(1976) The R Document (8 page)

‘Then you’re willing to see Keefe?’

‘You set up the meeting and I’ll be there.’

‘With an open mind, I hope. The fate of this whole damn republic can depend on what happens in California. I don’t like some of the things going on in California right now. Please listen to everything he has to say, Chris, and then make up your own mind.’

‘I’ll listen,’ Collins said firmly. He picked up the menu.

‘That orange sauce with the duck got to be pretty sour. Now, for a change, let’s have something sweet.’

*

The following day, exactly at noon, as he had done once every week for six months, Ishmael Young arrived in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building after a drive from his rented bungalow in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Even though it was Sunday, he knew that in these critical times everyone in Justice, in the FBI, was on a seven-day week. Tynan would be expecting him. Young parked in the basement, with effort pushed out of the front seat of his secondhand red sports car, and met Special Agent O’Dea in front of the Director’s private-key elevator. Sometimes it was Associate Deputy Director Adcock who met him. Today it was O’Dea, the former track star with the crew cut.

They rode the elevator up to the seventh floor, there parted company, and Young walked alone - carrying his tape recorder and briefcase - down a corridor that separated two rows of offices, and in moments he entered Director Tynan’s suite.

Presently, in Tynan’s spacious office high above Pennsylvania Avenue, Ishmael Young rolled a heavy easy chair closer to the low-slung circular coffee table, faced it toward the sofa where the Director would soon sit, took out his papers, and made himself ready. By twelve fifteen, Tynan’s secretary, Beth, had placed a beer on the coffee table for the Director and a Diet Pepsi-Cola for his writer. Next, she brought in two containers of lunch delivered by a delicatessen nearby on 9th Street. She laid out the cream-of-chicken soup and cottage cheese for the Director, and the potato salad, pickle, and egg salad on an onion roll for his writer. Then she left. Finally, Tyson got up from behind his awesome desk, after telling someone on the phone that no calls were to come in except from the President, and he secured the office, locking both doors from the inside. Next, he went past Young into his dressing room and on to his bathroom. A minute later, rubbing his dried hands together, he emerged refreshed and dropped down on the sofa to gulp his beer.

Vernon T. Tynan enjoyed these autobiographical sessions. Obviously, because they were about himself.

Ishmael Young hated them.

Young loved the FBI, but he hated Director Tynan. He loved the FBI not for its raison d’etre, but because it was flawlessly, smoothly efficient, which Young was not. He cherished all great organizations that worked - IBM, the Russian Communist party, the Vatican, the Mafia, the FBI - irrespective of what they stood for. He disliked how these mammoth machines manipulated and exploited people, but he loved how effectively these machines - bigger than life -painlessly got things done. He himself got things done mostly with a pencil, a typewriter, a mess of papers, in fits and starts, with nervous tension, and it was no way for a man to live.

He had loved and respected the FBI as an organization from that time, before his first session with Director Tynan six months ago, when Associate Deputy Director Adcock had taken him on a tour of the Bureau to give him ‘the feel’. There had been the tourist part of the tour. Over a half million tourists came to see the exhibits annually. He didn’t blame them. It had been exciting: the criminal Hall of Fame displaying John Dillinger’s actual guns and bulletproof vest and his death mask; ‘The Crime of the Century - The Case of the A-Bomb Spies’, featuring Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list; the Brink’s Robbery Case exhibit; ‘The Sinister Hand of Soviet Espionage’, starring Colonel Rudolf Abel; the indoor shooting range where every nine minutes a Special Agent gave a demonstration of deadly marksmanship using a .38-caliber service revolver and then a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun to riddle a life-sized paper target.

Above all - and here he had been taken backstage, off limits for tourists - Ishmael Young had been enamored of the FBI files. In this clearinghouse for criminal apprehension, there had been fingerprint sets, over 250,000,000 of them. If God had hands, Young had decided, the FBI would have his fingerprints. Among the other 8,700 gray file cabinets, there had been the Typewriter Standards file, a record of the typeface and make of every typewriter, regular or toy,

ever manufactured (he would never again fantasize the typewriting of an anonymous letter). There had been the Watermark file, the Bank Robbery Note file, the National Fraudulent Note file. There had been so much else - the Serology section, where body fluids and blood were tested; the Chemistry department, where human organs were boiled; the Spectrograph room, where particles of paint were examined. He had found it hard to tear himself away from the Hairs and Fibers Unit. ‘When people get into a fight,’ Adcock had explained, ‘the fibers of their garments may adhere to each other. We shave all fibers off the garments, separate them, and test them to learn which belonged to the assailant and which to the victim.’ Then Adcock had gone on, ‘Our lab is our silent secret weapon. It is invincible. J. Edgar Hoover established it in 1932. As he once said, “The minute stain of blood, the altered document, the match folder found at the scene of the burglary, the heelprint or fleck of dust often provide the essential link of evidence needed to link the criminal to his crime or clear the innocent person.”’

When he left, Young’s mind had been bursting with a hundred ideas. It had been a writer’s heaven. He had wondered, but had not asked Adcock, how any criminal could ever hope to escape the FBI. He had not asked because the nation was teeming with crime, and most of the criminals did get away with it.

And then he had been brought to his first official book-writing session with Director Vernon T. Tynan.

He had somehow expected that some of his love for the Bureau would rub off on its Director. It hadn’t, and then he was not surprised. He had hated Tynan from the start, before ever setting eyes on him. Tynan had wanted an autobiography, and Young had been recommended. Tynan had read two of Young’s ghosted books and approved. Young had resisted. From hearsay, he had known Tynan’s reputation, his egomania, and had rejected the offer to collaborate. But only briefly. Tynan had, in effect, blackmailed him and forced hrm to do the book.

He had never forgotten his first meeting with Tynan in his office. There was the Director - a cat’s eyes set in a

bulldog’s skull - saying, ‘At last, Mr Young. Glad to meet you, Mr Young.’ He had replied, jocularly, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The Director had looked blank. Then, Young had known that was how he was, and that was the way it was going to be. Incidentally, Tynan had never called him Ishmael, either. The Director had probably thought it a foreigner’s name. Thereafter, the Director compromised by calling him ‘Young’ or simply ‘You’.

Now six months of weeks had passed, and once more they were seated across from each other, Ishmael Young drinking his Diet Pepsi and Vernon T. Tynan gulping down the last of his beer. As Tynan put the beer mug aside and reached for his soup, Young knew it was the signal to begin. He leaned over, simultaneously pressed the Record and Play buttons on his portable tape recorder, nibbled at his egg-salad sandwich, and reviewed the notes in his lap. A week ago, the Director had announced the subject of this session, and Young had done his homework and had come prepared. It was not going to be easy. He reminded himself to show restraint.

‘We were going to talk about J. Edgar Hoover,’ Tynan said, spooning up a portion of his cottage cheese, ‘and how he broke me in and made me what I am. I owe a lot to him. When he died in 1972, I didn’t want to work for Gray or Ruckelshaus or Kelley or any of the others who followed. They were good men, but once you’d worked for the Old Man - that’s what we used to call Hoover, the Old Man -once you’d worked for him, you were spoiled for anyone else. That’s why I decided to quit after he died, and set up my own investigation agency. Only the President himself could make me give up my private agency to take on the head job. I guess I gave you all that already.’

‘Yes, sir. I have it all in transcript and edited.’

‘With things deteriorating the way they were, the President needed the Old Man again. Since they couldn’t have him, they - meaning the President - he decided he wanted a real dyed-in-the-wool Hoover man. So he pulled me back. He’s never been sorry. In fact, the opposite. I told you - didn’t I? - how he took me aside a month ago and said, “Vernon, not even J. Edgar Hoover could have accomplished what you’ve

managed to accomplish.” His very words.’

‘I remember,’ said Young. ‘That was quite a tribute.’

‘Well, Young, I don’t want this part of the book to be a tribute to me. I want it to be a tribute to the Old Man, so readers will know why I respected him and what I learned from him.’

‘Yes, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Hoover all week.’

‘You forget your reading. Those vicious press people were never fair to the Old Man, especially toward the end. You listen to what I have to say and then you’ll get it right.’

‘I’ll do that, Director.’

‘You write down carefully what I’m going to tell you next, just to be sure you get it with no mistakes.’

‘Well, sir, I have the tape on. There’s no need to write it-‘

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot. Okay. Now, you listen. It was J. Edgar Hoover who introduced professionalism into law enforcement. He got rid of the Keystone Cop image - that’s not bad, use that - and he made the public respect us. The FBI was started under Teddy Roosevelt by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte. He was born in the United States, but he was the grandson of Napoleon’s youngest brother. There were a bunch of Bureau Directors that followed, and they were all either mediocre or downright bad. The last before the Old Man was William J. Burns, and he was God-awful. According to Harlan Fiske Stone, under Burns the Bureau became a private secret service for corrupt forces inside the Government. So Stone, the year before he went to the Supreme Court, he picked a twenty-nine-year-old kid named J. Edgar Hoover to head the Bureau. Hoover had worked as a library clerk for the Government. He took over the FBI when it had only 657 workers. It had some 20,000 employees when he died. He introduced the crime laboratory, the fingerprint files, the training academy at Quantico, the National Crime Information Center with its computers and almost three million records. The Old Man did that himself. And under him - like under me - no FBI agent has ever committed a criminal or corrupt act. That’s something.’

‘It sure is,’ Young agreed.

‘Just think of what J. Edgar Hoover did,’ said Tynan, finishing his cottage cheese. ‘He nailed John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, Bruno Hauptmann, the eight Nazi saboteurs who landed from submarines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Brink’s robbers, James Earl Ray - the list is a mile long.’

Ten miles long, Ishmael Young thought. He thought of the triumphs Tynan had conveniently left out. For most of his career, Hoover had ignored the Mafia, refusing to believe in its existence. Not until 1963, when Valachi decided to talk, did Hoover recognize organized crime. Singed by this evidence of the Mafia, Hoover never referred to it by that name, preferring the euphemism La Cosa Nostra instead. Apologists would claim that the Old Man had ignored the Mafia because he was afraid that the underworld might bribe and corrupt his agents as they had the local police, and thereby ruin his scandal-free record. Cynics would insist he avoided the crime syndicate because investigations would take so long that they might lower his crime-statistics batting average.

Ishmael Young thought of other Hoover triumphs that Tynan had neatly passed over. Hoover had called Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, a notorious liar, and had wiretapped his telephone to record details of his sex life. Hoover had called former Attorney General Ramsey Clark a jellyfish. Hoover had called Father Berrigan and other Roman Catholic antiwar activists kidnappers and conspirators before their cases had been presented to the grand jury. Hoover had slurred Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, insisting people of those two nationalities couldn’t shoot straight. Hoover had bugged Congressmen, as well as nonviolent civil rights and antiwar protestors. He had even investigated a fourteen-year-old Pennsylvania boy who had wanted to go to summer camp in East Germany and an Idaho scoutmaster who had wanted to take his troop camping in Russia.

Ishmael Young recalled a column by Pete Hamill that he had read. ‘There was no single worse subversive in this country in the past thirty years than J. Edgar Hoover This

man subverted our faith in ourselves, our belief in an open

society, our hopes that men and women could live in a country free of secret police, of hidden surveillance, of persecution for political ideas.’ There was all of this to discuss, but Young held his tongue.

‘And I’ll tell you a little personal thing few people know about J. Edgar Hoover,’ Tynan was saying. ‘You can learn a lot about a human being by the way he regards his parents, I always say. Well, Hoover lived with his mother, Anna Marie, until he was forty-three years old. A guy who would do that has got to be a decent guy.’

Or at least a case for Freud, Young thought.

‘Let me tell you another story that gives you a picture of why the Old Man was respected and why I especially respected him. When J. Edgar Hoover was seventy, a lot of pressure was put on President Lyndon Johnson to have him resign. President Johnson, to his credit, said No, he’d never let him go. Someone asked him why, and President Johnson said, “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than have him outside the tent pissing in!” How do you like that?’ Tynan slapped his thigh and broke into raucous laughter. ‘Isn’t that something?’

‘It sure is,’ said Young doubtfully.

‘I don’t know if I should use the story in my book.’