Preserve and Protect (22 page)

Two
Bob Leffingwell’s Book

1

Returning to his empty house after the President’s address, he finds a postcard from Louise at Chocorua. “I hope you’re happy,” it says with the words underlined three times and three enormous exclamation marks after. That is all. There is no indication of what she is referring to. Happy because riots have occurred? Happy because the President has increased the tempo in Gorotoland and Panama? Happy because she isn’t there? He shakes his head with a tired, impatient smile. What oblique, elliptical interpretation of things has she come up with this time? It baffles him, as it has so often in the uneasy years of their marriage.

He quickly shreds the card, tosses it in a wastebasket, forgets it. There are other matters for Robert A. Leffingwell to be concerned about tonight, and Louise must retire to that rather neglected corner of his mind that she normally occupies: a rather sad little commentary, but characteristic of many a prominent marriage in the shining capital, which rearranges lives and emotions at whim and often reveals to husbands and wives that they are moving at entirely different tempos than they thought they were, when they and the world were young.

Right now his mind is occupied with the events of the past six hours: the implications they seem to hold for his future, the light they appear to throw on his past, the consequences they may have for his reputation. In Washington, where the care and feeding of the ego often take precedence over love, sex, marriage, hearth, home and health, Bob Leffingwell is following the standard pattern. Where do
I
fit in? What will it mean for
my
future? How do
I
feel about it? How will it affect what is obviously the center of the universe—
me?

There is in him, however—nearing fifty, handsome, highly intelligent, extremely capable—a saving grace, and he is honest enough to acknowledge to himself that it probably comes to him courtesy of Orrin Knox. Had anyone told him a year ago that he would ever feel for the Secretary anything but a bitter dislike, he would have scoffed the suggestion down with some withering witticism. Nowadays he finds he doesn’t make that kind of witticism any more. Something gentling, alleviating, mitigating an old arrogance has entered his being. Orrin Knox gave him a lesson when he defeated him for Secretary of State, and he is finally able to admit the fact to himself. He is even, wry though the thought makes him, beginning to feel the start of gratitude.

In these recent weeks leading up to the convention, he has been going through a quiet personal revolution. Tonight’s events have accelerated and advanced it. It amazes him now, as he changes quickly into his swimming trunks, gets a beer from the refrigerator and goes out to his favorite
chaise longue
beside the pool in the hot, humid night, to think how far he has come from the supercilious public servant who burst out of the Midwest fifteen years ago with all the answers about everything—all of them self-consciously “liberal,” all of them arrogant and all of them blindly and ruthlessly intolerant of any other point of view.

In this, he recognizes now, he was suffering from the liberal syndrome of the twentieth century, which said that all knowledge, justice and purity lay on the left and all evil, intolerance and reaction lay on the right. He has learned that nothing on earth can be so intolerant and reactionary as a humorless professional liberal, and he understands now as he never did before that out of intolerance and reaction only evil, in the long run, can come.

He and his fellows in all that arrogant, ruthless crew that dominated the thinking of the world in these past decades have a great deal to answer for. That world is in near-collapse. Its societies are in chaos, its laws in disarray, its decencies disappearing, its hopes of survival dwindling fast. How much are the conservatives responsible, for opposing necessary programs for the achievement of a more humane society! But how much also are the liberals responsible, for attempting to impose upon that society an arbitrary form that had no relation to human realities and offered only the most ruthless hostility to those who sought to inject a little human reality into it. How horribly far down the road to destruction has intolerant idealism taken mankind: especially in the hands of those for whom idealism has been only a tool with which to manipulate the naive for the purposes of the Communist imperialism, harshest and most oppressive of them all.

How many of the sincerely self-deluded—as distinct from the cold, deliberate agents of that imperialism—realize their responsibility and their blame? Not many, he tells himself grimly now. It takes a little humbling such as he has been through to bring about that kind of self-scarifying honesty. Many of them will not be humbled until the final great humbling of us all, when it will be far too late for anyone to make amends or do anything at all about it.

So he is not too sorry to find that bidding farewell to that kind of harshly rigid “liberalism” does not dismay him as it would have done at an earlier time of his life. There are many in the great sprawling city twinkling softly across the lazy river in the hazy night who will go on being true to that concept of liberalism until the day they die—or the world dies. There are many in other great cities, in schools, in churches, in places of power and influence in the press, who will never waver and never relax in their relentless hostility to all who dare expose or challenge the futility and emptiness of their beliefs. The world has passed them by, they are old-fashioned and out of date; but on they go, harsh and rigid and intolerant to the end, trapped in their own pride, unable to make the simple but to them terrifying and soul-destroying admission, “We are not perfect—we may be wrong.” Self-limited and self-robbed of the ability to adapt to the realities of human behavior in a changing time, they are as immovable as bugs self-immolated in amber, eons ago.

No longer for him, thank you very much; and as he thinks back now upon that perfect public servant who came to Washington—perfect in everything but tolerance, compassion and an open mind—he thanks God for the change. He has not traveled an easy road in the last two years, but from it he is beginning to emerge with a reasonable peace of mind, a reviving self-respect, and a concept of integrity rather far from that with which he began.

In basic outline the facts of his life have been simple enough, just as Senator Tom August of Minnesota, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described them on that morning, which now seems very long ago, when the committee began its consideration of “the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State.”

Forty-nine years old, born in Binghamton, New York, attended elementary and high school there. Graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in public administration. Received his law degree from Harvard. Taught public administration for four years at the University of Chicago. Appointed to the Southwest Power Administration, becoming director of its public service division four years later. Five years after that, appointed director of the Southwest Power Administration. Seven years ago, appointed chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Two years ago, given temporary leave to accept appointment as Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.

A year and a half ago, nominated for the office of Secretary of State. Defeated by the Senate after he lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerning a youthful, innocent and stupid flirtation with Communism at the University of Chicago twenty years ago. Appointed by the late President Harley M. Hudson to the position of director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, which he still holds.

Active in international conferences for many years, including terms as chairman of the International Hydroelectric and Power Conferences in Geneva and Bombay; arbitrator between India and Pakistan in their recent water dispute; principal United States delegate to the United Nations Conference on Water, Power and Economic Development of Underdeveloped Areas.

Married to the former Louise Maxwell; two children, Richard, married, of Sandia, New Mexico, and Annette (Mrs. H. B. Sears) of Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Resident of Manhattan and Alexandria, Virginia. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Bar Association and the Metropolitan Club of Washington.

Expert on government, supremely competent administrator, given numerous awards as “America’s outstanding public servant.” Somewhat flawed by the past two years, but not, he tells himself with satisfaction as he gets up on a sudden impulse and plunges into the pool, as flawed as he was.…

Back in his chair, dripping but perfectly comfortable in the warm unstirring night, he stares thoughtfully across at the city that looks so placid but has such explosive forces roiling in it, and asks himself how he could ever have moved so far from reality as to deny that he had known Herbert Gelman at the University of Chicago. But even as he asks, he knows: because he wanted to be Secretary of State, and all else fell before that overriding desire.

Given the circumstances of those hectic days that saw his nomination, the Foreign Relations Committee hearings, the bitter Senate debate, the tragic death of Brigham Anderson, his defeat, Harley’s appointment of Orrin Knox to fill the office he had so fiercely wanted—he cannot say with certainty even now whether the outcome would have been any different had he told the truth. His opponents had already charged him with being “an appeaser … soft on Communism … weak, wishy-washy … willing to compromise America’s principles for a temporary respite from tension that will only be renewed in worse form tomorrow”—and so on. To have admitted an early flirtation with Communism, however foolish and ineffectual, would only have increased the outcry a thousandfold. He would have been defeated anyway.

Or would he? If he had been able to show the escapade for what it was, an outgrowth of a lingering youthful idealism, an empty gesture which meant no harm and did no harm—if he had been honest about it and thrown himself on the mercies of the Senate and the country—would he have lost? And if he had, would it not have been better to lose that way, rather than to lose after lying to the Senate, and then have Herbert Gelman materialize like a sickly ghost from the past, point the finger and say, “He did it. I was there.”

At least then he would not have defeated himself in his own heart.

But everyone on his side, of course, had wanted him to lie at the time. They believed as firmly as he did—and his belief was quite sincere, and he was not ashamed of it, and had it still—that he did have much to contribute to the country and to world peace, that he could negotiate constructively with the Communists, that it was vital that he contribute his talents to saving the world from war, and do so in the most important Cabinet office of them all. It had not taken much to move this conviction into the realm of an arrogant, absolute self-confidence that would brook no opposition and accept no other possibility. And of course he had not been alone in this. He would be willing to bet right now that if he had consulted the Post—The Greatest Publication—Walter Dobius—any of that powerful group that were on his side in that fight, they would have said: keep quiet about it: if necessary, lie. The President had known about it, after all—that brilliant, effervescent, unfathomable man who had occupied the White House until Harley succeeded to it following his sudden death at the end of the Leffingwell battle—and the President had told him to keep silent. They had all wanted him to win. They were as ruthless for him then as now they were ruthless against him.

So there might have been no difference in the outcome, whichever way he had conducted himself. The only difference would have been in his own heart, which knew, whether his supporters did or not, what he had done to himself when he denied that he had ever known a former student of his named Herbert Gelman.

From that self-inflicted wound it had taken him all this time to recover, but recovery, he knew now, had begun with his defeat by Orrin Knox. It had proceeded slowly, almost subconsciously, for a number of months, as he had begun cautiously to venture forth again. It had come to crisis when a combination of gratitude to Harley for salvaging his public career, and horror at the extremes of violence to which ambition was carrying Ted Jason, had resulted in his leaving Ted’s cause at the convention to place Harley in nomination.

And in some curious, almost offhand way, it had settled into what he felt instinctively was to be its final and irrevocable form this afternoon, when Orrin, on the President’s orders, had asked him to come to the White House, and he had agreed.

That decision, reached in a moment in his silent house, had been the almost automatic response that most Americans would still give to such a request: if the President needs my help, I’ll do it. He had not paused to calculate its effects upon himself, had accepted it almost without thinking. Yet when he was driving, almost as in a trance, over the bridge into town, there had come to him the sudden certainty that he was doing the right thing. By the simple act of asking, the President had resolved many conflicts; and though he has already had, and no doubt will have later, some substantial misgivings about details, in totality he is satisfied. In a sense, shrewd old Mr. Speaker has done his deciding for him, and he realizes that he feels a genuine relief that the struggle is over.

Relief, and a sense of wonder that he suspects will remain with him for a while. Robert A. Leffingwell the liberal—still, he firmly believes, the liberal—falling in line with an Administration that theoretically stands for everything he has always opposed. How can it be that he feels so few qualms and so much peace of mind?

Looking down the convoluted corridors of the liberal years, since his youthful idealism first convinced him that the world must be remade in new ways and new patterns, he recognizes with an ironic—but friendly—smile for that distant believer, that he certainly followed the standard pattern for a long time. In college he was a philosophic leader in all those campaigns that so sternly ordered America to end and the world to get out. He was anti this and anti that, and always what he was against could be related to the established order of things. Yet he did not go as far as some of his contemporaries and opt out of society altogether to go wandering down paths of immaturity and self-destruction that led nowhere. Bob Leffingwell was basically too mature and too convinced of his own destiny to do that.