Watergate (7 page)

“Too bad they didn’t issue that ruling last Friday morning,” snapped Mardian, who had lost all patience. “Maybe that would have given those jerks of yours a little pause on Friday
night
.”

Mitchell took two quick puffs on his pipe, as if to say, “Now, now,” and then the bedroom phone rang. The General rolled his eyes, and LaRue, knowing who it would be, got up to answer it.

Sure enough, the operator had a collect call from the Newporter Inn in California.

“You’ve fired Jim McCord! Thrown him to the wolves!”

LaRue took a pause before saying, as soothingly as he could, that they just weren’t able to retain as campaign security chief a man who’d broken into the opposition’s headquarters. He wondered, as he said it, how Martha had even found out about the firing. Had the
Post
’s story already spread to the other coast, even before the evening news broadcasts out there?

“Honey,” said Mrs. Mitchell, able to tell what LaRue was thinking, “Helen Thomas can read me the papers whenever she calls.
Or when I call her
. But you get your mind back to Jim McCord now. That man used to drive my little girl to
school
. And you all have
thrown him to the wolves
.”

The Mitchells were each other’s second spouse, and people often imagined Marty, their eleven-year-old daughter, to be a grandchild or niece instead of the baby Martha had had with John when she was past
forty. The General’s wife regarded it as an honor, not a small humiliation, for McCord to have been asked to chauffeur the girl to school from time to time. Whether she now saw an injustice to him or to herself wasn’t fully clear.

“Miz Mitchell,” said LaRue, trying something that would probably just make things worse. “We’re not even sure Jim McCord wasn’t workin’ for the other side—that this whole thing wasn’t some kind of trap the Democrats sprang on us.”

Martha laughed with sudden exuberance at the possibility, at the sheer deviousness and fun it seemed to inject into the situation, and LaRue hoped this new mood would last until he could get her off the phone.

Before he could think of the next thing to say, she’d hung up.

As he reentered the living room, he heard Magruder saying that Hugh Sloan, the buttoned-up kid who was the campaign’s treasurer, had come to him today, upset to say the least, with news that the money found on the burglars could be traced back to the CRP.

Dean said he’d heard the same thing. “And by the way,” he added, “Gordon may not
need
to be stashed away with Howard Hughes. He’s offered to be shot.”

“How do we respond to that?” asked Jeb Magruder.

“Tell him things haven’t quite come to that.”

Understatement was typically lost on Jeb, and when it came to Liddy, nothing was a laughing matter. “I don’t even want to
think
about guns in connection with that guy,” he said. “A while back a couple of us made a joke about having Jack Anderson bumped off and, Christ, Liddy thought we were serious.”

“You might be interested to know,” said Dean, “that he blames you for Friday night.”

Magruder squirmed and pouted. “Oh, swell!”

“To return to the problem of the moment,” said Dean, “Ehrlichman definitely wants to get Hunt out of town.”

Mitchell at last spoke. “This whole thing feels like a Chuck Colson production, doesn’t it?”

LaRue knew that he was asking the question rhetorically, just to indicate a direction he’d like them to start thinking in, the way Dean
had mentioned the dark, absent Ehrlichman to implicate him in what everybody here, even Magruder, understood was already a cover-up. Who knew for sure whether Ehrlichman had said a damned word about Howard Hunt, or whether Colson’s fingerprints could be found on the events of Friday night?

Dean decided to answer Mitchell’s question. “Colson says no, but he’s very touchy on the subject. Liddy does accept responsibility for one thing: picking McCord to do the burglary. He knows he should have hired an outsider, but says that cuts to his budget made that impossible.”

The group responded with what LaRue felt certain would be the final laugh of the evening; it was a weak one at that.

“And one last thing,” said Dean, who’d clearly been busy today. “There’s a safe in Hunt’s EOB office. Ehrlichman’s put me in charge of getting it open.”

“How are you going to manage that?” asked Mardian.

“Somebody from the General Services Administration is coming around with the combination in the next day or two.”

“No safecrackers available on the Committee staff?” Mitchell asked Magruder.

Nobody laughed.

LaRue remembered a meeting with Mitchell and Magruder at the end of March, down in Key Biscayne, a couple of houses away from Nixon’s. It was there that Mitchell, instead of vetoing it once and for all, had just deferred any decision to fund Liddy’s crazy gumshoe plans. They had so much money on hand, and they’d had so many more serious things to discuss, that the proposal had been gently ignored instead of spiked. But of all the guys to take the path of least resistance with: Liddy! That mustachioed nutcase who back in January had stood in front of them all in Mitchell’s office at Justice, tapping an easel and talking about prostitutes and wiretaps and knocking guys over the head. Thinking about it now, LaRue winced. Mitchell’s mind had already been elsewhere, and it had stayed adrift ever since.

The phone, again. LaRue went into the bedroom to answer it.

No, as it turned out, not Martha; the White House operator trying to track down Magruder.

As Jeb went to the bedroom to take the call, LaRue retook his seat
in the living room and noticed a thick file folder on the couch cushion Magruder had vacated.
GEMSTONE
, said the label: Liddy’s James Bond title for his whole array of surveillance and sabotage operations, each stunt named for a different jewel.

While Mitchell discussed the status of fundraising in several states—a business-as-usual interlude, designed perhaps to lower Mardian’s blood pressure—LaRue leafed through the file, which bulged with miscellaneous newspaper clippings, photos of McGovern’s campaign headquarters across town, and some onionskin copies of what appeared to be the transcripts of telephone conversations picked up by the original bugs the burglars had installed in May:

LaRue wondered if this exchange had to do with some skimming operation the Democrats had going on with their own meager funds. Then he saw, at the bottom of the page, a notation pertaining to whoever the DNC employee had had on the line. OUTSIDE TELEPHONE (ACC. TO REVERSE DIRECTORY): WATERGATE BARBERSHOP. The whole conversation was about the guy’s appointment for a damned haircut.

Alarmingly, the file was crammed with stuff confirming the existence of the surveillance operation that had made this worthless transcript possible. Christ, there was even a bill to the CRP for the listening-post room at the Howard Johnson’s.

LaRue closed the folder as Magruder returned to the living room with a big smile on his face.

“Turns out I’ve got a tennis game tonight,” the deputy chairman informed everyone. “With the veep.”

Mardian shook his head in renewed disgust over this lucky clown. “I’m surprised it wasn’t an invitation to go bowling with the Old Man himself.”

Mitchell put down his pipe and picked up his cocktail. “You laugh,” he said. “The president called to cheer
me
up this afternoon.” He looked at his watch. “He and Bob ought to be getting back to town about now.”

Silence descended, as they all contemplated what Haldeman’s taking charge of this mess might bring: no doubt a cold wrath that would make Ehrlichman’s reaction seem genial.

The phone rang yet again. On his way to get it, LaRue handed the
GEMSTONE
file to Mitchell. Magruder, in his excitement over an impending singles match with Spiro T. Agnew, didn’t notice.

This time it
was
Martha, even more riled up than before.

“Well, honey, is he keepin’ his promise?”

“What promise is that, ma’am?”

“To leave politics! What John Mitchell promised me last night in this very room I’m in!”

LaRue took what he hoped would be a calming pause. “I’d have to assume he means after the election, Miz Mitchell.”

“And if I try to
redeem
that promise any
earlier
, I suppose that Mr. King, my
bodyguard
—or shall we say my
jailer
—will give me another tranquilizer shot in the rear?”

LaRue said nothing.

“Honey,” Mrs. Mitchell continued. “I’ve given that phone number you’re on to Helen Thomas. So you tell the former attorney
general
that he should be expectin’ a call anytime now.”

LaRue sighed, thinking of the bother he’d soon be going through to change the number once again.

“Well, Mr. LaRuesevelt,” Martha said, using one of her many nicknames for him. “You take care of that man of mine until I get back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You know
why
I want you to do that? You
don’t
? Well, I’ll tell you. Because when I get back
I’m
going to take care of him but
good
.”

She hung up.

LaRue sat on the bed for a moment, silently reviewing the algebra that governed the room on the other side of the wall. Magruder hated Liddy. Mardian hated Magruder. Ehrlichman hated Mitchell. Mitchell hated Colson. And that was all
before
Friday night. He himself was a kind of lotion, a soother, the one most generally trusted because he was
the one least thoroughly known. He looked out the window at the swirling green of the Watergate courtyard and wondered what tasks would fall to him in the coming weeks and months. He was good at hiding Mitchell’s skeletons, and had managed to keep a giant one of his own hidden for years—a set of bones upon which the whole Cornpone Compound rested. He knew he’d soon be covering whatever tracks led from the men in the living room to Hunt and Liddy and McCord. The trick would be covering them without leaving tracks of his own. The reward? One of the benefits he’d always had from politics: the chance—by distracting himself with others’ calamities—to forget about his own singular catastrophe.

When he returned to the living room, Mitchell handed him the
GEMSTONE
folder along with a whispered instruction. There was a lull in the meeting while Magruder put his jacket on and got ready to go. LaRue now followed the younger man into the hallway and handed him the file: “You forgot this.”

“Oh, wow,” said Magruder. “Thanks, Fred.”

“The General suggests that when you get home tonight you have a little fire in your fireplace.” LaRue tapped the folder.

“Will do,” said Magruder, nodding gratefully as he went off to play tennis.

“You look awful!” said Mrs. Longworth.

“Look who’s talking,” replied Joseph Alsop, forgoing a kiss and sitting himself down beside his second cousin’s silver teapot.

Mrs. Longworth laughed. With her head tilted back and mouth open, her long, yellowed teeth looked oddly glamorous, like the ruins of the Acropolis at twilight.

“Mrs. Braden was just leaving, coz.”

Startled, Joan Braden picked up her purse. “I guess I am!” she cried, rising to her feet. She shook Alsop’s hand. “I’d better get home to my own
homme sérieux
, before he becomes an
homme furieux
.”

Alsop frowned. An
homme sérieux
was what he and his brother, Stewart—solid old Truman-Kennedy Democrats—had taken to calling Richard Nixon in their columns, now that all the other old Cold Warriors, including Mrs. Braden’s husband, yet another columnist, had hopped aboard McGovern’s psychedelic bus.

“Goodbye, dear,” said Mrs. Longworth to the much-younger Mrs. Braden. She didn’t get up to see her out.

“I can’t stand her,” said Alsop, once Mrs. Braden was gone. “She’s a loudmouth knockoff of Ethel,” he added, meaning Bobby Kennedy’s widow. “You know how her husband got the money for that paper he used to run out in California? By letting his wife sleep with Nelson Rockefeller, that’s how.”

“That’s hardly news,” said Mrs. Longworth. “And if it weren’t true, I wouldn’t like her as much as I manage to.”

“What’s she
doing
here?” asked Alsop. “Why isn’t she home with her eight children? And what kind of courtesan
has
eight children?”

Joe’s problem, Mrs. Longworth knew, involved the one thing that procreation and prostitution had in common: sex itself. Mrs. Braden
didn’t bother her. Imagine: hatching that brood and still having time—before, during, and after the breeding—to sleep with Rockefeller and, so it was said, with Bobby as well. That might be carrying the Ethel imitation rather far, but when Mrs. Longworth had asked, Mrs. Braden had owned up to it. Alice might have asked her about the Kissinger rumor, too, if the possibility of its being true didn’t revolt her in a purely aesthetic way.