Free Watergate by Thomas Mallon

hers, and she let him know how bad she felt by her stony, out-of-character silence.
    Even so, he never budged from the structure Haldeman had sold himon, a chain of command that made sure he never had to hurt
anyone’s
feelings, at least face-to-face. Now, almost four years later, the place was crawling with a whole second generation of admen and junior executives even a decade younger than Bob, all these good-looking dumb-bunnies like Magruder who provided Richard Nixon with a whole new cloud of insulation, like those little Styrofoam peanuts Rose’s mail-order knickknacks came packed in.
    They all, of course, had college educations, and knew full well that she had none—no matter that she could correct the grammar and spelling of every one of them. College would have been lovely, but it wasn’t in the cards for a girl from Sebring, Ohio, who had to help out at home. As it was, nobody could say she hadn’t come a long way.
    Over the years there had been plenty of times when she’d had to pull the boss up with her, lift him from some funk and point the way out of whatever jam he was in. And, with the exception of Harry Robbins Haldeman, you wouldn’t find anybody along this whole high-and-mighty corridor who didn’t think she’d been underutilized for the past three and a half years. Actually, she thought, “underutilized” sounded just like them. What was wrong with “squandered”?
    “And what are you looking at?” she asked with mock fierceness, raising a chuckle from one of the subsecretaries who’d just come in and noticed the pickle-puss Miss Woods was displaying.
    “Oh, nothing,” said the girl, Lorraine, a strawberry blonde like herself. “I somehow thought you might have just run into HRH.”
    They both grinned at the use of Haldeman’s too-perfect initials.
    “Get out of here,” said Miss Woods, taking a file from the girl and laughing.
    At least the folder contained something she could enjoy working on: an invitation list, last-minute additions, for the Polish-Americans’ reception they’d be having on Monday in the Blue Room. Such guest lists constituted Rose Mary Woods’s chief remaining power, a meager tribute to her memory, smarts, and Rolodex, which over two decades had grown almost to the size of the potters’ wheels back at the Royal China Company, her very first employer, in Sebring.
    Henry Helstoski? A Democrat from the Jersey House delegation was on the list just because of his name. They could do better than that, she thought, scratching him, ethnic suffix and all, and substituting CharlieSandman, a Republican from the same delegation who always stuck with the boss, and had plenty of Poles in his district, besides.
    Should Agnew be coming? she wondered. Would that seem like penance for the crack he’d made about “Polacks” during the ’68 race? Or would his appearance add insult to injury? The whole thing had always seemed ridiculous. None of her Irish relatives had ever called a Pole anything other than a Polack, and they’d never meant anything by it, either.
    As she scanned the list, a good line came to her brain—the kind of ad-lib she sometimes passed on to Buchanan or one of the other writers. She put a card into the Selectric and typed it out:
I want you to know that between now and Election Day
,
you’re the only “Poles” we’ll be paying any attention to
. She went back and twice underlined “Poles,” so the president would remember to pronounce the word strongly enough for people to get the joke. As she put the card into an envelope and marked it for the writers’ office, she realized how automatically she now followed HRH’s filtration system. In the old days she’d always fed tidbits like this one right to the boss himself.
    Resuming work on the list, she could feel a late-afternoon contentment finally coming over her, the kind she used to experience during sleepy days long ago on Capitol Hill, when Pat might come in to help out with the mail and