Tenderness, p.48
Tenderness, page 48
But Mr. Hoover, who was only a few years older than she was, surprised her. He praised the honesty of her admission, as if he were her father. She had never felt so grateful to anyone in all her twenty-one years. She was a plain girl of average intelligence, and no one had ever commended her before. But she was diligent, and she knew she had a capacity, not only for loyalty, but for devotion.
Mr. Hoover leaned forward and read from an index card he had prepared in advance. ‘Secretary’, he said, came from the Latin ‘secretum’ for ‘secret’, and meant ‘person entrusted with a secret’. He studied her with those black eyes of his that were like a midnight spell. Could she be that person he could always trust? She felt tears prick at her eyes. ‘Yes, Mr. Hoover,’ she replied. ‘Yes. I am that person.’ And the beautiful girl on the bench was sent away.
As she typed the Bureau memorandum, she made a quick note to remind herself to pick up Mr. Hoover’s suit from the dry-cleaner’s. His chauffeur would take it home and pass it to Annie. The Director liked his suits to be lined up and ready. Helen Gandy pondered her weekend plans for trout-fishing. It was a glorious September, and she favored Gunpowder River at this time of year, a little north of Baltimore and good for wild brown trout.
She had her mixed maggots ready in her refrigerator, and her hip-waders in the trunk. She generally tied her own flies, used a 12 hook, and added a little split-shot for weight. There would be a nice ripple on the water this month and still, with all the heat of late, a good hatch of flies – perfect for trout.
At Gunpowder River, nobody got too stubborn about their spots, and sometimes she even waved to one or two fellow anglers on the opposite bank. She never made conversation. Most people, she found, asked too many questions. She, for her part, had learned not to ask any. Even the inclination to do so was long gone. Mr. Hoover had once said she was his ‘rock’. She seemed to recall he’d paid her that compliment in the early forties. True words lasted.
When the Director arrived back from his Friday lunch at the Mayflower, she put through a call from the New York Field Office. She heard Mr. Hoover speak – ‘What have you got for me?’ – then she gently put down the receiver.
* * *
—
In his office sanctum, Hoover listened to the update from New York. Senator Kennedy still hadn’t actually had sex with either of the call-girls they’d flown in from London. He was flirting, sure, said the New York S.A.C. ‘You bet he is.’ He was enjoying himself. But maybe, suggested the S.A.C., he’d turned over a new leaf with his wife pregnant again.
Hoover laughed down the line in a hard staccato.
Of course he could approve a budget for new girls, different girls, more girls. But the strategy had failed, he said. That was the point. Kennedy’s brother and his campaign team were obviously keeping the candidate on the straight and narrow, beyond reproach, until Election Day. Until the victor was decided: Kennedy or Nixon.
As fall overtook summer, it was too close to call, and far too close for Hoover’s comfort. He’d had a heart attack two years before, and his blood pressure was soaring these days, what with Bobby Kennedy being lined up for the role of Attorney General – cocky Bobby Kennedy, the liberal, do-gooder lawyer who was already too curious about the dealings of the Bureau. The kid lawyer who’d never practiced law. Of course he hadn’t! Now give him the top job in the Justice Department!
In July, Jack Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination on his father’s money, with pictures of his pretty, expecting wife, and celebrity types like Sinatra and Harry Belafonte campaigning for him all over the country. Harry Bela-baloney. The Democrats had taken to wooing the Blacks. Even Adlai Stevenson hadn’t scraped that barrel.
No one was more surprised than Hoover when his old neighbor, Lyndon B., had accepted the bone Kennedy threw: the offer of the Vice President spot on the ticket, in the wake of Johnson’s defeat at the Convention. Johnson hated Kennedy. That was no secret. He called him ‘the Boy’.
By all accounts, even Kennedy hadn’t expected LBJ to accept the offer. In the Senate, Johnson hindered most anything Kennedy tried to push through. As the primaries approached, he’d even teamed up with other Democrats to actively block Kennedy.
But there was no denying it. The strategy had improved Kennedy’s chances against Nixon and, with Johnson as his foil, Kennedy might even take Texas, where he didn’t otherwise have a hope in hell.
Anyway, what did ‘the Boy’ care who his number two was? One of the Bureau’s bugs, in the Democrats’ convention hotel, had picked up an argument between Kennedy and his campaign scheduler: ‘I’m forty-three,’ Kennedy told the guy. ‘I’m not going to die in office. So the vice-presidency doesn’t mean anything.’
Now he had Johnson as a running mate. So what? Jack Kennedy was still trailing in the polls. His convention victory speech had been a dud. He’d looked wrung-out. Where was all that supposed charisma? Hoover hadn’t seen any.
Even if Kennedy did manage to close the gap – and that was a big ‘if’ – he could still be knocked off his pedestal.
And by nothing more than a secret picture of his pretty wife.
Hoover had copies, if not the negative. His men in Boston had traveled to Cape Cod and turned over Mel Harding’s motel room to find the thing, but they’d returned to the Field Office empty-handed, except for a tripod – no camera – and a copy of the banned novel, with a bookmark in it near the end.
Poor Mel Harding! He was going to miss the happy ending. He had missed his own happy ending, that was for sure. He was still living out of the same cheap motel room, somewhere in the Back of Beyond, on the Cape.
Before leaving the motel, the Bureau men had left money with the proprietor for damages to the room, taken a receipt, and filed it in their end-of-day report. They knew how to conduct themselves.
Periodically, on Hoover’s instruction, the Boston S.A.C. sent a man down to tail Mel Harding’s car, watch his room or follow him on his days off. Whether the agent was right on Harding’s rear on the open highway, or turning up in the next booth in some diner on the 6A, ex-agent Harding was made to understand that the Bureau was never far.
Apparently, the dumb-bell had got himself a two-bit job at some drugstore in Hyannis. He was developing snapshots in the back room. Hoover had to smile. Harding had thought Butte was bad. Now he was printing wedding snaps and kids’ birthday party pictures with Bozo the Clown. He’d be getting shots of the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls ad nauseam. Most people didn’t have any imagination. Most people didn’t, because no one needed one. People with imaginations only got themselves in trouble.
Even with Harding out of action, the fact remained: no ex-agent was ever not a liability. So Hoover made sure the Bureau never lost an ex’s scent. Wherever Harding went, Hoover’s hounds would follow. The guy would never feel alone again.
You gave up certain comforts when you let the Bureau down. When you gave away Bureau secrets to Persons of Interest. To targets.
There was no forgiving that.
As for Mrs. Kennedy’s ‘delicate condition’, Hoover felt bad about that, he really did. He didn’t want to make trouble for any lady who was expecting, but Mrs. Kennedy had made trouble for herself, hadn’t she? She’d got herself tangled up with a banned book, a filthy book. Even her husband didn’t know what she had done, which only proved she knew her secret attendance of the New York hearing was wrong. All wrong.
Much as Hoover would have enjoyed it, he didn’t tell Kennedy what his wife had been getting up to. Because the security of the Bureau’s surveillance operations was paramount.
And Hoover’s conscience was clear. If Mrs. Kennedy had the First Lady role in her sights, she had to be subject to the same F.B.I. background checks as any other federal employee. It could hardly be one rule for everyone and another for Mrs. Kennedy.
He wasn’t unfeeling. If her un-American activity had ended with the hearing back in the spring, maybe, he told himself, just maybe he’d have dropped the whole thing and closed her file – at least he might have once he’d found out she was ‘in the family way’. He’d been raised in the South, and he was always a gentleman where ladies were concerned. But she hadn’t dropped it. Not at all. Her eyes were on the London trial now. She and Trilling were exchanging information and conspiring. Back and forth, to and fro, Cape Cod to Columbia U. The woman just wouldn’t stop.
Well, if Mrs. Kennedy had her eyes on the London case, so had he. So did the weekend papers all around the world, and that meant a certain picture remained the best ‘secret weapon’ he had. He’d been turning the plan over and over in his mind. Clyde was in favor, and now he was decided too. They only needed a guilty verdict for that damned book. Then the picture could be discreetly leaked. The beauty of the plan was its simplicity.
They didn’t need the expensive London call-girls. Clyde was right. Something less sensational would carry more punch: a shameful wife. A wife who read dirty books. An immoral, un-American First Lady-to-be who liked pornography. Who went against government decisions and even the view of the President.
‘Dreadful.’ That was Ike’s statement about the book. ‘We can’t allow it.’ Ike knew what he thought. Ike was his own man. Hoover had only suggested he make it public.
Now, they just needed that guilty verdict from London. Then, give it a day or two, and it would travel around the world.
The British Prosecution Office was getting on with the job, according to Dame Rebecca. She had certainly stepped up and played her part. Even if she was now withdrawing from the scene, he was grateful. Of course she still didn’t know about the Bureau’s Kennedy operation. Why complicate matters? The Soviets were watching the trial as closely as he was, and that had been enough to persuade Dame Rebecca to get involved.
He’d get Miss Gandy to send her a bunch of flowers. Pricey ones. Miss Gandy would have the flowers on their way and the receipt filed within the hour.
The timing of the London trial – a little before the American federal election on the 8th of November – was perfect. The plan was now in motion: 1. Get guilty verdict. 2. Leak photo to press. 3. Nixon to White House. 4. Winter vacation with Clyde in California.
He got the New York S.A.C. on the phone. ‘Find me a Miss Katherine Anne Porter. She’s a writer.’ Her published output looked slender to him. His own published pages certainly exceeded hers. But that didn’t matter. She was esteemed in academia, if nowhere else, and intellectual esteem was what was needed at this moment in time.
It helped that, according to his C.I.A. sources, Miss Porter was dependent on hand-outs from the Congress for Cultural Freedom – the biggest cultural exporter of American, liberal, anti-Communist art and ideas. If she was financially needy, all the better!
Miss Porter had toured Europe with their goddamn artsy road-show. Writers who couldn’t afford bus tickets got flown around the world First Class, with limousines waiting and champagne receptions.
The Ivy League guys at the C.I.A. were able to tell him all about it because the Congress for Cultural Freedom was covertly funded by none other than the C.I.A. As was Britain’s own elite literary magazine, Encounter. They had agents planted among the editors. Almost no one knew, even among the top staff. The C.I.A. presence was a time-saver. No one had to go to the trouble of censoring contributors anymore – because most of the journal’s writers, especially the American ones, were ‘pre-approved’.
Whether she knew it or not, Miss Katherine Anne Porter had been pre-approved – and, looking at her gift of an article, Hoover could see why. Her recent review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was damning. Even the rarefied, literary types at the C.I.A. wanted D. H. Lawrence’s anti-capitalist, anti-war novel stopped.
The Soviets were rubbing their hands over all the trouble a renegade novel was causing, and, same as him, the C.I.A. guys were determined to wipe the smiles off their faces. Hoover asked a C.I.A. contact straight up about Katherine Anne Porter’s politics, especially regarding the upcoming election. ‘She’s a longstanding Democrat,’ the contact said. ‘She loved F.D.R. Likes Adlai. Has little time for Kennedy. Calls him a “young tough” and is not happy that the son of an erstwhile bootlegger might be on his way to the White House.’
Unbeknown to any of his C.I.A. contacts, Hoover had a Bureau man planted in their midst. Encounter, his guy was learning, allowed the Agency access to a better quality of international intelligence: who in London was pro-McCarthy, and who wouldn’t dirty their hands in the anti-Communist fight. That sort of thing. Encounter was, it seemed, a successful, joint Anglo-American intelligence operation smuggled in under the cover of a high-brow magazine. Miss Porter had proved surprisingly useful when she denounced Lady Chatterley on its pages.
Hoover’s plant read him a taste of her review over the phone. ‘A woman like Lady Chatterley “often wears extremely well, physically. How long will it be before that enterprising man” – that’s the pervert-gamekeeper,’ added the agent – ‘ “exhausts himself trying to be everything in that affair, both man and woman too, while she has nothing to do but be passive and enjoy whatever he wants her to have in the way he wants her to have it?” Blah, blah, blah. “I suppose she deserves anything she gets, really, but her just deserts are none of our affair.” ’
Only on that point did Hoover disagree. Lady Chatterley’s just deserts were very much his affair.
His agent didn’t know how much ‘editorial’ coaching Miss Porter had had at Encounter, but her article had been welcomed by the Agency. Hoover explained that her role was not yet complete. He wanted her on ‘Bureau’ business. The good news was that she’d known hard times since childhood, and no doubt she was smart enough to know which side her bread was buttered on. He let out a short, sharp laugh. Then he hung up.
He called for Miss Gandy. She was to send, pronto, a cable to the Bureau attaché in London: REQUEST FOR INFO RCVD FROM BRIT OFFICE OF PUBLIC PROS. RQST APPROVED. DESPATCH GROVE PRESS FED COURT TRANSCRIPT. ALSO K. PORTER/ENCOUNTER MAG/FEB 60. LONDON-BU TO OFFER FULL ASSIST TO O.P.P. AS MATTER OF PRIORITY. E.J.H., DIRECTOR.
vii
In London, the press were busy speculating about the identity of the Prosecution’s illustrious experts to come.
‘PROSECUTION GUARDS SECRET LIST OF STAR WITNESSES!’
No one could have guessed that, with just five weeks to go, the names of their star witnesses were as great a mystery to the Prosecution as they were to the general public.
Around a mahogany table in Senior Counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s chambers, an articled clerk, a bony, concave young man called Mr Leaf, produced an old book – ‘criticism from 1931,’ he said, by one John Middleton Murry, who had been ‘a close friend of Lawrence’s until they had a falling-out’. Mr Leaf read aloud: ‘ “a wearisome and oppressive book, the work of a weary and hopeless man”.’ He looked up. ‘There is more,’ he ventured.
Mervyn Griffith-Jones nodded, listened, and then raised a large, paddle-like hand. ‘Mr Leaf, where is Mr Middleton Murry, pray?’ His courtesy was withering.
‘Deceased, sir, I’m afraid.’
The office clerk scratched a name off the list.
‘Kipling?’ tried another, from the end of the table. ‘He was a witness for the Prosecution at the Well of Loneliness trial.’
‘Dead,’ called various voices.
‘Henry James,’ began a man with film-star looks and a weak grasp of literary history, ‘gave a very mixed review to Lawrence early in his career. I have located a copy of it. Mr James will, in all likelihood, have an even lower opinion of Lawrence’s work now…’
No one spoke. No one threw him a life-line. Henry James was as dead as a door-nail.
Mr Griffith-Jones waited. The hinge of his jaw flexed.
Mr Leaf had boot-black hair and a blue-white pallor. His lips seemed permanently bluish too, as if he had been made to sleep in a pot-drawer as an infant. His suit was cheap but well pressed. He was the only ‘grammar-school boy’ at the table, and everyone knew it.
‘And you are now waving Mr Eliot about, Mr Leaf, because…?’
‘Because he is alive, sir.’
‘Go on, Leaf.’
‘As you know, sir, Eliot is one of this country’s major poets – and now practically English, if, regrettably, American by birth. He is also, arguably, the most distinguished lay-critic of our times, that’s to say, the most respected critic outside the Academy.’
‘I am acquainted with the meaning of “lay-critic”, Mr Leaf.’
‘Of course, sir. In this series of published lectures, entitled After Strange Gods, Mr Eliot denounces liberalism, individualism, D. H. Lawrence and’ – Mr Leaf paused, a sort of rapture lighting up his pot-drawer pallor – ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.
Heads turned to assess anew the unprepossessing Mr Leaf. He continued boldly, if trembling like a— well, yes.
‘Mr Eliot’s series dates from…’ He checked a note on his wrist. ‘1933. We’d only need ask him to repeat, or even simply read out, his text in court.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for? Get on with it.’
‘Unfortunately, attempts at gaining an introduction to Mr Eliot have not progressed.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would seem Mr Eliot does not wish to be introduced, sir. To us, that is. We have, however’ – he lifted the book – ‘his words.’
