He looked forward to the small dinner tonight. By then, the festivities, the games, the resolutions, would be behind them all. Then there would be easy, relaxed companionship, Wanda and himself as hostess and host to The Judge and his Missus, to Admiral Oates and his sister, to the Stovers, to the Tuttles, and—he had almost forgotten—to Edna Foster and to Tim Flannery, if they had finished their work in time.
Then Dilman’s eyes came to rest on Sue and Nat Abrahams, side by side on the sofa, and their three youngsters at their feet, and his only regret was that they could not remain for the dinner tonight. But Dilman knew, with a pang of guilt, that he had detained Nat long enough. In the weeks since the trial, and then through Christmas, Nat had stayed on, had volunteered to do so, to help Dilman draft the radically revised version of the Minorities Rehabilitation Program, one which put as much emphasis on giving Negroes and other minority groups equality in education, accommodations, voting, as the old bill had given them in economic parity. The revised version was prepared, ready to be introduced by his supporters in Congress when the members of both Houses reconvened shortly. And now, at last, Nat Abrahams was free to go home to Chicago, to share the holiday weekend with Sue’s relatives and to return to the law offices that his partner, Felix Hart, had been manning alone.
As he noticed the bulky morning newspaper on the sofa, Dilman’s mind went to the persons who were not here but had been so much a part of his life, for better, for worse, in recent months, and who were now less a part of his life, except as he read about them or heard about them. Hastily, Dilman’s mind revived news items, important, minor, of recent days.
Arthur Eaton was being boomed as the Party’s candidate in this year’s Presidential election, and his vociferous backers had entered his name in the first three state primary elections. But to the surprise of many, Governor Talley’s name had also been entered as a candidate in those primaries, and to the surprise of fewer people, Senator Hoyt Watson’s name had been resoundingly entered, too. For, although Watson had been dropped by his own state political machine, the curve of his national popularity (led by Southern liberals and independents) had risen, and the Party was now interested in testing his appeal outside the boundaries of the Mason-Dixon Line. In the Deep South, Representative Zeke Miller, basking in the afterwave of his impeachment trial publicity, was trying to organize and gain support of his idea for a powerful third political party, and there was money behind him, but it was too early to tell if there were also votes.
As for Dilman himself, the chairman of the Party, Allan Noyes, had telephoned the Oval Office repeatedly for an appointment “to talk things over”—meaning, no doubt, to find out in what manner Dilman could be useful to the Party without harming or obstructing it, and to learn his plans, and to determine what must be done with him in the future. But as Dilman had now shut out the past, he refused to peer into the future. He was entirely devoted to the present, to trying to be the kind of President he thought he was capable of being and the kind the nation needed. And so whenever Noyes had telephoned, Dilman had been too occupied to speak to him or arrange to see him.
There were other names Dilman knew, and they were often in other sections of the morning newspaper. On the society page it had been announced that Miss Sally Watson was off to Switzerland for a vacation. But Dilman had heard more, that it would be an extended stay in a renowned mental clinic in Zurich. On the book page it had been announced that Leroy Poole’s authoritative biography of the President was completed and would be published in the spring. But Dilman had heard more, that Poole had quickly brought the book to an end (making no secret of the fact that he was still Dilman’s foe) in order to obtain the necessary funds to work with Mrs. Gladys Hurley on an angry protest biography of the late Jefferson Hurley. On the feature page it had been announced in several columns—as rumor, not fact—that General Pitt Fortney, since his resignation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would become a member of the board of directors of an Oregon aircraft company, a newly acquired subsidiary of Eagles Industries Corporation. And occasionally, in the back sections of Miller’s newspaper, there was a minor story bearing the dateline “New Orleans” and the by-line “George Murdock.”
Suddenly Dilman, whose eyes had strayed to the clock on the fireplace mantel, realized how late it was in the morning. Holiday or no, half of his staff were at their desks in the West Wing offices downstairs, Edna Foster among them, and Dilman knew that there were at least four or five hours of paper work for him to do, too.
He walked over to the sofa where Nat Abrahams sat, and touched his shoulder. Immediately Abrahams, still flushed with the delight he took in his family, jumped to his feet and came around to join Dilman.
“Well, Nat,” Dilman said, “I’ve got to get down to the galleys and start rowing. I’m afraid this is good-bye until sometime next year—”
“Mind if I walk you to the office, Doug?”
They found their overcoats, pulled them on, then went together into the West Hall and started for the elevator.
“Nat,” Dilman said, “we’re old friends, and you know how inarticulate I am about my deeper feelings. I’ve tried to tell you, in my way, how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me, how grateful I am to you. I don’t know what would have happened without you.”
“Nothing different would have happened.”
“I choose to believe it would not have been the same. No other attorney on earth would have understood me well enough to perceive the real indictment, and been able to invent and throw that Article V at them. Anyway, Nat, what you must know, before taking off, is how conscious I am of the sacrifice you made—”
“Enough of that, Doug. I don’t wear a halo well. I’m the bare-headed type. What sacrifice? Three unhappy years, filled with self-reproach, with that inhuman corporation? Thank God, you brought me to my senses. You saved me those wasted years, Doug. You handed them back to me. I’m the one who should be grateful to you for what you gave me.”
They reached the elevator and waited. “You know what I mean, Nat,” Dilman said. “Maybe you kept the three years, but you lost the farm, additional security, a financial cushion, because of me.”
Entering the elevator, they started down to the ground floor. “Listen to me,” Abrahams said. “I lost nothing, nothing at all. Farms? There are a hundred more, always will be, and maybe better ones. Instead of having mine in three years, I’ll have it, and all the rest, in five or six years. Doug, you have no idea how many calls I’ve had, fat offers I’ve received, since that trial. Not only corporations, but labor unions, Manhattan law firms. Some of them sound even better and more corrupting than Eagles ever was. Eventually I may accept one, if I can find one that is clean behind the ears as well as solvent. No hurry this time. I’ll sit back and let them woo me. So, you see, Doug, what you think I did for you has done as much for me. And it did something else, besides.” He grinned shyly before leaving the elevator. “It put me right smack in the history books, a footnote to you. My children’s children, they’ll read about me. Now, tell me, what other neighborhood Jewish lawyer ever had a break like that? Don’t thank me, Doug. Let me thank you.”
Once they were in the ground-floor corridor, with the two Secret Service agents falling in a discreet distance behind them, Nat Abrahams spoke again.
“What about your future, Doug?”
“I don’t permit myself to think about it,” Dilman said. “I wake up, I work, I go to sleep. I’m trying to handle life a day at a time. That’s a big job, a big, strange, new job for a person who only recently found out he has the right to perform as a man and not just a colored man. It’s like starting afresh, second chance, with a new mind, new limbs, new nerve apparatus, new outlook. You have to get used to it before you can use all that health and strength.”
“Yes. I know,” said Abrahams. At the ground exit Abrahams stopped. “Whatever happens, Doug, I think it’s going to be better for you from now on.” He dug into his pocket and came out with a clippi
ng. “Did you see this in the morning paper?”
“What is it?”
“The latest nationwide Public Opinion Poll taken on you. Listen.” He consulted the clipping. “When you came into office, 24 per cent of the people favored you, 61 per cent were against you, 15 per cent were undecided about you. Today, four months later—well, here it is—33 per cent of the people are in favor of you, 28 per cent against you, 39 per cent undecided.” He returned the clipping to his pocket. “The significant thing, Doug, is that right now, instead of the great percentage of people being against you, they’ve moved into the undecided column; they’ve left behind attitudes of strong resentment to move closer to you and say, in effect, ‘Okay—maybe—let’s wait and see—show us.’ Can you realize what that means, Doug?”
Dilman did not reply. The garden door had been opened for them, and Dilman went outside, with Abrahams following him, then going alongside him. The air was crisp, wholesome, bracing, and as they proceeded up the colonnaded walk, there was no sound other than the crackle of their footsteps on the snow-crusted cement.
Briefly, Dilman strode in silence, lost in thought, and at last he looked at his friend. “Strange, Nat, how whenever you’re not sure of the future, you go scampering back into the past. My mind just went back to when I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old. There was a ditty all of us used to chant. Want to hear it?”
Abrahams nodded.
Dilman hesitated, then he recited:
Ef I wuz de President
Of dese United States,
I’d live on ’lasses candy
An’ swing on all de gates!
He shook his head. “Our most fanciful dream of heaven. Little did we realize there was no ’lasses candy, no swinging gates.’ ”
“Or realize that it was not a fanciful dream at all.”
Dilman glanced up sharply at his friend. “Not a dream? . . . Yes, I see. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“ ‘Ef I wuz de President.’ You became the President, Doug. You still are the President. That’s something, I think.”
“I suppose—yes, I suppose it is, ’lasses candy or not.”
“Because you’ve grown, Doug, and so has everyone around you—the entire country, it’s come of age, too,” said Abrahams. “The American people have finally learned what a great Kansas editor tried to teach them years ago, that—that liberty is the only thing you cannot have—unless you are willing to give it to others.”
Rounding the corner, Dilman stared out at the lustrous snow-covered garden and the glittering expanse of the White House south lawn. “You think it has been learned, Nat?”
“I believe so,” said Abrahams.
They had arrived at the French doors outside the Oval Office. They halted, facing one another.
“Let me put it this way,” Abrahams said. “The country may be uneasy today, but it is no longer ashamed or afraid, ashamed or afraid of you—or itself. The country’s learned to live with you, Doug, so now, at last, it can live with itself. It has a better conscience today. It feels right. That’s an awful good feeling, Doug. . . . And that’s a huge step, the greatest this country’s made since the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Lincoln had long legs. But now, for the first time, we’ve found countless men with legs as long, and they’ve made the next step, the giant one. As a result, the country is closer to becoming one nation than it ever has been before—and by the time it becomes one nation, it may be ready, and qualified, to help make our world one world. . . . Big words, Doug, but these are big times. None of us will ever be the same again—not you—not me—not anyone, anywhere. Thank God.”
A French door creaked behind them, and Edna Foster appeared. When she saw them, her worried features reflected immediate relief.
“Oh, there you are, Mr. President. I was calling everywhere,” she said. “There have been some messages—emergencies—low-grade, but nevertheless—”
“I’ll be right in, Miss Foster,” Dilman said, and then he turned back to his friend.
Nat Abrahams was smiling. “I think you belong inside.” He extended his hand. “Good luck, and a Happy New Year, Mr. President.”
Douglass Dilman clasped Abrahams’ hand firmly in his own. “Good luck, and a Happy New Year to you, Nat.”
After that, Dilman lingered outside briefly, watching Abrahams leave, and then, feeling assured and purposeful, feeling good, he entered his Oval Office to begin the day’s work.
AFTERWORD
I remember clearly the night that my father conceived the idea for The Man. It was after midnight June 8, 1963. I was fifteen years old. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and talking. My father burst into the room, his eyes gleaming. “Have I got a great idea for a story,” he said excitedly.
It was not unusual for my father to tell us his ideas for novels. He would try them out and talk through a few possible plot directions. If an idea progressed to the stage where he would actually start writing it, he would clam up and, although we knew what he was working on, we wouldn’t hear again about the plot or the characters until he had written the words, “THE END.”
My father loved writing novels. He loved every aspect of the process. He enjoyed thinking of ideas. He enjoyed developing a plot and interweaving sub-plots. He enjoyed creating characters. He even enjoyed the minutiae of novel writing, like paging through the phone book looking for names to match his characters. He enjoyed researching the locations of his stories and he prided himself on the accuracy of his descriptions. He particularly loved the writing itself—putting a blank piece of paper into his typewriter (the same Underwood his parents gave him when he was thirteen years old) and filling it with the thoughts and dialogue of the characters he had created. He even liked, although to a lesser extent, rewriting, proofreading, and responding politely to the suggestions of editors.
My father was born March 19, 1916, in Chicago, Illinois. When he was still an infant, his parents moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and it was there that my father grew up and came of age.
I visited Kenosha once in 1978. It was quite a revelation to me and helped me to understand my father’s worldview. The houses he had lived in were still there, with their open yards and their long front porches. His father, in good times, owned a general store. When times were bad, he worked as a clerk in someone else’s shop. His mother always had snacks and sweets ready for my father and his friends. Even forty years after my father left it, Kenosha still exuded the pleasant charm of an All-American town where citizens could feel safe walking the streets at night and where everyone could dream the American dream. It was just like a small town from a Frank Capra film of the 1930s except that the inhabitants were Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Swedes and Jews.
My father played high school football, edited the school newspaper, acted in the school play and was a star of the debate team. As active as he was in these diverse pursuits, none of them absorbed him as fully as his true passion: writing. At the age of thirteen he was already working as a sports stringer for the Wisconsin News. At sixteen he saw his first published magazine article appear in Horse and Jockey. When he was seventeen, he won a national journalism competition and earned the title of “America’s Best High School Feature Writer.” At eighteen he sold his first work of fiction: a baseball short story entitled “Sacrifice Hit.”
In 1935, he accepted a scholarship to the Williams Institute, a creative writing school in Berkeley, California. But it turned out that the curriculum there emphasized writing for magazines. Because he had already published dozens of magazine articles, my father lost interest in the school after only five months. He headed south: to Hollywood.
Hollywood was a glamorous place in the 1930s, particularly for a 20-year-old. But the Depression was the Depression and, although my father worked hard to earn a living as a writer, there came a point in 1937 when he had to borrow money from a friend to buy the bread, eggs and milk that he lived on for weeks. Financial security was a long way off. Eleven years late
r, when I was born, my parents had to borrow money again just to pay the obstetrician.
It was in Hollywood that my father developed a writing routine that would last for twenty years. For six days a week he would write to earn a living; on Sundays he would write for himself. In these early days, that meant writing plays, four of which were produced in Los Angeles.
Early in 1940, he met Sylvia Kahn, who was West Coast editor of Modern Screen magazine. They would marry the following year.
In July 1940, Liberty magazine sent my father to Japan and China. He interviewed the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and naval strategist Admiral Nobumasa Suetsgo, both of whom threatened war with the United States. When my father’s report that Japan was preparing for war appeared in Walter Winchell’s column, the Japanese government accused my father of lying and banned him from returning to Japan. Seven years later, as a result of an article he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, he was also forbidden from reentering Francisco Franco’s Fascist Spain.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, my father volunteered to be a combat correspondent for the U.S. Marines. He was rejected because he was colorblind. He tried again with the Army. This time he was accepted. He was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Forces and stationed in Culver City, California, a few miles from his home in Hollywood. Later he was transferred to the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographic Center, also in Los Angeles. For more than three years, my father drove to the War. He worked on twenty-five films, the most important of which was Know Your Enemy Japan, part of the “Why We Fight” series. On this project, my father worked with Frank Capra, John Huston, screenwriter Carl Foreman and a writer named Ted Geisel, who would later gain fame as “Dr. Seuss.” Although he had been working in Hollywood for several years, this was my father’s first contact with filmmakers.
(1964) The Man Page 98
