The Redhunter (50 page)

“No, thanks.”

Joe McCarthy took a deep swallow, shook his head vigorously, and drew a deep breath through his nose. “There. That’s better.
You wanted to tell me?—”

“About the war record, Zwicker’s. I have it here.” He reached in his pocket for a 3x5 card.

“Ralph Zwicker served with the infantry in Normandy, in northern
France, in the Ardennes, the Rhineland, and central Europe. His decorations include the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit with
Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Arrowhead, the British Distinguished Service Order, and the
French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre with Palm. After the war he graduated from the National War College.”

“Good man. Should know better than to surrender this late in life.”

Harry said nothing. He let Joe talk about the assorted concerns—would Tom Coleman be sore if he and Jeanie canceled the weekend
invitation? Did Harry know anything about a planned program by Edward R. Murrow, “He won’t be very friendly, I suspect.” Harry
permitted himself one last sally as they walked up the stairs of the Senate Office Building. “Joe, this is executive session,
I know, which provides some protection, but
don’t
go overboard—”

“I appreciate the care you take of me, kid. I mean that.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, Harry.”

The examination of General Zwicker began. Harry was seated on McCarthy’s left, Cohn on the right. Harry was silent throughout
the session.

Roy whispered continuously in Joe’s ear after, it seemed, every answer by the witness. Harry couldn’t hear the words uttered,
but he knew instantly the sense of them because McCarthy was bearing down on the witness, grinding away, just one senator,
the others all absent, sitting opposite the general and his two aides, asking the same question, sometimes reworded, more
often not, bringing his clenched hand down on the table. Would it ever, ever end, Harry wondered?

Finally it did.

McCarthy seemed to have forgotten that he had asked Harry to go to New York with him—he was engrossed with Roy Cohn. When
the committee session ended, Mary Haskell approached McCarthy from her staff seat. Harry heard McCarthy outline his travel
plans. Roy would accompany him to New York, he heard him say. There was no mention of Harry. Harry rose quickly and preceded
Joe and Roy out of the chamber. Briefcase in hand, he walked the nine blocks to his house. When he got there, he went to the
liquor closet, poured out
and drank a large jigger of vodka. Impulsively he went to the telephone and dialed Sam Tilburn.

“Sam, is there anything out on the wire about the Zwicker meeting this afternoon?”

“Not a thing. Want to tell me about it, Harry?”

“No. But Sam—” Harry had to talk to someone, someone he knew and trusted; someone who would be familiar with the general scene
“—are you free for dinner?”

“Yuh.” Sam was a little surprised, but he liked Harry. Besides, Harry kept hot company. “I could arrange that. Would have
to be after seven.”

“That’s good. I want to pick something up to bring along, and it won’t be ready till then. Let’s say seven-forty-five, at
the Monocle.”

Harry put down the phone. His head was churning. He poured another vodka, this time carefully measuring the amount. Without
giving thought to what he was doing he reached into the cavity in his briefcase reserved for a very private document that
reposed there even if months went by without his fondling it. He pulled out the letter he was looking for. He had found it
in his mailbox, hand delivered, when he reached the apartment after the terrible meeting in New York with his mother.

It was a single sentence, written in light ink across a page of plain paper.

I will always love you as a brother.

Robin

He stifled a sob.

He had removed her picture from his apartment and destroyed a half-dozen letters, love notes, really, she had written to him
during those golden months. When he returned to Washington from the evening with his mother and found her letter, his wretchedness
had kept him all but immobile the following day. He managed a single call to Mary Haskell. He thought to write to her but
knew he couldn’t match the weight of her single line. The best he could think to do was to resolve not to play in his memory
his days, and nights, with her. He prayed for powers to forget. But he could not dispose of the letter, which would lie always
in that little cavity in his briefcase.

He had fifteen endless minutes to kill before the office would be ready with the transcript he wanted, to read, to check out
with the nightmare of that afternoon.

He found himself unaccountably wondering with odd desperation how to make fifteen minutes go by.

The idea came to him suddenly. He reached for his telephone and dialed the number in New York of Willmoore Sherrill.

Time always flew, in conversations with Willmoore.

Sam Tilburn was known to his colleagues as a conscientious and accomplished journeyman. He never sought by-line treatment,
though often his name was placed on top of his dispatches by the editor. He was unhesitating in the amplitude of his reporting
and resolutely committed to impartiality—opinion was for the editorial pages; a very different thing. Ed could do the editorializing.
When off duty, Sam was diffident and unassertive, a patient, undemanding listener. When he lost his leg at age seventeen,
he thought himself too disfigured to woo a wife, and by the time he had acquired the physical self-confidence that permitted
him to fly with test pilots to write their story, or dive deeply with submariners to document their long ordeals, he had passed
the age for romance. He lived sedately, sharing an apartment with a widowed sister.

Sam would never, answering such a call as he had had from Harry Bontecou and meeting him for dinner, precipitate an agenda.
Let Harry do whatever he wanted to do in his own way, at his own speed.

Harry held back, sharing a bottle of wine, until after they had both finished their steak, and ordered ice cream and coffee.

“Sam, I want to share something with you, but it’s got to be off the record.”

“That’s always okay, Harry. The usual rules: If I learn about it elsewhere, I’m not under any constraint.”

Sam would need no briefing about the background of General Zwicker or about the morning paper’s reports on the general’s impending
collision with the McCarthy committee this afternoon.

“I’ve got the transcript of what happened today. I’ve marked the passages I want you to read. The first is Joe—McCarthy—talking.
Joe
talking after the general said he couldn’t testify because of the presidential directive.

“Joe says,” Harry looked down at the typescript and read, “ ‘Don’t be coy with me, General. … Don’t you give me double-talk.
I am going to keep you here as long as you keep hedging and hawing.’ Now read from there—” he handed over the text.

Sam took it and elected to read the passages out loud. He did so in a soft monotone, barren of any expression, as though he
were dictating into a recording machine.

General Zwicker: I am not hedging.

The Chairman: Or hawing?

General Zwicker: I am not hawing, and I don’t like to have anyone impugn my honesty, which you just about did.

The Chairman: Either your honesty or your intelligence; I can’t help impugning one or the other.

The general had not replied.

McCarthy continued.

The Chairman: If there was a general—this is hypothetical—who consented to the promotion of a Communist officer and allowed
his honorable discharge, would you think such a general was incompetent and ought to be discharged?

General Zwicker: I don’t think I fully understand the question.

The Chairman: You are ordered to answer it, General. You are an employee of the people.

General Zwicker: Yes, sir.

The Chairman: You have a rather important job. I want to know how you feel about getting rid of Communists.

General Zwicker: I’m all for it.

The Chairman: All right. You will answer that question unless you take the Fifth Amendment. I do not care how long we stay
here, you are going to answer it.

General Zwicker: Do you mean how I feel toward Communists?

The Chairman: I mean exactly what I asked you, General, nothing else. And anyone with the brains of a five-year-old child
can understand that question. The reporter will read it to you as often as you need to hear it so that you can answer it,
and then you will answer it.

General Zwicker: Start it over, please.

(The question was reread by the reporter.)

General Zwicker: I do not think he should be removed from the military.

The Chairman: Then, General, you should be removed from any command. Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted
to general and who says, ‘I will protect another general who protected Communists,’ is not fit to wear that uniform. General,
I think it is a tremendous disgrace to the army to have this sort of thing given to the public. I intend to give it to them.
I have a duty to do that. I intend to repeat to the press exactly what you said. So you know that. You will be back here,
General. This time at a public hearing, on Tuesday.

Sam Tilburn finished the droning recitation and resumed his normal voice. The ice cream was untouched, the coffee was getting
cold.

“What are you going to do?”

“I—I don’t know. But the idea is coming to me.”

“You or Cohn?”

“Me or Cohn.”

Back in the apartment he felt a great relief. Sam had served as an older brother. Harry had wrenched out of himself the necessary
conclusion of the steps that led to it. Willmoore used to quote the philosopher, “Who says A, must say B.”

The next morning he called Mary Haskell.

“I got to have a half hour with Joe alone,” Harry said. “Can you figure out how that’s possible?”

“It ain’t easy, Harry.” Mary was obviously scanning the senator’s appointment book as she spoke.

“It’s important, Mary. Bless you, love.”

“I know what I can do. He’s got a date at six at the suite in the Hay-Adams, same room you had a few weeks ago with Joe and
Roy. He’s got to be on time because the date is with Eugene Pulliam, and Joe knows that Mr. Pulliam doesn’t like to wait around.
What I’ll do, I’ll call Pulliam and tell him the hour for the supper with Joe has been moved up to six-forty-five. You get
there at six, you’ll have him all
alone. I won’t tell the senator the Pulliam hour has been moved up. If I did, he’d be late for your date.”

“Thanks, Mary.”

Harry arrived at the hotel at 5:50. There was no answer when he rang the bell at suite 455. He’d go back to the lobby, fuss
around a few minutes at the newsstand, and then come back up. He was there at 6:05. As he lifted his finger to ring, he heard
the voice behind him … in February 1954, the most recognizable in the country apart from the president’s and maybe Edward
R. Murrow’s.

“Hey there, Harry! How you doing?”

McCarthy took the room key out of his pocket and opened the door. “Come on in. But Harry, you ought to know I’m expecting
that newspaper tyrant Gene Pulliam any second, and he doesn’t like to share my company with anyone, even my Phi Beta Kappa
assistant-speechwriter. What are you doing here?”

Harry didn’t want to dissimulate, so he took some shortcuts. “Mary found out Mr. Pulliam couldn’t get here till seven, too
late to warn you away, but I asked her for the hole so I could talk to you.”

“Sure, sure, Harry. Let’s order a few … beers and wait for the old dragon.” He dialed room service and put in his order.

“So what’s on your mind, besides the speech tomorrow?”

Harry put it up front. “I think the way things have been going the past few months you are, net, hurting the anti-Communist
cause.”

Joe looked up, startled.

“I don’t understand that, Harry, coming from you. If it was any of those … other people. But
you
—”

“It’s disordered, Joe. Terribly disordered. You know how I felt about some of the issues, the challenge to Eisenhower and
now the treatment of Zwicker, with you scheduled to go back at him in public session tomorrow—”

“That’s been put off till Thursday.”

“Then with you scheduled to go back at him in public session on Thursday. You’ve always been frank, and you hit people hard—”

“It’s a hard world—”

“I was going to say that. It’s a hard world. But the impulse to act
has got out of hand. You’re losing sight of the strategic picture. You’re giving ammunition to the enemy that’s going to hurt
you and our position on the Soviet Union and for sure on the internal security question.”

McCarthy stood up to open the door to room service. The waiter took the glass with the ice and poured it half-full of bourbon.

“Shall I add soda, sir, or water?”

McCarthy shook his head. “Just ice.” He slipped a dollar to the waiter. And to Harry, “You don’t see that people like Ike
and Zwicker are blocking out any possibility of us making real progress?”

‘Joe, the White House announced last week that fourteen hundred-odd federal employees had been let go. That’s your accomplishment.
The loyalty/security system is on its way to making sense—”

“Meanwhile, a known Communist is promoted and given an honorable discharge.”

“Joe, Joe. Now hold it. I’m not talking about individual acts of stupidity, like promoting Peress. It’s the bigger view of
how some people are seeing you. You probably didn’t read Walter Lippmann this morning. Well, don’t tell me what you think
about him, most of which I agree with. But here’s what he said, and it matters that
he
said it.” Harry pulled the clipping from his pocket.

“ ‘This is the totalitarianism of the man, his cold, calculated, sustained, and ruthless effort to make himself feared. That
is why he has been staging a series of demonstrations, each designed to show that he respects nobody, no office, and no institution
in the land, and that everyone at whom he growls will run away.’ Now Joe, I know there’s a lot of horseshit there and I know
that Lippmann and that tribe defended Hiss. But what
matters,
Joe, is that some of what Lippmann is thinking and saying he has
reason
to think and say. Who’d read your exchange with Zwicker and not think the same thing?”