At Watergate anniversary, Thomas Mallon reflects on Nixon

Thomas Mallon’s obsession with Richard Nixon goes way back — all the way back to the author’s youth on Long Island.

The year was 1968. Nixon was on a campaign swing through Nassau County and Mallon was a 16-year-old Republican from Sewanhaka High School who got to shake the candidate’s hand right there on Hempstead Turnpike in Franklin Square.

For a historical novelist, which is what Mallon is, there are worse obsessions. Sunday is the 40th anniversary of what the Nixon White House dismissed as a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee offices at Washington’s Watergate Hotel — a break-in that would eventually bring down the president. Coincidentally, last week I happened to come across a copy of “Watergate,” Mallon’s compulsively readable new novel about the break-in and its aftermath.

So I thought it would be a great time to give its author a call. I should admit that I’ve always been a Mallon fan. “Henry and Clara,” his searing account of the ill-starred couple who were in Lincoln’s box when the president was assassinated, is one of my all-time favorite novels. “Dewey Defeats Truman,” a later book, will charm the pants off anybody, even a stiff like, well, Thomas E. Dewey.

The obvious question about this new book is, why Nixon? The answer was surprising: “I think that up to a point I identified with him.” He was misunderstood, he wanted to change the world, he was a great tragic figure who suffered political death and resurrection. For an adolescent, it must have been easy to identify.

Besides, author and politician go way back together. Mallon recalls that, as a fourth-grader at the Stewart Manor School, he was assigned to watch the first of the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960. “I’d picked up my dad’s politics,” Mallon says, which were those of a former New Deal Democrat who’d come back from the service, done pretty well, moved to the suburbs, and became a Republican. So when Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960, “I was crushed.”

I’m only 100 pages into “Watergate” (see an excerpt) but Nixon himself seems less the focus than his wife, Pat. In fact, while Watergate junkies will rejoice to learn that the book features all the presidents’ men — Dean, Magruder, Hunt, LaRue and the rest — its most compelling characters are three women: Pat, Rose Mary Woods (the president’s loyal secretary), and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the sharp-tongued daughter of Theodore, who spent part of her childhood at Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay. “Mrs. Longworth laughed,” Mallon writes of Washington’s longtime grande dame. “With her had tilted back and mouth open, her long, yellowed teeth looked oddly glamorous, like the ruins of the Acropolis at night.”

Unlike so many literary types, Mallon remains a Republican and says he’s likely to vote for Mitt Romney in November. So I couldn’t resist asking what Nixon, who was in some ways the last liberal president, would make of today’s GOP. But the author quickly turned the question around. “Nixon would be aghast at the current Republican Party,” Mallon said, noting that Nixon was a foreign policy visionary with no real interest in telling people how to live. His liberal domestic agenda — environmental protection, guaranteed income, massive funding for the arts and a move toward national health insurance — was aimed at placating critics, mainly, but would have been anathema to today’s GOP. Says Mallon: “I don’t think he’d have a comfortable home in the Republican Party today.”