Murder at the Watergate (5 page)

As preparations for Christmas had been starting earlier each year, the same phenomenon had been occurring with politics, particularly on the national level. Of course, as some had observed, each new campaign began on the same day that the previous campaign ended, or earlier. Already, two other Democratic presidential aspirants, one a liberal senator from Wisconsin, the other a fence-straddling member of the House from California, had begun traveling the country making speeches to influential groups of Democrats, initiating the tortuous process of raising money, and had started their sniping at VP Aprile’s stance on issues. More accurately, their attacks were on the administration itself, with Aprile suffering the fallout, as if he had engineered every issue and problem.

Claire Coyne, recently hired as press secretary for the campaign, huddled with an assistant in one of six offices comprising the suite. The remaining five offices were occupied by other staffers, each convinced that his or her role in Aprile’s drive for the White House was the crucial one, that his or her insight into the electorate’s psyche was the most pertinent and most valuable; failure to heed their admonitions was to ensure defeat. Embrace them and victory was in hand. They didn’t express this in so many words, certainly not to Joe Aprile, but they believed it in their hearts, which was less important than the cognitive reasoning of more senior staff members, whose pacemakers were the polls.

Chris Hedras conferred with the campaign’s finance chairman, Philip Hentoff, a New York investment banker, who looked older than he really was thanks to prematurely graying hair and a perpetual expression of disagreement. He’d been wooed into a leave of absence from his firm to handle things financial for the Aprile campaign, having heard the siren call of power and responded to it. He already had money. Power was the logical next acquisition in his hierarchy of needs, as psychologist Abraham Maslow might have explained.

The largest of the offices was the campaign’s boiler room, where a dozen phones stood at attention on two sturdy folding tables. This was where calls soliciting money for Aprile’s coffers were routinely made: “We know you’ve supported the administration in the past and wouldn’t want to see the country be derailed by a new administration. Joe Aprile knows you, knows what you need. It’s imperative he be the next president, but he needs your financial support. He’s counting on you and
other Americans with your values and vision to put it on the line. And believe me, he won’t forget that you stood up for him and his vision of a strong and prosperous America.”

Aprile had put out the word that he was not about to become ensnared in the sort of imbroglios that had dogged previous administrations. There would be no fund-raising calls from federal offices, especially the White House. Members of the administration, and certainly those working directly for the vice president, made the daily trek from the White House to the Watergate to make solicitations. “The vice president is obsessed with this,” members of Aprile’s staff were lectured on a daily basis. “Break the rule, even once, and you’re gone.”

Mac Smith sat in another office with a policy advisor and two of the campaign’s speechwriters. He listened quietly as the writers argued over a line Aprile was to use in his remarks that evening. It seemed to Mac that the differences between the two versions were so minor it wasn’t worth debate. Pride of authorship was, at best, quaint where the ghostwriting of political speeches was concerned. Still, Mackensie Smith, who considered himself politically astute, at least to the extent that few things surprised him, was aware that the wrong word in a speech, or even the right word interpreted the wrong way, could have serious negative impact in the media the following day. He stayed out of it.

The writers were still arguing over the line when the vice president arrived, flanked by his usual contingent of Secret Service agents. With him was his appointments secretary, an advisor on domestic policy, and a deputy chief of staff to the president who’d been promoted after
Chris Hedras relinquished his official White House duties to take hands-on control of the Aprile campaign.

Wresting Hedras from the president’s staff had not been easy. Negotiations had gone on for months, with the president adamantly refusing to lend Hedras to his veep’s run for the White House. But he eventually acquiesced when Aprile made a personal plea to his boss. Joseph Aprile liked Hedras. More important, he agreed with many of the young Bostonian’s views on how to get elected. You stayed above the fray and applied a tolerable amount of near-demagoguery, meanwhile acting presidential, assuring those already in your camp that you wouldn’t change positions on them, while indicating you might be willing to shift perspective for those who hadn’t yet made up their minds. And you raised and spent money, plenty of it, hammering away on television, your face and message always there, establishing a share of the market for the product—a person named Joseph Aprile. Like laundry detergent, your brand had to promise to do a better job than the competition’s. Hedras had had mixed emotions about this switch in duties. On the one hand, he was comfortable with most of the president’s policies, finding them easy to defend when that was necessary. He was not as sanguine in his acceptance of some of Joe Aprile’s political positions.

On the other hand, he’d begun to wilt somewhat under increasing criticism of him by other members of the president’s inner circle, who painted him as arrogant, bordering on fascist. If they wanted something to reach the president’s ear, Hedras was the conduit. He reveled in such power. But a call for investigations by key Republican members of Congress into alleged campaign finance
abuses during the administration’s last election had cast an unpleasant pall over Hedras’s daily activities. It seemed that the sort of intrigues that had plagued politics for years were about to raise their ugly heads again, same script, different players. China. Now Mexico. Tomorrow, who knew? Maybe Germany, or Argentina, or some Arab country plainly, if covertly, seeking to buy influence in the American governing process.

Hedras was well aware, too, that this was a lame-duck president who would be in a position to delegate power for only another year. The future was, very likely, Joe Aprile. Successfully running Aprile’s campaign meant Hedras would be able to call his shots in a new administration, a zestful contemplation for a thirty-five-year-old whose requisite energy for handling such jobs would one day wane, but certainly not for another four years. He’d learned back in Boston the need to suck it up, to always keep something in reserve when the main tank threatened to run dry. Most important, his earlier political experience had instilled in him one inviolate rule: The only person you could trust was yourself. Slaps on the back lasted only as long as you had something to give. When you no longer did, those slaps quickly turned to daggers.

Aprile came directly to the office in which the speechwriters continued their bickering. “You have my remarks?” he said, extending his hand.

The writers started making their respective cases but Aprile shut them off, waving that same hand and saying, “Give me the version I saw this afternoon.”

“But Mr. Vice President, I really think—”

The victorious writer handed her version of the speech to Aprile. The other writer shrugged, leaned back
in his chair, and looked at Mac, his brow knitted into a frown. Mac managed a small smile. His friend Joe not only had the reputation of being a stiff, staunch square shooter, he was decisive, a trait Mac always admired in people provided they were decisive about something with which he agreed.

“Hello, Mac,” Aprile said, taking a chair one of the writers had vacated. “How was your party?”

The veep, as usual, looked fit and ready for whatever might come. Mac sometimes thought Aprile was the right man in the wrong job, too decent to spend his life in the often bitter, disingenuous world of politics. More suited to be a high school guidance counselor. But Aprile’s long and successful political career testified to his political skill and backbone. You didn’t aspire to the White House unless you were a warrior, no matter how genteel you appeared on the surface.

Aprile wore his customary conservatively cut dark suit, white shirt, and unremarkable tie. Although he ordered his suits custom-made from London’s tony Savile Row tailor Anderson & Sheppard, they looked as though they might have come off a local department store’s rack. But that was part of Joe Aprile’s appeal to the masses; he didn’t wear his wealth and expensive taste on his sleeve. He appeared to be the quintessential common man—which he certainly wasn’t—a serious, thoughtful expression on his long, Lincolnesque face, clear, understanding green eyes, his ready smile not masking another agenda, soft brown hair cut by a local barber, not a tonsorial artiste, aka stylist. (In reality, the Watergate Hotel’s resident hairstylist, Zahira, regularly traveled to Aprile’s office to trim him.)

Joseph Aprile was, as Mac Smith realized long ago, the perfect political package, born to the calling and comfortable with it. “Went well, Mr. Vice President. Annabel took a page from Pat Buckley. Kept it simple, made sure it was right.”

“Chicken pot pie?” Aprile asked, laughing. The wife of conservative columnist and commentator William F. Buckley was known as much for her pot pies, meticulously prepared, as for her omnipresence in fund-raising.

“No, that would have been a little too elaborate for us. We stuck to finger food. Nice crowd. Elfie made sure of that.”

“Good old Elfie, everywhere at once. I think there must be a half dozen Elfie Dorrance impersonators around Washington, like society orchestra leaders who book six jobs the same night and seem to be at every one of them.”

“She is dynamic, that’s for certain,” Mac said. “Nice to have someone like her on your side when you’re running for president.”

They were interrupted by Chris Hedras, who handed Aprile a sheet of paper. “These are the people I think you ought to acknowledge tonight.”

Aprile shook his head as he perused the list. “Everybody in the room is on it,” he said.

“I did it in classic journalistic form,” Hedras said. “The inverted triangle. If you’re going to lop off names, do it from the bottom up.”

Aprile said nothing as he put the list in a file folder.

“A couple of minutes alone?” Hedras said.

“Sure.”

Mac and the others in the room stood on cue and left.
Mac went to a window in the phone room and absently looked through it. He wasn’t quite sure why he was there, included in the vice president’s official circle. Actually, he knew the answer. Like every leader, Joe Aprile needed to include a few people around him with whom he was at ease and who did not play a direct role. Mac had committed himself to being at Joe Aprile’s side whenever summoned, no questions asked, willing to listen and, when asked, to give an opinion without worrying about its political ramifications. Joe Aprile was a friend. But Mac was also quick to admit, at least to himself, that he enjoyed a certain psychic pleasure in being close to so powerful a man, to being an invited member of his kitchen cabinet, and being allowed to share some of his more intense concerns. Like Joseph Aprile, Mackensie Smith was, among many things, human.

During the twenty minutes Joe Aprile conferred in private with Chris Hedras, Mac passed the time chatting with the loser in the speechwriter debate, who still seemed anxious to convince Mac he’d been right.

When the door opened and Aprile stepped through it, followed by Hedras, it was obvious that it had not been a pleasant conversation. Additional anger lines had been added to the vice president’s handsome face. Hedras didn’t look especially cheerful, either.

“See you later,” Aprile said to no one in particular as he prepared to leave the offices, surrounded again by staff and protectors. He turned to Smith: “Coming with us?”

“You bet.”

Mac accompanied the vice president to a suite on an upper floor, a staging area to be used before Aprile’s entrance into the ballroom. Annabel would be linking up
with Carole Aprile in an adjacent suite where wives readied themselves. When that plan had been announced, Annabel had commented that it sounded like an anachronistic dinner party where the men retired to a separate room for brandy and cigars while the ladies stayed at the table to discuss domestic help.

“A civilized practice that ought to be resurrected,” Mac had replied.

“Like foot binding and bloodletting,” Annabel said, kissing him on the cheek.

Mac thought of again being with Annabel in a few minutes. Although they’d been together just an hour ago, the contemplation of seeing her always elevated his spirits.

Invited guests had started to arrive. A Secret Service checkpoint had been established just inside the doors leading into the hotel from the lower-level entrance. A second checkpoint at the top of the winding staircase that linked the banquet-room level with the lobby floor above was also in place. There had been a debate whether to use metal detection equipment for the affair, but the decision was made that it wasn’t necessary. The area had been “swept” three times in the previous two days, including a last-minute examination late that afternoon. Every access to the route the veep would take on his way to the ballroom was secure.

But now that an alert had been issued, Mike Swales wished he had those metal detectors. No time to order and set them up now. Protecting the vice president would be strictly a human endeavor.

Swales intensified his visual scrutiny of the area. He was known within the Secret Service as a belt-and-suspenders sort of agent, always looking for that extra security edge even if it meant overdoing it. Better safe
than sorry. If he had his way, the president and vice president would spend their days in offices encased in bulletproof canisters. If nothing else, that would ensure that there would be no more JFK or RFK assassinations, no crackpot coming up to Reagan on a sidewalk and putting a bullet in him. No chance of something like that happening on Mike Swales’s watch.