Watergate A novel

Review by New York Times Review

I'M fairly sure it's a faux pas to compare a novel and a television show, but I mean it as a compliment to both when I say that Thomas Mallon's new novel, "Watergate," bears a certain resemblance to "The West Wing." Like that much-loved NBC drama, "Watergate" shifts among various men and women - mostly men - working inside and outside the White House. Even when the action becomes convoluted, we're propelled forward and kept highly entertained by the colorful characters, the delicious insider details, the intelligence of the dialogue. Where "The West Wing" and "Watergate" diverge, at least most obviously, is that one is about a fictitious, idealized Democratic president and his staff while the other features fictional depictions of real, corrupt Republicans. This difference is less pronounced than you might imagine, however, largely because of Mallon's evenhandedness. He's not out to lampoon Richard Nixon or anyone else. Nor is he out to redeem the Nixon administration, which would have been just as tedious. In fact, Mallon avoids rendering Watergate in the familiar and expected ways: there are only fleeting references to Woodward and Bernstein, and the eventual profusion of indictments and imprisonments aren't major plot points. What Mallon captures particularly well is the fundamental weirdness and mystery at the center of the scandal. Who was trying to achieve what with those break-ins? And why? Given how ineptly they were carried out, could the sloppiness have been intentional - either as a result of double agentry or as individual self-sabotage? In these pages, even those closest to the events remain bewildered by their smallness - their ridiculousness, even - and their contrastingly outsize and ruinous consequences. It appears that Mallon's primary goal, one he achieves with great finesse, is to make the portrayals of his characters as believable as possible. Like the rest of us, they aren't simply moral or immoral but are both clever and defensive, selfish and self-pitying, sweet and loyal, generous and venal. Also, there are quite a lot of them. Mallon's initial list of "The Players" in this book contains 112 names, perhaps an unnecessary resource for readers who lived through Watergate, but extremely valuable for those, like me, who did not. Yet Mallon's control over his material, his ability to subtly cue the reader about what information warrants close attention, means that "Watergate" isn't usually confusing, even to a younger reader and even though name-bestrewn passages like this one, which describes the night of Nixon's landslide 1972 re-election, are common: "Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages and returned phone calls from Rockefeller and Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's tough-cop mayor, who made Agnew look like Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, 'Was Richardson on the platform at the hotel?'" With such a large cast, it's no surprise that the characters who show up the most often emerge the most vividly: Fred LaRue, a gentle White House aide from Mississippi, haunted by a not-so-gentle secret, who deliberately flies below the radar of the public; Rose Mary Woods, the president's tough and steadfast secretary (and yes, the eraser of those tapes - though not for the reason everyone thinks); Elliot Richardson, who serves as secretary of health, education and welfare, then of defense and finally as Nixon's attorney general, hiding his own presidential ambitions behind a screen of self-righteousness. (Hoping to be tapped as Gerald Ford's vice president after Nixon's resignation, Richardson makes an amusingly blunt list "of his rivals' liabilities": Gov. Nelson Rockefeller is "too old, pushy," while Senator Edward Brooke is "too liberal, black.") Also included in the mix is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, widow of the former House speaker Nicholas Longworth and famed deliverer of bons mots. At 90, Mrs. L. remains "a creature of motiveless mischief" who steals every scene she's in. She demands that the White House schedule Christmas parties around her own calendar, performs bucktoothed impersonations of her cousin Eleanor, rides the dumbwaiter in her house (or claims to) because there's no elevator and stays up all night reading, then uses the bone from a veal chop as a bookmark. As for the Nixons, sad and stoic Pat is also keeping a secret, one that makes her seem highly sympathetic. And Mallon abandons the usual sweaty, paranoid caricature of Nixon, offering instead a nuanced man who can even be endearing - quite a feat for those of us in the generation for which a Nixon Halloween mask is as much a reference point as Nixon himself. Mallon's Nixon is preoccupied less with his enemies than with his foreign policy. An oddly touching moment in October 1972 has Rose Mary Woods glancing at a folder marked Oslo, "containing a plan of action to be implemented should the president win the Nobel Peace Prize. If he secured the Vietnam deal on top of China and Russia, how, Rose wondered, could he not get it?" (Ironically, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state, would win it the following year.) A "misanthrope in a flesh-presser's profession," this Nixon is awkward rather than evil. He's chivalrous with elderly Mrs. Longworth, forgiving of subordinates' mistakes and entirely human in poignant ways: fastidious about having the White House barber "cup a little tuft of chest hair emerging above his collar," irritated by the fact that the edited transcripts of the White House tapes make him sound as if he drops hard-core obscenities rather than mild ones. AND yet it's the very fact that Mallon portrays Nixon and others so convincingly that raises questions about the fairness of depicting real people in a work of fiction. Is this type of literary borrowing less trasgressive when it makes readers like the subjects better? When the subjects are dead? If so, for how long? Ten years? A hundred? Obviously, there's no consensus when it comes to any of this, but I do know that if you write a novel about, say, Catherine the Great, you probably won't be scolded for misrepresenting her or otherwise infringing on her privacy, while if you write a novel inspired by Laura Bush, as I did in 2008, you most definitely will. In my case, I changed names, which Mallon has chosen not to do. And I made peace with the intrusive nature of what I was doing by telling myself that to sincerely imagine what the world looks like from someone else's perspective is an act of compassion. The counterargument, of course, is that even the most savagely mocking skit on "Saturday Night Live" is less insidious than the sustained realism of a novel. "The reason it's such a violation," a journalist told me about my own book, "is that every single thing in it is plausible." Judged by the same standard, Thomas Mallon is - appropriately enough, for a book about Watergate - equally guilty. Curtis Sittenfeld's fourth novel, "Earthquake Season," will be published next year. A 'misanthrope in a flesh-pressers profession,' Mallon's Nixon is awkward rather than evil.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 4, 2012]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Mallon (Fellow Travelers, 2007), astute and nimble, continues his scintillating, morally inquisitive journey through crises great and absurd in American politics by taking on Watergate. Mixing judiciously selected facts about the infamous break-in and cover-up with shrewd invention, Mallon creates a whirling behind-the-scenes drama with a selective and intriguing cast: Nixon, a misanthrope in a flesh-presser's profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. Howard Hunt, a mediocre fiction writer turned ill-fated White House plumber. Ambitious cabinet member Elliot Richardson, and melancholy and enigmatic bagman Fred LaRue. Always sensitive to the marginalized, Mallon tells the stories of the Watergate women with particular insight and panache, beginning with Pat Nixon, a clandestine smoker with a secret love and far more wit and moxie than her public persona suggests. Nixon's devoted and flinty secretary, Rose Mary Woods, loves to dance and conceals a molten temper. The venomously funny belle of this satirical ball is Alice Longworth Roosevelt, who, in her mischievous nineties, knows everyone and will say anything. Mallon himself is deliciously witty. But it is his political fluency and unstinting empathy that transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With Washington politics in an uproar, Mallon's knowing and entertaining take on Watergate will garner avid media attention as he makes appearances accompanied by a high-profile ad campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Mallon's historical novels have been moving steadily closer to the present, from the Lincoln era through the Gilded and Jazz ages to the 1940s and, with Fellow Travelers, his last book, the McCarthy era. Here he takes on the '70s, which, depending on the reader, will seem either ancient or way too recent to be history. As Mallon moves from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices to Nixon's resignation, shifting viewpoints as he goes, he provides a lot of exposition. Some of it, implausibly, occurs in dialogue and internal monologues, as people go over what they know for the sake of readers who no longer do or never did. It's hard going at first, but the reward is getting to enter the heads of Watergate participants who were off to the side or never wrote memoirs: Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods, progenitor of the famed 18-minute tape gap; stoic Pat Nixon; meddling Alice Roosevelt Longworth, famously tart-tongued and responsible here for some very funny moments; and Mississippian Fred LaRue, aka the "Bagman." Mallon makes these people sympathetic, no small feat; readers may be surprised at how much they end up disliking Elliot Richardson, one of the era's few heroes. If the author can't bring the story to a satisfying close or explain why so many were so loyal to the president they call "the Old Man," well, history is often messier than fiction. Agent: The Wylie Agency (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

If ever a historical event was worthy of a comic novel, it's Watergate, and Mallon, with several outstanding historical novels to his credit (most recently, Fellow Travelers), has the skills to write it. What a cast of characters we meet! Ex-spy G. Gordon Liddy is nearly certifiable; his colleague H. Howard Hunt's hold on reality seems equally tenuous at times. Around them floats a cast of clowns and self-serving creeps who make the familiar story a veritable opera buffa. At the top, clinging desperately to his fading political success, is Nixon, a complicated man who can't understand why people don't trust him. Events unfold through the perspectives of six characters: Republican Party fixer Fred LaRue; ex-spook Hunt; 90-year-old society madam Alice Roosevelt Longworth; Nixon's doggedly loyal secretary, Rose Woods; Nixon himself; and his wife, Pat, who comes across as far from the plastic Barbie Doll she's usually portrayed to be. There are no surprise revelations here, but Mallon writes with such swagger that it all seems new again. VERDICT A sure winner, for its subject and Mallon's proven track record as a historical novelist, and because it's good. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/11.]-David Keymer, Modesto CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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In her room inside the czar's apartments, Pat Nixon, jet-lagged at 4:30 a.m., lay awake and looked toward a crack in the velvet curtains. The White Nights wouldn't really come for another month, and Moscow wasn't Leningrad, but the glow outside had nothing to do with dawn. It was the same strange silvery light that had persisted all night and been shining even when the state dinner ended at ten- thirty. The sky reminded her, oddly enough, of the ones she used to walk beneath in the Bronx on rainy autumn twilights back in the early thirties, looking south toward Manhattan. She'd leave the X- ray machine she'd tended all day and, with her coat pulled tight and never more than a dollar in her pocket, head down Johnson Avenue in search of dinner, often just a slice of apple pie and coffee. She could no longer remember the names of the nuns she'd lived with atop the TB hospital, but could still recall what she would think while walking on nights that looked like this one: Maybe I won't try to get back to California; maybe I'll seek my life right here.   She wondered whether Mrs. Khrushchev, now a widow, still lived in the dacha she and Dick had lunched at back in '59. There was probably no more chance of her having been allowed to keep it than there had been of her being at the dinner tonight. When Pat had raised that second possibility with Kissinger, he'd pompously informed her that it was out of the question, and that she should be grateful for the political progress signified by Nikita Khrushchev's having been merely retired instead of shot.   What a show Mrs. K had made, a dozen years ago, of not trying on the hat that Pat and the other ladies had presented her with at a luncheon in Washington, when the Khrushchevs returned the Nixons' visit to Russia. She'd said she would accept the hat only so that back home it could be copied for the masses of Soviet women! Oh, put it on, dear, they'd all cajoled, and they eventually did succeed in raising a smile from her plump face. But, no, they never saw her try it on.   The Soviets had certainly never given up any of the swag in this room. Pat decided she might as well get up, put on the lights, and give it another look instead of just lying here staring at the curtains and gold- leaf ceiling. But on her way to the mosaic table, the one supporting the beautiful French clock, she stumbled over an extension cord left by Rita, her hairdresser, who'd fought a losing battle with the different voltage until two young men from Kissinger's staff got the dryer going just before they were all due downstairs for the first toasts. Was Rita--across the courtyard in the block of rooms supposed to be full of ramshackle Communist-era furnishings-- getting any more sleep than she was? Poor Bill Rogers wasn't even inside the Kremlin; he'd been put in some hotel a few minutes away, no doubt from Kissinger's continuing need to keep the secretary of state in his place and away from the real action.   It bothered her that Dick encouraged all that, especially if he did it not for some strategic reason but out of resentment left over from their six years in New York, when Bill and Adele would invite the Nixons out to "21" and give the impression--at least to Dick--that the Rogerses were doing them a favor. Pat herself had never seen it that way. She remembered those evenings, as well as the law firm's partner dinners from that same all- too- brief time in her life, as being more agreeable than all the political entertainments in the years before and after.   Even Martha, for a while, had been fun.   How Rose Woods would love this room: all the figurines and bibelots, the kind of stuff she filled her little place at the Watergate with, those frilly knockoffs amidst the real little gems she got from Don Carnevale, her very safe escort from Harry Winston.   She heard voices coming from the courtyard below, bouncing up off the paving stones. Dear God, it was--Dick. She parted the curtains and saw him down there in a windbreaker and slacks, walking with Bill Duncan, their favorite Secret Service man, and she thought back to the mad night two years ago when he'd gone to the Lincoln Memorial, at about this hour, with almost nobody but Manolo and some aide of John Ehrlichman's. To talk with the "demonstrators." And a fat lot of credit he'd got for making the effort.   She thought of the people who'd come out to greet them this afternoon, trying to catch a glimpse of the limousine. You could scarcely see them, kept back as they were a block or more from the path of the car, but you could hear them, buzzing and cheering, interested in the whole   thing, hoping for something to come out of it-- whereas back home the only crowds you could gather for politics were the angry, filthy kids and their teachers. Would those same protesters now grudgingly admit that the "warmonger" was really a peacemaker? No, of course not.   She could see Dick now, staying two steps ahead of Duncan, lost in thought until he'd turn around and say something, half from politeness and half from the need to hold forth. And then, after he spoke a couple of sentences, he'd break away and go it alone for another fifty feet, starting the cycle again. For all his need of an audience, he was happier alone. She remembered him just like this on their wedding day, June 21, 1940. She'd looked out the window of the Mission Inn and spotted him pacing the courtyard, a nervous groom, an hour before the ceremony. The birds had been singing in the branches as she stood there in her lace suit from Robinson's department store and watched him without his knowing it. Money had been so much on both their minds: his mother had made the cake; his brother had picked her up and brought her to Riverside to save the cost of a hired car.   Next month, June, would be their anniversary. What would Rose be buying for him to give her? Once this trip was over and the two women had a quiet moment together, she'd have to start dropping hints. Dick had lately been making all this odd conversation about a "dynasty." David would run for Congress from Pennsylvania; or maybe Julie would. And both Eds, his son- in- law and much younger brother, would find open seats in New York and Washington state. This fantasy was new, another one agitated into life by too much concentration on the Kennedys. She herself never inclined to the long view.   Julie had taken to asking when she would have her portrait for the White House painted. "When I can find the time" was her usual answer, easier than saying what she really thought: that sitting for it in the first term would be bad luck.   She could hear Dick's voice growing fainter. Poor Bill Duncan would be relieved when his boss decided to go back to bed. Maybe she, too, was at last ready for sleep; if she got lucky, she would drift off for a couple of hours before breakfast.   She closed the curtains and undid the long belt of her wrapper, jumping in fright when her hand brushed, and nearly knocked over, a porcelain figure on the largest chest of drawers. No harm done, thank God. Everything, the whole world, really, was so fragile. Only yesterday   there had been that horrible newspaper picture of the man attacking the Pietà with a hammer.   She knew from long practice that she could, by sheer force of will, banish such an awful image from her mind. As she closed her eyes, she did just that. Excerpted from Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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