Watergate (36 page)

He didn’t reply.

“After your pals got caught,” she continued, “everyone at the office beavered away looking for anything that might be missing. Almost nothing was, except from me. And I wasn’t going to tell them what it was.”

“The envelope?” asked LaRue, with the same nauseated sensation he’d had upon hearing of the plane crash.

“Yes.”

“Why do you think they took it?”

She laughed. “What did those peabrains expect to hear when they tapped Larry O’Brien’s telephone? That he prefers the Caesar salad at Duke Ziebert’s to what he can get at the Sans Souci? Who
knows
why they took it?” She paused. “I’ll tell you what I think happened, Hound. If you listened to McCord’s testimony this morning, you know that Hunt was never on the DNC premises, not the first time they went in or the second. Well, maybe the Cuban who was photographing things in my desk saw this big ol’ envelope marked MOOT and decided it looked too thick to photograph page by page, but too interesting not to show to Big Chief Spy, Señor Hunt, back in his hotel room next door. And maybe Señor Hunt, having written one too many of his novels, thought MOOT sounded like a code name for something, and so he put the envelope in his pocket, thinking he’d look at it later, when things were a little less frantic.”

“So where do you think it is now?” asked LaRue, automatically, as if talking about something to which he had no personal connection.

“I have no idea,” said Clarine. “Someplace as unlikely as an airport locker?” She reached for Dorothy’s pin and began to twirl it between her index and middle fingers.

LaRue wondered if the envelope might be in the prosecutor’s office, ready to be thrust toward him at some crucial moment he hadn’t figured on. Or maybe it had been in Hunt’s White House safe—before going up in flames in Pat Gray’s fireplace, when the hapless interim FBI director fulfilled Ehrlichman’s wish to get rid of the safe’s contents. Could it even have been in the little pile of stuff Mitchell asked Jeb to burn just three nights after the burglary? Perhaps he himself had failed to notice the envelope amidst those transcripts and memos that
Jeb almost left behind when he rushed off from Mitchell’s apartment to play tennis with Agnew.

Or maybe it was still intact, in Hunt’s own desk out in Potomac, the contents waiting for their new owner to return from prison.

“Do you know how much I detest ‘Mr. President’?” asked Clarine.

“I think I do.”

“No, you don’t. There were moments, like Cambodia and Kent State, when I thought I might
open
that envelope and see what the Canadians had had to say all those years ago about your daddy’s mishap. If it were bad, I reasoned, well, Jack Anderson might be interested in knowing what manner of man Mr. President had on his staff. Might be interested in runnin’ an item that would put one little dent, just a BB’s worth, in the presidential hide. Hound, I’d have been willing to ruin your life just to make Mr. President endure one uncomfortable page-twelve story.”

LaRue didn’t flinch. He himself had thought about something like that happening. He hadn’t been able to relieve his mind of the thought that the envelope’s contents might be worth a small something to the Old Man’s enemies, enough to let them wreck his own life as heedlessly as Larrie claimed she’d been willing to do.

“If you felt that way, why’d you come here?” He almost said “back” instead of “here.” Staring, he pressed for an answer. “Why’d you come here last month?”

“Because I heard you’d just been to the prosecutor. We hear everything in the office.”

“And?”

“I came to warn you. I decided I didn’t want you to get any more than you deserve.”

She looked at the coffee table, lost for a moment in these second thoughts. After lighting another cigarette, she fastened Dorothy Hunt’s pin to a ruffle on her blouse.

“Ignore the scandal, think of the country!” said General Haig, playfully tapping the shoulder of a new West Wing typist Rose was introducing him to.

The president’s secretary was crazy about the new chief of staff, and she now invited him to step into her office for a few minutes prior to the eleven a.m. Cabinet meeting. The boss was running a bit late in any case, taping a Memorial Day message for whatever radio stations in the South and Midwest would bother to play it.

Rose poured Haig some coffee. Neither of them had had anything like enough sleep last night, but for once the reason was joyous. The welcome-home dinner for the POWs had brought a thousand guests to the White House, and a handful of couples continued dancing until a quarter to five in the morning. The smell of a dozen extra corsages—bought for the men’s wives and mothers with the Nixons’ own money—still filled Rose’s office. As Haig shook some Cremora into his coffee, she looked out the window to see whether the sun was at last drying off the South Lawn. Yesterday’s rains had made a soggy mess, but the enormous white tent had held up beautifully. She could spot a few sling-back shoes that the younger women had abandoned to muddy revelry in the wee hours. Pointing to a couple of soldiers dismantling one of the army field kitchens, she asked, “Does that make you nostalgic for the battlefield, Al?”

Haig shook his head. “No, but Rose, I must tell you: during the entire battle of Ap Gu, I never had a cup of coffee as bad as this one.”

She roared, thrilled again to have this funny, manly, Shakespeare-quoting replacement for HRH on the premises. A Catholic, too—with a priest for a brother!—instead of one more Christian Scientist.

“Do you know,” she asked, full of wonder at the fact, “that I danced
with a man last night who’d also been a POW during
World War Two
?” The officer may not have had Don Carnevale’s smooth moves, and she’d had to relinquish him soon enough to his wife, but a few minutes with him had given her a wonderful feeling, as if this were her basketball-playing Billy somehow come back to life and they were celebrating victory in the big, real war of long ago instead of stalemate in this grubby eight-year business that had just ended.

“There was another guy who’d been penned up in Korea,” said Haig.

Rose shook her head, amazed.

“You know,” said the new chief of staff, trying to sound wistful and reluctant, “it’s not a good idea for a military man to have this job I’m now in.”

“Oh yes it is!” Rose responded, happy to say just what he wanted her to. “You’re
exactly
what we need right now. Tough. Organized. Upbeat.” All of which didn’t include the wonderful fringe benefits he brought along, like the spectacle of Henry’s having to report to a former member of his own staff. “So you’re here ‘for the duration’!” exclaimed Rose. “Until we ‘win this son of a bitch,’ if I may quote the boss. Here,” she added, rummaging behind the corsages to retrieve a plaque the president had been given last night. “Take this in with you to the meeting.”

Those weak sisters in the Cabinet could do with seeing how
brave
men appreciated their commander in chief.
TO OUR LEADER—OUR COMRADE—RICHARD THE LION-HEARTED
. Every last POW and every one of their wives knew that only Richard Nixon’s guts had freed them. One fellow had even told Rose that the Christmas bombs sounded like the voice of his mother calling him home for supper.

“Put this thing right in the middle of the table,” said Rose.

“Yes, sir,” Haig replied.

God, she loved this guy! As he left the room and the two of them went back to the new, grinding war that devoured every day, she realized that she was counting on him, not the boss, to get them out of it alive.

When the president entered the Cabinet Room and saw the assembled members admiring the plaque, he felt a moment of vexation. Last night
he had thrilled to its eerie fulfillment of his mother’s royal choice for his name—but he now feared the object would trump the item he himself had brought to the meeting.

He took his seat at the middle of the long table, giving a protocol-driven nod to Agnew and then winking, more warmly, at Cap Weinberger. He paused a moment before speaking.

“Most of you know what a night we just had. I can say without question that it was the most gratifying evening I have ever spent in my long public life.” A bit too stentorian, he decided. He would lighten the tone, and smile: “I gave instructions that the orchestra should keep playing as long as anybody remained on the dance floor. As some of you know, I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to dancing. I managed to loosen up the Quakers at Whittier College on that issue when I was student-body president forty years ago.”

No, that was
too
light, given what he had in his hand. When the laughter ended, he took things back down a notch: “I’m holding something I thought you all might be interested to see, a present from Lieutenant Colonel John Dramesi, one of the POWs, who was here with his mother from Blackwood, New Jersey.” He held up a handkerchief onto which the imprisoned officer had secretly embroidered a small American flag. “The blue threads came from an old sweater, and he got the red ones from a pair of underwear. He managed to hide the flag from the North Vietnamese while he was making it, and managed to sneak it out with him when he was released.” Nixon handed Bill Rogers the little piece of cloth, as if it were one of the letters from world leaders that he sometimes passed around the table. “I think it’s important to remember that while some young Americans were burning their country’s flag, there were others still willing to risk torture and death so that they could have a flag to salute.”

The men around the table were gravely respectful as the handkerchief made its way from hand to hand. Two or three bowed their heads when it reached them, and Connally—back among them as a special advisor, having at last switched parties in the GOP’s hour of maximum need—exercised his talent for the theatrical and snapped off a salute.

Nixon pushed his chair back from the table. He wasn’t in the mood
to talk about the bankrupt Penn Central or the price of gasoline. Nor did he feel like yielding the floor to Kissinger for a long sonorous description of all the national security advisor was doing to prepare for Brezhnev’s Washington visit.

Actually, he realized, he could use Henry to keep the focus on last night’s triumph.

“Did you see all the grateful kisses and hugs Dr. Kissinger got from the wives and girlfriends last night? I think he got kissed by a couple of the men, too.”

Kissinger knew that any reciprocation of levity was, in this instance, out of the question. In responding, he even injected a quaver into his guttural growl. “I have never been more moved in my life, Mr. President.”

“You may have noticed,” said Nixon, his eyes on some bookshelf high above the group, “that there was no head table last night. The greatest honor that could come to me, I thought, would be dining with all of our guests. You know,” he said, lightening things up again, and wishing he could be gone from
this
table, “the whole thing was really Sammy Davis’s idea. He was here a couple of months ago and he suggested a big entertainment for the men as soon as they were up to it. Pat loved the idea, but said ‘no girlie shows.’ I mean, from the start we knew that Bob Hope would be the ideal emcee, but the occasion seemed too special for a USO kind of thing. Even so, did you see Joey Heatherton there last night? God bless her. And I’ll bet Henry wasn’t the only one to notice the
Playboy
gal that one of the guys brought as a date.”

“There’s a picture of her in the
Post
this morning,” said George Shultz.

“The
Post
isn’t
all
bad,” added Weinberger.

After a few seconds of laughter, the men seemed to remember that the appointment of Mrs. Armstrong with cabinet rank had added a woman to the room. They quickly reined in the locker-room talk, and the president changed the subject. “So, Elliot, is it hard to remember where you’re supposed to sit?”

Richardson was still in the defense secretary’s chair, but an hour from now he would be sworn in to the attorney general’s job—his third cabinet position in six months.

“It’s only a difference of subject matter,” he replied, repeating a line Nixon had heard him give to the newspapers, which quoted it as if Richardson were goddamned Noël Coward.

“Well, we know you’ll do a first-rate job. After all, you’ve already managed to do something—twice—that I’ve never accomplished.” Pause for a beat, the way Hope had taught him to, long ago. “Carry Massachusetts!”

Everyone laughed and then at last got ready to drone through the agenda, fully aware they were working for a president who didn’t believe in cabinet government to begin with, and who, before Watergate began to swallow him, had been intent on combining their domains into three or four super-departments. In less than an hour the meeting was over, with only three of the secretaries having uttered a word.

“Gentlemen, lady,” said Nixon, rising from the table. “A pleasure, as always.” He left the room alone.

Those remaining milled about for a minute or two, relieved to be no longer getting on the boss’s nerves. They exchanged stories about last night or, more quietly, swapped the few bits of inside information they’d been getting from Republican staffers on the Ervin Committee. Senator Baker, the ranking minority member, was so eager not to appear the president’s man that only a trickle of leakage had been coming from the GOP side. “I think you need a new set of Plumbers,” Connally was telling Shultz. “This time to
loosen
the faucets.”