by Liz Moore
The letter asked him two things: First, what languages he knew. Second, whether he would be interested in working for the United States government in Washington, D.C.
If so, said the letter, please reply.
Yes, said Harold. I am immediately available for employment and relocation if necessary.
It was necessary. In 1940, shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-two, Harold packed up and moved across the country, from California to Arlington, Virginia. He said goodbye to Ernest, who, one year later, would be sent to fight in the Pacific theater.
For the next ten years, Harold worked in intelligence for the United States government. First, for the Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall; next, for the Signal Security Agency, which swallowed the SIS; next, for the U.S. Army Security Agency, which swallowed the SSA; finally, for the Armed Forces Security Agency, comprised of all intelligence units for every branch of the military. He broke codes: Japanese, mainly, but also German, and also, eventually, Russian. He was good at his work.
With William Friedman, he worked on the Venona Project that broke Soviet codes emanating from New York. He was integral to the building of the PURPLE machine that was a replica of a Japanese encryption device; with this duplicate, the United States was able to decrypt information that contributed directly to American success in the Pacific theater. He imagined, as he was working, that he was protecting Ernest. He worked harder.
For the first years of the war, he and Ernest wrote long and complicated letters to one another. Both of them, in person, had been happily loquacious, talking to each other for hours in a tumbling, almost psychic way. This tendency carried over into their letters.
Let me tell you about my day, Ernest might begin, and what followed was vivid, lucid writing, a detailed account of his every thought.
They employed a code the two of them had invented years earlier; relying on words, not numbers, it went undetected by the censors who scanned the mail. Brother, they called one other. Friend.
In these letters they made plans: following the war, Ernest would get a job at George Washington University, or Georgetown, or American. Harold would go to graduate school after the war. Washington, at that time, was flourishing with men like them. Lafayette Square, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle. Many of the public parks in the city. A community was forming. You’ll see when you get here, wrote Harold, in code.
In 1944, the letters stopped.
It took another six months for Harold to learn, definitively, that Ernest was gone. Killed in action. Harold had no one, after all, to ask: certainly not Ernest’s family, whom he had never met, who did not know of his existence. At last, a friend of theirs was able to confirm it. Harold took two days off from work, citing a stomach illness. He stayed home. He thought of Ernest. He thought of Susan.
When he returned, he threw himself into his work. Arlington Hall was brimming, then, with talented people, and in them Harold found friends. He sorted them out, assessing them carefully, wondering who might be an ally, deciding at last that there were several.
It was at Arlington Hall that he first knew what it was to be in a lab. It felt like a team. At times it felt like a family.
There were several people there who were like him: men who loved men, women who loved women. Temperamental, they called themselves, or homophile, or gay. The last was the first word Harold learned that felt correct to him. It was a nice word, he thought, appropriate in many ways. He liked the carelessness of it, the implication that they had their heads somehow above the fray. That they did not care what others thought of them. Outsiders referred to them differently: the lavender set, or sex perverts, or queers.
In 1946, he went with a colleague to the Mayflower Hotel, and he met George. George was sitting on a tall stool, wearing his hat indoors, grinning. He was younger, fashionable. He was, Harold thought, powerfully attractive. His gaze was steady and secure. The word beatnik hadn’t been invented yet; if it had been, he’d have been one. Where Harold was conservative in dress, George was unsubtle. He wore mainly black. The length of his hair raised eyebrows. He wrote poetry. He was a talented artist: he made paintings on large canvases that it took two people to lift.
Harold, at first, was skeptical of him. He seemed frivolous, cocky, too overt. He went with frequency to the Chicken Hut, a hangout so obvious that Harold avoided it.
“Why?” George said, wrinkling his brow. “Who cares?”
By that time, George had already cut off all contact with his family, wealthy New Yorkers from a dynastic family who disapproved of him deeply. They had caught him with a boy, said George. They humiliated him. There had been a scandal, already, in the family—something about the father and a girl—and they were wary of another. They threatened to institutionalize him. Instead they sent him off to preparatory school in New Hampshire, from which he ran away when he was seventeen. They reported him missing; they could not find him. It was only when he became a legal adult, at eighteen, that he reemerged. He told them he had no interest in ever speaking to them again. In turn, they disowned him.
This was the subject of one of the first conversations Harold ever had with him. Telling his story, George looked simultaneously amused and distressed. Emotions passed across his face like scudding clouds.
George lived at the Hamilton Arms, a strange housing complex in Georgetown, a sort of commune populated by artists and scholars. The buildings were a collection of alpine-style cottages centered by a café called the Hamilton Arms Coffee House, where George also worked. There were murals on the walls, a pool, perpetually drained, in the middle of the courtyard. He brought Harold back with him, that first night.
Inside the gate, which locked behind them, were two women sitting in lawn chairs on the edge of the empty pool. One was smoking a pipe. Harold had never seen a woman smoke a pipe before.
“Helen,” said George, nodding in her direction, and Helen—lanky, languorous, older than both of them, said, “Who’s the catch?”
Harold had never been referred to as a catch before. He reddened.
George held the door to the coffee shop open for him. He ordered banana pie and Coca-Cola: a strange combination that remained in Harold’s memory for years. He listened over a cup of coffee while Harold talked, clumsily, at length, about his own family. About Ernest.
“You must miss him,” said George.
“How old are you?” asked Harold, warily.
“How old are you?” asked George.
“Twenty-eight,” said Harold.
“Twenty-one,” said George.
“A kid,” said Harold, but in fact—when he looked back on that time later—they both were.
They fell in love. George, as it turned out, was kind: endlessly kind, and endlessly willing to do what was just in the face of oppression. He was radical, carefree. Braver than Harold was. He was exciting. Once—Harold smiled, remembering it—George kissed him full on the mouth, outdoors, on the street. He did not believe in or bend to formalities or social niceties, and therefore he was sometimes perceived as rude, but really he was just honest. He worked for equality in every pocket of the world. He lived as best he could, he told Harold, outside the confines of an oppressive, warmongering America. He joined the Communist Party, attended meetings in the back room of a local bar—a fact that was first whispered about him, and then spoken of overtly, when it became clear that George did not care to keep it a secret.
As much as he scoffed at tradition, though, George still bore the hallmarks of his upbringing, and though he was quite a bit younger than Harold, he taught him a great deal. It was George who taught him to make tea the way he would for the rest of his life, for example. It was George who taught him about classical music—one of their first outings together was to the National Symphony Orchestra, to see them perform Beethoven’s Fifth. George who got Harold listening to the police dramas that he would enjoy for the rest of his life.
Harold felt safe, at first, in Washington. There was a community, a movement—
the fellowship that Harold had mentioned in his letters to Ernest. The city felt modern. The war had ended: it was a new era.
This sense of safety extended even to his work. There were several other men and women like him. He had even seen his boss, Conrad Lewey, at the Horseshoe one night—although Harold normally avoided places as indiscreet as that one, he had been dragged there with George, tipsy, after a long night—and Lewey had nodded to him from across the room. Harold did not approach him in person; there was no need to press the matter further. Lewey had looked stricken, anyway, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. Still, Harold took this exchange as a positive sign: a sign of an ally within the department.
The rest of his colleagues, too, were intellectuals, progressive, subversive in their way. It was true: they worked for the government, but it was with a sort of tacit agreement that they were doing it only to protect their peers. If they could prevent an attack on American soldiers, well, that was good and valuable work. When it came to the government officials to whom they reported, there was a collective eye roll, a kind of benevolent dismissiveness.
Harold did not speak of George at work, except as a friend; but he felt there was an understanding, with his closest colleagues, that they were attached. Once or twice they were invited, together, to some social event. At night they went to films, to concerts, to coffee shops or bars. They walked through the gates of the Hamilton Arms and felt as if they had entered an embrace: no one inside of it minded who they were, what they did. They had friends there. Compatriots. They stayed up late in George’s apartment, in great numbers, talking, debating.
Many of them, including George, were anarchists, revolutionaries. George had never paid taxes, on the premise that taxes funded wars. All the money he made was under the table; he operated entirely in cash. He would, he maintained, for the rest of his life. He did not begrudge Harold’s tendency toward conformity, he insisted. “To each his own,” said George.
“But if you get sick,” said Harold. “If you get caught?”
“I won’t,” said George simply. Or, sometimes, “I’ll go to Mexico. I’ll go to Canada. I’ll hide.”
Harold laughed at him, his impracticality, his idealism, his bravado. But there was a part of him that admired George; that wished to be like him. George laughed loudly in public; he tossed his head back with a pride that simultaneously alarmed and attracted Harold.
Each morning, Harold left early from Hamilton Arms, trudging back to his place, feeling like he was waking from a dream. He smiled at the memory of the previous night, took a quick shower (cold as often as hot: the building was old, the systems inside it unreliable), and then left again for work. And he felt, for the first time in his life, content. Long days of work ended in long and satisfying conversations, emotional and physical fulfillment, acceptance. They ate well. They slept well. They left the bedroom window open well into November, and opened it again in March.
In the late 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee turned its focus from rooting out Nazi sympathizers to rooting out Communists. And in February of 1950, a senator from Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he declared that he held in his hand a list containing the names of 205 Communists currently working in the State Department.
At that time there was an overlap, in the mind of the public, between Communists and homosexuals—the term then used by politicians to signify deviance, perversion. Both categories triggered some deep-seated unease in the minds of both politicians and the public, some fear of the unknown. The Second World War had just ended; the Cold War had just begun.
A specific campaign was begun to eradicate homosexuals from the State Department—especially those who dealt with high-level information. The stated reason: homosexuals were said to be weak, incapable of keeping secrets; or able to be extorted, out of a fear of their personal secrets being revealed to friends and family; or, simply, immoral. Corrupt. In some way evil. “Loyalty risks,” they were called.
A newspaper headline read “Pervert Elimination Campaign Begins.” And Harold thought, abruptly, of his father—of people like his father—throughout the country, sitting by their radios, reading their newspapers. Nodding, approving. Urging McCarthy on.
All around Harold, his friends in government, both gay and straight, began to make plans. The talk was low and furtive: in bars, at home. He began to feel paranoid, nervous that he was being watched, being tailed. For several weeks he stopped going to George’s, until his loneliness overwhelmed him; then he only went after dark, and left before the sun rose.
What would he do, he wondered. What would he do if he was a part of the great felling then taking place all around him?
George didn’t have to worry. He was an artist, a bohemian; he worked for no organization that could fire him, aside from the coffee shop—which itself was owned by two radicals. He was lackadaisical, unafraid. Harold wondered if these qualities came out of growing up rich.
“Just drop out of the system,” said George one night, placing a gentle hand on Harold’s head. “Just stop caring. Make a different living.”
“Maybe I will,” said Harold, but in fact the thought made him miserable. There was only one kind of work that satisfied him, and it was the work of the mind: the sort that required the support of an institution. Without this kind of work, he sometimes thought, he would go insane.
If he were simply fired—that would be one thing. But the problem was not the firing; it was the blacklist. They kept you on it, Harold knew, for your whole life. It was a risk-mitigation strategy: they didn’t want their decryption techniques getting out. The high-level information they all had access to. They wanted to stifle you, discredit you. Make you look crazy. They made sure you never worked again.
The first wave of firings in the Signal Corps took place in the summer of 1950, and it quickly became a plague. John and Larry. Eddie Townes. Margaret Graves, who was married, for heaven’s sake, but said to be masculine in some unquantifiable way.
Eddie Townes came to George’s apartment for dinner after he was fired, and he wept. “What will I do now?” he said.
In the end he moved back to North Dakota to help at his father’s gas station. This was a cryptanalyst, like Harold.
“I’m next,” Harold said, after Townes had left, still bleary, mildly drunk, giving them a brave salute from just outside the door. There was no question, he thought, that they would come for him next. He imagined a life without work: bleak and uninteresting and endless. A return to his dusty, blighted childhood.
George contemplated him for a while. “What if,” he said, and took a breath.
On October 9, 1950, Harold arrived at work to find that two men in suits were waiting for him. The man on the left was wearing a toupee; Harold was almost sure of it. His hair sat on his head too heavily; he moved his head slowly, carefully. The other was handsome, impeccably dressed.
“Mr. Canady,” said the first man. “I’m Ted Doherty, and this is Art Tillman. We’d like to have a word.”
Moments later, a third person entered the room.
It was Conrad Lewey, Harold’s boss—the same man Harold had seen at the Horseshoe. Briefly, he caught Lewey’s eye.
That night he went to George’s house and told him what had happened.
We know what you know, they had said. We know whom you’ve shared it with.
They were referring to the high-level information he had been intercepting for a decade. It was a lie: he had shared his findings, of course, with nobody—not even George. He never would.
Tillman was holding a file stuffed full of papers, which he shook at Harold as if to indicate that it was full of evidence that could be used against him.
It was a bluff: presumably it was a bluff.
Still, it shook him.
“A full investigation into these matters will be conducted in the coming weeks,” said Tillman. “In the meantime, your job will be suspended.”
“I’ve done nothing,” said Har
old, holding open his hands, turning up the tender white palms, as if to display their emptiness.
“Then you have nothing to worry about,” said Doherty. Lewey, in the background, shifted slowly back and forth.
On the way out, Harold tried to catch his eye. He knew what was happening: Lewey, alarmed, was framing him, pointing a finger preemptively, assuming that Harold would otherwise have thrown the book at him.
I would have said nothing, he wanted to tell Lewey. But Lewey avoided his gaze.
All of this Harold told to George.
“So it’s time?” George asked.
“Yes,” said Harold. “I think so.”
They had put their plan into place several months before.
There had been suicides already since the HUAC was formed. (Among themselves, they never called it the House Un-American Activities Committee; they called it the Inquisition.) Five, ten, fifteen suicides within the State Department alone. They were men and women fired from their lifelong work—men and women who could not fathom another life. Some of the deaths were labeled accidental. Everyone knew the truth.
“They wouldn’t notice another,” said George. And at first Harold was confused. He did not understand.
“Are you suggesting,” he said, wounded, and George shook his head emphatically.
“No, no,” he said. “I don’t think you should actually do it. Only that you might be able to make it seem as if it had been done.”
Harold gazed at him.
“It would blend in,” George said. “They wouldn’t investigate it further. It wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. It would make sense to them.”
He was right, Harold thought. They would think, Of course. They’d think, What else did he have to live for? No family, no job. A sex pervert. A freak. They would be relieved. It would solve problems for the State Department, in fact—one fewer to worry about. One fewer to keep track of. An item crossed off a list.
“But then what,” said Harold. “What would I do next?”