BOOKS BY THOMAS MALLON
Fiction
Arts and Sciences
Aurora 7
Henry and Clara
Dewey Defeats Truman
Two Moons
Bandbox
Fellow Travelers
Watergate
Nonfiction
Edmund Blunden
A Book of One’s Own
Stolen Words
Rockets and Rodeos
In Fact
Mrs. Paine’s Garage
Yours Ever
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Mallon
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were previously published in somewhat different form in The American Scholar and Five Points.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mallon, Thomas, [date]
Watergate / Thomas Mallon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90708-0
1. Watergate Affair, 1972–1974—Fiction. 2. Journalists—Fiction.
3. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 4. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A43157W38 2012 813’.54—dc22 2011017393
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket design by the Office of Paul Sahre
v3.1
FOR
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS,
AMERICAN
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Players
Prologue
Part One: HIDE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Two: SEEK
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Epilogue: 1978–2004
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Players
Marje Acker: assistant secretary to Rose Mary Woods
Spiro T. Agnew: thirty-ninth vice president of the United States
Carl Albert: speaker of the United States House of Representatives
Joseph Alsop: syndicated newspaper columnist
Stewart Alsop: syndicated newspaper columnist
Susan Mary Alsop: wife of Joseph Alsop
Jack Anderson: syndicated newspaper columnist
Anne Armstrong: counselor to the president
Alfred C. Baldwin: monitor of illegal phone wiretaps at Democratic National Committee
Bernard Barker: former CIA operative; White House “plumber”; Watergate burglar
Carl Bernstein: reporter, The Washington Post
William O. Bittman: attorney for E. Howard Hunt
Joan Braden: Washington hostess; wife of Tom Braden
Tom Braden: author and journalist
Ben Bradlee: executive editor, The Washington Post
Edward Brooke: U.S. senator (R-MA)
Patrick Buchanan: White House adviser and speechwriter
William F. Buckley, Jr.: conservative author and commentator; editor of National Review
J. Fred Buzhardt, Jr.: special White House counsel for Watergate matters
Art Buchwald: newspaper columnist and humorist
Steve Bull: special assistant to the president
George H. W. Bush: U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; chairman, Republican National Committee
Don Carnevale: vice president, Harry Winston, Inc.
Rene Carpenter: television personality, former wife of astronaut Scott Carpenter
Dwight Chapin: deputy assistant to the president
Anna Chennault: widow of Lieut. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault
Charles Colson: special counsel to the president
John B. Connally: former governor of Texas and secretary of the treasury; head of “Democrats for Nixon”
Archibald Cox: Watergate special prosecutor, department of justice
Edward Cox: son-in-law of President and Mrs. Nixon
Tricia Nixon Cox: daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon
Richard Darman: aide to Elliot Richardson
Samuel Dash: majority counsel, Senate Watergate Committee
John W. Dean III: White House counsel
Thomas Eagleton: U.S. senator (D-MO); Democratic nominee (briefly) for vice president
James O. Eastland: chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee (D-MS)
David Eisenhower: grandson of President Dwight Eisenhower; son-in-law of President and Mrs. Nixon
Julie Nixon Eisenhower: daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon
Daniel Ellsberg: United States military analyst and antiwar activist; charged in theft of the “Pentagon Papers”
John Ehrlichman: assistant to the president for domestic affairs
Samuel J. Ervin, Jr.: U.S. senator (D-NC); chairman, Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities
Lewis Fielding: psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg
Betty Ford: wife of Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford: fortieth vice president of the U.S.; thirty-eighth president
Frank Gannon: White House aide
“Tom Garahan”: retired trust-and-estates lawyer
Leonard Garment: special consultant to the president; White House counsel
Katharine Graham: publisher of The Washington Post
Robert Gray: public relations executive; frequent escort of Rose Mary Woods
Edward Gurney: member, Senate Watergate Committee (R-FL)
Alexander Haig: deputy national security adviser; White House chief of staff (from May 1973)
H. R. Haldeman: White House chief of staff, January 1969–April 1973
Bryce Harlow: counselor to the president
Hubert H. Humphrey: U.S. senator (D-MN); former vice president
Dorothy Hunt: wife of E. Howard Hunt
E. Howard Hunt, consultant to the White House
Leon Jaworski: Watergate special prosecutor, Department of Justice
Lady Bird Johnson: former First Lady
of the United States
Lyndon B. Johnson: thirty-sixth president of the United States
Herbert W. Kalmbach: personal attorney of Richard Nixon
Edward M. Kennedy: U.S. senator (D-MA)
Ethel Kennedy: widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Henry Kissinger: national security adviser; secretary of state (from September 1973)
“Clarine Lander”: staff member, Democratic National Committee
Fred LaRue: deputy director, Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP)
Ike Parsons LaRue: deceased father of Fred LaRue
G. Gordon Liddy: finance counsel, CRP
Alice Roosevelt Longworth: daughter of Theodore Roosevelt; widow of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth
Dr. William Lukash: White House physician
Clark MacGregor: former U.S. congressman (R-MN); chairman, CRP
Robert Mardian: former assistant attorney general
James W. McCord, Jr.: security director, CRP
George S. McGovern: U.S. senator (D-SD); Democratic nominee for president
Janie McLaughlin: housekeeper for Alice Roosevelt Longworth
John Mitchell: former attorney general; director, CRP
Martha Mitchell: wife of John Mitchell
Gail Magruder: wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder
Jeb Stuart Magruder: deputy director, CRP
Pat Nixon: first lady of the United States
Richard Nixon: thirty-seventh president of the United States
Lawrence F. O’Brien: Chairman, Democratic National Committee
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: former first lady of the United States
“Billy Pope”: political aide to Senator James O. Eastland
Charles “Bebe” Rebozo: businessman, friend of Richard Nixon
Charles Rhyne: attorney for Rose Mary Woods
Elliot Richardson: secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; secretary of defense; attorney general
Nelson Rockefeller: governor of New York
William P. Rogers: secretary of state (January 1969–September 1973)
Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Jr.: grandson of Theodore Roosevelt; former political action officer, CIA
Manolo Sanchez: valet to Richard Nixon
Diane Sawyer: White House aide
James St. Clair: attorney for Richard Nixon
Earl Silbert: U. S. attorney, District of Columbia
Hugh Sloan: treasurer, CRP
Taft Schreiber: vice president, Music Corporation of America
R. Sargent Shriver: Democratic nominee for vice president
George Shultz: secretary of the treasury
John J. Sirica: chief judge, United States District Court for the District of Columbia
John C. Stennis: U.S. senator (D-MS)
Frank Sturgis: Watergate burglar
Joanna Sturm: granddaughter of Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Dr. Walter Tkach: White House physician
Anthony “Tony” Ulasewicz: former New York City police officer; White House private detective
Jack Valenti: former aide to Lyndon Johnson; president, Motion Picture Association of America
Theodore H. White: author and journalist
Charles Wiggins: U.S. congressman (R-CA)
Edward Bennett Williams: attorney for the Democratic National Committee and The Washington Post
Rose Mary Woods: personal secretary and executive assistant to the president
Bob Woodward: reporter, The Washington Post
Robert F. Woodward: American diplomat; former U.S. ambassador to Uruguay
Charles Alan Wright: constitutional scholar; attorney for Richard Nixon
Ron Ziegler: White House press secretary
Prologue
MAY 22, 1972
9:55 P.M., EDT
WASHINGTON, D.C., AND MOSCOW, U.S.S.R.
Fred LaRue looked out his apartment window at the blinking red light atop the Washington Monument—on, off, on, off—and thought about George Wallace’s newly recovered ability to wiggle his toes. “First time anybody ever got on page one for doin’ that,” he’d said to the boy who came around the Committee offices this afternoon with the Star.
But never mind the toes: Would the governor, shot last week by a kid with short hair, ever get back up on his feet? It was doubtful, the doctors still seemed to think.
And it was not to be wished, thought LaRue; not if that meant the governor might get back into the race for the Democratic nomination or, much worse, get set for the kind of third-party run he’d made four years ago.
If Wallace stayed out, lying on some beach and wiggling his toes to his heart’s content, then the Old Man should do a wing-tipped cakewalk toward a second term. LaRue couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten this lucky, with McGiveup looking like the guy they’d be running against. The “peace” candidate—oh, yeah? When it was Richard Nixon over in Moscow tonight rubbin’ noses with the Reds?
LaRue fished a last pinch of tobacco out of his pouch and managed to fill only half the bowl of his pipe. Hell, he thought, putting it down; he’d already puffed himself into a stupor while on the couch, watching that movie. He went back to watching the Monument blink, and to thinking about the gov’s tootsies.
If it weren’t for George Corley Wallace, Fred LaRue wouldn’t even be here in Washington working for the Old Man. God, it had been fun in ’68, lining up those radio endorsements from Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl, doing everything they could to bite into Wallace’s southern vote and keep a couple of border states in the Nixon column. “Fred LaRue,” he’d been told by Minnie Pearl—very much a lady and very much Mrs. Henry Cannon when she was out of that hat with the dangling price tag—“you’ve got the sweetest-soundin’ voice. We could make you into the next Eddy Arnold.”
He laughed every time he thought about it. Hell, he might be skinny like Hank Williams, but he didn’t look like anybody you’d want to put on an album cover. Dean, the little fellow in the Counsel’s office, had teased him about resembling a basset hound, and he had a point when it came to the ears, but up top Fred LaRue was losing his hair so fast he couldn’t support a tag team of fleas.
He looked over to the TV, still waiting for the ten o’clock news to come on. The pictures of the Old Man landing in Russia were supposed to be excellent; at least that was the word that had reached the CRP this afternoon. LaRue sometimes wished he were back inside the White House as an unpaid consultant to the president, even though he’d spent most of his time there working for Mitchell, shuttling between the Justice Department and the southerners on the Hill. But when John decided he needed him, again at no dollars a year, down at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, he could hardly say no, since it had been John—the campaign manager last time out, too—who’d put him in the White House in the first place.
He had nothing apparent in common with Mitchell, except for their bald heads and pipes, but inside both had the same sort of basic faith in the Old Man, along with a serene skepticism about most everything else.
Mitchell knew how much money he had laid on Goldwater in ’64, and then on the Old Man four years later, and naturally enough suspected there was a lot more left than there was. Hell, if Fred LaRue were still as rich as people thought, he would be living on the other side of this crazy, round, Italian-made apartment building, facing the courtyard or the Potomac instead of Virginia Avenue and the blinking old Washington Monument.
God knows there’d been plenty of money to inherit back in ’57. “Christ, that’s not, you know, is it?” Mitchell had once asked, in this very room, when he saw the elegant bird gun mounted on the wall. Nope, that was not the gun with which Fred LaRue had managed to shoot Daddy instead of a duck; it was the gun old Ike Parsons LaRue, worth thirty million dollars, had been holding when he dropped to the ground during their ill-fated hunting trip.
Daddy had made his money fast, and his son was now losing it slowly. Back home in Mississippi, the oil-and-gas busines
s was starting to sputter out. There were no more big strikes to be made, and the idea that Fred LaRue’s being inside the White House would redound to the benefit of I. P. LaRue Oil and Minerals was just that, an idea—one that others, though not Fred LaRue himself, entertained.
He preferred the business of politics to the business of business. He liked the way he got to operate without so much as a business card or a line in the staff directory—same at the Committee as it had been at the White House. If this year he’d pretty much be “giving at the office” instead of from his wallet, the campaign was going to be such a slam dunk that nobody would even notice. Every day McGovern was finding something nice to say on behalf of amnesty or abortion, and all the while the troops kept coming home from Vietnam by the hundred thousand, thanks to the Old Man. The demonstration over at the Pentagon this afternoon had featured the usual moth-eaten old peaceniks, like that ginny priest openly rooting for the Vietcong, but the whole passel of them—he had seen them marching across Memorial Bridge—hadn’t required a single canister of tear gas or made it as far up the front page as Wallace’s wiggly toes.
The joke, of course, when it came to all these Wallace votes they were about to inherit, was that Mitchell had desegregated ten times more schools than Bobby Kennedy and Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark put together. Watch what we do, not what we say, Mitchell liked to whisper into the ears of the party moderates, but folks back home in Mississippi listened to the words, as if they were music. They’d soon fall in line behind the Old Man, whose administration, they scarcely realized, was putting all those colored kids at desks beside their own white offspring.
With Wallace out of the way, there’d be less need for TV and radio spots and everything else down South, including nice old Minnie Pearl. How-DEEE! They had the chance for a real blowout, and it was beyond LaRue why they were waiting so much as another week to shift the money they’d planned to spend down home out to California instead. They ought to make the switch before other operations, like the ones being run by that weirdo Liddy, started laying claim to it.
Project Gemstone, my ass, thought LaRue, who looked up at the clock over the television and wondered if it was too late to call Mitchell at his apartment across the courtyard.
Hell, he’d wait until he saw him at the office in the morning. Martha was so cranked up these days that if he called now she’d probably not only listen in on the extension but burst out with some tirade about “Her,” the only name she seemed able to find these days for poor Mrs. Nixon.