Watergate Read online

  “Praise of Dick never bores me,” said the first lady.

  In fact, her curiosity was piqued. With a raised eyebrow she beckoned Connie Stuart, her top aide, to come stand next to her, as Schreiber threw a last bouquet: “Attorney General Mitchell—former Attorney General, I should say—has been particularly splendid. But enough. No more politics. Let me relinquish you to all the people who’ve come to see you.”

  She and Connie, now by her side, stepped back from the receiving line for a confidential moment.

  “I thought it was just Israel,” said Pat, “that made Taft Schreiber such a big supporter. What’s John Mitchell done for him? John doesn’t run tax policy or the Middle East.”

  “Justice filed an antitrust suit against the TV networks,” Connie explained, “to stop them from making their own movies for television. Which means they’ll have to keep buying movies from the men here.”

  Pat, a quick study, nodded and got back to the receiving line. She glanced over at Mitchell, who didn’t look happy for a man with such grateful and generous friends. Well, how could he, with Martha berating him in that loud, slicing voice? She sounded like a parrot in a cage. Pat could hear her all the way from over there, scolding the poor man for being unhappy.

  “John Mitchell!” cawed Martha. “I do not understand why each and every man from the Committee to Re-Elect Mr. President is looking lower than a snake’s belly tonight!”

  John mumbled and placated and continued to caress the back of his wife’s dress. The two of them, even now, Pat had to concede, were a love match. But Martha would be the death of him. And Dick only made things worse by encouraging her with all those give-’em-hell notes and across-the-room thumbs-ups. Instead of clamping down on Martha, the most anyone ever did was try for a little distraction, as John was doing now, pointing out Zsa Zsa Gabor to her.

  Even as she watched, Pat could hear herself telling—yet again, automatically—the Becky Sharp story she’d already told three times tonight; about how she’d gotten work as an extra on the film during her days at USC, and then been given a single line to read. “But they cut it!” she concluded, once more, with a laugh. “Maybe Chuck,” she added, gently touching Charlton Heston’s arm, “can ask Governor Reagan where my Screen Actors Guild card is. I’m still waiting for it!”

  She’d made the same joke ten minutes ago to John Wayne and his Peruvian wife.

  Like most of her memories, the ones involving Becky Sharp were something she’d prefer to keep to herself—not that there was anything so private about the story, only that it seemed to lose vividness, be less real to her, with every occasion she had to tell it. Each time she described driving over from campus in Ginny Shugart’s red Ford, the car grew a little less red, the sunshine above it a little less warm and a little more like CinemaScope. Of course, she never mentioned how she’d hated all the time wasted standing around on the set; how one of the assistant directors had come over to the house one night, drunk, and been tossed out by her brothers. But because she never added any of these details to the recitation, they remained fresher, oddly more satisfying, than the story’s rote, pleasant parts.

  She saw John Mitchell leaving Martha in the care of that man from Mississippi, the one with the soft, soothing voice whose name she could never remember. He’d been Mitchell’s man in the White House, and by now she supposed he’d gone over to the Committee to Re-Elect. She was struck by how patient he was with Martha, who seemed more agitated by the moment.

  Six years ago, on the evening they first met, Pat had felt sorry for Martha. It was just after John’s law firm had merged with Dick’s and his wife was feeling slighted at some University Club function in New York. Pat remembered talking to her softly, as the man from Mississippi was doing now. Martha, responding well that night, had called her “Patty,” something she alone in the world continued to do. Like most drunks and flamboyant people, Martha was actually, secretly, shy, whereas Pat knew herself—however unlikely it seemed—to be naturally an extrovert. She held her real self in with discipline, the same way Martha unleashed a false one with drink.

  But she had long since lost patience with Martha. It was all too much now, the late-night and early-morning calls—five a.m. tirades to Connie about one thing or another—and the stupid comments to the press: how Fulbright needed to be “crucified” and all the rest.

  And now Martha was coming straight toward her; the man from Mississippi helpless to stop it. “I’m going to stand beside Patty when Mr. Mitchell speaks!” Martha brayed. “That is, if he can tear himself away from one more hush-hush little huddle back there!”

  Oh, no, you’re not, thought Pat. Taking Connie by the elbow, she swerved away, as unnoticeably as she could. Together they made their way to a punch bowl. (Better to be photographed with a little crystal cup—schoolteacher’s night out—than that tumbler of scotch Martha had in her hand.) Martha now looked furious, well and truly snubbed. Still, she would have no choice but to keep silent, at least for a few minutes, since her husband had begun addressing the crowd of contributors.

  You be president; I’ll be secretary of state. She remembered hearing Dick say this to John, just after the election: evidence of his esteem for Mitchell and a poignant indicator of his own real interests. But right now John looked too exhausted to be even a justice of the peace. He was probably more loaded than Martha, and he was making it through his remarks with the help of a microphone, talking about all the millions of dollars they’d taken in, as if the campaign were for cancer research or the Heart Fund, a money-raising operation that would go on forever. Back in 1960 no one had ever spoken this way. The money was handled by one or two men and went mostly undiscussed even in the press, let alone polite conversation.

  It was Reagan’s turn now. He had mounted a little box beside the poolside crowd, his skin as smooth and brown as Mitchell’s was blotchy. He was making a joke about how he wouldn’t be governor today if Lew Wasserman had done a better job getting him parts in movies. Pat threw back her head and laughed and wondered again where all the young men from the campaign kept disappearing to. Martha was right: they’d been scurrying around, nervous and gloomy, all evening. What was going on? What news had they had from Washington? Mitchell himself had once more gone back to the house after finishing his remarks, and the absence of male attention—even the man from Mississippi had vanished—was giving his wife fits.

  As Reagan went on talking, Pat wondered how Dick had spent his evening in the Bahamas, at the Abplanalps’. Probably watching a movie. The time difference made it too late to call, but she knew how the conversation would go in any case. She’d mention that Schreiber’s house was in Bel Air, and Dick’s file-card memory would pop out a recollection of their own brief time here, in ’61, between the two defeats. He’d ask if she recalled the day the big fire swept through the neighborhood and he and the fellow helping him write Six Crises had gotten up on the roof of their rented house to hose the place down. As he told her this, he’d be silently remembering how by that point he’d already decided to run for governor in ’62, something he’d been wrong and she’d been right about. Though neither one of them would mention this now, the conversation would get frosty for a moment or two. No, she thought, smiling: there was no new Nixon.

  She hadn’t been happy until they’d left Los Angeles and gone to New York, and not really happy until Tom Garahan had come along. And then not really miserable until she’d pushed Tom away. But she wouldn’t think about that now; she’d put it out of her mind just as lately she’d been expelling pictures of that boy shooting George Wallace and that madman taking his hammer to the Pietà. Still, it was harder to shut out the sensation of happiness, what she’d briefly known with Tom. Best of all, its memory was undulled by the confession of it to anybody, ever. The eight months wearing kerchiefs and dark glasses; the afternoon meetings in movie theaters: there they were, the still-vibrant images and feelings, coming to her, assaulting her will power right now, as Reagan finished speaking.
/>   She needed to get back once more into the receiving line. Shaking another fifty hands would be less of a chore than staying here and being encircled by people who wanted extended conversation. But before she could take a first step forward, she saw the man from Mississippi coming out of the house, no doubt redeputized to look after Mrs. Mitchell. She waved to him, merrily indicated that he should come over; maybe she could delay his getting an earful from Martha about the little snub of a few minutes before.

  The man squinted to make sure he was really being summoned. She now remembered the way his weak eyes had kept straining to read the printed handouts at the one meeting she’d ever been at with him; something about the hurricane, back in ’69. They’d assigned it to him because he came from Mississippi.

  “Hello, Miz Nixon. Fred LaRue.”

  “Somebody called me ‘Miz’ about an hour ago, but I’m pretty sure she had it spelled ‘M-s-period’ in her mind!”

  The man smiled and looked at his shoes. “I meant what you call a lady, not a women’s-libber.”

  The soft voice was such a relief from the clipped tones of all the young campaign sharpies who’d come out on the plane. No wonder he was good with Martha.

  “I’m remembering that you briefed me about Hurricane Camille. Wasn’t that just an awful thing?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I imagine it was the worst storm most folks’ll ever go through.” He looked back at the house, through its glass doors, to the cluster of men still around John Mitchell, before he added: “But you can never be sure.”

  Chapter Two

  JUNE 19, 1972

  EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Howard Hunt parked his Pontiac Firebird on Seventeenth Street, across from the EOB and White House. For over an hour he’d been driving around what passed for the capital’s downtown—worse than Newark. He was pondering a number of what-might-have-beens, and one of them was automotive. Liddy had run a yellow light Friday evening on his way to the Watergate. If he had mouthed off when he got pulled over—hardly an improbability with Gordon—the cop might have run him in and thereby scuttled the whole operation.

  Sixty hours had passed since the botch. Getting out of the Firebird, Hunt looked across Pennsylvania Avenue to number 1701, where the Committee to Re-Elect had its headquarters. He tried to imagine how the news had hit Mitchell and Magruder and all the expense-account boys out in California for that fundraiser. Hunt could have told them that he was the one who’d wanted to abort the operation. At a Friday dinner meeting, beforehand, when McCord reported something funny—the disappearance of the masking tape that kept the jimmied door to the DNC unlocked—it was Howard Hunt alone who had said they should scrub the mission. It was Gordon who’d said no, we go ahead, that the tape had more likely been removed by some fastidious mailman than a suspicious security guard. And since Gordon was head of the operation—and needed something to show for his fat quarter-of-a-million-dollar budget—that was that. Bernie and the rest of the boys went in, as planned.

  Hunt showed his identification to the EOB guard and took an elevator to the third story, whose big black-and-white floor tiles suggested an infinitely extending chessboard, one whose alternating colors represented not the players’ pathways but the players themselves. He himself played for black. The opposition white was monolithic, totalitarian, fixed; but the black squares, his team, hid within themselves an abundance of different colors, all the shades of faction and party whose intramural conflicts could be as deadly as the larger battle. His world, the Free World, was seething with dissent and treachery; he needed to keep his eyes fixed on its black tiles, to detect and avoid all its obscure hues of sickness and appeasement, to steer clear of sinkholes and traps.

  He entered room 338, though it was room 214, the room at the Watergate Hotel, that remained on his mind. Saturday had become Sunday, and now Monday, and Bernie and the boys were still in the District jail. Hunt sighed as he lifted the telephone receiver and asked the White House operator to get Mrs. Hunt at her hotel in London. The phone here was more secure than the one at home, and there wasn’t much point in worrying about an overseas personal call showing up on the office’s monthly printout. He doubted he’d ever be returning to the EOB after today.

  Dorothy had just gotten back from an early dinner. She said she was going to stay in tonight: one could have too much theater, even in London. The two children she had with her would go out to a movie by themselves. “No, Howard, they won’t slip off to Oh! Calcutta! They could have done that in New York.”

  He tried to get on with what he had to tell her, but he couldn’t make himself get to the point. When he finally got near it, all he managed to say was “We had some trouble with the Watergate job.”

  “Wasn’t that a month ago?”

  With a deep breath, he launched into a concise, not-quite-complete explanation of how the listening devices they’d installed in May had malfunctioned and been yielding more or less useless information ever since. “So we had to go back in Friday night.” He didn’t tell Dorothy that they’d attached one of the bugs to the wrong phone. He also didn’t tell her that he’d been nervous the moment they arrived, returning to the scene of an inadequately committed crime.

  He could hear Dorothy managing her own breath, struggling not to interrupt, as he went through the story of the evening. He told her how McCord’s man, Baldwin, had waited and waited at the lookout-and-listening post across the street inside the Howard Johnson’s, until he was able to radio word to the Watergate Hotel that the lights had finally gone out in the Democrats’ offices. He explained how it was past midnight before the boys went into the office building next door. He and Gordon had stayed behind in the hotel, room 214, watching a late movie, waiting to hear Bernie come in over the radio and say that they’d finished.

  “Was Gordon arrested?” asked Dorothy.

  Hunt knew she was already worrying about Frances, Liddy’s wife, who was always so timid and baffled around her husband’s Horst-Wesseling hijinx.

  “No, neither one of us.” McCord had been the cops’ only white-collar capture. Yesterday’s Post had linked him to the CIA (retired); today’s edition had connected him to the Committee to Re-Elect, as its security consultant.

  “They got us!” He imitated Bernie’s voice for Dorothy, explaining how the words had shocked him and Gordon to life once they came over the walkie-talkie. He and Liddy had managed to pack up the hotel room in less than a minute. The last thing he himself snatched up was the wire hanger, a supplementary antenna for the radio, taped to the balcony. He’d then raced across the street with it inside his pants leg, like one of his mother’s old washday stretchers. Once inside the Howard Johnson’s, he’d helped Baldwin to pack up the listening post.

  And that had been just the beginning of a long night, one that wore on through his visit to the pansy lawyer he knew from his job at the PR firm, where he might still be working in full-time peaceful misery had it not been for Colson’s offer of exciting opportunities at the White House. The lawyer was a nice enough fellow and a good enough attorney, but he wasn’t a criminal lawyer, and that’s what they needed—especially the boys. The night’s worst moment had come, he now explained to Dorothy, when he’d had to call Miami and tell Clarita, Bernie’s wife, that her husband was in the D.C. jail along with the police department’s regular nighttime yield of jacked-up dealers and murdering pimps. Her cries had been so anguished and baroque that even Sturgis would not have been able to repeat them en español.

  When he got home to Potomac, not much before dawn, he had drunk most of a quart of milk. His ulcer had been killing him, just as it was now. He looked over at the safe beside the file cabinet and wished it were a little refrigerator, like the one in room 214.

  “Honey,” he said to Dorothy, steeling himself. “I had a call from a reporter a little while ago. A fellow named Bob Woodward.”

  “Bob Woodward! From Montevideo?”

  “No, same name.”

  Robert Woodward
, a career prick, had been Eisenhower’s last ambassador to Uruguay a dozen years before, when Hunt had been station chief in the capital with an embassy job for his cover. The chief diplomat had disliked the disguised operative from the moment they met. Woodward had known of Hunt’s involvement in the Guatemala coup of ’54 and didn’t want that kind of zealotry kicking over the hors d’oeuvre trays in Montevideo. The ambassador couldn’t bring himself to admit that the Uruguayan capital was crawling with Soviet agents, and it galled him that Hunt’s local contacts exceeded his own. Woodward had been afraid, in short, that Howard Hunt might actually do his job, and so he’d kicked him home to Washington as soon as he could.

  Should he be grateful, or furious, that the reposting had led him to the Bay of Pigs? To this day, even in the fix he now found himself, he didn’t really know.

  “How did this other Woodward connect you to what happened Friday night?” asked Dorothy. “Howard, you weren’t arrested, were you?”

  “My name and White House phone number were in Bernie’s address book.”

  “Why would Bernie write them there!”

  “Well, he did. Now listen, sweetheart, and try not to worry. My name hasn’t been in the papers yet—so far it’s just McCord—but I expect it will be soon. Maybe even in the papers where you are—”

  “Oh, my God!” cried Dorothy.

  He knew she didn’t need more troubles. Her woes and worries had already, several months ago, sent her to a shrink, who’d then gone and disappeared in a boating accident. Her nerves were so bad that he himself had suggested she get away, take a couple of the kids with her on a vacation to Europe, even though they could hardly afford it—not with the school expenses and the continuing medical bills from the car accident that had blighted the life of one of their daughters. Not when he was paying for the maid in Potomac as well as the horse and the country club. Years ago a deskmate had teased him about all the spending: Howard, those old OSS guys were living off family money—not their salaries! But the bills had always stayed high. Even in Montevideo there’d been the Jockey Club.