(1976) The R Document (14 page)

Adcock nodded.

‘Sit down, Harry.’

Tynan moved around his desk and settled into his swivel chair, as Adcock lowered himself into the seat across from him.

Tynan lay back in his swivel chair, arms crossed on his barrel chest, eyes set on the ceiling.

After a while, he spoke. ‘I thought he was a nice kid, one of those lightweight intellectuals, still wet behind the ears. I also thought, considering that Noah brought him in, he was a team player. I’m not so sure of that anymore. I think he’s a smart-ass and I think he’s definitely looking for trouble.’

‘Like what, chief?’

‘Like dunking he can outsmart Vernon T. Tynan.’ The swivel chair groaned as he sat straight up in it. ‘You know, Harry, this building is J. Edgar Hoover’s monument. I know what I want my own monument to be. I want it to be the 35th Amendment ratified as part of the Constitution. I don’t care if I’m not remembered for anything else, as long as I’m remembered for that.’

‘You will be, chief,’ said Adcock fervently.

‘Yeah? Well, I want to be sure our Mr Collins understands that, too. I think we better start keeping an eye on him. Not only here - but in California.’ His pause was almost a threat. ‘Especially in California. Yeah. Let’s talk awhile about that, Harry - about Mr Collins and about California. I’ve got a few ideas. Let’s try them on for size.’

Despite the speech he was scheduled to deliver, and the damn television show, Chris Collins had looked forward to the California trip. He had purposely kept his plans light. He would arrive in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon, check into his favorite suite at the St Francis Hotel, and meet, over drinks, with two of the United States Attorneys from California’s four judicial districts. After that, he would wait for his nineteen-year-old son, Josh, to come over from Berkeley. Following their reunion - he had not seen the boy in eight months - they would go out to Ernie’s and enjoy a long and leisurely catch-up dinner.

It hadn’t worked out that way at all.

Two days before his departure from Washington, Collins had telephoned Josh to set their date.

There had been the obligatory questions and the abbreviated answers.

‘How’ve you been, Josh?’

‘Busy as hell. Too much homework. Lots of outside activities.’

‘Well, how is school?’

‘You know. The usual.’

‘Still as excited about Political Science?’

‘Sure, if they didn’t make it so boring.’

‘Have you seen your mother lately?’

“Not since her birthday. I went to Santa Barbara for

two days. Helen’s okay. Only she can’t get off my back.’

‘How’s her husband?’

‘I guess they get along. Me, I can’t stand him. What’s there to talk about to an over-the-hill tennis pro with arthritis? And worse, he insists on calling me “son”.’

Collins could not resist laughing, and finally Josh had laughed, too. Actually, he was not a humorless boy; indeed, he was very sharp when it was worth his trying, and extremely intense about the world around him. Physically, he was very much like his father. He was tall - over six feet; wiry, with a gaunt face.

Collins had asked him if he still had his beard. He replied that he had only half as much as before. Mary had insisted that he trim it. Yes, he was still living with Mary in unwedded bliss, and she’d recently redone their apartment on Stuart Street, had repainted the interior herself. He was thoughtful enough to inquire about Karen, whom he’d met only twice. Collins had weighed telling him about her pregnancy, and finally had told him he would have a brother or sister in five months. To Collins’ relief, Josh was delighted and full of congratulations.

‘When are we going to see you both?’ Josh had inquired.

‘That’s why I’m calling,’ Collins had replied. ‘You’ll be seeing me this week if you’re free. I’m flying to San Francisco Thursday.’

He went on to explain the purpose of his visit to California.

There was a brief silence, and then Josh had asked, ‘Are you going to be plugging the 35th Amendment in that speech, Dad?’

Collins had hesitated, sensing storm warnings. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because it’s my job. I’m part of the Administration.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good reason, Dad.’

‘Well, there are other reasons. There are some good things to be said for the 35th.’

‘I can’t think of one,’ Josh had retorted. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I told you I was busy with outside activities. Well,

I’m busy, every spare moment I have, fighting the passage of that Amendment. I might as well tell you -I joined Tony Pierce’s group; I’m an investigator for Defenders of the Bill of Rights. We’re going to make a fight of it in California.’ ‘I wish you luck. I’m afraid you’re going to lose. The President is putting everything he has behind the bill.’

‘The President,’ Josh had said with contempt. ‘His head is as empty as a volleyball. He’d push the whole country under the rug if he could. Tynan’s the one we’re all worried about. He’s a Xerox of Hitler -‘

‘I wouldn’t be that hard on him, Josh. He’s a policeman, with a tough job to do. He’s anything but a Hitler.’ ‘I can prove you’re wrong,’ Josh had burst out. “What do you mean?’

‘The advocates of the 35th are always arguing it’ll never be invoked except in a serious emergency, like an attempt to overthrow the Government.’ ‘That’s absolutely correct.’

‘Dad, I think the people behind the bill - I’m not saying you, I mean Tynan and his gang - they intend to do much more with it, once they have the Amendment.’ ‘Do much more with it? Like what?’ ‘I don’t want to discuss this on the phone. But I can prove it.’

‘Prove what?’ Collins had demanded, trying to contain himself.

‘I’ll show you. I’ll take you there. We’ve all investigated it, and it’ll open your eyes. You’ve got to see for yourself to believe it. We - meaning some of us in Pierce’s DBR - were saving this as one of the big things we want to expose a few days before the legislature votes on the 35th. But my friends aren’t going to object if I show it to you, considering who you are. Maybe this’ll change your mind.’

‘I’m open to anything reasonable. If you won’t tell me what it is on the phone, perhaps you can tell me where it is. You understand, my time is very limited.’

‘It’ll be worth your time. I’ll take you there. Do me a favor, Dad. Do me just this one favor.’

Collins had faltered. Never in recent memory had his son asked a favor of him.

‘Well, maybe I can make the time. What do we do?’

‘We meet in Sacramento at noon Thursday.’

‘Sacramento?’

‘From there we drive to a place called Newell … ’

And that was how, because he was a father as well as the Attorney General and because he loved his son, he had flown into Sacramento, California, instead of San Francisco, after having transferred his meeting with the United States Attorneys to Los Angeles.

He had arrived in Sacramento just before noon. Josh -clean, sunburned, beard neatly trimmed - had been waiting, clearly filled with an inner excitement. After embracing, they had gone straight to a rented Mercury. They had been followed by Special Agent Hogan, who would accompany them, while the relief agent, Oakes, awaited their return that evening, when Collins was scheduled to fly directly to Los Angeles.

Now, after what had seemed hours on the road, Josh assured him that they were nearing their destination. He had not, and would not, divulge their actual destination. ‘You’ve got to see it for yourself,’ he had repeated several times.

As their driver had headed north on U.S. Highway 5 to Weed, and then veered northeast on U.S. 97 to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and then had backtracked into California again, Collins had the growing feeling that he had too easily succumbed to what would prove to be a wild-goose chase, a teen-ager’s paranoidal trip. Nevertheless, he tried to remain good-natured about it, smoking, attempting to divert with small talk, meanwhile feeling pleasure in the presence of his gangling son.

Josh, for his part, while adamantly secretive about what he intended to show his father, was anything but silent about the way he and his group felt about the 35th Amendment.

He was arguing against it again. ‘One of the few things great about this country is the Bill of Rights,’ he was saying. ‘The 1st through the 10th Amendments guarantee the freedom of religion, press, speech, assembly, petition, and they give us freedom from search, give protection to those accused of crimes, promise trial by jury, do not permit excessive

fines or cruel punishment -‘

Collins wriggled restlessly in his seat. Why do sons assume their fathers know nothing? Or have forgotten everything?

‘ - and now along comes the 35th Amendment to suspend all these freedoms and rights.’

‘All bills of rights regard liberties as relative, not absolute,’ Collins suggested quietly. ‘As Emerson said, constitutions are merely the lengthened shadows of men. They are invented by men to protect themselves from one another. When they fail to do that, when the fate of human society is at stake, more drastic measures must be taken by men for society’s own sake.’

Josh refused to accept that. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘There’s only one test. Look around the world. Every truly free government has a bill of rights that can’t be tampered with by the government. Only dictatorships, tyrannies, unfree governments have no bills of rights or have bills of rights that are qualified and can be revoked by the parties in power in peacetime. England had the Magna Charta in 1215 and the Bill of Rights of 1689, and these and other bills gave the English freedom from arbitrary arrest, the guarantee of trial by jury, freedom of speech and petition, habeas corpus, protection of life, liberty, property. France has a Bill of Rights based on the Rights of Man and Citizen, enacted in 1789, six weeks after the fall of the Bastille. Here again the rights - of equality for all citizens, of care for women and children and for the aged and infirm, of work without discrimination, of social security and education, and so forth -are not qualified by any trick 35th Amendment. The same holds true in West Germany and Italy. Why, in West Germany their Bill of Rights cannot be amended, the way we’re trying to amend ours. But you go to other countries that have bills of rights, mainly Communist or dictatorship countries, and you always find a joker in the deck. Take Cuba. Freedom of expression guaranteed, sure, except that your private property can be confiscated “as the government deems necessary to counteract acts of sabotage, terrorism, or any other counter-revolutionary activities”. Take Russia. Equal rights for all, no matter what nationality or sex, except for the “foes of socialism”. Or take Yugoslavia. Their

constitution provides for freedom of speech, press, and so on, and then comes the joker. “These freedoms and rights shall not be used by anyone to overthrow the foundations of the socialist democratic order … to endanger the peace … to disseminate national, racial, or religious hatred or intolerance, or to incite to crime, or in any manner offend public decency.” Who decides that? Now your President and FBI Director are trying to stick a joker in our deck of liberties. Believe me, if California says Yes to the 35th, that’s the end of freedom and justice for all of us. Hell, I’d wind up in the slammer just for talking to you this way.’

Exhausted from listening, Collins said wearily, ‘Josh, the horrors you predict will never happen. The 35th will be used to protect you - and in fact, it may never have to be invoked at all.’

‘Never be invoked at all? Wait‘11 you see what I’m going to show you in a few minutes.’

‘We’re almost there?’

Josh peered through the windshield, over the shoulders of the driver and Hogan in the front seat. ‘Yes.’

Collins looked out the side window into the glare of the sun. America was many countries with dramatically different landscapes, and this was America at its most desolate. In the past hour he had seen little except dry lakes, alkali beds, abandoned farms overgrown by scrub, an occasional gasoline station posing as a town. Now they were passing through a hard and forbidding terrain, mostly old lava flows and volcanic pumice and no signs of life.

Suddenly, there was life, a few people chatting in front of a store, a few others gathered near a gas pump, some shanties, and a weatherbeaten sign reading Newell.

Josh gave the driver directions, and after a brief interval told him to stop.

Collins was bewildered. ‘Where are we?’

‘Tule Lake,’ Josh announced triumphantly.

Collins’ brow furrowed. Tule Lake. It had the sound of an old and familiar place.

‘Created in 1942, eight weeks after Pearl Harbor, by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066,’ said Josh. ‘Japanese Americans were considered security risks. So

110,000 of them were rounded up - even though two-thirds were United States citizens - and they were imprisoned in ten camps or relocation centers. Tule Lake was one of them, one of the worst of the American concentration camps, and 18,000 Japanese Americans were interned here.’

‘I don’t like that blot on our history any more than you do,’ said Collins. ‘But what’s it got to do with today - with the 35th Amendment?’

‘You can see for yourself.’ Josh opened the back door of the Mercury and stepped outside. Collins followed his son, standing in the dry hot wind trying to get his bearings. He realized, then, that they were near what appeared to be a huge modern farm or manufacturing plant of some kind -a series of brick buildings and corrugated huts in the distance set behind a new chain-link fence.

Collins pointed off. ‘Is that Tule Lake?’

‘It was’ said Josh with emphasis, ‘but it’s not anymore. It was our toughest concentration camp, built on a 26,000-acre dry lake bed. Now it’s something else, and that’s why I brought you here.’

‘Get to the point, Josh.’

‘All right. But before doing so, let me show you something that will make it clear.’ He’d been holding a large manila envelope and now he opened it and extracted a half dozen photographs and handed them to his father. ‘First, look at these. We got them from the Japanese American Citizens League. These photographs of the old camp were taken from this spot just one year ago. What do you see?’