The Man with the Iron Heart

sign that I am meant to succeed. And if I fail, what is left for Germany but the old dreadful choice between brownshirts and Reds?”

“Sooner or later-sooner, with luck-Germany will need to stand on her own two feet again,” Hudgeons said. “So we see it, anyhow. The only other choice is sitting on this country forever, and that would be…difficult.”

Lou thought it was just what Germany deserved. Whether the rest of the USA felt the same way was liable to be a different story. People with picket signs marching in front of the White House? Congressmen and Senators with them? If they’d done that while the war was still going, it would have been treason, or something close to it. It still felt that way to Lou, even though the fighting was officially over. But more and more Americans seemed to think otherwise. And fewer and fewer dogfaces on occupation duty wanted to do anything more than pack up and go home in one piece.

“We can stand up, stand alongside of the United States and Britain and France as a free and prosperous democracy,” Adenauer said. “We can. But we will not, not until people are able to go about their business without worrying whether a fanatic will blow himself up in the market square or explode a truck in front of the church on Sunday morning. However much you may hate it, fear is a weapon.”

He had a point. Lou wished he knew how to keep Heydrich’s men from making everybody else afraid. No one seemed to know how to do that, not yet. Could something like the Christian Democratic Union make a difference? Lou didn’t know-but if it could, he was all for it.

XI

Sometimes you stepped on a dog turd and came out smelling like a rose. Sometimes the bread landed butter side up. Sometimes, even in the newspaper game, you had to go easy on the cliches and just write.

When the Army booted Tom Schmidt out of Germany, he’d been afraid he would have to quit reporting and find a real job. If he didn’t have to go that far, he’d figured he would end up on a weekly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that never got word of his fall from journalistic grace.

He’d been doing what he thought was right when he passed on the fanatics’ film of luckless Private Cunningham. He’d had the nasty feeling that would make him a villain to almost everyone outside the news business. To his surprise, he turned out to be wrong. A startling-and growing, which was even more startling- number of people back in the USA were loudly calling for President Truman to bring all the GIs home from Germany. They weren’t always people he was comfortable with, but he was in no position to be choosy.

He was, for instance, a staunch New Dealer. The Chicago Tribune had gone after FDR from the minute he got nominated to run against Hoover. The Tribune showed no signs of letting up on Democrats just because a new fanny sat in the Oval Office swivel chair, either. But when it offered him a slot in Washington at twice the money he’d been making before he had to come home, how could he say no?

He couldn’t. He didn’t even try. He had no trouble snagging an apartment in Washington. Now that the war was over, or mostly over, or whatever it was, more people flowed out of the capital than came in. His landlord was almost pathetically eager to have him.

He didn’t have much trouble finding a replacement for Ilse, either. An awful lot of people left in Babylon by the Potomac were secretaries and clerk-typists. Making connections wasn’t hard. Myrtle was more expensive than Ilse; she wouldn’t put out for K-rations. What the hell? You couldn’t have everything.

When Tom applied for a White House press credential, he wondered if the flunkies there would tell him to fold it till it was all corners and then stuff it. But, after one of them made a phone call to a higher-up, everything went snicker-snack.

“Thanks,” he said, wondering how his vorpal blade managed to slice through red tape.

“It ain’t your pretty face, buddy,” the press secretary’s subordinate replied. “If we turned you down, how much crap would you crank out about how we were stifling free expression? So we won’t stifle it. You want to ask the President questions, go ahead. Five gets you ten he spits in your eye.”

Roosevelt had been a gentleman right down to his paralyzed toes. From what Tom heard, Harry Truman was anything but. If he thought you were a son of a bitch, he’d call you one. Well, it made for good copy. “I’ll take my chances,” Tom said.

“You sure will.” The other man sounded as if he looked forward to it.

If Truman cussed him out…Tom had been cussed out by experts. You couldn’t quote a President cussing- there were unwritten rules about such things, as there were about reporting on, say, a Senator’s lady friends-but you could probably get the idea across one way or another.

Tom’s chance came on a blustery day in the middle of January. He presented his pass at the front gate of the White House, wondering if the guards would turn him away at the last minute. But they didn’t. One of them said, “Lucky stiff-you get to go inside. Goddamn cold out here.”

They wouldn’t have had anything to complain about in the White House press room. Tom figured he’d come out as a ham: thoroughly cooked, and just as thoroughly smoked. His own Old Gold added only a little to the tobacco haze. Truman’s press secretary came in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Charlie Ross was a longtime Missouri newspaper man. He was an even longer-time friend of Truman’s; they’d gone to high school together. Rawboned, with a lock of gray hair that flopped down onto his forehead, he stood several inches taller than the President.

But Truman ran the show. He bustled in and started sassing several correspondents he knew well. They returned fire. Truman wasn’t Stalin-giving him a hard time wouldn’t cost you your head. He looked out over the crowd of reporters. When his eyes met Tom’s, he said, “Haven’t seen you here before. You new?”

“Yes, sir. Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune.”

“Oh. You’re him.” Truman looked as if somebody’d just farted. “Charlie wanted to give you the bum’s rush, but I said no. You don’t have to go sneaking around any more, Mr. Schmidt. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face. Believe me, I can take the heat.”

“Thanks, Mr. President,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t’ve had to sneak if your people in Germany weren’t hiding how badly things are going there.”

“They’re still fighting in Germany, Mr. Schmidt, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Truman said tartly. “We don’t want to spread information that can help the fanatics.” He might be tart, but he was also smart: he didn’t use the word war. The war, after all, was over.

Sure it is, Tom thought. “Well, yes, sir,” he replied. “But since the Nazis were the ones who kidnapped that poor GI and then filmed him, don’t you think they already knew what was going on?”

Truman glowered at him over the tops of his metal-rimmed glasses. Tom felt as if he were getting grilled by his principal after some high-school scrape. No doubt the President wanted him to feel just that way. “During the War Between the States, Abe Lincoln asked why he had to order a young deserter shot but let the clever so-and-so who conned him into deserting go free,” Truman said. “All these years later, it’s still a damn good question. Or don’t you think morale matters?” He skated around war again.

“Of course I do, Mr. President,” Tom said. “But I think truth matters, too. Or what are we fighting for? Hitler was the one who went in for the big lie.”

Truman’s nostrils flared as he snorted angrily. “I suppose you think we should have pointed a big arrow with neon lights at the Normandy beaches and run up a billboard that said ‘We’re going to invade here.’ Some things need to be kept secret, that’s all. Go ahead-tell me I’m wrong.”

“Not me.” Tom shook his head. “But you can hide anything you want behind that kind of smoke screen. Like I said, we weren’t keeping this from the Nazis. We were keeping it from our own people. I don’t think that’s right.”

“Heydrich’s so-and-so’s didn’t snatch Private Cunningham because they figured we’d yield to those demands they made him mouth,” Truman snapped. “They released that movie because they wanted to confuse decent Americans and to scare them. Schrechlichkeit, they call it. Frightfulness. We tried to suppress it to keep that from happening-at my order, in case you’re wondering. But you played straight into their murderous hands. Thank you one hell of a lot, Mr. Schmidt. I hope you’re proud.”

Tom had thought the President would say his commanders in Germany had made the decision and he backed