The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  The summons had social dress—an invitation to Furniss’s house for a drink before dinner. But it had, even so, an instrumental feel. The subject Harry knew had to come up at some point might now be coming up: the matter of Harry’s retirement. The senior Storrs community, when the subject of retirement came up (not infrequently), called their talisman the “Old Age Act.” It was the law-regulation that made it unlawful for any institution that received federal funds to discriminate against an employee on account of age. Professor Harry Bontecou was mutely grateful for this protection, while aware that civilized behavior would require him, at some point, to hang up his hat and make way for younger scholars. But then too, in recent weeks he had found himself restless.

  It had been just two months—the day after Valentine’s Day. There had been no theater for a public dispute over whose fault the accident was, no lawsuits, no arraignments. But for an oppressive week or two, one thousand faculty and ten thousand students took it for granted that Professor Bontecou privately thought the responsibility for the accident lay with Mrs. Furniss—the late Mrs. Furniss—and that Professor Furniss privately thought the responsibility for the accident lay with Mrs. Bontecou—the late Mrs. Bontecou.

  The official verdict: The accident was, in every respect, accidental. Approaching the bridge from the south, in a heavy snowstorm, Mrs. Furniss had swerved left to avoid the fourteen-year-old boy crossing the bridge, walking from right to left (he testified to seeing the oncoming car for only an instant). A police reconstruction had her slamming on her brakes, skidding diagonally left into Mrs. Bontecou’s car, which had been approaching the bridge from the west road, going downhill. The impact edged both the Ford station wagon driven by Mrs. Furniss and the Bontecous’ Volvo over the embankment, the two cars and their drivers dropping twenty feet into the icy water. The boy’s telephone call from the half-hidden house on the point brought police and ambulance in fifteen minutes. Both drivers were drowned.

  They had agreed, in a crisp telephone call the next morning, not to attend each other’s funerals, and they both declined to give interviews to the New London Press. A month later the university chaplain invited them to a small dinner party to which just the right other people—two close friends of each of the widowers—had been invited. The dinner party worked. There had now been a meeting between the two widowers, who had professional reasons to be in touch.

  Ed Furniss was a natural diplomat. He had no problem using his house for official purposes. As a widower, he recognized that he needed to give extraordinary attention to domestic arrangements. What on earth had his wife done, he made himself wonder out loud, pencil and pad in hand, to make one guest professor comfortable? On that list today were fresh limes, essential to a proper gin and tonic. That was the drink Harry Bontecou had requested at the chaplain’s dinner.

  “You know, of course, about Campari?” Furniss’s voice sounded to Harry, seated in an armchair in the handsome book-lined living room with ornithological prints nicely spaced along three walls, as if he were speaking from deep inside the refrigerator.

  “What do you mean, Ed? Do I know that Campari exists? Or are you asking me for recondite knowledge about Campari? My field is history.” He attempted to make his voice sound solemnly reproachful—better to break the ice that way than to answer routinely.

  “Don’t slight Campari when you’re making a proper gin and tonic. I use one teaspoonful per jigger of gin. Since I will be giving you two jiggers of gin, which I would not have been permitted to do by Edith—she insisted on three jiggers—I will be giving you two teaspoonfuls of Campari.”

  “That follows. How much tonic?”

  “Ah. People are careless on the subject. The ratio must be exact. One and one-half ounces of tonic water for one ounce of gin. Otherwise the tonic taste simply takes over. I don’t really like the taste of tonic, come to think of it.”

  “You know what, Ed,” Harry moved into the orderly New England kitchen, where Furniss was mixing the drinks, “I don’t know you very well, but I’d bet you have a cup there that holds five ounces, which is what the average cup holds. So to make it sound highly calibrated, you come up with the one-point-five measures of tonic for one gin, but what it all boils down to is a cup of tonic water and a regular two-jigger splash of gin.”

  “Plus the Campari bit.”

  “Plus the Campari bit.”

  Ed Furniss laughed and, seated back in the living room, raised his glass and started talking about the upcoming baseball season.

  Harry let him go on a bit. But after the refill was served he took his pen from his pocket and tinkled his glass, as though summoning a dinner party to a toast. “Ed, you want to talk to me about when I plan to pull out of UConn?”

  Furniss raised his own glass and sipped from it, a philosophical smile taking shape. “Well, yes.”

  “The Old Age Act no longer shelters me, Ed?”

  “Yes, it does. But—well, who knows the situation better than you do? There’s a lot of pressure, and not unreasonable pressure. All those young cubs gasping for the pure air of tenure. But,” he said with resignation, “we can’t move any without a corresponding vacancy, not with Hartford’s budget, and that budget ain’t going anywhere.”

  Harry had several years before resolved not to pay out his federal anchor line beyond the point he thought seemly. He had no financial obligations he couldn’t handle. His third book, Victorian Disharmony, was on its way to the University of Chicago Press. He had fitfully planned to visit Europe (his wife hated to fly, so he had been there only twice). But everything was now different, and he knew that he really yearned to be away. He’d make it easy for Furniss.

  “Tell you what, Ed. I’m not due for a sabbatical until 1992. Give it to me instead at the end of this semester. I’ll go off for the summer and fall, come back after that and teach one more year, then quit. Okay?”

  “Done,” said the provost.

  Harry was oddly grateful for this nudge by Official Connecticut. Before he had finished his second drink, Harry was talking to Ed about other matters, academic, national, collegiate, though never personal.

  Lord Alex Herrendon was tall, spare, well-groomed, his abundant hair silver. A trace of a smile on his face. “I was told you were waiting for me here,” he said. “I’m sorry if I kept you.”

  Harry stood. Herrendon motioned Harry back down with the deferential touch of a hand on his shoulder. “Please sit.” He slid his limber frame onto the chair Tracy Allshott had left behind. “And I will join you in a sherry. I gave the order to the steward coming in. You selected the favorite of my father, I discovered.”

  Lord Herrendon was animated on a subject he and Harry had resolved by correspondence to pursue.

  Herrendon eyed Harry. “It is very important to me that you were so intimately involved with Operation Keelhaul.”

  Harry Bontecou had served in the U.S. Army division that was involved in the repatriation of Russian refugees right after the world war. Three million Russians, against their will, had been sent back to the Soviet Union.

  Herrendon addressed Harry. “Which division were you with?”

  “The 103rd,” Harry replied.

  “Have you written on your experiences in 1946?”

  “No,” Harry said. “I never have.”

  Herrendon sipped his drink. For a few moments there was silence. Neither spoke. Then Herrendon said, “I had a jolly difficult time finding out where in the University of Connecticut to find you. Department of history, yes. But I did not know to put down ‘Storrs.’ ” He sipped and suddenly he smiled. “I should have asked Marcus Wolf to advise me. You noticed the story in the newspapers? He is angry at having run into some bureaucratic difficulty in getting a visa to visit America—” Harry nodded. Yes, he had seen the story.

  Another pause. And then, “I know about your late wife. I am sorry. But it is always easier, wouldn’t you agree—”he looked up—“not to get into personal matters?”

  “Yes,” Harry said, w
ith some emphasis.

  “So let me quickly get to the matter I wrote to you about. My book. But now let me ease into the subject. Let me talk to you first, oh—permit an eighty-six-year-old historian to digress a little—talk a little about my Operation Keelhaul research, which will be a part of my bigger book. It will perhaps interest you to know that I received a call from the new Russian ambassador in February, telling me I would be receiving an invitation to visit the archives housed, as it happens, in Tolstoy’s estate—Leo Tolstoy’s estate—with permission to examine for my own purposes the archives the Soviet authorities wouldn’t let Nikolai Tolstoy, when doing his book on the question twenty years ago, look at.”

  Harry nodded but said nothing.

  “The offer came too late for Nikolai’s book. But they will be important for my own.” Harry looked at the eighty-six-year-old gentleman, admiring his confidence and apparent good health. “Which is … one reason I wrote to ask you to meet with me. A book about the Communist scene in the West—after the war. So I wrote back cautiously on the Tolstoy business. I am certain to want Russian cooperation on the book I am planning.”

  “You took the trip to Saint Petersburg?”

  “Yes. The man who dealt with me was a General Lasserov. A scholarly gentleman. We spent some time together, and we surveyed the estate—it is twelve hundred acres. The dwelling places—the main house and the farmers’ quarters—will sleep four hundred souls. Non-dead souls. Aleksandr Lasserov, I would learn after several evenings together, was as a young man in Gulag for four years, sent there by Brezhnev, for what infraction I forget. He is eager to sort out the history of Soviet suffering and to analyze compliant responsibility for it by the West.”

  “He is talking mostly about Operation Keelhaul?”

  “Yes. Though not exclusively. He cares about American foreign policy and its neglect of Soviet suffering in the years that followed Keelhaul.”

  “You told him about your prospective book?”

  “Yes.” Herrendon took a worn leather packet from his jacket and—“Do you mind?—”lit a small cigar. He stretched out his legs.

  “So what exactly is his interest in your project?”

  “Lasserov is an ethicist. He wants to try to understand why presumably moral people simply stand by when huge crimes are not merely committed but institutionalized.”

  “He wants you to figure that out?”

  Herrendon smiled. “You have the point exactly, yes, Professor Bontecou.”

  “—Harry.” Odd, Harry thought, to be asking Herrendon to call him by his first name.

  Herrendon nodded and went on. “There are not many senior officials alive who took part in the operations. But, at a junior level, you of course did. Most important, for me, is what came later. The great, turbulent, postwar Communist/anti-Communist/Red scare/McCarthy period. You were in it, deeply in it. And you are a trained historian. And I am here to ask you to spend time with me—as much time as is required—to help me to understand, retrospectively.”

  Harry drained his glass. His wife, Elena, had often teased him about his impetuosity, sometimes reproachfully. He recalled her summons to spend more time deliberating commitments he often made offhandedly. Accordingly, with a nod to her memory, he touched his napkin to his lips and said with mock deliberation, “Let me think about it.” He was not ready to call him Alex.

  He would say yes. Tomorrow. Actually—he was busy assembling supporting arguments for his decision—actually, he had nothing else to do. He had no plans on how to spend the sabbatical suddenly sprung on him. And just one hour ago, reading the news of Pol Pot, the old questions had stirred: Why? How come? He turned to Herrendon.

  “I know. You want me to talk about Senator McCarthy.”

  Lord Herrendon took a puff on his cigar. “Yes.”

  “You probably know that I have never written about Senator McCarthy. You probably do not know that I have never spoken about him.”

  “I did know that. One of your students was a colleague in Cambridge. Jim Presley. He said he once tried to interview you for the college paper.”

  Harry paused. He had made his resolution in 1957, more than thirty years ago, and hadn’t diverted from it. But he felt now not merely the weakening of an old resolve but an utterly unanticipated anxiety to reverse himself. The historian who shelters historical material profanes his calling—the point had been made to Harry before, both by fellow historians and by survivors of the great McCarthy wars, 1950 to 1954.

  He spoke finally. “I’d need a lot of stuff.”

  “I’ll bring over everything you want.”

  “Nobody can put his hands on everything I’d want. Though I know a bit about his boyhood, and the war years. I collected all that, way back then.”

  “From the widow?”

  “Well, Jeanie McCarthy and I were close. But she died in 1979. I’m talking about way back. Let’s put it this way—you can count on me to help.”

  “Even to telling all … telling everything you know about Joe McCarthy?”

  Harry closed his eyes. “Even to telling about Joe McCarthy.”

  “That is what I hope you can tell me about. When is your next appointment?”

  “What’s the date today?”

  “June thirtieth.”

  “Well, I should get back to Storrs in a year or so.”

  “In that case, we’d better get started.”

  BOOK ONE

  3

  Joe McCarthy, age fourteen

  Joe McCarthy left on the school bus on the opening day of classes. He didn’t respond to the talk of his schoolmates, which surprised them: Joe was the very best fifteen-year-old to swap stories with, discuss the virtues and weaknesses of the faculty, all six of them. “What’s the matter?” Billy asked him. “Just thinking,” Joe said. “Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt that, you agree, Moe?” Joe ducked his head and shot his right elbow back as if preparing to deliver a blow. But he laughed, and when he turned his head again to the bus window, his companions left him alone.

  When he descended the bus, the decision was made. He thought to take Billy to one side—it was 8:20, and class didn’t begin for ten minutes. Take him aside and tell him what Joe had decided. Joe would tell him he wasn’t learning anything, he was “bored out of my mind—”Joe had heard that formulation on the radio and thought it expressive. He would tell Billy that the shortage of hands on the farm—his father’s, and also their neighbors’—meant there was need for extra help. And anyway, what harm had leaving school done to his two older brothers?

  But he quickly reflected that it would be disloyal to his parents to tell anyone before they learned about it. What he knew he couldn’t do, having made up his mind, was to enter that classroom and wait until bus time at three P.M. to go home. So instead of making his case to Billy, he leaned over and said, “I’ve got to go home, very important. Tell Miss Lockhart I won’t be there.” Billy tried to interrogate him, but, lunch box in hand, Joe simply wheeled about and started his five-mile walk back to the farm.

  He had rehearsed how to say it to Tim and Bid. He didn’t look forward to it, and delayed opening the door to the farmhouse until the lunch hour, noon. He spent two hours in his old tree house, well removed from his father’s sight—he’d be tending the farm over the brow of the hill. But he had to do it and thought, after much self-interrogation, to do it matter-of-factly.

  Tim and Bid were seated at the kitchen table with the big bowl of soup, the loaf of bread, and the platter of butter. “What you doing here at noon, Joe?” his mother asked.

  Joe knew to direct the conversation to his father. “I’m sure you know, Dad, it’s one of those things, just like it was for Steve and Bill.” Joe knew his mother would make a fuss, never mind that his older brothers had done the same thing. But he knew also that his father would deal fatalistically with Joe’s decision. His brothers too had been fifteen and had said they would join their father as farmhands, as now Joe was expected to do.

  There
was more of a problem with his mother. Bid closed her mouth tightly. But she knew instantly, knew from the way Joe had given them the news and from her close study of him as a boy, that there would be no changing his mind. Bid got up, left the table, and retreated to the bedroom, but returned moments later to the silent kitchen, neither husband nor son saying anything. Bid fancied her son Joe as someone who ought to continue in school. Joe listened, and let his eyes dart over for comfort to his father. Tim McCarthy had finished his soup and was now seated by the stove, idly petting the hound dog.

  Joe was reassured: He could be confident that there would be no interference from that quarter. Joe rose and embraced his mother, propelling her into a cheek-to-cheek dance, Joe humming the tune.

  Bid stopped resisting. She couldn’t deny the handsome, dark, muscular boy whose school picture she always kept within reach. When Bid visited her cousin at Fond du Lac she would put up on the mirror in the room she shared with her hostess a picture of her husband, Tim. Tim never changed, neither in appearance nor in dress: always the blue overalls and the straw hat with the old pheasant feather, faded after five years, sticking up from the hatband that took icy snow in the winter and, in the summer, day after day of Tim’s sweat-soaked hair. And alongside it, the picture of Joe, standing stiffly for the school portrait but unable to suppress entirely the smile that seemed always to animate his face, as also his spirit.

  What was special about Joe, Bid thought, was that in his view of life everything was marvelous and everybody was wonderful. Joe packed so much pleasure into his waking hours that he resented even the hours given to sleeping. He was now, at fifteen, up earlier and earlier, going to bed later and later. Sometimes in the late hours he would read magazines, occasionally a book. He would listen to the radio and comment on whatever he heard, laughing uproariously when Jack Benny told a funny story. He took careful notes whenever the announcer gave the name of a product that could be had, free of charge, by just mailing in a request for it. He had his own special wooden box that he kept in the barn. He had built the box himself, though it was his brother Steve, three years his senior, who taught him how to use the lathe that made it possible.