by Allen Drury
He knows—and it is both pleasing and flattering—that since the Sixties they have made it virtually impossible for anyone who disagrees with them to receive an impartial hearing in America. They have successfully scoffed and attacked and withered almost every attempt to state the opposing view. They have established such a monopoly on the means of communication that those who venture to assert an independence from them are subjected instantly and automatically to a savage campaign to smear, suppress, or ridicule down. It is no mean accomplishment, and Walter and his world are justified when they reflect, with the smugness born of a secure intellectual hegemony, that their views, and their prejudices, are quite, quite safe.
If their countrymen sometimes show a certain restiveness at this, if on occasion there is some harsh indication—such as, say, a roar of cheers at a public meeting when someone attacks the press—Walter and his world are highly indignant and dismayed. Their consternation is, in fact, quite comical. It is not enough for them to exercise the virtual censorship of American thought that they do, in fact, exercise: it is necessary to their self-esteem that they be allowed to believe that they are getting away with it. One of the few humorous—if not actually pathetic—aspects of Walter and his world is their naïve belief that nobody sees through them. It is shattering to them to realize that while the peasants may be easygoing and too lazy to object very much, they are not fooled. This is upsetting.
But not, of course, upsetting enough for them to deviate in the slightest from the exercise of the dictatorship that they have managed to establish over the American mind. Right Thoughts flood the columns, dominate the airwaves, fill the editorials, news reports, movies, plays, and reviews. Right Thoughts are everywhere. Right Thoughts are gospel, and Walter, as Patsy truly says, is their God.
And the gospel he presides over and offers to his countrymen? It comes down essentially to the same basic arguments that first caught the approving eyes of his employers, the same arguments that he and his major colleagues have offered ever since the end of the Second World War, endlessly repeated through every means of communication:
America is declining in influence and therefore unable to meet her problems with firmness and integrity—
Communism is gaining in strength and therefore had best be accommodated, because its advances aren’t really very important anyway, and anyway, it might be dangerous to try to stop them—
And a blind fear of atomic war, offered as the final obliterating answer to all who dare suggest that if America will only stand unafraid for the great revolutionary principles upon which she was founded, she can come safely through her perils and achieve in reasonable time the establishment of an honorable and lasting peace.
In the minds of Walter and his world, this last is a naïve and childish idea, a hopeless obsession on the part of far too many of their foolish countrymen. Toward it their scorn is implacable and unyielding. He is readying some of it right now, as he carefully wipes his lips on his damask napkin, pushes back his richly carved chair from the massive old refectory table, and starts slowly and thoughtfully up the stairs to his study to resume work upon his speech.
For that idea and for all who hold it, up to and including Orrin Knox and the President himself, Walter Wonderful and his world have only savage answers. The thought of them brings once more the tight little smile of satisfied contempt to his lips as he snaps on the desk lamp, takes off his coat, sits in his writing chair, and again flicks on his electric typewriter with a pudgy, determined finger.
Others may doubt, on this cold, blustery night suspended between winter and spring, the course they will follow in the presidential campaign now getting under way. Others may be uncertain where the best solutions lie for the enormous problems domestic and foreign that swirl about their uneasy, beleaguered land. Others may be humble and afraid, seeing not only the night of snow but the night of ages threatening to close in on America.
Not so Walter Dobius. Walter and his world, now as always, have no doubts.
He flicks a key or two in a tentative, pondering way, and then, without humility or hesitation, begins to write steadily and forcefully into the night.
***
Chapter 3
There were, of course, other perspectives on the night.
Not as simple as Walter’s, a portly man at a big desk overlooking the floodlit Washington Monument told himself ruefully as he put down his knife and fork and stared at the fluffy pink-and-white matron eating opposite from a TV tray, was the White House perspective.
For Harley M. Hudson, who actually had the responsibilities Walter and his world thought they did, life was never a simple matter of fears, slogans, and the arbitrary consignment of people and issues to categories labeled with automatic little words. For him life was real and not a shadow play of ego and ambition that led to standing tall in Georgetown. The President of the United States had to stand tall before his country, mankind, history, and his own conscience. He did not find the last particularly difficult, but the other three were sometimes not so easy.
He sighed, a little heavily, and Lucille Hudson gave him an appraising glance.
“Now what are you worrying about? Surely not about being President, again.”
“Am I worrying?” her husband said mildly. “I didn’t realize it.”
“Oh, of course you are. I can always tell. And really there’s no cause for it. If Walter Dobius makes a speech and nominates Ted Jason, what of it? Walter isn’t the convention.”
“Walter is part of it,” the President said. “A substantial part.”
“He can’t stop you,” Lucille said calmly. “You know that.”
“I know that,” the President agreed. “He can’t stop me because I’m not going to be in a position to be stopped, since I won’t be running—”
“Oh, stuff,” his wife interrupted. “Of course you’re going to be running.”
“I gave my solemn pledge to the Senate and the country when I moved in here that I was retiring at the end of the term. And I am.”
Lucille Hudson sniffed.
“Solemn words are all right for solemn occasions. But later one has to get down to what’s really practical.”
“Oh, one does, does one?” her husband inquired with a sudden humor. “You’re certainly getting to be a cold-blooded politician, I must say. Where did you learn all that?”
“Right here in this house,” she said. “It does that to one.”
“Yes,” he agreed, abruptly sobered. “It does. Nonetheless, I have given my word—”
“Harley Hudson,” she said, and her faced dissolved into the twinkling little smile which, combined with her rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, roly-poly figure, and infallibly sweet disposition, had long ago prompted Helen-Anne to bring forth her famous private description of the First Lady as “a meringue enigma wrapped in whipped cream inside a marshmallow sundae”—“Harley Hudson, I don’t care how many people you’ve given your word to, the facts are the facts and they’re going to produce exactly the situation I’ve always known they would. They’re going to force you to be a candidate for re-election.”
“I really don’t want the job, you know,” he said mildly. She chuckled.
“Look me straight in the eye and say that,” she commanded. He obliged. She chuckled again.
“I could almost believe you if I weren’t your wife. Ted and Orrin are going to eliminate each other and then there’s going to be you. There’s got to be. So I don’t really see why you don’t step in right at the beginning, right now, and say that events have forced you to reconsider and you’re going to run. It would save everybody so much wear and tear.”
“Can’t you hear Walter Dobius and his friends if I did?” the President inquired with a sudden grin. “Poor Walter would have a stroke, he’s so dead set on getting Ted in here. About as dead set,” he added, the grin deepening, “as you are to get me in here.”
“But you are here,” the First Lady said comfortably. “That’s the difference.”
“I really think,” he said with a smile, “that you think it’s just a picnic. Any normal wife would be worried about the wear and tear on me. She would want me to retire and take it easy. She wouldn’t want me to continue to knock myself out in the world’s most thankless job—”
“I know it isn’t a picnic,” she said. “I’m not a fool. It’s just that I believe in you and in what you are doing for the country. Furthermore, Harley Hudson,” she added indignantly, “ever since you went to Geneva and defied the Russians the country’s worshiped you and you know it. So don’t give me Poor Old Harley. You love it.”
His smile broadened.
“Some segments worship me, but I haven’t noticed too many hosannas from Walter and his friends. They’ve had to go along with the general mood, but you’ve noticed all the careful qualifications in the columns, broadcasts, and editorials. They don’t like anybody to get really tough with the Communists. It upsets them.”
“They’re worried about the bomb,” the First Lady said. He made a skeptical sound.
“And I’m not? My God, I eat, sleep, think, and dream the bomb twenty-four hours a day.”
“I know you do. You needn’t swear about it. That’s the only thing I regret about this office. You use more profanity than you used to.”
The President gave a delighted laugh.
“Lucy, you take the cake. I wish I could reduce everything to the fundamental level you do.”
“How could you?” she inquired with her sudden little twinkle. “You’re a man. Now: why don’t you announce at your press conference this week?”
“I don’t think I’ll have one. I think I’ll lie low this week and let Walter and Ted and Orrin produce the fireworks. Anyway, as I say, I have nothing—absolutely nothing—to announce.”
“You can’t sit still,” his wife said. “History won’t let you.” The buzzer on his phone sounded sharply in the big, cluttered room. “There’s history, now.”
“No it isn’t,” he said, reaching for the phone. “It’s Orrin. But I guess he’s history, too. Hello?”—he nodded across the desk with a confirming smile—“yes, put him on … Hi … Why, sure. I thought we had pretty well decided on policy in that area but if you’d like to come by and talk about it again, there’s nothing doing here tonight, as you know. We’re just having a quiet snack in the upstairs study. I don’t mind talking about problems some more, it’s all I—Oh, it’s you you want to talk about?” He chuckled. “My friend, I could never have guessed. O.K., come along. I’ll be here. Right. In fifteen minutes.... There, you see?” he said, turning back to his wife. “I don’t need to move. I can sit still. History comes to me in this house. I don’t have to go after it.”
“Harley Hudson,” she said, rising and preparing to depart for the family quarters, “if I hadn’t already bet with you, I’d bet with you again: come next January you will be right here, right where you are this minute, after being re-elected by a landslide. It’s inevitable.”
“Inevitable’s a big word.”
“If anything is,” she said, concluding a conversation she would recall many times later, “you are.”
“Well, don’t tell Walter,” he said with a grin. “He couldn’t stand it.”
She came around the desk and kissed him goodnight.
“I’ll let you tell Walter. He only listens to people on his own level. Don’t be too late, now.”
He nodded.
“I’ll try not to. But it depends on the Secretary of State.”
Alone in the room that held so much history, in the house where history lived, he sat for a moment after she had gone, staring out at the Monument where it rose imperious and shining into the snow-swept night. The storm was beginning to slacken a little, the savage gusts blowing out of Virginia and the west were dying, soon it would be over and the soft muffling silence of a cold white world would settle over Washington. It was a little late in the year for it, hopefully spring would come tomorrow, but tonight and probably for the rest of the week the capital was still in the grip of the weather, and the mood, of winter.
And not a very happy mood it was or had been, he thought with an uneasy grimness, still reflecting as it did the savage stresses and strains created by his successful confrontation with the Communists at Geneva a year ago and the many problems flowing from the crisis that had arisen six months after in both the United Nations and the United States over the visit of H.R.H. Terence Wolowo Ajkaje the M’Bulu of Mbuele.
When he had walked out on the Soviets at Geneva, in the most decisive action any American President of recent decades had taken with the Communists, the world had not known for some hours whether it would die or live. It had lived, but on different terms and on a different basis from those existing before the Chief Executive had reasserted his country’s integrity in the face of an outright ultimatum from its most implacable opponent.
When the M’Bulu, the Communists, and the more childlike and irresponsible of the Afro-Asian nations had almost succeeded in censuring and expelling the United States from the UN because of its racial problem which the M’Bulu had deliberately inflamed, the reaction within America had been violent and grave indeed. Walter Dobius and his world might argue with a suave desperation that the United States was undoubtedly to blame and therefore should stay in the UN in order to keep the Afro-Asians happy and well-financed while they went about their carefree business of destroying the fragile bonds of world order, but all their millions of words had not been sufficient to stem the tide of feeling in the country. The UN, as always, had been the UN’s worst enemy; and not all the bugaboos of possible disaster should the UN collapse, raised by Walter and his world, could conceal the organization’s built-in death-drive from a proud and impatient people increasingly convinced that the United States was always destined to get the short end of the stick and increasingly unable to accept the argument that the United States must always be cheerfully willing to.
Upon the President, however, there rested a higher obligation than the powerful carping of Walter’s world on the one side, a stronger imperative than the rising impatience of so many of his countrymen on the other. It was true that the UN was in sad disarray, that not all the Right Thinkers in the world could conceal the fatal irresponsibility of its new and inexperienced members, that its sickness infected all of international relations with a cancer second only to that of Communism itself. The argument could not stop there. Weak and wavering as the United States itself had been toward the organization over the years, sadly as its leaders had allowed themselves to be persuaded on a thousand occasions that they must not act with firmness because it might offend some little power that might not like them, still there was something to be gained by keeping the UN alive, and staying in it. Or at least there was something to be gained by an orderly termination, if history, brushing aside the dreams, pretensions, and fears of men, should find termination inescapable.
He was not ready to write the UN off yet, however, ragtag and bobtail hodgepodge of nations and non-nations though it had become. There was still some glimmering, feeble hope of reformation, some last faint possibility that its raucously brawling members would realize at the last moment that every time they weakened it or twisted its rules to satisfy their anti-colonialist hysteria they were only weakening themselves and making more certain the road to their own extermination. Without the UN, most of Africa and Asia would die under the new Communist imperialism, yet every day most of Africa and Asia did everything they could to make the UN die. They were fools, the President thought impatiently, history’s greatest fools, and saying that they were still just children was no excuse.
It was time, and past time, that they grew up.
This was perhaps the major headache that would face the next man to sit at this desk, that and of course the never-ending struggle with Communism itself. He had read in many a column by Walter Dobius, he had sat right here last Thursday night and heard him say it in person, that the old fears of Communism were now o
ut of date, that a new era had dawned, that it was no longer wise or even, he gathered, fashionable, to be suspicious of the Russians, the Chinese, and all their vicious little hangers-on around the globe.
He could not in all honesty see how Walter got that way. He could remember these wildly welcomed “new looks” before, these oft-recurring and quick-dying “new eras,” the trade, the visits, the desperate attempts—by the West, not by the Communists—to pretend that the basic drive had changed; the determined and unending campaign by Walter and his world to make their countrymen believe that it was somehow stupid and unfair to continue to be suspicious of a system that was absolutely and irrevocably dedicated to the death of their country as a free nation and themselves as a free people.
He could remember all this, and he was not impressed.
These eagerly and repeatedly hailed softenings of Communism that were no softenings at all were the Potemkin villages of the Western mind, or at least that portion of it influenced by “Salubria” in Leesburg. Not one single item of hard fact in more than half a century gave corroboration, yet day in and day out, week after week, year after year, Walter and his friends reiterated their contention that Communism was changing, that it was becoming “mature and civilized,” that its practitioners were really human beings as kindly as could be and not human machines dedicated to the destruction of every decency in the world.
Well, he had not fallen for that standard weakness of Presidents which had led most of his predecessors to fancy that their own personal charm, devastating and infinite as it always was, would be sufficient to divert Communism from its irrevocable purpose. The naïve belief that a personal chat could solve everything had not been his. His own confrontation had come in the first week of his Presidency. The stars had been knocked out of his eyes at once and permanently. Thank God for that. It enabled him to read with the skepticism they deserved the suave exhortations to weakness put forth by Walter’s world.