The Redhunter (12 page)

“I told him: Tracy, look, we can’t run six pieces by you on this business unless you can back them up, and you simply
haven’t done that.
He was sore and argued that the evidence—I like this—the evidence in the articles ‘is incandescent.’ I finally told him,
Tracy, it’s my job to decide whether an article merits publication.”

“Now,” Rosen took over again, “Tracy says that if the six articles had been accepted, the points he’d have been awarded from
them would—he is certain—have lifted him into the winners’ circle. By the way,” he said, now addressing Joe as assistant managing
editor and bookmaker in charge of the competitors’ score sheet—“is that in fact the case? How many points would he have earned
if we had run with his series?”

“A lot. They were his idea. His research. His writing. Figure fifteen hundred points each: nine thousand.”

Rosen looked down at the large paper spread, three stiff sheets of paper Scotch taped together, listing, after the name of
each applicant, the number of points earned in editorial, in business, and then the totals, in descending order.

“Let’s see. We did elect Shevitts. He came in number eight, with 47,526 points. Allshott wasn’t ninth just behind Shevitts.
He was tenth, with 39,800 points.” He looked up. “The answer is: Yes. With nine thousand extra points he’d have come in ahead
of Shevitts.

“Allshott doesn’t know that with nine thousand extra points he’d have been elected. We haven’t yet sent the score sheet out
for framing. It has to be ready for the Christmas party, when our board presents
it—”he reminded his colleagues—“to the winner. It becomes his souvenir.”

George said: “You’re talking about Bontecou. As winner, he gets the score sheet, right?”

Rosen nodded. “Yeah. Harry.”

“He
rooms
with Tracy Allshott!”

Rosen paused and then said out of the blue, it seemed, “Anyone know anything about the Civil Rights Congress? Allshott says
here he is sending a copy of his complaint to the Civil Rights Congress.” He looked around the table. He reached over to the
coffee table and picked up the phone. “I’m calling my father,” he said as he dialed the number. “He’s an expert on this kind
of thing.

“Dad, I’m at an … important meeting here, the
Spectator.
A student who didn’t make it on Monday—that’s when we elected junior editors—is saying we cheated on him and he’s sending
a copy of his complaint to the Civil Rights Congress. Who are they? You got any idea?”

He listened.

“Thanks, Dad.” He hung up the phone.

“The Civil Rights Congress, my father says, is a Communist front. It takes on complaints by pro-Communists.”

There was silence.

Then George said, “You know, I think it would make sense, in our situation, to check with counsel, as the lawyers say. Bill
Bradbury is a trustee of the
Spec.
He was editor sometime before the war; 1938, I think. He’s with Coudert Brothers.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

Rosen took off his glasses and stuffed the papers back in the manila folder. He announced his decisions. “One, we hold up
the score sheet. Lock it up. Two, I’ll check out the legal scene. Three, then I think it makes sense for me to call Harry
on over, see if he can help figure it all out. Next item, four, is chow.”

Harry Bontecou walked from the
Spectator
offices to the Butler Library. To do so he had to cope, as he had got used to doing, with the renowned irregular bricks modeled
after the famous School of Athens. Reaching the library, he brought up the book
Shadows of
Change,
by Pierre Enfils. It was published in 1945. He ran his eyes over the text, a history of the Soviet Union beginning with the
“October” uprising. He scanned the chapter summaries. They told of events Harry was first told about by Erik Chadinoff at
Plattling during his discourses on the perfidy of the Communists. He had told of the John Dewey Commission, and later Harry
had read about the famous commission and its expose of the 1938 Soviet “show trials.” In 1937, the philosopher John Dewey
agreed to head up a commission of inquiry to examine the great trials in Moscow. His pretense back then was that he was searching
out collaborators of the despised Leon Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1928. Stalin, two years after the trials,
consummated his hatred of Trotsky by arranging for his assassination in Mexico. The show trials had been followed by the execution—for
alleged treasonable activity—of a large number of what had been the Communist cadre in Moscow. The ruling of the Dewey Commission
was emphatic and conclusive: The so-called confessions from high Communist functionaries had been fraudulent, coerced, contrived.

Chadinoff had stressed, in his winter seminars at the Plattling BOQ, the importance of the Dewey findings, “especially since
Dewey was a man of the left. It was a terrible blow for the left intelligentsia who were fellow travelers.”

Returning to New York, Harry’s summer reading had included Malcolm Muggeridge’s
Winter in Moscow,
Freda Utley’s
The Dream We Lost,
and Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon.
Now, Enfils’s book in hand, he turned to the chapter on the show trials of 1938. Professor Enfils stressed that it was naive
to assume that the trial’s defendants were innocent, nothing more than Stalin’s victims. This paragraph in particular caught
Harry’s eye.

The commission to investigate the trials was headed by the prominent philosopher and educator John Dewey. He assembled a jury
of distinguished academic figures. What they had in common was a virulent distrust of Soviet policies. Many of them, like
Professor Dewey himself, had ten years earlier sympathized with the socialist ideal. Many turned away from an understanding
of Soviet policies after the break between Stalin and Trotsky. It was evident from the language in which Dewey brought his
indictment that the Soviet Union was being dismissed without an appropriate sense of the vicissitudes
of historical evolution. It is characteristically American to apply whatever its own standards are as instantly paradigmatic
for other societies. Thus if America writes a Hatch Act in 1939 protecting the political freedoms of public servants, all
other societies must have a Hatch Act. What truly happened in 1938 was that evolutionary Stalinism felt the need to excrete
men who were basically antagonistic to Soviet ideals. In the United States, a President Jackson could find other ways of getting
rid of John C. Calhoun. But it is naive, and self-deceiving, to repudiate Joseph Stalin for exercising procedures which have
been routine throughout Russian history.

Harry left the library and went to room 302 of Earl Hall, the office of the Columbia Young Progressives. He found Tom Scott,
the Progressives’ twenty-three-year-old president, tall, brown-haired, tousled, wearing thick steel-rimmed glasses, at his
desk pounding a typewriter. Behind him was a huge poster of Henry Wallace, former vice president of the United States under
President Roosevelt, and until only a few weeks ago secretary of commerce under President Truman. The small room’s broad shelves
were crammed with brochures and pamphlets.

It was Tom Scott who, in March, had led the student protest against the awarding of an honorary degree to Winston Churchill.
Churchill had delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, denouncing Soviet practices and deeply antagonizing
those who favored an accommodationist foreign policy. It had been arranged that on the way back to Great Britain, the former
prime minister would stop at Columbia in order to receive a degree. The Young Progressives amassed a remarkable 1,700 student
signatures protesting the degree. They were directed to retiring Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler.

Asked to comment on the student protesters, Churchill, accepting his degree, jocularly urged Communists, “wherever they are,”
to read up on the life of the “white ants—”“termites which lead a life of slavery.” He then pledged “all the moral and material
forces of the British Empire to strengthen the United Nations and maintain the peace.”

Scott looked up at Harry. “What can I do for you?”

The telephone interrupted him. He conversed with the caller
about a joint rally with Hunter College soon after the New Year. While they spoke, Harry looked at the brochures being offered
by the Young Progressives, pocketing two or three.

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes. The
Journal American
said in an editorial last week that the Civil Rights Congress was a Communist front. Can you enlighten me on that?”

“It’s a lie, of course. I hate to put it this way, but there are fascist tendencies in Washington, and they’re applauded,
of course, by people like William Randolph Hearst and the warmongers.”

“But what about the Civil Rights Congress?”

“It’s an organization devoted to the civil rights of everybody, Negro, white, Jew, Christian, Communist. It is being reviewed
by the the attorney general with the obvious design of listing it officially as a Communist front—in order to appease the
ultrarightists in Congress. It’s just not true that Attorney General Tom Clark is a reliable liberal. He’s a Red scare demagogue
who likes to list organizations that disagree with government policy as Communist fronts.”

“Are they all innocent? I mean, all those organizations he has listed?”

Scott was slowed down. “Innocent of what?”

“Innocent of taking orders from the Communist Party?”

Scott leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and said, “Look,—what’s your name?”

“Harry. Harry Bontecou.”

“Look, Harry, the Communists have certain ideals in common with other people who aren’t ‘Communists.’ They oppose imperialism,
nuclear proliferation, inequality, and fascism. I can’t speak for
all
the outfits on the attorney general’s list, because I don’t know enough about them, but I
can
speak for the Civil Rights Congress. I am all for it, and I have their literature.” Scott reached over to one of the stacks
in the bookcase. “You’ll see. Pretty important people back the congress. Including academics, artists, scientists.”

Harry pocketed the brochure. Scott’s phone rang again. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then cupped the mouthpiece
with his hand, looked up at Harry, and said, “This call is going to keep me busy for a while.” Harry gave a half wave with
his hand. “Thanks. I’ll look the material over. See you.”

He left the building and walked to the offices of the
Spectator.
He didn’t want to review the material he had collected back in his room, with Tracy looking over his shoulder. He turned
first to the brochure on the Civil Rights Congress. He spotted, in the roster of sponsors, the name Pierre Enfils.

He had had enough. He felt a rush of indignation and a hot rage. He felt he knew from Camp Plattling what kind of a world
threatened. He walked back to his room. Tracy was there, typing those punchy strokes Harry had got used to. Harry sat down
at his own desk at the other end of the room, facing Tracy.

“Can I interrupt you for a minute?”

“Yeah.” Allshott edged his typewriter toward the wall.

“Tracy, do you know Professor Pierre Enfils?”

Tracy was surprised. “What do
you
know about him?”

“I’ve read your articles on the Gardiner Trust.”

“Oh? I didn’t show them to you, of course—we were in competition. What did you think of them?”

Harry’s jaw tightened. He looked directly into Tracy’s eyes. “What I think, Tracy, is that if it’s true that Enfils was intercepted
on his way to a chair in the history department of Columbia, I say:
Good
for whoever did it—the Gardiner Trust people—President Butler—whoever.”

“So much for academic freedom, Harry?”

“There is also freedom to react against distortion. I’m asking you again. Do you know Professor Enfils?”

Tracy was silent.

“Did you get the Gardiner Trust story from him directly? Or maybe from the Civil Rights Congress? Do you know Enfils’s position
on the Moscow trials?—”

Tracy stood up abruptly. He slammed shut his desk drawer, grabbed the book on the sofa, and strode from the room.

Harry’s heart was pounding. He took the material from the Young Progressives office and the notes he had made in the library.
He put them in a manila folder and walked from their little two-desk study into the bedroom, upper and lower bunks, he shared
with Tracy. He opened the door to the clothes closet and reached for the briefcase with the combination lock his mother had
given him in September. He put the folder in the case and twirled the lock. His heart
was still pounding. He had a feeling that he had met the enemy at very very close quarters; different, yes, from when he was
fighting in Belgium, cheek by jowl with the enemy, but he felt something of the thrill and danger of the reconnaissance scout,
identifying the enemy at close hand.

DECEMBER 1945

In the seven years that had gone by since McCarthy had served as judge, going then to the Marines in the Asian theater, he
wrote regularly to his mother. In one letter he let it out of the bag. “The war isn’t going to last forever, Mom. And you
know what I’m going to do when I get back home? Well, if you
promise
not to tell, I’m going to run for—”Joe then listed a half dozen political offices.