Jailbird

3

But my unflagging optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry rne, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three — although, roughly speaking, half my life was over.

Oh, to be sure, I had, while in Washington, "made love," as they say, to this woman or that one from time to time. There was a WAC. There was a Navy nurse. There was a stenographer in the Department of Commerce typing pool. But I was fundamentally a fanatical monk in the service of war, war, war. There were many like me. Nothing else in life is nearly so obsessive as war, war, war.

My wedding gift to Ruth was a wood carving commissioned by me. It depicted hands of an old person pressed together in prayer. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a drawing by Albrecht D?rer, a sixteenth-century artist, whose house Ruth and I had visited many times in Nuremberg, during our courting days. That was my invention, so far as I know, having those famous hands on paper rendered in the round. Such hands have since been manufactured by the millions and are staples of dim-witted piety in gift shops everywhere.

Soon after our marriage I was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, outside of Frankfurt am Main, where I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical documents for inventions and manufacturing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics — any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise — or so it was widely believed at the time.

Our son was born by cesarean section in Wiesbaden. Ben Shapiro, who had been my best man, and who had also been transferred to Wiesbaden, delivered the child. He had just been promoted to full colonel. In a few years Senator Joseph R. McCarthy would find that promotion to have been sinister, since it was well known that Shapiro had been a communist before the war. "Who promoted Shapiro to Wiesbaden?" he would want to know.

We named our son Walter F. Starbuck, Jr. Little did we dream that the name would become as onerous as Judas Iscariot, Jr., to the boy. He would seek legal remedy when he turned twenty-one, would have his name changed to Walter F. Stankiewicz, the name that appears over his columns in The New York Times. Stankiewicz, of course, was our discarded family name. And I must laugh now, remembering something my father once told me about his arrival at Ellis Island as an immigrant. He was advised that Stankiewicz had unpleasant connotations to American ears, that people would think he smelled bad, even if he sat in a bathtub all day long.

I returned to the United States with my little human family, to Washington, D.C., again, in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. My optimism became bricks and mortar and wood and nails. We bought the only house we would ever own, which was the little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Ruth put on the mantelpiece the woodcarving of the praying hands by Albrecht D?rer. There were two things that had made her want to buy that house and no other, she said. One was that it had a perfect resting place for the hands. The other was a gnarled old tree that shaded the walk to our doorstep. It was a flowering crab apple tree.

Was she religious? No. She was from a family that was skeptical about all formal forms of worship, which was classified as Jewish by the Nazis. Its members would not have so classified themselves. I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp.

"No," she said. "I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis," she said. "They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away."

I still ponder a toast Ruth gave one Christmas Eve, in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four or so. I was the only person to hear it — the only other person in the bungalow. Our son had not sent us so much as a Christmas card. The toast was this, and I suppose she might just as logically have given it on the day I met her in Nuremberg: "Here's to God Almighty, the laziest man in town."

Strong stuff.

Yes — and my speckled old hands were like the Albrecht D?rer hands atop my folded bedding, as I sat on my prison cot in Georgia, waiting for freedom to begin again.

I was a pauper.

I had emptied my savings account and cashed in my life-insurance policies and sold my Volkswagen and my brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to pay for my futile defense.

My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.

Nor did I have glamour to sell. I was the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators. What made me so uninteresting, I suppose, was that I had had so little power and wealth to lose. Other co-conspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak. When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three-legged stool in the bottom of a well. All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool.

Not even I cared. My wife had died two weeks before they took me away, and my son no longer spoke to me. Still — they had to put handcuffs on me. It was the custom.

"Your name?" the police sergeant who booked me had asked.

I was impudent with him. Why not? "Harry Houdini," I replied.

A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. It happened all the time.

"At least I don't smoke anymore," I thought.

President Nixon himself commented one time on how much I smoked. It was soon after I came to work for him — in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Seventy. I was summoned to an emergency meeting about the shooting to death of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. There were about forty other people at the meeting. President Nixon was at the head of the huge oval table, and I was at the foot. This was the first time I had seen him in person since he was a mere congressman — twenty years before. Until now he had no wish to see his special advisor on youth affairs. As things turned out, he would never want to see me again.

Virgil Greathouse, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, and reputedly one of the President's closest friends, was there. He would begin serving his prison term on the same day I completed mine. Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was there. He would eventually plead nolo contendere to charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes. Emil Larkin, the President's most vindictive advisor and dreaded hatchet man, was there. He would eventually discover Jesus Christ as his personal Savior as the prosecutors were about to get him for obstruction of justice and perjury. Henry Kissinger was there. He had yet to recommend the carpet-bombing of Hanoi on Christmas Day. Richard M. Helms, head of the C.I. A., was there. He would later be reprimanded for lying under oath to Congress. H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson and John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, were there. They, too, would be jailbirds by and by.

I had been up all the previous night, drafting and redrafting my suggestions as to what the President might say about the Kent State tragedy. The guardsmen, I thought, should be pardoned at once, and then reprimanded, and then discharged for the good of the service. The President should then order an investigation of National Guard units everywhere, to discover if such civilians in soldiers' costumes were in fact to be trusted with live ammunition when controlling unarmed crowds. The President should call the tragedy a tragedy, should reveal himself as having had his heart broken. He should declare a day or perhaps a week of national mourning, with flags flown at half-mast everywhere. And the mourning should not be just for those who died at Kent State, but for all Americans who had been killed or crippled in any way, directly or indirectly, by the Vietnam War. He would be more deeply resolved than ever, of course, to press the war to an honorable conclusion.

But I was never asked to speak, nor afterward could I interest anyone in the papers in my hand.

My presence was acknowledged only once, and then only as the butt of a joke by the President. I was so nervous as the meeting wore on that I soon had three cigarettes going all at once, and was in the process of lighting a fourth.

The President himself at last noticed the column of smoke rising from my place, and he stopped all business to stare at me. He had to ask Emil Larkin who I was.

He then gave that unhappy little smile that invariably signaled that he was about to engage in levity. That smile has always looked to me like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer. The joke he made was the only genuinely witty comment I ever heard attributed to him. Perhaps that is my proper place in history — as the butt of the one good joke by Nixon.

"We will pause in our business," he said, "while our special advisor on youth affairs gives us a demonstration of how to put out a campfire."

There was laughter all around.