Fellow Travelers (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

October 6, 1953

The handful of observers at the back of Room 357 could see the shoulders of the witness stiffen. Mr. Edward J. Lyons, Jr., representing the Judge Advocate General, gamely proceeded to describe the frequency with which United Nations prisoners had been “discovered with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes gouged out. They’d been used for bayonet practice and the like.”

While still in charge in Korea, General MacArthur had been determined to do things differently from the way they’d been done during World War II. Rather than waiting for victory—or, as it appeared to be turning out this time, negotiated stalemate—he’d begun investigating North Korean atrocities as soon as anyone got wind of them. The evidence of torture and brainwashing was plentiful and compelling, and Senator Charles Potter (R-Michigan) appeared to relish running this hearing that had been convened to discuss it.

McCarthy had not finished honeymooning down in Nassau, but the atrocities task force of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was Potter’s responsibility, and he seemed determined to make the most of it. There were no cameras or reporters here at this closed executive session in the Senate Office Building, and public hearings on the subject wouldn’t come until December, but even so, Potter remained energetic—no matter that the Democrats, who’d months ago quit the committee in protest of McCarthy’s tactics, refused to come back even for this; no matter, in fact, that Potter was the
only
senator, amidst several staff members, to have shown up this morning. He still looked bent on getting to the bottom of something awful.

For most of the grim testimony it was hard to remember that this was the McCarthy committee. But there came a point, in the midst of eliciting information from Lieutenant Colonel J. W. Whitehorne III, when Potter made the mistake of thinking out loud: “I am curious about the twenty-three Americans who are still over there, whom apparently Communist propaganda got the best of. Or maybe they went into the service as pro-Communists. Is there any check being made as to the background of the men still there?”

Once Colonel Whitehorne declared that information on the defectors was indeed available, Roy Cohn, as if hearing a whistle, sprang from a midmorning slumber: “What was the answer on that? Did any of those people have Communist backgrounds?”

“Some of them had leftist leanings,” said Colonel Whitehorne.

“Would we be able to get some documentation?” asked Cohn, more in the imperative than the interrogative. All at once he was in possession of the hearing, which now seemed, more familiarly, to be concerning itself with domestic subversion.

Tim Laughlin had a much better view of Cohn than he had had at McCarthy’s wedding last week. He wasn’t sure whether to take him for a mobster or a boy wearing his first suit. The dark, hooded eyes; the scar down the nose; the slicked-down hair—all these features fought against the committee counsel’s improbable, extreme youth. Twenty-six, Cecil Holland, back at the
Star,
had said.

Tim could see the concern that Cohn’s line of questioning had provoked on the high, creased forehead of the army’s new counsel, John Adams. But Tim was looking more closely at Potter, to whom he might actually be talking once the hearing reached its conclusion. Yesterday afternoon he’d called the senator’s office to confirm his appointment and been told by the secretary that he might like to get a glimpse of Potter in action before coming in for an interview.

With his horn-rim glasses and balding brow, he reminded Tim of the lay teachers in math and science at St. Agnes’ Boys’ High. He would have been surprised by Potter’s own youth if he hadn’t looked him up in the
Congressional Directory
during his last afternoon at the
Star.
Only thirty-six, and already in the upper body after three terms in the House! In addition to his regular committee assignments, the senator served on the Battle Monuments Commission, a fact that somehow appealed to Tim, who last night had imagined getting the job and making phone calls that would spruce up the cannon at Bull Run or the statue of Father Duffy in Times Square.

But the crisp zeal Potter was again showing, now that Cohn had subsided, had to do with far-more-distant battlefields that had barely cooled. None of the POWs who’d been rescued or exchanged—in a mental condition more frightening than their physical one—was seated here this morning. Only the brass were at the witness table, and it was painful enough hearing the descriptions of torture filtered through them. Tim could only guess what the impact would be when the victims themselves testified in a couple of months. Cecil Holland had told him how McCarthy liked to perform a sleight of hand between the committee’s executive and public sessions. When pink witnesses who’d been subpoenaed to reveal their former Communist ties showed any instinct to fight back during the closed session, they most likely wouldn’t get called for the open hearing, where McCarthy preferred to display the timid and guilty-looking. Things would operate with a strange similarity in this case, Tim imagined. The more shaky the repatriated prisoners, the more powerful Senator Potter’s point would be.

All this activity felt reassuring to Tim. Whatever the committee’s reported excesses, surely not even Miss McGrory, back at the
Star,
could object to this particular inquiry. Only three days ago the pope himself had called for new international laws against war crimes, and two years before that, Tim had heard Father Beane, the visiting priest from the Chinese missions, tell about what he and his brothers had suffered at the hands of Mao’s advancing armies. Even now he remembered the friar’s cadences and fervor, and how he himself had sat in the Church of the Epiphany, between Frances and his mother, thinking: Some “soldier of God”
I
am! That was, after all, what he was supposed to have become on the spring Sunday in 1944 when Bishop O’Neill confirmed him with a symbolic toughening slap to the face.

But maybe here, in the smallest of ways, he could be helpful in the fight against godlessness and cruelty. If he went to work for Potter, he would not just be keeping Father Duffy laureled; he’d be affording protection to Father Beane as well. It might be the only soldiering he ever did. He’d never been able to think through what he’d do when the draft board got around to calling him up.
Do you have homosexual tendencies? Check yes or no.
When he’d registered, almost four years ago in that little office up at Fordham, he’d realized he was damned either way he answered: he could be an outcast or a liar. He’d chosen to lie, rationalizing that “tendencies” could be proved only by experience, and he’d certainly had none of that.
Homosexual tendencies:
had Uncle Alan, his mother’s never-married brother, kept them tucked away with his St. Christopher medal, inside the backpack he’d carried onto Corregidor? Tim had often wondered.

Potter was making ready to adjourn, telling the military men that he’d be out on the West Coast later this month, doing some more preliminary interviews. While he was away, he expected them to keep getting ready for the open hearings in December. “We’re working toward the same purpose,” he said, with midwestern nasality and a smile. His gavel came down at 11:45 a.m.

Everywhere in the city one could feel that autumn—the season not of death, Tim always thought, but of quickening—had finally arrived. What Drew Pearson still called the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” had, after a summer idling in the weeds, rattled to life, even without McCarthy in town to flip the switch. Yesterday Governor Warren had been sworn in as Chief Justice, while Nixon was embarking on a ten-week tour of Asia.

Potter stood up, with a wincing, unexpected slowness, and came out from behind the committee dais. How large his head seemed in proportion to the rest of his body, Tim thought, before noticing what was seriously wrong. An aide had handed the senator two canes. From the stiffness of his gait, Tim realized that the man was walking on artificial legs—not the sort of fact that went into the tabular pages of the
Congressional Directory.

And yet, all at once this fact seemed more joking than somber. Each cane had a little electric flashlight near its top, and Potter was now playfully using one of them to signal a man three seats away from Tim.

That man—small and gray and grudgingly groomed, with a thin face somewhere between mottled and ravaged—returned Potter’s smile. He then got up to leave the back row, nodding genially to Tim.

“Excuse me,” said Tim, before the man could depart, “do you know where Room 80 is? I tried to locate it on my way here. I’ve got an appointment there in—”

“That’s number 80 in the
Capitol,
son. Not here in the SOB. In fact, Charlie’s the only s.o.b. not housed with the other ninety-five s.o.b.s here in the SOB.”

“I have a job interview with him. With Senator Potter, I mean.”

“Well, come with me, young sir. I’m heading there now.”

They trotted down the stairs to the subway that ran between the two buildings. The older man explained how the senator had his office in the Capitol to make his handicap less of an inconvenience. “Of course it’s not so damned convenient when the committee meeting is
here
instead of there, but it helps more often than not.”

Tim could smell a peppermint on the man’s breath and wondered if it was there to mask a morning shot of Four Roses. He could easily imagine the two of them saying hello on Ninth Avenue, the older man having emerged from McNaughton’s saloon to slap him on the back with best wishes “for that fine woman, your Grandma Gaffney,” who would decline the wishes with a lace-curtain shudder once Timmy brought them to her kitchen.

The man ushered him to a wicker seat on the jammed little subway. Tim could see Potter in the car ahead as the two-car train started down the monorail. While it moved, the man continued talking in a rat-a-tat-tat like Winchell’s. “It was a land mine that did it,” he explained. “January 31, 1945, Battle of the Bulge, in the Colmar Pocket. No choice but to amputate both his pins. Spent a year in Walter Reed and had to learn to walk all over again. Fella who’d once been a high jumper!”

Tim nodded gravely in the darkness.

“The VA calls him ‘permanently and totally disabled’!” cried the man, cackling over the clatter. “Well, it doesn’t keep him from voting on their budget.”

“What are the lights on the canes for?” asked Tim.

“Hailing cabs.” The man paused for a moment. “Well, we’ll soon see how ‘abled’ Charlie turns out to be among this crowd he’s in with now.” He pointed to one of the heads in the lead car. “See our boy Roy up there?”

“Yes,” said Tim. They had reached the end of the Lilliputian tunnel, and he could make out the back of Cohn’s freshly cropped skull.

“Don’t use the men’s toilet when he’s around, if you catch my drift. Though he tends to be enchanted by fellows a little huskier than yourself.” The man laughed as the train bucked to a stop.

“Are you on Senator Potter’s staff?” asked Tim.

“No,” the man answered, chuckling, as he and Tim made their way to the Capitol’s first floor. “Let’s just say I’m authorized to help him out a bit from time to time. Him and some of the other Michigan GOP men. My name’s McIntyre, Thomas McIntyre. Call me Tommy. Was a newspaperman for several eternities, down here and up in Detroit.”

Tim shook hands and introduced himself, trying to understand what this slight, fast-moving man meant by helping the senator out, and wondering who had authorized him to do it.

“Potter’s a good-enough egg,” said McIntyre, the heels of his unshined shoes beating a fast rhythm across the marble corridor. “He’s managed to vote for foreign aid but not forget it’s the automakers who sent him here. You know,” he continued, almost reflective, “he
ought
to be an interesting fellow. He was actually a social worker before he went off to the war. But he’s got one handicap worse than no legs.”

“Really?” asked Tim, as McIntyre knocked on the door of Room 80.

“Yeah. A permanent charley horse between his ears!”

McIntyre was still laughing when the door to the senator’s office was opened—by a man with one arm.

“His driver,” whispered Tommy. “No foolin’!”

Miss Antoinette Cook, the woman Tim had spoken with on the phone, introduced him to Robert L. Jones, a still-young man who looked as if he might be Potter’s executive assistant, and whose speech carried the salt of a Maine accent. “Oh, yes, Mr. Laughlin,” he said, appearing less than pleased by Tim’s arrival, let alone McIntyre’s. “The fellow that Hawkins Fuller recommended when he was up here to defend State’s latest excessive appropriation.”

McIntyre looked at Tim with an encouraging smile, and then alarm. “Jesus, kid, your face has gone white. It’s only a job interview. This ain’t the Depression.”

Hawkins Fuller.

Tim managed to nod and shake Mr. Jones’s hand, while McIntyre cheerfully took charge of the situation. “Put him to work, Jones. See what he can do. Better yet, see if he can do the bit of work
I
was going to do for you today. Here, son, this is a copy of what Knowland’s planning to say on the floor a couple of hours from now. I got it from his press man. It’s no different from what he said at his press conference yesterday, but it’s a couple of decibels higher, and it’s going to make a splash. So why don’t you sit down at one of the Underwoods here and write a couple of paragraphs that Charlie can say in support of it?”

Mr. Jones had already lost interest in Timothy Laughlin; he was on a phone behind Miss Cook, cupping his hand over the receiver.

“Go on, read it, read it,” said Tommy McIntyre, as he wheeled a typist’s chair into position behind Tim.

Senator Knowland, the majority leader, had come home from his world tour the other day and learned of Adlai Stevenson’s call for a nonaggression pact with the Russians—a proposal that had irritated the California senator to an extreme degree. “Now watch the Koreans drag out the Panmunjom talks,” he was warning. “This will be one more sign that we need to put our house in order and our rifles at the ready. Time is not on the side of the Free World, and we don’t need Mr. Stevenson, after his massive repudiation at the polls, recommending that we play at useless diplomacy.”