Watergate (20 page)

At 8:44 p.m., when the networks called McGovern’s home state of South Dakota for Richard Nixon, the president’s head snapped backwards and he let out a sharp cry.

“I’m very sorry,” said Dr. Chase, who was nonetheless satisfied that the temporary cap he’d just put on one of Nixon’s front teeth would hold. “I’d avoid apples until we can get something more permanent for you—but champagne and strawberries ought to be fine.” He smiled politely at his preoccupied patient and began gathering up the implements he’d brought along on this unexpected call to the White House’s basement dispensary.

The original cap, which had been put on Nixon’s tooth the year he came to Congress, had fallen off during dinner—the only bad, or even inconvenient, occurrence of the day. The whole family had been together for supper—David had gotten home from the Mediterranean, without any strings being pulled, a little earlier than expected—and during the meal Pat had let her husband take calls from Colson and Haldeman without any objection. And why not? Each one brought more good news than the last.

Chapin entered the dispensary as Nixon swigged some Listerine.

“Mr. President, somebody will come up to the residence to make you up at eleven twenty-five, just before the drive to the Shoreham.”

They were expecting five thousand people there; he had gotten the speech down to two minutes.

“Fine,” he told Chapin, who nodded and left.

He felt an odd desire to go upstairs and find the old cap, which had disappeared into the carpet. It seemed like some telltale clue he had left behind, and he felt, despite the replacement, somehow incomplete without it. Well, a cap wasn’t even a tooth, but it had to indicate
something
. And if it wasn’t a portent, it wasn’t about the past, either. He’d be too embarrassed to bring it up with Hutschnecker and by the time he saw him again would probably have forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, he could feel a dull pushing sensation where the old real tooth met the new false one; he decided he would let it take his mind off the pain in his leg.

But he couldn’t take his mind off the letdown he was feeling. Rose was having to fight it, too; he could tell that when he saw her getting off the plane at Andrews. Only Pat seemed genuinely happy. He tried for
a moment to think of the election as a gift to her—it meant, after all, no more politics. But he didn’t suppose there was much logic in giving thanks to politics for putting an end to itself; sort of like thanking God for sparing some people in the earthquake He’d just caused. Why not just dispense with the quake to begin with?

But it was not 1947, and he could not stop the life that he himself had set in motion. He went upstairs to look for the artificial tooth through which he’d spoken his first words in Congress.

There had been so much good news so early that the CRP team in charge of the Shoreham’s ballroom looked worried about maintaining what their memos called “a suitable level of enthusiasm” until the president arrived. The Nixonettes continued to twirl their batons every time another state was called, and every so often someone would roar “FUCK MASSACHUSETTS!” to diminishing bursts of laughter, as the Bay State remained the only one in the opposition column. McGovern’s concession speech had already been booed, along with Shriver’s, the latter providing a special pleasure, given all the Kennedys up onscreen with him.

Fred LaRue milled about, nodding hello and sipping his drink and relighting his pipe. He saw Ziegler hug Chapin and Kleindienst kiss Bebe Rebozo, but there wasn’t anything loud or down-home about these encounters. The whole thing felt less like a celebration with your battlefield buddies than some faraway military victory won with long-range missiles.

LaRue looked at his watch and realized he might have to miss the big moment. The stage was already filling—there was Clark MacGregor and his wife; the Agnew daughters; now Tricia and her husband—but he had no choice except to fight his way out of the ballroom, murmuring “ ’Scuse me, please, ’scuse me” a hundred times, as he swam against a crowd pressing closer to the action.

He at last made it upstairs to a quiet stretch of carpeted corridor that ran between some empty meeting rooms. He stopped in front of a particular pay phone and pretended to consult his address book while waiting for it to ring. That happened, as agreed upon in advance, precisely at midnight.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, picking up the receiver.

“You’ve gotten five-hundred-plus electoral votes,” said the voice on the line.

“It looks that way, ma’am.”

“You must have a great many people to thank.”

“Indeed,” said LaRue.

“Tell me, Mr. Friend-of-Mr.-Rivers, how much have you budgeted for canapés at all those inaugural balls?”

LaRue did not lose patience but tried to convey a smidgen of sternness by using the caller’s name. “I can’t say I really know, Miz Hunt.”

“I’ll bet you it’s more than is being spent to sustain the defendants’ families until the trial.”

“I hope it won’t be too much longer before the trial gets under way.”

“It will probably start right around the time of that inauguration,” said Dorothy Hunt.

“So they’re sayin’,” said LaRue.

“You know, the same things that could have lost an election can cripple a presidency.”

The fearsome bluntness reminded him of Clarine Lander. Appalled, and a little thrilled, he had nothing to say for a moment.

“I’m looking at the little calendar I keep in my purse,” said Mrs. Hunt. “I’ve circled December eighth on it.”

LaRue still said nothing.

“It’s an important day. I’ll be making a trip to Chicago. A trip with its own special requirements.”

“Special requirements,” said LaRue.

“That’s right. Ones you’re going to supply, and which you’ll be hearing about closer to the time. Meanwhile, let me remind you that there’s a payment due a week from today.”

LaRue acknowledged the last point and mentioned the figure. Mrs. Hunt snorted at the sum. “Do you ever talk to the president?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you ever talk to those who do?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” He hadn’t had the heart to call Mitchell tonight, or the stomach to talk to Martha, who would likely have picked up.

“Well, tell those people to recall how Mr. Nixon not long ago
relaxed some of the wage-and-price controls that he himself put on the economy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell them that controls are about to be lifted altogether for several key employees.”

LaRue hesitated, then said, “I’ve made a note of what you just told me.”

“Tell them there’s a reliable forecast of a surge in inflation. It should arrive in early December.”

LaRue felt a rumble and then a roar beneath his feet. The whole floor was throbbing, and the pulsations were driving up through his legs. Richard Nixon had taken the stage in the Regency Ballroom, and Mrs. Hunt had hung up the phone.

Most of Mrs. Longworth’s guests were Democrats, and a few of them groaned when Nixon concluded his brief victory speech on her black-and-white television. But such opposition didn’t keep Joe Alsop from raising a glass to the triumph of his
“homme sérieux.”

“Joe,” called Alice from her seat on the couch. “You remember 1916, don’t you?”

“I was six years old,” answered Alsop, “but if you’re talking about election night 1916, yes, I do remember it.”

“I was just telling Mrs. Braden how nothing compares to it—not ’48, not 1960—and certainly not
this
.” She pointed to the television, and signaled with a snap of her fingers for the live coverage to be extinguished. “We didn’t really have an election
night
in 1916. It went on for
days
, while we all waited to see how California had turned out—just
clinging
to the hope that Professor Wilson had been knocked back to Princeton from Pennsylvania Avenue.”

A street fiddler from Dupont Circle, whom Alice knew from her errands in the neighborhood, had been asked to provide the evening’s entertainment. He now struck up a plaintive Scottish air while her granddaughter’s friends, off in a corner, did some marijuana-fueled imitations of Nixon’s tormented body language. The whole second floor sported only one red-white-and-blue decoration, an old piece of bunting hung from the jaws of the decaying tiger.

Alice felt glad that Dick had won so big. But along with regrets about the lack of suspense, she was experiencing a keen awareness that Joe had been right at the beginning of the summer, and that Richard Nixon’s troubles were just getting started.

“Charles Evans Hughes was the only Supreme Court justice ever to run for president,” Joe was now informing Joan Braden, with a touch of condescension.

“Perhaps the next Democrat to become president can give the chief justice’s job to McGovern,” Alice mused. “He can do a little ‘legislating from the bench,’ and we’ll get amnesty, acid, and abortion after all.”

As she spoke, she kept an eye on Stew, who really did look like death.

Lyndon Johnson’s elder daughter now approached, with her good-looking young husband. What
is
his name, wondered Alice, who had even been to their wedding. She accepted a box of chocolates from Lynda Bird, her favorites from a specialty shop over in Alexandria. So delighted was she by the gift that she neglected to say thanks before rising from the couch to put a note on the box—
DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE EAT THESE
. She sent it down the dumbwaiter to Janie in the kitchen.

On her way back to the couch, she saw Bob Taft, the grandson of her father’s fat protégé-turned-nemesis, now himself a senator from Ohio, chatting with Strom Thurmond’s beauty-queen bride. Thurgood Marshall, eager not to be drawn into that conversation, greeted Alice instead, taking her hand and admiring her Spiro Agnew watch, which had the vice president dressed up like Mickey Mouse and telling the time with little gloved hands. “I told Dick,” she explained, tapping Agnew’s image, “ ‘
promise
me you’ll always have this one travel on the same plane with you, in case there’s an accident.’ ”

When Rose Woods arrived, she was offered the most watery cocktail she’d ever tasted. A lot of the crowd here wasn’t really her cup of tea, she soon realized, and the room was too small for dancing. Ever eager to get out on the floor, she wondered if she shouldn’t have stayed at the Shoreham instead—though the hot ticket over there was the party in Agnew’s suite, and she hadn’t been invited.

She said hello to her hostess. “You’ll be seeing the president and Pat next month?” she asked, helping the old lady resettle herself on the couch.

“Yes,” said Alice, looking up with a suddenly businesslike stare. Rose wanted to ask about the letter to the boss that she’d opened last month, and Mrs. L. was sly enough to see this.

“Kim!” cried Alice. “My nephew,” she explained to Rose, as Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., thin and balding and in his fifties, wearing old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses, approached the couch and introduced himself to Richard Nixon’s secretary.

“Please give the president my congratulations,” he added.

“I know he’ll be glad to get them,” said Rose. “I’m sure you must know him yourself.”

“I’ve
met
him, yes,” said Roosevelt, in an accent just like Joe Alsop’s. “But
know
him? Not really.”

“I’ll tell you which White House man Kim
does
know,” said Alice. “Or I should say
former
White House man. That’s your Mr. Hunt.”

“Alice, for Christ’s sake,” said Alsop, who’d been listening to this.

Kermit Roosevelt looked around the room, as if to decide whether he was among friends, and cautiously explained his aunt’s remark to Miss Woods: “I met Mr. Hunt in Cairo some years ago when we both worked for the same outfit. I learned some very interesting things about him as we tried getting Mr. Nasser to help out poor old King Zog of Albania. It’s rather a long story.” He said this as if speaking of somebody’s complicated business reverses, giving assurances he wouldn’t bore you with the details.

Rose remained all ears, but Joe Alsop was trying to nudge his relative out of this conversation, asking Kermit Roosevelt if he wouldn’t enjoy saying hello to Stew over there near the television. On top of that, a new guest had just entered the room. Alice rose from the couch yet again. “Play something Asiatic,” she said to the fiddler, as Bob McNamara came over to greet her.

The Secret Service logs would note that the president had spent twenty-four minutes inside the Shoreham. His real victory celebration took place afterwards, between one and three a.m., in the company of Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson, inside his hideaway office at the EOB.

Nixon and Colson drank cocktails, while Haldeman sipped a Christian Scientist’s Coca-Cola. Together the three men pored over some
wire-service returns from Illinois, usually a cliff-hanging state for Nixon but tonight not even close. “
Everything
played well in Peoria,” said Haldeman, meaning the whole tumultuous past four years.

Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages and returned phone calls from Rockefeller and Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s tough-cop mayor, who made Agnew look like Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, “Was Richardson on the platform at the hotel?”