Checkpoint Read online

  BEN: Ah, that was thanks to the Carter administration, that was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Then Reagan and Bush ramped it up hugely. You don’t want to think about all that too much, though, because then you get cranky. You want to keep focused, keep to a small canvas.

  JAY: Man, I know what you mean about cranky. I get so cranked up. I mean—so what you’re saying basically is that the CIA gave us urban sprawl? Jesus, man, that’s—whoo!

  BEN: Well, no, no, be careful, now, I wouldn’t go that far. There may be some institutional overlaps, that’s all I’m saying. But what I’m hoping is that some of the people who did these sprawl studies may still be around, and they may still be sharp enough to shed some light on the fine structure of the events they were part of.

  JAY: You want to interview them.

  BEN: Yeah, and that’s always the painful part of doing Cold War research. You find the number and call, and maybe a son or daughter answers, or maybe a nurse’s aide, and then after a long wait your man comes to the phone. He’s got a reedy, old-man’s voice: “Hello?” He’s a guy who once, long ago, had strong, tough feelings toward the Russians, and now he doesn’t remember too well what was going on back then, what the motives were, why there was all this bustle and activity. He’s probably got pale blue pants on and he’s probably not wearing a belt. He’s become an outsider in his own life. It seems rude to interview him, and yet—

  JAY: And yet you have to, you have to. Don’t you? You have to pick up the phone and call him up.

  BEN: If you want to tell the story, you at least have to try to talk to him.

  JAY: Right. That’s right. So you’re, ah, sunk pretty darn deep into the fifties and sixties now.

  BEN: I am, and I do enjoy learning more and more tiny things—stacking new tidbits onto the tidbits that I’ve already got stacked. A lot of material was declassified under Clinton. That may be the best thing he did—he didn’t like secrecy, except of course in some areas. So yes, I’m still interested in the Second World War, of course, but the fifties lure me as well. But okay, I see where you’re going.

  JAY: Where am I going? I don’t know where I’m going.

  BEN: You’re wanting to imply that there’s equally entrancing material for study right here and now.

  JAY: Well—

  BEN: And that we can understand it in a fuller way because we’re living through it, and that we should be spending time on our time, and not peeling away at these cold, dead onions. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?

  JAY: Well, no. Well, sure, yeah. I mean, it is sometimes frustrating to see a person like yourself who is willing to poke and poke into the “fine structure” of stuff that happened back in 1944 or 1954, but who’s uninterested in 2004, you know? Here’s this whole funky truckload of horror that’s going on right now! And yet the digging on the part of the real historians is minimal.

  BEN: You try it. Try it with 2004. Be my guest. Blow the lid off it, my man. You’ll find it’s difficult to do.

  JAY: I know it’s difficult.

  BEN: People are still very much in the middle of their careers, so they’re guarded all down the line, and not only is everything classified, but it still feels to them like it needs to be classified, which isn’t true about secrets from fifty years ago. And it’s so huge, because it’s all happening now.

  JAY: I know it’s huge.

  BEN: It’s so big that there are no insiders because the inside is all around us. That’s the thing. You need a fair amount of condensing and distilling and sheer forgetting to go on before historians like me can get to work.

  JAY: Yeah, yeah.

  BEN: But that’s not the real problem. For me the real problem is that if I worked on Now rather than working on Then I’d have to type these names all the time. Day after day I’d have to be typing “Dennis Hastert” or “Richard Perle.” “Tom DeLay.” They’re so familiar. They’re for journalists. Much more pleasant to type “Stuart Symington” or “Harry Hopkins” or “John Foster Dulles.” You see?

  JAY: It’s an escape.

  BEN: Sure it is! Of course it is! I don’t want to have to think about William Kristol any more than I have to. That sad sickly smile on TV. I want to think about Herman Kahn. He’s dead, he can’t do any more harm.

  JAY: Who’s Herman Kahn?

  BEN: Oh, a civil defense nut.

  JAY: You could at least map the old onto the new.

  BEN: Well, you know, the weird thing about this administration, actually, is that the big guys in it are historical figures already. They’ve lurched back to life.

  JAY: Like Cheney.

  BEN: Cheney was part of the Nixon White House; so was Rumsfeld. You can go to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and ask to see the Cheney papers. They’re there.

  JAY: It’s as if these rusted hulks, these zombies, have fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they’ve been lying, and they’re stumbling around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they’re going “We—are—your—advisers.”

  BEN: Precisely.

  JAY: I mean they’re there, physically in the White House, making decisions—Dick Cheney! Oh, he’s hunched, man, the corruption has completely hunched and gnarled him. His mouth is pulled totally over on one side of his face. It’s really—

  BEN: And around him are all those freshfaced little Republicans.

  JAY: Yes, yes, the applecheeked boys with their cruel mouths, starstruck, I swear they fall in love with these drugstore cowboys. George W. Bush, J. Danforth Quayle. Surrounded by fawners who want to Serve Our Leader. Soon they’re going to discover some hormonal thing that leads to right-wing behavior, some very specific deficiency combined with an overdose. You end up mean-spirited, with a high, whiny voice.

  BEN: Like Newt.

  JAY: Or Orrin Hatch. Or what’s his name, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. And the thing I can’t figure is, military men seem to want to spend their lives living with other men. Can you make any sense of it? They’re out there on some desolate airbase in the middle of nowhere, protecting some future pipeline—eating with other men, shaving with other men. And then actually defecating with other men.

  BEN: It’s a puzzler.

  JAY: Shitting with them, day after day after day! How can they endure it?

  BEN: I guess it’s like professional football.

  JAY: Excuse me for a second, I’ve got to take a dump.

  BEN: Sure.

  JAY: No, I’m just kidding.

  BEN: Oh, I see.

  JAY: And then they stand in the briefing rooms tapping a stick on a map. “These, gentlemen, are our targets of opportunity.”

  BEN: Yeah, the Democrats—

  JAY: And then it begins, the flyovers, and people get hurt. Bombing “campaigns.”

  BEN: The Democrats do seem more real, somehow. Not all of them. But guys like Barney Frank.

  JAY: Barney Frank is great.

  BEN: He’s articulate, he’s funny. I love the guy.

  JAY: He’s a normal human being.

  BEN: Well, and coming from a person such as yourself, that’s quite an endorsement.

  JAY: Haven’t you ever thought about killing somebody? Haven’t you?

  BEN: Yeah . . . but not. Not. But yeah.

  JAY: Okay, then.

  BEN: Well, what about Dick Cheney? Are we going to kill him, too?

  JAY: We certainly should.

  BEN: He’s smarter, he’s more corrupt, by which I mean he’s had more time to capitalize on

  his corruptions, he’s wrecked military procure-

  ment—

  JAY: But what do you mean, “we”? That’s what you said: “Are we going to kill him?”

  BEN: Yeah, well, by “we” I mean “you.”

  JAY: Oh, I see.

  BEN: You know, of course, that Cheney tried to block the Freedom of Information Act back when Ford was president? The man is a classic intelligence hack, working to keep everything quiet. There’s a nice photograph of him and Rumsfeld toge
ther when they were both on staff for Gerald Ford. Rumsfeld’s chin was even bigger then.

  JAY: Fucking Bobbseys. Cheney was CIA, surely, he has that look.

  BEN: Oh, maybe, who knows? Actually, Cheney’s first job in Washington was working for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity—Johnson set that up to help poor people. Then Nixon took over and he went, “We’ll show those poor people, heh heh,” and he put Don Rumsfeld in charge of it. And Rumsfeld kind of got into it. Then later, Rumsfeld and Cheney got extremely rich. Rumsfeld made his bundle when he got the FDA to approve NutraSweet.

  JAY: Economic opportunity.

  BEN: But no, see, the thing about Cheney is that he’s the one. He’s the guy who bombed Iraq back in 1991. He and Father Bush tore up those people with cluster bombs, pounded the power stations, the water plants.

  JAY: They’re responsible.

  BEN: The targeting was immoral, and then most of the bombs missed the targets anyways. Sometimes they fell in the sand, sometimes they fell on a house. Not just that one shelter where a hundred cowering civilians died, but over and over.

  JAY: And then the years of sanctions.

  BEN: Madeleine Albright, God of mercy, that woman! And Clinton goes ahead and does it all over again in Belgrade, with the cluster bombs. Unbelievable. A Rhodes scholar.

  JAY: And they know that they’re killing innocent people. I remember last year, at the start of this war, that very first day I think it was, General Barry Mc—McArthur?

  BEN: McCaffrey.

  JAY: General Barry McCaffrey, that animal, was on one of the networks as a color commentator, and he himself said, right on network TV, he said, We know we’re going to have civilian casualties, because we know that ten percent of the bombs don’t go where they’re supposed to. It’s built in to their statistics.

  BEN: Well, in the first Gulf War it wasn’t anything like ten percent, because we were getting rid of all those old munitions—sixty percent of the dumb bombs missed, sixty percent. It was a big waste disposal project—the Persian Gulf was the landfill. You dump the expired bombs so that you have to order up fresh new ones. Did you ever by any chance read Crusade?

  JAY: No, no.

  BEN: Well, it’s a history of the first Gulf War. There’s a moment in there—it’s by a guy who writes for the Post, and he interviewed a ton of people—there’s a moment in there that sums up the whole war, the futility of it.

  JAY: What is it?

  BEN: This battleship is stationed somewhere off the coast of Kuwait. So it shells the coast and it shells the coast, and then the assessment people fly over and they say, Okay, you’re done, you’ve totally destroyed everything that needs to be destroyed, mission accomplished, you can stop your shelling now, nice job. And the captain of the ship goes to somebody, I think he went to Schwarzkopf, and he says, “General, my ship is due for scrapping. This is its last moment of glory. When we go home all the old shells we have on board will have to be decommissioned, and that’ll be very expensive. So what do you say?” And so Schwarzkopf, or whoever it is, goes, “Okay, sure.” And so the ship sits in the water lobbing more shells into Kuwait, blowing up stuff that’s already been blown up fifty times over.

  JAY: Waste disposal.

  BEN: That’s it, that’s what it was, when it wasn’t simple savagery. That was the war that really undid me. Seeing those bombs float down silently on TV. My blood froze, I had to turn everything off—I remember one night I went down to the basement and I sat there for ten minutes listening to the furnace. All those sorties, and Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes on TV cheerfully chatting away.

  JAY: They were high on it.

  BEN: Suddenly everyone was using that word, “sorties.” We’d been working with Saddam for years. Total devastation. That’s on Dick Cheney’s head, and George Senior’s head. Not George W.’s head. He was just fooling around with a baseball team back then.

  JAY: They got away with it in ’91.

  BEN: They got away with it.

  JAY: This time, they won’t.

  BEN: Well, we’ll see. Who knows whether the man will be reelected or not? At the moment, he’s dropping, but he may bounce back.

  JAY: He won’t be reelected, because he’s going to be dead. Marines standing in rows with their hands on their hearts, hundreds of limousines, mourners filing past.

  BEN: Come off it.

  JAY: No, this time, this war, that he imposed on the world, when the whole world said no to him so CLEARLY, in the streets, in every country, this war that he forced on humanity—this war will be avenged!

  BEN: Okay, but first, how about we get a bite to eat? I’m ready to chew my thumb off. I drove all the way down here at eighty miles an hour because I thought you were going to jump out a window.

  JAY: The window does open.

  BEN: That’s nice to know. Listen, I saw a couple of restaurants on the way in. We could go, or I could—I could just, you know, I could hop out for a second and get us something and be back in a jiffy.

  JAY: No, no, no, no need to do that. You might come back with federal agents, and we need to continue this. There’s room service.

  BEN: That’ll work.

  JAY: And the menu’s here somewhere. Ah: “All Day Dining.” Club sandwiches. Hey, I can tell you they make a peppercorn steak that’s kind of nice. I had it last night.

  BEN: Have they got a Caesar salad?

  JAY: They do. You want that?

  BEN: Yes, I would. A Caesar salad and a steak.

  JAY: Good.

  BEN: On me, though.

  JAY: No, you drove all the way down.

  BEN: No, no, no. You said you’re having pecuniary difficulties.

  JAY: Yeah, but that’s not really going to matter too much. I’m charging everything to my room. Hi—yes, is this Inez? Hi, Inez. I talked to you last night, I believe. How are you? Good. We’d like to order some lunch. That’s right. For two. My friend’s in town. Ben. Could we possibly have, let’s see, one Caesar salad. . . . You want anchovies on that?

  BEN: Sure.

  JAY: That’s an enthusiastic yes to the anchovies. And the peppercorn steak, please. It was so good last night. How do you want it cooked?

  BEN: Medium.

  JAY: He’d like it very well done, please.

  BEN: No no.

  JAY: It’s okay. And a cheeseburger and fries. Extremely well done. Right. And we’ll have a big bottle of, uh, sparkling water. Not flavored, just clean, fresh sparkling water. That’s it. And a big tub of coffee, as well. That’ll be great. Thanks, take it easy. Boy, she’s very nice. She says half an hour. We can have some bagel chips or something now from the minibar if you want.

  BEN: No, I’ll just wait for my, uh, very well done steak.

  JAY: You have to do that these days, trust me. If you say you want it medium, they’ll bring it to you raw, and I mean raw raw, bleeding all over the plate. Just raw.

  BEN: I see, so if you ask for well done—

  JAY: If you ask for well done, you get medium rare. I’ve been there, man. If you ask for very well done, you get medium. And that’s what you wanted.

  BEN: How do you get well done?

  JAY: There’s no way, it’s impossible. Nobody’s going to cook your steak well done in this day and age. Forget it.

  BEN: Well, thanks for looking out for me.

  JAY: No problem. Yee, it’s bright out. Let’s crack the window a little.

  BEN: Why?

  JAY: Just to be aware of what’s going on outside. Way over there, beyond those trees, that’s where the snipers are on the roof. The sharpshooters. But that’s okay, because I’ve got my special bullets.

  BEN: Consider this: You kill him and boing, Cheney’s driving the truck. He’s twice as bad.

  JAY: Well, once you go down that road, man—that’s a slippery slope, let me tell you. You start to think, Okay, I know I’ve got to get rid of Bush, oh, but wait, Cheney’s twice as bad, got to take him out, too, maybe some kind of tiny scorpion that climbs up
his leg just as he’s being sworn in, bites him, he slumps. The scorpion has no memory of what it’s done—The Manchurian Scorpion. But wait, hmm, Rumsfeld’s just as bad as Cheney, so in fairness—and don’t forget Powell—maybe you don’t kill Powell, because he was less enthusiastic, maybe you just want to put him in a coma. And then there’s Tommy Franks and General Richard Myers, with all his medals, and it just goes on and on. And eventually you start thinking you have to somehow do away with about thirty or forty people. Which is pretty outrageous. And then you think, well, thirty or forty people, what’s that? That’s NOTHING. They’ve killed thousands of innocent people. People who are utterly blameless. Thousands of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with any warlike activity.

  BEN: Yeah, no, wrong road, we definitely don’t want to go down that road.

  JAY: The proportions are skewed. It’s like peeking into the hole in one of those miniature rooms—those little Dr. Caligari rooms, where everything looks right, but it isn’t right at all. People think these prison photos prove how bad the war is. Actually, no, the prison photos are nice compared with how bad the war is. If the prisoners had had clothes on, even bloody clothes, the Republicans would have said, Hey, sometimes you have to break a few eggs, you know. It’s the nakedness that made it a scandal.

  BEN: Perhaps so.

  JAY: They say, in hushed tones, they say, “Some of the Prisoners Have Died.” Well, what the fuck? Yes, some have died. Some have been packed in ice and spirited away. But more than ten thousand Iraqis have been killed in this war. It’s off the charts. Tanks firing on apartment blocks. Morgues and hospitals filled to capacity, blood splashed on the walls. None of it is secret. It’s known, it’s been reported around the world for a full year, and yet there’s no outrage about that, there’s no scandal. What, that? Oh, that’s just the war. I mean, standing naked with a hood over your head while a dog barks at your dick, okay, that’s horrible, but having a missile hit your house is a hell of a lot worse, because you may be carrying your own kid out of the rubble.

  BEN: There’s something really sinister about those hoods.