The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  I had seen Toby from time to time over the years. Following my own wife’s death three years ago, he was more supportive than I could have believed. He was also unfailingly excellent company, kind and clever when you got below the surface performance. And so I was pleased when he called to say he had read about my retirement in the Times and invited me for a celebratory drink.

  We met one Friday evening at Charlio’s, just around the corner from the old Radio City Music Hall. After a couple of drinks (in his case I suspected it was a couple more drinks) he sat back in the booth and looked at me in a rheumy-eyed, wistful way, mumbling something whimsical about reaching a point when you realize that the meat and potatoes of your life are in the past and most of the puddings are off the menu. He also said some nice things about my own career and added that he wished he had done more with his own life. I demurred, but he waved my protests away and said ‘And I wish, I wish, Tom, I wish you had been at that reunion, in Oxford, and that weekend here in New York of course, all those years ago.’

  I had almost forgotten the college reunions that I had been unable to attend and asked him why, after all this time, he was wishing I had been there. ‘No reason,’ he said, checking himself. ‘No reason. It was just a whole lot of intellectualizing when all the time what was really happening was mostly hormonal.’

  ‘So why should I have been there?’ I persisted.

  ‘Because then I could tell you what really happened,’ he said, almost tearfully. ‘But now I can’t. Because, you see, you weren’t there.’ He was swaying very slightly on the bar stool, but I could see that there was something behind his words; something important, at least to him.

  ‘You know, don’t you, Tom, what Marshall McLuhan said? I’ll tell you – he said “advertisements are the real history of our times”. In a way, you see, I was the real historian. So, anyway, what was I saying? Yes, no, really, after that I did do something with my life. I did, you know. Did something, Tom. Something quite significant. With my life, I mean. Just the once. Didn’t make a habit of it. Wouldn’t want anyone to think I had a serious side.’

  I was intrigued. ‘So go on, Tobe, what was it?’

  Toby stared into the bottom of his glass, clearly struggling to take hold of himself.

  ‘Not saying. Can’t say. Will one day. From the grave, shouldn’t wonder.’ He looked around the bar, clearly intending to find another topic of conversation. But by now my journalistic instincts were engaged.

  ‘So something happened at those reunions that had to be kept secret – that the size of it?’

  Toby stared again into his now almost empty glass. ‘Trouble with keeping a secret is … no one knows you’re keeping it. Wit and wisdom of Toby Jenks.’

  ‘Well, it was obviously some kind of deal if it still has to be a secret after all this time.’

  ‘It was some kind of deal. It was, Tom, really some kind of deal. Specially for me. Truth is, Tom, I only ever really did one do-goody thing. In my life, I mean. But here’s the thing, it probably did more good than all the other do-gooders in the world rolled into one big, fat do-gooder, if you see what I mean. Going to write it all down before I dissolve entirely in this stuff. Be a great little book. Can you help me think of a decent title? No, of course you can’t. Silly question.’

  Toby staggered off to the washroom and it was there, sitting on a bar stool in Charlio’s, with Manhattan’s ‘happy hour’ getting under way around me, that the pieces first began to drift towards each other. Something had happened at those reunions. Something important enough for Toby Jenks to be clinging to it like a moral life raft more than thirty years later. Something that he believed had done some significant good in the world. Something that had to be kept secret even after all this time. And in one of those connections that the brain makes without any particular effort, I recalled something long forgotten – the lunch with Seema all those years ago, soon after I had arrived in New York. At the time, the fact that she had reacted so nervously to my asking what happened at the reunion had been just another of life’s little unexplained oddities. But now, all these years later, her strange behaviour came back to me.

  The noise in the bar was building up as I waited for Toby to return, but by this point I was in a world of my own and about to make the big leap. Michael Lowell had been at both those reunions. And it was Michael who had been in charge of WHO’s global immunization programme through the 1980s – a programme that had succeeded largely because of the President’s out-of-the-blue announcement that day. What if Michael hadn’t merely responded to ‘The Kennedy Moment’? What if he had somehow engineered it? And what if this was connected to the ‘something significant’ that Toby had done with his life?

  Toby was making his way back through the bar now, bald head glowing and fading as he passed under the orange globe lights. It was an absurd notion. What could the connection possibly have been?

  Toby hoisted himself back on to his stool, mumbled something about ‘the booze talking’, and turned the conversation back to my retirement plans. I postponed my speculations for a quieter moment and for the next half hour we talked of ‘the things one has never had time to do’.

  That quieter moment came as soon as I left Charlio’s that night and began to walk back to my soon-to-be vacated apartment on the Upper East Side.

  No sooner was I out in the fresh air than the preposterousness of the thought gained the upper hand. All I had was a few passing straws in the wind that a slightly inebriated imagination had snatched at and twisted into a fantasy. But I could not leave it alone. If Toby’s great thirty-year secret was somehow linked to The Kennedy Moment, then some kind of leverage had to be involved, some kind of threat. And it had to have been something powerful enough to force the government into that totally out-of-character announcement.

  Many unanswered questions litter a correspondent’s life, and most of them have no connection with each other. But as I walked up 5th Avenue that night, some of those questions began to stretch out hands from the past. Around that time, in the early 1980s, there had been a big simulation exercise to test plans for coping with a bio-terrorist attack on a major US city. This had been public knowledge, not least because the New York City Health Commissioner at the time had invited journalists to participate on the grounds that an informed public response would be vital. But had it been just an exercise? Vague rumours had circulated at the time that the simulation might have been in response to an actual rather than a theoretical threat.

  My thoughts continued to scurry around the possibilities, running into improbable channels and more than one dead end. But as I crossed to Madison and waited for the lights to change opposite Williams-Sonoma, I remembered the bomb scare that had shut down Grand Central station at around that time – and the unmarked van with the Dekalb County licence plates. One buried chamber of memory leading into another, I also dimly recalled my lunch with Stephen Walsh who, like Seema, had clearly been running scared at the very mention of that little reunion.

  As I neared my apartment building on 89th, my speculative rollercoaster took another dip. It was surely all impossible. The CDC connection meant some kind of virus would have had to have been involved. And there were only two real candidates: the two that the US government itself had identified as Category A biological threats – anthrax and smallpox. Michael had been – still was – one of the world’s leading experts on smallpox, and for a moment my imagination ran wild. But there was surely no way that someone as buttoned-down as Michael Lowell would ever have gotten himself involved in anything so off the wall. Not to mention the fact that not even he could have gotten his hands on the virus. As I well knew from the pieces I had written to mark the various anniversaries of smallpox eradication, the remaining stocks were held under about the same level of security as the nation’s supply of enriched uranium. Absurd to think that it could have been stolen. I told myself to forget about the whole crazy notion. But, as I continued on up Madison Avenue, my thoughts kept returning to those dee
p-phase freezers in the Level 4 bio-containment facility down in Atlanta.

  And to Paul Lewis.

  Paul, who had died of pancreatic cancer at around the same time as the events I was struggling to recall; Paul, who had been Principal Deputy Director of the CDC and the country’s top virologist; Paul, who had been the close friend of Michael Lowell; Paul, who would have been one of the very few people in the world with access to the pass codes for those freezers.

  Totally preoccupied, I walked straight past my own building, only turning back when I had almost reached Mount Sinai Hospital. But, by the time I was nearing my apartment again, I was taking another reality check. No two men would have known better than Michael Lowell and Paul Lewis that smallpox had brought more suffering and death to this world than any other virus in history. Bar none. Neither of them would have taken the slightest risk with it. Neither would have done anything so mad, so evil.

  And, even then, the penny did not drop.

  I was thinking, more idly now, about my own years at the CDC when, apropos of nothing, inspiration dropped out of the night sky. Paul would have been the obvious go-to man if there had been any reason to suspect that an ampoule left somewhere – in a baggage locker at Grand Central Terminal for example – contained the smallpox virus. He would have been in a position to confirm that whatever had been brought in from New York that night was indeed variola. And no one would have dreamt of questioning his conclusion. Sure, it was unthinkable that the two of them would have stolen the virus. But what if they hadn’t needed to?

  I stepped out of the elevator on the 35th floor, key in hand, lingering for a while on the landing, not even wanting to enter my own apartment in case the vision of what might have happened all those years ago were to vanish on contact with the mundane and familiar surroundings of my life. Eventually I let myself in and sank into a chair, looking out across the East River and the lights of Jackson Heights and wishing I hadn’t been too preoccupied to pick up something to eat.

  And Toby Jenks? Dear old Toby, who had started me on this mad chase less than two hours ago in Charlio’s. What might his involvement have been? The only possible connection I could think of was the powerful wording of the President’s speech that day – the moving, Sorensen-like quality that had been much commented on at the time. Among the many writers I have known and worked with, very few would have been capable of writing a speech like that. And one of them was Toby Jenks.

  As I sipped a beer, my estimate of whether any of this was even remotely likely veered first one way and then the other. Even if such a threat had been made, it was surely inconceivable that the government would have given in to it? On the other hand, it could have been argued that going down in history as the President who immunized the world’s children was better than being known as the President who had presided over panic and been unable to protect the American people.

  I eventually went to bed telling myself I had drunk more than usual and the thing to do was to sleep on it and see whether any of this still seemed plausible in what I was trying not to call the cold light of day. It was all speculation; but already it rang more true in my own ears than the President’s ‘Kennedy Moment’ had ever done.

  A few days after the evening at Charlio’s, I called Toby and talked him into coming up to my home in Connecticut for the weekend. He had sounded dubious, mumbling something about the countryside being a dangerous place and asking if the Constitution State had gotten electricity yet. But he had eventually came around to the idea and arrived one Saturday evening in time for dinner at our local seafood restaurant.

  It would be quite untrue to say that I plied him with drink. Toby could do the plying all by himself. But I confess to waiting until after he had drunk most of a bottle of Vinho Verde before raising the issue. We were talking, somewhat inevitably, about the pleasures and pitfalls of retirement when I mentioned that I had in mind to write a little book about smallpox. Toby looked doubtful and asked whether the subject hadn’t already been done to death, if I’d forgive the expression. Pouring melted butter over a lobster tail, he mentioned not only D A Henderson’s account but also the books by Donald Hopkins and Bill Foege. I said I was thinking more along the lines of the long-running controversy as to whether or not the remaining stocks of the virus should be destroyed. Toby wiped his chin on a napkin and said it would be nice to think it had gone for good but that it would surely be foolish for the US to destroy its stocks if we couldn’t be sure that ‘the little bugger wasn’t still alive and well and living in Siberia’. Soon after that I let him steer the conversation away to some other topic. I had found out what I wanted to know: Toby Jenks knew more about smallpox than he could reasonably be expected to have picked up on Madison Avenue.

  I telephoned Michael a few days later to suggest getting together. As I had half expected, he invited me up for a weekend.

  And so it was that on Saturday, June 6th – as fair a spring day as New England has to offer – I made an early start from New Canaan with the intention of taking the slow route up through the Berkshires, crossing Massachusetts by the back roads. I had always loved the drive through this part of New England, drawn to its clapboard houses and white-spired churches as if to a more solidly based world, and did not in the least mind the slow progress.

  Many times over the years I had spent weekends with my old friends. Both were still much in demand: Seema as a guest speaker at every conference touching on the history of slavery; Michael as an Emeritus Professor at Harvard Medical School and still an occasional consultant to the WHO. Both were keen hikers and had completed most of the Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont sections of the Appalachian Trail. Neither had put on a pound over the years.

  For much of the way on 202, picking up I90 after Springfield, I speculated on how they might respond when confronted with my suspicions. For it surely all fitted together. And surely it had all begun at those reunions I had missed.

  I had no thought of alarming my hosts. I knew that Seema, who had always been self-possessed, and Michael, chess player that he still was, would have thought it all through a long time ago; would have known there was nothing to link the five of them to what had happened. Not then. Not now. But if it were true, then it would surely be impossible for them to remain entirely unmoved when confronted with my little hypothesis.

  Shortly before noon, I turned off the highway onto Old Mill Road, heading up past the former rifle range to Caterina Heights and the loop road of lovely old New England homes. The azaleas were in full bloom on the lawns and the shingled gables and white-painted porches were a picture of modest, domestic elegance against a backdrop of birch, red oak and maple.

  ‘Toby sends his love. Had a drink with him the other week.’

  We had decided it was warm enough to have lunch on the terrace, a raised and paved area overlooking the yard with its lawns and lily pond. Wine was poured, news exchanged, home-made cookies made a fuss of. I helped re-lay the table outdoors and admired the garden, at its best on a fine June day.

  Michael inquired about the route I had taken. I described the drive up and commented on the lovely part of the world they had chosen for their retirement. Seema said something about becoming President of the Concord Historical Society. Michael had heard from Stephen, now almost a recluse on his country estate in England and apparently crippled by arthritis. When Hélène was mentioned, the three of us sat in silence for a moment or two. I asked Michael if he still played chess in Washington Square.

  ‘Haven’t played there in years. Seems like another era.’

  It was opening enough.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the past myself quite a bit. And there’s something I want to ask you both. Do you remember those college reunions in the Eighties, the ones I wasn’t able to get to?’

  I had turned from Michael to Seema at the critical moment. The look of alarm in those still-lovely eyes was quite unmistakable.

  Michael himself seemed unperturbed. ‘We still think about Hélène, too. St
ill wonder if there’s anything we might have done.’

  ‘There was nothing anybody could have done. There wasn’t even a diagnosis.’

  With this, Michael steered the conversation to what had for many years been my own journalistic beat – those years of the early 1980s when prejudice and politics had made for such a disastrous delay in responding to the AIDS crisis. I was in no hurry, and for five minutes or so we talked about whether lessons had been learnt, and whether the health establishment would do any better if anything similar came along again.

  But I had no intention of being deflected. ‘Just to get back to those reunions, I’ve been wondering if they might have been a lot more significant than I thought.’

  The two of them looked at each other again. It was clear that Seema was going to leave it to Michael. He turned to me, frowning pleasantly. ‘Significant?’

  ‘In view of what happened directly afterwards, I mean. I’m thinking of the US commitment to the global immunization effort. You were running the WHO immunization programme at the time, as I remember?’

  ‘Yeah, and that commitment sure opened up the way.’

  ‘And I’ve been wondering recently what opened up the way to the commitment?’

  Silence for a few seconds. Then Michael put his head on one side and looked at me with half-closed eyes.

  ‘Where are you going with this, Tom?’

  I suppose it must have taken me all of three or four minutes to set my little narrative before them. Some of the pieces were missing, I admitted, but there were more than enough to suggest what had really happened in those early months of 1981. As I spoke, Seema looked out over the garden, her hands very deliberately relaxed in her lap but the strain showing on her face. Michael sipped his wine occasionally, paying close attention, as if listening to a complicated exposition of something he found new and interesting.