Fellow Travelers
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 356 pages, $25
In “Many Are the Crimes,” historian Ellen Schrecker’s examination of McCarthyism in America, she sketches the growth of post-World War II loyalty programs at departments such as State and Commerce, whose employees were subject to repeated attacks, most prominently from the Capitol Hill redoubts of Sens. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Pat McCarran of Nevada.
Public Law 733, passed in 1950, had authorized 11 departments and agencies to dismiss employees summarily if they were deemed security risks, and President Harry Truman signed an executive order the following year that replaced the “reasonable grounds” standard for considering someone disloyal with a less-rigorous threshold of “reasonable doubt.” Shortly after taking office in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order extending P.L. 733 to cover the entire government. Escalation of the Cold War and McCarthy’s antics solidified an environment in which, Schrecker notes, “people could be fired if they were gay or drank too much or could not keep a secret or if they appeared to be vulnerable to some kind of pressure either through their own wrongdoing or their family connections.”
Welcome to Thomas Mallon’s “Fellow Travelers,” a novel set in precisely that period and context, in which one character could ask about another’s newly fired friend: ” ‘What’s his problem? Pink or lavender?’ ” ” ‘Lavender,’ ” is the reply. The friend had failed a polygraph test administered under the direction of Scott McLeod, the real-life former FBI agent who was put in charge of State Department security and who appears as a character in Mallon’s novel.
The fictional character who poses the communist-or-homosexual question, Z. Hawkins Fuller, is a State Department operative who will also be dragged into McLeod’s clutches to have his galvanic skin response measured, after being betrayed as a closeted gay by a subordinate in his office. Miraculously, “Hawk,” who is sexually magnetic to males and females, manages to fool the machine through some mental galvanism of his own.
The main on-again, off-again affair at the center of “Fellow Travelers” begins with a serendipitous meeting as Fuller shares a sunny park bench at Dupont Circle with a milk-drinking younger man, Timothy Laughlin. Laughlin is a summer intern at the Washington Star, and as an emergency fill-in has just attended McCarthy’s wedding and reception to take notes for the newspaper’s society reporter.
Later, through Fuller’s intervention, Laughlin will be taken on as a member of Sen. Charles Potter’s staff. Fuller is something of a Lothario, troubled principally by practical considerations — discovery of their liaison could end employment for them both — but Laughlin contends with the tension between his acts and his devout Catholicism, and expends much of his energy trying to reconcile two different kinds of faith.
As Mallon plays it out, fellow-traveling is a trope for many types of consorting, whether from belief in political systems or in the day-to-day playing of the political game itself, or in personal relations (although, as the fired gay character says of naming names to the government, ” ‘You know, “we” don’t all know one another’ “). The press often represents an unindicted co-conspirator here, operating out of shared interests with a political patron. For example, McCarthy, when feeling threatened by Potter, tells him, ” ‘I have some friends among the press. Men like [Walter] Winchell and [Hearst newspaper columnist] George Sokolsky. . . . Winchell has a microphone, Senator. And Sokolsky has a thousand of Hearst’s printing press- es.’ “
The public/private divide is a closely related fault line that Mallon has running under his literary turf, how machinations behind the scenes both politically (such as the meeting above between Potter and McCarthy) and personally are translated in the public sphere, in which duplicity is all too common. Laughlin, an ardent idealist who believes in the cause of fighting communism, gradually becomes disaffected with politics-as-theater, dismayed to discover that ” ‘it’s all phony’ ” when he sees how words are put in Potter’s mouth, for which the senator is then lionized.
The high irony of McCarthy (rumored in his time to have had homosexual experiences, something that Mallon plays with in his plot) and his nasty deputy Roy Cohn (whose homosexuality is historically documented, although it does not play heavily in the novel) investigating others for moral turpitude is rich, if a little obvious.
The main body of “Fellow Travelers” is bracketed with a prologue and epilogue, which take place in 1991, in the aftermath of Laughlin’s death and amid the new flush of freedom in the Baltic republics (whose fate is one of the Cold War themes threaded through the novel). Fuller is, as the 1990s dawn, deputy secretary of the U.S. mission to Estonia, and as far as his personal politics go, he considers his situation analogous to Findland’s, “for so long half free and quite comfortable, somehow exempt from the fuss of near-apocalypse.” The near-apocalypse, we can assume, applies multiply to the Cold War nuclear standoff and the McCarthy period, and by extension to Laughlin and Fuller’s heated relationship as well. (Laughlin’s excitability “veered ungovernably, they both knew, between something that charmed Fuller and repelled him.”)
The bulk of the novel takes place in the Eisenhower period from 1953 to 1957, an era of political brinksmanship within the closely divided Senate as well as between East and West and McCarthy and Eisenhower. Mallon weaves his plot around the high points of McCarthy’s time in the limelight, including allusion to the dressing down TV journalist Edward R. Murrow delivered on his CBS show “See It Now” in March 1954, hanging McCarthy with his own words, and the famous line of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that June, when Welch asked the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
The weakness of many historical novels is that the history is reduced to a theme park in which the characters cavort but represents little more. The historical import of McCarthyism helps Mallon avoid that pitfall to a significant degree: The personalities of his characters are securely tied to the environment in which they exist and represent varied potential responses to it. In both macro and micro moments, Mallon plays with the history. What is the significance of Potter, in whose office Laughlin labors? Potter, a war veteran who had lost his legs in combat, was a Republican from Michigan who exercised his political legs by siding with the Democrats and becoming the swing vote in a 4-3 decision that forced Roy Cohn off McCarthy’s committee.
Much more subtly, but showing that Mallon is working even the small details, Laughlin befriends a (fictional) correspondent for The Nation, who tells him that the magazine Encounter he sees Laughlin reading will one day be shown to be “an organ of the United States government”; that publication of the anti-communist advocacy group Congress for Cultural Freedom later proved to have been the beneficiary of Central Intelligence Agency funding. (That part goes unmentioned by Mallon, but it’s the fact underlying what otherwise might seem an offhand comment by a character.)
Mallon mixes in cultural and historical references from the early postwar period in profusion: Earl Warren’s swearing-in as chief justice; Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s marrying; characters singing from the score of “Oklahoma”; Dylan Thomas’ drinking himself to death; the Hollywood 10; Doris Day on the radio, singing “Secret Love”; “Teahouse of the August Moon” on Broadway, and Mary Martin in “Peter Pan”; the notorious Sam Sheppard murder trial; the opening of Disneyland; Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds; Dr. Albert Schweitzer; and Clare Boothe Luce. Richard Nixon and Bobby Kennedy. Margaret Chase Smith, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and a spate of other senators past. And that’s not to mention the attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel over control of the Suez Canal, or the French loss in Indochina at Dien Bien Phu.
Mallon has mined history before in his novels, and once described in a short essay that in “Henry and Clara” (centered on the couple who accompanied the Lincolns to Ford’s Theater in 1865) he stuck to the facts as he knew them, and grew the novel in the spaces between those facts. Yet when it came to “Dewey Defeats Truman,” he invented much more liberally, explaining that “it’s important to remember that the historical novelist’s principal obligations are to literature, not to history.” In the acknowledgments of “Fellow Travelers,” this caveat appears: “I have taken my usual small liberties with historical fact, and more than my usual license with historical figures.” Should we reach for the polygraph?
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Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
