After the Tall Timber (23 page)

At one end of the field, at the finish line of one of the longer racetracks, Tom Liddy, wearing his army pants, sneakers, and a sports shirt, stood, with six other boys from St. Albans. Each was carrying a stopwatch and holding on to a section of an often-torn and re-knotted colored string, which served as the finishing tape. “Who’s got the guy with the green pants and white shirt?” Tom asked, as children lined up in their lanes at the starting line for the beginning of one race. “I’ve got the tall guy in blue,” one of his classmates said. “Let’s do it by numbers,” another boy said. They were each timing, and otherwise watching out for, a child in a single lane. The children had numbers pinned to the front of their shirts. A card, with name, age, and school, was pinned to the back. The timers decided to keep track by numbers. “Remember, if someone comes barrelin’ down and doesn’t want to stop at the finish line,” one of the older boys said, “let ’em come. Sometimes they don’t like to stop.”

“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” Tom bellowed, in the hearty way of athletes on playing fields and basketball courts. Then, as the race began, “Way to go. Way to go. Way to
go
.” An extraordinary number of people seemed to be cheering each child and then hugging each child as the races finished. It turned out that adults and St. Albans students in charge of the meet had been divided into timers, huggers, and runners. The runners accompanied each child, after every race, back to an area near the reviewing stand where there was the group from his own school. In every race at Tom’s track, there were stragglers, children who walked all the way, or turned back, or simply stopped running. The seven boys at the finish line would cheer, beckon, wave, smile, and advance slightly toward those children, until the last child had reached the finishing tape, and been given his hug. “Congratulations. Boy! You really moved. You flew,” the timers would say. “Is that all right? You pleased? Hey, c’mere, I’ve gotta get your name and everything.” Timers would read the child’s name on the back of his shirt and record the time. A hug. For the most part, the children hugged back, or slapped hands, or simply grinned. Some of the larger children came along the track with such force and speed that the seven holders of stopwatches would have to step back a bit, to avoid being bowled over. The finishing tape kept advancing toward small stragglers, retreating before large, pounding racers. “Watson, do you have a class?” a girl student asked one of the timers. He said he did. She took his place.

Gordon and Frances Liddy arrived at the reviewing stand. A student immediately introduced herself to him and set him to awarding ribbons. Frances walked around the field toward where Tom was. She had wanted to talk to him about his grades, but, seeing how busy he was (all the timers, huggers, and runners, by this time, looked as though they had taken part in an athletic marathon themselves), she decided to raise the matter by letter instead. “In first place,
Roulette Taylor
!” a girl student’s voice shouted, with hoarse enthusiasm, over the loudspeaker; all the announcers’ voices were starting to go. “It’s very good for our kids, very important to them,” a St. Albans mother said to me. “It exposes them to a serious, important part of reality.” “I’m standing all by myself,” a very little girl said, standing next to her. “I’m all by myself. I’m all alone.” “Why, I’m all alone, too,” the St. Albans mother said at once, and lifted her up to watch a race.

During a break, Eunice Shriver and Gordon Liddy had a brief conversation. A member of the student organizing committee told Frances that Tom would be in charge of the Special Olympics next year. Somebody was in a bulldog costume (Frances had for years been in charge of the washing of it), and she thought for a moment it was her son. “I almost hugged it,” she said, “but then I saw the legs were too thin.” The races began again. Tom was by now lifting up every child that came near him at the finish line. So was Ronald Brown, a black student and national champion in the 100 meters, who had been admitted to St. Albans under the same program as Tom Liddy. Music came over a loudspeaker. A white child, with a number on his T-shirt, stood in front of it, rapt in a kind of ritual dance. Only first-prize ribbons were left; most children in the final races got first-prize ribbons. “I’ve been sort of encouraging people along,” a girl student said, happily, to the Liddys as they were leaving, “and I’m just
dead
.”

After being stranded in Kansas City by an Ozark Airlines strike, Liddy arrived one night in St. Louis, at the Marriott Hotel. He had been looking forward to his stay there, he said, because of the hotel chain’s “Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow ads.” “Is this your first experience with Marriott?” he said they asked him at the desk. He said it was. “Everybody’s saying ‘Hi,’ as in the ads,” he said, in telling the story the next morning. “All I’m asking for is shelter, and everybody’s saying ‘Hi.’ They call a boy named Charlie to the desk, and say, ‘Mr. Liddy, this is Charlie.’ Charlie says. ‘Hi.’ We take an elevator, and walk down a hall. Charlie throws open a door, and says, ‘Mr. Liddy, your
room
!’ Evidently, it isn’t. There’s a man in the bed. There’s an airline captain’s jacket hanging over a chair. Your first Marriott experience. Off Charlie runs. Only one elevator works, so there is a wait. I’m there, outside the room, standing on one foot and then the other. Alone with the baggage cart. Two women walk by. One says, ‘I think that’s Gordon Liddy.’ The other says, ‘I don’t think he’s got a room.’ Charlie comes back. We go to another room, on another floor. He throws open the door. ‘Mr. Liddy, your
room
!’ A man sleeping in the bed. Another pilot’s jacket. Even the rank is the same. You know, this is my first Marriott. It’s after midnight. Finally, I get a room.

“When I’m in bed, I start to hear this little sirenlike whistle, in the air-conditioning. I think, I’ll endure this because Bill Arript [of Marriott] was so good to Sally Harmony.” (Ms. Harmony, who was Liddy’s secretary at the time of Watergate, is unforgettable to viewers of the Ervin Committee hearings, for at least one line: Asked whether, when she was typing from photocopies with the outline of gloved fingers at their edges, she had not guessed that the work in progress was clandestine, Ms. Harmony replied, “I knew it was clandestine. But to me, Senator, clandestine does not mean illegal. And I can keep a secret.” Later, Marriott gave Ms. Harmony a job.) “But I just can’t sleep. So I call downstairs. Up comes this maintenance fellow. He checks. Then he says, ‘It’s the air conditioner. There’s dirt in the cones. Sometimes, even when you turn them off, there will be this little whistle.’ I said, ‘I’m sure your analysis is correct. But can you fix it?’ He said, ‘Not before tomorrow.’ ”

At the airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul, there was again no limousine—or rather, there was a mysterious locked and empty limousine. No driver. Liddy took a cab to his hotel. On the flight to Detroit, Republic Airlines lost Liddy’s luggage. A day later, they found it. An interviewer for the
Detroit Free Press
said to Liddy, “You are remembered as a second-rate burglar. How would you prefer to be remembered?” Liddy said, “More favorably.” When the interview was over, Liddy said, “I think that fellow believed we were having a tough-guy contest in there.”

Back in New York for a brief visit, which included three appearances (a breakfast meeting of advertisers and businessmen, organized by the Smith-Greenland Agency; an address at lunch to the Coast Guard Officers Club on Governor’s Island; and an afternoon taping of the three interviews with Dick Cavett), Liddy stood on a sidewalk, waiting for a taxi. Finding none, he looked repeatedly at his watch. An off-duty cab drew up. “I disagree with your views, but I like you. Get in,” the driver said. Liddy got in. The driver said he was already late. He was going to pick up his wife, in Queens. Then, describing himself as “a moderate Jewish liberal,” he began a long disquisition about himself, his background, his politics, his wife, Queens. At an intersection, he saw a man with a briefcase, trying to hail a cab. “Where are you going? LaGuardia?” he shouted. The man said, “LaGuardia Airport.” “I’d like to help this other fellow out,” the driver said, remarking that LaGuardia was near enough to Queens. Then, having introduced Liddy to the passenger, he resumed his discourse, about politics, his wife, Queens, the quality of city life, Mayor Koch. At a red light he turned, with an interrogatory inflection, to his new passenger for agreement. “Am I right? Or am I right?” “Well,” the man said, “I’m from
Ohio
.”

During the cab ride Liddy told me that he and Frances had begun a negotiation, which he hoped would be successful. They had put in a bid for a house, on the Potomac, which had originally been built for Alan Drury, author of, among other Washington novels,
Advise and Consent
. They expected to have an answer within the week.

At the businessmen’s breakfast, Liddy stood for a moment in silence at the microphone. Then, rather loudly and startlingly, he said, “Boo!” His audience laughed, a bit uncertainly. Previous speakers at these breakfasts had included Harrison Salisbury, Arthur Ashe, Theodore Kheel, Mayor Koch, Pete Rozelle, Martha Graham, George Gallup, William Safire, Jack Valenti. (“We were going to have Princess Ashraf last month,” a man told me, as he was putting on his name tag, “but the idea was shot down.”) The Smith-Greenland Agency had somehow created the impression, within St. Martin’s Press and also with Liddy, that audiences for these breakfasts were limited to members of the Fortune 500 (although actually the guests were mainly advertising people). After his “Boo!” and with a few other equivocal jokes and interjections, Liddy addressed what he had been led to believe were “movers and shakers” with a long, impassioned stem-winder about American politics, foreign policy, and morale. The Founding Fathers, he said, had been wise but tough men, and the world was still and would be a tough place, always. “It is that way, and it’s been that way since the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.” He was worried, he said, about the country’s “post-Vietnam War abhorrence of battle.” Not that he believed in battle, except when there was no other choice, but he believed in preparedness for it. He was concerned, he said, when a great democratic country chose to rely on an all-voluntary, and underpaid, professional army. Among peaceful nations with armed, trained citizenry, he mentioned Switzerland, then said, “I think Universal Military Training is the fairest way to go.”

He approved, he said, of President Carter’s “resolve” in undertaking the Iranian desert rescue mission. He was not of course qualified to appraise its planning. He recognized its difficulty. “A helicopter,” he said, “was once defined as ten thousand nuts and bolts trying to fly off in the same direction.” At the same time, he worried about the “mind-set” of contingency plans for failure. For this audience, though, no mention of the wimp, the bad neighborhood, the wallet. First, the Founding Fathers. Now, Liddy spoke of the conquistadores, who had no contingency plans for failure. “They burned their ships behind them,” he said. “They didn’t start their mission ready to say abort, abort, abort.” He worried that the country, irresolute, was growing “weaker and weaker.” Then, he ended on a ringing, hortatory note, and took questions—of which there were very many. Toward the end, a tall black man got to his feet, and asked, “How do you see your own future?” Liddy said, “Well, let’s face it, I had my shot. And I missed.” Then, he told of a famous admiral, a man so abrasive that he fell into disfavor and obscurity, until World War I broke out and his country needed him. A correspondent had asked the admiral how he could account for his recall to a post of great importance. “When the shells start to fly,” the admiral replied, “they call on the sons of bitches.” Liddy paused a bit wistfully.

The chairman of Smith-Greenland finally called the questions short, then made a few remarks about Liddy’s “forceful personality.” “As evidence,” he said, rather oddly, “he has five wonderful children.” Liddy said, “I was away during their formative years.” Several people gathered around him when he had finished speaking. Several others milled about, muttering to one another that he was “crazy” or “insane.”

Some of his remarks this time about where America stood, however, had been so unremittingly bleak that I asked him, when we had left the breakfast, why he usually seemed, by temperament, so sanguine. “I see these problems recognized as problems by serious people in a position to do something about them,” he said. Then, he recalled that, after a lot of ineffectual bumbling, the country had pulled itself together for World War II. “Of course this time, the reaction time with missiles makes it unlike World War II. We have less time to protect ourselves from folly, and there is a steeper price. But I measure the price of failure against the great reward attendant to success.” He mentioned that we have, after all, a constitutional democracy. “Some might favor having a President answerable to Parliament,” he said. “And the White House press corps is a poor substitute.”

In the car, a shiny new Mercedes, which had picked Liddy up at the Waldorf for the drive to lunch on Governor’s Island, the driver, a Coast Guard officer, described how eager and then how glad he had been to avoid service in Vietnam. “I didn’t wanna stop a bullet,” he said. “I didn’t even wanna slow one down.” On the drive downtown and during the fifteen-minute ferry ride, he and Liddy chatted amiably. The officer said his wife had just had a hysterectomy, but was feeling better. Liddy said he was glad she was feeling better. The ferry docked. “Guess you haven’t been here since the Korean conflict,” the officer said to Liddy. Then he took us on a quick tour of the island’s Coast Guard installations: its golf course; its housing; its view of the Statue of Liberty; its nursery school (the Hooligan Haven Day Care Center); its lot for the repair of damaged or rusting buoys. He parked in front of the Governor’s Island Officers Club. “Those who enter here,” said a sign in the hallway, “shall buy a round of cheer. Those who do not pay with verve, we shall refuse to serve.”

During drinks on the terrace, Liddy was introduced to a lot of Coast Guard officers, several of whom asked him to sign copies of his book, and most of whom seemed to be drinking a quantity of Bloody Marys. At lunch, after all visitors, including Coast Guardsmen from other installations, had been introduced, and had acknowledged the introduction by rising slightly in their chairs, Liddy gave another stem-winder. There were no black Coast Guardsmen in the room, and only one Coast Guard woman. Someone at my table remarked that, last year, at the Coast Guard Academy in Groton, “the homecoming queen was a cadet.”