Читать книгу The Game in the Past - John Zeugner - Страница 6

Historical insight Professor David Moran believed was the end product of diligent, extensive preparation. Only after you had been through and been through and been through the data did the connections begin to emerge.

“Historical linkage—I abjure the term, causality—surfaces only in so far as you rescue the elements of the past from their natural habitat at the bottom of the sea.” Moran had pontificated the sentence more than once to that pasty and malproportioned collection of graduate students who were forced each year to take the department’s seminar on historical methods. “If those elements breathe, it is because you have carried air to them. To pump life into the past you may have to yield sustenance, breath, in the present. The endeavor requires commitment, dedication, monastic discipline, and certain fascination for the inert—a willingness to sacrifice living now in order to discover what it might have been like to refuse that decision in the past.”

All well and good. Repeated earnestly, automatically. No need to check its validity. He believed it once as he composed the phrases, rehearsed them for the dutiful graduate students. The repetition was entirely appropriate and Moran discovered that as the sentiment meant less and less to him, his mouthing of it became more and more convincing. In the early days he had logged up his monastic time. A book on Clarence Gauss, the U.S. Ambassador to China during World War II, had come of it, and tenure and a certain admission to the lower echelons of the mildly revisionist historians of the Cold War. His name turned up more and more regularly at the conclaves of diplomatic history. A modest national reputation had led, through a unique conjunction of recommendations, to the lecturing assignment in Japan. And the apex of the assignment was, apparently, the summer convocation of Cold War historiographers at a posh hotel on a mountain top overlooking Kyoto. Moran and seventeen Japanese historians had been summoned to comment on the most recent papers of the profession’s most ascendant star. At thirty-four Graham Guade, a full professor for four years, had published six books detailing with exquisite density of footnotes in five languages, the interplay of strategy that controlled and throttled U.S. diplomacy from 1942 to 1954.

Guade wore a hearing aid, an oversize beige object clamped to the back of his right ear, a shiny clear plastic line plunging, apparently, into the center of his brain. Moran thought, for a while, he saw fluid from Clio traveling instantly into that categorizing mind. The aid made Guade anomalous. He looked younger than his age, had a rather fit body which might have been, save for a little padding, called athletic. His motions were controlled but incessant. He cast off waves of energy, constant motion that signaled aliveness, and somehow ferocity. And yet the aid enveloped the energy in an image of neurasthenia—as if the young Vulcan had traded in his club foot for a beige tumor behind his right ear. He wore light flannel plaid shirts entirely appropriate to his Western, athletic image. Moran imagined the Japanese saw him as the quintessential American—open, bluff, vigorous, an intellectual cowboy quickly propping up the dominos of their beloved stereotypes.

Each morning he dazzled them by reading a dense, brilliantly documented paper on the American concept of a defensive perimeter in Asia, capping that effort on the last day with fifty pages on the collapse of perimeter strategy in Korea in June, 1950. As always the Japanese made no comment. They took notes and nodded, having no appetite, no sympathy for verbal combat. Guade appeared puzzled by the silence, kept prodding his audience demanding an end to stillness. It fell to Moran to keep the discussion period from collapsing as thoroughly as the strategy Guade had analyzed. Their watched conversation veered quickly out of criticism of the paper. Moran, as always, was awed by the scholarship, overwhelmed by the logic. Instead, he and Guade talked about the importance of certain documents, the accessibility of others, and finally speculated on any American troop withdrawals from Korea. Would the U.S. intervene, for example, if the North Koreans came down across the demilitarized zone?

“When you get to hypotheticals and predictions I guess you can say the discussion has run out of substance,” Guade laughed, refusing to answer the question.

Suddenly a Japanese at the far end of the table began speaking British-accented English. “Isn’t the real problem than no one in the State Department in Washington, or in the U.S. knew very much about Korea in the period after World War II? There was no one who had any knowledge of the peninsula. Isn’t that the real problem?”

Guade seemed delighted the Japanese had spoken; his reply was slow in coming, measured, apparently thoughtful. “I believe you are right. Acheson certainly had almost no feel for the Korean situation. It is a very telling point.”

Moran wondered if the Japanese understood that idiom.

“I’m trying to think who might have had Korean expertise,” Guade continued.

“When did Hornbeck leave the department?” Moran volunteered, “And what about Atcheson, George Atcheson?” The two names Moran could summon up from the Department’s Far Eastern Desk.

The Japanese professor, amazingly, rose quickly to the challenge. “Hornbeck knew nothing of Korea. He was a so called ‘China hand’.”

“And Atcheson,” Guade continued, “was killed in a plane crash in 1947.”

“Well, I suppose that settles it,” Moran said. “It seems the less the U.S. knows about an area, the more likely it is to intervene there.”

“Maybe intervene is the wrong word,” Guade said, smiling.

“We could try decimate,” Moran answered, smiling his best Japanese smile, a signal that whatever you’re doing is not what I want.

Guade looked annoyed. Silence fell over the group and the chairman asked for further questions. When there were none, Guade suggested an early break for luncheon.

“So you think America is the scourge of the world?” Guade said to Moran in the bar afterwards.

“You don’t?” Moran answered.

“There have been lamentable incidents,” Guade went on, eyes bantering over the top of a Gin and Tonic.

“You know you can’t get decent tonic water in Japan,” Moran said. “For some reason Schweppes hasn’t gotten here yet in 1979.”

“I see,” Guade continued, “you wish to overlook my defense of the U.S., flood over it with your superior knowledge of Japan.”

“My knowledge of Japan . . . it’s true I’ve listened to too many arguments over whether we vaporized 140 thousand or 200 thousand folks in less than six seconds. Hiroshima’s Peace Park is a good place to test out whether decimate is too strong a term. But my true Japanese expertise concerns Gin—it’s a bargain here. Nobody drinks it but visiting professors and, of course, Brits in Kobe.”

“We agree to disagree,” Guade said. “I see you have adopted Japanese tactics. Now you can smile and cock your head, indicating that you know I’m an idiot who must, nonetheless, be indulged.”

“Precisely, only my smile indicates you deserve to die,” Moran said.

“Well, anyway, one of them,” Guade motioned to the Japanese who had clustered at two far tables, “actually said something today. I must be making progress. I appreciate you’re coming up with some names.”

“In graduate school I did a paper on Hornbeck and Atcheson. Their world view or some such. I ended up thinking Atcheson was a Communist. So you see we aren’t so far apart politically.”

“Absurd,” Guade countered.

“Our agreement, or my judgment on Atcheson?”

“Both.”

“Have you read Atcheson’s China dispatches?”

“No. But his anti-communism when he came here to Japan on the Commission after the war was well known—even embarrassing.”

“A cover, like my smile.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Well, read the China dispatches and then tell me what you think. Though you’ll have a bitch of a time finding U.S. government documents here. I don’t think Foreign Relations of the U.S. series exists in Kansai.”

“They certainly do at Doshisha,” Guade said.

“Well, they certainly don’t at the national universities.”

“Tell you what. Come to Tokyo next month for the seminar and we can argue about Atcheson,” Guade said paternally.

“What seminar?”

“A kind of reunion—the original proponent of the perimeter theory, including Liv Wells.”

“The Undersecretary for Marshall?”

“Byrnes,” Guade corrected him, smiling.

“Touché.”

“I’ll get you invited. You can even do a colloquium if you like.”

“I don’t like.”

“Well, just a private discussion then.”

“A history lesson?”

“Of course! Atcheson was no traitor,” Guade said, with just enough earnestness to stop the conversation— banter scattered.

2.

Moran actually had the China FRUS volumes with him in Japan. He wanted to write a follow up article on some recent students of the China Foreign Service Officers and there was grant money to air freight the FRUS volumes to Osaka. For the next week he worked over Atcheson’s dispatches, once again, cutting new notecards. He knew Guade would find his own volumes, knew that Guade would be rigorous and thorough and energetic in marshalling his evidence. Moran understood well enough that preconceptions inevitably shaped data, so he tried to make the case for Atcheson’s naiveté or anti-Communism, or simply a failure understand Mao and Chou. But he became certain there was no other way to explain Atcheson’s long dispatches explicating Marxian theory, or his agonized employment of that theory to justify new moves on the part of Stalin or Mao. Why should a counselor or attaché be so obsessed with the theory of Communism?

Guade could, doubtless would, point to changes of tone. Early Atcheson cheered the Communists on, but by 1945 he had begun to call the reforms a veneer for something else, begun to sound the anti-Russian incantation that characterized his post war work in Tokyo. But all ideologues risked disenchantment and all traitors understood the use of cover, didn’t they?

At the opening of the seminar sponsored by the American Center, Guade took Moran aside, to a corridor adjacent to the small lecture hall. “I’ve looked at the dispatches,” he said.

“So have I, again.”

“We should talk.”

“Aha! Is it a certain sense of contrition I hear in your tone?”

“More than that. We need to discuss several things. I’ve been to the states since Kyoto.”

“To the states and back?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve discovered Atcheson was really Alger Hiss?”

“I’ve a series of questions for you and a couple of envelopes. Let’s try to get some yaki tori after the panel. Meet me right here as soon as we’re through, can you?”

During the discussion Moran kept turning over in his mind Guade’s tone and insistence, as if he had taken on a certain respect for Moran, or at least seriousness toward him. Could it be had re-read Moran’s book on Gauss? That seemed unlikely. More probably Guade was hooked on an anti-Communist persuasion and glad to find new candidates for pillory. Moran was convinced of his own accusations against Atcheson, but equally convinced that such information was irrelevant, nothing more than a game one played with the data. But it occurred to him that providing such game data to someone like Guade who took the enterprise with the utmost seriousness was rather like tossing an ember into a pool of gasoline—an image which seemed appropriate to the glowing brazier of the yaki tori place they found. They took two stools at one end of the twenty that formed a semi-circle around the open hearth. Moran ordered beer but Guade refused to drink.

“The dispatches are interesting in that they display a man trying to apply dialectic theory to actual occurrences. It’s not simply a matter of reporting favorably on Mao or the Communists in Yenan.”

“Exactly,” Moran said.

The chef, in a sort of sawed-off, brilliantly-colored robe, dispensed charcoaled delicacies from off a long-handled wooden paddle. The Japanese on the other stools kept up a cascade of laughter and conversation. Already most of them had a red band around their eyes, which signaled intoxication. Moran always felt buoyant in such places. He siphoned off the incomprehensible exhilaration around him, drank furiously, and pointed to whatever he wanted cooked on the grill. He knew enough of the names to get favorites like chicken (tori), shrimp (ebi), and squid (iika). Guade was not interested in the ambiance of the place. He talked incessantly, made references to certain dates, certain dispatches, displaying, as always, total command, total recall, of the material, but Moran ceased to follow the exposition. He was settling over the edge of his stool, dribbling down the sides as Sapporo Ebisu beer worked its wondrous relaxation. Why was Guade talking so?

“With Davies and Service and to a certain extent Vincent, you catch enthusiasm for what seems to be a democratic regime run by Mao, but Atcheson is never interested in that. When Stalin suspends the Comintern Atcheson spends two pages explaining how this can be done under Marxist theory. I mean who was reading such a dispatch? Who could have cared? Alone among the China officers he seems mesmerized with dogma, theory, dialectics. It’s astonishing.”

“Of course. Of course,” Moran answered. “I never thought McCarthy had a shred of evidence against Service or Davies or Vincent, but against Atcheson, I thought there was a case and he never tried it.”

“Atcheson dies in August, 1947. McCarthy didn’t start ranting ‘till early 1950.”

“I know that. I guess you need living enemies. But Atcheson would have been the perfect target. He never even got mentioned.”

“Hurley accused him and all of them in 1945.”

“Hurley doesn’t count. Who cares about one bitter, Indian-bonneted Ambassador for chrissakes?”

“There’s more to Atcheson,” Guade hunched over, as if full of intrigue and revelation.

But Moran, after three large bottles of Ebisu, watched him from a perch about thirty feet overhead. Down below it seemed the Japanese squealed in abandon. A waitress moved on the outside of the semi-circle distributing more sake or beer to the increasingly noisy patrons.

“Essentially the dispatches raise significant questions and you have to answer why would somebody be writing such things? Why would somebody want to display control of Marxian theory as an interpretive prism of events in China?”

“I give up. Why?” Moran laughed. He liked the slow, mechanical way the chef brought the paddle to the grill and then slowly swung it toward the crowd revealing something to eat on the end. The paddle stopped at the correct orderer.

“I formed three hypotheses—“

“Just three?”

Guade looked carefully at Moran’s focusing eyes. “Yes, just three: One, he’d done some reading, maybe brushed up against Marxism, and was practicing to test his own comprehension of the schemes—bored in China. I know Foreign Service Officers do that, a kind of detachment from the impact of their own statements. Writing in the void and so to make some order you tend to test out theories that structure what you’re living in.”

“A kind of interpretation verging on apologia,” Moran said. He contemplated dipping his grilled onion slice in a side dish of raw beaten egg.

“Admittedly so, number two is that he was, after all, what Hurley thought he was, a Communist, committed, in a cell someplace and he merely analyzed the world, especially Russian actions, as a Communist might. Or three, he was an apprentice Communist filing dispatches to his mentor in the movement.”

“Ah, conspiracy!” Moran said, chomping on the mucusy onion. “I like that. Commies were everywhere you know. But you don’t exactly sound as skeptical as I imagined you would.”

“The data go elsewhere,” Guade said. “So you have to know more about him. What his background was, and who he reported to.”

“Gauss?” Moran asked.

“You know the answer to that,” Guade answered.

“Yes, indeed. Not Gauss. Blessed Clarence for once gets some benefit from being ignored.”

“Since I had to go back to D.C. anyway, I checked the archives and asked to pull his 123 file from State Department records.”

Moran has spent almost two hours going through Gauss’s 123 file. 123’s were usually fairly tame collections of innocuous personal documents—birthday greetings, letters from old friends concerning department business, sometimes photographs, occasionally a copy of a letter of recommendation, sometimes, if you were lucky, some diary entries that for one reason or another didn’t end up in the personal papers; often enough, only travel vouchers.

“But,” Guade went on, “it wasn’t there.”

“Someone had pulled it?”

“No. It was simply gone, disappeared. He had no 123 file. But that was unacceptable, so I asked to see the invoice of accessioned boxes when the stuff came over from State in 1957. And it wasn’t on the list. Ten packages of Foreign Service stuff, nine 123 files, none for Atcheson. It never came over. Lots of other Atcheson stuff, but not that. So I went over to State and said I wanted a trace on the Atcheson material before 1957. Where was it and who handled it?”

“All because of my joke in Kyoto?”

“You weren’t joking,” Guade said levelly. “Now follow this, pay attention and stop drinking your beer. In 1947, September of 1947, all of the Atcheson holdings went to an Air Force base in California, as part of the investigation of the plane crash that killed him. The holdings were requisitioned by a Lt. Kimball in charge of the Flight Accident Investigation, and the transfer was authorized by the Undersecretary, after consultation with the White House.”

“And they wouldn’t let you into the Air Force base?”

“Not funny. I haven’t been yet. I was more interested in why the investigation of a plane crash, the technical investigation of what it was that brought the plane down, required a review of all of Atcheson’s records.”

“Because he had a long history of fiddling with explosives?”

“The plane ran out of gas, ditched off Hawaii. No explosion.”

“Because Kimball was his brother-in-law? Because Atcheson had top secret clearance and any accidental death requires thorough investigation including the possibility of assassination?”

“Hardly,” Guade said, and then stopped abruptly.

Moran, who had gotten used to Guade’s recitation in the same way he had gotten used to inexplicable Japanese noises around him, was jolted by the silence.

“Wasn’t that an interpreter at the seminar?” Guade nodded in the direction of a Japanese toward the middle of the semi-circle. The fellow was wearing oversize tortoise shell glasses.

“Where?”

“Ten over, with the draft beer.”

“No.”

“He wasn’t up front. He was doing the simultaneous stuff from a booth in the back, behind you. I’m sure of it. You couldn’t see him unless you turned around, but I had to watch him all the time.”

“Maybe he’s a killer, a Japanese ninja.”

“Not funny. It’s just interesting he should turn up here, don’t you think? Maybe I should pass you the envelopes now.”

“Jesus, I am certainly sorry I said a word about Atcheson. In fact, I take it back. He was as American as apple pie, with shoyu.”

“What?”

“Soy sauce.”

“I see,” Guade said staring now at the apparent interpreter, whose eyes were surrounded by the tell-tale red band. The interpreter suddenly looked back, smiled, half-waved. Guade waved back. Moran could see him assessing the Japanese, reaching an innocent verdict and dismissing him to return to Atcheson’s greater conspiracy.

“We need much more data,” Guade said, “much greater access. But that might take years, would be equivalent to doing a biography, so I’ve decided to take a short cut and focus directly on the death. Why should the Air Force want to have a passenger’s background to determine the technical failures of a B-17 flight? Why would consultation with the White House be necessary? And what did the final accident report conclude? The Times is rather muddled. It says the plane ran out of gas and ditched about 40 miles off Oahu in very rough seas. But the pilot reported having eight hours of fuel when he left Kwajalein, more than enough for the four-hour flight. One of the technicians guessed that the number 2 engine which had been replaced en route in Guam had turned out to be a ‘gas eater’ but that surely would have been clear by Kwajalein. So a plane with plenty of fuel runs out of gas, ditches. There are four survivors. Atcheson is never found. Never found. Six bodies are recovered. Four aren’t. One of them presumably was Atcheson. The Times says the Coast Guard Cutter Hermes approached one body, but it sank out of sight in the last seconds before it could be pulled aboard.”

“It sounds like an accident to me.”

“Undoubtedly was, but why have all of Atcheson’s papers go to Norton Air Force base in California?”

Moran had stopped listening. He watched as the waitress opened a large electronic console in the far corner of the restaurant‘s tent over the grill. She undid a small microphone and slowly carried it to a patron sitting near the middle of the semi-circle. “Jesus,” Moran said, “now we get the singing.”

Guade suddenly took a half swallow of his beer. “No we don’t. I haven’t told you the half of it yet. Come on. We’ll go back to my hotel.”

Moran signaled the waitress, paid her twelve thousand yen. Guade forgot about the dinner check, but insisted on splitting the cab fare back to the Hilton.

“Atcheson drowned, slipped into the Pacific. No body. None. Ever.”

Moran stood a bit woozily in the gold lame light of the Hilton lobby, while Guade showed his hotel booklet and got his key. This shining world surpassed, Moran surmised, the cramped quarters of his business hotel in Shinjuku.

“He had one son, and I understand his wife came for sea burial ceremonies in Hawaii, but erected a monument in Denver. That’s an interesting problem, isn’t it—putting up a tombstone for a body not there?” Guade continued in the elevator, Moran watching his own widening grin in the circular mirror mounted on the back wall. “So in terms of removal Atcheson’s death was about as antiseptic as you could ask for.”

The corridor was grey-white and carpeted in grey-pink, spongy thickness, but Moran was delighted to find out Guade’s room was scarcely larger than his own in Shinjuku. There was one substantial difference. Guade’s bureau had a miniature bar on top of it, a rack of choice liquors in tiny bottles, and there was a refrigerator.

Moran unhesitatingly opened a tiny scotch bottle.

“I pay for that in the morning,” Guade said, irritated.

“I’ll deduct from the dinner tab,” Moran answered.

Guade sat on the bed, which doubled as a couch. Moran sank into a narrow straight-backed wicker chair opposite.

“Atcheson’s death—” Guade said.

“Look,” Moran interrupted, “I only made a suggestion about Atcheson. What’s the point in getting so riled up over it? I don’t think it makes any real difference. What would happen if you could show Atcheson was Mata Hari? Who’d care? And what would it prove historically?”

“You can’t make evaluations before the story is clear, can you?” Guade answered. “Why judge the data at the outset? You assemble the data and then decide. You simply can’t judge the sources at the outset.”

“As good a time as any,” More said. The T.V. seemed better than his Shinjuku version which was suspended about 18 inches from his bed.

“I want you to do something for me,” Guade said.

“Only if you pay your tab.”

Guade stared straight at the scotch bottle, then took a five thousand yen note from his wallet. “Are we even? Those cost 1,800 yen.”

“More than even,” Moran answered, taking the note.

“I want you to ask a question tomorrow. I want you to ask Wells a question. About Atcheson. Ask him why the Air Force wanted to see Atcheson’s papers as part of the Flight Accident Investigation.”

“And he’ll know?”

“He authorized the transfer, as often as not, from ’43 on Atcheson reported to him.”

“And Wells being here was also an accident?”

“You must have known it,” Guade said. “You must have foreseen it. That’s the best part. You set me up!”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“You’ll ask the question?”

“Why not? It’s a bland enough question.”