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to listen to him deliver an opening harangue about the bombing and the mining. But it was pretty much just for show, the way Khrushchev roared on about the ‘Captive Nations’ resolution by the goddamned Congress back in ’59.”
    This was probably saying too much, babbler or no babbler. Time to rein it in.
    “Sir, McGovern’s now pulled ahead of Humphrey in both Gallup and Harris. And his delegates are piling up.”
    “Good, good. How was the Pentagon thing? They had some demonstration planned for today, didn’t they?”
    “Pathetic. A few hundred, if that.”
    “Could have taken care of them with your trusty car, huh?”
    Colson laughed. “I told Dean I’m saving it to use against the next ones who demonstrate on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk.”
    Nixon laughed. He wanted to talk about Wallace, too, but knew he should wrap this up. Still, the conversation had done a good job of exciting and relaxing him all at once, the usual Colson cocktail.
    “Okay, Chuck. I’ll call you later today from the limousine.”
    “I’ll look forward to it, Mr. President.”
    “Get some sleep in the meantime.”
    After turning off the babbler, Nixon at last fell into an early-morning dream that found him back in the South Pacific, at “Nick’s Hamburger Stand” on Bougainville, his own little operation, where during the war he’d taken a lot of poker winnings off a handful of other naval officers. But something in the dream was wrong; he was winning too much; he had too many chips in front of him. He didn’t know how he’d gottenthem, but he knew he had to get
rid
of them fast. But
how
? He couldn’t figure it out, and so, in this bedroom of the czars, in the middle of the dream, he began to sweat, and finally he groaned—startling the technician in the recording room forty feet below the cobblestones of Red Square.

Part One

HIDE
    JUNE 17, 1972–APRIL 30, 1973

Chapter One

JUNE 17, 1972
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
    “The president did a wonderful job at the summit,” remarked the studio executive, or lawyer, or whoever it was shaking Pat Nixon’s hand.
    “Oh, thank you!” she replied. “
This
is some summit, too, don’t you think?”
    She gestured toward the lights of Los Angeles far below Taft Schreiber’s mansion in Bel Air and thought of how these days the million blinkings down there stretched all the way to and beyond Whittier, a continuous gold carpet. When she and Dick were kids, Whittier had flickered like a small distant planet, far from the sun of downtown, into which Frank Nixon drove a streetcar every day.
    The wife of the man who’d shaken her hand was also now remarking on the Russian summit, the safest topic for any Hollywood liberal who’d come to this fundraiser more from fear of Taft Schreiber and MCA than out of any sudden enthusiasm for Dick. She’d heard one older executive say to his wife, while pointing to the eager-beaver campaign boys knifing into the pâté, “They’re pretending it’s Helen Gahagan.” The wife, young enough to be the husband’s daughter, had looked baffled.
    Well, that
was
over twenty years ago. But no election provided Pat with sharper—or better—memories. The liberals could say all they wanted that Helen Gahagan had been the martyr to a dirty campaign, but Dick had had her number from the start. She
was
pink, right down to her underwear, and if telling the truth about her voting record in Congress amounted to dirty pool, well, that was too bad. It had been a grand brawl, fought out in the California sunshine while they were still so young. She’d had to carry Julie in her arms when they went to all the new shopping centers in that battered station wagon. Tricia had been just old enough to pass out flyers—including, yes, the “pink sheet,” whichhad the nerve to print the facts about Mrs. Melvyn Douglas on just the right color paper. If Dick had
really
wanted to run a dirty campaign, he could have spread the word that Mrs. Douglas had been having an