Little Green Men Read Free Page B

mouth full of verdure.
    Bitsey reached him first, trailing Tyler Pinch. She was smartly turned out in a double-breasted suit, pearl necklace, gold earrings. Bitsey was petite, angular, pretty, in a slightly toothy sort of way, with large eyes conveying a permanently startled look. She had southern roots, as many Washington cave dwellers do. Her father could bore a man to death at a hundred yards tracing the family tree back to the Precambrian era.
    Banion and Bitsey had met twenty years back when they were both summer interns on Capitol Hill taking part in an Excellence in Futurity program in which America's young leaders were brought to Washington to stuff the envelopes of the power elite. Banion, shy and bookish, had never been very successful with women, but he was attracted to her. At a time when women took pains to look their worst so that men would take them seriously, Bitsey always looked her best, arriving each morning fresh, in pumps, stockings, and smartly pleated skirts, smelling of a perfume (White Shoulders) that Banion found intoxicating. He finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. To his amazement, she accepted.
    That night, after the symphony at the Kennedy Center, they sat on the marble steps by Memorial Bridge and he told her in excited tones, in the moonlight, about his senior thesis on France's decision to withdraw from military participation in NATO in 1966. She was enthralled. From Oxford, where he was avoiding his own military participation in the Vietnam War, he wrote passionate letters to her about the emerging Common Market. They were married at Christ Church in Georgetown. It was a by-the-Establishment-book affair. The secretary of state, an old family friend of Bitsey's parents, attended. The reception was at the Chevy Chase Club. The honeymoon, in Bermuda. Jobs awaited them on their return. Bitsey in the marketing and sales office of the Hay-Adams Hotel. Banion as staff aide to Sen. Germanicus P. Delph of North Carolina - fortuitousiy, as it turned out, just as the Delph hearings on the CIAs unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the Canadian prime minister were getting under way. It was the beginning of Banion's unlikely career as a television "personality." But then in Washington, most careers are unlikely, one way or another.
    Senator Delph held his position strictly by virtue of seniority on the Senate Committee on Governmental Eliminations. He was not, as one pundit at the time put it, a charter member of Mensa. The newspapers usually described him as a man of "limited intellectual interests." Banion, bright young man that he was, made himself indispensable to the senator, and as the hearings unfolded during that long, hot summer, he became familiar to the millions of Americans watching on TV as the handsome young staff aide whispering almost nonstop into Senator Delph's ear. The Washington Post wrote that he "appeared not only to have the senator's ear, but to live in it."
    Banion's authorship of the resulting committee report did much to enhance his new luster. It struck a well-balanced tone between righteous indignation and cautious reform, between those who thought that the United States had no business trying to poison Canadian prime ministers and those who, while disapproving of this particular instance, felt that the United States ought to reserve the right to dispatch troublesome Canadian PMs in the future, should circumstances warrant. The quality of the prose was unusually high for a congressional report, down to elegant literary quotes from Cato the
    Elder, Paul Valery, and, with a touch of intellectual sauciness, Mao Zedong. The New York Times bestowed upon him the laurel of "young man to watch." Other senators tried to poach him away from Senator Delph for their own staff.
    Banion began to appear as a frequent guest on Washington Weekend, one of the more thoughtful, if intolerably dull, weekend television shows. He enjoyed the sensation of being stared at on the street by people