Watergate (17 page)

They had a short after-dinner receiving line for her to work, and that would be it. In twenty minutes she would be back on the plane, sitting down with the Taylor Caldwell novel right where she’d left it in the cabin.

Would he come through the line? Two of the first dozen hands she shook belonged to men wearing the little gold pin that signified their gift of at least a thousand dollars to the campaign. A couple of nuns now approached, an old-fashioned pair like the ones she remembered from the Bronx, not the habitless girls of today, all big on abortion and against the war.

As the line moved and shortened she felt her heart beginning to pound—whether from relief or disappointment she couldn’t be sure.

“What a beautiful green your dress is!”

“Thank you! I couldn’t have worn anything else. Not tonight—not to this!”

Like the queen, she always wore bright colors, never black, though she didn’t do it to help the people in crowds struggling for a glimpse of her. It had started with the trousseau for her Mexican honeymoon. She did it for Dick, who’d seen nothing but those awful black Quaker dresses growing up. His mother had
still
been in them the summer she died, only five years ago, the same summer she herself had had to give up Tom.

And there he was, right in front of her: a pair of blue eyes instead of brown ones; a jaw that was firm instead of jowled. Not Dick, but Tom, with his slight, good-natured Irish paunch, a man not forcing himself to eat cottage cheese for lunch.

“Thomas Garahan,” he said, extending his hand with a big grin.

She smiled and gave the Secret Service man the usual signal, a gently cocked head, to indicate the need for a private word with the person coming through the line. There was always someone special, often recently bereaved, and the agent would take them to a nearby little room that had been secured for this purpose, while Connie told the next people in line that Mrs. Nixon would be back in just a minute.

“Victoria.”

“Roger.”

They didn’t embrace, just sat down on the kind of tufted bench you found in a powder room. By themselves for the first time in five years, they looked at each other.

“I keep thinking I deserve only half of that crystal platter,” she said. “You know, my German mother.”

“It’d still be big enough to hold a piece of pie.”

She laughed, thinking there was nothing in their words or expressions that couldn’t have been exchanged in the receiving line.

“Well,” he said. “I held out for as long as I could. Then a couple of months ago I decided I was going to throw caution to the winds.”

“Oh?” she asked. “What made you do that?”

“That gesture you made down in Miami. Brushing back some phantom hair that wasn’t even out of place. You never do that unless you know I’m looking.”

She laughed, remembering how this used to thrill her—hearing a man apply his shrewdness to her psychology instead of to a realignment of the nuclear superpowers.

“I was hoping for a blush,” said Tom. “I’m not wrong, am I?”

“You watched the convention?”

“Of course I did. I watch every piece of film the evening news runs of you. You should tell Agnew to let up on the network guys a little. They’ve shown some very pretty pictures of you out West.”

Now she was blushing and avoiding his gaze. “Kids okay?” she asked.

“The finest of fettle. Both married off, same as yours. Saw you dancing at Tricia’s wedding, too. I would have cut in if I’d been there.”

She laughed. “He really is the worst dancer, isn’t he?”

“I took a vow, you’ll remember, never to criticize him. But Herbert Hoover could cut a better rug.”

After a moment, she asked, “You want to hear about holding out?”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve twice written notes to Rose Woods saying ‘Put Mr. Thomas Garahan of New York City on this or that invitation list’—Boy Scouts, cancer, one or another of your good works. Nobody would have thought twice about your being there.” She paused. “And I almost sent them to her.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good. Whenever I was with you, I hated seeing a third person in the room, let alone three hundred of them.”

She thought that she would give anything for it to be five years ago, noontime on a weekday, the two of them sitting over plates of spaghetti at Gino’s.

She touched his hand and looked down at her lap. “I’ve got to get back out there.”

He stood up, took both her hands, and gently brought her to her feet.

She laughed as soon as she noticed his thousand-dollar-donor pin.

“Kiddo,” he said, “the things I do for you.” He added, softly, “But I promise I won’t pull anything like this again.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“I won’t need to next time.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll be the one who does.”

“Tea, please,” said Elliot Richardson to the waiter coming around with coffee.

Clark MacGregor, the former congressman who’d replaced Mitchell as CRP chairman, was giving a long-winded update on the campaign to an assembly of Cabinet secretaries, senators, House members, and “surrogates”—speakers, some of them Cabinet wives, who would keep stumping the country for the next four weeks. The event was more a rally than a serious strategy session; many of those in the room had not seen one another since the convention in Miami. While MacGregor remarked upon the health of the campaign’s budget in Ohio and Indiana, Richardson waved to Jerry Ford and a cluster of House Republicans. Trapped between Kleindienst and George Shultz, he guessed that he was even more bored than they.

A glance over at Ehrlichman showed the president’s domestic advisor to be hard at the doodling habit he shared with the HEW secretary. It was about all they had in common. Richardson now recalled the day last fall when Ehrlichman had had him over to the West Wing to suggest broadly that Nixon would be considering him for the vacant Supreme Court seat—which soon enough went to Rehnquist. The conversation had been designed to ensure that, while he hoped and waited for the seat, he wouldn’t offer congressional liberals any concessions on the administration’s welfare-reform bill, which even Richardson would have admitted was surprisingly liberal to begin with.

MacGregor now remarked that things looked very good in Kentucky.

At least this wasn’t a meeting of the Cabinet. During those, Richardson wore himself out trying to find the sweet spot between grandstanding and too-evident boredom. He almost missed the presence of Mitchell, who used to give Nixon a discreet signal, no more than the shake of a wattle, when the president began to ramble. Even so, Richardson
could never forgive the former attorney general for joining Nixon and Agnew in what he regarded as a three-way humiliation of him a couple of summers ago. Just after he’d left State for HEW, he’d had to listen to each of them, right there in the Cabinet Room, insisting that the South be let down easy when it came to desegregating the schools—as if he’d started flooding the region with carpetbagging bureaucrats!

Henry, with his Cabinet rank if no Cabinet position, would have witnessed the spectacle had he not been traveling that day, just as he was absent from this morning’s moribund show. Was he in Paris or Saigon? Perhaps even Hanoi? Richardson knew they were struggling to get Thieu to accept a settlement, and that a handful of men in this room, the ones working on it, were divided about whether it would be better to get a deal before the election or after. The latter school of thought held that an announcement of peace just before the country went to the polls would look phony. “So what’s your point?” snorted those from the opposing school. Richardson wondered which school Nixon himself belonged to.

The president finally stepped up to the microphone to shouts of “Four more years!” While others roared the campaign slogan, Richardson just murmured the words, with enough of a smile that a distant lip-reader might think he was joining in for real.

After a few tortured football metaphors, Nixon began assaulting the
Washington Post
’s recent story of how some kid named Segretti, a pal of young Mr. Chapin in the West Wing, had been hired to perform some pranks, “dirty tricks,” against the Democrats running in the primaries last winter.

“Yes,” said Nixon, mocking the
Post
’s connection of Segretti and Chapin as fellow USC almuni, “it sounds like a grand conspiracy to me. I’m wondering if they’ve questioned O. J. Simpson about it.” He got a big laugh with that—and an even bigger one with what followed: “Come to think of it, Mrs. Nixon went to USC as well.”

The president now emphasized how there had been, in contrast to the Truman and Johnson years, “no
personal
corruption in this administration,” his stress on the adjective creating an unfortunate suggestion that there had been every other kind. He ended his pep talk by promising that the election would represent “the last burp of the
Eastern Establishment.” This of course got a tremendous cry of approval, but Richardson refrained from applauding. He locked eyes for a moment with Bill Rogers, his old boss at State, who seemed to be thinking the same thing: the Establishment doesn’t burp, even when dying.

The long pointless session was at last over, and the troops began a slow shuffle through the too-few exits. Richardson found himself standing next to Ehrlichman, like two schoolboys frustrated by the lunch line at Milton Academy.

“You know, Elliot, just yesterday the Old Man was telling me that every Cabinet ought to have at least one future president in it.”

Richardson pretended to smile. “I wonder who he believes that would be now that Connally is gone.”

“Oh, I think he meant you, Elliot. He said this just the other day, satisfied that we were filling the bill.”

“Well, there’s no sweeter smell than the perfume of flattery.” He wasn’t going to fall for it a second time from Ehrlichman.

“The president intended no flattery, believe me. There was only ‘fear and loathing’ in his voice, as our countercultural friends like to say.”

The remark was a serious insult, not the towel snap it might have been if uttered by, say, Mitchell. Ehrlichman knew that all the job switching and musical chairs bound to take place after the election would be a mere warm-up to the jockeying to succeed Nixon himself. Richardson maintained his smile but fixed his gaze on the narrow backs of the two Haldeman flunkies who were shuffling forward an inch or two ahead of him.

“Dean thinks he’s going to be an ambassador,” said one to the other.

“I know. When you pass his office you can hear him playing how-to-learn-French tapes.”

“If he has to stay here, he’s supposed to become the new Colson.”

“Where does that leave the old Colson?”

“Same as before—with Nixon reporting to him.”

As the two of them laughed, the bottleneck still showed no sign of clearing. Richardson turned his head and saw Rose Woods, who’d actively detested him since his uninvited visit to San Clemente last summer, when he’d actually succeeded in getting her boss to change his mind about something.

Rose, too, was listening to the Haldeman boys, the kind who were dispatched as spies even to White House parties. The morning after, some poor dress-uniformed Marine on the social staff would be terrified to get a memo reprimanding him for something inappropriate he’d been overheard to say while waltzing with a secretary from the Costa Rican embassy.

As the line finally began moving, Rose fell into step beside nice quiet Fred LaRue. Before they could say hello, Colson and Magruder cut in front of them, much to her annoyance—though Magruder, whom Colson regarded as unqualified to run a candy store, let alone a campaign, had no choice in the matter. Colson was squeezing his elbow, propelling him, insisting the press needed to know that McGovern had recently insulted Katharine Graham. “They asked him about what Mitchell said”—that the
Post
’s publisher had better keep out of Watergate lest she get her tit caught in a wringer—“and McGovern, for once taking off his preacher’s collar, responded by saying, ‘Having seen her figure, I don’t think there’s much danger of that.’ ”

Rose asked LaRue, who looked awfully low, if
he’d
heard that.

LaRue didn’t want to comment on a sexual remark, even if the lady had brought it up herself. He replied in a whisper: “You know, Mitchell says that Colson’s constituency consists of the president’s worst instincts.”

Rose bristled for a moment—long enough to make clear she didn’t think the president
had
any bad instincts—but then she laughed. She knew that Colson’s ability to absorb hours of the boss’s ventings made HRH’s life easier; the provision of such a service was reason enough for her to dislike Colson too. The line was moving fast now, and the only other word she heard out of Colson’s mouth was “Hunt,” before she strode ahead of him toward the West Wing.

Back at her desk she found a stamped, sealed envelope with a cobweb of black handwriting and a return address that she recognized. Alice Longworth was one of the few people—Mamie was another—whose letters didn’t have to go through “the system,” so long as there was somebody in the mailroom sharp-eyed enough to spot them. Haldeman wasn’t interested in Mrs. L, but the letter’s evasion of his maw still pleased Rose, as if it were a secret message flung over the battlements without the castle’s ogre having noticed.