Advise and Consent (40 page)

The witness looked at him with his closed-off, stubborn expression; some inner struggle was apparently going on, and when he spoke it was in an almost inaudible voice.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t take it.”

There was a wave of excited murmurings over the room, and the first relay of wire-service reporters jumped up and raced downstairs to the press room with their bulletins. Behind the committee table Fred Van Ackerman drove his right fist into his left palm with an expression of triumph on his face, and at the table John DeWilton gave a disgusted snort. His colleagues, however impassively reserved judgment.

“Why did you say you took it, Mr. Gelman?” the nominee asked patiently. “Wasn’t that a lie?”

“I started to take it,” Herbert Gelman said doggedly, “because you asked me to. Then I got sick for a while and had to drop it. But we were still friends just the same, and we still did what I said yesterday.”

“Yes,” Bob Leffingwell said, looking thoughtfully through the papers before him, “you got sick. I believe you did get sick, Mr. Gelman. I, too,” he said with a little bow to Arly Richardson, “have received an airmail special-delivery letter from the president of the University of Chicago. It contains the information, Mr. Gelman, that in your senior year you suffered a nervous breakdown, were under treatment in the university hospital for two months, and had to leave school, returning to complete your senior courses a year later. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Herbert Gelman said almost inaudibly, “that’s true.”

“Speak up, Mr. Gelman,” Bob Leffingwell said savagely. “Speak up loud and clear. You were loud enough yesterday when you were trying to destroy me. I want you to be just as noisy today while you’re destroying yourself.”

“Yes,” Herbert Gelman said loudly, “that’s true.”

“That’s good,” Bob Leffingwell told him. “Now we can all hear. So you suffered a mental breakdown.”

“It wasn’t mental,” Herbert Gelman said stubbornly. “It was just nerves.”

“Well, you draw the distinction if you care to, Mr. Gelman,” the nominee said contemptuously. “I’m sure we’ll all listen. So how much credence are we supposed to put in the word of a mentally ill individual who was mentally ill at the time I was supposed to be conspiring with him to overthrow the government? Why should we believe
anything
you say?”

To this the witness did not reply, but instead stared at the nominee without expression until Bob Leffingwell went on.

“So you didn’t take the seminar,” he said. “You had a mental breakdown, and it’s your word against mine about these little revolutionary get-togethers of ours. Where was it you said we held them, Mr. Gelman?”

“At 2731 Carpenter Street,” Herbert Gelman said promptly. “On the second floor in that room on the left at the back.”

“You have a great talent for specific detail that might lend credibility, Mr. Gelman,” the nominee told him. “Perhaps it goes with a mind a little more—inventive, shall we say—than most. At 2731 Carpenter Street. You’re quite sure of that.”

“Pretty sure,” Herbert Gelman said slowly. “Of course I might be mistaken in a digit or two—”

“Oh, no, Mr. Gelman,” Bob Leffingwell said quickly. “Don’t try to dodge, now, just because you can see what’s coming. And don’t ever admit the possibility of your being mistaken. Your whole case here rests on the fact that it’s your word against mine, and that you, at least, never lie, are never wrong, and are never mistaken
....
Mr. Chairman, I wonder if the distinguished Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Van Ackerman, might be permitted to tell the subcommittee what he has told me about this magic address of 2731 Carpenter Street?”

“Certainly,” Brigham Anderson said. “Fred?” Senator Van Ackerman stood up behind him and rested one hand on the chairman’s shoulder in a friendly way as he spoke.

“Just the same thing I told you yesterday, Brig,” he said easily, “only you didn’t want it in the record at that particular point. There is no 2731 Carpenter Street. I called the city hall in Chicago yesterday morning and checked. It’s a vacant lot. There’s nothing there. There’s no record of anything ever having been there. That’s what I wanted you to make public yesterday, Brig, only you wouldn’t.”

“Is that all, Fred?” Senator Anderson asked impassively.

“That’s all, Brig,” Senator Van Ackerman said.

“Very well, Mr. Leffingwell,” the chairman said. “Proceed.”

“Well, by God,” the
Washington Post
whispered excitedly as Fred Van Ackerman sat down again, “what’s Brig up to, anyway?” “Maybe we’d better try to find out,” the
Herald Tribune
suggested. “I think so,” the
Providence Journal
agreed. But at the committee table, where experience had taught the lesson that it is always best to wait and watch and not jump too soon to conclusions, the chairman’s colleagues were as impassive as he, as the nominee turned back to Herbert Gelman.

“I appreciate the concern of the Senator from Wyoming about the timing of this,” Bob Leffingwell said smoothly, “and I am grateful for it, but I can also appreciate the decision of the Chair that these matters should be developed in their proper course in the record. The delay has done me no damage, I can assure the Senator from Wyoming, as long as we now have the truth made public, thanks to him. So, Mr. Gelman, no seminar, no meeting place. But you say there were meetings.”

“There were meetings on Carpenter Street,” Herbert Gelman said stubbornly. “It may have been 2733 or 2729, but it was on Carpenter Street.”

“Well, Mr. Gelman,” Bob Leffingwell said in a pitying voice, “if the facts cannot convince you, obviously nothing will. But suppose just for a moment, on a strictly hypothetical basis, we explore these alleged meetings a little bit further. According to your tale, there were actually only four people engaged in this great plot to overthrow the government—”

“I didn’t say we were plotting to overthrow the government,” Herbert Gelman interrupted.

“I stand corrected,” Bob Leffingwell conceded sarcastically. “You didn’t. There were four, at any rate, according to your story; yourself, myself, someone who is dead now, and someone named James Morton, who had a beard and you don’t know who he was or where he came from or where he is now and you probably couldn’t recognize him if you saw him again, correct?”

There was a little snicker from the audience, and Herbert Gelman if anything looked more stubborn.

“That’s right,” he said.

“And you have nothing to back this up except your own word, fortified by a record of mental breakdown and a series of exploded assertions,” Bob Leffingwell said dryly.

“You,” Herbert Gelman said slowly, “and me, and the one who died, as you know, and James Morton. That’s all.”

“And at these great sinister meetings, accepting for a moment the hypothetical—the very hypothetical—assumption that you could by the remotest chance be telling the truth,” the nominee said, “what did you do, Mr. Gelman? Suppose I read from yesterday’s transcript, page 975, Senator Richardson interrogating, and I quote:

SENATOR RICHARDSON: Why are you here, Mr. Gelman?

MR. GELMAN: For what I’ve done.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: And what was that? Did you start any riots? Did you touch off any bombs? Did you kill anybody for the cause?

MR. GELMAN: No, sir.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: How many of you were there in this so-called cell?

MR. GELMAN: Four. Mr. Leffingwell, myself, one other who is dead, and James Morton.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: That’s not a very big group to overturn the government.

MR. GELMAN: No, sir.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: And you didn’t plot anything?

MR. GELMAN: Not to my knowledge, no, sir.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: In short, you just talked, didn’t you?

MR. GELMAN: Yes, sir.

SENATOR RICHARDSON: And that’s all you did. A few ineffectual meetings fourteen years ago. Is that all?

MR. GELMAN: I’ve felt badly about it, Senator.”

Bob Leffingwell closed the transcript. “And so you should feel badly about it, Mr. Gelman,” he said softly, “coming here as you have to destroy a fellow being without facts, without proof, with nothing but the lurid imaginings of your own sick mind. You should indeed feel badly.”

But once again, instead of speaking, the witness only looked at him with the same stubborn, dogged expression, and after a moment the nominee went on.

“So even if we accept this fantastic story of meetings, nothing was done at them except talk,” he said. “So why were they held at all, Mr. Gelman,
if we permit you for a moment to get away with the assertion that they were? What were they all about, anyway?”

“We believed,” Herbert Gelman said quietly, “as you know, that we could work out a philosophy that would retain what we believed to be the best of the communist theory and apply it to this country. We knew by then what communism had turned into in Russia, and we didn’t want that here. We thought we could develop a new communism. That was your phrase, you remember—‘the new communism.’”

“You’re a liar, Mr. Gelman,” the nominee said quietly, and the witness shook his head.

“Oh, no,” he said with equal quietness.

“But supposing all you say were true,” Bob Leffingwell said in a tone of baffled wonderment as though he could not conceive how he happened to be involved in this fairy tale, “suppose the meetings were held and they discussed the new communism, whatever that is, and everything you say—it was still just talk, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Herbert Gelman said.

“Then why was it so important?” the nominee demanded in an exasperated voice. “What would it matter now? Why would it be significant of anything, if it all happened so long ago and meant so little?”

“The only reason it would be important or significant now,” the witness said, and the room quieted down completely to hear him, “would be the way in which we react to it now. If we tell the truth about it, the way I am, that is one thing. If we lie about it, as—if we lie about it, then it casts a reflection on everything we have done and raises serious questions about what we may do in the future. That is why it is important, Bob.”

At this sudden and startling use of the nickname, at which the nominee first paled and then flushed angrily, there was a sharp gasp from over the room, and as the full import of what the witness had said sunk in, it was followed by a mounting murmur of exclamation and excitement. At the committee table Orrin Knox leaned comfortably against the chairman’s arm and murmured dryly behind his hand, “He should have quit when he was ahead.” Brigham Anderson gave a grim little smile. “Let him do it his own way,” he said. Then he rapped the gavel.

“The hearing will be in order,” he said. “The Chair appreciates the audience’s co-operation with his request earlier and hopes it will continue. Are you through, Mr. Leffingwell?”

The nominee, who had regained his composure without noticeable difficulty and was once more in command of the situation, smiled pleasantly.

“No, Mr. Chairman,” he said, “not quite. We haven’t established motive here, yet. We haven’t discussed the Federal Power Commission.”

“Yes, I think that would be interesting to the subcommittee,” Senator Anderson agreed. “Proceed.”

“Now, Mr. Gelman,” Bob Leffingwell said, “and by the way, my name is Mr. Leffingwell, and I don’t recall anything, nor have you been able to prove anything, that gives you the right to call me Bob—you said you worked at the FPC in an agency close to the chairman, as I recall. After all this testimony yesterday, I went back to my office and I checked with my own personnel people, and with the Civil Service Commission, and I find that, sure enough, you did work for two years for my commission. But isn’t it true that this was as a minor clerk, not in ‘an agency close to the chairman?’ Isn’t it true that you were never in my office, and that I never had any dealings with you at all until the unfortunate episode of your retirement from the Commission?”

“I was sure you knew I was there,” Herbert Gelman said.

“That isn’t responsive to what I asked you,” the nominee said calmly.

“Because I was sure you had gotten me the job,” Herbert Gelman added, as though he had not even heard the nominee’s rejoinder.

“Are you about to have another mental breakdown, Mr. Gelman?” Bob Leffingwell asked curiously. “That would be three, wouldn’t it? Maybe you ought to go to St. Elizabeth’s for a while.”

But again the witness gave him only that dogged, stubborn stare.

“In the two years since you left the Commission,” the nominee went on, “many matters of course had come before me, and your case had entirely slipped my mind, so that yesterday when your name was mentioned to me it did not immediately ring a bell; particularly since it was mentioned to me in connection with the university, where of course, having dealt with you only as one student among many hundreds, I quite naturally had no recollection of it at all. But during your own testimony, when you mentioned the Commission, I did remember something of it; and after checking yesterday afternoon I now have all the facts in hand. The most important fact is the medical report we have on you. Not to prolong it unnecessarily, you had a second breakdown, didn’t you, Mr. Gelman, and your resignation was requested as a result of that illness?”

“Good Christ,” UPI murmured, “this guy’s a mental basket-case.” “I told you Bob would take care of him,” AP responded.

“I did have another nervous breakdown,” Herbert Gelman said, “but it wasn’t a bad one. It was just overwork, the doctor said. I could have come back if you had let me.”

“If I had let you?” Bob Leffingwell said in a tone of surprise. “Would you like me to read what our own medical report said about you, Mr. Gelman?”

“Then why did you get me another job, if you didn’t know me and I was so crazy?” Herbert Gelman demanded with a sudden anger teetering on the edge of hysteria. “Why did you let me resign voluntarily and then get me lined up over in Commerce with the Bureau of International Economic Affairs? Why did you do that for me, if nothing I’ve said was true and I’m such a mess?”

Bob Leffingwell gave him a pitying look.

“Because I was sorry for you, Mr. Gelman,” he said calmly. “You probably can’t understand that, but it’s true. It was just ordinary charity. You had done reasonably good work while you were in good health, the doctor did think you would recover with rest, and when you did there was still a feeling in the Commission that we perhaps shouldn’t abandon you altogether.”