Getting fired hardly left the General a lonely and embittered man. In fact, it was pretty good. He felt about twenty years younger. About the age of his wife, to whom he had been married since 1948, the year after his first wife died. Belinda Blue was considered by many in Washington a dark and mysterious woman who had spent twenty years in Washington accumulating about forty years’ worth of power. She had coal-black hair, and her twinkling green eyes darted from side to side as she spoke, giving the unintended and erroneous impression that she wasn't paying attention to the person with whom she was speaking. She looked ten years younger than her fifty-one years, and she had a petite figure frequently clad in an unusual mix of old skirts and pants she had saved over the years, and topped with bright, youthful blouses, jackets, and furs. She was one of the first women in Washington the Post described as “perfectly put-together,” an approbation not frequently applied to the hostess class. In a town not exactly celebrated for its fashion-consciousness, Belinda Blue was a fresh breeze blowing through the endless procession of parties and receptions and teas that political life required of both husband and wife. She stayed trim by riding her horse on the trails of Rock Creek Park every morning and training her jumper two afternoons a week on a farm across the river in Great Falls, Virginia.
General and Mrs. Blue entertained frequently, giving dinner parties for which they were widely celebrated. Belinda Blue's parties differed from most Washington gatherings. They were less socially than politically oriented. She liked to say that she refused to entertain for entertainment's sake.
“There should be a purpose to every gathering in my house,” she told the Washington Post "Style” section in a feature it did on her. “And that purpose should be political, though not in the conventional sense. The General and I aren't as interested in the politics of vote-getting as we are in the politics of ideas. I like to talk. I like to talk politics. I like people who like to talk politics. That's what we do. We eat and we drink and we talk politics.”
That kind of blunt speech in social Washington had earned Belinda Blue a galaxy of critics and detractors, chiefly among the ranks of the uninvited. But those who populated her political salon were as numerous and devoted as her critics were vicious. Her devotion to the cause of civil rights and what she loosely referred to as “economic justice” had won her a strong following among predominantly liberal Democrats, as well. That, in turn, had landed her on the boards of such established liberal organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Americans for Democratic Action, even though Belinda Blue had been born to relative privilege in Great Britain and was still a resident alien in the homeland of her husband.
They had met in London in 1939. Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., had been sent by Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to England with the First Ranger Battalion for training at the British Commando School. A secondary mission for Lieutenant Colonel Blue was to establish liaison with the British military command, for Marshall was already anticipating a land war in Europe against Nazi Germany and wanted to know with whom he would be dealing. More precisely, he wanted to know who was strong, who was weak; who drank too much, who too little; who was loud and pushy, who was quiet but effective; in American terms, who was a Grant, and who was a Lee.
Once in England, Lieutenant Colonel Blue was quickly promoted to brigadier general, skipping the rank of colonel altogether. Under the protocols of wartime London, a general rated a vehicle and a driver. The vehicle was a London taxi painted olive drab. The driver was a young curator from the Royal Albert Museum who had volunteered for wartime duty in the service of her country. Because her specialty at the museum was London architecture, she was deemed to have special knowledge of the complicated maze of London streets and addresses, and was therefore drafted as a driver. Her first passenger was General Blue. Her name was Belinda Thomason. She had black hair and darting, curious green eyes that knew London like the city was her backyard.
The General spent a year in England before returning to the States to ready the 22nd Infantry Division for combat in North Africa. He and Corporal Thomason had a brief affair. When he left, neither heard from the other for the next two years. The war drifted and surged in the way wars do. Starting in 1942, the General returned to London periodically to participate in planning sessions by the Allied High Command. When he did, Ike's chief of staff made sure a certain driver met the General's plane. When the war ended, the next three years drifted by in a haze best described as Relief That It Was Over.
When the General's wife, Carey Randolph Blue, died in 1947 of kidney disease, the General waited an interval of six months and wrote his former driver. Belinda Thomason wasted no time writing back. Her job at the museum didn't mean as much to her as it had in the years before the war. The walls were stone, the faces were stone, half of the museum's art was chipped out of stone. The arrival of General Blue's letter lifted a fog from her life. She replied immediately. They were married nine months later.
And now she fussed in her kitchen, and he fussed over his newspaper. The kitchen was hers. She had made sure of that, making the General agree to move out of the southern Virginia farm he and his deceased wife had inhabited since the end of the war. The Georgetown house was entirely her creation—well, all of it anyway that he hadn't built himself, using the skills of carpentry and cabinetmaking he had honed in garages around the world over a thirty-year career in the Army. The kitchen was hers until he walked in, then it became theirs, for the General was a wonderful cook who liked nothing better than presiding over the preparation of the roots and greens he had grown in his garden. It was part of the magic of their dinner parties. Everyone came to the Blue house knowing that the first hour or two wouldn't be spent standing around the living room with a stale drink in your hand, wondering when dinner would be announced. No, at the Blues’, you gathered in the huge kitchen, open on one end to the dining room and on the other to the den, and watched two creatures in white aprons drift from counter to stove to sink in a kind of elegant ballet. If you got lucky, one of them told you to peel the carrots, or go out in the garden and pick the lettuce. Best of all was cleaning up, the General's specialty. He stood over the sink, scraping dishes, loading the dishwasher, and dispensing brandy, old Army stories, and unconventional wisdom in equal measure. You had the feeling in the kitchen of General and Mrs. Blue that you were somewhere near the heart of the beast, somewhere in the vicinity of the soul of an America you'd suspected was there. It wasn't something you went home and described to your friends, not in 1969, and certainly not before then. But you knew that you'd been someplace special, and maybe, just maybe, life within that kitchen was magical, the way America had always been meant to be.
The Blues gave great parties; the Blues were great horsemen; the Blues knew their way through the cracks and crevices of Washington politics as well as most politicians and better than the rest of them; the Blues made the columns and in fact the Blues wrote quite a few of them; yet the Blues stood anxious and alone and frequently angry in a town that prized cooperation, coalition, and complacency above all else.
“In Washington, You Are Who Your Friends Are,” announced one headline on a magazine piece that was meant to be a satire on the scene. Whatever satirical edge the piece started out with was dulled by the third paragraph, where the truth crept inexorably in. The headline was deadly accurate. The Blues commanded a lot of cooperation, were identified with numerous coalitions, and experienced their fair share of complacency. But the number of real friends they had was limited by the willingness of each of them to tell powerful people to go to hell. People in Washington were reluctant to be too closely identified with iconoclasts of the order of the Blues.
Perhaps because friendship in Washington was by nature so transitory, most of all the General missed the friendship that was logically due him as the father of a son and a daughter. But his daughter was a stranger, an expatriate living her twenty-fourth year in Rome with an Italian
motion picture set designer. It was hard even to get her on the phone. His son, the Colonel, had been lost to him years before—so long ago, in fact, he couldn't recall where the hatred had come from, why it continued, what had gone so terribly wrong.
For a man who had once commanded two million men in combat, loneliness was part of the price one paid for greatness. There was nothing lonelier than waking up in the morning and moving two stickpins on a map and knowing that by noon two hundred men would be dead—two hundred of your men, American boys. And that didn't count the four hundred who would be likely to die on the other side. They were men, too. They had been somebody's boys. By lunchtime, then, six hundred bodies would be out there somewhere, half-buried in the dirt of artillery explosions, cut in half by machine-gun fire, shredded by shrapnel. Dead.
What a man like the General needed was the safety of his family, but for the General, ever since the Army had taken him to its bosom, it had been the Army first, and all else had come second. He had never really been part of the America that fathered kids and looked after them and built a future for them and passed along a legacy that amounted to something more than what had come before. What the General had left was a litany of ground taken, armies defeated, nations conquered, surrenders accepted. Fatherhood had to do with the future, with a hunger for the unknown, even the unknowable, and in one sense the General had come well prepared. He had lusted after life ever since he first sensed that the barren prairies of southwest Oklahoma were but a wide gateway to a better world somewhere out there beyond the flatness of the horizon. But lust for life and a savage drive for success were no substitutes for the kind of failing downward that fatherhood entailed, where no decision was without grievous consequences for both father and child. Everything you did with and to your kids that seemed right at the time was bound to turn out wrong in the end. At your best as a father, you gambled. At your worst, you took potshots in the dark.
The trouble with General Blue was the trouble with most fathers of his generation. They were never there. Fathers were supposed to be immune from the details and duties of family life that stuffed up mothers like a bad cold. Families meant late nights and crying and sneezing and feeding and burping and wiping and changing, and fathers were supposed to work, while the rest of the rabble back at home, presumably, familied. Fatherhood for the General had meant presiding, not participating.
Well, now he was paying immunity's price. When Carey Randolph Blue died, he had been able to replace his wife, but not his family. He was one of the most influential, popular figures in Washington—at least until he had been fired, anyway—but when it came right down to it, apart from his second wife, he was alone. He didn't know his children, and they didn't know him. He had missed his chance to communicate his love to them. Moreover, his way of expressing affection and concern was clumsy at best, and downright stupid at worst.
Once when his son was ten years old, he had come home with a C in English on his report card from school. He should have taken the boy into the study and had a talk with him about the importance of studying hard at school, getting good grades so he could get into a good college. Instead, the General had taken the boy's recently acquired baseball mitt—half of which had been paid for out of his son's lawn-mowing and car-washing earnings—doused it with kerosene, and burned it to a cinder in the driveway.
He didn't even say to his son, “That'll teach you.” He just walked by him on his way to bed. The next morning he told the boy to clean up the mess.
The boy cleaned up the mess, and he never forgot it.
Never.
“What's on the agenda today, sir?” Belinda teased the General, wrapping her arms around his neck from behind.
“You think that goddamned Hancock is going to call this morning?” he asked. His mind was somewhere else. He hadn't even heard her, which wasn't surprising, considering that there wasn't much left of his hearing in either ear.
“Why don't you stop worrying yourself about Hancock, Buddy. Our pet CIA Director hasn't turned out the way we thought, now, has he? But he'll get what's coming to him soon enough.”
“You goddamned right he will,” said the General. “That little bastard kissed my ass and every other ass in view for twenty goddamned years, and soon as he got to be Director, he forgot every goddamned phone number he ever knew. I curse the day I ever yanked his ass out of that stinking hole he dug for himself in Teheran and moved him to Berlin with me. If I had it to do over again, I'd tell Dulles to kick his ass all the way to Sri Lanka, issue him two ceiling fans, a washcloth, and a bar of brown soap, and misplace his personnel file. He'd still be there, you know that, Miss B? Rotting in a stinking sweathole so far out of the action you'd have to go all the way to goddamned Harvard to find someone who could locate the goddamned place on the map.”
The General emitted a rasping, hacking guffaw that was the product of thirty years of three-packs-a-day cigarette smoking, a habit he had broken only when a heart attack nearly killed him in 1947, the year he became Director of European Operations for the newly minted CIA. In 1948 he had sent for William Hancock, the Yale-educated intellectual and former OSS man who would serve as his aide and right-hand man for twenty years. Together they oversaw all of Allied intelligence in postwar Europe until the General was promoted to Director of Operations of the CIA in 1953, the most senior deputy directorship in the Agency. President Eisenhower, who had just been elected, called the General back from Germany and told him he wanted one of his own men at the CIA, someone who could keep an eye on Allen Dulles, the headstrong former head of OSS in Europe during the war, now CIA Director.
“There's one too many of these Dulles fellows around here, Matt,” said the President, referring to the fact that Allen's brother John Foster was Secretary of State, an arrangement that had been foisted upon Eisenhower in return for his backing for the Presidency by the Republican Party. “With you over at the CIA, I'll have to worry about only one of them.”
The General stayed at the CIA until President Lyndon Johnson appointed him ambassador-at-large and promoted William Hancock to the directorship of the CIA.
“I wish you'd stop railing on about little Billy Hancock, dear. He really isn't worth the worry now, is he?” Belinda asked, still hugging the General's neck.
The General took a deep, wheezing breath and turned to face his wife. His eyes were full of fire, and the corner of his mouth twitched as he spoke.
“But he was like a goddamned son to me, don't you see? I brought him out of the wilderness. I taught him how to bury a hatchet in somebody's back so quietly, cleanly, so they wouldn't know it was there. He wouldn't be Director right now if I hadn't brought him along like a goddamned colt, watering him when he needed it, pointing him toward the tall grass, reining him in . . .” His words drifted off in a rasping stutter.
“I know it hurts, dear,” said his wife, stroking his silver hair. “I know. I know.”
“No, you don't,” said the General. “He's the second son I've lost, and you couldn't possibly know that feeling.”
She hugged him tightly, and he stared out the window of his study at the garden below, a narrow, long corridor of flowers interwoven with vegetables. If you stood in the middle of the garden, all you could see were flowers. But from a second-story window, the genius of the garden was visible. The garden was such a small urban space that there wasn't room for a flower garden and a vegetable garden, so the General had combined the two, planting rows of vegetables between rows of flowers that concealed them. A herringbone brick walk fanned through the garden, giving easy access to every plant therein. The garden, in fact, was a lot like the General himself. If you stood down there on one of the brick paths, smelling the flowers all around, the garden seemed precise, uniform, gentlemanly. But between the rows, in where you couldn't see, was the real business of the garden—a dirt farm among the peonies and foxgloves and lupines. He had figured out how to have it both ways. The garden told his lie so beautifully you never noticed the food amid the flowers.<
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The phone rang, and rang again. Belinda broke her hold on the General's neck and kissed the top of his head.
“I'll get it, Buddy,” she whispered. He was a tough old goat, she thought, but like most men, he wasn't as tough as he'd like to think he was.
She disappeared into the kitchen, and the phone stopped ringing. The General stared at his garden, making mental notes on how he was going to change it next year. Every spring he drew up a new blueprint for the garden, moving the brick walks, redesigning the layout of the flowers and the vegetables, refining the illusion he took so much pride in having created.
“It's for you, dear,” came his wife's voice from the kitchen.
“Who is it?” he rasped.
“It's Mr. Weatherby, from the New York Times. He says it's important.”
“It's always goddamned important to those assholes from the New York Times,” said the General.
“Blue here,” he said, characteristically blunt.
“Homer Weatherby, General,” said the voice on the phone.
“I know who the hell you are,” said the General. “Now what the hell do you want?”
“There seems to be more than meets the eye to this White House announcement of your resignation yesterday, sir. My information is that you haven't been in the office for almost a month. What's going on, sir? Did you in fact resign?”
“What goddamned office?” bellowed the General. “What goddamned office am I supposed to have been absent from?”
There was a pause as the reporter from the Times gathered himself after the General's outburst.
“Your office over at State, sir. On the third floor.”
“You call that goddamned cubbyhole an office, Weatherby? How in hell can I have been absent from there for two weeks if I've never been there? Why don't you ask a few of those bastards you've been talking to over at State if they've ever seen me there? Throw that at the bastards, Weatherby. That might be the most constructive thing you could do today. You might wake a few of them up.”
Army Blue Page 5
