(1964) The Man (24 page)

In the Oval Office of the White House, the medal was pinned on Otto Beggs by President Eisenhower. There were columns of photographs and feature stories, and one of Gertrude’s gifts was the first scrapbook. There were dozens of well-paying executive jobs offered him, and he took the best, and left it, and took another, and then a third and a fourth, and left these also. After Oregon and Korea the jobs were too tame and caging. He wanted challenge and danger. He wanted—Gertrude’s word—“clippings.”

His nostalgia, in his waking dreams, was for that climactic moment in the White House when President Eisenhower had given him the Medal of Honor. He was jobless, but not concerned, because Gertrude had saved their money, and he was telling friends that he was “looking around for the right sort of thing.” Then one noon, in a barber’s chair, leafing through a magazine, he found exactly what he was seeking. There was a coverline article commemorating the death of a White House police officer who had been shot down before Blair House in the assassination attempt on President Truman by two Puerto Ricans. The alert and gallant White House police and Secret Service agents on guard had saved the President’s life in a gun battle. The story then went on to explain the role of the White House police, as a branch of the Secret Service, and told about the history and the daring adventures of the Secret Service itself, from the time after the murder of President McKinley when its prime responsibility became that of protecting the life of the President.

Intrigued by this one rare job that put a premium on courage, that promised drama, Otto Beggs wrote to the Chief of Secret Service, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., relating his background, his keen interest, and applying for a position as a special White House agent.

What followed came quickly. Beggs was summoned to prove himself. With enthusiasm, he took the United States Civil Service test, the four-hour written observation and memory test of the Secret Service, the thorough physical examination. He overcame each obstacle, including the personal interviews, with ease. He received his appointment to the Secret Service at the beginner’s salary of $5,000 a year, with the assurance that once he had experience he would be raised gradually to $10,000 a year, and once he became a supervisor of top grade he could earn $16,000 a year.

While the money was not what he had earned in business, as Gertrude kept reminding him, he pointed out to her that it was more than sufficient for their needs. He told her that he would be serving his country again, which was worth any monetary sacrifice, and the prestige that he would acquire through the years might make him a political figure with the attendant wealth necessary to insure their future. He did not tell her that he felt he was being paid for having fun.

And, indeed, for Otto Beggs the beginnings were challenging. His enthusiasm mounted as he attended the Secret Service’s special training school in Washington. He was instructed in the use of the most modern submachine guns, revolvers, riot guns. He was instructed in judo, first aid, fire fighting, parachute landing, wrestling, psychiatry. He was indoctrinated into the mysteries of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare. When his basic training was concluded, he was casually asked what position in the Secret Service interested him the most. He was frank. He knew that the procedure was for a newcomer to spend two years in the field, apprehending counterfeiters and forgers, before being considered for an elite job in the Executive Mansion. Nevertheless, he felt that his background warranted his requesting immediate assignment to the exclusive White House Detail. He had no interest in chasing petty criminals. He desired only to protect the nation’s leading official from assassins. Having spoken his piece, he waited with confidence. He did not wait long. The word came from the Secretary of the Treasury himself. Otto Beggs had been assigned to become a member of the White House Detail. He was not surprised. He knew that the old Medal of Honor had counted for something.

The first year was agreeable, if somewhat disappointing. He had expected his supervisors, on the second floor of the East Wing of the White House, to recognize his unique merit by assigning him, at once, to be at the President’s elbow. Instead he found himself with the police at the East, then the South, then the West guardhouse entrances to the Executive Mansion. When he was assigned to what was cheerfully labeled “the diaper detail,” off and on watching over President Kennedy’s daughter and son, President Lyndon Johnson’s two daughters, his hopes soared again.

Encouraged, optimistic about his future in the early days of the “diaper detail,” he had insisted upon buying a house that would be their own. Impulsively he purchased a small, comfortable two-story residence off lower Connecticut Avenue. He crowed over his bargain, but Gertrude did not hide her apprehension. While the neighborhood was still genteel middle-class, it was only a few blocks from a bursting lower-class Negro section. Beggs was not concerned. The Negroes, he was positive, would stay in their place. If they invaded his neighborhood, he and Gertrude could sell at a profit. By then he would have his promotion, raise in salary, and they could find their way to one of the more expensive locations in suburban Washington. Gertrude was not convinced. She felt that the Negro invasion was on its way and her husband’s promotion was not.

As ever, Gertrude was proved right on both scores. The Negro invasion began slowly, at the perimeter, and then cut in deeper and faster. White homeowners, prospering at their government jobs and businesses, seeing a chance for additional profits, sold off and moved elsewhere. The neighborhood streets that Beggs liked to stroll along in the evening were soon one-third black, and several years later two-thirds black. Beggs’s favorite haunt, a congenial corner tavern known as the Walk Inn, with its bar and booths and variety of pinball machines, began to undergo a transformation, too. In the beginning, when he went there for his evening beer, Beggs joined a community of white neighbors, men who were his equals and who respected his important job and contested with him over the pinball machines. Gradually his friends disappeared, one by one, and there remained strangers with dark skins, men with whom Beggs had nothing in common.

From time to time, bowing to Gertrude’s increasingly shrill demands that they move, he accompanied his wife to suburbs like Silver Spring and Bethesda to see what the housing developments had for sale. It was for his sons, Ogden and Otis, for their better school conditions, that he did this. But the new pseudo colonials were too expensive. After each of these frustrating explorations, Beggs promised his distressed wife that a promotion was forthcoming and the move would soon be made possible.

Incredibly, the promotion did not come. Within the White House, and about its spacious grounds, Otto Beggs was transferred from one inconsequential job to another. Other agents surrounded the President’s Oval Office, walked with the great man, traveled with him. Beggs remained chained to routine and peripheral duty. When T. C. was elected, his hopes lifted once more. A change in the occupancy of the White House always gave promise of a change in his duties. And, indeed, there was a change. He found himself assigned to the West Wing lobby, occupied mostly by the press and visitors who called upon T. C. He did not mind, because he liked the reporters, who were important and who occasionally mentioned him or quoted him in their feature stories. But Gertrude would give him no peace.

One day, before his shift, he called upon Chief of Secret Service Hugo Gaynor, waited in the oak-paneled, red-carpeted receiving room, and had his embarrassing interview. Gaynor was impatient, evasive, and pledged to Beggs that he would be kept in mind for the next promotion. Upset, Beggs sought his immediate boss, Lou Agajanian, in the Secret Service office off the West Wing lobby, and Agajanian said that he, too, would see what he could do. A short time later, eating in the President’s Navy Mess in the downstairs basement, he overheard some of his fellow agents gossiping, unaware that he was within earshot. They were analyzing one another and their absent colleagues. He thought he heard his name mentioned. He heard expressions like “workhorse” and “not too bright” and “living in the past.” He was not certain if they were referring to himself, and chose to believe that they were not. He did not repeat what he had overheard to Gertrude, who was too antagonistic to be a confidante any longer, but he thought about it for a number of nights in the Walk Inn, where his beer intake had gone up from one to three steins per sitting.

What he thought about was that while he liked his job, he had become increasingly disappointed in it. From the first, he had assumed it promised responsibility and danger and high adventure, countless opportunities for a fearless individual to prove himself under fire. Instead it had proved a job like almost any other, no more hazardous than had he remained a stockbroker or public relations man. Perhaps the disappointment, the monotony of each day’s shift, had dulled him. Perhaps the routine had made him less lively, less enthusiastic, less sharp and aggressive. Perhaps Gaynor and Agajanian saw this, and felt that he could not be trusted as one of the six to ten agents assigned to be closest to the President, or as one who deserved to be made a supervisor. He did not know.

Yet, despite Gertrude’s recent nagging that he quit the Secret Service and go into the real estate business with her successful rebuke of a brother, Austin, he could not bear to make the change. As a realtor, he might acquire money, but there would surely be the grave of anonymity. As an agent, he could always hope for recognition. He could also, no matter what the routine, feel he was in the center of life, where anything might happen. Once, some unimportant newspaperman, a kid named George Murdock, had interviewed him. Well, despite what the big reporters said, Murdock wasn’t that unimportant. His Tri-State Syndicate did have twelve newspapers, even if half of them were only weeklies. Anyway, this kid, George Murdock, had asked him what he liked about being an agent and what he did not like. He did not remember his reply, but what Murdock quoted him as saying was, “To me, the appeal of the Secret Service is the same appeal most law enforcement jobs hold. But I don’t consider it a mere job. If I did, I would have left it long ago for higher-paying executive positions that have been offered to me. There is more to it than merely doing a job. As an agent, you feel you are doing a real service to everyone. There is enough going on to keep you on your toes. There’s no routine or rut to bore you. Maybe it’s not as glamorous as people think, but there is plenty of pressure every minute, and there’s no margin for error. Our most important training is to cope with suddenness. Well, when you have to be alert for suddenness, you haven’t time to be bored.” George Murdock had given him a clipping of the interview as it appeared in the Sandusky, Ohio,
Register
. He supposed no one important, like the President or Gaynor or Agajanian, ever saw it. But he had seen it. It was on page seven of his third scrapbook.

All that had gone through his head last night, before he fell asleep as dawn came. Now, fully dressed, ready for breakfast and his daily shift that began in an hour, he stood immobilized in front of his scrapbooks. He opened the uppermost one and turned to page seven. There it was. He reread Murdock’s quote. He had remembered it correctly, word for word.

“Otto!” It was Gertrude screaming at him from the foot of the stairs. “Otto, you want to see your sons before they go to school, or not?”

“Coming!” he shouted back, almost gaily.

He felt
good
. He could not wait to get to work. The West Wing lobby would be a madhouse today. He would be interviewed about Sonenberg and McCune, who had died last night in Frankfurt with the President. He would think of what he should say, on the way to work. He might be too busy to say anything. He knew that Agajanian or Gaynor would be waiting for him.

He went, light-footed, out of the bedroom and down the stairs, as light and quick as he had been at Oregon and in Korea. Although he now weighed 210 pounds instead of 190, and maybe his face was a bit fleshier and blotched from beering, he was proud that he was still strong and fast and without an inch of flabbiness.

Almost breezily he entered the dining room, where Gertrude, in her usual early morning disarray, was trying to force Ogden, his ten-year-old, and Otis, who was eight, to eat their plates clean. Settling down to spear a waffle, he noticed, as he often had recently, that Gertrude, once pleasantly thin of face and trim of figure, had become sharp around the nose and mouth and baggier beneath the spotted housecoat. He noticed, too, that neither she nor his sons had acknowledged him with so much as a good morning. This time he would permit no disrespect to intrude on his good cheer.

“Well, Gertie, what’s the bad news today?” he said with a grin.

He had almost forgotten how much this greeting, which he had been using lately to anticipate and blunt her shrill attacks, infuriated her.

Her head swung toward him, threatening as a machine gun. What unholy hour did you get to sleep?”

“I don’t know. Two or three.” He buttered his waffles and poured syrup over them. “I couldn’t take my eyes off the television screen. What a night.”

“Apparently you were able to take your eyes off it long enough while my brother was here. I suppose you went to that frightful saloon?”

“Just for cigarettes.” He sliced off a piece of waffle and was pleased to find it limp and cold. “Then I guess I walked around. I as pretty shook up by that Frankfurt thing.”

“I didn’t know what to say to Austin. He only wants to help you. Even if he is my brother, he doesn’t have to.”

“I appreciate it,” Beggs said grimly. He stared at the tops of his sons’ heads. “Ogden—Otis—where’s your manners? I haven’t even heard hello.”

Both their sandy-haired heads went up and down. “Hello, Pop . . . hello.”

He might have been a stick of wood for all they cared, he thought. Gertrude had done a thorough job of brainwashing them against him. A few years ago they would have been swarming over him, tugging, hugging, pestering him for more stories of derring-do on the Oregon gridiron, on the Korean battlefields, on the perils of his White House job. They had looked up to him, admired him. Only Gertrude’s increased and open daily hectoring had reduced his past heroism and authority to his present symbol of failure.