New York in the '50s (39 page)

“Yes, go on,” as the analyst said. And both of us did, as our other friends did, beginning the same process with other partners, coupling and holding together for a while and then coming undone when things got rough or just stale, moving on to the next, and the next, and the next.

Little did we know we were setting a trend for a future in which noncommitment was a way of life, even for the middle class in middle America, where divorce rates followed the soaring marital crack-ups of the coasts, boosting a national average of 50 percent as the norm. Even steven. Half and half. You pays your money and takes your chances.

Who knows if back then we were riding the wave of freedom or being catapulted into a future of chaos, tossed helter-skelter like so many random surfboards whose riders are lost in the sea? Whatever mistakes we made, whatever illusions we nurtured—and there were many of both—we did it all with conviction and passion, with love of the time and place and the people who appeared in our lives like marvelous characters in a great play, lovers and companions.

I think back to those days with Helen in the cozy apartment she had near Hudson Street, convenient to the White Horse, near the river and the docks, where you could hear in the night the low horns of steamships coming in. One winter I wrote there with my typewriter set on a table by the window. I'd put on the Miles Davis album
Sketches of Spain
and watch the snow come down past the faces of small brick houses on the quiet, winding street, so far from Indianapolis. The plaintive music mixed with the hissing sound of the radiators and made it seem like another dimension, a world that was mysterious, yet safe and warm. In the fading light of five o'clock, with a lamp turned on above my table, Helen would appear in the doorway, stamping the snow from her feet, shaking out her long brown hair. There was no other place I wanted to be.

NINE

From Joe McCarthy to Jean-Paul Sartre

I ruefully recited the Yeats poem “Politics” to myself just before my thirtieth birthday—it was all about the irony of the poet being unable to concentrate on politics while he's looking at a girl and wishing she was in his arms. I blamed my own blind pursuit of a pretty girl for landing me in the “subversive” political soup for the first time since leaving Indiana. Damn! It was spring, it was 1960, dawn of a whole new decade. I was wooing an uptown beauty who was also pursued by a
number of men of considerable affluence, and I was trying to think of ways to impress her that didn't involve great outlays of cash. Just then the phone rang with an invitation to a cocktail party where I would meet Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Fate.

It wasn't to be a cozy affair in someone's living room, but a mid-town hotel soiree to listen to the two great French intellectuals tell about their recent trip to Castro's Cuba. Not surprisingly, they'd had a wonderful time—but why not go and hear them? I casually called the object of my affections and dropped the names of the Parisian dynamic duo. Would she like to meet them over cocktails? You bet.

We pushed our way into the crowd pressing around Beauvoir, but even standing on tiptoes we couldn't spot Sartre, at least not until we got to the very center of the gathering. Then, in a flash, I understood existentialism. Sartre was short, about the size of Napoleon, or Jimmy Hoffa. Talk about compensation—this guy had created a whole philosophy, one that explained the angst of the human condition, including being too short.

Both Sartre and Beauvoir spoke glowingly of what they had seen on their trip and warmly endorsed Castro and his regime. Not exactly a social or literary tête-à-tête, but we could always say we'd met them. Good enough. The hitch was that on the way out, one of our hosts said the guests of honor, as well as a number of American writers and intellectuals, wanted to publish a statement in an ad calling for “fair play” for Cuba. He said he'd send along the statement and hoped I would sign it. I said to send it on.

The envelope came but I didn't open it. I had never signed anything for a political cause, and I wasn't inclined to start, though I did think Castro was getting a raw deal from the American press and politicians. I forgot about the whole thing until the phone rang a few days later, and the host who sent me the statement asked again if I'd sign. I said I hadn't yet read it, but he said he needed an answer right away because they were going to press with a full-page ad in the
New York Times
. So far, he said, the statement had been signed by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and even Truman Capote. I knew I agreed with Baldwin on most things, and I felt I owed something to this guy on the phone—I mean, I had taken a date to the party and we'd drunk their liquor and munched their
hors d'oeuvres, hadn't we? Signing his ad seemed a bit like picking up the tab, so I said yes, then hung up feeling queasy. I couldn't even find the letter with the statement I'd just “signed”—I'd already tossed it.

When I saw the full-page ad with my name on it, I felt even queasier. It was full of flaming rhetoric of the kind that makes me cringe, even though I agreed with the basic idea of “fair play.” My stomach gurgled at the phrase “dollar diplomacy,” which was straight out of stale, stock leftist rhetoric. I put down the ad and tried to put it out of my mind.

I had never been ashamed of anything I'd written and published on political topics—most of which were reportage rather than interpretation—but those pieces were, for better or worse, expressed in my own words. I could stand by them and for them. Affixing my name to somebody else's rhetoric, though, made me feel like a parrot. I tried to console myself that I wasn't alone, but part of a distinguished chorus. After all, Truman Capote was right there with me on the barricades.

When the bearded Castro and his young revolutionaries came down out of the mountains and took Havana on New Year's Day of 1959, ousting the longtime dictator Batista, I regarded Fidel as my friends—and I think most other Americans at the time—did, as a hero of the people, a liberator rather like Marlon Brando in
Viva Zapata
. (Perhaps to transpose that image onto its invasion force, the Kennedy administration gave the code name Operation Zapata to the Bay of Pigs mission two years later.)

Castro came to the United States in April 1959 on what seemed a triumphal visit, winning further sympathy when he left his hotel in midtown Manhattan and quartered himself and his people at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. There were stories of his hardy band cooking chickens over open fires in Central Park—
viva la revolución!
Castro was a hero on many college campuses, and though Princeton limited his audience to 150, a crowd of 6,000 turned out at Harvard when he spoke at Dillon Field House.

If Castro raised the suspicions of conservatives, who thought him a Communist right off the bat, he won the hearts and imaginations of liberal and left-wing intellectuals, who saw in his revolution a hopeful, non-Communist, non-Soviet, socialist answer to the downtrodden
countries of the world. Besides that, Castro himself had credentials as a true intellectual: while he was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra he was reading
White Collar
and the other works of my former professor and boss, C. Wright Mills.

By the time I signed the “Fair Play for Cuba” ad a year later, a lot of people were already disillusioned with Castro, calling him a Communist and a menace to the security of the United States. But that seemed panicky and reactionary—certainly it wasn't fair play. So what was I worried about?

What I feared came to pass: some of the people who signed the ad were called before the Senate Internal Security Committee of Mississippi's James O. Eastland and grilled in public testimony; others (including me, I was told) were subjected to investigation by the FBI. I sat down and wrote a long letter resigning from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (it seemed superfluous, in a way, to resign from something I didn't think I'd joined), stating all kinds of valid political disagreements and questions—though I knew I was really motivated by the fear of what I'd dreaded ever since Columbia, the witness I saw who seemed to foreshadow my own possible fate.

No one I knew had a television set in college. It was considered an expensive and frivolous luxury for a student, and it seemed beneath one's dignity. A TV set was called an idiot box, and we were intellectuals. If we wanted to watch anything on television—most likely a sporting event or some national disaster or spectacle—we went to a bar. (Most of my friends and I continued this practice until I took an apartment in 1961 and had to buy the furniture, which included an old, boxlike TV.) At Columbia we went to the West End, and it was there, with friends from the
Spectator
, that I watched several sessions of one of the landmark political events of my time, which was both disaster and spectacle: Senator Joseph McCarthy's first nationally televised hearings on subversion, with his investigations of alleged Communist influence in the Voice of America. The reason my friends and I went to see these particular three days of testimony in March 1953 was that one of our own alumni who had been an editor of
Spectator
and now worked for the Voice of America was the subject of investigation.

In some eerie, quite scary way, watching this man Reed Harris
was like watching us,
ourselves
, as we might be put on some stand twenty years in the future and asked to explain, justify, and perhaps recant things we had written in college, words and ideas we were thinking and writing
now
, in the same
Spectator
that was being quoted back at this alum in an effort to discredit him, strip him of his good name, his job and career.

Reed Harris had worked for the Office of War Information, which waged psychological warfare against the Axis forces during World War II. The office was re-formed by President Truman in 1952 as the International Information Administration, which included the Voice of America. Senator McCarthy, in his new role as chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (in the past it had studied such dangerous matters as “employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government”), announced he was going to investigate the Voice of America, which, he darkly told reporters, employed people who were “sabotaging” the foreign policy of the United States.

We got a hint of the nature of McCarthy's tactics in February 1953, when he charged that there were thirty thousand books in our government's overseas libraries by “Communist” authors. The number was compiled by listing copies of books by more than four hundred writers, including Edna Ferber, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., W. H. Auden, Stephen Vincent Benét, and Dashiell Hammett. Columbia's former president, now president of the United States, at least spoke out for intellectual freedom by defending the works of one author whom he wanted to remain on the shelves: Ike himself asked that the mystery stories of Hammett not be purged.

As my friends and I from
Spec
sat around the horseshoe bar at the West End, nervously sipping beers, munching peanuts, and smoking cigarettes, we watched with a combination of disbelief, amusement, anger, and foreboding the appearance of Reed Harris before McCarthy and his committee. It was the first time many of us had actually seen the Red-hunting senator live on television. He glowered, droned, badgered, and bullied in a malicious monotone that seemed immune to nuance or contradiction—you were either friend or enemy, supporter or target, one or the other.

McCarthy “exposed” the former student editor from the thirties for having written editorials in our college newspaper, more than
twenty years before, attacking such sacred institutions as intercollegiate football, the American Legion, and, literally, apple pie. Reed Harris had been given two favorable “full field investigations” by the FBI and clearance from the Civil Service Commission, but he was still accused by McCarthy of harboring disloyal thoughts and opinions, and was ordered to produce documentary evidence of having had a change of heart.

Evidently, Mr. Harris had not recanted his subversive belief that college football had assumed too much importance in American life. While still a student at Columbia he had written, in addition to those subversive editorials denouncing apple pie, a book called
King Football
in which he went so far as to defend the idea of academic freedom, even upholding the right of Communists to teach in colleges. This position had been endorsed by Republican stalwart Senator Robert Taft, but was regarded in the political atmosphere of the fifties to be proof of disloyalty and—that most scurrilous new designation, one for which there was not only a name but a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate it—un-Americanism.

What I still clearly remember from those hearings of nearly forty years ago is not just the droning voice of McCarthy accusing Reed Harris of writing those satirical, youthfully exuberant editorials and demanding demonstration of a change of heart. The line that comes back the loudest and still raises goose pimples along my arms is the angry, frustrated, bitter voice of Harris objecting to the senator's unrelenting efforts over three days of testimony “to wring my public neck.”

How far did I want to stick out my own neck? That was the inevitable question that came to my mind, as it naturally must have come to all the other guys from
Spectator
sitting around me at the West End as we watched one of our own—an obviously bright, talented, spirited man who seemed pretty much like ourselves but twenty or so years older—being pilloried for words he had written and thoughts he had expressed as a college undergraduate.

Harris resigned his post on April 14, 1953, and McCarthy commented, “I only hope a lot of his close friends will follow him out.” That spring hundreds of employees were fired from the International Information Administration (later reorganized as the U.S.
Information Agency), and the hearings dragged on until July, though no evidence of treason or conspiracy was found. (Reed Harris was later rehired under the John F. Kennedy administration.)