Dreamer of Dune (10 page)

By now I was proficient in Spanish, so my parents decided to place me in Mexican public school, in the first grade. I wore a thin white peasant outfit like local children and carried my school supplies in a small canvas bag. I traveled to and from school on a unique schoolbus, an old station wagon with some of its windows broken out, including the back one. This allowed motor exhaust into the passenger compartment. I sat in the rear, probably the worst seat from the standpoint of air quality, scrunched up next to other kids.

We had been in Ciudad Guzman for only a few days when the retired Mexican Army general who ran the town asked to see Frank Herbert, in order to evaluate his application for an extended stay in Mexico. One of the local merchants took Dad in a truck to the general's beautiful three-story house, where flowers hung from wrought iron balconies. The general was very friendly. Several people were in attendance, and sweet cookies were served, which Dad liked. He ate two, realizing later that the others only took one apiece.

When Dad returned to the merchant's truck, he began to feel drunk. He told the merchant to go get their wives; they were going out to have a party. The merchant wanted no part of this, for he knew they would get into trouble. He told Dad that the cookies had been laced with the most expensive North African hashish in the world, flown in by the Mexican Air Force for the general.

Dad recalled being taken into a beautiful building and guided up a long flight of stairs to a room with a table. There the merchant and a beautiful woman filled him with six or seven cups of strong Mexican coffee. Dad came down from his hallucination, and noticed the woman was an old hag, a whorehouse madame. He left as soon as he could, and while descending the stairs noticed now that they smelled of urine, and that there was a stench of burro dung outside.

Another time, a Mexican friend gave my father a cup of tea made with “semillas” (seeds), and Dad didn't think to ask what sort of seeds they were. After consuming the delicious beverage, he learned they were morning glory seeds. Subsequently he passed out, falling into a pleasant sleep. He recalled my mother waking him up the next morning in a sunny room.

A few months later, upon returning to the United States, Dad would have a third and final experience with a hallucinatory drug. While the first two experiences were inadvertent, the third, as I will explain later, was not. Through these experiences he was developing an awareness of the significance of drugs in human life, and would write about this one day in the
Dune
series. The fictional spice melange, the most important substance in the universe, was produced only on the planet Dune, and Paul Atreides's experiences with that drug mirror the author's personal experiences. Melange, in fact, would become the key to an entire political, economic, and religious structure in the Dune universe.

In Ciudad Guzman, with no money coming in, our funds soon ran dangerously low. We packed and left town for parts north. By the end of 1953 we were staying with the Vances at their farmhouse in Kenwood, California. On a small kitchen table at the rear of the house, Mom worked with me on a scrapbook about the Mexico trip. She located a stamp pad and large rubber letters, which we used with painstaking slowness to print a story on the pages. This was one of my first writing experiences, and it was in effect a journal, albeit a brief one.

These are some of the entries:

Dad played a double-reed harmonica in those days, favoring sea chanteys, Irish songs and Western tunes. He played “Greensleeves,” too, which may have been written by one of our ancestors, King Henry VIII. My father's harmonica tone was sweet, with excellent tremolo effect. He could play the guitar and piano as well, with more than passable skill, and he whistled beautifully. “Worried Man Blues” and “Rhapsody in Blue” were among his favorites. He had a natural ear and was self-taught. Above all, Frank Herbert was blessed with a wonderful baritone singing voice, rich and full. My mother commented often on how much she enjoyed hearing him sing.

He was between jobs at the time, and a number of bill collectors were hot on his trail. One day, my father vowed, he would pay all the old bills in full, with interest. For the moment, however, they would have to wait.

W
HILE WE
stayed with the Vances in California, Dad wasn't doing much creative writing. For several years, he had been wanting to return to the Northwest, and now he had feelers out for jobs in Washington State and Oregon—either in the newspaper business or other professions that involved writing. To get by, my parents borrowed money from Mom's Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bing, who lived in nearby Sebastopol, California.

In the spring of 1954, when Dad was thirty-three years old, he obtained an important job. It was as speech writer for Guy Cordon, a U.S. Senator from Oregon who was running for re-election that year. Cordon chaired the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, with substantial responsibilities in government land-use policy. He also sat on the powerful Senate Appropriations committee and on a number of subcommittees, including Armed Services and Atomic Energy.

Years before in Burley, Frank Herbert had been influenced by Henry W. Stein, an ex-newspaperman who spoke of the romance of life on a big-city newspaper. Stein also instilled in the boy a passionate interest in politics. Stein had been involved in state and national politics, serving as a presidential elector from the State of Washington.

Now my father jumped at the opportunity to join Cordon's staff. This would vault him into elite circles, providing his developing intellect with important insights into the mechanics of national politics—insights that Frank Herbert could use extensively in his writing for years to come.

Initially he would work in Washington, D.C., with the Senator, but for only a six-week period between early April and the primary election in May. After that, Dad was to return to Portland, Oregon, to handle publicity and other tasks for the re-election campaign. Under those circumstances, it wasn't practical for us to accompany him to the nation's capital.

We packed at fanatical speed to move our household to Portland, and within seventy-two hours everything we owned was ready to go. Then, as always, my parents owned a lot of books, so this made up a great deal of the weight of the shipment. Dad made arrangements for men to come in and carry the items.

Two days later, with only a few suitcases, we were six hundred miles north in Portland, staying in a hotel. Cordon's previous speech writer had resigned on short notice, so Dad was needed right away. He only had one day to help Mom find an old house to rent in the city.

That evening, Mom, Bruce and I accompanied the new political staffer to Portland Airport. My parents kissed, and Mom said to Dad, “Give 'em hell, darling.”

My mother would not listen to the radio until hours later, when she was certain his plane had landed safely in Washington, D.C.

A man of ethics with a perfect senatorial attendance record, Guy Cordon had been in office for a decade. Like ex-president Harry S. Truman, his close friend in the other major party, he refused to become obligated to private interests. Since Cordon was chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, oil companies were always trying (without success) to curry favor with him. He was a “nuts and bolts” man, a technician who cared more about substance than politics. Many times he avoided publicity. My father would grow to respect him very much.

In a magazine article, Frank Herbert wrote:

My parents wrote to one another, but Mom had more time to write than he did. Her letters were more frequent and longer. One thing was common to all of their correspondence: They spoke of how much they missed one another, how much they ached to be together again.

Each evening my mother liked to read, or would knit while listening to Fulton Lewis, Jr., or Paul Harvey on the radio. The oil furnace didn't heat the house enough for her, so she liked to bundle up in an afghan and sit by a cozy fire. She read murder mysteries, historical accounts and, increasingly, books about politics. She was fascinated by biographies of American political leaders, including Eisenhower and Stevenson, and analyses of events that led to the first and second world wars.

In April and May 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings were in full swing in Washington, D.C. Radio broadcasts began at 2:00
P.M
. Portland time, and Mom listened to every moment of them.

She was a fine seamstress, and using a sewing machine borrowed from Babe, she made curtains for the house, along with her own slacks, shorts, blouses, skirts, and dresses. She also knitted sweaters for Dad.

In every way possible, she wanted to help Dad on the Cordon campaign, either with advice based upon her political researches or through other campaign-related tasks that he needed completed in Oregon. She was always volunteering to do things for him, and he very much appreciated it. She located news accounts from papers all over Oregon about Democrat Richard Neuberger, who would probably be Cordon's opponent for the senate seat after the May primaries.

Using all available information on Neuberger, my father then prepared speeches and press releases that attacked the opponent's positions on a variety of issues.

Public opinion polls came in showing Neuberger doing too well, and as panic set in on the Cordon staff, some of them discussed tactics that could only be classified as dirty politics. My father refused to participate in any of those schemes, and instead recommended a course of direct confrontation with Neuberger on the issues. Cordon followed this advice, but seemed uncomfortable campaigning. With his aversion to publicity, his accomplishments and messages did not always reach the attention of the voters. Cordon had done a great deal to promote the interests of Oregon labor, for example, by saving a Columbia River dam construction project in committee, but few people outside of the U.S. Senate ever learned about it.

Frank Herbert had taken on a formidable task, attempting to publicize a man who would not blow his own horn, a man who was widely respected by his peers in the U.S. Senate, but not well-known in his own state. In two earlier U.S. Senate elections, Cordon had won easily against weak Democratic opponents. Now, in Neuberger, he faced a former state senator and published writer who was easily recognized in Oregon. His wife, state legislator Maurine Neuberger, aided his cause with her own personal popularity, having been a champion of consumer protection issues.
^*

In a very real sense, Mom missed Dad so terribly that she tried to keep herself busy while he was gone. She was always asking him on the telephone and in letters when he would be home, and telling him she was keeping the home fires burning. Whenever the phone rang, she ran for it, hoping it was him, hoping he would surprise her with a call from Portland Airport. Whenever she heard footsteps on the front porch, she thought they might be his. When they spoke on the phone, I sometimes saw tears in her eyes, and as they closed she often said to him in Spanish,
“Adios, mi amor.”
(“Good-bye, my love.”)

Dad, who was living in a five-dollar-a-day room at the historic Mayflower Hotel, missed her just as much. As days away from her passed, he wrote in a letter home that he had been singing the words from a popular song to himself, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

They counted the days remaining until my father would come home.

While in Washington, D.C., he obtained a pass through Senator Cordon's office and attended a number of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Dad sat in the Senate reserved gallery amidst much security, since five members of Congress had been wounded a short time before by Puerto Rican separatists who fired pistols from a spectators' gallery.

Senator Cordon had been criticized by Neuberger for not coming out against Senator Joseph McCarthy, and this was hurting Cordon's campaign, dropping him in the polls. To counter this, Frank Herbert was sitting in on the hearings, obtaining information that Cordon might use to advantage. Cordon, former Oregon State Commander of the American Legion, was strongly pro-military, and concurred with many of McCarthy's publicly expressed positions. But troubling bits of information were reaching Cordon's ears concerning the methods of the Senator from Wisconsin.

On his maternal side, Frank Herbert was a McCarthy himself, with many relatives in Senator McCarthy's home state, including the famous red-baiter himself, who was a distant cousin. Dad referred to him as “Cousin Joe,” and on one occasion they met in the nation's capital, at a cocktail party.

After initially keeping an open mind about McCarthy, Dad was appalled to learn about blacklisting methods the Senator used to prevent suspected Communists and “Communist sympathizers” from working in their chosen professions—particularly since this was often based upon scant evidence. Frank Herbert, like McCarthy, felt the leadership of the Soviet Union was psychotic enough to start a nuclear war, but believed McCarthy had gone too far in his zeal and paranoia, to the point where he was endangering essential freedoms of the people of the United States. Here my father drew the line, for he was a great believer in the Constitution of this nation—particularly in the rights of individuals. After consideration he recommended that Cordon make a strong statement against McCarthy, which Cordon did. But he didn't do it until the hearings were almost over, which Neuberger used against him.

At the hearings, Dad saw Robert F. Kennedy working as an aide to Senator McCarthy, talking in hushed tones with the Senator, doing the Senator's bidding, constantly at his side. This, when added to RFK's later position in support of federal wiretapping, branded him as a dangerous politician in my father's opinion—as a politician, who, like Senator McCarthy, would not hesitate to trample on human rights for the sake of a pet cause.

In the
Dune
series, which would begin in serial form in 1963, Dad wrote extensively about the abuses of power by leaders. These were opinions based, in large degree, upon his experiences in Washington, D.C. Another reflection of this time can be found in the short story “Committee of the Whole,” which would appear in the April 1965 issue of
Galaxy
. In that story, Frank Herbert described, in highly cynical terms, the workings of a Senate committee.

Dad worked for Senator Cordon in Room 130A of the Senate Office Building. The building was commonly referred to as the “S.O.B.” And Cordon's “big office,” as staffers called it, was Room 333.

My father's days were long, often from early in the morning until midnight. Almost every day he had breakfast in the S.O.B. dining room, usually a poached egg on unbuttered wheat toast, a half grapefruit without sugar and two cups of black coffee. He read three newspapers with breakfast—
The Washington Post, The New York Times
, and, in great detail,
The Congressional Record
. He scanned for items of interest and read quickly—a style of research that would be beneficial to him during his long writing career.

After breakfast he liked to take a constitutional around the Capitol Building, and shortly before 8:30
A.M
. he always reported to Room 130A. Dad was much more than a speech writer to the Senator. Each morning after organizing his papers, Dad went up to the third floor to consult with Robert Parkman (Senator Cordon's administrative assistant) on promotional projects for the day. Then he went back downstairs and worked on speeches, political letters and news stories about the Senator, for release to the press.

Speech writing took up most of his time and involved many rewrites. He worked on this for most of each morning and often into the early part of the afternoon. At least four lunches each week were with important people, including Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay, a friend and supporter of Cordon. Frank Herbert knew McKay from years earlier in Salem, Oregon, when the younger man had been a reporter and McKay had been a state senator. Other lunches and important meetings were with research directors at the Defense Department (for the Army Corps of Engineers), with National Archives people, with Senator Margaret Chase Smith (whom Dad admired), and with Jack Martin, press secretary to President Eisenhower—all to obtain assistance for the Cordon campaign.

From mid-afternoon to 6:00
P.M
., Dad could invariably be found in the Library of Congress, in what he called his “second office.” That was Study Room 249 in the Library of Congress Annex. The little room came equipped with telephone extension 807, where he could always be reached if someone needed him right away.

Usually he took his portable Remington typewriter into that office. With piles of books and periodicals all around, he researched and wrote speeches, political letters and press releases. To add spice to the Senator's speeches, my father included familiar quotations and anecdotes of famous people, particularly American politicians with a sense of humor, such as Chauncey M. Depew. Depew, renowned as a raconteur and after-dinner speaker, wrote an autobiography,
My Memories of Eighty Years
, which Dad referred to often.

The Library of Congress, in two huge buildings by the Capitol, was the largest reference facility in the nation, with more than thirty-three million documents. As a senatorial staffer, Frank Herbert had C-9 security clearance. This permitted him access to the Legislative Reference Service, through which he could use virtually any document or book in the library. He just got on the telephone, ordered what he wanted, and presently it arrived in a cart, with blue bookmarks designating the pages that were of interest to him. Additional notes were included on material available at other government facilities, such as the National Archives. If Dad wanted any of the material, he just ordered it through the Library of Congress, and presently it was in front of him.

He had so much research to do, so much studying, that at times he felt like he was cramming for a college examination. In a moment of late-night silliness he wrote to Mom, referring to the library as “the Liberace of Congress.”