The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Alex spoke over the telephone from his house in Georgetown, a part of his late wife’s estate. He had been put onto one Eustace Meikkle-john, Esquire, with whom he now exchanged greetings. Alex read him the text of the letter the ambassador had received from Loyalty-Security and agreed to meet with him the following Friday.

  “Things are a little different when State is dealing with foreign citizens, but most of the security routine is the same thing,” Meikklejohn counseled him.

  The interval would give Herrendon time to forage for any exchanges, fourteen years ago—or, for that matter, subsequently—with the organized consumer people. He wished he knew where to find Guido Pacelli, who had got him into this mess. Pacelli was a good bit older than Alex, who was in his late forties. Probably Pacelli was retired. He could hunt him down, if it seemed advisable, or necessary.

  What was absolutely required, Herrendon closed his eyes and thought deeply on the matter, was that no investigation by the loyalty/ security board should lead to a wider investigation. One that could establish that (Viscount) Alex Herrendon was now and had been for ten years, in London and in Washington, an agent of the Soviet Union performing intelligence work and engaging in espionage. He must get the consumers league business dealt with and satisfy the investigators that there was nothing more to look into.

  On impulse he looked over at the framed wedding picture. For my Alex, with eternal love, Judith. The picture was taken immediately after the wedding at St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church, in Hamden, Connecticut. Judith had appended the date, December 29, 1927.

  After gazing at the wedding picture he turned to the antique mirror behind the desk. He examined his image clinically. His hair was still full, with only traces of gray. His features were regular, his brown eyes wide and expressive. His lower lip was full, his teeth unblemished. He did look forty-eight, but not a day older.

  He doubted he would ever readjust after Judith’s death, though at the hospital, during those awful last weeks, she had pressed him to go on with life “—my beloved Alex.” And that last time she had hugged Robin to her. “Make your father live again a whole life, Robin. That’s the only way I will truly—”she managed a smile—”rest in peace.”

  That was two years ago. He hadn’t, in the period since then, spent a single evening alone with any woman. He accepted social invitations and, as often as not, enjoyed them; but he never called any of the myriad maidens or widows who were seated, serially, next to him at dinner party after dinner party. He allowed himself to wonder whether he was trying to make up in middle-aged sobriety for a youth that had been anything but regulated. That other life—this one—he had never shared with Judith.

  After the session with the lawyer on Friday, Alex came home to his alluringly comfortable living room and began to read a novel, plucked from his complete collection of Anthony Trollope. Robin came in, a special bounce in her stride, to advance on her father and give him a kiss. She would bring him tea. “But after that I’ll have to hurry. Can’t sit here with you tonight and watch the news.” She had a date, and he—her new friend—had tickets to the dress rehearsal of As You Like It, which would open at the National Theater the following Monday. Robin was visibly excited. Alex saw in her her mother’s radiance.

  “Who’s the young man?” His voice carried to the kitchen, where Robin was heating the water.

  “Oh, Daddy, he’s terrific. Tall, handsome, bright—Phi Bete, Columbia—great sense of fun.”

  “What does he do?”

  Robin had steeled herself for the question. She would put off full disclosure as long as possible.

  “He works in the Senate.”

  “For whom?”

  “Oh, Daddy, do you want a cookie with tea?”

  “Yes. For whom does your beautiful young man work?”

  It was no use. “He works for Senator McCarthy.”

  Her father appeared in the kitchen. “Joe McCarthy?”

  “Umm,” said Robin, biting on a cookie.

  “Oh, my God, Robin.” Alex laughed, took his tea, and sat down. “I’m being investigated by the man who is the boss of your boyfriend.”

  “Daddy, come on. I don’t think Senator McCarthy has anything to do with the business you talked about yesterday. And certainly my—he’s not exactly my ‘boyfriend.’ He is somebody I met at a White House party. You’ll like him, I’m sure of that, Daddy.”

  “Well, don’t let him come around. He’ll become a security risk. Be sure to ask him tonight if Senator McCarthy has located every … consumer. No—” Herrendon checked himself immediately. No taunts. Nothing provocative. “Just, well, just have a good time.”

  The following day, Alex came in from his golf game with Simon Budge, invigorated by the physical exercise, gratified by his score, and indolently relaxed in the clement weather. Robin was upstairs but heard him come in. “Good day, Daddy?”

  “Fine day. Shot an eighty-four. I’m thinking maybe of going into tournament golf.”

  Robin laughed and came down the stairs in a gray cotton suit with starched white collar, lapels, and cuffs. She wore her mother’s pearls and gold and ruby earrings.

  “And where are you going, all dressed up?”

  “I’m going to the races at Laurel.”

  “Oh? Who with?”

  “With my new friend, Harry.” She breathed deeply for fear he would ask who else was going.

  He didn’t.

  She kissed him, looked at her watch, and walked down the stairs to P Street. Harry said he would appear at her door in his Chevy at “exactly 11:32. I use CIA protocols. Never arrange to meet somebody at 11:30 or 11:35, because that way they’ll wobble in one direction or the other on the designated time. When you work for Joe McCarthy, you’ve got to be exact because he never is. He told me he’d be ready at eleven. That means he’ll be ready at 11:20, which is just right for 11:32 at your door.”

  “You mean Senator McCarthy will be in your car?”

  “Yes. And also Jean Kerr. She’ll be Mrs. McCarthy soon.”

  “I’ll be there,” was all that Robin could manage.

  The domestic explosion came the following day.

  A picture in the Washington Post, two couples, all four figures smiling. The caption: “Coming in with the winner. ‘We bet on the winner. Always do!’ said Senator Joseph McCarthy. Accompanied here by his fiancee, Jean Kerr, McCarthy aide Harry Bontecou, and date.”

  41

  HANBERRY, 1991

  A clarification by Herrendon

  Harry Bontecou continued to answer questions as Alex Herrendon fired them off. It was on the third day, after breakfast, that Harry came in. He shook off the rain after his brisk walk. They sat down in the study at their customary positions, and Harry said he had done “a lot of thinking” the night before. “Things aren’t quite right.”

  Alex leaned back, apprehensive. He didn’t want to run any risk of losing Harry. His concern was sincere. “Is the work too … heavy? Too detailed?—”

  “No, no. The long hours don’t bother me, and I welcome the chance to look back more on that scene, straighten out my own mind on the subject. But what I considered last night is this: I’m as curious about what you know and did as you are about what I knew and did, and of course, what McCarthy knew and did. I’m as interested in what you can tell me as you are in what I can tell you.”

  “Interested how? You mean interested professionally? Or do you mean—interested personally?”

  “Well, both. I spent three years chasing down Communists and pro-Communists. You were a Communist. Worse, you were a spy. I don’t want you to tell me again what it was that shook you loose. I read your famous essay in Encounter about your reaction to Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech in 1956, and that was thirty years ago—”

  “Yes, that was what did it.” Herrendon reflected. Harry had told him he didn’t want to hear about it “again.” He could understand. “It obviously pains you that I stayed with the Communists through the show trials, throu
gh the Hitler-Stalin pact, through the Iron Curtain—right up until Khrushchev himself, addressing the entire Communist fraternity, dethroned Stalin, to whom I—and a lot of others—well, you know this—swore allegiance.” Again he paused. “Well, as you remind me, I gave my reasons in that essay in Encounter.”

  “I remember them. I read your story with intense curiosity at every level. The Twentieth Congress alienated more American Communists than the Hitler-Stalin pact, it looks like.”

  “What we were told by Khrushchev on February 24, 1956, was the equivalent of telling us that everything the fascist world had been saying about Stalin for twenty years—was correct. Did you ever run into Howard Fast?”

  “No. I know about him, obviously.”

  “Yes. Well, Howard is of course known as a novelist and historian. But he was an editor of the Daily Worker when the Khrushchev speech was leaked. As you know, leaking that speech was a CIA operation. It had been delivered three weeks before. Delivered in the very closed chamber in the Kremlin where the Communist congresses take place.

  “Well, the big question, in the offices of the Worker when it came in, was: Should we publish Khrushchev’s speech? Or bury it? The editor in chief of the Worker warned that if they published it, they’d lose ten percent of the members of the Communist Party. Howard Fast said, No, you’re wrong: We’ll lose fifty percent. They finally reckoned there was no way to keep it hidden, so they did publish it. And lost not fifty percent of the members of the party, but ninety percent—or so Howard Fast told someone I know. So I suppose the point I am stressing is the shock value of that speech to some of the Soviet colonials.” He paused again and this time got up from his chair and walked toward the window. But after a moment, perhaps afraid he would sound theatrical, he reached for his pipe and sat down: Alex, Lord Herrendon, gone back to work. But he didn’t mind describing to Harry—especially to Harry—something of the personal impact.

  “What I did not relate in my Encounter piece was the agony I felt from then on in coming up in my mind with some means of—atonement. There is much literature on that theme, the great ideological hangovers of such as Koestler and Muggeridge and Utley, Eugene Lyons—the list is vast. In my own case I thought to make the point I wanted to make by dropping out of sight and living in poverty, doing menial work in a hospital in Liverpool. I swore to myself I’d do it for an entire year. I lasted ten months, and learned then quite by accident—from a hospital cancer specialist who had been called to give treatment in London to a special patient—that my father was terminally ill. I went to him and in his closing hours told him what it was that I had done for over ten years. He communicated his understanding. He couldn’t speak, but he nodded his head, in a particular way. He was himself much addicted to lost causes, though not to ignoble causes, as I was.”

  Harry stopped him. “I understand.” And once again attempted to emphasize to Lord Herrendon that “my purposes are not inquisitorial. I don’t think we want to go into the question of why you had to wait until 1956 to quit the party. People see the light at different times. But I am interested in how you wrestled with the McCarthy problem. I know that your file was pulled out for a going over, because I spotted it on one of those lists we accumulated in McCarthy’s office: a list of people the State Department wanted to look into. What I don’t remember is what it was that caught the attention of the State Department.”

  “It was this. Sometime in the thirties, I now forget just when, I signed a petition got up by the National Consumers League protesting utility rates. It turned out that the league was under Communist control. As you can imagine, I was pretty apprehensive. I didn’t want a half dozen FBI agents training their microscopes on my past, though I had been pretty careful.”

  “Okay, okay.” Harry was anxious to get with the point he had set out to make. “Listen, Alex: One. You want to do a book on the formation and cultivation of pro-Communist sentiment in the West in the postwar years.

  “Two. I’m interested in the anti-Communist sentiment in the West in the postwar years, and of course the two are related. But you’ve brought on an itch, to look back at the whole Joe McCarthy scene, something I never expected to do.”

  Alex leaned back in his chair. “Harry, I’ve no objection to your producing your own scholarly work on the era. I don’t see that my own work will suffer in the least—quite the contrary—from your expressing your curiosity and getting from me my own story as a soldier on both fronts of the Cold War.”

  “Good. It’s odd how I can sit and talk fraternally—”Harry, a faint smile on his face, looked up at Alex—”with someone who was doing his best to bring misery to the—” He stopped, then looked away. “Sorry about that. It isn’t quite as if you were Marcus Wolf.” Harry’s reference to the spymaster and master killer of the former East Germany was strong stuff.

  “No, at least I wasn’t Marcus Wolf. Marcus Wolf, as keeper of the wall in Berlin, tortured and killed. I didn’t do that. I’m afraid to ask myself: Would I have done that if the party had asked?”

  Harry didn’t reply. Neither of the two spoke. Then Alex said, “That was almost forty years ago that I quit the party, but the hangover is still there.”

  Harry could tell that that was so. Just by looking at the old man. He knew they had that much in common, the difference being critical. He remembered Willmoore’s formulation when a fellow faculty member had insisted that both sides in the East-West struggle were moved by ideals. “That’s like saying that the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of the bus has a lot in common with the man who pushes the old lady into the way of the bus. They both push old ladies around.” Harry thought to pass that one along to Alex, but decided against it. He found himself saying: “Alex, what do you say to some kind of a break tonight? You got any good movie tapes? Maybe From Russia with Love?“

  Harry threw himself on the floor and played vigorously with Bloor, the big red Labrador.

  42

  JULY 1953

  Harry pursues Robin

  “I got to say it, Harry, your romance is taking time away from the struggle for the free world!” McCarthy had suggested Harry join him for a quick supper before returning to work, but Harry said no, he had a date.

  “You must be dating that lady five times a week.”

  “Sorry about that, Joe. I hope you won’t denounce me in your speech.”

  “Oh, the hell with it. Go off to your lady friend. She works for McMahon, I hear.”

  ‘Yes, she does. But we don’t talk about it.”

  “Maybe I’ll have her bugged.” McCarthy laughed.

  Harry, momentarily stunned, opened his mouth to return the wisecrack, but quickly changed his mind. He wouldn’t involve Joe in his own little problem. He knew somebody in the FBI who would give him advice on how to handle it.

  Harry had, in two days, three odd phone calls, the caller hanging up immediately after Harry picked up the phone. It could have been accidental. Or somebody who had read about Harry in the papers, decided to call him, then decided to back out. His name was often printed, as accompanying Senator McCarthy here and there, sitting at his side during hearings, whatever. Harry did think to examine the telephone itself, but found no traces of a bug. But he knew that technology in the bugging business had advanced. He had a friend in the FBI who was taking advanced training as a sweeper.

  But then why, other than maybe to listen in on his conversations with Joe, would anyone want to bug him? His mind turned, momentarily, to the most conventional uses of wiretaps. They were common in domestic disagreements, or suspicions. What else? He couldn’t imagine anyone going to extravagant lengths, in his case, to document his romantic … distractions. Though they were getting intense.

  The mere thought quickened his pulse, and his ardor was high when he arrived back at his apartment with the chicken, coleslaw, the quart of ice cream, chocolate, and nuts at the ready. And the two wines he would pluck from his ten-bottle cellar.

  He had uncorked the white wine when the be
ll rang.

  He had asked her a few weeks before what perfume she wore. She hadn’t replied. Now he returned to the subject, asking her the same question.

  “It’s a secret,” she answered.

  “Why? Is it a Communist scent?”

  “A Communist sent by who?”

  “By whom.”

  “By God, you are inquisitive.” She leaned over in the bed and kissed the tip of his nose.

  “Kiss me other places.”

  “You are a dirty old man.”

  “I am a dirty young man. I want to kiss you everywhere.”

  And he forgot about the name of the perfume. But he was overwhelmed by it. With one hand he held her filled glass. With the other he brought her head to his.

  43

  Off to the races!

  It was Saturday, Wheeling plus. Harry, driving his own car proudly, the second-hand Chevy he had contrived an excuse for pulling out of the garage every day in the week since he bought it, picked up Jean Kerr. Robin would be waiting for them as arranged. They drove to Adler Street and stopped outside Joe McCarthy’s apartment building. “Be here sharp at eleven,” Joe had instructed him. “That way we can have lunch and catch the first race. We’ll take your car, Harry. Okay? Mine ain’t fitting for the premier anti-Communist in the Western world.” Harry could practically hear him wink over the telephone.

  Harry left Jean in the car. Joe—of course—had not been waiting at the door, as he had promised. After a few minutes, Jean stepped outside to avoid the car’s heat.

  She looked smart and tidy in her coffee-colored silk skirt, her white blouse slightly open, the small ruby and gold earrings visible when she brushed her hair back. At twenty-eight, the five-foot-ten sometime Cherry Blossom Queen of George Washington University was a striking figure. Her blue eyes were wide, her lips ample and determined. She was a two-year veteran of Joe McCarthy’s staff, utterly devoted to his cause, affectionately curious about his endless foibles, and engaged by his manners, courage, and determination. When in the company of any staff member she was formal with him. But she was not, on this shining summer day, in an office mood. She had quickly okayed Joe’s idea late in the evening in the office after hours and hours of work. His idea was: Let’s forget the whole world, as he put it. That meant go to the races. Harry was working with them, and Joe said: You come too.