The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  Henri had not tasted beer before, but of course as captain-elect he was the special object of the revelers. The incumbent captain rose with toast after toast to Henri Tod, the German boy who in a little over a year had had such a meteoric career at the same school as the great General Montgomery—Montgomery, who would be the first to reach Berlin (cheers!), by God, and show those Krauts (nothing personal, Tod) who was who, and maybe General Montgomery would bring back Hitler’s mustache to frame in the school’s museum (cheers!). Are you willing to drink to that, Tod?

  Henri lifted his glass solemnly to the defeat of Hitler. To the defeat of Hitler and the Germans, corrected Espy Major.

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, Henri smiled, jug in hand, there are some good Germans, you know, please don’t think that they are all like Adolf Hitler.

  Well, said Espy, there are certainly a lot of Germans who are taking orders from Adolf Hitler and a lot of Germans who have been cheering Adolf Hitler all these years. Perhaps, he said, Tod was so engaged in his studies while in Germany that he didn’t have a chance to find out what was happening to other people?

  Henri at this point could not quite focus, either on his companions or on the question. But he felt a compulsive need to straighten Espy out, and so, as the boys began filing out to cross the street to the campus and to their dormitories, Henri approached Espy and asked him to come with him for a minute to the corner of the room, as there was something he wished him to know. Espy good-naturedly did so. “But first,” Henri said solemnly, trying to remind himself how one was supposed to look when one looked solemn, “first, you must promise me that you will never tell anyone what I am about to tell you.” Espy promised, solemnly, that as long as he lived, Tod’s secret would be safe. Well, said Henri, he had suffered. He was a Jew. His parents had been taken away and killed in a concentration camp. He had a sister, her name was Clementa. She hid out in a town called Tolk, with a family called Wurmbrand. They pretended that Clementa and Henri were their niece and nephew. They had looked after them since he was thirteen, and they were in touch with the Resistance. And the Resistance had brought him safely to England. Was this not evidence that there were indeed good Germans?

  Espy Major whistled, and whispered that he’d had no idea that Tod had gone through so much, and that he wished immediately to modify any suggestion that Tod had not known danger. Whereupon they shook hands, rose, and Henri was very sick. Espy led him to his bed.

  Three weeks later, Henri was surprised to be called out of his Greek class. Mr. Wallenberg had secured permission of the headmaster to interrupt him, and was waiting for him in the reception room.

  He was pale, and told Henri that he needed to talk with him privately. And so they drove to The Boltons, at Number 7 of which Wallenberg lived. Inside, he told Henri to sit down.

  “Have you spoken to anyone about the Wurmbrands and your sister?”

  Henri’s lips quivered, and for a moment he did not reply.

  Wallenberg repeated the question.

  “I told one boy.”

  “When?”

  “The night I was made captain. Three weeks ago.”

  Wallenberg turned his face to one side. “The day before yesterday, the Gestapo went to the farmhouse. They took the Wurmbrands out and shot them. They took your sister away in their car. She was driven to Hamburg and put on a train with all Jewish people rounded up in a general sweep. The train left Hamburg, and headed toward Poland.”

  Henri Tod left St. Paul’s the next day and took a job in Leeds as a coal miner. His curiosity about Espy was limited, because he knew that Espy himself would not wish harm to come to Henri’s sister. He did inquire about the profession of Espy’s father, who was a journalist, wholly engaged in covering the war. It crossed his mind only fleetingly to ask Espy Major whether he had told his father (or anyone else) the story of the new school captain’s secret family in Tolk, but decided against doing so. Of what use that line of questioning? On whom could the blame be put, other than himself? And so all he did was to collect, wordlessly, his personal materials, and leave a note in the headmaster’s office. He did not leave a forwarding address with Mr. Wallenberg, whom he never saw again.

  In the spring of 1950, he knocked on the door of the dean of admissions at Trinity College in Cambridge and said he would like to enroll to do advanced studies in philosophy. The dean looked at the young man, deferential but proud, mature beyond what the dean had experienced in young men of twenty-three or four. He was clean-shaven, strong, even-featured, brown-eyed, with perfectly shaped white teeth, slender nose and lips. The dean told him, somewhat more courteously than he’d have addressed a young man less striking in appearance and behavior, that there were conventional ways of applying for admission to graduate schools—where had he attended college?

  He was surprised to be told that the applicant had not even completed his public schoolwork at St. Paul’s, five years earlier. However, the applicant said, he had done concentrated reading while working in the coal mines, and was prepared to submit to examination. Rather intrigued by all this, the dean excused himself, left the room, and telephoned to the taskmasterish Russell Professor of Philosophy, James Jamison, and told him he would be grateful if Jamison would examine an applicant who was there under unusual circumstances.

  Three years later, with an advanced degree in philosophy, Henri Tod recrossed the Channel he had only once before crossed, as a frightened fifteen-year-old sick at heart at leaving his sister who, however, had promised him she would be seeing him soon, very, very soon.

  7

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy sat in the Oval Office. He had one hour before he would need to go upstairs to dress for the state dinner for what’s-his-name, the little hypocrite. Dulles told me he’s stolen maybe forty, maybe fifty million, and he is always poor-mouthing about his people. Damn right they’re poor. He stays in power another ten years, what’s-his-name (he must make it a serious point to get his name straight before dinner—why aren’t they all called Gonzalez? I mean, most of them are as it is), ten more years and his “people” will have nothing at all left. Ah, but if only the worst problems were Latin American. Chiquita Banana, da-da-da da-da—how does it go? … But he was putting off what he had scheduled for himself—more hard thought on Khrushchev, the bastard, and Berlin. He couldn’t remember whether his dad had told him that all communist chiefs of state, like all businessmen, were s.o.b.’s. Maybe he thought I’d simply take that for granted. Nobody knows what Khrushchev’s after and nobody’s going to find out, not even Arthur.… (Arthur! That might be fun! Say in 1986, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. I’ll be … almost sixty-nine. We’ll arrange a big public seminar, and someone will say, “Mr. President, in his study of your presidency, Professor Schlesinger writes that you were said to have simply shrugged off the Bay of Pigs as just one of those misjudgments that occasionally happen. Would you comment on that?” I’ll pause … look a little pained. Then I’ll say, “Oh dear. I was afraid someone would ask me about that book someday. The trouble is, Arthur really never understood.…”) He stopped and hooted, just audibly. Cut it out, Jack. I mean, Mr. President—back to the problem. It was true that no one had understood how deeply he felt about the screw-up at the Bay of Pigs. For their sake and his. Yes, he had said publicly it was his fault. Yes, he had got plenty of people friendly to him, in plenty of places, to suggest it was really the fault of the CIA, and the Pentagon, and Ike, and Tricky Dick, and Sagittarius, and Marilyn Monroe. But let’s face it, it really was my fault. I know I’m as bright as anybody. Nobody, really, is any brighter than I am. But being bright isn’t enough. You need to make the correct decisions, and sometimes dumb people can make sounder decisions than bright people, I mean, look at Ike on the one hand, Adlai on the other hand … God, what will they talk to each other about in eternity—Joe McCarthy? That’s about the only distaste they have in common.… In two weeks he would have met with Khrushchev. Was there any human being who had met Khrushchev, studied Khru
shchev, defected from Khrushchev, that he, the President of the United States, hadn’t either a) spoken to, b) read the works of, or c) been lectured to by? Was it possible to count the number of hours he had spent with Dean Acheson? Good old Dean, he wants just one little world war before he dies. On the other hand I could take Walter Lippmann’s advice, in exchange for which Khrushchev can have Europe. I’ve talked to every ambassador alive who has ever served in Moscow. What do they say? Pretty much the same thing, give or take this emphasis by Bohlen, that emphasis by Kennan. I’ve studied the minutes of—what? God. Geneva summit 1955—I wonder what that one solved. Then there was Camp David 1959. And Paris 1960—he aborted the damn thing on account of a U-2! That was vintage Khrushchev, right! Especially the press conference he gave when he stopped over in Vienna. Said maybe Ike was just a little cuckoo.… Brings up an interesting point. One of the things I have to ask myself is: How far do I let him go? I mean, if he starts to scream and yell, what do I do in the cause of Peace with Honor—God, I wish that phrase had never been coined. Fact is, you don’t that often get both at the same time. You make up the honor, like the Japs after Hiroshima saying they had to have their emperor. They’d have imported the people who did in Mussolini to take care of their emperor if we had said to them we had one big beautiful one left over after Hiroshima for Tokyo … OK, so what’s he up to? Seriously, what is he up to? Jack old boy, I mean, Mr. President, old boy, let’s start at the other end. What’s he not up to? He’s not up to beginning a nuclear war. Among other things, Poppa Marx wouldn’t like that. A nuclear war with maybe only Patagonians left over isn’t going to do much to validate the Marxist theory of class struggle. Okay, at what point do we start dropping nuclear bombs? A hell of a question to ask, but I’m the one who’s going to decide. Well, since you can’t argue with hypotheses (quote unquote; old Strausshaven, Harvard, Philosophy 10ab—nice guy, and little Miss Hilda Strausshaven was, well, what’s that word—synesthetic? Was she ever. He was a little nuts, but most of them are), then I can’t argue with the proposition that Khrushchev doesn’t want nuclear war. So he’s got to know that nuclear war is exactly what is going to happen if … if what? That’s the problem … He depressed a button on his desk. “Get me a Coca-Cola, please.” He smiled. Ken Galbraith once said that when Jack Kennedy really got excited, he would order a Coca-Cola. Never booze. So, he was excited? Correct … So they don’t want a nuclear war. But they do want to press on. After all, there isn’t any believable sense in which they are acting in order to end an aggression we are responsible for. The only thing we’re “responsible” for is giving shelter to East Germans who are moving out of the workers’ paradise. That’s hardly our aggressive act. Khrushchev might try demanding that we deport them. Not that it would be the first time. Ugh, 1945, 1946. God, let’s not think about that. He knows he can’t ask us to keep people from going from East Berlin to West Berlin. And once they’re in West Berlin, what are we supposed to do if they tell our processors at Marienfelde they want to go on to West Germany? That they can’t go to West Germany? The refugee stream into West Berlin is the only ongoing East-West phenomenon that’s in any way destabilizing. Laos has quieted down. The nuclear testing issue is on track. Now, how bad is it in Berlin? Is Khrushchev up against something he literally can’t stand and must do something about? Or is he simply looking around to make a little hell, and push the old revolution up a peg or two? In the last three weeks he’s talked to maybe six ambassadors or foreign ministers or whatever, and talked about how nuclear bombs might be necessary if I’m intransigent. Me, intransigent. All I want is a continuation of the status quo, that’s all. But [he was looking out on the Rose Garden at this point, where Caroline was arguing with her nurse] I’m not going to draw a line and then redraw it. That’s what happened in Cuba. It hurt me. It hurt me with Europe, it hurt me in America, and it hurt me inside. The whole point of the exercise is to find exactly where that line should be drawn, and make it absolutely clear that that line is not to be moved. We can’t simply give them Berlin. But we’ll have to give them other things, things that don’t really matter, if possible. Question: What doesn’t matter? That’s what I’ve got to find out. De Gaulle will have one idea on this, Adenauer another, Macmillan another. And Khrushchev, gee … He thought. Was it really a good idea to agree to see Khrushchev? Hell, to ask to see him—that, really, was how it had gone, en route to this summit, though the history books will be appropriately murky on this point. Khrushchev can scream and yell, and what he does is acceptable as packaged behavior—a) his people don’t have any say in the matter; and b) those few of his people who do have a say in the matter don’t seem to attach much importance to decorum. They want their satisfactions. Funny thing: it shouldn’t really make any difference, as I understand their phony-baloney doctrine. It’s action that matters; but theater matters a lot too. I wonder whether Suslov—good example, Suslov, the tablet-keeper of Marxism in the Kremlin—I wonder what he thought when Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table at the UN? Or when he went crackers in front of De Gaulle, Macmillan, and Ike last year? If Khrushchev is just being Khrushchev, then the boys have got to weigh whether just being Khrushchev is the best way to advance their cause. And the only means they have to measure that is—me. How do I react?—that’s the question. How does John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, maximum leader of the imperialist powers, react. And what will I come up with, in my search for something we can give them, that we can do without?

  The special telephone on his desk rang, to which, at the other end, only one person had access.

  “I’m coming, dear.”

  8

  Leonid Ustinov came into his office in the massive new building in East Berlin. Soviet agents who did not wish to hunker down in the principal dwelling of the Soviet Embassy were more comfortably inconspicuous in one of the side buildings within the huge compound, and accordingly it was in one of them that Ustinov elected to locate the intelligence ganglion that had heretofore squatted in the embassy. From this side building subsidiary terminals went out to the safe houses sprinkled about East (and West) Berlin.

  There were two entrances to his office. The conventional entrance, through which he, his secretary, and various aides entered. And a back-door entrance, used only by Ustinov. This led to a large room which, from the outside, appeared to be a kind of windowless concrete blockhouse, housing giant furnaces or what-have-you. Radio equipment and a detection-proof electronic insulation system covered the entire room, which measured twenty feet by thirty feet. Access to it other than from Ustinov’s office was by elevator. The elevator that went from the ground floor of Building H to the fourteenth floor listed G as the bottommost stop. A special key inserted in the elevator’s push-button panel impelled the elevator down to a subterranean level, the elevator exit opening on a door that could be opened by working a safe lock, or by using the little telephone to announce one’s presence. Ustinov was pleased with the expeditious means by which he was able to carry out his normal administrative life and, without going through the boring rigors of buses, taxis, subways, umbrellas, goatees, what-have-yous in order to meet with his agents in scattered safe houses, he could actually bring them to Blockhouse H, as they came to call it.

  Ustinov, age fifty-one, had been deputy intelligence officer in Berlin from 1947 until 1953. He was recalled after the June uprising in 1953, on the general principle that whenever there is an anti-Soviet demonstration or strike or riot, that means that the cadre of Soviet officials supposed to prevent that kind of thing has been in some way negligent. Since the uprisings were in June, and Stalin had died three months earlier in March, Ustinov felt lucky. Moreover, he had early on mastered a principle taught him by his mentor and patron, the legendary Pupskavitch, for a brief period himself a protégé of Josef Stalin. That was just after Stalin had exiled Trotsky, who had been Pupskavitch’s original patron. Pupskavitch resolved, at age twenty-eight, that he was really too young to die, and so he elected to build up a per
sonal dossier documenting the surreptitious treacheries of Trotsky, whose treacheries went so far beyond anything Stalin had thought possible to contrive that he instantly demanded to see the author of this political grand opera, promoted him on the spot, and gave instructions that he was to be attached to Stalin’s personal staff. In what capacity? Stalin said he did not care. And then, on reflection, he suggested that Pupskavitch become the Trotsky expert, in charge of counteracting Trotsky’s propaganda and that of Trotsky’s janissaries. This Pupskavitch did with wonderful ingenuity, and remained in the Kremlin right up until Stalin succeeded, in 1940, in contriving the assassination of Trotsky.

  In the early thirties, Pupskavitch had brought Ustinov into his staff, partly because Ustinov read and wrote English and Spanish, two languages through which Trotsky was sending out high-voltage anti-Stalin material all over the world, and partly because Pups, as in informal circumstances his staff liked to call him, was a Stakhanovite homosexual, and young Leonid, whose sense of priorities was never tormented, had no problem whatever in electing to feign reciprocal ardor for Pups in return for a private apartment in which he could keep his mistress. During the seven years Ustinov was a part of the Trotsky Bedevilment Team, Pups fell out of favor twice: once when Stalin, quite without reason, held him personally responsible for not having got hold of, and destroyed, Lenin’s so-called last will (it was always referred to as Lenin’s “so-called” last will) in which he had warned against Stalin. And, again, Stalin was infuriated when Trotsky provided evidence to the John Dewey Commission set up to investigate the validity of Stalin’s purge trials. Pups had on both occasions taught Ustinov what he called the Principle of Evanescence. “You simply cease to exist, my dear Leonid; it is that simple. You will note that all communications to Comrade Stalin will be signed other than by me, never mind that I wrote them. All suggestions will be made by others. For all intents and purposes I shall be dead. Except!—I can be made to rise again! By whom? By the great Stalin. Who, one day, will say, ‘Where is Pupskavitch? I said, Where in the name of God is Pupskavitch!’ And within fifteen minutes I shall appear; ‘Comrade Stalin, you were asking after me?’