Tucker's Last Stand

by William F. Buckley

  They sat outdoors, at the seaward corner of the second-story veranda, well insulated for private conversation conducted in a low tone of voice. The waitress took their order, iced tea for Rufus, an icy beer for Blackford.

  Blackford told him about the ambiguous day aboard Mai Tai. He gave him every detail, let him ponder every question. “I know they checked the machine out with various kinds of shipping off the coast of Maryland, but I can see that it isn’t easy to duplicate the traffic in junks we got out here. Tomorrow, limiting our boarding to suspicious ships, we can probably scan three or four times the number we did today.”

  Rufus nodded. “Yes, we will need more substantial sampling before we equip the entire patrol fleet with the scanner. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Blackford said, draining his glass of beer in a swallow and signaling for another one. He knew what Rufus was saying: That is the end of our conversation on that subject. We can move to another.

  Blackford said, “Any news?”

  “The Warren Commission filed its report. The investigation concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself.”

  “You go along?”

  “I haven’t read the report. I am not surprised by its findings. There was no mention of Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico.”

  “Why didn’t … we give them that?”

  “The decision was made.”

  Blackford laughed, pulling out the front of his shirt to receive the evening breeze. “You kill me, Rufus. You’re the damnedest combination. The no-questions-asked, that’s-none-of-my-business Rufus, your eyes trained on duty. And yet if there is a moral breeze in the air, I can feel you rustling.”

  Rufus did not enjoy personal references, and few of his associates would have ventured to make any. But he permitted himself a smile.

  And then, out of the blue, he said, “Do you know, Blackford, our friend Tucker is not very bright. He is something of a genius, but not, no, not very bright.”

  Blackford was taken aback. Instinctively he was defensive about his friend—while wondering whether, in their association, he had missed something Rufus hadn’t. He found himself forcing a retrospective review of all that he had seen and heard from Tucker during the past weeks, begining when they had met to survey the Trail. Meanwhile:

  “What do you mean, Rufus? We’re talking about a guy who—I mean, just look at the whole Igloo enterprise—”

  “I am not talking about his gifts. I am talking about his judgment.”

  Blackford thought hard. True, Tucker’s fixation with Hiroshima clouded his political judgments—that certainly was so. And, clearly, Tucker was not in sufficient control of his libido, though Blackford, who considered himself “bright,” acknowledged that in making that judgment, he was living in a glass house. Though Blackford hadn’t, in fact, let his romance affect his political judgment.… Surely if he’d done so, Sally would long ago have been his wife.…

  Rufus continued. “I have looked very closely into his background, only the general outline of which you are familiar with, I think. When we took him on, we had only an outline. His role in Los Alamos turns out to have been much more than merely that of an assistant physicist. Did you know that?”

  “Yes. He told me. Just two weeks ago.”

  “In fact at one stage of the bomb’s development Tucker’s contribution was evidently critical. It is entirely probable that the bomb would have been delayed weeks, conceivably even months or more if it hadn’t been for a breakthrough of his. You also did not know this: he was on board the Enola Gay—”

  “Yes, he told me that too.”

  “And after returning from that mission, after a month or two, he had a nervous breakdown. He was discharged, and went into a Benedictine monastery in Rhode Island. Did he tell you that as well?”

  “Not quite so—nakedly.”

  “And then—” Rufus did his half-smile.

  “And then?” Blackford asked, gravely.

  “The priapic daemon. Our friend is a highly developed—highly obsessed—satyr. It began—at least, I suppose it began, there being no record of his romancing while at Los Alamos—not easy to do, at Los Alamos—at the monastery. Before Alamos he was at the University of Texas, working around the clock. But his stay in the monastery was aborted by—”

  “A lady?”

  “A woman. He left and took a job as a Spanish teacher in a boys’ school in Massachusetts, and seduced the French teacher. He was dismissed—in those days, such behavior was thought incorrect”—Blackford noticed that Rufus was not at this exact moment looking Blackford directly in the eye—“and we next found him back in Texas. El Paso, where he lived with a rich Mexican socialite until Don Husband came in one day with a loaded pistol. He missed. Tucker joined—rejoined, actually—the Army. Personnel, for some reason, never came up with the record of his previous service at Los Alamos, which for reasons having to do, I suppose, with the Hiroshima pathology he had intentionally concealed. He was sent to Fort Benning, got a commission in the infantry, and found himself in Korea, where he seemed to have no psychological problem at all engaging in combat. He won a Silver Star. And then there was the business in the Philippines, which you know about, and the Medal of Honor. I did tell you about the forty-one Huks he overwhelmed?—Yes. He was frequently absent without leave, always because of a … romance. But when General Lansdale was consulted about someone to go with you on the Trail, he said he had just the right man, named Montana. Then there was that odd business, his suddenly coming up with that dazzling concatenation of—Well, he is the godfather of Igloo.”

  “What makes you conclude—what you began by saying?”

  “That he’s not very bright? Observation, my dear Holmes.”

  “You mean the business of his girlfriend in Saigon? Lao Dai?”

  “In part. At first I thought that his rushing off to see her so often was simply the priapic imperative at work, his—”

  “Phallus?”

  “—Yes, taking over from his brain, one more time.”

  “It’s more than that. He is genuinely nuts about her.”

  “Yes. Understandably so, I gather from you. But no, it is his—naïveté I had in mind.”

  “You worried?”

  “Yes. Lao Dai is an agent of the North Vietnamese. She has done steady work for them for several years. I have been checking her out since she first came into view. It was confirmed today who she takes orders from.”

  “Oh God! You going to tell him today? Tomorrow?”

  “No, not wise at this point. I can’t imagine he would give Lao Dai details of Igloo. But we are having him followed. Also the girl. The woman.”

  “We doing it?”

  “No. Colonel Yen. But he is reporting only to me. And now, Blackford, you will need to … observe him very carefully. He has a way, both of us have noticed—you have noticed it, I must assume—of talking very frankly about what is on his mind. And often in a contradictory way. Last week he was dizzy with delight over the Spikebuoy and the whole Igloo operation. In more recent conversations he was almost unintelligible, talking, rather distractedly, about the whole operation, wondering whether, in trying to block those choke points—the two passes—we weren’t engaged, in fact, in maneuvering in such a way as to require the intervention of the Chinese army. He is now invoking the Korean parallel. There, we were fighting the North Koreans—and suddenly we were fighting the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists.…”

  “I’m not all that sure that point is all that dumb, Rufus.”

  Rufus looked at Blackford intently. “The larger geopolitical question is not our professional concern, Blackford. Granted, we’re never going to extrude from our own pessimistic strategic analysis factors that bear on our Indochinese operation. But we aren’t here to write foreign policy. This is done, well and badly, in Washington. I think it is, currently, being done badly, as I expect you think it is being done badly. But we are here to apply our professional skills to
the problem at hand as defined in Washington. And we face a problem.”

  Blackford found his mind fidgeting. He said nothing, and Rufus was silent.

  “Any ideas?”

  Blackford shook his head. “I’m not sure I see the point in not telling him what you know about Lao Dai.”

  “I was on the phone an hour with the Director on that point. The decision was his, and I understand it. What it comes down to is that Tucker is absolutely essential for about eight weeks more on Igloo White. He sizes up the situation as dangerous if I barge in and shatter him about Lao Dai.”

  “Thinks he’d quit?”

  “Maybe, but also we have to weigh it that, given the record, he might have another nervous breakdown. He also figures the North Vietnamese are going to know pretty soon what it is we’re up to and it wouldn’t make all that much difference if they found out a day or two earlier. But it would make a great difference if Tucker Montana were not here to stitch the operation together.”

  Blackford leaned back in his chair. “You know something, Rufus, even though I think you’re right, that Tucker isn’t sophisticated politically, we mustn’t ever let ourselves think that he’s—dumb. Or—” Rufus began to say something, but Blackford said, “—Or, that he doesn’t have some pretty deep insights.”

  “You mean, on our risking a nuclear war by being out here?”

  “No. Not so much that. But on his occasionally wondering whether we’re getting anywhere, or how much we are risking and how much we might be paying eventually trying to get somewhere.”

  “Do you think we are getting anywhere, Black?”

  “No, Rufus. I don’t. And I’d bet three stripes of Old Glory that, strapped down on a polygraph, you’d give the same answer.”

  Rufus rose. “Time to go, Blackford. A lot to do.”

  31

  November 1, 1964

  Bien Hoa, South Vietnam

  At first, when reached by phone at BOQ Danang, Blackford, in his deepening gloom, tried to beg off. But Tucker was so enthusiastic about the idea, he pressed Blackford. The three of them—Blackford, Lao Dai, and Tucker—would drive to Bien Hoa for lunch at his favorite restaurant. “After all, you’ve got to come in to Saigon for our five o’clock meeting with Rufus. Just come on a morning flight instead of the afternoon flight.”

  Blackford quickly reflected and said yes, he would enjoy such an excursion hugely, he would have the pleasure of seeing Lao Dai again and after all, Bien Hoa was only 12 miles away so they could easily be back for whatever Rufus had for them on the agenda that afternoon in Saigon.

  “How’re things going?” Blackford was more experienced than Tucker in the Aesopian mode by which intelligence agents speak to each other over the telephone, but Tucker managed, haltingly. “They’re slow, the … construction workers. But the, er, machinery, you know, the agricultural machinery that—that does all those wonderful combinations?—that is going very well, extremely well. Am very anxious to talk to you about it. And on your front?”

  “That new … razor’s going to work out just fine, I think. Shaves you real clean. Knows just about as close as it needs to know where the beard is. Very intelligent little razor.”

  “Good, good. Well, you’re a bright, sharp li’l ol’ razor yourself, Black-o. I’ll see you on Wednesday, five o’clock, usual place. I mean, not the usual place. The new place. So long, Black.”

  “So long.”

  Tucker extended the lunch invitation for the following day to Rufus. Rufus replied that he had another engagement, that he was very sorry, and if the 4:15 he had in mind for their meeting the next day was too early, it would not inconvenience him to move the hour to 5:15, since the agenda as of this moment was not crowded. “No sweat, Rufus,” Tucker said, to a man who had never visibly sweated in his life. “We can be back easily by four.”

  They set out in a jeep, Tucker, dressed in white corduroy slacks, at the wheel; Lao Dai, holding down her straw hat with the flowered white band, beside him; Blackford, in khakis and polo shirt, in the rear. Tucker was taking it all in the spirit of a fall outing in New England, on the way to a football game. And indeed as October closed the temperature was lowering. He had brought along a tape player and as they drove along the roadway, dodging bicyclists and pedestrians, slowing for the army caravans and avoiding such axle-breaking potholes as he could, Tucker slipped on Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. Tucker, carried away by the melody and the lyrics, at one point broke out with his own raspy baritone voice to underscore his enthusiasm for Porter’s injunction, “Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.” Lao Dai applauded. Blackford said that he thought Ella did better on her own, with her own orchestra, unaccompanied by Tucker—who was much tickled by it all and asked Lao Dai whether today, at the restaurant, she would choose the pigeon again, as she had on their previous outing. She replied that she would always look the menu over very carefully, to examine the choices.

  Le Bon Laboureur was nicely located on a corner. A row of tall cypress trees stretched out along one of the streets, planted by the French to break the monotonous concrete profile of a large penitentiary. There was room, at the tables outside under the awning, for twenty diners or so, and inside, crowded about the picturesque little bar, room for a dozen, at four tables with the traditional checked red-and-white tablecloths. Blackford and Lao Dai stood awkwardly just under the awning. Tucker was making a scene.

  He was speaking in not entirely secure, but decidedly emphatic French. “I am telling you, mon cher monsieur, that I made reservations over the telephone, by long distance, three days ago for an outside table.”

  “Yes,” the maître d’hôtel said, looking down at his register, “M. Mohn-tana. But, sir, you made your reservation for 1300 hours, and it is only”—he looked at his watch—“1250. Please please, go inside and have an aperitif, and certainly within a very few minutes I can seat you here outside.”

  Tucker had few alternatives, Blackford reasoned, since there was not an empty table outdoors.

  Inside, by contrast, on such a day there was only one couple. They took the central table from which they could easily spot the first table vacated outdoors. A few minutes later, as the waiter approached them with their drinks, tray held high to clear the heads of the two diners at the adjacent table, the tray and its contents crashed down on Blackford’s lap while a machine gun raked the diners outdoors. A half-dozen men dressed in the anonymous, uniform black pajama suits, armed with weaponry of several kinds, were firing at the entrance to the prison, two of them spraying the intersecting avenues with machine-gun bullets. Tucker had thrown himself across Lao Dai, Blackford was on the floor, a bottle of wine and three broken glasses between his stomach and the old auburn tiles. He looked up. Tucker had a pistol in his hand and was beginning to crawl toward the outdoors. Blackford knotted his fist and with all his strength swung it laterally at Tucker’s hand, knocking the pistol loose. It slid across the tiled floor toward a recess of the restaurant.

  “Goddamnit, Tucker, you idiot,” Blackford hissed. “They’ve got machine guns out there!” He suddenly changed his tactics. “Get Lao Dai out of the way. There—” Blackford pointed in the direction of the pistol. Tucker breathed heavily, said nothing, and began to drag Lao Dai toward the kitchen. With the bar blocking their view of the outside, they stayed in place. It seemed a long time before the firing stopped. It was only eighteen minutes, the papers the next day recorded, though parallel coordinated attacks nearby lasted as much as a half hour. A half hour, and five U.S. soldiers killed, seventy-six wounded, five B-57 jet bombers and fifteen transports damaged, four helicopters and three Skyraider bombers destroyed, and the state prison opened, with over one hundred Vietcong released. There were several hundred casualties among the native population, including over one half of the patrons of Le Bon Laboureur who had been dining outside.

  Charlie had made his demonstration. He was everywhere. Nobody was safe from him.

  32

  November 1, 1964

  N
ew York, N.Y.

  Robert Kennedy, having resigned as Attorney General to run for the Senate seat now held by Republican Kenneth Keating, was campaigning before a full house of students at Columbia University. He was everywhere met with a kind of tentative affection—not unexpected, less than one year after the tragedy at Dallas, but different in kind from the visceral delight his brother had engendered among college students. His opponent, Senator Keating, had a good reputation. He was a liberal Republican who, however, had been at the forefront of those who had warned against Fidel Castro. It was Kenneth Keating, more than one week ahead of the event, who had warned, in October 1962, that nuclear missiles were being introduced into Cuba. Official Washington had paid no attention to what the insiders dismissed as attention-getting rodomontade by a senator who wanted to stay in the headlines, his campaign only a couple of years away.

  Keating was at heart a soft-spoken man, but he had been infuriated by Robert Kennedy’s most recent maneuver, against which, however, he could not publicly protest. For two years, every week at noon on Saturday, Kenneth Keating had delivered a five-minute radio address to the voters. The first minute had become quietly celebrated among political junkies who tuned in. It was, quite simply, hilarious: whatever the week’s news, Senator Keating would succeed in giving it an amusing spin. The cost of the humorist’s time, who wrote these lines for the senator—leftovers, for the most part, from the heavy ration he and his three confederates wrote every week for Johnny Carson—had been subsidized by a friend of Keating’s who had insisted that a jollier public personality would pay off in the next election. When Bobby Kennedy became a candidate, he and his staff decided that Keating needed to be separated from his humorist. A Kennedy deputy traveled to Hollywood, easily established that the writer was himself a Democrat, arranged for a personal call from Bobby, together with the promise of “a more realistic” compensation for his extra work, and the following Friday in Washington, when ordinarily the script from Hollywood arrived at Keating’s office, there came instead a letter reporting that the burden of work at the studio would, unfortunately, keep him from continuing to supply Senator Kenneth Keating with the weekly roll, wishing him all the best, had been a pleasure working with him, sincerely.