Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  And that is just what this Patrick Henry Campaign was—grassroots politics on a national level. Robert and Leslyn had worked many such projects, in Los Angeles, and for the California State Democratic party, always on a local level. This was the first time he and Ginny had worked on a political project together. Robert and Ginny Heinlein worked together as smoothly and as concentratedly as Robert and Leslyn Heinlein had.

  They worked sixteen- and seventeen-hour days for six weeks, handling a very taxing volume of mail, appearing on local television, and giving talks at meetings. Expenses mounted.

  The earliest returns were very encouraging. Lurton Blassingame not only signed the letter and made a useful cash contribution, he showed it to the editors of American Legion Magazine and reported that they might want to give it national exposure in a month or two.34 That could help a great deal.

  The only stiffly unfavorable replies they received, as expected, were from the local group that had sponsored the SANE ad, plus two others—a man who wrote that he was all in favor of freedom but didn’t think he cared to die for it, and a woman who wrote that she “agreed with us in every particular but was unwilling to pay higher taxes for any reason whatsoever.”35

  After an initial burst of approving response, incoming mail slowed to a steady dozen per day. Nevertheless, they could not be even cautiously optimistic: The rest was silence—and expensive silence at that. Some, like Alice Dalgliesh and John Campbell, wrote back agreeing with his positions but refusing to sign the letter. Most simply ignored it. In addition to newspaper ads and (mostly local) speeches, they (Ginny did the donkey work) mailed out several hundred individual appeals to a list that included rocket and missile engineers and a sampling of Naval Academy alumni now in civilian life, many of them Robert’s classmates.

  It was perhaps not entirely surprising that they heard almost nothing from the rocket men: They were under such tight security and such oppressive scrutiny that they were effectively locked down and could not speak freely. But the response from his classmates was disillusioning: Only 8 percent responded at all.

  They would have given it up after a few weeks except for two letters.36 One came from the outgoing chairman of the new Atomic Energy Commission, Admiral Strauss. The other was from Dr. Edward Teller, the inventor of the H-bomb.

  Each of them told us that they knew of no one else anywhere in the country who was trying to organize support for their policies. Strauss wished us good luck in the tired manner of a man who has tried hard and knows that he is whipped; Dr. Teller’s letter was such that you could almost hear a sob in his voice: “Yours is the first one. Yours is the only one. I hope that you will not remain the only one!”37

  There were some other encouraging developments: A group in San Francisco got a modified version of the ad printed in a local paper; General Gruenther wrote, “The United States owes a vote of thanks to Robert and Virginia Heinlein.”38

  Heinlein took every opportunity to speak to groups outside Colorado Springs, as local resources were running dry. An overnight visit with Hermann Deutsch in New Orleans resulted in a very encouraging column publicizing the cause.39 A cold caught in Florida turned into chronic bronchitis and laryngitis, yet he could not put off these requests until he should heal up: He developed a routine of chewing one Aspergum twenty minutes before he was scheduled to speak, and another while he was being introduced carried him through the speeches—but he could not shake the sore throat, and it did not get any better. “[T]he next morning,” he told his brother Rex, “I’m in as bad shape as ever.”40

  Time magazine put a letter out in all their foreign editions—but not the domestic edition. One of the editors of The Saturday Evening Post responded favorably, and Heinlein considered reworking his writing output to concentrate on The Post again and shuffle his book contracts around so that he was placed only with publishers he could rely on.41 He knew he would lose money that way—“but at least I would have the satisfaction of doing business with patriots.”42 Jinny Fowler at Holt had ignored the letter, too:

  … if she had signed I would have moved my juvenile books over to her list; I am staying with Miss Dalgliesh (if I ever write another one) simply because I do not know of a juveniles editor in the trade who is firm on this point—if you know of one, let’s grab our hats and go!43

  But by June it was clear that the struggle was not catching on. The Cold War dynamics played themselves out on the small scale, confirming his realistic estimate of their chances written at the start of the project: “[T]he efforts of two people seem too futile in attempting counter-propaganda to 176,000,000 people who have already been reached by the original propaganda on a thoroughly organized and highly expensive scale.”44

  That coordinated propaganda was working: Late in May, Robert took time off while Ginny kept the campaign going in Colorado Springs to go to Denver for an Air Force–organized Symposium on Manned Flight in Space. “I know now why the Russians beat us into space,” he wrote a furious note to himself. “A panel of learned defeatists—thank God they didn’t advise the Wright Brothers.”45

  The prospect looked bleak. Given that the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev was playing an “A” game—and Eisenhower’s United States was not—the most likely prospect, Heinlein concluded, was not nuclear war, but a prolonged surrender, with America’s nuclear weapons placed under United Nations control, which effectively meant Soviet control. They were left with prospects Heinlein had articulated very early in the campaign:

  I don’t really expect World War III. I think we are going to go under through capitulations, the way Czechoslovakia did. I think we will suspend nuclear weapons testing, in response to “World Opinion,” after this present series this summer—and I don’t think we will ever set off another nuclear explosion. Then, after some years of apparent peace and good will, when we have effectively disarmed, something will happen (be caused) which will really annoy us. When we object, we will be handed an ultimatum—and it will turn out that we no longer have the potential to win. And we will surrender.

  I’ve skipped a lot of stages in the above—but that is the route we have been following. I see no strong prospect that we will change.46

  The Heinleins were not the only ones who thought this way: The phony “missile gap” issue swept the Republicans out of the White House in the 1960 elections, and a few years later President John F. Kennedy did draw a line in the sand—a cordon around Cuba—when the Soviets installed nuclear missiles ninety miles from Florida. That was forthright action for the highest good, both for the United States and the entire world—stakes worth the risk, and prideful enough to suffer, if not to forgive, the Bay of Pigs bungling. But the horrifying foreign policy continued, and it is America’s continuing support of dictators around the world that sowed the desert whirlwind we reap in the Middle East of the twenty-first century.

  As Ginny had predicted, the Heinleins did lose the better part of their friends, not only in Colorado Springs but among Robert’s colleagues in science fiction. Some—Mick McComas and A. P. White—simply dropped him. Others, ditherers such as H. L. Gold and John Campbell, and the pacifists, Robert Bloch and local Colorado Springs artist Lew Tilley, he dropped.47

  They quietly let the campaign lapse, and it ran down of exhaustion. When they zeroed out the accounts, they found their six weeks of effort had put five hundred signatures on President Eisenhower’s desk—at a net cost to them out of pocket (that is, after donations were deducted from expenses) of $1,000. Two 1958 dollars per signature was poor economics in the first place—and even poorer politics when it was producing apparently no results at all: President Eisenhower announced a unilateral cessation of American nuclear testing.

  “If you can think of anything more that we can do, along different and more effective lines, please tell us,” Robert wrote Blassingame. “We are anxious to start working again—but we don’t relish running in circles.”48

  “[A]s an old ward-heeler,” he wrote Hermann Deutsch, “I can see the ble
ak fact that my methods did not work, especially as the movement did not effectively take root elsewhere.”49

  12

  WAITING OUT THE END

  As the Patrick Henry campaign wound down in June 1958, Ginny became ill: She was testing positive for dysentery again—several organisms. Robert recovered from his bronchitis and was only a little “nervy” from exhaustion—which meant a return of his recurrent insomnia. They tried to rest, not going out, not entertaining anyone. Morale was not good.1 Robert had done virtually no writing for more than a month, and the correspondence and business details piled up. Korshak made an absurd offer to let him purchase Shasta’s stock and the printing plates for the three Future History books for $4,000, just about what one of the books had earned in royalties. Heinlein wanted to be shut of Shasta, but not that badly.2 Korshak was still selling secondary rights he didn’t own, despite serious efforts by Blassingame to call a halt to his villainous business practices. In mid-June 1958, Heinlein bluntly told Korshak and his remaining business partner in Shasta, T. E. Dikty,3 that he held off legal proceedings only because he did not want to appear harsh—“But my forbearance has been ill paid; there have been many annoyances in the mean time”: illegal sales continuing even after they had been caught and warned off, a “contra-accounting” scheme that resulted in Robert’s royalties being diverted—

  And now, to top off all these, I learn (as usual, by accident, through subscribing to a British magazine [probably Ted Carnell’s New Worlds]) that the SFBC of England is offering as its July/August 1958 selection something called a “Robert Heinlein Omnibus” published by Sidgwick & Jackson and offered at the preposterous price of 5s. 6d or $.75! I don’t know what it contains; you haven’t told me about it[.]4

  Shasta was keeping all the monies they got by selling rights they didn’t even own.

  International news continued depressing. Sputnik 3 went up, and the press was silent about it. Heinlein fretted about the implications of this news blackout: “… when Russia put up Sputnik #3, the giant one, I followed the papers and the news very closely because I wished to see it.” He had even gone downtown to look at the wire services feeds directly, but found no coverage at all.

  … did the word go out quietly from the White House (Adams, maybe5) to play it down, pay little attention to it, sweep it under the rug … don’t get the peepul stirred up … I find it downright chilling that that thing should be going by overhead, with all that it implies about the future, and no real news about it in the papers.6

  There was too much that was not being talked about, that ought to be shouted from the rooftops: Russian submarines were spotted in offshore international waters almost daily, and nothing was being done about them, nothing at all.7 Earlier Heinlein had expressed his opinion of the administration’s response succinctly, to Alice Dalgliesh: “I can’t figure out whether Mr. Eisenhower is senile or simply stupid and irresolute.”8

  Heinlein was also disturbed, he told Hermann Deutsch, by the silence on the issue of the unknown number of American prisoners being held by China.

  I’ve heard figures running from four to over three thousand. There are some nasty rumors going around that a great many of our soldiers officially listed as “missing in action” in Korea are actually prisoners in China … and that the administration would rather not hear any more about it because they do not intend to do anything about it.9

  When Captain Eugene R. Guild (U.S. Army, Retired) formed a lobbying organization to keep the Korean War POWs alive as a public issue, Robert and Ginny contributed generously to Fighting Homefolks of Fighting Men and repeated their gifts year after year.

  On July 11, 1958, Heinlein sat down at the typewriter and banged out in one long session a 4,500-word story aimed at Playboy. He had been fascinated by the “circle in time” gimmick for a long time, and he apparently had the odd but original idea to combine it with some topical material—that 1947 nonsense song “I’m My Own Grandpa”10 (that was, in fact, one of the titles he considered for the story), and possibly also the gender-reassignment surgery Christine Jorgensen had made world headlines with in 1952.

  Heinlein started out with a natural hermaphrodite, a rare but legitimate medical condition in which a child is born with both sets of sex organs, and gender assignment is largely a matter of choice on the parents’ part anyway. Heinlein has his hermaphrodite raised as a girl and impregnated by a time-traveling male version of herself, later on in her/his personal timeline—giving birth to himself (only one set of genes to draw on), and since the male would have to be able to travel back in time, he could put himself into a foundling hospital, too. The time paradox was expressed in a single character, and it was a neat reversal on the old “you can’t kill your own grandfather” time paradox. The him/her personal timeline is an Ouroboros snake, swallowing itself perpetually. He initially titled it “The World Snake,” but changed it as he spent the next two days cutting and revising it, to something his character said in one of the last, pathetic lines of the story: “All You Zombies” (Zombies were big that year). Playboy promptly rejected it, the editor saying the implied sex made him queasy.11 It circulated for a while to the stag magazines, but without any takers. In November, editor Robert Mills picked it up for F&SF (A. P. White—“Anthony Boucher”—had retired earlier that year).

  Gnome Press had brought out a very disappointing-looking hardcover issue of Methuselah’s Children. Heinlein was very unsatisfied and told Greenberg so in very clear terms: “[T]he book looks and feels, in all respects, like a cheap reprint of a trade edition. In effect, that is just what it was—because you went almost immediately into your cheap book-club promotion on this book.”12

  The last installment of Have Space Suit—Will Travel appeared in F&SF in October. Heinlein must have been generating a new book idea while recuperating from his amebic and bacterial infections, for he outlined and on October 14, 1958, began to write Podkayne Fries: Her Life and Times, with a female teenaged protagonist, and written in the first person—“unheard of in the genre.”13 Even aside from the aftereffects of dysentery, though, he found it unusually difficult: “Right at the moment I am having a hell of a time trying to start a novel. I find myself more and more out of sympathy with the spirit of the times, which makes it hard for me to write popular fiction.”14

  Ginny had started to study the Russian language in an extension course offered by the local high school (with teachers from the University of Colorado).15 The students were mostly military men from one or another of the local military bases—twenty-one to start with.16 She worked hard at it, and strained her eyesight: Some of the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet have small tails distinguishing them from letters without the tails. Ginny had to get glasses to see the tails.

  At some point Heinlein must have proposed to Ginny that they make their next trip inside the Soviet Union, to see Communism at firsthand, and from the inside. The USSR had an international travel agency, InTourist, which would allow them to book the trip.

  Ginny cannot have been enthusiastic about this proposal, having no desire to be behind the Iron Curtain—but they had been in the buffer states on their most recent trip and nothing untoward had happened. Perhaps it was her Russian classes that tipped the balance in favor of going.

  Early in November, Blassingame received a “heads-up” letter from Doubleday: A Robert Kent in Los Angeles had written to Heinlein’s publisher about a new cheapie film that had just come out from American International Pictures, The Brain Eaters, that seemed like a plagiarism of The Puppet Masters.

  There was perennial interest in that property in Hollywood—Blassingame had recently received a couple of nibbles for options at $2,500 and $3,500, respectively, offers so low that they could be ignored. Ned Brown, on the other hand, was fielding a more serious offer: One of his clients, actor-turned-producer John Payne, had made a similar lowball offer to purchase the property, and Blassingame had set a $15,000 total value on it: $5,000 on signing, $5,000 when it went into production, and $
5,000 on release.17 Payne was hesitating, but his hand was inching toward his checkbook.18 If this Brain Eaters was a real piracy, it might render the property valueless. Heinlein should see the picture and let Blassingame know what he thought—but it was not due to hit the Colorado Springs area until the end of December 1958.

  Heinlein took Podkayne Fries off his agenda: A hundred pages into the manuscript, it just was not coming together for him. He must have been mulling over the intertangled notions of freedom and responsibility, duty and moral self-discipline and citizenship—subjects possibly suggested by the depressing reception of the Patrick Henry campaign, but also by his brother Larry’s promotion to the rank of brigadier general of the Army Reserves:19 Larry “did it the hard way … he took the long route, all the way from private to general officer.”20 Another story came to him: Starship Troopers. Later, Robert recognized the origin of the story in something his father had said when he was just five years old: “I just remembered where I got the basic thesis of S. Troopers. From my father—his conviction (1912) that only those who fought for their country were worthy to rule it.”21

  In 1912 the country was in the middle of the militarism associated with the Progressive movement—a time and place in the culture that persisted all through Heinlein’s own upbringing, and of which the Civilian Military Training Corps Heinlein attended while he was in high school was a part. It was undoubtedly that connection that suggested a young man undergoing military training (and that, in turn, may have suggested Kipling’s “The ‘Eathen” [1896] as its basic story arc,22 which he may also have melded with a wartime novel by H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916): “Conscript soldiers are the ruin of war” [327]).

  If the militarism of the Progressive Era was the starting point, the idea certainly underwent a great deal of reprocessing before the typewriter went clicking. Perhaps this aspect of Starship Troopers derives from another book that had influenced him highly in the past, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (the book of which For Us, the Living was a modernized retelling). Although Bellamy’s “industrial army” is officered by a strict meritocratic review, there is one great exception to this schema: The head, or general, of each guild is chosen by vote of the veterans of the guild.23 Certainly Bellamy interchanged military and civilian descriptions of the structure of the industrial army, and Heinlein’s story also mixes freely the civilian and the military in the makeup of his world. He made his far-future military 100 percent voluntary, to discourage the chaff, and turned it into a kind of Darwinian evolutionary filter.