Crooked (11 page)

People talk about
1968 as Richard Nixon’s greatest year, when I took the presidency in one of the most improbable political comebacks in history. Or maybe the greatest was 1972, the year I won a second term and took my historic trip to China. But I’m not sure anything ever mattered as much to me as the months of July through November of 1952, the late summer and autumn when I learned how to be a spy, and I ran for vice president, and I fell at least partly in love with Tatiana.

I would leave the venetian blinds in my office open to a certain level, and Arkady would know to meet me. Or he would leave me a message, a laundry notice, perhaps, with a prearranged set of numbers contained in it. Through what sleight of documentation I don’t know, Arkady managed to obtain for himself a legitimate-looking taxi, and he’d pick me up at a discreet distance from the Capitol.

We would meet for drinks and talk about curious rumors floating in from all over the globe. We could never quite see the full picture but we knew that underneath the elegant black-and-white chessboard of nuclear strike and counterstrike there was another conflict playing out. In Southeast Asian conflicts, bodies of men and women with hooves, with solid black eyes, with half-developed wings were found. A house-size lumbering form was photographed moving among the trees of a Florida swamp. Chunks of the defense and intelligence budgets dropped out of view with even greater frequency than one usually expected, and the little we could trace ended up at university presses and with crackpot mystics and in shell companies whose origins we could never discover.

I lost sight at times of whether I was cooperating or being blackmailed. Like bullying older siblings, Arkady and Tatiana kept me in my place with alternating warmth and threats, smug in the knowledge that I would never dare to appeal to a higher authority. On nights when it was just me and Arkady and we were particularly drunk, we would give up on passing secrets and do spy training. We’d split up and then meet in an all-night grocery pretending to be strangers; we’d slip each other messages, give signs and countersigns, then vanish into the night. I’d tail him through the city streets and he’d disappear from view and then appear out of nowhere a few minutes later to clap me on the shoulder. When we reversed roles, I was never able to shake him, even on moonless nights.

As the months passed, I noticed that Tatiana grew paler and distinctly haggard. I wondered what her duties were when she was not terrorizing me, who her other agents were; people whom I’d met, perhaps, and never suspected? Once, coming out of the Capitol building, I saw her in the street. Dressed as a businesswoman or executive secretary, stylish and aloof in dark glasses. I tailed her, trying on Arkady’s skills, until she reached the Supreme Court building, and I watched her enter by an unmarked metal door. On a whim I tried the handle. Locked.

“Alger Hiss was the least of it. There is risk, a grave risk, of active foreign intelligence sources within the United States government,” Agent Hunt said. “Worse than we’d ever admit to the public. I’m talking deep cover, gentlemen. Men and women who have waited years for this opportunity to inform on us. Isn’t that right, Mr. Nixon?”

“Yes, quite right,” I said. “Do you have plans in place to find these bastards out?” He was staring at me with unnatural intensity. Spend too long as a spy and everything starts to look like a secret message.

“We have methods, yes. Signals intelligence. Defectors from Soviet intelligence. We correlate small pieces of data, for years if necessary, and they don’t even know we’re observing them. And then we act.”

“What kind of people are these?” asked a gray-haired senator, a hatchet-faced statesman of the Midwest. “What could possibly make a person act this way?”

“There are various answers, but typically it comes down to mundane motives of the lowest sort. Greed and ambition. A childish need to feel important. Many of these people are broken by other means, intimidated or blackmailed, and are simply too cowardly to resist. A very few really believe in what they are doing. Soviet intelligence knows how to handle each of these types and runs them all with immaculate perfection. Sooner or later we will get them, each and every one.”

True, all of it, but I could have told him more than that if I’d known how to explain. The exact weird mixture of desire, fear, ambition, and selfishness that pushes you privately across an invisible line, past whatever it was you used to think was so important and sacred. And when you cross the line, it vacuum-seals behind you, and it’s as hard as steel, and there’s no way to go back.

And why should you want to?
I would have asked Agent Hunt. Why did people ask you to play a game when the deck was stacked against you from the beginning? Why shouldn’t I lie to their faces and steal the food off their plates? What did I owe to any of them?

The spy hunt was in full cry, that much was clear. I went back to my office and shifted the potted plant in the window from the left corner to the right. I let Pat know I’d be working late, left the building, drove to the high school, pulled into the parking lot behind it, and walked the length of the football field to the back fence, where Tatiana was waiting in a long, dark coat, smoking as usual.

“Yes? What is it?” she said. I wondered if I’d interrupted her plans.

“Does anybody else know that we’re talking?”

“Arkady is the only one. I am sure there are analysts in Moscow who would like to know who you are but they will not know for sure. That at least I can promise.”

“But how do you know? You could be tortured.”

“It is possible. I have much protection, though. Friends. And I know a great many things about people. If they want to burn me, you are not the only one at risk.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I’m a spy, right?”

“Sort of. I’m not sure what you think of as a spy, but yes, okay.”

“Well? Where’s my protection? How do I do this?”

“You have a point, Dick. We pull you into this too fast, I think. I talk to Arkady, we make arrangements.”

“Okay, okay. Thank you,” I said.

“Is that all?” Tatiana said.

“Well. I just…I just wanted to talk, maybe.”

“We are not friends, Dick,” she said again, and not for the last time. “Is common mistake. You will hear from Arkady.”

She turned and walked along the length of the end zone and into the darkness. I waited for a car or anything to start but there was nothing. A disappearing act.

I hurried home to a reheated dinner that Pat watched me eat.

“Are you happy, Dick?” she asked. She’d ask me that at odd times during the week, at dinner, before bed, driving home.

I stared at her across the dinner table, confounded. I wanted to say,
I have a terrible secret.
I wanted to say,
I think the twentieth century is going very badly wrong.

“Of course, honey,” I said. Pat was perfect. I was a liar. I hated Pat.

“You look worried. The campaign’s going all right, isn’t it?”

It was. We were going to win by a landslide. As she very well knew.

“Great,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”

I had no idea what she was thinking at that moment. Possibly that she was married to the most boring man in creation.

Save me, idiot,
I thought, so loud it felt like I was screaming it. She cleared the dishes. As the years passed, the one thing I’d never forgive her for was not catching me sooner.

I didn’t see Eisenhower again in person for a long time. Not until the convention the following year, where the Republican Party took only thirty-five minutes to approve him as the nominee. I was in my underwear when I got the call summoning me to his hotel suite. In a rumpled suit, I barged in and mistakenly called him “chief” and generally behaved like a nervous boor as I was introduced to his wife, Mamie, and said something too loudly about ideals. It was a blur of whiskey and handshakes, and Pat heard the news on television. Nothing about it seemed quite clear or real, even after his bone-dry claw of a hand hoisted mine overhead and he called me his running mate in front of thousands and perhaps millions of human beings. And my job became making him the most important man in the world, although after the convention, he once again ignored me entirely.

In September an article accused me of taking donations from a group of rich people. Which, on its face, struck me as slightly comical—from who else was a presidential candidate meant to receive money? But the charges were beginning to stick. Articles appeared in the national press. Pat and I were shouted at while checking in to our hotel, while eating in restaurants. Men and women threw pennies at me.

Worse, they were heckling Eisenhower. And Eisenhower? Maddeningly, he released a statement that read
I believe Dick Nixon to be an honest man. I am confident he will place all the facts before the American people, fairly and squarely.
He seemed to wink at me from the page of the
New York Times,
challenging me to wonder what he knew about me. Thomas Dewey, smirking, beetle-browed Thomas Dewey, the three-time presidential loser, called me to suggest I resign from the ticket. Was he relaying a message from Eisenhower? He wouldn’t say. Was Eisenhower testing me? Was he simply an egregious asshole?

Panicked reflex: I called the number, long distance, from a pay phone outside a Portland hotel. I was told to take a long walk late the following night. I excused myself to Pat. I walked uphill in the waning heat of the Indian summer, not caring about the direction, past seedy bargain stores and brownstones, losing my way under the yellowing trees. Someone shouted at me on a street corner and I ignored it, walking until a black limousine pulled up beside me; Tatiana making her usual entrance. She beckoned me inside.

“Why did you call me? Why the fuck do I fly to Portland?” she said. She looked even more tired than usual.

“Because I don’t know what to do. I could lose because of this.”

“And you want the KGB to help you? I thought you were good at this—isn’t that what you said, Senator Nixon?”

A policeman pulled up next to us and I slouched down uselessly. Tatiana politely ignored it.

“Do you think Eisenhower knows—well, about us? I don’t understand why he won’t help.”

“I don’t know what you think ‘us’ is, Dick. But Eisenhower, I think he knows a great deal more than he says. But who can say for a man who has seen what he has seen?”

“Then what do I do?”

She lit a cigarette and thought.

“Why are you asking us? You must have people for that.”

“Nobody I trust.” And it was true. How could I trust any of them? They certainly couldn’t trust me. The Russians were the only ones who could.

“I am not an American politician, although I have stayed alive for quite some time in Moscow. But in Moscow, it wouldn’t be this way. Would happen behind the scenes. Probably you are quietly killed and then Stalin makes a speech. Not this schoolyard shit.”

“But what about Eisenhower? Why doesn’t he back me?”

“He is afraid for your weakness. Has he chosen the wrong guy? You caught Hiss, you acted like you were a tough guy, but he suspects now you are just sneaky bitch. I think he insults you on purpose. He asks you to fight for yourself.”

“Do you know yet what’s wrong with him? I thought you were investigating that.”

“I get a little from our people from the Reich. The Nazis who went east. The military types, they respect him, you know? He was smart, he outplayed them. But then we have a few others, the fringe ones. Bavarian shaman and a couple vets of the Tibet expedition, Ernst Schäfer’s people. Eisenhower scares the shit out of them.”

The Checkers speech is a joke now, if it’s remembered at all. In the moment it was something else; it was bizarre and electric. No one had thought of this before, a candidate getting on TV and sitting down to talk things out. It was Pat’s idea. Who else would have thought of just telling people the truth?

She sat next to me in the TV studio on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. It was the set of
The Colgate Comedy Hour
and
This Is Your Life,
and it smelled of foundation powder and the burning of hot lights. I had slept for four hours the previous night. At the last minute they set up a little fake office for me and I sat down to face people as if I were a school principal or a regional manager. I would go on at nine thirty, after Milton Berle was finished.

Behind me, hastily arranged curtains and bookshelves. The cameraman looked no older than twenty-two, a skinny kid staring at me blank-faced, waiting for the farce to begin. I tried to look into the camera rather than at his eyes. I tried to picture a person on the other side of the lens. All I could see was a cheap wise guy watching in a half-empty bar, knowing an asshole when he saw one. The camera swung around, irised in on me where I sat behind the host’s desk, and I was live on television. Afterward I learned there were sixty million viewers. Eisenhower watched; my own mother watched.

I didn’t have a script, just an impulse. You start with “My fellow Americans” and you go from there. “I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity have been questioned.”

Humility and folksiness, bathos and nasty innuendo. I caricatured my own working-class origins, maybe the one truly admirable thing about me, turning it into gross sentimentality. I smeared my opponent for employing his wife on staff. I relied, as always, on being a slightly worse person than my opponents expected.

It seemed, though, that the production was plagued by odd technical misfires. The temperature in the television studio dropped precipitously, then rose to a stifling level. Strange audio blips, voices whispering and then shouting in my ears, until my own speech seemed garbled and hollow. Voices that were completely absent from the recorded audio. In some moments I saw peculiar figures occupying the studio audience seats, cloaked figures, bizarre even for Los Angeles. I never heard another person acknowledge them.