Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  She had read some of the book, but it didn’t make much of an impression, certainly not the kind made by the spring 1976 number of The Tom Thumb House Newsletter, which had noted with regret the passing of the charity’s longtime friend and generous supporter, Mr. Thomas Garahan of New York. A heart attack at the age of sixty-six.

  On February 20, 1980, eight days after her ninety-sixth birthday, Alice entered the last five minutes of her existence. The television in her bedroom showed Ronald Reagan fighting for his political life in New Hampshire and then, a moment later, the Russians marching through Afghanistan. Alice imagined that Father would soon be on his way to the Khyber Pass, forcing the combatants into peace talks.

  Her mind, like the television, was sometimes on and sometimes off, but she felt certain, as did her granddaughter and Janie, that the end was quite near. Bronchial pneumonia, the doctor had said. When he told her, she’d experienced a slight disappointment that such an ordinary complaint would be what finally carried her off.

  On the table by the bed lay the last piece of mail she would ever receive, a printed change-of-address announcement:

  Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon are now residing at

  142 East Sixty-fifth Street

  New York, New York 10021

  So far, she had to admit, he’d done rather well, and if he went on as long as she had, he’d be around for another thirty years. An advance copy of his latest book, sent a week ago “with the compliments of the author,” sat on another table in the room. There would be no funeral for her, and no wake, but the dress she’d be buried in was laid out, at her insistence, across a chair near the foot of the bed. She had managed to place inside one of its pockets a little scrawl of Paulina’s from fifty years ago: Dear Mother, I love you very much. Love, “Kits.”

  One piece of jewelry lay atop the dress: the wedding bracelet from the kaiser. The jewel thief who’d gotten hold of it in ’66, when she was up in New York at Capote’s party, had pried out all the diamonds, and they’d never been recovered, so there didn’t seem any reason what was left of the thing shouldn’t be buried with her—just those empty gold settings, like a mouthful of missing teeth. What could be a better memento mori?

  Of course she wouldn’t be needing any reminders, since she’d be dead, lying in Rock Creek Cemetery beside Paulina, with Hilda Wilhelmina Luoma as their neighbor a few grassy feet away. No Nick, no Bill, and no prospect of meeting up with either one in any sort of afterlife, let alone the big reunion bash that Bobby’s widow continued to expect.

  All at once she groaned, realizing that Joe was no doubt getting ready to write something about her for a newspaper or magazine. He’d repeat a half dozen of her hoariest remarks, at least three of which she would never actually have said.

  Her mind again flickered off: she suddenly wasn’t sure which of the brothers, Stew or Joe, remained alive, and which of them was dead. She looked out into the hall, toward the old stuffed tiger whose paw had once fallen off in Stew’s hand.

  As soon as she closed her eyes, for the last time, she saw it—the tiger, quite alive, coming toward her.

  “We love you, Muggsy!”

  The crowd in the hotel ballroom laughed and cheered, and Elliot Richardson acknowledged his self-bestowed nickname with a dignified, defeated smile.

  “I’m proud of what I’ve done and what my conscience would not let me do,” he declared, conceding his loss, by more than twenty-five points, in the Massachusetts Republican Senate primary.

  The crowd applauded his sentiment, though not so loudly as it had applauded the nickname he’d assumed six months ago at a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon roast hosted by Billy Bulger, the state senate’s president, a man less famous for his legislative accomplishments than for his gangster brother, Whitey. When Bulger held up a mock-advertisement urging those who saw it to VOTE FOR ELLIOT, HE’S BETTER THAN YOU, Richardson had come back with a suggestion that the monicker “Muggsy” might serve to warm him up for an electorate either put off by his manner or unsure of who he was. He had, after all, been gone from Massachusetts for most of the last fifteen years.

  Nineteen eighty-four hadn’t looked completely hopeless back in March, but now, in mid-September, the smart money was moving to a Reagan reelection victory even here in Massachusetts. The fellow who’d just trounced Richardson in the primary was very much the president’s sort of man—a self-made millionaire in what was now bewilderingly called “high tech.”

  “The Former Everything” had done his campaigning at Irish taverns and town dumps, flinging his Muggsy buttons like doubloons to whoever showed up. But once he began to speak it was usually of arms control (unlike Mr. Reagan, he was for it) or tax increases (with all due respect to the president, he saw their necessity). He was sorry to have to disavow so much of the Republican Party and its platform, but there you were. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to, he would tell them. Some remembered what he was talking about; many didn’t.

  The jobs between Justice and now had gotten ever more rarefied and finally Ruritanian: ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; secretary of commerce; chief negotiator for the Law of the Sea treaty. By the time he left Washington to make this Senate run, heading up to Massachusetts had felt almost like going off to Hawaii. Rather a lot of things were upside down now; he’d realized just how many when this May the American Society of Newspaper Editors—ten years after his own appearance—had chosen Richard Nixon for their speaker.

  “I congratulate my opponent but hope he’ll remain mindful of the kind of people and principles that have preceded him here in the Grand Old Party.”

  The applause had become decidedly weak, and he could tell from the camera lights that two of the local TV stations had cut away from the ballroom. It was time to wrap this up and have Muggsy bid everyone a fond good night.

  Richardson imagined that from this point on—he was, after all, sixty-four—he’d be grazing in the pastures of the Kennedy School of Government just across the river, ruminating upon the Saturday Night Massacre for the next dozen students writing a master’s thesis on Watergate. Maybe Dick Darman would have some other ideas, but having found his way into the Reagan White House, Dick lately seemed uneasy taking his calls.

  After reaching Geneva with the foreign minister’s party, General Sobatkin summoned the KGB rezident from the Bern embassy and gave him private instructions to prevent a possible approach by agents of the People’s Republic of China.

  Howard Hunt was reading the final proofs for Chinese Red and watching the fifth Republican National Convention since the one that had renominated Nixon in ’72, right here in Miami. He had been unmoved by the rhetoric of both George Bush and Pat Buchanan, each a very different veteran of Nixon’s White House. The troubles of his own children, exacerbated by his time in prison, had deafened him to the culture-warring cries of the insurgent candidate; and it seemed to him, Gulf War aside, that Bush had done little these last four years but take the victory lap Reagan deserved for winning the Cold War. As for being a fellow “Company” man—well, how long exactly had Bush directed the CIA? About as long as Elliot Richardson had run the Department of Justice? Certainly less than the total of thirty-three months Hunt himself had spent shuffling from one prison to another—attaining, after the loss of his appeal, what must still stand as the longest sentence ever served for burglary by a first offender.

  “Papa!” cried his youngest son. “Can I have money for the ice cream truck?”

  Hunt found two quarters in his chinos and told the boy to be careful of the cars on Griffing Boulevard. He took a quick, protective look out the window, beyond the NO TRESPASSING sign, to see what the traffic looked like.

  He and his wife had been married for fifteen years now. After his experience with Clarine Lander, he’d been wary of any out-of-the-blue prison visitor, but Laura had turned out to be the real thing. She was less dark and complicated than Dorothy, and while he still missed his first wife, he no longer found himself in conversation with her ghost.
He traveled a straight and simple path these days, not preoccupied with stepping on the white squares or the black. Nearly seventy-four, he was too intent on supporting his new family to cultivate any instincts for self-destruction—that check he’d left in the hotel!—or even to engage in Transcendental Meditation. And he’d certainly lost his appetite for club memberships and housekeepers.

  Along with the proofs and his bills, his desk was piled with letters prompted by recent twentieth-anniversary TV appearances. There would be another round of them two years from now, commemorating Nixon’s resignation instead of the break-in, and in between he could count on a steady stream of inquiries and accusations from the Kennedy crazies, who were determined to put him on the Grassy Knoll back in ’63. None of the anniversary interviews paid anything, but he liked to imagine they helped to move at least a few copies of novels like Chinese Red. He hoped his sales figures were better than Colson’s. A copy of Chuck’s latest born-again production, Why America Doesn’t Work, inscribed with a nauseating “Yours in Christ,” sat unacknowledged on a nearby shelf.

  He read little about Watergate, but from time to time did discover some fact that was new to him. Only a few years ago he’d opened Magruder’s memoir to check something before an interview and discovered—the story of LaRue’s old man! So that was Mr. X, the person mentioned inside the envelope he’d carried throughout the maddest weeks of those mad two years. Even now he had to hand it to her: if he were still in the game, he’d probably try to recruit Miss Lander for the Agency.

  But as he sometimes now said, “I don’t do derring anymore.” The long fever of his life, spiking even before the break-in, had thrown him into delirium and then it had broken, and he had no desire to exchange the improbable domestic contentments of old age for the excitements of his early and middle years. His novels, for as long as anyone wanted them, would be enough in the way of vicarious high flying.

  He checked the cozy dedication of Chinese Red.

  To Laura: through the tough times and the good.

  The book, once printed, would take its place on a shelf next to The Berlin Ending. For now, he replaced the dedication page in the stack of proofs under the old jade pin he used as a paperweight.

  Nixon’s head was throbbing, with such force and regularity that he could count the beats. This had been happening a lot in the past couple of weeks, and here in his pajamas, half a world away from home, he was trying to recall whether Pat had experienced this sort of thing before the stroke. But that was almost twenty years ago, and he couldn’t remember. He closed his eyes and checked his lucidity by counting off his trips to Russia, one per throb, starting in ’59 with Khrushchev and going all the way up to this current one, in March of ’94.

  Satisfied that he was not impaired, only overworked, he took his mind off his mind and began thinking about the substance of this latest trip. He had to prepare himself for the possibility that Yeltsin, usually inclined to roll out the red carpet, might this time stiff him, annoyed by his plans to meet with Rutskoi and Zyuganov, the opposition leaders.

  Well, there was no way he could do that. In all his travels between ’63 and ’68 he had never failed, wherever he went, to sit down with both the head of the government and the heads of the opposing parties. If Yeltsin wanted to play in the big, respectable Western leagues, he still had to learn that that’s how things go.

  But there was nothing wrong with creating a little drama, making a little news. And Christ, he’d rather be rebuffed by Yeltsin than received by Gorbachev, who was in love with his own nobility and thought the approval of the New York Times made up for supervising the dissolution of his own goddamned country.

  He’d also rather, once he got home, spend a half hour inside Clinton’s chaotic White House, reporting back on the trip and attempting to be useful, than spend day after day on the golf course, or in some bullshit corporate boardroom, like Jerry Ford. The speaking fees that guy was pulling down to this day! With just one of them you could buy twenty of the old Truman crowd’s mink coats.

  He rubbed his head and almost wished whatever was throbbing would explode and be done with it, a fate preferable to wandering through a fog like Reagan—though with Reagan how could anyone tell the difference? Christ, the man had had more luck in his life than Ford, and that was saying something.

  He massaged his left temple and reflected upon a tendency to see only bad luck, never good, operating in his own life. Bad luck was the source of his defeats, whereas his achievements had come from his own skill and nerve. This was, he knew, a lopsided, childish view, like LBJ talking to Kennedy on election night in ’60: I hear you’re losing Ohio but we’re doing fine in Pennsylvania. He ought to get over it, even at this late date.

  He looked out the hotel window at the big red star over one of those Metropolis-style towers Stalin had thrust into the Moscow skyline. He found his thoughts going back to Reagan, to the only thing that really bothered him about the man. Would the lucky actor be seen as the bigger visionary, the one who refused to settle for “a new relationship between the superpowers,” deducing instead that one of them might be tipped over entirely? The “evil” empire. Every left-wing professor had recoiled at seeing the word used to describe the Soviet Union, but had no trouble applying it twice a week to Richard Nixon.

  As he’d told Henry, it will depend on who writes the history. His own presidential library out in California is a joke, a Madame Tussaud’s full of plaster statues and none of the records that matter. But as long as he lives, he will never settle with the Archives, who are more rapacious than Cox when it comes to the tapes. He will leave it to Julie to figure things out when he is gone for good, to see how he can be mainstreamed into history with the rest of the men, mostly unimpressive, who had preceded and followed him in office.

  Too many goddamned funerals this past year. Connally and Norman Vincent Peale, Haldeman—and before any of those, Pat. When he buried his wife, he’d given the press what they’d always wanted from her—tears, sobs, a loss of control in front of the cameras. They’d said he wouldn’t last a year without her, and maybe they were right. There was that bottle of 1913 Lafite-Rothschild in the basement in Park Ridge, awaiting his hundredth birthday. But nobody made it to a hundred, not even Mrs. L.

  He was nervous alone in the house at night, but he had no regrets about giving up the office downtown, no more than Pat had had, years before, when they gave up the town house on East Sixty-fifth. She’d told him once or twice that the city felt haunted, and her mood had lifted a little when they picked up stakes for Jersey.

  Before long it wouldn’t matter where one lived. Who needed an office in New York when you could have a fax at home in the suburbs? God, he loved that machine! He could have run the whole damned presidency from Camp David with it. For that matter, one would soon be able to run the world from Whittier.

  But on the whole he felt pretty awful. He was sick, and so was the newly free city outside and below him. He reached over to the pad by the telephone—each sheet of it still as coarse as the old Soviet toilet paper—and wrote: Russia—turning pessimistic—anti-American. He would expand on this for Clinton, suggest a shift in tone.

  He turned off the lamp, but by the night light he could still see well enough to reach for the Walkman Tricia’s boy had gotten him for Christmas. He inserted the tiny padded earphones and fast-forwarded the tape of Mussorgsky to the part he liked, a point in the prelude to Khovanshchina where he imagined himself aboard the Sequoia, early in the first year, sailing down the Potomac. He listened. This wasn’t the triumphal crashing of Victory at Sea, just something peaceful. His eyes were closing. The music, turned low, would eventually put him to sleep, but that was all right, because the tape would turn itself off.

  On New Year’s Day 2001, Rose’s niece was helping to dismantle her aunt’s little Christmas tree.

  “You love Christmas,” the niece said softly, trying to jog Rose out of a confused spell.

  “Of course I do,” Rose replied, harsh
ly. “Everybody loves Christmas.” But after a moment, her perplexity over the tree that had been in her apartment these last few weeks renewed itself. “Where did it come from?” she asked.

  “Bob Gray,” explained her niece. “An old Washington friend of yours. He always sends you one. Because he knows how much you love Christmas.”

  “But we’re in Ohio,” said Rose, with a suspicious tone, making it plain she wasn’t about to be tricked.

  “He has it delivered from a local man—yes, here in Ohio,” said the niece, who got up to put on some old swing music, the kind her aunt had once loved dancing to. It soon put Rose into a better mood, where she would stay for a while, if the talk didn’t turn, as it did from time to time, to McCrea Manor, the nursing home into which she had no intention of moving.

  The apartment was neat as a pin, the niece had to concede as she got ready to lug the tree out the door and say goodbye. All of Rose’s knickknacks were dusted and in their usual places. Same with her two little shelves of books, which included her old boss’s memoirs; Julie Eisenhower’s book about her mother; and The Haldeman Diaries, a library-discard copy which a couple of years back a nephew had ill-advisedly given Aunt Rose as a present. He didn’t know the history between those two, and Rose had given him a real earful. Still, she’d kept the book.

  “Goodbye, Aunt Rose.”

  “So long, sweetie. You can bring back the tree whenever you’re through with it.”

  Rose was relieved to be alone again. She scarcely ever left the apartment and had not traveled any considerable distance since the two California funerals, Pat’s and the boss’s, in ’93 and ’94. She was able to get along just fine with the help of the woman who shopped for her once a week. It was true that some mornings she woke up thinking she needed to get ready for work at the old Royal China Company, her first job, but that misapprehension did no one any harm, and it always lifted by the time she finished making coffee.