Washington, the winter of 1950: the young man in the good hat returns with the paper he was measuring, and the author, called before the Congress on the atomic-security matter, pays at last the debt contracted in the first bundle and tells the story of the subpoena. It is the first payment of four, and the reader is advised now, before enjoying it, that the payments will not agree. —Ed.
The hat came back in the middle of October. The reader will remember it from June: a polite young man in a good grey one, who had asked the front office whether Mr. Klipspringer was often in town in the autumn and left no card. On a Thursday morning he came in off West Adams with the hat in his hand, established me the way a man establishes a parcel, and laid a folded paper on my blotter beside the gyroscope, which had by then been fingered by every service in the Republic but the Coast Guard.
"Mr. Jay Klipspringer?"
"Since April of 1923."
"Then I'm to give you this, and to say the committee looks forward." He said it without irony, being too young to own any, put the hat back on, and was gone into the Loop.1
It was a handsome instrument, all whereases, commanding me to appear before a subcommittee of the Congress sitting on the atomic-security matter, and to bring with me all books, papers, records, and memoranda touching my wartime service. I read that clause twice and felt my religion pay out at last. Since 1943 I had kept nothing in my own hand: no diary, no carbons, not so much as a laundry list; and the mightiest government on earth had now commanded the complete archive of Jay Klipspringer produced before it, the archive being a bottle and a paperweight. I would go to Washington carrying a hat. My nose gave me nothing all that week, and quite rightly; it is an instrument for catastrophes still in the leaf, and this one had arrived with a docket number.
Miss Dunn read the thing upside down without moving her head. "Will you want the itinerary in carbon again?" Kessler came around the partition, read it right side up, and offered me his experience of collapsing states: "Be flattered. One young man in a good hat is curiosity. When they mean it they send two, and no hat." Zaremba said if it got me out of the front room for a week the Republic knew its business. Sympathy, in an engineering concern, is issued against a schematic, and nobody had one of me.
Sennett's wire found the office Tuesday, the money squeezed out as ever: PAPER KNOWN HERE BEFORE YOU OPENED IT. COMMITTEE IS THEATER NOT COURT. NO FIFTH. ANSWER WHAT IS ASKED THEN STOP. ADMIRE NOBODY. WEAR THE RIBBON. I burned it in the ashtray and took myself down to LaSalle Street, where Prosser received me with the warmth he reserved for signatures.
"The family holds no view of your innocence, Mr. Klipspringer," he said, squaring his pencils. "The family holds a view of its name in a caption. You will be brief, respectful, and photographed in daylight."
"And if counsel presses?"
"Answer the question asked. Then stop. Most men hang themselves on the second sentence; the first is the answer, the second is the confession." He turned a page of his notes like a man checking freight. "You will not take the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth is for guilty men, and worse, it photographs like one. If matters turn, faint. The public forgives a fainter."
I did not tell him I owned the method already, and from the most exact witness I ever put a question into, then a year into fourteen for answering just what was asked and stopping. I had ridden to town a whole spring on those lessons; it seemed only orderly to ride them back out.
I wrote the board of one its two true sentences, I am wanted in Washington and the machine is well, and Tuesday's three lines came back: the lake was closing, the Averys had gone south early, and Daddy said no man was ever hurt by a committee while being dull. That month there was a fourth line: wear the blue suit, darling; grey comes out guilty in the papers. I wore the blue. The needles, as ever off that hand, read nothing.
From the east, all that autumn, nothing, and nothing was the correct entry; on the other set of books I remained a going concern, and the Congress cannot subpoena a ledger it has never heard of. The thought did for a nightcap several nights running, and needed to.
Now. The reader was promised this story at the very start of these papers, and I know the look of a debt that has aged. So, once, rogue to rogue: I have sold this morning a good many times in fifty years, to bars, to boardrooms, and once to a President between the ninth green and the tenth tee, and I am told the tellings do not agree, a story that works for its living being entitled to dress for the customer. This telling is the goods; the others were sold as seen.
Washington in the first week of December was a town with its collar up. The Chinese had come into Korea, the corridor cameras were all for generals, and no lens could be spared for a Chicago paperweight, an arrangement I endorsed with my whole heart. They took me in executive session, the spectators strained out, seven members at a green table under a flag. The chairman was a Southern gentleman who had passed his war defending a desk on the Potomac and had discovered Communism the season it began to poll; he pronounced atomic in four syllables and was courteous the way a hanging judge is courteous, as part of the vestments. Counsel was the newer article, a crew-cut young lawyer who had taken up anti-Communism the way the boys of my year took up radio, as the coming trade with the short apprenticeship. He wore a small enamel flag in his tie, and I could draw you that flag today, which tells you what the blue suit was covering.
I was sworn, and the chairman opened by having an aide carry up the photograph, the famous one, dawn and crate and all. "The committee is aware of the witness's record," he said. "He thought of the records, gentlemen." I said I had been young, sir, and the records heavy, and got the morning's first laugh, and despised how much I wanted the second.
"You served at the project from 1943," counsel began, "as liaison and keeper of records. You knew Dr. Fuchs."
"Everybody knew him. Nobody knew him. He was the man who drove you to town on Sundays." It did what it was built to do; even the stenographer's shoulders moved.
"You rode with him often."
"Most Sundays of a season, with half the Technical Area. Nothing else went down that didn't smell of the bus."
"Did he talk shop at the wheel?"
"Whatever you asked him, exactly, and then he stopped. The mountains did the talking."
He came to the car, as I had known he must since October: the second Sunday of April, 1945, the witness alone in Santa Fe, arrived by automobile, the automobile the doctor's. He had the Bureau's four lines and he had the Army's watch reports, and he read their heading into the record in the voice of a man opening a vault: moral lapses only.2 "The witness will explain that entry."
I explained it the way you carry a coffin, slowly, eyes down. A lady. A birthday. A war on. I asked, and my voice was not entirely managed doing it, that the lady's name be kept from the record, she having since remarried into a blameless vestry, and the chairman ruled that the lady was not the business of the Congress, with a look of such fellow feeling that I understood the vestries of two states were praying I held the line. I have given the reader the doctrine before, and here it stood at the top of its profession: sin is the one alibi nobody checks the second half of. The committee entered the first half in its record, blushed, and drew the curtain on the rest with its own hand.
"The prisoner has a memory, Mr. Klipspringer. Our people visit him."
"Then you hold my witness, sir. He never in his life answered more than was asked, and I am content to be judged by the habit."
Then counsel squared a fresh folder and asked the flat one, the question the whole morning had been walking toward. "Did you yourself, at any time, remove, carry, convey, or communicate any document, article, or information from that project to any person not authorized to receive it?"
The room did not move, and neither did I, which is to say the sweat let go down my back in one sheet and my knees went to rope where the table hid them, and I sat looking at the stopper of the water carafe and answered on the level beat of a man mildly bored.
"No, sir. I carried the government's paper for the government. Of my own I never kept so much as a diary."3
"No papers at all."
"Counsel is holding my archive. It is a subpoena and a hat."
The chairman enjoyed that; the enamel flag did not. He went to an older folder, and the floor moved a quarter of an inch under my chair. "Before your enlistment, Mr. Klipspringer. The Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. That laboratory has interested the Congress."
"I was never enrolled anywhere, sir. I went up on my own hook, out of term, the summer of '41, one of the odd bodies; I swept floors and hauled cable and watched the experiment. Professor Lawrence kept the doors open."
"Who would remember you there?"
"Several thousand men went through those doors. The floors met them all."
He looked at the folder, and the chairman looked at the clock, and somewhere between the folder and the clock the Republic mislaid its last clean shot at me. I watched it go with my hands folded like a communicant.
There remained the member whose vigilance ran ahead of his attendance, who woke toward the end and wanted it on the record whether I, as a hero of that desert, believed the secret had been handed over by men in high places. I said my corner of the desert had been small and the men in it large, and that the secret I had kept best was how little of it I ever understood. It went down as modesty and drew the best laugh of the morning, being the plain truth; I commend the method to any liar with one fact left.
And I will own the disgraceful part: somewhere past the second folder I had begun to enjoy myself. A committee room is only a demonstration room with the current run the other way; they had convened to prove the machine a fraud, and the machine was closing the sale. It ran the better part of the morning by my clock, and then the chairman gaveled once, thanked me for a candor the record will search for in vain, and came around the table to take my hand. "The country is in your debt, Mr. Klipspringer, and this committee is glad to have had the debt in the room."4 On the steps a photographer posted for a general took me instead, on speculation, and Thursday's Tribune gave it two columns, ATOM HERO AIDS SPY INQUIRY, which is the sweetest sentence a hunt ever printed about its fox.
"You were adequate," Prosser said on the train, which from LaSalle Street is a garland.
So the winter's ledger, drawn on the Capitol Limited with a whiskey standing sentry. Item: one subpoena, served in a good hat, answered with a hat, retired empty. Item: one shirt, ruined at the back where no camera reaches; the blue gave nothing away, as instructed. Item: one perjury, committed level and seated under the flag of the United States, weightless until two witnesses can be produced against it, and I could name the two, and no process of the Congress will ever reach either. Item: my name, entered in the calendar of the Congress as a cooperative witness, the best paper anybody ever held on me and not a word of it in my hand. No acquittal in any of it; a committee does not acquit, it moves its lamp, and the walk backward out of New Mexico had not stopped walking. It had tipped its hat, said the committee looks forward, and gone on down the row of doors.
Sennett's wire beat me home: WITNESS NOTICES SATISFACTORY. PHILADELPHIA MACHINE SELLING HARD. TELEVISION ASKING AFTER ARITHMETIC. FOUNDERS PHOTOGRAPH WELL. The trade was going on the air, and the costume basted onto me in '48 was wanted at the fitter's, in front of the whole country. That is the next number's business. This number's is done: the noose came down, took its measure, and went back up empty.
By the autumn of 1950 the inquiry into the wartime leak ran on at least three tracks. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York was hearing the matter of the Philadelphia chemist, the machinist, and the machinist's New York connections, whose trial came in March 1951; the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was assembling, in executive session, the study published the following April as Soviet Atomic Espionage; and the House committee had been at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley since 1949, in pursuit of a man its record calls Scientist X. A former project man with a famous photograph might that season have been wanted by any of the three. The author does not say which had him; it is the only institution in these papers to which he extends that courtesy. —Ed.
The heading is authentic and its power was real. Under the loyalty program of March 1947, several million federal employments had by 1950 been examined for "derogatory information," and the wartime surveillance summaries of Army counter-intelligence had passed into the Bureau's keeping, the author's among them (first bundle, No. 8). The examiners of the era read a file for associations and opinions; a man's morals were leverage, not disloyalty, and a subject whose watchers had closed his account with "moral lapses only" arrived pre-explained. The heading did for the author before the Congress exactly what it had done for him in Santa Fe, and the second half of the alibi went unchecked, as his doctrine provides. —Ed.
The answer was safer than it reads. A congressional witness of 1950 testified under no grant of immunity, none existing in the statutes until 1954, and his choices were the Fifth Amendment, which ended careers in the taking; the truth; or perjury, and the perjury statute, under the old two-witness rule, required for conviction two witnesses to the falsity, or one witness and corroboration. Of the persons who could have supplied that testimony against the answer recorded here, one was a box number in Denver that appears in no file ever opened, and the other a gentleman resident beyond the reach of any process the Congress owns. The perjury was, as the author says, weightless. The editor adds only that it was perjury. —Ed.
With this number the author discharges, for the first time, the undertaking recorded at the outset of these papers (No. 1, note 2): the story of the subpoena, promised in its proper place and delivered instead in four incompatible versions, of which the reader now holds the first. He should know what he is holding. The subpoena preserved in the counsel's file at the Halsted archive is returnable in December, and the process server's affidavit is sworn on Tuesday, the seventeenth of October; the author's Thursday is his own, and the reader has been advised about his Thursdays. If the body that heard him is the one his description best fits, its calendar, opened a generation later, shows one witness that morning admitted at five past ten and excused twenty-six minutes later; the better part of the morning is also his own. The chairman's parting sentence appears in no record of 1950; it appears in the author's Stanford address of 1987, attributed there to a senator who had died in 1949. And the celebrated answer about the man who drove you to town on Sundays had been rehearsed on the author's own office staff in February of that year (No. 14), which is where a fine phrase generally comes from: earlier, and cheaper. None of this convicts the account; it measures the tailoring. Three versions remain. They will not agree with this one, or with each other, on the year, the city, or the nature of the paper itself, and one of them is the paper he was fleeing when he sold everything he owned in the first week of March, 2000. All four will be presented as written. The editor reconciles nothing. —Ed.