by Allen Drury
“And now it’s come. So what do I do, Tommy?”
“I don’t know,” the little Justice said, “I honestly do not, Orrin. But I do say this to you: as far as I am concerned—and I like to think you will find this true of most of those I think of as genuine liberals, as distinct from the ‘phony’ or ‘professional’ liberals who dominate so much of our thinking nowadays with their automatic blind reactions to things—as far as I am concerned, I shall support whatever you do loyally and affirmatively and with genuine acceptance, because you are my President, doing the best you can, and I think I owe you and my country that.”
“Well, thank you, Tommy,” he said, genuinely moved. “I warn you, I may take you up on that. That informal ‘war council’ I was thinking about a while back may become a very necessary reality at any moment. I may need you right here beside me.”
“I shall be there,” Justice Davis said. “In the meantime, if you want a statement from me supporting your decision—whatever it is—you will have it.”
“Good,” he said. “Sometime in the next twenty-four hours. You’ll know when.”
“Fine,” the little Justice said. “Count on me. And, Orrin—Mr. President: God bless you, and do be of good heart. There is great strength in this country still. It won’t let you down.”
“If I didn’t believe that, Tommy,” he said simply, “I literally could not go on. Good night, old friend. Thanks for your call.”
“Not at all,” said Justice Davis with a quaintly old-fashioned dignity. “I should be a poor friend indeed if I could not give comfort when it is needed.”
And comforted he was, he thought as he left the Oval Office and walked slowly, past the respectfully watching guards whose faces, worn like all faces by the strain of these days, brightened a little as he passed, to the Mansion. Comforted by old friends, comforted by a faith as basic as Tommy’s in the good heart of the country, comforted by faith in himself and comforted by the Lord, though he did not spend too much time directly addressing Him. Like many pragmatic people, the President had a basic feeling that the Lord would be there when he needed Him, and usually, he had found, the Lord was.
He knew he must touch base with three more people, and then he would reach the decision which he now knew to be very close. He paused before a door some distance down the second-floor hallway from his and rapped gently a couple of times.
“Yes?” Hal called promptly. “Is that you, Dad? Come in.”
“If you aren’t asleep—”
“Asleep!” Hal said, opening the door. “Is anybody in the world asleep tonight?”
“I suppose not,” he said, entering to be greeted with a kiss from Crystal. Both were in robes, a fire was burning brightly in the grate, a tray with milk, cake and cookies was on an ottoman. Facing their two chairs, a television set chattered urgently on. He caught a glimpse, photographed from a plane high up, of a long, dark column winding, winding, with a certain inexorable, implacable slowness, across a frozen waste. With a sudden, almost harsh movement, he stepped over and snapped it off.
“Do you mind? I want to talk.”
“Sure,” Hal said easily. “We’ve had enough for a while, ourselves. It doesn’t change: they just keep coming along.” He drew up a chair to face theirs. “Want something to eat? The kitchen sent up a pretty good supply.”
“I will, thanks,” he said, helping himself to a piece of cake and a glass of milk and settling into the chair.
They watched him with an affectionately attentive concern while he ate. He looked, they thought, very tired, but, in some almost indefinable way, less tense than when they had seen him briefly at breakfast that morning. Hal, who knew his father, voiced the conclusion he drew from this.
“You’ve decided, and you want to bounce it off us and see what we think.”
He smiled.
“Not quite decided yet, but close.” The smile faded. “God help me if I’m wrong.”
“Who’s to say now what’s right or wrong?” Hal inquired moodily. “Only history will be able to tell us that someday—if there is any. Basically, I would guess you’ve decided we’re going in.”
“What makes you think that?” he inquired with some sharpness.
“Because I know you,” his son said. “You’ve given nonintervention the old school try and done your best with it, but events have caught up with you and now you feel you must move one way or the other. Right?”
For a moment he contemplated bluff, then abandoned it: Hal did know him.
“Essentially,” he said. Crystal leaned forward.
“Why?” she asked earnestly, not reproving, just asking. “Before the war broke out, when you were facing the Russians and Chinese in Panama and Gorotoland, you held out against the Congress, the media, a lot of the country, most of the world. You were adamant. We were kidnapped”—and her eyes darkened for a second at the memory, and so did his—“and still you were adamant. Now you’ve held out for a while—but you aren’t going to hold out any longer. I don’t question your decision, because you have many more facts than I do. I’m just curious, as many people are going to be. Why?”
“That’s a fair question,” he said slowly, “and no one has a better right to ask. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I feel you deserve an explanation, and I also want to clarify my own thinking about it.…”
He paused, thinking back to an hour ago, when, almost casually, he had conceded to Bill Abbott that the policy he had defended so vigorously up to now would have to be abandoned.
Why had the concession been so quick and so casual?
Because the situation had changed … and because he had known, subconsciously perhaps for days, that he was going to have to change with it.
It was as simple as that.
The problem remaining was to state it in terms objective enough and convincing enough so that the country and the world would understand and accept what he was now beginning to perceive as his only possible course.
He looked at the two earnest young faces before him. All right, here was the world: make them understand.
With a little affectionate smile at their solemn expressions, he began to do so, fumblingly at first, then with increasing fluency as he proceeded, selecting, rejecting, polishing, perfecting—writing the speech which now was inevitable.
When he had concluded some twenty minutes later, Hal gave him a glance as straight and uncompromising as his own.
“That clarifies that decision. Now what about the other one?”
“What’s that?”
His son smiled.
“Don’t be innocent. Who are we backing, the slippery Slav or the heathen Chinee?”
“Now, that,” he replied lightly, “is my secret.” But when he saw their expressions, a little amused but basically disturbed, disappointed, somewhat crestfallen at his almost flippant tone, he dropped it and spoke with complete seriousness.
“In due time … in due time.” His tone became lighter again. “I have to hold back some secrets, otherwise you kids wouldn’t listen, you’d have heard it all. Isn’t that right?”
“We’ll listen,” Hal promised, knowing he wouldn’t get farther by pressing. “You’d better get to bed and get some sleep. You’ve got a busy day ahead. And”—he looked much older than his twenty-seven years for a second—“so have we all.”
“Yes,” he said gravely, kissing Crystal good night. “Sleep well, you two, and I shall try to do likewise.”
In the Lincoln Bedroom as he began methodically preparing to retire, he spoke to the last and final arbiter, whose picture smiled at him from a dozen places in the room, as young girl, fiancée, mother, political partner, encourager, comforter, adviser, friend.
You see, he told her, here is Orrin Knox being inconsistent again—or consistent, I don’t quite know which. He says one thing—he means it. He changes his mind—he means it. He defies circumstance—he means it. He yields to circumstance—he means it.
I guess the old boy is pretty human, a
fter all.
But, he said almost defensively, though he knew that he never really had to defend himself to her, in one thing he has always been consistent, and that is his desire to serve his country. It has been a curiously old-fashioned desire, maybe, in an age when the tricky win power and the sly abuse it. A curiously old-fashioned thing, that Orrin Knox should have basically no other aim than to do the best he knows how for his people and for all the other peoples whose destinies the destiny of his people might affect.…
Now the test had come, as it had so often, but never in such cataclysmic, imperative form: was that basic principle enough to guide him through the morass he faced? Because if it was not, then the world would quite literally end—or survive in such awful disarray that it would literally be generations, perhaps centuries, before it could ever put itself together again in any semblance of recognizable order.
Maybe good will, good faith, good heart, sincere, compassionate and idealistic purpose, were not enough. Millions had possessed them, since history began, and look where it had all brought the world at this moment: to an almost insoluble tangle of desires, ambitions, motivations—hopes, fears, loves—terrible, unyielding hatreds … to monstrous dealings between man and man and between nation and nation … to atomic war.
Millions before him had wanted to make the lot of mankind better.
Millions, also, had not.
It appeared that history might very well be about to render final judgment that the millions who wished mankind ill were the final winners, bringing all down with them in one last spasm of hate that would leave the world an empty sphere, drifting lifeless in the universe.
And against that judgment stood Orrin Knox and many other good men—still, he believed, the majority.
But he was the one to whom history, in its inescapable way, had given the final chance. He would have the support of the majority if he proved to be right. But it was not the majority who must make the decision, deliver the speech, push the button or not push it as some last inspired gleam of inspiration might advise.
It was Orrin Knox, President of the United States of America, alone at the pinnacle, alone in the vortex.
Hank, he told her simply, I wish you were with me now.
But she was not, and so he told her:
I will do my best.
And after three final telephone calls, went quickly to sleep, comforted in the final knowledge that she knew this, and supported him, and understood, as always.
At 1 a.m. a bleary-eyed and exhausted press secretary called together the bleary-eyed, exhausted night watch of the media, who were now on around-the-clock vigil at the White House, and gave them the morning headlines:
President to meet with military advisers at 8 a.m., address nation from White House at noon.
Intervention decision expected.
4
“My Countrymen,” said and perhaps for the last time—who knew what would happen, who could say?—America and the world quieted down to hear a President of the United States.
“I speak to you today at perhaps the gravest moment in the history of the world.
“Atomic war is raging in Asia, pushing toward Europe. A massive Chinese onslaught, undertaken without regard to human life or the restraints of caution that normally condition nations, is striking deep into the Russian heartland. One Russian government, unable to stem the tide, has gone down. A new one fights on, but who knows for how long or with what success? The sheer massed weight of eight hundred million Chinese is being hurled against the enemy. Devastated cities, atomic blows, deaths in the millions, are apparently meaningless when there exists such an overwhelming mass of humanity to draw upon. It is awesome, and it is terrifying.
“It does indeed seem, as many in the Congress believe and as many millions of you agree, that there will be no stopping the Chinese drive—that it will sweep over Russia, and then, carried perhaps simply by its own momentum, will continue on into Europe; and then, eventually, will turn to the Pacific and so, in time, to our own shores.
“Inspired by this fear, the Congress passed a resolution urging that America intervene on the side of the Russians. As you know, I vetoed that resolution. I did so because I believed that the best course for us was to stay out, to preserve our own strength, to stand ready to mediate, to pacify and ultimately to help rebuild.
“I still think that this could have been a viable policy.”
(‘“Could have been’!” they exulted at the Post: “We’re going in!” “Now we’re getting somewhere!” they jubilated at the Times. “Bless that foolish bastard, Orrin Knox!”)
“However,” he said gravely, “events have moved past that point. With the fall of the Shulatov government in Russia and the apparent rising Chinese determination to push the issue to a final conclusion as rapidly as possible, a new set of circumstances prevails.
“This is no less than the very real possibility of a complete rearrangement of the balance of power in the world. Despite the wishful thinking of recent years in our own liberal community, balance of power is the only practical way to keep the peace because it is the only method that takes into account the endless deviousness and boundless treachery of the human animal.
“Men try to be good, but far too many of them are not good. They need restraints, particularly when they organize into nations. They have to be made to behave, otherwise they do not behave. They can love you on Monday and kill you on Tuesday. And unless they know that they will be punished when they break the law, they will break it with impunity. And if they are men acting as nations, when they break the law they have the capacity to bring down the world, as witness what is going on at this very moment.
“For this reason I have concluded, reluctantly but I think realistically, that the situation has now deteriorated to the point where the United States of America, as the sole remaining uncommitted major power, has a duty to see to it that balance is restored.
“I do not say this because I am afraid of any ‘Yellow Peril’ from China, or because I am afraid of any ‘alien culture’ there. The Chinese nation is an ancient and honorable one, with aspects of great culture far antedating the great majority of the Western nations, including our own. I respect the Chinese history, the Chinese people and the Chinese culture. I do not respect the present Chinese vindictiveness toward Russia which is destroying both countries and which will lead, unless stopped, to the ultimate catastrophe for us all. The same applies, of course, to the Russian vindictiveness toward China, which they must bitterly regret, now that it is too late.
“That, too, must, for the sake of mankind, be stopped.
“It is solely on those factors that I base my decision. It is not based in any way, I hasten to add, on any great admiration or love for the Russian nation, which in recent decades has been the world’s greatest troublemaker, its greatest deliberate saboteur, its most vicious, most ruthless and most unprincipled imperial power.
“Nothing it has done in recent decades gives it any right to expect anything from the United States of America. We would be entirely justified in sitting back and letting it be destroyed—were it not that if we did so, even greater troubles would probably ensue for all mankind.
“I am quite sure that satisfied abandonment would be all that we could expect from Russia were the roles reversed. But America still has, I think, sufficient conscience and sufficient responsibility so that it cannot indulge itself in that pleasure. We, at least, have some continuing concept of responsibility to the world—imperfect as it may be, and imperfectly as we may have expressed it on many occasions, as our good friends abroad always make sure to tell us.
“We possess some demon that will not let us sit by. And for that demon, the world can thank God, for it has brought the world a lot of headaches but it has also rescued the world from many troubles.
“And while I am discussing Russia and China,” he said, and his tone turned a little sharper and his head came up and he looked straight into the eyes of his countrymen, “I
think there are a few things to be said about America, too—since we’re getting right down to cases here, and since no one knows whether intervention as my advisers and I have conceived it will work or not work, and no one knows whether we will all be here tomorrow morning or not.…”
(A ghostly humor flickered across the nation. In spite of the situation no one could quite believe he meant this, though of course he did, absolutely.)
“America has not been so perfect, either, in these recent years.
“We have had an intellectual community, dominated by certain influential sections of the media, which has consistently denigrated, downgraded, vilified and sabotaged every worthwhile impulse and effort of its own country. Certain influential members of the academic world have eagerly gone along with this, where they have not directly inspired it. At their hands our history has been sneered at, our principles have been attacked, our society has been condemned, the basic good heart and innocent good will of the great majority of our people have been made the mockery and the destructive target of the arch know-it-alls who presume to control our thinking.
“And they have, my friends: they have. Through the schools they have turned out two generations, now, of whom a great many think very little of their country because they have been taught to think very little of it. Through the courts they have engaged in a steady campaign to weaken, destroy and subvert the laws necessary to maintain in our own society the same balance and order that must be maintained in the world, if both the world and our society are to survive. Through a certain intellectually fashionable segment of the churches, they have steadily and implacably chipped away at all those moral standards and guidelines by which sensible men, however weakly, imperfectly and humanly they may fail to measure up to them, still try to conduct society’s business, for society’s sake.