Watergate (38 page)

Pat didn’t know what to say. The pipe, the hassock—somehow it all brought to mind not Dick but Tom, whom she badly needed.

“Mother, he asked us if he should resign.”

Pat shook her head in disgust, not at Dick’s tormentors but at Dick himself. “What did you say?”

“We said, ‘Don’t you dare!’ of course!”

She lit a cigarette. “He was just letting off steam, Julie.” And, she thought, extracting testimonials to his worth and valor from his own daughters. She wanted to go back into the living room and tell him:
For God’s sake
,
do that with Bebe; do it with Kissinger—but don’t do it with the girls
.

Her anger was caged but flying, like the doves at the reception yesterday afternoon. One of them had nearly gotten out.

“What do I say the next time he asks?” wondered Julie.

Pat crumpled an empty bag of chips and threw it into the garbage pail.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

Hidden beneath the pitifully thin pillow with its volume turned low, Hunt’s radio could make itself heard to his own ear without disturbing the snores of his cellmate or drawing attention from the lights-out guard. At ten p.m. the news announcer was still offering tidbits about last night’s POW dinner, making Hunt wonder, not for the first time today, whether his own time in jail might eventually exceed the median figure served by men in Hanoi.

It was his first night here in Danbury. He’d been transferred up to Connecticut early this morning, in leg irons. The new prison promised to be a vast improvement over his D.C. dungeon. It had light and air and even a baseball diamond. But he’d been told to expect plenty of trips back to Washington, as a kind of commuter in chains, whenever the DOJ and Senate investigators needed to summon him. They’d have to rely on his memory, since his own papers were mostly destroyed or subpoenaed—whatever had been in the EOB safe; his desk in Potomac; his box at the bank; the file cabinet at Mullen.

Mullen! Bob Bennett’s CIA-front consulting company, its offices one block from the White House and across the street from the CRP, suddenly came to mind.
Had
he taken everything out of there? Everything from his
own
filing cabinet, yes. But another, empty one there, which had belonged to nobody in particular, now formed a picture in Hunt’s consciousness. He reached beneath the pillow and turned off the radio, trying to think back to the night of the
first
break-in.

He was soon remembering a small armload of stuff that Bernie had foisted upon him and that he had dumped, the following Monday, in the bottom drawer of this other file cabinet, which had contained nothing but some broken staplers and a bottle of aspirin. He’d intended, once he got the chance, to sift through the material for anything that might interest Liddy, and, ultimately, Mitchell. And now he realized:
it was still there
.

He’d forgotten all about it, the way that sometimes happened with him, with anyone. Not as some subconscious act of incrimination
—Pay to the Order of Lakewood Country Club
,
$6.36
—but authentic forgetting, pure and simple. They had soon after gotten so busy planning the
Watergate reentry that he had never thought of the stuff in the drawer, not until this moment. Now he found himself sweating with the prisoner’s panic, the sudden bolt-upright, middle-of-the-night terror that something is out of place, that confiscation and punishment will arrive with the guard’s next footsteps.

He fought down the surge of fear, tried to will the perspiration back into his body. Whatever Bernie had swept up was probably junk—“MOOT”? Hadn’t that been the word on the envelope? Anyone who found it, two or three years from now, would toss it away after a moment’s head-scratching.

“I haven’t dictated in years!” said Mrs. Longworth. “It will be thrilling.”

The girl had arrived at nine a.m. sharp to pick up the recipe Alice had agreed to contribute to the Kennedy Center’s fundraising cookbook, which was overdue at the press. Mrs. Longworth had promised something suitable for the category “Tea After the Matinee” and sworn that she would have her typewritten submission ready to collect, but naturally she didn’t. So she’d proposed dictation, handing the girl, who didn’t know shorthand, a cracked pencil and a tablet of paper brittle with age.

“I used to dictate my
column
,” she explained. This syndicated rival to Eleanor’s “My Day” had not lasted long; the editors were always cutting and caviling and deciding she’d gone out of bounds. Of course, that was decades ago, and Alice realized that this girl, poised with ancient pencil over ancient paper, had a very sketchy idea of who she was. The thought displeased her.

Janie called from downstairs: “You’re going to be late! Mr. Alsop’s outside in a car, with a driver, and the motor’s running!”

The housekeeper’s order to hurry slowed Alice down further. “Read me Jackie’s,” she said to the girl, who pulled from her folder Mrs. Onassis’s typewritten directions for “Risotto with Mushrooms,” suitable for an “Early Dinner Before the Concert.”

“And Mamie?” interrupted Alice, before the girl could even get to the beef marrow and onions in Jackie’s list of ingredients.

Further rummaging of the folder revealed that President Eisenhower’s widow had sent a dessert recipe for “Frosted Mint Delight.” It called for a lot of pineapple juice and whipped cream.

“Revolting!” cried Alice. “Couldn’t be worse if you topped it with a hair from one of her
bangs
. All right, I’m ready.” She cleared her throat:
“Bread and butter,” she said solemnly. The girl headed the paper with these words, and Alice continued: “Buy very good unsliced bread; cut it into very thin slices with a very sharp knife; then butter it with sweet butter.”

The girl looked up.

“Did I go too fast for you?” asked Alice.

“Well, no, but—”

“Good, I’ll telephone later if I think of anything else.” She gave a little off-with-you-now wave, and picked up a page from Wednesday’s
Post
, which lay open on the couch. So gripping was the drama being provided by young Mr. Dean that she had been reading—even underlining—Joanna’s copies of Kay’s rag, and hardly bothering to cover her tracks. She had, for example, put a large red circle around one transcribed exchange between the Ervin Committee’s chief counsel, Mr. Dash, and the Tortoiseshelled Tattler, as she now liked to call the bespectacled young star witness:

She had put
two
red rings around a later bit of interrogation—Senator Talmadge asking the TST why he hadn’t told Dick, right from the start, that everyone in his employ was trying to cover up the break-in:

And the reply!

He made it sound as if they were a battalion of ants in some skyscraper, not allowed to get on the same elevator with the boss. For heaven’s sake, she could remember old John Hay, Father’s secretary of state,
bursting
into the office to talk about his problems just after
she’d
burst in to discuss her own. There was no more barrier to his getting in than there’d been forty years earlier, when he was just little Johnny Hay and Lincoln’s
private
secretary.

It was the
strangeness
of Dick’s operation, not any misconduct, that had her shaking her head. When it came to accusations, she
preferred
not to believe Mr. Dean—but first she needed to see the Tattler in action, even if the opportunity for that depended on Joe trundling her in and out of the Senate Caucus Room.

“How long are you going to keep him waiting?” scolded Janie, who’d come upstairs after showing out the Kennedy Center girl.

Alice gave her housekeeper a hard look.

“It’s twenty to ten,” said Janie, whose patience with the old lady’s nonsense went only so far. “And from what I hear on the radio, Senator Ervin likes to start on time.”

Reluctantly, Alice accepted the other woman’s help in getting out of her chair, into her hat, and down to the first floor. Once out the door, she called hello to the people at the bus stop, a few of whom recognized her. Joe’s driver then assisted in getting her into the back of the big black car. “Thank you,” said Alice, crisply, as if forgiving an imposition.

Alsop wouldn’t even speak to his cousin while the car cleared Dupont Circle on its way east toward the Russell Building on Capitol Hill. In the space of two minutes Alice saw him take three nervous-Nellie looks at his watch. It was now a quarter to ten and he was worried, even with reserved seats in the Caucus Room, about their having to fight the crowd.

“I thought it was
thirty
transfusions that you’d supplied,” said Alice, breaking the silence.

“It was,” replied Alsop, confirming the number of blood donations he’d made to his still-dying brother. “It’s been going on longer than a year now. Just like this goddamned thing.” With the back of his hand he slapped the
Post
’s front page of Watergate news.

“Well, from the expression on your face, Joe, it looks more like
sixty
drainings.”

“You should see Stew.”

“Don’t want to. Too depressing. And I’m sure he doesn’t want to see me.”

“You saw what he wrote? ‘A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep.’ And the doctors say it could go on for
another
year.”

Alice decided to change the subject. “Tell me, why am I not on the Enemies List?” The existence of an actual roster of the president’s foes—people to be denied White House invitations and perhaps audited by the IRS—had come to light during Tuesday’s questioning of Dean.

Alsop gave her a worried look. “Because you’re his
friend
. You know, I’d be concerned that you’re going through second childhood if it weren’t fully apparent that you never left your first.”

Alice ignored the insult. “I concede that it’s a long shot, but not beyond possibility. Bobby was my friend, and if he’d gotten in in ’68, I’m sure he’d have had such a list, and I’m sure I’d have done something to put myself on it by now. And we’d
still
be friends.”

Alsop remained silent. He was weary of her monkeyshines.

But Alice plowed on. “Bella Abzug and Mary McGrory! Putting
them
on it. Could anything be more obvious? Aside from all else, I can’t believe the
fuss
over this list—as if Dick isn’t entitled to hate people.” She paused briefly, before asking, “Why are you
so
gloomy? Apart from letting yourself be tapped like some maple tree?”

“There’s this nephew of Susan Mary’s who’s coming for a long visit,” said Alsop, with a sigh. “The two of them are great pals, and I can’t stand him. He also can’t stand me. They’re going to chatter and whisper without letup, and I think he’s going to convince her to leave me at last.”

Mr. and Mrs. Alsop had held on so far—even gone to China together after the election, thanks to the
homme sérieux
—but Susan Mary still had the option on that apartment in the Watergate.

“And I’m gloomy about having to go look at
him
,” Alsop added, meaning Dean, whom he’d described in print, even before his testimony began, as “a bottom-dwelling slug.” A marathon “opening statement”—245 pages—and three days of questioning had not changed Joe’s mind. He clung to a piece of logic he had put into his column a few weeks ago: “What is against one’s interest is always credible. So they have to be believed if they say, ‘The President knew nothing and ordered nothing.’ ” He was talking about Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and
Colson—all of them apparently ready to say just this, even if it made people believe that they’d been covering up at their own initiative—and were thus
more
guilty than if they’d just been carrying out orders. Dean, inconveniently, was saying something else, but Alsop hoped that its manifest self-interest (confession in exchange for leniency) would be obvious. And, in the absence of independent evidence, how exactly could Dean prove that he was
not
a bottom-dwelling slug?