The Unwitting (32 page)

“Wright was paranoid.”

“It’s not paranoia when there’s good reason for the fear.”

“What would be the motive for killing Charlie?”

“He wanted to stop cooperating. He wanted to go public about what you people were doing. Wasn’t there a rumor about someone who tried to stop working with the Agency? He was supposed to have committed suicide by jumping out of a window, but his wife insisted he hadn’t even been depressed.”

“Who told you about that?”

“Frank Tucker.”

“Of course, Tucker, the source of all wisdom.”

“He may not be a sterling human being, but he generally gets his facts right.”

“Nell, listen to me. Charlie was mugged. End of story.”

“What about the life insurance policy?”

“What about it?”

“Why did the foundation take it out if he wasn’t in danger?”

“I told you, to keep him happy. He was worried about you and Abby.”

“How many thirty-year-old publishers do you know who are so worried about their wives and children that they threaten to leave a magazine they love unless they get a huge life insurance policy?”

“Not all publishers walk around with Charlie’s sense of disastrous contingencies.”

“Something happened that day in the park, and it wasn’t a mugging.”

He sat behind his desk and put his head in his hands. “It was a
mugging. Just because they didn’t convict Vega doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. I wish to hell they had convicted him.”

“Send someone to prison, anyone, and then you don’t have to worry about a guilty conscience.”

“I don’t have a guilty conscience about Charlie.”

“You damn well ought to.”

I was still standing, and he was sitting, staring at me across the expanse of uncluttered desk.

“I’m not sure you want to cast the first stone,” he said quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He stood. “Nothing, forget it. I’m sorry, but you get me so damn angry.”

“The feeling is mutual. What was that supposed to mean?” I asked again.

He hesitated, then sat behind his desk again, opened the top drawer, took out a key, and bent to open the bottom side drawer. He straightened and put a notebook with a marbled cover, the kind kids use in school, on the desk between us.

“I think you ought to have this.”

“What is it?”

“Charlie’s journal.”

“You have a journal from Charlie and you never gave it to me!”

“The day he died, I went to his office to take care of a few things.”

“To destroy the evidence.”

“Evidence of what? That he took money from the foundation? You could read that in the books. But I had a feeling this existed.” He put his hand on the notebook, then took it off. “It was the kind of thing he’d do. He even hinted at it a couple of times.”

“So you just took it?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “That’s part of my job.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Before you found out about the funding there was no reason to.”

“Charlie was my husband. It’s not up to you to decide what I should or shouldn’t know about him.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“Bullshit!”

He flinched.

“Why didn’t you give it to me once I knew?”

“I wanted to. But that night in your apartment, after the television broadcast, I said I’d tell you the rest when you were ready, and you said you’d already heard enough.”

“I didn’t know you had Charlie’s diary.”

He shrugged. “His account isn’t so different from what I would have told you.”

“Then you read it.”

“That’s part of my job too.”

“You really are a bastard.”

He shook his head. “I’m just like everyone else, part bastard, part idealist. Just like you, for that matter.” He stood, picked up the notebook, and held it out to me. “Why don’t you read this before you make up your mind?”

I took the notebook, turned, and started for the door.

“Nell.”

I stopped but didn’t turn around.

“It was a mugging. I swear to you.”

Now I turned. “As if your oaths mean anything.”

Twenty-Four

*Comments entered later in time

November 18, 1952

I
HAVE DECIDED TO
keep a journal so that when this is over, when we’ve
vanquished
brought down another totalitarian regime, not with guns and bombs but with words (I can see my sixty-year-old self groaning at that, oh, the pomposity), I will recall, without the rosy burnish of memory, what it felt like. And I’m keeping it so I can make Nell understand. I think if I could tell her now, I could make her see it from my point of view—at least I hope I could—but I gave my word. If nothing else, I don’t want to endanger anyone. *Jesus, I’d better watch it. I’m beginning to sound like that kid in London who kept changing taxis to make sure he wasn’t being followed. 6/1/53 McClellan used the term “eternal confidentiality,” but once this is over, and it can’t go on forever, I’ll try to explain. This is a debt I have to pay. She’ll understand that. McClellan did. That was why he came after me. He’d done his homework.

I suspected something was up when he asked me to lunch. Not only the job, but the rest of it. I’d heard rumors about
Encounter
and other magazines. And occasionally Gideon dropped a hint. Once, when we were sharing a taxi, he started to say something about the foundation’s funding. Then the cab stopped for a light, he told me he thought he’d walk the rest of the way, and jumped out. *Now I understand the irresistible urge to confess, the desperate desire to cleanse yourself of the stinking little secret. 5/12/63

I’m writing this now, only hours after meeting with McClellan,
because I want to be clear not only about what was said, but about the order in which it was said. That’s something else I want Nell to understand. I didn’t agree to do this to save
Compass
. I agreed because I think it’s the right thing to do. In other words, not opportunism but conviction. *Or was I fooling myself? 12/8/54

By the time the “eternal” in confidentiality has expired and this journal becomes of any use, things will have shaken down. Either we’ll have headed off the threat or we’ll be living under a totalitarian regime and this diary will be my death warrant. I’m not being melodramatic. I know what we’re fighting. And that is what I have to get down, just how frightening the world looks today, Tuesday, November 18, 1952.

I don’t know anyone who isn’t worried sick about another war, which of course with the bomb will mean total destruction. But it isn’t just the idea of a shooting war that terrifies. It’s a more subtle insidious battle for the hearts and minds of men and women, for the future. Practically every left-wing journal or newspaper in the world is financed by Moscow. At lunch, McClellan told me that the Soviets spend more on cultural propaganda in France alone than the U.S. does in the entire world. Their fingerprints are all over India, Africa, South America, the Far East. The fact that colonial greed and mismanagement turned those areas into such fertile ground doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous. I know Nell agrees with me about that. We’ve discussed it often enough. So when McClellan asked the question in that bastion of haute Gentile privilege, I was ready to say yes, though I admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder by the time I got into the place. I’m not going to describe the incident with the door that wouldn’t open, because time isn’t likely to cast a rosy glow over that. McClellan was standing in the hall, but I don’t know whether he saw what happened. He doesn’t give away much.

I’m still trying to sort out my take on him. Can I trust him? My
initial response is yes. I wouldn’t have agreed to this otherwise. Do I like him? That’s a more complicated question. We make strange bedfellows, the old upper-class Yalie with O.S.S. credentials and the poor Jewish former fellow traveler from Brooklyn. But I gather from what he told me at lunch, there’s a lot of that going around. If the old boys’ club wants the anti-Stalinist magazines to be liberal, they have nowhere to turn but the left-wing Jewish intellectual mafia.

I won’t bother to record the early stages of lunch. I was being courted, and I knew it. He wooed me with allusions to my vanished grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. He almost overdid it there. I didn’t like his bandying about my dead relatives. He lured me with a reference to that shadowy cousin lurking somewhere behind the Curtain, whom, thanks to Uncle Joe Stalin, I’ll never know. He reeled me in with reminders that my parents and I were the only ones left, and that was due to the magnanimity and values of the United States of America. Not, as I said, that I needed much persuading. Then he came out with it.

“Would you like to do something for your country?” *Every time I hear that inauguration line, “Ask not what your country can do for you …” I’m back at this damn lunch. If I ever do get up the guts to quit, I can hear Elliot asking Wally Dryer the same question. Maybe he’ll even put it in JFK’s words. 1/20/61

I started to say that I’d like to know a little more about what he had in mind, but before I could, he went on.

“I should mention one condition.” That was when he used the term “eternal confidentiality.”

I told him eternity was a long time.

“It goes with you to the grave. No exceptions.” He sat staring at me for a moment, and when he spoke again, I knew my face had given me away. Or had he merely done enough homework to know not only about me but about Nell and me?

“That includes your wife.”

“What happens if I break my word? You send someone to break my kneecaps?”

He smiled across the table at me, and the old cliché about butter and its melting point in the human mouth came to mind.

“We have more elegant methods than that.” Then the smile slid from his face. “The division I work for is known as the campus. Most of the men are Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and half of them write poetry, paint, or play the violin. In other words, they’re nothing like those gun-toting cowboys who are still fighting the war, their finest moment. If that makes you feel any better.”

It did, but I told him that all the same, I would not toe an editorial line.

“That’s the last thing we want,” he said. “The whole point of this operation is to promote freedom of expression. Unlike the Soviets, who dictate what people can think and write and paint. All you’ll be doing is helping people say what they would have said anyway.”

How could I argue with that?

November 19, 1952

Last night Nell and I celebrated the new job. She’s over the moon about it, but she kept coming back to one point. Editorial independence. In a sense, I wasn’t surprised. That was what I questioned McClellan about at lunch yesterday, but I knew about the arrangement. Does she suspect it?

January 22, 1953

I’m not sorry I agreed to accept the funding. I still believe in the aims. I still think it will permit
Compass
to do some good. But for all McClellan’s seriousness of purpose, there’s a fun house aura to all this. That’s one more reason I hate not being able to tell Nell about it. She’d get a kick out of the ludicrous aspects.

McClellan and I had a curious moment in his office today. His digs are a far cry from ours. His office even smells different. Ours reeks of burnt coffee, stale cigarettes, and ink. The aroma is untidy and vaguely cerebral. His is redolent of expensive leather bindings and furniture polish. Ours simmers with the messiness of inquiry and argument; his lies quiet under the smooth surface of certainty. Appearances, as it turned out, were one of the things he wanted to talk to me about.

He said I had to be wary of what he called governmental extravagance. I thought he was warning me not to be profligate, but it turned out he was less worried about how we spent taxpayers’ money than about how it looked to the unwitting. I’ve already come to hate the phrase, which he keeps throwing around. I’m witting. Everyone else at the magazine is unwitting. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind the distinction as much if the second group didn’t include Nell. I feel as if I’m cheating on her.

In any event, he sat in front of those shelves of leather-bound books warning me against small touches like leatherette bindings on reports. I told him we didn’t write reports, and if we did, I doubt I’d put leatherette bindings on them. He said what he meant was that I had to be careful not to make the magazine look too flush. Parties were another example. I’m supposed to go on giving them, but not make them as flashy as Gideon’s. My wife isn’t heir to an American fortune. J & B and White Horse are okay; Chivas is not. The last thing we want, he said, the last thing we can afford, is to have people suspect government funding.