America America (30 page)

He pointed into the house. “I said
back inside
.”

A
T HIS DESK,
Mr. Metarey opened a newspaper on its stick and pushed it across the leather blotter. “Have a look,” he said. I’d been stacking firewood.

I picked it up. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. National section, April 8th, 1972.

“Bottom left,” he said. “Small. With the car ads.”

I looked again, and there it was. Fourteen-point headline over an eight-line filler:

SENATOR TIED TO FATAL ROAD INCIDENT

Islington, NY—Senator Henry Bonwiller (D-New York) has been questioned in connection with the highway death of a local woman near this well-to-do vacation community along the eastern shore of Lake Erie, according to sources. The Bonwiller presidential campaign has not issued a comment, and police have termed the investigation simply a precautionary measure.

“Not a bad poker face, kid.”

“Sir?”

He picked up his pipe from the ashtray and puffed on it. “You read it?”

“I did, sir.”

“And what do you make of it?”

“It’s awfully small.”

“Small, yes—but it’s there.”

“And his name’s not in the headline, sir.”

“True.”

“And it’s strange,” I said. I set it back on the desk.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, the
Post-Dispatch
is a liberal paper, isn’t it, sir?” Even in those days I knew which editorial pages favored us—the
Times
, the
Post
, the
Globe
, the
Post-Dispatch
—and which didn’t—
The Wall Street Journal
, the
Tribune
,
The Union Leader
,
The Dallas Morning News
, the
Boston Herald Traveler
. “St. Louis is one of the friendly ones, I think. Right, Mr. Metarey?”

“That’s right, Corey.”

“But it’s the same article that ran in the
Tribune
.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned and looked out the window, where a few spring flurries were drifting under the long soffits of the roof.

“At least I think so, sir,” I said. “If I remember.”

“That’s exactly right, too,” he mumbled, still looking away. “February sometime. The national section.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a file folder, then fished in it till he found something. He glanced in at it, puffing again on the pipe. “Not a word different,” he said.

“Except for the headline.”

“That’s right, Corey. You noticed that, too. They left out the name but the headline’s still a damn sight worse. It’s that one word.”

“
Fatal
—”

“And
that
was Colonel McCormick,” he said. “
This
is the
Dispatch
.”

“What’s happening, sir?”

“Wish I knew. Could be they’re still trying to protect us.”

For years, as it turned out, I was left to think about what he meant by this. He drew on the pipe again, but it was nearly extinguished. “Could be a message, too,” he said. “A word to the listening.”

Was he talking about the president? Or about the newspapers? For a long time I assumed that the Bonwiller family—and perhaps the Metarey family as well—had simply reached out with its iron hand to quell the news, wherever it rose. But I don’t know now if that’s true. It could have been even more corrupt than that.

On the other hand, to be fair, it could have been less. In my job since then I’ve seen plenty of leads die quietly on the vine, of their own accord. Lack of proof. Lack of trustworthy sources. The public forgets that the worst thing a newspaperman can do is publish a rumor. That’s still true, and still a boon to any politician who needs only to weather a single storm. But whatever happened, whatever Liam Metarey was referring to, it’s still impressive to me that for so many months, so little was revealed. Was it in fact worse than I knew? Had Henry Bonwiller paid off the newspapers? Was it in the end that crude? Was that what he meant? Or was it Nixon’s men, finally, playing this long and thorny hand? Is that what Mr. Metarey knew?

At the desk, he drew once more on the pipe, hard, then turned it over and tapped it into the ashtray. Something came over his face as he did—a look of sudden, deadening fatigue—and for a moment, as I stood watching him, I actually thought he was close to tears. He pinched off a fingerful of tobacco, refilled the bowl, and struck a match. In all the time I worked for him, he never told me what he knew about all of it, of course; but at that moment, I think, as he held the flame over the bowl and sucked for several seconds on the nib—as though he needed some time to compose himself—at that moment, he came the closest to doing it. I can’t explain how I know that, but I do. I remember it clearly. His face looked as though for a moment he’d taken off a mask.

“Well, Corey…” he said, around the pipe.

But then the mood passed. The bowl came to flame and his face reconfigured itself. “We’ve got a whole new set of enemies now,” he said briskly. “That’s part of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But not all.”

He was referring, I now realize, to nothing more than what had just occurred in the race. After Illinois, Henry Bonwiller had been transformed into the indisputable front-runner. And he was polling well in every state that mattered from here on out: in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, which would vote at the end of the month, and in Ohio and Indiana, which would vote not long after. McGovern was still alive in the West and parts of New England, but everyone—at least everyone in the Bonwiller campaign—considered him a long shot. And despite what had happened in Florida, Wallace was hardly mentioned at all. Humphrey was hanging on, too, but it was understood that this was only for influence at the convention. And in every region now except New England, Muskie was all but dead. Just that week a couple of editorial writers on the East Coast had called Henry Bonwiller the nominee. This, of course, worried Liam Metarey.

“Faint rumble of armies,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Faint rumble of armies.”

He tilted his ear toward the window. I turned in that direction, but all I saw through the glass were the snowflakes, dancing upward in the eddies of the eaves.

SEVEN

O
F COURSE, IT’S PREDICTABLE
what I found out about Eoghan Metarey: the history of riches is always sordid. And if it weren’t, we would make it that way. That day in the Haverford library, as soon as Holly had left, I opened one of the books I’d hidden under my notepad at the desk.
The Age of American Barons
, by Geoffrey Morris. I flipped to the index and found the entry:
Madarey, Eoghan J.
Earlier that morning, I’d stumbled on it: I’d been looking for the wrong name.

Later, I discovered that the spelling had been changed by Eoghan Metarey himself, sometime around the turn of the century. His younger brother Rupert split with him around that time, keeping the Madarey spelling but setting off for Canada. In fact, a whole band of Madareys still populates southern Ontario, and even if the name differs, the two halves of the family clearly share the same fierce inheritance: today, you can’t drive twenty minutes anywhere between Ottawa and Montreal without passing a Madarey’s Restaurant, and—as everyone from Buffalo to Belleville knows—you can’t turn on your radio within a hundred miles of Toronto without hearing a jingle for Madarey Cadillac.

The type was small, and I carried the book to a spot near the window to read. I felt my breathing change. Sitting down in the empty hallway at the back of the stacks, I copied the passage by hand into my pad:

One of the most aggressive of this second wave was Eoghan Madarey, a Scottish iron and coal miner, and later a rail pioneer, who had come to New York State from near Dundee in 1881. Like his hero and fellow Fife immigrant, Andrew Carnegie, Madarey was a self-made millionaire, and where he had sought his fortune first was in the carboniferous basins of northern Nova Scotia. He was a driven man, sometimes brutal, who maintained separate houses for his various concubines during his long marriage. He was also said to have kept a riding crop in his pocket, which was not for use on his horses. His home was principally in Saline, New York, close to the eastern shore of Lake Erie, but he owned estates throughout northern New England and Nova Scotia as well. He was also well known for throwing lavish parties at his Hudson River manor, named River Glen, attended by the likes of John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Vincent Astor, and for keeping in his employ a local English teacher whose only duty was to help cleanse his speech of its Scottish brogue.

Coal was the first source of his significant wealth. By the time he was 22 years old, in 1898, Madarey Mine #1, near Westville, Nova Scotia, was employing over 300 men, who were paid between 90 cents and $1.80 per day, and possibly half that number again of boys, who were paid 75 cents. This was before the wide advent of compressed air drills and well before the invention of longwall mining, and picks and wedges were the only tools used to work the seam. The rooms were first holed across the middle; then the sides were sheared and wedged. It was dangerous, dirty work, as it remains today, but the millions of tons of coal lifted to the surface each year by pit ponies and later steam hoists formed the basis of Canadian and much of northern New England’s heavy industry, as well as provided readily available fuel for the widening network of electric power in the region.

Eoghan Madarey’s first claim had been a sizeable strike along the Acadia seam. This strike produced the harder, purer anthracite, which was suitable for steelmaking, rather than the softer, less pure, bituminous coal that dominates the region. Although the Madarey seam was thinner and more expensive to mine than the vast, neighboring Pictou fields, the higher grade of extract fetched a superior price, and Eoghan Madarey was a substantially wealthy man before the age of 30. (Thornfield estimates his fortune at $28 million by 1911.)

But not long after Madarey Mine #1 was in full production, trouble struck. During a thunderstorm on the night of May 11, 1900, a lightning bolt came to ground along an iron rail at the surface of the mine, and the charge carried down into the working chamber, where it exploded a pocket of methane gas and coal dust. The shaft collapsed and 14 miners were trapped inside. A line was sunk and voices could be heard. Families gathered at the mine head.

As it happened, Madarey Mines had been engaged at the time in a tense standoff with the Provincial Workman’s Association, the miners’ union that later became the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia. The dispute was over wages. No strike had been called but one seemed imminent. Miners had been staying home from work in increasing numbers, and armed guards had been called in to patrol the company land. But after its initial successes in the preceding two decades, the union was now weakened by declining membership and limited funds. At Madarey #1 and several other local mines, many of the recalcitrant workers had already been replaced by scabs. Tempers were short on both sides.

It is not clear who was caught in the collapsed shaft, but it is believed to have been unionized miners. Madarey management allowed fresh air to be pumped through the life-line, but they refused further access to the site to attempt a rescue, citing safety, and at the same time also refused the union’s request to postpone wage negotiations. Stewards of the PWA found themselves in the position of negotiating with Eoghan Madarey while 14 PWA members were trapped 500 feet under the earth. When union observers attempted to widen the life-line to deliver fresh water, Madarey guards prevented them, again citing safety and pointing out that the trapped miners had access to the pit ponies’ drinking troughs, which were at every landing. The union countered that the trapped men might not be able to reach the landings. Management then refused to allow food to be delivered, perhaps as a negotiating tool. The following day, in a gesture of “goodwill,” Eoghan Madarey himself at last consented to the delivery of water. And the day after that, subsequent to a union wage concession, rescuers were allowed to lower a minimal amount of salt cod and bread into the mine. But still no work on a second shaft was opened.

On the morning of May 14, 1900, three days after the collapse, workers tore down a fence and succeeded in opening a wider life-line from a shelf still standing in a neighboring shaft at 250 feet, through which they passed food and water and clean air to their mates below. Families gathered again at the mine head but were driven off by Madarey guards, claiming private property. This time, equipment was commandeered by the union from nearby sites to attempt a full-scale clandestine rescue. But in the middle of the night of May 16, 1900, while a small clan of miners dug in secret along the neighboring shaft, apparently with the cooperation of a few Madarey guards, another explosion was heard. The full contingent of company guards then drove off the rescuers, and in the papers the next day Madarey again pointed to danger at the site.

By morning, the wider life-line had somehow disappeared, either damaged in the explosion or, as unionists have long believed, intentionally closed off by the company. Contract negotiations proceeded, and as part of an agreement a few days later in which the union consented to the small wage increase offered by the mine owners, Madarey at last agreed to a rescue attempt. Here, nine of the miners from one pocket of the shaft were brought out alive. But by then the five from the neighboring pocket, who were unable to reach the pit ponies’ water, had perished. The incident became a rallying cry for the unions, which once again strengthened their positions in the years that followed. Today, the five lost miners are immortalized in the lyrics of several songs, including “Westville Number One” and “The Dark Sixteenth of May,” as well as in a nursery rhyme still sung in Canadian preschools….

I set down the book and looked out the window. It was spring. Holly would be coming back to the library in the afternoon to study with me. Outside, students were riding bikes and throwing Frisbees and lounging on the steps, and it struck me again, the way it had just begun to do in those days, how diligently privilege had to work to remain oblivious to its cost.

I’m speaking of myself now, too, of course.

B
Y THEN EVEN A BOY LIKE ME
understood the capricious headiness of politics—I’d already watched once as Nixon had stolen everything from us with his visit to China—but you couldn’t be around Aberdeen West in late March and early April of 1972 and not realize that something powerful had changed. It was around then, I think, after the wins in New Hampshire and Illinois, and with the new polling coming out in Wisconsin and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, that Henry Bonwiller underwent a critical change. For the first time, I believe, he began to imagine himself as President of the United States.

Think of that moment. One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead; it’s an obvious point but because of my history I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering what it might have meant for Henry Bonwiller and Liam Metarey. For a man on the rise in politics, power first comes through character—that combination of station and forcefulness that produces not just intimidation, which is power’s crudest form, but flattery, too, which is one of its more refined. After that, power begins to grow from its own essence, rising no longer exclusively from the man but from the office itself. And this is where some balance must be found between its attainment and its allotment, between the unquenchable desire in any politician to rise, and the often humbling requirement that one’s station must now be used to some benefit. And here, of course, is where corruption begins; for power contains an irresistible urge to further itself: there is always the next race. But when finally there isn’t any more, when at last there is no more ambition to quell, no more inchoate striving to follow as a guidestar, then a politician must make a transformation that he may have no more ability to make than he has to grow wings and fly. He must change his personal ambition into ambition for his country. This, I believe, was where Henry Bonwiller stood that spring, as he first began to actually imagine himself as president. It’s luck of the draw, of course, who can make the change and who can’t. I imagine he was wondering himself.

I have no more knowledge than what I’ve recorded of the strange events earlier that month on the estate, but I can’t help considering now that the army helicopter that touched down behind Breighton’s barn the week before was carrying an envoy of the president. John Ehrlichman, maybe, or H. R. Haldeman, or even John Mitchell. The presence of the Secret Service even makes me wonder if it had been Vice President Agnew who made the visit, arriving in secret and to this day unreported. And if I had to guess about what took place that morning, I’d say that it’s important to remember that Henry Bonwiller had not only recently become Nixon’s probable November opponent but that he remained at the same time a pivotal force in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, the great barrier to Nixon’s ambition, at a time when the public was crushingly weary of the war. And one must also remember the techniques the president was already using. The Watergate break-ins hadn’t yet occurred, but the first would take place in less than a month, and the plans were undoubtedly already in the president’s mind and probably in the minds of Ehrlichman and Haldeman and Mitchell, as well; and the president in his own conception of himself might have just recently crossed the line of decency that he would soon obliterate. What might he have wanted with Henry Bonwiller and Liam Metarey under those conditions?

I wouldn’t be the first to guess that JoEllen Charney herself was working for the White House. It’s an old story, as old as Samson and Delilah, and an old theory about Henry Bonwiller, too, that’s based on fifteen years of cocktail party whispers, indiscriminately amplified by fifteen subsequent years of webpages. But from what I’ve come to know since then of the Charney family, I don’t give it much weight. And on balance I don’t believe that Nixon had any sort of privileged knowledge of what had happened between JoEllen and the Senator, either. But I do know that George McGovern had just begun to reassert himself after his early showing in Iowa, and at the same time that Nixon had just witnessed the wildly successful fruition of his henchmen’s strategy to destroy Edmund Muskie. Was the president now completing the next step in the hand selection of his own November opponent? Most historians would tell you that Henry Bonwiller, with his New York ties and his New York money, would have been vastly more effective than George McGovern in a national race. Was there a deal being made? At the time, Senator Bonwiller and Senator McGovern were the two most outspoken voices in the country against the war in Vietnam, and Nixon in his inherent shrewdness would have understood that this would have made the two senators not so much allies against him as bitter rivals themselves. More bitter rivals with each other, probably, than either of them was with the president.

What I’ve finally concluded is that Nixon might have sent an envoy, in the guise of legislative diplomacy, to give Henry Bonwiller early knowledge of the escalation he planned that month in Vietnam. It’s not a particularly sensationalistic theory, but that’s part of the reason I allow it credence. The escalation, which included nighttime air raids against the civilian population of Hanoi, would no doubt have deeply angered the Senator; but what Nixon must have known is that advance news of it would also have flattered him—the second skill of powerful men—because it meant that for the first time Henry Bonwiller was being treated as a possible president. It also would have given the Senator an advantage over McGovern among their congressional colleagues. Naturally, I have to assume that there was at least one mole in the Bonwiller presidential campaign, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that word of the new majesty in Henry Bonwiller’s bearing might have reached the White House. Nixon probably rejoiced.