An electric fan on a windowsill proved itself no real substitute for air-conditioning, and Pearson was in a short-sleeved pale yellow shirt with a bow tie as crooked as the rural landscape. You could see the cheap thing clipped on. Ah how the mighty had fallen, or anyway stumbled. He was in fewer papers these days, and unless my son had heard me bitching about my sometime client’s stinginess, Sam like most of his age group had no idea who this household name of yesterday was.
A jar of Oreos towered over the cluttered desk, one of the Mormon’s Quaker boss’s few indulgences. Light drinking was another, and fair-haired girls used to be.
But like all of us, Drew Pearson was growing older. No, old. He remained lanky if bonily so now, not the robust presence of before. His short-trimmed hair clung to the sides and in back, snow-white now, dwarfed by a chrome dome. To go with his egg-shaped head, he had a little Poirot mustache, also white, no longer waxed.
Pearson finished his page, all but ripped it from the Smith Corona and tossed it on the desk. He swiveled to me and unleashed his well-modulated, midrange voice.
“Nathan, how is that son of yours?”
I shrugged. “Healthy. Lots of hair. He was going to vote for Gene McCarthy, but I think now maybe his candidate is Bobby Kennedy.”
A curt nod, pursed lips. “Not realistic, then.”
“What kid in his early twenties is?”
“Tell him McCarthy votes with the gas and oil lobby. He can count on Humphrey for good old-fashioned liberal values.”
“Okay.”
That was it for small talk. Not his forte.
“Drew, you don’t have to pretend you liked Bob Kennedy. I’m from Chicago. Politics are just another racket as far as I’m concerned.”
“Cynicism makes an undignified fallback, Nathan.”
“At the circus it’s best you work with a net. You never trusted Bob because he worked for that other McCarthy, a hundred years ago — Joe. And Bob never liked you because you attacked his father in 1960. Now that another son’s in the ground, what’s the goddamn difference?”
The Quaker did not like that kind of language. His blue eyes — that same ice blue as Anderson’s — widened momentarily, but he didn’t comment on my profanity.
Instead he said, “Bobby might have grown into it. But he was too young to be president.”
“You don’t get any older than he is now.”
That didn’t change Pearson’s dismissive attitude. “The kids only liked him for that shaggy hairstyle.”
I rested my right ankle just above my left knee. “Have you seen Gene McCarthy’s hairstyle? It’s about as pre-Beatle as they get.”
Pearson shrugged that off. It was almost a shudder.
“McCarthy’s finished,” Pearson said. “He said too many bad things about Bobby. It’s not fair but he’ll be seen as having blood on his hands.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, but I knew the old boy had a better sense of where the political winds blew than most, myself certainly included.
Anderson, who’d been sitting quietly with his arms crossed over his suitcoat like an usher on break, said to his boss, “I recall what you said about Bobby, when you interviewed him after—”
“After his brother made him Attorney General, yes.” The columnist looked up, as if that were where he kept his memory; he sneered a little. “‘A gimlet-eyed, cold young man who sits in his shirt sleeves with his tie undone.’”
Said the gimlet-eyed, cold old man sitting in his shirt sleeves with his clip-on askew.
“Speaking of blood on somebody’s hands,” I said, not putting any edge on it — that wasn’t necessary, “you sure spent last month working Bob over.”
Those ice-blue eyes flashed again and the little white mustache twitched. “I’m complimented, Nathan. That you’re following my column even now.”
“Sure. It’s fun to see a knife wielded well when you’re not the victim. A whole installment, free of anything approaching news, about how ruthless Bob was. All about how his old man once said, ‘Bobby hates the way I hate.’”
He sniffed, a much-ingrained habit. “I’ve never made a secret of my preference in this race. Hubert’s an old friend. How was I to know we’d have another Kennedy martyred on us?”
“Tough break for you.”
Speaking of knives, I’d dug mine in deep enough. No need to say it out loud: everyone in this room knew Pearson served as Lyndon Johnson’s hatchet man and Hubert Humphrey’s cheerleader.
Anderson, who had a measured, reasonable style even when he was defending his boss, said, “Nate, what we ran about Bobby was absolutely accurate. Whatever, whoever, our sources might have been.”
I grunted a laugh. “Things that happened in 1963, when Bob was Attorney General, were somehow news in May ’68? Ancient history suddenly ‘stop the presses,’ right before the Oregon primary?”
Which RFK had lost, the first election defeat ever for a Kennedy.
Pearson sniffed again. “Your late friend bought a primary in Indiana last month... just as his brother Jack did a West Virginia primary, once upon a time — with Papa Joe’s urging... and money.”
“This just in — the latest from 1960.”
The columnist sat forward, bristling, spewing words: “With young Kennedy pandering so shamelessly after the black vote, it’s only responsible to reveal how AG Robert Kennedy authorized the wiretap of Martin Luther King’s office and home!”
That juicy tidbit would have gone from J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to LBJ in the Oval Office to this un-air-conditioned one I was sitting in while a bored cat snoozed.
Anderson raised his eyebrows, his expression otherwise cool. “Bobby’s campaign saw to it that his speech in Indianapolis, the night King was assassinated, got plenty of play in the media.”
Bob hadn’t handled the King wiretap controversy at all well, his defense coming across as self-serving hair-splitting. He’d claimed only wanting to prove to J. Edgar that King wasn’t a Commie threat, insisting he’d never approved bugging the Civil Rights leader’s hotel rooms — office and home only. Gene McCarthy had pounced on that like a hungry hound tossed a T-bone.
The hotel room bugging, whoever approved it, was an obvious effort to put King in bed with a female not his wife — a supple secretary or star-struck supporter. Which you might think a public figure like Pearson, dallying with his own “fair-haired girls,” would be hesitant to use. You’d be wrong. Hypocrisy was the lifeblood of D.C.
Anderson said, “You can’t fault us, Nate, for telling the truth. What do you expect from journalists?”
“Is that a trick question?”
The legman ignored my dig. “When I wrote about the involvement of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in the Castro assassination plots... this ‘Operation Mongoose’... there was no denial from your friend’s quarters.”
How could there be? It was true. And I’d been in it up to my neck.
I tossed Anderson a look and another to Pearson. “You two gents do realize Bob isn’t running anymore. And that I am only here in town because he was my friend and they were burying him yesterday.”
Pearson’s palms patted the air and Anderson shifted in his chair uncomfortably. The cat stirred but didn’t give a damn.
The columnist said, “My fair-game criticisms of your late friend, in the heat of battle, now puts me in an awkward position with my readership.”