Inherit the Mob (5 page)

Flanagan was right about one thing; Gordon had no desire to be a sensitive, brooding moralist. In any case, Vietnam in those days was no place for idealism. The covert buildup was already under way, and even a novice like Gordon could tell that the diplomats and CIA officials were lying about what was going on.

One day Flanagan returned from a CIA briefing with sparkling eyes and a light step. “What the hell are you so happy about?” Gordon asked.

“Gordon, these mo-humpers are bullshitting us,” said Flanagan.

“Yeah, what else is new?”

“Well said, kid. Like Humphrey Bogart. But do you know what they’re lying about?”

Gordon shrugged. “Everything, probably.”

“Everything means nothing,” said Flanagan triumphantly. “They want to start a war, Gordon, that’s what they’re planning to do. A
full-scale, shoot-’em-up, send-in-the-marines bang-bang right here in Chinatown.”

Gordon hadn’t thought about it in exactly that way, but he realized that Flanagan was right. “OK,” he said, “but what difference does it make? I mean, you can’t prove that’s what they’re doing, and you don’t have a story without proof.”

“Correct. Which means we get proof,” said Flanagan. “What we really need is to get close to Henderson.” Henderson was a senior CIA operative, the kind of Wasp that Flanagan called “a white guy.”

“How do we do that?”

“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his gatkas, kid,” said Flanagan. “That means underwear, in case your Yiddish is rusty.”

From then on, Flanagan made Henderson his special project. He gave Gordon most of the daily work—attending embassy briefings, interviewing local politicians and writing long color stories on Vietnamese teenagers who loved Hula-Hoops and Elvis that wound up spiked in New York. In the meantime, Flanagan spent his time cultivating the CIA agent.

Flanagan’s technique was simple; he pimped for him. First, he took Henderson out to dinner and filled his Yankee skull with stories about exotic Oriental whorehouses, most of which he invented on the spot. Henderson was married to a relentlessly wholesome girl with thick ankles who spent all her time and energy making their stay in Saigon a replica of life in Ames, Iowa. Flanagan guessed that she wasn’t much fun to come home to.

At the end of their first dinner, Flanagan suggested that a working acquaintance with Saigon’s nightlife was a necessary weapon in the arsenal of a compleat CIA operative. Henderson agreed, and declared himself ready to sacrifice some of his precious personal time in the name of national security. He wanted to go out on the town that very night, but Flanagan sent him home in his chauffeured government limo and let him stew for three days. Then he called to suggest another dinner.

“I’ve got him, Gordon,” he said, putting down the receiver. “He’s hot to trot.”

That night, Flanagan showed up at dinner with two hookers he
introduced as university students. Henderson, turning up the charm, entertained the women, whose English was rudimentary, with racy stories of his own college-boy exploits at Yale. Flanagan took the party back to his large, empty apartment and left Henderson alone with the hookers. He spent the night on Gordon’s couch, his long legs draped over the edge.

The next afternoon, Flanagan called the CIA man. “You decadent bastard, what did you do to those chicks?” he said in a tone of locker-room jocularity. Henderson asked if he was free for dinner again that night.

In three weeks, Paul Arthur Henderson became a prisoner of his own sex drive. Flanagan supplied him with an unending stream of single women, sister combos and even, on one occasion, a trio. The girls were always introduced as showgirls, secretaries or students; Henderson never guessed that they were actually being financed out of the
Trib
’s entertainment budget. He had a key to Flanagan’s apartment, and Flanagan took to spending most of his time at Gordon’s flat.

“I’ll tell you something, kid,” he said one afternoon, after Henderson called to smugly announce that he had ‘just scored again.’ “If these dip-shits do start a war, we ain’t gonna win it. They don’t know the difference between kenahbee juice and Kool-Aid. I don’t think our intelligence operation is ready to take on the inscrutable East.”

“Not to mention the devious Irish,” Gordon said.

Flanagan laughed happily. “It won’t be long now,” he predicted. “Henderson is a little leery of being blackmailed, which is what they teach these dumbbells in the CIA. So I’m gonna throw him a fastball right down the middle. I’m gonna ask him for help, guy to guy. Nothing in writing, you understand, just some guidance, a little professional courtesy. Perspective on the American effort to save democracy in Chinatown. If I get some string, I can unravel the whole thing.”

It sounded to Gordon like a good plan. He was rooting for Flanagan, and took a vicarious interest in the story, but he wasn’t truly involved. At twenty-two, he was still thrilled just to be working for the
Tribune
, drinking at the bar of the Hotel Continental with the other hacks, being accepted into the fraternity of foreign correspondents.
Although he wouldn’t have wanted Flanagan to know it, he didn’t honestly care if there was going to be a war or not.

One day, coming out of a briefing by an embassy political officer, a secretary Gordon had occasionally dated caught him by the coat sleeve. Her name was Andi Moore, and she had been in Saigon for less than six months. She and Gordon had slept together a couple of times in a comradely way, but they were far from serious about each other. She was having an affair with a married American colonel stationed at the embassy, and she used Gordon as a stand-in when he couldn’t get away from his wife.

“William,” she said in a soft, serious voice, “there’s someone I want to introduce you to. Can you come to dinner tonight?”

“Sure, Andi, who is it?”

“Top secret,” she said, and winked.

That night Gordon arrived with a bottle of wine and some flowers. He didn’t usually bring Andi gifts, but he was hoping that her surprise guest would turn out to be a good-looking woman, and he wanted to make an impression. He was disappointed to find her alone and the table set for two.

“Last-minute cancellation,” she said. “But the person I wanted you to meet left you a present. I think you’ll like it.”

She went to a desk drawer, unlocked it, and pulled out a large manila envelope. “This is for you,” she said, although there was no name on the package. “But you can have it only on one condition. You’ve got to promise me that nobody will ever know how you got it.”

“Sure,” he said.

“No, not ‘sure.’ Say, ‘I swear to God that nobody will ever know how I got this envelope.’ ”

Wryly, with his hand over his heart, Gordon recited the pledge. “What’s in it?” he asked.

“Let’s have dinner first,” she said. “I made spaghetti with a white sauce. The wine will go great with it. Then you can go home and open your present.”

They ate the spaghetti, drank the wine and made love with impersonal passion to the strains of Johnny Mathis. Gordon forgot about the package; during his time in Saigon he had often been given
“gifts” of this sort by diplomats; usually they turned out to be thinly disguised publicity efforts. Andi had to remind him to take the envelope with him when he left her place about eleven.

It wasn’t until he got home and opened the envelope that Gordon realized that Andi had given him an extraordinary gift—a set of memos and cables to and from Washington, outlining the new administration’s plan for a major troop buildup. There was a lot of jargon and cablese, but the meaning was unmistakable—Kennedy intended to turn Vietnam into a battlefield.

He showed the cables to Flanagan the next morning. The bureau chief read through them quickly, and then again, slowly. When he was finished he looked at Gordon narrowly. “Where the fuck did you get ahold of this?” he demanded.

“John, I can’t tell you,” he said. “I promised. But I’m pretty sure it’s real. I got it from an inside source.”

“Obviously,” he said. “Fucking Henderson.”

“Listen, it’s your story,” Gordon said quickly. “You’re the chief. Take this stuff and use it. Be my guest.”

Flanagan thought for a long moment; he was tempted. Finally he sighed and shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “You got it, it’s yours. You may stop a war with this shit. And you’re definitely going to get yourself a Pulitzer.” He lifted his glass of Jameson’s, which was half full at ten in the morning. “Gordon, you’re going to be a star,” he said.

The cables served as the basis for a five-part series on the American buildup in Vietnam. Flanagan was wrong about stopping the war, but right about the prize. Gordon got the Pulitzer for international reporting, 1962. He was not yet twenty-three years old.

On the day the prize was announced, Gordon’s mother called from New York and cried on the phone. His father got on the extension in his den and growled, “Nice going, boychik,” which was his version of conferring a knighthood. Cy Malkin sent a long congratulatory cable and invited him to a dinner with the publisher in New York. Gordon heard nothing from his uncle Max.

He went home for the award ceremony, and traveled to Madison, where he was hailed as a conquering hero. He told no one that his scoop had been given to him by a horny embassy secretary. When he said that he had been lucky, people took it for false modesty.

Gordon returned to Vietnam, where he was boycotted by the embassy, which conducted a fruitless investigation into the leak. Andi Moore avoided him. Their only meeting was in the garden of the French ambassador’s residence on Bastille Day. They stood together on the veranda, glasses of cool white wine in their hands, and spoke in a conversational tone. “Why did you do it?” he asked. She smiled. “Just for the heck of it,” she said.

Early in 1964, Flanagan went back to New York, where he was assigned to cover City Hall, which he considered a promotion. Foreign policy bored him, and he loved crooked politics. Malkin offered Gordon the Saigon bureau, but he turned it down, and went to Moscow instead.

Gordon stayed abroad sixteen more years. After Moscow he went back to Vietnam; there was a new set of officials in Saigon, and they treated him more like a celebrity than a pariah. From there he went to Tel Aviv, the first Jew ever assigned to cover Israel for the
Trib;
to South Africa for two years, and finally to London, where he was stationed until 1980.

In Israel he won his second Pulitzer. During the Yom Kippur War, on the day before the Israeli army launched its counterattack across the Suez Canal, he got a call from a general he had met once or twice but barely knew. The general invited him to his home in Tzahala, a suburb of Tel Aviv. There, over strong coffee and homemade cake, he gave Gordon the operational plans for the next day. “Why me?” Gordon asked, and the general smiled. “Somebody’s going to have this,” he said, “and it might as well be you. The
Tribune
is an important newspaper.” For the next two weeks the general kept Gordon one day ahead of the pack, and in the end he had another Pulitzer.

The second prize made him a superstar. He was in demand as a lecturer, wrote a warmly received book on détente and became a well-known face on television talk shows. Viewers saw a broad-shouldered man with a salt-and-pepper beard, thinning black hair and a prominent nose, broken in a pickup basketball game with a group of marine embassy guards in Tel Aviv. For television appearances, Gordon wore a tie and coat; otherwise, he dressed in jeans and a faded corduroy jacket.

In 1980, Gordon returned to the States for good. Not long after,
he was profiled by the
Atlantic Monthly
in an admiring article entitled “William Gordon, Mr. Reporter.” The writer, who was not much older than Gordon had been when he first went to Vietnam, described him as as a profanely wise, cigar-chomping, hard-drinking cynic with a physical resemblance to Abbie Hoffman. This portrait greatly amused Flanagan.

“I know you’re still in there, kid,” he said over drinks at Gallagher’s. “I know you’re still a sensitive SAT at heart.” Gordon laughed. It was a relief to him that Flanagan knew his act, like leaving a spare house key with a reliable neighbor.

Aside from Flanagan, only Max seemed to see through Gordon’s facade. He had visited the old man occasionally during his home leaves, but their relationship remained cool. Gordon realized that efforts to impress his uncle with macho stories from the world’s battlefields had little effect; the old man continued to relate to him as a lightweight, a good talker. Eventually Gordon stopped trying, and confined his chats with his uncle to foreign affairs. Several times the old man had surprised him with his knowledge of Latin American and East Asian politicians. It occurred to Gordon that Max probably had business dealings with some of them, but his reportorial instincts, usually sharp, deserted him when it came to his uncle.

The
Tribune
rewarded Gordon by making him a columnist and roving international correspondent. After the grind of foreign reporting, the task of turning out two columns a week was light work, and it left him plenty of time for other pursuits. Flanagan was now deputy city editor, and the two old friends spent a lot of time drinking in various haunts downtown. Flanagan had been married, briefly and indignantly, and now lived in misogynistic solitude in a small apartment near Gramercy Square. Gordon was still single, and his name occasionally appeared on lists of the city’s most eligible bachelors. Unlike Flanagan, he loved women, but he had yet to meet one he was certain was good enough for him.

Flanagan’s obsession was New York politics, and he usually contrived to steer their conversations to some municipal scandal or local villain. Venality and corruption fascinated and amused him, and he frequently asked Gordon about his uncle Max. He found it unbelievable
that Gordon knew and cared so little about his celebrated uncle. One night at O’Dwyer’s, a pub on Twenty-third Street, Flanagan was holding forth on the subterranean connection between union pension funds and a Bronx ward leader when he was interrupted by a commotion at the door.

Gordon turned and saw a slender young woman, surrounded by three men in business suits, walk through the crowded room to a table in the rear. Several people called her name, and one or two even applauded. Dressed in sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt, she carried herself regally, shoulders thrown back and head high, as if she were trying to peer over an obstacle. Her most striking features were shoulder-length black hair that hung down in wild curls and a powerful hawklike nose. She wasn’t at all beautiful—special-looking was the description that came to mind—but she filled the room with her presence.