After a few months Groteschele, because of his skill In German, was able to get himself transferred to the section which interviewed SS troopers. These interviews were longer, more concentrated, more meaningful. The interviewing officer could, in fact, question an SS man as long as he wished. Groteschele always guided the conversation to the Jewish question. The SS men stared back at him, unafraid and their faces expressionless, and said, “Rabbits. The Jews are like rabbits, but without the speed of a rabbit.” Always it was a rabbit or an undernourished rat or a mouse to which they compared the Jews.
It-was during this time that Groteschele found himself trimming off excess weight and taking daily exercises. Finally he was doing hours of bar-bell exercises, pushups, and road-work every day. He became as physically tough as the SS troopers, his belly as flat, his face as expressionless. Always, just before the interview was over, Groteschele let slip the fact that he was a Jew. Never as a direct admission, always slyly and as if the prisoner had known from the start.
It was the only thing that made the SS troopers crack, even a little. They would stare at Groteschele’s well-muscled body, his inscrutable face, lila bard eyes. Then, for a moment in time, Groteschele could see fear in their eyes. It was gone instantly, the eyes shut, the expression lost. But it was enough for Groteschele. They had seen a different kind of Jew and it frightened them.
By the time the war was over Groteschele had developed a new interest. It was the study of politics. Americans had mastered technology and the scientist would continue to be a hero for some time. But the real decisions, the real power would lie with those who understood politics. Competence in pglitics would be the ultimate sanctuary, although partisan elective politics would be as volatile as ever. He must, he reasoned, be an expert in politics but not subject to popular opinion. He calculated that with the GI Bill and the money be had saved he would be able to get a Ph.D. at an Ivy League college an, still be a few thousand dollars ahead.
His father had only one piece of advice. “If you are going to become a professor change your name to Groth,” he said. “American universities have too many German Jews. They will lose their tolerance for them.”
Groteschele had not changed his name. It was the first time he had rejected his father’s advice, but now he was surer than his father about some things: the character of Americans, for instance, and the favorable attitude toward the Jewish intellectual in the academic world. This did not mean that he was insensitive to names. In fact he found them fascinating. He had, for example, noticed that his name was considered by most to be German and he knew that his appearance was not distinctively Jewish. He considered the possibility that he might even suffer somewhat from anti-German feeling, but he also remembered the guilty conscience which Americans had had over their anti-Getinanign after World War II. All in all, when everything was added up, he calculated that he would benefit by sticking with his name and identity.
Once this decision was made the plan was simple. He knew that it would take some luck, but he was also determined to do everything possible to minimize the importance of that element.
The first thing was to become a protégé of Tolliver. Groteschele sensed that Tolliver had an ego of formidable proportions. This was what led him to work in the area of great sweeping diplomatic moves, intricate military strategies, and it was also what led him to an instantaneous and ferocious defense of his views.
For the first year in graduate school Groteschele made no move toward Tolliver. He sat quietly in his classes and read every book and article the man had written. He watched the other graduate students as they slowly learned the pitfalls and terrors of the academic world. By the end of the first year none of them regarded it as “the ivory tower” any more. By then they - bad learned it was more like Kafka’s Castle: a place of enormous tension, the scene of ununderstood conspiracies, a place of stalking and frantic flight from an unseen enemy. Groteschele watched some of the others break and remained impassive. Groteschele was certain that he would not be one of those who broke. He had been prepared for the fact that the big beautiful buildings and the book-lined studies and the quiet seminar rooms would really be scenes of battle.
At the end of the first year Groteschele’s chance came. Tolliver published a book called Models for the Future War. The title had been a mistake. It suggested that Tolliver was, somehow, advocating war. The reviews of the book were generally negative, some of them, scathing. Groteschele read the reviews carefully. Finally he found one in a liberal monthly in which it was clear that the author had not read the whole book but had skimmed the first few chapters and then used that much as a platform to expound his own theories about “the rising tide of militarism.”
Groteschele wrote a 2,000-word letter to the magazine. It was a model of careful and biting analysis. The editor of the monthly, in a spasm of regret, sent Groteschele a check for $25 and published the letter as an article.
Groteschele wisely did not send Tolliver a copy of the article, but inevitably Tolliver read it. He never thanked Groteschele for the article, in fact, he never mentioned it. But in his second year of graduate work, Groteschele received a written invitation from Tolliver to be his research assistant. Groteschele never worked so hard in his life. His eyes constantly burned from reading in bad library light. He had no time for exercise and could feel his body go slack, the fat start to gather, the hard muscularity he had liked disappear.
Carefully and patiently Groteschele read all of the memos which Tolliver, as a long-time consultant to the Pentagon, received from Washington. By studying the memos and by careful questioning of Tolliver, Groteschele found what he wanted: a public gap in American military thought. Stretching over a generation, the notion had arisen that America would never start a war. Even the most hardened of the military people cautiously skirted around this question. As a result a mood had grown up which made a discussion of America striking first impossible. A few officers had mentioned it in “off-the-record” briefings and bad promptly been branded warmongers and their careers carefully altered so that they disappeared from the public eye. Even among themselves the military had developed a theory and lexicon and strategy which always skirted the idea of the United States starting a war.
In his Ph.D. dissertation Groteschele attacked this taboo. He provided a respectable language and theory within which the “first strike” or “preemptive war” could be discussed. The name of the dissertation was The Theory of Counter-Escalation Postures in a Thermonuclear World. He gave Tolliver five copies of the first draft of the dissertation. Tolliver knew why he had received extra copies. He sent them along to Washington.
Groteschele curbed his hopes. He knew the copies of the dissertation might well disappear in the labyrinths of Washington. Or the central idea might be attacked by a powerful person, or, even more damaging, be dismissed as trivial or nutty. But his luck held. One day the phone call came.
“Dr. Groteschele, this is Colonel Stark of the Air Force in the Pentagon,” a calm voice said. “We have read your dissertation with great interest and wonder when you can come to Washington to discuss it.”
Technically Groteschele was not yet a Ph.D., but he sensed this was not the time to point out that fact.
“Colonel Stark, my schedule is fairly full for the next five or six days,” Groteschele said cautiously. “Maybe sometime next week.”
Stark cut in abruptly. There was an edge of irritation in his voice, but there was also something of respect.
“Doctor, down here we consider this rather urgent,” Colonel Stark said. “After all, the security of the country is involved.”