Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  Before setting off for another engagement, Helena gave instructions to the day’s volunteers. Jody, the secretary, who kept her earphones on while working on her typewriter, thereby serving two purposes, took notes. Mr. Raynor was to call Mrs. Crowder as soon as he checked in to his office. Helena had rearranged the office so that the young man from Belmont could have a telephone and desk of his own. She took one of the larger poster-photographs of General Walker and thumbtacked it on the wall behind the desk Raynor would be using. Her bridge date was at two, so she would not be reachable until later in the afternoon. But Raynor could leave a message on her phone and she would pick it up from the answering service.

  Woodroe arrived just after lunch, after checking in at the boardinghouse where he would have a room and breakfast. In the JBS office, on Churchill Way, he introduced himself to Jody and Sonny, the file clerk, and to the volunteers, who were hard at work. He familiarized himself with the layout of this nerve center for the third-largest JBS community in the country, outnumbered only in Los Angeles and Phoenix. Seated behind his desk, he called Mrs. Crowder’s number and left a message. He devoted himself to reading office files, checking budgets, and passing an eye over the inventory of political material. Sometime after four, Jody signaled him to pick up on 117, his phone connection.

  Helena Crowder was on the phone. She said how happy she was to know that he had arrived and how anxious she was to spend some time with him, to be debriefed about everything going on in Belmont, and to brief him on everything going on “and planned”—her voice had a tone of mystery now—by the George S. Patton Chapter in Dallas. “Why not come to my place for a drink? I have complete privacy in my part of the house. Do you have a car yet? . . . Well, I will send for you. It’s 4:30 now. Where will you be at six?” Woodrow said he would still be at the office at six.

  “Perfect. And welcome to Dallas, Mr. Raynor.”

  She lived in a large Georgian house in Highland Park. Nacho, the Mexican driver, escorted Woodroe across a large lawn to an entrance in one wing. The driver touched the bell, then opened the door for his passenger. Woodroe entered a living room luxuriously appointed. It served the owner—that great, tall, resplendent figure who greeted him—clearly as more than a living room. It was also an office. At the corner was Mrs. Crowder’s polished wooden desk with stacks of papers and clippings on it. Behind were signed photographs. She gave him a little tour. There was General MacArthur, in a large frame. Then Senator Taft, and Admiral Nimitz, and General Walker. “General Walton Walker. No relation. But before he went to Korea, where he was killed in an accident, he was in Dallas, head of the Eighth Army Group. He came to this house several times. That’s me and Senator McCarthy, before he died.” She stopped herself, and suppressed a giggle, shaking her head. “Obviously it was before he died, since he is alive in the picture. What I meant was, taken soon before he died—he died a year later. Of a broken heart. Senator McCarthy, you must realize, was really the first Bircher, though the Society didn’t exist when he died. What did him in was that he voiced the same suspicions as Bob Welch.

  “On that other wall”—she pointed—“are the intellectuals. That’s Eugene Lyons, then Ludwig von Mises—you know, the great economist?” Woodroe nodded. “And that’s Ayn Rand. Have you read Atlas Shrugged?” Again Woodroe nodded. “Inspiring. If we could get every pro-Communist in the world to read that book, they’d all understand, understand the whole story.”

  They sat down and she rang for a maid. “What can I give you to drink, Mr. Raynor?”

  “I wish you would call me Woodroe.”

  “Yes, of course. Though I’m old enough to be your mother”—she paused—“if only barely. We have no children. Twins died at birth. Yes, you must call me Helena. Everybody does. Your drink?”

  “I would like a gin and tonic.”

  “That’s my favorite too. With just the right slice of lime. Not lemon.”

  Woodroe sat in an armchair, his hostess on the sofa. She said she wanted to hear more about his background. “I have Bob’s letter, of course, and he says you saw the Communists at work in Austria.”

  “In Hungary, actually.”

  “Yes, in Hungary. What were you doing? Oh yes, you are Mormon and were doing missionary work. Did you have actual contact with the Hungarians?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “I saw the refugees. They flowed into Austria across a little bridge, over a canal. They call it the Einserkanal. The bridge, about forty yards long, took them across to Austria. They call it the Andau Bridge because the nearest town is Andau, about forty-five miles southeast of Vienna.” Woodroe had discovered long ago that any mention of Andau required geographical orientation.

  “And then Princeton?”

  “Yes. In senior year I went to Sharon. I was one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom.”

  She bridled. “I am not so hot on YAF. They were going to give General Walker an award last spring, and there were votes against him.”

  “Yes, I knew about that.”

  Helena Crowder got up, walked over to her desk, and picked up and displayed the photograph of Edwin Walker. “Did you know that General Walker, as a colonel, commanded the paratrooper commando Canadian-American First Special Service Force? They fought in France, Germany, and Italy. He went to Korea then, and never got over having to pull away. It was after that that he was named commander of the Twenty-fourth Infantry in Germany. He joined our Society in 1959.” Helena laughed. “I’ve counted up his special dislikes. They are Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Mad magazine, Edward R. Murrow, and Harvard University.”

  “That’s . . . eclectic.”

  “Can you make out the inscription? His handwriting is not very clear. It reads, ‘To Helena Crowder, a princess of freedom!’” She paused and lowered her eyelids for a second.

  Seated then with her drink, she said, “I want you, of course, to meet General Walker. He has a suite of offices on the seventeenth floor downtown, courtesy of the American National Oil Company, so he doesn’t have far to go to the Adolphus Hotel, where I’ve booked a private dining room for lunch tomorrow, so we can talk with complete confidence and security. And now I want to tell you what my idea is for Thanksgiving. Or did Bob tell you?”

  “Yes, he did. It sounds very exciting.”

  “Well, keep it completely confidential. When we announce it, we want a total surprise. I’m thinking of a big splash the first week of November. I’ve already discreetly inquired. The football stadium is free on Thanksgiving Day.”

  They talked and chatted for an hour and shared their concerns over the Soviet government’s declaration, the day before, that any attack by the United States on Cuba or on Soviet ships bound for Cuba would bring a nuclear war.

  “It was all very well,” said Helena, “for Secretary Rusk to say that the United States wasn’t nervous or afraid. Nervous or afraid!” She repeated the words with contempt. “The same secretary of state who was too nervous or afraid to help the Cuban freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs or to resist the partition of Berlin.... Well, you know all that. Thank God for our Senator Tower.”

  Woodroe told her he hadn’t read what Senator Tower had said.

  “He said that U.S. policy on Cuba and the Soviet Union was, I quote, ‘one of massive appeasement.’”

  Woodroe looked again at Helena’s photograph of Ayn Rand. Warmed by the drink and by the personal allure of his hostess, he ventured, “I know somebody who works for Ayn Rand.”

  “Lucky man.”

  “He’s a she.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “She is very enthusiastic about the Nathaniel Branden Institute.”

  “We’re thinking of helping out the people who want to sponsor some lectures here in Dallas. What do you call what they call themselves?”

  “Objectivists.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  Woodroe smiled and swallowed a large draft of his gin and tonic. “It takes Branden twenty lectures to spell that out. And
Atlas Shrugged was—”

  “—One thousand one hundred and sixty-eight pages.”

  “Right. Well, the important thing, I guess, is that objectivism absolutely rejects any increase in government power.”

  “We have to have an army and an air force.”

  “Yes, but what they say is that only volunteers should serve. Never conscription. In fact, everything that is done by anybody should be voluntary, and volunteers shouldn’t be guided by anything more than self-interest. And the mind must be free to recognize what a person wants and can reason for himself—herself—what they want, and why they want it. That kind of thing.”

  “Well, I know she’s a great writer and a great champion of freedom. That’s why I have her picture up there.”

  Her house phone rang. “Yes. Yes, Jerry. I’m coming. I’m just having a nice chat with the very nice young man taking over the JBS office. . . . Yes, Jerry. He’s taking over the JBS subject to my direction.” She smiled broadly, a splendid figure of a woman. Her face was expressive, the lips full, the makeup highlighting the blond hair, the pin on her jacket displaying the American flag in rubies, diamonds, and sapphires.

  “Nacho will take you wherever you want. Then tomorrow I will meet you at 12:03 P.M.” She laughed. “General Walker is very insistent on punctuality, so he never makes an engagement using round numbers.”

  “See you at 12:03, Helena. Many thanks.”

  Nacho was waiting for him outside the door.

  18

  IT WAS TOWARD THE END of the lunch that General Walker confided his plans to Helena and Woodroe. He had put off disclosing them until he had moved well beyond the perfunctory handshake with the young man Helena had brought in. Woodroe Raynor’s membership in the John Birch Society was a pretty fair warrant of his reliability. But after all, it was the responsibility of the Society to be skeptical about presumptive credentials, and to penetrate disguises. Accordingly, General Walker waited until after dessert had been served. He was impressed by Woodroe’s account of the Hungarian refugees’ fleeing their country in 1956. But he instructed Woodroe that the apparent revolt by the apparent freedom fighters in Hungary had been exposed in one of Robert Welch’s communications as having been, in fact, an elaborate ruse. The Communists had staged the entire thing—

  “Why, General?”

  General Walker smiled. There was a hint of condescension toward the young man. “Because, Raynor, the Communists’ idea was to expose the real anti-Communists, find out who they were, then lug them off to prison and execution. There were 13,890 people shot and 2,492 students hanged.”

  Woodroe drew breath. “Gee. Where did you get those figures? I never saw them before.”

  “I had my sources of information when I was in Germany. In fact, I still do. You don’t believe it about Hungarian treachery?”

  “Oh yes, General. Yes, I do believe what you say about . . . Hungarian treachery.”

  The general looked Woodroe square in the eye. “I trust you, young man.” And then to Helena. “Draw your chair up a little closer. I’ll keep my voice down.”

  He divulged that he was going to go to Oxford, Mississippi. “The time has come for a showdown with the federal government. They—the Kennedy people—haven’t said it, but I know it: they’re going to send federal forces, maybe the army, to force Ole Miss to admit a Negro.” He lowered his voice still further. “Helena, you know this—maybe you don’t, Raynor. I was the commander on the field in Little Rock just five years ago when General Eisenhower—”

  “President Eisenhower,” Helena corrected him.

  “I always think of him as a general. And”—turning to Helena—“we both know what Bob Welch says about the general. I’m not sure I’m on board on that one—I’m not yet prepared to say that Ike was a Communist agent—but it would explain a lot of things.”

  “Like Little Rock?” Woodroe asked.

  “Yes, like Little Rock. Here was the Supreme Court ordering the integration of the local schools, which the people in Little Rock just didn’t want to do. It wasn’t for the federal government to decide these things. What the government did was tear up the country by sending troops into Little Rock. And tearing up the whole country is exactly what the Communists want, like Bob Welch says. I tried to resign—that was later published in all the papers—”

  “Yes, I read about that.”

  “But they wouldn’t allow that, wouldn’t allow me to pull out. That was tough, me following orders on that assignment. But I’m out of the army now. And you know, they’re going to try, you watch, to do the same thing in Oxford.”

  “What’s the legal situation there, General?”

  “Yes,” Helena said. “Explain that to Woodroe. Call him Woodroe, Ed.”

  The general leaned back in his chair. “Well, you know, I’m not a lawyer. But this is how it is, pretty much. I might be getting the courts a little crossed up, but the colored outfit, that . . . National Committee of Colored People, or whatever they call it, they lined up this young feller, he’s twenty-nine years old—already married and has a kid—and he’s got no more interest in going to the University of Mississippi than I’ve got, oh . . . in enrolling in the navy.

  “So what happens? So the colored people line him up and look at him and tell him where to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in his application form. Then they go to court. Court in Mississippi, I believe, they began with. And the court said no, there’s state law against mixing the races, and the governor, he said right away he was going to enforce that law. So what do the colored people do? I shouldn’t say the colored people, because my impression of it is that they have only one or two they bring out for parades. What they have up there is mostly white Jews.

  “So they appeal to another court. That’d be a federal court, right?”

  Helena nodded.

  “And that court says the Supreme Court, back in that ruling—the Brown ruling—ruled that separate schools were unconstitutional. So the federal court ruled—not unanimous, like maybe . . . 3–2, something like that. They said the colored student had to be admitted.”

  “His name is Meredith,” Woodroe contributed.

  “Well, of course there was an appeal, and the governor—Governor Ross Barnett—he backs the appeal to the hilt, says either state governments have control over their schools or some foreigner, some foreign body, has control.”

  Helena turned her head slightly toward Woodroe. “They pleaded the doctrine of ‘interposition.’”

  “Yes, something like that. So the Mississippi court says that Mississippi police and troopers have to take orders from the governor. So”—he raised both arms in a gesture of despair—“the colored society goes to a federal court in New Orleans, the same one that had, you know, that split decision, and this time the court splits in favor of states’ rights, but not by a big margin. So? Back to the next higher federal court.”

  “The Court of Appeals.”

  “That’s the one, Helena. And the good news was, the Court of Appeals upheld, granted it was a close vote, the New Orleans court. You following me, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But that means the colored people are going to appeal both of those court decisions. That’s been done, and now it goes over to the Supreme Court. The Warren Court. Impeach Earl Warren, the John Birch Society says. Yes. You might as well say, Free Cuba. You can bet on it, the Commie-dominated court is going to rule that socialism wins. When it’s states’ rights versus socialism, socialism wins.”

  He took a gulp of his iced tea.

  “So the Supreme Court is going to vote with the integrationists. Then Kennedy will have to enforce that decision. And there’s a congressional election coming up, four or five weeks down the road, and I don’t reckon the other Kennedy, Bobby, is going to hurry up to advise his brother to send troops down to Mississippi a few days before an election.”

  Woodroe permitted himself to look at the carpet. The general had been taking him in with concentrated attention. The
fixity of the general’s eyes had disconcerted him. When Woodroe raised his head again, he affected a cough. But the general was undistracted.

  “When you see the enemy getting ready, that’s the time for you to get ready. Maybe I told you that once, Helena?”

  “I think you did, Ed. I think it was in one of your speeches.”

  “I like to think you’ll find it in all of my speeches. So? That’s the job I’ve assigned myself. Be up there with the Mississippi troops. The freedom fighters. If the feds come down, the freedom fighters will need professional help.”

  Woodroe worked to control his breathing. He eased his eyes over to Helena.

  There was silence. The first silence since they had come into the room.

  The general took a sip of water. “I wanted you to know my plans, Helena.” And to Woodroe, “You are sworn to secrecy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, it’s time to get to work.”

  “Yes,” said Helena. “And you’ve got the speech tonight at Fort Worth. You’re great to take everything on the way you do.”

  The general rose. He was a commanding presence in his double-breasted blue suit, standing taller even than Helena Crowder. The general turned to Woodroe. He winked broadly. “You know what I call her, Woodroe? I call her a princess of freedom.”

  Helena smiled and led the way out of the dining room.

  19

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, September 28, Helena Crowder went directly to her office at the Birch Society and used the intercom. “Woodroe, dear, come in. I want to talk to you about something important.”