Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  “Oh. And Elliot? I see he’s crossed out. Does that mean he’s on his way out?” Haig laughed as he asked the question, but hoped to high heaven it wasn’t true. That was all they needed, no matter how much he despised Richardson.

  “He’s crossed out in the sense of ‘not applicable.’ Hell of a thing having an attorney general you can’t trust to ask for legal advice, isn’t it? He’ll want whatever Cox wants.”

  “And Agnew’s a yes? Sure he’s not trying to get you impeached?”

  The president shrugged. “So that he can serve for two weeks before he goes to jail?” They both knew the case against the vice president was strong. Nixon now even wondered if Agnew had used the same lunkhead testifying on TV today to deliver his envelopes. “Connally and Rocky are both very strong, and neither of them has any special stake in things. Connally suggests a bonfire on the South Lawn.”

  Haig responded with more realism but no less urgency: “You could tell the Secret Service to just cart them away and get rid of them.” As it was, Haig himself had already ordered the dismantling of the system and the end of any further taping.

  “The hell of it is, Garment’s right,” said the president. “Just because there’s no subpoena yet doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be in legal jeopardy by getting rid of them. I mean, Christ, those letters already demand them.” He pointed to the metal boxes in the other room.

  “Well,” said Haig, “we can keep making the same executive-privilege argument we made when it was just documents. As Henry would say, ‘It has the additional advantage of being true.’ But, Mr. President, if you destroy the tapes you’ve got to do it right away, and not just to beat whatever process-server we see coming up the lawn. If you don’t get rid of them within days, the public won’t believe you really care about the principle of confidentiality. They’ll just think you’re sifting through them, weighing the pros and cons, maybe even tampering with them.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Nixon, closing his eyes. “I’ll decide by then.” His energy had drained away in an instant. He was asleep before Haig could even step into the makeshift office. The chief of staff sighed, wondering how the president would keep his head from falling into the fruit cocktail when the Shah arrived next week.

  Closing the door to the sitting room, Haig noticed that Rose was there, too, having come through the other entrance. She was casting a baleful look at the photographers three floors below, before briskly shutting the blue drapes.

  “ ‘Viral pneumonia, no complications.’ ” Haig merrily quoted the recent, definitive diagnosis of the president’s condition. “Finally, something around here without complications.”

  Rose handed him a cookie from one of the baskets still arriving from all over. He said he’d sit for just a minute.

  The president’s secretary took a bite from a macaroon and before she finished chewing lit into the latest group of her boss’s critics: “I can’t stand all these crybabies saying how betrayed they feel finding out their conversations were taped. Carl Albert!” She uttered the diminutive House speaker’s name as scornfully as she could. “Maybe he’s worried about how he sounds because he never draws a sober breath.”

  Haig playfully soothed her. “Jerry Ford insists he has no problem with having been recorded. Of course Jerry never has all that much to say.”

  A small piece of Rose liked the idea that her own voice would be on the tapes—her casual imprint on history, like lipstick on a napkin. She had nothing to hide either! But she always sided with the tough-guy position, because it was always right. If anyone asked, she would say that she was all for Connally’s bonfire. She’d liked Garment well enough in the New York days, but if he couldn’t see what the present moment demanded, he ought to pack his bags and go back up to the city.

  Her general, as usual, was getting Rose through this latest storm: she hoped he’d get rid of the tapes as fast as he’d done away with the machinery that produced them.

  “I knew they existed,” said Rose. “This business that only Haldeman and his boys like Bull and Butterfield knew is ridiculous. I’d see the Secret Service changing the reels! And I knew how to work what was in the Oval Office desk.”

  “You know when I found out?” asked Haig. “Not until a month after I started—when I walked over to the EOB one morning, about six weeks ago, just after we’d gotten back from seeing Pompidou in Iceland. Steve Bull had set up a recorder for the boss, who was in there listening to a whole stack of tapes he’d requested. He never even took a lunch break, and I let him be.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” said Rose. “From the day our Mr. Butterfield walked into the White House, I wondered if he was some kind of Democrat plant. If he’d really wanted to, he could have danced around the committee’s questions without letting on about the tapes—and without even perjuring himself.”

  “I know you could have, Colonel Woods.”

  “Well,” she said, laughing, “I want a promotion when all this is over.” She was struck by the words she’d chosen: when all this is over. Was she kidding herself? Would it ever be?

  “I’ll sleep on it, Rose. In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to the fort. Or is this the fort?”

  “This is the bunker,” said Rose.

  Though it was usual for him to get the exit line, Haig decided he would steer clear of any Nazi jokes and settle for a wink. As he left the suite by the same door Rose had used, he reflected on that day in the EOB he’d just told her about: it only now occurred to him that there must be hours of tape filled with the sounds of Nixon listening to earlier tapes. Christ, these things had to go.

  In the sitting room, Rose plucked and organized cards from the gift baskets and decided to put on the TV. She’d actually liked the palooka who’d been testifying an hour ago. There was a little of her brother Joe in him, and he’d been good for one or two laughs. But as the screen now came to life, she found Fred LaRue, whom she hadn’t seen since that day in March, in the hall outside his apartment, occupying the witness chair.

  He’d always looked a lot older than he was, but sort of stringy and appealing, too, like a cowboy. He was squinting at a chart and cupping his ear, and speaking so softly the committee could barely hear him.

  DASH: And did you think that this money was being paid for humanitarian purposes?

  LARUE: Mr. Dash, my understanding of the payments to the defendants is that this money was paid to satisfy commitments that had been made to them by someone I do not know. Commitments had been made to them at some point in time, and—

  Rose grabbed a cookie and opened an orangeade, the only beverage she could find.

  DASH: Now, when was your last payment to Mr. Bittman, counsel for Mr. Hunt? Do you recall?

  LARUE: Yes, sir, it would be in March.

  DASH: March of 1973?

  LARUE: Yes, sir.

  DASH: Can you tell us how much was involved in that payment?

  LARUE: As I recall, $75,000.

  Rose’s nerves suddenly stood up. She had never actually imagined LaRue’s testimony, and she hoped the boss would not choose this moment to walk into the room with some brainstorm. She leaned forward and crossed herself as the live, televised dialogue competed in her head with four-month-old echoes of her own voice and LaRue’s.

  Do you have what you need?

  Barely.

  You can add this to it.

  The televised LaRue had begun explaining to the majority counsel how, over the phone, John Mitchell had instructed him to go ahead and make the last payment.

  DASH: And you followed the same method?

  LARUE: Same method.

  DASH: That was a bigger packet, though, was it not?

  LARUE: You would be surprised, Mr. Dash, how many $100 bills you can get in a small package.

  DASH: Good things come in small packages. By the way, was this $75,000 payment made just shortly before Mr. Hunt was sentenced on March 23?

  LARUE: I think that is correct, yes, sir.

  DASH: Now, ther
e came a time when you did go to the U.S. Attorney, is that true?

  LARUE: Yes, sir.

  DASH: Would you tell us about when that was?

  LARUE: As I recall, Mr. Dash, that would be approximately the middle of April—April 16 or 17.

  Rose felt the moment of danger pass like a bus that had come within inches of hitting her. She could feel her legs shaking, as if she had just stepped back onto the curb, astonished to find herself intact. While Dash questioned LaRue about the beginnings of his cooperation with investigators, she tried to calm herself, to use her head. If he had ever told the special prosecutor anything about her, she would surely have been summoned already.

  As she sipped the orangeade with a trembling hand she thanked God LaRue was such a gent. Dabbing at her eyes, she looked over at the letters from Cox and Ervin. For everybody’s sake, they had to get rid of those damned tapes. She now wished that the boss would wake up, would come in from the next room and ask for her two cents.

  Pat Nixon didn’t stop in until after dinner. “Hi, kiddo,” she said, kissing her husband’s freshly shaved cheek, before putting one dollar and three quarters onto his bedspread. “I’ll spring for today,” she declared. One of the newspapers had explained that $1.75 was the naval hospital’s daily rate for commanders in chief.

  “Have you recognized that yet?” She pointed to the painting of a New York City sunrise; she’d had it hung in here two days ago. “It’s from the Fifth Avenue apartment. It used to be in that little hallway near the dining room, remember? It’s been in the White House basement for the last four years. Julie and I dug it out so you’d feel more at home. But I guess it didn’t work,” she said with a laugh.

  Nixon could feel himself tearing up; for the last couple of days his emotions had been breaking through his skin like his usual excess of perspiration. “You know, now that the pain is leaving”—he tapped his chest—“I realize more and more what Arthur and Harold went through. Christ, not to mention your father.”

  Pat instantly recalled the rages into which black lung had driven Tom Ryan. But she rejected any comparison. Like Dick’s brothers, her father had lived with, and then died from, his disease. The illness that had put Dick in here was already cured, dissipating into the air. She could again feel anger rising inside her, this time over his dramatics; she raised her chin imperceptibly and narrowed her eyes. If anyone here had pulmonary worries, it was herself: the doctor had told her she was a prime candidate for emphysema. And it didn’t help that right now she was dying for a cigarette.

  “So how rough was Brünnhilde today? Did she crack any ribs?”

  Nixon smiled. “She was in twice. She’s a nice gal. Did you know she worked with a couple of POWs here? Ones who came back from Hanoi with crud in their lungs.”

  Pat took a chair near the window and looked out at the setting sun. “So,” she asked after a couple of silent minutes, “do you want me to weigh in?” There was no need to say on which subject.

  “Sure,” answered Nixon.

  “Get rid of them. Immediately.” She’d been sick to her stomach with the thought of a hundred young Ivy League Democratic lawyers mocking every call Plastic Pat had ever made to the Oval Office. She could hear them mimicking her cheerfulness and twang as she conveyed to Dick the compliments of some African first lady, or told him how cute the Chinese pandas looked at the zoo.

  He nodded, pleased that she was taking the hard line, but not really signaling his own intent.

  “They will use whatever is on them, half a phrase, to finish you off,” Pat argued. “And they’ll eventually get all of them. Every reel, every syllable. They’ll say it’s all government property, created on the government clock.” She was determined to avoid bringing up any personal stake she might have in the tapes’ destruction, because she didn’t want him granting her a favor and thereby giving her a reason to quell the anger still building inside her. Though tempted to note what embarrassment the tapes would cause the girls, she avoided that, too, since the girls would only seem to be proxies for herself.

  She couldn’t stand that her emotions were all over the place. Looking at the pill bottles, the now-silent respirator, all the dials and monitors, she became furious at the newspaper columnists and talk-show panelists who kept insinuating that Dick had barely been sick. And then, looking at Dick himself, she thought for just a second how much easier everything would be, for him and for her, if last Thursday night, with the fever still spiking, he’d run into some unexpected difficulty and died. Viral pneumonia, with complications.

  “Well, I just thought I’d speak my piece. I know Al Haig’s waiting to see you.”

  She rose from her chair, picked up her purse, kissed him lightly, and left the room.

  By the time Haig entered, several minutes later, Nixon was out of bed and on his feet, wearing a robe with the presidential seal. The quarters that Pat had brought were jingling in his pocket.

  “Welcome back to ambulation!” Haig cried in greeting.

  “Well,” said Nixon, moving slowly, “we’ll see how far I get.”

  Plans had been made for a limited postprandial walk, and the two men now started down the corridor, shaking a few hands at a nurses’ station before getting into the elevator.

  “Feels good,” said the president, stepping off on the sixteenth floor, close to the top of the hospital’s tower. “Feels as if I’m getting the circulation back in my legs. Aside from everything else, they’ve been bothering me.” He saluted the officer leading them to the floor’s VIP suite. Once seated there, he pointed to his chest and told Haig, “Tkach says anybody can get this,” meaning pneumonia. “It’s just stuff in the air. I asked him if stress and overwork could have brought it on; he said doubtful. So I guess we can’t put out the story that doing the nation’s business is killing me.”

  Haig laughed, relieved by the conversation’s tone. The two of them sat in catercornered club chairs, sort of the way things had been with Chairman Mao a year ago. As the navy steward poured coffee from an elaborate silver service, the chief of staff tried to figure out the best way to move Nixon toward a definitive decision about the tapes. After putting his spoon on his saucer, he observed casually: “You know, we’re the ones who get called ‘imperial,’ but Cox has eighty people working on Watergate, while we’ve got a handful. If we complied with all the document requests, we couldn’t find people to do the Xeroxing.”

  Nixon sipped his coffee, not ready to get into things, so Haig detoured from the business at hand. “There’s another one of these suites upstairs,” he told the president. “In fact, it’s the one where Jackie Kennedy and the family waited out JFK’s autopsy. Pretty grim. I suggested this one when I found out we had a choice.”

  “Oh, this one’s much more interesting,” said Nixon.

  “How so?”

  “Forrestal.” The president made a swan-dive motion with his arm, refreshing Haig’s memory of how Truman’s just-fired defense secretary had jumped from the hospital’s tower in 1948. A nervous breakdown? Probably; though there were darker suppositions, too.

  The chief of staff knew that the Hiss era remained the principal frame of reference for most things on Nixon’s mind, but it bothered him that the president should know the exact location of Forrestal’s jump.

  Noticing the look on Haig’s face, Nixon changed the subject. “Johnson told me that Kennedy’s autopsy was a botch, and that there wouldn’t be half these crazy conspiracy theories if the doctors had done a better job.” The president paused for a moment, waiting for a change in Haig’s expression that didn’t come. Then he shrugged. “I’m just surprised Kennedy didn’t get up off the table. Years before, I lost count of how many times they gave him the last rites and he bounced back. Christ, I remember being over in the Senate Office Building in ’54, while he was in New York getting his back operation. They didn’t think he’d make it, and this was at a time when the majority kept going back and forth and I kept having to break ties. One geezer after another, theirs o
r ours, kept dying. Styles Bridges, a real bastard from New Hampshire, one of ours, organized a little cocktail party in a basement office when he heard that a priest had been called to Kennedy’s hospital room. I managed to skip it.” He took another sip of coffee. “I can imagine the glasses that are now being raised whenever my temperature rises half a point.”

  For a moment Nixon appeared almost comfortable, like somebody telling old football stories, and in this expansive instant Haig felt an urge to say: Give it up. Don’t force yourself through the hellish months ahead. Go home and write your memoirs. Take the tapes with you. If you resign, they’ll let you have them.

  “Do you think the Secret Service have a second copy?” Nixon asked. “Of the tapes,” he added, after seeing Haig’s surprise.

  “I doubt it, sir. There’s barely enough room in the EOB to store the ones we have.”

  “You know, Al, when it comes to that March twenty-first tape, hell, somebody could add, if need be, a line that has me telling Dean not to pay any more money, or has me telling him to get to the bottom of things. I mean, they say some of Kennedy’s autopsy photos are fakes.”

  Haig did not want to pursue this line of thought. “There’s always the possibility you’ll win in court with the executive-privilege argument,” he replied instead.

  “No,” said Nixon. “Everybody on the Supreme Court, including our own appointees, will want to be lionized by the liberal press. ‘Great victory for the rule of law,’ et cetera. ‘Courageous conservatives’ and all that jazz.”

  Haig nodded.

  “I never wanted the goddamned thing,” Nixon said softly. “Johnson had a system, not quite as elaborate, and I had it ripped out, like the damned high-pressure shower nozzles he had. The water coming out of them could knock you back to California. We were going to preserve things by just asking everybody to submit memoranda of whatever meetings they were in—or whatever meetings they were assigned to witness between me and somebody else. And you should see what we used to get, if they remembered to turn in anything at all. Showboating, incoherent crap. So Haldeman came up with this instead—creating a record automatically.”