Say You're Sorry (20 page)

Silence was the thing that had struck him most about the Nixons over the years. He’d flown with them several times in the helicopter up to Camp David and watched them sit side-by-side the entire trip without saying a single word. No one else had dared to speak: the doctor, the Secret Service guys, the military aide. They’d been very awkward journeys.

It had been like that in the White House too. The Nixons had led almost completely separate lives. The president rarely ate dinner with his wife. He didn’t consult her about matters that should have fallen into her purview—menus, entertainment for state affairs—and certainly not policy matters.

The visitor had asked her once, “Does the president try out speeches on you?” Pat Nixon had answered, “He never tries anything out on me.”

It was ironic, he thought. For while Nixon was a whiz at speaking extemporaneously, he looked so miserable and so
phony
, that no matter how well informed he was, his public appearances were always a disaster. Whereas Pat, who detested public speaking, was fabulous at it. She conveyed warmth and sincerity, the generosity of spirit that was truly hers, without turning a hair. When she went to South America on her own, after the Lima quake, they’d loved her. Just as they’d applauded her in Africa, as a
person
, as an ambassador of her country’s and her own goodwill.

Perhaps, he thought, there was the crux of it. Pat Nixon loved people, loved helping people, but she
hated
politics, politicians, and the whole political process. Whereas, while Nixon was
interested
in people,
fascinated
by them, in fact, his interest was cool and detached, as if he were a Martian,
studying
humans. Socially inept and horrible at small talk, he
adored
the political arena.

“You know,” Pat said now, her voice soft, with the sound of the faraway in it, “that very first election, when Dick ran for Congress in 1946, I sold my part of our family farm in Artesia to my brother Tram for three thousand dollars. We spent most of the money printing pamphlets to introduce Dick to the voters.”

The visitor remembered. She’d told him this story before. But he nodded, Go on.

“And I was so naive, that was before I learned how
vicious
politics can be, that I was thrilled when a labor leader requested fifty pamphlets. I didn’t realize that he was the opposition, that he’d use the pamphlets against us, or at best, throw them in the trash. But Dick was already wiser than I to the way these things worked, and he said I had to suspect everyone. So the next time there was a large request, I questioned the caller and got him to fess up that he was a Democrat.

“And you know, it wasn’t long after that our campaign office was broken into. They took all the pamphlets that my money had paid for, every last one of them we hadn’t yet distributed. We had such a slim chance of winning that election. No one knew Dick. We desperately needed those pamphlets. But did anyone care about our break-in?” She shook her blond head. “No, of course not. No one knew how devastating the loss of those pamphlets was to us. No wonder I couldn’t understand the fuss over Watergate. By that time, I knew all too well the way the game was played. How could anyone think that this wasn’t business as usual?” She paused, then added. “No, people have no idea.”

Her visitor said, “I just read an article the other day about a young congressman who came to Washington thinking it was all about limos and parties and making
momentous
decisions.”

Pat’s laughter was not a pretty sound. “Thought he was going to make a
difference
, did he? Well, you know,” she said, settling again into her chair, “that’s what Dick and I thought, back at the beginning. That first term, he threw himself into the work. There was the Alger Hiss case, and, of course, the Committee on Un-American Activities, and Dick was trying so hard to drum up support for the Marshall Plan, to help the Europeans who were starving after the war, we didn’t even discuss whether or not he would run for office in ’48. It was never a question. It was simply a given. You run. You run until you can’t run anymore.”

She paused. “Of course, while Dick was routing out Communists and taking care of the world, and working for the Dewey candidacy of ’48, I was home in California, pregnant with Julie, taking care of Tricia, who was a baby, and looking after Dick’s parents, both of whom were in failing health. Plus they were going through a terrible patch with that little farm of theirs. It was a hard time. I finally told Dick how hard it was. I said that I needed him to be around a little more.” She ran her right thumb over the fingers of her left hand, glancing off her wedding band. “You know what he did? He wrote me a letter. In it he said that he’d try to spend more time at home.”

Then Pat Nixon stood and turned and looked out past the gardener, out to sea, out at the horizon. “He was so caught up in it all. He was going to do such great things. Though I think I saw from that first election, back in ’46, how hard it would be to actually accomplish good. I saw that politics were more complicated than that. That they’d never let us…” She paused. “Let him accomplish much of anything, or if they did, it would be at a terrible price. But it wasn’t us anymore, you know. Not what we wanted. Dick stopped listening to me in that very first race. He thought his political consultant knew more than I did.”

She strode back and forth before the window now. The visitor was struck by how thin she was—and how tightly wound. “Those people, those consultants. There are thousands of them, of you, a never-ending army of advisors and handlers and counselors. All with your own agendas. With your lists. All wanting to play. You wanted to play, didn’t you? To play at politics?”

“Yes, I did,” the visitor said. “I did.”

“Why?” She’d wheeled and thrown the word at him.

He found himself startled. Why? Why had he wanted to participate in the Big Game? No one had ever asked him that before. No one, in all those years…

Pat was smiling at him, her head canted to one side. “Don’t try to answer,” she said. “I know you can’t, because the answer is a part of who you are. That kind of lust is in your blood. You have to play. You start out saying, telling yourself, that it’s about honor or nobility or governance or justice or the will of the people. Like Dick, you may start out believing that. But before long, you have to see the truth. You have to recognize that politics is nothing more than one long powerplay. An exercise in ego.” She held up her hands. Empty. Then she plopped back in her chair. “You know what I think? That you ought to play at politics in an arena. Strip down, then use your fangs and claws and bludgeons, your skill at dirty tricks, your fists, your feet. Just go ahead and get filthy, knee-deep in blood and sweat. Stomp on your opponent’s throat, then listen for the crowd’s roar. Do it out in the fresh air, where everyone can see. Stand proud and show your hands, covered in shit and blood. All of you, Republicans, Democrats, whatever you call yourselves, what difference does it make? You are politicians.” Pat Nixon spat the last word off her tongue as if it were a bug which had crept into her drink.

Her visitor sat. He had no response.

Now Pat Nixon was on her feet again, her posture as ramrod straight as it had always been. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. Even now, at sixty-four, she was still quite lovely, with young flashing eyes, the eyes of a girl whose father, Will, a gold miner, had nicknamed Babe. Her pale gold hair would be as close as Will Ryan ever got to the real thing.

“Pat Buchanan,” she said. “Pat told them at the hearings that everyone was knee-deep in muck. Those high-and-mighty Democrats, sitting there in judgment as if their souls were saved, asked him what he’d do in the way of political tactics, and he said, ‘Anything that is not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns.’” Pat Nixon clapped her hands together. “Oh, I loved that. But no one wanted to hear it. They were out for Dick’s blood, and they didn’t want to hear that everyone was guilty. The FBI operations under Kennedy and Johnson were much more serious. They didn’t want to know how Kennedy stole the 1960 election from us. Stole it. He did.” Pat Nixon’s voice rose as she warmed to her subject like a revival minister under the big tent, the hot lights. “That LBJ bugged the 1968 campaign plane. That Bobby Kennedy used everything he could put his hands on to get Jimmy Hoffa. That Adlai Stevenson’s workers bugged JFK at the ’56 convention. That JFK in peacetime tapped well over a hundred individuals, way more than the wartime Nixon administration. Did they want to hear that LBJ had wiretaps on Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King at the Democratic Convention? That Bobby in turn tapped King? That FDR’s son John once said to a columnist, ‘Hell, my father just about invented bugging. He had them spread all over, and thought nothing of it.’ That Roosevelt had taps on Charles Lindbergh? No, of course not.” She slowed now, and her voice dropped, almost to a whisper. “It all depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it? The
Washington Post
adored publishing papers stolen from the senatorial committee investigating Watergate. It all depends on which office you’re burglarizing, doesn’t it?”

Yes, he agreed. It does. It did. It will.

“The
Post
,” Pat Nixon repeated. “The goddamned
Washington Post
.” Then she said, “Have you read it?”

He nodded.
The Final Days
. He knew that’s what she meant,
Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s new book about Nixon’s last days in the White House. The same reporters who had so doggedly pursued the story of the Watergate break-in. Who had broken story after incriminating story about the president and the president’s men.

“They’re all over the TV,” she said. “The two of them, gloating about that piece of trash. We can’t even watch
Bonanza
without running into them.”

Pat turned then and fixed her eyes upon her visitor. “If you read the book carefully, you can see it. You know that, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I really don’t think so. Well, maybe, if you knew what to look for. But like I told you, back then, and I’m telling you now, no one’s ever going to know.”

Pat Nixon’s hand trembled slightly as she lowered her glass of bourbon to the tabletop. “Not that it made any earthly difference what we did, of course. Nothing could have turned things around, not once they smelled blood.”

“Absolutely. But you should never regret any of it. You did what you could, and that’s what’s important.”

“What I
could
?” Her laughter spiraled high. “What could I ever do? Once I made the decision to stick it out, not to divorce him, back in 1962, I’d made my bed, hadn’t I? Then, after he lost California. After that…well, it was over, really. We didn’t talk. We didn’t have any kind of real relationship.” She lifted her drink again and took a long pull. “I was just along for the ride. For the girls. For appearances. And I did a little good for a few people.”

“A little! You did wonders.”

“No, no,” she waved him off. “Even if I had, if I did help a few, nobody wanted to know about it. Even that business about trying to fix up the White House, that most
ladylike
of tasks. It was worn, you know. Filthy with those millions of visitors and hundreds of parties, but Lady Bird was smart, knew better than to try to touch a thing. And when I set to it, they
screamed
. I had
dared
to touch Jackie’s handiwork.”

“Yes, but in the end, you did so much more than she did in the White House. All those wonderful antiques. Twice as many as she acquired.”

Pat shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it. And I was glad to do it. And Jackie herself was so sweet, she could see what I’d done with the house, when I arranged for her and the children to come and visit that time, to see her portrait. The children hardly remembered the place. She was quite lovely, you know.’’

He nodded. “She knew how hard it was for you. And she could have told you, even when you didn’t see it, that people loved you. They did. All those children you visited and helped…”

Pat raised a hand. “Do not,” she said, her voice clipped and low and dangerous, with long spaces between each word. “Do not patronize me. They hated me. I was attached to Dick, and no matter what I did, they’d hate me for that. They presumed…” Her voice broke. She stopped. Then she said, the words like shards of glass, “They called me Plastic Pat.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last thing on earth I’d want to do is bring all that….”

Her head jerked up. That carefully coifed head. The only time she’d ever appeared in public with her hair undone was the day Nixon resigned. She said, “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To talk about our feeble plan. Our attempt… To remind me how stupid I was, thinking that I could save us some shred of dignity by siccing Woodward and Bernstein on some of those horrible little men. Those insects. Those bottom feeders.” Her lip curled with disgust. “Why did we think that if we fed them bits of the story, of what we knew, or at least I knew, that they would stay away from Dick?” She waved her hand in front of her chest, above her heart. “That they would leave us alone? That they would go off on another track? That they would desist? All it did was unlock doors and open closets I didn’t even know existed.”