Tucker's Last Stand (31 page)

They set out in a jeep, Tucker, dressed in white corduroy slacks, at the wheel; Lao Dai, holding down her straw hat with the flowered white band, beside him; Blackford, in khakis and polo shirt, in the rear. Tucker was taking it all in the spirit of a fall outing in New England, on the way to a football game. And indeed as October closed the temperature was lowering. He had brought along a tape player and as they drove along the roadway, dodging bicyclists and pedestrians, slowing for the army caravans and avoiding such axle-breaking potholes as he could, Tucker slipped on Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. Tucker, carried away by the melody and the lyrics, at one point broke out with his own raspy baritone voice to underscore his enthusiasm for Porter's injunction, “Let's do it. Let's fall in love.” Lao Dai applauded. Blackford said that he thought Ella did better on her own, with her own orchestra, unaccompanied by Tucker—who was much tickled by it all and asked Lao Dai whether today, at the restaurant, she would choose the pigeon again, as she had on their previous outing. She replied that she would always look the menu over very carefully, to examine the choices.

Le Bon Laboureur was nicely located on a corner. A row of tall cypress trees stretched out along one of the streets, planted by the French to break the monotonous concrete profile of a large penitentiary. There was room, at the tables outside under the awning, for twenty diners or so, and inside, crowded about the picturesque little bar, room for a dozen, at four tables with the traditional checked red-and-white tablecloths. Blackford and Lao Dai stood awkwardly just under the awning. Tucker was making a scene.

He was speaking in not entirely secure, but decidedly emphatic French. “I am telling you,
mon cher monsieur
, that I made reservations over the telephone,
by long distance
, three days ago for an
outside
table.”

“Yes,” the maître d'hôtel said, looking down at his register, “M. Mohn-tana. But, sir, you made your reservation for 1300 hours, and it is only”—he looked at his watch—“1250. Please please, go inside and have an aperitif, and certainly within a very few minutes I can seat you here outside.”

Tucker had few alternatives, Blackford reasoned, since there was not an empty table outdoors.

Inside, by contrast, on such a day there was only one couple. They took the central table from which they could easily spot the first table vacated outdoors. A few minutes later, as the waiter approached them with their drinks, tray held high to clear the heads of the two diners at the adjacent table, the tray and its contents crashed down on Blackford's lap while a machine gun raked the diners outdoors. A half-dozen men dressed in the anonymous, uniform black pajama suits, armed with weaponry of several kinds, were firing at the entrance to the prison, two of them spraying the intersecting avenues with machine-gun bullets. Tucker had thrown himself across Lao Dai, Blackford was on the floor, a bottle of wine and three broken glasses between his stomach and the old auburn tiles. He looked up. Tucker had a pistol in his hand and was beginning to crawl toward the outdoors. Blackford knotted his fist and with all his strength swung it laterally at Tucker's hand, knocking the pistol loose. It slid across the tiled floor toward a recess of the restaurant.

“
Goddamnit, Tucker, you idiot
,” Blackford hissed. “
They've got machine guns out there
!” He suddenly changed his tactics. “Get Lao Dai out of the way. There—” Blackford pointed in the direction of the pistol. Tucker breathed heavily, said nothing, and began to drag Lao Dai toward the kitchen. With the bar blocking their view of the outside, they stayed in place. It seemed a long time before the firing stopped. It was only eighteen minutes, the papers the next day recorded, though parallel coordinated attacks nearby lasted as much as a half hour. A half hour, and five U.S. soldiers killed, seventy-six wounded, five B-57 jet bombers and fifteen transports damaged, four helicopters and three Skyraider bombers destroyed, and the state prison opened, with over one hundred Vietcong released. There were several hundred casualties among the native population, including over one half of the patrons of Le Bon Laboureur who had been dining outside.

Charlie had made his demonstration. He was everywhere. Nobody was safe from him.

32

November 1, 1964

New York, N.Y.

Robert Kennedy, having resigned as Attorney General to run for the Senate seat now held by Republican Kenneth Keating, was campaigning before a full house of students at Columbia University. He was everywhere met with a kind of tentative affection—not unexpected, less than one year after the tragedy at Dallas, but different in kind from the visceral delight his brother had engendered among college students. His opponent, Senator Keating, had a good reputation. He was a liberal Republican who, however, had been at the forefront of those who had warned against Fidel Castro. It was Kenneth Keating, more than one week ahead of the event, who had warned, in October 1962, that nuclear missiles were being introduced into Cuba. Official Washington had paid no attention to what the insiders dismissed as attention-getting rodomontade by a senator who wanted to stay in the headlines, his campaign only a couple of years away.

Keating was at heart a soft-spoken man, but he had been infuriated by Robert Kennedy's most recent maneuver, against which, however, he could not publicly protest. For two years, every week at noon on Saturday, Kenneth Keating had delivered a five-minute radio address to the voters. The first minute had become quietly celebrated among political junkies who tuned in. It was, quite simply, hilarious: whatever the week's news, Senator Keating would succeed in giving it an amusing spin. The cost of the humorist's time, who wrote these lines for the senator—leftovers, for the most part, from the heavy ration he and his three confederates wrote every week for Johnny Carson—had been subsidized by a friend of Keating's who had insisted that a jollier public personality would pay off in the next election. When Bobby Kennedy became a candidate, he and his staff decided that Keating needed to be separated from his humorist. A Kennedy deputy traveled to Hollywood, easily established that the writer was himself a Democrat, arranged for a personal call from Bobby, together with the promise of “a more realistic” compensation for his extra work, and the following Friday in Washington, when ordinarily the script from Hollywood arrived at Keating's office, there came instead a letter reporting that the burden of work at the studio would, unfortunately, keep him from continuing to supply Senator Kenneth Keating with the weekly roll, wishing him all the best, had been a pleasure working with him, sincerely.

That was bad news, losing his best writer. But when, one week later, candidate Robert Kennedy announced that he too would make a weekly broadcast, Senator Keating and his staff were there, listening in to the first one. And the first full minute was a series of engaging gags about the week's developments, of exactly the pattern Kenneth Keating had made popular.

Keating rose. “He has stolen my humorist!” But of course no one could contrive a nonhumiliating formula for making the protest public.

But since the bad news from Vietnam had broken in the Saturday-morning papers, Keating wondered whether Robert Kennedy would begin his noon broadcast, opposite Kenneth Keating, with a joke about Bien Hoa. And what would he say to the Columbia students on the subject?

Kennedy elected to devote his broadcast to the need for federal health insurance. This left his listeners with the impression that the Vietnam news, which overwhelmed all other concerns, had broken after Mr. Kennedy had recorded his broadcast. But he could not avoid being accosted by Bien Hoa when he met with the students at the McMillin academic theater at one o'clock. What matters, his principal aide had said to him in the late morning, “is your
aspect
. Grave, deliberate, outraged, sad, determined. Got it?”

“Got it.”

What I want to know
, the first student panelist said, after the brief introductory remarks,
is how can the Vietcong stage a massive raid just twelve miles from Saigon
?

It was an act of sheer adventurism, Mr. Kennedy said pensively. By no means representative of the strength of the Vietcong, which we have every reason to believe is diminishing every month, with our strategic hamlet program. These were desperadoes. They will undoubtedly be tracked down and be made to pay the penalty for killing civilians, to say nothing of brave United States soldiers.

How does the President intend to respond
?

Mr. Kennedy had spoken with him over the telephone just an hour or two earlier, and had been told that all the aircraft destroyed or damaged would be quickly replaced, and that the incident would by no means provoke the Administration into relenting in its determination, so frequently reiterated by his late brother, to stop the Communist aggression, or into thoughtless retaliations.

Did Mr. Kennedy think the President's attitude correct
?

Mr. Kennedy turned his head just a little, in that special, affecting way of his, and said that yes, he thought the President's strategy sound, but only in context of the imperative need to press for a negotiated settlement, a return to the Geneva Accords, and that when elected—if elected (smile)—he would do everything he could to continue to fuel enthusiasm for diplomatic initiatives. But meanwhile there was no alternative to standing by our commitments to our ally and to the relevant treaties.

The applause, while not deafening, was substantial, and reassuring.

“How'd I do?” Kennedy asked his aide, back in the car and headed for his new house in Long Island, necessary to his rebirth as a resident of New York.

“Good.
Perfect
line … got-to-keep-up-our resolution … help-our-allies … but look-for-diplomatic-pressures … Good. Hang on to it. By the way,
did
you speak to the President?”

“No. But I left word with a pal at the White House to log the call in on the record. LBJ will understand. He
always
understands things like that.”

The aide was right. President Johnson did understand it. He was casually advised, later that day, of the imaginary telephone call, and of Bobby's comments at Columbia. They were innocuous, LBJ concluded. And Bobby had been correct in reporting that the President would order immediate replacement of the damaged aircraft. He did wonder how Bobby knew this, since the order had only gone out at about the time Bobby spoke, noon. Goddamn informant on the staff, probably over at the Pentagon.… What he couldn't understand, and nobody he had questioned could enlighten him on the point—not McNamara, not Rostow, not Bundy, not McCone—was the ability of the Vietcong to stage so dramatic a raid so close to South Vietnamese headquarters; that, and their
motives
in doing so. Why behave so provocatively at this time, so close to a national election?

McNamara had not really been helpful. McCone had said something to the effect that the eternal South Vietnamese intramural political squabbling, and the recent public protests against General Khanh, in-again, out-again, might have been a reason for the North Vietnamese publicly to challenge any notion that South Vietnam was stabilizing.

The door to the Oval Office opened, after a perfunctory knock. A military aide approached the President, laid a folder down on his desk, turned around and walked out. Johnson opened it.

Hanoi had broadcast that the Bien Hoa incidents had been in retaliation for the U.S. raids following the “fake” Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, and in further retaliation against more recent disguised raids against North Vietnam on the Laotian frontier, and by naval forces which had shelled the coastal areas of Quang Binh Province. And that the raid had been further motivated in retaliation against Saigon's execution of Nguyen Can Troi, who had attempted to assassinate Secretary McNamara during his last visit to Vietnam.

LBJ allowed himself to wonder whether attempting to assassinate McNamara ought to be a capital offense.

The President allowed himself to wonder where it would all end, how would it end.

33

November 2, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

It was after two in the morning when the telephone rang in the safe house where Blackford was asleep. As usual, he came rather slowly to his senses, his reaction beginning only after the third ring. Sally? But as he switched on the light he knew it couldn't be Sally calling. He hadn't given her this telephone number, and hadn't expected a call from her.

Tucker.

“Sorry 'bout this, Black, but I got to see you. Yes, I know what time it is, but I'm scheduled to go back to Savannakhet tomorrow and you're going to Danang, and I can't wait another couple of weeks for our next meeting.”

“Come on around, Tucker.”

He arrived in ten minutes. Blackford had on khaki trousers and was barefoot. He led Tucker to the kitchen table, on it fresh coffee and two bottles of beer. Blackford sat down. “Take whatever you want, Tucker.”

He poured himself coffee. “You, Black?”

“Same.”

“I got to tell you something. But I got to swear you to silence.”

“Tucker … Look, sometimes it can't work that way.”

Tucker paused. “Can't you trust me?”

“Can't you trust
me
?”

“What do you mean? Why do you think I'd be here, if I couldn't trust you?”

“I mean: You tell me what you want to tell me, and I'll have to decide whether I'm obliged to communicate it to someone. Trust me to make the decision.”

Tucker hesitated. “All right. But on one condition: that you level with me on whether you intend to—to give it away. My secret.”

Blackford nodded his head lightly.

“Okay. Well.” Again, Tucker hesitated. “It's this. I found something out tonight.” He stared away. Blackford didn't press him. His face still turned, Tucker went on. “Madame Lao Dai works for North Vietnam.”