The Redhunter (26 page)

I assume you will drive. Drive out Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda. From Bethesda to Rockville, from Rockville to Gaithersburg.
Then to Damascus, Mt. Airy, Taylorsville, Westminster. A road map will give you the route numbers. Route 140 is Main Street,
Westminster. Drive out 140 (towards Pennsylvania) for three miles beyond Westminster. There a concrete road comes in to 140,
but does not cross it. This is Route 496, the only concrete road you will meet above Westminster. Drive out 496 two and 7/10
miles. We are there, on your left, we are back from 496 on a hill; you have to turn left down a dirt country road for a short
distance; then right at the mailbox into our lane. At the corner of 496 and that country road there is one of those metal
Guernsey Cattle Club signs which says: Chambers. In addition, anybody in the county can tell you where we are. I look forward
to seeing you.

It was warm and sunny when they emerged from the car in Maryland farm country. Esther Chambers, slim and ascetic, her gray
hair austerely brushed back, opened the door of the farmhouse. She kissed Nixon, who introduced her to Jean Kerr, Joe McCarthy,
and Harry Bontecou.

They heard a “Hello!” It was Chambers, coming from the red barn. Of medium height, pronouncedly heavy, his face round, his
lips parted in a smile of formal greeting. He wore khaki work pants and a loose white sport shirt. He was perspiring heavily.
He wiped his face and hands with a handkerchief, shook hands, and asked them in to the comfortable living room. “I think we’ll
need the fan.” He went to turn it on.

They sat around the large old coffee table on a sofa and three armchairs in the book-crammed living room, the foliage in the
surrounding trees and bushes now dimming the window light. On the mantelpiece were photographs of the two Chambers children,
the girl, Ellen, a student at Smith, the boy, John, attending high school locally and working on his father’s farm. Esther
Chambers asked who would like coffee, or tea?

They stayed through a lunch of potato salad and ham and mixed fruit. Chambers asked Nixon about Korea: “I don’t have my private
wire into the hotboxes anymore, and the people at
Time
don’t exactly keep me posted, but from the news I get it looks bad.”

Nixon confirmed that his own contacts were pessimistic about the scene there. “Kim Il Sung is anxious for an opportunity to
be bloodied in the Communist wars, that’s what I think.”

Chambers then turned to McCarthy. “What do you know about Oliver Edmund Clubb, Senator?”

McCarthy had tried earlier in the morning to persuade Chambers to call him Joe. Chambers had nodded quietly and, rather than
rebuff him by addressing him as “Senator” in the next breath, used neither the formal nor the informal address; but now, at
lunch, he slipped back into conventional habits. McCarthy knew better than to protest.

Clubb’s was one of the names given by McCarthy to the Tydings Committee. “Did you bring the file on Clubb with you, Jeanie?”
She had brought a large briefcase in the car. “No, but I can remember.” She spoke to Chambers. “Clubb was an important China
hand in the State Department. Born in Russia, came over in the thirties, I think, and was chief of the China desk in 1950.”

Chambers puffed lightly on his pipe. “Yes. I knew him slightly, met him in 1932 when he came into the
New Masses.”
Chambers’s reference was to the Communist monthly he was briefly associated with.

“Did he come in to the magazine as a party type?” McCarthy asked.

Chambers laughed. “Or do you mean, Was he just calling? … That was eighteen years ago. I don’t remember. The reason I asked
is the FBI came around a week or so ago with some names, and he was one of them. On the Korean business—I spotted Clubb’s
name in a quarterly—”he pointed to a large pile of magazines on a stand in the
corner of the room. “He was writing about Korea from the perspective of Peking.”

He looked at McCarthy. “They are giving you a very hard time. I wrote a chapter for my book yesterday, Wednesday, whenever.
I wrote of the quite extraordinary spontaneous mobilization of all the people who want to believe that it is problematically
un-American to spy for the Soviet Union, but it is certainly un-American to call attention to it.” He put down his pipe and
chuckled. “Now, Senator, you are not to say to anybody that Whittaker Chambers informed you that Oliver Edmund Clubb was spying
for the Soviet Union.”

Everybody laughed. And Nixon said, “I assume
everything we
talk about here is off the record, as usual, right, Whit?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Chambers dilated then on his favorite theme, the corruption of the West, documented by its failure to rise adequately to the
Soviet challenge. Nixon insisted it would soon be different. Truman was a lame duck, as also Dean Acheson. In two years it
would be different.

“In two years, the cow will jump over the moon,” Chambers remarked. And then he asked, “Who will it be when the Republicans
meet?” Chambers peered over at Nixon.

Nixon cleared his throat. “I don’t have any party secrets on that point, Whit. I don’t think there are any party secrets,
but it’s plain that a movement for Eisenhower is forming.”

McCarthy said he’d be more comfortable with Robert Taft.

Chambers said, “Esther and I saw him on television two or three days ago. We found him terribly stiff, didn’t you think, Esther?”

“Yes. Stiff, but decent. And I’d guess strong. Strong on the important points.” She rose. Everyone responded to her signal.
Time to go, to leave Chambers alone, whether to go back to his work or to rest for a bit. But Chambers sensed that there had
been a neglect of Senator McCarthy’s young aide. “Wait one minute,” he said to McCarthy. “I’d like to introduce Mr. Bontecou
to my son, John; he’s probably over by the shed.” He smiled at Harry, who bounced from his chair and out the door Chambers
held open.

They walked together in the direction of the barn. Chambers chatted, asking about Harry’s background. Harry spoke quickly,
compressing it all into the minute or two they had. He added this, that he
thought Chambers’s trial and the little he had written about it moving and memorable. “I think the whole world is waiting
for your book, Mr. Chambers.”

They had reached the barn door. Chambers opened it and called out, but John was not there. Chambers turned to Harry. “I can
see that you are close to the senator. He has grave responsibilities. I know you can help him. Do not hesitate to write to
me if you need—anything.” Harry was bowled over. An invitation, evidently sincere, to stay in touch with the poet—Harry thought
Chambers just that—the poet of the Western resistance to Communism. “Thanks so much, Mr. Chambers. I really appreciate that.”

Chambers smiled, and they met his guests coming out of the door. Extending his hand, McCarthy looked Chambers directly in
the face. “I really would like it if you would … think of me as Joe.”

Chambers smiled, nodded, and said quietly, “Yes. Thank you, Joe.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “Be careful. Be very careful.”

Back in the car they were silent. After a while Jean turned on the radio. The broadcaster spoke of 500,000 East Germans carrying
Lenin banners who had marched that afternoon in Berlin. He commented that the demonstration was an obvious answer to the 500,000
West Germans who had marched early in the month in protest against the Communist government in the eastern part of the city.

“You got to hand it to the Communists,” McCarthy commented. “If they want a mass demonstration, they get a mass demonstration.”

“Yup. And some of them, we got to believe, believe in what they’re cheering,” Nixon observed.

On June 4, several weeks into the Senate’s scheduled debate on McCarthy’s charges, the telephone rang at his apartment, two
blocks from the Capitol. A month after his return from what forever after would be referred to in his office as “Joe’s Wheeling
week,” McCarthy had unlisted his telephone number. He had heard the phone ring every few minutes for days on end, bringing
calls from newspaper reporters, radio interviewers, agitated citizens, and what he referred to, in the office, as “the spook
patrol.” (“We got enough spooks of our own,” he commented to Mary Haskell. “We don’t need somebody on the telephone prepared
to dictate the names of three hundred fifty homosexuals in the Bureau of Weights and Measures.”)

McCarthy, dressed in shorts and T-shirt, a half-consumed cup of coffee in hand, picked up the phone that now rang only when
dialed by the few who had his new, secret number, leaving him secure in the knowledge that whoever was calling was an intimate.

The voice wasn’t one he had heard before. It was a refined voice, a man whose words were soft-spoken, the syntax poised, his
message intriguing.

“Senator, I’m not permitted to tell you on whose behalf I am calling you. And there is no way you can, over the phone—or for
that matter in person—verify my credentials because I cannot give you any credentials to verify. I’d like your permission
to come to your
apartment and to take fifteen minutes of your time. It doesn’t matter what time of day, if you consent to see me, but you
should know that my message is urgent and may lead to information useful to you in the Senate investigation. May I come?”

“Hang on.” McCarthy put down the receiver and looked at his watch. He reached into the inside pocket of his brown tweed jacket,
lying over the couch, and pulled out his appointment book. He scanned the schedule.

He picked up the telephone again. “Is what you want to tell me something one of my aides can listen in on?”

“Under no circumstances. I am authorized to give my message only to you.”

Joe hesitated. “How soon could you get here?”

“Five minutes.”

Joe said, “Make it ten minutes. When you call up from downstairs, say it’s Henry calling. I’ll ring the door release.”

He hung up and dialed his office. “Hello, darling,” he greeted Marge, the telephone operator. “Put me through to Don.”

“Don? Joe. Look, it’s nine-oh-five. Go down, right now, to the delicatessen across the street from me. Yeah. That one. They
have a pay phone there. Now, I want you to ring my number here at exactly nine-twenty. I got somebody coming in. I don’t know
anything about him, but I have a hunch about it so I’m having a look. When I answer the phone, if I say, ‘Don, I’m running
late,’ then that means everything is okay—go on back to the office. If I say, ‘Okay, I’ll be right with you,’ that means I
want you to use your key and come to my apartment as soon as you can make it, which I figure should be like twenty-five seconds.
Got that? I hope so; I don’t have time to say it again.”

“Got it, Joe.”

He opened the door to a short man, neatly dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and regimental tie. His hair was full,
carefully parted, and there were signs of gray. He wore tortoise-shell glasses and carried a briefcase. Slung over his right
arm was a light tan overcoat he had evidently removed in the hallway.

“May I put down the coat?”

“Yes, sure,” Joe said. “Give it to me. Er, coffee?”

“No, thank you, but I will sit down.”

McCarthy indicated the chair at the other end of the room. He positioned himself by the telephone, behind the coffee table.

“So what’s up, Henry?”

The stranger made only the slightest effort at a smile at the reference to him as “Henry.”

“Senator, you may pretty soon infer who sent me, or try to do so. Do me the favor of not suggesting who you think it is, as
I can say nothing on that score.”

“Okay, Henry. So go ahead.”

“A woman who was for six years active in the government and served as a Soviet agent has turned. She has a very detailed story
to tell, we have reason to believe. She recounted to her interrogator the names of two people who worked closely with her.
One—there is reason to believe—is still in the government. The relevant people have tried to persuade her to tell the whole
story to the FBI or to the loyalty board of her government … division. At one point we thought she would. Then she changed
her mind. A few days later she left her lodging. May I smoke?”

“Sure.”

“She disappeared. Until yesterday we were afraid she might have left the country, or maybe—had an accident. Yesterday, almost
four weeks after we were last in touch, she telephoned—to a number—a number she had been given. And what she said was that
she would be willing to tell the whole story, but would tell it only to ‘Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.’ ”

McCarthy was a good listener. But a lifetime of poker playing had taught him not to reveal what he felt. He looked on, impassive.

“We asked if we ourselves could come by. She said she was not giving out her new address, but would give it to Senator McCarthy.
She did say that she is an hour’s driving distance from Washington. You can probably guess what else she said, but I have
to repeat it. She said that if she hears from anyone—anywhere—anything that she thinks traces to her initiative, no one will
ever hear from her again.”