Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (21 page)

But, of course, that was a big difference—and that is where the case departs abruptly from the paradigm. Barbara Mandel responded to her husband’s rejection not just as a wounded wife but as a seasoned politician. She carefully leaked tidbits of information to selected reporters. She allowed one reporter to negotiate on her behalf with the governor’s chief aide. Her statement on July 3—which seems on the surface quite hysterical—carefully left the governor a face-saving way to return: he could simply admit that she was right, the pressures of the job
had
gotten to him; now he had come to his senses. Hell hath no fury, it is true; at the same time, it was clear that part of Mrs. Mandel’s fury came not just from the fact that there was another woman involved, but also from the suspicion that the other woman wanted to use her husband and his position exactly as much as Mrs. Mandel did.

Marvin Mandel was a young Baltimore lawyer in 1952 when he first entered the state legislature. He was diligent and hard-working; in addition, he was thoroughly introverted. His outgoing wife—who was known as Bootsie, a nickname that she inexplicably rhymes with “footsie”—campaigned and went everywhere with
him; she provided the warmth and earthiness he was chronically unable to convey. Mandel rose to become speaker of the House of Delegates. In 1969, after Spiro Agnew left the governorship to become Vice-President, the Mandels moved into the fifty-three-room Georgian governor’s mansion in Annapolis. By this time, the governor’s relationship with Mrs. Dorsey had been common knowledge around the State House for years; one of Mrs. Dorsey’s four children recently told the
Washington Post
that his mother had been seeing Mandel since 1960. Mrs. Dorsey, now thirty-six, was divorced a few years ago from another Maryland legislator; she is a Democrat who served as police commissioner during a stint on her town board. (“I’m not a big story,” she told the
Post
’s Judy Bachrach recently, “and there’s no reason why I should open my private life to you. Now, frankly, there is a big story and it’s right here in Leonardtown. We have this terrific sewage problem.”)

Bootsie Mandel was never in the tradition of great first ladies—but compared with her predecessor, she did an energetic, creditable job, and she became more involved in it as her isolation from the governor increased. “God damn it, I’m nothing around here,” she told one of her husband’s supporters early in his first term. “Before he was governor, I used to drive him everywhere. Now he has a state trooper. I used to help him with his speeches. Now he has a speechwriter. What good am I?” What good she did had mainly to do with the mansion. She refurbished it, printed up lavish programs describing its interior, appeared at charity luncheons to announce that twice-a-week tours through it were available.

At the same time, she had a habit of getting everything she did slightly wrong. At one point, she discovered
that a portrait hanging in the mansion had a label attributing it to Hogarth; she promptly insured it for $300,000, scheduled a ceremony and surprise announcement, and was informed by a prominent art historian that the painting wasn’t a Hogarth at all. Several years ago, she confounded the entire state legislature by inviting the wives to the annual party celebrating the legislature’s adjournment; the party had traditionally been an event for the politicians to be with whatever women they had been seeing on the sly during the session. Said one Baltimore assemblyman: “You cannot overestimate the panic that went through this place that day.”

Governor Mandel’s relationship with Mrs. Dorsey became increasingly open. In December, 1970, his unmarked state police car hit another car in Prince Georges County and the driver of the other car was killed. The governor refused to say what he was doing in an unmarked car after midnight; then he said he had been at a secret political meeting. Reporters checked and could not find any other politicians who had been to a meeting with the governor that night. When they asked whether he hadn’t in fact been returning from St. Marys County, where Mrs. Dorsey lived, he declined comment. At about that time, Mrs. Mandel apparently found out that the situation was serious and began to pump friends for information. Sometimes she asked straight out; more often, she attempted an approach she seemed to believe was devious. “What do you think the Jewish community would say about a governor who left his wife for another woman?” she asked the wife of one of her husband’s associates.

Within a few weeks of the governor’s walkout, Mrs. Mandel realized she had made a terrible mistake. She
had counted on her friends to side with her—and they sided with the governor and his power. She had counted on major political repercussions—but there was only a brief flurry of mail support from middle-aged women. She had counted on seeming to be a force for morality—and instead she became an object of ridicule. “She was playing cards in a game that had ended,” said one Maryland politician. “It had ended in American politics, in American life, even ended in her narrow circle. Divorce just doesn’t mean that much anymore.”

Bootsie carried on. She alerted the press as to her comings and goings. She appeared at a Washington literary party and identified herself as the woman who had knocked Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s breakup off the front page. She spoke to a group of Democratic women, many of whom cried as she vowed to continue as first lady. “I want you to know that I am a very proud woman,” she said, “very very proud of everything I’ve done since I’ve been a little girl. Life does not always work out the way you want it.…”

In the end, what kept Barbara Mandel in the governor’s mansion as long as she stayed was not the pathetic hope that her husband would return—she had long given up on that—but the fact that her presence there was the only wedge she had to negotiate a substantial money settlement. Mandel’s first offer to his wife, she told friends, was $6,250 a year, a quarter of his yearly salary as governor. Her lawyer ultimately negotiated a six-figure settlement. And on December 20, with a crowd of reporters standing outside the wrought-iron gates, Barbara Mandel moved out, with her hope chest, love seat, artificial flower centerpieces, and eight wardrobe boxes of clothing. “Five and a half months have
passed and our marriage has not returned to normal,” she said. “Therefore, with deep regret, I am leaving the mansion.”

She moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore—in the same complex where her married son and daughter live—and when I reached her on the telephone, she told me she preferred not to say anything. “I’m very busy,” she said. Doing what? I asked. “Just the normal things,” she said, “the normal things you have to do for yourself.”

“I’ll tell you a story,” one of her friends said a few days ago. “The day after Marvin moved out, last July, Bootsie went to the family cemetery. She sat looking at the graves, and she wished that he were dead. She felt she would have been better off as a widow. I can’t help thinking she was right.”

January, 1974

It all depends on whom you talk to. Everything does, as it happens, but the case of Rose Mary Woods depends so much on whom you talk to that the more people you talk to, the more confused everything becomes. People in Washington talk to each other about Rose Mary Woods a great deal these days, and the conversations always end up sounding like the third-to-last chapter in an Agatha Christie mystery. Loose ends. Nothing but loose ends. The Uher tape recorder. The mysteriously elliptical testimony of J. Fred Buzhardt. The White House allegation that the subpoena did not cover the Haldeman conversation. The weekend at Camp David. The weekend in Key Biscayne. The role of Stephen Bull. And at the center of it all is Rose Mary. Dear, sweet, considerate, thoughtful, devout, loyal, put-upon Rose Mary. Tough, cunning, crafty, complicated, powerful, fanatical Rose Mary. Which one is Rose Mary: the lady or the tiger? It all depends on whom you talk to.

“Everybody on God’s earth is against her,” Charles Rhyne is saying. “The power of the judiciary, the White House lawyers, the prosecutors, the tape experts. There’s
never been a setup like this one. How can she stand up against all this by herself? She’s got the grand jury, the Common Cause people, the milk people, the Watergate committee—all of them are after her.” Charles Rhyne is Rose Mary Woods’s lawyer, has been since the day after Thanksgiving, two days after Miss Woods, who has been Richard Nixon’s personal secretary some twenty-three years, was told she had better go out and find a lawyer of her own, because the White House lawyers would not represent her on this one. The problem, of course, had to do with an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on a White House tape made June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in. And the reason the White House lawyers cast Rose Mary Woods out to pay her own legal fees was that they thought she might well be responsible for every buzzing second of it. Charles Rhyne is outraged by the whole business. He is a former president of the American Bar Association, the lawyer Central Casting sends out when you ask for Integrity, a man of impeccable connections (most of whom he appears with in photographs on his office wall), a classmate and good friend of Richard Nixon’s from Duke Law School, and his North Carolina-accented voice becomes positively mellifluous as he assures the press that his client was sold down the river. To prove it, he pulls out a transcript of a conference held the day before Thanksgiving, November 21, 1973, when White House counsels J. Fred Buzhardt and Leonard Garment finally went to Judge John J. Sirica to tell him they had discovered a gap on the tape.

“Judge, we have a problem,” Buzhardt began that day. “In the process of preparing the analysis … one of the tapes, the intelligence is not available for approximately
eighteen minutes. You can’t hear the voices.… Under the circumstances, we know at this point that it looks quite serious. It doesn’t appear from what we know at this point that it could be accidental.”

“Does not appear?” Sirica asked.

“Does not appear from the information we have at this point,” Buzhardt said. “At its worst, it looks like a very serious thing, Your Honor. If there is an explanation, quite frankly, I don’t know what it is at the moment.…”

“Who was the last one that actually listened to this particular tape?” Sirica asked.

“The original? The original, according to the record, was first checked out to Miss Woods.”

“Was it all right before it was checked out to Miss Woods?” Sirica asked.

“We don’t know …” Buzhardt said. “I guess she is the only one [who] listened to it.… Then the circumstance is even a little worse than that, Your Honor.”

“I don’t know if it could get much worse,” said Sirica.

“Just wait,” said Leonard Garment.

“As you know, Your Honor,” Buzhardt went on, “the notes were subpoenaed, too. We found Mr. Haldeman’s notes on this meeting.… The notes reflect that the discussion was about Watergate.… When you get past the Watergate typed notes … that is where the tape picks up.… Maybe I am out of line for saying this, but quite frankly I think Miss Woods ought to have time to reflect on this and she ought to have time to secure counsel.”

The meeting ended with Sirica’s scheduling a hearing for the following Monday, November 26. Leonard Garment accepted a subpoena for Rose Mary Woods to appear there—and telephoned her to say he was doing so. He returned to the White House and sent it over to
her with a note. “Here is the subpoena we discussed earlier,” it read. “Love, Len.”

“ ‘Love, Len,’ ” Charles Rhyne says, shaking his head. “Her own lawyers plead her guilty, then say she ought to get counsel of her own, then accept a subpoena for her when they’ve admitted they aren’t her lawyers any longer, and then send it over and sign it with love. Of course, I didn’t know anything about this in the beginning. The day after that meeting, on Thanksgiving Day, I was called by General Haig and he asked me to come down. He told me that Rose had been told to get a lawyer and was very upset. I’ve known Rose twenty-three years. I called her and told her to calm down, that I’d come down the next morning.

“So on Friday I go down and speak to Haig and he sends me over to see Garment and Buzhardt. ‘She did it,’ they said to me. ‘No question about it. We ran tests on the lamp and the typewriter. So sorry. We don’t know what you can do for her.’ I went over to see Rose. She was enormously upset. I’ve never seen Rose upset. She said she didn’t know what was going on. ‘For the last week,’ she said, ‘everyone’s been treating me like a leper.’ ‘Well, Rose,’ I said, ‘I’ve talked to Garment and Buzhardt and they say you knocked eighteen and a half minutes off this tape.’ She just blew up. She said she’d known me a long long time and she was going to tell me everything. She would not accept responsibility for that. She hadn’t done it. She wouldn’t say she’d done it. She would not let them say she’d done it. She told me about the accident she had had October first with the tape, that she might have knocked four minutes off it. ‘But,’ she said, ‘what really haunts me is that I never heard a word on that part of the tape.’ I talked to her for three
or four hours. I listened to the tape. And I said to her, ‘I believe you.’

“This poor secretary, without any government money, all alone,” said Rhyne. “I stand between her and the world.”

Aunt Rose. That is what Tricia and Julie call her. She is family. Dick and Pat and Tricia and Julie and David and Bebe and Rose. She baby-sat for the girls. She exchanged clothes with Pat. Her brother Joe, a former F.B.I. man who served as sheriff of Cook County, used to wear Richard Nixon’s hand-me-down suits. She attends family dinners in the White House. The President relaxes with her. He kids her—and it is not even labored. He becomes openly irritated with her—and he does that only with people he is close to. She is the person his own relatives call when they want to get through to him: the night of the first debate against Kennedy in the 1960 election, Nixon’s mother, Hannah, called Rose Woods—not Pat Nixon—to say she thought her son looked a bit under the weather. Rose has been through it all. She took dictation for the telegram he wanted sent to General Eisenhower withdrawing from the 1952 ticket after the slush-fund charges—and she would have torn it up herself but for the fact that Murray Chotiner did it instead. She was in the car when they were stoned in Caracas, in the kitchen in Moscow; she followed him to Los Angeles and New York during the long out-of-office stretch. “I was his, I suppose you could say, personal secretary, aide, wastebasket emptier, anything else,” she testified recently. “I was the only person who worked for him at that time.”