Watergate (13 page)

Richardson smiled thinly. The word “impertinence” was actually rising to his lips, but one could no more deploy it against this famous crone than against some Negro picketing the department for higher benefits.

“My brothers and I,” he said with forbearance, “were raised by a very fine woman who agreed to take us on.”

Yes, thought Alice, the housekeeper who beat you. She spent the next moment or two wondering how she herself might have turned out with treatment like that instead of the gentle ministrations of Auntie Bye.

“We do have one thing in common,” she said at last, causing Richardson, from his great height, to regard her wide-brimmed hat as if it were a fortune-teller’s turban.

“We both dislike doctors,” she explained, knowing that Richardson had declined to extend a six-generation family string of them. “We both knew, early on, what they’re capable of—what they did, or failed to do, for our mothers. After that, you wouldn’t
be
one, and I won’t even
see
one, at least for years at a time.”

Joe Alsop came hurrying over, realizing that Richardson—whom Alice suspected he had a little crush on—might be needing rescue. He also needed to inform them of some logistical fuss. “Those drum majorettes,” he explained, “are going to lead people out to their cars. It’s time everyone was getting to the hall.”

Richardson smiled and gratefully peeled away.

“Mark my words: that man hates Dick,” Alice warned Alsop. “I guarantee it. He’d like to give the whole
world
a beating.”

Joe looked at her dismissively, urging her forward toward one of the baton-carrying girls now trying to conga-line the guests out the door.
GET TO KNOW A NIXONETTE
, said the large bright button the girl was wearing.

“Someone will be flying
her
before the night’s out,” Alice said to Joe.

The president, punctual to the second, begins making his way to the podium, moving between all the agents and advance men talking into their radios. He can swear that there are tears in his eyes: Has all this talk of his “last convention” and “last campaign” gotten even to
him
? No. He can’t stop thinking that the Republican Party remains the world’s largest and laziest Rotary Club; if he can’t get them to nominate Connally four years from now, he’d just as soon see a whole different party with a new name take the GOP’s place.

He’d still love to kick Agnew to the curb and run with Connally this
year, but it has been apparent for months that all the Chevy dealers and country-club lawyers who still dominate things at the local level won’t accept a Democratic convert for the number-two spot. Nor will the party’s new fire-breathers let go of their hero Spiro without a lot of grumbling. So, a week before the Watergate thing, he’d made Mitchell give Agnew the word that he could stay.

The president wipes his right eye. No, it isn’t nostalgia causing the tears; it’s the goddamned Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who even now are only blocks away on Collins Avenue, provoking the cops into firing the occasional canister of gas. He’s seen the news clips; half of them seem to be in wheelchairs, which he bets they need about as much as he does. Colson doubts that most of them have even been in the army, let alone over to Vietnam. If the Secret Service had let them get any closer as he came into the hall, he’d have flashed them the “V” sign, which drives them nuts whenever he uses it in the old Churchillian sense of victory instead of peace.

What really changes the world, he’s been telling Henry and Haldeman all summer, is Tory men with liberal ideas. Churchill had been one of those, and so is he. That’s what took him to Peking and Moscow, and that’s what will propel him through the whole second term.

He is already focused months beyond this moment, so much so that he barely hears the cheering for Agnew’s lousy introduction of him, barely realizes it when he is already a page into his own speech. He has forsaken the teleprompter’s crawl for Rose’s typewritten text with its cues about cadences. He’s already paid tribute to the platform and to Pat and is now telling all the newly enfranchised eighteen-year-olds: “Years from now I want you to look back and be able to say that your first vote was one of the best votes you ever cast in your life.”

If he’d been able, in ’32, to cast a vote at the age of nineteen, he’d have cast it for Roosevelt. He’d thought about admitting that tonight, putting it into this speech, but decided it would get too much play in the coverage that followed. He’ll save it, make it a good story for his memoirs, which five years from now he’ll be contentedly composing, his feet up, a long yellow pad on his lap, the tape recordings from the Oval Office bringing it all back to memory and life.

Hunt listened to Nixon’s speech on the TV in his study. Its reminder that “people on welfare in America would be rich in most of the nations of the world today” pleased his ears. He also liked the president’s refusal to consider McGovern’s precious amnesty for draft dodgers. “The real heroes,” said Nixon, pausing a moment before the predicate, “are two and a half million young Americans who chose to serve their country rather than desert it!” Hunt turned up the volume, wanting to get into the spirit of things, to feel that he was actually in Miami—as he could so easily have been, if things had gone otherwise.

He and Dorothy had gotten home six days ago, after a week in the Keys spent fishing with Bernie and waiting for a reply to the letter he’d finally sent Colson at the beginning of August. Sitting on the dock down there, regarding his fishing rod and line, he’d imagined the four of them—Clarita and Dorothy, too—setting off for Central America by boat, or having one of the
brigadistas
fly them into Nicaragua, where Somoza would almost certainly grant protection and a home.

Then a message from Colson’s secretary had reached them, with instructions for Dorothy to call in from yet another pay phone, which they found by the side of US 1. Colson assured her that they would all be taken care of, that the commitment would be kept. However short it might be on specifics, the pledge had reassured both Dorothy and himself, at least for a while—long enough for him to take a breath and concentrate on things like the deposition he would soon have to give for the Democrats’ civil suit over the burglary. That he was scheduled to give it before Edward Bennett Williams, owner of the Redskins and darling of the
Washington Post
, made the prospect troublesome; he couldn’t imagine Bittman being a match for him.

In the last day or two the vagueness of Colson’s promise had started to gnaw at him, along with Mr. Rivers’s clear hints that Dorothy’s demands were excessive. She and “Tony” were engaged in a continuing test of wills, and his wife feared losing it. At the same time, she appeared intent on going for broke. She was urging her husband to call Colson again, to pressure him so that she in turn could press for larger sums and an extended series of payments, could get more and more, as
much as possible, before the election. How, after all, did these men in the White House expect him to make a living from now on? Did they want him shopping a book proposal? He didn’t even need to write the book; just circulating the pitch would guarantee spillage of the story’s best beans in the press.

Hunt wondered how long Dorothy’s adrenalized energy would last. She’d been up on the ladder cleaning gutters, all over the garden pulling every weed; when would she lapse back into the despondency of springtime? To distract himself from the question, he lifted up the big pink seashell he’d brought home from the Keys and put it to his ear, the sound from its empty heart growing louder, until a particular bit of Nixon’s oration startled him back to life:

“Let one thing be clearly understood in this election campaign. The American people will not tolerate any attempt by our enemies to interfere in the cherished right of the American voter to make his own decision with regard to what is best for America without outside intervention.”

He hoped Bernie was listening, and was understanding the remark exactly the way he himself was taking it. The audience in the convention hall and throughout the country might think Nixon was imagining a North Vietnamese trick—maybe a prisoner release designed to help McGovern—but he knew, and Bernie would, too, that the president was talking about Castro’s money going to the DNC, the very thing they could have established if they’d had a little more time inside the offices before the cops showed up. Nixon was giving the burglars a signal that what they had attempted was important, and that, yes, they would be taken care of—even after the election.

As he listened to the televised cheering from Miami, he decided—once and for all, he told himself—that the commitment Colson had spoken of was real, and that Mr. Rivers’s complaints were no more than the insubordinate grousings of a messenger boy who didn’t know the real story.

That was what he wanted to believe. But the way his mind had been turning and working of late, he knew he might believe something quite different an hour from now.

“Dorothy!” Hunt called down the stairs, wanting to enjoy and prolong
his certainty. He wished in fact that he had turned on one of his study’s several small tape recorders before Nixon had said what he said. But he remembered it word for word, and he needed to share it with his wife. He called her name once more and added,
“Buenas noticias!”

Fred LaRue, sitting on a spare folding chair with his state delegation, read no special meaning into the Old Man’s warning about foreign interference in the election, but he did experience a moment of satisfaction over the presidential promise to keep appointing tough-on-crime judges—a pledge that surely wouldn’t hurt his own dealings with southerners on the Hill.

LaRue looked over at the big vertical state standard—MISSISSIPPI—and imagined Clarine Lander trying to seize its equivalent for the liberal insurgents at the Democrats’ Atlantic City gathering, back in ’64. He’d still been trying to get over Larrie that summer, when he went to his own first convention, all the way out in San Francisco. When Rocky came to the Cow Palace’s podium, all the mad-for-Goldwater delegates had had a ferocious go at their nemesis, screaming, “You lousy lover! You lousy lover!” to this fantastically rich governor who’d just divorced his wife to marry his mistress. LaRue had joined in the shouting, and even if his own yells were scarcely louder than another man’s murmurs, he’d been shocked to hear them come out of his mouth. What he felt toward Rockefeller wasn’t so much anger as identification and envy. By Mississippi standards, Fred LaRue was a very rich man, but he had not been able to spirit Larrie away from her own life and into his.

Tonight, eight years later, Rockefeller had actually put the Old Man’s name in nomination, making their long rivalry seem very far back indeed. Which made the time of Clarine Lander seem long ago, too. None of the men he was here in Miami with had been part of his life in the years when she drove all his thoughts.

Mardian, Dean, Magruder, and Colson—looking god-awful in his Bermuda shorts each afternoon—were all here, but at no point tonight had he spotted a one of them on the convention floor. Even by day, instead of being anywhere near the activities of the ethnic “heritage groups” and special-interest caucuses, they could be found by the pool
at the Doral, ordering drinks and talking about the effort to keep a lid on Watergate.

They were now all pretty sure they’d done that. Magruder, after hours of coaching by Dean, had lied his way through a second grandjury appearance only last week, and two days later had gotten word that his name would
not
be among those being charged when the indictments came down, probably in the middle of September.

The agreed-upon story, that it had all been Liddy’s harebrained idea, and that no one else had any clue, seemed to be taking hold not only in the minds of the prosecutors but in the heads of half the guys peddling it from the White House and Committee to Re-Elect. The youngest of them, so eager for promotion, were lining up to testify to all kinds of stuff they knew nothing about; they just asked for a script. And once they recited it, they more or less believed it.

The night Magruder got his good news, the two of them had gotten plastered. Jeb, experiencing a sentimental moment, had looked him in the eye and said, “You know, Fred, we’re not covering up a burglary; we’re safeguarding world peace.” To which he himself could only reply, “Jebbie, you’re going to have one blue-ribbon motherfucker of a hangover in the morning.”

If Magruder knew how the burglary had actually come about, who ordered it, he’d never told him. And maybe, of course, he
didn’t
know. Not knowing the exact truth was another thing that made the lying easier; it created the possibility that some of what one told the investigators just might
be
true, like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day.

“I thought he was the best man for the job four years ago. I think he is the best man for the job today. And I am not going to change my mind tomorrow!”

The president had gotten to the point where he was talking about Agnew, and his jab at the Eagleton fiasco had everybody on their feet for what must be the twentieth time. LaRue was standing with them, but this mention of “the best man for the job” and the supposed constancy of Nixon’s affection made him think of the man who was no longer at the head of the Committee to Re-Elect, and nowhere to be found here in Miami.