by Jim Lehrer
Marti’s super-enthusiastic gratitude may have been based on an assumption that I—the good guy who came to help—had paid for the trip out of my own pocket. I was not about to tell her that The Dallas Tribune had picked up the tab for the travel. That was after I convinced Bernie to “walk one more mile with me” on the Van Walters story—which remained off the record. It was a hard sell and to make it I had to agree to take whatever time it required as vacation. “If and when the story works out, maybe we’ll give you back the days,” said Bernie. That’s the way it was in the newspaper business.
Then Bernie said something that really got my attention. “We’re talking about something different for you anyhow—maybe soon, Young Jack. Particularly if you can make this Secret Service story work.”
“You mean a new assignment?”
“Yeah, something like that maybe.”
That lit me up—big-time. I had been doing well, mostly interviewing Dallas-area and other Texas congressmen about what they thought about the current issues and big events of our time. I was definitely ready for some real stories—big ones that mattered.
“What exactly is it?”
“Later, Young Jack. Later.”
“Can’t you tell me anything? Please? C’mon, Bernie.”
There was a beat before Bernie said, “Just make sure your passport is in order.” And that was the end of the conversation.
Passport? I had one and it was definitely ready to go—but ready to go where? The Tribune had only one foreign bureau and that was in Mexico City. But I didn’t even speak Spanish …
Then it hit me! The White House! That had to be it. Travel the world with the president! Hey, I was ready for that. I really was. The White House! Journalism heaven, here I come!
Meanwhile, I had to make the Van Walters story go huge—and speak loudly. And that meant taking things one step at a time. Marti Walters was my focus at the moment.
Marti’s semi-monologue on the drive from the Albany airport was about how her mother embraced her when they’d first greeted each other a few days ago. She held on tightly—much too tightly for Marti, who had come to the unpleasant conclusion that she was no longer comfortable being embraced by her own mother. At least Rosemary Walters wasn’t drunk. Marti only noticed a hint of some kind of liquor underneath her minty breath, probably the result of a big mouthwash-and-toothbrush effort.
There had been the letters from Singapore, with their brief “Dear Mom” responses. But there had been only a handful of times when Marti and her mother were actually physically together in the four years since the move to Singapore had happened. Those occasions included Marti’s high school graduation in San Antonio and three times when Marti went to Singapore during summer vacation since she’d been at Penn. Those trips were all brief—less than two weeks each—and most depressing because of her mother’s drinking and her father’s sad, miserable, unresponsive condition. Van Walters didn’t come to San Antonio to his daughter’s graduation and spent most of his time avoiding eye contact with her when she was in Singapore. They hadn’t had a conversation that lasted more than ten minutes or was about anything that mattered.
Marti said she could tell that her father was still alive and functioning at some level. But every conversation she had with her mother about her dad’s condition beyond that veered off in some oblique direction. She said Van was still able to work, but when Marti pressed for details she was told that work involved mostly staying in the office to consult with others on how best to protect Singapore’s leaders. Apparently he did little or no field work himself. Talk of treatment options led to vague allusions to new medicines and therapies. There were never any specifics. Marti always left Singapore relieved—but scared and guilt-ridden.
When she’d arrived in Kinderhook a few days earlier, it had been almost nine months since her last visit with her family. As the moment approached, her thoughts, worries, fears had been mostly about her dad. What would he look like this time? Even thinner, whiter? Softer? Would there be a lobotomy scar on his forehead, deeper bruises on his temples? Could he even speak coherently? If so, what would he say to his daughter, and how would he say it?
And what would the daughter ask her father? More about the bubble top? The death of Kennedy? How crazy are you, Daddy?
“I’M JUST SO happy you are here, Jack,” Marti said to me finally as she and I approached Kinderhook. “I know it may sound strange because we’ve only just begun to get to know each other … but I’m not sure I could go through this without you.”
I was grateful to hear that. But it made me feel a bit like a heartless jerk, too. I was proving to be exactly the kind of heartless jerk some people consider us reporters to be. Willing to do anything for a story. But I was still trying to convince myself that as long as I did not permit this to get really personal, I was in the clear morally and ethically—no matter what happened down the line on the story.
We rode through downtown Albany across the Hudson River bridge and then south on Highway 9. Marti’s talk, still a bit frantic sounding, was suddenly about trivial things. We came to the Kinderhook town limits sign and then the Dutch Reformed Church Cemetery.
“Good to see you again, ‘O.K.,’ ” Marti said with a laugh, tossing her head in a bow toward a field of gray gravestones on the left. The gesture was aimed specifically at a sixteen-foot-high gray marble obelisk on the grave of Martin Van Buren, known as O.K. for short.
It was a memorial that made for an embarrassing comparison with the dominating obelisk of the 555-foot Washington Monument in Washington, DC. There was nothing in the District of Columbia, not even a park bench or a sewer culvert, named in honor of Van Buren. Marti said she knew from her dad that some wise guys around town took notice of the obelisk comparison between the first and eighth presidents by referring to their local hero Van Buren as “Shorty.”
But the Van Buren nickname “O.K.” actually had added something permanent to the language. It came from Van Buren’s being called “Old Kinderhook” to copycat his political mentor, Andrew Jackson, known famously as “Old Hickory.” Van Buren’s “Old Kinderhook” was shortened by political supporters to “O.K.”—and thus okay was born forever and for everyone.
I had already done a little homework on Kinderhook from the various encyclopedias and travel books in the bureau. I knew that it was a postcard Hudson River Valley one-stoplight town, antique and Dutch, always beautiful and cozy.
The only personal memory of the town Marti shared with me now involved a race against an older neighborhood boy when she was eight to the tower steps of Lindenwald, the former Van Buren mansion. Marti lost the race and then punched the kid in the stomach when he tried to kiss her as “a first-place trophy.”
Marti stopped the Pontiac now at the traffic light. There were a few stores, a bank, a couple of cafés, the city hall, and the library radiating for a block in the four directions of the intersection. All were lit up with lights and holiday decorations.
Then she gunned the big wagon and resumed her rat-tat-tat talk.
“I was in this car. My mother was driving me from the airport just like I’m doing with you now. Just the two of us. ‘Hold your breath, Marti, while I show you something,’ she said. Nothing else was said for the next few blocks until she swung onto a major blacktop road, drove for a few hundred feet, and then turned off abruptly into a driveway and stopped.
“ ‘How do you like it?’ That’s what she asked me, Jack. ‘How do you like it?’ ”
Marti said she could not see what there was to like. Through the darkening gray atmosphere there stood a modest, one-story faded cream-colored wooden house set back from the road fifteen yards or so.
“I had no idea what was going on, what she was talking about. ‘Welcome to our new home. The treatment just wasn’t working for your father in Singapore, Marti. We just closed on it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you that before. But he needs very special care that is only available here with a particular doctor.’ ”
Marti said she looked at the house. It didn’t have a single Christmas light or any other decoration. No lights of any other kind were on, either.
“Mom said there’s a doctor—a psychiatrist—in Boston who is an expert on Dad’s kind of disorder. His name is Reynolds. He believes it may be possible for my dad to make real progress. He has some theories that he’s working on. He has already been here once to see Dad and is coming back this afternoon. Maybe Dad will be going into a hospital in Boston soon.”
Marti then explained to me some of the chronology of what had been happening. She said her mother had called her from Singapore in mid-November to report with alarm that her dad was getting much worse. A few days later Marti happened to see the story in the Philadelphia newspaper about the press club panel that led to her calling me.
“After she showed me the house, Mom warned me about what I was going to actually see when I saw Dad this time. She said, ‘It may be all in his head but it’s affecting his body like a regular disease. You will see … he’s not doing well at all. Not physically or mentally.’ ”
Still in the car, Marti told me to look over at another of Kinderhook’s Van Buren landmarks—one of the few she knew.
“That’s Lindenwald, the old Van Buren place. The one I was telling you about. The one with the tower.” I saw the tower with the house, which looked huge, old, cold, and neglected.
Marti stopped the car in the driveway of Lindenwald and finished the story of her arrival in Kinderhook.
“We got to the house where my grandmother and the family lived, where Dad was waiting for me. I dumped my only piece of baggage and raced as fast as I could into the sitting room.
“ ‘Dad, hi …’ And I stopped talking and running. I had to choke down a scream of horror.
“There in a chaise lounge a couple of yards away was a shriveled-up shadow of a man laid out under a blanket with his eyes closed. On his head was the dark brown snap-brimmed felt ‘agent’s hat’ he always wore in public when on duty. I looked immediately for a lobotomy scar. There was none. Thank the good Lord. That was the only relief I felt.
“He seemed to move slightly to the sound of my cry and barely opened his eyes. He reminded me of the pictures I had seen of people who had just been released from Nazi concentration camps.
“ ‘Is that you, sweetheart?’ He said it in a barely audible whisper. Sweetheart. That was what he had always called me. I was his sweetheart.
“I turned away from him and ran from the room.”
Marti put her hands on the top of the station wagon’s steering wheel and cried and cried. I leaned over and put an arm over her shoulders and pulled her my way.
“It was two days before I could stand to look at him, my poor sick daddy,” Marti said after a while. “We’ve talked a little but I have still—in ten days—to really touch him.”
NOW IT WAS my turn to see Van Walters. Almost, but not quite yet. Marti had a plan.
“Let’s not tell anybody—except Dad, of course—that you’re a reporter” were Marti’s last instructions as we prepared to get out of the car at her grandmother’s house.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “The Tribune has a policy against interviewing news sources under false pretenses.”
“Are you or are you not here to help my dad?” she asked sternly.
“Sure, you bet, sure,” said I, telling what I believed—hoped, honestly—was only a half lie.
She shot back: “Remember, please, there are no news sources here or anywhere else involved in this—right now, at least. This is personal.”
Personal? Okay, okay. “But how do we explain who I am and why I’m here?” I said quickly.
“You’re my new boyfriend.”
I smiled. So did she. “Aren’t I a bit too old for you?”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty,” I said. “You?”
“Twenty. But no problem. Fortunately, I look older than I am and you look younger than you are.”
That was not true. Or was it? Maybe, I let it go. I was learning quickly that she had a way of getting what she wanted.
“We’ll tell everybody that we met at Penn,” she said. “You’re a Hemingway scholar working on a master’s.”
There was a lie that I could live with—if not huff and puff about.
ROSEMARY WALTERS REALLY was as attractive a woman as Marti had described. I had a brief introductory chat with her when we got inside the house. But there was an inanimate quality to her that was unexpected. Marti seemed so full of energy and action while her mother seemed completely out of energy and disinterested in action. Also, there were signs of the havoc of drinking in Rosemary Walters’s skin and eyes. There was a smell of liquor on her though she was not drunk. I was hit—suddenly, unexpectedly—by a wave of sympathy and understanding for this woman, knowing as I did the details of what Marti had told me she’d been through with her damaged, dying husband. Every minute of their five years together since the assassination must have been a desperate existence for both of them.
I only exchanged quick hellos with everyone else on the way up to the bedroom I was assigned. Marti gave me a quick pass-by introduction to an elderly woman who was her grandmother but to no one else.
I knew Marti’s dad was somewhere in the house, but clearly I was not to see him until later.
The huge white frame three-story house seemed to have dozens of rooms, most of them small. Mine was only slightly larger than the cubbyhole I’d slept in as a marine lieutenant at a makeshift bachelor officer’s quarters on Okinawa in 1960.
Marti finalized my orders of the day while escorting me to my room. Dr. Reynolds, the psychiatrist, was driving in from Boston and was due in Kinderhook shortly. She wanted us both to meet and talk privately with him before I met her dad. It was much too cold to talk outside and, while there were plenty of private places in the family house, Marti wanted the chat to happen somewhere else. So, on her mother’s suggestion, they would meet in a quiet corner of the Dutch Reformed Church in the center of town.
“Mom said it’s always open and kept warm for anyone who wants to come in, but she said nobody much ever does,” Marti explained. “We should have complete privacy.”
And we did. A sign outside told me the church was organized in 1677; the current sanctuary, the last of a couple of rebuildings, had been there since 1869. It was warm and deserted. I followed Marti directly to the pew used by Martin Van Buren and his family, first one on the left closest to the pulpit. On the wall to the right of the pulpit was a six-foot-wide replica of the Ten Commandments painted in Old English lettering.
I was taking notice of the greenery, candles, and an array of baby Jesus, wise men, manger, and other symbols of Christmas when Dr. Reynolds arrived.
Psychiatrists are not the favorite people of those of us who cover news for a living. As an old courthouse reporter in Dallas told me, “Shrinks don’t know yes or no for an answer.” But the upside is that most of them are characters. Funny, smart, eccentric, flamboyant, effusive. I knew on sight that Dr. Frederic Reynolds fit the bill. He was a perfect psychiatrist, a man in his late forties with a grin, a full head of long black hair, a beard, and a long black leather overcoat. He could be cast in a Charles Boyer movie on his appearance alone.
Marti introduced me to him as a friend she wanted to be present for this chat and, as she did so, I realized that the boyfriend ID was not going to work for Reynolds—not for long, at least. He would be smart enough to realize what Marti and I had stupidly failed to focus on: the obvious fact that it was my Love Field experience as a reporter with Van Walters that would be at the heart of what we were going to be talking about. But I figured we would deal with that when we had to.
After a few preliminaries, Marti and I listened to Reynolds explain what he thought was going on with Van Walters.
“I believe your father is suffering from a form of mental disorder with the symptoms of shell shock, though not fully understood in other contexts—not
yet, at least. It is a syndrome, a disorder whose symptoms usually spring from specific horrendous actions on a battlefield—but we now think they may come from other happenings as well. For example, a police officer in a violent situation who has to fire his weapon resulting in the death of a person—possibly an innocent person. That is only one of many potential examples. Your father’s situation with the Plexiglas covering over the Kennedy presidential limousine could be another.”
Guilt was at the heart of it, he said. “Guilt is the driving force of all human relationships, beginning with man and woman up to and through parent and child, worker and employer, soldier and commander. I may add to that list, of course, the doctor and the patient and just about any other set of pairings.”
The doctor spoke in what sounded to my movie-fan ear like the accent of a German submarine commander; smooth, forceful, precise, in control under depth-charge fire.
“In your father’s case, guilt itself, through a kind of shell shock malady that went from mind to body, is the potential killer, pure and simple—awful and complicated.”
That made Marti shudder and turn away. I felt like I needed to say something—but what? I was caught between being a supportive friend and a reporter. Silence was the only way to be of assistance right now, but questioning was the only way to move the story along.
Reynolds preempted my decision by moving on himself. “We are beginning, I believe, to expand our understanding of this kind of terrible result of a guilt that is so pathological, it leads to physical disease.”
“They gave Dad drugs and shocked him with a machine, didn’t they?” Marti suddenly barked at the doctor.
“I am not privy to all of the prior treatment protocols that were used on your father,” the doctor said. “But based on my examination of him, I would say there are definite signs that he has undergone extensive electroshock treatment.”
“I saw those scars on his temples from the very beginning,” Marti said. “I hate it that they’ve done that.”
“There are perfectly legitimate and constructive uses for electroshock treatments for some patients in some situations,” Reynolds said, perhaps trying to reassure her.
