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wrong and she’d been right about. Though neither one of them would mention this now, the conversation would get frosty for a moment or two. No, she thought, smiling: there was no new Nixon.
    She hadn’t been happy until they’d left Los Angeles and gone to New York, and not really happy until Tom Garahan had come along. And then not really miserable until she’d pushed Tom away. But she wouldn’t think about that now; she’d put it out of her mind just as lately she’d been expelling pictures of that boy shooting George Wallace and that madman taking his hammer to the
Pietà
. Still, it was harder to shut out the sensation of happiness, what she’d briefly known with Tom. Best of all, its memory was undulled by the confession of it to anybody, ever. The eight months wearing kerchiefs and dark glasses; the afternoon meetings in movie theaters: there they were, the still-vibrant images and feelings, coming to her, assaulting her will power right now, as Reagan finished speaking.
    She needed to get back once more into the receiving line. Shaking another fifty hands would be less of a chore than staying here and being encircled by people who wanted extended conversation. But before she could take a first step forward, she saw the man from Mississippi coming out of the house, no doubt redeputized to look after Mrs. Mitchell. She waved to him, merrily indicated that he should come over; maybe she could delay his getting an earful from Martha about the little snub of a few minutes before.
    The man squinted to make sure he was really being summoned. She now remembered the way his weak eyes had kept straining to read the printed handouts at the one meeting she’d ever been at with him; something about the hurricane, back in ’69. They’d assigned it to him because he came from Mississippi.
    “Hello, Miz Nixon. Fred LaRue.”
    “Somebody called me ‘Miz’ about an hour ago, but I’m pretty sure she had it spelled ‘M-s-period’ in her mind!”
    The man smiled and looked at his shoes. “I meant what you call a lady, not a women’s-libber.”
    The soft voice was such a relief from the clipped tones of all the young campaign sharpies who’d come out on the plane. No wonder he was good with Martha.
    “I’m remembering that you briefed me about Hurricane Camille. Wasn’t that just an awful thing?”
    “Yes, ma’am. I imagine it was the worst storm most folks’ll ever go through.” He looked back at the house, through its glass doors, to the cluster of men still around John Mitchell, before he added: “But you can never be sure.”

Chapter Two

JUNE 19, 1972
EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
    Howard Hunt parked his Pontiac Firebird on Seventeenth Street, across from the EOB and White House. For over an hour he’d been driving around what passed for the capital’s downtown—worse than Newark. He was pondering a number of what-might-have-beens, and one of them was automotive. Liddy had run a yellow light Friday evening on his way to the Watergate. If he had mouthed off when he got pulled over—hardly an improbability with Gordon—the cop might have run him in and thereby scuttled the whole operation.
    Sixty hours had passed since the botch. Getting out of the Firebird, Hunt looked across Pennsylvania Avenue to number 1701, where the Committee to Re-Elect had its headquarters. He tried to imagine how the news had hit Mitchell and Magruder and all the expense-account boys out in California for that fundraiser. Hunt could have told them that
he
was the one who’d wanted to abort the operation. At a Friday dinner meeting, beforehand, when McCord reported something funny—the disappearance of the masking tape that kept the jimmied door to the DNC unlocked—it was Howard Hunt alone who had said they should scrub the mission. It was Gordon who’d said no, we go ahead, that the tape had more likely been removed by some fastidious mailman than a suspicious security guard. And since Gordon was head of the