A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  After he left Kennedy’s office and rejoined Prettyman and press secretary Edwin Guthman, the latter informed Yates that he was actually in competition with two other writers from Newsweek and Time; as it happened, Prettyman (who hadn’t known this beforehand) wasn’t the only one Kennedy had asked to find a speechwriter. Guthman went on to explain that the three candidates would each submit a “trial assignment”—a civil rights speech to be delivered at an “exclusive girls’ college in the East.” Yates was intimidated by the prospect of competing with veteran journalists, but Prettyman felt confident that he had the edge: He was recommended by Styron, after all, and that had impressed the attorney general.

  Back in New York, Yates spent an industrious all-nighter writing his trial assignment. Rather to his surprise he found he enjoyed the challenge, the craft, of imagining Kennedy as a kind of fictional character (with a Yatesian outlook, no less)—namely, an attractive young man seductively persuading a group of female admirers to support the cause of civil rights: “School is out, girls. You may sometimes regret your education, for a free mind will always insist on seeking out reality, and reality can be far more painful than the soft and comforting illusions of the intellectually poor.” Yates tightened the speech to fit the attention span of its audience, then typed the finished product on his beat-up Underwood and sent it off. A few days later he was summoned back to Washington. He had the job.

  A problem remained: The woman he was leaving behind seemed determined to drink herself to death in his absence. One day Yates appeared at the Schulmans’ door with the blind-drunk Craige in tow. He had to leave for Washington, he explained. Would they mind looking after his girlfriend? Grace was furious: Just because she no longer worked full-time at Glamour, Yates had simply assumed she was free to care for a suicidal alcoholic. “It’s up to Grace,” said the good-natured Jerry, after which his wife stormed out and stayed in a hotel for the night. Yates’s girlfriend, meanwhile, ended up with Grace’s elderly mother, and Grace ended up caring for both of them.

  * * *

  “I only took the job because I needed the money,” Yates later claimed, “which is an odd thing because everybody else around me was there at some sacrifice of income. I was the only hireling.” That Yates always considered himself a “hireling” rather than a “true believer” is indisputable; he was determinedly skeptical where the Kennedys were concerned, and would tell (almost) anyone who asked that he still thought Stevenson should be president. But if money had been the only incentive, he might as well have gone to Iowa: As his new employers rather sheepishly put it, the salary was “more of an honorarium kind of thing”—enough for an ascetic writer, but hardly a lure in itself. For Yates, of course, there was more to it than that: “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to be that close to the Center of Power in America,” he admitted to a friend in 1964, “and it turned out to be a lively and interesting thing for a while. [Kennedy] seemed to like what I wrote, which fortunately was almost all about civil rights, and I think I even managed to put a few words in his mouth that were a little stronger than he otherwise might have used.” This is true: While Yates may have wavered in his opinion of the Kennedys, he was eager to enlist his talent in the cause of civil rights, and RFK was a potent mouthpiece. “Dick composed the most memorable phrases the Attorney General ever uttered,” said Prettyman, and Kurt Vonnegut went further: “He used RFK as a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

  Happily the work didn’t require any particular knowledge of, or interest in, the nuts and bolts of public policy. Yates’s job was to convert raw data into eloquence: “BAG [i.e., “Bobby-A.G.”] is making speech in [City] on [Date],” Guthman’s assignment memo would read; “please look over attached material and let’s talk.” Yates would do so, perhaps call the sponsors of the event in question, then ask the ultracompetent research assistant to provide further material on, say, B’nai B’rith or Slovak Catholics in Ohio. If the speech was momentous enough, the staff would gather for brainstorming sessions in the attorney general’s office, where a shirtsleeved Kennedy would pace around the table and fitfully explain the “main points” he wanted to make. Sometimes Yates would meet with Kennedy alone, or Burke Marshall, and with both men he had a good but impersonal working relationship. “Dick was respectful but not intimidated,” said his colleague Jack Rosenthal, “and Kennedy appreciated that.”

  At first Yates and Rosenthal shared a big sunny room in the Public Information office. Rosenthal, a future Pulitzer Prize–winning editorialist for the New York Times, was then a twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate whom Guthman had brought in from Oregon to serve as assistant press secretary. Yates was fond of the young man, but found it all but impossible to work in the same room with him. “Sorry I’ve been so elusive,” Rosenthal would say (always) when he returned a reporter’s phone call, and finally he’d close with, “You’re a nice man.” Then he’d return another phone call. And another. For hours Yates would sit rigid at his typewriter, his legal pad, and listen to these exchanges over and over. Often people would wander in to chat. After a few days Yates buttonholed the research assistant and begged her to find him a private workspace, whereupon she led him to what appeared to be a broom closet at the back of the fifth floor: crowded into the narrow space was an old desk, a working typewriter, a few derelict chairs, and dusty storage cartons stacked to the ceiling. Yates called his new office the “Herbert Brownell Room” after the previous attorney general (whose files were stored there); the place was almost like home.

  Yates was eager to make his mark, since he didn’t expect to be around very long: four months, to be exact. That was usually how long it took, according to Prettyman, for the FBI to conduct a methodical background check. When told as much, Yates confided that he’d had two nervous breakdowns in the past three years, both of which had required hospitalization, and wondered if the FBI was likely to pursue that sort of thing. Prettyman thought it highly probable. Still, some hope remained that they were mostly interested in Communist affiliations—until, a couple weeks into the job, Yates got a letter from Sheila: “The FBI wheels are very much in motion. A bright young man was here on Friday, inquiring closely into everything he could get me to talk about.… He did ask specifically about such things as alcoholism and ‘stability of character which might affect Mr. Yates’s ability to perform well in the assignment.’” So much for the lone Communist angle. “I questioned him a bit,” she went on, “and he said the investigation would extend to your ‘friends and associates.’” Yates was touched by his ex-wife’s loyalty—“I certainly said nothing,” she assured him—and others, too, tried to forestall his doom with the same sort of circumspection. Styron managed to skirt the subject of Yates’s drinking during the long afternoon he spent in an agent’s company, while Grace Schulman was downright uncooperative. Asked if Yates had any “vices,” she volunteered that he smoked too much, and when the shrewd G-man inquired whether Revolutionary Road was autobiographical, Schulman quoted Yates on the subject: “The emotions of fiction are autobiographical, but the facts never are.” The man looked puzzled, then moved on to another subject.

  Nevertheless Yates’s days seemed numbered, and since the idea was to save as much money as possible, he was reluctant to take a second apartment in Washington. Commuting via the Eastern shuttle was hardly a thrifty alternative, nor was his drunken girlfriend a compelling reason to return to New York on a daily basis. At the beginning of June, then, Yates got in touch with his old army buddy Frank Knorr, whose house in the Washington suburbs included a self-contained basement apartment. Yates moved in, and for the most part proved an amenable guest. His drinking could hardly be less than conspicuous, but he regarded the Knorrs as nice, decent people, and he was at pains not to shock or inconvenience them. “Dick ate dinner with us during the week,” Janis Knorr recalled. “At five o’clock sharp he’d come upstairs rubbing his hands: ‘Cocktail time!’ Then he’d drink bourbon the rest of the night and tell stories. He’d get loud, but he wasn’t too obnoxious.�
�� Yates doted on the Knorrs’ three-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who was given the thankless task of waking him each morning when he was “hungover and surly.” As with his own children, Yates made a special effort to act playful and pleasant around the girl, though Janis Knorr observed that he seemed “generally unhappy.” Around this time his daughter Sharon, during a visit to Washington, first became aware that her father drank too much: “The adults would play cards after dinner,” she said, “and Dad would drink steadily but the Knorrs wouldn’t.” Sharon was thirteen now, and the contrast stuck in her mind.

  Whatever his other sorrows, Yates enjoyed his work at the Justice Department. He thought of speechwriting as show business, and assigned a particular persona to RFK depending on his audience—as Bill Grove put it in Uncertain Times, “once you’ve got the character established he kind of takes over, and the rest is mechanical.” For a B’nai B’rith dinner in Chicago, Yates imagined RFK as “a fine-looking young man” in his well-tailored tuxedo—the sort of mensch who knew he didn’t have to mince words with such an educated, receptive audience, but rather address them as fellow liberals who cared about human rights and knew all about persecution: “President George Washington once made a solemn pledge to the Jewish Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, when he said ‘The American government gives bigotry no sanction.’… They must have understood even then, those early Jewish settlers in New England, that bigotry doesn’t care whether it has governmental sanction or not.” Kennedy, reading over the speech, wondered aloud if Washington had really said that, and Yates replied that it was in Bartlett’s Quotations; Kennedy, pleased, remarked that it made a good opening statement. Yates’s next assignment, the Catholic Sokol Convention in Ohio, called for “a plainer, cornier, dumber Bobby Kennedy,” and Yates pictured him “glowing and disheveled in an open shirt with rolled-up sleeves.” Such relatively casual speeches tended to end with the same tag—“I think I’ve said most of what I came here to say now”—just before the folksy, personalized punch line: “Let me salute you with the only two words of Slovakian I understand: ‘Zdar Boh!’”

  Yates’s first few speeches were so well received that, when President Kennedy prepared to address the nation on civil rights, the attorney general asked Yates to contribute a draft. The speech would be historically momentous—what many Americans had been waiting to hear ever since they’d elected Kennedy more than two years earlier. That same day, June 11, Governor George Wallace planned to fulfill his campaign promise to “stand at the schoolhouse door” and prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. RFK had dispatched his deputy Nicholas Katzenbach to counter Wallace’s “states’ rights” rhetoric and enforce the law, and a few hours later JFK would announce to the nation that he was sending an omnibus Civil Rights Bill to Congress.

  On Sunday evening, June 9, Yates was assigned to write a version of the President’s speech; his deadline was the following Tuesday. He was advised that another draft—possibly several—would be generated by the White House, though it was all but certain that at least part of Yates’s contribution would be used: He was RFK’s speechwriter after all, and the president deferred to his brother on civil rights. Thus, a little more than two weeks into the job, Yates was already in a position to influence national destiny, and he was eager to make the most of it. For two nights and a day he cloistered himself in the Herbert Brownell Room, consuming coffee and cigarettes and trying to imagine JFK as a character—not “hunched and impassioned” like his brother, but “erect and cool”—a man whose appeal to the heart would seem all the more powerful in contrast with his usual “witty and sardonic” manner.

  Early Tuesday morning Yates called his friend John Williams, who was then working on a piece for Holiday magazine titled “This Is My Country, Too,” about a black man traveling in America. (While in New York he’d planned to stay a few days at Yates’s vacant apartment in the Village, but on the second night he heard a scratching noise and discovered—“Holy shit!”—a horde of water beetles swarming over his sleeping bag. He packed up and left.) Yates wanted to read his finished draft to Williams, and ask him a few basic questions about civil rights. Williams tried to be helpful, though privately he was taken aback by Yates’s frank ignorance over what, exactly, was meant by “civil rights.” Years later Williams admitted as much in a letter: “Dick, I recall feeling this: ‘Yates is okay. I like Yates. He’s a good guy. Maybe that’s why he’s got to start this research from scratch.’” But it irritated Williams at the time, who thought it only too typical that a white man would be hired to write about issues he didn’t really understand, when there were plenty of black writers (e.g., himself) who did: “I felt I should have had your job,” he wrote Yates; “I felt I could have done a better job for my people and for people as a whole.” Yates was furious: “If my questioning you about ‘civil rights’ seemed naive,” he fired back, “and maybe even asinine, as I knew even at the time that it must, I thought you were taking it all in good faith and not begrudging me the job. And when I read that damn speech to you over the phone, I thought you liked it.”

  The fact was, Yates took considerable pride in his work, and he’d been particularly pleased by the way his version of the president’s address had turned out. He told the Knorrs that he didn’t really expect it to be used, but urged them to watch television with him that night “just in case.” When the time came, as Janis Knorr recalled, Yates was taut with anticipation. “He wants to do well for MARR’s [i.e., Knorr’s] sake,” Yates scribbled in the margin of this episode in the Uncertain Times manuscript—that is, he’d always admired Frank Knorr as a good soldier who’d accepted him in spite of his incompetence, and he viewed the president’s speech as a chance to redeem himself. But it wasn’t to be. As Kennedy spoke, the Knorrs glanced furtively between Yates and the screen, and it was clear that each line struck him as a fresh disappointment. At one point he suddenly came alive—“There! I wrote that!”—but it was a false alarm, and when it was over Yates seemed embarrassed. As the scene concludes in the novel: “Grove thought he could see the Marrs exchanging very slight, fond smiles of amusement—smiles suggesting that their houseguest might really not be such an important person after all.”*

  Other than a slightly more perceptible dislike of JFK, Yates gave little sign of dwelling on the matter. That summer the attorney general had to appear before several congressional committees in support of the Civil Rights Bill, and his speechwriter was kept busy composing his formal testimony. Whatever Yates lacked as a policy specialist was redeemed somewhat by a willing heart and a positive grasp of the moral issues—not to mention a way with words—as witnessed by the remarks he wrote for Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate Commerce Committee on July 1:

  White people of whatever kind—even prostitutes, narcotics pushers, Communists, or bank robbers—are welcome at establishments which will not admit certain of our federal judges, ambassadors, and countless members of our Armed Forces.… For most of the past hundred years we have imposed the duties of citizenship on the Negro without allowing him to enjoy the benefits. We have demanded that he obey the same laws as white men, pay the same taxes, fight and die in the same wars. Yet in nearly every part of the country, he remains the victim of humiliation and deprivation no white citizen would tolerate. All thinking Americans have grown increasingly aware that discrimination must stop—not only because it is legally insupportable, economically wasteful, and socially destructive, but above all because it is morally wrong.

  Contrary to John Williams’s understandable chagrin, Yates may well have been the right person for the job after all, or at least not the wrong one.

  * * *

  One of the secretaries in the Public Information office was a fetching, good-natured young woman named Wendy Sears, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a prominent Brahmin lawyer in Boston. She and Yates engaged in a hesitant flirtation for much of that summer: Sears felt shy in the writer’s presence, but thought he was one of the handsomest men
she’d ever seen, while Yates seemed too bewildered those first few weeks to take more than polite notice. One day, during a dull meeting in the attorney general’s office, Yates passed her a note—“Bored?”—and Sears scribbled back “Oh, yes!” The practice took hold: While the rest of the (male) staff solemnly discussed civil rights legislation, Yates would mock them either in prose or cartoon form (he was still a good caricaturist), and pass the results under the table to the perky stenographer. At one point Kennedy caught Sears pausing thus in her shorthand and became vexed—“We’ve got to get somebody else in here!”—whereupon Yates sprang to her defense: It was his fault, he said, and firmly suggested that Miss Sears be allowed to stay. “That was typical of Dick,” she said. “He wouldn’t even let Kennedy be offensive.” Yates was naturally given to chivalry on behalf of attractive young women, though he did find Sears “a little heavy in the leg.” She seemed to sense as much, and when she came upon the phrase “unpardonably thick ankles” in Revolutionary Road, she approached the author: “Dick, how thick do ankles have to be before they’re ‘unpardonable’?” Yates recognized his own epithet and laughed. “That got the ball rolling,” Sears recalled.

  “I have a new girlfriend,” Yates announced to the Schulmans upon his return to New York, “and she has really sturdy parents.” By then he’d come to dread the sight of the slatternly, whiskey-for-breakfast Craige, whose dissolute behavior he blamed in part on an unwholesome family background. But Wendy Sears was the healthy, well-groomed embodiment of good breeding, and what’s more she laughed at his jokes. When she was pouty Yates called her “Wendy Serious” (a name that stuck whatever her mood), and he’d go to any length to cheer her up. Their mutual delight was infectious. As Jack Rosenthal put it, “Wendy and Dick were the hub of a circle of laughter—cynical, not necessarily loyal to the powers-that-be, but good-natured.”