Watergate (46 page)

“I’m feeling like a goddamned president again!” Nixon told Kissinger over Friday-evening cocktails in the Residence.

“You have never failed to function, through all of this, at a supremely high level,” replied the secretary of state.

Ignoring the auto-flattery, Nixon asked, “When do you actually leave?”

“A little after midnight.”

“Play it hard with them, Henry. Don’t hesitate to let Brezhnev know there’s been considerable improvement in my position over here.”

“That will be an enormous factor, Mr. President.”

In a matter of days, thanks to the airlift, the Israelis had bounced back. It was the Arabs who were now on the run and the Russians who were calling, preposterously, for a cease-fire at the pre-1967 borders. Well, Kissinger would go to Moscow and get them to drop that. Then, once a more realistic cease-fire was in place and Congress had voted the two billion dollars in aid he’d just requested for Israel, the president would tilt to the Arabs and get them to turn the oil back on. The Israelis would be unable to resist his pressures for a real peace settlement, and pressure them he would. They had no choice: he’d saved their country! Golda Meir said there’d be statues of him dotting the landscape someday.

After twenty-five years, he would get this goddamned thing solved, and the solution would be bigger than China, Vietnam, and arms control put together. Watergate would at last, to anyone but a lunatic, seem a shameful obsession.

“You know,” he told Kissinger, “Ervin admitted he’s actually
relieved
.”

The committee chairman had been in the Oval Office an hour ago with Howard Baker and had agreed to a compromise: the White House
would turn over
summaries
of the eight tapes after John Stennis—a Democrat, it should be remembered—had listened to them and verified the accuracy of the synopses. And Stennis would do just that: not because he was hard of hearing, but because he had a sense of proportion. He would understand that the cover-up had essentially been Dean’s doing, and that the president’s little verbal flights of complicity had been more apparent than real.

“Mr. President, we are
all
relieved,” said Kissinger.

“Hell, once Ervin agreed, I even apologized for chewing him out over the phone this summer.”

“That was just the pneumonia talking.”

“Talking pneumonia!” said Nixon, with a laugh. He hadn’t been this cheerful in months. “You know, Taft Schreiber was in this afternoon. He brought in some movie they haven’t even released yet—not like those moth-eaten old reels up at Camp David. We’re going to run it tonight, right after Ziegler announces the compromise.”

“Will they go ‘live’ with Ron?” asked Kissinger. “If they do, Professor Cox will be switching to
Sanford and Son
to cheer himself up.”

“That son of a bitch is on his way out. Christ, he’s been into my taxes, the San Clemente deal, Bebe’s businesses! Richardson says he even wanted in on Agnew.”

“He was foolish to reject this compromise.”

“Well, he’s going to be canned for it. Richardson was over here with Al and Garment and Buzhardt this morning, and he agreed to get rid of him.”

“He’s been conducting a persecution, not a prosecution,” observed the secretary of state.

Abruptly, as if Kissinger had been forcing him to discuss the petty business of Watergate, the president changed the subject. “Henry, you’re to make it clear to Brezhnev that everything you say comes from me personally, and that I’ll now be strong enough to follow through on it.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Good. And by the way, did you notice Dean pleaded guilty this morning? I don’t give a damn if it
was
to just one count and he’s been immunized up to his eyeballs on the rest. The history books can now say the president’s accuser was a convicted felon.”

“Mr. President, the history books will not be mentioning John Dean at all.”

Two hours later, as Taft Schreiber’s movie,
The Sting
, was being readied in the projection room, Haig called the Residence. “The bastard stiffed us,” he informed the president.

“Which bastard?” asked Nixon.

“Richardson. I called him a minute ago, after Ziegler’s announcement. I don’t know if I did it to celebrate or because my instincts told me he needed checking on, but he said, ‘I can’t fire Cox.’ No, actually, he said, ‘I cannot fire Cox.’ Contractions are beneath Elliot.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Nixon, with a sigh.

“I told him we had his word—not to mention
witnesses:
me, Buzhardt, Garment.”

In a voice that was even, but hollowed out, Nixon asked, “What exactly was his explanation?”

“That he couldn’t possibly have agreed to Cox’s firing. That it would break a promise he’d made to the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings—not to get rid of the special prosecutor except for ‘extraordinary improprieties.’ He could barely get the two words out tonight; they kept slurring over each other. He admitted to me that he was tired and had had ‘a’ drink.”

As if nostalgic for the actual goddamned president he’d gotten to be a few hours ago, Nixon asked, “What is Brezhnev going to say if he sees my own attorney general defying me?”

Instead of answering, Haig beat the dead horse of the tapes compromise: “I told him, ‘You
first
agreed, Elliot, days ago, to a two-step plan. To tell Cox the Stennis deal was a
fait accompli
and see if he’d resign. Then, if he refused, to fire him.’ ”

Nixon squeezed the coils of the telephone cord. “Well, I’m not surprised that pious cocksucker cares more for his ass than his country. Get him in to see me tomorrow morning. It’ll probably be the first Saturday he’s ever worked in his life.”

The following evening, across the river at the McLean Tennis Club, Alice Longworth reassured a young waiter nervously guiding her to a courtside table: “If I get beaned, it will probably knock some sense into me.”

Art Buchwald, the humor columnist, was throwing himself a birthday celebration that had taken over the entire place. Most of the invited guests, when not at the tables or bar, were taking turns playing mixed doubles.

Tom and Joan Braden had invited Joe Alsop to tag along here with them. This attempt to cheer him up now that Susan Mary had finally decamped had been seized upon by Alice, who insisted that she herself needed cheering up, too. In truth, she didn’t, but she was enjoying this trip out of the house, an increasing rarity, more than Joe seemed to be.

“Brighten up,” she commanded him. “You can at least be happy that the Tortoiseshelled Tattler is going to jail.”

“Yes,” said Alsop, with no hint of a smile. “Probably for about six months.”

“At this point I would consider six months a prognosis of longevity.” She was looking more birdlike than ever, but the remark was greeted by protests from everyone seated and hovering around her.

Lyndon’s little poodle, Jack Valenti—now a miniature, silver-haired version of the MGM lion, cheerleading for the movie business on Capitol Hill—complimented her same old black straw hat as if it were some fabulous new piece of plumage. David Brinkley, the NBC man, sidled up to shake her hand, and then came Ben Bradlee with an attractive, sharp-eyed girlfriend, apparently a reporter, who wanted to know if she could write a profile of Mrs. Longworth on the occasion of her birthday—“your ninetieth, I believe”—which would be coming up in February.

Alice glared at her. Of course she would eventually say yes, but there was no point in making the girl’s evening.

“So,” she asked Joe about the gaggle of admirers, “is this what they call a full court press? Is that a tennis term?”

“Basketball,” he informed her.

“Short answers make you fat,” she responded. She waved a handkerchief for the waiter, who rushed toward her. “Bring Mr. Alsop a whiskey sour, very strong, immediately.” The drink’s intended recipient
looked skeptical, but she insisted. “You don’t need to be siphoned for Stew for another week. You told me yourself.”

Pert Mrs. Braden now raved about Professor Cox’s afternoon news conference, during which he’d explained his rejection of the Stennis compromise. “It really
was
like watching your favorite professor, just as someone said.”

Alice imagined that Mrs. Braden had had a
lot
of favorite professors and that her grades had been very good.

Buchwald arrived at the table with an extremely pretty blonde and Edward Bennett Williams, the biggest Democratic lawyer in town.

“Happy birthday,” said Alice, extending her hand to the humorist. “If I’d ever read your column, I’d quote you a line or two from it.”

Alsop wearily offered something like an apology: “She pretends not to read the
Post
but a minute ago she didn’t give Bradlee’s girlfriend a definite no about doing an interview.”

“That has nothing to do with whether or not I read the paper. I don’t. But I do watch television. You look familiar,” she said to the blonde.

Lovely Rene Carpenter, now divorced from the astronaut, explained that she hosted a show on topics of interest to women.

“You may have seen one of her more
advanced
programs,” said Williams, who retained a good deal of primness beneath his courtroom bluster. “She showed”—he decided he couldn’t say it—“well, it was the most disgusting thing I ever saw.”

Mrs. Carpenter smiled brightly. “It was a diaphragm, Mrs. Longworth. And a tube of gel.”

“I saw it!” cried Alice, with an enormous grin. “I thought you were frosting a cupcake! And then I put on my glasses.”

“ROGER MUDD, PLEASE CALL YOUR OFFICE,” boomed a loudspeaker. “MR. MUDD, PLEASE CALL YOUR OFFICE.”

Alice noted that Bradlee had already gone off in a rush. She looked at the television above the distant bar and thought she could make out a man with a beard and mustache who looked like a villain out of Sherlock Holmes. People began moving quickly back and forth between the bar and the tables, ferrying fact and rumor. The mixed-doubles players on the courts had been reduced to a solitary pair who wondered if they should carry on with a singles match.

It was first a set of facts that reached Alice and her group: Elliot Richardson and his deputy had both resigned after refusing to fire Professor Cox. The bearded man on the television was the department’s number three, who had agreed to do the deed.

Then the rumors arrived: that the FBI had gone to the special prosecutor’s office on K Street—perhaps to seize files; perhaps to protect them. Or the files had already been
hidden
by the special prosecutor’s staff, who—rumor also had it—were rushing from their homes to the office.

Alice found the present moment to be one of a handful in her long life when she could not command an audience. Joe had left her for the TV, and Tom Braden had left with him. “You should go, too, dear,” she said to Mrs. Braden. “You never know what spry luminary is likely to be there wanting to buy you a cocktail. Averell Harriman. U Thant …”

Someone had turned the television up so loud that even Alice could now hear it without getting up from the table. John Chancellor of NBC was speculating that this might be “the most serious constitutional crisis in history.”

Oh
,
please
, thought Alice, who could remember legless Civil War veterans begging in the streets. And yet, the palace
did
seem to be firing back on the peasants. As a student and theorist of the scandal—who wasn’t?—she believed that Hunt had somehow been the one who’d managed to pull back the curtain on all that might have remained hidden. But who had really
started
everything? And did that matter now?

Joe had returned to the table with Braden, two old pundits wishing they were once again young reporters.

“Watch them forget about confirming Ford and go straight to impeaching Nixon,” Braden predicted.

“No,” said Joe. “Not with Carl Albert more oiled than the drunkest man here. Almost as well-oiled as a Soviet missile.” He shook his gloomy head. Even now he couldn’t stand the thought of his
homme sérieux
ceding the presidency to somebody less substantial, let alone that boozing homunculus out of Bugtussle.

“What are you doing?” he asked, when he looked over and saw Alice scribbling.

She was making a record on the Page-A-Day pad she’d extracted
from her purse. With a large fountain pen, she wrote:
The clock is dick-dick-dicking
.

On Tuesday morning, waiting for his cue, Elliot Richardson reflected on how wise he had been to stay off the Sunday interview shows. Veterans Day—on the newfangled federal calendar—had shut the DOJ on Monday, so almost seventy-two hours had now passed since his resignation, long enough really to whet the public’s appetite for an appearance by him. It was time that he and Bill Ruckelshaus and Archie Cox, the slaughtered of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” rose up, covered with principle and glory.

By late Friday night, after the phone call from Haig and most of a pot of coffee, he had regained his nerve. The following morning, when the chief of staff asked if he would hold off on resigning until things settled down with the Russians and the Arabs, he’d informed Haig that that was simply not possible—and managed to refrain from suggesting that surely the president could hold off on firing Cox until the same such tranquility descended upon the Middle East?