The “most feared and hated man in Washington, D.C.”-as the Washington Times-Herald had termed him, with neither affection nor irony-lived in a typically dignified Georgetown townhouse so evocative of bygone days that you might expect to see a gloved gent in stovepipe and muttonchops stroll down the steps to the cobblestone lane where a horse-drawn coach awaited.
But on this sunny Sunday afternoon on Dumbarton Avenue, you would instead have seen only a gloveless guy in a tan fedora and dark blue shantung suit going up those steps, and trying the polished brass knocker at the door of the home/office of Drew Pearson.
Speaking of knockers, it would have been more fun trying those of the healthy young woman who answered-a buxom lass of perhaps twenty with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face.
“Who is, sir?” she asked, in a middle-European accent similar to, but much more fetching than, Teddy Kollek’s.
She stood at attention in a crisp, streamlined white dress with thin vertical blue stripes (well, as vertical as they could be, considering her figure) and white collar and cuffs; she looked like a nurse in one of my dirtier dreams.
“Would you tell your boss his overdue account from Chicago is here?”
She frowned, full red-rouged lips forming a pouty kiss. “Excuse, please?”
So English was her second language; still, I’d wager her job description read “Secretary.” Clearly she was the latest office “fair-haired girl,” as Pearson’s veteran employees dubbed them, “cutie-pies” as the boss described each lucky girl singled out for such special services as enlivening cocktail parties and accompanying him on out-of-town speaking engagements.
“Just tell the big cheese Nate Heller is here.”
“Big …?”
“Nate Heller, honey.”
“Very busy today.” She frowned again and shook her shimmering golden locks; it was cuter than a box of puppies. “Mr. Pearson see no one on broadcast day.”
I dug out one of my cards and handed it to her. “Just give him this-I’ll wait.”
Soon she was back, equal parts solicitude and pulchritude, smelling like lilacs (or anyway lilac perfume), hugging my arm, yanking me into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the house.
“I am too sorry, Mr. Heller,” she said, batting long lashes, putting the accent on the second syllable of my name.
A modern living room was straight ahead, down a couple steps, and to the left, also sunken, was a formal dining room with a kitchen glimpsed beyond.
“Honey, I’m almost over it,” I said, taking off my hat.
That confused her for a second, but then she grinned, showing crooked teeth I was perfectly willing to forgive, and lugged me down two steps to the right, through a doorway into a book-, paper- and keepsake-arrayed study where the air was riddled with the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of typing. To one side of a wide, wooden desk, at a typewriter stand, his back to us, a large (not fat) bald man in a maroon smoking jacket was hammering away at the keys.
The blonde looked at me gravely and held up her hand, in case I was thinking of speaking: the boss was not to be interrupted while he was creating.
A window fan was churning up air. Off to the right of the fairly small room, visible (and audible) through the open doorway, a desk-cluttered workroom bustled with two men and a trio of women typing or talking on the phone or attending the clattering wire-service ticker or putting something in or getting something out of one of the endless gray-steel filing cabinets lining the walls. While these secretaries were not unattractive, they-unlike my blonde escort-had the businesslike apparel and bespectacled, pencil-tucked-behind-the-ear manner of professional women. Depending on the profession, of course.
Drew Pearson’s profession was journalism, or anyway a peculiar variant of his own creation. At one time just another Washington newspaperman covering the State Department for the Baltimore Sun, Pearson had taken the gossip-column style of New York’s Walter Winchell and Hollywood’s Louella Parsons and grafted it-to use a fitting term-onto the Washington political scene.
The column-“The Washington Merry-Go-Round”-initially had not been solely Pearson’s. The Christian Science Monitor’s D.C. correspondent, Robert S. Allen, had come up with the idea for a hard-hitting book that would expose both the personal peccadilloes and political chicanery of our country’s leaders, particularly those in the Herbert Hoover administration.
Bob Allen did most of the writing, but brought his pal Pearson aboard as a collaborator for a few chapters because Drew knew the social scene, his mother-in-law being the powerful newspaperwoman and socialite Cissy Patterson. The book, published anonymously in 1931, was a huge best-seller and made tidal-type waves that started in Washington and splashed across the nation; the pissed-off President sicced the FBI on the case, to ferret out the identities of the contemptible authors.
Exposed, Allen and Pearson were fired by their papers, but Pearson-giving himself top billing-took the notion of the book to a newspaper syndicate, United Features, which snapped it up. The column was a sensation, and Pearson hogged the spotlight, and became the country’s best-known crusader for liberal causes. With World War Two imminent, Bob Allen left the column to enlist in the Army; Pearson took that opportunity to remove his partner’s name, refusing to pay Allen, or his wife, a dime while he was away. When Allen returned, a colonel who’d lost an arm in combat, he found he’d lost his column, as well.
The man at the typewriter stopped typing, yanked the page out of the machine and, without turning, tossed the page on the desk, on which paper-filled wooden intake boxes were lined, a regal black cat sleeping quietly in one of them.
“Get that added to the script, Anya,” he commanded in a rather harsh, clipped baritone. Pearson had trained himself to sound like a more dignified Walter Winchell when “Washington Merry-Go-Round” had become a radio show as well as a column.
“Yes, sir!” The blonde leaned over to snatch up the typed page, and the plump globes of her behind under the blue-striped nurse’s dress tilted up invitingly.
“That’s a good girl. Now shut the door behind you.”
“Yes, sir!”
And she scampered out.
He scooted over on his chair till he was behind the big desk, and twisted around like a kid on a soda fountain stool, to where I could see him. His rather large head was shaped like-and had only a little more hair than-an egg; his eyes crowded a strong, prominent nose and his mouth was no wider than his well-waxed, pointed-tipped mustache. A white shirt and maroon-and-black tie peeked out from under the smoking jacket.
“What a cutie-pie,” Pearson purred, looking toward where Anya had exited.
The sleeping cat echoed him with its own purring.
“You lucky bastard,” I said.
He stood, rising to his full six three, and extended his hand over the messy desk and the tidy cat. “Nice to see you, too, Nathan. Jack said you were in town.”
“I hear he’s a Mormon,” I said, shaking his clammy hand. “Is he a Mormon like you’re a Quaker?”
Raised in that faith, Pearson only used the “thee” and “thou” routine at dinnertime with family, and while he didn’t smoke, he had a reputation for hard drinking.
He lifted an eyebrow, as he sat back down. “You understand this is broadcast day. I can only give you a few minutes.”
Ignoring that, I prowled his office. The dark-painted plaster walls wore framed original newspaper cartoons featuring Pearson, and photos of him with various political figures, including the last two presidents. A primitive rural landscape in oil-a relative’s work, apparently-hung near a portrait of a man who might have been his father; snapshots were lined up along the mantelpiece of a working fireplace, and the window-sills were piled with books and papers.
“Why don’t you buy yourself a new typewriter?” I asked, nodding toward the battered Corona on the typing stand. “Live a little.”
“That machine was given to me by my father”-and he nodded toward the portrait, confirming my suspicion-“in 1922. It’s my pride and joy; take it with me on trips, and nobody touches it but me.”
“How do you get away with that?”
“When it breaks down, I simply get it fixed at a certain small machine shop-”
“I was talking about the blonde.” I shook my head. “Right under your wife’s nose?”
His wife, Luvie, was an elegant, model-thin blonde; his second wife, actually-he’d stolen her, like his column, from a close friend.
“Well, she’s at the farm today,” he said, “but she doesn’t mind my dalliances. Boys will be boys. She understands my appetites.”
“Does she have a sister?”
“Who? Luvie or Anya?”
I pulled up a chair and sat. “Where’s the blonde from, anyway? Transylvania?”
“Yugoslavia. War refugee.”
“You are a public-spirited son of a bitch. And open-minded by not insisting that your secretary speak or write English. You’re in arrears three hundred bucks, by the way.”
Pearson tilted his chin and looked down his considerable nose at me. “Your expense account was outlandishly out of line. We’ll call it even-or you could always sue, though you’d have to take a number.” He was smiling; he smiled a lot, a smile that creased his eyes into slits.
“Didn’t do General MacArthur much good, did it?”
“None whatsoever,” Pearson chuckled. He had a quiet, gentlemanly manner, and the chilly, aloof bearing of an ambassador to some unimportant country. “By the way, does your current client know of our past association?” He posed this mildly, sitting forward, stroking his cat, its back arching.
“No,” I admitted.
In the mid-thirties I’d done a few jobs for Pearson, having been recommended to him by another former client of mine, Evalyn Walsh McClean, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, owner of the Hope diamond, and a prominent if eccentric D.C. socialite and party-giver. Evalyn was a friend of Pearson’s first wife and her mother.
The initial work I’d done for the columnist had been so long ago, it well predated my relationship with Forrestal, and had apparently not made my FBI file, or Baughman would have rubbed my face in it, the other night.
And the government apparently wasn’t aware that, as I’d mentioned to Jack Anderson, I’d done some work in Chicago for Pearson, not long ago, despite swearing I never would again, as he really was the cheapest son of a bitch on the planet. He negotiated you down to nothing, then took forever to pay.
“Your client’s ignorance of our past history,” Pearson said, “puts you in a delicate position, Nathan-and me at an advantage.”
“Sure it’s not the other way around,” I asked, “since I know how you’re getting inside info from Forrestal’s house? If I tell Jim about that colored maid, he’ll fire her … but then, of course, maybe you could hire her as your next secretary.”
He just smiled, corners of his mustache up, eyes lost in slits. “For a man who’s been in your tawdry profession for as long as you have, Nathan, you have a less than firm grasp of blackmail.”
“Well, hell … then I’ll defer to the master.”
That didn’t seem to offend him in the least. Amid the mess on his desk was a glass jar filled with small chocolate chip cookies; he lifted the lid, plucked one out and began nibbling it. “Would you like one, Nathan? Anya made them.”
“How much are they?”
“Now that’s unkind. I pride myself on being a gracious host. You’re the one charging fees; you’re the tradesman.”
“And knowing your politics, Drew, I’m sure you mean that in the nicest way, friend to the working-man that you are.”
He took a last bite of cookie, chewed it and swallowed before speaking. “How do you think Jim Forrestal-in his current delicate mental condition-would react to the news that his trusted investigator has done numerous jobs for his archnemesis-yours truly?”
Obviously, it would further fuel his paranoid delusions and I’d be out on my ass.
But I said, “Jim knows I’m not terribly particular about who I work for.”
Pearson selected another cookie. “And does he know your loyalty is to the dollar?”
“Now you’re being unkind. But then that’s your stock-in-trade, isn’t it?”
He bristled a little, leaned back in the chair. “My stock-in-trade is telling the truth, and letting the chips fall where they may.”
Chocolate or otherwise.
“Telling the truth, Drew, like that story about Forrestal running away from robbers who stripped his wife of her jewels and money? The truth is, Jo Forrestal was on her way home from a party, with another man, and Forrestal wasn’t even at the scene. You knew that and printed the lie, anyway.”
He shrugged, rocking gently, nibbling his cookie. “It could have been worse-I could have told the real truth: that he and his wife live a sham marriage.”
I laughed, once. “You can say that with a straight face, while Miss Yugoslavia 1946 is out in the other room buttering your scones?”
He frowned and his close-set eyes almost crossed. “I’m not a public official.”
“Jesus, Drew-can you imagine, a proud guy like Forrestal, responsible for the safety of his country, how a false accusation of base cowardice could affect him?”
The smile returned; he looked like your rich uncle. “Please, Nathan. You don’t wear moral indignation very well. Come on, man! People forget that I’m trying to do something for my country, and the world.”
“By lying to ruin a man’s reputation?”
“In politics, questionable actions are often employed for desirable goals.”
“The ends justify the means, you mean.”
“Isn’t that how you operate? I’m well acquainted with your mode of operation, Nathan.”
I sat forward. “What the hell’s the idea of putting all your muscle behind destroying an able, dedicated guy like Jim Forrestal?”
“Sure he’s able,” Pearson huffed. “Of course he’s dedicated. But to what? He’s a man who lives only for himself. He’s broken his word, turned his back on his friends …”
This was rich, coming from the guy who stole “Washington Merry-Go-Round” from Bob Allen.
“… and he’s driven by one ambition and one ambition only: to be top man, first of Wall Street, then the cabinet, and now he’s got his eye on the presidency. And were he president, with his worldview that the godless, evil Soviet Union is on the verge of invading us, we’d find ourselves in a catalysmic world war. He has to be stopped. I have stopped him.”
“You’ve crushed him, Drew.”
“Then good for me.” Pearson was shaking his head. “He’s been a law unto himself, Nathan, and behavior like that can’t be countenanced.”
“From a public official, you mean. It wins columnists Pulitzers.”
“Listen, my friend, Jim Forrestal has nurtured, has created, this nightmarish Central Intelligence Agency, and mark my words, America will suffer the consequences for decades. And before he had that charming organization up and running, peddling its counterintelligence and counterinsurgency around the world, he would step in himself, raising huge funds from his rich friends to pay off railroad strikers in France, to buy off politicians in Italy-”
“Save it for the broadcast.”
He arched an eyebrow. “All right. Since you seem disapproving of my campaign-successful campaign-to induce Harry S. Truman to remove James V. Forrestal, I have to ask: why did you want to see me today?”
“Why were you willing to see me?”
The smile turned sly again; he stroked his purring pussy and said, “Well … I thought, as someone who’s spent time with Forrestal … who has his ear, his trust … you could, you might, let me know just how far around the bend he is.”
“Why, so you can put it on the radio tonight?”
“Yes,” he said, with no shame. “It appears to me that Forrestal has gone off his rocker. That he’s mad as a hatter. And if I could say that, with confidence, on the air, it would be a great service to our country.”
“Jesus! Suppose the guy has lost his marbles … and I’m not confirming that, mind you … what purpose does it serve humiliating him further? You won, Drew! Isn’t that enough?”
“You don’t think the country has a right to know that its Secretary of Defense is a madman? I want to know how long he’s been demented, I want to know what orders, policies, security breaches might be ascribed to his mental state! If a raving lunatic has made government policy, mightn’t we want to undertake a critical review of those policies?”
“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I haven’t seen a ‘raving lunatic’-just a man battered down by years of hard work for his country, and maybe buckling a little under your barrage of bullshit.”
He rocked gently. “I ask again, Nathan: why did you want to see me today?”
“To ask you, out of common decency, not to broadcast any speculation about Jim Forrestal’s mental condition. He’s quitting tomorrow-give him a chance to go out with a little goddamn dignity.”
Both eyebrows lifted. “This is unexpected, Nathan.”
“What is?”
“The milk of human kindness in one so monetary.”
“Why don’t you surprise me, Drew, and behave like the liberal lover of mankind you pretend to be: give the guy a fucking break.”
He thought about that, as he scratched his cat’s neck. Finally he said, “All right. But if Forrestal gets back into the political fray, all bets are off.”
I hadn’t expected it to be this easy; frankly, I hadn’t expected him to go along with me at all.
“Understood,” I said.
“But … I need a favor of you, in return.”
So much for the milk of human kindness.
“What kind of favor?”
“Your presence in Washington is fortuitous, Nathan.”
“It is?”
“Yes. I’d like you to do a job for me. Today. This afternoon.”
“… What kind of job?”
He folded his hands prayerfully on the desktop. “I want you to talk to somebody for me. I don’t want to be seen talking to this individual myself, and I don’t even want my staff knowing about this particular … subject matter.”
That didn’t surprise me. Pearson had a conspiratorial managing style, never letting an investigator or legman know what each other was up to.
I asked, “What subject matter is that?”
He spoke very softly: “In researching your client, Secretary Forrestal, I stumbled onto some information that is either the biggest story of the century … or an attempt to make such a fool out of me that I would be discredited, once and for all.”
“All right. You’ve got my attention. But, favor or no favor, my fee is a hundred a day.”
Immediately, he reached in a desk drawer, withdrew a checkbook and began filling out a check, asking, “You want that made out to the A-1 or to yourself?”
“A-1 will be fine … but make it four hundred, to bring your account up to date.”
Pearson shrugged. “All right.”
My jaw dropped. “Now you really have my attention….”
He handed the check across to me, its black ink glistening wetly. “No further expenses, though … for right now, this is a one-day affair, and you can buy your own damn meals.”
“Fair enough. Who do I talk to, and on what subject?”
He rocked back, folded his arms. “Let’s start with the subject. Nathan … what do you know about flying saucers?”
I winced. Weren’t Commies, Zionists and Nazis enough? Must I add spacemen to the list?
“Nathan, please … answer the question.”
Money was money. “Well … last year or two, there have been a lot of sightings of flying saucers, flying discs, flying cigars, whatever, some of ’em by fairly reputable types. I figure it’s some kind of postwar hysteria-like the gremlins pilots in the war talk about seeing. I saw ’em myself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in Bugs Bunny cartoons.”
Pearson shuffled through some manila file folders on his desk, came up with a thick one, folded it open and began thumbing through; I hoped it wasn’t my FBI file again.
“The first published report of a saucer sighting was in June of ’47,” he said, “by an air rescue pilot-Kenneth Arnold, of Boise, Idaho-who said he saw nine flying saucers flying at twelve hundred miles per hour over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, in formations, shifting positions like … what’s it say, here, where is it … ‘like the tail of a kite.’ This seemed to trigger sightings, with saucers spotted in Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, Idaho, Missouri, Colorado, California, Arizona, Nebraska …”
I nodded. “Yeah, for a few months there, if you wanted to see your name in the paper, all you had to do was just call in and say you saw an unidentified flying what’s-it.”
“Your attitude mirrors my own, essentially; but some of these sightings are from credible sources-a United Airlines pilot, a National Guard captain-and I’ve learned that the U.S. Air Force is studying and cataloguing these sightings.”
“Or pretending to-after all, these ‘saucers’ could be some new experimental top-secret aircraft or weapon of ours. The kind of thing a civilian might easily misconstrue.”
Pearson nodded. “And the inquiry into ‘saucer’ sightings could be a military screen of ‘black propaganda’-lies. In any case, that effort-whether sincere, or simply cosmetic-started in December ’47, as Project Sign, but it’s evolved into something called Project Grudge.”
“That sounds like the code name for your Forrestal crusade.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Well, Secretary Forrestal is involved in this matter.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. As I said, I came across this information in my investigation of Forrestal…. Take a look at this, Nathan.”
Pearson handed me a photostat from his folder; it was of a single sheet of stationery, rubber-stamped at the top: top secret/majic eyes only.
White House stationery.
The date was September 24, 1947, and the contents were as follows:
MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Dear Secretary Forrestal:
As per our recent conversation on this matter, you are hereby authorized to proceed with all due speed and caution upon your undertaking. Hereafter this matter shall be referred to only as Operation Majestic Twelve.
It continues to be my feeling that any future considerations relative to the ultimate disposition of this matter should rest solely with the Office of the President following appropriate discussions with yourself, Dr. Bush and the Director of Central Intelligence.
And it was signed, with a flourish: “Harry Truman.”
“This doesn’t say anything about flying saucers,” I said.
“Indeed it doesn’t. But a Pentagon source has informed me that Operation Majestic Twelve is a government research and development project formed with exploring the ‘flying saucer’ problem as its mandate.”
I reread the letter, then asked, “Who’s this Dr. Bush?”
“Dr. Bush is, with Forrestal, one of the twelve-the ‘Majestic Twelve’-that is, key government, scientific and military figures. Bush is former dean of MIT; he led the development of the atomic bomb, radar, the proximity fuse, the analog computer, and much more. The top government science mind.”
I tossed the photostat back on his desk. “Do you believe your source?”
“You know what they say-in Washington, if your mother says she loves you, get a second source to corroborate it.”
“Glad to see you checking your facts, for a change.”
He sighed rather heavily. “Nathan, as I said, I suspect this may be an effort to make a colossal boob out of me. But if what I’ve been told does prove correct, our government may have in its possession technology from another planet, which they are intending to capitalize upon for military purposes.”
“I’m gonna vote for the colossal boob theory on this one.”
Pearson was shaking his head. “I know, I know-it sounds incredible, even bizarre … but it all seems to stem from one incident-the crash of an unidentified flying object in Roswell, New Mexico, in July of ’47.”
I shifted in my chair. “Not a sighting-a crash….”
“Yes-a crash by an alien spacecraft.”
“And Forrestal is nuts? Drew, you thought about trying a smoking jacket that buttons up the back?”
“The Air Force base at Roswell-the 509th Bomb Group, who incidentally are the only squadron in the world armed and ready to drop atomic bombs-issued a public statement to the effect that a flying saucer had crashed, and its wreckage been recovered … a statement that was, within hours, withdrawn by the powers-that-be.”
“You’re making this up.”
“No. I’ll give you my clipping file to take with you, on your way.”
“My way where?”
“To talk to the Air Force major who says he found the saucer. Sure you won’t have a cookie?”