Fellow Travelers (10 page)

CHAPTER NINE

December 2, 1953

“Our orders was to hold at all costs,” said Sergeant Weinel, “and that is what we was doing. We was holding at all costs.”

Even so, the sergeant’s unit had at last been overrun, on August 30, 1950, by the village of Chinju near the Naktong River, and that’s why he was here today, three years later, in the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building. After the unit’s forced march from Chinju to Taejon, Sergeant Weinel testified, he and his sixty buddies had been beaten, indoctrinated, denied medical care, and put on display in North Korean villages; and then—with the exception of the sergeant himself—they had been massacred by their captors.

He explained his own survival to Senator Potter and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: “Yes, sir; they covered me over with dirt, too. It was just loose dirt, with enough to cover my head up. I laid there and after they got through I could breathe through that loose dirt.”

As if fearing that heroism might be ascribed to him, Sergeant Weinel quickly shifted the committee’s attention from his success at playing possum to the last efforts of those actually dead. “Out of the whole bunch that was shot there, I never heard one man ask for mercy; none of them did. In fact, there was one of the boys that wasn’t hit good, and he even asked them to give him another. Out of that many men, nobody cracked.”

With this recollection Sergeant Weinel choked up, and appeared to be on the verge of sobs, which he managed to restrain when Senator Potter, rising to his artificial feet, leaned across the committee table to pass him a cigarette.

Watching from a seat behind his boss’s chair, Tim felt his own hand trembling from some internal tumult of anger and fear, all of it overlaid and trumped by shame. Had he been in Sergeant Weinel’s company, he
would
have cracked, and long before they reached Taejon. He would have begged for mercy and been killed by the enemy in full view of his own contemptuous comrades.

Sergeant Weinel quickly regained his composure, nodding while Potter explained how the evidence they were gathering suggested that the North Koreans had begun a coordinated effort to kill POWs, in numerous locations, on the day the sergeant’s group was slaughtered. “It had to be a command order rather than a prison order,” the senator reasoned. He was especially interested in the timing of a visit to the prison by a North Korean higher-up, a propaganda speaker, shortly before the massacre.

One could argue that a cover-up of the atrocities extended all the way to the Soviet Union—and beyond. Just yesterday, Vishinsky, the Russians’ UN ambassador, had declared with a theatrical yawn, and considerable support, that the United States’ heavily documented report on war crimes was just fantasy. But, Potter insisted, the particulars with which Sergeant Weinel and the other men were now harrowing the Senate proved otherwise. “When a Red Chinese nurse cuts off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears, without benefit of anesthesia, and wraps the wounds in a newspaper, this makes a liar out of Vishinsky.”

In the row of chairs behind the committee, Tommy McIntyre leaned over to Tim and whispered, “Charlie sounds half like a senator today. Too bad his
luck’s
not a little dumber.” He pointed to the dearth of press at the back of the room. No television cameras, and only half as many reporters as would be there ordinarily: a strike by photo engravers had shut down the New York papers. McCarthy, Tommy had explained, was relieved that a break in the Fort Monmouth hearings should be occurring while there were no headlines to be had in Manhattan. The chairman, present here today and all modesty, had told newsmen, “It’s Charlie’s hearing,” when he entered the Caucus Room this morning. “He’s been a one-man task force on this important issue.”

Seeing him now in half profile, Tim could sense McCarthy’s boredom with the whole undertaking, this bit of pro bono work where the witnesses were praised instead of pilloried. As a display of his supposed confidence in the Michigan senator, McCarthy had told the reporters that Potter was free to disagree with his own approach to the POW issue, which involved getting tough on any country still trading with Red China, including Britain. “I myself believe it’s time to stop sending perfumed notes to our supposed allies,” he’d said, repeating a choice image from his pre-Thanksgiving speech.

Tim had hoped to see Cecil Holland from the
Star
here this morning, but the day’s real action was over at the White House, where at a news conference Ike would—or would not—back up Dulles’s own rebuttal of McCarthy’s speech. There was also, here in the Caucus Room, no sign of Roy Cohn, who doubtless thought the hearings a digression beneath his notice. Even Robert Jones, Potter’s own staffer, had gone to get a haircut in the Senate barbershop. Well, Tim would at least be able to tell Uncle Frank that he’d once more seen McCarthy, albeit the back of his head.

After a Pfc’s testimony about a chaplain who’d been shot in the back while giving the last rites, the hearing was recessed for lunch. Tim had to do without eating, since he’d been assigned to prepare the witnesses’ travel vouchers in the committee’s office space down the hall. He’d hand them out once the men had had their meal and turned in their receipts. But before he left the Caucus Room he walked up to Sergeant Weinel to shake his hand and say thank you—not just for his testimony, he hoped the man would understand, but for what he’d endured in Korea. As Weinel mumbled, “You’re welcome,” Tim noted a smirk on the face of a reporter witnessing the exchange, and he wondered if he’d violated some protocol. When the newsman began to shake his head in what looked like knowing disgust, Tim felt something angry flare up inside himself. “What did I do wrong?” he asked the reporter, trying to make it sound like a genuine request for information. But his emotions were running high, and he found it hard to keep the edge out of his voice. “I’m Timothy Laughlin,” he added, extending his hand without a smile.

“Kenneth Woodforde,
The Nation,
” responded the reporter, whose facial expression, beneath a lot of curly auburn hair, had turned almost pitying. “Tell me, fella, don’t you think these guys are just as much on display here as they were in those Korean villages?”

Tim looked at him blankly. “No, of course I don’t.”

“Well, guess again, buddy boy. They’re trotting out these fresh-faced farm kids—victims of big bad communism—to inflame support for the committee’s real work.”

“Which is?”

“A gigantic domestic purge.”

“You don’t think these soldiers suffered?” asked Tim. At the start of the hearing, General Ridgway himself had testified that there was no precedent for the kind of atrocities being described.

“War is hell,” said Woodforde, with even more sarcasm than before. “Bad things happen. So do exaggerations and outright lies.”

“You sound like Vishinsky,” said Tim, who immediately wondered if the insult wasn’t beyond the pale.

“Well, I’d rather have worked for
his
Joe than for
your
Joe.”

Tim was about to say “I work for Senator Potter,” but Woodforde had already walked away. So he stood for a moment by himself, in silence, outraged over the idea that he should be ashamed to serve McCarthy, however indirectly.

He looked at Sergeant Weinel, now near the exit, and thought of him trying to breathe through the dirt and the corpses while pretending to be one of them.

Down the corridor, inside the committee’s workroom, Tim found that Robert Jones, freshly shorn, had taken a seat next to Roy Cohn, who was now delivering an agitated monologue into a telephone.

“Laughlin!” called out Jones. “Which one of those fellows who testified is from Maine?”

Tim consulted his clipboard and found the name of the private from Augusta whose pus-filled arm had been slammed with a North Korean’s rifle butt on the march to Taejon.

“Do
not,
” said Jones, “repeat—do
not
—allow Margaret Chase Smith to get her picture taken with him. This afternoon, if the kid gets called to her office, I don’t care what you do—take him to look at the Declaration of Independence or the White House Christmas tree—but do
not
let her pose near him.”

Tim nodded, but this whole tough-guy marching order sounded so much like an imitation of Cohn imitating McCarthy that he had trouble believing Jones could be fully serious.

Cohn himself continued shouting into the phone: “Listen, Adams. You’re double-crossing me for the last time! You told me that Dave would be assigned back to Manhattan after he’d finished his eight weeks of basic. Yes, you did, goddammit! And now you go back on your word and try to make him eat shit!” Pointlessly cupping the receiver’s mouthpiece against his ever-rising volume, the committee’s chief counsel declared: “If you don’t get Stevens to straighten this out, Joe and I are going to wreck the goddamn army! Yes, that’s exactly what I said, and it’s a promise!”

Further upset, Tim went over to the table with the travel vouchers, amazed at the way Cohn and Jones seemed to think they could treat the army, as if it were some crooked dry cleaner down the street. After all, it was the army, with its million Private Garritys from Augusta, that was actually killing Communists and being killed by them. Still, Tim’s anger toward the two staffers couldn’t approach what he was even now feeling for smirking Kenneth Woodforde, who didn’t seem to think the reds ever killed anyone at all.

Tommy McIntyre approached Tim’s table in a grand mood. “It seems that for all the ordure Private Schine’s been ingesting, he’s so far had four weekend and five weeknight passes. Good thing he wears a uniform. Otherwise he might not know he was in the army at all.”

Tim was too agitated to remember who Private Schine even was. Half the time he didn’t grasp what Tommy was saying, let alone who really employed him and to what end. He didn’t know why Woodforde should be one of the anti-anticommunists, as they were now called, and he couldn’t be sure McCarthy, Cohn, and Jones wouldn’t end up creating more of them. And he still could not understand why, even with the New York strike, there hadn’t been more press in the Caucus Room this morning. There was a war on, for God’s sake, between good and evil, regardless of whether Woodforde thought so, or even if he believed that each of those values had been ascribed to the wrong side.

“
Oh, god-fucking-dammit!
” Tim heard his own voice flying out of him when the heavy-duty stapler caught the tip of his thumb.

McIntyre and Mrs. Watt, the committee’s chief clerk, began to laugh, mistaking his uncharcteristic profanity for exasperation over some clerical error. Cohn, ranting through another phone call, didn’t even turn his head. Dizzy with pain, Tim held his tongue against further outburst; he wanted only for Hawkins to be here and to take hold of him, the way he had when Tim had stubbed his toe one night in the apartment on I Street.

“Jaysus,” said Tommy, realizing the actual situation. “You’re bleeding, kid.”

“I’m okay.” But he wasn’t. He was a fool. Cowardly, and clumsy to boot.
I never heard one man ask for mercy. Out of that many men, nobody cracked.

Mrs. Watt, also apologetic, now hovered over him.

“I’ll get him patched up,” said Tommy.

On their way to the nurse, his thumb wrapped in Tommy’s handkerchief, Tim recognized Senator Hunt, the Wyoming Democrat whose son had been convicted of sexual solicitation. Tommy remained unusually quiet until the man passed and the two of them reached the elevators. “Timothy,” he then asked, “have you got a girlfriend?”

Annoyed by the pain in his hand, and now by this question, Tim answered without suppressing the edge in his voice: “No, Mr. McIntyre, I don’t.”

Tommy threw an arm over his shoulder. “Before the coming shitstorm’s over, you may want to get yourself one.”

CHAPTER TEN

December 19, 1953

Thruston Morton wished Jerry Baumeister a Merry Christmas. He shook his hand while propelling his own six-foot-two frame and pretty wife, Belle, a few inches farther into Mary Johnson’s apartment. He also patted the heads of Jerry’s two girls, who stood politely in red velvet holiday skirts that their mother had made for them.

Watching from her kitchen, Mary took his skillful progress as confirmation of the rumors that Mr. Morton did indeed want to get back into elective politics with a Senate run from Kentucky in 1956. The bureau chief did not look like a man who had lately received any troubling phone calls, from Senator Fulbright or anybody else. He certainly didn’t appear to know that the man he was greeting had recently been discharged from his own department.

About thirty of the people Mary had invited were already here, and it was warm enough for her to open the window. The place was beginning to smell a little like the Maine Avenue wharf where she’d gotten the crabs and cherrystone clams that Paul had helped her to steam all afternoon—work he’d enjoyed much more than sitting with her through the Mannes Trio at the Coolidge Auditorium Thursday night.

What was it she’d come in here for? Napkins, that’s right. Okay, now she had them and could rejoin both Paul and Beverly Phillips, who’d arrived with some nice widower from the Social Security Administration.

“He said he wanted to take me to the Shubert!” crowed Beverly, who was in a fine mood. “I told him, ‘Hey, what do you take me for!’”

“I had to tell her they haven’t done burlesque in five years,” the nice widower explained to Paul Hildebrand.

“See how far behind you get living out in the suburbs!” exclaimed Beverly. “Gosh, Mary, this place is cute. And jammed!”

“Everyone who’s ever filled out a Form 57,” observed Paul.

“How does this poor man know about that!” cried Beverly. “Oh, God, Mary, he’s not going to make you
leave,
is he?” Paul Hildebrand’s dislike of politics and government had become a matter of teasing and speculation among those who knew the progress of Mary’s romance, and two bourbons had made Beverly even more direct than usual.

“No,” said Mary. “I think Form 57 was mentioned in the monologue Paul got a little while ago from that girl in International Materials.” She pointed out a young lady across the room. “She was telling him how well she hears women are doing at the FBI. Getting to be everything but agents.”

Beverly’s widower seemed interested in pursuing the subject, but it would have to be without Mary, who had just decided that she and Paul, as if they really
were
married, should be circulating separately through the party. Departing the conversation, she introduced one of her old Q Street roommates to the little circle Paul would now be in charge of. Betty Bowron, conspicuously tanned, had just been to Miami with her boss for a Commerce Department conference, and she seemed eager to talk about it.

Mary edged into another conversation. Her old friend Millie Brisson, the congressman’s secretary, was talking about the suicide of a young guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“Mysterious, no?” said Millie.

“Redundant, I’d say,” offered the young man Millie was talking to, a Lousiana acquaintance of Mary’s who was up here trying to write a kind of national version of
All the King’s Men.

Mary checked the phonograph: the Christmasy Corelli concerto had another two inches to go before she’d need to change the record. But one of Jerry’s daughters, she now noticed, was struggling with a hem that had fallen. Maybe the hard-drinking mother had dropped a few stitches. “Honey,” called Mary, coming to the rescue, “let me get you a little old safety pin.”

Inside her bedroom, while she rummaged the sewing box, Mary’s glance was drawn through the window, to a scene made visible by the streetlamp two houses down P Street. Hawkins Fuller, dressed for her party and holding a small brown bag, stood talking to a smaller man in a woollen cap and zippered jacket. She now recognized him—the tortoiseshell glasses—as the boy who’d come to the office with the book a couple of months back. He and Fuller appeared to be saying goodbye. After giving Fuller a sweet, casual punch on the arm, the boy smiled and walked away. At which point her colleague turned around and started toward her apartment.

Mary wondered: Had that lovelorn little dogsbody leapt at the mere chance to walk Fuller to a party the older man wouldn’t even let him enter?

What exactly should she be feeling? Disgust? Sympathy? She blocked the questions from her mind, and decided to use a needle and thread, instead of a pin, on the Baumeister girl’s skirt. Picking out a spool of bright red, she heard Corelli give way, abruptly, to Eartha Kitt:
Santa baby, hurry down the chimney to me…

Looking out into the living room, she saw Fuller at the turntable and realized that he’d had a phonograph record inside the little brown bag. People were beginning to cluster around him, just as they would have had he only blown some dust off the needle and dropped it back onto Corelli. An older man from European Affairs was asking in a loud voice if he didn’t “think it terrible what had happened to poor George Marshall over in Oslo. You were over there once, weren’t you, young fellow? The poor general, heckled by those Communists while picking up his Peace Prize!” Fuller agreed that it was a shame, and moreover an embarrassment to old Haakon VII, “a fine chap and top-drawer king.” Even as his always-adaptable speech found him communicating in the EA man’s idiom, Fuller began letting his own shoulders sway in a manner both slinky and manly, one that belonged to nobody else at the party.
Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing, a ring
…

Mary watched him and nodded but didn’t smile. She proceeded to Jerry’s daughter with her needle and thread.

Ten minutes passed before she again needed to be in the kitchen, where she found Miss Lightfoot, middling drunk on Harvey’s Bristol Cream and wearing a hideous hat. Mary had had to invite her, and poor Mr. Church, an old friend from the Passport Office, was having to listen to her.

“What do you mean by ‘this’?” asked Miss Lightfoot, who knew perfectly well that Mr. Church had meant the sway of Senator McCarthy when he told her that “this could all end if Senator Morse just voted with the Democrats.” Should Oregon’s independent—formerly a Republican—throw in with the other side when it came time to organize the congressional session, then the chairmanship of McCarthy’s committee, and much of his power, would pass to the opposition.

“Well, Morse won’t vote with the Democrats. He’s already said so,” Miss Lightfoot informed Mr. Church, whose more serious error had been to assume, from the general tenor of those at Mary’s party, that Miss Lightfoot, too, wanted all “this” to end. She did not. Nor, actually, did the Democrats, she now argued. “They don’t
want
to take over. They’d rather carp. Which is why they left the committee in the first place.”

Mr. Church was shaking his head with forbearance, allowing Miss Lightfoot to overprove her point, when Hawkins Fuller brushed past them both. Leaning against the sink, Fuller took note of Mary’s sleeveless black dress and declared: “That appears to be a
very
cold shoulder.”

Miss Lightfoot, already keenly stimulated, and wishing for a sprig of mistletoe under which to capture Fuller, tried to annex him to her own conversation. “Mr. Fuller, tell Mr. Church here how
you’ve
got to deal with the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Tell him how—”

Fuller ignored her ardent grasp of his forearm. He was interested only in the lady of the house, who he realized had already had enough to drink herself.

“You came alone?” Mary finally asked him.

“More or less,” he replied.

“How is a
person
‘more or less’?” asked Mary. “Did you make that poor creature I saw from the window walk all the way back home by themselves?” Lit as she was, she took care to keep the pronouns neutral, even at the expense of grammar, since she and Fuller now had Miss Lightfoot’s complete attention, Mr. Church having beaten a gentlemanly retreat once the handsome guest began having words with the hostess. Fresh from political triumph, but still smarting from Fuller’s rebuff, Miss Lightfoot now appeared determined at least to savor victory over whatever hapless female Fuller had apparently declined to bring up to the party.

Mary attempted to move out of the kitchen, but Fuller blocked her, trying to smooth things over with a laugh. “If I’d brought him up, he would only have asked you for a glass of milk. And you don’t seem to be serving any.”

By now furious at being ignored, Miss Lightfoot could feel her overpowdered jaw suddenly slacken.
Him? He?
A small cascade of pennies started dropping in her head. After all her flirtation! She’d even
sung
with this man! Without hesitation, she began a loud, seething recitation of the words she’d seen that
boy,
that milk-drinking
nancy,
write in the Lodge biography: “‘With thanks to Hawkins Fuller. I got the job. You’re
wonderful.
’” She made the inscription sound as if it were a cable from Moscow that had been discovered in Fuller’s shoe.

Mary, still unable to get away, could picture the book lying on Fuller’s filing cabinet. He’d never even taken the gift home—a bit of callousness that still appalled her, even as she wanted to defend Fuller from this harridan to whom he’d so foolishly exposed himself. Pushing Miss Lightfoot aside, she at last returned to the living room.

Fuller lifted the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream from the kitchen counter. He topped up Miss Lightfoot’s drink and poured one for himself. He clinked her glass and said, “Miss Lightfoot, I
am
wonderful.” And then, before walking away, he leaned over and whispered in her ear: “So why don’t you just
suffer.
”