Watergate (12 page)

“WE WANT PAT! WE WANT PAT!” they kept shouting, until the lights finally went down for the little movie (yet another!) in which she
was not an extra but the star, walking on top of the Great Wall of China; waving from a Conestoga wagon in support of grit and volunteerism; being wrapped in a headdress somewhere in Liberia. The several minutes’ worth of biography sped by like someone else’s life entirely.

The Secret Service agent gave her a gentle signal, and the two of them, in the dark, walked to the podium so that she could be there, arms outstretched in thanks, when the lights came up. The gesture, when she executed it, seemed a bit too Eva Perón, but she’d never heard such cheering, at least not for herself.

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, the microphones wildly amplifying the twang that had never left her voice. And still they kept cheering. She thought back to Chicago in ’52, to the great surprise of the vice-presidential nomination, when she’d first stood in front of a national convention in that polka-dot dress and planted a great big smacker of a kiss, a real smooch, on Dick’s cheek. From the corner of her eye, she’d spotted Eisenhower, their sudden patron, cheerful as a Popsicle and just as cold. He was taking note of the kiss—and not entirely approving, she’d realized.

“WE LOVE PAT! WE LOVE PAT!”

From the moment she’d caught that glimpse of the general, she had stiffened into a twenty-year salute, teaching herself to wave
for
but never quite
at
the crowds and cameras. She’d vowed never to let them see her smoke or cry. For two decades she’d succeeded at the first and faltered only once when it came to the second, on that awful night in ’60 when Jack Kennedy had stolen the election and Dick had put them in front of a screaming, anxious crowd of supporters for that not-quite-a-concession speech.
If the present trend continues
,
Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States
. As the tears started coming, she had felt a surge of revulsion that surpassed even Caracas, two years before, when she’d seen the mob start rushing the car. They had done their worst with rocks and fists and spit, and succeeded in breaking the windows, but they’d soon been dispersed, whereas those tears from 1960 were forever still falling, inside every film vault of every television network and on every page of
Life
bound up in a library.

“Thank you! Thank you!” she repeated, just as the teleprompter’s
screen, complete with exclamation points, urged her to. Jerry Ford handed her a jokey giant gavel, which she pretended to bang. But still they kept cheering: “WE LOVE PAT! WE LOVE PAT!”

“Thank you, Chairman Ford, Senator Dole …” The pronunciation of names, as if she were calling the roll at Whittier Union High, had a magical effect. Deciding that lovely Miss Ryan now meant business, the crowd fell into an obedient silence.

She had never been at a podium this high off the ground. She actually felt less like Miss Ryan in front of her classroom than some angel atop the Mormon Tabernacle. She spoke of the “great victory” that lay ahead, and as soon as the phrase left her lips and landed on the crowd, they roared and shook and waved as if she were talking about Judgment Day and the final reward.

In the teleprompter’s shiny right-hand square, she caught a reflection of herself brushing back an errant strand of hair. It was a fussy, vain gesture, not at all her style, and as soon as she saw it, she realized she was doing it for Tom. She knew he would be watching her, a thousand miles away and all alone, having a late supper off his widower’s TV tray in the library of his apartment,
our place
, above Madison Avenue.

She mustn’t think of him now, just as she wouldn’t think of the cigarette she was dying to have once she was in the car with tinted windows on her way back to the hotel.

VERMONT, ARIZONA, WYOMING. The lights were such that, as she went on speaking her single page of remarks, she could see only the three state delegations at the front of the hall. In the very first row she now noticed a young man, a Vermonter, who sported a mustache, just like her teasing, funny, hot-tempered father in the handful of photos taken during his mining days, before they’d picked up stakes and left Nevada to have a go at farming in Artesia. Much safer to be thinking of him than Tom as she launched into the last paragraph of this speech, which she was giving on behalf of the number-three male love of her life. Dick had never quite gotten past her father, and he could not get past the more recent memory of Tom, but, with whatever sadness and difficulty, he still made the list.

“Oh, so do I!” cried Alice Longworth, two nights later, while pointing to the sign:
AMERICA LOVES WHAT THE COLONEL COOKS
. “Go get me some, dear.” She pushed her granddaughter toward the heaping trays of drumsticks and wings inside Gerald Ford’s hospitality suite at the Algiers. The convention’s chairman was giving a reception just prior to the president’s scheduled renomination and acceptance speech.

As Alice waited for her chicken, Florida’s senator Edward Gurney welcomed her to the Sunshine State. With his deep tan and wavy hair, Alice thought he resembled a tennis pro who had just retired to become the hotel gigolo.

“We’re honored to have you here, ma’am.” He gently shook her white-gloved hand and seemed amazed that she was ambulatory. “How did you travel down?” he asked.

“With my granddaughter and my cousin Mr. Alsop over there.” She pointed out Joe, who was chatting up some good-looking lieutenant governor. “We came on one of those planes with the big orange sunburst.”

“National Airlines,” said Senator Gurney, ready to extol the success of the Florida-based carrier.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Longworth. “Marvelous girls. All wearing the most forthright buttons. The one we had in first class had one saying ‘I’m Lynn. Fly Me.’ I asked who’d flown her
lately
, and she seemed baffled.”

“Grandmother, eat your chicken,” said Joanna, back with the plate.

“Marvelous,”
said Mrs. Longworth, biting into a drumstick. “Much better than what Rockefeller had over at the Doral.”

The suite was decorated with blowups of frames from the Wolper campaign movie: Nixon shaking hands with a soldier in Vietnam; greeting Golda Meir; hugging a little boy wearing short pants and a hearing aid.

Gerald Ford, everyone’s host, looked like a happy small-town banker in his blue-plaid suit. He came over to greet Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter.

“Mrs. Longworth,” he said, taking hold of a gloved hand now stained with the colonel’s secret recipe. “Do you remember that we first met at a Republican convention? The one in Philadelphia that nominated Tom Dewey? ‘The little man on top of the wedding cake.’ ”

“I’m afraid I never said that, but
please
continue to give me the credit.”

“I remember your telling me back then that you’d be returning to Philadelphia a few weeks later for the Democrats’ convention, too.”

“I always went to them all. Even in 1912, when there were three.”

“Well, I hope you kept away from McGovern’s this year. You’d have lost your beauty sleep waiting up for that acceptance speech to start.”

A principal theme of conversation among the Republicans was the supreme efficiency of their own convention compared to the Democrats’.

“I should like to lie and say I’d been there—I
love
disarray—but I don’t have enough stamina for two conventions anymore. Did you hear the one about the ticket they really should have settled on?”

The opposition party’s recent chaos had only ended with the replacement of Senator Eagleton—its original, electroshocked VP nominee—by Kennedy relative Sargent Shriver. No, Congressman Ford said, he hadn’t heard.

“ ‘Kennedy and Eagleton: Waterproof and Shockproof.’ Better than ‘A Chicken in Every Pot,’ don’t you think? Have you, by the way, tried the chicken you’re serving?
Wonderful
.”

Ford had declared to the convention that “Truth will be our greatest weapon in 1972.” Bad strategy, Alice now thought. Dick, after all, was the nominee; one didn’t want him playing another man’s game.

“Tell me, Jerry,” she said, pointing across the room, “which of those two Little Lord Fauntleroys has a better chance, four years from now, of taking the nomination from rough, tough Ted Agnew?” She indicated Elliot Richardson and Senator Charles Percy, who were earnestly conferring. Their look of sleek northern
noblesse oblige
seemed odd in this roomful of delegates whose party was moving ever further south and west, picking up more and more hard-edged high rollers as it went, men who loved Agnew’s alliterative scorn for all the pundits and eggheads. Mrs. Longworth looked at Ford, the soul of Main Street moderation, stalled between these arrivistes and those two Brahmins, and waited for him to answer.

“Between you and me, Mrs. L,” he responded, reluctantly, “Elliot is the much tougher customer.”

“I thought that might be so,” she replied.

Ford’s wife and Nixon’s secretary, each of them carrying a fresh drink, were coming over to say hello. Alice allowed Mrs. Ford to kiss her on the cheek and Rose Woods to relieve her of her empty plate.

“My ears are
not
ready for Miss Merman to sing the national anthem,” she said, tapping tonight’s program.

“She can certainly belt,” acknowledged Rose.

“I believe she’s to be released back into the wild after the benediction,” mused Alice, as she looked around the room. “Now where is Sammy Davis, Jr.?
I
want a hug.” A cringe-inducing photo from yesterday’s youth rally, which showed the entertainer embracing the president from behind, was all over the newspapers. “He can grab the same spots on me,” said Alice, patting her chest where her breasts used to be. “No impediments.” In the brief silence that followed, she asked Rose Woods to take her over to Elliot Richardson.

The president’s secretary gave her a doubtful look. Wouldn’t she rather be brought to someone besides that pompous Mister Clean whose loyalty was so suspect? Rose still could not get over Richardson’s nerve in flying out to San Clemente last summer after he’d failed to get his way on some policy decision concerning that zoo of a department he ran. Like Henry, he was forever hinting he might need to resign and take his indispensable self somewhere else.

But Mrs. Longworth was not to be denied, so Rose dutifully piloted the old lady in Richardson’s direction. He had finished talking with Senator Percy and was moving purposefully toward the National Committee’s black-affairs man when Alice reached him and dismissed Rose.

“Mrs. Longworth,” Richardson said, lowering his six-foot frame and square jaw.

“All your press clippings say Clark Kent, but I’d say the resemblance is more to Dick Tracy. Why don’t you complete it by getting some contact lenses?”

“That never occurred to me,” said Richardson, laughing.

“You might see the road better.”

Richardson looked startled. She
had
read up on him. One or two of his magazine profiles had interrupted their admiration long enough to mention his plethora of reckless-driving arrests and the conviction involving alcohol. The writers generally decided that all this was
just the eccentric escape valve of a duty-driven nature, similar to the doodles and watercolors he compulsively turned out. Still, it was unsettling to have her bring it up.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Longworth. “I do make studies of things, generally at the local library. When my cousin Mr. Alsop asked if you and I were related, I realized I didn’t know
anything
about you if I didn’t know
that
.”

“Being related is an honor I would cherish, but alas, I don’t believe it’s the case. Perhaps very distantly.”

He spoke to her, she realized, with the indifferent politeness he’d display to a GS-5 clerk in the elevator at HEW.

“So is it too soon for you to be the next president, after Dick?”

Richardson tried to smile. “The only presidency I’ve ever been mentioned for was Harvard’s, and that was almost twenty years ago. There’s a tradition of precociously young college presidents who wind up serving for decades and decades, but I’m afraid the little boomlet for me was quite artificial—a one-man operation, really. Justice Frankfurter, for whom I’d clerked, kept putting my name forward.”

“What a lot of jobs you’ve had since,” Mrs. Longworth observed. “Elective, appointive, state, federal. My cousin says you’re bound to have plenty more.” She could see from Richardson’s expression that her conversation was provoking the nervousness she always enjoyed inducing in a listener, especially one so assured of his own rectitude. “One shouldn’t, however, have too much ambition without a clear plan, don’t you think?” she concluded.

“Well,” said Richardson, “I’m happy to go wherever I can be of use.”

She made no effort to hide how the answer bored her; immediately she went off on another tack.

“Which of us do you think had it worse?” she asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“My mother died giving birth to
me
. Your mother died giving birth to your younger brother. I was made to feel
guilty
, but you must have felt
angry
—at your brother. Which feeling do you suppose is the harder to bear?”