Where Are Your Papers?
Mayer, Milton
Where Are Your Papers? BY MILTON MAYER In the Thirteenth Century, the heretics were turned over to the Holy Office. In the Twentieth, they are turned over to the Passport Office. This time...
...Baby and I were domiciled in Europe, variously hustling a slow buck, as usual, when the American Friends Service Committee asked me to come back for a month to shoot my cuffs on a lecture tour for their Peace Section...
...Baby and I had something like ten weeks before we had to take off on May 1, there was nothing to worry about—or there wouldn't have been, had it been any place but the Passport Office...
...I say a bare-faced lie...
...Ode regretfully returned the $9, and I repaired to my wintry Alpine digs and sat down, removed my mittens, heated the ink, and wrote a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Washington, D.C...
...How they hanging...
...I crossed her and got the snowbank treatment, one short letter notifying me that in view of my failure "to complete all necessary information on your application for a passport...
...Whoever crossed Franny did so at his own peril, yea at his own perdition...
...In a pigeonhole...
...Don't worry...
...that was what I was paying J. Edgar Hoover for1 day to get them on the 'phone, and they apologized for the busy line at this busy season...
...No, this is the Telephone Company in San Francisco...
...But I despaired of getting the call at all...
...And a luxurious fight it was, adding up to $15,000...
...Well," she said, "sometimes the buttons on these touch-tone telephones get clogged...
...But Sirica and Cox were softies, and so (for all I know) was Rusk...
...We send the names in to the Passport Office and they say, 'Issue' or 'Hold.' They ordered yours held...
...The hardie was Frances G. Knight, Director, Passport Office, the terror of the heretics...
...Why...
...Robert C. Ode was not the only subsequently photogenic figure who figured in, Mayer v. Rusk...
...The sins of the fathers—of twenty years before—were about to be visited on the fathers...
...I'll come by your place this afternoon, on my way back to the palace from lunch...
...These two front-fighters between them did in Richard Nixon...
...My lawyers were the best that money could buy, David Carliner and Oliver Stone of Washington and, of course, Francis Heisler, and none of them took a red cent...
...But Attorney Mark Lynch of the ACLU in Washington was alive and ready to kick, and I just happened to have landed, some years back, in the California Congressional district represented by the formidable Leon Panetta...
...Otherwise, this matter may be considered closed...
...At that time, my hair turned gray, my eyes sank into my head, and I developed a still undiagnosed violent tremor...
...She didn't know...
...This time around—my second on the rack—the treatment began with my application for a new passport on February 18, 1983...
...I was in the hapless position of complaining of the service in the only saloon in town...
...One day to go...
...Postal Service delivered it— mirabile dictu—the next day...
...The new passport didn't arrive at the end bob GALE of six weeks, or of eight...
...Baby had to return to the Land of the Unfree to keep me company in my great big beautiful continental cell...
...In those bad old McCarthyite days, Frances G. Knight represented the stone wall, the bottom line, and the star-spangled hatchet...
...If I would submit the required oath as an affidavit, my application might be considered further...
...And I couldn't go out of the house lest they call...
...On April 25, with five days to go, I dialed the Agency for more than an hour, getting the busy signal...
...Baby would only have to say, "Do you want me to get Frances G. Knight after you...
...Where do you suppose it was all that time...
...Under a pile...
...We'll let you know as soon as we get the word...
...I told Ode that I would take his, or the sheet's, word for it that it was a felony, etc., and that I was nevertheless applying for a passport, and that I never took nondisloyalty oaths (the sheet also included the oath), and that if I was feloniously applying for a passport it was up to J. Edgar Hoover to come and get me...
...Everybody I knew who was anybody, who could strike terror into whichever Frances G. Knight was now off-with-his-headsing at the Passport Office, was long since dead...
...A vest pocket...
...I reported all these calls, successively, to the local operator to get credit for the wrong numbers and asked her what was up...
...They may have been harassing me in return for my harassment of them twenty years ago...
...She was genuinely apologetic...
...He looked a good deal older than he had when first we'd met in Bern, and so did I; we had aged each other...
...I know," he said, "that it's on her desk...
...My passport fee would be returned—and was...
...I couldn't read...
...An oubliette, and your Roving Editor, instead of Roving, could have spent the next six months, or six years, or sixty, twisting slowly in the wind, with never a notification of any kind from anybody...
...It took me all Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, is clutching his passport as he roves Eastern and Western Europe this summer...
...A lie, I say...
...Consulate in Bern, Switzerland...
...Nor did I pay the court costs...
...He issued it—but not at once...
...Another two years...
...I tried another 'phone for another hour and got through to San Francisco...
...Two days to go...
...That alone kept me awake nights and, days, had my fingernails chewed all the way up to the elbow...
...They don't tell us...
...Then she 'phoned me: The word to release the passport had just come from Washington...
...But," I said, "this is a dial telephone, and I just got it from the Company...
...Mark Lynch and Leon Panetta would do what they could...
...I wish I were a citizen of a very small country, say, Andorra or Lichtenstein, or a subject of a very small king...
...I voiced—I didn't need to word it, only to voice it—my desperation...
...The nice woman had the passport prepared and got it in the mail...
...Such as...
...Is this the San Francisco Passport Agency...
...They told us that it was just a routine delay, due to the similarity between your name and birth date and that of another person...
...passport if the applicant was then, or had been in the past five years, a communist...
...I respectfully demand," I respectfully demanded, "that you either charge me with a felony or issue me a passport at once...
...Not me," I said, lying...
...She had 'phoned Washington, and there was "something about getting the file from the Federal records...
...But the spectre of Frances G. Knight abode, and when I would not eat farina at breakfast and spat it out all over the high chair, Ms...
...Sign here," said the consul, who turned out to be one Robert C. Ode, the same Robert C. Ode who showed up all over the television screens a couple of decades later as the oldest of the hostages held in the Embassy in Tehran...
...We had to leave in a week, May 1, and our house was rented as of that date...
...It was the California Department of Health in San Francisco...
...Any one of a number of reasons...
...I couldn't sleep...
...I paid the—then—$1 application fee and the $9 passport fee and completed the application, when the consul handed me a separate sheet of paper and explained that it was a new regulation that had to be signed and had not yet been embodied in the printed form...
...I'll make it out before I leave the office...
...Two days after the Supreme Court slapped down Sirica, Cox, Knight, and Rusk, I received the passport by special delivery...
...Oh," politely, "confusion of names, repatriation status, previous fees owed...
...They said they would institute a search for my application...
...I didn't know if I was more afraid of not getting the passport than I was of getting that call...
...And how's the missus...
...When...
...I told Robert C. Ode I never took nondisloyalty oaths, and if I was feloniously applying for a passport it was up to J. Edgar Hoover to come and get me...
...Each of the calls took all day at the 'phone, since the Agency's line was always busy...
...The nice U.S...
...He issued it only after he was nudged by the Supreme Court of the United States, which held the oath unconstitutional and ordered it thrown out of the passport application...
...As appellant from the three-judge decision upholding Rusk, I faced (so to say) an equally famous Watergate figure in the person of the then Solicitor General of the United States, Archibald Cox...
...they cut (and lost) their teeth on Milton Mayer...
...Then the morning paper arrived, soggy, and reported that the only airline that would get me to San Francisco if I had to go there to get my passport had that morning gone belly-up...
...How long does it take to clear up things like that...
...The fourth time I called they had news for me: "We've found your application...
...And everybody—Frances G. Knight, too—twenty years older...
...And never paid the $9 for it, the only man around the round world with a free passport...
...Ordinarily no time at all...
...And I had been through this fun-and-games routine twenty years before...
...The operator said, "I'll report it...
...But the harassment may have been unintentional if unconsidered...
...I had had a succession of passports in the twenty years since Mayer v. Rusk...
...The red flag doubtless appeared on my name when it went through the computer9 jurisdiction...
...The Passport Office, the Telephone Company, the airline—a clear case of conspiratorial torment...
...The nice underling said he would have the supervisor, who was out to lunch, call me back...
...Two years, two years indulging the luxury of Fighting City Hall...
...Another stretch of solitary confinement to the United States of America...
...Since Ms...
...I furnished the body, first as plaintiff, then as appellant...
...The supervisor of the San Francisco Passport Agency was out to lunch and would call me...
...Then Leon Panetta's office called: The passport was being released...
...Allow six weeks for delivery...
...And like as not there was no malevolence at all in the hold-up...
...She knew how soon I had to have the passport...
...I asked her what had held it up...
...And up it piled...
...In six weeks...
...Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I applied for a new passport at the U.S...
...But I did...
...Now I turned sleepless as my desperation—my helpless desperation—grew...
...I couldn't even look at television...
...The red flag doubtless appeared on my name when it went through the computer...
...It was lunch time, but an underling was there...
...that was what I was paying J. Edgar Hoover for...
...Held up...
...The $15,000 was for court costs alone ($350 to print three copies of the brief which had to be submitted in print to the three-judge court of original 'I was in the hapless position of complaining of the service in the only saloon in town...
...They came out of the hands and hides of friends—including the ACLU—and Friends, including the Service Committee...
...My name probably went into a pile of red-flagged papers on the desk of an overworked, underpaid clerk who had a squash racquets date that afternoon and said to the overworked, underpaid clerk at the next desk, "I'll have to get on to this stuff...
...Hello," said a man,at the other end...
...My passport would expire while I was home, so I bethought me to apply for a new one before I left Europe...
...My cracked heart sank: At the Passport Office my name must have turned up a red flag...
...They kept putting the query on the computer, they said, but nothing came back...
...Did anybody there know what had held it up for nine weeks...
...Things like that...
...And how's the missus by you...
...I couldn't work...
...Still, they couldn't be holding anything against me, not after the twenty years that had passed since I last shellacked them in a full-dress eyeball to eyeball...
...It has been held up in Washington...
...On April 15, I called the Passport Agency in San Francisco (where I had applied by mail) and learned that they could find no record of having received the application...
...But why...
...no further action can be taken...
...He issued it two years later, during which interval the United States was my prison, my European assignments were gone by the boards, along with the slow bucks they entailed, and Ms...
...I could call him up and say, "King, this is Miltie, on 35th Street...
...The next time it was a different Telephone Company number in San Francisco...
...I need a passport...
...The next day the nice woman in San Francisco still knew nothing and would 'phone Washington again...
...Another $15,000...
...Baby said, "I'd be worried...
...And then a ringing...
...The Passport Office may have changed its spots, or stripes, or lionesses, since Frances G. Knight's day...
...But I got it, from the nicest woman you ever set ears to...
...The people at the Agency in San Francisco were sympathetic but, as they explained, powerless...
...The next time I called, a ring again...
...The new regulation informed me that it was a felony to apply for a U.S...
...Three days to go...
...And if I am libeling the Passport Office, all it has to do is, in confidence, give me the name and birth date of "another person" and I will apologize publicly for the libel...
...You're a sound for sore ears, Mil-tie...
...That was the first of a half dozen, actually eight, calls spaced a few days apart...
...It's piling up...
...My only hope was such clout as I could commandeer...
...One of the members of the three-judge court appointed to hear the constitutional issue was District Judge John J. ("Maximum John") Sirica of yet-to-be Watergate fame...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
