On TV, Huntley or Brinkley was saying that Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, “have been indicted by a grand jury in Boston on federal conspiracy charges for advising young men to dodge the draft. If convicted, the activists face prison terms of five years.”
Buzzy was nodding. “Not to be paranoid, folks, but that grand jury is right across the river. The shit is officially hitting the fan.”
Chuck stood up. “I’ve got a sociology exam at nine tomorrow,” he announced, and left. I stayed.
At lunch the next day Chuck told me that he’d ended his speed hiatus; he’d taken three bennies that morning and filled two blue books with exam answers “about the pseudo-objectivity of sociologists who are puppets of the reactionary power elite.” He also said he was sorry about giving in so often to his niggling, paralyzing, wishy-washy liberalism, and that he had also started writing me a long letter “explaining everything.” I accepted his apology and told him he didn’t need to write a letter. He had snapped out of his funk, and my anger was once again homed in on people I’d never met. Benzedrine was an all-around wonder drug.
The feeling of Armageddon in progress, however, did not abate. In Khe Sanh, the swarms of American planes continued their devastation around the clock, day after day, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on a few square miles of Vietnam, the most concentrated continuous bombardment in human history. Respectable people in the newspapers and on TV were saying that Vietnam might be about to trigger World War III.
We decided to mark the end of exam period by tripping—Alex for the second time, me for the third, Chuck for the fourth, Buzzy for “I don’t know, the fifteenth, maybe.” The drug we took the afternoon of Groundhog Day 1968 wasn’t mescaline or acid but something called DOM that Buzzy had gotten in the mail from his Benzedrine supplier in California, “Dimethoxy-something, totally new, just invented. Chemically related to speed, so you know—never mix, never worry!”
As soon as we each swallowed a pill, Buzzy grinned and wouldn’t stop.
“What?” I asked.
He handed me the envelope that the pills had come in, pointing to the postmark. “Walnut Grove, California,” he said. “About twenty-five clicks east of Oakland. Big corporate research lab.” He was still grinning.
We waited for the punch line.
“The following psychedelic experience is brought to you by the Dow Chemical Company.”
He also told us the drug’s hippie street name was STP, for Serenity, Tranquillity, and Peace. We made fun of that, but for the first couple of hours, I did feel pretty tranquil. Instead of the extradimensional pixies-and-elves strangeness I’d felt with mescaline, reality was not so much distorted or fractured as enhanced and intensified. When we listened to “Manic Depression” and “Purple Haze” on the stereo, I didn’t wonder if Jimi Hendrix was a time traveler, and Alex’s Oriental rug did not look like a field of writhing neon worms, and this time, when I looked out across the Yard at the statue of John Harvard, he didn’t lift his head and look straight up at me. The reds and purples on the carpet were incredibly red and purple, rich and subtle, at least as startling as when I got eyeglasses in fourth grade and saw leaves clearly for the first time. And through the midwinter dusk from fifty yards away, the golden patches of depatinated bronze on John Harvard’s forehead and left shoe gleamed like the special effects on Glinda in The Wizard of Oz.
The mood of the room instantly turned inside out when Alex switched on the TV. We’d heard about the big military offensive launched by the Vietcong two days earlier at the beginning of the Vietnamese New Year, Tet. It was epic. A hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns had been attacked by eighty thousand guerrillas.
We were warned by Huntley or Brinkley that we were about to see a disturbing scene filmed by an NBC cameraman on a street in Saigon. All right; okay; fine. I had been a collector of disturbing news stories since I was eight. For two years I had gorged on the ghastliest reports and pictures from Vietnam.
A skinny man in shirtsleeves, the chief of the South Vietnamese national police, sauntered calmly across the TV in front of a handcuffed Vietcong wearing a plaid shirt, took a snub-nose revolver from a holster, raised it a few inches from the man’s right temple, and fired, executing him with a single shot. I heard the bang. I saw the blood gushing from the dead man’s head onto the pavement.
I was not prepared for what I’d seen. For an instant I wondered if I was hallucinating, but the looks on the boys’ faces told me we had all watched the same thing. Chuck threw up in Alex’s wastebasket.
President Johnson was on the screen from Washington. He said the Vietcong’s Tet offensive was already “a complete failure.”
“That is one gung ho madman motherfucker,” Buzzy said.
“Such a bloody liar,” Alex said.
“The enemy will fail again and again,” the president said, because “we Americans will never yield.”
“I think he’s literally psychopathic,” Buzzy said. “I mean it. MacBird! was no joke. He’s the most dangerous man on earth right now.”
When I was a girl in Sunday school, and as I studied the catechism, the notion that I’d always found most alluring and most frustratingly unimaginable was when Catholics, saints in the making, had epiphanies and revelations, when they didn’t just believe the truth but all of a sudden experienced it on a gut level, independent of reason. No brilliant light from heaven shined round about me, but now, for the first time, I didn’t merely have a strong opinion. I suddenly understood all that is, seen and unseen. I knew.
“He’s a fiend,” I said. “He’s a demon.”
Chuck stared at the TV, shaking his head until Alex turned it off.
For hours we talked about the nature of evil in the world, about whether Vice President Humphrey was saner than President Johnson, about Faust and Gandhi, about the various Germans who tried and failed to murder Hitler, about the morality of killing to save lives and whether the phrase “military-industrial complex” was (in Buzzy’s phrase) “a brilliant psyop trick by Ike” to make us believe that blows against it were impossible, whether history was shaped by individuals or by impersonal forces, how extreme and unprecedented the present moment was, how Kennedy’s assassination had altered the course of history because he might’ve pulled out of Vietnam already, and how that suggested the war lovers inside the government had a motive to kill him and replace him with Johnson, about the impossible odds against Gene McCarthy winning the nomination and the presidency and ending the pointless massacre in Vietnam. It didn’t feel like one more endless dorm-room bull session. It felt like four hardheaded friends finally, unflinchingly coming to grips in an orderly way with the whole ugly truth and our own destinies.
As we sat and sprawled in our circle, I kept thinking all night of my first long-ago moment of political understanding, half a lifetime earlier, reading at age nine about young Arthur learning from Merlin that the only just reason for war is to stop a much worse war, to use Might for Right. We were turning into knights of our own Round Table. Instead of referring to the children’s book I’d loved, I quoted the Malcolm X speech I’d written about for my summer school class at Northwestern.
“And I don’t think it applies only to the evil inflicted on black people. It’s about stopping the war, too. ‘Don’t ever think,’” I recited more or less verbatim, “ ‘that they’re going to stop it just because they’re convinced it’s immoral. We need action that we’re justified in initiating by any means necessary.’”
As it started getting light outside, we were no longer high, exactly, but still talking up a storm, continuing as a group to shave away and erase the grays until nothing remained but unbelievably clear and sharp blacks and whites, looping back every few minutes to the subject of Lyndon Johnson.
“So we could zap him,” Buzzy said. “We could actually do it. We could actually do it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Zap him, cockadau him, terminate with extreme prejudice.�
��
Holy shit. Buzzy wasn’t smiling.
“The CIA,” he said, “gets rid of guys all the time, right? Like Che. Even presidents—Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Lumumba in the Congo. And in Nam, Diem … plus, it’s what Special Forces guys do every day when they go in and ding some particular Chuck.”
Chuck snapped to attention. “What?”
Buzzy was cool as ever. “I never told you that? Chuck, Charlie, Vietcong. I called them ‘Chucks.’ Better than ‘gooks,’ right?”
I suppose we’d been heading here for hours, or for weeks or maybe months. But at that moment the irresistible logic loomed suddenly and shockingly.
“We’re four people,” Buzzy continued. “Correct size for a special-ops direct-action team. Short-duration strike, precise use of force to achieve a specific objective.”
“You’re not serious, right,” Alex said, “about, I mean, you know …” We were alone in his dorm room, but his voice shrank to a whisper. “Assassinating Johnson?”
Buzzy turned to Alex. “You were the one who said democracy started twenty-five hundred years ago with the assassination of a tyrant in Athens, and what a hero Brutus is for killing Julius Ceasar. You’re the one who said the murder of one good person to prevent the death of a thousand or a million innocent people is ‘morally right, obviously.’ What, so now everything you and he and she have been saying for the last twelve hours is all hypothetical college-kid jerk-off fairy-tale bullshit?”
“No,” Alex said, “no, I, I just … I don’t know. I get it, I wouldn’t be unhappy if it happened. And Humphrey might end the war if he were president. But …”
“Nixon sure as shit won’t if he’s in there a year from now,” I said.
“A year less of war,” Buzzy said. “Tens of thousands of lives saved, maybe more. Who can argue with that? Maybe we prevent World War III. Let history be our judge.”
I waited for one of us to say What the fuck? This is insane! None of us did.
“I mean,” I said, “he has lived his life. He’s almost sixty.”
“But is it possible?” Alex asked. “Us?”
“Don’t reject it out of hand,” Buzzy said. “Don’t assume you’re powerless. That’s what they count on.”
For a minute or more, none of us said a thing. Buzzy looked at each of us. I listened to the wind against the windows and my heart beating. I looked at Chuck, who stared at his hands.
Finally, Alex said, “This is very heavy.”
Then Chuck inhaled deeply and loudly, and on the exhale, he shot to his feet like a missile launching, startling everyone. “It’s not impossible,” he said. “It’s not.”
I thought of something. “It’d be the tenth mission.”
“The what?” Buzzy asked.
“It’s like we were training for this,” I said to Chuck and Alex. I don’t know exactly how the variables interacted at that moment—remembering my clubbing at the Pentagon, ten weeks spent imagining and reimagining the violent particulars of my sister’s pointless death, seeing the casual point-blank murder on the evening news twelve hours earlier, the final molecules of 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine ricocheting around my possibly glucose-deprived brain, the magical-thinking apocalyptic spirit of the age—but at dawn on the third of February in 1968, I believed in what Buzzy had proposed and what I was saying. “It’s like our destiny.”
“What the hell are you talking about, ‘training’?” Buzzy demanded. Apparently, none of us had ever told him about our nine junior-high-school-kid jerk-off fairy-tale espionage missions.
“James Bond,” Alex said. “These things we did when we were young. These games, these ‘missions.’”
25
When Waverly calls, what surprises me most about her reaction to the previous chapter is that she doesn’t seem a bit freaked out that her grandmother conspired to assassinate the president of the United States forty-six years ago. But then I realize that if my mother’s darling mother had told me when I was seventeen that she’d plotted to kill Warren Harding in 1920, when she was seventeen, I might have laughed, and it wouldn’t have made me love my grandma Scattergood any less.
“I was confused,” Waverly says. “I thought ‘LBJ’ was a typo or something. I knew LeBron James wasn’t alive then, but … How come everybody called presidents by their initials back then?”
“I don’t know.” Nor did I know until a few minutes ago that the star player on one of the teams headed for the NBA finals next month is known as LBJ.
“Also? Nobody called weed ‘weed’ back then? When did that start? And why?”
“No idea.”
“I can’t wait to read more to find out what happens.”
“We don’t get away with it.”
“That’s funny, Grams.”
I’m glad she knows who was and wasn’t assassinated in the 1960s. Briefly, last summer, I’d thought about writing this story as a counterfactual fiction, a novel in which some college students succeed in assassinating Lyndon Johnson in 1968, which triggers a full-scale American police-state crackdown for a decade, like in Chile and Argentina, with hundreds or thousands of American citizens secretly tortured and murdered by the government. When I pitched that novel, my editor encouragingly said, “I get it, Frederick Forsyth meets Philip Roth, Day of the Jackal crossed with American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, plus Philip K. Dick.” Then I saw the 3-D JFK documentary last fall and decided not to be a wuss, to tell the nonfictional truth instead.
“I have a question,” Waverly says. “Did Grandpa know? What you’d done?”
“Nope, he didn’t, uh-uh.”
“Weird. And he never … suspected?”
“I don’t think so.”
When I married Jack Wu in the summer of 1974 and decided not to tell him about the plot, I told myself I was doing him a favor, that it would be too burdensome, and that my secretiveness wasn’t a negative leading indicator for the marriage. It was the moment when I understood I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone.
He made it easy by being incurious about my past, indifferent to politics, and opposed to real-life drama. Jack was very even. When we were dating he never complained that I spent too much time working on the Law Journal and studying. He was not fazed by my diabetes or by the fact that I’d never heard of most of his favorite composers, wasn’t obsessed with Nixon and Watergate, didn’t mind when my mother asked him if he had “any theory about why Orientals are so intelligent and musical.” I wasn’t head over heels for Jack. But I’d decided I didn’t want to be head over heels about anything ever again. And I convinced myself that was a long-term plus for the marriage, because in year five or year twenty, I wouldn’t suffer the disappointments of hot young love gone tepid.
I can pinpoint the moment when I knew my marriage had gotten bad. One night, just before my forty-first birthday, I turned over in bed and found Jack staring at me—and I embraced him not because I felt any rush of desire but to avoid looking into his eyes. The next morning I woke up from a sex dream and realized it had been better than any actual lovemaking in ages, and then, reading the paper, I came across the first story about mad cow disease and the fears that it might destroy British agriculture. “It’s Blofeld’s plot exactly!” I shouted with a big smile to Jack at breakfast. He looked at me as if I’d gone mad. He said he had no idea who Blofeld was. “In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service?” I explained. Had I never mentioned Blofeld? We’d been married sixteen years. Jack started taking antidepressants around the same time Seth did. I knew they could diminish the libido. But it was Greta who told me, right after I demolished his BlackBerry and left our marriage, that they also biochemically reduce one’s ability to feel love.
That I never told my husband what I’d done when I was eighteen obviously baffles and upsets Waverly more than the thing I never told him about.
“So Grandpa’s gone, but why,” she asks, “are you writing about all this now? Won’t it cause a lot of trouble for you and your friends?”
>
I sigh. “The short answer is that I need to get the truth down before I go. No more secrets and lies.” Part of the longer answer is that in the several decades since I decided I ought to kill the president, I have strenuously avoided making any grand, self-destructive, compulsive gestures in my life. Writing this memoir is my grand, self-destructive, compulsive last hurrah.
“You’re not sick or anything? I mean, ‘before you go’ in like twenty years, right?”
“Sure hope so.”
Speaking of LeBron James, she tells me, Sophie “copped a disorderly conduct plea” in Florida and just finished serving her one-week sentence in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center, an experience for which she’s receiving independent-study credit from their high school. “She’s like this celebrity now,” Waverly tells me. “It’s sick.” I know “sick” isn’t exactly a pejorative. The night of Sophie’s release from jail, paparazzi photographed her standing next to LeBron James at Mark Zuckerberg’s thirtieth-birthday party at a South Beach nightclub called Snatch.
“So you,” I ask Waverly, “are not freaked out by what I did?”
“You didn’t do it.”
“Wait and see what we did. What happened.”
“When I got back from Miami, Dad gave me a book on cults.”
“He thinks you’re in a cult?”
“He thinks Hunter’s brainwashed me. You know, Hunter’s always talked about how insane the Vietnam time was, but I never understood what he meant until now, from reading your book.” She pauses. “I’m not saying you were insane.”
“Oh, I pretty much was.”
“Right,” Waverly says. “Temporarily. Right?”
“Yup,” I confirm, and we say goodbye.
My temporary insanity aside, I think it should be noted for the record that the slaughter in Vietnam was staggeringly and unnecessarily huge. More than a million soldiers and another million or maybe two million civilians died.
True Believers Page 32
