“If you want, Mr. Scott, I can visit some night late and discreetly trim what needs to be trimmed. We’ll take that worry off you.”
“Great idea,” I said. It was. I hadn’t thought of it. I’m glad Jimmy, ever practical, had.
“Then our patsy falls back through the alley, cuts between two houses, turns right, hides the rifle under the Forty-fifth Street Bridge, takes off his galoshes, climbs up to Forty-fifth Street, and takes a bus home. Can he do that?”
“That’s why I want you with him at a discreet distance. It’s possible he’ll get scared in the dark. If he turns the wrong way at the river, he’ll be miles from a bus stop. It’ll all be different in the dark. He was supposed to do it in the dark to familiarize himself, but he’s such a disorganized twit, I don’t know.”
“I’ll lead him by the nose if I have to.”
“Good man, Jimmy. Now let’s go into the Patio, get a table, and try their margaritas.”
So we did, three merry murderers having a good time on the patio of the Patio, which would soon be the scene of our crime. Since the duty day was done and we were on to the bonding aspect of the operation, I passed on the tequila drink and knocked back three vodka martinis, and Lon kept up with me, though he was a bourbon guy, and Jimmy sipped beer, regaling us with stories of his youthful run-ins with a Sergeant O’Bannon of Boston’s Fifth Precinct in the North End of town, where it was still more a suburb of Dublin than Beacon Hill. He told a funny story in perfect dialect. There was hardly anything Jimmy wasn’t good at.
I arose early, took the Wagoneer to Alek’s neighborhood, parked well down from his roominghouse, and waited for him to emerge. He was late, as usual. (The idiot was on time for only one thing in his life, the murder of JFK.) I let him turn the corner on the way to the bus stop, then pulled up to him. No one was close enough to hear us in Russian.
“Good morning, Alek. Hop in, I’ll run you downtown.”
He got in, and I took a U-turn to avoid driving by the bus stop where a few commuters waited, in case any of them happened to notice the highly unusual spectacle of the grumpy Lee Harvey Oswald being picked up in a large American vehicle.
“Tell me what you’ve been up to, Alek,” I said.
“I memorized the plan. I went to the Patio twice, walking it, getting used to the lighting. I will make a good shot.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Earlier that night, we’ll move in some old wooden crates. You can use them for support so you don’t have to try any fancy positions.”
“I’m a Marine Sharpshooter.”
I knew that Sharpshooter was a relatively easy distinction to attain in the Marines; he had not made Expert.
“I have complete faith in you. And you have walked your escape route? You won’t get lost in the dark? I worry about you being arrested, going the wrong way home, and singing like a canary.”
“I will die before talking, Comrade,” he said fiercely. “You can count on my love of socialism and the working fellow to get me through any ordeal the fascists have in mind!”
“Well said,” I replied. “That’s the kind of spirit we need.”
There was nothing particularly memorable about the discussion. He had a kind of morose personality and didn’t seem agitated about what lay ahead. We just went through the details rather dully, without much sparkle at all.
“Any more visits from the FBI?”
“Nah. Maybe Agent Hotsy is bored with me.”
“How’s Marina?”
“She’s fine. I’ll see her this weekend and Junie and new baby Audrey. Also, I’ll get the rifle.”
“Any problems getting it out of the house?”
“No sir.”
“You know she’ll look for it when the news comes, and not seeing it, she’ll conclude you went back on your word and murdered him.”
“She won’t talk,” he said. He held up a fist. “I am the king of my house, and the wench”—he used a cruel Russian word, devushka—“knows better than to betray me.”
He guided me through traffic, which thickened as we drew near to Dealey Plaza along Houston Street, after crossing the river. In a block or so, we were there, and I had my first look at Alek’s place of employment, with its Hertz sign set on the diagonal above. I cannot say I paid it much attention, because at that point Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository were utterly meaningless to me. I had no revelation, no surge of heartbeat, no epiphany. The structure was a big, ugly building on the edge of a municipal park of no particular charm, brick, six or seven stories tall, completely without character. The cars whizzed by it, all the other buildings were equally uninteresting, even the triangle of grass that constituted the plaza lacked feature or interest. I regret many things I did over the next few days, and among them—not the first but up there nonetheless—was that I made the Book Depository eyesore a historical shrine, never, ever to be demolished.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll turn here so nobody sees you get out of this car. Oh, I wanted to get the diagram from you.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled it out, the only article except for the box of cartridges I’d given him that both of us had touched. I knew I’d burn it at the first opportunity.
I dropped him at the corner of Main and Elm, then turned left on Elm, passing under the shadow of the Book Depository as I headed down the slight slope of Elm to the triple overpass a hundred yards ahead. I came within sixty or seventy feet of the even more famous grassy knoll on the right. In all the years that followed, I always had a smile—perhaps the only one the operation ever produced on my face—at the expense of the lunatics who believed that the little green lump explained everything.
I found a way to reverse my direction, got back to Commerce, and in ten blocks or so reached the Adolphus. There, I made phone calls to Jimmy and Lon to set up a real-time run-through that night, as we would do for the next six nights, to get used to the routes, the patterns of the shadows, the rhythm of the traffic, the different hues of darkness as the conditions altered the nighttime weather.
That night after dinner, I had a moment of happiness and calm. I was doing something big that I thought would help my country at the cost of one small, worthless, ugly man. It did not feel wrong at all to me, and I had no doubts, no qualms, no reservations. I was going to make a difference. I was going to change history.
The next morning, Wednesday, November 20, 1963, I woke, ambled groggily to my door, opened it, and grabbed the newspaper, the Morning News I think it was, and before I sat down, I saw the headline: “JFK Motorcade Route Announced.” I had not known Jack Kennedy was coming to Dallas on the twenty-second. But as my eyes ran down the story, I saw the names of streets I had driven the morning before: “. . . Houston to Elm, Elm under the triple overpass . . . ,” and I knew in an instant that I had been given a chance few men have. Circumstance had bent itself to offer me an opportunity that was not only the logical outcome to my ruminations, but almost a moral obligation. Who could say no to such a possibility? Not Hugh.
Ah, Vod. So dependable. Such a friend, an ally. Vod always has my back, my best interests at heart, my happiness paramount in its fermented little potato brain. With Vod at my side as well as in my blood, I launch into the final act, which would leave me, theoretically at least, history’s most abominable man. I slew the prince who was the king. I widowed the goddess of all our dreams; I made Ari Onassis possible. (There’s one I know I’ll never be forgiven for!) Oh, and I orphaned those two little so-cute-it-hurts-even-now kids. Bad Hugh. Hugh, you bastard. Vod, a little help here, please.
I knew I had to convince three people to help me tilt Operation LIBERTY VALANCE a little bit, so that instead of shooting General Edwin Walker on November 25, 1963, we would shoot John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, two and a half days hence.
The three people were Lon Scott, Jimmy Costello, and myself. As for Alek—Lee Harvey Oswald—I knew the glory pig would take zero convincing. The idiot would be like a r
abid dog pulling on a leash. He might have come up with it himself if he’d read the paper. It was everything his fetid little sewer-Commie mind demanded and had dreamed about for years. His eagerness would surely get him killed and everyone else electrocuted. But I felt I could control him and improvise a new plan so brilliant that even he couldn’t screw it up too badly. I would see him tonight at the bus stop.
As for me: Did I believe in what I was about to do? And if I didn’t, how could I convince the others? I tried to apply the dictates of the New Criticism to the ethical issue, as if it were a poem demanding the most rigorous attention to detail, untarnished by the excesses of biography, assumption, sentimentality, lugubrious emotionalism. Read the text, I told myself: read the text alone.
Here was the text I read, trying to ignore the young president’s glamour, his vitality, his beautiful children, his strangely beautiful but beautifully strange wife, his brood of brothers, cousins, sisters, parents, whatever. No room for sailboats, touch football, movie stars, no thought of parochial politics (we were both Democrats), all that out. Lyndon Johnson, whoever he was, out.
My clinical reading of the text that was JFK demanded only one answer: what were his intentions in the Republic of South Vietnam? I didn’t give a damn about Castro or Cuba, I didn’t see much that could be done in Europe except minor maneuvering for minor leverage, a missile base exchanged here or there, a spy betrayed, a minister blackmailed, all of it, in the long haul, meaningless.
But what of that steamy glade, with its ravishing jungle and mountain landscape, its little yellow people who wanted nothing in life except to be left alone to raise their rice plants ankle-deep in water and shit? The issue was: would JFK get us into a big shooting war there? If so, who would fight it? The tiny yellows he cared nothing about—they would die in the hundreds of thousands, for sure—or a generation of college kids unlikely to care to risk a war to save a country so far away, whose rise or fall meant so little to them and would not be worth dying for. Left to their own devices, neither of these demographics would vote to let slip the dogs. It wasn’t like the Vietcong had bombed Pearl Harbor, much less Winnetka. No, it would happen only if JFK willed it to happen by inventing reasons to send our troops over there. He’d already begun, and I’d seen them, tan, lean young men with the close haircuts and narrow eyes of highly trained professional military, the so-called Green Berets, yearning for a war they thought would be quick and glorious, with a nice sniff of powder to it. I knew there were a lot more of them there than the Times had reported, and I knew also that despite my report and Cord’s passionately earned and argued reluctance, there were those in the Agency who’d smelled the treasure of career enhancement hunting Pajama Charlie for a year already.
To me it was shit. The place was infinitely more complex than anybody in Washington suspected, and it had the kind of suction that could drag us down to ruin in its whirlpools of deceit and danger, its anthropological conundrums and village traditions, its cruelty; our enemies would degrade us, but not as much as we would degrade ourselves in fighting them.
I took, as I said, the recent murder, under our auspices, of Diem as doubling down on a bad bet. We knew Diem was so corrupt that his military was incapable of winning a war, and that the reigning tactical concern for field and general-grade officers, much less administrators and bureaucrats in Saigon, would be filling their own secret bank accounts in Paris. We had decided to wipe that corruption off the face of the earth, to encourage new, younger, American-trained (and American-allied) officers who would win the war. If they proved unable, we would begin to send more than “advisers”: we’d send divisions, we’d send our new helicopter-borne army, and the general slaughter—as well as Eisenhower’s feared “land war in Asia”—would be on. There was no telling how many would die, theirs, ours, the unfortunate peasants caught in the middle, and for what? One piece on the board, said to be a domino but maybe just a piece on the board.
That JFK was a philanderer, that he was screwing Cord’s wife (among the many), that he came from a family as narrow and clannish and narcissistic as any Tudor or Hanoverian, all these I tried to discount. That his heroism in the Pacific was greatly exaggerated, that he received the Pulitzer for another man’s work, that his father bought him every election he ever won, all that I tried to push aside. I don’t know if I did. But in the end I made up my mind, and once I’d done that, it was on to the others.
I called Lon.
“No, Hugh,” he said. “Not a chance.”
“Lon, please—”
“I will be on a flight to Richmond by three if you say one more word, Hugh.”
I let the conversation simmer off into silence for a bit. Finally, I came back with what I knew was the weakest of propositions. “Just let me make the argument.”
“My mind is made up. As soon as I saw the paper, I knew how that devious little insect that you call a brain would set its antennae to twitching, its mandibles to grinding, its pincers to snapping, and I knew exactly where you’d go. I know you better than you know yourself, Hugh. Anyhow, what’s the point of listening to the argument? There’s only one argument, really. You believe you can pull off the biggest coup in history. You would call it an ‘operation’ in your spy-novel lingo, so as to distance yourself from it, as if it’s scientific or medical. It’s hubris, Hugh. It’s just hubris.”
“Lon, you are—”
“I know you, Hugh. I know you.”
“If you’ve made up your mind, how can it hurt to hear my argument? I assure you, it has nothing to do with me, my needs, any of that. The psychology involved is yours, Lon. I will make you see how it has to do with your needs, and you will see your duty clearly.”
“Oh, right. Oh, that’s rich. Hugh, you are a bastard.”
“That’s what they pay me for. The things I’ve authorized, you wouldn’t believe, the things I’ve seen. Please, Lon, meet me in the lobby in ten. We’ll go for a little walk.”
“Agghh.” He snorted, signifying surrender.
I pushed him in silence across the street from the hotel. I didn’t head south, down Commerce toward Dealey, but north, and then I turned east down a street I don’t remember. It was November 20, 1963. The sun was out, and true fall, as we New Englanders would recognize it, had yet to begin. The leaves were still green. In late November! We arrived after a block or two at a small park that seemed to be dedicated to some glorious Texan or other who had triumphed at the Battle of Squashing Mexicans or some such. That’s what we did in the Agency—if not Mexicans, some other little brown tribe, anyone who got in our way. That’s what I helped us do. We were in the empire business, after all, and I was paid to make sure that empire stayed strong and lasted forever, and anyone who opposed us got squashed. If the empire was to fall, it wouldn’t be on my watch.
We sat in the sun. Should I say birds sang, the wind blew gently, the sun was bright, the world seemed full of hope? Maybe all that is true. I have no idea.
“Get on with it, goddammit,” Lon said. “I don’t have all day.”
“I just have one question,” I said. “Request, actually. Then I’ll shut up.”
He waited.
Finally, I said, “Lon, tell me about the chair.”
“The what?”
“The chair. The one you’re sitting in. It’s made of steel. I can see a label; I think it was manufactured by Ridgeway Medical Equipment Company, Rahway, New Jersey.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t talk about such things.”
“No, tell me. You’re a goddamn noble Roman, Lon. I know you too. You’re sick with honor. You’ll never complain, you’ll never cease to maintain the code. Stoic, dignified, without complaint to the end, a study in Protestant rectitude and Western heroism. You’re braver than John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or—”
“They’re actors,” said Lon.
“Audie Murphy, Neville Brand, I don’t know, the boys who raised the flag on Iwo, Robert C. Scott, Cord Meyer, Bill Morgan, Joe McConnell, Major Darby.
”
“It’s nothing to do with courage. It’s the practicality of acceptance and resignation. It’s doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”
“Tell me, Lon. You’ve never told anyone, probably not even yourself. Tell me.”
Lon waited a bit. Then he said, “All right. S4 is lousy. It stinks. It’s no fun. It’s better than S3, it’s better than any of the Ts, it’s much better than any of the Cs. But still: it’s lousy. I get sores on my legs, and I don’t even feel them. But the pants are smeared with blood and pus and have to be thrown away because no dry cleaning gets it out. I shit in my diapers and don’t know I’ve done it, and I have to somehow deal with the diapers on my own, in my room at night, a truly repulsive job. I worry that there’ll be a leak, that I’ll offend, that something humiliating will happen. I get bruises on my spine, and sometimes they climb above S-4 and I get tremendous pains. I sometimes remember my legs in my dreams, remember walking, feel the experience, and almost believe that, by some miracle, I’ve— But then I wake up, dead from the waist down. Psychologically, that’s hard to take, particularly the seven hundredth time or so. I have nightmares about Dad. He had a look on his face for a split second, before the horror came over him as he saw what had happened. I saw it as I twisted around to see what the hell had happened and saw him standing there with the rifle on the ground before him. I think about that look. Was it a smile? It could have been a smile! I— I don’t know. There was something there, a kind of, I don’t know, satisfaction or something. Dad was great, considering. Until he died, he did everything he could to make my life livable. He spent a fortune, he was with me nearly every single day. I know that he hated himself for the accident, and that it took twenty-five years off his life, but still . . . That look. A father’s worries about usurpation. His inability to get totally behind somebody who will replace him.”
He was silent for a while, gathering wind. He had never spoken of such things.