The official said, ‘Credentials can be lost or stolen, so you must have a password which you can speak to the proper man when you meet him. You may choose a word’.
Lanny hadn’t the remotest idea why the name Christopher Columbus popped into his head, but he said it, and the other smiled and said, ‘Okay’. During the war years Lanny had often wondered how such names as ‘Operation Overlord’, ‘Anvil’, and ‘Torch’ had come to be chosen. Now he could guess.
VI
Lanny left the Treasury Building and went walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, swarming with traffic. He had his notes in hand and was diligently learning them. Suddenly another idea popped into his mind; he went to the first telephone kiosk he could find and called the White House. He asked for the President’s first secretary, knowing that he wouldn’t get that busy and important individual but one of the assistants. He explained that some three months previously he had been flown to Moscow as a personal representative of President Truman, to interview Marshal Stalin on the President’s behalf. Maybe the assistant had not heard of this, but the first secretary had undoubtedly heard of it. Mr Budd was going back to Europe, leaving in three days, and the President had suggested that if he ever was planning such a trip he, the President, should be informed.
The assistant, properly impressed, promised to bring the matter to the first secretary’s attention. The impressive Mr Budd said that he was staying at the Shoreham Hotel for this night only and was intending to motor to his home in New Jersey early in the morning, unless he heard that the President desired to see him before he left.
Having thus spoken, Lanny went walking again, and when he came to the hotel he found his wife lying on the bed, working on a portfolio of manuscripts she had brought along. He said to her, ‘Darling, I have promised to fly to Berlin to give somebody some advice. There is nothing dangerous about it, and I want you please not to worry. I expect to stay only a few days’.
He said no more, and Laurel asked no more, being a well-trained wife. Worry she would have, knowing that he would be flying over the same route in which he had had both his legs broken in a dreadful accident. It amused him to point out to her that only because of those broken bones had she got a chance to lure him into matrimony. You can say things like that in matrimony, provided that you smile while you say them. Lanny smiled frequently at this alert little woman who had taken charge of his affairs; she was a most conscientious person, with a sharp tongue, but she used it as a rule only on the warmakers.
Hardly had he taken a seat and unfolded the afternoon paper before the telephone rang. There was the assistant secretary, saying that the President requested Mr Budd to be at the White House at nine that evening. Lanny said, ‘I will be there’.
It was hard not to tell Laurel that item of news, but he would have to wait until he had made sure whether this also would be a confidential mission. He had promised to take her to a movie that evening, but instead he had to tell her, ‘This is part of the job’. All she answered was, ‘It will give me a chance to do my homework’.
VII
It is not considered good form to approach the White House except in a vehicle; but Lanny felt like walking on this crisp fall evening. When he came to the gates the naval sentry on duty accepted his statement that he had an appointment with the President; but a man in civilian clothes stepped out from behind the sentry box and followed close behind him. Two other such men stepped forward at the portico, and it amused Lanny greatly to produce the card in a little folder that Turner had given him that afternoon. The three men looked surprised and promised they would know him next time.
Inside an elderly Negro took his hat, and the secretary led him to the elevator. This stately and dignified building was less than a hundred and fifty years old, but it was rapidly giving way to decay. The floor of the President’s bathroom was so creaky that he was afraid he was going to fall into the room below. Before long they would have to spend five and a half million dollars to take the building to pieces and put it together more soundly. But none of that showed, and there was nothing to mar the visitor’s impressions of these historic rooms.
In the old days Lanny had been taken to the third floor to Franklin Roosevelt’s bedroom and had found the Boss in bed, wearing an old crew-neck sweater upon which moths had got in their evil work. Now on the second floor he found Harry Truman sitting at a large desk, looking like one of the ten best-dressed Americans, with a stack of papers before him. He had to sign his name six hundred times every day of his life, and sometimes he got up at half-past five in the morning to finish the previous day’s stint.
He was a man of medium size, a couple of inches shorter than Lanny. He was quick in his movements and impulsive in his speech. He got up when he saw the visitor, shook hands cordially, and told him how glad he was to see him again. He signed him to a seat and said, ‘Mr Budd, I listen to your programmes whenever I can get a half-hour. I envy you the judgment and taste you show. You have been bringing forward the best minds in our country, and I only wish I could spend my time with such people’.
‘The judgment and taste are mostly my wife’s’, replied the visitor. ‘She is the boss of that programme’.
‘You must bring her to see me some time. Tell her I envy her the ability to work for peace and to believe in it’.
‘She will ask me if you do not believe in it, Mr President’, said Lanny, smiling.
But the President did not smile. ‘I am truly a man of peace, Mr Budd. I would give my life to be able to prevent another world war. But reports come to me, and I am forced to face the fact that there are people who don’t share my feelings. You know the old saying, “It takes two to make a quarrel”; but that is just not true. A drunken man can make a quarrel, a bully can make it, a fanatic can make it. I think it would be more correct to say that it takes two to keep the peace’.
‘A wise and careful statement’, said Lanny. ‘I will tell you frankly, I am coming to share your uneasiness’.
‘I understand that you are going abroad, Mr Budd. How long do you plan to stay?’
‘I can’t be sure about that. It depends upon what I find. I am going on a government errand’. He would not tell even the President unless the President specifically asked—and the President didn’t. What he said was, ‘I wish you would make it an errand for me also. I know that you have sources of information and I wish you would keep your eyes and ears open and tell me what you think I can do to persuade the Politburo to keep its agreements’.
‘I will be glad to do what I can, Mr Truman’.
‘I know what you did for President Roosevelt, and truly I need your help’.
VIII
This accidental President of the U.S.A. was a sociable man, and he was often lonely in that great mansion where he couldn’t enjoy the company of any man without making a score of others jealous. Just now he was in a mood to pour out his heart, and this visitor was a man whom the newspaper reporters hadn’t yet found out about.
Said the President, ‘I need not tell you, Mr Budd, that I was not trained for this job. I was surprised that I was invited to become a senator; I was still more surprised when I was made a candidate for vice-president, and when this terrific load was dumped on me I was really in a panic. I knew little about international affairs—I had spent my time as senator trying to keep big business people from cheating the government. But now, it seems, I have the whole world on my shoulders—and so much of it going wrong!
Franklin Roosevelt led me to believe and hope that when we had given the Soviet government eleven billion dollars of lend-lease aid and the help of all our Armed Forces to put Hitler out of his evil business—that then we would have Russia for a friend and an ally; we would be able to work out a friendly solution of all our problems. I felt sure we had no real reason for rivalry or quarrel with that country. I thought that Roosevelt had given every evidence of friendship in the Yalta Agreements, and that I had done the same at Potsdam. But now look! They wouldn’t get out of Northe
rn Iran until they had a government there that suited them. They are in Dairen and Port Arthur and are under pledge to evacuate them, but they don’t. They are supposed to agree to the setting up of democratic governments in Poland, Hungary, and those other countries, and apparently they just mean to take them over. They are threatening some provinces of Turkey and trying to set up a revolution in Greece. And when I go before Congress and urge military aid to those threatened countries I am blasted before the whole world as a warmonger. Tell me, what am I to make of that? What am I to do?’
Lanny said, ‘The way to answer that, Mr Truman, is to tell you my experience with Adolf Hitler. It was just about a quarter of a century ago that I heard him make a speech in a Munich beer-hall. Before long I met him, and then I watched his career year after year until he seized power and began to threaten the rest of the world. When I travelled in France and England people would ask me in dismay the same question that you have asked: What are we to make of him? My answer was always one thing, “Read his book”. He had told the whole story in Mein Kampf. He portrayed himself, his life, his ideas, his purposes, in detail; yet I doubt if one person out of ten to whom I gave the advice ever took the trouble to look into Mein Kampf—it was hard reading, I admit. But here is the same situation with Stalin. He is a voluminous writer, and any one of his books would do. Unlike you, Mr Truman, he was trained for his job; he spent his whole life training for it—in prison, in hiding, or wherever he was. He has a perfectly definite and precise programme, and he tells you all about it. Of course he is writing for his own kind of people, and he assumes that no other kind will take the trouble to read him—and they don’t’.
‘Speaking confidentially, Mr Budd’, replied the President, ‘I asked for the opinion of our embassy on this subject, and our charge in Moscow, George Kennan, has read the books. He sent me an elaborate cablegram in which he agreed pretty much with you. But he ended up with the advice that “face” is all important to Moscow, as it is to the Chinese; so if we expect to get any agreement with them it is essential to put the proposition in such a way as not to humiliate them’.
‘That’s all very well, Mr President, provided they want an agreement; but suppose they don’t want an agreement? Suppose they want what they want?’
‘That is the question that keeps me awake at night, Mr Budd. But I am surprised to hear it from you, the conductor of a peace programme’.
‘Ah, me, Mr Truman!’ said the conductor. ‘That keeps me awake at night also. You must understand: an old friend of my mother died and left her fortune to be used for this purpose. The war was just over, and we had won it and were in a fine glow of enthusiasm. Everything was going to be different now; the boys were being brought home on points and the world was going to be made over, with your help. We believed Stalin, because we had to believe him; it was too terrible not to. All sorts of people took fire, and it was wonderful—the beginning of a new world. The United Nations was going to be run on a basis of world friendship. But now come these developments, one after another, and we discover that the United Nations is to be nothing but a platform from which Stalin can pour out his propaganda of hate’.
‘What will you do—change the programme?’
‘It is a foundation, and we have the problem of keeping faith with the dead. Emily Chattersworth was my friend from my cradle up, and I know that she was no Communist and would have no idea of turning the world over to violent revolutionists. I haven’t broached the idea to my associates, but I have the thought to turn the programme and the paper into an open forum and let the questions be argued out. The problem is more difficult because my wife is with child, and I shrink from putting any strain upon her in the next couple of months’.
‘I can understand your position’, said the President. ‘My own wife has no love for politics and would like nothing better than to go back to Independence, Missouri, where she could have some friends without concerning herself with social precedence, and without having to be worried about people trying to make use of her’.
Lanny took the occasion to remark, ‘For a matter of eight years I gave FDR what help I could, and I made it a point never to ask the smallest favour of him. You may count upon me to continue that attitude’.
‘Come and see me when you come back from Europe, Mr Budd’, said the sorely burdened man.
IX
Lanny returned to his hotel and found his wife still absorbed in making notes on the margins of manuscripts and letters. All sorts of people sent her material which they hoped to get on the radio, and she felt a sense of obligation to these earnest souls. So many agreed with her on the subject of peace, it seemed strange indeed that there should be so little peace in the world and so many prospects of wars.
‘I was with Truman’, he told her. He had a right to tell that because Truman had sent her a message. But he didn’t deliver it correctly, because it seemed to imply that the President was losing his hopes for the success of their programme.
‘Did you invite him to talk on the programme?’ she asked—the insatiable one. He told her he had overlooked doing so; the President had had a confidential request to make. Lanny said no more than that, and she did not ask. He told how the President looked, and about the six hundred documents he had to sign every day. He had said that he was a man of peace, and this was a consolation to Laurel, who had been worried by the speech he had made to Congress, propounding the so-called Truman Doctrine. It had sounded warlike, though it said no more than that the Kremlin would not be allowed to have its way with Greece and Turkey. But obviously there could be no reason for considering it warlike, unless Stalin did mean to do some harm to those two countries. It appeared that persons who were calling the ‘doctrine’ warlike were persons who didn’t mind seeing the harm done.
Lanny reported that he would fly to Berlin by way of London in three days. He could not say just how long he would be gone, but he hoped it would not be more than a week or two. They would have time to discuss matters with the Peace staff and arrange for Laurel not to have too many burdens to carry. She said, ‘I won’t complain. Do take care of yourself’.
X
Next morning they drove back to Edgemere, and in the evening there was a session of the whole Peace family. It was quite an impressive family, whether you judged it by standards worldly or intellectual. The oldest member was an English baronet with the distinguished name of Sir Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson. He was a year or so older than Lanny, which had meant a great deal when they were boys together. The two, with Kurt Meissner, had been dancing demons in Gluck’s Orpheus at the Dalcroze festival away back before World War I. Most of his life he had walked with a limp, having crash-landed as a flier in that war.
Rick had helped to build the Labour party in England and to bring it to power the previous year. He might have gone back and had an important post, but he preferred to stay and feed ideas on the subject of peace and social reconstruction to the American press. He considered these two causes to be one and the same, wars being simply the culmination of unrestricted competition in the world’s economic affairs. ‘Let there be peace’ meant to him ‘let there be social planning’. He was a man of exacting literary standards and spent his time wading through manuscripts and looking for hidden talent. Now he sat, taking an occasional puff on his pipe, listening attentively to what the others had to say. When he spoke it was with decision, and they heeded him.
There was his wife, Nina, who had taken care of him as a war nurse and married him soon thereafter. She edited the weekly paper called Peace, made up in part of the radio talks, with comments about the speaker and the audience, and the fan letters, full of ideas and arguments. It also used some of the material which the syndicate sent out to the press. It was not a heavy job, so Nina had time to help with reading manuscripts and interviewing would-be talent.
Then there was the eldest son of this pair, who went by the odd pet name of Scrubbie. He had been a flier in the recent war, and had come to Edgemere partly to be with his pa
rents and partly to be with Frances Barnes Budd, Lanny’s daughter by his first marriage. Scrubbie didn’t say much, and Frances didn’t say anything; they sat close together and listened attentively to the wisdom of their elders. She was going to school, and he was making a regular job of the Peace work. The same was true of Freddi Robin, a Jewish boy whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. His uncle, Hansi Robin, the violinist, came now and then to play over the radio.
Then there was Gerald de Groot, scion of an old New York family; his mother was in the Social Register, but Gerald wasn’t apt to make it himself, with the present company he was keeping. It was he who did the radio announcing when Lanny was away. He had a most elegant manner and a cultivated voice, from what he called Havvud. He was proud to be earning his own keep, and he boarded with an elderly family which did and delivered the town’s laundry. The woman was an ardent Socialist, while her husband called himself an Anarchist. The scion of the de Groots found them both delightful.
Such was the Peace group. Freddi’s mother would come in an emergency, and there were several other persons in New York and nearby suburban towns who would do the same. Also there were secretaries and other paid employees. They had had to get along without Lanny in the past and could do it again. The scheduling of speakers for the radio was always several weeks ahead, so Laurel, who ran the programmes, did not have to worry. They promised to help her out, for the special reason they all understood.
In the studio from which the Peace Programme went out over the air there hung on the wall in front of the microphone a life-size oil painting of a stately grey-haired lady, Mrs Emily Chattersworth, who had lived on the heights above Cannes on the French Riviera and had been the friend and protectress of Beauty Budd when she had borne a man child and had had him christened Lanning Prescott, that having been the name of Emily’s father. Emily had been the daughter of a fashionable but impoverished family and had been married off to a New York banker much older than herself. This gentleman moved to France when it was discovered that he had been using life-insurance funds in his private speculations. Emily stood by him, but always thereafter felt guilty about her money; she suffered both in mind and fortune through two world wars, so when she died she left a million dollars to a foundation in the hope of preventing a third calamity.
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