The Negotiator Read online

  This arrangement continued for several months. I then learned, by accident, that Robbie was being paid $15 a week for each concession. That meant he was paying me $5 a week while keeping $25. And I was doing all the work. That didn’t seem right to me, so I screwed up my courage and confronted him. He calmly explained that it took a lot of knowledge and effort to get a concession; if he hadn’t done that there would be no jobs for me and I would not be earning $5 a week. He then used a phrase I’ll never forget: “I’m management and you’re labor, and management always gets paid more.” I was still troubled, but I couldn’t think of any rejoinder, so I left and continued the arrangement. But I recall thinking, When I grow up I want to be management, like Robbie.

  Robbie was more than a brother to me. Although close in age we had an adult-child relationship. He got his first real job at the age of six. By the time he was in high school, besides the janitorial services, he had developed and was operating a golf driving range. He also bought a cotton candy machine and promoted entertainment and sporting events in Maine. He hired me and Ron Stevens to run the cotton candy machine. He rented a pickup truck and carted the two of us and the machine to several of the fairs that blanket rural Maine in the summer. He would drop us off in the morning at a space he had rented at whatever fair was taking place that week. We spent the day making and selling cotton candy, lots of it. Each night he picked us up, took the cash proceeds of the day, and paid us each $2. Once, after a particularly busy and productive day, Ron asked for more than $2. Robbie patiently explained that he had to pay for the cotton candy machine, for the pickup truck, for the gas, for the booth at the fair. He concluded by saying, “Now that I think about it, I may have to cut you guys back to one dollar a day.” It had the predictable effect. He then gave Ron his management-labor speech. After Robbie left I said to Ron, “You’ve got to admit, he’s a really smart guy.” Ron agreed. We left, each to go home to bed, elated to be $2 richer but exhausted from a long hot day at the cotton candy machine.

  Among the many events Robbie promoted, two stand out in my memory. He brought Emmett Kelly, a nationally known circus clown, for a performance at the field house at Colby College. It was well attended, though not sold out. As always, Robbie griped about the expenses, especially the $5 he paid Ron and me for our assistance in organizing and running the event. In the spring, after the basketball season was over for the colleges and high schools, Robbie hired well-known college players to barnstorm across Maine, playing against local semiprofessional or pickup teams. (Johnny, the real basketball star of the family, had done that the preceding two years.) The most notable player Robbie got to play was Walter Dukes, then a star at Seton Hall University, later a professional in the National Basketball Association. Dukes, an African American, was seven feet two inches tall. He was scheduled to take the train from New York to Portland, where Robbie and I were to pick him up and drive him to Waterville for the first game. I was with Robbie when he telephoned Dukes the day before the event to confirm the schedule. Dukes was concerned that we would have trouble finding him when he got off the train in Portland, so Robbie told him to wear a red rose in his lapel. After Robbie hung up I told him that we’d have no trouble recognizing Dukes and that the red rose was unnecessary. “I know,” he replied, “but he’s never been to Maine and is probably thinking about a big crowded station like New York City. He wants reassurance, and we should give it to him.” The next day, when the biggest man I had ever seen stepped off the train in Portland, he was wearing a bright red rose in the lapel of his blue suit. On the drive to Waterville I sat in the backseat and listened in awe as Robbie and Dukes swapped basketball stories as though they were old friends.

  THE TRIP TO BRISTOL

  By the time the sun crept up over the eastern horizon we were well on our way. By car it’s only about fifty miles from Waterville to Bristol, much less as the crow flies. Since my parents didn’t own a car then, we rarely traveled. When we did we hitchhiked, as Robbie and I were doing that day in the summer of 1944.

  I had never been to the town of Bristol and I was geographically bewildered by the fact that to get there from Waterville we had to travel country roads through towns with names like East Vassalboro, South China, and North Waldoboro. I had once been to Vassalboro, but the others were a mystery to me; that added to the sense of adventure. There weren’t many cars on the most narrow of the roads, so Robbie insisted on an early start to make sure we got there before dark. He said he didn’t want to keep Mr. Moran waiting.

  I stood by the side of the road in the damp darkness, with my right thumb stuck out. Robbie crouched nearby, a few feet off the road. He liked having me out there because I was smaller and more fragile looking than he; he thought I’d have a better chance of getting a ride. I didn’t know where we were going, or why, but Robbie said it would be a good adventure. I was pleased, even honored, that he’d asked me to come with him. As it turned out, we made it well before dark, which pleased Robbie and Mr. Moran.

  The farmhouse was small, old, and rundown. Some of the window screens were torn, the front door didn’t fully close, and a lot of junk—an old washing machine, a broken lawn mower, a table with two broken legs—marked a sort of path from the house to the barn. Inside the barn was more junk, including what looked like the carriage part of a horseless horse and buggy.

  The Morans were old and stooped, like their house. They were kind and obviously pleased to see Robbie. We were quickly ushered into their kitchen for dinner. It wasn’t very tasty, but it was hot and we were very hungry, so eating didn’t take long. Robbie took me out to the barn, and we climbed up into the back of the carriage. Two tattered blankets had been spread out and we slept on them. I asked Robbie again what we were going to do in the morning; he again said only that it would be a good adventure. I asked him how he knew the Morans; he didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell if he was really sleeping or just pretending to. It didn’t make any difference; I was very tired and sleepy, so I rolled over and quickly fell asleep.

  The next morning, after a breakfast that was even quicker and more quiet than the previous evening’s dinner, Robbie led me out the back door and across a wide field to a dirt trail that led into the woods. The trail was rough, poorly maintained, and just wide enough for a vehicle to scrape through, although in some spots shrubs and tall grass intruded to narrow it even more. It was a cloudy and cool morning, good for walking, but an intermittent drizzle turned the trail into a series of puddles separated by patches of mud.

  Several attempts to get Robbie to tell me where we were going and why failed, so we lapsed into silence. I trusted him totally, so I accepted his repeated assertion that this would be a good adventure.

  We kept a steady pace for two or three hours. Then, without any warning, we walked into a small clearing. There, in front of us, was the rusty broken-down hulk of what had been a tank.

  An army tank.

  A German Army tank!

  My surprise and astonishment were total and obvious. World War II had been raging for years. My father followed the news closely, and we were well aware of the major battles and had been surprised by reports of German spies in Maine. As we circled the tank and I reached out to touch it, Robbie asked if I’d like to see the inside. We jumped on the track that was closest to the ground, climbed up to the turret, and descended. The outside had been rusting and broken, but the inside was worse, a filthy shambles. There was little room, little light, and virtually nothing had been left to see. But of course none of that mattered, because we were able to imagine what it looked like and how it felt in combat. We fought several imaginary battles before climbing out and heading back home.

  My questions now came firing out like bullets from the tank’s machine guns. “What’s a German Army tank doing in the woods near a small town in Maine?”

  “They moved it from Dow Air Force Base.”

  “That’s in Bangor.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, what was a German Army tank doing at a
n American Air Force base in Bangor?”

  “To confuse them.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “The spies.”

  “The spies? What spies?”

  “The German spies. They’re all over.”

  “They are?”

  “Of course. Don’t you remember the two that got caught after they were dropped off by a submarine near Bar Harbor?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Well, they got those two, but there’s lots others.”

  As we walked on I scanned the woods around us for spies. Nervously I stepped up the pace. If we ran into any it would be better to do so on the highway. After a long silence I resumed the questioning. “Robbie, I still can’t figure it out. Why would the spies be confused by an old rusted tank in the woods?”

  “You’re confused, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but I’m not a spy. And besides, how would they ever know about it?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We make sure it gets around.”

  “You mean we tell the spies about the tank?”

  “We don’t tell them. We just make sure they know.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “When?”

  “Soon enough.”

  After another long silence, he said, “You’re just a kid, I know, but can’t you see that if the German spies are trying to figure out what the tank is doing here, they won’t have time to do what they came here to do?”

  I thought about that for a few minutes. “Robbie, you’re a genius.”

  He repeated himself. “You’ll figure it out.”

  We never actually went to Bristol. All of this was a tale Robbie told me as we lay in our beds, in the bedroom we shared one hot, sleepless night in the summer of 1944, one of many of his tall tales. His vivid imagination and the way he told the story had an indelible effect on me. I will never know if there really was a German Army tank hidden in the Maine woods. Many years later, as a candidate in search of votes, I went to Bristol for the first time. As I was driving into town, and later on the way out, I carefully scanned each house we passed to see if I could find one that fit Robbie’s description of the Moran farmhouse.

  Although I am close with all my brothers and my sister, it was Robbie with whom I grew up and spent the most time together. From my earliest conscious moment until his death, I loved him intensely. After graduating from college and serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he entered the banking business, first as an examiner for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, then as the president of small banks in Maine and Massachusetts. He retired at sixty, having been diagnosed with leukemia. Five years later, after a long and very difficult day at the peace talks in Northern Ireland, I got to bed after midnight, physically and emotionally exhausted. As I turned off the light, I hoped for a fresh start and a better day tomorrow.

  The telephone rang. Slowly, drowsily, I picked it up.

  “Hello.”

  “George, this is Janet.”

  “Janet! What’s the matter?”

  “Robbie’s in very bad shape.”

  She put him on the phone and we spoke briefly. His voice was faint and weak. “George, I love you.” “I love you, Robbie.” We said a few more words. I fought back the tears until we hung up. Then I lay back down and cried.

  Heather had been with me in Belfast until security officials urged her to leave because of the potential of violence. So she spent much of that summer in London, and I joined her there on weekends. I flew to London, the next morning. There, we spent a long and sad weekend. It was hard to focus, hard to talk, hard to do anything but wait with dread for the phone to ring. The call came, finally, on Saturday. He died that morning.

  I’ve had the burden of delivering many eulogies; Robbie’s was the only one I could not finish. After a slow and halting start I faltered and, unable to continue, ended by whispering, “Goodbye, Robbie. I love you.”

  He meant so much to all of us and he remains alive in our hearts and minds. When we get together as a family, there always are lots of Robbie stories. As he did in his life, he makes us smile and laugh today. It’s as though he just left the room for a moment to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

  Maine

  MAINE

  They came from deep in Asia fifteen thousand years ago, in one of the great migrations in human history, across the bridge of land that has since disappeared into the Bering Sea, between Siberia and Alaska. They settled the continents now known as North America and South America, and they became Incas and Aztecs, Navajo and Sioux, Seminole and, in the Northeast, Algonquin.

  Many tribes made up the Algonquin family. Those who settled in what is now Maine came to be known as Abenaki. The word is an English-language version of Wabanaki, which means “living at the sunrise.” To the early Indians, this area was Dawnland, the place where the sun first rises.

  We do not know how many there were or precisely how long they lived here. As happened throughout the Americas, they were displaced by whites. But they left their names to mark forever their presence. Madawaska is a town at the northern tip of Maine. At the southern border is the Piscataqua River. The highest point of land is Mount Katahdin. The three largest rivers are the Penobscot, the Kennebec, and the Androscoggin. The largest county in land area is Aroostook. Today only about three thousand Indians remain, mostly Penobscot and Passamaquoddy on reservations in central and eastern Maine and a few Maliseet and Micmac in the north.

  For the Indians moving east across the continent, the Atlantic coast was as far as they could go. For the white men who came west across the ocean, it was the first place they came to. Several of the discoverers, some of them well-known, touched at or near Maine: Cabot in 1497, Verrazzano in 1524, John Walker in 1580. The earliest efforts at settlement failed: the French in 1604 at the mouth of the Saint Croix River in eastern Maine, the British in 1608 near the mouth of the Kennebec River in southern Maine. Over the next century more white settlements were established along the coast and up the rivers. Most of these failed too, victims of the continuing conflict between the British and the French. The Abenaki for the most part sided with the French, who used them to conduct raids on British settlers. This slowed the white settlement of Maine, even reversing it in some areas. But in the early eighteenth century, when the British and French had a quarter-century interlude of peace, the settling renewed and then accelerated.

  Under the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, the British gained undisputed control of what was then known as Acadia, now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This eventually led to the departure of the French settlers, a noteworthy event in Maine history, and ultimately to the settlement of the northernmost part of Maine by French immigrants from Acadia. That area is now known simply as “The Valley,” a shorthand description of the Saint John River Valley. The Saint John forms the boundary between the United States and Canada along much of northern Maine. In its fertile valley on both sides of the river the French settlers endured and prospered. Today it is a vibrant, friendly, distinct part of Maine where French is still commonly spoken.

  White settlement continued to increase in Maine, even though fighting between the British and French was renewed. The final victory over the French in the Battle of Quebec in 1759 consolidated British control over eastern North America. The distraction of a common foe having been removed, many British settlers began to question the motherland’s economic policies, which seemed unfair to the colonies. Maine, by then a district of Massachusetts, had been largely settled from the coast inward. Its economy was based on its ports and the sea; thus hostility was intense to British policies that adversely affected coastal trade. When the colonists in Massachusetts revolted, they had much support in Maine.

  Although statehood for Maine had been discussed earlier, it didn’t gather momentum until after the War of 1812. Just as people in Massachusetts had protested
British economic policies, people in Maine began to protest Massachusetts’s economic policies. Maine tax dollars were being allocated disproportionately for the benefit of Massachusetts proper. The only way for the residents of Maine to take care of themselves was to govern themselves. In 1819 Maine voters in referendum approved separation from Massachusetts, and on March 3, 1820, Maine became a state. But it almost didn’t happen.

  The 1819 referendum provided that Maine would become a state if Congress approved within nine months, or by March 4, 1820. That was thought to be a mere formality that would be accomplished well within the required time. But in Congress Maine’s application for statehood was considered along with Missouri’s, and it became entangled in legislative efforts to end slavery there. For the first time decisions on statehood applications were linked to the question of slavery. From then until the Civil War, that became the standard practice. Finally, on the day before Maine’s deadline, the Missouri Compromise was reached and the two states were admitted, Missouri as a slavery state, Maine as a nonslavery state. Although no one could foresee it at the time, that later became a transforming issue in Maine, shaping the state’s politics for a century.

  There were no slaves in Maine and few free blacks, but the linking of Maine’s statehood with Missouri’s, and therefore with the issue of slavery, appears to have generated interest in the subject. Over the first thirty years of statehood, support grew gradually in Maine for abolition. It rose sharply after the publication in 1851 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe at her home in Brunswick, Maine. By the time the Civil War began, Maine was a fervent antislavery state.

  The issue split the Democratic Party and led to the swift rise and long dominance of the Republican Party. Democrats had dominated the state’s politics from statehood to the Civil War, but in the ninety-four years from 1860 to 1954 no Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate, only one was popularly elected governor (Louis Brann in 1936), and Democrats controlled both houses of the state legislature only once (in 1912–13). Maine became known as a rock-ribbed Republican state. At the general election in September during the post–Civil War period, Maine citizens always voted Republican for president, as did most of the rest of the country. This led to the saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” In 1936, after Franklin Roosevelt carried forty-six of the forty-eight states in his landslide victory, his close friend Jim Farley laughingly changed the saying to “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”