Memories of the Ford Administration

by John Updike

  “I have read of it in the news,” Hawthorne said quietly. “The British press has been considerably indignant, and those on the continent more so.”

  “Oh, and the U. S. Congress, too—we have been mightily flayed,” Buchanan avowed, “and not without justice! The entire business was instigated by two swashbuckling reprobates in our government’s employ, Dan Sickles and Pierre Soulé—both of them hasty in temperament, and quick to take short cuts, whether with diplomatic channels or with other men’s wives. I invited Sickles, at his request, to join the London Mission, thinking as compensation for his willful and pompous moods we would have the company of his charming young wife; but he left her at home in New York and brought along instead a young woman, Miss Fanny White, with whom his only ties appeared to be those of affection! As for Soulé, he has nothing of the temperament of a minister: come to Louisiana from France as a political refugee, having been jailed for agitation against the Bourbon restoration, he has continued his anti-monarchical activities in Spain, lending the diplomatic pouch to revolutionary letters and further distinguishing himself by shooting the French Minister to Madrid in a dispute over the latter’s wife!” The old man rocked forward in the protesting chair, its legs and rungs and curved stick-back loosened by the squirms of untold unhappy petitioners; he coughed with smoke and laughter and took pause to dab at his eyes with a handkerchief produced from his black sleeve. “Well, these two hotheads, Sickles by going to Washington and stirring up the President with talk of an easy conquest and Soulé by demanding a bullying ultimatum to accompany our offer of a hundred thirty million to the Spanish queen, had put our Mr. Marcy in such a bind that he found himself instructing Soulé to ‘detach that island from the Spanish dominion’—I use his very words. Meanwhile, Dan Sickles had returned to Europe spilling into every receptive ear what he had understood to be General Pierce’s order for drastic action. Naturally, protest though I did, it fell to me and Mason—and Mason took the whole conference as a lark, and contributed scarcely his presence at the table—to frame a formal advisement that would draw the teeth from Soulé’s threats while expressing, in some sort, their gist. Though I cannot claim your own pride of artistic authorship, mine was an ingenious composition, which achieved abeyance enough for Marcy to coax from Soulé his resignation this last December. In the case of Cuba as in many another, the best deed is doing nothing. The Young Americans and their hope of a filibustering expedition have been stymied, and Cuba will fall into our hands when the Spanish rot advances a little farther, as under Providence it is bound to. The public press, which understands nothing but crude sensation, accuses me of proposing ‘sale or seizure,’ when in truth it was I who pulled the administration back from such a disastrous option, which might well have given the European powers an opportunity to come forth and rattle our domestic peace with a Caribbean intervention! Britain is in a fighting mood, as you may sense. It has taken all the friendship I enjoy with Lord Clarendon to curb their reaction to our destruction of Greytown and, worse from the diplomatic point of view, our President’s adamant refusal to disavow Captain Hollins’ rash action! Luckily, not a life was lost in the bombardment, though a mass of mud huts were flattened.”

  Hawthorne silently wondered at the old fellow’s ability to delight in the intrigue that the expediencies of power impose. The Minister knew his auditor to be the President’s dear and loyal friend from their college days together at Bowdoin, and while seeming to rattle on freely, yet left to incommunicable implication any low view of Pierce’s ability; neither Pierce, who had defeated him for the 1852 Presidential nomination, nor Marcy, whose stubborn retention of his New York votes helped deny the Pennsylvanian that same nomination, could be counted among Buchanan’s friends, yet here he was (Hawthorne reflected), serving them both in this mostly ceremonial post, bereft of real negotiating authority, making the best of their erratic orders, yet serving with a curious relish. He had become, whatever his initial nature and its potential, a slave of public life, at home only among its formalities and nuances, which, like those of feminine society, seek to regulate with a touch and a word the masculine currents of force that seethe across the planet, and to put an acceptable face on the world’s bloody business of birth and murder. Buchanan and Miss Lane cut considerable figures in high British circles, and indeed it was not infrequently rumored that the Minister’s niece might soon make a titled marriage. Like all eager talkers, the man had something to sell or conceal. Yet, withal, something rustic and honest—a sunshot innocence aged in the barrel of long experience, an unspoiled aptitude for pleasure foreign to the shadowed psyche of New England—rendered the old functionary companionable, and indeed imparted a sense of his pleading, beneath the consciousness of high position and importance, for the less public and more reflective man’s approbation.

  The Consul, whose consciousness was divided between the deferences owed by his inferior office and his responsibilities as host, thought it wise, after so long an unburdening by his elderly guest, to introduce a topic where he might bear his share of the discourse. He took up the mention of the English mood, and expanded it to a question of the general English personality, as perceived by his fellow American, and discovered impressions not unlike his own, though on a broader plane. Buchanan felt the British willing to fight for their toehold on the Mosquito Coast, if maladroit and domestically distracted American policy provided an excuse for John Bull to exercise his bully tactics, and Hawthorne found the British personally overbearing and cold. There are some English whom I like, we might imagine him saying, in colloquial paraphrase of his words in Our Old Home—one or two for whom, I might almost say, I have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us, as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar, who went to bed with the princess, but placed the cold steel blade of his scimitar between. Perhaps, if I were at home, I might feel differently; but, in this foreign land, I can never forget the distinction between English and American. Buchanan nodded in eager agreement; when he did return from his English mission, he proclaimed to a crowd in New York City, I have been abroad in other lands; I have witnessed arbitrary power; I have contemplated the people of other countries; but there is no country under God’s heavens where a man feels to his fellow-man, except in the United States. Emboldened by the warmth of his important guest’s agreement, and by the second glass of morning brandy, from the consular cabinet, which the visit entailed, Hawthorne moved on to caricature English women, in implicit contrast to willowy American beauties both he and Buchanan had known. As a general rule, they are not very desirable objects in youth, and, in many instances, become perfectly grotesque after middle-age—so massive, not seemingly with pure fat, but with solid beef, making an awful ponderosity of frame. You think of them as composed of sirloins, and with broad and thick steaks on their immense rears. They sit down on a great round space of God’s footstool, and look as if nothing could ever move them; and indeed they must have a vast amount of physical strength to be able to move themselves.

  The Minister’s response to this word-picture was so gratifying, forcing the gentleman to squeeze the mirth from his abdomen with several lurches of his large and well-upholstered frame, that Hawthorne added, to modulate the conversation back into sobriety, “They must exist, but I have not happened to see any thin, ladylike old women, such as are so frequent among ourselves.”

  His slender Ann would be one such, Buchanan thought, soberingly. A life with her at his side, as time worked its gradual way with their bodies, felt suddenly to have been within reach, and narrowly missed. He found himself, for the moment, unable to speak, to this handsome reserved Yankee with his deepset, heavy-browed eyes, the wonderful eyes, Elizabeth Peabody had once exclaimed, like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens.

  Hawthorne sensed the snag in the Minister’s social flow, and motionlessly waited. He was not one of those men, those lusty Southerners given easy initiations in sl
ave shacks and river-town brothels, who found Buchanan’s failure to marry comic and odd. He knew from his own experience how easily a man might remain a bachelor, never gathering the energy for the leap, the days and years blending one into another, as they had in the Mannings’ house at 12 Herbert Street, he writing his dim delicate tales in his little room under the eaves, his mother distant and discordant in her antique widow’s weeds, his sister Ebe his only soulmate, little sister Louisa their only emissary to the people of the town, their shopper and gossip, his mother and Ebe and he venturing forth only at dusk for a walk along the wharves, skirting woodland and marshy pastures, strolling sometimes as far as Gallows Hill, where the witches had been hanged and flung into their graves, returning by way of proud streets lined with the redbrick mansions of Salem’s China merchants. But for the energy of another family—the intellectual busybody Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her two sisters—he might be immured there yet, in a kind of betranced obscure disgrace; Lizzie Peabody called him out into daylight, and little Sophia, the invalid youngest, seized him, no longer young, with the talons of love. That first visit, Sophia later told her husband, Lizzie had rushed upstairs, where her sister was sequestered with one of her migraines, and cried Oh Sophia, Mr. Hawthorne and his sisters have come, and you never saw anything so splendid—he is handsomer than Lord Byron! You must get up and dress and come down. Somehow certain of her prey even then, Sophia had laughed off the command: I think it would be rather ridiculous to get up. If he has come once he will come again. And this proved true. Like everyone else—the tale was folklore in political circles—Hawthorne knew that Buchanan’s life had early taken a stain: the lovers’ quarrel, the unexpected and unexplained death, the refused plea to attend the funeral, the grieving family’s curse, and the survivor’s curious escape into public life. No doubt it had been the making of Buchanan as a politician, just as those dozen closeted years had been his own making as an artist. In this dismal chamber FAME was won. Fortune warps us to fit its ends.

  “In the same fashion, you never see a fat plowhorse in the United States. We work them too hard,” Buchanan responded, apropos of American women, their thinness. The old man had shaken off his reverie, and now was attentive, cocking his white-haired head, to another ornament of the Consul’s apartment, a colored, life-size lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece and darkened, since his aborted term, by five years of oily smoke from the coal grate. “I hope, Mr. Hawthorne, your appointment calendar doesn’t run as tardy as your Presidential portraits; you are two Presidents behind.”

  “We are a war or two behind as well,” Hawthorne said, indicating another wall adornment, some rude engravings of our naval victories in the War of 1812.

  “Old Zack,” Buchanan mused. “Some say he was poisoned, by an agent of the South, when he showed himself to be a Free-Soiler at heart. Had he lived, he would have vetoed the Compromise of 1850, with civil war the likely result.”

  Hawthorne politically kept to himself his opinion, that the celebrated Compromise had been mere fiddle-faddle, a futile placation of the South’s irrepressible fears, as it saw slavery crowded into an increasingly minor fraction of a country tripled in size since 1800. All of Cuba, with the Mosquito Coast thrown in, could not right the balance.

  “I have always supported,” Buchanan stated, “extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. All those territories below 36° 30′, as they apply for admittance, to vote for or against slavery as they please. None will vote for it, and that includes Kansas. What the South needs from the North at this juncture is not lectures and pamphlets urging the slaves to massacre the planter and his sleeping babes, but indulgence, as we would show a man ill beyond recovery—as we show defenseless minorities in our midst like the Mennonites and the Jews.” He may have heard in his own voice an un-needed note of lecture, for he became confidential and faintly apologetic again, shifting his weight forward in the rickety petitioners’ chair to declare, “But by a quirk of fate my views have rarely been put to the test of a heated public vote: I was not yet in the Congress when the Missouri Compromise was passed, I was Minister to Russia during the worst of the nullification struggle, I was out of office and tending my garden in Lancaster by 1850, and I have been lifted above the vicious Kansas-Nebraska debate by my mission here.”

  “A charmed life,” Hawthorne murmured.

  “I was early wounded in life’s lists,” Buchanan confided, as if assuming his tale to be known, “and have been a peacemaker ever since. At times I had to differ with Jackson and Polk, and two flintier heads the country hasn’t seen since the first John Adams, but I always avoided a break.”

  “It may be, sir, that fate has reserved you for a great task not far ahead.”

  Buchanan’s color rose slightly. “Impossible, my dear friend. I have put in for my recall next October. Firmly and gladly, I intend to retire forever from public life. I am sixty-three years old, and have many familial responsibilities, though none of my own making; I possess a pleasant country estate that hasn’t known my step for it will be upwards of three years, and, if I may dare say this to you, whose words have been graced by the divine breath, I have some writing I wish to do—a memoir of my times, especially the administration of Mr. Polk. Though never possessed of genius, I have been in my plodding fashion a man of the written word, who has preferred written communication to any other form. When Henry Clay wished to heap scorn on me, he would merely say, ‘He writes letters!’ Well, I admit it—many the night I have fallen asleep at my desk, writing. When passions have evaporated, and what we strive to achieve has been undone by history, the words we write remain, and will plead for us.”

  “For some blessed few,” Hawthorne amended. “For the rest, books find a grave as deep as any. But your retirement, sir—will the people permit it? If our friend the General, who has conducted his duties under a stifling weight of personal sorrow and domestic pall, fails of renomination in the cry over Kansas—” He let the thought complete itself. Another thought crossed his mind: that he was meant to relay Buchanan’s protestations of final retirement to General Pierce; but he dismissed the notion. But it is a very vulgar idea,—this of seeing craft and subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect.

  The other’s animation increased, and his pink color sharpened. “My mind is fully made up; I will never be a candidate; and I have expressed this decision to my friends in such a way as to put it out of my power to change it. I admit, I would have been glad of the nomination for the Presidency in 1852, and would not have refused it in ’48 or ’44; but now it is too late, I am too old. My time has come for reflection and repose, and to improve my relation with my Maker, for we shall shortly, I devoutly trust, meet face to face.”

  Hawthorne involuntarily cast down the famous lamps of his eyes at this flare of piety, and said so softly the other had to strain to hear, “I pray not shortly. Come what may, Mr. Buchanan, you are at this moment the only Democrat whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office.”

  And the old man’s blush deepened further. His lips parted and merely trembled, groping for an evasion that would yet do justice to the high vision of half his lifetime. The blush of excited ambition stained all his face, between the white linen of his old-fashioned stock and his crest of upstanding white hair. Visibly he calmed himself, pondering with his ungainly squint the one English object in the room, a barometer hanging on the wall, generally indicating one or another degree of disagreeable weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, that I began to consider that portion of its circle as made superfluously. “Do you know any French, Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “Un peu.” There had been readings of Montaigne, Rousseau, Racine, Voltaire under the eaves, in books Ebe brought back from the Salem Athenaeum, and then, the weeks he stayed with Horatio Bridge in Augusta, his nightly conversations with Bridge’s tutor and boarder Monsieur Schaeffer, a little blond, cross-eyed Alsatian who would return from a d
ay of trying to drum French into young Maine blockheads with the cry “Je hais les Yankees!”

  “There is a profound wisdom,” Buchanan told Hawthorne, “in a remark of La Rochefoucauld with which I met the other day—‘Les choses que nous désirons n’arrivent pas’—comprenez?”

  “Thus far.”

  The accent that had served in the Court of St. Petersburg was carefully distinct, testing each word like a man advancing over thin ice. “—‘n’arrivent pas, ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ni de la manière qui nous auraient fait le plus plaisir.’ Oui? Comprenez-vous? C’est une vérité dure, n’est-ce pas?”

  “C’est dure, c’est triste, mais vrai. C’est la vie.”

  “La vie humaine depuis la Chute—depuis Adam and Eve, eh?” And the old fellow laughed, a high-pitched laugh wheezily withdrawn as soon as it was offered, mixed with a shriek from the tormented chair as if its runged and spindled wood were inhabited by the agonies of all the wriggling supplicants who had ever sat there in its hard embrace. Hawthorne felt on his neck a chill of the uncanny—the shriek seemed to have arisen not within the fusty official chamber but within his own haunted, reverberant skull.

  When was it? My memory wants to assign our exchange to a raw gray day of earliest spring, with soot-besprinkled tatters of unmelted snow huddling beneath the Muellers’ bushes and against the northern side of their cellar bulkhead, but by the logic of sequential event it must have been fall—late fall, let’s say—after Election Day. The Ford era is drawing to a close; Ford has lost, albeit narrowly; the leaves so ruddily, rosily, goldenly translucent on the day of the President’s cocktail party have fallen. More than fallen, they are raked and bagged or mulched and already rotting back into the sweet, misty earth. The maples and beeches and few surviving elms of southern New Hampshire—a woodsy state that like Pennsylvania has in over two hundred years contributed but one son to the Presidency, a state too good, one might say, to make great men, who extract such a toll from the rest of us; a state where Mt. Washington, that bitter blowy dome of rock, has never been renamed Mt. Pierce—stood silvery-bare along the meandering Wayward River, which having once powered and cleansed a few mills to the north was now free to pour itself uselessly into the sea. Live Free or Die is our motto; low taxes, our boast. We are the Union’s fourth most industrialized state. Though not so gothic as Maine, we have our pockets of rural poverty and sad fits of sex-motivated murder. Our highways have an honest tackiness; no curried Vermont, its green hills plump with New York money, this. No two streets of Wayward were parallel, and half had no sidewalks. Genevieve’s house, you will not have forgotten [see this page], stood across the street from a great old elm and was an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, symmetrical and modest yet rendered majestic for me by its enclosing of her live body and ardent, orderly spirit. Lately, I rarely got inside it. Brent came and went, visiting their two daughters, and Genevieve thought it would be too confusing for them if another man made equally free with the front door and back door. Also, the neighbors would notice my car, a conspicuously aging old Corvair convertible, if it were frequently parked where her front lawn blurred into the asphalt street, and who knows what neighborly evidence her husband’s lawyers might call upon in a pinch? In the Ford era, superstitious dread of lawyers and stockbrokers as potential sources of financial ruin had not been superseded by fear of failing banks and outlandish hospital bills, as in the present, Bush era.