The genuineness from Tyrone softened Scott's attitude some. "I thought you spooks stuck together. Spy and die together."
Tyrone contorted his face to show disgust with that thought. "That'll be the day. In fact it's the opposite. A third of our budgets are meant to keep other agencies in the dark about what we're doing."
"You're kidding!"
"I wish I was." Tyrone looked disheartened, betrayed.
"At any rate," Tyrone continued, "I got spooked by the stunt with your paper and the Attorney General. I just couldn't call you, you'll see why. The Agency is supposed to enforce the law, not make it and they have absolutely no business screwing with the press. Uh-uh." Tyrone took a healthy sip of his drink. "Reminds me of times that are supposed to be gone. Dead in the past. Did you know that I am a constitutional lawyer?"
Scott ordered another beer and shook his head, no. Just a regular lawyer. Will wonders never cease?
"Back in the early 60's the South was not a good place for blacks. Or Negroes as we were called back then." Tyrone said the word Negro with disdain. He pulled his tie from the stiff collar and opened a button. "I went on some marches in Alabama, God, that was a hot summer. A couple of civil rights workers were killed."
Scott remembered. More from the movie Mississippi Burning than from memory.
Civil rights wasn't a black-white issue, Tyrone insisted. It was about man's peaceful co-existence with government. A legal issue. "I thought that was an important distinction and most people were missing the point. I thought I could make a differ- ence working from inside the system. I was wrong, and I've been blinded by it until now . . .you know.
"When I was in college the politicians screamed integration while the poor blacks no more wanted to be bussed to the rich white neighborhood that the rich whites wanted the poor blacks in their schools." Tyrone spoke from his heart, his soul, with a touch of resentment that Scott had not seen before. But then, they had never spoken of it before. This was one story that he had suc- cessfully neglected to share. "Forced integration was govern- ment's answer to a problem it has never understood.