The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  IANTHE REMINDS US THAT OLD SPIES NEVER DIE

  Forgive me, Fred, for what may appear a digression, but the subject of spying deserves some attention. Just about everything nasty that went on during the war continued after. Brinestalker and Standing were spies, of course, though I can’t imagine they were good ones. There were many more, and people receiving government stipends to fight the war in covert situations did not wish to be abandoned for some old piece of peace. You don’t get rid of old spies just like that. When people who possess top-secret information feel threatened they can do desperate things.

  Men had become accustomed to getting paid for talking, rewarded somehow, but you had to be careful to whom you talked to get it. You could just as easily get fired or somehow disposed of. The Brits were the best at that: they chased their best daredevils all the way to Russia, where they had to spend the rest of their lives or be executed if they came back home. I’d estimate that of the hundred or so men in the “intelligence field” that Strode and I knew, more than half of them wound up stuck behind various curtains, iron or otherwise, and can never come home, no matter how many big kills they brought off for their home team. Spy stories don’t tell you about this because it appears unheroic, which it is. I never could understand why men want to spy. The English lot, most of them out of Cambridge, claimed they were doing it for their country, which I never believed for a minute, although I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot about men no woman can ever understand, and I don’t think that they undertstand about themselves either. It’s all a big game somehow, left over from childhoods of challenging each other over who was King of the Mountain, who has the biggest dick, and going out and using it, metaphorically, of course. Most of the best ones did turn out to be fairies, like Burgess and Maclean and Philby and Blunt and our own James Jesus Angleton. In these cases, I’ve always wondered if it was some sort of retribution toward their mommy country that didn’t approve of fairies, an “I’ll show you who’s a fairy!” sort of thing. When you get to more recent times, all they were interested in was money. In my day that was considered insulting.

  Most spies aren’t given but half a picture, if that. Edwin always complained that Franklin had a way of keeping everyone in the dark about his overall picture, which only he had in his mind’s eye. That’s why most histories of leaders are so full of baloney. No one can ever know what the subject really had in mind, no matter how much he wrote down or said out loud or even whispered. Since things change day by day, minute by minute, you’d better not have had too many drinks, which spies, to a man, love to do, get drunk, which made them, drink by drink, feel increasingly important. Or to get caught up in some other obsession, like poor Sumner and his Negro railway porters. Sumner was a real loss to Franklin because he knew what had to be done and Franklin usually didn’t. The more I find out about Franklin, the more I believe we just had good luck, little of it coming from him but from the fact that the war somehow ended itself and in some way we were relatively all still here. Nobody bombed us for a start. I don’t think one single American considered “luck” a part of winning this war. But it was. Big-time. Franklin wasn’t smart enough and the men he had around him weren’t either, except for Sumner.

  I personally believe that Franklin spoke with Hitler a number of times and that deals transpired. There. I’ve said it. God knows I’ve thought it all along. What’s the point of being a leader if you can’t make deals? I’ll bet old Franklin got something in return for not allowing Jews into this country. The only question is what, and this we’ll never know, no matter how many historians or biographers write their “definitive” works of horseshit. I put it bluntly to Eleanor one day: “Do you realize that you and Franklin will go down in history as the ones who wouldn’t do anything to help a zillion Jews and fairies and gypsies survive?” Well, she was a bucket of sobs and groans and protestations. “No! No! No! Don’t say that again! I tried! I begged! I didn’t know about the gypsies and the … homosexuals, but I got down on my knees and I begged for the Jews!”—something that’s hard to visualize, but I took her word for it. She had the only heart in that relationship. Once during the war she took me to a meeting of Hadassah ladies whom she was addressing and trying to console, somewhere in Jew Tank territory, Northwest, third alphabet, Ellicott Street, I think. They were lapping up her sympathy when I got up and actually shouted at them. “Your relatives and families are in hell, if they’re still alive, and you have done nothing to help get them out! They’ve been living in hell for the entire duration of this war while you’ve been living in houses like this one, Sara Sue Goldenstein’s gilded baroque monstrosity. Sara Sue, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your Sammy let you spend on this hideously tasteless morgue? How can any of you face your own blood when they come back? If they come back?” Eleanor ran from the room. The Hadassah harpies just stared at me, speechless. On my way out I saw Emma Liebowitz, whose son, a homosexual, was arrested in Berlin trying to emulate Auden and Isherwood and hadn’t been heard from since. We filed a Seek and Search for him. “And you, Emma, what kind of mother are you? The Nazis murder homosexuals right alongside Jews.” The poor woman collapsed in a faint on the floor, and I—oh, I am so righteous—stepped right over her body and haughtily stalked out.

  Yes, it may seem inapt to digress into something that on the surface appears so alien to the world of science and our plague as spying, but it really isn’t and I do think we all must ask, what exactly is spying, or “intelligence” to call it by its more formal and more ridiculous name? How inclusive was it? Spying during World War II particularly attracted faculty members from America’s and Britain’s elitist educational institutions, no one has ever been able to tell me why. Chief among the American schools, in that it provided some 75 percent of all spies working for America and Britain, was Yaddah. In charge of the most important and confidential wartime initiative (code name: Boola) was Yaddah’s Tom Jones.

  Tom Jones was, of course, not his real name. We haven’t heard much yet about Yaddah since its founding, and I know Fred and Daniel will rectify that in due course. How you two got through four years at that prison, I don’t know. Edwin was on the faculty there for a few semesters after we returned, long enough for us to know that the tactics of Stalinism were not confined to Soviet Russia. I don’t mean it was full of Commies, although Tom and a lot of others will shortly do their best to convince everyone that all of America could be. I mean you couldn’t take a breath of fresh air in New Godding without there being a regulation for where and when you did so, and if you breathed out of sync you were summoned for chastisement by someone you’d not met and would likely never see again. There must have been spies in the woodwork for them to know whatever it was that so never-endingly bothered them about anyone. It was almost a joke, unless you were fined, I mean your salary was actually docked if you talked about the “wrong things” in a classroom. Joseph Grandage, who refused to join the OSS, told me he walked into a dining hall while an officer of the university was eating with the boys and he was told to have dinner elsewhere. And if the boys weren’t wearing ties, forget it! Fifty lashes with a wet noodle, they used to joke. My God, but it was regimented! And petty! And as at Harvard, Yaddah students and faculty were booted out very quickly if any whiff of fairylike behavior could be smelled on them. Suicides at both universities for being gay were highly guarded secrets and I’ll bet still are.

  I’ll just bet also that the same charge could be brought against the pharmaceutical industry, that the number of suicides and even murders is numerous and classified. But as Grace is fond of saying, that’s somebody else’s history to tell.

  D. HEWLING DUPPERS REDUX

  Hello again. I hope you remember me. I increased that information overload for you with my earlier entries about Comstock and Garfield. I’m the boring queen who managed to keep his tenure at Yaddah. I’m retired now but as I still live locally I go in now and then to pinch-hit if someone in American Studies is out for a spell, sort o
f the Yaddah version of the substitute teacher you had in grade school. Fred has asked me to fill Ms. Strode in on Tom Jones because number one, I was his student, number two, I was his office assistant, number three, I was with him when he went to England and came back to Yaddah after being a part of such historically important work, number four, he was one of the strangest men who ever walked this earth, number five, we fucked like bunnies, which wasn’t easy for him because he was a hunchback and often in great pain, and number six, I really loved and admired him. Because of five and six I’m not going to use his real name, although anyone who was at Yaddah then and involved in its administration or its American Studies department will be able to figure it out. I hope they’re all dead and if they’re not I hope reading this will give them their well-deserved heart attacks and finish them off.

  Tom Jones loved American literature more than any teacher I ever had or heard about. He knew all our great ones inside out as if they were his blood relatives. Hawthorne and Melville especially. He knew they were both gay and loved each other. He’d hold me in his arms as he read to me parts of both their works to point out stuff to back up his theories. “Can’t you just read what’s underneath these words?” he’d ask me. “Subtext. You’ve always got to search for subtext. In art and in life.” He was a big believer in codes, for everything, particularly art, “where artists aren’t able to be as honest as their art demands but they’re trying to be honest anyway. Not easy.” His friends were all writers, poets, certainly not teachers, “we’re too boring, and we need our artist friends like a vampire needs blood to stay alive.” When I asked him why he didn’t write his own great work—academics are always looking to do that—he said, “Because I’m not brave enough to say what has to be said.” I loved him even more for that. He would lecture his classes to “pay attention to what Hawthorne and Melville are really saying,” that sort of thing. But when confronted to flesh that out a little bit more, his eyes would twinkle mischievously and he’d be silent, and I’m sure no kid had a notion what in the world he was talking about. He could lose his job if he talked gay anything and we both knew it, every teacher at Yaddah knew it. Yaddah was not what you would call a gay-friendly place. It started at the top, with all its presidents, who said in public really awful things.

  I was his assistant as an undergraduate and when I was writing my thesis. At first I just filed his correspondence to the many famous writers all over the world that he kept in touch with, like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and a lot of lesbian “imagists,” as they were called. When we first fell into each other’s arms, it was, or seemed like, an accident. I was on a ladder and slipped coming down. Simple as that. He picked me up and held on and so did I. “You don’t want to go any farther with a cripple like me, laddie,” he said, as neither of us let go and we kissed. I’d had lots of men by then, and lots of hunky bodies, but I loved his bent and crippled body as if he were Cary Grant. He had some kind of childhood malformation that never healed right and in those days they couldn’t do much to fix it, even though his family could afford it. After that, we were together all the time we could be. I told him I didn’t want to know if he had a wife and kids, because I figured he did and I didn’t want to feel guilty and I didn’t want him to feel guilty either.

  When the war came he offered his services immediately. It turned out he’d also studied mathematics and was interested in the burgeoning field of computers and collecting information more efficiently, as I certainly knew because I had to deal with his thousands of every kind of literary ephemera his vast collection contained. He was Mister Neat and Mister Organized and Mr. I Must Be Able to Lay My Hands on Everything I Own or You’re Fired. The stacks and shelves and file cases in his office were a feat of modern—I don’t know what to call it—library-ology. When the offer came for him to go to England, and to Bletchley Park, he took me with him to be his assistant there as well. He told the Brits in charge of Bletchley they couldn’t have one without the other. I guess they were used to guys like us. We figured that out when we were given a room with a single bed!

  In and out of this stone pile came a formidable amount of everything imaginable to send forth into battle. None other than James Jesus Angleton, who would become head of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was our assistant in our Office of Strategic Services, the OSS (code: XYZ-22). Office XYZ-22 worked with the intelligence divisions of each branch of the armed forces of both our countries as well as our FBI. James Jesus was a dark and sly weasel and sexy as hell and gay as a coot, though trying so hard to hide it you’d think he was trying to keep himself from an onset of diarrhea, trying to hold it in. Wild Bill Donovan, who founded the first OSS, the two Dulles brothers, Bill Casey, who worked for both the OSS and the CIA and will run Peter Ruester’s successful campaign for president (and along the way convince him of that worldwide Communist threat that was as fictional as Dredd Trish, Jr.’s weapons of mass destruction), all were then youngsters, wandering about searching for political enemies. Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Anthony Blunt, all had papers of top-secret affiliation. It was like anybody who was or would be anybody wanted to be part of XYZ-22, even though it was considered a British hothouse. The Brits were a seedy, smelly, unfriendly lot, and they were, to use their own terminology, beastly to each other. We were all, Brits and Yanks, also a part of the Fifty Committee, my goodness there were a lot of committees; every committee leader claimed he was trying not to play favorites (we learned fast that down that road lies eventual blame and responsibility for sure), and if there was a committee headed by a Brit, there had to be one headed by a Pole, or a Russian, or of course a Yank. Now, there was no way in hell that each country had the same goals in sight. So the whole system, not only of international cooperation in “intelligence,” but of out-and-out spying, was, as Tom and I learned to say, “pretty much of a wash. We’ll just have to find a way to do it by ourselves.”

  Tom, who as I said was a demon for detail and total neatness, became noticed because he managed to compile and input, with the expert assistance of yours truly, some 400,000 entries into what today we’d call a database, the likes of which had never been available before. We chalked up many an all-nighter, just the two of us, in that attic room at Bletchley Park, an amazingly down-at-the-heels once-stately pile, by the way. While we’d played with each other in his office at Yaddah, compiling this true achievement in the UK is what really brought us together. For one thing, there was only that one bed. I got to see how horrid his curvature was becoming; often it was a suppurating sore, and I tended him like I was his nurse, which I was. He didn’t want anyone to know that he was in any way infirm. If there was a physical challenge every other man was performing as a matter of course, like climbing five flights of stairs numerous times a day, he would do it faster. From this database, the Brits concocted Operation Gracie Fields, which involved the “turning”—that is, imprisonment or killing—of every German spy introduced into Britain, another amazing achievement that not so coincidentally gave us access to the German codes necessary for us to break the Enigma code, which Tom and chiefly Alan Turing did, which won the war.

  Kim Philby, the great spy against his own country, was Tom’s counterpart. We went to many an all-night drunken orgy with him and his fellow twits from Cambridge that wound up quite naturally as a sexual orgy too. People still have no idea how homosexual the world of spying was! Mind you, as with armed forces in the trenches, there’s nothing else to fool around with but other guys. But this was more than that. There was such an intensity to our work and its importance that we really became a brotherhood of men, and, like something out of ancient Greece, preferred each other. I can’t recall one single time when any of us went into any neighboring town, or even London, to lasso a lassie.

  By the end of the war, Tom was a very powerful figure, for good reason, and got lots of medals from various governments. Then Truman decided to close down the OSS and form the CIA and give the leftovers to the FBI. Hoover was in there on the ground floor
already, keeping touch with his gay spy contacts—that man’s tentacles were sprouting everywhere. Tom had to decide whether to move to Washington with the CIA or come back to New Godding, which he’d left as a lowly instructor. He was offered $8,000 a year from Uncle Sam, a lot of money, and $2,500 a year from Yaddah, and he took Yaddah. He knew he couldn’t continue to live our kind of life for the government even if James Jesus was his co-worker, and he thought we could at Yaddah. No, I put too much emphasis on his and my sexual attraction to each other. He had idealistic reasons for electing Yaddah that I didn’t know about yet. He wasn’t finished trying to change history, and this was when things between us turned sour, as would much of the rest of his life.

  Tom’s goal was to reconstruct the American Studies that he’d left into something beyond the study of America (“Brits ruling the curriculum have had more than enough time at bat, boy”), into a curriculum that inadvertently would provide ideological ammunition for what soon was being called the Cold War. It was a new American crusade. Rich alumni now appeared who wanted something to show for their money and saw this as virtually a second Civil War and they wanted in. You’ve got to remember (well, I’m sure Ms. Strode remembers quite well) that this was a secret postwar world then, secrecy being the operative necessity because spies and spying, as she points out, was a bigger deal than it had ever been before. And this was not Mata Hari and Ashenden kind of stuff. This was dangerous in new ways, most particularly in terms of exposure: you were out there in the open air with no government or rules of war to really protect you should anything go wrong. No government, even to this day, is willing to admit it has spies. During World War II, what came to be known as the U.S. Intelligence Community, well, my goodness, it was all puffing meerschaum pipes and Burberry raincoats, but after it, spies now carried guns. And the rich and powerful Yaddahs loved it.