Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  What a show Mrs. K had made, a dozen years ago, of not trying on the hat that Pat and the other ladies had presented her with at a luncheon in Washington, when the Khrushchevs returned the Nixons’ visit to Russia. She’d said she would accept the hat only so that back home it could be copied for the masses of Soviet women! Oh, put it on, dear, they’d all cajoled, and they eventually did succeed in raising a smile from her plump face. But, no, they never saw her try it on.

  The Soviets had certainly never given up any of the swag in this room. Pat decided she might as well get up, put on the lights, and give it another look instead of just lying here staring at the curtains and gold-leaf ceiling. But on her way to the mosaic table, the one supporting the beautiful French clock, she stumbled over an extension cord left by Rita, her hairdresser, who’d fought a losing battle with the different voltage until two young men from Kissinger’s staff got the dryer going just before they were all due downstairs for the first toasts. Was Rita—across the courtyard in the block of rooms supposed to be full of ramshackle Communist-era furnishings—getting any more sleep than she was? Poor Bill Rogers wasn’t even inside the Kremlin; he’d been put in some hotel a few minutes away, no doubt from Kissinger’s continuing need to keep the secretary of state in his place and away from the real action.

  It bothered her that Dick encouraged all that, especially if he did it not for some strategic reason but out of resentment left over from their six years in New York, when Bill and Adele would invite the Nixons out to “21” and give the impression—at least to Dick—that the Rogerses were doing them a favor. Pat herself had never seen it that way. She remembered those evenings, as well as the law firm’s partner dinners from that same all-too-brief time in her life, as being more agreeable than all the political entertainments in the years before and after.

  Even Martha, for a while, had been fun.

  How Rose Woods would love this room: all the figurines and bibelots, the kind of stuff she filled her little place at the Watergate with, those frilly knockoffs amidst the real little gems she got from Don Carnevale, her very safe escort from Harry Winston.

  She heard voices coming from the courtyard below, bouncing up off the paving stones. Dear God, it was—Dick. She parted the curtains and saw him down there in a windbreaker and slacks, walking with Bill Duncan, their favorite Secret Service man, and she thought back to the mad night two years ago when he’d gone to the Lincoln Memorial, at about this hour, with almost nobody but Manolo and some aide of John Ehrlichman’s. To talk with the “demonstrators.” And a fat lot of credit he’d got for making the effort.

  She thought of the people who’d come out to greet them this afternoon, trying to catch a glimpse of the limousine. You could scarcely see them, kept back as they were a block or more from the path of the car, but you could hear them, buzzing and cheering, interested in the whole thing, hoping for something to come out of it—whereas back home the only crowds you could gather for politics were the angry, filthy kids and their teachers. Would those same protesters now grudgingly admit that the “warmonger” was really a peacemaker? No, of course not.

  She could see Dick now, staying two steps ahead of Duncan, lost in thought until he’d turn around and say something, half from politeness and half from the need to hold forth. And then, after he spoke a couple of sentences, he’d break away and go it alone for another fifty feet, starting the cycle again. For all his need of an audience, he was happier alone. She remembered him just like this on their wedding day, June 21, 1940. She’d looked out the window of the Mission Inn and spotted him pacing the courtyard, a nervous groom, an hour before the ceremony. The birds had been singing in the branches as she stood there in her lace suit from Robinson’s department store and watched him without his knowing it. Money had been so much on both their minds: his mother had made the cake; his brother had picked her up and brought her to Riverside to save the cost of a hired car.

  Next month, June, would be their anniversary. What would Rose be buying for him to give her? Once this trip was over and the two women had a quiet moment together, she’d have to start dropping hints.

  Dick had lately been making all this odd conversation about a “dynasty.” David would run for Congress from Pennsylvania; or maybe Julie would. And both Eds, his son-in-law and much younger brother, would find open seats in New York and Washington state. This fantasy was new, another one agitated into life by too much concentration on the Kennedys. She herself never inclined to the long view.

  Julie had taken to asking when she would have her portrait for the White House painted. “When I can find the time” was her usual answer, easier than saying what she really thought: that sitting for it in the first term would be bad luck.

  She could hear Dick’s voice growing fainter. Poor Bill Duncan would be relieved when his boss decided to go back to bed. Maybe she, too, was at last ready for sleep; if she got lucky, she would drift off for a couple of hours before breakfast.

  She closed the curtains and undid the long belt of her wrapper, jumping in fright when her hand brushed, and nearly knocked over, a porcelain figure on the largest chest of drawers. No harm done, thank God.

  Everything, the whole world, really, was so fragile. Only yesterday there had been that horrible newspaper picture of the man attacking the Pietà with a hammer.

  She knew from long practice that she could, by sheer force of will, banish such an awful image from her mind. As she closed her eyes, she did just that.

  No, he decided, catching sight of another American flag atop the Kremlin; he was not yet ready to quit pacing and go back inside. The yellow walls of the place were coming to life in the dawn’s early light, and he could hear the horn of a boat on the river, mixing with the sound of trucks outside the fortress walls. He stopped, turned around, and waited for Duncan to catch up, before telling him, “Napoleon managed to spend one day here before they set fire to the place. Never forget that.”

  “No, sir,” Duncan replied.

  Nixon could still not believe that the rug hadn’t been pulled out from under the summit. Two weeks ago he’d put the whole thing at risk by mining Haiphong and upping the bombing, and every goddamned editorial writer in the world swore that he was going to get himself disinvited to Moscow—and throw away his chances of reelection to boot. Well, they’d been wrong, and he’d arrived here with a stronger hand than if he’d risked nothing at all.

  Looking up at the strange light, he remembered his visit to the Danilovsky Market at this time of day thirteen years ago. Jack Sherwood had been the Secret Service agent, and there’d been plenty for him to worry about, tensions being what they were and no preparations having been made for the appearance. The people in the market had turned out to be friendly, though you would never have known it from the report that ran in Pravda. Still, to have made the Soviets’ front page even before facing off with Khrushchev in that crappy kitchen: not bad.

  It’s the work, not the showboating, that matters. For all the good press it got back in the U.S.—that picture of him jabbing his finger toward Khrushchev’s chest had nearly made him president—the ’59 trip had actually been a frustration, because he had nothing to negotiate and no authority to be doing it.

  This time would be different: great things were afoot, and that’s why Rogers had to be kept far away and out of the loop, so he didn’t raise all the candyass niceties and scruples he’d soaked up from three years inside State. A few months ago, in Shanghai, they hadn’t let him know about the big communiqué until he was told to sign it. And then he’d nearly loused everything up with his chickenshit objections about Taiwan!

  “Did they feed you all right tonight?” Nixon asked Duncan.

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “On that first trip Khrushchev gave us Stalin’s favorite fish for lunch. Made a point of saying so, while he and Mikoyan pretended to be fighting over Mrs. Nixon.”

  Duncan laughed, discreetly, and Nixon remembered—he’d heard it from Ehrlichman—how three years ago
Tricia had made this poor guy call the White House from London after Annenberg groped her at a party.

  “Mikoyan?” asked Duncan.

  “Old-timer,” replied Nixon.

  He once more walked on ahead, his mind already off to a different place. He was wishing he had Kissinger here, right now, since the two of them couldn’t really talk privately anywhere except in the limousine. He couldn’t stand, and didn’t trust, the goddamned “babbler” device that was supposed to drown out whatever the electronic eavesdroppers might pick up from conversation in the palace apartments.

  “Let’s go back in,” he told Duncan, who noted the local time—4:51 a.m.—for the log.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good night,” said Nixon, as they mounted the stairs. It was easier to take them than wait for the elevator, which was probably wired just like the room.

  Bug or no bug, Nixon would never be able to sleep unless he made one call, and so the communications man put it through, at 5:05, after Nixon himself reluctantly turned on the babbler.

  “You’re up late,” he said, instinctively shouting the words because of the distance, the way his old man had always used the telephone. He’d had to remind himself not to do it when talking to Armstrong on the moon. As he heard himself now, he hoped he wouldn’t wake Pat in the next room, though he imagined the czars hadn’t skimped on the plaster.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” said Colson. “There are a number of us still here at the White House.”

  “Good, good. How did things go with Haig’s backgrounder?” Kissinger’s deputy was supposed to have briefed the Washington press yesterday morning.

  “Fine, better than fine, Mr. President. He excluded the Times, just as we’d decided after their damned Haiphong stories, and they still had to write a positive page-one piece about the trip. Everybody’s coverage conveys the impression of a serious, determined, imaginative leader.”

  “You should hear Brezhnev,” Nixon responded. “Serious and determined? Yes. Imaginative? I wouldn’t say so. Had to listen to him deliver an opening harangue about the bombing and the mining. But it was pretty much just for show, the way Khrushchev roared on about the ‘Captive Nations’ resolution by the goddamned Congress back in ’59.”

  This was probably saying too much, babbler or no babbler. Time to rein it in.

  “Sir, McGovern’s now pulled ahead of Humphrey in both Gallup and Harris. And his delegates are piling up.”

  “Good, good. How was the Pentagon thing? They had some demonstration planned for today, didn’t they?”

  “Pathetic. A few hundred, if that.”

  “Could have taken care of them with your trusty car, huh?”

  Colson laughed. “I told Dean I’m saving it to use against the next ones who demonstrate on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk.”

  Nixon laughed. He wanted to talk about Wallace, too, but knew he should wrap this up. Still, the conversation had done a good job of exciting and relaxing him all at once, the usual Colson cocktail.

  “Okay, Chuck. I’ll call you later today from the limousine.”

  “I’ll look forward to it, Mr. President.”

  “Get some sleep in the meantime.”

  After turning off the babbler, Nixon at last fell into an early-morning dream that found him back in the South Pacific, at “Nick’s Hamburger Stand” on Bougainville, his own little operation, where during the war he’d taken a lot of poker winnings off a handful of other naval officers. But something in the dream was wrong; he was winning too much; he had too many chips in front of him. He didn’t know how he’d gotten them, but he knew he had to get rid of them fast. But how? He couldn’t figure it out, and so, in this bedroom of the czars, in the middle of the dream, he began to sweat, and finally he groaned—startling the technician in the recording room forty feet below the cobblestones of Red Square.

  Part One

  HIDE

  JUNE 17, 1972–APRIL 30, 1973

  Chapter One

  JUNE 17, 1972

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  “The president did a wonderful job at the summit,” remarked the studio executive, or lawyer, or whoever it was shaking Pat Nixon’s hand.

  “Oh, thank you!” she replied. “This is some summit, too, don’t you think?”

  She gestured toward the lights of Los Angeles far below Taft Schreiber’s mansion in Bel Air and thought of how these days the million blinkings down there stretched all the way to and beyond Whittier, a continuous gold carpet. When she and Dick were kids, Whittier had flickered like a small distant planet, far from the sun of downtown, into which Frank Nixon drove a streetcar every day.

  The wife of the man who’d shaken her hand was also now remarking on the Russian summit, the safest topic for any Hollywood liberal who’d come to this fundraiser more from fear of Taft Schreiber and MCA than out of any sudden enthusiasm for Dick. She’d heard one older executive say to his wife, while pointing to the eager-beaver campaign boys knifing into the pâté, “They’re pretending it’s Helen Gahagan.” The wife, young enough to be the husband’s daughter, had looked baffled.

  Well, that was over twenty years ago. But no election provided Pat with sharper—or better—memories. The liberals could say all they wanted that Helen Gahagan had been the martyr to a dirty campaign, but Dick had had her number from the start. She was pink, right down to her underwear, and if telling the truth about her voting record in Congress amounted to dirty pool, well, that was too bad. It had been a grand brawl, fought out in the California sunshine while they were still so young. She’d had to carry Julie in her arms when they went to all the new shopping centers in that battered station wagon. Tricia had been just old enough to pass out flyers—including, yes, the “pink sheet,” which had the nerve to print the facts about Mrs. Melvyn Douglas on just the right color paper. If Dick had really wanted to run a dirty campaign, he could have spread the word that Mrs. Douglas had been having an affair with Lyndon Johnson, something that everyone in Washington, yet no one in California, seemed to know. But Dick didn’t go in for that sort of thing—not even against Jack Kennedy. He’d ended the ’50 campaign saddled forever with “Tricky Dick” as a nickname, but he’d been the one to go to the Senate.

  “We’re so thrilled you could be here!”

  Oh, golly, the name: a redhead, but which one? Arlene Dahl? Rhonda Fleming? She and Dick had always seen a lot of movies but could never keep those two straight.

  “That’s so sweet of you to say! But I know you’d all be more thrilled if Dr. Kissinger had been able to make it after all!” She winked, a woman-to-woman tribute to Kissinger’s supposed charm and magnetism, which Pat couldn’t say she’d ever really experienced. Henry had been the administration star promised for this fundraiser by the Committee to Re-Elect; she was aware of herself, a bit painfully, as the second choice, and she hoped it didn’t look like a bait-and-switch—Kissinger really did have to attend to something that had come up in the Far East. Still, she wished that the Committee had asked Julie or Tricia (well, Julie) to substitute instead, and that Dick hadn’t pushed her so hard to come out here at the last minute.

  “We’re so happy to have you!” said the redhead, maybe even meaning it. Of course the real commotion here tonight was being provided by Martha. By now she was probably a bigger draw than either the first lady or the national security advisor, but enough protocol remained in politics that they couldn’t make a cabinet wife the official guest of honor—no matter how many times Martha made the evening news. Poor John: there he was, not thirty feet away, his hand gently on his wife’s back, trying to keep her from skyrocketing into another burst of hilarity or rage.

  “And you look so beautiful in that dress!” said yet another executive’s wife, moving up the line behind the redhead.

  “Well, look who’s talking!” said Pat, with an up-and-down appraisal of the gal’s flouncy chiffon outfit. Sleeveless, of course. She herself never had the nerve for it, not even in California in June. She was al
ways getting compliments, or protective cluckings, about how thin she was; well, she might have the waist to wear anything, but not the arms.

  The executive’s wife wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was open in a little “o” of disbelief—shock, even—that the first lady was capable of making a joke. Not even a joke; just a funny figure of speech: look who’s talking. Good Lord, thought Pat: Was her image (she hated the word) really that bad? That “plastic”? Well, there was nothing she could do to change it. Every couple of years the press talked about a New Nixon, but that was Dick. She was stuck where she was with the reporters. Especially when it came to clothes. That beautiful inaugural gown with the golden jacket! On anyone else it would have been deemed magical, but once she stepped into it, Women’s Wear Daily pronounced: “schoolteacher’s night out.” She’d felt so bad for poor Karen Stark, who’d done such a beautiful job designing it. Dick had been furious, and gone on a toot about pansies in the fashion business, which of course had nothing to do with the sharp-clawed lady cats in the fashion press.

  Actually, they were half right. The dress was beautiful, but in some ways the whole past twenty-five years had been a schoolteacher’s night out, an improbable recess from what still seemed the real life she’d been settling into as Miss Ryan in the classrooms of Whittier Union High. When she’d made this observation to Dick—as a joke with some truth in it, just to have a laugh and get him off the subject of Women’s Wear Daily—he’d only gotten madder.

  Taft Schreiber was cutting the line. She hadn’t yet met the host, and before she could thank him for this lovely party and his generosity to the campaign, he was all over her with flattery of Dick that not even Kissinger could have matched: “When I think of all that the president—one of California’s own—has done for the movie industry, I burst with pride as well as the sincerest gratitude. The investment tax credit, the accelerated depreciation allowances—magnificent! But I shouldn’t bore you with such technical things.”