The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “What did it pay?” Donlon asked. They crossed through a formal library, softly lit and silent as a mortuary. A small, white-haired figure was bent over a writing desk. He didn’t look up.

  “Didn’t. Threw a shoe and the jock pulled her up. Threw it clean over the grandstand. Jock’s name was Joquita, Chicata, something like that. A real banana. He don’t go to Pimlico anymore. I go up to Charles Town by myself, Jennifer and me sometimes. Those mountain Baptists bet the shit out of the short odds, hammer them right in the ground. You’re better off playing bingo at a church supper. You a betting man, Mr. Wilson?”

  He inspected Wilson with cool precision as they reached the door at the end of the library.

  “Not much.”

  “The quiet life,” he said, the blue eyes lingering on Wilson’s gray suit, the soft white shirt with the button-down collar, and the solid woolen tie. “Keep it up,” he murmured with quiet approval. “He’s in here, just up from the barn.”

  He opened the door. Wilson followed Donlon into a large, disorderly study. Books and book cartons were strewn everywhere. Angus McVey was seated on a small leather sofa opposite the fireplace, where a low fire blazed beyond the brass fender. He arose to greet them, a tall, whitethatched man in his late seventies, slightly stooped. The blue eyes in the thin wintry face were, for a moment at least, as bright and curious as those of his granddaughter. But then, just as quickly, the curiosity dimmed, the head faltered, and he seemed overcome with confusion. He avoided Wilson’s eyes as he shook his hand and Wilson recognized the symptoms Donlon had described to him.

  He wore a ratty tweed jacket, a faded denim shirt, whipcord trousers whose twill was threadbare at the pockets and knees, and a muddy pair of gum boots whose leather uppers were cracked with age. He’d been removing the latter as they’d entered, his feet carefully positioned on a square of spread newspaper upon which he continued to stand. “Please,” he began in dismay, “sit down, both of you. Have you had lunch? What about a cocktail? Would you like a cocktail? Fletcher, what about a cocktail?” His hands seemed to be trembling, his eyes were flushed. He looked only at Fletcher, no one else.

  “Yes, sir, whatever they’d like,” Fletcher replied calmly.

  “Thanks,” Donlon said, “but we just finished a couple of martinis.”

  McVey misunderstood. “Martinis, then. Two martinis, Fletcher. How do they prefer them, very dry?”

  He stood in front of the leather couch on a piece of spread newspaper like a scolded schoolboy or a muddy spaniel, a millionaire flushed with an amateur bartender’s anxieties as he tried to accommodate his two guests; and Wilson identified in the distraught recluse everything Donlon had warned him about—the morbid sensitivity, the horror of public appearances, and the initial excruciating discomfort among strangers, a man so pathetically isolated within himself that the act of performing some small inconsequential duty, even in the sanctuary of his own study, seemed to bring him agony. But it would pass, Donlon had said. Just be patient and blind.

  “I wouldn’t mind coffee,” Wilson suggested. “If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Coffee? Are you sure?” McVey looked to Fletcher for help.

  “No trouble at all,” Fletcher said, as calmly as before. The serene, old-fashioned face held the wisdom of some universal valet, omniscient and indestructible.

  “Three coffees, then,” McVey decided. “Yes, three.”

  Fletcher nodded and went out.

  Donlon talked quietly, described their drive up, discussed Wilson’s interest in finding a farm, and told of Betsy’s dislike for rural life. Wilson joined in after a few minutes. McVey listened in silence, like an eavesdropper. Fletcher returned with a pair of sheepskin slippers, which he put on the floor next to McVey’s gray-stockinged feet. Then he picked up the gum boots, rolled up the newspaper, and silently withdrew.

  “She teaches school, you say?” McVey ventured at last. “Your wife teaches school? Very difficult these days, isn’t it?” His hand trembled visibly as he searched the table next to him for his reading glasses.

  “Yes, it is,” Wilson said, looking away. The study was lined with bookshelves. The wooden filing cabinets, the tables, and the two antique writing desks were heaped with books. A few were new but most were old, bound three and four together by cord, the seams split, the morocco, calf, and buckram bindings beginning to disintegrate. There were also manuscripts, bundles of old journals, back issues of newspapers, and a few oddly named scholarly quarterlies Wilson had never heard of.

  As the moments passed, Angus McVey’s tremors seemed to subside as he described the library he’d recently purchased from a dead history professor’s estate. He’d taught at Johns Hopkins, but evidently left his best thoughts in the classroom. There was no marginalia among the old volumes, not a word, not an idle thought. He asked Wilson about his experiences at the Department of Justice and on various Senate committees. Wilson found himself talking about his decision to leave, something he’d discussed with no one, not even Betsy.

  Fletcher brought the silver coffee service and placed it on a brocaded footstool. McVey sat up absentmindedly, his eyes on the tray. “No biscuits, Fletcher?” He seemed disappointed, an invalid denied his afternoon sweet, but then apologized. “I’m sorry; what you’re saying interests me very much. Please continue.”

  Even Donlon seemed intrigued by what he’d heard. “Go on, Haven; I’ve never heard this.”

  “There’s nothing unusual about it,” Wilson said. “It happens to everyone sooner or later. It’s just that what you’re doing no longer has any relevance at all to any world you can recognize.”

  He’d told them that the seed had probably been planted on a dark, blustery afternoon when he’d accompanied two senators from the Senate Intelligence Committee to a secret briefing by the Afghan special action group in the old Executive Office Building across from the White House. By then, late in the Carter administration’s only term, its foreign policy objectives seemed in total disarray. After Iran and Afghanistan, it was obvious to him that a new beginning had to be made. The covert special action deliberations had grown more and more unreal, leading them further than ever from the flesh-and-blood national landscapes where these disasters had their root causes to the more and more specious world of the Washington strategy session.

  On that dark afternoon almost ten months after the Afghan invasion, he and the two senators had been informed of the most recent punitive measures being cooked up for the Soviets as part of the National Security Council’s policy of demonstrating to Moscow that its Afghan initiative couldn’t remain cost-free. Afghanistan had mountains, deserts, xenophobic tribesmen and rebellious Muslim fanatics; yet to the NSC briefers sitting about the long oak table that day, Moscow’s Afghan adventure might have taken place on the moon, in a wholly friction-free environment in which the Soviets were immune to any of the hazards of the occupying power except for the gimmicks that handful of bureaucrats was plotting.

  The briefing was chaired by a senior NSC deputy, a gray-haired academic and theoretician whom Wilson had seen transformed over three years from a rumpled, fussy, indecisive meddler into a frantic activist and busybody, a sorcerer’s apprentice, obsessed by the necromancy of the covert assets he controlled. So Wilson had sat there on yet another afternoon, listening to the deputy describe the latest covert scenarios to convince the two senators of the integrity of Carter’s aggressive new line toward the Soviets—orchestrating Pakistani military help here, Egyptian gun and ammo support there, Saudi financing for this operation, European support for that, all of them picayunish, irrelevant, and inane, worthy of some third world mediocrity, like the old Savak, but not of the U.S., whose NSC staffers seemed inspired most of all by some squalid imitation of the old Kennedy machismo, but they were two decades too late. Years earlier they could command as much as seventy percent of the industrial world’s assets, invoke allegiances, orchestrate alliances, and command loyalties at the drop of a hat. Now they were reduced to Ha
lloween night high jinks to harass the Soviets. They could no longer command the political, financial, or moral assets to play the Great Game, but were as bankrupt as Chrysler, cooking up dollar rebates to buy the Pakistanis, promotional hardware to bring in the Egyptians, and Awacs planes to lure in the Saudis. What would George Marshall have thought? It was obvious. Their era had passed.

  Their operations were only gimmicks, quick fixes, like the disastrous Iran rescue mission. That, too, had just been a technical production, staffed out by a small clique of well-intending military experts from the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon, those new soldier-technicians who inhabited a kind of finite, self-contained, dust-free research cell that might be useful in replicating the environmental vacuums of space for NASA but weren’t the kind of laboratories where the E. coli of the political world were to be found. The fine dust sent up by the storm in the Iranian desert had found those flaws quickly enough.

  So he’d decided to leave. There was nothing complicated or unusual about his decision. It was a matter of choosing the appropriate time. The discussion he had heard that blustery afternoon in the EOB had merely crystallized an uneasiness that had been growing for years. The gimmicks they had described that day, like the ones you could read about today, no longer represented answers to the problems they faced but were an escape from them, the stategies of weakness or cowardice disguised as strength. It was as simple as that.

  Wilson had spoken too much and now he regretted it. He finished his coffee, which had grown cold.

  “Your own experience could be quite helpful to us,” McVey said finally. “The Center, as you may have heard, is in a dreadful state.”

  “The Center?” Wilson asked.

  “Yes; didn’t Ed tell you?”

  Fletcher filled his coffee cup again.

  “It’s what Angus wants to talk to you about,” Donlon said. “Helping him reorganize the Center down in Foggy Bottom.”

  “As I said, it’s in terrible shape,” McVey added. “It seems to have gotten away from us.”

  Wilson didn’t have a chance to reply. Fletcher’s cardamom-scented breath breathed against his ear.

  “Was it milk or sugar, sir?” he asked with renewed respect.

  5.

  In 1975, Wilson had heard that someone had offered the Nixon library fund a million dollars if the ex-President would consent to psychoanalysis within fifteen months of his departure from office. The offer had reportedly been conveyed through a former White House aide who’d returned with Nixon to San Clemente after those final disastrous days. The rumor reached Wilson through a senior NSC staff member, over lunch in the White House mess. He’d given it little notice at the time and supposed it another bit of apocrypha dug up from the Watergate wallow, where a few journalists were still mucking about. Within a month the rumor had reached the Washington press corps, which livened it up a bit and fleshed out the details.

  According to one press account, the million dollar offer had been made by an obscure little policy research institute hidden away in a handful of dowdy Victorian residences in Washington’s Foggy Bottom between George Washington University and the Watergate. Endowed privately in the late forties and the recipient of numerous government grants and research contracts since, the institute was called the Center for Contemporary Studies, and consisted of a small permanent staff and a handful of visiting scholars and annual fellows pursuing research projects funded by the government, by universities upon occasion, and, less frequently, by private corporations. There was nothing unusual about the Center’s activities. A dozen similar policy and research institutes were scattered in and about Washington—most of them larger. What kept them from public attention wasn’t so much the sensitivity of a few projects but the banality of the remainder, much of which was the usual technical rubbish that various patrons, most often government agencies, are willing to pay large sums of money in sponsoring. Like federal bureaucrats, academic scholars are often uneasy about their work-in-progress, most of which is utterly irrelevant, and if they can’t conceal them by a Secret or Confidential stamp, an impenetrable title will do. A lot of the Center’s work was of this nature.

  The Nixon story gave the media the chance to invade the Center’s privacy. What they found was an obscure caucus of reclusive scholars, dusty offices, dark corridors, and smelly laboratories, all of which seemed slightly subversive. The inquiries were poorly handled by the Center’s director and his deputy. The former was an aging Russian specialist, who denied any knowledge of the Nixon offer. A young reporter discovered that he’d worked for the OSS during the war and was subsequently a CIA office director. After digging about for two months, he credited him with an OSS plan, conceived during World War II, to infest the Japanese atoll of Iwo Jima in the Pacific with twenty thousand rabid fruit bats in lieu of the Marine invasion that subsequently cost so many lives. He was also revealed to be the architect of a CIA effort to clandestinely infect the Russian wheatfields of the Ukraine with a species of wheat-stem sawfly immune to parasites and insecticides. The bugs were to be carried to the Soviet granary by the prevailing seasonal winds from the Black Sea launch area. In a letter to the newspaper that carried the story, the director denied both charges, but in such unfortunate detail—the flora and fauna of Iwo Jima, a meteorological description of the Ukraine in the months before harvesting, and the morphology of the wheat-stem sawfly—that any reader curious enough to plod through the text would have concluded that the science of the denial was so much more encyclopedic than the accusation that both propositions had obviously received detailed high-level consideration.

  The deputy director was equally inept. In an interview with a newspaperman, he denied that the million-dollar offer had been made to the Nixon library fund. He was a pipe smoker, who happened to be breaking in a new pipe that day. While he lit and relit it, he also made an excellent case for Nixon’s psychoanalysis and ended by urging that the ex-President come forward immediately, for posterity’s sake, to deliver himself to a well-known California psychiatrist. MAKE A CLEAN BREAST OF IT, DICK! was the banner line, but what the reporter failed to tell his readers was that the deputy was a psychohistorian and a scholar of the neuroses of leadership, Republican or Democrat, Russian, French, Israeli, or American. Most readers concluded that the Center, like many other Nixon critics, was engaged in a deliberate campaign of harassment and persecution of the former President through the public suggestion that he badly needed clinical help.

  The press reports had two consequences. A political holdover in the Ford White House ordered an executive review of all government contracts held by the Center, and the veil of anonymity was lifted from the Center’s founder and chief patron, Angus McVey.

  He was described by one Sunday supplement writer as an eccentric millionaire and horseman who’d long been a heavy contributor to the Democratic party and to various left-wing causes, a sort of liberal equipoise to the many fruity Texas tycoons and their right-wing billions, but a naïf himself who subsidized the Center and its mercenary scholars to cut the canvas of history to his own baroque design. American wealth had traditionally bought up European artworks and resettled them in mausoleums which bore their family names and had become national shrines; why not history as well? The Sunday supplement writer offered two anecdotal insights into the character of the Center and its founder. One was an original letterhead from 1949 which paraphrased below the masthead a Burckhardt quotation suggesting that history was pathological in nature. The second was a comment by the director of another Washington policy institute, of contrasting views, claiming that neither McVey nor his Center was taken seriously by more sophisticated policy groups, such as his own, which referred to the Center as the History Is Bunk Club.

  The press accounts were inaccurate. The Center had begun as a serious research institute, well and favorably known by a number of federal agencies. It had been originally funded by Angus McVey in the late forties for the analysis of political behavior, especially that faceless Soviet totalitari
anism confronting the uneasy West across the rubble of Europe. The Center’s work on the Soviet apparatchiki was original and useful, anticipating by a half dozen years the office for the analysis of personality and behavior in the CIA scientific intelligence division, which the Center helped organize and staff. Much of the Center’s original purpose departed with the creation of the latter. By the early sixties, the Center’s contracts with the CIA were negligible and the bulk of its government research contracts came from other executive agencies, most of them for highly specialized behavioral studies.

  In addition, Angus McVey wasn’t the dilettante described by the press. The youngest son of a Nova Scotia-born mining, timber, utilities, and shipping magnate, he was a millionaire several score over, but not a horseman. The Virginia estate had been owned by his second wife, who’d died in the early sixties. He wasn’t an amateur scholar but a professional historian, had taken a doctorate at Harvard, where he’d taught for two painful years before he was forced to resign, victimized by that same morbid affliction which had blighted his youth, devastated his middle years, and finally driven him to the Virginia countryside; which made it physically impossible for him to speak in front of an audience, attend a dinner party with more than a half dozen guests present, mingle in any sort of crowd in which he was recognized, or even chair the annual meeting of the Center’s board of directors. After he’d fled Harvard, he’d gone to Europe to spend two years in analysis, but had ended up working toward a medical degree in Berlin. Those years had helped him understand his affliction but not control it—the facial paralysis, the shriveled vocal cords, the hyperventilation, but most terribly of all the palsied hands and neck, tremors which inevitably produced spasms so grotesque that the Harvard undergraduates who’d witnessed them referred to him as Old Anguish McVey. Many were convinced he was an epileptic. But the hysteria or delirium to which he was prey had no physiological base. It was his struggle to understand those psychic demons within that led him from the dance of history to medicine and finally to psychohistory, two decades before the term passed into popular usage.