The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  “He arrived by cab at the theater. Gerry Fillmore—he’s the president—and I were there to meet him. He got out of the cab, about five feet ten, on the heavy side, big, pleasant face, big grin, big ears, hard handgrip. He paid the cab, picked up his briefcase, and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, where’s the crowd?’

  “We took him to lunch at the faculty club. He ordered a minute steak and a beer and talked—you know, Willmoore, I don’t remember what he talked about—yes, it was about veterans’ housing. There were six of us, and we just bantered about this and that. Then we walked over to Miller Theatre. It was embarrassing.”

  “Nobody there?”

  “Practically nobody. Maybe twenty guys. But WKCR—”the student radio station—”sent a reporter, and he had the lectern wired in. McCarthy’s speech went out on the air.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “Again, vets’ housing; there was some stuff on the Malmedy massacre. Nothing that stuck in the memory. The next day the Spec gave the speech about two inches of space.” Harry paused.

  “There was one amusing bit. He was winding up his talk. WKCR had obviously allocated exactly a half hour. McCarthy didn’t know that, of course. He was just winding down. He began the closing bit. ‘I believe in God’—”Harry imitated the senator’s high-pitched monotone—”the student announcer’s voice came in. He had earphones on and was speaking in a real low voice into the mike, but everybody could hear it, ‘The views you have heard do not represent the views of station WKCR’ Everybody broke out laughing. Including McCarthy. He finished the I-believe-in-God sentence, going on to flag and country. He was very polite, good-natured about the turnout. Left no impression, except—a nice guy.”

  Sherrill took it all in and made one of his characteristic turns, famous among his seminar students: turning from the recounting of an event in the news to theoretical speculation. Sherrill had moved politically since his strenuous opposition to the Wallace movement in 1947 and 1948. That opposition had led him not so much to the Republican Party as to a defiant conservatism centered on his respect for the general will. When two years later ten Communist Party leaders were convicted for belonging, as Communists, to a movement that sought to overthrow the government, Columbia’s political science department scheduled a faculty meeting to deplore and protest the verdict and, indeed, the Smith Act itself. Going around the table, one after another of the tenured professors expressed grave concern over the Smith Act. When it was Willmoore Sherrill’s turn to comment, he had said (the word spread quickly), “There’s an old colored gentleman who looks after my Fellows’ suite. He said to me this morning, ‘Professor, is it true there’s people who want to overthrow the government by force and violence?’

  “I said, ‘Yes, that’s true, Jamieson.’

  “He said, ‘Well, Professor, why don’t we just run them out of town?’ ”

  Sherrill turned to his distinguished colleagues. “I think Jamieson has a more sophisticated understanding of democratic theory than any of you gentlemen.”

  “My guess—”Willmoore Sherrill was pursuing the theme over a second glass with his talented student, “is that Senator McCarthy is going to cause a hell of a row.”

  At his seminar the next day, Professor Sherrill encouraged a discussion on the theme of what he called “clear and present objectionability.” He asked the students to consider the question whether, under a bill of rights, a society could satisfactorily formulate language that allowed the majority to say to an unassimilable minority: “ ‘We don’t want you in our society.’ We can tinker with ways of saying why we don’t want you—the clear-and-present-danger business. But the problem is like obscenity—how do you define it? Answer: You can’t define it. But a free society isn’t satisfied if there isn’t any language around to convey what it is it doesn’t want to tolerate. Communists and fellow travelers,” he told the students, “are urging something the people don’t want. How do they talk back conclusively? Isn’t that what Joe McCarthy is saying: that the Communists are illicit members of the American society?”

  “Through something like the Smith Act?” Harry had ventured.

  Professor Sherrill predicted that the language of the act wouldn’t hold up in the long run. “Society’s managers will say: ‘Prove it. Prove that the society is wobbly enough to get overthrown.’ But what the people are saying is they don’t want a society that tolerates people who might succeed in making society wobbly, or even want them in the American tent. My guess is that Senator McCarthy is saying something—trying to say something—like that.”

  The objections in class were heated and varied. Willmoore liked it that way.

  23

  Harry applies for a job

  They had been to the theater to see Antony and Cleopatra and walked now up and across town toward the Stork Club. Harry had been there only once, also with Elinor, that notable time, one year earlier. They had dined, danced, and drunk moderately and taken great joy from each others’ company. Harry had never, ever missed the company of anyone in quite that way. He teased himself. “You missed the company of Erik Chadinoff back at Plattling, didn’t you, Harry, my boy?” Sure. He loved those evening sessions with Chadinoff, playing chess and listening to him work off his knowledge of Communism and hatred for it. … He missed his mother, sure. He even missed Willmoore Sherrill, what the hell.

  Was it possible? He had fallen for her? She was oddly, provocatively inattentive. He said to her only a month ago, “Has it ever occurred to you to pick up the phone and ring me—I’ve had a phone now for over a year. I don’t need to rely on the phone I used to use when Allshott was my roommate.”

  How had she handled that? She giggled. But Harry knew that there were a lot of contenders for her company. Obviously the Stork Club wanted her (them?) back because—

  When on that visit a year ago Harry called for the bill he had been told by the head waiter that there was no bill; it was all “courtesy of Mr. Billingsley.” Harry got the news, said nothing, then laughed. For a preposterous moment he was—jealous! As if Mr. Billingsley—

  He was the legendary owner of the Stork Club. He cherished the patronage of beautiful people. A beautiful person, in the eyes of Sherman Billingsley, was either an influential reporter, a gossip columnist, a tycoon, a movie star, or J. Edgar Hoover. Or … a truly handsome young couple. Once or twice a week Billingsley himself would tour his fashionable club and signal with his eyes to the head waiter, indicating, when time came for the bill, the lucky couple. When he asked for the bill, the young man would be told, “Courtesy of Mr. Billingsley.”

  That night Billingsley had not hesitated when he looked over at the corner table and spotted the laughing couple, Harry Bontecou, the trim and poised and handsome young man with sensual lips and lively eyes, rapt in the company of Elinor Stafford, tiny, perhaps the size of the queen of England, dark, and alluring.

  Tonight was young, young as the tragic Cleopatra. “And this is our twenty-fifth anniversary,” Elinor said, for once forswearing her traditional giggle. “The twenty-fifth time we’ve gone out together.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a monogamous type,” Harry said, affecting great pomp and giving her hand a squeeze. They strolled across town on Fifty-third Street, talking and laughing.

  “Look!” Elinor said. “The Stork Club!” They had decided to walk to it but not to enter it.

  Suddenly, from Elinor: “… Why not?”

  They paused. Harry frowned. It would be abusive to patronize the Stork Club too soon after their free ride. “Too soon? It’s been over a year. And, Harry, presumably Mr. Billingsley gives free rides in order to stimulate regular business. We can go ahead in without giving the impression he’s going to pick up the tab again. In fact, maybe it’s, you know—sort of polite to go back again.”

  She laughed—”I know what! We’ll go in, eat and drink wildly, and if the bill comes, unpaid by Billingsley, we can make a scene! Walk out in a huff!”

  “You’ve spent too much time with Cl
eopatra tonight. She owned the world too!”

  They went in and were seated. They were in no hurry, and the Stork Club never seemed to close. The music was just right, quiet, energetic but not convulsively so. In honor of Kurt Weill, who had died early in the week, they played “September Song” and something from Lady in the Dark that Elinor recognized, Harry didn’t. They danced after the first course and then, back at the table, Elinor brought up the implications of the letter Harry had received that morning from the army reserve. It was to celebrate that letter’s message that Harry had pulled away from the campus on a weekday to have an evening on the town.

  The army reserve’s claims on First Lieutenant Harry Bontecou had hung over him since he had received the notice in March that his reserve unit was now on standby for reactivation. Notices from army reserve commanders (or draft officials) were never discursive on the subject of world affairs. The reserve notice made no mention of Korea, but of course the projected remobilization was traceable to the brewing crisis there. Harry had been considering law school or perhaps graduate school, to which Willmoore Sherrill was so ardently beckoning him. But he was in no mood to start in on three years of school from which, at any moment, he might be yanked away by the army.

  They were seated, as it happened, at the same table, by a corner, at which they had sat a year before. They ordered wine. The notice they were celebrating had come in that morning, a letter from Major Reuben Holden, in command of Harry’s reserve unit.

  In answer to your letter of March 22, 1950, requesting resignation from the Army Reserve, your application has been reviewed. Resignation is denied. But because you were wounded in action on January 12, 1945, you may apply for a one-year exemption from further military service under U.S. Military Code 801.1 effective May 15, 1950.

  “So what does that mean, Harry? That we can dance all night up till midnight, May 14, 1951?”

  “They do make things sound that way, don’t they? I suppose a lot depends on what happens in Korea. If the North Koreans back down in the negotiations going on, then it’s over and out, crisis ended. If there’s a war and South Korea overwhelms North Korea, then it’s also over and out. If there’s a war and North Korea overwhelms South Korea—again, over and out. If there’s a war and north and south are fighting it out every day, then who knows whether, on May 15, 1951, they’ll decide they need the services of First Lieutenant Harry Bontecou, 01334961, B.A., Columbia, 1950.”

  “Doesn’t make for a stable … career move, Harry.”

  “No.” He laughed. “I like that. A career move. Then one day Edward decided to make a career move and proposed marriage to Mrs. Simpson.” Elinor joined him in laughter. He put his hand on hers, under the table. She returned the squeeze. They had finished their wine. The time had come. Harry withdrew his hand and reached into his inside jacket pocket, bringing out a single sheet.

  “I sent this off this afternoon.”

  Elinor maneuvered the letter to read it in the Stork Club’s candlelight.

  Dear Senator McCarthy:

  Your speech yesterday spoke of the crowning challenge of the free world to resist Soviet claims on our freedom and to expose the agents of servitude and surrender.

  I served in the war in the 103rd Division. I was decorated with a Bronze Star, received a battlefield promotion during the Battle of the Bulge, and was discharged as a First Lieutenant in the spring of 1946.

  At Columbia, my academic major has been in history and political science. I am Phi Beta Kappa. I fought the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace in New York and at his convention in Philadelphia. I was elected editor in chief of the student newspaper, the Spectator, and served as editor beginning in junior year. I was active in the Political Union as vice president of the Conservative Party. I met you when you spoke for the Union. There is obviously no reason for you to remember this.

  In the last period of my service I was stationed at Camp Plattling. My final duties were to guard Russian refugees pending their forcible repatriation into the Soviet Union. I resolved, after my experience at Camp Plattling and many hours talking with one of the detainees, that the highest calling of our time is to contribute to the anti-Soviet cause. To this end I apply for service on your staff. If you consent to interview me, your office should ring New York, BUtler 8-0337. My mother, Mrs. Bontecou, will take the message. Or you can write to Apartment #3, 12 West 87th Street.

  Hoping to hear from you, and with sincere congratulations on your work and your courage,

  Harry F. Bontecou

  Elinor put down the letter. “I’m not surprised, Harry. That’s the way you feel about things. If you’re not fighting in Korea you’d want to be fighting here.”

  “That’s right.” Harry had spoken to Elinor a month ago about the McCarthy investigations initiated after his speech in Wheeling in February. “The whole idea is to find out whether the State Department et al. have been so sleepy they don’t really ask the right questions.”

  “What are the right questions?”

  “The right question is: Does this policy forward the interests of the United States, which includes a concern for human liberty, or does that policy mostly add up to giving in to Soviet pressure, as we did in 1945–46, when we repatriated those Russian refugees.”

  “Those are the loyalty risks?”

  “It’s not easy to draw a clear line between one category of people who shouldn’t be working for the State Department and another.”

  “They’re mixed up together as far as I can see,” Elinor said. But her point was inquisitively phrased. Harry took her up on it.

  “Sure. There are four divisions, roughly. The first is the kind of thing Alger Hiss has apparently been caught up in. There are—spies, saboteurs. Americans who work for the Soviet Union. We’ve got Russians who work for America. It’s standard, the difference being that our people are working to free Russians who have been enslaved since 1917. Their people are working to advance the fortunes and the leverage of the Soviet empire. Now, they are, really, beyond loyalty ‘risks.’ They are agents of the enemy.

  “A loyalty risk is a federal employee who has left a trail—policy recommendations that add up to siding with the Communists on one Cold War issue after another. If you come across an employee who belonged to the Soviet American Friendship League or to the Civil Rights Congress or to the National Lawyers Guild—or all three—and there are dozens and dozens of Communist-organized and -dominated organizations—you have ‘reasonable grounds’—important term—to question whether continuing them on duty is wise. They are, Elinor, ‘loyalty risks.’

  “Now, beyond that, let’s say you have someone who gets drunk too often, maybe carries state papers home against the rules. Maybe he’s a homosexual and is frightened of exposure and susceptible to blackmail. … People in that category are security risks. That’s the kind of thing that makes up security risks. They oughtn’t to be in government this side of the post office. Anyone who is a loyalty risk is automatically a security risk. But a security risk isn’t necessarily a loyalty risk. … Is that too complicated for you, honey?”

  “Hey. Don’t be condescending.”

  He laughed. “Let’s have some more wine. A half bottle?” She nodded, and he signaled to the waiter.

  “The point is, a lot of people are hung up on the distinction.” He gave a couple of illustrations. She listened. He watched for a tug from her, resisting his decision to apply for a job in Washington. He didn’t feel anything. On the other hand, her curiosity on the public question stopped, abruptly. Elinor knew that Harry didn’t want to be removed from the center of anti-Communist action. “He seems to want to acquit himself of the burden of Operation Keelhaul,” she told her roommate the next day.

  But some time later that evening he did touch again on the subject. “Washington—if he takes me—isn’t so far from New York. Tell you what. I’ll manage to be in New York a lot. I’ll persuade McCarthy to investigate Barnard, make sure in your final year you’re not corrupted
. Like Cleopatra.”

  “She wasn’t corrupted. It was Mark Antony.”

  “As Mark Antony said to Cleopatra, ‘Do we have to talk about world affairs tonight?’ ”

  They got up to dance, and two hours later Mr. Billingsley overrode their protests and sent them home once more with wallet undiminished.

  The letter from Harry arrived in the office of Senator McCarthy on the same day that the Senate voted an appropriation for him. Twenty thousand dollars were voted to hand over to the junior senator from Wisconsin to defray the costs of preparing his case on the delinquency of the loyalty/security practices of the federal government. McCarthy’s office kept a file for applicants for jobs. Most of these were precipitated by the post-Wheeling publicity; a few—usually from Wisconsin—came in from routine job seekers whose applications arrived with a covering letter, affectionate, admiring, paternal, from a Wisconsin judge, alderman, state senator, or uncle. The office had ready a we’re-so-sorry form reply on which Joe would scratch out a handwritten sentence aimed at stroking the sponsor.

  Ever since Wheeling, screening and sorting the incoming mail was taking more than one hour. Mary Haskell paused over the letter received that morning from Harry Bontecou. Impulsively, she walked into Joe’s office with it. “I think you should read this.”

  He proceeded to do so.

  “Hot stuff from the Ivy League, eh, Mary? Well, I tell you what: You answer it; you tell him to come on down to Washington, and you interview him.” Joe smiled and resumed his examination of a huge folder.

  She didn’t tell Mr. Harry Bontecou, when she called him on the phone, that it would be she, alone, who would be talking to him. She thought to be diplomatic by setting up the interview for Saturday morning, when the office was officially shut and the senator was elsewhere. It was more tactful that way. If the boss who has declined personally to interview the applicant is during the interview sitting at the other end of the office, feelings get hurt. Giving him the impression that he would meet and be interrogated by the senator, Mary told Harry that Saturday morning would be a very good day, “less hectic for the senator.”