by Allen Drury
It shone upon the two flags, side by side everywhere, flying together from the top of the Capitol, snapping together around the inaugural stand, arranged on trees and lampposts, draping government buildings and private establishments, red-star-and-sickle, red-white-and-blue, red-star-and-sickle, red-white-and-blue, all down the Avenue and all along the main arteries of the city.
It shone upon the Russian jets, passing in perfect formation, back and forth and back and forth again, at regular three-minute intervals, over the cold, cold city.
The sun shone upon the Speaker of the House, increasingly nervous as the clock moved toward, and then beyond, 11:45 a.m. He didn’t know why, Jawbone confessed to his wife, but he jes’ had a little ole hunch things weren’t goin’ right, he jes’ didn’t know exactly what it was but he jes’ had a hunch. “Hooush!” Miss Bitty-Bug ordered, soft-voiced but vehement. “All these people goin’ hear you maunderin’ on like an old fool, Jawbone. You jes’ keep calm, now, and remember who you are. Ev’thang’s goin’ be all raight.”
The sun shone, too, upon the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, seated in his armchair to the right of the lectern, opposite the one awaiting the President, smiling and beaming and waving cheerfully to the crowd, which responded with applause and cheers each time he greeted them: applause and cheers that seemed a little forced, somehow, but this did not disturb him. He was used to that kind of applause in Russia, and he knew that his countrymen who had arrived with him to assist in the new arrangements with America were used to it, too. It would not bother them any more than it bothered him. The applause came on signal, did it not? Its nature did not matter. The fact of it was all that was necessary to satisfy the eyes of the watching world.
And the sun shone on the president pro tempore of the Senate, seated in the row behind, looking about him with an interested, satisfied, triumphant air he took no pains to conceal. Fred Van Ackerman was a happy man this day and he did not care who knew it. All was going according to schedule, and he saw no reason to complain about or fear the future, for he believed it to be his.
So the clock moved on toward noon—reached noon—passed noon; and presently, through all the crowd at the Capitol and all down the Avenue and all over the world where satellites carried the scene there began to run little questionings and murmurings. For there came up, from the snowbound city and the Avenue below no surge of welcoming shouts, no sound of advancing motors, no sirens of triumphal progress.
Instead a great hush seemed to be falling, and after a few minutes, as the hour moved on to 12:05, 12:10, 12:20, it seemed to have come down upon all the world. Here and there someone coughed nervously, a restless child cried out, a horse whinnied. Other than that, a vast and troubled stillness lay on the world as they waited, with growing uncertainty, for the President of the United States.
“Shall I step forward?” Jawbone finally whispered frantically to his wife. “Is he comin’ or i’n’t he? Oh, Lord, Bug, what shall I do?” And this time Bug could not advise.
In the clever mind of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers the obvious possibility of a trap occurred and was immediately dismissed. The Russian jets still continued their rhythmic fly-over every three minutes, Russian aircraft carriers and long-range missile submarines stood along the eastern seaboard from Boston to Baltimore, eight more subs were at anchor in the Potomac channel from Anacostia to Kennedy Center. At many other places around the periphery of the North American continent many trained fingers were poised to push many decisive buttons to send off many deadly greetings, should the need arise. There was no trap, Vasily Tashikov knew, though it could be that a certain annoying and embarrassing stubbornness had suddenly developed. Yet where could he turn, this naïve and thoroughly checkmated President who had delivered up his country? What good would stubbornness do now?
In the clever mind of the president pro tempore of the Senate, something nearer the truth suddenly occurred; and with it, a slow and contemptuous smile, as he contemplated what would be left, should his flash of intuition prove correct. Roger P. Croy, that simple-minded, old-fashioned liberal fool, would be child’s play to scare into resignation or a heart attack within a month. That would bring into the White House that other fool, Jawbone Swarthman, and he, too, would be child’s play to remove. And that left—
He swung about restlessly in his seat with a savagely satisfied smile that contrasted startlingly with the sober expressions that had developed all around him as the silence lengthened. As he did so he caught the eye of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, whose glance, inspired by some sudden intuitive hunch of his own, seemed to have sought him out. Impulsively Senator Van Ackerman clasped his hands, raised them to chest level where Tashikov could see them, gave the prize fighter’s self-congratulatory shake of triumph.
With a sudden look of comprehension the Chairman nodded, bowed and turned away as Fred smiled happily. The Senator from Wyoming had plans and now, more swiftly than he had thought possible, they were about to unfold for him. Like all the simple egomaniacs of history who have not been Communists but have thought they could use communism for their own ends, Fred was, temporarily, content.
So they waited for the President of the United States, whoever he might be; and presently, in a soft, secretive way that went unnoticed by anyone around him, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers also began to smile.
Fred Van Ackerman, savage child of a savage age, was not the only one who had plans. Nor was he the only one whom history would fool. For the Chairman, whose smile turned savage too before he removed it with a sudden furtive haste, did not know, of course—as men never really do know, however much they may believe they know it philosophically—that in due course his plans as well, and those of his strange, misruled, misguided country, would in their turn crumble into dust and be forgotten in the merciless, inexorable, implacable unwinding of time.
All, all had gone wrong for the President of the United States.
And not from evil intentions.
But from good intentions, foolishly applied.
And so America in her turn learned the lesson:
Great states are brought down, great nations are humbled, great dreams are destroyed.
It can happen here.
No one had ever really believed it.
Until now.
October 1971—February 1973
***
Appendix
The Dangerous Game of “Let’s Pretend”
By Allen Drury
The United States is in many ways the most powerful nation on earth. Its people enjoy a way of life which, despite shortcomings, gives them, generally, a more comfortable and rewarding society than that of any other people. Its supremely human form of government stumbles and blunders, yet has repeatedly proved—most recently in the smooth transition of power after the tragic murder of its President—to be one of the strongest, most stable governments history has ever known.
Yet there has developed in this land in recent years a grave and crippling hypnosis whose outward signs are easy words and comfortable slogans, a dangerous rationalizing, a determined glossing-over of unpleasant truths. It induces in those who suffer from it the fateful notion that, if you pretend long enough and hard enough that certain things are not so, they will miraculously become not so.
“Let’s Pretend” was once a game that children played. Now, unhappily, grown men play it, and even base upon it policies of great nations—thereby throwing away bit by bit the world of stable foundation they might have if they were honest enough to face the cold reality of the world as it is. This applies to almost every problem that confronts us.
From X to Z. Do we recognize, for instance, that a truly safe disarmament treaty requires adequate inspection? Why, of course we do. But see how it goes.
In Year A, we demand X number of inspections. Our opponent shouts, and says No. Instead of saying firmly, “We’re sorry, this is it,” in Year B we narrow the demand down to Y inspections. This doesn’t make ou
r opponent happy, either. So in Year C we reduce our position still further, to Z number of inspections. And presently, when it suits our opponent’s purposes to conclude in two weeks a nuclear test-ban treaty he has been deliberately holding up for seven years, we find ourselves—just as he has told us all along we would—down to no inspections.
The tragic thing about this performance is not that our resolution has failed us, not that we have given up the only sensible position, but that, in the process of becoming somewhat more unsafe, we have managed to convince ourselves we are still safe. We have managed, both as a people and as a government, to rationalize retreat into advance, defeat into victory. And by just so much have we moved further toward our opponent’s candidly declared objective—our own destruction as a free people.
Whittled Down. There is Southeast Asia. We know quite well that our position there is being whittled away. It is shaky in Laos, equivocal in South Vietnam, desperate in Cambodia. We know this. But we pretend it isn’t so. We pretend—and quite sincerely—that we are being staunch, standing firm, and that we will take a stand. The problem is that, by the time we do, the platform on which we take our stand may very well have been whittled down to nothing at all.
And there is Cuba. In our heart of hearts we know that the spectacle of a great nation accepting the lifting of a piece of tarpaulin on a ship at sea as proof of a pledge kept by a hostile power is a genuinely pathetic sight. But somehow we manage to convince ourselves that an opponent we know we cannot trust (for we have caught him secretively trying to put nuclear missiles in our backyard) has suddenly become trustworthy, that we were right to abandon our demand for the on-site UN inspection.
And in some fashion, we think, or we guess, that 3000—or 6000, or 10,000—Soviet troops have been removed. Eventually we come to believe this, and once again we have managed to convince ourselves that surrender of our position has made us stronger!
Nice people? Even more fundamentally, there is the nature of our opponent. We had in Dallas a graphic demonstration of what our opponent’s philosophy can do to a twisted mind grown sick upon it. Communism has been spreading hatred and violence for almost 50 years. Yet despite steadily mounting evidence of its nature, there have been many Americans, some in very influential positions, who have desperately pretended that the communist conspiracy is just a nice group of misguided people with whom we can get along if we keep treating them with decency—a decency they cannot understand and do not respect.
The record clearly shows that these are not nice people. They are not going to be persuaded by soft words and gentle approaches. They can be persuaded only by superior strength and the determination to use it if necessary—as President Kennedy proved in the initial showdown in Cuba. Yet there are Americans, even now, who pretend that if we just continue retreating before the communists we will, by moving backward, somehow move forward toward a genuine and stable peace.
So it goes in other matters. There is the United Nations. We know it is in desperate straits. We know we are probably the only power with sufficient dedication to it, and sufficient financial leverage upon it, to force a revision of its policies so that it can truly lead the world to peace. And yet, rather than face the facts, many of us pretend that, if we just claim vehemently enough that the UN is perfect, it will somehow become so.
Such is the American attitude, baffling to our allies, self-defeating to us.
Risk of War. There must sometimes come, for all of us, the staggering realization that our pretense of “Things are really going all right” just isn’t true. Why then do we do it? One reason is the wistful hope that all bad things will go away. A more fundamental reason is fear—the fear of having to do something about a given difficulty confronting the country, if you once admit candidly that it exists.
On many occasions in recent years, a familiar little drama has occurred. A Senator or a Representative or a member of the administration is under questioning by reporters on matters affecting foreign affairs. Sooner or later the guest advocates some strong course of action. Then: “Senator,” he is asked in a hushed, disbelieving tone of voice, “do you mean you would really do that, even at the risk of war?”
And such an awesome place does this question hold in the national legendry that nine times out of ten, instead of saying bluntly what his own intention and national integrity demand—which is “Yes!”—the legislator ducks and dodges and weasels and equivocates. His interrogator retires triumphant.
That “risk of war” is a favorite bugaboo, no one can deny. It gives great support and impetus to Let’s Pretend. But examine it for a moment.
War today is horrible beyond concept—at least the kind of war we all assume would come in a major showdown between the free world and the slave, obliterating in one fiery instant all that we hold dear. But does that make the principles of free men any less valid? If it does, then why don’t we give up right now? Why don’t we abandon the biggest pretense of all—that there is anything worthwhile in freedom, anything worth saving of this Republic which has been handed down to us to preserve and pass along? If we are so afraid of the consequences of being true to our heritage and our country, why not forget about it right now, and save all this wear and tear on the national budget and our own nervous systems?
To state the proposition thus is to demonstrate at once its absurdity. Of course we are not going to give up. Of course we are not going to abandon our principles and our country.
If we wish to keep this life—with all its liberties and freedoms—we must be prepared to give it up. If we wish to live, we must be ready to die. Only by being unafraid of war can we avoid war. And being unafraid of war does not mean feeling no worry or terror about it. The citizen who did not feel thus would be a fool indeed. It means being able to accept that fear and go on from there, with the courage expressed in a little-used verse of the national anthem: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just.”
Right Is Right. Of course, no sane person wants war. But, by the same token, we cannot let ourselves be bamboozled into believing that war is indeed the only alternative to surrender—that a firm, steady, unyielding, unbelligerent policy will lead inevitably to disaster. Almost more than anything else, we have to fear the idea that there is no way open to us, with all our power and infinite resources, to combat our opponent without bringing on all-out nuclear war—and that therefore we must close off discussion of other ideas and not try to develop them as cogently and effectively as we can.
The imperative first step in this latter process is to banish another contention, that there are no answers to the world’s major problems—that there are, to use the parrot-phrase, “no permanent solutions,” and we should, therefore, stop trying to find any. As with the fear of war, this argument can be used to paralyze all action and defeat all attempts at constructive thought. It can be used to justify doing nothing, particularly if what must be done carries with it the risk of war.
These two ideas are the most powerful weapons of today’s Do-Nothing party: those who say we can’t expect a solution to Berlin, or expect to eliminate the Soviets from Cuba, or stand firm for a truly safe disarmament treaty, or do anything, in fact, that entails any risk—because 1.) there are no permanent solutions, and 2.) it may mean war. If this policy is followed long enough, there will be one permanent solution—with or without war—the elimination of the United States as a free Republic and a factor in world affairs.
We must seek solutions as though we really mean to find them, because that is the job history has given us, however much we may wish it had not. It is the job of saving freedom, as we have saved it before and as we are going to save it now, for the simplest and most commanding of reasons—because what is right is right. If we are committed to the support of right, as the United States is by history, and by choice, then it does not matter how many horrors may be threatened or how many fearful weapons may be waved in our face by Nikita Khrushchev. We have to defend the right, and that is all there is to it.
If we do not, we lose all self-respect, all honor, all decency. We also, in this happy 20th century, lose our safety, our liberty, our democracy and our lives.
A Tide-Turn Moment. We must be brave enough to look at the world as it is, and do the things necessary to set it on a course that truly leads to peace. There were a couple of weeks in October 1962, for instance, when we were brave like this—but where has it gone now? Dissipated on the winds of a billion words, vanished down the hallways of timorous compromise and unnecessary concession. There was a Moment when we had the world united behind us—not just the free world but, one suspects, behind their jailers’ backs the peoples of the slave world as well—in the great hope that we had at last turned the tide and were really going to start leading the earth up the long hill toward sanity and peace.
But we took one step—and stopped, at the moment when we had our opponent on the run, at the moment when we should have insisted, calmly but with absolute firmness, that unless UN inspection in Cuba was started at once, we were coming in … that unless Soviet troops were removed at once, we were coming in … that unless a revision of positions all around the world was undertaken, we were coming in. We stopped. And now, of course, when such proposals are made, there comes the cry, “You don’t want a war, do you?”
Well, right now, of course, there voices may be right. The world’s support has been lost, the hemisphere’s support has been fragmented, the Soviet Union, having tested us with lifted tarpaulins and solemn promises, has concluded that the United States was once again just talking big. To insist upon these things in Cuba, as of this moment, might mean war.
But we should not forget, for these international crises are matters of timing, that if that October’s moment had been seized and made the most of, we would really have turned the tide. We let the chance slip. But who knows when such a moment may come again?