It took a great deal of arranging, and the State Department people were at first a little sluggish, but soon got into the spirit of the thing. Unknown to any of the fifty-odd government officials and hundred-odd guests of Van, when they promenaded into the elegant Franklin Room, was that a huge television screen had been hidden behind an oriental screen in the corner of the large room. Hidden also was a television videocassette player into which the three minutes of incriminating film had been inserted. So that when the signal was given by me from the lectern, the lights would suddenly dim and the crowd, standing, would hear Van's voice, turn around, and see him sitting, dressed in shorts and polo shirt, in the cockpit of a sailboat, barreling over the Atlantic Ocean, and giving his views of government service in language appropriately salty. Oh, the thought of it that day was almost too wonderful to endure. When I arrived at the State Department, Van greeted me, while his aide, in on the plot, winked, which meant everything was going well; and we went and chatted with Bill Clark for a few minutes until the ceremony was scheduled to begin.
It was all very solemn, and before my eyes my old friend suddenly became, by act of Congress and of the President of the United States, ambassador to France, successor to Benjamin Franklin. I was then introduced for the traditional personal tribute . . .
Secretary Clark, Jim [brother James, Under Secretary] , Ambassador Galbraith, ladies and gentlemen.
It is characteristic of the personal courage of Ambassador Galbraith that he should have deputized me to speak on this solemn occasion. Courageous because I have known him for many years, and very well.
But then I have been told that the ceremony here today, to the extent that I figure in it, is intended to be highly personal. This was said to me by no fewer than three State Department officials, from which I deduce that there was some active concern in these parts that I might take the occasion to recite my Weltanschauung. To do so would be in the tradition of those journalists who do not report events without giving historical background. We recall that the lead sentence in the London Times announcing the declaration of war against the Kaiser began: "Back in 1870. .
Well, if it is to be personal history, so be it.
Back in 1947, it happened that I won the only election I ever won. I remember having called my brother Jim, at the time a student at the Yale Law School, while I was a freshman in the undergraduate school. I had expected that the voting for the chairmanship of the Yale Daily News, which election was traditionally carried out one year before assumption of office, would be close. Since Jim had been an officer of the newspaper, I asked him whether it would be ethical for me to vote—in the unsigned ballot we each would insert into the basket —for myself. Jim, then as now, believed in deliberation; but told me that Yes, he thought this could be done discreetly, and in good conscience. And so the following day I folded the piece of paper with my own name written on it and dropped it in with the other twenty or thirty. A few minutes later the incumbent chairman emerged, and announced that I had been elected the chairman of the Yale Daily News for 1948. He paused dramatically and smiled, adding, "I am pleased to report that Bill was elected unanimously."
We moved, a few of us, from that chamber to the nearest watering hole, which was Deke fraternity house, and there a blond, heavyset fellow sophomore accosted me to ask, with what I came to know as characteristic curiosity and ebullience, just what was the hilarity all about? It is something of a poetical miracle that exactly thirty-five years later, I should be involved in a situation that calls for at least as much hilarity. The similarities are almost perfect. It is rumored that Van voted for himself. And the President has told me that the vote for Van was unanimous.
I have not confided to the President, or to Secretary Clark, or to anybody, I guess, my special knowledge of the general and orderly deliberation given by Van Galbraith to the hypothetical possibility of joining the government.
It happens that in June a year and a half ago, when the President was still only a candidate for the Republican nomination, Van and I were together, as I am happy to say we have often been, on a sailboat. I have in mind a conversation we had about two hundred miles south of Bermuda, heading first for that island, then on to the Azores, then to Spain. There were six of us doing the sailing and the navigating. The day was blue, the wind brisk; we were an entire happy day removed from a sloppy and emetic little storm that had dogged us for forty-eight hours. As we were eating lunch, one of our company, Dick Clurman—former head of correspondents for Time-Life, and former Commissioner of Parks and Cultural Affairs in New York City—was arguing the nobility and inspiration of public service. As I remember I was somewhat skeptical, adhering to a rather dogmatic position that there was a deep and instinctive antagonism between service in the private and in the public sectors. Van, if I remember, joined in expressing skepticism of a sort, reminiscing briefly about his single experience in public service, as aide to a Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration. If memory serves, the conversation was not extended, lasting only for three or four minutes, but the banter did indicate something of the mood of the freshly installed Ambassador to France, back in the long ago, when there was another President in the White House, and when the only immediate problem Van Galbraith faced was whether the navigator would succeed in guiding the boat to Bermuda. . . .
[At this point the videotaped section came on the screen. It showed the ketch in full sail, Clurman and Galbraith heatedly arguing in the cockpit, Galbraith insisting that working for the government was generally pointless. He recalled his own experience as a legal aide to the Secretary of Commerce under the Eisenhower administration. The last words the audience heard him utter were: "Don't you understand, Dick, most of the people in Washington are assholes." The crowd roared, the screen went blank. . . .]
For the first years of their marriage, Van and Bootsie lived in Paris. They came back, briefly, to America for a year in New York, after which they were gone again, this time to London, where for a number of years he pursued his professional career [as a banker-lawyer], traveling frequently to New York and spending his vacation periods for the most part in Switzerland, where on his first visit I took him skiing for the first time. As I think back on it, if I were to add the distances we have sailed together to the distances we have skied together, it is probably safe to say we have, by wind and gravity, circled the globe.
It was at law school at Harvard that Van first interested himself in the politics that make the world go round, so very eccentrically. Soon he became conversant with the principal engines of political behavior, and with those forces that have pockmarked this century. I remember once, in 1957, when we found ourselves in Baltimore to serve as ushers at the wedding of a friend, and in the morning I thought impulsively to visit Whittaker Chambers in Westminster, one hour away. One would not take just anyone to that reclusive eyrie in western Maryland, but I took Van there with full confidence, and we stayed two hours. A few days later I had a letter from Chambers. He began it, "I liked Galbraith at sight. This happens so seldom with me that I wondered why it happened. As I listened to him laugh, watched him study the titles of my books, watched his mind fasten on one or two points of no great importance in themselves, but somewhat as an ant, at touch, clamps on the rib of a leaf that may be littering its path, I liked him better. I decided that what I liked was a kind of energy, what kind scarcely mattered. One of our generals was once being ho-ho-hearty with the ranks, as I understand generals are sometimes, especially if newsmen are present. He asked a paratrooper, 'Why do you like to do an insane thing like jumping out of airplanes?' The paratrooper answered: 'I don't like to, sir, I just like to be around the kind of people who like to jump out of airplanes.' I felt something like the paratrooper about Galbraith. . .
His friends, for whom I speak, would agree that his qualities are special. Everyone who has known him is more cheerful for the experience of having known him. The French will find him, in his official capacity, in no sense different from how they found
him in private life fifteen years ago. He is hospitable to every kind of ambiguity, charitable in his constructions of human behavior, but entirely convinced that the Lord has provided man with a fundamental apparatus by which we distinguish between what is right and what isn't; and convinced that the challenge to right thought and right conduct was never in history more menacingly threatened. I can imagine no presence in Paris more distinctively American than Van's, because jaded and worldly men will see in him the storybook American, the man of spontaneity and steadfastness, of innocence and wit, of flexibility and purpose. It may seem somehow wrong, in these circumstances, to congratulate the French people, but exactly that far I am prepared to go, confident as all of us who have known him over the years are, as also those of you in government who have known him over the years or have come recently to know him—Al Haig, Bill Clark, Bill Draper, Tom Clausen, Tom Enders, Jim Buckley, Jack Maresco, my son Christopher—that his presence as his country's ambassador will inform and refresh, yet another installment in the apparently endless repayment of the debt we incurred when, as a young and struggling republic, we welcomed the arrival of Lafayette. I join you all in wishing him and Bootsie a great and fruitful adventure, in the service of our beloved country.
I hadn't seen Van since the swearing-in, which he now described to everyone at lunch in hilarious detail, and I told the guests that I had the videocassette at hand, so we trooped into my music room that looks out over the sea, drew the curtains, placed the big television screen up, and ran Ambassador Galbraith's Atlantic Charter. That reminded David of a story in which he was caught up in mad social embarrassment, but he said Pat and I had heard it, but I made him tell it, and his old vocal powers came through.
It was a couple of years ago, and the dozen tables, at one of those palaces around Buckingham, were set for six people each, and David found himself seated opposite the Queen of England, and on the Queen's right an elderly duke-type, full of whiskers, who approached David most affably while the Queen was in animated conversation with the man on her left. The duke said to David, "I say, Niven, have you seen Tommy Phipps in New York lately?"
"Well yes," said David.
"How is he?"
"Well, I saw him just a week ago, and I said, 'Tommy, how are you?' And he said, 'Well, I fall down a lot, and cry a lot, but otherwise I'm fine!"' The duke roared.
At which point the Queen suddenly turned and said, "What was that, Mr. Niven?"
Well, David said, there was no 'way such a story could be repeated and made to sound funny, but neither was there any way to deny the Queen's request, so he had said, "Well, ma'am, there's this man in New York, a friend of uh"—but David hadn't of course caught the duke's name, so he nodded with a bright smile—"a friend of some of us over here, and he said to me"—David said he was growing more and more desperate in the foreknowledge of the absolutely certain failure of his story—"and he said to me"— David's voice here trails off slightly—"that he feels fine except he falls down a lot and cries a lot."
"Oh dear!" said the Queen. "Poor man!"
But, said David—and now he stands up. He usually does, from sheer excitement, when he really gets going—the duke then said, "Ah, Niven, it's been a long, long time." And, not having any idea who he was, David could only say, "Yes, it's been a long, long time!" And then he said, "But it was a memorable day, Niven, a memorable day." "Yes," David had said in desperation, "it was certainly a memorable day!" Whereupon the duke said, "I know we haven't seen much of each other in recent years, Niven, but I always tell my friends I was very proud to serve as best man at your wedding."
It was all great fun, and we went in to eat one of Pat's incomparable meals, with Julian (whom Pat met, years ago, as the chef on the boat in the south of France that David and Hjordis Niven had chartered) introducing something (I forget what) brand-new as dessert. We went into the living room for coffee, and Gloria told me that "el senor Valenti" was on the line.
I hadn't talked to Fernando since getting his news and I dreaded this conversation, though Tom Wendel had informed me that Fernando had finally agreed to submit to the radiotherapy and that the neck tumor—though not the primary tumor, which they hadn't succeeded in locating— was responding. We spoke in Spanish for a while, as over the years we have got into the habit of doing (Fernando's father was Spanish—the doctor to the King of Spain). Fernando has a way of inducing great melancholy by ostentatious levity. But he told me he had decided to spend Christmas in New York, the doctors willing, and that they would give him their decision the following week. I told him I'd have his plane met, and Jerry would take him to Barbara's apartment (Barbara, Fernando's former wife, was ill in southern California, and had turned over her apartment to him). Fernando asked what was I doing this year about a Christmas concert? I told him that I had assumed right along that he would not be in New York, and that even if he was, he would not (I must get just the right word here) "feel" like playing. But I hadn't wanted to engage another harpsichordist (Judith Norell, also a fan of Fernando, sweetly volunteered) on the grounds that it would sound too much like king-is-dead-long-live-the-king, so I had arranged, via Michael Sweeley who runs Caramoor, the great summer music festival at Katonah, New York, to bring in a choral group. Fernando said he thought that was fine, and anyway he wouldn't be reaching New York until five days after the scheduled concert. I told him I'd continue to pray for his recovery, and went back to the living room.
The weather had suddenly turned bright, and I asked if anyone wanted to walk. Van said he had to go home and attend to last-minute business. He and David arranged to disport in Switzerland in December, as Van would continue the skiing vacations with the children in Gstaad (he had solemnly explored the question whether the French would resent his going to a Swiss resort).
Sam and David and Jo were dressed in overcoats, I handed around walking sticks, and as we set out I thought, Why not take them and show them my new boat? We could then take our walk around Yacht Haven. They thought this a capital idea, so we got into the Volvo and five minutes later stopped outside the pier, one of thirty or forty, where my little (36-foot) sloop was squatting, along with three or four others whose owners had decided, as I had, to winter in the water.
It was very cold, but the sun had come out, and as I stepped into the cockpit and diddled with the combination lock I got a second capital idea. I said, Hey, let's take a ten-minute cruise! They said fine, though I think I detected just a trace of hesitation in Sam, but taxing him on this a few minutes later, he countered by saying that he was trying to reflect on whether Doubleday's insurance policy permitted the publisher and two authors to go out in the same hull.
In a minute the little diesel was purring, the dock lines were released, and then with David handling the bow line and Sam the stern line, off we went. At first I hadn't thought to raise the sail, but I decided I'd show them, as we headed south toward the harbor entrance, with the strong wind coming in from the west, how wonderfully easy it was to handle the genoa with the roller furling device. So I turned the wheel over to David, got the winch handle, and lo and behold the genoa was out, and we were bouncing along at six and a half knots. Oh how exhilarating the sailboat is! I thought about the mainsail, decided against raising it. A practical problem was that the temperature was so cold, one's hands had to be stuffed into one's pockets every minute or so. Poor Jo looked frostbitten. Without just a little crew drill, better stick to the genoa.
So we raced out, about a mile and a half, just outside the harbor, and they marveled at the seakindliness of the vessel, which seemed to iceskate over the waves. Then we turned around, and headed back, and en route I gave excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to effect a landing. And there was never a prettier one than this, as the boat came to a dead stop just by its pier and was promptly snubbed down at either end by David and Sam. I told them that the very next time I sailed to Spain, I'd take them along. We walked back to the car, and of course Pat was furious on learning that we had been out sailing, declai
ming at vigorous length that obviously Sam shouldn't be head of Doubleday Publishing if he permitted his most valuable asset, David, to go out in midwinter with the madman she was married to. All this was great fun, but Sam and Jo had to drive back to New Jersey, so regretfully we saw them off. David said he would take a little nap, and I got into the car and drove to the Radio Shack a mile or so down the line, because I need to have a present for James Burnham's birthday party tomorrow, and it occurred to me that perhaps a few of those television games would entertain him. He has always liked games, and with that mind of his, which framed The Managerial Revolution and Suicide of the West, good as ever in brief moments but, since the stroke, incapable of retention, perhaps engagements on the television screen—some solitaire, some he might play with his wife Marcia—might be just the thing. I scooped up a few and drove back. It was dark now, and I parked opposite the study and groped my way in. I turned on the light and checked the temperature— forty-five degrees, so I turned on both the gas heater and the electric heater, and in ten minutes it was sixty-five and I had an hour in which to go back to the mail.
Sophie Wilkins, my beloved friend, scholar, translator, writes the most complex, ornate, profound, erudite letters I regularly get, and it is always a little dismaying when I answer them because there is never the time, and often not the resources, to do them justice. Today she comments on an essay Jeff Hart has published in National Review in which he gives an account of hearing four poets while studying and teaching at Columbia: Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot. Her own memory of Eliot's performance (she was then departmental secretary for the English Department) was sharply different from Jeff's. "The 'show,' " she wrote, "was so dramatically the exact opposite of the Dylan Thomas event, somebody should really make a movie on the basis of my description: the Great Dead Poet, looking totally mummified—well, he was [now] happily married and had gained weight, as Jeffrey Hart says. He looked like a well-upholstered package—flanked by two undertakers in dress uniform (penguins): Jacques Barzun to the right of him, Lionel Trilling to the left of him. I didn't even hear the introduction, it was given in such hushed tones, appropriate to the funereal occasion. Then the GDP at last was stood up behind the lectern and proceeded to read, indeed, indeed, work that had been the great excitement of myself and schoolmates in high school, a quarter of a century ago! 'April is the cruellest month . . Yes, to be sure, but the way it came across was that he was basing his appearance solidly on the past. Normally a poet gives you a little work-in-progress, something you haven't seen yet that he needs to try out on a live audience in a live voice—and he reeled it off in the spirit of those ancient, scratchy, flawed Caruso records: mechanically, with the whole afflatus of infinite boredom he was entitled to feel at such reiteration of what had once been a bombshell. Not one living word came out of him, in that dead voice (the poet was dead, the man had probably never been so happy, and I did not begrudge him that; he had certainly earned it). But to read Jeffrey Hart's pious conclusion, 'Eliot was the West that night.' Yes indeedy, but if so, he was burying us more effectively than Khrushchev ever could, burying us from the Inside, beginning with himself. Just thought you ought to know."
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