THE ART AND ARTS OF E. HOWARD HUNT

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• Publication Date: December 13, 1973
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L, 1 0 1"1 :4 d I I LLIA I 1 71
THE NEW YORK REVIEW
13 December 1973
The Art and Arts
Gore Vidal
From December 7, 1941, to August
15, 1973, the United States has been
continuously at war except for a brief,
too little celebrated interregnum. Be-
tween 1945 and 1950 the empire
turned its attention to peaceful pur-
suits and enjoyed something of a
golden or at least for us not too
brazen an age. The arts in particular
flourished. Each week new genius was
revealed by the press; and old genius
decently buried. Among the new novel-
ists of that far-off time were Truman
Capote (today a much loved television
performer) and myself. Although we
were coevals (a word that the late
William Faulkner thought meant evil at
the same time as), we were unlike:
Capote looked upon the gorgeous
Speed Lamkin as a true tiger in the
Capotean garden where I saw mere
lambkin astray in my devouring jungle.
The one thing that Capote and .I did
have in common was a need for
money. And so each of us applied to
the Guggenheim Foundation for a
grant; and each was turned down.
Shocked, we compared notes. Studied
the list of those who had received
grants. "Will you just look," moaned
Truman, "at those ahh-full pee-pull
they keep giving muh-nee to!" Except
for the admirable Carson McCullers
who got so many grants in her day
that she was known as the conductress
on the gravy train, the list of honored
writers was not to our minds dis-
tinguished. Typical of the sort of
novelist the Guggenheims preferred to
Capote and me in 1946 was twenty-
eight-year-old (practically middle-aged)
Howard Hunt, author of East of
Farewell (Random House, 1943); a
novel described by the publishers as
"probably the first novel about this
war by an American who actually
helped fight it." The blurb is unusually
excited. Apparently, H. H. "grew up
like any other American boy" (no
tap-dancing on a river boat for him)
"going to public schools and to college
(Brown University, where he studied
under I. J. Kapstein)."
A clue. I slip into reverie. Kapstein
will prove to be my Rosebud. The key
to the Hunt mystery. But does Kap-
stein still live? Will he talk? Or is he
afraid? I daydream. "Hunt ... E. How-
ard Hunt.. . ah, yes. Sit down,
Mr.... uh, Bozell? Forgive me ... this
last stroke seems to have.... Where
were we? Howie. Yes. I must tell you
something of the Kapstein creative
writing method. I require the tyro
of E. Howard Hunt
some acknowledged world masterpiece.
Howie copied out-if memory serves-
Of Human Bondage."
But until the Kapstein Connection is
made, I must search the public record
for clues. The dust jacket of H. H.'s
first novel tells us that he became a
naval ensign in May, 1941. "There
followed many months of active duty
at sea on a destroyer, on the North
Atlantic patrol, protecting the life-line
to embattled England. . . ." That's
more like it. My eyes shut: the sea. A
cold foggy day. Slender, virile H. H.
arrives (by kayak'?) at a secret rendez-
vous with a British battleship. On the
bridge is Admiral Sir Leslie Charteris,
K.C.B.: it's Walter Pidgeon, of course.
"Thank God, you got through. I never
thought it possible. There's someone
particularly wants to thank you." Then
out of the swirling fog steps a short
burly figure; the face is truculent yet
somehow indomitable (no, it's not
Norman Mailer). In one powerful hand
he holds a thick cigar. When He
speaks, the voice is the very voice of
human freedom and, yes, dignity. "En-
sign Hunt, seldom in the annals of our
island story has this our embattled yet
still mightily sceptered realm owed to
but one man...."
H. H. is a daydreamer and like all
great dreamers (I think particularly of
Edgar Rice Burroughs) he stirs one's
own inner theater into productions of
the most lurid sort, serials from which
dull fact must be rigorously ex-
cluded-like the Random House blurb?
"In February, 1942, Howard Hunt was
detached from his ship and sent to
Boston." Now if the dates given on the
jacket are accurate, he served as an
ensign for no more than nine months.
So how many of those nine months
could he have spent protecting Eng-
land's embattled life-line? H. H.'s naval
career ends when he is "sent to
Boston, to take treatment for an injury
in a naval hospital." This is worthy of
the Great Anti-Semanticist Nixon him-
self. Did H. H. slip a disk while taking
a cholera shot down in the dispensary?
Who's Who merely records: "Served
with USNR, 1940-42."
I turn for information to Mr. Tad
Szulc, H. H.'s principal biographer and
an invaluable source of reference.
According to Mr. Szulc, H. H. worked
for the next two years "as a movie
correspondent in the Pacific." Who's
Who corroborates: "Movie script writ-
er, editor March of Time (1942-43);
war con. Life mag.- 1942." Yet one
wonders what movies he wrote and
what stories he filed, and from where.
Limit of Darkness (Random House,
1944) was written during this period.
H. H.'s second novel is concerned with
a naval air squadron on Guadalcanal in
the Solomons. Was H. H. actually on
Guadalcanal or Aid he use as source
book Ira Wolfert's just published Battle
for the Solomons? Possible clue: the
character of war correspondent Fran-
cis X. O'Bannon ... not at first glance.
a surrogate for H. H. who never casts
himself in his books as anything but a
Wasp. O'Bannon is everything H. H.
detests-a low-class papist vulgarian
who is also-what else?-"unhealthily
fat and his jowls were pasty." The au-
thor contrasts him most unfavorably
with the gallant Wasps to whom he dedi-
cates the novel: "The Men Who Flew
from Henderson."
They are incredibly fine, these
young chaps. They ought to be with
names like McRae, Cordell, Forsyth,
Lambert, Lewis, Griffin, Sampson,
Vaughan, Scott-not a nigger, faggot,
kike, or wop in the outfit. Just real
guys who say real true simple things like
"a guy who's fighting just to get back
to the States is only half fighting...."
A love scene: " `Oh, Ben, if it only
would stop.' She put her face into the
hollow of his shoulder. 'No,' he
said. . . . `We haven't killed enough of
them yet or burned their cities or
bombed them to hell the way we
must. When I put away my wings I
want it to be for good-not just for a
few years.' " A key motif in the H. H.
oeuvre: the enemy must be defeated
once and for all so that man can live
at peace with himself in a world where
United Fruit and ITT know. what's
best not only for their stockholders
but for their customers as well.
An academic critic would doubtless
make something of the fact that since
the only bad guy in the book is a fat,
pasty Catholic newspaperman, H. H.
might well be reproaching himself for
not having flown with the golden
gallant guys who gave so much of
themselves for freedom, to get the job
done. In their numinous company,
H. H. may very well have felt like an
overweight Catholic-and all because of
that mysterious accident in the naval
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hospital; in its way so like Henry
James's often alluded to but never
precisely -by the Master named dis-
ability which turned out to have
been-after years of patient literary
detective work--chronic constipation.
Academic critics are not always wrong.
The actual writing of Limit of
Darkness is not at all bad; it is not at
all good either. H. H. demonstrates the
way a whole generation of writers
ordered words upon the page in imita-
tion of what they took to be Heming-
way's technique. At best Hemingway
was an artful, careful writer who took
a good deal of trouble to master scenes
of action-the hardest kind of writing
to do, while his dialogue looks most
attractive on the page. Yet unwary
imitators are apt to find themselves (as
in Limit of Darkness) slipping into
aimless redundancies. Wanting to Hem-
ingwayize the actual cadences of Wasp
speech as spoken by young fliers, H. H.
so stylizes their voices that one char-
acter blends with another. Although
Hemingway worked with pasteboard
cutouts, too, he was cunning enough
to set his dolls against most stylishly
rendered landscapes; he also gave them
vivid things to do: the duck that got
shot was always a real duck that really
got shot. Finally, the Hemingway trick
of repeating key nouns and proper
names is simply not possible for other
writers-as ten thousand novels (in-
cluding some of Hemingway's own)
testify.
In H. H.'s early books, which won
for him a coveted (by Capote and me)
Guggenheim grant, there is a certain
amount of solemnity if not seriousness.
The early H. H.- liked to quote from
high-toned writers like Pliny and Louis
MacNeice as well as from that echt
American Wasp William Cullen Bry-
ant-whose radical politics would have
shocked H. H. had he but known. But
then I suspect the quotations are not
from H. H.'s wide reading of world
literature but from brief random in-
spections of Bartlett's Familiar Quo-
tations.
H. H,'s fliers are conservative lads
who don't think much of Roosevelt's
Four Freedoms. They fight to get the
job done. That's all. Old Glory. H. H.
is plainly dotty about the Wasp aristoc-
racy. One of the characters in Limit of
Darkness is almost unhinged when he
learns that a girl he has met went to
Ethel Walker. Had It. H. not chosen a
life of adventure I think he might have
made a good second string to O'Hara's
second string to Hemingway. H. H. has
the O'Hara sense of irredeemable social
inferiority which takes the place for so
many Irish-American writers of original
listing the better
world. Even on Guadalcanal we are
told of a pipe tobacco from "a rather
good New Zealand leaf."
By 1943 H. H. was a promising
author. According to The New York
Times, "East of Farewell was a fine
realistic novel, without any doubt the
best sea story of the war." Without
any doubt it was probably the only sea
story of the war at that point but the
Times has a style to maintain. Now a
momentous change in the daydreamer's
life. With Limit of Darkness in the
works at Random House, H. H. (ac-
cording to Who's Who) joined the
USAF (1943-1946); and rose to the
rank of first lieutenant. It would seem
that despite "the injury in a naval
hospital" our hero was again able to
fight for human dignity, this time in
the skies.
But according to Mr. Szulc what
H. H. really joined was not the Air
Force but the Office of Strategic
Services, a cloak-and-dagger outfit
whose clandestine activities probably
did not appreciably lengthen the war.
"As a cover, he was given the rank of
Air' Corps Lieutenant." Mr. Szulc tells
us that H. H. was sent to China to
train guerrillas behind the Japanese
lines. Curiously enough, I have not
come across a Chinese setting in any of
H. H.'s novels. Was he ever in China?
One daydreams. " `Lieutenant Hunt
reporting for duty, General.' The hag-
gard face with the luminous strange
eyes stared at him through the tangled
vines. `Lieutenant Hunt?' Wingate's
voice was shrill with awe. `Until today,
no man has ever hacked his way
through that living wall of slant-eyed
Japanese flesh.....' "
In 1946, H. H. returned to civilian
life and wrote what is probably his
most self-revealing novel, Stranger in
Town (Random House, 1947). This
must have been very nearly the first of
the returned war veteran novels, a
genre best exemplified by Merle Mil-
ler's That Winter; reading it, I confess
to a certain nostalgia.
Handsome, virile young Major Flem-
ing returns to New York City, a
glittering Babylon in those days before
the writing appeared on Mayor Lind-
say's wall. Fleming has a sense of
alienation (new word in 1947). He
cannot bear the callous civilian world
which he contrasts unfavorably with
how it was for us back there in the
Pacific in our cruddy foxholes with the
frigging sound of mortars overhead and
our buddies dying-for what? How
could any black marketing civilian spiv
know what war was really like?
Actually, none of its knew what it
was like either since, as far as my
investigations have taken me no novel
ist of
bAlp it al F6~h~ele Yoni,dq e P$dveq~ 32 0~O11 0b 'lieu
ever took part in any action. Most
were clerks in headquarter companies
or with Yank or Stars and Stripes; the
manlier was a cook. H. H. may have
observed some of the war as a corre-
spondent and, perhaps, from behind the
lines in China, but no foxhole ever
held him, no wolf ever fed him, no
vastation overwhelmed him in the
Galleria at Naples. But the daydreamer
of course is always there. And how!
The book is dedicated to two dead
officers (Wasp), as well as to "The
other gallant young men who did not
return." Only a book reviewer whose
dues were faithfully paid up to the
Communist Party could keep a tear
from his eye as he read that line. Then
the story: it is early 1946. Major
Fleming checks into the elegant Man-
hattan flat of his noncombatant
brother who is out of town but has
given him the flat and the services of a
worthy black retainer who could have
played De Lawd in Green Pastures. A
quick resume of Fleming's career fol-
lows.
Incidentally, each of H. H.'s narra-
tives is periodically brought to a halt
while he provides the reader with
highly detailed capsule biographies
written in Who's Who style. H. H.
plainly enjoys composing plausible
(and implausible) biographies for his
characters-not to mention for himself.
In Contemporary Authors, H. H. com-
posed a bio. for his pseudonym Robert
Dietrich, taking ten years off his age,
putting himself in the infantry during
Korea, awarding himself a Bronze Star
and a degree from Georgetown. A
quarter century later when the grand-
mother trampler and special councilor
to the President Charles W. Colson
wanted documents invented and his-
tory revised in the interest of Nixon's
re-election, he. turned with confidence
to H. H. He knew his man-and fellow
Brown alumnus.
As Fleming orders himself cham-
pagne and a luxurious meal ending
with Baked Alaska (for one!), we get
the bio. He has been everywhere in the
war from "Jugland" (Yugoslavia?) to
the Far East. He remembers good
meals in Shanghai and Johnny Walker
Black Label. Steak. Yet his memories
are bitter. He is bitter. He is also edgy.
"I can't go around for the rest of my
life like somebody out of the Ministry
of Fear."
Fleming is an artist. A sculptor.
H. H. conforms to that immutable rule
of bad fiction which requires the
sensitive hero to. practice the one art
his creator knows nothing about. We
learn that Fleming's old girl friend has
married someone else. This is a re-
current theme in the early novels. Was
of a Dear John
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letter? Get cracking, thesis-writers.
The civilian world of New York,
1946, annoys Fleming ("maybe the
Far East has spoiled me for America").
He is particularly enraged by demobili-
zation. "Overseas, the nineteen-year-old
milksops were bleeding for their
mothers, and their mothers were bleed-
ing for them, and the army was being
demobilized, stripped of its powers....
He had had faith in the war until they
partitioned Poland again.... Wherever
Russia moved in, that part of .the
world was sealed off." Fleming has a
suspicion that he is not going to like
what he calls "the Atomic Age." But
then, "They trained me to be a
killer.... Now they'll have to undo
it.,,
At a chic night club, Fleming meets
the greasy Argentine husband of his
old flame; he beats him up. It seems
that Fleming has never been very keen
about Latins. When he was a school-
boy at Choate (yes, Choate), he met
an Italian girl in New York. She took
him home and got his cherry. But "she
smelled of garlic. and the sheets
weren't very clean, and after it was all
over when I was down on the street
again, walking home, I thought that I
never wanted to see her again." Ernest
would have added rain to that sen-
tence, if not to the scene.
The themes that are to run through
H. H.'s work and life are all to be
found in Stranger in Town. The sense
that blacks and Latins are not quite
human (Fleming is attracted to a
"Negress" but fears syphilis). The in-
terest in pre-war jazz: Beiderbecke and
Goodman. A love of fancy food, drink,
decor; yet whenever the author tries to
strike the elegant worldly note, drapes
not curtains tend to obscure the view
from his not so magic casements,
looking out on tacky lands forlorn.
Throughout his life's work there is a
constant wistful and, finally, rather
touching identification with the old
American patriciate.
There is a rather less touching
enthusiasm for war: "An atom bomb is
just a bigger and better bomb," while
"the only justification for killing in
war Js that evil must be destroyed."
Although evil is never exactly defined,
the killers for goodness ought to be
left alone to kill in their own way
because "if I hired a man to do a dirty
job for me, I wouldn't be pre-
sumptuous enough to specify what
weapons he was to use or at what
hour...." Toward the end of the
book, H. H. strikes a minatory anti-
communist note. Fleming denounces
pacifists and "a new organization
called the Veterans Action Council"
the Communist manAARl"0V aFrl~ele ;; 00711 ~OT':`SIR' D,~'7`X-6t~"43ZRQQ@NI0@U 1J&Davis who wrote
as c eap, taw ry, t is
3
these veterans prefer to follow the
party -line which is to disarm the US
while Russia arms. A few years later
when Joe McCarthy got going, this was
a standard line. But it was hot stuff in
1945, and had the bookchat writers of
the day like Orville Prescott and
Charles Poore not hewed so closely to
the commie line Stranger in Town
would have been much read. As it was,
the book failed. Too avant-garde. Too
patriotic.
The gullible Who's Who now tells us
that H. H. was a "screen writer,
1947-48; attache Am Embassy, Paris.
France, 1948-49." But Mr. Szulc
knows better. Apparently H. H.
joined the CIA "early in 1949, and
after a short period in Washington
headquarters, he was sent to Paris for
nearly two years. Now for a cover, he
called himself a State Department
reserve officer." But the chronology
seems a bit off.
According to the blurb of a John
Baxter novel, the author (H. H.)
"worked as a screen writer until Holly-
wood felt the impact of TV. `When
unemployed screen writer colleagues be-
gan hanging themselves aboard their
yachts,' Baxter joined the Foreign Ser-
vice." I slip into reverie. I, am with
Leonard Spigdlgass, the doyen of
movie writers at MGM. "Lenny, do
you remember E. Howard Hunt alias
John Baxter alias Robert Dietrich ali-
as...." Lenny nods; a small smile
plays across his handsome mouth.
"Howie never got credit on a major
picture. Used to try to peddle these
foreign intrigue scripts. He was hipped
on assassination, I recall. Poor Howie.
Not even Universal would touch him."
But I fear that like Pontius Pilate in
the Anatole France story, Lenny
would merely say, "E. Howard Hunt? I
do not recall the name. But let me tell
you about Harry Essex...." If H. H.
was in Hollywood then he is, as a
writer, unique. Not one of his books
that I have read uses Hollywood for
background. This is superhuman conti-
nence considering how desperate for
settings a man who writes nearly fifty
books must be.
~~'.?y pretty good.) That was the
i. H. H. had ceased to be a con-
: :.1.r in the big literary sweepstake
currently features several young
Ii. -is of that day grown mangy with
;e's passage but no less noisy.
In 1949, at popular request, the
rncclist Howard Hunt hung up the
k until this year when he re-
rpeared as E. Howard Hunt, author
I'll The Berlin Ending. Simultaneous
with the collapse of his career as a
serious author, his attempts at movie
writing came to nothing because of
"the impact of TV." Too proud to
become part of our Golden Age of
television, H. H. joined the CIA in
1948 or 1949, a period in, which his
alias Robert Dietrich became an agent
for the IRS in Washington.
In Paris, H. H. met Dorothy Wetzel,
a pretty girl herself given to daydream-
ing: she claimed to be a full-blooded
Cherokee Indian to the consternation
of her family; she may or may not
have been married to a Spanish Count
before H. H. One reasonably hard fact
(ritually denied) is that she was work-
ing as a secretary for the CIA in Paris
when she met H. H. They were married
in 1949 and had four children; their
marriage appears to have been idylli-
cally happy despite the fact that they
were rather alike in temperament. A
relative recalls that as a girl Dorothy
always had her nose in a book-a bad
sign, as we know. She also believed in
the war against evil, in the dubiousness
of the battle which'at the end of her
life last December seemed to be going
against the good.
From Paris the two CIA employees
moved on to Vienna where they lived
a romantic life doing whatever it is
that CIA agents do as they defend the
free world, presumably by confounding
the commies. According to Who's Who,
H. H. was transferred to the American
Embassy in Mexico City in 1950. Latin
America was a natural field for H. H.
(with the Guggenheim money he had
gone for a year to Mexico to learn
Spanish). Also, in Latin America the
struggle between good and evil might
yet be resolved in good's favor. Europe
was old; perhaps lost. John Baxter's A
Foreign Affair (1954) describes H. H.'s
life in those days and his settling
Trios Who puts H. H. in Paris at the views. A Foreign Affair also marks the
Embassy in 1948. Mr. Szulc puts him resumption of H. H.'s literary career
there (and in the CIA) early 1949. and the beginning of what one must
Actually H. H. was working for the regard as the major phase of his art.
Economic Cooperation Administration Between 1953 and 1973, H. was to
at Paris in 1948 where he may have
been a "black operator" for the CIA. write under four pseudonyms. over
forty books.
With H. H. the only facts we can rely Three years in Mexico City. Two
on are those of publication. Maelstrom years in Tokyo. Three
appeared in 1948 and Bimini Run in years at Mon
1949. The Herald Tribune thought that tevideo (as consul, according to Who's
.Maelstrom was a standard thriller_ Who; actually he was CIA station
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I Came to Kill (Fawcett, 1954). In
1957 H. H. gave birth to Robert
Dietrich who specialized in thrillers,
featuring Steve Bentley, formerly of
the CID and now a tax consultant.
Steve Bentley first appears in Be My
Victim (1957). It is interesting that the
Bentley stories are set in Washington,
DC, a city which as far as I can judge
H. H. could not have known at all well
at the time. According to Mr. Szulc,
H. H. Was briefly at CIA headquarters
in 1949: otherwise he was abroad until
the 1960s. Presumably the city whose
symbol was one day to be Watergate
always had a symbiotic attraction for
him.
From the number of books that
H. H. began to turn out, one might
suspect that he was not giving his full
attention to the work of the CIA.
Nevertheless, in 1954, H. H. found
time to assist in the overthrow of the
liberal government of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatemala.
H. H. has now published Give Us
This Day, his version of what really
happened at the Bay of Pigs. He also
tells us something about the Guatemala
adventure where he had worked under
a Mr. Tracy Barnes who was "suave
and popular ... a product of Groton,
Yale, and Harvard Law. Through mar-
riage he was connected to the Rocke-
feller clan. . . ." Incidentally, both the
OSS and its successor the CIA of the
early cold war were manned by fun-
loving American nobles. Considering
H. H.'s love of the patriciate, it is not
impossible that his principal motive in
getting into the cloak-and-dagger game
was to keep the best company. The
hick from western New York who had
gone not to Harvard but to Brown,
who had not fought in the Second War
but worked behind the lines, who had
failed as a serious novelist found for
himself in the CIA a marvelous sort of
club where he could rub shoulders
with those nobles whose savoir-faire
enthralled him. After all, social climb-
ing is one of the most exciting games
our classless society has to offer.
But as Fitzgerald suspected, the
nobles are not like those who would
serve them on the heights. They are
tough eggs who like a good time
whether it is playing polo or murdering
enemies of the state. They take noth-
ing seriously except their pleasures and
themselves. Their admirers never under-
stand this. Commie-hunting which is
simply fun for the gamesters became
for their plebeian friend a holy mis-
sion. And so it is the true believer
H. H. who is in the clink today while
his masters are still at large, having
good times. Of course they make awful
messes, as Fitzgerald noted; luckily the
In recruiting H. H. for the Bay of
Pigs, Barnes expected to use him as
"on that prior operation-Chief of
Political Action ... to assist Cuban ex-
iles in overthrowing Castro." This
means that H. H. had worked with
Guatemalan right-wingers in order to
remove Arbenz. "The nucleus of the
project was already in being-a cadre
of officers I had worked with against
Arbenz. This time, however, all trace
of 'US official involvement must be
avoided, and so I was to be located
not in the Miami area, but in Costa
Rica." Later in the book we learn
that "the scheduled arrival of Soviet
arms in Guatemala had determined the
date of our successful anti-Arbenz
effort." Arms which the American
government had refused to supply.
During a . meeting with President
Idigoras of Guatemala (who was giving
aid, comfort, and a military base to
the anti-Castro forces) H. H. "thought
back to the period betore the over-
throw of Colonel Arbenz when CIA
was treating with three. exiled leaders:
Colonel Castillo Armas, Dr. Juan Cor-
dova Cerna, and Colonel Miguel Idi-
goras Fuentes. As a distinguished and
respected jurist, Cordova Cerna had my
personal vote as provisional presi-
dent...." But H. H. was not to be a
kingmaker this time. Castillo Armas
was chosen by the golden gamesters,
only to be "assassinated by a member
of the presidential bodyguard in whose
.pocket was found a card from Radio
Moscow...." They always carry cards
-thank God! Otherwise how can you
tell the bad from the good guys?
One studies the books for clues to
H. H.'s character and career; daydreams
are always more revelatory than night
dreams. As I have noted, H. H. chose
Washington, DC, as setting for the
Robert Dietrich thrillers starring Steve
Bentley. Although he could not have
known the city well in the Fifties, he
writes knowledgeably of the broken-
down bars, the seedy downtown area,
the life along the wharfs-but of -course
low life scenes are the same every-
where and I can't say that I really
recognize my native city in his hard-
boiled pages.
Here is Georgetown. "In early Colo-
nial times it was a center of periwigged
fashion and Federalist snobbery that
lasted a hundred years. For. another
eighty the., close-built dwellings settled
and tottered apart until only Negroes
would live there, eight to a room.
Then for the last twenty-five years,'the
process reversed. The New Deal's-flood
of bureaucrats claimed Georgetown as
its own.... On the fringes huddle
it seemed a shame that the slaves had
ever left." The narrator, Steve Bentley,
is a tough guy who takes pride in the
fact that Washington has "per capita,
more rape, more crimes of violence,
more perversion, more politicians,
more liquor, more good food, more
bad food ... than any other city in the
world. A fine. place if you have
enterprise, durability, money, and
powerful friends." It also helps to have
a good lawyer.
The adventures of Steve Bentley are
predictable: beautiful girl in trouble; a
murder or two. There is a great deal of
heavy drinking in H. H.'s novels; in
fact, one can observe over the years a
shift in the author's attitude from a
devil -may-care-let's-get-drunk-and-have-
a-good-time preppishness to an obses-
sive need for the juice to counteract
the melancholy of middle age; the
hangovers, as described, get a lot
worse, too. Mr. Szulc tells us that in
real life H. H. had been known to
tipple and on at least one occasion
showed a delighted Washington party
his CIA credentials. H. H.'s taste in
food moves from steak in the early
books (a precious item in wartime so
reminiscent of today's peacetime ar-
rangements) to French wine and lob-
ster. As a student of H. H. I was
pleased to learn that H. H. and his
fellow burglars dined on lobster the
night of the Watergate break-in. I think
I know who did the ordering.
It is a curious fact that despite
American right-wingers' oft-declared
passion for the American Constitution
they seem always to dislike the
people's elected representatives. One
would think that an enthusiasm for the
original republic would put them
squarely on the side of a legislature
which represents not the dreaded
people but those special and usually
conservative interests who pay for
elections. But there is something about
a congressman-any congressman-that
irritates- the American right-winger and
H. H. is no exception.
Angel Eyes (Dell, 1961) is typical.
Beautiful blonde calls on Steve Bent-
ley. Again we get his philosophy about
Washington. "A great city.. - .. All you
need is money, endurance, and power-
ful friends." The blonde has a power-
ful friend. She is the doxie of "Senator
Tom Quinby. Sixty-four if he was a
day, from a backwoods, hillbilly state
that featured razorback hogs, turkey-
neck sharecroppers, and ; contempt for
Civil Rights.... A prohibitionist and a
flag-waving moralizer." One suspects a
bit of deceit in the course of the Steve
Bentley thrillers. They are not as
heavily right-wing and commie-baiting
Howies of this world eVr~~O ~a~el p5ec'Clit71 /{ au Sf~ 7 3L1[vvt7?I ( Ooee1k8 while some of
up after them. that are ever so quaint, and sometimes the coloreds are actually OK guys in
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
Steve Bentley's book. All the more
reason, however, to find odd the
contempt for a tribune of the people
whose political views (except on pro-
hibition) must be close to H. H.'s own.
I suspect that the root of the
problem is, simply, a basic loathing of
democracy, even of the superficial
American sort. The boobs will only
send boobs to Congress unless a clever
smooth operator like Representative
Lansdale in End of a Stripper manages
to buy an. election in order to drive
the country, wittingly or unwittingly,
further along the road to collectivism.
It would be much simpler in the world
of Steve Bentley not to have elections
of any kind.
Steve doesn't much cotton to lady
publishers either. "Mrs. Jay Redpath,
otherwise known as Alma Ward" (or
Mrs. Philip Graham, otherwise known
as Kay Meyer) makes an appearance in
Angel Eyes, and hard as nails she is.
But Steve masters the pinko spitfire.
He masters everything, in fact, but
Washington itself with its "muggers
and heroin pushers and the white-
slavers and the faggotry.... This town
needs a purifying rain!" Amen to that,
Howie.
In 1960 H. H. published three Diet-
rich thrillers. In 1961 H. H. published
two Dietrich thrillers. In 1962 there
was no Dietrich thriller, But as John
Baxter H. H. published Gift for Go-
mala (Lippincott, 1962). The dates are
significant. In 1961 H. H. was involved
in the Bay of Pigs and so, presumably,
too busy to write books. After the Bay
of Pigs, he dropped Robert Dietrich
and revived John Baxter, a straight if
rather light novelist who deals with the
-not-so-high comedy of Kennedy Wash-
ington.
H. H. begins his apologia for his
part in the Bay of Pigs with the
statement that "No event since the
communization of China in 1949 has
had such a profound effect on the
United States and its allies as the
defeat of the US-trained Cuban inva-
sion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in
April, 1961. Out of that humiliation
grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis,
guerrilla warfare thoughout Latin
America and Africa, and our Domini-
can Republic- intervention. Castro's
beachhead triumph opened a bottom-
less Pandora's box of difficulties...."
This is the classic reactionary's view of
the world, uncompromised by mere
fact. How does one lose China if one
did not possess China in the first
place? And what on earth did John-
son's loony intervention in the Domini-
can Republic really have to do with
our unsuccessful attempt to overthrow
Approved
H. H. deplores the shortness of the
national memory for America's dis-
grace twelve years ago. He denounces
the media's effort to make JFK seem a
hero for having pulled back from the
brink of World War III. Oddly, he
remarks that "The death of Jack Ruby
and worldwide controversy over Wil-
liam Manchester's book for a time
focused public attention on events
surrounding the assassination of John
Fitzgerald Kennedy. Once again it
became fashionable to hold the city of
Dallas collectively responsible for his
murder. Still, and let this not be
forgotten, Lee Harvey Oswald was a
partisan of Fidel Castro, and an ad-
mitted Marxist who made desperate
efforts to join the Red Revolution in
Havana. In the end he was an activist
for the Fair Play for Cuba Commit-
tee." Well, this is what H. H. and a
good many like-minded people want us
to believe. But is it true? Or special
pleading? Or a cover story? A pattern
emerges.
H. H.'s memoir is chatty. He tells
how in 1926 his father traced an
absconding partner to Havana and with
an Army Colt .45 got back his money.
"Father's intervention was direct, ille-
gal, and effective." Years later his son's
Cuban work proved to be indirect and
ineffective; but at least it was every bit
as illegal as Dad's. Again one comes up
against the paradox of the right-wing
American who swears by law and order
yet never hesitates to break the law for
his own benefit. Either law and order
is simply a code phrase meaning get
the commie-weirdo-fag-nigger-lovers or
H. H.'s Nixonian concept of law and
order is not due process but vigilante.
As H. H. tells us how he is brought
into the Cuban adventure, the narrative
reads just like one of his thrillers with
the same capsule biographies, the same
tight-lipped asides. "I'm a career offi-
cer. I take orders and carry them out."
It appears that ex-President Figueres
offered to provide the anti-Castro
Cubans with a base in Costa Rica (the
same Figueres sheltered Mr. Vesco).
But the Costa Rican government de-
cided not to be host to the patriots so
H. H. set up his Cuban government-in-
exile in Mexico City, resigning from
the Foreign Service (his cover). He told
everyone he had come into some
money and planned to live in Mexico.
Privately, he tells us, he was dedicated
to getting rid of the "blood-soaked
gang" in Havana by shedding more
blood.
This
was the spring and summer of
exiled Cubans tended to be pro-
Kennedy in the--election. But not H. H.
He must have known even then that
JFK was a communist at heart because
his chief support came from the pinko
elements in the land. H. H. also had a
certain insight into the new President's
character because "JFK and I were
college contemporaries" (what he
means is that when Jack was at
Harvard Howie was at Brown) "and I
had met him at a Boston debut" (of
what?') "where he was pointed out to
me ... I freely confess not having
discerned in his relaxed lineaments the
future naval hero, Pulitzer laureate,
Senator, and President."
Meanwhile H. H. is stuck with his
provisional government in Mexico and
he was "disappointed. For Latin Amer-
ican males their caliber was about
average; they displayed most Latin
faults and few Latin virtues." In other
words, shiftless but not musical. What
can an associate member of the Wasp
patriciate and would-be killer. of com-
mies do but grin and bear it and try to
make a silk-purse or two of his Latin
pigs' ears?
In 1960 Allen Dulles received the
top team for a briefing on the pro-
posed liberation of Cuba. H. H. was
there and tells us of the plan to drop
paratroopers at "Santa Clara, located
almost in Cuba's geographic center"
while "reinforcing troops would land
by plane at Santa Clara and Trini-
dad ... on the southern coast." Assum-
ing that Castro's troops would be in
the Havana area, the Brigade would
"march east and west, picking up
strength as they went." There would
also be, simultaneously, a fifth column
to "blow up bridges and cut communi-
cations." But "let me underscore that
neither during this nor other meetings
was it asserted that the underground or
the populace was to play a decisive
role in the campaign." H. H. goes on
to explain that the CIA operation was
to be essentially military and he ad-
mits, tacitly, that there would prob-
ably be no great uprising against
Castro. This is candid but then H. H.
wants no part of any revolution. At
one point he explains to us that the
American revolution was not a class
revolution but a successful separation
of a colony from an empire. "Class
warfare, therefore, is of foreign ori-
gin.
The Kennedy administration
inspire H. H. with confidence.
did not
Richard
Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ches-
ter Bowles "all had a common back-
ground in Americans for Democratic
Action-the ADA." In H. H.'s world to
1960 and Kennedy and Nixon were
running for president. Since Kennedy's
denunciations of the commie regime
ninety
miles off the coast of Florida belong to ADA is tantamount to
For ReleasenNelg@18i:07e: tUA14RMYs7-&0438 1iQ03000r01E3nuuunist party.
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
True to form, the White House lefties
started saying that the Castro revolu-
tion had been a good thing until
betrayed by Castro. This Trotskyitc
variation was also played by Manolo
Ray, a liberal Cuban leader 11.11.
found as eminently shallow and oppor-
tunistic as the White House found
noble. H. H, had his hands full with
the Consejo or government-to-be of
Cuba.
Meanwhile, troops were being
trained in Guatemala. H. H. made a
visit to their secret camp and took a
number of photographs of the Brigade.
Proud of his snaps, he thought they
should be published in order to "stim-
ulate recruiting"; also, to show the
world that members of the Consejo
were getting on well with the Brigade,
which they were not.
At this point in time (as opposed to
fictional points out of time), aristo-
cratic Tracy Barnes suggested that
H. H. meet Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. at
the White House where Camelot's his-
torian was currently "pounding out"
the White Paper on Cuba for Arthur
the King. Arthur the historian "was
seated at his desk typing furiously, a
cigarette, clinging to his half-open
mouth, looking as disorderly as when
we had first met in Paris a decade
before." Although H. H.'s style is not
elegant he seldom comes tip with an
entirely wrong word: it is particularly
nice that in the monster-ridden cellar
of his brain the word "disorderly"
should have surfaced instead of "di-
sheveled" for are not all ADA'ers
enemies of law'n'order and so dis-
orderly?
During this meeting, H. H. learns
that Dean Rusk has vetoed the seizure
from the air of Trinidad because the
world would then know that the US
was deeply implicated in the invasion.
(The word incursion had not yet been
minted by the empire's hard-working
euphemists.) Then the supreme master
of disorder appeared in the historian's
office. Said Adlai Stevenson to aristo-
cratic Tracy Barnes, "'Everything go-
ing well, Tracy?' and Barnes gave a
positive response. This exchange is
important for it was later alleged that
Stevenson had been kept in the dark
about invasion preparations."
Latei, waiting in the press secretary's
office, "I sat on Pamela Turnure's desk
until the getaway signal came and we
could leave the White House, un-
observed, much like President Hard-
ing's mistress." Bull's eye, Howie!
Worthy of Saint-Simon, of Harold
Robbins!
D-Day. "I was not on the beach-
head, but I have talked with many
Cubans who were." Shades of the war
has been written before, it is enough
to say that there were no cowards on
the beach, aboard the assault ships or
in the air." But the Bay of Pigs was a
disaster for the free world and H. H.
uses the word "betrayal." As the sun
set on the beachhead which he never
saw, "only vultures moved." Although
safe in Washington, "I was sick of
lying and deception, heartsick over
political compromise and military de-
feat." Fortunately, 'H. H.'s sickness
with lying and deception was only
temporary. Ten years later Camelot
would be replaced by Watergate and
H. H. would at last be able to hit the
beach in freedom's name.
At least two other Watergate burg-
lars were involved with the Bay of Pigs
caper. "Co-pilot . [of a plane. that
dropped leaflets over Havana] was an
ex-Marine named Frank Fiorini," who is
identified in a footnote: "Later, as
Frank Sturgis, a Watergate defendant."
That is H. H.'s only reference to
Sturgis/Fiorini. On the other hand, he
tells us a good deal about Bernard
"Bernie" L. Barker, "Cuban-born US
citizen. First man in Cuba to volunteer
after Pearl Harbor. Served as USAF
Captain /Bombardier. Shot down and
spent eighteen months in a German
prison camp." H. H. tells us how
Bernie was used by the CIA to
infiltrate the Havana police so "that
the CIA could have an inside view of
Cuban antisubversive operations."
Whatever that means. Bernie was
H. H.'s assistant in Miami during the
pre-invasion period. He was "eager,
efficient, and completely dedicated." It
was Bernie who brought Dr. Jose Mir6
Cardona into H. H.'s life. Mirb is a
right-wing "former president of the
Cuban bar" and later head of the
Cuban revolutionary council. He had
also been, briefly, Castro's prime minis-
ter.
Bernie later became a real estate
agent in Miami. Later still, he was to
recruit two of his employees, Felipe de
Diego and Eugenio P. Martinez, for
duty as White House burglars. Accord-
ing to Barker, de Diego had conducted
"a successful raid to capture Castro
government documents," while Mar-
tinez made over "300 infiltrations into
Castro Cuba." At the time of Water-
gate Martinez was still on the CIA
payroll.
Give Us This Day is dedicated "To
the Men of Brigade 2506." The hero
of the book is a very handsome young
Cuban leader named Artime. H. H.
offers us a photograph of this glam-
orous youth with one arm circling the
haunted-eyed author-conspirator. It is a
equally handsome Augustus of the
West. H. H. is particularly exercised by
what he believes to have been Ken-
nedy's tactic "to whitewash the New
Frontier by heaping guilt on the CIA."
H. H. is bitter at the way the media
played along with this "unparalleled
campaign of vilification and obloquy
that must have made the Kremlin mad
with joy." To H. H., the real enemy is
anyone who affects "to see com-
munism springing from poverty" rather
than from the machinations of the
men in the Kremlin.
"On December 29, 1962, President
Kennedy reviewed the survivors of the
Brigade in Miami's Orange Bowl.
Watching the televised ceremony, I saw
Pepe San Roman give JFK the Bri-
gade's flag" (Footnote: "Artime told
me the flag was a replica, and that the
Brigade feeling against Kennedy was so
great that the presentation nearly did
not take place") "for temporary safe-
keeping. In response the President said,
`I can assure you that this flag will be
returned to this Brigade in a free
Havana.' " H. H. adds sourly, "One
wonders what time period he had in
mind."
Who's Who tells us that H. H. was a
consultant with the Defense Depart-
ment 1960-1965. Mr. Szulc finds this
period of H. H.'s saga entirely murky.
Apparently H. H. became personal
assistant to Allen Dulles after the Bay
of Pigs. Mr. Szulc also tells us that in
1963 the American ambassador to
Spain refused to accept H. H. as dep-
uty chief of the local CIA station
because of H. H.'s peculiar activities as
station chief for Uruguay in 1959.
After persuading President Nardone to
ask Eisenhower to keep him en poste
in Uruguay, H. H. then tried to over-
throw the same President Nardone
without telling the American ambas-
sador. It was this tactless treatment of
the ambassador that cost H. H. the
Spanish post.
One of H. H.'s friends told Mr.
Szulc, "This is when Howard really
began losing touch with reality."' In
Give Us This Day H. H. tells how he
tried to sell Tracy Barnes on having
Castro murdered. Although H. H. gives
the impression that he failed to per-
suade the CIA to have a go at killing
the Antichrist, columnist Jack Ander-
son has a different story to tell about
the CIA. In a column for January 25,
1971, he tells us that an attempt was
made to kill Castro in March, 1961, a
month before the invasion.. Castro was
'The New York Times Sunday Maga-
zine, June.3, 1973, p. I l_
novelists of a quarter century before!
touc
"Rather than atte> pp~vedtFowlf~>rle A
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t 432R000100300001-3
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
to be poisoned with a capsule in his
food. Capsule to be supplied by one
John Roselli-a Las Vegas mobster who
was eager to overthrow Castro and
re-open the mob's casinos. Also in-
volved in the project was a former FBI
agent Robert Maheu, later to be How-
ard Hughes's viceroy at Las Vegas.
It is known that Castro did become
ill in March. In February-March, 1963,
the CIA again tried to kill Castro.
Anderson wonders, not illogically, if
Castro might have been sufficiently
piqued by these attempts on his life to
want to knock off Kennedy. This was
Lyndon Johnson's theory. He thought
the Castroites had hired Oswald. The
Scourge of Asia was also distressed to
learn upon taking office that "We had
been operating a damned Murder, Inc.,
in the Caribbean." Since it is now clear
to everyone except perhaps Earl War-
ren that Oswald was part of a con-
spiracy, who were his fellow conspira-
tors? Considering Oswald's strenuous
attempts to identify himself with Cas-
tro, it is logical to assume that his
associates had Cuban interests. But
which. Cubans? Pro-Castro or anti-
Castro?
I think back on the evidence Syl-
via Odio gave the FBI and the War-
ren Commission's investigators.2 Mrs.
Odio was ,an anti-Castro, pro-Manolo
Ray Cuban exile who two months
Walker, the sort of thing a deranged
commie would do. Was he then simply
a deranged commie? The right-wing
Cubans and their American admirers
certainly want us to think so.
After the murder of the President,
one of those heard from was Frank
Fiorini/Sturgis, who was quoted in the
Pompano Beach, Florida, Sun-Sentinel
to the effect that Oswald had been in
touch with . Cuban Intelligence the
previous year, as well as with pro-
Castroites in Miami, Mexico City, New
Orleans. A Mrs. Marjorie Brazil re-
ported that she had heard that Oswald
had been in Miami demonstrating in
front of the office of the Cuban
Revolutionary Council headed by our
old friend Dr. Miro Cardona. A sister
of one Miguel Suarez told nurse Mar-
jorie Heimbeckei who told the FBI
that JFK would be killed by Castro-
ites. The FBI seems eventually to have
decided that they were dealing with a
lot of wishful thinkers.
Finally, Fiorini/Sturgis denied the
story in the Sun-Sentinel; he said that
he had merely speculated with the
writer on some of the gossip that was
making the rounds in Miami's anti-
Castro Cuban community. The gossip,
however, tended to be the same:
Oswald had killed Kennedy, on orders
from Castro or from those of his
admirers who thought that the murder
of an American president might in
some way save the life of a Cuban
president.
Yet the only Cuban group that
would be entirely satisfied by Ken-
nedy's death would be the right-wing
enemies of Castro who held Kennedy
responsible for their humiliation at the
Bay of Pigs. To kill him would avenge
their honor. Best of all, setting up
Oswald as a pro-Castro, pro-Moscow
agent, they might be able to precipi-
tate some desperate international crisis
that would serve their cause. Certainly
Castro at this date had no motive-for
killing Kennedy, who had ordered a
crack-down on clandestine Cuban raids
from the United States-of the sort
that Eugenio Martinez is. alleged so
often to have made.
I suspect that whoever planned the
murder must have been astonished at
the reaction of the American establish-
ment. The most vengeful of all the
Kennedys made no move to discover
who really killed his brother. In this,
Bobby was a true American: close
ranks, pretend there was no con-
spiracy, do not rock the boat-
particularly when both Moscow and
Havana seemed close to nervous break-
downs at the thought that they might
be implicated in the death of.the Great
Prince. The Warren Report then as-
sured the nation that the lone killer
who haunts the American psyche had
struck again. The fact that Bobby
Kennedy accepted the Warren Report
was proof to most people (myself
among them) that Oswald acted alone.
It was not until several years later that
I learned from a member of the family
that although Bobby was head of the
Department of Justice at the time, he
refused to look at any of the FBI
reports or even speculate on what
might have happened at Dallas. Too
shaken up, I was told.
Fortunately, others have tried to
unravel the tangle. Most intriguing is
Richard H. Popkin's theory that there
were two . Oswalds.4 One was a bad
shot; did not drive a car; wanted the
world to know that he was pro-Castro.
This Oswald was caught by the Dallas
police and murdered on television. The
other Oswald was seen driving a car,
firing at a rifle range, perhaps talking
to Mrs. Odio; he was hired by...? I
suspect we may find out one of these
days.
before the assassination of President
Kennedy was visited in her Dallas 2 Warren Commission Hearings, Vols.
apartment by three men. Two Were XI: 369-381 and XXVI: 834-838; see
Latins (Mexican, she thought, they also National Archives: Commission
weren't the right color for Cubans). Document No. 1553.
The third, she maintained, was Oswald. 3The Warren Commission and the FBI
They said they were members of her never satisfactorily identified Mrs.
friend Manolo Ray's organization and Odio's visitors. Just before the Report
one of them said that their companion was finished the FBI reported to the
Warren Commission that one Loran
Oswald thought Kennedy should have Eugene Hall, "a participant in numer-
been shot after the Bay of Pigs. If Mrs. ous anti-Castro activities," had recalled
Odio is telling the truth, then whoever visiting her with two other men, one
was about to murder Kennedy may of them, William Seymour, resembling
have wanted the left-wing anti-Castro Oswald. But after the Report appeared
group of Manolo Ray to get the the FBI sent the Commission a report
credit.3 that Hall had retracted his story and
During this period Oswald's behavior that Mrs. Odio could not identify Hall
or Seymour as the men she had seen.
was odd but not, necessarily, as official (See Richard H. Popkin, The Second
h
l
m
c
ronic
ers
aintain, mad. Oswald was Oswald [Avon, 1967], pp. 75-80.)
doing his best to become identified Hall had already been brought to the
publicly with the Fair Play for Cuba Commission's attention in June, 1964,
Committee as well as setting himself under the names of "Lorenzo Hall,
up privately as a sort of Soviet spy by alias Lorenzo Pascillio." The FBI heard
writing a mysterious "fact -filled letter in Los Angeles that Hall and a man
to the Soviet Embassy. That the called Jerry Patrick Hemming had
Russians were genuinely mystified by pawned a 30.06 rifle, which Hall
his letter was proved when they turned redeemed shortly before the assassina-
tion
ccount with a ch"aven on the
it over to the American government a
account of the "C Commmittee to Free
after the assassination. Also, most o Cuba." Hemming was identified in
intriguingly, Oswald visited ? Mexico 1962 as one of the leaders of Frank
City in September, 1963, when, ac- Sturgis's anti-Castro brigade. (See War-
cording to Mr. Szulc, H. H. was acting ren Commission Document 1179:
chief of the CIA station there. Finally, 296-298 and Hans Tanner, Counter
In 1962 H. H. published A Gift for
Gomala as John Baxter. This was an
attempt to satirize the age of Camelot.
Lippincott suggests that -it is "must
reading for followers of Reston, Alsop
and Lippmann who are looking for
Oswald's widow tells us that he took a Revolutionary Brigade [London, comic relief." One would think that
pot-shot at the rApW,t d ErRele 12001/ZW07 : CIA-RDP77-00432 O&lG630.fla01e,3ollow all three of
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
those magi would be beyond comic
relief. The tale is clumsy: a black
opportunist dresses up as a represent-
ative from a new African nation and
tries to get a loan from Congress; on
the verge of success, Gomala ceases to
exist. Like Evelyn Waugh, H. H. thinks
African republics are pretty joky af-
fairs but he gives us no jokes,
For about a year during this period
(1965-1966) H. H. was-living in Spain.
Whether or not he was working for the
CIA is moot. We do know that he was
creating a new literary persona: David
St. John, whose speciality is thrusting a
CIA man named Peter Ward into
exotic 'backgrounds with a bit of
diabolism thrown in.
As Gordon Davis, .H. H. also wrote
Where Murder Waits, a book similar in
spirit to Limit of Darkness. In the
early work H. H. daydreams about the
brave lads who flew out of Henderson,
often to death against the foe. In
Where Murder Waits H. H.'s dream self
hits the beach at the Bay of Pigs, that
beach where, finally, only vultures
stirred. Captured, the hero spends nine
months in the prisons of the archfiend
Castro. Once again: Expiation for
H. H.-in dreams begins self-love.
It is curious that as H. H. moves out
of the shadows and into the glare of
Watergate his books are more and
more (?pen about his political obses-
sions. The Coven, by David St. John, is
copyrighted 1972. In July of 1971, on
the recommendation of Charles W. ("If
you have them by the balls their hearts
and minds will follow") Colson, H. H.
was hired by the White House and be-
came a part-time criminal at $100-a
day. Zeal for his new masters informs
every page of The Coven. The villain is
the hustling handsome rich young
Senator Vane with "a big appeal to the
young and disadvantaged" (i.e., com-
mies)-just like Jack-13obby-Teddy. The
description of Mrs, 'Vane makes one
think irresistibly (and intentionally) of
Madame Onassis-not to mention
Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann,
and the horde of other writers who
take such people and: put them in
books thinly revealed rather than dis-
guised.
"The Vanes are legally married to
each other and that's about all. Their
private lives are separate. He's.a terror
among the chicks, and she' gets her
jollies from the artists; writers and
beach boy -types Vane gets public
grants for." She also seduces her
narrator. _"I had seen a hundred maga-
zine and newspaper photographs of her
cutting ribbons, first-nighting, fox-
hunting at Warrenton, and empathizing
with palsied kids...." But, as H. H.
reminds us, "only a fool thinks there's
figure's public image and reality."
Fortunately the narrator is able to
drive the Vane family out of public
life (they are prone to taking off their
clothes at orgies where the devil is
invoked). H. H. believes quite rightly
that the presidency must never go to
devil-worshipers, who appeal to the
young and disadvantaged.
The chronology of H. H.'s life is a.
tangle until 1968 when he buys
Witches Island, a house at Potomac,
Maryland- (his wife went in for horses).
On April 30, 1970, the new squire
retired from the CIA under a cloud-he
had failed too often. But H. H. had a
pension; he also had a lively new
pseudonym David St. John; his wife
Dorothy had a job at the Spanish
Embassy. But H. H. has always needed
money so he went to work for Robert
R. Mullen and Company, a PR firm
with links to the Republican party and
offices not only a block from, the
White House but across the street from
the Committee to Re-Elect the Presi-
dent.
Mullen represented Howard Hughes
in Washington. H. H. knew his way
around the Hughes operation-after all,
Hughes's man in Las Vegas was Robert
Maheu, whose contribution to Cuban
affairs, according to Jack Anderson,5
was to "set up the Castro assassina-
tion" plot in 1961, and whose con-
tribution to Nixon was to funnel
$100,000 to Bebe Rebozo in 1970.
But Hughes sacked Maheu late in
1970. In 1971 H. H. found -a second
home at the White House, assigned
with G..Gordon Liddy to "the Room
16 project" where the Administration
prepared its crimes.
Room 16 marks the high point of
H. H.'s career; his, art and arts were
now perfected. Masterfully, he forged;
he burglared; he conspired. The Shake-
speare of the CIA had found, as it
were, his Globe Theatre. Nothing was
beyond him-including tragedy. Ac-
cording to Newsweek, John Dean told
Senate investigators that H.'FL, "had a
contract" from "low-level White House
officials" to murder the President of
Panama for not obeying with sufficient
zeal the American Bureau of Narcotics
directives. "Hunt, according to Dean,
had his team in Mexico before the
mission was aborted. ,6.
As the world now knows, on the
evening- of June 16, 1972, H. H. gave a
splendid lobster dinner to the Water-
gate burglars' and then sent Bernie
Barker and his Cubans into battle to
5Japan Times, January 23, 1971.
6Newsweek, June 18,. 1973, p. 22.
bug the offices of the Democratic
party because H. H. had been told by
G. Gordon Liddy "that Castro 'funds
were going to the Democrats in hopes
that a'rapprochement with Cuba would
be, effected by a successful Democratic
presidential candidate." H. H. has also
said (Time, August 27, 1973) that his
own break-in of the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist was an attempt
to find out whether Ellsberg "might be
a controlled agent for the Sovs."
One daydreams: "Doctor Fielding, I
have these terrible headaches. They
started just after I met my control
Ivan and he said, `Well, boychick, it's
been five years now since you signed
on as a controlled agent. Now I guess
you know that if there's one thing we
Sovs hate it's a non-producer so....'
Doctor Fielding, I hope you're writing
all this down and not just staring out
the window like last time."
Now ? for the shooting of George
Wallace. It is not unnatural to suspect
the White House burglars of having a
hand in the shooting. But suspicion is
not evidence and there is no evidence
that H. H. was involved. Besides, a
good CIA man would no doubt have
preferred the poison capsule to a
gunshot-slipping ole George the sort
of slow but lethal dose. that Castro's
powerful gut rejected. In an AP
story this summer,7 former CIA offi-
cial Miles Copeland is reported to have
said that "senior agency officials are
convinced Senator Edward Muskie's
damaging breakdown during the pres-
idential campaign last year was caused
by convicted Watergate conspirator E.
Howard Hunt or his henchman spiking
his drink with a -sophisticated form of
LSD."
When Wallace . ran for president in
1968, he got 13 . percent of the vote;
and Nixon nearly lost to Humphrey. In
May, 1972, 17.percent favored Wallace
for president in the Harris Poll. Wallace
had walked off with the Michigan
Democratic primary. Were he to con-
tinue 'his campaign for president as an
independent or as a Democrat in states
where he was not filed under his own
party, he could have swung the elec-
tion to the Democrats, or at least
denied Nixon a majority and sent the
election to the House.
"This entire strategy - of ours,"
Robert Finch said in March, 1972,
"depends on whether George Wallace
makes a run on his own." For four
years Nixon had done everything possi-
ble to keep Wallace from running; and
7 AP Dispatch, London, August 17,
1973.
any resemblance between a - public
1
0
e President, 1972
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The Second Oswald a
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failed. "With Wallace apparently
stronger in the primaries in 1972 than
he had been before," Theodore White
observed, "with the needle sticking at
43 percent of the .vote for Nixon, the
President was still vulnerable-until, of
course, May 15 and the shooting. Then
it was all over."8
Wallace was shot by the now famil-
iar lone assassin-a demented (as usual)
busboy named Arthur Bremer. Then
on June 21, 1973, the headline in the
New York Post was "Hunt Tells of
Orders to Raid Bremer's Flat."
According to the story by Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, H. H.
told the Senate investigators that an
hour after Wallace was shot, Colson
ordered him to fly to Milwaukee and
burglarize the flat of Arthur H. Brem-
er. the would-be assassin-in order to
connect Bremer somehow with the
commies? Characteristically, the tele-
vision senators let that one slip by
them. As one might expect, Colson
denied ordering H. H. to Milwaukee for
any purpose. Colson did say that he
had talked to H. H. about the shoot-
ing. Colson also said that he had been
having dinner with the President that
evening. Woodward's and Bernstein's
"White House source" said, "The Presi-
dent became deeply upset and voiced
concern that the attempt on Wallace's
life might have been made by someone
with ties to the Republican Party or
the Nixon campaign." This, Nixon
intuited, might cost him the election.9
May 15, 1972, Arthur H. Bremer
shot George Wallace, governor of Ala-
bama, at Laurel, Maryland, and was
easily identified as the gunman and
taken into custody. Nearby in a rented
car, the police found Bremer's diary
(odd that in the post-Gutenberg age
Oswald, Sirhan, and Bremer should.
have all committed to paper their
pensees). .
According to the diary, Bremer had
tried to kill Nixon in Canada but failed
to get close enough. He then decided
to kill George Wallace. The absence of
any logical motive is now familiar to
most Americans, who are quite at
home with the batty killer who acts
alone in order to be on television, to
be forever entwined with the golden
legend of the hero he has gunned
down. In a nation that worships
psychopaths, the Oswald-Bremer-Sir-
han-Ray figure is to the general illness
what Robin Hood was to a greener,
saner world.
Bremer's diary is a fascinating
work-of art? From what we know of
the- twenty-two-year-old author he did
not have a literary turn of mind
and a dull one. Politics had no interest
for him. Yet suddenly-for reasons he
never gives us-he decides to kill the
President and starts to keep a diary on
April 4, 1972.
virgin-would he? Perhaps) where he is
given an unsatisfying hand job. The
scene is nicely done and the author
writes correctly and lucidly until, sud-
denly, a block occurs and he can't
spell anything right-as if the author
suddenly remembers that he is meant
to be illiterate.
One of these blocks occurs toward
the end of the massage scene when the
girl tells Bremer that she likes to go to
"wo-gees." This is too cute to be
believed. Every. red-blooded American
boy, virgin or not, knows the word
"orgy." Furthermore, Bremer has been
wandering around porno bookstores on
42nd Street and the word "orgy"
occurs almost as often in his favored
texts as "turgid." More to the point,
when an illiterate is forced to guess at
the spelling of a word he will render it
phonetically. I cannot imagine that the
girl said anything that sounded like
"wo-gee." It is as if the author had
suddenly recalled the eponymous hard-
hat hero of the film Joe (1970) where
all -the -hippies--got shot- so satisfyingly
and the "g" in orgy was pronounced
hard. On this page, as though to
emphasize Bremer's illiteracy, we get
"spair" for "spare," "enphasis" for
"emphasis," and "rememmber." Yet
on the same page the diarist has no
trouble spelling "anticipation," "re-
sponse," "advances."
The author of the diary gives us a
good many random little facts-seat
numbers of airplanes, prices of meals.
He does not like "hairy hippies." A
dislike he shares with H. H. He also
strikes oddly jarring literary notes. On
his arrival in New York, he tells. us
that he forgot his guns which the
captain then turned over to him,
causing the diarist to remark "Irony
abounds." A phrase one doubts that
the actual Arthur Bremer would have
used. As word and quality, irony is not
part of America's demotic speech or
style. Later, crossing the Great Lakes,
he declares "Call me Ismal." Had he
read Moby Dick? Unlikely. Had he
seen the movie on. the Late Show?
Possibly. But I doubt that the phrase
on the sound track would have stayed
in his head.
The diary tells us how Bremer tried
According to Mr. Szulc, in March,
1972, H. H. Visited Dita ("call me
Mother") Beard in Denver. Wearing a
red wig and a voice modulator, H. H.
persuaded Dita to denounce as a
forgery the memo she had written
linking ITT's pay-off to the Republican
party with the government's subse-
quent dropping of the best part. of its
antitrust suit against the conglomerate.
In May, H. H. was installing the first
set of bugs at the Democratic head-
quarters. His movements between April
4 and May 15 might be usefully
examined-not to mention those of G.
Gordon Liddy, et al.
For someone who is supposed to be
nearly illiterate there are startling liter-
ary references and flourishes in the
Bremer diary. The second entry con-
tains "You heard of `One Day in the
Life of Ivan Dynisovich'? Yesterday
was ---my day;" The ""mi"sspelling of
Denisovich is not bad at all. Con-
sidering the fact that the name is a
hard one for English-speaking people
to get straight, it is something of a
miracle that Bremer could sound the
four syllables of the name correctly in
his head. Perhaps he had the book in
front of him but if he had, he would
not have got the one letter wrong.
The same entry produces more
mysteries. "Wallace got his big votes
from Republicans who didn't have any
choice of candidates on their own
ballot. Had only about $1055 when I
left." This is the first and only
mention of politics until page 45 when
he describes his square clothes and
haircut as "just -a disguise to get close
to Nixon."
One reference to Wallace at the
beginning; then another one to Nixon
a dozen pages later. Also, where did
the $1,055 come from? Finally, a
minor psychological point-Bremer re-
fers to some weeds as "taller than me
5'6." I doubt if a neurotic twenty-
two-year-old would want. to remind
himself on the page that he is only
5'6" tall. -When people talk to them-
selves they seldom say anything so
obvious. On the other hand, authors
like this sort of detail.
Popular paperback fiction requires a
fuck scene no later than a dozen pages
into the narrative. The author of the
diary gives us a good one. Bremer goes
to a massage parlor in New York (he
has told the diary that he is a
(among his effects were comic books, 9New York Post, June 21, 1973,
to kill Nixon. The spelling gets worse
and worse as Bremer becomes
"thruorly pissed off." Yet suddenly he
writes, "This will be one of the most
closely read pages since the Scrolls in
those caves." A late April entry re-
cords, "Had bad pain in my left temple
& just in front & about it." He is now
going mad as all the lone killers do,
and refers to "writting a War, &
some porno). He was a televisio .baby reprinting a Washington Post story. a `Clockwork Or-
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9
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
ange' and thought about getting Wallace
all thru the picture-fantasing my self as
the Alek on the screen...." This is a
low blow at highbrow sex'n'violence
books and flicks. It is also-again-
avant-garde. Only recently has a debate
begun in England whether or not the
film Clockwork Orange may have
caused unbalanced youths to commit
crimes (clever youths now tell the
Court with tears in their eyes that it
was the movie that made them bash
the nice old man and the Court is
thrilled). The author anticipated that
ploy all right-and no matter who
wrote the diary we are dealing with a
true author. One who writes, "Like a
novelist who knows not how his book
will end-I have written this journal-
what a shocking surprise that my inner
character shall steal the climax and
destroy the author and save the anti-
hero from assasination!" Only one
misspelling in that purple patch. But
"as I said befor, I Am A Hamlet." It is
not irony that abounds so much in
these pages as literature.
May 8, Bremer is reading R.F.K.
--Must -Die! by ? Robert -Blair Kaiser. Like
his predecessor he wants to be noticed
and then die because "suicide is a birth
right." But Wallace did not die and
Bremer did not die. He is now at a
prison in Baltimore, awaiting a second
trial. If he lives to be re-examined, one.
wonders if he will tell us what corn-
THE NEW REPUBLIC
8 December 1973
-S taril-eV4Ka.r..n.ow_
pany he kept during the spring of
1972, and whether or not a nice man
helped him to write his diary, as a
document for the ages like the scrolls
in those caves. (Although H. H. is a
self-admitted forger "of state. papers I
do not think that he actually had a
hand in writing Bremer's diary on the
ground that the journal is a brilliant if
flawed job of work, and beyond
H. H's known literary competence.)
Lack of originality has marked the
current Administration's general style
(as opposed to the vivid originality of
its substance; witness, the first magis-
trate's relentless attempts to subvert
the Constitution). Whatever PR has
worked in the .past :_is tried again.
Goof? Then take the blame yourself-
just like JFK after the Bay of Pigs.
Caught with your hand in the- till?
Checker's time on the tube and the
pulling of heart strings.
Want to assassinate a rival? Then
how about the Dallas scenario? One
-slips into reverie. Why not set up
Bremer as a crazy who wants to shoot
Nixon (that will avert suspicion)? But
have him fail to kill Nixon just as
Oswald was said to have failed to kill
his first target General Walker. In
midstream have Bremer-like Oswald-
shift to a different quarry. To the real
quarry. Make Bremer, unlike Oswald,
apolitical. Too heavy , an identification
with the Democrats might . backfire.
Then-oh, genius!-let's., help him. to
write a diary* to get the story across.
(Incidentally, the creation of phony
documents and memoirs is a major
industry 'of our secret police forces.
When. the one-,man terror of the South-
east Asian seas Lieutenant Commander
Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter was relieved
of his command, the Pentagon put him
to work writing the* "memoirs" of a
fictitious Soviet submarine commander
who had defected to ' the Free
World.)' ?
The White House's reaction to the
Watergate burglary was the first clue
that something terrible has gone wrong
with us. The elaborate and disastrous
cover-up was out of ..all proportion to
what was, in effect, a small crime the
Administration could have lived with. I
suspect that our rulers' state of panic
came'from the fear that other horrors
would come to light-as indeed they
have. But have the horrors ceased? Is
there something that our rulers know
that we don't? Is it possible that
during the dark night of our empire's
defeat in Cuba and Asia the American
story shifted from cheerful familiar
farce to Jacobean tragedy-to murder,
chaos? - 0
10See The Arnheiter Affair by Neal
Sheehan (Random House, 1971).
Intelligence in the Colby Era
CIA -A A IL
When President
ation of the Cent
c;a
iluarter-century a.;
Marshall warned a+:
grounds that its '~
and need clarific.lt
cessfully resisted h
limit and clarify it
this time by Sena
promises by be c
a
rAr
mcl Services. s
vise the CIA, has'
Oman was contemplating, the cre-
Intelligence Agency more filar; a
Secretary of State George C.
ainst the new organization on the
owers . . . seem almost unlimited
on." Since then the CIA has suc-
indreds of attempts by Congress to
powers, and the latest such bid,
or John C. Stennis of Mississippi,.
uaiiy ineffective. Stennis, whose
`
bcommittee is supposed
to super-
onsistently protected it against any
serious. investigatilon, control or criticism, and, con-
sistent with that p~actice, his present bill is less a gen,
uine effort to harness the agency than a diversionary
tactic designed to prevent other members of Congress,-
notably Senator William Proxmire,. from pushing
through stronger measures. The CIA is likely to emerge
unscathed again.
Even so, other pressures have combined to ailninish
the CIA's influence, and, although it continues to carry
on covert and sometimes reckless activities, the agency makes its re nests to P1Aw 9f1
Js not quite the si~l3n+"ro` f
S4C1D-S# t /0wP7 *#P% P&J25R `EOr 't t'Pfr~
10
years past, for one thing its,rcputation has suffered
Wdly from misadventures like the Bay' of Pigs and the
secret war in Laos, as well as its tangential involve-
ment in the Watergate scandals, and, as a result, , it has
fallen prey to.the fierce bureaucratic rivalries of Wash-
ington. It has gradually become overshadowed by the
Defense Department's various espionage services,
.which now accountt for. about 85 percent of the esti-
mated six or seven billion dollars spent annually by
what-is known, in the idiom of the cariital as the "intel-
ligence community." The biggest of the Pentagon out-
fits is the National Security Agency, whose 25,000
employees manage satellites, fly rcconnaissanci-.
ciaft, and, among other jobs, monitor open and'sTccci
foreign radio communications from some 400 clandes-,
tine bases around the world, all on a budget that runs
into. the billions. In contrast the CIA staff of 15,000
operates on roughly $750--million per year, and, in
many 'respects,' jt could not function without military
support. Unlike the Defense Dcpartmerit, moreover,
the CIA cannot, seek funds directly from Congress, but
anagement and
'ally in charge of
 Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100300001-3
the entire int Iigerjce community, the agency direc-
tor's theoretic predominance is restricted by his rela-
tive poverty. he extent to which the military has
reached into i l l elligence matters was recently reflected
in the assign nt of two senior officers, MajorGeneral
Daniel O. Gr4 am and Major General Lew Allen, to
key positions side the CIA. Prior to his shift Graham
contended in 4 unusual article in Army magazine that
the Pentagon r ther than the CIA ought to have'the
chief responsi~ lity in the field of defense intelligence.
"The time is ripe," he wrote, "for the military profes-
sion to reassert its traditional role in the function of
describing mi i ary threats to national security."
More -signiff antly, the importance of the CIA has
been pared d 'n over the years by the White House.
John F. Kenne 's confidence in the agency was shaken
by the Bay of I~ igs disaster. and, as the Pentagon Papers
have vividly rj 'ealed. Lyndon Johnson repeatedly ig-
nored ressimiM is CIA evaluations of the Vietnam sit-
uation that c itradicted his preconceived policies.
The agency's prestige has dropped even further under
President Nixon, p r:'.y l-e~au c his has, tried to cc; ralize power at the expense of the dif-
ferent %.Vashin on bureaucracies and also because his
resident foretl} policy expert, Henry Kissinger, who
served as a cou ter-intelligence sergeant during World
War 11, lost pat; nce with many of the CIA's long, slabOOrcat. dnd sometimes inconclusive reports. According
to Patrick J. Mc arvey, a former intelligence 'specialist'
whose book on the CIA was officially cleared, Kissin-
. ~...n~ ?~iC\.J: At7 al l'!: .,aa:d .c ritai / aiid lnc
Common Mar ?et with the words "Piece df Crap"
scrawled across the cover. McGarvcy also disclosed
fhcit;-:Kissinger