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  All summer she’d assumed that Howard’s leverage would end with Nixon’s reelection. But as November approached she had realized the timidity of her reasoning. Nixon might be done with the voters, but not necessarily with the courts, or even Congress. Her few moments of conversation with LaRue on election night—I’ve made a note of what you just told me—had convinced her that she was right to start thinking bigger. She had been able to sense the power she held from the nervousness in his voice at the other end of the phone line.

  She closed her eyes now and rested her head against the back of the seat, enjoying the descent toward a new world and life, where she and her husband would be secretly rewarded for all the dangers they’d endured these past twenty years. Dealing with Mr. Rivers and LaRue might be an odd way to collect at last, but collect she would. As the plane drew closer to its destination, she felt almost as she had on that morning more than twenty years ago when she and Howard, laughing in their white convertible, pulled away for the last time from that awful Mexican apartment over the whorehouse.

  Now, finally, they were above the airport, and getting close to the ground. She could see a nearby schoolyard full of children and had time to wonder how the teachers got anything done with what must be the constant jet noise. But the question was driven from her mind by a more urgent one: Where was the runway? The plane made a sudden, sickening turn, as if the pilot were afraid of the schoolchildren and needed to flee them. Seconds later it was over the rooftops of some houses, barely clearing them in its last moments of flight. In her own last seconds of consciousness—amidst an explosion of blue and orange flames that fused her locket forever shut—Dorothy realized that she was in someone’s living room.

  At first LaRue thought it was film of a riot: the noise and the Chicago Fire Department hoses brought ’68 to mind. But then the TV announcer explained that this had been United Airlines Flight 553.

  There was no mention of Mrs. Howard Hunt, only of a Negro congressman who had also been on the plane.

  As it sank in, nausea and dread took possession of LaRue, as if he might be listening to the description of an “accident” that was really something else. He looked toward the telephone, certain that Mitchell or Magruder or Dean would now call him. But they didn’t, and as he continued staring at the silent phone, amidst the noise of the early-evening news, the smell of his pipe began to sicken him. He took it out of his mouth and whacked its contents into an ashtray, then put his head between his knees, as if he were getting airsick on a plane that was still aloft. His mind went to all the things he didn’t fully know or understand: to Liddy, to the CIA, to whatever dark sludge the Plumbers may have been working to keep inside the administration’s pipes.

  He got himself a glass of water, then poured it down the drain without taking a sip. The sight of a bourbon bottle on the kitchen counter made him vomit into the sink. With enormous effort he picked up his keys, shut off the television, and went down to the garage.

  Planes coming into National flew so low over the Watergate that the huge, swirling complex might as well be those little houses in Chicago. He never really got used to it, and now, as he made the five-minute drive to the airport, the noise of the low-flying jets pulled him out of his skin. Once at National, he sat in the parking lot for ten minutes, composing himself, watching the news crews and their vans, there to film the family members of passengers who’d been on United 553. LaRue himself could spot them running into the terminal to demand any available seat to Chicago.

  At last he got out of the car and entered the building, trying to look calm as he approached the locker-rentals counter. He told the attendant that he was Harry Johnson and that this morning he’d put his things in J20; he remembered the number because he’d gotten married to his wife, Joanne, twenty years ago this month. And he was damned if he hadn’t gone and lost the key sometime later in the day.

  While he spun this tale, he thanked God that he had been the one to pay for the locker and to get a receipt; he just prayed that the alias he was remembering had been what he’d actually used this morning.

  The attendant didn’t even bother checking one slip of paper against the other. He just reached up to the pegboard and took down a duplicate key to number J20. “Happens all the time,” he said.

  LaRue retrieved Dorothy Hunt’s jade brooch and the two hundred and eighty thousand dollars—“one helluva lot of cabbage,” Tony Ulasewicz would have said. He then exited one door of the terminal, while Howard Hunt, his face as white as his raincoat, entered through another.

  Chapter Seventeen

  DECEMBER 18, 1972, 6:10 P.M.

  WEST WING, THE WHITE HOUSE

  Rose Woods revised the invitation list for the last of the holiday parties, a New Year’s week reception. She decided to add a few names from far down the staff roster of the National Security Council. It might be their final shot at a White House shindig, since rumors of Kissinger’s resignation were swirling. Six days ago the peace talks had collapsed, and Henry had come home empty-handed to a president who told him to stop being brilliant and start being effective. Rose had heard the remark with her own ears.

  Along with the invitations, she had on her desk, courtesy of Dwight Chapin, a memo titled “Four Truman Death Hypotheticals”: scheduling scenarios for each of the next several weeks, during any of which Harry Truman might die. It was the fashion for everyone to admire Truman now—there were people here in the White House who saw the same toughness and tenacity in both him and Richard Nixon—but to Rose the foul-mouthed thirty-third president remained a nasty character, the same breed of cat as Helen Gahagan Douglas and Stevenson and all the rest.

  Six weeks after the election, a damper had fallen over the White House, and nobody seemed able to remove it. The president, when he was around at all, couldn’t keep from limping, though he made an agonized effort to hide this from reporters. The doctors had concluded that the problem wasn’t his old phlebitis but a bone in his foot that he’d splintered months ago during a spill at Camp David—where he continued to spend most of his time. Having lost any remaining patience with the enemy, the president had yesterday—high time, too, thought Rose—begun carpet-bombing North Vietnam. Within hours everyone in the Mansion and EOB had started hearing the loud, slow thump of a bass drum in Lafayette Park, somebody’s idea of a protest against the assault, performed by a steady relay of long-haired demonstrators. It was beyond Rose’s comprehension how they remained immune to arrest. Her own nerves had started to shred, and she knew that Pat would never be able to sleep with it going on.

  Rose felt relieved not to be working on the inaugural. Magruder was in charge of it, and the whole operation had moved out to Fort McNair. In fact, she’d seen Mr. Junior Executive only once since the election, when he’d breezed through the West Wing, tan as a coconut from ten days in the Bahamas, telling everybody about the two hundred thousand “honorary invitations”—whatever the hell that meant—his committee was sending out.

  As she went about keeping the Christmas-party list to a manageable number, Rose took a certain comfort in how even Magruder seemed infected by the current gloom. It now looked as if during the second term he might have to settle for running the bicentennial under Agnew, since all the undersecretary jobs he hankered for required Senate confirmation. Nobody was going to send Magruder’s name—or Dean’s, or Chapin’s—up to the Hill for any of those positions, not when hearings would allow the Democrats to ask any Watergate question they liked.

  All of a sudden HRH was darkening her door.

  “Did you authorize flowers for Mrs. Hunt’s funeral?”

  “I did,” Rose replied, stiffly.

  “Why?”

  “Because Howard Hunt had been a White House employee, that’s why. It’s what we do when there’s a death in anyone’s family.”

  Dorothy Hunt had been buried out in Potomac, not far from her house. The Post had tailed the funeral procession and reported in its smartass way that one of the vehicles carried a “Re-Elec
t the President” bumper sticker. And now here was Haldeman telling her that the paper had just followed up with a call about the White House’s little floral tribute, which would probably get a snide mention in their next Watergate story.

  “You should deviate from the usual procedures when there are special circumstances,” said Haldeman.

  “I thought the circumstances were very special in this instance. The man’s wife burned up in a plane crash.”

  Haldeman turned and left her office. Rose went back to the invitation list, so angry she thought she might burst a blood vessel. The root cause of her feeling was not Mrs. Hunt’s death but Don Carnevale’s. He had passed away two weeks before, at the age of sixty-three, from a heart attack he suffered behind his desk at Harry Winston in New York. Had there been flowers or a word of sympathy for her? Only from Pat and the girls, a little bouquet delivered to her apartment, its card commemorating “Uncle Don,” who’d overseen the design of Julie’s and Tricia’s wedding rings. According to the Post, Don had “remained a bachelor.” The picture they ran with the obituary showed him dancing with “the president’s secretary, Miss Rose Mary Woods,” and Bob Haldeman had surely seen it. But not one daisy had appeared on her desk. Maybe HRH thought the “usual procedures” required her to order flowers for herself.

  Rose closed her eyes and rubbed her temples and thought about how rotten the past few weeks had been. She wished that, instead of those bogus assassination warnings, Jeane Dixon had provided advance word of the actual calamities that had been in store; and yet, what good would knowing have done?

  Then, all at once, at the sound of an old lady’s voice, her eyelids sprang open. It was Mrs. Longworth, who had decided to saunter through the West Wing on her way to dinner in the Residence. “I thought I would check on how the place is looking!” she informed the Marine escorting her. “My father had it built, you know. Just like the Panama Canal.”

  There were twelve people at two tables, six around each. They’d put Alice between the president and Julie, and more or less across from Kissinger and Anne Armstrong, the wealthy Vassar-educated rancher’s wife who was the president’s newest advisor, with Cabinet rank. Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had looked scared of Mrs. L when introduced to her during cocktails, and he’d been glad to find himself assigned to the other table, over which Mrs. Nixon presided.

  As dessert started coming around, people shifted a little, and Pat squeezed an extra chair for herself between Dick and Mrs. L, who had been their first dinner guest in the Residence, along with J. Edgar Hoover, back in ’69. The first lady smiled at the steward when he remembered to bring Alice tea with brown sugar instead of coffee.

  “Well,” said the president, “this is a lot more fun than the dinner we had for the Cabinet two nights ago!”

  Pat tapped Alice’s skeletal left arm and said, so that everyone could hear, “I’ll bet Mrs. Armstrong wishes you’d been at that one, to give her a little feminine support.”

  From what Alice could see, Mrs. Armstrong didn’t require any.

  “Mrs. L,” asked the president, “how long have you lived in Washington? ”

  “Seventy-one years and three months,” she replied. “I keep waiting to see if I like it.”

  “Do you think you can convince Julie and David to stay? I’m trying to fix up something for her on the East Wing staff.”

  “Daddy,” said the president’s daughter.

  “But then what would you do with Sugarfoot?” asked Alice, startling the table with her use of the Secret Service’s code name for Tricia Nixon Cox. “Or is it Mister Sugarfoot you have plans for? Putting him on your legal team perhaps?”

  Nixon could see that Mrs. L was revving up for some playful conversation about Watergate, so he decided to get out in front of her on the subject. “You know,” he said, stealing a joke of Kissinger’s, “if McGovern had given a few more speeches about the scandal, he would have made people like wiretapping.”

  The ensuing laughter included Kissinger’s, and when it ended, Nixon added, quietly, “You’ll see. We’ll come out of this just fine, the way we did with the Hiss case.”

  “Yes,” said Alice, “but you were the investigator on that one.”

  Nixon pretended to laugh. “It’ll end in victory is all I meant.” He then made a sharp change of subject. “We’re having all the inaugural balls inside government buildings next month, Mrs. L. No hotels, except for the kids’ thing at the Sheraton Park. It’ll be a lot cheaper and we can entertain a lot more people. I just hope it can hold a candle to 1905.” He flashed her what he hoped looked like a flattering smile.

  “The only inaugural ball of my father’s that I can remember is the impromptu one my brothers and I had when McKinley was shot and killed. We danced a jig upon realizing that we, and, incidentally, Father, were now going to the White House.”

  Pat burst out laughing. Mrs. Armstrong shook her head and pretended to be scandalized. “Children,” she said.

  Alice quickly corrected her: “The others were children. I was seventeen. My pleasure was quite adult.” She looked around for a moment and realized that they were dining in what had once been her bedroom.

  The president returned to the subject of his inauguration. “The parade’s going to be shorter. We’re going to tighten the distance between the bands and floats.” Everyone except Alice nodded politely. She was stupefyingly bored and remained so until a sound penetrated the silence at the table and made her break into a huge grin. “I hear it!” she cried. “They mentioned it on the television!” As the others watched, she started tapping the tablecloth with her knife, matching the drumbeat from Lafayette Park.

  Pat looked down into her coffee cup. The current atmosphere, unexpectedly, was beginning to resemble the spring of ’70, when that ring of empty buses had seemed all there was to protect them here. The military’s prediction of heavy plane losses over North Vietnam was proving true. If the bombing operation kept going, there would soon be, along with all the cries about civilian casualties, accusations that Dick was only adding to the number of POWs rather than forcing the release of those already held. Even so, he’d told her he was prepared to have them fly five thousand sorties if that’s what it took to break the North Vietnamese once and for all.

  “Haig is over in Saigon, pressuring Thieu,” he said now, trying to remind everyone that he had to deal with the South’s intransigence as well as the North’s. He looked straight at Alice, hoping she would stop the business with her knife. He ignored Kissinger, though his remark seemed to imply that Henry ought to be in Vietnam with his deputy, doing the heavy lifting instead of sitting here stuffing his face with Christmas cookies. Nixon’s reflexes were urging him toward a joke about Hanukkah, but Mrs. Longworth spoke before he could make it.

  “You are not to worry,” she said, “about all the noise down the street.”

  After observing a general perplexity, she clarified her pronouncement. “Not across the street. Not the drum. Down the street: the Congress, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Honestly, she sometimes felt as if she were talking to a fish tank.

  “They’re already yelling their heads off,” Nixon acknowledged. “But I’m not worried about them. I’ve got worse problems even closer to home.” He finally looked at Kissinger, whose phone calls to and from the press he’d been monitoring ever since the Italian interview. The president laughed. “Henry says it may not be so bad if the North Vietnamese think I’m crazy. What do you all think?”

  Alice brightened considerably, as if a parlor game had just begun. “Are we talking about your actual craziness or their perception of it?”

  “I don’t care if that’s what they believe,” said Nixon, with a measure of the same delight in mental gymnastics. “And I especially don’t care if the Russians and Chinese think it. Let ’em. They can push the North Vietnamese into a settlement before they all have a wider war on their hands.”

  Kissinger retreated into conversation wi
th Mrs. Armstrong and Julie, while Pat, getting good and depressed over the war’s new life, returned to the other table to take care of Admiral Moorer and his wife. She hoped that Howard K. Smith, the ABC anchor who was also there, hadn’t been hearing any of this.

  With everyone else otherwise engaged, Nixon now had Mrs. L to himself, and he began explaining to her how in the coming days, down at Key Biscayne, he hoped to be photographed on the beach looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “That’ll infuriate the Democrats, but it’ll dismay the North Vietnamese and Thieu—and that’s what’s important.”

  “An homme frivole,” said Alice. “If only on the surface.”

  He didn’t know exactly what she meant, but understood she was playing on the Alsops’ term for him.

  “How is Stew?” he asked.

  “Drinking Joe’s blood,” replied Alice. “And it’s pretty thin gruel. Now, listen: I want to talk to you about a different one of my relatives. My nephew Kermit. We call him Kim. You’ve met him.”

  “Several times.”

  “Well, he knows your Mr. Hunt from days gone by.”

  Only now did Nixon remember the letter she’d sent back in October. “Is he sure he’s our Mr. Hunt and not theirs?” he asked. The burglary had been such a fuck-up that the president had wondered, more than once, about the possibility of double agentry.

  “I’m afraid he is your Mr. Hunt. It’s wishful thinking to believe otherwise.”

  Nixon nodded.

  “Kim’s story involves King Zog!” She loved just saying the name. “Do you remember him? He looked a bit like Paul Muni. He was the president of Albania before he made himself king, sometime in the late twenties—long after my time.”

  “A president who became a king. Something I can look forward to?” asked Nixon, grinning.

  Alice gave him a scolding look. One did not gain a reputation for wit by swinging at the easy pitches. If Dick really was an homme sérieux, this would be a good moment to focus on what she was trying to tell him. “They attempted Zog’s assassination on fifty-five separate occasions,” she said sternly. “One time he even shot back.”