Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [190]
When I got back to New York, I looked into the matter, which turned out to be amazingly simple—though I did not tell Graham this, since he would have been hugely disappointed. All I had to do was get a lawyer in Washington to make an application to the FBI, then wait. Time, it appeared, was the major factor, perhaps because the government hoped that some applicants would simply lose patience. In this case, time dragged on for months, while Graham inquired impatiently whether there was any news and wondered if the FBI was using the time to destroy or alter their records on him.
Finally, there arrived in my office a slim envelope containing the FBI’s famous Graham Greene dossier. Though many of the names and some of the information had been carefully blacked out, my heart sank instantly at the sight of it—this was not at all the bulky package Graham had been expecting for all these years. One typical item was a clipping from Walter Winchell’s column in the New York Daily Mirror, dated December 19, 1956, in which Winchell wrote: “Hollywood newspaper people are not happy about America’s most-decorated soldier (Audie Murphy) taking the lead role in the film version of ‘The Quiet American,’ which libels Americans. The author of the book admits to being an ex-Commie.” The clipping had been pasted carefully to a sheet of paper, at the top of which Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, housemate, and reputed lover, had written his initials to indicate that Hoover had read it.
Another item, also bearing Tolson’s initials, was a reply to a request for information from Marvin Watson in LBJ’s White House, where apparently they wondered who Graham Greene was and why several antiwar groups were quoting him on the subject of Vietnam. The FBI memo explained helpfully that he was “a well-known Catholic British writer.”
The only other document of note was a lengthy report on an International Congress of Intellectuals, held in Warsaw in 1948, in which Graham Greene was listed as a delegate, along with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier, Bertolt Brecht, Lord Calder, Ted Hughes, Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Benedict. A note at the bottom of the document warns that John Rogge, a former assistant attorney general from the New Deal, “is bringing to the Congress an address from Henry Wallace.” Apparently the worst the FBI could produce about Graham was that he might have listened to an address from the former vice president.
This was about the extent of the FBI’s knowledge of Graham Greene. There were no glamorous spies, no records of telephone conversations, no record of his visit to Fidel Castro or his travels in Vietnam, no dark accusations of opium smoking or visiting prostitutes, no mention even of his having been a member of the SIS or a close friend of Kim Philby. Far from being a thorn in J. Edgar Hoover’s side or the target of constant FBI surveillance, Graham had apparently hardly ever attracted Hoover’s attention.
Graham brooded darkly on the possibility that the FBI file was a fake, that somewhere they had concealed the real file, with all the dirt, and from time to time he urged me on to further effort, but nothing came of further inquiries. The bomb had turned out to be a damp squib, and no book was to come of it.
Perhaps because of that, our relationship temporarily lost some of its warmth, and eventually, with a typically cutting comment, he went back to Viking, ostensibly because he was dissatisfied by the number of copies we had remaindered of Getting to Know the General, a book about the late Omar Torrijos that had been difficult, if not impossible, to sell.
We continued to correspond, and I continued to see him whenever I went to Europe—in some ways it was easier to think of him as a friend when I was no longer his editor, though I am not sure the reverse was true. I had thought of Graham as old when I was fifteen, but now he really was old, his eyes an icy blue, so pale that he seemed almost blind, his face puffy where he had once been gaunt, yet he continued to travel, to write, to