"Watergate" by Thomas Mallon: Hopelessly Human

The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended thirty eight years ago today with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service. Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right, and was regarded at the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust in organs of American government. The seeds of the Tea Party’s bitter hatred of “Washington” 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 Damon Runyon character 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. (And to add to the kitchiness of this recollection, the summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly taking the President to the cleaners.)  

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 butt-kissing Henry Kissinger. The whole cast. 

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. 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 in love with and 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 will propel his duplicitous actions in the cover-up and 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?

An easy enough way to imagine yourself into Mallon’s understanding of history is to think back to the last time a relationship, a friendship, or a marriage dissolved. There is the story you tell your friends and relatives, the story you have sold to yourself. She likes Chinese, you like Italian. You just weren’t compatible. It’s true, or true enough. But there is another, more complicated story you know in your heart. There is (though you cringe to recall it) that lame, dumb thing you whispered to her on the pillow one night. You thought you were being funny and original and edgy, and in fact you thought she was asleep. But she wasn’t and ten days later, as the two of you were preparing to go to a party and she was in the middle of a bitch-fit about a run in her stocking, she threw the remark back in your face. A chilly silence descends over the two of you. At the party you avoid her and find yourself trapped in a conversation with an expert in Sanskrit who is desperate to go home with someone tonight.  The Sanskrit expert is not at all your type and a bore besides, and you’ve been avoiding your (wife, girlfriend, partner, friend) mainly because you are hot with embarrassment. But you’ve had a few drinks and you really need to get to the bathroom to take a piss and when you make a move to go, the Sanskrit expert simultaneously moves in the same direction causing the two of you to bump into each other in what looks like a kiss, or a hug, or something kind of, sort of affectionate.  Your partner of course assumes you were making a pass at the Sanskrit expert and after the party a vicious alcohol-fueled fight ensues over this “incident”. Five days later you are determined to set things right by surprising  her at home with flowers and a home-made dinner.  But on the night of the big surprise she is called to an emergency baby-sitting assignment  for her hard-pressed, single-mom sister whose kid has dyslexia and ADHD. On the phone you are crestfallen, and you actually really like and admire the single-mom sister, but the end is spelled when you absent-mindedly let slip the remark, “well, doesn’t that just fucking figure.”

Let’s face it, you can’t tell that story to the relatives, and they don't want to hear it anyway. What they want to hear is the story about how she likes Chinese, you like Italian and, well, you just weren’t compatible.

In just such a fashion does Mallon render the history of Watergate. 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. But this should not at any cost be confused with “conspiracy theory,” which is an effort not to understand random complexity but to reduce historical events to a child’s building blocks. The people who think that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, aren’t interested in comprehending what happened on and before that terrible day; they are in full flight in the opposite direction, grasping at a fairy tale that will release them—and all of us—from the terrible randomness and uncertainty of history.

If I have a complaint—and this is a tepid one for a really good read—it is that this is history without culprits and correspondingly without consequences, beyond the fate of the vain and shallow characters who inhabit it. But in fact, there were culprits-- surely Richard Nixon and his carpet bombing madman Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were a most noxious couple of power-sick fellows  to be running the world’s most successful democracy. And there have most certainly been consequences, which are everywhere around us today to see.