Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  The work itself she attacked with an energy born of months of enforced intellectual idleness. Maggie had made a perfunctory start at organizing and indexing the Richard Ewing Dobbs archives, and Marlene spent several weeks updating this and becoming familiar with the material. This comprised several drawers full of clippings related to Dobbs and his arrest and trial, and the political arguments and commentary that resulted from that event; boxes of photographs, letters from prison, and other personal memorabilia; the transcript of the trial itself, with all the documents produced by discovery, and notes made by Harley Blaine, the defense lawyer; a thin sheaf of material yielded by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act; and finally, a large archive of 8mm home movie film.

  The senior Dobbs, it turned out, had been an avid home cameraman, from almost the first period in which such equipment had become available to the general public. There were four library shelves stacked with neat green file boxes in which were stored hundreds of spools in Kodak yellow cardboard sleeves, all neatly labeled with dates from the late thirties to the late fifties. Marlene had watched dozens of these films selected at random from each year of the record. At first, she ran film when she was bored with reading; later she became fascinated with the vérité aspects of the record. She watched a young, soft-looking, but handsome Yalie in sleeveless sweaters, saddle shoes, and slicked-down dark blond hair become a studious grad student and then a pipe-puffing New Deal bureaucrat in baggy three-piece suits. She watched his play: horses, croquet, tennis, engaged in with other men of the same type and clouds of bright young things, that cloud gradually resolving itself into one, a slim, elegant girl with good bones, a corona of blond hair, and a dignified expression. After 1938, she appeared on nearly every reel: Selma Hewlett Dobbs, the wife, now the Widow. Marlene saw the courtship, the wedding (two reels), the honeymoon (Havana, Rio, eight reels), the new house on L Street, a more subdued Selma, her belly swelling from one reel to the next, and finally, in 1939, the infant congressman, little Hank (six reels).

  Dobbs had taken his camera to war too. A whole box was devoted to shots of jungles, airstrips, warships, planes landing and taking off, and any number of what appeared to Marlene to be exactly similar views taken from the rail of some sort of vessel, of the sea at night, with flashes in the distance. Only the labels indicated that they were distant prospects of the great night battles that raged around the Solomons in 1942.

  The most interesting parts of these films to Marlene were those depicting the men of the Pacific war, all deeply tanned, many pitifully thin, crop-haired, incredibly young. Like most Americans, Marlene derived her understanding of World War II from war movies, where the soldiers had been played by thirtyish 4-Fs like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. From Dobbs’s films she realized for the first time, and with some shock, that the Japanese Empire had been crushed largely by pimply teenagers and their slightly older brothers.

  Dobbs had caught these young sailors and marines at their daily work, or relaxing, or lying wounded in tent hospitals, grinning often, smoking perpetually. There were shots of Dobbs too: at a desk, with a small fan cooling his sweat, in khakis boarding a PT boat, inspecting a submarine, photographing something through the nose bubble of a bomber. The most remarkable sequence was a scene in which Dobbs was shaking hands with a group of young naval officers, with PT boats in the background. One of the officers was a startlingly young Jack Kennedy.

  Marlene had mentioned this to Maggie, who had rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, yes, the meeting of the giants! I’m surprised the image isn’t worn off the film. That’s one of the ones they show you when they’re checking you out to see if you’re fine enough to be a Dobbs. The poor old bastard used to watch it over and over again, that and the other Meetings with the Great.”

  She had directed Marlene to an indexed list of film spools bearing shots of Dobbs and famous people: FDR, Hopkins, Nimitz, Spruance, the Dulles brothers, Bob Hope.

  And then, of course, there was Harley Blaine. Blaine was in nearly as many of the films as Dobbs’s immediate family, from the Yale years onward; during the war, he was in more of them. Blaine had apparently served with Dobbs during some part of his service. There was a long series of them in navy whites working and carousing around wartime Pearl Harbor, and another series of the two of them poking around in ruins and interrogating Asians; the film labels identified Saipan and Okinawa as the venues.

  Blaine apparently shared Dobbs’s interest in moviemaking. They traded cameraman duties when they were together, and after a while Marlene was able to recognize their individual cinematic styles: Dobbs flitted from one subject to another in quick cuts. Blaine provided a rock-steady camera platform, focusing on one subject for long seconds and then slowly panning to another. She even learned to recognize the shadow of their heads and upper bodies when they were using the camera: Blaine had huge shoulders sloping upward to a bullet head; Dobbs had a small round head on a graceful long neck.

  Maggie confirmed this observation. “Yeah, the two of them were real pests, according to Hank and my mother-in-law. They’d sneak up on anything, one or the other of them, and get it down on film. Selma said the only place you were safe was in the toilet, and maybe not even then. When there was nobody else around they took shots of each other cutting up. Just boys at heart!”

  Blaine was, of course, a key to Marlene’s investigation, not only as Dobbs’s lawyer at the trial, but as a lifelong friend. On a day, perhaps three weeks into her task, having read all the material in the archive and having watched dozens of hours of film, she asked Maggie whether it would be all right to call him in Texas.

  They were in the kitchen; Maggie had just brought the kids home; Jeremy was napping and the girls were playing quietly in Laura’s room. Maggie’s reaction was not what Marlene had expected.

  “Oh, my!” she exclaimed, holding her hand to her mouth. “Call him? Is that absolutely necessary?”

  “Well, yeah, Maggie. I’m looking into a case that’s twenty-five years old, I guess I need to talk to the lawyer.”

  A worry line dug itself deeper below Maggie’s golden bangs. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, of course. But … oh, I don’t know what to do now… .”

  “You’re worried about Hank finding out I’m doing this.”

  “Yes! I know it’s stupid, but …”

  “But what? Tell him! I mean, it’s not like it was illegal. Besides, I’m going to have to talk to Selma too, and I doubt that she’s going to swear secrecy. The worst that could happen is that he’ll yell at you and tell me to stop. I mean, he doesn’t strike me as such a tyrant.”

  “Oh, no, he’s not, not at all. It’s just he’s so sensitive about this whole thing with his dad.”

  She hemmed and hawed for a time, but under Marlene’s cold eye, and not wanting to look like a jerk in front of a woman she regarded as the epitome of courage (and of course Marlene would never try to hide stuff from her husband for fear of an argument), she gave over Blaine’s private number and said that she would break the news to Hank.

  The call to Texas was answered by a man with a soft accent. Marlene explained who she was and what she wanted. The man asked her to hold. There was a hiatus of perhaps three minutes. Then another voice came on the line, with a similar accent but a different and more impressive timbre, a voice that reminded Marlene of Lyndon B. Johnson’s: cast iron with a coating of honey.

  “So you’re gonna write all about Dick Dobbs,” said Blaine after the brief pleasantries were concluded.

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘write,’” said Marlene. “Maggie’s asked me to do the research. Find out the facts, and so on.”

  “Find out the facts, hey? That’ll take some doing. I hope you’re not an old lady.”

  “No, sir, but I’m working on it. Tell me, do you get to Washington much? This kind of thing might be easier to do face-to-face.”

  “Oh, no, I stick close to home nowadays. I been under the weather.”

  “I’m sorry—I hope I’m not distu
rbing you.”

  “No, that’s fine. I don’t get many calls lately either. I’m always glad to chat with a lady. So, tell me, what’ve you made so far of the great case of U.S. v. Dobbs?”

  “I’ve gotten as far as confusion, as a matter of fact,” said Marlene, not particularly amused by the “lady” business.

  A gravelly laugh. “I’m not surprised. I guess you been reading all the commentary?”

  “Yes. And it’s either a right-wing plot to destroy a patriotic American who was a premature peaceful coexistence advocate or a foiled left-wing conspiracy to disarm the United States and deliver it into the hands of the Soviets. It’s impossible to figure out which because, as you know, the case was never resolved. The right-wingers claim it was dropped as a part of the conspiracy, with the treacherous Harley Blaine threatening to blow the whistle and reveal national security secrets. The other side claims it was a victory for civil liberties in the dark days of McCarthyism, won by that great civil libertarian Harley Blaine. So my first question is, which Harley Blaine am I talking to?”

  Another laugh, and then a long coughing spasm. “Sorry ’bout that,” Blaine said. “Guess I’m not used to having my aged ears jangled by impertinent remarks—no, don’t apologize—it’s good for me—gets the old juices flowing again. Which Harley Blaine, huh? Well, miss, here’s the main thing you have to understand. Dick Dobbs was my best friend. He was the one interested in politics, not me. When he got into trouble I figured my job was to get him out of it, whatever it took, and I did that. Whatever a bunch of eggheads and pissant hack writers said about it afterward—hell, I never paid any mind to it at all and neither did Dick. The Harley Blaine you’re talking to is the only one there ever was, a good friend and a damn good lawyer.”

  “Okay, fine, but how did you get him off. There was something about a defector you uncovered—”

  “Hell, the government’s case didn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Blaine interrupted. “What they had was the uncorroborated testimony of an admitted spy, that Weinberg fella, and a bunch of papers. There was no question that the papers came from Dick. The question was, did Dick give ’em to Weinberg or did Weinberg steal them? They didn’t have a scut of real evidence that Dick had turned them over. Weinberg had no messages, no communications from Dick at all, and he had free access, as a clerk, to everything in Dick’s office. Of course, in those days an accusation was about the same as a conviction. They got Alger Hiss and fried the Rosenbergs on cases just about as bad. I wasn’t about to let that happen to Dick.”

  “So you short-circuited the process with this mysterious defector.”

  “I did. You’ll want to know how I pulled it off?” Teasingly.

  “Yes. According to the articles and books I’ve read, you’ve never been straight on the issue. That’s what’s fed the conspiracy accusations over the years.”

  “Well, Miss Ciampi, I don’t reckon a smart girl like you would’ve swallowed much of that old horseshit—pardon my French.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to tell me the real story, Mr. Blaine?”

  There was a long pause on the line, long enough to make Marlene think she might have been cut off. But Blaine remained connected. He cleared his throat heavily and said, “Matter of fact, I told Selma the whole thing, back then, Selma and Dick both. I told them what I’d found out, and how I’d found it out, and I said I wasn’t going to use it unless they thought it was right. I said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, the two of them holding hands, sitting on straight chairs in the interview room in that damn prison they had him in, and I told them that the government was bound and determined to see Dick convicted of treason and that they would find some way to do it, and that they’d probably ask for the death penalty. And Dick asked me, would it hurt the country, what I was planning to do, and I said, no, I didn’t think so, and he told me to go ahead with it. Damned if I knew if it’d hurt the country. About then I wouldn’t’ve cared if it meant the Russian navy could steam into New York. I just wanted him out of that place and safe.”

  He paused again, and Marlene heard the sound of drinking and a clunking noise, as if a glass had been set down. “So there’s no reason not to let you in on the conspiracy after all this time. Everyone’s dead, just about, except me and Selma, and a bunch of the small fry. The judge and prosecutor gone; Dick, of course. The chief witness, Weinberg, died in prison. Lord knows where Reltzin and Gaiilov are, dead too, probably. And as far as national security”—he drew the word out long and mockingly—“I expect the Republic will survive the revelation.”

  “Gaiilov?” asked Marlene.

  “Hah! See, you’ve wormed it out of me already. Yeah, that was the boy. Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov. Talk about your conspiracy! My Lord, you couldn’t start a conspiracy in this country if your life depended on it; folks here just like to talk too much. They ain’t comfortable with secrets. How it happened, I was sitting in the Navy Club in Washington worrying about how I was going to get Dick out of this mess, when I heard two fellas talking. They were huddled together at the bar and I was sitting in a club chair about six feet away with my back to them. They were sort of arguing in a polite way about something or other and then I heard a name that made my ears perk up. I had good hearing back then; getting deaf as a post now. I got this thing makes the phone louder. Anyway, one of ’em said something like, ‘But he says that Weinberg was the only contact,’ and the other one said, ‘Well yes, that’s the point. He’s trying to protect Dobbs. It means he’s a mole.’ And the other one said, ‘Damn it, Gaiilov’s no mole. He’s given us loads of stuff that checks out,’ and then he went on to name all kinds of stuff with names like Hatrack and Boneyard, secret files of various kinds, I imagined, but by then I wasn’t really paying too much attention. When they left, I asked the barman who they were and he gave me a couple of names and I checked them out and sure enough they were CIA.”

  “How did you do that—check them out?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t much of a problem. Washington was still a small town back then. I’d had some connection with naval intelligence, being a former naval person and all, and I asked some friends and they asked their friends and that’s how it was done. What it was, anyway, was that an employee of the Soviet mission to the UN in New York had just walked out one day and stopped in at FBI headquarters and said he wanted to defect. He claimed to be KGB. Of course, the CIA got into it right away, and of course they leaned on this guy something fierce to make sure that he wasn’t a phony defector. It stirred up quite a ruckus in the Agency, so I learned, because one faction, Bissell and them in operations, thought he was genuine, and another faction, Angleton and his friends, thought he was a phony, a double agent. Anyway, the real kicker was that this joker, Gaiilov, said he knew all about Reltzin and Weinberg, and yeah they were spies, but he’d never heard anybody in the KGB mention Dick Dobbs.”

  “The point being,” Marlene put in, “that if you thought Mr. Gaiilov was a double, then you’d expect him to try to cover for Dobbs, the master spy, but if you thought he was on the level, then Dobbs had to be innocent.”

  The man chuckled, a dry rustling sound. “Yep, you got it. I reckon you can figure out the rest. I called a meeting in Judge Palmer’s chambers with the U.S. attorney, Paul Gerrigan, and I told him that I intended to call Armand Gaiilov as a witness. Well, when that got back to the CIA it let the skunk loose in amongst the choir. There was a great gnashing of teeth, I expect, and it must’ve brought the internal battle to a head. The last thing they wanted was a fella who they didn’t know whether he was a spy or not getting hauled up in open court under oath to testify about Dick Dobbs. So they said they wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, for national security reasons, and I said in that case, I’d settle for a subpoena duces tecum—the transcripts of all their debriefs of Gaiilov. Well, of course, they said I couldn’t have that either. Judge Palmer hemmed and hawed, and I got shouted at a good deal, and accused of being a Red communist myself, but after Palmer had sta
red down the barrel of the Sixth Amendment for a while, he told them they had to let Gaiilov testify. He said, ‘Gentlemen, the Constitution in the instant case allows me no leeway. The witness may indeed refuse to answer on grounds of national security or prior oath, at which point I will make a determination as to whether such refusal is justified, but there can be no prior bar to Mr. Dobbs’s right to call whomsoever he will to his defense.’ ”

  “And the government dropped the case.”

  “They did.”

  “Very fancy,” said Marlene, with sincerity.

  “Why, thank you kindly, miss. I thought so myself at the time.”

  “Weren’t you worried that he might get up on the stand and lie for the Agency and say that Dobbs was the one?”

  “Oh, that was a possibility, of course. On the other hand, a good half of the CIA had staked their reputations on the idea that Gaiilov was genuine. If he lied about Dick, I would’ve treated him as a hostile witness, and then I’d’ve had reasons to call the CIA big shots up there to confirm, or try to deny, Gaiilov’s original exculpation of Dick. No way they were going to open up that bag of cats. They’d’ve looked like a bunch of fools. And, my dear, if there’s one thing the CIA can’t stand, it’s public embarrassment. They don’t mind one bit walking out there to the wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette, but make ’em look like a horse’s ass? Hell, they’d do anything on God’s earth to stop that.”