(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  “Yes.”

  “Can we believe that you had her alone in there, were alone with her, the entire period of time?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not send for the valet or housekeeper? You remained alone with Miss Watson?”

  “Yes. Because of Miss Watson’s unsettled state, I rang for no one. I still hoped to protect her good name, for her father’s sake as well as her own.”

  “You claim she invaded your room, yet you summoned no one. I consider that highly unnatural and abnormal. On the other hand, had you brought her to your room, kept her there, your reluctance to call for outside assistance would be more understandable. In any event, no third party was summoned, no third party intruded, and there were the two of you behind closed doors and four walls. That is correct, is it not?”

  “I have already agreed that is correct—the fact of it, not the implication.”

  “Then, Mr. President, what followed, the truth of it, plainly comes down to our acceptance of Miss Watson’s word on what took place or your own. Whose word shall we believe? Shall we believe the word of a naïve, unworldly young lady, educated, of unblemished reputation, the only child reared to the blossom of youthful maturity by the most revered legislator in the land, who has nothing to gain from the unpleasant ordeal of giving testimony here today? Or shall we believe the word of a witness who, according to the serious indictment voted by the House of Representatives, had secret dealings with a gang of Nigras bent on mongrelizing and weakening the nation, who kept intimate company with an unmarried female friend for half a decade, who was frequently under the unholy influence of alcoholic spirits? Mr. Witness, whose word shall it be? This you cannot answer, nor can I. We will let our peers, dedicated and objective men, steeped in human insight, decide this question. And for ourselves, we will undertake to discuss the final Article of Impeachment. . . . Mr. Witness, the morning after our beloved T. C.’s tragic death, upon your assumption of the Presidency, you did meet with the members of the Cabinet?”

  “I did.”

  “Mr. Secretary of State Arthur Eaton was, by rank, the first member of that Cabinet, was he not?”

  “He was.”

  “Was the purpose of this meeting a desire, on your part, to inform the Cabinet members to stay on their jobs? In fact, did you request them to stay on and serve you as they served T. C.?”

  “I did.”

  “And the Secretary of State, and the other members, they agreed to remain at their posts?”

  “They did.”

  “Why did you desire Secretary of State Eaton to continue as the head of the Department of State and as the leading member of your Cabinet?”

  “At the time, I thought him competent in his office and useful to the government. There was no reason to replace Eaton or anyone else under the circumstances.”

  “But after several months, you found reason to fire your Secretary of State, contrary to the law of the land, and to replace him with an underling?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You knew, of course, that Secretary Eaton was a close friend of the late President, dedicated to promoting T. C.’s ideals of government, did you not?”

  “That was the talk. I had heard it.”

  “Of course, you were aware, you knew, that should you suffer disability or death, it was Secretary Eaton who would become President of the United States in your place?”

  “Yes.”

  “As time passed, could you see that Arthur Eaton, through the integrity of his behavior, because of his adherence to the policies of T. C., was growing in popularity as a national figure?”

  “I would have no way of evaluating that.”

  “In fact, that as Arthur Eaton’s popularity dramatically increased, so, conversely, your own popularity, Mr. President, drastically decreased?”

  “That may be. I repeat, I would have no way of knowing the truth.”

  “No way of knowing you were rapidly becoming the most unpopular President in history? Unpopular among those of your own race as well as among whites? Come now, do not make mockery of the intelligence of the learned senators by pretending you had no way of knowing that the electorate disapproved of you and fully approved of Secretary Eaton. Weren’t you hooted into silence by those of your own race at Trafford University? Did not one of your own color, a fellow Nigra, make an attempt to assassinate you? Answer me that.”

  “Yes.”

  “In your recent trip around the nation, weren’t your public appearances greeted with booing and catcalling? Weren’t you castigated and threatened? Answer me that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did not all this unpopularity, along with Secretary Eaton’s obvious popularity, convince you that you might be forced and pressured by the American people to resign from your office, so that at last they could have for President a man whom you’ve just called competent and useful? Weren’t you afraid that as long as Arthur Eaton was in public office, you might be thrown out and be replaced by him, and therefore—?”

  “That is an utter falsehood, Mr. Manager, a false assumption, and a vicious accusation.”

  “You fired Arthur Eaton because his presence was a threat to you. You also fired him because you could not manipulate him, bend him to accept your prejudices, and you tried to replace him with Mr. Stover, who would gratefully comply with any policy and order you wished to impose on the people. I say—”

  “Mr. Manager, you are not interrogating me, you are lecturing me. And you are attempting to brainwash the Senate. Your assumptions are a tissue of lies, produced by your imagination, which you are attempting to stuff into the senators’ heads.”

  “Is that so? I am sure the able senators may see for facts what you prefer to see as a tissue of lies. Contrary to your reckless claim, the great Secretary of State was trying to preserve you in office, not usurp your office. If you yourself were not conscious of your inept bumbling of domestic and foreign affairs, and the national hostility this had engendered, Arthur Eaton was aware, as a dedicated patriot he was extremely aware, and devoted himself to protecting you from yourself, if only to preserve peace and the continuity of our government. If he withheld certain CIA documents from you, it was because he knew how dangerous they might be in your hands, how you might misuse the information because of your own unbalanced feelings about your race. Secretary Eaton’s reward for this act of patriotism was to be fired, illegally and lawlessly fired, by you. It is evident to one and all today, this very day, that Secretary Eaton was acting in the right in temporarily withholding from you certain hearsay information about Baraza. Because as we now see, once you had illegally removed your Secretary of State and learned what he tried to keep from you, you performed and are still performing as injudiciously and as dangerously as he had feared you would. You are ready to send American troops into Africa, are you not?”

  “Yes, I am. I have already informed the American public of that possibility.”

  “You are aware that Baraza has a population that is 100 per cent black?”

  “Yes, I am perfectly aware of that.”

  “Do you admit that, even if you alone think it should be done, you are ready to pour into the defense of this primitive African Nigra tract the peerless product of American manhood, to sacrifice rocketry battalions that are, by coincidence, 100 per cent white-skinned?”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “Have you read the published accounts, only two hours ago released, that Premier Kasatkin spoke last night, in an address made in Leningrad, and said any American troops sent by you into Baraza would be regarded by the Soviet Union as an act of aggression? And that the Soviet Union would not stand for it?”

  “Yes, I have been informed of his speech. I have not read the newspaper accounts.”

  “Mr. President, are you prepared to risk the consequences of a worldwide nuclear war to protect something called Baraza?”

  “Every head of this nation, henceforth, will have to risk the possibility of nuclear war to prote
ct both America’s freedom and democracy elsewhere.”

  “Or, in this case, to protect a patch of foreign jungle because its inhabitants are black, and you are black?”

  “I trust that is not a formal question. I would not demean myself by replying to it.”

  “We-ll, Mr. Witness, I am certain our honorable Secretary of State would be honest enough to reply to any question concerned with our life and our liberty. Nor would Secretary Eaton have countenanced the reckless and suicidal policy you are promoting. That is why I charge that you, knowing his feeling, and in defiance of law and the Senate, decided to thrust him aside. Tell me, Mr. Witness, do you consider yourself wiser than Arthur Eaton? Better versed in foreign affairs? More loving of your homeland than one whose ancestors came to these shores on the Mayflower and founded this republic to which your antecedents were later invited? No, there is no need to answer those questions. You need answer only this one: Do you feel that in recent weeks, and today, you have acted and are acting in the best interests of the United States, without being swayed by any outside pressures, without being influenced by any prejudices of any kind?”

  “Mr. Manager, no man on earth can say to you in naked honesty that he comes to a decision, arrives at a judgment, entirely devoid of prejudices. All men are possessed of certain prejudices, certain feelings, certain emotions toward every problem they face. These prejudices need not necessarily be harmful or bad. More often, they are good, and collaborate with intelligence and common sense. I have prejudices, strong prejudices, against tyranny, slavery, against arrogance, deceit, against vengefulness, demagoguery, against poverty, ignorance. I can only say to you that my understanding of the Presidency, its responsibilities, has grown inside me these last weeks, and perhaps I have grown with the office, grown in the knowledge of myself and of other men, grown in my vision of what our country and the world should be and can be. Today I am trying to act in the interests of every man, white or colored, who believes in a human being’s right to possess dignity, independence, equality among his fellow men. Today I am doing my best, doing what I believe to be best. I hope my decisions, and the results of these decisions, will be proved right. But no man, not even such a one as our recent Secretary of State, can always be right. We are both human beings. Human beings are fallible, they make mistakes—”

  “Mr. President, forgive me for interrupting your most diverting political address. But your last remark is one I dare not overlook. Human beings, you humbly and disarmingly say, are apt to make mistakes. I suggest to you, sir, that today, in this perilous day and time, this nation cannot afford to retain in office that kind of human being, a leader, a Chief Executive, a President who is apt to make a mistake—for a mistake, one mistake born of prejudice or rashness, can today mean the total annihilation of all humanity. And I fear that it is such a mistake, perpetrated by our President, that we must face, and pray to rectify in these somber hours. Mr. President, you have led us to the brink of destruction. But we have come to our senses. You shall lead us no more . . . . That is all, sir. . . . Mr. Chief Justice, as far as the House managers are concerned, the witness may be dismissed.”

  Douglass Dilman stood up.

  He had not done well, he knew. Yet he was curiously relieved. For he had done what he had known from the first must be done: he had made the invisible Article V a part of the conscience of the court, and tomorrow he would be judged on it and nothing less.

  Stepping down from the witness stand, then crossing past the podium and the table of opposition managers, he could see a crowd of press photographers, along with witnesses and page boys, jammed before and around the doorway to the Senators’ Private Lobby through which he would reach the President’s Room of the Senate. Then, as he moved toward the milling mob, he recognized Wanda’s distressed face among those waiting for him.

  That moment, he knew that there was one act left undone that he now wished done. In seconds, they would surround him, begging him to pose, and he would agree, yes, he would agree, but not before insisting that Wanda pose side by side with him. To some, it might be a small thing, but to him, it was of dominant importance. Yes, he would call her to him, because she was so beautiful, because she was so courageous, but, above all, because he must let her know that today, perhaps, he had finally earned the right to stand in public by her side.

  Now, at eight forty-five in the evening, and for the first time since Dilman had become President, certainly for the first time in many weeks, Arthur Eaton felt in high spirits.

  Arms folded across his vest, the ankles of his outstretched legs crossed, he sat back in the soft armchair and continued to watch the drama ooze out of the trial on the brilliantly colored television screen near the built-in bar of his living room. Chewing on the stem of his empty silver cigarette holder, Eaton followed Nat Abrahams as he plodded through his examination of the last of the defense witnesses.

  For Eaton, the trial was all but ended. Except for a few bad moments in the afternoon, when his own name had been bandied about in the low exchange between Abrahams and Sally Watson, it had been a glorious and heady day. Even when President Dilman had unexpectedly taken the witness stand, no doubt denigrating himself further in the public esteem by his undignified self-pleading, and collaborated with his counsel on that defensive pap about Eaton attempting to usurp his powers, Eaton had not been dismayed. He had known that Zeke Miller would, when his turn came, demolish the President, and Miller had succeeded in so doing. Much as Eaton had formerly disliked the Southern legislator, he had been forced, more and more, to admire him for his clever (if barbaric) forensics. In fact, Eaton had told himself while watching the House manager make mincemeat of the President, if Miller were not handicapped by his inherited racial intolerance, he might make, very well might make, an excellent Attorney General in the Cabinet of a new Administration.

  Eaton surmised that not only for himself, but possibly for the millions viewing the live spectacular on television, the dramatic climax of the trial had been the foolhardy exhibition of President Dilman on the witness stand. Why had he risked it? Had he expected, under his counsel’s soft guidance, to sway the Senate and public to his side by his posture of persecuted martyr? If so, he had failed miserably. Zeke Miller had shown him for what he was, for the entire nation to see, not martyr but satyr, not public official but pitiful fool. That had been the high point: Dilman’s fall.

  All else that had followed before and after the dinner recess, and what Eaton could see now on the screen, was tiresome and technical and would change no votes. Tomorrow morning’s closing addresses by Miller and Abrahams, while they might provide some pyrotechnics, could do no more than underline and emphasize, and then summarize in capsule, the strongest contentions of both sides, all of which were already known. There was nothing left to feed into the Senate’s computing mind. The data had been fed. What was left, of interest, historic interest, was the answer that would be spewed out. When would the jurors vote? He remembered. They would vote tomorrow at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Arthur Eaton wondered which suit he should wear tomorrow afternoon.

  The doorbell sounded, followed immediately by the heavy clanging of the antique brass front-door knocker.

  Eaton came out of the armchair, perplexed. He had expected no visitors tonight. And Kay, it could not be Kay. He had sent the car to the airport after her only twenty minutes ago, and besides, her flight from Miami was probably not in yet.

  Eaton opened the door, and then, to his amazement, he found himself staring at Sally Watson.

  “Well, President-elect-by-the-Senate, aren’t you going to let me in?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, Sally. Of course, please do come in. I guess I was surprised. I thought you’d be busy, and—I was expecting someone else. I’m going to be tied up in a little while.”

  “Goody for you, my hero,” she said. “Well, I’m not tied up, only fit to be tied.”

  She went into the living room. Eaton closed the door and hastily followed
her. She opened her leopard coat but did not remove it.

  Pirouetting on a spiked heel to confront him, she jerked her thumb toward the television set. “Licking your chops, Arthur?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t be senile, Arthur.” She considered him. “I haven’t been made very welcome. I guess it has been as long as I thought.”

  Unhappily, he stepped toward her and kissed her lightly on the lips. Her breath was acrid with the fumes of whiskey, and he stepped back quickly, fighting to hide his reaction.

  “Don’t tell me, Arthur. Let me guess. Multiple choice. Is she drunk, or sorta drunk, or very drunk?” She tried to snap her fingers, but they missed. “Very drunk. Kee-rect!”

  “Sally, what’s going on with—?”

  She lifted her hand for silence. “Multiple choice number two. Is she drunk because she hasn’t seen or heard from him for eight days, or because he has broken three standing dates, or because he hasn’t answered six calls she made in forty-eight hours? Answer—not one but all, all, kee-rect! Fooled you, didn’t I?”