The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  This new American Studies program that Tom was setting up at Yaddah was not only part of a university bureaucracy but cheek to cheek with that U.S. Intelligence Community, now depiped and de-Burberryed and called the CIA. Tom knew it could be harsh. He didn’t know it would be treacherous. “It was our time in our history for that.”

  The people running Yaddah were a tough lot. Charles Seymour was president and he was related to a handful of previous Yaddah presidents going back to 1740 and Griswold and Devane and Gobus and Mendenhall and Henning and Buck, they were all, well, not one of them was a professor I’d trust to help me in a fix. Mendenhall, now president of Smith, would drive the final stake into the heart of Newton Arvin that put paid to lifetimes of great scholarship by Newton and his gay group.

  Mendenhall had taught Fred Lemish at Yaddah, as had Joel Dorius, with whom he’d had sex in the Provincetown dunes. The Smith board member Mary Griswold, wife of Yaddah’s new president, A. Whitney Griswold, who was known to make homophobic remarks as was her husband, supported the firings of these scholars, ruining their lives. (See Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin—A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal, and Joel Dorius, My Four Lives: An Academic Life Shattered by Scandal.) Somehow my Tom had talked President Seymour and Griswold and Dean DeVane into setting up a new program, called, of course, New American Studies. It was so described: “the purpose of this new American Studies program is not narrowly nationalistic [whatever that was meant to mean], but is adapted for American students who desire to study the civilization of our country as a whole with the aim of more effective service in national life.” He was setting up a program to teach students to go out and take over the world. It might look a bit, say, overarching in print here. But that’s what it was, and what university wouldn’t glom on to a gig like that if Yaddah was doing it? In bed (we stayed in my rooms but he had to get home each night), Tom would dream his dreams out loud to me. He felt America was the greatest thing that ever happened period and that it was our responsibility to prove this superiority to the rest of the world. He’d come back from England hating every Oxbridge Brit who ever walked, and he came back from Washington feeling much the same for every uneducated and crude bureaucrat who’d worked for Roosevelt and Truman, “who have no sense of who we are! I’m meant to spy for them!” and Tom being Tom had determined a way to rectify all this, using our country and our history and our culture and our literature that he loved so much as the tools and template for doing so. Yaddah promoted him to assistant professor at a salary of $4,600 and placed him in charge of “his” program. The program was being secretly funded by Angleton’s OSS. Tom knew that, of course, “but I had to locate start-up funds from somewhere, laddie.” And he thought he could trust James Jesus, we sharing our own personal special secret.

  “That’s it for us,” Tom said to me, when he got everything more or less in order. “We can’t continue anything between us except on a scholarly basis.” I won’t say my heart wasn’t broken. He also had a wife and family and that was harder for me to face. We both decided it was better than nothing. At least I did. By this time, looking back, I don’t know what Tom was thinking. When I asked him, he answered the same as he did when he was working out codes at Bletchley. “You just take it a day at a time, laddie. You make it up as you go along, if it lets you. And if it doesn’t let you, you’re not doing something right.” And then, as I was literally sticking an American flag in a stand beside his desk, he said, with much more clarity, “I have fashioned a way for America to secure peace in the world.”

  The university put out this official announcement: “Yaddah believes that it has a special duty to perform not only for The American People but also for common humanity, providing an understanding of American life and culture that will serve the interests of all.” Seven of Tom’s roster of instructors asked to be transferred to other departments, or found other places for themselves elsewhere. They smelled something and they weren’t far wrong. In no time at all came that Congress of Cultural Freedom thing, again secretly funded by the CIA, with Tom as its board chair.

  I told myself it all seemed logical and even beneficial. For by the time the Cold War came, the CCF was set up to fight the Communist “menace” to America. “We must utilize all the resources that we can to mobilize to teach our students the facts of Communism and the implications of Russian ideology. The Communist threat must be met vigorously.” DeVane and Seymour wrote that. Tom by now had an American Studies department with five hundred guys clamoring to take one of our classes. No need for fund-raising now. Every conservative corporation or rich alumnus poured money into our coffers as if we were the Holy Grail. “One comes to a new appreciation of what we are and what we have done, demonstrating it to the world,” Seymour writes again. This was in 1949, not far from McCarthy and Vurd and Sam Sport and that gang.

  An anonymous donor accompanied his million bucks with this warning. “I have become greatly disturbed over the drift in recent years toward a totalitarian governmental and economic system in this country, and unless one of the clearly stated objectives of our, may I now say our, general program is to counteract this tendency, I doubt if I will be interested in further supporting it.” And sure enough, don’t you love democracy and one vote for all, in a Prospectus of the New American Studies Program, you can find these words: “A program based on the conviction that the best safeguards against totalitarian developments in our economy are an affirmative belief in the validity of our institutions of free enterprise and individual liberty.” God, it all sounds so innocent! With the appearance of this Prospectus, eight other faculty members left, not only from American Studies but History and Economics and Political Science, all now also having their teaching programs dictated to them, four of them to Harvard and the other four to UC Berkeley. There appeared to be no official love lost for any of them. The anonymous donor was so pleased “with how things are developing” that he gave another million, identified himself as Boris Greeting, and was rewarded with a seat on the Yaddah Corporation board. In one way or another he will be on one Yaddah board or another until … well, Fred says to hold off on discussing this.

  Another major donor, one Jeshua Brinestalker, who said his opinions had become “completely turned around by your William F. Buckley and his groundbreaking book, God and Man at Yaddah,” wrote this. “I further request that the Professor who heads this Program of New American Studies shall always be one who firmly believes in the preservation of our System of Free Enterprise and is opposed to the system of State Socialism, Communism and Totalitarianism and that my funds be used for furtherance of our new System above referred to.” Ironically, this, it turns out, from an old spy for foreign powers, now—most of them—Communist and broke.

  Tom was appointed to associate professor with no additional raise in salary. You can certainly begin to see what an ungrateful alma mater Yaddah is proving for this man who helped to win the war in the first place. When I tried to point this out to Tom, he broke down in tears and I comforted him, in my arms once more for a moment or two. I think he was beginning to see what damage his dream was creating. When James Jesus came for a visit, and we all got drunk and wound up in bed together like the old days (“My God, this feels so good again; you have no idea how hard this is for me to do in D.C.”), and Angleton then said he was hiring four more of Tom’s faculty for the CIA, Tom started to cry again. “I did not start this as a recruitment tool for the CIA. I did not start this to create weapons for the psychological warfare that is going on and that you are whipping up to such a froth and fury and frenzy, James Jesus.” Since one of Tom’s concerns during the war had been as a trainer of intelligence staff and agents, Angleton didn’t understand. Quite frankly, I’m not so sure Tom understood completely either. He’d have had to be blind not to see how guys from the English department, or Music or Art, and History certainly, now passed him no longer nodding hello. McCarthy and Sam Sport and Vurd were big-time on the front pages now, and Washington Confiden
tial was on everybody’s nightstand. I tried to get Tom to read it, but he wouldn’t. Someone had already put it on our official required summer reading list at New American Studies.

  It would be 1974, by which time Tom was a full professor, when Marchetti and Marks would write in their honestly groundbreaking The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,

  To spot and evaluate students, the Clandestine Services maintained a contractual relationship with key professors on numerous campuses. When a professor had picked out a likely candidate, he notified his contact at the CIA and, on occasion, participated in the actual recruitment attempt. Some professors performed these services without being on a formal retainer. Others actively participated in agency covert operations by serving as “cut-outs,” or intermediaries, and even by carrying out secret missions during foreign journeys.

  Tom pressured James Jesus into telling him who was doing anything as “demoralizing” as this and discovered it was pretty much every man in his department, for a start. “Tom, what’s come over you, man? I thought you loved your country?”

  One of my own students, Michael Holzman, assembled many of the details above that so refreshed my own memory of those awful times. He has written an amazing essay about it, “The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yaddah.”

  I want to go back to something I dropped in earlier, Tom’s relationship with Alan Turing.

  As perhaps you remember, Ms. Strode (I know Fred knows, because he mentioned it in one of his plays), Alan Turing is credited with founding computer science, but also with cracking various German codes, enabling the Allies to win World War II. Both are gigantic achievements, historical ones for all time. He and Tom became quite close at Bletchley Park, and Alan and I had a brief affair. He was a bit of a loner, a bit withdrawn into his own brilliance as he tried to constantly figure out everything that he was uncovering day by day. I adored him. Tom wanted to join us in a threesome, but Alan didn’t want to, ostensibly because of his disfigurement but I believe because he recognized in Tom someone as brilliant as himself. They remained good friends after the war, how good I was to learn only much later.

  In 1954, Alan picked up a hustler one night in Manchester who subsequently returned to rob his house. Alan reported him to the police. In the course of the investigation Alan acknowledged homosexual sex with the man. They were both instantly charged with gross indecency, the infamous Section 11 under which Oscar Wilde had been convicted more than fifty years before. This man who won the war lost his security clearance and any opportunity to continue his work. He was refused permission to enter the United States. He was offered by the British government the choice of punishment, either imprisonment or castration. He chose the latter, by hormonal treatments, chemical castration—which caused his body to grow breasts. He was found dead from poisoning. A poisoned apple, less a bite or two, was on the table beside him. Tom had come up from London. They had finally made love and, at Alan’s request, Tom injected the cyanide into the apple for him and stayed there until Alan’s end, holding his hand, before sneaking out and coming back home to America.

  “Fucking Brits with their hypocritical snot-nosed culture full of Wordsworth ballads and Keats odes and Shakespeare sonnets. They demand complete fealty from us. They demand we worship their culture as superior as we deny our own! I hate them.”

  And then he told me, “And I’m going to set up a program to prove that America’s talent and culture are superior to any others.” It damn near killed him. When we all were asked to sign “loyalty oaths,” he retired.

  DAVID VISITS AN OLD FRIEND

  The first person I go to see when I come back is Mr. Hoover. He loved me once.

  Mr. Hoover lives across the street from Skipper, who was my first friend outside of Masturbov Gardens. We met when we were little boys and our mothers took us to the same dentist. We both had bad sinus infections. Skipper liked to take charge of everything. We’ll do this. We’ll go there. I liked him. He called me up all the way from Chesapeake Street after we met in the doctor’s office. “Hello, this is Skipper. Come to my birthday party. I’ll have my pop pick you up and take you home.” We’d take long walks in Rock Creek Park with his dog, which also had red hair, and his mother would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and great apricot cookies. We would take her cookies over on a plate to Mr. Hoover. Skipper’s parents and Mr. Hoover and Clyde, his housemate, played bridge together. Skipper was afraid of him and would run away before the door was opened and I was left holding the plate. Today I ring Mr. Hoover’s bell hoping Charles the butler will open it fast in case Skipper is still looking out his window. But he wouldn’t recognize me now. He must be married by now anyway.

  Mr. Hoover is standing on the upstairs landing looking down. He’s short and round and he always reminds me of Philip. He’s just got out of the shower and is wearing a bathrobe. It’s open and I can see his penis. He had the first uncircumcised penis I ever saw.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he says. “Come on up.” He takes me to his dressing room and sits on a little stool, studying me in all the mirrors on the walls. He looks at me a long time before he says what I hoped he would, “Take off your clothes, boy.” He takes a pencil and lifts my penis. He lifts up my arms and runs the pencil through the tufts of hair. He runs his fingers over the scars on my back. I hear him sigh. He turns me to look at him. He shakes his head. He looks sad. I want to cry. “Don’t you cry, boy. Do you hear me?” I nod. “We’re just at the end of a chapter, boy. It’s time to start another chapter. That’s what life’s all about. You end one chapter and start another one. Come now, give me a hug.”

  Then we do what we always did before I went to Germany. I put my arms around his big belly and give him a squeeze, the way he liked it. He liked to have me run my hand over his stomach, too, like I was smoothing down a big pile of sand. Even his genitals are shaved. He always smelled of soap and powder.

  When I was five or six with that plate of cookies, he invited me inside. It was very exciting. His house was dark and filled with lots of furniture and paintings that looked valuable. We went into the kitchen for milk and some of the cookies. He was very easy to talk to. He asked me all kinds of questions about Philip and Rivka and what they did and if I was happy. I didn’t answer that one. In fact, I suddenly started to cry then, too. No one had ever asked me a question like that. In fact, I started to bawl. He was smiling, in the nicest way, and I ran to him and he did what suddenly I wanted him to do. He put his arms around me and comforted me. I covered his face with kisses. I wouldn’t let him let me go. I wanted to stay in his arms. If he was as powerful as Skipper said, then I would be safe in his arms. He was wearing his bathrobe then as well. “Put your arms around me, boy, and give me a big, big hug.” I stuck my arms under the robe and did just that, feeling his soft skin and his tough big belly. “Now give me a big, big squeeze.” I did that, too. Then I said, “I want you to do that to me, too!” And I ripped off my jersey and short pants and put his arms around me and told him, “Now give me a big, big hug plus a big, big squeeze.” He laughed, and he did so. I can still feel it. I will always remember how wonderful it felt and how Philip never made me feel this way, my own father. Then he said what would become his routine every time we met. “Let’s see your body, boy.” And I threw off my underpants and yanked off my shoes and socks and he turned me around this way and that way, and then pushed me a few steps out so I could do it as if I were showing off for him, which I really was, which I really wanted to. I turned this way and that way and wound up bowing to him like I was in a play. He really laughed loudly then.

  Did we ever do more than this? I am not going to answer this because I’ve learned he was a first-class monster and deserves to be hated big-time. If I were a religious person, I would think of Jesus, who was always said to have compassion and forgiveness in his heart for all mankind. Mr. Hoover comforted me when I needed comfort most. Someone once said to me that I always bet on the wrong horses. But I never placed bets. Onl
y hope.

  Clyde comes into the room. “Yes, another chapter,” he says as he helps me to get dressed. He sounds sort of sad, too. Once Mr. Hoover told me about Clyde’s penis. “It’s like a huge fire hose,” he laughed. “All Clyde has to see is a glimpse of stocking and anything goes.”

  There was devotion there. Some kind of love. Each did whatever he did for the other. I don’t think one could have lived without the other. Mr. Hoover couldn’t have been Mr. Hoover without Clyde. His act was as much for Clyde as for history. They were great actors, I see now. No star of stage or screen could have played such parts for so long and so well. When I later became friends with Fred and he professed such admiration for the actor’s courage in getting out there night after night to pretend, to be so vulnerable, so naked, I laughed in recognition. I had witnessed some of the best acting in the world, and those performances had gone on nonstop for years. Clyde and Mr. Hoover didn’t do it out of courage. They did it because that was the only way they could live. If you ask me now, that’s not so much courage as cowardice. It’s much easier to pretend. It’s safer. And I can’t blame anyone for wanting to be safe.

  I never liked Clyde. I thought he was an asshole. He is a slave and yes-man and is mean and nasty to everyone, including Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover ignores him most of the time. Once Clyde took me downstairs to show me “the room.” I was taken into one of those basement dens with gallows and stocks and whips and all those props that sadists and masochists use. I looked at it all quite calmly. I didn’t know yet what I was looking at, and Clyde didn’t tell me. He just took me back upstairs. I don’t think you’re supposed to like Clyde. I think this is the way Mr. Hoover wants it.