Watergate by Thomas Mallon

one last harrowing, protracted hairsbreadth election night, just like ’60 and ’68. Throughout his whole eight years “in the wilderness,” she’d always known that the boss would reach this office. She’d known it even at the most tearful, rock-bottom moment of all, when she was driving her convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway, the morning after they’d lost the governor’s race in ’62, and over the car radio she heard the horrible “last press conference”—
You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore
—which he’d promised her he wouldn’t give.
    “Rose,” the president now said, as the cameraman set up one more shot. “You’ll help Mrs. Nixon with her part of this filming, won’t you?”
    “Of course.”
    “You know,” he told the crew, “way back when, in California, my wife worked as an extra in the movies.”
    Out came the stories of
Becky Sharp
, and while they were being told, Rose’s mind went to another time and place entirely, to the years in New York, between that morning on the Pacific Coast Highway and the start of the ’68 campaign. Pat may have loved that period, but Rose had hated the whole five years. As she sat amongst the Nixons at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, she could feel herself waiting for the day when he would get up and once more be
fighting
, and she would be fighting with him, never giving up, just as she hadn’t given up when they told her she had less than twelve months to live—a high school girl with cancer! She’d fought it and beat it. And she hadn’t given up when Billy, her beautiful, basketball-playing fiancé, went off to the war and was killed. She’d gotten up from her bed of grief, the same way she’d gotten up from the operating table, and come to Washington to start a new life with twenty thousand other government girls.
    “You know,” the president said, as the production assistant experimented with a slightly more mussed look for the desk, “Rose more or less hired
me
.”
    It was a story he told more often than the tale of Mrs. Nixon’s time on the fringes of RKO.
    “Rose was working for the Herter Committee, which was helping to straighten out the Marshall Plan, and I was one of the congressmen on it.”
    “The only one,” she now said, completing the story from across the room, “who filed expense reports that weren’t an unholy mess. His were neatly typed and checked out to the penny. I was impressed.”
    All eyes turned to her as she continued. Though the staff had heard this story many times, every one of them, except for HRH, smiled. Rose paused, waited a beat, and said, “I suspect Mrs. Nixon had a little to do with the perfect typing.”
    The president tilted his head back and laughed, as if hearing the penultimate line of the story for the first time. He then supplied the kicker: “So when I got to the Senate a couple of years later, Rose decided she could stand running my office.”
    The laughter might be practiced, but his mood was awfully good, Rose thought. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The
news
had been so good these past few months: China and Russia had been just the beginning. Inflation had fallen below three percent, and the Supreme Court’s abolition of the death penalty, expected any time now, would be one more millstone to tie around McGovern’s skinny neck. What fun it would be to keep forcing him to say he agreed with the ruling.
    Her own mood would be better if Bob Haldeman weren’t standing just in front of her. He, too, like Ehrlichman next to him, was noticing the boss’s genuine high spirits.
    “So what
is
it?” Ehrlichman whispered.
    “He’s relieved to be taking action,” Haldeman replied. “Walters is going to call the FBI and tell them CIA wants them to stay the hell away from investigating the burglary thing. National security.”
    Ehrlichman chuckled.
    “Mitchell’s idea, actually,” said Haldeman.
    Now Ehrlichman snorted. “Even he’s right once or twice a year.” After a