A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  “They have a right to criticize,” he told Orrin next day, “and I don’t think one in ten does it with any but the best of motives. But damn it, they’ve got to realize this isn’t a tea party we’re in with these people. They’ve got to do it responsibly.”

  “They will,” the Secretary replied, “as long as you’re as popular as you are. My advice is to make the most of it while it lasts.”

  And so he has, the President thinks as he looks out the window at the Washington Monument surging whitely upward into the soft autumn sky and waits a trifle impatiently for his lunch. Six months is a short time in which to judge a Presidential stewardship, or any other kind for that matter; but starring with Geneva, which he regards now as being in all likelihood one of the supreme turning points in history, he feels that he has served his people well so far. The immediate and more easily tackled aspects of the world situation have yielded to a firm hand and a forceful approach. The problem and the atmosphere summed up in what the press has come to refer to tersely as “P.G.”—post-Geneva—is another matter. And on that, the President thinks with a sigh and a sudden unhappy expression that destroys the normal amicability of his pleasantly plain face, the vision is dim and the way is not yet clear.

  Whether it ever will be—whether, in truth, it ever has been, for any Administration at any time, in the delicate and uncertain area of relations with other powers—he does not know. Here too he is trying to do his best: to transform the psychological shock and advantage of his actions in Geneva into a lasting and long-range policy that will gradually restore a balanced sanity to world affairs and, indeed, place the United States once again in the lead. This last aim he does not mention, save to his Secretary of State, for he knows that it too would draw down upon him the scorn of elements in the country which are either afraid of Soviet reaction or still in the grip of the strange philosophy of the Forties and Fifties that the United States should be satisfied to seek no more than a timid and uneasy equality with its most deadly enemy. Like all who understand the ultimate implications of the American Revolution, the President is something of a revolutionist himself. He is prepared to advance the cause of genuine freedom wherever and whenever and however he can, now that he has succeeded in putting at least a temporary halt to the headlong Russian campaign of imperialism, subversion, hypocrisy, and hate.

  But the ways in which these purposes can be achieved remain, P.G., obscure. For the task the President feels he has a diplomatic team as good as any and probably better than most. The Secretary of State is proving to be considerably more diplomatic in his diplomacy than his past performance as a Senator might have indicated, and at the UN the United States has a delegation, able and hard-working, upon most of whose members the President feels he can rely with implicit confidence and trust.

  Thinking for a moment of Harold Fry, acting head of the delegation during the lingering and probably fatal heart illness of the Permanent Ambassador, the President smiles in an affectionate way. The senior Senator from West Virginia, with his easygoing nature, steady humor, and stubborn dedication in the cause of the United States, may not be as subtle in his methods as might sometimes seem advisable. Yet he inspires, at the UN as in the Senate, a warm regard and a deep and abiding trust in his integrity and good faith. Lafe Smith of Iowa, replacing Clarence Wannamaker of Montana, who asked to be relieved to return to his Senate duties, is—well, Lafe Smith, liking everybody, liked by everybody, hard-working and able, with the extra ingredient of an attitude toward sex which, the President suspects, makes him more understandable and endearing to a good many delegations than some more strait-laced Americans who have served at the UN in the past. Possibly Lafe’s recent marriage has curtailed his energies and activities, but the President rather doubts it. Unless Lafe has changed mightily, he has probably already strengthened relations with half the young ladies in the Secretariat. Around the world in eighty days, the President thinks with a mild chuckle at his mild joke, and decides he will have to josh Lafe about it when the Senator is next in Washington.

  The remainder of the delegation, composed in the usual pattern, consists of the customary State Department advisers and staff and, with an exact attention to the nation’s minorities, a Catholic, a Negro, and a Jew. Of these last, the Negro is the only one who arouses some uneasiness in the mind of the President, who has been wary of changing the delegation left him by his predecessor. LeGage Shelby is something of a problem, and the President, at something of a loss how to solve it, frowns as he considers the rather fiercely clever young man who heads Defenders of Equality For You (DEFY) and has been in the vanguard of the increasingly vigorous drive to overturn the hard-dying racial patterns of the South.

  It is not that ’Gage Shelby has been openly opposed to United States policy, but he has managed to convey to both his own government and the United Nations as a whole that he is not entirely happy with such attitudes as those concerning Red China, now awaiting admission in two years’ time under the compromise finally worked out by Yugoslavia and Ceylon; the patient tolerance toward France and her still-uneasy relations with the Algerians; the continuing insistence of the President on adequate disarmament safeguards in the face of the steady and terrifying growth in the “atomic club,” now numbering eleven nations, including Communist China; and the situation in the Caribbean, where the Republic of Panama seems of late to be working with elements not overly friendly to the United States.

  ’Gage has done a great deal of what he calls, with a sardonic grin, “black missionary work” among the African states; but neither Hal Fry nor the President has been entirely satisfied that all of it was in line with what Washington desired. “It isn’t that I’m out of step with you, Mr. President,” LeGage had told him recently with a disarming smile; “I’m just an inch or two ahead.” Such candor had momentarily stopped the President, as he was sure LeGage had known it would, and he had only said mildly, “Well, you understand of course that it is advisable for all of us to proceed along the same general line if we are to present a united front to the world.” “Absolutely,” LeGage had said, again with the disarming grin. “You and I couldn’t see more eye to eye on anything, Mr. President.”

  But, the President thinks now, of this he is not so sure; and how to handle LeGage within the context in which he must be handled is among the more annoying, if not major, problems that now concern the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. DEFY, a youthful and turbulent offshoot of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed out of the impatience of the younger generation with the cautious older, commands the loyalties of many of the nation’s Negroes in the college and young-married levels. It was for this reason that the President’s predecessor appointed LeGage to the delegation a year ago and, shortly before his death, announced his intention of appointing him again. The President has gone along with it for reasons that are as practical as his predecessor’s: the simple fact that LeGage is well on his way to becoming one of the nation’s major colored politicians, plus the fact that the increasing prominence of the new African states seems to make him a natural for the UN assignment. Now the President wishes he had chosen someone like Cullee Hamilton, even though under the custom, which governs appointment of the United States delegation, the Senate and House alternate in providing two delegates each year, and this is a Senate year.

  Somewhere, the President recalls, he has heard that Cullee and LeGage roomed together at Howard University right here in Washington, and it is quite possible that the young Congressman from California may have some useful insights into the chairman of DEFY that would prove helpful to the White House. He makes a mental note to talk to him about it if the opportunity arises and thinks with genuine pleasure of his few brief contacts with Cullee in the past. He has always found him eminently sensible, he thinks approvingly—and then assures himself hastily that he doesn’t mean that as patronizingly as it might sound if said aloud. Cullee has not been sensible in the negative sense that Seab Cooley might use the wor
d in describing a Negro; rather, he has seemed sensible to the President in the sense of his understanding of the needs of all parties involved in what the President considers the major domestic problem, human, economic, emotional, and moral, of twentieth-century America.

  “I don’t think we should move too fast,” Cullee had said three years ago when the then Vice President had asked him to drop by his Senate office for a private chat after the Congressman had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “but we should move. That’s the important thing. We’ve got to keep moving. History won’t let us stop now.”

  There was, the President was pleased to find, an absence of the customary cant, true but fatuous in its false emphasis, about “the eyes of the world are on you, America.” There was just a firm insistence on America being true to what America ought to be, irrespective of what anybody else might think. Just because there were certain things that America, being America, must necessarily do and certain high standards that she must eventually live up to if she were to be ultimately whole.

  Compared with LeGage, who is always giving lengthy interviews about “America’s solemn obligation in the eyes of humanity,” and “America’s duty to see that she does not disappoint humanity’s hopes,” this is a very sensible position on Cullee’s part. It is not demogogic—indeed, the Congressman is so calm-spoken and mild in outward bearing that political Washington sometimes wonders how he ever got elected in the first place—and it is not the sort of thing to win big headlines in the papers. But it is, the President suspects, an attitude that, matched by a similar attitude on the part of responsible whites both North and South, will ultimately provide a solution if solution is to be found.

  If solution is found!

  He snorts, startling the butler bringing in his lunch.

  It has to be found.

  He sighs at the unending complexity of the problems that beset the President, and instantly a hundred pressing urgencies rush into his mind. Trouble in Asia—trouble in Africa—trouble in the Middle East—trouble in Latin America—disarmament talks—a slight sag in business—unemployment rising—missile program still lagging behind the Russians—new integration crisis possible any moment in South Carolina—the space program—maintaining the moon expedition, readying another—Governor Edward Jason of California and his ambitions—Orrin’s ambitions—his own ambitions and/or lack of them—criticism by America’s enemies—criticism by America’s friends—the United Nations—anti-American riots in Lima, West Germany, Manila, Capetown, Panama City—bills he must sign—people he must see—things he must worry about … it never ends. And always, overriding all else, the constant evil pressures from the Communist world, inflaming every problem, increasing every difficulty, negating every hope for peace in a blind, insensate drive toward world destruction so automatic by now that he doubts if the Kremlin could reverse itself and rejoin the decent purposes of a decent humanity even if it wanted to.

  He finds it difficult not to feel that this is, as Bob Munson remarked to him the other day with a surprising melancholy, a haunted autumn; indeed, a haunted era. “The weather’s too beautiful,” the Majority Leader had said; “I don’t trust it.” Whether there are valid grounds for this premonitory sadness, the President does not know; probably no more than at any time in the past decade or, if the world is so fortunate as to have one, the next decade. But he, too, cannot escape the frequently recurring feeling that things everywhere are moving toward some sort of climax, one that may come a month from now, a year, two years, a day, a minute: who knows? Ever since the last war the Russians have engaged in a relentless and unceasing campaign to push tensions everywhere to their absolute peak; and the human animal does not live forever under such conditions without an explosive release into violence—it is simply beyond human nature.

  War may come, the President feels, for no other reason than that the Soviets have deliberately created so many tensions in so many places that there is nothing else that can logically happen except war; and he sighs again as he contemplates the possibilities of such a holocaust and wonders what, if anything, a man even in his position can do to stop it.

  Sometimes he considers the struggling masses of the earth and it seems to him that their leaders are no more than chips on a tide, flung this way and that by the necessities of national security and self-interest and the pressures of the inarticulate yet insistent millions below. No sane man aware of the facts wants to destroy the world; but who, nowadays, is sane, and who has all the facts? Even he, on whom so many heavy responsibilities and desperate hopes devolve, often thinks that he possesses no greater light to see by than anyone else in the fitful darkness that rests upon the twentieth century.

  Lost in such thoughts he does not realize for a moment that he has stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth and is staring blankly out at the Washington Monument, the river, and autumn-tawny Virginia beyond. Then he starts, gives his head a rueful shake, and bites firmly into the ham and lettuce sandwich sent up from the White House kitchen. He had asked for chicken, he recalls with an ironic smile: even here, the President is powerless to set the course. Like the rest of the world, he will take what the kitchen sends him and make the best of it.

  He wonders if anyone else undergoes such prolonged and self-scarifying appraisals as he has found himself called upon to undertake since he entered the White House; and concludes that probably many do, though possibly none with quite the direct and agonizing personal involvement of the President.

  “The buck stops here,” Harry Truman had put it, in a sign he kept on his desk. “I am all alone,” Harley’s own predecessor had remarked in a tone of absolute desolation, in a secret telephone call Harley had never told anyone about, on the morning after Brigham Anderson’s death. In a world of problems that range from men on the moon to the relatively minor yet important matter of a difficult member of the United States delegation at the UN, the President now realizes to the full the import of both these comments, at once curiously pathetic and deeply terrifying, on the office he now occupies.

  As for the United Nations, which he has thus returned to in the course of his absent-minded and preoccupied lunching, he wonders how the session is going today and what Orrin will have to report when he calls in later. The Problem of Gorotoland is not a simple one either, filled as it is with implications of an argument with allies, and the President contemplates it with real misgivings. Trouble anywhere is sooner or later trouble for the United States in these times, and in the person of the M’Bulu of Mbuele he can sense all sorts of potentials for trouble. He thinks for a moment of putting in a call to the Secretary-General, just to get another point of view on the situation, but then abandons it for the time being. The S.-G. he considers a friend of his, they had enjoyed a warm and cordial talk when he addressed the opening session of the General Assembly—but the thought occurs to him that perhaps he should hold in reserve against a time of real need any further direct contact. It might be interpreted now as going behind Orrin’s back, and that would be most unfortunate. Nonetheless he wonders whether the Secretary-General, agent of an organization with such great potential capabilities but so little real power, is ever moved by such philosophizings as those which come to him who has so much real power as head of a state whose capabilities are felt wherever men live.

  If he were to make the phone call, instead of abandoning it for a later day, he would find that the Secretary-General, sitting in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat building, is indeed filled with a comparable concern. He has changed the chaste decor left him by his predecessor—there is more color in the room and a livelier atmosphere in which to conduct negotiations—yet far below in the General Assembly Hall, the Security Council, the noisy lounges, and the bustling corridors, the rulers of earth remain as obdurate and contentious and far apart as ever.

  For this, the S.-G. thinks moodily, he is not to blame, yet he cannot avoid feeling, as other idealistic men in his position have felt before him, th
at he bears a major responsibility. Like them, he has come into office to find his powers ill-defined, his duties circumscribed by the conflicting national interests of more than a hundred nations, and his office the focus for a constant tug of war between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, he would not be here were it not for this constant conflict; and the fact that he is here, in and of itself automatically makes him almost impotent.

  Remembering his election, outcome of two months of bitter struggle between East and West, the S.-G. sometimes wishes one of the other candidates had received sufficient votes: then at least the issue would be clear. But the East would not accept the West’s candidates, the West rejected those of the East. Finally his name had been mentioned, almost as an afterthought, by the British. Within two days sentiment in the lounges, the corridors, and the delegation headquarters scattered through midtown Manhattan had coalesced in his favor and he had been elected. “Il n’est pas un Pape de Rome,” Raoul Barre had commented to the prime minister of the Secretary-General’s country. “Il est un Pape d’Avignon.” And in truth, for ineffectualness and inability to do the things the salvation of the world so clearly demanded, he was.

  For this state of affairs, he reflects, the Communists are largely responsible, for their constant attacks upon the office of the Secretary-General and their steady hammering at the morale of the Secretariat have inevitably, in time, begun to produce some of the results they desire. The attack begun by the late Chairman of the Council of Ministers during his raucous attendance at the Fifteenth General Assembly has borne its evil fruit and been continued by his successors. Now both the office of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat are closer to real impotence than they have ever been.