Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (23 page)

“There was a natural clash between Haldeman’s zero defects system and Rose’s theory that life was more complicated,” said another observer. “Haldeman wanted a zero defects system to avoid mistakes, and Rose had the
natural insight that that was the way to have a mega-mistake. She provided ways and means of access, and he resented it.”

Rose Woods’s office is two from the Oval Office, and there she has a staff of three secretaries who handle high-level clerical tasks. The Christmas card list. Letters to the President’s friends and supporters. Requests from V.I.P.s. Miss Woods—who is paid $36,000 a year—has continued to perform her customary duties for the President. She is in the office every morning by 8:05 and often works well into the evening hours. “Her work is essentially mountains of mail,” says Rhyne, “keeping in contact with people who know the President personally, handling indeterminate numbers of phone calls. It drives you nuts to look at the stack of messages on her desk. The President has continued to use her to do exactly what she did before. I can’t see any big change in that. He has not cut her loose. But so far as I know, they’ve had only one conversation about the tape—on November 14—and nobody has broached the subject with her since. It seems the guy is so intent on what he’s doing he doesn’t concern himself with anything else. This is a very interesting aspect of the picture.”

Miss Woods has always typed most of the President’s speeches—and not just his drafts, but the speechwriters’ drafts. “I’ve seen her edit mistakes out of copy that would have gotten everyone in trouble,” said one of those speechwriters. “She is also something of an artist. You know how e e cummings writes poetry? She takes a draft of a speech and does a similar thing to it, breaks it up into phrases on the page, makes it much more easy to read, and, incidentally, makes it almost impossible to put back together as prose.” Miss Woods also controls the lists
for White House parties and prayer breakfasts—which gives her a great deal more power over patronage than might be supposed. And she has functioned as a sort of White House ombudsman, listening sympathetically to complaints from other employees who hope she will go to the President with them. When she goes out at night, she is constantly cornered by Nixon supporters who press letters to the President upon her, ask her to give him messages, give her something they’ve clipped for him.

Her apartment at the Watergate is a two-bedroom cooperative, furnished by a decorator in beige and brown, and trimmed with some of the mementos she has picked up on her trips with the President—elephants from every country she has been to, a chest from China, an ikon from Spain. There are also lots of flowers—friends have been sending them lately—and they have also been sending posters of a cat hanging from a tree limb, with a printed message: “Hang in there, Baby.” She reportedly has enough of them to wallpaper a room.

Rose Mary Woods is hanging in, but her friends say it has been difficult. “Of course she’s depressed,” says a New York friend, Claudia Val. “Anyone would be, under the circumstances.” She is not speaking to Leonard Garment and J. Fred Buzhardt, and apparently a number of people in the White House are not speaking to her. Recently, she called her dear friend Miss De La O, and asked, half-humorously and half-bitterly, “Are
you
still speaking to me?” The antipathy she has always felt for the press has increased; she is not used to being in the public print, even less used to hostile questions from reporters. A few months ago, Miss Woods stood up at a dinner party to toast the President as “the most honest
man I have ever known,” and reporters continually badger her with the remark. After one of her recent court appearances, a journalist asked her if she would stand by the statement, and Miss Woods lost her temper. “That is a rude, impertinent …” she replied. “The answer is yes.” Hill & Knowlton executive Gray has tried—strictly in a private capacity—to make sure she goes to a lot of parties and keeps busy, and he also made certain she bought a Christmas tree this year. “This wasn’t the year for her not to have one,” he said.

Until mid-November, Rose Mary Woods’s troubles were not particularly serious; or if they were, she at least felt she was being taken care of by the family. Haldeman was gone, and she had been named executive assistant to the President. She had been asked to give a deposition in the Common Cause lawsuit. (She had sole possession of the secret list of corporate donors to the 1972 campaign—the list is known as “Rosemary’s baby”—and used it for party invitations.) The Watergate committee was thinking of subpoenaing her because of her knowledge of the Howard Hughes $100,000 contribution, but had not gotten around to it. There was the milk case, and the fact that she has had a peripheral involvement in the President’s murky finances—in 1968 he gave her stock options he held in a Florida land deal, and she doubled her money. But her problems were the President’s problems. And then, on November 14, the White House lawyers sat down to play the tape and found the buzz. They could not duplicate it—and they entered Miss Woods’s office without her permission in an attempt to reproduce it.

Miss Woods’s version of her role in the mystery of the buzz is as follows. On September 28, the President
asked her to go to Camp David for the weekend to transcribe the tapes. She canceled her plans, and on Saturday morning she and the President’s appointments secretary, Steve Bull, went up to Dogwood Cabin, and Bull began marking which sections of the tapes Miss Woods was to transcribe. At 10:10 a.m.—apparently in response to a question from Bull—General Haig called and explained to Miss Woods that the subpoena of the June 20 tape covered only the conversation between the President and John Ehrlichman and that she should not bother listening to the one between the President and Haldeman. Miss Woods sat down to work, but she had a difficult time: the quality of the tape was bad and the Sony tape recorder she was using was cumbersome. Saturday afternoon, President Nixon came into the cabin, jiggled the tape back and forth several times, and said he didn’t know how she could hear anything on it. Miss Woods worked until 3 a.m. Sunday morning, and got up three hours later to work until 5 p.m., when she joined the Nixons for dinner. “It is one of the few [Sundays] in my life I did not attend Mass,” Miss Woods testified, “because I was trying to finish this job.”

On Monday, October 1, she resumed work on the June 20 tape back at the White House. Technical Services brought her a Uher 5000 tape recorder they had purchased that day. Sometime around 2 p.m., she was listening to the beginning of the Haldeman conversation—just to verify that Ehrlichman had left the room, she says. The telephone rang. When she got off the phone—four to five minutes later—she realized she had pushed the record button down. She put the tape into reverse and heard the buzz. As soon as she saw the President was alone, she went into his office, the Oval Office, and told
him she had made a mistake. “He said there is no problem,” Miss Woods testified, “because that is not a subpoenaed tape.”

Miss Woods’s version continues. In early November, she was told she would be testifying before Sirica, and on November 7, she met with White House lawyers Leonard Garment and Sam Powers—who have said they did not know about the accident at that point. They told her to answer the questions yes and no, and not to volunteer anything. Miss Woods does not remember being so instructed, but she says it was her impression that her testimony was to cover only the subpoenaed tapes. She appeared in court November 8, and she calmly and deftly told the story of the weekend at Camp David, described at some length how difficult a job it was, and said she had worked on a conversation that seemed to her to be “two to three hours” long “between the President and Ehrlichman, chiefly, and Haldeman, briefly.” She added: “It was a very dull tape, frankly.”

“Were there any precautions taken to assure you would not accidentally hit the erase button?” prosecutor Jill Wine Volner asked.

“Everybody said be terribly careful,” Miss Woods replied. “I mean, I don’t think I want this to sound like I am bragging, but I don’t believe I am so stupid that they had to go over it.… I was told if you push that button it will erase, and I do know even on a small machine you can dictate over something and that removes it and I think I used every possible precaution not to do that.”

“What special precaution did you take?…” Mrs. Volner asked.

“What precautions?” Miss Woods replied. “I used my head. It is the only one I had to use.”

From November 26 through 28, Miss Woods appeared once again before Sirica, this time represented by Charles Rhyne, and she finally told the story about the accident and posed for a series of ridiculous pictures at her desk. Judge Sirica asked her why she had not mentioned the accident when she first appeared in court.

“I would say, Your Honor,” she replied, “that I would today, but I didn’t then. I think, if you may remember, that I was petrified; it was my first time ever in a courtroom, and I understood that we were talking only about the subpoenaed tapes. And I think all I can say is that I am just dreadfully sorry.”

A few questions: How did the President know off the top of his head that that part of the tape was not subpoenaed unless he was already concerned about it? Why did Technical Services buy a new Uher when they had four identical models sitting in the basement not in use? Why did Miss Woods have to listen ahead to make sure Ehrlichman had left the room if Steve Bull had marked the part of the tape she was to transcribe? Why did the White House legal staff think the Haldeman conversation was not subpoenaed when the language of the August 13 revision of the subpoena read: “Respondent met with John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman in his old Executive Office Building office on June 20, 1972, from 10:30 a.m. until approximately 12:45 p.m.”? Why did Miss Woods mention that she had worked on “Ehrlichman, chiefly, and Haldeman, briefly” if she did not believe the Haldeman section was covered? How could it have taken her thirty-plus hours at Camp David to transcribe only an hour of conversation—and why did she originally think the conversation was “two or three hours long”? Why did
she claim to have had the Uher for several hours before the accident when she had had it for only an hour? Why did she think she went in to see the President alone in the Oval Office when White House logs show that on October 1 she saw the President in his Executive Office Building office while he was with his doctor?

In an article in the
New Republic
, Walter Pincus suggests that Miss Woods was telling the truth November 8, and invented the story of the accident some time later. “But in so doing,” Pincus writes, “she had no intention of taking the blame for the entire … gap.” That is possible. It is also possible that Miss Woods heard the Haldeman section of the tape, knew it was damaging, and erased it deliberately. It is possible she erased the entire eighteen and a half minutes accidentally. It is possible she erased the initial four minutes accidentally and then someone who hoped to stick her with it erased the rest. It is possible that the erasure was already on the tape and Miss Woods was deluded into thinking she had done it. It is possible that the President—or someone working on his behalf—erased the tape and Miss Woods agreed to take part of the blame, never dreaming she would be sold out by the White House legal staff. It is even possible that the experts are wrong in saying that the gap was caused by five to nine separate and deliberate erasures; a faulty diode may have done it. At this point, no one knows—and it is possible that, like many other aspects of the whole Watergate mess, no one will ever know.

And in the meantime, we are left with Rose Mary Woods. The loyal secretary who did it for The Boss? Or the loyal secretary who was set up? The tiger or the lady?

“I was thinking about her last night,” Eloise De La O
was saying. “Here all these things are happening and there isn’t a thing any of us can do for her. It’s a maze of things you just can’t figure out. I don’t know how she’s going to get out of it. But I pray for her. And I know she’s praying very hard.”

March, 1974

I suppose it is completely presumptuous for me to write even one word on the saga of Pat and Bill and Lance and Kevin and Grant and Delilah and Michele Loud. Last year, I managed to miss every single episode of
An American Family
. But I did catch the Louds on the talk shows, and it seemed to me at the time that, with the possible exception of Tiny Tim, no group of people had ever passed so quickly from being celebrities to being freaks. I was amazed at the amount of time they lingered on, being analyzed in print, taking up space on the air, stealing valuable time from any number of people I would prefer to have read about or seen, even including Shecky Greene. Finally, though, like a toothache, the Louds went away. And the other day, when Pat Loud’s book arrived in the mail, I felt terrible that I had not spent the months of their absence grateful for it; it is always easier to have a toothache return when you have at least had the sense to appreciate how wonderful it was not to have had one.

Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story
was written by Mrs. Loud with Nora Johnson, and the publicity director at Coward, McCann & Geoghegan assures me that its style—which
is slick and show-biz rat-a-tat-tat—reflects Mrs. Loud’s way of speaking exactly. “Gloria was a lamb chop.” “Rose gardens he doesn’t walk through.” Like that. The book itself is sad and awful, and at times quite fascinating and moving. All these adjectives ring a bell: it seems to me that they were applied to the television series as well. In fact, the only thing about Pat Loud’s book that is different from the television series that propelled her into her book contract is that no one who reads it will ever wonder Why She Did It. She did it because she wanted to tell her side. She did it because she had very little else to do. And she did it because she has come to believe that her brand of letting-it-all-hang-out candor is valuable to others in her position. Will she ever learn?

“Every other writer and cocktail circuit sociologist is contemplating the problem of the 46-year-old mother-housewife who suddenly isn’t needed anymore,” Mrs. Loud writes. “But most of these ‘problem women’ never had what has saved me, at least so far, from that devastating moment of truth: instant fame.” The television show may not have saved Pat Loud from the truth—her own head seems to have done that job perfectly well. But the experience certainly confused her, and confused the issues involved to boot. Pat Loud’s book is not the straight I-found-myself-through-divorce women’s lib confessional; her case is too unusual. Rather, it is a rambling, perplexing, contradictory account by a woman who is trying, and failing, to make some sense out of a series of events that probably defy sensible explanation.