Watergate: The Random Chaos of the Human Heart
The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended 46 years ago today with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had an enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how Americans regard politicians and government. The scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust of government and of what had been regarded for most of American history as the dignity of public service. The seeds of the Trump phenomenon can be found in Watergate.
Such are the ironies of history.
But the episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle school year-book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard Hunt’s wife and talked like a character in a mediocre detective novel when testifying before the Senate investigative committee?
It is a bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when the scandal was making headlines. I was fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. The summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, the same summer when Woodward and Bernstein were “following the money” from the burglars to the White House.
Washington at the time had a lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” It was a profoundly segregated city and the ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for white people).
Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and clairvoyantly. They are all there — the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha Mitchell. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues, crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections.
Mallon has a great gift for getting the inside story. By that I very much do not mean the Washington journo’s version of the “inside scoop” (although he resides in Washington and his novels do include the sort of stuff that gets traded around among D.C. people-in-the-know in that gossamer middle zone between gossip and news). I mean instead that he understands how events on the public record are driven by the passion passions of the men and women who make the history. This is preeminently on display in Watergate, which is rendered in Mallon’s telling as a story of many private intentions gone haywire.
It is a tale of humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis — although wildly imaginative — is entirely plausible. John Mitchell, the attorney general, is hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife tearfully, when the gig is up.
The central figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep them quiet. But LaRue — in Mallon’s telling — also carries a terrible secret from his childhood, one that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?
This is history from the inside — history written by the random chaos of the human heart — and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to which this tall tale is entirely believable. At the end of the novel, after much chaos has spilled, LaRue ponders the nature of history itself, the fact that each moment, each event, is preceded by other moments, other events; that all of them are linked in a chain of causation, so that searching for the precise origin of any one event becomes an exercise in the absurd.
No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started he would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson, Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate depended on Fred — or Ike — LaRue’s having been born.
