FEB. 22 1974 Page 9
mon sickness. One morning Lekoj was taken to the operating room for a marrow test, and when he came backI asked,
OEE.
“Marrow hurt bad?”
He replied enthusiastically, “Marrow hurt bad.” Then I
had a marrow, and the same exchange took place in reverse.
We both had a hemoglobin transfusion on the same day.
I said, “Blood make you feel good.”
He enthusiasticaliy agreed again. “Yes, blood feel good.”
On October 27, at long last, John took the needle out of
my arm and pronounced the pneumonia under control. I
asked Lekoj how hefelt for one last time, and this time he
said again, “Fine. Fine.” We said good-bye, and I left the
hospital.
With Lekoj’s permission, I had written a column about
him 1 imagine it was because of the column that someone
in the Interior Department, under whose bureaucratic aegis
Lekoj fell, called Amandain the office about ten days after
1 had left the hospital and asked her to tell me that Lekoj
was dead,
Amandahated totell me, but finally she did.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“The man said pneumonia,” she said, and then quickly
added, “But don’t you go thinking it was your fault.”
The chances are that Lekoj picked up whatever virus
or bacteria had made mesick. But John Glick told me not
to worry, that the chemotherapy had failed and poor Lekoj
was terminal anyway.
Lekoj’s death deeply depressed me for a while. There
was, of course, what might be called the send-not-to-ask
aaa
syndrome. With my low defenses the pneumonia might well
have killed me; John Glick was surprised by how quickly
I recovered, given my corporal’s guard of granulocytes.
There was also the depressing feeling, hard to shake off,
that I had somehow been responsible for Lekoj’s death.
There was the further feeling, as hard to shake off, that we
Americans were responsible for his death—-that we had
killed him with our bomb. His was the world’s first death
from a hydrogen bomb, and the bomb was ours. And finally,
there was the feeling of the desperate, irrational unfairness
of the death of this gentle, oddly innocent young man.
For some time, I found a line, I think from T. S. Eliot
(though I can’t find it), going through my mind: “The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.”
Before Lekoj died, I had long believed in my mind that
the nuclear weapon,in its indiscriminate, unimaginable brutality, was an insane weapon,suicidal, inherently unusable.
NowI knew it in my heart.
[This material is excerpted from Stewart Alsop’s
new book "Stay of Executive a sort of memoir"
published by Lippincott. We received tne ine
formation courtesy of Dulcie Thorstensen]