Puzzle of Watergate (eBook)

1

THRESHOLD YEARS

He was born on June 23, 1936, in New Haven, Connecticut, the second of twins to Alfred Carlton Baldwin II and Veronica (Vera) Traub Baldwin. His father’s family was English and Protestant, his mother’s German and Catholic.

His paternal grandmother was a Clemons, a sister to Samuel Clemons who wrote as Mark Twain. His paternal great-uncle was Raymond Baldwin who had the distinction of being the only man in Connecticut history who held the three positions of governor, U.S. senator, and State Supreme Court justice. However, Al Baldwin never touted his prominent kinsman’s name as there had been a rift between that branch of the family and his own, the cause of which his father never revealed. His grandfather Baldwin had no formal education but worked in a factory at night and a law office in the daytime. On the latter job, he learned the law and, eventually, became a Supreme Court judge with the character of a venerable Connecticut Yankee. One of his cousins was Victor Clarke, a prominent officer in the Connecticut State Police, and Clarke would play a significant role in a traumatic event that occurred in young Al’s childhood as related hereinafter.

His mother, Veronica, had nine siblings. She and one sister were the only two born in the United States. Al’s maternal grandfather, Adolph Traub, brought his family out of Germany in the 1890s, anxious to avoid service in the Kaiser’s war. Adolph’s machinist skills made New Haven, already a thriving industrial center, a good choice to settle his family. In World War II, the location became a hub of corporations like Pratt & Whitney, Winchester Arms, and Sikorsky producing armaments, aircraft, and other war materials.

Al’s father, Alfred Baldwin II, his father’s brother Ralph, and his father’s sister, Harriet, never attended a formal K through 12 school but were homeschooled. Baldwin II passed the competitive examination for West Point and entered the United States Military Academy; Ralph passed the competitive examination for Annapolis and entered the United States Naval Academy. Alfred II served in the artillery branch of the Army in World War I. He was wounded in France when his horse-drawn caisson was blown up while moving to a new firing position. After hospitalization in France, he was shipped back to the United States where he was discharged due to his wounds. Ralph, after graduating from Annapolis, had a thirty-year career in the Navy. He was so severely wounded in the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific that he spent almost a year in Bethesda Hospital and the rest of his life paralyzed on his right side. Al III said that Army–Navy games were the occasion of lively competition between his father and uncle when he was a boy.

Baldwin II, barred from an Army career by his wounds, entered George Washington University Law School, completing what should have been a three-year course in one year.

Baldwin III wondered about the influence of his formidable family on his character. “What makes a man?” he once mused. “What basic causes set a man on a certain path when he begins his life’s journey? Is it his color? Is it his religion? His schooling? His time in the military? His family? What forms the spirit and soul that becomes a man’s personality and character?”

His father’s character was forged in homeschooling and West Point, and his creed was “honor, duty, country.” His father despised a liar. It was as if all evil began with a lie. That the peril of lying was the gravest of sins was a lesson learned early on by the Baldwin twins. Al declared: “That stuck with me my entire life. It’s important to me when I’m dealing with somebody that they’re being truthful. If I find somebody’s lying to me, I lose respect. I may not say anything, but I then avoid that individual.”

Puzzled by the many stories the loquacious Al Baldwin III told of various exploits when he used an alias or worked undercover living a lie or pretending to have evidence against a suspect he was interrogating, I asked how he could justify these untruths while holding to such a strict principle of truthfulness. He was vague in his answer but the gist of it was that lying was excused in the line of work. In light of some of the behavior I observed over the six months of taping Baldwin, I am not so sure that, in practice, the line between work and the other facets of his life could always be steadfast.

Alfred and his sister, Veronica (Ronnie) Baldwin, entered grammar school at the age of four in 1940. They lived in rural North Haven, a farming community adjacent to Hamden. St. Boniface in New Haven, the German Catholic school which they attended, was bookended by the Polish Catholic St. Stanislaus and the Italian Catholic St. Anthony. Whether young Al and his sister went north or south to and from the bus stop, they had to run the gauntlet of bullying by Polish or Italian youngsters. The 1940s were the years of World War II in Europe and even children had nationalist loyalties.

Back of the house occupied by the family in the 1940s was a cow barn that was important to the Baldwins. The young Baldwin twins spent time in its loft pretending it was a war room where they planned battles played out in the trenches they dug around the building. During these years and for many years after, Vera Baldwin supplemented her husband’s income by collecting antiques at flea markets and estate sales, storing them in this barn until she could sell them at a profit. Her two brothers would help move large items.

All the Traub siblings came together to improve the beach property at New Haven’s Silver Sands purchased at an affordable price after a 1936 hurricane had devastated all the rest of the buildings on the nearby shoreline. What had been a hot dog stand eventually became a beach cottage with five bedrooms upstairs, living room with fireplace, and kitchen and dining area that accommodated twelve to sixteen. The Traub/Baldwin tribes spent many weekends at the cottage, always improving the beachfront residence.

One of the favorite pastimes in that more tech-free innocent time was dragging a huge horseshoe crab on invisible fishing line from the water across the beach, frightening those who came across its path while the onlookers on the porch of the cottage laughed hilariously.

So young Alfred C. Baldwin III, “Al,” grew up among a close-knit unit of family support who worked together and played together.

In this atmosphere, Al also learned the discipline of work. He and his cousins, between the volleyball and softball games at the beach, acted as the maintenance crew for the communal summer house. In the winter, he delivered papers and groceries on his bicycle. In his early teens, his father, counselor for a local cinder block factory, secured for him the job of sweeping out the debris left in the kilns after the blocks were baked. Al said, “This was my father’s way of saying you learn to be a man by working and it instilled in me a work ethic that remained throughout my life and I owe him gratitude for that.”

The Great Depression had made Baldwin II a believer in government service. The pay, at that time, was less than that offered by private enterprise, but the job security and benefits were more important to him after that perilous economic experience. He abandoned his career as a private attorney and became an unemployment commissioner for the state of Connecticut. An unemployment commissioner is a quasi-judge who hears unemployment claim cases and renders decisions.

Alfred III entered Notre Dame all-male high school in West Haven, Connecticut, in 1948. In the summer of his senior year, his father suffered major injuries in an automobile accident and was hospitalized in St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, for an extensive stay. The possibility loomed that the senior Baldwin would never return to work.

Although his father was urging him toward either West Point or Annapolis, the senior Baldwin’s perilous health influenced Al to continue his education near home. He chose to attend Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, run by the Jesuits.

In casting about for a career plan, Al did take a Naval Aviation test. Having met all the requirements for acceptance to the Naval Aviation program, the final test was to be given at the Naval Hospital in Albany, New York. It would consist of a complete physical examination. The eye exam portion revealed Al lacked depth perception, a flaw he attributed to a severe eye injury experienced at the age of three.

Al’s German shepherd was in the Baldwin backyard when a neighbor’s Doberman Pinscher suddenly appeared and fell upon the boy’s puppy.

Al ran out to save the pup and the Doberman turned on the toddler, biting him on the left side of his head in the area of his left eye.

Fortunately, Victor Clarke, a kinsman and a Connecticut State trooper lieutenant, was then at the Baldwin house on a visit. He forced the attacking dog away from the boy and turned his attention to Al’s severe wounds. After administering basic first aid, Clarke and Al’s mother rushed the boy to the family doctor’s house in which his medical office was located. (In those days there was no hospital emergency room.)

The injury inflicted by the Doberman was so severe that hope of recovery of eyesight meant having the eyes of three-year-old Al bandaged for four months. Overcoming this period of temporary blindness, which surely seemed very...