He was full in the peephole once more. Edna’s heart ached, not from the fact that T. C. was not there, not from the fact that a stranger was there instead, but for Dilman’s forlornness. His charcoal suit looked too new, too uncomfortable, and long at the sleeves. He might have been a proprietor of a shoeshine-stand concession in his Sunday best, waiting for an interview on the new lease.
She must go to him, at once, before he came to her.
Withdrawing from the peephole, Edna Foster folded her letter of resignation, located the memorandum of urgent calls and messages that she had prepared for the President. Holding the letter, the memorandum and her shorthand pad in her left hand, she nervously opened the door to his office and went inside.
“Good—good day, Mr. President.”
“Miss Foster, how do you do. I—I was about to find out where you were.”
“There’ve been endless phone calls and messages. Some may be important. I didn’t want to break in on your meetings, the—the first day—but—” She removed the memorandum from her left fist and handed it to him. “I’ve typed it out for you, in detail. If you want to dictate—”
She had started for her familiar chair next to T. C.’s desk, but Dilman did not move. She halted, and waited.
His eyes were on the desk. Then they swung toward the sofas across the room. He indicated one sofa. “I think it’ll be more comfortable over there.”
She nodded, then remembered a procedure. She went quickly to the open French door leading to the Rose Garden, waved to a Secret Service agent, then closed it. She started toward the other open door leading to the corridor.
Dilman, having reached the captain’s chair, said, “What are you doing?”
Puzzled, Edna replied, “I’m closing the doors for privacy.”
Dilman did not hide his concern. “No. Leave that one open.”
“I—I’ve always been told to do it, to shut them. What you may be dictating—it might be personal, I mean privileged—”
“Leave that door open,” Dilman said.
She was surprised at his severity. “Well, I—” She shrugged. “Very well, Mr. President.”
Before she could move to the sofa, he intercepted her. His distress was obvious. “Let me—I think I’d better explain,” he said quickly. “I think I can be honest with you. After all, you were T. C.’s confidential secretary.”
“Yes,” she said, bewildered.
Dilman hesitated. His eyes were cast downward at his shoes. “Once, President Eisenhower appointed a Negro, E. Frederic Morrow, to his staff in the White House, in an executive capacity. Morrow required a secretary from the White House pool. They were all specially trained white girls. Everyone refused the job. According to Morrow, ‘None wants the onus of working for a colored boss.’ So Morrow sat alone in his White House office, without a secretary, not knowing what to do. Then, late in the day, a white girl timidly appeared. She was from Massachusetts. She was religious. She knew Morrow was having trouble. She felt that she could not be true to her faith unless she volunteered for the job. When the white girl appeared, Morrow said, ‘She kept the door open behind her, as if for protection, and refused to come in and sit down.’ ” Dilman paused. “I could never forget that. In the Senate I always kept one door open when I had a white secretary or female visitor in. I—I guess I’ve brought the same feeling with me into the White House. Forgive my sensitivity, Miss Foster. Now, at least, you understand it.”
Shaken, Edna wanted to burst into tears. When Dilman raised his eyes to look at her, she tried to control her voice, but it quavered. “I think the President’s door should be closed.”
She went to the corridor door, shut it firmly, and without meeting his eyes she went to the curved sofa and sat down.
Dilman was behind the captain’s chair, still standing. He ignored the memorandum that he held. “Governor Talley tells me that I should announce to the White House staff that I am keeping all members on. Is that right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I’ll begin with you, Miss Foster. Will you stay?”
As he spoke, she had separated her shorthand pad from her folded letter of resignation. Now she stuffed the letter of resignation deep into her skirt pocket. “Yes, Mr. President,” she found herself saying. “I’d be honored to stay. Thank you.”
“I thank you,” he said with a wan smile. “Then you’re my first appointment as President of the United States. I’ll take care of the others later.”
Efficiently, she had opened her shorthand pad and held a pencil poised, waiting.
He had not yet consulted the memorandum. His eyes were directed toward the three naval paintings over the mantel of the fireplace. “Miss Foster, do you remember what Harry Truman said after F. D. R. died and after he himself had become President? He said, ‘I felt like the moon, the stars, and the planets had fallen on me.’ He said to reporters, ‘I’ve got the most awful responsibility a man ever had. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.’ And Lyndon Johnson. Will we ever forget his leaving the plane at Andrews Airfield with President Kennedy’s coffin, and his going to the microphones? Do you remember, Miss Foster? He said, ‘I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.’ Well, Miss Foster, that’s how I feel, like Harry Truman did and like Lyndon Johnson did.”
Edna tried to find her voice. “I think everyone understands that, Mr. President.”
“Do they?” He looked at her absently. “I wonder.”
“They’ll pray for you and—and they’ll help you. I know they will, the way they helped Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. It’s no different now.”
His eyes were fixed upon her. “It is different now. . . . They weren’t black.” Then, suddenly, he smiled. “Of course, if there’s no one’s help, there is always God’s. After all, we don’t know if He is white or black.”
And he sat down in the captain’s chair, and was ready to begin.
III
Reclining low in the rear seat of the bulletproof White House limousine, Douglass Dilman felt, this early morning, as he had felt every morning of the past week, like a prisoner being transferred from his home to his cellblock.
Up ahead, through the distortion of the bent windshield, he could make out the motorcycle escort, red lights flashing. On either side of him were more roaring motorcycles. Behind him he could hear the higher pitch of the protective sedan, which contained the remainder of his complement of bodyguards.
Within the luxurious limousine there was little freedom. In the front seat, the driver and the man next to him were Secret Service agents of the White House Detail. In the back, an arm’s length from Dilman, sitting sideways on one jump seat, was agent Beggs. True, none of them had their eyes upon him. The chauffeur’s gaze was directed straight ahead, the other agent in front examined the passing panorama of Sixteenth Street to their right, and Beggs examined the passing pedestrians and buildings to the left.
Douglass Dilman pressed his brown fedora more tightly to his skull as the wind whipped in through the opening of the electric window beside the driver. Wistfully, Dilman took in the landmarks that he had passed so often in the years when he had belonged to himself, and almost no one had cared if he were living or dead. He recognized the Hebrew Academy, the Methodist Church, the blue Woodner Hotel, the all-female Meridian Hill Hotel, the Hotel 2400, the Bulgarian Embassy, the white-pillared, red-brick, bogus English houses with their porches and stoops, which so many affluent Negroes had purchased from whites. In minutes the limousine would take him away from all this, around Lafayette Square, and to Executive Avenue and the south entrance of the stately Executive Mansion.
Dilman had awaited with dread the inevitability of this important day. It was his moving day. And now it was here. T. C.’s widow Hesper, Dilman had been told, had overseen the removal of the late President’s and her own personal effects and furniture from the White House yesterday, just as Governor Talley and Edna Foster had removed T. C.’s personal belongings from t
he Oval Office of the West Wing three days before.
For long, painful hours last night, Dilman, with the help of his housekeeper Crystal, his Senate secretary, Diane Fuller, Rose Spinger, and two nervous Army enlisted men, had assembled and packed into cartons and crates his pathetically limited and long-used possessions. Dilman had refused to allow anyone from the White House to help him, not Edna Foster, not T. C.’s valet Beecher, and not any of the White House staff that included the housekeeper, the houseboys, the ushers. Although Flannery had talked him into permitting newspapers to publish photographs of his simple living room in the brownstone row house, he did not want any critical outsiders to see or poke through his home. Nor had he permitted the Reverend Spinger or Wanda Gibson to come downstairs to assist him. In his new role, Dilman realized, he could no longer treat Spinger as a friend, only as one who headed America’s foremost Negro pressure organization. As for Wanda, her presence might have made the Secret Service men wonder about her relationship to him, and someone might have divulged it to the press, which in turn might distort it. While he had spoken to her briefly on the telephone every night before going to bed, he had not seen her personally since assuming the Presidency. She had not chided him for his neglect, for that was not her way. But he suspected that she commiserated with him, knowing his weaknesses, which was justifiable on her part.
Through the window he could see that they were turning off Sixteenth Street. Suddenly he was terrified. He tried to define his terror. It was not simply that he was giving up the safe anonymity of the ground floor of his modest two-story brownstone to spend a year and five months of life in the unfamiliar, awesome, museum-like, constantly exposed second story of the White House. That was bad enough, being the intruder-lodger in a mansion supported by a population that had never before permitted him to live among them, as part of them, in their easy streets and developments and tracts. The worst of it was that he was being carried farther and farther away from the only woman on earth whom he loved, and who cared for him. In short minutes he would be entombed in a prison that she could not visit, to which he dared not summon her. He wondered how long she would wait for his release, or if she would wait at all. He might lose her. He would lose her. Then he would be alone, utterly alone, in a hostile world. It was this terrifying possibility that had chilled him.
He brought his eyes from the window to the ominous radiophone beside him, and then to the sour face of the Secret Service agent in the jump seat. Fleetingly he wondered what the agent was so unhappy about. Perhaps, Dilman decided, his expression was really that of anxiety over his responsibility.
The agent’s full name was Otto Beggs, Dilman remembered. He had been on the afternoon shift, on guard outside the Oval Office, throughout the week. This morning he had appeared at daybreak, introducing himself again, saying that he was on a split shift today, four hours now and four hours late in the afternoon. With the three women, Beggs had helped supervise the Army privates who carried the cartons and crates into their huge military truck. There had also been several pieces of Dilman’s furniture, a small bedroom desk and bench, a maroon leather armchair, a tall lamp with a shade that Aldora had painted so long ago, and the Revels chair, that Dilman had permitted to be moved. The Revels chair was the possession of which he was most proud. He had received it as a gift from the state Party organization upon his election to the United States Senate. Although it was a genuine John Henry Belter rosewood chair with an upholstered panel in its scrolled back and with an upholstered felt seat, handmade in New York in 1870s, he had been told its real value lay in the fact that in the 1870s it had belonged to Hiram R. Revels, of Mississippi, who had become the first Negro to sit in the United States Senate.
The rest of the furniture Dilman had left behind, so that Rose Spinger could lease his old quarters for him furnished, to bring a better rental. After the Army truck had wheeled away toward the White House, followed in a Presidential staff car by Crystal and Diane Fuller, who would direct the unpacking, Beggs and the other Secret Service agents had waited to escort Dilman himself.
Still filled with the panic induced by his thoughts of losing Wanda forever, Dilman determined to question Beggs. He must be discreet, he reminded himself. But he must also know what was possible.
“Uh, Mr. Beggs—”
The Secret Service agent turned his head. “Yes, sir—yes, Mr. President?”
“I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Anything, Mr. President. Pardon me if I keep my eyes on the street while I talk. Duty, sir.” He was attentive, but his eyes were pointed to what lay out beyond the limousine window in the gray morning.
“While I haven’t had time to acquaint myself with the functions of the Secret Service, I do gather your Detail is assigned to protect me at all times.”
“Yes, sir, since 1901. Title 18, United States Code, Section 3056, amended and approved by the 82nd and 83rd Congress,” recited Otto Beggs. Then he went on, “ ‘Subject to the discretion of the Treasury, the United States Secret Service, Treasury Department, is authorized to protect the person of the President of the United States and members of his immediate family.’ ”
“I gathered that,” said Dilman dryly. “I haven’t been out of your sight for a second this week, except when I’ve gone to the bathroom or have been asleep. Does it always have to be that way? Isn’ there some time when I can go out alone, privately, to see certain—certain friends?”
Beggs shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. President. How can we protect you if we’re not with you?”
“I can’t believe every President has been followed every minute of his term by agents,” said Dilman.
“It’s true, sir. Mr. Truman tried to get off on walks without us, and General Eisenhower tried to get rid of us to play his golf in peace, and Mr. Kennedy tried to escape for some swims, but they never succeeded one minute, far as I know. Mr. Johnson was more cooperative in some respects, but T. C. once tried to sneak off to a stag party in Foxhall Road at one in the morning. We caught up with him.”
Dilman was thoughtful. “Let us say I kept it perfectly secret, yet insisted I had to see some friends alone?”
“You can see anyone alone, Mr. President, but you can’t travel to them unguarded.”
“What if I ordered it?”
Beggs turned his head, his puffy red face showing astonishment. “You couldn’t, Mr. President—begging your pardon, sir, but it’s the law. Chief Gaynor is empowered by the law to prevent you from any physical movement that he considers dangerous. This is sort of embarrassing, Mr. President, but like I said, it’s the law—sir.”
Dilman surrendered. “Thank you, Mr. Beggs.” The conversation left him more agitated than ever about Wanda and himself. Circumstances had made any future relationship impossible for them. He could not see her again on his terms, which demanded complete privacy. He could visit her only on the Secret Service agents’ terms and, he supposed, her own desired terms—publicly—and this would for the first time make known to one and all their longtime association. He considered the last, and then one more possibility came to his mind, and he thought about it.
“Crowding up a bit,” the chauffeur called out. “Take us another five minutes, Mr. President. Mind if we go on sirens?”
“I’d prefer not,” Dilman said. “There’s no hurry.”
There was no hurry inside him to face what lay ahead. He put the meeting with Wanda out of his mind. He would tackle that dilemma later. He tried to consider his more immediate problems. Edna Foster had telephoned him at breakfast to read him his schedule for today. He would have one hour in the living quarters of the White House, to become further acquainted with the historic rooms that were now his home, and to meet his staff, to brief them on where his furniture and personal effects should be placed. After that, there were his morning engagements: a half-hour meeting with Secretary of State Eaton and Governor Talley; a one-hour full-dress Cabinet meeting, his first, not counting the brief gathering when he had asked the members to s
tay on; a short meeting with his son, Julian, who was coming down from Trafford to see him; a short meeting with his biographer, Leroy Poole, who had so insistently been telephoning.
Lunch, he remembered, would be with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were coming over from the Pentagon. This afternoon would be packed, conferences with the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives, conferences with the Directors of the CIA and the FBI, a conference with Tim Flannery, a conference with the Federal Loan Administrator, a conference with the Ambassador to Russia. Only the hours between five and eight had been left free, so that he might catch up on his official reading. After eight in the evening there would be the best time of the day and the week, a private and informal dinner in the White House, his first as President, with Sue and Nat Abrahams.
Thinking of everything he had to do before dinner made him acknowledge the tension that was overlaid on the weariness and uneasiness that had accumulated in the seven days behind him. It was incredible to him that a week, an entire week, had passed since he had become President of the United States. Even now, in his protective, mechanized capsule that moved toward the White House, he did not feel the way the President should, however it was that a President was supposed to feel. Perhaps, he realized, this was because he had not yet been made answerable to the demands put upon the executive branch. The events of the past week had been out his hands, had rolled in pomp and tragic splendor to their climax, as if motivated by the force of a Supreme Being. He had been an observer. And he had been grateful for this, and for Governor Talley and Secretary Eaton, who had both possessed the kindness and intelligence to speak for him when his voice was supposed to be heard.
(1964) The Man Page 21