by Allen Drury
In these recent weeks leading up to the convention, he has been going through a quiet personal revolution. Tonight’s events have accelerated and advanced it. It amazes him now, as he changes quickly into his swimming trunks, gets a beer from the refrigerator and goes out to his favorite chaise longue beside the pool in the hot, humid night, to think how far he has come from the supercilious public servant who burst out of the Midwest fifteen years ago with all the answers about everything—all of them self-consciously “liberal,” all of them arrogant and all of them blindly and ruthlessly intolerant of any other point of view.
In this, he recognizes now, he was suffering from the liberal syndrome of the twentieth century, which said that all knowledge, justice and purity lay on the left and all evil, intolerance and reaction lay on the right. He has learned that nothing on earth can be so intolerant and reactionary as a humorless professional liberal, and he understands now as he never did before that out of intolerance and reaction only evil, in the long run, can come.
He and his fellows in all that arrogant, ruthless crew that dominated the thinking of the world in these past decades have a great deal to answer for. That world is in near-collapse. Its societies are in chaos, its laws in disarray, its decencies disappearing, its hopes of survival dwindling fast. How much are the conservatives responsible, for opposing necessary programs for the achievement of a more humane society! But how much also are the liberals responsible, for attempting to impose upon that society an arbitrary form that had no relation to human realities and offered only the most ruthless hostility to those who sought to inject a little human reality into it. How horribly far down the road to destruction has intolerant idealism taken mankind: especially in the hands of those for whom idealism has been only a tool with which to manipulate the naive for the purposes of the Communist imperialism, harshest and most oppressive of them all.
How many of the sincerely self-deluded—as distinct from the cold, deliberate agents of that imperialism—realize their responsibility and their blame? Not many, he tells himself grimly now. It takes a little humbling such as he has been through to bring about that kind of self-scarifying honesty. Many of them will not be humbled until the final great humbling of us all, when it will be far too late for anyone to make amends or do anything at all about it.
So he is not too sorry to find that bidding farewell to that kind of harshly rigid “liberalism” does not dismay him as it would have done at an earlier time of his life. There are many in the great sprawling city twinkling softly across the lazy river in the hazy night who will go on being true to that concept of liberalism until the day they die—or the world dies. There are many in other great cities, in schools, in churches, in places of power and influence in the press, who will never waver and never relax in their relentless hostility to all who dare expose or challenge the futility and emptiness of their beliefs. The world has passed them by, they are old-fashioned and out of date; but on they go, harsh and rigid and intolerant to the end, trapped in their own pride, unable to make the simple but to them terrifying and soul-destroying admission, “We are not perfect—we may be wrong.” Self-limited and self-robbed of the ability to adapt to the realities of human behavior in a changing time, they are as immovable as bugs self-immolated in amber, eons ago.
No longer for him, thank you very much; and as he thinks back now upon that perfect public servant who came to Washington—perfect in everything but tolerance, compassion and an open mind—he thanks God for the change. He has not traveled an easy road in the last two years, but from it he is beginning to emerge with a reasonable peace of mind, a reviving self-respect, and a concept of integrity rather far from that with which he began.
In basic outline the facts of his life have been simple enough, just as Senator Tom August of Minnesota, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described them on that morning, which now seems very long ago, when the committee began its consideration of “the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State.”
Forty-nine years old, born in Binghamton, New York, attended elementary and high school there. Graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in public administration. Received his law degree from Harvard. Taught public administration for four years at the University of Chicago. Appointed to the Southwest Power Administration, becoming director of its public service division four years later. Five years after that, appointed director of the Southwest Power Administration. Seven years ago, appointed chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Two years ago, given temporary leave to accept appointment as Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.
A year and a half ago, nominated for the office of Secretary of State. Defeated by the Senate after he lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerning a youthful, innocent and stupid flirtation with Communism at the University of Chicago twenty years ago. Appointed by the late President Harley M. Hudson to the position of director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, which he still holds.
Active in international conferences for many years, including terms as chairman of the International Hydroelectric and Power Conferences in Geneva and Bombay; arbitrator between India and Pakistan in their recent water dispute; principal United States delegate to the United Nations Conference on Water, Power and Economic Development of Underdeveloped Areas.
Married to the former Louise Maxwell; two children, Richard, married, of Sandia, New Mexico, and Annette (Mrs. H. B. Sears) of Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Resident of Manhattan and Alexandria, Virginia. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Bar Association and the Metropolitan Club of Washington.
Expert on government, supremely competent administrator, given numerous awards as “America’s outstanding public servant.” Somewhat flawed by the past two years, but not, he tells himself with satisfaction as he gets up on a sudden impulse and plunges into the pool, as flawed as he was.…
Back in his chair, dripping but perfectly comfortable in the warm unstirring night, he stares thoughtfully across at the city that looks so placid but has such explosive forces roiling in it, and asks himself how he could ever have moved so far from reality as to deny that he had known Herbert Gelman at the University of Chicago. But even as he asks, he knows: because he wanted to be Secretary of State, and all else fell before that overriding desire.
Given the circumstances of those hectic days that saw his nomination, the Foreign Relations Committee hearings, the bitter Senate debate, the tragic death of Brigham Anderson, his defeat, Harley’s appointment of Orrin Knox to fill the office he had so fiercely wanted—he cannot say with certainty even now whether the outcome would have been any different had he told the truth. His opponents had already charged him with being “an appeaser … soft on Communism … weak, wishy-washy … willing to compromise America’s principles for a temporary respite from tension that will only be renewed in worse form tomorrow”—and so on. To have admitted an early flirtation with Communism, however foolish and ineffectual, would only have increased the outcry a thousandfold. He would have been defeated anyway.
Or would he? If he had been able to show the escapade for what it was, an outgrowth of a lingering youthful idealism, an empty gesture which meant no harm and did no harm—if he had been honest about it and thrown himself on the mercies of the Senate and the country—would he have lost? And if he had, would it not have been better to lose that way, rather than to lose after lying to the Senate, and then have Herbert Gelman materialize like a sickly ghost from the past, point the finger and say, “He did it. I was there.”
At least then he would not have defeated himself in his own heart.
But everyone on his side, of course, had wanted him to lie at the time. They believed as firmly as he did—and his belief was quite sincere, and he was not ashamed of it, and had it still—that he did have much to contribute to the country and to world peace, that he could negotiate constructively with the Communists, that it was vital that he contribute his talents to savi
ng the world from war, and do so in the most important Cabinet office of them all. It had not taken much to move this conviction into the realm of an arrogant, absolute self-confidence that would brook no opposition and accept no other possibility. And of course he had not been alone in this. He would be willing to bet right now that if he had consulted the Post—The Greatest Publication—Walter Dobius—any of that powerful group that were on his side in that fight, they would have said: keep quiet about it: if necessary, lie. The President had known about it, after all—that brilliant, effervescent, unfathomable man who had occupied the White House until Harley succeeded to it following his sudden death at the end of the Leffingwell battle—and the President had told him to keep silent. They had all wanted him to win. They were as ruthless for him then as now they were ruthless against him.
So there might have been no difference in the outcome, whichever way he had conducted himself. The only difference would have been in his own heart, which knew, whether his supporters did or not, what he had done to himself when he denied that he had ever known a former student of his named Herbert Gelman.
From that self-inflicted wound it had taken him all this time to recover, but recovery, he knew now, had begun with his defeat by Orrin Knox. It had proceeded slowly, almost subconsciously, for a number of months, as he had begun cautiously to venture forth again. It had come to crisis when a combination of gratitude to Harley for salvaging his public career, and horror at the extremes of violence to which ambition was carrying Ted Jason, had resulted in his leaving Ted’s cause at the convention to place Harley in nomination.
And in some curious, almost offhand way, it had settled into what he felt instinctively was to be its final and irrevocable form this afternoon, when Orrin, on the President’s orders, had asked him to come to the White House, and he had agreed.
That decision, reached in a moment in his silent house, had been the almost automatic response that most Americans would still give to such a request: if the President needs my help, I’ll do it. He had not paused to calculate its effects upon himself, had accepted it almost without thinking. Yet when he was driving, almost as in a trance, over the bridge into town, there had come to him the sudden certainty that he was doing the right thing. By the simple act of asking, the President had resolved many conflicts; and though he has already had, and no doubt will have later, some substantial misgivings about details, in totality he is satisfied. In a sense, shrewd old Mr. Speaker has done his deciding for him, and he realizes that he feels a genuine relief that the struggle is over.
Relief, and a sense of wonder that he suspects will remain with him for a while. Robert A. Leffingwell the liberal—still, he firmly believes, the liberal—falling in line with an Administration that theoretically stands for everything he has always opposed. How can it be that he feels so few qualms and so much peace of mind?
Looking down the convoluted corridors of the liberal years, since his youthful idealism first convinced him that the world must be remade in new ways and new patterns, he recognizes with an ironic—but friendly—smile for that distant believer, that he certainly followed the standard pattern for a long time. In college he was a philosophic leader in all those campaigns that so sternly ordered America to end and the world to get out. He was anti this and anti that, and always what he was against could be related to the established order of things. Yet he did not go as far as some of his contemporaries and opt out of society altogether to go wandering down paths of immaturity and self-destruction that led nowhere. Bob Leffingwell was basically too mature and too convinced of his own destiny to do that.
He had strayed close to what came in time to be described as “the New Left”—that phrase, so beloved of certain segments of the mass media, which really described just the same Old Left with a new generation of stooges to manipulate for its own imperialistic, Commufascist purposes. But he had never quite gone irrevocably over. Even when he had met and fallen in love with intense little Louise Maxwell, who was militant where he was philosophic, emotional where he was basically thoughtful.
How horribly serious and humorless so many of them had been in those days! How far they had persuaded themselves to go in swapping reality for an upside-down, cock-a-hoop vision of the world and society. What a strange psychotic state they lived in, encouraged by a press which tenderly front-paged their every unmannerly public belch and breaking of wind. And how desperately did some of them cling to immaturity still, despite all the evidence of all the years.
It was Louise’s intensity, he supposed, which had captured him more than anything else. This was a mate with whom a philosopher might storm the barricades. She did it every day, her bare, strained, not un-pretty little face contorted with her bitterness against America. Never had the noisy minority of a generation hated its own country more than Louise and her friends hated America; and with her, as with so many, he could never understand exactly why. She came of a wealthy, established family, had been given the most comfortable of childhoods. She had no reason, but for a long time she was as insensate and unthinking as the rest. It was the fashionable thing to do, in their generation, and so they did it, with that herd instinct of a certain segment of the young that stifles all thought and murders all individuality. The vast majority of their generation went quietly along getting an education, preparing themselves for constructive lives, becoming responsible citizens: Louise and her kind, everyday darlings of the media, rode high, wide and handsome in the days of their noisily pathetic youth.
For him it was an intellectual, not an emotional, matter. He kept to himself some basic reservations, for he did not really see for Robert A. Leffingwell any great future in destroying American society. If he had a future, and he believed he did, it was within the framework of that society, not in any chaos that might follow its destruction. And gradually, as time passed and they married and the children came, it seemed to him that Louise, too, acquired a certain maturity and mellowing, though she was still capable of flaring up in a white-lipped, implacable way about her country’s policies.
Gradually these outbursts became less, though she was always to be found in the front ranks of the middle-aged spread that overtook youthful rebellion as the years went on. Now her protests took the form of occasional attendance at the meetings of antiwar groups, donations to the Committee Condoning This, the Consensus Against That, her signature on petitions to Congress and full-page ads in the New York Times (moving higher up the list as he moved higher up the government). The barricades did not fit too well with a husband rising in the public service and a five-bedroom house on Arlington Ridge Road.
He had been genuinely surprised, however, that Seab Cooley or some member of the Foreign Relations Committee had not tried to raise the issue of Louise’s record and smear him with it during the hearings. No one had, and he had finally concluded, with a certain grudging disbelief that he was now ashamed of, that perhaps United States Senators weren’t as bad as he had always suspected. Louise’s past could have been a serious handicap to him, had it not turned out, ironically and through his own doing, that his own was quite enough.
Still, she had always furnished the sort of aura that had enabled him to remain in good standing with what he thought of as the “professional liberals.” The professional liberals, in his definition, were those who worked at it, for whom there was an unending, intolerant, relentless war against all differing opinion, for whom everything was always my-my and terribly-terribly, even as they too rose to being three-martini and wall-to-wall.
Louise remained, and helped him to remain, dreadfully In with all the Right People; and, as he was shrewdly aware and cynically capable of using, this did no harm to his career and reputation in an era dominated in major degree by certain powerful elements of the mass media, with their ability, through column, syndicate and broadcast, to condition the country coast-to-coast.
He had never told Louise about the days of the rather pathetic little four-man Communist discussion group when he was teaching a
t the University of Chicago. It had been, as much of his liberalism was, an intellectual exercise, a philosophic experiment, not direct or militant enough for her. She had been as shocked as his other supporters when it had come back years later in a Senate hearing to confront and confound him. He had not considered the episode that important, either when it happened or later. Its only importance, as she and so many who thought as she did were unable to see, was that he had lied about it under oath.
Almost all men, of course, would lie under oath at some point: a few saints perhaps had nothing embarrassing to hide, but not many of them existed in the world of power and press and politics that he knew. It just depended on which side of the table you happened to occupy. If you were lucky enough to be on the asking side instead of the answering side, you could wrap yourself in righteousness and heap coals on the heads of the guilty. If you were on the answering side—and were found out—you became a Robert A. Leffingwell, defeated for Secretary of State.
That was why he had been a little amused, even in the depths of his first despair over the Senate vote, by the attempts of his supporters to convince the country that he had been defeated because he was a “liberal.” That phony issue had nothing to do with it, as he knew and they knew: they were just playing the same old game they always played. The country sensed the reality, all right: dumpy little Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania had spoken for the people when she cried “Liar!” at the convention.
Out of the lie had come what he now regarded, in a way that would be almost mystical in a less skeptical and intelligent man, as regeneration. Out of it too had come what appeared to be the final loss of sympathy that had held together a marriage that had increasingly become, as he matured and she remained essentially the immature rebel of a long-gone day, a matter of calling to one another across an empty room. She had remained rigid, he had become more flexible. He suspected she really despised him because the Chicago incident had been so innocent—she would have respected him more had it really been subversive. A pursed-lipped disapproval had reached its climax in her frantic attempts to persuade him not to support Harley Hudson. He had recognized that this was the final step and, for all the reasons which seemed sufficient to him, had taken it. The result is summed up in a postcard from Chorocua saying, “I hope you’re satisfied!”