by Allen Drury
“We will never accept your ridiculous proposals. We will never abandon our duty to the world. We will never betray our friends. We will never shirk our destiny or our responsibility.” And he concluded slowly, with a softness to match the Chairman’s own, “Never. Never. Never.…
“And so what will you do now? Blow up the United States? Destroy the globe? Use upon humanity all those rockets, which, as your predecessor was so fond of telling us before you disposed of him, you ‘produce like sausage?’ Gentlemen, there are two sausage factories in this world. There are two bomb factories in this world. There are nuclear submarines with nuclear weapons beneath the seas of this world. There is everything in this world to destroy not only us but you as well. Gospodin, do you really think we will not use it? And do you think you will gain anything thereby?
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, and at last he spoke directly to the man who scowled upon him from across the table, “do you not see what you have done by this threat of terror, not only this threat but all the others you have flung upon the world over the years? You have made terror ridiculous. We have so much terror at our fingertips, you and I, that there is no more terror. It no longer makes sense. It is absurd.
“Blow us up, then! And we will blow you up, then! And let us together blow up the world, then! And that will be the end of humanity, then! And what will that accomplish, can you tell me?
“You are childish and unworthy to be trusted with your great responsibilities. And I and my delegation,” he concluded quietly, “have nothing more to say or do here. If you wish to meet us in the United Nations to conduct negotiations with a decent respect for our mutual needs and the needs of humanity, we shall be there as always. Right now,” he said in four words that were so simple they dignified the moment better than oratory could, “we are going home.”
And he rose slowly, and with a friendly nod to his countrymen, who also rose as in a daze and followed him, he walked with his sturdy, plodding gait down the long table past the cameras, past the guards, down the steps, into the limousine, and once again in screaming procession beside the blue lake in the warm wind along the Rue de Lausanne to the villa in the bright spring sun.
And the world did not collapse or the skies fall, Secretary Knox thought as he watched Tashikov come to the end of his indignant peroration and prepare to make way for a few words from Ghana prior to First Committee’s vote on the Panamanian resolution to have the General Assembly take up immediate independence for Terrible Terry’s Gorotoland. Yet for a little while it had seemed that they might and the globe had awaited with fearful trepidation what would happen next.
“My God, Harley!” Bob Munson had said when they were alone in the villa. “My God!”
“What else could I do?” the President asked simply. “Really, what else could I do?”
And that was it, of course: there was nothing else. But as they rode back to Cointrin Airport that evening they were not, despite the outward appearance of calm they managed to muster, at all sure what lay in wait for them or for the world. No further word of any kind had come from the Russians, and anything from kidnapping to an immediate nuclear holocaust could have greeted them. This time the crowds were small. No one cheered. There were little gestures and waves now and again, and it was not difficult to tell that they were again being wished well. But a terrible terror lay on the world. No one at all felt like demonstrations now.
Presently the plane was airborne and the lovely city faded in the night. Fog and clouds came on soon after they lifted off, and Europe, the Channel, and England were hidden from them. It was just as well, for they did not really think that any bonfires were burning for them now. What they were going home to they did not know, either: whether there would be cities or a country left, although the President had received no word of anything unusual from Washington, and so it seemed likely things were all right, at least for the moment.
Somewhere out from Ireland they broke above the clouds into a clear moonlit night. It was then that Tom August, peering up at earth’s companion floating serenely above, said suddenly, “Great God, what’s that?”
For a moment, somewhere far out between moon and earth, a tiny red rose blossomed in the endless depths of night—blossomed and grew infinitely brighter for a lovely, horrible minute filled with death and beauty and insane fear, and then began slowly to fade and fade, until at last it disappeared altogether. It was not repeated, and no one had ever been able to discover since whether it had been a shot that failed or simply a Soviet gesture for whatever propaganda value might accrue. It caused great headlines next day, but nobody knew. It was not repeated.
And now here they were in First Committee, Soviet pressure unrelenting but the direct ultimatum, at least for the time being, laid aside. The world had gulped, shifted, adjusted, changed: nobody could say quite how much, or quite in what direction, whether toward or away from the men of Moscow, toward or away from those of Washington. The event, however, had brought an even greater tension to affairs, given many lesser powers a bargaining position they had never known before. The middle nations, the so-called neutrals, the youthful governments of Africa and the uncommitted states, had become even more important now. The contest had reverted to diplomacy and the battle had become even more vicious, using every means at hand. Including, Orrin Knox thought uneasily as he watched Senator Lafe Smith of Iowa come in across the room with a wave and a cheerful grin, the M’Bulu of Mbuele, that glittering young man who now moved gracefully to the podium and prepared, with a respectful yet confident air, to address the chair.
Terrible Terry no doubt had some surprises up his sleeve for the West: all that education hadn’t been wasted on this particular product of the bush.
Nor was it entirely clear why he should suddenly wish to visit South Carolina.
“Trouble for both of us,” the British Ambassador had said. It might well prove true, though perhaps it could be kept within bounds if Washington would co-operate. If the President would make a gesture, if Cullee Hamilton would perform a possibly distasteful task, if Seab Cooley would not be too obstreperous and unmanageable, if— Ten thousand ifs: such was the unrelenting nature of his new life as Secretary of State.
He thought wistfully of the Senate, some two hundred miles to the south, and now at three minutes to noon preparing to convene, as the M’Bulu said politely, “Mr. Chairman,” and began.
3
A month later, after Terrible Terry has cut his swath through the United Nations, the United States, and the affairs of mankind; after Felix Labaiya and his wife and her family have advanced their various ambitions in their various ways; and after Cullee Hamilton and Harold Fry have, each in his own fashion, come to terms with the imperatives of personal need and the obligations of national integrity, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate will look back and wonder why he ever went along with Orrin’s idea in the first place.
He will be able to understand it as an intellectual proposition, but he still will not be entirely convinced of its wisdom: a tribute, he will suspect, to that universal state of confusion in which men everywhere, confronted by the necessity for making great decisions on great events, proceed along paths they cannot anticipate toward conclusions they cannot foresee. He will wonder then if the Secretary of State, impressed with the need for charting a careful diplomatic course in the wake of Geneva, may not have gone too far in his willingness to adapt himself to both the supposed attitudes of certain foreign states and the known prejudices of certain domestic critics, some of the latter more noted for their ability to raise hell than for their capacity to understand issues.
Contemplating the results of it all, Senator Robert Munson of Michigan will be inclined to think that the first reactions in Washington were the right ones; although, being aware with what imperfect knowledge and imperfect understanding the human race moves toward its mysterious and shrouded destiny, he will conclude honestly that, after all, the decisions taken may have been the right ones, or, at any rate, no
worse than any others that might have been adopted.
Right now, however, as he takes his position at the first desk, center aisle, of the Senate and prepares to bow his head to another of the Senate Chaplain’s maundering prayers, the senior Senator from Michigan is not concerned with such philosophic musings as this. Right now the M’Bulu of Mbuele and all the events and people about to be involved with him are among the least important items in the world of Bob Munson. He is aware that the United Nations is engaged in one more controversy about one more would-be African state, and he has followed its general outlines in the press. But he is much more concerned at the moment with the practical problems involved in bringing to conclusion the Senate’s debate on the foreign aid bill, and in pushing his balky and cantankerous colleagues toward an adjournment that is already, in late September, several weeks overdue.
It has not been his idea, Senator Munson reflects with some impatience as the clock reaches noon, the President Pro Tempore bangs his gavel, and the Rev. Carney Birch, Chaplain of the Senate, snuffles into another of his admonitory open letters to the Senate and the Lord, to let the Congressional session run on so long. Certainly he and the Speaker of the House would have liked to wind it up a month ago; only the President has seemed to want it prolonged. Since his return from Geneva and the growing public praise and acclaim which have mounted steadily as the world has begun to realize that it will not be blown up because of his actions, Harley has been displaying what Senator Arly Richardson of Arkansas has referred to with his customary sarcasm as “a great urge to play President.”
Leaving aside the fact that Harley of course is the President and definitely not playing at it, Arly’s casual cloakroom crack nonetheless does express a certain wry attitude on the part of the President’s former colleagues on Capitol Hill. The Executive whom Time magazine now hails respectfully as “the man the Soviets couldn’t scare,” and whom the editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post now pictures with a certain homespun strength that was hardly noticeable in his drawings when Harley first took office, is obviously enjoying his job. Not only that, he is using it to attempt to push through certain reforms which, like most other reforms of the human, haphazard, peculiar, and peculiarly successful American system, are long overdue. Possibly spurred on by Robert A. Leffingwell, who is receiving great press commendation as director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, the President has already proposed a sweeping overhaul of the Defense Department and its allied missile and space programs, a streamlining of the Foreign Service and the overseas information activities of the government, and even, God save the mark, a new farm program. This last has already caused some revision in the Congressional estimates of what he will do next year when his party holds its national nominating convention, “I really believed he meant it when he said he wouldn’t run again,” Senator Stanley Danta of Connecticut has just been quoted by Newsweek, “but when I saw that new farm bill I knew he’d changed his mind.”
Whether he has or not (and, queried at his press conference a week ago, the President would only chuckle and say, “My, my, you boys must be hard up for news if you can’t think of a better question than that”), and whether his burst of executive activity since returning from Geneva has been his idea or Bob Leffingwell’s, the fact remains that he has given Bob Munson a busy summer. The Majority Leader has been held to his duties as rigorously as he ever was during the tenure of the President’s predecessor. He has not complained about this, for, after all, it is his job, and it has also given his wife Dolly a chance to hold at least four extra garden parties at “Vagaries,” that great white house in Rock Creek Park, that she wouldn’t have held if they had returned to Michigan earlier in the summer. But the instinct of twenty-three years in the Senate, the last twelve of them as Majority Leader, tells him that the time has come to get the Congress out of Washington and give its members a chance to rest up from one another.
There comes a point, as Bob Munson is well aware, when Senators and Representatives have been together long enough and it is much better for the country if they can just go away, return home or travel or whatever, and forget the problems of legislating for a while. In a system resting so subtly but inescapably upon the delicate balances of human likes and dislikes, familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt but it does breed an eventual irascibility which, toward session’s end, makes the functionings of American democracy rather more subject to personal pitfalls that they should ideally be.
A fast windup to the aid debate—about two more days, Bob Munson estimates—an opportunity for a few last-minute speeches and dramatics by those Senators and Representatives who always have to have the last word for the sake of the political record and whatever headlines it may bring them, and then—home.
So thinks Robert M. Munson as Senator Tom August of Minnesota rises in the Senate to make his concluding speech on the aid bill and at the United Nations the M’Bulu of Mbuele begins to set in train the series of events that will add another ten days to the session and bring to the UN and to both houses of Congress one of the most violent and embittered controversies of recent years.
Unaware of these thoughts of adjournment passing through the mind of the Majority Leader, but fully in accord with their general import, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is also anxious to get away. Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina is just turned seventy-six—his colleagues spent all day yesterday trying to outdo one another in paying him tribute, except for Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who deliberately stayed away with the sour comment to the press that he “wasn’t interested in soft-soaping senility”—and he fully apprehends that he had best get on home to South Carolina and do some visiting around the state if he wishes to retain his gradually slipping hold upon it. The basic sources of his political power are as ancient as himself, and many of them, indeed, are gone. A great name and a great reputation, great battles in the cause of Carolina and the South, have carried him through election after election; but he is conscious now that new generations, new interests, new industries, and new money in the state are threatening his position as never before.
“Seab won’t leave the Senate until they carry him out on a stretcher,” Senator John DeWilton of Vermont remarked the other day. The old man knows with a lively awareness that he can be carried out just as effectively on a ballot box. New leaders walk the streets of Barnwell and new voices exchange the softly accented passwords of power in the moss-hung gardens of Charleston. Seab Cooley still commands great respect in his native state, but his instinct is not playing him false: there are whispers everywhere, an urge for someone new, a feeling, sometimes vague but increasingly articulate, that South Carolina should have a younger and more vigorous spokesman in the Senate.
“Younger and more vigorous, my God!” his junior colleague, H. Harper Graham, comments to his fellow Senator. “Could anybody be more vigorous than Seab?” But Harper Graham knows the talk, too, and Seab Cooley has good reason to believe that among those who would not be at all averse to seeing him defeated is Harper Graham himself, melancholy, dark-visaged, filled with ambition and temper almost as great as his own, burning like a dark flame in the Senate. He would not put it past Harper at all to actively seek his political downfall, Seab concludes, and the thought brings an ominous scowl to his face for a moment as he sees his colleague entering at the back of the big brown chamber. Then the look passes almost as it comes and is replaced by the sleepy, self-satisfied expression his fellow Senators know all too well. “What’s that old scallywag cooking up now?” Powell Hanson of North Dakota murmurs to Blair Sykes of Texas as they enter the Senate together, and they speculate for an idle and amused moment that he is probably dreaming up some way to get Harper Graham: so well-known to the Senate is the nature of the bond that unites the senior and junior Senators from South Carolina.
Actually, as is so often the case with Seab, the somnolent look conceals a mind at work on much more far-ranging matters than merely how to remove the threat
of a bothersome colleague. “Getting Harper” is part of it, but his entire political problem is what engages him now, and the self-satisfied expression is really due to one of those flashes of intuition—or inspiration—“or hashish, or whatever it is,” as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts once put it—which occasionally show the senior Senator from South Carolina how to work his way out of difficult situations.
It is not even, in this case, anything particularly specific, nor is it associated with the man on whom his eye happens to fall just now; it is just that Seab is reminded that on one issue, at least, neither Harper Graham nor any other successful politician in South Carolina can afford to take a position different from his. The man he sees is Cullee Hamilton, the young colored Congressman from California, but the thought Cullee immediately inspires in the mind of Seab Cooley is not one that directly concerns him; it is simply a generalized reaction, prompted by his presence, going back into the bitter past of a troubled region, stirred by emotions as new as tomorrow’s headlines, as old as the tears of time. It is not an especially original thought, but in a political sense it works; and contrary to much violently expressed northern opinion, which conveniently forgets such areas as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, it does not work simply because politicians both white and black make use of it for their own selfish purposes. It works because the overwhelming majority of his fellow southerners, like Seab himself, are absolutely convinced of it by birth, by tradition, and by belief. This poses many deeply tragic problems, but the Senator and his fellow citizens can no more change on that particular subject than they could fly, unassisted, to the stars.