Promise of Joy (58 page)

This time there was a genuinely ugly booing from many places in the galleries. This time he glanced up with an angry scowl but otherwise did not respond.

“Members of the Senate,” he said earnestly, “there are many extraordinarily compelling reasons for staying out of this tragic war. Not the least of these is the likelihood that we might not be able to keep it from spreading, that no ‘surgical strike,’ however well and hopefully planned, could keep us from being dragged in deeper and deeper. Then we, too, in all likelihood, would suffer terrible atomic damage. We are not immune from such things. It would be very possible.

“Rather, we must stay out, as the President has said, holding ourselves ready to mediate, help and restore. We must never let ourselves be motivated by racial fears that can only subvert our judgment and turn us against one another.

“The Chinese are not landing on Long Island or Hawaii. They are not attacking us. They are making one last desperate effort and whether it succeeds, as momentarily seems possible, or loses, they are not going to be able to do anything more for a long, long time.

“The Congress must not tie the hands of the President with this resolution. We must not take sides. And above all we must not give way to ugly racial fears, for they become us not at all and weaken us most fearfully.”

“And to that, gentlemen,” the President said, reaching over to snap off the machine as Arly Richardson rose in the Senate and prepared to make his reply, “I for one say, ‘Amen.’” He looked at them calmly across the big desk. “What say you?”

There was an uncertain silence and then by instinctive agreement they turned to the gentle old man who was executive chairman of
The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was.
He cleared his throat, studied the President thoughtfully for a moment and spoke with a careful deliberation.

“With his general sentiments, Mr. President,” he said, “I think we all, of course, agree in principle. Whether the principle can be applied across the board in the present situation …” His voice trailed away, then resumed in what appeared to be a tone of genuine curiosity. “May I inquire, Mr. President, why you have asked us to come here? It seems to me a rather puzzling—”

“No, it doesn’t, at all, Arthur,” the President interrupted. “It seems to you perfectly obvious, just as it does to me: I need your help.”

“In what way, Mr. President?” the editorial director of the
Times
inquired blandly. And the general director of the
Post
added with equal blandness:

“Why?”

It was his turn to study them thoughtfully, these eight stubborn faces already closed off and turned away from him, whose owners exercised so much completely uncontrolled control over what America thought—responsible to nothing at all but their own ruthless prejudices and arbitrary beliefs. He realized with a wry inward humor, not really very amused, that they were all much more comfortable now that they were on their way back to where they belonged—opposing Orrin Knox.

“The way in which you can help me,” he said quietly, “is by devoting yourselves to keeping the country calm, and by continuing to oppose, with every means of influence you have, the racial frenzy against the Chinese which is fueling the drive for intervention. If you should join the hue and cry for that reason—or indeed for any reason—it could force my hand and, I believe, help to destroy possibly the last chance to save the world. I am asking you to support me in what I am trying to do. It is as simple as that.”

“Mr. President,” Walter Dobius said, his tone, while equally quiet, filled with a growing indignation, “I for one resent the implication of your remarks. I think we are doing our best to keep the country calm, to judge the whole situation calmly, and to advocate what we think is best for the country and the world, which is just as much our responsibility as it is yours. We are against racial frenzy as much as you, Mr. President. You aren’t unique in that.”

“But you aren’t quite as firm against intervention as you were a little while ago, are you, Walter?” he asked.

“No, we’re not,” CBS said sharply, “because the situation has changed so rapidly in the past forty-eight hours that it’s no longer as simple a question as you make out.”

“Oh?” he inquired. “Have I made it sound simple? Forgive me, gentlemen. That was furthest from my thoughts.”

“It seems to me,” NBC remarked, “that all of us, be it in editorial, column or broadcast, have made several very valid points in the last few hours. The first is, of course, that you
can
end the conflict by intervening, and nobody else can. The second is that it is indeed a conflict between two cultures, to one of which we belong. The third is that if Russia does go down, if the balance of power is destroyed permanently by the onrushing hordes of China”—he flushed at the President’s sudden quizzical expression but managed to amend with reasonable dignity—“if the balance of power is permanently upset in favor of China—then there is a strong possibility that we will sooner or later be attacked ourselves. We all seem to be agreed that those things are valid. I don’t know why we should pretend they aren’t.”

“We regret as much as you do, Mr. President,” ABC pointed out earnestly, “that some people are using race to stir up trouble, but there it is.”

“Exactly,” Frankly Unctuous agreed. “We have all deplored that. But we can’t shut our eyes to the realities of world affairs.”

“Which I am,” he said sharply.

“You are not doing that, Mr. President,” the
Post
said with a calm arrogance that took his breath away, “but it may be that you are confusing your own conclusions about these things with what is really best for the country.”

For a moment the President stared at him with an open disbelief.

“Well, by God,” he said finally. “So
I
am the one who is confusing his own conclusions about these things with what is really best for the country, am I? Well, well.”

“There is possibly a legitimate difference of opinion, Mr. President,” the chairman of
The Greatest Publication
observed gently. “None of us is impugning your motives.”

“Nor am I impugning yours,” he said. “I am simply saying that underlying all these rationalizations is an ugly racial fear—an ugly gut terror—of what our friend from NBC and many, many others, I remind you, refer to as ‘the onrushing hordes of China.’ This to me is more terrifying than the Chinese themselves, because in one phrase it throws us back a hundred years or more into a blind emotionalism that simply cannot produce the kind of steady thinking we must have in this situation. It just can’t produce it.”

“But, Mr. President,” the
Times
said with a noticeable patience, “your general condemnation cannot possibly include us, because we have all specifically said in the past twenty-four hours, and less, that
we too
deplore racism, that
we too
want calm and careful policy. So—you puzzle us. We feel you are talking about one thing and we are talking about another.”

“Not really,” he said. “Not really. We are both talking about intervention.”

“And your only argument for being against it,” Walter said, “is that in some people’s minds it may have a racial reason!”

“That is not my only argument against it,” he said angrily. “My argument is that possibly the only way we can save the world and ourselves is by not intervening, by staying free, keeping our strength together, standing ready to pick up the pieces. Not by letting ourselves be stampeded by fears of ‘onrushing hordes’—”

“I am so sorry,” NBC said dryly. The President ignored him.

“—‘onrushing hordes’ and ‘alien cultures,’ or by dreams of ‘the balance of power,’ and my presumed ability to end the conflict by the simple act of waving some sort of magic wand and crying, ‘Stop!’ Good lord, do you know what intervention would mean? It would mean missiles and planes and bombs and, yes, maybe men and a great many men, before we were through. It would mean total commitment. ‘Surgical strike,’ you are all saying now, making it sound very neat and sanitary. War isn’t like that, at least on the scale that’s under way now. It handles things strictly on its own terms. It runs wild. That’s your intervention for you!”

“Nonetheless, Mr. President,” the chairman of
The Greatest Publication
said gently, “we for our part seem agreed that there may be very valid and compelling reasons for going in—particularly if the Russians continue to fall back in such disarray as they are now doing. If this continues, Mr. President—and there is no indication right now that it won’t—then I think we are agreed that we must continue to call the shots as we see them.”

He gave them a long look, from face to set, unyielding face.

“Which means, very shortly now, an all-out attack upon me, personally, does it not?”

“I would not like to consider it an attack, as such, Mr. President,” the chairman of the
G.P.
said, still gently. “Just a disagreement, such as we have had before.”

“Very well,” he said, standing up and speaking calmly as they followed suit. “Like you, I must continue to do as I see best. As I said at the start, I should like to have your pledge that you will help me in keeping the country calm, in attacking racism, in fighting intervention, in staying out. Apparently I am not going to have it. I shall make no attempt to conceal the fact that I am bitterly disappointed. Neither shall I make any change in the policy that I, as President of the United States of America, deem soundest and best for the country.”

“So once again,” Walter Dobius said, not without a certain satisfaction, “the media and Orrin Knox are at loggerheads.”

“Is that really a happy thing, Walter?” he inquired bleakly. “Is it really so good for us all?”

But for that, of course, Walter had no answer. He looked, in fact, quite taken aback and, surprisingly, for a moment even ashamed of himself. Very briefly, so did they all.

This of course changed no minds, shifted no positions, softened none of the attitudes that were hardening under the terrible pressures of the hour. They parted, as they had begun so many years ago, diametrically opposed on foreign policy. Only now he was where they had been, and they were where he had been, and strange were the ways of the awful war.

“The Congress must not tie the hands of the President with this resolution,” Cullee concluded in the tense and silent Senate. “We must not take sides. And above all we must not give way to ugly racial fears, for they become us not at all and weaken us most fearfully.”

In the plush offices of NAWAC, at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and L Street, Northwest, the chairman reached over and snapped off the machine with a short and ugly expletive.

To this his colleague Rufus Kleinfert, chairman of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism (KEEP), responded with nothing more informative than a grunt.

From his colleague the chairman of DEFY came a response more emphatic.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” LeGage demanded sharply.

“I mean screw the black son of a bitch,” Fred Van Ackerman said with an angry impatience. “I’ve had more than enough of his crap, I can tell you.”

“I’m a black son of a bitch,” ’Gage said with an ominous quiet.

The former Senator from Wyoming gave him an appraising look and a shrug both lazy and arrogant.

“That’s right,” he agreed, “but don’t tell anybody, ’Gage, boy, and maybe they won’t notice.” He raised a casual hand as LeGage started from his chair.

“So I’m a white son of a bitch, so what?” he inquired blandly. “Does it really matter? We’ve got a war to get into, ’Gage. It’s no time for us to start fighting each other.”

“I’m not so sure I’m going to get into any war,” LeGage said dourly. “I’m not so sure DEFY is going to follow you on this racial shit. In fact, I know we’re not.”

“So?” Fred Van Ackerman asked, sounding perfectly confident and not at all disturbed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means just what I said,” ‘Gage said flatly. “DEFY is pulling out.”

“Well, well,” Fred said softly. “So DEFY is pulling out. Did you hear that, Rufus? DEFY is pulling out.”

“It iss no time for dissunity,” Rufus Kleinfert observed in his heavy accent. “It iss a time to stick together.”

“So it iss,” Fred said, unable to resist his usual unkind mockery even with an ally. “You do as Rufus says, ’Gage. We need you, boy. In fact,” he said, and his tone became suddenly cold, “any attempt by DEFY to break away at this particular time, just when we’re gearing up to bring old Half-Ass Orrin around to do the job he’s got to do to save this country and Western civilization, would be regarded most unkindly by a majority of your fellow members of NAWAC. Most unkindly. I think I can promise you that, LeGage.”

“You never asked me about that statement of yours,” LeGage said angrily. “You never consulted me before jumping on this race bandwagon about the war.”

“I didn’t jump on it,” Fred observed, not without satisfaction. “I started it going, boy. I got in the driver’s seat before this stupid country even knew where it wanted to go. I told it it had arrived before it even knew it had started. As of course,” he added with a curiously impersonal thoughtfulness, “it had.… Hell, ’Gage! Grow up, man! If you want to stampede this country, how do you do it better than by appealing to race? It isn’t
your
race, after all. They’re yellow, man,
yellow.
You-all’s black as de ace of spades, I do b’lieve.”

“You
listen to me,”
LeGage ground out, and suddenly he had the chairman of NAWAC by the lapels, half lifted out of his chair. “I don’t want any more of your eternal crap,
Senator.
You turn on one race, next thing you’re going to turn on another. I don’t like that, hear?
I don’t like that!”
And he slammed Fred, who had possessed the sense to let himself hang limp and not fight it, back into his chair.

There was a silence broken only by their heavy breathing and Rufus Kleinfert’s gently drawn and carefully unobtrusive respiration. Then Fred looked up at him with a glazed and ominous expression in his eyes.

“I don’t like that kind of business either, boy,” he said softly. “I don’t like it at all. I consulted Rufus. I didn’t do it all by myself.”