The board promised at the close of the last number convenes in this one, in the spring the generalissimo died, and puts to the author the question of the age; he answers it in the syllable he was coached to, and the machinery he once fed renders its finding. With that finding the second bundle ends; note 5 ties the string and reads the marking on the third. —Ed.
The statement went back to Washington in January, inside the thirty days: twenty years of Jay Klipspringer in the subject's own hand, sworn and witnessed.1 Ten evenings it cost, and it taught me that a man who has kept nothing in writing since 1943 composes an autobiography exactly as he composes a cover story: sentences built to be checked, sentences built to be uncheckable, none of a third kind. The Pasadena years closed in the registrar's own comfortable words; the Berkeley summer worded so that several thousand men might have seen me and none could swear otherwise. It was the best thing I ever wrote, and the government holds the only copy: a complete life of me, in a federal vault, wrong in every load-bearing place. I am writing the other one now, on these pads; of the two I commend the government's, as shorter and better witnessed.
Sennett's wire came up while the ink dried: STATEMENT READ HERE FIRST. BERLIN LEG IS OURS IF ASKED. SAY SO AND STOP. BOARD WILL BE FRIENDLY. FRIENDLY IS NOT SAFE. I burned it per the religion and noted my nose, after a month of ringing, had gone quiet; it rings for bills coming due, not bills in collection.
The board convened in March, the week the generalissimo died. The papers were full of the deathbed all the way in on the Northwestern, and I sat wondering whether an entry made in 1944 burns with its emperor. I knew better. Initials change, portraits come down; the entry reads Corporal either way.
They gave me a Thursday, the day my bills fall due, and a sixth-floor room in a federal building in the Loop: long table, flag, stenographer, and a steam radiator painted silver, with a rust tear down one rib. No bench, no bar, no press. The board was three citizens of standing: a retired colonel in the chair, a telephone-company lawyer, and a packing-house director, volunteers all, the government having found that for the work of ending a man's living, gentlemen who serve without pay do it more gently than police and sleep at least as well. A security officer, a Major Ives, kept the folder, and the folder kept everything else.
The colonel opened with the trade's courtesies. "This is an inquiry, Mr. Klipspringer, not a trial. The board has no adversary character; nobody here is your accuser." The plain truth, my accuser being confidential, certified reliable, and not in the room; I have written that sentence myself, and sat admiring the workmanship. "The government's mind holds a doubt. We hope to resolve it in your favor. You are entitled to counsel."
"I waive counsel, Colonel. I can say who I am."
Ives read me to me for an hour, and I confirmed myself paragraph by paragraph. Pasadena, withdrawn, family circumstances; the lawyer looked up with kindness ready, and got: "My mother's circumstances, sir. They were never good." True, and covering that entry these eleven years. The war record they had by heart, and honored in the voice men use at memorials. My title had come in ahead of me; a man the television calls father arrives everywhere pre-introduced.
"Have you at any time belonged to any organization designated on the Attorney General's list?"
"I have never belonged to anything, Mr. Chairman. Not a party, not a lodge, not a burial society."
The packer found it remarkable, and in that year it was; a man who had joined nothing was either a hermit or a careful traitor. "Astoria, sir. Two rooms and an airshaft. Everything with dues was past us, and I never got the habit." My religion had dressed itself as thrift, and thrift, before an American board, out-argues theology.
"What do you read, Mr. Klipspringer?"
"The Tribune, and the trade press." The colonel wrote that down approvingly; the Tribune has been called many things, never soft on Moscow.
They came to the Sundays, Ives reading the association in: the subject and the convicted agent, 1944 and 1945, an automobile, Santa Fe. Under it lay the Army's old watch summary, heading and all; the reader knows the heading, and it worked again. Half the Technical Area had ridden that Buick; the colonel ruled the lady no business of the board and moved on, faintly colored, a man who has carried something scandalous safely across a room. The car's calendar stands drawn complete these two years, my mile not in the drawing; sin remains the alibi nobody checks the second half of.
The money took two minutes. Did I live above my salary? "My wife lives above my salary, sir. I live with her." The telephone lawyer, who knew the Halsted name the way Chicago knows it, closed the line himself; on the North Shore the presumption of innocence attaches to the money, not the man.
Then Ives turned a page, and the room changed pitch: the stenographer's hands coming up level, the packer leaning in a quarter inch, the colonel not moving at all.
"You traveled in Europe in December last. London, Paris, Bonn. And Berlin."
"Yes."
"On the afternoon of Thursday, December the eleventh, you crossed into the Soviet sector of that city. Alone. On foot. The board would hear your reasons."
The sweat let go down my back in one sheet, where no board sees, and my eyes fixed on the radiator's rust tear and studied it. Some confidential mouth had put me east of the line: a spot check sold across a desk, one of ours at the crossing, the waiter. Whose, I never learned; the method is built so that it never matters. Four o'clock, a cellar, a hat square beside a cup: if they had the hour, they had the war. The colonel's face was all patience, and that is the sound a hit makes in that trade, patience.
"I walked east to see it, Colonel," I said, on the level beat of mild embarrassment. "The way forty thousand Berliners walked it that afternoon. Swept ruin, a boulevard of barracks dressed as palaces, and a cup of coffee I commend to this board as the strongest argument for our side in Europe. I was west by seven, at a garrison colonel's table; the guest book will bear me out."
"Whom did you meet there?"
"Nobody who gave me a name worth keeping."
Ives looked to the colonel, who opened the thin second folder, from Washington, and read out, naming no office, that the December itinerary had been arranged, cut, and paid for by an agency of the government, and no further inquiry was recommended.2 The packer sat back like a man whose chair had been pulled an inch. The question was not answered; it was withdrawn from circulation, one confidential mouth overruled by a confidential letter on better stationery.
I hand the apprentice, free, the rule I used in the next half minute: when a bad question dies, do not attend the funeral. Relief is a drunk with money and will buy the room a round. I sat with my teeth together, and the next question was about machine tools.
Toward the end came the favorable information, the liturgy running derogatory first, credits after: references, the medal, the caption. Then, in the flattest voice of the day: the subject had, on his own initiative, furnished information of value to a federal investigative agency in June of 1951, and was regarded by that agency as reliable and cooperative.3 The board warmed the way a parlor warms when the furnace catches, and the packer looked at me the way you look at a man already invested in the firm.
Behind my communicant's face I watched the arithmetic run. Two of us had come out of one file before this machinery. Corbett brought it the truth, all of it, to everyone who asked, and it burned him to the waterline for the curiosity; he was teaching general science downstate that morning, to boys who will never know what the quiet man at the blackboard had been. I brought it a name, his, and the name sat on the credit side of my folder, glowing like the medal. The board could not test loyalty, no instrument tests it, so it took the proof the age had agreed to bank, a fellow citizen delivered; against collateral of that grade, no doubt held. I did not smile; it was only the trade closing, and I have made the same face at a hundred sales.
At five past four the colonel took off his reading glasses, any tribunal's bell for the last lap. "One question the board is required to put, Mr. Klipspringer, and then we are done. In the event of hostilities, would you defend the United States of America against all its enemies, foreign and domestic?"
I had been rehearsed for it, word and hour, across a cellar table in the Soviet sector, by the enemy in question; I set it down flat because no reader spared this century will believe it. Say yes. You have always said yes to me.
"Yes," I said.
It went into the shorthand and held, one syllable satisfying both parties to my account. If the reader asks whether I meant it: I have said yes all my life to whoever held the paper, and that afternoon the flag held it. It is the other entry that never moves.
The colonel came round at the close, chairmen never being able to help themselves with me. "Speaking for myself, Mr. Klipspringer, I'll sleep no worse for today." His grip was dry and warm, and I took with it the hand of the machinery that had finished my friend, and felt nothing in it but a retired colonel being kind.
The finding came by mail in May: continued access, clearly consistent with the interests of national security.4 Miss Dunn laid it on the blotter unfolded. Sennett wired: CLEARED AS EXPECTED. CERTIFICATE TRAVELS WELL. WASHINGTON CONTENT. DO NOTHING. Tuesday's letter came, three lines: the lake was cold, the Averys were building a boathouse, and Daddy said a man the government vouches for borrows at better rates. Then a fourth line: Two men came in February and asked about you, darling. I gave them tea and told them everything I know. I read it to the bottom of a whiskey and got no nearer its floor than in seven years. The government had interviewed the board of one, at leverage I never held, and cleared me anyway; that settles either what she knows or what it can find out, and I never framed the sentence deciding which.
All that summer you could hear the era proper coming, the way you hear a parade before you see it. The junior senator from Wisconsin had a subcommittee of his own now and a chief counsel of twenty-six, and had made the age's discovery, that the hunt photographs; in the entertainment trades the blacklist already ran like a second payroll. In October his men turned onto the Army itself: the radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth, in Jersey, where a corporal took down one sentence of mine in 1942 and stamped what he took. That sentence, the foundation stone of everything the reader has had from me, was drawing interest in a cabinet forty miles from the senator's microphones.
The telephone call came the same month, a young man off the subcommittee staff, flat and friendly. The Senator admired my record; the Senator was interested in the laboratories; there would be hearings, and there would, he said, giving the word the weight of an appropriation, be television. "The country believes men it has seen, Mr. Klipspringer. We may want it to hear from you." I said I was at the committee's service, at its convenience, and sat with my thumb on the gyroscope's gimbal, having heard convenience in that tone before, from process servers.
So the bundle's accounts, drawn the way I keep them, nowhere. Item: one statement, twenty years, sworn, notarized, and wrong wherever it mattered, banked in a government vault. Item: one clearance, granted to the single man in that room carried on an enemy service's books, and paid for in December of 1951, by another party. Item: one oath, coached in a cellar in the Soviet sector, administered under the flag of the United States, and holding. Item: one entry, unmoved since 1944, reading Corporal through every renaming of its keeper. And item: one telephone number on the blotter, to be called at my convenience, my convenience having acquired, by the sound of him, a date.5 The little board was the parish court; the assizes were coming, gavel to gavel, wanting faces the country trusts, and my second gift was always standing next to the right man. I was cleared, crowned, and current on every account; I slept excellently that autumn, and the reader, trained across two bundles, knows where to enter the fact.
The paper was the statement of personal history required of contractors' personnel under the industrial security program of the armed services, the machinery of which the reader has now seen from both sides (Nos. 18, 19). Its method in 1953 was as this number shows it: charges furnished in summary, sources confidential and certified of known reliability, no confrontation and no cross-examination, hearings before boards of private citizens serving without pay, and doubt resolved for the government. Weeks after the hearing recorded here, Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953 carried the same standard across the whole federal establishment, replacing disloyalty with the broader category of the security risk; the question put at the end of such hearings, whether the subject would defend the United States against all its enemies, was standard to the form. The author's statement survives in the file. Where it can be checked, it checks; the Pasadena entry reproduces the registrar's annotation of June 1942 word for word (first bundle, No. 2); the Berkeley summer rests, as it rested in 1942 and 1950, on the testimony of floors. —Ed.
The file, released a generation later in the usual condition, preserves both papers of the afternoon. The derogatory item reports the subject entering the Soviet sector of Berlin on foot on 11 December 1952, source designated by letter and number and described as of known reliability; the source was correct in every particular, and the reader of the nineteenth number holds more of that afternoon than the board was ever given. Against it lies the communication the chairman read: a single paragraph on the stationery of an office with no printed function, certifying the December itinerary as government business and recommending no further inquiry, over a signature that is a stamp. The item was marked resolved the same day. The board weighed no facts on the point; it weighed the two sources, and found the second to outrank the first, which under the program was a finding in correct form. —Ed.
The favorable information is likewise in the file: the Bureau's advice that the subject had in June 1951 furnished, on his own initiative, information of value respecting former project personnel, and was carried as a cooperative informant of established reliability. It is the summary the reader met at No. 18, seen from its other face. The same sentences thus stand twice in the government's paper of those years: in the file of the man who spoke them, as credit, and in the file of the man they described, as the doubt that finished him. Both boards sat under the same program, on the same instructions. —Ed.
The finding of May 1953 is preserved in the Halsted archive in the standard words the author quotes. The era he heard coming arrived on schedule. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had passed in January 1953 to the chairmanship of the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, its chief counsel twenty-six years old that autumn; in October the subcommittee opened its inquiry into the Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where the author had been classified into the Special Engineer Detachment in 1942; and the collision it began ran, in the spring of 1954, to thirty-six days of hearings carried live on television before audiences reckoned at twenty million. The Senate condemned the senator that December, sixty-seven to twenty-two. The blacklist of the entertainment trades, institutional since 1947 and codified by the publication of Red Channels in 1950, outlived him by years, as did the files. —Ed.
With the letter of May 1953 the account of the years 1945 to 1953 is complete, and the bundle the author tied and marked, in his own hand, Loot, the second of the nine, comes to its end. It has kept the three senses of its title: the plunder shipped west by the crate, the founding credit taken by caption, and the atomic debt that came to collect and was paid, the reader has seen with what. Of the two men this bundle sent before the same machinery, the one who told it only the truth was broken, and the one who fed it a friend holds its certificate; the machine did not malfunction, and the reader who wants a moral is directed to the specifications. The next bundle, in the same hand and on the same string, is marked McCarthyism. —Ed.