Watergate

by Thomas Mallon

  What Stew’s death would do to Joe was anyone’s guess. He’d told her on the phone last night that he felt amputated from the brother with whom he’d shared his byline and blood. He’d yet to get over his mother’s departure, now three full years ago. Alice leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned around in the front pew, she saw how ashen and distressed he really was. For one awful moment she thought he would lean over and kiss her, but he instead just surveyed the congregation stretched out behind him.

  Here in “the church of presidents,” Alsop could not keep his gaze from returning to the president’s pew, number 54, from which the behind of Richard M. Nixon was lamentably absent. Up until a minute ago, Joe had been hoping for the sudden murmur of excitement that would indicate the arrival of his homme sérieux. But it was not to be. The White House had commented on the “sad loss” but sent no human offering, not even so modest a one as Jerry Ford. Joe could spot Shultz and Bryce Harlow and—amazingly enough—Kleindienst, Mitchell’s successor and his equal in disgrace as attorney general; he’d filed his own guilty plea two weeks ago. Had Stew once written something sympathetic about him? Joe couldn’t recall. Another craning of his head revealed Arthur Schlesinger and Mrs. Dean Acheson. God, what a back number the very mourners were making him feel! But he did notice one more or less up-to-the-minute touch in the presence of Larry O’Brien, presumed target of the Watergate burglary and thus, in his way, prime mover of the current apocalypse.

  A scolding look from Alice warned him to put an end to his fidgets and face the altar.

  Thou anointest my head with oil …

  His mind went back to Stew as a little boy destined to be handsome but then beset with eczema. They’d had to swathe him in gauze and slather him in cocoa butter. The memory now filled Joe’s eyes with tears, which persisted in falling for the rest of the service, all the way through “Abide with Me” and “The Strife Is O’er.” Oh, how he wished it were! And oh, how he’d come to loathe this city where he’d outlived himself.

  The honorary pallbearers—Tom Braden and Kermit Roosevelt among them—walked beside the casket as it rolled back up the aisle on a platform with casters. Joe helped Alice to shuffle along behind it, something she accomplished with such difficulty that, once she reached the vestibule, he got one of the vestrymen to set out a chair for her right there.

  Alice accepted the offer reluctantly. The throng who now had to pass her looked slightly startled. Some were afraid to approach, and others were excessively eager. Jack Valenti and George Bush came over as if she were the wallflower at a dance, in need of their high spirits and loud voices. Then came Ben Bradlee and Kay, marching together like Watergate, Inc.

  “How are you, my dear?” asked Mrs. Graham.

  Alice said nothing.

  “I loved Stew,” said Bradlee, his voice sounding as if it were grinding rocks. “The indignation that the man could display. Just gorgeous.”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “I’ve never been capable of it myself.” Nor, she thought, could she ever approximate the sorrowful expression on Kay’s puss. She decided to speak to her. “You did get the obituary right this time. Leukemia. So often your paper gets the cause of death wrong.”

  Kay looked mystified; she just smiled weakly and moved on. Alice knew the penny would drop later, that she would realize the reference had been to Paulina.

  The Shrivers said a brief, solemn hello. At least they acted like people at a religious service, which wasn’t the case with Teddy and Ethel, now following them through the vestibule. Alice was polite to her, for Bobby’s sake, even while the silly woman jabbered on about everything she’d put into her sympathy letter to Joe—a boatload of nonsense about how Jack and Joe Jr. and Kick and Stew and Bobby would now all be talking to one another in heaven, as if earthly life were just a matter of packing for some eternal picnic. “You know,” said Ethel, “Teddy and I are heading over to Arlington from here. It’s Jack’s birthday. He’d be fifty-seven! Can you imagine?”

  Well, yes, she could.

  Stewart Alsop’s mourners lingered to chat outside the church, whose simple stucco walls could belong to almost any house of worship in any American small town—which is what Washington, D.C., had always seemed to Joe, before the 1960s unleashed their detestable passions. For a brief, genuine moment, Lady Bird Johnson put her arms around him.

  But then a peculiarly excited young man introduced himself as Richard Darman and conveyed to Joe the regrets of Elliot Richardson, who would love to have been here this morning but couldn’t break his commitment to give this year’s Shattuck Lecture to the Massachusetts Medical Society. “He trusts that you’ll understand,” said Darman. “If anything is going to make progress against this dreaded disease from which your brother suffered, that of course will be medical research.”

  Joe looked at him as if he were mad. Alice, now positioned on a lawn chair near her cousin, watched the encounter with a certain fascination until her nephew Kermit, whom she hadn’t seen since the birthday party, approached to tell her that after much dithering the Central Intelligence Agency had decided to work on Hunt.

  Alice looked at Kim in the same way Joe had regarded the boy named Darman. “I would suggest that they stop,” she advised him.

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” replied Roosevelt. The CIA, it seemed, was a sort of submarine, unable to retract its torpedoes once they were launched.

  Lady Bird was now walking over to Alice with Margaret Truman Daniel in tow. Oh God, the whole presidential-family business, yet again. She didn’t think she could stand it. Fortunately, Joe interrupted.

  “Are you coming back?” he asked, meaning to the buffet lunch he would be giving in his wifeless house.

  “No,” said Alice. “But somebody can drop me at home on their way. I dismissed the driver.”

  Joe gave her an exasperated look. Lady Bird, smoothing things over, said that her driver could do it.

  “When did I last see you, dear?” Alice asked Lyndon Johnson’s widow.

  “I believe it was 1968—that terrible year! Dr. King, Senator Kennedy, the riots.” She looked over at the White House, where she’d once lived, just blocks from the still-charred stretches of downtown. “My son-in-law was the lucky one. He got to be in Vietnam that year!”

  Alice closed her eyes and tried for a moment to think of Watergate as the comic denouement of all that, bringing war and riot to a close with Richard Nixon, like Malvolio, locked up in the cellar. But, then again, didn’t Malvolio escape at the end?

  The church’s bell, cast in Boston by Paul Revere’s son, began to ring; not a mournful tolling but a joyous series of loud clangs.

  Nixon heard the ringing on the way back from the barber shop to the Oval Office. He would be appearing on television at one p.m., and as part of his regular trim he’d asked the barber to clip a little tuft of chest hair emerging above his collar.

  Once at his desk, the president looked over toward a shelf holding the “Blue Book,” the transcripts still stacked up from the night of his last TV address, a month ago. What a fiasco! Their release had made things much worse, with—sure enough—every “goddamn” taken to be a “fuck,” every “inaudible” or “unintelligible” assumed to be him ordering the assassination of McGovern or, on the later reels, John Dean. There was no need to wonder how it was playing in Peoria: it had bombed. Even the Omaha World-Herald was gunning for him now, while Jaworski still clamored for the other sixty-four tapes.

  He took out a pad of yellow paper in order to draft a letter of condolence, nothing fancy, to Joe Alsop:

  We know that Stewart’s death is a great personal loss to you as well as to all the members of your family. Mrs. Nixon and I just wanted you to know that we are keeping you in our thoughts and prayers.

  He made an annotation indicating that this should go out, typewritten, on regular White House letterhead. It was strange, he knew, that the recipient would never get the much more desirable handwritten draft, but that wa
s how he liked it. His holography remained nearly as concealed as his chest hair; he felt better reserving it for the most personal special occasions, like notes to the girls when they’d gotten married, or that assassination exchange he’d had with Jackie a decade ago and which he still kept in his desk.

  Now, on May 29, he all at once remembered Pat’s angry November suggestion—Why don’t you call her on Jack’s birthday sometime?—but no, he wouldn’t telephone the widow, not when he’d spoken to her only six months ago. He wondered, in fact, if he’d ever speak to Jackie again: if he’s forced to leave office, the shame will be too great.

  The church bell had stopped pealing, and hardly a sound now penetrated this huge egg of an office. At times these days he felt completely alone, robbed of all his former associates. He might as well be Martha in her fourteen-room apartment up in New York. Mitchell said that she was still there, by herself, the maid terrified to go home at night lest Martha burn the place down with some cigarette she’d left going someplace. It amazed him that Mitchell was still in love with her—you could hear it in his voice—when she was the reason everything, all of it, had happened. She was what had distracted her husband from the campaign and allowed him to let Hunt and Liddy run wild. He’d almost said as much when he called Mitchell a month ago, after his acquittal in the Vesco trial. Christ, some good news for once!—made even better by the fact that Dean had testified and the jury didn’t seem to believe the little ferret.

  He had long wondered about Mitchell’s health; lately he wondered and worried about his own, too. There were even bullshit rumors going around that the president had had a stroke. The truth that no one, not even Haig, knows is how bad his leg has gotten—worse than when he went to Japan twenty years ago.

  The leg isn’t the only secret putting an uncomfortable distance between him and his chief of staff. Three weeks ago—four days before the Judiciary Committee started its hearings—Jaworski had come over to the White House and told Haig that he’d settle for eighteen of the sixty-four tapes, but that if he didn’t get those he’d reveal to the press what he was now telling the chief of staff: that Richard Nixon had been named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the big indictment of Haldeman and Mitchell and everyone else.

  Unindicted co-conspirator. In a way he did remain among his former associates, at some weird remove, like Eichmann in a glass cage.

  Haig had suggested that he listen to the eighteen tapes before he let Jaworski blackmail him as badly as Howard Hunt had. So he’d gone to his EOB hideaway, where he was now almost able to operate the recorder without assistance from Steve Bull. And that’s when he’d heard what he knew he would: himself talking to Haldeman. Even so, he’d played it a second time, and then a third, hoping to hear something else:

  … just say this is a sort of comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it: “The President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again” … they should call the FBI in and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case—period!

  There it was. Jaworski and Rodino might now find—practically by accident—what Cox and Ervin had never managed to get to: the daisy chain of Nixon telling Haldeman to tell the CIA to tell the FBI to ignore the break-in.

  Christ, why couldn’t this be the stretch of tape Rose had erased? Never mind that he and Bob had more or less been bullshitting—or that as soon as Gray mentioned being uncomfortable about CIA pressure, the president had told him to go full-steam-ahead with the FBI investigation. And could anybody seriously claim that the thing had been underinvestigated since? But it didn’t matter. They would hang him with this tape as surely as if it were rope.

  In one way, hearing it, knowing it was there, had made for a certain relief, or at least clarity. He’d come back from the EOB and told Haig to tell Jaworski: Not sixty-four tapes, not eighteen tapes, not another goddamn six inches of tape. The loser’s game of cooperation and compliance was over.

  Still, he had not told Haig what was on the tape, just instructed him to keep this reel and the rest of them locked up, even though the one he’d heard could just about burn its way through any strongbox. And who knew what was on the rest of them? Keeping his discovery to himself had given him his first sensations of real guilt since the whole thing had started, two years ago. He now felt like the poor bastard of a client who’s lying to his own lawyer. But Jim St. Clair didn’t need to know what was on the tapes in order to defend the principle of their confidentiality in the Supreme Court, where—it was now certain—a loss would send him back to California, and maybe to jail.

  Haig now entered the office. “Terrific, top-notch,” he said, in his usual clipped, peppy voice. He was talking about the statement the president would read for the TV cameras, in the press room, at one o’clock: the announcement of an agreement between the Syrians and the Israelis to disengage their forces in the Golan Heights.

  “Goddammit, Al, we can still get things done in the world—even now.”

  The Middle East situation was astonishing on every level. Richard Nixon, domestic archfiend, had become, abroad, the brave honest broker, the man who’d saved Israel but was also pressuring her to make concessions. Everyone wanted him to take the lead.

  “We’re going to go ahead with this trip, Al. Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan—Syria, for Christ’s sake! Every one of them has got the red carpet out.” The region was suddenly a casino, and he was running the table.

  “There are still risks, of course,” said Haig.

  “What have we got to fear? That the Arabs will turn fickle and we’ll come home empty-handed? What’s going to happen? We’ll drop in the polls?” Knowing there was nowhere left to drop, the two of them shared a moment of the West Wing’s new gallows humor. “Whatever the case,” Nixon continued, “going there is better than sitting here being tarred and feathered with these goddamned subpoenas.”

  Haig nodded as he did a last scan of the one o’clock text. Nixon looked out the window, imagining a triumphal progress through Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Damascus. Before he left he should get some suits with wider trousers, so that the swollen left leg didn’t show so much when he sat down. But, Christ, where would he even find the money for new clothes? They were determined to drive him not just to jail but the poorhouse, too. The IRS now wanted four hundred thousand in back taxes, after disallowing the deduction he’d taken for donating his vice-presidential papers to the Archives—all because his tax attorney had wound up having to backdate some form he’d overlooked. For Christ’s sake, the boxes of papers had been delivered to the Archives before the donation was even due! He was being pauperized because somebody forgot to do a piece of paperwork.

  Pat found release of their financial records more mortifying than publication of the tape transcripts. Here they were, the nation’s “first family,” subjected to more green-eye-shaded scrutiny than they’d had when they were still the church mice of the Checkers speech.

  And so now, what I am going to do—and, incidentally, this is unprecedented in the history of American politics—I am going at this time to give to this television and radio audience a complete financial history, everything I’ve earned, everything I’ve spent, everything I own.

  He had watched her sit through every live televised minute of that—my God, the self-control!—listening to his recitation of every cheeseparing fact:

  I have just four thousand dollars in life insurance, plus my GI policy, which I’ve never been able to convert, and which will run out in two years. I have no life insurance whatever on Pat. I have no life insurance on our two youngsters, Tricia and Julie. I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. We have our furniture. We have no stocks and bonds of any type.

  She’d sat on the couch on that stage, her jaw slightly lifted, and he’d never admired her more. It was the moment when he’d realized that admiration was his highest form of love, and the only kind he wanted for himself.

  Was he losing her, too? He was suddenly thinking of another stage, the o
ne in Nashville, where she’d clutched that little present in her hand, almost daring him to ask whom it was from.

  “You know,” he finally said to Haig, who’d finished checking the statement, “Pat’s stopped reading the papers. She can’t stand it anymore. They just send a copy of the daily news summary over to the East Wing and she reads that.”

  “Get Rose to do the same,” Haig suggested. More gallows humor.

  “We already did. She’s now given up even that.”

  He had come to realize that Pat had been right about everything: don’t release the tax returns; don’t release the tapes. If the tapes had been burned, these idiotic sanitized Blue Books would never have been created. What had been the point of making the tapes in the first place? Whatever they contained about his grand policy designs, Kissinger would still get all the credit, just as he would for whatever they accomplished in the Middle East next month.

  “Christ, Al,” he said, as a crushing weariness descended. “I’ve got more congressmen to entertain on the Sequoia tonight, trying to keep these jackasses loyal with hors d’oeuvres and souvenir tie pins.”

  “Bring a few of them to the Middle East with you.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea; maybe they could take a senator or two as well.

  “Come on,” Nixon said, hiding a wince as he stood up on his bad leg. “Let’s get this done.”

  The two men walked to the press room, where the president bypassed Ziegler and went straight to the podium. Three different red dots stared him in the face, tiny portals through which he would now walk into fifty million different living rooms. He wondered if the man from the Omaha paper was here and willing to consider returning to the fold. And then he began to read the statement, not even hearing his own words, just thinking how the game might still be won, even if St. Clair lost in the Supreme Court. Could he win it himself with a miracle performed in the desert, where water had been turned into wine and Lazarus raised from the dead?