Watergate (53 page)

He looks over the lectern and sees a slight perplexity on the editors’ faces. Is the analogy a bit too patrician—English moors—or just plain confusing? Perhaps Darman can clean it up a bit before he gives this speech in Detroit.

He’s ready to perorate, to offer his solution to the mess they are all in: “I submit that the only buffer to cynical acid is truth. The only restorer of confidence is scrupulous honesty.” It is time for “a politics of openness,” and time for those who decry “wallowing in Watergate” to realize that, in the investigation of this transcendent scandal, it has been “in the public interest to subordinate considerations of fairness to individuals that should otherwise and in ordinary circumstances have had greater weight.” He cannot of course get into particular cases, cannot tell them who may have been leaned on a bit hard, but, yes, that’s how tough this battle-scarred veteran has been in their service.

Questions?

“Gene Patterson of the
St. Petersburg Times
, sir. If nominated for the presidency, would you accept? And if elected, would you serve?

The question itself is applauded, and Richardson’s answer—“Yes”—provokes cheers. “Of course, you understand,” he adds, “that doesn’t make me a candidate.”

That evening, after drinks with the
Boston Globe
’s Tom Winship—shoring up his favorite-son status—a limousine took Richardson to the airport for a flight to Richmond. He would spend the night at a Holiday
Inn in Ashburn, talk to the students at Randolph-Macon tomorrow afternoon, and hit the University of Virginia Law School tomorrow night, before heading home.

He leaned back in his seat and sighed. Unemployment was, in its way, more tiring than most of his jobs had been. The backlog of portraits alone! He’d not yet even posed for the one that HEW required, and once he’d done that, there’d still be sittings for Defense and Justice. They couldn’t very well all hang the same canvas. But all those hours behind someone else’s easel would take time from the relentless if inchoate business—there was so much guesswork involved—of positioning himself for ’76.

He flipped through his calendar as the driver approached the Atlanta Municipal Airport. On Friday he’d be in Chicago for the Bar Association. The Detroit speech, to the local NAACP, came on Sunday. Fordham University, the Cleveland Park Synagogue, and
Meet the Press
followed in the days after that. If he taped the show on Saturday, he could still get out to Anaheim for the National Association of Elementary School Principals on Sunday, the twenty-eighth.

Some initiatives required little decision-making. There was, for instance, hardly an argument to be made against doing the Georgetown commencement on May 19. Other requests were trickier, like the two he’d been carrying inside the front flap of his briefcase the past several days. Perhaps he could dispose of them now. He looked at his watch before entering the first-class passengers’ lounge. There was time to find a pay phone and call Darman.

“Dick, I’m hoping you’re through with your dinner by now.”

“Yes, sir! How did it go? Did you wow the newsmen?”

“Oh, it was fine. I just thought that with three or four idle minutes in front of me, I’d try to take care of one or two things hanging fire.”

“Fire away, sir.”

“One of them is this Bernstein and Woodward thing.”

“Yes,” said Darman.

“Give me the case for going.”

Darman explained why, all things considered, the former attorney general should indeed show up at the publication party, on June 13, for a book the
Post
’s reporters were calling
All the President’s Men
. “This is
not
the same as the book about Agnew. You’re not one of the principal subjects in this one—I gather, I’m afraid, that only about three pages of it concern you. So you won’t appear to be gloating if you go. Your appearance will solidify your ‘clean’ image, and it probably won’t be covered in Peoria. Those are the ‘pro’ arguments. And there’s only one ‘con’ argument I can think of—also concerning Peoria.”

“What’s that?” asked Richardson.

“Well, it
might
be covered out there, and that might antagonize the diehard Nixon voters a bit more than you need to—or might, I should say, antagonize them a bit
prematurely
.”

“Mm-hmmm,” Richardson replied.

“What’s the other matter?” asked the highly organized Darman.

“The ABC thing.”

“Yes,” said Darman. “Frank Reynolds. Their evening news is doing segments on the ’76 field. It’s desirable—no, essential, sir—to be on the list. At this point you need to seem ‘maximally mentioned’ and ‘minimally seeking.’ A three-minute interview, which is what they want, won’t have you exceeding the limits of the latter category. You should do it, sir, and we should rehearse it. I’ll play Reynolds.”

Richardson sighed. “All right, Dick. You’ve persuaded me.”

As Richardson hung up the phone, he noticed a member of the plane crew coming through the lounge with his rollaway suitcase, approaching him for an autograph. Richardson reached for his pen and the calendar that was still open on his lap dropped to the floor. Its pages flipped to July. The destinations “U.S.S.R.” and “JAPAN” were spread, in his secretary’s bold hand, across the grid of dates. He’d be burnishing his foreign-policy credentials in those two nations before a spot of rest in Hawaii, early in August, when even Watergate should be enjoying a summer lull.

Nixon stood in a holding room off the main stage of the Mississippi Coliseum. A Democratic congressman was telling him, with only slight exaggeration, that twelve thousand people were waiting out front.

The Democratic governor had met the president’s plane, which Senator Eastland had proudly been aboard. If it came to impeachment, the southern states and their Democratic congressional delegations would be Nixon’s firewall. When color-coded onto the strategic diagram he had sketched with Haig and Bryce Harlow, these friendly territories resembled the pacified circles on the old Vietnam map in the Situation Room.

Back in the White House, Rose’s most trustworthy girls were this week typing up conversations from the forty-two tapes the Judiciary Committee had subpoenaed on April 11. Jaworski could go fuck himself when it came to his latest request for sixty-four more, but Nixon had decided that four days from now he would release a stack of transcripts that Rose said would exceed a thousand pages. And he would do it on TV, too—in an act of prolonged nakedness, the kind he’d not put himself through since the Checkers speech. It was a long ball, just like the one he’d thrown twenty-two years ago, and his biggest worry didn’t involve any of the supposed evidence he’d be handing the impeachment mob. What bothered him was this phrase “expletive deleted”—a coinage they’d come up with to take care of the curses on the tapes. All the white-gloved churchgoing ladies who’d lined the motorcade route twenty minutes ago, the ones he’s depending on to save his political life, are going to imagine words a lot worse than most of the ones he actually said. But there’s probably no alternative: the ladies wouldn’t like “goddammit” any better than they’d like “cocksucker.”

Christ, this is what it was coming down to.

The event here, nominally an address to the Mississippi Economic Council, is really a giant rally put together by the old Democrats for Nixon organization from ’72—men as conservative as they could reasonably be without bolting their party altogether. He might have gotten them to do just that by ’76 if all this chickenshit hadn’t intervened. As it is, he can hear them roaring and stamping their feet out front.

Eastland came up to present his granddaughter to the president, and to observe: “It’s been more than a year since we had lovely Miss Tricia down here.”

“Well, Jim, she sends her best.”

“You say hello to her and to that fine-looking son-in-law you’ve got.”

Nixon snapped off a little farewell salute, and Eastland turned his attention to the excited young aide who’d just approached him. The walls of the room were beginning to shake while the Democratic governor, doing the introduction, fired up the crowd:

“Do you believe the president’s in a friendly place right now?”

“YES!”

Steve Bull and the Secret Service were ready to get him onstage, but the governor was really stretching out the hog-hollering praise. Strange, thought Nixon, that these southerners, among whom he’d always felt so odd at Duke, should be giving him refuge. Last month at the Grand Ole Opry he’d made a fool of himself playing with Roy Acuff’s yo-yo, but he’d felt the tears come to his eyes when they all started singing “Stay a Little Longer.” The crowd had loved seeing him sit down at the piano to play “Happy Birthday” and “My Wild Irish Rose” to Pat, who’d sat there smiling and clutching some little birthday present, a piece of jewelry she’d been given on the Brazil trip. He’d joked with her later that she looked like an Arab with a string of worry beads, and she’d laughed. “It was in a little box, waiting for me in my cabin, when we took off from Brasília to Nashville.”

“Mr. President?” asked Eastland, who’d just come back over to him. “One more quick word?”

Standing at the back of the vast hall, Fred LaRue squinted toward the stage filled with those “regular Democrats” Clarine and her kind had
started opposing way back in the “Freedom Summer” of ’64. What his poor eyesight beheld was what he’d spent ten years building, from Goldwater on: a kind of Republican Party right inside the Democratic one.

The Old Man reached the first applause line in his speech. As the cheering swelled, Clarine, standing beside LaRue, started to hum the theme from
Gone with the Wind
into the better of his two ears. Whether she meant it to apply to Richard Nixon or to this whole political edifice of Fred LaRue’s construction was not clear. A foot or two away from them a
NIXON NOW MORE THAN EVER
sign began bobbing furiously, as if someone had detected her treacherous sentiments.

Clarine had come down to Jackson a few days ago and was staying with an aunt. After this rally LaRue planned to sneak off with her to the Gulf Hills Hotel, down near the old dude ranch that had burned down three Christmases ago. The two of them, here in Mississippi together for the first time since the old days, would see if they could re-create the powerful feeling of room 205.

While Nixon announced a plan to help increase housing starts, LaRue tried to shut his weak eyes and anticipate tonight’s rendezvous. But the Old Man wouldn’t leave his thoughts. Soon enough he will have to tell the Judiciary Committee the same largely true story he told Ervin’s gang last summer, but this time it will feel like testifying against Nixon in a court of law, since the House committee will be working up to a vote on the president’s removal from office. It will feel as bad in its way as having to testify at Mitchell’s trial, which will also be coming soon.

In the meantime, Clarine has been continuing her game of cat-and-mouse with Hunt, trying to make him give up the MOOT envelope, tantalizing the old spy with hints of something she “knows,” never letting him realize that she is acquainted with only one minor combatant in the whole Watergate war. For a cat, she has told LaRue, she doesn’t have much power. She is all bluff, and there are even moments when she thinks she might herself be a mouse. She cannot shake the sensation that somebody, maybe one of Hunt’s old paymasters, has become aware of her cryptic dance with him, and taken to watching her.

Nixon was launching into a list of “America’s great goals,” when a man LaRue recognized as Billy Pope tugged at his sleeve and said, “I
thought
I saw you.” Billy had been a college kid working for Goldwater
in ’64 and had ever since floated between the Republicans and the old-style Democrats. “Can you stay put a minute?” he now asked LaRue. “I’ve got somebody who’d like to see you. I told him I thought I’d seen old Fred LaRue out in the crowd!”

Clarine, pretending to be a stranger, looked on with amusement.

“I got nowhere else to go,” said LaRue. “Leastways not for a while.”

Billy clasped his forearm; he understood that LaRue meant prison. “Stay right here. I’m gonna fetch him.” He hightailed it back toward the front of the Coliseum.

Clarine asked, “Is this another of those professional sons you’re not even old enough to have sired?” She had come to understand the way so many of the administration’s young men, like Magruder, had made a father of this man who spent his own life wondering if he’d killed his daddy. “Who’s he on his way to fetch, Hound?”

“No idea,” said LaRue. “Could be any of a dozen guys I had beatin’ the bushes here in ’64 and ’68.”

Clarine lit a cigarette. “Oh, they beat on more than the bushes.”

She was back to Freedom Summer, talking about politics in their usual oblique, hit-and-run way. To this day a part of him suspected the killing of those three “civil rights workers” had been a hoax. Who knew for sure whose bodies had really been buried inside that dam?

Soon enough, as the Old Man went on about “prosperity without war,” LaRue saw Billy Pope striding back up the leftmost aisle of the Coliseum, ahead of two policemen and the round, bespectacled head of Senator James O. Eastland.