The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  “You are saying, Hans?”

  “I am saying Khrushchev will be looking for a scapegoat.”

  “Why me? The Warsaw partners endorsed my proposal, unlike last March.”

  “Your thoughts, Walter, as I warned you as a student in the university, are sometimes hampered by a bourgeois affinity for reason. If the operation fails, there will be the need for a scapegoat. Chairman Khrushchev will take care to exclude himself. You will recall that he contrived to cause you to petition for the Moscow meeting. Enough said?”

  Ulbricht got up. “I appreciate your personal loyalty, Hans. Don’t worry.”

  28

  It was a very late night for Caspar. Ulbricht had instructed him to prepare the minutes of the meeting in Ulbricht’s secretary’s office, rather than use the pool typewriter he shared with three other aides. “This time, make no copies. Just put the original in a sealed envelope and leave it right on my desk.”

  Caspar sensed that this was the moment to take liberties. Instead of supplying Henri with a paraphrase of the minutes, he resolved to give him a carbon copy. He emerged at 4 A.M. with four sheets of paper in his pocket, in an envelope on which was imprinted “Office of the Chairman, Democratic Republic of Germany.” In his left pocket he carried an unmarked, unsealed envelope. If by any remote chance he was stopped and searched, he would identify himself and advise that the document he was carrying was a confidential document of his uncle’s that he had been up late working on. When he reached the lockers, he would take the document from the official envelope and insert it in the unmarked envelope in his pocket, destroying the official envelope.

  But go, at four in the morning, to the Ostbahnhof’s lockers? He deemed this provocative. Not earlier than 6:30, he reflected. By then the traffic would have begun to move. But not later than 6:45, because Henri’s courier came as early as 7, and on no account must they meet or must there be any delay in relaying the tidings of the evening. But to go home, a distance of sixteen blocks, enter his house, sleep, wake, wash, and return by 6:30 meant not only to risk awakening his mother, but also to reduce his sleeping time by the one hour the round trip would take him. The answer was, clearly, to rest at Berchtesgaden.

  And so he slithered into the old sidings via the usual entrance, the same door through which Henri had come the night he was wounded. He walked silently the well-trod route. When he turned at the fourth siding he began reflexively counting the cars as he walked down. 10206 was the fourth. He got there, took the key from his pocket, and opened first the platform door, then the door leading to the car. He lit a single candle, next to Hitler’s bed, set the alarm clock, reflected on the convulsive events one week hence, and wondered, among other things, what, if anything, would happen to Berchtesgaden, and soon he was asleep.

  It was 8:15 when Roland delivered the envelope to Bruni, who opened it and, without a word to the housekeeper who was serving him breakfast, tore out the door. He knocked his code on the door. Henri promptly opened it, then read the document and said to Bruni, “I must go quickly to Oakes. Trail me—just in case. No chances on this one.” He went to the telephone and dialed Blackford’s number. Without identifying himself, he said, “I am on my way to see you. Wait for me,” and hung up.

  At Rheinstrasse, Blackford was waiting. His right hand trembling, Henri gave the envelope wordlessly to Blackford, who said, “Come on in.” As he started to read, he led Henri to the kitchen. While still reading, he poured a cup of coffee, sat down at one of the kitchen chairs beside his own unfinished cup, and finished reading.

  “Great God, Henri. Who in the hell is your mole? Mrs. Ulbricht?”

  “You know I can’t tell you, Blackford.”

  “I know that ordinarily you couldn’t tell me. But this time you have to tell me. Don’t you know how much hangs on the reliability of this document?”

  “It is reliable.”

  “Thanks, Henri. Now all we need to do is convince the President of the United States. Look, for this one I’ll need you to come with me to my superior.” On principle, Rufus avoided meeting other than with his own agents. He especially did not want to meet Henri Tod, wanted, in the Eastern Zone, for murder, among other things. Blackford knew Rufus well enough a) to break the rule, and b) to do so without consulting him. “Let’s go,” he said.

  29

  Cool young man, Oakes. You’d think the President of the United States, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Adviser to the President—did I forget anybody? Caroline didn’t drift in on this meeting—oh yes, the Secretary of Defense. McNamara would love that, remembering everyone there, forgetting the Secretary of Defense. All of us in the Situation Room, which by the way why in the hell didn’t I choose a larger room? In there like sardines. Oakes talked, if anything, as if we were classmates. Well no, that’s not fair. As Bobby says—oh, forgot Bobby. Of course Bobby was there. As Bobby would say, protocolwise he was okay. Master spy Rufus is a pretty impressive guy, Allen was right about it. And Oakes absolutely swears for that Tod man. I don’t doubt Tod believes those minutes. As a matter of fact, I don’t doubt their authenticity. Boy, how we went round and round on that point. The Oakes guy, I bet he makes out. Mm. He came pretty close to advocacy, though his job was just to answer questions about Tod and his contact. Jesus Christ, that’s got to be one for the history books. His own fucking nephew! “Mr. Chairman,” I’ll say to Khrushchev next time we summit, “Mr. Chairman, do you have a nephew whose father you executed? Because I have a wonderful idea how you can make amends. You don’t have such a nephew fitting that description? Well, I tell you what, Mr. Chairman, you pick any nephew, and you go ahead and execute his father, then you’ll have a nephew you need to make amends for, right? There’s a simple solution to every problem. All we need to do is to think positive, right?” … Oh shut up. So after a half hour on the authenticity of the document we dismiss Tarzan and Boy, and then oh God. I set the rules. Look—I was right about this, Bobby agreed right away, so did McNamara. You set out a premise and move or you don’t move, but you don’t question the premise. I was right to say: Goddam it, we’ve decided it was authentic, now let’s think the problem through on that assumption. Otherwise we’ll sit here and find ourselves arguing all over again whether the minutes are the real thing. I didn’t look at Dean, I looked in the opposite direction, but Dean knew I was really looking at him. I don’t think Dean really cares much about Berlin, or, for that matter, about Germans. That was a nice line of Clemenceau’s—was it Clemenceau? “I feel so attached to Germany I think there should be at least two of them.” Might use that one, one of these days. If I had invited Acheson into the meeting he’d have come out for three American tanks going over the Berlin barbed wire and not stopping until they reached Moscow. Khrushchev told Ulbricht that if the barbed wire is run over by American tanks he is to call off the operation because of the Soviet Union’s “comprehensive obligations to the Warsaw powers.” That’s a nice way of saying that he doesn’t really want to tangle with us. So Lemnitzer says, What if Khrushchev changes his mind? We have twenty-seven tanks in the American sector. The Russians have over one thousand squatted around Berlin. But Khrushchev wasn’t telling Ulbricht and the gang that he couldn’t lick our Berlin military, even if you add a couple of British bicycles or whatever they have out there—not much, McNamara says—and add whatever the French have that they haven’t flown out to Algeria—add all that up and still they can clobber us in no time. But that isn’t what Khrushchev is afraid of, apparently. He’s afraid of a casus belli. Good thing they put that in Latin. Sounds too scary in English. I wonder if I could decline casus; I got pretty good marks in Latin at Choate. Casus, casi, casum, no, there’s something in between. Caso? I’ll ask Jackie. Maybe Vienna wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe he thinks I’m looking for an opportunity to wipe out the Bay of Pigs. Could be. Bundy’s right, of course. Even the Moscow meeting was only three days a
go, and the partition is coming up fast—wish we knew exactly when; there’s still time for the generals around Khrushchev to push and shove and make him change his mind. If they can get into the act, they will. They could persuade him that world opinion would weigh in on their side if the Russian tanks, say, met our tanks deep inside East Berlin. I know I know—old Acheson must have told me this five thousand times—the Soviet Union has no right to do what’s being done, but the fact of it is that East Berlin has for all intents and purposes been Soviet territory for ten years. That’s the way the world would square off on this business. And what’s the flip side? Suppose they do cave in? So the escape valve business goes on, and we continue to get the refugees. Into West Germany. And East Berlin tries to keep them from leaving by becoming a pleasant place to live. But that means West Germany has to become a pleasant place to live, otherwise people would leave East Germany and go live in East Berlin. But if East Germany became a pleasant place to live, then people would leave Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia and Romania and Poland. Did you ever see a dream walking? … I was right not to take a vote. There was sentiment there to go in with a few tanks. It would have been a hell of a show, all right, if the barbed wire people had slunk back to their dungeons, big cheers in Berlin, but we’ll get big cheers in Berlin—in West Berlin, as I said on teevee last week—whenever we go, so long as we keep West Berlin open, and this we’re going to do. The alternative? Sounded good, but you got to be careful. Guns of August sort of thing … Was kind of startled, coming out, to see the spymaster and Junior still there. Who told them to wait? Did they need to know our decision? The spymaster already told us we needed to protect our source; what other business do they have that kept them waiting there, like ambassadors waiting for a yes-no? On the other hand, you don’t like to be rude. When I think of all the people I haven’t been rude to I’d like to be rude to, like that asshole who runs Chicago. I wasn’t going to start out being rude by being rude to Superspy, who’s a terrific asset, Allen says, and his brightest kid. Well, hardly—he must be thirty. So I stopped and shook hands. But I didn’t say anything about what we were going to do, just that we were considering the question. Oakes looked awfully let down. Well, so am I, in a way. But damn, it’s a relief if that’s all K has in mind for East Germany. Yes yes, I’m just putting on my tie. I’ll be with you in a minute.

  30

  On the flight Washington-Paris-Berlin the coach section was uncrowded, so Rufus took the three seats directly ahead of Blackford, allowing them both to stretch out. Rufus had been in session with the Director after leaving the White House, a meeting from which Blackford had been excluded. On the way to the airport Rufus had said nothing about what he had learned at that meeting, and they had to hurry to catch the flight. Rufus, one hour after takeoff, was reading De Gaulle’s War Memoirs, Blackford the latest issue of National Review. They were over Nantucket when Blackford bopped Rufus on the head with the magazine open at a page on which Blackford had circled an editorial and scratched on top: “Rufus, read this. Buckley is almost always right. But on this one he doesn’t have the right nephew advising him.” Rufus picked up the magazine and read an open letter:

  “Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov

  “The Soviet Embassy, Washington, D.C.

  “Last Saturday you told some fellow diplomats at a Washington cocktail party that Americans will not fight for Berlin. Well, it isn’t true. How do we know it? Because we are Americans, and only Americans can know truly how wrong you are. It is not a distinctive American heroism that we are laying claim to. Probably we are no more heroic, nor less, than this people, or that. Nor do we want war as a means of exporting our well-being—and yet we know there are others who would go to war to export, and share, their misery. We would not die for Berlin merely to save Berliners—that would be un-American, as the saying goes. But we are all agreed, right across the political spectrum, that Berlin’s freedom is inexorably tied to our own freedom, that a single axis connects the two and that if you disturb it at one end, you must disturb the other end. That, and let us be very plainspoken here, is a basic strategic intuition, and the assumption underlying our country’s foreign and military policies.

  “We are saying something much less grand than that freedom is universal, or indivisible, or whatever. Berlin is different. You Communists certainly know that. To the extent Berlin is coveted by you, it is coveted also by us. For you it is a bone in your throat; for the West it is a regenerating fountain whence flows hope for millions. For you Berlin is a bourgeois enclave which must be wiped out. But for us it is the critical salient we cannot surrender. For you it is a mirror, which throws incandescent rays east and west, opposing, against the potency and spirit and well-being of life under freedom, the hideousness of life under Communism.

  “And then, apart from all of that, the laws of nations uphold our right to stay in Berlin. And, finally, we have pledged, through Presidents Democratic and Republican, that we will not let the people of Berlin down.

  “Examine, then, your assumption. A lot hangs on that re-examination including, quite conceivably, your life and ours.

  “Yours truly, The Editors of National Review.”

  Blackford saw Rufus’s hand crooked over the back of his seat, waving a piece of paper. Blackford leaned forward and retrieved it. Rufus had scrawled,

  “Like everybody else, NR anticipates a threat against West Berlin, which isn’t going to happen.”

  Blackford turned the notepaper over and scratched out, “Rufus. Are we going in with the tanks on D-Day?”

  From where Blackford sat he could see that Rufus was pondering whether, or perhaps how, to reply. But a minute later his hand stretched up over the back of his seat with the notepaper. Blackford took it.

  Under Blackford’s query he had written, “No.”

  One more time Blackford scratched out a comment, which just fitted in the space under the word “No.” He wrote: “Whittaker Chambers died last month. I think he was right that he left the winning side to join the losing side.”

  Rufus terminated the colloquy with a note on a fresh piece of notepaper. “Despair, Blackford, is a mortal sin.”

  31

  At nine o’clock on Thursday morning, Henri received the news from Caspar. The date and hour had been set: 0100 Sunday August 13. Less than seventy-two hours.

  Never had three hours taken so long for Henri Tod. Blackford’s flight was due in at eleven, and he would reach Henri by twelve or shortly after. And he would bring, Henri supposed, the tidings from Washington for which he longed. He managed during those three hours to look only three times at the picture of his sister, though he did go back to write yet another few pages to the letter he had begun the day he heard. The document was now forty pages long. He would finish it, he pledged, that night, and have it delivered to her. But he would first consult Blackford, as promised. At ten minutes to twelve he left his rooms and walked the six blocks to Number 12. Ten minutes later, a taxi brought Blackford.

  Henri knew the moment he saw him. He would not have needed to say, “The answer is no, Henri. The President isn’t sending in the tanks.” Blackford added, “And if you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to go get some sleep. I’ll check on the phone and see if the information is in on Clementa’s custodian. If it is, I’ll get back to you. But it may not be till tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Blackford. And my news is that the wall will go up at 0100 Sunday.”

  “This Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will be interested to know, Henri, and this is obviously confidential. At Washington we were told that the intelligence services of France, Great Britain, and, yes, the United States, informed the foreign ministers at their get-together in Paris last weekend that there was no indication whatever that partition was being planned.”

  Henri managed a smile.

  32

  “Why is supper taking so long?” Caspar looked over from the radio at the end of the sofa in Berchtesgad
en.

  “Because tonight we are going to have a special dinner.”

  “Why? It’s not your birthday, Claudia. Is it mine?”

  “You can be very silly, Caspar.”

  “Well, then, why are we having a very special dinner?”

  “Because I feel like it.”

  “Well, that’s a good reason. Come to think of it, you don’t really need an excuse for a specially good dinner, do you? It’s always a good idea. But rather a bore to bring in all the makings, isn’t it?”

  “I have it pretty well down to a system. Caspar, I went over today, and I came back with a ham. You ought to see what the stores there have. It’s like Christmas.”

  “Henri told me I was not ever to go over, you know that.”

  “Henri is quite right. But I want to talk to you about something after dinner.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “I said after dinner. Anything special on the news?”

  “Yes. The great Rudolf Nureyev has just defected, in Paris.”

  “Who is Rudolf Nureyev?”

  “Who is Rudolf Nureyev? Who is Napoleon Bonaparte!”

  “Come on, who is he?”

  “He’s only the world’s best ballet dancer.”

  “Have you ever seen a ballet?”

  “No.”

  “When did you hear about the great Rudolf Nureyev?”

  Caspar giggled. “Tonight. Over the radio. Anyway, I’m glad. Aren’t you?” Claudia had sat down at the little table, decorated with three candles and two apples, one facing Caspar’s plate, one facing Claudia’s. Each had been made to look like a human face, by means of raisins and cherry stems and careful peeling. Caspar cried out his pleasure. “They’re beautiful!” He leaned down and kissed her, and slid into his seat. Hitler’s seat.