The Redhunter (29 page)

“Mary. Send someone to the library tomorrow and get a photostatic copy of that jacket. Harry, did you read the book?”

“No, didn’t have time. But I called a professor of mine who knows the publishing business and asked him whether a blurb would
ever appear on the jacket of a book if the author of it didn’t approve.”

“Answer?—”Joe was impatient.

“All but inconceivable in such a situation as this. That means to me not only that Lattimore argued those positions, but that
he was proud to advertise them.”

They spent until eleven in the office. “Your real problem, Joe,” Jeanie said, “is you can’t do any thorough exposition of
the points you are trying to make, the way Tydings is running the show. I think you’ve got to try to put it together in a
speech—”

“Tydings wouldn’t like that,” Don Surine interjected. To give a speech in the Senate about something that is currently being
investigated
by
the Senate—no, that’s not right. Not only Tydings wouldn’t like that. The Southern gentleman wouldn’t like that. We wouldn’t
want to alienate Senator Russell.” It would not do to antagonize Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. He was not the majority
leader, but
he was senior in almost every other sense of the word. The tribune of Senate practice, custodian of procedure and protocols.

McCarthy mused. “Yes. Maybe I should give it as a speech?”

They bandied that about. But that too might appear—would appear—“contumacious.” McCarthy the lawyer supplied the word. And
went on. “Maybe we should get somebody else to give the speech.”

“—or write an article,” Jean said.

“An article wouldn’t see print for a couple of weeks. Don’t we need to move faster?”

“What about this: We could feed the information to Larry Spivak, maybe. Maybe get him to invite Lattimore on
Meet the Press
and ask him a couple of questions.”

“That would mean giving Lattimore a very big audience when he hits you over the head. He’s probably pretty good at it.”

“Still,” Joe said, “let’s sleep on it. If we decide to go with it, I’ll call Spivak tomorrow.”

“He’s not all that friendly.” Mary Haskell never missed
Meet the Press
on Sunday mornings.

“He’s above all things a journalist,” Jeanie said.

McCarthy got up, grabbed his briefcase, and stopped. He put his arm around Jeanie. “How’m I doing?”

“Not too good, Joe.”

“We’ll see what we can do about that.”

HANBERRY, 1991

Harry Bontecou and Lord Herrendon worked now every morning in the library of the country estate, Hanberry, not a villa as
vast as one gets used to, visiting titled tycoons in England. “My father never cared much about space when he didn’t use it.
But there is the farm down there, and we have quite enough acres—forty, when I last looked at the tax bill. The house itself
is very old, Georgian, eighteenth century. And ample for six scholars, let alone two. You will be comfortable.”

They met for three hours before midday in the library, and for three hours late in the afternoon, after taking exercise and
a rest. Alex’s computer sat on the table and lit up a large screen at the end of the room, a pedagogical device recently developed.
He worked studiously in his notes on Western capitulation to the Soviet Union in the matter of the prisoners-refugees.

“Operation Keelhaul was not a heavily documented operation. American and British files are incomplete. We don’t have that
genetic German compulsion to record everything, no matter how heinous.”

“Yes,” Harry concurred. “I know what you mean. In the summer of junior year-”

“You were in Nuremberg.”

Harry was no longer surprised by his host’s detailed knowledge of Harry’s life. The long article in
Contemporary Authors,
published after
his Pulitzer-winning biography of Bismarck, had brought Harry Bontecou his fifteen minutes of fame. The article had recorded
in some detail the historian’s year-by-year itinerary, beginning with his wartime duty. It was, except for the war years and
the immediate post-college years, the life of a sedate historian.

“I, er,” Harry had not yet devised a workable name for Lord Alex Herrendon. Though he yet been urged to do so, he found it
difficult for more reasons than age and rank to call him Alex. He’d get used to it. But meanwhile—“I was about to tell you
that I had a firsthand experience with that aspect of German historical punctiliousness we’re talking about. I worked that
summer vacation from Columbia in the War Crimes Office—I was in Germany to study the language, but I was earning my own vacation
money. The honcho I worked for asked me one night if I wanted to know exactly what happened to the men who tried to assassinate
Hitler on July twentieth.”

“But of course you knew what happened to them, didn’t you? Lowering them live onto the meat hooks?”

“Sure I knew. I still shiver. Yes, Stauffenberg had to guess that if he didn’t succeed in killing Hitler with a bomb on July
twentieth, Hitler would find something more painful than a bomb to punish Stauffenberg and his collaborators with. When I
visited Berlin I found out there what actually took place. The executions. What Captain Rothstein showed me was something
I didn’t know existed.”

Alex killed the computer screen and looked over at Harry. “I guess I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There is a—movie of their executions. I asked Captain Rothstein to stop the screening after I viewed Stauffenberg lowered
onto the hook. Hannah Arendt was talking about the Holocaust when she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil.’ But you can’t
see that movie and believe people could get used to it. But then, that’s what you—are working on.”

“Yes, though at some remove. I’m not talking so much about how torturers go to sleep at night. Though it’s good to remember
that professional hangmen in Britain during the last century couldn’t find anybody to drink a beer with them after work. What
I want to look at is: How is it that societies estrange themselves from huge-scale systematic brutality? Hitler-Stalin, of
course. But Pol Pot? Strenuously
unnoticed. Did the movie you saw part of—I didn’t know it existed—get any kind of circulation?”

“No, I gather not. It was suppressed even by the Nuremberg tribunal. … Mildly interesting development: The filming was intended
for showing to the fuhrer, to give him personal satisfaction in seeing the … the treatment of his would-be assassin, so to
speak, in the flesh. It was in a fine European tradition. You’ve read about the public torture of Guy D’Amiens, for trying
to kill Louis XV. Anyway, for whatever reason, Hitler never got around to viewing the film.

“What a waste,” Harry spoke grimly. “I don’t know whether your people—your then people—went in for protracted torture of that
kind—”

“No. Well, no unless you count Gulag as protracted torture, and there’s a good argument for saying that is exactly what it
was. But when the idea, for the Bolsheviks, was execution, the shot in the back of the head in the Lubianka was the routine.
Granted, Gulag—I repeat myself—is torture, as is starving to death in the Ukraine. … But we’re a far cry from what you engaged
in at Plattling. The men you helped to round up to return to Russia were in many cases shot, or sent to Gulag. What I was
saying,” Alex relit the screen, “is that I am anxious exactly to trace the events of February 25, 1946—exactly what happened
to the repatriated Russians. And I have come up with material that wasn’t available to early historians like Nikolai Tolstoi.
I’ve loaded my computer with six photo shots of what I think was Plat-ding; I’m wanting your confirmation of this—” he called
them up on the screen, one after another.

“Yes, that’s Plattling,” Harry said, his voice husky. “That’s definitely Plattling. You can see off at the corner—at eleven
o’clock—where my company headquarters was.”

“And I have this one. I need to know if it harmonizes with your memory of that morning.”

The photo was taken from a hundred yards outside the camp, looking in at an angle on the main gate. There was scattered snow
and a heavy congregation of soldiers on both sides of the gates. At the left, one tank was visible, facing the gate.

“Is that it?”

Harry examined it carefully. “At least I can’t find my own face among the U.S. Army contingent.” And after a pause, “I can’t
say. I
can imagine other situations where there’d have been a lot of GIs and Russians on the scene, and tanks here and there weren’t
rare. … Tell you what, Alex. As a historian I’m careful about these things. You can say that the photograph is of Camp Plattling
and in no way contradicts what happened on February twenty-fifth, and is probably authentic.”

Alex, as usual, was writing down on computer Harry’s answers to the questions put to him.

They went on to pictures of the Bavarian forest, where the Soviet soldiers had picked up the refugees. Once again there was
the question of absolute identification. Indeed it was a picture of a train loaded with men with indistinct features, once
again a picture of what might have been on February 25, 1946, beyond Zwiesel, near the Czech frontier. “Does it really matter?”
the historian asked his host.

“I would like to fortify a personal narrative. The pictures would make that possible.”

The balance of the week was spent reviewing the long textual narrative of U.S. and British appeals against the Soviet demand
for repatriation of the refugees.

“You know something,” Harry said at the end of a long day. “If Truman and Churchill had been as resolute as Stalin, they’d
simply have said: No. ‘No, Marshall Stalin. You can’t get them back. So what do you want to do about it? Go to war?’ But they
really abandoned that kind of language at Teheran and Yalta. They hoped Stalin would come around; FDR was ill and Truman new
at the game, Churchill beleaguered by the British rejection of his government, Attlee relatively green and concerned mostly
about domestic socialization—”

“Yes. And Stalin’s obduracy, I think we both agree, was a great strength. I was certainly impressed by it. I saw Stalin staking
out his position: the Marxist-Leninist position. Everything else was derivative. Like Saint Thomas on God: If He exists, then
you have a postulation, and nothing that you see or experience can undo that postulation. It just exists—and is permitted
to exist by the divine order. I’m writing about why the West wasn’t as convinced about
its
position as Stalin was about his. And I’m asking why Stalin appealed to so many, in so many forms. God help me I’m qualified
to write about that. It is vulgar to
forget, which so many people in fact do, the high appeal that Communism had for so many.”

“Maybe I was too young to come across that appeal.”

“Come now. Do not pretend to be unfamiliar with the story. I know you are not. I marked here, I took it from a manuscript,
unpublished, of letters to Ralph de Toledano, the American author and journalist, from Whittaker Chambers. It is a paragraph
that for reasons hard to understand was omitted from his great book,
Witness,
apparently at the urging of his editor. Chambers was apparently remonstrating to a friend who wonders that Communism’s idealistic
net could ever ensnare the sophisticated. Here, let me read it to you. I like to
hear
the sound of Chambers, and his reproach here is arresting.”

He picked up the book and read.

“ ‘Now, in the light of its late sundown, you tell me that you took one look at Communism and knew at once that it was a fraud.
My friend, you are mistaken. In the terrible decade, 1915-1923, you scarcely knew the word Communism. You did not know that,
for multitudes, Communism hung, like a star-shell, lurid, but casting the only steady light into that bleeding, dark and ruined
world. It is only now that you know that Communism is a fraud. You only know now that, of the ways of saving the world, Communism
is not one. I know that too—now. I learned it in another school. I learned by trying, in the day of disaster, to do something,
and doing the wrong thing, because I did not see what else to do. Life has been more gracious to you—or perhaps your judgment
is better. For you did nothing at all.’ ”

“Of course I understand, but then it’s true I didn’t live through that decade Chambers is talking about. My decade, 1938 to
1948, tilted me, and most others, in a different direction. But we’re to talk about all that.”

“Right, Harry. And to get down to a little business. I need to know some details of your life that were not reported in the
Contemporary Authors
biography of 1986. What did you emphasize when you served in the National Endowment for the Humanities?”