Watergate Read online

  “NIXON YOU LIAR—WHERE’S THE CEASE-FIRE?” one bunch of them kept shouting. Another bunch, dressed up like Grim Reapers with black robes and scythes, passed by on LaRue’s right, a sort of minstrel show in reverse, their whiteface makeup peeking out from under their black hoods.

  And, Christ, there was Bella Abzug, at her own microphone, bellowing like a cement mixer. He stopped to listen to the snarl coming from under her wide-brimmed hat. While he stamped his feet and rubbed his hands some more, he saw that a few of the boys close by her were keeping warm without any problem, thanks to a couple of flags they’d just torn from the poles around the Washington Monument and were now burning inside oil drums. One of the Grim Reapers offered up his black robe to keep the blaze going.

  LaRue thought nothing in this town could shock him anymore, but as he watched the flags go up in flames, he noticed that the Park police weren’t making the feeblest move to stop it. For all he knew they had orders from Ehrlichman to stand aside and not let the arrest numbers get too embarrassingly high. Even so, it was hard for LaRue to contain his disgust, and after twenty minutes of wandering the Mall he turned northeast, toward Pennsylvania Avenue, where he thought he’d join the crowd waiting for the parade.

  He discovered it to be one deep, if that, for long stretches. The sparseness embarrassed him and he changed his mind. With his White House pass he managed to go around the unnecessary sawhorses, cross Pennsylvania, and head toward his favorite breakfast place, an old waffle shop opposite Ford’s Theatre. Once inside, he sat and ate a stack of pancakes served by a tired old Negro lady. Up on the Hill the Old Man would now be suffering through lunch with a congressional leadership that was forced to host him between the speech and the parade. The Democrats controlled the guest list and menu, so maybe Bella would hightail it back from burning the flag and propose some nasty toast before she put on the feedbag.

  LaRue had thought about staying inside his apartment, but the day’s milestone nature had made him anxious: once the TV stations started their inaugural coverage, he kept half-expecting Gordon Strachan or Mrs. Chennault to come by with another bagful of money that would require him to re-don his rubber gloves. He would be better off out of the capital altogether, down in Jackson with his wife, who had no interest in coming up for the inaugural balls. But he needed to stick around; nobody knew what he and Dean and the rest of them might have to improvise next.

  Martha would be making the rounds of them, because Nixon had indicated he wanted Mitchell on the scene—not too conspicuously, but enough to show that the man who’d done more than anyone else to make him president was still a figure of honor within the administration, someone whose move to New York didn’t mean he’d been thrown overboard. Toward that end, Mitchell was now being cast as a kind of bald, pot-bellied Duke of Windsor, a fellow who’d given up Washington for the sake of his irrepressible wife, a complicated woman who loved him beyond the social whirl, and whom he adored beyond whatever power he might have kept accumulating down in Washington.

  For stretches, Martha was able to make herself believe this fiction. She had been in good spirits over Christmas, vacationing with Mitchell at Bebe’s place in Key Biscayne, telling anybody within earshot she didn’t give a who-happy about politics now that she’d gotten her husband away from all that. Yes, she’d do her duty and come to the inauguration, but she’d wear all the same outfits she’d worn back in ’69 and then scamper right back to New York City, where people, she insisted, understood her a lot better than they did in poky old D.C. That place was all now part of her past, she said, and maybe she was right; just yesterday, when a group of college students got a glimpse of her outside the F Street Club, they’d cheered her with a kind of startled nostalgia.

  And yet this morning Mitchell had told LaRue that Martha was in a tizzy because it appeared no seats had been reserved for the former attorney general and his wife on the parade reviewing stand. When Mitchell told her that places had in fact been reserved—and that he himself had declined them, figuring one appearance at an inaugural ball to be enough showing of the flag—she’d refused to believe him. Nonetheless, both John and Martha—he placid, she fuming—would be watching the parade from a window high above Pennsylvania Avenue, inside the Washington offices of what had once been Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Mitchell.

  With no real celebrating throngs to impede him, LaRue now left the waffle shop and walked to the corner of Pennsylvania and Fourteenth. He took up a spectator’s position once he heard the first motorcycles begin their slow, roaring way from the Capitol to the White House. The raw wind had not let up, and he could hear the chattering teeth of a nice woman next to him, a mother from the suburbs who’d brought her two small kids to see the parade, just the kind of voter, multiplied by many millions, who’d given the Old Man his landslide. As the limousine approached, its flags flapping, LaRue waited for the president’s upper body to poke through the canopy, which sure enough it soon did, allowing Nixon to make that strange, faggy version of Churchill’s “V,” his frozen fingers limply wagging high above his head. Mrs. Nixon stood up, too, squeezing herself into the tight rectangle of space that had been opened by the limousine’s sliding roof. The first couple looked as if they were caught in a vise, ready to be crushed by the retractable panels.

  “Hi!” shouted the mother’s children, only a few seconds before some college kids in windbreakers began to chant: “NIXON IS A RACIST SWINE! MAKE HIM SIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE!” LaRue now realized that their sporty windbreakers were protective coloring. Still chanting, the protesters pressed against a sawhorse, hurling pebbles and fruit at the limo. Secret Service agents trotting beside the car clearly wanted the Nixons to sit down, but the president kept waving his fingers, and Mrs. Nixon, setting her jaw a little more firmly, smiled past the demonstrators toward some nonexistent second row of parade watchers who must have been, in her imagination, more friendly.

  Several minutes later, after a break inside the White House to freshen up, Pat took her place behind the bulletproof glass of the reviewing stand, next to an empty seat still reserved for Alice Longworth. They’d all been hoping, as late as this morning, that she might be well enough to come, but Connie Stuart had gotten a call from Mrs. L’s doctor, who said her flu remained pretty bad; she just couldn’t be exposed to the weather, not at eighty-eight.

  So, with Tricia on one side of her and nobody on the other, Pat waved to some passing baton twirlers from West Virginia. The trumpeters alongside them would have drowned out the bass drum in Lafayette Park, had parade regulations not already allowed the police to clear away whatever drummer had this afternoon’s shift.

  Pat could feel the cold air freezing the Aqua Net spray that all morning had managed to hold her hatless hairdo in place against the wind, even when she’d stuck her head through the open roof of the car. She wasn’t going to let a few pebbles and pieces of fruit force her back into her seat. Once they reached the White House driveway, she’d told Dick, who didn’t laugh, that “all this ecology and back-to-nature stuff must be catching on. Four years ago they threw coins.” The noise they’d made striking the limousine had caused her to remember a joyous cry she’d heard her mother let out one morning when she found a nickel while sweeping the miner’s shack.

  She had long ago learned to find sympathetic faces in whatever crowd she was gliding by or plunging into. There had even been some in Caracas as the spit and stones rained down, simple people even more astonished to find themselves watching a parade than she was to find herself in one.

  A military unit playing a Sousa march now came into view. Dick was back on his feet, hand over heart, and she knew he’d want her to stand, too. So she did, just as the unit’s flags and shouldered rifles passed. She noticed a press photographer across the street adjusting his lens to get the exact shot she knew he wanted: one of the whole family, looking like stiff little pinheads behind bulletproof glass and a passing forest of bayonets.

  A few feet from the first lady, Nixon look
ed at the fife pressed to one soldier’s frozen lips and thought about how much he’d like to shove it up Thieu’s Oriental ass. Five minutes before getting into the limo to go to the Capitol, there’d come word that the South Vietnamese president finally seemed ready to say yes to the agreement—now that he’d gotten a rhetorical pounding from Goldwater and a few others that almost equaled what the B-52s had dropped on the North. Christ, he would never forgive him for holding things up, for forcing him to give this tentative, chickenshit, peace-is-sort-of-at-hand inaugural address that even Ray Price’s high-toned pen couldn’t save. Then again, maybe Thieu deserved some grudging spoonful of admiration for toughness, for holding out as long as he had against this deal that would eventually see his miserable little country sewn back into a single stringbean controlled by the North. If he preferred fighting on to cushy exile, you could hardly knock him. Still, whenever they saw each other again, he would be hard-pressed to shake the man’s hand if there wasn’t a camera around.

  Toughness would be their own order of the day, for the next four years, and especially the next four months, however long it took the goddamned Senate to get through their Watergate hearings. He’d take his inspiration from Eugene Ormandy, his favorite conductor, up there on the podium last night after telling a bunch of his left-wing musicians they could look for jobs with another orchestra if they refused to sit their asses down and play an inaugural concert for the man who’d just been reelected president.

  Right now, as the umpteenth state float passed by, Nixon could feel a chill go straight through him. He closed the lapels of his topcoat, determined not to catch his death like William Henry Harrison. He wished the whole damned day were over and he was alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room, feet up, drink in hand, talking to Colson, though these days even he tended to bring more trouble than consolation. All these hints about clemency for his pal Hunt: without it, Colson argued, astronomical sums of money would be required to keep him quiet. But for the moment clemency was a nonstarter, a PR impossibility, and if it came up again tonight, Nixon would cut the conversation short and hit the sack.

  Jesus, thought the president, looking through the frozen glass at a man with a small magnifying scope up to his eye and a finger on what looked to be a trigger. After a moment’s fright, he realized it was only Haldeman shooting one of his home movies. He waved at him to come join them for a bit; Pat and the girls could each scoot down a seat toward the one left empty by Mrs. L.

  “He’s driving me crazy,” the president whispered to his chief of staff, once he got within the enclosure. He gestured with a tilt of his head toward Agnew, who was on his feet, clapping too loudly and enjoying himself too much while some Ohio National Guard unit marched past. “We ought to let him take his goddamned Middle East trip if he wants to. Yeah, it’ll build him up, but it’ll at least get him out of our hair.”

  Haldeman nodded, trying to decide whether he was actually supposed to set this in motion, or if the remark was just the usual letting off of steam. A brass band was soon deafening them with “Anchors Aweigh,” and Nixon was back on his feet, his eyes peculiarly focused on the corner of Fourteenth Street, far from the reviewing stand but still visible. “You see that?” he asked Haldeman, pointing to some protesters who appeared to be chanting. “If you drown it out, it goes away—as if it were never even there.”

  The brass instruments blasted: Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!

  “Are you talking about the Johnson idea?” asked Haldeman.

  Nixon nodded. He and Haldeman had been discussing this elegant long shot off and on all month. It went like this: They could find out from Cartha DeLoach—an old Hoover loyalist who still talked to Mitchell—just who at the FBI had bugged the Nixon campaign plane, at LBJ’s direction, in ’68. Then they could privately insist that this abuse be made part of the Senate’s investigation into “presidential campaign practices”—thereby evening the score and confirming the already common-enough public sentiment that they all do it and so what? Maybe Johnson, sure to hear about it, would ask the Democrats on the committee to back off, and maybe—as a favor to a dying man—they would. And then maybe the whole thing would fade into nothingness.

  The only problem was that Johnson, dying or not, already seemed to have gotten wind of what they were thinking; he’d sent a signal that they’d better not try to bring up that business about the plane, not if they didn’t want him talking about how Mrs. Chennault had helped out during the ’68 race by trying to sink the peace negotiations, telling the South Vietnamese to quit the talks until Nixon could be elected and get them better terms. Apparently, LBJ was down there in Texas—pouring Jack Daniel’s on his cornflakes and letting his hair get longer than Howard Hughes’s—using his last breaths to say that he might still come out and accuse Nixon of treason, the way he could have in ’68 before Hubert went down for the count.

  The brass band had marched out of view, replaced by twenty piccolo players from New Hampshire. Nixon took advantage of the lower decibel level to ask his chief of staff whether there’d been any new word from Austin on Johnson’s physical condition.

  The president could see himself reflected in Haldeman’s blue eyes. Embarrassed to look as if he were pushing too hard, taking advantage of the near-dead, he added, “I just want to make sure we’re quick out of the box doing everything we can for Lady Bird as soon as, you know …”

  “Yeah.”

  Oh, what was the point of dissembling? “I don’t know if it would be worth it or not to play the plane card once he’s gone,” said Nixon, hoping Haldeman might have a thought on this point. The chief of staff, now watching some trampolinists perform on a moving float without breaking their necks, replied with only a circumspect shrug.

  Nixon gave the athletes a big smile and the OK sign, and he thought of the gymnasts he’d seen in China. “Well, we’ve all got to be more cheerful, that’s for sure,” he told Haldeman. “There’s been too much death.” He’d been weirdly affected by Truman’s passing a few weeks ago. “In fact, I want to give a party,” he suddenly declared. “Something in the State Dining Room. Cocktails for every Democrat in the House and Senate who stuck with us on the war.”

  Haldeman nodded, recognizing this for a real order and ready to get on it.

  “Who knows when we’ll need them again?” asked Nixon.

  Rose hid behind the dinosaur inside the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. She was trying to avoid Jeb Magruder and his pretty wife and their whole brood of Pepsodent-fresh kiddies, who ought to be in bed, she thought, inaugural ball or no inaugural ball—even one organized by their father.

  Charlie Wiggins, the California congressman, was providing her with additional cover, laughing over her tale of how the president had called last night, while she was getting ready for the Kennedy Center concert, to complain that a line from the last draft of his speech seemed to be missing. Could she help him find it? “ ‘Not unless you want to come over here and zip me up,’ I told him. He seemed to think about it for a second, too—until I reminded him that I live in the Watergate!”

  Wiggins was enjoying the story, but Rose herself had been miffed last night. Honest to God, what did he expect? She’d been half-prepared to hear him ask that she spend the weekend taking care of his eighty-year-old aunt Jane, the one who’d taught him piano back in Whittier and had come to Washington for the ceremonies.

  Telling the tale through a second glass of champagne was beginning to make her feel better; in fact, all at once she felt a flush of well-being. Truth be told, she’d never been prouder of Richard Nixon, even if he sometimes irritated her the way a husband might. Her one wish right now was that Wiggins would ask her to dance—she really missed Don at a moment like this—but the congressman was getting the high sign from his wife.

  And Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, here were the Magruders, coming round the dinosaur. Well, the wife was even prettier than Rose had imagined—sort of like a runner-up for Miss America—and it was hard not to like the kids, w
ho seemed bored and well-behaved as they got introduced to “Miss Woods.” But Junior remained insufferable. She supposed she should congratulate him on the whole inaugural shebang, but couldn’t bring herself to.

  “You don’t look any older than you did in ’60,” she said, after resisting his kiss of her cheek a little too evidently. “I remember you from when the campaign passed through Kansas City. What were you doing? Selling women’s stockings?”

  “Paper products.”

  “Jeb’s thinking about running for California secretary of state!” the overexcited missus chimed in. Rose could tell from hubby’s expression that this particular cat wasn’t supposed to be out of the bag.

  “Really?” asked Rose. “It’s a shame Charlie Wiggins’s wife snatched him away. He might be able to help you out there.”

  “I’m making a trip to talk to Reagan and to Bob Finch,” said Magruder. “We’ll see.”

  “You do keep a busy schedule,” said Rose, hoping he took it for a dig at his impending appearance in Sirica’s courtroom, where he’d no doubt have to swear he’d never given Liddy an order to commit the burglary. She already knew that nothing was going to come of this California idea; she’d heard that HRH was planning to rescue him with some job in the Commerce Department.

  The wife broke the silence. “Well, Rose, I hope we’ll see you at the White House church service in the morning. We’re so thrilled to be going!”

  “I went to five o’clock mass this afternoon so I can sleep in tomorrow.” She said it as casually as she could, to leave the impression she saw the president too regularly for such an invitation to mean anything.

  Rose’s eyes scoured the room, hoping to catch sight of Ed Brooke, the best dancer she’d ever met in Washington. He liked to joke with her that some stereotypes were true, but there was nothing jazzy and jivey about him. All his moves were out of Fred Astaire and Vernon Castle—sophisticated and sleek; just the way he spoke. Could she ever use him now!