Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  When would he open the damned thing? When the trial was over and he’d finished speaking his piece against Mitchell? Or maybe the night before he, too, went to prison? That way, if it was bad news, he could imagine he was being sentenced for something truly awful, not the little cloak-and-dagger foolishness of Watergate.

  A breeze came through the car window. The clouds were scudding by fast in the direction of Chesapeake Bay. Thoughts of its marshes took him back, yet again, to the spot in Canada; to the two blinds they’d set up because he and Daddy weren’t getting along; to the six snorts of bourbon he’d had while sitting by himself; to the gun that felt as heavy as his limbs felt light; to the moment he’d raised it to fire at the birds; and then to the weirdly long report that came back over the reeds; the cries of “Ike! Ike! Ike!”

  Who knows what impulse the drink might have made him give in to?

  He tried, as always, to banish the image, turning up the radio’s volume to the point where Rosemary Clooney was singing “Tenderly” as loud as the kid in the next lane had Jimi Hendrix or whoever it was playing the guitar. And then the station interrupted the record for an unexpected piece of news, a recorded announcement that Jerry Ford had made sometime between going to church and teeing off at Burning Tree:

  … a decision which I felt I should tell you and all of my fellow American citizens …

  LaRue knew what was coming, no matter that Ford had spent all spring assuring his fellow American citizens that the Old Man was innocent.

  … do grant a free, full, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon.

  Did the Old Man make a deal for it—through Haig? Or was it simply that Ford couldn’t get his presidency going with everyone still lined up outside the courthouse waiting for Nixon to arrive in shackles?

  Or maybe it was honest-to-God pity. Eastland had called LaRue a week or so ago to say that the Old Man had been crying on the phone from San Clemente. He was in the worst shape imaginable and, according to the senator, both Jaworski and Jerry Ford needed to know it.

  Well, Nixon was now off the hook, and that was fine with LaRue. He tried to imagine the Old Man enjoying the moment, feeling the relief as he sat on the ash heap of his life beside the Pacific Ocean. He couldn’t begrudge him the reprieve, and he wouldn’t complain that he and Mitchell still had prison stretches ahead of them.

  And yet, God Almighty, what would it be like to feel such relief after seventeen years of doubt as to what his subconscious might have made him do to Ike LaRue, to Daddy, who could be hell on wheels and whose money anyone would have enjoyed sooner rather than later?

  Up ahead LaRue saw the sign for a rest stop. On impulse, he let himself turn into it. He shut off the engine, picked up the envelope, and tried to do what he’d resisted doing for five days—open it.

  But he couldn’t, even now, make himself do it. He stayed seated in the car, parked at the rest stop, letting his mind wander over his life—the last two years, the first twenty-eight, the fifteen that lay in between. He kept the radio low, listening to a Sunday gospel program, restarting the car not when he reached some moment of clarity, but only when he feared he’d otherwise drain the battery.

  He arrived at Holabird an hour late. Magruder came toward him—fit, if a little pale—in a blue Ban-Lon shirt. His Dale Carnegie manner was undiminished: “Fred LaRue, you’re looking fine!”

  When the two of them sat down, Jeb seemed to sense his visitor’s preoccupation and, with the instinct of a salesman, did enough chatting for two. “So I guess you heard about the Old Man,” he began.

  “Yeah,” said LaRue.

  “McGovern’s already come out against it!” Magruder laughed, as if the joke were still on the sad sack they’d run against two years ago.

  “So,” he asked, when no laughter from LaRue met his own, “do you think we’re next? For clemency? Colson does.”

  “I doubt it,” LaRue replied. He hadn’t given the matter any thought, whereas Jeb was now eyeing the possibility of a pardon the way he once would have looked at a promotion.

  “I guess you’re right,” Magruder admitted, a little crestfallen. “I just hope they won’t go harder on the rest of us now that the Old Man’s gotten off scot-free.”

  “Is that how you see it?” LaRue asked, with a kind of wonderment that he could feel baking itself into hostility.

  Magruder decided to change the subject, offering LaRue some reminiscences of his recent stay in Allenwood: “This place is a hell of an improvement over that one. We had fifty-four guys to a dorm there! I hadn’t heard snoring like that since I was in Basic. They counted us six times a day—and forget this ‘white-collar’ stuff. There were plenty of ghetto guys up there, and the ones in for drugs blamed the Old Man—and us—for their stiff sentences.”

  To LaRue, Nixon’s “war on drugs” now sounded as remote as the Vicksburg Campaign.

  “Hey,” said Magruder, cheerfully determined to keep the talk going, “you know who I played tennis with up there? Johnny Sample, that black guy from the Jets. He was in for passing bad checks.”

  LaRue nodded.

  “But believe me, it wasn’t all tennis. The first few weeks I did nothing but scrub pots and pans.”

  LaRue nodded again.

  “This place is a lot easier on Gail,” Magruder continued, speaking of his wife. “The shorter drive means she can do it as a day trip.” LaRue still said nothing, while Jeb persevered in trying to jolly him out of his frozen state. “I guess even Allenwood had its pluses for her. She didn’t have to worry about the Committee secretaries coming on to me, or about my drinking. But, boy, I’ll tell you, there were a hell of a lot of tranquilizers up there—prescribed and bootleg. Half the guys stayed stoned all day.”

  “I guess you’ll be at this place for a while,” LaRue said finally, as if trying to nudge their meeting back toward some agenda it didn’t have.

  Magruder understood that he was referring to the postponement of the Mitchell trial, whose Washington venue was the reason for keeping the Watergate prisoners here. “Yeah,” said Jeb. “It’ll be a while. I feel sorry for Mitchell, with all the delays, but you won’t hear me complaining as long as we get to work off our time down here instead of in Pennsylvania.” His voice and expression turned somber for a moment. “You know, Gail always liked Mitchell, saw him as a father type.”

  “I thought I was the father figure,” said LaRue, without a smile. He handed Magruder the box of peanut brittle. He declined a piece of the candy for himself, while Jeb described the courtly way one of Holabird’s Mafia men always behaved when Gail visited.

  When LaRue said nothing, Jeb chattered on, in search of a topic that might restore his visitor to his familiar old amiability. “They tell me the book is selling pretty well.”

  LaRue had been determined to keep the conversation away from Magruder’s memoirs, and this was more than he could stand. “Jeb, your ‘American Life’ has about as much social significance as Dino’s.”

  “Who’s Dino?”

  “The cocker spaniel in the apartment next door to mine. Barks all the time.”

  Magruder looked hurt.

  LaRue, thinking of the letter out in his car, asked, “Where did you get off putting in that stuff about my father’s hunting accident?”

  Magruder appeared confused. “Did that wind up going in? I can’t even remember, there were so many drafts. The ghostwriter must have decided—”

  “You didn’t read your own goddamned book?”

  “Sure I did, but—”

  “Hell, you couldn’t resist whatever might make it a little more interesting, isn’t that right?”

  “Jeez, Fred, I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “Well, fuck all, maybe I’ve never been in these circumstances before.”

  Jeb, not even wearing convict’s clothes, looked like an organization man who’d just joined one more organization. Whereas, thought LaRue, prison would likely kill Mitchell. And maybe it would kill him, too—he could imagine get
ting shanked after thoughtlessly dropping some word like “coon.”

  He sat in silence, damned if he was going to tell Jeb what his own last year had been like; about all that he’d been through with Clarine; about the damned envelope out in the car.

  Magruder, biting into a piece of the peanut brittle, took a philosophical turn: “You ever think how little it would have taken to keep things from ending up this way?”

  “Yeah,” said LaRue, indulgently.

  Magruder warmed to the new subject. “I mean—if the security guard hadn’t seen the tape on the door; if McCord had kept his mouth shut; if the president hadn’t bugged his own office. So many variables.”

  LaRue gave a fatalistic shrug. “I’d dial it back to Key Biscayne myself.” Mr. Mitchell, to the best of my recollection, said something to the effect that, Well, this is not something that will have to be decided at this meeting. Actually, he would rewind things all the way back to that meeting at Justice, where Liddy had presented his grand plans at the easel. Given a do-over, LaRue would have Mitchell throw Liddy out the window, just as the attorney general had fantasized about doing, “in hindsight,” to Sam Ervin and Sam Dash.

  LaRue didn’t want to go any further with this pointless game, but Jeb persisted: “I should have been stronger, resisted the pressure I was always feeling from Haldeman and Colson. God, the day Chuck called me with Hunt right in his office! Asking when I planned on giving Hunt and Liddy something to do.”

  “Yeah,” LaRue said, with rising anger. “Well, you sure picked the most useless target in fuck-all creation. I mean, Jesus, the damned DNC.”

  Magruder, believing the remark to be—at last!—a piece of the old Magrue insult humor, smiled. “Yeah, I could have picked a half dozen better places to tell them to go into. Even McGovern’s headquarters would have been an improvement. But after Colson’s call, the DNC was the first place that came to mind. You remember that night you and I had at Billy Martin’s?”

  “Yeah,” said LaRue, recalling the occasion when he’d none too wisely poured out to Jeb his history with Clarine.

  “When we were both pretty far gone,” said Magruder, “I could hear you say, sort of muttering, ‘Yeah, I’d love to know what’s in Larry’s desk.’ Two or three times: ‘Larry’s desk.’ You also said, sort of to yourself, ‘Might make no difference; might make all the difference.’ You kept repeating those two lines like they were from one of your country songs.” He laughed.

  LaRue looked into Magruder’s blank, handsome face. He could almost hear the two of them speaking and slurring the way they did that night at Billy Martin’s. He’d learned from the White House “Blue Book” and all the hearings what a difference there could be between what somebody said and what wound up getting transcribed, and all at once he realized what had happened when they stumbled from one personal and political topic to another that night.

  I’d love to know what’s in Larrie’s desk.

  “You dumb fuck,” said LaRue, in a tone Magruder had never heard from him before. “We spent half that night talking about Clarine Lander—Larrie—L-A-R-R-I-E.”

  “Fred,” said Jeb, still not getting it, “you look as if you’re seeing a ghost.”

  I’d love to know what’s in Larrie’s desk: LaRue had mumbled the words to himself, since he’d told Jeb almost everything about Clarine except for the letter he knew was in her desk. Jeb had heard “Larry” instead of “Larrie,” and days later he’d sent the burglars in search of whatever crap Larry O’Brien might have under his blotter or be talking about on his phone. And during their first entry—putting half-dead bugs onto the wrong lines, rifling the wrong desks, and photographing the wrong documents—Hunt’s goons had swept up the MOOT letter.

  Magruder seemed vaguely aware, at last, of what had happened. He sought to calm his old friend by laughing, and by telling him with a touch of pride, “You don’t need to worry about this. I never told any of the investigators. I let them think Larry O’Brien was my idea!”

  LaRue hadn’t taken a swing at anyone in twenty years. He thought he might now, but reckoned that his fist would just sink, pointlessly, into Magruder’s handsome custard pie of a face.

  He got up, walked away, and said, over his shoulder, “Take care of yourself, Jeb.”

  Outside the visitors’ room, he submitted to an examination of his pockets. His shaking hands excited a certain suspicion in the guard, but he forced himself to remain calm, even as he wondered about all that might not have happened if he’d not, while in his cups, mentioned Clarine by her nickname.

  No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started, he would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson, Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate depended on Fred—or Ike—LaRue’s having been born.

  Once the guard nodded his okay and handed him back his wallet, LaRue walked out into the afternoon light, toward his car.

  The letter lay on the passenger seat, the pre-electric typewriting on its envelope looking as official as all the green-covered transcripts of all the congressional hearings he’d recently testified at. But what good would it do him, he wondered, to know a truth that might be as untrue or as ludicrously incomplete as he now knew all those transcripts to be? Further knowledge would not save Mitchell from boozy decomposition, let alone prison. It wouldn’t stop the Old Man’s whirlings through his gray pardoned purgatory. It wouldn’t bring back Clarine or, for that matter, Ike.

  And so he put the envelope into the glove compartment and began his journey home, southwards, in the direction of Mississippi, where he would head for good and all, after one last night inside the Watergate’s walls.

  Epilogue

  1978–2004

  Each morning that she sat down behind Henriette’s easel, Pat performed a bit of camouflage, putting both hands in her lap and placing the right one over the left, which even now, two years after the stroke, remained weak. As she posed, she would look out the window of the breakfast room, regarding the purple gazanias and occasionally catching sight of a hummingbird.

  She’d lost track of the number of sittings and had long since run out of things to say to Henriette: she’d joked about how her garden was falling to ruin because of all the time she was spending in here, and asked if the picture was magically going to make her look a full, straight-backed five-feet-six again. Henriette was better at keeping up her end of the conversation, telling stories of the whole painting Wyeth family—her brother, Andrew; her nephew, Jamie—or about some of her recent sitters. Paulette Goddard and Helen Hayes!

  Pat hadn’t wanted to pose for a portrait at all. The girls had insisted on it for the past four years—for Dick’s sake, or theirs, or just for history’s. She had avoided argument about the first two sakes, but maintained that history would be better off without the picture. A missing portrait—the one never made of the only first lady evicted from the premises—would be more instructive than anything hanging on a wall.

  “What’s that lovely smell?” asked Henriette.

  “Eucalyptus,” Pat answered. “Manolo taught us to use the leaves for kindling. You can smell it long after the fire’s gone.”

  Manolo, Dick’s valet, was gone, too. He and Fina had retired and moved to Spain.

  She’d agreed to the picture only this summer, when Julie at last gave them a grandchild. The baby was now three months old, and Henriette had been on the scene for three weeks.

  An odd bond between painter and sitter had grown up around their hands. In Henriette’s case the right, not the left, was twisted—from childhood polio. But she had taught herself to use it; she drew with her left hand and painted with her right. The division of labor, the self-discipline that must have been required to make it happen, fascinated Pat, though the two wo
men had spoken of it only once.

  She had lots of time to think while sitting here facing the blank back of the canvas. But her mind rarely traveled back to any past but the recent one, the four years that she and Dick had been together in this house. He had been the first one to approach death’s door, just after they arrived here in ’74. The blood clots nearly killed him, and the hemorrhaging during surgery was even worse. But he’d come home and rallied and written his book, and the two of them had fallen into a strange, anesthetized routine. She often felt that the ocean was not just on one side of the house but all around; that they were on an island, a little two-person leper colony. Able was I ’ere I saw Elba. She wondered if she would live long enough to teach Jennie, her new grandchild, about palindromes.

  As for her Napoleon, his plots involved reclaiming not his throne but his reputation. He was now at work on another book—not another memoir, though she thought he’d gone too easy on his enemies in the one he’d written. This new project was a book about foreign affairs, how to handle the Russians. It would display the kind of expertise people were willing to concede him, the way they’d admit that the Bird Man of Alcatraz did have a way with canaries.

  He was lately talking about returning to New York, where he could live amidst thinkers and editors and make himself available to any foreign minister checking in at the United Nations. Well, if he wanted to go, she would. She would give up the garden here for a window box there and be perfectly all right. She’d have little reason or desire to leave the apartment.

  Dick never tired of saying that she’d had her stroke, in July of ’76, because she’d made the mistake of looking into Woodward and Bernstein’s second book, which spared not even her—tales of drinking and so forth. He had convinced himself of the connection, and he’d railed against the two authors throughout her recovery, every time he saw her struggling with the stair-steps of the exercise box, or trying to draw out the pulley they’d attached to a wall by the patio.