Memories now come to mind of our talk. Her gray electric typewriter, the television set behind her desk, the overflow of Presidential souvenirs on her shelves. Above all, I recall the magnified peephole built into her door, through which she could peek into the Oval Office to see if the President was occupied with visitors or alone. Mrs. Lincoln told me that a White House limousine which picked her up in front of her apartment at seven-thirty every morning deposited her here in the West Wing, where she often toiled until eight-thirty at night. She handled all of the President’s personal letters, phone calls, and dates. “I don’t know if I should tell you this,” she said, “but I even get his suits for him, and see that they are sent to him on time. Of course, he has definite tastes, and orders what he wants, but I follow through.”
The days that followed were a kaleidoscope of impressions of visits to every nook and cranny of the nation’s first house. The most exciting of all was the early evening when President Kennedy’s Negro valet, Preston, in a black suit and a white tie, escorted me through the rarely seen second-story apartments where the President and First Lady lived, shut off from the outside world. Little things, not big ones, remain in mind: the white match covers with “The President’s House” imprinted in gold, in an ashtray in the Lincoln Bedroom, where Mrs. Rose Kennedy often slept; the leather-topped table behind a yellow sofa where the President worked in his living room late at night, while his wife curled up on the sofa and read beneath the brilliant Cézannes on the wall; the green pads on the white patio furniture outside on the Truman Balcony, where the President could stretch out during soft summer evenings, chatting off the record with Lyndon B. Johnson and Congressional leaders; the giant humidor in the President’s bedroom where he kept his cigars.
As for President Kennedy himself, I saw him three times in those days—did not interview him, but rather, saw him in action and close up. The first occasion was a morning in the Cabinet Room, when he made some public remarks after the swearing in of new representatives to the eighteenth United Nations General Assembly. Afterward, he and Adlai Stevenson joked. I saw his remarks, later, in the official transcript, but not the jokes.
The next occasion was more memorable. I was invited to the Oval Office to watch President Kennedy deliver a television broadcast to the nation on the tax cut he so much wanted. It was to be, although none of ts knew it at the time, his last national television address. I watched as his desk was cleared of its gadgets, a black curtain hung behind it for a backdrop, and two pillows placed on his chair (I asked if this was to make him taller, and I was told no, it was to make him more comfortable, because of his bad back). I watched him enter the office, much huskier than I had imagined, and he nodded and greeted me, and I returned his greeting. I watched him run through his first paragraph for still photographers, and after the photographers were shown out, the red lights on the big television cameras blinked on, and the speech was under way.
The third and last time I saw him, on a late afternoon, he was walking, alligator briefcase under his arm, across the lawn of the Rose Garden toward the huge helicopter squatting on its steel pad on the South Lawn, readying to fly to New York and the United Nations.
A few days later, I was back in Los Angeles, filled with the spirit of what I had seen, undramatic and yet more dramatic than anything I had ever witnessed, and I knew that I must write my book about all this, and could write it—and I did. But there is one last part of the story to tell, so mystical, so strange, that I almost hesitate to recount it. Yet, tell it I must, for it is part of the whole adventure, I had been writing my novel feverishly. At the end of the first chapter, my fictional Negro succeeds to the unexpired term of the dead fictional President. I wanted to show my fictional President, Douglass Dilman, sworn in by the Chief Justice, show him with his hand on the Bible, and I wondered to what passage he might open the Bible. My mind ranged across all the pertinent Bible quotations I could remember, and then fastened on one. I looked it up to be sure I had it right. And then I wrote it. Here is exactly what I wrote:
“She heard Eaton inquire of Senator Dilman, ‘Do you wish this open on any particular passage?’
“She heard Dilman reply, ‘Psalms 127:1.’ Slowly, Eaton leafed through the book, and then he said, ‘Is this it? “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”’ He glanced inquiringly at Dilman, and Dilman swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and said, ‘Yes, sir, that is it’”
One week later—it was noon, and I had just resumed work—my wife called from an appointment at her beauty parlor and cried out, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas!” With disbelief, I turned on my radio. An hour later, stunned with the nation and the world, I learned that he was dead.
All that shocking afternoon was a blur, and late that night, sitting on the edge of my bed, exhausted, numbed, I watched and heard the mournful television reports. Then, suddenly, a commentator was on, and he was saying that when the President was killed, his motorcade had been headed toward the Dallas Trade Mart, where he was to address a luncheon of the Dallas Citizens’ Council. President Kennedy’s speech had been prepared. It would never be delivered. The commentator felt that this last speech by John Fitzgerald Kennedy should be read now. So he read the speech, and when he reached the final paragraph, he read that the President had written that our generation was “the watchman on the walls of world freedom,” and that we must forever exercise strength tempered by wisdom and restraint to achieve peace on earth. And then, the commentator read the President’s last words of his last speech:
“That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: ‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’”
I sat chilled. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. Inspired by a chair in the Oval Office, I had written those words for a fictional President succeeding an imaginary dead President a week before. And here were the final words of our own President. The coincidence was as incredible and mysterious to me as the mystery of existence itself.
The life of the nation went on. We all went on. And months later, seeking another appropriate quotation for my book, I found one I had jotted on the back of a folded envelope as I had left the Oval Office. Now, firmly, I wrote it into my story, and it was the essence of all that I had learned from the vacant chair in the Oval Office—and perhaps, from the one who had filled it so well, so briefly. Writing, I had a white lawyer, the Negro President’s best friend, say to him:
“The American people have finally learned what a great Kansas editor tried to teach them years ago, that liberty is the only thing you cannot have—unless you are willing to give it to others.”
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…
This article was the last one I wrote after I won my freedom from being only a Sunday Gentleman.
For several years, the editors of the Family Weekly, a popular magazine supplement published in New York and distributed to subscribing newspapers throughout the United States, had been asking me if I would contribute a brief memoir to a series they had been running. The series was called “My Most Inspiring Moment,” and a great number of renowned authors in the United States and Great Britain had already contributed to it.
Since I had noticed that most authors’ inspiring moments fall into the pattern of recollections about an uplifting or edifying experience shared with their parents, or a brave handicapped friend, I did not feel that I could enhance the series with more of the same. And so I told the editors that if I should ever have an idea that was different and that absorbed me, I would contribute to their series.
I then forgot about the matter. However, the editors of Family Weekly did not. From time to time, they wrote to ask me if I had yet found an idea about which I wanted to write, and always I said that I had not, not yet. One such inquiry from them came some months after President Kennedy’s assass
ination, at a period when I was finishing my writing of The Man. As usual, I replied that I had nothing in mind, not yet. But then, shortly after answering, suddenly, thinking of how my visit to the White House had inspired me to complete my novel, I realized with rising excitement that there was something I wanted to write about, something I burned to write about and have readers across the nation read.
Immediately, I picked up the telephone and spoke to the chief editor of Family Weekly in New York City, and sketched out the personal story I wanted to call “The Chair in the Oval Office.” He was enthusiastic about it, and insisted upon my setting a delivery date so that he could schedule its publication in advance. I promptly made notes, but then became caught up in rewrites of my novel, and it was not until the summer of 1964 that I finally sat down to write this story. I wrote it in Paris, rewrote it in Cannes, and mailed it off. The editors accepted it, moved and pleased by it, and scheduled the story to be printed in the issue of their supplement that would appear in newspapers across the United States on the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death.
It did not appear in print on the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. Nor did it appear in print in any issue of that supplement at any later date. Perplexed, I asked my literary agent what had happened. He in turn asked the editors what had happened. They were evasive. For “reasons” beyond their control, they had found that they could not publish it at all.
This was not a satisfactory answer, and I remained mystified until, on a visit to New York, I accidentally ran into one of the editors at a social gathering. I asked him bluntly what had happened to “The Chair in the Oval Office.” He said, somewhat sadly, that the story had been suppressed. He said that when certain Southern newspaper publishers, who subscribed to and helped support the supplement, learned about the contents of my story, they protested. They did not intend to use it. As a result, the supplement’s editors decided to withdraw the article.
This was the explanation given me. I do not know if it is the true one, or the entire one. I only know that a story so often solicited, and eagerly accepted, was inexplicably kept from being published—until its appearance now in this volume.
I am pleased to close this book with my White House adventure, because I feel that its point is more meaningful today than ever before: “Liberty is the only thing you cannot have—unless you are willing to give it to others.”
John F. Kennedy understood this fully. I grieve over our loss of him for many reasons, but this is one of the major reasons, that he understood the definition of liberty fully and might have brought more of us to an understanding of it more swiftly had he lived. Yet, I suspect, the chair in the Oval Office of the White House will be better occupied in the future, to the benefit of all of us, because he sat there once, briefly.
Recently in a London periodical, I came across W. H. Auden’s “Elegy for J.F.K.” It seemed to me a fitting note upon which to conclude this story.
Why then? Why there?
Why thus, we cry, did he die?
The heavens are silent
What he was, he was;
What he is fated to become
Depends on us
Remembering his death,
How we choose to live
Will decide its meaning.
When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise.
Sorrow and joy are one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irving Wallace was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and educated at Williams Institute in Berkeley, California. After writing political articles, biographical profiles, human interest stories and fiction for the leading national magazines, he turned his attention to the creation of books, both fiction and nonfiction.
Each new Irving Wallace novel is a publishing event, and, since 1960, each one has become an international bestseller. His novels include: The Word, The Prize, The Man, The Chapman Report, The Plot, The Seven Minutes, The Three Sirens, and The Sins of Philip Fleming. His nonfiction titles include: The Nympho and Other Maniacs, The Writing of One Novel, The Sunday Gentleman, The Twenty-Seventh Wife, The Fabulous Showman, The Square Pegs, and The Fabulous Originals.
Mr. Wallace currently lives in Brentwood, a suburb of Los Angeles, with his wife, Sylvia, and their two children, David and Amy.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 59