Watergate (40 page)

She knew, right at that moment, why Dick had picked those lines, and why she’d come to him. No, he had not yet protested the
Post
’s libel about suicide, and not yet pressured the insurance company to pay out. But she didn’t need to see him do those things. She’d come to the house that night because of the look on his face when he’d shouldered the coffin—the creased, naked expression on this darkest of dark horses, this misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. She didn’t share his general dinginess: she smiled in delight, however viciously, whereas he smiled only in a kind of animal desperation. But she shared the darkness beneath and the capacity for denial; she could sometimes change or negate reality just with her contempt for it.

By the time she left his house that night, the two of them had effected a little sorcery, succeeded in convincing her that Paulina had been
her
own heart’s dearest and that all the world knew it. She held on to this illusion long enough to get home to the empty house in Dupont Circle and throw away Bill’s old straight razor with which she might have put an end to herself the way she’d imagined doing it, draining the blood as if she were her own taxidermist.

Dick’s current illusions would evaporate soon enough. Fewer and fewer people shared them. Joe might be one of those, but he’d soon look a fool if his columns kept talking of resignation and impeachment as remote possibilities. Stew, who by now knew something about dying, rightly gauged Dick’s prospects for survival as not much brighter than his own. She was still ashamed of her own early blitheness about the burglary; her dismissive remarks of a year ago now struck her not as the denial of reality, into which she’d successfully put so much of her life’s energy, but a failure of imagination, a kind of laziness or, even worse, stupidity. She’d wised up soon enough, but shouldn’t have been so dumb in the first place.

Would her kindred spirit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—so shrewd and so deplorable—manage to hold on? The other afternoon, Janie, glued to the radio, had asked her the same question. “California, here he comes,” Alice had replied, pleased with the remark as she made it, but rather miserable about it once she got back upstairs.

And yet, she now thought, closing her eyes against the afternoon sun: surely the Tattler had no
proof
. And if he didn’t, could not the truth remain forever in abeyance, like Paulina’s paternity if not her death? Could not Dick live on in the White House, known but not proved to be guilty, like Lizzie Borden in Fall River? Surely he could endure such a condition better than anyone. It was now the best he could hope for, and perhaps it would come to pass. After all, what
deus ex machina
could possibly provide corroboration for Mr. Dean?

The watchful Mr. Ellis, fearing she’d started to doze, honked the horn.

“Just once more. Hard as you can stand it, sir.”

Nixon braced himself before Miss Williams pounded both her hands against his chest, attempting to loosen more of the congestion. He moaned, but resisted complaint, enduring the blows of the inhalation therapist until she declared he’d had enough.

“Very good,” said Miss Williams.

There were tears in the president’s eyes, but he was breathing easier and hurting much less than he had been during the first awful hours of his hospitalization, for viral pneumonia, six days ago.

“You know,” he said, offering a variant of their usual joke, “a lot of Democrats would love to have your job.”

Miss Williams returned the serve. “A few Republicans, too.”

Nixon, still clearly spent, managed a laugh.

“Dr. Tkach and Dr. Katz should be in soon,” said Miss Williams. “I’ll give them a good report in the meantime. And I’ll see you again this afternoon.”

Once she was gone, Nixon lay back on the bed and glanced into the sitting room of the hospital’s presidential suite. Haig and Ziegler and Rose had been taking turns with it as an office. He could see the two tall metal boxes of important papers. They’d been brought over the day he arrived and were now, optimistically, packed up for a departure to Camp David, which he’d be permitted to make in a couple of days if he continued to improve.

He’d awoken last Thursday morning sicker than he’d ever been, with a roaring fever and a brutal pain in his right side. If it were a heart attack, he’d managed to tell himself, the pain would be on the left; but the deduction was more disappointing than consoling. As he’d sat up, his pajamas soaked with sweat, he’d allowed himself a wistful
moment to imagine history’s gentle treatment of a president who’d persevered in the duties of office until his enemies hounded him to death.

Dr. Tkach knew it was pneumonia the minute the stethoscope touched his chest. A few hours later the visiting German foreign minister told him he looked awful, but he’d toughed it out for the whole day—foolishly, he now realized, since the fever had made him blow his cool with Ervin over the telephone. Rather than making a calm declaration of executive privilege against the Senate committee’s document request, he’d disgorged all his pent-up fury against that cornpone grandstander—who actually wanted him to come and testify in person! In a voice so hoarse he barely recognized it as his own, he’d shouted about its being perfectly clear that Ervin was out to get him. By lunchtime every staffer and intern on the Hill was hearing that Nixon had gone crazy at last. He knew there was already talk among the Georgetown crowd that he’d landed here in the hospital not for pneumonia but a nervous breakdown.

Well, if they were all so goddamned interested in seizing presidential papers, let them ask for his medical records. They could have them—a complete set of fever charts; the whole list of antibiotics; consultations with Katz and pummelings from Nurse Williams.

He might be improving, but he was exhausted. Sometimes the fever would flare up, and his breathing would once again become shallow and fast. He’d been warned to expect a long recovery time.

At least he was unhooked from the monitor. After all its days of blinking and beeping, he felt strange seeing it idle and unlit—you’d think he’d died instead of gotten well. He now sat up a little, took in more breath and felt a sharp twinge. Christ, was this what it had been like to live as Harold and Arthur?

He clicked on the TV gizmo and got the Ervin show. Jesus, who was
this
character testifying? With his girth and slicked-back hair he looked like one of Colson’s “ethnics,” though from which “heritage group” wasn’t clear.

Nixon realized that they were talking about the delivery of money to Hunt and the rest of them. Christ, what a system it must have entailed: you had Kalmbach, who always appeared as if he’d just gotten a manicure, having to work with this guy who looked like a loan shark. Where had they
gotten
the whole slew of goofballs like Segretti and Liddy, not to mention the Cubans? At its beginning, the administration had been full of crew-cut guys who could pass for astronauts.

He wanted to turn the thing off, but the remote control had decided to give him trouble, and he couldn’t find the call button for the nurse. He’d have to wait until they came in with his hundredth glass of orange juice. Meanwhile he looked over at what he knew was a letter from Cox lying atop one of the metal boxes in the sitting room. Ziegler had brought it over an hour ago, and it was now the piece of paper that mattered most in the whole damned suite.

The special prosecutor was demanding eight tape recordings, whose existence had been let out of the bag, more like a lion than a cat, by one of Haldeman’s boys, during testimony to the committee the day before yesterday:

Two years’ worth of tape, a quantity of evidence you couldn’t fit into a whole fucking farm’s worth of pumpkins. Well, the tapes were now the nuclear football. In a way, revelation of their existence simplified the whole struggle. If these tapes were so goddamned important—the key to it all, as Cox and the rest of them now kept saying—then logic said they couldn’t evict him from office without them. Awareness of the tapes was actually
weakening
all the testimony that had been shoveled into Ervin’s lap the past six weeks; the tapes were turning it, by comparison, into a kind of second-rate inadmissible hearsay. And with any luck Cox and Ervin would wear each other out squabbling over who deserved to hear the recordings first. Ervin’s letter asking for them, which had shown up yesterday, now sat beneath Cox’s.

Haig came in and reached up toward the television when the president
signaled for him to kill it. The chief of staff, as usual, was all cheer and charm. Nixon half-expected him to start dancing like Gene Kelly.

“Good news, Mr. President! The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company says the penalty for a person’s recording phone calls without telling the other party is limited to removal of the violator’s equipment. And considering the importance of maintaining phone service at the White House, they’ve agreed to waive that.”

Nixon let himself smile, feeling grateful he’d recovered the strength to brush his teeth.

“First the country, then the scandal,” said Haig, setting his usual mind-over-matter priorities for what he knew would be a very short business meeting with the boss. “Bhutto will be happy to put off his visit until the fall. But we’ve yet to cancel the Shah, who’s still supposed to be here next Tuesday. Dr. Tkach says you
might
be able to go through with it if you agree to an abbreviated schedule.”

“Under no circumstances are we to postpone the Shah. Same with the Phase IV statement. Tell Shultz he’s to go ahead.” Nixon had no interest in this planned adjustment to wage-and-price controls, other than that the announcement take place on schedule. His instruction to Haig was reasonable enough, but even to himself it sounded stiff and artificial, as if he were playacting the role of president in one of those old Whittier amateur theatricals where he’d met Pat.

“Al, give me that yellow pad over on the cart.”

Haig glanced at the writing on the pad’s top page before handing it to its author:

“If this is about who’s for destroying the tapes, I’m not a maybe, I’m a yes,” said the chief of staff. “I was trying to appear neutral yesterday so that I could moderate that rather lively discussion we had going on here.”

“Goddamned Garment. He’s the only real no. So worried about what his pals in the liberal press will say. Mitchell always knew we shouldn’t have brought him with us from the law firm in New York.”

“But you’ve got Haldeman down as a ‘no,’ too. Is he? I can’t say I’ve spoken to my predecessor about this.”

“He’s a no, but for a different reason. He’s certain the tapes can help. He listened to the one from March twenty-first and says he can hear me saying, ‘It would be wrong’—you know, to do what Dean wanted me to do.”

“What do you think about that?” asked Haig.

“I couldn’t make out half of what’s on the goddamned thing when I listened to it.”

“Who’s TCRN?”

“Pat. You know, Thelma Catherine Ryan.”

“Oh. And Elliot? I see he’s crossed out. Does that mean he’s on his way out?” Haig laughed as he asked the question, but hoped to high heaven it wasn’t true. That was all they needed, no matter how much he despised Richardson.

“He’s crossed out in the sense of ‘not applicable.’ Hell of a thing having an attorney general you can’t trust to ask for legal advice, isn’t it? He’ll want whatever Cox wants.”

“And Agnew’s a yes? Sure he’s not trying to get you impeached?”

The president shrugged. “So that he can serve for two weeks before he goes to jail?” They both knew the case against the vice president was strong. Nixon now even wondered if Agnew had used the same lunkhead testifying on TV today to deliver
his
envelopes. “Connally and Rocky are both very strong, and neither of them has any special stake in things. Connally suggests a bonfire on the South Lawn.”

Haig responded with more realism but no less urgency: “You could tell the Secret Service to just cart them away and get rid of them.” As it was, Haig himself had already ordered the dismantling of the system and the end of any further taping.

“The hell of it is, Garment’s right,” said the president. “Just because there’s no subpoena yet doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be in legal jeopardy by getting rid of them. I mean, Christ, those letters already demand them.” He pointed to the metal boxes in the other room.