Tucker's Last Stand

by William F. Buckley

  Le Duc Sy had given the final act of love, his life for his country. Now she truly was a widow. Was there a drumbeat at the base of her mind? Not a nagging Catholic conscience, like Tucker Montana’s, which had brought on the almost silent hasty little prayer to his own God, but insistent, subordinated only in that her passion was genuine and even had she wished to do so, she could not have controlled it. But although she surrendered, she had not capitulated. She felt that her joy, requited, was, finally, a reminder of a transcendent mission. She kept that mission in mind, guarding against any temptation to thrust it out of the way, if only for these holy moments. As she rose toward him again, she harnessed her thinking with merciless determination, even now as the climax was at hand: She was doing this—this sublime thing, for something more sublime, more important, for which her Le Duc Sy had died so heroically.

  25

  September 11, 1964

  Saigon, South Vietnam

  Through room service, Tucker had ordered, indeed invented—the hotel had never had exactly such a request—an American breakfast. A Texas-American breakfast of rolls and orange juice and jam and scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and corn cakes, the nearest he could get to the hominy grits he had unsuccessfully attempted to describe to the chef. Tucker was disappointed that Lao Dai had taken to eat only the roll, with a little jam, and coffee. “Petit déjeuner, simple,” she smiled at him, expressing admiration over the cornucopia he had ordered and was proceeding, with such wholesome pleasure, to devour. He was wearing shorts, nothing more, and she told him, as he stuffed a corn cake into his mouth, that even when he was being disgustingly greedy, he was very beautiful, and where had he got that scar; she pointed to a line just to the right of his navel, drawing down his shorts a few inches to inspect the length of it.

  “In the Philippines?”

  He had told her of his experience there with the Huks. “Now,” he smiled, reaching over to draw down her negligée, “do you have any scars? Let me examine you.…” He did so, and she laughed, escaping.

  “You have not told me,” she insisted. “Where did you get that scar?”

  “It was a very evil man who did that to me,” he said solemnly. “He approached me with a sharp knife. I was knocked out, unconscious, but somehow I saw him. He came at me with that knife. My hands were tied down and I could not see the expression on what I suspected was a sadistic face, and I thought, well, this is the end, tortured to death. I became then fully unconscious, and woke up I don’t know how many hours later.”

  Lao Dai was tense. “Tell me.”

  “Well, I saw that man again, only now his mask was gone and he was—grinning at me, staring down at my lower stomach.” He paused. “Dr. Stringfellow had taken out my appendix.”

  She reached for the cushion on the chair by her and smashed it down over Tucker’s head. “You—you are the sadist.” She laughed, and Tucker laughed, and he told her he had not completed his physical examination, that he could not do so until she was completely unclothed, lying down in their bed, to which he lifted her in his arms, and there completed his examination, leaving no part of her unexplored.

  Driving to Bien Hoa an hour later he asked her, had she ever traveled away from Vietnam? Yes, she said, and lowered her voice.

  “Where?”

  “To Japan.”

  “To Japan? A Vietnamese girl traveling to the nation that—that occupied your whole country? Whose soldiers, I have to guess, occupied you … too?”

  “Yes,” Lao Dai said. “Both are—in a sense—true. Though it wasn’t me, but my mother, that the Japanese ‘occupied.’ I was three years old when the Japanese were defeated, but for two years my mother was placed in a Japanese-run brothel. And that, in a way, is why I went to Japan.”

  “Explain,” Tucker said, slowing down the Army jeep he had commandeered, to dodge the potholes as best he could.

  “It was four years ago, I was eighteen. The Japanese consul sponsored a ‘cultural exchange.’ For the first time, a Vietnamese delegation would travel to Japan, and at the expense of the Friendship Association of the emperor, so that we could see how the … new Japan was so different from the Japan of our nightmares.

  “Our president refused to go. He said he had too many memories of the occupation to make it possible to guarantee ‘civil behavior.’ So the mayor of Saigon was deputized, and said he would take with him six young people who had not themselves suffered from the occupation, but whose parents were the victims of it—Mother committed suicide one year after the Japanese left. I don’t know what the process was of selection, but at the finishing school I was attending, studying English and oriental history, I was told I would be one of the lucky travelers; so I was prepared, and was given a very luxurious wardrobe, three dresses, one of them suitable for very formal occasions: we would have an audience with the emperor.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. A wonderful, austere, removed man, Emperor Hirohito. You would not have thought that he had anything at all to do with the Japan that led my mother into a brothel that drove her mad.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He recited one of his own poems. We—the two other girls, and the three boys—did not know what it was all about, but we took the signal and applauded.”

  “And then, besides the emperor?”

  “Oh, the usual things. And one unusual thing. One unique thing, I hope.” She hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Hiroshima.”

  Tucker stiffened, and now he looked only straight ahead at the road. He said nothing.

  “If you only knew. Have you ever been there?”

  “Not exactly,” Tucker said.

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

  Tucker Montana snapped, “If you don’t know idiomatic English enough to know what ‘not exactly’ means, then you should go back to your finishing school.”

  She was transparently hurt. She said nothing until, finally, he broke the silence. “All right. Tell me. What did you see … in Hiroshima?”

  She closed her eyes and said, “I went to the museum. The museum of August 6, 1945. And there I saw the actual table—one of I don’t know how many thousands that were not preserved in museums—the dining room table of a couple with two children. I do not know how it was accomplished, but the mother and the father and the boy and the girl were still sitting upright at that table. There were no facial features visible, only charred flesh. We knew which was the mother, which the father, only from the swelling at the breast level. There were four plates on the table and a large pot. They were all … char. And then there were the photographs, a dozen, a hundred, it seemed like a million of them. After five minutes, I just closed my eyes, but every now and then I open them, and I think: Are we moving in that direction? Toward Hiroshima? In the direction of a global, nuclear war?”

  “Why in the hell should we?” Tucker spoke severely.

  “Because great wars happen sometimes when little wars do not—give way. You read about Charles de Gaulle’s press conference Friday?”

  “What press conference?”

  “He said that the war in Vietnam would not be settled by military force. That if the Americans insisted on using all of their resources, they would—as he put it—‘risk a general war.’ So it isn’t only little girls who went to the museum in Hiroshima who think of this … think of this possibility.”

  Tucker drove into town and asked a passerby the direction of the restaurant Le Bon Laboureur. But he could not make out what he was being told, and so asked Lao Dai to take over. In Vietnamese she posed the same question and then translated the instructions for Tucker, who drove on, turning right at the indicated street. He pulled up at the restaurant and, wordlessly, opened the door and led her in. Throughout the meal his conversation was distracted, perfunctory. She would not take dessert, she said, or even tea. He went immediately to the counter to pay the bill rather than sit and wait for it to be brought in.

  Tucker walked ahead of
Lao Dai to the parked jeep. He helped her aboard and she could see that he was perspiring heavily.

  “Are you all right, darling?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I’m all right, but I have a … every now and then I get a little … giddy. I mean: Would you mind driving?”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  Tucker sat on the fender of the jeep and leaned down. “Sorry. Just trying to get some blood up into my head, that’s usually all I need to do. But it will take a little—” He stopped talking.

  “Take all the time you want, my darling.”

  Tucker did not answer. He was immobile for ten minutes. Lao Dai turned away, to spare him embarrassment. At length he stood up again. “I’m all right now,” he said.

  He drove back toward Saigon without speaking.

  As they reached the outskirts of the city, Tucker said that on reflection he had to prepare for the afternoon conference, so it would not be feasible to return together to the Caravelle. Instead, he drove her to her little apartment on Henri Brevard. She leaned over—he had stayed in the driver’s seat—and kissed him.

  “Will we be meeting tonight?”

  Tucker roused himself. He smiled up at her. “Of course, dear Lao. Of course. I will meet you at La Tambourine. At ten o’clock, unless there are problems, in which case I shall leave word with Toi.” He returned her kiss, absently, and drove off.

  26

  September 12, 1964

  The Cabinet Room

  The White House

  Lyndon Baines Johnson was morose. He sat there in the Cabinet room with his closest aides—McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Rostow, and also Valenti and Moyers. They had all seen him in such condition, but rarely. When it happened, the vitriol reigned for the initial period, and then, eventually, he would focus his powerful mind on the vexation, the irritant, the goddamn son of a bitch creating the problem! His sense of maneuver would then awaken, and he would rise from despondency to a cathartic kind of torrential abuse—after which order imposed itself on his thinking. Then would come the planning. For the time being, all he could say was, “Surely de Gaulle understands? I mean, what was all that Cross of Lorraine shit if it didn’t mean that he would fight until he won?”

  “My guess,” Walt Rostow volunteered, “is that de Gaulle is scarred by his own experiences, more recent than those fighting the Germans to reconquer Paris. His country lost Indochina, and he lost Algeria.” Johnson turned to him, shaking his sad face ever so slightly, the effect of which was a kind of purring satisfaction: somebody else at the table was doing the talking, relieving him of the pain of doing so in his depressed state, and he hoped this would continue until his energy was reconstituted; meanwhile, who knows, conceivably what was being said would be worth listening to.

  “We can’t forget that, Mr. President. The defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu was a national devastation. De Gaulle was at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, waiting to be called to duty, a call that didn’t come until four years later. He was very careful not to blame Dien Bien Phu on bad generalship in Vietnam—because he does not think of it as a national defeat. He thought the odds were, well, ontologically against France.”

  “Onto-what?”

  “Sorry, Mr. President—er, organically, beyond reach, structurally against France. So along comes the United States, ten years later, and decides to save not even the whole country, but half the country. He is bound to feel that if we bring it off people might ask. How come France couldn’t bring it off? Not the kind of questions he wants to encourage.”

  “And then,” Bundy chimed in, “there’s Algeria. By no means settled, with a great many very determined men turning on de Gaulle himself. What he did there, Mr. President, is really what he is urging us to do. He decided a couple of years ago that the military could not impose a French solution on Algeria. The French call it force majeure—”

  “Is that the same as ontomonism?”

  McGeorge Bundy quickly studied the Commander in Chief. But his face was entirely innocent. He was not being teased, Bundy concluded. He would slide out of the problem deftly. “Yes,” he said, evading entirely the question he had been asked, “the idea of an overwhelming force against which one simply doesn’t argue. Almost as if it were fate.” Bundy picked up his notebook. “De Gaulle said at the press conference, ‘It does not appear there can be a military solution in South Vietnam—’”

  “How the hell does he know?” The President was aroused. “The Vietnamese who beat the French were fighting for independence from France. The South Vietnamese are fighting for independence from North Vietnam. They know goddamn well the United States doesn’t want to colonize South Vietnam. Shit, I’d like to think in a year, two years mebbe, the whole Vietnam business will be just a memory, a bad memory. But even if there weren’t any more people out there than on Quemoy and Matsu—how many was that. Walt, about fifteen?—even if we weren’t talkin’ about fifteen million people we promised we’d keep free, we have the SEATO alliance, and we have the Containment Doctrine. Are we supposed to repeal all of those simply because General de Gaulle, who never won a military battle in his life, that I was ever told about, says there cain’t be a military solution?”

  Bundy held in there. “Sir, he goes on, he says … ‘Certain people imagine that the Americans could seek elsewhere this military solution that they could not find on the spot, by extending the war to the North. Surely they have all the means for this, but it is rather too difficult to accept that they could wish to assume the enormous risk of a general war. Then since war cannot bring a solution, one must make peace.’”

  McNamara opened his own notebook. “Listen to what’s been happening since our raids, Mr. President. Here’s our friend Khrushchev. He said your—our—raids (he was talking about the retaliatory raid after Tonkin 2) were ‘an attempt to restore the use of violence and piratical methods in relations between states.’ And he said the U.S.S.R. would ‘stand up for other socialist countries if the imperialists impose war on them.’ Since Khrushchev always says the same thing at least two times, he said it again in his next sentence. Retaliatory raids are ‘a threat to the security of the people of other countries and can entail dangerous consequences.’” McNamara raised his hand, asking the President to withhold comment for one moment. “And then two days earlier we got this from Peking: ‘The so-called second Tonkin Gulf incident on August 4 never occurred. It was a sheer fabrication in order to extend the war in Indochina.’ And then, one day later, the Peking Party newspaper writes that we have committed ‘armed aggression’ against North Vietnam in order ‘to gain some political capital for the coming presidential election and to involve the allies of the U.S. in war.’” McNamara raised his hand even higher, pleading to hold back the presidential reaction. He had one more. “So two days after that, 100,000 Chinese rally at Tiananmen Square where Lioa Chengchih says it all: ‘The Chinese people are determined by practical deeds to volunteer aid to the Vietnamese people in their just struggle against U.S. aggression and in defense of their motherland.’

  “There, Mr. President, there it is. As far as de Gaulle is concerned, there are two alternatives. The United States either negotiates or faces a”—McNamara’s voice was solemn—“a world war.”

  Lyndon Johnson took over.

  “Well,” he said, “and what does de Gaulle propose? He proposes we all go back to the Geneva Accords. Genius! Sheer genius! Give that man a Nobel Prize. What in holy shit does he think we’ve been sayin’ over the last five years? That the Accords have been violated! The Geneva Accords recognized South Vietnam. There was going to be a vote on unification but Diem said no, because the terror campaign had begun by the North. One million refugees—that’s the right figure, isn’t it Walt?” Rostow nodded—“One million refugees and then a terror campaign,” he repeated the word. “What we have is just what we have said it is, a war of aggression staffed by Communists supplied by Communists, one more of their fucking acts of aggression against the free world.”

&
nbsp; There was silence.

  “Now, Dean, here’s what to do. One, get Bohlen over here from Paris, and you,” he pointed to McNamara, “brief him on the plans we’ve got going to seal off that Trail. Tell Bohlen—what the hell’s an ambassador to France for?—to go and see de Gaulle and tell him that goddamnit we are not going to have a world war but that if every time the Communists want to take over one more country they say, Get out of our way or it’s going to be a world war, then they can gobble gobble gobble—Wonder if Chip Bohlen knows how to say ‘gobble’ in French?” The President looked around the table, willing to give any volunteer the opportunity to come up with the French word. He resumed. “Tell de Gaulle we have very modest, er, plans but we believe, we damn well believe, we can stop them, because the South Vietnamese people, including those one million refugees, don’t want that poet Marxist Ho Chi Minh to take over their country. Okay?” Dean Rusk was taking notes.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And then issue a statement—”

  “Yes, we’ll need a statement. Over your signature?”

  LBJ paused. Then, “No. I don’t want to give General Charles de Gaulle, President et cetera of France, holy—holy carrier of the Cross of Lorraine, the feeling that every time he says some dumb thing at a press conference, I’m going to twitch. Over your signature. Give it out as a State Department reaction. Say what we all”—he looked around the table, his face one big interrogatory—“what we all think. Right?”

  “Right, Mr. President.”

  Late that afternoon the State Department issued the press release. It said, in part, “The United States seeks no wider war. If others would keep the solemn agreements already signed there would be no problem in South Vietnam. If those who practice terror and murder and ambush will simply honor their existing agreements, there can easily be peace in Southeast Asia immediately. But we do not believe in conferences called to ratify terror, so our policy is unchanged.”