Oh! That John Ehrlichman! That arrogant, thoughtless creature! I never could stand him, and now this...So what if Ehrlichman could pull "rank"--this wasn't the military. Let him come in and try, just try, to get us out.
The Deans leave, of course.
FOR ALL ITS WHIMPERING, this is the best that Mo Dean achieves in A Woman's View: sudden glimpses into the Watergate men's feelings for each other, and their characters. Dean plays a tape of an interview with E. Howard Hunt for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, "who were so entranced with what they were hering that when the President summoned Haldeman--which he did several times--Haldeman told him he would just have to wait 'until we get through with John."' At Camp David, Maureen peers into all the windows because she wants to see Nixon's huge stereo system:
John told me that some of the Camp David staff had been whispering that Nixon often stood before the stereo and--all by himself--'conducted' a symphony.
She is also pretty good at defining people with one sharp cut. She works with Jeb Magruder on Nixon's re-election festivities committee, and she describes him as "the chairman of the Junior Prom who wants to run for student body president next year."
Unfortunately, it is only rarely that she manages a pointed anecdote. Her writing style (or her ghost writer's) is tacky and trite, and she often lapses into Watergate language:
Not at that time or at any other time did I think that it would be thrilling to be with a man who was close to the President.
We simply radiated delight at the various perquisites, assumed they were no more than we deserved, and enjoyed them to the fullest.
After this, the lawyers and the investigators coopted John again.
And so does her husband:
John. You're coming home. You're not leaving me here alone another night.
Hate to. But I can't run that press gauntlet.
or
I know how you feel, Mo. But we're in a period of no options.
Mo is a constant superficial moral quandary. Her three biggest dilemmas are womens' liberation, abuse of taxpayers' monies, and whether or not her husband did anything wrong. Her answers to all three are shifty. Every time she mentions that she assumed a "traditional female function," (preparing hors d'oeuvres for her husband's business associates) she adds, as an after thought, a "maybe I shouldn't be this way" clause, but always resolves it with that catch-all "but I am." She says she never realized she and her husband were misusing taxpayers' dollars (all those limos) until after he testified before the Senate Watergate Committee. And as to her husband's wrongdoings, she admits he committed some crimes, but, as she repeats ad nauseum, it was out of loyalty to Nixon; besides, he made a clean breast of it in the end. All of this is nothing more than conservative claptrap. Anytime she can avoid analysis or explanation, she does.
A Woman's View of Watergate is really more the story of the difficulties of being married to John Dean in troubled times than it is the story of those troubled times. It is the story of a romance that Maureen Dean knew was fated to occur from the moment she met the "Brooks Brothers" tan; a romance that began with this message, scrawled in lipstick by Dean on a motel room mirror: "Smile...an owl loves ya, loves ya, yes, loves ya."