Murder on K Street - Margaret Truman [51]
Rotondi glanced up at a clock decorated with colorful birds. “I think I’d better go, Marlene.”
“So soon?” The little girl voice again. “Please stay. I haven’t seen you in a while, and I need comforting. My poor sister is dead. I didn’t ever hate her, Philip. It’s just sometimes I—”
He stood and stretched his leg, grimacing as he did.
“Poor dear,” she said. “I hope the man who shot you rots in hell.”
“He’s close to it,” he said. Rotondi had never been in favor of the death penalty: As far as he was concerned, life behind bars was a fate far worse than having a needle stuck in your arm, delivering you to a more peaceful place.
He’d started toward the living room when she stopped him with, “Jeannette should have married you, Phil. You were the one she loved.”
He turned and leaned on his cane.
“She told me that many times,” said Marlene. “She told Polly that, too. She should have married you.”
“I’ll stop by again, Marlene,” he said and continued to the front door.
She came to him. One hand went to his cheek, her fingertips caressing it.
“You take care, Marlene. Everything will work out.”
He left quickly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The war was a mistake to begin with.”
“They say we had to take a stand somewhere against Communism.”
“My father says that if we hadn’t gone to war in Vietnam, the whole area would’ve fallen to the Communists.”
“The domino theory.”
“That’s what he called it. The domino theory.”
“We went into Vietnam because we were misled. The Gulf of Tonkin was a deliberate lie to justify sending in troops. Our involvement in Vietnam isn’t justified on the grounds of vital national interest, or of moral commitment. The government says we had to go in because North Vietnam was aggressively attacking the south. That makes it a civil war, and we have no right injecting our national will into a civil war. Not only that, Vietnam was one nation until it was temporarily split by the Geneva Accords of 1954. There were supposed to be national elections to unify the country, but it was the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh, who violated that agreement.”
“That may be true, but—”
“Besides, we’ve never had a treaty agreement to defend South Vietnam. All SEATO did was to establish a structure through which its members would get together and talk about Communist aggression in the region. It didn’t dictate military action by us or anyone else.”
Lyle Simmons laughed. “I see why you’re the captain of the debate team, Phil. You guys won the tournament, right?”
“You bet we did.”
Rotondi had returned a month earlier from a four-day Midwest collegiate debate competition on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. He’d joined the team as a sophomore, and had been elected captain at the start of his senior year. He considered the debate team a natural extension of his studies as a pre-law major; it would provide valuable experience for arguing cases in courts of law.
Rotondi, Simmons, and Jeannette Boynton were having this discussion about Vietnam on a gentle, warm afternoon in May 1971. They’d driven to an idyllic knoll a few miles outside the campus and had spread a blanket. It was a sunny day, with a hesitant breeze that put leaves, and their hair, into motion, hardly a time and place for arguing over a nasty, controversial war.
But this was May 1971. Only one year earlier, on May 4, 1970, the nation’s universities and colleges had erupted in protest over the killing of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard. The students had rallied against the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia. By May 4, more than three thousand protesters had flooded the university and downtown Kent. When the wind caused tear gas to float away from the crowds, the Guard opened fire. The torch had been lit, banners raised high.
Two days later, almost five million students at 850 colleges and universities across the nation, the University of Illinois among them,