Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Mr. Hunt goes on, and of course, the closer we listen, the more he swings on his own noose. It’s a cruel business. He was kind of pleased with his family facts until they hit the light of our cold hearth. His father and mother, for instance, sang in the Cornell Glee Club.

  “Oh,” I say, “terrific. Your father must have loved Cornell.”

  “He did. One of the tragedies of his life is that I chose to go to Brown. He was the sort of man, however, never to express his disappointment.”

  “Good fellow,” said Hugh.

  “Yes. Dad, I warrant, is no fool. Said to me once, ‘I’m on to your work, Howard. I didn’t become a Thirty-second Degree Mason for too little, did I?’”

  “How odd,” said Hugh, “My father was also a Shriner.”

  “Let’s drink to that happy coincidence,” said Howard.

  “Why not?” said Hugh, “why not?” But I winced. Hugh never talks about his father. It brings back the fatal night. Of course, Hugh can ride right over such rocks without suffering visible scratches on the hull. “Yes,” he said, “my father was a secretive man”—a sip of his wine—“and my mother.” Second sip.

  This warmed Howard. He knew he had been tendered some small favor by the master. I believe Hunt is not without psychic gifts. His next remark was certainly aware of sudden mortality as an appropriate topic. He began to talk about a plane crash. Last summer, the Hunts, scheduled to return to Washington from Tokyo, lost their sleeping bunks on the overnight passage due to a booking error. Since, as Howard put it, “I am not one to subject my family to inferior accommodations when the government has already coughed up the stimulus for proper treatment, I chose to postpone our departure inasmuch as a later flight did have bunks available. Lo, the discerning finger of Kismet!” concluded Howard in the mildest voice, as if to discount any outsize claim to magical selection. “Do you know, the first plane went down in the Pacific? All passengers lost.”

  I think there was a hint of special pride in the way he told the story, as if Providence peered through the smog of mankind long enough to spare E. Howard Hunt and family. After all, they do have large roles to play.

  There it is. He isn’t so much outrageously ambitious as filled with the idea that he’s anointed. Be certain, therefore, in all your dealings with your new boss, not to lose sight of this belief he has in himself. If he weren’t half attractive, the man would be intolerable. Too confident for too little.

  Item: The Hunts occupied a house in Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Not bad for a Chief of Covert Operations in North Asia. (Howard’s highly titled job, so far as I could make out, consisted of propaganda, public relations, and leaving stink-bombs at Communist meetings.) Hunt, by the way, calls them Who-Me’s.

  “Who-Me’s?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Howard. “If they ask, ‘Did you leave that odor?’ you answer, ‘Who? Me?’” He then laughs at his own explanation, with an involuntary whinny, a snaffling sort of sly, skinny laugh. (I think he considers it the appropriate response to genteel humor about the anus.) I naturally am more interested in being given some idea of what it was like to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, but he doesn’t respond directly to such questioning. His pleasure comes from the name: Frank Lloyd Wright. Goes on to describe the moon gate, the courtyard, the garden with granite shrines, and the deep lily pond. “It was, of course, lovely,” said Howard, “but upon due consideration, and the assurance by the Japanese gardener that the lilies would eventually grow back, we pulled them out and converted the pond to a swimming pool that could serve the children.”

  “Didn’t you hesitate,” I asked Dorothy, “over the lilies?”

  “Well, I did,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Not as soon as I knew it was feasible. Not for a moment. Children’s needs precede aesthetic considerations.”

  As you can see, he’s a bit of a menace. When he speaks of his daughter Lisa, for instance, it is all too often by her full name. Obviously likes the euphony of Lisa Tiffany Hunt. “Her birth,” he tells us, “is inscribed in the Civil Register of Mexico City, where she was born while I was establishing the first OPC station in that region for Frank Wisner. As a result, Lisa is on the Consular List of Americans born abroad, and belongs thereby to a special and insufficiently recognized natural club of birth.”

  Just as I’ve come to the conclusion that this is pretty heavy going—Consular List, my suffering little toe!—why, he crosses me up by adding in a faintly spiteful voice, “Of course, some Americans in foreign settings are just out for the oofah.”

  “Oofah?” I ask.

  “Jack and stack. Stickum.” When I am still blank, he translates, “The simoleons, the shekels.” I remember that he’s already spoken of money as “the stimulus.” I expect he has an astonishing number of synonyms for good old filthy lucre. It seems he’s not only anointed, but wistfully greedy, and all too keenly aware of the economic sacrifice we make in working for the Agency. He just can’t figure out how he’ll ever be oofy, and opulent.

  All the same, I may be laughing at Howard Hunt a little too much. He can be as stuffy as turkey stuffing, but he’s sly for all that. He’s going to love having you on board. He even told Hugh that a friend of his at Brown had gone to St. Matthew’s and was on the soccer team Hugh used to coach.

  “I remember him,” said Hugh. “Tried hard. Slow feet.”

  Living with a man in holy matrimony is analogous to taking a course in human mechanics. Hugh, I have discovered, has gears in his voice box. They tell me when he is ready to take over the conversation. “I hear you did a nice job of preparation in Guatemala,” he now said.

  “It killed me,” answered Hunt, “to be taken out before the real op began, but the powers that be insisted my job had been accomplished and I was now needed in Japan.”

  “Well, the powers did lend you that Frank Lloyd Wright house for consolation,” said Hugh.

  “Hardly compensatory,” said Hunt. “It’s nettling to hear, far away in Tokyo, that your former assistant was actually invited over to the White House and congratulated by President Eisenhower for his fine work. Most of that fine work was mine.”

  “I heard from my more elevated sources”—Hugh’s reliably effective reference to Allen—“that the President was effusive. ‘To take that country with just a few hundred men! All that sleight-of-hand!’”

  “I’m glad you can understand how I feel,” said Hunt.

  “Well, before we quaff the cup of eternal friendship,” said Hugh, “let us put it to the test. What would you say if I remark that your famous operation was, in my opinion, a gross error. American interests would have been better served if we had allowed Arbenz to build up a little Communist state in Guatemala.” For all his desire to play politics, Hugh is not capable of it.

  “What you’re saying,” said Hunt, “seems awfully liberal to me.”

  “Say behind my back that I wish to bugger little boys, but do not suggest that I am liberal. I loathe the faintest emanation of Communism. It is a cancer in full metastasis on the body of the Western world.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Hunt. “My sentiments are being most elegantly expressed. Aren’t they, Dorothy?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “But, sir, if it is a cancer, why not operate on it? Whenever and wherever you can.”

  “Because each cancer is a study in its own anomaly,” said Hugh, “and world Communism is a weak cancer. You see, Howard, it got into metastasis before it asked itself whether it was ready. It doesn’t have the inner wherewithal to fight those cancer wars on every front. Guatemala was, potentially, a desperately expensive proposition for the Soviets. They would have had to invest in that country, supply it, and probably end up feeding it. Their economic system is altogether unsuited for such a job. A huge inefficiency would have been sent to succor a dwarf inefficiency. Why, we could have cost the Russians a pretty penny. And if they had been so foolish as to invest real force, we could have pulled off your surgical i
ncision then. That would have exposed them to serious mockery around the world.”

  “Wouldn’t it also increase the danger of a nuclear war?” asked Dorothy.

  “Nuclear scenarios must never be linked to small-scale foreign operations. Nuclear war will come, if it ever does, from another factor altogether.”

  “Would you name it?” Dorothy asked.

  “Despair. World despair. Nuclear war is mutual suicide. A husband and wife make a pact to kill themselves only when they believe they do not have the right to continue to exist. They are spoiling too much. Whereas, in the real world, no two countries are as vain as the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Neither of us can believe for a moment that we could spoil anything. But if I decide that I am wonderful, and it’s the other fellow who is the mess, I guarantee you, Mrs. Hunt, I will not embrace him in a deadly grip and jump off the fatal bridge. I will try to get rid of the beast by other means.”

  “By starving the Russians out?” she asked.

  “Exactly. Exhaust their wherewithal. Entice them into places that use up Soviet energies to little avail. Just think of a million Red Army soldiers in Mexico. What chance would they have against us in a land war?”

  “I wouldn’t want the numbers to get that high in our backyard,” said Hunt.

  “They never would,” said Hugh. “The Russians are not that stupid. Would we try to put a million soldiers into Eastern Europe? We certainly didn’t make the move in Hungary, did we? Yet we can afford a serious war far better than the Soviets. I repeat. We should have left Guatemala alone. They would have built up a third-rate Communist state that would soon have been looking to us for aid.”

  “I can’t agree, sir,” said Hunt. “I believe we must shoot varmints between the eyes before they grow up to raid our crops. I hate Communist rats wherever I find them.”

  Harry, he was seized, as he said this, with the most peculiar intensity. His voice was as husky as a boy getting ready to kiss a girl, and if he felt close to murder, and I would say he did, it was as a virtuous, if not wholly manageable, emotion.

  I saw it then. Do you know, Harry, I fear our lovely country has become a religion. Joe McCarthy only dipped his finger into the bowl of the new holy water. It’s not the cross but the flag that is going to stir all those larger feelings people can’t live without.

  In any event, Hugh had heard enough by now to decide that Hunt could not be bent to any of his uses. So my husband diverted the conversation over to real estate values in Georgetown, about which Howard and Dorothy, as one might expect, knew a lot.

  I keep thinking of you working with this odd, semi-inspired man as your future boss. I think Hunt is going to love you. Snobs on the slope always will. Before the evening was done, he let us know that Dorothy was not only one-eighth Oglala Sioux, but descended from the John Quincy Adams family on mother’s side, and the Benjamin Harrison family on the father’s end. (He made another point of saying, “President Benjamin Harrison”—I suppose this august name does not register for all.) “There,” he might just as well have declaimed, “is our little tit to your fat tat, Miss Mayflower.” Yes, Howard Hunt keeps his kickers for the end. Be sure to tell me all about him.

  Yours,

  Kittredge

  10

  HUNT ARRIVED IN MONTEVIDEO IN ADVANCE OF KITTREDGE’S LETTER, AND I had formed my own impression by then.

  Jan. 29, 1957

  Dearest Kittredge,

  Well, our new Chief of Station disembarked yesterday with his family: wife, two daughters, son, maid, and Cadillac from the SS Rio Tunuyan. Mayhew leaves in a week—which can’t be too soon for any of us, including Mayhew. Long live the new Chief! God, Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, came in like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Twenty-two pieces of luggage, all monogrammed with an E.H.H., no less. Plus untold furniture and cartons. All this related to us by Gatsby (speak of serendipity), who was deputied to go with Mayhew to the pier and take him through Customs. (We would all have gone but Agency policy is, of course, not to call all that much attention to new arrivals.)

  The Hunt entourage, staying at present in a suite at the Victoria Plaza, are already looking for an appropriate home in Montevideo’s best suburb, Carrasco, ten miles out of town. Great changes are going to take place in the Station. We know that. Hunt appears quiet and affable, but stimulates a room by entering it. He is obviously, and with total happiness, full of himself. It’s his first stint as COS.

  Can’t write any more at this point. Will finish tomorrow.

  Harry

  By the next day, however, her letter was in my hand, and I decided to wait on mine. We were considerably apart on Hunt, and I did not wish to receive another lecture. Station work, after all, had become more interesting from the day Hunt came in.

  Even before Mayhew had departed (and that did not take the usual month, but was accomplished in seven working days), we had already learned that our new COS was going to be active among us. Indeed, he gave a full address to the troops, all six of us, counting Nancy Waterston, on the day after he landed, and we listened with rising hope as we sat in a semicircle around him in the office.

  “Ever since I came back to Washington from Tokyo,” said Hunt, “I’ve been studying this Station, and I can warrant that there will be changes. Before we get, however, down to analysis and rectification, I want you to know the Agency credentials of the man you will be working for. This is my first full Chief of Station slot, but I feel highly qualified and will lay out why. On graduation from Brown University in June 1940, I chose to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve, V-7 program, and after a speeded-up program at Annapolis, went out as a midshipman in February 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor, on the destroyer Mayo. At sea, I suffered a combat-related injury climbing an ice-coated turret ladder during a general quarters alarm in the North Atlantic in early December 1941, and the injury was serious enough to give me an honorable medical discharge. Since I can see by your faces that you are ready for more intelligence, I will state that the injury was groin-related, but had no permanent effects. Praise the Lord, I can still pass the ammunition.”

  We laughed. Even Nancy Waterston. It might have been a small joke to others, but it was a large one to us. We already knew more about Hunt than we had ever learned about Mayhew.

  “While recuperating, I wrote a novel, East of Farewell, which was accepted by Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers. Soon after, Life magazine named me their South Pacific war correspondent to replace John Hersey in such places as Bougainville and Guadalcanal. Back in New York in 1943, I enlisted in OCS, was commissioned, and not too long after, went into OSS training. Assigned to China, I flew over the Hump, and found myself in Kunming when the war ended. A stint of screenwriting in Hollywood soon followed, and from there I went to work on Averell Harriman’s staff in Paris for the Marshall Plan, and before long was recruited by Frank Wisner to join the Office of Policy Coordination. Have any of you heard of a brilliant fellow named William F. Buckley, Jr., who’s now chief editor of a magazine he founded himself, The National Review?”

  We nodded.

  “Good. It’s worth being familiar with that magazine. Buckley was my assistant in Mexico, and damn good. Might be with us still if the magazine world had not called to him. After Mexico, I was posted in Washington as Chief of Covert Operations, Southeast Europe Division. That meant Desk at Headquarters and related trips to Athens, Frankfurt, Rome, and Cairo. Then, I was transferred to the Propaganda and Political Action Staff for the Guatemala op, where with three hundred men and—I will say it myself—a brilliant psychological and radio communications campaign, we succeeded in getting the Arbenz government to decamp. Moses designed the march into Israel, but he never got there. I, speaking as a poor man’s Moses, also did not enjoy, at first hand, the fruits of my design. I was already en route to Tokyo to handle Covert Operations in North Asia Command, where I did my best to confound, confuse, dismay, and dishearten every effort of the Chinese Communists to spread their propaganda throughout Japan and South Korea.
<
br />   “That brings us to the present. In Washington, at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk, I could not help but be aware that there’s a feeling this Station is not a mainstream activity. Well, let me pass one bit of advice. There are no small jobs in our life. South America, in my opinion, is the land of musical chairs. You never know which leader is going to lose his seat next. Any Station in South America can become a center of high Agency focus. We are going to bring initiative, therefore, to the Uruguay Station of a like that has not been seen here. By the time we’re done, the going remark back at Headquarters will be, ‘Yessir, Uruguay is the tail that wags the South American dog.’”

  We gathered around him afterward and pumped his hand. I recognized that I was happy. My desire to work was alive again.

  March 5, 1957

  Herrick,

  Six weeks have gone by since my last letter. Are you now the rage of Montevideo, or just the King of the Brothels?

  Please advise.

  Kittredge

  March 27, 1957

  Dear Harry,

  I detest owing money or favors to anyone. I loathe it even more when people I care about are in debt to me. Silence is the commencement of debt.

  Kittredge Montague

  April 5, 1957

  Dear Kittredge,

  Yes, yes, no and no, yes, no, and yes. You may pick any of the above answers to your questions. Yes, I am the king of the brothels, no, I am not; yes, Mr. Howard Hunt is mad about me, no, he is not; yes, I miss you, no, I don’t; I’m too busy to think.

  Take this as an apology and trust me. I will write a long letter in the next ten days.

  Your own H.H.