Democracy at home: teachers is cheap. There is a rough justice in this equation, in which, please note, there is no allowance for the variable factor of ability. Young intellectual snobs must be suckled on the thin broth of the insipid mean; to give them a richer diet would, in the glib cliché, be undemocratic. It is not undemocratic, of course, to provide special schools for retarded children; they are below the general level and must be brought up to it. Thus we see again the topy-turvy dogma—the same twisted thinking which corrupted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “The poorest are no longer necessarily the most ignorant part of society” to mean “The commoner the man, the wiser he.” Gifted children (“double-domes”) are distrusted. The dull and delinquent (“underprivileged,” “sick,” “victims of society”) belong to a privileged caste. We must look down on those above us, up to those beneath us. So sacred is this doublethink that we rarely challenge it, though sometimes it is carried to a Tartuffian extreme and we see a glimmer in the night. The last time I visited the Barnum and Bailey sideshow, the barker interrupted his spiel to deliver a brief sermon. He just wanted us to know that these fine tattooed, misshapen and deformed people on the stage were folks, same as you and me. Why, you’d be glad to have any of them in your home, he said. Sure, they were interesting. But—and his voice dropped to a tactful whisper—they weren’t freaks.
Meanwhile, what of the snob? Prayer seems to be all that he has left. Every institution in the republic, from the Army to the pulpit, is at his throat. Here and there a country club holds out like a Beau Geste fort in the Sahara, but to the thoroughbred snob these odious allies are worse than none at all. Apparently he is a doomed species, destined to die without heirs. Yet we are left with a paradox. Why do the anti-snobs persist in railing against snobbism’s tattered remnant? Why can’t they leave us with our illusions of superiority, which they are so sure are spurious? There are two excellent reasons. The first is that they aren’t at all sure. Deep in every egalitarian breast there is a gnawing suspicion that he is inferior and, since the suspicion is fully justified, it won’t be still. The second reason is that they desperately need us. They are what they are because we are what we are. They, like all snobs, must look down on someone. To satisfy this human craving they have created their own inverted pecking order, with us at the bottom of the pyramid. Neglect us, and they would lose their illusions; forget us entirely, and each of them would be obliged to recognize the clod in his shaving mirror.
Shall we then scorch the earth, recant, disperse? No, that’s not our way. Like that grand old snob Homer, who urged warriors into battle by reminding them of their heroic lineages, we must hold fast and trust that victory may yet ride at our stirrups. It won’t be easy. Belonging to an élite has never been easy, and we may as well face it; these are the times that try snobs’ souls. There are endless snubs ahead from Joes who think they are better than we are because their manners are worse, their pasts shadier, their brainpans smaller. Decorated veterans will be insulted by soldiers with unimpeachable records of cowardice. Hi-fi women will be cut dead by the arrogantly unchaste. Offspring will deride us because they are dependent upon us, and unlettered graduates of Teachers College, Columbia, will leer when we don’t talk like they think we should. Still we must keep our noses high, even when the press traduces us:
“The real triumph of democracy will not be recorded until every man jack American practices equality in his daily rubs against the coat sleeves of his fellows.”
Every man jack?
And: “Call no man democratic who forgets that his barber, cook and errand boy are made of the same human clay as himself.”
My barber? My cook? My errand boy?
And, from a wartime patriot: “Many an elevator’s boy’s life is made intolerable by the little Hitler who is his elevator starter; he wonders how much good will be accomplished by getting rid of the big Hitler if the little Schicklgrubers still [sic] persist.”
It is dark in the Führerbunker tonight. Outside, the egalitarian legions press harder and harder, led by AWOL privates and nursed by Florence Nightingales on leave from call-girl clienteles. We can no longer see properly. An athletic snob is doing push-ups, a travel snob fingers lovingly the thick visa inserts in his passport, a music snob rewinds his gramophone and replaces a Bach with a Bartók, but the rest of us are at loose ends. Directly across from me an F.F.V. representative has put aside her stars-and-bars embroidery. Beside her a Harvard man (Porcellian Club) has abandoned his translation of Ajax. Others were reading Rilke; were reading Wilbur; were hanging Braque canvases; were rearranging Biedermeier furniture. Now they are sitting idle on the bunker floor in an arc—rather a cramped arc, since no one wants to be on the left. Yet none of us is bored. We are carrying on bravely in the spirit of Tommy Carlyle, Billy Thackeray, Bobby Frost, Bert Russell, Georgie Shaw, Ginger Woolf, Evvy Waugh and Josy Gasset. Russ Lynes started the conversation, and now everyone has joined it.
We’re bragging.
Public Men
In January 1953 I crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. My stateroom was next to Winston Churchill’s suite, and I covered the Prime Minister’s voyage for Reuters. Each day at sea I saw him alone briefly, but my most vivid memory of the trip was a public episode. The evening before we docked in Southampton, first-class passengers were shown a documentary film about the first half of the twentieth century in England. The climax was the Battle of Britain. At the height of it, the sound track carried dubbings of Churchill’s voice delivering his famous speeches of that year. And as the unforgettable rhetoric rolled through the first-class theater, Churchill, who was in the audience, rose and walked out on himself.
Why did he do it? There are several possibilities. Conceivably he was moved. Perhaps he was bored; he had, after all, heard all this before. He may have wanted to use the toilet, to light a cigar, to finish that last inch of brandy in the bottle he had nearly consumed at dinner. Or maybe—and I think this is the likeliest explanation—he may have known that no one who was there would ever forget it.
Churchill was wholly the public man. We never conversed. He addressed me as though I were a one-man House of Commons. If he had a different manner in private, I never saw it. Nehru was like that; so was U Nu of Burma; so, I’m told, was Franklin Roosevelt. Most political figures, however, divest themselves of their public manner when away from the limelight. Eisenhower could be crisp and sometimes even cold. John Kennedy was an adroit conversationalist; Bob Kennedy a tender father; Nixon profane and paranoid.
Entourages become familiar with the switch in the demeanor of most statesmen when they withdraw from their constituents. Sometimes the leader is more impressive behind closed doors (Eisenhower was), sometimes he is less striking (Nixon was). The octaval shift is essential to their renewal and regeneration. If this suggests that there is something of the charlatan in each of them, let the implication stand. That is the way they are because that is the way they must be if they are to survive emotionally. I think we should be tolerant of a little fakery in our politicians. We must also reconcile ourselves to a certain amount of misbehavior in their private lives. The man who has nothing in his closet may not have anything in the attic, either. If constituencies cannot accept that, we may be cursed with leadership by the bland.
And that isn’t good enough. Without imaginative politicians, democracy will collapse. Periodically Americans display open contempt for politics. This has been especially true since Watergate. It is wrong, it is dangerous—precisely that attitude destroyed the Weimar Republic—and it is unjust. For over a quarter century I have been a professional observer of public men. Some have been stupid, some weak, a few venal. They have not been typical, however. Characteristically the public man is ambitious and sensitive. He has a social conscience. He is shrewd and a believer in expediency, but he is capable of nobility. The extent to which that capacity is realized depends upon the press and the voters.
There is an old Zen allegory: “I am a mirror. Whoever looks at me looks at himsel
f. Whatever he sees in me, good or bad, reflects him.” It is the same with politicians. If you condemn them all, you condemn yourself. Honor the best, and the likeness in the looking-glass will improve. Even a mirror, metaphorically speaking, needs self-esteem. And no one is prouder than good public men.
Adlai in Defeat
Adlai Ewing Stevenson lost the Presidency on November 4, 1952, while winning 27,314,992 votes, more than any previous winner except FDR in 1936. One of those Stevenson votes had been cast by me. My heart went with it, which hardly made me unique, since he was among the best-loved losers in the history of American politics. When he conceded, saying he was too old to cry, I was but one of millions who wept for him. That week I sent him a copy of my first book. Back came a surprisingly prompt acknowledgment from him, which confirmed my lack of confidence in the judgment of the electorate, and in January, still heartsick, I flew off to Asia as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.
Abroad I continued, at long-distance, what had developed into a Hildy Johnson—Walter Burns relationship with Neil H. Swanson, the Sun’s executive editor. He was forever sending me service messages like:
PROCEED LAHOREWARD SOONEST COVER QUADIANI RIOT ETDENY OR CONFIRM AP FACTWISE SWANSON
UPFOLLOW FULLEST DULLES STEPTAKING INSURE SEVENTHFLEET READINESS EVENT COMMIE UPRISING RANGOON ACKNOWLEDGE SWANSON
YOUR STORIES UNARRIVED RENEGOTIATIONS CUMMOSADEQ STOP FLASH RUSSENVOY FACTS TIMELIER FULLIER WITH VIGOR DETAILS COLOR ACCURACY WIT ETBALTIMORE ANGLE WHENEVER POSSIBLE REGARDS SWANSON
Usually I filed these in the nearest wastebasket or, more mischievously, mailed them to Russell Baker, now a New York Times columnist and then the Sun’s one-man London bureau. Russ couldn’t retaliate, for although I had his Fleet Street address, he never knew where I was. I was always on the move, living out of a musette bag. Swanson caught up with me only once, when I was staying at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. My bedside telephone rang. “Swanson here,” shouted a voice from the other side of the world, sounding as though it were being relayed through a wind tunnel. “The Russian legation in Tel Aviv has just been bombed. How fast can you get there and cover it?”
To appreciate the peril this put me in, you must remember that Egypt and Israel were still in a state of war. In Cairo the new Naguib-Nasser junta was suspicious of all foreigners. They shadowed correspondents and eavesdropped on their telephone conversations. I knew they were listening to all of mine, because just the day before, John Gunther, who was in the same hotel, researching Inside Africa, had phoned me in my room to suggest that we have a drink, and the man bugging his line got into a jurisdictional dispute with the man on mine. They broke into our conversation, arguing aloud in Arabic. Eventually they completely drowned us out. (We never did have the drink.) Had I so much as acknowledged Tel Aviv as a contemplated destination in my exchange with Swanson, the authorities would have jailed me within an hour. I took the only sensible course.
“I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” I yelled back, and hung up on the executive editor of the Sun.
The following day I cabled an explanation from Cyprus and flew on to Tel Aviv, where I actually entered the razed Soviet embassy on Rothschild Boulevard by pretending to be a member of an Israeli delegation which had come to apologize for the incident. That story ended the furious rockets from Baltimore (BADLY BEATEN TIMES SPLASHING FRONTWARD UNRUSSIAN DEMONSTRATION HAIFA), and I heard virtually nothing from the home office until, having completed a tour of southern India, I was settling in at the Cecil Hotel in Old Delhi and preparing to research a series on Benares. Then I received instructions which more than compensated for all the abrasive messages of the previous month:
UNPROCEED BENARESWARD MEET STEVENSON CALCUTTA INTERVIEW FREQUENTLY USING YOUR DISCRETION AM AIRMAILING DETAILS DEHIS SCHEDULE SWANSON
I didn’t need the schedule. I had been following Stevenson’s current tour of the world by reading the cables in the New Delhi office of Bob Trumbull, Indian correspondent for the New York Times. While traveling, Stevenson was writing about his trip for Look magazine. Thus far he had, in a period of six weeks, visited Hawaii, Okazaki, Tokyo, Formosa, Okinawa, Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, Saigon, Hanoi (then in French hands), Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and before landing at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport on April 28 he would have stopped in Bangkok and Rangoon also. Along the way he had been interviewed four times, had held three press conferences, and had spoken to the Japan-America Society, attended four state dinners, observed the training of ROK troops, visited the front lines above Seoul, which were being shelled at the time; inspected a U.S. warship in the Sea of Japan, reviewed Chinese Nationalist regiments on Taiwan, and—in what seemed to me to be an unnecessary indignity—had been notified that the Gagwriters Association of America had voted him its annual award.
In Malaya he had nearly been killed when his helicopter caught fire and crashed in a jungle clearing. He had been formally received by, among others, Japanese Premier Yoshida, Emperor Hirohito, General Mark Clark, Chiang Kai-Shek, Premier Quirino of the Philippines, President Sukarno and Premier Min Notewidigdo of Indonesia, and Premier Pibul Songgram of Thailand. Everywhere he had been greeted by cheering throngs. His eloquence during the presidential campaign had delighted vast numbers of English-speaking people in other countries. It had been said that he could have been elected Prime Minister of any country in Europe that year, and educated Asians admired him, too. As a result, he was experiencing the kind of receptions given to the winners, not the losers, of presidential elections.
Looking back on the dispatches of those days—my own and those of other correspondents along the way—I wince at the Cold War rhetoric which crept into Stevenson’s speeches and at the eagerness with which we quoted him. He warned the Japanese against being “lulled to sleep” by hopes for a favorable change in Soviet foreign policy because Stalin had died, praised the achievements of Chiang’s Formosa regime as “the most important historical accomplishment of many years if not many centuries in the Far East,” expressed pleasure in Malaya’s suppression of Communist guerrillas, said in Saigon that the blame for the Vietnamese war lay in Moscow, warned the Thais that “I do not see any evidence of sincerity or peaceful intentions in the Communists’ activities in Southeast Asia,” said he was “alarmed by the Communist invasion of a new state—Laos,” and repeatedly doubted that the Communists really wanted to end hostilities in Korea. But that was how all public men in the West talked in those years. It is easy to condemn them, but it is also chronological chauvinism. Stevenson erred, which means he was human. One might add that it was the very dimensions of his humanity which set him apart from most of his contemporaries.
On Tuesday, April 28, 1953, I arrived at Dum Dum less than an hour after he had landed there from Rangoon, and within another hour I was in Calcutta’s Great Eastern Hotel, looking for him. It was hot work. The Great Eastern, a rambling, rococo, white wooden relic of the Raj, was an insane jumble of dead-end corridors and roller-coaster flights of stairs; a trip from the lobby to the nearest men’s room took on the proportions of an expedition. I had thought the great pre-monsoon heat would keep Stevenson in his suite long enough for me to get there, but I reckoned without his relentless schedule. By the time I had registered with the local police as an alien, he was off to interview the Chief Minister of West Bengal, and most of his party—William Blair, Jr., his law partner; Barry Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal; and Dr. Walter Johnson, chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago—had accompanied him. The only one still in the Great Eastern was Bill Attwood, then the young foreign editor of Look and a colleague of mine. I walked in on Attwood.
He was stripped and prostrate on his bed near the room’s air-conditioning machine. We exchanged hellos, and he wearily motioned me to the place of privilege, by the machine.
“This is brutal,” he said faintly.
I agreed that it was pretty awful.
“I don’t mean just the heat,” he said. “
This whole trip—it’s impossible. I’m a reporter. I like to get to a town, make my appointments, see people, check everything. But everyone’s got to see him, all the officials. Everybody wants to hear him talk.”
Bill explained that Look was paying $60,000 for the Stevenson series, together with the group’s expenses, in the hope of adding thousands of his admirers to its circulation lists. The hitch was that the articles had to be turned out en route, which meant that Stevenson, a slow and painstaking writer, had to produce a piece every two weeks. The one exception was the next article, which Attwood was to write on Stevenson. Apart from that, Stevenson wouldn’t stand for any ghosting. “I could do them like that,” Attwood said, snapping his moist fingers. “It’s my trade. But no; I write a first draft and he rewrites my draft, and it’s murder for both of us. Stevenson’s punchy. He’s been getting about three hours’ sleep at night, and it’s killing him. Wait till you see him.”
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 34