May 1945: a leak scare closes over the mesa, every badge in the Technical Area is called to an interview room, and the author — his monthly arrangement suspended and his cabinet holding nothing but blank paper and bourbon — spends the three days before his Thursday choosing a name to spend. Of all the numbers in these Papers, this is the one the author's admirers most wish he had not written. It is printed as written. The machinist's name stands unaltered; note 4 gives the reason. —Ed.
The slip said Thursday. That left me Monday to Wednesday, and the three days are the story; the interview room was only the delivery.
The mess on Monday served rumor with the coffee, three brands of it. A document had gone loose from somebody's pouch. A letter had been stopped at the censor. A man had been overheard talking past his badge in a Denver hotel. G-2 said nothing at all, which fed all three equally.1 I had lately addressed an envelope to Denver on another gentleman's behalf; I gave the coincidence one cigarette on the annex steps and put it out under my heel.
My monthly with de Silva stood postponed without a new date — no line in, no weather out, for the first time in two years — and the men asking were imported Counter Intelligence faces, billeted apart, eating apart, working down mimeographed lists. My cabinet held blank pads, carbons, and bourbon. Nothing answers a search; it does not answer a man behind a table with the whole afternoon. An interview has to be fed.
Monday night the poker ran short-handed, and a draftsman fresh from his own half hour gave us the shape of the thing between deals.
"They ask about you first," he said. "Then they ask who you'd wonder about."
"And you said?"
"That I don't wonder about anybody." He said it proud and raked his pot, and I did my arithmetic elsewhere. There is the whole science, set down flat: a man survives an interview by confessing small, confessing freely, and putting a name in the plate. The first half I had carried since 1943 — be seen to surrender ground, and choose the ground. That week taught me the finished form: the ground goes down easier when it is somebody else's.
So Tuesday and Wednesday I went shopping — the PX at the slack hour, the shop doors on the courier circuit, the mess, the table at night. Guilt was no part of the specification. I wanted a man whose true facts, laid end to end on a desk, would keep an office interested for a month.
I considered a supply sergeant with a quiet trade in gasoline coupons, and put him back: his traffic ran too near my own. A chemist who talked New Deal politics at the urn went back too: T Division, and the office stepped soft around doctorates. A teamster in the motor pool went back for the opposite fault: an hour would exhaust him, and an office fed short comes back hungry.
Which brought me by Wednesday noon to the man I had known since Monday I would come to; the shopping was mostly ceremony. Walt Griggs. V Shop, hired out of Denver in '43; forty or thereabouts; forearms like bridge cable; half-glasses worn down the nose at cards. I had eaten at his elbow at the second sitting through a winter, and lost eleven dollars to him at stud, in installments.
Everything I knew of him he had given away free at that table, the way honest men do. The union book first: a boy ribbed him about dues, and out came the wallet — International Association of Machinists, Denver local, paid through the war. "On principle," Walt said, and put it away. The brother: in the steel at Pueblo, organizing for the CIO, his letters read out at cards — "the smart one," Walt called him. The wife: Marie, born in Brno, came over in '27; sent kolaches up to the shop at Christmas in a boot box. And the habit, the best fact because it was the most innocent: Walt liked to know what a part was for. The shops worked blind, off drawings with numbers where the names ought to be. "A man ought to know what a thing does," he told the table once. He held views on Bathtub Row too, and aired them: the long-hairs got the tubs, the machinists got the drawing numbers.
Wednesday night I sat across from him a last time and lost two dollars to queens over eights. Now the reader may have the arithmetic, plainly. I did not pick Walt Griggs out of dislike; I liked him as well as anyone on that mesa. I picked him because a physicist would have cost the project blood, and the project would have fought — the long-hairs minded their own like a regiment — whereas a machinist is a telephone call. The Denver hall would have another man on the train inside a fortnight; I did no more than take the union at its word. The wards that make machinists make them by the gross — dues on Friday, mass on Sunday, a strike whenever the hall whistles — interchangeable to a tolerance their own shops would envy. And every fact was true — the union book, the CIO brother, the Bohunk wife, the questions across the shop line. I would need to manufacture nothing, and it is the manufacture that hangs a man. The best of the rumors wore Denver; so did his union card. It was Anton's method, if the reader wants the pedigree: nothing stolen, everything given.
Thursday, then. The room was the old pay office with the counter taken out: a trestle table, a folding chair set square to it, a window painted over to the waist. Behind it sat a first lieutenant I had never seen — twenty-five perhaps, a flat-country haircut, a folder agreeably thin — and in the corner a sergeant with a notebook, never introduced.
"Corporal Klipspringer." He said the name right, which the Army mostly can't. "Sit down. Smoke if you want."
He let a silence run; Millikan showed me that trick in '42, from the better side of the desk. I sat it out looking cooperative and mildly stupid, the correct face for such rooms. He turned a page and asked for Berkeley, and I gave him what I had given de Silva in '43 — never on the rolls, up on my own hook, floors and cable with the rest of the Rad Lab's odd bodies. The story held under a fresh examiner; I had told it so often I could feel modest telling it.
Santa Fe he had by the pass record, most Saturdays, and I gave him Vera — the widow, the hotel, the eleven o'clock mass. The heading had cost a year of Saturdays to build — moral lapses only, in G-2's own phrase2 — and on the day it was tested, it held. I confessed freely, like a man glad to be shut of it: the bourbon in government steel, against standing orders and mine; lumber, the winter the water quit, no chit; a quantity of sugar. He wrote them at the speed a man writes what he already believes, and by the third sin he was very nearly kind. A confessed man is a read man; nobody searches the drawer he has just been handed.
He came to the bottom of the printed sheet and worked at making it sound unprinted.
"Anything else you'd want to tell us, Corporal? A man who talks outside his section, say. A man who's — discontented."
I let it sit; I had rehearsed the reluctance the night before, walking the annex, until it hung naturally.
"I'd hate to make trouble for a good man out of shop talk, sir."
"That's ours to weigh. It's what the week is for."
"Griggs," I said. "Walt Griggs, V Shop. And I'd want it written down that I think the world of him."
"It's written down," he said, and the sergeant in the corner turned to a fresh page.
I gave it to him slowly, every fact wearing its excuse. Talks union in the shop, though plenty do; carries the old Denver card and shows it when the overtime's argued. The pencil moving. A brother organizing with the CIO at the Pueblo steelworks — the brother, mind, not him. Moving faster. A wife born in Brno — half the wives on this Hill are from somewhere. And a habit of asking what parts are for — shop pride, I said; I never once heard him get an answer. Hand an office an accusation and it hunts the flaw; hand it a defense and it hunts the crime. Then the one sentence I had built the night before, the only manufactured article in the transaction: "It's just a great many facts for one bench."
"But he asks," the lieutenant said.
"He asks. Machinists ask, sir. It's likely nothing."
"Most of them are," he said, writing. "Anything further?"
"That's the whole of it."
"You've been helpful, Corporal." Twenty-five minutes, door to door. I was at chow by noon and ate all of it.
The following Wednesday my courier round took me past V Shop, and a stranger stood at Walt's machine having the switches shown to him. Nobody in the shop looked up. Shops know when a man has been lifted out of them, and know better than to say so on government floor. There had been no charge, no hearing, no farewell at the mess: clearance withdrawn, services no longer required, transportation provided.3
On the Friday I was on the PX steps with a bottle of Coca-Cola when the truck came up from the trailer camp and stood at the corner waiting on the gate traffic. A footlocker, boot boxes tied with string, a sewing machine in its case. Marie Griggs rode in the cab in a church coat in May, looking at the road. Walt rode behind with the luggage, in the suit a man keeps for weddings, and while the truck stood he looked around the mesa like a man trying to recall where he had left a tool he was fond of. Then the traffic cleared and the truck went down toward the gate. He was not looking at me; so far as he knew then, or ever knew, there was no reason to. I did not wave. He had never done me a wrong, and nothing I told them about him was false; both of those are true, and in fifty-five years I have never gone looking for a third. I finished the Coca-Cola, set the empty in the crate for the deposit, and went in and bought razor blades and a writing pad.
The sweep wound down by the first of June with nothing announced, which on an Army post means nothing found. My verdict came back clean by the same sign, and then by a better one: de Silva's summons resumed as though no month were missing. "We'll pick up the schedule," was all he ever said of the gap. He had been lent to the flap like every officer with a desk; the silence I had spent three weeks reading as a sentence had been a duty roster. On the Sunday Fisk poured at nine and wrote one line in the notebook, standing, before he sat down to the weather, and I did not ask.
As for the sieve: every badge in the Technical Area had its half hour that May. The quiet man with the Buick was in and out, I heard, inside ten minutes. I had my twenty-five. The interviews caught nobody at all, and the one man the month removed from the Hill was Walt Griggs.4 If a moral wants drawing, apply to the government; it conducted the exercise. I only passed it.
With June came the next weather up the teletype: the General himself, due on the Hill inside the fortnight. And Pomeroy came down the T corridor wanting a man who could walk the General's aide through the month's minutes — "in English, Klipspringer." In my experience that phrase has only ever been pointed one way.
The sweep is historical practice. Installation-wide security interviews — every badge, no exceptions, schedules by section — were conducted at Manhattan District sites more than once in 1945, and the May flap on the mesa left no stated cause in the open record: the surviving files record the interviews and not the reason. The three rumors the author lists are the three the memoirs list, in roughly the same proportions. One of the three contains the name of a city, and the reader has lately been given a Denver box number (No. 13). The editor draws no conclusion. —Ed.
The heading is genuine G-2 usage, met already at No. 8: Army surveillance summaries of the period twice enter the author's Santa Fe conduct as of "no security interest — moral lapses only." His interview sheet from this sweep survives in the index, half a page: "candid and cooperative," minor irregularities of property and conduct noted and dismissed, and, at the foot, the routine notation that the subject volunteered information regarding another employee — "see separate memorandum." The separate memorandum is the business of note 4. —Ed.
The instrument was the quiet transfer, and it too is historical practice. Where the District suspected but could not charge — or merely wished to be rid of a doubt — it withdrew the clearance, declared the services no longer required, and provided the transportation, with a flag in a file the man would never see and no reason stated, then or afterward; since no charge was laid, no appeal lay. The receiving post was told nothing. The family was told less. Within the security organs the method was regarded as the humane alternative, in that it accused no one. There had never been an accusation. There had been an interview. —Ed.
Walter Griggs, of Denver. Machinist; hired by the District in October 1943; rated excellent by his shop in four consecutive review periods. His security file, released to his daughter in 1997, runs to four sheets: an interview summary of May 1945 attributing certain observations to an informant described as reliable; a memorandum noting a union book paid through the war, a brother then organizing at the Pueblo steelworks, and a wife born in Brno; the withdrawal of clearance; the transfer order, dated 29 May 1945. No sheet alleges an act. The transfer was to a quartermaster depot in Utah, where the Army found him work suited to his flag: he counted parts. Discharged in February 1946, he went home to Denver with a reference giving his dates of employment and nothing else — which from that employer, in that year, was a document no plant would touch. The aircraft plants declined him without saying why, and he spent the next twenty-three years machining truck parts on Brighton Boulevard at a good deal less than his Hill rate. He wrote twice, in 1947 and again in 1953, asking to be told the reason; both replies are in his daughter's possession, and neither contains one. He told his family the altitude had not suited him. Marie Griggs's citizenship petition, filed in 1944, was granted in 1949; the delay is nowhere explained. He died in 1968. His daughter, offered the protection of an altered name, declined it: her father, she said, had done nothing, and his name belongs in the record of it. The author, who in the year 2000 checked the dates of his own treasons three times with a ruler, appears never once to have looked for Walt Griggs. —Ed.