Promise of Joy

by Allen Drury

  “And all this they have done in the name of a spiteful and shallow cleverness, a snide, in-group superiority, an intellectual arrogance, which, take it all in all, has been the greatest combination of reaction, intolerance, unfairness, hypocritical suppression of opposing viewpoints and downright ruthless illiberalism ever foisted on a great nation.”

  (“Oh, come, now!” they hooted at the Post. “Hey, hey!” they chuckled at the Times. “Get you!”)

  “And, my friends,” he said quietly, “it has hurt. Make no mistake about it. It has hurt this country grievously in many areas. It has not been just an intellectual joke. It has been important. It has mattered.

  “So we come to this time of ultimate testing not the confident nation we should be, given the fantastic story of our beginning, our subsequent history and all the great and generous good that we have done in the world. For all our many faults, and I am the first to acknowledge them, we have nonetheless accomplished here miraculous things. Our thought manipulators should have accorded us the right to believe in them; they have not. They should be our pride and our strengthening; they are not. Because of the incessant attacks of some of our own people in influential position in the thought-controlling institutions of the country, we are uncertain of our heritage, crippled in our purposes, weakened in our ideals. It is a grievous burden, and a fearful responsibility rests upon those who have done it.

  “But—here we are. Someday there may be a redress of balance and a return of perspective, and we hope there will be. In the meantime, we have today’s situation and today’s demand, and to that we must address ourselves.

  “My friends,” he said, and again he looked straight into the cameras, “the situation in the heartland of Russia is obviously now moving toward some kind of climax. We do not know at the moment what this climax will be, nor do we know whether, if left alone, it would work itself out in the long run in a Chinese victory or a Russian victory.

  “We do know, or at least my advisers and I believe, that we cannot wait any longer to find out. We must place our weight where it will do the most good for threatened humanity.

  “Starting at eight this morning I conferred with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other advisers, including President Abbott and Mr. Justice Davis of the Supreme Court. We decided upon a plan of action.

  “That plan of action began when I began to speak to you. It is now under way with many methods in many areas. During the next forty-eight hours, in a carefully phased, step-by-step program, it will progress to what we hope, and believe, will be a termination of the war.

  “If we are right, we can begin to rebuild a sane and a better world.

  “If we are wrong, it will not matter either to history, or to us.

  “There are some of you, I am sure, who will greatly applaud what we are going to do. There are some of you who will violently condemn. To all of you I say:

  “Suppose you were the President of the United States of America, faced with war between Russia and China.

  “Suppose you had to make the decision to stay out or go in, and if your decision was to go in, who to help, and how to do it.

  “Suppose you carried the burden on your shoulders, not in a relaxed time of easy decisions, but right now.

  “Suppose you had my share of our joint responsibility to the world.

  “What would you do, my friends, you who applaud and you who condemn? How would you handle it?

  “Think about it.

  “Think about it!

  “And then move on, with tolerance, with understanding and with compassion, to join me in the job we have to do.

  “As I said to you before, when I addressed the Congress:

  “‘It may be that we will survive to put the world together again—or we may just as likely go down with it. It is all uncertainty, all conjecture, all dark and desperate, all filled with frightful peril for us all.

  “‘But we must be brave—and we must be strong—and we must look to our own defenses—and we must hold ourselves ready to help where we can—and we must pray.

  “‘The Lord has preserved us through many perils, for some purpose. We must be confident that He will continue to do so. I make no pretense to you whatsoever that it will be easy. But I call on you to join me in meeting whatever the future holds, with courage, with determination, with unity and with faith in ourselves, our traditions and our purposes.’

  “At noon our intervention began. Within forty-eight hours we will know whether it has succeeded, and whether peace can come.

  “I bid you farewell for now, not in pessimism or foreboding, but in courage and in hope. I commend to you the same positive approach.

  “We are doing the best we can, and we are doing it selflessly, generously and, we hope, helpfully for all mankind. The event rests in the hands of God, but you and I, his servants, bring to it the best that is in us. I am confident He will accept our offering, and to it give His blessing, and success.

  “God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

  “Until we meet again.”

  And the anthem thundered up, the flag rippled across the screen. Against it his tired but confident face looked out for a last impressive, calmly emphatic moment before it faded slowly away.

  For several moments, everywhere, there was silence. Typical of those who finally broke it were his friends of Supermedia.

  “Do you realize,” somebody asked in an awed voice at the Times, “that he never told us who we were intervening for, or how we are going to do it?”

  “That’s right,” somebody else agreed in an equally hushed tone at the Post. “He never did.”

  5

  Late that night, after the world’s response had poured in, turning gradually from initial dismay and condemnation of his deliberate vagueness to a more optimistic note as the outlines of the invasion plan became clear and its progress began to pick up speed and meet some small indications of success, he walked alone down the second-floor corridor to the elevator and went up to the solarium overlooking the Washington Monument, the Potomac, Tom Jefferson and Abe Lincoln in their softly lighted temples. He stood for a long time at the window.

  No pedestrians were on the streets, very few cars passed. Winter lay cold on the city.

  A tiny, cautious hope was beginning to come back into the world, but it still was a long way to spring.

  A long way to spring, and a long way to the point where he, his country and the world could really begin to plan for peace—if they could plan for peace. The enterprise appeared to be moving well in its opening stages, the first signs were good. But an infinite amount remained to be accomplished and there was enormous room for error still.

  At the moment, it was still entirely unclear whether his plan would really succeed or whether the whole world would be blown up in the wake of what could still turn out to be history’s most disastrous gamble.

  Yet he felt confident, perhaps because he really had no choice. Having set into motion the monstrous terrifying machine of a modern military enterprise, he must remain calm and ride Juggernaut to the end, hoping it would follow the paths to which he had directed it. There was nothing else to do now.

  Reviewing the final thinking that had gone into his decision, the thinking ratified after somber conference by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by Robert A. Leffingwell and Blair Hannah, by Bill Abbott and Tommy Davis and Bob Munson and Cullee and Ceil and Hal and the rest, he felt that he was justified in confidence. He had indeed done the best he could, and so had all he trusted and relied upon; and so they could commend the event to the hands of God and await its outcome with a fair serenity.

  He had been amused by the immediate reaction to his speech. Frantic indignation had shouted from every page, spouted from every broadcast. How could he do such a thing? How could he keep them guessing? How could he take refuge in such a cop-out?

  He had been tempted to tell them scathingly, “Shut your yapping mouths and wait a c
ouple of hours, and it will all come clear.” But he had restrained himself, and within a couple of hours it had come about as he could have told them. And so the chorus softened and began to change tentatively but increasingly in his favor.

  He was glad that he had given them that time in which to think, and he was glad he had put it to them squarely in his speech:

  Suppose you were the President of the United States of America, faced with war between Russia and China.

  Suppose you had to make the decision to stay out or go in, and if your decision was to go in, who to help, and how to do it.

  Suppose you carried the burden on your shoulders, not in a relaxed time of easy decisions, but right now.

  Suppose you had my share of our joint responsibility to the world.

  What would you do, my friends, you who applaud and you who condemn? How would you handle it?

  Think about it.

  Think about it!

  He wanted them to know that it wasn’t all that easy, and perhaps now they did, though he would not wager on their retaining the memory for very long.

  So it was going forward as he had planned it, intervention on his terms, where and in such manner as he thought would be successful. The event was indeed in the hands of God. And supposing it would succeed, as he believed likely, what then for his frightened country and the shaken world?

  He knew the answer.

  Infinite pains, infinite patience, infinite struggle and strain. Infinite labor that would have to go on for years, decades, possibly generations before it could be said that a truly stable peace had finally been achieved.

  And that, perhaps, was the key to it: the unceasing struggle, the fugitive joy, the recurrent pain, the endless, mostly heartbreaking endeavor.

  “‘Let us,’” Lafe Smith had said, quoting on a dark and dismal night, “‘wear upon our sleeves the crêpe of mourning for a civilization that held the promise of joy.’”

  The promise of joy.

  Not the easy certainty.

  Not the painless assurance.

  Not the comfortable guarantee.

  Just—the promise.

  That, perhaps, was all that the American experiment, all that any experiment in human governance that sprang from essentially decent motives, could hold out—the promise of joy. A promise always elusive, always fleeting, never quite captured, never quite achieved, here today, gone tomorrow, back again next day—if you kept working and hoping and struggling and, above all, if you never gave up. If you hung on and kept trying, all of you, unto the last generation.

  If his successors—for successors he still believed there would be—were strong, were determined, never lost sight of the essential goodness of the American experiment and the essential goodness of all other sincere and well-meaning peoples wherever they might reside on troubled Earth—then just possibly, somewhere far off beyond his lifetime and maybe far off beyond many other subsequent lifetimes, the promise of joy might sometime—somehow—someday—be kept for his country and for all mankind.

  But more likely that was all it was, or could ever be: a promise.

  A promise forever worth the seeking—but only a promise.

  All ye of faint heart and wavering will who seek the certainty of joy, he told them quietly in his mind, forget it.

  It does not exist.

  So the missiles and bombs and planes and submarines raced on through the winter night to keep their fateful appointments in the warring lands, over the oceans, over the continents, over the good, bad, decent, crafty, devious, straightforward, honest, dishonest, mean, generous, cruel, kindly, gentle, brutish races and nations of the globe, about to find out whether history still had a place for creatures so strangely composed of great ideals and unhappy compromise as they.

  October 1973—June 1974.

  ***

  Appendix

  Based on the Novel

  Allen Drury

  The lights go down, the curtain parts, the Saul Bass titles, complete with a disjointed Capitol dome and waving American flags, drift across the screen to muted martial music. This is the movie of Advise and Consent, and somewhere down toward the end of all the credits you are informed that it is “based on the novel” of the same name.

  If you happen to be the author, you can reflect with some satisfaction that the movie, in this film case, is based on your novel far more accurately and faithfully than most such transitions from the printed page to Hollywood. And you can also reflect, as a thousand memories of two fantastic and fascinating months come crowding back, on just what occurred when the words you wrote became transformed into lights and sets and camera-angles, and the highly individual interpretations of a forceful director and a cast of brilliant stars.

  On one level of memory, of course, there are the statistics. They are quite impressive:

  Budget, $3,000,000-plus.

  Total days of shooting, 47.

  Total hours of shooting, approximately 350.

  Total number of regular personnel of all categories, actors and technicians, approximately 500.

  Total number of extras, including some 2,500 of Washington’s most famous social figures, approximately 3,000.

  Total running time of the final product of all these dollars, all these days, all these hours, all these hard-working and dedicated people—two hours and 17 minutes.

  So goes the basic, facts-and-figures tale: but nobody, in all probability, ever regarded a movie—at least a good movie—as just facts and figures. Certainly no one could who has been involved in the making of it day-to-day and night-by-night for two months. The facts and figures are there. But the people keep getting in the way:

  Walter Pidgeon, regaling cast and company between takes with endless amusing tales of screen and stage. Charles Laughton and Lew Ayres, discussing painting in long, philosophic talks as the grips and electricians move about setting up lights for a coming scene. Gene Tierney, charming and gracious, obvious darling of all the many members of the company who have worked with her before. Former Senators Henry Fountain Ashurst of Arizona and Guy M. Gillette of Iowa, tickled to death with the chance to get back, even if only filmically, to the Senators they loved, running Miss Tierney a close second in the popularity race with everyone on the set. Don Murray, earnest and ambitious, busily making plans for his own productions as he works with an easy and effective skill in someone else’s. Lovely Inga Swenson, discussing her little boy … Henry Fonda, confiding with a grin concerning his own acting offspring, Jane, “It isn’t that I’m a weak father—it’s just that she’s a strong daughter!” … Franchot Tone, dry and witty, participating in a triumphal, police-escorted procession is through Washington to a dinner-date with the Bob Kennedys, remarking, “I guess I’m a simple soul—somehow I’m never quite at ease playing the police-siren type” … The director—always the director, around whom the world of a movie revolves by laws of motion as rigid as those that bind whirling satellites to their paths around the earth shouting in a ball-room scene, “Shadows, start shadowing!” or, in a Senate gallery scene, “You! You with the red hat: Were you wearing that red hat when we shot the scene yesterday?”

  And, of course, the delightful occasion when the director, hurrying to correct a famous actor and momentarily misspeaking his name, addressed him as “Mr. Laughton.”

  “Mr. Lawford,” the famous actor corrected him elaborately.

  “You should be honored!” the director snapped, bringing down the house.

  Looked at from this human perspective, the making of a movie becomes something far more than a few statistics; it becomes a study in human nature almost as detailed as a novel itself. (The similarity, indeed, prompts the same suggestion, at different times, from the director and the head cameraman. “You ought to write a novel about us,” the director says. “Hey,” says the head cameraman, “why don’t you put us in a novel?” You agree with them that only a novel, probably, could do it justice—even as you realize, now that you’ve had a little taste of it, that the H
ollywood novel hasn’t been written. Probably, you decide, because it couldn’t be.)

  In its early stages, you find that the process of making a movie rather resembles a piece of music, with the statement of its opening theme your book—and then the gradually accelerating pace by which it eventually becomes 500 regulars and 3,000 extras and a budget spiraling beyond the $3,000,000 mark.

  The process begins, many months ahead of the start of shooting, with contract negotiations in New York. These go on for many months, as you are solemnly assured by lawyers and agents that it really takes an infinite amount of time (and, presumably, infinite number of expense-account luncheons) to work out the details. Eventually there comes along from the Big City, presented to you at least on a frantic, hurry-up-and-sign basis (lawyers and agents don’t allow you quite the time they allow themselves, in these matters), the Contract. Acting on the advice of those you think you can trust, you accept it. The machine of a movie starts into motion.

  Your own first immediate contact with it comes in the form of a telephone call that afternoon from New York. The blunt, positive, heavily man accented voice you will presently come to know as well as you have ever known a voice, reaches cordially over the wire. He, Otto Preminger, has bought the movie rights to Advise and Consent, and he is looking forward eagerly to working with you. You say you are looking forward eagerly to working with him. There are promises to see each other soon, a warm glow of friendliness on both sides. Can this kindly soul be the Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang you have heard so much about? Perish the thought! It’s only Gentle Otto. Before long, Gentle Otto will begin to move rapidly toward the head of the list of most unforgettable characters you have ever met.