The Redhunter (40 page)

Jean, Harry, and Robin shook hands with Henry and sat down again in the box seats lent to Joe by Urban Van Susteren of Appleton,
a hearty McCarthy booster who had the box for the season.

In the third race Joe was triumphant—”How’m I doing?” he beamed at Jeanie—and on the last race he lost it all.

“How’d you do on the day?” Jean asked, back in the car.

“Oh, I don’t know, Jeanie. Win some, lose some. That’s life.” He sighed noisily, intending to draw attention. “Life. What’s
life without Jeanie? Tell me how much you love me, Jeanie.”

“Shut up, Joe. I’m too smart to love you.”

“Besides,” Harry got into the act, “Jeanie belonged to the Soviet-American Friendship League when she was six.”

“You making fun of my work, kid? Communist kid. Remind me to fire him when we get in, Jean.”

But now the races were behind him. He fell silent as the car came into Washington. They stopped to let Robin out.

“Tell you what, Harry,” Joe said. “Drop me at the office. I got some work to do.”

Jean sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll go on up with you.”

“Can I help?” Harry said.

“No. You’re working on the Philadelphia speech, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m batting away at home.”

“Good. See if you can work into it something about a lousy racehorse called Tidings.”

They were together at Washington National Airport, headed for San Antonio, when Senator McCarthy was paged. Harry, briefcase
in hand, waited outside the telephone booth.

Joe came out, a shimmer of sweat on his face. He had not been exercising; he had been eating, and drinking, more. He leaned
his increasing bulk against the booth.

“That was Don. There’s been a subpoena from Drew Pearson.”

Pearson’s complaint filled many pages and held that McCarthy had defamed his “professional and personal” life. McCarthy had
hired a young, flashy lawyer named Edward Bennett Williams as his counsel. “Surine called Ed Williams, and he says we can’t
be late on this one, so Don has to pull out of the preparation for the Gillette committee hearings—which means, my boy Harry,
that
you
have to do the Gillette-Monroney work. You’re the only man on the staff other than Don who can handle that one. We have to
furnish an account of every activity undertaken by me or my staff in the Maryland campaign, can you beat it!”

The Gillette-Monroney Committee had been impaneled, after the Tydings Report was filed, to investigate charges against Senator
McCarthy that his tactics in the Tydings campaign had been unethical and illegal.

Joe patted Harry on the shoulder. “I’ll have to handle the San
Antonio speech on my own. I’m going to let Harry Truman have it tomorrow.”

“I know that, Joe. I wrote the speech.”

“Yes, of course, sure. But I told you what to say.”

“And I tried to say it your way. But I hope you
won’t
use the word
impeach.”

McCarthy put his elbow on the counter. “What other word would you use? Look: Chiang Kai-shek offers to send Nationalist military
units to Korea to help solve the mess created by the Truman administration. What does Truman do?

“He stalls.

“I think I’m right; if
he
continues to refuse Nationalist aid,
we
have a duty to ask whether he shouldn’t be retired as president. We have to view his performance as a whole. That, coming
on top of the firing of General MacArthur—”

“But Joe, dammit, it just isn’t that obvious. General MacArthur writes a letter to
Joe Martin,
Republican Minority Leader in the House! MacArthur backs, in that letter, the Martin position on the war—that we should bring
in the Nationalist troops. He is in effect urging a different military, in fact a different geopolitical strategy in Korea
from that of the commander in chief. I mean, if I gave a speech outlining a mistake I thought
you
were making, you’d have every right to can me, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, sure. But if the Senate thought I was really abusing my authority, they’d have the right to censure
me.
Or even to throw me out.”

“But my point is, you
wouldn’t
have been abusing your authority if you did something comparable to what Truman did to MacArthur.”

“You’re a bright kid, Bontekow. But I have to reason it my way. No offense.”

“Okay,” Harry said. “Now Joe, on the speech you’re taking with you.—Don’t alter that speech. It’s right the way it is.”

“Waal, Harry … I won’t. But I might just give it a little … color.”

If Joe McCarthy had decided to change it, Harry said to himself, then it would be changed. He let it go. The airplane boarding
had begun.

“Good luck. Say hello to San Antonio. And remember the Alamo, Senator.”

McCarthy smiled broadly and waved his hand, first at Harry, and
then at two or three passers-by who had spotted him and begun to cheer and clap. Harry took a taxi to the office, picked up
the bulky file he’d have to go through to answer the queries from the Gillette committee, and set out on foot to his apartment.

The nine-block walk had become a part of his daily regimen, important to him now that he had so little time for the tennis
and bicycling he had done while a student at Columbia. Walking down from the Senate building he passed Buster Jensen, aide
to Senator Gillette. He was walking with his own heavy briefcase up toward the hill. Jensen stopped.

“Tell you what, Harry. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!”

Harry laughed. “Buster, if you tell me what specific questions you’re going to ask my boss on Thursday that would sure lighten
my workload.”

Jensen was a wag. In a dark whisper: “We’re going to find out whether a Communist has
infiltrated
Senator McCarthy’s staff. But that’s top secret, Harry.”

Harry mock-cuffed him on the chin and resumed his walk. “See you Thursday, Buster.”

Harry walked up the two flights to his apartment, pulled the key from his pocket, and opened the door on Tracy Allshott. Tracy,
dressed in khaki trousers, sport shirt, and sweater, stood there in the interior hallway, papers strewn over the back of the
couch.

Neither of them spoke.

Harry closed the door quietly. He contrived to find the door lock behind his back. With his left hand he felt for the door
key in his pocket. He wheeled around, inserted it, and locked the door from the inside. The click seemed loud as a bullet
shot.

“You will see, Tracy, that I’m extending your visit.”

Allshott remained standing. Standing awkwardly, with papers in either hand. He hadn’t changed, the near-assertive blondness,
the blue-blue eyes. His shirt was open, but then Harry had never seen Allshott with a tie on. He appeared gaunt.

The question flashed through Harry’s mind: Was Tracy armed? If he was, Harry would not succeed in putting through an emergency
call to the police. If he was not armed, Harry, three inches taller and a graduate of infantry training in hand-to-hand combat,
would probably prevail. Whichever, he had best start up an exchange.

With some deliberation, he walked over to the chair behind his desk on the right and sat down.

“So what’s up, Tracy? I haven’t seen you for a few years.”

Tracy let down the papers on the couch and leaned back on the bookshelf. He remained standing. He was breathing heavily.

“What’s up is that your boss McCarthy is trying to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship so we can have another
world war.”

Harry didn’t know whether soft reason would work. He might as well try.

“Why would he be doing that, Tracy? Sit down. Just move those papers behind the couch out of your way.”

“Don’t try to sweet-talk me, Harry.”

“Okay. I can always call the police. But shouldn’t we, maybe, try to talk a bit?”

“I don’t see how you can
stand yourself,
working for that man.”

“Who do you work for, Tracy?”

Tracy looked to the window and said in a solemn tone, “I try to work on the side of history.”

“Was it history’s idea to break in to my apartment?”

“It’s a historically responsible thing to do to expose the crazy mind and doings of your boss McCarthy.”

“Well, I’ve got no answer to that, Tracy. I mean, if you can do—on behalf of history—anything you want to do, how am I supposed
to defend, like, the privacy of my apartment? Or my own papers?”

Suddenly it was Tracy Allshott whose voice was that of reason, reason struggling amiably to get out.

“Harry, you just don’t understand. Like back at Columbia. You don’t
understand.
We’re headed toward the great global renunciation of capitalism and war and imperialism.”

He pointed to Harry’s open file drawer. “What you and—McCarthy—are doing is trying to find everybody who shares my vision
of a new history. Let me tell you something, something I never told you at Columbia. My father was a factory owner in Iowa.
In 1943—I was seventeen—the union struck. Dad had three hundred workers. Older people, mostly, everybody under thirty-five
was off to the war. Dad’s factory made bicycle wheels, so there was no wartime antistrike weapon he could wheedle out of Washington.
So after the third week we got the goons. The strikers had barricaded the office.
Mum heard them. She told me in French—she’s French—that Dad had ordered the strike broken: Two days later they were there.
Fifteen of them. There were pictures in the paper. They came with clubs. Great big clubs. Twenty-seven workers were hospitalized,
two dead. Dad told the press he knew nothing about the strikebreakers, he thought they had come in from a rival union.

“But the striking union people read the signals. They went back to work. One week later Dad fired twenty-five of them, the
union cadre. That’s the world some of us—a lot more of us than you think, Harry, never mind how poorly Henry Wallace made
out—want to do something about, and a good start on that is to expose your,” Tracy’s voice now resumed its earlier stridency,
“your lying fascist boss.”

Allshott moved. His stance was now that of the boxer.

If necessary, Harry calculated, he’d use the brass lamp on his desk as a weapon.

He said calmly, “Well, Tracy, I’m sorry about all that. We’ll just have to go our separate ways. I think you’d better go now.”

He reached in his pocket for the door key. As he did so, Allshott lunged at him, his head low. With his right hand Harry grabbed
the lamp and smashed it as hard as he could—harder than he supposed he could—on the back of Allshott’s head.

He called first the ambulance, then the police.

Would he recount the words Tracy had spoken? Or, instead, leave the whole episode as the work of a deranged former roommate.
Turned to petty larceny.

Anything,
he thought quickly,
anything
to keep Joe McCarthy from emerging as the central figure in an Allshott-Bontecou drama.

He told the police he would not prefer a complaint but he thought himself entitled to knowledge of where Tracy Allshott lived
and worked. The sergeant, making notes, agreed to forward him the information.

He saw the two policemen out, Allshott logy, head bowed, following them. Harry dreaded the thought of a long evening devoted
to the Gillette hearings. But the research had to be done, and Joe was right that Harry had to do it. No one, except maybe
Don and Jean, knew better than Harry what Joe McCarthy did—every day,
every week, every month. Harry wished Joe would slow down a bit. He was at it all day long and most of the night, going over
the files, speaking on the telephone, preparing final versions of his speeches. He was acting often on a sixth sense. Reviewing
a file he’d say to Harry: “I’d bet anything this guy is just plain on the other side. Look at that front record.” Then, maybe
at one in the morning, he’d say, “Harry, let’s have a drink, and maybe just four rounds of draw poker.” He would pull out
the poker chips he kept in the bottom drawer and open the little office refrigerator Mary had given him for Christmas.

Harry remembered the night in February. Tom Coleman was wintering in Arizona and Joe had been given Coleman’s ample house
in Madison to stay in. Again it was one in the morning and Harry was working on the speech Joe would deliver the following
night at the convention of the Dairy Council. It would be an important speech, with two special tables reserved for his Wisconsin
backers.

Finally, Harry said, “I’ve got to go to sleep, Joe.”

“Fine. What time do you want me to wake you?”

Harry yawned. “If you wake me at seven, I can get it done all right.”

Harry slept deeply, and when he heard the knock on the door he groaned. Joe was standing outside in his dressing gown with
a tray and a hot cup of coffee.

“Thanks, Joe.” Harry yawned, grabbing his own robe and heading down the stairs to the study and his typewriter.

“Before you start in, Harry, let me show you something very exciting.”

Joe bent down on the floor. He had spread out a large map of China. “Look at this,” Joe said on his hands and knees. “That
railroad line, Peking to Shanghai.
It is the only railroad line coming into Shanghai.”