Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Cooper turned toward his mark. “Governor Chandler?” he asked, as if surprised.

  Chandler looked up, wary at first, then eased by Cooper’s smile. “Yes?”

  “I’m Frank Cooper of the New York Eagle,” Cooper said.

  “Nice to meet you, sir. No interviews.”

  “Not my intention, Governor,” said Cooper. “I’m a sports fan. I’ve always wanted to tell you in person: I just wanted you to know how much I respect you for breaking the color barrier in baseball.”

  Chandler smiled. His face softened. “Not everyone here would agree with you,” said Chandler. “But, thank you.”

  “Well, I’m also a fan of Kentucky basketball,” Cooper said, fabricating a lie to suit his needs. “Not everyone here would agree with that, either.”

  Chandler smiled.

  “History will judge you well, sir,” said Cooper. “Mark my words.”

  “I have my detractors.” He knocked back half of his drink.

  “I suspect you were right to stay off this Wallace ticket,” Cooper said, after another long moment. “My own opinion, if you don’t mind me telling you, speaking off the record, running with Wallace wouldn’t have done your fine legacy much good.”

  “I never had a very realistic chance at it, son,” Chandler said, filling a plate. “Hell, I might have liked a little more national spotlight and maybe I could have brought some sanity to George’s campaign. He’s not a bad man but he has some bad instincts.”

  “That right?”

  “They came to me in Louisville, asked me to disavow what I’d done in baseball.”

  “They?”

  “The Governor and his advisors. Plus a couple of his money men. Disavow my life’s work? No.”

  “So Mr. Wallace nixed you over that? A shame.”

  “Not so much George,” Chandler said over a sandwich. “These other folks. Money, you know. When it’s not about race, it’s about money. And when it’s about money, it’s often about race.”

  “Ah. Yes,” Cooper said. “Sad to agree with you on that one. Race. Money. Oilmen in the southwest. Mr. Big.”

  “They’re boys from the far right, all right,” Chandler said. “Some of them don’t believe the War Between the States is actually over.”

  Cooper allowed a laugh. There was a slight silence. Then, “You consider George Wallace a friend, I assume,” Cooper said.

  “I do, Mr. Cooper. Listen, I remember George when he was the circuit judge of the third judicial court in Alabama. The ‘fighting little judge’ they called him. He was a pretty fair boxer in his day. Served his country with distinction. George nearly died of spinal meningitis while he was in the military. Left the service with partial hearing loss and permanent nerve damage. Discharged early with a disability pension. Could have sat back and relaxed for the rest of his life, but went to law school, became a lawyer, became a judge. Compared with a lot of men on the bench, he was a fair man. Later, he tried to talk about good roads and good schools and making a few things more accessible for the poor white people and the colored, all these things were the early part of his career. Nobody listened. Nobody. Then he started talking badly about the colored people, the Kennedys sent soldiers in and the people stomped the damned floor for George. Whose fault is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Cooper said.

  “I don’t either,” said Chandler.

  “But you make me wonder,” Cooper said. “There were these oilmen, you mention. And they pushed you out of the honor of being on a national ticket. You might have been able to moderate the country on race. Must have been irritating.”

  “Damned irritating.”

  “I’d be resentful if such a thing happened to me,” Cooper said.

  Cooper let it simmer for a moment, then went for the touchdown.

  “So who was this Mr. Big that cost you a place in third party history, Governor? You know if this ticket had tilted toward sanity, you might have been Vice President.”

  “Off the record, not to be in print, not to be attributed to me?”

  The response was terse. “Good night, Mr. Cooper,” said Chandler. “And take that nice lady who came with you back upstairs with you.”

  Cooper knew he had gone as far as he could go. He moved quickly to the nearest men’s room where he took out his notebook and made precise notes of the interview. Then he emerged, grabbed Lauren’s hand and they hurried back to the press box.

  Curtis LeMay had wrapped up. The crowd listened impatiently to a succession of appeals for money and performances by country musicians. Wallace’s musical entourage now included a perky new duet of pretty ‘down home’ girls, The Taylor Sisters, Mona and Lisa. The Wallace fans had waited nearly an hour and a half for their savior, many of them goaded by the presence, attitude and actions of hundreds of young people clashing in several scuffles with Wallace partisans and police.

  Then, a few minutes after nine p.m. the lights dimmed, rose and dimmed again and then went as bright as possible. The walls of Madison Square Garden shook with applause and approval.

  George Wallace was about to take the stage.

  Chapter 79

  Wallace bounced up the steps and onto the platform of Madison Square Garden. A row of people behind him held up signs that spelled, "New York is Wallace Country." The huge circular hall of Madison Square Garden reverberated with the screams of more than sixteen thousand supporters of Wallace’s third-party Presidential candidacy. A standing, screaming ovation of two minutes brought the candidate to the front edge of a bunting-draped stage eight times. Each bow prompted increased sound and fury. General LeMay joined Wallace on stage.

  Beaming in the glare of eight spotlights, clapping to the bouncing melodies of “Dixie” and “I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Wallace and LeMay clasped hands and raised them in triumph. Two thousand balloons floated down on the frenzied crowd. Cooper and Lauren popped as many balloons as they could, some with their hands, some with their feet, as they returned to their seats.

  “I’ve been wanting to fight the main event in Madison Square Garden all my life,” Wallace proclaimed. He drew himself up to his full sixty-seven-inch height. “Now here I am!” he shouted.

  The former Golden Gloves boxer unloaded his regular political punch, forty-five searing minutes of criticism of the Republicans, Democrats, the United States Supreme Court and the young hecklers who opposed him.

  Occasionally, he would look gratefully to his hecklers. It gave him a chance to unleash his best lines. “Come on down, I’ll autograph your sandals,” he sneered at one. “You’ll be all right, sonny. All you need is a good barber.”

  Then there were the ugly incidents, not by coincidence when Wallace was targeting his hecklers. A group from a local black church, the Beulah Baptist Church on West 130th Street, was spat on, punched and pummeled. Police made no arrests but put the church group under protective custody.

  “Hey! Niggers, get out of here!” several in the crowd chanted at them.

  There were other incidents in the balcony. It went on as long as Wallace was at the podium. "You better have your say now, I can tell you that," Mr. Wallace said, tilting his head to find his protagonists. "After November fifth, you anarchists are through in this country."

  No one heard anything that Wallace hadn’t said before. Wallace trashed the United States Supreme Court and United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark for recent decisions on civil rights and inaction against "left-wing intellectuals and Communists professors who advocate a victory for the Vietcong." He blasted Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Humphrey as "unfit to govern our country in the next four years."

  Wallace ripped the news media for aiding "the rebellion in our streets," singling out to the delight of the audience the New York Times and the national television networks, whom he accused of broadcasting fake news, “made-up” stories about him. "They just don't want the good American people to know what kind of support we have," he said. With the skill of a veteran entertainer, he timed his gibes
and wisecracks to provoke the maximum response.

  When the rally broke up near ten o’clock, the crowd spilled out into the streets. Those looking for fights had no trouble finding them. A crowd of anti-Wallace youths drifted up to Times Square, snarling traffic by marching in traffic lanes. By midnight, the crowd had reached Columbus Circle, by which time it had dwindled to one hundred and fifty. Not all had gone home. They threw bottles and picked fights. It was a touch of Berlin, circa 1931. The New York City police arrested several dozen young men.

  Martin Friedkin returned to the Eagle offices just in time to make his deadline.

  “There are many things that frustrate and anger the people who came here to the Garden last night, and Mr. Wallace is a symbol of their protest. He offers simple solutions for simple Americans. Most do not even know the details regarding the things he says. Wallace is against "them," they believe, the people who would tear down their perfect country. His voters are proud of their willful ignorance. Wallace ‘says what he thinks’ and he is on their side. Or so they believe.

  “America is beset by problems,” wrote Friedkin. “Make no mistake. Neither Wallace nor anybody else has solutions. The average John Square White Workingman is grossly dissatisfied. He's angry that the government has been turned over to what he sees as traitorous college types. That's how he sees Nixon and Humphrey. The working stiff associates himself with Wallace because he feels that he's for the common man. Wallace can't solve his problems, but the average working man ain’t so smart and he thinks Wallace can. So he’s going to vote for him. God Bless America!”

  He fudged S.W. Murphy’s signature on his copy to speed in through the printing process. His coverage would make the next day’s editions.

  Chapter 80

  Cooper found a taxi for Lauren and sent her home to the East Village. He returned to his apartment building on West 96th Street late the same evening. He stopped in the lobby at his mailbox. Immediately, he heard the clicking of a latch dropping behind him, followed by the heavy release of a door bolt. Then a door creaked open.

  “Mr. Cooper?” The voice was low and subdued. It seemed to ooze up from the floor.

  Cooper took his mail in his hand and answered. “Jonas?” he said, turning.

  The door of the ground-level apartment opened further. The building superintendent, a small man with a jagged body, stepped forward. Cooper gave him a smile. Jonas never kept late hours. He was normally up at four in the morning to start his workday. So Cooper guessed that Jonas must have been waiting for him.

  “We speak?” Jonas asked, glancing in each direction to make sure they were alone.

  “Of course.”

  Jonas came to within a few inches of Cooper. He spoke no language perfectly, least of all English. He kept his voice low. “Two people more earlier today, sir,” Jonas said. “Man and a woman. They inspect building directory and mailboxes. Inspecting. Your name, they wanted.”

  Cooper’s eyes narrowed.

  “What did they look like?”

  “Rough man,” Jonas said. “Bad. Not gentle,” which was his way of saying the man resembled a thug, not a gentleman.

  “What about the woman?” Cooper asked.

  “Oh! Her! Very pretty. Blonde. Legs, beautiful. Very short skirt above knee. And bosoms.” Jonas grinned and made a gesture with his hands that amplified the point. The woman was a beauty: a blond with an impressive front porch. “Hooker, I think,” he said. “Expensive.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells with me,” Cooper said. “Did you talk to them?”

  Jonas shook his head. He never stepped out of his apartment, he said. He kept his wise ear to the door and his eye to the peephole, alternating as needed.

  “How do you know they were looking for me?” Cooper asked.

  “They were talking on yourself, sir,” he said. “By name. You owe money?”

  “Not a damned nickel,” Cooper said.

  “Rough couple. And they was talking Ukrainian,” Jonas said.

  “Ukrainian?” Cooper said.

  Ukrainian, the superintendent confirmed.

  Jonas didn’t speak Ukrainian, but he had gotten a snootful of it when he was a younger man in Hungary, he said. There were Ukrainian conscripts among the Soviet troops that invaded Hungary in 1956 to protect the population from foolhardy democratic ideas. So Halász knew the lingo, could tell it apart from Russian and understood it. As Jonas explained it, the Commies—and Jonas made it clear he hated them—sometimes got a bunch of sadistic deranged Ukes to do jobs that were too dirty to assign to a fine upstanding Commie Red Tartar.

  “That way, if things mess up there is never any Soviets to blame. Instead, blame the dumb ‘ukuleles’,” Jonas said.

  “What do you mean by ‘too dirty’?” Cooper asked.

  “The Russians hire them to kill people,” said Jonas.

  Cooper sighed.

  More than once in the past Jonas’ mitteleuropa paranoia had gotten the best of him, it seemed to Cooper. The superintendent once confided to Cooper that the Hungarian KGB was tapping his phone. He had waved around his prized possession, a shiny loaded FÉG PA-63, a gloriously illegal Hungarian-made semi-automatic pistol. He boasted to Cooper that he was ready to go in a blaze of bullets if the Red bastards came looking for him. Cooper always listened politely. One never knew. He had always Jonas seriously, but with a few shakers of salt. Then one day Jonas had ushered Cooper into his apartment and shown him a photograph of his family in Hungary in 1955. They had all been killed during the Soviet invasion, he said, while he was in the army.

  “You know some Ukrainians?” Jonas asked.

  “Sure. Vic Stasiuk. Johnny Bucyk. Bronco Horvath.”

  “Friends?” asked Jonas ominously.

  “Hockey players, Jonas,” Cooper said. Cooper still went to see his boyhood team, the Chicago Blackhawks, whenever they visited Madison Square Garden, Hull, Mikita and company. “I don’t know them personally. I was making a joke.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “They talk about trip to Florida, too. And Texas.”

  “Listen,” Cooper said. “I wouldn’t worry about it this if I were you. I don’t know any Ukrainians and I’m not going on any trips.”

  “All right, sir,” Jonas said. “You be careful. The Ukrainians, the kill people.”

  “Got it,” Cooper said. He climbed the stairs. He arrived at his apartment and crashed hard. From time to time during his labors, Cooper had been in a few seedy blue-collar bars in the old Ukrainian neighborhood on the Lower East Side near Tomkins Square Park, not far from Lauren’s current tub-in-kitchen abode. Aside from that he didn’t know any Ukrainians. Someone somewhere must have been mistaken. But considering everything that was going on, the warning unnerved him.

  He reminded himself: He had a permit for his pistol. Maybe he needed to start carrying it regularly, instead of just occasionally. He had made more than his share of enemies in his day. If some adversary was going to demand a day of reckoning, Ukrainian or otherwise, he needed to be ready.

  Chapter 81

  Richard Nixon was especially anxious as October drew to a close. He had entered the fall campaign with a formidable lead over Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but the polls were narrowing as working-class Democrats returned to their party and Johnson’s efforts to make peace made positive news. Nixon believed he would prevail unless a major event reset the political topography. He knew that Johnson knew that too.

  The leaders of the Soviet Union knew it, also. Kremlin leaders had never much liked the red-baiting, anti-communist Nixon. To keep him from the Oval Office, and help Humphrey become president, they began to meddle in the U.S. presidential campaign, pressing their clients in North Vietnam to agree to a ceasefire and hold constructive talks to end the war. It was nothing new; from Lenin onward through the Twentieth Century, Kremlin leaders had played a hand wherever possible in American politics. They had put tacit support behind Roosevelt in 1940 and Henry Wallace in 1948. Why stop now?

  In a nationally
televised address on October 31, 1968, Johnson announced a cessation of the three-year U.S. bombing campaign. With Americans relieved at the possibility of peace from the bloody and divisive war, polls showed Humphrey moving into a tie with Nixon. Richard Nixon, not content to just violate the Logan Act, also sought assistance from Chiang Kai-shek, the president of Taiwan. Nixon ordered his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew, to threaten the CIA director, Richard Helms. Helms’s hopes of keeping his job under Nixon depended on his loyalty to Nixon. “Tell him he does as we say,” Nixon said. “Or he hasn’t got the job after election day.”

  Agnew, Nixon’s hatchet man, contacted Helms by telephone on Sunday.

  On Saturday, November 2, 1968, Anna Chennault phoned Bùi Diễm, South Vietnam's ambassador to the United States under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. She delivered a message, "Hold on!” she said. “Nixon is going to win.”

  Diem and Thieu held on. They refused phone calls from the administration. Over the weekend, President Thieu of South Vietnam announced he would not attend the talks.

  Peace hopes vanished. Privately, Lyndon Johnson knew he had been snookered. He snarled about “political sabotage that can also be called treason.” In Johnson’s view, activities beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat had sabotaged a potential peace treaty.

  But Johnson, once again, was hamstrung.

  He hesitated to call out his opponent’s collaboration with a foreign power when he had no proof.

  Chapter 82

  Two days before the election, Misha, the Ukrainian, looked through the sight of his weapon. He could barely believe his eyes. Cooper had come into his apartment with a woman. The assassin, dressed in slacks and a single T-shirt within which the muscles of his chest and arms bulged, turned off all the lights in his apartment. He sat down at the scope of his rifle and watched. As he had so many times previously in his life, he waited in distant ambush. On a table a few feet away lay his loaded pistol.