“Too little hope too late, Judge,” persisted Dilman. “Let me finish. My fate is in the hands of the voting public right now, and for four days I’ve seen that public up close, cheek by jowl, and I don’t know if any President ever endured such unanimous vilification and hatred. The voice of the people wants me out, and that voice will call the Guilty’s in the Senate.”
The Judge touched a match to his corncob and said, “I declare, Douglass—and this I didn’t altogether expect from you—you’re becoming what the Missus’ fancy books call a paranoid, meaning you’re down on yourself because you’ve built up a case for believing the whole world’s against you, and you won’t allow nothing to bring you up.”
“I’m facing the harsh facts, Judge—what I’ve seen firsthand.”
“Bah,” said The Judge. “You’re so beat-up inside, you can’t handle a fact when one comes along. Here’s a few real facts, the way I see them. I read about your speeches in Cleveland, Los Angeles—where else?—Seattle. You got rough-handled, for sure, but there were lots of people, lots, who weren’t booing and stomping their boots against you. There were some clapping for you, I read, not many, but some, and there were lots who were silent, listening, giving you a chance, withholding judgment. There’s that part of the public you can’t ignore. Then there’s that impeachment vote in the House yesterday. Sure, the majority voted against you. But there were plenty who spoke up on your behalf, and out of 448 members there were 161—no small number—who voted for you. They’re the people’s voice, too. Now, we got the Senate next week. What were most of the senators before they were elected? Most were attorneys-at-law; the Senate’s top-heavy with lawyers. That means you’ll have more educated men than in the House hearing your trial. Then, also to be considered is the fact that the House is pretty much overturned every two years and a lot of new members are elected, so the old members have to parrot their constituents word for word if they want to avoid being replaced come next election time, true? Those senators, though, they’re in for six years, and they don’t have to parrot, knowing in six years their constituents won’t remember much or will maybe have mellowed. So you got a body that has its share of donkeys from the North, and linen suits and Panama hats from the Confederate South, but you got a body of judges apt to be more independent of public hysteria. Young fellow, you remember this: old Andrew Johnson got impeached by the House, but there was no twothirds against him in the Senate, and contradicting the asinine House, the Senate set Andrew Johnson free.”
Dilman shook his head. “No comparison, Judge. Andrew Johnson had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at him, and he barely squeaked by. Me, I’ve got everything and the kitchen sink thrown at me—because, Judge, cards on the table, President Johnson wasn’t black, and I am. The electorate and the Congress simply won’t have a Negro running their affairs in Washington. They never have and they won’t allow it today.”
“The hell they never have, Douglass.” The corncob in The Judge’s hand now went up and down like a schoolteacher’s ruler. “Don’t tangle with me on matters of history, young fellow. There were fourteen colored congressmen in the House of Representatives between 1869 and 1876, and there are eleven in the House this year. There were two Negroes in the Senate between 1870 and 1881, and there are three in the Senate today. Maybe the public crawls along the way, but each decade it gets a bit closer to the State House in Philadelphia where the Constitution was drafted, signed, and sealed. Americans let some Negroes run their affairs far back as the 1870s and—”
“And what happened right after?” Dilman said. “You’re telling half the story. I’ll tell you the rest. For sure, no one lived happily ever after. The unreconstructed Southern Democrats powered Hayes into the Presidency, and he paid them back by pulling Federal troops out of the South, troops who’d been protecting Negro voters, and then came the Klan and segregation and the Negroes were niggers again.”
“Today it’s different,” insisted The Judge, “because today Negroes are gaining their rights by using the ballot, not by relying on the force of Federal troops. I don’t say you’ve gotten enough fast enough. What’s the old mammy spiritual of yours?—yes—you ‘keep inchin’ along.’ The public’s more prepared to allow a Negro to govern than ever before. Maybe not this morning, because they’ve been whipped into a frenzy against you. But maybe two weeks from this morning, when your side of the case is aired for the first time, maybe then their temper will change and their intelligence be restored. Maybe it’s a long shot. I say it’s at least a shot. You’ve still got a good chance.”
Dilman had listened thoughtfully, and now he pushed his chair back, hardly aware of the act, and stood up and went to the window. “All right, Judge,” he said. “It’s no use beating around the bush any longer. I’ll tell you what compelled me to come here. But before that, I’d better fill you in on how this impeachment came about.”
Quietly, half facing the pondering ex-President, Dilman recounted the entire story, beginning with the CIA report on Baraza that had been withheld from him by Secretary of State Eaton and Governor Talley, and including Miss Watson’s effort to help Eaton by her bizarre espionage in the Lincoln Bedroom. Then he told of how he had summoned Eaton to his office to ask him to quit his Cabinet post, and described what had followed—Eaton’s refusal to quit, Eaton’s demand that, instead, Dilman either resign from the Presidency outright or back off because of a pretended disability and turn the reins of government over to T. C.’s crowd, or prepare himself to face impeachment and trial.
Dilman took a few steps toward The Judge. “At first I braved it through, Judge, because I couldn’t believe the House would even consider their phony case. Now I see how wrong I was. I misunderstood their consuming need to believe the charges against me, I miscalculated the degree of their hatred of me, and the public’s hatred. I was stubbornly optimistic, and the vote yesterday proved me a fool. Since yesterday I’ve been faced with one last decision—”
The Judge tugged his chair around, directly toward Dilman. His eyes were hard. “What decision?” he demanded.
“Whether or not to undergo this excruciating trial before the Senate and the world, to go through the personal agony of it, permit my poor dead wife’s miserable history of alcoholism to be paraded before all eyes, permit my one son, with all his emotional problems, to be tortured for his alleged and fictional affiliation with anti-white terrorists, to let the one woman I love in the world, a decent, innocent woman, be marked for life as no better than a prostitute—to decide if it is right and humane to undergo all of this myself, to let all of this happen to the ones I hold dear, out of selfish anger and vanity, knowing all the while that inevitably I’ll be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the White House and into the street. I’ve got to decide whether to do that or accept the one alternative that Eaton and Miller and their gang offered me, and that is to give in, meekly quit my post, resign, save myself the indignity of defeat, spare those dear to me the scandal, protect my country from a trial that can only, ultimately, intensify racial hatred. Shall I turn the Presidency back to the white majority who want it for their exclusive club? That’s the decision I must make today.”
The Judge filled his corncob with a practiced hand. His eyes stayed on Dilman. “Okay. How say you?”
“Judge,” said Dilman, “I intend to resign from the Presidency.”
The Judge’s pipe was halfway to his mouth, but now it hung in midair. “Resign?” he said. “You’re going to quit?”
“I have no choice.”
“The hell you haven’t!” the old man roared. His corncob clattered to the table, and so quickly and vehemently did he jump to his feet that Dilman backed against the wall. The Judge was upon him like an angry, pecking rooster, waving his finger under Dilman’s nose. “You resign, you slink out of that greatest office in the world, you give up the best opportunity a President and a minority citizen ever had to improve this country, and I swear—Dilman—I swear on the Missus, and on my niec
e and her kids, you’ll never set foot in my presence again. I’ll receive and respect any race of man on earth—black, white, yellow, purple—but I won’t receive and respect a puling, wailing coward.”
“Wait a minute—”
“You shut up!” shouted The Judge, vibrating from head to toe. He glared at Dilman, hands on his hips. “You came here for advice, and goddamit to hell, you’re going to get it, like it or not. I’m through coddling your self-pity. I’m through exchanging intellectual statistics with you. What you need is a good boot in the behind, and I got seniority in that Oval Office, so I got the right to give it. Young fellow, you hear me out. I don’t care if they were putting you before a firing squad tomorrow unless you resigned, you still couldn’t resign. No President of the United States who’s marched into that Oval Office either by popular acclaim or by accident ever quit under pressure. You’re not going to degrade the office, be derelict in your duty, thumb your nose at the Constitution, by being the first. No sir, young fellow, no sir! Resigning from the Presidency is the real high crime, not being tried for a pack of partisan lies. Resigning from your opportunity to show a Negro can lead would be the real crime, not being found guilty of adultery and incompetence. If you quit because you’re a Negro President who’s scared stiff, if you go down that way, it’s not only your race that loses, it’s the Missus and me and every decent white person in this democracy that loses, because it shows us and the world we got a country where a Negro is afraid to perform as a man, act as a man, live as a man, because he’s scared we won’t let him do it. Well, goddamit, Dilman, if you know it or not, in the eyes of the Lord and our Saviour and the Constitution, you are a man, not a Negro, not a Baptist, not a Rotarian, not a war veteran, but a human mammal who is a man under God in heaven before he is anything else. You can be a bald man, or a long-nosed man, or a crippled man, or a colored man, or a dago man, or a kike man, but first,last, and always, you are a oneheaded, two-legged man, whose complexion happens to be black and whose Social Security file says he is President of the United States.”
The Judge was livid, gasping for breath, punching the air with his right hand. Frightened, Dilman held to the wall, watching him advance, nostrils dilated, nose quivering with indignation.
“For a half minute there, while you were working in the White House,” the ex-President went on in his nasal rasp, “I thought, ‘Maybe that fellow’s going to find out what he is.’ That was when you had the guts to veto that foul-smelling Minorities Rehabilitation Program Bill. I thought you were standing up for your principles as a man equal to any other man, and more, as a leader who wanted good for his people. Now I see I was bamboozled. You vetoed it as a single act of spite, and out of vanity, to show the ones kicking you around that they better let up once in a while, just once in a while. But that was all it meant, ’cause now I see you’re so afraid of being kicked around some more, and kicked out, that you’re ready to get down on all fours and crawl away voluntarily. Hell and tarnations, fellow, stop crawling. Stand up on your two hind legs like a man, and when somebody kicks you, boot them right back in the ass. You believe in the Republic. You’ve got ideas for this country. You’ve got the most important desk in the nation, full up with unfinished business. Don’t let any man force you to walk out because you think he is a man and you know he thinks you’re not. You’ve got too much to do. Like President Lyndon Johnson said back a time, ‘Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skin, Emancipation will be a Proclamation but not a fact.’ That’s one piece of your unfinished business, Dilman—to make it a fact, and to make it a fact not as a Negro who is President but as an American man who is President. And that’s only the beginning of what you’ve got to do. Don’t tell me they won’t let you, won’t give you a chance. If they obstruct you, you knock them aside. If they charge you with crime and misdemeanor, you answer them and you charge them with ignorance and medievalism, and you battle them as their equal, knowing you’re a human being, and as their superior, knowing you’re still the legal holder of the highest-ranking office in the land. The way President Kennedy wrote in that fine book of his on courage—it’s the most admirable of human virtues, courage is—he knew, ’cause he owned enough of it for ten men—and the way he said—compromise is okay in its place, but only compromising on issues, not your principles—but nowhere did I read in that book of his any praise or defense of quitting, turning tail and running, under any circumstances. You came for my advice and—”
The Judge suddenly stopped, bent his head sideways, listening. The front doorbell was ringing insistently.
The Judge cursed under his breath, glared once more at Dilman, and said curtly, “A grown man’s got to decide for himself.”
He strode from the dining room into the parlor, and Dilman slowly followed him. The Judge had opened the door, and the Missus appeared. “You locked me out,” she said crossly, then peered over his shoulder at Dilman. “Mr. President, there’s somebody important to see you, and Mr. Flannery says you have to see him.”
Dilman had come forward. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know—somebody just flown in from Washington.” She had turned around to beckon to the person. “Right in here, sir, the President will see you.”
He came through the open doorway, a diffident, embarrassed, well-built gentleman in his late forties, his fingers playing nervously across the brim of the hat he held in his hand. “Mr.—Mr. President,” he said, “I don’t know if you remember me—Harold L. Greene from—”
That moment, Dilman recognized him. “Of course, Mr. Greene, I couldn’t make you out for a minute—so far from the Hill. You’re the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate.”
“Yes, sir.” He wriggled in his ill-fitting overcoat. “I was sent here by plane from Washington on official Senate business. I’m supposed to serve you with this”—he reached inside his bulky coat and pulled out a document that resembled a folded legal brief—“summons. It’s an order for you to stand trial, sir, a week from today, before the Senate constituted as a court of impeachment. It’s all in here, sir. I’m sorry to have to do this, but—” He shrugged unhappily and held out the summons.
Dilman stepped forward, reached out and accepted the summons. “Thank you, Mr. Greene, for going to this trouble. I suppose I shouldn’t send you back to Washington empty-handed.”
The Sergeant at Arms appeared as puzzled as The Judge, who stood beside him.
“You can take this message back with you,” said Dilman. While he faced the Sergeant at Arms, his gaze had shifted to The Judge. “Tell the Senate of the United States that the President of the United States looks forward—looks forward to seeing them in court!”
The second that the Sergeant at Arms had gone, The Judge let out a whoop. Beaming from ear to ear, he descended upon Dilman and gave him a wrestling hug. “Mr. President, spoken like a man!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “I knew you wouldn’t quit, knew you’d fight, felt it in my bones.”
Smiling, Dilman pocketed the summons. “I guess I came here, Judge, knowing that too. Only I needed somebody wiser and tougher than I am to give me a kick in the pants, so I’d get mad enough to remember I was right, and do some kicking myself.”
The Judge pounded Dilman’s back affectionately, then held him off. “Mr. President, no matter what comes of this, when you come to be my age, you’ll look back and won’t regret it, never for a minute.”
Dilman nodded gravely. “I hope so,” he said softly, “because I’m going to take an awful licking.”
“No matter what,” said The Judge. “Ever hear of an ancient Roman philosopher by name of Seneca? Ever read what he wrote about a company of Romans trapped and decimated in an ambush? He wrote, ‘The three hundred Fabiae were not defeated, they were only killed.’ Remember that when it gets real bad. It’s enough to make it worth while. Now go, and God bless you.”
Dilman returned The Judge’s powerful handshake, and then he was surp
rised to find the Missus, holding his coat and hat on her pudgy arm, waiting at the door. Dilman allowed her to assist him with his overcoat. When he took his hat, and began to thank her, he could see that her eyes were brimming. Impulsively she went up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “Be brave, Douglass,” she said. “There’s lots of us who need you.”
Too choked by emotion to reply, Dilman fumbled for the door-knob. As he opened the door, he heard the immediate chorus of shouts from the photographers beyond the porch, but louder than the rest was The Judge’s admonition behind him.
“Braveness is good,” The Judge had called out, “but a smart lawyer is better. Get one, and get one fast, the best there is, Mr. President!”
From over his shoulder, Dilman forced himself to smile at The Judge. “I’ll try,” he said. “I know the best attorney there is—but he wants to be a farmer like yourself, so it’s hard to say if he’ll be able to take time off from his harvesting. I’ll try, you bet. That’s all a man can do.”
Behind the closed doors of their bedroom on the sixth floor of the Mayflower Hotel, Nat Abrahams finally hung up the telephone receiver and remained standing over the instrument, lost in thought.
At last, mechanical as an automaton, he wandered past the double bed to the window. He stared down into darkened Connecticut Avenue, his mind still on the call he had taken, hardly aware of the early evening foot and vehicular dinner traffic in the street below.
The glow from a neon light across the way caught the glaze of the window, and its angled illumination intensified the reflection of himself in the glass. He realized then that he was attired in his best suit, dressed for a festive night out, and with a start he remembered that Gorden Oliver and Sue were still waiting for him in the living room of the suite. His activity in the ten or fifteen minutes before the telephone had interrupted him was instantly revived.
(1964) The Man Page 70