The Redhunter
Authors: William F. Buckley
OTHER NOVELS BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
Saving the Queen
Stained Glass
Who’s on First
Marco Polo, If You Can
The Story of Henri Tod
See You Later Alligator
The Temptation of Wilfred Malachey
High Jinx
Mongoose, R.I.P.
Tucker’s Last Stand
A Very Private Plot
Brothers No More
Copyright © 1999 by William F. Buckley Jr.
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quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of historical fiction. It contains some names of real people, and some historical events are described.
It also describes events and characters that are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical
persons or events to actual ones is purely coincidental.
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Contents
OTHER NOVELS BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
7: Harry Bontecou, age eighteen, goes to war
8: Alex, Lord Herrendon, reminisces
9: Harry Bontecou goes to Columbia
12: Senator Joe McCarthy goes to Washington
13: President Harry Truman gives ’em hell
16: Herrendon and Harry comment
18: J. Edgar Hoover calls McCarthy
19: McCarthy defends his Wheeling charges
22: A professor tries to understand
24: McCarthy meets Whittaker Chambers
26: McCarthy meets an informant
28: Herrendon and Harry dig in
29: Meet the Press with Lattimore
30: The North Koreans invade the South
31: Acheson reflects, Did he give the wrong signals?
33: Hoover calls McCarthy to his lair
34: The Tydings Committee reports its findings
35: Alex and Harry discuss espionage
36: Two Soviet agents meet in Pennsylvania
37: The GOP Convention nominates Eisenhower
40: Herrendon and the security check
41: A clarification by Herrendon
44: Harry and the intruder, 1951
45: Acheson collects McCarthyana, 1953
47: Alex Herrendon visits Dorothy Bontecou
48: Herrendon talks of March 1926
49: Professor Sherrill complains about McCarthy
50: Eisenhower, in the Oval Office, is irked
51: McCarthy reviews the hidden memorandum
52: McCarthy begins the Monmouth investigation
53: Ike is angered by McCarthy
54: McCarthy questions General Zwicker
55: President Eisenhower holds a press conference
56: The evaluation of Eisenhower
57: The Army-McCarthy hearings—an overture
58: Viewing Army-McCarthy on television
59: The view of the hearings from abroad
60: Jean McCarthy meets with Harry
61: Day thirty-four of the Army-McCarthy hearings
63: Tom Coleman of Wisconsin suggests a compromise
64: Army counsel Joseph Welch testifies
65: The committee votes A second Senate committee convenes
66: Joe McCarthy and Jean, in Wisconsin; vacationing
67: The censure committee begins hearings
68: McCarthy returns to visit Whittaker Chambers
69: A rally at Madison Square Garden
71: Harry speaks about the memorial services
Advance praise for THE REDHUNTER
TO L. BRENT BOZELL
—
in grateful memory
I knew Senator McCarthy and, with my brother-in-law the late L. Brent Bozell, wrote a book about him
(McCarthy and His Enemies)
in 1953. This book is a novel, but most of the events here recorded are true to life.
The McCarthy library is scant, but one book is central. It was written by Thomas C. Reeves, professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin-Parkside, is titled
The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography,
and was published in 1982 by Stein and Day. I am very grateful to Professor Reeves.
In
chapter 7
I quote almost verbatim for several paragraphs a scene described by Nikolai Tolstoy in his book
The Great Betrayal, 1944–47.
It was published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1977.
Christopher Weinkopf, formerly assistant editor at
National Review,
now at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, did research for this book over two winters and made fine
suggestions. I am grateful for his work, as for his company. And grateful, too, to Julie Crane, for her useful last-minute
reading.
Frances Bronson of
National Review
superintended the editorial effort with customary intelligence and dispatch, and Tony Savage patiently produced all seven
drafts of this work, with punctilio and good humor.
I am grateful to several readers who were kind enough to read
drafts and make suggestions. My sister Priscilla Buckley, brother Reid Buckley, Professor Chester Wolford of Penn State, Professor
Thomas Wendel of San Jose State, Mr. Evan Galbraith of New York, Tracy Lee Simmons of
National Review,
my agent, Mrs. Lois Wallace, and my wife, Pat. Mr. William Phillips, my editor at Little, Brown, made valuable comments.
I owe special thanks to M. Stanton Evans, the author and journalist who is preparing his own book on Senator McCarthy and
is comprehensively informed on the issues of that period.
I come now, with some trepidation, to Samuel S. Vaughan. Harold Ross, the founding editor of
The New Yorker,
spoke impatiently of a contributor who in his manuscript had written of an “indescribable” event. Ross pounded into the margin
of that essay,
“Nothing
is indescribable!—”a dictum that makes you feel good (“It can be done!”), but also a little scared (“But can
I
do it?”). Perhaps I can get by with saying that what Sam Vaughan did to encourage and refine this venture is unimaginable.
This novel is not, at 400 pages, slight; yet his notes and references and asides and quotations and emendations were more
extensive than my text. I wish this book were written about Mother Teresa, not Joe McCarthy, so that it might serve as a more
fitting conduit for Sam’s productive benignity. I leave it that the best that is here is his responsibility.
W. F. B.
Stamford, Connecticut
October 1, 1998
1
LONDON, JUNE 1991
Harry Bontecou was tired, but also relaxed. He sat in one of the pleasant, comfortably tatterdemalion clubs patronized by
English literati. He had been warned his host might be late for dinner so he had brought along the morning papers. The headline
in the
Telegraph
spoke of the rumored capture the day before of Pol Pot in the Cambodian forests. There were two accounts, one in a news article,
the second in the editorial section, telling the minihistory of Pol Pot, sometime plenipotentiary ruler of Cambodia.
They differed on the enumeration of Cambodians executed by Pol Pot during the years 1975 to 1979, when he ruled. The news
account spoke of “over a million executed,” the editorial of “two million.” Harry sipped his sherry. He paused then and reflected
on exactly what he was doing, reading about Pol Pot twenty-five years after the age of the killing fields, drinking sherry.
He supposed that there would not ensue, in the press accounts the next day, lively and informed discussions over which of
the two figures was more nearly correct—one million killed by the self-designated Marxist-Leninist, or two. The population
of Cambodia at the time of Pol Pot’s rule was five million, the
Telegraph
reminded its readers. So, Harry Bontecou closed his eyes and quickly calculated. The variable estimates meant 20 percent
of the population executed, or 40 percent of the population executed. The
Telegraph’s
account
told that Pol Pot’s genocide was the “gravest since those of the Second World War.” Harry reflected. The executions in Nazi
Germany might have reached 10 percent of the population; perhaps an equivalent percentage in the Soviet Union (twenty-five
million shot or starved between 1917 and the death of Stalin in 1953 was a figure frequently encountered). Harry remembered
his reaction on that winter day in 1946 when it became his job to expedite a genocidal operation. A mini genocidal operation.
Now he could read the papers and sip sherry and speak softly and securely in this well-protected shelter for British men of
letters. It was very different for him then, and very different those early years. Now he could focus on the statistics, on
the round figures. Now he was Harry Bontecou, Ph.D. History.
The
Telegraph
noted also the transatlantic debate over whether Marcus Wolf was entitled to a visa to visit the United States. Herr Wolf,
the paper reported, was indignant at having been held off. He had served as chief of intelligence for the Democratic Republic
of Germany, which no longer existed. But when it did, East Germany’s mission had been to do the will of Moscow. This included
guarding the impermeability of the Berlin Wall. That was a special responsibility of Marcus Wolf, Harry knew—he scanned the
story, would the reporter mention the wall? No. He went back to the paragraph reporting Wolf’s displeasure. Harry knew, as
did how many members of the Garrick Club?—70 percent? 10 percent?—that as Secret Police (Stasi) chief, Wolf had engaged in
the torture and killing of anyone who, between 1961 and 1989, when the wall came down, tried to escape from the Democratic
Republic of Germany to West Germany. Marcus Wolf had taken considerable precautions to discourage trespassers to freedom.
They included land mines and electrical fences and barbed wire and spotlights and machine guns and killer dogs. Now, in the
morning paper, Wolf was reported as saying he did not
understand
being persecuted for carrying out a routine professional assignment. “I didn’t kill anybody personally,” he told the reporter.
Neither did Hitler, Harry reflected.
He was jolted by the hortatory tone of voice from a figure standing by the bar, who now, drink in hand, approached him, an
elderly man stylishly dressed in dark gray. His abundant white hair framed an angular face with heavy tortoise-shell glasses
that magnified the
light blue eyes. Oh, my God, Harry Bontecou thought, Tracy. His freshman-year college roommate.
