Chapter 4 — The Norfolk Briefing

I am writing this in the upstairs room of the house in Vermont in the second week of October. The maples on the slope below the window are at the orange stage, and the wind is from the northwest, which is the wind that brings the smell of woodsmoke from the Hutchins farm across the valley. I am seventy-seven years old. My wife has been dead nine years. My dog has been dead two. There is a kettle on the stove downstairs I will get to in a minute. There is no one in the house who will interrupt me, and the work of this chapter is the work I have most often postponed.

The man I am about to write about was named Daniel Wexler. He was a colonel in the United States Air Force. He was forty-four years old when he died, on a Tuesday afternoon in late September of 1961, at the base of a cliff on the Virginia coast called False Cape — a place I had never heard of before that week and have visited only once since. He was my superior officer, he was my friend, and I was the one of the nine of us who knew him best. When his widow Eleanor wrote to the surviving members of the working group in 1976 to say she was selling the house in Bethesda and moving to her sister’s in Tucson, I did not write her back. I had been meaning to write her back for fifteen years by that point. I have been meaning to write her for another twenty-eight since. Eleanor died in 1994. The letter I owed her is one of the things I am attempting, late and inadequately, to discharge in these pages.

This chapter is about Daniel and about the day at Norfolk, but it is also, I should say at the outset, about the thing I have come to believe happened to him, which is not the thing that was put in the casualty file.

I should set down what the working group was, because the men who would have understood without explanation are all dead.

In the spring of 1956 I was a captain stationed at Wright-Patterson, twenty-eight, three years out of the Korean rotation, recently married. In April of that year I was called into a cleared facility I had been into perhaps twice before and interviewed by three officers for forty minutes. They asked about my marriage, my religious convictions (which were and remain nominal), a college roommate of mine who had become a Quaker, and whether I had ever, in any context, lied to a superior officer. I answered honestly. Two weeks later I was reassigned, without a change of quarters or visible change of duties, to a small bilateral working group whose name I will not put in writing even now, although Helen has informed me that the designations were declassified in 1998 and I am, technically, free to use them. Old habits.

The working group was nine officers. We were six by 1962. We were three by 1968. Major Harlan Pierce died in a single-car accident on Route 35 outside Dayton in October of 1959; the road was wet, he was thought to have been driving too fast. Captain Robert Mead was found in his garage in March of 1961 with the engine running and the door closed; the coroner ruled suicide, and his wife concurred in the ruling, which was unusual. Daniel was the third. After Daniel we lost Lieutenant Colonel ▆▆▆▆▆▆ in November of 1964, recorded officially as a fall from a hotel window in Geneva during a NATO conference he had no listed reason to be attending; Colonel Henry Aldiss to a coronary in 1966, the only one we believed to be natural; and Major Thomas Reston to a second suicide, this one at the Pentagon, in 1968. I retired in 1972 at the rank of lieutenant colonel and came north to this house, which had been my wife’s family’s, and from this window I have watched the maples turn forty-seven times.

Our remit was the early management of contact protocols with what the founding officers called the constituency — a curiously parliamentary term that implied the founders thought of the visitors as a population with interests we were obliged to take account of, in the way one takes account of a voting bloc. The arrangement that has since become known as the Pact did not exist in 1956 in any form one could have written down. What existed was a series of incidents, beginning in the late 1940s, managed ad hoc by predecessor groups whose records we inherited in a footlocker, and a small number of standing protocols for the conduct of what were then called receptions but which we would later, under Daniel’s influence, take to calling meetings. The protocols were procedural in form and improvisational in substance. We made them up as we went. The contemporary literature, Helen tells me, describes a clean institutional apparatus with continuous lineage and consistent doctrine. What I can report is that in 1961 there were nine of us, we wrote our own minutes on a Royal Quiet De Luxe with a sticking a-key in a room that smelled of vinyl floor wax and HVAC ozone, and we were operating without a manual.

The cleared facility was on the western edge of Wright-Patterson, two stories, no windows on the lower floor, accessed through a vestibule with two guards and a logbook. We worked banker’s hours when we could. The safe in Daniel’s office was a Mosler Class 5; when the bolts retracted it made a small soft mechanical sigh I would recognize today if I heard it, and that I have not heard since the morning in 1961 when I opened the safe with Daniel’s combination, which he had given me in 1959 against the possibility I would need it, and which I had never used.

I will come back to the safe.

In 1961 we stood at what I have since come to think of as the inflection point. The early meetings had been characterized by a courtesy that struck us as deliberate and a patience that struck us as professional — the relief, I would say, of two diplomatic services that have, after some preliminary uncertainty, recognized in each other a counterpart that knows how to behave in a chancery. By 1961 the early period was ending. The meetings had become more frequent. The constituency had begun to ask for things; we had begun, with some unease, to formulate what we might ask in return. The shape of what is now called the Pact was being negotiated in 1961 the way any treaty is negotiated in the months before anyone is willing to write down the word treaty: through specific, partial, undocumented exchanges committed to memory by both sides and memorialized by neither. Daniel kept handwritten notes on a yellow legal pad, which he locked in the safe at the end of each session.

Daniel received the order on a Friday. It was verbal, transmitted over the secure line from the Pentagon, requiring him to present himself the following Tuesday morning at the ▆▆▆▆▆▆ installation on the Virginia coast, southeast of Norfolk — a Cold-War-era radar facility activated for the day for a meeting at which a representative of the constituency would be received. The choice of venue was unusual. We had, by 1961, three regular sites, all inland and on Air Force property. A fourth, on the coast, on what was nominally Navy ground, was a departure Daniel and I spent the better part of Saturday morning trying to interpret. We could not. Daniel decided the venue was not load-bearing, and that he would go.

He prepared as he prepared for all such meetings: a notebook, two sharp pencils, a fresh ribbon for the Royal, a clean uniform from the dry cleaner on Springfield Pike, and a long conversation with Eleanor on the Sunday evening which he did not describe to me and which I did not ask about. He told me Monday morning that he would be driven down by Sergeant Aaron Whitlock, our regular driver, in the 1958 Chrysler Imperial that was the staff car for the working group’s senior officer; that he expected to arrive by 1100; the meeting was at 1300; and he expected to be back at Wright-Patterson by Wednesday afternoon. He asked me to keep an eye on Eleanor, which I took as his habitual courtesy rather than an expression of concern.

He left at 0600 Tuesday morning. The Imperial had a full tank — Whitlock told me later that gasoline at the base pump that week was 27.9 cents a gallon, which I record because it is the kind of detail that anchors a day in time, and the day is one I would like to anchor — and a clean windshield, and the small American flag on the right front fender that the working group’s staff car carried in lieu of a pennant. Daniel was in the back seat with his briefcase and the legal pad and a thermos of Eleanor’s coffee. They talked baseball for the first hour; Daniel read for the next two; they did not talk again until they reached the coast, where the radio reception, which had been carrying a Richmond AM station, faded out in the salt marsh somewhere around the North Carolina line. Whitlock turned the radio off. Daniel said something Whitlock did not quite catch about the quality of the light over the marsh, and went back to his reading. They reached the installation at 1047, thirteen minutes ahead of Daniel’s estimate.

The installation was a small Cold-War radar station: a single Quonset hut, a perimeter fence, and a 1950s tracking dish of a type retired in 1959 and reactivated, for the day, through arrangements I never fully traced. The site had been chosen, I came to believe much later, because it was nominally inactive, so the meeting could be held there without the kind of base routine that would have generated a paper trail. The central bay of the Quonset had been set up with a folding table and two chairs, a small generator outside, and a single Navy enlisted man at the gate who had been given a name to expect and no other information.

Daniel went inside at 1252. Whitlock waited at the car.

What happened in the meeting I reconstructed, over a period of years, from two sources. The first was Whitlock himself, who saw nothing of the meeting but who, when the visitor arrived at 1306 — Whitlock’s note: arrival from the direction of the dunes, on foot, alone, dressed in what appeared to be a dark civilian overcoat — watched the visitor cross the perimeter and enter the Quonset hut. The second was the typed minutes, which Daniel had prepared on the portable typewriter he carried in his briefcase, and which were returned to me on the Thursday following his death. They were five pages. I have them in the file box. They are the only document of their kind I possess.

I will not quote them in full. I am not sure I have the right to. I will quote one passage, from the third page, because it conveys, better than any reconstruction I could attempt, the texture of what Daniel was doing on that Tuesday afternoon.

1334. Subject seated opposite. Subject’s coat removed and placed across back of chair. Subject’s posture composed. Hands visible on table throughout. Skin tone unremarkable in the available light. Eyes dark, set slightly wider than the human mean, with what appeared to be an additional inner membrane that closed laterally at intervals of approximately ninety seconds. Voice low, accent not placeable, cadence deliberate. Subject offered the customary courtesies and inquired after the health of the writer’s wife by name. Procedure as previously agreed. Item one: the question of the staffing of the western sites. Subject indicated that the constituency would prefer fewer rotations and longer tenures, citing the difficulty of re-establishing rapport with new officers. Writer indicated this would be raised with the appropriate authorities. Item two —

The minutes continue, in this register, for two more pages. Daniel had a clerical instinct that did not desert him under pressure. I have read them perhaps two hundred times since, and what strikes me, now as then, is the courtesy of it. The visitor inquired after Eleanor by name. Daniel, who had not previously given any indication that the constituency had access to the names of officers’ wives, recorded the inquiry without comment and proceeded to item one.

The meeting ended at 1438. Daniel saw the visitor out. Whitlock watched the visitor cross the perimeter and walk back across the dunes until he was out of sight in the sea grass. Daniel returned to the Quonset hut, completed the minutes, sealed them, locked the door, and told Whitlock he wanted to walk for a few minutes before the drive back. Daniel had a habit, after these meetings, of taking a short walk to settle himself. Whitlock said he would wait at the car.

Daniel walked south along the perimeter road, in the direction of the dunes, and was lost to Whitlock’s view in perhaps two minutes.

He did not come back.

Whitlock waited until 1530 and then began to search. He found Daniel’s hat, which had blown or been placed onto the wire of the fence, three-quarters of a mile south of the Quonset hut, near the boundary of what was then the False Cape preserve. He returned to the car at 1620 and used the field radio to call the duty officer at ▆▆▆▆▆▆, and the search began in earnest within the hour.

Daniel’s body was found at 0840 the following morning at the base of the False Cape cliff — not in fact a true cliff, but a steep dune face of perhaps sixty feet — by a Coast Guard party working along the beach from the south. The cause of death was given as massive trauma consistent with a fall. The death was ruled accidental. There was no autopsy beyond the field examination. The body was returned to Bethesda by Thursday morning and buried at Arlington the following Monday with full honors. Eleanor was given a flag and a cover story about a training exercise. The cover story was thin. Eleanor, who was nobody’s fool, accepted it without comment, and never, to my knowledge, asked any of us about it directly. She knew what she was permitted to know. She did not press.

The working group met on the first Thursday of the following month, as we always did. Frank Voss, who had assumed Daniel’s seat, opened the meeting by raising his coffee cup, which contained, I have reason to believe, something stronger than coffee, and saying only, To Daniel. We raised our cups. We drank. We proceeded to item one. There has been no other commemoration in the forty-four years since, except in the private observances of those of us who were there and who, year by year, became fewer.

I went to the safe on Wednesday morning, before the body had been recovered, on Frank Voss’s instruction. I opened it with Daniel’s combination. The bolts retracted with the small sigh I have already described. Inside were the working group’s standing files, three sealed envelopes containing material I will not describe here, Daniel’s personal effects — his West Point class ring, which Eleanor had asked him to leave at the office rather than wear in the field, and a photograph of Eleanor and their daughter Margaret at Rehoboth in 1957 — and a single typed sheet on Daniel’s letterhead, placed at the front of the safe so it would be the first thing seen by whoever opened it after him. It was a memorandum dated the Monday of that week, the day before he left for Norfolk, addressed to no one. It began In the event that the bearer of these instructions is reading them in my absence, the bearer should understand the following. It made certain administrative dispositions, most uncontroversial. It closed with a sentence I have committed to memory and which I will not write down even here, because the sentence was Daniel’s and it was meant for whoever opened the safe and not for the reader of a memoir.

I locked the safe again. I did what Daniel’s memorandum asked me to do. I went home, had a drink, sat on the back porch of the house we then had on Hilltop Road, in Fairborn, and waited for the call that came Wednesday evening from the search command.

What I have come to think, in the long quiet of the forty-four years since, I offer not as a finding but as the sum of what I have been able to put together.

I do not think Daniel fell. I do not think Daniel was pushed, either, in the sense the word usually carries. I think Daniel was offered something, in the course of that meeting or in the short walk afterward, that he could not accept and could not refuse and could not return to Wright-Patterson carrying. I think the offer was made in good faith, by the visitor’s lights, and that the visitor would have been genuinely puzzled by Daniel’s response. I have no proof. I have only the courtesy of the minutes, the inquiry after Eleanor by name, the fact that Daniel walked south along the perimeter road of his own free will and that the visitor had walked south along the same road perhaps half an hour earlier; and the additional fact, which I learned in 1973 from a Coast Guard officer I will not name, that there were in the sand at the base of the False Cape dune face on the Wednesday morning two sets of footprints leading to the spot where the body was found — one Daniel’s, and one a man’s print of approximately the same size, made by a shoe of a type the Coast Guard officer had never seen, and which was not recorded in the official report.

The procedural apparatus the working group’s successors have built — the protocols Helen tells me are now codified down to a four-digit cycle designation, the formalized minutes, the standing sites, the layers of oversight — none of it existed in 1961, and Daniel was operating without any of the protections it would have afforded him. I do not know whether they would have helped. I think the visitor, in some form, has continued to make the offers it makes, and the apparatus has continued to find ways to receive them. Those of us who were there in the early years understood this as an irreducible feature of the work. Those who came later have, perhaps necessarily, attempted to systematize it.

The kettle downstairs has begun to whistle. I will go down and attend to it in a moment. Tomorrow I will begin Chapter 5, which concerns the years 1962 through 1965 and the slow formalization of what had been, in Daniel’s time, an improvisational and intensely personal enterprise. I have done what justice I can to Daniel here.

In 1988, twenty-seven years after Daniel’s death, I drove south from Vermont to the Virginia coast. I was sixty. Our daughter had begun her first year at the law school in Charlottesville, and the trip had a plausible cover as a visit there with a detour to the shore. I went to False Cape alone, on a clear afternoon in early October, and walked the beach from the south parking area to the foot of the dune face where Daniel had been found. It was not as high as it had seemed in the photographs the search command had distributed — perhaps fifty feet, with sea grass on the slope and a long view north along the line of the surf. I had brought a camera, a Pentax K1000 my daughter had given me for my fifty-fifth birthday. I took one photograph of the dune face from the beach, with the late afternoon light coming in from the right. I did not show the print to my wife. I have not shown it to anyone. It has been in the top drawer of the desk in this room since 1988. The maples are darker now than when I began. The light goes early in October. I am looking at the photograph now.