The Hellfire Club(32)

Street shook his head. “I don’t know, Charlie. John Adams knew better. John Quincy Adams knew better. Lincoln knew better. Right is right and wrong is wrong. You fought for your country, you married a good woman, you work hard to protect troops from future shitty gas masks. You’re not betraying your principles. You don’t contain multitudes.” He paused. “Do you, Charlie?”



“Charlie, how are you?” Senator Kefauver greeted him with his attention focused more on the Zenith television. Senator McCarthy was interrogating a witness.

“I’m fine, sir. I need some advice,” Charlie said. He had brought two things to the meeting: the Boschwitz dossier LaMontagne had given him and Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. He set both on the coffee table and sat in the chair in front of the senator’s desk. “I’ve got—”

Kefauver held up a hand to hush Charlie and pointed toward the television console in the corner. Using a Lazy Bones remote control hooked up to the television by a wire, he turned up the volume.

“Look, mister, I am not going to waste all afternoon with you,” Senator Joseph McCarthy bellowed at a witness. “I have asked you a very simple question. You will answer it, unless you want to take the Fifth Amendment. If you think it will incriminate you, you can take the Fifth Amendment.”

“Restate the question,” said the witness.

The hearing’s reporter read back from her notes. “‘When you got this job working on Army ordnance, do you know whether or not the man who hired you knew that you had been accused of Communist activities prior to that time,’” she said. The witness and his lawyers huddled in consultation.

“I see you’re reading Seduction of the Innocent,” Kefauver noted. “It is amazing the twisted things children are learning about murder and rape and torture. This is going to be a big hearing, Charlie.”

On television, Senator McCarthy had now turned over the hearings to his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who appeared to be eviscerating a new witness.

“While you were attending Cornell, did you know a man named Alfred Sarant?”

Cohn, a pit bull of a man, was clearly already in possession of the answer.

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment,” said the witness.

“Did Sarant recruit you into the Rosenberg spy ring?”

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.”

“Did you engage in a conspiracy to commit espionage with certain persons working for the Army Signal Corps?”

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.”

“Jesus,” said Kefauver, standing. “The Rosenbergs!”

“Did you ever visit Julius Rosenberg at the Emerson Electric Company and obtain from him material which you transmitted to a Soviet spy ring?”

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.”

“I mean, good Christ, Charlie.”

Kefauver exhaled loudly, sank his bulky frame back down into his chair, and grabbed a cigar stub from his desk that he commenced chewing. His dull blue eyes ping-ponged between Charlie and the television.

“So, speaking of McCarthy and the Army Signal Corps,” Charlie said, “an acquaintance of mine handed me a file on one of Zenith’s guys. Asked me to pass it on to Bob Kennedy or Cohn.”

Kefauver looked as though he had just detected an unpleasant odor.

“Yeah, that was my reaction, too,” said Charlie. “Making matters worse, he’s with a direct competitor of Zenith.”

“Oh, Lordy,” said Kefauver.

“But what happens if I don’t hand the information over and it’s real?”

“Or even if it’s not real but McCarthy leaks to his stooges in the press that you refused to inform the committee about a Commie,” Kefauver said. “You’ve got to worry about those things now. We all do. McCarthyism is a cancer. And it won’t just be an election you don’t win.” Kefauver warmed to his topic with alarming speed. “You’ll be ruined. Columbia won’t let you back; you’ll end up teaching at Barnyard High in East Turtle-Turd, Kentucky.”

Charlie suddenly realized that until just now, he had regarded his new life in Washington almost as if it were a summer camp in the Catskills or the home of a college buddy he was visiting for a long weekend—someplace he could parachute into and soon leave with no impact on his real life. But he knew Kefauver was right: Columbia would invoke the standard clause about bringing shame and embarrassment to the university community. His publishing house would stop returning his phone calls. Charlie had seen how even the liberal Manhattan elite dealt with publicly ostracized Communists in their midst, and it wasn’t pretty: sociology lecturer Bernhard Stern saw his name dragged through the mud not only by the McCarthy Committee but by the university; anthropology lecturer Gene Weltfish had been dismissed altogether. And these weren’t individuals accused of espionage; their transgressions had been in thought and belief. There was no escaping the stink of the Red Scare.

Kefauver eyed Charlie’s Seduction of the Innocent on the coffee table.

“With regards to the juvenile delinquency hearing,” he said, “have you lined up the courthouse for us?”

“Not yet. Working on it.”