Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “The nation’s moving right,” said Nixon. “People like this Agony whatever—well, all they do is help things along. Every time these bums blow something up, they turn a million voters from Democratic to Republican.”

  This was too much even for Kevin. “And what about when the Klan blows actual people up?”

  Again Nixon laughed. “The Klan. Hoover will have them shut down pretty soon. That’s what he tells me.” He fumbled with his knife and fork. “Those Agony people, on the other hand—they’re pretty clever. That’s what Hoover says. Lots of discipline, lots of commitment. Hard to track down. Tell you something. Next President, whoever he is? The one after that? They’re gonna face so many of these left-wingers, he’ll have to put troops in the streets.”

  “Not in America,” said Kevin. “Never in America.”

  Nixon put his fork down. He glanced at his wife. “Let me make one thing crystal clear. America’s just a country. It’s like anyplace else. Anything that happens anywhere can happen here. If it’s different, it’s because we make it different. Us. The good guys. The quiet people. The majority nobody ever talks about or listens to. If we let the bums run the place, blow things up, burn things down? Anything can happen, Kevin. Anything.”

  Before the Garlands left, the former Vice President managed to pull Aurelia aside in the living room while his wife chatted with Kevin. He dropped his voice.

  “Know why you’re asking these questions. Know what Eddie thinks. Saw him the other day. Listen. Hoover doesn’t know where she is. Nobody knows. He thinks she’s still with those bums, demoted to cleaning the latrine. Reds are big on that kind of thing. Discipline. Party line. No way to tell.”

  He had left her behind. “You saw Eddie?”

  Nixon nodded, offered that awkward smile, head bobbing. “Never got the chance to thank him for those kind words in the magazine. In Washington on some business. Dropped in at his office. Surprised him. He’s a good kid. I like him. Of course, he’s with the Kennedys, and the Kennedys—Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I think Jack’s heart is in the right place, always have. Got him to sign one of his books for my kids. Eddie. Maybe you could talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “Next year, the party runs Goldwater. Gotta get it out of their system. I’ll campaign for him—do one’s duty—but, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I’m not Goldwater. I’m Nixon. Next time around, 1968, we have big plans. Do great things for America. Could use his help on the campaign. Your Eddie. Writes a great speech. Thinks we’re the devil incarnate. Listen. Put in a word. You owe me one, Aurie.”

  The funny thing was, she did. All the way home in the car, half dozing on her husband’s warm shoulder, she reminded herself that she did indeed owe Nixon one. He had done her a favor four years ago, giving Eddie hope in his moment of greatest despair. It was at Aurelia’s desperate insistance that Nixon had sent Eddie the photograph of June Cranch Wesley toting her rifle in the battle of Maxton, North Carolina.

  (III)

  AS FOR EDDIE, he was pulling in every marker he could think of, and discovering how few he really held. Bernard Stilwell was suddenly unavailable. His friends in the White House gave him lunch, and pitying smiles. He knew what they were thinking: that he was raising the question of Commander M’s absent signature in an effort to get his sister off the hook for this, Agony’s first fatal bombing. They were missing the point, but he had no way to explain. It had not occurred to him how desperately he relied on news of the group’s crimes as evidence of Junie’s continued safety.

  “These groups change leaders all the time,” said Langston Hughes when Eddie dropped by 127th Street. “You can’t attach any importance to it.”

  “What if they purged her? What if she’s dead?”

  “You can’t divine all that from a single letter, Eddie. You have to be patient.”

  But patience came hard to Eddie at the best of times. He tried his connections again and met blank walls. He talked to a couple of in-the-know journalists, but if they knew anything about the fate of June Wesley they were not admitting it. He returned to New York to track down Derek Garland, but Derek had gone off to Ghana, and his brother Oliver seemed delighted to have no idea how to get in touch. Gary Fatek was suddenly, and suspiciously, too busy to meet.

  And so, in the third week of November, Eddie went home.

  Not to I Street. To Boston, to visit his parents. Life had changed in the Wesley household. Wesley Senior had turned his pulpit over to a younger man, and had become a virtual recluse. He sat with his son in the study. He listened without hearing, and talked mostly about the Book of Daniel. Was he thinking of Junie? Of himself? Or simply remembering a sermon from days past? Whatever the answer, Eddie’s father was visibly fading, less a shadow of his former self than a refraction, thin and without affect. The fire had gone out of his eyes, and his manner. It was as though his daughter’s crimes had sapped his life’s force.

  Hoping to rouse him, Eddie mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision last spring, banning Bible readings in public schools. Surely this would rouse his father’s ire. But Wesley Senior merely nodded. “The old ways were not sustainable,” he said, and, briefly, shut his eyes. “But the new ways will be the death of our people. Wait and see.”

  Eddie said something silly about the wheel of history.

  His father snorted. “Well, you’d say that. You work for Kennedy.”

  “What’s wrong with Kennedy?” asked Eddie, very surprised.

  “Where’s his civil-rights bill?” Wesley Senior demanded, but more in despair than in ire. “We turned out all those voters for him….”

  He trailed off.

  “There’s big plans for the second term,” said Eddie, wishing he could communicate his enthusiasm. “You’ll be proud of him, Poppa.” And of me, he wanted to add, but dared not.

  “America has been good to us,” Wesley Senior said before going upstairs to take his nap. “Even when it’s not, we are called to turn the other cheek.” He shook his head. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” The words were as close as he would come before he died to acknowledging that Junie existed.

  As for Eddie’s mother, she bustled about, to all outward appearances her usual self, but, in truth, Eddie made her nervous. She did not know how to treat him—nor he, her. There was a great deal of tiptoeing around the obvious. Only on the second morning of the visit did Eddie have the chance to talk to her. They were in the kitchen. Marie had made pancakes and sausage. Wesley Senior, as was his recent habit, was sleeping late. Marie poured Eddie a huge glass of orange juice. She watched him eat, but limited her own meal to tea and a bit of toast. Wesley Senior was fourteen years older than his wife, and Marie seemed to her son to be trying to close the distance.

  “The hardest days,” she said, “are when the reporters come around. Usually right after some action. Isn’t that what she calls it? In her letters? Action. Her people take an action, they blow something up, and then the reporters come.”

  “I’m sorry, Momma.”

  “We raised her right. We didn’t raise her for this. That’s what your father says, and he’s right.” Animation crept into her tone. It occurred to Eddie that his mother wanted to talk about Junie, and had nobody to talk to. “He’s disowned her,” Marie continued. “He wrote her out of his will.”

  Eddie would have smiled had his mother’s face not been so grim, for Wesley Senior possessed no significant assets other than the house, and he had made clear years ago his intention to deed it back to the church once Marie died.

  “She’s a good girl,” said Marie Wesley, hopelessly. “I know she is. No matter what they say, she would never have done these things. Never.”

  On the train ride back to Washington, Eddie pondered. He should be under surveillance. The federal government had lost track of Commander M, but keeping track of her brother would be a snap. Maybe Lenny used to watch him in Harlem, but Eddie no longer lived in Harlem. Someone had to be watching him now.<
br />
  He wondered who.

  Just before the train reached New York City, it shuddered to a halt. People looked out on the tracks for an obstacle. The conductor came on the public-address system. His voice was crackly and faint. But everybody heard.

  President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. He was dead.

  CHAPTER 33

  An Editorial Dispute

  (I)

  IN THE SPRING of 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson went to Ann Arbor to deliver the first of several speeches in which he called upon his fellow Americans to build the “Great Society” that would overcome poverty and racial division. The ruling class greeted the news dolefully, but in Harlem the remaining salons sizzled with the conviction that a new day at last had dawned. Kennedy had been a fine fellow in his way, but this Johnson, Southern cracker though he was, seemed ready to push for everything black America had been demanding for a hundred years. The mood of the Negro press was celebratory—that is, the Negro press other than the Seventh Avenue Sentinel, whose editor, without consulting anybody, wrote a signed piece on page one warning that such apparent gifts never came without a cost, and that it might behoove the darker nation to spend less time dancing in the streets, and more time searching for the hidden puppeteers pulling the strings. Near the end of the column, she nevertheless issued a stirring call for nonviolence. She was really very hard on Jewel Agony, and the other militant groups springing up in the wake of its notoriety. All they would do, Aurelia insisted, was bring the darker nation to grief. The Commander M of whom all Harlem reverently spoke was making a deadly mistake.

  Aurelia’s husband was concerned. She was saying too much, he explained, over dinner in Manhattan.

  “Too much about what?”

  “I think you’re putting together things I shouldn’t have let slip.” He slid a copy of her editorial across the table. It was heavily underlined. “I think you were writing this to me.”

  Aurelia looked down. “This is about Jewel Agony.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  He was silent for a while, playing with his steak. She waited for him to make the bridge, the way he always did. “Honey, look,” he finally said. “We don’t have anything to do with Jewel Agony, okay?”

  This set her back. “Who said you did?”

  “You’re implying it.”

  “Kevin, no. You’re wrong. This is about Jewel Agony. It’s not about anything else.”

  He pointed to one of the passages he had marked. “Then who’s this? Who are the puppeteers?”

  Aurelia laughed jerkily. “Honey, come on. All I know is, there’s some kind of Project, and it’s out of control. That’s all you’ve told me. That and that Philmont Castle left a letter behind. Fine. I don’t know what you and your—your group are up to, but, really, Kevin, I’m not accusing you of—of influencing Washington.”

  Her husband never so much as smiled.

  (II)

  AS SOON AS SCHOOL WAS OUT, Aurelia packed the children into the station wagon and drove up to New Hampshire to visit Mona and the twins. The two women spent a lot of time walking in the woods while a Dartmouth student watched the kids. Mona hiked every day, usually several miles. She walked Aurelia into the ground.

  Aurie told her old friend that she was tired of the Sentinel. She might bear the title of editor-in-chief, but Kevin owned the paper. “I’m working for my husband,” she said. “I want a real job.”

  “Most women in America work for their husbands,” said Mona, who had been reading Betty Friedan. The two women were sitting on fallen trees, taking a break.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You’ve finished grad school, right?”

  “Just about.”

  “So, do what I did. Teach college. I still owe you, honey. I’ll help you find a job.”

  Aurelia shook her head and dared not say what jumped to mind, that Kevin would never put up with it.

  “Maybe when the kids are older,” she said. “They need me at home.”

  Mona snorted. “Get up. Time to walk some more.”

  “I can’t. I’m worn out.”

  “You need to stop smoking.”

  “I need to rest.”

  Later that night, the two women sat up in the kitchen, watching an old movie and sharing a very fine sherry, a gift to Mona from a lover.

  “Eddie’s pretty obsessed with his sister,” said Aurie after a bit.

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I guess. I’m just wondering if there’s something I should do. Something I should say. He’s in so much pain.”

  She glanced at her friend. Mona’s face was stony. “There is nothing you can do, Aurie. Nothing you can say. Don’t you dare even try.”

  “But maybe if I just—”

  “You can’t undo what’s been done, honey. You start talking to Eddie about Junie and, well, you and I both know where that’s going to lead.”

  The guest bedroom was in the rafters. Aurelia lay awake for hours, watching through the dormer as the trees swayed beguilingly, teasing her with their ability to dance in place without losing their roots.

  She knew what Eddie thought about Junie. She wondered what Junie thought about Eddie.

  (III)

  AS IT HAPPENED, Eddie often wondered the same thing. He had recently published a piece in the New York Times on the dangers of violence in a good cause, relying in large measure on a sermon Wesley Senior had preached back in the early fifties on Isaiah 60:18. Junie had always thought it one of her father’s best, and Eddie probably hoped that Commander M, in whatever hideout, might read the essay, and remember her old pacifist self. Some intellectuals on the left, however, linked the theme of the essay to the Nixon piece from 1962, and concluded that the great Edward Trotter Wesley’s conservative tilt was fully accomplished.

  The critics were incorrect. In the months since the assassination of President Kennedy, Eddie’s essays had been moving by increments in a more radical direction, almost as if he hoped to appeal, through his public pronouncements, to his missing sister. Like a lot of Kennedy’s men, Eddie harbored serious doubts about Johnson, and the Great Society proposals never entirely assuaged his concerns. In early July, the new President signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, establishing broad protection for the darker nation against discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. As it happened, the employment provisions also applied to women. Opponents of the Act had forced this change, hoping the patent absurdity would scuttle its chances. Eddie suggested in The Nation that the barely mentioned amendment might, in the long run, work a larger change in American society than the more visible rules about race. The Caucasians will forget about us, he argued. We are their servants. Women are their sisters and daughters and mothers. Liberating white women will strike them as more appealing than liberating Negro men.

  Eddie received a rather droll note from his own mother: And maybe when you and the white man are done with your feud about whom to liberate first, white women or Negro men, we can do something about liberating Negro women.

  Then in August of 1964, when the new President informed the nation that North Vietnam had fired on a pair of American patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, Eddie’s skepticism about Johnson flared into anger. Although the Vietnam expedition, at that time still relatively small, had always worried Eddie, he had accepted the assurances of those closest to Kennedy that the conflict could be managed. Now here was Johnson, demanding a special congressional resolution, and implying without ever quite saying that small was no longer possible. Within days of the attack, the resolution passed the House by unanimous vote, and the Senate with only two dissents. Eddie was beside himself. Not because he thought, as his friends did, that Johnson was lying about the attack. No. Eddie’s concern was that the Tonkin Gulf incident had knocked from the front pages the discovery in Mississippi of the bodies of three missing civil-rights workers, dispelling the Klan propaganda that their disappearance was a hoax organi
zed by outside agitators. In another essay, Eddie prophesied that the battle over the burgeoning war would capture the nation’s attention, relegating the battle for racial justice to a sideshow.

  Toward the end of August, a young black man was arrested in Mississippi, supposedly in the act of planting a bomb at the home of a local police chief linked to racist violence. Rumor said that he was a member of Agony, but he died in his cell before federal agents had the chance to interrogate him and find out for sure.

  CHAPTER 34

  The Festival Day

  (I)

  IN MARCH of 1965, Senator Lanning Frost arrived in New York to speak at a series of fund-raisers, although everybody knew he was also testing the presidential waters, if not for 1968—when Johnson was expected to win in another Democratic landslide—then perhaps for 1972 or 1976. In his first term in the Senate, Frost had become wonderfully popular for his confusing way of interrogating witnesses: “Now, General, you’re not trying to tell this committee that if we build this tank you won’t be back for another one next year or not?” or “If we confirm you to be a judge, it won’t be because you’ve been more than truthful here today, will it?” Standup comics loved him. But so did ordinary Joes, who seemed to think that one of their own had made it to the top. Besides, there were those who whispered that he was twisting his words intentionally, so that the witnesses would be bound to err in response. After all, pointed out his defenders, Senator Frost seemed perfectly relaxed when questioning the witnesses he liked. Eddie was not sure which side to believe. David Yee, at the Washington Bureau of the Times, had told his friend privately that he was quite certain that Lanning Frost was every bit as dim as he seemed. When he behaved himself, said David, it was because his wife, Margot, wrote his lines for him.

  “How has he gotten so far?” Eddie asked, bewildered. “If he’s really as thick as a post, why are people talking about him as President?”

  “Margot Frost is six times smarter than her husband. She tells him what to think and what to say. If they ever get to the White House, Lanning will be the face and the voice of the Administration, but, believe me, Margot will be the brains.”