Watergate (32 page)

“The Gillespies have been aces,” declared Jeb Magruder, in praise of his neighbors. Fred LaRue had been allowed to pull into that family’s driveway, undetected by reporters staking out the Magruder house down the street, and Jeb, who’d been drinking coffee in the Gillespies’ kitchen almost since dawn, was now able to slip into the passenger seat of LaRue’s Chrysler. The older man had called late last night, asking for this talk.

A few weeks ago, after McCord’s letter to Sirica went off like a cluster bomb, Jeb had been the one needing an ear, since he and everyone else knew that the perjury referred to in the letter was his own. He had shown up at Watergate West a couple of times to discuss developments and to express hope that things might—if Liddy didn’t talk—still somehow hold together.

But two days ago he himself had finally spilled things to the U.S. Attorneys, and now he was hearing LaRue say, in his soft, undramatic way: “I saw Dean on Friday. I told him I’m going to the prosecutors.”

Somehow the words still came as a shock, and during the long pause that followed, Magruder snuck a glance out the Chrysler’s rear window. In the street he saw a thick black cable belonging to one of the TV news outfits. It looked like a snake that had escaped from the Woodley Park Zoo.

“Jeb,” said LaRue, “I love John Mitchell. And it’s damn near going to kill me to talk about him. But if I let this go any later, it’s going to be worse for me and just about everybody, maybe even for him.”

Magruder nodded. “I met with Mitchell a week after McCord’s letter. He gave me two pieces of advice. The first was to get a lawyer, and the second was to not tell the lawyer the truth.”

LaRue smiled, even as his head sank a little.

“You know,” Magruder continued, “I gave some thought to suicide.” He conveyed this revelation in the same tone with which he might once have informed LaRue that he’d considered and rejected a direct-mail campaign for the CRP’s Kentucky operation. “The circumstances didn’t really make it appropriate.”

It was the possibility of Mitchell’s suicide that remained much on LaRue’s mind, and he didn’t like hearing talk of that act from Jeb, in whose case it would seem plain stupid.

“I also thought about skipping the country,” Magruder added. “I even had my assistant at Commerce research extradition treaties—who we’ve got them with and who we don’t.” He shook his head. “It was too complicated. And I decided I couldn’t do it to the kids, even if I managed to get them out with me and Gail.”

It all sounded fantastical to LaRue, who had come here this morning to discuss the legal realities in front of them. “I just hired Fred Vinson, Jr., to be my lawyer,” he told Jeb. “You old enough to remember his daddy? Truman’s chief justice?”

Magruder shook his head. The name sounded only vaguely familiar. “You know,” he said again, appearing to be off in his own world, “I really loved that Commerce job. It was supposed to be a waiting room for me until things cleared up and I looked confirmable again, but I think I had my happiest six weeks in Washington there.”

“Things are not going to clear up, Jeb.”

“Oh, I know that now. And here’s a funny thing: once you start telling him the truth, you’ll
like
Earl Silbert. He’s a stand-up guy. On Saturday, when I finally let everything out, I ended up apologizing to him for having lied so long.”

LaRue felt his own mind beginning to wander as Jeb meandered along all these tangents. He remembered being in the CRP office last spring, trying to settle an argument between Jeb and Liddy, almost having to separate them physically. Why hadn’t he told Jeb to fire Liddy then and there? And down at Key Biscayne, when they got to the Gemstone memo in the stack of things to be considered, why hadn’t he told Mitchell in no uncertain terms to get rid of the goddamned idea, along with goddamned Liddy, once and for all? Mitchell had said, “We don’t have to decide that now,” and they had let it go, allowed things to drift—until they’d all washed up where they were now.

LaRue’s best guess remained that Liddy had decided to go into the DNC all on his own, but to this day he had never asked Jeb how
he
thought the thing had actually happened. He wasn’t going to ask him now, either, not when it was so dangerous for anyone to know more than he already did.

He volunteered some gossip instead: “Mitchell says the Old Man wouldn’t see him in person on Saturday. Since then he’s even stopped taking his calls.”

“When did you talk to Mitchell?” asked Magruder.

“Last night.”

“I haven’t spoken to him since I went to Silbert with, you know, the truth. I wanted to call him this weekend, but I was scared Martha would pick up.”

LaRue snorted. “Mitchell says the reporters are sendin’ her flowers and fruit baskets every half hour, tryin’ to get her to come downstairs and do interviews.”

A scream penetrated the rolled-up windows of the Chrysler.

“You get away from my child!” shrieked Magruder’s pretty, well-brought-up wife. “If you have something to say, you come to me! Don’t you
ever
come near my children!”

Both men turned in their seats, and LaRue saw Gail Magruder in the middle of the road, shoving a blonde he recognized as Lesley Stahl from CBS. The Magruders’ boy, Whitney, was soon free to continue walking to school.

“Shit,” said Jeb, “I ought to be out there.”

“She looks like she’s handling it pretty well on her own,” observed LaRue. He wondered, though, how she would do when the reporters were gone and Jeb, along with himself and the rest of them, was off in prison.

An hour later LaRue was downtown, sitting on his usual stool in the waffle shop across from Ford’s Theatre, eating a second breakfast and trying to stir himself toward action. Even after a third cup of coffee, he lingered, and once he left the little eatery he strolled along the streets by the National Archives, becoming curious about whether his rubber gloves and Tony Ulasewicz’s coin dispenser might achieve eternal rest in that building.

It was ten minutes past noon when he called Fred Vinson, Jr., at his office several blocks away, and another half hour went by before the two of them were sitting in front of a team of shirtsleeved lawyers headed by Earl Silbert, who looked like one of those Jews hauled before HUAC twenty years before, with glasses thicker and goofier than LaRue’s own.

“So, Mr. LaRue, you’ve decided you may have something you need to tell us.”

“Yes,” he murmured. Sensing that Silbert
was
a stand-up guy, he felt glad that, unlike Jeb, he didn’t have any courtroom perjury to apologize for. He cleared his throat and began responding to questions on several particular subjects:

About being out in California
,
for the fundraising gala
,
on the morning after the burglary:
“I told Mr. Mitchell about the call Magruder had just gotten from Liddy. That was the one where Liddy said Jeb had better get to a secure phone at the nearby NASA base. I told Liddy I thought a pay phone would be okay.”

About the meeting two days after the burglary
,
in the former attorney general’s apartment:
“Mr. Mitchell thought—we all did—that this sounded like one of Colson’s shows.” To LaRue’s way of thinking, it still did, but there had never been that much to connect Colson to it.

About his own meeting with Liddy
,
a day after that
,
in his own Watergate West apartment:
“Yes, he mentioned the other attempted burglary, the one of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.”

About how
,
on June 29
,
he’d devised a set of code names with the president’s personal attorney:
“Mr. Kalmbach told me this would be a highly secret operation. He said we needed to conduct our business over pay phones, and that we’d both call ourselves Bradford.”

And, finally,
about Key Biscayne on March 30
,
1972:
“Magruder handed a paper to Mitchell. Mitchell read it and asked me what I thought about it, and I told him it wasn’t worth the risk. To the best of my recollection, Mitchell responded by saying something like, ‘Well, we don’t have to decide this right now.’ ”

The questioning went on for hours. Every so often a new shirtsleeved lawyer would come into the room and take the place of another. Eventually, LaRue stopped looking over to Vinson before answering each question. His attorney just kept nodding, indicating that he should keep
talking, should let them pump him like some old oil well that might still have another thousand gallons pooled at the bottom. LaRue realized he had entered the backwards, flip-sided world of plea bargaining, where the more you confessed to, the less you’d wind up being guilty of.

Through a window on the office’s west side, he watched the sun descend, and he heard Silbert ask, “Mr. LaRue, will you be prepared to testify that during a telephone conversation on March the twenty-first Mr. Mitchell instructed you to meet all or most of Mr. Hunt’s demands?”

LaRue gave the only acceptable answer, yes, and as he did he began to cry. Lowering his head and closing his eyes, he put himself, yet again, back in that living room in Key Biscayne. He wondered if Mitchell had kept the plan alive, and he had protested it so feebly, because deep down, in what his wife sometimes called the subconscious, both had known it was the kind of thing that might appeal to the Old Man.

Or had it appealed to something in themselves? To the memory of that afternoon early in the first term, when they’d stood on the DOJ balcony with Martha and looked down at the demonstrators carrying their North Vietnamese flags? The two of them had laughed when Martha called the protesters “the very liberal Communists,” but they had also wanted to spray them with machine-gun fire. Three years later, had Liddy’s array of plots and sabotage operations simply appealed to the bit of Liddy in all of them? The part that longed to pulverize every McGovernite who thought those kids with the flags were okay?

Or was it just the love of the game, the excitement of the foxhole, that had made him spend most of the last few years up here instead of at home with Joyce in Mississippi, tending to his businesses and the lives of his kids? The swirling bowls of the Watergate and the checkerboard floors of the EOB had been an alternative to all that, a chosen displacement from it and from everything that had happened years ago—first in the Canadian woods, and then at Gulf Hills.

After today this strange city would no longer be a choice; it would be a jurisdiction, one he could leave only temporarily, whenever the shirtsleeved men across the table deemed that permissible. He looked at them now, aware that he had told them the truth this afternoon, and aware that, by doing so, he’d likely invited a much older truth—a half-known
and catastrophic one—to break out of the mental compartment where he tried to keep it stowed.

By 6:45 LaRue was having a drink on the balcony at Watergate West, looking down Virginia Avenue toward the Washington Monument, whose sky-high pair of little red lights had not yet begun their nighttime winking. April was more than half gone, but the cherry blossoms lingered on the air, and Washington seemed, as it often and oddly had to LaRue, the most pleasant city on earth.

He had called Mitchell, not ten minutes ago, to tell him where he’d been this afternoon. “I’m sorry, boss,” he’d added, after one of his long pauses.

“You have to do what you have to do,” Mitchell had answered, with no hint of surprise, between puffs on his pipe.

“I’m still sorry.”

And he always would be, whether the two of them ever spoke again or just nodded at each other inside all the committee rooms and courthouses now awaiting them.

The phone rang. He hoped for a second that it might be Mitchell with something more to say, or even Martha ready to scald his ears off.
Is this Mr. Freddy LaRuthless? Mr. Freddy LaTruth?

But it was only the doorman. “I have a message for you, Mr. LaRue. It doesn’t seem to be signed, but it must have been put on the desk here a few minutes ago, while I was on my break. Whoever left it is waiting for you at one of the umbrella tables down in the shopping plaza.”

“No name?”

“No, sir.”

LaRue felt a wave of dread. Was someone down there who knew he’d been with Silbert? Somebody waiting to punch him in the nose? Maybe even shoot him?

If he had a pistol here, instead of just Daddy’s bird gun mounted on the wall, he might take it with him. But when he could at last bring himself to leave the apartment, the only defense he brought along was the self-deception that he was really just going downstairs for a pouch of tobacco, and to see whether the barber shop might be open this late.

He wondered how he would recognize the person, before realizing that hardly mattered. Whoever was there would recognize him. Maybe it would be McCord, still out on bail? Dean? Somebody who’d regard the conversation’s Watergate location as a bit of coincidental black humor? Or would have reasoned that a conspiratorial rendezvous here would be a matter of hiding in plain sight—a case of the purloined letter?

Once in the shopping plaza, LaRue found no one at the tables except a woman with most of her back to him, and two Chinese boys from the restaurant who were having an early dinner before making their deliveries throughout the complex. The woman had long black hair that fell between her shoulders. She was smoking a cigarette and drawing the panels of her cardigan sweater a little closer, as if, despite the evening’s balminess, the weather wasn’t as warm as the kind to which she was most accustomed. LaRue allowed himself to gaze at her shoulders for a moment before deciding that the summons here had been a hoax. He set off to the drugstore to get some tobacco after all.

But the woman in the sweater seemed somehow to recognize his footfall. She turned around in her chair under the big picnic umbrella.

At that point he saw Clarine Lander motion for him to come sit down beside her.