Memorial Bridge (32 page)

"But
air force?
I can't land in an airliner at National Airport without my palms getting wet. I don't think you know what you're asking."

"Hell, do I look like a birdman? I'm not asking you to fly a secret mission into Berlin. I
am
asking you to help us keep the Russians from
finding out when someone else does, though. Your palms don't get wet at the thought of that, do they?"

"No."

"Good. And that's the last 'no' I'll take from you this time. I told you, this is conscription."

"I'm not saying no, Mr. Crocker."

"You're not saying yes either, I notice."

Dillon had been gripping the handle of his briefcase all this time. He released it. "Six months?"

"That's the commitment. You acquaint yourself with what's under way in the army. You already know some of how it goes. Learn everything. Decide what functions fit and what don't, what activities, what plans, what procedures and what command channels. I want your view of everything but personnel. That will be my problem. Yours is to give me an organizational blueprint that's so foolproof even military men can implement it. Six months. That's Hoover's limit of how long I can have you, but these initial six months before the new service hardens up are all I have anyway. We have to get the new operation up and running before the old ones, especially CIC and CID, can move to undermine it."

"How would they do that, if you're in charge?"

"They'll do it on the Hill. Every feudal baron in the Pentagon has his protector in Congress. And they will
all
be threatened by what you're doing. First they'll whisper, then they'll scream. And some congressman will listen. Like it or not, those knuckleheads on the Hill think they're in charge."

Dillon grinned. "They gave you the law you wanted, didn't they?"

"They're knuckleheads not to know what we are going to do with it. When Jimmy Forrestal and I get finished, the brass are going to be on permanent parade up there, accusing Congress of selling them out, when what they will have done is simply to have put some new men in charge of the American military." Crocker shook his head, imitating the generals' and admirals' stark disbelief. "And the new men in charge are all goddamn civilians! That is what 'centralization' in the National Security Act means. The military, which in the war came to regard itself as omnipotent, is about to be brought back into the corral of the U.S. Constitution. Is that important enough for you?" Suddenly Crocker seemed pissed off, but then Dillon read that as an imitation too, the imitation of a cross-examiner. Never ask a question you don't already
know the answer to. "Is that important enough for you to leave Chicago?"

"Yes, sir, it is."

"Do you agree then? Do you accept the job?"

"Absolutely."

Crocker pushed his chair back and hauled himself up. He leaned across to offer his hand. "Great, Sean, great!"

Sean's hand was dry. The sensation of strength in his fingers, his own and also Crocker's, filled him with pleasure.

"Have lunch with me then. We'll celebrate."

"I'm due at the director's office."

"I'll call Hoover. You and I have to talk. We'll have lunch."

Dillon pictured himself walking with this exemplary man into the sterling, exclusive room across the way. He imagined the preening patrician males of Washington looking up from their chats; he imagined a footman announcing his name.

"All right," Dillon said.

Crocker came out from behind his table. When he took Dillon's arm it was partly an intimate gesture with which to lead the way, and partly a cripple's move for support.

"And we can talk about getting your family back here right away. How is your dear wife?"

"She's fine."

"We'll pull some strings and get you a place to live that she will love."

"That won't be a problem, sir." Dillon was crisp. When had he made
this
decision? Life without Cass? Life without his boy? No warm bundle on his chest each night? "Since it's just six months, my wife and son won't need to come out."

"Really?" Crocker let Dillon lead the way into the corridor. "But you'll want to talk to Mrs. Dillon before making up your mind."

"No need, sir." What a surprise, the relief he felt, although it made him feel a bit ashamed. He would not have to deal with Cass or her proposal after all. "I'm sure of it," he said. "They won't be coming to Washington."

The Cold War took its shape from a pair of strange springtime suicides occurring within a year of each other. In both cases a senior government official plunged out a window to a jolting, gruesome end, flattened on concrete far below. The first was the death in Prague of Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. It happened on the night of March 10, 1948, and because Masaryk was identified with elements inside Czechoslovakia which had resisted the establishment of a Moscow-run Communist regime, his death was taken as a symbol of the demise of the Czech republic itself. As such, it sent a shock wave rolling west, where Masaryk was assumed to have been murdered by Stalin's agents. Czechoslovakia's fall represented the final consolidation of the Russian theft of Eastern and Central Europe, and was taken as dramatic evidence of aggressive Soviet intentions toward the rest of the Continent. Masaryk's death precipitated what came to be called, in Washington, the Spring Crisis. American generals and admirals sounded alarms on Capitol Hill and succeeded, by the way, in derailing the two-pronged process of demobilization and centralization under civilian authority that had been under way for two years. "Things look black," Truman wrote. "A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it." What he decided was to get ready for all-out war at once.

Such was the "crisis" that no one seemed to notice how useful it was,
in fact, both to the President, whose heretofore uncertain election prospects were enormously improved, and to the generals in the Pentagon whose very jobs were saved by the "shocking" events of that spring. Families all over the country understood that the emergency was real when, at Truman's urging, a new draft law was rushed through Congress. America seemed relieved, really, to look for rescue again to its sons in uniform. And not only sons; the newly empowered civilian commissioners of the AEC were shunted aside as the generals were given custody once more of atomic weapons. A quickly drawn-up defense appropriations bill with huge outlays for increasing A-bomb production was passed without objection. The military budget doubled overnight. Within weeks of Masaryk's death, the United States entered into a formal new pact with the French and the British, committing itself, in what would become NATO, to the defense of nations outside the Western Hemisphere for the first time since 1778.

The pressures generated by this sudden reversal of national direction bore down on the mind and psyche of one man more than any other, hard-driving James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense. Forrestal had been a Wall Street investment banker, and it was he who had prevailed upon Randall Crocker to come back to Washington to help reassert civilian control of the military. Forrestal had served during the war as secretary of the navy, but his role beginning in the autumn of 1947 was to be the architect of a new, streamlined, combined military built around the axis of air power and the atomic bomb. He had expected the navy and the air force to be maneuvering against each other, but not against him. When the Spring Crisis led to the sudden mushrooming of the entire military, with the revitalized draft for the army, the promise of new bomber wings for the air force and the prospect of a new fleet of aircraft carriers for the navy, generals and admirals not only intensified their squabbling with each other, but also began to challenge Forrestal. The one thing they all agreed on was that centralized command was a bad idea, and to hear their version of it, unification of the services would play into the hands of the newly threatening Russians. Forrestal fought the generals, but the lines of his own authority became unclear as Congress and the President himself steadily gave the service chiefs what they wanted.

Having used the spring war scare to defeat the secretary's efforts at consolidation, the military settled back into its old systems of inde
pendent fiefdoms which cooperated with each other only when a common enemy forced them to. The Russians were such an enemy, but Forrestal discovered to his horror that he was one as well. For month after month he stalked the labyrinth of the Pentagon, but with increasing ineffectiveness, irascibility and, on occasion, irrationality. Finally, with no support from the all too political civilians across the river, and with no power over the unleashed warlords in the corridors around him, he was replaced as secretary in March of 1949, exactly one year after Masaryk's "suicide."

The war alert of the previous spring had become institutionalized. In one short year public hysteria about the Soviet menace had come to seem normal, but by then James Forrestal's hysteria was also private, and not normal at all. On his last day in the Pentagon an aide found him sitting alone in a small dark room, wearing his hat, his eyes fixed on a point in the empty air before him. After Forrestal was taken away, generals heard and repeated in the corridors that he had run though the streets near his house, crying, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" The generals knew better than anyone that it had not been Russians who had so undone the first secretary of defense, but even his strange demise, by fueling American fears, which in turn fueled their return to power, served the generals' purposes. Forrestal was admitted as a psychiatric patient to the naval hospital in Bethesda, where within days he opened the window of his room on the sixteenth floor and jumped.

That was the unlikely situation into which Sean Dillon found himself so unexpectedly inserted in the period just before Jan Masaryk's ominous "defenestration." His status as a special assistant to the secretary of the air force amazed him. Bureau work had always seemed important, a defense if not of the great virtues, then of social cohesion or good government. But those had been things at a distance, like clouds passing behind the branches of a tree, compared to the sense of urgency he had now, moving through rooms in which the real fate of the world itself was being decided.

Dillon had nearly been taken under at first by an eerie feeling of dislocation in an unfamiliar postwar Washington. As a civilian in the hypermartial Pentagon, he had no standing of his own, apart from Crocker. It depressed him to return at night to a dreary furnished room alone. Sometimes he was so tired he slept on top of his blankets, fully
clothed, and always his last, fleeting and forever unexpressed thoughts were of Cass and of their son.

He dealt with the unwelcome loneliness by working all the harder, throwing himself into his Pentagon assignment with diligence rare even for that driven place. It was always dark when he left the building at the end of the day, and dark when he returned in the morning. He had become a man without daylight, and why should he not have felt dislocated?

As usual, his was one of the first cars to pull into the remorseless expanse of the Pentagon parking lot on that day in May 1948. He walked up the sequence of broad, gleaming terrazzo ramps to the third floor of E-Ring, his footsteps echoing loudly in the empty halls. After retrieving his papers and charts from his office, Dillon went by himself, well ahead of schedule, into the air secretary's briefing room where he was at last to present his report.

The fact of his having completed his work would alone have accounted for the current of adrenaline, but the prospect of contention had quickened his juices too. He had come into this room early to reacquaint himself with the space, set up his boards and stand at the lectern—not to rehearse, exactly, but to imagine himself efficiently making his points before a group of men who would want nothing to do with anything he said. The predictable resistance of the brass would be Crocker's problem, a new version of the most familiar problem he and the other civilian secretaries already had.

The room was large and appointed like a corporate boardroom. Dillon had attended briefings here, at Crocker's side like a satchel carrier. But he had never stood behind its lectern in the circle of light that washed down from a pair of aimed ceiling cones. The rest of the room was illuminated by the new long fluorescent tubes hidden in valences, soft light spilling on the walls, but also cold and unnatural. A stretch of drawn blue draperies so blanketed one wall it was impossible to know for certain that there were windows behind it. He resisted an impulse to throw those draperies open, to let in the real light of dawn. Instead, he let his eyes drift past the podium to the wall which was entirely taken up with an unclothed movie screen. He remembered watching, weeks before, the grainy images of troops clubbing citizens while the throaty narrator had described the latest purges, arrests and executions then taking place in Czechoslovakia.

Taking up the long, third wall opposite the draperies was a map of the world, not the usual Mercator projection, but a view of the globe as seen from above the North Pole. Instead of Kansas at its center, this map had the massive white bull's-eye of the ice cap.

Versions of this same map covered walls in the chief of staff's
office
and in the Air Staff conference room, and Dillon remembered the day it had dawned on him that this air force view of the world, by emphasizing the Soviet Union's ominous proximity to Alaska and Canada, exploded the Mercator-reinforced illusion of American invulnerability behind a pair of protecting oceans. The point was to undercut the navy's claim to a mammoth share of the new defense appropriations. Dillon recalled how shocked he was at first by the bitter conflict between the leaders of the two service branches—how it had engulfed Forrestal—but even he had grown accustomed to Pentagon infighting. Now the argument had shifted to Capitol Hill where the choice would be made between the new long-range bomber the air force wanted and the navy's new generation of aircraft carriers.

The fourth wall of the secretary's briefing room was painted the unlikely blue of robins' eggs, but dominating it were four dark oil paintings depicting dramatic scenes of warplanes in combat: a single bomber diving toward a factory complex amid puffs of antiaircraft fire; a pair of fighters swooping at each other; a downspinning plane with sharks' teeth painted on its nose and flames streaming from an engine; a fleet of bombers in formation high above a desolate, burning landscape.