Fellow Travelers (13 page)

“I have a father, too.”

“Are they happy together? Mother and father.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Fuller.

“Why shouldn’t they be? Mine were.”

“The corridors at Park and Seventy-fourth are just as quiet, and nearly as long, as the ones we have here. Mother was more or less within shouting distance of my room, to the north. Father was around the corner and far to the south.”

“A
sister,
” said Mary, trying for lightness. “That’s what you need.”

“I have two of them. A surfeit, Miss Johnson.”

“I’m making you angry. I should go.”

“You’re making me angry.
I
should go.”

“I shouldn’t pry.”

“As if
that
were the reason you anger me!” said Fuller, with a laugh.

She suspected the real cause of his anger was his not wanting her to be a mother
or
a sister. A part of him—the part that hated what he was; even
he
couldn’t be without that—must also hate her, for the way she got under his skin, ever so slightly, while remaining, finally, irrelevant. He wasn’t angry because she knew his secrets; he was angry because she couldn’t be the way out of them. Hadn’t he looked at her, now and then, with a moment’s real interest? An interest that quickly curdled into something like contempt—for himself, for her, for his inability to follow through? She doubted she would ever tell him her own secrets, not when some part of him might take an oblique pleasure in betraying them.

He got up from his chair, a folder in hand, and began to exit the office.

“Are you mad at me now?” she asked.

“Now and forever,” he replied, with a tenderness that made the answer no less true.

Not a good day for the mimeograph machine to be on the fritz! But it was, and so once Tim cut the stencil announcing Jones’s termination, he had to trot it over to the office of Senator Goldwater, another GOP freshman and World War II veteran, whose secretary would be happy to run it off. Eager for some air, he took the outdoor route, and on the sidewalk in front of the SOB came upon a cluster of photographers. They were shouting like the crowd he remembered outside McCarthy’s wedding.

“How about giving her a kiss, Joe?” “How about signing the cast?”

“I’ve already signed it,” said McCarthy, who grinned as he pointed to the plaster enclosing one of Jean McCarthy’s shapely legs. She’d broken it in a taxi accident in New York, the night before the Zwicker hearing. Joe hadn’t been injured, but his wife had spent a couple of nights by her lonesome in Flower Hill Hospital. McCarthy had just gone to Union Station to meet the train bearing his injured bride from New York. If ever there was a day when he could use a picture full of pulchritude and warmth, this was it. Jean flashed her beauty-queen smile and the cameras went in for tight shots that cut out the plainclothes policemen whose sidearms bulged beneath their coats.

Amidst this Hollywood clamor, Tim suddenly locked eyes with Robert Jones, who looked like a man just given his dream job, not one who’d just been fired. Jones smiled broadly at the lensmen, hoping to interest one of the cameras in himself. Tim made his way into the building without their exchanging even a nod.

A half-hour later he was down on Fourteenth Street, entering the Press Club with a hundred copies of the firing announcement under his arm. The first one went to Tommy, eating peanuts at the bar, and the second to May Craig, who sat beside him. Each already had another press release—not as neatly typed as Tim’s—resting on the bar beside their drinks. Tommy picked up that sheet, damp with ginger ale, and gave it to Tim to read.

JONES DECLARES SENATE CANDIDACY

Robert L. Jones of Biddeford, Maine, former legislative assistant to Sen. Charles Potter (R-Mich.), announced this afternoon that he would challenge Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith in this June’s Republican primary. Citing Sen. Smith’s “shameful reluctance to face the Communist menace for what it is…”

“Running for office!” cried Tim. “Where will he get the money for that?” He recalled the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that Jones’s wife sent him to work with.

“Wait till you see what Joe McCarthy’s Texas supporters pony up!” cawed Miss Craig. “Jones’ll be riding around Bangor in a red Cadillac all his own! Even so, it’s only because the liar got canned. So in the meantime,” she said, lifting her glass in a toast to McIntyre: “To the man who chopped down that miserable little cherry tree!”

“I cannot tell a lie,” said Tommy. “’Twas I.” The gleam in his eye thanked Miss Craig, but behind its excitement, much farther back, Tim thought he could see the look of a man who knew he had entered a dark and perilous grove.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

March 3, 1954

“Ah, seems Skippy fell into the coalpile in Grandma Gaffney’s basement.”

Tim stood, puzzled, at the doorway to the Bureau of Congressional Relations. His Ash Wednesday had begun so early, near the crack of dawn at St. Peter’s on Second Street, that he’d forgotten the priest’s black thumbprint on his forehead. Now he remembered.

“And to dust I shall return,” he told Fuller.

“Come inside,” said the older man, guiding him between the desks. “Meet our ambassadresses to that foreign country where you reside. I refer, of course, to Capitol Hill. Timothy Laughlin, this is Mrs. Phillips, my right arm, and here is Miss Johnson, increasingly our left wing.” Fuller completed the roster with a reference to their Kentucky boss: “The colonel, I’m afraid, is nowhere to be found.”

“Well,” said Beverly Phillips, “I’ve got to go find him. Excuse me, all.” On her way out, she smiled at Tim, whose October visit to the office she did not recall.

He knew that even mild political joking was proscribed at State, but Hawk had told him how the atmosphere in the office had become much merrier since a woman named Miss Lightfoot had gotten herself transferred to the Operations office. In fact, as he went to take a phone call, Hawk told him to sit at the desk that was still awaiting her replacement. Before disappearing, he took from Tim the manila envelope that was the reason for this visit.

“It’s nice to see you again,” said Mary. “You’re the young man who brought Mr. Fuller a book sometime back.”

Tim nodded, nervousness subsumed into pleasure over how this memory of hers certified that he had a
history
with Hawkins, that he was situated within his life. There was also something thrilling about the term “Mr. Fuller.”

“Right,” said Tim. “Yesterday he left some papers at—on the Hill.”

Within the limits of the adjusted preposition, this was not a lie. Fuller had forgotten the envelope in Tim’s apartment early last evening, when he’d come around after some late appointments in the House Office Building. Tim had meant to return the papers tonight, but Fuller had called Senator Potter’s office an hour ago to say he needed them now.

“Did you at least manage a Mardi Gras celebration last night?” Mary pointed to the ashes on his forehead. “I should explain I’m from New Orleans.”

“Oh, I know,” said Tim, who feared, as soon as he said it, that he’d said too much. But Miss Johnson was smiling at him, and he felt suffused with a sense of safety. He forgot about his desire to see around the doorway and into Hawkins’ office, where he’d worried about finding the Lodge biography, uncherished, lying atop a filing cabinet or beside a dying plant.

“We’re usually a bit more busy here,” said Mary. The defeat of the Bricker Amendment the other day—owed in part to the theatrics of Lyndon Johnson, who’d brought Senator Kilgore in on a stretcher to cast the deciding vote—had been a rare piece of good news. And it had been followed by another, when Secretary Dulles unexpectedly relieved Scott McLeod of his personnel duties, confining him henceforth to security matters—an amazing, tacit declaration that the two operations were not locked together in eternal emergency. McCarthy had complained about McLeod’s diminution, but he had too many other fish frying—everyone could see something big coming—to say very much.

“It’s nice,” said Tim. “The calm, I mean. It’s anything
but
calm where I am.”

“He’s right,” said Fuller, emerging from his office. “These days poor Mr. Laughlin is even dodging bullets.”

“You weren’t near the shootings, were you?” asked Mary.

“No,” said Tim. “I’m on the Senate side. But I was at the hospital this morning. My boss, Senator Potter, went to see Congressman Bentley. They’re both from Michigan, and I came along for the ride.”

It had been an odd delegation that went to Walter Reed to see Bentley, who’d been wounded by the Puerto Rican nationalists firing from the House gallery. Tim had shared the car with Potter and his one-armed driver and Tommy McIntyre, whose eyes had remained, for the past ten days, continually ablaze. As near as Tim could tell, he’d been asked along because Tommy liked having an audience for all sorts of indiscreet chatter about the committee’s impending showdown with the army. The confrontation would either break McCarthy—as Tommy tended to believe one day—or render him omnipotent, as he generally feared the next. Either way, for as long as it went on, Tommy insisted, Potter would have to be manipulated into doing the right, maybe even pivotal, thing. Robert Jones’s campaign against Margaret Chase Smith—a small, distant theater of a much bigger war—was already another arena for Tommy’s attempts at subversion. Cash was being mailed, phone calls getting made.

These were the sorts of things Tim told Hawkins on nights they were together, eliciting laughter at naïve points in the telling.

“Has McCarthy still got his guards?” Mary asked Tim.

“Plainclothes, I think. You wouldn’t believe some of the mail Senator Potter gets, just from sitting at the same
table
with McCarthy. Which isn’t really fair,” he said, lowering his eyes toward Miss Lightfoot’s old blotter, not truly confident of what he was saying. “The Communists are the real issue, and—”

Fuller cut him off: “I wouldn’t open any packages that arrive, even after all this is over.”

Tim, not sure if he was being teased or protected, said nothing, while Mary Johnson pictured this boy opening a parcel with his small scrubbed fingers and getting blown to bits. His destruction was, she thought, going to occur in any case. She watched him watching Fuller, his face like a paper target on a firing range.

“The rumor,” said Tim, “is that John Adams, the army’s lawyer, has a diary that lists all the pressures McCarthy and Cohn applied to get special treatment for David Schine. People also say McCarthy’s own staff has been coming back to the office late at night to cook up documents that will refute the diary.”

He spoke the last sentence as if refusing to believe it.

“My boss,” Tim continued, meaning McIntyre, “had me go over there the other night and look around.” He blushed at the admission. “I didn’t really see much through the frosted glass of the door.”

“All right, Mr. Laughlin.” Fuller rose from the edge of the desktop. “We can’t waste the taxpayers’ money by keeping you here any longer.” The dismissal was performed as a burlesque of impatience, but Tim knew he was indeed meant to go, as if the two of them really were Mr. Fuller and Mr. Laughlin, strangers. The touch of Hawkins’ hand to his shoulder, for the briefest moment as they reached the door, did little to erase the impression.

“He’s a nice boy,” said Mary Johnson, once he was gone.

“Skippy?” asked Fuller. “Practically an angel.”

She resumed typing thank-you letters to opponents of the Bricker Amendment.

“You don’t approve,” said Fuller, not quite ready to reenter his own office.

“Of what?” asked Mary.

The ensuing silence convinced her he didn’t really mean to discuss it. “Fuller,” she finally said—a last effort—“I’m not Miss Lightfoot.”

“I’ll tell the brewer. He’ll be relieved.”

“But no,” said Mary. “I suppose I
don’t
approve. I doubt any woman really does. And you can’t expect me to: I was still getting ashes on my own head three years ago. But there are things I approve of less.”

“Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?”

“No. Of your breaking his heart.”

Fuller paused before saying, grandly, “I lack all such intention.”

“But not all such power.”

They were both still afraid of this conversation, and knowing that Fuller could outlast her in any duel of silences, Mary got up to file a handful of Bricker clippings from the European press.

“I suppose,” she said at last, “Tim was imagining how he’d like to sit at that desk every day, be at your beck and call.” She nodded to Miss Lightfoot’s empty station.

“He’d be excellent,” replied Fuller. “Works very hard, and has his race’s gift of gab when he’s working on paper. The stammer disappears then, just as it does when he’s drunk or—I’m sure—angry, though that I’ve never seen. His handwriting is even neater than Miss Lightfoot’s.”

“Oh, you’d see him angry if he worked at that desk.” Mary kept filing as she spoke. “How do you think he’d feel taking your calls, and hearing your conversations?”

Fuller said nothing, but still would not go back inside his office. Mary knew that he wanted to make her work even harder at this, force her to stick the knife farther in, get her—where McLeod had failed—to make the needle jump.

“Wouldn’t sooner rather than later hurt him less?” she asked. “Couldn’t you let him down easily? Give him up for Lent?”

Fuller pushed his hair above his forehead, making his ashless, marble brow fully visible. He returned to his office, declaring curtly, “I’m not Catholic, Miss Johnson.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

March 10, 1954

“You’re not coming in?” Senator Potter asked Tommy McIntyre at the threshold to McCarthy’s inner office in the SOB.

“No,” said Tommy. “I’ll let Mr. Laughlin go in with you to make a record.”

Surprised as he was by Tommy’s directive, Tim was soon even more startled to feel the hard, friendly clap of Joe McCarthy’s hand on his shoulder. The chairman didn’t seem to mind his presence, taking him, perhaps, for an unpaid gopher, maybe even a page. There was nothing to do but go in and, after taking charge of Potter’s canes, sit down on a beat-up horsehair sofa, a few deferential feet from the two senators.

“Now, Charlie,” said the chairman. “I hope you haven’t let Egghead R. Murrow scare you off from all the work we’ve still got to do together.” McCarthy ran his tongue over his top front teeth, and smiled as he awaited a reply.

“I didn’t see the program,” said Potter.

Tim had watched it on Hawkins’ television. The half-hour episode of
See It Now
had been unrelenting, even brutal, but Hawk had fallen asleep before Murrow closed with an ominous quotation from
Julius Caesar.

“I gather the fellow doesn’t like me,” said the chairman, flashing another smile and twirling his big horn-rimmed glasses above the blotter. McCarthy was nervous, Tim realized, though only for moments at a time. At the doorway, when he realized he’d hit Tim’s shoulder far too hard, a look of tenderness had crossed his face and then instantly vanished, been left for dead in the space of a second.

“Well,” said Potter, who sat in a chair beside the desk, “my old aide Jones is throwing you plenty of bouquets up in Maine. ‘A great American, a great patriot, doing a great job.’” He tried smiling, but couldn’t manage it; there wasn’t enough mischief in him.

McCarthy, however, roared with laughter. “You never should have let him go, Charlie! I’m not sure I could get even Roy to put it so well.”

“Jones has also been saying some things, not so flattering, about Margaret Smith,” added Potter, just above a mumble. “‘A nice lady but for her left-wing ideas.’ Stuff like that.”

McCarthy shrugged, but Potter managed to warm to the topic of Jones, even if it wasn’t the subject he’d come in with. “In his speeches up there, Bob now talks about having been a ‘member of the committee.’”

McCarthy again laughed things off. “
There’s
a go-getter! You should have kept him and given him a raise!”

“He seems to be doing pretty well up there for a guy who’s no longer pulling in the eighty-five hundred a year I used to pay him.”

“He hasn’t gotten a
dime
from me, Charlie.”

The smile was gone, and the “m” in “dime” came out as a prolonged, electrical buzz, the way McCarthy would have sent it through a radio microphone.

“Joe, I got a report last night from across the river.”

There was no need to explain further. Everyone had been hearing rumors of the “Adams chronology,” a timeline prepared at the Pentagon by the army counsel, detailing all the pressures exerted on Schine’s behalf by McCarthy and Cohn.

“That prick Nixon wouldn’t be behind this, would he?” When it came to exposing Communists, McCarthy liked to call the veep a Johnny-leave-early, an ambitious young man who’d traded his once-raucous sound truck for the smooth sedan of Eisenhower moderation, a vehicle he now thought he could ride to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“No, Joe,” continued Potter, as sternly as he could. “I got this report from Wilson. He sent it to me himself.”

Surely, Tim thought, even Potter knew that the secretary of defense had not dispatched this dynamite without a direct order from the White House.

McCarthy tried to stare down his interlocutor, but Potter managed to continue: “I’m disturbed by what I see in it.” He sounded like the social worker he’d once been, regretfully forced to confront a relief recipient with reports of misbehavior.

The senator from Wisconsin would have none of it: “Charlie, you and I and the rest of the committee need to get back to finding Communists. We should be getting Scott McLeod the rest of his job back.” The “Ms” and the “Ns” were buzzing.

“Joe,” said Potter, delivering the line he must have rehearsed the hardest, “Roy Cohn needs to be fired.”

Tim recalled the look on Cohn’s face when the committee counsel had been on the phone screaming to John Adams about Dave Schine’s having to “eat shit” in basic training. Had that remark gotten typed into the “Adams chronology,” which Potter was nervously rolling and unrolling in his hands? Tim had no more than a second to ponder the question; the room’s sudden, inescapable drama was the hurricane sweeping McCarthy’s face, stirring up the expression that must have greeted General Zwicker a few minutes into his testimony.

“Senator Potter, believe it or not, I have some
friends
among the press. Men like Winchell and George Sokolsky.
Jews.
Strong, right-thinking Jews who have a clear sense of what communism actually is. They’re a minority among their own people, from whom they take considerable abuse. They won’t be pleased to see you and your friends go after Roy, who’s the youngest and the finest and the strongest of this minority within a minority. Winchell has a microphone, Senator. And Sokolsky has a thousand of Hearst’s printing presses. Go after Roy Cohn and they’ll go after you, Senator. In fact, I’ll make sure they do.”

Tim gripped both of Potter’s canes as if they might actually be needed to beat McCarthy back. And yet he could hear that the secretary sitting outside next to Tommy had not so much as interrupted her typing in response to the boss’s bellow. She seemed to realize that the fierce-sounding storm would actually be a quick shower, not worth opening an umbrella for.

But McCarthy was not quite through. “Everybody’s money comes from someplace, Senator. Even yours. Everybody’s
people
come from someplace.” McCarthy indicated the outer office with a raise of his chin. Was Tommy, Tim suddenly wondered, a former Communist? He looked toward Potter for some confirmation of the possibility. The senator did not respond. His courage, Tim realized, was of a purely physical kind; when Potter looked into the boiling face of his colleague, he appeared calmer than when he merely glanced at the carpet.

Then the sun broke through. McCarthy relaxed his chin and smiled. He shook his head. “Oh, hell, Charlie. I don’t give a damn about Schine. He’s just a dumb, good-looking kid hoping to get laid even more than he already does. I think he figures coming home with a few scalps and a few headlines will accomplish whatever his face and his old man’s money can’t.” Potter said nothing, not even when one last cloud scudded across the chairman’s face. “But Roy worries about him,” said McCarthy. “And I’m not going to get rid of Roy.”

What, Tim wondered—trying to think like Tommy—did Cohn
have
on McCarthy? It couldn’t just be, as McCarthy was now saying, that “the Communists would take more comfort from Roy’s being fired than they have from anything since Roosevelt recognized Russia twenty years ago.” Nobody, thought Tim, not even Cohn, could be that smart or indispensable. Everybody said Bob Kennedy would have done just as well, been just as ferocious, if McCarthy had given him the counsel’s job. Joe Kennedy had wanted it for his son, but McCarthy, who’d even dated one of Kennedy’s daughters, had feared being tainted with the old ambassador’s anti-Semitism, something he couldn’t afford when the committee was investigating so many Jews. And so the job had gone to Cohn.

“Have a drink, Charlie.”

The chairman, smiling again, now appeared to take Potter’s silence for consent. It was settled; Roy would stay. And since the bottles in the glass-doored bookcase were all the way across the room, McCarthy reached a few easy inches for his briefcase, unsnapping its metal tabs and taking out a fifth of Jim Beam. He looked at Tim and laughed: “Are you old enough, son?” The “n” didn’t buzz. McCarthy may already have had a liquid lunch, but he was fully himself—playing to the room, not the radio. Tim smiled and shook his head, declining as politely as he could, while wondering if Tommy’s hatred of McCarthy might not spring from this alone, the drinking, the loathing a reformed drunk has for an active one. No, Tim decided, it wasn’t enough of an explanation, any more than Cohn’s talent for fighting communism could explain McCarthy’s determination to keep him around.

While the chairman, still smiling, took a drink by himself, the junior senator from Michigan sat in silence for a last few seconds. But then—perhaps only, Tim thought, because he feared Tommy’s displeasure—Potter found his voice and seeded the clouds for McCarthy’s next mood-storm: “We can get the army to fire John Adams, too, Joe. We can make it look like a trade, with fault on both sides. But unless Roy goes, this whole thing is going to have to be investigated, maybe even in front of television cameras.”

McCarthy’s smile disappeared, but no thunder issued from behind the new clouds on his visage. He seemed to be considering the possibility those cameras would present him, how they might be a risk worth taking if he could bend the hearings in his own direction, change their subject once the lights came up and the lenses opened. For the moment, however, it seemed he would err on the side of caution. “You tell your new friend Wilson to keep that report to himself from now on. We’ve got files of our own. We’ve got typewriters, too. You tell him that, Charlie.”

The meeting was over, and by all appearances McCarthy, now on his feet, was judging it a success. He reached into the office refrigerator for three small wheels of Wisconsin cheese, one for Tim, one for Potter, and one for Tommy McIntyre. All of them, the chairman included, were soon exiting Room 428 and walking down the corridor.

“Did you hear Flanders on the floor yesterday?” asked McCarthy. “It was better than Murrow and all that
Julius Caesar
crap. Listen to this,” he said, urging them to slow down while he pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. McCarthy began quoting the Vermont senator’s remarks: “‘In this battle of the agelong war’—I guess he means against the Communists—‘what is the part played by the junior senator from Wisconsin? He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink army dentist.’”

McCarthy’s laughter bounced off the walls of the SOB. At the landing of the staircase, by the blue-and-white peppermint-stick columns, he said goodbye to his visitors with a high, enthusiastic wave that parted the halves of his unbuttoned jacket and revealed the holstered pistol beneath.