Watergate (24 page)

As dessert started coming around, people shifted a little, and Pat squeezed an extra chair for herself between Dick and Mrs. L, who had
been their first dinner guest in the Residence, along with J. Edgar Hoover, back in ’69. The first lady smiled at the steward when he remembered to bring Alice tea with brown sugar instead of coffee.

“Well,” said the president, “this is a lot more fun than the dinner we had for the Cabinet two nights ago!”

Pat tapped Alice’s skeletal left arm and said, so that everyone could hear, “I’ll bet Mrs. Armstrong wishes you’d been at that one, to give her a little feminine support.”

From what Alice could see, Mrs. Armstrong didn’t require any.

“Mrs. L,” asked the president, “how long have you lived in Washington? ”

“Seventy-one years and three months,” she replied. “I keep waiting to see if I like it.”

“Do you think you can convince Julie and David to stay? I’m trying to fix up something for her on the East Wing staff.”

“Daddy,”
said the president’s daughter.

“But then what would you do with Sugarfoot?” asked Alice, startling the table with her use of the Secret Service’s code name for Tricia Nixon Cox. “Or is it
Mister
Sugarfoot you have plans for? Putting him on your legal team perhaps?”

Nixon could see that Mrs. L was revving up for some playful conversation about Watergate, so he decided to get out in front of her on the subject. “You know,” he said, stealing a joke of Kissinger’s, “if McGovern had given a few more speeches about the scandal, he would have made people
like
wiretapping.”

The ensuing laughter included Kissinger’s, and when it ended, Nixon added, quietly, “You’ll see. We’ll come out of this just fine, the way we did with the Hiss case.”

“Yes,” said Alice, “but you were the
investigator
on that one.”

Nixon pretended to laugh. “It’ll end in victory is all I meant.” He then made a sharp change of subject. “We’re having all the inaugural balls inside government buildings next month, Mrs. L. No hotels, except for the kids’ thing at the Sheraton Park. It’ll be a lot cheaper and we can entertain a lot more people. I just hope it can hold a candle to 1905.” He flashed her what he hoped looked like a flattering smile.

“The only inaugural ball of my father’s that I can remember is the
impromptu one my brothers and I had when McKinley was shot and killed. We danced a jig upon realizing that we, and, incidentally, Father, were now going to the White House.”

Pat burst out laughing. Mrs. Armstrong shook her head and pretended to be scandalized. “Children,” she said.

Alice quickly corrected her: “The others were children. I was seventeen. My pleasure was quite adult.” She looked around for a moment and realized that they were dining in what had once been her bedroom.

The president returned to the subject of his inauguration. “The parade’s going to be shorter. We’re going to tighten the distance between the bands and floats.” Everyone except Alice nodded politely. She was stupefyingly bored and remained so until a sound penetrated the silence at the table and made her break into a huge grin. “I
hear
it!” she cried. “They mentioned it on the television!” As the others watched, she started tapping the tablecloth with her knife, matching the drumbeat from Lafayette Park.

Pat looked down into her coffee cup. The current atmosphere, unexpectedly, was beginning to resemble the spring of ’70, when that ring of empty buses had seemed all there was to protect them here. The military’s prediction of heavy plane losses over North Vietnam was proving true. If the bombing operation kept going, there would soon be, along with all the cries about civilian casualties, accusations that Dick was only adding to the number of POWs rather than forcing the release of those already held. Even so, he’d told her he was prepared to have them fly five thousand sorties if that’s what it took to break the North Vietnamese once and for all.

“Haig is over in Saigon, pressuring Thieu,” he said now, trying to remind everyone that he had to deal with the South’s intransigence as well as the North’s. He looked straight at Alice, hoping she would stop the business with her knife. He ignored Kissinger, though his remark seemed to imply that Henry ought to be in Vietnam with his deputy, doing the heavy lifting instead of sitting here stuffing his face with Christmas cookies. Nixon’s reflexes were urging him toward a joke about Hanukkah, but Mrs. Longworth spoke before he could make it.

“You are
not
to worry,” she said, “about all the noise down the street.”

After observing a general perplexity, she clarified her pronouncement.
“Not
across
the street. Not the drum.
Down
the street: the Congress, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Honestly, she sometimes felt as if she were talking to a fish tank.

“They’re already yelling their heads off,” Nixon acknowledged. “But I’m
not
worried about them. I’ve got worse problems even closer to home.” He finally looked at Kissinger, whose phone calls to and from the press he’d been monitoring ever since the Italian interview. The president laughed. “Henry says it may not be so bad if the North Vietnamese think I’m crazy. What do
you
all think?”

Alice brightened considerably, as if a parlor game had just begun. “Are we talking about your actual craziness or their perception of it?”

“I don’t care if that’s what they believe,” said Nixon, with a measure of the same delight in mental gymnastics. “And I especially don’t care if the Russians and Chinese think it. Let ’em. They can push the North Vietnamese into a settlement before they
all
have a wider war on their hands.”

Kissinger retreated into conversation with Mrs. Armstrong and Julie, while Pat, getting good and depressed over the war’s new life, returned to the other table to take care of Admiral Moorer and his wife. She hoped that Howard K. Smith, the ABC anchor who was also there, hadn’t been hearing any of this.

With everyone else otherwise engaged, Nixon now had Mrs. L to himself, and he began explaining to her how in the coming days, down at Key Biscayne, he hoped to be photographed on the beach looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “That’ll infuriate the Democrats, but it’ll dismay the North Vietnamese and Thieu—and that’s what’s important.”

“An
homme frivole
,” said Alice. “If only on the surface.”

He didn’t know exactly what she meant, but understood she was playing on the Alsops’ term for him.

“How is Stew?” he asked.

“Drinking Joe’s blood,” replied Alice. “And it’s pretty thin gruel. Now, listen: I want to talk to you about a different one of my relatives. My nephew Kermit. We call him Kim. You’ve met him.”

“Several times.”

“Well, he knows your Mr. Hunt from days gone by.”

Only now did Nixon remember the letter she’d sent back in October. “Is he sure he’s
our
Mr. Hunt and not theirs?” he asked. The burglary had been such a fuck-up that the president had wondered, more than once, about the possibility of double agentry.

“I’m afraid he
is
your Mr. Hunt. It’s wishful thinking to believe otherwise.”

Nixon nodded.

“Kim’s story involves King Zog!” She loved just saying the name. “Do you remember him? He looked a bit like Paul Muni. He was the president of Albania before he made himself king, sometime in the late twenties—long after my time.”

“A president who became a king. Something I can look forward to?” asked Nixon, grinning.

Alice gave him a scolding look. One did not gain a reputation for wit by swinging at the easy pitches. If Dick really was an
homme sérieux
, this would be a good moment to focus on what she was trying to tell him. “They attempted Zog’s assassination on fifty-five separate occasions,” she said sternly. “One time he even shot back.”

It was Nixon’s turn to grow impatient. He wanted her to get back to Hunt, whom he’d been concerned about since the plane crash. Colson thought he was the type who might become unhinged.

“Kim knew Hunt in Cairo,” Mrs. Longworth explained, “during a period in the fifties when Nasser was preparing to give exiled old Zog the boot. Farouk had been kind to him, and that was reason enough for Nasser to be otherwise. It fell to Kim and Hunt to plead the case for his being able to stay. In the event they failed, there was a place waiting for Zog on Long Island. Muttontown! You know, when we lived at Sagamore Hil—”

Nixon knew Mrs. L well enough to understand that, with a story of this nature, she would be grateful if he brought her back to the point. “What was Hunt’s exact part in all this?”

“Forgery!” cried Alice. “He concocted some cables showing why the Israelis hated Zog for one reason or another—thinking that, in Nasser’s mind, the Jews’
dis
like of Zog would trump Farouk’s approval of him, and that Zog would thereby get to stay in Egypt.”

“Didn’t do the trick?” asked Nixon.

“No,” said Alice. “And when he got thrown out, Zog wound up going to France instead of Muttontown. But the episode convinced my nephew that Mr. Hunt can be very creative, and that he has a tendency to start believing in his own fantastical ruses.”

She could see Nixon’s eyes moving. The president was remembering the cables that Hunt had been forging in order to pin the Diem assassination on Kennedy. Dean had found them in that damned safe.

Alice continued: “Kim says that his and Mr. Hunt’s former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, is rather worried about being tarnished if its name gets bandied about at the burglars’ trial.”

Nixon hesitated. He would love to be able to tell her about his and Haldeman’s own attempt to use the Agency in this matter. Days after the break-in they’d passed word to the CIA that it needed to shut down the FBI’s Watergate investigation, on the grounds that a serious probe might open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, given the history of Hunt and his Cuban cronies. The ploy had been a good one—it might have made the whole goddamned thing go away—but after a moment’s worth of cooperation, Helms, who was slippery even for a spy, had balked.

“The point is,” said Alice, who had been watching Nixon resist the temptation to spill these beans into her lap, “the OSS—sorry, CIA, I’m dating myself—were worried that Hunt might try something foolish even
before
his wife died in that crash. That’s why I wrote to you last month. His superiors gave him a long leash for many years, let him write his books and so forth, but he was judged an odd duck even by that collection of very odd ducks. Indeed, to hear Kim tell it, Mr. Hunt is odder than Kim himself, and that’s saying plenty. Their former colleagues are currently agitated by one element of Mr. Hunt’s mentality that they’ve been very aware of from years of observation. A very dangerous and rather unusual facet.”

“What’s that?” asked Nixon.

“He loved his wife. Inordinately, I would say.” She paused, before adding, “Don’t be surprised if some new ‘document’ turns up and changes this little Watergate calamity into something even worse.”

Alice decided to let the president chew on this.

Her chief exasperation was with herself. She’d scoffed at the prankish
burglary back in June, but had adjusted her thinking since. She wondered if Dick had adjusted his. She looked over toward Kissinger, still chatting up Mrs. Armstrong, and decided that, after ignoring him all evening, she ought to say at least something. She beckoned him to lean across the table, and when he was within whispering distance, she asked, in a voice no lower than her usual one: “Tell me, Dr. Kissinger, did you and Rockefeller ever trade impressions of what it was like to sleep with Mrs. Braden?”

Howard Hunt explained, in flat tones, that “critical commitments made by high officials of the United States government” had simply not been kept.

William F. Buckley, Jr., responded with a quizzical grin, as if wondering whether his guest might be thinking of something other than the subject at hand. Hunt was not on
Firing Line
to discuss Watergate; the subject was U.S. policy toward Cuba, and he was appearing together with the exile Mario Lazo. Both of them were explaining the Bay of Pigs.

It was decent of Bill—that bright boy Hunt had supervised in the Agency more than twenty years ago—to fly him out to San Francisco for the taping, if only to take his mind off Dorothy and try to ease the terrible depression that all Hunt’s friends knew he had fallen into. Even the small appearance fee would be helpful, but the invitation to be on the program was also Bill’s way of reminding people that Howard Hunt had had a career before Watergate, that he had done important and honorable things with his life. The court’s permission for him to make this trip, while he was between conviction and sentencing, seemed to validate that idea.

Buckley raised his eyebrows—a signal for Hunt to lift his voice above a murmur as he finished detailing the CIA’s long-ago efforts against Castro.

Like Buckley, Mario Lazo seemed determined to help Hunt out, venturing as far into Watergate as the other man’s legal situation would allow. Specifically, he managed to work in a suggestion that Castro’s regime had been funneling money to the Democratic Party, the reason for the break-in that Hunt had given Bernie and the boys eight months ago.