The Unwitting (33 page)

So this is the way we fight the cold war, not with guns or words, but with blended whiskey.

May 12, 1953

I’m beginning to understand what I got myself into. Not the funding. I still believe in that. But the lie. I feel as if, in the spirit of altruism,
I brought home some harmless stray, and now it’s grown into a monster that’s eating us out of house and home, fouling the apartment, and keeping me up nights howling at the moon. Note to my sixty-year-old self: that may sound like hyperbole, but it’s the way I feel.

We were sitting in my office yesterday evening, Nell, Sonia, Gus, and I. I had just liberated the scotch from the bottom drawer, the one that’s designed for files so it’s tall enough for whiskey bottles, when Wally came in.

“Now hear this, staff,” he announced. “I just got a call from the firm that handles our subscriptions. It seems we’re the coming thing in Western Europe and—drumroll please—India. Ninety-seven new subscribers in France, 85 in Italy, 62 in all the Scandinavian countries combined—must be those long winter nights—and, are you ready, 138 in India. A grand total of 382. That brings our foreign circulation to 2196.”

Wally said it called for a drink, Gus pointed out we were already drinking, and Sonia lifted her glass and made a toast to our fearless editor. Nell didn’t say anything. She just sat looking at me with an expression that shut out everyone else in the room. Under normal circumstances, it would have given me a hard-on. Last night it emasculated me.

If we had been alone, I would have told her, eternal confidentiality be damned. But we weren’t, and I didn’t. All 382 subscriptions were purchased by the Drinkwater Foundation and sent to unsuspecting but ripe-for-conversion-to-Western-ways readers abroad.

June 12, 1953

This morning McClellan called to talk about Nell’s piece in the current issue. The minute he mentioned it, I bristled. I hadn’t told him I’d put her on staff. It’s no more his business who writes for
Compass
than what they write.

“I have to admit,” he said, “I was worried when I saw the title. ‘Book Banning in the United States and Russia.’ It’s not that we don’t want you to run anything critical of the U.S. We don’t want
Compass
looking like a front organization,” he said for what must have been the hundredth time. “But I don’t think you can equate the two systems.”

“It doesn’t.”

He laughed. “I know. The title worried me, but the piece was a nice little slice of history. I knew
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had been banned in the Confederacy; I didn’t know it was banned in tsarist Russia. Congratulate her for me.”

I told him I would, but after we got off the phone, something was still bothering me. If he called to say what he liked in the magazine, was he going to call to complain about what he didn’t? *Oh, was I naïve. 12/28/55

September 23, 1953

The stakes have been raised. Note the passive voice. Old Charlie Benjamin didn’t do anything to raise them. He’s just an innocent bystander. He didn’t agree to take the funding. He didn’t swear goddamn eternal confidentiality. I’m beginning to sound like some latter-day second-rate Hamlet, awash in indecision and self-pity.

Last night, Abby was fretting about something. She’s a tiny mystery, a terrifyingly fragile package of unexpected gurgles and smiles and murderous rages. Last night was one of the murderous occasions. It must have been around one when she started crying. Nell got up and went in to her. The crying didn’t stop. It merely went from room to room, as Nell changed her, gave her water, and carried her around the apartment humming a futile lullaby. I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again, the clock on the night table said three ten and the apartment was silent. It took me a
moment to realize Nell was in bed and Abby was between us. We know we’re not supposed to do that. We’ve read the books. Not healthy for the baby, the experts insist. Maybe they’re right, but there comes a point in the middle of a sleepless night, in a sequence of sleepless nights, that I’d risk Abby’s future mental and physical health with a stiff scotch down her sweet little gullet if it would quiet her.

Nell was on her side of the bed with her left arm across the baby. I reached my right arm around both of them. Abby smacked her lips. Nell sighed. I lay in the dark thinking that I was betraying one to protect the other. I hate lying to Nell, but I like to think that I’m doing some tiny part to make the world safer for Abby. Surely Nell will forgive that.

Note to my sixty-year-old self: I hear the fatuousness of the phrase. It was still in my head when I got up this morning. Woodrow Wilson got us into World War I to make the world safe for democracy, and look where that led.

October 1, 1953

Today Elliot and I were having lunch at his club when he announced that the foundation has decided to take out a life insurance policy for me. All I could think of, again, was the young editor from
Encounter
who’d kept changing taxis in London. I’d laughed at his self-importance then, but suddenly it didn’t strike me as that funny. I asked Elliot if there was something about this funding arrangement he had neglected to mention.

He smiled, and it occurred to me that, for a grown man, he has very small teeth. He said the Agency valued the work I was doing and wanted to keep me happy.

“This seemed a good way to do it, now that you have a family. We were thinking of three hundred thousand dollars.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So if you do send someone to break my kneecaps, Nell and the baby will be in high cotton.”

We both laughed, but the joke is wearing a little thin.

March 25, 1954

I had lunch with Elliot again today. It turns out he’s a big Housman fan. He said he never would have guessed it of me. Most unmodern, he pointed out. Not in the least, I countered. If you listen carefully, you hear the coming of Hemingway.

It was pretty much a social lunch, little business involved. He even told a funny, well, perhaps not so funny, story about some Drinkwater meddling (my phrase) with a screenwriter in Hollywood. The CIA, through the foundation, has long arms. Apparently, they persuaded the screenwriter to insert a couple of negro characters in a movie, not as servants or slaves or minstrels, but as respectable, if minor, characters. The idea was that when the movie plays overseas, the characters will put the lie to the stories the Soviets sell about racism in America. Not without good cause, Elliot said before I could. The problem is the movie is being shown here too, and now southern theaters are refusing to run it unless the negro characters are cut. Wouldn’t Nell love to do a story on that?

April 10, 1954

I lost my temper with Elliot today. He didn’t exactly object to the piece on Brecht. He never objects. He just wondered if
Compass
really wanted to heap so much praise on an apologist for Stalin. I pointed out that the article was about Brecht’s art, not his politics.

“You can’t look at one and ignore the other,” he argued.

“That’s not what you say when I run something on von Karajan
or Furtwängler. Nobody breathes a word about their late lamented Nazism.”

He backed down in the end. He always does. But sometimes I wonder if his objections aren’t having a more insidious effect. Am I beginning to censor the magazine instinctively? The other night Nell and I had an argument about it. No, not an argument, a discussion.

“That sounds like Elliot talking,” she said when I explained that I didn’t think the fact that a distinguished Brecht biographer was fired from Brooklyn College after taking the Fifth was relevant to an article on Brecht’s art.

She agreed that it might not be relevant to Brecht’s art, but it was to the state of freedom in America.

Finally, we both let it go, but her comment about my sounding like Elliot rankled. The idea of Elliot’s trying to influence editorial policy is irritating. The idea of my being co-opted without realizing it is demoralizing.

July 22, 1954

Nell was right. It was no accident that Sydney Gruson was pulled off the Guatemala story. Someone at the CIA was spreading rumors around the
Times
that Gruson was a dangerous radical with communist connections and therefore not the correspondent to cover the overthrow of a left-leaning president. By the time the powers that be at the paper realized they’d been had, it was too late. The problem is that I can’t run anything on it. I have no proof, only off-the-record accounts from friends at the
Times
. But if they’re right, what kind of an organization am I in bed with? I asked Elliot that. He insisted the Gruson incident was blown out of proportion, but he couldn’t say any more about it, yet. He must have seen I didn’t buy it, because then he brought up the Geneva Accords. “We just signed all of Vietnam above the seventeenth parallel over to the communists, whose dirty tricks make our methods look like playground pranks. Now
maybe that doesn’t worry you, old buddy, but it scares the hell out of me.”

August 1, 1954

Today, Elliot surprised me. He called to talk about the next issue. I suspect he courts Dottie, the new secretary, to get an early look at what’s likely to be in it. I expected him to go through the roof at Nell’s piece on McCarthy. Maybe I even wanted him to. Nell didn’t call me a coward for not running it, but I knew that was what she was thinking. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I decided to publish it. (When did proving my masculinity become editorial policy?) But Elliot didn’t even mention the article.

August 28, 1954

Elliot complimented Nell on her piece about McCarthy. That was when I realized why he hadn’t objected when he saw the table of contents. He’s pleased because now that McCarthy is pretty much yesterday’s news, the article proves once again that the magazine isn’t a front. It embarrasses me to realize how slow on the uptake I was.

September 7, 1954

The letter came yesterday. I’m to report to something in Washington called the Office of Security, a.k.a. FBI. I went straight to Elliot’s office—I didn’t want to discuss this on the phone—and asked him what in hell was going on. I’m taking government funds to fight communism, and the FBI is accusing me of being a communist.

Elliot said I’m being called in precisely because I’m cooperating—what an anodyne term—with the CIA. Everyone knows about the fierce competition between the FBI and the CIA.

“It’s unconscionable,” Elliot added. “Suddenly, Fordham men are deciding whether Yale and Harvard men are fit to work.”

I told him, boola boola and all that, but I’m just a Columbia man caught in the middle.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The Agency has to let them call you in, but they won’t let anything happen to you. The Agency takes care of its own.”

When did I become the CIA’s own? And if I am, why can’t I tell Nell they’re going to look after me? She’s worried sick about this business, and all I can give her are empty reassurances.

September 8, 1954

Last night I almost did it. I almost said to hell with confidentiality, temporary or eternal, and told Nell.

I’d brought Elliot home for a drink. I think I was hoping that he could find a way to reassure her about this inquisition without telling her the Agency takes care of its own. It didn’t work out that way.

When I came back to the living room after going in to see Abby, I sensed they’d been talking about my being called in, though neither of them mentioned it. Then sometime early this morning, lying in bed, bound by the muscle-tense cord of our shared insomnia, she turned on her side and wound herself around me. Under other circumstances, it would have been an invitation, but neither of us was feeling amorous. We’re both too frightened. Then she spoke.

“We’re the only ones we can trust,” she whispered.

I took her hand and held it to my mouth. It was the only way to keep from confessing.

September 15, 1954

I’m writing this in my hotel room in Washington. I just got off the phone with Nell, reporting on my first day of questioning. They told
me to come back tomorrow at nine. I have no idea how long this will drag on. There’s an eerie Kafkaesque quality to it. I called Elliot out for his comment about Fordham men judging Yale and Harvard men, but the idea that those two semiliterate picklock detectives can get me blacklisted or even sent to jail for reasons I don’t know scares the hell out of me.

I’m furious at them, but I’m not feeling too good about myself either. That was the part I couldn’t tell Nell. How can I be working for a government that permits this travesty? I signed on to fight totalitarianism, but this is totalitarianism, even if it reads like the Marx brothers’ version of it.

December 7, 1954 (The Day of Infamy, all right)

Elliot was right. The Agency takes care of its own. A
favorable
decision was reached. (In case my sixty-year-old self forgets, I underline for irony.) I got the letter this morning.

I was afraid Nell would want to celebrate the news. She didn’t. She said she had no desire to celebrate something that makes her feel dirty. And she knows only half of it.

December 8, 1954

Elliot stopped by the office today to congratulate me on the good news. I told him I’d done a lot of thinking in that hotel room in D.C. It’s time for me to get out.

“Who’s going to run
Compass
?” he asked.

The question, I’m ashamed to admit, surprised me. I’d meant get out of my connection with the Agency. In my mind, I’d give up the foundation’s backing and stay on at the magazine. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. We might have to scale back to a quarterly again. But for some misguided naïve reason, I didn’t think Elliot and the rest of the board, whom he controls, would dump me. Apparently I was wrong.

I gathered the frayed skirts of my dignity around me and told him Wally Dryer would be happy to do something for his country.

“I have a better idea,” he said. “Hang on just a little longer. Now that the Senate has censured McCarthy, the witch hunts are on the way out. The country will right itself. It always has, which is more than you can say for the Soviet Union. And that’s what this is about.”