Chapter 4
And that, Walter Dobius told himself as he arose nervously at six the next morning, having stayed awake most of the night in gloom, foreboding, and disturbance, was a sample of what happened when you had an inexperienced dunderhead in the White House and a trigger-happy, irresponsible firebrand like Orrin Knox advising him. How on earth his poor country had got into such a tangle, Walter would never know. Certainly, reviewing the many warning columns he had written about Orrin, recalling the innumerable occasions on which he had given the President sound and irrefutable directions on how to proceed, he knew it was not his fault.
Now all he could do, along with men of good will everywhere, was make some attempt, however futile, to help pick up the pieces. The difficulties of this depressed him as he slowly dressed, ate breakfast and got ready to have Roosevelt drive him into town so that he might fly up to a United Nations racked and shaken by the latest fearsome turn of events. This time might be too much. This time, his awkward, ill-led country might have stumbled into the final morass from which neither it, nor the world it could pull down with it, would emerge.
When he had heard the news last night of the rebel capture of Molobangwe, of the slaughter of thirty-five or possibly forty American medical missionaries there and the destruction by dynamiting, with further undetermined loss of life, of the Standard Oil installation up-country, his first assumption had been that of course the United States would proceed like a civilized nation. It would take the matter to the UN and their tempers might be soothed, the crisis might be eased, the dead might be decently buried, and the damage decently forgotten in one more endless, if heated, debate which would prove anew that fine old UN truism: “At least when they’re talking they aren’t shooting.”
This would, as Walter saw it, have been the right and proper thing to do. It is true that it would not have brought earnest good-hearted innocents back to life or really have justified their deaths, nor would it have restored ruined property or re-established broken law, but it would have been civilized, as the later twentieth century understood civilization. It would even, he thought with a bitter protest against all the hotheads and the extremists have been Christian. It would have turned the other cheek. Above all, it would have kept the United States from placing itself in the position of aggressor.
The rebels who had committed the deeds which had brought from the United States so violent a retaliation were not, in Walter’s mind and in the minds, he knew, of most of the UN’s clamorous newly arrived nations, aggressors themselves. They were simply freedom-loving children of nature seeking their God-given rights. The aggressors were those who reacted to them and called them lawless and insisted that they be punished. The aggressors were those who refused to concede that freedom-loving children of nature had a right to hurt them and walk all over them. The aggressors were those who said murder and destruction were wrong and should be stopped.
Those were the ones, in Walter’s mind and in the minds of all those many millions on all continents who agreed with him, who were in the wrong and deserved the condemnation of civilization in this enlightened, if perhaps somewhat topsy-turvy, century.
Instead, what had happened? Out of the fateful meeting at the White House—which he had tried to prevent by a furiously alarmed call direct to the President, which the President had refused to accept—had come a harsh and shattering decision, as uncontrollable and threatening to the settled fabric of life as a first thunderclap on the open plains: United States transport planes, carrying three thousand Marines, would be sent—indeed were already on their way—to invade Molobangwe. Units of the United States Indian Ocean Fleet would be sent—indeed had apparently been on their way for more than a week, even at the time the President, disgracefully, was telling Walter he didn’t know what he would do next—to stand off Tanzania and furnish logistic support. Three squadrons of United States Air Force fighter-bombers, equipped with small atomic weapons, would be sent—indeed were already on their way—for stationing in the nearby Congo, no friend to Terry but less to Obifumatta.
The United States, in other words, stupidly, fantastically, inexplicably, inexcusably, was for all practical purposes going to war. And over what? Perhaps fifty murdered people and an oil monopoly’s property! It was utterly insane, as Walter saw it, and not all the President’s mealy-mouthed hypocrisies could change the fact.
The President had gone on television and radio after midnight. The broadcast was being repeated every hour on the hour. Walter had just seen it again for the fourth time, and still he could find in it nothing but faulty logic and hysterical emotionalism totally unsuited to the conduct of a great power—the world’s greatest power, he thought bitterly, until it got into the hands of two madmen like the President and Orrin. And now God help it! He recalled with a scathing sarcasm the President’s words, a sarcasm whose angry vigor had already found expression in the column he had written at top speed at 2 A.M. when he had heard the broadcast in its original delivery.
“My countrymen,” the President had said gravely, flanked by Orrin and the Secretary of Defense, with the rest of the Cabinet, top Congressional leaders, and members of the National Security Council ranged behind them, “six hours ago in the African nation of Gorotoland thirty-five or forty of your fellow citizens, medical missionaries and nurses, were deliberately and mercilessly murdered and mutilated by rebel forces running amok in the capital of the country. At the same time, less than two hundred miles away, installations of the Standard Oil Company, protected by treaty and agreement with the legitimate government of Gorotoland, were deliberately and wantonly destroyed by other members of these same rebel forces. An as yet undetermined additional number of Americans were killed there.
“These acts occurred despite the clearest and most specific warning from the Government of the United States, delivered to the rebel forces, as you know, a week ago.
“In that warning, which many of you heard on your television or radio, or read in your newspapers, I said:
“‘The Government of the United States further warns the rebel forces in Gorotoland, led by Prince Obifumatta, that if so much as one more American citizen or one more piece of American property is hurt, the Government of the United States will take immediate and substantial action.’
“Apparently it was decided by those backing Prince Obifumatta that the United States did not mean this, and that it would be safe to try the United States’ patience once again because nothing would come of it but an empty protest.”
“But now your fellow countrymen lie dead, mercilessly slaughtered in the most cold-blooded and deliberate way. Now American property lies in ruins, mercilessly destroyed in the most cold-blooded and deliberate way.
“What option confronted me and your Government when the news reached me here in the White House two hours ago?”
Here the President paused and then ad-libbed what was, in Walter’s estimation, a most inflammatory and propaganda-filled statement.
“It could be you I am called upon to protect.
“It could be your property destroyed.
“It could be you lying dead.
“What would you have had me do?”
It had been quite clear to Walter that this bit of demagoguery had greatly pleased the Secretary of State—he was practically smirking with joy, Walter thought—though most of the other faces ranked behind the President were grave and upset. But not Orrin the warmonger! He looked happy.
“Consistent with the position taken by your Government a week ago,” the President said, “and consistent with what I believe to be my obligation to every American citizen—here or anywhere on earth—and to every legitimate American property-holder—here or anywhere on earth—I decided to act.
“I called together my advisers in the Cabinet, the Congress, and the National Security Council.
“We discussed whether to take this matter on appeal to the United Nations, as no doubt some of you would have wished.” (My God, Walter thought, would have wished! Then he’s already done something else.)
“This course,” the President said slowly, “I rejected. (I rejected, Walter echoed, phrases for his column already racing through his mind: then the President must have overruled a substantial group right in his own house.)
“I rejected it because the challenge was immediate and I felt the response should be immediate. I did not want to wait weeks to have others decide whether Americans had been hurt. I knew they had been hurt.” (‘Oh, you demagogue,’ Walter told the portly figure before him on the screen, ‘you demagogue!’)
“I also knew,” the President said dryly, “that others would get the matter to the United Nations fast enough. That was not my worry. My worry was what to do about the facts that existed. My worry was how to act.”
He paused and took a drink of water, wiped his lips carefully on a handkerchief, and went on.
“I did act. I have acted. Supported by my advisers whom you see here before you, I gave orders, which are already being carried out, to dispatch appropriate air. Marine, and naval forces of the United States to the nation of Gorotoland. These forces have orders to protect American lives and property and also to restore order to Gorotoland so that civilized law may prevail and all individuals, native as well as foreign, may be protected and safe.
(My God, Walter thought savagely, you’re going to establish a protectorate. You’re going to administer a free and independent nation. My God, how can you ignore what I and all other sane and civilized men have been advising the country all these years?)
“These forces of the United States are on their way at this moment. The first contingents will arrive in Gorotoland at 6 A.M. Washington time this morning.
“They will proceed to carry out their orders.
“If anyone attempts to interfere with them,” the President said calmly, “They will be dealt with.” He paused and looked straight into the cameras.
“I want you, and I want the world, to know exactly why I have done this. I have done it because it seemed to me that it was time to take a stand. It was time to put a stop to the wanton destruction of American lives and property. It was time to defend the law of civilized nations. It was time to stop the steady slide that we have seen in recent decades toward the complete breakdown of responsible dealing between nations.
(You call this responsible? Walter cried in his own mind. You fool, is this responsible?)
“It was time to re-establish the fact that when America says something, she means it. Specifically, it was time to re-establish the right of American citizens, as long as they behave themselves, to go anywhere in safety on the face of this globe.”
The President’s final words were soft but unyielding.
“I have had enough of the other. There will be no more of it.
“I hope you will understand my reasons. I hope you will support them. I have committed you to what I believe to be the honorable course. I hope for all our sakes that you agree.”
And then, as always (Walter described it to himself bitterly) there had come that damnable national anthem that fogs over any President’s words with a haze of stupid patriotic emotionalism, and the thing was over.
But it was not over, anywhere on earth. The special edition of the Post that was delivered to him by special messenger every morning was waiting beside his breakfast coffee, placed there by a purse-lipped, worried Arbella. It was index enough to what would follow.
U.S. MOVES ON (not “in”) GOROTOLAND, the headline said. MOSCOW, PEKING ISSUE ANGRY WARNINGS, DEMAND WITHDRAWAL, IMMEDIATE UN SESSION.
“What do you think of this, Arbella?” he had demanded sharply. “Don’t you think the President is insane?”
“No, sir, Mr. Walter,” she had replied firmly. “They only one way to deal with bandits, I say. I like it.”
“Well,” he snapped. “There will be plenty who won’t.”
“That’s right, Mr. Walter,” she agreed with what could only be the insolence of long association. “I expect you’ll tell ’em not to.”
And so, by God, he would, he thought as he reviewed once more the column he had written in the night. His mood had been savage and the column was savage. He had changed it hardly at all before he had called the syndicate at 3 A.M. and dictated it so that it could be rushed out at once to replace the rather dull one on gold outflow that he had filed earlier.
“So the triumph of idiocy over reason has come at last,” it began. “So we are going to war on a distant continent, for unworthy and indefensible objectives, in a contest in which nine-tenths of the world is automatically against us. So American imperialism is reborn, helped to new life by the monstrous midwifery of Harley M. Hudson and Orrin Knox. So stands the United States, convicted of aggression by its own foolish act. What will history make of so insane, futile, and foredoomed a decision?
“How arrogant they are, these little men who have placed the United States in a position that is an affront to civilized mankind everywhere! How serenely they talk, as though they had all the answers! How savagely has mediocrity achieved its revenge upon all those superior minds who have for decades sought with patient care to weave the difficult fabric of peace. How quickly is all their painstaking effort vanished now!
“The President tells us that he had to decide what to do. Apparently it did not occur to him that civilization has a mechanism, the United Nations, for settling such petty disputes between nations. Apparently he did not recall that the use of force has long ago been condemned by the decent men of all nations everywhere. Using the flimsy pretext that freedom-loving elements in Gorotoland, seeking the just achievement of their just desires, may have inadvertently attacked and possibly killed a handful of Americans and may also have damaged an oil monopoly’s plants, Harley M. Hudson has committed his country to what amounts to a state of war in the middle of Africa.
“The President says, ‘I rejected’ suggestions by some of his advisers that he make the appeal to the United Nations that would have been the only honorable, civilized course. Obviously, then, it was his decision alone, overriding the grave doubts and objections held by many who participated in last night’s fateful conference at the White House.
“For this grave crime against humanity Harley M. Hudson will have to answer to history, as will the man who clearly urged him on, Secretary of State Orrin Knox.
“The President talks of his ‘warning’ to the People’s Free Republic of Gorotoland. Did he really believe that any self-respecting government, seeking the full dignity and freedom of its long-suffering, colonially suppressed people, would do anything but reject such a humiliating ultimatum? How could it, and still hold up its head among the nations?
“It was, in effect, an invitation to do exactly what has been done—to punish the United States and so give proof, to those foolish, irresponsible, and shortsighted men who still need proof that in this forward-marching century the world cannot be run by ultimata from Washington. The response was exactly what could have been respected. And history, it seems likely, will say it was exactly what was deserved.
“What, now, of Peking and Moscow? Are we to assume that they will sit idly by and let the United States work its will in Central Africa? Rightly they fear renewed imperialism, justly they think they see a new attempt to re-established colonial control. Are they, whose entire modem histories have been devoted, at least in principle, to the battle to spread freedom and peace throughout the world, to do nothing while the world’s latest torch of freedom is wantonly and ruthlessly put out by superior force?
“The President and his war-happy principal adviser are sending American boys to die many thousands of miles from home, in an inconvenient and inaccessible terrain that cannot be either easily captured or adequately defended if it is captured. He is throwing away your sons and your money in pursuit of a purpose no decent man can defend, engaging American fortunes and forces in a hopeless war far away at a time when the nation’s domestic needs are crying for solution. All this he is doing in the name of the honor of the United States.
“Never has it been so sadly misjudged or so dreadfully defended.
“War is what the President and the Secretary of State are committing in Gorotoland. World war is what trembles on the edge of what they do, waiting only the slightest misstep to unleash its awful nuclear horrors upon a helpless world.
“My fellow Americans, pray for your country. It needs your prayers as never before.”
And never before, Walter told himself with an iron satisfaction, had he written truer words than those. And never had he been more confident of their soundness or more certain that he should send them forth to the world. It was insanity that the President and Orrin were engaged upon, the dreadful insanity that can end nations and end worlds.
It was up to him, he realized as he trudged out through the heavy drifts to the car where Roosevelt waited to drive him to the airport, to him and to all other decent men and women in America, to stop it if they could. Helen-Anne thought he never got really angry, did she? Well, this time she’d find out—they’d all find out—that he could.
A thin, bitter line settled around his lips and stayed there. Roosevelt, normally sunny and chatty, made no attempt to talk as they passed slowly over the slippery, drifted roads to the capital in the sparkling morning that had succeeded the world’s dark night.
Far below on the East River the barges, tugboats, and freighters maintained their ceaseless commerce; across on Long Island the world was a smudgy gray, clean snow contending with drab buildings, drab buildings winning out. But when he had entered the shimmering glass monolith of the UN Secretariat Building to take the elevator to his office on the thirty-eighth floor, the air had been crisp and clear, the sun had been steadily warming. Winter’s last storm would not lie too long on the land. Spring, at any moment, would be here.
And what a spring it promised to be, the Secretary-General thought sadly as he let his black, knobbled old hands rest idly on his desk and stared out the window, not really seeing the lovely day that was developing. What a spring, and how would men survive it to see summer, or the autumn that would follow, or another winter after that? Somewhere along the way in the next few months or weeks or days or hours someone would do something to make it impossible, the flywheel would spin out of the creaking machinery, the whole great game would end, the centuries’ old pretense that man could determine his own destiny would collapse in one final, obliterating NO brought on by man himself. Man could determine his own destiny—if that destiny were destruction. That was clear enough. It was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely to him that man could exercise the slightest control if the destiny were to be anything else. That apparently lay entirely with the God or gods to whom man prayed, when he remembered to pray.
Thinking of all the raucous, brawling, undisciplined nations and non-nations that snapped and snarled in the Security Council, the General Assembly, the committees, and the conference rooms that lay below his fragile and impotent aerie, the S.-G. gave a heavy sigh, the sigh of an old man who has seen too much and accomplished too little, in his own estimation, to have made it all worth the struggle. He had come to his office with such high hopes, had learned so soon that the Communists had no intention of permitting him to exercise any real influence upon events, had found himself attacked by his fellow Africans and Asians for his decision to be fair to the white nations, had found all hopes dissipated in the conflicting hatreds and suspicions that swirled constantly like a sickening and fatal gas through all the handsome chambers below. The UN was dying, it had been dying for years, and why had it been given to him, he wondered bitterly, to preside over what might well be its final agonies?
There lay before him on his desk the latest earnest pamphlets of all those well-meaning and good-hearted American organizations which still insisted, in the face of all the evidence, that the raddled organization was a strong and effective force for world peace. He had also seen on their television screens and heard over their radio the defensive, anguished pleas to believe in a dream whose guardians had wrecked it long since. THINK WHAT YOU WOULD DO WITHOUT IT! they urged; DON’T LET THE SKEPTICS TELL YOU IT ISN’T WORKING! Well: he was its Secretary-General, and he knew. Every honest observer in the world knew. Yet here were the Americans, pretending with a desperate anguish to the end, that somehow by sheer incantation and appeal they could put life back into something that was already, insofar as its original purpose of being an effective peace-keeper was concerned, a corpse putrescent and overdue for burial. This was the fact, and not all the desperate pamphlets and all the defensive statements and all the indignant outpourings of scorn upon those who acknowledged the fact could change it in the slightest. Long, too long, after the UN had been weakened and dragged down by its own members into a howling shell of what it could have been, powerful groups in America were still pretending that it was the vigorous and hopeful organization of their long-ago dreams.
The Secretary-General could not understand this on the basis of reason, though he could understand it on the basis of fear. They were so dreadfully afraid of what the world would be like without the shaky symbol, however empty, of their hope of peace. They were so frantically unsure of themselves when confronted by the possibility of a world in which they might have to stand on their own feet, take the consequences of their own acts, be unable to avail themselves of this comforting fiction to which to pass the buck for their own errors. They wanted the UN propped up and kept there so that they could run to it like children and hide their faces in its skirts. But the skirts were empty, the sought-for womblike comfort long gone, if it had ever really existed after the first ten minutes of the organization’s life. They knew it, as he did, but they would not give up the pretense. They were too afraid.
Not so, ironically, the Africans and Asians who had done so much, with their exaggerated fears of the colonial past, to bring the UN down. It was the greatest thing in the world for them to be able to come to New York, all expenses paid, usually by American money, and live in luxury while they went to the Assembly or the Security Council every day and denounced America to the accompaniment of fine, approving notices in the American press. To use one of those skeptical, ironic, knowing American phrases that so often went to the heart of things, they never had it so good back in the bush. But they did have, back in the bush, the comforting assurance that no matter how irresponsible they were, no matter what they said or did, the UN would continue to exist as long as the Americans could possibly preserve it—a free and protective shield from behind they could spit out their hatreds of America and make a bitter mockery of its earnest, awkward, well-meaning hopes that somehow, sometime, somewhere the world might discover dignity and peace.
And now America had finally given them real cause for hatred, and most of them, he knew, would be in a manic frenzy when the Security Council met at three this afternoon. The President had called him last night near midnight, waking him from a deep yet troubled sleep in which he had been chasing, with dragging feet and arms so dreadfully heavy that he could not raise his spear, some impossibly bright and golden lion in his native Nigeria. He had known at once that something of dreadful import must have occurred. He had also realized that the call was a great courtesy, for he need not have been informed; few others bothered to inform him. His gratitude increased when he realized that the President was actually asking his advice, as much as Presidents ever could.
The President had told him what had happened and had asked what he should do. Did the Secretary-General think that any purpose other than a futile and foredoomed attempt to appease the vague phantasm “world opinion” would be served by refraining from stern and direct action? Did he see any hope of affirmative support in the Security Council or the General Assembly if the United States should go through the procedure of submitting the issue?
“You answer a first question with a second, Mr. President,” the S.-G. had said. “We both, I think, know the answer to the second. Therefore the first need hardly have been asked, do you think?”
“Probably not,” the President said. “But I felt it should be, out of respect to you.”
“Thank you,” the S.-G. said, feeling flattered. “I think, in any event, that you need have no doubt that the issue will be submitted to the Council, as it is already seized of Prince Obifumatta’s complaint against your ultimatum.”
“Call it what you will,” the President said, “I felt it had to be done.”
“I am afraid Obifumatta, too clever, like his cousin, did not foresee that you were laying the foundation for future action.”
“I am afraid Obifumatta has not foreseen many things. Very well. I am sorry to have disturbed you, but I wished you to know what to expect and I also wanted you to have the opportunity to go on record, if you so desired, as being opposed to what I am about to do should I decide to do it.”
The Secretary-General had permitted himself a wry chuckle.
“Opposed to what you will do should you do it,” he repeated. “Mr. President, even if I were warning you against it—”
“Are you?” the President asked quickly.
“Each of us must act as his fate decrees.”
“I thought as much. Understand me on one thing: I do not minimize the consequences at all. They may be ultimate. But I feel we have no choice.”
“The world is becoming full of no choices,” the Secretary-General said sadly. “Daily the choices diminish. It is a world of no choices.”
“And Obifumatta and his friends have just reduced them further,” the President said grimly.
“As they no doubt thought you did with your ultimatum,” the Secretary-General ventured. The President sighed.
“There is one-millionth of a chance that they sincerely believe they are in the right. But I do not believe it. I think their actions always spring from the most abysmal cynicism and the most utter contempt for human decency as we understand it. I think this is the essential fact underlying all the others … Thank you again. My advisers are waiting for me to tell them what they may advise me to do. May all go well until we meet again.”
“Which will be?”
“Who can say? I may address the Assembly myself before this is over. Though not for a while, yet. Events must develop for a time, first. Nothing would be gained now.”
“If that is your opinion,” the Secretary-General said, “When you are ready—”
“I shall let you know.”
“May all go well with you, too, Mr. President,” the Secretary-General said, moved by a strange combination of sympathy, understanding, pity, and fear.
“My thanks. Good night.”
“Good night.”
The S.-G. had rolled back into his pillows, though not to sleep for several hours. Always there was the fear that the United States might be provoked too far; always there was the possibility that her patience, which usually was sufficient to withstand any amount of attack, opposition, disparagement, and contempt, might abruptly snap; always there was the awesome possibility that she might explode into some violent and drastic action whose consequences could not be foreseen, much less controlled. It had happened in Asia, it could happen in Africa. Apparently this was to be one of the times.
Nothing but disaster lay ahead for anyone, as the Secretary-General saw it. He knew that in the morning he would have to receive a constant stream of visitors from the rooms below, all furious, all shouting, all demanding that he do something. Do something! He had done all he could, though he would not admit it to them. He had in effect told the President to go ahead, for he agreed with the President; though he knew the ultimates of the decision might be dreadful beyond imagining.
Now the first howling visitor was about to arrive. The graceful Swedish girl who was serving as his principal secretary this year entered the room.
“The Soviet Ambassador wishes to see you,” she said.
The Secretary-General sighed and nodded. Now the bad day would begin, and in the worst possible fashion. He sat very still, bracing himself for the screaming denunciation he knew was about to come.
“Good morning,” the familiar voice from the Senate said with a certain dry amusement. “I hope you’re well rested after our busy night.”
“I’m not exactly chipper,” the Secretary of State admitted. “You, I suppose, are fresh as a daisy and have nothing to worry about, up there on the Hill. Don’t relax. I’m going to give you something.”
Robert Durham Munson, who was senior United States Senator from Michigan and Majority Leader of the United States Senate, uttered his comfortable chuckle.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. What do you want us to do?”
“The obvious. A concurrent resolution supporting the President and affirming the determination of Congress to stand by him until Gorotoland is pacified.”
“And the world is made safe for Standard Oil?” Bob Munson inquired in a mocking tone that parodied all those who believed as much.
“And missionaries and Americans abroad and honorable dealings between nations and so on,” Orrin Knox said impatiently. “We were all agreed on this last night. I just want it put in a form the world will recognize. What’s the matter with that?”
“Have you seen Walter Dobius’ column?”
“I have.”
“It’s having some effect, I find.”
“So? And are we supposed to run from Walter?”
“No, I’m not saying anything about running from Walter. I’m just saying it’s having some effect. I’ve already heard from quite a few people this morning. Some are quite disturbed.”
“Aren’t we?” Orrin asked in a scornful tone. “Do the dolts think we went into this lightly last night?”
“No, but people like Fred Van Ackerman and Arly Richardson, for instance, are convinced from Walter’s column that there was a terrific split at the White House and that Harley overrode us all and dragged us kicking and screaming off to war.”
The Secretary snorted as he thought of Fred Van Ackerman, junior Senator from Wyoming and perennial troublemaker, and Arly Richardson, junior Senator from Arkansas and not much better.
“Seven negative votes out of thirty-one?” he demanded. “That’s a terrific split? They’re just making trouble, as usual.”
“I’m not arguing what the facts are,” Bob Munson said patiently. “I’m arguing what Walter Dobius says they are. The two needn’t be the same in order to satisfy Walter’s followers. His word is sufficient.” He made an amused sound. “I see he says you’re a monstrous midwife. There’s a new description of Orrin Knox.”
“Walter’s hysterical. I’ve known him to write some strange things, but this one takes the cake. I think he’s gone mad.”
“Obviously he thinks the same about you. And, as I say, there are some who are going to agree with him. A great many, I suspect, before it’s over. Over there.”
“How could we have done anything else?” the Secretary demanded. “How could we—”
“I’m not arguing,” Senator Munson said, “I’m not arguing. I was there last night. I voted for it. I’m just philosophizing on the great gap that exists between what a situation actually is and the picture of it that people like Walter can create in the public mind if they have sufficient distribution. I sometimes think there ought to be a law.”
“There is. The First Amendment. They all go screaming behind it when you try to challenge their version of things.”
“Walter’s a special case, though. He doesn’t only fight through his column now. He’s become too big a wheel in the Washington world for small potatoes like that. He’s called me this morning. Guess what he wants.”
“A resolution opposing it,” the Secretary said.
“Exactly.”
“He is mad.”
“I reminded him that in twenty-five years of columning here he had never yet seen a Congress fail to support a President in an international crisis. He said this might be different. He sounded as though he really thought so, too. Very grim is Walter Wonderful on this bright sunny day. What’s this Dolly tells me about him going to receive the Jasons’ Good and Faithful Servant Award Friday night?”
“So I hear from Helen-Anne. Don’t worry, you’ll be invited. Quite inadvertently events seem to have played right into his hands as far as timing’s concerned. By Friday he should be really wound up and ready to let go with both barrels.”
“I suppose Patsy set the whole thing up so he could come out for Ted,” Senator Munson said.
“Apparently. Now he’ll be in even better shape to do so. Unless Ted supports the President.”
“How could he? Wouldn’t that be supporting you, too?”
“Oh, some people might be broad-minded enough. Or patriotic enough. Or honorable enough. Or some other old-fashioned concept like that. I doubt if Ted will curb his ambitions at this moment, though. If Walter really does represent a major segment of the population, it seems like a bandwagon tailor-made for Ted.”
“The neo-neo isolationists?” Bob Munson suggested. “How many contortions poor Walter and his friends have had to make in recent years!”
“I feel deeply for them,” Orrin Knox remarked. “It’s touching to watch Walter, in foreign affairs, stand on his head, rub his stomach, wiggle his ears, peddle a bicycle, and do push-ups, all at once and the same time.”
“Nominating Ted is going to hurt you, though. You know that.”
“Certainly. I don’t minimize it. However, that’s still assuming that Harley won’t run again. I don’t see how he can avoid it, now. Ted isn’t the only one who has things tailor-made.”
“Oh, I expect this will die down in a week or two, don’t you?” Bob Munson asked. “I doubt if it will take any longer than that to get things settled. You’ll still be in the running.”
“I’m not so sure,” Orrin said gloomily. “Who can say how long a crisis is going to last nowadays? We may be in there for years if things don’t fall just right. I don’t think Peking and Moscow are going to let stability be restored without a contest, do you? As usual, they’ve got too much stake in chaos.”
“It’s a devilish place for them to supply,” Senator Munson remarked.
“Us, too. But that isn’t going to stop anything. Nor do I see why it should. ‘Sending American boys to die many thousands of miles from home,’ Walter says. Well, isn’t that too bad. He sang a different tune with Hitler.”
“He always sings a different tune with people he doesn’t like.”
“Except when he’s afraid of them. Unless you assume that Walter Dobius and his crowd are Communists, which strikes me as ridiculous in spite of what some wild-eyed people say, then the only logical explanation of their erratic positions over the years is that they’re so afraid of war that they are willing to bow down to anyone who appears to threaten it.”
Bob Munson chuckled.
“I believe they would prefer the word ‘negotiate’ to the words ‘bow down.’ It amounts to the same thing, but ‘negotiate’ smells better. Maybe you’re right. It’s always baffled me, I must say. Well, you want a resolution, then. Have you talked to Bill?”
“The Speaker of the House isn’t in yet, so his office just informed me. Rather primly.”
“Must be a new girl. I’m ready to go, over here. I’ll have Tom August introduce the resolution as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, right after the opening this noon.”
“I’m sure the Speaker will go along, too,” Orrin said. “Thanks, old pal. When are we going to get together for something social?”
“The Jason Foundation dinner Friday night appears to be the first opportunity,” Senator Munson said solemnly. “I’m sure we’re all going to be there, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Orrin said thoughtfully.
“Have you talked to Harley,” Senator Munson asked, “and has he seen Walter’s column?”
“Yes and yes. Our mild-mannered old friend is not so mild-mannered this morning.”
“I’d advise you both to keep calm and prepare for a savage lashing from the press. This is one of those many times in recent years when all of America’s finest minds are going to be telling the world that the worst thing in it is America. And those who got her into this.”
“It seemed the only thing consistent with honor.”
“Not honor as they see it.”
“Thank God I don’t wear their glasses,” the Secretary of State remarked. “Keep me advised on the resolution.”
“Same thing. Keep me advised on the candidacy.”
“I want to talk to you about that one of these days soon.”
“No point until Harley decides, is there?”
“He’s got to say something soon. The time for drift is ending, particularly with Gorotoland on the griddle. I imagine it won’t be long, particularly after Friday night.”
“You don’t think Walter will show his usual restrained and dignified statesmanship, then,” Bob Munson suggested.
“Usual restrained and dignified fiddlesticks. He’ll be raving.”
“The whole thing is such fun,” Senator Munson said gently. “Give my love to Beth.”
“Likewise Dolly. Keep in touch.”
The Speaker, when the Secretary reached him ten minutes later, was equally cooperative on the resolution, equally intrigued by the public hullaballoo.
“Should have thought of the resolution when we were all together at the White House last night. Don’t know why we didn’t, Orrin. Must have been too many other things on our minds. When you going to announce for President?”
“You think I should, when I’m a monstrous midwife to a third world war?”
The Speaker chuckled.
“Yes, I see where friend Walter got a little heated this morning. I expect he’ll carry a good many with him, too. Scare you?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me. The only thing I worry about is that it may scare some of the people who want to be for me.”
“You can’t include me there,” the Speaker said with the comfortable assurance that was his from years of unassailable power and control over his unruly branch of the Congress. “Told you a year ago at the time young Brigham Anderson died that I’d be for you, and I am. Folks like Walter been trying to scare me for forty years. They never have.”
“Thank you, Bill,” the Secretary said with a genuine gratitude. “You’re one big plus I have on my side, anyway. You don’t know how much it means.”
“First, though,” the Speaker said, “we’ve got to blast Harley loose. He may not want to blast, Orrin.”
“I’m quite happy either way. Honestly I am. Bill. I think you know me well enough to know that.”
“I know, I know, but still. He ought to let us know.”
“How much damage is Walter going to do in this Gorotoland business?”
“Quite a lot, I think,” the Speaker said gravely. “He called me this morning early, you know. Wants the House to pass a resolution opposing it.”
“He’s an egomaniac.”
“He isn’t modest, that’s true enough. However, we’ll pass your resolution, all right, and plenty to spare. But it won’t stop some of ’em making a hellish row.”
“Will Jawbone Swarthman introduce it for us?”
“Now, there’s an example,” the Speaker said regretfully. “Much as I love Jawbone—and I do, you know, I’ve known him since he was a little tad coming up here when his grandfather was in the House from South Carolina—he can be as slippery and stubborn as one of those Carolina mules sometimes. I’m afraid this may be one of ’em.”
“It’s going to look a little odd if the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee won’t back the Administration in a crisis like this.”
“Oh, I’m working on him,” the Speaker said. “Don’t worry about that. But he’s pretty riled up. Tends to agree with Walter Dobius, I’m afraid, that we shouldn’t send American boys thousands of miles from home. At least,”—the Speaker chuckled—“not to meddle in any colored folks’ family quarrel, as Jawbone puts it.”
“Jawbone isn’t a fool,” the Secretary said sharply. “He knows perfectly well this is another pitched battle with the Communists. Why didn’t he speak up last night at the White House if he had all these qualms? He voted for it then.”
“That’s what I mean when I say slippery,” the Speaker said. “Jawbone’s doing a lot of thinking about the folks back home these days. Now that Seab Cooley’s dead, God rest his soul, that South Carolina Senate seat’s up for grabs, and Jawbone has ambitions, you know. Plenty of ’em.”
Orrin made an impatient sound.
“What on earth does he want to go to the Senate for? He’s got fifty times more influence as chairman of House Foreign Affairs than he’ll ever have as a member of the Senate. What does he want it for?”
“He’s never really been comfortable with foreign affairs,” the Speaker said. “Jawbone would much rather have been chairman of Agriculture, worrying about all the cotton and taters on the old plantation back home. Plus the fact, Orrin”—the Speaker gave a wry little chortle—“plus the fact, much as I hate to admit it and you must never quote me, that for a lot of people, an awful lot of people, the title of United States Senator somehow means more than the title of United States Representative. They just like to have it.”
“And for that Jawbone is going to give up Foreign Affairs and betray his own Administration when it needs him? I’ll talk to Jawbone!”
“Now, Orrin, now, Orrin. Easy does it. You can talk to Jawbone, but you let me do some talking first. I think we can ease him around, but it may take a little time.”
“This resolution ought to go through at once if it’s going to do any good.”
“It may just not,” the Speaker said. “Better brace yourself, if you and the President are counting on it. It may just not. The folks who agree with Walter can’t stop it, but they can slow it down some. Particularly when it’s all involved with the presidential election. That makes everything extra touchy.”
“Are you going to the dinner for Walter Friday night?”
“Patsy called and invited me last night just as I was leaving for the White House. I told her I didn’t know whether I’d be in town, but if so, I might. Be interesting to hear what he has to say. Also be interesting,” he added dryly, “to hear what Ted’s going to say about this Gorotoland business. I expect he’s being asked.”
“I’m awaiting a blast any minute. Or he may just be clever enough to keep still. We’ll see.”
“I’ll bet he’s under plenty of pressure to speak out,” the Speaker said with a chuckle.
“I feel for him,” Orrin said, realizing he had said the same thing to Bob Munson about Walter, and realizing that it came from the same commingling of impatience and contempt for those who could not see their country’s best course as clearly as he could. Or, as he reminded himself with the saving grace that kept Orrin Knox from being insufferable, as clearly as he thought he could.
“Darling,” Patsy Labaiya was saying at that very moment from the house in Dumbarton Oaks, “you know we’re counting on you to introduce Walter Friday night. Why don’t you call Ted right now—collect, of course—and consult with him about it? Then you can also tell him that Walter and all his friends back here do hope that he’s going to issue a strong statement condemning this latest insanity by the President and Orrin Knox in Gorotoland. Could you do that, darling?”
Downtown in the marvelous gingerbread structure known as the Executive Offices Building, or, more historically and affectionately, as “Old State,” the director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform swung around in his chair and stared across West Executive Avenue at the White House. It was gleaming so brightly in the sun that Robert A. Leffingwell felt he could touch it if he reached out a hand. The snow was melting fast on the roof; as he looked, a large section slid off and doused a couple of photographers emerging from the press room. He could almost hear their shouted profanities as they jumped back. It lent an amusement to his voice that Patsy was quick to notice.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I might or I might not, at this point. I don’t just know yet.”
“Don’t know?” Patsy demanded in some dismay. “Well, it isn’t any laughing matter, I can tell you that.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” Bob Leffingwell said. “I just saw a couple of friends of mine get socked by the snow over at the White House. It melted and fell down on them. Anyway, why ask me to talk to Ted? He’s your brother. You two are still speaking, aren’t you?”
“He knows what I think, we don’t have to communicate on a thing like this. It’s important that other people talk to him, though.”
“It might be important for him to stay out of it for a day or two,” Bob Leffingwell suggested. “He can’t be hurt by keeping his mouth shut, but he might be if he kept it open.”
“I don’t agree. I think it’s imperative that he say something right now while things are at their peak.”
“Do you think that this is their peak? I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Even more reason why he should speak out,” Patsy said firmly. “And you, too, I might add, especially if you’re going to be associated with him in the campaign. Have you read Walter’s column?”
“Yes, I read it.”
“Well, then,” she said triumphantly. “You agree with it, don’t you?”
There was a thoughtful pause and she repeated in some alarm, “You do agree, don’t you?”
“I told you, I just don’t know,” Bob Leffingwell said slowly. “I thought Walter was a little extreme. In fact, I thought he sounded hysterical. It didn’t really sound like Walter at all. He’s usually so calm and judicious.”
“This time he obviously feels very, very deeply. He obviously feels this is THE END.”
“Even so,” Bob Leffingwell said in an unimpressed voice, “I thought he went overboard. Quite amazingly so, for Walter. I wonder if he’s losing his touch?”
“He is not losing his touch,” Patsy said sharply. “He is just simply frightfully concerned about this insane act by the President and Orrin, that’s all. Aren’t you?” she demanded in a challenging tone. “Don’t tell me YOU’VE gone over to the enemy. That would be the day!”
“Of course I’m frightfully concerned,” Bob Leffingwell said with a show of annoyance rare for one normally so suave and self-possessed. “Don’t be a fool. Everyone’s frightfully concerned, and I’ll thank you not to impugn my intelligence or integrity.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Patsy said hastily. “I just got carried away. But, REALLY, now, you aren’t going to side with Orrin and the President on this, are you? It would be so DREADFUL to have you on the other side. I did so want you,” she added forlornly, “to introduce Walter Friday night. It would have made it so perfect for Ted.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t introduce Walter. I just said it’s a situation that requires some thought and some restraint. I don’t know if I want to associate myself with everything he says if he’s going to be as rabid as he was in that column this morning.”
“I still don’t think it was rabid,” Patsy said stubbornly, “but if you do, I suppose I can’t change you. But honestly, you don’t want to be with Orrin and the President, do you? It’s one of those issues that narrows down to just where does a man stand. You’ve got to make a choice, you know. You can’t just sit out the campaign.”
“Is Ted going to fight the campaign on this issue? That would be interesting.”
“He may be forced to. It may be one of those things a candidate can’t avoid, you know. Especially with the enemy taking the other position.”
“Who is this enemy you keep talking about?” Bob Leffingwell asked with some amusement. “If you mean nice old Harley and volatile old Orrin, that seems a slightly fierce way to talk about them.”
“I think that’s the kindest tone I’ve heard you use about Orrin since he—since a year ago,” Patsy said. “You really AREN’T going over to him, are you, darling?”
“I doubt it very much,” Bob Leffingwell said in a voice that was suddenly quite crisp as they both remembered the way in which Orrin, then senior Senator from Illinois, had blocked his nomination to be Secretary of State. “Even so,” he said, less arbitrarily, “I think it is easy—dangerously easy—to oversimplify a situation like the present one. I think it is a time to be reasonable and mature in our judgments of it.”
“Darling,” Patsy said in a wistful tone, “you don’t sound liberal at all, any more. You sound just like a REACTIONARY. Don’t you think Orrin and the President have oversimplified? Don’t you think they should have been reasonable and mature? Don’t you think what they’ve done is dangerous?”
“Of course I do,” he said with a renewed impatience. “But I’m not saying I might not have done the same had I been—had I been in a position where my advice was sought. It wasn’t. If it had been, I couldn’t honestly tell you at this moment what I would have counseled.”
“Well,” Patsy said, really dreadfully shocked at this apparent betrayal of what everyone on the Right Side had always thought Bob Leffingwell stood for, “I guess if you don’t want to introduce Walter, then, we’ll just have to get somebody else. But I had so hoped—”
“I repeat,” Bob Leffingwell said, “I’m not saying I won’t introduce Walter. In fact, I will. But I’m going to reserve the right to qualify my own position as I see fit.”
“You want it both ways,” Patsy said, though she told herself she mustn’t be spiteful, it would only antagonize. “You want to be in both camps at once. I never thought I’d have to see the day when Bob Leffingwell abandoned his principles.”
“Perhaps Bob Leffingwell is learning a few,” he said crisply. “Give my best to Ted when you talk to him, because I’m not going to, at this point.”
“He would value your advice,” Patsy said soberly. “That’s the only reason I asked.”
“My advice is to keep quiet,” Bob Leffingwell said in the same crisp tone. “But I don’t suppose he’ll take it.”
Sitting in his office in Sacramento, however, staring thoughtfully down at the crowds of state employees hurrying to work along the walkways of the Capitol, the Governor of California was not being as hasty as his friend feared and his sister desired. It was still early in the West but already the full flood of Eastern opinion was shrieking from the headlines, blaring from the radio, snarling with a suave indignation from the television screens. The little turns of phrase that do so much to tear down something Walter and his world wish to tear down were everywhere apparent to the perceptive citizen:
“The sudden and abrupt American move against Gorotoland.…An action which many Americans themselves regard as indefensible.…A situation in which the rebels, apparently seeking only to establish an independent government free from colonial control, are suddenly confronted with the ghastly ghost of colonialism, strangely revived by the West’s leading democracy.…A minor skirmish and a few American lives, transformed instantaneously into the sort of issue that could destroy the world.…The President’s inexplicable, and many people feel, inexcusable decision.…”
Walter and his world had wasted no time, and dutifully the chant was being picked up in the West as well.
Ted Jason sighed as he looked at the state’s morning papers spread across his desk. The homogeneity of Walter’s world impressed him anew. It had been increasing ever since World War II until now it was virtually a solid mass of automatic opinion, swinging on cue against this issue, for that personality, as though someone punched a button. From Manhattan to the Golden Gate the cry was predictable, consistent, and virtually impenetrable by any dissenting opinion. When the big boys in the big city spoke, those who considered them the epitome of sophistication wanted desperately to speak like them. In pursuit of that goal, a blanket of conformity stultifying to thought and murderous to genuine discussion lay upon the nation. Orrin and the President, Ted told himself grimly, would have a tough time making their way against it. It wouldn’t matter much if the entire populace started out solidly behind them, Walter and his world would do their damnedest to swing the balance the other way. And if, as was certainly the case now, many Americans were divided, uncertain, and confused, the current might be too strong for even the President to overcome.
Should Ted, then, swim with it and seize what advantage he could? The way was open and it could be easy. Perhaps the President, all unknowing, had handed him the key to the White House after all. Quite possibly he had if Orrin ran, and—heady thought—perhaps he had even if he himself should run. Governor Jason was absolutely certain that if he issued a strong statement denouncing the President’s decision, the entire apparatus would be his to ride as far and as high as he could. And that, he realized with a cold-blooded calculation as he studied the harshly self-righteous journals before him and remembered the indignant and condemnatory broadcasts he had heard and seen with breakfast, might be far and high indeed.
Still, there were other things. He had to admire the President’s guts, taking such an action on the very eve of a campaign: such things were usually deferred until after, when politically it was quite, quite safe. Many a staunch defender of the nation was braver after November than he ever was before. Harley Hudson had preferred to meet the issue head-on and do it now. So, too, had Orrin Knox, who had gone into it with his eyes open, knowing it was to be a decision that he too must carry should the President retire and he become an active candidate for the nomination. Ted Jason, not for the first time, was forced to admire the courage and integrity of his principal opponent.
And his own courage and integrity? Recalling how Ceil, very glamorous and Givenchy as always, had paused in the doorway to look back at him this morning, he had wondered if these qualities were showing signs of the strain they were under.
“Sweetie, I must dash,” she had said with her cool little humorous air. “That thing the P.T.A. convention is putting on, you know, that breakfast for distinguished ladies. Of whom,” she commented with an amused expression, “they seem to think I am one. I shall try not to make a speech. If I do, I shall try not to mention Gorotoland. But, my dear”—giving him that long, slanting glance that he sometimes felt might penetrate his defenses, though it never had and they both knew it; but Ceil kept trying in a humorously halfhearted way—“my dear, what about you? Can you get by without, today?”
“I don’t know,” he had confessed. “Do you think I should?”
“Whatever you decide I shall be for,” she said with the look repeated, the humor exaggerated. “I’m a politician’s wife. I go along.”
“That’s not responsive to my question,” he told her with his calm, self-possessed smile.
“I repeat,” she said with her cool, cordial little laugh, “I’m a politician’s wife. You name it, I’m for it.”
“Then you think I shouldn’t say anything. Sit down a minute,” he had added impatiently, but with the basic good nature that underlay all their discussions, “and stop being the social butterfly long enough to apply that magnificent brain of yours to it.”
“Sweetie!” she cried. “You say the nicest things!” But she complied and, disposing herself gracefully across from him at the huge old table gave him a long, analytic stare which he returned unflinching. “You aren’t sure, are you?” she observed finally. “I thought Ted Jason was always cold, calculating, self-assured, and ruthless. As the papers say. Not so much this morning, eh?”
“The stakes are very high,” he remarked, gesturing at the papers spread about. “Look at this reaction.”
“Very high in every way,” she agreed, slipping off one of her gloves and studying her long, handsome fingers critically in the sunlight that fell across the comfortable room. “Politically and personally both. I imagine if you hop on the bandwagon it might carry you right on up. I also imagine your voice would be more powerful than any other single voice in slowing the bandwagon down, if you so decided. It poses a problem.” She slipped the glove back on, clasped her hands on her purse, and looked at him with her shrewd, level gaze. I’m glad it isn’t mine.”
“Tell me what to do,” he suggested. She smiled and shook her head.
“I know what honor would suggest, but perhaps conviction is too strong for it. And ambition. It isn’t everybody who’s lucky enough to have those two coincide. Perhaps you should make the most of it.”
“But you don’t think I should.”
“If it’s genuine conviction, why not?” she said, but, as always, he couldn’t find the real Ceil in it. The real Ceil was somewhere back inside where he would always pursue in vain. Which, he thought with an ironic little amusement that reached his eyes and was answered in hers, was why he would always keep on pursuing.
“It seems to be genuine conviction with a good many of those,” he said, gesturing again at the papers. She nodded.
“And also Walter Dobius and the other big boys say so, so it’s stylish. But, I repeat: you can stop it if you will. And very probably, as I say, no one else is in exactly the position you are of being able to stop it.…Excuse me, sweetie,” she said with a sudden briskness, “but the distinguished ladies of the P.T.A. are awaiting the arrival of one more distinguished lady in their midst. I must run.”
“First Lady of California,” Ted Jason remarked with an ironic but friendly smile as she came around the table, leaned down, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “First Lady of—”
“Don’t bedazzle a poor girl’s head with dreams. I repeat, I’m that necessary adjunct of politics, a wife. Lead on, McDuff, and whither thou et cetera. I’ll try not to mention Gorotoland.”
“Good,” he said with a smile. “Ceil,” he added as she reached the door. She turned back, tall and stunning and willowy but, as he knew better than anyone, shrewd as nails and tough as steel underneath.
“Yes?”
“I think you’re somewhat more than an adjunct.”
She gave him a dazzling smile and blew him a kiss.
“I hoped as much, but I wasn’t sure.”
“Oh, get out,” he said with a grin, turning back to the papers. “Go on, get out.”
She gave him another smile, this time filled with a genuine friendliness and amusement, and did so.
But that, of course, was little help in solving his problem. It was all right for Ceil to advise, as she surely had, that he say nothing to oppose the President and, if possible, support him; but much as he admired his wife’s brains and intuitive grasp of politics, the matter was not so simple.
If he spoke out now in support he probably could give the President the extra edge he needed to carry the country wholeheartedly with him; he probably could effectively slow down the world of Walter Wonderful. But what would that do to his own chances for the nomination and election—and what, also, would it do to his own convictions in the matter? He might not be as rabid as Walter—like many on this day who admired and followed Walter, he was a little taken aback at the extreme virulence of his column attacking the President—but he did have very grave personal doubts about the wisdom of what had been decided last night at the White House.
If he spoke in opposition, it would be considerably more than ambition that prompted it. And if he spoke in support, it would in fact require of him more of a conscious effort, more a deliberate forcing of himself into a not entirely comfortable position. Yet speaking in support of course had its imperatives and its appeal, depending upon how seriously one conceived the United States to be threatened by Communism and how actively one thought it should defend its rights and protect its citizens.
He was held by this dilemma for a while, wandering in the gray no-man’s-land between conviction and desire, ambition and duty. Which was which, and what was the true nature of any of them? Who ever knew, when the crises came and history said: decide—and you were one of those history had chosen to do the deciding?
He had been sitting thus, staring unseeing at the screaming headlines, the insistent columns, the harshly demanding editorials, for perhaps five minutes when his secretary buzzed and a light flashed on his telephone. Across three thousand miles of a troubled country he heard with a startled surprise and an immediate tension the quiet greeting of its Chief Executive, apparently not at all upset by the gale in which he found himself.
“Hello, Ted,” the President said. “I’m pleased to find you in. My luck.”
“My pleasure, Mr. President,” the Governor said, recovering rapidly and preparing to listen with extreme care to every nuance in the comfortable voice. But the President’s next remark made it clear he was not indulging in subtleties today.
“I wonder where you stand, Ted. Perhaps you can tell me.”
“Why—” the Governor began. Then he laughed. “You’re so direct you leave me momentarily speechless.”
“Only momentarily, I hope,” the President said in a friendly tone, but not allowing him time to really gather his thoughts. “Well?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve been sitting here reading the newspapers and realizing that I really don’t know where I stand.”
The President chuckled.
“Oh, well, if you’ve been reading the newspapers you know where you stand. There’s only one position with them—or most of them, anyway, the most powerful. The position is that I’m history’s greatest scoundrel and World War III is here. Do you agree?”
“I find it difficult to agree with extremists of any kind,” Governor Jason said carefully; so carefully that the President chuckled again.
“I could take that personally, you know—at least if I adopted the line about me that Walter Dobius and his friends have adopted this morning. Well, then, if you aren’t ready to tell me at the moment, let me put it to you this way: what would you have done?”
“How can I say,” the Governor inquired smoothly, “since I couldn’t possibly place myself in your position with all the facts you had at hand when you made the decision?”
“They weren’t so very different from what has already been made public,” the President said dryly. “I’m not one of the fact-hiding Presidents, you know.”
“I do know,” Ted Jason agreed, “and I admire you for it. I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, but, really—I don’t have the facts, at least as they came to you fresh from Africa last night, so how could I know what I would have done had I been where you are?”
“You might have to face that one of these days.”
The Governor laughed.
“That I doubt. Harley M. Hudson is going to be President of these United States for quite some time, I imagine.”
“Maybe you can beat Harley M. Hudson on this issue,” the President suggested calmly, “if you decide to make it an issue. Or Orrin Knox,” he added, so smoothly that it was a second before Governor Jason realized the slip he had made, “or whoever.”
“I doubt that,” the Governor said, giving no indication he had caught it. “I imagine anyone who wants to run a winning campaign will pretty well have to endorse Harley M. Hudson’s position, won’t he?”
“Perhaps,” the President said. “And perhaps not. That’s one reason I’m calling. Do you?”
“I haven’t made any statement yet,” Ted Jason said, “though of course I’ve had plenty of opportunity. I’m sticking to ‘no comment’ for the time being.”
“Probably sensible,” the President said. “I want you to know, however, that it would be a great help to me if you would endorse my action. Just as it will make us mortal political enemies,” he added calmly, “if you don’t.”
The Governor made an acknowledging sound.
“Suppose I don’t do either one, for the moment? What would your reaction be then?”
“I should be disappointed,” the President said, “but not actively annoyed. Assuming that in due course you saw your way clear to supporting your President and the leader of your party.”
“It’s complicated for me a little,” Governor Jason said thoughtfully, “because I am not sure what I would have done. I am not sure that this is the wisest course. I am not sure that we should be doing what you have committed us to. Why, for instance, make the issue here and now? Why not some other time, some other place?”
“All places and all times are the same in this onslaught against us,” the President said somberly. “It had a beginning, once, many years ago, but once it began it has never stopped, it has never even paused. It is a continuous thing, and it is up to us to decide where and at what time we shall try to stop it. One time is just as good as another, one place as good as another, one issue just as valid as another, for they are all on the same footing in the eyes of the Communists, they are all attacks upon us, and so we might as well look at them the same way. The attack is total. It may be a military skirmish, a cement wall, a diplomatic negotiating table, a cocktail party, a riot, a visit—anything and everything. I simply chose this time and place because I personally—and, I will say, most of my advisers agreed with me—felt that it was time for certain things to stop.”
“So you started others,” Governor Jason suggested. “Understand me,” he added quickly, “I am not being flippant. You will realize that I am trying to be as honest with you as you are being with me.”
“I do realize. I appreciate it. I don’t want to force you into something you honestly can’t accept. I’m not that kind of President, either. But of course if you oppose me I can’t ignore it. It’s going to have consequences. Inevitably.”
“Suppose I were to endorse what you’ve done,” Ted Jason said slowly, “so that Orrin and I were on exactly the same footing as far as support of you is concerned. What would your attitude be in the convention? Would you be neutral as between us? Or would you endorse Orrin? Or would you endorse me? Or,” he said, taking a gamble on the President’s good nature, “is it all academic because you plan to run yourself, anyway?”
“Will my answer help you make up your mind on a matter which you tell me is one of such fundamental conviction with you?” the President inquired dryly. “Are you for sale?”
“I am not,” Ted Jason said coldly, and prepared himself for the explosion his next remark would bring: “Though you seem to be bidding.”
But Harley Hudson was a surprising man in a lot of ways to his political contemporaries, and instead of flaring back in anger he simply responded with his comfortable, unperturbed laugh.
“I suppose I deserved that. And I suppose I am, yes. And you still haven’t told me. So what shall I do about you, Governor?”
“I don’t see that you have to do anything,” Ted Jason said, more calmly, feeling suddenly that he was emerging from this conversation the winner. “When I have made up my mind I shall speak out. It will be a matter of conviction, too. Believe me.”
“I am sure,” the President said, again so dryly that the Governor abruptly wasn’t sure that he had won, after all. “I shall look forward with interest. I assume your decision will come fairly soon.”
“The way events are moving, I would think so. Will we have the pleasure of your company Friday night at the banquet for Walter Dobius?”
The President laughed.
“Walter does me such honor that I should of course be eager to honor him. But I shall have to think about it. There are many implications in that affair, aren’t there, Ted?”
“Only the recognition of a great career of service to the country, as far as I know,” the Governor said blandly. The President laughed again.
“Well, we shall have to see. I assume you can fit me in somewhere, even if it is a late acceptance.”
“I think we can. In any event, I hope to see you when I am in Washington.”
“I, too,” the President said. “We must talk about this some more.”
“Gladly,” Ted Jason said. “Good luck, Mr. President.”
“And good luck to you. We shall all need it.”
But despite the friendly cordiality with which he offered this final thought before ending the connection with Sacramento, it was with a somber expression and a worried mood that the President turned back to a desk which, like Ted Jason’s, was covered with newspapers. He had managed to preserve a fair equanimity and simulate a comfortable unconcern, but he was as aware as he knew Ted was of how important the Governor’s position could be at this particular moment.
All the hysterical anger of Walter and his world, all the frantic dismay of the allied worlds of education and culture that were so influenced by it, were already in process of finding their focus in the carefully calculating mind that sat in Sacramento. Not yet had anyone spelled it out, though the President would be very much surprised if Walter did not do it Friday night, but there was just one logical man to lead the opposition to what was being done in Gorotoland. It was so logical, in fact, that the President did not see how the Governor of California could possibly avoid it; unless, of course, he possessed a patriotic devotion to the country’s welfare that the President was not ready to accord him.
Yet possibly this skepticism was too harsh and too dictated by his own convictions in the matter, his own need for support. It could be that Ted was honestly opposed. Certainly the President was willing to concede that even Walter and his world, harsh as they were, were moved by a genuine conviction. He was not sure they were willing to concede him an equal honesty of purpose, but fortunately he had a nature charitable and mature enough to be able to concede it to them.
He was struck, as he had often been before, by the strange nature of this America which is capable of arousing such absolutely divergent opinions, most of them quite sincere, as to what is best for her.
Certainly they were divergent today. The President was ready to admit that he had never seen such a universal and vitriolic tidal wave of condemnation as that which was descending upon him. The violent diatribes that had greeted the Johnson administration’s firm stand in Vietnam and Santo Domingo, the furious uproar that had greeted his own action in walking out on the Russians at Geneva a year ago—these were the two most violent outbreaks of press hysteria he could remember in recent decades, and neither was the match of this.
“We cannot remember a President more headstrong and impetuous in his abrupt decision to plunge the nation into a course that could mean open war among the great powers,” the New York Times said gravely.
He could not remember a press campaign more determined to thwart, hamper, and cripple a President in the performance of his duty as he saw it.
And of course those segments of the American commonalty that always know better than everyone else what ought to be done were also reporting in. Students were rioting against him at the University of California campus in Berkeley. The General Board of the National Council of Churches had just issued a statement strongly attacking his action. The head of the AFL-CIO, in his shrewd, sharp-eyed way, was about to do the same. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, afraid that profits from trade with Communist countries would suffer, were going to follow suit. Two lost souls in nearby Maryland had already purchased kerosene. Herbert Jason, uncle of Patsy and the Governor, brother of Selena Castleberry, Nobel Prize-winning nuclear scientist, was drafting a public letter, aided by the arrogant little professor who had once served as court historian to the most self-conscious Administration in American history and had never recovered from it.
“Mr. President,” they wrote: “We feel that we must express the abhorrence that the overwhelming majority of your countrymen feel concerning your invasion of innocent, helpless Gorotoland. As holders of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, we feel we have a right to admonish since we feel we express the overwhelming opinion of America on what your course should be.” In Congress, Senator Fred Van Ackerman of COMFORT and Arly Richardson were only the start of a noisy parade. In New York, a distinguished group of actors, artists, authors, scientists, publishers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, were busy with telephone and telegram urging as many of their fellows as they could reach around the country to sign their names to a full-page ad headlined MR. PRESIDENT! STOP THIS INSANITY IN GOROTOLAND! which would appear in sixty-seven leading newspapers tomorrow morning. LeGage Shelby of DEFY, first major Negro leader to speak out, had issued a statement terming the President’s action “wanton imperialist aggression of the worst neo-colonialist type.” And in Dallas, Rufus Kleinfert, Knight Kommander of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism (KEEP) was calling the Gorotoland decision “an obvious concealed Communist-inspired move to bring the United States into universal disrepute.”
And of course the world was reporting in. Moscow and Peking had issued angry statements. London was nervous, Bonn alarmed, Rome quizzical, Paris wry. Eleven U.S. embassies had already been attacked by well-organized spontaneous student rioters, seven tin pot dictators in Africa and Asia had already seized the opportunity to burn down U.S. Information libraries and thus get rid of outside ideas once and for all. The President of Egypt was threatening to close the Suez Canal to American shipping, Morocco had already closed its airfields to American craft en route to Africa. The International Film Festival at Scquircz, Yugoslavia, had turned into a mass protest rally of all the right-thinking movie folk from Bandung to Beverly Hills, and in London an International Committee to Oppose U. S. Imperialism in Gorotoland was being formed by Britain’s oldest, most doddering, most pathetic peer.
All in all, Harley Hudson reflected with a wry smile and some return of his normal easygoing humor, it was quite a morning to be President of the United States.
He still had no doubts that he had done the right thing: as he had told Ted Jason, the issue had to be made sometime, and in the last analysis it really made no difference where it was made or over what. The battle was continuous and the decision to bring it a showdown could be taken whenever it seemed advisable or necessary. Gorotoland might not be the most convenient ground, but then, what would be? No place would be convenient for the United States unless the United States struck first. Until the United States did, the ground would always be of the enemy’s choosing.
There was a curiously childlike strain in these protests from some of his more vocal countrymen about “inconvenient and inaccessible terrain.” Did they really think the Communists were going to choose terrain convenient and accessible to the United States to conduct their maraudings? He wondered where the perfect ground would be, in the minds of Walter and his world, and what the perfect issue. Nowhere and nothing, he was forced to conclude from their febrile yappings now.
Somehow they wanted the deadly issue between the free world and the slave to be settled without war, without conflict, without controversy, and without any advantage for their own country—not even the advantage of a guaranteed stability, apparently, for that would require force, and force, apparently, was the only thing they really were able to abhor. All else they could swallow, but threaten them with the possibility of force and they would climb the wall, just as they were doing now. It baffled him how such people could sincerely consider themselves to be loyal Americans loyally dedicated to America’s preservation, yet he knew the great majority did. It increased the burden of opposing them, for no such tolerance informed their attitude toward him. He was a monstrous midwife who would have to answer to history. He gave a grim little chuckle as he recalled the tart comment of his fellow midwife, when Orrin had first read Walter’s column.
“I’m a monstrous midwife helping Walter have a miscarriage of mice,” he had remarked. But the mice were not so funny, gnawing as they did at the vitals of the Administration as it sought to meet a deliberate challenge its leader felt had to be met, and in just the way in which he had chosen to meet it.
He pushed the shouting papers aside with a motion that was, for Harley Hudson, surprisingly impatient, and pressing the buzzer on the intercom, asked his secretary to get the chief American delegate to the UN on the line. The screams of Walter’s world were so much chaff on the winds of history: he was dealing in fundamentals much more serious than their quivering vituperations.
When Cullee Hamilton answered from U.S. delegation headquarters across the street from the UN the President gave him precise and specific instructions as to what he was to do in Security Council later in the day.
“If you agree with me, that is,” the President said. “I don’t want to jeopardize your political future. If you’d rather not be the one to do it, you can turn it over to Lafe.”
“I don’t duck out,” Cullee said calmly. “And I do agree with you, 100 percent. In fact, I’d be terribly disappointed if you wanted me to do anything else.”
“Good,” the President said. “Then we’re ready for them.”
“Let ’em come,” Cullee said.
And come they did, the first wave greeting him as he arrived at the United States delegation building across First Avenue from the UN an hour later. He had asked the driver to take him up to the new apartment house on East 63rd Street to pick up Sarah Johnson, and they had shared a comfortable, if worried, ride back downtown. She was working now in delegation headquarters in an office two floors below his: he found that quite often he was dropping in there. They had also dated a good deal at the endless round of UN dinners and cocktail parties, he had taken her out occasionally for dinner and the theater. A couple of times he had stayed overnight. But, as he had told Lafe, he couldn’t have said at the moment exactly what it meant, if it meant anything. Except that she was comfortable—that perhaps was the best word. Comfortable and reassuring, after all the hell he had gone through with overclever, overambitious, waspish little Sue-Dan.
Now as the limousine moved slowly through the midmorning traffic down FDR Drive, they were uneasy about the news from Gorotoland but curiously exhilarated, too.
“I only hope we can carry it off,” she said thoughtfully.
He frowned.
“We’ve got to.”
“I suppose the roof will blow off the UN today,” she said with her slow, amused smile. “I can hear them now.”
“Another Hate America day. Sarah, you and I are a couple of no-good nothings, to be running the errands of such an imperialistic, colonialistic, grasping, arrogant, evil nation. How can we live with ourselves?”
“I don’t find it hard,” she said. “Particularly when I see some of the alternatives.”
“They aren’t too attractive, are they?” A scornful expression came into his eyes. “Even if they think they are, just because they’re black.”
“They have egos,” she agreed. She gave his arm a sudden squeeze and uttered a gentle little laugh. “So do some others I could mention.”
“Do you think I do?” he asked with some dismay, abruptly serious, finding curiously painful the thought that she might be criticizing, however gently.
“In a nice way,” she said, squeezing his arm again. “A necessary way, to be in politics, I suppose.”
“I don’t think I’m too bad,” he said, still, ridiculously, hurt. “You have to have a certain self-assurance to stay in the game, but I don’t think—”
“Now, I’m sorry I said anything,” she said, though still with a gently humorous air. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I think you have a very nice ego.” She smiled again. “Just the right size to be United States Senator.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said, flattered. “There’s a lot of things involved in that.”
“Nobody’s better equipped,” she said seriously. “I’d come out and work for you myself.”
“You would? Do you mean that?”
“Why not?” Her tone lightened. “There are worse causes to work for.”
“I’ll remember that,” he said with a smile. “That may just do it. That may just make me decide. I’ve been hesitating, but with an offer like that I may just have to do it.”
“I think you’d better,” she said, as the car swung off the Drive at 42nd Street and prepared to double back past the UN to U.S. headquarters. “We need people like you.”
“Do you really mean that?” he asked, quite touched by her suddenly earnest tone. She gave him a quick look.
“Of course I do. This girl doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.”
“That,” he said soberly, taking her hand in his, “is why I like this girl.”
“Now,” she said, flushing and pleased. “I don’t know whether you mean that.”
“Same as you,” he said simply. “I don’t say it unless I mean it.”
For a moment they looked at one another with a candid, trusting gaze that withheld nothing. He was about to speak, impelled by some instinctive knowledge that this was the time to do it, to accept what was offered, to give up Sue-Dan once and for all, evil and unhappy as she was and evil and unhappy as her influence over him had been, to commit himself to the future and be thankful he had found it. The words were almost out when the chauffeur suddenly rapped on the glass, rolled it down, and asked, politely but with a noticeable tremor in his voice, “Do you want me to try to go right through, Mr. Hamilton? It looks as though it might be—kind of hard.”
And now they could see ahead that First Avenue was filled with a swarming mob that washed from the UN esplanade to the steps of U.S. headquarters. Traffic was rapidly backing up on either side of it; four or five mounted policemen were trying vainly to push back the marchers who surged against the door of the U.S. building; sirens were beginning to sound in the city as police cars screamed toward the area. Banners and placards bobbed through the crowd:
DOWN WITH HUDSON THE WAR-LOVER! … HANDS OFF GOROTOLAND! … OBI, GREAT! HARLEY, NUTS! … DEFY DEFIES YOU, MR. PRESIDENT! … OIL STINKS! COMFORT DEMANDS NEGOTIATIONS NOW! … LET’S HAVE A NICE BIG WAR, HARLEY! … AMERICA, THE NEW IMPERIALIST! … U.S. SAYS: KILL NEGROES AT HOME, KILL NEGROES IN AFRICA … HOW ABOUT U.S. AGGRESSION, HARLEY?
Off on the edges of the roaring crowd Cullee could see cameras grinding, flashbulbs popping. I hope you’re satisfied, he told them grimly. This is the way you want it.
Whether this was a fair comment by a mind that usually tried to be fair, he did not have time to analyze, for it was obvious that he must make some decision at once or their car would be engulfed in the mob with consequences that could literally be fatal. He had a wild, ironic impulse to shout, Go ahead, John, they’ll let us through, we’re all black! But of course it was gone as it came. It was obvious he and his companions were Americans, the stamp of their civilization was on them whatever their color, and in addition the two small flags on the front fenders were there to advertise it. Already he could see the nearer rioters beginning to turn, he could see their eyes picking out the flags, and he could sense the impulse that shot through an ever-larger segment of the crowd.
He yanked open the door, grabbed Sarah’s arm and pulled her after him, yelled, “Take the keys and leave the car, John!”—and then the three of them were running back toward 42nd Street, managing to elude the stragglers still rushing toward the riot, managing to find haven, finally, among the morning crowds on 42nd, where he abruptly slowed down. They began walking, winded but as though they belonged there, slowly around the long block until they could come again, unobserved, to the upper edges of the mob.
“I didn’t want to abandon government property, John,” he said with a shaky laugh, “but I thought, better lose a car than our lives.”
“That’s right,” their driver said fervently. “That is right!”
“Maybe it won’t be lost,” Sarah said as they turned back toward First Avenue. “Maybe the police got there in time.”
But this, they saw as they came in sight of the mob again, was a vain hope. Though the police had noticeably increased in five minutes, the mob still filled the street. It too seemed to have increased, and over at the far side smoke was rising. Through it they could see the wheels of their overturned limousine. It lay on its back, windows smashed, tires ripped. Someone had doused it with gasoline and set it afire, and around its pyre a ring of rioters, holding hands, moved with a lively step and a happy chant. “Down with U.S. mur-der-ers, down with U.S. mur-der-ers, down with U.S. mur-der-ers. Yeaay!” And again, “Down with U.S. mur-der-ers, down with U.S.—” And yet again, as the mindless circle continued its jocular parade.
“I think,” Sarah Johnson said in a voice close to tears, “that we did the right thing. How horrible!”
“I know we did,” Cullee said grimly. “Officer!” he said to a nearby mounted policeman patrolling the edges of the crowd, “can you get us into U.S. headquarters?” He pulled out his wallet, showed his credentials. The officer smiled, tipped his cap to Sarah, but shook his head.
“I’m afraid not, Congressman. You see what they’re doing. I don’t think it’s even safe around at the back, right now. You’d better stick by me. Or I’ll stick by you, rather. As much as I can.”
They could see now that the front of the headquarters building was spattered with mud, eggs, and manure. Even as they looked two windows on the second floor were shattered by flying rocks, and an approving shout went up. There was an extra disturbance just in front of the door, a flurry of motion, a sudden great splash of oil across the door and the ground-floor windows immediately adjacent. A great “Yeaaay!” rose exultantly from the crowd. It was repeated with an even wilder, more savage, and triumphant note as the oil was followed by a flare that ignited it instantly, sending a great wave of flame running up the front of the building.
“Excuse me,” the mounted policeman said abruptly and swung his horse away, directly into the crowd as his fellows did the same from all around the periphery. There were screams, yells, groans, boos, but the mob at last began to give way. Staring intently into the sea of insanely contorted faces, Cullee saw at last the two he knew must be there. For a brief instant his wife Sue-Dan and LeGage Shelby stared back at him as though from a cavern in hell. Then they were lost again in the crowd, but not before he knew that they had seen him, too, and not before a terrible pain for a moment wrenched his heart. They were lost to him, lost; yet was not he still lost to them? His face must have said as much, for he became conscious again of Sarah Johnson’s hand upon his arm.
“What’s the matter?” she asked with concern. “Do you feel all right?”
“I feel fine,” he said, trying to sound as though he meant it. But the mood in which he had started to address her before the riot, whatever it had been, was gone for now. “I think we’d better try to get on in as soon as we can.”
“All right.” She shivered and drew her coat more tightly about her. “What an awful age we live in,” she said quietly.
He sighed.
“And getting worse.”
South 250 miles, in front of the White House, several hundred pickets carrying similar banners pushed and shoved and tried to block traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue. The police fought them back but more kept coming. By 11 A.M. forty-three were seriously injured and one was dead, a white student from Georgetown University who lost his footing and fell beneath the wheels of a patrol car attempting to herd the mob.
A sense of the world unloosed began to grip America and turn decent men everywhere to a somber and desolate mood.
Such was Walter Dobius’ mood, and it needed no further turning, as he arrived, walking from the East Side Airlines Terminal, at the UN esplanade just as the mounted police were pushing back the last group of rioters who had attacked U.S. headquarters. One quick look at the building with its coating of filth, its shattered windows, and its great scar of flame and smoke, one quick look at the burned limousine being towed away, the littered street, and the little core of picketers who still obligingly waved their banners before banked television cameras on the UN steps, and the reporter’s instinct that never failed hurtled him across the slowly resuming traffic. Out came his pad and pencil as he ran. He was already jotting notes when he arrived at the knot of rioters and reporters who were paying little heed, so fascinated were they by each other’s attentions, to the still arguing, angry police shouting to them to move on.
“LeGage!” he called as he recognized the lithe, tense figure that appeared to be dominating things. “Walter Dobius here. What happened?”
“There’s our friend!” LeGage cried happily. “There’s Mr. Walter Dobius, the man who understands what we’re trying to do this morning, the man who’s against this crazy deal in Gorotoland! Stand back for our friend there, Mr. Walter Dobius!”
There were cheers from the forty or fifty rioters who remained, respectful looks and greetings from many of the reporters. Helen-Anne’s standard advice—don’t let yourself be made to look ridiculous—flashed across his mind, but he instantly rejected it. This was no ridiculous cause, this was literally the cause of world peace. Anything his presence could do to serve it he would contribute. Years of conditioned caution against placing himself too obviously in a partisan position found themselves consumed by his absolutely sincere conviction that it was now or never for the world.
“Thank you,” he said, stepping forward with dignity. (Behind his head as the eager cameras swung in upon him and LeGage Shelby, a white rioter from the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism held high a tattered but still-legible placard reading DON’T FALL FOR COMMIE TRICKS! NEGOTIATE NOW!—KEEP. And behind that, looming beautifully for all the pictures, the scarred delegation building made a perfect backdrop across the street.)
“I have just arrived,” he said in his most gravely pompous voice to the intent cameras, the hushed and feverishly scribbling reporters, “but it is obvious that there has occurred here this morning a sincere and genuine protest against the irresponsible policies of the present Administration in Africa. I hope it will be noted in Washington. I believe it to be representative of the reactions of most sober and sensible citizens in this period of fearful crisis provoked by President Harley M. Hudson and Secretary of State Orrin Knox.
“America abhors the kind of violent action this Administration has ordered in Gorotoland. America rejects this kind of dangerous gambling with the lives of this nation and all others on the face of the globe. America wants peace, not war.”
He flung out his hand with a sudden vigorous gesture and the cameras obediently swung around to climb the glassy monolith of the UN Secretariat looming above them.
“There is where this issue should be decided,” he said firmly as they swung obediently back. “There in the UN. Not with guns and planes and squadrons of Marines, in violation of all the rules of civilized behavior, but in the UN!
“I applaud the genuine outpourings of protest that are apparent throughout the nation this morning. They are in the great tradition of a free people. May Washington take heed and bring this matter speedily to a peaceful settlement here in the world organization where it belongs.”
He stopped and again there were shouts of approval, cheers, and applause. LeGage shook his hand fervently, a clever fox-faced girl whom he remembered from Washington cocktail parties as Congressman Hamilton’s wife came forward and did the same while further pictures were taken. He bowed, waved gravely to the crowd, and pushed through the respectfully opening ranks of his fellow journalists. With his steady, trudging gait he moved forward across the broad esplanade toward the doors of the UN. Behind him his older colleagues looked at one another with some skepticism, but his younger assured each other with a genuine excitement that they had seen one of the authentic greats of their profession, brave enough to lay his reputation on the line for what he believed. It was a real inspiration. They assured one another that they would never forget it.
“Have you seen this quote on the news ticker from Walter Dobius at the UN?” the President asked half an hour later when the Secretary of State entered his oval office in the west wing of the White House. “Walter’s taking himself seriously indeed.”
“Do you still want to go to his luncheon on Thursday?” the Secretary’s wife asked when she talked to him fifteen minutes later after hearing about it on the hourly news roundup.
“Hell, yes, I want to go,” Orrin snapped. “It’s time somebody pinned his ears back.”
“Right now,” Beth said thoughtfully, “I’d say he’s the one who’s doing the pinning.”
And so he believed himself, as he stood just within the entrance to the Delegates’ Dining Room waiting for Vasily Tashikov, while the multicolored garbs and faces of the peoples of earth went by. Many recognized his stocky, determined figure and proud, self-confident air, frequently he was flattered with their polite and respectful greetings.
“Walter!” Krishna Khaleel said, bowing low and shaking his hand vigorously. “We are honored by your presence, dear friend. You will be here for the Security Council debate this afternoon?”
“I will indeed. What do you think will happen, K.K.?”
The Indian Ambassador frowned.
“It does not look good for America, I am afraid,” he said sadly. “These are difficult times. I think the President and Orrin have”—he sucked in his breath and shook his head with a worried air. “I do not know exactly what they have done, goodness gracious!”
“Gone to war, I think,” Walter said grimly. Krishna Khaleel nodded quickly.
“I read your column. I thought it magnificent.”
“Will we be ordered out, do you think?”
“I do not see how it can be otherwise,” the Indian Ambassador said.
“I hope so. I hope we are forced to leave at once.”
“Of course,” K.K. noted with a wistful delicacy, “there is just one thing, you know. We can order, but … if you do not want to go … what then?”
“I cannot conceive of an American Administration so brutal and so unresponsive to world opinion as to do such a thing!” Walter Dobius said, and the Indian Ambassador could see that he was genuinely shocked at the concept.
“Possibly not,” he said gently, “But Orrin and Harley, you know … would it surprise you?”
“They would destroy themselves politically,” Walter said somberly. “They would destroy the United States in the eyes of the world. I cannot conceive of it. I simply cannot conceive of it.”
“Well,” K.K. said with a worried frown, “I hope for all our sakes you are right, dear Walter. We shall see as events develop. You have a luncheon companion?”
“Vasily Tashikov has invited me to be his guest. It seemed to be a worthwhile invitation to accept. Although I did not know when he called me yesterday that we would have quite so many things to talk about.”
“My, yes,” the Indian Ambassador said. “I am waiting for the delegate of Brazil.”
“How does he feel?”
“Our governments are quite agreed, I think.”
“I doubt that we have a friend in the world,” Walter said, and was aware as he spoke of a cheerful presence coming up to him out of the throng of arriving delegates.
“I heard that!” Lafe Smith said, giving his arm a jocular squeeze. “I heard it! Shame on you, Walter, you old warmonger. We’ve got millions. Literally millions.”
“I don’t think the occasion is one for levity, if you’ll forgive me,” Walter said coldly, disengaging his arm.
“O.K.,” Lafe said, matching his mood instantly with obvious relish. “I think that was the God-damnedest column you’ve ever written this morning, and I think that was the God-damnedest stupidest performance you ever put on, out there in the street. I think it was close to treason, if you want my frank opinion.”
“My goodness,” Krishna Khaleel said in an alarmed tone. “My goodness, Lafe, what are you saying!”
“What he always says,” Walter said through lips compressed with anger. “The most fatuous nonsense in the United States Senate.”
“You’re getting too big for your breeches, boy,” Lafe told him with the same infuriating air of enjoyment, while a number of delegates, seeing their expressions and hearing the tones of their voices, drifted nearer with attentive faces. “You think you run this whole country, don’t you? Maybe you’re wrong.”
“We’ll see who’s wrong, after this little episode in Gorotoland,” Walter said harshly. “If you’ll excuse me, I see my host. Goodbye!” But he found his way blocked by the giant frame of the chief American delegate, who was holding a copy of the Daily Mirror in his hand.
“Before you go,” Cullee said softly, “just one little word with you, Walter. Do you realize what happened out there this morning before you came along and gave it your grand endorsement? Take a look. You see that burned car? I was riding in that car, with Sarah Johnson and a driver. We got out just in time, Walter, while your grand, democratic, liberty-loving friends were rioting against your country. Would it have made you happy if we’d been killed?”
For a long moment Walter Dobius stared up at him with a look of studied contempt. When he finally spoke it was in his most clipped and heavy tones, biting off the words as though he would spit out each one.
“No, it would not have made me happy if you had been killed. How infantile can you be? As for my grand, democratic, liberty-loving friends, as you call them, I was happy to endorse their protest against the irresponsible, inexcusable act of a war-mad Administration. I would do it again. I will do it again, in my column and in everything else I say. Is that clear?”
From his compact height, Cullee looked down with an equal contempt. Again he spoke softly, while all around the watching nations goggled and stared.
“What you overlook, Walter, dear, is the fact that some thirty-five or forty people have been killed, that American property has been destroyed, that honorable American rights guaranteed by honorable arrangement with a legal government have been violated.…It’s always the same, with you and your crowd, isn’t it? You always succeed in turning everything upside down so that you get the whole world arguing about what the United States has done—instead of about what has been done to the United States. Ignoring, of course, very conveniently, the fact that if nothing had been done to us—we wouldn’t be doing anything. I swear to God I don’t see how you people can do it with a clear conscience. I swear I don’t.”
“Well, now, Cullee,” Krishna Khaleel said nervously. “It is not only ‘Walter and his crowd,’ as you put it, who feel the great measure of concern about what the United States is doing. It is all of us. It is because of your greater power and your greater potential to do damage to the world. We are all concerned.”
“I can understand you,” Cullee said, making his voice less contemptuous with an obvious effort. “But”—and the contempt came back—“I can’t understand him and his friends. They’re beyond me and they always have been. Now go have lunch with your pal, Walter. Who is it, Tashikov?”
“Yes!” Walter spat out.
“That figures,” Cullee said in a tired tone. “That sure as hell figures. Come on, Lafe.”
“Dear me,” Krishna Khaleel said to no one in particular as three angry Americans strode away toward their respective tables. “Mercy!”
***