William F. Buckley Jr. (24 page)

“You?” Henry volunteered.

“That’s one way to put it. A better way is, ‘Me, FDR’s grandson.’ ”

“What about the problem of financing a senatorial campaign, Danny? You’re not a political figure.”

“I don’t think financing is going to be one of my worries.”

This time Caroline met Henry’s glance.

H
ENRY WAS BACK at the same PX in Guam where he had bought the forty-dollar cognac. He recalled the genuine pleasure he had given a couple of his
Time/Life
colleagues and a few old friends with his forty-dollar bottle. He amused himself recalling Danny’s theatrical whiff from the glass. What was it about the presidency of Martino Enterprises, Henry wondered, that had caused Danny to put on such airs? He had always behaved naturally. In the army, at Yale, even at Nice—naughty-natural. But affected? More and more, Henry thought, Danny was becoming Mr. FDR’s grandson. A seigneurial afflatus. Born to rule. And now, at age thirty-eight, he had the U.S. Senate in mind. Henry thought a great deal about Danny, even as he attempted, for some reason, to think as infrequently as he could
about Danny. But however he might manage that, there was no way to think infrequently about Caroline—which ended up with thinking a lot about Danny.

Caroline was becoming cloistered. The right word? Yes, but the unfortunate word, given the now near-strident hostility Danny showed for the Catholic Church. It was plain to Henry that the intensity of her involvement with the Church was a measure of her alienation from Danny, or, rather, his from her. The Church asked nothing of Caroline that imposed at all on Danny, save whatever restrictions on sexual congress affected the size of the family desired by both parents. Henry was made overpoweringly sad as he thought about it, what seemed the impending destruction of what had seemed a perfect union. He found himself flirting with the wish that Caroline had never come near a Catholic priest. But then he was forced to ask himself whether he was sorry his own life had been saved—by Brother Ambrose, a Catholic monk. And, finally, he forced himself to ask the question: Could it all be Danny’s fault? Was Caroline responsible in some way he hadn’t detected?

Meanwhile, Henry was pleased fully to have recovered his energy. He pondered whether to buy another bottle of the forty-dollar cognac. Henry would never engage in such an extravagance merely for himself. If he bought it, it would be to give to somebody. But who? Henry Cabot Lodge? General Big Minh?

 … Than Koo? He paused. Koo liked the wine they sometimes shared at dinner in the field. And once Henry had offered him Scotch, which he had taken, perhaps for the first time—he had refused it during their inspection trip of the hamlets.

But no. Not a forty-dollar bottle of cognac for a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese boy. Well, no, Henry should stop thinking of him in that way, never mind that he continued to look like a sixteen-year-old. Than Koo was a grown man, a college graduate, a skilled interpreter, a shrewd and resourceful sleuth wonderfully skillful in ferreting out newsworthy tips and information useful to a correspondent. And, Henry allowed himself to think it in as many words, Koo was a very graceful, arrestingly attractive biological specimen. No doubt the Vietnamese ladies lusted after him,
though come to think of it, he never saw Than in feminine company, but then he was wholly devoted to his work. He felt an impulse quite alien, distinctive, stir within him. He did not analyze it, but it moved him. He suspected it was such a feeling as fathers have for their sons.

He placed the bottle in the trolley. He would give it to Koo on his birthday. Or before that, if Ho Chi Minh surrendered to Big Minh. Fuck, Henry thought. By the time North Vietnam gave up, the cognac would be worth eighty dollars.

He boarded the plane. It was an improvement over the troop carrier that had taken him from Vietnam to Guam. The government was now chartering conventional 707s. It was after midnight, Guam time. The plane was not full. It carried perhaps fifty men, a half-dozen women, one of them Marguerite Higgins of the
Herald-Tribune.
Henry occupied the aisle seat in the first row and could stretch his legs outside the bulkhead. He dozed.

What was it, one hour, two hours later, the shove on his shoulders?

He looked up. It was a steward. Evidently he hadn’t wanted to turn on the overhead lights—too many people sleeping; everybody was sleeping, Henry guessed woozily. But the steward’s flashlight shone
right into Henry’s eyes
, causing him to blink and pitch his head forward. He reached up with his hand, an effort to deflect the light.

“What’s going on?” His voice sounded testy.

He heard the shocked voice wrestling with the words.

“Kennedy. President Kennedy. Shot. Dead.”

Henry yanked at his seat belt, stood up, one steadying hand on the bulkhead, the other on the shoulder of the steward.

“
What did you say?
”

He just nodded, as in a daze, moved to ease Henry’s hand away from his shoulder, and stepped forward to the next row of seats. There he shook a sleeping soldier. Henry stared at this man, transformed into a death courier. He was mouthing the words when suddenly all the lights in the large cabin flared up and the voice of the captain came through the loudspeaker.

“Ladies and—” No, that wasn’t right. There was a little static,
the sound of the voice clearing itself. “I have news. The radio reports that President John F. Kennedy is dead. Shot by a sniper in Dallas. I’ll fill you in when more details come in. Ladies and gentlemen”—the captain had recovered his bearing—“the President of the United States is dead.”

The passengers were instantly awake, mostly mute, were staring at one another, repeating, “Dead?… dead … dead?” And going on to, “How? Who did it?”

After what seemed an eternity the captain’s voice came on again. “The President’s body has been taken to Air Force One. A judge has administered the oath of office. Lyndon B. Johnson has been sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States.”

The steward and the stewardess were summoned to the pilot’s cabin. They emerged with instructions to open the bar, in the captain’s words, “to give everybody anything they want.” Henry turned to Marguerite Higgins. He could think only to say, “It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” she said. She made it plain she didn’t want to talk about it.

Henry had to talk with someone. He made his way to the seats opposite where an army captain, a glass of Scotch in his hand, was staring down at his drink. Henry couldn’t think what to say, and could not believe it when he found that he had actually spoken the words, “Did you know him?”

The captain looked at him, startled.

“Sorry. I meant, Did you ever lay eyes on him?”

The captain shook his head. “No. But my father did. Dad was on the PT boat with the President.”

So it went during the long four hours. Before the plane landed, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested.

Henry walked down the gangway, shielding his eyes from the bright sun. Than Koo was there. His face was stern.

“Now Americans will know how we felt.” Henry had never before heard Koo sound bitter.

They shook hands. Than Koo took the typewriter from Henry. They walked silently into the terminal. The whole airport was
silent, except that over the loudspeaker an organ played sacred music. It was a more resonant stillness than that of twenty days earlier when Diem was killed. Even the dispatcher out front hailed the cabs without blowing on his whistle. What mattered was decorum, even as decorum sometimes matters on the battlefield.

B
EFORE LEAVING on his trip into the northern sector, Henry slipped a sheet of paper into his typewriter and addressed a cable to Richard Clurman, his boss. He knew Dick well and trusted him. But he didn’t want to reveal the nature of his anxiety—not to Dick, not to anyone. The tangled domestic situation had something of a scandal value: Danny O’Hara was bordering on being a public figure now, having quietly advertised his availability for the Democratic nomination for Senator.

When Bobby Kennedy, nine months after the assassination of his brother, announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination in New York, Danny was grown up enough to get the message, which was, roughly, Get lost. But, having ventured into the race, Danny was widely accepted as a political contender, the
young, glamorous hotel tycoon, grandson of the most towering figure in United States politics—well, there were those who felt that John F. Kennedy, for all that he had only one thousand days in office, had moved FDR over on the historical stage.

Still, Danny had got a fair amount of publicity, and in some of it a reference could be found to his brother-in-law, Henry Chafee, whose own reputation as a dogged and lucid foreign correspondent was rising as the U.S. commitment in Vietnam occupied more and more of the public’s attention. Dick Clurman would notice it if Henry spoke of family problems, because, among other things, Clurman noticed everything.

So Henry wrote to him: “I’m a little ashamed, and also a little sorry, to be asking to go home after only fifteen months. But if it works out, I’d like a tour in Washington or New York, or for that matter, anywhere in the States, New York being best. The reason for this request is personal, but it has to do, also, with the feeling that I need to whiff firsthand U.S. air on the whole Vietnam business. So much has happened, between the death of Diem and the Tonkin Bay business in August and then LBJ’s bombing of North Vietnam installations. I could use time at home to sharpen my perspectives.

“I’m about to take off for Hoile Lang Miet. ARVN maintains a small unit there, and the gooks keep up sniper fire, even though the area has been swept three or four times. It’s a good illustration of what we need to get a handle on: If ARVN doesn’t succeed in absolute pacification, then we have a situation in which a single Vietcong sniper can keep a platoon of ARVN immobilized. I’ll try to get you some good copy on this.”

What accelerated Henry’s thinking on the request to go back had been yesterday’s letter. Caroline had closed by saying, “There is something going on, something of a corporate nature I don’t understand, and Danny is not about to explain it to me, but he is on the phone what seems endlessly, mostly to Cutter Malone and to Mr. Martino’s lawyer. He is terribly distracted, and leaves home sometimes for periods of four or five days without letting me know that he’s going or when he’s coming back. If I need him (I try not to bother him) I have to call his office and
try to track him down. Say a special prayer for Danny, as I think he needs help.”

Henry was not a churchgoer but he believed in prayer, and did as his sister requested, except that his prayer sought help not for his brother-in-law but for his sister.

He got up and walked over to the air conditioner to turn it off. It would stay off for as long as he was away. Now the usual plunge into the hot, wet air of Saigon. Always he would put on his sunglasses—that helped to prepare him psychologically for the shock of moving from fairly dry 80-degree air to very wet 100-degree air.

He walked, briefcase and typewriter as ever in hand, to the driveway outside the office building, now guarded by two ARVN soldiers with automatic rifles.

Than Koo was ready, the baggage was in the station wagon. They made their way through the mopeds and motorbikes and jeeps and trucks, through security at the airport, and boarded the plane. Once again Henry found himself in Hué.

Nobody was a better guide in Hué than Than Koo. On the other hand, at this point Henry was willing to say that nobody was a better guide anywhere than Than Koo. In the past year he had become fluent in English. He and Henry still spoke together in French, but only out of habit. Beginning in the spring, Henry had given his dispatches to Koo to read and pass judgment on. Henry admired the shrewd appraisals. From time to time Koo would recommend including this or that datum, or putting greater (or lesser) stress on this or that development. He remembered the deferential smile on Koo’s face when months earlier he had returned the dispatch in which Henry wrote of the ascendancy of Tran Kim Tuyen as the new security head. “Tran will get nowhere,” Koo said simply. “Nhu does not trust him.” A few weeks later, Tran was deposed.

Two hours after landing in Hué, they checked in at Lang Miet. It was a “strategic hamlet,” in the formal designation. But in the past year its resident military population had evolved from a single soldier per hamlet to a full platoon. This was the dismaying change in equilibrium on which Henry wanted to report.

He was given a hut to share with an ARVN lieutenant, a wiry young grizzled veteran of three years in the field. His name was Tu Da, and Henry was gratified that he spoke French. This, Tu recounted, was his third tour of duty at Hoile. “The first time I was here with two soldiers, we were told to hunt down a sniper who, at night, was firing into the village rather lackadaisically. I got the picture after talking to a dozen villagers. They contradict themselves, you know. But it came down to this. Over a couple of weeks, this sniper had fired forty, fifty rounds of rifle fire.”

Lieutenant Tu’s face was grim now as he described the demoralizing effect of this random firing into Hoile. “It meant that after dark no one could walk from any place in the village to any other place because there was always the possibility of a stray bullet. Have you ever been in London?”

“Yes,” Henry said.

“It must have been like that in London at the time of the V-2 rockets, you agree?”

Lieutenant Tu, it transpired, had learned recent European history from a Frenchwoman who had fought in the resistance in Bordeaux during the war. Tu spoke with animation about the great events in England, France and Belgium in the closing months of the war.

“So your mission when you first came was what?” Henry asked, taking notes on his pad.

“To find the bugger.”

“Did you?”

“Oh yes. My men and I hid out late in the afternoon, nicely concealed. The hills surrounding Lang Miet are of course ideal for the single, hidden sniper. But I calculated that he was firing from between one hundred and one hundred and fifty meters away, so we took stations two hundred meters back, and waited. It was a good wait; we saw nothing on the first night. But on the second night I heard a shot. It came in at about ten o’clock, but a little closer to me than to my corporal over on the left. So I began to crawl toward him, hoping he would keep firing. I knew that my corporal would be advancing from his other side. Well, we were successful.”