Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  Chapter Forty-Two

  JULY 3, 1974

  RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING; WATERGATE WEST 310; ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE; LORING AFB, CARIBOU, MAINE

  “Are you a married man?” asked Albert Jenner, majority counsel to the Judiciary Committee.

  “Yes, sir,” answered Fred LaRue.

  “Do you have a family?”

  “Yes, sir. A wife and five children.”

  From the back of the hearing room Clarine could see that even Fred’s lawyer was having trouble staying interested. He knew the committee really just wanted to hear the same song that had been sung last summer. If anything, its members were hoping Hound could sing it a little faster: they had only just now, in the middle of the afternoon, gotten him sworn in, and if they couldn’t finish with him today, they’d have to resume on Monday, after the holiday weekend.

  But the narrative could be speeded up only so much. It required its high points and also its groundwork, the pre-Watergate movements Clarine had heard about or followed from afar: LaRue’s work on the GOP campaigns of ’64 and ’68; his recruitment of southerners to the Nixon administration; his absence from the White House directory, and his EOB office with no name on the door.

  And then, of course, came the fateful Thursday, March 30, 1972, in Key Biscayne:

  “My only recollection is that Mr. Mitchell read this paper, asked my opinion of it, and I gave him my opinion. And Mr. Mitchell, as I recall, commented that this was not a decision that needed to be made at this time.”

  There was lately talk in the papers of a movie being made from the Woodward and Bernstein book, but Fred had told her he felt as if he’d already sat through six showings of it. Jenner now said he was having trouble hearing the witness’s soft voice, and it seemed to Clarine as if the majority counsel were asking someone to turn up the sound on the projector.

  Fred did his best to stay audible through his latest reconstruction of the Monday, June 19, meeting at the Mitchells’ apartment:

  “As I recall, Mr. Mitchell asked Mr. Magruder if he had a fireplace in his home. He stated he did, and Mr. Mitchell said, ‘Well, it might be a good idea if you had a fire tonight.’ ”

  The hour grew late and Jenner never made it to March 21, 1973, the day when—the committee would have to decide—the president either did or did not order that a final payment be made to Howard Hunt. The chairman declared adjournment at 5:48 p.m., but the words of that March conversation between Nixon and Dean, so familiar to everyone by now, would keep playing in everyone’s head over the holiday weekend, as if the movie’s soundtrack were continuing through the picture’s interruption: You could get a million dollars … The question is, who the hell would handle it … Mitchell’s got Fred LaRue doing it …

  In fact, the hearing’s resumption would have to wait until Monday afternoon: Nixon’s lawyer needed to be present, and on Monday morning he would be tied up arguing the president’s case in the Supreme Court. Watergate, Clarine realized, could no longer keep up with itself: on Monday, in addition to what went on at the Court and here in the Rayburn Building, Hunt would be testifying against Ehrlichman at the Plumbers’ trial in another part of town.

  Fred rose from the witness table and squinted in an effort to catch sight of her. When he did, he seemed, as always, surprised—as if he’d been expecting her already to have bolted, for Biloxi, or Bora-Bora. He shook hands with his lawyer, who pretended not to know that his client would be departing room 2141 with the woman who’d been hidden, all year, at the center of his life.

  Back at Watergate West, Clarine watched Fred make himself a drink, one finger of water atop two inches of bourbon, before he sat down behind the coffee table. The books on it were starting to pile up. LaRue had told her he had no desire to read All the President’s Men—he’d had a two-year-long bellyful of Woodward and Bernstein in the Post—and the arrival of a book by Jeb Magruder (courtesy of the publisher!) had produced, he insisted, even stronger revulsion.

  Jeb was fun, dumb, good-looking, and, until recently, lucky. That he should write a book at all seemed pretty ridiculous. For it to carry the fancy-ass title An American Life was enough to make you upchuck. The book even offered analysis by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the antiwar Yale chaplain who’d had the same job at Williams when Jeb was smiling his way through there in the fifties. Coffin was now happy to recommend Jeb’s American life as a study in the country’s warped values, blah blah blah.

  But Clarine kept irritating LaRue with the book, urging it upon him like a feather being tickled against his nose.

  She picked it up yet again as she sat down beside him on the couch.

  “It takes a man with a powerful lack of vanity,” she said, “to resist even looking for his name in the index.”

  LaRue took a swallow of his drink and gave her the kind of smile he did when she tried to bait him with progressive pronouncements about the war or the races, like a recent lecture she’d enjoyed giving him on how Elvis had really stolen his music from the blacks who lived around Tupelo.

  “LaRue, comma, Frederick C.,” she read from Magruder’s index. “Pages 183 to 184, 236, 251, 278—”

  “What’s he say on 184?” asked LaRue. He picked the number at random, hoping she’d toss him a sentence or two and get the book out of her system.

  “If Fred LaRue came into a room,” she read, “you’d hardly know he was there.”

  “Well,” said LaRue, “there’s no arguin’ with that.”

  “Mitchell had the highest regard for LaRue, and around the first of the year he sent him over to CRP ‘to help out,’ with no clear-cut title or assignment.”

  Clarine saw LaRue glance in the direction of John and Martha’s old apartment. He was, she knew, remembering the weekday suppers, the storytelling, his first meeting with each of them. I hope you’ll never LaRue it, honey.

  He gave her a look: that’s enough.

  But she continued reading: “LaRue was no threat to me. He had no desire to be a manager, only to advise. We became so close, both professionally and personally, that people in the office used to refer to us jointly as ‘Magrue.’ ”

  LaRue took more of his drink. “Yeah, Larrie, you should have seen the shit-eating grins the two of us and everybody else wore at the beginning of ’72.” He’d told it all to her during evenings after he’d returned from the prosecutor’s office: how everybody at the committee had been awash in a constant stream of money and good news. Liddy might occasionally alarm them, like some village idiot who’d just acquired a car and a gun, but “Magrue” had had plenty of untroubled time to go off and drink together, early in the evenings, avoiding their families—in Hound’s own case by a thousand miles and for weeks at a time.

  “You know,” she said, “page 183 is actually more interesting than page 184. In fact, the index has an entry for LaRue, comma, Ike, page 183.”

  LaRue said nothing, and she went to the page.

  “Fred LaRue … was an introverted soft-spoken Mississippian whose life had been haunted by tragedy. Fred’s father, Ike LaRue, was an oil man and a cousin of the Texas oil millionaire Sid Richardson. Ike LaRue was sent to prison in Texas for banking violations, and upon his release started over in the oil business in Mississippi. In 1954 he and his sons, Fred and Ike Jr., struck oil in the Bolton field, twenty miles from Jackson, and made a fortune. Then, three years later, in 1957, during a duckhunting trip in Canada, Fred LaRue accidentally shot and killed his father.”

  LaRue’s mood and expression changed considerably. The passage was registering as Clarine had hoped it would: as something disgustingly impersonal, scientific, something that turned LaRue into a swab of blood on a slide. Here was the other side of Jeb, the user.

  “I guess,” said Fred, “that adds a little chunk of somethin’ to Jeb’s thin gruel.” He took the book from her hands and shut it hard. At the sound, he added, “I’m tryin’ to remember, from my visits to Daddy, whether prison doors clanged or thudded.”

  Jeb had gotten
his own sentence from Sirica in May, and he’d been locked up for the last few weeks.

  Clarine got up to start dinner, knowing that she looked pleased. The feather, pushed against Hound’s nose, had at last gotten him to sneeze.

  “You know,” said LaRue, “I really like Jeb. And I really dislike him, too.”

  “That’s not uncommon,” she said, coaxingly, from the kitchen. “Are you going to visit him, since he keeps askin’?”

  LaRue ignored her question. “I loved my daddy twenty times as much—and hated him twenty times more, too.”

  Clarine poured herself some bourbon and came back to the couch. “So, Hound, what are you saying?”

  LaRue murmured more faintly than usual. “I’m sayin’ that anything could have happened in those woods. We were drinking too much of this”—he wiggled his glass—“and we’d all been arguin’ way too much.”

  She looked at the wall. He had always forced himself to keep his daddy’s bird gun out in the open, mounted in everybody’s full view, to risk its becoming a conversation piece and not just a private, penitential reminder of what he had done, by accident or a moment’s lunacy, with his own gun.

  “Yes, I imagine anything could have happened,” said Clarine.

  “I feel like I don’t know much of anything anymore, but I ought to at least know that.”

  She put her hand on the back of his neck and scratched it. “You will, Hound.”

  She was still doing her best to make sure of it. The other day she’d been paid a call by some horn-rimmed ex-CIA man who wanted to ask questions about her “friendship” with his old colleague Howard Hunt—whose own two trips to her apartment had been, it would seem, surveilled. Clarine had no exact idea who the horn-rimmed man might be, and his references to the wisdom of some ancient aunt gave her no clue. Would she, he wished to know, use her “influence” with Hunt, get him to recant his previous testimony and say that the Watergate burglary had been conducted entirely at his own initiative, because of what he’d heard about Cuban money and the Democrats?

  The CIA, it would appear, had decided this late in the game that Nixon was indispensable: he might be pursuing détente, but he had also gotten the Russians kicked out of Egypt.

  She had deflected his suggestion that winning Hunt’s cooperation might prove advantageous to herself. There was only one thing she wanted from Hunt, and her instincts—not about politics, but about men—had lately convinced her that, after some delay and discouragement, she was soon going to get it.

  She now looked at LaRue, who no longer seemed to be thinking of the woods, or even of the MOOT letter. His eyes were looking straight at the wall with the bird gun; his foot was on the coffee table, planted on top of Jeb’s book. He was seething with a sense of betrayal, and she was glad to see it. If she could get the letter, and if she could keep him angry, he’d be strong enough for her to move on.

  At this same hour, the plane Nixon had rechristened The Spirit of ’76 was flying over the North Atlantic, returning to the United States from Moscow. Pat Nixon, who had come out of her cabin to take a seat beside Rose, had her feet up. Both women, exhausted from the trip, were alternately dozing and then waking with a start. Ollie Atkins, the White House photographer now coming up the aisle, occasioned Rose’s latest resumption of consciousness.

  “Are we landing a.m. or p.m.?” she asked him. “All I remember is that it’s supposed to be around eight.” She couldn’t even recall whether it would be July third or fourth.

  “P.M.,” answered Atkins. “July three.”

  “Thanks,” said Rose, managing to laugh. Even so, her heart was fluttering with the thought that she’d dropped the ball and somehow lost herself and everybody else a whole day.

  Seeing that she was awake, Marje Acker now handed Rose a fact sheet about the arrival ceremony planned for an air force base in Maine. Rose saw that Ford would be there to greet the plane, accompanied by his daughter but not his wife.

  “Julie will be there, too,” she told Pat, who was emerging from her own nap.

  The first lady brightened. “Oh, that’s swell.” After a pause that took away her happy expression, she added, “God, she’s done so much more than her share.”

  Rose didn’t have to ask what she meant. Week after week the president’s younger daughter valiantly sought out the press in order to defend her father. Tricia? Well, that was another story.

  “I felt you go bolt upright a minute ago,” Pat said to Rose. “I did the same thing this morning in my bedroom in the Kremlin. I thought we were in Cairo!”

  It was as if they’d been on one big trip; Russia had followed the Middle East with only six at-home days in between. The Soviet part of the journey, just finished, had produced no big arms-control treaty, only a few minor agreements, like the small potatoes in a babushka’s market basket. Well, they could blame Dick for that, too. Having brought off three summits in three years, he’d made them look routine.

  But, dear Lord, Cairo, a couple of weeks ago: anything but routine. The cheering from the sidewalks and balconies had been a kind of tornado. In almost thirty years of campaigning and traveling the world, she’d never seen or heard anything remotely like it. And they were cheering for him.

  All this travel—twenty-five thousand miles in about twenty days—made her feel as if they were already living a life in exile. And all these hours in the air made her think of those nuclear-war movies that have the president taking to the skies to keep himself and the government alive while everything falls to smithereens below.

  Propped against a wall inside her cabin was a painting of Moscow by night that Brezhnev had given them. The other present, amber jewelry, would of course go to the Archives, but she wondered if, without creating another impeachment count, they might actually be able to keep the painting. She could imagine hanging it beside the Manhattan sunrise she’d brought to the hospital last summer. What she couldn’t yet visualize was where both paintings would end up. Don’t let him take you back to California … We’ll manage. And we’ll keep each other alive.

  Haig was coming up the aisle, cheering the troops, and Pat decided she would pretend to be sleeping.

  Rose had noticed the chief of staff’s underlying weariness, as well as his new distance from the president. Even so, at one of the banquets yesterday, Haig had told her that their boss—despite the diagnoses of amateur headshrinkers in the press—was actually the sanest of men. Anybody else would have cracked in two while half the world called him a devil and the other half proclaimed him a Christ. Jaworski had proved as good as his word, telling the press about the “unindicted co-conspirator” designation as soon as he didn’t get his way on the tapes. Every cartoonist had immediately put the president into stripes—and then six days later the Egyptians were screaming their approval of the man who was saving them from the Russians and maybe leading them toward peace.

  Rose had yet again resolved: if he could keep from going crazy when caught between such fires of scorn and adulation, then she and everybody else could for damn sure hold themselves together. She was hardly in the clear over the tape erasure—the panel of scientists had declared that five separate manual operations had been required to produce it—but “the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap” was just one clod of dirt in Richard Nixon’s mountain of troubles. She would continue to live with her feelings of guilt, continue diminishing them with a constant penance of fear that she could be charged at any time.

  Haig reached her seat on the aisle. “You ought to start reading the papers again, Rose. There’s occasionally good news in them.”

  “You think?” she said, playfully frowning. “I sometimes sneak a look just to punish myself. And speaking of punishment: What’s the penalty for strangling a committee chairman?” She meant Rodino, who last Thursday had told reporters that all the Democrats would be voting for impeachment—never mind that there had as yet been no public hearings and no presentation from the defense.

  “Joe Waggoner counts seventy votes for us
on his side of the House,” said Haig.

  Rose looked skeptical. Waggoner was one of the boss’s mint-julep Democrats. God love ’em, but they wouldn’t be enough.

  “Ford and Harlow agree with him,” Haig insisted.

  Rose passed him a caramel. “Don’t try to cheer me up. It’s better if I stay inconsolable. That way I don’t get knocked back down again.”

  She’d been struggling to recover her equilibrium ever since the fall, when she’d lost control with the Sony 800B and then with Ed Brooke. She had to keep herself steady, especially if the end really was approaching. She was glad the Muslims hadn’t made a single drop of alcohol available on that long Victorian train ride from Cairo to Alexandria.

  Haig walked toward the press at the rear of the plane, leaving Rose and the first lady more or less alone. Pat, now fully awake, seemed reflective. “Dick’s been playing the piano a lot before bed. Or at least he was before we left. Sometimes he seems less depressed by everything than David is. I often worry about David the most. You know, Mamie wants me to go up to Gettysburg, just to hide out for a while, have a rest, gossip.”

  “You should go,” said Rose.

  “Julie should go. She’s the one who deserves a rest. I can make do just lying in my bathtub.”

  Rose laughed, knowing what she referred to: the room the first lady had had, with a half dozen chandeliers, in the Saudi queen’s palace, cooled to what the queen’s major domo thought were American tastes, which is to say freezing. Lest she offend her hosts, Pat had actually slept in the tub for a couple of hours in the middle of the night with every blanket she could find, since the bathroom at least had a little heater. “Starlight sees it through,” she said, mocking herself with her Secret Service code name.

  Pat grew a little nervous when they saw Dr. Tkach heading up to the president’s cabin. One night in Salzburg, on the way to Cairo, Dick had finally shown her, along with Haig and Rose, his leg—unveiling it more like a secret weapon than a potentially fatal vulnerability. Over the next days it had been awful to watch him standing up in the limousines that drove them through those tornadoes of cheering, even if the adrenaline probably did more to help than all the hours spent keeping the leg elevated in whatever palace they repaired to later. He’d insisted his condition remain a secret among the small group who knew from Salzburg.