Personal History (30 page)

The night of my dinner, conversation went well enough during the meal, which was perfectly peaceful except that both Donald and Prich got rather drunker than I realized. After dinner we moved out of the dining room into our front room, a small area with only space for a sofa, four chairs, and a bench in front of the fireplace. No sooner had we settled down there than the conversation got edgy. Prich and Donald began to tease Isaiah about his social life, which they portrayed as being too conciliatory of right-wing or isolationist people. Everyone teased hard in those days, but that night the teasing gradually slid into acrimony and became unpleasant, exacerbated no doubt by Prich’s and Donald’s alcohol consumption.

Out of the blue, Donald said to Isaiah, “The trouble with you is you hunt with the hounds and run with the hares. You know people like Alice Longworth; that’s disgusting. One shouldn’t know people like that. If I thought you knew her out of curiosity, I wouldn’t mind so much. But I’m told you actually like her company. That is dreadful.”

Isaiah asked why Donald thought it was dreadful.

“Because she’s fascist and right-wing. She’s everything that’s awful,” Donald spat out.

Isaiah, totally taken aback, summoned up his courage and replied, “Well, you know, we’re supposed to be fighting for civilization. Civilization entails that we’re allowed to know anybody we wish. It’s true that in wartime or during the revolution one may be prepared to shoot them, that I concede, but so long as one doesn’t have to … Of course, one must be judged by one’s friends. I don’t deny that either. That is my defense.” Donald immediately pounced, saying, “That’s wrong. What you say is absolutely false. Life is a battle. We must know which side we’re on. We must stick to our side through thick and thin. I know at the last moment, the twelfth hour, you’ll be on our side. But until then, you’ll go about with these dreadful people.”

Isaiah claims that I then said, “He’s absolutely right.”

Donald kept battering Isaiah: “The trouble is you’re a coward. You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong and you will not cut out in time to defend the right cause. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

The poor Binghams were flabbergasted. They didn’t know what it was all about and shuffled around nervously. At one point I went upstairs and looked out the window to see Donald Maclean relieving himself on the front lawn. The nightmare evening seemed completely out of control. Finally, everyone decided at once that it was time to go. Melinda offered Isaiah a lift, to which he responded, “No, certainly not.” Donald, still pursuing his line, added, “Oh, you wouldn’t take a lift from us, oh, never.”

So ended my first dinner party as a single hostess.

Prich and I called Isaiah separately after the dinner, apologizing for what had happened and asking him what to do to heal the wounds. I found him angry and bruised. His response to me was, “Prich has no manners anyway, so he doesn’t know any better, and I will forgive him eventually. But Donald Maclean does know better, and I’ll never speak to him again.”

Years passed, and Andrew Boyle, interviewing Isaiah for a book he was writing, asked, “What made all those young men in Cambridge go left-wing?” Isaiah then told Boyle about this dinner. In describing it, he said he felt like Douglas Fairbanks in one of those old films, fending off several of the enemy at once. The first edition of the book added an untrue but funny touch to the drama of the evening by solemnly reporting, “Donald Maclean turned upon his stockier colleague and attacked him for his political views. He would have struck him but Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., thrust himself between them.” That bit was removed from the second edition. What actually happened was dramatic enough for me.

As the spring of 1945 approached, I realized I would have to move—our lease was about to expire and our cozy little house, which we had been in off and on for almost five years, would be too small after the new baby came in April. I had hoped to rent, but there was little or nothing to be had, so I faced buying a house, which worried me without Phil around to consult. He was supportive, however, saying that he thought my judgment was sound, agreeing that I should rent if I could but buy if a bargain or necessity forced me to. By “bargain” he meant “something irresistible rather than something for half price.” He also felt that eventually we would want to live farther out than Georgetown, particularly if the time ever again came when there was sufficient gas to move around freely.

In early March, as I was in the throes of looking for a house and nearing the due date for the baby, I got word that Phil would be coming back to Washington with General Kenney for a few days of meetings. I went out to the military airport to welcome them when they arrived on March 14 in a C-54, the first four-engine plane I had ever seen. Their mission, which I certainly wasn’t aware of at the time, was to argue that Japan was through. Special Branch knew that the Japanese were weaker than General Marshall and many others thought. The meetings also had to do with the need for an immediate invasion of Japan. “I didn’t believe it was necessary to wait for Hitler to fold nor did we need help from the Russians to beat Japan,” wrote General Kenney later. General Marshall didn’t agree, believing the Japanese still had a lot of fight left in them, and certainly a large army that would have to be defeated. Initially, General Kenney was not going to be allowed by the top brass to see the president, but Phil, through his friends in the White House, arranged a meeting. Kenney reported that FDR looked tired and gray and that his hands shook when he
held some photos of Corregidor. Roosevelt told Kenney he had lost twenty-five pounds and had no appetite.

Though the visit was exciting in many ways, it was also frantic, and a very strained reunion for Phil and me. I was feeling the pressure of looking for a new house. At the same time, I was laboring under the usual stresses of being eight months pregnant. I always seemed to carry my babies right out front, and I produced big babies. And there was an early heat wave, which made me more miserable than ever.

Phil was already strung out and exhausted from the long trip back to Washington, on top of which he was busy the entire week, working about fourteen hours a day. He spent a large part of his nights phoning the families of his colleagues back in the Philippines, so we didn’t have much chance to see each other. I was dispatched with a shopping list and spent my days running around town gathering gifts and necessities for him to take back—cigars for the men; housecoats, bobby pins, and even cotton panties for the WACS; sardines and whiskey for everyone. I then had to sit down and tape the cork tops of the liquor bottles so they wouldn’t pop under the poor pressurization of the plane on the return trip.

Toward the end of the week, I begged Phil to look at a house I had found and settled on buying, a sort of solid, unimaginative, but adequate gray stone house behind a Sears, Roebuck store in a rather nondescript neighborhood. Phil, his mind on Kenney’s mission and not on house-hunting, walked through the house in a dazed and uninterested way, saying it looked fine to him and agreeing to it without enthusiasm.

Phil and General Kenney were to take off at eight the next morning, and as I was driving Phil to the airport, he told me that the real-estate agent had called him, very embarrassed, to say that the house turned out to be in a restricted area—meaning it was zoned against sale to either Jews or Negroes. It took me totally by surprise. The issue of my Jewish identity had never arisen in a discriminatory way except for the incident about clubs at the University of Chicago, so I was more or less oblivious to the problem. Phil said that it was totally illegal and we could sue, but he didn’t think I’d want to do that on my own. He then said, “I don’t much like the house anyway. I’m afraid you’ll have to go on looking.” The thought of extending the search still further added an extra pall to his departure.

So, with the baby only a few weeks away, and without a house for us to move to, Phil flew back to the Pacific. In desperation, I bought the next house to come along—one at 33rd and O Streets in Georgetown, a very odd house with two living rooms on the ground floor and a kitchen and dining room in the basement. I wrote Phil that we had bought a house I didn’t much like.

For the first time I faced paying for a house and furnishing it. I worried whether I could make such a purchase without dipping into capital; in
fact, I didn’t really know the difference between capital and income, or that there was such a thing as a mortgage—a typical example of my ignorance about handling money. In my parents’ zeal not to discuss money, they neglected ever to explain what you could and couldn’t do with what you had. Nor had I ever asked my father about financing a house; and he didn’t offer to tell me how much I could or should sensibly allot.

I was also entirely at sea about decorating or how much it was appropriate to spend. I found a decorator, a nice woman who ran an antiques store a few blocks away from the new house. She asked if I liked English or French furniture and what I could afford. I replied blankly that I had no idea what she was talking about—I didn’t know there was a distinction between English or French, much less what either would cost. I still have remnants of some of the furniture I acquired then, but it took many decorating experiences and corrected mistakes before I knew how I wanted things to look.

I moved into the new house that summer. Though it was considerably larger and harder to run than the old one, at least I had a place to live.

O
N
A
PRIL
12, 1945, the world got the news that FDR had died. None of us realized how ill he had been, so we were stunned. It seemed as though we had suddenly lost a father figure in whom we had the greatest confidence and were confronted by an unknown, relatively inexperienced, and seemingly uninspiring Midwestern former senator, Harry Truman. With an overwhelming sadness, I went down to see the funeral procession that brought the president’s casket from the train to the White House. A week later, I went back to the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, my mother accompanying me, to await the birth of the new baby. Donald Edward was born three days later, on April 22.

Don was quite unexpected-looking to me and seemed to resemble no one I knew of in either of our families, although his mouth was slightly like mine. He was light in coloring and had not much hair of any kind, but such as there was was light brown. I thought he was quite a character from the beginning. To commemorate Phil’s thirtieth birthday, my father wrote him an account of how he viewed our two children. His letter was amazingly prescient: “Lally is getting more important to me weekly.…” He called Donald “Judge” because:

T
HE WAR IN
E
UROPE
ended on May 7, but the war in the Pacific went on, culminating on August 6, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The letter Phil wrote me the next day contains his appropriate reactions to the concept of the bomb but no indication that he realized it had been dropped on a city filled with civilians:

But on August 11 he wrote again, saying that the first bomb had “scared the living hell out of me.”

Most of September passed with rumors of Phil’s being sent to Japan, but he thought there was nothing substantive for him to do there, and by that time he wanted nothing more than to come home. Under the system by which the men and women in the armed forces overseas accumulated points that put them in line for returning home—Don had added six points to Phil’s total—he received his orders on September 27 and was on a waiting list with the Air Transport Command, with a good chance of leaving within ten days. He was close to being embarrassed at getting away so easily, but he was grateful. And so was I.

B
ACK IN
W
ASHINGTON
lay an uncertain future. Despite his earlier agreement to work at the
Post
, Phil still seemed undecided about what he was going to do. Al Friendly had written to him, talking about his own desire to return to the
Post
and pleading with Phil to “go Postward.” At the end of August 1945, Phil told Al that there had been a general agreement with my father the year before but nothing had been said since. In addition, Phil’s father, Ernie, was persistent in urging that he come to Florida to help run the dairy business. Even as late as September, Ernie had written Phil about what he called “the set-up out here,” referring to the farm at Hialeah, which Ernie said was “too good a thing to be turned down without thought.”

Somewhere along the way, Phil made up his mind. On December 28, there was an announcement that he would join the paper on January 1, 1946. The next day, a letter from Phil’s friends and associates at Lend-Lease—Oscar Cox, Joe Rauh, Al Davidson, Buster Stoddard, Lloyd Cutler, Winthrop Brown, Louis Hector, and Malcolm Langford—appeared on the editorial page praising the appointment, listing his achievements, and congratulating the
Post
on hiring him. His friends obviously wanted to tell
Post
readers that this was more than the publisher’s son-in-law—that he had a demonstrably distinguished track record of his own.