The Redhunter (17 page)

The hall was in an uproar. There were jeers and catcalls but also wild applause. President Tucker struggled a full two minutes
to get silence. Succeeding speakers tried but did not succeed in recapturing attention.

The vote that night detonated on campus the next day when news of it got out. The verdict—to deny Gus Hall an invitation—was
a story in the
New York Times.

Two days later, Tom Scott announced that the Columbia Young Progressives had extended an invitation to Gus Hall to appear
on campus under the Progressives’ sponsorship.

“Dell?” The phone rang in the corner office rented only ten weeks ago and awash with campaign posters and buttons and brochures
and yesterday’s paper coffee cups.

“Yeah, this is Dell. Victor?”

“Dell, you are a
true
asshole.”

“Stop making love, Victor. I’m spoken for. What you want, boy?”

“I’m talking about the list of convention speakers published in the
Times.
So we put you in charge of the Arrangements Committee in Philadelphia and who do you line up to nominate Henry Wallace? Humberto
Stover!”

“What’s the matter with Humberto?”

Victor put down the telephone and lit a cigarette. He needed a breather, even a few seconds.
“What’s the matter with Humberto Stover?”
Was it possible the dumb sonofabitch didn’t
know?
“Stover is—was—a paid-up party member. Yes, we know all about our neat little party-member ploy. So do most people seriously
involved in our business.”

The Communist Party had made an internal move attempting lightly to frustrate the FBI and others in search of Communist Party
members. The new rules were: Any individual membership was automatically rescinded if anybody got officially curious. Vaporized!
“Nobody, except maybe Gus Hall, is documentably a ‘member of the
party.’ Oh, yes. And Stalin, of course. Dell, you know what I could lay my hands on, with only maybe ten minutes’ research?”

“What, Victor?” Dell’s voice was quieter.

“I could give you the party
card number for
Humberto before it was deactivated. It’s just
that
dumb what you did. I can’t believe somebody else, some journalist, isn’t going to come up with Humberto’s party record. The
FBI—
somebody
—will leak it. The press is moving in on our Philadelphia convention, and now you give them as lead-off nominator for Henry
Wallace somebody who is—was—is—what the hell—a member of the Communist Party U.S.A.!”

“Victor, I was wrong, I know. But Stover is tops with labor unions, tops with the academic set, fought in Spain, I mean he’s
Hollywood made for that first speech. And anyway, it’s too late to change, Victor.” Dell sounded truly repentant, waved away
the volunteer clerk who had tried to come in to take something from the file. (“
Shut the door!
” he hissed out at her.)

“
I know it’s too late to change,
Dell. Michelangelo Dellabocca. Should have called you Bocca, not Dell. Look. There is one chance in about one thousand that
nobody will pick it up. Humberto has a following and moves in good circles. So the first thing: Don’t mention his party background
to
one living human being.
Don’t even mention it to Gus. He likes to think he knows everything about what’s going to happen in Philadelphia, but he’s
left the program part of it to us. Yes, he’s the boss, and the platform will be checked out through Gus. But—again, it’s just
a
possibility
—he may just not happen to
know
about Humberto. The other guys you picked to second the nomination are okay. Usual types. Well, let us pray.”

Dell could begin to feel the morning heat in New York in this room without fan or air conditioner. But he picked himself up
enough to be able to say, jocularly, “Let us
what,
Victor?”

“Fuck you, Dell. No. I should pray? Okay. Lord, will thee please
fuck Dell?
I’ll call tomorrow.”

Victor put out his cigarette and placed another call. It was Sunday—only two weeks to go before the convention opened in Philadelphia.
The Wallace team worked every day—and Max would be home, safely out of the way of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
where he worked, blissfully undetected as a clandestine Communist.

“Max? Victor. … Fine, fine, thanks. She’s fine. Now Max, I want
you to do me another favor. It’s a pretty simple one. You still get to see the committee files when you want to? Yes? Well
look, I want to know just one thing. In the file for Humberto W. Stover, S-t-o-v-e-r, do they have his card number? ‘There
is no party member.’ But I happen to know that Humberto Stover’s number was floating around just a couple of years ago, and
maybe one of your HUAC people got hold of it. I know, I
know
it’s risky. What the hell, Max, we’re in a risky business. World revolution isn’t for sarsaparilla types.
I
take risks,
you
take risks. I really want this information, Max. Okay? … Great. Good man, Max. We really appreciate what you do.”

Harry was at home at Eighty-seventh Street, seated in the great armchair that had belonged to his father, drinking coffee,
when the Saturday afternoon paper came. It gave the text of the Progressive Party platform for 1948. It would be ratified,
the story said, in Philadelphia on the first day of the convention, a week from Monday.

Harry was astonished by the platform’s planks. “I mean, Mom, what’s surprising is how they
almost
succeed in avoiding doublespeak. I mean, it’s all right there—the Communist Party platform on foreign policy is the platform
policy of the Progressive Party—allegedly a United States–driven political movement. Its only consistency is that it favors
every plank of Soviet foreign policy.” Dorothy Bontecou, protected by an apron, was kneading dough while her eyes focused
from time to time through her eyeglasses on a recipe pinned by a thumbtack to the cupboard above the work area. But she looked
down to answer her son.

“What’s in it, Harry?”

“Okay. Sit tight.”

“I can’t sit tight when I’m making a pie, Harry.”

“Listen, Mom. I’m quoting. The Progressive Party wants ‘Negotiation and discussion with the Soviet Union to find an agreement
to win the peace.’ ”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Mom. Please. Next, ‘Repeal of the peacetime draft.’ Next. ‘Repudiation of the Truman Doctrine and an end to military and
economic intervention in support of fascist regimes in China, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Latin America.’

“Next. ‘Abandonment of military bases designed to encircle and intimidate other nations.’ Then, ‘Repeal of the National Security
Act provisions which are mobilizing the nation for war, preparing a labor draft, and organizing a monopoly militant dictatorship.’
”

He paused and looked through the doorway at his mother.

“So Harry Truman, Mom—in case it escaped your notice—is ‘organizing for a monopoly militant dictatorship.’ ”

His mother didn’t comment.

“More. ‘Repudiation of the Marshall Plan and in its place creation of a UN reconstruction and development fund.’ They want
‘destruction of existing atomic bomb stockpiles. … Support of all colonial peoples throughout the world for independence,
including Puerto Rico, Africa, Asia, West Indies, Korea.’ ”

“Isn’t that right, Harry?”

“The point, Mom, is they don’t talk about freedom for Poland or Bulgaria or Romania or Czechoslovakia or East Germany.”

“Will they get anywhere, Harry?” Mrs. Bontecou was now in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a washrag.

“Wallace isn’t going to win the election, if that’s what you mean. But the Progressives are predicting ten million votes.
What hurts is the high-profile people they’ve got backing the party. Professors, scientists, artists, critics.” He ran his
eyes down the news story. “Everybody’s in the picture. Academics from NYU, Harvard, Yale, Williams … These are
educators.
”

“What are you going to do about it?”

He broke the news to her. He and Chris Russo had made their plans. “As soon as we get out of class in June, we’re going to
do research on the people who are running the Progressive Party. Do you know who Sidney Hook is, Mom?”

“Of course.”

“Well, on top of being a well-known philosophy professor, he’s been a very active anti-Communist. He served on the Dewey Commission
exposing the Moscow purge trials. Listen to this, I found out that last week he went to Princeton and spent two hours with
Einstein. You know Einstein is a backer of the Wallace movement? Well, Chris Russo’s father knows James Burnham, the professor—he
was also at NYU—who wrote
The Managerial Revolution.
He’s a superinformed
anti-Communist, and he told Mr. Russo—Chris’s father—that Hook pleaded with Einstein to get out of the Wallace movement.”

“Did he make any progress?”

“Einstein listened. He admires Hook. But apparently Hook couldn’t get Einstein past the basic problem, which is that Moscow
is a socialist society and Einstein is a socialist, so why shouldn’t he be pro-Russian? But of course Sidney Hook is a socialist
too. What I imagine Hook said to Einstein was that what’s important about the Soviet Union isn’t that they have nationalized
the sources of production and exchange, to quote from the socialist kindergarten. It’s that they suppress human freedom and
torture and imprison and kill. What has to be done is get to the key people—the intellectuals, I mean, the intellectuals who
are making the mistake. Talk to them and get them when they look at Moscow to look through the socialist state to the repressive
state. Erik Chadinoff—you remember him? at Camp Plattling? the doctor who was court-martialed and did six months in the brig—has
promised to come down to Philadelphia for the convention. He’s a magnetic guy. I wish Einstein could talk with Chadinoff.”

The doorbell rang.

“That would be Elinor,” his mother said. “You can get your mind off politics.”

Harry got up and went to the door. At the end of the room he turned suddenly.

“Mom? How do I look?”

“Dazzling.”

Harry gave a little yelp of joy as he opened the door to Elinor.

HANBERRY, 1991

Herrendon had gone over the material Harry had given him, saved from his college years. He turned to Harry, “You had an intimate
experience there, I know, with fellow traveling, back when you were a Columbia student. I knew Enfils. Very bright. When he
wrote that book he was less cautious than later on. Ten years later, he’d have watched his step in talking about the show
trials that way.”

“Was he a party member?”

“I don’t know. And, really, it never greatly mattered. The party sometimes wanted some of its … friends to take membership—it
gave the party a more disciplinary hold on them. And some friends of the Soviet enterprise wanted to be members of the party
in a comparable sense of some people wanting to be priests or monks—to identify themselves plainspokenly with the cause. Enfils—I
don’t remember what came of him—was useful to the party, up through the Wallace years.”

“Wallace, yes. Henry Agard Wallace. His campaign was the loftiest you people ever got. But finally it was a fiasco; or was
it?”