After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  A car whizzed by us on the left. Scheffer said, “He’s really going,” Liddy mentioned that in some states, Pennsylvania for example, there are signs reading Keep Right Except to Pass. Scheffer nodded, approvingly. He returned to the subject of the Department of Transportation. “Diesel truck races are now becoming very popular,” he said. “Sometimes, of course, you get so much torque that the right-front tires blow. Because of the heat and the weight. Now, Joan Claybrook has done everything in her power to stop those races.” No one said anything. “Well, all right. But can you imagine, she came out to one of our conventions. And she brought us a Department of Transportation film called Underride. Its message was, You’re all potential killers and murderers. I mean, can you imagine? These guys know their profession. They have families. She brings them this audiovisual aid for kids.” He dismissed as government propaganda, too, the request that Americans, as an act of patriotic energy conservation, drive less this summer. “We have research proving,” he said, “that you use less fuel on a camping trip in the car with your whole family of four than you would have used if you’d spent your entire vacation at home.” Suddenly, he turned to Liddy and asked him what reaction there had been to him across the country. “Most people are favorable. Not all, of course,” Liddy said. “But most Americans, let’s face it, do not like a snitch.”

  Scheffer arrived in Colorado Springs, and pulled into the driveway of the Four Seasons Motel. Most of the parking lot was covered by a circus tent, which contained equipment of interest to truckers. The rest was covered with vans and rigs of every size. Scheffer pointed to a converted city bus, with signs reading Overdrive, Honk If You Want to Save the American Dream, Truckers for Free Enterprise, etc. Scheffer had told us that, when the association had inquired of the Four Seasons whether the truckers might hold this year’s convention there, the motel’s management had written, as managements in such situations customarily do, to the site of last year’s convention, a motel in Nashville, to ask what sort of guests these independent truckers were. “They told us Nashville’s recommendation said ours was the best convention they’d ever had,” Scheffer said. From the minute we entered the lobby, it became clear why this might be true. The convention looked like the sweetest-natured, best-mannered, grave, friendly, strong, and yet highly varied large group of Americans I had ever seen. There were few blacks, and I saw no Asian or Spanish-Americans. Most of the men present had at one time been Teamsters, when the Independent Truckers Association was not yet strong enough to make it possible for them not to be. Most of the women, including the secretaries and copy editors of Overdrive, had at one time been, or still were, truckers. And the financial and regulatory difficulties which the Independents have faced in recent years made it remarkable that so wide a variety of owner-drivers should still have the time, the money, and the tenacity to attend a convention of this sort, or even to exist. They did not drink much—I never saw more than three people in the bar. So they could not have been desirable guests in that big-spender sense. But I remembered a hotel detective in New York, saying that, of all conventions, hotels most dread associations of psychologists or psychiatrists, who are forever hiring prostitutes, male or female, and refusing to pay in full, or having their wallets stolen, or getting hurt, or otherwise becoming involved with the police. The truckers, from one small, frail driver who was nearly ninety, to the many couples, with or without well-behaved but animated children, spent their money in the restaurant and coffee shop. Teenage sons and daughters, when they were not in the pool or at the Ping-Pong table, spent their change in a little gallery of pinball machines. And there was nothing of even Shriner-level mischief in anyone at all.

  At the reception desk, Scheffer detached a walkie-talkie from his belt and, speaking into it, asked where Michael Parkhurst, president of Overdrive and the Independent Truckers Association, was. A voice said, “He’s right here.” Scheffer said, “But I don’t know where ‘here’ is.” There was a little static. Then, the voice said that Parkhurst would meet Scheffer and the Liddys in the Liddys’ room. The Liddys’ room turned out to be a duplex, with a bar on which there was Scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, Seven-Up, Coca-Cola, a bouquet of flowers, and a bottle of champagne, on ice. There was also, rolled up, a large poster, with a red circle crossed by a diagonal red bar, which to drivers all over the world means No Entry, superimposed on a picture of a peanut. The Liddys laughed. “We also have one of Khomeini,” Scheffer said. Michael Parkhurst came in, a large, dark-haired man in his late forties, who looked as though he might have spent his adult years, as he has, in fact, spent them, giving the Teamster leadership their first serious opposition. He apologized at once to Liddy. Congressman Crane, it seemed, had refused to speak at tomorrow’s barbecue if Liddy was going to speak there. “I guess he’s one of those who thinks once you’ve put nail polish on your nails, it never comes off,” he said. But that, in his view, was the congressman’s problem. Liddy was scheduled to speak then, and could do so if he liked. “I don’t want to make it difficult for you,” Liddy said. “Whatever is easiest for you. I don’t want to cause you any problem.” Then, as Parkhurst continued, rather dourly, to discuss Congressman Crane’s objections, Liddy said, “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I don’t mind making him uncomfortable.” In the end, it was decided that Crane would speak, then leave if he liked when Liddy spoke. Liddy asked how accurate the scheduling would be. “We’re always right on the money where time is concerned,” Scheffer said. Parkhurst said he had not checked the local bookstores, to see whether they had copies of Liddy’s book. “I didn’t come out here, to your convention, to sell my book,” Liddy said.

  It was 7:45 P.M. At eight, inside the motel’s only ballroom, there was to be an Ice Cream Parlor, sponsored by the Detroit Diesel Company. Just outside the ballroom, the letters ITA (for Independent Truckers of America) were sculptured in ice. A couple were photographing their baby in front of the letters. Behind them, about two hundred truckers, of all ages, with many children, waited for the doors to open. Many of the adults, and most of the children, were holding the strings of pink balloons. Promptly at eight, the doors did open. People filed in, served themselves with many flavors of ice cream from two large tables, then sat down at small round tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. When the little tables were filled, people sat on the floor. Congressman Rousselot was scheduled to speak at nine. The congressman’s legs are severely crippled. At the request of his administrative assistant, a desk had been placed in front of the microphone at which the congressman would stand. Shortly before nine, the congressman looked around the ballroom. He asked that the desk be taken away. He removed his suit jacket and his tie. “These are my kind of people,” he said, and hobbled to the microphone. He spoke for more than an hour. He mentioned a small businessman’s proposal to HUD for the use of a piece of real estate. HUD had replied that he would require the approval of twenty-eight separate agencies. HUD had also pointed out that he had not, as required, traced the deed of his property (which was located several miles outside Baton Rouge) back beyond the year 1803. The businessman had replied in turn, “Gentlemen: I was unaware that any educated man did not know that 1803 was the date of the Louisiana Purchase.” He then went on to trace title to the King of France, to the Indians, to Jesus, and to God, adding, “I hope you’re satisfied.” The congressman spoke of over-regulation by the federal government, of the country drifting toward “dictatorship by bureaucracy.” He spoke of the federal food stamp program, which had been intended to be small, local, addressed to the rural poor, and which had burgeoned from 440,000 recipients in its first year to 22 million in fiscal 1979. He said he wanted to “get the federal government out of your pockets, and off your backs,” and so forth. He said, “Thank you for what you do. For your posters and your bumper stickers. You do more good than you might think.” He asked them to “educate,” by which he meant lobby, or put pressure on, their congressmen. He mentioned that contractors had managed to “reeducate” Congress i
n the matter of common situs picketing, when the unions thought they had permanently “educated” it to the opposite effect.

  When the questions came, their tone was earnest, often sad. Could he help reduce the excise tax on trucks and parts? He hadn’t known there was such a tax, but “I’ll vote for any tax cuts any time, at the federal level.” A questioner said that, as an American, he had always thought and spoken in terms of inches, feet, yards, pounds. Now, on account of “the multinations and the scientific community,” who wanted a uniform worldwide system for their own convenience, he was forced to undergo the cost of converting to the metric system. “Congressman,” the trucker concluded, “are they going to take our language away from us next?” Rousselot replied that he understood that the conversion from pounds, feet, inches, etc., to the metric system was “voluntary.” “How can it be voluntary,” another trucker asked, “if it’s on the road signs of the interstate?” The congressman said that, since he normally traveled by plane, he was not overly familiar with the interstate highway system. He would look into the matter. When the questions were over, he received a standing ovation. It was clear that the Independents were, as he had thought, “his kind of people.” It was also clear that he had not known much about them before.

  After the Ice Cream Parlor closed, the Liddys, Scheffer, and I, had hamburgers in the coffee shop, with Walda Abbott, a woman from Los Angeles, in her middle thirties, who is the attorney for the Association of Independent Truckers of America. “Walda,” a man named Jack Hurlbutt said, from an adjoining table, “if there are a hundred thousand of us, how come we can’t get every one of us in the country together, and get some of the deregulation that we want?” “It’s because they’re Independents, Jack,” Ms. Abbott said. “It’s just the nature of the beast.” Ms. Abbott turned out to have lived for six years in Singapore, where she had worked on a publishing venture with an attorney I had met when he was still working for the civil rights movement in the South. I asked her how on earth she had happened to become the attorney for the ITA. She and Parkhurst and Scheffer, she said, had known one another when they were growing up in Pittsburgh. She had gone to law school. Scheffer had gone to engineering school, then became a Teamster. Parkhurst had become a Teamster, then founded the ITA. When she had come back from Singapore, where she had gone more or less for the sake of travel, Parkhurst and Scheffer had hired her. That was all. The nearly ninety-year-old trucker walked by. Liddy asked what routes he drove. Scheffer said he hauled fruits and vegetables from Florida to Hunts Point Market, in New York.

  The Liddys and I knew Hunts Point, the New York equivalent, in the South Bronx, of Les Halles, though considerably rougher. Trucks of food arrive and depart all night long. Just outside the market, in winter, little bands of people warm themselves over fires in steel drums. There are often fights, inside the market and on its perimeter, in spite of policemen stationed at various checkpoints. Scheffer asked whether we had seen the “lumpers.” We had not, did not even know what they were. Scheffer said that the regulations regarding lumpers were among the costly impositions that Independents, and only they, are required to bear. To load or unload his truck, an Independent is required to employ a lumper, forty dollars to load, forty dollars to unload. Moreover, under a tax regulation which Teamster and ICC-licensed carrier lobbyists had pushed through Congress, the IRS does not permit Independents to take a deduction for the use of lumpers. It falls not, as might have been expected, under the deduction for “ordinary and necessary business expenses” but under the “No Deduction for Casual Labor Rule.” One night, several years ago, Scheffer, wanting to avoid the eighty-dollar expense, had unloaded and reloaded his own truck. As he drove through the Hunts Point exit, he was shot. He showed us the scar on his arm. No policeman had moved to help him. As we went off to our rooms, the Liddys asked where they might buy some Overdrive T-shirts, like the ones some teenagers were wearing in the hall. The next day, Liddy gave yet another, the best, of his stem-winders. He received a standing ovation far longer than Congressman Rousselot’s. Congressman Crane received polite applause.

  The last week in August, the Liddy’s offer on the Alan Drury house was definitely accepted. In the first days of September, the issue of Playboy with the Liddy interview appeared. The interviewer, who had interviewed Liddy in sessions lasting part of each of three days, wrote that he had “spent the better part of ten days with him.” Since Liddy had taped the conversations as the interviewer was taping them, and since he had asked to see the transcripts, the interviewer had sent him the transcripts, for his approval. Liddy had been surprised to find not only that his answers were changed, and that other answers, which he had never given, were attributed to him, but that even many of the questions, which both real and invented answers and even poorly edited sections of Will were set as replies to, had been made up as well. He had been told to make what corrections he liked. He edited out only things that he had not only never said but would never conceivably say, references to “my brutal captors” in the D.C. jail, for example, or sentences like “I have always lived on the razor’s edge.” He also corrected factual errors. West Cornwall, New Jersey, he pointed out, for example, is not and never was “on the Hudson River.” He cut out a few passages from his book, which had been misquoted and used as his answers, in conversation, to questions that had never been put and with which they had nothing to do. The interviewer had thanked him for all these corrections, the one about the geographical location of West Cornwall, New Jersey, along with the rest.

  In the issue of Playboy that appeared on the stands, not a single one of the corrections was made. Liddy still has his tapes. In one of his earliest radio interviews, he had said, concerning the notion of celebrity, “To some people, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Liza Minnelli or the Son of Sam.” In another, he had said, to an interviewer whom he liked, and who had asked him whether, honestly, he had no remaining fear, “Maybe. The fear of boredom.” But when, with the tapes in his possession, he read the issue of Playboy, he seemed, only for a moment but for the first time since I have known him, somewhat depressed, and a bit demoralized.

  1980

  BUT OHIO. WELL, I GUESS THAT’S ONE STATE WHERE THEY ELECT TO LOCK AND LOAD

  THE NATIONAL GUARD

  AT SIX o’clock one recent Saturday morning, a Karmann Ghia and several other civilian vehicles were parked in the rain outside the Seventh Regiment Armory, at Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. Inside, several uniformed young men were rushing about carrying duffel bags down the carpeted stairs and along wood-paneled corridors to the huge central arena of the armory, where several military vehicles were preparing to move out. A jeep carrying a 105-mm. recoilless rifle was being loaded onto a carrier, and men were climbing into other jeeps and trucks. The First Battalion of the 107th Infantry (New York National Guard) was preparing to join two battalions from the armory at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, one battalion from the armory at Thirty-fourth and Park, and units from armories in Brooklyn, Long Island, Flushing, and (for some organizational reason) Pennsylvania, to undergo—as the Forty-second (Rainbow) Division of the New York National Guard—their two weeks of summer training at Camp Drum. Camp Drum itself, which is in upstate New York, was regarded as too strenuous a trip for a single day, so after rest stops at a racetrack in Goshen and at Whitney Point, the convoy would bivouac just one night at the state fairgrounds in Syracuse. “Inherent in our organization,” said Colonel Dominic Pellicio about the Guard convoy’s capacity to bivouac, “is an ability to stay out and eat.”

  Kitchen trucks had set out for Syracuse an hour earlier. To avoid traveling on the Sabbath, an Orthodox Jewish chaplain had gone up the day before. Colonel Pellicio (commander of New York City’s Guard units, senior brigade commander during the March postal strike and in his civilian life a contractor) greeted some of his men (another chaplain, a law student, a resident in urology) and made a last-minute check of a long list of hospitals along the convoy’s route. “You know, these m
en drive these vehicles maybe three, four times a year,” he said. “In the rain it can be very dangerous.” Then, after the first units of jeeps and trucks had left, he set out in his military sedan (complete with a siren, which he did not use) into the rain on Lexington Avenue, across Central Park at Sixty-fifth Street, and onto the West Side Highway toward a “marshaling point” in Teterboro, New Jersey. The reason the colonel had chosen Teterboro, which is not on the most direct route to upstate New York, was to avoid “the traffic density on the New York Thruway” and to “give my men some experience” on a new convoy route to Camp Drum.

  There were Guardsmen posted to wave directions at many intersections and at all bridges and toll booths on the way to New Jersey Route 17. The first units arrived on schedule, at 0734 hours, at the marshaling area—a parking lot across from the Teterboro Airport. But by 0816 hours, the colonel learned, two vehicles were already lost (one broke down, one was hit by a station wagon), and more would be lost, with maintenance problems, along the way. Vehicles continued for three hours, desultorily, to arrive at the marshaling area. Meanwhile, the men smoked, caught some sleep in the trucks, or ate sandwiches from the first of their several box lunches. Most were armed with M-1 rifles, while “key” men carried pistols, and one (like Colonel Pellicio himself, an older man and a veteran of World War II) wore a bayonet in a camouflaged sheath at his waist. A lot of the younger men wore mustaches. Maneuvers at Camp Drum, the colonel said, would consist mainly in borrowing a hundred or two hundred tanks, using them, and, at the end of the two weeks, returning them to the regular army. Last summer, a Guardsman had knocked himself unconscious falling off a tank the first day. “But our main concern is the safety of the men in these vehicles,” the colonel said. “Getting them up to camp is always the biggest problem.” The weather was clearing a bit, and two civilians drove up safely enough, at 0927 hours, to the Teterboro Airport. “Hey,” one of them said as they passed the marshaling area. “Will you look at them weekend soldiers.”