The Redhunter (37 page)

“Midge, ring Mrs. Tankersley at home.”

Bazy Tankersley, the young niece of Colonel McCormick of Chicago, was the publisher of the
Washington Times-Herald.
That paper was a property of the Tribune Corporation, owners of the
New
York Daily News
and the
Chicago Tribune.
The papers were presided over by maybe the country’s most indomitable right-winger, Colonel Robert McCormick. He had refused
to back Eisenhower for president on the grounds that Eisenhower was too much of an internationalist, a liberal, an Anglophile.

“Hang on a minute,” Joe instructed Don and Harry as his phone rang.

“Bazy? Hello, doll. It’s Joe. Bazy, something’s come up, not something I’d want to discuss over the telephone—”

He paused to hear Bazy out.

“Well, Bazy, I can’t answer that, not for sure—I appointed J. B. Matthews chief committee aide because he’s a good man. Now,
Bazy, listen, what happened is I’m here with my staff working on the deadline tomorrow, and Jeanie comes in. And Bazy, she
is
very
upset because she told you we’d both be over there with you at seven. Now I could be there at eight-fifteen, but the
problem,
Bazy, is that Jeanie came in just now and she’s
awfully
sore. I can’t say I blame her. But you know, she’s all Irish, like her husband-to-be—”

He paused. Then,

“I know, I know, I’m really looking forward to married life with Jeanie, only there’s this problem. She said just now she’s
not going to marry me. … Well I
agree
that’s silly. You know I adore your dinner parties, Bazy, but just because I’m late for one of them shouldn’t mean my wedding
is off, you think? … What can you do about it? Well, Jeanie lives only two minutes from here. Maybe if you could call her
at home, and say … you know what to say, Bazy. And tell her I’m coming to your house direct from the office—I know you, Bazy.
You’ll make everything okay
before dark.
Whoops! It’s dark already! Before midnight! Big kiss, Bazy.”

He leaned back in his chair. “We’d better wrap it up. Don, you pull together the J. B. Matthews business. Just stress the
line I told you. Just because Matthews said in his article that the Protestant clergy were the—what words did he use?—”

Surine spoke the sentence.

What seemed like the whole Senate was in an uproar over the article by Matthews published in the
American Mercury.
The Republican sweep of 1952 had made McCarthy the chairman of the Government Operations Committee, and now he had nominated
J. B. Matthews,
the veteran expert on Communist front activity, as chief of staff. “What he wrote,” Don said, “was, ‘The largest single group
supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen.’ How do you want to handle
it?”

“Just stick to what I said. Stress this: J. B. didn’t call any single Protestant minister a Communist. What he said strikes
me as just plain
obvious.
A lot of people—well, not a lot of people, but some people—support socialism because they think it’s going to, you know,
eliminate poverty, starvation, war, et cetera, et cetera. So they end up supporting Communist fronts. I mean—Harry, you probably
saw this at college. I did: You start up a committee in favor of peace, and the pacifists and Protestant ministers flock in
by the carload—”

Surine, ever patient, but resolute, interrupted him. “We know all that, Joe. I’ll get the statement ready for you in the morning.”

McCarthy got up. “Well, I’ve got a little diplomacy ahead of me tonight. Mary still here?” He pressed a button. Mary Haskell’s
voice came in on the speaker.

“You keeping tabs on the wedding, Mary?”

“Yes, Senator.”

“Did Dulles accept?”

“Allen Dulles did, not John Foster.”

“Nixon?”

“Nothing yet.”

“He’ll come. … Miles McMillin?” He laughed.

“Joe,” Mary called him Joe when there was nobody else around. “You might want to know about Ross Biggers—Biggers. You know
him, Fort Worth? Well, he is giving you and Jean as a wedding present a Coupe de Ville.”

“Hey, that sounds great. I never even drove a Cadillac.”

“But get this. He has paid for it by taking donations from his employees. It says here some gave twenty-five cents, a few
one hundred dollars. It’ll be here when you get back from the honeymoon.”

“That’s really wonderful! I’ll tell Jeanie. If she decides to marry me!”

He clicked off the speaker and got up. “Good night, folks.”

“Good night, Joe.”

Don Surine took a deep breath. “Long day.” He picked up the intercom. “Mary, come on in here. We boys are yearning for a little
female company and a deep breath of—deep breath of what, Harry?”

“Deep breath of Joe-absence!”

Mary had come in, sat down, and lit up a cigarette. She laughed. “Ray—”Don’s assistant was Ray Kiermas, office manager and
Joe’s oldest friend in town, who had stopped by on his way out—”how many days since you stopped smoking?”

Kiermas, with his pince-nez glasses, tightened his tie and looked very solemn. He replied, “It depends, Mary, on how you count
the days. Some people would say 205, others 81, others 57.”

They all laughed. Harry said to Don Surine, the former FBI agent, industrious researcher, utterly loyal to Joe and his cause,
“Don, is it true you worked once for Senator Ralph Flanders?”

“For about three weeks. I was just out of the army, and you know, I’m from Vermont. I had to do something for the month I
had before reporting to the bureau. The morning paper had a profile on Senator Flanders, said his Burlington office was immobilized
because his aide there had a ruptured appendix. So I thought—why not? Arrived there at ten
A.M.,
and he hired me at ten-fifteen.”

Ray: “Didn’t he ask you if you were a Communist?”

There was more laughter. But Mary decided the time had come to be stern. “Now cut it out, boys. This is serious stuff we’re
into.” She was afraid she had sounded the schoolmistress. “I know you’re joking. Was Senator Flanders, well, you know, normal?”

“Wouldn’t think so after the kind of thing he says about McCarthy. But, to tell the truth, he was only in Burlington for two
days during the few weeks I worked for him. I don’t remember his smiling ever, come to think of it.”

“He’s a mean man. I wonder if anybody ever told the junior senator from Vermont that Joe isn’t a mean man?”

“Well,” Harry smiled, “Jeanie thinks he’s a mean man.”

Mary got tough again. “Now, nobody here say anything about Jeanie except that you love her. Kiermas?”

“I love Jeanie.”

“Don Surine?”

“I love Jeanie.”

“Harry Bontecou?”

“I love Jeanie.”

“Okay, Mary.” Don yawned. “We’ve passed our loyalty tests. I’m going to the cafeteria for a sandwich or something. Anybody
want to come?”

Jeanie was there, but when Joe walked in she most conspicuously did not greet him. At dinner for twelve she was seated, following
her request to Bazy, as far from him as the table would allow. The conversation was animated and collegial. All ten guests
were ardent backers of McCarthy, and Betty Lee, who was scheduled to be maid of honor, spoke excitedly about the event on
September 29. “I bet the whole
world
will be there, Jean.”

Jean flushed and nodded her head aimlessly, without looking over at Joe.

So it went. By eleven o’clock Jeanie had cooled down, and at eleven-thirty, McCarthy drove her home. He promised he would
tame his schedule.

“You always say that.”

“Well, but you know as well as anyone, Jeanie, the kind of things that come up. I mean, like the J. B. Matthews business.
That’s taken
hours and hours.”

“I love J. B.”

“And I love Ruth.” McCarthy spoke of Matthews’s scholarly, beautiful, and devoted wife.

“So you see how it is, Jeanie?”

“Do you
really
want to marry me?” Jean asked.

Joe knew the best way to answer her. He leaned over, left hand on the steering wheel, and kissed her fully on the lips.

Alex Herrendon found it hard to believe. As press aide to the British Embassy he regularly attended State Department briefings
on trouble spots around the world, a courtesy extended to Washington representatives of all NATO powers. Now the letter, brought
in by the ambassador, advised him that the privilege of attendance at these meetings was suspended, pending a more thorough
investigation of Press Attache Herrendon’s security file.

If Herrendon wished to appear at the security hearing about himself, he was, as an accredited diplomat with the British Embassy,
entitled to do so. The first paragraph of the State Department letter was clearly standard. The second said that Herrendon
would be asked, specifically, to account for his association with the National Consumers League.

The National Consumers League! …
He dimly remembered. It was sometime in the late thirties. Thirteen, fourteen years ago. His neighbor across the street in
McLean-what
was
his name?
Pacelli!
“Same name as the pope,” he would tell you-was indignant over the cost of electricity and went around the Drury Park neighborhood
collecting signatures for an organized consumer protest group against monopoly utilities. He had signed that paper for Pacelli
in 1939. During the war, Herrendon did intelligence work for the War Ministry in London. It was after that, posted again to
America, that he noticed—quite
accidentally—that the House Committee on Un-American Activities had listed the National Consumers League as a Communist front.
Herrendon’s reaction, as given to an associate at the embassy, had been: For all I know, that’s what it was—a Communist front
exploiting consumer resentments.

But of course that was pre-McCarthy.

He wasn’t exactly alarmed, but he was troubled. It would take a little time. Probably, for the hell of it, he should fish
through his files to see if there had been any communications from the consumer people—the Communist consumer people—to whom
he had paid no more than cursory attention. Which was a mistake.

But Alex was advised by Simon Budge, the British congressional liaison officer, to consult a lawyer. They spoke in his office,
and Budge had a most visible hangover. The day before, he had married off his daughter to an American—Alex was at the wedding
and had toasted the couple extravagantly.

“McCarthyism is a booming industry, Alexie-boy. It may become a major field of study in American law schools. Specialty? ‘Defense
of federal employees or security-cleared foreigners who once belonged to a Communist front.’

“But—” Budge was now the negotiator “—the point is there are lawyers in town who specialize in this kind of thing. They know
what questions are going to be asked. And they have a keen nose for smelling out whether the case is likely to metastasize
to congressional committee investigation proportions. You’ve got a special problem, you know: You’ve got a high security clearance—and
you were at Yalta.”

“Yes. Perhaps I was with Mr. Churchill’s staff to help him persuade Stalin to give better care to Russian consumers. On behalf
of the consumers union.”

“I know, I know, Alex. But this is 1953, and McCarthyism reigns.” Budge put his hand theatrically over his mouth. “I mean,”
he reduced his voice to a whisper, as if frightened to be overheard, “this is 1953, and McCarthyism reigns.”

Alex Herrendon laughed. “Very well. I’ll call over to the legal department and get somebody’s name.” He did so, reflecting
on the irony of a British official calling on the U.S. State Department to recommend
someone to shield him from the importunities of the U.S. State Department.

Alex spoke over the telephone from his house in Georgetown, a part of his late wife’s estate. He had been put onto one Eustace
Meikkle-john, Esquire, with whom he now exchanged greetings. Alex read him the text of the letter the ambassador had received
from Loyalty-Security and agreed to meet with him the following Friday.