Legacy (13 page)

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committee I had performed various lawful tasks that were on the public record and to the public benefit. But she had strong opinions, this young house wife and community helper, and I could see tha she was about to voice them: 'This nation ha,, watched a Navy admiral take the Fifth, an Ai Force general take the Fifth, alid a Marine colonel And they're fed up. If one more military man stand there and takes the Fifth, it would sicken them. I d( not want my husband to be the hero who finaHl makes them throw up.' Zack, having expected such a rejection from me was not surprised at my wife's outrage, but h( knew how to deal with it: 'Nancy, sit down and stol the heroics. Your husband can go to jail if we don' handle this right, and by we, I mean all of us, yot included. Now shut up and listen.' From his papers he extracted his copy of thE Fifth Amendment: '... nor shall any person bE subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeo pardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in an~ criminal case to be a witness against himself . . It's there to protect everyone, innocent and guilty from what governments used to do to extract testi mony.' And in solemn tones he described the kinds of extracting of information that used to occur: the cutting off of ears, the dislocation of limbs on the rack, the hot oil in the ear, the incarceration in a cell too cramped to permit standing or sleeping. 'One of the noblest provisions in the Bill of Rights is

the Fifth Amendment. And your husband is exactly the kind of person it was intended to protect.' Stunned by the force of Zack's description of what trials used to be like, even in Colonial America, Nancy took the chair he indicated, and

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asked: 'So he gets on the stand like all our other inilitary heroes and crybabies? 'No,'Zack said patiently, 'he protects himself, as Simon Starr's Constitution invites him to ... no, wants him to.' 'And then he begs the Senate Committee to grant him immunity?' 'Not beg. But I will certainly seek it for him ... and get it!' 'Then whaff 'Well, he's supposed to tell all he knows, assist the committee.' 'You mean rat on his associates?' Nancy has the habit of reducing evasions to basics, and Zack did not like what he heard. 'Now you must understand. . .'he fumbled. Nancy cut him short. Folding her hands in her lap and smiling warmly, she said: 'Zack, you've known us a long time without really knowing us. It's clear you don't understand Norman and me. He will not evade responsibility, never. And if facing up to the truth gets him in trouble, I can always get back that word-processing job I had when we got married. So if you think my husband, to save his own neck, would. . .' It was a brave speech, but it did not impress Zack. He was a fighting redhead and he had coddled us long enough. Standing over us, he said: 'Yesterday morning, before I had~the all-day ses- sion with our top lawyers, who know more about Washington than I ever will, I was one kind of guy and you were two ordinary people. Well, com- padres, that's changed.' 'How?'Nancy asked, always ready for a fight. 'Because at the meeting this morning a man from one of the top law firms informed us that he had

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certain proof that the Senate panel had someone who was going to blab about an affair in Nicaragua ... maybe just over the bokder in Honduras, called Tres Toros.' I remained perfectly calm, but both Zack and Nancy had to see that my knuckles had whitened. To Zack it was what he had expp~cted, but to Nancy it was like a fire bell clanging at night. It terrified her, and suddenly the pugnacious battler became a trembling wife eager to protect her husband. She did not ask what Tres Toros was or what it signi- fied; in a low voice she asked: 'What are we to do, Zack?' He smiled at her as if he loved her, and said: 'We stay calm, all of us. Your husband takes the Fifth, and for one very good reason that supersedes all others.'And here his voice rose almost to a scream: 'To save his goddamned ass.' Then he sat down, wiped his forehead, and said quietly: 'There is no other way, Nancy. And with luck, I think I can bring this off. But Norman and I must have your support.' I shivered, because when he had talked with me only that morning, he said: 'I'm sure I can save your neck.' But after Nancy's outburst and the surfac- ing of the Tres Toros, his boast had been down- graded to: 'I think I can.'

It was a chastened pair of Starrs who drove to my parents' home for Sunday-night supper. Since Nancy was driving, I sat hunched in the shotgun seat pondering gloomily the things that faced me

tomorrow. We rode in silence, through snow- plowed streets, for this was the time of year when Eastern states and especially Washington were hit by tremendous snowfalls, and the white icy night meshed neatly with my personal storms.

When we reached a place in the streets where a wide place had been plowed, Nancy slowed, turned toward me, and said: 'Okay. What was Tres TorosT I remained silent for some time, then reminded her of the family rule we had agreed upon at mar- riage: 'The house is your domain. The Army is mine.' But then, like a clever lawyer, she cited the elaboration which she had insisted on: 'I can ask two questions in the area of the subject, and you must answer them unless they touch too close to secret matters. Do you agree that I'm entitled to my two questionsT 'I do.' 'Were you authorized to do whatever you didT 'I play by the book. You know that.' But after reflection, I added: 'Zack thinks I'm in trouble mainly because those who gave the authorization have already publicly denied it.' 'Was money involvedT 'A great deal. But I don't have to tell you that none stuck to my fingers.' 'Did the money come from the Iran caperT This question I was not allowed to answer, so I merely said: 'That's three strikes, and you're out.' Suddenly she pulled the car over to the side of a snowbank, stopped it, turned toward me, and flung her arms about my neck. After kissing me, she whispered: 'Oh Norman, I love you so much. You've always been so damned decent.' We sat there for some minutes, each aware of how tremendously important the other was, and my storm subsided. Our gesture of mutual reassurance was rudely broken by two burly men who flashed bright lights into our car and growled: 'What's going on in thereT They were police, and to them we were

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suspicious prowlers in a residential district. On the spur of the moment I said: 'My wife felt a little faint,' and after inspecting us closely, the older cop asked: 'Well, if she's dizzy, shouldn't you be driving?' and I had to agree, so I got out in the snow, walked around the car, and started to get in the driver's side while she scrunched over to mine without leaving the car. 'I'm sure you have a driver's license,' the lead cop said. 'And your registration.' Couples our age stopped in a snowbank at dusk aren't too common, so I brought out my license, and when they saw my address they whistled. 'You a professor or something?' 'Army major.'The younger cop saluted and said 'Sorry to have caused you any inconvenience,' and off they went. When we reached my parents' snug house and felt the warmth of both the place and the occu pants, we relaxed, and since the Sunday papers had been full -of the fact that I was to testify tomor row, Mom and Dad had to be aware of my tension but they were almost amusingly casual, careful to avoid any mention of Iran, the contras or the man they knew to be my associate, Oliver North. As they moved about setting the table while I read the sports pages, I thought how truly Ameri can they were and how close they stood to the heart of our mainstream. My father was a certified mili tary hero with a wooden leg to prove it, and my mother ... that quiet, powerful lady was a civilia

heroine laden with her own kind of honours.

Born on the edge of Philadelphia to a family of little means, Rachel Denham went to a public school where her marks were so striking that she won a

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scholarship to Bryn Mawr, but because she could not afford a college dormitory or buy even a used car, she had to commute each day on the Penn- sylvania Railroad, walking six blocks to the station and a long distance from the Bryn Mawr platform to the college. The travel must have done her good, because she earned phenomenal grades and a better scholarship each year. As a military man I didn't like Bryn Mawr very much because it was one of those Quaker schools which preach pacifism, and that never gets a nation very far. But it is also a college which requires students to write term papers, and I don't see how anyone can get a serious education with- out doing that. Anyway, in the winter term of her junior year, in 1948, a serious professor - as you can see, I like that word serious - gave her a political-science assignment that baffled her: 'In the decades ahead, malapportionment is bound to be a red-hot political issue. Find out the facts about Pennsylvania.' That was all. He'd never discussed apportionment of any kind in class, so she was on her own. Well, I've seen the paper. It could have been pub- lished, because in her dogged way she reported not only on Pennsylvania but on nine other states, too, revealing just what her professor hoped she would: that across America people who lived in cities and large towns were grotesquely discrimi- nated against in favour of people who lived in small towns or on farms. As the professor had known when he assigned the paper, her home state of Pennsylvania was amongst the worst. It had fifty- three counties, many of them wooded rural areas with few people, many more deer, and of great value only in the four weeks of hunting season. It

also had two big cities, Philadelphia and Pitts- burgh, with large populations. But because there was a tradition that each county must have its own representation in the lower House, ridiculous imbalances occurred which the rural legislators would not allow to be corrected. When my mother saw the raw data, she cried: 'Find me an adding machine!' and with it she produced a series of charts whose squiggly lines portrayed an ugly situation:

For example, here is Forest County with 4,944 and it has its representative, and here's the city of Chester with 66,039, but it also gets one seat. So a. farmer voting in Forest has 13.36 times as much civic power as the city clerk in Chester. I think conservative Pennsylvania, afraid of what it calls 'the corruption of big cities,' wants to keep it that way.

Her charts demonstrated that in the state Senate, which exercised great power, the situation was equally unfair:

I show you three small counties with a combined population of 101,210, and they have one sena- tor, but here is an urban area with 441,5 18 peo- ple, and it has one senator too, which means that the farmer is four times as important as the city man.

Mother prepared figures showing how an absurdly small minority in the rural community could deter-

mine what happened in the legislature. She con- cluded by pointing out:

And because Pennsylvania sends congress- men to Washington in accordance with local

districting, our federal legislature is also grossly affected by the overrepresentation of rural areas and underrepresentation of cities. This imbalance results in national legislation that is sometimes absurd.

I'm told that many young people have the course of their lives determined by the term papers they write in college, and that was certainly the case with my mother. The facts she uncovered in researching this one paper so captivated her that she spent what should have been her senior year as an aide to a Pennsylvania senator in Washington. In her next year back at Bryn Mawr, she organized a conference attended by students from all parts of the nation: 'Malapportionment in State Legisla- tures,' and her opening speech to the delegates dealt with: 'The Refusal of the Tennessee Legisla- ture to Reapportion.' - My wife and I have a copy:

The Tennessee constitution requires a fresh reapportionment of districts following each decennial census, but rural legislators, who vastly outnumber urban, refuse to make any changes which might diminish their numbers. The result? Since 1901 there has been no reapportionment in Tennessee, and the cities suffer. Is there any force within the state capa- ble of making the state conform to its own law? None.

It was the long discussion conducted at that conven- tion which convinced my mother, and many bright young people like her, that the only agency power- ful enough to make the states obey their own laws - and there were half a dozen as badly out of

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balance as Tennessee - was the United States Supreme Court. 'Because,' she pointed out, with a sensitivity far beyond her years, 'the federal Con- gress is itself voted into power by districts which are also just as badly unbalanced.' 'Not senators,' a young man from Alabama cor- rected. 'They're elected statewide,' and she replied: 'You're right. But most of them get to be senators by being congressmen first. They band together to protect the bad old system which pro- duced them.' By accident my mother had stumbled upon her life's work. Before she left Bryn Mawr she was an expert in apportionment, and by the time she got her Ph,D. from Smith, she was being invited to address various state legislatures and counsel on problems facing them when new census figures came in. Her numerous publications on the subject attracted such favourable attention that she was offered positions at various institutions, including Chicago, but because she wanted to be near Con- gress, she chose Georgetown, which made it easy for her to heckle the government in its shameful failure to do what clearly had to be done. In an arti- cle published in 1960 she wrote:

I am totally frustrated. Every concerned man and woman in the United States knows what ought to be done to assure justice to the people of the cities, but there is no way to force action.

What in common sense can we do? Congress will never take steps to launch a constitutional amendment. State legislatures refuse to cleanse themselves. You and I are powerless to do any- thing. Where can a citizen look for help?

But she did not allow her obsession to become a monomania: 'Always I kept before me the example

of Emily Starr, who sacrificed her personal happi-, ness on the altar of political reform, and I wanted none of that. I kept my voice down when consulting with legislators. I wore good-looking clothes and was deferential to elderly men who had spent their lives in government. But when the going got tough ... boy, did I stick it to them!' One of the most vivid memories of my life is sit- ting with her and my two sisters and hearing her tell how she met our father, 'the war hero' as she always referred to him when teasing: 'I was an underpaid, undernourished beginning professor at Bryn Mawr, just getting my feet wet in the aca- demic world. And to tell you the truth, I was a wee bit desperate about finding a husband. Then your father appeared on campus to speak at an assem- bly of some kind. Marvellous uniform, medals on his chest, wooden leg adding mystery. Oh, did I ever fall in love.' 'Did his leg sort of off-steer youT my sister once asked, and Mother gave a remarkably frank answer: 'Some women in the faculty club asked that, and I told them: "So far as I know, the left leg has nothing to do with love or the production of fer- tile sperm," and you adorable kids are the proof of that.' Then came the exciting news. The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments regarding the fail- ure of state legislatures to reapportion, and what state do you suppose they chose as the prime exam- ple? The very one my mother had identified years before: Tennessee! The case was called Baker v. Carr, and Mother was invited to testify as an amicus curiae, informed friend of the court, or as she told us: 'In my case an amica curiae, since I am a woman.'