Watergate (65 page)

To Laura: through the tough times and the good
.

The book, once printed, would take its place on a shelf next to
The
Berlin Ending
. For now, he replaced the dedication page in the stack of proofs under the old jade pin he used as a paperweight.

Nixon’s head was throbbing, with such force and regularity that he could count the beats. This had been happening a lot in the past couple of weeks, and here in his pajamas, half a world away from home, he was trying to recall whether Pat had experienced this sort of thing before the stroke. But that was almost twenty years ago, and he couldn’t remember. He closed his eyes and checked his lucidity by counting off his trips to Russia, one per throb, starting in ’59 with Khrushchev and going all the way up to this current one, in March of ’94.

Satisfied that he was not impaired, only overworked, he took his mind off his mind and began thinking about the substance of this latest trip. He had to prepare himself for the possibility that Yeltsin, usually inclined to roll out the red carpet, might this time stiff him, annoyed by his plans to meet with Rutskoi and Zyuganov, the opposition leaders.

Well, there was no way he could do that. In all his travels between ’63 and ’68 he had never failed, wherever he went, to sit down with both the head of the government and the heads of the opposing parties. If Yeltsin wanted to play in the big, respectable Western leagues, he still had to learn that that’s how things go.

But there was nothing wrong with creating a little drama, making a little news. And Christ, he’d rather be rebuffed by Yeltsin than received by Gorbachev, who was in love with his own nobility and thought the approval of the
New York Times
made up for supervising the dissolution of his own goddamned country.

He’d also rather, once he got home, spend a half hour inside Clinton’s chaotic White House, reporting back on the trip and attempting to be useful, than spend day after day on the golf course, or in some bullshit corporate boardroom, like Jerry Ford. The speaking fees that guy was pulling down to this day! With just one of them you could buy twenty of the old Truman crowd’s mink coats.

He rubbed his head and almost wished whatever was throbbing would explode and be done with it, a fate preferable to wandering through a fog like Reagan—though with Reagan how could anyone tell the difference?
Christ, the man had had more luck in his life than Ford, and that was saying something.

He massaged his left temple and reflected upon a tendency to see only bad luck, never good, operating in his own life. Bad luck was the source of his defeats, whereas his achievements had come from his own skill and nerve. This was, he knew, a lopsided, childish view, like LBJ talking to Kennedy on election night in ’60:
I hear
you’re
losing Ohio but
we’re
doing fine in Pennsylvania
. He ought to get over it, even at this late date.

He looked out the hotel window at the big red star over one of those
Metropolis
-style towers Stalin had thrust into the Moscow skyline. He found his thoughts going back to Reagan, to the only thing that really bothered him about the man. Would the lucky actor be seen as the bigger visionary, the one who refused to settle for “a new relationship between the superpowers,” deducing instead that one of them might be tipped over entirely? The “evil” empire. Every left-wing professor had recoiled at seeing the word used to describe the Soviet Union, but had no trouble applying it twice a week to Richard Nixon.

As he’d told Henry, it will depend on who writes the history. His own presidential library out in California is a joke, a Madame Tussaud’s full of plaster statues and none of the records that matter. But as long as he lives, he will never settle with the Archives, who are more rapacious than Cox when it comes to the tapes. He will leave it to Julie to figure things out when he is gone for good, to see how he can be mainstreamed into history with the rest of the men, mostly unimpressive, who had preceded and followed him in office.

Too many goddamned funerals this past year. Connally and Norman Vincent Peale, Haldeman—and before any of those, Pat. When he buried his wife, he’d given the press what they’d always wanted from
her—
tears, sobs, a loss of control in front of the cameras. They’d said he wouldn’t last a year without her, and maybe they were right. There was that bottle of 1913 Lafite-Rothschild in the basement in Park Ridge, awaiting his hundredth birthday. But nobody made it to a hundred, not even Mrs. L.

He was nervous alone in the house at night, but he had no regrets about giving up the office downtown, no more than Pat had had, years before, when they gave up the town house on East Sixty-fifth. She’d
told him once or twice that the city felt haunted, and her mood had lifted a little when they picked up stakes for Jersey.

Before long it wouldn’t matter where one lived. Who needed an office in New York when you could have a fax at home in the suburbs? God, he loved that machine! He could have run the whole damned presidency from Camp David with it. For that matter, one would soon be able to run the world from Whittier.

But on the whole he felt pretty awful. He was sick, and so was the newly free city outside and below him. He reached over to the pad by the telephone—each sheet of it still as coarse as the old Soviet toilet paper—and wrote:
Russia—turning pessimistic—anti-American
. He would expand on this for Clinton, suggest a shift in tone.

He turned off the lamp, but by the night light he could still see well enough to reach for the Walkman Tricia’s boy had gotten him for Christmas. He inserted the tiny padded earphones and fast-forwarded the tape of Mussorgsky to the part he liked, a point in the prelude to
Khovanshchina
where he imagined himself aboard the
Sequoia
, early in the first year, sailing down the Potomac. He listened. This wasn’t the triumphal crashing of
Victory at Sea
, just something peaceful. His eyes were closing. The music, turned low, would eventually put him to sleep, but that was all right, because the tape would turn itself off.

On New Year’s Day 2001, Rose’s niece was helping to dismantle her aunt’s little Christmas tree.

“You
love
Christmas,” the niece said softly, trying to jog Rose out of a confused spell.

“Of course I do,” Rose replied, harshly. “Everybody loves Christmas.” But after a moment, her perplexity over the tree that had been in her apartment these last few weeks renewed itself. “Where did it
come
from?” she asked.

“Bob Gray,” explained her niece. “An old Washington friend of yours. He always sends you one. Because he knows how
much
you love Christmas.”

“But we’re in Ohio,” said Rose, with a suspicious tone, making it plain she wasn’t about to be tricked.

“He has it delivered from a local man—yes, here in Ohio,” said the
niece, who got up to put on some old swing music, the kind her aunt had once loved dancing to. It soon put Rose into a better mood, where she would stay for a while, if the talk didn’t turn, as it did from time to time, to McCrea Manor, the nursing home into which she had no intention of moving.

The apartment was neat as a pin, the niece had to concede as she got ready to lug the tree out the door and say goodbye. All of Rose’s knickknacks were dusted and in their usual places. Same with her two little shelves of books, which included her old boss’s memoirs; Julie Eisenhower’s book about her mother; and
The Haldeman Diaries
, a library-discard copy which a couple of years back a nephew had ill-advisedly given Aunt Rose as a present. He didn’t know the history between those two, and Rose had given him a real earful. Still, she’d kept the book.

“Goodbye, Aunt Rose.”

“So long, sweetie. You can bring back the tree whenever you’re through with it.”

Rose was relieved to be alone again. She scarcely ever left the apartment and had not traveled any considerable distance since the two California funerals, Pat’s and the boss’s, in ’93 and ’94. She was able to get along just fine with the help of the woman who shopped for her once a week. It was true that some mornings she woke up thinking she needed to get ready for work at the old Royal China Company, her first job, but that misapprehension did no one any harm, and it always lifted by the time she finished making coffee.

She still read the paper each morning, having resumed the habit a year or two after the coup—which is what it was and what she called it. Sometimes, to no particular purpose, she clipped items: six months ago they’d named a Boston courthouse for Ed Brooke! She’d thought he was dead. In truth, she wished he
were
dead, not out of any ill will, but from some sense that she’d once embarrassed herself in front of him. How exactly, she couldn’t remember.

People occasionally found her—sent requests for her autograph or got in touch with arcane questions about Watergate. She never responded, and the people who wrote never had the wit to realize she couldn’t remember half the things she
wanted
to, let alone stuff from that awful time.

“Bob Gray.” She had tried to keep her niece from seeing she didn’t
really know the name, but it was on her mind now. For the life of her she couldn’t remember who that was, and so she walked over to the bookshelves and did something she did very rarely and with the greatest reluctance: consulted Bob Haldeman’s diaries. Yes, there was Bob Gray in the index. She fumbled with her arthritic fingers to get to page 21, where he figured in an entry made on January 25, 1969:

She remembered it as a cigar box and would have sworn it had come from Don Carnevale. But maybe not. The real problem with the entry was that it didn’t help her remember who Bob Gray was.

She never felt comfortable having this book open; she always imagined she would flip a page and find some nasty crack about herself or somebody she liked. But it was hard not to thumb through these entries from January of ’69, the beginning of things, and sure enough, there she was, the night before the first inauguration:

Nothing mean, but the lines excited such a powerful recollection that the tears were soon coming in a kind of relay—joyous ones, the kind she’d shed that day; and bitter ones, too, that it had all been taken away, so unfairly and so soon.

She felt a familiar rush of anger toward HRH, not for putting her through this now, but for having her there on the page in the first place, weeping with happiness; for putting on display that private moment she should never have told him about. He had no right to it.

She got up, steadied herself, and found the pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. She brought them over to the book and carefully cut away the entry on pages 17 and 18, as if what it recorded had never happened.

“You know what he used to tell me?” asked one of the three men, buddies of Fred LaRue seated around a courtyard table at Mary Mahoney’s. “That he gave the feds four months—and they gave him ten years.”

The other men nodded. They’d heard LaRue say the same thing about the prison term he’d finally served in 1975. During his months at Maxwell, over in Alabama, he’d dried out and stopped smoking and played a lot of badminton, probably adding a decade to his life, which had now, on July 17, 2004, come to an end.

“He used to say it was more like bein’
overhauled
than rehabilitated.”

The men laughed, more loudly than Fred ever had.

“Badminton! How the hell he played is beyond me. Take a look through these,” said one of the men, passing the others a pair of eyeglasses they’d gathered up from a night table in Fred’s room at the Sun Tan Motel, before the coroner came to collect the body.

“Christ,” said another of the men, looking through the lenses. “These must be stronger than the Hubble telescope.”

All three laughed and then fell silent, brooding again on the sad but likely fact that Fred had been dead for two or three days before the motel maid found him.

“He was never bitter, that’s for sure.”

“I never heard him say a word against Nixon or Mitchell.”

“Only one I ever heard him talk against was, what’s his name, Magruder.”

“Oh, Christ,” said the one closest to being a Watergate buff. “Even Colson never went and got himself
ordained
.” He explained that in recent years Magruder had taken to giving interviews in his Presbyterian minister’s surplice.

“Colson still alive?”

“Him and Dean. Couple of others.” He pointed to the TV above the bar inside the restaurant. “The producers tended to forget about Fred whenever it came time to doin’ another Watergate program.”

“And that was fine with him.”

With smiles they acknowledged their late friend’s shyness, the way he never told them quite all there was to be told about anything. During his last years, his family up in Jackson had kept him on a long leash, and otherwise he was pretty much the same as he’d been before politics led him up to Washington, almost forty years ago.