The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  Then the smile faded. Martha was the dearest thing in the world to her, but even Martha didn’t really understand. Most American Jews didn’t quite get it. You had to think of her father not as a boy from Brooklyn made good in a WASP world—like the perfectly American, perfectly liberal Ohlingers—but as an Israeli: he’d spent half of his life there since running away to join Tsahal, the Israel Defense Forces, at seventeen. Understanding that, for Alley, was key.

  Once, after a dinner, Pauly had said: “Daddy, for Christ sake. How can you deal with these people?”

  It was an evening not at Grace Court but at 454 Park, so she must have been in college. Her father had just ushered important dinner guests out: Amiram Nir, Richard Secord, and a young man with a South American accent who was somebody’s son.

  “How?” He answered absently, jotting down figures at the living room escritoire while she watched. Then he turned directly to him and spoke in the dimmed lights of the room. “Now you listen to me. Who do you want to have the profits? Portugal? Sweden? Germany? Or the country that has millions of Soviet Jews to absorb? David Ben-Gurion himself said that all military embargoes are embargoes against Israel. You decide, boychik.”

  That was the end of the conversation. The next day the man with the South American accent who was somebody’s son called to invite her out, and she found out his name. It was Stroessner.

  Thinking all this, watching Martha across the table at the Corner Bistro. But how could she tell her this? And Martha was speaking.

  “I know what happened, Alley. Britain and France both got wind of your dad’s sales. They know he works with our government all the time, they know he wouldn’t do a thing like this without a directive from our government. Only thing is, Britain and France don’t give a fuck about the Bosnian Muslims, and they don’t want them armed and shooting on their peace-keeping forces, which our damn president forced them to send in the first place. So they filed diplomatic démarches.”

  Eyes narrowed, Allison was listening now. “Go on.”

  “So, what the fuck, Alley. If you’re the president, that’s why you use covert programs in the first place. He got his guns to Bosnia, now he has your dad prosecuted to prove he was uninvolved. That’s called plausible deniability.”

  Alley shook her head emphatically. “Christ sake. Clinton’s too smart to establish plausible deniability through the Justice Department.”

  “Oh? Who’s the smart guy ordered Paula Jones audited by Treasury?’ The voices of both women were rising in pitch now.

  “I don’t know. A lackey probably. Not the damn president.”

  “That’s right, Alley girl. A lackey. Like my father. Or like Ed Dennis.”

  Deeply annoyed now, Allison stood suddenly. “Hey Marty? You have any word on who the U.S. Attorney hired to do the prosecution?”

  Lips grim, Martha shook her head.

  “Then stop telling me about it, okay? I know they’re scapegoating my father. I also know nothing’s going to stop them, and so does my dad. So let’s stop wasting our time over what we can’t help.”

  8.

  Her father, his profession, it meant nothing to her: just another of the unsavory things adults did to one another at work. That she was in law school led people to think she was more concerned with her father’s affairs—particularly reporters, one or two of whom she came to expect to find waiting in Washington Square as she came out of classes whenever her father was in the news, hoping for a comment. But law school had nothing to do with what she wanted in life: she had never wanted to go. When her father had started pressuring her to study law rather than go to graduate school, she’d obeyed only because she could not, or would not, fight back. That was less fear of him, she vaguely knew, than concern: her empire over her father’s fragile emotions—his fear for her, his ambitions—since his divorce was so enormous that she didn’t have the heart. She hadn’t really needed to fight, anyway: Pauly, as always, had done it for her.

  “You want her in the family business, Dad? Another Rosenthal gonif?”

  It was at the Shabbos dinner table, and her father had paused in incomprehension, then suspicion.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, David?”

  Her heart was pounding as she watched, but Pauly seemed as calm as usual when he answered.

  “For God’s sake. I know what you do for a living. You think I’ve forgotten meeting Oliver North in this very house? Or Amiram Nir? Let’s go ask Amiram Nir. Oh, wait, he’s dead, right? That’s what you want Alley to go to law school for? Or what, you going to introduce her to Greg Eastbrook in the NSC, and she’s going to carry on the family business? ‘Rosenthal and Daughter.’ Sounds like the smoked-fish store on Houston Street. Except you don’t sell fish, do you, Dad?”

  Her father had listened to Pauly’s speech, his jaw falling lower and lower with each name: not even his only son had ever talked to him like this before. Perhaps no one had. When his son had finished, he’d been too surprised to respond for long seconds. Then he’d asked the maid to leave the room, and addressed Pauly with restrained fury.

  “What do you know about my work, David?”

  He was nearly shouting, his face flushed, his body tensed against the table edge.

  “I can read , Dad. You’d have to be blind not to see your name in these damn books, the library catalog indexes , the footnote references. I’ve seen enough of you in the papers.”

  Her father nodded, as if, despite his anger, Pauly was merely confirming what he had long suspected about his son.

  “Calm down. I know you can read. Now tell me what you know about Greg Eastbrook.”

  It clearly surprised Pauly that her father had picked that name out of others. He calmed somewhat with his answer.

  “I don’t know what’s your particular business with that scumbag, Dad, but by your response I’d infer that it’s particularly insalubrious.”

  Her father answered now, decisively, and in the language of his business. “Infer, would you? Who made you the jury? And didn’t the judge instruct you that if you see fit to ‘infer’ from ambiguous evidence, the law requires you to favor the exculpatory inference?”

  For a few moments, silence reigned in the ornate, high-ceilinged dining room while her father considered his son. And then he turned to his daughter.

  “Now you listen to me, Essie, not to this child, okay? You want to talk about my business, then you’d better be ready to be a big girl. First off, the law isn’t about truth, it’s about appearances. David wants to judge me, fine, but let him learn what he’s talking about first. Then I’ll debate the issues, not the emotions. You go read Thomas Jefferson, you go read Madison, then read Curtiss-Wright , and you’ll see that what I do is the same as WASP businessmen in Washington do every day, okay? I work every day with the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA. I change my name to Gladstone and no one’s going to pay any attention to me. Only, I’m Rosenthal, get it? You ever read about the mail Bill Cohen and Arthur Liman got during Iran-contra? You see even the Hawaiian or Italians on the committees getting mail like that? And Cohen only sounds Jewish, he’s a WASP himself.”

  He paused now, thinking so deeply that Alley was afraid to interrupt.

  “Secondly, this isn’t about me, and it’s not about David. It’s about you. Men have a lot more latitude. You be whatever kind of lady poetess you want to be, but you’re going to do it with a law degree, okay? You do what your daddy says now, Esther. You get a law degree. I don’t care if Farrakhan joins forces with the Michigan Militia, you’re gonna be protected as sure as you got a gun. You follow me? This is America. The country’s made for the people who know how to use the law. Okay?”

  There was no arguing with her father. No one could. Even trying to screw up the LSATs hadn’t helped, just committed her to going to NYU instead of back to New Haven. The best she’d been able to do was convince him that a year of finishing in Paris was what every girl needed after graduation, and then she’d managed to extend that to two.
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  But at the end of the second year, while she had been relaxing into a hot Paris summer, her brother had called her home. And even after he died, the deal had stood. Without either of them questioning it, she’d started law school at NYU in the fall after Pauly’s death.

  And although her father had never mentioned his business to her again—never directly—he had, after Pauly’s death, come to treat her confidence as assumed, which was strange, as if Pauly’s suicide had made her an accomplice.

  Nothing, then, changed for Allison Rosenthal. As the dry August of 1994 swelled toward fall, by day she went to the offices of DG&B, a meditative, rote exercise in which she had no stake; by night she sat in the Corner Bistro, alone or with Martha, where the bartenders protected her from all comers. Or read. Or padded around her little apartment in her underwear, watching the saturated summer night reflecting from the surface of Eighth Avenue.

  In mid-August, in a dinner during a Group of Seven trip to Europe, Clinton was reported to have referred to the Rosenthal trial as categorical proof of America’s commitment to uphold the European Union’s embargo of the Bosnian Muslims. Allison stayed away from work that day, and so was at home midmorning to receive, by messenger, a letter from Bill Dykeman asking her, in light of her father’s approaching prosecution, to take the rest of her internship off with full pay. When the smart of the affront had subsided, it occurred to her that now she could spend the rest of the summer at Ocean View Farm, her childhood home, and for the first time since her father’s arrest the chill lifted.

  But not for long. While she was packing that day, to go up to the island, Bob Stein called to tell her he had received a federal notice of seizure on her father’s property, including his business, his Park Avenue home, and his summer estate, Ocean View Farm.

  She listened to Bob with incredulity. Did they not know that Ocean View had been Pauly’s last home? Did they not know that everything else, for her, was gone? Briefly, it occurred to her that one by one the doors of her life were closing, and with each closing door she lost one of the small rosary of people she loved: her grandparents at Borough Park; her mother in Brooklyn Heights; and her brother, her dear, dead brother, from Ocean View. Now her father was exiled and they were taking Ocean View from her too. Then she interrupted.

  “Wait a minute, Bob. You’re saying my dad’s going to be convicted.”

  Silence. Then: “I’m saying the seizure’s going to take place in the fall. You knew they were using RICO, honey. We won’t be able to stop that.”

  “Why?”

  Stein let dead air sit on the phone.

  “Cause he’s guilty, right?”

  “Allison. Calm down.”

  “Bob. Do something for me, okay?”

  “Yes honey.”

  “Don’t call me again. You hear?”

  She must sound to Bob, she thought as she hung up, exactly like her father.

  And it was only then that Allison Rosenthal’s quiet courage failed and, alone at the desk of her apartment, in sunlight mediated by the leaves on the London plane tree outside her window, she let herself feel the horror of everything that had happened since July 1st, everything that had happened, just as Martha had worried, not to her father, but to her.

  CHAPTER 2

  August 1, 1994.

  Washington, D.C.

  1.

  The first hint, to the outside world, that Ronald Rosenthal’s arrest on Arms Export Control Act violations was not going to go away was extremely understated. So much so that David Treat Dennis, Dee, might have missed it.

  It was August 1, and page 15 of the Washington Post ran a short account that the State Department had suspended all open export licenses held by the Falcon Corporation pending the outcome of the Rosenthal trial. A second article, from the UPI news wire, reported that the Israeli envoy had protested the move.

  Each article was small, as if not even the writers understood the importance of what had just happened. That was because, perhaps, it was important to so few people. And that it was, to those few, so vitally important did not matter yet.

  Dee Dennis read the account in a taxi from Dupont Circle to Thirteenth and F, where he worked on the skeleton staff still assisting Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in cleaning up from the Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters. And as he read he felt regret.

  Ronald Rosenthal. Dee had followed the account of his arrest, the month before, with something close to salivation. This, he had thought at the time, was the kind of criminal whose ass you can lock up without fear of a government pardon and unfettered by the nasty Kastigar decision that had so complicated his life under Walsh. It was precisely in the hope of this kind of prosecution that he had so far turned down all the offers of jobs as counsel or analyst that had come to him since Walsh finished, whether from powerful New York houses who had flown him up in company jets to talk over lunch at the Harmony or Maidstone, from congressional offices or committees, or from NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—on Mass. Ave. and Beltway Bandits in Arlington. That he had refused them all was because Dee Dennis wished to work on a criminal prosecution for the Justice Department. One like this.

  The weekend of Rosenthal’s arrest, the month before, his father had mentioned the case as the two flew up to their family home in Martha’s Vineyard, where the rest of the Dennises were already waiting to celebrate Independence Day. That he should be au courant with this affair was, to Dee, a surprise: Edward Treat Dennis, counsel to the Democratic National Committee during the election, was now White House counsel. Rosenthal was properly the business of the Justice Department, and between the two there were meant to be fire walls.

  “You see we indicted Ron Rosenthal?”

  “Yeah. What’s it all about?”

  His father had shown surprise.

  “Deedee, that’s the son-of-a-bitch who took Ocean View Farm off of Gerry Saunders.”

  Now Dee understood his father’s interest. It was Rosenthal, the big property owner on Martha’s Vineyard, where generations of Dennises had been born, and where Dee had summered his whole life. Rosenthal had bought Ocean View Farm in foreclosure from one of the island’s oldest families during hard times in the sixties, and no sooner had he acquired it than he’d started subdividing. So quickly, in fact, that the State Assembly had passed a three-acre wetlands zoning law to stop him. As for his father’s emotion, Rosenthal’s tenure on the island was only a quarter century old. Many of the original families, environmentalists before there was any such movement, much resented this newcomer gaining control over large tracts of fragile oceanfront.

  Still, even if his father’s interest in the case was more personal than political, Dee knew that his influence was both. Watching his father turn his attention back to a report he was reading, for a brief moment Dee considered asking a direct favor.

  But caution—practiced caution, never taught but intuitively grasped—interceded.

  If his father didn’t understand by himself, Dee Dennis knew, there was no point in asking.

  It was a shame. But after his return from the Fourth of July weekend on the island, Dee Dennis doubted he had thought about Rosenthal even once.

  And now, on August 1st, riding a taxi to work through the morning rush, he read the page 15 item on the sealing of Falcon’s John Street office with a sudden spike of attention. Then he closed the paper and stared out the window as the taxi turned and a fall of summer sun struck directly in his face, making his sky blue eyes glint, narrow, and then, like a light extinguished, close.

  David Treat Dennis, Dee.

  The Treat was the maiden name of a distant paternal grandmother, the same as had lent her name to the often-noted Treat Street in Vineyard Haven, where old Alice Treat had lived and died, centuries before. The same middle name as was inscribed on generations of tombstones, many actually rounded at the edges by the passage of time, in the little cemetery on Lambert’s Cove Road.

  As for David and Dennis, they composed a gre
at-uncle’s name, and could be seen still on his tomb, not in Martha’s Vineyard, but in the World War I graveyard outside of Brest, peering enigmatically across the Channel toward the country where the first David Dennis had decided to think big in 1653 and washed up, some months later, half starved, loose-toothed, and syphilitic, to reinvent himself on an island off the coast of Massachusetts.

  Little dreaming that generations later his namesake—one of his many namesakes—was about to be required to reinvent himself too.

  That namesake didn’t yet dream that either.

  2.

  Dee entered Walsh’s office suite through a windowless conference room—the offices had been built to house classified material—where five or six suited people stood over a table holding coffee and doughnuts. The table was covered with papers, from the Washington Times to Defense News; from the centrist, establishment Foreign Affairs to the far-left, muckraking North American Review of Intelligence Affairs; since the filing of Walsh’s final report, there was no longer any need for the attorneys here to avoid being tainted by media coverage of the industry and now could—some, for the first time in years—read whatever paper they wanted. Without pause—although he was surprised by the lack of a greeting—Dee hung his jacket in a closet and was pouring coffee somewhat self-consciously when his secretary approached. There was, Dee noticed suddenly, no noise in the room. In as quiet a voice as she could manage she spoke.

  “Mr. Dennis. You got a call.”

  “Oh yeah?” Intensely conscious of the silence, Dee put down his half-poured coffee, looking at his secretary. “Who?”

  “Shauna McCarthy.”

  Dee absorbed the news, then without any delay turned and walked into his office, past the studied unconcern of his colleagues.