Watergate (57 page)

Haig was coming up the aisle, cheering the troops, and Pat decided she would pretend to be sleeping.

Rose had noticed the chief of staff’s underlying weariness, as well as his new distance from the president. Even so, at one of the banquets yesterday, Haig had told her that their boss—despite the diagnoses of amateur headshrinkers in the press—was actually the sanest of men.
Anybody else would have cracked in two while half the world called him a devil and the other half proclaimed him a Christ. Jaworski had proved as good as his word, telling the press about the “unindicted co-conspirator” designation as soon as he didn’t get his way on the tapes. Every cartoonist had immediately put the president into stripes—and then six days later the Egyptians were screaming their approval of the man who was saving them from the Russians and maybe leading them toward peace.

Rose had yet again resolved: if
he
could keep from going crazy when caught between such fires of scorn and adulation, then she and everybody else could for damn sure hold themselves together. She was hardly in the clear over the tape erasure—the panel of scientists had declared that five separate manual operations had been required to produce it—but “the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap” was just one clod of dirt in Richard Nixon’s mountain of troubles. She would continue to live with her feelings of guilt, continue diminishing them with a constant penance of fear that she could be charged at any time.

Haig reached her seat on the aisle. “You ought to start reading the papers again, Rose. There’s occasionally good news in them.”

“You think?” she said, playfully frowning. “I sometimes sneak a look just to punish myself. And speaking of punishment: What’s the penalty for strangling a committee chairman?” She meant Rodino, who last Thursday had told reporters that all the Democrats would be voting for impeachment—never mind that there had as yet been no public hearings and no presentation from the defense.

“Joe Waggoner counts seventy votes for us on his side of the House,” said Haig.

Rose looked skeptical. Waggoner was one of the boss’s mint-julep Democrats. God love ’em, but they wouldn’t be enough.

“Ford and Harlow agree with him,” Haig insisted.

Rose passed him a caramel. “Don’t try to cheer me up. It’s better if I stay inconsolable. That way I don’t get knocked back down again.”

She’d been struggling to recover her equilibrium ever since the fall, when she’d lost control with the Sony 800B and then with Ed Brooke. She had to keep herself steady, especially if the end really was approaching. She was glad the Muslims hadn’t made a single drop of alcohol available on that long Victorian train ride from Cairo to Alexandria.

Haig walked toward the press at the rear of the plane, leaving Rose and the first lady more or less alone. Pat, now fully awake, seemed reflective. “Dick’s been playing the piano a lot before bed. Or at least he was before we left. Sometimes he seems less depressed by everything than David is. I often worry about David the most. You know, Mamie wants me to go up to Gettysburg, just to hide out for a while, have a rest, gossip.”

“You should go,” said Rose.

“Julie should go. She’s the one who deserves a rest. I can make do just lying in my bathtub.”

Rose laughed, knowing what she referred to: the room the first lady had had, with a half dozen chandeliers, in the Saudi queen’s palace, cooled to what the queen’s major domo thought were American tastes, which is to say freezing. Lest she offend her hosts, Pat had actually slept in the tub for a couple of hours in the middle of the night with every blanket she could find, since the bathroom at least had a little heater. “Starlight sees it through,” she said, mocking herself with her Secret Service code name.

Pat grew a little nervous when they saw Dr. Tkach heading up to the president’s cabin. One night in Salzburg, on the way to Cairo, Dick had finally shown her, along with Haig and Rose, his leg—unveiling it more like a secret weapon than a potentially fatal vulnerability. Over the next days it had been awful to watch him standing up in the limousines that drove them through those tornadoes of cheering, even if the adrenaline probably did more to help than all the hours spent keeping the leg elevated in whatever palace they repaired to later. He’d insisted his condition remain a secret among the small group who knew from Salzburg.

“He’s probably just getting his throat sprayed,” Rose now guessed, as Dr. Tkach disappeared into the cabin. “He sounded awfully hoarse at that last luncheon.”

“Yes,” said Pat, thinking of the twenty-five thousand miles’ worth of recycled airplane air. Part of her husband, she felt certain, had hoped he would die in Cairo—in a more heroic version of what could have happened at the naval hospital last summer. That time history might have said he’d been hounded to death by his enemies; this time, if he’d collapsed in the limousine inside the tornado of sound—the clot having
traveled from his leg to his heart—history would be forced to say he’d died pursuing peace for the world.

At 7:50 p.m., a few minutes after the plane touched down in Caribou, Maine, Pat felt the shock of the cool summer air against her face. She breathed it deeply, ridding her lungs of the plane’s stale oxygen and the Kremlin’s opulent stink. Jerry Ford kissed her on the cheek a moment after Julie did, and then he stepped to the microphones to lay it on pretty thick for the returning boss: “What better way could the American people celebrate our one-hundred-ninety-eighth Fourth of July than with the assurance that you bring of a world that’s a little safer and a little saner tonight than it was when you left. Your strategy for peace, Mr. President, has been bold but never rash, courageous but never foolhardy, tough but never rude, gentle but never soft.”

Pat looked at Ford’s daughter, Susan, a big, athletic, uncomplicated-looking girl, so unlike her own daughters, each of them intense in a different way. She was sufficiently absorbed in the comparisons that she almost missed Ford’s compliments to the boss’s wife: “Mrs. Nixon has charmed and captivated both the officials and the citizens of every country she has visited as first lady.” Well, maybe; maybe not. She never felt she’d gotten anywhere with DeGaulle or Prince Philip. But it was sweet of Jerry to say anything at all, which you could bet was more than she’d be hearing any minute from Dick. And yet that was fine, too. In fact, knowing there would be nothing made her feel a funny surge of affection for him, for the way he’d be keeping faith with the shared reserve that still bound them.

Or was that only what she told herself? It was the truth—and it wasn’t. Just like with everything else. Watergate was enormous, colossal; and it was nothing.

She watched Ziegler and Haig nod with pleasure to each other about the serious-looking military backdrop that viewers must now be seeing on their television screens. She knew what they were thinking: the images would help to placate Dick’s critics on the right, the ones who thought détente was too soft. They were, of course, forgetting the far greater number of people who would just be annoyed by the interruption of their favorite television shows.

Glad to be out of camera range, she drank in the cool—almost
cold!—breeze and wondered why, as soon as they refueled, they had to go straight from here, in July, to Key Biscayne. Dr. Tkach had ordered Dick to swim and to walk the beach, even if he did it in his wing-tips, but surely they could find someplace else for him to get the exercise.

She could see him favoring the bad leg, almost imperceptibly, as he took the microphone from Ford. “To each and every one of you,” he told the welcoming party, “and to perhaps millions who are listening on television and radio, I can assure you of one thing, and that is, it is always good to come home to America.”

He spoke of the last several weeks as if they had indeed been one long trip—“all of these visits were directed toward the same purpose, and they are all interconnected”—and he implicitly pleaded to be kept on the job, reminding the audience of the need to negotiate another arms-control agreement before the current one expired in 1977.

Even at this distance, and from a side angle, Pat could see in his eyes what she had seen in Cairo, as he stood in the limousine amidst the Cecil B. DeMille throngs.
He’s hiding something
, she thought. Something quite specific; and he was hiding it even from her. And whatever it was, he’d been hiding it since early May.

She looked far to her left and saw Rose clutching a rosary, the way she’d been doing on and off for months. The sight made her squeeze more tightly the small, solid-gold shamrock that had been waiting for her on this same plane before it took off from Brasília—months and continents and humiliations ago.

Clarine stared at the flag. Flying at half staff over the Supreme Court, it had all morning puzzled people in the crowd outside, as if the decision they were awaiting had already been rendered—to official disapproval. Then someone would explain, as a man now did to Clarine, that the flag was still flying low out of respect for Earl Warren, who had died two weeks before.

“Ah, of course,” she said.

She had been with LaRue when each of them heard the news.
Go on
,
say something
, she’d told him.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
, he’d replied—the only Latin he remembered from school. But he was the sort of fellow who could say it and mean it. Her own daddy, were he still alive, would have been dancing a jig over the great desegregationist’s demise.

KEEP FAITH WITH MADISON—AND MARTHA
! read the sign closest to her. Most of the others were a good deal graver.

The Court, perhaps within minutes, would hand down its decision about the tapes, and then tonight the Judiciary Committee, over in the Rayburn Building, would start deliberating the impeachment counts. Yes, it was all dramatic, but she was uncertain why she’d come, and still unsure whether a quick departure by Nixon would make things better or worse for LaRue. Before long, whatever curiosity had brought her here felt idle, and she remembered her appointment with the travel agent arranging her tickets to Europe. She would allow herself one more fast survey of the scene, this time from the nearby steps of the Capitol, but that would be it.

A few hundred people—the quietest, politest protesters she’d ever been among—were keeping vigil there. An odd mixture, Clarine thought: lots of Asians and what seemed to be Jews. Then she noted the
signs identifying them with the Reverend Moon and that rabbi who’d gone everywhere defending Nixon for months. Support for the president was now a fringe position. Back home her mother’s minister might not be leading any prayers for the late chief justice, but according to Mamma the sheer
meanness
of the White House tapes, never mind the cuss words, had shocked him.

A pimply white country boy, almost as skinny as his tie, was now telling Clarine that he and his pro-Nixon compatriots had been there all night and would stay until someone from the Unification Church told them to leave. The general feeling of strangeness in the air was being heightened by the president’s absence from the capital. It seemed as if he might already be gone for good, that he might just stay in San Clemente, where he’d been for more than a week, and never come back to resign or face trial in the Senate.

Clarine finally turned away from all the different vigils, so that she could proceed with her errands. More than three hours passed before she arrived home at her apartment, carrying a one-way ticket for a flight to Madrid. It would leave Dulles the morning after Labor Day.

Walking and thinking had tired her, and the humidity had made things worse: there was no sweetness to the liquid air, the way there would be back home. She thought of the May breezes at the Gulf Hills Hotel, where she’d tried playing Hound’s game and nearly succeeded—pretending they were really at the old dude ranch; that the sliding synthetic curtains were still the old fluttering muslin ones; that the garment she tossed on the floor was a shirtwaist dress hemmed an inch below the knee instead of a miniskirt whose Pop Art circles were themselves passé.

Now, standing in her own apartment after a long nap, she poured herself some sweet tea and considered the reasons she had reentered the life of Fred LaRue. Yes, she’d needed to tell him what befell the envelope that had been so long in her custody, but she knew she’d really come back to ease his way toward the prison that awaited him. She remembered the way he’d held on to her during his panic seventeen years ago, when whatever had happened in the duck blind was still anything but MOOT. She remembered how powerful his clinging had made her feel. It was a sensation that she had been seeking ever since, and the likelihood
of Hound’s imprisonment, two decades later for something so different, had drawn her to him.

If she was easing him toward jail, he was easing her out of Washington, now that she had decided she was definitively done with both her second husband and the hapless Democrats—maybe even with miniskirts. Madrid might just as well be Manchuria. It didn’t matter. In fact, thanks to Nixon, she now reflected, Manchuria itself would soon be a bookable destination.