Better Dead (2 page)

Maybe they gave her a pass. Possibly even Commies needed somebody to hand out popcorn at the movies.

The mock coup, staged by the Wisconsin American Legion, was an elaborate daylong piece of street theater put on for members of the press, an international contingent that included television networks, newsreel outfits, wire services,
Reader's Digest, Life,
and
Time,
and even the Russian news agency, TASS. A few dignitaries had been invited as observers, and I'd rated one of their rarefied armbands because the unofficial guest of honor for the Red takeover was Senator Joe McCarthy himself.

I was along as McCarthy's guest because we'd done some business over the last couple of years and were friendly. When I learned he'd be back home in Wisconsin for a short stay, I arranged for an audience with America's newly self-appointed Commie-Hunter-in-Chief. A client of mine needed help and McCarthy was the only path.

The business I represented was my own—the A-1 Detective Agency, of which I, Nathan Heller, was president. The firm had started back in 1932 as a one-man, one-room affair in a fairly dingy building at Van Buren and Plymouth, and had grown to include a Los Angeles branch office and an expanded main one in the celebrated Monadnock Building in the South Loop. Today I had half a dozen operatives, not counting my partner Lou Sapperstein (my old boss on the Pickpocket Detail) or our secretary Gladys Fortunato (with us since before the war).

You might wonder why the forty-four-year-old president of the A-1 would go chasing into the wilds of Wisconsin on behalf of a client when he had plenty of young operatives who could do that for him. But when it's a United States senator like Joe McCarthy you make exceptions. Not that there really were any other United States senators like Joe McCarthy.

My forty-four years, by the way, were well-preserved ones, assembled into six feet and two hundred pounds, including features considered by some female types to cause no eyestrain. I was in a dark blue Dobbs hat and a gray Albert-Richard greatcoat with a black fur collar and lapels, its lining in (I'd been to Wisconsin in the “spring” before), over a lighter blue Botany 500 suit. Buying clothes on Maxwell Street was out these days, unless I needed a suit cut to conceal my nine-millimeter, which I had not brought to the party.

Good thing—it might have been confiscated by the Reds.

I admit to reporting some of the early morning activities secondhand, having flown in that a.m. from Midway to Downtown Wausau Airport, where a young aide of McCarthy's waited in a black Buick to drive me the half hour to Mosinee. But I got there in time to fall in beside McCarthy where he lurked with the press on the periphery, as the mayor gave his surrender speech at pistol point to the assembled community in the park. That is, Red Square.

McCarthy wore neither Dobbs nor Botany 500—he was in a rumpled raincoat over one of those dark blue ready-made suits he seemed to buy in bulk. His red tie was showing—an irony that had escaped him, like most ironies did—and sported random polka dots that were really food stains.

He was grinning at the dark proceedings, and occasionally laughing under his breath—“Heh heh heh!”—in an almost girlish fashion that hardly suited such a bullnecked, barrel-chested, blue-jowled brute. His black hair was thinning, his eyebrows heavy and grown together over hooded sleepy eyes, his Bob Hope–ish nose flat from bridge to tip, a condition possibly dating to collegiate boxing days. For all that, the oval face on the big head could almost be called handsome.

No legislator had as many enemies in government as Joe McCarthy—then again, no legislator had as many followers outside of government. The junior senator from Wisconsin's notoriety and popularity on the national scene had, in a matter of months, grown exponentially.

Nothing in McCarthy's history hinted at the fame and power awaiting him. He'd been a chicken farmer and a grocery store manager, and had not gone to high school till he was twenty-one, although admittedly he'd then raced through. In college he majored in frat-house beer and poker, but did manage to graduate with a law degree. As a New Deal Democrat, he lost a run for district attorney of Shawano County; but as a Republican he became a Circuit Court judge. Running on a self-inflated war record (“Tail-Gunner Joe”), McCarthy became a U.S. senator in 1946.

Today, standing behind the newsreel and television cameras in the park, McCarthy was keeping an uncharacteristically low profile, begging off interviews, saying, “This is the Legion's day. I'm just a spectator here. A guest.”

He explained to me from the sidelines, as we'd watched the mayor surrender his town, that the national American Legion was the real author of this Commie-takeover melodrama.

“Well, heh heh heh,” he said quietly, lessening the nasal drone of his baritone, “the Legion and
J. Edgar.
Everybody's favorite G-man's got the Legion wrapped around his little pinky, and good for him.”

As we passed the concentration camp on our way to a soup-kitchen lunch (vegetable—not bad), the senator pointed out among many unlikely prisoners in hats and business suits the owner/editor of the Mosinee
Weekly Times,
a tall distinguished-looking fellow in his forties who turned out to be retired Brigadier General Francis Schweinler.

“He was the local mover and shaker,” McCarthy said. “High mucky-muck on the state Legion's Americanism committee. Really put it together.”

“Oh?”

The big bucket head nodded. “Sent a letter out all but ordering that citizens here join in. Told 'em they were being asked to play along for the greater good, and to voluntarily subject themselves to a few harmless inconveniences.” His small smile was almost a sneer as we took in the dazed faces of the concentration camp crowd, their breaths pluming. “Afraid the good people of Mosinee didn't really know what they were getting themselves into.”

Later, as we watched the May Day parade, citizens trudging along with grim faces, a grinning Joe said, “This is wonderful—
wonderful!
A real object lesson in what it's like to live under Communism. It's no bed of roses.”

“Who are these troops, anyway?” I asked. Red-star-emblazoned jeeps were parked on either side along Main Street with helmeted rifle-bearing soldiers spotted all around.

“Ex-servicemen,” he said gleefully, “from all over the state. Seem to be having a darn good time.”

Maybe a little too darn good.

About that point I excused myself to take in
Hello, Moscow!
And two hours later, when I rejoined McCarthy in back of the camera crews, a dusk the color of the senator's five o'clock shadow had fallen. A quietness settled in only to be shattered by bullhorns demanding everyone's presence in Red Square.

There, under bright lights, the froglike commissar with his gangster overcoat and hat, wire-rim glasses and droopy cigarette began to speak again, extolling the virtues of Communism.
“You have had today a small taste of the superior way of life represented by Soviet Russia!”

McCarthy, his mouth a slash in the blue-cheeked face, said quietly, “Good, isn't he?”

“He's a believable Commie, all right.”

“That's because he used to be one. Name really
is
Kornfeder. He's Czech, a real leader in the American Communist movement back in the thirties. Ten years ago he turned friendly HUAC witness. Now he's what you'd call a professional anti-Communist.”

Took one to know one.

The commissar was still yakking when from nowhere the mayor—finally out of his pajamas and into a dignified suit and tie, hair neatly combed but face still gray—emerged to walk up onto the platform and push the commissar out of the way. Suddenly blue-uniformed police came up onto the stage and dragged off the protesting commissar, Kornfeder feeding corn to the wildly applauding audience to the very end.

With an austere dignified smile, the mayor said into the microphone, “I am here, good people of Mosinee, to announce that democracy has been restored to our fair city.”

More, even wilder applause now. Whistles and hoots and hollers.

As if in reaction, the mayor's eyes widened.

But then he clutched his chest and seemed to be working at keeping his balance, as blurts of concern blossomed around the crowd. Finally he slumped to the wooden flooring, first on his knees, then onto his side, feet drawn up into a fetal position.

A collective gasp came up.

“Now what?” I asked McCarthy.

“That's not scheduled,” the senator said, eyes disappearing into slits. Not smiling at all now. He took me by the arm. “Come on, Nate, let's find my man and get out of here. This looks like something not to be a part of.”

Screams and wails were going up from the assemblage and we passed a screaming, wailing ambulance as in our black Buick we headed out of the liberated little community, making a getaway worthy of bank robbers.

*   *   *

Robbers back in Dillinger days were said to have escaped coppers via tunnels below the Hotel Wausau. But Joe McCarthy and I, in the downtown hotel's restaurant off its Gothic cathedral of a lobby, weren't hiding from anybody.

A scattering of diners exchanged glances and stole looks as the senator and I sat in a booth, the dark, rich wood around us typical of the hotel. McCarthy was working on a well-done porterhouse steak about the size of a hubcap and a buttered baked potato not much larger than a hand grenade. His short arms were pumping and his big hands were balled as he carved with knife and fork.

Delicate eater that I was, I had settled for a club steak, rare, and some hash browns with onions. McCarthy was drinking beer, and so was I. Schlitz. Made Milwaukee famous, you know.

We were inside an eight-story 1880s brick structure courtesy of Chicago architects Roche and Holabird—who turned out such little numbers as Soldier Field and the Art Institute—which might have made a Chicago boy feel at home. It didn't. I had come to Wisconsin and Joe McCarthy's table on a mission of mercy, or seeking mercy anyway, and right now my dinner companion didn't seem merciful at all. Certainly the porterhouse was being shown none.

“There's no
question
this friend of yours was in any number of Communist
front
groups,” he said between bites. When he said things like that, McCarthy fell into public speaking mode, forcing his baritone up into second tenor and emphasizing random words by dropping them back down.

“Youthful college days,” I said. “He didn't know better. It was the Depression. You remember the Depression, don't you, Joe? Lots of folks out of work. Weren't you an FDR man back then?”

He grinned and had some more steak, chewed, swallowed, said, “But he's a scientist. They're the worst kind. Damnit, Nate, he worked on the Manhattan Project! Think what he had access to.”

“Early days at the University of Chicago. A minor figure, Joe. And back then the government gave him a full security clearance.”

“Quit assin' around, Heller! In those days Uncle Sam let more Commies in than a half-ass henhouse fence does foxes. My boys tell me your pal is just another State Department Red.”

“He doesn't work for the State Department, Joe. He's a full-time professor now.”

“Filling empty young minds with dangerous propaganda.”

“No. Just physics. He does a little consulting with State, that's all. Did your people find any Soviet ties?”

“… No.”

“Can you give him a pass, Joe? As a favor?”

He moved on to the baked potato, using the steak knife to cut down to and through the skin. “How are you and our buddy Drew gettin' along?”

This was not the non sequitur it seemed. Reporter Drew Pearson, easily the nation's most powerful syndicated left-of-center columnist, had once been very friendly with McCarthy, who had provided him and his man Jack Anderson with all kinds of inside dope from the Hill. But lately Pearson had been running negative items on McCarthy. The bloom could well be off the rose.

“We fell out,” I said, spearing some hash browns and onions, “after what he did to Jim Forrestal.”

Former Secretary of Defense Forrestal, a client of mine, had committed suicide in the midst of a heavy Pearson smear campaign. I'd stopped doing investigative work for Drew because of that.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, as he chewed potato. “As for your professor pal … let me sleep on it. I'll let you know in the morning. When do you fly out?”

“Ten o'clock.”

“Come by my room at eight and we'll have breakfast.”

As for the name of my friend at the University of Chicago, that isn't pertinent to this narrative. Just in case you thought I was somebody who named names.

We were having apple pie when McCarthy's slender young staffer came around and leaned in. His name I can't give you because I don't remember it, but I can tell you he had a nicer suit and tie than his boss.

“Senator … turns out Mayor Cronenwetter had a heart attack back there. He's in the hospital in critical condition here in Wausau. Did you want me to arrange to go out there and…?”

The hooded eyes flared. “No. We, uh, don't want to intrude on the family.”

The staffer nodded and disappeared so fast I expected a puff of smoke.

McCarthy said, “Damn shame.”

“Yeah. Too bad.”

“Really casts a pall on a great day.”

That evening I kept McCarthy company on a walking tour of downtown Wausau bars. He put away more beer than a bachelor party and yet circulated among the citizens, pumping hands like they were so many more porterhouses he was carving. I'll give him this: He seemed to know them all by name, and he sat and laughed and talked with maybe a dozen of them.

Shanty Irish Joe had the common touch, all right. This was his base—Wisconsin's German, Polish, and Czech voters. My Irish looks, courtesy of my mother, made me fit right in. Would I have been as welcome, I wondered, if my apostate Jewish pop showed more clearly in my features?