Tucker's Last Stand (28 page)

“Hello, my darling Blacky.”

“
¿Qué tal, mi querida Sally? ¿Cómo estás
? ¿
Cómo está el bebito
?”

“Not bad. No, not bad. Not terribly taxing, those sentences, granted. But even the Spanish accent sounded good. Great heavens! Is that you, Blackford, or is it some spy brought in from the Mexican cold, pretending to be you?”

“You kech me up, gringa. Fok you!”

Sally laughed. She asked how he was. He was fine, thanks. Had he been to church the preceding Sunday? In fact he had, had she? Yes, she said, Tony was a very faithful Catholic and the little boy would be brought up in the Church so she figured she might as well learn a little more about it. “You've always been more of a Christian than I, darling,” she conceded. “Maybe I can catch up one of these days. On the other hand, it isn't
absolutely
clear, is it, that your profession exemplifies the practice of Christianity?”

“Not if it isn't certain that communism exemplifies the anti-Christ.”

“Oh dear, darling, here we go again. We mustn't, of course, and it's my fault, though your retaliation just now was, really, a little massive, don't you think? No, you don't think. I guess I just ought to tell you this, that the majority of the people I talk to among the faculty at the university here in Mexico think that the Vietnam war is simply a matter of an assertive North wanting for the South the same independence the North has achieved—”

“Darling?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Why is the average university professor so stupid? I mean—now listen, Sally; just once, listen. We've got a perfect phone connection, so just pretend this is another seminar, without Jane Austen. The North Vietnamese are
totally
dependent on the Soviet Union and China. Without them they couldn't build a tin canoe, let alone a SAM missile. What's
our
record in this part of the world? Sure, we conquered the Philippines. But that was sixty-five years ago and had to do with war against Spain. So, after planting a few democratic seeds there, and fighting a war of liberation against the Japanese, in fifty years we made the Philippines free. We occupied Japan and then left it to run itself. We fought for Korea, then let it fend for itself, with a couple of divisions sitting there in case they were needed. Intellectuals who think the North Vietnam business is only about anticolonialism just don't think, except for that Anti-U.S. Think which most foreign intellectuals go in for, their special brand of masturbation. How do
they account
for the impulse of Communist-driven leaders to expand their power? East Europe, Greece, Berlin, Korea, Vietnam—”

“Blacky, Blacky. Yes, and of course there's a lot of packaged anti-U.S. thought among these people. But on the other hand,
you
can't account for the popular support for Ho's movement in the North—”

“How can you say that, darling? That popular support shows itself, among other ways, in that one million people have left the North since Geneva—”

“Well, you can't tell me all those people coming down to fight for Hanoi are all conscripts, can you?”

Blackford thought:
He did not have an answer to that point
. Sure, he could edge away by saying that most Germans fought for Hitler, and Russians for Stalin, and no doubt their understanding of what they were doing transcended any question of personal loyalty to Hitler, and to Stalin, whom so many of them loathed. But Sally was pressing her point.

“I heard a Spaniard, a journalist,” Sally was saying, “just back from Saigon—charming man. If he goes back to Vietnam I will tell him how he can get in touch with you. There were six of us, and he was telling this story after dinner. It goes like this: A North Vietnamese nineteen-year-old soldier starts out from North Vietnam with an eighty-pound pack. He goes down the Trail. He makes out with bread and water as he can. He wades through fetid swamps, climbs icy mountains, gets bitten by snakes and mosquitoes, sweats with malarial fever, but plods on and on and on and on and two months later he has covered four hundred miles and delivers his cargo to the Vietcong unit where the captain meets him, gives him some rice, tells him to rest up for a day, and then to go back to Hanoi and bring another bundle of the same.… Kind of gets you, doesn't it?”

Yes, Blackford said, it does kind of get you. By polemical forward inertia he'd have gone on to say that history was full of surprises about the stamina shown by tyranny when colonizing, but he was exhausted. Not physically; it was something else. The awful, demoralizing, subversive plausibility of what Sally was saying. This tired him, he thought, reaching with his right hand to press the flesh on his right thigh so hard as to cause him to start up with the pain of it;
anything
to wake him from the sudden torpor his mind, not his body, had taken him to. He managed to rouse himself, and for a few minutes more they traded small talk and then love talk, and he hung up. He went to the closet and brought out a small bottle of gin, poured a quarter glass, gave it a little water from the jug on the table and drank it down. He sat and thought. And then he knelt down and, as he had done so many times before, but so infrequently in the past year or so, prayed for guidance. Prayed that General de Gaulle was mistaken. Prayed that he, Blackford Oakes, on a mission for his country and, yes, for the free world, would regain his faith in the Vietnamese venture. A faith, he realized, he had—only just tonight—realized he had lost.

28

September 14, 1964

Goldwater's Headquarters

Washington, D.C.

When Senator Barry Goldwater stepped out of the White House, escorted to the door by the President himself, the entire West Wing lit up with flashbulbs.

What ground did you go over with the President, Senator
?

Did you talk with him about the civil rights bill
?

Did Vietnam come up
?

Is there any chance, Senator, of a televised debate
?

What do you think, Senator, of the President's campaign ads
?

Did you have coffee
?

Barry Goldwater, groping his way to his limousine, interrupted his smiled silence to bark, “I don't drink coffee.” In his car, the glass divider up, his campaign manager Denison Kitchel asked how it had gone.

“All right. He gave me one of those half-Johnsons. You know, hand on my shoulder. I was watching for what in the Senate we call a ‘full-Johnson.' That's when his arm stretches all the way to your other shoulder. That's when he
really
wants something. If he had given me one of those, I'd have expected him to tell me I ought to drop out of the race.”

“So?”

“Well, it was my meeting, I asked for it, and I told him he ought to get a new Secretary of Defense, that the Vietnam scene was a mess, but that I didn't think we ought to divide the country on that issue during the campaign. Wait till it's over.”

“He liked that, I guess.”

“Said he did. Said of course we both had to continue to campaign as we've been doing, and I said sure, but maybe it would be good if we agreed none of our people would call him a pinko, and none of his people would call me a Nazi.”

“Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

They left the car on Connecticut Avenue and went into a staff meeting. Goldwater had in front of him notes assembled during the week. He began by telling his staff that he had told LBJ the Goldwater camp would not make a big issue of Vietnam, but he thought we were losing out there. Look—he pointed to his sheaf of notes—just one week, and look. He adjusted his glasses.

“Casualties: 1,387 U.S. to date—163 killed in combat, more than one thousand wounded. That's men
killed in action
.

“LBJ orders five thousand more military into Vietnam. That was last Tuesday. Thursday, new estimates from the Pentagon say the Vietcong number more like 75,000 than 25,000. How come? How come they are increasing, after six months of our 34-A operation in the Gulf? Did a lot of South Vietnamese just happen to fall in love with communism? With President Ho?” He turned to Baroody.

“I don't know, Bill. You say it isn't a good campaign issue to go out there and just say the whole Vietnam operation is screwed up; maybe you're right, you're probably right. The minute I touch on foreign policy, I'm identified as a warmonger. It's just that simple. We should make a note to tell the Republican candidate in 1968: Don't touch foreign policy. Just pretend it doesn't exist.”

“Oh come on, Barry.” The voice of Bill Baroody, pacifier.

“What do you mean, come on? They asked me in California what I would do about the Trail, I told them not what I would do, but what
the Pentagon
at one point was
considering
—defoliation by nuclear tactical weapons. And I tell them
I
don't think that's too good an idea—and the press has
me
in favor of nuclear war in Vietnam! I tell 'em defensive tactical nuclear weapons have to be at the disposal of the NATO commander, next day I'm in favor of giving every staff sergeant in NATO a nuclear weapon. So General Partridge, who
was
head of NORAD, pops up and says
he
was authorized by Ike to use tactical nuclear weapons in combat defense, and Ike up at Gettysburg doesn't deny it. Does anybody notice? No. Fuck it.” He sank into a chair and said:

“You see what Sulzberger wrote in the
Times
?”

There was silence in the room. They had all seen it. But Goldwater insisted on reading it aloud. He picked the paper on which it was clipped out of his notebook. “‘The possibility exists that, should Goldwater enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow.'

“So, since we all want a day after tomorrow, we'll hit the Vietnam question on the broad front. We'll just say we're in favor of meeting our commitments to SEATO, of observing the Containment Doctrine, of maintaining a strong presence in the Pacific, of helping the South Vietnamese as best we can, that kind of thing. But we aren't going to tell Lyndon Johnson how to
win
that situation out there. Nobody's going to listen, and he'll make us sound like warmongers. He's already done that. So unless he really screws up in the next few weeks we let it alone. And if I do decide to go after him on it, I'll call him up and let him know ahead of time.”

“You're not likely to have to do that, Barry.” It was Kitchel talking. “They've got a mole in our outfit. Don't know who he/she is, but all those rumors about a mole have got to be right. Every time you give a speech, even speeches we keep from the press till you deliver them, the Democrats have a point-by-point answer ready for distribution to the press in about half an hour.”

“Denis,” Goldwater spoke with mock gravity, running his hand across the table to include all the eight staff members in the room, “give 'em all lie dectector tests by tomorrow.”

The tension broke. Goldwater left the room, and Kitchel took over, going down the agenda. There was the speech tomorrow in Cleveland—

“Deny, does the senator mean we can't use something like this?” Freddy Anderson, the young speechwriter, handed the campaign manager a clip. Kitchel read out loud the AP bulletin. “‘General Maxwell Taylor, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, met yesterday with Premier Nguyen Khanh. He told Premier Khanh that his threats of carrying the war beyond South Vietnam's borders were contrary to U.S. policy …'” Kitchel moaned, and finished reading the clip. “It is contrary to U.S. policy to cross over to their side of the fifty-yard line. No, Fred, you heard the candidate. We don't use it.”

“Okay,” said Anderson. “I'll just write about how we ought to abolish Social Security.”

“Yeah,” Dean Burch spoke up. “And don't forget to include something about selling off the TVA.”

Baroody nodded solemnly. “Sounds like you got the makings of a good speech. Just don't forget to say something against the poverty program. Something really … inspiring.”

Freddy Anderson was moving his pencil with feverish haste, as if transcribing carefully his instructions. Didn't want to miss any of it.

Nice tableau, Kitchel thought to himself, as Baroody broke out in laughter. He reached into his coat pocket. “Here's a letter came in from a G.I. in Vietnam. No name, no address. ‘Dear Goldwater Headquarters. Thought you'd like this one, maybe you can use it. I was there. McNamara and General Taylor last week on their morale-boosting trip with General Khanh, visiting ARVN units all over. McNamara was given a few words in Vietnamese to memorize, and everywhere he went he stood up and spoke them. The words he was given say, in Vietnamese, ‘Vietnam a thousand years!' Only he pronounced it wrong, and what came out was, ‘Southern duck wants to lie down.'” More laughter.

“Let's go to work,” Kitchel said.

29

September 28, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

It was as if that afternoon two weeks before at Bien Hoa, in which Hiroshima had come between them like a mushroom cloud, hadn't ever happened. Tucker's exhilaration subordinated any thought given to any other question or distraction. He hadn't known at Nakhon Phanom exactly when or at what hour the test would end, and by the time it did, at noon on Monday, it was too late to telephone, so he went directly from the airport in Saigon to her apartment with a bottle of champagne and a jar of Strasbourg pâté.

She was not yet back from school. For a moment Tucker just stared at the lock, kept looking at it as, slowly, he bent down to deposit his packages on the floor. He emptied the contents of his pockets into his hand. Anything there might do the trick? Hm. No, not really. He stuffed it all back into his pockets and then opened his briefcase, poking about in it. One of his folders was bound together by a large paper clip. There. Was he not, after all, the son of Faraday Montana, who could fix an electric fan by … looking at it?