Annapolis, page 72
Instead, he called his brother and asked if he could come down to the Pentagon.
Tom sounded shocked to hear his brother’s voice so close, but he recovered smoothly enough and told Jack to come ahead. An hour later, they were sitting in the five-acre park that smart-ass Jack always called ground zero.
Tom bought Jack a cup of coffee and offered to share his sandwich.
“No,” said Jack. “You need all your strength for keeping America free.”
“You are a sarcastic bastard.”
And the next fifteen minutes were straight party line. Whatever the president had said was what Tom said to Jack. Jack knew that Betty’s little tips had somehow been gleaned from her husband. But whatever had gone on the night before was not going on now.
Tom was… well, Tom. Melon’s kid brother, Smiley. The captain on his way to admiral.
So Jack decided to name names without betraying Betty. “Isn’t Wayne Morse on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee?”
Jack noticed just a flicker of surprise cross his brother’s face.
“I think so.”
“He’s been pretty tough on the president. What will his stance be?”
“I don’t know. But he’s in a clear minority, I’d say. Everyone in the country is lining up behind the president.”
“I guess we all should. Even if this bombing run is just the camel’s nose.”
“I think it’s the camel’s tail,” said Tom. “The camel is running away from us.”
TWO DAYS LATER, a column was syndicated to fifteen daily newspapers in America. It had Jack’s usual mix of hyperbole, irreverence, sarcasm, and solid reporting:
The Camel’s Nose by Jack Stafford
They say that if a camel gets his nose under your tent flap, you better watch out, because the whole two-humped beast will be in your lap before you know it.
Why is it that nobody in the Senate but Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska seems to think that this Tonkin Gulf Resolution has a pair of big snorting nostrils on it?
Everybody else is just rolling right over, in Congress and the press.
Now, I’m all for hitting back if someone hits us. In a world that moves much faster than most deliberative bodies can deliberate, the president needs to be able to strike fast if we’re struck. And we’ve done that. Whatever those North Vietnamese PT boats may have done, we’ve more than compensated with our strike on the Vinh oil facilities and PT boat bases. If that’s where it stops, President Johnson deserves a pat on the back.
But now everyone is saying that we should remember Munich in 1938, when the European powers tried to appease Hitler. So let me get this straight: Ho Chi Minh is Hitler, and a country with no industrial base is a threat to the most powerful industrial democracy in history?
Sure, they’re Communists, and make no mistake, these Communists are sworn enemies of the kind of personal freedom that allows me to write this column three times a week and that allows you to read it. But Senator Morse is just asking us to remember the Constitution.
No one seems to be listening.
I watched ninety-eight lawmakers roll over today, because we may have been attacked on the high seas by a few torpedo boats. I wasn’t surprised that Barry Goldwater voted for this resolution. But George McGovern? Gene McCarthy? These men are accustomed to looking before they leap. And if they look closely at this Tonkin Gulf Resolution, they may see before them the gaping maw of a land war in Asia—unwinnable and unworthy of our blood.
Wayne Morse has been critical of presidents Johnson and Kennedy in their Vietnam policy before. But he was especially furious about this event. Why? Does he know something we don’t? Did someone in the know get to him, turn up the gas under him, so that his simmering anger was brought to a rolling boil?
Listen to what the senator from Oregon said in the Senate chamber last night: “I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States by means of this resolution.… We are in effect giving the president war-making powers in the absence of a declaration of war.”
He’s right. Too bad no one bothered to listen. The legislators were all out in the lobbies or in their offices, just waiting to come back and vote. Maybe, if someone got to Wayne Morse, he should come forward with what he knows. That might get the Senate’s attention.
Of course, it might be too late. The vote was 98–2 in favor of giving the president a free hand in Southeast Asia.
I think—yes—the camel’s head is under the tent, and the son of a gun is looking right at me. Hey, do camels bite?
CHAPTER NINE
The Last Story
October 13
The shadows in the yard were longer now.
Most of the curious midshipmen who had been listening had gone off when the little Filipino began to speak. What could he have to say?
Little did they know.
Watergate had the anonymous Deep Throat. The Vietnam War had the anonymous Pentagon staff member who called Wayne Morse on that August night in 1964. One of them brought down a presidency, but the other could not stop a war.
The person who made that phone call had disappeared from history as completely as Deep Throat.
And now Susan had him. The question was, would he let her tell the story? Could she use the footage?
Susan wished that she had two cameras so that she could film the admiral’s reactions while Juan and Betty told the story of that August night.
The admiral sat to one side, folded his arms, set that famous old Stafford jaw, and never said a word. He never even moved. By the time Juan and Betty had finished talking, Susan could have mistaken Tom for the statue of Tecumseh, the Indian immortalized in bronze before Bancroft Hall.
And if a woman could be said to look frightened and relieved at the same time, it was Betty Stafford.
“Smile, Betty. You’ve just told the truth,” said Jack. “You too, Juan.”
“If I didn’t have a big damn prostate, I’d be pissin’ in my pants for tellin’ it,” said Juan.
“Don’t worry,” said the admiral. “You won’t be court-martialed.”
“Neither will you,” said Jack. “If you’re still afraid of this, I won’t tell it.”
“I’m not afraid of anything. Have you written it?”
“I roughed it out last night. Now Betty and Juan have given me some detail.”
“Did you know it was me when you wrote that Camel’s Nose article?” the admiral said.
Susan zoomed in slowly.
“I guessed. Where else would Betty have gotten that information?” said Jack. “But I promised her I wouldn’t say so, and she promised Juan. And I always protect my sources.”
“Professional honor?”
“Personal honor,” said Jack. “That matters more. That’s why I’ve sat on it all these years. That’s why I’m here now.”
The admiral looked at his grandson. “What about Steve’s father? Have you written his story, yet?”
Jack shook his head. “I had to get past yours first.”
“Would you like me to turn off the camera?” asked Susan.
“No. Let’s tell this now.” The admiral looked at the camera. “This is a hard profession. You need men of courage and conscience and foresight, too.”
Instinctively, Betty put her arm around him.
“Since that night, I’ve never known which was worse—that I made that call to Wayne Morse, or that I didn’t have the courage to shout it from the rooftops.”
“I don’t think shouting it would have changed anything,” said Jack. “And Wayne Morse only had one vote.”
“That isn’t what you said in print back then.”
“Those were different times.”
“I envied you, Jack,” said the admiral. “And I hated you. You didn’t have to worry about loyalty to the navy. You could just take a scattergun and start blasting. And the more you wrote, the more I hated you. When we lost our Jimmy, I dumped that on you too, because you weren’t backing our boys.”
“I just wanted them to come home.” Jack looked at Steve, who had been listening, dead silent, through all of this. “I wanted that boy to have a father.”
“I had a father,” said Steve. “I just didn’t know him.”
“He was a brave man,” said the admiral. “I’ve told you that. All the reports say so. Even Oliver Parrish, and he knew, better than anyone.”
Susan had been so mesmerized by what she was filming, she had forgotten about Ollie. Now she turned to him, but he had vanished.
“I didn’t notice him leave,” said Steve. “I thought we might put him in front of the camera next.”
“Did he agree to an interview when I wasn’t looking?” asked Susan.
“No. But Jack told us he had to interview his brother before he could write about my father. Well, from everything I know, I’d think the only way to write about my father is to interview Oliver Parrish.”
“You let me be the reporter,” said Jack, pumping the good cheer into his voice, as though he knew that things had been heavy enough for one afternoon. “And one thing reporters like to do is eat and drink. Now that the admiral’s given me his scoop, I’m buying.”
• • •
THEY WENT TO Cantler’s Crab Shack for dinner. The tables were covered with brown paper. Everyone was given a lot of napkins and a wooden mallet to crack the crab shells. And they ordered a big pitcher of beer to go with dinner.
Then Melon and Smiley went at it as though they were kids.
The admiral, baited often that day, started out with a little baiting of his own. “You know what I’ve never been able to figure out? How could that Jimmy Carter, an Academy man, and a nuclear submarine man to boot, let everything go to hell the way he did?”
“Vietnam taught him not to trust the defense wonks. He didn’t believe in blank checks for the military.” That was Jack’s standard answer.
And on it went, the brother-against-brother debate: The Reagan defense buildup and the six-hundred-ship navy? Yeah, but what about the deficit they helped to build along with those ships? But they brought the pride back to military service, and they let the Russians know we weren’t going to roll over.… But now look at our cities.… “Here we go with guns and butter,” said Betty.
“I’m just glad,” cracked Steve, “that there’s enough money for the institute to buy that Fine Folly. Give them someplace quiet, so they can think up ways to keep me in business.” It was the first time that day that Susan had seen Steve relax.
But she was still wondering—and worrying—about Oliver Parrish. As Jack started complaining about the sale of the Fine Folly, she went out and called Oliver’s house. No answer. So she called his Washington office and left a message on the voice mail: “For a guy who makes a living out of confrontation, why did you walk away from a confrontation just begging to happen?”
Back at the table, Jack was still at it. “What do you think Lloyd Shank would say about selling you the Fine Folly if I told him about that leak to Wayne Morse? You know, a lot of people used to speculate that was him.”
“I don’t think he’d give a damn,” said the admiral. “He wants some of the institute’s money, and I want that house. I want it more than you do, Jack.”
“And I want the sense of freedom I had in an A-6 again,” said Steve, pouring his third beer and growing a little wistful. “A complicated piece of machinery, but the idea behind it’s real simple. Know what you’re doing and live. Push the wrong button and die. I’m getting tired of funding debates and fielding reporter’s phone calls and—”
“You don’t like the gray areas?” Jack asked. “Young guys don’t believe in them… at first.”
“I’ve seen a few today,” said Steve, glancing at his grandfather.
“Sometimes you think you’re standing on firm ground, son,” said the admiral, “and it shifts, right beneath your feet.”
“You know,” said Steve, “I read the reports of my father’s last action, and I’ve always wondered about one of the guys who survived, an engineer named Little, he never made a report… always a gray area to me.”
The admiral glanced, briefly, at his wife. Then his voice was smooth and soothing. “Things get jumbled in wartime, Steve. And sometimes, things get lost.”
“Just remember,” said Betty, “your father stood for something.”
A LONG DRIVE didn’t appeal to anyone that night, so the Staffords from the Patuxent and Washington checked into the bed-and-breakfast where Susan was staying.
After an hour of editing, Jack gave them all something to read and went back to his room at the Maryland Inn to keep writing. He had confronted the first half of the Stafford Vietnam conundrum, the long-hidden secret. Now he had to face the harder part, the murky events on a little stream on the Mekong delta.
ABOUT ONE O’CLOCK that morning, Susan Browne was awakened by the sound of fire engines.
It was the first time she had heard a middle-of-the-night noise in Annapolis.
Those fire engines sounded nearby.
Then she smelled smoke.
She rolled over and glanced out the window. Flames. Jesus.
In an instant she was out of bed and grabbing instinctively for her video camera.
Within minutes the whole house was awake and all seven guests—the Staffords, Susan, and two grandmothers from Philadelphia—were running for the door.
The Stafford House Nursing Home was burning.
From a block away, they could hear the flames crackling and see that eerie red-orange smoke boiling up into the sky.
The fire station was right on East Street, a block and a half away from the Fine Folly, so the fire engines were there as soon as the alarm was called, but the fire had moved fast.
The street in front of the house looked like a battlefield. Powerful lights were pointed at the house, powerful streams of water were already hitting the front roof. Firemen were rushing up the stairs, smashing through the front door with their axes.
And above it all was the sound of a tremendous roar, as if a century of dried wood and more than two centuries of hopes and dreams and pretensions were going up.
“You son of a bitch!” cried the admiral, racing up to Jack. “You did this, didn’t you?”
“Go to hell, you old fool.” Jack’s attention was on the fire chief in the white helmet. “Chief! Chief! Try to save the old part of the house.”
“We’ll be lucky to save any of it, mister!”
“So make a line of defense by the staircases at the back of the old—”
“Ask him,” the admiral shouted to the chief. “Ask him where the hot spots are, because he set it.”
The chief turned away from them.
“You did this, Jack,” the admiral said again, “just so we couldn’t get this house.”
A fireman appeared in the Palladian window just above the door, the window from which old Walter Parrish had once waved a Confederate flag. With a swing of the ax, the glass in the window shattered.
“Jesus!” cried Jack.
And then the windows flew out of the front room on the east corner, the Alexandra Room, and Betty Stafford cried out as though the ax had struck her.
Ventilating the fire, they called it.
The front windows on the west side went next, an explosion of glass from two corners at once. Susan thought of all the famous men who had eaten in that room, and she could not bear to watch, but she had her video camera with her, so she raised it and rolled tape.
Steve Stafford ran up to the fire chief. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Just keep those two old men away from me.”
“A defensive line, Chief!” Jack was crying. “The back of the house doesn’t mean anything, but—”
The chief snapped at Steve Stafford, “Get them away, or I’ll have them arrested.”
Steve grabbed Jack and pulled him to the other side of the street. “Come on, Jack, let them do their job.”
Two firemen appeared in the doorway and called for reinforcements.
Suddenly Jack broke out of Steve’s grasp.
Susan caught him in her camera and followed him as he went. She felt like a news photographer, filming a terrible moment rather than intervening.
Jack flew across the street, raced up the steps to the landing in front of the Fine Folly and was struck from the side by a body that sent him sprawling then pinned him down.
“I have to get in there. I have to tell them—”
“I told them!” It was Oliver Parrish, covered in soot and sweat. “I told them to save the old house and forget the rest.”
Jack wrestled himself into a standing position. “We have to save your caretaker, that Simpson Church.”
Oliver grabbed Jack and pulled him away from the house as another group of firemen rushed up, dragging a heavy hose behind them. Then he said, “Simpson’s dead. The firemen found him in his room. They think the fire started there.”
“He set it?”
“I don’t know,” said Ollie. “Jesus. I hope he didn’t think I was serious when I said I wished somebody would burn the damn place down.”
LATER, WHILE STREAMS of water were still pouring onto the house, Susan noticed Jack and Oliver disappearing around a corner.
She followed and caught up to them at the waterfront, just as they sat down on a bench.
Oliver took a swallow from a flask.
Jack took out a little tape recorder and began fiddling with it.
“The admiral’s story is out,” said Oliver. “I guess there are things I can talk about. Things I should talk about. And that woman standing behind me can sit down and listen too.”
So, she thought, this ex-SEAL still had eyes in the back of his head. And now it was time for his story.
The Stafford Story
BOOK TEN
The Limits of Power
June 1967
Jimmy Stafford’s wedding was at 9:30 a.m. on the second Tuesday in June.
It was an odd time to be getting married, especially if you were doing it for the first time and both families approved. But midshipmen were not allowed to marry, so right after commissioning, they lined up, and every hour on the hour, the weddings went through the magnificent Academy chapel. It was like a military version of a Las Vegas marriage mill.
