True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

Buzzy Freeman lives in extreme northwest Washington, D.C., almost in Maryland. The neighborhood reminds me of where I grew up on the North Shore. Big and biggish houses and perfect yards, lots of old trees, hushed suburban gravitas. People talk about the un-American elitism of life in the District, inside the Beltway, but this is elitism of an absolutely all-American kind. George H. W. Bush lived around here when he was CIA director, as did Richard Nixon in the 1950s. And Lyndon Johnson when he was vice president.

  I haven’t had a real conversation with Buzzy since college.

  “Wonder Woman! You found us—and my gosh, don’t you look wonderful,” he says at the door. He means, I think, that I’m tan and size-sixish and my hair isn’t stiff. Also, maybe he’s detecting a bit of post-sex glow twelve hours after the fact. “Life in Tinseltown obviously agrees with you.”

  Tinseltown. Yeesh. “Thanks, Buzzy—and thanks so much for agreeing to see me on a Sunday.”

  He’s wearing a white dress shirt, crimson V-neck sweater, blue jeans, and Gucci loafers. I wonder if the red, white, and blue is conscious theming. Because I’ve seen him on television every few years, my mental picture is more or less current. He’s not obese, but he’s got a big gut; and he’s got his hair, but it’s thin and wispy. It’s hard to believe that I once found him supremely charismatic.

  “You’ve grown the beard back.” I remember the day he shaved it in 1968.

  “Covers the double chin.”

  Some residual wit, at least. He leads me to “the den,” where there’s a fire in the fireplace. “Harleen’s so sorry she won’t get to see you. Still at church, a confab with our pastor, planning this big community dinner we do every Easter. She’s a deaconess.” When we were in college, Buzzy and I bonded over being former Catholics. I guess he’s moved on to Protestantism.

  It’s hard to believe that, forty-six years ago, I watched him, for instance, standing outside an army induction center in Boston, chanting “No more war” with breathtaking conviction.

  I decline a glass of chardonnay, and while he’s gone getting coffee, I listen to the Bach fugue playing on the radio and squint at the photographs on his wall: young Buzzy with Ronald Reagan, middle-aged Buzzy with Ariel Sharon, old Buzzy with Dick and Lynn Cheney and Jon Voight. He made a lot of money in the ‘80s doing political junk mail, and now he’s got one of those vague, expansive Washington portfolios—chairman of a think tank, vice chair of foundations with “freedom” in the name, conference attendee, cable news commentator—that pass for a distinguished career in public service. I see his honorable-discharge certificate from the U.S. Coast Guard and his college diploma. Lame.

  He shuffles back in, carrying a tray with two double espressos and a Spode pitcher of steamed milk. I refrain from making a crack about latte-drinking, white-wine-swilling, NPR-listening conservatives.

  We say we’ve enjoyed seeing each other on TV. I tell him I was amused to read that he’d helped organize a screening at the Pentagon of The Battle of Algiers during the first summer of the Iraq war, since we’d seen it together when it came out in 1968. He tells me he hasn’t spoken to Alex Macallister since their public shouting match about gay rights during a panel at our twenty-fifth reunion. I tell him about my kids, he tells me about his first set of children, as well as the younger kid by Harleen—”pre-med, but unlike his lazy old man, he’ll make it to med school.” He congratulates me on the success of Objection, Your Honor but says he doesn’t read fiction anymore, “not even Tom Clancy.” However, he loved The 7th Founder—John Jay is one of the conservatives’ favorites; they think the liberal historian-media elite has demoted him to the junior varsity—and when his right-wing friends accused me of recasting their hero as a “secular civil rights liberal,” he asked them, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot are you folks talking about?” Buzzy served his two years in the Coast Guard before college, and when I met him freshman year, he told me he was “Sierra Alfa Tango seven-niner-zero,” by which he meant he’d gotten a 790 on his math SAT.

  “I appreciate that, Buzzy, thanks. Some people on the left hate me for portraying Jay as a good guy, you know.”

  “That’s Democrat intellectual honesty for you.”

  “The reviewer in The Nation mentioned that we were college friends, you and I. Guilt by association.”

  “Give yourself to the Dark Side, Karen. Got a new book going?”

  I shrug and nod, but he really just wants to tell me about the book he’s finishing up, Cities upon a Hill: Defending American Values in the Holy Land. It’s a polemic about how we need to cut Israel maximum slack in their fight against the Palestinians, to “stop worrying about nice neat Miranda distinctions between combatants and noncombatants in kinetic operations when you’re struggling to survive.” I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase “kinetic operations” in conversation. It means combat.

  “But I assume you’re against killing innocent civilians?”

  He sighs. “Oh, Karen … who’s ‘innocent’? You’re the lawyer. People talk about ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence,’ but in our legal system, it’s ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty,’ right? ‘Innocent’ isn’t a verdict. Anyhow,” he says, pivoting directly from murky moral ambiguity to a celebration of black-and-white moral simplicity, “in Cities I’m arguing that Americans need to consider Israel a spin-off of America, our national soul mate, su Judeo-Christian casa es mi Judeo-Christian casa. And since I’m not Jewish, I can appear to make the case more … dispassionately.”

  “In the book, do you talk about the Paul Plan?”

  Buzzy’s eyes narrow and he stiffens, leaning forward, the way he used to do in dorm rooms and coffeehouses and greasy spoons, as we chain-smoked and talked and talked about a culture of total resistance, closing our minds in the name of opening them, hardening our young hearts. His ferocity then set a high standard for us all.

  “What Ron and Rand Paul have proposed,” Buzzy says, “is soft genocide. It’s just a prettied-up version of what Himmler and Göring proposed before they went for the Holocaust—this time, it’s ship the six million Jews to Nevada instead of Madagascar.”

  As you no doubt know, the two Pauls, Republican congressman father and senator son, introduced identical bills that would offer all Israelis virtually automatic U.S. citizenship until 2020. It would also authorize the creation of a new commonwealth on about 1 percent of the American land owned by the federal government, “at least seven million contiguous acres in Nevada, Idaho, Oregon or other states as appropriate”—in other words, a quasi-nation on the U.S. mainland, self-governed like Puerto Rico, a jurisdiction as large as Israel and richer in natural resources, and safely seven thousand miles west of the Middle East and its several hundred million Muslims. Any Israelis who accepted the citizenship offer could live anywhere they wished in America, but they (and any other American) could also choose to live in what’s already being called New Israel, somewhere in the vast boondocks between Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and eastern Oregon. The U.S. government would create an endowment to build out the commonwealth and resettle as many as six million Israelis in this country.

  “It’d cost a lot less than we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the senior Paul said recently, “and this time instead of war we might get Middle East peace, peace forever. Plus millions of super-smart, hardworking new Americans, exactly the type of immigrants we want.” What they decline to articulate so bluntly is the endgame. After the E-Z-citizenship offer expired, any Israelis remaining in Israel would be on their own, citizens of a country no longer the problematic special ally of the U.S. We wipe our hands of the endless Middle East tragedy once and for all.

  The plan has next to no support among members of the political Establishment. What worries Buzzy and his friends is that ordinary Americans seem to like the idea—according to the latest polls, almost 40 percent say it sounds reasonable, and that pool of support is rather astoundingly broad, coming from left-wingers and right-wingers and middle-of-the-roaders almost equally. Only 32 percent s
ay they’re opposed. And with Rand Paul planning to run for president in 2016, the idea will remain in the public discourse. “Perot didn’t get elected in ’92,” Buzzy says, “and Ron Paul didn’t get elected last time, but their ideas and their takes had a gigantic impact. Things are wild now, Karen. Revolution is in the air. People are ready to throw all kinds of babies out with the bathwater. The people pushing this are the most dangerous men in America right now. As dangerous as anybody in Tehran or Yemen or Waziristan.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Absolutely! Absolutely.” Now he’s on a roll. “There are a whole lot of lazy, cowardly, ahistorical moral idiots in this country who always want the easy way out. Remember, I know those people, I’m from out there.” Because Buzzy grew up in Nevada and served in the military, he’s always cast himself as a more authentic American than the Ivy Leaguers and cosmopolites he’s lived and worked among his whole adult life. And depending on the particular point he’s trying to make, he can use his rustic roots and firsthand knowledge of regular folk to revile either the elite-hating People or the People-hating elite. It’s a neat trick.

  He stops, leans back, smiles. “Sorry about the rant. You know me.”

  “I do indeed.” In fact, he’s weirdly consistent: a radical who passionately despises liberals and other misguided Americans in 1968, a conservative who passionately despises liberals and other misguided Americans in 2014.

  I’ve been here almost half an hour. Because I’ve kept it friendly, let him rattle on without getting into a real debate, he’s relaxed. That was my plan. I’m playing the good cop, and he doesn’t even know I’m playing a cop. Finally, he pops the big Washington question.

  “Any regrets,” he asks, “about taking yourself out of the running for the Supreme Court? Because you’d’ve been a hell of a lot better Democrat choice than the weasel they picked.”

  I give an abridged version of my standard answer. “Never served on the federal bench? And sixty-two years old at the time? Wasn’t going to happen.”

  “But you practiced in the real world, private-sector law for profit-making enterprises! And in any case, why short-circuit the process? Frankly? I think you did yourself a disservice.” He sips his coffee. “Reputationally.”

  Can he be serious? You have no idea the disservice I’m about to do myself. And you. Reputationally. “Buzzy, I think you can figure out why I couldn’t go through with it. The vetting, the White House lawyers’ questions. ‘Is there anything in your personal history that could be controversial or embarrassing?’ We committed felonies in 1968. Big felonies, Federal Class C for sure, arguably Class A.” The prosecutorial jargon gets people’s attention. “People died, Buzzy.”

  He blanches. He puts down his coffee. He frowns. He sighs.

  What if he responds the way Alex did? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Karen, none, not a clue, you’re mixing up the real and the make-believe. Then it’d be two against one. From which I would conclude what? That each of them, independently and spontaneously, when asked to acknowledge the truth after so many years of silence, has chosen to stonewall a person who knows the truth? Seems unlikely. Or that the two of them have hatched some kind of conspiracy against me? Given their mutual loathing, that seems even less likely. Or that I’m the one who’s nuts? “Right,” Buzzy says. “Yes.” His body loosens. He sighs again. “I understand. Of course.”

  I must not smile. I have never so completely suppressed joy. I’ve spent several decades disliking Buzzy Freeman from afar, suspecting him of dirty tricks and double agentry in the 1960s and galled by his hard-core apostate politics since. But now I feel a surge of gratitude,.

  His eyes are watering. “Kilo Hotel—Bravo Foxtrot, over,” he says. Those were our code names in 1968..

  “This is the first time I’ve really discussed it with anybody except my lawyer,” I say.

  “Me, neither—I mean, me, too. I’ve never told anyone. I once went to a doctor who wanted to hypnotize me to make me quit smoking, but I was afraid of what I might say when I was under. So I quit smoking to avoid being hypnotized.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I’ll go for weeks without ever thinking of it specifically,” he says. “I have these dreams where I’ve done something terrible, it’s never clear exactly what it is, but I’m terrified of being caught. And then in the mornings I wake up and, well … You know. The bad feeling and fear never quite go away. Like an ache.”

  “I know.”

  “My ex-wife, when she decided to leave, told me she couldn’t get over this nagging sense that I was keeping secrets from her. I offered to take a polygraph test to prove that I’d been absolutely faithful, that I wasn’t a bigamist, wasn’t gay, wasn’t a spy, wasn’t any of the things she suspected me of.”

  He’s given me the perfect opening. “Were you a spy, Buzzy? Back then? An agent from Army Intelligence or part of COINTELPRO or one of those programs?”

  “What? No! I was the one who was always warning about that, and you all called me paranoid! I was the one who dosed Chuck with LSD to test his loyalty!”

  “I remember. If you’d been an undercover agent, that would’ve been a clever way to convince us to trust you. And you had been in the military.”

  “No. No. I believed. Like you say, I’m a true believer now, and I was a true believer then. For better or worse. Believe me.”

  I do, I think. “After they got Chuck, why were the rest of us allowed to get away with it, walk away? Why did they never arrest us? Or blackmail us? Did anyone ever try to blackmail you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “If they knew who we were,” I say, “and they obviously had to, why did it never come out? We all have people who don’t like us.” Especially you, Buzzy.

  “Yeah. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Maybe because the government had much bigger fish to fry at the time. Or maybe they watched us for a while and then just gave up and sealed the files. I agree, it’s mysterious. Luck, I guess. Dumb luck.”

  For another twenty minutes, Buzzy and I keep talking a mile a minute. It feels so good—so liberating—to speak truthfully. Although I’m lying by omission. I don’t mention that I’ve talked to Alex, and I let Buzzy think I’ve come to his house for purely private, personal reasons, seeking only (his word) “closure.”

  If I reveal to Buzzy that I’m publishing our story, he might go wild. He is tort-crazy—he sued an MSNBC commentator and a website for libel; he sponsored some kind of class-action defamation suit on behalf of West Bank settlers; and he won a settlement from Unilever after he scratched his inner ear with a Q-tip that had insufficient cotton. But suing me or the publisher to try to prevent publication won’t stop the truth from coming out. He’s not stupid.

  I can’t lie.

  “I’m writing about it,” I tell him. “In my book, my memoir. All of it.”

  He stares at me for a long, long time, nods, then gets up and takes away the coffee tray when he hears his wife coming in.

  Have I just made a terrible mistake? Buzzy is still a guy for whom the ends justify all kinds of unsavory means.

  When my taxi arrives, just as his wife is getting home, he embraces me with such fervor and for such a long time that Harleen starts to look a little embarrassed. I make myself smile when I think, Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.

  14

  We never officially suspended the Bond missions, never said out loud that it was time to grow up and move on. However, as soon as we were in high school—not just high school but New Trier and its inescapable throb of self-importance—our spy toys and funny accents became childish things to put away, like painted wings and giants’ rings.

  I’ve tried hard to recall any specific, telling reactions I had to President Kennedy’s assassination. When I heard the news—geometry class, the principal over the PA—I remember thinking how strange it was that Chuck had given a world history presentation that morning about the assassinations
of Prime Minister Lumumba in the Congo and President Diem in South Vietnam. I remember thinking: Lyndon Johnson is the fourth president in my lifetime. I remember worrying about my brother, Peter, who was in third grade and had an autographed photo of Kennedy tacked to his bedroom wall. I remember my mother fiddling with her rosary and sniffling all weekend.

  Two days after the assassination, my dad and I were alone together in the TV room, the way we’d started spending every Sunday morning. He was reading the Tribune, and I was reading Life—that is, examining a picture of Yvette Mimieux in an orange bikini standing next to a giant orange surfboard, thinking of Chuck Levy and wondering to what extent I could remake myself as a surfer girl. This weekly time alone with Dad, faintly subversive, had been an unanticipated benefit of my refusal to attend Mass. We usually turned off the TV after Meet the Press, but today the set was on because of the assassination coverage. The president’s casket was being carried from the White House and loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon.

  I asked Dad if anything like this had happened when he was a kid. He told me yes, the Austrian chancellor and the king of Yugoslavia were both shot dead when he was just about my age.

  “Who killed them?”

  “Nazis killed the Austrian, even though he was a fascist, too. And the king by some kind of revolutionary. There was also an assassination in the States around the same time—the socialist hillbilly running for president from Louisiana, killed by the young doctor … Huey Long.”

  On TV, the funereal hush was replaced by bustle, with a correspondent speaking quickly and urgently. We both looked over at the screen. It was Dallas, a police station, the assassin being paraded in front of reporters.

  Dad snorted and shook his head. It was his what-a-crazy-country reaction without any of the humor.

  “Did you kill the president?” someone shouted.

  “No,” Oswald said.

  The man accused of killing the president, the actual guy, with a black eye and a cut on his forehead, giving an impromptu press conference, on TV, live, so live. I was transfixed.