True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  The last time Stewart and I spoke, he said that “Macallister definitely was the one who really gave up Charles Levy. Gave him up in the process of trying to save his ass, actually. Sort of beautiful and tragic.” When Alex and Chuck had their phone conversation on Easter 1968, Alex confessed that he, Alex, had been working with the government—”we’ve all been sneaky and disloyal in our own ways,” Chuck said to him in response, alluding to but not revealing the fact that he, Chuck, had been a federal informant as well. Anyhow, Alex thought Chuck could somehow be cajoled, maybe recruited, at least neutralized—brought in from the cold—by an experienced intelligence professional. He set up a meeting between Chuck and a CIA officer the following day at Chuck’s boardinghouse in Washington. Meanwhile, Chuck arranged his own meeting with army CONUS intelligence agents at the same time and place—and for some reason, he didn’t tell either his CIA contact or his army handlers that the other would be there as well.

  What precisely was Chuck’s plan on that day in 1968, the fifteenth of April? Did he want to prove to each set of spooks that he was connected, a real player? Did he think he was somehow protecting himself from each by having the other present? Did he lie to the army about who the CIA man was? Did he have some James Bond–ish denouement negotiation in mind? Or was he just goofing with them all? Did he intend to go out in a glorious, murderous, murky blaze? Had he gone completely nuts? The possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

  According to Stewart’s electronic surveillance log, the CIA man, during the fifteen minutes after he arrived to meet with Chuck, chatted good-naturedly about swimming and Alex and Harvard, took an offered cigarette, and suggested twice that Chuck “put the gun away.” Chuck asked the guy which languages he knew and if he had been posted overseas, what subjects the CIA preferred its officers to study in college, and whether or not he thought JFK had been killed by a government conspiracy.

  The CIA man’s last line in the ELSLURS log is “You expecting somebody, Chuck?”, to which Chuck’s answer is “Maybe (unintelligible).”

  Then comes “Unidentified Male 1: ‘Don’t, asshole—’” and the notation “Shouts (unintelligible), multiple rounds fired, 11 seconds,” and finally, “Unidentified Male 2: ‘I’m hit, f***, I’m hit.’” The transcript ends at “1418 hours.”

  Stewart says the two unidentified males were army intelligence agents, probably CONUS undercovers in costume—long hair, mustaches, hippie clothes. The CIA man, thinking he was being ambushed by radicals, drew his weapon and fired at the armed intruders, hitting one of them, who died later. Both CONUS men fired back, killing both the CIA officer and Chuck, who was holding a loaded .9mm Luger that had never been fired.

  The CIA and army intelligence immediately took over jurisdiction from the D.C. police. The case never became a criminal case, never officially passed through the local prosecutorial system at all, which was undoubtedly easier to accomplish in Washington than it would have been anywhere else, since the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—that is, a federal government official—also acts as the local district attorney.

  One CIA memo I got from Stewart refers to “information classified pursuant to an Executive Order in the interest of the national defense involving intelligence sources or methods.” Another refers to “the likelihood that public exposure” of “the Agency’s interest in the problem of student dissidence would result in considerable notoriety,” and that “the incident carries the highest embarrassment potential for the Agency, activities and relationships which in certain contexts could be construed as delicate or inappropriate and would have serious domestic implications.” A third CIA memo notes that “ODFOAM, which was informed of the case two weeks prior to the incident, has declined to take responsibility for it, on the grounds that POTUS was in Hawaii on 15 April and the incident concerns CIA and ODIBEX internal security.” POTUS is the president, and in CIA jargon, ODFOAM is the Secret Service and ODIBEX is the army. “CIA Office of Security is severely inhibited in the actions it can take against any of the suspects, Agency employees or proprietaries for fear of compromising other operations.”

  In other words, it was a Keystone Kops tragedy in which confused agents from competing intelligence agencies accidentally killed each other. So the CIA and army intelligence decided to engage in cover-ups. Both agencies’ domestic spying operations were secret and probably illegal. If they’d been revealed at the time, with a nineteen-year-old Harvard boy dead in the bargain, a catastrophic political crisis might have resulted.

  What was more, prosecuting Buzzy and me would have been difficult, given that Alex and Chuck were, legally speaking, federal agents operating improperly—Alex’s evidence against us might have been inadmissible, in the criminal bar’s term of art, as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”

  Did the army lie to Professor Levy about the circumstances of his son’s service and death, or did he fabricate his own story to make his wife feel better? I don’t know.

  I encouraged Chuck’s radicalism and our plot. I cheated on him. Mea culpa. But not mea maxima culpa. For forty-six years, I’ve believed it was my long-distance call from the Times Square pay phone to the Secret Service that got Chuck killed two weeks later. That was the straightest, simplest explanation. Now I know it wasn’t so, that the mysteries of why Chuck died and why Alex and Buzzy and I were allowed to walk away are much, much more complicated. Occam’s Razor is a good rule, but there are exceptions to the rule.

  There are things I’ll never be certain about. Alex and Chuck each believed that spying for the government was their ace in the hole, giving them immunity from the draft and maybe protection from prosecution. Neither knew the other was a spy, at least until the very end. So: did the sangfroid and commitment to the cause that each of them showed that winter and spring increase both their mutual admiration and their feelings of guilt about being snitches? Did the secret-agent provocateurs unintentionally provoke each other?

  As I began writing this morning, I thought the puzzle was finished, the soluble mysteries solved.

  Buzzy had been a true believer and, like me, at the final crossroads, took the right fork while Chuck zigged and zagged and took the left.

  Alex, clever, hard-hearted Alex, had been a snitch all along, telling the CIA what we had planned, waiting for the last moment to call in the feds and shut down the plot.

  Looking over one of the old typewritten pages from the CIA yet again, I focus on a stray fact I didn’t really notice the first twenty times I read it.

  I actually think: Aha.

  “Sorry. Mr. Macallister is in South Africa, on safari. He can only be reached in an emergency. Would you care to leave a message?”

  “I’d like to set up a meeting if I can.”

  “Will he know what this is in reference to?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re friends. When does he return home from safari?” Why am I wasting energy on attitude with an assistant?

  “I’m afraid he’s going straight from Jo-berg to Rio for the World Cup, so … Ah, you’re in luck—he has an opening on Monday afternoon, August fourth.”

  “Perfect,” I say, not wishing this imperious boy in Santa Monica to think I’m even a bit put out by having to wait almost a month for an appointment with Alex the great and powerful.

  You’re in luck, the scheduler at Wheel Life Pictures said. I feel sometimes as if half my life consists of people telling me how lucky I am. Sometimes the congratulations concern actual good fortune. But sometimes when I feel lucky—becoming a grandmother at forty-seven, ending my marriage at fifty-eight—no one else sees it that way. And often the luck is the glass-half-full kind—lucky that I got diabetes when treatment was improving, lucky that my dad died seven years after getting Alzheimer’s rather than twenty. People of my generation constantly talk, with smiles more self-congratulatory than abashed, about how lucky they were to escape death during their daredevil youths, stories that tend to involve drunken swimming off rocky shores at night and driving cars without seat belts whil
e drug-addled. The shit we got away with as kids! We are the Smuggest Generation.

  I am lucky. But people haven’t known the half of it.

  I was lucky I didn’t blow myself up as we mixed our batches of acetone peroxide. I was lucky that Lyndon Johnson made his political-surrender speech four days before we planned to kill him. I was lucky, as it turned out, that two of my coconspirators had been independently in league with the government, which forced the government to let me go free.

  Because my father had survived a Nazi camp and breezed into America, I grew up thinking that luck ran in our family. Now I know that my father wasn’t just lucky, that he supplied information about his friends to the Nazis while he was imprisoned and then to the Americans after liberation. He possessed knowledge that he traded to improve his own chances for survival and contentment. He snitched. I told myself in 1968 that my call to the Secret Service was intended to save Chuck from his own haywire behavior, but it was also—maybe mainly—about self-preservation and self-advancement. I snitched. You can decide how far the apple fell from the tree.

  I’ve been lucky for decades that the government files on our case were never accidentally or deliberately pried open, that I was never blackmailed, that no personal or professional or political enemy of mine ever used my brief but inexcusable criminal past to besmirch and destroy me. Again, however, it wasn’t just luck. I’ve been careful, too, mostly.

  An hour ago, the Ink Spots came up on my iPod shuffle. I don’t want to set the world on fire / I just want to start a flame in your heart … I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim / I just want to be the one you love. It’s too pat, right? But it’s true. As a young girl, I had large ambition for worldly acclaim and to be the one he loved. As an older girl, for a time, I wanted to set the world on fire more or less literally. And then as a young woman, I reverted overnight, trying for the rest of my life to set the world on fire in a strictly figurative sense, to work hard, become successful, and leave both radicalism and true love—every form of wild romance—to others.

  When I first moved to L.A., I was fixed up with an older guy who ran some kind of left-wing storefront operation. On our first and last date, before he used the phrase “back in the day” five different times and before we got into a shouting argument about charter schools (I’m pro) and Hezbollah (anti), he said he remembered seeing me at SDS events in Cambridge in 1967. He’d “developed a thing” for me, but then I “just, like, disappeared,” and he assumed I’d “gone underground.” When I said I was sorry I didn’t remember him, he told me that in 1970 he’d been indicted for attempted murder after “somebody fired a rifle into the Cambridge police station.” He smiled as he said it. I remembered reading about the incident at the time. The charges were dropped, he told me. “The shit we got away with back in the day, huh? We were so lucky.”

  Until the last year, I’d never read any of the memoirs published by the old ‘60s radicals. They were people who’d genuinely believed they were making a revolution, who had set off bombs in government buildings for years and really did go underground for a decade. Now I’ve read every one, and I find them unsatisfactory.

  They are too fondly sentimental about their crazed young selves, coy and opaque about exactly what they did and disingenuous about their motives. They don’t quite regard their crimes as real crimes, and definitely not their madness as madness. For them, “Mistakes were made” has no ironic stink. They mainly blame the Man for their mistakes and still think of themselves as noble veterans of a great and ongoing crusade for justice. They give sincerity a bad name. I’m not saying every ‘60s radical was obliged to undergo a political apostasy, or that their careers in education and prison reform and all the rest have been unworthy. The balance in their memoirs between candid explanation and self-justifying rationalization, however, is tipped way, way too far toward the latter. They remind me very much of members of the Bush administration talking about the wars they waged and bungled.

  32

  As I awoke the morning after we found out Chuck had been killed, and every morning for days, I had a quick flicker of hope that it had all been a dream, like at the end of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I experienced that same hopeful instant the morning the three of us took a taxi to the airport to fly to Chicago for Chuck’s funeral, and the morning we went to sit shiva and I told Mrs. Levy that Chuck was not a drug dealer or a drug addict and I didn’t know whom he’d gotten involved with in Washington on spring break.

  After those half-awake instants of magical thinking stopped, I woke up every day wondering only if that would be the day the men in suits knocked on my door in North House or stopped me in the Yard as I walked to class and informed me, as they snapped on the handcuffs, that I had the right to remain silent.

  But a week after and then two weeks and three weeks after Chuck died, nobody questioned us. Alex and Buzzy and I avoided discussing what we had done and what had happened, both as a matter of operational security—who knew, Buzzy said, how or when they might be eavesdropping?—and for me, to avoid jinxing this uncanny limbo condition. The flipped coin had landed on its edge, and I didn’t dare move or breathe. Life during the months leading up to April had been one kind of implausible dream state, and life afterward was another kind.

  I would cry, then feel like crying until I cried again.

  The world at large, meanwhile, was boiling over, which made my frozen cowering anxiety feel all the weirder. What I considered to be Chuck’s last words—This is the revolution—seemed like a prophecy coming true. It was as if the signal had gone off, and millions of angry, energized young would-be agents of history were running wild. While I skulked off carefully and silently in the opposite direction.

  The newspaper front page might as well have been spinning toward me each morning, like in an old movie.

  At the end of April 1968, as SDS embarked on its nationwide antiwar campaign, Ten Days to Shake the Empire, Columbia students occupied buildings and took a dean hostage. After a thousand cops busted them, Columbia was shut down for the rest of the semester, and two hundred thousand New York college and high school kids stopped going to classes in protest, chanting “No class today, no ruling class tomorrow.” The student marches in Paris in early May became riots and repeated themselves, more spectacularly and with more people, in Paris and other cities around France, day after day, until the whole country went out on strike. The revolt spread to West Germany and Italy, even to Prague and Zagreb.

  The afternoon I arrived home in Wilmette for the summer, my mother said, “It looks like President Johnson heard you.”

  What? I was speechless.

  “He wants to lower the voting age to eighteen—he’s sending Congress the constitutional amendment this week.” I watched her face drop as her very hopefulness made her sad for a few seconds—she was thinking of Sabrina, who would have been old enough to vote in 1970. But my mother refused to give in to the blues. “He also said he wanted to end the draft. Thank God, for your little brother.”

  “They’re not drafting twelve-year-olds yet, Mom.”

  “And for Alex. And all the boys.” I saw her fighting sadness again as she thought of Chuck.

  After dinner, Alex called and asked if I’d seen on the news that Andy Warhol was going to pull through. We’d read in the paper that morning at Logan Airport that an actress from one of his movies had shot him. I’d noticed but didn’t mention that she had used a .32-caliber automatic, the same as the pistol we’d taken to New York. Alex wondered how long he should wait to phone the Warhol people and ask whether his internship was still on.

  I stayed up late that night with my parents and Peter, watching the election returns from California. For my mother, an unhappy outcome was impossible. She loved Senator McCarthy, but Bobby Kennedy was every bit as liberal, and a Catholic, and quoted Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and had won two out of the last three primaries, so when he came on TV around two in the morning to give his victory speech, she said to my little brother
, “Peter, I think you’re watching the next president of the United States.”

  A few minutes later, Kennedy was shot dead.

  When Peter quietly asked, “Why do they only kill the good guys?,” I was surprised when I realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  I think my family was surprised by how hard and long I cried.

  Buzzy had gotten a form letter from the D.C. police telling him his car had been found abandoned. And empty. Overcoming his paranoia that it might be some kind of trap, he went down to Washington, paid the parking tickets, and drove west, arriving without warning in Wilmette on the last day of June, on his way home to Las Vegas.

  As soon as he arrived, I knew my attraction to him had fizzled, that my lust had depended on our affair being illicit. My parents and brother had gone to Wisconsin for the Fourth of July long weekend, so on his final night in Wilmette, Buzzy and I drove out way into the sticks to watch a fireworks show. We smoked a joint in his car beforehand.

  After the last explosions, as we stood up and turned to leave the Downers Grove park, three DuPage County sheriff’s deputies were standing directly behind us. Two of them had their hands on their holstered pistols. The other one asked to see our identification.