The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

“Cowboys, thirty-four to seven.”

  Kinkaid turned off the set and returned to the table. The rain was still coming down, sluicing from the shed roof in the rear; the sounds from the front room had grown fainter. They drank in silence. The Vietnamese waiter from the dining room stuck his head in the door.

  “Telephone,” he called in a thin soprano. “Is there a Mr. Chen with you gentlemen?”

  “Sorry,” Wilson answered, looking up at the thin face and the thatch of glossy violet-black hair. “Not here.”

  “Try Chinatown,” Cyril sang out without turning his head. The waiter disappeared. Guiltily, Nick Straus put down his glass without drinking.

  “This place stinks,” Fuzzy announced to no one in particular.

  “It’s the fish paste,” Kinkaid said. “It reminds me of the Camel Bar in Nha Trang.”

  Haven Wilson knew it was time to go.

  “So what have we decided?” Buster Foreman asked, lighting a cigarette. “What are we gonna do to this grade A Carolina turkey?”

  “Fry him,” Fuzzy said. “Barbecue him the same way he’s been roasting Washington and the federal bureaucracy.”

  “Deep fry,” Wilson suggested, reaching behind him for his raincoat. “Deep fat, maybe pork rind—like what you’ve been chewing for the last hour. Only it’s not going to solve anything. Chew it all you want, but you’re not going to swallow it. You’re just blowing your ears after a day in the pits.”

  “We’re serious,” Buster Foreman insisted. “Come on, get your wig on—give us an idea to work with.”

  “How come you’re so hacked off about Combs? He’s been around for a few years. He’s no worse than a few other senators I could name. He didn’t invent Capitol Hill hypocrisy. So why is it Combs you’re so bothered about? The Senate’s always been filled with small-time chauvinists like Bob Combs.”

  “Because he’s a goddamned self-righteous hypocrite with seven million bucks in his war chest, that’s why,” said Buster.

  “Hell, yes,” Cyril agreed.

  “You see?” Fuzzy put in quickly. “Cyril’s as sore as the rest of us. Nick’s mad too, aren’t you, Nick?”

  Nick Straus frowned, recalled suddenly from reflections which had nothing to do with Senator Bob Combs or the back room at The Players. “Frustrated, I suppose.…”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Wilson asked, still looking at Fuzzy. “Sore at what? Because Combs isn’t cherry and the rest of the Senate is? They’re all the same. I know these people. You’re the ones who are cherry.”

  “So how come everyone’s hacked off the way they are?” Buster asked. “Not just us, but everyone?”

  “It’s the way things are,” Wilson offered. “Ask Nick—he’s the historian. Ask him, he’ll tell you.” But Nick Straus faltered, unable to say anything at all. “Everyone’s fed up,” Wilson said. “Not just here. Look at France. Now they’ve got Mitterrand, but no one’s happy. Look at Norway, look at Sweden. It’ll be Schmidt’s turn next in West Germany, then Thatcher’s. Revolving-door presidents and prime ministers, that’s what’s happening. Everyone’s fed up.”

  “So how come?”

  “Because that’s what government has grown to—too small for the problems, too big for the people. Now it’s amateur night in Washington—four years of it. But no one has any answers, just the same old bullshit. In a couple of years, that’ll wash Reagan out too.” He pulled his raincoat across his knees and brought out his car keys. “But that’s not why you guys are talking this way. Do you know why you’re so pissed off, why you’re fed up with Combs, with Reagan, with the Democrats, who’re so dead in the water no one’s even turned the body over yet? Because it’s Monday night and the Redskins lost yesterday. It’s raining cats and dogs and half a million Redskin fans who’re also Washington bureaucrats in their spare time are sitting around the tube, dying again, just like yesterday, watching the Dallas Cowboys kick the hell out of a team that was twenty points better than the Redskins two weeks ago.” He looked at Buster Foreman, beginning to smile. “So while that’s happening, Bob Combs is sitting there on TV kicking the hell out of a few GS-18s who make more money than you do. That’s the problem. The Dallas Cowboys are winners, like Bob Combs and his seven-million-dollar political war chest. The Moral Majority, that’s America’s team, like the Cowboys, like that California sing-along crew in the White House.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” Fuzzy said.

  “So have I,” Wilson added, “and that’s why we’re sitting here chewing the fat, the Monday night losers. If you really wanted to get serious, you wouldn’t screw around with Bob Combs. Combs is nothing, just flat beer like they used to have down at Fort Bragg. In a couple of years no one is going to remember Combs any better than Wayne Morse, Dirksen, or the Dixiecrats. If you want to burn someone, go after Reagan—he’s the man you want. It’s easy. I mean, he’s a natural nitwit, a puddinghead, a stand-up comedian. You want to do something, show him up for the idiot he is? I’ll tell you how to do it.”

  He had their attention now. Even Nick Straus sat forward.

  “You get him to go on television, right out in the open, say a televised press conference. All one-liners, like the Johnny Carson show. So you get him to go on a national TV hookup and say something stupid—I mean something so dismally stupid that eighty million mom and pop Americans just sit there in their living rooms looking at each other like their ears just fell off. Just get him to go on television and say something like that, say a message to Brezhnev delivered over the CBS or NBC hot line, something like a kindergarten nursery rhyme, something like ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, stay out of El Salvador, Poland too.’ That’s all it takes. Just get him to do that and see what happens.”

  He stood up to pull on his raincoat.

  “But he already said that,” Fuzzy pointed out.

  “Yeah, I heard that one too,” Buster Foreman remembered.

  “So you see what the problem is, don’t you?” Wilson asked. “When you’ve got the answer to that, give me a call. Come on, Nick, I’ll give you a lift.”

  The rain had slackened, the subdued rush dulled by the sounds of conversation in the front bar. A busboy was noisily stacking crates of beer bottles in the storage room.

  “Turn back to the goddamned football game,” Wilson heard Fuzzy say as he and Nick went out.

  “Yeah, like always. Shove it,” Buster said.

  The two men drove out of the parking lot in Wilson’s twelve-year-old station wagon, trailing a pall of exhaust fumes over the damp pavement from worn piston rings and a leaky muffler.

  “They get a little carried away sometimes,” said Nick Straus. “I’d always heard Foreman and Larson were full of eccentric ideas. I never had much contact with them. Frustrated, I suppose, like all of us.”

  “They’re bored, just blowing off steam. What about you? How’s the Pentagon watch these days?”

  Nick Straus gave the question a moment’s thought. “Just as bad—idiotic, like the talk tonight. High-tech fixes, idiot gadgetry, technological determinism to explain Soviet intent—the same old Pentagon mythology.”

  In the late sixties and early seventies, when Wilson had moved to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Nick Straus had been his mentor, helping him better understand deterrent strategies, nuclear targeting policy, SALT, and the theodicy of the nuclear arms strategists.

  “You mean if the Soviets get a new military technology, it means they’re going to use it,” Wilson said. “Capability equals intent.”

  “To gain the advantage, that’s right. All the political or historical constraints go out the window. The same primitive fears, the same primitive mythology. But now it’s more dangerous. All this new Pentagon budget means is that they’re reviving the old containment strategy, containment everywhere. It’s lunacy.”

  Wilson eased the station wagon to a stop at an intersection. A fat, middle-aged jogger in nylon raingear lumbered slowly through the headlights, his feet barely lifted
from the asphalt.

  “He’s foolish,” Nick said softly, watching him disappear through the rain-ticked windshield. “Does he think he’s doing himself a favor?”

  “He’s training for a cardiac arrest—that and fallen arches. You can tell by how they move whether they know what they’re doing or not. That guy doesn’t.”

  “They’re everywhere you look these days,” Nick said as Wilson drove on. “You catch the Pentagon shuttle across Memorial Bridge at noon and that’s all you see—people running all over the place, like it’s lunch hour at St. Elizabeths.” The rain pattered against the roof. Wilson dimmed his lights for an approaching car and slowed down. After the car splashed past, Nick said, “It’s the same thing along the Mall or the Georgetown towpath. There’s a major in my office at DIA. He runs ten miles a day. He logs the Soviet SS-19 missiles, the Mod 4 SS-18 with ten warheads, both, but he spends more time on his jogging log. He calculates his daily mileage within two hundred yards.” He turned. “Did you realize that there are fewer than a dozen people in Washington who can understand the calculus upon which the claims for Soviet missile accuracy are based? Did you realize that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Wilson said.

  “That’s where most of them you see running along the Potomac come from,” Nick said, his voice odd, a man hovering between two voids.

  “That’s the way it is with those guys,” Wilson said, trying to evoke the Nick Straus he’d once known. “It used to be handball, then squash, after that, racquetball. I remember when I was in Berlin for a week or two back in the sixties, working on a Senate staff study. I used to play squash with a bird colonel, a short little guy who was still playing regimental football. A forty-six-year-old blocking back with gray hair, scabs on his shins, and a houseful of teen-aged kids. He could never make the adjustment. He had the reflexes of a kid, but he’d always overrun the ball. He’d nearly kill himself every time we got on the court, and the poor guy’d always lose. Then he’d jump in a hot shower, boil himself up like a lobster, put on his strangle suit, and go roaring off to his battle group, ready to blitzkrieg the Wall. He used to scare the hell out of me. I kept thinking to myself: This guy’s our tripwire out here? This nut? I used to see the same kind in Vietnam, the kind of gung-ho CO that gives pep talks to his troops over the bullhorn, then steps out of his bunker after the lights are out and gets fragged. That’s a kind of paranoia too, isn’t it?”

  He turned off the boulevard and up the hill through the tunnel of trees, conscious of that crude, colloquial voice Nick Straus sometimes drew from him. He didn’t know why he was telling him all this. “Anyway, that’s the trouble with the Pentagon, whether it’s Afghanistan, Poland, or the Persian Gulf. They’re always overrunning the goddamned ball.”

  “They’re dusting off some of the old strategies,” Nick said, “and not just containment. Fighting a limited war with theater nuclear weapons, for example. I even saw an option paper the other day for reviving the old Davy Crockett. You remember that? It’s a sub-kiloton nuclear weapon, small enough to be carried by an infantryman. Totally destabilizing, totally insane.”

  Wilson turned off the shadowy lane and into the Straus driveway. Nick sat quietly in his seat, not stirring, still pondering some cosmic destabilization. Finally, he said, “How about a quick one, one for the road?”

  “Thanks, I’d like to, but Betsy’ll be looking for me. She’s home by now.”

  Nick opened the door but didn’t get out, still holding the door open. “Sometimes I think maybe I didn’t put up enough of a fight when they wanted to retire me. What do you think?” He sat looking at the old coach lamp atop the post near the front porch. “Maybe I should have stayed on at Langley for a few more years, kept plugging away.” In the years prior to his retirement, Nick had been removed from a SALT II delegation, brought home from a Geneva arms control committee, and then eased into bureaucratic limbo after he’d been accused of underestimating Soviet capabilities in the annual CIA assessment. “Do you ever think about it, whether you did the right thing or not, quitting the Intelligence Committee when you did?”

  “Not much anymore.”

  “It worries me. What you said about this administration is true. It’s not a joke anymore.”

  “No, it’s not a joke.”

  “But even if I were back there, back at Langley, what could I do? After a time, people stop listening; you become too predictable. That’s what happened to me. I’d used up my capital.”

  “Most of us did. The rooster that crowed himself to death. Maybe that was me too. No, I think you did the right thing.”

  “You think so?”

  They’d talked of it many times, but Nick Straus’s doubts remained, the question always returning. Something had gone out of him, Wilson thought, some purpose denied, something broken or missing, like the old grandfather clock in the downstairs hall that would fall silent for days at a time and then suddenly begin ticking again, waking him with its ghostly chimes as it tolled the hour at five o’clock in the morning.

  “That’s always the trap,” Wilson said, “waiting a few more years. You wait a few more years and then it’s too late, there’s nothing left. You don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, just remember where you’ve been and how it used to be—Korea, NATO in the old days, all the old myths that don’t exist anymore. No, you did the right thing. The problem now is to pick up from here and go on. Maybe we should open a consulting firm. That’s something we could think about—Straus and Wilson, the beltway bandits.”

  “Maybe. It sounds like a shoe store.” Nick climbed out. “Thanks for the lift. Stop by sometime.”

  Wilson cranked down the window. “I’m going out to Ed Donlon’s place in the Shenandoah this weekend,” he called, “maybe cut some firewood, work the dogs. Why don’t you come along?”

  But Nick Straus only waved as he passed in front of the coach lamp and Wilson couldn’t hear his reply. He wondered what Nick had wanted him to say, what he might have told him—someone whose grasp of the issues of the times made Wilson’s own amateur ramblings sound like so much warm air from some bush-town hot-stove league.

  He drove back through the rain to his own residence a mile away, a sprawling, white-painted brick rambler on a winding lane between McLean and North Arlington. A small creek lay in front of the sloping acre lot planted in oak, maple, and dogwood. He’d bought the house fifteen years ago at a time he could barely afford it. Now it was appraised at quadruple its original cost and he couldn’t afford to sell it. With their two sons out of college and living elsewhere—the oldest in residency at a Boston hospital, the youngest in Oregon—Betsy was already thinking about moving to Naples, Florida. She wanted to buy a house on the Gulf near her parents and sister.

  At forty-eight, Haven Wilson wasn’t enthusiastic. Washington was his city, even if under enemy occupation, and rural Virginia was his country, autumn and winter country, the hillsides blooming with dogwood and red-bud in the spring, with yellow and red maples in October, as in the small town in southwestern Virginia where he’d grown up. He didn’t like Florida’s unchanging season any more than he liked the Miami Dolphins. People who sat in hot weather stadiums should be watching jai alai or the dog races, not football, which belonged to autumn and winter, to the autumn afternoons of the Midwest or the Atlantic seaboard, to the mud and shadows of the old Polo Grounds in New York with the wind sharp, the dusk coming fast, rain and snow both part of its element. It didn’t belong on AstroTurf under a plexiglass bubble or in a sun-drenched coliseum full of California sun freaks sitting shirtless in the stands, bellies to the skies, quaffing beer like kids at a rock concert.

  After Sunday’s Redskins loss, he’d remained in the basement rec room trying to finish the New York Times, all four pounds of it, while watching Sunbelt football with half an eye. Two teams in Day-Glo nylon uniforms scrambled over a vivid green plastic carpet under a Polynesian sky. Tired of reading news reminding him only of his own political isolation here in the Virginia sub
urbs, he’d wandered outside to rake the leaves, but shadows had come to the rear terrace, darkness to the woods. He’d stood in the eerie dusk like a TV cretin, still wired up to the California sunshine by electronic synapses and synthetic replay, like the rest of the country, persuaded that the great golden aurora from the Pacific had flooded eastward to relight the cold kilns of Youngstown, Lorain, and East Chicago, the artificial dawn reinvesting the continent, washing from silicon valley, the mercury lamps of television city, and the golf greens of Palm Springs where the Great Communicator’s transcendentalists gathered, or the tacky, all-night fast-food and drugstore emporiums of the West Coast where their entrepreneurship thrived.

  Sunbelt football was killing the game he’d once played and loved, the same way the Reaganites were trashing the country.

  “I thought you’d be home earlier,” Betsy called as he stood in the back hall, taking off his wet raincoat. “How was your meeting with Mr. Larabee?”

  “Crummy.”

  She sat on the orange sofa in the rear study, her legs drawn under her, a book on her lap. Twists of yarn from the half-completed Afghan had been pushed aside, like the knitting bag. Her once dark hair showed streaks of gray now, cut short. The sharp features were still as striking as ever, her skin as firm as porcelain. “Really? What sort of person was he?”

  “A nut.” He hung up his coat.

  “Then why are you so late?” she asked, disappointed.

  “I stopped by The Players to see if someone was there who knew Larabee. Then I watched the game. What time did you get home?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.” She hadn’t been to a teachers meeting but to a get-together of the Kennedy Center Subscription Club, a group of suburban music lovers who purchased blocks of tickets for the Kennedy Center music season. Once a month they gathered at a club member’s home to listen on stereo to the program for a particularly esoteric upcoming concert. “But I thought The Players was closing. You stopped to watch the football game?”

  “Just part of it.” He entered the study and pulled off his tie. The television set was turned on across the room.