The Redhunter (38 page)

“Things are a little different when State is dealing with foreign citizens, but most of the security routine is the same thing,”
Meikklejohn counseled him.

The interval would give Herrendon time to forage for any exchanges, fourteen years ago—or, for that matter, subsequently—with
the organized consumer people. He wished he knew where to find Guido Pacelli, who had got him into this mess. Pacelli was
a good bit older than Alex, who was in his late forties. Probably Pacelli was retired. He could hunt him down, if it seemed
advisable, or necessary.

What was absolutely required, Herrendon closed his eyes and thought deeply on the matter, was that no investigation by the
loyalty/ security board should lead to a wider investigation. One that could establish that (Viscount) Alex Herrendon was
now and had been for ten years, in London and in Washington, an agent of the Soviet Union performing intelligence work and
engaging in espionage. He must get the consumers league business dealt with and satisfy the investigators that there was nothing
more to look into.

On impulse he looked over at the framed wedding picture.
For my Alex, with eternal love, Judith.
The picture was taken immediately after the wedding at St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church, in Hamden, Connecticut. Judith
had appended the date,
December 29, 1927.

After gazing at the wedding picture he turned to the antique mirror behind the desk. He examined his image clinically. His
hair was still full, with only traces of gray. His features were regular, his brown eyes wide and expressive. His lower lip
was full, his teeth unblemished. He did look forty-eight, but not a day older.

He doubted he would ever readjust after Judith’s death, though
at the hospital, during those awful last weeks, she had pressed him to go on with life “—my beloved Alex.” And that last time
she had hugged Robin to her. “Make your father live again a whole life, Robin. That’s the only way I will truly—”she managed
a smile—”rest in peace.”

That was two years ago. He hadn’t, in the period since then, spent a single evening alone with any woman. He accepted social
invitations and, as often as not, enjoyed them; but he never called any of the myriad maidens or widows who were seated, serially,
next to him at dinner party after dinner party. He allowed himself to wonder whether he was trying to make up in middle-aged
sobriety for a youth that had been anything but regulated. That other life—this one—he had never shared with Judith.

After the session with the lawyer on Friday, Alex came home to his alluringly comfortable living room and began to read a
novel, plucked from his complete collection of Anthony Trollope. Robin came in, a special bounce in her stride, to advance
on her father and give him a kiss. She would bring him tea. “But after that I’ll have to hurry. Can’t sit here with you tonight
and watch the news.” She had a date, and he—her new friend—had tickets to the dress rehearsal of
As You Like It,
which would open at the National Theater the following Monday. Robin was visibly excited. Alex saw in her her mother’s radiance.

“Who’s the young man?” His voice carried to the kitchen, where Robin was heating the water.

“Oh, Daddy, he’s terrific. Tall, handsome, bright—Phi Bete, Columbia—great sense of fun.”

“What does he do?”

Robin had steeled herself for the question. She would put off full disclosure as long as possible.

“He works in the Senate.”

“For whom?”

“Oh, Daddy, do you want a cookie with tea?”

“Yes. For whom does your beautiful young man work?”

It was no use. “He works for Senator McCarthy.”

Her father appeared in the kitchen. “Joe McCarthy?”

“Umm,” said Robin, biting on a cookie.

“Oh, my God, Robin.” Alex laughed, took his tea, and sat down. “I’m being investigated by the man who is the boss of your
boyfriend.”

“Daddy, come on. I don’t think Senator McCarthy has anything to do with the business you talked about yesterday. And certainly
my—he’s not exactly my ‘boyfriend.’ He is somebody I met at a White House party. You’ll like him, I’m sure of that, Daddy.”

“Well, don’t let him come around. He’ll become a security risk. Be sure to ask him tonight if Senator McCarthy has located
every … consumer. No—” Herrendon checked himself immediately. No taunts. Nothing provocative. “Just, well, just have a good
time.”

The following day, Alex came in from his golf game with Simon Budge, invigorated by the physical exercise, gratified by his
score, and indolently relaxed in the clement weather. Robin was upstairs but heard him come in. “Good day, Daddy?”

“Fine day. Shot an eighty-four. I’m thinking maybe of going into tournament golf.”

Robin laughed and came down the stairs in a gray cotton suit with starched white collar, lapels, and cuffs. She wore her mother’s
pearls and gold and ruby earrings.

“And where are you going, all dressed up?”

“I’m going to the races at Laurel.”

“Oh? Who with?”

“With my new friend, Harry.” She breathed deeply for fear he would ask who else was going.

He didn’t.

She kissed him, looked at her watch, and walked down the stairs to P Street. Harry said he would appear at her door in his
Chevy at
“exactly
11:32. I use CIA protocols. Never arrange to meet somebody at 11:30 or 11:35, because that way they’ll wobble in one direction
or the other on the designated time. When you work for Joe McCarthy, you’ve
got
to be exact because he
never is.
He told me he’d be ready at eleven. That means he’ll be ready at 11:20, which is just right for 11:32 at your door.”

“You mean Senator McCarthy will be
in your car?”

“Yes. And also Jean Kerr. She’ll be Mrs. McCarthy soon.”

“I’ll be there,” was all that Robin could manage.

The domestic explosion came the following day.

A picture in the
Washington Post,
two couples, all four figures smiling. The caption: “Coming in with the winner. ‘We bet on the winner. Always do!’ said Senator
Joseph McCarthy. Accompanied here by his fiancee, Jean Kerr, McCarthy aide Harry Bontecou, and date.”

HANBERRY, 1991

Harry Bontecou continued to answer questions as Alex Herrendon fired them off. It was on the third day, after breakfast, that
Harry came in. He shook off the rain after his brisk walk. They sat down in the study at their customary positions, and Harry
said he had done “a lot of thinking” the night before. “Things aren’t quite right.”

Alex leaned back, apprehensive. He didn’t want to run any risk of losing Harry. His concern was sincere. “Is the work too
… heavy? Too detailed?—”

“No, no. The long hours don’t bother me, and I welcome the chance to look back more on that scene, straighten out my own mind
on the subject. But what I considered last night is this: I’m as curious about what you know and did as you are about what
I knew and did, and of course, what McCarthy knew and did. I’m as interested in what
you
can tell
me
as you are in what
I
can tell
you.”

“Interested how? You mean interested professionally? Or do you mean—interested personally?”

“Well, both. I spent three years chasing down Communists and pro-Communists. You were a Communist. Worse, you were a spy.
I don’t want you to tell me again what it was that shook you loose. I read your famous essay in
Encounter
about your reaction to Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech in 1956, and that was thirty years ago—”

“Yes, that was what did it.” Herrendon reflected. Harry had told
him he didn’t want to hear about it “again.” He could understand. “It obviously pains you that I stayed with the Communists
through the show trials, through the Hitler-Stalin pact, through the Iron Curtain—right up until Khrushchev himself, addressing
the entire Communist fraternity, dethroned Stalin, to whom I—and a lot of others—well, you know this—swore allegiance.” Again
he paused. “Well, as you remind me, I gave my reasons in that essay in
Encounter.”

“I remember them. I read your story with intense curiosity at every level. The Twentieth Congress alienated more American
Communists than the Hitler-Stalin pact, it looks like.”

“What we were told by Khrushchev on February 24, 1956, was the equivalent of telling us that everything the fascist world
had been saying about Stalin for twenty years—was correct. Did you ever run into Howard Fast?”

“No. I know about him, obviously.”

“Yes. Well, Howard is of course known as a novelist and historian. But he was an editor of the
Daily Worker when
the Khrushchev speech was leaked. As you know, leaking that speech was a CIA operation. It had been delivered three weeks
before. Delivered in the very closed chamber in the Kremlin where the Communist congresses take place.

“Well, the big question, in the offices of the
Worker
when it came in, was: Should we publish Khrushchev’s speech? Or bury it? The editor in chief of the
Worker
warned that if they published it, they’d lose ten percent of the members of the Communist Party. Howard Fast said, No, you’re
wrong: We’ll lose
fifty
percent. They finally reckoned there was no way to keep it hidden, so they did publish it. And lost not fifty percent of
the members of the party, but ninety percent—or so Howard Fast told someone I know. So I suppose the point I am stressing
is the shock value of that speech to some of the Soviet colonials.” He paused again and this time got up from his chair and
walked toward the window. But after a moment, perhaps afraid he would sound theatrical, he reached for his pipe and sat down:
Alex, Lord Herrendon, gone back to work. But he didn’t mind describing to Harry—especially to Harry—something of the personal
impact.

“What I did not relate in my
Encounter
piece was the agony I felt from then on in coming up in my mind with some means of—atonement. There is much literature on
that theme, the great ideological hangovers of such as Koestler and Muggeridge and Utley, Eugene
Lyons—the list is vast. In my own case I thought to make the point I wanted to make by dropping out of sight and living in
poverty, doing menial work in a hospital in Liverpool. I swore to myself I’d do it for an entire year. I lasted ten months,
and learned then quite by accident—from a hospital cancer specialist who had been called to give treatment in London to a
special patient—that my father was terminally ill. I went to him and in his closing hours told him what it was that I had
done for over ten years. He communicated his understanding. He couldn’t speak, but he nodded his head, in a particular way.
He was himself much addicted to lost causes, though not to ignoble causes, as I was.”

Harry stopped him. “I understand.” And once again attempted to emphasize to Lord Herrendon that “my purposes are not inquisitorial.
I don’t think we want to go into the question of
why
you had to wait until 1956 to quit the party. People see the light at different times. But I am interested in how you wrestled
with the McCarthy problem. I know that your file was pulled out for a going over, because I spotted it on one of those lists
we accumulated in McCarthy’s office: a list of people the State Department wanted to look into. What I don’t remember is what
it was that caught the attention of the State Department.”

“It was this. Sometime in the thirties, I now forget just when, I signed a petition got up by the National Consumers League
protesting utility rates. It turned out that the league was under Communist control. As you can imagine, I was pretty apprehensive.
I didn’t want a half dozen FBI agents training their microscopes on my past, though I had been pretty careful.”

“Okay, okay.” Harry was anxious to get with the point he had set out to make. “Listen, Alex: One. You want to do a book on
the formation and cultivation of pro-Communist sentiment in the West in the postwar years.

“Two. I’m interested in the anti-Communist sentiment in the West in the postwar years, and of course the two are related.
But you’ve brought on an itch, to look back at the whole Joe McCarthy scene, something I never expected to do.”

Alex leaned back in his chair. “Harry, I’ve no objection to your producing your own scholarly work on the era. I don’t see
that my own work will suffer in the least—quite the contrary—from your
expressing your curiosity and getting from me my own story as a soldier on both fronts of the Cold War.”

“Good. It’s odd how I can sit and talk fraternally—”Harry, a faint smile on his face, looked up at Alex—”with someone who
was doing his best to bring misery to the—” He stopped, then looked away. “Sorry about that. It isn’t quite as if you were
Marcus Wolf.” Harry’s reference to the spymaster and master killer of the former East Germany was strong stuff.

“No, at least I wasn’t Marcus Wolf. Marcus Wolf, as keeper of the wall in Berlin, tortured and killed. I didn’t do that. I’m
afraid to ask myself: Would I have done that if the party had asked?”