“Of course, you would say that.”
“Why?” said Ringham, raising his eyebrows. “You think I’m part of the department here? I’m not. I’m an investigator for the federal government, FBI. And my guess is, we’re more interested in finding out what happened to Mr. Taylor than you are. But the campus police are not on our list of suspects.”
“So you have a list of suspects?”
“We have some leads. By the way, do you know the whereabouts of a white girl named Billie Lee, blonde, about five-seven?”
“No, but I told you I didn’t know Joshua very well, or his friends either, for that matter. Could that have been the problem, though? Him dating a white girl?”
“I don’t think so, but I do believe you when you say you didn’t know Joshua Taylor very well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just so you know, Mr. Taylor did not come from a ghetto background. His father is a high school principal in St. Louis, and his mother is a history teacher there. Mr. Taylor was a high school track star and an honor student. As an undergraduate, he regularly made the dean’s list and participated in student government. He was middle class all the way.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t experience police brutality. And he was active in SDS.”
“I think your friend was having some fun with you.”
“So what happens now?”
“Let’s see,” Ringham said as he exhaled audibly. “We’ll proceed with the investigation, follow all the leads we can, and share the information with headquarters. They seem to have a real interest in this case, although I don’t know why.”
That night, feeling cold and clammy, Arthur took a long hot shower and smoked a joint before going to bed.
Chapter Four
About four months later, in mid-September 1969, Arthur sat across the desk from his new supervisor at the University of Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory, Dr. Claude Fischer. Feeling somewhat nervous in the unfamiliar surroundings, he shifted in his weight restively, uncrossing and re-crossing his legs, as Dr. Fischer, a thin, small-boned man, pored over Arthur’s graduate school transcript.
“Okay, good, good,” Dr. Fischer mumbled, his narrow face diminished further by the large lenses in his wire-rimmed frames. “Looks like you did well in quantum mechanics and kinetics.”
“I worked hard,” Arthur replied.
“Yes, yes, and your thesis described mechanisms for the initiation of free radical reactions?”
“Right. I think you have a copy of it there.”
“Yes, I’m sure I do. I’m sure everything is fine. I know we went over all of this before, but I wanted to refresh my memory. Looks like you have a good background for this area.” Dr. Fischer looked up at Arthur.
“Apparently there’s still a lot of opportunity in radiation chemistry.” Arthur responded eagerly. “A lot of things we don’t know yet.”
“Yes. That’s for sure.”
“And I understand the Radiation Lab has been here for quite a while,” Arthur added, trying to avoid any awkward pauses. “Of course, this building is fairly new.”
Dr. Fischer sat back in his chair and took off his glasses. “Oh, yes, yes, you bet. The building is new, but it all started with the Manhattan Project in the early forties. Dr. Franks told you about that, I believe. We had a 2.5 million electron volt accelerator at the time, which the Army needed. They needed our expertise, too. I think all that work’s still classified though, for some reason.”
“Dr. Franks did mention something about the Manhattan Project, but I thought the first atomic bomb was developed at the University of Chicago, under the football stadium, by Enrico Fermi and his group.”
“It was. But the Radiation Lab here played a significant role as well. All part of the same team. Everyone wanted to do their part. Very patriotic times. Very different from what we have today, if you know what I mean.”
“I suppose.”
“Now we have a bunch of little know-it-alls running around, protesting the war and everything else they can think of while they write checks off their parents’ accounts.”
“I guess that is different.”
“Let’s just say things were much simpler back then.” He nodded his head slowly and closed his eyes.”
“But don’t you think World War II was a lot different than Vietnam? I mean with Hitler and Mussolini being such blatant tyrants.”
“No,” Dr. Fischer replied. “No, I don’t. I think Ho Chi Minh was just as ambitious and reckless as Hitler or any other self-obsessed political dictator. But we let him off the hook. That’s the sad thing.”
“How is that?”
“We just haven't had the same commitment to winning that we did during World War II. We’re not focused enough on victory.”
“You don’t think we’re trying to win?”
“Not enough. Not the way we did before. We went all out during World War II, drafted everyone, then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we hadn’t done that, hadn’t dropped the bombs, I mean, if we had gone on with conventional warfare in the Pacific, we might very well have gotten bogged down in the Japanese countryside like we are now in the jungles of Vietnam.”
“So you think we should nuke North Vietnam? Not that it hasn’t been suggested before. That’s what Goldwater apparently wanted to do in sixty-four.”
“If we could afford to,” Dr. Fischer replied, stroking his chin. “If we could afford to, I think that would be an elegant solution, a very elegant solution. The only problem is the Soviet Union. The Russians would very likely launch missiles against us in retaliation. But if we could, I think dropping a couple of nuclear devices on North Vietnam would make a lot more sense than watching our boys get butchered over there, year after year, getting nowhere on the ground. Of course, if the Russians did fire missiles at us, we would fire missiles back at them, and that would be the end of the world as we know it. So, back to square one. But I think a lot of the frustration we feel now about Vietnam comes from knowing that we’re fighting with one arm tied behind our back and that Ho Chi Minh took full advantage of the situation.”
“We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t end the war,” Arthur said, repeating a popular epigram. He glanced at Dr. Fischer and wondered if his father’s generation would ever get past the World War II paradigm of good versus evil? Probably not, he thought. Just too set in their ways.
Later that afternoon, his first day on the job completed, Arthur stopped by Dr. Fischer’s office to let him know that things were proceeding on course.
“Sounds good,” Dr. Fischer said. “The first day’s usually kind of hard—a new lab, new equipment. But things will fall into place soon enough. Don’t worry about that.”
“Thanks. Like I said, I made up the solutions we talked about and worked with the instrumentation a little, so we should be able to start the irradiation and electron spin experiments tomorrow.”
“Excellent.” Dr. Fischer ran his index finger slowly down the side of his face. “You know, I may have come across a little strong this morning about Vietnam and everything. And God knows, most of the powers that be around here are dead set against the use of nuclear weapons for any reason, even testing purposes. So I—”
“I understand. You were just expressing a personal opinion.”
“Right,