“So, Timmy,” Uncle Frank fairly shouted, “did you have a hand in that speech the other night?” He meant McCarthy’s eleven-p.m. radio-and-TV address. It had been billed as an equal-time rebuttal to Truman’s broadcast on the Harry Dexter White case, though in the event, McCarthy had spent more time attacking the current president than the former one, with a claim that Ike was “batting zero” against Communists in government.
Tim politely shook his head. “Uncle Frank, except for his wedding, I’ve never even seen McCarthy. He’s mostly been up here in New York.” The committee, Tim explained, had the other week done a little investigation of General Electric, before returning its attention to Fort Monmouth. But such details didn’t matter to Uncle Frank: Tim’s work for Charles Potter gave him in the eyes of everyone here, even Frances, an admirable proximity to the senator from Wisconsin. However much Tim tried to correct them, his family regarded him as a lucky oblate to an all-powerful monsignor.
The White case—with the once-more-front-page Truman calling the attorney general a liar, and J. Edgar Hoover branding Truman a liar in return—had all the elements to sustain long discussion, save one. “Where’s McCarthy in all of this?” Uncle Alan asked Tim, at a decibel level low enough to indicate actual curiosity. “I mean aside from that speech.”
“It’s really HUAC’s show,” explained Tim, who realized with a touch of shame that he was tossing off such lingo to convey the very insiderliness he’d been trying to disclaim at dinner. But he had heard Tommy McIntyre remark that the White story was “making old Joe emerald with envy” each day it gobbled up the lion’s share of column inches in the papers.
Political news soon gave way to neighborhood reminiscence. Talk of the Donahues, who’d recently moved from Fiftieth Street to Mineola, ushered the family toward a collective sleepiness. The television was at last turned off, and Tim began to hear the tick of the clock near the old radio cabinet, a kind of telegraph tapping out the unvaried existence of Uncle Alan and Grandma Gaffney, who sometimes seemed more married than his own parents. He noticed the thickness of the paint—another layer added by the landlord every five years—on the square strip of molding that ornamented the room’s plaster walls. And he also regarded the telephone, which had come into the apartment only a few years before the TV. I’m not on the phone.
With the same finger he’d yesterday used to trace circles on Hawkins’ bare chest, he could right now, if he chose, dial the Charles Fuller family, who were in the Manhattan book. What might be going on in those rooms at Seventy-fourth and Park, high above the doorman and flower-filled lobby that Tim could picture? Behavior there could scarcely be more specified or formal than here. Even now, Tim and his father and uncles had yet to loosen their ties, pride in their white collars supplementing a deference both to the day and to the family matriarch.
As conversation grew more intermittent, Tim’s discomfort increased, as if, without much else on their minds and tongues, his parents and uncles and aunts would somehow be able to see images, like stigmata beginning to bleed, of his naked hour with Hawkins Fuller.
“Grandma,” he said, too nervous to sit still any longer, “I’m going to wrap up some of the leftovers and take them to the church. The icebox won’t hold everything.”
“All right, Timmy,” she replied, all but adding “if you must.” She tended to view charity not as a corporal work of mercy but a species of busybodiedness, and yet, as a “nice boy”—her designation, seeming to signify a handicap that made certain actions unavoidable—Timmy “did such things.”
Out on the street, carrying a bag of waxed-papered turkey and asparagus spears, Tim drew a great cleansing breath of the city’s dirty air. He passed the corner of Forty-third Street and looked down to the old building where he knew Hawkins’ clarinet player—the one from the day of the Draft Ike rally—must still have his apartment. Closing his eyes, he thought of yesterday, when Hawk had been inside him, and he wondered if he weren’t now really more closely connected to this musician—at just one physical remove—than to everyone still sitting back in the parlor.
He found himself saying aloud a couple of lines from Dylan Thomas, the ones Tommy McIntyre had come into the office reciting the other day:
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
The Welsh poet had died in mid-bender here in New York only a couple of weeks ago. “Ah,” Tommy had said with Irish reverence and envy, “he should have been one of ours, Mr. Tim. He should have been one of ours.”
The lines of verse vanished onto the breeze racing down Ninth Avenue ahead of Tim, just as yesterday, in the apartment on Capitol Hill, his own whispering of the words “I love you,” barely but deliberately audible, had disappeared into the pillow and walls, unanswered except for two gentle pats on the back of his head.
CHAPTER NINE
December 2, 1953
“Our orders was to hold at all costs,” said Sergeant Weinel, “and that is what we was doing. We was holding at all costs.”
Even so, the sergeant’s unit had at last been overrun, on August 30, 1950, by the village of Chinju near the Naktong River, and that’s why he was here today, three years later, in the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building. After the unit’s forced march from Chinju to Taejon, Sergeant Weinel testified, he and his sixty buddies had been beaten, indoctrinated, denied medical care, and put on display in North Korean villages; and then—with the exception of the sergeant himself—they had been massacred by their captors.
He explained his own survival to Senator Potter and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: “Yes, sir; they covered me over with dirt, too. It was just loose dirt, with enough to cover my head up. I laid there and after they got through I could breathe through that loose dirt.”
As if fearing that heroism might be ascribed to him, Sergeant Weinel quickly shifted the committee’s attention from his success at playing possum to the last efforts of those actually dead. “Out of the whole bunch that was shot there, I never heard one man ask for mercy; none of them did. In fact, there was one of the boys that wasn’t hit good, and he even asked them to give him another. Out of that many men, nobody cracked.”
With this recollection Sergeant Weinel choked up, and appeared to be on the verge of sobs, which he managed to restrain when Senator Potter, rising to his artificial feet, leaned across the committee table to pass him a cigarette.
Watching from a seat behind his boss’s chair, Tim felt his own hand trembling from some internal tumult of anger and fear, all of it overlaid and trumped by shame. Had he been in Sergeant Weinel’s company, he would have cracked, and long before they reached Taejon. He would have begged for mercy and been killed by the enemy in full view of his own contemptuous comrades.
Sergeant Weinel quickly regained his composure, nodding while Potter explained how the evidence they were gathering suggested that the North Koreans had begun a coordinated effort to kill POWs, in numerous locations, on the day the sergeant’s group was slaughtered. “It had to be a command order rather than a prison order,” the senator reasoned. He was especially interested in the timing of a visit to the prison by a North Korean higher-up, a propaganda speaker, shortly before the massacre.
One could argue that a cover-up of the atrocities extended all the way to the Soviet Union—and beyond. Just yesterday, Vishinsky, the Russians’ UN ambassador, had declared with a theatrical yawn, and considerable support, that the United States’ heavily documented report on war crimes was just fantasy. But, Potter insisted, the particulars with which Sergeant Weinel and the other men were now harrowing the Senate proved otherwise. “When a Red Chinese nurse cuts off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears, without benefit of anesthesia, and wraps the wounds in a newspaper, this makes a liar out of Vishinsky.”
In the row of chairs behind the committee, Tommy McIntyre leaned over to Tim and whispered, “Charlie sounds half like a senator today. Too bad his luck’s not a little dumber.” H
e pointed to the dearth of press at the back of the room. No television cameras, and only half as many reporters as would be there ordinarily: a strike by photo engravers had shut down the New York papers. McCarthy, Tommy had explained, was relieved that a break in the Fort Monmouth hearings should be occurring while there were no headlines to be had in Manhattan. The chairman, present here today and all modesty, had told newsmen, “It’s Charlie’s hearing,” when he entered the Caucus Room this morning. “He’s been a one-man task force on this important issue.”
Seeing him now in half profile, Tim could sense McCarthy’s boredom with the whole undertaking, this bit of pro bono work where the witnesses were praised instead of pilloried. As a display of his supposed confidence in the Michigan senator, McCarthy had told the reporters that Potter was free to disagree with his own approach to the POW issue, which involved getting tough on any country still trading with Red China, including Britain. “I myself believe it’s time to stop sending perfumed notes to our supposed allies,” he’d said, repeating a choice image from his pre-Thanksgiving speech.
Tim had hoped to see Cecil Holland from the Star here this morning, but the day’s real action was over at the White House, where at a news conference Ike would—or would not—back up Dulles’s own rebuttal of McCarthy’s speech. There was also, here in the Caucus Room, no sign of Roy Cohn, who doubtless thought the hearings a digression beneath his notice. Even Robert Jones, Potter’s own staffer, had gone to get a haircut in the Senate barbershop. Well, Tim would at least be able to tell Uncle Frank that he’d once more seen McCarthy, albeit the back of his head.
After a Pfc’s testimony about a chaplain who’d been shot in the back while giving the last rites, the hearing was recessed for lunch. Tim had to do without eating, since he’d been assigned to prepare the witnesses’ travel vouchers in the committee’s office space down the hall. He’d hand them out once the men had had their meal and turned in their receipts. But before he left the Caucus Room he walked up to Sergeant Weinel to shake his hand and say thank you—not just for his testimony, he hoped the man would understand, but for what he’d endured in Korea. As Weinel mumbled, “You’re welcome,” Tim noted a smirk on the face of a reporter witnessing the exchange, and he wondered if he’d violated some protocol. When the newsman began to shake his head in what looked like knowing disgust, Tim felt something angry flare up inside himself. “What did I do wrong?” he asked the reporter, trying to make it sound like a genuine request for information. But his emotions were running high, and he found it hard to keep the edge out of his voice. “I’m Timothy Laughlin,” he added, extending his hand without a smile.
“Kenneth Woodforde, The Nation,” responded the reporter, whose facial expression, beneath a lot of curly auburn hair, had turned almost pitying. “Tell me, fella, don’t you think these guys are just as much on display here as they were in those Korean villages?”
Tim looked at him blankly. “No, of course I don’t.”
“Well, guess again, buddy boy. They’re trotting out these fresh-faced farm kids—victims of big bad communism—to inflame support for the committee’s real work.”
“Which is?”
“A gigantic domestic purge.”
“You don’t think these soldiers suffered?” asked Tim. At the start of the hearing, General Ridgway himself had testified that there was no precedent for the kind of atrocities being described.
“War is hell,” said Woodforde, with even more sarcasm than before. “Bad things happen. So do exaggerations and outright lies.”
“You sound like Vishinsky,” said Tim, who immediately wondered if the insult wasn’t beyond the pale.
“Well, I’d rather have worked for his Joe than for your Joe.”
Tim was about to say “I work for Senator Potter,” but Woodforde had already walked away. So he stood for a moment by himself, in silence, outraged over the idea that he should be ashamed to serve McCarthy, however indirectly.
He looked at Sergeant Weinel, now near the exit, and thought of him trying to breathe through the dirt and the corpses while pretending to be one of them.
Down the corridor, inside the committee’s workroom, Tim found that Robert Jones, freshly shorn, had taken a seat next to Roy Cohn, who was now delivering an agitated monologue into a telephone.
“Laughlin!” called out Jones. “Which one of those fellows who testified is from Maine?”
Tim consulted his clipboard and found the name of the private from Augusta whose pus-filled arm had been slammed with a North Korean’s rifle butt on the march to Taejon.
“Do not,” said Jones, “repeat—do not—allow Margaret Chase Smith to get her picture taken with him. This afternoon, if the kid gets called to her office, I don’t care what you do—take him to look at the Declaration of Independence or the White House Christmas tree—but do not let her pose near him.”
Tim nodded, but this whole tough-guy marching order sounded so much like an imitation of Cohn imitating McCarthy that he had trouble believing Jones could be fully serious.
Cohn himself continued shouting into the phone: “Listen, Adams. You’re double-crossing me for the last time! You told me that Dave would be assigned back to Manhattan after he’d finished his eight weeks of basic. Yes, you did, goddammit! And now you go back on your word and try to make him eat shit!” Pointlessly cupping the receiver’s mouthpiece against his ever-rising volume, the committee’s chief counsel declared: “If you don’t get Stevens to straighten this out, Joe and I are going to wreck the goddamn army! Yes, that’s exactly what I said, and it’s a promise!”
Further upset, Tim went over to the table with the travel vouchers, amazed at the way Cohn and Jones seemed to think they could treat the army, as if it were some crooked dry cleaner down the street. After all, it was the army, with its million Private Garritys from Augusta, that was actually killing Communists and being killed by them. Still, Tim’s anger toward the two staffers couldn’t approach what he was even now feeling for smirking Kenneth Woodforde, who didn’t seem to think the reds ever killed anyone at all.
Tommy McIntyre approached Tim’s table in a grand mood. “It seems that for all the ordure Private Schine’s been ingesting, he’s so far had four weekend and five weeknight passes. Good thing he wears a uniform. Otherwise he might not know he was in the army at all.”
Tim was too agitated to remember who Private Schine even was. Half the time he didn’t grasp what Tommy was saying, let alone who really employed him and to what end. He didn’t know why Woodforde should be one of the anti-anticommunists, as they were now called, and he couldn’t be sure McCarthy, Cohn, and Jones wouldn’t end up creating more of them. And he still could not understand why, even with the New York strike, there hadn’t been more press in the Caucus Room this morning. There was a war on, for God’s sake, between good and evil, regardless of whether Woodforde thought so, or even if he believed that each of those values had been ascribed to the wrong side.
“Oh, god-fucking-dammit!” Tim heard his own voice flying out of him when the heavy-duty stapler caught the tip of his thumb.
McIntyre and Mrs. Watt, the committee’s chief clerk, began to laugh, mistaking his uncharcteristic profanity for exasperation over some clerical error. Cohn, ranting through another phone call, didn’t even turn his head. Dizzy with pain, Tim held his tongue against further outburst; he wanted only for Hawkins to be here and to take hold of him, the way he had when Tim had stubbed his toe one night in the apartment on I Street.
“Jaysus,” said Tommy, realizing the actual situation. “You’re bleeding, kid.”
“I’m okay.” But he wasn’t. He was a fool. Cowardly, and clumsy to boot. I never heard one man ask for mercy. Out of that many men, nobody cracked.
Mrs. Watt, also apologetic, now hovered over him.
“I’ll get him patched up,” said Tommy.
On their way to the nurse, his thumb wrapped in Tommy’s handkerchief, Tim recognized Senator Hunt, the Wyoming Democrat whose son had bee
n convicted of sexual solicitation. Tommy remained unusually quiet until the man passed and the two of them reached the elevators. “Timothy,” he then asked, “have you got a girlfriend?”
Annoyed by the pain in his hand, and now by this question, Tim answered without suppressing the edge in his voice: “No, Mr. McIntyre, I don’t.”
Tommy threw an arm over his shoulder. “Before the coming shitstorm’s over, you may want to get yourself one.”
CHAPTER TEN
December 19, 1953
Thruston Morton wished Jerry Baumeister a Merry Christmas. He shook his hand while propelling his own six-foot-two frame and pretty wife, Belle, a few inches farther into Mary Johnson’s apartment. He also patted the heads of Jerry’s two girls, who stood politely in red velvet holiday skirts that their mother had made for them.
Watching from her kitchen, Mary took his skillful progress as confirmation of the rumors that Mr. Morton did indeed want to get back into elective politics with a Senate run from Kentucky in 1956. The bureau chief did not look like a man who had lately received any troubling phone calls, from Senator Fulbright or anybody else. He certainly didn’t appear to know that the man he was greeting had recently been discharged from his own department.
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