Watergate Read Free Page B

trip up from Miami had given Hunt a chance to explain that their
next
job would be bugging Larry O’Brien, a big Kennedy man, postmaster
generalísimo
, now head of the Democrats’ national committee. Bernie never asked what they’d be looking for, but Hunt had told him anyway: evidence that money was coming McGovern’s way from Havana, out of Fidel’s own coffers, which were swollen with expropriations from every exile Bernie knew in Miami.
    Hunt now handed him an inch-thick bundle of cash and said he’d be in touch tomorrow. He began the drive home to Potomac, wondering if he himself believed there was the least chance of finding out something so momentous from a lousy tap on O’Brien’s phone. If by some stretch of the imagination there
was
—he could feel himself trying to catch Bernie’s own wishful train of thought—McGovern would be finished off beyond recognition, and maybe the Marines would be allowed to go in and get rid of Castro once and for all. Credit for the break-inand wiretap could easily be transferred from the White House to the Agency; an illegal act would become an intelligence triumph, and the past decade of his own career would be transformed from a dead end to a mere detour.
    As Hunt’s car passed 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, the lone occupant of the house’s third-floor bedroom, having heard from the television that Nixon might make Brezhnev the gift of a Cadillac, tried to recall what the Czar of Russia had given her for a wedding present in 1906. She remembered Edward VII sending a snuffbox with his face on it; she and Nick had never figured out whether it was intended for the bride or groom or both of them. But the czar? Maybe nothing. It seemed to the still-sharp memory of Alice Roosevelt Longworth that that was right. Father had not long before made peace between the Russians and the Japanese, and the Russians had gotten rather the short end of the big stick. Yes, that was why the Japanese had outdone themselves with
their
present—bolt after bolt of that golden chrysanthemum-patterned silk. Not too different from the United Mine Workers sending that boxcar loaded with coal. Again, all about Father and not about Alice: the miners had still been happy with the way he settled the coal strike in ’02.
    Pat looked well, thought Mrs. Longworth, gazing over the top of her eyeglasses at the TV. The first lady’s hair might be teased a bit too high on her head, but she never got sufficient credit for being pretty—much prettier than Tricia, whom all the newspapers, no matter how they hated Dick, continually described as looking like a fairy princess. With that ridiculous
retroussé
version of Dick’s ski-nose? All wrong. And not an interesting word out of her, ever.
    Pat Nixon’s televised image was gone too quickly for Mrs. Longworth to get a good look at her coat, which might still be cloth but would have come, at the very least, from Elizabeth Arden. Even back in ’60, some of Pat’s outfits had cost more than Jackie’s, not that the press ever had the wit to see it. Mrs. L, as she was resigned to being called, liked both of them, always had; it was Jackie’s mother-in-law, the detestable Rose, with that helmet of dyed black hair, who got on her nerves. Six years Alice’s junior but forever babbling about how she’d met McKinley, as ifhe were Moses or Methuselah. Well, Alice Roosevelt had met
Benjamin Harrison
, and didn’t feel the need to squawk about it to every reporter who came along.
    And those
lamentable
Lilly Pulitzer dresses Rose wore around Palm Beach! Polka-dotted knee-length muumuus that could be shower curtains, for all anyone knew. And which just
hung
against the form. She herself, since the second mastectomy, might be the world’s best-known topless octogenarian (her own line, and a good one, too), but a bit of tailoring never hurt, even if it wound up accentuating one’s deformity.
    Mrs. Longworth now realized that she would be in Florida in just three months