Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Speaking of Colson,” said Mitchell, lifting his glass from its place on his chest. “He thinks we might be able to get away with clemency for Hunt if we just hold off on it until the holidays. Make it a merciful gesture.”

  LaRue laughed. “Mercy: the president’s Christmas specialty. We can drop it on Hunt from a B-52.”

  “But it’d be too late,” Mitchell said with a sigh. “This Hunt character is likely to blow long before that. Which is why our friend Dean says you and I have got to get busy raising more money right away.”

  LaRue nodded, depressed that they’d arrived at the matter he’d come to New York to discuss. As it was, Mitchell seemed eager to avoid it for just a little longer by citing more of Nixon’s own avoidance behaviors. “You know, he’s been telling Haldeman to see about getting King Timahoe bred.”

  LaRue laughed at the thought of a canine dynasty. “Easier than finding congressional seats for the sons-in-law.”

  “He also wants Ray Price to see if they can’t change the procedures for compiling each year’s volume of presidential speeches; he’d like to see his off-the-cuff remarks and toasts get printed, too. And,” said Mitchell, pouring himself what LaRue hoped would be a last drink, “he wants Bebe to take charge of sprucing up the White House bowling alley.” He added, more forgivingly, “I suppose everybody needs to get away from this nightmare, even if it’s only down to the basement to roll gutter balls. They say Kissinger’s already made three trips to the zoo to see the pandas.”

  LaRue watched Mitchell’s bald crown slip a little further down the headboard. There seemed no more time to waste. “John, word is that Hunt doesn’t feel any of his legal fees should come out of what he’s received. He thinks all of it—and it’s more than a small fortune—should go to ‘living expenses.’ I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can raise enough money to satisfy him.”

  LaRue had never told anyone, not even Mitchell, about his rendezvous with Dorothy Hunt on the day of the plane crash. But he had by now disbursed to Hunt’s attorney nearly all the money that had sat for those hours in the airport locker. And each night he still struggled to push from his mind the thought that there’d been a connection between the cover-up and the crash.

  He now found himself wondering whether not just Mitchell but all the Mitchell men—including Jeb and himself—would soon be cut loose. But there was no time for speculation. He needed to get Mitchell focused on Hunt and the money. If that’s where things came apart, they were all goners.

  From the living room came a sudden happy shriek, followed by an equally loud cry of disappointment. “Oh, GODDAMN and GLORIOSKI!”

  Martha came to the bedroom door to explain: “I thought it was Jackie down below. But it’s just some big old bouffant copycat.”

  “Take her upstairs,” Mitchell gently urged LaRue, once Martha returned to the living room. “To the Kennedy party. They’ll love having her, trust me. She’ll be more fun than a girl coming out of a cake—even for Teddy.”

  LaRue appeared hesitant.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mitchell. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  Martha insisted that crashing the party was the farthest thing from her mind, but LaRue had no trouble getting her up to the Smiths’ apartment. In fact, while putting the checkered kerchief around her neck, she suggested they take the two flights of stairs, lest the surprise of her entrance be blunted by an elevator ride shared with other guests.

  LaRue felt as if he were entering the party with a live cheetah; there were gasps all around when they came in. He saw no sign of the birthday boy, but Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s sister, came straight over, accompanied by what LaRue took to be some good-looking fag in leather boots. John Lindsay, who’d kept his black tie but added a cowboy hat, also approached Martha to introduce himself.

  She smiled with a mouth so wide open you could have put an apple in it. “I did not have to become a Democrat in order to get in here!” she shouted, extending her hand to the mayor, whose switch from the Republicans last year had done his pursuit of the presidency no good at all.

  A waiter bowed slightly to Mrs. Mitchell and offered her a bottle of Lone Star beer, the theme party’s designated beverage, but she refused it. “Martha wants a nice tall Dewar’s, honey—lots of ice, no water.”

  Stephen Smith came over to tell her she was most welcome, and one of Ethel Kennedy’s kids began snapping pictures. Martha draped her arm over anyone who wanted to pose with her, and LaRue began getting nervous.

  She pulled him down onto a couch and pointed, with her drink, to a gaggle of miniskirted young women. “The boiler-room girls?”

  LaRue wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “The ones who were up on Chappa-Q-tip, or whatever it’s called. I’ll tell you one thing, honey. If this Supreme Court had come to its senses a little earlier, the guest of honor, wherever he may be, would still have a future.”

  “How so?” LaRue responded.

  “Abortion, honey,” Martha explained. “It’s been legal for the last month, or have you only been payin’ attention to the earth-shattering matter of who picked the lock on the Democrats’ clubhouse?”

  LaRue had learned never to use the word “logic” when seeking clarification from Mrs. Mitchell; it inflamed her. So he asked instead for the “connection” between abortion and Edward Kennedy.

  “You don’t think that drowned girl wasn’t pregnant? Well, I’m tellin’ you that she was, and that we’re movin’ toward a world where that won’t any longer be such a big ole catastrophe. But that was not true three years ago. Tell me, Freddy LaRooster: Did you ever pay for one of those operations? Or fa-cil-i-tate one?” She drew out the last word, as if mocking the jargon of Magruder and the junior executives.

  “Miz Mitchell, I’ve got five children,” said LaRue.

  Martha hooted, and swirled the ice cubes in her drink. “That proves nothin’,” she declared. “Though I suppose I do take your point, honey.”

  LaRue silently remembered Larrie coming to see him, one night in 1961, a few months after their last time together at the resort property. Over a cup of coffee at a restaurant in Jackson she asked for what she said was “the only thing I’ll ever ask you for. A plane ticket to Los Angeles. Round-trip. Open-ended.” He’d gone and got one for her and asked no questions; she wouldn’t have answered them, anyway. Six months later she was back in town, briefly, before her permanent departure for Washington, D.C. He’d often wondered, then and later, whether she’d gotten rid of a baby, or given birth to one, out in California.

  Martha detested quiet, and here he was creating some. He looked out into the room, worried that her novelty might already have worn off for the Kennedys. He didn’t want this party to turn into one of her defeats, the kind of crash landing whose debris John Mitchell would be forced to sort through.

  Fortunately, that guy who’d joined the Detroit Lions for a year in order to write a book about it was coming toward her.

  “I’m George Plimpton,” he said, in a voice that sounded too much like Elliot Richardson’s for LaRue’s taste. “I’d like to meet you, and so would Lee Radziwill.”

  Martha lit up and offered Plimpton her hand. While he shook it, she managed to whisper to LaRue, “It’s a little like bein’ offered Princess Margaret instead of the queen, but hell’s hooley, she is a princess, supposedly.” To Plimpton, she cried, “Take me to her, Georgie boy!”

  LaRue knew he shouldn’t leave, but Plimpton seemed enough of a gent that she’d be safe with him for a while—maybe long enough for LaRue himself to get back downstairs and conduct his business with Mitchell. Then he could come back up, escort her home, and head over to his hotel room, having concluded this whole sorry business trip.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Martha. “You go check on Mr. Moral Obligation Bond,” she instructed, mocking her husband with mention of the fiscal instrument he had invented before Richard Nixon took over their lives.

  LaRue left the Smiths’ apartment after
the two bodyguards at the door promised to let him back in.

  Reentering the Mitchells’ place proved slightly difficult: no one answered his repeated knockings before he realized that the door was unlocked.

  “John?” he called, venturing into the dim rooms. The only response was a faint snore—more of a wheeze, thought LaRue, as he got closer to it. He went into the bedroom and saw Mitchell asleep with the cocktail glass on his chest. He moved it to the night table and took off Mitchell’s shoes: wing-tips, just like the Old Man’s. He covered him with an afghan and put out the light.

  Back in the living room, LaRue sat by himself for a few moments in the near dark. He looked out the window that was still open from Martha’s rubbernecking and saw a plane fly by in the winter darkness. He thought of Dorothy Hunt and listened once more to Mitchell’s labored breathing.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  MARCH 21–23, 1973

  WEST WING OF THE WHITE HOUSE; WATERGATE APARTMENT OF FRED LaRUE; CELLBLOCK 1, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA JAIL

  “It hurts my sacroiliac just to look at her,” Rose whispered to Lorraine while the two women stood near a door of the Oval Office. It was almost lunchtime, and the president was greeting the Soviet women gymnasts. Little Olga Korbut, whose pretzeled form and grimace had become famous during last summer’s Olympics, had given Nixon flowers.

  Hoping she wouldn’t be heard over the applause, Lorraine asked Rose, “Are these girls even old enough to get their period?”

  “Probably not,” answered the president’s secretary. “They cheat at arms control; why not cheat at this?”

  “Dasvidaniya!” said Nixon, who marched out of the office while the girls were still clapping. He gently tapped Rose’s elbow, indicating that he needed a word. The gesture had a furtive, emergency quality, making her wonder if, say, the Israelis had just dropped the bomb on Cairo.

  “Let me ask you something,” said the president. “We may have a need for substantial cash for a, uh, personal purpose. Do you know how much is around?”

  The question knocked her off balance, as did the drained, waxen quality of his face, which she was seeing close up for the first time today. The boss hadn’t looked this bad since that awful week during the ’60 campaign when he’d slammed his knee on a car door and wound up in the hospital with an infection.

  “I don’t know,” she answered nervously. “I would have to look. I’d have to get into the safe.”

  The president gave her a consoling pat on the arm and walked off to his next meeting, knowing she’d have a look, and an exact count, before the afternoon was through.

  Rose knew that he had cleared his calendar to spend much of the morning, before the gymnasts, with John Dean. The president’s counsel had been scurrying around the West Wing these past couple of days, contributing to Rose’s sense that things had taken a swift, terrible turn. Watergate stories were piling up in the Post once more, and the president had been projecting a false and fragile gaiety. Everything was off-kilter: somebody had picked last Saturday night, St. Patrick’s Day, to have Merle Haggard come sing his country songs at the White House, and the president had burst into the East Room, late, wearing a clownish green tie he’d gotten off Freddy, the old man who ran the elevator. He had looked glazed and keyed-up all at once, as if he were stumbling through one of those dreams where you find yourself onstage without any drawers.

  On the way back to her office, Rose nudged Steve Bull, one of the president’s youngest assistants: “Let me know when he goes over to the EOB.”

  Bull nodded, promising that he’d get word to her. For part of every day, Nixon chose to work inside the vast stone hive of offices next door, where he’d spent much of his vice presidency. Today, however abnormal the atmosphere, was unlikely to be an exception.

  Rose ate a sandwich at her desk and thought about how little she’d been out to dinner, let alone lunch, since the second term—so different from what they’d expected!—had gotten under way. She missed Don but wouldn’t let herself get blue now. She slapped the crumbs from her hands and returned her attention to a set of thank-you letters. They were going out to the musicians who’d performed here a couple of weeks ago with Sammy Davis, Jr.—who, come to think of it, wouldn’t have made any less sense on St. Patrick’s Day than Merle Haggard had. There was also a packet of materials to be assembled for tomorrow’s Oval Office meeting of the Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse—what she and the girls kept calling “the pot party.”

  She was still working on that at 1:21 p.m., when Steve Bull called to say the president was crossing the driveway and heading to his EOB hideaway.

  A minute later she was in the Oval Office. She closed its doors and hit the button on the machine inside the Wilson desk, listening impatiently to the high-pitched squeak of the reels as they rewound the president’s morning. Yard after yard of tape took her back from the girl gymnasts—Dasvidaniya!—to the soft-footed ten o’clock entrance of John Dean. At this point, once she located it, Rose let the tape run forward, keeping its volume low enough not to draw anyone’s attention. There really wasn’t much need for caution: she frequently came in here by herself to organize things, a right of access even HRH had never dared to question.

  While she listened, she pitied whoever would be stuck transcribing these things a few years from now. She had always hated working with Dictabelts, but at least they involved somebody’s deliberate, steady effort to make each word audible—not the picking up of all the murmurs and asides that this machine strove to catch. The conversation she now heard was full of stammerings and pauses; the voice-activated equipment had often stopped and restarted while recording it, as if struggling to stay alert.

  With his peppy sports car and platinum second wife, young John Dean was less insipid than the rest of the Magruder-style junior executives, but Rose had no particular affection for him, and whatever she did have quickly vanished as she listened to him speechifying on this hours-old tape:

  We have a cancer—within, close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now because it compounds itself … and there is no assurance—

  The president cut him off:

  That it won’t bust.

  She knew better than most that the only thing to do with cancer was cut it out. She could remember perfectly the sense of lightness and relief she’d awoken with on that long-ago morning when she came out of the ether feeling as if some horrible twin had at last been severed from her. But on this tape all she heard was irresolution, a lot of clucking but still a willingness to coddle the cancer, to feed it further. Dean spoke from what she realized had been a lot of rehearsal:

  Hunt is now demanding another seventy to a hundred thousand dollars for his own personal expenses; another fifty thousand dollars to pay his attorney’s fees; a hundred and twenty-some thousand dollars. Wants it, wanted it, by close of business yesterday. Because he says he’s going to be sentenced on Friday and needs to get his financial affairs in order … Mrs. Hunt was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture … This is his blackmail. He says, “I will bring John Ehrlichman down to his knees and put him in jail. I have done enough seamy things for him that he’ll never survive it.”

  Rose’s ears perked up further. She allowed herself to feel a momentary thrill at this mention of Ehrlichman, thinking that a threat against Haldeman might immediately follow. But the next voice was the president’s—

  What’s that? On Ellsberg?

  —to which Dean responded:

  Ellsberg, and apparently some other things.

  She didn’t know anything about Ellsberg or whatever else Dean referred to; her alarm came from realizing that the boss did. Instinct made her reach for her pad, but it wasn’t there, so she opened one of the desk drawers, took out some stationery, and began making a shorthand transcription from the point at which the two men started talking turkey:

  RN: How much money do you need?

  JD: I would say t
hese people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.

  RN: We could get that.

  JD: Uh-huh.

  RN: I mean, you could get the money. Let’s say—

  JD: Well, I think that we’re going—

  RN: What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten.

  JD: Uh-huh.

  RN: I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done. But, uh, the question is who the hell would handle it?

  JD: Well, Mitchell’s got one person doing it who I’m not sure is—

  RN: Who is that?

  JD: He’s got Fred LaRue doing it.

  She was taking the words down faster than they could utter them, and when she heard Nixon ask, Don’t you, just looking at the immediate problem, don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation?, she wondered if his bashful tone reflected not just his usual dislike of giving any order that implied criticism—in this case, of Dean’s apparent reluctance to do what had to be done—but also a strained awareness that he himself might at this moment be committing a crime.

  She now understood the sick look of his skin at lunchtime, understood that this was way beyond the spring of ’70, when all that stood between them and the incensed mob was that ring of empty buses.

  Shaken, she returned to her office and the pot-party list. The words ringing in her ear were not the muffled ones on the tape, but what the president had said to her at noon: We may have a need for substantial cash.