Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  As if nostalgic for the actual goddamned president he’d gotten to be a few hours ago, Nixon asked, “What is Brezhnev going to say if he sees my own attorney general defying me?”

  Instead of answering, Haig beat the dead horse of the tapes compromise: “I told him, ‘You first agreed, Elliot, days ago, to a two-step plan. To tell Cox the Stennis deal was a fait accompli and see if he’d resign. Then, if he refused, to fire him.’ ”

  Nixon squeezed the coils of the telephone cord. “Well, I’m not surprised that pious cocksucker cares more for his ass than his country. Get him in to see me tomorrow morning. It’ll probably be the first Saturday he’s ever worked in his life.”

  The following evening, across the river at the McLean Tennis Club, Alice Longworth reassured a young waiter nervously guiding her to a courtside table: “If I get beaned, it will probably knock some sense into me.”

  Art Buchwald, the humor columnist, was throwing himself a birthday celebration that had taken over the entire place. Most of the invited guests, when not at the tables or bar, were taking turns playing mixed doubles.

  Tom and Joan Braden had invited Joe Alsop to tag along here with them. This attempt to cheer him up now that Susan Mary had finally decamped had been seized upon by Alice, who insisted that she herself needed cheering up, too. In truth, she didn’t, but she was enjoying this trip out of the house, an increasing rarity, more than Joe seemed to be.

  “Brighten up,” she commanded him. “You can at least be happy that the Tortoiseshelled Tattler is going to jail.”

  “Yes,” said Alsop, with no hint of a smile. “Probably for about six months.”

  “At this point I would consider six months a prognosis of longevity.” She was looking more birdlike than ever, but the remark was greeted by protests from everyone seated and hovering around her.

  Lyndon’s little poodle, Jack Valenti—now a miniature, silver-haired version of the MGM lion, cheerleading for the movie business on Capitol Hill—complimented her same old black straw hat as if it were some fabulous new piece of plumage. David Brinkley, the NBC man, sidled up to shake her hand, and then came Ben Bradlee with an attractive, sharp-eyed girlfriend, apparently a reporter, who wanted to know if she could write a profile of Mrs. Longworth on the occasion of her birthday—“your ninetieth, I believe”—which would be coming up in February.

  Alice glared at her. Of course she would eventually say yes, but there was no point in making the girl’s evening.

  “So,” she asked Joe about the gaggle of admirers, “is this what they call a full court press? Is that a tennis term?”

  “Basketball,” he informed her.

  “Short answers make you fat,” she responded. She waved a handkerchief for the waiter, who rushed toward her. “Bring Mr. Alsop a whiskey sour, very strong, immediately.” The drink’s intended recipient looked skeptical, but she insisted. “You don’t need to be siphoned for Stew for another week. You told me yourself.”

  Pert Mrs. Braden now raved about Professor Cox’s afternoon news conference, during which he’d explained his rejection of the Stennis compromise. “It really was like watching your favorite professor, just as someone said.”

  Alice imagined that Mrs. Braden had had a lot of favorite professors and that her grades had been very good.

  Buchwald arrived at the table with an extremely pretty blonde and Edward Bennett Williams, the biggest Democratic lawyer in town.

  “Happy birthday,” said Alice, extending her hand to the humorist. “If I’d ever read your column, I’d quote you a line or two from it.”

  Alsop wearily offered something like an apology: “She pretends not to read the Post but a minute ago she didn’t give Bradlee’s girlfriend a definite no about doing an interview.”

  “That has nothing to do with whether or not I read the paper. I don’t. But I do watch television. You look familiar,” she said to the blonde.

  Lovely Rene Carpenter, now divorced from the astronaut, explained that she hosted a show on topics of interest to women.

  “You may have seen one of her more advanced programs,” said Williams, who retained a good deal of primness beneath his courtroom bluster. “She showed”—he decided he couldn’t say it—“well, it was the most disgusting thing I ever saw.”

  Mrs. Carpenter smiled brightly. “It was a diaphragm, Mrs. Longworth. And a tube of gel.”

  “I saw it!” cried Alice, with an enormous grin. “I thought you were frosting a cupcake! And then I put on my glasses.”

  “ROGER MUDD, PLEASE CALL YOUR OFFICE,” boomed a loudspeaker. “MR. MUDD, PLEASE CALL YOUR OFFICE.”

  Alice noted that Bradlee had already gone off in a rush. She looked at the television above the distant bar and thought she could make out a man with a beard and mustache who looked like a villain out of Sherlock Holmes. People began moving quickly back and forth between the bar and the tables, ferrying fact and rumor. The mixed-doubles players on the courts had been reduced to a solitary pair who wondered if they should carry on with a singles match.

  It was first a set of facts that reached Alice and her group: Elliot Richardson and his deputy had both resigned after refusing to fire Professor Cox. The bearded man on the television was the department’s number three, who had agreed to do the deed.

  Then the rumors arrived: that the FBI had gone to the special prosecutor’s office on K Street—perhaps to seize files; perhaps to protect them. Or the files had already been hidden by the special prosecutor’s staff, who—rumor also had it—were rushing from their homes to the office.

  Alice found the present moment to be one of a handful in her long life when she could not command an audience. Joe had left her for the TV, and Tom Braden had left with him. “You should go, too, dear,” she said to Mrs. Braden. “You never know what spry luminary is likely to be there wanting to buy you a cocktail. Averell Harriman. U Thant …”

  Someone had turned the television up so loud that even Alice could now hear it without getting up from the table. John Chancellor of NBC was speculating that this might be “the most serious constitutional crisis in history.”

  Oh, please, thought Alice, who could remember legless Civil War veterans begging in the streets. And yet, the palace did seem to be firing back on the peasants. As a student and theorist of the scandal—who wasn’t?—she believed that Hunt had somehow been the one who’d managed to pull back the curtain on all that might have remained hidden. But who had really started everything? And did that matter now?

  Joe had returned to the table with Braden, two old pundits wishing they were once again young reporters.

  “Watch them forget about confirming Ford and go straight to impeaching Nixon,” Braden predicted.

  “No,” said Joe. “Not with Carl Albert more oiled than the drunkest man here. Almost as well-oiled as a Soviet missile.” He shook his gloomy head. Even now he couldn’t stand the thought of his homme sérieux ceding the presidency to somebody less substantial, let alone that boozing homunculus out of Bugtussle.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, when he looked over and saw Alice scribbling.

  She was making a record on the Page-A-Day pad she’d extracted from her purse. With a large fountain pen, she wrote: The clock is dick-dick-dicking.

  On Tuesday morning, waiting for his cue, Elliot Richardson reflected on how wise he had been to stay off the Sunday interview shows. Veterans Day—on the newfangled federal calendar—had shut the DOJ on Monday, so almost seventy-two hours had now passed since his resignation, long enough really to whet the public’s appetite for an appearance by him. It was time that he and Bill Ruckelshaus and Archie Cox, the slaughtered of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” rose up, covered with principle and glory.

  By late Friday night, after the phone call from Haig and most of a pot of coffee, he had regained his nerve. The following morning, when the chief of staff asked if he would hold off on resigning until things settled down with the Russians and the Arabs, he’d informed Haig that that was simply
not possible—and managed to refrain from suggesting that surely the president could hold off on firing Cox until the same such tranquility descended upon the Middle East?

  By the time he saw Nixon on late Saturday afternoon, it was the president whose speech seemed a bit slurred; his own had been as crisp as he could ever recall it. “I’m sorry that you insist on putting your personal commitments ahead of the public interest,” Nixon had more or less recited. And he himself had replied, politely, that they each seemed to have a different view of the latter.

  So here he was, three days later, ready to tell the assembled Justice Department employees—he could hear them buzzing out there in the auditorium—that he’d just cleaned out his desk.

  When he stepped onto the stage, one would have thought the Boston Red Sox had just beaten the Yankees for the American League pennant—and that he was the winning pitcher.

  He looked around sheepishly, as if all this were really unnecessary. He promised to be brief, and he was: praising Nixon’s overall policies; making it appear that sorrow was trumping anger, let alone pleasure. “I have been compelled to conclude that I could better serve my country by resigning from public office than by continuing in it.” He could picture the plaque onto which this sentence would soon be engraved. It would hang next to the one from the ABA, not far from the easel.

  And that was it. No hamming it up and botching things the way MacArthur had. Within minutes he was being driven west toward home, past the White House, where a protester’s HONK FOR IMPEACHMENT sign was being met with deafening, almost universal compliance. Oh, the temptation to roll down the tinted window and show them who was here! But he resisted.

  At three o’clock, back in McLean and alone in the study, he mixed himself a cocktail, took out his paint box, and put on the radio. Archie was having a press conference, declaring that he’d decided to stay in town for a bit, in case the Ervin or Judiciary committee wanted testimony from him. Richardson supposed he, too, should be prepared for that, though he rather wished Archie had resisted going before the press so soon after he had. He felt a bit as if the batter who’d merely driven in the winning run were crowding the pitcher out of the locker room photo.

  Now, though numberless fates of death beset us which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and either we shall give honor to one another, or another to us.

  Over the weekend he’d quoted this, from the Iliad, to Archie. It was inscribed—correctly, he wondered?—on a photo here in his study, a gift from Judge Learned Hand, for whom, in addition to Frankfurter, Richardson had once clerked. Only now did it occur to him that Cox, too, had clerked for Judge Hand; perhaps he had the same photo with the same inscription.

  Well, whatever the case, there was really no us about it anymore. He was now on his own—an odd position for a perpetual appointee—and he must wait until the brief Ford presidency, when he would get himself appointed anew and be carried by another man for the last time, across the ultimate threshold.

  He dipped into the darkest brown paint in the box and applied some last touches to the tail feathers of the buff-breasted sandpiper.

  The radio said that Kissinger was already back from Moscow with a cease-fire, but that there would be no press conference by the secretary of state in view of all the commotion on Capitol Hill and at the federal courthouse, where Charles Alan Wright, Richard Nixon’s new lawyer, had said that his client would surrender the tapes after all, because, of course, “this president does not defy the law.”

  Richardson rinsed his brush and thought he could almost hear the sandpiper singing.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  NOVEMBER 22, 1973

  THE WHITE HOUSE AND CAMP DAVID

  “Mr. President, I have Mrs. Onassis.”

  “Thank you, Operator. Happy Thanksgiving, Jackie.”

  “They found me here in Peapack!”

  The breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice was unchanged—and he knew it was for real. He could recall the first time he’d heard her, twenty years ago, before he’d ever even seen Monroe in a movie.

  “When we lived in the White House,” she now told him, “the operators used to amaze me. They once found my sister when she was shopping for shoes in Marrakech! And here I am in my little gray house in New Jersey.”

  Nixon laughed. He didn’t imagine the house was all that small. “Well, I just wanted to wish you a wonderful day.”

  “Oh, you beat me to it, Mr. President! I wanted to thank you for your wonderful words. I heard them on the radio this morning.”

  He himself had seen the Thanksgiving proclamation on his desk only a couple of hours ago. At first he’d been annoyed by what he guessed was a Ray Price flourish, about the coincidence of today and the tenth anniversary of Dallas: As we give thanks for the goodness of the land, therefore, let us also pause to reflect on President Kennedy’s contributions to the life of this nation we love so dearly. But he’d decided it was probably all right, especially with the commentators still going on about how he’d really canned Cox for being a Kennedy man.

  “Well, we all miss Jack,” he told Mrs. Onassis.

  “You’re so kind to say that, and to do this. You and Lyndon have both been so good to me. I should call Lady Bird, shouldn’t I? It just occurred to me that this must be her first Thanksgiving without him. You know,” she added, as if fearing any pause in the conversation, “the children just treasure the letters you wrote them after we came to see the portraits.”

  She laid it on thick, but she always had a way of making you believe it. “Well, you know we’d love to have you back anytime,” he responded.

  “Are you and Mrs. Nixon having Thanksgiving in the White House?”

  He noticed her artful deflection of his open invitation. “We’re going up to Camp David a little later.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely. I don’t think we ever made enough use of it.”

  Why would they have, once Papa Joe got them that place in the Virginia horse country?

  “Are the children with you today?” he asked. There was no point inquiring about Onassis, who apparently was never around. Having gotten what he wanted, he didn’t need to gaze upon it.

  “Oh, yes,” said Kennedy’s widow. “We went to mass this morning, and we’ll go riding later.”

  “I saw some of the family at the president’s grave this morning. The television had a picture. I think it was Mrs. Lawford standing in the middle.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  Had he been wrong to bring this up—as if implying she were derelict by her absence? He wished he had a talking-points card, the little series of cues and compliments and personal facts that Rose would have prepared for a call to any national committeewoman having a birthday. No gaffes that way.

  “It’s been such a wonderful and terrible week,” said Mrs. Onassis.

  He knew the terrible part: Teddy’s boy losing a leg to bone cancer. But the wonderful part? Had one of Bobby’s kids gotten married? Fortunately, she kept talking. “I heard from my sister-in-law that you sent Teddy Jr. the most wonderful letter—handwritten! I don’t know where you find the time.”

  “I saw my brothers go through so much at his age,” said Nixon.

  “Yes.”

  It was clear she knew nothing about all that, whereas of course everyone was expected to absorb every bit of the Kennedy legend. Still, he’d never disliked her. She was a lot nicer than the gene pool she’d dived into by marrying Jack. Johnson thought the same thing.

  But this call was a mistake. All the stiff overstatement was depressing him. He’d had them ring her on impulse, always a bad idea, after Connally had called him this morning. Mostly with political advice: accuse the Democrats of delaying on Ford to steal the presidency and put in Albert. But the two of them had of course wound up talking of how Connally had gotten shot up that day, nearly bleeding to death while all the doctors worked on the already-dead JFK.

  “Well, Jackie, I do hope you have a wonderful day in spite of this t
errible anniversary.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. President!” Once she realized he was ready to wind up the conversation, she couldn’t keep her relief from being audible. “You enjoy it, too! And please give my best to your family.”

  He sat at the desk for a couple of minutes, thinking how strange it had been for him to wake up at the old Baker Hotel in Dallas that same morning. He’d been eager to get out of the city ever since the previous day’s luncheon, when the Pepsi-Cola bottlers made it politely clear that they were more excited by Joan Crawford’s presence on the dais than his own. Friday morning, on the way to the airport, he’d seen all the flags set up along the motorcade route, and he’d been painfully aware that he was on the wrong side of the divide, traveling in the opposite direction from the one Kennedy would soon be taking. Late that night, up alone in the New York apartment, he’d written to Jackie, and her oddly sloppy reply, in ballpoint ink and full of dashes, had come in the mail a few weeks later. He still had it by heart: I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you all the question comes up again … Just one thing I would say to you—if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.

  Would they have been consolation enough had he not tried again, or had he lost in ’68? He swiveled in his chair to regard the faces in the framed photographs on the shelf behind the desk. They were positioned for the TV cameras to pick up whenever he spoke from here. Would they be consolation enough now, if he had to give up what he’d sought, and sought again, and finally won?

  Well, thought Pat, this is a new record: worst Thanksgiving ever. Dinner consumed, start to finish, in thirty-five minutes flat.

  “A stupendous meal,” said Bebe Rebozo to the navy steward bringing him a second cup of coffee. Ed and Tricia Cox nodded their agreement, as did the president and, finally, the first lady.