I Married a Communist Read Free

everything—though not because Grant was any less reckless in the use of power than the rest of Nixon's gang. Before he went to Congress, he wrote that column for the
Journal-American,
a gossip column three times a week about Broadway and Hollywood, with a dollop of Eleanor Roosevelt-defiling thrown in. That's how Grant's public service career began. That's what qualified him so highly for a seat on the Un-American Activities Committee. He was a gossip columnist before it became the big business it is today. He was in there at the start, in the heyday of the great pioneers. There was Cholly Knickerbocker and Winchell and Ed Sullivan and Earl Wilson. There was Damon Runyon, there was Bob Considine, there was Hedda Hopper—and Bryden Grant was the
snob
of the mob, not the street fighter, not the lowlife, not the fast-talking insider who hung out at Sardi's or the Brown Derby or Stillman's Gym, but the blueblood to the rabble who hung out at the Racquet Club.
    "Grant began with a column called 'Grant's Grapevine,' and, if you remember, he nearly ended as Nixon's White House chief of staff. Congressman Grant was a great favorite of Nixon's. Sat as Nixon did on the Un-American Activities Committee. Did a lot of President Nixon's arm-twisting in the House. I remember when the new Nixon administration floated Grant's name back in '68 for chief of staff. Too bad they let it drop. The worst decision Nixon ever made. If only Nixon had found the political advantage in appointing, instead of Haldeman, this Brahmin hack to head the Watergate cover-up operation, Grant's career might have ended behind bars. Bryden Grant in jail, in a cell between Mitchell's and Ehrlichman's. Grant's Tomb. But it was never to be.
    "You can hear Nixon singing Grant's praises on the White House tapes. It's there in the transcripts. 'Bryden's heart is in the right place,' the president tells Haldeman. And he's tough. He'll do anything. I mean anything.' He tells Haldeman Grant's motto for how to handle the administration's enemies: 'Destroy them in the press.' And then, admiringly—an epicurean of the perfect smear, of the vilification that burns with a hard, gemlike flame—the president adds: 'Bryden's got the killer instinct. Nobody does a more beautiful job.'
    "Congressman Grant died in his sleep, a rich and powerful old statesman, still greatly esteemed in Staatsburg, New York, where they named the high school football field after him.
    "During the hearing I watched Bryden Grant, trying to believe that there was more to him than a politician with a personal vendetta finding in the national obsession the means to settle a score. In the name of reason, you search for some higher motive, you look for some deeper meaning—it was still my wont in those days to try to be reasonable about the unreasonable and to look for complexity in simple things. I would make demands upon my intelligence where none were really necessary. I would think, He
cannot
be as petty and vapid as he seems. That can't be more than one-tenth of the story. There must be more to him than that.
    "But why? Pettiness and vapidity can come on the grand scale too. What could be more
unwavering
than pettiness and vapidity? Do pettiness and vapidity get in the way of being cunning and tough? Do pettiness and vapidity vitiate the aim of being an important personage? You don't need a developed view of life to be fond of power. You don't need a developed view of life to
rise
to power. A developed view of life may, in fact, be the worst impediment, while
not
having a developed view the most splendid advantage. You didn't have to summon up misfortunes from his patrician childhood to make sense of Congressman Grant. This is the guy, after all, who took over the congressional seat of Hamilton Fish, the original Roosevelt hater. A Hudson River aristocrat like FDR. Fish went to Harvard just after FDR. Envied him, hated him, and, because Fish's district included Hyde Park, wound up FDR's