The Board explained to him, informally and in a most friendly manner, that whereas it was true it would be necessary that his personnel file forever retain Senator Iselin’s stain to explain Colonel Marco’s—uh—unusual—uh, advancement, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with his own hand, had appended an explanation of the attendant circumstances, absolving the colonel of any threat of shadow.
All in all, because he was human to extreme dimension, Marco secretly felt he had done pretty well out of the Iselin brush, which in no way forgave Iselin or diminished Colonel Marco’s prayers for vengeance. The single negative factor connected with the mess had been the death of General Jorgenson, but that was another matter entirely and one not pertinent to his promotion. Someday, he thought fervently, he would like to see the notation made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs upon the personnel file of General Jorgenson before it was permitted to pass into Army history. As a soldier, Colonel Marco knew that the general’s death had been a hero’s death, in the sense that a Hindu priest would believe deeply in the right of a widow to burn herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre, becoming a saint and joining Sati. So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn; but the world itself knew itself was sick.
Colonel Marco puzzled his past nightmares and decided they could make him a full general yet.
While Raymond toured Europe with his mother, Marco toured the United States with Amjac and Lehner and completed a formal canvass of the survivors of the patrol. This yielded nothing. Nightly, in the manner of a lonely drummer distracted by the boredom of the road, Marco telephoned his girl whom he had not yet had either the time or the opportunity to marry. She comforted him. The three men moved through seven cities from La Jolla, California, to Bay shore, Long Island. Marco and Melvin had been the only two men on the patrol who had ever dreamed of it.
Sixteen
MRS. JOHN ISELIN’S TOUR OF EUROPE IN THE summer of 1959 with her son developed into the most shocking string of occasions, as redolent of that decade as a string of garlic pearls. Mrs. Iselin achieved more for sustained anti-Americanism and drove infected wedges more deeply between America and her allies than any other action by any individual or agency, excepting her husband, of the twentieth century.
It would seem that wherever Mrs. Iselin set down with her personable, strangely expressed son, she gave a different account of why she was traveling. In Paris, she was looking for inefficiency in United States Government offices overseas. In Bonn, she said she was looking for subversives in United States Government offices overseas. In Munich, she said she was looking, actually, for both, because “any concept of efficiency in government must include complete political responsibility. If anyone should favor the Communists, then he cannot be efficient,” Mrs. Iselin explained to the German (and world) press.
Mrs. Iselin’s only brother was, at the time of her visit to Rome in late July, the American ambassador to Italy. He extended an invitation to his sister and his nephew to stay with him and his family, which Mrs. Iselin accepted via the Associated Press. “My brother is so dear to me,” she said for publication in many languages, “and I do so ache to see him again after a long separation, listen to his wisdom, and rejoice in his embrace. Pressure of work for our country has kept us apart too long. We are out of touch.” It was not told that what had put them in direct touch again was a specific coded order from the Secretary of State ordering his ambassador to invite his sister to be his house guest.
Mrs. Iselin moved out of the ambassador’s residence to the Grand Hotel on the afternoon of the second day she had been her brother’s guest and immediately called a press conference to explain her action, saying, according to the transcript which was printed in full in The New York Times for July 29, 1959, “In every sense of that melodramatic word I am standing before you as a torn woman. I love my brother but I must love my country more. My loyalty as a sister of a beloved brother must be moved to serve a greater loyalty to the unborn of the West. My brother’s embassy is wholly directed by American Communists under direct manipulation by the Kremlin, and I pray before you today that this is a result of my brother’s ineptness and ignorance and not of his villainy.”
After the press had left, Raymond languidly asked his mother what in the world had ever possessed her to do such an unbelievably malicious thing. “Raymond, dear,” his mother said, “in this life one can turn the other cheek in a Christian manner only so many times. A long, long time ago I told that brother of mine that I would see him nailed to the floor and today he knows that I kidded him not. I kidded him not, Raymond, dear.”
Mrs. Iselin’s brother resigned at once as ambassador to Italy and his resignation was at once accepted by the State Department and refused by the White House because Foster had not cleared through Jim or Jim had not cleared through Foster. For thirty-six hours thereafter the matter remained in this exquisite state of balance until, on return from the greenest kind of rolling countryside in Georgia, the President’s will prevailed and the ambassadorship of Raymond’s mother’s brother was restored, the wisdom of the President’s decision being based upon the choleric rages into which the mention of Johnny Iselin’s name could throw him.
As his wife succeeded with such consistency in gaining so much space in the press of the world, Senator Iselin found it necessary to issue his own directive as to his wife’s mission in Europe, from Washington. In close-up on television during his formal investigation of atheism in the Department of Agriculture he said to the millions of devoted viewers throughout the country, “My wife, a brilliant woman, an American who has suffered deeply before this, long before this, in the name of her great and abiding patriotism, was sent abroad as unofficial emissary of the United States Senate to bring back a report on the amount of money that this Administration has spent to further the cause of communism in the Western World. It is my holy hope that this will answer the question of certain elements in this country for once and for all with regard to this matter.”
Alas, the statement did not settle the matter for once and for all, as the President insisted that his Minority Leader in the Senate make a policy answer to settle Senator Iselin’s statement for once and for all. The President, being of the Executive Branch, overlooked the fact that the Minority Leader was first a member of the Senate, an establishment which has always taken a dim view of any directives from the Executive.
The Minority Leader’s text was a model of political compromise. As Senate spokesman the leader denied, in a sense, that Mrs. Iselin was an “official” emissary of the United States Senate although he conceded that the Senate would indeed feel honored to think of her as its “unofficial” emissary at any time. “Mrs. Iselin is a beautiful and gracious lady,” this courtly gentleman said, deeply pleased that the White House was so discomfited, “a delightful woman whose charm and grace are only exceeded by her outstanding intelligence, but I do not feel that either she or her distinguished husband would want it said that anyone not actually elected by the great people of the states of the United States to the sacred trust of the United States Senate could be said to represent that body. Say, rather, that Mrs. Iselin represents America wherever she may be.” (Applause.) The gentleman received a written citation from the Daughters of the American Struggles for Liberty for his gallantry to American womanhood.