Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Jane Wyman: film and television actress; first wife of Ronald Reagan

Gennadi Zakharov: Soviet physicist and spy

Jerome Zipkin: New York society “walker” and friend of Nancy Reagan

Mort Zuckerman: editor in chief, U.S. News & World Report

That faint clanking sound, arriving through the open window of his home office: Was it coming from the courtyard? Was it being made with the pulley they’d attached to the house?

Christ, it couldn’t be , thought Nixon, looking at his new digital watch: 6:15 p.m. No, they still had the round-the-clock nurse, and she wouldn’t be letting Pat get up from her long afternoon nap for another fifteen minutes, when he’d join her for a glass of fruit juice and dinner off the TV trays.

He heard the clanking again and realized it was just the halyard slapping the flagpole. Manolo must be lowering the Stars and Stripes a little early. Nixon felt relieved to know that poor Pat wasn’t once more at the exercise pulley, working it without complaint, no matter the agony, trying to regain the left-arm strength the stroke had stolen six weeks before. Thank God she could still use her right hand; he would die from the pity of it all if he had to sit there and feed her.

More of a breeze than usual was coming off the Pacific tonight. Nixon closed the window and turned up the sound on the office TV. It was prime time in Kansas City, two hours ahead of San Clemente, and Rockefeller had just taken the podium to cheers that seemed almost affectionate, nothing like the catcalls he’d gotten twelve years ago in San Francisco. YOU LOUSY LOVER! YOU LOUSY LOVER! Sitting on the sidelines of the Cow Palace that night, Nixon and Pat had stared ahead in disbelief, not reacting, pretending not to hear. Hell, maybe Nelson had had it coming — running off with Happy, who’d abandoned her own four kids — but Nixon would have preferred another Caracas shower of spit and stones to the shrieks of all those triumphant Goldwaterites, rushing like lemmings into Lyndon Johnson’s landslide.

The Tilt-A-Whirl of the last twelve years had ended up making Nelson vice president, the unelected standby to an unelected president; and now, in a last gyration, he’d been kicked to the curb, dumped by dumb, docile Jerry in order to placate the Reagan troops, who’d damned near succeeded in nominating their own man. Christ, this was some sorry spectacle for a sitting president. Limping over the finish line with a handful more delegates than the other guy!

And now it fell to Nelson to nominate his own successor — angry Bob Dole, whom the liberals were already calling Ford’s Nixon, Jerry’s “hatchet man.” Well, it was a bad choice, as he could have warned Ford, and tried to. No soap. So here was Nelson, still garrulous and not very bright — all money and dick, if truth be told — knocking himself out to be a sport:

Delegates to the convention, fellow Americans, last night in this hall the Republican Party made history. It endorsed the solid achievements of the first person ever to hold the office of president of the United States by appointment.

Christ, what’s the point of bringing that up? Ford’s biggest problem, if you didn’t count the pardon, was that he owed his goddamned job to Nixon.

And I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, where else in the world would the winner go pay a call on the runner-up?

Well, what winner but Jerry would be dumb enough to go to the hotel room of the man he’d just beaten , barely, as if he were room service rather than the goddamned president of the United States? Same as he’d pissed away the Bicentennial, giving a half-dozen dopey speeches instead of one big memorable address. No sense of any occasion’s demands and opportunities.

This could all have turned out worse, of course. The party could have decided that Nixon’s replacement and pardoner was so beyond the pale that they wouldn’t even think of nominating him. They could have turned to some noble son of a bitch like Richardson, just to purify themselves for the voters. No, he wouldn’t raise his blood pressure higher than Pat’s by thinking about that cocksucker, who after all was going nowhere fast. The London embassy and then secretary of commerce: What did they call it? “Downward mobility”? Christ, the bastard had done better under Nixon than Ford!

The former president was, on this summer California night, still in a jacket and tie. He never lets himself be without either when he goes to this office just yards from the house. If he starts sitting around in a Ban-Lon shirt, that’ll be the end of any chance to climb back even halfway from the hell of the past two years. Exile, they called it. Christ, more like house arrest.

As Nelson went on, Nixon did allow himself to loosen the tie a bit, an action that tugged his gaze toward the accumulating typescript of his memoirs, piled on a cabinet near the window. He was up to 1970, and the work was getting harder all the time. Try telling the story of your administration without access to your own damned papers! Everything remained under the government’s lock and key three thousand miles away, and Jerry Ford wasn’t about to intercede on his predecessor’s behalf for the sake of mere history.

The little, recent punishments, postscripts to the loss of the presidency, were turning out to be more inventive and sadistic than the giant axe that had fallen two years before. Only weeks ago they’d thrown him out of the New York State Bar rather than allowing him to resign: oh no, they weren’t going to let him get away with that again — not when disbarment could be made into a miniature version of the impeachment he’d “escaped.” You almost had to admire their maneuver, something worthy of Colson in his best days.

Pat, who’d never wanted to be anything more than the wife of a lawyer, had taken the disbarment especially hard — the social disgrace of it, he supposes. It had, he was sure, contributed to the worst blow of all, this stroke. If she were well, she’d be coming in here, fetching him for the short walk back to the house and dinner, scolding him when she saw he’d already fixed himself a cocktail from the little cabinet on which the typescript sat. Put a little more water in that, pal . His imagination could so clearly imagine her saying it, her smile untwisted and her speech unslurred.

Those sons of bitches, Bernstein and Woodward, had made her out to be a drunk. They were the main cause of this stroke, as surely as if they’d injected her with something. The Final Days: he’d told her not to read it, and she’d promised him she wouldn’t. But she’d borrowed it from one of the two secretaries he had here each day until five o’clock — a gal who’d been skimming it, maybe for libels but probably just out of curiosity. One thing you could bet on: if Rose were still with him, she’d never have left the goddamned thing on the desk where Pat could see it. Reading the book over Fourth of July weekend is what sent the blood bursting out of her veins and brought on the heartbreak to which he now paid daily witness. To see his wild Irish rose playing with a preschooler’s blocks, trying to get back the coordination in her fingers by pressing them into a little steeple!

He turned his gaze toward the huge Oriental fan mounted on the wall — something she’d been given in China, not in ’72 but during their trip this past February. God, how they’d enjoyed themselves! The crowds in Canton had been as loud, as crazed with friendliness, as the ones in Cairo back in ’74, two months before the end, when he still thought he might save himself by solving the whole insoluble Middle East mess.