by D. W. Buffa
Browning lifted his right eyebrow and threw back his head; his mouth turned down at the corners as he weighed in the balance what had been done.
“And why not? For the Clintons and the rest of that generation born after the war, history and everything else begins and ends with themselves.”
The lines on Browning’s forehead, scarcely visible when he wore his normal expression, etched deeper into the skin. He lowered his pensive eyes and began to twist his mouth back and forth. His gaze moved haphazardly across the floor and around the room, inching its way up until, for one brief moment, it met my own and then, once again, wandered away.
“There was something duplicitous, even cowardly, about the way he went about it.” Browning took a breath, not quite a sigh, but long enough to underscore the point he was determined to make. “The way it always is with half measures, when you’re too afraid of offending anyone to act in an honest, straightforward fashion that, whether or not they agree with it, people will at least respect. Clinton could not just let Teddy Roosevelt’s picture stay there. It was not enough to identify with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, one. There was a third Roosevelt who was famous as well. Yes, exactly— Eleanor.” Browning’s eyes blazed open. He started to laugh. “He wouldn’t put Franklin’s portrait back over the mantel,” Browning explained, nodding toward the portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, “but he could put a bust of Franklin’s wife right under the picture he left.”
Shoving his soft hands into the pockets of his blue striped suit coat, Browning rose up on the balls of his feet, an expression of thoughtful amusement lying idle on his mouth.
“Can’t you almost hear the gears turning, the wheels twisting around in that eager, calculating brain? Someone had probably told him the story about Eisenhower and how he had changed the meaning without changing the name. There’s something essentially small-minded about a thing like that,” mused Browning as he started to lead me out of the room. “Thinking yourself clever for imitating what someone else has done.”
As we reached the door, he glanced over his shoulder at the empty fireplace mantel. “There’s an interesting end to the story, a strange irony in that rather crass attempt to associate himself with FDR’s remarkable wife. The day Clinton made that memorable statement— perhaps the only memorable statement he ever made— that first, angry, denial, shaking his finger at the camera, insisting with such savagery that he had never had sex with ‘that woman—Ms. Lewinsky’? He did it right there, in front of the fireplace, right in front of the bust of Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s a wonder the bust didn’t roll off and crash to the floor, shattered in a thousand pieces.”
From the Roosevelt Room, Browning showed me an office next to that of the White House chief of staff.
“Yes, Mr. Vice President?” asked a middle-aged woman with suspicious eyes and an unsmiling mouth. She placed her hand over the telephone. Browning ignored her. She went back to her call, but her eyes stayed on him, watching him, as if he were trespassing in a place he had no right to be. Browning held the door open just long enough for me to get a look.
“That was where the last several vice presidents have had their working office.” With his hand still on the door handle, he nodded toward a corridor ahead. “Next to the president’s chief of staff, just around the corner from the Oval Office itself. There was not a promise they were not willing to make,” he said, lowering his voice at the approach of someone leaving the office of the chief of staff. “And not one they’ve kept.”
Browning’s head came straight up. “Hello, Arthur,” he said in a firm, businesslike voice. “How are you?” They shook hands and then Browning made the introduction. “Arthur, I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Joseph Antonelli. And this, of course,” he said, turning to me, “is Arthur Connally, the president’s chief of staff.”
There was a blank expression on Connally’s round and strangely featureless face. My name meant nothing to him, and I had the feeling that even if it had, he would not have let it show. He worked for the president, and everyone else was judged in relation to that. He looked back at Browning before he had finished shaking my hand. “What brings you over, Tom? Anything I can do?” asked Connally in a distant, preoccupied voice. His eyes darted down the corridor. He started to walk, expecting that Browning would follow; Browning did not move. Connally stopped, looked back, impatient, anxious to go.
“I thought you might prefer to discuss it in private,” said Browning in a civil but, as it seemed, slightly ominous tone.
Clutching under his left arm a voluminous folder, Connally explained that he was already late for a meeting. Browning fixed him with an icy stare.
“Tell the president that I need to talk to him.”
Connally shook his head as if they both knew that was not possible. “He won’t be back for three days. And after that… Well, you know how difficult it is.” He shook his head again and hurried off, slowing only for a moment when Browning called after him, “Then tell the president that I tried.”
I wondered what it meant, but it was not my place to ask. It was obvious, however, that whatever it was had been building for a long time. Browning had made an attempt at civility, the smooth polished politeness that at least allows enemies to talk; Connally—and if the look of that secretary was any indication—and others in the White House would not do even that.
“Does he always do that?” I asked, playing a hunch.
“Connally? Yes. Whatever it is you’re asking—yes, he always does that. He is nothing if not consistent. So, yes, whatever it was—it’s always the same. What particular ill bred thing did you especially notice in that most ill-bred of small-minded men?”
The irrepressible puckish grin was back on Browning’s face, the charming gleeful commentary on his own irreverence, the smile that came like a flashing neon advertisement for his own best-considered work.
“Tell me, Antonelli—tell me,” he urged as we made our way out of the West Wing and gulped the thick humid outside air. “I can’t wait to hear what particularly struck you about that monumental…”
“Does he always look at everyone like they don’t exist?”
Browning twisted his head to the side. The mischief vanished from his eyes. He thought about what I had said, turning it over in his mind.
“Yes,” he said quietly, and, as it were, to himself. “Always; except of course when he looks at… But then,” he went on as if this had just occurred to him, “a lot of them over there do that: They don’t really see anything except what they think they already know. And one thing they know for sure,” he added with a deadly grin, “is that they have to get rid of me.”
A couple of people, members of his staff, tried to get his attention. He waved them off like a swarm of meddlesome flies.
“Sit,” he ordered perfunctorily as he plopped into the chair behind that all-too-ceremonial desk. His chin sank down on his chest; he stared at me from under his lowered brow. He had the look of an innocent schoolboy forever plotting mischief in his mind. The fact that he was hated, the fact that the president’s people and, presumably, the president himself wished he would somehow disappear, had the effect, perhaps not altogether strange or unprecedented, of enlivening his senses and bringing all the color back into his face.
Browning’s eyes caught a document that during his brief absence had been placed discreetly on the corner of the desk. From the faint expression that began to form around his mouth, I could tell it came as no great surprise. He pursed his lips, rolled his eyes heavenward, and then, with the tips of three fingers, pushed the document in my direction.
“Read that,” he said, a strange, bitter smile tracing a line between his lips. “I was the head of the third-largest company in the world,” he began, the words coming from deep in his chest. His eyes began to shine with a kind of vehement, vengeful delight. “I was a member of the United States Senate for damn near ten full years,” he went on, the voice growing louder, fuller, more insistent. He sprang forwar
d in the chair, his face full of defiance and humor. His small hands made into petulant fists, he pounded on the famous second-place desk. “I would have been president if that treacherous gang of cutthroats over there had not engaged in such unspeakable conduct—a campaign of poisonous half-truths and outright lies. I took this on, agreed to the vice presidency, because without me they could not carry Michigan, and without Michigan they could not win. And after all that,” he roared, his voice echoing off the walls, “this moron over there has the temerity to tell me that yet another speech that needs to be given—cannot be!”
Browning began to march around the room, beside himself with angry jubilation at the stupidity of these people he despised. He stopped, whirled around, looked at me as if he knew that at last there was someone who would understand.
“I was going to make a few remarks, reminding people as gently as I could, that the notion some people seem to have that the country owes reparations for slavery reflects a certain ignorance of a small matter called the Civil War. The president is against it; everyone in the administration who has been asked about it is against it; but I’m not allowed to say that because someone might find it offensive.
“Isn’t it wonderful! You have an entire generation growing up whose only knowledge, whose only understanding, of history come from movies and everyone is too lazy, or too stupid, to ask what these people demanding reparations think the Civil War was all about. What do they think would have happened if the North—if Lincoln—had not been willing to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of men to save the Union? What kind of reparations would anyone be talking about now?”
With a doubting, troubled look in his firm-set eyes, Browning loomed over the varnished table that ran the length of the room. “Everything would have changed,” he said in a low, reflective voice. “Slavery triumphant. The North—a fraction of what the United States has become. The wars of the twentieth century—what result? Germany undefeated. Black slavery; Jewish annihilation.” Browning pulled his head back as if to scrutinize more closely what he knew. “Lincoln did not just save the Union: He saved the world.—And he knew it, too. No one seems to understand that: Lincoln knew! That’s what he meant when he said we were the last best hope of freedom—the last chance, really, of ‘government of, by and for the people.’” Browning’s mouth curled back in disdain. “Reparations? Read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Go see the graves, at Gettysburg, at Antietam.” He sighed and shook his head. “When you can’t talk about Lincoln and the Civil War, then you might as well give up hope that this country stands for anything more important than how to make money and how to get rich. But try telling that to the people over there,” he said, nodding toward the White House next door. “The only thing they understand is what they think they need to do for the next election.” He paused, and then, with a subtle half smile that seemed to hold the key to everything, added: “And of course the next one after that.”
“Lincoln,” Browning murmured to himself as he again took his chair. “Wilson understood.” He glanced at me. “Did you know that Woodrow Wilson wrote a history of the United States? You are looking at the only man alive who can honestly claim to have read all five volumes of it. It’s a curious thing, this phrase Wilson uses over and over again, trying to describe what was going on after the war was over and the Union had been saved. That’s when it began, when the forces of industrialization were suddenly let loose and the country began to build itself into what it became. Wilson—an academic—could only see it from the outside. He kept using this phrase—‘men on the make.’ He was trying to understand what drove these people to risk everything to build all those factories and plants, those mills and refineries, that whole infrastructure that changed not only who we were but, more important, what we thought we should be. ‘Men on the make.’ It’s not a bad phrase: It captures the frenzied, driven quality of what it must have been like.”
When Browning was talking about something over which he had often pondered, he would narrow his eyes and with the fingers of his right hand pressed against the side of his chin, scratch or pick at the end of his lower lip. It was a gesture that bordered on anxiety: the finger working over and over, faster and faster, until, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, it would stop. The hand would fall away, settle usually into his lap, while his eyes resumed their normal, almost languid pose: large half circles that looked at you with the detached irony of someone who knows there are limits to what he could ever hope to explain.
“It’s probably better I’ve been banished from the White House to this place. This, by the way, was the secretary of the Navy’s office after the Civil War. For a time the building held the departments of the Navy, the Army, and State. At the time of its construction it was the largest office building in the United States: five stories high with another two floors underground.” Browning’s eyes grew larger. “It’s what the Civil War did—what Lincoln did—make the national government so much more powerful and important than the states. Lincoln re-created America—something that probably needs to be done again,” added Browning with the kind of shrug that suggested it was nothing more than a turn of phrase, a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the way things had become. Yet, beneath the surface of the words, I thought I heard something more, an ambition that, while distant, was never out of sight. It seemed to fit with the disdain he had been quick to exhibit when he described how only the next election had any meaning or importance to the people who ran things in the next building over.
“The curious thing,” continued Browning without a pause, “is that something happened that right from the beginning expressed the tension between the efforts of human foresight and the scientific revolution that was just getting under way. Just look at these walls,” he said, marveling at more than their size. “Six feet of solid concrete, built to withstand—what else?—a cannon assault. But then, in eighteen seventy-two, just a year or so after construction was completed, it became possible to build skyscrapers out of steel. Don’t you see the great irony in that—that the biggest thing, not just that government, but that anyone had built, was obsolete the day it opened?” Browning emitted a low, wistful laugh. “Rather the way I was the day I was sworn in.”
The telephone on his desk rang in a muted tone. Browning answered.
“Yes? I see. Very well. In that case, I’d like to have someone take Mr. Antonelli around. We can tie up again at that thing early this evening… the ambassador of… ? Yes, that’s it. That shouldn’t take long. Would you call Mrs…. ? What time? Oh, I see. Very well. Yes, right away.”
Browning hung up. With his hand still on the receiver, he stared straight ahead, as if he were intent on organizing his immediate impressions, remembering what he had to and forgetting what he could. He let go of the telephone and flashed a polite, helpless smile.
“I’m afraid I have a minor rebellion on my hands.” He nodded toward the door to the outer office. “We’ll meet up again late this afternoon. Some country you’ve probably never heard of has just spent half their gross national product on a new embassy, and I’m scheduled to make a few remarks.” He looked at me with a playful grin. “Or maybe I’ll just introduce you and you can make them instead.” he began to walk me toward the door, but after a few hurried steps, he slowed down. His mood became pensive and a little dark. When we reached the far corner of the long varnished table, he placed his right hand on top of a chair. He studied me with a sudden severity, as if he were questioning some assumption he had made. Then, apparently satisfied that he had not been wrong after all, he seemed almost to apologize with his eyes.
“What we talked about… last night in New York. I’m afraid it’s true. There is going to be an indictment. It may be coming sooner than I thought. And when it does,” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder and looking me straight in the eye, “I am going to need your help.”
Browning nodded twice in quick succession, then he opened the door, and with a broad smile to those who stood waiting, sent me on my
way.
CHAPTER 6
I was taken around Washington, perhaps not quite a tourist, but still someone very much from the outside, by Elizabeth Hartley, who, as she made a point of letting me know, was also a graduate of the Harvard Law School.
“Like Browning,” I said, smiling to myself. “Though I imagine you got much better grades.” She was driving past the Smithsonian, and had just begun to say something about a recent exhibit. The remark about Browning’s grades caught her attention.
“His grades weren’t very good?” she asked with an amused expression.
“His grades were fine,” I replied. “But it was never important to him to make Law Review or finish at the top of his class. You were on Law Review, though, weren’t you?” I asked.
She nodded with a thin, polite smile, anxious to hear more about Browning. She was smart and pretty and amazingly quick, but she was too close to what she wanted to see it from the distance that would have shown it from all sides. Eventually, she would learn that, but for now, despite the long silences and the friendly looks, it was a little too obvious that she never rested, that she never had a thought except what her next move should be.
“Browning had too many other things he wanted to do. He went to Harvard because he wanted to learn something about the law; I went to Harvard because I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. There’s a difference. And, no,” I said before she could ask, “I wasn’t on Law Review, either.” she invited me to have lunch in Georgetown, but I took her instead for a hot dog at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the Lincoln Memorial. I had seen it before on other visits to Washington, and I wanted to see it again.