Watergate (29 page)

“Miz Mitchell, I’ve got five children,” said LaRue.

Martha hooted, and swirled the ice cubes in her drink. “That proves
nothin
’,” she declared. “Though I suppose I do take your point, honey.”

LaRue silently remembered Larrie coming to see him, one night in 1961, a few months after their last time together at the resort property. Over a cup of coffee at a restaurant in Jackson she asked for what she said was “the only thing I’ll
ever
ask you for. A plane ticket to Los Angeles. Round-trip. Open-ended.” He’d gone and got one for her and asked no questions; she wouldn’t have answered them, anyway. Six months later she was back in town, briefly, before her permanent departure for Washington, D.C. He’d often wondered, then and later, whether she’d gotten rid of a baby, or given birth to one, out in California.

Martha detested quiet, and here he was creating some. He looked out into the room, worried that her novelty might already have worn off for the Kennedys. He didn’t want this party to turn into one of her defeats, the kind of crash landing whose debris John Mitchell would be forced to sort through.

Fortunately, that guy who’d joined the Detroit Lions for a year in order to write a book about it was coming toward her.

“I’m George Plimpton,” he said, in a voice that sounded too much like Elliot Richardson’s for LaRue’s taste. “I’d like to meet you, and so would Lee Radziwill.”

Martha lit up and offered Plimpton her hand. While he shook it, she managed to whisper to LaRue, “It’s a little like bein’ offered Princess
Margaret instead of the queen, but hell’s hooley, she
is
a princess,
supposedly
.” To Plimpton, she cried, “Take me to her, Georgie boy!”

LaRue knew he shouldn’t leave, but Plimpton seemed enough of a gent that she’d be safe with him for a while—maybe long enough for LaRue himself to get back downstairs and conduct his business with Mitchell. Then he could come back up, escort her home, and head over to his hotel room, having concluded this whole sorry business trip.

“I’ll be
fine
,” said Martha. “You go check on Mr. Moral Obligation Bond,” she instructed, mocking her husband with mention of the fiscal instrument he had invented before Richard Nixon took over their lives.

LaRue left the Smiths’ apartment after the two bodyguards at the door promised to let him back in.

Reentering the Mitchells’ place proved slightly difficult: no one answered his repeated knockings before he realized that the door was unlocked.

“John?” he called, venturing into the dim rooms. The only response was a faint snore—more of a wheeze, thought LaRue, as he got closer to it. He went into the bedroom and saw Mitchell asleep with the cocktail glass on his chest. He moved it to the night table and took off Mitchell’s shoes: wing-tips, just like the Old Man’s. He covered him with an afghan and put out the light.

Back in the living room, LaRue sat by himself for a few moments in the near dark. He looked out the window that was still open from Martha’s rubbernecking and saw a plane fly by in the winter darkness. He thought of Dorothy Hunt and listened once more to Mitchell’s labored breathing.

“It hurts my sacroiliac just to look at her,” Rose whispered to Lorraine while the two women stood near a door of the Oval Office. It was almost lunchtime, and the president was greeting the Soviet women gymnasts. Little Olga Korbut, whose pretzeled form and grimace had become famous during last summer’s Olympics, had given Nixon flowers.

Hoping she wouldn’t be heard over the applause, Lorraine asked Rose, “Are these girls even old enough to get their period?”

“Probably not,” answered the president’s secretary. “They cheat at arms control; why not cheat at this?”

“Dasvidaniya!”
said Nixon, who marched out of the office while the girls were still clapping. He gently tapped Rose’s elbow, indicating that he needed a word. The gesture had a furtive, emergency quality, making her wonder if, say, the Israelis had just dropped the bomb on Cairo.

“Let me ask you something,” said the president. “We may have a need for substantial cash for a, uh, personal purpose. Do you know how much is around?”

The question knocked her off balance, as did the drained, waxen quality of his face, which she was seeing close up for the first time today. The boss hadn’t looked this bad since that awful week during the ’60 campaign when he’d slammed his knee on a car door and wound up in the hospital with an infection.

“I don’t know,” she answered nervously. “I would have to look. I’d have to get into the safe.”

The president gave her a consoling pat on the arm and walked off to his next meeting, knowing she’d have a look, and an exact count, before the afternoon was through.

Rose knew that he had cleared his calendar to spend much of the morning, before the gymnasts, with John Dean. The president’s counsel
had been scurrying around the West Wing these past couple of days, contributing to Rose’s sense that things had taken a swift, terrible turn. Watergate stories were piling up in the
Post
once more, and the president had been projecting a false and fragile gaiety. Everything was off-kilter: somebody had picked last Saturday night, St. Patrick’s Day, to have Merle Haggard come sing his country songs at the White House, and the president had burst into the East Room, late, wearing a clownish green tie he’d gotten off Freddy, the old man who ran the elevator. He had looked glazed and keyed-up all at once, as if he were stumbling through one of those dreams where you find yourself onstage without any drawers.

On the way back to her office, Rose nudged Steve Bull, one of the president’s youngest assistants: “Let me know when he goes over to the EOB.”

Bull nodded, promising that he’d get word to her. For part of every day, Nixon chose to work inside the vast stone hive of offices next door, where he’d spent much of his vice presidency. Today, however abnormal the atmosphere, was unlikely to be an exception.

Rose ate a sandwich at her desk and thought about how little she’d been out to dinner, let alone lunch, since the second term—so different from what they’d expected!—had gotten under way. She missed Don but wouldn’t let herself get blue now. She slapped the crumbs from her hands and returned her attention to a set of thank-you letters. They were going out to the musicians who’d performed here a couple of weeks ago with Sammy Davis, Jr.—who, come to think of it, wouldn’t have made any less sense on St. Patrick’s Day than Merle Haggard had. There was also a packet of materials to be assembled for tomorrow’s Oval Office meeting of the Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse—what she and the girls kept calling “the pot party.”

She was still working on that at 1:21 p.m., when Steve Bull called to say the president was crossing the driveway and heading to his EOB hideaway.

A minute later she was in the Oval Office. She closed its doors and hit the button on the machine inside the Wilson desk, listening impatiently to the high-pitched squeak of the reels as they rewound the president’s morning. Yard after yard of tape took her back from the girl gymnasts—
Dasvidaniya!
—to the soft-footed ten o’clock entrance
of John Dean. At this point, once she located it, Rose let the tape run forward, keeping its volume low enough not to draw anyone’s attention. There really wasn’t much need for caution: she frequently came in here by herself to organize things, a right of access even HRH had never dared to question.

While she listened, she pitied whoever would be stuck transcribing these things a few years from now. She had always hated working with Dictabelts, but at least they involved somebody’s deliberate, steady effort to make each word audible—not the picking up of all the murmurs and asides that this machine strove to catch. The conversation she now heard was full of stammerings and pauses; the voice-activated equipment had often stopped and restarted while recording it, as if struggling to stay alert.

With his peppy sports car and platinum second wife, young John Dean was less insipid than the rest of the Magruder-style junior executives, but Rose had no particular affection for him, and whatever she did have quickly vanished as she listened to him speechifying on this hours-old tape:

The president cut him off:

She knew better than most that the only thing to do with cancer was cut it out. She could remember perfectly the sense of lightness and relief she’d awoken with on that long-ago morning when she came out of the ether feeling as if some horrible twin had at last been severed from her. But on this tape all she heard was irresolution, a lot of clucking but still a willingness to coddle the cancer, to feed it further. Dean spoke from what she realized had been a lot of rehearsal:

Rose’s ears perked up further. She allowed herself to feel a momentary thrill at this mention of Ehrlichman, thinking that a threat against Haldeman might immediately follow. But the next voice was the president’s—

—to which Dean responded:

She didn’t know anything about Ellsberg or whatever else Dean referred to; her alarm came from realizing that the boss did. Instinct made her reach for her pad, but it wasn’t there, so she opened one of the desk drawers, took out some stationery, and began making a shorthand transcription from the point at which the two men started talking turkey:

She was taking the words down faster than they could utter them, and when she heard Nixon ask,
Don’t you
,
just looking at the immediate problem
,
don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation?
, she wondered if his bashful tone reflected not just his usual dislike of giving any order that implied criticism—in this case, of Dean’s apparent reluctance to do what had to be done—but also a strained awareness that he himself might at this moment be committing a crime.

She now understood the sick look of his skin at lunchtime, understood that this was way beyond the spring of ’70, when all that stood between them and the incensed mob was that ring of empty buses.

Shaken, she returned to her office and the pot-party list. The words ringing in her ear were not the muffled ones on the tape, but what the president had said to her at noon:
We may have a need for substantial cash
.

She couldn’t bring herself to move until it was past three o’clock. Only then did she go to the little room with the safe and reach in for the money, some of it in neatly banded stacks, some of it in wadded fistfuls. It took her a half hour to count up nearly a hundred thousand dollars, her coral nail polish flashing against the bills, over and over, before she put them into three manila envelopes, interoffice mailers whose string ties she looped as tightly as she could.

The envelopes sat on her desk for the next hour and a half, beside the letters to Sammy Davis’s band. If she passed the money on, would
she
be committing a crime? Would the lack of a specific instruction to have done so make her
less
guilty—or more? All her instincts spoke of the danger and foolishness of what she was about to do, but if this was the boss’s chosen course, she wasn’t going to second-guess him. She would do what had to be done, demonstrating even more loyalty and initiative than the great degrees of both already attributed to her. She would take this step even if it lowered her to the level of the Chicago
ballot-box stuffers, the ones who’d prevailed in ’60 and then been thwarted by her brother Joe eight years later.