Watergate (19 page)

The president guessed that what she had to impart wasn’t so much fresh information as her shrewd assessment of different persons’ motives. It would be all worth listening to, but it was hard to tell—Mrs. L being such a creature of whim—what degree of urgency really attached to this preview. She herself said it could wait until after the election, so he would not press for anything now. Still, he wouldn’t forget to ask once he saw her.

He went over to the writing table, where he would answer her, fountain pen for fountain pen. Unscrewing the cap of his old Waterman, he looked out the window, toward the south, at the winking Washington Monument, and wondered: Would he have made it here without Mrs. L? Maybe not—not if she hadn’t told him to fight all the Stassens and Herters trying to get Eisenhower to drop him in ’56. He thought back to the January after all that, when she’d come by herself to the house on Tilden Street, just hours after they’d all been at Rock Creek Cemetery burying that odd, stuttering daughter. Paulina: only days before she’d been alive, with her own little girl on Twenty-eighth Street, crazy with religion and still mourning that queer drunk of a husband she’d had.

Nixon remembered Mrs. L making it clear, once she arrived at the house, that she wanted to talk only to him, not Pat. Mrs. L, however ashamed she might be over her failure as a mother, was implacably convinced that the death had been an accident—no matter the
Post
’s report about the girl’s having swallowed a bottle of pills. He and Bill Bullitt had gone to see the insurance company, which because of the newspaper story wouldn’t pay out. When, after a little persuading, they did agree
to pay, Mrs. L demanded that the
Post
retract their story. Which of course they did not.

Odd, thought Nixon—looking back from the window to the blotter and writing the date at the top of the page—how coldly rational the old lady could be about everything but this. She’d always regarded the little task he performed with Bullitt—let alone what he’d convinced her of that night on Tilden Street—as heroic. She’d spent the last fifteen years making things up to the
grand
daughter, redeeming the cruel botch of an upbringing she’d given her own child.

He addressed the envelope and put it on the table from which it would be picked up and sent on its way in the middle of the night. Then, heading
to his bedroom, the long day over at last, he found himself wondering: What if she
had
meant an actual, specific piece of intelligence—and not just her opinion of things?

But what could she really know? And when could she have come to know it?

Pat Nixon turned around to wave through the car’s rear window. The cluster of poll workers and teachers outside Concordia Elementary began receding as the presidential limousine pulled away. The Nixons had just cast their votes, at 7:10 a.m., too early for any children to be at the school—a small miscalculation that would deny the campaign some warm, last-minute imagery from San Clemente. But Pat now realized she would never again have to worry about such a thing. Over the next four years there would be plenty of hands left to shake, but not one of them would belong to a voter she was trying to sell on Dick Nixon.

They were heading back to the house for a couple of hours; a flight from El Toro would take them to Washington in time for dinner. For the moment Dick was as quiet as herself, looking out at the Pacific and thinking. But after a minute he pointed toward Red Beach and told her, “When I was swimming out there yesterday, I realized the tide was farther out than I’d ever seen it.”

Pat lit a cigarette and began humming “Ebb Tide.”

“Think it was a bad omen?” the president asked.

She playfully swatted his hand. “You’re acting like Lincoln, pal. Seeing signs and symbols everywhere.”

Dr. Hutschnecker, her husband’s intermittent psychiatrist, had long ago told him that dreams were not portents, that they were always about the past and never the future. Dick could usually remain persuaded of this, and on occasion, at the breakfast table, would even sift through one of his dreams like a set of election returns, breaking down the details as if they were precinct reports. His talk of dreams with Hutschnecker was the only part of his sessions with the headshrinker that he ever revealed to her, and she wished he wouldn’t share even them. They seemed to invite the reciprocation of some intimacy that was beyond her to give.

She now pointed to the sandstone cliffs and the giant peace symbol that early in the administration had been painted onto one ridge near the house. The lines of the circle and arrow were faded now, barely discernible, and she took their disappearance to mean not that peace was fading—it was still “at hand,” in Kissinger’s phrase—but that the war itself, especially the one at home, was at last going away.

As the car reached the driveway of La Casa Pacifica, Pat couldn’t help telling herself, for all its seeming self-indulgence, that peace was at hand for her, too. The girls would be coming to the fore; Martha was gone from Washington; for all she cared, the photographers could catch her smoking now.

“Let yourself relish it, Dick,” she said, patting his hand.

It was 10:30 a.m. in the East when Howard Hunt, returning from the polls, pulled into his driveway in Potomac, Maryland. He had feared that the firehouse where he voted might be staked out by photographers on the prowl for “irony.” As it turned out, the TV stations and papers had lacked the cleverness or manpower to send anybody, but early this morning Hunt had decided he would run whatever gauntlet he had to, since this could be the last election in which he exercised his franchise for quite some time. If the trial went badly, he would be stripped of his civil rights—in the strict, old-fashioned sense of that term.

He had voted for Nixon and Agnew, feeling no enthusiasm for the ticket’s junior partner, who’d been as crooked as any other Maryland governor. Sustained by the belief that Colson would yet come through, Hunt had summoned up a small degree of gusto for Nixon himself.

Dorothy did not share the feeling. Recent payments to “the writer’s wife” had been pitifully meager. After the Cubans got their cut, barely enough remained to meet the mortgage, let alone Kevan’s tuition at Smith. Dorothy’s summertime fervor, that adrenal emergency, had been replaced by alternating bouts of anger and depression.

He would spend the rest of the day working on
The Berlin Ending
. He was about twenty thousand words from finishing the novel, though he’d yet to figure out a way to wind up the plot. After ascending the stairs to his study, he opened the door to his wife’s bedroom just widely enough to find her still under the covers, still asleep in her nightgown.

“Mr. Secretary,” said the voice coming through the intercom. “Mrs. Richardson called a little while ago. She could only get car service at nine-thirty tonight—earlier than you both wanted, I know. She asks that you figure on having dinner together a little before you’d planned.”

“Thank you,” said Elliot Richardson, whose frown would have been imperceptible to his assistant even if she were in the same room. He had let his after-hours government driver take Election Day off, forgetting that, with the thousands of people heading to one party or another, private cars would be at a premium tonight. He wanted to arrive at the Shoreham with Anne just before Nixon accepted victory, no sooner, and one of the CRP’s precision drill teams had assured cabinet secretaries that that would happen a few minutes after midnight.

Nine-thirty. Oh my
. Richardson did not believe he could stand being in that hotel, amidst the madding crowd, for more than two hours. But if he suggested to Anne that they take their own car, she’d insist that she drive or that he not drink, neither of which possibilities he approved. He would need a stiff one to get through ten minutes of just Nixon himself, and more than that to bear two hours of all the delighted-with-themselves little Magruders—let alone Sammy Davis, Jr., and Sinatra, whose presences at the Shoreham were promised in this morning’s
Post
.

“I’ll call Mrs. Richardson in a bit,” he at last replied through the intercom. As soon as he released its lever, he made a decision: he and Anne would not go at all. They would stay home and he would complete one of his bird watercolors, part of the series he was doing from photographs. For all he knew, impolitic absence, a refusal to kiss the presidential derrière up on the dais of the Shoreham, would actually improve his standing with Nixon.

The half-finished watercolor was not exactly the study of a soaring hawk. Richardson had gotten it into his head that all the highest-level appointees would be expected to supply the chieftain with a little gift commemorating the reelection, something to match the tie clasp or cuff links that would no doubt be coming their way from the president, and toward that end he had begun creating a customized tribute, a painting of a prothonotary warbler, the little yellow-chested, blue-gray-winged creature that long ago had allowed Congressman Richard Nixon to
connect Alger Hiss to Whittaker Chambers. The warblers that nested by the Potomac would now be heading south for the winter. Did they, Richardson wondered somewhat preposterously, hate themselves for always coming back to Washington?

“You want my
thoughts
?” Rose Woods asked Theodore H. White.

“Yes,” the author said. “What you’re feeling on this day of days.”

“I’m feeling,” said Rose, “that I’d better get the president’s speech typed.” The clocks aboard Air Force One had been set forward to eastern time, and even so said only two p.m. It was hardly yet urgent for Rose to push the boss’s brief victory remarks through her IBM, and she realized that her reply to White had come out harsher than it needed to. Still, she couldn’t help herself. She’d read his book about the ’60 campaign and knew that he’d later cooked up the whole Camelot label with Jackie Kennedy; she didn’t see why they had to let him on the plane. But history, of course, trumped everything with the boss, and having White here to write about an imminent landslide was a way for Richard Nixon to further outrun Jack Kennedy, twelve years minus one day after he’d lost to him.

White smiled and began to move away.

“Maybe later?” said Rose, trying to sound conciliatory.

The president was in the plane’s open area, alternately chatting and dozing in a seat beside Haldeman, two away from Kissinger. “Peace is at hand,” Rose muttered to herself, thinking she would believe it when she saw it. As of now, Henry still had two doves in the bush and
nothing
in his hand. There was no sign of Pat, who must be asleep in her private cabin. Rose had hoped for an invitation to dine with the family tonight, upstairs in the residence, but
que será será
. Nothing was going to dampen her spirits. As it was, she had an invitation to Alice Longworth’s election-night party, and as soon as the boss was through at the Shoreham she was going to make a beeline over to Dupont Circle. She’d make sure to have one or two belts beforehand, because the old lady served very little booze. Mrs. Longworth liked the conversation sharp, and Rose hoped she could oblige.