Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  By now Alice had come to life with Joe and the rest of the audience. Perhaps this hotel coffee shop was the prothonotary warbler!—the item in the case that pops a stitch in the witness’s story and unravels all his believability.

  GURNEY: How long have you lived in Washington?

  DEAN: I have been here about ten years.

  GURNEY: And you don’t know the difference between the Statler-Hilton and the Mayflower hotels?

  DEAN: I continually get them confused, I must confess. The point in substance here is that the meeting did occur. We met in the coffee shop. We went from the coffee shop to his room.

  Alice imagined Dick leaning forward over his bowl of Cheerios in San Clemente, talking to the TV, telling Gurney to hurry up and twist the knife he’d stuck into the little bastard.

  Alas, thought Alice, handsome is as handsome doesn’t. Gurney already seemed to be losing the thread, meandering into a series of unrelated questions about Dean’s credit cards. Joe began twitching with exasperation, afraid the potentially fatal moment had passed. And then suddenly it was Dean, not Gurney, who was returning them to it, asking if he might impart a bit of information that someone had just helpfully conveyed to his lawyer: “The name of the coffee shop at the Statler is The Mayflower.”

  A burst of applause, loud enough to rattle the chandeliers, filled the room. Alice’s gloved hands, ignoring which side she was supposed to be on, contributed to it. Joe shot her a glance, furious that she couldn’t help herself: her love of smarts, her lifelong preference for winners over losers, trumped everything. If Iago was a species of “motiveless malignity,” she was a creature of motiveless mischief. At this new low point in the president’s fortunes, he felt only disgust toward her.

  And yet it was Alice who now said, “I’ve seen enough.”

  “Good,” replied Alsop. Remembering his manners, he gritted his teeth and reminded her of their plan to have lunch at the F Street Club. “I’m ready to go eat anytime you are.”

  “No, thank you,” said Alice. “There’s something else I’d rather do.”

  Alsop saw a chance to get rid of this petulant child. “If you want to go over to Borah’s statue, I’ll get a page to take you. And after that I’ll have Mr. Ellis run you home.”

  “I want Mr. Ellis to drive me to Rock Creek.”

  Alsop looked at her painfully frail frame and shook his head. “You can not go to the cemetery. What are you going to eat?”

  “Janie always puts a banana and peanuts in my purse. I’m starting to look like an ape, so she feeds me like one.”

  She was getting her way, thought Alsop. But he comforted himself with the thought that he would more or less be getting his, too. He headed for the rear exit of the Caucus Room; he would find Ellis and tell him to take her away.

  Alice dozed during the drive to Petworth, the cemetery neighborhood near the District’s northern tip. She guided Mr. Ellis, who had remained silent, through a gate on New Hampshire Avenue and then, at under five miles per hour, along the path to the graveyard’s section A. “I’ll get out here,” she said.

  Mr. Ellis at last spoke: “Mr. Alsop instructed me not to leave you by yourself.”

  “I am old enough to be Mr. Alsop’s mother.”

  “I believe that’s the point, ma’am.”

  “All right,” said Alice, eager to escape. “I’ll get out and let you follow at a reasonable distance. If I keel over, you’ll see a black hat rolling across the lawn.”

  The afternoon was sweltering, and the old lady didn’t even have a cane, but her catnap had revived her. So Mr. Ellis opened the door and helped her out of the car. She certainly looked as if she were dressed for a funeral.

  Alice set off slowly through section A, wondering as she went whether Stew had gotten around to choosing where he wished to be buried. Perhaps he’d decided to send his carcass back to Connecticut, where it had been raised—a line of reasoning Alice always faulted for the way it made one’s whole adult life seem a mere detour.

  She passed the grave of Agnes Harvey Stone, widow of the chief justice, dead for fifteen years without ever having returned Alice’s copy of Ten North Frederick. The mausoleums of Riggs and Heurich, the District’s biggest banker and biggest brewer, soon came into view, each much nicer than that ridiculous “Grief” statue by Saint-Gaudens, a vulgar extravagance thrown up by Henry Adams to pay off the guilt he felt over his wife’s suicide, just as another man might provide a diamond bracelet to the spouse he’d neglected for a chorus girl. Eleanor used to come out and sit on the bench across from this monstrosity, a fact Alice had turned into one of her party pieces. She would put a dish towel over her head to mimic the statue’s veil, then raise her hand to her face, just like the sculpture, shutting her eyes to complete the imitation. And then, when her tableau vivant appeared fixed, she would buck out her teeth and say, in Eleanor’s horribly untethered upper register, “I have just returned from surveying conditions in the afterlife!”

  A circle of trees now shielded her eyes from the statue, so popular with visitors that it had become a celebration of suicide rather than a caution. She preferred the plain lawn and modest headstones of section F—and there it was, her own eternal reward, the half-filled plot beneath the granite marker for PAULINA STURM 1925–1957. Watching Mr. Ellis watching her, Alice lowered herself onto the grass covering HILDA WILHELMINA LUOMA, Paulina’s preposterously named neighbor since 1959.

  From this seat, Alice recalled the expression on Dick’s face as he helped to carry her daughter’s coffin to its open grave. She also again remembered the night that had followed, her going to the Nixons’ house on Tilden Street, Pat remaining upstairs, the girls out of sight, watching television somewhere. Alone with Dick in his study, she had forced herself to speak of suicide, the subject which all day had ruled everyone’s thoughts and stilled their tongues.

  “She didn’t do it, but I believe I shall,” she’d told Dick, meaning it, her voice quavering as it never had before or since. To her surprise, he’d gone to one of his bookshelves, as if to fetch a Physicians’ Desk Reference, and taken down a volume of Father’s collected works. It took him no time at all to find the passage he wanted: And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever. He read out loud, astonishingly, what Father had written about her mother and, by extension, about her, the child whose birth had brought on such a foul death and such inordinate grieving.

  She knew, right at that moment, why Dick had picked those lines, and why she’d come to him. No, he had not yet protested the Post’s libel about suicide, and not yet pressured the insurance company to pay out. But she didn’t need to see him do those things. She’d come to the house that night because of the look on his face when he’d shouldered the coffin—the creased, naked expression on this darkest of dark horses, this misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. She didn’t share his general dinginess: she smiled in delight, however viciously, whereas he smiled only in a kind of animal desperation. But she shared the darkness beneath and the capacity for denial; she could sometimes change or negate reality just with her contempt for it.

  By the time she left his house that night, the two of them had effected a little sorcery, succeeded in convincing her that Paulina had been her own heart’s dearest and that all the world knew it. She held on to this illusion long enough to get home to the empty house in Dupont Circle and throw away Bill’s old straight razor with which she might have put an end to herself the way she’d imagined doing it, draining the blood as if she were her own taxidermist.

  Dick’s current illusions would evaporate soon enough. Fewer and fewer people shared them. Joe might be one of those, but he’d soon look a fool if his columns kept talking of resignation and impeachment as remote possibilities. Stew, who by now knew something about dying, rightly gauged Dick’s prospects for survival as not much brighter than his own. She was still ashamed of her own early blitheness about
the burglary; her dismissive remarks of a year ago now struck her not as the denial of reality, into which she’d successfully put so much of her life’s energy, but a failure of imagination, a kind of laziness or, even worse, stupidity. She’d wised up soon enough, but shouldn’t have been so dumb in the first place.

  Would her kindred spirit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—so shrewd and so deplorable—manage to hold on? The other afternoon, Janie, glued to the radio, had asked her the same question. “California, here he comes,” Alice had replied, pleased with the remark as she made it, but rather miserable about it once she got back upstairs.

  And yet, she now thought, closing her eyes against the afternoon sun: surely the Tattler had no proof. And if he didn’t, could not the truth remain forever in abeyance, like Paulina’s paternity if not her death? Could not Dick live on in the White House, known but not proved to be guilty, like Lizzie Borden in Fall River? Surely he could endure such a condition better than anyone. It was now the best he could hope for, and perhaps it would come to pass. After all, what deus ex machina could possibly provide corroboration for Mr. Dean?

  The watchful Mr. Ellis, fearing she’d started to doze, honked the horn.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  JULY 18, 1973

  NATIONAL NAVAL MEDICAL CENTER, BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  “Just once more. Hard as you can stand it, sir.”

  Nixon braced himself before Miss Williams pounded both her hands against his chest, attempting to loosen more of the congestion. He moaned, but resisted complaint, enduring the blows of the inhalation therapist until she declared he’d had enough.

  “Very good,” said Miss Williams.

  There were tears in the president’s eyes, but he was breathing easier and hurting much less than he had been during the first awful hours of his hospitalization, for viral pneumonia, six days ago.

  “You know,” he said, offering a variant of their usual joke, “a lot of Democrats would love to have your job.”

  Miss Williams returned the serve. “A few Republicans, too.”

  Nixon, still clearly spent, managed a laugh.

  “Dr. Tkach and Dr. Katz should be in soon,” said Miss Williams. “I’ll give them a good report in the meantime. And I’ll see you again this afternoon.”

  Once she was gone, Nixon lay back on the bed and glanced into the sitting room of the hospital’s presidential suite. Haig and Ziegler and Rose had been taking turns with it as an office. He could see the two tall metal boxes of important papers. They’d been brought over the day he arrived and were now, optimistically, packed up for a departure to Camp David, which he’d be permitted to make in a couple of days if he continued to improve.

  He’d awoken last Thursday morning sicker than he’d ever been, with a roaring fever and a brutal pain in his right side. If it were a heart attack, he’d managed to tell himself, the pain would be on the left; but the deduction was more disappointing than consoling. As he’d sat up, his pajamas soaked with sweat, he’d allowed himself a wistful moment to imagine history’s gentle treatment of a president who’d persevered in the duties of office until his enemies hounded him to death.

  Dr. Tkach knew it was pneumonia the minute the stethoscope touched his chest. A few hours later the visiting German foreign minister told him he looked awful, but he’d toughed it out for the whole day—foolishly, he now realized, since the fever had made him blow his cool with Ervin over the telephone. Rather than making a calm declaration of executive privilege against the Senate committee’s document request, he’d disgorged all his pent-up fury against that cornpone grandstander—who actually wanted him to come and testify in person! In a voice so hoarse he barely recognized it as his own, he’d shouted about its being perfectly clear that Ervin was out to get him. By lunchtime every staffer and intern on the Hill was hearing that Nixon had gone crazy at last. He knew there was already talk among the Georgetown crowd that he’d landed here in the hospital not for pneumonia but a nervous breakdown.

  Well, if they were all so goddamned interested in seizing presidential papers, let them ask for his medical records. They could have them—a complete set of fever charts; the whole list of antibiotics; consultations with Katz and pummelings from Nurse Williams.

  He might be improving, but he was exhausted. Sometimes the fever would flare up, and his breathing would once again become shallow and fast. He’d been warned to expect a long recovery time.

  At least he was unhooked from the monitor. After all its days of blinking and beeping, he felt strange seeing it idle and unlit—you’d think he’d died instead of gotten well. He now sat up a little, took in more breath and felt a sharp twinge. Christ, was this what it had been like to live as Harold and Arthur?

  He clicked on the TV gizmo and got the Ervin show. Jesus, who was this character testifying? With his girth and slicked-back hair he looked like one of Colson’s “ethnics,” though from which “heritage group” wasn’t clear.

  He kind of looked at me and I said, “Well, it’s definitely not your ballgame, Mr. Kalmbach.”

  Nixon realized that they were talking about the delivery of money to Hunt and the rest of them. Christ, what a system it must have entailed: you had Kalmbach, who always appeared as if he’d just gotten a manicure, having to work with this guy who looked like a loan shark. Where had they gotten the whole slew of goofballs like Segretti and Liddy, not to mention the Cubans? At its beginning, the administration had been full of crew-cut guys who could pass for astronauts.

  He wanted to turn the thing off, but the remote control had decided to give him trouble, and he couldn’t find the call button for the nurse. He’d have to wait until they came in with his hundredth glass of orange juice. Meanwhile he looked over at what he knew was a letter from Cox lying atop one of the metal boxes in the sitting room. Ziegler had brought it over an hour ago, and it was now the piece of paper that mattered most in the whole damned suite.

  The special prosecutor was demanding eight tape recordings, whose existence had been let out of the bag, more like a lion than a cat, by one of Haldeman’s boys, during testimony to the committee the day before yesterday:

  THOMPSON: Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?

  BUTTERFIELD: I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.

  Two years’ worth of tape, a quantity of evidence you couldn’t fit into a whole fucking farm’s worth of pumpkins. Well, the tapes were now the nuclear football. In a way, revelation of their existence simplified the whole struggle. If these tapes were so goddamned important—the key to it all, as Cox and the rest of them now kept saying—then logic said they couldn’t evict him from office without them. Awareness of the tapes was actually weakening all the testimony that had been shoveled into Ervin’s lap the past six weeks; the tapes were turning it, by comparison, into a kind of second-rate inadmissible hearsay. And with any luck Cox and Ervin would wear each other out squabbling over who deserved to hear the recordings first. Ervin’s letter asking for them, which had shown up yesterday, now sat beneath Cox’s.

  Haig came in and reached up toward the television when the president signaled for him to kill it. The chief of staff, as usual, was all cheer and charm. Nixon half-expected him to start dancing like Gene Kelly.

  “Good news, Mr. President! The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company says the penalty for a person’s recording phone calls without telling the other party is limited to removal of the violator’s equipment. And considering the importance of maintaining phone service at the White House, they’ve agreed to waive that.”

  Nixon let himself smile, feeling grateful he’d recovered the strength to brush his teeth.

  “First the country, then the scandal,” said Haig, setting his usual mind-over-matter priorities for what he knew would be a very short business meeting with the boss. “Bhutto will be happy to put off his visit until the fall. But we’ve yet to cancel the Shah, who’s still supposed to be here next Tuesday.
Dr. Tkach says you might be able to go through with it if you agree to an abbreviated schedule.”

  “Under no circumstances are we to postpone the Shah. Same with the Phase IV statement. Tell Shultz he’s to go ahead.” Nixon had no interest in this planned adjustment to wage-and-price controls, other than that the announcement take place on schedule. His instruction to Haig was reasonable enough, but even to himself it sounded stiff and artificial, as if he were playacting the role of president in one of those old Whittier amateur theatricals where he’d met Pat.

  “Al, give me that yellow pad over on the cart.”

  Haig glanced at the writing on the pad’s top page before handing it to its author:

  YES MAYBE NO

  Connally Haig Garment

  Rocky TCRN (?) Haldeman

  Agnew

  Richardson

  “If this is about who’s for destroying the tapes, I’m not a maybe, I’m a yes,” said the chief of staff. “I was trying to appear neutral yesterday so that I could moderate that rather lively discussion we had going on here.”

  “Goddamned Garment. He’s the only real no. So worried about what his pals in the liberal press will say. Mitchell always knew we shouldn’t have brought him with us from the law firm in New York.”

  “But you’ve got Haldeman down as a ‘no,’ too. Is he? I can’t say I’ve spoken to my predecessor about this.”

  “He’s a no, but for a different reason. He’s certain the tapes can help. He listened to the one from March twenty-first and says he can hear me saying, ‘It would be wrong’—you know, to do what Dean wanted me to do.”

  “What do you think about that?” asked Haig.

  “I couldn’t make out half of what’s on the goddamned thing when I listened to it.”

  “Who’s TCRN?”

  “Pat. You know, Thelma Catherine Ryan.”