Watergate Page 6

  He was twenty-six years her junior and, sitting across from her, looked like a very old man. “So, Joe,” she asked, as he took another sip of tea. “When did I last see you?”

  “The Gridiron dinner. April.”

  “That’s right. And it was no fun at all, except for crossing the picket line.” The club now allowed female guests at its big annual event but still didn’t admit women as members. “So stupid of Dick not to go. For the second straight year, too. All because he finds the jokes rough. That’s carrying your homme sérieux business a bit far.”

  A thought struck Alice, and pleased her. “He should have said he couldn’t go because he was siding with the women. Had his cake and eaten it.” She sliced Joe a piece of the delicious chocolate layer cake that sat between them. Her guests were always surprised to find what she served so moist and fresh; they expected Miss Havisham’s wedding cake along with the cracked leather cushions and the crumbling taxidermy.

  “I just wrote him a contribution for forty-nine dollars,” said Alsop. “That’s one dollar under the limit of what’s got to be reported.”

  As if, thought Alice, Joe’s journalistic integrity, or whatever it’s called, was what he really had to worry about—instead of those photographs the Soviets had had in their possession for years, of Joe in his Moscow hotel room in bed with a soldier.

  “You know, you really do look awful,” she told him.

  “Nothing’s felt right since Mother died.”

  “Your mother”—Father’s niece, and Alice’s first cousin—“was a grand gal. She was also eighty-five.”

  “You’re eighty-eight.”

  “And perfectly willing to be dead. How’s Stew?” How foolish that she should find it easier to ask after Joe’s brother, dying of leukemia, than to inquire about Susan Mary.

  “Not good,” said Alsop. “You’ll notice I haven’t gotten up to mix myself an actual drink. I’m back to playing blood bank this week.”

  “Easier than donating bone marrow, I suppose.”

  “You think?” said Alsop, grimacing as he swallowed more tea.

  “Poor Stew,” said Alice. “What a nuisance.” Reflexively, she looked out into the hall, where an old stuffed tiger had lost a paw the last time Stew was here and decided to shake hands with it. “Slice yourself more cake.”

  Joe declined, and she admired his discipline. What a preposterously fat young man he’d been when he arrived in town in the thirties to cover Franklin and the New Deal. A reporter with a Harvard diploma; silly. She supposed he’d slimmed down to please the boys.

  Suddenly, Joanna’s voice came up the stairs.

  “I’m off, Grandmother!”

  “Enjoy yourself, dear!” Alice cried in response. “Try not to be home before midnight!”

  “Where’s she off to?” asked Alsop. “And why doesn’t she come in here to say goodbye? Or, for that matter, hello?”

  “She probably thought Mrs. Braden was still in here. For God’s sake, Joe, she’s twenty-five. I haven’t the slightest idea where she’s off to.”

  “Doesn’t she eat with you? What, in fact, are you going to eat tonight? Does she let you live on cake and tea? Is there a servant left in this whole place?”

  “Janie’s off for the night. Don’t worry. Joanna will come home around one o’clock and bring me a lovely veal chop from Anna Maria’s, that little place up on Connecticut Avenue. And it will be exactly what I want.”

  Alsop knew that Alice’s routine hadn’t varied for decades. She would read through the night, until almost dawn, when she’d mark her place, probably with the bone from the veal chop, and then fall asleep until noon.

  “Tell me,” he asked. “Are we related to Elliot Richardson? Are you, I mean.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  “Elliot Lee Richardson? Not one of your Boston Lees?”

  “I cannot imagine. I should think that in the forest of Lee family trees I’m fewer branches away from Robert E. or Lorelei.”

  “I spent half the afternoon with him at HEW. An interview, supposedly, but there was a camera crew traipsing through the office taking ‘footage’ ”—he said it as if the word were new—“for some film they’ll show at the convention.”

  “What possessed him to leave State?” asked Mrs. Longworth. “Even being one of Rogers’s undersecretaries has to have been more interesting than sending out welfare checks.”

  “He left because he was asked to.”

  “By your homme sérieux?”

  “Of course,” said Alsop. “And this won’t be the last job he’s given to do. Nixon needs him from time to time. Almost the way he needs Ed Brooke.” He referred to the Senate’s only Negro, a Republican to boot. “Richardson is somebody to put in front of the cameras when they have to show a bit of probity and class—all the Harvard, high Establishment stuff Nixon’s usually able to do without.”

  “You sound as if you’re back on the New Frontier, Joe.”

  “No,” said Alsop, loudly putting down his teacup, as if the gesture might reaffirm his new fealty toward the incumbent. “But Nixon’s going to require Richardson’s type a little more than he thinks.” He pointed to a copy of the Washington Post. “Kay seems determined to make something serious out of this burglary, doesn’t she?”

  “Dick’s second-story men?” asked Mrs. Longworth. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Well, my dear, I wouldn’t dismiss it just yet. A CIA connection one day; a link to the White House the next.” The Post had today run a report of Howard Hunt’s involvement.

  “I almost like Kay,” said Mrs. Longworth. “Her mother detested me.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “I’m glad she did. I detest their paper. That copy you’re pointing to belongs to Mrs. Braden, not me.”

  “Ah, of course,” said Alsop. He had his own problems with Kay Graham, who had gently let him know that she regarded his column, still running in her pages, as increasingly uncivil and out of touch. But he knew that his ancient cousin was talking about something else.

  And she, moreover, knew that he did. Mrs. Longworth would never forgive the Post for making it clear, fifteen years earlier, that Joanna’s mother, Paulina, had committed suicide by swallowing sixty pills. Except for the Post, her only child might have gone out of the world as ambiguously as she’d come into it: recognized as the daughter of Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House, but the child, in reality, of Senator William Borah, Alice’s lover of many years and the one man she’d truly hoped to make president. Paulina’s paternity had always, among anyone who counted, been an open secret—which was the best and most civilized kind of secret—and there was no reason her death at the age of thirty-one couldn’t have been treated the same way.

  Dick had come to the funeral, even agreed to be a pallbearer, just a week after his second inaugural as vice president.

  Mrs. Longworth now looked across at Joe, one of Jack Kennedy’s spear carriers. These days he liked to present himself as someone who’d made an intellectual conversion to Nixon—one homme sérieux to another—and liked to regard her own affection for Dick as rote Republicanism, crude. Well, he didn’t know the rest of the story, what else Dick had done for her that January, besides carrying Paulina to her grave. The rest of it was very much a closed secret, one she would never tell to Joe or anybody else.

  There he sat while she cut herself another piece of cake: reading the detestable Post, certain that each of her antipathies was more childish than the next, calling on her this afternoon as if she were the old lady instead of himself.

  She felt the urge to inflict a little pain. “I hear rumors that Susan Mary is going to leave you. Are they true?”

  He allowed the newspaper to collapse into his lap, and he crumpled along with it. “I don’t think so, but she’s threatening to. She’s even looked at a place for herself.”

  “Where?”

  “Where else? The Watergate.”

  The two of them laughed. Her yellow teeth flashe
d and bit into the cake, and she forgave him.

  But she did not forgive Kay.

  Chapter Five

  JUNE 23, 1972, 3:50 P.M.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  “Bob,” said Rose Mary Woods, nodding curtly.

  She brushed past him on the way back to her office, outside of which Marje Acker and two other secretaries sat at their desks. If one charted the pecking order and included Marje, it was possible to say that the president’s secretary had a secretary who had secretaries of her own, which made Rose Mary Woods sound rather grand, but this was not what she had hoped for at all when the boss finally reached the White House.

  All she’d ever wanted here was the same setup that Ann Whitman, Ike’s head girl, had once had. No matter who was serving as chief of staff, Ann remained the gatekeeper, just as Rose herself had been for the vice president. That included barring the door—the incident was now legendary—to the head of the Republican Policy Committee, Senator Bridges of New Hampshire, when he tried to see Nixon during the ’60 campaign. “To bother him about nothing,” Rose remembered. “I told him no.”

  For eighteen years, whether they were “in” or “out,” that’s how it had been. But it had ended once and for all in the elevator of the Waldorf, the morning after the ’68 election. Riding down to his press conference, the boss had told her that Haldeman would control all access to him after the inauguration. She’d practically seen stars when he said it, and for the rest of the ride down to the ballroom and the rest of the week after that, she wouldn’t say a word to him, refusing to lose her temper and give him the chance to make an awkward little joke about her getting her Irish up. He hated hurting anyone’s feelings, least of all hers, and she let him know how bad she felt by her stony, out-of-character silence.

  Even so, he never budged from the structure Haldeman had sold him on, a chain of command that made sure he never had to hurt anyone’s feelings, at least face-to-face. Now, almost four years later, the place was crawling with a whole second generation of admen and junior executives even a decade younger than Bob, all these good-looking dumb-bunnies like Magruder who provided Richard Nixon with a whole new cloud of insulation, like those little Styrofoam peanuts Rose’s mail-order knickknacks came packed in.

  They all, of course, had college educations, and knew full well that she had none—no matter that she could correct the grammar and spelling of every one of them. College would have been lovely, but it wasn’t in the cards for a girl from Sebring, Ohio, who had to help out at home. As it was, nobody could say she hadn’t come a long way.

  Over the years there had been plenty of times when she’d had to pull the boss up with her, lift him from some funk and point the way out of whatever jam he was in. And, with the exception of Harry Robbins Haldeman, you wouldn’t find anybody along this whole high-and-mighty corridor who didn’t think she’d been underutilized for the past three and a half years. Actually, she thought, “underutilized” sounded just like them. What was wrong with “squandered”?

  “And what are you looking at?” she asked with mock fierceness, raising a chuckle from one of the subsecretaries who’d just come in and noticed the pickle-puss Miss Woods was displaying.

  “Oh, nothing,” said the girl, Lorraine, a strawberry blonde like herself. “I somehow thought you might have just run into HRH.”

  They both grinned at the use of Haldeman’s too-perfect initials.

  “Get out of here,” said Miss Woods, taking a file from the girl and laughing.

  At least the folder contained something she could enjoy working on: an invitation list, last-minute additions, for the Polish-Americans’ reception they’d be having on Monday in the Blue Room. Such guest lists constituted Rose Mary Woods’s chief remaining power, a meager tribute to her memory, smarts, and Rolodex, which over two decades had grown almost to the size of the potters’ wheels back at the Royal China Company, her very first employer, in Sebring.

  Henry Helstoski? A Democrat from the Jersey House delegation was on the list just because of his name. They could do better than that, she thought, scratching him, ethnic suffix and all, and substituting Charlie Sandman, a Republican from the same delegation who always stuck with the boss, and had plenty of Poles in his district, besides.

  Should Agnew be coming? she wondered. Would that seem like penance for the crack he’d made about “Polacks” during the ’68 race? Or would his appearance add insult to injury? The whole thing had always seemed ridiculous. None of her Irish relatives had ever called a Pole anything other than a Polack, and they’d never meant anything by it, either.

  As she scanned the list, a good line came to her brain—the kind of ad-lib she sometimes passed on to Buchanan or one of the other writers. She put a card into the Selectric and typed it out: I want you to know that between now and Election Day, you’re the only “Poles” we’ll be paying any attention to. She went back and twice underlined “Poles,” so the president would remember to pronounce the word strongly enough for people to get the joke. As she put the card into an envelope and marked it for the writers’ office, she realized how automatically she now followed HRH’s filtration system. In the old days she’d always fed tidbits like this one right to the boss himself.

  Resuming work on the list, she could feel a late-afternoon contentment finally coming over her, the kind she used to experience during sleepy days long ago on Capitol Hill, when Pat might come in to help out with the mail and answer the phone: “Senator Nixon’s office. Miss Ryan speaking.” They’d take a break and gab a little while putting on nail polish, the same pinkish kind she was applying now, since she wouldn’t have time to go back to her apartment before Don Carnevale picked her up for an early dinner.

  They were going to a new French place tonight: La Chansonette. The Post had panned it, and that was good enough for her. The two of them would have a fine time, whatever the food turned out to be like, and at a couple of points in the course of the evening, she’d silently remind herself that she was out with a man who over the years had had Clare Luce and Joan Crawford on his arm. The wives of the junior executives could sneer all they liked about her “confirmed bachelor.” As far as she was concerned, Don, a vice president at Harry Winston who’d worked himself up from nothing, was more of a gentleman than the pretty boys they’d married.

  At 4:05 she saw the red light that blinked only for calls from the boss. She picked up to hear the voice that for twenty-two years had come to her as often through telephone receivers and Dictabelts as in person.

  “Rose, will you bring in that speech about the meat imports?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, before hanging up and blowing on her nails. She fluffed her hair, straightened her dress, and started on her way, carrying the typescript through the outer office.

  “Ready for your close-up?” asked Lorraine.

  “I’ll give you a close-up,” she answered, pretending to swat her with the rolled-up pages. They both knew that this speech, while real enough, was right now wanted as a prop, something she and the president could pretend to go over while David L. Wolper’s team shot some film for the little movie that would be shown to the convention two months from now.

  She found a half dozen aides rubbernecking in the corridor just outside the Oval Office, and a few more who’d been permitted to stand against its far wall while the president cooperated with the production manager in setting up the next shot.

  Dwight Chapin, the best-looking of all the junior executives, smiled and made room for Rose inside the office. John Dean whispered a quick hello and goodbye, vacating a spot for Bob Finch, the boss’s old California crony.

  The president prepared to sign a document for the cameras. “Anybody you want me to pardon?” he asked, as the paper was moved into place on the blotter. Everyone laughed, and Rose could now see him, emboldened by the joke’s success, going into his regular-guy routine. “I’d tell you to shoot me from my good side,” he said to the cameraman, “but I’m not sure I have one.” More laughter.<
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  The production man nodded deferentially to John Ehrlichman, indicating they’d reached the moment in the script for him to approach the desk for some conversation with the president about revenue sharing and the environment. Ehrlichman chronically griped that the domestic programs he oversaw were ignored by commentators, and even by staffers, who’d rather concentrate on Russia and China and Henry. He could be an even rougher character than HRH, but to Rose’s mind his little resentments and occasional flare-ups were genuine. Ehrlichman actually believed in a few things, and if he, too, never deferred to her long history with the president, he at least rejected her on a human basis—he simply didn’t like her—whereas Haldeman regarded her as a piece of dust needing to be vacuumed from the transistors.

  “I see Rose over there,” said the president to the cameraman, between takes of his supposedly unrehearsed chat with Ehrlichman. “She looks great, doesn’t she? You know, she and Mrs. Nixon sometimes swap dresses.”

  Actually, she and Mrs. Nixon hadn’t done that in years. But the theme of thrift, embodied in 1952’s lifesaving cloth coat, was still honored in Nixon speeches and conversations. “What are you girls?” he asked. “Both size ten?”

  “Careful, Mr. President,” said the production man. Amidst the general laughter that followed, everyone could detect the sharp cackle of Chuck Colson.

  The president reacted to the arrival of his political advisor with a smile, but two seconds after that, Rose saw him signal Chapin, with his eyebrows, that Colson’s presence here might not be the best idea. Chuck was continually being urged to lower his public profile, as if he were a kind of mad relative who needed to be kept out of sight. Rose agreed with Ehrlichman and HRH about precious few matters, but she’d bet they felt the same as she did about the break-in at the DNC: the idea for it had to have come from Colson.