by Allen Drury
Helen-Anne gave her ribald hoot.
“You’re all alike, holding out one carrot and then topping it with another, for us poor old spavined hacks in the press. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, lovey: if I were to do that job, you can bet your bottom dollar it would be done, and done right. That’s for sure.”
“We know that. Why do you suppose it’s being offered?”
“Is it being offered, or is this just pleasant persiflage on a snowy night in the nation’s capital?”
Beth laughed.
“Let’s put it this way: it isn’t being offered after three martinis at Dolly’s, is it? We aren’t shouting at each other across a crowded room at Perle’s, are we? I mean, this is cold-sober stuff, isn’t it, girl? What more do you want?”
“Forgive me for being suspicious, but I’ve played around and stayed around this old town too long. I’m afraid it won’t be official until I hear from the man himself. Where is he, by the way?”
“Taking a shower. He was down talking to the President earlier, and—”
“Oh?” Helen-Anne said, instantly alert as Beth had intended her to be. “Any signs of a break in the logjam?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Beth said lightly, “but, no, there aren’t.”
“I can’t stand Harley’s wife for some reason,” Helen-Anne said, “but I love him. I’d like to set off an H-bomb under his chair and blast him out of there so our man can get moving.”
“‘Our man’? That’s a good sign. I think you’re softening.”
“Helen-Anne Carrew?” that lady said in a disbelieving tone. “Softening? You’re mad!”
“Think it over. It’s a firm offer and Orrin will confirm it Thursday if not before.”
“I’ll be waiting. Sorry I haven’t got the angle just yet on what the Leesburg Lion is up to, but maybe I’ll snatch it from some passing breeze in the next couple of days. I’ll let you know if I do.”
“Thanks, dear. You’re a real friend. As well as a press secretary.”
“We’ll have to see about that,” Helen-Anne said. “There are a lot of things to be considered before I—Hello!” she said in a startled voice. “What’s that? Is somebody trying to cut in?”
“That’s funny,” Beth said in a puzzled tone. “I wonder what—”
There was a definite clicking on the wire, a sudden urgent voice.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Knox,” the White House operator said, “but we can’t seem to reach the Secretary on the direct line.”
“I know,” Beth said, too taken aback to be entirely coherent. “He’s running the—the faucet thing in the shower. What is—can I—”
“Please tell him at once that the President is calling the National Security Council, the rest of the Cabinet and the Congressional leaders to the White House in half an hour and he wants the Secretary there.”
“Certainly,” Beth said. “Certainly.”
“Thank you,” the operator said, and went off the line.
“My God,” Helen-Anne said, “what’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Beth said hurriedly, “but I’ve got to get Orrin.”
“Call me back and tell me all you can!” Helen-Anne shouted, and Beth shouted back, “I will!” before she slammed down the receiver and hurried up the stairs to recall her soapily oblivious husband to the cold realities of a cold world.
So began, for all practical purposes—and several days before Walter Dobius had thought he would begin it with his speech—the presidential campaign, with all its fateful consequences for so many millions of people. As the news spread out through the night—first a FLASH on the news-wires to the effect that PRESIDENT CALLS SECURITY COUNCIL CABINET TOP CONGRESS IMMEDIATE WHITE HOUSE SESSION, and then bulletin after bulletin of speculation, rumor, gossip, and non-news generated by the crew of several hundred nervously talking newspapermen and women who began to converge on the White House press room from their homes and beds all over town—as it spread on to New York, where it found Terry surprised and delighted as he thought he could predict the consequences, Obifumatta excited and gratified as he thought he could do the same—as it reached all the twittering, clamoring, argumentative members of the UN in the great cold city and found them shocked, appalled, dismayed, and/or delighted according to whose side they were on—as the news swept forward over London and Paris and Moscow (where the corps of student rioters was told to prepare itself for another spontaneous attack on the American Embassy) and Rome and Tokyo and all the rest—as it came over the short-wave on the chartered jet carrying Felix Labaiya home to Panama, and instantly changed and accelerated certain plans of his—and finally as it reached Leesburg and took Walter hastily to the telephone for a futile and angry call—even as it did all these things, its import and impact began to change and shift the emphasis of events even though the event itself, as the nations knew, was only half-completed.
It would not be completed until a decision came out of that hastily called meeting at the White House. It would not be completed until action, or non-action, flowed out of that decision. It would not, in fact, be completed at all, but would simply take its place in the mysterious and fearful story that the years still had to tell, flowing into the ever-broadening stream of events carrying a world too reckless to a fate too harsh.
***
Chapter 4
And that, Walter Dobius told himself as he arose nervously at six the next morning, having stayed awake most of the night in gloom, foreboding, and disturbance, was a sample of what happened when you had an inexperienced dunderhead in the White House and a trigger-happy, irresponsible firebrand like Orrin Knox advising him. How on earth his poor country had got into such a tangle, Walter would never know. Certainly, reviewing the many warning columns he had written about Orrin, recalling the innumerable occasions on which he had given the President sound and irrefutable directions on how to proceed, he knew it was not his fault.
Now all he could do, along with men of good will everywhere, was make some attempt, however futile, to help pick up the pieces. The difficulties of this depressed him as he slowly dressed, ate breakfast and got ready to have Roosevelt drive him into town so that he might fly up to a United Nations racked and shaken by the latest fearsome turn of events. This time might be too much. This time, his awkward, ill-led country might have stumbled into the final morass from which neither it, nor the world it could pull down with it, would emerge.
When he had heard the news last night of the rebel capture of Molobangwe, of the slaughter of thirty-five or possibly forty American medical missionaries there and the destruction by dynamiting, with further undetermined loss of life, of the Standard Oil installation up-country, his first assumption had been that of course the United States would proceed like a civilized nation. It would take the matter to the UN and their tempers might be soothed, the crisis might be eased, the dead might be decently buried, and the damage decently forgotten in one more endless, if heated, debate which would prove anew that fine old UN truism: “At least when they’re talking they aren’t shooting.”
This would, as Walter saw it, have been the right and proper thing to do. It is true that it would not have brought earnest good-hearted innocents back to life or really have justified their deaths, nor would it have restored ruined property or re-established broken law, but it would have been civilized, as the later twentieth century understood civilization. It would even, he thought with a bitter protest against all the hotheads and the extremists have been Christian. It would have turned the other cheek. Above all, it would have kept the United States from placing itself in the position of aggressor.
The rebels who had committed the deeds which had brought from the United States so violent a retaliation were not, in Walter’s mind and in the minds, he knew, of most of the UN’s clamorous newly arrived nations, aggressors themselves. They were simply freedom-loving children of nature seeking their God-given rights. The aggressors were those who reacted to them and called them lawless and
insisted that they be punished. The aggressors were those who refused to concede that freedom-loving children of nature had a right to hurt them and walk all over them. The aggressors were those who said murder and destruction were wrong and should be stopped.
Those were the ones, in Walter’s mind and in the minds of all those many millions on all continents who agreed with him, who were in the wrong and deserved the condemnation of civilization in this enlightened, if perhaps somewhat topsy-turvy, century.
Instead, what had happened? Out of the fateful meeting at the White House—which he had tried to prevent by a furiously alarmed call direct to the President, which the President had refused to accept—had come a harsh and shattering decision, as uncontrollable and threatening to the settled fabric of life as a first thunderclap on the open plains: United States transport planes, carrying three thousand Marines, would be sent—indeed were already on their way—to invade Molobangwe. Units of the United States Indian Ocean Fleet would be sent—indeed had apparently been on their way for more than a week, even at the time the President, disgracefully, was telling Walter he didn’t know what he would do next—to stand off Tanzania and furnish logistic support. Three squadrons of United States Air Force fighter-bombers, equipped with small atomic weapons, would be sent—indeed were already on their way—for stationing in the nearby Congo, no friend to Terry but less to Obifumatta.
The United States, in other words, stupidly, fantastically, inexplicably, inexcusably, was for all practical purposes going to war. And over what? Perhaps fifty murdered people and an oil monopoly’s property! It was utterly insane, as Walter saw it, and not all the President’s mealy-mouthed hypocrisies could change the fact.
The President had gone on television and radio after midnight. The broadcast was being repeated every hour on the hour. Walter had just seen it again for the fourth time, and still he could find in it nothing but faulty logic and hysterical emotionalism totally unsuited to the conduct of a great power—the world’s greatest power, he thought bitterly, until it got into the hands of two madmen like the President and Orrin. And now God help it! He recalled with a scathing sarcasm the President’s words, a sarcasm whose angry vigor had already found expression in the column he had written at top speed at 2 A.M. when he had heard the broadcast in its original delivery.
“My countrymen,” the President had said gravely, flanked by Orrin and the Secretary of Defense, with the rest of the Cabinet, top Congressional leaders, and members of the National Security Council ranged behind them, “six hours ago in the African nation of Gorotoland thirty-five or forty of your fellow citizens, medical missionaries and nurses, were deliberately and mercilessly murdered and mutilated by rebel forces running amok in the capital of the country. At the same time, less than two hundred miles away, installations of the Standard Oil Company, protected by treaty and agreement with the legitimate government of Gorotoland, were deliberately and wantonly destroyed by other members of these same rebel forces. An as yet undetermined additional number of Americans were killed there.
“These acts occurred despite the clearest and most specific warning from the Government of the United States, delivered to the rebel forces, as you know, a week ago.
“In that warning, which many of you heard on your television or radio, or read in your newspapers, I said:
“‘The Government of the United States further warns the rebel forces in Gorotoland, led by Prince Obifumatta, that if so much as one more American citizen or one more piece of American property is hurt, the Government of the United States will take immediate and substantial action.’
“Apparently it was decided by those backing Prince Obifumatta that the United States did not mean this, and that it would be safe to try the United States’ patience once again because nothing would come of it but an empty protest.”
“But now your fellow countrymen lie dead, mercilessly slaughtered in the most cold-blooded and deliberate way. Now American property lies in ruins, mercilessly destroyed in the most cold-blooded and deliberate way.
“What option confronted me and your Government when the news reached me here in the White House two hours ago?”
Here the President paused and then ad-libbed what was, in Walter’s estimation, a most inflammatory and propaganda-filled statement.
“It could be you I am called upon to protect.
“It could be your property destroyed.
“It could be you lying dead.
“What would you have had me do?”
It had been quite clear to Walter that this bit of demagoguery had greatly pleased the Secretary of State—he was practically smirking with joy, Walter thought—though most of the other faces ranked behind the President were grave and upset. But not Orrin the warmonger! He looked happy.
“Consistent with the position taken by your Government a week ago,” the President said, “and consistent with what I believe to be my obligation to every American citizen—here or anywhere on earth—and to every legitimate American property-holder—here or anywhere on earth—I decided to act.
“I called together my advisers in the Cabinet, the Congress, and the National Security Council.
“We discussed whether to take this matter on appeal to the United Nations, as no doubt some of you would have wished.” (My God, Walter thought, would have wished! Then he’s already done something else.)
“This course,” the President said slowly, “I rejected. (I rejected, Walter echoed, phrases for his column already racing through his mind: then the President must have overruled a substantial group right in his own house.)
“I rejected it because the challenge was immediate and I felt the response should be immediate. I did not want to wait weeks to have others decide whether Americans had been hurt. I knew they had been hurt.” (‘Oh, you demagogue,’ Walter told the portly figure before him on the screen, ‘you demagogue!’)
“I also knew,” the President said dryly, “that others would get the matter to the United Nations fast enough. That was not my worry. My worry was what to do about the facts that existed. My worry was how to act.”
He paused and took a drink of water, wiped his lips carefully on a handkerchief, and went on.
“I did act. I have acted. Supported by my advisers whom you see here before you, I gave orders, which are already being carried out, to dispatch appropriate air. Marine, and naval forces of the United States to the nation of Gorotoland. These forces have orders to protect American lives and property and also to restore order to Gorotoland so that civilized law may prevail and all individuals, native as well as foreign, may be protected and safe.
(My God, Walter thought savagely, you’re going to establish a protectorate. You’re going to administer a free and independent nation. My God, how can you ignore what I and all other sane and civilized men have been advising the country all these years?)
“These forces of the United States are on their way at this moment. The first contingents will arrive in Gorotoland at 6 A.M. Washington time this morning.
“They will proceed to carry out their orders.
“If anyone attempts to interfere with them,” the President said calmly, “They will be dealt with.” He paused and looked straight into the cameras.
“I want you, and I want the world, to know exactly why I have done this. I have done it because it seemed to me that it was time to take a stand. It was time to put a stop to the wanton destruction of American lives and property. It was time to defend the law of civilized nations. It was time to stop the steady slide that we have seen in recent decades toward the complete breakdown of responsible dealing between nations.
(You call this responsible? Walter cried in his own mind. You fool, is this responsible?)
“It was time to re-establish the fact that when America says something, she means it. Specifically, it was time to re-establish the right of American citizens, as long as they behave themselves, to go anywhere in safety on the face of this globe.”
The President’s
final words were soft but unyielding.
“I have had enough of the other. There will be no more of it.
“I hope you will understand my reasons. I hope you will support them. I have committed you to what I believe to be the honorable course. I hope for all our sakes that you agree.”
And then, as always (Walter described it to himself bitterly) there had come that damnable national anthem that fogs over any President’s words with a haze of stupid patriotic emotionalism, and the thing was over.
But it was not over, anywhere on earth. The special edition of the Post that was delivered to him by special messenger every morning was waiting beside his breakfast coffee, placed there by a purse-lipped, worried Arbella. It was index enough to what would follow.
U.S. MOVES ON (not “in”) GOROTOLAND, the headline said. MOSCOW, PEKING ISSUE ANGRY WARNINGS, DEMAND WITHDRAWAL, IMMEDIATE UN SESSION.
“What do you think of this, Arbella?” he had demanded sharply. “Don’t you think the President is insane?”
“No, sir, Mr. Walter,” she had replied firmly. “They only one way to deal with bandits, I say. I like it.”
“Well,” he snapped. “There will be plenty who won’t.”
“That’s right, Mr. Walter,” she agreed with what could only be the insolence of long association. “I expect you’ll tell ’em not to.”
And so, by God, he would, he thought as he reviewed once more the column he had written in the night. His mood had been savage and the column was savage. He had changed it hardly at all before he had called the syndicate at 3 A.M. and dictated it so that it could be rushed out at once to replace the rather dull one on gold outflow that he had filed earlier.
“So the triumph of idiocy over reason has come at last,” it began. “So we are going to war on a distant continent, for unworthy and indefensible objectives, in a contest in which nine-tenths of the world is automatically against us. So American imperialism is reborn, helped to new life by the monstrous midwifery of Harley M. Hudson and Orrin Knox. So stands the United States, convicted of aggression by its own foolish act. What will history make of so insane, futile, and foredoomed a decision?
