Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “And?”

  “As a professor, I lived in the world of ideas. As a judge, I now live in the real world.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Mr. Rena, I am no fool.”

  Twenty

  “Peter, this is Henry Weingarten. I’m sorry I’m late returning your call.”

  Rena’s cell had vibrated and he excused himself from the interview with Madison and wandered outside to the back deck for the call. Though it is spring, it is cold, a cloak of silver fog moving swiftly down the mountain toward the ocean.

  Rena called Weingarten two days ago, part of the process of calling people he knew who might know the judge. Weingarten had gone to Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same years as Madison. He’d also gone to law school—Berkeley not Harvard—and then became a journalist. He’d covered legal matters and labor for the Los Angeles Times for twenty years and now taught law and journalism at the University of California, Irvine. Rena had met him years earlier. Weingarten was the only reporter who had come close to getting the real story of the incident involving the general that had ended Rena’s military career.

  Their acquaintance is enough for only a few pleasantries before Rena says, “Henry, I want to ask you something from your life before you were a reporter. I want to ask you about something off the record.”

  Silence. Then: “Why would I agree to that?”

  “Because I want to ask you something you learned about in college, under circumstances that were personal. The basis of your knowledge about this has nothing to do with your being a journalist, and your responsibilities are personal, not journalistic.”

  More silence. “You have thought this through pretty carefully, haven’t you, Peter?”

  “I hope so.”

  “From college?”

  “Do you agree to my conditions, Henry? Off the record. Not for you to use? I am interviewing you, Henry. The shoe on the other foot and all that.”

  Another pause.

  “Ask.”

  “Do you know Roland Madison?”

  “Why?”

  “No, Henry. Off the record, about something you learned before you were a journalist.”

  Weingarten laughs. “Okay, Peter, you have me cornered. I am too curious to say no.”

  He and Madison had been friends in college, close friends, Weingarten says. They were both serious kids, both interested in law. They were the same year, though Madison was two years younger. “Rollie really was a prodigy, an extraordinary mind. Immature, obviously, on top of the awkwardness that usually comes from being serious and bookish.”

  “Is there anything in his past I should know about, Henry?”

  There is a silence on the other end.

  “Henry, you do him a favor by telling me. And you do him harm by withholding it. You know that. No one should know that better than a reporter.”

  “I can’t believe you have talked me into this, Peter.”

  “I haven’t talked you into anything, Henry. I’ve leveled with you.”

  Weingarten laughs again.

  “What is it you want to tell me, Henry?”

  “Nothing . . . no, it’s . . . Well . . . There may be one thing. Something we’ve never told anyone, never needed to. But if this background check is for what I think it is, maybe you should know.”

  Rena lets the silence do its work.

  “One year, Rollie and I and two friends created an antiwar group that engaged in activity that was illegal.”

  “What do you mean by illegal?”

  “We called ourselves the New Walden Project—you know, Thoreau, civil disobedience—and we talked about the limits of civil disobedience to protest an unjust war.”

  “What was illegal, Henry?”

  “Well, we talked ourselves into some things. Rollie was seventeen years old. A very young college sophomore. The rest of us turned, what is it, nineteen during that year.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, expressions of civil disobedience that we wanted to explore—something different from mass protests. Something with a more defined message, we thought. But it seems absurd and naïve in retrospect. There was vandalism of an army recruiting office. We wrote a manifesto and spray-painted some words on the front window of the storefront where it was located. And another message on the hood of a recruiter’s car. We also made contact with groups advising people on how to evade the draft. Contact with groups shepherding people to Canada. We let a few people stay in our dorm. We didn’t really know who they were. But we thought we were part of the new underground railroad. It lasted a year. Then we moved on. We fancied ourselves the heirs of Thoreau.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Well, and this is why I think you might need to know, we were detained briefly, by a military guard. Caught doing the car.”

  “Detained? You mean arrested?”

  “No. He let us go. We cleaned the glass and the car. We explained the whole Thoreau business. I think he thought we were idiots more than threats. Look, people had just been killed at Kent State. It was late May 1970. School was almost over for the year. The army was in no mood to overreact. And this was Berkeley. He knew what he was dealing with.”

  “That it?”

  Weingarten hesitates.

  “Henry, it’s worse if some detail we missed comes out later. Much, much worse.”

  “There was a woman,” Weingarten says, “who stayed a night on her way to Canada, or someplace. There was a rumor she might have been on the run, a member of the Weather Underground or something. We were never sure. Never knew her real name. But that made it seem a little too real. It was the beginning of the end of it.”

  Damn, Rena thinks.

  “This was forty years ago. How come it’s never come up before?”

  “Of the four guys, three now work in government, all now pretty high up. Two of them started there pretty young. And those two guys didn’t divulge when they started out because they were afraid.”

  Weingarten pauses.

  “Since it had never come out, they just kept it buried, assuming it was lost to history. I am assuming, Peter, off the record, we are talking about something different from that now.”

  Rena doesn’t answer but says, “I need the details, Henry.”

  There aren’t many more. The messages painted on the army property are lost to memory. There were self-important echoes to Thoreau and puffery about the significance of citizens to articulate their objections to laws considered unjust or immoral. Harboring a fugitive from the Weather Underground would have been a serious crime, but even that, if it was more than just a rumor, was lost to the mists.

  Weingarten is worried now, as people usually are after they are persuaded to be candid in a situation they do not fully understand.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m trusting you. This is no trick.”

  “No trick. I’m working for Madison. Not to hurt him.”

  “If you’re screwing with me, I won’t forget. And I won’t forgive.”

  Weingarten’s career stretched back to a time when a newspaper like the Los Angeles Times could really hurt you if you crossed it. And Weingarten, one of the smartest and shrewdest journalists Rena had ever met, would know how to do it. That shrewdness is probably why he had trusted Rena. Weingarten had always operated as much as a social activist as a reporter and thrived most when the two jobs coincided.

  That was why Weingarten hadn’t published what he’d learned about the incident involving Rena years ago. He’d decided the harm to some innocent people would outweigh the good.

  Today’s transaction, however, bound them in a way they had never been bound before. Or at least put Weingarten at Rena’s mercy.

  “I’m trusting you, Peter.”

  “You can.”

  Could he?

  Rena can imagine the portrayal. A domestic terrorist. Aiding and abetting the enemy. Perhaps a harborer of a murderer on the FBI’s
Most Wanted list. He needs to find Brooks.

  “Jesus, Peter, you called a reporter?” she says after he has retrieved her from the den and brought her out to the deck.

  “He won’t publish it, Randi.”

  “The hell he won’t.”

  “He learned it in a context in which he wasn’t a reporter.”

  Brooks grimaces.

  “Learned what exactly?”

  He relates what Weingarten told him.

  “And why the hell did he tell you?

  “Because he became convinced it was better that we know than if it is discovered some other way.”

  “He became convinced?”

  “He listened to reason.”

  Brooks looks doubtful.

  After a few more questions about details and why it has been kept buried, Brooks announces: “Twenty-Five Year Rule.”

  The 25-Year Rule is Brooks’s time guideline for bad things in politics: Anything someone did twenty-five years ago or longer is considered a “youthful indiscretion” and could not hurt you. Politicians could smoke pot in college, or even worse, and no one cared.

  Rena isn’t so sure how far any rules fully apply. As far as he can tell, politics is more like sandlot baseball than geometry. You make new rules whenever the ball ends up somewhere it has never landed before.

  “Anyway, it’s bullshit,” Brooks says. “It was the height of the antiwar movement. The government was shooting people. The only people who weren’t engaging in antigovernment activity were asleep, drugged out, or too dumb to know better.”

  Rena can think of a lot of people who don’t fit that description. He looks at his partner, a woman he trusts implicitly and admires. She is as smart and good as anyone he has ever met. But they come from different worlds. He says nothing.

  Twenty-one

  The restaurant they had passed at the junction is called Alice’s. That’s where the Madisons take them when they return from the deck and suggest a lunch break. The combination restaurant, gas, and propane-filling station reflects the mixed culture of the mountain neighborhood where Madison lives, a remote rural enclave in the hills above Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Alice’s menu features “Harley” burgers, grilled salmon and tofu sauté. They choose a table on a back deck where they can’t be overheard.

  As the plates clear, Rena asks Madison to “describe your life to us as if it were a story.”

  Madison regards Rena a moment and then tells a spare tale of growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, attending Berkeley, then Harvard Law, clerking on the Supreme Court, and then working briefly in the solicitor general’s office in the Carter administration before entering academia.

  The man is astonishingly articulate. The fruit of a thoroughly examined life, Rena wonders? Or something rehearsed and practiced?

  “What was Berkeley like in the early 1970s?” Rena asks.

  “Boiling over.”

  “With radicalism?”

  “Depends on your definition of radicalism.”

  “I’d say talking about overthrowing the government. Being anticapitalist. Defying the law. Left-wing extremism.”

  The cool, vaguely detached smile on Madison’s face is back. It may just be the way his face breaks, Rena thinks. But the guy often looks like he’s smirking. That would bother the shit out of senators. They like to be the ones doing the smirking.

  “The whole country was left-wing back then by today’s standards, Peter,” Madison says. “Kent State happened in Ohio.”

  “Not the whole country.”

  Madison nods.

  “Were you into criminal civil disobedience?” Rena probes.

  A hesitation. Just a hint.

  Then Madison says, “These conversations always lack a sense of time.”

  “Sense of time?”

  “Context.”

  “Try adding some.”

  Rena looks at Brooks. She usually enjoys when her partner is about to interrogate someone, but something in her expression suggests says she doesn’t like the vibe that is developing between him and Madison.

  “Martin Luther King was assassinated my senior year in high school,” Madison says. “A few weeks later, Robert Kennedy. Then the Democratic Party nominated Hubert Humphrey for president, who didn’t win a single primary and said he’d continue LBJ’s war policies. Johnson lied to us about the war. Then Nixon escalated it and lied some more. My generation felt trapped and betrayed. The whole system seemed to be splitting apart. What did Joan Didion write about the era? ‘The center was not holding.’”

  “And Harvard?” says Rena. “What was that like?”

  “The country was exhausted. We had gone from killing kids at Kent State and a secret war in Cambodia to proof that the president was a criminal with Watergate. It is hard to imagine now. I think we wanted it all over.”

  “Tell me about the radical group you formed at Berkeley with three friends your sophomore year: the New Walden Project.”

  Madison’s face registers a millisecond of surprise and then changes to pained and a little sad.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Your opponents will be,” Rena says. He fixes his melancholy eyes on the judge, his interrogator’s stare.

  “What a farce,” Madison says.

  “How so?”

  “If you were worried about this, why didn’t you ask me two hours ago?”

  “I’m asking now, Judge.”

  “We were sophomores,” Madison says with a sigh. “Idiots. We were opposed to the war, and we imagined that we were the first people to ever think of the things we thought.”

  “You helped people evade the draft.”

  “Virtually everyone who could tried to evade the draft. Certainly the majority of men in college, including most of the Republicans my age in Congress.”

  “You helped people flee to Canada.”

  “We let people stay in our dorm. We talked about driving them to Canada. We talked about a lot of things.”

  “One of them, a woman, might have been a killer, might have been a member of the Weather Underground.”

  “Or she might have been someone’s cousin,” Madison says with lawyerly precision. “I always thought that particular speculation was an urban myth.”

  Rena holds Madison’s gaze a moment, examining the tall face of the judge before asking his next question.

  “You also vandalized an ROTC office, and an army recruiter’s car. And wrote a manifesto defending the right of people to resist the government and break laws you considered unjust.”

  Madison is a reader of faces, too. He and Rena are studying each other’s.

  “This is garbage,” Madison says finally. “This didn’t mean any of the things you’re suggesting.”

  “Then why hide it? All four of you. All these years. It’s called conspiracy.”

  Madison sighs again. “No, it’s called life.”

  Rena can feel Vic Madison’s eyes on him. He wants to know if they are disapproving, but he doesn’t break his gaze from her father’s.

  “You’re going to have to explain it in Washington, later, if you’re lucky. So you should explain it to us now.”

  Rena glances at Brooks. She is looking at Madison. But she won’t interrupt this, he knows, and won’t try to defuse it with humor or by playing the good cop. When they do interviews together, they always let the other have their runs, like musicians who’ve played together a long time and don’t get in each other’s way.

  Madison nods and says, “All kinds of things that would be explained and dismissed today seemed more significant then. We lied on job applications about taking drugs and protesting in illegal demonstrations. Something you don’t hide now. But these things weren’t forgotten and forgiven back then.”

  Maybe they are forgotten and forgiven by most of the people Madison knows, by the young, and most people in this restaurant, Rena thinks. But they aren’t by everyone. Not by the motorcycle guys he saw on the front deck of the restaurant with
the Vietnam vet badges on their leather vests. The guys who felt betrayed by rich college kids like Madison.

  “We better go back,” Brooks says. “I have more questions.”

  Twenty-two

  Rena and Vic are standing in Madison’s kitchen, exiled there by Brooks so she can have some time with the judge alone. “I get you’re trying to break his defenses, Peter,” Brooks had whispered to him as they returned to the house, “but that was getting to sound personal.” She asked for some time with the judge. Vic suggested she and Rena make tea.

  “Is this what you do, Peter?” Vic asks. “Check out nominees for the government?”

  “Not really. Most of our work is private. Background and security. Law firms on criminal cases. Companies looking for CEOs.”

  “So you’re modern private investigators, Washington-style?”

  “It’s not as romantic or dramatic as you make that sound,” he says. “It’s hardly Philip Marlowe in a trench coat or the TV show Scandal.”

  “More like NSA spying?”

  “More like trolling people’s lives on Facebook and then asking the ones tagged in the photographs exactly what happened before the picture was taken.”

  She laughs.

  “But Randi’s a lawyer. You do legal work, too?”

  “Randi and a few others in the firm, but no, we don’t. It’s just good to know the law.”

  “And you?”

  “Not a lawyer. Army. West Point.”

  “A soldier,” she says, as if she doesn’t know many.

  “A past life.”

  Vic smiles, apparently at the idea of past lives.

  “Have you investigated a Supreme Court nominee before?”

  She is good at this, he thinks. Asking questions.

  “They don’t come along very often.”

  As she prepares the tea, he notices how delicate but strong her hands are. He feels something he hasn’t in a long time. It’s not just a physical attraction, though he feels it, to her athleticism, to her fit body, and to her intelligence. There is something warm and disarming about her, an informality, an empathy, as if she inherited her father’s perceptiveness but not his remoteness.