A President In Peril

Chapter Four M₃ O₁ R₁ A₁ T₁ O₁ R₁ I₁ U₁ M₃ (n) a suspension of activity

I heard nothing more from my nasal-voiced caller for two days and had almost forgotten him when on Friday morning I received a plain white envelope in the press room. It was addressed in ink in printed capital letters to TRIBUNE MAN MALIK, POLICE BUILDING, SOUTH STATE STREET, CHICAGO.

I slipped a folded sheet of cheap white notepaper from the envelope, which of course had no return address. The message also was printed neatly in ink, all uppercase:

As if the sign-off wasn’t enough, small swastikas were neatly printed in black ink on all four corners of the sheet. I crumpled the paper and started to toss it into the wastebasket but checked myself, smoothed it and slipped it into my desk drawer along with the envelope. I made no mention of it to my press room colleagues.

When I went down for my daily visit to Fergus Fahey later that morning, I took the note along. After the usual pleasantries with Elsie, which included getting a mug of her superb coffee, I entered the chief’s office, plopped into a chair, tossed my pack of Luckies on the desk, and slid the note and envelope across to him.

“What kind of crap is this?” he growled, looking from the wrinkled sheet to me and back again, then studied the envelope.

“Just got it this morning in the mail. I started to throw the note in the wastebasket, where trash like this belongs, but then figured you’d better have a look at it. Real sweet stuff, isn’t it?”

“Damn. You’d think after what we found in all those Nazi death camps at the end of the war, this sort of garbage would have been eliminated forever.”

“Apparently not the case, Fergus. Sad to say, there’s no moratorium on hate. And what really irks me is that whoever this slimy bastard is, he thinks the Tribune would buy into this sort of bigotry.”

Fahey leaned back and pressed his palms against his eyes, groaning. “The lowlife who sent that is itching to get publicity. What are you going to tell your editors?”

“Not a damn thing, at least for the moment. I’d sooner quit my job and become a press agent for a used car lot than give this piece of dirt any ink.”

“Can’t say that I blame you there.”

“You want the note?”

“Yeah. I’ll have it dusted for prints, for what that’s worth, and run a check on any known Nazi-sympathizing groups, although I’ll be surprised if we find much. In the three years now since the war ended, there hasn’t been much anti-Semitism here, at least of an overt nature. That’s not to say that stuff isn’t going on all the time...”

“Well, these creeps seem to have it in for Truman for no other reason than he got the U.S. to be the first country to recognize Israel.”

“You know, Snap, I can’t honestly say that I’ve been the most fair-minded person in town over the years. As a kid — and dammit, even as a young man and a middle-aged man, for that matter — I suppose it’s fair to say that I’ve said things I shouldn’t have, at least in private, about Jews. Shame on me for that, especially after Iwo Jima.”

“Oh? And just what does Iwo have to do with all this?” I asked, surprised.

Fahey lit a Lucky and flipped the match into his battered metal ashtray. “You’ve heard me mention my son Kevin a few times off and on. He’s married now and lives down in Homewood in the south suburbs with his wife and a new baby girl who redefines the word adorable.”

“Spoken as only a grandfather can speak. Yes, I remember you’ve talked about him. Came back from the war quite a hero with lots of medals and citations, as I recall.”

The old copper nodded and interlaced his hands across his stomach. “That he did, and made us all proud, of course. But he might not have come back at all except for a sergeant in his company.”

“Now that I have never heard,” I responded, taking a healthy swig of coffee and leaning forward in my chair, elbows resting on knees.

“Kevin was a first lieutenant, and his company, so he tells the story, was moving up a hill on Iwo under heavy fire from the Japs above them, who were really dug in, some of ’em even in caves, mind you, ready to fight to the death. Which a lot of them did. Anyway, a grenade gets lobbed down Kevin’s way and one of his sergeants, a guy from Philadelphia named Gutterman, yells, ‘Look out, sir!’ and snags the grenade right out of the air like a damn White Sox outfielder making a one-handed catch. This Gutterman then starts to toss the grenade away, but it goes off just as he’s getting rid of it.”

I swallowed. “And...?”

“And Gutterman survived,” Fahey said hoarsely, “but lost his right hand. He gave me my son, though. And as I’m sure you’ve figured out, he’s Jewish. As I said, Snap, shame on me.”

We sat for close to a minute in silence. “You’ve got no reason to beat yourself up, Fergus,” I told him. “Hell, growing up in that all-Irish neighborhood of yours on the South Side, you probably never even knew anybody who was Jewish.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t, not until years later. But that doesn’t excuse me. Not one bit.”

“Well, it makes me worse than you, though, because when I was growing up over in Pilsen, there was a Jewish kid or two in the neighborhood and, truth to tell, I wasn’t all that nice to them.”

“We’ve all got things we’d like to do over, I guess. Anyway, fact is, like it or not, we’ve got a Jew-hater on our hands,” Fahey grumbled. “Whether he’s also a threat to the president is a different matter altogether. If I were to guess, I’d say no.”

“I hope you’re right, Fergus. Christ, what’s the world coming to? I thought it would all be better once the war was over.”

“I ask myself that question every night when I walk out the door of this miserable place. If there’s a job in the whole goddamn universe where you see more misery than... Oh, never mind, dammit. Forgive the ranting of an old coot who’s feeling sorry for himself and who’s hung around for too damn long,” Fahey said heatedly, grinding his cigarette butt in the ashtray.

“Maybe we’ve all hung around for too long,” I told him, meaning it.

There was a time, in what now seems like the last century, when I spent my weekday evenings in one saloon or another, particularly Kilkenny’s place a couple of blocks south of Wrigley Field on Clark Street. But that was when I was between marriages and had nothing better to do — or so I told myself — than to eat steaks and baked potatoes, swap stories with the other bar regulars, and suck up drinks, lots of drinks, before pouring myself into the sack in my one-bedroom, third-floor flat overlooking Clark and its clanging red streetcars. Looking back, I’m amazed I functioned as well as I did as a reporter in those days.

Now I am the true stereotypical suburban husband, commuting by El train on the old Lake Street Line, arriving at home every night at six P.M. and at the dining room table for supper with Catherine by about six-thirty. It may not be exciting, but it’s a life I’ve grown comfortable with. Chalk it up to rapidly advancing middle age, or maybe to a happy realization that my life has turned out better than I deserve — a whole lot better, in fact.

On my birthday in August, Catherine gave me a brand-new, just-on-the-market board game called ‘Scrabble,’ which now occupies our post-supper evenings at least a couple of times a week. For those of you who don’t know, this is a game in which you string together tiles with letters on them on a board to form words. Each letter has a numerical value, with the least-used ones — like Z and X and Q — having higher values than, say, E and S and A.

Now I like to fancy myself as something of a wordsmith. After all, it’s presumably at least part of how I earn a salary at the self-styled ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper.’ Also, I’ve always fancied myself as having a larger vocabulary than my fellow scribes and most other people. However, Catherine has been beating me most of the time. For instance, yesterday I felt I had the game won until she laid down tiles to spell QUIXOTIC. For the record, it means ‘extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable.’ Also for the record, she won yet again, and as usual was too polite to crow about it, although her expression was what I would term serene satisfaction.

I do beat her on occasion, although without question she has the superior vocabulary. “Must be because of all those years at the library,” she would say in self-deprecation. “And all those years reading best-selling novels and biographies and having to look up words I didn’t understand.”

“I read some of the same best-sellers you did, but I didn’t bother looking up words I didn’t know,” I conceded. “Would you say the hens and their roosters are now coming home to roost?”

“Darling, you tear through every book as if you’re on some kind of a deadline,” she said, deftly dodging my question. “It has to be a carryover from all these years as a reporter.”

“Thanks for trying to let me off the hook, but the fact is, you probably absorb far more than I do as a reader. Anyway, let’s play one more game before bed. I’m feeling lucky. And I want to see if I can get ‘quixotic’ this time.”

“Never happen,” she said with a gentle laugh as we turned back to the Scrabble board.