Crooked (2 page)

This is the
true story of the Watergate break-in. It’s the story of the original crime, of course, and the hapless cover-up that followed, but there were other things we covered up, worse things, and other crimes. This is the version that will be redacted and concealed for the next thousand years or hundred thousand if the limestone vaults beneath the Nixon Library survive that long and remain undiscovered. But to understand it all you have to begin much earlier, as long ago as 1946, in the dawn of the American era and my final few days as an honorable man.

The Nixon of 1946 was clear-eyed and righteous and hungry for whatever the world had to offer. At thirty-three years old, I lived just fifteen miles from my birthplace. I had a law degree from Duke University and the remnants of a law practice I’d begun before the war. I wanted nothing more than to leave, but after the adventure of the war, I had nowhere else to go.

My parents built the house we lived in on a bare patch of dirt scorched clear by the unrelenting Southern California sun. When my father planted a tree, he’d dig down through three or four feet of red clay and crumbling sandstone before the first hint of damp. October to March it was a little cooler, and every few weeks there were torrential rains that ran and pooled on the clay soil. Red rains, sometimes, and black rains, even a yellow rain one year. Growing up, I thought we were the first people ever to live there since the world began.

An Orange County childhood was nothing like the ones in the children’s books in the library. My family was Frank and Hannah, my older brother, Harold, and three younger ones, Arthur, Donald, and Edward. Electricity came in the year I was born, the first paved road when I turned four. There was a small school. Two kids who apparently lived in the woods. A family of eight who spoke a language no one ever identified; the youngest daughter translated when she had to, until the morning their house was found standing empty and they were never seen again.

 There were no white Christmases or meadows or scented pine woods, no bears or foxes. There were rattlesnakes and black widow spiders we boldly stomped on when we found their messy little webs. It was the west, but it wasn’t wild at all, or romantic. It was dusty and lonely and weird and I dreamed obsessively of getting away, even before the worst of it began.

Even for that world the Nixons were a strange race, quiet and inward. My father and mother read too much; my father taught Sunday school, and I was singled out for it. There was a silence around our house; other children did not come over to play.

The faint smell of rotting lemons seemed to cling to everything we owned, our clothes, our hair. There are still moments when I will smell it, out of nowhere, and feel the fatal dust of Orange County between my fingers and remember that bleak, sunny place. No one was surprised when we began to fall ill.

It was as if something were stalking us. Arthur died first, when I was twelve. No one ever determined what the cause was. Tuberculosis or meningitis, one of those unanswerables. They held prayer meetings for him. Arthur had never been strong, and it was 1925. Kids died.

But then there was Harold. Four years older than I, Harold wasn’t shy like me; he liked to be with people, and he could talk to girls. He’d stay out late in the warm nights in Yorba Linda’s meager social world. Harold flew airplanes. After Harold had one especially late night, Dad sent him to boarding school in Massachusetts, unimaginably far off. I never found out exactly what he’d done. I was fourteen and maybe they didn’t think I should be told.

When they sent Harold back six months later, he wasn’t well. He’d lost weight, he coughed, he couldn’t stay warm. I was, I guess, too young to understand what was happening. Arthur’s death might have made sense but Harold getting sick was like something had gone wrong with the sun. They called it tuberculosis, and maybe it was. We moved him to a sanitarium nearby and then to another in Arizona. He died when I was twenty.

Later my mother would say that losing Arthur and Harold was the source of my precocious seriousness, that I was trying to make up for the loss and do the work of two brothers. She said it because that’s the kind of thing you say to the press, but I don’t think my mother could have been confused about this: I worked to stay out of that Yorba Linda dirt. I worked to get out.

The only good thing Orange County ever gave me was Pat, and if anyone in the Nixon White House was less well understood than me, it was her, a woman who passed through history leaving behind only a ghostly parody of herself. A reporter once wrote, “She chatters, answers questions, smiles and smiles, all with a doll’s terrifying poise…Like a doll, she would be smiling when the world broke.” No one in Washington ever saw Pat for what she was except, perhaps, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he never told.

I met Pat when I was twenty-five, when both of us were cast in a community theater production of
The Dark Tower,
a justly forgotten stage play. According to the script, Pat was supposed to be a “dark, sullen beauty of twenty, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment.” I was a “faintly collegiate, eager, blushing youth of twenty-four.” Neither casting was a stretch. In the play we supposedly had a great rivalry—I was naive, she was charismatic and manipulative, we had made-up fights and said absurd things to each other, and that was our introduction.

When biographers tell the story of our courtship, the emphasis is on my prolonged, almost pathologically dogged pursuit—everyone dwells on the fact that I would chauffeur her anywhere she liked, even on dates with other men. History has managed to make even the great romance of my life a snide humiliation.

Not that I knew what I was doing. I was in my middle twenties but this was the beginning of my romantic life and I had only very vague ideas about what I was looking for. I was absurdly passionate about her but I had no insight whatsoever as to why.

I’d like to say that love made me a better man but it didn’t, and I don’t actually see how love could ever make anybody better.

All I learned at the time was that when I wanted something I behaved with all the dignity of a rookie soldier panicking in a foxhole. I courted her with exactly the same no-brakes determination with which I later ran for public office.

Like an eons-buried elder god or a vast extradimensional intelligence, the heart lives by unreadable codes and incomprehensible motives, knows nothing of dignity or humanity, and more often than not brings only destruction and madness on those who are exposed to its baleful cravings. You could say we recognized each other. She sensed that I was as desperate as she was, as angry as she was, and that I was struggling to go places and would maybe do something stupid and interesting.

It took me years to learn that Pat’s life made no more sense than mine did. Pat’s father started as a miner, failed at that, and then became a failed farmer. He and her mother both died before she was sixteen. She’d dug in the dirt on her parents’ farm and worked at department stores and cleaned at a bank and driven an elderly couple across the country for money; she’d cared for tuberculosis patients and been an extra in films and taught bookkeeping at Whittier Union. She was enormously intelligent and uncomfortably aware that it didn’t matter, that she was going to be poor her whole life, and on some level she was on the verge of going insane.

We didn’t know how to be in love, or live together, or any of it, so we made it up. We were grown-ups, yes, but young ones. Still with a great deal to find out about ourselves and each other, secrets that would take years and decades to come out. Still with ample room to make a lifetime’s worth of stupid decisions as our partner looked on. We moved in together, we set up house and tried to make a home that looked roughly like our parents’ homes, partly as a kind of private joke, mostly because it was time to act like grown-ups and we didn’t know how else to do it.

We’d been married only a few months before I left for the war. We’d write to each other while I was in the Pacific. I wrote her long, intense, almost hallucinatory letters about my ambitions, about what we’d do, about who I thought I was and what my purpose was. What I thought we were. Hers were more polite, remote. She was keeping house, working in the war administration.

When I saw her next we were like college friends meeting up again, a couple of years later, to see who we’d grown into. To see if we were still friends. To see what we had to contend with, now that we were suddenly in the same house together again, husband and wife. Or were we even friends?

This is a tale of espionage and betrayal and the dark secrets of a decades-long cold war. It is a story of otherworldly horror, of strange nameless forces that lie beneath the reality we know. In other words, it is the story of a marriage.

At thirty-three I had come back to Whittier. My family expected I would settle myself but I couldn’t shake the idea that my life hadn’t really begun yet, not the real one. It seemed as if this were my last great chance: I would reinvent myself or else close myself off forever.

I read Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, anything at all for a glimpse of a faraway place. I went to the public library and found a directory of law firms in New York and wrote them long, courteous letters while picturing myself in a glamorous snow-covered city with sophisticated men and women. I mailed in an application for work at the FBI. None of them wrote back.

But one day a letter arrived from the Republican National Committee inviting me to come in for an interview. They were looking for someone to run for Congress against the Democrat Jerry Voorhis. It didn’t take much in those days; I was a lawyer and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Navy; no criminal record.

The first thing I did was bring the idea to Pat.

“You mean Congress as in government?” she said. “You’re going to be in an election? Oh, honey, no. You can’t.”

“Of course I can. I was class president, wasn’t I?” I told her.

“But you’re…I love you, Dick, but you’re not…”

“Not what?” I asked.

“I mean, you’re not exactly a statesman, are you? You’re, well, you have to know things for that, don’t you? About oil prices and unwed mothers and foreign-exchange rates. And people have to vote for you.”

I knew what she meant, however she meant it. I was grimly competent at making small talk because I’d learned it by rote and strenuous self-coaching. At larger functions I strained heroically for the effect of joviality and bulled through any surface awkwardness by force of will.

“It’s just an interview. Is it all right if I go in for that?” I asked.

“Go on, go ahead. My blessing.”

I did go, along with the other would-be Nixons, local businessmen, eminent lawyers, a minor-league baseball player, a crowd of hopefuls in the waiting room of history. I was chosen to run.

It turned out I had natural advantages that applied to politics and no other situation whatsoever. I had a slyly acute sense that we were moving into an interesting historical moment. The war had concluded triumphantly. Peace would reign; the great rebuilding would commence. Europe was exhausted and devastated but Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would set up the international chessboard again with the rattle bag of leftover pieces.

All I saw was darkness and suspicion. The great powers had won the war together but they weren’t friends. The Soviets had lost the most and were angrily determined to make up for it. The British were clinging to an outsize notion of their own importance, and Roosevelt was only weeks from death. It was like a formal dinner party for starving children: a brief mutual sizing-up followed by a barely decorous rush for food that would degenerate into a panicked frenzy.

The bright moral and strategic clarity of the last war vanished, leaving us with a tarnished world of intrigue, proxy fights, and a queer black humor. Even the pretense of civility was owed to simple terror, to the horror that had appeared at the war’s end. The new strategic language was all calculated risk, bloodthirsty audacity. The image of towering mushroom clouds swallowed all ideas of heroism; it made all the worries that had come before seem naive and quaintly Victorian.

 It was, it turned out, exactly the kind of climate that a shrewd, pushy, ignorant person such as myself could turn to his advantage.

My other asset was that, as I discovered, I wasn’t a nice person. Jerry Voorhis was a well-liked, Yale-educated incumbent Democrat and I was an underfunded rookie. I took liberties. I bribed, I pulled any strings I could, I begged favors, co-opted any press members who would return my calls and seemed open to a deal. I misrepresented Voorhis’s record and made insinuations just short of slander.

And okay, yes, very well, Jerry Voorhis was not a Communist. But there were a range of things a person could do that were akin to Communism or trended toward it. Restrictions on commerce, price regulations; the relationship was—look, a campaign rally isn’t a graduate philosophy seminar. I hardly had time to go into details, but I was pretty sure I was right on the basics.

And Communists were bad, weren’t they? We were talking about Stalin and company here, so without knowing too much about it, even then I could say with certainty they weren’t the greatest.

I fought Jerry Voorhis in all the ways I would have deplored in the abstract but that seemed reasonable in this particular instance—which is to say, when I wanted a thing very badly and felt that I should have it. Jerry Voorhis was perfectly competent and one of the nicer people I have ever met in politics. He just didn’t know what I was going to be like. He was expecting a gentleman.

I never hid any of this from Pat. She knew that we had very little funding and only a few viable options. She believed I was doing it for the right reasons, that this was a small price to pay to get a decent man into Congress (or at least a man who was decent before the campaign and had very sincerely promised to become decent again once he got there).