“He’s probably just getting his throat sprayed,” Rose now guessed, as Dr. Tkach disappeared into the cabin. “He sounded awfully hoarse at that last luncheon.”
“Yes,” said Pat, thinking of the twenty-five thousand miles’ worth of recycled airplane air. Part of her husband, she felt certain, had hoped he would die in Cairo—in a more heroic version of what could have happened at the naval hospital last summer. That time history might have said he’d been hounded to death by his enemies; this time, if he’d collapsed in the limousine inside the tornado of sound—the clot having traveled from his leg to his heart—history would be forced to say he’d died pursuing peace for the world.
At 7:50 p.m., a few minutes after the plane touched down in Caribou, Maine, Pat felt the shock of the cool summer air against her face. She breathed it deeply, ridding her lungs of the plane’s stale oxygen and the Kremlin’s opulent stink. Jerry Ford kissed her on the cheek a moment after Julie did, and then he stepped to the microphones to lay it on pretty thick for the returning boss: “What better way could the American people celebrate our one-hundred-ninety-eighth Fourth of July than with the assurance that you bring of a world that’s a little safer and a little saner tonight than it was when you left. Your strategy for peace, Mr. President, has been bold but never rash, courageous but never foolhardy, tough but never rude, gentle but never soft.”
Pat looked at Ford’s daughter, Susan, a big, athletic, uncomplicated-looking girl, so unlike her own daughters, each of them intense in a different way. She was sufficiently absorbed in the comparisons that she almost missed Ford’s compliments to the boss’s wife: “Mrs. Nixon has charmed and captivated both the officials and the citizens of every country she has visited as first lady.” Well, maybe; maybe not. She never felt she’d gotten anywhere with DeGaulle or Prince Philip. But it was sweet of Jerry to say anything at all, which you could bet was more than she’d be hearing any minute from Dick. And yet that was fine, too. In fact, knowing there would be nothing made her feel a funny surge of affection for him, for the way he’d be keeping faith with the shared reserve that still bound them.
Or was that only what she told herself? It was the truth—and it wasn’t. Just like with everything else. Watergate was enormous, colossal; and it was nothing.
She watched Ziegler and Haig nod with pleasure to each other about the serious-looking military backdrop that viewers must now be seeing on their television screens. She knew what they were thinking: the images would help to placate Dick’s critics on the right, the ones who thought détente was too soft. They were, of course, forgetting the far greater number of people who would just be annoyed by the interruption of their favorite television shows.
Glad to be out of camera range, she drank in the cool—almost cold!—breeze and wondered why, as soon as they refueled, they had to go straight from here, in July, to Key Biscayne. Dr. Tkach had ordered Dick to swim and to walk the beach, even if he did it in his wing-tips, but surely they could find someplace else for him to get the exercise.
She could see him favoring the bad leg, almost imperceptibly, as he took the microphone from Ford. “To each and every one of you,” he told the welcoming party, “and to perhaps millions who are listening on television and radio, I can assure you of one thing, and that is, it is always good to come home to America.”
He spoke of the last several weeks as if they had indeed been one long trip—“all of these visits were directed toward the same purpose, and they are all interconnected”—and he implicitly pleaded to be kept on the job, reminding the audience of the need to negotiate another arms-control agreement before the current one expired in 1977.
Even at this distance, and from a side angle, Pat could see in his eyes what she had seen in Cairo, as he stood in the limousine amidst the Cecil B. DeMille throngs. He’s hiding something, she thought. Something quite specific; and he was hiding it even from her. And whatever it was, he’d been hiding it since early May.
She looked far to her left and saw Rose clutching a rosary, the way she’d been doing on and off for months. The sight made her squeeze more tightly the small, solid-gold shamrock that had been waiting for her on this same plane before it took off from Brasília—months and continents and humiliations ago.
Chapter Forty-Three
JULY 24, 1974
CAPITOL HILL AND 1200 EIGHTEENTH STREET, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Clarine stared at the flag. Flying at half staff over the Supreme Court, it had all morning puzzled people in the crowd outside, as if the decision they were awaiting had already been rendered—to official disapproval. Then someone would explain, as a man now did to Clarine, that the flag was still flying low out of respect for Earl Warren, who had died two weeks before.
“Ah, of course,” she said.
She had been with LaRue when each of them heard the news. Go on, say something, she’d told him. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, he’d replied—the only Latin he remembered from school. But he was the sort of fellow who could say it and mean it. Her own daddy, were he still alive, would have been dancing a jig over the great desegregationist’s demise.
KEEP FAITH WITH MADISON—AND MARTHA! read the sign closest to her. Most of the others were a good deal graver.
The Court, perhaps within minutes, would hand down its decision about the tapes, and then tonight the Judiciary Committee, over in the Rayburn Building, would start deliberating the impeachment counts. Yes, it was all dramatic, but she was uncertain why she’d come, and still unsure whether a quick departure by Nixon would make things better or worse for LaRue. Before long, whatever curiosity had brought her here felt idle, and she remembered her appointment with the travel agent arranging her tickets to Europe. She would allow herself one more fast survey of the scene, this time from the nearby steps of the Capitol, but that would be it.
A few hundred people—the quietest, politest protesters she’d ever been among—were keeping vigil there. An odd mixture, Clarine thought: lots of Asians and what seemed to be Jews. Then she noted the signs identifying them with the Reverend Moon and that rabbi who’d gone everywhere defending Nixon for months. Support for the president was now a fringe position. Back home her mother’s minister might not be leading any prayers for the late chief justice, but according to Mamma the sheer meanness of the White House tapes, never mind the cuss words, had shocked him.
A pimply white country boy, almost as skinny as his tie, was now telling Clarine that he and his pro-Nixon compatriots had been there all night and would stay until someone from the Unification Church told them to leave. The general feeling of strangeness in the air was being heightened by the president’s absence from the capital. It seemed as if he might already be gone for good, that he might just stay in San Clemente, where he’d been for more than a week, and never come back to resign or face trial in the Senate.
Clarine finally turned away from all the different vigils, so that she could proceed with her errands. More than three hours passed before she arrived home at her apartment, carrying a one-way ticket for a flight to Madrid. It would leave Dulles the morning after Labor Day.
Walking and thinking had tired her, and the humidity had made things worse: there was no sweetness to the liquid air, the way there would be back home. She thought of the May breezes at the Gulf Hills Hotel, where she’d tried playing Hound’s game and nearly succeeded—pretending they were really at the old dude ranch; that the sliding synthetic curtains were still the old fluttering muslin ones; that the garment she tossed on the floor was a shirtwaist dress hemmed an inch below the knee instead of a miniskirt whose Pop Art circles were themselves passé.
Now, standing in her own apartment after a long nap, she poured herself some sweet tea and considered the reasons she had reentered the life of Fred LaRue. Yes, she’d needed to tell him what befell the envelope that had been so long in her custody, but she knew she’d really come back to ease his way toward the prison that awaited him. She remembered the way he’d held on to her during his panic seventeen
years ago, when whatever had happened in the duck blind was still anything but MOOT. She remembered how powerful his clinging had made her feel. It was a sensation that she had been seeking ever since, and the likelihood of Hound’s imprisonment, two decades later for something so different, had drawn her to him.
If she was easing him toward jail, he was easing her out of Washington, now that she had decided she was definitively done with both her second husband and the hapless Democrats—maybe even with miniskirts. Madrid might just as well be Manchuria. It didn’t matter. In fact, thanks to Nixon, she now reflected, Manchuria itself would soon be a bookable destination.
She probably loved LaRue, but had not imagined that her visit to him in April of last year would turn into a fifteen-month adventure. She’d been held by the soft voice and the squint; by the gentleness he’d evidently sustained amidst all the pseudo-rough characters he’d worked with; and by the way he was always more alive in the dark than the light. She was held, as it were, by the clinging.
She wanted to see him through, to get him the envelope and then fortify him for jail. But her capacity for doing either seemed to be waning.
Not only Hound’s fate, but maybe even Nixon’s, continued to depend on Howard Hunt. The town’s pundits and mandarins now regarded the president’s March 21 meeting with Dean—You could get a million dollars—as the most crucial one of all: Had the President authorized blackmail? On this score LaRue had done one last favor for the Old Man (Clarine detested the epithet) before wrapping up his testimony to the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago: he’d said that Dean had called him on the twenty-first, with instructions to advance the last big payment to Hunt, before Dean had talked with Nixon, which meant that the blackmail had gone ahead without the president’s specific authorization. When he’d testified to Sam Ervin a year before, Hound hadn’t been so sure of the chronology.
Clarine put some Mozart on the stereo and sipped her sweet tea for twenty peaceful minutes, until the intercom sounded.
“Robert Dietrich,” said the voice from the lobby.
She should have been excited, yet Clarine couldn’t keep from rolling her eyes: Hunt’s pseudonyms had begun to seem silly. But she went ahead and buzzed him in, and flipped over the LP as he came up in the elevator.
He had driven in from Potomac wearing a white suit that looked as if it might be left over from his Cuban days. She poured him a drink and pitched her affect, as she had during his two or three other visits, toward something Ava Gardner–ish. She knew from his novels that this would speak to his idealized sense of himself, what he projected through all those chiseled cold-warring protagonists.
He sat down on her couch and explained how peculiar it felt to be out of jail, if only pending appeal, now that Colson and Magruder had been put away like Liddy. Ehrlichman, too, would soon be going: he’d been convicted twelve days ago, partly through Hunt’s testimony.
Clarine listened, acting the way Ava might when the script called for a “Sphinx-like” expression.
Hunt informed her, solemnly: “The decision made me come over this afternoon.”
“The decision?”
“Eight to zero. Against Nixon. Didn’t you hear it on the radio?”
Clarine calmly explained that the Mozart was coming from a record player. This was the first she’d heard of it. The end was approaching and she ought to be calling Hound. But then she noticed the bent, legal-sized envelope sticking out of Hunt’s torn suit pocket.
She pointed to the tear in his jacket and did what any southern girl, even Ava Gardner, would do: she offered to mend it.
Hunt declined, but added, “I do miss a woman’s touch.”
Clarine knew he meant it in the domestic sense, but she still cringed. “Your wife took good care of you.”
“Yes,” said Hunt. “She had exceptionally good judgment. Same as Jacobo Arbenz’s wife. A much smarter character than her husband.”
Clarine had become familiar with the odd frame of reference he wobbled inside. He had told her twice before, apropos of nothing, about the Guatemalan coup he’d once engineered against Arbenz.
“We wound up living two streets from them, the Arbenzes, in Montevideo, some years after the event, while he was in exile. I was under cover at the embassy.”
“Yes, I’ve seen the picture of you shaking hands with Eisenhower when he came through Uruguay. Strange, the things that connect people. I wonder what old Ike would make of all that’s going on with his former protégé these days?”
Hunt showed no interest in talking about Eisenhower; his mind was still on his wife. “Dorothy was a very strong woman. She knew how to keep things to herself. She never even told me the dollar figures she was dealing with during those months. And I never asked.”
Clarine nodded, recalling Dean on the tapes—Mrs. Hunt was the savviest woman in the world. She also remembered what LaRue said Dorothy had told him at the airport: If the plane crashes, I’ll still be thirty grand behind.
“The figures must have been awfully high,” said Clarine. You could get a million dollars.
“There were others’ needs involved besides our own,” Hunt replied.
“Yes.”
“Lawyers’ fees. Living expenses. Even bills for a child psychiatrist.” He was talking about his youngest boy.
“They say it will all come down to March twenty-first,” Clarine ventured.
“Unless,” said Hunt, “there’s something big on these new tapes that they’ve just forced out of him.”
“Yes,” replied Clarine, who assumed there must be—otherwise Nixon’s team wouldn’t have fought so hard to keep them secret. “Either way, nothing can save him now.”
“Nothing?” Hunt protested. “I could come forward and say I told Richard Nixon the break-in was my idea. And that he covered up to protect the Agency and national security—the same way he fought to protect presidential privacy by not surrendering the tapes.”
The CIA man who’d followed her a few weeks ago, whose name she still didn’t know, had clearly started talking to Hunt once it was clear she had no interest in cooperating with whatever he and his friends in the Agency wanted.
“Why would you do that?” she asked. She didn’t give him a chance to answer before adding, “This morning I did have the radio on, and it said that this president you worked for is about to sign a bill creating a new legal services corporation, a pet project of all the left-wingers you despise. He’ll do anything for the votes in Congress that can save him.”
“It’s all part of the game,” said Hunt, as if she were now some naïf instead of Ava Gardner.
“Richard Nixon called you a blackmailer on national television.”
“I never blackmailed the president.”
She had been noting his swings between literalness and grandiosity, wondering how wide they had been before Dorothy Hunt’s flight to Chicago, before Watergate itself. “He says that you did,” she retorted. “That you threatened to expose Ehrlichman’s ‘seamy’ activities.”
“I only mentioned such activities to Dean. He’s the one who drew a conclusion from that.”
“I heard another thing on the radio this morning,” said Clarine. “Elliot Richardson is in Moscow telling them that détente will continue even after Nixon is ousted.”
Hunt shrugged.
“Didn’t you want victory over the Soviets? Instead of this truce that Nixon has more or less brought about?”
“I didn’t want George McGovern. Or Teddy Kennedy.”
“Richard Nixon calls you an idiot on the tapes.”
“ ‘Idiot’ is Dean’s word, actually.”
“Nixon doesn’t disagree when he hears it.”
“The idiocy referred to,” Hunt retorted, “could be the botched operation itself, not the idea for it. Bill Buckley has suggested just such an interpretation.”
Clarine went over to the stereo and lifted the needle from the Mozart record. From the table next to it she picked up a paperback copy of The Whit
e House Transcripts. She brought it back to the couch and read from page 118:
NIXON: That was such a stupid thing!
DEAN: It was incredible—that’s right. That was Hunt.
NIXON: To think that Mitchell and Bob would have allowed—would have allowed—this kind of operation to be in the campaign committee!
“I think that refutes Mr. Buckley’s interpretation,” said Clarine.
She could see that Hunt was upset, and she decided to let up on him, for reasons both human and strategic. “What were you doing before you came here today?” she asked.
“I was working on my book,” said Hunt, with an effort at dignity. “We’ll probably call it The Road to Watergate.”
“Don’t,” Clarine advised. “It will make you and Liddy sound like Hope and Crosby.”
He laughed, but Clarine could see that the dignity he’d summoned a few seconds ago was making him consider a change of title.
“Why did you break into the DNC?” she asked.
“Foreign money. We heard that they’d been getting secret contributions from Castro.”
“But who told you to?”
“Jeb Magruder. He told Liddy, and Liddy told me.”
Clarine could see it rankled him that Liddy, younger than himself and stranger—at least on the surface—had been the operation’s head man.
“Who told Magruder?” she asked.
“People were always pushing him.”
“Which people?”
Clarine could see Hunt trying to look as if he shouldn’t tell. But it was evident that he simply didn’t know, and that the question baffled, even scared, him. His expression again showed a sudden change. He now looked as if he were coming up for air, finding himself in a different place from where he’d last disappeared below the surface. “How did you get my wife’s pin?” he asked.
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