And then suddenly I had this stunning vision of little Ethel Greenglass, about six years old, standing naked by a kitchen coalstove, pulling on a pair of white cotton panties, watched furtively by her brothers, her mother nagging at all three of them from the kitchen table where she was laying out some kind of breakfast. It looked like bread. The table was spread with an oilcloth. Her swollen belly was pressed against the lip—
I tried to shake it off. But the stove was still there. There was something like linoleum on the floor. I could smell the breakfast and feel that early-morning tremor of getting ready for school. Then I remembered that my brothers and I always used to get dressed huddled around the kitchen stove like that in Yorba Linda, and I caught this exact look of midwinter grayness out the window, only there were old brick buildings out there, not a lemon grove. And this peculiar sensation that Mama—Mrs. Greenglass, I mean—was pregnant, I could see the very shape of her swollen belly just about eye-level. Was it when my mother—? And Ethel’s amazing bottom: we didn’t have any sisters. Only the hired girls.
I leapt up, grabbed my jacket, switched off the lights and, praying fervently: “God, get me home safe!”, fled the office, afraid even to look back over my shoulder, much less clean the place up. As I ran down the corridor of the old Senate Office Building toward the elevator, my footsteps echoing and reverberating through the empty marble hallways of that dark tower, I seemed to see rats and vermin everywhere, to hear the grinding racket of traffic and feel the violence and dereliction of tenement houses crowding around me, yet at the same time I felt the stomach-churning excitement of a school football game, a piano recital, dance date, my nostrils twitching with a wild murky reminiscence of chlorinated pools, choir robes, girls’ hair, pie crusts, and greasepaint. I felt angry with myself for giving way to panic like this, it was like lurching offside in a big football game, I tried to stop myself but couldn’t—I heard footsteps just behind or beside my own, somebody breathing, the stairwells were sunk in a swarming darkness, doors seemed to be yawning open. At the elevator I pulled up, tried to catch my breath, my heart was beating wildly, I—what? something rustling in the dark space behind the elevator! I wanted to cry out, to run the other way, but I was determined not to lose my cool, not to show fear in the face of the Phantom, not any more than I already had. I knew I had to do something unexpected. I turned and walked directly toward the shadow behind the elevator. “Coward!” I gasped, and gritted my teeth. There was a wall back there and I hit it with my face.
I staggered back, half blinded by the blow, feeling hurt and alone. I found the elevator button and leaned against it, remembering that hired girl who let me fall out of the carriage and get run over, her big lap, big to me, yet not big enough. I could almost smell her as she came to tuck us in, fresh from washing up. To listen to our prayers. Read to us from James Whitcomb Riley: “Listen, boys…”—the elevator door gaped: a big mouth—I was frightened of it and took the stairs down, jumping them three at a time—“… I’m tellin’ you…
“The Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!”
INTERMEZZO
The War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness
The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower
(from Public Papers of the Presidents, January 20–June 19, 1953)
Tonight,
as you sit in your homes all across this broad land,
I want to talk to you about an issue
affecting all our lives—the question
that stirs the hearts of all sane men:
How far have we come in man’s long pilgrimage
from darkness toward the light?
Are we nearing the light—
a day of freedom and peace for all mankind?
Or are the shadows of another night
closing in upon us?
Since the century’s beginning,
a time of tempest has seemed to come upon
the continents of the earth—great nations of Europe
have fought their bloodiest wars; thrones
have toppled and vast empires have disappeared.
The shadow of fear has darkly lengthened across the world.
We sense with all our faculties
that forces of Good and Evil are massed and armed and opposed
as rarely before in history.
No principle or treasure that we hold,
from the spiritual knowledge of our free schools and churches
to the creative magic of free labor and capital,
nothing lies safely
beyond the reach of this struggle.
You are even puzzled
as to whether it is wise to say anything,
because anything that one in my position might say
could be used as an excuse to make
these conditions worse.
But do you cure cancer
by pretending it does not exist?
We must see, clearly and steadily,
just exactly what is the danger before us;
it is more than merely a military threat.
The forces threatening this continent strike directly
at the faith of our fathers and the lives of our sons,
at the very ideals by which our peoples live!
Freedom is pitted against slavery;
lightness against the dark!
Here, then, is joined no argument
between slightly differing philosophies—
for this whole struggle, in the deepest sense,
is waged neither for land
nor for food nor for power
—but for the Soul of Man himself!
We are Christian nations,
deeply conscious that the foundation
of all liberty is religious faith:
we trust in the merciful providence of God,
whose image, within every man,
is the source and substance
of each man’s dignity and freedom.
This faith rules our whole way of life—
we live by it and we intend to practice it.
I think that is not hard to prove
in the case of America: when we came
to that turning point in history, when we intended
to establish a government for free men
and a Declaration and a Constitution to make it last,
in order to explain such a system we had to say:
“We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator”
—thus establishing once and for all
that our civilization and our form of government
is deeply imbedded in a religious faith.
Indeed, those men felt that
unless we recognized that relationship
between our form of government and religious faith,
that form of government made no sense!
Now, that is the doctrine of the administration.
It is most certainly the doctrine of the Republican Party
and those Republican leaders in Congress.
The faith we hold
belongs not to us alone
but the free of all the world.
This common bond
joins the grower of rice in Burma
and the planter of wheat in Iowa,
the shepherd in southern Italy
and the mountaineer in the Andes,
the French soldier who dies in Indochina,
the British soldier killed in Malaya,
the American life given in Korea.
We believe.
The enemies of this faith
know no god but force, no devotion but its use;
they tutor men in treason;
they seek not to eradicate poverty and its causes
but to exploit it and those who suffer it—
they feed upon the hunger of others.
These forces
seek to bind nations not by trust but by fear—
whatever defies th
em, they torture,
especially the truth. Against these forces
the widest oceans offer no sure defense.
We live in a time of peril.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations
when the gravest choices must be made—a moment
when man’s power to achieve good or to inflict evil
surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears
of all ages.
The worst to be feared
and the best to be expected can be simply stated:
the worst is atomic war…the best:
a life of perpetual fear and tension.
We must act from a lesson learned at terrible cost:
to serve our reasoned hope for the best,
we must be ready steadfastly to meet the worst.
These plain and cruel truths
define the peril and point the hope
that come with this spring of 1953.
The world, at least, need be divided no longer
in its clear knowledge of who has condemned
humankind to this fate—we all know something
of the long record of deliberately planned Communist aggression!
It has been coldly calculated by the Soviet leaders,
for by their military threat they have hoped
to force upon America and the free world
an unbearable security burden leading to
economic disaster!
They have plainly said
that free people cannot preserve their way of life
and at the same time provide enormous military establishments
—Communist guns, in this sense,
have been aiming at an economic target
no less than a military target: prolonged inflation
could be as destructive of a truly free economy
as could a chemical attack against an army in the field!
They seek to promote,
among those of us who remain free and unafraid,
the deadliest divisions: class against class,
people against people, nation against nation—
we cannot escape the implication of these attacks,
their complete indifference to human life and to the individual;
it is clearly part of the same calculated assault
that the aggressor is simultaneously pressing
in Indochina and in Malaya,
and of the strategic situation
that manifestly embraces the island of Formosa—
the destruction of freedom everywhere!
It is, friends, a spiritual struggle.
And at such a time in history, we who are free
must proclaim anew our faith; we are called as a people
to give testimony in the sight of the world
to our faith that the future shall belong to the free!
History does not long entrust
the care of freedom to the weak or the timid—
we must be ready to dare all for our country!
Human liberty and national liberty
must survive against Communist aggression
which tramples on human dignity;
upon all our peoples and nations
there rests a responsibility to serve worthily
the faith we hold and the freedom we cherish
—which means essentially a free economy.
Let none doubt this:
we are free men.
I don’t like the word “compulsory”;
I am against the word “socialized”;
everything about such words seems to me
to be a step toward the thing
that we are spending so many billions to prevent—
the overwhelming of this country by any force,
power, or idea that leads us to forsake
our traditional system of free enterprise.
Private investment has been the major stimulus
for economic development throughout this hemisphere;
this is the true way of the Americas—the free way—
by which people are bound together for the common good.
Make no mistake:
the reason we have representatives around the world
is to protect American interests
wherever they may be endangered or in difficulties;
we do everything we can to protect the interests
of the United States everywhere on the globe—
the peace we seek is nothing less than
the practice and fulfillment of our whole faith!
It is on such simple facts as these, ladies and gentlemen,
that your foreign policy is founded
and established and maintained.
I know these facts, these simple ideals,
are not new; this idea of a just and peaceful world
is not new or strange to us—all of this springs from
the enlightened self-interest
of the United States of America.
But to be free and stay free,
we must be strong—and we must stay strong!
We shall never try to placate an aggressor
by the false and wicked bargain
of trading honor for security!
If we allow any section of the world that is vital to us,
because of what it provides us—say, manganese,
or uranium, or cobalt—anything that we need
—if we allow any of those areas to fall
to a form of government inimical to us,
that wants to see freedom abolished from the earth,
then we have trouble indeed!
It is necessary
that we earnestly seek out and uproot
any traces of Communism at any place
where it can affect our national life,
that all of us by our combined dedication and devotion
may merit the great blessings
that the Almighty has brought to this land of ours!
It is up to every American to realize
that he has a definite personal responsibility
in the protection of these resources—they belong
to the people who have been created in His image:
they must, at any cost, remain armed, strong,
and ready for the risk of war!
In that way only, can we permanently aspire
to remain a free, independent, and powerful people,
living humbly under our God—
in the final choice, a soldier’s pack
is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.
But there is no security for a free nation
in the sword alone.
Security must spring
from the hearts and minds of free men—
our defense, our only defense,
is in our own spirit and our own will!
If we ponder this a moment,
we all know that this really means the defense
of those spiritual values and moral ideals
cherished by generations of Americans
—the true treasure of our people;
this treasure of the spirit
must be defended above all
with weapons of the spirit:
our patriotism,
our devotion,
our readiness to sacrifice.
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world
must first come to pass in the heart of America;
the true way to uproot Communism in this country
is to understand what freedom means,
and thus develop such an impregnable wall
that no thought of Communism can enter;
and we must seek
in our churches,
our schools,
our homes and
our daily lives,
the clearness of mind and strongness of heart
to guard t
he chance to live in freedom.
I know of nothing I can add
to make plainer the sincere purpose of the United States.
My grateful thanks
go out to each of you for your prayers,
because your prayers for divine guidance on my behalf
are the greatest gift you could possibly bring to me.
Today I think that prayer is just simply a necessity,
there is a need we all have in these days and times
for some help which comes from outside ourselves
as we face the multitude of problems
that are part of this confusing situation—
if we can back off from our problems
and depend on a Power greater than ourselves,
I believe that we begin to draw these problems into focus.
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