Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page A

the way.”
    “I’m pleased to meet you, Timothy Laughlin.”
    Tim had time enough to see that the man
was
pleased, but then the doors of the streetcar opened and the most terrible thing imaginable happened. As the two of them boarded, three other people, two women and a child, got between them. Standing in the aisle of the crowded car as it went down Pennsylvania, struggling to see past those three other souls, Tim only briefly recaptured his acquaintance’s attention. The young man gave him a helpless shrug and a relaxed smile that seemed to say: Oh well, sorry about this little turn of fate.
    Tim got off—there was nothing else to do—when the car stopped in front of the
Star.
He waved goodbye from the sidewalk, unsure whether the man could even see him. Standing in the doorway of the newspaper’s office, he watched the streetcar continue on its eastward way, and he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never be more in love than he was now.

CHAPTER FOUR
    October 6, 1953
    The handful of observers at the back of Room 357 could see the shoulders of the witness stiffen. Mr. Edward J. Lyons, Jr., representing the Judge Advocate General, gamely proceeded to describe the frequency with which United Nations prisoners had been “discovered with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes gouged out. They’d been used for bayonet practice and the like.”
    While still in charge in Korea, General MacArthur had been determined to do things differently from the way they’d been done during World War II. Rather than waiting for victory—or, as it appeared to be turning out this time, negotiated stalemate—he’d begun investigating North Korean atrocities as soon as anyone got wind of them. The evidence of torture and brainwashing was plentiful and compelling, and Senator Charles Potter (R-Michigan) appeared to relish running this hearing that had been convened to discuss it.
    McCarthy had not finished honeymooning down in Nassau, but the atrocities task force of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was Potter’s responsibility, and he seemed determined to make the most of it. There were no cameras or reporters here at this closed executive session in the Senate Office Building, and public hearings on the subject wouldn’t come until December, but even so, Potter remained energetic—no matter that the Democrats, who’d months ago quit the committee in protest of McCarthy’s tactics, refused to come back even for this; no matter, in fact, that Potter was the
only
senator, amidst several staff members, to have shown up this morning. He still looked bent on getting to the bottom of something awful.
    For most of the grim testimony it was hard to remember that this was the McCarthy committee. But there came a point, in the midst of eliciting information from Lieutenant Colonel J. W. Whitehorne III, when Potter made the mistake of thinking out loud: “I am curious about the twenty-three Americans who are still over there, whom apparently Communist propaganda got the best of. Or maybe they went into the service as pro-Communists. Is there any check being made as to the background of the men still there?”
    Once Colonel Whitehorne declared that information on the defectors was indeed available, Roy Cohn, as if hearing a whistle, sprang from a midmorning slumber: “What was the answer on that? Did any of those people have Communist backgrounds?”
    “Some of them had leftist leanings,” said Colonel Whitehorne.
    “Would we be able to get some documentation?” asked Cohn, more in the imperative than the interrogative. All at once he was in possession of the hearing, which now seemed, more familiarly, to be concerning itself with domestic subversion.
    Tim Laughlin had a much better view of Cohn than he had had at McCarthy’s wedding last week. He wasn’t sure whether to take him for a mobster or a boy wearing his first suit. The dark, hooded eyes; the scar down the nose; the slicked-down