Chapter 8
For Whom the Bell Tolls
It was easy. I would get someone to guarantee a public parade schedule for Fits Jr. I would get some wacko with a credible motive to snipe him somewhere along the route, and I would get someone more dependable to make sure he was sniped, at the same time from about the same place. I would slop things up enough to be sure the wacko sniper was caught in short order, and soon after I would have some desperate dude commit suicide by police, killing the caught sniper.
Surely you can see that most of the complication was in finding the right personalities. Everyone had to be a lot like Linden, but everyone also had to have different skills and opportunities. Linden and Conundrum were both essential, for the opportunities they presented, for selecting the ideal route. Linden could recommend and support, but it had to seem Conundrum’s selection. So the last problem was how we could recruit Conundrum. And Dicky did that trick.
Dicky and I had a lot of very long talks. First, in those talks, I let him understand the power of my position in the petroleum industry. From that step, the second and remaining steps in the sequence fell like dominoes, from the possibility of his supporting me in becoming a leader in the Republican party’s administration to the possibility of my using that leadership with my petroleum power to make him Linden’s successor as president. Tricky Dicky bought the possibility.
He was tricky enough to see that I was seeking further steps for maybe my own presidency. But he also saw that his would be first and that there’d be more tit for tat from both of us along the line. I was tricky enough to see some tit for tat for all of us, as you’ll see. But what has this to do with Conundrum?
Easy answer. Conundrum and Dicky and I had one long and gradually forthright conversation, over scotch with Linden at the Cattlemen’s Club in San Antonio. I thought it crazily appropriate, since Saint Anthony had been the most powerful single factor in subverting Saint Francis’s organization from Francis’s disavowal of monetary wealth to the Franciscans’ becoming a premier fundraising organization, just as I would be the most powerful single factor in winning the Cold War. I regretted Anthony’s subversion, and I hoped mine would be for the best. But I understand mixed blessings.
Within those walls of longhorn decorations, the hangings of horns of dead cattle as though they were trophies of war, we Democrats and Republicans planned the next four presidential elections of the United States of America, the land of the free, our democracy. Here’s part of the conversation.
“Here’s the deal, John,” said Dicky. “Would you like to be president?”
“It sound’s crazy,” said Conundrum. “Well, of course it sounds crazy.”
“Don’t talk crazy,” said Dicky. “We’re not goof-offs. We’re important people.”
“Alright,” said Conundrum, pausing hardly long enough to sip some of his scotch through fresh rocks, not at all like Jimmy Huffa’s at the El Dorado. “Let me be sure I’ve got this straight. Someone’s going to assassinate Fits Jr., so Linden will be president. Then Linden’s going to abstain from running against you, so you’ll be president. Then you’re going to make me look good, so I’ll be president. What about the fact that I’m a Democrat, for Christ’s sake?”
“Switch parties,” said Linden. “Are you too proud for that? And Christ has nothing to do with it! Don’t be maudlin.”
So that was the vast bipartisan conspiracy that laid Fits Jr. moldering in his grave, with its flame above, at Arlington. It was that quick and easy, with my Skull and Bones friends suggesting to Fits Jr. that he ought to visit Texas, the land of the Alamo. He didn’t know the Alamo had been a mission in a city named for Saint Anthony. But he was always up for a parade.
“As I remember,” said Fits Jr., “the Alamo isn’t in Dallas.”
“But it’s cattle country,” said Harriman. “You’ll love it.”
“If you say so,” said Fits Jr. “Too bad Norma can’t go.”
So Linden and Conundrum set the parade route, and Rich and Mikhail and Jimmy Huffa helped me with the rest. Rich recruited a dependable rifleman, and Mikhail scared up a wacko rifling fall guy, and Huffa destroyed some evidence.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Fits Jr. had to save some face, and Rich was the fall-guy for that. Rich was good enough at drawing-rooms to know he’d have to take the fall, and to assure that he not fall further than he wished. He and I had talked, and I’d let him in on the secret of my being from outer space, and he knew enough about outer space to believe me. He immediately replied by telling me of a couple of things he knew.
“Sometime in the second millennium before Christ,” he said, as we sat on a bench on the capital mall near the Smithsonian aerospace museum, “a pharaoh said he saw foul-smelling circles and disks in the sky. Do you know anything about that?”
“Must have been when Oliver, I mean Moses, was arriving,” I answered. “We’ve improved our emission-systems since then. We’re using more methane, and we’ve completely eliminated sulfur from the mix. The wonders of modern technology.”
Rich looked at me and looked away and at the cherry-trees, at the George Washington monument and the Lincoln memorial and the capitol. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he nodded and shook his head and went on.
“Lyon, France,” he said. “In the last quarter of the first millennium after Christ, some people said they saw a craft land and let three people out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Theresa told me about that. That was when Oliver and Slavey landed to be Orlando and Oliver at Roncesvalles. Theresa came along for the ride, because she was in between jobs and thought she’d take a little vacation. That’s when she fell in love with France and why she asked Bob to let her be Joan of Arc. She told those people no one would believe them. How about you?”
“You’re a stone lunatic!” said Rich. “What can I do for you?”
The deal Rich made with Fits Jr. was that Rich transfer to the CIA’s UFO unit, which Fits Jr. thought was crazy to begin with. It was quite a lot like Br’er Rabbit’s begging Br’er Fox not to throw him into the briar patch, when Br’er Fox was threatening bodily harm to Br’er Rabbit. Br’er Rabbit was raised in a briar patch, and Rich had pretty much raised himself to the sky, trying to identify objects in it. I don’t remember who came here as Uncle Remus.
But I remember that the outcome delighted Rich, and I remember that he lost no respect from anyone in the Agency. Fits Jr., on the other hand, had no respect from the good-old-boys of Ike and Allen, having lost it long before the Bay of Pigs. He lost it by founding the Peace Corps as an arm of the Agency.
Fits Jr. so admired Eisenhower that he tried to outperform him in every aspect of intelligence, not only in that adverse emulation at Bay of Pigs. He sat in that rocking chair, with those drugs pumping through him, and dreamed up many ways to be ideally arrogant, and one of his ideas was the Peace Corps.
He thought it would be effective and efficient to get smart good retired experts and smart good kids from colleges all over the country to give their best for peace, and to recruit from that lot intelligence-agents. Ike’s and Allen’s old-boys were quite contented to recruit from such sources as West Point and Skull and Bones, and to leave people whom the Peace Corps might attract to be the force for international peace the ideal attraction to the overt mission of the Peace Corps easily powered more overtly.
But Fits Jr. wished to be the smart-guy. So he founded the Peace Corps, and now one of the silliest ploys of United States intelligence operations is refusing personnel with overt intelligence experience entry into the Peace Corps. Of course the silliness is in that the policy doesn’t stop covert agents from entering, and it doesn’t stop recruiting honest young men and women for work within the Peace Corps immediately, or recruiting them for outside the Peace Corps later. Who would be silly enough to fall for that ploy?
But the silliest ploy of United States intelligence is training military personnel in photography at the Defense Intelligence School and having dozens of them at once practice their new skills taking photographs of the George Washington Monument in their new civilian suits from their new civilian-clothing purchase-allowance with identical cameras from class, days before they go off to embassies all over the world to collect intelligence for defense attaché operations whose overt mission is to collect intelligence, while the fact that they use photography to do it is classified “confidential, no foreign dissemination”. Doesn’t “confidence” mean confiding, and with whom, if not others: shouldn’t confiding be sharing to stop alienation, foreignness?
I mean, sharing is inclusion, not excluding les autres. Of course the motive for that misreferring misrepresentional misnomer is to make the foreigners designated as enemies of the United States pay attention to those low-ranking soldiers with their antiquated equipment and limited training, rather than pay attention to the more adequately equipped and trained operatives. Of course the Defense Intelligence School doesn’t tell its students they’re decoys. But who couldn’t figure it out?
Anyway, Rich’s intelligence beat Fits Jr.’s literally to death. Rich used his unadulterated access to find an expert Agency rifleman and spoke with no one, except the rifleman, about the mission. He simply told his rifleman that the mission was too secret for other involvement. Meanwhile, Mikhail did about the same.
The reason Mikhail was able to meet me in Paris so early in our careers was that he had performed excellently in the Soviet Union, both academically and in his profession of the ideals he observed his government to signify loyalty. So he quickly won recruitment into the KGB, and a trip to Paris, to recruit me.
Harriman originated the idea and originally contacted Mikhail in Russia, and Mikhail presented the idea to his manager. He referred to my Yale degree and my oil-industry connections and my naming my company Zapata petroleum, which was also Harriman’s idea, as far as I know. I know for sure that I agreed.
Mikhail didn’t have the access level within the KGB that Rich had within the CIA, but he had access to his manager, who had much more access. So he proposed my suggestion to his manager, the suggestion that we have a wacko sniper kill Fits Jr. along a route I had ways to know well, and his manager found a resource.
My plan was as I’ve suggested, that this sniping be incompetent enough to insure that a sniper be destroyed as well, but I didn’t even tell Mikhail how I’d get that done. He suggested presenting the plan to his manager as though the United States government would execute immediately anyone caught killing its president.
The resource Mikhail’s manager found was a former United States Marine, a young man who had become disgruntled by not being accepted as an official American sniper and had been discharged for his wacko suggestions and so had offered his services to the Soviet Union. The wacko’s name was Remington Bosworth.
Remington. How appropriate. To make it look on the up-and-up to Remington, we had him go to Moscow to meet Mikhail, and then come back to Houston to meet me. To keep it invisible to anyone else, Mr. Bosworth never met anyone in it other than the two of us, and that’s where Jimmy Huffa came into the plan, to destroy the evidence.
On that dreadful day in Dallas, we put Rich’s sniper in a room we had rented in the Texas School Book Repository, a building along the route tall enough to open a clear shot. We got Bosworth a job there, so he could us nearby space to which his job gave him access, to be conspicuous. We issued them identical Remington rifles.
Fits Jr.’s schedule was to parade past in a Lincoln Continental convertible with its top down on his way to lunch. The snipers’ schedule was to wait most of the morning for that, for Bosworth to take two shots whenever he felt comfortable enough to ascertain accuracy, and for Rich’s sniper to synchronize with Bosworth’s sound.
Bosworth watched the pass to lunch and took a shot with ease. On the hearing the sound of that shot, Rich’s sniper pulled his trigger and put a bullet into Fit's Junior's head as it bobbled from Bosworth's shot. Technology is always more advanced than television, and we saw the whole thing, on tape for television, all three hits.
Rich’s sniper had a camera in his office far more advanced than what those Defense Intelligence Agency students have, and nearly as advanced as the satellite cameras that impressed us when they were declassified in the nineties. So, surely not for posterity, but to feel responsible for his part, Rich recorded the whole thing.
Bosworth’s first bullet went through Fits Jr.’s neck and hit Conundrum, who must have wished to be president badly or maybe trusted us too much to ride so close, before Rich’s sniper’s projectile splattered pieces of Fits Jr.’s brain all over the car. Bosworth’s second shot we’d told him to fire for certainty missed the car entirely.
Apparenly someone else got involved, maybe someone Mikhail's manager sent along to be sure the job got done, but that person missed Fits Jr. entirely but put more holes in Conundrum. But Rich's camera showed only the hits and not the hitters, and my team had little reason to care. Except that it provided helpful diversion later.
I felt horrible when I saw the pictures, Jackie clambering onto the trunk-lid, trying to get out, get safe. I had already felt bad about her husband’s faithlessness to her, even worse than I felt for her husband’s betrayal of the better things his brother Robert tried to carry through despite him. But to see her like that. It was dreadful.
I never told Beatrice any of this, and the only good feeling I ever had later about those pictures was that Jackie went on to a happier life, monetarily wealthy enough and doing things of her own, which was more important, or should be. Reasonable or not, I feel more hurt for Jackie and for Norma Jean than for the Bay of Pigs.
So the dastardly deed was done, and now we had to destroy the evidence, and Norma Jean helped me with that, by telling me about Jimmy Huffa. I visited her in Heaven as soon as I heard she’d died, and she told me how Huffa had intimidated her. And that was exactly the talent we needed to close up this operation.
Rich’s sniper was safe. He was a dedicated Central Intelligence professional, and he knew no one in this little conspiracy, except Rich, anyway. Bosworth had met both me and Mikhail, and we could not take the chance of his recognizing us and raising questions, later when we were famous in our roles to win the Cold War. And Huffa proved the perfect antidote, and the right solution for this mess.
By then, Huffa had graduated, not to being a major Chicago union-leader, but to being pushy enough in exploitation of women to do what we needed. From the sleaze of the non-Pacific side of Hollywood, in his new job as porn-king of people like Fits Jr. but less presidential, he had spread the sleaze to many places, including Dallas. I knew he would, and I’d watched him grow in this year since what he’d done to Norma Jean.
So I looked him up, at his old sleazy club, El Dorado. Some things never change, and Jimmy huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down is one of them. He’s probably as rotten in his grave as he was on Earth’s surface, and he’ll never be in Heaven. So Norma Jean will never have to look at him again, or at Fits Jr. The last I heard, she was having fun with that other Jimmy. Sailing silent silver clouds above.
Anyway, when I found Jimmy huff’n’puff, he was sitting in the silence of afternoon absence of music in his club named for greed for gold in the city of angels, sipping dregs of scotch nothing like Catholic Queen Mary. Who knows what evil lurked in his heart as he sat alone in that dark closed club as the California coastal sun shined brightly outside, though not as brightly as on the clouds above?
Whatever, I proved him the shadow he was.
“Jimmy,” I said. “Want a job?”
“How did you get in here?” he asked.
“The door was open,” I answered. “Trash.”
“Trash,” said Jimmy. “Trash is a matter of opinion.”
“Fine,” I said, sitting down. “Oliver Wendell Holmes said that trash isn’t trash. He said it’s just something in the wrong place.”
“Dirt,” said Jimmy. “He said that about dirt, and he was a lawyer. Are you in the wrong place? Are you a trash lawyer? What do you want?”
I could see the dregs of the rocks in his scotch had become sludge in his brain. Nothing in his next demeanor indicated knowledge that he was not now alone. He bowed his head to the table, and his eyes seemed to peer at his eyebrows.
“I have a proposition for you.”
He said nothing, but his eyelids moved.
“Do you remember Norma Jean?”
Now his eyelids moved back where they’d been.
“I have the same sort of job for you,” I said. “But better.”
He sighed and looked at the empty bandstand.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I know your business,” I said. “You’ve built a clientele in Dallas, out of losers who’ll do anything to win but are such losers that they don’t know what winning is, people like you. Do you understand?”
“I do my job,” he said. “I’m getting into bigger unions next, to help better people who just do their jobs. Just tell me about the job and the money, and I’ll do my job. Your philosophy isn’t my business.”
So I told him the details, among them that Fits Jr. dead couldn’t carry Huffa’s huff’n’puff corruption further. I told him to find some other such loser and threaten him with a choice of either killing Bosworth or having his family die. I told him to find someone whose life wasn't much for his family or anyone else anyway. I was sure he could do that, in the strip-club business. But I wished to be sure.
“Not a woman,” I said.
“No problem,” he said.
From there the rest was easy. Huffa found a Dallas strip-club owner, with a wife and several children in school, and in debt and in trouble with Huffa’s employers, who were essentially the Sugar Fits underground legacy, for trying to get out of debt by skimming beyond his cut, and for trying to compete a little on his own in some of their businesses. For the final deed, I left the timing to loser Jimmy, and he passed it on to the other loser. The strip-club-owner killed Bosworth on his way from interrogation to jail. Then he let cancer kill him in prison, though he ranted a little.
I killed Huffa myself, back at the El Dorado. But that was more than a decade later, and it had to do with another move essential to winning the Cold War. So I’ll wait to tell you about that, until that part of the story. The next part was getting Dicky elected, after Linden quit. Meanwhile, Oliver and Slavey were finishing their part.
Linden did two things for us, or failed to do two things against us, depending on how you look at it. First, on the momentum of the legacy of the young dead president, he let the Voting Rights Act go through Congress. Second, on the momentum of his own greed for power, he let Eisenhower’s advisory mission in Indochina escalate into war in Vietnam. The first of those doings of his was primal to our mission, and the second forced him to resign and make room for Dicky. But a problem was that the second somewhat conflicted against the momentum of the first.
Seeing dead burnt babies in Vietnam distracted attention from having seen beaten and bitten babies in Birmingham. But the Alabama legislation after the bus boycott and the federal legislation in the next decade laid a foundation that promised to give the civil rights movement momentum Sugar Fits could not have hoped for for himself, even by having his son elected to the presidency of the United States. So Oliver and Slavey decided to make three last symbolic gestures, gestures grand and memorable enough to stand in history forever, and then to get out of Dodge.
Or we might count five, rather than three. First, Oliver would make a grand enlightening spiritual speech to a hundred-thousand Americans from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Second, partly because of that, he would win the Nobel peace-prize and make another speech, this one to all of Earth. Third, Slavey would make a pilgrimage to Mecca and return preaching brotherhood and sisterhood of all on Earth. Fourth and fifth, Slavey and Oliver would get themselves killed.
They’d be martyrs to the cause, for whatever that is or isn’t worth.
The fourth and fifth, besides being Slavey’s and Oliver’s style, was necessary partly because of Fits Jr.’s death for nothing many Earthlings understood. Fits Jr.’s death stood quickly, through the momentum of Birmingham and Selma, as at least partly a martyrdom for freedom. But we couldn’t let another white-man stand alone as Lincoln largely had, as a martyr for black people. We thought it important that African Americans show their own sacrifice. And Slavey and Oliver were ready.
One might think that slavery and Birmingham and the bridge outside Selma would stand as such a symbol. But names of single people ring more signal in the ears of people than do names of deeds or places, or crowds. Even the name of Hitler rings more loudly in most ears than do the names of Normandy and Auschwitz. Maybe the reason is like the reason French corporals get so little credit or blame. People seem to think all things come from leaders. Big persons build the places and win the wars. Little persons do nothing but die. Martyrs are big persons dead.
So, while Linden was sending a half-million little persons across the Pacific Ocean to kill as many other little persons as they could, Slavey took his own leading personage across the Atlantic Ocean to see what was becoming of the millions of little persons to whom he had given pride in the previous millennium, and Oliver planned a capital march on some land between those oceans, to speak up for all those little persons, for all the people. Oh, Earth is so complicated, and so unnecessarily.
The civil rights movement had become extremely factional, divided by ideas of how to approach the problem and by egos of persons trying to approach it. The division between Oliver’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Slavey’s Nation of Islam, between civil disobedience and whatever means necessary, was the most famous disagreement. But the factionalism began much earlier.
It began before Theresa’s bus boycott, when many African Americans thought the NAACP was doing too little by restricting itself to legal action, to court-battles. For the bus boycott, Oliver and others formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, to focus on that particular event. Then, after the boycott succeeded, rather than return to NAACP dominance, Oliver and others formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to broaden the movement, beyond Montgomery, and past the courts, to all Christians.
Slavey formed the Nation of Islam, to make conspicuous the alternative to the SCLC’s call to common sensitivity, and Atlanta students formed the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, partly to separate sectarian dominance from their state of affairs. Then Stokely Carmichael formed the Black Panthers, because all the existing organizations were too peaceful or too clerical or too something, or because he wished to be the boss, le chef de guerre. That last is always the tragedy.
Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry, and bigotry cannot survive without hypocrisy. Grotesquely absurd is that people claiming to fight racism, which may be the ugliest form of bigotry, tried to do it with bigotry. Rather than all setting aside their egos to form a coalition of all organizations working together, they fought against each other for private preeminence, to be the chief of the fight for freedom. Were they fighting first for freedom or for their preeminence, their own egos?
Vive la France! Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité!
Whichever, Oliver’s effort to fill the capital mall with freedom fighters was an extreme exercise in coordination, extreme because of the wish of factions to remain factions, and Linden didn’t help much either, intentionally. Linden hadn’t graduated from teaching kids in Texas to lecturing politicians in the District of Columbia because he believed in sharing. He graduated from manipulating children to manipulating politicians because he liked to manipulate. He liked decisions to be his.
Aware that Linden shared that quite common illness of psyche, Oliver proposed to him a march on the Capitol. Linden’s initial answer was no direct answer, a message vague through aides that he was too busy killing people in Vietnam to have people storming his seat of government. Over a little time, the message developed into specifics such as that such a march might distract the populace from the war-effort and might turn into a riot. Both the war and the race-riots were scaring him.
During that time, Detroit and Los Angeles were going up in flames, and people were using assault rifles as flower-vases. African Americans were burning and looting their own neighborhoods in cities across the country, and many races and walks of life were standing up to soldiers, not only in Vietnam but also within American borders. On the capital mall, students placed stems of flowers into barrels of corporals’ rifles. On a university campus in the heartland, others slaughtered others trying.
Oliver seized the unfortunate day, to gain from it a little good fortune. Linden was scared, and Oliver directed the fear, to scare some of the hell out of him. He promised his personal effort to quell the race-rioting, if Linden would meet with him. Linden, his presidency out of control, grasped at what he thought was a straw. Just the two of them, in the oval office, aides dismissed
Other myths call such a signal combat, for mortal hope of immortality.