Watergate (42 page)

“Oh, this one’s much more interesting,” said Nixon.

“How so?”

“Forrestal.” The president made a swan-dive motion with his arm, refreshing Haig’s memory of how Truman’s just-fired defense secretary had jumped from the hospital’s tower in 1948. A nervous breakdown? Probably; though there were darker suppositions, too.

The chief of staff knew that the Hiss era remained the principal frame of reference for most things on Nixon’s mind, but it bothered him that the president should know the exact location of Forrestal’s jump.

Noticing the look on Haig’s face, Nixon changed the subject. “Johnson told me that Kennedy’s autopsy was a botch, and that there wouldn’t be half these crazy conspiracy theories if the doctors had done a better job.” The president paused for a moment, waiting for a change in Haig’s expression that didn’t come. Then he shrugged. “I’m just surprised Kennedy didn’t get up off the table. Years before, I lost count of how many times they gave him the last rites and he bounced back. Christ, I remember being over in the Senate Office Building in ’54, while he was in New York getting his back operation. They didn’t think he’d make it,
and this was at a time when the majority kept going back and forth and I kept having to break ties. One geezer after another, theirs or ours, kept dying. Styles Bridges, a real bastard from New Hampshire, one of ours, organized a little cocktail party in a basement office when he heard that a priest had been called to Kennedy’s hospital room. I managed to skip it.” He took another sip of coffee. “I can imagine the glasses that are now being raised whenever my temperature rises half a point.”

For a moment Nixon appeared almost comfortable, like somebody telling old football stories, and in this expansive instant Haig felt an urge to say:
Give it up. Don’t force yourself through the hellish months ahead. Go home and write your memoirs. Take the tapes with you. If you resign
,
they’ll let you have them
.

“Do you think the Secret Service have a second copy?” Nixon asked. “Of the tapes,” he added, after seeing Haig’s surprise.

“I doubt it, sir. There’s barely enough room in the EOB to store the ones we have.”

“You know, Al, when it comes to that March twenty-first tape, hell, somebody could
add
, if need be, a line that has me telling Dean not to pay any more money, or has me telling him to get to the bottom of things. I mean, they say some of Kennedy’s autopsy photos are fakes.”

Haig did not want to pursue this line of thought. “There’s always the possibility you’ll win in court with the executive-privilege argument,” he replied instead.

“No,” said Nixon. “Everybody on the Supreme Court, including our own appointees, will want to be lionized by the liberal press. ‘Great victory for the rule of law,’ et cetera. ‘Courageous conservatives’ and all that jazz.”

Haig nodded.

“I never wanted the goddamned thing,” Nixon said softly. “Johnson had a system, not quite as elaborate, and I had it ripped out, like the damned high-pressure shower nozzles he had. The water coming out of them could knock you back to California.
We
were going to preserve things by just asking everybody to submit memoranda of whatever meetings they were in—or whatever meetings they were assigned to witness between me and somebody else. And you should see what we used to get, if they remembered to turn in anything at all. Showboating,
incoherent crap. So Haldeman came up with this instead—creating a record automatically.”

“Well, it’s gone now, and—”

“There’s so damned much that’s
not
Watergate on those tapes. Anyone who listens can hear that it was one percent of this presidency. Which ought to be reason enough to save them.”

Haig murmured agreement, though he knew that for the past several months the figure was nearer one hundred percent than one.

Nixon closed his eyes and continued speaking. “I’ve been remembering a record my brother Harold made for my mother, not a month before he died, in Los Angeles. There was a place on Sunset Boulevard that you could go into, step up to a microphone, and come out with a hard waxy record you could play on any Victrola. Harold made one singing ‘Street of Dreams,’ and he was going to give it to Mother for her birthday. He died before he could. So when Mother’s birthday came around, I went to get it from the closet shelf where we’d hidden the thing, and found out that my old man had gotten rid of it. ‘Morbid,’ he called it. And there went the last trace of Harold.”

“You’re tired, Mr. President.” It was the only thing Haig could think of to say.

“Yes,” said Nixon, opening his eyes. His thoughts had begun chasing, overriding, and recycling themselves—probably an effect of the medication. But when he looked through the window, at the deepening nighttime darkness, he knew with finality that he would keep the tapes. Inertia would win: he would fight for them in court, however hopelessly, rather than trigger a vast convulsion—and maybe impeachment—by their destruction. He himself had always loved the big play, the bold move, but he didn’t have the crazy courage to light Connally’s bonfire.

He looked at the window ledge and thought of Forrestal in
his
pajamas. With a surprising sadness, he realized that he also lacked, at least for now, whatever strange bravery it would take to leap from the window.

“Al, I’ll let you know in the morning.”

Out on the balcony with her second cup of coffee, Clarine was reading
The Optimist’s Daughter
. Over her first cup, she had told LaRue that the book’s author, Miss Welty, had once years ago stopped into the Jackson law firm in order to have something notarized.

LaRue had only nodded. He and Clarine weren’t due at the Montgomery County Detention Center for a couple of hours, but he was considerably more nervous than she about the visit they’d be making there in order to pursue a scheme of Clarine’s devising.

A scam was actually more like it, and as its execution approached, LaRue could feel the need for a couple of strong pops. But he resisted: it was only eleven a.m. and he had to do the driving. In her thirty-eight years, Clarine had experienced little trouble navigating the world, but she had never managed to obtain a license.

Her plan had been formulated a few weeks ago, while LaRue was back in Jackson. She had clipped a review of Howard Hunt’s latest novel from the Books section of the
Washington Post
and then written to the novelist in prison, saying that she, unlike the reviewer, did not regard Hunt as “a loser with a humid fantasy life who was subsidized by the American taxpayer.” In addition to expressing her enjoyment of
The Berlin Ending
, Clarine’s letter mentioned a longstanding and entirely untrue interest in the life of King Zog, the Albanian monarch whose exile Hunt and the CIA had long ago tried to manage. In fact, she’d told Hunt that, after years of working among lawyers and politicians, she was writing a biography of the late king, who she understood from recent press reports may long ago have commanded his attention. She included a picture of herself and signed the letter with her full, real, and almost-never-used name, Helen C. Lander.

Clarine had told LaRue all of this over the phone, while he was in
Jackson trying to make a first round of repairs on his family life. That work was difficult, since he was also contemplating what roles prison and Clarine Lander might play in the life ahead of him. During his time at home, the television had provided a steadily unsettling background music: Jeb Magruder had taken his turn pleading guilty to obstruction of justice; and on a trip to New Orleans, Nixon had succumbed to accumulated frustrations by giving his press secretary a hard shove in full view of the cameras.

Considered against everything else, Larrie’s caper seemed fraught with unnecessary peril. Her hope was to wangle a prison visit with Hunt, and to explore—delicately, she promised—whether the MOOT envelope might have gotten scooped up during the first burglary of the DNC. She had reminded LaRue that, if it had, there was probably no way Hunt could connect him to it: an initial letter from their Canadian contact—she distinctly remembered its arrival, along with Ike LaRue’s bird gun—had promised that the investigators would communicate about the “incident” without mentioning any names or any identifiable circumstances.

The whole idea was mildly crazy, thought LaRue, but Larrie would not be deterred.

And then she’d gotten a reply from Hunt, the envelope from Danbury sporting a new “Progress in Electronics” stamp that some wit in the prison PO had sold to the convicted wiretapper. The letter said that Hunt would enjoy meeting her at the Montgomery County Detention Center outside Washington, his prison home away from home, where they had him stay whenever he was needed in the capital for testimony before a grand jury or committee. He was pleased to say that Miss Lander, as a reader and fellow writer, was permitted to visit him. Only journalists were not allowed, and even that restriction was breachable:
Time
’s David Beckwith had gotten in by saying he was a lawyer—which he was.

So that’s where they were due, at the “MCDC,” at one o’clock. LaRue wished they were already on the road, and his nervousness only increased when the phone rang. But as soon as he recognized the caller to be John Mitchell, gloom replaced his jitters.

“I’ve got a new telephone number to give you,” said the former attorney general.

LaRue wrote it down.

“I’m at the Essex House, but it’s a private line,” Mitchell explained.

“Does that mean what I think it does?”

“Yes,” said Mitchell.

While Clarine continued to read and smoke out on the balcony, Mitchell informed LaRue that he had finally left 1030 Fifth Avenue, and Martha, after she’d smashed a mirror in the apartment and brushed Ajax onto his oil portrait. If her drinking got any worse, he could expect to have his actual face assaulted.

“Okay, pal,” was all LaRue could manage to say. He was touched—and god-awfully sorrowful—that Mitchell should want to maintain a thread of connection to him, a man making things worse for his old boss with every visit to the special prosecutor’s office.

LaRue hung up thinking yet again that he himself might have kept Watergate from ever happening—if down in Key Biscayne a year and a half ago he’d just raised his voice of protest a couple of decibels and said they would be nuts to give Gordon Liddy one thin dime.

Clarine stayed calm as could be all the way to the Detention Center. LaRue sensed folly in what they were doing, but he was soothed by the spell of her confidence. There was also this to consider: Risky as her retrieval operation might be, was it any worse than allowing that old investigative report to float free in the world? And, aside from all else: however peculiar Clarine’s scheme, participation in it kept him from the kind of brooding he had done back home in Jackson.

“You got your alibi?” he asked her. He was worried about the warden and the guards, no matter that the visit had been approved.

“I’ve even got my lipstick,” she replied, putting on a fresh coat of it once he parked the car.

As it happened, no one asked her a single inconvenient question. The guard in the visitors’ room stayed mostly out of earshot and let her sit across a small table from Hunt, without even a wire mesh between them. The inmate was permitted to bring a folder of papers with him. Even so, despite such leniencies, Clarine could now say she understood what prison pallor is. Hunt was even thinner than she had imagined;
he bore no resemblance to any of his fictional heroes and fantasy projections.

“It’s very good of you to see me, Mr. Hunt.”

“I was delighted to get your letter. I thought it discerning and very generous.”

“How are you getting on here—and up in Connecticut?”

Hunt laughed, hoarsely. “It’s a long commute, and I’m not exactly on the Eastern Shuttle. Handcuffed in the back of a van, you know. I’m more or less a professional witness these days, like one of those doctors whose career consists of testifying for the insurance companies.”

“Are you writing another novel?”

“Kind of you to ask,” said Hunt. “But no. Not at the moment. I’m at work on two pieces of nonfiction. The lesser of them is my opening statement for the Ervin Committee. I’ll be testifying the week after next.” He extracted several sheets of paper from his folder, as if they actually were the pages of a novel-in-progress and he was asking an admirer if she’d like to hear any of it. When Clarine indicated she would, he recited the following passage from the statement he was preparing:
“I have been incarcerated for six months. For a time I was in solitary confinement. I have been physically attacked and robbed in jail. I have suffered a stroke. I have been transferred from place to place
,
manacled and chained
,
hand and foot. I am isolated from my four motherless children. The funds provided me and others who participated in the break-in have long since been exhausted.”

Clarine shook her head sadly, without overdoing it, the kind of gesture that had once made a drama coach at Bailey Junior High School tell her she could go far. “And your reviewers accuse
you
of having no sense of proportion,” she said.