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Readers must bear in mind that nearly everything we knew about the Clutter murder investigation before now was derived from a novel (not my description; Capote took great care in choosing it himself). By definition, a novel is fictitious prose narrative, which—when merged with details of the crime that Capote was either given or came by on his own—allowed him to create such a realistic and stimulating account.
As a consequence, however, in a way we’re dealing with fictional characterizations of real people, thanks to Capote's dramatic treatment of them to suit his story. Few people alive know more than what the author has told us, which nearly everyone continues to cite as fact because that's all they were given. The compelling nature of his story has become the stuff of legend, reshaped time and again in print and on film. And since others long before now have already exposed many of Capote’s embellishments, who's to say Hickock and Smith really were faithfully depicted on the pages of his "novel"?
As literary detectives, then, we're not so much working with facts as we are with Capote's rendition of them. When I consider Smith or Hickock or Wells—or anyone in the book, for that matter—I must set aside Capote’s interpretations and rely, to a larger extent, on what I have in hand: Harold Nye’s personal field notebooks; "most" of the official KBI and FBI reports; interrogation transcripts; Capote’s and Lee’s firsthand notes; recorded interviews with townspeople; reliable press coverage and reputable published biographies; and yes, even Hickock's own letters and Smith's effusive journals.
As objective analysts after the fact, we must resist the lure of being taken in by Capote's novelistic approach, simply because it's suspect as an impartial assessment of reality, and we are only now beginning to understand by what measure.
Considering the rough-and-tumble political stakes of the burgeoning post-war agricultural industry, the very public acrimony between Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and Herb Clutter over pricing parity for farmers could have led to enormous consequences for either side, not to mention the country at large. If Clutter were some average farmer, the issue might have been insignificant. But he was far from that, with more power and political prestige than was revealed in the pages of In Cold Blood, including personal influence with the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In a recent disclosure of Benson’s FBI file, “[Benson] argued to [FBI director] Hoover, whom he viewed as a friend and fellow fighter of communism, that Eisenhower helped communism’s spread more than he hurt it... [and that] because freedom was threatened by soft stands against communism, [Benson] pondered making public such feelings ‘even at the risk of destroying the influence of men who are widely respected and loved’—including Eisenhower.”[216]
One undersecretary of state even advised the FBI that “the president is a little ‘teed off' with Secretary of Agriculture Benson” because he “has not been successful in quieting the farmers, cattlemen, dairymen and Capitol Hill.”
But it wasn’t just ranchers and their cowed Congressmen who were disquieted. Governors of sixteen Midwestern states, led by Nebraska’s Ralph Brooks, were up in arms over the “grave and tragic situation confronting the farmers of the Midwest.” Brooks cited an “explosive feature” of Benson’s new farm program that would remove government controls on wheat and fix price supports to a moving average market, resulting in abandonment of market quotas and price parity for farmers.
In economic terms, that meant farmers were facing a proposed loss of $1 billion dollars in expected farm income for 1961 (roughly $8 billion today). Given that the 1959 production value for all U.S. wheat crops was just $1.8 billion, the devastation would have been considerable. “Benson’s proposal,” Brooks said, “is a move to kill the wheat program as he already has done for corn.”[217]
High stakes indeed. By the time Benson was finally called to task, however, Herb Clutter had been dead for two months, no longer able to protect the industry he helped shape. Benson left government service a year later, eventually becoming the thirteenth president of the Mormon Church.
As for the elusive “Roberts” referred to by Hickock, exhaustive research yielded little more than those separate hotel guest registers listing two Robertses. If they were, in fact, two different men, their concurrent departures the day before the murders seem oddly coincidental.
Assuming Roberts did exist, he may have been an intermediary acting on behalf of someone else, someone who wanted to see Herbert Clutter dead. In any event, time is the adversary in getting any sensible answer now. With half a century gone by, few principals of that period are still alive, and records—those that may be potentially worthwhile anyway—appear to be inaccessible, sheltered by a state having, for whatever reasons, strong motives for secrecy and self-protection.
