Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

I pushed anyway. “What happens to Gottlieb?”

  His frown evidenced mild irritation. “This got botched on the doc’s watch, no question. To some degree, it was a comedy of errors—the man who should have been in charge of the Olson operation, a federal narcotics agent who looks after the Bedford Street safe house for us, well, he got called out of town. His mother died.”

  “Be sure to let me know where to send a sympathy card.”

  He ignored that. “John Martin and his Sicilian friend Vince were assigned the task, and that rests on Gottlieb’s shoulders. I assure you, he’ll be reprimanded.”

  “Reprimanded.”

  “Yes. And disciplined.”

  I leaned halfway across the table. “I should have ‘reprimanded’ him out a high window! And my guess is, he likes being disciplined, if it involves that sick shit in your safe house.”

  “That’s uncalled for.”

  “Fuck you, Shep. Do you know the kinds of things your road-show Frankenstein is up to? That he’s dosing unwitting subjects with this LSD-25 shit and God knows what else?”

  He tossed a hand. “A necessary evil.”

  “Necessary! For Christ’s sake, how can it be…?”

  His expression turned suddenly grave; any trace of folksiness was gone when he spoke: “The Russians are looking at LSD-25 and many other drugs, Nate, and they have no scruples about how they go about their research. They have a concentrated program of brain-conditioning able to make men confess to crimes they never committed, and capable of changing American patriots into mouthpieces for Commie propaganda.”

  “They’re doing it, so we’re doing it.”

  His eyes were tight. “We can’t allow the Reds to get ahead of us, Nate, on this crucial battlefield of the mind—just because they don’t hesitate to use unwilling human guinea pigs and we’re too soft to do the same. Russia has mind control, and so we have to have it—just like the Bomb.”

  I shook my head, astounded. “So you align yourself with a twisted bastard like Gottlieb? I should have killed that son of a bitch when I had the chance.”

  He smiled faintly. “Nate … you want to be John Wayne. You want to be Mike Hammer. You don’t want to settle for sending the small fry to hell, you want the man at the top. You want him to look down the barrel of your .45.”

  “It’s a nine-millimeter.”

  Steel came into the drawl. “Okay, well then, use it. You’ve got it on you right now, don’t you? Because if you want to remove the man at the top, you’re lookin’ at him—the big boy in this one is me, Nate. The CIA’s Chemical Division is my baby. Shoot me right here in the Waldorf Cafeteria, and slip out the side door.”

  “Don’t fucking tempt me.”

  He grinned. “Of course, I’m not the tippy-top of this operation—that would be you, Nate, and all your fellow citizens, the taxpayers who back the United States government … who rightly give the Agency their tacit blessing to do what is necessary to stop the Communist hordes.”

  “You make it sound like a war.”

  He leaned halfway across the table. “It is a war, my friend. It’s the war on Communism.”

  I threw my hands up. “Jesus, Shep, you can’t fight a war against an ‘ism.’ You can go to war with Red China or Russia, all right—if you care to risk the atomic consequences. But you can’t fight an idea except with other ideas, even if all you’ve got is blustering bullshit like Tail-Gunner Joe’s.”

  “Speaking of which…” He pushed the manila envelope toward me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Payment for services rendered. Tonight—this mornin’—you handled two ‘Special Employees’ of ours who botched the Olson operation rather badly. Saved us the trouble of dealing with them.”

  I slid from the envelope a two-inch file folder labeled “McCARTHY—TOP SECRET” on its flap.

  Shep said, “You were hired to find out what was in our file on Senator McCarthy. Well, there’s the works, your own copy. Mostly it’s sexual indiscretions, a lot of it involving bad boy Roy, but Joe’s been … adventurous himself. Do what you will with it. Sell it to your pal Pearson and make out like a bandit. Or hand it over to McCarthy, who is after all your client. Either way is fine.”

  I was flipping through, eyes landing on depositions from various individuals asserting various things, from homosexual encounters between McCarthy and Cohn to Caligula-like orgies at a beach house of the latter to accusations of pedophilia against the former.

  And that was just a quick flip-through.

  “You see, Nate, it doesn’t matter what you do with it,” Shep said with a sunny grin. “Either way, McCarthy will be finished. And if you don’t give it to either of them, then we’ll use the information in that file as suits our needs … if McCarthy really is foolhardy enough to make us the subject of his next witch hunt. Up to you, Nate. Really … from here on out … it’s all up to you.”

  He collected his hat, his Chesterfields, his lighter, and gave me a pleasant smile and nod. “We’ll stay in touch. We’re going to be great friends, Nate, because none of this is personal. Hope you understand that.”

  He retrieved his topcoat and went out. The place was filling up, the cafeteria line crowded.

  I had finished the cigarette a while ago. I had no urge for another. That had passed. What was left of my coffee and breakfast was cold. Bettie had her head on her folded elbows, like a student in class who’d finished her test and was taking a nap. She was facing the window.

  I sat down opposite her.

  She jerked up, ponytail swinging, those lovely blue eyes red, possibly from crying but probably from what she’d been through.

  “What now, sugah?”

  “Well, we’ll get some sack time.”

  “Can we go to the Waldorf for that? The other Waldorf, I mean?”

  “Sure. We’ll pick up your toothbrush on the way.”

  “Then what?”

  “You ever been to Florida?”

  CHAPTER

  23

  In mid-December, after two pleasant weeks in Miami with Bettie, I wound up back in Manhattan, where, at the Empire State Building, the A-1 branch was up and running, with a bullpen of operatives in the space adjacent to the executive offices. Bob Hasty knew nothing of the reasons for my sudden Florida vacation, but I was his boss and it was the right time of year, though the city had been unseasonably warm.

  I sat in his office like a client and asked him if anybody interesting had come around looking for me.

  “Interesting how?” Hasty asked. His moon face could take on an innocence helpful in an investigator. And his preference for bow ties didn’t hurt.

  “Interesting like cops or feds or hoods.”

  “Well, that’s pretty interesting, I grant you, but no. I hope it doesn’t break the heart of the A-1’s celebrated prez, but nobody has come around looking for you at all.”

  “Good.”

  “Oh, there was a call yesterday from Senator McCarthy’s office.”

  “In D.C.?”

  “No. Temporary digs at the U.S. Courthouse. His subcommittee is holding hearings in town.” He smirked. “Seems there are a bunch of Commies in the Army in New Jersey. How’s a guy supposed to sleep at night?”

  “When there’s a Red under your bed,” I advised, “sleep with a gun under your pillow.”

  McCarthy being in town saved me a trip to D.C., since what I had to tell him wouldn’t do on the telephone. The office at Foley Square was small and spare, and—in his trademark blue off-the-rack suit and mildly food-spattered tie—the blue-jowled senator was too big for his little desk.

  My chair across from him was hard and uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t be in it long.

  “Horseshit through and through,” he said with a scowl, batting the air with a thick hand.

  I had just given him a rundown on his CIA file, claiming not to have it—really it was in the A-1 New York branch safe, and would go back to Chicago with me—but saying I’d spent enough time with the thing to ge
t more than the gist.

  “It’s poisonous stuff,” I said, pulling no punches. “They’ve got you in public bathrooms blowing servicemen and vice versa, and diddling little boys and girls.”

  “Well, they should make up their mind,” he said sneeringly. “Am I queer or not? It’s ridiculous. Scurrilous lies.”

  “What they have on you is thinner than on your sidekick,” I admitted. “Maybe you could weather it. But the Cohn stuff is devastating—the guy has had more sailors than the local recruiting office. Plus he’s a hypocrite, chasing homos out of the State Department because they’re security risks.”

  “Ridiculous! Roy Cohn is a man’s man.”

  “My point exactly.”

  He shook a fist. “They’re next, the dirty bastards. The things these CIA stuffed shirts do in the name of Americanism, it sickens me.”

  McCarthy was not long on self-reflection.

  “No question they play rough,” I said. “They’re paid to. You need to back off this one, Joe. Look what happened to Olson.”

  He sneered with his whole upper lip. “Well, they obviously killed him. Because he was going to talk to me. We’ll start there. These pricks don’t scare me.”

  “They should. Start by firing Cohn. Repudiate the little son of a bitch, expose him as a pervert and fire his ass. It’ll ruin him, which he deserves for plenty of better reasons, and then maybe you can shrug off the accusations that the Agency will unleash. Risky, but—”

  “I won’t be intimidated by lying accusations. Just because somebody makes outrageous unfounded charges against you, why should you fold?”

  Not terribly self-reflective, no.

  The CIA inquiry died on the vine, because McCarthy’s pal Roy Cohn—to whom Joe remained mystifyingly loyal—had used the Fort Monmouth inquiry as a weapon to try to get his drafted buddy David Schine preferential treatment, browbeating Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the Army himself. That was Cohn’s bad judgment. McCarthy was riling the Army further by telling Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker in public that he was “not fit to wear that uniform” and didn’t have “the brains of a five-year-old.”

  Out of this came the famous Army-McCarthy hearings, where McCarthy and Cohn—choosing to represent themselves—were the defendants in a hearing conducted by their own investigatory subcommittee. Two famous confrontations in the hearings, widely televised from April through June 1954, sealed their doom.

  McCarthy, having been accused of cropping a photograph to change its meaning, was asked by his nemesis—folksy Boston lawyer Joseph Welch—if the original picture had come from a pixie. Joe, typically full of himself, snidely asked Welch, “Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might be an expert on that—what a ‘pixie’ is?”

  Welch, with a fatherly smile, said, “I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.… Have I enlightened you?”

  This of course got the much-rumored homosexual motive behind Cohn’s efforts on Schine’s behalf out in the open, if in a sideways, laughter-inducing manner.

  Even more devastating had been McCarthy’s attack on a young lawyer in Welch’s firm, who was not directly involved in the proceedings, an instance of gratuitous cruelty on the senator’s part that had unmasked him as a bully before millions of TV viewers.

  McCarthy, possibly drunk with more than just power, launched an in absentia diatribe against the young attorney, who had once worked for the National Lawyers Guild, which the senator identified as “the bulwark of the Communist Party.”

  Welch responded eloquently and emotionally: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” And when McCarthy blustered on, Welch, with some spine, said, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”

  The door was open for McCarthy’s many enemies, in both parties, to take him down. By the end of 1954, he had been censured by the Senate. He became a pariah to his own party and the White House, and his drinking accelerated, leading to frequent detox visits to hospitals. Finally he was put in a straitjacket and hauled to the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he died in May 1957 of alcohol poisoning within feet of where his mentor, James Forrestal, had gone out the window to his death, a supposed suicide.

  Jean Kerr McCarthy remarried in 1961 but protected her late first husband’s legacy to the end. When she donated his personal papers to the archives of Marquette University, she restricted their use until 2050. She died of cancer in 1979.

  Roy Cohn became one of Manhattan’s most successful if controversial lawyers, with clients including Donald Trump, numerous mob figures, and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He never worked with David Schine again—the hotel heir married a former Miss Sweden, had six children, and produced films, including The French Connection, dying in a light-plane crash in 1968.

  Cohn, meanwhile, lived with his mother in Manhattan and hobnobbed with the Studio 54 crowd, dating several women, including TV’s Barbara Walters. He insisted he was not a homosexual even as he continued to throw wild gay parties. His legal career was marked by charges of misconduct, including perjury, witness tampering, and misappropriation of client funds; ultimately he was disbarred. He died at fifty-nine in 1986 of complications from AIDS.

  I continued to do occasional jobs for Drew Pearson, whose power waned, in part because of McCarthy’s attacks when both men were in their prime; but his muckraking style paved the way for modern investigative journalism. He died of a heart attack in 1969.

  Dashiell Hammett never published another word, in part due to blacklisting but mostly because he held himself to so high a standard; he was working on an autobiographical novel, Tulip, at the time of his death in 1961. Hammett outlived his accomplishments, but his accomplishments outlived him. As a veteran of both world wars, the creator of Sam Spade, vilified as a “Commie,” was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  For decades, the Left considered the Rosenbergs martyrs, which I’m sure Julius and Ethel would have relished. But Julius must have known the truth would eventually come out about his espionage activities.

  And it did, when in 1995 declassified documents—known as the Venona transcripts—revealed Julius’ work for the Soviets. Now the Rosenbergs were bad guys, though nothing in the Venona files made Julius out as more than a minor figure in A-bomb spying, with Ethel shown to have no role at all.

  The shameful railroading of these two minor figures by Cohn, his boss Saypol, and the FBI became painfully obvious—if you read past the headlines. But these days all anybody seems to know about the Rosenbergs is that they were guilty and really did deserve to die.

  Well, hell, everybody dies. It’s just that some people take longer getting around to it—like the Greenglasses, for instance.

  After serving nine and a half years, David Greenglass joined his wife Ruth and their children to live under an assumed name in Queens. In 1979, David and Ruth participated in their only joint post-Rosenberg-execution interview. The New Republic interviewers characterized the couple’s replies in the one-hour session as “so filled with contradiction, lapses of memory and apparent evasions” that it was doubtful the famous typing incident ever took place.

  From 1960 forward, the Greenglasses lived a typical, even idyllic American life—Ruth a legal secretary, their son a doctor, their daughter a medical administrator. David again worked as a machinist and a sometime inventor, including coming up with a gadget that sold millions but got him only a $500 bonus—how unfair life can sometimes be. After Ruth’s death in 2008, at eighty-three, David finally came forward and recanted, saying that to protect his wife, he’d lied under oath about his sister Ethel’s involvement with Julius’ espionage. He died at age ninety-two.

  Harry Gold—who served just under half of his thirty-year sentence—only made it to sixty. He found work as a clinical chemist at a Philadelphia hospital, `where he fit in well, just as h
e had at Lewisburg Penitentiary.

  Julius and Ethel’s two boys, Michael and Robert, did not abandon their parents to history. The Meeropol brothers—they adopted the last name of their foster parents—fought for over three decades to prove the innocence of their parents, waging legal battles for the release of FBI files that eventually revealed the extent of the misconduct of Cohn and others. But when, at age ninety-one, Morton Sobell finally admitted in a New York Times interview that he’d spied for the Soviets, the two boys—an economics professor and a lawyer, respectively, and grandfathers now—did not challenge the confession, which implicated their father. But they still insisted, rightly, that their parents had been the victims of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, and that the execution of their mother was a travesty of justice.

  Out of my involvement in the Rosenberg case, one lasting friendship grew—Bobby Kennedy and I would work together on his Rackets Committee in just a few years.

  Bettie Page had liked Florida; we’d had a great time there. Working with Miami photographer Bunny Yeager, Bettie posed for some of her most popular pinups, including a 1955 Christmas centerfold in Playboy, various fresh-air bikini shots, and a memorable photo layout in a wildlife park.

  Back in New York, Kefauver kept his word and didn’t make Bettie testify, but double-crossed us by issuing her a subpoena, so that she would have to sit waiting outside the hearing room, where Irving Klaw could see her and get rattled. Klaw was essentially ruined and dead by 1966. Kefauver’s McCarthy-style attacks on crooks and comic books never got him to the White House, even as a vice president; he died shortly after suffering a heart attack on the floor of the Senate in 1963.

  As she spent more time in Florida, I lost track of Bettie and last dated her around 1958. She said she was winding down her modeling—she’d begun late and feared she might start showing her age; she was wrong, but try to tell a good-looking woman that. Years later I learned she became a Born Again Christian when a neon cross glowed in the night and called to her.

  This would have been around ’59, but I didn’t hear about it till much later, when the revival of interest in her pinups had made her a cult figure. My first thought, hearing about the glowing cross, was that she had probably been slipped LSD at the Bedford Street safe house. Enough time had passed that I knew about LSD flashbacks.