Blue Genes Read online

  Later. New Delhi. Tony is miserable:

  I’m afraid things have not been going very well at this end for the past few months. I was bitterly unhappy at the Times’ decision to put Joe Lelyveld in here eight months before my departure. Even though he is technically the second man in the bureau . . . this seemed to me to be an unfortunate move.

  This reflects a perpetual issue for Tony, his “Halberstam dilemma.”

  The fact that my brother never made managing editor at the Crimson, and David did, bedeviled Tony for years. It began a lifelong rivalry with David, of which Halberstam himself was perhaps never aware. In Tony’s view David was richer, more famous, and more blessed than he. Halberstam got a job with the New York Times before Tony. Halberstam got his first Pulitzer before Tony. My brother’s need to be “the best there is” never let him believe he was successful enough. The disparity—or perceived disparity—between David and himself rankled.

  This lack of self-worth, the jealousy, the sourness of spirit, could spur him on at times—make him push for greater goals, more perfect stories—but it could also send him into the depths of depression.

  So with Lelyveld, the dilemma raises its head again. In fact, I cannot remember a year going by when some real—or potential or imagined—rivalry did not raise its head to bite him. He was—and would remain—sensitive to the juggling of hierarchies and positions.

  In his final letter from India, he restates this dilemma:

  I confess I am returning to New York with great trepidations about my future on the Times. In the last eight months almost everything in my relations with the paper has turned sour. However, things may look brighter on 42nd street than they do here.

  In fact, things did look brighter, and Tony never returned to the foreign field, except for special assignments. He found the work on the metropolitan desk, under Arthur Gelb, rewarding. Here, he could write about Harlem or City Hall or Newburgh with the same kind of attention to detail and color, and with the same insights, he had brought to his work in India and the Congo, and enjoy the friends and family he had missed abroad.

  MY LIFE HAD ALSO TAKEN A SERIES OF TURNS. Due to a variety of conflicts with Bob Maxwell, I found myself, just before my wedding, with no job. I despaired that I’d ever be in a position to support Susan, who was starting her first year of graduate studies at UCLA.

  But in January, in one two-week period, I received two offers. One was for a TV series just starting up at MGM. The other was to join New York’s public television station, Channel 13, WNDT (later to be WNET).

  We leaped at the opportunity to move to New York, to be closer to Tony when he came home on leave, my father, and the exciting theater there. Susan abandoned grad school.

  Tony wrote from the Congo that he was delighted to hear that I’d moved from the “fleshpots of L.A.” to the serious world of New York.

  As I look back at the correspondence from Tony, the fact that there were fewer rather than more letters makes each one have a weight that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. The same is true of my mother’s letters to Dad. Sometimes—as Freud said in another context—a letter is just a letter, not a cry for help or a metaphor.

  Nevertheless, because there were few, I awaited them eagerly and opened them quickly. These were the times that Tony let himself express positive and negative feelings openly, where he said what was on his mind. In person, he came across as a serious, guarded, often depressed, or angry character—deep, sad eyes with dark circles under them; low, lugubrious voice—but on paper he could allow his wishes and desires and disappointments to emanate.

  As the years went on, it was also the only place that Tony now allowed himself to embrace me as a friend and brother. For instance, from the Congo came this, reacting to an Emmy I won:

  A long overdue congratulations on your Emmy. You are becoming emmynenter and emmynenter by the day. I want you to know that I’m damned proud of you.

  As I turned thirty, I was made director of cultural programming.

  Well done, chappie, as they say “out here.” [By now, he’s in India.] I know how hard you’ve worked for this promotion and—although I’ve seen very little of what you’ve done—I’m told by Jack Gould that you’re the hottest thing since Milton Berle. The title is very impressive indeed. Do you get a rug on the floor too? And a beautiful secretary? And six TV sets in different colors on which you can watch the major channels simultaneously? And a cringing yes man who shuffles into the office and says “great idea, CW,” and “You’re the hottest thing since Milton Berle, CW?” Seriously though, CW, heartiest congratulations and long may you wave.

  When Tony decided to come in out of the cold, to decline that third year as correspondent in India, Susan and I offered him a bedroom in our apartment. We were planning to have children, but because none had yet arrived, we thought that having him with us would be good for all of us. He was touched by this, but opted instead for the Harvard Club until he could find an apartment for himself. I think he was genuinely embarrassed at the thought of “having” to share with us, but there were probably other motivations, including his desire to look for a long-term relationship with a woman.

  IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, Tony pursued his bliss at the Times, moving ever upward, gaining the accolades he deserved, writing stories that advanced daily journalism. He didn’t always please his co-workers or his editors. Sometimes he was moody, sometimes combative, sometimes just a loner.

  Occasionally, he would telephone or ask me over to his apartment to read a paragraph or even a page of a new piece. In all the time this practice went on—both with me and with colleagues—Tony always read aloud. He didn’t permit us to take the pages into our own hands. I don’t know whether he didn’t trust us to use our eyes or whether this was more a way of hearing it for himself. Or perhaps just some of the Lukas zest for theatricality.

  He did that with me when he wrote a famous piece on the Greenwich, Connecticut, teenager Linda Fitzpatrick, a front-page story that won him his first Pulitzer Prize. It was the late 1960s, the height of the hippy generation’s hold on America. In San Francisco, the Haight was thriving. In New York, it was Greenwich Village that held sway. Fitzpatrick was living a double life: being a “normal” adolescent at her parents’ home in Connecticut during the week, but using drugs and sleeping with addicts and down-and-outers in Greenwich Village on weekends. She was murdered, and Tony was put on the story.

  When I arrived at Tony’s apartment one night, he was in the throes of wrapping up the piece for the Times. He had kept his work on the project very quiet, since many people at the paper, as well as Fitzpatrick’s parents, had it in their heads that Tony was going to paint Linda as “clean,” anything but the drug user that she had been portrayed as previously. It was not to be, and few people, outside of his editor, knew what he had uncovered, how big a story it would be. None knew the style in which it was written—filmically cutting back and forth between the two Green-wiches—or that it would be a journalistic triumph.

  Tony asked me not to tell anyone anything about the revelations, but he wanted to read me some of it. With a totally straight face, he said, “This is going to win me the Pulitzer.” I took his statement with a pinch of salt; it seemed egregiously optimistic and grandiose. Besides, I thought, who thinks of prizes when the work isn’t even finished? Apparently, Tony did, and when the full investigative story ran on the front page two days later, I understood the power of what he had been doing, and how important it was to him that he kept his eyes on the prize.

  Daily journalism never quite got that exciting again for him, but the work was always interesting, and his reputation grew.

  AT CHANNEL 13, I was able to win Emmys, rise to become director of programming, and produce hundreds of programs. Despite a psychological distance between us, Tony and I were equally proud of each other. Nonetheless, his great successes were always tempered by his interior sense of failure, of fraudulence. So, too, Tony was constantly afraid that he would be “found ou
t,” that an editor was going to “kill” his piece, that it wasn’t good enough. He would often doubt his own craft and experience. He would tell me that things were going badly, when in fact they were just coasting, or actually progressing.

  I could see what Tony could not, that he was always a step ahead of everyone else in our crowd. He was intellectually advanced, well-read, and a superior writer and researcher. And he always believed that he could keep escalating his abilities, keep winning prizes, keep doing more—and better. He told one date that he hoped to win the Nobel Prize someday.

  I, too, always felt I was not good enough at what I did. On some level—bizarre as it may sound—I believed that if I were as creative as I should have been, if I were truly a beautiful person, then Mother wouldn’t have abandoned me!

  While Tony and I were moving up our ladders, Dad was changing gears, too. In the 1960s, he became deeply involved in civil rights causes and organizations and went to the South to defend black men and women in courts where few white Southern attorneys wanted to go, and few black lawyers were allowed.

  I had never been as brave, nor as able in public service, but I began to think of my work at Channel 13 as a way I could contribute to the world. In those days of the deepening civil rights and antiwar movements, I asked myself about each program: Does it advance equality among Americans? Does it give unpopular views a hearing? Do we hear enough about what is right, as well as what is wrong, with our world?

  If Tony thought about his work in the same way, I never heard such sentiments expressed. Proud as he was of Dad’s civil rights activities, as a journalist he believed his role was simply to write objectively about the world. On the other hand, as a private person, he contributed his time to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Authors Guild; also, he helped young reporters on their way up. In fact, some have written that he was the preeminent “quiet” journalist in America: the reporter who was not in the limelight because he took such care (and time) to write his books, but whose efforts on behalf of younger talented writers and journalists were stellar.

  In 1970, a new general manager came to Channel 13, which meant a management shake-up. In 1971 I was again out of a job.

  I secured myself six months’ severance pay. Susan, our two young daughters, and I went off to Aspen, Colorado, for the summer, to figure out the rest of our lives. It was a glorious summer, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what my professional future would turn out to be.

  About a month into the summer, Tony joined us for a vacation. He had already won the Pulitzer for his story on Linda Fitzpatrick and had published a book on disaffected youth, Don’t Shoot—We Are Your Children! as well as his slim but famous book on the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities. He was the Chicago bureau chief at the time of the trial and returned to New York after the book was published. He came to Colorado both for a well-earned vacation and to do some of what I was doing: figure out his future. It would not be long before he left the Times for good, choosing the freelancer’s route.

  One weekday afternoon, as the cumulus clouds drifted over-head, revealing occasional bursts of great sunshine, Tony, Susan, and I rented horses and some fishing gear and rode an hour up into the mountains to a pristine lake where, the locals said, beautiful trout awaited us. Tony had not ridden since Santa Fe; as Susan and I watched him, dressed in what we always thought of as his Harvard uniform—cordovan shoes, a wool pullover sweater, gray slacks—climb unsteadily atop the stocky horse the stable provided him (“Does he really know how to ride?” queried the wrangler), we leaped nimbly aboard our own steeds, but began to wonder if this was the best idea in the world. Nonetheless, with sandwiches, fresh worms, and light hearts, we took off for the lake, which was at eight thousand feet above sea level.

  The horses knew their way, so we relaxed on the way up, joking back and forth about the fish we hoped to catch. At the top, as the crystal lake reflected a crystal sky, we let the horses graze and set to work to best each other at fishing.

  Three hours later, neither nibble nor catch. Clouds began to cover the sky, darkening at the horizon; it was getting chilly. Clearly, a storm was coming, and neither Susan nor I wanted to remain at the lake without shelter. Tony, on the other hand, had come to the mountain to catch trout. He was unwilling to leave and begged us for another half hour so that he would not have to return to New York without word of his prowess. Reluctantly, Susan and I acquiesced. A few minutes later the first drops fell, increasing with frightening speed into a downpour. Thunder rumbled. We packed up.

  As sure-footed as the animals had been on the way up, they were even better on the way down. We let them pick their path along the often tricky route. Soon, despite my rain jacket and hat, I was soaked. So was Susan. Tony, who had not brought a jacket or a hat, was dripping with cold water. His expensive wool sweater was soaked through, and I worried that it would shrink on him if we hit sunnier weather.

  There was no jocular banter this time. It took us an hour and a half to wind our way down to the stable, where we all rushed to our little rental Toyota, undressed to our underwear, and drove home with the heater blasting.

  Like many adventures, scary during the episode, our eventual safety provided all of us with a sense of derring-do in years to come. If we didn’t exactly dine off this experience, we could remember it with pleasure.

  IN OUR FAMILY, the old seemed to die with terrible reverberations of how the young had perished. Again and again their deaths were marked by depression, bipolar disorder, and suicidal disappointment.

  Missy came first. In January of 1970, suffering from heart problems, she was moved to Philadelphia by Uncle Ira and settled in a nursing home. The day after she got there, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. A depressive for her entire life, she was never satisfied with the love she got from her children and grand-children. She felt abandoned by me—when I married, and when I did not follow her to the Philadelphia hospital. She died, in 1971, at the age of eighty-seven.

  Two years later, Dad died. At the age of seventy-one, his liver weakened by endless drinking, his body not up to the stress of all that abuse, he had a stroke. Susan and I had moved to England the year before, both to escape Richard Nixon’s America and for me to look for exciting work.

  While I was job hunting—and Susan and the kids were acclimating to the English pace—Tony phoned from Washington, where he was working on a huge piece on Watergate for the New York Times Magazine. It was time to say good-bye to our father, who had retired to California. We agreed that he and I would meet on the West Coast at the hospital.

  When we arrived, it was not clear whether Dad would last a long time in his coma or would die soon. Tony and I talked about it over dinner near Dad’s apartment in Tiburon. The doctors could give us little accurate information.

  “I’ve got to get back to Washington,” Tony said. “The Times needs this piece. It’s going to take up the whole magazine; nothing else.”

  I understood. But I, too, had a conflict. Susan had just heard that her first book, Fat Emily, would be published. Her editor was coming to England to work on the final copy with her. I needed to take care of the girls while she did work on that.

  Tony and I decided that we would both go back to our respective obligations, leaving Dad at the hospital; we’d return as soon as something “happened.”

  Within two weeks, Dad awoke from the coma and was sent to a nursing home. Tony visited him, then I replaced him at Dad’s bedside; the Times wanted a second piece on Watergate.

  Dad was moving in and out of sleep, heavily sedated, his right side badly paralyzed. There was an open sore on one arm. This was a new experience for me. Ever since I could remember, I had always been with an active father, one from whom I sought support and praise. That man now lay helpless and dazed from sedatives. The moment of separation was on me, and I didn’t know what to do. How was I supposed to act?

  He’d rubbed his paralyzed arm, turning and twisting to get
comfortable, and it had become raw. They now had him restrained and sedated. As he slept, I sat by his bed quietly, which was characteristic of our relationship. My fear of his power and anger dampened any real give-and-take. He would awake for brief periods, look at me in surprise as if he didn’t remember I was there, and then soon go back to sleep.

  What I do remember him saying, shortly before I left that morning, was that he hoped Tony would find a woman to marry pretty soon. Shortly after he told me that wish, he complained of an ache in his left shoulder, and I massaged it until he fell asleep. In the years since, I have often thought of that moment as the one and only time that I actually gave him comfort.

  Tony told me that he, too, had had a “last talk” with Dad. He mentioned nothing about “finding a bride,” but said Dad hoped I’d find a job soon and “be happy.”

  Those dual wishes, told to the wrong sons, have always stood as a symbol of the miscommunication between us. Not that I thought Dad wished me ill, but a heartfelt statement of love would have been very welcome at that time—when I’d been drifting for so long. And he was leaving us.

  Tony reported that Dad’s last words to him of any kind were “Shit, piss, and corruption,” and then he fell asleep.

  That was more like him.

  Before Dad’s death, after we knew he was ill, Susan and I made plans to move to San Francisco, to be near him as long as he lived. Maybe I could jump-start my career back in the States. It was not going anywhere in London. Before we could even move, however, Tony phoned to say that Dad had died.

  I didn’t cry, not at that moment. It all seemed too futile, too far away emotionally. I thought, maybe I’ve done all my crying for dead people. Maybe I should reserve it for the living.