by Allen Drury
“Seems to me we’ve got to have an understanding about some things, Cullee. I think you need to be set straight on the way things are going.”
“You try to tell him,” Sue-Dan said spitefully. “I’ve been trying for the past week, but it’s no good. He won’t listen. He knows it all.”
“I don’t know it all,” Cullee said. “I just know you’re riding way out there on the risky edge and I don’t intend to ride out there with you. That’s all.”
“What’s the matter, friend?” LeGage asked scornfully. “Afraid you might lose some white votes or something? Listen! One of these days it won’t matter how the white folks vote.”
“Who are you,” the Congressman asked, “the Prophet LeGage? All us Black Muslims about to hit the high road, are we? I’m glad you told me, Prophet. I didn’t know.”
“Maybe you haven’t been getting the phone calls I’ve been getting,” LeGage said softly, “but a lot of people are watching you, Cullee. They want DEFY to take out after you. The Muslims aren’t any joke, either.”
“Better stay clear of that crowd,” Cullee said with equal softness. “Real bad business, that crowd. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt playing with them, ’Gage.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt, either,” LeGage said, “but I’m telling you, Cullee, you will be if you don’t help out your own people. Everybody’s wondering about you, right now. They want to know where you were when Terry went to that school, and why you aren’t doing more now, and why you aren’t helping DEFY—”
“I told him all that,” Sue-Dan said. “I told him what to do, and he won’t listen. He’s too big for us. Don’t argue with him, ’Gage. Let’s go to New York.”
“Damn it,” Cullee said, “you’re not going to New York. Now that’s final.”
“Wonder if final does as loud as final talks,” she said airily. “You better get on back to the Hill, Mr. Congressman. Your people need you. Your white people, that is.”
“I’m going in just a minute. First I want to ask this wild man one question. Why are you so all-fired excited just because the President and Orrin Knox say we’re all one country? We are all one country. Bad or good, we’ve got to work it out here, haven’t we? Or maybe you know something I don’t know that makes it different. You leaving us, ’Gage? You going somewhere we don’t know about? Tell me, boy!”
“All my life,” LeGage said with a strange tone of lonely anger Cullee had never heard in his voice before, “I’ve been trying to play it your way, the way so many of us have tried to do in the past. I’ve been trying to get along with them on their terms. Even when I’ve led DEFY out picketing someplace, it’s been to accomplish something in a way they could understand, so they would do something about it. Well”—he drew a deep breath—“well, maybe now I’m not going to do it like that, any more. Maybe I’m going to do it the way we think is right, for things we want, and let them sweat, for a change. Maybe I’ve just decided I’ve got to be true to what I think is best for us, not what they think.” He paused somberly. “That’s about it, Cullee. And maybe I think it’s time for you to stop playing their way, and help us.”
“And maybe I would,” Cullee snapped with a sudden anger, “if maybe you weren’t running after Terry like a sweet little lap dog, and if maybe you weren’t messing around playing stooge for Felix Labaiya, and if maybe you weren’t getting ‘way out there where you can’t tell the honest colored folks from the witch doctors. What do you want to do, ’Gage—tear the country apart? That’s what Russia wants, for us all to fall to pieces fighting over race. They’re working on it every day. You want to be lap dog for them, too? Get on out of this house, if that’s it, because you’re no friend of mine.”
“I’d rather do what I think is right for my people,” ’Gage said bitterly, “than try to ride both races the way you do, Cullee.”
“Your people? Your people? I suppose you’re trying to say they’re not my people, too, is that it?”
“Then act like it,” LeGage said with an angry desperation. “Damn it, act like it, that’s all I say to you. Else I’m not a friend of yours, for sure, or you of me.”
“Guess that makes it unanimous,” the Congressman said coldly. “Best you run along now and be a stooge for Terry and the Commies and all that junk. I think we can get along without you in this house.”
“My house too,” Sue-Dan said sharply. “Maybe I want him here.”
“He won’t stay unless I ask him,” Cullee said tauntingly. “He wants me to ask him, don’t you, old roomy? Want Cullee to beg, right? Well, Cullee won’t beg. So get on out.”
“I want him to stay,” Sue-Dan said as LeGage made an angry gesture of protest but did not move from his chair. “You stay, ’Gage. We can make some plans for New York, once we get this white man out of here.” She gave a scornful laugh. “He’d pass right over, except he’s so black.”
“You going?” Cullee asked, feeling the old tension, the visceral clash of absolute wills, the excited combination of things, mental, emotional, physical, sexual, or what-have-you, that went back to Howard campus days. But he was unmoved and unshaken. He had always won in a showdown before, always. He was confident he would now.
Finally LeGage spoke.
“Think I’ll stay,” he said softly. The Congressman got up at once, stepped quickly to the closet, yanked his jacket off the hook, grabbed his overcoat, and turned to the door.
“Okay, I’ll go. You be good to each other, now, hear? Mighty fine bed upstairs if you want to use it, ’Gage. That little gal’s quite something when you get her in it. Be my guest.”
“That isn’t—” LeGage cried out, his face suddenly contorted with pain. “That isn’t what I—”
“I don’t care what you!” Cullee Hamilton shouted with an equal pain. “I just want to get away from both of you, that’s all, from both of you!”
But of course he knew, as he hurried to the garage, jumped in the Lincoln, and started blindly off in it, that this was not what he wanted at all, really. Not at all. But how could he go down their road, which led nowhere? How could he abandon the only thing that made sense to him, which was to try to be a responsible ambassador between the races, since he had been given the great honor of election to the Congress? How could he betray his own people, when he had it in his hands to do them more good his way than LeGage ever could in his?
“Always ragging me,” he said aloud as he turned into Sixteenth and started down across town to the State Department, “always tagging me!”
He caught a glimpse of his distraught face in the mirror and realized with a shock that his eyes were both miserably angry and filled with tears.
How many times, the Majority Leader wondered with an ironic inward sigh, had he faced that pugnacious, tousled old physiognomy across the desk, and how many times had he tried with all the desperate craft of a hard-pressed imagination to think of the right arguments with which to bring its owner around to what he desired? How many times had he succeeded, how many failed? He could no longer remember, the process had occurred so often during their long years of service together in the Senate. But one thing was certain: It was one of the things that had always made life interesting.
“Yes, sir,” he said aloud, “it has that.”
“What has what, Bob?” Senator Cooley inquired. “What are you talking to yourself about, Bob? Me?”
Senator Munson smiled.
“I was telling myself that trying to figure how to outfox you was one of the things that had always made life interesting for me here. Then I’d told myself, Yes, sir, it has that, and that’s when you began eavesdropping.”
“You always do it, Bob,” the senior Senator from South Carolina assured him. “You—always—do it! I try to hold firm to my principles, but you talk me around every time.”
“Unn-hunh,” the Majority Leader said. “Well. This time I’m not so sure about that, Seab. This time I’m plumb scared.”
“What do you have in mind, Bob?” Seab Cooley a
sked with growing interest, and the Majority Leader, because this time he had in mind something that would provoke his old friend as he knew few things could, continued to play it for chuckles.
“Oh, I thought you might like to be named Ambassador to Liberia. I thought maybe I could arrange it with the President, if you did.”
“Way things are going over there in that continent right now, best not send anybody but a black man any place there, Bob. Nobody but a black man can even get ashore, Bob, more’s the pity.”
“It would be an interesting experiment, though; you have to admit that. Especially,” he said, deciding to take the plunge, “since we need all the help we can get with that particular problem right now.” The reaction was exactly as he expected.
“Not from me,” Senator Cooley said firmly. “No, sir, Bob, not from me.”
“Yes,” the Majority Leader said. “I was afraid that might be your position, Seab. Nonetheless, I doubt if even the most optimistic observer would say everything was going right for us at the moment. You know the situation up there in the UN. Combined with the way the Russians are beating the propaganda drums about it, it’s not a pretty spot to be in. Something drastic may be required, it seems to me.”
“Somebody’s put you up to something, Bob,” Senator Cooley said. “Who is it, Bob, Orrin? And what does he want us to do, Bob, pay that little kinkajou twenty million dollars in sob-money? Is that it, Bob?”
The Majority Leader, confronted with the instinctive ability to guess close to the mark that comes to many an experienced veteran of politics, decided to play it straight.
“Yes, it’s Orrin. And you’re somewhere in his vicinity, though you’re overstating it a bit. He thinks it might be well for us to make some more formal amends than we’ve made so far. The form remains to be worked out. He wanted me to sound you out about it.”
“Do you agree with him, Bob? You don’t, do you, Bob? I can always tell when you don’t agree with what you find yourself asked to do. Why don’t those folks downtown ever leave you alone, Bob? Seems to me you’ve earned the right to be left alone, for a while.”
Senator Munson smiled, a trifle bleakly, but his tone was comfortable enough.
“Now, don’t try to pry me loose from my obligations, Seab. You know why I do these things. It’s habit—it’s custom—it’s duty—it’s my word. Nine times out of ten, it is also my honest conviction. Adding it all up, I really don’t have too much choice.”
“Except on the tenth time, Bob,” Seab Cooley said softly. “And this is a tenth time. You know it is, Bob. We’ve humbled ourselves enough, in this instance. We have to have some national pride, Bob, no matter what.”
“I agree with all you say, but Orrin makes a reasonably convincing case even so. You know Orrin’s pride for this country, Seab, and if he can see it this way, possibly there’s something in it.”
“Orrin’s a puzzle to me right now,” Senator Cooley confessed. “I can’t quite understand Orrin, at this moment. He’s not the Orrin we knew in the Senate. He’s weaker, it seems to me.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Senator Munson said thoughtfully. “He’s got a lot of new responsibilities now, and they change a man. I think he’s trying to do the best job he can as Secretary of State, and sometimes you can’t be as forceful as you’d like to be in that office. You have to pick your way more cautiously because the whole world depends on it, sometimes. It makes a man more hesitant, I’m afraid.”
“Just so a man doesn’t lose sight of what’s really best for the country, Bob. That’s what worries me about that office. I’ve seen them come and go, Bob, and you have too, and you know what can happen there, sometimes. A man can get to balancing so many things against so many other things that sometimes all he does is balance. He never does really move America forward; he’s too busy balancing, worrying about what this country’s going to say or that country’s going to think. Sometimes you have to go straight ahead and say damn them all, Bob. You know that.”
“I don’t really think there’s much danger that Orrin Knox won’t go straight ahead and say damn them all if he really feels it necessary, Seab. He hasn’t changed that much.”
“Then why doesn’t he say it now, Bob? We’ve done enough. Is he playing for the colored vote, Bob? That’s what I want to know. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt that will be the first thing some of our good friends of television, press, and radio will say if the background of it comes out, Seab. Orrin will be doing exactly what they want him to do, but that won’t stop anybody from impugning his motives … I’m not going to deny Orrin is a politician sometimes—not as good as you, of course, Seab, but no slouch—but I think in this instance it’s a little too pat to say that’s the chief motivation. I think he really believes the situation in the world is delicate enough to warrant what he has in mind.”
“It isn’t that delicate in terms of real power,” Senator Cooley remarked. “It’s only that delicate in terms of what people think.”
“And unfortunately,” Bob Munson said, “that’s the foundation the world seems to rest upon at the moment. That’s what makes the conduct of foreign policy such a slippery, uncertain, frustrating, infuriating thing. Do one little thing that somebody somewhere—anybody, anywhere—doesn’t like, and half the nations on the globe start cackling like a flock of silly geese. That’s their foreign policy: don’t do anything constructive yourself, just cackle at somebody else. That’ll bring you headlines and television coverage and a big, dynamic international image. It’s a heady thing for all these peoples that came late to the world’s attention.”
“Then why should we do it Bob?” Senator Cooley asked softly. “Seems kind of silly to oblige them, doesn’t it? Why don’t we just forget whatever it is Orrin wants, Bob, and go on about our business?”
“Because I said I’d give Orrin a fair chance. I didn’t promise I’d go along with him; in fact, I said I might not. But I said he’d have a fair chance with his idea. I want you to help me give him that chance, Seab.”
“I didn’t make him any promises,” Senator Cooley said gently. “Now, you know I didn’t, Bob. And of course you know the reality of it for me, Bob: I could no more be a party to humbling the United States to a colored man than I could commit murder, Bob. My people in South Carolina would never forgive me. Furthermore, there’s something else about it, too. You’ve lived here on the edge of the South long enough, you’ve known enough Southerners to know, Bob. It isn’t a matter of politics, with me. I really believe they aren’t competent and capable, Bob. I really believe the only way is to treat them decently but keep them in their place. I’ve never knowingly hurt a colored man in my life, Bob, and I never will. But look at Africa, if I have to have justification. It’s a tribal chaos pretending to be a civilization, Bob; dress it up all you like and say it isn’t so, but it still is so …” He stared out the Majority Leader’s window, down across the Mall to the Washington Monument and the rolling hills of Virginia lying russet and hazy in the autumn sun. “No, Bob,” he said softly, “it isn’t as though I have a choice. Each of us has to do as he believes. I’ve believed what I believe for seventy-six years, Bob. I can’t change now.”
“I know that, Seab,” the Majority Leader said in a tired tone, unhappy and saddened for all the peoples of earth who appear always to have no choice but to meet head-on upon the battlefields of their lifelong beliefs, “and I respect it. But the times are against you, the world has changed. You’ll only hurt yourself, and you won’t win. I think I can promise you that. You won’t win because you’re wrong. Not just politically wrong, in the context of our times, but fundamentally, morally wrong. Give it up, Seab. Make your formal protest, but don’t make a real fight of it. You’ll only get terribly hurt, and you can’t win.”
“Bob,” the senior Senator from South Carolina said gently, “I don’t make formal protests. When I fight, I fight. There’s honor in that, too, Bob, you know. That’s my kind of honor. Grant m
e that, at least, Bob.”
“I do, Seab,” Senator Munson said sadly. “I do, but I wish—”
“I’m not a wisher, Bob,” Senator Cooley said, getting slowly out of his chair and preparing to go. “That’s the trouble with the world right now—too much wishing. I fight, Bob. I don’t trim. You can tell Orrin.”
“Yes,” the Majority Leader said bleakly. “I’ll tell Orrin.”
In the luxurious penthouse atop the State Department Annex the Secretary awaited his three o’clock guest with some trepidation, uncertain exactly what tack to take to secure Cullee’s agreement for the project he had in mind, aware of many of the delicate considerations that surrounded it, wondering whether Cullee would be able to see and seize the opportunity offered him to serve his country in time of need. Orders had been left that he be shown up to the privacy of the penthouse, away from the formal offices downstairs, out of the often stultifying atmosphere of the Department itself, which Orrin found oppressive and tried to avoid as much as possible in his conduct of affairs. But atmosphere, of whatever kind, could only do so much. The rest depended upon men. He wondered what would come of their discussion now.
His eyes traveled across the white blocks of government buildings, the Potomac, Virginia, the lovely tree-filled city, and came at last to the Capitol sitting far and dominant upon the Hill. He was not quite used to this perspective yet. He had looked down from there upon the city for so long, and now he must look up to it, instead. There was not only an obvious symbolism here, there was also a tactical problem. His ties to the Congress were so strong that they were an instinctive, implicit part of his being; yet here he was in a position where he must deal with it, not as one of its most powerful and commanding insiders, but as an emissary from the Executive Branch, forced to rely upon argument and persuasion to secure the support he once could secure just by being Orrin Knox, with all that meant in power, influence, and personal authority. Now he was an office, not a man: the Secretary of State. It separated him from the sources of his power, put up a barrier, silken but distinct, between his colleagues and himself, forced him to rely upon subtler persuasions and gentler arguments. He studied the distant building on the Hill with an expression of naked longing on his face so pronounced that some of it still lingered when the private elevator arrived with a gentle thud, the door opened, and his visitor stepped out.