(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  She paused. “I—I have no right to ask it, Senator Dilman, because now my husband is gone, and I am no longer a President’s wife but a private citizen and a widow. Nevertheless, I will ask it as a private citizen, one of the millions who put him in office to lead us. I will ask that you try—try your best—to—to perform in the next seventeen months as if the Saviour had resurrected T. C. inside your head and your heart.” Suddenly her voice broke, and her composure with it. “Oh, I know you can’t be T. C., but—” Her hand went to her wet eyes, and she murmured, “Oh, forgive me—”

  He had come off the sofa, stirred, to embrace this good woman, but then, as he neared her, arm extended, he could see the blackness of his supplicating hand groping past her white face. He froze, then straightened, trying to find the right words to speak.

  There was a light knocking on the door behind him. Startled, he spun around.

  “Mr. President?” A platinum-haired, smartly dressed young female was speaking to him from the doorway. “I’m Miss Laurel, the White House social secretary. I have a worried call from Edna Foster. She’s trying to locate you. She says you are running behind schedule. Secretary Eaton and Governor Talley are in your office, and then the Cabinet meeting—”

  Dilman nodded, distraughtly, then turned back to look down at the former First Lady. She had found her handkerchief and was dabbing at her eyes.

  His voice thick, Dilman spoke to her. “You have my promise, ma’am. On any matter that confronts me, from this day on, I will think before I act—I will think of T. C. first. I can never be the man he was, except in one respect. I love my country as much as he did, and I will do everything I can to preserve its security and wellbeing, no matter what lies ahead.”

  Quickly he left her, and as he did, he exposed T. C.’s widow, for the first time, to the full view of Miss Laurel, who was still standing at the doorway. Miss Laurel gasped at the sight of the handkerchief and tears, and ran past Dilman, crying out, “Hesper, dear—what is it? What is it? Don’t, my dear—everything will be all right.”

  Dilman fled from the room into the hall, but Miss Laurel’s promise to T. C.’ widow, repeated over and over again, followed him to the elevator. Everything will be all right. These moments, if the alchemy were possible, he would have sold his soul to the devil to bring T. C. back. For he knew that he could never be T. C., because he was weak and he was black. Then, he thought, he crazily thought: an original sheet of paper is white, but the carbon is black, and often the carbon, copy, no matter how weak, is almost as useful. He would try. He would try with all his strength.

  When he punched the elevator button, he felt better.

  Slouched in the wooden antique chair alongside the Buchanan desk in the President’s Oval Office, Arthur Eaton crossed his legs, dropped the memorandum he had prepared for the Cabinet meeting in his lap, and tightened the navy blue knit tie higher between his button-down shirt collar. He brought out his silver holder, twisted a cigarette into it, lit it, puffed contentedly, and watched with amusement Wayne Talley’s impatient dartings about the office.

  “Easy, Governor,” Eaton called out. “Save yourself for the Cabinet meeting.”

  “If there’s going to be any,” Talley growled. “Why does he have to be late on a day like this? We’ll have only half the time we need to cram him.”

  “It won’t require as much time as you think,” said Eaton.

  He continued watching Talley, as the stocky aide went to the French doors, peered across the Rose Garden, made some indistinct sound, tramped to the first window overlooking the south lawn, then came around to the almost barren Presidential desk.

  Talley’s arm swept across the desk. “Look at it. Everything gone, even the clock, even his pens, and the captain’s chair. Not a damn thing of T. C.’s left—”

  “Except us,” said Eaton, with a smile.

  “Yeh, sure. If they get that New Succession Bill through, you’re safe. What about me? How do I know who’ll get to him a month from now?”

  “Nobody’ll get to him a month from now, Wayne.” Eaton uncrossed his legs, and held the Cabinet memorandum in his free hand. “Look, Wayne, Dilman is President. Learn to live with it. I knew from the start that Zeke Miller’s protest would be thrown out of the Judiciary Committee and it was. After all, when the written law is obscure, you follow the unwritten law, which is historical precedent. The precedent was, nine times, that the next eligible in line becomes President, and no ifs, no maybes, about it, and no special elections either. Dilman was the next eligible, and now he is the Chief, and let us not waste any more energy fretting about it. Let us get on with business.”

  Talley had planted himself in front of the Secretary of State. “Okay, business, Arthur. Do you know that the New Succession Bill sponsored by Senator Hankins is being approved by the full committee in the Senate Caucus Room today? Only one change suggested by the Legislative Council. After a President dies, and the next in line is serving as temporary Acting President, the new President and Vice-President are elected by the existing Electoral College for a full four-year term and not merely the unexpired term.”

  “Yes, I heard about the change. I didn’t know the hearings were done and the bill was being approved today.”

  “The committee isn’t touching a word in the language about you and the rest of T. C.’s Cabinet. It stays right in there. Dilman cannot remove you or any other member of the Cabinet without Senate consent. In fact, the line of succession as it was the day T. C. and MacPherson died stays untouched for the rest of the unexpired term. No new Speaker, no new President pro tempore of the Senate is to be elected to take precedence over you. The chairmanship will be revolving. That’s it, Arthur.”

  “I know.”

  “As committee chairman, Hankins is bringing the bill to the floor tomorrow or the next day. It’ll pass.”

  “Will it?”

  “It certainly will. And now, to expedite things, Zeke Miller is introducing a companion bill, same language, in the House. The House Rules Committee won’t stymie it. When it gets to a roll call there, it’ll go through in a flash.”

  “Maybe.”

  “For sure, Arthur. The question is—will Dilman sign or veto?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Eaton with annoyance. It irritated him to be dragged into these grimy, tricky, bartering legislative matters.

  Eaton allowed Talley to drift out of his vision. He closed his eyes and smoked his cigarette. As much as he had tried not to, he had thought of that damned New Succession Bill, of course. How could he help but think of it? Everyone in T. C.’s inner circle, in the Party, in the press, his own wife, Kay, in fact, had kept reminding him that he was the next in line to the Presidency. Even if he had been able to remain deaf to the talk of the past week, it would have been impossible not to recognize his new position with the arrival of the three Secret Service agents, assigned by law to protect him as the Number Two man in the government.

  Now, like it or not, he had Senator Hankins’ New Succession Bill, with language that retroactively froze him into the position of succeeding Dilman as President, no matter whom the House and Senate selected for chairmen, no matter whom Dilman might prefer in his Cabinet. It was an embarrassment in many ways, the kind of act Eaton ordinarily deplored, for it was so nakedly political and unreasonable. If it passed, it told Dilman that the Congress did not trust him as a person (and a Negro), that the Senate was stripping him of his inherent removal powers, that the Senate was taking over as his guardian. Furthermore, no matter how ambiguously written, it told the country to shut one eye to the Constitution, for while the Constitution gave the Senate the right to approve of a Presidential appointment, it did not give that body the right to control a Presidential removal. In short, one paragraph of the language of the act was clouded over by doubtful legality, yet it was skillfully hidden behind the verbiage of an otherwise valid New Succession Bill. The political cynicism and rationalization that wrote the bill, put it in the hopper, had it in
troduced on the floor, had it powerhoused through the subcommittee, the full committee, and to a roll call, was appalling to Arthur Eaton.

  Moreover, Eaton hated himself for being thrown into the Hankins and Miller camp. They were not his kind of people. He despised their talk. Publicly, they were pleading that an unusual situation in government had called for an unusual measure to meet it and to secure the continuity of government. Privately, secretly, these same men were agreeing that even if the doubtful paragraph made the bill unconstitutional, it would take so long a time to reach a test before the Supreme Court, take so long a time to be thrown out, that by then President Dilman would have served his one year and five months under Senate restraint, and what happened after that did not matter. All that mattered was that the nation would have been protected from its own current President.

  Eaton wanted no part of those politicians and their bill, and he promised himself that he would stay aloof, as far above and beyond the questionable intrigue as possible. He had one task, and it was enough for one human being—to see that the United States was steered in the direction that his friend T. C. had set for it.

  He opened his eyes to find Wayne Talley before him once more.

  “Arthur,” Talley said, “Dilman mention anything to you about the Hankins bill?”

  “Not to me, no.”

  “What if it’s brought up at the Cabinet meeting?”

  “I doubt that it will be brought up,” said Eaton. “Since it concerns each of the Cabinet members, protecting them against their President, why should any one of them bring it up? Certainly I would not have the nerve to speak of it myself.”

  “What if Dilman himself brings it up?”

  Eaton thought about this. “No, he won’t bring it up either,” he said with confidence. “You’ve seen him in action throughout the week. He’s afraid to open his mouth. He listens. He worries. He retreats. He has no strong or definite opinions about anything in government, except that he doesn’t want trouble. I think he wants to remain unobtrusive and accepted. If he can get through T. C.’s term without rocking the boat, I believe he will feel that he has accomplished all he wished to accomplish.”

  “Which is?”

  “To prove a Negro can be President and leave the nation no worse off.”

  Talley did not seem convinced. “I hope so. Let’s see how he reacts to that first television speech we hammered out for him. If he goes for it verbatim, every point we made, promising the country he will serve merely as a caretaker for T. C.’s program, then I think you’re right.”

  “When did you give him the draft of the speech?”

  “When he was leaving here last night.”

  Eaton nodded. “Then we should know today. After all, if he is going on the networks with it tomorrow—late tomorrow afternoon, isn’t it?—he should—”

  Eaton left the sentence unfinished, as he cocked his head to listen to the approaching clack of footsteps on the cement walk outside. He came to his feet, and he and Talley stood respectfully attentive as the Secret Service agent near the garden greeted Dilman and the White House policeman opened the screen and turned the latch of the French door.

  Dilman was inside the Oval Office, nodding his head. “Mr. Secretary—Governor—”

  “Mr. President,” said Arthur Eaton.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” said Wayne Talley.

  Dilman remained uncertainly before them, revealing a troubled smile. “I know I’m late. I apologize. I was trying to supervise the moving, and trying to find where everything was, when I ran into the—the First Lady—you know—”

  “Oh, Hesper, you mean,” said Eaton. “I thought she’d moved out yesterday.”

  “Well, there were a few bits of unfinished business, I guess,” said Dilman. “Anyway, we got to talking—a lovely lady—and that’s why I’m late. Do we still have a little time before the Cabinet meeting?”

  “Only fifteen minutes now,” said Talley. “We can cover the ground, if we go right at it.”

  “I’m ready,” said Dilman. He started for the desk, and with obvious reluctance sat down behind it in the straight-backed, light green leather swivel chair that had been substituted for T. C.’s widely photographed ebony chair with the electrically controlled lifting and reclining device built into its massive frame.

  Eaton settled back into the seat he had been using beside the President’s desk, and Talley pulled up a cane-bottomed chair.

  As Talley took the memorandum from the Secretary of State, Dilman held up one hand. “Before you start,” he said, “I—I’ve got to remind you I’ve never attended a real Cabinet meeting, let alone chaired one. I assume our gathering last week was merely a brief prayer get-together. As to a full-dress meeting—” He shrugged helplessly.

  Talley glanced at Eaton, and then addressed Dilman. “While there are no set rules as to procedure, Mr. President, there are a few certain practices that are traditional. As you know, you are the presiding officer, and, as you know, the ten Cabinet members are seated in their order of succession. Generally, you meet with the Cabinet twice a week, usually Tuesday and Friday, but that is highly flexible. Truman and Eisenhower believed in these regular Cabinet meetings. Lincoln, Wilson, Kennedy did not, preferring to work out problems in individual conferences with Cabinet members or advisers. Other members of the government that you feel can be helpful can also be invited to attend. F. D. R. usually had Harry Hopkins in the room—”

  “I’d expect you to be present, too, Governor Talley,” Dilman said.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. Now, the meeting is nothing more than a sort of clearing house—you know, clearing house for ideas, opinions, exchanges of specialized information, and so on. It gives you a chance to get a diversity of advice, reactions to your own notions, and to pick up some expert knowledge. The whole thing is informal, and because no official records of the conversation are kept, it can be pretty freewheeling. Truman had a private secretary take rough notes. Eisenhower appointed a special Secretary of the Cabinet to prepare the agenda and keep minutes of what went on, but that hasn’t been done much since. You are expected to open the meeting by presenting any problems you have on your mind. Or you can simply ask the members, from Secretary Eaton here down to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, what they have to report or discuss.”

  Listening, Eaton pushed forward. “Excuse me, Governor. . . . Mr. President, I want to interject one observation I have made while attending so many of T. C.’s Cabinet meetings. Don’t be disappointed if not too much is accomplished. Your Cabinet members are specialists in different fields. T. C. found that the Secretary of the Interior had neither interest in nor knowledge of our problems in—well, say my Department of State. And the Postmaster General is apt to be more concerned about the design of a new stamp issue or political patronage in the Post Office Department than the Attorney General, who is full of facts and figures and concern about Negro voting. I think it was to avoid this bureaucratic self-interest, as much as for any other reason, that President Kennedy chose to depend on small task forces to dig up facts for him, so that he could thrash them out beforehand with a handful of intelligent advisers. Certainly he had no fixed schedule of Cabinet or National Security Council meetings. Neither did T. C. He liked to get his facts from any one of the ten government Departments, from experts among the more than two million civil servants in the executive branch, and then sit down with Governor Talley and myself, maybe one or two others, and debate the specific problem and arrive at a conclusion.” Eaton paused. “I think, Mr. President, you will be able to determine, shortly, if you prefer to lean on the Cabinet as a whole or on advisers you find intelligent and sympathetic.”

  Dilman’s fingers twisted the cigar visible in his upper suit-coat pocket. “I don’t imagine I’ll go wrong following T. C.’s procedure. Only—”

  Eaton waited, curious to see if Dilman had any unexpected qualification.

  “—I keep wondering if the country might not feel easier ab
out me if they knew I was meeting regularly, formally, with T. C.’s Cabinet. They can then see plainly what I am doing. Whereas, well, they might be worried about what I’m up to behind closed doors, you know, with a kitchen Cabinet.”

  It was sensible, a fine point, Eaton told himself, yet he could not be sure that Dilman was not offering resistance to their guidance or attempting to assert his individuality.

  Eaton decided to proceed cautiously. “You may have something there, Mr. President. I believe you will be able to decide which course to take in a few weeks. Certainly give the regular Cabinet meetings a tryout.”

  “Yes,” said Dilman. He swiveled toward Talley. “What are we going to talk about in there today, Governor?”

  Reminding the President that they had only seven or eight minutes before the meeting, Talley went rapidly through the problems on the agenda. There was the African Unity Pact. Renewal of the United States as a member nation, pledged to defend the independence of the new African democracies, was being scheduled for consideration in the Senate. T. C. had wanted ratification, had planned to speak out for it and then sign the Pact. This would satisfy Africa. At the same time, T. C. had intended to pressure President Amboko of Baraza into dropping anti-Communist legislation on a local level, and into resuming cultural exchanges with Moscow. This would satisfy Russia. Then, to conclude the peace parley left unfinished in Frankfurt, President Dilman and Premier Kasatkin would have to arrange another international conference. Talley thought it wrong to resume the talks in Frankfurt. The President of France had already offered the hospitality of his country. A site near Paris might be considered.

  “As to domestic affairs,” said Talley, “the major effort, the one T. C. gave most of his energy to, is the Minorities Rehabilitation Program. I’m sure you are well acquainted with it, Mr. President.”

  “Not as well as I should be at this point,” said Dilman. “Naturally, as a senator, I’ve followed its development. Lots of people have had lots to say to me about it, inside Congress, and on the outside, too. But it’s been in the Legislative Council so long that I’ve been waiting for the final form of the measure.”