Watergate Read Free Page A

got on Hunt’s nerves. There was a screw loose in the guy, the way he would rush over to the Hunts’ house in Potomac to play a just-acquired recording of Hitler seducing some hysterical crowd. His lips were even looser than whatever screw was aboutto fall out of his head. On the way home from Los Angeles, having accomplished the magnificent feat of messing up a few papers in the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, he had gotten half-loaded on the plane and started talking to a stewardess who, under her jaunty cap, looked as if she might be able to put two and two together.
    All right, they were on Pennsylvania at last, in sight of the White House, lit up even brighter than the Kennedy Center. One could be sure that, behind the floodlights, Chuck Colson’s desk lamp was burning the midnight oil.
    “So much light, with the boss not home?” asked Bernie, tightening his lips, perplexed over why the anti-Communist Nixon should be drinking champagne in Moscow with the men who armed and bankrolled Castro year after year.
    “Wheels within wheels,” replied Hunt, trying to suggest the intricacy of Nixon’s stratagems. “Even tonight, while he makes nice with Brezhnev, there are a lot more than eight planes over Hanoi.”
    Did he believe it all himself? That Nixon actually knew where things were heading, and remained motivated by the kind of zeal that had sent Bernie’s comrades and Howard Hunt’s career to their deaths? As far as Hunt could tell, the president spent no more time at the geopolitical chessboard with Kissinger than he did drinking with Colson, who had once said he would run over his own grandmother if it would advance his boss’s reelection. During these drinking sessions, Chuck would serve Nixon a new harebrained scheme as if it were just another ice cube or olive. A week ago tonight he had lubricated the president with the idea that they should send him, Hunt, out to the Milwaukee apartment of the kid arrested for shooting Wallace, so that he could plant some left-wing leaflets that would make the boy look like a McGovern acolyte instead of a nut job. “And I’m supposed to accomplish this even though the FBI will have sealed the place off?” he’d had to ask Colson, who even after that couldn’t let go of the possibility.
    Three years ago, the two of them, Charles Wendell Colson ’53 and Everette Howard Hunt ’43, had been president and vice president of the Brown Club of Washington, D.C. Then one day, Chuck, knowing about his special skills, aware of his dry dock and frustration, had brought him around to see Ehrlichman. Soon after came Liddy and room 16 and“Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1,” which had led them to the utterly beside-the-point contents of that L.A. shrink’s filing cabinet. Which Bernie, standing in the shambles of the doctor’s office, had unquestioningly photographed.
    When Hunt had seen the pictures, he had found himself thinking only that he would like to be on Dr. Fielding’s couch, to ask him about the strange waverings and loss of certainty that he’d started to experience from time to time.
    “Amigos,”
said Hunt, “you’re here.”
    The Manger-Hamilton Hotel, at the corner of Fourteenth and K, had seen better days, but at least there was a room waiting for each Cuban. When he’d called here yesterday, after learning that the Watergate had nothing, he’d been told this place hadn’t been full since Hoover’s funeral almost three weeks ago. And indeed, it looked like the sort of modest spot where sentimental old FBI agents living on fixed incomes in Davenport and Des Moines might book a room in order to come east and say goodbye to their old chief.
    Bernie had come to town then, too—to participate, at Hunt and Liddy’s request, in a raucous demonstration that would counter the one Ellsberg had planned for the steps of the Capitol while Hoover’s corpse cooled in the Rotunda. A little heckling and scuffling turned out to be the only result, but Bernie’s