Crooked (27 page)

My memories of
the night of June 17 will never be complete, and the various wild and hallucinatory accounts of what happened cannot be reconciled. The only certainty is that some went into the eighth floor of the Watergate Hotel, and some fewer walked out.

The Democratic National Committee had fatally overreached. Gregor had contacted that fool McGovern and sold him on a plan for electoral victory, sold him as only a Kremlin-trained operative could. The Politics of Spirituality or some such hippie line, tailor-made for the New Left.

As it was, they were almost too late. When Arkady tore the door off the room on the sixth floor, the air inside felt frigid, felt like dawn over Russian permafrost. Several DNC staffers were found frozen to death, still standing in the postures in which they had completed the ritual, victims of their own naive understanding of power politics. The suite was soaked in blood, caked in feathers, and strewn with candles, paper, the debris of the summoning.

American magic is haphazard, a thing of
genius loci
and wild talents. The Russians had set their most inventive minds to the problem of travel through frozen, starry places beyond their gates. When they came, the eight military shamans who stepped out onto American hotel carpeting were hardened from service in Afghanistan and stranger places, and ready to die to establish their beachhead.

While six shamans dug in behind desks and chairs, the final two prepared the way and its cold breath pervaded the room. Pat glimpsed it but would say little, a dark shape rising from the Russian steppe, spilling millennia-old snow from wings that could shroud a city. It needed only to empower a proxy in the land of its enemy and it could bring its will to bear. And then, its host in power, it could at last shake off its bonds and take flight over the pole to the New World, its form a gargantuan blot on American radar before it descended to breed in its new satellite nation. A McGovern presidency would end the Cold War and unite the rival powers in one savage, blasphemous coalition.

I wish I could have seen the fight. Tatiana unrestrained, a blur to the eye, at last free of the pretense and control of civilian life.

I’d begged Pat not to go but she wouldn’t hear of it. As I heard it later she was capable of far more than she ever confessed to me. I believe she had spent time in the subterranean White House without me, reading the Democratic disciplines that had belonged to that party long since, battle magics perfected in the War of 1812 and on the fields of the Revolution itself. Pat reportedly shone so brightly it was impossible to look at her; it was as if the world had been torn open to show the light behind it, a fracture in the shape of my wife.

Henry loomed in the fray, the dark beast of the Bavarian forest at last unleashed. His origins will never be understood and whether he was profoundly good or evil, human or not, it was his legalistic sorcery that turned the tide and closed the gate, though the effort nearly killed him. He did his duty that night; his only mistake was to miss that crucial last card I would deal from the very bottom of the deck.

A numbed and semiconscious George McGovern was apparently central to what they’d hoped to accomplish. We also recovered several spheroid objects, each two feet across, whose composition was later found to be an inexplicable match with lunar rock formations. But Gregor was nowhere to be found.

I, of course, was nowhere to be found either. In fact, I was in the lobby, disguised and safe from harm, only waiting for the outcome. Eventually, I went to the restroom, walked to a stall, and sat down to wait in privacy. Just for a minute, face in hands, trying not to wonder how much time it would take. After a few seconds, I heard the restroom door.

I thought maybe Gary had come to tell me the world was ending after all. I opened the stall door just a crack. A little old man in the red-and-gold uniform of a Watergate Hotel valet lingered in the restroom doorway.

It was a shock to see how much Gregor had changed. The sleek young man of 1948 had withered and puckered; his skin had a deep permanent tan and age spots. He still wore his thinning hair combed straight back, but there was now a circular scar on his left temple, the skin roughened, the surface visibly cratered. It appeared he’d once been shot in the head and it hadn’t worked.

“Richard?” he said. I didn’t say anything. There were no other exits. It wasn’t going to be hard to find me, but I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the stall. I was only seconds away from a very unpleasant thing happening. I wanted those seconds. I wished with all my heart I could fight him. Eisenhower would be gathering thunderclouds by now, preparing to strike the man dead.

“Richard, I don’t have much time. I wanted to do this properly and have a good talk but Kissinger’s made it hard. I was going to run for office against you. If you think Kissinger played it rough, well…you should see how we do it back home.” True, the restroom had only one exit, but the space was palatial in scope. A line of stalls ran down each wall, with a marble island of sinks, soaps, and mirrors in the center. I was in a middle stall and watched while Gregor strolled along the stalls opposite me, stopping and nudging each one open, taking deliberate care, one and then the next. I waited breathlessly for him to pass the midpoint.

“But you’ve come on your own, and it’s too much to pass up. I truly can’t wait till he sees me wearing your face. What a time we’ll have then. East and West united. Down comes the Berlin Wall. We’ll go to the moon. All comrades together.” Now Gregor had reached the middle, and then he passed it. I was closer to the door than he was.

Behind him, I eased the stall open and took my first step along the tile. Gregor was making headway. He could turn at any moment. I took another step, as silent as I could be in stiff presidential shoes. I tried to calculate my odds. The moment I began to run, he would hear my footsteps clattering. He still walked like a young man, and I had never been fast. A desperate scramble across the tiles with the devil himself at my heels. For some reason that was the thing I couldn’t stand. What if I slipped? What if he caught me?

Two more gingerly placed steps. In ten seconds he was going to turn around and see me standing there. The thirty-seventh president would die creeping through a public restroom. Where were my fucking powers? The real ones? I’d thought I was going to be able to fly.

Five seconds. Just up to the mirror with the light switch. I should probably have started running by now. Eisenhower would have backed Gregor down and laughed him out of the room. I was nowhere near the door. Could I get back to a stall? No. It was a joke. It was over. Three seconds. The awful thing was going to happen and I didn’t know what to do.

I turned the lights off. I heard a soft “Oh” from across the room. Had Gregor noticed where the light switch was on his way in? If he had, then I’d just told him where I was. I stood frozen and waiting for it but it didn’t come. I watched as Gregor felt his way along the row of sinks to the door.

“All right, comrade. I’ll wait. I’m at the door now. You may come to me when you’re ready.”

I felt my way forward to the sink and turned one of the taps on, and the water hissed out, the white noise masking every other sound in the room. I slipped my shoes off for good measure.

“What are you doing, Mr. Nixon?” Gregor said. I looked for something I could pick up, anything at all. It didn’t seem like anything in the room was going to kill Gregor. I lifted the heavy ceramic lid off one of the cisterns, hefted it; the man who controlled North America’s nuclear codes was going into battle armed with a toilet-tank lid.

I remembered being dragged, long ago, toward that hole in the wall and the frightful thing beyond, and I remembered begging them to stop, and I watched now as the shadows around Gregor darkened further. He was becoming less human as I watched, features contracting and lengthening into that hideous beak.

And there was nowhere to hide now. I was going to die alone with the darkness inside me that had always been there, inescapable. The night in Yorba Linda, the train whistle, dark shapes in the depths of the reservoir. I had written once of the black thing in a tree, and the dark swarm that came out of it, and the good dog Richard who ran from it, ran all the way home.

I saw now that Gregor stood in the darkness too, blind and deaf and very far from his home. Gregor, the monster I made. He didn’t see me as I hefted the cistern lid and swung, hard, but it was only to get his attention. I let it drop and shatter on the tile. I’d lived in that darkness for so long and I knew it now. I was the blackness of a particularly cold winter night in 1620, and although Gregor was a frightening man, there were worse things in the world. There were in particular four women still out there in the dark forest under the snow who had never quite died after all, had they? And they knew what to do with Gregor.

An hour later
the second team entered the Watergate Hotel. Their mission, to shift the night’s drama from tragedy to farce. A group of young and highly competent men meticulously cleaned and reconstructed the offices of the Democratic National Committee to make them look only mildly ransacked and then stood in the middle of the suite and waved flashlights around until, at 2:30 in the morning, the police were finally called. They disclosed their names and handed over their surveillance equipment, cameras, emergency cash, and at least one incriminating phone number and then proceeded to deny everything. The curtain on the final act of my low-comedy political demise had risen, and the masquerade, the bizarre double game whose story has been told and retold, was afoot.

I egged them on, all of them. “Come and get me,” I said. The ones whose phones I’d tapped, whom I’d lied to, slandered in the press, stolen votes from. I’d spent a lifetime making enemies, and here they were. They were coming for me and they were going to have themselves a grand feast.

But Richard Nixon would fight them first. I brazenly declared my innocence. I lied. I told them it was a matter of national security. I threw John Dean to the wolves, and then the rest of them, denying their friendship, loyalty, credibility. I pleaded for time and clemency. I cursed them. I’d go kicking and screaming, ducking and dodging and, ultimately, crying. I’d go out like a Nixon.

It took them a year. In July 1973, they began asking for the tapes. What tapes? No one had any tapes. Well, in fact, everyone had tapes. Johnson did, Kennedy did. We all made them. And no, they couldn’t have them, subpoenas be damned. I invoked executive privilege. The tapes were a sacred trust, to expose them would compromise anyone’s ability to speak with the president. The court told me to give them the tapes. We appealed, lost, appealed again. I wouldn’t go quietly. I couldn’t.

Four years later I would sit for my interview with David Frost. We had scarcely met before we were thrust together under the lights, and he smiled, mousy and sharply discerning. He  asked, for his very first question, why I didn’t destroy the tapes. Pat Buchanan had told me to destroy them, everyone had. I was startled and very nearly told the truth, at least part of it, which was that I deserved them. I deserved to be brought before the judgment of history and damned in my own voice.

But I did not necessarily want what I deserved, not yet. In October I fired the special prosecutor, and in response, the attorney general and his deputy both resigned, the famous Saturday Night Massacre. They called it the most poorly judged act of my political career. They hadn’t seen anything yet.

What happened in
those few seconds birthed the modern idea of the inopportune sound bite, the career-defining gaffe. Millions have watched it, probably hundreds of millions. In a few seconds I made the presidency a joke in a way that the obese Taft or the pathetically corrupt Harding never could.

It was already far from my best day. I would never have gone back to Disney World if I had had a choice. The setting lacked dignity and there has always been something uncanny about the location, one of the nation’s primordial swamps. But the lawyers advised it and Henry was getting desperate. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t gain any ground. So we decided I would do a question-and-answer session at the annual convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, held at the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World.

I’d flown in the night before and had stayed up till dawn looking out at the lagoons, at the strange artificial landscape of the Magic Kingdom, and remembering Agent Reindeer. I arrived at the convention and was shown to the front of a long, low, claustrophobic ballroom, and immediately they clustered around, firing questions. The talk veered from Watergate to the
Pentagon Papers
to the tapes to illegal surveillance, and I struggled to focus. Watching myself on videotape, I see I was obviously tired, angry, possibly a little drunk. I leaned into the lectern as if into a high wind. I was needled, harangued, cross-examined. I was punch-drunk when it began, that car wreck of a paragraph.

“Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the television audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service—I have earned every cent.” Here it was, the warm-up to the crash, to the fishtail and skid. I still had a decent rhetorical rhythm going but I was stalling; time was slowing down inside me.

“And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice.” Why did I even say this? On the videotape there’s a little head shake for emphasis at the end, as if I’m daring somebody to contradict me, to ask me if I had any idea what constituted justice at that point. As if I’m rhetorically steering straight for the guardrail and the cliff beyond.

“And,” I found myself saying, “I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination.” I welcomed it? This was the fuck-you, and as I said it, I threw up my hands to prove it, essentially saying,
Shout me down, if you will, given that I’m virtually staking my career on a doomed lawsuit over the privacy of the executive branch.
I said it because I could see what was coming, a lifetime of this hedging and prevaricating, a fighting retreat unto death.

And I said it because I was waiting for the questions that weren’t coming, that no one knew to ask. About Alger Hiss’s true secrets, about Eisenhower’s lost plan. About the terrible truths of our reality, the shattering gulfs of time haunted by alien intelligences. And then the wave broke, and I lost control, and I said the rest of it.

“Because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.” People have accused me of lacking political instincts, of having a tin ear, but I knew at once what I’d done. I could already see the bullies of the press corps light up, the corners of their mouths twitching. They had the purest schoolyard sadists’ instincts for the inadvertent and the off-script, the screwup, but whether or not I was a crook was the question I would be asking for the rest of my life. I said it and then I gave the answer. You’ll see me say it on the video, bitter and resolute, then step back and look at their faces and wait for the laughter. Watch me. Knowing I’d crafted the perfect cover-up at last, the ruse that ensured I’d never be believed, I flung it straight in their teeth and fooled them all.

I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I didn’t even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn’t allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn’t guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division.

I’d met Walt himself in 1954. Eisenhower had called me into his office and introduced me to a gentle, slightly stooped man with a wispy mustache and hair combed straight back. “Meet Agent Reindeer,” he’d said. Reindeer had a weak chin but extraordinary heart-warming eyes, liquid and intelligent and sly. He shook my hand earnestly and said, “How do you do?” Of course I knew him at once.

“Reindeer’s a great technician,” Eisenhower said, “the man in charge of Negate Crystal. He’s building the greatest military fortification the world has ever seen.”

“You’re from California, Mr. Vice President?” Reindeer said. He had a genteel manner from somewhere that I couldn’t place, and the magnetism of a film star. I wondered how he’d been recruited.

“That’s right. Yorba Linda.”

He froze a moment, then looked at me carefully.

“How did you like it?” he asked seriously. Like an examining physician.

“I had my childhood there. Good folk,” I said. It was a presidential answer, the kind I’d been trained to make, impenetrably bland and folksy.

“You didn’t notice any manifestations?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. Manifestations?”

“The soil there…never mind‚ never mind,” he said, but he took a noticeable step back.

“Reindeer’s been active in your area for quite some time. You’ll go out and see the facility when it’s operational,” said Eisenhower. “I can’t explain how it all works. Geomancy is a very technical field. It’s principally a defensive installation, although there may be offensive capabilities down the road.”

I sat through a long briefing then, none of which I understood.

On Reindeer’s way out, I stopped him.

“You do mean the magic…of the imagination, right?” I said. “The look in a child’s eyes and that sort of thing?”

“Oh, no, none of that nonsense,” he said. He glanced down shyly. “I’m a sorcerer, Mr. Nixon. Come see me when my work is complete and you’ve come into your power, and I’ll show you. I’ll show you wonders.”

He’d said that. But then he’d died in 1966, years too early. No magic, no kingdom.

Still, a trip to Disney World couldn’t truly be the worst day of my presidency. Except insofar as, at this point, every day of my presidency seemed to be the worst day.

The management came out and greeted us and we were ushered in through the turnstile. Everything felt wrong. Even the optics were wrong. Shouldn’t we be paying? We looked like visiting royalty, not regular small-town Americans, and that was my brand. And
Disney
was a byword for the kind of trumped-up sentimental Americana believed in only by children. I’d be “the Disney president” in a hundred penny-ante op-ed pieces this week.

Julie was bored; Tricia was embarrassed. And I walked around feeling like shit, trudging from one cheap photo opportunity to the next, my grinning Nixon mask firmly in place. It was as if the whole operation were designed to make a real person, a grown-up person, feel bad about himself.
This is how you’re supposed to feel,
it seemed to say,
good and wise and pure. See how great that is? How do you feel about yourself now?
We’d been handed a few younger children, cousins or friends of cousins, I wasn’t quite sure, and they trotted along. They were locals. Gary was there too, eyes wide and evidently having the time of his life even as he hauled his payload through the amusement park. The straps of his satchel looked a little frayed to me, but I didn’t mention it.

I wanted to like it too; honestly, I did. I wanted at least to feel like I was standing there. Jesus, all I could think of was my approval rating. Haldeman had called; the Gallup poll had come out that morning. A 32 percent approval rating. I’d sat with the phone, feeling the silence stretch, as I tried to think of an answer to 32 percent.

“What—what do they actually ask when they call a person on the phone?” I asked. “What’s the question people are answering?”

“The exact words are ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the way Richard Nixon is handling his job as president?’ And so, that’s the choice.”

“So…disapprove. Not much room for ambiguity there,” I said.

“No.”

I had a list of the things people were unhappy about: Vietnam. The Russians. The Chinese. The protest movement. Now I’d come into my power, and what was the point? Maybe this was Eisenhower’s joke on me.

“What did Eisenhower have this month? End of fifth year?” I asked. I knew Haldeman would know.

“Look, sir, those were different times.”

“Just roughly.”

“He’d had a bump, so…fifty-eight. But Eisenhower was—it was a different metric for someone like him.”

“Someone like him? What does that mean? What about someone like me? How exactly are we different?”

“Never mind, sir.”

“Well, what do we do?”

There were a lot of possible answers to this. A speaking tour with the goal of connecting with ordinary Americans and their concerns and then crafting legislation to address them. Social welfare to the neediest. Sitting down with the warring camps in our divided nation and looking for places to compromise.

“Henry’s got the letter writers going. The
Times,
the
Wall Street Journal.
Letters in protest. A couple experts questioning their methodology.”

“Well…well, carry on, then.”

It was how we did things. Approve or disapprove? Honestly, it was hard to say.

“Where do you want to go first?” Pat said, watching me a little cat-like. I don’t think I ever told the truth to a single soul until I met Pat, and I’m not sure I ever regretted it more than I did then, stewing in self-loathing.

When you go into Disney World, it starts with a rustic town square, fire station and city hall and movie theater. A cozy little town of friendly faces and homespun wisdom where no one was ever spat on, where three-toed feet never lurked outside one’s living-room window only to vanish with the dawn. A place I’d never been.

We window-shopped a little as we strolled Main Street, U.S.A., displays of toys and country scenes, eerie Victorian dolls and bric-a-brac. Was this Eisenhower’s childhood? The street opened out into a wide circular plaza, and beyond it, dominating the skyline, was Cinderella’s Castle, absurd and delicate and beautiful.

They’d repurposed the look of a Bavarian folly, a nineteenth-century German monarch’s Romantic idea of an ancestral dwelling. What was it doing here? How was this American at all? Wasn’t the point of America to not have a king? To not have magic? I remembered what Eisenhower said about the place: “It is the engine of our phantasmal dominion. I believe that as long as it stands, America cannot fall.”

We soldiered on through the main plaza, crossed a drawbridge, and entered into Fantasyland, a crammed-in ghetto of folklore. King Arthur’s sword stuck in a rock, Peter Pan’s London town house, and Toad Hall. A wicked queen (monarch of what country?) peered out of a lit window. The crowd was densest here, the atmosphere somehow more crushing. One of the masked dwarfs took my hand in his (hers?) for a photo opportunity and I glanced around to find a Secret Service agent, for a terrifying moment certain he (or she) was dragging me off to either subterranean revelry or ritual punishment, I could scarcely decide which. In fact, we walked a few awkward paces until I pulled away, averting my human eyes from his (or her) platter-size ones. I wondered whether one could buy a drink anywhere on the grounds or how a president might even raise the subject. A king, I supposed, could just raise a jeweled goblet and beckon.

Inevitably, Liberty Square and the Hall of Presidents. I walked there like a prisoner going to trial. This had to be Agent Reindeer’s last shot at me, and a venomous bolt it was.

It was as if Disney knew my ancient nightmare and had rewritten it. A ponderous speech played but I didn’t hear the words; I was just looking at the thirty-six presidents staged like figures in Raphael’s
School of Athens,
Washington and Lincoln framed by the lesser lights. I set my face in a pious mask, trying to look like a man ennobled by an encounter with his great forebears. They looked at me and I looked at them, the brotherhood. All captured in their most essential aspects. The dying patrician FDR’s noble languor. Andrew Jackson’s foppish menace. James Madison’s hollow-eyed stare, pregnant with mortal knowledge. Taft’s vital glare. A lineage of grotesques and homicides, slavers and geniuses. A fistful of dead presidents. The silent majority.

A crowd of angular faces, scowls and beards and the occasional sly smirk. And they began to speak as the light shifted from one to the other, at first voicing only a chorus of patriotic platitudes.

I seemed to hear more, now in whispers, faster than I could catch. Washington mused, “I will not become a king. I will be…something stranger.” James Polk anxious and unpleasantly fervent: “There is a cancer at the heart of our Republic. Yea, a living god!”

Ulysses S. Grant keening,
“Iä! Iä!,”
the model staggering to its feet. McKinley stretched out a warning hand: “I fear what I have become. My blood will poison the ones who slay me!”

Teddy Roosevelt stuttered, “It’s s-so bright in here. My eyes—can nothing be done?”

Taft, rapt: “I have made a most extraordinary discovery.”

Eisenhower’s voice, heartbreakingly familiar: “There is one who will come after me.”

At last they fell silent; the lights dimmed and then rose again. No one else seemed disturbed. Had I fallen asleep?

It was getting dark. We were taken to see what was meant to be the showpiece of my visit, two rides that were new since the last time I’d been here. Was this, I wondered, to be the completion of Agent Reindeer’s work? Or were they going to keep building this thing forever? There was a hushed humid bayou, a summer evening. Lanterns glowed over the black water; an old man sat in a rocking chair. We got into a boat and bumped along down a sudden declivity and into a cavern and then rapidly passed a series of allegorical tableaux. Skeletons sprawled on a sandy beach, the outcome of a long-ago frenzied melee. A sunken rowboat. A skeleton posed in the midst of limitless wealth plundered from all the civilizations of the world, studying a map. Each one a memento mori. A dilapidated tavern room where two skeletons faced each other across a chessboard. Was this Cold War symbolism? “Dead men tell no tales,” a voice said. He’s not going to say anything? Then what was I doing here?