The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  ‘Michael!’

  Picking up the newly refilled glass of iced water, he poured a little into the now-open neck of the food jar. A half-melted ice cube and a slice of lime slipped over the rim with a splash. Seema closed her eyes for a second to shut out the scene. When she opened them again Michael had lifted the jar to his lips and was drinking from the thermos. She stared at him, thoughts racing with nowhere to go as he returned the food jar to the table between them and reached again for the stopper.

  ‘What’s in there, Michael?’

  He held his breath for just a moment. ‘Nothing. Same as the one Stephen has in his minibar in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. I’d better call him. Save him getting himself into trouble.’

  Seema looked away towards the Citicorp building, its aircraft warning lights steadily flashing red over the city. After a few seconds, she pulled Michael’s jacket closer around her shoulders. ‘Can we stop this game now, Michael, and just tell me what’s happening?’

  Michael looked at her, as if not knowing where to start. ‘Seema—’

  ‘Tell me first of all – if only one of those jars had the virus, how on earth did Stephen know which one? He was the one who got to pick the one to leave at Grand Central.’

  It was Michael’s turn to look away, oblivious in his shirt sleeves to the temperature as night fell over Manhattan. ‘Do you remember me telling you about Paul Lewis?’

  ‘Your colleague at the CDC? Yes, of course. We all assumed that was how you got hold of it.’

  ‘Paul Lewis is dying of cancer.’ Michael was clearly struggling. ‘I didn’t know if it was right to ask. I still don’t know if it was right. But in the end I just told him the whole story. We were outside, on a park bench in the snow somewhere quite near the White House. When I’d finished he was quiet for maybe a couple of minutes. Then he said he couldn’t think of anything better to do with his last few weeks.’

  Seema saw that there were tears in Michael’s own eyes now. When he remained silent she said softly, ‘I knew you were close.’

  Michael took a deep breath. ‘In the end I think he was glad. Ever since med school the only thing Paul’s ever wanted to do is make a contribution. And he did. He did. Both over all the years and at the end.’

  Seema waited for a moment before pressing. ‘You still haven’t told me how you knew, how Stephen knew, which of the containers it was.’

  Michael picked up the jar from the table and slowly screwed on the metal cup. ‘I’m sure you can work it out.’

  Seema took a first sip of wine, her thoughts returning to the morning that Stephen had picked up the thermos from the apartment. To her left, Manhattan’s universe of lights retreated to the south where the Pan-Am building rose above Grand Central. Way below, the northbound traffic made a slow-moving river of lights on First Avenue.

  After a minute, her lips parted slightly, her eyes widening as she returned the wine glass to the table. She looked up into his eyes.

  ‘I’m being slow. All the thermos flasks were empty, weren’t they?’

  Michael gave her a half-apologetic smile, picking up his own glass. ‘Especially the one left at Grand Central.’

  Seema straightened her back, her shoulders still only half-filling his suit jacket. ‘And the only thing you asked your friend for was to say it was smallpox. That was the favour you asked, wasn’t it?’

  Michael said nothing, watching every movement of her face as she continued. ‘But it can’t have been just Paul Lewis. You said they would have two or three experts look at it?’

  Michael turned the jar round in his hands, as if checking it had come to no harm. ‘And I’m sure they did. But what were they looking at? Fact is, I don’t know myself. Either it was the real thing, put there by Paul and given to a couple of other virologists to examine. Or, as I suspect, it was just a set of slides, culture reports, electron microscopy images of a strain of variola major, a strain called “Harvey”.’

  Seema was still holding the collar of the jacket closed with one hand. ‘And of course the slides would have been prepared by … Paul Lewis.’

  Michael zipped the thermos into the shoulder bag and hung it over the back of his own chair. ‘You’re right, of course. What Paul agreed to was to make sure that whatever was brought in that night from Grand Central was identified as smallpox.’

  Seema shook her head, as if to throw off all past misconceptions. ‘I have to get this right. You’re telling me there never was any virus? Never any risk at all?’

  ‘None at all.’

  It took several more seconds for Seema to readjust every frame in the movie that had been the last month of her life. Finally she stood, slipping off the jacket and handing it back. ‘I don’t know whether to love you or hate you, Michael Lowell.’

  He too stood, handing back the shoulder bag as she led him into the restaurant.

  It was still only a few minutes after seven and there were few other diners in the candlelit interior. When the waiter had presented them with menus, Seema stared out at the city from a different angle, looking past the Empire State and Chrysler buildings to the more distant towers of the financial district. There were other restaurants with spectacular views of Manhattan, but not with this intimate atmosphere. Of all the fifty thousand restaurants in the city Michael had chosen the most romantic, and for a few moments she opened herself to the astonishing spectacle, thoughts suspended, letting the tensions fall away, rejoicing that an evening that had begun with such a weight of dread might now be so full of light and promise.

  Aware that he was looking at her, and that he was still uncertain of her reactions, she punished him by continuing to look out of the window as if absorbed by the view. ‘You chose a romantic place to tell me all this, Michael.’

  He looked slightly embarrassed, and turned to look in the other direction towards the East River. ‘There’s also a very good view of the old smallpox quarantine building just down there on the tip of Roosevelt Island.’

  Only for a moment did she think he might be serious, then they were both laughing, hands almost touching across the table.

  ‘So friend Stephen is running around out there plotting to strike a blow against global capitalism when in fact what he’s got is …’ – she paused and looked into Michael’s eyes – ‘… zilch. Nothing at all.’

  Before he could answer the waiter reappeared. Once they had ordered, Seema assumed a more determined look. ‘There are still some things I don’t get.’

  ‘Seema, I’m sorry …’

  ‘And the first is, why didn’t you tell us all the whole story?’

  Michael looked down, twisting the wine glass around by its stem. ‘I didn’t tell you because keeping quiet about it was the one thing that Paul asked me to promise. And then he asked me not to promise because there might come a time and a place … like here and now. ‘

  Seema was not sure of the significance of the last words but determined to press on. ‘I still don’t get it. Why was that so important to him?’

  ‘Because he was really the one in the firing line. It wasn’t just that he wanted to be sure that none of us was taking the decision to do this … too lightly, I suppose. If the secret came out … well, that particular strain of the virus could have come from anywhere … but if the deeper secret was ever known, that there never was a virus at all, then a positive ID could only have been down to Paul. No one else could have done what he did.’

  ‘But you said he doesn’t have long to live.’

  ‘It wasn’t himself he was afraid for. It was his family, Anne and their two boys. If he’d been exposed as some kind of bio-terrorist or whatever, how would that have been for them? And he couldn’t really trust anybody but me, you can see that? He doesn’t even know any of you.’

  They sat in silence for a while as the plates of pasta arrived, followed by an ice bucket in a stand. Two more diners appeared, but were shown to a table at the far end of the gallery restaurant.

  ‘There’s an even bigger questio
n though, isn’t there? Why involve the rest of us at all? You and Paul could have managed the whole thing between you.’

  He replaced the glass on the table, shaking his head for emphasis. ‘There was a good reason. More than one.’

  ‘I really don’t mind if you count them off on your fingers, Michael.’

  Michael smiled at his food. ‘Hélène was the one who really began it all. In Oxford. And Stephen too, in his own way. And it needed Toby. Boy, did it need Toby. What he did made all the difference. Up at that Mountain House place you could see the impact the statement made. The President read it. The Chief of Staff read it. The National Security Adviser read it. And none of them was in any doubt about the effect it would have. Plus which, even for themselves, I don’t believe they weren’t moved by it.’

  ‘I wish I could have seen it.’

  ‘It wasn’t only that. It was Toby’s idea to include the wording that had to be used in the announcement. Otherwise we might have gotten some half-hearted commitment that might not have attracted all that much attention. Something too easy to let slide as time went by. What Toby did was create something that didn’t leave them any wriggle room. A Kennedy Moment is what they were calling it at Mohonk. Because they could all see how powerful it would be, how difficult to go back on.’

  Seema pictured Toby’s face; his bemused smile, his regrets over Hélène, his sense of his own weakness, his steady regard for Michael. And, now she thought of it, his mumbled comment, ignored at the time, that if anyone was likely to go off like a frog in a sock it was Stephen Walsh.

  ‘Good old Tobe. So you think some of them might even have been with us in their hearts?’

  ‘Maybe. It was difficult to read the statement without something inside rising up to meet it. That was Toby’s genius.’

  ‘Michael, Hélène has to see everything that Toby wrote. Isn’t there any way of recreating it, even if it’s not exactly word for word?’

  Michael almost blushed. ‘I broke the rules. Made a coded copy.’ He produced the small note book from the Gladstone bag at his feet. Opening it at the back, he flicked through the pages of numbers. ‘Unbreakable. I made it for Hélène, and for you.’

  Seema restrained herself from taking his hand, picking up her wine instead. ‘You’ve still only used one finger. What about the rest of us? We didn’t do anything you couldn’t have done yourself.’

  Michael again shook his head. ‘Stephen had to be included. What he said was true. He did come to me that last morning in Oxford and make a kind of an academic argument along the same lines. Only he was talking about a real virus, a real threat.’

  Seema considered for a moment. ‘And what about Hélène and me? Hélène had already played her part. And I guess you needed someone with a fridge in Manhattan.’

  ‘That wasn’t the only reason.’ He continued winding pasta on to the fork without attempting to pick it up. ‘When I was first wrestling with all this, way back before Christmas, I came to a decision I can’t really explain too well, even to myself.’

  Seema watched him struggling for a second or two. ‘And the decision was?’

  ‘I decided I wouldn’t take it any further if I couldn’t persuade you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Hélène’s an insider, seen so much. Stephen’s judgement I didn’t trust. Toby I was pretty sure would go with it if Hélène and I were both in.’ He tried to look at her but ended up staring down at the table. ‘You were my touchstone, Seema. The one I had to convince. There’s no one I’d trust with my own mind … no one more sane, not really what I meant, more human …’

  Seema smiled to ease his embarrassment, feeling again the surge of tenderness at his sudden clumsiness with words. ‘And that was the only reason? I was your … what shall we call it? … your test of your own sanity?’

  Michael gave her the rueful smile, but knew there was no way out. ‘Maybe there might have been something else.’

  ‘Which was, Michael?’

  ‘I guess, maybe …’ He looked down again at his plate. ‘I guess maybe I wanted to do something that would surprise you.’

  When he looked up again her eyes were filled with tears and their hands reached out to touch across the table.

  After a few seconds, she took out a tissue from the bag on her chair. ‘I know I was an idiot twenty years ago, Michael.’

  He took the tissue from her hand and gently dabbed her face. She took it from him and tucked it into her sleeve, then took his hand again.

  He stared down at their interlocked fingers on the white tablecloth. ‘I’ve also been giving quite a lot of thought to your sabbatical.’

  She looked up in surprise, seeing in his eyes more irresolution than she had seen in all the hours of planning they had done. ‘My sabbatical?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been wondering how you might feel about taking it on the shores of Lake Geneva?’

  Epilogue

  by Thomas Keeley

  I do not know whether it was my good or ill fortune to have been the one member of the original group who was unable to attend those two college reunions in the early 1980s. Nor do I know for certain what happened there. More than thirty years later, none of the principal characters has ever referred publicly to the events described in these pages.

  It is possible, of course, that this may change in the years to come if one or more of their diaries are published, perhaps posthumously. In the meantime, the reader may like to know something of what became of the five and of how I eventually came to suspect what really happened in that now-long-ago winter of 1980/81.

  As the Times’ chief medical correspondent, I had covered the story of immunization’s astonishing rise, finding it a welcome change from my main beat of the 1980s – the progress of the HIV/AIDS crisis. All that need be said about it here is that the decade following ‘The Kennedy Moment’ saw extraordinary progress towards immunizing the world’s children. Across the developing world, the proportion of children vaccinated against major diseases rose from below twenty per cent to almost eighty per cent, saving many millions of young lives every year.

  It was of course an achievement to be celebrated. But it also raised an obvious question. The vaccines themselves had been cheaply available since at least the mid-1960s; what, then, was the cause of this sudden, dramatic surge in the 1980s?

  The standard explanation says that it came about because of the commitment made by the Government of the United States on March 6th, 1981. The President’s speech that day – his ‘Kennedy Moment’ as it became known – was a ringing declaration that the US would lead a worldwide effort to save the lives of millions of the world’s children. It was, as several papers, including my own, could not resist punning, ‘the shot felt round the world’.

  I never bought it. Not for a minute. Coming out of a clear blue sky, the President’s speech that day was totally out of tune with an administration that was preoccupied by the Cold War and known for its almost visceral abhorrence of major government initiatives. And I was far from being alone in my suspicions.

  Those suspicions lay dormant for many years. And it was only after my retirement that something happened to cause me to speculate about an alternative explanation.

  And it was, of course, Toby who gave it to me.

  In retirement, Toby Jenks had become something of a sad character. His marriage to our mutual college friend, the distinguished Canadian paediatrician Hélène Hevré, had begun in bliss and ended in tragedy. Less than two years after returning to Canada to take up an appointment as Director of International Health with the Canadian International Development Agency, Hélène Hevré died in McGill Medical Hospital, Montreal.

  Caroline and I visited her the week before her death. She was skeletal, and unable to breathe without an oxygen mask. Words were limited, and from her doctors I learned that the exhaustion had eventually reached the point where even breathing had become difficult. No amount of tests had been able to identify the cause, either of the bodily weakness or of
the yeast infections that covered the inside of her mouth or of the lack of T cells that had left her immune system in tatters. All they could tell me was that she had a progressive disease of unknown cause, her lungs filling up with millions of the organisms known as pneumocystis carinii that were slowly suffocating this gentle, brave and dedicated woman. But, as Hélène herself told me between gasps of oxygen, ‘No one dies of pneumocystis’.

  Soon afterwards, I covered the controversial October 1982 New York University Symposium on AIDS. By that time, 691 Americans had been documented as having contracted the virus and 278 had already died. At the Symposium, French researchers presented data to show that many of the earliest confirmed cases had occurred among Africans and Europeans who had spent time in Central Africa immediately before becoming ill. Even earlier than this, Dr Ib Bygbjerg – friend and colleague of Dr Grethe Rask, who had died in circumstances not dissimilar to Hélène’s – had also made the link between AIDS and infectious tropical diseases.

  The mystery of Hélène Hevré’s death was solved. Like Grethe Rask, she had been one of the first non-Africans to fall victim to what became known as HIV/AIDS. And, again like Grethe Rask, the virus had almost certainly been contracted through contact with blood in one of the over-populated and under-equipped hospital wards in which both of them had served with such devotion.

  After the funeral, a shattered Toby kept his head above water for some years doing good work for Dick Manoff’s social-marketing agency, which at that time was pioneering the use of professional advertising skills to communicate public-health messages. But eventually he succumbed to periodic mild depression and drifted south from Montreal to New York where he picked up sporadic work for one or two of the Madison Avenue agencies where he was still known and loved. But he had also drifted into spending the hours from six until late in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village where he now lived in a two-room apartment above a tattoo parlour.