Defending the Truth, page 3
Magdalena had continued to live with the Rabbs. There had been no question about it. She was part of the family now. She had earned her education degree at the University of Arizona. And when she married Jesus (“Chuy”) Leyva, the chief of the Indian police for the San Xavier Reservation, she and Chuy had gone to live in a small house, owned by the BIA and designated by BIA Superintendent Edgar Hendly as the official residence of the chief of police, across from San Xavier del Bac Mission. She had given birth to a son, whom they named Macario in honor of her grandfather, just a week before Chuy was recalled to the marines; and after Chuy had left, she had been too depressed to live alone on the Reservation. So she and Macario had come to live in the spare bedroom on the second floor of the Rabbs’ house, separated by a small bathroom from Hanna’s bedroom.
Adam parked in the driveway with the motor running, and Barbara went into the house to get Magdalena. They came out a moment later. Magdalena’s shiny ebony hair was pulled back in a thick peasant’s braid. She carried her baby in her arms. She got in the backseat with Barbara.
“What’s new with Chuy?” Joshua asked.
She shook her head sadly. “He was up with MacArthur’s spearhead across the thirty-eighth parallel. They were on the offensive, and he felt confident. Now that MacArthur’s been fired, Chuy’s really worried.” She paused and her voice got thicker. “I’m scared.”
Joshua nodded. “When I was in Europe, the army censored all the mail and never let us write about what was really happening. Maybe that was better.”
Magdalena shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do or say to make anything change. I just feel helpless.” Her voice trailed off, and she stared out the window of the car into the darkness.
Chapter 2
Bill Maitland sat on the black velvet upholstered armchair in the living room of his house on Camelback Mountain. He was a big, handsome man of forty-seven, blond hair and blue eyes. The expansive picture window and sliding glass doors to the patio gave him a panoramic view of the glimmering lights of Phoenix sprawling to the west.
“The guy is a fucking genius,” Maitland said. He took a sip of the straight scotch in the old-fashioned glass he was holding.
“Yeah, he’s got all the words,” said Horton Landers, the senator’s administrative aide. “The people love him. ‘Commiecrats. Parlor pinks and parlor punks. Bureaucratic Frankenstein.’ Where’s he get that shit?”
The third man in the room was Herman Gruver, McCarthy’s chief of staff in his home office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He had been McCarthy’s assistant campaign manager and had helped orchestrate the intoxicating landslide victory of 1946.
“Some of that stuff he picks up from the reporters who follow him around,” Gruver said. “Some of it just pops into his head, and he doesn’t even know from where.”
“Well, wherever it’s coming from,” Maitland said, “it’s sure as hell working for him. I heard he got twenty grand in campaign contributions after that speech in Virginia.”
“More like forty,” Gruver said.
Landers let out a low whistle. “We oughta try to get in on some of that.” He sipped at his scotch.
“That’s why the senator asked me to come here,” Gruver said. “You read the packet we sent you on those two professors in Tucson?”
Maitland nodded. “Sure did. Great stuff. But we have to have a good man down there working it for us. I don’t want it biting me on the ass.”
“We got one,” Gruver said. “This Essert is on the team. I talked to him on the phone last week right after the senator called you about the Academics Against War. Essert said he’d put together a grand jury, no questions asked. He’s a good boy. And the senator told me to go down there and stay as long as it takes to make sure it goes right.’”
“Fantastic!” Maitland said. “It’s going to be just the ticket for me.”
Gruver smiled and nodded. He was a thin man with a bony, narrow face, fifty-three years old, with thinning, short gray-brown hair and rheumy green eyes.
“This is my chance,” Maitland said, his face sober. “I’m getting on Joe’s bandwagon and riding it to the White House.”
Landers’s eyes got big. “McCarthy say something?”
“He said it’s me or Dick Nixon. Nixon got a lot of distance out of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but he doesn’t have my kind of backing with the money boys. Joe wants a million bucks in private money.”
Landers shrugged. “Hell, that shouldn’t be any problem.”
“That’ll be music to the senator’s ears,” Gruver said.
“I already told Joe that,” said Maitland. “He told me I better get this Academics thing boiling hot to get my name in the papers. If I make it hot enough and get national press on it, Joe will include it in his hearings. Then I’ll get some real name recognition. Name recognition plus the million”—he snapped his fingers—“I’m Vice President Maitland in 1956, 1960 at the latest.”
“I’ll bring the packet down to Essert tomorrow,” Herman Gruver said.
“I’ll go with you,” said Horton Landers.
Chapter 3
“Julio Moraga’s on the phone,” Frances Hendly said through the squawky intercom.
Joshua Rabb was sitting at his desk in his small office at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Tucson. He pressed down on the intercom lever, said “Thanks,” and picked up the telephone.
“Julio, how are you? What’s up?”
“I’ve just been subpoenaed to a federal grand jury.”
Joshua paused, thinking that he hadn’t heard correctly. “What?”
“I’m in my office at the museum. The U.S. marshal just served a subpoena on me to testify about being a communist.”
“A communist?”
“Yeah.”
“You?”
“Yeah. But I’m not.”
“I know that. But why?”
“I wrote an article with Mischa Livinsky for a scholarly journal.”
“What?”
“Mischa Livinsky,” Julio said articulately.
“What the hell is a Mischa Livinsky?” Julio chuckled. “Sorry for laughing. Nerves. It isn’t so funny. He’s a professor of political science at the U.
Joshua thought for a moment. “Yeah, I think I read something about that a couple of days ago in the Star. He must be one of that Academics Against War group that the story said the attorney general declared to be a Communist front organization.”
“Right. Me, too.”
“Are you and—”
“Joshua, I’ve got to go. I’m already late for an appointment with the provost to talk about renewing my contract. I’ll be at your office at one o’clock with Mischa.”
He hung up the telephone, not waiting for a reply.
Edgar Hendly walked into Joshua’s office and sat down on the straight-backed wooden chair. Edgar was the BIA superintendent for Arizona, almost sixty years old, nine inches shorter than Joshua and at least fifty pounds heavier. He wore a threadbare dark gray wool suit with sweat patches under the arms, a frayed white shirt, and a black silk tie anointed with tiny remnants of a variety of breakfast foods. He had a nervous habit of combing his few strands of gray hair over his bald spot with pudgy fingers. But despite his rumpled, unkempt appearance and rube demeanor, he was the best friend Joshua had ever had. He was one of the two reasons that Joshua had retained his fifteen-hour-a-week job as BIA legal officer and head of the Office of Land Management, although he no longer relied on the $129-a-month salary.
Joshua’s private law practice had grown substantially since he had married Barbara and moved away from the San Xavier Papago Reservation into Tucson two years ago. The other reason that he had kept his job was that occasionally he had the opportunity to do something good for the Papagos. They were mostly gentle, poverty-stricken people, abandoned and ignored and repressed by the surrounding populace, and it gave Joshua a feeling of self-worth to be able to help them. “Haud ignara mali, miseris succerere disco,” Sister Martha Robinette, a Poor Claire nun, had said to him the first time he had come to this office in June 1946: “Not unaccustomed to misfortune, I have learned to succor the downtrodden.” She had intended to insult him with that line from a poem by Virgil, not imagining at the time that this transplanted Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn might actually fit the description.
“Nice to see you, Edgar.”
“What’s new, Josh?” Edgar eyed him askance.
“Same old stuff.”
“Aw now, don’t be pissin’ on my shoes and tellin’ me it’s a rainstorm. I hear ya got a call from Julio Moraga.”
“You got antennas in your ears?”
“I got a wife who loves and reveres me and likes to keep me up on all the latest gossip. And she happens to answer the telephone ‘round this joint.”
Joshua smiled. “That would be Saint Frances the Fearless of BIA?”
“The very one. Now what did ol’ Julio do this time?”
“Got subpoenaed to a grand jury.”
“Punch out another voting registrar?” Edgar snorted.
“Nope. He’s a member of the Academics Against War over at the university, and the attorney general declared it a subversive Communist front.”
Edgar stared at him quizzically. “Julio, a Communist? Bullshit.”
Joshua lifted the telephone. “Call the attorney general in Washington and tell him.”
Edgar held up his hands in a halt gesture. “Shi-it no, man! That fuckin’ Senator McCarthy’d have my ass in a sling in two seconds flat.” He looked oddly at Joshua. “You ain’t plannin’ to take his case?”
Joshua shrugged. “I haven’t been asked.”
“Get outta town ‘fore he can ask.”
“What the hell do I have to be so afraid of?”
“Man, if you don’t know, then yer a damn sight dumber ‘n I think ya are. All them killers and thieves and gangsters ya represent gets folks round here a little pissed off. But this? They’ll hang ya by yer dick from the flagpole in Armory Park. The gazebo’ll be all decked out in red white ‘n blue buntin’ fer the occasion, and the Davis-Monthan Air Force band’ll play patriotic music whilst all the little ol’ ladies from the Daughters a the American Revolution admire how nice ya swing in the wind.”
Joshua laughed. “And you’ll probably set up a hot dog concession to make a few bucks off me.”
“I don’t think nobody’ll be in the mood fer a hot dog when they see ya strung up by yer wiener. I think I’ll do cotton candy and Cokes.”
Both of them laughed. Then they sat quietly for a moment studying each other.
“Seriously. Don’t do it.”
Joshua screwed up his face and shrugged. “Seriously, I haven’t been asked. If I am, I’ll have to make a decision.”
“Yeah, you ‘n yer decisions. Yer gonna get into somethin’ no smart person would touch with rubber gloves an’ a pole.”
“We’ll see.”
“This ain’t only you, ya know. Ya get inta this som bitch, Harry Coyle gonna be callin’ me from Washington wonderin’ what kinda Commie I got on the BIA payroll.”
“And you’ll tell him I’m just a lawyer doing a job.”
“I’ll tell him,” Edgar said wryly, “but there’s no tellin’ what he’ll tell me.”
Julio Moraga came into Joshua’s office at a few minutes after one. He wore Levi’s, a plain plaid cowboy shirt, and black cowboy boots. He was of average height and weight with straight black hair cut short and great bushy wild-haired eyebrows guarding deep-set angry black eyes in a fleshy, russet face. He was in his late thirties, one of the few Papagos who had ever earned a master’s degree, and was the assistant curator of the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona.
As a native speaker of English, Spanish, and Papago, Julio was invaluable to the professor of anthropology who headed the museum and whose expertise was the history and prehistory of southern Arizona.
He and Julio, whose specialty was archaeology, had discovered and excavated the Ventana Cave about eighty miles west of Tucson on the Big Papago Reservation, which contained the earliest and best preserved artifacts ever found of the civilization from which the Papagos had descended.
Julio sat down on the edge of one of the straight-backed wooden chairs, perched and jittery like a Harris hawk searching for prey from a high limb of a mesquite tree. Joshua had brought a second chair into the office for Mischa Livinsky, who sat down heavily on it, a much older and meeker-looking man than Julio.
“This is my very good friend Mischa Livinsky, full professor of political science,” Julio said.
Joshua stood up, as did Livinsky. They reached across the desk and shook hands firmly. They sat down, appraising each other. Livinsky was dressed dapperly in a light gray silk suit, white shirt, and royal blue silk tie. He was about six feet tall, thin and angular to the point of gauntness, with soft blue eyes, a drooping left eyelid, graying reddish blond hair, and a hatchet face that looked like it had been cut from a cracked and parched knotty pine log, yellowish skin striated with wrinkles. He may have been only fifty-five or sixty years old, but he could easily have passed for seventy.
“Professor Moraga has told me that you are the finest lawyer that he has ever met,” Livinsky said, his voice deep and thick with the familiar Ukrainian accent of Joshua’s parents.
“I think I’m the only lawyer he ever met,” Joshua said, smiling.
Livinsky and Moraga both nodded and chuckled.
“Now that I know I come so well recommended, what can I do for you?”
“I should tell you first, Mr. Rabb, that I have been to see three other local attorneys in the last two days. They have refused to represent me. A fourth refused even to meet with me.”
“Lawyers usually only refuse because the person can’t pay.”
Livinsky shook his head. “No, Mr. Rabb, that wasn’t a problem and will not be with you. It was the nature of the matter.”
“I think I have a pretty fair inkling of the nature of the matter. I saw the story in the newspaper a couple of days ago.”
“The story was very inaccurate, Mr. Rabb.”
“Anything written by J. T. Sellner is inaccurate, Mr. Livinsky. So why don’t you tell me about it.”
Livinsky took a thick packet of thermofax pages from his inside suit jacket pocket and pushed them across the desk to Joshua. Joshua unfolded them and scanned the first page.
“Have you ever read the McCarran Act, Mr. Rabb?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I thought that Tucson was a little bit out of the way for the attorney general of the United States to be hunting Communist front organizations, so I’ve never read it.”
“Let me give you a short precis, Mr. Rabb. Otherwise it will take you an hour to read.”
Joshua nodded.
“It’s officially called the ‘Internal Security Act of 1950,’ enacted by Congress about a year ago, and it encompasses virtually all of the notions that have been adopted by Senator Joseph McCarthy as the essence of his quest to rid our government and our society of all Communists, which really boils down to harassing and persecuting or destroying the lives of anyone who doesn’t go along with McCarthy. It is the most virulent hate campaign since Hitler, focusing on liberal thinkers in every sphere of governmental, academic, and entertainment life, and especially Jews.”
Livinsky’s nose blanched on the tip, his mouth tightened, and he breathed deeply to calm himself. His eyes were riveted on Joshua’s. There was nothing meek about him now. He took another sheet from his pocket, unfolded it, and studied it.
“Julio and I have been notified that we are under investigation for the crime of failing to register as members of a Communist front organization called ‘Academics Against War,’ which consisted of nine professors at the University of Arizona. It is a crime carrying a penalty of ten years imprisonment and a ten-thousand-dollar fine per day of nonregistration.” He looked up at Joshua and grimaced. “Ten thousand dollars per day,” he repeated.
“Let me explain on exactly what evidence our organization was designated a Communist front. Our group opposes the war in Korea. We don’t believe that the domino theory of world domination by monolithic communism is realistic, and we believe that there is a growing rift between Russia and Red China which will militate against such an eventuality. We believe that South Korea is too remote from the legitimate interests of the United States to support the sending of a half-million American soldiers there. And we think that the consequent threat of a nuclear holocaust is too real to be ignored.”
“Well,” Joshua said, “I happen to disagree with you. I think we do need to be there.”
“That’s perfectly fine, Mr. Rabb. But does your disagreement with my views arise to the level of wishing to silence me or to imprison me for them?”
Joshua shook his head slowly. “No, I think the First Amendment guarantees you the right to express your views, as long as you don’t advocate the forceful overthrow of the United States government.”
“I not only don’t advocate it, Mr. Rabb, I would abhor such an action or even the very suggestion of it. And I stated that clearly in the article that Julio and I wrote.”
“What article is that?”
“In January, it was published in the American Journal of Governmental Studies. That’s what got the FBI investigation started. You’ll see in section twelve of the McCarran Act that it created the Subversive Activities Control Board, which was appointed by President Truman and is charged with ferreting out all Communist front organizations and compelling all members of such organizations to register with the attorney general within sixty days. Failure to register is the felony with which Julio and I are about to be charged.”
“Your organization was designated a Communist front, but you failed to register?”
“We refused. It was designated on March three of this year. We had until May three to register, and we refused. We are not Communists. We are now some seventy-five days late. That’s three quarters of a million dollars in fines for each of us, just for starters.” Livinsky and Moraga both stared gravely at Joshua.
