(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  VIII

  For the first time in the nine days since the impeachment trial in the United States Senate had been under way, the front page headline of the morning edition of the Washington Citizen-American made no direct mention of the legal proceedings against the President.

  This early morning, the top and banner headline, bolder and inkier than any that had appeared before, read:

  SCANDAL! EXCLUSIVE! DILMAN HAS DAUGHTER PASSING AS WHITE!

  The second headline, scarcely smaller, as brazen and black, read:

  PRESIDENT’S HIDDEN OFFSPRING ASHAMED OF HER RACE—AND PRESIDENT KNEW IT ALL ALONG!

  Slowly, Douglass Dilman folded the newspaper until the headlines were no longer visible, and then he folded it again and dropped it into the wastebasket beside the Buchanan desk.

  He slumped in his chair for a moment, feeling old and feeble, sickened to the marrow of his bones, but then he forced himself to lift his bowed head and meet Tim Flannery’s angry look and Nat Abrahams’ worried one.

  “Why?” Dilman asked despairingly. “Doesn’t that Zeke Miller have enough without this?”

  “No,” said Tim Flannery. “He wants to be sure you’re a dead horse, a real dead horse, before he stops beating you.”

  “But can’t he see, it’s not I who am the victim?” Dilman said. “It’s poor Mindy, that poor, poor girl. Why go after her? Why ruin her life? It won’t get him any more Senate votes. . . . Nat, explain it to me—I mean it—this is not only revolting, it’s mad, it’s senseless.”

  Nat Abrahams sighed. “I know, Doug.” Restlessly, he came out of his chair, crossed the Oval Office to the French doors, and stared into the bleak gray of the morning. Then he said, “When you’re locked in a death fight with a fanatical enemy, Doug, don’t expect rational motives for his actions. If there’s any rhyme or reason to this—this so-called exposé in the paper—well, trying to fathom a mind like Zeke Miller’s—I suppose the sense of it would be this.” He came around and spoke directly to Dilman. “Miller doesn’t care a hoot about your daughter. She doesn’t exist, as far as he’s concerned. You are the target, and all he cares about is hitting you, high or low, anywhere. He’s prosecuting you before two sets of jurors, so he needs as much heavy buckshot as possible, and if there’s no legitimate buckshot, then nails or anything else will do.”

  “What do you mean, Nat, two sets of jurors?”

  “Your first jurors, the real ones, are the great outside public, and the members of the Senate are actually only a vulnerable second jury. If Miller can keep the voters antagonized toward you, he knows their feelings will press down on the Senate, and encourage their continuing antagonism. This Reb Blaser story about Mindy passing, for instance. Try to see its value through Miller’s distorted vision. Despite your turning down the Hurley appeal, and his execution the other day, you’ve captured more and more Negro and liberal white sympathy because of your willingness to fight your tormentors. The big television speech on Baraza and our pledged defense, over a week ago, is a good case in point. The majority of the audience didn’t like it, true, because they think you’re fomenting a needless war to help some worthless African blacks. But American Negroes and white liberals liked it, for the wrong reasons, and many moderates and independents liked it, for the right reasons. Miller understood their growing sympathy for you. He doesn’t want those people going over to your side. How to turn them against you once more?

  “Well, however he did it, he found out you had another child, a daughter named Mindy, who is ashamed of being a Negro and is passing, and he found out that you knew that she was doing this, yet you had not stopped her. Okay. So today he shouts it to the world—he yells out—hey, American Negroes, lookee here, your Negro President has a daughter who’s ashamed of being the same color as you, and her old man approves. Do you see, Doug? He’s desperately trying to turn the ones who are for you against you, trying to tell your Negro following that you hate their skin and your own, trying to tell everyone—Dilman, he’s ashamed of his skin. Then he’s trying to tell the liberals, and the members of the Senate, Look, look at the kind of man you are judging, a man capable of perfidy and lies, constantly saying he had one child when he had two, hiding a grown daughter, condoning her masquerade. Is this kind of man fit to remain President? He’s not only untrustworthy, he’s positively un-American.

  “That’s it, I think, Doug. That’s the level of Miller’s mentality, and the thinking of his fellow managers. They are appealing to the public, trying to get the public so whipped up against you that if the Senate dared to acquit you, there’d be marchers from four directions bearing down on Washington to burn the Capitol. You saw the caliber of witnesses they threw up against you all week long. Experts? Authorities? Judicious men to explain and defend their Articles of Impeachment? Hell, no. Not one. Instead, plain people, just-folks people, brought here for the holiday, swearing to hearsay and depending upon faulty memory to insist you were a drunkard, a lecher, an extremist—anything, as long as it is foul and inciting—and all declaiming your shortcomings in language the public can understand. No, Doug, it is not Mindy, it is you—they’re after you, by means foul or fair. It’s bad luck your girl has been caught in the middle. This news story is lousy. The whole thing is rotten lousy.”

  Dilman pushed himself up from the desk and walked heavily toward Abrahams, joining him at the French doors. For a long and silent interval he looked out upon the barren Rose Garden. Then, as if addressing himself rather than Abrahams and Flannery, he said, “I’m so sorry for Mindy, so sorry. She was like her mother. She wanted so badly to be white, and average, and part of life. This thing, I don’t know what this’ll do to her, publishing both her names. I’d give anything to be with her now, just to comfort her and try to talk to her, try to explain and soothe her. But I don’t even know where she is. Edna says the phone number listed under Linda Dawson no longer is connected. It was changed to an unlisted number a couple of weeks ago. Now Mindy has seen the papers, she knows the truth is out, the fact of her being Negro, and now all her white friends know, and her employer knows, and her life—what’ll it be? And I can’t even get to speak to her.”

  He looked at Abrahams. “Nat, it’s my fault for not resigning when I could, for being a selfish and prideful mule and bucking the men with the whips, and all I’ll have succeeded in doing is to harm everyone—Wanda, Julian, the Spingers, and now the worst of it, my little girl Mindy. I knew I was up against mudslingers, but I thought I’d be taking most of the mud. I didn’t know it would spatter so wide, so wide and far and destructively. Well, I guess there is no turning back now.”

  Absently clasping and unclasping his hands, he wandered back to the middle of the office floor. Aware of Tim Flannery again, he said, “What can I do for my girl? I don’t know.”

  Flannery said, “Fight the mudslingers in the press, the way you’re fighting them in the Senate, Mr. President. Is there any statement we can release to offset this—I don’t mean just for your sake—for hers, too, to ease it for her?”

  “No. What could I say that would do anything but make it worse? Thanks, Tim. You’d better get back to your work.” Then, as Flannery shrugged and prepared to leave the office, Dilman said to no one in particular, “If people only understood what makes a colored person pass for white.” Suddenly, he exclaimed with wonder. “Wait now—why not tell them? Why not tell them what it is like?”

  He saw Flannery had hesitated at the door. “Tim, if Mindy can’t speak for herself, maybe her father should speak for her. I think I will make a statement.”

  As Flannery returned, Dilman looked at Abrahams. “Any comment before I do, Nat?”

  Abrahams said, “Don’t worry about my problems. This is something altogether your own. This is personal. Act the way I know you want to act—like a father, and not like the President.”

  “Yes,” said Dilman.

  “Do you want to dictate this statement now?” asked Flannery.

  “Dictate it? No. I just want t
o go out in the press lobby—yes, that’s what I’ll do—and speak my mind. You go ahead, Tim. Alert the correspondents that I want to make a few brief remarks, and that’s all.”

  Flannery hastened out. Dilman remained lost in thought for long seconds, then he went to the wastebasket, retrieved the Citizen-American, unfolded it, studied the headlines, and scanned the story.

  “Poor child,” he said, and then he left, with Abrahams following him.

  After Dilman went through Edna Foster’s empty office into the corridor, where two Secret Service men fell into step behind him, and turned toward the Reading Room, he was conscious of his press secretary’s staff watching him curiously from their desks as he passed them.

  Nearing the open door leading to the press lobby, now blocked by Tim Flannery, with Edna Foster and her shorthand pad and pencil behind him, Dilman could see Flannery holding up his arms to quiet the clamoring reporters. Dilman hung back, listening, until Flannery finished his speech.

  “—I repeat, gentlemen, those are the rules. He’s decided to make an impromptu statement about the unfortunate story that appeared exclusively in Zeke Miller’s Washington Citizen-American this morning. When he has finished his remarks, no questions about the matter will be entertained. None, boys.”

  “Hey, Tim,” someone shouted, “after he does that, would he mind a couple of questions about the impeachment trial? I’d like to ask him about the House witnesses yesterday from the Vaduz Exporters, who insisted—”

  “Absolutely no,” Flannery replied. “Nothing’s changed about that. No comment on the impeachment trial, or the Dragon Flies and Baraza, or anything else this morning. And no questions about his daughter. If you refuse to abide by our stipulations, I’m afraid—”

  Several voices yelled out, “Okay, Tim! . . . Bring him out! . . . Let’s go! Where’s the President?”

  Tim Flannery turned and nodded to Dilman, who came forward, easing his way between his press secretary and personal secretary, until he stood within the thickly massed assemblage of eager and impatient correspondents. For a moment Dilman scanned their familiar faces, then dropped his gaze to the pencils and notebooks or pieces of paper their hands held ready. They were waiting, and behind him, behind the Secret Service agents, Flannery, Miss Foster, Nat Abrahams, and many of the White House staff were waiting.

  Dilman’s lips were dry. His Adam’s apple had grown huge in his throat. His lungs felt hot. For a hanging second he wondered if this was wrong, feeding fuel to the scurrilous Blaser story, and then his eyes picked out Blaser’s toad face, puffed and important, toward the rear. At once, he knew that he must speak what was in his heart, because somewhere in New York his poor girl child might be waiting also, and listening.

  Dilman opened the newspaper in his hand, studied it, then held it aloft.

  “You all read this—this news, I’m sure,” he said. He cast the newspaper aside, heard it flutter to the floor. “It is quite true, every word of it. Despite its tone or interpretation, these are the facts. The facts are correct. I have a twenty-year-old son named Julian, who has returned to his studies at Trafford University. I also have a daughter, yes, she is older than my son, she is twenty-four, and her legal name is Mindy Dilman. I have not seen her, not set eyes upon her, since shortly before my wife’s death, when my daughter was eighteen or thereabouts. With my wife’s encouragement, Mindy left the Midwest for the East, to seek a career. Like my wife, more than my wife, Mindy was fair-skinned, and had delicate features. On my wife’s side, for perhaps three or four generations back, and to a lesser extent on my own side, there were Caucasians and Indians, white and brown forebears.”

  Dilman hesitated. “I might add, this is not unusual. I am well acquainted, as are most literate Negroes, with the history of our common ancestry. The information about ourselves comes to us largely from white sociologists and anthropologists. According to these authorities, there has always been miscegenation—racial mixing with consequent propagation—in the United States. This began in colonial times, although the most intensive interracial contact among Caucasians, Negroes, and Indians, as Dr. Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, occurred during our period of slavery and immediately thereafter. It was a time when Negro women were sexually exploited by white men. As a result, according to Dr. Myrdal and numerous other sociologists, as a result of this mixing between whites and colored peoples, with or without the benefit of marriage, there are today estimated to be 70 per cent to 80 per cent of American Negroes who have some degree of so-called white blood or, more accurately, white genes. Because of this, my wife and I, like eight out of every ten Negro Americans, have some white heredity, no matter how minute. I might add that conversely, because of this mixing, at least 20 per cent and perhaps as high as 40 per cent of the whites in the United States have some degree of so-called Negro blood in their veins, whether they know it or not. In any case, because of these heredity facts, many Negro families will, every generation or so, produce offspring who more closely resemble their one or two Caucasian ancestors.”

  Dilman studied the tops of the reporters’ heads encircling him, and then he went on.

  “In our family of four, there were two of us who were black-skinned like myself and two who, because of the old admixture, were fair-skinned. My wife Aldora was fair-skinned, what is called, in a certain section of the country, ‘pumpkin yellow.’ I, her husband, as you can see, am unmistakably black. My son is also unmistakably black. But my daughter Mindy, from birth to maturity, was as fair as her mother. Her complexion was, and no doubt is today, more light-colored than many Mediterranean whites.

  “Now, it is a regrettable fact, or so I believe, that among American Negroes themselves, most of them, the lighter-skinned ones, often feel superior, and are envied or looked up to by their brethren. Why is this? I think the reasons are obvious. Just as whites consider white skin more esthetically satisfying than dark skin—despite the widely prevalent effort, constantly, to become sunburned or tanned by the sun, since this is a status symbol equated with leisure time and therefore wealth—despite this, whites find whiteness more attractive than blackness, just as in India and Brazil, the natives consider the lighter ones of their communities more attractive—so this same color scale has invaded and infected the American Negro community. But ahead of pure esthetics, there is a more compelling reason why American Negroes are frequently pleased to have, and are envied for having, tan or pink or almost white or totally white skins. It is that these lighter Negroes get closer to the majority of the white population, are more acceptable to the dominant white community, more apt, by mistake or their own intent, to escape discrimination and persecution. And often these almost white Negroes, seeing how much easier and better life is for them when they are taken for white instead of Negro, become tempted to cross the color line, to live permanently in the white world as whites, to enjoy being a part of the aristocratic majority with all its advantages and privileges.

  “Yes, every Negro like myself, especially one who has had a nearly white wife and an almost white daughter, knows a good deal about this subject. I can tell you, with considerable authority to support the statement, that at least three thousand American Negroes with light-colored skin, at least three thousand a year, maybe as many as six thousand a year, take advantage of their appearance, slip away from their Negro homes, communities, family, friends, and cross over and join the white race. I can tell you, also on excellent authority, that of the one million mixed or interracial marriages in the United States at the present time, and there are that many, at least nine hundred thousand are marriages in which the white partner does not know his or her mate is Negro, or of some other color, because that mate is passing as white and has got away with it.

  “For the most part, Negro parents do not like it when their fairer-colored children quit their race and surreptitiously join the white classification, the white world, the white census, pretending to be white when they are not. Negro parents will condone the action of one of their children if h
e passes as white in order to acquire a better education or get a better job that might not otherwise be available to him. This is condoned on the condition that the one passing remembers he or she is Negro, and returns from the school or business world to resume family and social life among his or her Negro brethren. What Negroes resent is permanent passing by one of their number who resigns entirely from his race, attempts to blot out his blackness, pretends to be white in school, in work, and in his social life. Yet, as much as Negroes resent permanent passing, only rarely do they expose or give away to whites the true origin of their defectors. They will guard a passer’s secret because, as black Americans, suffering as a minority group, they can understand how driven one of their kind must be to risk this form of escape into equality.”

  Dilman halted. The circle of heads came up. He inspected the faces, nodded, then resumed speaking, and the heads went down to the note-taking.

  “Now you have the background explaining my daughter’s defection. She was reared as a Negro, and around her she could see the terrible injustices and inequities that were to be her lot. When she realized that she alone, of the four of us, need not endure the suffering, like a curse on her for the rest of her years, she fled it, she escaped it, she ran over the line and far away, and lost herself in the white world of New York City, where there was no reason for anyone to suspect that she was not white. I will not stand here and say I approved of Mindy Dilman’s action. I will simply say I did not try to stop or dissuade her then, and I would not now, because I understand her and the three to six thousand other Negro girls and boys who annually cross over.