An earlier version of this review incorrectly suggested that Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) is a character in the book. He is not. This version has been updated.
Book World: Thomas Mallon’s ‘Watergate’ is imaginative political farce
Early in Thomas Mallon’s new novel about the Watergate scandal, President Nixon’s secretary wonders when her boss will get his own marble temple on the Mall. It’s the sort of arresting moment of naivete that frequently punctuates this witty, surprisingly humane dramatization of that vaudevillian chapter in American politics.
Four decades have passed since five bungling burglars were arrested in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, indelibly contaminating a posh commercial-residential complex with the stink of our nation’s most bizarre political ordeal. Many of the participants have served their time (in prison and on television), written their best-selling memoirs, and passed into those great 181/2 minutes of oblivion. After Irangate, Whitewatergate, Monicagate and even Nipplegate, the scandal-infused suffix gets tossed around now by people who weren’t even born when the sweaty president looked into the TV cameras and claimed, “I’m not a crook.”
The time is right, then, for a novelist to bring us together again, and perhaps no one is better equipped than this Washington-based writer who has blended political history and speculation so effectively in such books as “Dewey Defeats Truman,”“Henry and Clara” and “Fellow Travelers.” Running up and down what he calls “the always sliding scale of historical fiction,” Mallon entices us back to those frenzied pre-Internet days of the Dictabelt, the smoking gun, the hush money, the Saturday Night Massacre, the Enemies List, Deep Throat, CREEP and “expletive deleted” — the whole, labyrinthine episode that newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford too expansively characterized as “an American tragedy in which we all have played a part.”
While staying close to the chronology of events, Mallon distinguishes his story from the library of books that have come before by shaping “Watergate” in his own inimitable way. Nixon’s the one, of course, and all the spiteful principals are here, too, caught by the author’s delectable humor, from H.R. Haldeman, “the castle’s ogre,” to Chuck Colson, “a kind of mad relative who needed to be kept out of sight.” But Mallon has rotated the cast of characters, pulling some stars out of the limelight and raising others into new prominence. Henry Kissinger just creeps around the edges of the story, “underlining his every offhand insight with some guttural profundity or toadying compliment.” Although you might expect G. Gordon Liddy to be the zany court jester in a comedy about Watergate, he’s mostly offstage here. And those of us suckled on the legend of Woodward and Bernstein will be surprised to find The Washington Post — “Kay’s rag” — reduced to a little footnote in this version of the tale.
Instead, Mallon’s “Watergate” places presidential aide Fred LaRue, “the bagman,” at the center, not as the instigator but as the troubled conscience of the novel. A wealthy, unflappably gracious Mississippi oilman, LaRue is the story’s Nick Carraway, always within and without. He conspires to protect the president even as he hopes to save his own soul, haunted because he shot his father during a hunting trip in Canada years earlier. History, Mallon suggests, is not a clash of titans but just the magnified effects of ordinary people’s secret longings and fears.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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