The Third Bullet (40 page)

I found a way to reverse my direction, got back to Commerce, and in ten blocks or so reached the Adolphus. There, I made phone calls to Jimmy and Lon to set up a real-time run-through that night, as we would do for the next six nights, to get used to the routes, the patterns of the shadows, the rhythm of the traffic, the different hues of darkness as the conditions altered the nighttime weather.

That night after dinner, I had a moment of happiness and calm. I was doing something big that I thought would help my country at the cost of one small, worthless, ugly man. It did not feel wrong at all to me, and I had no doubts, no qualms, no reservations. I was going to make a difference. I was going to change history.

The next morning, Wednesday, November 20, 1963, I woke, ambled groggily to my door, opened it, and grabbed the newspaper, the
Morning News
I think it was, and before I sat down, I saw the headline: “JFK Motorcade Route Announced.” I had not known Jack Kennedy was coming to Dallas on the twenty-second. But as my eyes ran down the story, I saw
the names of streets I had driven the morning before: “. . . Houston to Elm, Elm under the triple overpass . . . ,” and I knew in an instant that I had been given a chance few men have. Circumstance had bent itself to offer me an opportunity that was not only the logical outcome to my ruminations, but almost a moral obligation. Who could say no to such a possibility? Not Hugh.

Ah, Vod. So dependable. Such a friend, an ally. Vod
always has my back, my best interests at heart, my happiness paramount in its fermented little potato brain. With Vod at my side as well as in my blood, I launch into the final act, which would leave me, theoretically at least, history’s most abominable man. I slew the prince who was the king. I widowed the goddess of all our dreams; I made Ari Onassis possible. (There’s one I know I’ll never be forgiven for!) Oh, and I orphaned those two little so-cute-it-hurts-even-now kids. Bad Hugh. Hugh, you bastard. Vod, a little help here, please.

I knew I had to convince three people to help me tilt Operation LIBERTY VALANCE a little bit, so that instead of shooting General Edwin Walker on November 25, 1963, we would shoot John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, two and a half days hence.

The three people were Lon Scott, Jimmy Costello, and myself. As for Alek—Lee Harvey Oswald—I knew the glory pig would take zero convincing. The idiot would be like a rabid dog pulling on a leash. He might have come up with it himself if he’d read the paper. It was everything his fetid little sewer-Commie mind demanded and had dreamed about for years. His eagerness would surely get him killed and everyone else electrocuted. But I felt I could control him and improvise a new plan so brilliant that even he couldn’t screw it up too badly. I would see him tonight at the bus stop.

As for me: Did I believe in what I was about to do? And if I didn’t, how could I convince the others? I tried to apply the dictates of the New Criticism to the ethical issue, as if it were a poem demanding the most
rigorous attention to detail, untarnished by the excesses of biography, assumption, sentimentality, lugubrious emotionalism. Read the text, I told myself: read the text alone.

Here was the text I read, trying to ignore the young president’s glamour, his vitality, his beautiful children, his strangely beautiful but beautifully strange wife, his brood of brothers, cousins, sisters, parents, whatever. No room for sailboats, touch football, movie stars, no thought of parochial politics (we were both Democrats), all that out. Lyndon Johnson, whoever he was, out.

My clinical reading of the text that was JFK demanded only one answer: what were his intentions in the Republic of South Vietnam? I didn’t give a damn about Castro or Cuba, I didn’t see much that could be done in Europe except minor maneuvering for minor leverage, a missile base exchanged here or there, a spy betrayed, a minister blackmailed, all of it, in the long haul, meaningless.

But what of that steamy glade, with its ravishing jungle and mountain landscape, its little yellow people who wanted nothing in life except to be left alone to raise their rice plants ankle-deep in water and shit? The issue was: would JFK get us into a big shooting war there? If so, who would fight it? The tiny yellows he cared nothing about—they would die in the hundreds of thousands, for sure—or a generation of college kids unlikely to care to risk a war to save a country so far away, whose rise or fall meant so little to them and would not be worth dying for. Left to their own devices, neither of these demographics would vote to let slip the dogs. It wasn’t like the Vietcong had bombed Pearl Harbor, much less Winnetka. No, it would happen only if JFK willed it to happen by inventing reasons to send our troops over there. He’d already begun, and I’d seen them, tan, lean young men with the close haircuts and narrow eyes of highly trained professional military, the so-called Green Berets, yearning for a war they thought would be quick and glorious, with a nice sniff of powder to it. I knew there were a lot more of them there than the
Times
had reported, and I knew also that despite my report and Cord’s passionately earned and argued reluctance, there were those in
the Agency who’d smelled the treasure of career enhancement hunting Pajama Charlie for a year already.

To me it was shit. The place was infinitely more complex than anybody in Washington suspected, and it had the kind of suction that could drag us down to ruin in its whirlpools of deceit and danger, its anthropological conundrums and village traditions, its cruelty; our enemies would degrade us, but not as much as we would degrade ourselves in fighting them.

I took, as I said, the recent murder, under our auspices, of Diem as doubling down on a bad bet. We knew Diem was so corrupt that his military was incapable of winning a war, and that the reigning tactical concern for field and general-grade officers, much less administrators and bureaucrats in Saigon, would be filling their own secret bank accounts in Paris. We had decided to wipe that corruption off the face of the earth, to encourage new, younger, American-trained (and American-allied) officers who would win the war. If they proved unable, we would begin to send more than “advisers”: we’d send divisions, we’d send our new helicopter-borne army, and the general slaughter—as well as Eisenhower’s feared “land war in Asia”—would be on. There was no telling how many would die, theirs, ours, the unfortunate peasants caught in the middle, and for what? One piece on the board, said to be a domino but maybe just a piece on the board.

That JFK was a philanderer, that he was screwing Cord’s wife (among the many), that he came from a family as narrow and clannish and narcissistic as any Tudor or Hanoverian, all these I tried to discount. That his heroism in the Pacific was greatly exaggerated, that he received the Pulitzer for another man’s work, that his father bought him every election he ever won, all that I tried to push aside. I don’t know if I did. But in the end I made up my mind, and once I’d done that, it was on to the others.

I called Lon.

“No, Hugh,” he said. “Not a chance.”

“Lon, please—”

“I will be on a flight to Richmond by three if you say one more word, Hugh.”

I let the conversation simmer off into silence for a bit. Finally, I came back with what I knew was the weakest of propositions. “Just let me make the argument.”

“My mind is made up. As soon as I saw the paper, I knew how that devious little insect that you call a brain would set its antennae to twitching, its mandibles to grinding, its pincers to snapping, and I knew exactly where you’d go. I know you better than you know yourself, Hugh. Anyhow, what’s the point of listening to the argument? There’s only one argument, really. You believe you can pull off the biggest coup in history. You would call it an ‘operation’ in your spy-novel lingo, so as to distance yourself from it, as if it’s scientific or medical. It’s hubris, Hugh. It’s just hubris.”

“Lon, you are—”

“I know you, Hugh. I know you.”

“If you’ve made up your mind, how can it hurt to hear my argument? I assure you, it has nothing to do with me, my needs, any of that. The psychology involved is yours, Lon. I will make you see how it has to do with
your
needs, and you will see your duty clearly.”

“Oh, right. Oh, that’s rich. Hugh, you are a bastard.”

“That’s what they pay me for. The things I’ve authorized, you wouldn’t believe, the things I’ve seen. Please, Lon, meet me in the lobby in ten. We’ll go for a little walk.”

“Agghh.” He snorted, signifying surrender.

I pushed him in silence across the street from the hotel. I didn’t head south, down Commerce toward Dealey, but north, and then I turned east down a street I don’t remember. It was November 20, 1963. The sun was out, and true fall, as we New Englanders would recognize it, had yet to begin. The leaves were still green. In late November! We arrived after a block or two at a small park that seemed to be dedicated to some glorious Texan or other who had triumphed at the Battle of Squashing Mexicans
or some such. That’s what we did in the Agency—if not Mexicans, some other little brown tribe, anyone who got in our way. That’s what I helped us do. We were in the empire business, after all, and I was paid to make sure that empire stayed strong and lasted forever, and anyone who opposed us got squashed. If the empire was to fall, it wouldn’t be on my watch.

We sat in the sun. Should I say birds sang, the wind blew gently, the sun was bright, the world seemed full of hope? Maybe all that is true. I have no idea.

“Get on with it, goddammit,” Lon said. “I don’t have all day.”

“I just have one question,” I said. “Request, actually. Then I’ll shut up.”

He waited.

Finally, I said, “Lon, tell me about the chair.”

“The what?”

“The chair. The one you’re sitting in. It’s made of steel. I can see a label; I think it was manufactured by Ridgeway Medical Equipment Company, Rahway, New Jersey.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t talk about such things.”

“No, tell me. You’re a goddamn noble Roman, Lon. I know you too. You’re sick with honor. You’ll never complain, you’ll never cease to maintain the code. Stoic, dignified, without complaint to the end, a study in Protestant rectitude and Western heroism. You’re braver than John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or—”

“They’re actors,” said Lon.

“Audie Murphy, Neville Brand, I don’t know, the boys who raised the flag on Iwo, Robert C. Scott, Cord Meyer, Bill Morgan, Joe McConnell, Major Darby.”

“It’s nothing to do with courage. It’s the practicality of acceptance and resignation. It’s doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”

“Tell me, Lon. You’ve never told anyone, probably not even yourself. Tell me.”

Lon waited a bit. Then he said, “All right. S4 is lousy. It stinks. It’s
no fun. It’s better than S3, it’s better than any of the Ts, it’s much better than any of the Cs. But still: it’s lousy. I get sores on my legs, and I don’t even feel them. But the pants are smeared with blood and pus and have to be thrown away because no dry cleaning gets it out. I shit in my diapers and don’t know I’ve done it, and I have to somehow deal with the diapers on my own, in my room at night, a truly repulsive job. I worry that there’ll be a leak, that I’ll offend, that something humiliating will happen. I get bruises on my spine, and sometimes they climb above S-4 and I get tremendous pains. I sometimes remember my legs in my dreams, remember walking, feel the experience, and almost believe that, by some miracle, I’ve— But then I wake up, dead from the waist down. Psychologically, that’s hard to take, particularly the seven hundredth time or so. I have nightmares about Dad. He had a look on his face for a split second, before the horror came over him as he saw what had happened. I saw it as I twisted around to see what the hell had happened and saw him standing there with the rifle on the ground before him. I think about that look. Was it a smile? It could have been a smile! I— I don’t know. There was something there, a kind of, I don’t know, satisfaction or something. Dad was great, considering. Until he died, he did everything he could to make my life livable. He spent a fortune, he was with me nearly every single day. I know that he hated himself for the accident, and that it took twenty-five years off his life, but still . . . That look. A father’s worries about usurpation. His inability to get totally behind somebody who will replace him.”

He was silent for a while, gathering wind. He had never spoken of such things.

“The women,” he said. “I don’t know if it was better to have had a decent amount of intimacy before or to lose your sexuality as a virgin, because then you’d never remember, never know what you were missing. I have no policy position here. But I smell women’s perfume, I see the crease between their breasts, I see the tops of their stockings. It happens all the time, because around me they’re not so guarded in their body movements; they know I’m out of the game. They’re not being cruel, it’s
just their nature. They love to put out the sniff of sex, but they hold it back until the wedding night to make sure he shows up at church. That whole ritual guardedness, the flash, the tease, the lean-over, the crossed legs, that’s all missing around me, because, absent a working penis, I’m one of the gals. That’s what happens to us S4s. So I see breasts and even thighs all the time. And I remember, and it makes me crazy, and I have to get through it on what I suppose is Yankee grit or something. But I hate it. I hate them, yet I yearn to be around them, to smell them, to see them smile, to make them laugh, to know that except for the one thing, I would be with them. Instead, I’m the witty eunuch in the chair, the gelded stallion, so charming yet so unable to satisfy and give to them what they desire, children and dick. So yes, Hugh, the chair is no fun. I’m guessing you probably already deduced that with your spy’s keen powers of observation. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”