(1964) The Man (101 page)

“Mr. President, you can’t do that,” General Fortney insisted emphatically. “Do I have to spell it out for you because”—he looked disdainfully at the others in the room—”because no one else here has the guts to spell it out for you?” He stared at Dilman once more. “Okay, I’ve got the guts. I’ll spell it out, I sure will.”

General Fortney’s cold eyes seemed to fasten harder on Dilman. His thin lips by now seemed bloodless. He said, “No matter what you’ve heard, do you know what the Dragon Flies are, what they really are? They are a fighting force that is 100 per cent—not 99 per cent not 89 per cent, but 100 per cent—Caucasian white. This is a division composed from top to bottom, from Lieutenant General C. Jarrett Rice at the top to the lowest one-striper on the bottom, of militarily educated, all-white, fighting veterans. And in case this gets anyone’s dander up here, it is not all-white for discriminatory reasons—if Rice and I could’ve included colored boys, we’d have welcomed them—this group is what it is because when it was created, developed, and ever since then, it required fighting men with advanced technical know-how, good education, plenty of savvy, to handle this newfangled complicated airborne rocketry hardware, and we’ve found such men only among the white troops and white population. That’s the way it worked out, and that’s the way it is.”

Dilman’s expression neither evinced surprise nor conceded compromise. Not a muscle in his dark face moved. He waited.

“Now you know the military facts of the situation,” General Fortney continued relentlessly, “and knowing them, maybe you’ll have some second thoughts. Because I tell you, Mr. President, it’s my duty to tell you—you send that 100 per cent white elite corps of ours into that 100 per cent black hellhole, send our white lads in to fight and die for a pack of ignorant tribesmen and savages, and, Mr. President, you’ll have yourself a nationwide rebellion on your hands right here at home. You think the Congress of this country, or the people out there, will sit still and allow such an action for one solitary second? You bet your life they won’t. . . . Look, don’t think I’m not considering you, too. You’ve got yourself enough problems with that impeachment trial under way. Why ask for more? Why try to commit suicide? Even one hint in public that you’re putting the Dragon Flies on combat alert for Africa, and you’re politically dead and buried. It’ll look just one way—like you are absolutely determined to sacrifice only American whites for African blacks, all the while keeping your Negro brethren who are in uniform safe at home—”

“General Fortney, if I may interrupt, sir.” It was General Jaskawich speaking for the first time. “If we are being absolutely frank, sir, why not go a bit deeper? I think it is well known in military circles that the Dragon Flies are today an exclusively white force because that’s the way you and your Pentagon command willed it to be ten years ago. If you had permitted young Negro recruits to have the same advanced education, technical training, military opportunity as those of us who are white, I venture to say that 30 per cent of that force would be colored today. I think the blame, sir, falls not only on your shoulders but on the whole country. Now we must all face the consequences.”

General Fortney shook an angry finger at Jaskawich. “Young man, don’t you try to tell me what’s going on right here on terra firma, because I’m the only one with enough military experience to know. You stay way out there in outer space where you belong, and leave the real problems down here to men who have to tend to them.” He turned upon Dilman. “Mr. President, you listen to me, for your own sake if not the country’s. You let me alert a couple of substantially Negro outfits, or evenly mixed ones. They’ll do well enough, and then we can stall along until we see what the future brings—”

For Edna Foster, absorbed in the verbal give and take, as well as her own pothooks on the shorthand pad, the sum total of Fortney’s resistance gradually became clearer. He was trying to stall for time until the impeachment trial ended. Then Dilman would be out, and Eaton would be in. Eaton would never commit any racially mixed American divisions, let alone an all-white battalion, to action in distant Baraza. She wondered: Does the President perceive this? She had her answer almost instantaneously.

President Dilman was on his feet. “General, if it is your hope that the near future will bring a more reasonable white President into this office, you may be right, but I cannot permit you to wait for him or for his orders. Nor will I endanger our integrity by allowing the country to wait. Right now, it will be my orders that count. I want the Dragon Flies readied.”

Steinbrenner was standing. “Of course, Mr. President—”

“If you insist,” General Fortney said bitterly to Dilman. “But—”

“I don’t merely insist,” said Dilman, “I command it, I command it now.”

After Fortney, Steinbrenner, and Scott had gone, there were three of them left alone.

“Brassy bastard,” said Jaskawich.

“Never mind him,” said Dilman. “What’s next, Miss Foster?”

She came out of her chair to take up the engagement holder. Her eyes traveled down the card. “At five you are seeing Mr. Poole and Mrs. Hurley, and at—oh, before that, in fact, almost any minute, you’re scheduled to go to Walter Reed Hospital—”

Dilman slapped his desk. “That’s right. I want to get over there. . . . General Jaskawich, I’d like you to draft a short note to Soviet Ambassador Rudenko. Let him know that we have a good idea of what’s going on around Baraza, and the part his country is playing in that skulduggery, and that we are taking necessary steps to prevent any Communist takeover. Just rough it out, and let me see it later. . . . Very well, Miss Foster, better have the car brought around to the South Portico. I want to get right over to Walter Reed Hospital. This is something I want to do—while I’m still President of the United States.”

I
T
was the first full day during which Otto Beggs’s body was not racked by excessive postoperative spasms and his mind was not fogged by pain-killing drugs. It was a day during which he could think clearly. This lucidity he had at first welcomed as a blessing, but now he could see it was leading him steadily toward morbidity and dejection.

An hour ago, a nurse had been in to roll up the head of his hospital bed so that he could more easily look over his splinted and bandaged right leg, suspended in traction, and divert himself with the doings on the television screen.

Every network channel at this time carried the same picture: Nat Abrahams, on the Senate floor, methodically attempting to refute the lurid charges brought against President Dilman by Zeke Miller, spokesman for the House of Representatives. For a viewer who found his own condition and situation more pitiable than that of the President, the on-the-screen coverage of the momentous trial provided little diversion or escape from his increasing depression.

By now, Otto Beggs’s attention had drifted entirely away from the screen to turn inward on himself and his own trial. Automatically his thumb pressed down on the volume key of the remote control unit beside him on the bed. He clicked the key several times, until the sound of Nat Abrahams’ voice had become inaudible and only the image of him on the screen ahead remained.

Wearily, Otto Beggs turned his head on the pillow and stared out through the rain-streaked window at the limited square that was his view of the 113 acres of the Walter Reed General Hospital and Army Medical Center, the compound which had become his world and prison. Although the steady downpour had abated by late afternoon, the rain still fell in thin slanting lines, creating a gray shrouded and vaporous effect that obscured any view he might enjoy of the outdoors. Directly below him, marking the hospital entrance, was the high-spouting fountain, centered in the now muddy flower bed, and Beggs could make out the top of the fountain’s geyser as it reached up to meet the weakening rainfall.

Of his treatment in Walter Reed General Hospital he could not complain. He was not even sure that he belonged here. He knew that its doors were open to career soldiers, ranging from generals, like Pershing (who had made it his home in the seven years before his death) and MacArthur, to ordinary privates. He knew that Presidents like Eisenhower and T. C., and even Dilman, had come here, and that Cabinet members like George Marshall and John Foster Dulles and Arthur Eaton had been treated here. He did not know what had made him eligible for the free treatment and care. Unless it was that he had once been in the service. Unless it was his Medal of Honor. Unless it was that he had saved a President’s life. This much he did know—he had heard it from the talkative anesthetist—that the consulting orthopedic surgeons, brought down from Johns Hopkins, had been ordered by President Dilman himself. Beggs had accepted knowledge of this special treatment with mixed feelings. Instinctively, he had been grateful for the President’s unpublicized assistance. At the same time, he had not liked the idea of being indebted to anyone, let alone Dilman, especially in this period of helplessness. Yet, when his head was clearer, as it was today, he realized that Dilman was the one who was really trying to pay off a debt.

Leaving the window, his eyes took in the close hospital room that had come to resemble a hothouse. Among the elaborate banks of flowers, from everyone, from his onetime neighborhood friends, the Schearers, from his brother-in-law Austin and family, from the proprietor of the Walk Inn, from the White House correspondents, from Miss Foster, and dozens more from dozens of others, the least ostentatious was the modest pot of violets placed on the medicine table next to his chrome water pitcher. Gertrude, the other day, examining and impressed by the cards of the various senders, had found no card among the violets. “Who’s this little thing from, Otto?” she had asked. He had replied, “I don’t know, Gertie. Crazy, but it came without a card attached.”

Of course there had been a card attached, addressed simply to Mr. Otto Beggs and not, correctly, to Mr. Otter Beggs. The card had read: “You are the bravest man in the world. Will you and the Lord Jesus ever forgive me? Ruby.”

He had tried to trace Ruby Thomas through the card. He could learn only that the order had come to a Washington florist in an envelope postmarked Los Angeles, along with the card pinned to a ten-dollar bill and the typewritten request that whatever the money would pay for in a flowering plant be sent to Mr. Otto Beggs.

In his early drugged fantasies he had hunted Ruby down and punished her, or meant to punish her, for the fantasies had always ended with his embracing her nude, flawless, coffee-colored body. In moments of clarity he had wondered if he would ever see her again and, if their paths crossed, how he would behave.

Then, slowly, in his recuperation, Ruby had receded to some hazy dream of make-believe, and Gertrude, less sharp-featured, less baggy, better groomed, and more kindly than at any time since their early married years, and ten-year-old Ogden, and eight-year-old Otis, as awed by their father as when they were younger, had taken over and dominated his real world. They had visited him early every evening, and every few days the boys proudly presented him with a cardboard box of newspaper clippings which they had cut out themselves or received from friends, clippings proclaiming the heroism of Otto Beggs. The seven boxes of clippings stood piled against the wall. Except for the first box, which he had undone to find out what was inside, he had not bothered to open them. He was pleased to have these from his sons, but the contents no longer interested him as once they might have.

For Otto Beggs, each clipping was not a new merit badge proclaiming his courage, but an obituary. He could not bear to read the last of himself that he would ever see in print. For Beggs, the assassin’s bullet had, to all intents and purposes, ended his useful life. While Admiral Oates had considered the surgery a great success—because his smashed right leg had been repaired and not amputated—Otto Beggs had considered the medical victory a hollow one. His leg had been saved, true; but for a man of action, for a Secret Service agent, it was no longer an effective limb but a paralyzed appendage that could do no more than give him the appearance of being a man, when he was, in fact, a cripple. Admiral Oates had assured him that he would be able to walk under his own power, with the aid of a crutch or cane, and he would be able to drive a specially modified car. But never in his remaining years would he be able to run, jump, crouch, to be the Otto Beggs of West Coast gridirons and Korean battlefields again. Or even the Otto Beggs who had sprinted toward the President, brought him down with a flying tackle, taking the assassin’s bullet and answering with the fatal shot of his own. Gone forever the whole Beggs. Left merely the half Beggs.

“Hey there,” he heard the colored registered nurse say to him. “What you got your face so crunched up for in that nasty look? You in pain?”

She was offering him the tiny paper cup with its pink pills, and a glass of water.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“Well, take these anyway. Good for digestion. Hey, is this a new fad, looking at television without the sound? You should turn it up. Whole ward’s seeing and listening. That smart lawyer fellow for the President, he’s giving back as good as he got. He’s closing his speech.”

Beggs washed the pills down, and after the nurse had gone, his thumb manipulated the remote control, and the volume came on full blast.

On the screen, the President’s attorney, Abrahams, had paused. The camera closed in on his worn countenance. In measured sentences, he began to speak once more.

Dutifully, because all the others on the hospital floor were listening, Otto Beggs watched and listened, too.

“Honorable gentlemen of the Senate, allow me to conclude my opening address to you by quoting from the words spoken over a century ago by that legendary member of Congress upon whom the opposing manager lavished so much affection earlier in the day,” said Abrahams. “I refer to Thaddeus Stevens, and to his last anguished tirade before the Senate, after that Senate had rejected his demand for conviction and had acquitted President Andrew Johnson.