She still read the paper each morning, having resumed the habit a year or two after the coup—which is what it was and what she called it. Sometimes, to no particular purpose, she clipped items: six months ago they’d named a Boston courthouse for Ed Brooke! She’d thought he was dead. In truth, she wished he were dead, not out of any ill will, but from some sense that she’d once embarrassed herself in front of him. How exactly, she couldn’t remember.
People occasionally found her—sent requests for her autograph or got in touch with arcane questions about Watergate. She never responded, and the people who wrote never had the wit to realize she couldn’t remember half the things she wanted to, let alone stuff from that awful time.
“Bob Gray.” She had tried to keep her niece from seeing she didn’t really know the name, but it was on her mind now. For the life of her she couldn’t remember who that was, and so she walked over to the bookshelves and did something she did very rarely and with the greatest reluctance: consulted Bob Haldeman’s diaries. Yes, there was Bob Gray in the index. She fumbled with her arthritic fingers to get to page 21, where he figured in an entry made on January 25, 1969:
President received beautiful silver cigarette box from Bob Gray. Presidential seal and name on top, date on front, plays “Hail to the Chief” when lid lifted …
She remembered it as a cigar box and would have sworn it had come from Don Carnevale. But maybe not. The real problem with the entry was that it didn’t help her remember who Bob Gray was.
She never felt comfortable having this book open; she always imagined she would flip a page and find some nasty crack about herself or somebody she liked. But it was hard not to thumb through these entries from January of ’69, the beginning of things, and sure enough, there she was, the night before the first inauguration:
Rose Woods said she cried all the way in from Andrews AFB, crowds along the streets, triumphal return vs. departure eight years ago.
Nothing mean, but the lines excited such a powerful recollection that the tears were soon coming in a kind of relay—joyous ones, the kind she’d shed that day; and bitter ones, too, that it had all been taken away, so unfairly and so soon.
She felt a familiar rush of anger toward HRH, not for putting her through this now, but for having her there on the page in the first place, weeping with happiness; for putting on display that private moment she should never have told him about. He had no right to it.
She got up, steadied herself, and found the pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. She brought them over to the book and carefully cut away the entry on pages 17 and 18, as if what it recorded had never happened.
“You know what he used to tell me?” asked one of the three men, buddies of Fred LaRue seated around a courtyard table at Mary Mahoney’s. “That he gave the feds four months—and they gave him ten years.”
The other men nodded. They’d heard LaRue say the same thing about the prison term he’d finally served in 1975. During his months at Maxwell, over in Alabama, he’d dried out and stopped smoking and played a lot of badminton, probably adding a decade to his life, which had now, on July 17, 2004, come to an end.
“He used to say it was more like bein’ overhauled than rehabilitated.”
The men laughed, more loudly than Fred ever had.
“Badminton! How the hell he played is beyond me. Take a look through these,” said one of the men, passing the others a pair of eyeglasses they’d gathered up from a night table in Fred’s room at the Sun Tan Motel, before the coroner came to collect the body.
“Christ,” said another of the men, looking through the lenses. “These must be stronger than the Hubble telescope.”
All three laughed and then fell silent, brooding again on the sad but likely fact that Fred had been dead for two or three days before the motel maid found him.
“He was never bitter, that’s for sure.”
“I never heard him say a word against Nixon or Mitchell.”
“Only one I ever heard him talk against was, what’s his name, Magruder.”
“Oh, Christ,” said the one closest to being a Watergate buff. “Even Colson never went and got himself ordained.” He explained that in recent years Magruder had taken to giving interviews in his Presbyterian minister’s surplice.
“Colson still alive?”
“Him and Dean. Couple of others.” He pointed to the TV above the bar inside the restaurant. “The producers tended to forget about Fred whenever it came time to doin’ another Watergate program.”
“And that was fine with him.”
With smiles they acknowledged their late friend’s shyness, the way he never told them quite all there was to be told about anything. During his last years, his family up in Jackson had kept him on a long leash, and otherwise he was pretty much the same as he’d been before politics led him up to Washington, almost forty years ago.
The men called for another round, and while their empty glasses were being cleared from the table, they looked at the handful of LaRue’s possessions, ready to be turned over to his family, sitting amidst the coasters and napkins.
“You seen this?” One of the men picked up an envelope. “It’s the strangest goddamned thing.” The stamps on it were Canadian; the postmark was from 1957; the addressee was a law firm in Jackson. And there was that word “MOOT.”
“Never opened?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Ever heard of the law firm?”
“Oh, open the goddamned thing.”
The man holding it slit the envelope with a butter knife. He took out some thick stapled pages that were discolored where they’d been folded for forty-seven years. He flipped through the sheaf until he came to the fourth page, which had two paragraphs somebody had drawn a dark red box around. He positioned the paper so everyone could read it for himself under the sunlight filling the restaurant’s courtyard.
Investigators conclude that Mr. X could not have been killed by Mr. X Jr.
When Mr. X Jr. stood up to fire at the birds, Mr. X, who had also been drinking alcohol (see medical appendix), reacted with startlement from his semi-upright position approximately 25 feet away. Mr. X’s own weapon discharged itself into his upper-right torso, so quickly after the discharge from Mr. X Jr.’s that witnesses believed they had heard a single report.
“Jesus, they’re talkin’ about his daddy.”
They all knew something of the story, most of it from people other than Fred.
The victim’s intake of alcohol may have been a matter of contributory negligence—his own—but otherwise his death was indisputably accidental.
“And he kept this thing sealed up for fifty years? Never even opened it?”
“Fred had his own way of dealin’ with the world.”
“Somebody once opened it,” said the waitress, who’d liked Fred and had been eavesdropping. She pointed to the box outlining the two paragraphs. “That was made with lipstick, sure as shootin’.”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful, even more than usually, to my editor, Dan Frank, who guided me toward and through this book in innumerable ways.
I also appreciate the enthusiasm that my agent, Andrew Wylie, has shown toward this project over the past few years.
Thanks, too, to Ed Cohen, Altie Karper, and Jill Verrillo for all their skillful editorial and production help.
I owe a debt to all of the following people and institutions for archival resources and research help: Jeffrey M. Flannery at the Library of Congress; Susan Cooper and Marty McGann of the National Archives and Records Administration; Brian McLaughlin of the U.S. Senate Library; Margaret Zoller of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; the Washingtoniana Division of the District of Columbia Public Library; Jonathan Movroydis at the Richard Nixon Foundation; the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California; the Biloxi Sun-Herald, Biloxi, Mississippi.
For various kinds of encouragement and assistance I would like to thank: Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kenne
dy Center for the Performing Arts; Patricia Kenworthy; Dr. Joseph Abraham Levi; Priscilla McMillan; Charles Francis; Tom Duesterberg; Robert Nedelkoff; Michael Bishop.
For reminiscences of life within the Nixon administration and around Washington during the early 1970s, I am grateful to Robert Gray, Michael Balzano, and my dear friend Rene Carpenter.
James Rosen, author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, provided me with advice, Watergate lore, and research materials. Most of the latter pertained to Fred LaRue, and I am very much in his debt for them—though I should note here that, among the book’s main characters, LaRue’s life has undergone the greatest degree of fictionalization.
In this book, as in my previous novels, I have operated along the always sliding scale of historical fiction. The text contains deviations from fact that some readers will regard as unpardonable and others will deem unworthy of notice. But this remains a work of fiction, not history.
I owe thanks to John McConnell, who served in two presidential administrations, for a host of shrewd suggestions and free lunches in the White House Mess.
While writing this novel, my mind has often traveled back to conversations I had about Richard Nixon with my pal Kevin Morley when we were college freshmen during the tumultuous spring of 1970. I’m grateful for his friendship during that time and in all the years since.
Special thanks to Bob Wilson and Sudip Bose at The American Scholar.
But thanks, above all, to Bill Bodenschatz—for everything within, and outside, these pages.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
OCTOBER 15, 2011
About the Author
Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.
Also available in eBook format, by Thomas Mallon:
Fellow Travelers • 978-0-375-42516-5
Mrs. Paine’s Garage • 978-0-375-42192-1
Yours Ever • 978-0-307-37864-4
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