Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  She had never been at a podium this high off the ground. She actually felt less like Miss Ryan in front of her classroom than some angel atop the Mormon Tabernacle. She spoke of the “great victory” that lay ahead, and as soon as the phrase left her lips and landed on the crowd, they roared and shook and waved as if she were talking about Judgment Day and the final reward.

  In the teleprompter’s shiny right-hand square, she caught a reflection of herself brushing back an errant strand of hair. It was a fussy, vain gesture, not at all her style, and as soon as she saw it, she realized she was doing it for Tom. She knew he would be watching her, a thousand miles away and all alone, having a late supper off his widower’s TV tray in the library of his apartment, our place, above Madison Avenue.

  She mustn’t think of him now, just as she wouldn’t think of the cigarette she was dying to have once she was in the car with tinted windows on her way back to the hotel.

  VERMONT, ARIZONA, WYOMING. The lights were such that, as she went on speaking her single page of remarks, she could see only the three state delegations at the front of the hall. In the very first row she now noticed a young man, a Vermonter, who sported a mustache, just like her teasing, funny, hot-tempered father in the handful of photos taken during his mining days, before they’d picked up stakes and left Nevada to have a go at farming in Artesia. Much safer to be thinking of him than Tom as she launched into the last paragraph of this speech, which she was giving on behalf of the number-three male love of her life. Dick had never quite gotten past her father, and he could not get past the more recent memory of Tom, but, with whatever sadness and difficulty, he still made the list.

  “Oh, so do I!” cried Alice Longworth, two nights later, while pointing to the sign: AMERICA LOVES WHAT THE COLONEL COOKS. “Go get me some, dear.” She pushed her granddaughter toward the heaping trays of drumsticks and wings inside Gerald Ford’s hospitality suite at the Algiers. The convention’s chairman was giving a reception just prior to the president’s scheduled renomination and acceptance speech.

  As Alice waited for her chicken, Florida’s senator Edward Gurney welcomed her to the Sunshine State. With his deep tan and wavy hair, Alice thought he resembled a tennis pro who had just retired to become the hotel gigolo.

  “We’re honored to have you here, ma’am.” He gently shook her white-gloved hand and seemed amazed that she was ambulatory. “How did you travel down?” he asked.

  “With my granddaughter and my cousin Mr. Alsop over there.” She pointed out Joe, who was chatting up some good-looking lieutenant governor. “We came on one of those planes with the big orange sunburst.”

  “National Airlines,” said Senator Gurney, ready to extol the success of the Florida-based carrier.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Longworth. “Marvelous girls. All wearing the most forthright buttons. The one we had in first class had one saying ‘I’m Lynn. Fly Me.’ I asked who’d flown her lately, and she seemed baffled.”

  “Grandmother, eat your chicken,” said Joanna, back with the plate.

  “Marvelous,” said Mrs. Longworth, biting into a drumstick. “Much better than what Rockefeller had over at the Doral.”

  The suite was decorated with blowups of frames from the Wolper campaign movie: Nixon shaking hands with a soldier in Vietnam; greeting Golda Meir; hugging a little boy wearing short pants and a hearing aid.

  Gerald Ford, everyone’s host, looked like a happy small-town banker in his blue-plaid suit. He came over to greet Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter.

  “Mrs. Longworth,” he said, taking hold of a gloved hand now stained with the colonel’s secret recipe. “Do you remember that we first met at a Republican convention? The one in Philadelphia that nominated Tom Dewey? ‘The little man on top of the wedding cake.’ ”

  “I’m afraid I never said that, but please continue to give me the credit.”

  “I remember your telling me back then that you’d be returning to Philadelphia a few weeks later for the Democrats’ convention, too.”

  “I always went to them all. Even in 1912, when there were three.”

  “Well, I hope you kept away from McGovern’s this year. You’d have lost your beauty sleep waiting up for that acceptance speech to start.”

  A principal theme of conversation among the Republicans was the supreme efficiency of their own convention compared to the Democrats’.

  “I should like to lie and say I’d been there—I love disarray—but I don’t have enough stamina for two conventions anymore. Did you hear the one about the ticket they really should have settled on?”

  The opposition party’s recent chaos had only ended with the replacement of Senator Eagleton—its original, electroshocked VP nominee—by Kennedy relative Sargent Shriver. No, Congressman Ford said, he hadn’t heard.

  “ ‘Kennedy and Eagleton: Waterproof and Shockproof.’ Better than ‘A Chicken in Every Pot,’ don’t you think? Have you, by the way, tried the chicken you’re serving? Wonderful.”

  Ford had declared to the convention that “Truth will be our greatest weapon in 1972.” Bad strategy, Alice now thought. Dick, after all, was the nominee; one didn’t want him playing another man’s game.

  “Tell me, Jerry,” she said, pointing across the room, “which of those two Little Lord Fauntleroys has a better chance, four years from now, of taking the nomination from rough, tough Ted Agnew?” She indicated Elliot Richardson and Senator Charles Percy, who were earnestly conferring. Their look of sleek northern noblesse oblige seemed odd in this roomful of delegates whose party was moving ever further south and west, picking up more and more hard-edged high rollers as it went, men who loved Agnew’s alliterative scorn for all the pundits and eggheads. Mrs. Longworth looked at Ford, the soul of Main Street moderation, stalled between these arrivistes and those two Brahmins, and waited for him to answer.

  “Between you and me, Mrs. L,” he responded, reluctantly, “Elliot is the much tougher customer.”

  “I thought that might be so,” she replied.

  Ford’s wife and Nixon’s secretary, each of them carrying a fresh drink, were coming over to say hello. Alice allowed Mrs. Ford to kiss her on the cheek and Rose Woods to relieve her of her empty plate.

  “My ears are not ready for Miss Merman to sing the national anthem,” she said, tapping tonight’s program.

  “She can certainly belt,” acknowledged Rose.

  “I believe she’s to be released back into the wild after the benediction,” mused Alice, as she looked around the room. “Now where is Sammy Davis, Jr.? I want a hug.” A cringe-inducing photo from yesterday’s youth rally, which showed the entertainer embracing the president from behind, was all over the newspapers. “He can grab the same spots on me,” said Alice, patting her chest where her breasts used to be. “No impediments.” In the brief silence that followed, she asked Rose Woods to take her over to Elliot Richardson.

  The president’s secretary gave her a doubtful look. Wouldn’t she rather be brought to someone besides that pompous Mister Clean whose loyalty was so suspect? Rose still could not get over Richardson’s nerve in flying out to San Clemente last summer after he’d failed to get his way on some policy decision concerning that zoo of a department he ran. Like Henry, he was forever hinting he might need to resign and take his indispensable self somewhere else.

  But Mrs. Longworth was not to be denied, so Rose dutifully piloted the old lady in Richardson’s direction. He had finished talking with Senator Percy and was moving purposefully toward the National Committee’s black-affairs man when Alice reached him and dismissed Rose.

  “Mrs. Longworth,” Richardson said, lowering his six-foot frame and square jaw.

  “All your press clippings say Clark Kent, but I’d say the resemblance is more to Dick Tracy. Why don’t you complete it by getting some contact lenses?”

  “That never occurred to me,” said Richardson, laughing.

  “You might see the road better.”

  Richardson looked startled. She had read up
on him. One or two of his magazine profiles had interrupted their admiration long enough to mention his plethora of reckless-driving arrests and the conviction involving alcohol. The writers generally decided that all this was just the eccentric escape valve of a duty-driven nature, similar to the doodles and watercolors he compulsively turned out. Still, it was unsettling to have her bring it up.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Longworth. “I do make studies of things, generally at the local library. When my cousin Mr. Alsop asked if you and I were related, I realized I didn’t know anything about you if I didn’t know that.”

  “Being related is an honor I would cherish, but alas, I don’t believe it’s the case. Perhaps very distantly.”

  He spoke to her, she realized, with the indifferent politeness he’d display to a GS-5 clerk in the elevator at HEW.

  “So is it too soon for you to be the next president, after Dick?”

  Richardson tried to smile. “The only presidency I’ve ever been mentioned for was Harvard’s, and that was almost twenty years ago. There’s a tradition of precociously young college presidents who wind up serving for decades and decades, but I’m afraid the little boomlet for me was quite artificial—a one-man operation, really. Justice Frankfurter, for whom I’d clerked, kept putting my name forward.”

  “What a lot of jobs you’ve had since,” Mrs. Longworth observed. “Elective, appointive, state, federal. My cousin says you’re bound to have plenty more.” She could see from Richardson’s expression that her conversation was provoking the nervousness she always enjoyed inducing in a listener, especially one so assured of his own rectitude. “One shouldn’t, however, have too much ambition without a clear plan, don’t you think?” she concluded.

  “Well,” said Richardson, “I’m happy to go wherever I can be of use.”

  She made no effort to hide how the answer bored her; immediately she went off on another tack.

  “Which of us do you think had it worse?” she asked.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother died giving birth to me. Your mother died giving birth to your younger brother. I was made to feel guilty, but you must have felt angry—at your brother. Which feeling do you suppose is the harder to bear?”

  Richardson smiled thinly. The word “impertinence” was actually rising to his lips, but one could no more deploy it against this famous crone than against some Negro picketing the department for higher benefits.

  “My brothers and I,” he said with forbearance, “were raised by a very fine woman who agreed to take us on.”

  Yes, thought Alice, the housekeeper who beat you. She spent the next moment or two wondering how she herself might have turned out with treatment like that instead of the gentle ministrations of Auntie Bye.

  “We do have one thing in common,” she said at last, causing Richardson, from his great height, to regard her wide-brimmed hat as if it were a fortune-teller’s turban.

  “We both dislike doctors,” she explained, knowing that Richardson had declined to extend a six-generation family string of them. “We both knew, early on, what they’re capable of—what they did, or failed to do, for our mothers. After that, you wouldn’t be one, and I won’t even see one, at least for years at a time.”

  Joe Alsop came hurrying over, realizing that Richardson—whom Alice suspected he had a little crush on—might be needing rescue. He also needed to inform them of some logistical fuss. “Those drum majorettes,” he explained, “are going to lead people out to their cars. It’s time everyone was getting to the hall.”

  Richardson smiled and gratefully peeled away.

  “Mark my words: that man hates Dick,” Alice warned Alsop. “I guarantee it. He’d like to give the whole world a beating.”

  Joe looked at her dismissively, urging her forward toward one of the baton-carrying girls now trying to conga-line the guests out the door. GET TO KNOW A NIXONETTE, said the large bright button the girl was wearing.

  “Someone will be flying her before the night’s out,” Alice said to Joe.

  The president, punctual to the second, begins making his way to the podium, moving between all the agents and advance men talking into their radios. He can swear that there are tears in his eyes: Has all this talk of his “last convention” and “last campaign” gotten even to him? No. He can’t stop thinking that the Republican Party remains the world’s largest and laziest Rotary Club; if he can’t get them to nominate Connally four years from now, he’d just as soon see a whole different party with a new name take the GOP’s place.

  He’d still love to kick Agnew to the curb and run with Connally this year, but it has been apparent for months that all the Chevy dealers and country-club lawyers who still dominate things at the local level won’t accept a Democratic convert for the number-two spot. Nor will the party’s new fire-breathers let go of their hero Spiro without a lot of grumbling. So, a week before the Watergate thing, he’d made Mitchell give Agnew the word that he could stay.

  The president wipes his right eye. No, it isn’t nostalgia causing the tears; it’s the goddamned Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who even now are only blocks away on Collins Avenue, provoking the cops into firing the occasional canister of gas. He’s seen the news clips; half of them seem to be in wheelchairs, which he bets they need about as much as he does. Colson doubts that most of them have even been in the army, let alone over to Vietnam. If the Secret Service had let them get any closer as he came into the hall, he’d have flashed them the “V” sign, which drives them nuts whenever he uses it in the old Churchillian sense of victory instead of peace.

  What really changes the world, he’s been telling Henry and Haldeman all summer, is Tory men with liberal ideas. Churchill had been one of those, and so is he. That’s what took him to Peking and Moscow, and that’s what will propel him through the whole second term.

  He is already focused months beyond this moment, so much so that he barely hears the cheering for Agnew’s lousy introduction of him, barely realizes it when he is already a page into his own speech. He has forsaken the teleprompter’s crawl for Rose’s typewritten text with its cues about cadences. He’s already paid tribute to the platform and to Pat and is now telling all the newly enfranchised eighteen-year-olds: “Years from now I want you to look back and be able to say that your first vote was one of the best votes you ever cast in your life.”

  If he’d been able, in ’32, to cast a vote at the age of nineteen, he’d have cast it for Roosevelt. He’d thought about admitting that tonight, putting it into this speech, but decided it would get too much play in the coverage that followed. He’ll save it, make it a good story for his memoirs, which five years from now he’ll be contentedly composing, his feet up, a long yellow pad on his lap, the tape recordings from the Oval Office bringing it all back to memory and life.

  Hunt listened to Nixon’s speech on the TV in his study. Its reminder that “people on welfare in America would be rich in most of the nations of the world today” pleased his ears. He also liked the president’s refusal to consider McGovern’s precious amnesty for draft dodgers. “The real heroes,” said Nixon, pausing a moment before the predicate, “are two and a half million young Americans who chose to serve their country rather than desert it!” Hunt turned up the volume, wanting to get into the spirit of things, to feel that he was actually in Miami—as he could so easily have been, if things had gone otherwise.

  He and Dorothy had gotten home six days ago, after a week in the Keys spent fishing with Bernie and waiting for a reply to the letter he’d finally sent Colson at the beginning of August. Sitting on the dock down there, regarding his fishing rod and line, he’d imagined the four of them—Clarita and Dorothy, too—setting off for Central America by boat, or having one of the brigadistas fly them into Nicaragua, where Somoza would almost certainly grant protection and a home.

  Then a message from Colson’s secretary had reached them, with instructions for Dorothy to call in from yet another pay phone, which they found by the sid
e of US 1. Colson assured her that they would all be taken care of, that the commitment would be kept. However short it might be on specifics, the pledge had reassured both Dorothy and himself, at least for a while—long enough for him to take a breath and concentrate on things like the deposition he would soon have to give for the Democrats’ civil suit over the burglary. That he was scheduled to give it before Edward Bennett Williams, owner of the Redskins and darling of the Washington Post, made the prospect troublesome; he couldn’t imagine Bittman being a match for him.

  In the last day or two the vagueness of Colson’s promise had started to gnaw at him, along with Mr. Rivers’s clear hints that Dorothy’s demands were excessive. She and “Tony” were engaged in a continuing test of wills, and his wife feared losing it. At the same time, she appeared intent on going for broke. She was urging her husband to call Colson again, to pressure him so that she in turn could press for larger sums and an extended series of payments, could get more and more, as much as possible, before the election. How, after all, did these men in the White House expect him to make a living from now on? Did they want him shopping a book proposal? He didn’t even need to write the book; just circulating the pitch would guarantee spillage of the story’s best beans in the press.

  Hunt wondered how long Dorothy’s adrenalized energy would last. She’d been up on the ladder cleaning gutters, all over the garden pulling every weed; when would she lapse back into the despondency of springtime? To distract himself from the question, he lifted up the big pink seashell he’d brought home from the Keys and put it to his ear, the sound from its empty heart growing louder, until a particular bit of Nixon’s oration startled him back to life:

  “Let one thing be clearly understood in this election campaign. The American people will not tolerate any attempt by our enemies to interfere in the cherished right of the American voter to make his own decision with regard to what is best for America without outside intervention.”