Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's Read online

  The dark events continued. Robert Kennedy would later be assassinated in Los Angeles two months after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis. Race riots erupted in most major American cities, lasting for several days afterwards. The lawlessness and unrest in Europe and Asia had spread overnight to the United States. Attacks on American police officers intensified. Police in most American inner cities felt as if they were under siege by armed black militants while the black communities frequently felt as if they were under attack by the police.

  There was no respite against the violence. And so, against this backdrop of chaos and turmoil at home and around the globe, American voters faced the task of choosing a new leader of the Western World, someone to take control of events and restore order.

  1968 was an American election year. The Republicans, the self-proclaimed party of “wholesome family values,” met on an off-shore subtropical island that had been developed in a quest to avoid the realities and banalities of American life: Miami Beach, a sunny exclusive place for wealthy older Americans.

  Miami Beach rose like a gaudy mirage across a blue lagoon, accessible only via a causeway. It was a place that had once been an alligator-infested mangrove swamp. But by now it had been built, largely with money from organized crime, into a place where visitors could cavort, gorge, swim, booze, ogle the endless brigades of unattached girls and gorgeous young men. Miami Beach had no airport, no factories, no railroad and not even any cemeteries, a remarkable detail considering the age of the average permanent resident was sixty years old.

  The names on locations bloomed from fantasy and old movies—Eden Roc, Monte Carlo, and Casablanca. In the western hemisphere in 1968, only Las Vegas could give Miami Beach a run for the money in intensified vulgarity.

  Family values? One Republican candidate’s delegation took up residence at the Casablanca, where they shared space with a “Swinging Singles Club” that offered “relaxing pillow talk comfort.” Another was in the Americana with the “splashiest, spiciest, stark-nudest review this side of Paris.” Many were at The Fontainebleau where an obsequious plaque read, Thank You, Frank Sinatra, For Filming Tony Rome at The Fontainebleau.

  Mr. Sinatra’s yacht happened to be in Miami at that time, too, allowing some of the unfriendly members of the press corps to remind the public that Lucky Luciano, who also passed occasionally through town, carried a gold cigarette lighter inscribed, To My Dear Pal Lucky from his friend Frank Sinatra.

  At the convention, there was an aura of inevitability around one of Mr. Sinatra’s other dear pals, Richard Nixon. Never mind that Nixon had lost to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier. Never mind that he had blown his bid for governorship of California in 1962. Forget even that he had held his “last press conference” after that defeat and promised that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

  Nixon was back. Presumably he was willing to be kicked around again.

  One by one, Nixon had outflanked his opponents, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. The initial frontrunner, George Romney, an affable but gaffe-prone man, had self-destructed.

  “George Romney of Michigan is so ill-suited to campaigning,” wrote the London-born political correspondent Martin Friedkin of the upstart New York Eagle, “that watching Romney run for President is like watching a duck trying to have sex with a football.”

  In the end, the selection of Richard Nixon was closer to a coronation than a nomination. The Reverend Billy Graham, present at the convention, insisted that the Vice-Presidential choice be “a man of high moral character.” Keeping that in mind, Nixon and the party selected Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland.

  Three weeks later, the Democrats gathered in Chicago. The metropolis this time was not just Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat.” Instead, it was the butcher of the Democratic Party, which—amidst riots, tear gas, and convention thuggery—nominated a tired haggard already-defeated Hubert Humphrey, who had been the captive Vice President of the Johnson administration for the last four years. Humphrey, exhausted and disillusioned, would campaign on the “politics of joy.” He selected a little-known Polish-American U.S. Senator, Edmund Muskie, to be his running mate.

  And so it went: a fool’s carnival, a typical American election cycle to elect a man of presumed intellect and courage to navigate the landmines of world events.

  Except it wasn’t typical.

  There was a third choice, George Corley Wallace, former Governor of Alabama.

  From distant KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, in a lovely neo-baroque building that had been the corporate headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company until 1917, Yuri Andropov watched, enchanted. There was nothing that amused the KGB quite so much as an American election. It had been that way for half a century and would remain so.

  The possibilities were endless.

  Chapter 3

  At lunch hour the next day, Frank Cooper was in the noisy Eagle cafeteria, seated alone. Sam Rothman slid onto a steel chair across from him.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  “Why the hell would I mind, Sam?”

  Sam sat. “How was Hawkins last night?” he asked.

  “If you’d gone with me, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

  “Something came up.”

  “At your age?”

  Sam was graying, affable, and puffy-cheeked. He was Brooklyn-born and worked in the office next door to Cooper. On the surface, Sam should have had nothing in common with a Scottish/Irish/German/English mongrel from Illinois. But newsrooms made strange friendships.

  “You’re a no-good bastard, Frank,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Sam took out a pack of Marlboros which was Cooper’s cue to shake loose a Kool. They lit up together. A white cloud of carcinogens gripped the room. Before either of them could launch into any part of a conversation, a third man appeared at the door.

  “So this is where the old soreheads hang out?” the man said.

  Cooper looked up and saw the third member of their vanishing crew: Marty Friedkin, the at-large political columnist for the New York Eagle.

  For more than fifteen years, Friedkin had reported American politics for solid newspapers, including the Dallas Times and the Atlanta Constitution. He habitually wore a rumpled suit and an acerbic, pale, pummeled look. He was an Englishman from Sussex who had come to the United States with Reuters in the late 1940’s. More accurately, he had served in the British Navy in Asia during the final months of World War Two and had never returned to England. He had settled in Atlanta post-war, married an American and earned a degree in world history from Emory University. In 1947, Reuters had hired him.

  “This is the spot for old soreheads if and when you join us,” Cooper said.

  “Perfect.” Marty gave Cooper a friendly slap on the shoulder and settled in. “Guess where I’m going?”

  “Prison,” said Cooper. “And it’s long overdue.”

  “Close. The Sixth Floor re-assigned me from Nixon. I’m now following the George Wallace campaign for a few weeks. Murphy assigned me himself.”

  “No crap!” said Sam.

  “Better you than me,” Cooper said.

  The Sixth Floor was where the Eagle’s management had their suites. There was a swarm of Business Board toadies on Six. All of them were male. They studied charts, wandered purposefully down corridors studying printouts on clipboards and looked upon reporters as nuisances. The business and marketing people often didn’t read their own newspaper. Cooper didn’t care for them, and the feelings were mutual. The Sixth Floor was also where employees were summoned to be rebuked, censured, humiliated, screamed at, threatened, fired or praised, in that order of likelihood. By Murphy, Friedkin meant S.W. Murphy.

  S.W. Murphy's name was prominent on the upper masthead of the New York Eagle, where it was listed as managing editor. The name—and the position—sat fourth from the summit, below Kenneth Siegelman's listing as publisher
and those of two co-executive editors.

  As managing editor, Murphy oversaw the day-to-day operations and publication of the Eagle. The S.W. in S.W. Murphy stood for Steven William, but Cooper insisted to anyone who would listen that it stood for “Screw the World.” Screw the World Murphy, Managing Editor. Or as Sam called him, “Mismanaging Editor.”

  “Where are you going? Alabama?” Cooper asked. “Hey, take Sam with you, okay? The old goat is getting on my few remaining nerves.”

  Sam smiled and folded the New York Times. With an aggressive slap that made loose papers flutter next to Cooper’s sandwich, he returned the big gray competing newspaper to the table. He smiled, eased back in his chair and flipped Cooper an upraised center finger.

  “I’m supposed to get a flight out of LaGuardia to Indianapolis this afternoon,” said Friedkin, indicating a small suitcase at his side. “Then I connect to Fort Wayne. I’m picking up the Wallace campaign in Indiana. If I make connections, I can cover the eight-p.m. rally tonight.”

  “Lucky you,” Sam said. “Be sure to wear a white sheet.”

  Cooper snickered. “The most famous Twentieth Century American from Indiana was John Dillinger, Marty,” he said. “Dillinger remains a hero to most of the rubes out there. Remember that and you’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks,” Friedkin said, grabbing some coffee.

  “Why did they take you off the Nixon campaign?” Sam asked.

  “Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, worked it. Mitchell phoned Murphy. I reported about Sinatra being tight with Nixon and Lucky Luciano carrying a cigarette lighter from Sinatra. They also didn’t like my referring to Tricia Nixon as ‘a vanilla ice cream cone.’” Cooper and Sam laughed. “I don’t know why they put me on the Wallace beat,” he said. “Not my politics at all.”

  “Marty’s a pinko, you know,” Sam said affectionately. “It’s amazing that Marty draws a check at this newspaper. He’s a Bolshevik. He could be financing a cell.”

  “Do they have electricity out there in Indiana?” Cooper asked with a grin.

  “I know the Pistons left Fort Wayne and went to Detroit,” Sam Rothman added. “What’s left out there in the farmland?”

  “Listen, mates, they not only have electricity, but I’m happy to tell you they have indoor plumbing, also.”

  “Impressive,” said Cooper.

  “Remarkable!” Sam chimed in.

  “I covered a few stories out there in the hinterlands in my younger days,” Cooper said. “I’ve always thought the most terrifying places in this country were the remote rural areas, not the inner cities. But that’s just me. Good people, but weird stuff sometimes. You know how it works: ninety-seven percent of good normal folk, two and a half percent are a little off from normal and the final one half of one percent are potential ax murderers.”

  Marty laughed Sam finished his smoke. They lingered over coffee.

  Before them on a gray steel table was not just that day’s edition of their paper, the Eagle, but the Times, the News and the Post. Rothman glanced at the front page of the Times. He focused on the lead story, which was a cautionary report on rising tensions in Europe.

  “What do you guys think of Wallace?” Friedkin asked. “Honest impression.”

  “A little Hitler in the making,” Sam said.

  “Any chance he can get elected?” Friedkin asked. “Frank? Your thoughts?”

  “Wallace is a spoiler. Nixon’s going to be elected. The ship of state will continue to sail through green pastures,” Cooper said, intentionally mangling a metaphor.

  “Yeah, well, I had relatives who left Germany in 1938,” Sam said. “I had others who went up the chimneys in Poland. Maybe as a Jew I’m oversensitive to the potential Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich. Wallace is an evil little belligerent prick fascist.”

  “And our newspaper management secretly loves him,” Friedkin said.

  Cooper rolled his eyes. “Secretly?” he muttered.

  “You think Wallace is personally an anti-Semite, Sam?” Cooper asked.

  “Any right-wing movement, you scratch the surface, you find Jew-haters.”

  “Sam’s got a point on that one,” Friedkin said.

  Sam checked out of the conversation in disgust. He flipped through the newspaper to the competitor's sports section. “Detroit’s got a hell of a team this year. Look at this fat mick pitcher, Denny McClain,” Sam said.

  “You look at him, shmuck. I’m too busy,” Cooper said. “I actually do some work here.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “You write about dead people. Who was the last dead guy to get on the phone and complain?”

  “There’s always a first time,” Cooper said. “I’ll let you know when it happens.”

  Friedkin departed for the Midwest. Sam left for the sports desk. Cooper was back to his office at two p.m. He put himself into high gear to finish for the day.

  Who were the people in the day's death notices? Why had they died? How had they lived? Whose lives had been touched by theirs? Whose lives were now diminished? What had they accomplished?

  There was a plumber from Queens. An editor of books from New York and Nantucket. A restaurateur who'd found fame in the 1940s and ruin in the 1950s who committed suicide. An old Cuban wrestler—once the “Champion of the Free World”—dead in a car crash. A young endocrinologist who lost a bout with cancer. And a woman who'd taught Italian renaissance studies at New York University had dropped dead after thirty-two years of teaching.

  Arbitrarily, because the mood was upon him, he decided to go for a class act this morning. He'd write up the university professor first—Barbara Rizzo Hurd.

  Cooper telephoned the deceased's family and talked to Mrs. Hurd's daughter as he pecked out notes on a battered Olympia typewriter. He confirmed her age and of what she had died. He asked questions based on a clipping he had found in the Eagle's morgue. He asked if the deceased had believed in God, or what wine—if any—she might have preferred, or how often she might have visited Italy. Cooper asked questions that were none of a traditional obituary writer's business. In that way, he provoked people into chatting and came up with the odd anecdote that might otherwise have not been volunteered.

  “Why do people talk to you?” a younger peer had once asked.

  “It's like any other reporting,” Cooper had explained. “People tell you things if you work it right. Why shouldn't they talk to me?”

  When Dr. Hurd's daughter was talked out, Cooper thanked her.

  Then he phoned the professor's associates at the university. He learned she was a scholar who specialized in the works of Pollaiolo, Castagno, and Da Vinci. She had liked to paint, too. She was well liked by her peers. Cooper talked to one of her students. By noon he had a full portrait. He began his lead:

  CONSTANCE SCOTTO HURD, 67

  PROFESSOR AND FRIEND TO

  ITALIAN ART AND CULTURE

  “August 30. Constance Scotto Hurd, for many years a much loved and appreciated expert on Italian life and culture, died of a stroke today at age 67. She had visited Italy last month. A bottle of Antelfiore, her favorite Tuscan wine, and a copy of The Divine Comedy, her favorite book, were at her bedside, along with her family, when her life concluded. On the wall of her bedroom, the room where she passed away, were prints of Donatello. Dr. Hurd left this world surrounded by the things and people she loved…”

  Eventually, Cooper had enough to fill six column inches. He called back Dr. Hurd's daughter later in the afternoon and read what he had. The Hurd family was touched.

  Cooper repeated the procedure with the other five deceased. The plumber proved the most obtuse, as he left no relatives. A call to his church, however, yielded a young priest who had known the man. Cooper held two column inches open on his page and manufactured two accurate paragraphs. He easily made his evening deadline.

  Cooper walked to the fourth-floor men's room where he bantered with some of the younger sportswriters who worked down the corridor. Most of the staff were these young guys,
as Cooper thought of them. The term guys included women as well as men, and young was meant disparagingly. “The Brat Brigade,” Cooper called the younger staffers. Inevitably they were J-schoolers—journalism school graduates—who were expert at the new computerized part of the work and hopeless at the heart and bad-ass soul of it.

  “A heavy read for these brats is the flip-side of a parking ticket,” Cooper had once fumed.

  “Ah, come on, Frank,” Sam had soothed. “They're not bad kids. Learn from them.”

  Cooper had replied with a pleasant profanity.

  Poor old Sam Rothman, Cooper thought to himself as he dried his hands in the washroom. Sam was also the office dinosaur, and worse, once Sam retired in six months, Cooper would be, along with Marty. He would hate every second of it. Cooper, whether he liked it or not, still represented an age that he was just old enough to remember, when newsmen wore baggy Robert Hall suits and were recognized as cynical, foulmouthed, nosy, and belligerent. They subsisted on booze, coffee, nicotine, rumors, old shoes and hard work. They proudly caused no end of trouble and held no joy greater than poking holes in an official story. For all those reasons, many of them had been relatively young when they burned out, retired, or died.

  Cooper left the washroom.

  He glanced at his watch. Better grab some food early. He was meeting Margot that evening. There was something about it that he didn’t like, not that he could figure out what it was. With Margot, there was always something that was off, in one way or another.

  Chapter 4

  Frank Cooper arrived back at his building on West Ninety-sixth Street by seven p.m. He saw Margot Bradford standing patiently in the otherwise empty lobby. “Your car or mine?” she asked.

  “Mine is legally parked until Thursday morning,” Cooper answered, “unless someone steals it.”

  Hers was around the corner, she said, parked in a two-hour meter. She also knew the way. She departed to get it.