The Man

by Irving Wallace

  Aware of activity to his left, Nat Abrahams looked down the table. Felix Hart had passed an open note to Priest, who read it, nodded, gave it to Tuttle, who glanced at it noncommittally, and then handed it to Abrahams.

  Abrahams stared at the note. “Nat,” it read, “that was rough. We’ve lost them, unless you can bring them back sharply. Need an immediate attention grabber, what writers call a narrative hook. Suggest you discard agreed-upon opening, and alternate as well, and go all out with third possibility we discussed. What do you say?” The note was signed “Felix.”

  Abrahams’ mind had already been made up. Taking up a pencil, he scrawled across Hart’s note, “I say YES!”

  He passed it back, observing each of his associates read his reply. He waited for their decision. Felix Hart was the first to answer, vigorously nodding his approval. Then Joel Priest ducked his head twice in affirmation. Abrahams waited upon Tuttle, who sat with his jaw on his fist, thinking. Tuttle’s head turned. “Hate to fight their roughneck style,” he said gruffly, “but when you’re set upon in a dark alley by ruffians, guess you got to knee as well as punch. No choice, Nat. Yup, better bring that audience back, right quick, or nobody’ll know we have a case or a President.”

  Abrahams was relieved, and now edgy but eager for the counterattack. He glanced behind him and upward.

  The sputtering Chief Justice had hit his gavel down one last time. The Chamber had finally lapsed into silence. Abrahams’ gaze returned to the senators at their desks. While respectful and half attentive, most of them were slouching and slumping in attitudes of relaxation, as if they had heard it all, as if there was no more to be said, as if the show was over and only the necessary and boring closing formalities of the first day remained.

  The Chief Justice had rolled his chair forward and leaned across the side of the rostrum.

  “Mr. Managers for the President,” he called down, “are you prepared to proceed with your opening statement?”

  Adjusting the knot of his tie, Nat Abrahams came swiftly to his feet, hearing the crack of his knee joints and feeling the strained pull on his back and calf muscles.

  Facing the Chief Justice, he replied, “Yes, Mr. Chief Justice. I am instructed by my associates to say that we are ready to proceed with our evidence against the Articles of Impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives against the President of the United States. I am Nathan Abrahams, Your Honor, and I have been assigned to present the opening testimony for the defense.”

  “Very well, Mr. Manager Abrahams, proceed with the evidence.”

  Abrahams lifted a document from the table. “Mr. Chief Justice, before undertaking the defense, I should like to offer first, on behalf of the managers, a certified copy of the oath of the President of the United States, which I will now read.” He read aloud from the document: “ ‘I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ Signed, ‘Douglass Dilman.’ ”

  Handing it up to the Chief Justice, Abrahams announced in a voice penetrating enough to be heard not only by the presiding officer but by the legislative jurors, “That is our prime exhibit, and the cornerstone of our case-evidence, first, that Douglass Dilman is the legal President of the United States, and evidence, second, that he was and is fully cognizant of his oath of office, which we contend he has entirely lived up to and is continuing to live up to, and which contention we shall support through select witnesses and further certified evidence. Now, Your Honor, I shall enter upon my opening argument.”

  Walking slowly to the spot on the carpet between the rostrum and the jammed Senate benches, his face rigidly set and unsmiling, Nat Abrahams was prepared to begin. He had left his multitudinous notes on the table. He had committed to memory every fact and shred of evidence. All the stored knowledge he possessed of the case, provoked by his opponent, had been electrified, and now pulsated with life inside his brain, waiting for his summons. He required no written reference. He was alert, anger controlled, ready as he would ever be to even the score. If it was possible, he would do it. He would try.

  “Mr. Chief Justice, gentlemen of the United States Senate, fellow citizens,” he heard himself say, surprised at how firm and even was the pitch of his address. “As the document I have turned over to the Chief Justice of the United States confirms, we have for President of the United States a man, a man who has sworn, before the presiding officer now seated on the bench above, that he will preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution and our nation under God. We have, I repeat, a man for our President of the United States.

  “Perhaps, from the outset, since the managers of the House have raised the point, some clarification is necessary. What is a man? Is he, indeed, Emerson’s ‘golden impossibility’? Or is he, in the definition of Noah Webster, simply ‘a male human being’? Is he, to give the anthropological view of him, ‘an individual (genus Homo) of the highest type of animal existing or known to have existed, differing from other high types of animals, especially in his extraordinary mental development’? Is he Pindar’s ‘a shadow and a dream’? Or is he more? Is he, in the words of Genesis, that one whom God created in his own image, that special and holy being whom God formed from the dust of the ground, and into whose nostrils God breathed ‘the breath of life’ so that he became ‘a living soul’? Or is he, as the poetic Psalms would have it, a creature ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and made only ‘a little lower than the angels’?

  “You see, then, man is defined as many things, but of one fact I am positive, and all higher authority is positive, one thing he is not. Man is not a beast.

  “A beast, again quoting Noah Webster, is plainly, precisely, ‘any four-footed animal,’ and an animal, as apart from a plant, is most often ‘a brute or beast, as distinguished from man.’ There are many beasts on the earth, quadrupeds all. A lion is a beast, a panther is a beast, a rhinoceros, a dog, a jackal, a wolf, a hyena, each is an authentic beast. But only among the unknowing and the ignorant, or the malicious and unbalanced, is a man ever confused with a beast. Sometimes, in the North of our nation, I have heard pathetic and psychopathic perverts called beasts, even though they were men. Sometimes, in the South of the United States, not the South of Africa, in the South of the United States and occasionally in the North, I have heard our citizens of black skin called beasts. But I have always attributed that confusion of identity to ignorance or malice, and believed the only corrective measure to be education.

  “Forgive me the biological discourse, honorable senators, but since my able opponent mistook the nature of the subject on trial today, I thought it but proper, indeed necessary, to correct him. Let there be no confusion among you from this moment on. In 1868, the President of the United States was a man, a man made in the image of God, Thaddeus Stevens notwithstanding. Today, the President of the United States is another man, a man created in the image of God, Zeke Miller notwithstanding. The President is not a four-legged brute, but a man, as you are men, no more, no less, as even the managers of the House are men.

  “I am determined to keep the definitions in this trial precise. You are here to sit in judgment on the future of a human being who is the President of the United States. The managers of the House are here to prosecute a human being and try to remove him from his rightfully held office. My colleagues and I are here to defend a human being and retain him in the highest position in the land. If that is understood and agreed upon, I am prepared to enter into our argument against the Articles of Impeachment voted upon by the House of Representatives.”

  It was time for a breather. Nat Abrahams halted. With unfaltering gaze, he surveyed the faces and the profiles of the senators arrayed before him. He had gained and held their attention, he guessed, shamed some, annoyed others, but he had opened the path for what must now, of necessity, follow. Along this path there was danger, but there was no other way.

  Bending
his head to organize his thoughts, he took several paces to his right. When he raised his head, his eyes met those of Zeke Miller, and it pleased him to see that Miller’s balding warm pate was beaded and his eyes burning and his thin-lipped mouth compressed with contained bile.

  Abruptly, Nat Abrahams swung back to confront his audience.

  “Gentlemen of the Senate, I shall now enter into my argument against the five Articles of Impeachment-wait, it was not a slip of the tongue, I repeat, the five Articles of Impeachment pronounced against the President this afternoon.”

  There was puzzlement on many faces, he could see, and there were rustles and whisperings of wonder from behind some of the desks. Rapidly, Nat Abrahams resumed. He almost had them; now he must grab them and hold them and bang their skulls against the truth.

  “It is not the fourth Article, as my distinguished opponent has stated, that stands as the gravest charge and the one most crucial to the welfare of our government and our democracy. No, gentlemen, it is the fifth Article of indictment against our President, the covert, hushed fifth Article, unannounced, unwritten, unmentioned yet in this judicial court, that pervades the atmosphere of this Chamber, that dominates this trial, and that exists as truly as if it had been made public from the first-it is this Article, I submit, that is and shall be the head and heart of the House’s case against our President, and the disposition of which shall affect the future existence of our democracy most seriously.

  “This vaporous, invisible, elusive Article V, if the opposition had possessed the courage to set it down in writing against President Dilman, would have read as follows: ‘That said Douglass Dilman, President of the United States, at Washington, in the District of Columbia, unmindful of the high duties of his office, of his oath of office, and in violation of the Constitution, did irresponsibly, and without regard for the will of the majority of the public and its elected legislators, accept the high office of the Presidency, despite his origin and color. And said Douglass Dilman, President of the United States, did then and there commit high crime and misdemeanor by daring to undertake his duty as Chief Executive and perform as President, while knowing that in the eyes of zealots and bigots he was unqualified and unfit for leadership because he was of the Negro race, and therefore not a full citizen but a second-class citizen, and therefore semiliterate, shiftless, mentally arrested, socially inferior, addicted to whiskey and violent behavior, possessed of unnatural inherited desires, if not to marry, then at least to molest daughters of Caucasians, and contemptuous and sullen in his determination not to know his rightful place and in his refusal to serve his racial betters.’ ”

  Nat Abrahams could hear the vocal storm rising before him, around him, the legislators barking their indignation, or pounding their desks, the lung-filling intake of shock followed by scattered outbreaks of applause from the galleries, the enraged protests from the House managers’ table.

  He tried to go on. “Gentlemen!” he cried out over the tumult. “This unannounced Article, I submit, is what lies behind the announced four Articles, colors them, shades them in the hue of darkness, and unless this fifth indictment of President Dilman is brought into the open and aired, and considered by honest and courageous men, there can be no justice done in the impeachment trial of Douglass Dilman!”

  He wanted to say more, but he could hardly hear his own voice now over the hubbub, and so he stopped and waited for what would happen next.

  Chief Justice Johnstone’s gavel smashed down three times, and the sounds of it were as deafening as a cannonade, and at once the tumult receded, settled into order, except for a pocket of continuing protest at the rear of the Chamber.

  Then Abrahams realized that Senator Hoyt Watson, gray hair disheveled, string tie out of line, was standing, arm aloft, attempting to hail the chair.

  “Mr. Chief Justice! Mr. Chief Justice!” Senator Watson roared. “Objection! I submit a question on a point of order!”

  At last, the room fell silent.

  “The chair recognizes the honorable Senator on a point of order,” Chief Justice Johnstone announced. “Your inquiry, Senator?”

  “Mr. Justice, we have just been subjected to the most insolent performance I have ever been witness to in my many years on this floor. That Mr. Manager Abrahams, on behalf of the President, should dare to insult our intelligence, impugn our integrity, by implying that we fly under false colors, that the four Articles under consideration are lies created to mask some horrendous racial plot, that he should dare assail the honesty and human decency of the Senate of the United States, and the House as well, by charging that we want that miscreant Dilman out of the White House because he is black, and not because he is incompetent, offends me, offends every one of us, beyond conceivable expression… Mr. Chief Justice, I demand that the manager’s offensive grandstanding tirade be stricken from the records forever. I suggest that he be reprimanded by the chair for attempting to convert this august Chamber into a Turnerite meeting hall. I demand that he not be permitted to discuss again his ludicrous and inciting fifth Article, this rabble-rousing figment of his imagination, at the pain of being ordered to withdraw from the case and from this Chamber for the remainder of the trial. I trust, Mr. Chief Justice, that you will instruct Manager Abrahams to confine himself strictly to a discussion of the evidence against his client that is known, that exists, that is the subject of this impeachment trial, and if he should arrogantly persist in disobeying, that he be held in contempt of court!”

  As the flushed Senator sat down, his colleagues and the House members crowned him with a smashing round of applause.

  Nat Abrahams had turned to the bench. “Mr. Chief Justice-”

  Chief Justice Johnstone nodded. “What say you to the objection, Mr. Manager Abrahams?”

  “It was not my purpose or intent to incite or inflame through demagoguery, or to imitate the manner and method of the opposition,” said Abrahams calmly. “I submit, Your Honor, that it is President Dilman’s difference of color that has antagonized his opposition, and inspired them to build their cleverly diverting Articles of Impeachment. I submit that the President’s color will in turn color and affect the mind of every prosecution witness, and a majority of the jurors, and largely to the detriment of my client. I submit this is the real hard-core issue, and no mere figment of my imagination. I stand prepared to offer concrete evidence in the form of affidavits-signed editorials from newspapers, speeches in the Congressional Record, off-the-record statements made by biased Senators-to prove that the President’s color is the central issue of this trial. I am prepared to contend with the four Articles as voted, to fight them with all my heart and soul, but I suggest that they are windmills, Your Honor, and that the real dragon to be slain is racial prejudice. I beg your leave to be permitted to speak further, with as much restraint as possible, and when it is appropriate, on this invisible Article of indictment.”

  Chief Justice Johnstone huffed, gathered his judicial robe around him, and looked past Abrahams toward Senator Hoyt Watson.

  “The Senator’s objection is sustained,” he announced. He peered down at Abrahams. “The counsel will not allude to a fifth Article again in this trial, but devote himself solely and entirely to the four Articles before this court. Proceed as directed, Mr. Manager!”

  Abrahams tried to accept the rebuke graciously. Turning his head from the bench, he could see his three associates watching him, and while their faces remained phlegmatic, there was applause in their eyes.

  Slowly, Abrahams continued around until he was once more face to face with the Senate. Legally, his accusation was stricken, but in fact the entire nation had heard his charge, and now it was a living issue that would hang over the conscience of every man in the days to come. If he could no longer allude to the fifth Article, it was nonetheless now made visible for all to see and reckon with. Officially, the color prejudice against President Dilman had been segregated from this hostile and limited Chamber, but now it ran rampant across the breadth of the broad cou
ntry.

  By his reckless offensive into the exposed high ground of truth, Abrahams decided, he had lost hard votes for Doug Dilman as a President on trial for impeachment, but perhaps he had won something more important for Doug Dilman as a man. He hoped that his choice of tactic had been the right one, and that Doug would, somehow, understand.

  Inaudibly, Abrahams sighed. Well, he told himself for the last time, the truth was in the open. He had done what had to be done, in a manner most repugnant to him, but there had been no other choice for one who believed his cause was just.

  And now, he could see, he had accomplished something else, also. He had won the eyes and ears of the Senate, the House, the galleries, the entire nation. He had them even as Zeke Miller had not.

  Satisfied with this one victory, Nat Abrahams, relieved to be able to resume the role of attorney once more, quietly began to address his audience again.

  AT approximately a quarter to three in the afternoon, Edna Foster had suddenly turned off her television set, blotted the loathsome spectacle from her screen if not from her mind, impulsively changed into a severe suit, set a hat on her bunned brown hair, pulled on her transparent olive-colored raincoat, telephoned for a taxicab, snatched up her umbrella, and gone downstairs to wait for it.

  Now, at a quarter after three, she walked purposefully through the puddles of rainwater gathering across the circular driveway leading from the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the West Wing lobby of the White House. What she had relived, during the short taxi ride, she continued to relive intensely, unmindful of the steady drizzle spattering upon her umbrella overhead.

  It had been a horrible week of lies, lies and indecisiveness, and she was glad she had finally brought it to an end.

  She had seen George Murdock only once after her return from Paris and his belated return from the extended visit to New York City.

  Their meeting had taken place during the early evening of the day that the President’s impeachment had been introduced into the House of Representatives. It had not been her best evening, from the moment George had picked her up to the moment he had left her at her apartment door after dinner, because her mood had been at such odds with his. She had been stunned and unhappy over the fantastic attack on Dilman. George had been alive and gay because of his new high-paying job with the Zeke Miller chain of newspapers, which he had announced to her that night. She had hated his taking the job, somehow equating it with her misery over the threatened impeachment, and not even George’s naming an actual marriage date had improved her mood. She had desperately tried to evince some pretense of pleasure, but she had failed. She had hoped that a long evening together-she was relatively at liberty, with the President off on his tour of the Midwest, Far West, and Atlantic Coast-would work its miracle, restore her joy in the knowledge that she would soon be Mrs. Murdock, but then George had had time for only a short evening. He was, he had apologized, toiling nights as well as days now, to impress his new employers, anxious to get off on the right foot. Then, after he had hastened away to the Washington Citizen-American Building, and she had wearily returned to her living room, the orderly, well-regulated, promising personal world around her (which excluded the Dilman part of her world) had disintegrated completely (because Dilman could not be excluded from it, after all), and since that time, by choice, she had not seen George again.