(1964) The Man (30 page)

“Not at all,” said Dilman hastily. “She belongs with you.”

She was inspecting him once more. “You’re alone, I’m told. Who will run this place for you?”

“I’m sure it will run itself.”

“No. It needs someone. There is so much that goes on. It needs a woman. Find one—an experienced social secretary, at least.”

“I—I’ll try to find someone,” he said. “I’m fortunate to have Miss Foster.”

“She’ll be helpful, but she is limited. I might add, I’ve requested her to empty my husband’s files, and put them in some kind of order, and send them to me—you know, for the biographers. I promise, she won’t take too much time away from you.”

“Miss Foster and I will do anything to cooperate. I want to do whatever is possible to commemorate T. C.’s achievements and his leadership. No matter what, do not hesitate to call upon me.”

She was staring at him. “There is one thing,” she said slowly, but said no more.

“Please, anything—”

She pulled herself erect. Her manner was more candid now, more firm and forthright. “Perhaps what I am about to say I should not say. Perhaps it is out of line. Do not misunderstand. I am not being presumptuous. I may be moved by private emotion, but I choose to think that what is giving me strength to speak out is my concern for the millions of Americans who voted for my husband, backed him, depended upon him.” She caught her breath, and then rushed on. “Nothing I can do from this day forward, no gathering of his letters and documents, no publication of his speeches and life, can be one-tenth as useful as what you can do, Senator Dilman. You alone can truly perpetuate T. C.’s memory and the ideals for which he gave his life. You, and no other, can serve his voters and the future generations who will be grateful for what he accomplished. You yourself can be his best memorial.”

Her urgency troubled and bewildered Dilman, and the burden she was settling upon him made him wince inwardly. He did not speak, but waited, hoping that he was masking his dismay.

She went on. “You will be sitting in the chair T. C. was to have sat in these next critical seventeen months. You will be holding the pen he was to have held when his proposals and legislations come to your desk. You will be implementing decisions on matters here and abroad, decisions he had already made but had had no opportunity to carry out. You will be surrounded by good and wise men, Governor Talley, Secretary Eaton, Attorney General Kemmler, General Fortney, whom T. C. appointed, counted upon, whose advice he would have continued heeding, but whose words he can hear no longer.”

She paused. “I—I have no right to ask it, Senator Dilman, because now my husband is gone, and I am no longer a President’s wife but a private citizen and a widow. Nevertheless, I will ask it as a private citizen, one of the millions who put him in office to lead us. I will ask that you try—try your best—to—to perform in the next seventeen months as if the Saviour had resurrected T. C. inside your head and your heart.” Suddenly her voice broke, and her composure with it. “Oh, I know you can’t be T. C., but—” Her hand went to her wet eyes, and she murmured, “Oh, forgive me—”

He had come off the sofa, stirred, to embrace this good woman, but then, as he neared her, arm extended, he could see the blackness of his supplicating hand groping past her white face. He froze, then straightened, trying to find the right words to speak.

There was a light knocking on the door behind him. Startled, he spun around.

“Mr. President?” A platinum-haired, smartly dressed young female was speaking to him from the doorway. “I’m Miss Laurel, the White House social secretary. I have a worried call from Edna Foster. She’s trying to locate you. She says you are running behind schedule. Secretary Eaton and Governor Talley are in your office, and then the Cabinet meeting—”

Dilman nodded, distraughtly, then turned back to look down at the former First Lady. She had found her handkerchief and was dabbing at her eyes.

His voice thick, Dilman spoke to her. “You have my promise, ma’am. On any matter that confronts me, from this day on, I will think before I act—I will think of T. C. first. I can never be the man he was, except in one respect. I love my country as much as he did, and I will do everything I can to preserve its security and wellbeing, no matter what lies ahead.”

Quickly he left her, and as he did, he exposed T. C.’s widow, for the first time, to the full view of Miss Laurel, who was still standing at the doorway. Miss Laurel gasped at the sight of the handkerchief and tears, and ran past Dilman, crying out, “Hesper, dear—what is it? What is it? Don’t, my dear—everything will be all right.”

Dilman fled from the room into the hall, but Miss Laurel’s promise to T. C.’ widow, repeated over and over again, followed him to the elevator.
Everything will be all right.
These moments, if the alchemy were possible, he would have sold his soul to the devil to bring T. C. back. For he knew that he could never be T. C., because he was weak and he was black. Then, he thought, he crazily thought: an original sheet of paper is white, but the carbon is black, and often the carbon, copy, no matter how weak, is almost as useful. He would try. He would try with all his strength.

When he punched the elevator button, he felt better.

Slouched in the wooden antique chair alongside the Buchanan desk in the President’s Oval Office, Arthur Eaton crossed his legs, dropped the memorandum he had prepared for the Cabinet meeting in his lap, and tightened the navy blue knit tie higher between his button-down shirt collar. He brought out his silver holder, twisted a cigarette into it, lit it, puffed contentedly, and watched with amusement Wayne Talley’s impatient dartings about the office.

“Easy, Governor,” Eaton called out. “Save yourself for the Cabinet meeting.”

“If there’s going to be any,” Talley growled. “Why does he have to be late on a day like this? We’ll have only half the time we need to cram him.”

“It won’t require as much time as you think,” said Eaton.

He continued watching Talley, as the stocky aide went to the French doors, peered across the Rose Garden, made some indistinct sound, tramped to the first window overlooking the south lawn, then came around to the almost barren Presidential desk.

Talley’s arm swept across the desk. “Look at it. Everything gone, even the clock, even his pens, and the captain’s chair. Not a damn thing of T. C.’s left—”

“Except us,” said Eaton, with a smile.

“Yeh, sure. If they get that New Succession Bill through, you’re safe. What about me? How do I know who’ll get to him a month from now?”

“Nobody’ll get to him a month from now, Wayne.” Eaton uncrossed his legs, and held the Cabinet memorandum in his free hand. “Look, Wayne, Dilman is President. Learn to live with it. I knew from the start that Zeke Miller’s protest would be thrown out of the Judiciary Committee and it was. After all, when the written law is obscure, you follow the unwritten law, which is historical precedent. The precedent was, nine times, that the next eligible in line becomes President, and no ifs, no maybes, about it, and no special elections either. Dilman was the next eligible, and now he is the Chief, and let us not waste any more energy fretting about it. Let us get on with business.”

Talley had planted himself in front of the Secretary of State. “Okay, business, Arthur. Do you know that the New Succession Bill sponsored by Senator Hankins is being approved by the full committee in the Senate Caucus Room today? Only one change suggested by the Legislative Council. After a President dies, and the next in line is serving as temporary Acting President, the new President and Vice-President are elected by the existing Electoral College for a full four-year term and not merely the unexpired term.”

“Yes, I heard about the change. I didn’t know the hearings were done and the bill was being approved today.”

“The committee isn’t touching a word in the language about you and the rest of T. C.’s Cabinet. It stays right in there. Dilman cannot remove you or any other member of the Cabinet without Senate consent. In fact, the line of succession as it was the day T. C. and MacPherson died stays untouched for the rest of the unexpired term. No new Speaker, no new President pro tempore of the Senate is to be elected to take precedence over you. The chairmanship will be revolving. That’s it, Arthur.”

“I know.”

“As committee chairman, Hankins is bringing the bill to the floor tomorrow or the next day. It’ll pass.”

“Will it?”

“It certainly will. And now, to expedite things, Zeke Miller is introducing a companion bill, same language, in the House. The House Rules Committee won’t stymie it. When it gets to a roll call there, it’ll go through in a flash.”

“Maybe.”

“For sure, Arthur. The question is—will Dilman sign or veto?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Eaton with annoyance. It irritated him to be dragged into these grimy, tricky, bartering legislative matters.

Eaton allowed Talley to drift out of his vision. He closed his eyes and smoked his cigarette. As much as he had tried not to, he had thought of that damned New Succession Bill, of course. How could he help but think of it? Everyone in T. C.’s inner circle, in the Party, in the press, his own wife, Kay, in fact, had kept reminding him that he was the next in line to the Presidency. Even if he had been able to remain deaf to the talk of the past week, it would have been impossible not to recognize his new position with the arrival of the three Secret Service agents, assigned by law to protect him as the Number Two man in the government.

Now, like it or not, he had Senator Hankins’ New Succession Bill, with language that retroactively froze him into the position of succeeding Dilman as President, no matter whom the House and Senate selected for chairmen, no matter whom Dilman might prefer in his Cabinet. It was an embarrassment in many ways, the kind of act Eaton ordinarily deplored, for it was so nakedly political and unreasonable. If it passed, it told Dilman that the Congress did not trust him as a person (and a Negro), that the Senate was stripping him of his inherent removal powers, that the Senate was taking over as his guardian. Furthermore, no matter how ambiguously written, it told the country to shut one eye to the Constitution, for while the Constitution gave the Senate the right to approve of a Presidential appointment, it did not give that body the right to control a Presidential removal. In short, one paragraph of the language of the act was clouded over by doubtful legality, yet it was skillfully hidden behind the verbiage of an otherwise valid New Succession Bill. The political cynicism and rationalization that wrote the bill, put it in the hopper, had it introduced on the floor, had it powerhoused through the subcommittee, the full committee, and to a roll call, was appalling to Arthur Eaton.

Moreover, Eaton hated himself for being thrown into the Hankins and Miller camp. They were not his kind of people. He despised their talk. Publicly, they were pleading that an unusual situation in government had called for an unusual measure to meet it and to secure the continuity of government. Privately, secretly, these same men were agreeing that even if the doubtful paragraph made the bill unconstitutional, it would take so long a time to reach a test before the Supreme Court, take so long a time to be thrown out, that by then President Dilman would have served his one year and five months under Senate restraint, and what happened after that did not matter. All that mattered was that the nation would have been protected from its own current President.

Eaton wanted no part of those politicians and their bill, and he promised himself that he would stay aloof, as far above and beyond the questionable intrigue as possible. He had one task, and it was enough for one human being—to see that the United States was steered in the direction that his friend T. C. had set for it.

He opened his eyes to find Wayne Talley before him once more.

“Arthur,” Talley said, “Dilman mention anything to you about the Hankins bill?”

“Not to me, no.”

“What if it’s brought up at the Cabinet meeting?”

“I doubt that it will be brought up,” said Eaton. “Since it concerns each of the Cabinet members, protecting them against their President, why should any one of them bring it up? Certainly I would not have the nerve to speak of it myself.”

“What if Dilman himself brings it up?”

Eaton thought about this. “No, he won’t bring it up either,” he said with confidence. “You’ve seen him in action throughout the week. He’s afraid to open his mouth. He listens. He worries. He retreats. He has no strong or definite opinions about anything in government, except that he doesn’t want trouble. I think he wants to remain unobtrusive and accepted. If he can get through T. C.’s term without rocking the boat, I believe he will feel that he has accomplished all he wished to accomplish.”

“Which is?”

“To prove a Negro can be President and leave the nation no worse off.”

Talley did not seem convinced. “I hope so. Let’s see how he reacts to that first television speech we hammered out for him. If he goes for it verbatim, every point we made, promising the country he will serve merely as a caretaker for T. C.’s program, then I think you’re right.”

“When did you give him the draft of the speech?”

“When he was leaving here last night.”

Eaton nodded. “Then we should know today. After all, if he is going on the networks with it tomorrow—late tomorrow afternoon, isn’t it?—he should—”

Eaton left the sentence unfinished, as he cocked his head to listen to the approaching clack of footsteps on the cement walk outside. He came to his feet, and he and Talley stood respectfully attentive as the Secret Service agent near the garden greeted Dilman and the White House policeman opened the screen and turned the latch of the French door.

Dilman was inside the Oval Office, nodding his head. “Mr. Secretary—Governor—”

“Mr. President,” said Arthur Eaton.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” said Wayne Talley.

Dilman remained uncertainly before them, revealing a troubled smile. “I know I’m late. I apologize. I was trying to supervise the moving, and trying to find where everything was, when I ran into the—the First Lady—you know—”