True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  “Unbelievable! Did they name it after the evil spy organization on Get Smart?”

  “Beats me. Maybe.”

  I put down the papers. “This is just stupendous.” Life imitates entertainment. Alex Macallister, my James Bond playmate, worked on Project RESISTANCE, became a CHAOS agent, had a code name containing a number. “Thank you.” I lean over and kiss Stewart.

  “If reading old files counts as foreplay, you’re sicker than I am.”

  As I brush my teeth, I realize I didn’t understand something Stewart said at dinner.

  “Honey?” I say as I walk barefoot and half-naked back into the bedroom. “One more thing, absolutely the last—”

  “Shhh,” he says, pointing at the TV.

  There’s an old silent clip of Buzzy in black tie talking to George W. Bush. “The influential Washington insider and FOX News commentator,” the anchor says, “was found dead early this morning, killed by a hand grenade, in his luxurious northwest Washington home.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Although it was initially reported as an execution-style terrorist killing, ATF and FBI sources now tell FOX News they believe Bernard Freeman’s death to be a suicide.”

  “Oh, Christ, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. He killed himself because of me, because I’m outing us.”

  Stewart takes me in his arms. He does not refute my theory. I’m shivering, not because I’m cold.

  “How close are you to done?” he asks. “With the book?”

  “Why? Fairly close, I guess.”

  “In case Freeman left a note. Telling all. Burning you before you can burn him. Check your voice mail, see if anybody’s called. I should probably clear the fuck out of here before the camera crews or the feebs show up.”

  26

  On the first Saturday in February 1968, I didn’t wake up until after the sun had gone down, so my father’s favorite cliché, the cold light of day, could not literally apply. But I was pleased and surprised to discover that I remembered everything we’d discussed and debated and decided to do. I was clear and calm, as if I’d been initiated into a secret club of heroic problem-solvers, had at last made a real moral choice, the only moral choice—to act, to eliminate the bloody tyrant. The night had had its dreamlike qualities, but it was a dream unlike any I’d ever had, because it made perfect sense while it was occurring and still made perfect sense afterward.

  I phoned Chuck, and he phoned Alex, and we all agreed to meet at Tommy’s Lunch—nominally for dinner, since none of us had eaten a real meal in twenty-four hours, but implicitly and actually to reaffirm our decision in the cold light of day, to make sure none of us was chickening out.

  Each of us was tentative at first, and we addressed the matter at hand by indirection, in a kind of ad hoc code. By the time our sandwiches were ready, however, Buzzy was referring to the plan as “Lima Bravo Juliet”—LBJ—and it was clear we were all in. Alex was grinning and wide-eyed, as if he’d been cast in a movie. Chuck seemed reborn, loose and determined; a weight had been lifted. Buzzy said it was important that we act and speak in public as we had all year, keep the same hours, go to classes as usual, everything outwardly unchanged.

  “So: D-day?” he asked. “We need a couple of months.”

  “April Fool’s?” I proposed.

  They all gave me sharp, shocked looks.

  “I’m not saying it’s a prank! I just mean the first of the month.”

  “Right,” Alex said, “that is during spring break.”

  “Okay,” Buzzy said, “we’ll aim for one April.”

  As we walked out into the frigid darkness of Mount Auburn Street, Alex declaimed loudly, “Into the breach, we band of brothers, we happy few.”

  “Brothers and sister,” Buzzy said.

  I wondered if I would lose my nerve.

  However, as we focused on our secret plan to improve the world instantly, the world obliged by becoming more atrocious. Consider the following Thursday, the eighth of February. On that single day, police shot and killed three students, two of them in the back, and wounded dozens of others during a protest at a black college in South Carolina; George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, announced his third-party candidacy for president and said he’d make Washington safe “if it took thirty thousand troops with two-foot bayonets”; and we read an Associated Press dispatch in The Harvard Crimson about the spasm of bombs and artillery shells that had wiped out Bến Tre, South Vietnam, and a U.S. Army officer’s explanation that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The following week, more than three thousand Americans were killed and wounded in Vietnam, the most ever and twice the rate of the previous month. The tipping point that had sickened and frightened me in January was tipping all the way.

  The newspaper was full of stories suggesting that Johnson might be about to turn Vietnam into a nuclear war. The Pentagon admitted that H-bomb experts from MIT and Columbia had gone to Saigon to assess “the effectiveness of new weapons.” Early one morning Buzzy called me to read aloud from an article in the Times about the chairman of the joint chiefs testifying to a Senate committee. “They ask him if they’re planning to use nukes anywhere in ‘Nam, and the fucker answers, ‘I do not think that nuclear weapons will be required to defend Khe Sanh.’ He doesn’t ‘think’ so, not in Khe Sanh, anyhow. What about anywhere else in Vietnam, General Wheeler?”

  How could we shrink from the obvious conclusion? It was clear to us that by eliminating one person, the right person, we might save the lives of many thousands of people. We really might prevent World War III.

  The radical wankers around us that winter and spring seemed more impotent and vain than ever, talking and talking and talking some more, which only fueled our conviction that we were serious and they were whiny children. They insisted that the university hire more Marxist faculty members. When another Dow Chemical job recruiter came to campus and said that he supported the manufacture of napalm and was “proud to work for Dow,” SDS did nothing. For a week, I shook my head or rolled my eyes every time I passed a kid wearing a black armband, one of the hundreds of students who were supposedly “fasting” to protest the war—and who then demanded rebates of fifteen dollars apiece for the week of cafeteria meals they’d skipped in protest.

  True, public opinion seemed to be shifting a little. Walter Cronkite came back from a tour of Vietnam and, shockingly, expressed his opinion on the evening news—”with each escalation,” he said, “the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.” Two weeks later, Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate, ran a close second to Johnson in the New Hampshire primary.

  We four, however, had our own take on these supposedly hopeful signs. “Armbands and peace rallies aren’t what’s doing this,” Buzzy said. “Resistance is. Those never-say-die Charlies in Saigon and Khe San are. Fighting fire with fire is.”

  “By the way?” Alex said. “In New Hampshire? Gene McCarthy lost, and LBJ won. My dad says Adlai Stevenson told him that McCarthy is never going to be nominated, let alone elected president.”

  We were not unlike the clipboard-clasping eager beavers all around us campaigning for McCarthy, my roommate and Sarah Caputo organizing carpools up to New Hampshire and out to Wisconsin. Like them, we were smart and hopeful and indefatigable, well organized and goal-oriented, with time on our hands. Which was why we thought we had a special destiny. Instead of harnessing our youthful energy to stuff envelopes and phone strangers and knock on doors and drive voters to polling places in order to rid the world of Lyndon Johnson and end the war, our little Children’s Crusade was efficient and didn’t require convincing thirty million Americans to vote for some goofy Minnesota poet. Unlike the fires set and store windows smashed and random cops shot by poor black people, the act of violence we envisioned was rationally, carefully, coolly premeditated and planned. We weren’t wild-eyed romantics or dead-enders, I thought. We would be effective. We were pragmatic.

  What I think each of us felt, although none of us
said so, was that we were invincible. We’d gotten away with every Bond mission unscathed, and with driving drunk and missing curfews and calling ourselves radicals and taking drugs and having sex and cursing our parents. We’d been admitted to Harvard. We’d gotten away with planting the M-80s in the ROTC building and holding the Dow recruiter hostage, and Chuck had even gotten away with fighting the U.S. marshal at the Pentagon. What hadn’t we gotten away with? Luck had always been on our side. Now we were daring it to abandon us.

  Through February and March, we all kept eating tablets of speed from Buzzy’s plastic jar as if they were Four A Day Supervitamins.

  After a couple of discussions, we decided on the basic logistics for Operation Lima Bravo Juliet.

  Buzzy’s military jargon made it seem less outlandish, almost sensible. “It’s a fairly standard paramilitary op,” he said.

  He and Chuck both had experience with rifles. “Oswald would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t also shot the Dallas cop,” Chuck said. “That was his big mistake.”

  “His mistake,” I said, “was his connection to the CIA—even if he wasn’t an agent, like that district attorney in New Orleans says, they knew who he was. They would’ve taken him out. And maybe did.”

  “I don’t believe he was CIA,” Alex said. “He was a loser.”

  Buzzy argued that in the post-Oswald age, snipers are exactly what the Secret Service was guarding against—they now had closed presidential limousines with bullet-proof glass and armor plating, and big security perimeters for outdoor appearances.

  Chuck told us about some Levy family heroes, Czech friends of friends of his dad’s, who returned from London to Prague during World War II to use a machine gun and a bomb to kill the number-two SS guy who had helped plan the final solution.

  “They got away with it?” Alex asked.

  He nodded.

  “Really,” Buzzy asked, “they escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia?”

  “No. But they killed a dozen more Nazis in a shootout. And committed suicide before they could be captured.” Chuck also said his uncle had known one of the two guys in his Zionist guerrilla group, kids our age, who assassinated Britain’s Middle East minister in Cairo in the 1940s, with pistols, point-blank.

  After a pause, he said to Buzzy, “You had pistol training in the Coast Guard, right? We could do it with pistols.”

  We could.

  “Yeah, well,” Buzzy said, “a sidearm would be iffy with the Secret Service right there to jump you. If you didn’t care about dying, the way to do it’d be with a frag in your pocket, a grenade, sidle up to him, ‘Hello, great to meet you, Mr. President,’ kaboom. But I’m headed for medical school—poor people to treat, promises to keep, miles to go, etcetera.”

  I was grateful that a suicide mission was off the table, and I could tell Alex was, too. Buzzy, sensing the mood in the room, flipped into teasing mode.

  “I’m wondering, Mr. Bond,” he said to Chuck, “would you use your .25 Beretta or your 7.65-millimeter Walther PPK?”

  Now I felt sorry for Chuck, so I told one of my dad’s few World War II tales, about an acrobat and juggler with the Copenhagen circus who formed a troupe to provide entertainment at some Nazi officers’ celebration,and then, during the finale, threw grenades into the audience.

  “Because my father loved the circus and could juggle, when I was little, I wondered if that story was about him.”

  “Nah,” Buzzy said, “that had to be a one-way mission.” He turned back to Chuck. He wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. “You’re a pilot. We could rent a plane, and you could crash it into Air Force One.”

  “Like they tried with de Gaulle, right,” Chuck said to me, “in Algeria? You told me about it that day at the library in Evanston.”

  “No,” I said, vetoing the plan, not denying my perfect memory of that day. “Besides, how many people fly with the president? Dozens of innocent people would die.”

  “That’s relative,” Buzzy said. “How ‘innocent’ the henchmen are.”

  We accommodated ourselves to the unfortunate fact that if we weren’t going to shoot Johnson, people near him would probably die as well. But we would endeavor to limit what Buzzy called “the collateral damage,” a phrase new to the rest of us.

  “A couple of times with de Gaulle,” Chuck asked me, “didn’t they plant bombs in the street where his car was traveling?”

  “Explosives,” Buzzy said. “That’s where I was headed, too.”

  I had an idea. I had the perfect idea. “Your model airplane, Chuck! You put some kind of bomb inside it and then fly it into him by remote control from far away. That might work, wouldn’t it?”

  On Washington’s Birthday, Buzzy and Chuck returned from a weekend in Wilmette—Chuck’s brother’s Michael’s bar mitzvah was the pretext—with Chuck’s seven-foot-long silver World War II bomber in the back of Buzzy’s station wagon.

  The following Saturday we all drove up to New Hampshire, ostensibly to ski but actually to practice flying “the Dauntless,” as Chuck called his model plane. Alex had wanted to bring his movie camera and film us, but Buzzy said, “Yeah, why don’t we just invite the fucking FBI to watch, too?”

  Chuck hadn’t flown it in three years, not since he’d started flying for real, and he worried that his new pilot instincts would trip him up. “Because you’re not inside of it,” he said, “flying the model, it’s like you have to switch back and forth between first person and third person all the time.”

  He’d also never flown it with such a heavy payload. It was packed with ten pounds of Play-Doh—or, as Buzzy said, “five kilos of simulated plastique.” It also had a hundred feet of fishing line tied to its nose, with a Ping-Pong ball on the other end.

  As soon as it took off, though, Chuck looked to us like a virtuoso as he gently tugged and nudged his two control sticks but kept his eyes on the plane.

  Alex complained he was cold, I lit a cigarette, Chuck said something about the rudder and new servos, Buzzy asked about the range of the radio signal and the plane’s speed.

  “Three hundred, four hundred yards,” Chuck said, “and maybe thirty-five knots. Forty miles an hour.”

  “I know what a knot is, man. In W-W-Two the Dauntless really was a dive-bomber, right?”

  “Yup.”

  Buzzy drove his car to the far side of the field, about a hundred yards from us, then walked to a hedgerow a hundred yards from the car and us. He had one of the two-pound walkie-talkies and the field glasses we’d bought at an army-surplus store; I had the other walkie-talkie; and Alex had his fancy graduation-gift binoculars. Buzzy had made us all study a glossary of military talk and insisted, for clarity’s sake, that we speak its language on the mission.

  “Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot, fack, over.”

  Karen Hollaender was Kilo Hotel, and Buzzy Freeman was Bravo Foxtrot. “Fack” meant “FAC”—forward air controller.

  I answered. “Readable loud and clear, over.”

  “Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot, fack, over?”

  “Push the button to talk, Hollaender!” Alex shouted.

  “Shit. Bravo Foxtrot, this is Kilo Hotel, you are loud and clear, over.”

  “Dauntless spotted at a hundred and fifty meters altitude, one hundred meters southwest of me.”

  “Roger.”

  A couple of minutes later, Chuck had the plane flying in tight circles high above the car.

  “Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot: engage.”

  “Okay,” Chuck said to me, “tell him I’m diving.”

  “WILCO, Bravo Foxtrot, proceeding with post hole, over.”

  “Roger, Kilo Hotel.”

  The plane started spiraling down, directly toward Buzzy’s old green station wagon. Its lawn-mower buzz got much louder.

  “Whoa,” Alex said.

  The dangling Ping-Pong ball touched the car, and Buzzy’s voice shouted over my radio: “Target marked, over!”

  The plane came out of its dive. �
�Roger, affirmative!” I said.

  Chuck circled the Dauntless back up into the sky. Buzzy moved the car to a different corner of the field, and we did it again, and again, and again, for hours.

  On the last go, the plane came down below the far treetops, and the moment after Alex shouted “Chuck!” and Chuck shouted “Shit!” at the same time, it pulled out of its dive and zoomed just barely over the trees.

  “Delta Hotel,” Buzzy shouted, “over!”

  “What? I mean, say again?”

  “Direct hit! Bravo fucking Zulu, team! Reset to home plate! It’s Miller time, over.”

  After Chuck brought in the plane for its final landing, he turned to me and said, “I guess we’re gonna do this.” I nodded. But we were playing with a model airplane. It still seemed like a game to me.

  “Even if it doesn’t, you know, work,” Alex said, “it’ll seriously be bringing the war home. It’ll make the news. It’ll be cool.”

  On the ride back to Cambridge, we talked about the possibility of things going awry, how we might escape, how much money we’d need to fly abroad. Chuck joked about “Alex’s pal Fidel fixing us up in Havana,” but Alex had done research on possible exile locales and decided that Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was the place to go, if necessary. “It’s this really sophisticated city, I mean really happening, with cool galleries and clubs, plus perfect weather, and really beautiful people, Christian, not Mohammedan, and,” he said, turning to Chuck, “they’ve even got a lot of Jews.” Alex already had a passport, and Buzzy and Chuck and I would all get them. Buzzy said that he’d lost his in the ‘Nam.

  It still felt a bit like a game when the boys began their daily exercise regimens at the Harvard gym, as it did when we discovered, in a Washington Star from the Harvard Square newsstand, that the president’s travel and appearance schedules were published every week in advance.

  Buzzy and Chuck drove up to a gun store in New Hampshire and used fake IDs with aliases James Bond had used—Peter Franks from Diamonds Are Forever and Hilary Bray from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—to buy two pistols. The guns, a .32-caliber automatic and a 9mm Luger, looked a lot like the toys we’d used as props on Bond missions.