Watergate (9 page)

As she scanned the list, a good line came to her brain—the kind of ad-lib she sometimes passed on to Buchanan or one of the other writers. She put a card into the Selectric and typed it out:
I want you to know that between now and Election Day
,
you’re the only “Poles” we’ll be paying any attention to
. She went back and twice underlined “Poles,” so the president would remember to pronounce the word strongly enough for people to get the joke. As she put the card into an envelope and marked it for the writers’ office, she realized how automatically she now followed HRH’s filtration system. In the old days she’d always fed tidbits like this one right to the boss himself.

Resuming work on the list, she could feel a late-afternoon contentment finally coming over her, the kind she used to experience during sleepy days long ago on Capitol Hill, when Pat might come in to help out with the mail and answer the phone: “Senator Nixon’s office. Miss Ryan speaking.” They’d take a break and gab a little while putting on nail polish, the same pinkish kind she was applying now, since she wouldn’t have time to go back to her apartment before Don Carnevale picked her up for an early dinner.

They were going to a new French place tonight: La Chansonette. The
Post
had panned it, and that was good enough for her. The two of them would have a fine time, whatever the food turned out to be like, and at a couple of points in the course of the evening, she’d silently remind herself that she was out with a man who over the years had had Clare Luce and Joan Crawford on his arm. The wives of the junior executives could sneer all they liked about her “confirmed bachelor.” As far as she was concerned, Don, a vice president at Harry Winston who’d worked himself up from nothing, was more of a gentleman than the pretty boys they’d married.

At 4:05 she saw the red light that blinked only for calls from the
boss. She picked up to hear the voice that for twenty-two years had come to her as often through telephone receivers and Dictabelts as in person.

“Rose, will you bring in that speech about the meat imports?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, before hanging up and blowing on her nails. She fluffed her hair, straightened her dress, and started on her way, carrying the typescript through the outer office.

“Ready for your close-up?” asked Lorraine.

“I’ll give
you
a close-up,” she answered, pretending to swat her with the rolled-up pages. They both knew that this speech, while real enough, was right now wanted as a prop, something she and the president could pretend to go over while David L. Wolper’s team shot some film for the little movie that would be shown to the convention two months from now.

She found a half dozen aides rubbernecking in the corridor just outside the Oval Office, and a few more who’d been permitted to stand against its far wall while the president cooperated with the production manager in setting up the next shot.

Dwight Chapin, the best-looking of all the junior executives, smiled and made room for Rose inside the office. John Dean whispered a quick hello and goodbye, vacating a spot for Bob Finch, the boss’s old California crony.

The president prepared to sign a document for the cameras. “Anybody you want me to pardon?” he asked, as the paper was moved into place on the blotter. Everyone laughed, and Rose could now see him, emboldened by the joke’s success, going into his regular-guy routine. “I’d tell you to shoot me from my good side,” he said to the cameraman, “but I’m not sure I have one.” More laughter.

The production man nodded deferentially to John Ehrlichman, indicating they’d reached the moment in the script for him to approach the desk for some conversation with the president about revenue sharing and the environment. Ehrlichman chronically griped that the domestic programs he oversaw were ignored by commentators, and even by staffers, who’d rather concentrate on Russia and China and Henry. He could be an even rougher character than HRH, but to Rose’s mind his little resentments and occasional flare-ups were genuine. Ehrlichman
actually believed in a few things, and if he, too, never deferred to her long history with the president, he at least rejected her on a human basis—he simply didn’t like her—whereas Haldeman regarded her as a piece of dust needing to be vacuumed from the transistors.

“I see Rose over there,” said the president to the cameraman, between takes of his supposedly unrehearsed chat with Ehrlichman. “She looks great, doesn’t she? You know, she and Mrs. Nixon sometimes swap dresses.”

Actually, she and Mrs. Nixon hadn’t done that in years. But the theme of thrift, embodied in 1952’s lifesaving cloth coat, was still honored in Nixon speeches and conversations. “What are you girls?” he asked. “Both size ten?”

“Careful, Mr. President,” said the production man. Amidst the general laughter that followed, everyone could detect the sharp cackle of Chuck Colson.

The president reacted to the arrival of his political advisor with a smile, but two seconds after that, Rose saw him signal Chapin, with his eyebrows, that Colson’s presence here might not be the best idea. Chuck was continually being urged to lower his public profile, as if he were a kind of mad relative who needed to be kept out of sight. Rose agreed with Ehrlichman and HRH about precious few matters, but she’d bet they felt the same as she did about the break-in at the DNC: the idea for it had to have come from Colson.

Chapin, having gotten the president’s message, fabricated a bit of urgent business that caused him to touch the political advisor’s elbow and propel him, with a whisper, back into the hall.

It was Rose’s moment to stand by the desk and discuss the text of the speech about meat imports. “Wish we had something a little more momentous to show ’em,” the president said to her, before the cameraman resumed rolling. “Even so,” he added to the film crew, making them feel trusted and important, “I hope you fellows won’t leak any of this before it’s released next week.”

“No, sir.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Good,” said Nixon. “What about zooming in on that?” he suggested, pointing to a page of Rose’s typing, which made the words do a zigzag
down the page, a system of spacing and capitalization known only to the two of them that indicated just the right speechmaking cadence.

“No one will get it,” said Haldeman from several feet away. “It will only confuse people.”

“I guess you’re right,” the president replied, picking up the typescript so that its blank back pages met the eyes of the now-active camera. He tapped the text, made a polite, knowing mutter about a phrase that “could probably go,” to which Rose responded, “Yes, you’re right.”

When her moment ended, she decided to linger by the wall for a bit, and just as she took up her position Kissinger walked in, a genuinely unscheduled arrival. He pretended to regret interrupting and, as the cameraman continued to film, he told the president about his latest, just-completed trip to China.

“Too many banquets,” said the national security advisor, patting his stomach.

“How were the dancing girls?” asked Nixon.

“They were all wearing tunics and carrying rifles. You’ve seen the ballets. It is always like watching the Rockettes invade Normandy.”

Nixon made himself laugh, but then told the production man, “Better leave that on the cutting-room floor. And then make sure you sweep up!”

Kissinger seemed to wonder if he’d made a tactical error.

“You know, Roland,” the president continued, impressing the cameraman by this use of his name, “Rose back there is a terrific dancer. She’s single, too. But be careful. Her brother will have you arrested if you get fresh. He’s a sheriff.”

Joe Woods hadn’t been the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, for two years, not since he’d left the post to run a losing race for head of the Board of Supervisors. But Joe had been plenty helpful on election night in ’68. As the Republican sheriff, he’d been able to delay reports of the count from pro-Nixon suburban precincts. Fortified by his sister’s still-fresh memories of 1960, he’d waited and waited, confusing Mayor Daley, who wound up undervoting the Democratic dead and never made up the shortfall. And thus did Richard Daley fail to steal the state a second time from Richard Nixon.

Rose almost found herself wishing they had an opponent tougher
than George McGovern, a man for whom Daley didn’t even want to turn out the living. (In fact, she and the president would bet their bottom dollars that not only Daley but LBJ himself would be voting for Richard Nixon this November.) What Rose really wanted was a third thrill ride, one last harrowing, protracted hairsbreadth election night, just like ’60 and ’68. Throughout his whole eight years “in the wilderness,” she’d always known that the boss would reach this office. She’d known it even at the most tearful, rock-bottom moment of all, when she was driving her convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway, the morning after they’d lost the governor’s race in ’62, and over the car radio she heard the horrible “last press conference”—
You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore
—which he’d promised her he wouldn’t give.

“Rose,” the president now said, as the cameraman set up one more shot. “You’ll help Mrs. Nixon with her part of this filming, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You know,” he told the crew, “way back when, in California, my wife worked as an extra in the movies.”

Out came the stories of
Becky Sharp
, and while they were being told, Rose’s mind went to another time and place entirely, to the years in New York, between that morning on the Pacific Coast Highway and the start of the ’68 campaign. Pat may have loved that period, but Rose had hated the whole five years. As she sat amongst the Nixons at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, she could feel herself waiting for the day when he would get up and once more be
fighting
, and she would be fighting with him, never giving up, just as she hadn’t given up when they told her she had less than twelve months to live—a high school girl with cancer! She’d fought it and beat it. And she hadn’t given up when Billy, her beautiful, basketball-playing fiancé, went off to the war and was killed. She’d gotten up from her bed of grief, the same way she’d gotten up from the operating table, and come to Washington to start a new life with twenty thousand other government girls.

“You know,” the president said, as the production assistant experimented with a slightly more mussed look for the desk, “Rose more or less hired
me
.”

It was a story he told more often than the tale of Mrs. Nixon’s time on the fringes of RKO.

“Rose was working for the Herter Committee, which was helping to straighten out the Marshall Plan, and I was one of the congressmen on it.”

“The only one,” she now said, completing the story from across the room, “who filed expense reports that weren’t an unholy mess. His were neatly typed and checked out to the penny. I was impressed.”

All eyes turned to her as she continued. Though the staff had heard this story many times, every one of them, except for HRH, smiled. Rose paused, waited a beat, and said, “I suspect Mrs. Nixon had a little to do with the perfect typing.”

The president tilted his head back and laughed, as if hearing the penultimate line of the story for the first time. He then supplied the kicker: “So when I got to the Senate a couple of years later, Rose decided she could stand running my office.”

The laughter might be practiced, but his mood was awfully good, Rose thought. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The
news
had been so good these past few months: China and Russia had been just the beginning. Inflation had fallen below three percent, and the Supreme Court’s abolition of the death penalty, expected any time now, would be one more millstone to tie around McGovern’s skinny neck. What fun it would be to keep forcing him to say he agreed with the ruling.

Her own mood would be better if Bob Haldeman weren’t standing just in front of her. He, too, like Ehrlichman next to him, was noticing the boss’s genuine high spirits.

“So what
is
it?” Ehrlichman whispered.

“He’s relieved to be taking action,” Haldeman replied. “Walters is going to call the FBI and tell them CIA wants them to stay the hell away from investigating the burglary thing. National security.”

Ehrlichman chuckled.

“Mitchell’s idea, actually,” said Haldeman.

Now Ehrlichman snorted. “Even he’s right once or twice a year.” After a pause, he added, casually, “I’ve told Dean to deep-six the briefcase.”

“Briefcase?”

“The one that was in Hunt’s safe.”

Neither of them worried about Rose’s hearing this exchange. They
both knew that when it came to things like this—and there were
always
things like this—her instincts were more ruthless than theirs.

She looked at both their collars, appraisingly, and thought: If someone ever told
them
they had less than twelve months to live, they’d crumble.

Hunt heard Dorothy’s car pull into the driveway. He got up from his desk, covered the half-composed letter in his typewriter, and went downstairs to greet his wife, who had just returned from the Potomac Village Shopping Center.