True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  It was only when Buzzy showed me the two boxes of ammunition they’d also bought in Portsmouth—”a hundred rounds,” he said—that our scheme no longer seemed like a game. The plan didn’t envision shooting anyone, but Buzzy had insisted on getting “sidearms as a contingency,” in case things went bad. “You know the Boy Scout motto,” he said. No, we didn’t. “‘Be prepared.’ And by the way, not to be paranoid, but here,” he said, handing Alex and me each a box of bullets to keep in our dorm rooms. He wanted us “to have some skin in the game”—to be materially, unequivocally bound up in the conspiracy.

  Buzzy conscripted all of us as his lab assistants when he mixed the sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and acetone in their dorm room. Our Benzedrine supply came in handy that week.

  We were very, very careful. We had to keep the beaker of acetone peroxide below 50 degrees as the mixture formed crystals, so we took turns, in four-hour shifts from eight A.M. one Saturday until eight A.M. Sunday, replenishing the ice in the ice bath. The second phase of lab work was much simpler, making what Chuck called “the AP putty”—acetone peroxide powder mixed with acetone and smokeless gunpowder (also bought in New Hampshire)—but it required a few days and a dozen sealed jars. Buzzy mixed up the ignition powder that would go in the nose of the Dauntless to ensure that the ten pounds of plastic explosive and buckshot in the fuselage would explode when it dive-bombed and crashed into the president.

  Because we discovered that the president’s actual appearances didn’t always conform to the published schedule, we decided, in Buzzy’s phrase, to “stay nimble and opportunistic” and wait for the right moment.

  Back in December, before we’d ever thought of Operation Lima Bravo Juliet, Chuck and Buzzy and I had gone down to New York, at Sarah’s invitation, to participate in a huge protest outside the army induction center. The day afterward, as it turned out, President Johnson made a surprise appearance at Cardinal Spellman’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so we were there on Fifth Avenue, carrying signs—mine was VIETNAMESE DON’T DIE PEACEFULLY, Chuck’s was HELL NO, Buzzy’s was NAPALM: JOHNSON’S BABY POWDER, Sarah’s was simply STOP—and chanting “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We watched Johnson arrive and leave Manhattan in a helicopter that landed in and took off from Central Park.

  When Cardinal Spellman’s replacement was announced in early March, I had a brainstorm—I figured Johnson would return to St. Patrick’s for the ordination of the new Catholic archbishop as a cardinal, scheduled for the fourth of April, right in the middle of spring break. If Johnson once again took a helicopter in and out of the big wide-open field in the park, we would have two ideal opportunities to send in our radio-controlled scale-model dive-bomber.

  One Friday in the middle of March, Alex flew home for the weekend; Chuck was writing two papers due the following Monday. Buzzy and I had just stayed up for twenty-four hours, making the acetone peroxide, and decided we needed a break. We went into Boston to see Country Joe and the Fish at the Psychedelic Supermarket. It was the first time I’d smoked grass since the fall. At some moment between “Superbird” (It’s a bird, it’s a plane / It’s a man insane / It’s my president, LBJ) and the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (Well there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee we’re all gonna die), I knew how the night was going to end. A couple of hours later, on my bed in North House, I threw off the shackles of bourgeois individualism and the folly of bourgeois monogamy. I had a box of 9-millimeter rounds at the bottom of my jewelry box, and I’d just helped manufacture ten pounds of plastic explosive intended to kill the president of the United States. In another few weeks I might be in prison or dead. I wasn’t sure whether I’d fallen out of love with Chuck Levy, but it seemed stupid at that point to deny my desire for Buzzy Freeman.

  The next morning I woke up feeling as if I’d made a quantum leap deeper into adulthood: I was only eighteen, but I was having an affair, which made me both happy and sad, as I imagined it was supposed to do. It had also been the most satisfying sexual experience in my nineteen months as a nonvirgin, which accrued to both the happy and sad sides of the ledger as well.

  I’d fallen for Buzzy for reasons people are ordinarily smitten. But as I admitted to myself a long time afterward, it was also because, after he brought up the idea of assassinating Johnson and the rest of us went along, he became our alpha male. Being the only female in our pack, I was alpha by default.

  I resisted my childish impulse to go to Saint Paul Church to make confession—would even some Harvard Square priest consider “relations” with my boyfriend’s roommate any more sinful than “relations” with my boyfriend?—and stayed in my room studying for the French lit midterm, rereading the passages in Sartre’s Dirty Hands that I’d underlined. A year ago, the world depicted in the play had seemed as fantastic as Arthur and Merlin and Guinevere and Lancelot—Communist cells in a fascist country, guns, assassinations, life-and-death deception, lovers’ betrayals. Now I was living it. I was Jessica, the cold young wife of the confused young would-be assassin Hugo in the play, treating their assassination plot as a game and cheating on him with their charming, more experienced older comrade.

  “It is the good children who make the best revolutionaries,” Jessica declares. “They say nothing, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one candy at a time—but later on, they make society pay dearly for it.”

  “An assassin,” Hugo observes, “is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand.”

  My phone rang sometime after lunch. It was Alex, excited, calling to tell me he’d just seen a special report on TV—Bobby Kennedy had announced that he was running against Johnson for the nomination. When the four of us met up after dinner for ice cream at Brigham’s, I was glad we had an urgent new discussion topic that might prevent Buzzy’s and my sexual electricity and lies and guilt from coalescing into some unmistakable, undeniable telltale form, like a freakish thundercloud issuing lightning bolts. We decided over hot fudge sundaes that the news of the day had not changed our plans. Lima Bravo Juliet was still a go—now more than ever, since removing Johnson from the equation would immeasurably improve Kennedy’s chances of becoming president and ending the war.

  I didn’t know if Buzzy and I would continue our affair. “You know,” he had said before he left my room, “Jules and Jim doesn’t have a happy ending.” But later that week, as I walked out of an afternoon class, there was Buzzy, who admitted when I asked that he hadn’t just happened to be passing by, which made me melt. I suggested we go to a movie, any new movie at all. In the theater, I came closer than I ever have in my life to having sex in front of other people. It was also the first time I laughed in the middle of making out—when, up on the screen, Charlton Heston shouted, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”—and the first time I’d really laughed in months.

  After the movie Buzzy went to the gym and I went to Chuck and Buzzy’s dorm room. Chuck seemed even more grim and keyed up than usual. I saw a patch of white dust on the bedside table. Lately, he’d taken to crushing and snorting Benzedrine. He was rereading the title story in For Your Eyes Only, one of his Bond books that he’d brought back from Wilmette a month earlier, and before I sat down, he picked up the book to read aloud a passage where Bond is about to assassinate a Nazi war criminal in America with a sniper rifle. “ ‘Tension was building up in him. In his imagination he could already hear the deep bark of the Savage.’ The gun store in Portsmouth had a Savage for sale,” Chuck told me without looking up, “just like this one in the book.”

  I hadn’t sat down, and he continued reading. “ ‘He could see the black bullet lazily, like a slow flying bee, homing down into the valley towards a square of pink skin. There was a light smack as it hit. The skin dented, broke and then closed up again leaving a small hole with bruised edges. The bullet ploughed on—’”

  “Stop,” I told him.

  He paused for barely a second. “ ‘The bullet ploughed on, unhurriedly,
toward the pulsing heart—the tissues, the blood-vessels, parting obediently to let it through. Who was this man he was going to do this to? What had he ever done to Bond?’”

  He closed the book and looked at me. I didn’t know what he expected me to say. I wasn’t in the mood to discuss morality again or to do another “gut check” of our commitment to going through with the attack. “I’m going to the library to work on my folklore paper,” I told him. In honor of April Fool’s Day, the teacher had assigned us to write five pages on a trickster figure. I’d chosen Loki, who killed a Norse god with a magic arrow, thus provoking Götterdämmerung, in which the world is destroyed and reborn.

  During March, Buzzy and I had two more full-on trysts—a word I’d only just learned, along with “assignation.” I didn’t think I loved him, and not just because in 1968 “love” had come to seem schoolgirlish, old-fashioned, irrelevant. The disconnection of sex from the pretense of love made it seem more adult—hot and crazy instead of warm and cozy.

  We’d all worn gloves and used rubbing alcohol to wipe our fingerprints from every inch of the Dauntless, inside and out, as well as the radio control unit. We’d very carefully wrapped the ten pounds of AP putty in several old sweatshirts and sweaters and inside a backpack.

  On Saturday, the thirtieth of March, the first day of spring break, we all headed south.

  Buzzy said that OP-SEC—operational security—required us to travel in pairs, in order to be less conspicuous. Chuck and Buzzy left for Washington in the Plymouth wagon with the plane and the bomb and one of the guns. Alex and I were more familiar with New York City, so the two of us took the train there. The plan was for each pair to spend the weekend lurping—”LRRP” stood for “long-range reconnaissance patrol.” In D.C., Chuck and Buzzy would get a firsthand fix on the security around the president. In Manhattan, Alex and I would familiarize ourselves with Central Park, pace off distances, check out getaway routes, test the range of the walkie-talkies in midtown. On Monday the first of April, Chuck and Buzzy would drive up to New York, and we’d rendezvous for the possible operation on Thursday the fourth. If the opportunity didn’t present itself—if Johnson didn’t come to New York for Cardinal Cooke’s ordination at St. Patrick’s, if he didn’t take his helicopter in and out of Central Park this time, if something didn’t seem right—it would be a rehearsal, and we’d pack up, rethink, and wait for our next chance.

  “Don’t I know you?” the clerk said to me with a smile as we checked in to the hotel. “Weren’t you here last year?”

  I was shocked that he remembered me from when Chuck and I had stayed there seven months earlier, and shocked that a Times Square hotel clerk would be so indiscreet. And terrified that we’d already made the amateur-outlaw mistake that would get us busted. I forced a cheerful smile—

  “Wow, good memory! Yeah.”

  —but on Sunday morning Alex and I moved to a different Times Square hotel and called the Washington YMCA to leave a message for Chuck and Buzzy about our new location.

  We went to St. Patrick’s—not for Mass but to time the walk from the cathedral to the right spot in the park (nineteen minutes). Then we timed the walk around the perimeter of the Sheep Meadow (twenty-two minutes).

  As we’d reckoned from the map we studied in Cambridge, the Sheep Meadow was just big enough: with Chuck and me in the trees at the western edge, the Dauntless would be within transmission range no matter where the president’s helicopter landed. The walkie-talkies worked perfectly. I would operate one of them alongside Chuck and his transmitter; Buzzy would have the other walkie-talkie as the spotter—the forward air controller—on the eastern edge; and Alex would be in Buzzy’s car on Central Park West as our driver.

  We examined the parking spots and signs on Central Park West. We took a taxi from West Sixty-sixth down to the brand-new Penn Station to time the getaway—seven minutes, but the traffic would be much thicker on a weekday. Particularly if a guided missile had just struck the president of the United States in Central Park.

  “You know,” Alex whispered as we took the subway the rest of the way downtown, “it’s amazing that I can, you know, be carrying this”—he patted his pea coat—”and no one has any idea. Not who we really are, not what we’re really doing.” In his right pocket were the unfired .32-caliber pistol and a box of fifty bullets.

  Walking through the neighborhood around City Hall, we saw no one but a pair of cops. At the Manhattan School of Firearms, Alex told the guy in charge, unnecessarily, that he dreamed of becoming a pentathlete, that he’d mastered fencing and equestrian jumping but needed to learn to shoot.

  We each fired eight rounds. Neither of us had ever fired a gun, and we were surprised by how slight the recoil was. It turned out I was a much better shot than Alex. I got three bulls-eye’s.

  While Alex went to the matinee of Hair, I returned to our hotel room and read the papers. In the Daily News, a columnist had written that he had it “on excellent authority that LBJ will be at St. Pat’s Thursday for Cooke’s installation as archbishop.”

  It was happening, like in a script. And I would play my part.

  Because it was Sunday, I phoned the parents, as usual. I worried that they’d be able to tell from the honks and sirens that I was in a Times Square hotel rather than a Radcliffe dorm. But no. My mother asked how Chuck and I were spending spring break, and I said he’d gone down to Washington. She’d been scandalized to read, she told me, that during President Johnson’s visit to the Vatican, Pope Paul had given him a gift of a Renaissance painting and the president had given the Holy Father a little plastic LBJ bust in return. “He’s a jerk,” I said.

  Right after I hung up, the front desk phoned to tell us a long-distance call had come in while I was on the phone—a “Mr. Leiter” from Washington, D.C.. I waited in the lobby for Alex, and when he appeared, we went out to a phone booth on Eighth Avenue to dial the number of the phone booth in Washington.

  Alex talked first, telling them that our recon had been successful and that they wouldn’t have liked Hair. He handed the phone to me.

  “Driving down here for ten hours made me really anxious,” Buzzy said.

  It had made me really anxious, too. I worried that with the two of them alone so long, he might wind up telling Chuck that we’d had sex. Also, they were carrying ten pounds of plastic explosive in the backseat.

  “Even with the ordnance wrapped up,” Buzzy said, “if we got in a wreck, it’d be all over.”

  Then Chuck got on. He sounded strangely calm. That made me anxious. Was he overcompensating, dealing with his discovery of my infidelity by acting nonchalant? He said that morning they’d walked to a Catholic church where they’d watched the president and Lady Bird and their daughter Luci and Luci’s husband go to Mass. “Some woman told us Luci converted to Catholicism when she was our age. I didn’t know that.”

  “Me, neither. Weird.”

  “The son-in-law, the marine, shipped out for Vietnam last night, the woman said.”

  I didn’t like this fact. I wanted it to make me feel that Johnson was an unfeeling ogre, sacrificing even his own daughter’s new husband, but it threatened to make me feel sorry for him, as if he were some king in an ancient Greek tragedy.

  After scoping out the first family at church, Chuck and Buzzy had walked two miles to the White House, arriving around noon, as the president and his family returned from church.

  “I was standing near a Secret Service guy,” Chuck told me, “and heard a voice come over his walkie-talkie: ‘Volunteer, Victoria and Venus in stagecoach on Pennsylvania crossing Fourteenth, over.’ Buzzy says those must be their code names—Johnson is ‘Volunteer,’ and they call his limousine ‘stagecoach.’ A second later, there was the motorcade right there, zooming past us”

  “Motorcade” startled me. All of us had learned the word at the same moment, four and a half years earlier, in the news reports from Dallas.

  “And in the car following his limousine, I saw a guy in the backseat facing
backward, holding a rifle. It was all real …”

  “What? Real what?”

  “I mean it just made everything seem really real, you know? I love you, Karen.”

  Before I could answer, I heard Buzzy say something in the background.

  “Buzzy says let’s meet tomorrow in New York at six instead of five at—”

  I heard Buzzy say something else, more emphatically.

  “Okay—we’ll rendezvous,” Chuck repeated, “at eighteen hundred hours. In front of the hotel.”

  Alex and I bought Orange Juliuses and coffee and went back up to our room. We were going to watch The Smothers Brothers, then head downtown and meet Sarah in the Village for a late pizza.

  But the TV show was being preempted for a speech by the president from the Oval Office.

  There he was, live.

  “Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia,” he began, and then a few minutes in, he got to his big announcement: “unilaterally, and at once,” he was ordering an end to the bombing and shelling of North Vietnam, “in the hope that this action will lead to early talks.”

  “Wow,” Alex said. “He’s really going for peace talks.”

  But then Johnson dialed back his peace initiative—fighting would continue all over the South, and bombing and shelling would continue in the North near the DMZ. By the way, he was going to send over an additional thirteen thousand U.S. troops.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure sounds like peace to me. This is such utter bullshit.”

  “I would ask all Americans, whatever their personal interests or concern, to guard against divisiveness and all its ugly consequences.”

  “ ‘Ugly consequences.’” I said to the TV. “He is such a hypocritical fucker. Isn’t he?”

  Alex nodded, but he hadn’t said much.