers” had been a hoax. Who knew for sure whose bodies had really been buried inside that dam?

  Soon enough, as the Old Man went on about “prosperity without war,” LaRue saw Billy Pope striding back up the leftmost aisle of the Coliseum, ahead of two policemen and the round, bespectacled head of Senator James O. Eastland.

  Under the circumstances LaRue would almost have preferred seeing his wife come toward him.

  Clarine took in the situation, drew on her cigarette, and laughed. She retreated several feet to hide from Eastland, the task of making herself inconspicuous complicated by the red cocktail dress she’d chosen to wear, as well as by her long, fashionable hair amidst all the beehives and permanent waves.

  “Mr. President,” LaRue said with a smile, using Eastland’s Senate title, the “president pro tempore” he had gotten from thirty years’ worth of seniority.

  Eastland tilted back his soccer ball of a head and laughed. A silver filling inside his open mouth caught the beam from a ceiling spotlight, as did his Rhodesian tie clasp. He asked one of the policemen to take him and his “old friend Freddy LaRue” someplace quiet for a minute or two. Once they’d been escorted down one of the Coliseum’s ramps, to a corridor with some utility closets, the senator said, “Freddy, I was backstage with the real Mr. President when Billy told me he thought he’d seen you. I figured it would be a little awkward for Mohammed to come to the mountain, so here I am, comin’ to Mohammed.”

  “I suppose that makes Richard Nixon into Allah,” said LaRue with the same soft laugh Eastland had always appreciated.

  “I suppose it does, Freddy.” The senator raised his voice over yet another burst of applause, dulled by distance but strong enough to travel even down here.

  “Deafenin’, ain’t it?”

  LaRue shook his head and smiled, acknowledging the political improbability of it all.

  “If he goes to trial in the Senate,” said Eastland, “we’re going to hold the line.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Today? Yes. Tomorrow? Could get complicated. I’m not talkin’ about these transcripts we hear are comin’. I’m talkin’ about whatever other surprises still might be out there. Anything you know I don’t?”

  “No, sir. But what I don’t know was always more than what I did.”

  “Freddy,” said Eastland, solemnly, “you know how bad I feel about everything that’s happened.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The senator took his elbow. Drawing him further away from Billy Pope and the cops, he practically whispered in his ear: “Freddy, Mr. President knows you’re here. I told him so back in the holdin’ room once Billy said he thought he’d spotted you.”

  LaRue raised an interested eyebrow.

  “He said to tell you hello.” Eastland imparted the greeting as if it were a secret message smuggled out of an occupied country. “This whole political fortification he’s now countin’ on is The House That Freddy LaRue Built—his exact words, or nearly so.”

  “Nice of him.”

  “He said more. Said that you should ‘keep the faith.’ ” Eastland laughed at the phrase. “Sounds like a nigger preacher, but that’s what he said. And it’s what you ought to do, Freddy. Keep the faith. Get your lawyer to string things out for as long as he’s able. See if he can keep you out of jail through ’76, because Mr. President will go out of office issuin’ a bunch of pardons. He said this, Freddy.”

  LaRue said nothing. He didn’t see how he could go on playing Scheherazade for another two years. The committees and the prosecutors would soon have their fill; the tale would exhaust itself, and he would be locked up.

  “He knows that you’ve never asked for anything, Freddy. And he gave me this assurance very privately, without a hundred special prosecutors buzzin’ around.”

  “And no hidden microphones.”

  Eastland laughed.

  “Well,” said LaRue, “I appreciate even moral support.”

  “Oh, we can do a lot better than moral support. Freddy, I’m not goin’ to be staying up in Washington, D.C., forever. I’m planning to retire in ’78 and come back to my cotton and soybeans. Yes, sir, this is my terminal term. And when I’m home, you can help me out runnin’ those six thousand acres.”

  LaRue laughed. “Do you know how much money I’ve lost in one business and another? I’m better at counting votes than dollars.”

  Eastland gave him a serious look. “There’ll always be a place for you, Freddy. You just need to keep your head high and think about comin’ home. Everybody does come home, you know—at least everybody who comes from here.” He extended both his short arms, as if to take in the whole state of Mississippi.

  “Everybody?” LaRue asked with a smile.

  “They sure do. In fact, do you know who my Elizabeth saw shoppin’ in McRae’s yesterday?”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Clarine Lander! Standin’ in front of the makeup counter, tryin’ on the fiercest lipstick in the store.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say. Everybody comes home, Freddy.”

  The senator nodded to Billy and the policemen, ready for their escort. “I’d best be gettin’ back to say my goodbyes to Allah. You keep well, Freddy. And you remember all I told you.”

  LaRue shook Eastland’s hand and returned to the ocean of standees at the back of the Coliseum, squeezing his way through dozens of folks until he reached Clarine. As he murmured “excuse me” to them all, Nixon was winding up: I say today that 1976, the two-hundredth-anniversary year for America, will be the best year in its history, the most prosperous, the most free!

  Watching the crowd whoop themselves silly, LaRue saw a small cluster of blacks, curiosity-seekers, he supposed, politely withholding their applause. Larrie withheld hers, as impolitely as she could, staring balefully through her dark glasses.

  LaRue thought about 1976 and decided he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to go to jail and get it over with. If he did it soon enough, with a little bit of luck and leniency he might be home free before ’76 was even through.

  Everybody does come home, you know.

  Maybe so. But as he looked at Clarine, he knew that she wouldn’t stay for long.

  Chapter Forty-One

  MAY 29, 1974

  ST. JOHN’S CHURCH; THE OVAL OFFICE

  Nick had always said she’d be late for her own funeral, and at ninety Alice supposed she already was. She was indisputably late for Stew’s this morning, but she didn’t like being rushed by Janie or the driver, and she had decided t
o take her time—now that Stew had all the time in the world.

  When she arrived at the church, one of Stew’s sons—what was his name?—led her down the aisle that she had never walked as a bride. Roland Smith, the rector of St. John’s in 1906, had been annoyed when it was announced that the Episcopal bishop of Washington would perform her wedding to Nick in the East Room. Strange that she could recall Smith’s name and not this boy’s, but she was not going to believe that her inability to come up with it presented evidence of some mental decline to go along with the physical one she’d been feeling, markedly, since the birthday party.

  Strange, too, on this lovely morning, to be thirty years older than the corpse. She’s been told, thank goodness, that there will be no eulogy, so she won’t have to sit in this second-row pew and listen to tales of how brave Stew had been while being poked by the doctors and infused with Joe’s vinegary blood. He had been brave, of course, and had written of his ordeal better than any preacher could talk of it; the mourners might now show a little bravery by not yammering on about all the lessons that suffering can teach us and all the comforts we can offer one another. There is no comfort, and there is no “we”; death is omnipotent, and it will go on performing its extinguishments, one by one.

  I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

  Fiddlesticks. Stew was as likely to meet up with the stuffed tiger whose paw had come off in his hand as he was to meet his Maker. She looked toward the coffin. It was ready, once the service finished, to be loaded into a hearse for burial up in Connecticut. Why not burn it? And, honestly, why not now consider whether she really wants her own carcass to spend eternity next to Paulina’s? Could she perhaps split the difference? Would Rock Creek accept a can of her ashes to go into the ground instead of her bones?