Seven Silent Men (51 page)

And he told her, that afternoon and most every Thursday afternoon for years to come, for Thursday was “their” day, with Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson outside in the car parked along the great circular gravel driveway even though he could have waited inside. Edgar complained, in lugubrious detail, of each of his own troubles … and always ended up with detestation and fears regarding Harry Truman and an emerging intelligence organization called CIA. Unlike the military's dominant Counterintelligence Corps, the successor to OSS, which answered to the general of the Army group to which it was attached, CIA was to be a nonmilitary, unaffiliated organization answering directly to the President of the United States. Edgar had luxuriated in the fact that he alone, of all law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering heads, spoke directly to the President. But Harry Truman those days was speaking more and more to CIA boss Allen Dulles.

Future peril to the side, Harry Truman had already inflicted a blow to FBI power and prestige by stripping the Bureau of its jurisdiction to operate in Europe as well as drastically limiting its activities in Central and South America. Except for Mexico, the FBI had been reduced to a domestic service, not the international organization Edgar had come to envision. Worse yet, Allen Dulles's CIA was the new glamour service. Young men who might have applied to become FBI agents were now, in epidemic numbers, flocking to CIA.

Spying, Edgar warned Patricia, was murky business and un-American. Foreign business better done by Brits and Russkies and Swedes. America was a no-nonsense nation of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white and nothing in between. No gray areas, no shading. Every American boy and his brother was either moral or immoral. Not amoral like the French. Espionage by definition was gray and amoral.

“With all this verbal diarrhea about cold wars and spies,” he told her, “I have a mind to give that sotted billygoat what he wants and let hell thunder.”

The billygoat was a junior senator from the state of Wisconsin by the name of McCarthy, who in an informal poll of Washington correspondents had been voted the worst senator in the entire Senate, which was why he was desperately rummaging for a reelection campaign issue such as communists in government, Edgar explained to Patricia. Patricia thought it might be propitious if Edgar tossed McCarthy a random communist or so to see what effect it would have on Harry Truman.

The matter of J. Edgar's faltering prestige troubled Patricia mightily. After profound consideration she came truly to believe salvation lay with cousin Orin Trask and his plans for the great training center … an FBI university developing unique and exciting curriculums for crime detection and prevention, nurturing generations of elite super-operatives. Edgar, however, wanted nothing as grand as a university and was wary of Trask's ideas on elitism.

“The average FBI agent today is better than his counterpart at any time in history, and this is good enough for me,” Patricia's journal would record Edgar having told her.

When Orin G. Trask returned to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins University, Edgar, at Patricia's urging, suggested he develop plans for a modest new training facility, perhaps at the very same U.S. Marine Corps base at nearby Quantico, Virginia, where the current FBI Academy stood. Edgar proposed paying a small sum from his own pocket for this service. Trask gladly accepted the assignment but insisted on personally financing whatever was required at this juncture. Edgar acceded to the funding arrangement.

Neither Edgar nor even Patricia foresaw the thoroughness, or the length of time, Trask would expend on the project. The first phase in itself, an analysis of every FBI procedure and investigation to that date, required five years of research by a hand-picked staff of think-tank experts Trask had assembled. With this knowledge in hand, a team of educators was brought in to evolve the actual curriculum for the future. Among the scholastics was the prestigious historian Barrett Amory.

Trask and Amory had both served with espionage organizations during World War II, England's SIS and America's OSS respectively. Whereas Trask had been interested in criminology and law enforcement prior to working in the secret service and returned to it after, Amory had been interested in espionage prior to, during and immediately after his stint with OSS. Amory was older than Trask, and his first love was history; his second, psychology. Trask, on recruiting Amory, suggested Amory do an extensive history of the FBI for him. Amory obliged. Several years later he expanded the history to cover crime in America.

In 1954 Barrett Amory joined the four-man steering committee entrusted with devising a curriculum for the new academy. By 1955 Amory and Trask were fast friends. During 1956 Amory moved into the great mansion, then shared by Trask and Patricia. On New Year's Eve, 1957, he married Patricia. Nothing was known of their courtship or how Edgar took the news. All that could outwardly be noticed was that Patricia's time was now divided among three men instead of two—Edgar, Trask and Barrett Amory.

Orin Trask's master plan for a new FBI training center and a curriculum was completed in 1959, ten years after work on it had begun. The achievement was remarkable, all fourteen volumes of it. What was presented, in exquisite detail, was not the “modest facility” Hoover had urged but a university more enormous and futuristic than any ever hinted at by Trask in almost two decades of conversation on the subject. J. Edgar Hoover, certain the Senate would never fund a project of such magnitude and cost, pigeonholed the leather-bound volumes without allowing anyone at the Bureau to see them, except Clyde Tolson.

Orin Trask was not all that perturbed by the rejection. Knowing the airplane would fly was for him as important as going somewhere in it. He busied himself with myriad other projects. Amory too had much to occupy his time. It was Patricia alone who was determined the university be built and, using her wile and wealth, set forth to create a power base from which to lobby Congress.

In spite of having turned down the university plans, J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by Trask's vision, was particularly taken by a teaching concept termed “cadreism,” in which certain experimental courses would be taught to small, handpicked units of trainees, groups as small as four or five men who would later serve together in the field. Edgar invited Orin to try out the concept at the present FBI Academy, which boasted a student population of slightly more than thirty. Trask declined, went on declining for years. Patricia finally interceded. Orin agreed, on the condition that he could select the students he wanted in his own way. Edgar agreed to that.

Orin Trask began conducting one seminar a week in Elements of Crime Detection in the fall of 1963. It proved to be a startling, effective and popular course. And a most difficult one to get into. Trask selected only four trainees a term. Admittance became a badge of honor among the aspiring agents.

The success of the experiment prompted expansion. Trask persuaded Barrett Amory to create a seminar of his own, which he did in 1966. Psychological Profiling and Comprehensive History of Crime were the two subjects Amory's four trainees were taught.

Trask had cautioned Amory that the seminars must never become clubs or fraternities, must avoid elitism and always remain part of the overall academy, must never become competitive with one another. This was easier said than done. The tiny groups, by the very selection process which created them, were elite. Pride in their own seminar and instructor prompted student competition between the groups. Oddly enough, it was Amory's students who were the most aggressively competitive.

On the other hand, the brothers-in-law, rather than compete, grew closer. Trask, having proved his point with the seminars, was wearying of them. Longed to get away and throw himself into several long-abandoned research interests. He urged Amory to join him on one of the projects. Amory was not interested. Even so, Trask spent more and more time around the old family estate where Amory and Patricia resided. Patricia's tenacity had been partially responsible for Congress approving construction of a magnificent new FBI Academy at Quantico, but Orin showed no interest in this. While at the estate he was usually cloistered with Amory discussing some future plan or another. On occasion Trask addressed Amory's seminars. The reverse never occurred. No one, including Amory, ever set foot in Trask's seminar any more. This was starting to bother J. Edgar Hoover. Trask's students were becoming too cliquish, too competitive with Amory's students, who already were far too aggressive for the Director's liking.

J. Edgar Hoover decided to put an end to the seminar experiment, but before he could, Orin G. Trask died of a heart attack on December 20, 1969. He was sixty-seven years old. Patricia was sixty-eight. Barrett Amory was seventy-three. J. Edgar Hoover was seventy-five. Construction of a new academy had been under way for six months.

Patricia's grief was limitless. The present, like the future, eluded her. She slipped backward. Took to wearing the trappings of her bygone British past. The gowns, the parasols. Took to standing at the window and watching her garden and seeing things of yesterday that only she could see. Hearing things. Took to whispering to sweet Edmond, Earl of Ardmore. To blowing kisses to Orin.

She didn't abandon Barrett Amory. She tarried in the present long enough each day to tend to his needs. This done, she returned to the garden. To Edmond. To Trask.

Billy Yates, waiting now in the side room at Three Oaks, glanced across the grand foyer and into the main salon and saw her there, standing at the arched window in front of the garden … saw her in profile, her chin jutted upward, peering out through the glass. He knew all about her. Anyone who had studied with Barrett Amory did, but he knew even more. She didn't like him. Didn't like him being so bright, so independent … so Jewish.

Billy Yates being Jewish but not looking Semitic provided him certain advantages, or so he thought. Often, not being recognized was like possessing a secret password, allowed him to cross behind enemy lines and watch his adversaries around their campfire … hear what they had to say … what they were planning. Most of the time he didn't bother one way or the other. The whole religious issue had become tedious to him. Even so, he wasn't taking chances. As Mom said, do everything twice as good as anyone else and maybe you'll come out almost equal.

Yates, while attending the FBI Academy during 1968, was almost as equal a person as there was. And then some. Academically no one else made the marks he did. Athletically, he had only one rival in the whole institution, Vance Daughter, who ranked second to him scholastically. Daughter was a member of Trask's private seminar, the members of which had a keen dislike for anyone in Amory's seminar. Yates was the star in the tiara of Amory's seminar, a group whose feelings toward the Traskians brought new dimensions to the word loathing.

The two seminars, in the time Yates was at the academy, had both evolved into ultra-exclusive cliques, ones in which the subjects being taught were often secondary to the philosophy of the instructor. Trask's penchant for uniformity and precision resulted in his selecting young men who were brainy, aristocratic and disciplined. His students' belief and trust in him neared adoration if not fanaticism. Trask didn't discourage such fervor and obedience. Nor did he discourage clannish isolation. The Traskians ate together at the same table in the academy dining room, studied together, weekended together … kept together whenever else possible.

If Trask's seminar students appeared religious in their approach, then those of Barrett Amory were definitely irreligious. Amory believed in individuality, picked as his yearly four candidates brainy loners and iconoclasts. Amory, unlike Trask, kept pretty much to the two subjects his seminar was supposed to explore … didn't overly fraternize with his students, except for Billy Yates.

Still, whatever else, when Yates was at the academy the three Traskian seminar students were gentlemen and polite. Southern gentlemen. Regardless of their feelings, they at least treated Yates with outer politeness. Billy did not always return the favor. He good-naturedly taunted them with his Judaic origin. No one at the academy mentioned the word
Jew
out loud except Billy Yates. Yates was distinctly unreligious, quite ignorant of his people's history and ritual, but on the Jewish New Year, Daughter and each of the other Traskians had received a commemorative card from Yates in Hebrew, a language Billy didn't understand a word of. In the gymnasium, with boxing gloves on, Yates and Daughter had at one another in a war that needed no language to comprehend.

Yates, with Barrett Amory, was forever the acolyte. He respected everything about Barrett. Because of Barrett he even grew tolerant of Patricia, though she did not reciprocate. Barrett took to Yates. Was proud of him. They spent hours alone talking, very often to the displeasure of Patricia.

… It had been two years now since pupil and teacher had seen one another as seventy-five-year-old Barrett entered the side room.

“You look hale, young Yates, hale indeed.” The old man never shook hands, only slapped people on the shoulder. He slapped Yates. “Where they have you these days?”

“Prairie Port, Missouri.”

“Ed Grafton country.”

“He's not there any more.”

“Grafton not at Prairie Port?”

“He was replaced over the Mormon State robbery investigation, or at least that's how I see it.”

“… Yes, seem to remember hearing something about that,” Amory recalled. “Probably better he's gone. He did his time. We all do our time. See the Lady Pat?”

“When I came in.”

“She doesn't like you, you know.”

“I know.”

“Come along and eat. Whatever you have to say, you'll say over supper and wine. Come, come.”

As they were crossing the marble foyer, Amory asked, “How's that religion of yours doing?”