Tucker's Last Stand

by William F. Buckley

  Only, Blackford, concluded, when provoked by highly unprofessional behavior. He knew that not much time would go by before Rufus had the full biography of Major Tucker Montana.

  11

  July 9, 1964

  Mexico City

  Tucker Montana caught up with Rufus and Blackford in Hawaii, where Rufus spent a day in consultation with CINCPAC, the Commander in Chief, Pacific. In conversations with Washington, Rufus established that the officials critical to a decisive meeting on the proposed operation could not assemble until ten days later. He would use that period to explore and refine Tucker’s proposals. And he was now free to yield to Blackford’s request for a week’s vacation.

  In San Francisco, Rufus and Tucker caught the connecting flight to Washington. Blackford flew south to Los Angeles, changing there for a flight to Mexico City.

  Why didn’t Compañía Mexicana de Aviación offer their tourist-class passengers Mexican food? He’d have exchanged the entire menu—tasteless shrimp, mystery meat, mashed potatoes, unclassified beans, the kind of pudding that reminded him of Greyburn, his old school in England—for one hot enchilada, one tamale, a half-dozen tortillas. Never mind, he would make up for it in Mexico, though it is hard, he had discovered, to find good Mexican food in the city of Mexico—at least hard to find it in restaurants where you’d want to eat.

  After the events of the past year, he had thought so much about their next encounter that he decided finally he would not speculate any further on how it would be, exactly, to see Sally again, for the first time since she had been married. They had, after all, always tended to extemporaneity with each other; yes, ever since that crazy afternoon at the college fraternity cocktail party when they had first met. He (in the Air Corps books a senior), a minor hero (he had knocked down three Messerschmitts in hand-to-hand encounters), studying—and playing—in a large undergraduate class that had a dozen such heroes, uniformly unrecognized as such. She, a graduate student, stunning, smart, scholarly, and in no particular need of young heroes. She outshone him, he remembered, in every way that mattered. And when, on the fateful night only ten days after their first meeting, lying together, she had told him in the matter-of-fact tones she used in describing her academic work that he was the most beautiful young man she had ever laid eyes on, he remembered what she had said more because it amused him than because it appealed to his vanity: his vague, outspoken, irrepressible mother had repeatedly embarrassed him in public with such references to him (“Oh, my beautiful Blacky!”) ever since he was fourteen years old. Theirs had been a volatile romance, but Blackford had never doubted that in the truly providential sense of it they were meant for each other, and when she suddenly married Antonio a year earlier, he had known what it meant to go about, for weeks on end, with an empty heart.

  In due course he came to know the works of Jane Austen, of necessity, that author being Sally’s specialty, and he had to remind himself that what had happened to him that afternoon after the football game was not insane or unique: it happened several times in Miss Austen’s six novels, genuine struck-dead, love-at-first-sight situations. Sally was slightly withdrawn, indomitably independent in spirit, dazzling to look at if you began by discarding as irrelevant most of the competition in icons of the day—she didn’t look like Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. In fact, she didn’t look like anybody else, and every now and then he wondered whether he alone found her so beautiful, and then one day he asked the question, rather shyly, of his closest friend, Anthony Trust, who had answered: “Is Sally beautiful? Is Mona Lisa beautiful? Is Venice beautiful? Is that Grecian Urn beautiful that Keats wrote about? What’s the matter—Ah! You are thinking maybe of Doucette? She was very beautiful too. I wonder what she looked like with clothes on.”

  Blackford had smiled at this reference to a joint “date” Anthony had engineered in Paris with two quite unusual ladies of the night. Blackford had had numerous engagements in the sportive mode during the fifteen years since he had met Sally. In an unconcentrated sort of way he vaguely disapproved of his own casual sexual behavior, but excused himself on the grounds that Sally had put off a wedding date, pending the completion of her dissertation; and then it was he who had (twice) put off fixing a date because he had been preoccupied with two successive time-consuming appointments for the Agency, the result of all of which had been frequent separations over extended periods of time. And then there was the summer when they were both in Washington and it was the season of her maximum irritability, the locus of which was Blackford’s continuing service in the Agency, which, more or less flippantly, she held responsible for the prolongation of the Cold War. He remembered one expression of it.

  “Darling,” she had said, “do you agree with the sociological generality that people tend to be very anxious about holding on to their jobs?”

  “Of course I do—is this the right turn?” They were headed for a little inn they visited from time to time in Virginia, where they were always welcomed as Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes, “the handsomest young couple in the state,” the old lady behind the desk would beam.

  “No. Next one. Well, wouldn’t it then be fair to say that people who work in the … Agency” (she always went along, if a little playfully, with the protocol never to refer to the CIA as the CIA. She flatly declined to refer to it as the “firm,” never mind that it had become quite universal, but went along with “the Agency”) “would be out of a job if the Cold War ended?”

  “Yes, sure. And doctors would be out of a job if illness ended.”

  “You know,” she said in quick exasperation, “you are always doing that kind of thing when we talk about these subjects, just sheer outrageous point evasion. When you study engineering, I forget, do you have to take a course in logic? Obviously if you did, you failed it. So let me just say, Blackford—yes, that’s the right one. Turn and go about two miles, it’s on the left—that illness is a part of the human condition; the Cold War isn’t.”

  “You’re only half right. The Cold War is a part of the human condition for so long as you have two social phenomena which we can pretty safely denominate as constants. The first is a society that accepts what it sees as the historical mandate to dominate other societies—at least as persistently as microbes seek out human organisms to infect. And the second phenomenon, of course, is the coexistence of a society that is determined not to be dominated or have its friends dominated. Now, when the setting I have just so nicely described takes place in a world in which both the aggressor society and the independent society have got hold of nuclear weapons, you are going to have a Cold War, or whatever you’ll call it, and if you have a Cold War you don’t want to get hot you are going to need to know what are the enemy’s resources, number one, and that is relatively easy, and then you are going to need to know, number two, and that is relatively hard, what are the enemy’s intentions.”

  “So, you are saying that there is no prospect of a CIA agent losing his job?”

  “Sure there is. We don’t get tenure, the way hard-driven Austen scholars do. We can screw up and get fired. Or get dead. There can be a Reduction in Force—remember that? Under Eisenhower? Federal employees got ‘RIFed.’ That lasted about six months. After that, dear Ike kept on hiring people, at just about the same rate as FDR and Truman.”

  “Well, what would you do if you were ‘RIFed’?”

  They had the inn in sight.

  “Hadn’t actually thought about it. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and I suppose I could brush up on what’s been discovered in that line in the past fifteen years. Hmm. I suppose I could teach people how to fly …”

  “What you could do,” Sally said, in one of those rapid changes in mood of which she was capable, “is model clothes, and teach people how to make love, you gorgeous thing”—she let her hand touch him.

  “Hey. Not here! Yes, we’re here! Later.”

  Not much later, he remembered; the porter had only just brought up their bags and closed the door and got out just in time.
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  He had asked her not to meet him at the airport. “I don’t want to see you, for the first time in a year, at a crowded airport, with everybody there. Send that chauffeur of yours. Tell him I’ll be carrying a copy of National Review in my hand. That ought to eliminate any confusion. Or, God knows, duplication.”

  In the big Buick he confessed to himself that he was apprehensive. As recently as a week before, over the telephone from Saigon, they had spoken as if they would, in fact, marry. Two years earlier, weekending in Taxco, she had abruptly said: Let us get married on June 1, 1964, and he had said, Yes, let’s; and as the months went by he thought of that date with almost superstitious anticipation, like an oasis at first dismissed as ephemeral, which on approaching begins to take life: real trees, real water, a real garden and house.… She hadn’t mentioned the date at their rendezvous in Acapulco in January 1963, the last time he had seen her, eighteen months ago. He had thought it a blissful three days, and six weeks later he learned that she had married a man named Antonio Morales.

  The residence was in Coyoacán, very old Mexico City and still an enclave of old-family houses, many of them dating back to colonial days. The stone wall surrounded the residence, the garden, a small plot where flowers and vegetables grew, two or three buildings for servants, one for equipment.… She had described all of this to him, in fact had sent him a picture—a picture, as it happened, taken on the day of her wedding reception. It was not a huge house, but it was a proud house which had been in the Morales family for several generations and belonged to Antonio briefly, between the day his parents died in an airplane crash in Venezuela and the day he had been shot dead sitting at a picnic table at Tres Marías, ten thousand feet high, halfway between Mexico and Cuernavaca. He had died on that cold damp day during the rainy season in August because he sought to advance the prospects of human freedom in Cuba. He had risked his life, and then given it.

  From that day on, the Casa Serena had become the house of little Anthony Morales de Guzmán—Jr., he’d have become, in America—who, lying in the womb of his mother, was twelve weeks old. The will stipulated, pursuant to Spanish custom, that the Casa Serena would pass to the heir effective on the day he was married. Until then, the matrona of the Casa was the widow, Señora Sally Morales de Partridge.

  Raúl guided the car slowly up the circular drive toward the portico with the tiled tableaux on either side. She was standing there, waiting for him.

  12

  July 17, 1964

  Westminster, Maryland

  The meeting this time was at the residence of Rufus, the farmhouse an hour and a half from Washington. Allen Dulles, when he had served as Director, enjoyed going there to meet with Rufus when certain Great & Serious plans needed to be made, and had passed along to his successor, John McCone, word of the suitability of the relatively isolated small house by the woods, twenty-five miles southeast of Gettysburg, where Rufus spent his spare time tending to his rose garden, living alone now since the death of his wife. “Nobody ever interrupts you there, and there’s something about getting away from the air of Washington that allows you not only to breathe better, but to think better.” CIA Director McCone had made the trip out there twice and this time persuaded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, who would be succeeding Henry Cabot Lodge as Ambassador to South Vietnam, to join him there for a critical meeting.

  Tucker and Blackford arrived earlier in a rented car, had coffee, admired Rufus’s flowers and the pharmacy of chemicals from which he selected just the right blend of nourishment for just the right rose. They didn’t speak about the war, but the public crossfire the night before between President Johnson and candidate Goldwater suggested that there was little else on the mind of official Washington than the Vietnam question.

  At 10:45 the chauffeured limousine drove in, and out of it stepped the studious, affluent, pious Californian, sometime Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, successor to Allen Dulles after the disgrace of the Bay of Pigs, in charge of the second-largest intelligence agency in the world. One would have said of him as he approached the house on the flagstone walkway that he was erect in his bearing, except that he’d have needed to be compared on this occasion with General Maxwell Taylor, who was ramrod-straight and yet somehow springy, flexible in posture: a nice combination, Blackford thought, as he prepared to meet the general for the first time, and the Director for the second.

  Rufus’s penchant for using as few words as possible extended to introductions. He accomplished this now by vaguely pointing at Blackford, who stepped forward and extended his hand, “I am Blackford Oakes, sir,” to the general, to whom Rufus vaguely pointed, turning then to Tucker Montana who also stepped forward and identified himself. The younger men shook hands with the Director, who said something about how they had both had a fruitful experience in Laos, exploring the Trail; and they went off to the terrace where the table had been simply prepared: yellow note pads and iced tea.

  McCone began. He turned to Tucker and said, “Major, we have run a more thorough check on your background—that is, a check on what you did during the war years. We were satisfied, before sending you on the current mission, to know what you have done—have accomplished—in the Army, and then in the Special Forces, since 1949, in what turns out to have been your second hitch in the Army. There is no need at this point to explore the reasons why you have so assiduously disguised your first hitch. Even though we can hardly pass without notice that none of the several forms you have filled out during the past decade and a half lists accurately what you did in the years 1944 and 1945.”

  Blackford cocked his head. He was curious. He had become fond of Tucker, and was of course grateful to him for helping to save his life. But he was uneasy about Tucker’s well-concealed past. What was the point in concealing the extensive training he had obviously had in science? And what was it that had caused him, so suddenly, to reveal that training, on that hot, humid day in Saigon, by an exposition that marked him as not only skilled in science, but inventive? On the night they both were brought together by Rufus to be taken to the White House to meet the President, Blackford had been told only that he was a member of an Army Special Forces unit. No biographical details were given out, any more than details of Blackford’s background had been given to Tucker Montana. “I don’t know myself what his background is,” Rufus had said. “Special Forces is that way. But who are we to complain?”

  “The command decision on this one,” General Taylor interrupted, “is to take you out of our Special Forces and assign you to the CIA. You’ll maintain your Army rank and all the benefits. But from now on, you take your orders from—” he pointed in the direction first of John McCone, then Rufus.

  McCone resumed: “And clearly your first responsibility is to superintend technology at Nakhon Phanom. The interdiction of enemy movement down the Ho Chi Minh Trail is now the first priority of this Administration. I do not mean by this that it is the first priority in that theater. I mean that it is the first priority, period. Nothing needed that can be obtained will be denied to you. Every scientist we need to consult, conscript, kidnap”—this was a conscious levity by serious John McCone, and his subordinates smiled appropriately even as, twenty-five years earlier, they’d have done for their headmasters—“will be at your beck and call. We absolutely need to staunch that flow of trained guerrilla fighters to the south projected by Hanoi. The volume right now, even though it’s only a small fraction of what’s intended, is causing a lot of damage in the countryside. The North Vietnamese feed the legend that what’s going on in the South is a civil war. Hell, the Vietcong operating within the South would be subdued in a fortnight except for the reinforcements from the North. You are to confer with Colonel Strauss during the next few days, before returning to Saigon, to select a staff, pass on their qualifications, and submit a general plan the realization of which will receive, as I say, top priority.”

  While Tucker was dipping his head slightly, just enough
to communicate that he agreed to go along, Blackford was wondering whether he was now expected to accept a reversal of roles, to work on the Trail as Tucker’s subordinate—an assignment he did not relish because of the nature of the work, but which he would not have resented, given the clear superiority in Tucker’s scientific qualifications. But—

  “And you, Mr. Oakes,” General Taylor was speaking now. “You will leave the area—leave the Trail, but not the theater. We are placing you in charge of Operation 34-A.”

  Blackford’s eyebrow went up inquisitively.

  “It’s a top-secret operation. Has to do with the east coast. There’s a lot going on in the Gulf of Tonkin. We need to know more than we do. We’re picking up a lot from 34-A, need to pick up a lot more, and to refine procedures, which is where you’ll come in. There’s sophisticated Soviet-supplied military technology going in there, right along the coast of North Vietnam, all the way to China. What we want is an effective blockade against the movement of men and materiel by sea into South Vietnam. Most of them disguised as fishermen. You,” he pointed to Tucker, “and you,” he pointed to Blackford, “are our pincers on Vietnam. Except that your function is not to close in on South Vietnam, but to protect it. To close in on the arteries from the North. The objective is to begin immediately to diminish the flow of troops and supplies—even as you, Montana, work through the Nakhon Phanom facility to stop the traffic on the Trail.

  “The enemy’s objective is to transport X numbers of men and Y tons of materiel to South Vietnam. Short of truly difficult infiltration right across the frontier—the DMZ—which is heavily observed and easily protected, there is no way to do this except through the Trail or by sea. To the extent pressure mounts on you”—once again he pointed at Tucker—“it will diminish on you”—he pointed to Blackford. “And vice versa. And just as they will need to coordinate their efforts, we will need to coordinate ours, which is why we think of Montana’s operation—Nakhon Phanom—and yours—34-A—as a joint enterprise. We will need to be constantly informed on what you find and what you’re doing, and you will need to inform each other. You should plan to come back in from the field regularly to Saigon, maybe even once a week. And in about one month, I will be there myself, as ambassador. That’s it.”