Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  “The White House!” burst out Felicia Butterworth. “Are you sure?”

  The dean shrugged.

  “The White House! Christ Almighty!” And she shoved back her chair and went to the sideboard, where she downed a large tumbler of vodka. The Dean Responsible for Relations with the Mafia remained seated, watching her without comment.

  “So what does he want from me, this Don Pugliese?” she said, returning to the table and throwing herself back into the chair.

  “He wants you to pay Templeton off for the evidence. Then when you get it—the evidence, I mean—you’re supposed to contact him and he’ll send his godsons to pick it up.”

  Felicia Butterworth rose from the chair again and started pacing, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her Armani Exchange pants. “Look,” she said, “if Templeton really has tracked down some papers about Lincoln coming to Canada … and it still sounds crazy to me, but if the White House …” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway,” she started up again, “if Templeton really has tracked down some papers about Lincoln, there are easier ways than a bribe to get them from him.” And to illustrate what she meant, she picked up two unopened bags of Doritos from the sideboard and smashed them together, sending corn chips flying across the room.

  “Well,” rasped the dean, gagging on the shattered fragments of a corn chip, “I did explain to the Don about your preferred methods of persuasion. But he was quite insistent. No force. No intimidation. Templeton might panic and destroy whatever he found. Then there would be hell to pay. So it has to be a bribe. That’s why he sent the money.”

  “Money? What money?” said Felicia Butterworth. “He sent no money.”

  “The student loan.”

  “The student loan! He expects us to bribe someone on the faculty with a student loan? A student loan for fifteen hundred dollars?”

  “The repayment schedule is very flexible, he assured me.” Although he tried to sound upbeat, the dean winced when he said it.

  Felicia Butterworth threw her head back and exhaled heavily, her cheeks puffing out.

  “Perhaps,” offered the dean, “it would make more sense if we came up with some money ourselves.”

  “Perhaps it would,” she agreed with a sigh, returning to her chair. “Although I’d have to use some creative bookkeeping to get it past the Governing Council.”

  They sat there without speaking for several minutes, Felicia Butterworth staring down at the bits and pieces of corn chips on the floor, and the dean distracted by her fingers drumming on the table. She had, at best, limited confidence in most members of her administration. However, the Dean Responsible for Relations with the Mafia had been with her in the marketing department at Frito-Lay. During their years together, she had developed great respect for his business skills and implicit trust in his judgment. For his part he could think of no more useful purpose in life than serving as her deputy, and in whatever enterprises she might propose.

  It was the dean who broke the silence. “Perhaps we should try another tack. Not all forms of bribery require approval of the Governing Council.”

  “Go on.”

  “Templeton is English, right?”

  “English. Yes.”

  “Well, it seems to me that the English value something even more than money.”

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  “Titles,” he trumpeted. “The English love titles. Kings and queens. Dukes and duchesses. Earls and … uh … whatever they call the wives of earls. You could offer Templeton a title.”

  “You think I should knight him?” she replied.

  The dean groaned.

  Felicia Butterworth laughed. “Relax, Bugsy. Giving him a title is a terrific idea. Absolutely inspired. Why, I could make him a dean!” And she laughed again.

  The dean frowned.

  “No. Quite right. Not impressive enough. I’ll name him to an endowed chair.”

  “An endowed chair. Yes. That would be just the sort of thing.”

  “A university professor,” Felicia Butterworth went on. “I could give him one of the university professorships. They’re very prestigious.”

  The dean nodded.

  “On the other hand,” she continued, affecting a thoughtful pose, “there are currently a dozen university professors. Perhaps what we need for such a noteworthy scholar as Yale Templeton,” and now her voice took on a sardonic edge, “is something that will truly set him apart.”

  “Like ‘Distinguished Professor of American History’?” hazarded the dean. “Like ‘Distinguished Professor of American History,’” repeated Felicia Butterworth. “Or,” she said, her imagination bounding exuberantly ahead of her, “‘Distinguished Professor of the American Civil War’.”

  She paused, a malefic smile appearing on her face. “Or,” she continued, surging to a triumphant conclusion, “‘Abraham Lincoln Distinguished Professor of the American Civil War.’” And she erupted in a violent, self-satisfied, demonic cackle.

  XLIV

  Meanwhile, back at the apartment near Dunbar Road, Yale Templeton and Bobbi Jo Jackson were sitting on the floor of the small living room surrounded by books, articles, and documents. Off against one wall stood a nondescript upright piano—a black Krakauer—that had been abandoned by the previous tenants. While a student at the Robinson-Fallis Academy for Boys, Yale Templeton had occasionally been required to play bells, cymbals, and the triangle in school concerts. That was the extent of his musical training, however. The piano in his apartment intrigued him, and from time to time he would sit down and poke away at the keys, usually producing a discordant noise. But Bobbi Jo Jackson had the ability to play piano by ear—a talent she had first discovered in her father’s church—and by listening to recordings of Elizabethan madrigals, she had very rapidly built up a substantial repertoire of his favourite pieces.

  At the moment, however, the two of them were hardly thinking about music. Yale Templeton was putting the finishing touches on the footnotes for his seminal article on the incidence of poisonous snake bites at Confederate military hospitals. No one in North America had a more thorough knowledge of the appropriate form of punctuation for historical citations. Still, next to him on the floor lay the Modern Humanities Research Association Style Book: Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses; Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors, and Publishers; Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (a rather reluctant concession on his part to American standards); and, his very favourite, because of its distinguished pedigree, Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers of the University Press, Oxford. He painstakingly checked the guidelines laid down in all four texts before committing himself to each comma, semicolon, and set of quotation marks.

  Bobbi Jo Jackson, on the other hand, was busily involved in making her way through an extensive set of CIA records on Quebec: memos, correspondence, field reports. Some of the material was written in code. “But it’s pretty easy to figure out,” she confided. He gave her a doubtful look.

  “Well, it is once you realize that the code is based on football statistics,” she insisted. “You know. The jersey numbers of punt returners in the NFC during the 1980s; the AP College coaches’ poll rankings in years ending in an even number; Norv Turner’s blocking assignments for third and long situations. I mean, like, who doesn’t know that kind of stuff?”

  As Yale Templeton had taught her, she was carefully copying all the information she found onto index cards. On top of each card she would write down the author and name of the source, assiduously following the rules set out in Turabian. “I think it is advisable in your case to use an American reference work,” he had said. “If later you decide to produce a monograph, in all likelihood the scholars who referee it will be from the United States.” (Logically, then, you might think that he would rely on Turabian in preparing his own manuscripts. But his deeply ingrained prejudice in favour of the footnoting conventions he had learned at Cambridge meant that he invariab
ly cast his lot with English opinion when there was a choice to be made, comforting himself with the suspicion that most American editors were lax when it came to checking footnotes.) When she needed some clarification or was examining the kind of document that, for one reason or another, was not explicitly discussed in Turabian, Bobbi Jo Jackson would lean over and ask his advice. Never having had occasion to use classified documents in his own research, he often had to make judgments based on inference. Not his strong suit, as we have seen, but he did the best he could.

  Her initial intention had been to scan the material as quickly as possible looking for evidence about her mission to James Bay. But he stressed to her the importance of approaching sources in a systematic—which to his way of thinking meant strictly chronological—manner, and so she had begun with the earliest document she had found, a report on American intelligence activities in Lower Canada during the War of 1812, and slowly worked her way forward. Well slowly for her. With her speed reading ability and the knowledge of shorthand she had picked up in high school, she would have been quite capable of getting through all the considerable body of material she had retrieved in little more than twenty-four hours. However, Yale Templeton was firmly of the view that anyone with aspirations to scholarly respectability should write out all notes in full to avoid the risk of error when transcribing information. As a result, it was several days before she actually came across the first CIA document—a memo—that mentioned her assignment.

  “This was the man they told me to contact,” she said, passing Yale Templeton a photograph that had been attached to the memo.

  “What odd attire!” he replied.

  “Oh, that was after he put on my dress. A local ritual or something.”

  “Exchanging clothes,” he commented. “That’s an ancient Ojibwa custom. He must have been an Ojibwa.”

  “Oh, really?” she replied, surprised. “I just thought it was a Canadian thing. At the CIA they told us all Canadians were transvestites.”

  “No, not all.” But now Yale Templeton was staring at the photograph. The figure looked very familiar. “Do you happen to know his name?” he asked.

  She shuffled through some papers. “Here it is,” she said. “Jean-Guy Lookalike.”

  Yale Templeton examined the photograph. Aside from the sequined dress and toque, the man could have been Joseph Brant Lookalike, or Charlie. Or Samuel Beartooth Lookalike, for that matter.

  “They seem to have collected a lot of information about him,” said Bobbi Jo Jackson, and she held up a handful of documents.

  “Oh, yes?” he replied. But his eyes remained fixed on the picture.

  “It appears you’re right,” she went on, glancing at one of the memos. “He was a Native Canadian, although it says Cree, not Ojibwa. Do the Cree exchange clothes, too?”

  Yale Templeton thought he remembered hearing from a Native guide at Moosonee that the Cree and Ojibwa were related. “I suppose they could,” he said, turning back to her. “It’s not like the CIA would ever get its information wrong.” And, no, he was not being facetious. Like many historians he had inordinate faith in the competence, not to mention fundamental honesty, of the bureaucrats who prepared the records he relied on in his research.

  Bobbi Jo Jackson snorted. “Don’t get me started. Someday I’ll tell you about my last mission to Baghdad … Anyway,” and now she was talking more to herself than to Yale Templeton, “I guess this means I was right the first time.”

  “The first time?”

  “About my mission. It really did have to do with the Cree, not hydroelectric plants … Although,” and here she was rapidly flipping through a secret report put together for the Department of the Interior, “it looks as if somebody had the idea of bribing Canadian officials into approving a ‘Grand Canal’—that’s the term they use, a Grand Canal—from the southeastern corner of James Bay down through Quebec and across Ontario all the way to Lake Huron. It says the water could then be diverted into the Midwest and the Southwestern states …”

  Yale Templeton politely waited for her to finish, but now she was completely absorbed in the report, and so he turned back to the (for him) far more interesting task of ensuring uniform punctuation in his citations. Not that he was unfamiliar with the often misquoted remark of Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds … With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.” But that was just proof, he told himself, that Emerson understood very little about footnotes and punctuation.

  During the next two weeks he was able to make great progress on his article, satisfactorily getting through more than half of the 228 footnotes he had projected. When, some years earlier, he had submitted an article entitled “A Day-by-Day Recounting of Weather Patterns During the Siege of Vicksburg as Reported in the British Press” to the American Historical Review (where it was rejected as being “rather too narrow for our purposes”), one of the scholars who served as a referee observed that “perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that the footnotes are neatly organized.” He had taken this as the highest form of compliment and since then had made it a practice to keep extensive notes outlining the logic behind each of his citations. His goal, he told Bobbi Jo Jackson, was to donate these “footnotes on footnotes” (as he happily thought of them) to the archives at Cambridge upon his retirement. “They might well prove to be the very greatest contribution I make to the advancement of knowledge,” he said. It would be hard to disagree.

  But we must not dwell on Yale Templeton’s footnotes any longer, no matter how fascinating they must inevitably seem to most readers. It is time to turn our attention back to Bobbi Jo Jackson. Or more specifically, to the discoveries she made in the files she smuggled out of Washington. Yes, she learned the reason for her mission to James Bay. But she also found evidence of a heretofore untold story of clandestine CIA activity—a story that, in the words of one distinguished scholar with whom she shared her findings, can only be described as “truly shocking.”

  XLV

  THE TRULY SHOCKING YET SHOCKINGLY TRUE STORY OF HOW THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSPIRED TO BRING ABOUT QUEBEC INDEPENDENCE, AS REVEALED IN SECRET CIA DOCUMENTS AND AS TOLD BY ST. CLAIR RUSSELL HILL, PROFESSOR EMERITUS

  Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friends, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

  John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

  The first action by the Kennedy administration in its purported crusade to spread liberty across the face of the globe was the Bay of Pigs invasion. The second was a plot to ignite separatism in Quebec. Kennedy assigned responsibility for the Quebec portfolio to Richard Helms, chief of covert operations at the CIA. Helms began with a pilot project along the Ottawa River in the northwest corner of the province. The small village of Harmony (today known by the name “Je-me-souviens”) was home to two men, identical twins, devoted to each other and to the vision of a united Canada they had inherited from their French-Canadian father and English-Canadian mother. Helms assumed that if he could turn brother against brother, that would promise well for creating internecine warfare across Quebec. Operating on the assumption that all Canadians are transvestites, he had his agents offer one of the brothers a bribe of dresses, blouses, jewellery, hose, and high heels to embrace the cause of separatism. That and five million dollars were enough to accomplish their purpose, and soon the village was riven into two factions, one committed to independence for Harmony, the other to Canadian nationalism.

  The successful outcome of the pilot project convinced Helms that conditions in the province were propitious for fulfilling the mandate given him by the President. He assigned agents to infiltrate various fringe groups dedicated to independence for Quebec, some on the right, some on the left. Most notable was the Front de libération de Québec, or FLQ, which became involved in
a series of terrorist acts, including bank robberies and bombings and, in 1970, the kidnapping of a British trade representative and the murder of a provincial cabinet minister. In the end, however, Helms decided that the most expedient course would be to secure a collaborator within the government. He targeted René Lévesque, a journalist and television personality who had served as a liaison officer for the U.S. Army during World War II. Whether Lévesque was actively taking orders from the CIA when he won election as a Liberal member of the Quebec legislature in 1960 is at this moment uncertain. However, internal Agency documents confirm that Washington was delighted when he received an appointment as minister of hydroelectric resources and public works and then used his position to nationalize Quebec’s private electrical companies and merge them with the Crown Corporation Hydro-Quebec. “This will significantly aid our efforts to establish control over Canadian energy policy,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote approvingly to John McCone, Director of the CIA.

  In 1967, Lévesque abandoned the Liberals to establish the Mouvement souveraineté-association, uniting it with the Ralliement national the following year to form the Parti Quebecois. CIA payroll records indicate that by this time he was receiving weekly shipments of cigarettes from Washington. Skilled at exploiting the media, Lévesque was able to gain support from labour and from the middle class, especially civil servants, teachers, and professionals. As a consequence the PQ rose rapidly in popularity, finally capturing power in 1976.

  Just four years later Lévesque took what he conceived to be the first step toward Quebec independence by calling a provincial referendum in which he sought authority to negotiate sovereignty-association with Ottawa. The initiative went down to defeat, however, winning the support of only 40 percent of the voters. CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner saw the result as “an important first step.” “I firmly believe,” he wrote in his journal, “that we can achieve our objective of an independent Quebec within fifteen years.” Lévesque, however, was deeply disappointed. Even worse from the point of view of the Reagan administration, he stopped agitating for separatism and began to concentrate on providing socially progressive government. The White House abandoned him, and when, after he left office in 1985, agents adjudged his personal popularity to be dangerous to American interests, CIA director William Casey arranged for him to suffer a fatal heart attack.