The interviewer continued smoothly, “You realize, of course, that President Eisenhower has stated that people who express that point of view are giving aid and comfort to the enemy?”
This, of course, was the climax of the show, and the spot toward which the interviewer had been building. Strangely enough, to me it seemed an anticlimax. The President’s statements were his, my statements were mine. I answered briefly that a man must speak and act as he believes and not tailor his thinking with no view but to oppose the enemy. The United States would be in a sorry state indeed if our only reason for saying “No” is because Russia has said “Yes.” This merely plays into the hands of an antagonist.
“A man must stand up for what he believes.” I finished, “even if this occasionally means agreeing with the enemy.”
Following the broadcast we were quite unprepared for the reactions it caused. Within the next few days I was (a) hailed as an individual of heroic courage, (b) regarded with suspicion as a fellow traveler or dupe of Communists, (c) chided for being so foolhardy as to “stick your neck out.” Frankly, I was amazed. I had been asked certain questions and I had answered them as honestly as possible. I didn’t think I knew all the answers but, on the other hand, neither did I consider myself completely uninformed, and in the area of radioactivity and human well-being I felt I could speak with some authority. I felt that I had the interests of my own country at heart as well as did most Americans, and better than some. Why all the fuss?
On June 22, after checking the tide tables carefully, we rounded the foot of Manhattan and started up the East River, with the tide in our favor. The trip was quiet and uneventful. In the late afternoon we dropped anchor off the west end of City Island, outside a small cluster of boats. Curious yachtsmen soon boarded us, and after dinner we spent a fine evening ashore as guests of the Stuyvesant Yacht Club, off whose pier we had chanced to drop our hook.
The next morning we had a good day’s run among the Sunday sailors on Long Island Sound. In the afternoon we were met by Barbara’s cousin, Dave Dorn, and his family, in their cruiser Grand Slam, and with a convoy of boating friends were escorted to an anchorage off the Sprite Island Yacht Club near Norwalk.
There we were introduced to the sociable custom of “rafting.” With the Phoenix in the middle and our anchor responsible for the entire flotilla, we found six launches tied alongside, to port and starboard. Hampers of food were unpacked, and ice and drinks materialized, and people began to drift back and forth from one boat to another. Without more ado we found ourselves in the center of as cheering a welcome party as I have ever experienced.
After several days here we moved to a small shipyard in Rowayton, up the Five Mile River, where it had been arranged that the boat would spend the summer.
Here Ted left us temporarily to join Minnetta in Madison and enter summer school at the University of Wisconsin, where he was accepted, in spite of his unorthodox schooling, on the basis of entrance exams. Tim, too, checked out in early July to enlist in the army, while Jessica and Barbara made a semipermanent home ashore at the invitation of the Dorns. The rest of us embarked on an extensive haul-out, including the installation of a new engine, courtesy of Universal Motors, who had offered to replace our doughty kerosene-burning model with a gasoline engine of the same type, even-steven. (Why they should want an old, slightly beat-up engine which had been over 35,000 miles and across three oceans is anybody’s—or maybe only an adman’s—guess.)
Using Rowayton as a base, we worked out a schedule which would permit us to do the necessary boat work and still visit friends and relatives in the Middle West. We planned to take Nick, Mickey, and Moto with us, so they could see as much as possible of the United States. To do this, I bought a very secondhand station wagon. But when we were ready to leave for Wisconsin, we learned that Mickey and Moto had decided to remain. Only Nick elected to go with us. To me it was another indication of the chasm that was widening between the men, but we said nothing and set off with Barbara, Jessica, Nick, and myself.