Chapter Three
I returned to madness; I knew from reading the papers in California that Watergate hadn’t gone away, but I was wholly unprepared for what awaited. The scandal had developed into a cottage industry. There were reporters from seemingly everywhere camped out at the foot of our driveway. It was a media circus to rival any of more recent times. We drove into the driveway and everyone jumped up, shouting questions. We drove out of the driveway and everyone jumped up, etc. In and out, up and down! We were virtual prisoners on parade.
As Watergate deepened, my mother served as the unofficial spokesperson for the jailed burglars. Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, hired ex-New York City Police Dept. Intelligence Unit officer, Tony Ulasewicz to funnel “hush money” to the many men that so depended on him. Using codes like “the writer” (my father), “the writer’s wife” (my mother), “the players” (the burglars), and “the script” (the money), more than four-hundred-thousand dollars were paid out. How much of this went through my mother, I don’t know, but she did have many spooky rendezvous at dimly lit bus terminals and airports, where locker keys were taped in secret locations.
She was worried that she would be kidnapped or worse. I know this because she told me so. She felt like she was being tailed, and probably was. I can only reflect that she was an incredibly brave woman. Charles Colson called my mother a very “savvy” woman. She was frightened, under tremendous pressure, and deeply involved in some very serious business with some of the most dangerous people in the world. My father was viewed as a blackmailer, and my mother the instrument of his bidding. She was out there, by herself, making demands, playing it tough, meeting desperate people in lonely, dark places. She listened, I imagine, to every sound around her … footsteps echoing down empty streets. She watched shadows moving across vacant buildings. She noticed strangers glancing a little too long, or too quickly. She made her way through basement car garages, always checking her rearview mirror.
The need for money was almost suffocating. Calls from lawyers, banks, brokers, and debts piled one on top of another … and another and another. School bills needed to be paid, the car payment was late, and the children’s school tuition was overdue. Multiply this by all the families whose fathers had been jailed for the Watergate burglary, add to that the need for repayment and good faith gestures, and you can begin to see what kind of pressure she was under. I saw in her face such utter depression, such loss of hope, such fear and anger. Oh, the resentment, and the bitterness! She suffered from severe pain due to having broken her back twice. She worried about her weight gain, and suffered from diabetes. She had spoken to me several times of divorcing my father, and just when she decided to make the break, this disaster happened.
This Watergate monster was like an iron chain around her neck with the weight of the world attached, and it robbed her of her freedom. She had to stay now. She couldn’t leave her husband at a time like this. So, she endured. She not only endured, she fought tooth and nail. She rose to the challenge and faced all the pressures and demons of the nation’s angst. Yet, throughout all of it, she tried her best to keep a smile for her children. She never lashed out, never grew impatient, never withdrew. On the contrary, she reached out even more. I don’t know if she knew the end was near, but she worked at being our friend. Each of us will always have the memory of stolen moments, of shared secrets, and deep conversations. This was a new woman to us; she opened up about herself and her dreams and losses. She had suffered through ten pregnancies; six ended in miscarriage, and four babies lived.
By December 1972, time seemed to have run out. My parents had made a desperate play to gain back control of their lives and those of the loyal Cubans. The “writer and his wife” had made a final demand to the President of the United States: pay up, or we’re going to blow this whole thing right up in your face. They had the evidence to link the President to the Watergate scandal, and perhaps to deeper and darker things. Nixon, caught on his own secret tapes, wanted to pay off Hunt at all costs. He figured it might cost “… a million in cash. We could get our hands on that kind of money,” he said. On December 8, 1972, my mother boarded United Airlines flight 553 scheduled to take off from Dulles Airport, non-stop to O’Hare airport in Chicago. The purpose of her trip has generated a lot of controversy. The facts are:
1] She was to meet with her cousin’s husband, a man named Harold Carlstead, who owned two Holiday Inns in the Chicago area.
2] She was delivering a large sum of money.
3] Some of the bills could be directly traced to the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
4] She also carried with her almost two million dollars in American Express money orders, travelers checks, and postal money orders, according to testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board during the re-opened Watergate plane crash hearings, June 13-14, 1973.
5] United Flight 553 never made it to O’Hare airport. My mother and 44 others were killed.
As the big jet closed in on its destination, the pilot received a call to divert the plane and land on the little-used and much more poorly equipped Midway airport. As it approached the outer runway marker lights, they flicked off, and, mysteriously, the pilot was not able to communicate with the tower. Missing the landing strip, the plane tore into the surrounding houses, demolishing several, and came to rest amid huge fires, with pieces of wing and metal housing strewn in a debris field which some have described as a scene of total destruction and absolute hell. Miraculously, the outer markers returned to perfect working order moments after the crash. The radio control tower also seemed to have suddenly started working again. What’s even more remarkable is that within minutes there were 50 FBI agents at the crash site. The fire department was called within a minute and a half of the crash and yet when they arrived, they were told to stand down until the FBI was finished in their search. What were they searching for? The nearest FBI field office was twelve miles away. How could there be 50 agents at the crash site in such a short amount of time. On June 13, 1973, Chairman John Reed of the NTSB told the House Government Activities Sub-Committee that he personally sent a letter to the FBI. It included the following:
a) Never in its history had the FBI acted as it did in the flight 553 crash investigation.
b)Under what authority did it act? (Air piracy was later cited.)
c) Before the NTSB investigators could do so, the FBI conducted 26 interviews within 20 hours of the crash and an FBI agent had gone into the tower immediately after the crash and confiscated the tape recording relating to the flight.
On December 9, 1972, just one day after the crash, White House Aide Egil Krogh was appointed by Nixon as Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the NTSB and FAA, the two agencies investigating the crash. Also on Dec. 9, White House Deputy Assistant to Nixon, Alex Butterfield, was appointed the new head of the FAA. Five weeks after the crash, another of Nixon’s men, Dwight Chapin, became a top executive at United Airlines. Am I to believe that all these facts are just random coincidences? All of this, as well as testimony from eyewitnesses on the ground that said the plane seemed to explode before it hit treetop level, pretty much defies the laws of chance. I was taught that if something looks too good to be true, it usually isn’t, and if you smell smoke, there’s probably a fire.
This suspicious plane crash is still one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the Watergate scandal. I call upon the U.S. Congress and the Department of Justice to reopen the case, and, using our modern technology, re-investigate it for possible sabotage and a subsequent cover-up.