Tucker's Last Stand Read online

  Dearest Mother: One hour from now I will be flying very high over the Pacific Ocean. I will be in direct charge of an instrument that may mean the end of the war. I have been with that instrument pre partum, in partu, post partum (ask Fr. Enrique what that means). If it works for the best, we have God to thank for letting us come up with a response to people who set out to advance themselves by visiting Pearl Harbor early on a Sunday morning with dive bombers. If I do not live through it, know that you were in my thoughts at the last moment when I was free to think about those I love, instead of those I must help to kill.

  Your devoted,

  Tucker.

  They wanted him to stay on at Los Alamos. Professor Neddermeyer told him that he possessed singular theoretical talents and that he must continue to put them to the use of his country, and also of science. Tucker wished above all not to intimate that what was troubling him was a moral question that simply hadn’t afflicted his colleagues, so far as he could see. He would say only that his mother was ailing and he absolutely needed to be with her as soon as possible, that perhaps the next season, the next year.…

  By January of 1946 he had accumulated enough points of service to qualify for discharge. One final effort was made to persuade him to stay on at least until the atomic tests of that summer at Eniwetok. He smiled and said that if there was a turn in his mother’s health, in one direction or the other, he would be in touch.

  There was the final dinner, only six or seven people, but Tucker felt that he knew them as well as he would ever know anyone, given the close intellectual and emotional company he had kept with them for over two years. (There was no talk of what it was that had held these men together during these frantically busy months: Tucker had noticed that. They never spoke of the bomb, except in the laboratory.) A soft-spoken toast was given by the commander of Division C, and it was clear that these men, four of them scientists, two of them professional Army, would miss the energetic, focused, and brilliant mind of their young associate, missing also that conduit to the innocent world which he uniquely provided to two men who had commanded battalions and the four others who for years had been separated from students who once upon a time had been the center of their professional lives. Tucker responded to the toast only by saying that he would never forget their joint experience, which was a safe thing to say, and true.

  Two months later, after visiting with his mother, whose health was robust as ever, and spending four weeks at St. Luke’s, where the attempt was made to diagnose his depression, he took a taxi from Providence, Rhode Island, to Portsmouth to the rendezvous he had arranged, after the long exchange of letters, with the Benedictine abbot at Portsmouth Priory. Arriving just before five in the afternoon, he was taken from the office of the abbot a few minutes later by a novitiate to the small spare cubicle with the bed, the modest hanging locker, the table-desk, the straight-backed chair, and the empty bookcase. The novitiate told him there would be vespers at 5:30 in the chapel, followed by supper in the refectory. The monks would be silent at supper, while they listened to a reading from St. Benedict, but directly after supper the Benedictine habit was to gather in the adjacent reading room with their coffee, where general conversation was engaged in for thirty minutes. After that, conversation was rare, save for those monks whose job it was to supervise the activity of the boys. A preparatory school was an administrative function of the monastery. The other monks and the novitiates maintained silence throughout a day spent in prayer, in reading, and in physical work on the 150-acre farm. Every novitiate had a sponsor, a monk with whom he could converse at any time during the two-year period, after which vows were taken and you were then a Benedictine monk, from that moment until you died.

  He would from now on be Brother Leo. And his sponsor was Brother Hildred, the elderly monk to whom the abbot had communicated, at the urging of Fr. Enrique, everything he knew about Tucker’s background. On the afternoon of the following day the older monk invited the novitiate to walk with him. “We’ll go past the orchard, then alongside the Sound. You will enjoy the view of Narragansett Bay.” A half hour into the walk, Brother Hildred, who taught physics, asked “Leo”—the monks called themselves by their sacerdotal first names—if he would like to visit the school’s physics laboratory that afternoon. Tucker replied that he would not like to visit it this afternoon, tomorrow, next month, or next year. But quickly he recoiled from his apparent asperity, and said simply that he did not wish to revisit any aspect of his past professional life. He went on to say that at Austin he had studied history and Spanish as well as physics, and that there was much reading he wished to catch up on in history, so he would not be idle. Brother Hildred understood, and changed the subject quickly.

  Fr. Enrique had sent Tucker’s troubled letters, written from Los Alamos, to Brother Martin. What Tucker had written to his old patron was not formally confessional in character, so that Fr. Enrique felt free to send the anguished letters to Brother Martin for his own appraisal. Fr. Martin had gone on to select Brother Hildred as an appropriate sponsor for young Tucker because he was, in a way, the St. Augustine of the Benedictine community. He had lived, up until just after his fortieth year, a robust sensual life, in America and in Europe, using up most of the toothsome legacy he had been left by his parents. When he decided to enter the monastery, he gave the remainder to the Benedictines and decided, as a novitiate, to impose upon himself the intellectual mortification of learning physics, which he had never studied during his school days, and to which he had never been attracted. Five years later, only a year or so after taking his final vows, he exchanged his dissertation for a doctorate in physics from Harvard. Brother Hildred’s perspectives were cosmopolitan and at times earthy, and at one point, a week or so after their first walk, he counseled Brother Leo in gentle but grave tones. “Don’t try to excrete it all at once, as if it were one large spiritual bowel movement. It doesn’t work that way. It takes time.”

  And it did. But nine months later, Tucker was a well-integrated novitiate in the Benedictine community. He had decided to study Spanish intensively, and did well enough over time to undertake with confidence to teach the introductory course in Spanish to the eighteen students who signed up for it at the beginning of the fall semester. The abbot, who prided himself on his own fluency, achieved during his missionary work in Mexico, enjoyed their conversations in Spanish. Indeed, it was on that account that Brother Leo was given another assignment. He was designated as the appropriate monk to drive to Newport to visit with Doña Alicia, the ailing widow whose wealthy husband, sometime ambassador from Spain to the United States, had made a critical contribution to the monastery. Indeed, the ambassador’s money was much of the fund raised to construct the impressive modern chapel in which the monks worshipped, as well as the 180 schoolboys (or in any event, they pretended to do so). When Don Luis Alargo knew that he was in his final days he asked the abbot to keep an eye on Doña Alicia, so helpless in her resolute ignorance of English. The abbot had made the promise, and frequently called upon her himself. But now that it was clear that she would need regular attention and instruction, he thought it appropriate to introduce her to the newest brother.

  When Leo rang the bell at the mansion, he came face to face with Josefina, Doña Alicia’s beloved niece. She had, it turned out, lost both parents during the Spanish Civil War. Luis Alargo had paid the cost of Josefina’s schooling while she lived with a maiden sister near Barcelona. Now the closely knit Spanish family thought it right that Josefina should repay her debt to the Alargo family by being with her aunt during her illness.

  Josefina had arrived in New York on the Queen Mary, traveling in tourist class. Traveling in first class was the ravishing Ava Gardner, returning from making a movie in Europe in order (that, at any rate, was the rumor) to pursue her romance with Frank Sinatra. When Josefina, dressed in a bright red cloth coat, descended the tourist gangway, a paparazzo, one of many guarding the first-class gangway, spotted her. So! Ava Gardner was attempting a hidden exit d
own the tourist gangway, dressed in a simple cloth coat! He rushed toward her, his large camera in hand, and began to flash bulbs at the startled Josefina. Other reporters and photographers quickly joined him and there was a large commotion until suddenly it settled on the press corps that the young lady who was saying in sentences that she was not Ava Gardner, acting out her lines in fractured English as she might have done for a Hollywood director, really was not Ava Gardner. She was someone called Josefina Delafuente.

  A month later Brother Leo in his monastic cell consulted the diary he kept of his activities, and counted nine visits to the Alargo mansion. He stood up and pulled at his hair by the roots with both hands until he felt genuine physical pain. He went, then, to the chapel, and on his knees prayed most earnestly. He tried to distract himself. He forced his mind back on those five hours and thirty minutes from Tinian to Hiroshima and back; forced himself to re-create in his mind the memory of the huge mushroom cloud that rose behind the Enola Gay as she flew back to the sanctuary of the island; he thought of his father, run over by a taxi on his way to a bus with a big electric fan in his hand; thought back to his humiliation at the hands of the recruiting sergeant in Austin.

  But the daemon would not detumesce, so that when, during the social hour immediately after the monks’ dinner, he was called to the telephone, as he knew that he would be by prearrangement with Josefina, he took the call in the office of the abbot, said the prearranged words, and went back to the sitting room where he whispered in Spanish to the abbot that Doña Alicia had taken a turn for the worse and had asked her niece to bring Brother Leo to console her. The abbot nodded. “Por supuesto. Véte, cuídale bien”—Of course. Get on with it. Take good care of her.

  Josefina was there in the car, radiant, the smell of her intoxicating. It was raining. She didn’t speak, nor did he. She drove toward Newport while Tucker reached over to the back seat, opened the suitcase, and pulled out the gray flannel pants, the shirt and tie, and the blue blazer. He slid into his pants without difficulty, as he had been wearing a monk’s surplice. This he pulled over his head, putting on the shirt and then the tie. And, finally, the jacket. Josefina now spoke, attempting a gaiety of spirit as she stared in concentration through the windshield, making her way in the driving rain. “Too bad,” she said, “taking so much trouble getting dressed. It is so much faster getting undressed.” She reached for his hand and slid it through the cleavage of her silk blouse under her breast. Tucker nestled her and then moved his hand to her other breast as she made the sharp right turn to the motel with the bright red light flashing VACANCY, under the incandescent NEWPORT ARMS MOTEL. She parked the car. “Vamos corriendo. No olvides la petaca”—Let’s make a dash for it. Don’t forget the suitcase. They ran and in a few seconds were protected by the portico. In the lobby, he signed the register for himself and his wife. The receptionist asked for the twenty dollars and suddenly Tucker was dumb. He had no money. But Josefina spoke: “Dahrling, you leaves your wallet in my bolso, don’ you remember? Here,” she pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the clerk.

  “Do you need any help with your baggage, Mr. Engaño?”

  “No no, thank you. We have just this … one bag.”

  They were shown the direction in which to go, and he fumbled with the key to Room 219. He closed the door behind her. She opened the suitcase and brought out a bottle of chilled wine, the cork unstopped. Then she turned off the overhead light. “I get glasses from the bathroom.” She emerged three minutes later, with two bathroom glasses filled with wine. She was nude.

  5

  April 15, 1964

  The Oval Office

  Washington, D.C.

  Lyndon Johnson depressed the button and answered the operator with the phrase the White House operators had got used to any time between seven in the morning and ten at night: “Tell Valenti to come in.”

  Jack Valenti was there within minutes, energetic as if it had been twelve hours earlier, attentive, devoted, formally dressed in a gray suit, with a tie of just the currently fashionable width.

  And Valenti knew—always—which attitude would appropriately complement the President’s disposition: indignant; defensive; aggressive; inquisitive; astonished.

  “This morning, as I tol’ you, Mac Bundy volunteers to go to Saigon as ambassador to replace Lodge. This afternoon Bob McNamara offers—himself. You know this, because I tol’ you that too, an’ I hope you didn’t hear it from anyone else, or I’ll have that asshole’s ass. First, trade off National Security Adviser for Ambassador to South Vietnam, for Chrissake. Does that make sense to you? Maybe that’s why Mac’s advice hasn’t exactly been—consistent on Vietnam, though McNamara isn’t any better. Get that! He wants to give up Secretary of Defense for Ambassador to Vietnam! But now—”

  The President stood up behind his big walnut desk in the Oval Office. “Look at this!”—he slid forward a sheet of paper. It was only a sentence or two. From Robert Kennedy. Offering to go to Vietnam as ambassador, replacing Henry Cabot Lodge.

  LBJ was thundering. “What the shit’s he want to do in Vietnam, run for President? Threaten to prosecute Ho Chi Minh? Bring Diem back from the grave he an’—” LBJ was careful to observe presidential protocol, whatever his fever; he paused slightly, “President Kennedy sent him to—you remember, Jack, I was agaiynst that coup—no more coup shit, I’ve said ever since, much good it does, whatever I say, the way those gooks go in for changin’ government in Saigon. What does Kennedy ’spect to do? I tell you what he ’spects to do, he ’spects to make a big impression over there and cash in on it here. But how? Doing what? So I send him to Saigon. So he does what I tell him to do, period, end, over, out. There’s talk—you’ve heard this, I’ve heard this, John-John’s heard this—he’s pullin’ out of the Cabinet and runnin’ for the Senate—from New York.” Lyndon Johnson put his hands before him, preacher-fashion, half-closed his eyes, and peered slightly up, in the general direction of heaven.

  “We all know how Bobby is reel-ly a Noo Yorker, only accidentally raised in Boston, schooled in Rhode Island an’ Boston an’ Virginia, but he’s really a Noo Yorker, down deep. ‘Deep in the heart of—Nyew York,’ his favorite song. Whass he up to, sayin’ he wants to go to Saigon as ambassador? Maybe I’ll juss say yes. Yes.” Dramatic pause. “Yes, Bobby. That’s a real good idea. Wish I’d of thought of that, Saigon is just where you belong; all your trainin’ as Attorney General makes you juss ahdeal for ambassador in Vietnam. Where they’re tryin’ to skin our ass. Yes. Now, Bobby, what you think it’s a good idea to do, once you get to Vietnam? Hunh?” He leaned over and grabbed Jack Valenti by the lapels, the President’s large nose one inch away from his aide’s. “Hunh?” the President began to shake him, demanding an answer.

  Jack Valenti drew his head back in very slow motion and said, “Yes, sir, it is certainly confusing, virtually our whole first team deciding they all want to volunteer as ambassador to Vietnam. I guess they think that is where the action is—is going to be. And your report, the one you showed me this morning from that agent, Oakes, on the Trail, seems to say that’s what’s coming down at us. But you’re right, it doesn’t make any sense, not for any of them, not Mac, not McNamara, not Bobby—”

  “You know what!” Valenti’s pacification program had not worked on LBJ. “They think I’m a great big”—he slowed his words to give them extra emphasis—“asshole. That is exakly what they think. Especially Bobby. He’s still mad about my X-ing him out of the vice-presidential business. What do you think of this—”

  He reached down and picked up a legal pad on which he had scrawled in pencil. Drawing the chair back with his left hand and sitting down on it, leaning, he began to read, aloud. “Dear Bobby: I have your communication in which you offer to serve the Administration as ambassador to South Vietnam. I’ll certainly take your offer into consideration, on’y it would help me come to a conclusion if you tol’ me what you think you could do when you got there. Like, settle the dispute between Khanh and
Minh? Mebbe something on the village pacification problem that Genral Lansdale hasn’t thought about? Give the CIA team hep on our Trail project? Come up with something that will keep the Russians an’ China from stuffin’ North Vietnam with weapons?” He looked up at his aide. His left eyebrow stretched up, a hint of tentativeness. “What do you think?”

  Valenti knew that his reaction needed to come in stages. 1) “That would certainly take care of Bobby, Mr. President.” Pause. Then, 2) “Of course, there are other considerations.” Pause. 3) “There’s the—uh, election coming up. You don’t absolutely need Bobby, and half the Camelot crowd is already working for you. But on the other hand, I guess it doesn’t make sense to have Bobby sulking all the way through the Atlantic City convention scene and until November.” Pause. 4) “Maybe you should think some more about it. But it is a hell of a letter, no doubt about that.”

  Lyndon Johnson looked up at Valenti, and let his eyeglasses slip down toward the end of his nose. He depressed a buzzer by his desk. “Bring me a Sprite.” He looked up questioningly. Valenti nodded. “Two Sprites.”

  “Whaddayathink I ought to say to him.”

  “Well, sir, there’s two ways to handle a gesture like the one he’s just made. One way is what you did. Another way is to be sort of, you know—terribly pleased, honored, that kind of thing.”

  “Lahk what?”