There were a few groups and individuals who were able to find the courage to assail him. One of the most astute political analysts of the national scene wrote: “Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin’s lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”

The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: “Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States.”

Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond’s mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond’s mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating—all of it together made Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond’s mother often said to friends, he was essentially a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country’s history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, antiprogressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.

After Raymond’s mother had written the scriptures and set the tone of the sermons Johnny was to make along the line to glory, she left him bellowing and pointing his finger while she organized, for nearly fifteen months, the cells of the Iselin national organization she called the Loyal American Underground. This organization enrolled, during that first period of her work, two million three-hundred thousand members, all militantly for Johnny and what he stood for, and most deeply grateful for his wanting to “give our friends a place from which they may partake of a sense of history through adventure and real participation in the cause of fanatic good government, cleansed of the stain of communism.”

Raymond’s mother and her husband held their mighty political analysis and strategy-planning sessions at their place, which was out toward Georgetown. They would talk and drink bourbon and ginger ale and Johnny would fool around with his scrapbook. He always had it in his mind that cold winter nights would be the best time to paste up the bundles of clippings about his work into individual books, with the intent of someday providing the vast resources for a John Yerkes Iselin Memorial Library. The analyses of the day’s or the week’s battles were always informal and usually productive of really constructive action for the immediate future.

“Hon,” Raymond’s mother said, “aren’t there times when you’re up there at the committee table when you have to go to the john?”

“Of course. Whatta you think I’m made of—blotting paper or something?”

“Well, what do you do about it?”

“Do? I get up and I go.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. Now tomorrow when you have to go I want you to try it my way and see what happens. Will you?”

He grinned horribly. “Right up there in front of all those TV cameras?”

“Never mind. Tomorrow when you have to go I want you to throw yourself into a rage—making sure you are on camera—wait for a tight shot if you can—and bang on the desk and scream for the chairman and yell ‘Point of order! Point of order!’ Then stand up and say you will not put up with this farce and that you will not dignify it with your presence for one moment longer.”

“Why do I do that?”

“You have to start making the right kind of exits for yourself, Johnny, so that the American people will know that you have left so they can sit nervously and wait for you to come back.”

“Gee, hon. That’s a hell of an idea. Oh, say, I like that idea!”

She threw him a kiss. “What an innocent you are,” she said, smiling at him dotingly. “Sometimes I don’t think you give a damn what you’re talking about or who you’re talking about.”

“Well, why the hell should I?”

“You’re right. Of course.”

“You’re damn right, I’m right. What the hell, hon, this is a business with me. Suppose we were lawyers, I often say to myself. I mean actual practicing lawyers. I’d be the trial lawyer working out in front, rigging the juries and feeding the stuff to the newspaper boys, and you’d be the brief man back in the law library who has the research job of writing up the case.” He finished the highball in his hand and gave the empty glass to his wife. She got up to make him another drink and said, “Oh, I agree with that, honey, but just the same I wish you would try a little bit more to feel the sacredness of your own mission.”

“The hell with that. What’s with you tonight, baby? I’m like a doctor, in a way. Am I supposed to die with every patient I lose? Life’s too short.” He accepted the highball. “Thank you, honey.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

“What is this stuff? Applejack?”

“Applejack? It’s twelve-year-old bourbon.”

“That’s funny. It tastes like applejack.”

“Maybe it’s the ginger ale.”

“The ginger ale? I always drink my bourbon with ginger ale. How could it taste like applejack because of the ginger ale? It never tasted like applejack before.”

“I can’t understand it,” she said.

“Ah, what’s the difference? I happen to like applejack.”

“You’re so sweet it isn’t even funny.”

“Not so sweet as you.”

“Johnny, have you noticed that some of the newspaper idiots are getting a little nasty with their typewriters?”

“Don’t pay any attention.” He waved a careless hand. “It’s a business with them just like our business. You start getting sensitive and you just confuse everybody. The boys who are assigned to cover me may call themselves the Goon Squad but I don’t notice that any of them have ever asked to be transferred. It’s a game with them. They spend their time trying to catch me in lies, then printing that I said a lie. They like me. They try to knife me but they like me. I try to knife them but we drink together and we’re friends. What the hell, hon. All we’re all trying to do is to get a day’s work done. Take it from me, never get sensitive.”

“Johnny, baby?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Do me a favor and tomorrow at the lunch break please make it a point to go into that Senate barbershop for a shave. You can stand two shaves a day. I swear to God sometimes I think you can grow a beard in twenty minutes. You look like a badger in a Disney cartoon on that TV screen.”

“Don’t worry about it, hon. I have my own ways and I look my own way, but I’m very goddam American and they all know it out there.”