Crooked (12 page)

Whatever she thought of me, Pat knew her role, which was to sit and smile. We were onstage again,
The Dark Tower
once more. I used everything I could. I had the line about her cloth coat. I told them I wasn’t a quitter and neither was Pat, and I ad-libbed something about her Irish background. She sat and smiled politely into the camera while radiating the knowledge that I had turned her into a political prop right along with the family dog.

The temperature rose, became feverishly hot. As the half hour closed, I stumbled to the finish with a final burst of irony, a resolve to fight “the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them” until my last breath. And then the finishing blow, a plea to viewers to write the Republican Party directly. Let Eisenhower answer that one if he could.

“And remember, folks,” I told them, “Eisenhower is a great man. Believe me. He’s a great man, a great man…” I repeated it, trailing off, as they cut to commercial. I staggered toward the camera lens, zombie-like, utterly spent.

Pat and I got drunk as the news came in: It was a triumph. They’d bought it. At ten minutes to midnight a telegram arrived from none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. It read
Good enough.

“Ho-kay. Tatiana and I talk, we think maybe Nixon deserves a little more respect.” It was a spy-training night, definitely. We were drinking in the kitchen of a sordid little suburban safe house; on the linoleum counter, a bottle of vodka sat steaming with cold, the liquor pure and clear and foreign. Pat and I never drank it at home.

“Thank you. I think it’s about time, to be honest.”

“The man is a TV star now, we say. You know they came after you there in the studio? You notice anything strange?”

“Noises, I guess. And the temperature.”

“Tatiana felt it too.
V’yedma
—witch or some shit. We investigate. But meanwhile we decide to get you a little something.”

“A little something?”

“Sure, you spy now, we think you’re ready.”

“Fuck you guys, you know? You’re asking me to risk my fucking life—”

“Okay, a little quieter. Raising voice now.”

“—asking me to steal from the United States government and you give me this shit, talk down to me. I’m a senator, okay? Not your little flunky.” I sat back.

“Okay, you got point. You’re not flunky. Not flunky.”

“That’s—that’s right.”

“But you need a couple things we got for you. Okay? Like you asked. We got, first, this.” He handed me a matchbox. Red and blue, a trio of dancing girls. “Is tiny camera, okay? Got a couple packs of film. Photograph anything you need. Low light okay.”

“All right. What else?”

“Hold out hands.” I did and he gave me the smallest pistol I had ever seen, scaled for a child. He poured a dozen pill-size miniature bullets into my other hand. I worked my finger behind the trigger guard and it felt light as a paper cutout.

“Does it work?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Close range only; is useless otherwise. Get here or here.” He touched his heart and then his head. “Do you really need to shoot anybody? If potential vice president is shooting people, it is not a good mission at that point. But maybe you feel better to have it.”

“Thanks, I don’t.”

“You want cyanide pill?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m okay.”

“Nobody wants these. I got like fifty.”

“Anything else?”

“Also this.” He handed me a thick envelope. I unsealed it and poured the contents onto the table and caught my breath. Passports. Dark reds, blues, greens like the hides of exotic animals, all embossed with gold.

He ticked them off. “Canada, South Africa, Palestine. Two from United States, two from UK. Not cheap. You ever need to disappear, this is how you go. And these.” He set down, with a blunt click, two small gold bars glowing with bright mystery, heavy with their potential. “I get you special suitcase, false bottom, nobody ever know.”

I grinned, speechless. I didn’t know how to thank him, but he clapped me on the shoulder.

“See? You’re a secret agent. One of us. Happy now?”

I was. It felt right. I pictured what it must look like to an omniscient observer, the two immense networks of intelligence gathering. Fathomless, overlapping, reciprocal, and interpenetrating organizations built on secrecy and compulsion and shame. Like a clandestine empire of the passive-aggressive.

I didn’t know why it should have been like this, but for the first time since I started public life, I felt safe. Who was Richard Nixon anyway? Whoever he was, I could get rid of him if I had to, throw him away and lose myself. I drove home, the passports lying on the passenger seat where I could glance at them, like million-dollar bills, like the Count of Monte Cristo’s treasure chest.

I pulled into the driveway and reluctantly slid the pile into my briefcase. As I stepped into the familiar smells of home, I saw it for the flimsy thing it was. I could live here but I’d always be ready to board a flight, to open a briefcase and shuffle identities and passports until I was lost in them. I wanted to step into the mirror maze and never come back.

What is it
like to be made vice president?

On one level it’s a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world.

It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising things and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories, farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I’m misremembering) several empty plots of land.

In the end, we beat Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman—no, we annihilated the pair of them by an absurd margin, giving up only a couple of states in the Southeast.

It was like being given what was almost the nation’s highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

This isn’t a plea for pity. It can’t be. Eisenhower and his advisers knew how I’d won my first few elections and they wanted more of the same: dirty tricks, innuendo, and scare tactics carried on at a safe distance from Dwight’s presidential bid.

I could have stood on my integrity and refused, but, well, the historical record is what it is. I wanted everything he was offering, wanted it with a panicked desperation, and I decided I would have it. I had already done worse for a great deal less reward.

I endorsed Senator McCarthy’s efforts while stopping just short of McCarthyite excess and avoiding his uncomfortable, nakedly self-destructive presence. I pretended to like him and then carefully leaked my distaste for him to a reporter at the
New York Times.
I had an intuition and a timing for this kind of manipulative nastiness. I didn’t care what I did to McCarthy, of course, no one did, but that was the least of it. I blamed Adlai Stevenson for the course of the Korean War and for tolerating a potential Communist insurgency. I said ridiculous and frankly childish things. I called him Sidesaddle Adlai for his leftist positions, with the leering implication that he was somehow female. Senseless, pandering, inciting statements that only stupid people would enjoy. I, Richard M. Nixon, did these things, and much worse. I was good at it as a congressman, even better as a national candidate.

It was not a talent I understood. It’s not how I spoke to my brothers or parents or schoolmates. It’s not how I acted in the navy. But in front of groups, in front of reporters, I knew how to get the effect I needed. I had an ignoble knack for meanness. Reporters would get out their notepads and scribble, nodding, knowing they had a quote. A talent perhaps learned in the early days of my childhood in some quiet moment of observation when I was very young, untraceable. I’ve said my mother was a Quaker and a saint; I’ve always said it. But then there was a night deep in October 1952 when I woke to the trace of a memory: One night when I was eight and found her alone in the sitting room. The wind was off the Santa Ana Mountains, dry, hot, and I couldn’t sleep. I stood in the doorway of the room and watched her talking to nothing in a singsong language. She sensed I was there and looked at me and I knew at once that she was teaching me what a secret was, a memory contained between the two of us and only we two. That there was more than one side to me. No matter how pure I seemed, righteous all the way through, there was always another me that couldn’t be put down, a sly one, a clever one, a lying one, a vicious one. I could be elected president of the whole goddamned United States but I’d always be Tricky Dick.

Of course Pat was there for every meal, every speech, every standing ovation, every sneering put-down. Alone, we scarcely spoke. Onstage she was perfection but I always watched her watching me and registering all of it in the tiniest hardening of her lips, the tiniest expression of the eyes, going vague for an instant, going elsewhere. In some moments, I saw what might have been suppressed laughter. I imagined a minuscule spasm of amusement at a renewed recognition of the striving, gutless wonder she’d married. At the realization this guy was actually winning the vice presidency.

On the day of the inauguration, after the swearing-in, she spent the afternoon alone in her room preparing, and when she emerged it was as someone I scarcely recognized. I stared. Her hair had been reengineered into something complicated, mounded and waved and clipped. She wore a white silk blouse and a jeweled brooch at her throat. This was the Pat the world knew later, the president’s wife, glazed over and sealed into history. This was Pat telling me she understood that our marriage was her job now. This was her telling me that I’d lost her.

People talk about
Eisenhower’s golden age, the bright era and the wise, blandly all-American figure at the center of it, his oddly hieratic grin beaming a beneficent influence throughout the country. Nostalgia for the wholesomeness and boom economy has long since passed into cliché and there’s only so much I want to go into. I suppose in a sense the clichés were true for plenty of people. They had lovely cars, television sets and kitchens, oral contraceptives, Teflon and FORTRAN. Rock and roll and credit cards and white-out and Barbies and the bloody Mary. A mood of confidence, of joy and astonishment, at their own wealth and daring.

Or so I’m told, and I’m certainly glad some people were happy. I’m reading it in a book, because how the fuck should I know? It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. Apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us.

What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make an agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plants and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn’t quite rate a visit from the top guy.

The rest of the time I was part of the consuming desperate purpose of the Eisenhower gang: the war. Not just the proxy war in Korea but the omnipresent, glacially vast global war with Communism. There were moments when it felt like Whittaker Chambers and I had dreamed up the Cold War in a conference room at the Commodore Hotel, but by 1953 we were all in the dream and it had changed and accelerated beyond all recognition, supercharged by the postwar boom in prosperity and science.

In October 1952 we exploded a thermonuclear bomb a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb. The numbers had stopped meaning anything, but men from Strategic Air Command screened the footage for us, a smear of red clouds and fire like the Last Judgment. The bomb annihilated the island on which it had been built and made a temporary crater in the Pacific waters a mile wide and a hundred and fifty-two feet deep. We made this for you, they said, then they stood back to see what we would do with it. The Soviets exploded their own hydrogen bomb less than a year later.

Every month, it seemed, the solemn young men of Strategic Air Command briefed me on the latest wonder. The B-47 Stratojet that could fly for thirty-five hundred miles without refueling; the USS
Nautilus,
a nuclear-powered submarine that could travel under the ocean for thirteen hundred miles without needing to surface. I was born into a world that had just seen the first cars and airplanes, and Eisenhower could remember a world where the cavalry charge was still state-of-the-military-art. In a decade, conventional weaponry had all but ceased to matter, and the airborne nuclear war was the only thing that counted. Thousands of years of military doctrine had been made obsolete and we were looking at a clean sheet of paper. And this wasn’t even counting what I’d seen at Pawtuxet and on East Seventy-First Street in the Wexford building.

Who better than Eisenhower to lead us into the new age? But then, who was Eisenhower? I saw so little of him and what I did see was almost too bland to be believed, a tediously wholesome middle manager who liked nothing more than to get business done and return to the golf course or go on a card-playing weekend with his buddies, a crew of portly, glad-handing businessmen.

What did I know about him? Apart from his military record, I knew almost nothing. His name meant, literally, “iron-hewer,” and his family had been in the United States since the eighteenth century. He smelled like dry grass, like dust, like Texas, like the Great Plains. And, for reasons never made clear, he’d appointed me his vice president.

The American side of the Cold War began to assume its real form in Eisenhower’s mind and in his weekly planning sessions. We crowded into the Oval Office, myself, John Foster Dulles, a gang of uniforms from the Pentagon, and, in their spectacles and expensive suits, the men from the RAND Corporation, the strategy-and-policy think tank whose reach was breathtakingly wide. Cold-blooded intellectuals of the eastern elite.

At one level, the logic was relatively straightforward. In 1949, the United States’ first-wave attack plan consisted of a fleet of planes loaded with a hundred and thirty-three atomic bombs, the idea being that they would destroy about seventy cities and 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity. There was a general feeling that the Truman administration had been a trifle tentative, and we were determined to roughhouse a little bit if we had to. This year’s plan featured a robust seven hundred and fifty-five bombs, all of which could be dropped within a couple of hours.

The basic tenets of Eisenhower’s strategic policy were spelled out in a typewritten document handed around the inner circle, the notorious NSC 162/2, a report to the National Security Council. The Soviets were actively expansionist, determined to conquer or disrupt Western capitalist democracies. The document modestly stated that given the current state of affairs, “a prolonged period of tension might ensue, during which each side increases its armaments, reaches atomic plenty and seeks to improve its relative power position.” But, good news, the Soviets could likely be kept in their place if we Americans showed ourselves ready to play. And, buried in section 39.b.(1), the heart of the Eisenhower doctrine: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.” We were ready to go, with “massive retaliation” the scenario of choice.

Thorny issues remained, however, such as the strong incentive to make the first strike. Clearly, the first player to move held an enormous advantage as long as its forces could reliably take out the opposition’s nuclear arsenal at one go and didn’t mind gratuitously murdering tens of millions. The idea of a preventive or prophylactic war still occasionally came up for debate, although Eisenhower was firmly against it.

On a brisk day in March we were in the Oval Office reviewing a new RAND report, mulling over the issue of just how much damage we would have to do to effectively dissolve the USSR and turn it into nothing but a group of ragged comrades with a common language and fur hats. I looked at the assembled faces and wondered who knew what. Who had been to Pawtuxet and had Blue Ox clearance apart from Eisenhower himself? Why weren’t we talking about it?

Eisenhower read the key passages aloud to the group while pacing the Oval Office’s perimeter. “‘Just what it takes to destroy a society is uncertain…The destruction of hundreds of cities in the space of hours is possible…we simply do not have any human experience with the loss of ten or a hundred major cities in one night.’” He paused, struck by some vivid mental image, then called on me like a gruff professor. “Well, Dick? What do you think? What’s it going to take to put them down?”

“Sir, with respect, it doesn’t matter.”

“Well, why the hell not?”

“According to your policy, we’re not striking first, not in an all-out attack. We’re only going nuclear if they do.”

“Go on,” he said.

“And it’s well documented that a Soviet first strike would knock out most of our bombers. If our nuclear arsenal dies on the ground, there’s no counterstrike. So if we don’t strike first, we don’t strike at all.” I was addressing the room as I spoke, and they all shrugged. Everyone had gotten this far. “If I can figure that out, you certainly can, which leads to another conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“If we’re talking about this, there must be another dimension to the strategic landscape,” I said. “You must know something I don’t.”

“Again, I’m fascinated.”

“Is there a new anti-air-defense technology I haven’t been briefed on?” I knew there wasn’t. And submarine-mounted nuclear missiles were a decade away. “Is there something…else?”

“Else?”

“Some other technology. Altogether separate from nuclear devices.” I’d started this without thinking and I could feel my face getting red.

“Like what, Dick? Cosmic rays? Moon men?” He stood over me, a teacher singling out an unruly student for mockery.

“No—nothing like that.”

“You must have something in mind.”

I patted my forehead with a handkerchief. Eisenhower wasn’t sweating, but he never seemed to perspire.

“Sir.” I took a deep breath. “Sir, I know there were other programs. Like the Manhattan Project, but ones that went in other directions. Project Blue Ox.” A couple of the RAND guys flinched, but everyone else either had not heard of it or was too well trained to show anything.

“I’ve heard the name,” Eisenhower said. “But I’m not familiar with the details. Remind me?”

“I’m not—I’m not sure everyone’s cleared for it, sir.”

“I hereby clear you all for Project Blue Ox,” he said to the room, making a mocking magician’s pass with one outsize hand. “Well, Dick?”

“I know you funded it. I’ve been to the Pawtuxet Farm.” At that, there was a long silence.

“And what did you see there?” he said finally.

“I saw the farm.”

“And there you saw…chickens? Ducks?”

“Germans. Old buildings. A man who—who vanished.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

I could feel that I was blushing but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to tell the president that I’d been forced into a ritual occult summoning by a pair of Russians.

“Have you?” he said again.

I muttered, “Never.”

“I see. And what did you think of what you saw?”

“A sort of a trick? I didn’t understand it. It seemed like he was…well, a ghost.” The generals were all smirking now, old comrades, I supposed, who knew the president’s routines of old.

“Well, if we’re done considering ghost-based strategic technologies, gentlemen, I believe we’ll close for the day.” Dismissed, we filed out. I expected to hear his voice call me back at any moment but it never came.

Every hour, I thought I’d hear from the Russians. They were only waiting for their chance to issue some impossible order or maybe just to bring the hammer down, turn everything they had over to the media and end the charade. I sweated and sometimes all I could hear was my own inner voice saying,
Liar, liar, liar,
as I wondered if the next thing to come out of my mouth would sound crazy or not.

I could have struck at them first, and I thought about it a hundred times. They were two little spies, and I was the vice president. With a little work I might have gotten the Kremlin suspicious of them, had them discredited as corrupt or even mentally unstable. And I could do worse. The CIA was a new thing and it was still the Wild West in American intelligence, without oversight or clear rules of engagement. And the two Russians were, in the end, the sworn enemies of my country.

But I felt the cold knife at my throat. They’d been in this game longer than I had. They had photographs, perhaps recordings; who knew what kind of insurance measures they’d taken? I lay awake thinking of how much I didn’t know. For all the vodka shots and gunpoint camaraderie we’d shared, Arkady and Tatiana were spies, which is to say, liars. Anything or nothing they said could be true. I had a lot more to lose than they did.

Or was that just an excuse? I’d waited for eight weeks and then that afternoon following the meeting where I’d brought up Blue Ox, almost without thinking, I found myself dialing the old fake number I’d been given for a fake laundry service and I told the guy who answered the phone I wanted my fake shirts back by fake Tuesday.

Soon Arkady would pull up in his disguise as a White House driver in the black monolith town car, swooping in with a little extra snap, maybe. I’d climb in the backseat, into the smell of sweet tobacco, leather, Russian sweat. He’d reach over and we’d clasp hands and then we’d drive a few minutes in silence and I’d be in the mirror world again, barreling along in a black car at night, family and office and loyalty forgotten, remembering what it felt like to be myself.