Senator

by Richard Bowker

  "You look like shit," I remarked.

  "Good of you to notice."

  We fell silent again; the guitar, too, fell silent. We were waiting, I realized. Waiting for graduation. A girl started to cry and said she was going home. No one stopped her. The darkness started to lighten.

  I thought of my own mother. She'd be upset, too, if she were alive. "Where did I go wrong?" she would moan, just like Mrs. Everson. But this was part of growing up. This was why you went to college. I had been a good boy all my life, I had kept my nose clean, and Danny had gotten all the girls, and the world was going to hell. Something wasn't right. Maybe we needed a revolution to fix it.

  Everson had nodded off again. This time the cigarette missed his leg. I took it from his hand and stubbed it out.

  "They're coming!" someone shouted.

  I stood up. Everson roused himself and got to his feet, too. Everyone was at the rear of the building, looking out at the quad with Widener on the right and Memorial Church on the left. There was nothing to see. "Busloads of 'em on Quincy Street," a blond-haired kid reported. Fire alarms started going off in the dorms around the Yard. I looked up. People were gathering on the roof of Weld Hall next door. "The whole world is watching," Everson murmured.

  The gaunt, bearded guy started rattling off instructions, but I didn't listen. I was too scared. I folded my arms across my chest, hoping to look determined but really trying to keep from trembling. This was what it was like every day in Vietnam, I figured. The wait continued, and I began to wonder and then to hope: false alarm. Everyone go back to sleep. Battles start at a decent hour in Cambridge.

  And then, just before five, we saw them. Several cars, followed by a half dozen buses, appeared from behind Memorial Church.

  We looked down into the windows of the buses; the police inside stared back at us.

  The caravan came to a stop. An official-looking man got out of one of the cars and seemed to be making an announcement. We couldn't hear it. We were too busy staring at the police marching out of the buses in their boots and jodhpurs and riot helmets.

  "Oh, shit," someone said. "State troopers."

  There were Cambridge police, too, and Harvard police—an army, getting ready for the battle. I saw them take out their nightsticks, and I tried to imagine the pain of being hit with one of them, just as I had tried to imagine having puerperal fever. Couldn't do it. That's why I was here, right? For the experience, right?

  Right?

  Students in the quad were giving the Nazi salute. The police started to move.

  Someone was pulling on my arm. I forced myself to look away from the advancing army. It was Everson. "Don't be a complete idiot," he said. "Let's get out of here."

  I couldn't quite process this. Paul Everson? Fleeing the Revolution? He pulled me away from the window. I let myself be pulled.

  We stumbled past people. Someone swore at us. We made our way downstairs and raced along the short hallway to the front door, away from where the troops were massed. Everson opened it. There was a crowd of students on the steps. A blue line of Cambridge police was heading toward us, nightsticks raised. Kids started leaping over the railing and onto the grass as the police approached. We hesitated for a second and then followed them as the police pushed their way up the steps.

  So we joined the gawkers. The cowards. The steps were cleared quickly, and the police headed inside. We could hear the thunder of feet on the stairs, screams of rage and pain. I looked at Everson. He was breathing heavily. His face was expressionless.

  And then people started pouring out of the building, with the police in pursuit. The blond kid who had told us about the buses on Quincy Street rushed out, his forehead dripping blood. A kid in a wheelchair shouted, "Sieg Heil!" and a cop overturned the wheelchair and started beating him on the ground. And I thought: Hey, this isn't right! We got out! You won! This is Harvard Yard, not Birmingham, not Chicago. A cop came straight at us and I started to run, but then I noticed that Everson wasn't with me. I turned and saw him standing his ground and shouting at the cop: "Pig! Pig! Pig!" The cop punched him in the face and he went down. Then the cop raised his nightstick and I rushed back, desperate to defend my roommate.

  "Hey!" I shouted.

  The cop looked at me. "Jimmy?" he said.

  It was Bill Doherty. He lived a couple of houses up the street from us in Brighton. He had played football with Danny in high school. I used to help him write book reports for English class.

  We stood on either side of my crumpled roommate. "What the fuck are you doin' here, Jimmy?" Billy asked me.

  "I belong here," I said.

  "Is this maggot your friend?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, get him the fuck out of here before he gets himself killed."

  "Okay, Billy. Okay."

  Billy shook his head as he looked at me. "Jesus, Jimmy. What would your father say?"

  And then he rushed off to beat up someone else. I got Everson to his feet and dragged him inside the nearest dorm, while the battle continued to rage around us.

  * * *

  That was the Harvard Bust. It's been over twenty years now, and no one talks about it much anymore, except in the occasional retrospective article about the turbulent sixties. Are there middle-aged radicals who still remember the protesters' demands, who still seethe at the injustices that motivated the takeover? I'm sure there are, but they have long ago shuffled off the stage of history. There are new injustices now, and new demands—or perhaps they are the same ones, only in different costumes.

  And yet if you were there... I can still close my eyes and I am standing outside University Hall in the cold predawn, trying to figure out what to do, dimly realizing that this was the biggest decision of my young life. I can still see the police getting off those buses—coming to get me: the lawbreaker; the enemy of society. I can still feel myself rushing toward the cop as he got ready to bludgeon my friend—and the shock of recognition when I saw that the cop, too, was my friend.

  If you were there, you were changed, and the change lasts a lifetime.

  Afterward the campus was shut down for a week or so, as people demonstrated and debated and held mass meetings. Things muddled along then until the school year mercifully ended.

  History has shown that there were no winners out of the Bust. The Revolution didn't begin, so the protesters couldn't claim that they lost the battle but won the war. But Harvard couldn't claim victory either. It had beaten up a few of its students, and that in turn had radicalized many more. The trust and mutual respect on which the institution was based had been destroyed. It had recovered its building but lost its soul.

  And what of James O'Connor and Paul Everson?

  My roommate went to business school and then entered the world of high finance. Do I detect the sound of relaxed laughter from my conservative friends? Ah, yes. The young radical realizes that revolution isn't quite so glamorous after he's been socked by a cop. Making money becomes a lot more interesting than crusading for socialism. How typical.

  Perhaps. But Everson was more complicated than that. He gave up on revolution, but he didn't give up his hatred for the establishment, for the smug American ruling class wallowing in its own self-interest. He decided to fight it by himself, for himself.

  He became one of the earliest of the corporate raiders. He would see a company grown complacent making shoddy products for undiscerning consumers, and he would buy up its stock and take it over, usually after management had fought him till its dying breath. He would then shake the company up, turn it around, and sell it off.

  I don't think he did this just to make money, although he made tons of it. He really disliked those corporate executives, safe in their boardrooms, screwing workers and consumers alike and thinking nothing could touch them, mouthing pieties about free enterprise but using every trick in the book to protect themselves from the dangers of the marketplace. Everson became the avenging demon of capitalism.

  He didn't always operate entirel
y within the law, I'm sure. But a lot of his demonic reputation came from the hypocritical pleadings of the executives he cast aside. They became concerned about the fate of their workers and the effect on the community only when their own jobs were on the line; otherwise it was layoffs as usual. Everson didn't mind his reputation; he enjoyed it, in fact. Billy Doherty could hurt him, but these guys couldn't—not as long as he was smarter and meaner and richer than any of them.

  And James O'Connor? How did he manage to avoid being radicalized?

  I wasn't radicalized, I admit, but I certainly was politicized. My most immediate response to the Bust was to lose all interest in becoming an English professor. The world was too important to spend my time reading what other people thought about it—or, worse, teaching what other people thought about it. I decided to go to law school instead.

  In the process I decided that, if forced to choose between the Harvard administration and the students I saw that morning in University Hall as the people I wanted to run society, I would have chosen the former, despite what they did during the Bust. What matters in the long run is the form of government, not its policies or actions at any given moment. You're always going to have cops like Billy Doherty socking punks who call them pigs. If the government is set up correctly, however, its policies can be changed, in accordance with the will of the governed. And what matters in the short run for most people, including myself, is not an abstract question about the form of government, but more prosaic concerns, like being able to go outside your home at night without fear of being assaulted. And for those concerns as well, I'd rather have Billy Doherty on my side than any of the University Hall protesters.

  Billy, I'll see you later on. You've had a greater impact on my life than you'll ever know.

  Anyway, I went to Harvard Law. My father was dubious about lawyers, but he liked the prestige. My chosen career was less acceptable than being an English professor, perhaps, but better than owning a bar.

  And after graduation, filled with crusading spirit, I offered my services to Francis X. Cavanaugh, newly elected district attorney for Suffolk County.

  Cavanaugh wasn't much older then than I am now. He had been an assistant DA for a long time, the last few years of which he basically ran the place as his boss descended into senility. When the old man decided to try for yet another term, Cavanaugh decided that he couldn't wait around for four more years and ran against him. The disloyalty didn't really shock anyone; politics is a tough business. It was clear the old man had hung on too long, and the Monsignor had earned his shot. Cavanaugh leaked some damaging stories about his boss's behavior, the old man's contributions dried up, and Cavanaugh won the Democratic primary easily. In Suffolk County in those days, that was all you needed to win.

  I followed the campaign in the newspapers, and I thought: Cavanaugh's office is the place for me. Cavanaugh had a good reputation. He talked a lot during the campaign about professionalizing the DA's operations. He would surely want to recruit all the talent he could find. He would surely be overjoyed to find a local kid fresh out of Harvard Law who preferred the long hours and low pay of an assistant DA to becoming an associate in some high-powered corporate firm.

  We met in his office. He was cordial. He was impressed by my credentials. He took me around to meet some of the people in his operation. We discussed what my duties might be if I came on board. I expressed my interest. He smiled encouragingly and said he would get back to me.

  He never did.

  After all these years that still irks me. At the time, being full of myself, with my two Harvard degrees and all, I was infuriated. Where did Cavanaugh get off, turning me down for a job? I tried to find out what the problem was, and the word came back that the Monsignor felt the chemistry was wrong. Chemistry!

  My anger fueled my decision to do the opposite of what I was going to do in the DA's office. I signed on as a public defender. I would show Cavanaugh just what kind of lawyer he had turned down.

  The PD's office, unfortunately, was not the place to show off one's lawyering skills. It was all I could do to keep my sanity as I dealt with the endless procession of pathetic, vicious, and crazy souls who had stumbled into the clutches of the system. They all were guilty, unless like a good liberal you believe that society itself was to blame for their misdeeds. And the most I could do for them was to bargain a little time off their sentences, or occasionally set them free on a technicality. Once in a while I felt as if I were helping society, but mostly I just felt numb.

  One good thing came out of my experience in the PD's office:

  I met Roger Simmons there. Roger was thinner and drank less in those days; he was just married to Doris, and the four of us were inseparable for a while—all of us young and poor and just starting out. Roger wasn't interested in changing society; his dreams were more suburban. But we felt right together, and when, after a couple of years, he suggested starting our own criminal law firm, I was willing to listen. Liz was certainly in favor; she hadn't married a Harvard Law grad so that she could live on hot dogs and Franco-American spaghetti. Besides, the baby was on its way, and we were going to lose Liz's teaching income.

  So Roger and I hung out our shingle, and we began to see another, wealthier brand of guilt. It was interesting and remunerative, if unexceptional, work. I might still be doing it today if Paul Everson hadn't called me up one day and once again changed my life forever.

  Chapter 11

  Paul Everson and James O'Connor, Act Two

  "You saved me once, Jim. I need you to save me again," he said over the phone.

  We hadn't kept in touch since college. I read about him in the papers, of course, and occasionally compared my own middling progress with his spectacular success. But that was about it. So I was surprised that he knew all about me and what I'd been up to. I shouldn't have been, I found out: Everson made it a point to know as much as he could about everything and everyone; that was how he stayed ahead of the competition. He wanted someone young and smart and energetic to represent him. Above all, he wanted someone who would believe in him. He said that I fitted the bill perfectly.

  Now I wasn't about to downgrade my own abilities. I had become a good lawyer, always well prepared, naturally eloquent and quick thinking, and yes, they tell me my appearance made quite an impression on the female jurors. And Paul Everson certainly had reason to think kindly of me. But even so, I was a little surprised when he dropped his case in my lap. It wasn't simply the murder case of the year in Suffolk County; it was the murder case of the decade.

  Everson was going to need all the help he could get, if you believed the newspapers. The facts of the case looked grim. He and his wife had been involved in a bitter divorce, one that would have cost him millions. It was the kind of divorce, filled with charges and countercharges, that makes the tabloids goofy with joy. Who is Paul's mystery woman? How much does Alice actually spend on shoes? Which of them will get custody of Kubla Khan, their beloved Lhasa apso?

  And then Alice was found dead—stabbed through the heart on the floor of her bedroom. All clues pointed to one suspect: her estranged husband. Whose fingerprints were on the knife? Who else could get into their mansion without setting off the security system? Who else could keep Kubla Khan from barking so much that the housekeeper would wake up? Who had a better motive?

  If the divorce made for great reading, the murder drove the tabloids to rapturous excess, even by their standards. Alice went from being the ditzy spendthrift to the tragic victim. Paul went from glamorous financier to sinister murderer. Corporate executives he had thrown out on the street were delighted to provide quotes about how ruthless he was, how little he cared about anyone besides himself. He became a robber baron, a symbol of the collapse of America's values. The photo of him being led away in handcuffs after his arrest, smiling cockily, wearing a cashmere blazer and suede Gucci loafers, seemed to say it all: Here is a man who thinks he can get away with murder.

  What lawyer wouldn't want this case? Only a lawyer
so convinced of Everson's guilt and so disgusted by his crime that he couldn't give his client effective representation. But that certainly wasn't me after my first meeting with him. It wasn't simply that he told me he was innocent; all my clients told me that. It was that I found myself so much wanting to believe him. Because when he talked to me, he wasn't the tabloids' personification of Satan; he was a scared young man in over his head—not so very different from the kid who stood next to me as the police marched toward University Hall. "Everything looks terrible, Jim, I know that," he said to me. "And I know I won't make a very sympathetic defendant. But Jesus, murder? No, Jim. I didn't do it. In my own way I'm as moral as anyone. You've got to believe that."

  "The most important thing you can do to help yourself is to tell me the truth," I said. "Otherwise I can't do my job." This was the standard admonition I gave my clients. They rarely paid any attention to it, but I felt obliged to make the effort.

  "I'll do whatever it takes," Everson said. "Trust me."

  I trusted him, and I set to work.

  Oh, what a trial it turned out to be! Not the least interesting aspect of it, at least to me, was the prosecuting attorney. Not surprisingly, Cavanaugh had decided to try this one himself. Cavanaugh never met a camera he didn't like, and there would be plenty of them focused on the Everson murder trial. The Monsignor was getting ready to make a run for attorney general, and the publicity of personally winning the case would give him the statewide exposure he needed to sew up the election.

  We met once or twice in pretrial maneuverings, and we conducted ourselves with the exquisite courtesy of men who detested each other. The idea of a plea bargain was in the air—Roger, for one, was in favor—but Cavanaugh didn't offer any deals, and I wouldn't have accepted any. He needed the trial to get the headlines, and I needed the trial to get the acquittal my client deserved. So we prepared for a showdown.