37 – Boston
By noon on the following day the federal justice system was well on the road to recovering from the overload following the arrest of nearly 3,000 people. The Israelis seized from hundreds of homes were taken to the Agganis Arena at Boston University, a covered stadium where the B.U. Terrier hockey and basketball teams played. The stadium had seating for more than 7,000 spectators. With guards posted at all the entrances, the Israelis were given virtually free run of the confined area. Families established their own spaces and waited to see what would be done with them.
Attorney General McQueeney returned to Massachusetts, making her fourth round trip flight between Boston and Washington in a Justice Department executive jet in three days. She sat at the head of a table in the conference room at the U.S. Attorneys office in the federal courthouse in Boston. Seated around the table in comfortable swivel reclining chairs were Arnold Anderson, the suave United States Attorney for Massachusetts, and his top staffers. Although none of Anderson’s managers mentioned it, each was aware that their colleague Judy Katz was again not present.
Her absence, and their individual assumptions for why she was not asked to attend this meeting, or the earlier ones, caused varying degrees of embarrassment and anger in each of them. Nobody, however, raised the topic as the Queen began to speak.
“As far as I’m concerned, this situation is out of control,” McQueeney said, looking around the table. “I hate to use the phrase, but I ordered this whole roundup to happen because I was following orders that came from above me, and there is only one person in the world above me, so you know who I am speaking about. Now, I have never, ever spoken badly of my boss, but I feel that I owe a duty to each of you to be as blunt as possible before any of you go any further down this path. My boss gave me no choice. This may shock you, but I am being candid right now. I offered to resign rather than do what we are doing. The boss wouldn’t let me resign, at least not right now.”
There was shocked silence around the table. The Queen continued, realizing she had their fullest attention.
“I don’t want any of you to justify what you are about to do by saying you were following my orders. I am not ordering anybody to do anything here. Any one of you who wants out of this operation can get up and walk right out of this room. I was not offered that choice. My boss told me what to do. Its my job to do it and I am doing it. But it stinks. It stinks to high heaven. It stinks and it is simply wrong.”
The Attorney General paused. She saw the shocked expression on every face around the table. Nobody spoke, however, and nobody got up and left. She realized how young all these lawyers, with the exception of Anderson, were. It was time for a history lesson, she thought.
“I’m not the first Attorney General ordered to do something she believed was wrong. In 1973, Eliot Richardson, the man who held my job then, a man from Massachusetts in fact, was called into the Oval Office. His boss, Richard Nixon, I assume you’ve all heard of him, ordered him to fire a fellow named Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon.
“Richardson refused to do that. It was wrong, he said, and he wouldn’t do it. So he resigned. Nixon then turned to the deputy attorney general, Bill Ruckelshaus, and ordered him to fire Cox. Well, Ruckelshaus resigned, too. Nixon finally found somebody in the chain of command who would do his bidding, Robert Bork. Bork fired Cox and, perhaps not too coincidentally, fourteen years later Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court, but I’m sure you know how badly that nomination failed.
“So why this history lesson when we’re all so busy? Because I want each of you to know that sometimes the honorable thing, the downright right thing to do is to refuse to follow orders. I can tell you that I am ashamed of myself for not doing what Eliot Richardson did. I’ve got my reasons, maybe because with nuclear bombs destroying cities these days and armed attacks on Coast Guard ships right in our own harbors we live in a less innocent time. But I can’t tell you that what we did last night was clearly the right thing to do. And I can tell you that what we are about to do is simply the wrong thing to do.”
Again she looked around the table.
“Anybody leaving?
“Nobody leaving? Well, damn you all then. And damn me. So let’s figure out what we’re going to do with this mess.”
Anderson, the United States Attorney, spoke first. Anderson had accepted appointment by President Quaid as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts because he saw the state-wide position as a stepping stone to other, higher state office, such as Senator or even Governor.
He appreciated that despite his basic agreement with his boss, the Queen, on this issue, ducking out of it would be political suicide. An astute student of Massachusetts politics, Anderson knew that despite his status as the hero of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Eliot Richardson’s later effort to become United States Senator from Massachusetts came to a dead end when he was defeated in the Republican primary by a political nobody.
“The big problem, boss, is the 3,000 or so folks we’re holding at BU who came off those ships. No question that they are in this country illegally. The trouble is, we can’t deport them back to Israel because, well, there isn’t any Israel left to send them to.” Here even Anderson was hesitant. “We don’t want to turn them over to the Arabs, do we?”
Anderson, like everybody else in the room, had seen news footage from the refugee camps set up by the Palestinians for those surviving Israelis who failed to escape the invading armies. These camps were established by the world’s leading authorities on horrendous refugee camps, having lived in them for three generations themselves. The Palestinians turned away all offers of humanitarian aid for these camps, saying the Jews were well off enough to take care of themselves. Even supplies from American Jewish organizations was confiscated and distributed to victims of the Damascus bomb.
McQueeney interrupted Anderson.
“We’re not going to have to worry about those people, the people from the boats. The way the President was talking yesterday, I think he’s come up with his own solution for dealing with them, a solution that won’t involve the criminal justice system and therefore won’t involve us.”
The Attorney General looked around the table, from face to face.
“What are we going to do with the other ones, the Boston people we’re holding? As I was reminded by my boss, more than once, ten Coasties are dead and somebody is going to pay for killing them. Suggestions anybody?”
“Conspiracy to commit murder,” one man said.
“Harboring fugitives or maybe obstruction of justice?” said another.
“Catch and release,” a third suggested. “Just like striped bass. We caught them, we taught them a lesson they won’t forget, now we slap their wrists and send them home, that’s what I say. We can’t charge 3,000 people with murder.”
McQueeney turned to Anderson.
“Arnie, what do you say?”
“Split the difference,” he said, looking for the political compromise. “We’ve got open and shut cases on harboring fugitives. After all, we took those boat people out of each of their houses. Indict them for harboring, let them plead out, and fine them a thousand bucks each.
“Let’s see, there’s nearly a thousand of them. That’ll be a million bucks, which will just about cover all the overtime for this whole deal. That’s what I say.”
McQueeney sat back in her chair, tilted her head back to look at the ceiling and stared silently for a minute. The President would not be happy with this solution.
Well then, the President can go fuck himself, she thought. I’m the chief law enforcement officer of this country. He’s commander in chief of the military, not commander of the Justice Department. This is my call, not his.
Maybe now he’ll accept my resignation.
McQueeney leaned forward and looked Anderson in the eyes.
“I like that. Make it happen. Make this all go away, OK?”
“Will do, boss,” Anderson said. “But this one isn’t going to go away.”