Deep in the inner sanctum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, high up on the fifth floor, J. Edgar Hoover, the world’s most famous policeman, lost for a moment in reverie and congratulatory telegrams (he is this year celebrating his Silver Anniversary as America’s Top Cop, his career being contemporaneous with that of Mickey Mouse), jumps clean out of his chair. What? What! He stumbles about confusedly, scattering dossiers, old $2 betting stubs, and comic books depicting his own life saga every which way. Holy Moley! This is terrible! His heart is palpitating, his florid face is splotchy, his trigger finger has gone cold and limp as a wet noodle. It’s times like these when John Edgar Hoover of the FBI wishes his mother were still alive. Of course it’s a spy ring, has to be, it always is. I mean, there’s only one secret, isn’t there? We had it, now they’ve got it, it’s that simple. He’s been warning them this would happen since 1937. The enemy within. Now, just look! Jumping Jehoshaphat! And if they could penetrate Los Alamos, they could penetrate Congress or the White House, or even — he pushes the thought out of his mind and, glancing edgily over his shoulder, scrambles frantically for the intercom buttons. Goodness! he’s all thumbs! This is worse than the day he tried to put the cuffs on Old Creepy Karpis! He whacks the intercom with his thick fists and cries: “The secret of the atom bomb has been stolen! Mobilize every resource! Find the thieves!” He cries:
Call up yer dog, O call up yer dog,
Le’s go a-huntin’ to ketch a groun’-hog!
Whet up ye knife an’ loaden up ye gun,
Away to the hills to have some fun!
Up on Capitol Hill, Early Warning Sentinels Mundt, Bridges, Nixon, and Hickenlooper take up the chorus: “To-my-rang-tang-a-whaddle-linky-dey!” It mushrooms into a countrywide singalong, orchestrated by the national press. G-men, whistling along softly, scurry through the FBI building and out secret exits, buttoning up their trench coats…
They picked up their guns an’ went to the brash,
By dam, Joe, here’s the hog sign fraish!
Git away, Sam, an’ lemme load my gun,
The groun’-hog hunt has jist begun!
FBI double agent Herbert Philbrick breaks his cover, and eleven top U.S. Communists are nailed as fanatical schismatics. Spying charges and naughty rumors are slapped on Judy Coplon from Justice and a Russian plant in the U.N. Wartime New Dealers are implicated, and the shadow of suspicion falls heavily on apostate Henry Wallace — once but a heartbeat away from the Incarnation — plus the million people who voted for him in 1948. And, thanks to the untiring vigilance of Congressman Nixon — who has already helped to sanitize Hollywood and the labor unions, and co-sponsored a tough-fisted Communist registration bill, which even Harry Truman has to admit is the equal of the Alien and Sedition Act of John Adams’s heyday — the slippery Alger Hiss is run to ground at last…
He’s in here, boys, the hole’s wore slick!
Run here, Sam, with ye forkéd stick!
Stand back, boys, an’ le’s be wise,
Fer I think I see his beaded eyes!
“The only sensible and courageous way to deal with Communists in our midst,” declares Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, “is to make membership in Communist organizations or covert subsidies a capital offense and shoot or otherwise put to death all persons convicted of such!” Congressman Harold Velde, an ex-FBI agent elected to the House on the slogan GET THE REDS OUT OF WASHINGTON AND WASHINGTON OUT OF THE RED, has a celebrated vision of Russian espionage agents running amok all over the country, and his Pennsylvania colleague Bob Rich, speaking in tongues, lets fly the suspicion that Secretary of State Dean Acheson might be working for Stalin himself! “The great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case,” Dick Nixon warns, “is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get thirty pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon…but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy!” To that, Mr. Republican himself, Senator Bob Taft, says: “Hey! to-my-whang-fol-doodle-daddy-dey, Dick!” And in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joe McCarthy, the Fighting Marine, waves a piece of paper—“I have here in my hand a list…!”—and launches an Era…
Up jumped Joe with a ten-foot pole,
He roused it in that groun’-hog’s hole!
“A list,” says he, “of two hundred and five…card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” He says: “Commiecrats! Prisoners of a bureaucratic Communistic Frankenstein! Parlor pinks and parlor punks! Prancing mimics of the Moscow party line in the State Department!” Oh yes! “Egg-sucking phony liberals,” says he, whose “pitiful squealing…would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers” who had sold China into “atheistic slavery!” He says: “A conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man!” He says:
Stand back, boys, an’ gimme a little air,
I’ve got a little o’ the groun’-hog’s hair!
I heard ’im give a whistle an’ a wail,
I’ve wound my stick right in his tail!
“I thank God,” cries the Reverend Billy Graham, “for men who in the face of public denouncement and ridicule go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle, and from that vantage point try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known, Communism!” And then, while Bible-belters, ex-FBI agents, Catholic hardliners and anti-Zionists, ladies’ clubs, Hearst newsmen, the legendary China Lobby, patriotic queer-bashers, and most of the Republican and Democratic parties surge around Joe to get a piece of History, the besieged President, egged on by Bernard Baruch, Edward Teller, Columbia University’s Dwight Eisenhower, and an uptight Dean Acheson, overrules the Atomic Energy Commission and sets in motion a new crash program: TRUMAN ORDERS HELL BOMB BUILT! “I wasn’t going to be one of your arm-rolling cheek-kissing mollycoddles!” says Harry. Du Pont gets the H-bomb contract, cash on the line. But already it may be too late…
Stand back, boys, an’ lemme git my breath,
Ketchin’ this groun’-hog’s might nigh death!
To-my-wham-bam-diddle-all-the-day…!
Up on the fifth floor of the FBI buildings, surrounded by souvenirs from his epic past and autographed photos from the radio stars of “The FBI in Peace and War,” Crimebuster J. Edgar Hoover, hand-in-hand with his bachelor friend Clyde Toison, oversees the spy-ring hunt. “Clyde,” he says, feeling a bit giddy, unable to suppress a soft little giggle, “this is the Crime of the Century!” “You said it, Eddie,” says Clyde. The entire FBI is mobilized for the hunt. They are digging into records at Los Alamos, poring through AEC personnel files, badgering a few old suspects, interviewing hundreds of people. Others, disguised as tourists, slip catlike through the ghettos of the nation’s cities, in deep where the unassimilated live, speaking alien tongues, eating weird shit, their seed still frothy with unhomogenized Old World discontents; 90 percent of all Commies in this country, as every G-man knows, are foreign-born or were dropped by foreign-born parents. But chasing them down is like falling down a welclass="underline" there are nearly forty million of these yahooskis in the U.S., plus all their goddamn kids — over three hundred thousand Russians in New York City alone — it’s an impossible job. Knock knock! Who’s dere? Police! Police who? Uh, police tuh meet yuh, lady. Thistle be quick. Chester routine inquiry. Hassan a body here seen a spy ring? We all aspiring, mister, it’s a Mary kin way! Clem the ladder of success, you know? Gopher broke. Hokay? Well, yeah, but… C’mon, Thomas money, copper, and Eisenhower late as it is! Yes’m, Czar Rhee tuh bother yuh. Dewey have your pardon? Sure, son, Hiss all right, to err is Truman. Better luck on the — knock knock! — Nixon…