by Allen Drury
“It’s my curse,” the Vice President agreed. “I try and I try, but there you are. Good night, you-all.”
And to the chorus of their farewells the door closed, the room fell silent, the President of the United States of America looked long and thoughtfully at his Vice President, who looked thoughtfully and earnestly back. Presently Orrin smiled.
“Never a dull moment, is there?”
“No, sir,” Cullee said softly, “there sure isn’t. Are we going in?”
“I said we weren’t,” he reminded sharply. Then his expression changed to one of honest admission of the facts. “I shall do my level best to keep us out. I pray I can succeed. If, however, the lemmings are determined to plunge over the edge, I may find myself forced to yield.”
“On the Russian side?”
He sighed.
“Cullee, I am damned if I know, and that’s the truth. They don’t deserve it, and certainly they don’t deserve it on the basis of the sleazy reason put forward by little Mr. Van Ackerman and already echoed by so many upstanding and righteous citizens in Congress and elsewhere. Certainly not on the basis of ‘the Yellow Peril.’ On the basis of the balance of power, which is evidently the only way even the slightest vestige of peace can ever be maintained by selfish, imperfect and greedy humanity, then perhaps there is an argument. But,” he added quickly, “I am not in any way committing myself to that. I’m not committing myself to anything. I’m sitting tight and waiting to see how long the furor lasts and whether it is really going to be sufficient to force my hand.”
“It’s getting stronger,” Cullee said unhappily. “That was a hell of a debate and there’ll be another today. The chances of that resolution going through are increasing by the minute.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—two things, actually. The first is that the chances of my being assassinated, which have never been exactly minimal, have now gone up a thousandfold with NAWAC back in the field and the anti-neutrality hysteria mounting. The amalgamated kooks of the land have their favorite target back again, now: I was a hero for a little while, but no more. And not only the kooks, but those who view murder as an extension of politics, as well.
“Somewhere here—where is it?” He riffled through the mass of papers on the desk. “Here it is—I have just received the official report of the commission investigating Harley Hudson’s death, Ted Jason’s death and—and Beth’s death. Starting with Harley, it was a thoroughly well-organized plan to change the succession of power in this country in favor of the old Soviet Union. If I hadn’t escaped at the Monument by some fluke of fate, it might very well have succeeded. As it was, it cost the deaths of a President, a possible future President and my wife. The old Soviet Union isn’t here anymore, the matter is relatively moot for the time being and I’m not going to release it until enough time has passed to give a little historical perspective—but there it is. The same elements that were devoted to Communism are still in NAWAC and are still, I have no doubt, devoted to Russia itself. Therefore, they’ll be after me. Add to them the hysteric, the paranoiac, the unbalanced, the erratic who flock to any cause and who now have the biggest cause in history to throw them off base, and you have odds that would give any insurance company pause.
“And that, my boy, is where you come in.”
For a moment the handsome black face before him looked bleak and stricken. Then the Vice President shrugged and managed a smile.
“It goes with the oath of office. I’m ready. Although I wouldn’t be honest”—the smile grew a little—“if I didn’t say I hope to hell you live, Mr. President. I don’t want this mess!”
“It is one, isn’t it?” he agreed somberly. “It is the mess to end all messes.… Well, good: I was sure you weren’t afraid of it, but it’s good to hear you say so.”
“What’s to be afraid of?” Cullee inquired. “I’m here—you’re here—we have the job to do. If you go, I take it, that’s all. You got me into it—with my willing cooperation—and it can’t be helped.” The smile grew broader. “I’d sure pray a hell of a lot, though.”
“Don’t think I’m not.”
“We’re all praying with you,” Cullee said. “And for you.” … The moment ended, his tone turned matter-of-fact. “What was the second thing you wanted to talk about?”
The President gave him a shrewd, appraising look and spoke with the bluntness characteristic when he faced an awkward subject.
“Race. Color. ‘The Yellow Peril,’ which for many whites, by implication and extension, is the peril of all skins that aren’t white … and whether a black Vice President feels strongly enough about the attempt to make race the fulcrum for intervention so that he will come to my assistance and attack it for me.”
It was Cullee’s turn to give him an appraising look.
“When I first got to know you,” he said finally in a slow and thoughtful voice, “I was suspicious, as a lot of people were, of the ‘conservative Orrin’ stereotype. I thought it applied, much more than it did, to practically everything that came along, domestic or foreign. Being black, I was extra touchy on that subject and extra anxious to find signs that you were racist and hostile. Well, before long I found, as any honest man would find, that conservative old Orrin wasn’t all that conservative, either domestically, in foreign affairs or on the subject of race. I realized he was a human being just like everybody else, pretty middle-of-the-road, and on some things, in fact, much more liberal,’ whatever that means, than his ‘liberal’ critics gave him credit for.” He smiled. “I really quite got to like the guy. In fact, I became a respecter, an admirer and a believer. Then we had that long talk when you were Secretary of State, before Seab Cooley died, and that did it. I enlisted for the duration, and here I am. So what do you want me to do?”
“Say something from the chair tomorrow noon, and make it as strong as you can. It will upset the Senate, because they regard the Vice President as the President’s agent, rightly or wrongly, and they don’t like him to get too involved. But on the other hand, this is an upsetting time and I guess we can take the flak—I guess we don’t have much choice. I don’t think the resolution is going through either house by anywhere near the margin Arly thinks. I have too much faith in the basic decency of the American people—perhaps falsely,” he interjected ironically, “but there it is. But it is going to be very tight, and I feel that you really have almost a duty to speak out—not necessarily a duty to me, though I appreciate very much what you say about me, but to your own race and to the general concept of this country as a basically decent and hopeful place. Will you do it?”
Cullee looked relieved.
“I’ve been wanting to, but I was waiting until you were ready to ask me.”
“I’m asking.”
“With pleasure,” the Vice President said. A sudden scowl crossed his face. “I suppose that bastard Van Ackerman will come out of this stronger than ever.”
“If any of us comes out of it,” the President said, “he may. I’m surprised LeGage is sticking with him on this, though.”
“Maybe I’ll talk to him, too,” Cullee said, scowl deepening. “He needs it.”
“I’m really surprised he hasn’t split from NAWAC over the race issue,” the President said. The Vice President smiled.
“I said I’ll talk to him,” he repeated. The smile faded. “It probably won’t be easy, the hard-nosed bastard, but I’ll try.”
It was, however, much easier than he had thought it would be, when, fifteen minutes later, his chauffeur drove him into the grounds of the Vice President’s official residence at the Naval Observatory up Massachusetts Avenue. Lights were on in the house, and in the drive he saw the sleek and highly expensive sports car that the chairman of DEFY managed to maintain with the aid of the dues of his organization’s many humble and earnest members.
Cullee’s mouth set in a thin line. The good feeling he had carried from the White House after his cordial and affectionate good-night from the President vanished.
He entered the house prepared for battle.
Surprisingly, it did not come. ’Gage was cold sober and in a cold rage, but for once it was not directed against Cullee and all the old twisted jealousies that Cullee’s successes as a man and as a public servant had so often aroused in ’Gage’s seething mind and volatile heart. It was directed against exactly the man Cullee and the President wanted it to be.
LeGage, too, it seemed, had been as startled and angered as Cullee by Fred’s arrant appeal to racism. He, too, had seen the implicit transition Bill Abbott had perceived, from fear of “the Yellow Peril” to fear of “the black peril,” in the minds of their more frightened and intolerant white countrymen. He, too, had been dismayed, frightened and infuriated. And he, too, had come to ask Cullee to speak out.
“Now, why,” the Vice President asked slowly, “should I do that? Why do you want me to help old Orrin out of this mess? After all, you didn’t think so much of old Orrin lately, as I recall. Why shouldn’t I just play it cool and stand to one side while the whiteys fight it out? Why should I get involved?”
“Because Orrin Knox is right!” LeGage exclaimed with an impatient anger.
“Right on staying out?” Cullee inquired in the same slow and quizzical tone.
“Right on race!”
“W-e-e-ll,” Cullee said with a deliberately infuriating slowness, “I … don’t … know.…”
“Oh, stop it!” LeGage exclaimed, angrily and not entirely consistently. “There’s no comparison between Orrin Knox and Fred Van Ackerman! That dirty bastard never consulted me, did you know that? I may just leave him, yet—I may just quit NAWAC and take my people with me. I may!”
“If you’ll do that,” Cullee said quickly, “I’ll speak in the Senate this afternoon and be as tough as I know how.”
LeGage studied him carefully for a second. A grim little smile touched his lips.
“Let me work on him first,” he suggested softly. “Maybe we can scare him out of it.”
“And you can stay in NAWAC and have your cake and eat it, too,” the Vice President said. “Oh, no.”
“You don’t understand,” LeGage said sharply. “That dirty bastard never consulted me. He never did.”
“And if he had,” Cullee said in the indifferent tone with which he could always upset ’Gage, “you would still have gone right along with him and tried to get us in on Russia’s side, anyway. That’s what NAWAC’s always been about, boy, isn’t it?”
“He’s using race,” LeGage said stubbornly, for once not rising to the bait, “and when he uses race—any kind of race, boy—he’s attacking you and me. And you know it as well as I do.”
“Okay, so I’m going to attack him.”
“And I’m going to talk to him!”
“Make it fast,” the Vice President suggested, “because it’s two a.m. now and I’m going to be speaking in the Senate in just about ten hours.”
“All right, I will!” LeGage cried angrily.
“Let me know how you make out, boy,” Cullee urged in a kindly way. “Lots of luck.”
And satisfied, when LeGage stormed out of the house five minutes later, that he had programmed him sufficiently for the target, he spent another half hour making notes for his speech to the Senate and then went up to Sarah, and bed.
“The Post” said the Post when it reached the streets three hours later, “has never knowingly condoned, or approved, or participated in, anything that even remotely smacked of racism.
“Nor will we now.
“Nor will we ever.
“Race as a reason for intervening on the side of Russia against China in the terrible new battles in Asia is a vicious argument that all responsible Americans, all who value their country’s traditional decencies, must abhor and reject.
“We cannot state strongly enough our eternal opposition to the attempt to portray the current controversy as a contest between the white and yellow races, and to use that as an argument to intervene on behalf of the white race.
“It seems to us, however, that there are other grounds—still not decisive, still not entirely valid, no doubt subject to change at any moment as the tide of battle flows—upon which it might be possible for the United States of America to exercise a restraining, and probably decisive, influence upon the war.
“The first reason for intervention, of course, is that it would almost certainly end the war at once, which is something all sane men in the entire world desire. If done as its Congressional proponents conceive it—a ‘surgical strike,’ swiftly and antiseptically administered for the sole purpose of ending the war—it would carry its own justification.
“The second reason for intervention (while we do not for one moment accept the idea of one ‘culture’ being superior to another) is that it is true that Russia does, generally, represent the European tradition, the European way of looking at things, the whole complex of ideas, ideals, emotions that we have come to lump, historically and sentimentally, under the general label ‘Western Civilization.’
“The third reason for intervention is that the Chinese, while in many ways an admirable people who in recent years have accomplished much, still do undeniably spring from a background, a tradition, a history which is uniquely and specially ‘Eastern’ and essentially much different from ours.
“China is—and it does no good to blink the fact—an alien country.
“Alien to our history, alien to our thinking, alien to our ways.
“Therefore, given Point One—that our intervention would almost certainly be decisive—the question arises, would we wish to make our intervention on the side of the culture that is traditionally and in every other way closest to ours, or do we wish to cast our lot with a nation—if one can call such an amorphous and unwieldy aggregation of disparate peoples ‘a nation’—which is entirely alien (and, in essence, actively hostile) to everything in which we have always believed, and for which we have always stood?
“The issue is now before Congress in clear-cut form. We urge all Americans to consider most prayerfully which course they would like their government to take, and to so advise all of their public servants, from White House to Hill, who have anything to do with making the decision.…”
“The Times” said the Times, “has already rejected, totally, completely and beyond any slightest implication of doubt, the racist argument for intervention in the Asiatic war put forward by ex-Senator Fred Van Ackerman.
“We are pleased to see that the brief resolution of support for Russia now pending in both houses of the Congress nowhere rests its argument upon such an evil and reactionary foundation.
“Rather, it places the issue where we believe it belongs—between two ways of life which have traditionally always been at odds and alien to one another—the ‘East,’ to use a term of easy reference, and the ‘West.’
“That America does, in fact and in truth, belong to the ‘West,’ and that nine-tenths of all those nations and peoples with whom we have always felt kinship and sympathy also belong to it, cannot be denied.
“That Russia, although to some degree bridging East and West in her Asiatic reaches, also belongs to it cannot be denied.
“That China definitely does not belong to it, with equal emphasis cannot be denied.
“Therefore, Americans have much more than race to support their arguments for possible intervention—if, indeed, intervention in so dreadful a conflict should be desired by the majority.
“There is the fact that it is a contest between a tradition and culture essentially like our own, and a tradition and culture essentially different from and alien to our own.
“There is the fact that American intervention can almost certainly end the conflict completely, efficiently and at once. Particularly would this be so if it were done as the ‘surgical strike’ its proponents in Congress envisage: quickly in and quickly out, for the decisive and worthy purpose of ending the war.
“There is the fact that intervention, if used at all, would logically
seem best justified and best employed on behalf of the side which is traditionally ‘ours,’ rather than the one traditionally hostile to us.
“The resolution embodying this belief is now before the Congress. We do not yet join those who say America must intervene. But for all those Americans—and surely they are nearly all of us—who are at the moment prayerfully and earnestly studying the situation, we commend the resolution as a point from which to approach a decision which, while tremendously painful, may yet prove to be both necessary and inevitable.…”
“Here in this city of great issues and great tensions but not always great men,” Walter Dobius wrote rapidly at lovely “Salubria” buried in the snow, “the leaders of America are about to come to grips with the most fateful questions in American history: shall this nation intervene in atomic war in Asia, and if so, on whose side and for what purposes?
“Hourly, indeed almost momentarily, the conclusion is being reached in many powerful minds and hearts that yes, we may yet have to intervene if the Russian forces continue to be pushed back by the innumerable millions of Chinese who are now flooding forward in a great death tide, blinded to everything but the grim determination to crush the hated enemy.
“And if we find that we must intervene, then the second question becomes all-important: on whose side shall it be, and for what purposes?
“Intervention in atomic war is something so terrifying and abhorrent that only the most compelling of reasons should prompt our action. Yet it is not, as has already been brought out in Congressional debate, an absolutely fatal and final act. Rather, to use the term first proposed by Senate Majority Leader Richardson, it can be a ‘surgical strike,’ quickly and efficiently done. Indeed, it would have to be: anything else would be catastrophic. Its principal purpose would be to end the war.
“No more worthy purpose, possibly no more compelling purpose, could be found.
“Yet there is, in the minds of many here, a second purpose, almost as compelling as the first: the fact that the Russians, for all their sometimes difficult and prickly ways, are nonetheless in essence ‘people like us’—and that the Chinese, for all their praiseworthy efforts to improve their sorry lot in recent years, are not.