Blacklist (14 page)

CHAPTER 14

Gaps in the Newsreel

Many people saw Olin Taverner as your husband’s greatest enemy, Renee. Can you explain to us why Calvin Bayard continued to see Olin Taverner socially?” Dennis Logan cocked his head at Renee Bayard with an intense sincerity that made her withdraw deeper into her studio chair.

Lotty and I were sitting with Max Loewenthal, watching the interview in the back room where Lotty keeps her television. Max, who’s known Lotty practically her whole life, is the executive director of Beth Israel, where Lotty has her surgical privileges. The two have been lovers for many years, but since last fall they’ve become much closer. In a way, I resented not having Lotty to myself as much as I used to, but I like and respect Max.

Over roast chicken and a bottle from Max’s impressive cellar-which I was still too congested to appreciate-we talked idly about a number of things, including Max’s perennial struggle to find a way to bring more paying patients into the hospital. One of his board members had suggested getting designer hospital gowns for affluent patients.

“Great idea,” I applauded. “How can we really tell we’ve got a two-tier health care system if we don’t have outfits that demonstrate it? Armani in a soft gold silk for the privately insured, gray overwashed nylon for the wretched poor.”

Max laughed, but Lotty wasn’t willing to joke about the matter. She uses

her substantial surgical fees to fund a number of health programs for the un-or underinsured, but she’s acutely aware of how small a drop that is in the health care bucket.

I changed the subject hastily, describing my encounters with young Catherine Bayard. Lotty and Max had immigrated to America from Britain in the late fifties. By the time they’d arrived here, the HUAC hearings had pretty well died down, so she and Max didn’t know the names or histories of the key players, but they were interested enough to follow me to the television after dinner. We turned on the nine o’clock news on Channel 13.

To my surprise, the show started not with Olin Taverner’s death, but with the parents’ meeting at Vina Fields that Catherine had mentioned. I wouldn’t have thought that was newsworthy, but I guess angry rich people shouting at each other makes good theater.

The segment opened with Beth Blacksin standing in front of Vina Fields. “This discreet stone facade hides the entrance to a Chicago power institution. It’s here that Grahams, Bayards, Felittis and other Chicagoans whose names spell clout send their children. It’s a mile from the Cabrim Green housing projects, but a light-year from the turmoil of an inner-city school. No gangs, no guns here. But lately this calm building has itself been caught up in turmoil over whether they’ve been harboring not street gangs, but an international terrorist. Parents and administrators have been anguishing over whether student records, including what books students check out of the library, should be open to law enforcement agencies. At the center of this upheaval is an Egyptian dishwasher, Benjamin Sadawi, who disappeared three weeks ago.”

The station showed a photo of the youth in the white shirt and tie Mr. Contreras and I had seen last night. “The Justice Department claims he fled to his terrorist cell’s hideout. They want to examine all school records to see if these might shed some light on his disappearance. The First Freedoms Forum is trying to intervene to keep the justice Department out of school files. We spoke to lawyer Judith Ohana before the meeting. Judith, what’s at stake here?”

A tall, slim woman took the mike with practiced ease. “This is basically a witch-hunt, Beth. If one of the children from this school was in Cairo, and the army came in to confiscate books and papers and computers because of a rumor about a missing dishwasher, everyone in America would

be outraged. That’s what’s happening here: a few parents are fanning the flames of mob hysteria. Do they really want their children’s private thoughts to be the bedtime reading of FBI or INS agents?”

Beth then took us inside the school so we could watch the parents discuss what they wanted school administrators to do. People were screaming at each other with the hearty venom of a hockey game. An angry man came to the center mike to say his daughter was a student at Vina Fields. “My child’s safety is paramount. I won’t have the school sheltering terrorists because of some First Amendment gobbledygook that puts my child’s life at risk.”

Other parents jumped into the fray, then Renee Bayard came to the mike. She was still wearing the red dress, which stood out vividly against the gray suits and ties around her.

“We all want our children to be safe in school, at home, on the streets, in the air. When our children are at risk, we don’t care about law, or justice, or abstractions, we only care about their safety. I’m the same way. And that’s why I don’t want police agents meddling in my granddaughter’s school records. I don’t want some private opinion my daughter put in an essay scrutinized by the FBI to see whether she’s a security risk. Adolescents think in extremes. It’s their nature. If they have to second-guess everything they write or read, then pretty soon we’ll have a country of robots. We won’t have the freethinking, creative young people who have the zest for experiment, even for risk, that makes American business lead the world.”

The camera cut away during another angry salvo from the man who objected to First Amendment gobbledygook. “That was Renee Bayard, CEO of Bayard Publishing,” Beth said. “Her husband Calvin, a leading First Amendment advocate, fought memorable battles with Chicago lawyer Olin Taverner, who died today at ninety-one. Stay with us after the news for Chicago Talks, when we’ll be discussing Olin Taverner’s life and career. Renee Bayard will describe her husband’s clashes with Taverner in the House of Representatives. For now, I’m Beth Blacksin, live at Vina Fields Academy on Chicago’s Gold Coast.”

A battery of commercials came on; Lotty muted the sound. “Could the FBI really have put that kid in custody without telling his mother or anyone at the school?” Max was troubled.

I grimaced. “Morrell just did a story for Margent about a Pakistani

immigrant who vanished from his Uptown apartment last October. His family searched frantically for him, but it was only after the guy died out in Coo’ hs prison that the Feds told his sons they’d been holding the father for eleven weeks. I did the local legwork for Morrell on that-it seems a neighbor had reported seeing a suspicious-looking van pull up on September 15 with a large box: turned out to be a new toilet, but by then the FBI had moved on, and INS didn’t think that bit of information was relevant.”

“And this boy? They could do that to a child?” Lotty demanded.

“He’s sixteen or seventeen. If he really is a terrorist, that’s plenty old enough to be planning something.”

“So you believe the FBI or whoever it is has a right to turn the school upside down looking for him?”

“I didn’t say that. Just that in the context of terror, kids younger than he is are making and using bombs. As to whether the Feds have the right-I don’t know what rights this Patriot Act gives them. If he’s an undocumented immigrant, the kid doesn’t have any rights under the new lawbut whether that extends to the place where he worked, well, I guess that’s why First Freedoms jumped in here. To test the act’s limits.”

Max and Lotty looked at each other. They’d met in London as child refugees from Nazi Europe, where they’d seen their own families and friends arrested and killed without being charged or tried. Neither of them spoke, until Lotty quietly said she’d make me a hot drink to help my cold. When I started to follow her, Max shook his head at me. By the time she came back, with a mug of something soothing and lemony, the interminable weather report and endless commercials were over.

Lotty returned as Dennis Logan gave his provocative introduction to his interview with Renee.

“I didn’t realize this was a gossip show, Dennis:’ Renee responded. “It’s been many years since my husband saw Olin Taverner except to say hello. Of course, they grew up in the same milieu and knew the same people; you don’t walk out of a meeting with a senator or a governor just because you don’t like one of his other guests.”

“But your husband must have felt strongly about seeing the man who tried to ruin him accepted at many of the same political and social gatherings you attended.”

Renee leaned forward, her heavy brows meeting above her nose. “You know, Calvin and I were so busy building up Bayard Publishing, and then the foundation-looking after the First Amendment shouldn’t have to be such a full-time job, but it is-that we didn’t have time to think about Olin Taverner. Of course, we used to see him at the Symphony or the Chicago Club, but, once he moved into his retirement apartment, he stopped coming into the city. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time.”

“You didn’t think about him even though some commentators-including your own son-have been urging us to revisit the McCarthy era and see people like Taverner, or Congressman Bushnell, as American heroes, trying to protect the country from internal enemies?”

Dennis looked as earnest as if he knew or cared what he was talking about: what he really wanted was to provoke Renee into some on-air reaction. But she had her advice to Catherine well in hand: rise above it.

“I think it’s dangerous when we start to turn people who want to subvert the Constitution into heroes. We need to think especially carefully about that these days, where we’re making it hard to hear any dissent from our current government’s policies. But unlike some of our talk-show hosts and editorial writers, I don’t believe those who disagree with me should be jailed, or hounded out of the country. All I want is for them to respect my right to hold differing views from theirs.”

“Even though your own son has been among those leading the charge?” Renee Bayard’s smile grew wooden. “Edwards’s essays in Commentary and the National Review haven’t been leading a charge, Dennis. He takes a different tack on the issues than his father and I might-but at least I know that we raised a child who can think for himself. Child-of course, he’s a grown man now, with a daughter Calvin and I are incredibly proud of. She insisted on joining me in the studio tonight.”

Dennis looked a little sour as the camera moved away from him to a glowing Catherine seated at the corner of the studio. He started talking to force the camera back to his face. “Speaking of jailing people who disagree with us, Renee, people have often wondered how your husband walked away from those hearings without either a contempt citation or a sentence.”

“There was no reason for Calvin to be in prison. He committed no crime and he was never charged with one. However much our son dis

agrees with our politics, I don’t believe he would claim his father should be put in prison.”

“But Calvin was a member of the Committee for Social Thought and Justice,” Logan persisted. “And he refused to answer questions about it to Congress. That interview was shown on television; I found an old copy this afternoon when we were looking for footage on Olin Taverner”

Renee looked startled as the grainy black-and-white tape began to run. It took us back to the old House hearing rooms, with men in the doublebreasted suits of the day. I recognized Calvin Bayard at once: his lean face, pale hair, even the good-humored smile with which he greeted someone behind him, were much as they’d been when he spoke to my law school class twenty years later. He sat alone at a table facing the committee, not even a lawyer at his side, his long legs stretched out in a pantomime of the man at ease. On a raised dais, six men faced him from behind a nest of microphones.

Channel 13 had written the men’s names in white above their heads. Olin Taverner, austere, hair combed back from his forehead, looked like the model for the upright public man. In contrast, Congressman Walker Bushnell, the committee chair, had a face as round as a lollipop; his buzzcut hair turned him into the caricature of a thug.

Taverner spoke first. “You were at a meeting of the Committee for Social Thought and justice on June 14, 1948, in Eagle River, Wisconsin, were you not, Mr. Bayard?”

Calvin Bayard chuckled. “I attend a great many meetings, Olin, just as you do. I don’t remember all the names and dates. You must have an amazing calculating machine in your head if you can remember the exact date of meetings that far back.”

Taverner leaned forward. “We have testimony from other witnesses whose memories are good that you were in Eagle River on June 14, 1948. Do you dispute this?”

Bayard answered impatiently, “I can’t discuss the matter because I don’t know whether you had testimony or not, and I don’t know who did or didn’t provide it.”

Taverner slapped the tabletop. “We have reliable testimony that you were at this meeting. Who else was present with you?”

Bayard hooked his fingers in his belt loops and leaned back in his seat. “Mr. Chairman, when Mr. Taverner and I were boys in rural Illinois, we often found weasels and rats prowling around our henhouse. They like to slide through the cracks under cover of dark. The weasel doesn’t come out in broad daylight and meet you face to face the way a dog will.

“Now, I wouldn’t like to characterize any of my distinguished friends in the publishing or entertainment industry this way, or even those serving this committee, because every man at the end of the day has to face his own conscience in the privacy of his bedchamber, and my conscience may tell me something different than what yours, or those of my friends’, do. But slithering around under cover of darkness, or under pretense of patriotism, why my dog would know what to do with a creature that acted like that.”

A gasp went up among the spectators in the committee room. Taverner himself started to shout something, but Walker Bushnell silenced him by reaching across to put a hand over Taverner’s microphone.

“So you refuse to tell this committee who was at the meeting with you on June 14, 1948,” Bushnell said.

Bayard looked at him steadily. “Mr. Chairman, the greatest pleasure America’s enemies have is seeing her leaders attack our cornerstone, the right to free speech, a free press, free association. I will not give succor to our enemies by violating those rights.”