by Mark Spivak
“I’ll tell you why. Because the police, God bless ‘em, are too busy enforcing the law to try to prevent crime in their communities. By the time they get involved, a crime has already been committed. They’ve got too much on their plate to be proactive, and we certainly can’t blame them for that.
“But long before we had an organized police force, we had watchmen. These were men who patrolled their neighborhoods, usually as volunteers, and made sure that everything was under control. They knew their communities inside out, and they could spot trouble before it developed. They performed an important and essential function, although they largely ceased to exist after police departments were organized.
“And some of you folks here tonight probably remember when the cops on the beat did the same thing. It wasn’t unusual at all, even up until thirty or forty years ago. But the sad fact is that our society has changed. Today our families are fragmented, our young people lack direction, and our neighborhoods are filled with transients. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that, as we sit here just a few miles from the Mexican border.”
The room erupted in spontaneous applause.
“And long before we had watchmen, we had valiant organizations like the Knights Templar. They were the bravest of the brave—warriors who fought for the good of mankind simply because it was important to do so. They were also the purest of the pure. They took vows of poverty and chastity, and they stuck to them. I’m proud to say that the Angels of Democracy follow in the footsteps of the Knights Templar. We’re not too strong on the chastity business, but we’ve got the poverty part down pretty good.
“And that’s why,” he said over the laughter of the crowd, “I’m proud to wear this jersey with the red cross on it, the insignia of those brave knights. That red cross was a symbol of martyrdom for the Knights Templars, a reminder that they never needed to be afraid of dying in battle, because there was a place reserved for them in heaven. The Angels of Democracy don’t fight real-life battles, but we are engaged in a constant struggle to restore the values of our society. That cross reminds us every day that we have a mission bigger than ourselves, a mission that needs to be fulfilled.”
He took another dramatic pause, scanning the crowd to eye contact with as many adult males as possible.
“I want you to join me in that mission. If you have a pure heart and an open mind, we have a place for you in the Angels of Democracy. You won’t get rich. You won’t become famous. But you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped restore this country to its roots. And I can tell you that there is no more noble cause on earth.
“Will you join me?”
The crowd rose to its feet and applauded, and men made their way to the podium to shake Marshall’s hand. At the rear of the room, the representative from Haft Industries stopped recording on his iPhone.
Chapter 5
It all started when Gunther Haft was splattered with mud.
Gunther came to the United States with his parents in 1892 at the age of twelve. The family headed for Missouri, a collection point for German immigrants. The Hafts settled in Gasconade County, where the population consisted almost entirely of transplants from their native region of Saxony.
Young Gunther was a bright and headstrong child, but his intelligence was easily eclipsed by his physical strength. By the time he finished school at 17, the boy stood well over six feet and tipped the scales at a muscular 220. No wonder he was attracted to the Missouri Bootheel. The southern tip of the state comprised parts of seven counties, and word had reached Gasconade that the Bootheel was a logger’s paradise: densely wooded and virtually uninhabited. By 1897 access to the area was opened by railroads, and Gunter headed south to pursue his fortune.
His physique made him a standout in the logging camps of the Bootheel. He was calm and quiet, never seeking confrontation but never shying away from it. He had the stamina to work harder and longer than anyone else in his crew, and he was so thrifty that he quickly accumulated far more money than his workmates. In 1903 he founded Haft Lumber, and soon he was supervising dozens of men.
During his filial trips back to Gasconade County he met and courted his future wife, Julia. He sired two daughters and a son, Jacob, born in 1899. Gunther continued to prosper during the first decade of the 20th century, and as World War I came over the horizon he was one of the wealthiest men in the Bootheel.
Then came the moment that changed the direction of his business completely, affecting him more profoundly than the tales of endless forests that had enticed him to move south.
One day in 1913, Gunther was out in the field with a logging crew when he heard the noise of a machine in the distance. The sound grew louder as the apparition came into view, and he realized it was a Model T. Ford’s production had begun to explode the previous year. Gunther had heard of these cars but had never seen one—common as they might have been in St. Louis, they were a rare sight in the isolated Bootheel. His crew stopped working and gaped at the vehicle as it approached. The car bounced along the rutted field toward them at its top speed of 45 mph. As it passed the men it lurched through a ditch filled with the remnants of that morning’s rain and splattered mud all over Gunther Haft.
Fastidious though he was, Gunther was more astonished at the significance of the event than with the mud that fouled his neatly pressed clothes. Like many in rural America, he had dismissed the automobile as a fad of the moment. The fact that the Model T had penetrated into the Bootheel meant that the world was changing more radically than he realized. Over the next few months he read everything he could about Henry Ford’s business. He learned about the assembly line method that had produced nearly 70,000 cars the previous year, and which was projected to turn out 200,000 in 1913. Within five years, Ford claimed he could be making 500,000 cars annually.
The future, Gunther realized, was oil. He temporarily placed the management of Haft Lumber in the hands of foremen and embarked on a tour of the nation’s burgeoning oil industry. As he visited oil fields from the Gulf Coast to Oklahoma, he had another revelation. Drilling for oil was not only messy and dangerous—it was also expensive. Gunther decided that he had no interest in the costly, time-consuming roulette game of extracting oil from the ground. The real future lay in the process of transforming oil into gasoline, then transporting the fuel to the millions of people who would soon own cars.
He focused his efforts in Louisiana, where Standard Oil had never been able to establish a significant foothold. He opened his first refinery in Shreveport in 1916. By the mid-1920s, when his son Jacob joined the company, it had annual revenues of $6 million. When Gunther died in 1935 and Jacob took over, it was known as Haft Petroleum.
Jacob may have lacked Gunther’s physical strength, but he was even shrewder than his father. In the 1930s he realized the war was coming, that America would eventually get involved, and that oil would become more important than ever. Between 1936 and 1941 he doubled the refinery output of Haft Petroleum and kept the company debt-free.
World War II turned out to be the winning lottery ticket for Jacob Haft. Even though he detested what he perceived to be the Socialist policies of Franklin Roosevelt, he used the New Deal to accumulate a formidable fortune. His own sons—Sheldon and Richard, born three years apart—grew up on a steady diet of dinner table lectures about the dangers of government intervention in business and the blessings of the free market system. It was a catechism: Government meddling was bad, individual entrepreneurship was good; pure capitalism meant that the strong survived and the weak perished; fiddling with the Darwinian order of things would wreak untold havoc on the universe. By the time the boys were teenagers, they could repeat it in their sleep.
They were also indoctrinated into their father’s political opinions, positions that grew more extreme as the years passed. Jacob Haft had been a staunch Republican throughout the Roosevelt years. When the war ended and the country’s economy boomed duri
ng the Truman era, he realized that Socialism had become permanently embedded in the American system: as individual entrepreneurs accumulated more wealth, they were steadily subjected to a flood of regulations that hampered their activities. He came to believe that it was no longer merely a case of the government wanting their cut of the pie. The authorities wanted to tell him how to bake it, a situation he found galling.
When the young Barry Goldwater was elected senator from Arizona in 1952, Haft followed him closely and liked what he heard. Goldwater had bucked the system and snagged a Senate seat as a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. He was both a friend of Herbert Hoover and a bitter opponent of the legacy of the New Deal. He fought against labor unions, Communism and the pervasive interference of the federal government into states’ affairs. When Goldwater’s book The Conscience of A Conservative came out in 1960, Haft called it “the most important literary work since the Bible.” He purchased several thousand copies and distributed them to friends, family and business associates.
One morning in December 1958, before Sheldon and Richard had been trained as engineers at M.I.T. and had completed their education at Wharton Business School, Jacob Haft walked into a large Tudor home in the suburbs of Indianapolis. He took a seat in the living room surrounded by a dozen of the country’s leading right-wing academics and industrialists. For the next two days he listened as Robert Welch, a retired business executive and rabid anti-Communist, outlined his perception of the worldwide Soviet menace. According to Welch, the U.S.S.R. had conceived a plan for global domination and was executing it flawlessly, both in America and abroad. On the evening of the second day, Welch finally outlined his vision of how to combat this menace. It would be a coordinated effort involving public education, support for conservative media, organization of interest groups, and political action. It would be called the John Birch Society.
John Birch was an American military officer and Baptist missionary who had been executed by Chinese Communists in 1945. Welch referred to him as “the first American casualty of the Cold War.” The group that took his name attacked the Communist conspiracy on many fronts. They wrote and distributed pamphlets and magazines, produced informational movies, lobbied for U.S. withdrawal from the UN, organized field offices and sponsored letter-writing campaigns. Jacob Haft supported them financially from the beginning. He traveled widely giving speeches about the unseen dangers of Communism and wrote his own pamphlet, One American’s View of the Communist Threat, distributing several million copies around the country.
Jacob Haft continued to be involved with politics until his death in 1990. He was a major contributor to conservative candidates on both a local and national level, constantly searching for people who displayed enthusiasm for the free market system, disdain for government regulation and a hatred for all forms of Socialism. He became fascinated with the Libertarian Party when it surfaced in the 1970s and passed his passion on to his sons. Sheldon, the eldest, inherited many of his father’s hard-core beliefs, even opening a John Birch Society bookstore in St. Louis in 1978. Richard was more balanced, although he ran for office unsuccessfully on the Libertarian Party ticket. Above all else, the brothers learned from their father the importance of using their wealth to influence the direction of the country.
Many years later, had he lived, Jacob Haft would have been amazed and delighted to see how far the boys took it.
Chapter 6
Chet Wallko was maneuvering his way out of the Senate chamber when he saw the vice president coming toward him. Curtis Bassen flashed his usual grin, wide and brilliant, as he extended his hand.
“Surprise, surprise,” said Wallko. “I never expected to see you on the Hill today.”
“Chet.” The vice president placed his hand on the senator’s shoulder. “How the hell are you?”
“Not too shabby, for a middle-aged moderate.”
“We’re hoping you’ll be able to help us out on this committee vote.”
“I’m sure you realize the answer to that question is no.”
“Can we talk privately for a minute?”
“Sure. The committee can wait.”
The two men ducked into the Democratic cloakroom, which was deserted except for a cluster of aides in the corner. Startled, they looked at the two men and headed for the door.
“The President would appreciate your help on this, Chet.”
“Can’t do it, sorry. I believe you know the reasons.”
“Run down them for me quickly.”
“This is a worthless deal. Cuba gets everything out of it, and we get nothing.”
“I disagree, and so do a lot of other people. I think it will greatly improve the quality of life for the Cuban people.”
“It will greatly improve Atalas’ image as the savior of the downtrodden. That’s about it, really.”
“Still the sarcastic son of a bitch I know and love.” Before running on Khaleem Atalas’ ticket, Bassen had spent five terms in the Senate, the last three of which had overlapped with Wallko. “Cuba hasn’t been a threat to our security for decades, Chet. It’s time we tiptoed into the 21st century.”
“I agree with you there,” said Wallko. “But here’s what concerns me. Say we make this worthless deal. What’s next? Persepostan, according to Gottbaum, and you’d be hard pressed to find a greater threat to our security than them. They’re bankrolling the New Caliphate, for God’s sake. If we give Atalas Cuba, the next four years will be a parade of concessions to our enemies. We might as well put our nuclear secrets on the Internet and call it a day.”
“I think you’re overreacting.”
“Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, Curt. That’s the beauty of America.”
“Look, I won’t lie to you. We’d love to have you on our side on this.”
“And it’ll look bad if you don’t.”
“Maybe so. But the President would really like to have a closer working relationship with you.”
“Gosh, let’s see. Maybe he could give me some subsidies for sausage-making factories back in Indiana.”
“Go ahead, have some fun. But you do realize that if the treaty doesn’t pass—or if it isn’t even reported out of committee for a floor vote—he’s going to go ahead and open a diplomatic relationship with Cuba anyway.”
“As I say, it’s a free country. There are people around here who question how long we should be funding 100,000 troops in Kabulistan. I’m too busy holding them off to worry about Cuba.”
“We appreciate that, we really do. But that’s another conversation.”
“Better believe it.”
“Apparently there’s nothing I can say to change your mind. But I can tell you that the President will be very disappointed with this.”
“Tell him one thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Remind him that he’s the president—not the emperor or king.”
Wallko stared at the gavel, turning it over in his hand. Unlike the famous ivory gavel of the Senate chamber, this one was made of wood—snakewood, one of the hardest and most expensive varieties of wood on earth. It was plain, although at first glance its intricate natural markings made it look engraved. His fascination with the gavel dated to the day he first assumed chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was a rare day in the committee room when he failed to study it carefully before using it. A staffer had once asked him what he found so intriguing about it.
“This time around,” he told the aide, “banging that gavel’s about as close as I’m going to come to being in the movies.”
Slowly and forcefully, he thumped the gavel three times against the wooden sound block in front of him.
“The committee will come to order. The clerk will note that all nineteen members are present, and I want to thank all of you for coming here today.
“Today’s session should be a shor
t one. We’ve already had extensive debate on the administration’s proposed treaty with Cuba, and I’m sure that further discussion won’t change any minds. Therefore, I’ll ask each member to deliver a concise, two-minute summary of their position, and then we can vote. And speaking of concise, two-minute summaries, we’ll start with the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Caldwell.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman.” The slow drawl of James “Bull” Caldwell (R-Miss.) rang out over the laughter in the room. “I’m sure the distinguished gentleman from Indiana would agree that loquaciousness in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.” It drew another laugh from the press corps. “That being said, my statement today will be a short one, and one that I suspect even our illustrious chairman wouldn’t argue with. The gist of my position, as you know, is that this treaty will not just weaken the stature of the America in the world. It will pave the way for a series of foreign policy deals that will deliver us into the hands of our enemies. For the first four years of his presidency, Khaleem Atalas was intent on redistributing the balance of wealth and power within the United States. Now he seems intent on taking our global influence and handing it over to those who bitterly oppose us. And as they say where I come from, that dog won’t hunt.
“There are people in this great land who would tell us that the Communist menace is a thing of the past. Those folks would insist that Cuba is harmless, and they characterize the fight against Communism as a long-gone by product of the Cold War. To those people, I say this: Who do they think is supplying all the money and weapons to Persepostan—resources that are being channeled to the New Caliphate in their crusade to transform neighboring Sumeristan into an Islamic state? I’ll tell you who: it’s China, by God! The Chinese Communists aren’t content with weakening our country by owning all our foreign debt. No, they want to take the most important achievement of the past decade—namely, the liberation of Sumeristan and the removal of its brutal dictator, Hussein Ghazi—and subvert it by funding a group of radical Muslims hell-bent on our destruction.”