Author: A Page

Read Part I
Read Part II

Back in Santa Fe for the summer, Blake and I moved into a rambling adobe house in a small compound off of Canyon Rd. That summer between Junior and Senior year turned out to be an emotional roller coaster that resulted in Blake’s* and my break-up in the first month of our senior year, and I asked Christy if she could recommend me for house sitting jobs to her friends. I couldn’t afford much for rent, since I already had paid for my room on campus, but I didn’t feel like living where I would constantly be reminded of all of the friendships that had been destroyed in the wake of Blake’s and my relationship, and I didn’t want to see Blake any more than I had to.  She offered to rent their guest quarters to me for a small sum. It was mutually advantageous since they were traveling a lot. My dad agreed to help me pay for it, and also offered to come and beat up Blake. I accepted the money.

Looking back at that period in my life from here, I can see that I was a mess. This year, and the years that followed, were full of missteps and poor judgement calls on my part.

Although not consciously trying to become somebody else, that is what I was doing. I had always been a granola girl, crunchy, exactly what one would expect of a Colorado girl. I was an athlete, outdoorsy, and natural. I wore my hair long, often in a French braid, wore no make-up, and donned colorful  casual clothing. I did not smoke, drank very little, and had been a dedicated student. Blake was my male equivalent, or so  I thought, my destined match; some said we looked like we belonged together, which I mistakenly believed meant that we did.

The demise of our relationship had not been sudden; it likely began to erode the day it started in the first week of our freshman year,  but it only became obvious to me in the first semester of our Junior year for reasons I did not understand until many years later. Blake ended up transferring to Annapolis for a semester, ostensibly to figure things out away from me. We had only half-broken things off though, and I went to see him over spring break, during which time we decided to make another go of it. In retrospect, that was a huge mistake. We spent the following summer tormenting each other with petty jealousies, and then the dam broke. At first it was a trickle of leaked lies, secrets that I was among the last to know, and then it was a flood.

After that, I broke it off for good. I had probably read one too many Greek tragedies at that point, pre-disposing me to dramatic expressions of mourning.  I cut my hair short, started wearing a lot of black, and began my new less-than-healthy lifestyle as a smoker. I moved from one unsuccessful relationship to another. I did everything to distance myself from who I had been with him. I felt confused and angry.

In this condition, living in the guest quarters  at the Ehrlichmans’ turned out to be less than ideal. Unlike when I was staying there as a house sitter, John and Christy were home a lot. I felt like they were too aware of me and my comings and goings. Christy was offended by my newfound habit of smoking, and had made it clear that she didn’t want me doing it anywhere in the vicinity of the house. I had also become a bit of a partier, and came home at odd hours of the night, or didn’t, and  I did not always come home alone. John and Christy worried about me, which was something I didn’t really want. I felt cramped and watched over, and I sensed that they felt intruded upon, so I decided to move back on campus for my last semester.

One highpoint of living there that semester, was when my mother came to visit and got to meet John in person. They seemed to genuinely like each other, and why not? They had so much in common: a couple of years apart in age, both had five children, each divorced, both had lived through a lot of the same things in their lives. The age-set effect is a powerful cultural binder. In the end, meeting John, and talking to him humanized him for her just as it had for me; she shifted her perspective on the Watergate criminals. Good men can become bad men, especially ambitious men.

After moving out, I didn’t work for John and Christy very much. I was too busy with my senior thesis, and all of the other activities of my last semester, but I remained on good terms with them.  I invited John up to campus when I learned that a prosecutor from the Watergate hearings was going to be on campus to discuss Executive Privilege. John wanted to be there. He and I sat together at the event in the front row. When the speaker came in, he and John met eyes and nodded in recognition at one another.

John’s presence at this event changed it from one in which a man on the “correct side,”  the prosecutor, would be talking to an audience that completely agreed with everything that he would say to an event that forced the audience to seriously consider alternative views. Namely, we were forced to examine executive privilege in the context of Watergate from the perspective of the accused and convicted. Nixon repeatedly used cries of executive privilege to prevent the testimony of his closest counselors, not to protect them, but to protect his office. Throughout the discussion, John was courteous, even gracious, in his interactions with the college’s guest. Many people later said that he had really made it a great moment for them.

John and Christy were there for me in meaningful ways throughout the remainder of the year, inviting me over for dinner, and even attending my graduation ceremony, something my own father did not do. After graduation, I moved to Toronto to live with my new love, Will*, but that move was short-lived, and I returned to Santa Fe before the summer was over. Upon returning, I stayed with a guy I had met during my last semester, a handsome alum named Tom* who was several years older than I.  I ran into him after I got back into town, and mentioned to him that I was looking for a place to live, and he offered a spot at his place. He was living in a cabin up in an Arroyo near the college. It was a wonderful place, but it had no electricity and no heat, so with winter coming, we were forced to find someplace else to live within a couple of months.

I asked John and Christy if we could rent their guest quarters. They agreed to it, and so we moved in and played house there briefly. I was not in love with Tom, and he turned out to be untrustworthy in some fundamental ways. I fled Santa Fe, seeking refuge with my mother in Denver, leaving Tom behind living at Christy’s and John’s. When he finally moved out of the Ehrlichman’s a few months later he left their place a mess. I ended up owing them money, and they never forgave me for leaving them in the lurch. That was the end of my friendship with them.  I tried to make amends, but I never succeeded.

Christy and John ended up divorcing in the early nineties, and John moved to Atlanta. He remarried. I had completely lost touch with both he and Christy by that point. And then in 1999, two years after my own father died, I heard that he also had died at the same age as my father, 73. I felt sad that I had lost touch with him. He was not a great man, but he was a man; he had his flaws, just as I have mine. He was my friend for a time, and I will always cherish that.

I leave you, and this story with this quotation from John that I found in his NYT Obituary, a lesson for current times, children, and councelors:

”I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to somebody else, and if I had any advice for my kids, it would be never — to never, ever — defer your moral judgments to anybody: your parents, your wife, anybody.” [NYT, 1999]

THE END

Note: This story is a recollection of events that took place nearly four decades ago. In creating this narrative, I have constructed dialogue that approximates real conversations that I might have had.

*Pseudonym

 

Read Part I

Summer flew by between sophomore and junior year, and soon I was back in the throes of school, but I continued to work for John and Christy. The job paid well, and they gave me the run of the house.

It was a tastefully decorated rambling Santa Fe adobe house up on a hill. I enjoyed spending time there. Christy had been in the interior design business before meeting John, and she had furnished this house to be comfortable, not too fussy.

Christy and I got along pretty well, especially in the first year and a half of our relationship. She had come to trust me, and to rely on me to be there when she and John could not be, but she did not confide in me. There was something slightly cool and a little brittle about her, but she was generous and kind toward me.

One day I had arrived at the house to babysit, and found John home alone. Christy was out picking up Michael from a play date, and was running a little late. John invited me to sit. He put down the newspaper he had been reading. Making small talk, I said, “I love the furniture in this room! It is so comfortable.” John said, “Yes, Christy’s work! I am afraid I can’t take credit for that.”

He went on, “That is how we met. She was one of the first people I met when I got out of prison. I was shopping for furniture. I felt completely lost at the time,” he mused, “and she came to my rescue.”

I asked him what prison had been like. He laughed uncomfortably. “Not too bad…it wasn’t quite a country club, but it wasn’t all that bad.”

“How did you spend your days there?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Well, I read a lot, played a bit of tennis, and after a while I was allowed to leave on furlough to work. It wasn’t high security or anything like that.”

Didn’t sound like the prison part of prison had exacted much punishment. “Hmmm…I said, sounds like a country club to me! How much do you think it cost us taxpayers to keep you there?”

“I know it was on the order of forty thousand per year,” John replied.

“Now that is a crime if you ask me,” I said, “That is almost four times what my mother makes as a teacher! You should have done hard labor for what you did!”

John laughed. “And here I thought you were my friend.” We went on to talk about what might have been a better alternative to prison. “My punishment came in losing my family, and my dignity, not in going to prison,” he said. I think that was true. He agreed that there would have been better ways to make reparations, consequences with more value to our society that would cost taxpayers less. White collar criminals should have to pay their own way.

I loved working at John’s and Christy’s house, and getting a glimpse into the life of someone who was infamous, and there was some comfort in learning that they were ordinary people with ordinary problems and aspirations. They fretted about what to make for dinner, who was going to pick up the kids, and they had a few rip-roaring arguments, one right in front of me that ended with Christy throwing a wad of keys at John and stomping out of the room. He deserved it, as I remember.

John was always very nice to me, but he had a mean streak that I witnessed a few times, mostly aimed at Christy, but I also saw it rise up when anything related to Nixon came up. He hated him, a fact I first came to realize one day when I was doing my homework in his office, something he encouraged me to do. I was bored, and started browsing his bookshelves. I pulled out The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, and began skimming through it; John had marked it up with underlines and margin notes. It made for fascinating reading, but also gave me some insight into how John’s ambition and misplaced sense of duty toward the office of the president had clouded his judgement. He considered Nixon to be a complete liar. After reading his margin notes, I came to think that he blamed Nixon for what had happened to his life more than he blamed himself.

One time when I was house sitting, I was hunting around in the office for a legal pad to write on. I opened a drawer and saw a file folder in it that was labeled “The 18-minute Tape Gap.” I immediately closed the drawer, feeling as if I had stumbled upon something that was possibly dangerous. I felt a surge of adrenaline. In the press, the tape gap continued to be a source of great speculation. Some people believed that it was a damning conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. Nobody ever discovered the truth, but I am sure that somebody knew the truth. Maybe it was Ehrlichman, I thought.

The next few nights, I lay awake in the room next to the office obsessing about the folder and whether I should look at its contents. I knew that it was wrong to; it was a level of snooping that was morally reprehensible, and yet, after several days, I decided to look. I nearly fainted from anticipation as I opened the folder, and to my great disappointment, it contained nothing but newspaper clippings about the tape gap. I felt pretty stupid to have thought that I would find the smoking gun sitting in almost plain sight.

By the end of my Junior year, I had been working in the Ehrlichman household for a year, and had developed a genuine friendship with John, but I felt vaguely ashamed to admit it, especially to my mother who despised all of the Nixon cronies and criminals. Just thinking about the possibility of a conversation with her about my job made me sweat. I decided that I needed to tell her though. It seemed like too big a thing to hide from her.

That summer when school was out, before my return to Santa Fe for my exciting summer job at the “Pink Adobe” in the “Dragon Room” as a cocktail waitress, I told my mother about my job at the Ehrlichmans’, and also about the unexpected friendship that John and I had developed. I told her how much I liked him. He seemed smart, nice, and like a real person. He reminded me of my own father who I didn’t know all that well. She, initially, seemed surprised, and a little concerned, but she found the news interesting, at least, and she was willing to withhold judgement for the time being.

Read Part III

Note: This story is a recollection of events that took place nearly four decades ago. In creating this narrative, I have constructed dialogue that approximates real conversations that I might have had.

Towards the end of my sophomore year at St. John’s College, Blake*, my then-boyfriend  and I were hanging around Peterson Student Center near the mailboxes chatting, waiting for the mail to arrive, as people did back in the days before email. It so happened that the student job bulletin board, a physical entity where people posted jobs for students, was also located there. A man in his fifties, balding, bearded, and over-weight, walked in the door, and pinned a note card to the board.

Blake’s eyes darted toward the man, and his face brightened as he leaned in close and whispered, “You see that guy?”

I looked and nodded affirmatively.

“I know him.” Blake said. “He was a neighbor of ours in Virginia.”

“Wow,” I exclaimed, “How weird. Are you going to say hi to him or something?”

“Nah” Blake said. “He wouldn’t even know me. I was just a kid.”

“Hmmm…is he somebody?” I asked. Blake grew up in the D.C. suburbs, had gone to Langley High School, an affluent high school attended by the children of Washington’s elite. His own family was tied into the political establishment in mysterious ways.

“Well, yeah, actually, that is John Ehrlichman.”

“No way!” I said. “Old Sneer Face?” My mother had forced me to watch the Watergate hearings when I was in sixth grade. History in the making, she had said, just as important as the first man to walk on the moon. I remembered being bored out of my skull, and not understanding what was going on. I had no idea what was at stake. To entertain myself, I had come up with nicknames for the various characters. Ehrlichman was “Old Sneer Face.” Haldeman was “Flat-Top.” John Dean was “The Rat.” I hated them, even though I didn’t understand what they had done wrong. They were the enemy.

“Yep,” Blake replied. “I am certain of it.”

By then the man had left and we had moved over to the job board. The contact  name on the posting was “Christy Peacock” and it was a tutoring job for her 7 year-old son.

Blake looked at me with a shit-eating grin. “Trust me, you should apply for that job,” and so I did.

I called the number on the card, and a day later made my way to the house for my interview with Christy. When I got there, I was warmly greeted by a friendly golden retriever whose name escapes me. I was surprised to see how young Christy was. She appeared to be in her early 30’s, a petit redhead with a pixie-cut and smooth skin. Perhaps the man who posted the job was her father? I was still a bit skeptical about its being Ehrlichman. I got the job, and we agreed that I would start the next week. Christy said that her husband would pick me up and bring me over.

On the following Tuesday night at the appointed time, the man who  had posted the job was waiting for me at the curb in a late-model manual transmission Toyota Celica. Definitely her husband and not her father. Hardly seemed like the kind of car John Ehrlichman would drive. I  opened the door and poked my head in.

“Hi,” he said, “I assume you are Anne?”

“Yeah!” I said as I slid into the seat.

“I’m John. Nice to meet you. Christy has said very complimentary things about you!” His name is John. My heart pounded. I thought, well, John is a common name.

I studied his face, racking my brain to match this man to Old Sneer Face, but I couldn’t see it. This John seemed warm, friendly, charming, the complete opposite of the calloused and angry man I remembered from our black and white television screen. He had a nice smile, not a sneer, and he had a jolly beard.

We made small talk on the short trip to their house. He talked about their two sons, one seven, the other not quite three. The boy I would be tutoring was Christy’s son from a previous marriage. He had been diagnosed with dyslexia, and they didn’t want him to lose gains that he made during the year in his reading. He didn’t live with them full-time, so the tutoring job would last just through the summer.

For the next several weeks, John picked me up and drove me to their house. He asked me about my studies. We talked about philosophy, politics, and a variety of topics, but he never gave away his identity, and I was still uncertain that he was who Blake said he was. I was curious, but I didn’t dare ask. He told me that he was writing a novel. Over time, I found myself spending more and more time at John’s and Christy’s, first to babysit, and then to housesit when they traveled.

On my first night of babysitting, I went in to use a bathroom that I hadn’t used before. Upon entering it I saw a large framed Doonsbury cartoon. It was about Watergate, and specifically about John Ehrlichman. I wish that I could remember what it said. What I do remember is that Gary Trudeau had inscribed it to John with warm wishes, as if they were friends. I don’t remember the exact words of the inscription, but it implied affectionate familiarity. I knew then with certainty that Blake had been right.

I continued to interact with John on the same terms as we had been. I burned with curiosity though. Then one day, when he drove me back home after a babysitting gig, he asked me about my family. Among the things I told him were that I was the youngest of five—two girls and three boys, that my father was a career military man, and that my parents had divorced.

“Really? I have five children from my first marriage. Same distribution!”

“You do?” I asked. “How old are they? Where are they?”

“Grown,” he paused before saying, “I am a little estranged from most of them.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with such adult information. I was not quite twenty, and found myself feeling vaguely embarrassed at hearing a man who was my father’s age with so much emotion in his voice. I wondered if that is how my father thought about his own children.

“How so?” I asked uncertainly. “I mean, what happened?”

“I went to prison,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t think they will ever forgive me for what I put them through.”

Not knowing what to say, I offered, “People can be pretty forgiving. Maybe with time…”

We rode along in silence the rest of the way.

Read Part II

Note: This story is a recollection of events that took place nearly four decades ago. In creating this narrative, I have constructed dialogue that approximates real conversations that I might have had. Doing this exercise, reminds me of just how thin the line is between fact and fiction.

*Pseudonym