Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Of course he won. Did this man ever seriously stumble? I knew of only one instance. He had developed three corruption indictments against Roy Cohn and failed to get a single conviction. That was not a good record against a rabid Communist hunter who with his boss, Senator Joe McCarthy, had ruined countless lives in the 1950s.

  “Ah, I was wondering about your indictments against Roy Cohn. The newspapers said you were out for vengeance because he investigated your father.”

  “He did not investigate my father. That’s a gross distortion,” he said, scowling at me. “There were reasons we never got a conviction on Cohn. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and at the second trial we were pretty sure Cohn or one of his cronies got to one of the jurors.

  “You know Bobby Kennedy tried to stop me from prosecuting Cohn, while the grand jury was deliberating. I was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, and he summoned me to Hickory Hill on Labor Day weekend.”

  The way Bob uttered the rather precious name of Bobby’s Virginia estate, enunciating every syllable in his crisp, provocative voice so that it sounded as if he were poking fun at Bobby without doing it at all, got me laughing so much, I swallowed the wrong way and had a coughing fit. I decided I couldn’t care less if Bob was the hero of all his narratives. He was priceless.

  “Bobby said a columnist had accused me of persecuting Cohn. I laid out the evidence against him—bribery, conspiracy, and blackmail. By that time, Bobby knew I wouldn’t follow orders. So he just sighed and told me to do whatever I thought was right. The grand jury deliberated for sixty seconds before they brought in an indictment.”

  “Then at trial there was a hung jury,” I said sympathetically.

  He nodded. “But you know I convicted Carmine De Sapio. And I wiped out a lot of the Mafia—operatives of the Bonanno and Lucchese families—as well. A lot of gangsters.”

  “That’s extraordinary,” I said.

  “President Roosevelt was a huge influence on me. I hate to hear people say he should have bombed the Nazi concentration camps and done this or done that. He had a war to win. And he transformed this country.

  “When he died, I was stationed out on a destroyer, and I cried for the first time in my adult life.”

  “He was your friend. He was family.”

  “He was my commander in chief,” Bob said with finality.

  I got goose bumps, the way he had said those words: duty and sacrifice before anything else. He was the kind of man they didn’t make anymore. I pushed my plate of smoked oysters toward him: “You have the rest.”

  The man across from me was for real. Many have the intention to do good, but Bob Morgenthau had actually succeeded. The politicians I had interviewed, with their fishy faces and well-oiled egos, would never be in his league.

  I had a shiver of recognition. Today he was a fine man, but someday he would be a great one. Would he want to marry me? The thought was terrifying. How could he choose a rebellious, insecure kid with a veneer of bravado? I would be a poor political asset, even a liability. Did I even have what it took to stand by him, to put myself aside and help him achieve his destiny?

  * * *

  My apartment was so cold when I returned home that I put the oven on, wrapped myself in Aunt Kit’s afghan, and watched the dazzling orange sun as it dropped below the horizon. It had been a lovely interlude between us, but then a web of cracks spread over the gloss. The magic was gone.

  When we had left the café, I followed Bob down the stairs, feeling warm and loving, missing the shadow that had fallen over him. Then he rather rudely pushed through the door ahead of me, letting a blast of wind hit my face. Something had pissed him off. Was it that I had brought up Roy Cohn? Or all the men I’d been with—was he resentful, or did he think it in bad taste? Either one, I had gotten my first hint of his exquisite sensitivity.

  Outside, the sun had lost its brilliance. Grumbling about the lack of taxis in this woebegone place, about feeling tired, he seemed like an ordinary man in baggy pants wanting his nap.

  That evening, having seen this new petulance in a man whom I thought as unflappable and gentlemanly as my father, I decided there were many sides to Bob. Did I miss, for instance, a certain vindictive streak? Did he always use his power for good, or at times was he motivated by a personal animosity?

  I knew who he had been as a child, as a youth, but what about afterward? I only knew his public persona by reputation. He wasn’t the mea culpa confessional type; in fact, though I did encourage him to brag, today he had portrayed himself as the hero of all his stories. But was he? And did I have the moral right to find out? To muckrake about a man I was devoted to?

  I had butterflies all afternoon. But then, when the gloom of evening descended, I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the phone.

  I called my friend the book publisher Victor Temkin, a Morgenthau devotee. At first, he parried my questions but finally admitted, “Let me put it this way: I’d hate to have Bob Morgenthau for an enemy.

  “He’s always known where the bodies were buried,” Victor added. “He liked to say, ‘Never get mad, just get even.’

  “Look, Bob could intimidate you. Just being in his presence was scary. But his independence and defiance of the status quo was mind-blowing. People thought the Boss was God, they had been given a tremendous chance in life, they came out of his office with their knees shaking.”

  Their knees shaking? Mine hadn’t. Yet.

  I was more than curious now about the Cohn controversy, so I called Bill Safire, the Times’s famous conservative columnist and Roy’s pal. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Roy was hounded by Morgenthau and that afterward Cohn was never the same again,” Safire said flatly. “He is a loyal and a kind man and a great lawyer. He’s been tortured. Ruined by these indictments. I’d suggest you look at the October issue of Commentary. A very interesting article by Irving Younger … he witnessed Morgenthau’s persecution of Roy precisely because he was part of it.”

  I got hold of Commentary, which had become a neoconservative magazine, and found a long mea culpa article by Younger, confessing that he had been used by a spiteful Morgenthau as a tool “to get Roy Cohn.”

  He wrote how Morgenthau had summoned him with a buzzer that linked their two desks. In Morgenthau’s office was the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, who seemed as enthusiastic about bagging Cohn as Morgenthau was. Younger said Morgenthau appointed him to lead the investigation and then sent him to Zurich on a complicated goose chase involving machinations with other parties who he hoped would help corner Cohn. The article went on to list a number of the Boss’s misuses of prosecutorial power in pursuit of his quarry.

  I put the magazine down, shaken. But I smelled a rat. Bob had told me Bobby Kennedy, far from encouraging him to go after Cohn, had tried to stop him.

  I called Arthur Liman, who had been one of Bob’s big guns at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, to get his opinion on Younger’s narrative. “It’s full of outright lies and exaggerations and preposterous conclusions about Mr. Morgenthau’s integrity. A lot of assistants and members of the Justice Department can’t believe it was published. Younger makes up a good story about a noxious office none of us recognize.”

  There were those who thought the law’s pursuit of Cohn, on any pretext, was justified. “He was the greatest scoundrel of the twentieth century,” declared my friend Dorothy Samuels, who worked at the ACLU and would later become a New York Times editorial writer. “Bob Morgenthau could have indicted him three more times as far as I’m concerned. He’d wave his arms against homosexuals while being gay himself; he was evading taxes, taking bribes, you name it. Meanwhile, he made himself a celebrity, throwing these lavish parties for everybody from Norman Mailer, Abe Beame, Andy Warhol, to men like Carmine De Sapio.”

  Okay. So yes, Bob’s assistants refuted the Younger accusations, and yes, people hated Cohn, but I felt as if this were just scaffolding. What was the inner story of Bob Morgenthau and Roy Cohn?

  Victor was always good for
the rich stuff. I invited him to lunch at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal. He was a former assistant. And he was also the kind of person so brusquely honest he’d give you answers to questions you wished you hadn’t asked.

  He was a character: a handsome, stocky, and ebullient figure who got on his stationary bike and pedaled furiously for two hours a day. He ordered a salad, which he picked at as we chatted. I finished my popcorn shrimp, and then, twisting a bottom corner of the checkered tablecloth, I asked the question. “Was there any serious mistake you think the office made? Like Roy Cohn. Was he plagued?”

  Victor started to shake his head, but then he looked away.

  Finally, he turned to me. “I think we did go too far with Cohn,” he said. “Sil Mollo tried to convince him to stop, but Bob just hated Cohn, just hated him. His motto was ‘prosecute without fear or favor,’ but I think he stretched things with Roy.”

  I let out my breath. So Bob wasn’t perfect. He had told me he didn’t want to crucify Arthur Goldberg, but according to some he had crucified Roy Cohn. Bob was human, maybe even as human as I was. And that made me love him even more.

  It was time to change the subject. “So do you miss the office?” I asked cheerfully. “What was it like working there?”

  “Oh Lord, we were a motley crew from all over the place,” he said, laughing. “There were Irish Americans, Italian Americans, German Americans. Sil Mollo, his chief deputy, was a shrewd, diminutive man who looked a little like a muskrat and wore white short-sleeve button-down shirts. Arthur Liman, with his rumpled suits and hair half tumbling down his narrow forehead, had not only brilliance but, like Bob, total recall. He went on to become a prestigious criminal lawyer, you know; he shone as chief counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Iran-contra affair.

  “Bob once crowed that Liman could ‘take a witness’s socks off, leaving his shoes still on and securely tied.’”

  I laughed. “What was he like when Kennedy appointed him, when he first came in as U.S. attorney?”

  “He did the complete opposite of what was expected. Instead of hiring the white-shoe boys from Yale and Harvard, he’d take hungry imaginative students of minor law schools like St. John’s in Queens, train them relentlessly, and set them free. I was just a kid from the boondocks of the Middle West!”

  Under Bob’s direction, Victor went on, they wiped out the torpid traditions of previous U.S. attorneys who had given free passes to crooked lawyers and big financiers who should have been indicted for tax fraud or corruption. With the approval of the new Kennedy administration, Bob’s office took away the virtual immunity enjoyed by the high and mighty. His closest employees, like Steve Kaufman, Pierre Leval, and Frank Thomas, ran circles around them.

  “He was aloof to the disgruntlement of the lesser guns,” Victor explained. “They complained that he played favorites, and he did. He worked the city making alliances while he groomed his best assistants to become judges, partners in law firms, heads of corporations. When they were ready to move on, they could do just about anything they wanted.

  “My gosh, half the judges in Manhattan owe their posts to him!” Victor spoke exuberantly. “The office became so famous that Bob could move mountains. How do you think I became head of Bantam Books? Bob gave me a lifestyle I never would have had otherwise.

  “We were paid less than fifty thousand dollars a year, but we were so cocky we helped him develop the prosecution of white-collar crime like it had never existed before. Lucinda, the office was a playground! And it was filled with a panorama of nobodies who would one day be known as among America’s best and brightest.

  “There was nothing like it,” Victor said wistfully, pushing away his plate. “Nobody like him, before or after.”

  5

  I love you, love you, love you.

  For the last month, we had said the words, acted out the words, immersed ourselves in their meaning. If we separated for a day or two, we began to get that strange hollow sensation, like people who are thirsty before they know it. It was just too much being together and too much being apart. It was early January 1977, and we had been together for about seven months.

  When he was hospitalized for one of his particularly stubborn ear infections, our separation was unbearable, so we wheeled his IV into the bathroom and shut the door, an experience all the more sweet for the imminent possibility a doctor or nurse would come in. Later, he found an excellent ear specialist who pierced holes in his eardrums so any infection he got would drain out, thus ending a lifetime of misery.

  As inextricable as we were, I had my own life, and Bob continued to accept it without complaint. He didn’t say a word when I continued to put myself at risk by participating in agitprop demos with the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, the Purple Panthers, whomever, or hung out with the straggle of hippies left over from the early 1970s. Truthfully, no one paid attention to us. After the war ended, we lost support. Unless they’re bleeding, Americans are too lazy for outrage. And we had already managed to engender change in the culture: blacks and women gained some rights; people were less repressed, lived freer, and even truer, lives.

  But living in the real world, loving Bob and watching how he changed the culture in his own quiet way, had affected me. As I joined feminist “Take Back the Night” vigils and I lit straw dummies representing President Ford, I began to feel embarrassed. Feminism was worth fighting for, long overdue, but nice old Ford wasn’t worth putting a match to. He wasn’t a fascist. It was the hardened and by the way sexist revolutionaries of my generation who were the true fascists now.

  My friends and I had believed in absolute simplicity, the workability of the pure idea, but man is just a tiny step above the animal, and the mores and restrictions of society that we have been battering against probably hold us together. The circular nature of life lets us change the world very little. The Weathermen, who threw homemade bombs at empty banks, corporation warehouses, military offices, did not move forward in a straight line; they moved in a spiral, coming no closer to overthrowing the establishment than they did when they began.

  We had been simpleminded, so idealistic, so gullible.

  * * *

  At dusk, the diminished people sit

  In caves and sing songs that are not heard until

  The sun slips beneath them and they recede

  To watch the birds tuck

  Up their wings and drop like stones.

  * * *

  I had one or two friends left who were still true believers. Bob even agreed to visit them and sat eating tofu on a water bed, but when he came out of the bathroom, having had to wipe his hands on towels made of American flags, he looked dour. Though he didn’t discourage me from visiting, he never went there again.

  Nor did I. I didn’t want to sleep on icy stone church floors anymore. I was ready to feel safe, sheltered. I wanted to get my grandma’s Victorian bed out of storage and cover it with a Wedding Star quilt. I wanted to watch old movies, have roses on my table, and feel a familiar shoulder beside me on which to lay my head.

  I knew that Bob, after five years of being unmarried, wanted this also. We lived like a couple, at my apartment, at Riverdale, and, since he had to have a Manhattan residence as DA, at a rental on Central Park West. We were in a marriage without being married. The question circled above us but was never asked. I naively fantasized: maybe he was trying to decide on a ring, or maybe he was worrying over where he should ask me. It could be in the bathtub, for all I cared, or in a noisy restaurant; he could even do it in his office while he was reading an indictment. Just so long as he did it.

  But the question did not come.

  Even his first wife’s friends in Riverdale told me I had healed him. “You’re strong, you’re ebullient,” said Nan Leneman, a family friend in Riverdale. “I’ve never seen him so animated. If he hasn’t asked you to marry him yet, he had better do it.”

  But he didn’t. He still didn’t.

  So, one day, I simply asked him. “Wa
nna go to Vegas and get married? We could honeymoon at Caesars Palace. Play the slot machines. Sleep in a round bed with black satin sheets and a mirror on top.”

  He laughed, then looked away. “We should do it, I know. Let me ask Barbara what she thinks.”

  * * *

  You’d think he was marrying Barbara, for God’s sake. But then … Barbara isn’t just an ordinary child. She’s extraordinary, because she’s motherless. I know how lousy that feels. And I was an adult when my mom died last year, not a little girl. I can’t imagine how it must have hit her, how confusing it must have been not to know, down deep, what dead even means. All you really know is that Mommy left you, not why. I didn’t know why, really, it had happened to me. We were both of us too young to lose each other. But Barbara lost her mother when she was nine, and at that age the world is magical. Did she worry whether it was something she had done? And now, if he marries me, she’ll think she’s lost her father too.

  * * *

  A week went by, then two weeks, and Bob didn’t mention marriage again. As hard as I knew this must be for him, I began to think that perhaps his youngest daughter was a blind. Maybe he loved me but didn’t love me that much … or maybe he was simply terrified. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided he was terrified.

  More time went by. He began saying he would ask her tomorrow, but tomorrow followed tomorrow until there was no tomorrow, only today.

  We were walking in the park through the balmy spring air from the Great Lawn up to the Conservatory Garden to an abundance of yellow daylilies, scarlet peonies with their big black eyes, hollyhocks. I wanted to make a particularly good impression on him that day: I wore a white sundress cinched at the waist, and I had pinned my hair up in back, leaving strands to fall over my neck.

  “Bob,” I said as we sat under the bower of violet wisteria. I crossed my ankles and smiled up at him sweetly. “Could we discuss getting married, I mean really discuss the whole thing seriously? Decide some things.”

  “Not again. Can’t we just enjoy ourselves? Look at the beautiful gardens?”