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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  On this issue, no: The opinion that a Negro volunteer should be treated differently from a white volunteer possessed no merit whatsoever—and if that was “intolerant” in Bob Laura’s book, so be it. “I’m one of the most intolerant men I’ve ever met,” Heinlein noted to himself. “I had thought that, simply because I had uncustomary responses as to what I liked and what I hated that I was ‘tolerant.’ I’m not. I’m not even mildly tolerant of what I despise.”21

  There were things more important than party unity in the Republican Party of Colorado.

  Late in August, the political situation became very black-and-white for Heinlein: President Johnson made a broadcast address to the nation, timed to catch the evening news. Early in the month (August 2 and again on August 4), the U.S. destroyer Maddox was fired on by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 7, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, essentially putting war powers in the president’s hands without a declaration of war. In his August 18 news conference22 President Johnson told of an attack in progress—actually launched but not yet engaging the enemy.

  This was an extraordinary—indeed, almost treasonable—violation of national security: giving away intelligence about an offensive before it happened. As the results came in—one naval aviator dead and one captured—Heinlein’s shock turned to raw, uncontainable fury.

  It was that hour and thirty-nine minutes of warning to the enemy—simply to catch the late evening east coast newscast!—that disgusts me. In civilian life we call this sort of thing “murder.” Since we can’t hang him for it, I intend to make every possible effort to see to it that he is retired to Texas where he can do no further harm … [sic] or at least will not be in command of men—and betray them.23

  No matter what, Johnson must be defeated.

  Politicians bungle and military commanders are often stupid—but this is a depth of cold-blooded villainy almost unique.… But I do not drink my brother’s blood—nor stand idly by while another does so—and any man who is defending my life with his is my brother and his safety is as much my personal concern as is that of our nephew. The least I owe him is to get rid of a commander who does not value his life and replace him with one who understands the responsibility of a commander toward his men.…

  We shan’t spare any effort and will spend whatever money is necessary.”24

  Heinlein cancelled his planned trip to Annapolis for his thirty-fifth class reunion and got a second car so both he and Ginny could be mobile.25 He began working full time at the county offices, setting up an expansion into a satellite office to handle the closing months of stepped-up campaign activity.

  A wonderful fund-raising opportunity fell into their laps at the start of September when a wealthy party regular, Al G. Hill, volunteered to underwrite a fifty-dollar-a-plate dinner and open-bar cocktail party at the Garden of the Gods Park—an elegant, high-profile tourist destination, with spectacular towering red rock formations. The local party organization already had a similar fund-raiser scheduled in a more “traditional” venue,26 but Heinlein saw this as an opportunity not to be missed: It could be marketed to the sort of people the party usually had a hard time getting contributions from—socialites and the resort crowd who normally contributed, if at all, in their home districts. This would be a social event—a gala—rather than a stuffy party function.27 Heinlein got the preparations under way for September 26—a Saturday evening far enough in advance of the elections for the new money to do some good.28 This new money was not tied to the county organization’s campaign literature or the phony promise to send everything to the national headquarters: Heinlein got the proceeds earmarked to spend on uncommitted voters in El Paseo County.29

  At an Executive Committee meeting on September 9, Laura tried to impeach him (Heinlein’s notes are not clear on the issue involved) and eject him as a troublemaker. “I declined to be ‘tried,’” he remarked dryly in his office journal, but made his regular report instead. Two days later, Weldon Tarter, Laura’s contact with the state party organization, conducted what Heinlein’s office notes call a “Drum Head Court Martial” of Heinlein, accusing him of rudeness, excessive brusqueness to the headquarters staff, and even a kind of personal violence, saying he had been observed throwing someone out of the office literally by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants (this latter was contradicted on the spot by an eyewitness).

  Heinlein had tried to effect a change, get more out of the organization they had—and you can’t change unless you actually, you know, change …

  Heinlein demanded to be confronted by his accusers—or at least to know the details of these accusations, but Tarter ignored him. He would not even discuss any details.

  “I said that I could not continue in Hq under such conditions,” he noted in his office journal. Ginny and he withdrew completely from the formal party organization in the county until Tarter should give them a written statement of what their duties were. They never heard further from Laura or Tarter. Heinlein turned over all his outstanding files to Laura and put all the contracts he had been generating on hold until Tarter and Laura should make up their minds what to do with the new assets.

  But Heinlein did keep one file: The Garden of the Gods dinner was less than two weeks off.

  This fund-raiser had a lot of support even inside the county organization, where not everyone had taken the ugadat, ugodit, utselet vow (“pay attention, ingratiate yourself, survive”—the motto of the old Soviet bureaucracy). In addition to the $500 they had already donated, Heinlein was covering the minor overhead expenses out of pocket, so they could market it as any money raised being 100 percent donation to the cause; they had the enthusiastic and intelligent cooperation of the manager at the Garden of the Gods, and donations of labor and kind supplemented the underwritten cost of the dinner and the open bar.30 Nearly every penny raised could be donated to the campaign. They were limited to a seating of sixty, so Robert felt it best to deflect any potential conflict with the traditional fund-raiser being organized by the local party by urging people to subscribe to the party dinner instead.31

  The Garden of the Gods dinner was soon fully subscribed. Heinlein had sought out subscribed tickets for each local Republican candidate and wife and was able to secure the appearance of two-thirds of them. A special political guest, William Miller, the vice presidential candidate and Goldwater’s running mate, was flying in for the affair. Heinlein told his sponsor, Al Hill:

  But there were still some candidates for whom I did not have subscribed plates. When Mr. Miller’s advance man, Jack Cole, told me that Mr. Miller could be expected to attend the cocktail party, I phoned the remaining candidates and the officers of the County Central Committee and invited them to the cocktail party. You had not authorized me to invite any extras to the cocktail party but with the tough situation which does exist between the old-line Republicans and the Goldwater organizations, I felt that this was necessary.32

  They raised $3,625—on a theoretical maximum of $3,000—all earmarked for local campaigning and not controlled by the county organization. A large part of it went to purchase campaign literature for precinct workers. Some of the money went to underwrite Senator Goldwater’s television appearances, and for these Robert wrote three thirty-second spots:

  “Communist opinion” 30-sec spot.

  Heinlein 6 Oct. 1964

  THEME SOUNDER

  When Goldwater was nominated, Radio Moscow said, “The Republican Party has been taken over by some pirates led by a sworn enemy of the Communist camp.” But after the Democrat Convention, PRAVDA, official Soviet newspaper, praised the Democrat platform. Why?

  THE WORKER, official organ of the American Communist Party, says: “STOP BARRY!”

  Why?

  Why does every socialist, every Communist, every person intent on overthrowing our free government, scream for us to “Stop Goldwater!” Think it over.

  In your heart you know he’s right.

  END SOUNDER

&nbs
p; “Shooting from the hip” 30-sec spot.

  Heinlein 6 Oct 64

  THEME SOUNDER

  SOUND EFFECT—three rapid gun shots.

  1ST VOICE (male or female, surprised and frightened):

  He shoots from the hip!

  2nd VOICE (male, confident, hearty approval): And he hits the mark—every time!

  3RD VOICE (female, confident): In this supersonic age, fast, accurate decisions are a must! Goldwater knows where he stands and doesn’t have to waste precious minutes looking it up. He flies supersonic fighter planes where a man must have split-second correct judgment to stay alive. He has more than four thousand hours as a military pilot. Today … [sic] for us all to stay alive … [sic] the man on that hot-line telephone must have fast and accurate judgment. Vote for Goldwater! In your heart you know he’s right!

  END SOUNDER

  “Civil rights” 30-second spot.

  Heinlein - 6 Oct 64

  SOUNDER

  MALE VOICE: (Rising intonation, indignant unbelief) Goldwater against Civil Rights? NONSENSE! Here’s the truth: as a Phoenix City Councilman, Goldwater voted to desegregate the city airport restaurant. As chief of staff of the Arizona Air National Guard, Goldwater ordered desegregation. GOLDWATER’s department store was the first major employer in Arizona to hire Negroes on a regular basis. Goldwater says: “The key to racial intolerance lies not in laws alone but in the hearts of men.” In your heart you know he’s right! Vote for Goldwater!

  END SOUNDER

  There is no evidence these spots were ever used. A week later, Heinlein sketched out a campaign speech.33 But by mid-October it was already clear that Goldwater’s chances were slim.

  The last few weeks of the campaign were personally depressing for the Heinleins. On September 24, Sarge Smith died of advanced lung cancer in a Cleveland hospital. And on October 2 their cat Shamrock died delivering kittens: Ginny took time off from the campaign every few hours to feed them formula.34

  Robert and Ginny arranged to go directly from the voting booth to the airport on November 2, 1964, flying out to Houston for an AIAA/NASA Manned Spaceflight Conference. When that was over, they would board a Danish freighter, Hanne Skou, at Mobile and travel in the Antilles and South America. “A rest from politics will be welcome.”35

  After the Spaceflight conference, they went from Houston to New Orleans instead of directly to Mobile (freighters do not keep tight schedules, and they were delayed) and spent a few days relaxing as Hermann Deutsch’s houseguests. Goldwater carried only six states and 36 percent of the popular vote. Goldwater said he would not have voted for himself if he believed everything that journalists had written about him.

  They toured the Boeing plant in Louisiana, guests of the chief engineer and chief counsel—“and I beg to report that the Saturn is the most monstrous big brute imaginable,” Heinlein wrote to Blassingame, “and I do not believe that the Russians can do things on the scale of our APOLLO project. I do believe we will have a man on the moon this decade; progress looks good.”36

  Ginny did not show her usual enthusiasm for shopping on this trip, but she did find one unusual item in New Orleans: A saluting gun—a brass cannon, about twenty inches long and four inches in diameter—from an eighteenth-century sailing vessel. It reminded her, she said, of that old joke about the man who retired and went into business for himself, polishing a brass cannon. They had their own brass cannon shipped to Colorado, where they could deal with it after they got back home.

  They had only begun to unwind when Hanne Skou embarked from Mobile on November 9 for Jamaica, Aruba, Maracaibo, Porto Cabello, La Guaira, and Trinidad before heading back to Mobile on about December 5.

  The Danish captain thought he would have a little amusement at their expense, assuming they would be conventionally racist: He invited them to his cabin one night while they were in Kingston, Jamaica, and they found the captain and his first officer with a couple of local girls, both quite dark. Robert and Ginny had drinks, and then it was suggested they go nightclubbing on the island. Ginny recognized the invitation as a challenge, and so did Robert. Naturally they accepted the gauntlet.

  The first nightclub was a beautiful location high on a hillside, but nightclub entertainment is sparse, even in Jamaica, on a Monday night. They visited two more nightclubs. After this time, even at only one drink per place, the party was a little the worse for wear. Ginny recalled what happened next:

  After the third club, one of the girls took the bit in her teeth, and gave the taxi driver an address … We arrived there and I immediately noted that there was a red light at the side of the building, but Robert did not see it, and we went inside the house. (I was, well, delighted—I’d always been curious about those places.) Inside there were a number of girls in various stages of undress lying and sitting around the living room. We went through and into a place that served as a bar, ordered drinks, and the Madame joined us there. She was furious at the fact that I was along, and talking it over later, we decided that was caused by the fact that my presence was losing business for her.37

  The girls seemed ominously well acquainted at their next destinations, a succession of dives on the waterfront. Eventually the Heinleins turned in for the night, leaving the captain and FO—and their dates—to their own devices. Robert complimented Ginny on her excellent comportment in trying circumstances.

  Back at home was back to the grind.

  19

  THAT DINKUM THINKUM

  Around Christmastime, Heinlein began receiving angry or puzzled letters from a number of his friends saying this Alexei Panshin person was asking nosy questions about him. Shortly before New Year’s, Panshin wrote to Lurton Blassingame, saying he had been commissioned by Earl Kemp at Advent to write a critical work about Heinlein: “I am in the need of information, advice, and quotable opinion.”1 Blassingame sent the letter on to Heinlein with an inquiry, but replied to Panshin, saying, “It’s about time for a critical study of this sort.”2

  Betsy Curtis3 told Heinlein that Panshin had winkled a file of Robert’s letters to Sarge Smith out of his widow and was going to write a biography.4 Heinlein placed a call to Earl Kemp within an hour of receiving Curtis’s letter, and wrote also to Sarge Smith’s widow, telling her he did not want Panshin having the letters—would prefer he never saw them at all. He recalled Panshin from fan mail following the publication of Starship Troopers—an arrogant, argumentative, and tiresome teenager. “Pee” (as Heinlein later came to refer to Panshin) had also, he later found out, written an arrogant and clueless article titled “Heinlein By His Jockstrap”5 for a Los Angeles–based fanzine—claiming Heinlein was sexually naïve and puritanical, hypocritically pretending to sophistication.

  Kemp’s response was strangely evasive. Panshin had approached him, he said, not the other way around. Heinlein later said:

  I told Kemp that I preferred not to have my total corpus of work evaluated in print until after I was dead … [sic] but in any case, I did not want a book published about me written by a kid less than half my age and one who had never written a novel himself—and especially one who had tried to pick a fight with me in the past. Why not ask someone nearer my age, one with a long experience in the field and with established reputation as a science fiction writer—such as de Camp, Knight, Merril, or Leiber?

  When it finally became clear that Kemp was dodging and was firmly determined to get my name on his list by this means (since I would not write a novel for him), I wrote Kemp a registered letter6 stating that, while I could not keep anyone from writing about me, I would not condone anything and I was reserving any and all legal rights and redresses if it should develop in the future that I had been damaged. (I did not “threaten to sue” as was widely claimed. There is a vast difference between reserving one’s rights and uttering threats.)

  But it did scare Kemp off.7

  Mrs. Smith wrote to Panshin asking for the return of the letters, and he complied. There was nothing in them he found useful for his purposes, an
yway, he said—which struck Robert as very odd when the remark was relayed to him: In those letters, Heinlein had bared his soul, including discussing much of the material that went into Starship Troopers. Biography or critical commentary, how could such a thing not be useful?

  Matters that others might discuss on a couch to a psychoanalyst I took up with Sarge; he was my father confessor for years. If a competent critic wanted to delve into the inner Heinlein, that letter file would be a gold mine. But Panshin could not see it—possibly because what I had to say did not match Panshin’s preconceptions. (I do not know.)8

  If there was any doubt before, it was probably this remark reported of Panshin that took him out of the class of responsible professionals in Heinlein’s mind and positioned Panshin as just one more toxic fan.

  The unique problem of organized fandom is one that I have wondered about for many years. Here is a group made up largely of well-intentioned and mentally-interesting people—how is it and why is it that they tolerate among themselves a percentage of utter jerks?—people with no respect for privacy, no hesitation at all about libel and slander, and a sadistic drive to inflict pain.…

  The situation was the same back twenty-five years ago—and I became so disgusted by the behavior of this minority that I had nothing to do with fandom for almost twenty years. Then I was urged back in, found it fun at first—but again began to run into the sadistic jerks.

  Only now the jerks were of supposedly mature years.9

  At just that moment, in fact, science-fiction fandom was tearing itself apart over the preemptive cancellation of the membership of a suspected pedophile by PacifiCon, the most recent world science-fiction convention, in September 1964.10 This conflict might have passed the Heinleins by, except that the suspected pedophile was the husband of one of Heinlein’s more intimate correspondents, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Heinlein never commented on the “Breen Boondoggle” publicly, but to Bradley Heinlein wrote: