Watergate (51 page)

“My dear,” she then said to Pat, “there’s a bathroom upstairs where you can take a break from this and puff away unseen to your heart’s content.”

Pat laughed. “You know me too well, don’t you?”

“The cat’s probably hiding in there. I forget his name, but you’ll like him.”

Alice decided to toddle over—destestable expression—toward Joe, who was sitting on the velvet mulberry-colored sofa, next to his
Post
colleague Buchwald and still far away from Susan Mary. She noticed that he had tossed her well-known lettered pillow—
IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT SOMEONE, SIT RIGHT HERE BY ME
—from the sofa to the floor.

“I guess that’s why they call it a throw pillow,” she told him.

Buchwald stood up to kiss Mrs. Longworth’s gloved hand and to offer her his seat. He recalled her presence at his own birthday party on the night of the Saturday Night Massacre and wondered what extramural event could top that tonight.

“Martial law, I should think,” suggested Alice. “The president could get the ball rolling by firing him,” she said, pointing to Henry Kissinger, who had slid into earshot.

“Kim!” she cried, to her nephew a few feet away. She tilted her head toward Nixon and gave her relative a what-are-you-waiting-for look.

As commanded, Kermit Roosevelt moved toward the president, who was discussing Maryland politics, pre- and post-Agnew, with Senator Scott and some friends of Mrs. Longworth’s granddaughter.

“A word?” said Roosevelt, with the family’s usual lack of shyness.

Nixon could hardly refuse the grandson of TR and the nephew of
his hostess. “Certainly,” he said to Roosevelt, as two Secret Service men created a small, nearly private space beside some bookshelves. The human wall the agents provided was not exactly soundproof, but it seemed forbidding enough to other guests. As it was, the president and Roosevelt spoke to each other in low tones.

“I hope you know how much fervent support you still have left,” declared the retired CIA agent.

“That’s very kind of you to say.” Nixon tried to remember what Mrs. L had told him about Roosevelt and Hunt—all of it wrapped up with King Zog—at that dinner more than a year ago. It had been too convoluted to remember, let alone follow up on. And yet, sure enough, Hunt was Roosevelt’s subject. “My old colleague,” he was soon saying, “has always been a very malleable man. That made him ‘fungible,’ to use the Agency’s terminology.”

Christ, it was like talking to Foster Dulles’s brother. “Tell me what you mean,” said the president, politely.

“Well, the life of Hunt’s imagination sometimes blends, conveniently, into his actual cognitive existence.”

No, this was worse than Allen Dulles. It was like those ridiculous psy-ops briefings they’d given him in Vietnam in ’65 and ’67, when he’d come calling as both Elder Statesman and Man in the Wings. He was no less malleable than Hunt, if you came down to it; he only wished that Roosevelt would come to his point.

“With all due respect, sir, I know that there are those who say you paid blackmail to Howard Hunt.”

Nixon replied crisply: “Hunt himself says he never blackmailed me.”

“Yes,” said Roosevelt. “It would be helpful for him to emphasize that.”

“It would.” The president was losing interest; there was nothing new here.

“It would be even more helpful,” said Roosevelt, “to have him recant his testimony, to indicate that the Watergate burglary was begun and carried out at his own insistence, because of connections he believed to exist between the Democratic Party and Castro’s Cuba. And because he believed the operation to be consistent with the Agency’s longtime overall objectives. The Agency itself would remain blameless for the particular act.”

Nixon looked back toward the party while wondering what the proportion of craziness to genius might be in Roosevelt, let alone Hunt. With a lot of the old OSS types, it ran about eighty–twenty.

“He would be contradicting no one,” Roosevelt continued. “No one else has owned up to it, and Mr. Liddy continues to say nothing. If Hunt were to take all responsibility, there would be an enormous shift in the situation—seismic, one might say. Yes, he could concede that there had been a Gemstone plan; and, yes, people had covered up when they shouldn’t have. But the actual, specific event that caused the catastrophe would have been his doing, not something done at the direction of anyone high up in the campaign or White House.”

“Do you know something I don’t?” asked Nixon.

“Only about the possibility of Mr. Hunt’s saying something different from what he’s said so far. Of his deciding to come forward and assume, through his recantation, a heroic status with your defenders.”

“A coerced recantation?” asked Nixon, almost in a whisper, with one eyebrow raised. He knew what Colby, his own CIA director, had been capable of in the Vietnamese jungles.

“Not coerced. Not even persuaded. Mr. Hunt was always
suggestible—
and is even more so at this point.”

Nixon said nothing. Why would Hunt step forward when Mitchell hadn’t been willing to?

“Just something for you to consider,” said Roosevelt, as if he’d been passing along a stock tip to some fellow commuter on the B&O. “And very good of you to listen. I should let you get back to my aunt’s celebration.”

As the Secret Service reimmersed Nixon into the crowd, Roosevelt looked at his aunt and indicated with a nod that he had done his duty. Alice, who guessed it was too late to save Dick by the sort of spooky shenanigans Kim had described to her, gave her nephew a weary wave of acknowledgment before turning to notice Averell Harriman standing before two framed cartoons of Franklin and Eleanor. Appearing to take fresh offense at their irreverence, he transferred his regard to a small picture of the Chinese Dowager Empress, who Alice supposed must be striking him as yet another contemporary.

She next noticed sad Joan Kennedy, standing on her long, unsteady legs and clutching the arm of that other in-law, Mr. Shriver. She looked
around for Stew: not here. Nearing the end? she wondered. Dick was giving her a little goodbye salute and Pat was blowing a kiss. Once he was gone from the room, she went over to its front window and waited for him to descend the stairs and depart the house. As the president, he was entitled to a showy goodbye wave from his hostess, and so, at her direction, one of the waiters opened the window, ushering in a marvelous blast of winter air.

Along with it came the staler sound of Dick’s presidential voice. There on her front walk he was talking to a few of the reporters who had trespassed onto her property.

“Mrs. Longworth’s secret to a long life?” he asked, repeating the question that had been put to him. “Not being obsessed by the Washington scene,” he replied. “Applying her excellent mind to more than political scandal or the obsession of the moment. You know, I spoke at the Lincoln Memorial today—one of Washington’s
other
monuments,” he added, pointing back at Alice’s house. “I talked about how vilified Lincoln was in his time, and how he never let himself show he was being hurt by it.” The comparison—between the apelike caricatures of Lincoln and the mad-hunchback ones of himself—was invited but unspoken.

Russell Baker, the
Times
columnist standing next to Alice at the window, asked her about what they’d just heard. “Is that true? Is that how you’ve kept yourself so young?”

“If I had the strength of an actual young person, I should rear my head back and roar with laughter. Not wallow in Watergate? I can’t wait to see what happens next!”

Despite her semblance of good cheer, she had had enough. She felt suddenly sick of it all—the party, everything. If Dick could even pretend not to know that the essential fact of her life had been a failure to apply her fine mind to anything useful, he was too daft even for politics. She looked around for Janie and began moving toward the stairs. She wanted to get up to the third-floor bedroom and resume her vampire existence. After a nap she would get up and read the Latin grammar that had been taking her through the last several nights. She found a certain symmetry in being the dead student of a dead language, and by the time she opened the book tonight, it would be pitch dark outside. On
a normal day, which she now wished this was, Janie would already have drawn the curtains, at sunset, the way she’d done ever since coming to work here in 1957, just after Paulina’s death.

Sweet Joan Kennedy was all at once standing over her, tremulously trying to kiss her goodbye. Alice flinched, shook her head, and snapped, “That’s why I usually wear a wide-brimmed hat.”

Mrs. Kennedy looked childlike and stricken. Janie whispered to her: “It’s okay, honey. She just hates being touched.”

Pat Nixon consulted the mirror in her compact as the limousine pulled away from the Alvorada Palace. The scattered, unobtrusive highlights that Rita had put into her hair made it look almost windblown. The effect was rejuvenating, and she was glad she’d let Rita talk her into doing it just before the start of the trip down here.

She turned around in the backseat for a last look at the clean white lines of the palace, which resembled a world’s fair pavilion and for a moment made her remember the day in 1959 that she and Dick had opened the monorail at Disneyland. All the oblongs and ziggurats of this new capital looked as if they’d been dropped onto the Brazilian jungle from the sky. No, not Disneyland: what it really made her recall were the big modern towers of midtown Manhattan—her walks with Tom past the Seagram and Pan Am buildings.

It was a good thing their meeting would come on this last day of the trip. The anticipation had pulled her through the two countries and the long schedules: Venezuela before Brazil; two swearings-in and two parades; four embassy receptions; a half dozen schools and hospitals amidst everything else.

The inauguration here was faintly ridiculous: they were installing an unelected general who’d already been ruling with the rest of a junta for ten years. But Venezuela had been different: an honest-to-God election, and the new man, Pérez, couldn’t have been nicer. Same with the crowds, who this time, unlike sixteen years ago, had pelted her with flowers instead of rocks. Comments on the improved mood had been almost continual, even if some of the Venezuelan politicians thought Jerry Ford, at the least, should have been the American designated to make the trip. But there’d been more press for her than there would have been for him; the papers couldn’t resist running side-by-side photos
of now versus ’58. Even Dick had sent word that he was pleased with the coverage.

Of course nothing really lifted, for very long, the sense that they were free-falling toward doom. Pérez had accepted her invitation to visit the White House, but she had to wonder if she’d be there to greet him by the time he showed up.

Another sign of final disaster seemed to lurk in the way everything new these days only reminded her of something old, as if she and Dick and Rose and all the rest of them had spent their full allowance of life and could now only bounce checks against the past. A couple of evenings ago at the American embassy reception she’d looked down the hill toward the lights of Caracas and thought of that party at Taft Schreiber’s mansion. Only later did she remember that that had been the night it all began.

No one seemed to know how the Tom Thumb House, which they were now approaching, had gotten its name. The gingerbread building was festooned with flowers, and the smallest of the kids who lived there were lined up, waving American and Brazilian flags.

“Estas são para si,”
said the little girl handing her a big bunch of gloxinias.

“ ‘These are for you,’ ” said Mrs. Carvalho, Tom Thumb’s English-speaking director.

“Thank you! They’re so pretty. And so are all of you!”

When the Portuguese translation produced some giggles, the first lady added: “I probably should say ‘handsome’ for the boys.”

“Bonitos,”
said Mrs. Carvalho.

The scrubbed, smooth-skinned children all applauded. There was nothing wrong with them; it was their parents who were sick, isolated somewhere in treatment for TB. The boys and girls—she could remember Tom explaining this to her years ago—would be cared for here until their mothers and fathers were either cured or dead. She felt relief that the girls and boys were so pretty, or handsome. She had consciously begun taking comfort in one fringe benefit of the doom that might be approaching: once Dick left politics, she would never again have to let her heart be assaulted by a malnourished or cleft-palated child being thrust toward her in his Sunday best.

“I hope you’ll study hard and not give your teachers a tough time. I used to be a schoolteacher myself, so I know! And I hope your parents will be surprised by how much you’ve learned and how tall you’ve gotten when they next see you!”

The children clapped their hands like fifty butterflies, going on long enough for her to see the man in the doorway. He was joining in the applause and smiling as if to say, “Well done, Victoria.”

Mrs. Carvalho escorted her inside and showed her the clean, sunny bedrooms, the dining hall, the backyard garden and the soccer field beyond it. Mr. Garahan—“our man at Catholic Charities in New York,” Mrs. Carvalho explained—followed along a couple of steps behind, until he and Mrs. Nixon were ushered into a little office where a private consultation between them had been scheduled. The first lady was offered a chair beside a vase of yellow flowers.